Ghouls'n Guns

by Jared Mandani

  “What a rude awakening,” she muttered, finally regaining her full consciousness as Davidoff and Zeke prepared themselves for the hike ahead of them. “Just when I thought all this crap,” she gestured all around, “was the bad dream. My actual dreams seemed far more normal than any of this.”

  ***

  As they filed out of the cave and along an almost invisible dirt track, hiking steeply upwards straight for the top of the mountain, they began to notice one after another that something did not seem quite right with Roger.

  The man was sick, they thought. His big, undetailed face was visibly green. At first, it was just a tinge, like you might find on somebody suffering with food poisoning. But after fifteen minutes, Davidoff saw that his face was actually turning a light, acid green.

  Roger choked and fell, at one point, holding his sides. They were in a small clearing, with high rocks on one side and thick woodland around the others.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Mara asked. “You’re a simple AI. How have you developed to be able to get sick?”

  “I don’t… I don’t quite know, I’m afraid,” Roger said. He closed his eyes, sweat pouring down his face. He began to shiver and heave, his stomach giving him quite violent contractions. Then he staggered up, fell, and found himself on his hands and knees.

  As a kid, Davidoff had always loved his cat. He grew up with Mox, a little tabby who died when he was about twelve or thirteen. Every so often, Mox would get a hairball stuck in her throat and would heave and hiss, her back arched, as she coughed the hairball up. Davidoff was reminded of this as he watched Roger, his cheeks flushed red and everything else the vicious, yellow green that seemed such a trademark of the warping influence of this game’s universe. He heaved and he arched his back, looking for all the world like there was something inside him that was trying to get out.

  Roger looked up at Mara as the heaving subsided for a few seconds and she fell, clutching her head and crying out. She scrunched her eyes up and the color left her face. However, it only lasted a couple of seconds, and then she was fine once more. She stood as Roger began to convulse, more violently this time, and she had tears in her eyes.

  “He’s given me the map,” she said, turning to look first at Zeke and then at Davidoff. “It’s fixed now, a part of the unchanging game so that others can find it, but we’re nearly there so he thinks it doesn’t matter.”

  “What’s going on with him, though?” Davidoff asked. “We can’t leave him like that.”

  “I… I…” Roger gasped, looking up at them. His face had begun to grow more detailed than it had been before. High cheekbones carved themselves into it and his eyes, bloodshot and wide, were clearer than ever. They could see a five o’clock shadow on his jawline, and his teeth…

  “Oh, crap,” Zeke cursed. Roger’s teeth were elongating into pointed fangs. At the same time, his blond hair, no longer a block of color but detailed and textured, began to fall out in tufts. Horns poked through his skull and his clothes ripped at the seams. Like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk, he had begun to grow, bigger and bigger.

  “My coding…” he sighed, his voice sibilant and cruel-sounding now. “I’ve been taken over… they’re turning me into a… into a… a…”

  “A ghoul,” Davidoff said. Mara pointed her rifle at Roger’s head. Zeke protested, but Davidoff thought she was right. If he alerted anybody, it would all be over. They needed to kill him now.

  “My firewall… too weak…” Roger hissed, and then, one frame to the next, his eyes turned a bright, evil yellow. Mara was about to squeeze the trigger, but Roger was too fast for her. He leapt to his feet, eight feet tall and growing fast, slapped the gun from her hand and charged forwards. He slashed at her as he passed, tearing a great chunk out of her chest.

  Then he span, growling, with venom dripping from his teeth. It coated his long claws. He was naked and towering, with no fat and large muscles bursting with newfound power. Zeke cursed, as did Davidoff, and both raised their Uzis. In seconds, the clearing was reverberating with the sound of gunfire, lit by the constant flashes of barking muzzles.

  The bullets tore through Roger’s skin, but he seemed not to notice. He laughed and he roared, and he bounded towards them. Zeke dove to one side, hitting the rock wall hard and winding himself. Davidoff leapt high. He trod a step on Roger’s shoulder as the ghoul charged and used it to propel himself higher still. He turned in the air, backflipping and landing lightly, facing Roger’s back.

