Deadhead: A Zombie Apocalypse LitRPG Novella

by David Payne

  My name is Joe, and I am an addict

  I’d been able to admit that to myself a long time ago. But the thing was, I liked being addicted and I had absolutely no intention of going to rehab. Did rehab exist for gamers? In this day and age- probably, I’d have to look that one up. But on the other hand, that would be useless information for me. Why the fuck would anybody want to be cured of this?

  There was a line that had stuck in my head from some old movie I had tuned into when I had been channel surfing one night. I couldn’t remember much about the movie, except that it was about junkies and that the characters were speaking in something barely resembling English that I could hardly understand. But there was one line I could understand.

  “We do heroin for the pleasure of it, because it feels good. We’re not stupid.”

  Or something like that anyway. I loved gaming. I played these games because it made me feel good, although one down side was people always telling me stuff like…

  “You’re pissing your life away spending twenty four hours a day in your bedroom playing damned video games!” My father would scream. “I’m telling you son, that’s not natural, you need to get out into the world and start living a life!”

  “Hey man”, they would say at high school, “you need to go out and talk to chicks dude, like, they ain;t just gonna fall into your lap where you’re playin’ your games yo.”

  It all soon became a broken record. Stop playing video games all the time. Get out there and live a real life. You see, they thought I was stupid, that I was choosing the pixels on the screen over real life. But as far as I was concerned, the real life was in my bedroom.

  What they could not know, what only the gamer could know, was the rollercoaster of emotion that being a gamer could give you. To escape from the fucking dreariness, the everyday sameness, the mind numbing, get up, breakfast, commute to work, spend eight hours doing something you hated, sigh with relief when the clock hit five, commute home, maybe pick up some fast food on the way, watch some TV, jerk off thinking about that girl at work who didn’t even know you existed then head off to bed shit that as far as I could see, most people called life.

  No thanks folks, you keep your real life, and I’ll stick to my rollercoaster. You see, unlike the masses, I actually felt things, I went through whole gamut of emotions on a daily basis. Imagine the following:

  Your entire world is the screen in front of you, you’re up against the end level boss, this huge multi-tentacled motherfucker, shooting a hundred lasers at you ten times a second. You’re swerving this way and that with your ship, bolt after bolt missing you by a millimetre as you go crazy on that controller with your thumb, pounding on that button as much times per second as humanly possible. You’re unloading on this motherfucker. He might be ten times as big as you, but goddamn if you’re not giving as good as you’re getting.

  This is the boss who killed you in seconds the first time you met, the boss you couldn’t put a scratch on the first ten times you met him. But now you’ve got his number. Your heart is pumping, the adrenalin is coursing through your veins. You’re scoring hit after hit-critical hit! Your mana and his mana are low, you’re both severely weakened, but if you can just avoid those red bolts he’s firing, if you can just land one more shot where it hurts…

  This boss has kept you up at night, consumed your every waking thought. When you’d been having your morning coffee you were thinking about what manoeuvres you were going to use to finally kick his ass.

  His mana is one percent, yours is one percent, next blow wins. You dodge in between two bolts, you have him in your sights. “You’re mine now”, you say, just like in the movies, “say goodbye…”

  And then you’re hit. The screen is filled with a burst of orange and yellow that was once your little ship, the explosion sound fills your ears as the words ‘Game over’ flash in huge red letters, taunting you, saying ‘So near yet so far-tough luck chump’.

  And then the rage comes.

  You become a madman, it’s like there is volcanic eruption inside you as you take hold of your controller and smash it into the ground repeatedly.

  “Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Cunt! Cunt! Fuck! Stupid motherfucker! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  The controller then goes flying across the room with considerable force, somehow not smashing into pieces as it hits the wall. You are now on your hands and knees, issuing the same cuss words over and over again, slapping the palm of your hand on the ground so hard it’s like you are trying to slap a hole in the floor.

  “Honey is everything all right?”

  It’s the voice of one of your parents, naturally they are wondering what the hell is going on. Though eventually they will get used to your rages and refrain from asking so much.

  But you are not done yet. Now literally frothing at the mouth, several strands of spit hanging from your lips, you rise up to your feet and give the ‘Game over’ screen the double middle finger.

  “Fuck you! Fuck your game over! Fuck who created this game and fuck their mother for having had them! Take your fucking high scores and your fucking XPs and shove them up your fucking ass! I’ll kill you motherfucker, I’ll come over to your house and I’ll rip your fucking head off. Like that huh? Then it will be fucking game over won’t it? You won’t be laughing in my face then will you? We’ll see who’s fucking game over cunt!”

  And then you lie back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, getting your breath back. You think to yourself that if that controller is fucked it’s the third in as many months and you need to calm it down a little.

  There have actually been occasions when you have stopped yourself from physically putting your fist through the screen, so you’re not completely without restraint. In that moment you realise the immense satisfaction you get from venting rage, how it’s weird that while you never aim to be frustrated, you feel truly alive when boiling with anger, destroying equipment, hurting your hand, and threatening the creator of this game whom you have never met with physical violence.

