Damage: 93
Ammo Type: 7.62
Description: In the right hands this DMR would get almost any rifleman out of even the stickiest of situations. But you aren’t the right hands, are you?
“We survive this,” The Duke said as he took a few steps back from the door and pulled a bullpup rifle off his back, “you can keep that.”
“I won’t be bought off.” I growled, suppressing the urge to ask where he was keeping all his guns, “If we’d have waited just a few more secon-”
Suddenly something came crashing through the window that was on the left side of the door and I instinctively squeezed off three rounds in quick succession at the figure.
Gable_1337 has been slain (World).
+1 Firearm Skill
Firearm Skill: 6/100
Level Progression: 90/150
Community Population: 11/35
Well would you look at that? You killed one of your Community members! Let me guess, they ate all the paste before you got a chance to try it? And yes, because you killed them they got taken out of the Community, because why would anyone want to stay in a group where they got killed by their supreme leader?
I was frozen, staring at Chad’s dead body as he bled all over the floor, my mouth opening and closing as I debated whether or not I should apologise.
And then I heard Duke laughing, “Oh, oh that is golden!”
Without hesitation, I turned my gun on him, an act of aggression that The Duke mirrored, “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shoot you.”
“I’ll give you two,” he said, the amused tone in his voice instantly vanished, “one, you shoot me, I shoot you, we both die. Two, you shoot me, I miss you, the Muties and raptors break in, we both die.”
As if to confirm his point, bodies started crashing against the front of the house and green eyes appeared at the windows as the Muties contemplated whether or not that was the route they wanted to take.
Neither of us were willing to let our guard down though, our guns still aimed at each other even as the front door cracked and splintered.
“Fine.” I growled, turning my sights on the door and firing two quick rounds into it and eliciting a shriek from the creature on the other side.
“Back into the house,” The Duke said after sending a three-round burst from his bullpup into the face of the Mutie at the window, “there’s a second set of doors behind us.”
I started stepping backward, but I didn’t stop shooting, aiming for centre mass at a Mutie I couldn’t see.
+1 Firearm Skill
Firearm Skill: 7/100
Level Progression: 100/150
I hit the door with my back and stopped, deliberating whether it was safe enough for a ceasefire, “Should I open th-”
“Go ahead, I’ll keep us covered.”
Without wasting another second, I turned around and twisted the wooden door handle, only noticing the problem with the door after we’d walked into the living-dining-sleeping area of Piggly’s house and shut the door behind us.
“It’s glass!”
“Relax, it’s bulletproof.” The Duke replied before turning and looking around the room we were in, “Why would you sleep in the same room as your kitchen? You know what? Whatever, you see an exit?”
I did a quick sweep and discovered not so much as a window in the fifteen-by-fifteen metre space we were in, “Nada.”
“Me either. I guess we’re holding here then.”
“What? No way. Need I remind you that there’re raptors out there? And if there’re raptors there’s gonna be worse comin’ for the corpses they leave behind.”
Duke tapped the big rifle on his back, “That’s what the .50 cal’s for. ‘Sides, not much out there that I can’t take on.”
“Except Muties.”
“Except Muties. But to be fair they do just keep comin’ and comin’. Speaking of…”
There was a full three seconds of delay before it happened, detracting from the awesomeness of The Dukes trail off somewhat, but the Muties did bust through, taking what seemed to be the entirety of the front wall with them as a good dozen of them poured in, ignoring the fact that a few of their buddies were being munched on by raptors not twenty feet behind them.
“What do we do now?” I asked, my finger nervously hovering over my trigger.
“We wait. Like I said, that glass is-”
Yeah… turns out the glass wasn’t so bulletproof.
Chapter Nine
“Some bulletproof glass there mate!” I spat as I fired a few rounds into the Muties that had started smashing down the door, “Top observational skills there!”
“It was a fair assumption!”
“Well you know what they say about assumptions! They make an arse outta you and umption!”
“What!?”
“Just keep shooting!” I barked as I realised that in-jokes with my dad didn’t extend beyond… well, my dad.
+1 Firearm Skill
Firearm Skill: 8/100
Level Progression: 110/150
“There’s gotta be a way outta here…” Duke trailed off as he switched back-and-forth between shooting the Muties and searching around the room, “There!”
“Where!?”
“The rug!”
“The rug!? Did the old owner really seem like th-shit!”
One of the Muties had broken through the door, the glass severing it from the waist down, and started dragging its way toward us.
Ammo depleted
Ammo depleted
“Fuck it!” I growled, my gun clicking uselessly, “Fine!”
I darted over to the rug near the kitchen and, to my surprise, kicked it aside and revealed that it was indeed hiding a secret door.
“Well I’ll be dam-oof.” I grunted as The Duke shoved his way past me and opened the hatch, “Rude much?”
“Get down here!” he shouted back as he mounted the ladder inside and started his slide down.
I don’t know why I did it, maybe it was some kind of weird homage to all those zombie films I saw, but the ‘why’ doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that I did and I very nearly fucked myself by doing it.