  He took a couple of seconds to take stock of the situation. Zeke was hurt, but not badly—he had only suffered -20 HP and a little dazing from his collision with the rocks. Mara was in a bad way, however. She had lost 120 HP in one swipe of Roger’s claws, coming down to 332 / 492 HP, which was incredible enough. But Davidoff saw that she was also poisoned. She was losing more HP rapidly, so that as Davidoff watched, she fell even further, to 329, then 324, then 320.

  Meanwhile, Roger seemed to have the same regenerative capabilities as the psychic warlocks they had met a short while before. His HP had rocketed up to 789 when he transformed. The short range fire he had taken from Zeke and Davidoff’s Uzis had brought him down all the way to 202 / 789 HP. Now, however, he was back up to 476 / 789 HP, and climbing still even as Mara’s health dropped.

  Davidoff shouldered his Uzi and pulled out his luger with one hand and his machete with the other. He would have to work fast, which for him meant getting in close and delivering as many punishing hits as possible. With his new combo together, he ran towards Roger. The ghoul picked up Mara’s body in one hand and threw her fully into the rocks, making Davidoff wince. He had no time to check on her HP, though he feared that they would be getting perilously low by now.

  A few feet in front of the ghoul, he fired two rapid shots from his luger into its upper back, aiming for the spine. One shot was fairly mediocre: it only managed Damage 72. The other, however, must have hit the spinal area itself, because it managed a full Damage 147.

  Roger staggered forwards, wailing, shouting its rage, and began to turn. At that point, however, Davidoff jumped up and released a potent, fast-paced attack combo. First, he delivered a flying roundhouse to the beast’s face. It barely did any Damage, knocking just 5 HP from Roger’s health, but it stunned him for a moment. Turning in midair, Davidoff then slashed a backhand with his machete, cutting a great wound across Roger’s ugly mug and even bisecting a couple of fangs. He landed, turned, and immediately fired three more rounds, combining to do Damage 267, bringing Roger down to a mere 72 / 789 HP, warring with his regeneration to bring him lower and lower.

  Next, as Roger snarled, bellowed and began to totter towards Davidoff—pale blood seeping from wounds all over his body and his attention almost entirely taken up with the daze that had overcome him from the various head and spinal shots—Davidoff delivered the final blow. He lunged in, ducking under Roger’s arms, and barged into his large, wounded stomach. Roger’s HP was climbing once more, reaching over one hundred now, but Davidoff was where he needed to be. He looked up and located Roger’s chin, aimed his pistol, pushing the luger’s barrel into the ghoul’s throat, and fired the kill shot.

  Roger fell backwards, landing with a heavy thud, and 120 XP hit Davidoff immediately, though he didn’t care about it too much for the moment. Instead, he ran over to Mara, crouching over her as her labored breath staggered from her mouth.

  “Zeke, you OK?” he asked as he knelt by Mara.

  “Yeah, fine… just hit my head a bit…” his friend muttered, managing to climb to his feet. He was still on nearly full HP, however. He was just a little disoriented.

  Mara’s poisoning was bad; she was down to 67 / 492 HP. Davidoff dropped his rucksack and rummaged through, bringing out his medical kit. There was a generic anti-tox injection inside, designed by the chemists back at the compound to counter any poisons the game had to throw at them. He injected Mara and she gasped.

  “The hacked programs are fighting back,”
she sighed before falling unconscious.

  As a medic, there was little that Davidoff could do for Mara. She was beyond patching up and would have to wait until her avatar began to recover by itself once more, but he could stabilize her and detoxify the poison.

