Boothe tossed the scrapped gun back down and walked towards the farmhouse.
“Keep watch out here,” he told his drone, hoping that more gecks, or any other creatures for that matter, would not come to attack him.
Alert Mode. Confirmed!
Boothe stepped through the front door into a small living room, keeping an eye on the drone’s camera feed while he explored the house. The interior stank of unwashed animals, rotten meat, and the bitter, metallic scent of blood. The furniture had been destroyed and the walls were streaked in filth. A red trail dragged along the floor from the front door, through the living room, and into another adjacent room. Boothe followed it and looked into what was once a bedroom.
A body lay on the floor – a man, stripped to his underwear and gutted down the middle. It looked like he had been dead for only a few hours, but the gecks had already emptied him out and gnawed along the muscles of his legs and arms. Though they had chewed the meat all around it, the gecks had avoided the tattoo on the man’s bicep – letters and numbers formed into a block.
32IUIJ
G325K
BJ78U
This man had been another player, possibly on the same quest to clear the farmhouse. One wrong move and Boothe could have been in the same position – dead on the floor – a nice dinner for the gecks. He left the bedroom and continued searching the rest of the house. In the kitchen, he found a hoard of useless junk piled into the oven – a license plate, a headless doll, a chipped ceramic coffee cup. Among the garbage, there were also a few useful items, along with a wad of money stuffed into a rusty Altoids tin.
ITEM OBTAINED
Leather Jacket – Shoulders Slot - Light Armor
Durability 60% - Value $6
ARMOR +1
This thick leather jacket offers a small bit of protection and also makes you look like a complete badass.
Leather Boots - Feet Slot - Light Armor
Durability 70% - Value $7
ARMOR +1
These boots are comfortable and light, giving you some protection, while also not hampering movement.
Gained 1 MEDKIT
Gained $13
Boothe put on the new jacket and boots, tossing his old worn-out tennis shoes aside. He stuffed the money into his pocket and clipped the medkit onto his belt to replace the one he had used earlier. He tried to loop the machete he had been carrying onto his belt as well, but found that he didn’t have room for both the machete and the hunting knife. He needed a backpack or something to hold all this stuff in.
For now, he removed the sheathed hunting knife, slid it into his jacket pocket, and left the farmhouse.
One by one, he made his way down the line of vaporators, activating each of them. After hacking the first terminal, he knew exactly how to activate the other four. The process was simple, and after only a few minutes, the night air hummed with the sound of spinning fans.
“Time to head back,” Boothe said. His drone flew slightly behind him as he returned east towards Perry.
Even after the violence he had seen this day, he couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the sky was. It practically overflowed with bright clusters of stars, offering enough light that he took the goggles off his face and held them in his hand while he walked back towards Perry, enjoying the calm. He knew it wouldn’t last long.
The lights all around Caden’s Outpost were lit, transforming the place into a beacon on the dark landscape. As Boothe walked past, Robert the machinegun robot called out to him.
“Hello [BOOTHE], welcome back! I am sorry, but we are currently closed. Come back tomorrow at [WHENEVER I DECIDE TO OPEN, DAMMIT]. Thank you!”
Boothe chuckled, gave the robot a wave and continued past the station towards town. Wulfa had left by the time he arrived, her stall as empty as the rest of the street. The light inside The Depot was still on however, and Boothe found the place just as filled with customers as it had been earlier. Giles sat at the same table, his eyes locked on what might have been the same half-empty mug of beer in front of him.
“The gecks are dead and the vaporators are on,” Boothe said, taking a seat across from him.
“What?” Giles asked, looking up. “You killed them?”
“Yeah, you can go back to your house now, though it’s kind of a mess.”
“Wow!” Giles exclaimed, standing up. He wobbled drunkenly for a moment, then pointed down at Boothe and called out to the entire bar. “This man just killed a group of gecks and got my farm back for me! Give him a cheer!”
Some claps and a half-hearted cheer rose from the rest of the patrons, before they went back to their own drinks and conversations.
“Well, I’m happy at least,” Giles said falling back into his seat. From his pocket, he pulled a wad of crumpled bills. “And here is your money. I have another job for you, if you’re interested. It’ll probably be a little tougher than the gecks, but I’m sure you can handle it.”
“I don’t know,” Boothe said. “One of those gecks nearly chopped my damn arm off. I might need something a bit safer.”
“I can make it worth your while,” Giles said. “I have a nice car that could use a good driver.”
“A car?” Boothe asked, raising an eyebrow. “Okay, let’s talk about this job.”
QUEST COMPLETE: Giles and the Gecks
REWARD: $100
Boothe Gains 200XP
LEVEL UP!
Boothe reaches Level 3!
Ability point gained. Skill point gained.
Assign available points.
Interlude 2
Dad
For a moment, I couldn’t tell where the faint knocking was coming from. The noisy crowd inside The Depot nearly blocked the sound out completely.
Then Dad opened the door to my bedroom, his eyes tired and his shirt half-tucked. “Hey bud, you hungry?” he asked.
