“No,” I replied as swiftly as I could without sounding like a complete bitch, “you need to rest that leg. I’ll be going to the farm, and Chad’ll be making sure the girls get to the working age of thirteen.”
For a few seconds there I felt guilty about running a community on child labour, but then I realised that they’d be adults soon enough and the bad feeling went buh-bye.
“Probably wouldn’t hurt to make sure they have some clothes ready for when their eighteen either,” Chad said, taking his duties with stride, “otherwise we’re just gonna have a whole lotta distracted dudes up in here.”
“Hey!” Paul snapped.
“I was talking about the Js, but sure, whatever dude, I’m worried you’re gonna be distracted by some animated boobies.”
“Alright, I’m leaving.” I said both in response to being done with that particular conversation and the sun slowly rising over the trees along with the sound of the air raid siren.
I think Chad tried to talk to me after that, but I didn’t hear him as I started marching through the grass and in the general direction of the farm without thinking about the fact that I had no idea where exactly I was going.
Usually I was cool with the guys being the guys, Hell, half the time I counted myself among them. But talking about boobs and that while I was trying to work on ideas about what we were gonna do with the rest of our day just irked me.
What made it worse was the fact that if I’d have started that conversation I would’ve been cool with it, yet for some reason I was getting pissy with them for doing the same.
Maybe it was some inbuilt sexist thing within me. Like, if I didn’t start the conversation about vaginas or boobs then a man sure as Hell couldn’t.
As I bushwhacked through ten minutes of forest I debated whether or not that was a rational sexist response, would they have been weird if I started talking about penises?
Probably not, as long as I wasn’t talking about theirs’, and even less-
“Fuck.” I growled as I looked around at the unfamiliar terrain, “Fuck. Fucking. Fuck.”
Chapter Seven
Yeah… Turns out when you start getting all concerned about social issues in the middle of arse-fucking nowhere you get lost.
I mean ‘I just finished watching Primer for the first time and now I think my brain hates me’ lost.
At first I thought I’d send out a hail, see if I could get one of the guys to find me through the Community chat, but then I remembered that it had an effective range of about fifty metres when you didn’t have walkie-talkies or mobiles.
“Should probably add those to my list…” I mumbled as I looked around for landmarks.
I was convinced that there had to be something, some kind of marker that would set off some kind of mental alarm bell in my head that reminded me exactly where I was.
“Oh you fucking idiot.” I laughed to myself as the obvious finally dawned on me.
I pulled up my map and smiled, a clear line in the Fog carved from Home Base to where I stood, which put me at a good kilometre or so from where I’d started and nowhere near where I’d been heading.
“I swear I heard someone.” a male voice said from somewhere nearby, making me drop to the ground in nothing flat, “It sounded like a girl…”
“I’m telling you dude,” a second voice mocked, “nobody’s out here. Metois have been carving down the forest looking for whoever raided their compound.”
“That thing with the truck? Everyone knows that those guys are always moving.”
“Nah, I heard that they noticed some small crap was missing from their stash.”
“What kinda stuff?” the first guy asked, their voices having grown way too close for comfort.
“How the fuck should I know? Shovels and shit. Did you hear anything or not?”
There was a few seconds of silence as they undoubtedly listened out for any sign that I existed while I held my breath and waited.
I hadn’t seen them yet, so for all I knew they could’ve been getting around with pointy sticks and delusions of grandeur, but they could also have a bazooka and a squad of enhanced wolves with razors for teeth.
Paranoia kept me alive for a long time before I died.
“I can’t hear her anymore.” the first guy finally said, allowing me to release a silent breath, “Guess it must’ve been my sister talkin’ to my mum or somethin’. Let’s go.”
My brain was working at a million miles an hour, which I’m guessing is the reason why I thought I could shoot up without consequence.
“Hey, you!”
Chapter Eight
I felt like such a fucking idiot.
“Don’t. Move.” the first guy said as he came up behind me, “You alone out here?”
“No.” I said without wasting a second, “I’m with the Metois search party.”
“Ha!” the second guy let out, revealing that he was hanging back as his friend moved on me, “Yeah, I’m sure that the Metois are in such dire need that they’d start arming their members with piss weak rifles and bows. Try again.”
“I don’t know what to tell you man,” I said, coming up with an elaborate backstory as fast as I possibly could, “I’m a new member, and they said they didn’t wanna waste resources on ‘a scrub who’s gonna get herself killed fifty fuckin’ times.’ Their words, not mine.”
The first guy’s feet ground to a halt and a palpable fear appeared in our little grid of the forest.
“So you won’t mind if we take you back to your squad then?” the first guy said, his voice putting him at maybe a metre behind me, maybe even closer.
“Do you know where they are?” I asked hopefully, “That’d be amazing if you did.”
Terrified silence returned, giving me a slight tingle of pride that I was managing to trick the doofuses.
“Will there be a reward?” the second guy asked.
