Dream Stream Reality: Publisher's Pack Books 1-2: (A LitRPG Adventure)

by Derrick Burke

  My phone vibrates and I look at the incoming message from Rosie.

  Having food with the girls and not camera worthy. Still playing your silly game?

  Not camera worthy? I have a dozen photos of her with food crammed into her mouth from meals we’ve shared. I send back a reply.

  Actually, I’m out with the boys. When do you think you will be back? We haven’t hung out with each other for a while, and I’m missing you. Maybe your friends and mine can all go out together and watch a movie or something?

  The blonde chick pulls out her phone again before laughing and showing the text to the guy, who says something with a malicious grin before laughing himself. He gestures for her to reply, so she does, and I receive another buzz from my phone.

  Nah, I don’t think you and your friends will get along with mine. I really don’t like your friends that much and don’t want to spend any more time with them than I have to, if you haven’t noticed. Let me know when they aren’t staying over anymore and I’ll get the girls to drop me off.

  Woah, that was just plain nasty. Fuzzy is always telling me that she doesn’t like my group of friends, but I never really believed it. The feeling of dread constricting my heart slowly burns into a fire that begins to spread as I finally begin to believe I’m looking at my cheating girlfriend down in the lobby as she goes through the metal detector.

  One of my eyes begins to twitch as I watch Rosie swaying through and then laughing as she looks behind her at Hercules to check his reaction.

  I press the call button to Rosie’s phone.

  Rosie’s ringtone of Billy Joel’s ‘We didn’t start the fire’ starts playing quite loudly across the lobby and turns a few heads. It’s the ringtone she uses only for my number, and not a lot of people use that one that I’ve heard.

  She grimaces at the phone for a few seconds and looks like she is about to answer it, but Hercules interrupts her by making an obscene gesture. He is laughing with a malicious expression and gestures again towards the phone. Deciding not to answer the call, Rosie shrugs and presses a button to end it.

  “Hey, isn’t that Rosie’s ringtone for you, Donald?” Anya says as she looks up from her tablet towards the noise. Her face blanches before she freezes in place as she quickly processes what’s going on and looks at me slowly. “Oh shit!”

  The slow spread of anger that I’ve been trying to quell while watching Hercules manhandle my girlfriend turns into a full-body hot flush. My vision starts to tinge red as it turns into a deep burning rage.

  It normally takes something really serious to set me off. Like someone physically harming someone I care about and around that level of seriousness. But I guess seeing the person I love cheating on me in person may be a bit much as well.

  All my rage begins to focus on the upstart who is cutting my grass. My jaw aches from clenching it so hard, and my muscles are hardcore twitch tensing from all the adrenaline. Somehow, I’m holding my sanity just away from the edge.

  I’m usually a nice guy when I’m not being an asshole. But I like my friends, so I throw Anya a lifeline before I’m not capable of doing it anymore. I slowly, but jerkily give Anya my phone.

  As her eyes read through the text messages and the call log, they become as wide as saucers as she repeats, “Oh shit!”

  Anya glances towards Rosie just as Hercules saunters up to her. The lantern-jawed blonde bends Rosie over backwards and proceeds to thoroughly shove his tongue down her throat. She does seem to just as thoroughly enjoy it.

  My sanity takes off his top hat as he bows and exits stage left, before swan-diving with a triple back twist into the sea of uncontrollable rage as I watch this all happen.

  Sound comes through my mind as if cotton were shoved in my ears as all my rage pinpoints on the man who knows he’s banging someone else’s girl and thinks it’s a joke. A laugh, just a bit of fun.

  Mr Hercules here looks like he is actually a blonde villain masquerading as a hero. One that is about to get the shit kicked out of him for being so low as to not have respect for someone else’s partner.

  “CODE BLACK!” Anya roars before quickly trying to grab me in a massive bear hug.

  I try to launch myself down the stairs in my desire to cause pain to the usurper who stole my girlfriend.