I took off my headset and slid my computer chair away from the desk.
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly realizing that I hadn’t eaten anything all day. “You have food?”
“I brought pizza.”
“Give me just a second,” I said.
He stood in the doorway, waiting, while I logged out of the game. On the screen, Boothe sat motionless in the barroom chair until thirty seconds had passed and the game menu appeared, allowing me to exit back to the desktop.
“You been playing that all day?” Dad asked.
“Well, since about ten or so this morning.”
“So yes,” he chuckled. “This is your new game? The one you’ve been waiting for?”
“Yeah – Apocalypse 2020.”
We walked to the kitchen together, where a pizza box nearly as big as the dining table waited.
“Is it good?” Dad asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “The graphics are amazing, and it’s really immersive. It’s a lot of fun. Hard, but fun.”
“Wouldn’t be a good game without a bit of a challenge, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, but this one is really hard. And, I’m pretty sure that if you die, you’re just done. Like, you can’t play anymore.”
“Wow.” He opened the pizza box and sat down in a flimsy plastic chair. He continued talking as he lifted a slice from the box up to his mouth. “But it was a free game, right? So it’s not like you paid for something that you can’t play?”
“I guess,” I said.
Dad always seemed to focus on the value of everything. What is it going to cost? How much is it going to earn? Yeah, the game had been given to me for free by the developers, because I had placed in the top one hundred during the qualifiers. Still, even though I hadn’t paid for it, it would suck if I died and couldn’t play anymore. I may not be out any money, but what about all the time and effort that I put into the game? That was worth something, wasn’t it?
We sat in silence for several minutes, eating the cold, greasy pizza. It had likely sat in the car for at least half an hour while Dad drove home from work.
“How’s school go
ing?” he asked.
“School’s okay,” I said. I hated this conversation, tried my best to avoid it, but he made that nearly impossible.
“Okay how? Good grades? Making friends?”
“I have friends,” I said. “In Austin. What’s the point of making friends here when I’m going to graduate in a few months and move back home?”
“How are you going to move back to Austin, son? You’re not going to get into UT, much less get a scholarship, with the grades you came home with on your last report card.”
I had been a straight A student in Austin. I had never really struggled in school, not because I was very smart, but because I was very good at taking tests. I understood how multiple-choice exams worked. They were just another game. If you knew the rules of how a question was phrased, you could discern the correct answer nearly every time, even without any knowledge on the subject. When I moved to this new school though, I found that the rules were different. The teachers here gave much more homework, which I didn’t do, and there were more essays in the tests, which I wasn’t good at. I had failed several classes the first quarter of the semester, and I wasn’t terribly interested in putting extra effort to pass them in this quarter.
“I’m going to do better,” I said.
“Yeah you are,” Dad replied. “Else you’ll be a senior again next year.”
God, that would suck!
“Most of these classes are optional, Dad. There’s only four that I have to pass to get my diploma.”
“Doesn’t matter, son. F’s look bad on your transcript, whether the class is optional or not. You want to move back to Austin and go to UT, you’re going to have to make better grades.”
“I know.”
“Have you finished your homework for this weekend?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I did it yesterday.”
I hadn’t. I’d spent Friday night playing Civilization, one hour turning into two, turning into five.
Dad looked at me, judging. I lowered my eyes to the pizza so I could avoid that gaze.
“Is the computer getting in the way?” he asked. “Would you be doing better in school if you weren’t on the computer all the time?”
“I need the computer for school, Dad!”
“You don’t need the games.”
“It’s not getting in the way,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’m getting my schoolwork done. I’ll bring my grades up. I’ll graduate and move back to Austin next year and then you won’t have to worry about me anymore, okay?”
“Hey now!” Dad said. “You know it’s not like that. I just want you to be successful. I just want you to be happy.”
“I’d be happy if we’d stayed in Austin!”
With that, I turned and walked back to my room.
“Thanks for the pizza,” I yelled, and shut the bedroom door.
I laid on my bed, looking up, staring at the cracks that stretched all the way across the ceiling. The bedroom at my old house had been much better. It was bigger, on the second floor of the house, and had a window. This room was small, cramped, and dark.
I glanced over at the computer. I wanted to allocate Boothe’s skills and abilities. I wanted to know more about this quest and the car that Giles had offered, but my mind kept going back to that conversation, replaying it again and again. I shouldn’t have said those things. I knew that I was being a jerk. I knew that I should apologize. Dad was trying hard, working all the time. Still, he shouldn’t have moved us here. Not in the last year of high school. He could have found a job in Austin if he had wanted.
“Goodnight Bran,” he said through the closed door a few minutes later. “Love you son.”
I didn’t reply, and heard him walk into his own bedroom across the short hallway and shut the door behind him.
I looked over at the computer screen again, the skull icon on the desktop calling to me.
“Come,” I could picture it saying. “Play more. The wasteland needs you, and you need it. Escape your life. Boothe’s is better.”