  He pulled her out of the bloodshed, out of the churned mud and the spilled body matter that was strewn over the battle ground. Between them, he and Zeke managed to bring her into the relative safety of a thicket of trees, away from the slim trail they had been taking and hidden from view from anyone. There, Zeke kept watch as Davidoff grabbed his medical kit from his backpack, pulled Mara’s uppermost layers of clothing off her, applied antiseptic spray to all her wounds—of which there were only a couple of bad gashes, the rest being minor scrapes and a few deep bruises—placed some dressings in place and began to wind bandages around her torso. He injected her with a dose of painkiller and then waved some ammonia under her nose, waking her once more.

  She cursed, she swore, and she sighed in pain. “Don’t worry,” Davidoff told her. “You’ve taken a beating. Your HP is only 119. It was as high as I could bring it, I’m afraid. But you’re stable and the poison has been neutralized.”

  “God,” she whispered. Her whole body was shaking and her face was a deathly white. Looking around, Davidoff realized that Zeke also looked like he was in shock. Presumably, Davidoff himself did as well.

  It was all getting too much and every time they thought they had grown used to the idea that the programming had gone rogue—at least enough to work within the system, to complete their mission and ignore the worst of the implications of their situation—something arose to shock them once more. It was a near paralysis each time, and they each had to grit their teeth and work harder on their emotional stability than any of them had ever done before just to get through it. None of them were expecting a program like Roger to be able to be corrupted like that. If the rogue programming could get into him… Davidoff did not want to think too much about the consequences. The paralysis hovered above him, threatening to engulf him, and he had to set it to one side, pragmatically, dogmatically, even, and stick to the immediate tasks at hand.

  Suffice to say that, for yet another time in the last few hours, their view of what was possible had been drastically altered in-game.

  Mara struggled to stand and slipped back down, landing painfully and cursing afresh. “Rest,” Davidoff told her, trying to keep his voice sounding calm. “You’ll only hurt yourself if you try to move.”

  “But the mission…” Mara began. Her face was drawn. That icy white remained and she looked like she was about to be sick. The cocktail of drugs running through her system, combined with the blood loss and the pain of her injuries, was making her dizzy. Her morale was low as well, at just 23 / 83. Even if in real life, the person controlling her avatar wanted to go on, her stats would soon plummet with morale like that. Her aim would be off and her damage output would be crippled. She would be a burden, if anything… and she would get herself killed.

  “We will complete the mission,” Davidoff told her, looking deep into her eyes. “You’ve got us this far. We would never have made it up here without you guiding us. We would never have made it through those mountain ranges, especially at such speed, and we wouldn’t have been able to find this path without you.

  “But you’re done,” he said firmly as Zeke stood behind him, nodding. “I cannot get your HP any higher. There’s no magical cave around where to rest up, nothing in my medical kit that can heal you up from that beating. You can’t move, and even if you could, you couldn’t fight properly. And if you take any more damage, you’ll die.

  “In this world and the other,” he finished, gritting his teeth. He had to be blunt. Too much depended on it.

  Mara looked crushed, as he knew she probably would. She looked like she wanted to hurt him, to rage against his words, but she could not. She didn’t have the strength, and, though she was loath to admit it, she knew that Davidoff was telling the truth. Even if they let her come along with them, she would be a danger to them. Not only would she be killed, but she would most likely slow them down enough to get them killed as well.

  Reluctantly, and with tears of rage welling in her eyes, she nodded.

  “You’re well-armed,” Davidoff said as Mara began to root through her own rucksack. She brought out a couple of spare clips for her automatic rifle, laying them next to where she sat, her back against a rock. Then she pulled out a smaller zipped up bag with her share of the explosive in it. She passed them to Zeke, nodding.

  “Yes, I’m well-armed,” she said, a lump clearly restricting her throat a little bit. “I can hold them off if the bastards come for me.”

  “Good,” Davidoff said. “We’ll carry on up to the castle, set the charges and then we’ll come back for you. We just need you to tell us the way. Describe the route to us.”

  “No,” Mara shook her head. “You don’t need me anymore. The castle is a ten minute climb straight up. Just carry on along the path; the server’s cleared an entrance for you into the observatory. Zeke should be able to find it easily enough. You’ll be able to slip in. Then Zeke can download a map from the observatory’s central computer. You can rig the place and leg it.