  Suddenly I’m on the floor and trying to get up, but I can’t. I’m struggling as I keep breaking the bonds holding me down before they are replaced, constricting me again and again. My red tunnel vision is still focused on the asshole down below who just stomped on the broken pieces of my heart. When they walk through the opaque glass sliding door and out of sight, I roar in my frustration.

  Bucking and twisting, I manage to free myself and get up, though that’s when I feel a tightness around my neck. As my body moves on its own to remove this new threat, my legs are knocked out from under me, and both my arms are squashed to my torso.

  Slowly but surely, as I can’t even move an inch, darkness begins to creep over and replace the red of my rage, and everything turns to soothing emptiness.

  When I come to, I am face down on the floor and it feels like I’m hog-tied. Both of my arms are twisted behind my back, and my ankles are crossed and touching my ass. There is a great weight on all my limbs and the back of my neck.

  I can hear muffled voices above me. It sounds like Anya and someone with a very deep voice are having an argument from their tone of voice.

  What the hell?

  This isn’t where I parked my car. I start to struggle against my bonds. My memory is all disjointed and I have no idea how I got here. The last thing I remember is having a coffee after we logged out.

  “Shit, Fuzzy, he’s awake. That was quick,” Blake exclaims heavily as if he is trying to catch his breath. The pressure on my neck deepens a little.

  Furniture and tablets are scattered everywhere across the floor from my point of view with my face pressed up against it. My view is suddenly taken up by a thick red beard and my childhood friend’s grinning face. He is for some reason sporting a bloody nose and a large lump over his eye.

  “Ah, Donald, glad to have you back.” His eyes are searching mine for something.

  The weight on my chest makes it difficult for me to breathe, but I manage to say, “Why am I trussed up like a pig, brother?”

  “That’s a very good question,” replies Fuzzy. “Code black, brother. Code black.”

  “Oh.” Well, that explains it, then.

  The first time this happened was when I was told my parents and little brother had died. I was twelve then. I had blacked out and gone into a fit of rage and directed it towards the two army representatives who gave me the news. Back then I woke up in a similar position and had somehow given one of them a broken rib.

  Because of that incident, I was court ordered to attend martial arts classes every day at the military base my parents were based at. It was to control the anger and give it a positive outlet, and I shudder to think of where I would have been without it. Either dead or rotting in prison probably. I had even done a few years overseas before giving up the army life.

  When Fuzzy and I became close in high school, I told him about why I was always off to the military base every day, and he solemnly swore to protect me from myself if I ever lost control. He started coming with me to the classes then. From that day forth, he wanted it to sound cool, so he dubbed the situation code black.

  Over the years, I have only ever lost control like this a total of five times. This would be number six. One of the times was when I was twenty-two and came off deployment with the rest of my section. That deployment was a tough one, seeing as how I lost my friend Billy, someone who had been with me from boot camp. The part I couldn’t get over was that he was killed in action by goddamn friendly fire from our so-called allies.

  As terrible as that was to witness, I can’t imagine what his wife, Sally, at home felt like, especially seeing as Billy never even got to hold his newborn son, Joel. He chose the name because he always wanted to int
roduce himself and his son to other people as Billy Joel. Corny, but that was him in a nutshell and Sally loved it.

  All of our section, along with a few of Billy’s other mates, pitched in and set up a trust fund for his son, using our hefty deployment pay packets. We also chipped in and set up an account for her to use.

  As we were all stowing our gear and getting ready to go on leave, I realised that I didn’t have my phone with me. Asking the boys, George said that I had left it in the plane and handed it to me.

  Just as he handed it to me, I got a phone call from Sally, sounding all teary and slobbery. Everyone in the room could hear it. She said that she was so sorry to bother me, but she went to buy some diapers for little Joel with the account we had set up for her, and the card had been declined. She said that she then checked with the bank, and all the money from that account and the trust fund had been removed less than half an hour ago by the person who set it up.