Oh yeah, I still haven’t explained the ‘it’ yet; I turned around.
Yeah, it wasn’t all that dramatic, until you take into consideration the fact that the Muties had successfully brought down the door and were all hammering toward me and stumbling over themselves like lanky Pit Bulls jacked up on amphetamines.
I fell backwards as the horde moved for me, the one that had been dragging itself having grabbed one of my ankles, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.
A QTE started and, after a few seconds of trying to figure out where the damn ‘Q’ key was, I started driving the butt of the DMR into the bastard’s face, ruining the gun’s durability and mashing the Mutie’s face to the point of making it look like bloody seafood salad.
The damage to its face wasn’t stopping it though, but I wasn’t about to either, and, in my desperate backward shuffling, I found that I’d reached the hatch and did one final drag that sent both me and the mashed Mutie down the hole, getting stuck on The Duke’s head as he desperately tried to climb down the ladder.
“What the Hell are you doing!?” he shrieked as we reached the bottom of what I assumed was Piggly’s old bunker.
Before I could answer him, he’d fired off a dozen or so shots into the Mutie’s face, stopping it from pushing its mostly useless mouth against my legs.
“Thanks.” I said, not bothering to hide my adrenaline-fueled anxiety, “That had the potential to go really poorly.”
“You don’t say?” Duke bit back sarcastically before slamming the red button on the concrete wall beside the ladder that resulted in the hatch above our heads slamming down with a cacophonous bang, “See, I thought that someone as notorious as yo-shit!”
Without looking up at what had spooked him, I rolled out of the way and just barely dodged the angry and flailing Mutie as it slammed into the ground
with an unsettling squishing sound.
Unsurprisingly, a few broken limbs wasn’t gonna stop a genetically modified man-dino hybrid, and pretty much the instant it’d hit the floor it’d started crawling toward me like a pissed off huntsmen.
You wanna know what does stop a genetically modified man-dino hybrid though? A fifty calibre round splitting its body from mouth to arsehole.
Does a bloody good job of bursting your eardrums too, especially when you’re in a four-by-four metre concrete echo chamber.
“Fucking Hell!” I shouted, at least I think I did, the words sounded all tinny and reverberated by the time they reached my ears.
“Wubba lubba dub dub!” The Duke responded angrily.
Alright, so maybe he didn’t say exactly that, and maybe he went on for a solid thirty second rant, but it really may as well have been ‘Wubba lubba dub dub!’ for all I could make out.
Tell you what though, those few minutes of damaged hearing really gave me perspective, the perspective being that being deaf sucks balls.
Chapter Ten
“So…” I trailed off from the corner of the mostly empty bunker as hearing slowly returned to me, “What do we do now?”
The Duke had taken to rummaging around the one thing that we had down there, a pantry built into the wall opposite the ladder, and ignoring me.
I’m not gonna lie, it looked pretty funny, like a six-foot shrubbery had somehow grown from one of the various cans.
“Oh come on man, you’re not still pissed about that whole thing upstairs are you? I was freaked out and didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You pointed a gun at me.” The Duke snarled without turning to face me, “A gun I gave you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what? Seriously, I can’t think of one good reason for you doing that. I saved your lives when I could’ve just have easily abandoned your arses in the forest.”
“But you did, didn’t you? You were ready to abandon Chad the second the opportunity presented itself.”
“Chad? Who’s Cha-oh, yeah, right, you mean Gable? Care to remind me who shot him?”
“Hey, that was only because I was stressed out after you locked the door, which, by the way, is what made him have to come through the window in the first place.”
Duke went to say something angry in response, but instead settled for a dejected sigh and turned to face me, “Look, I get that this whole thing hasn’t been ideal, alright? And that you guys wouldn’t have even been out there if I hadn’t left you to watch over the bodies, but the fact that you almost killed me for keeping us alive rubs me the wrong way.”
I was kind of lost for words after that, he’d admitted fault, which felt good, but was still blaming me for shit I had no control over.
…
Ugh, yes I felt guilty, but at the same time apologising just didn’t feel like something I was capable of at that point in time.
I guess it’s important to surprise yourself sometimes though.
“I’m sorry I nearly shot you in the face.” I said as quickly as I possibly could before locking my jaw shut before I started apologising for everything I’d done wrong in my life.
The Duke spent a few seconds staring at me after that, like he was trying to decide whether or not I was telling the truth, before finally giving me a nod and saying “It’s alright, I get it.”
A sigh of relief escaped me before I could stop it, followed shortly by a little laugh, “Thanks. Now, what do we do from here?”
“Well, considering the terms of my agreement with you are clearly in dire need of being updated after the muck around that occurred, I reckon we change that ‘owe you one’ to something slightly more substantial. For example, what would you say to me joining your Community?”
“Um…” I replied confusedly, “I-I meant more along the lines of what do we do now. Like, there ain’t exactly a clock down here, and I don’t know if we’d hear the siren, but yeah… um… Yeah, yeah I reckon that’d be great.”
