The Wards (Novella #2)

by Alan Ryker

  Flies poured out of the tiny torture room, too many to have ever been contained within it. She tried to peer through the hole in the wall, but the insects created a visual static that matched the aural buzzing, breaking everything up, making it impossible to interpret.

  She got to her knees, planted a foot, pushed up, both hands still on the cool tile. Reaching out, she climbed the wall, then began to stumble towards where she knew the front door stood because she’d put it there.

  At the end of the hall she looked back. Through the flies she saw Albatross glaring out at her, saw his mouth moving again, but this time not in prayer. He screamed at her, but she couldn’t hear it. She doubted he could hear it. But his eyes said enough.

  Between them, the flies that didn’t fill the air settled on his mother’s corpse, turning her into a mass of black squirming bodies and translucent, shimmering wings, all throbbing to the sound of—

  It stepped out of its portal, out of the torture room, into the hall, and Elizabeth’s knees grew weak again. She couldn’t feel her feet, could feel nothing but the rhythm that filled her, that tried to squeeze her out, telling her to give up, to let go of that pathetic body and fly up into space and disperse into the darkness between the stars.

  Death held out a bony hand toward the mass of flies and corpse.

  Elizabeth pulled her mind back into herself. This was her chance. She’d given up on standing and crawled down the hall, through puddles and piles of filth, toward the living room and its exterior door. She knew that Albatross would do no such thing, not until Death had re-entered its portal. She’d seen the look on his face: not just fear, not just awe, but worship. Albatross had forsaken her as his god and turned to Death. Had she not been cruel enough for him?

  She couldn’t think like that, couldn’t punish herself yet for what she’d done to these people. She hadn’t known. But she’d never be able to explain that to Albatross.

  Slipping and wobbling on hands and knees, she still struggled to put distance between herself and the terrible scene in the hallway, but her head began to clear. The flies buzzing shrank, taking up less than all the space in the universe. She found her feet and was soon walking, then trotting toward freedom. She remembered the house, went through its sunken living room that had become nothing but a garbage pit. The door was on the other side, and she carefully picked her way across to freedom.

  Until the buzzing stopped.

  PART 8

  Death had collected her brutally murdered twin, had carried her back through its portal and let it close behind, taking its legion of flies with it. The quiet was deafening until a frantic pounding started: the sound of heavy boots striking the floor in a sprint.

  Then careful was over, and Elizabeth ran, too, getting almost to the door before something beneath the surface level of trash jabbed into her foot. She kept going, hobbling, stepping up out of the pit and reaching for the door, opening it on a blindingly blue sky and stunningly green grass and fresh air that she gasped in like she’d emerged from a deep dive.

  But she had to move. She took a step across the stoop, another, and then hissed, hopped, looked back and down. Blood smeared the concrete.

  “No!” came a roar muffled by the house, starting loud and growing louder, like a jet plane firing up its engine. Elizabeth looked back into the house, saw Albatross leap down into the sunken living room, trip, claw toward her, regain his feet.

  She turned and ran, heedless of her bleeding foot, slapping it down into the cool, soft grass. Looking around her, she saw her only hope: her first house. It sat on the next lot. They would help her. They were decent people, and she hadn’t been a brutal creator to them.

  Elizabeth veered, taking a straight path to their front door. She was halfway there before Albatross screamed again, this time without the intelligibility of even a single syllable, and yet projecting all the meaning necessary.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw him leap down the stoop stairs, landing at a sprint, his long, black-clad limbs pumping, his white face stretched into a predatory grimace.

  Yes, she had dressed him like that, made him into one of the goth losers from her high school career, but now it didn’t make her think loser. Not on him, at least. The kids in high school had looked like they worshipped death, but death had never stood before them, personified and more horrible than could be imagined, a living negation to everything each human struggled for each day. Those kids wouldn’t have looked upon death and felt what she’d seen in Albatross’s eyes.

