This is not a game.
A second zombie stumbled out of the shattered shop window, another young woman dressed in the clothes of an employee; perhaps she was the store clerk. Her neck and shoulders were ripped open and ruined. She muttered something between undead lips, and without thinking I aimed and blew her away with a shot to the chest, then followed up with one to the head. Her body collapsed supine, and lay still. But my focus didn’t linger on her, shifting quickly onto a group of zombies emerging from a café opposite the gaming arcade.
They were people dressed in many walks of life, some wearing business suits, other in casual wear, and a couple dressed in tight waitress outfits. But they were all undead, and again the gamer in me took over, but now I felt a pressure on my consciousness I’d never experienced before most probably from knowing this wasn’t the game I was accustomed to playing.
The plaza was real.
The zombies were real.
And the lightguns fired very real yet tiny bullets.
Taking a number of deep breathes, and gathering my nerves like I’d never before – except on the occasion when I dressed up as the Silver Blue Princess as per the signed agreement with the Cosplay Club – I extended the gunstock, pressed it against my right shoulder, and then stepped forward to face the undead slowly emerging from the shops of the arcade.
Opening up my mind to the patterns I could recognize in their group movement, and gripping tightly the lightgun that wasn’t a lightgun, I began picking them off one at a time with well-placed shots to their heads.
Little by little, I lost myself to the game that wasn’t a game and the ensuing carnage.
Chapter 3.
- I -
The notion that I was experiencing a holo-VR simulation was quickly dispelled from my mind. Even now, I like to think of myself as an open minded person, something that benefited me greatly when dealing with the blunt reality I was facing. However, while I had acknowledged that the situation was indeed real I nonetheless chose to refer to it as The Game, and while taking down zombies in quick succession, I made mental notes regarding my observations of The Game.
To begin with, I considered the lightguns.
It was obvious after the first few shots that the weapons were actual firearms. However, they were unlike anything I’d heard off. They fired mini caseless bullets, perhaps no more than four or five millimeters in diameter, and with a very short body. Calling them bullets wasn’t entirely accurate as I noticed later – when the shooting had finally stopped – they were a cross between tiny arrows and bullets. The effective firing range wasn’t so good – fifty meters at best – and their penetration was poor. A hit to the zombies bodies was insufficient to stop them, and sometimes it required two or three shots to their heads to bring them down for good. So despite the oversized magazines containing some ninety rounds apiece, I had to avoid being liberal with my shooting.
The second item of note was The Game itself.
Necropolis was a game played through three to five stages. Because of my lack of stamina, I usually played it for three stages, rarely going as far as five. So the question plaguing my thoughts was whether The Game had stages. If so, then how many could I expect. However, the more dire consideration was whether or not The Game had an actual ending, or was I expected to travel the zombie infested city, fighting to the death until I ran out of ammunition? In short, this was a waking nightmare, and thus far I had seen nothing to suggest a way out of it.
The third item of note were the zombies.
To confirm they possessed physical bodies, I kicked one over after killing it. It felt very real to my foot and shoe, and in addition to its wounds, the condition of its skin and flesh implied rather explicitly the horrid fact that zombies did exist. Needless to say, I was quite familiar with their lore so knowing that these were actual zombies sent my panic gauge roaring skyward. It came back down over time as I forcefully immersed myself into the act of killing the undead, but the knowledge that zombies were real continued to trouble me greatly.
Thankfully, it wouldn’t be long before I learnt the truth, and thereby avoided being traumatized for life.
However, I would eventually learn there are worse things in life than a zombie apocalypse.
- II -
When the shooting stopped, silence befell the plaza of the entertainment complex, and a deathly stillness spread throughout.
I noticed I was breathing harder than usual, The Game stage – if indeed this was a stage – proving to be more taxing than I was accustomed to.
Carnage surrounded me, countless bodies lying everywhere, including a few children lying prone in the fountain pool, dying the water red.
It was all very visceral and traumatic, and certainly not for the faint hearted.
I swallowed hard, wondering how something virtual could have turned into something that was evidently real.
I silently pledged that if I found a way out I would hang up my lightguns for good.
Afterwards, fear gripped me as I wondered if I was trapped in this Necropolis.
I glanced at my wristwatch, and realized I’d been shooting away for almost twenty minutes, though it felt like an hour since entering the booth. Maybe I’d experienced some sort of time dilation phenomenon without knowing it. Looking down at the weapon in my hands, I saw that the ammo count or charge was almost empty. Thus far I’d employed only one lightgun as I massacred the undead, so I still had a full magazine in the weapon slung across my back. However, I didn’t know if there were other stages, or if I was doomed to wander the city of undead for an unforeseeable future.
On the assumption that this environment possessed some of the attributes of a game, I wondered if there were hidden items for me to find, ammunition being one them.
On a hunch, I made my way back to the information kiosk, and searched about the place. My intuition served me well, and I found a cardboard box containing about a dozen ammunition magazines under the kiosk counter. After quickly emptying my school carry-bag of anything I felt wasn’t essential to my survival, I tossed the magazines into it. I also dropped a couple of magazines into my trouser pockets, and swapped out the empty mag in the lightgun for a fresh one.
