by Isaac Stone
“And that’s where you learned how to shoot so well,” Kurt tried to change the subject. “Or did you grown up with a gun in your hand?”
“Learned in a simulator, just like the one we’re inside right now. Not quite this realistic and I never had the chance to ride around and guide a robot, but it was the same idea. Tell you the truth, I prefer things this way. I like being outside, even if it’s behind a screen that looks out through the cameras of something mechanical. This computer wrap is fine, but I wonder what these mechanical things appear like without the enhancement.”
“I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,” Kurt told her. “Check it out; is that a rest stop up ahead?”
It was a small collection of buildings, which set back from the main highway. They appeared suddenly and Kurt speculated they popped up inside the game once someone was close enough. This time there wasn’t many enhancements. The buildings had a few burnt-out cars in front of them, but they seemed quiet. Kurt stopped the column and looked through his gun sight to get a better view of what was ahead.
He counted three outbuildings and some kind of shop in the middle of them. There was a ramp that led from the main highway to the buildings, none of which was more than a single story. Kurt signaled to the group with him to approach slowly. At least everyone at this game level had a sufficient amount of training in silent communication.
“We’re going in slow,” he whispered to Lavon. “Once we get to the first building, we’ll check them out one at a time. I don’t see movement, so maybe they’re abandoned.” She nodded and relayed the command back to Jesse.
As they approached the first building, Kurt could see broken glass all around it. Some kind of firefight took place here and it wasn’t long ago. The writing on it was burnt off and he couldn’t identify what it said. Kurt ordered them to fan out and approach it, but stay close enough to hear commands.
All of which became a moot point when two things in black uniforms jumped out from behind the nearest burnt car and began to fire at them.
The entire Skull Legion hit the ground at the same time and returned fire. One of the things in the black uniforms went down fast as it was too close to retreat. However, it didn’t go down alone. As the rifles buzzed shells at each other, Kurt, out of the corner of his eyes, watched Anders go fall to the ground.
“Anders Baldwin KIA!” flashed up in his faceplate long enough to let him know they’d lost a man. Kurt swore and reached into his pack for another magazine round. He snapped it in place and looked around to make sure everyone else was together.
Before he could order a tactical retreat, Marco broke rank and ran in the direction of the creature shooting at them. Kurt couldn’t get a visual on what was in the black uniform, but it appeared to be some variation on the Nazi Zombies they’d encountered before.
“Get your ass back here! This ain't Call of Duty!” Kurt yelled at Marco. He wasn’t so far away not to hear him.
“I’ve got it!” Marco shouted as he stopped and unloaded a round on the creature. He hit it square in the middle and the thing went down in a spray of blood.
However, at that moment, more of the things poured out of the building in front of them. Before Marco could swing his gun in their direction, he was ripped apart by the combined fire of several assault rifles. In front of everyone, he bounced a few times and fell over. Marco did not get back up. Anders got hit with a lucky round, but Marco had forgotten that this wasn't your average first person shooter, and the hard charging style of play would get you killed.
There was no opportunity to mourn. By now, Kurt could see a mob of uncountable hellspawn in Nazi uniforms as they surged at his Skull Legion. He saw them all through the lens of his simulated gun sight. Most of them swarmed out of the building in front them, but there was an entire back-up unit that flowed out of the next building. Dust swirled up from the ground in the hot air as the advance units kicked it up.
Kurt turned and saw the remains of a truck body next to him and had an idea. “Everyone!” he cried out. “Follow me! Make for the truck.” He ran to the burnt-out truck as bullets tore through the air next to him.
Minus two members, the Skull Legion found itself somewhat protected from the hail of shells behind the engine block of a burnt truck. Kurt looked up and watched the window glass burst from the gunfire of the NZ’s as they advanced. The one thing that gave him hope was the uncoordinated shots. The other side didn’t seem to have anyone who knew how to organize their ghastly troops.
“Let them burn through their mags,” he told the rest of his group, “When I give the word, we all take a position on top of the truck hood and open up. Semi-automatic only, make your shots count, this trick only works once.”
Kurt waited until the hellspawn quit shooting, and then closed his eyes. He could hear them as they closed, steps on the ground crunching on the hard soil. Right now, he could still show some initiative and surprise the enemy.
“One, two,” Kurt said in a low voice, with Jesse crouching next to him, “three!” He popped up with his assault rifle and fired off a few bursts at the advancing horde.
Through the scope, he could see three of them hit the ground. Two more tried to take cover, but the combined fire of the Skull Legion at such close range took them out fast. In seconds, they all fired controlled bursts at the creatures in uniforms that either fled or took hits. What started out to be an ambush turned into a victory for the Skull Legion as the other side fled in terror. They were able to shoot most of them before they reached the safety of the buildings in the distance.
“Suck on that!” Kurt cried out as the last creature went down. He heard the sound of the guns on their side cease to shoot at the NZ’s.
“Lavon,” he called out in a command voice. “Go around front and see if there is any still standing.” He knew she was the woman for the job. “But first give me the radio. I may need it.” She handed it to him.
