They crested the hill and came out of the trees onto a wide, barren stretch of rocky hill. They had been aiming for it. From here, it would be a straight drive to the observatory, where they would be able to complete their mission in plenty of time. They had only been going for a little over two hours. Which meant they still had seven left on their timer.
They cleared the edge of the hill and Zeke put his foot down, revving the engine up a little faster. They bounced higher and harder. The rock face’s surface was pitted and rough, showing them no mercy at all.
Then Davidoff swore as he got a glimpse of the shapes pouring out of the forest behind them. “They’ve followed,” he whispered into his radio. “They are coming up behind, pretty damn fast.”
“I can’t go any faster,” Zeke replied. “We’ll tip over if we hit some of these bumps at high speed.”
Davidoff thought for a second and then radioed back. “Slow down, then,” he said.
“What, are you crazy?”
“No, trust me,” Davidoff replied, and he felt the engine cut down a little as Zeke eased his foot off the gas. “I count eight or nine on one side, a dozen or more on the left. I reckon I can take them if I can aim properly.”
“You’ll wake up everything for miles,” Mara said. “You will let everything out here know that we’re here.”
“We don’t have any other choice,” Davidoff replied, cursing his luck. “They’re fast. They won’t let up.”
Then the first of them broke into his field of vision, the spotlights washing them in their glow. They looked half like great apes, half like humans, and they were warped and distorted. Some had great tentacles for arms whilst others had the same chitinous claws they had witnessed on some of the ghouls back in town. “Some kind of mutants,” Davidoff shouted into his radio. “Guns at the ready, folks.”
The nearest one was enormous, the size of a gorilla but with the gait and head of a human woman. She had rags all over her body, her arms were as thick as tree trunks and short but powerful, scaly legs loped along, lending her an almost unnatural speed. Her skin was cracked all over, lines tracing themselves all over her frame. Through those cracks, her body glowed yellow, slightly, the same sick shade as the alchemical magic that permeated this world.
But Davidoff did not give her much time to get too close. He squeezed the trigger, softly, and the chassis rocked a little under the power of his gun’s recoil. Immediately, the ape woman’s chest burst open and she flew back with almost cartoonish force and speed. She crashed into the mutant behind her, both flailing and falling down.
Next, wanting to buy himself some distance between the rest of the attackers and the truck, Davidoff rotated the gun from side to side, spraying everywhere with hot lead. He caught three more, tearing them apart as though they were being hit with a great chainsaw rather than mere bullets. There was blood and gore everywhere and limbs came flying off.
A group of four or five backed away, slowing their pursuit for a few seconds as the bullets rent the ground at their feet. As they fell back, the others fanned out, ready to come at the truck from every direction. The group was refocusing its efforts, every member keeping themselves just out of effective range of the minigun, and now that the others were spreading out he could not catch them.
“They’re going to rush us from all sides,” he shouted into his radio.
And then they came.
Davidoff heard guns barking from the truck’s front seats as Mara and Zeke fired on the mutants, killing a few. Meanwhile, the group farthest off was beginning to glow brighter, that same sickly yellow-green light surrounding them. The fallen mutants started to gleam a little, shivering, and a couple of them, dead just seconds before, began to sit up.
Necromancy. As if this game wasn’t dark enough, he thought to himself with a shudder.
The group was out of range of his minigun, so he switched tactics. The RPG launcher was on top of the main gun and he swiveled it to face them, sighting them and lining up his range. He fired once, slid another grenade into the chamber and shot again.
He fired four, in all, landing them all around the group. Two fell a little short, just buffeting the group slightly with their explosion, and another went a meter wide. It exploded next to the outermost couple, shredding them to bits but leaving the others near enough unharmed. All the time, that glow was growing brighter. As it started to shine out properly, another couple of the dead mutants began to reanimate.
