Gamer Fantastic

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “Boss,” said a voice to his right. “Chief. Hey!”

  A fist punched his shoulder, rocking him sideways. He turned, heart thudding, and saw Russ, his second in command, the one he’d fought beside since it all began.

  “The hell, man?” he snapped, rubbing his shoulder. “That hurt.”

  “Boo fucking hoo.” Russ, who—like him—was dressed not in a uniform, but in gray clothes blotted with black in a makeshift camo pattern, rolled his eyes. “I’ve been calling you for five minutes while you looked through that thing. What did you see?”

  “Foot patrol,” Stephen answered. “Standard detail. Eight.”

  “Eight, huh? Counting cloakers?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then you don’t really know how many there are,” Russ said. “Fine. We still should be able to take ’em, especially from ambush. They headed this way?”

  Stephen nodded. “Straight down Boylston.”

  They shared a smile.

  “Tell the rest,” Stephen said. “Wait for the bang, then make it rain.”

  Russ nodded and darted off to pass the order along. He didn’t really need to: his squad all knew the strategy cold, had held to it many times before. Stephen watched him run from one hiding place to the next—a shattered storefront here, the half-collapsed entrance to the Green Line Subway there—then turned away.

  He rubbed a hand over his face. He was tired, hungry, cold. Sleep and food and shelter weren’t plentiful, not anymore. Boston, like every city on the planet, was a broken ruin. The Klathi had seen to that. Governments, armies, police—all dead or scattered. Within six months of the appearance of their silver, spherical ships in the sky, resistance had deteriorated to nothing but regular people with scavenged gear and guns. That was how the world ended, with every city on Earth transformed into the kind of hellholery previously reserved for places like Fallujah and Darfur.

  Still they fought. Like hell they were going to let the Klathi finish this without so much as a bloody nose. There still didn’t look to be much hope for victory, but so what? Better to go down fighting than cowering—the one constant theme of human history.

  He saw Russ coming back and looked through his scope, tracking the Klathi. Still the same eight, just three blocks closer now. No telltale shimmers to indicate cloakers, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The black-clad aliens picked their way among the blasted cars; the hunks of fallen concrete and twisted, rusty steel; the torn-up asphalt. The distant gunfire chattered on, much of it from across the river in Cambridge. The resistance was stronger there than it was south of the Charles. Students from MIT, it turned out, made pretty damned good guerrillas. Who would have guessed?

  “All set,” whispered Russ. “They still coming?”

  Stephen scowled. “We have got to get you some binoculars.”

  “Sure. Find me a sporting goods store that’s still standing.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while. Stephen watched the Klathi creep closer, taking their damned time, checking every alley and doorway. They were methodical bastards, more than any human. Probably why they’d been able to conquer the entire Earth in about twenty weeks’ time.

  Well, that and weapons that made nuclear war look like a pillow fight.

  A block to the west was a blackened thing that once had been a delivery truck, parked outside another blackened thing that once had been a copy shop. The Klathi were almost level with it now, the weird masks of their faces turning left and right. He heard one of them speak to the others in the growling, clicking mess they called a language. They peered inside the copy place, then came forward, approaching the scorched bones of the truck.

  Stephen didn’t look up from the scope. “Now.”

  Russ had an old cell phone in his hand, though people didn’t really make calls any more. He pressed the power button with his thumb.

  The truck blew apart with a bam that shattered the last pane of glass left on the block, on a drugstore down by the corner of Dartmouth. Orange fire billowed and hunks of ragged metal scythed through the air. They turned two of the Klathi to ground meat, cut another in half, and left a fourth stunned on the ground, its left arm in a pool of black blood against the far curb. The last one had been a cloaker, unlucky enough to be within range of shrapnel—so there had been more than just the eight, after all.

  “Go!” Stephen screamed. “Ventilate ’em!”

  The squad knew what they were doing. They’d done it before. One after the other, they leaned out or popped up from cover, ripped bursts of auto-fire into the Klathi, then ducked back again. One after the other, the Klathi fell.