  She was literally asking without asking if I had gone back on my word and stolen the money everyone had set up for her and her son. I was starting to get angry, not at her, god no. I was livid at the son of a bitch who had the audacity to steal from the widow of our mate, someone who lived and breathed and died with us.

  The problem was that only two people had access to those accounts, Sally and myself.

  I told Sally I’d fix it and hung up.

  My face turning several different shades of red, I logged onto the bank from my phone and checked the accounts. Sure enough, I’d apparently removed the money half an hour ago. When I didn’t have my phone. When George had my phone.

  When I looked up at him, his face had guilty defiance written all over it. It’s safe to say that I didn’t kill him. But by the time the rest of my section mates restrained me, I had broken a lot of his bones.

  Suffice to say that George was dishonourably discharged and went to prison for theft. I was discharged as well, due to my basically black outrage, but my military lawyer convinced them to make it at least honourably. I couldn’t really care less though, as if I couldn’t trust my section mates, whom could I trust?

  That was when I started doing all sorts of jobs to see if one fit my personality and kept me from being too bored. Eventually I found security and it stuck.

  Looking up at Fuzzy, I sigh with a wince. “Sorry, Fuzzy.”

  Still kneeling down and looking in my eyes, he replies, “I understand.”

  My brow furrows as I try to recall my memories; then they all rush back at once. Vicky and the tangle of guilty emotions from that situation to the elation of completing the registration for beta testing. Then finally to the rage of seeing Rosie cheating on me with another guy.

  For a split second the rage tries to surface again before I clamp down on it so hard that it instead turns into a ball of cold seething hate towards both Rosie and Hercules. That ball settles deep down next to the one reserved for my previous section mate George.

  “Alright, let him up. It’s over,” Fuzzy says as he gets up with a wince, finally seeing what he has been searching for.

  Acceptance. I can’t change what has been done.

  “Wait a moment. If you let him up, we will be forced to intervene and restrain him ourselves,” states the deep voice I heard earlier. “Then we will have to file for your removal from the beta test.”

  “Mr Snipes, if you would just hear us out, I’m sure you will see Donald’s aggression wasn’t entirely unwarranted. Especially when you know what happened in his past,” Anya calmly states. “Besides, except for the property damage, which we will gladly pay for, no one has come to any harm.”

  “No harm, you say?” Mr Snipes says with a pregnant pause. “Well, we need to know what caused this level of aggression for our records anyway, so go ahead. You’d better hope I agree with you, or your friend will be finding himself a one-way ticket to being banned from DSR2,” Mr Snipes replies.

  “If you would be so kind as to pick up Donald’s phone? I believe it may have slid under that lounge chair,” Anya says while moving her body weight slightly. I guess she was indicating which lounge chair it was, but I wouldn’t know because my face is still crammed into the floor.

  They must have retrieved my phone because I can feel my thumb being pressed onto the smart button, which is also a fingerprint lock.

  “Open up the messages to Rosie. That’s his girlfriend, who he lives with and has done so for quite a while now. Then check the call log and see the unanswered call,” directs Anya.

  “You are trying my patience, Miss Sokolov. What is this supposed to prove?” asks Mr Snipes.

  “Okay, now match up the timing of the texts with your security videos of the lobby, and look for the two blonde sensations as they come inside the lobby. They line up to go through your security boys and into the rest of the building. They are tongue fighting quite heavily at the end there,” continues Anya.

  “You mean the guy who looks like Hercules and the trashy blonde all over him?” asks Mr Snipes with a tone of voice that I just know he has raised his eyebrows.

  “That’s them. You should have the records on them and see that she is Rosie Williams, and according to the government, she lives with Donald here,” agrees Anya.

  “One moment while I look it up.” Mr Snipes must have pulled out his own tablet or something, as we are all still hanging out together on the floor.