Davidoff’s final shot with the RPG launcher hit the mark, however, landing in the dead center of the little cabal. It detonated wildly, sending them all sprawling, killing two immediately and leaving one just barely clinging to life at HP 55 / 524. The glow dissipated and the reanimated mutants slowed down, more zombielike than before, nowhere near their previous strength.
Only three mutants remained unharmed. They had unbreakable morale, seemingly, and they refused to flee, running if anything with ever more vigor. Two rushed to the driver’s door, grasping at Zeke, as another jumped up onto the gun turret, moving with blinding speed. As it landed, Davidoff had just enough time to see that it resembled a lithe, tall monkey, standing at about five feet. It had the long beard and wizened face of an old man, leering down at him with a sickening expression. It had great spurs of ragged bone along its torso, armoring it effectively, and it carried a sharpened spear of dense bone clutched in its two hands.
It swung the bone spear at Davidoff. Davidoff ducked, nearly getting out of the way. It caught his helmet, doing no damage but rattling him. Then it was back, stabbing down at him. It caught the tip of its spear in his body armor, piercing through just enough, lightly breaking the skin of Davidoff’s chest. He cried out with the pain and the worry, though it was just a flesh wound—it only did Damage 23, even though it made him bleed, as his armor absorbed the worst of it.
He grabbed his luger from its holster as the mutant tried to pull its spear out. Without waiting, unthinking, he aimed the barrel of his gun at the mutant’s old man head and fired from near enough point blank range. The mutant’s skull vanished and its HP disintegrated. It fell down, limp, and Davidoff pushed its headless body off the turret.
There was tussling at the front of the truck and the whole body rocked. Zeke and Mara were wrestling, trying to stop the two mutants from climbing into the cabin. Davidoff leveled his gun, squinting, and aimed at the first as it tried to push in on Zeke. He caught it in the spine, just between its shoulder blades, and it began to die quickly. Then he jumped over to the other side, where Mara was trying to reach her gun as she fended off a particularly well-muscled mutant woman. He shot it and shot it again. The woman took three bullets in all before she died. The first hit the beast’s shoulder, causing her to reel away, whilst the second tore a chunk out of her breastbone as it turned to face him. Finally, he put another bullet between her eyes, taking the kill shot.
Panting, Davidoff took a moment to look at his XP. Hopefully, he would be able to keep adding to his defense the more he accomplished on this mission. He was not disappointed; he had killed thirteen mutants, some in quite spectacular fashion, some multiple with one shot from the RPG launcher. He was rewarded for his efforts with XP 54.
He climbed back up to his perch and slumped back down into the gun turret’s cockpit, tired out, as Mara and Zeke climbed out. They went around the few remaining reanimated mutants, shooting them in the heads from close range. It was all over for the moment.
However, Mara was right, of course: the noise and the light from the fight would have alerted anything within ten miles or more to their presence. Anything out there hunting would be drawn to them. Zeke and Mara climbed back in, their grizzly work done, and the truck rumbled back into life. They would have to make good time if they were not to become targets again this night.
As they sped along, Davidoff pulled up his profile screen. He had enough XP to add 9 HP to his profile. Though it wasn’t much, his plan was to keep doing this as they went, adding mo
re and more to give him an increasingly better chance of making it through until they could be rescued. His new stats blinked in front of him:
Agility
71
Melee Weapon Skill
48
Ballistic Accuracy
32
Damage
44
Resistance
47
Initiative
48
Morale
78
HP
433 / 456
XP
3
Skills
Ambidextrous, Knife Fighter, Acrobat, Counter Strike, Medic
He returned to himself and popped a pill from one of his older, less effective med-kits. Then he placed a gauze bandage over the wound from the spear and his HP went back up to full. He felt the wound in his chest disappear, the blood no longer flowing. It was always an odd sensation to use medicine in Code Red’s games, as they refreshed you so instantaneously, but he was not complaining. He was healthy and he was tough. He might yet make it through the coming hours.