  There were other cloakers—three in all. They did what cloakers do, namely stay hidden long enough to get behind the squad and open fire. Two of Stephen’s men went down, their heads split open by explosive rounds. The rest wheeled around and let fly. Two cloakers collapsed, sparks fizzing and popping as their cloaking devices gave out. The third disappeared in a shimmer, eluding them.

  “Shit!” yelled Russ. “We’ve got to find—”

  Then his face disappeared, replaced by a bloody hole as a bullet came through his skull from behind. Blood and teeth spattered Stephen, and Russ dropped.

  Instinct took over, blocking out shock, rage, grief. Stephen brought his gun around, raking a stream of bullets, and watched as the last cloaker—who had been standing not ten feet away when he blew Russ’s head off—glimmered into view, a strip of dark holes stitching its chest. The gun fell from the creature’s hands, hitting the ground with a clatter. A second later, the cloaker’s dead body followed.

  Like that, it was over. The Klathi were dead. So were three of Stephen’s squad, including Russ. Russ, who’d been his right hand since the whole mess began, his brains now strewn among the spent shell casings and the sparkling pellets of busted safety glass. Russ, whose last name he’d never known.

  “Son of a bitch,” Stephen muttered.

  As a eulogy, it would have to do. They’d won a victory, but the Klathi would send more, maybe add a land strider, or even a hovergun, for backup firepower. They had to disappear fast.

  “Scatter!” he yelled. “Go!”

  They ran, each in a different direction. Stephen sprinted up Clarendon, then turned right on Newbury and darted among the wrecked remains of boutiques and galleries. He knew a safe place to go, and he made for it at full speed. But all he could see, as he ran, was Russ’s face, bursting open as the cloaker’s bullet shattered it from inside. Blossoming, like the ugliest flower ever to bloom.

  He knew he’d be seeing it in his head for a long time to come.

  “Stephen Michael Sarris!” shouted a woman’s voice from the depths of the house. “Get off that damned machine and come downstairs now!”

  Steve shook his head, his ears ringing. He could still see Russ, or what was left of him, hitting the ground. Dead. Now, though, he was elsewhere. A small bedroom, clothes and schoolbooks and soda cans strewn wherever gravity and inertia had left them. His room. He was lying on his bed, headset on his head, controller in hand, facing a flat-panel television on a dresser whose drawers were all half open. Beside the TV squatted a sleek black game console, purple LEDs glowing on its front. The curtains were drawn, the lights out. On the TV was an image of a black-clad Klathi warrior, gun at the ready. BLASTED EARTH 3, said the text superimposed over the image. RESUME GAME?

  He lay still for a moment, disoriented, then pulled the headset off and set the controller down. He started to stand up, then lay back down again, feeling a little dizzy. It was always this way: whenever he shut the game off, he had a good, long while when he felt like he didn’t belong in this body, like he really still ought to be in that other Boston, the one where aliens had destroyed everything. This one, where the sun shone bright and the only sounds of gunfire were on TV, just didn’t seem as real.

  There was a bang, and his door shook with the weight of a fist pounding on it. Steve sat bolt upright, then scrambled back.

  “Steve-o,”
said a deep voice outside. A tired voice. His father. “Please put the game away and come eat before your mother kills us both.”

  Steve sighed, got up, went to the door. His dad stood outside: a taller, balder, paunchier version of himself. Brian Sarris was a geneticist at a biotech lab in Cambridge. His wife was a lawyer at a firm downtown. They lived in a small-but-nice house in West Roxbury. Steve was in the eighth grade at Boston Latin School. He was a good student, but he was having trouble in English and hadn’t told his parents yet. He’d smoked pot for the first time a couple weeks ago, over at his friend Ben’s. He still hadn’t kissed anyone, though most of his friends bullshitted about sweaty grope sessions with one girl or another. He was into anime and the Red Sox and this band called Bang Camaro that had, like, fifteen lead singers or something. They kicked ass.