Lavon giggled and stood up in slight crouch. Kurt kept his eyes on the gun sight, but he could hear her creep around the front of the truck. Soon, she saw her form through his scope. She was safe; none of the hellspawn moved.
“Looks safe to me,” she yelled back. “I don’t see anything else.”
“Everyone advance to her,” Kurt called to the rest of the Skull Legion. “We’re going to check those buildings and make certain we got all of them.” He was the first to move up to her.
They spent another hour exploring the buildings near the highway. From what Kurt could tell, the demonic creatures arrived recently and without any kind of motor transportation. They found plenty of prints that led out of the desert to the small park where the buildings sat. Kurt’s only concern was that there might be more of them on the way.
“Could have used those two, but we’ll survive,” Kurt announced to the others. He turned and looked at the dead creatures on the ground. “At least we got more of them than they got of us. Or something. Let’s move on. I have to assume we’ll run into more of these things before we reach the town, and then a whole heap more."
“Too bad about Marco,” Detra called out. “He really wanted that top slot.”
“He’ll have time to go back and try again,” Camper responded. “Always was a determined motherfucker.” He picked up his pack and joined the others who were ready to leave this group of buildings.
Chapter 7
They walked for a few more hours.
He had no idea where the next save point might be, but it had to be placed somewhere on the road ahead. He walked with his rifle held close to the chest and advised the others to do the same. If they didn't have to have them up and shooting, might as well conserve energy, and despite the fact that it was a game, he could tell that both his own body and that of whatever robot shell he was controlling needed to conserve power.
The loss of the two new players affected the remaining two men. Kurt could tell it. They were quiet, not as brash when they first met. He decided to leave them alone and addressed most of his c
onversation to the women who walked ahead with him.
The remainder of the highway was littered with broken and burnt automobiles. Kurt wondered where they’d found so many of them, but decided there were still plenty of old fuel inefficient cars and trucks left over from before the fuel shortage. People had a tendency to abandon them in the road or walk away after the expensive fuel became hard to find. Still, he walked slow past each one and inspected them whenever possible for any hostiles.
He took out his rifle a few times and scanned the horizon with the scope mounted on the top. A few times Kurt thought he saw movement, but decided it was a random shadow or the motion of some kind of animal. There was no reason for any of them to sound a warning.
“Do you feel comfortable riding this mechanical bot?” Jesse asked him about an hour later. “I don’t feel much below the neck and I know I’m tied into some kind of damn metal toy.”
“The simulated wrap doesn’t do much for me,” Kurt responded. “I suppose you can get used to about anything, but I feel a little strange mimicking my walk so it can match this thing. If we saw it without the image of the person who controls it, I don’t think I’d like it much at all. Not that it matters, it’s all about the game and who wins.”
“Which is another problem,” Jesse continued. “We work as a team. Don’t you think it might be a little bit different when we reach the end of the game?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if we all survive to reach the beacon, we’ll have to fight it out to see who gets to hit the button. How are we going to do it? Everyone back up and shoot it out?”
“Saw that movie too. No, I think we can all come to an accommodation at that point. No reason to kill each other just so one of us can have the prize to him or herself. That might make for less dynamic television, but it helps us all walk with something instead of dead or rich.”
They continued a bit further until the sight of another Quonset hut appeared in the distance. This time there were no blinking lights or flashy signs that indicated it were to be used by the game players. It had a subdued atmosphere to it, although something that would still appeal to people. At last, Kurt recognized it for what it was: a truck stop. However, there were no trucks.
There was no one to greet them as they approached the building. Kurt looked at the sign and saw that it merely read “Spawn Twelve”. He wondered if it was some kind of trap and turned the rest of the crew behind him.
“What do you all think?” he asked them. “I can’t imagine the enemy has built a fake save point to lure us inside, but nothing surprises me these days.”
“Guess you can ring the bell and find out,” Camper offered. “I’ve got a full clip loaded. The rest of us do too. Anything that comes out of it will have to deal with us.” He shrugged his shoulders.
Kurt reached over and touched the buzzer.
This time the door slid open, but an older woman in a dress stepped outside and greeted them. “Hello and welcome to English Creek Outfitters,” she announced. “Sorry for the lousy exterior, but we’ve had some trouble with those things that come out of the town. Mr. Rashid placed us here the other day and we’ve twice had to call the center for drone support. But don’t you worry; gamers are exempt from any interference. Come on inside.”
The Skull Legion filed in once more and found a much cleaner facility on the inside than they expected. A number of rival groups circled around the racks and tried to look at the prices on them. They all looked worse for wear, and he could tell that they'd encountered just as much resistance making it this far as he and his team. Killstreak might not be as flashy as games like Doom 25 or whatever Halo number they were on right now, but it had the grit and discomfort of real life combat, and Kurt had the feeling that while it would take some getting used to, Rashid was sitting on top of a proverbial gold mine. Wiping out a legion of random bots while playing Call of Duty Infinity was fun and made you look cool, but eating dust and shooting one or two of these Nazi Zombies felt more worthwhile somehow. He'd lost Anders and Marco in the blink of an eye. No crouching behind cover until their health bars returned to normal, just standing one moment and corpses the next. This was a whole new kind of shooting game, one that took actual skill, not just a gamer's gift for reflexes and auto-targeting.