***
A couple of hours later, a light began to rise in the east. It had taken them a long while to cover just a few miles, as they had to climb a long way over a couple of peeks, making no progress on the map despite the long minutes spent on the rough roads. Night was lifting, however, giving way to the dawn, and the artistic teams at Code Red had done themselves proud. The rosy hue opening up above a distant set of mountain peaks was beautiful.
All night long, Davidoff had listened to the sounds of mutated beasts in the woodlands below as they were skirting across the tops of these hilly ranges. His nerves were taut, rigid with the effort of not panicking, of not wheeling his minigun to fire at the slightest sound, and his eyes were heavy from the constant wakefulness. They had been pursued a couple of times by smaller creatures, or by large, plodding shapes out beyond their lights which fell behind them soon enough, but for the most part they had been able to navigate their way through the mountain paths, relying always on Mara to guide them.
Now, however, as a pink tinged sky began to stretch wider and wider above them, bringing everything in the world into its light, Davidoff thought he saw something else loping along in the woods below them. The ridge they had been following for the past twenty minutes lay above the treeline, and the forests had stretched out inky black for miles below. Then, as the sun broke above the horizon, the trees began to glow golden, ablaze with it all, and Davidoff saw movement ruffling their limbs.
“Guys, I think there’s something in the woods, following us,” he muttered into his radio, gripping the minigun’s handle and swiveling it around to track the motion. “I can see the trees shifting, like they’re being barged out the way.”
“Copy that, buddy,” Zeke replied. “I’ll get higher up, away from the forest.”
The car began to pull away from the ridge’s lip, onto rougher terrain higher up towards the range’s peaks. The new path shook the chassis, rattling them all, but Davidoff breathed a little easier. It was open, exposed, and they would see whatever might come at them from a good way off. It would give him more than enough time to pump them full of hot lead.
Their divergence was noticed, however. Mara managed to find them a path which took them off course, up between two peaks and over, into a slight ravine. As they approached the two peaks, the treeline, three hundred feet away now, began to shake. A dust cloud raised up from the ridge’s lip as a large, colossal shape clambered upwards.
“God, they have giants here!” Davidoff shouted into his radio.
“What, like that ghoul at the factory?” Zeke’s voice replied.
“No, bigger! And I think it used to be human!” Davidoff shouted back, and then he took a few seconds just to gape at the beast as it began to jog along behind them as they drove between the two peaks and into the ravine.
It was four or five times the height of a regular human, and much broader, standing at around twenty five feet tall and about ten feet across. Davidoff could only really make out its outline in the dawn’s half-light, but he could feel every footfall as it ran towards them, gathering speed.
“Can you go any faster?” he shouted into the radio. “The damned thing’s catching up with us.”
“No!” Zeke said. “We’ll be screwed if we hit anything, break an axle or worse, and then we’ll be done for.”
Right, then, Davidoff thought. It’s down to me.
As soon as the giant came in range, he squeezed the trigger, letting loose a few hundred rounds. The beast hollered and yelled as a few of the stray bullets caught it, ripping into its chest and legs. Davidoff tried to look at its stats, but nothing made sense. He had expected it to be much like the elephant, with a whopping great HP bar and decent enough Defense. However, what he encountered was bizarre to say the least. The giant had no fewer than nineteen separate HP bars, all between 200-400.
That doesn’t compute, he thought. Some of the bars diminished when he landed his first few shots. However, as he puzzled at it, the beast disappeared from view for a few seconds as the truck hopped down, swerving down a slope and slaloming between some jagged great boulders, and he lost sight of its stats.
They passed the last boulder and sped on and, as they left the rocks behind, the giant returned, hurdling clumsily over them. A minor avalanche of smaller rocks and dust began to stream down, creating a dust cloud, and the giant slid a few meters before finding its feet and running onwards once more.