  It all came back, bit by bit, like it always did. This other life, this other world.

  “Good game today?” asked his dad. “Frag a lot of aliens?”

  Steve shrugged and mumbled. He hated it when his parents got interested.

  His dad frowned. “You look troubled, Steve-o. Something bad happen at school?”

  “No,” Steve said. He thought of Russ again, the bloody mess of his face. It wouldn’t go away. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Did that Leahy kid give you a hard time again? Because I swear, I’ll rain a storm of shit on the school administration if they don’t—”

  “I said everything’s fine,” Steve snapped. “Just leave me alone, okay?” With that, he shoved past his dad and went down the hall, clumping down the stairs like an avalanche.

  His mother was furious. This was nothing new. Ellen Mayview-Sarris survived on coffee, cigarettes, and indignation.

  “I’ve had it, young man,” she said, spooning noodles and tomatoes and olives into a bowl for him at the dinner table. “Every day I scream myself blue for you to get off that stupid game and come downstairs. I’m sick of it.”

  Then don’t fucking do it anymore, Steve thought. He didn’t say it out loud, though. He knew better than that. He looked down at his lap. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need your ‘sorry,’ ” his mother said. “Sorry doesn’t change anything.”

  Neither does constant bitching, Steve thought.

  “Go easy, El,” said his dad. “So he likes the game. So what? It’s not like the moon’s going to hit the earth because of it.”

  His mom rolled her eyes. “There you go, taking his side again.”

  “I’m not taking any side, El,” his dad said, and sighed. “There aren’t any sides. We’re all on Team Sarris, right Steve-o?”

  Steve shrugged poked at his pasta puttanesca.

  “All right,” Ellen said, in that brittle tone of voice that meant things were anything but all right. “But if I find out you’ve been doing badly in school because of this, I swear I’m putting that stupid game out with the trash on Thursday.”

  Steve shrugged. Without sorry, he didn’t have much to work with. He glanced at his dad.

  “Why do we always have to have linguine?” he asked, still prodding the noodles with his fork. “Other parents cook spaghetti.”

  His dad grinned. “Because other parents are idiots, Steve-o. Linguine is more awesome than spaghetti—proven fact. Now eat up, then go do your homework. When you’re done, I want to kick your butt at chess again.”

  He had an essay due next Monday on Thoreau. He worked on it a while, then got bored and put the rest off for tomorrow. He did algebra problems for half an hour, then read some incredibly boring shit about colonial life for U.S. history. Bang Camaro blared on his headphones while he worked, guitars squiddling, their legion of singers yelling “Attack! Attack! Attack! It’s a trap!” When he was done, he lay back on his bed and stared at the TV. The Klathi soldier glared back, taunting him.

  His dad would be waiting downstairs, the chessboard already set up, its pieces all hand-painted figurines of King Arthur and his knights. Christ, his dad could be a nerd.

  But his dad didn’t know he was done with his homework—not yet—and his mom had gone out after dinner to her monthly book club meeting. Steve could hang in his room another half-hour before anyone missed him. Time enough for a quick session in the game.

  He put on the headset, picked up the controller, thumbed START.

  Russ was still gone, and it still hurt. He’d heard that the pain of losing a friend dulled after a while, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. Stephen had seen plenty of people killed, but this was the first one he’d been close to. This wasn’t like when his dog died, back with his mom and dad in that other world. Or his grandma. Or his Spanish teacher, back in the fourth grade. That had never felt real, not truly.

  This did. It was like he’d lost a hand, or an eye. Shuddering at the thought, he touched a charred hunk of wood to keep it from coming true. Then he shook his head and glanced around, getting his bearings. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was; it was always like this, when he’d been Steve for a while. He sat in an old South End brownstone, in an upper-floor bedroom not too unlike his room in the other world, unless you counted all the busted windows and the hole in the roof and the stink, still fresh after years, of the house having burned. It was a safe house, one of a handful of places scattered around Boston where resistance fighters were secure, more or less, from the Klathi. They’d rigged a genny and used it to power their shortwave radios and some old computers connected to a rogue satellite, giving them a crude entry into the bones of what once had been the Internet. They weren’t as lucky with other stuff, like running water and sewage disposal. Still, it was better than squirreling away in the old MBTA tunnels like some fighters did.