  “But be careful,” she finished. “This path is invisible to the warlocks, but they might have been able to hear the fight. They shouldn’t have been able to, the server should have been able to isolate the noise… but after Roger changed, there’s no telling what the rules might be now. If they did hear the gunfire, then they will know to expect you.

  “So, go slow, don’t take any risks, and don’t do any more than you need to. Just blow the place up and get the hell out.”

  Davidoff nodded as Zeke packed Mara’s explosives alongside his own. “We’ll be an hour, tops,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and run on down to find the jeep again. By then, you should have regained enough HP you’ll be able to help us fight once more.”

  So saying, both he and Zeke threw their bags over their backs, hitched their gun straps over their shoulders and set off, not daring to look back. They were alone together once more: the two friends, inseparable since childhood, off to face the most dangerous mission of their lives.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They crested a high ridge with four and a half hours left. Plenty of time, Davidoff thought, though time was not what was worrying him. As they reached the edge, they saw the warlocks’ castle before them and his heart sank. Four and a half hours is all well and good, he thought, but it could be all the time in the world for all he was concerned: they would still never be able to achieve their task.

  They hunkered down in some bushes, looking upwards at the peak’s top fifty feet above them, where the observatory sat squat against the horizon. Stark cliffs surrounded it on their side. The other side was a steep slope, though it would be far too well protected for them to even contemplate going that way. A gateway stood before them, an entrance to a zigzagging, slim road that climbed the cliffs diagonally, but it looked treacherous—the road was in a bad state of repair and solid iron doors stood in the gateway, firmly locked. A high, metal mesh fence topped with razor wire encircled the whole peak, at their level.

  The main building itself, high up above, was white washed concrete with yet more mesh fencing all around its perimeter. The observatory was still intact, though Davidoff doubted that it had been used for its original purpose in quite some time. A great metallic dome covered the central building, green with oxidation, with a giant telescope pointing out of its hull towards the heavens above. The whole compound must have covered a square quarter mile, and there were several warlocks on guard duty. They stood at the gateway, the only way in and out that Davidoff and Zeke could make. Both players watched through their scopes, zooming in to check for any weaknesses in the security. There were none.

  As well as the warlocks on the gate, several walked to and fro behind the fences themselves, some alone and some in groups
of four or five. “The place is crawling,” Zeke muttered, glaring through the telescope on his rifle. Davidoff nodded and carried on looking. There were several patches of light glimmering at intervals, lighting up the citadel’s walls in several places, flickering over the ground or the fence in places, always the same sickly yellow green that they had grown accustomed to. It seemed to Davidoff as though the light was coming from a different world, shining down on the castle like sunlight cast from a different dimension. It made him sick to look at.

  “I can’t figure out how we’re going to manage this,” he muttered, half to himself and half to Zeke. “It would be instant suicide to even try to enter this fortress.”

  “Mara said there was a way that I should be able to find… Hang on a minute,” Zeke said, zooming in somewhere. Davidoff watched Zeke, his friend’s face screwed up in contemplation as he seemed to figure something out. “I think she was right: there is a way,” he said after a little while. “You can’t see it. You’re not an engineer or a tracker. I reckon Mara would see it too, if she was here,” he said, eyeing up a spot in the fence. He pointed and Davidoff trained his own scope, finding a low platform up above with a raised mound and a boxy concrete bunker before it. “It’s an old access tunnel,” Zeke said. “I can see the details now; the server’s letting me read them. The observatory was never meant to be too secure. The fences are high enough, but it’s not like a military installation. Past the fences, there’s no security to speak of, and there are a couple of ways in.”

  Zeke traced his scope back a little way towards the forest, towards where they were sitting, smiling more and more as he did so. “Yes,” he said at last. “There’s an old lift shaft that starts a few hundred yards to the west,” he said. “It will take us up through the rock, to that bunker.”