Fragged

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  “When you lot decided to bring Pete in on this little group.” Miles snapped after we started going forward, which quickly proved difficult as we listed slightly to the left, “That guy did a real number on me, and now I’m supposed to what, act like everything’s all hunky-dory?”

  “No, but you could work on being less of prick to the rest of us,” I added with a grin, “I mean, I get that breakups can be shitty, but does it really warrant that much?”

  “He stole all the wall-adapters for my chargers!” Miles practically shrieked, “And none of the cables!”

  Now, I’m not proud of myself or the others for what we did next, but… eh, it was funny, I don’t need to justify the fact that we laughed our holes out.

  For ages.

  Like, an unreasonable amount of time.

  And loudly.

  So loud, in fact, that we didn’t hear the quad bikes come zooming up from behind us until it was too late.

  Suddenly the car was getting riddled with bullets from two cowboy-looking motherfuckers and their micro-SMGs.

  “Woo-hoo!” one of them hollered as they pulled up next to us, proving their vehicles’ were far more capable in our present environment, “Take that you Metois bitches!”

  “Oh yeah, this was a great idea!” Miles growled as he and the others went to work returning fire, “I’m sure this would’ve been happening if we weren’t dressed as some of the most hated people in the game!”

  “I’m sensing some sarcasm in your voice,” Chad replied coolly before opening fire on the closest of the quad bikes, “tell me, do you have some concerns about our present situation?”

  “I do!” Paul shrieked.

  “Of course you do,” Chad mocked, “Captain Bullet-Magnet and your magical bullet magnet abilities.”

  “We joke because we love you.” I added with a little chuckle before turning serious as a hail of bullets sprayed right through the car and into the bonnet, “Seriously though, are you guys even trying to shoot them?”

  “It’s kinda hard with you driving!” Miles snapped, “Maybe try driving straight!?”

  “Tell that to the trees!” I barked back, “I don’t think you’re getting this, but it’s actually really hard trying to-”

  I was cut short as I ploughed us into a surprisingly sturdy stump at full speed.

  Nice driving there.

  Maybe my driving was at fault…

  Chapter Nine

  Now, there was an upside to us… me crashing the car.

  It confused the everlasting fuck out of our attackers for a few seconds.

  Like I said though, there was an upside, but also a whole lot of downsides.

  For one, we were all sufficiently dazed and confused by what had happened, and as we each stumbled awkwardly out of the car, we couldn’t help but end up going a little bit further away from each other than we’d intended.

  For another thing, our health had taken a severe hit.

  I was sure that it was just one of those temporary effects, but the fact that I was suffering from the dreaded grayscale colour scheme didn’t bode well for my chances of survival.

  Oh, and for yet another thing, that initial upside was only temporary.

  Very temporary.

  “Huddle behind the car!” I shouted as I made a mad scramble for the boot, “Now!”

  Everyone managed to follow my order before the quad bikers could double back and start firing at us again, but one of our number wasn’t happy.

  Funnily enough, it wasn’t Miles.

  “Well this is just great…” Paul grumbled with just a twinge of fear.

  “I know that this isn’t the best of situations,” I replied as I pulled my shield off my back and got ready to shoot one of the quads’ wheels out, “but I’m sure we can survive a couple o’ wankers on child’s toys.”

  “It’s not that.” Paul said right before they zoomed past us, “Well, it’s not just that. I grabbed a couple of extra things from that pile of crap before. I wanted to surprise you with them, bu-”

  “Hey, don’t sell yourself short,” Chad interrupted as he started riffling through the boot, “I’m sure we would’ve all been very excited when we blew up.”

  “Blew u-whoa! Where the Hell did you get that!?” I practically yelped as I saw the lit stick of dynamite in Chad’s hand.

  “Trunk.” Chad replied disinterestedly before casting it in the direction of the fast-approaching quad bikes.

  I didn’t get much time to wonder how long the fuse on the red stick was before a massive fireball engulfed one of the quad bikes and sent the other one flying in our general direction.

  Sweet696969 has been slain (World).

  The notification popped up just in time for the second explosion from the fiery quad bike’s fuel tank rupturing to roar through the forest. There were another solid couple of seconds before the other, screaming cowboy hit the ground and went arse-over-head about fifteen times into the forest, missing us by a mile.

  After making sure he was still driving around or about to explode, we didn’t waste any time in following the lone survivor’s trail of destruction, discovering only at the end that he’d been thrown clear of his quad bike and had been knocked out.

  “Solid effort.” Miles scoffed as he started checking the poor, bloody bastard for ammo while I wandered over to the overturned but still functional quad bike, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone try to cartwheel with a quad.”

  “Then you just haven’t lived,” Chad joked as he joined me at the quad, “anything useful packed in the saddlebags?”

  “Nothing,” I replied disappointedly, “you reckon we should take it with us to the base?”

  Chad appeared to toss it up in his head for a few seconds before shaking his head and sighing, “Nah, I reckon someone would be willing to kill us for it. We can try salvaging the parts if you want?”

  “No point,” I said as I turned back around and started back toward the car, “I doubt we’d be able to find any interchangeable parts without a mechanic here.”

