He slashed wildly at the darkness behind him while sprinting down the creaky, snow-packed wooden staircase and out into the freezing cold night. They were right behind him now - he could feel them.
Dodgson spun round on the hard ice, and saw more hideous creatures emerging from the shadows. They were everywhere.
Dark shapes slithered across the ice toward him. They were closing in on him. Dodgson felt like his heart would explore in fear. An ice cold hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. Three grotesque creatures, dead eyes and rotten flesh, descended upon him.
Dodgson understood now. They were here to kill him - to tear him apart. Adrenaline pulsed through his body. He had tried flight. He only had one chance.
He had to fight.
#
Skinner, Santos and Harper raced into the pitch black maze of office spaces arranged around Doctor Becker's lab. Somewhere up ahead, Itou and Hill were tracing their way toward the stairwell. Close behind they could hear the crazed packs spill into the darkness while others pounded up and down the concrete stairs.
They were closing in fast.
"Come on" Harper whispered. "I've got most of the building information cached on my phone. I think I can get us there."
Skinner and Santos nodded, and with that Harper began jogging forward, zig-zagging around invisible obstacles, through corridors and open doors. Skinner grabbed Santos by the hand and they began running behind Harper, so close they could reach out and touch him.
Up ahead, Skinner could hear Itou growl "Hurry, hurry" and Hill respond with a whimper.
Skinner glanced behind. He could see shapes moving in the darkness, could hear the pack shout out to each other, trying to corner the fleeing group.
They were being hunted.
A few seconds more and the pack would be on them, and Skinner had no doubt they'd be torn apart. Harper suddenly darted to his left, while shouting, "This way, quickly."
Skinner and Santos almost missed the sharp turn through a doorway and into what felt like another long corridor. Harper had stopped dead. He was breathing heavily as his hands scrambled around the edge of the doorway.
Santos pressed into Skinner. "Ben - they're here!"
The pounding feet of the chasing pack turned the corner to face them, just as Harper slammed his palm hard on a discrete white panel on the inside of the door frame and triggered the manual release of the glass safety door.
Gasping for breath, Skinner, Santos and Harper could only watch as the homicidal pack descended from the darkened corridor, their eyes filled with hate.
#
Two men and two women, students in their early twenties, stumbled, laughing out of the warm Seattle bar and into the thick snow outside. As they walked gingerly up the six ice-covered steps and onto street level, they fell silent.
A man stood in the middle of the road, wearing white shorts and a T-shirt. He looked drunk or loaded up on something.
With a cautious nod to his companions, one of the two students moved toward the crazy guy. He placed his hand gently on the guy's shoulder and sobered up instantly. The man was shivering violently and his lips were dark blue. If they didn't get him out of the cold soon, he'd die.
"Hey buddy. You're going to freeze to death out here. Come on, let's get you inside and we'll figure out how you got here in the first place."
The man spun round with a look of raw savagery. His eyes were wide and wild. He let out a high-pitched scream, lunged forward and sliced wildly at the student, catching him across the neck.
Stunned, the student held his neck as the blood pulsed from the wound. He stumbled and fell onto the snow, gurgling up at the thick snow clouds above. The lunatic leapt onto the student, grabbed the fat kitchen knife in both hands and raised it high above his head.
A loud crack echoed through the still winter night as the thick, snow-covered leather boot of the second student smashed into the crazed man's ribs. The force of the kick lifted him off the dying student and back onto the icy road. Four ribs were broken, and one side of his face was ripped to shreds by road ice. Ignoring the injuries, he scrambled to his knees and stumbled on the poorly lit road before finding his knife.
He let out a guttural growl and turned to stare wild-eyed at the students. As he prepared to launch, a pickup truck travelling too fast for the icy conditions slid around the corner, its headlights spotting Dodgson much too late.
The truck careered into Lewis Dodgson, knocking the large knife from his grasp and breaking his rib cage against the grill. He fell backwards and under the onrushing truck. A rear wheel crushed his chest as the truck slid to a halt and the crisp white snow turned a scarlet red.
The sound of a woman screaming and a truck engine idling were the last sounds Lewis Dodgson ever heard.
#
A dull thud. Then another. And another.
John Evans face pressed flat against the glass and twisted in fury. Inches from him on the other side of the thick safety door, Skinner, Santos and Harper sat on the floor staring back at him. Behind Evans were more than a dozen infected players, each of them taking turns at pounding the thick glass door.