I didn’t mean to sound nearly as hesitant as I did, and I was sure that The Duke was gonna take offence, but it turns out he’s a lot cooler than most of the people I’ve dealt with in the past.
“Awesome.” he said happily before looking around the barren space we were in, “And I reckon we give it a few more minutes, last thing we wanna do is open the hatch and get flooded. I doubt I’ve got enough ammo left on me to handle another wave.”
“Fair enough.”
After that the atmosphere of the bunker turned into one similar to that of an elevator after an important conversation, with the exception being that we didn’t have the benefit of muzak or a small screen telling us how many floors we had to go.
And then I thought of something.
“Oh yeah, don’t you have a clan already?”
Duke seemed kind of thrown by the question and took on a very ‘deer in the headlights’ sort of expression, before finally registering what I’d said, “Oh, oh yeah. No, no I recently got screwed over by my clan, they were threatening to kick me out. So I raided the armoury and bailed.”
“Where have you been staying?”
“Built a tree fort.”
“And that’s safe?”
“Yeah, people don’t tend to look up unless they’re being shot at, and even when they do they don’t look hard enough to spot what could be hiding just above the branches.”
He was right, the amount of times where I would’ve been saved a whole lot of trouble if I’d only looked up is probably innumerable, and for a second there I even considered changing up my plan from hiding underground to going into the treetops.
And then I remembered pterodactyls.
“So you’re just gonna leave all the stuff in your fort behind then? Come and join us with a relatively clean slate?”
“What?” he laughed, “Hell no, I’ll swing by there in one of them trucks out front. Don’t worry though, I haven’t much there, so it shouldn’t throw off the whole ‘freshie’ thing you’re going after.”
Yeah, it threw me off a bit when he said that, mostly because it meant that he’d been watching the others and I for a whole lot longer than I thought.
“Alright, I’m cool with that.” I said, hiding my discomfort, “Oh, and what’s your name? I refuse to spend the rest of the game calling you ‘The Duke’, it sets a weird sorta vibe between us.”
He thought on what I’d asked a while, which I really couldn’t blame him for, before giving a shrug, “Eh, can’t see why not. Name’s Peter, nice to meet you.”
I let out an amused breath and nodded, “Nice to meet you Pete.”
The words had barely left my lips before we heard it, the faint sound of the Mutie’s siren calling them back from their night of murder and pseudo-cannibalism.
“Well, that’s a good sign.” Pete said in relief, “Thank God we didn’t head up earlier, huh?”
“Heh, yeah.” I replied as I got to my feet, “Come on, let’s head up.”
Chapter Eleven
Climbing out of the bunker proved to be a slightly irritating process as when we did finally reach the top of the long ladder we discovered that the only way to open the hatch was with the button.
We did eventually get out though, it took us about three times longer than it probably should’ve, but we did do it, and when we did we were met with a proper grim sight.
“Damn…” I said as I looked around at the dozens of dead Muties and the five dead raptors, “Just… damn…”
“Can’t believe this went on right above our heads, can you?”
I shook my head and started cautiously making my way toward the broken glass doors, waiting for any one of the dead creatures to leap up and drag me down into the gruesome pile, “You’d think that we would’ve at least heard some of it, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Pete replied, clearly not paying full attention.
I turned around slowly, not wanting to disturb the dead, to see what had distracted him and saw him c
rouched with a big knife over one of the raptors.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just getting some skins.” he said as he drove his knife into the reptile’s belly, “Figured it’d be best not to waste the opportunity, you know?”
I wanted to tell him to quit it and come with me, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it and instead said “Alright, just hurry up. I reckon the smell’s gonna bring in a rex soon enough.”
Pete nodded in response, but still was clearly not paying attention, “Yeah, yeah, sure thing. I’ll meet you back at Home Base with the other truck, yeah?”
“Mmhm,” I said, letting out a sigh that was somewhere between amused and annoyed, “see you later.”
I didn’t get a response after that, but I didn’t mind, instead I was focussed on getting out of the gore and glass-filled house as fast as possible.
The morning looked so welcoming as I stepped through the broken glass doors and walked toward the destroyed front wall.
There were bodies and gore strewn around the field in front of the house, sure, but what I could see around the truck gave me this odd sense of calm, and even as I climbed into the truck I felt warm.
Something about surviving that last night had made me happier than I’d been in ages, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that I’d shot Chad in the face, or maybe it was just that I’d apologised about something and meant it.
Whatever it was didn’t matter, all that mattered was how at ease I felt as I pulled away in that truck and started toward the path I’d carved the last time I’d been through there.
I was actually really enjoying the drive that time around, and even when I got out onto the open road where absolutely anyone could’ve jumped out and tried to rob me I was calm.
And then I panicked, hard.
Slamming on the brakes, I pulled to the side of the road, causing me to drift slightly as the hydraulic hiss of the truck’s brakes took their sweet, sweet time to dissipate and let me come to a halt.
I jumped out of the truck, ready to get swarmed by Metois troops, and started rooting around in the place that Miles had when we’d last taken a truck.
Fragged Page 13