  Tasty_ManCheese has been slain (World).

  “Did you have to slit his throat?” Paul asked as we passed him and Miles, “That shit always unsettles me.”

  “Better than wasting a bullet,” Miles replied, showing that he was at least making an effort to get back to his hard-arse self, “plus it doesn’t make any sound, which means we aren’t gonna attract any more unwanted attention. What’s this you were saying about a mechanic?”

  “Just that we don’t have one,” I said as soon as I realised he was talking to me, “though I’m thinking I might use that car of ours to remedy that.”

  “Heh, yeah, if it even runs anymore.”

  “And what makes you think it won’t?” Chad asked with obvious annoyance.

  “Uh, because she crashed it?” Miles scoffed, “I mean, it was unavoidable, not saying it wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean the car’ll run.”

  I hadn’t really thought about that, but as I approached the still semi-functional car, I couldn’t help but act like a smug tool.

  “Would you look at that?” I asked, pointing at the tiny dent in the front bumper, “How will she ever run again?”

  “Could’ve been worse,” Miles replied coolly, “and I don’t get why you’d think that I didn’t want it to be running, it’s not like I hate the car.”

  “Just the fact that it’s potentially a huge waste of time, yeah?” I jabbed light-heartedly as I got behind the wheel, adding a sigh of relief as colour finally started to return to my vision.

  “I like it,” Chad said after he’d climbed into the passenger seat, “has a lot of character.”

  “That’s just what people say when something’s broken,” Miles chuckled, “nobody says ‘ooh, it has character’ when it hasn’t got a whole bunch of broken parts.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” I said before reversing, straightening up, and getting us moving again, “he’s just jealous of how much I like you.”

&nb
sp; “I know I am…” Paul trailed off jokingly.

  Well, I hoped he was joking, but it is possible I was giving the car too much attention.

  “You guys reckon the base is gonna be alright when we get there?” Chad asked as we rolled peacefully through the forest.

  I shrugged and smiled after I started picturing the base flying our colours, “Can’t imagine Pete wouldn’t have given us a heads-up if we were heading for a trap.”

  “Yeah, but who knows with him,” Chad replied, “from what Miles has told me, the guy likes to play a ton of messed up tricks on people.”

  “It’s true,” Miles interjected, “couldn’t go a day without him pulling some kinda stupid gag when we were together.”

  “Of course you feel that way,” I chuckled, rolling my eyes as I realised that Miles and Chad had probably had plenty of time to get to know each other and bitch about exes in the time Paul and I had been gone, “but I sincerely doubt he’d pull any of that crap when it comes to the game. As much of jokester as he is, he seems to take this stuff pretty seriously.”

  “She’s right,” Miles added with some kind of obvious ulterior motive, “he’ll wait until we’re all nice and comfortable before causing the unending storm of pranks and general fuckery.”

  “That’s…” I started then trailed off with a sigh, “Ugh, that’s the spirit. Anyone know some work songs?”

  “Like a shanty!?” Paul exclaimed, reminding me of his weird obsession with pirates.

  “I… Sure, like a shanty.”

  I’d barely finished my sentence before Paul started singing some pirate song way, way, way too loudly, giving everyone else little time to sing along.

  We eventually caught on though, and before long we were all bellowing ‘Drunken Sailor’ at the top of our lungs.

  It probably wasn’t the smartest tactical move in the world, but hey, it was a whole lot of fun.

  Chapter Ten

  “Shit…” I whispered as we rolled into what was once the Metois base’s compound, the torn section in the fence having yet to be mended, “How the Hell did all this happen?”

  It was post-apocalyptic.

  Fires burned, every door and window was either opened or destroyed, and there were a whole lot of dead bodies, mostly steggies, but there were a bunch of humans, raptors, and Muties as well.

  I parked the car in front of the main building where literally tons of vehicles used to sit in waiting but had since been either stolen or destroyed and replaced with the Js and the rest of my clan.

  “Rethinking settling down here?” Pete asked as I climbed out of the car and he pulled up beside us, “Because I have to admit, this is worse than I expected.”

  “Understatement of the year…” Miles scoffed, “You guys think that any of this is salvageable?”

  “You tell us,” Chad replied as we moved for the main building’s front doors, “you’re the only one of us who’s been in here for any extended period of time.”

  Miles clearly wanted to say something to the effect of nothing being utilisable, but instead he let out a sigh, “We could technically keep all the structures, maybe even tear ‘em down and do a different layout, but unless you want the builder to be doing nothing but training for the next few days, that isn’t exactly what I’d called doable.”

  We went through the threshold of the building and did a quick sweep of the bottom floor, which showed up with nothing in either the lobby or the small armouries on either side of it.

  “I don’t see why that shouldn’t be an option,” I finally replied after ensuring we weren’t going to get surprised with a random attack, “we should be safe enough if we fortify in here, and I reckon if we claim this place as our new Home Base we’ll gain access to a whole mess-ton of new beds, which means more Freemen, which means more builders.”

  “But that’s only if we claim this place,” Paul clarified, “shouldn’t we be trying to find the property marker or whatever?”