The door was smeared in blood as the pack smashed against the toughened glass. Santos watched in horror and fascination. Pain didn't seem to register with any of the players. They punched, they kicked, they even smashed foreheads and elbows against the reinforced glass. She could see and hear fingers snap and arms break with the force of the blows. And yet the pack kept smashing at the barrier.
Santos stood up, now fully recovered from the attack, and stood directly in front of the glass door to address Skinner and Harper. The movement seemed to enrage Evans and the pack, the pounding increased.
"Ben. Andy. It seems pretty clear to me that these players are in some sort of group paranoid delusion. I know that on a really small scale, video games have been known to trigger episodes like this. It's rare, and as far as I know only with individuals already prone to instability. Nothing anywhere near this scale."
Skinner nodded. "Yeah Eva. Seems to me that the game has made some of them lose track of what's real and what's not."
Harper added, "I think it's more than that. I've been all over the iSight system since we got here, and have taken advantage of some 'inside information' to access a few areas not always open to the public."
He smiled warmly. Skinner was struck by the bizarre setting. They were calmly discussing the situation while infected players smashed against a glass door only inches from them.
Harper continued. "There's been some sort of massive - and I do mean massive - failure across all areas of the game. Pretty much immediately after it happened the shit started to hit the fan."
Santos frowned while tucking her thick black hair behind her ears. "What do you mean Andy?"
Harper paused for a moment. "I'm afraid to say I might be to blame. It looks to me like the game has been attacked. Which means the security system - my security system - has been breached."
Skinner turned to Harper. "But why would that turn some people into raving lunatics."
"Because the game had layer upon layer of controls. Ways of making sure everyone behaved themselves. That the rules of polite society were observed. The rules applied to the characters they generated and the human players. And when the system was attacked ..."
Santos jumped in. "The rules were lifted. Of course! The virtual players are programmed to live in a world of rules. When the rules are gone, they adjust. To live in a world with no rules. Which means they do anything to survive."
"Right Doctor Santos. And some of the humans respond in kind. So - all of a sudden the safe virtual world becomes deadly. It's so damn realistic, players can't tell what's real and what's not. So they organise. The strongest gather together and pick off the weak or foreign."
"That's right Andy. And so we get here - in our very own lord of the flies."
Skinner had been listening carefully as they spoke.
"Ok - so we need to make that wor
k for us. If they're acting as a pack, then the alpha male is the one that really matters."
Santos and Harper nodded as Skinner continued.
"Which means - great news team - that we need to find a way to get rid of that ugly mother." Skinner nodded toward the glass door, to see Evans pounding on the door. Suddenly, the door frame cracked, and a split appeared down its length.
Skinner pointed toward the crack, which was widening with each crash against the door.
"Ok Andy, coffee break is over. We need to get up to that NOC. Once we get there, we wait for help to arrive. There's no way this has gone undetected - this shit is happening everywhere ..."
Santos raised an eyebrow.
"... And this place should be swarming with help in no time at all. The elevators are no good, so we need to make the other fire exit."
A confident smile spread across Harper's face as he listened.
"No problem. I think I've got this figured out. As long as we don't run into any more of those shit heads, we should be ok."
Harper started jogging away from the glass door and into the dark corridor beyond. Skinner and Santos followed close behind. Jabbing a thumb back over her shoulder at the pack crashing against the door, Santos turned to Skinner.
"What about them?"
Skinner grimaced. "I say the door holds them for two, maybe three minutes. No more."
Skinner glanced quickly back at the door. At the end of the dark corridor he could make out the shape of Evans as he organised the pack into groups of three before shoulder-charging the door. The door shuddered and the frame cracked loudly.
As they disappeared into the darkness, Skinner turned back to Santos.
"I'm sorry Eva, but even two minutes looks pretty optimistic."
#
Harper led them silently through a black valley separating row upon row of ominous blinking black machines. Clearly any power the building did have was being used by these giant slabs of processing power. In the distance, they could hear Evans and his deranged followers smash through the glass door, and sprint down the long corridor. It suddenly occurred to Skinner that the infected players were just as wired in to the system as Harper was. That's why they were able to navigate so well in the dark.
Up ahead, he could see that the monotonous line of shadowy computer equipment was broken by a large, featureless room.
Doctor Becker's VR lab, and just beyond that, the emergency exit door.
Harper turned and whispered, "This might work. According to iSight, this lab was pretty well protected. Maybe Becker and his team are holed up in there waiting for help."