  She’d been gripping her robe tightly around her as she jogged to the neighbors’, but forgot modesty when death’s apprentice appeared behind her, exploding from the door of the torture house like a bullet from a barrel. Seeing that, she ran. She pumped her arms and legs and sprinted all out as she hadn’t since high school gym class. Her robe flew open and she let it, let it flap behind her where it didn’t impede her pumping legs.

  She was faster than she would have thought. Maybe she was stronger, too, but she didn’t want to have to find out. She didn’t look back, because her feet felt like they could fly out from beneath her at any moment, that she could step wrong, even on the oddly even turf, and go sprawling, and that would be the end of her. She’d feel the weight of Albatross, and it’d be the last thing she felt before Death’s portal opened again and she was carried away to the land of the digital dead, a place which she’d never seen, which she’d always wondered was even programmed, if those carried there existed in some kind of formless void because no afterworld had been created for them, and if that was what all afterworlds were like.

  She didn’t look, and she couldn’t hear him either, running on the dampening turf, breathing through clenched teeth. These sprints were where he lived his life, while she was only intruding for a few moments of panicked escape.

  Elizabeth bounded up the stairs, grabbed the knob, turned it, stepped into her first Wards’ house, all without breaking stride. She knew they didn’t lock front doors in The Wards. Otherwise friends and neighbors couldn’t wander randomly in to chat or argue, raising and lowering social meters and setting the tone of the society in your neighborhood. Still, she was surprised when she didn’t trip, or miss getting the door open and slam into it, bouncing off and down the steps to be dragged away to some dark place out of the bright blue and green.

  Her feet slapped the hardwood floor.

  “Help! Help me! Someone!” Her screaming interrupted her breathing and her vision went black around the edges, pulsating as she gasped.

  What if they weren’t home? She didn’t know what time it was. Dave could be at work. Beth could be out visiting or shopping.

  She’d made it almost all the way through the house when she heard the boom of heavy boots entering the front door at full speed. She nearly wept. Because she hadn’t looked behind her and couldn’t hear him, she’d hoped that he’d given up the chase, but he was only a few seconds behind her.

  She had a decision to make then. She could turn up the stairs into this house she knew so well, be trapped in this familiar place for at least a few minutes, or she could let the chase continue, try to outrun him. While her heart dropped to hear that he hadn’t given up and turned back, she was surprised at the distance she still had on him.

  But could she keep it up?

  That was an uncertainty. She didn’t watch horror movies, but she knew audiences screamed, “Don’t go upstairs.” That was certain. Certain death. In this case, the devil she didn’t know was preferable to the one she did.

  She kept going, on through to where she knew the kitchen stood with its door to the back porch. She’d go down wooden stairs to the backyard, across to the back plot…

  Maybe she should go upstairs. How long could she keep this up? She was small and soft and put in enough low-impact aerobic work to keep her figure, which didn’t require much at her age. Albatross was so long and sinewy, and while she felt her fuel—fear—about to burn her up, she knew that he’d been running on his—hat
e—for his entire life. But she was already past the staircase. Hiding was no longer an option.

  “Help!” she tried to scream, but croaked.

  And around the corner, from out of the kitchen, stepped a man she was never usually happy to see. Her husband, David. Or rather, Dave.

  Unfortunately, he appeared only two strides ahead of her, stopping dead in the center of the hallway like he’d just looked up to find a bus bearing down on him.

  Elizabeth put her arms up across her chest, lowered her head, closed her eyes, and collided with him. She couldn’t even stop running, because her body overshooting her feet at that speed on the hardwood floor would have been catastrophic.

  Dave made a soft woof as she hit him, managed one and a half backwards steps, and then she felt him tipping, sitting, both of them going down. His arms wrapped around her, protecting her as he’d rarely had opportunity to do, though one of her attractions to the man twice her age was the idea that he could protect her.

  They slid, and when they came to a stop, he was still holding her.