“I’d say so, the recruits that the Metois accept are normally seen as kinda important, right? That’s what I was led to believe when I got brought in anyway.”
I had them in the palm of my hand, I just had to wait for my moment.
“What do you think?”
And there it was.
Without hesitation I dropped to a knee and swivelled, pulling out my rifle before Scrub_Crusher, the one nearest to me, and Doctor McFeelGood had even noticed what I’d done, and started firing.
My first shot was off by a couple of inches, piercing Crusher’s throat, but he was still so thrown that by the time I’d forced down the handle and pulled it back up he was already catching a bullet in the eye.
Scrub_Crusher has been slain (World).
Though Doctor McFeelGood was still clearly thrown, he’d started spewing hot metal out of his AK in my general direction anyway.
His aim was off though, and I don’t know whether it was because of his surprise or the fact that his gun was rustier than a beach bum’s Kombi, but I was sure as Hell grateful for it.
A few seconds of heated gunfire later and everything was said and done, me still on my knee, and Doctor McFeelGood falling to his non-face as the back of his head smoked and spurted blood.
It was quite the sight to see.
Doctor McFeelGood has been slain (World).
+2 Firearm Skill
Firearm Skill: 4/100
Level Progression: 70/150
“That could’ve gone better,” I said to myself as I wandered over to the bodies, “you could’ve just played it smart and kept your head down, but no. You had to go ahead and make a mess of everything and kill these two saps.”
At that point I remembered what had gotten me in the aforementioned mess and shut up, the knowledge that a Metois squad could be out there, listening, watching, waiting for the opportunity to strike sending a shiver up my spine.
A quick scroll through the guy’s gear proved that much of what they had was either completely crap, painted cardboard armour was probably my favourite part, or so damaged and rusty that there wa
s no point in grabbing it unless I wanted to give myself and everyone else tetanus, even their clips had less than ten out of a hundred durability.
Gotta admit though, there was a part of me that wanted to know if that whole tetanus thing was actually a possibility, but the saner part of me was convinced that it was a bad idea to lug around something that someone desperate enough would definitely shoot me for.
Anyway, after a good few minutes of making absolutely sure no one had heard, or at least wasn’t going to come investigate, I had to decide what my next course of action was.
Option one was to haul arse back home and let the guys know that the Metois were out for blood.
Option two was to quickly get to the farm, grab what I could, then haul arse back home.
It took no small amount of reassurance, but I eventually decided that I’d go with option two, I’d just be quick about it.
I mean, surely the guys could handle themselves.
Right?
Chapter Nine
After making the decision to continue on my journey for the farm I became increasingly twitchy, and what was worse was I had no idea why. Everything looked like it was out to get me.
The birds, trees, falling branches, everything. Every little thing was out to get me in my eyes and there was no way for me to shake the feeling.
I tried rationalising it as being concerned that at any moment I could get jumped again, or that I’d get back home and see that everything was on fire, but it was nothing as simple as that.
It was the innate feeling, almost primal, that set me on edge, like ants scurrying around for every morsel of food hours before it even looks like rain.
And then I walked out of the forest and found the farm, blood all over the fenced-off fields which Paul had slaughtered Piggly’s livestock on, a beautiful but simple home a few hundred feet behind that, and oh yeah, heavily armed Metois everywhere.
I hit the deck as quickly as I possibly could, but without any tall grass to give me cover on wide and flat farmland I knew I’d be spotted in an instant if a soldier so much as gave the forest a sweeping glance.
What was worse was the fact that I’d somehow managed to wander a decent couple dozen feet away from the forest before laying down.
I was just a luck machine.
There were three military trucks in total, the closest of which was about fifty metres from me, and around ten or twelve armoured soldiers searching the farm and the house.
“Load everything! We’re shippin’ off in two mikes!” one of the soldiers shouted from inside the house as I debated whether I should stay dead still or shuffle back into the forest.
“Just say minutes dude!” another soldier called back, “It’s way easier!”
“Just load the damn trucks and shut up,” a third voice said, “you’re gonna piss him off again.”
“Eh, he gets pissed, he gets pissed. There ain’t a whole lot he can do to me, is there?”
“What was that!?” the first guy bellowed as I slowly started to belly crawl toward the closest truck.
I may have been going crazy, but it seemed like the best idea at the time.
“You heard me, you walk around like a cock in a henhouse, but what can you really do to us? Give us a stern talkin’ to? Maybe tell the big boss that we’re bein’ little turds?”
“You’ll bite your tongue or-”
“Or what? You gonna shoot me? You really reckon that’s gonna turn out in your favour?”
Things were starting to get a bit dicey, in case you couldn’t tell, and judging from the silence that was starting to ring through the air, we were about a hair’s breadth from a straight up war-zone.
“You know what?” the first guy finally said after a tense few seconds of silence, “Maybe I will.”
“Put that thing down before you hurt yourself.” the aggressor laughed as the sound of a revolver being cocked rippled across the field.