  A few minutes later Mr Snipes growls under his breath and then sighs. “Well, damn. Our facial-recognition software matches her to a Rosie Williams, who is de facto to Donald Patterson, and they live at the same address. Rosie was given a party member coin from a Jacob Bardem, who is the guild leader of the Imperials from DSR1. Says here that Rosie has been a part of his guild for the past year. The video evidence is extremely damning, but that alone doesn’t warrant this level of rage. Donald Patterson, what do you have to say for yourself? Let him up.”

  Feeling comes back into my limbs with pins and needles, and I’m finally able to take in a full breath as I’m hauled to my feet by Anya and Blake.

  There are three security guards from down in the lobby standing around us, and I look up at the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. Seven feet of rock-hard massive slabs of African-American with a bald head stares at me with piercing blue eyes.

  Damn. This guy ate all his veggies as a kid. Probably his siblings’ veggies, his next-door neighbour’s veggies, and probably had some of mine too without me realising it.

  “I have a rage issue that normally only comes out in defence of someone I care about,” I begin. “The first time it happened was when some army officers came and told me my parents and my little brother died an overseas trip. Another time was when I caught one of my section mates in the army stealing from a trust fund we had set up for the son and widow of another section mate we lost on deployment.”

  Mr Snipes stares hard into my eyes for nearly a full minute and I stare right back. Eventually he harrumphs and looks down, fiddling with his tablet for a few moments before asking, “Do you other gentlemen want to make any complaints against Donald for his use of force against you?”

  “We’re all good. Only Blake here hasn’t seen this before,” says Fuzzy.

  “I’m surprised at the level of intensity and, dude, you are slipperier than an eel coated in oil, but I’m fine,” Blake says with a laugh.

  “In that case, I get to inform you that, thankfully, Rosie’s group and your group are in separate areas of the building.” Mr Snipes taps his tablet a few times with his massive finger.

  I would have laughed if I didn’t feel like it was probably the wrong time to do so as he continues, “The notes on your group say that earlier today you were upgraded to VIP memberships due to your achievements within the game. I have a mind to strip you of the VIP membership. I won’t for one simple reason. It will keep your two groups separated. You will enter through the VIP car park access and have your own set of lifts.”

  Putting his tablet away, Mr Snipes looks me dead in the eye
s as he hands me my phone. “I served too and have a buddy who went through a similar issue. Pretty hard to come back right after something like that. Billy here will escort you to your car, and your tablets will give you directions on how to enter the VIP car park. Let’s hope we don’t see each other any time soon.”

  With that, Mr Snipes leaves down the stairs before calling over his shoulder, “Bob! Clean this mess up, will you? I need a coffee.”

  “Yes, sir!” both of the other guards say at the same time. An overly enthusiastic reply came from Billy, while an exasperated sigh from being forced to clean up someone else’s mess came from Bob.

  I shoot Bob a sympathetic look and begin to help him straighten all the furniture out. The others help out as well, and we quickly have everything back to rights. Well, apart from a single-seat lounge and two coffee tables, which are in pieces. Small ones.

  How we even managed to crack one of the glass panes of the balcony, I have no idea. These ones are like an inch thick. Maybe that is where the lump over Fuzzy’s eyebrow came from. Ha!

  During the clean-up, Blake spots a coffee machine like mine against the far wall and slyly makes his way over there. The only thing this one has better than mine is that it can make four coffees at a time, which is pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.

  Very shortly after we finish, we are all nursing mugs in our hands and are using the furniture the way it is supposed to be used. I look over at the two guards perched on the edge of some armchairs. They have accepted mugs of coffee and are looking furtively at the camera in the corner of the ceiling every now and then.

  “You boys mind if we relax a bit before we head out? I need to make a couple of phone calls rather urgently,” I ask them, pulling out my phone.

  “That’s fine. Seriously, take as long as you need. The boss didn’t give us a time limit, so by all means, take your time.” Billy grins, sipping on his coffee.