  It’d been a while since I’d taken a base, longer still since I’d been a part of the team that found the property marker, but I still roughly remembered what had to be done.

  “Miles, where is it?” I asked when it became clear he wasn’t going to give up the information unprompted.

  Miles let out a disappointed huff at that and gestured for the elevator on the lobby’s back wall, “It’s in the basement.”

  “This place already has a basement?” Chad asked happily as we approached the elevator, “That’s awesome! Gives us a place to start with our little underground bunker.”

  “Doubt it’ll be little once we finish it,” I replied boldly, “I reckon this place’ll end up being the envy of all of Thren, including those dudes in the city.”

  “I really hope we don’t actually draw their attention,” Miles said as he hit the button that called the elevator, “last thing we need is to be recovering from the Metois only to get bombarded by those arseholes.”

  The elevator doors peeled open to reveal a small space and a flickering light that, if I’m completely honest, didn’t make me feel altogether comfortable.

  “For once you’re right,” Pete added, surprising me with his existence as we piled into the elevator, “those guys could very genuinely wipe us off the map if we don’t get this place up off the ground fast enough, especially if they think there’s value in expanding their operation out here.”

  “Eh, I reckon they’ll be too focused on scooping up old Metois members to care about this base.” Paul replied after beating me to the little ‘B’ button, “They’re like the US and Russia after the war, snatchin’ up Nazi scientists like they’re made of gold and fairy floss.”

  The doors slid close and I started picturing what we were going to see in the basement, hoping that no one else had thought to check it out in their looting.

  “This is so exciting,” Chad chirped as we started going down, “I can’t believe we’re actually doing it.”

  “Me either,” I replied with a grin, “me eith-”

  I was cut short as, with a horrendous scraping sound and some kind of sizzling, the elevator groaned to an angled halt.

  “Don’t worry, this happens a lot.” Miles said, “We just need to climb out.”

  “Ugh… that’s just-” I started then stopped as the light finally flickered out, “great…”

  Granted, it wasn’t a fantastic start, but, even as I stood there in the dark, I couldn’t help but feel excited for what was going to come next.

  We were doing it.

  Really doing it.

  Zoey’s Fighters were moving on up.

  Well, figuratively.

  FRAGGED 8

  Chapter One

  “Get your arse outta my face!” Pete growled.

  “I would if you’d stop tryin’ to climb past me!” Miles snapped back.

  “And I wouldn’t be tryin’ to climb past you if you weren’t taking for-fucking-ever to get your arse up!”

  Ah, the bickering of the scorned lovers, how fun it was to be stuck in an elevator with them and their incessant bitching.

  “Pete’s right,” I interjected, preventing Miles from snarling something that he’d apparently had to take a few seconds to work on, “if you’re looking for enemy players, I sincerely doubt you’re gonna find any.”

  “It’s not that,” Miles replied with a much cooler voice than the one he’d been using with Pete, “there’s a lot of moving parts up here, and I’m worried that any one of them could get screwed with if I climb up the wrong way.”

  “Screwed with how?” I asked while Miles continued to shuffle around, taking no care to make sure he wasn’t kicking us in the face.

  “Screwed in that, as great a game as this is, I’m sure weird glitches with player-made elevators are still entirely possible.”

  “What kind of glitches?” Paul asked with no small amount of fear in his voice.

  “Well, we had a guy climb up on one of the elevators once after finding himself in the same position we�
��re in, only he had an engineer on the way and just didn’t want to wait for him to come and bail him out,” Miles said before apparently finding the exact right spot to climb up and shuffling awkwardly onto the roof of the elevator, “and to cut a long story short, he ended up causing the entire thing to catapult out through the roof of the building. Killed something like fifteen people, including the three other guys who were in the elevator with him.”

  “So,” I started then stopped as I followed Miles’ lead, “which elevator was the one that screwed up?”

  “You guys are standing in it.”

  That was all everyone else needed to start panicking, scrambling for the access hatch while I struggled to get out of the way in time.

  Within a couple of seconds, we were all standing on the roof of the elevator, doing our best not to start freaking out and disturb whatever it was that caused the spontaneous catapulting, when, out of nowhere, Miles started laughing his arse off.

  At first I was confused, understandably I believe, but then I realised what had happened, “Oh, you prick.”

  The rest of the guys gave me a sort of confused look for a few moments before they too realised that Miles was full of shit.

  “You dick!” Pete barked, “Why the Hell would you do that?”

  “I dunno,” Miles squeezed out between laughs, “it was funny. ‘Catapulting elevator’, seriously? You guys fell for that? This thing is busted. I’m guessing one of the cables or something just snapped.”

  There was a small part of me that wanted to shoot Miles right then and there, but I managed to stop myself just short of pulling the trigger.

  “What do we do now then?” Chad asked before tensions could rise again, “You know, now that the threat of death is mostly removed.”

  “I guess we can just go ahead and go through the door,” Miles replied, pointing to one of the walls, “we’ll have to crouch to get through, and I’m not sure if there’ll be anyone in there, but unless you wanna try a human pyramid, it’s the only option we’ve got.”