  Stephen realized he wasn’t alone. He looked toward the door and saw a man standing there, silhouetted against the light-filled hallway.

  “Jefe?” asked Angel, his new second in command. He was a kid, not even twenty yet—young enough that he’d still been in grade school down in Roslindale when the Klathi first attacked. “You okay?”

  Stephen blinked. “Not really,” he said, “but it’ll have to do. What’s the sitch?”

  Angel sucked on a cigarette, its ember glowing. “Nothing much,” he said. “Caught some chatter that the Klathi are moving something big to the west of us. Land-striders, supposedly.”

  “Striders, huh? Whereabouts?”

  “Coolidge.”

  Stephen raised his eyebrows, scratched the back of his neck. Coolidge Corner was only a couple miles away from the safe house. There’d been a really cool movie theater there, once. His dad took him there some Saturdays for midnight shows, in the other world.

  “That’s pretty close,” he said. “We should go take a look.”

  Angel exhaled smoke, making Stephen wonder—not the first time—where the hell he could still find tobacco after all that had happened. Kid was quite a scrounger. “I dunno. Hasn’t been a signal for the fighters to head that way.”

  “Since when did we wait for permission to go on an op?” Stephen asked.

  A slow grin spread across Angel’s face. “Good point. I can get—”

  There was a noise behind him, from out in the hall. He turned, a hand going to his sidearm. Stephen reached for his gun as well. But it wasn’t a Klathi who appeared; it was Hanna, the squad’s communications specialist. Her eyes were red and swollen.

  “Boss?” she asked. “You gotta come now. You have to see this.”

  “Girl, what is it?” Angel asked. “Why you crying?”

  She looked at him, seemed about to answer, then shook her head and turned back to Stephen. “Best you see it yourself.”

  The comm setup was in the basement, what had been a Thai restaurant. In the kitchens, well away from any windows, they’d set up a couple of scavenged ham radios, as well as one of their three computers, hooked into a big LCD television Angel had found in a condo by the harbor. Most of the squad were gathered around the cracked screen when Stephen and Angel followed Hanna in. He saw thei
r faces, pale and wide-eyed in the TV’s blue light. Some had their hands to their mouths. Tears ran down cheeks. Two or three had turned away.

  One of the radios was crackling, words pushing through bursts of static.

  “. . . fires are spreading as we speak on both sides of the river. There is no sign of survivors. Repeat, no survivors. The island is a dead zone.”

  “What’s going on?” Stephen demanded, pushing his way around, trying to see the screen. “What island? Where—”

  People moved out of the way, and he saw. The picture was lousy, made worse by a bad net connection, but he made it out anyway: a skyline of shattered buildings, huge skyscrapers, nearly all of them on fire. The video was being shot from the other side of a river, with a large bridge not far off. Its central span had collapsed into the water, but enough remained that he knew exactly what it was. What he was looking at.

  New York City was burning. All of it.

  “What the fuck,” he breathed.

  “The Klathi moved everything out of Manhattan an hour ago,” Hanna said. “I heard the chatter on the radio—they just pulled out. People were really excited. The guys holed up at Madison Square Garden had just broken out the beer when . . . when . . .”

  She choked and looked away, waving her hand at the screen. There was other footage playing there now: Manhattan mostly intact, though its skyscrapers were all dark. As Stephen watched, a huge . . . thing appeared above the city. It was Klathi, he was sure, but he’d never seen anything like it before. It was miles wide, broad and flat, like an umbrella made of white plastic-ceramic-chitin. It glowed pale blue from inside, faint at first, then brighter and brighter until it shone like the sun.