I shook my head, took the Economics homework out of my backpack, and began reading. If I did some tonight, I could play tomorrow, without feeling so guilty.
I reached over and turned off the monitor so I wouldn’t have to see the icon anymore. The wasteland would have to wait.
Level 3
The Battery
1
After the ordeal with the gecks, largely caused by Boothe’s inability to sneak up behind them, he decided to dedicate some resources into Stealth. He added his new ability point to Dexterity and his skill point to Stealth, then closed the menu.
“Welcome back,” Giles said.
Boothe sat up, looking around The Depot. The place was mostly empty now. Cliff stood behind the bar, cleaning out a glass, and Giles sat at the same table he had been at the night before. Light filtered through yellowed windows. Dust danced in the beams that shined down onto the dirty floorboards.
“Are you ready to talk about the task I have for you?” Giles asked.
“Sure,” Boothe said.
“What I’m looking for is a high-capacity battery,” Giles said. “The vaporators are solar powered, but the batteries that I have only hold enough juice to operate them for about two hours. So for most of the night, they’re not running. Now, if I had a high-capacity battery, I could run them through the night. It would increase my output by roughly 45 percent. More water for the town, more money for me.”
“I get you,” Boothe said. “So where is this high-capacity battery?”
“There’s an underground bunker, about two miles southeast of town. Some people from the old world hid there for a while, I think, but now it’s overrun by robots and automated defenses. I heard that there’s a battery somewhere inside, but I can’t get anywhere near it. What we need is somebody to sneak in, steal it, and get out.”
Even with the extra point in stealth, the idea of sneaking into the place didn’t seem very promising to Boothe.
“I’m not so great at sneaking,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter how you get it. I see you have a drone,” he pointed to the machine floating just above Boothe’s right shoulder. “You could try to hack something and turn the defenses off. You could blow them up - I don’t care. I just need the battery.”
“You mentioned a car,” Boothe said.
“Right,” Giles said. “The car. Follow me.”
Giles stood up and led Boothe out of the front door of The Depot and down the street.
“I keep it down here. I don’t really need it anymore. I don’t go anywhere except to town and back, and the walk does me good.”
He stopped in front of a large garage door and pulled it up to reveal the car inside.
“It’s a Falcon,” Giles said. “Engine is great. I don’t know a lot about cars, but this sucker goes fast. It’s also completely customizable, if you’re into that kind of thing.”
Boothe let his eyes roll over the vehicle from bumper to bumper. It was old and dusty, but seemed to be well kept. The body was all steel, painted matte black, and did not have a scratch on it. Inside there were two bucket seats up front and a small bench seat in the back - all tan leather that looked brand new. The chrome carburetor stuck up through the hood, and the car had a T-top roof allowing it to easily transform into a convertible.
Boothe fell in love immediately.
“So, all I have to do is get past a few robots, and you’ll give me this?”
“Bring me the battery and it’s all yours,” Giles said.
NEW QUEST - Battery in the Bunker
Retrieve a high-capacity battery from a bunker full of killer robots and Giles will reward you with a NEW CAR!
Reward: Falcon GT Coupe
“Point me to this bunker,” Boothe said.
Giles pointed across the dusty landscape. “About two miles that way,” he said. Boothe’s goggles placed a marker over the horizon in the distance, reading Bunker 2.1mi.
Before Boothe lef
t the town, he stopped by at Wulfa’s stall and sold the Hunting Knife he had bought the previous day. In exchange, he bought a sling for the machete that allowed him to carry it on his back.
He also paid $10 for another Frag grenade, since the previous one had been so useful. He had over a hundred dollars now, but didn’t see anything else that he felt he could use at the moment.
With his shopping done, Boothe took his revolver from its holster and attempted to unjam the bullet lodged in the barrel.
Weaponsmith (50%) - FAILED
Weaponsmith (50%) - SUCCESS
It took him couple of minutes to get the barrel clear and clean. He dry-fired it once to make sure that it would work, then loaded it up again and slipped it back into the holster.
Feeling as prepared as he could be, he headed off towards the bunker in the distance.
After about a fifteen-minute walk, Boothe spotted the place. He ducked down and scanned over it with his goggles. The bunker was a small cement building with one-foot thick walls. There may have once been a door on the front, but it had long ago been torn free, leaving the entrance wide open. Boothe could barely make out a set of stairs inside that led underground.
Two turrets, much like the ones back at Caden’s Outpost, sat on the roof, slowly rotating from left to right, guarding from all angles. There must be a terminal somewhere that controlled those things. If he could find where it was, he might be able to shut them down. In all likelihood however, the terminal would be inside the bunker, which defeated the purpose entirely.
Something moved in Boothe’s peripheral vision. A figure, its features obscured by a black cloak, crept towards the bunker. While the turrets above the bunker were facing away, the figure swiftly ran across the dirt. When the turret swiveled back towards it, the figure dropped down to the ground, holding completely still.
Apocalypse 2020: A Wasteland LitRPG Page 4