Emboldened by my newly acquired stock of ammunition, not knowing how much longer The Game would persist impinged upon me the need to be frugal with my expenditure of ammunition.
After searching the kiosk for other useful items, and finding none, I slung the carry-bag’s straps across my body, careful not to tangle them up with the straps of the lightgun, and then stepped away from the kiosk.
Although the plaza and arcade were still, there was no indication the stage would end, if indeed this was but one stage of the game.
Spotting a drink vending machine in the near distance, I walked up to it, and saw that it was receiving power and thus refrigerated. Looking around me, I noticed for the first time that the shops of the arcade were well lit, though the plaza lights were yet to turn on. The sky overhead was grey and overcast, and despite my watch claiming it was after six pm, I could be forgiven for thinking it was midafternoon.
I was able to observe this now that peace and quiet had fallen upon my surroundings.
Thinking of survival, I turned back to the vending machine. After carefully placing the lightgun on the ground and beside my feet, I waved my phone over the vending machine’s scanner, by no means confident that I could make a purchase. To my surprise, the machine beeped in response. Thus encouraged, I bought a half dozen bottles of water, depositing all but one of them into my carry-bag.
Regardless of the carnage, my thirst overrode my stomach. Opening a bottle, I drank down a third of its contents while keeping my eyes averted from the plaza. After another long gulp where I consumed half the water in the bottle, I capped it, then dropped it into my carry-bag. Only then did I turn and gaze around the plaza, searching for signs of movement or anything that caught my eye.
I suspected that perhaps I hadn’t cleared the level, so I pi
cked up the lightgun and began walking through the area. Regardless of the stillness surrounding me, I was wary of the bodies on the ground as there may be undead playing dead amongst them. Despite the need to be prudent with my ammunition, I fired a few rounds into bodies that didn’t look dead enough to me, and cautiously continued onward.
The sound of an infant crying in the near distance brought me to a stop.
Slowly turning my head left and right, I isolated the direction from whence it came – a pram rocking against a shop door roughly a hundred feet down the plaza. Holding the lightgun in a firm two-handed grip, I carefully approached the pram, and then peered at the child wailing lying inside, its short stubby limbs thrashing ineffectively at the air like a turtle on its shell.
To my horror, it was undead; its skin ashen like those of the other zombies I’d killed.
However, within moments a more horrifying thought dropped heavily into my mind.
I stood for a minute or more beside the pram, wondering if this was the key to ending the stage.
Would I have to kill this baby zombie in order to gain my freedom from Necropolis?
I felt a wave of revulsion for whomever was behind The Game. If I ever discovered who they were, I would find a way to exact retribution from them, the so-called pound of flesh.
It took me another minute to garner the grim resolve I needed to aim the lightgun at the child’s head…and then to pull the trigger.
A single round blew a hole through its small soft head, silencing its cries permanently.
I felt bile work its way up my throat, but I pushed it back down. I wiped the back of my mouth though the sour taste remained, and then backtracked to the center of the plaza not far from the fountain where a group of zombie children had fallen in after I shot them dead. At sight of them, the pressure of being surrounded by the deceased overwhelmed me, and I turned around in a hurry and walked fast toward the northeastern end of the plaza. In the distance, I could see a handful of large megascrapers as large as mountains with birds flying in small flocks between them. The buildings’ windows were illuminated so it was clear they were drawing power from somewhere. Realizing this, I began earnestly considering the possibility that I was inside a real city, one that had suffered a zombie apocalypse.
“Maybe this is Necropolis…maybe there are survivors….”
I was nearing the end of the plaza, and thereby approaching a deserted street with vehicles strewn about haphazardly. The area was as deathly still as the plaza behind me, devoid of movement or any signs of life. With the lightgun at the ready, I slowed my pace as I drew closer to the street.
“BRACE FOR TRANSLOCATION.”
My heart jumped into my throat. I spun around and faced the plaza, searching for the owner of that female voice, soon realizing it was coming from the public address system.
“TRANSLOCATION IMMINENT.”
I dropped to my knees in a hurry, but the hard shove I’d experienced before made an encore appearance and knocked me down onto my chest before I could stop my fall with my hands and arms. Wincing in pain, I was soon thrust into darkness and weightlessness that made my insides swim about for several nauseating seconds before I sensed a return to gravity and fell onto a hard ground. Lying on my stomach, I pushed myself up onto my elbows, and then stared up into the dim darkness.
I was back in the domed booth.
The words CONGRATULATIONS appeared above me, quickly changing to NEXT STAGE LOADING.
If this was indeed the booth, then I resolved to flee it immediately.
I was upon my feet in a matter of heartbeats, and searching for the control pedestal at the ‘back’ of the booth. I ran to it as soon as I caught sight of it, but my hopes were dashed when I saw that it was dark and unresponsive. Slapping the emergency open button made no difference.
BRACE FOR TRANSLOCATION.