There were another few seconds of silence after that, aside from the dirt being shifted under my body as I squirmed my way to a measly twenty feet from the truck, and then the shooting started.
The first shot fired definitely wasn’t from a revolver of any kind, but the second was, and as the deaths started to add up I guessed that the revolver wielder had gotten his man.
TasteTheRainbow has been slain (World).
YoFace has been slain (World).
xXGodXx has been slain (World).
Bullets were flying everywhere and I could immediately feel the difference from what I’d been doing in the forest, there was this sort of symphony to it.
They all knew what they were doing, and once those first three had gone down the deaths stopped.
The same couldn’t be said for the shooting though, and right as I reached the door to the truck a series of bullets riddled the side.
“Go, go, go!” a voice said from beside me as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
His name was Stone_Eagle307, and he was hurt, a torrent of blood rushing down the side of his face from where his helmet had failed him.
And then I recognised the voice, “You’re that guy who-”
“Shut up and drive!”
I listened and slammed my foot on the accelerator, the rumbling thrum of the truck’s massive engine sending vibrations through my entire body as we pulled away at high speed from the still very active gunfight.
Looks like someone’s decided they’re gonna try their hand at driving. Do you really think that’s the best call? What with your history of crashing and burning in every aspect of your life? Learning how to drive won’t fix your inability to hold down a steady job or relationship you know?
It was the aggressor sitting next to me, the one who’d gone ahead and decided to tick off the guy with the pube-length fuse.
“You do know I’m not Metois, right?” I asked as we smashed through no less than three trees and got onto the road, my driving abilities clearly more than a little rusty.
“Good, drive. I’ve gotta get patched up.”
He had seemed so much funnier before he’d been shot in the head.
“What’s your name?” he asked as he took off his helmet and got to work wrapping a bandage around his head.
“Zoey, yours?”
“No, not your game name, your real name. I like knowing the people I’m travelling with, gets rid of that anonymity that makes folk randomly shoot each other. Well, most of the time.” he said with a mildly annoyed laugh as he finished fixing his head.
“…My name’s Zoey, is that really hard to believe?”
Eagle shot me an interested look, then shrugged, “Guess it’s just rare to run into someone who has the good luck to get their real name. Must’ve been quick on the signup. Anyway, I’m Miles.”
Chapter Ten
Things fell quiet after Miles and I’s introduction, my typical coarseness falling away behind piles of confusion.
“Truck’s got loads of stuff in it.” Miles finally said, breaking the silence.
“Huh?”
“The truck, we picked up a ton of stuff when we were pickin’ that farm clean. Mostly surveillance gear and whatnot, but we got a few walkie-talkies and a big ol’ VHF radio, like the kind in boats and stuff.”
I didn’t know what to do with that information, mostly because I didn’t know what in the bibdly-fuck was going on.
Was I prisoner? Was I driving back to the Metois compound, or was I going home? Was I gonna die?
“Stop!”
“What!?” I shouted as I slammed on the breaks and accidentally jumped out of the truck.
“The tracker!” Miles exclaimed as he got out and crawled under the truck, “We stick GPS trackers on these things so that if anyone snatches ‘em we can get them back.”
Oddly enough, that confused me more, his use of the word ‘we’ in contrast with him removing the tracker being the main source of that confusion.
“Are you gonna kill me?” I finally asked, the tension sending me nuts, “I just w
anna know if I should be plannin’ to respawn in the near future.”
“Why would I kill you?” Miles replied as he tossed the tracker off the side of the road, “You got me the Hell outta Dodge when things went south back there.”
“Yeah… but you’re Metois, and Metois ain’t exactly known for being grateful.”
“I don’t know if I’d say I’m Metois anymore,” he laughed as he climbed back into the passenger seat, “not after that anyway. Besides, I’ve been kinda sick of how they run things for a while now, I think a change would be best for everyone involved.”
Now, I’m not an idiot, there was a big part of my brain that was convinced that all that had happened was a part of some kind of grand scheme to trick me into taking one of their guys to my base of operations, but at the same time that seemed like a Hell of a stretch.
After a moment of waiting for Miles to pop out and shoot me in the face, I climbed back up into the truck and got ready to take off again.
“I get that you probably don’t trust me yet,” Miles said as I started checking the map to get an idea of how to get home, “but I promise that I’ll be the perfect guest until you decide what you want to do with me.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said, veering off the road and into the forest, doing my best not to leave too obvious a trail, “why would you want to just go under someone else again? Especially someone like me? You do know I’m my group’s leader, right? There’re no max level players runnin’ the show, just a couple o’ guys who’ve barely gotten out of the Stone Age.”
“You see, that sounds fun to me,” Miles replied, “goin’ back to basics, going from the bottom to the top. Do you really think it’s fun to be on guard duty ninety percent of the time?”
“So, what, you’re just gonna abandon all your gear, become a noob like us?”
“No, that’s not all I’m gonna do. I’m just gonna find out where your base is, get voted in or whatever, then off myself and come back as a freshie.”
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