Once it was back in view, and when it came back into a decent effective firing range, Davidoff caught the giant in his sight and squeezed the trigger, letting loose the final 543 rounds in the drum in one, steady stream. The bullets pinged throughout the slim ravine, cutting into the rocks all around the giant as it sped, chipping through the mountain’s face itself and sending up ever more dust. A lot of them found their mark, thankfully, causing a good 1000 or so Damage all told. Parts of the monster began to slough off, falling awkwardly into the ravine, but it was heedless of its own pain: it just ran on and on.
Davidoff swore under his breath. He would have no chance to reload the minigun, and in this ravine he dared not fire any grenades. The explosions could have caused a more major avalanche, burying them all. Instead, he unslung his Uzi and rested it on top of the whole gunner rig, tracking the giant as it came closer.
He could not see much, however. The day’s light had yet to penetrate the ravine too well, and he could not aim properly. He switched the rear lights back on and set the spotlight forwards, and then began to swear in earnest as he got his first good full view of the behemoth.
No wonder it had so many disparate HP profiles. It was not one, massive monster. Rather, it looked as though a couple of dozen people had been fused together into one sickly mass. Naked bodies were twisted and contorted, looking like they had been melted together. Eight alone made up the torso, with a few more used for each limb. It moved like a single body, but it had borrowed flesh and bone from all those poor souls, warping them into one great mass.
Its head was small in proportion to the rest. Two of the torso’s bodies had their heads rising above the rest, and these had been glued together into a hairy lump with dead eyes. Another body’s head grew out of these, its eyes wild and its mouth snarling. Tendons stuck out of the skin, pulsing and tight. The hands were massive balls of meat with great claws like snapped shin bones in the place of fingers, and each time it grabbed onto the rocks a little of the bone snapped off to lie, left behind, discarded and useless.
Davidoff was nearly sick. The creature was unreal, unnatural, and all he could do was aim his gun and hope that it died, sooner rather than later.
He pointed the muzzle of his Uzi at the monster’s bulk and squeezed, letting loose three short bursts of gunfire. He hit each time, as the giant drew closer and closer, tearing through the
terrain as Zeke did his best to navigate it more carefully. One of the torso bodies fell down to 0 / 234 HP and fell off, sloughing away from the rest. Still, the monster came on, its remaining bodies sustaining it even as blood and guts flew everywhere.
“Zeke, find some higher ground,” Davidoff yelled into his radio. “I need to use grenades on this bastard!”
“There’s a turning a minute from here where we can climb a small hill,” Mara’s voice came back. “Hold it off until then.”
Right, Davidoff thought. He did not have enough bullets to kill the thing, but he could slow it down. Rather than aiming at the torso, he set his sights on the groin and right leg. A couple of bursts put the hurt in: one of the leg’s bodies, a large, mangled mess attached to the rest by raw, bloody meat, came down to 35 / 189 HP, even as a scrunched up body in the groin region came down to 108 / 263.
Davidoff received 11 XP for his efforts, alongside, as he saw, another 31 for his other attacks, bringing him up to 34 XP altogether. And, with the Damage he caused came the required result. The giant lost none of its fury, nor any of its determination, and kept coming at them no matter what… but it began to limp, falling behind a little.
Davidoff had one last burst left in his Uzi, a mere 13 shots. And he used them well, aiming at the beast’s head now. He let loose the final payload, hitting with three or four bullets and causing Damage 320, knocking the main head flying and crippling one of the other two. He earned himself a further XP 5 for the kill and the damage, giving himself XP 39, and the abomination started to thrash wildly, half-blind and furious.
“Here we go, now,” Mara’s voice shouted through the radio.
The truck turned onto a wide, gradual hill. Zeke put his foot down as the going became a little easier, and they were clear of the ravine within thirty seconds. The giant, limping badly and using its bony hands to haul itself upwards, came after them. But Davidoff was ready. He set up the RPG launcher, aimed his shot and fired three rockets straight into its center.
Ghouls'n Guns Page 13