  But there’s another side to this coin. When you kill the end level boss.

  He has got the better of you a hundred times, but slowly but surely, you’ve come to realise that he is very far from invincible, that he is no god. This is somebody that you can take down.

  With his mana down to one percent, you weave in between his red bolts.

  “Oh you’re getting weak my friend, not so big and bad now are we.” You fire…bullseye! Just like an x-wing on the Deathstar! The screen goes orange and red, the sound of explosion fills the room. But this time it is not your ship. This time that boss ship that was ten times the size of you a few seconds ago is now space dust. No more. He has ceased to exist. He will stand in your way no longer.

  “Level seven complete!” Those are the words that flash in huge red letters on the screen. A wave courses though your body, but this this time it is not one of volcanic rage. This wave is one of pure euphoria-of pure release. Instead of pummelling the floor in frustration you pump your fist in the air.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Fucking yes!”

  You keep repeating the word ‘yes’ over and over with various expletives thrown in, then leap up onto your bed and start jumping up and down like a five year old child.

  It is like you’ve injected some fantastic drug into your body. You fall down onto your bed, stretch your arms out and just revel in the exhilaration. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Victory tastes so sweet when you’ve been defeated a hundred times beforehand.

  That was the rollercoaster of the gamer. The rage and the exhilaration that made me feel alive. What did the masses know about the rage/exhilara
tion rollercoaster? Nothing. They wanted to live their little lives, with their commutes, their nine to five jobs, their white picket fences, two point four children and then call me a loser who spent all my time gaming. Call me what you will folks, you keep your white picket fence, I’ll take my rollercoaster addiction and let’s go our separate ways.

  ___________

  My situation was I was twenty years old and living on my own. I was very fortunate to have a musical father who had written a hit song that, shall we say, had brought in the royalties, of which he had felt the obligation to give to his only child of course. So he had bought a flat for me, and I wouldn’t have any money worries-for the near future at least.

  I often wondered if he had made that decision just to get me out of the house, so that mom would no longer me telling him to tell me to get off my ass.

  Of course, I could sit on my ass all day in my own place, or game all day, thump the floor, or yell as loud as I liked.

  I did get the occasional funny glance from the neighbours I passed in the hallway. It was that look of ‘There were some weird noises from your apartment last night, but I’m far too polite to ask you what they were’.

  No money worries and the freedom to game all day. There were days on end when I didn’t leave the house. The fact that I had to take breaks in order to eat, sleep and go to the toilet was actually a source of frustration to me. The pizza boxes from the deliveries were starting to pile, up, man I really needed to throw those out. I suspected I was going nose blind, but it was not like I had any visitors anyway.

  So all in all, life was pretty good. And then one day it wasn’t.

  The thing about being an addict, was that you always need more and more, and recently I felt like I had gotten to a point where I’d done all there was to do on every game that I found remotely interesting. I was very much a shoot em’ up and beat em’ up man. I’d beaten up every barbarian, werewolf or troll, taken a sledgehammer over every zombie’s head, shot up every town, blown up every space ship, compound, planet…I just needed something more, but I didn’t know what exactly and now I was just sitting on my couch staring at a blank screen.

  I had done it all. What now? What the rollercoaster over? Was I to spend my life waiting and hoping for a game that would challenge me? I was panicking, I could feel the sweat coming on. Fuck. I had read about drug addicts on cold turkey. One hour without gaming and I was actually feeling fear, I had a sick feeling in my stomach. For the first time ever, I was having thoughts of what the hell I was going to do with my life.

  ________________

  When I was at high school there were two guys that were the closest thing I had ever had to friends. Mike Dawson and Tony Romano. We were the guys who were playing RPGs while all the other guys were doing grown up stuff like discovering girls, getting drunk at parties and smoking weed.

  Our heads were always in front of a screen, buried in a choose your own adventure book, or rolling dice on a table top game. We were obsessed, the issue of high scores on whichever shoot em’ up we were playing at the time was like a matter of life and death-to me in particular.

  I had to have the highest score. Anytime Mike or Tony said they had a higher score than me it would send me into a huff. I would stomp off home, run up to my bedroom as soon as I got in the door- barely acknowledging my mom saying high-and get to gaming.

  I could not stand existing for one hour on this planet knowing that somebody out there had a higher score than me on Space Race 3000. Oh no, that shit was not going to fly, even if it meant me playing right through the night, turning the volume down so my parents couldn’t hear me. Even if it meant I turned up like a zombie at school the next day, fell asleep in class, and got so irritable with people I would end up in fights and get sent to the principal’s office. It was all worth it to see the looks on Mike and Tony’s faces when I told them I had just achieved a score of ten thousand four hundred and sixty seven points.

  When a new choose your own adventure book was released I would be charging down to the shops to buy a copy, and would be up all night reading and rolling dice in order to be able to rush into school and broadcast to the others ‘I completed Dungeon of Demons! Eat that motherfuckers!’. I loved to be the first to complete a book and have the others begging me for my secrets on how to complete it, even if that involved a few shortcuts.