Realizing my carry-bag and the lightguns had made the return journey, I ran back to the middle of the booth and picked up the closest of the weapons. With a two-handed grip, I aimed the lightgun at the wall of the booth were I judged the door to be and pressed the trigger. The weapon failed to fire, and I looked down to see the safety was on. Flicking it off, I took aim once more and pressed the trigger. The lightgun discharged bullets every half or quarter second, stitching the dark wall with small explosions.
WARNING. TRANSLOCATION FIELD DISRUPTION.
I kept firing, swinging the weapon a few degrees to the left and right, tracing a line of fire up the wall, hoping to trigger some kind of abort that would cancel the so-called translocation process and open the doors.
EMERGENTY TRANSLOCATION ENGAGED.
I clenched my jaw and kept firing. It was reckless since I was expending ammunition that I would need later, but I couldn’t bring myself to hold back as desperation overrode me.
TRANSLOCATING—
The hard shove was as bad as before, the weightlessness just as stomach twisting, and then the ground was pulled out from under me, tossing me face first into hard darkness.
“Damn it!” I yelled into the void.
Seconds later, I once again dropped onto solid ground and expelled the air in my lungs with a loud grunt.
- III -
I turned around smoothly to look around at my new surroundings.
It was a school not unlike Telos Academy, and thereby a disturbingly familiar sight.
I could almost imagine someone laughing wickedly at my expense from somewhere in the darkened corridors as cold sweat trickled down my back. Yet what unnerved me the most was the utter stillness of the air, as though my surroundings were locked in time. I wondered if the stage had actually completed loading as nothing moved around me.
Taking a quiet breath, almost fearful of breaking the enveloping silence, I stepped cautiously forward with light-guns at the ready.
From my memory of Telos Academy’s layout, I judged I was close to the entrance of the high school building, standing on the third level – the second floor if you counted the ground floor. I had classrooms and stairwells to my left, and the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main corridor to my right. The unbroken corridor circumnavigated the inside of the horseshoe shaped building – otherwise known as a broken circle – and if I followed it, I would eventually at the five-storey library constructed of transparent permaglass.
The interior lighting was still on, and I saw signs of damage, with tables and furniture thrown out of classrooms and into the corridor. Some of the overhead ceiling panels had fallen away, exposing air conditioning and electricity conduits.
The entrance to a stairwell was about twenty meters ahead of me. Approaching it with my right shoulder inches from the glass windows, thus giving the stairwell a wide berth, I trained the lightgun’s targeting beam on the landing.
A heartbeat later, a girl dressed in a school uniform stumbled up the stairs.
I held my breath and waited for her to see me.
When she looked up, I saw a very attractive face with large doe eyes and pale pink lips. She didn’t look frightened. She just looked….depressed. At sight of me she froze, but her gaze soon fell upon the weapon in my hands. A heartbeat later, she pointed down the stairs.
“Ah…help?”
I kept my gun up, certain she wasn’t an undead, but the same couldn’t be said about the owner of the shadow climbing up the stairs behind her. When it came into light, I saw it was a male teacher, eyes glazed, mouth wide, a hunger for living flesh contorting his features.
The girl cocked her head, then took a few steps away from the stairwell. She sounded depressingly bored as she waved her hands about gently in a dreary panic. “I’m being followed. I’m going to be eaten. Kyaaa.”
I blew the teacher’s head apart with two well-placed round to his forehead, then approached the stairwell to see two more undead faculty members crawling up the stairs behind the dead teacher. I brought their journey to an end before they arrived at the landing, then turned to look at the girl I’d just rescued.
She was a pretty thing, like many of the girls of my Academy, with long dark hair, an oval face, and expressive eyes. There was no need for me to doubt or question whether she was real. I was long since convinced that The Game was not a holo-Virtual simulation.
It sounded like a line out of a B-grade holovision horror flick, but I felt obliged to ask her, “Are you all right?”
She looked sadly at the deceased undead. “What a tragic end to an underappreciated teaching career.”
Her response and demeanor confused me. It wasn’t what I expected from someone fleeing from flesh eating zombies. Clearing my throat, I asked, “Are you hurt?”
“No,” she replied with a weak shake of her head. “I’m fine….”
Again, I found her response and forlorn mien uncharacteristic of someone caught in this kind of scenario. Then again, was my response to The Game any more or less unusual? It clearly wasn’t the game I remembered playing, yet I was treating it like a game that had stages to be cleared. Was I being open minded, or just simple minded? And if I considered this another stage of The Game, what were the conditions for clearing it? Would there be another undead zombie baby to euthanize? It wasn’t a prospect I found endearing.
Peering up and then down the stairwell, I gave the corridor a quick look before asking the girl, “Are you the only one alive? Are there any other survivors?”
“Hmm…survivors…I have no idea.”
What is wrong with this girl? Is she traumatized? Has her mind retreated or something?
When she turned and pointed through the corridor window, I saw that she was indicating the library that intersected the broken circle that was the school building. Constructed at the apex of the circle and directly opposite the administration building a thousand feet away, the library divided the middle school arc from the high school arc of the building.
“Over there,” she said despondently. “I noticed them hiding in the library. Not very smart though. The library walls and floors are completely transparent.” She lowered her hand. “Well, it may be too late for them as well.”
Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One Page 8