Kurt watched a few of them consult each other over how much money they had and how much they could spend. It was similar to the other save point in that they could relax and take it easy if needed. This one even had a bunk space for the gamers to use. Kurt tried to figure out how that would work with a skinsuit and gave up. There were more important things to consider.
Anders and Camper immediately went to one of the public terminals. The first thing they wanted to know was their current score and how many points they had to cash in on upgrades. Kurt watched Detra swear when he failed to find his score high enough.
“Did you expect it to get any better?” Camper asked him. “We lost two of our guys out there. You know they took it into consideration. Once you team up the algorithm changes.”
“Why don’t you ever check your score or see where you points are?” Jesse asked him when they were seated at a table in the rest area. Both of them had placed orders for food.
“I like the rifle I’ve used for the past three years,” Kurt explained. “My skills are about as good as they need to be and I don’t need any back-up weapons. Never could understand the need to load up with the greatest and latest. What good is some space age gun if you can’t shoot with it?”
“About the way I think too,” she told him. “Always stuck with what I knew. Worked out best for me.”
She turned to watch several of gamers from another group walk past, headed back to the gun shop. By the smiles on their faces, it was obvious they’d racked up many points and couldn’t wait to exchange them for upgrades and new weapons. With ninety nice gamers blasting their way across the play area, it was no wonder that they kept finding corpses and burning vehicles, on top of making more of those themselves.
“There is a perfect example of what I’m trying to talk about,” Kurt told her. He started to rub his head, and then realized it was inside a helmet, even if his full face appeared to Jesse. No reason to push things. “Those men are all excited to get some crazy new weapon they won’t be able to use with any kind of efficacy. It won’t be like the computer game world. They’re fighting with robotic simulations of humans, which, from the way my ass feels on this chair, does a good job. However, what happens when they start to shoot off a real high-power assault rifle, one they’ve never attempted to use before? I think they’ll exit the game pretty quick after they shoot each other.”
“You have a high opinion of your fellow man,” Jesse told him.
“I have a realistic one,” he corrected. “I’m surprised you don’t have one too.”
“Perhaps I hope people can turn out better in the end,” Jesse explained. “In spite of evidence to the contrary.” She turned to make sure they were out of hearing range, although it was possible every word was being monitored.
“I talked to some of the other groups after we first got into this save point,” she told him. “They’re a bit surprised too about how this scenario is shaping up. It's not nearly as much like a campaign as I'd expected, more like an open world scenario. So this whole region is a war zone, or at least it is now that we are here. Ninety nine gunslingers running around wrecking shit, all of us meandering in the general direction of city center.”
“Have they had many encounters with them? Like survivors post-combat?” Kurt probed. This line of dialogue was about to interest him.
“Nope,” she told him in a low voice. “Funny thing, however, some of the guys claim a drone came down and took a bunch of the NZ's prisoner. Can you believe that?”
“Makes no sense. Why would Command do such a thing? All they’d have to do is order the bots to return to base for servicing if they had trouble with them.” He turned and watched another group enter the spawn
point.
“I know,” Jesse returned. “A little crazy too, if you ask me. They said the things put up a fight and the drone that took them prisoner had to shoot one.”
Kurt’s eyes widened at that knowledge. “Perhaps they have some problems with these things. Could be Rashid has some bugs he needs to work out of them.”
“Then why send us out here if the bots are malfunctioning? Why risk all this money if the game isn’t finished. He could open himself for all manner of lawsuits if someone was hurt out there.”
“True,” Kurt replied. “But you need to keep in mind we’re all wearing skinsuits and helmets in a dark room. None of this is real. The bots are real, but we’re remote and can’t really get hurt.”
“Are you willing to bet on that?”
Kurt didn’t have answer.
He spent the next few hours in the spawn point examining some of the newer weapons for sale. As he’d told Jesse, Kurt didn’t put much faith in the purchase of a new weapon every mission. Since they were now playing with real guns, it gave him more incentive to use the same one with which he’d had so much luck. Even firing with a remote bot, the difference in using an assault rifle with a bot versus a pure simulation was astonishing. The simulations were supposed to be 99% real, but there was enough difference for him to notice.
He walked over to look at the merchandise. One of his favorites in the gun case was a MX-80 Zound, a very strange rifle built for use in smaller armies that needed maximum utility. It hardly appeared to be an assault rifle. The thing was designed to have a grenade launcher mounted from the bottom, but it was never part of the package. It had a fifteen-inch barrel and was made of polycarbonate. Light, but he preferred a gun with some weight to it. Kurt picked one up and looked it over.
The whole incident with the captured Nazi Zombies made him uneasy. He asked around and finally located a man who claimed to have seen a drone capture the NZ’s.
“Did they seem to be malfunctioning in any way?” Kurt asked the young man, who was about his age. “And you saw the drone come down and get them?”