  Let’s just say I sometimes succumbed to temptation and was not entirely honest with the dice rolls. That was the thing when doing the RPG books by yourself, there was nobody to check your honesty. But as for finding the right path in the books, that was achieved the same way I achieved the highest scores in the games, by staying up all night and saying to hell with sleep. I needed to get to the passage that said, ‘You have successfully completed your quest brave adventurer’, before anybody else did.

  It was all this that came back to me, as I was in the supermarket on one of my rare excursions out of my apartment.

  I was filling my trolley of the burgers that only took about a minute in the microwave, ignoring the looks from the old man next to me. That look of ‘The youth of day just don’t look after themselves and can’t be bothered doing their own cooking. This microwave dinner generation just wants everything and they want it now’.

  I caught his eye for a second. Yeah, yeah grandpa. Well I’m just lucky to live in this technological age aren’t I? And I ain’t got time for some old timer who wants to lecture me about how his generation had it so much harder, our generation is molly coddled and all he ever got for Christmas was an orange. At least I hoped I communicated all that with my eyes. The old man broke eye contact and moved on.

  From the rare occasions that I got out of my house and communicated with other human beings, I had come to the conclusion that people really could have entire conversations through eye contact alone.

  I smiled to myself, as I thought about what else I needed, and then I froze. It was Mike. There he was, back down in the fruits and vegetables section by the front door, loading his basket with far healthier food than me.

  He looked bulked up, like he had been going to the gym. He was wearing a tight fitting t-shirt that accentuated his muscles. I was taken aback by his appearance, he looked so sporty and fit. Along with me back at school he had been one of the anti-jocks, so to speak.

  I was unsure about whether I wanted to say hi to him or not, we hadn’t really kept in touch after high school. I was contemplating just turning my back and pretending I never saw him, when he looked up, caught my eye and smiled, then walked over. It was too late to do the ‘pretend I never saw him’ thing.

  “Hey Joe”, he strode up to me, flashing a perfect white toothed smile and holding out his arm with sinewy biceps. I shook his hand, his grip was firm. “Long time no see, how have been keeping?”

  “Oh…um…fine…you know”. God. Making conversation with another human being and having to go through the ‘Hi, what are you doing with your life?’ thing.

  He looked down at my burger filled basket.

  “Staying healthy I see. Do you know that supermarkets keep all the healthy foods at the front of the store so you buy the fruit and veg first? That way you feel less guilty about buying all the junk food. But I see you just walk on by. You won’t succumb to all this corporate brainwashing huh?”

  “Um yeah, well, I didn’t know that about supermarkets, I just, like, wanted my burgers.”

  “Hey man, we really should have kept in touch after high school. What do you say we grab a coffee and have a little catch up?”

  No. No. No. I didn’t want to interact with another human being. I wanted to go back to my flat and eat my burgers.

  “Um, sure.”

  ______________

  As I sipped away at my latte, Mike told me how things had been since he had left school. He had had an epiphany as he phrased it, that he had been spending too much of his life playing video games and reading. Those thing were fun, but at some point you had to grow up and start living a real life; get a g
irlfriend, go to the gym-fit in body, fit in mind and all that-get a job and get your own place.

  “I mean”, he continued, “I did love all that stuff, hell, I even game a little now and again just for nostalgia’s sake, but you know what? I’m not a fourteen year old boy anymore. So how about you Joe? Here’s me talking all about myself. What have you been doing with your life since I last saw you?”

  He laid his coffee down and looked me right in the eye. I wondered if he knew. Knew I had my own place and still gamed just as much as when we were in high school-in fact, probably more so. In his eyes was I still a ‘fourteen year old boy’? Were those eyes saying I was a loser who had never really grown up? Was he enjoying this moment? All those times I had gloated about how my score was higher than his, about how I had completed the books before he did, and now he was the one who got to sit here and say. ‘I have a life. You do not have a life. How does that feel loser?’

  Or maybe I was reading too much into it.

  “I, well, work, yeah.”

  Why did I feel the need to lie? I was so pissed with myself. Why could I not just tell him. ‘I have my rollercoaster and you’re on your way to being tied down with a wife and kids, so who’s the fucking loser?’

  “What as?”

  “Oh, just programming, you know, like, programming the kind of games we did as kids.” It was the first lie that came into my head.

  “Wow. That’s really interesting. Still do any of that gaming stuff in your own time?”

  You’re fucking right I do you smug prick.

  “Yeah, I game now and again, you know, just on my down time.”

  He nodded his head.

  “Hey, speaking of gaming, I heard some weird shit about Tony the other day. I mean, you know what Tony’s been into after we left high school right?”

  Actually I did. I had never seen him, but I had heard rumours that he had gotten into the mob. His family was Italian-American and he had always been a fan of gangster films, which was why we had always teased him, calling him Mr Mafia etc.