Skinner nodded. "Ok - let's check it out. But if it's a bust we need to get into that exit and up to level five as quickly as possible. I have a feeling it's not going to take the pack long to catchup."
Harper nodded and crept forward.
About a dozen steps ahead was Dr Becker's lab. The heavy door was open, splintered with the top half hanging free of its frame. The only light breaking through the pitch black was the small blinking green eyes peering out from the ominous technology towers and a faint glow radiating from the lab.
The lights were out in the lab too, and as they got within a few paces of the door it became clear that something very bad had happened there. The heavy door had been jammed open by what looked to Skinner like an engine block but was in fact one of the thousands of hi-tech devices adorning the computer racks all around them. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they cautiously edged their way inside, guided by the hazy glow of emergency lighting along the floor. It struck Skinner as odd that the designers had catered for emergency lighting in the lab but not in the maze of technology outside. Like the near-total dependancy on the iSight system for pretty much all navigation, it seemed clear to Skinner that the assumption had been that the system would never, could never, break.
Holding Santos by his right hand, Andy Harper to his left, Skinner nudged past the half-open door and into the VR lab. It took his eyes a little time to adjust to the dim lights above, and at first it was hard to make out the scene.
And then it emerged from the darkness.
There were bodies everywhere. Twisted necks. Skulls smashed. The spray of blood on the ceiling and walls. Lifeless bodies lay on the ground, a few on chairs. Only a small square of white rectangular floor tiles in the centre of the room had escaped - otherwise the floor had turned scarlet red.
Silence.
No groans. No cries for help. No, the pack who'd done this had made sure everyone was dead. As Skinner surveyed the wreckage, he pieced together the attack. Enraged psychopaths swarmed over these scientists and technicians, punching, stomping, tearing, stabbing. Once the fighting - if that's what it could be called - was over then the pack methodically visited each victim, bludgeoning their skulls.
This had been a massacre. In the distance, head twisted unnaturally and one arm horribly dislocated, lay Dr Becker, the artificial intelligence genius behind the game's personalities.
Skinner turned to Santos and Harper, who both stood transfixed with horror. Skinner and Clarke had seen a similar scene a couple of years back, and for the first time Skinner was joining the dots.
"Ok. We need to get up to that NOC right now. Let's move."
They nodded in grim silence, and Skinner led them quickly out of the lab and toward the emergency exit.
Skinner turned to speak to Santos but was interrupted by a loud metallic clang near the entrance to the lab, then voices jabbering excitedly.
There were more infected players out there. Coming their way. They had to get to that NOC right now.
#
Skinner moved quickly, silently to the emergency exit, then waved Santos to follow. She hustled up to the door, then turned and gestured for Harper to follow.
As Harper crept toward the door, a teenage girl flew out from a darkened row of computers and sprang toward him. She grabbed a fistful of his hair with one hand while the other held a large chunk of broken glass and slashed at his back.
Caught completely by surprise, Harper stumbled and fell to the left, his head clanging noisily against a steel rack. Harper lay dazed, face down, while the girl slashed viciously at his back and side. Skinner sprinted forward, but Santos beat him to it. With a ferocity that stunned Skinner, Santos grabbed the screeching girl by the hair and heaved her up off Harper. The girl fell backward, snarling and slashing, catching Santos on the right shoulder.
Santos yelped in pain, and the girl turned to attack her. By now, Skinner had made up the space, and with his fist curled tight, punched the savage teenager square on the throat, fracturing her larynx and crushing her trachea. Her dark red eyes popped wide open as she fell first to her knees, and then to the floor as air bubbled up through an open cut in her neck. Skinner didn't need to check - he knew she'd die from the wound.
Harper scrambled to his feet, blood pouring from his white shirt, and nodded his thanks. Skinner quickly scanned his wounds. There were lots of them. One or two looked like they'd sliced into muscle but most were shallow, surface wounds. Skinner turned to Santos and saw immediately that the surface skin on her shoulder had been peeled back, exposing two areas of open seeping wound. Skinner inwardly breathed a sigh of relieve. It would hurt - Skinner could see the pain etched across her face - but there would be no lasting damage.
He stole a glance back. He could hear the voices closing in fast. The larger infected pack was less than a minute away. Harper and Santos were both injured and bleeding. There was no chance they'd be able to outrun them.
Skinner pointed Harper toward the door, then bent over and hoisted Santos on to her feet. Harper flung the door open and the three of them spilled into the stairwell.
The Sapporo Outbreak Page 25