  “Beth? What’s going on? Albatross, what are you doing in here?” Unlike Davey, this version of her husband was as true to life as she could make him. He sat with who he thought was his wife clutched to his chest protectively and stared past her.

  Elizabeth peeked back over her shoulder. Albatross’s booming steps slowed, stopping just as he entered the kitchen.

  “That’s not your wife.”

  “You’ve gotten into a liquor cabinet again, haven’t you?”

  “No. She looks like your wife. She looks like my mom. She’s not. She’s The Eyes.”

  “The Eyes?” Dave sounded distant, confused. “The Eyes watch from afar. We strive to please The Eyes—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the litany. She’s The Eyes and she’s not a god, she’s a sadistic bitch who killed my mom after torturing her for years.”

  “Betty’s dead?”

  Elizabeth finally looked at Albatross. He stood with his hands on his hips, his shallow chest rising and falling as he caught his breath.

  Dave looked down at Elizabeth. “You’re not Beth.”

  “No, but please don’t let him kill me.”

  “Kill you? Were you going to kill her?”

  Albatross looked somewhat abashed, and for the first time since Elizabeth had met him, at a loss for words. He looked like he’d finally decided on the lie he thought would get him Elizabeth when he was interrupted.

  “Albatross, I thought I heard your screechy voice. Get out of my house.”

  Albatross shrank back against the wall, sidled a few steps back toward the front door, revealing Beth standing behind him. She looked so much like Elizabeth it was remarkable Dave had recognized the difference so quickly.

  “This woman killed my—”

  “You killed Pooki. I know you did, you sick piece of trash. Now get back to the trash pile you call a house.”

  As Elizabeth’s doppelganger berated him, Albatross visibly shrank, pulling his long thin limbs in to protect them like an insect might, curling his back to minimize his exposed underside.

  Elizabeth knew that Albatross wasn’t welcome in this house, and she’d known it was about Pooki, because a picture of Pooki always appeared in Beth’s speech bubbles when she confronted Albatross, but she was still surprised at the hostility the woman showed, the complete contempt, as if Albatross weren’t even a person. It was like she’d found a stray cat shitting on her kitchen table.

  “I didn’t do anything to Pooki.”

  “Everyone knows you’re the reason all the pets keep disappearing, Albatross. The least you can do is show some shame and only creep out at night when the rest of us don’t have to look at your freakish clown face. Now get out!”

  Albatross had backed all the way to the front door by this point, his face showing a hint of blush through the white. “She’s The Eyes, Beth. Don’t trust her.” Looking past Beth at Elizabeth, who still sat curled against Dave, he said, “We’re not done.”

  Beth took in a dramatic lungful of air, and Elizabeth braced herself for the shout, but Albatross saw it too, and stepped out, shutting the door behind himself.

  “What was he talking about? Who are you?” Beth said, turning toward Elizabeth with the confidence of high stats in every important category. Then the confidence wavered in her eyes for just a second before she composed herself and said, “And most importantly, why are you in my house, naked, lying on my husband?”

  Elizabeth looked down and the body she was so proud of because it was the only thing she was ever complimented on was fully exposed, the loosely tied belt of her fluffy robe having come untied in the deadly chase from one house to the next. She grabbed the edges and pulled them together, then tied them, then finally disentangled herself from Dave and stood. Dave lay there patiently the entire time. His patience stat was high, but Elizabeth imagined that he hadn’t minded lying beneath her mostly-nude body.

  She offered him a hand, but he waved it away and stood on his own, brushing himself down despite the floors being so immaculate that Elizabeth couldn’t see any dirt besides what she’d tracked in on her feet.

  “I’m Elizabeth.” She offered her hand to the woman who’d just saved her, the woman who had been intended as an idealized version of herself when she’d first started the game.

  Beth took her hand and shook it. Elizabeth felt surprising strength in her grip, then remember that she had her doppleganger exercise frequently to maintain the highest fitness stats. “That’s surprising. We already have an Elizabeth.”

  “You do?” Elizabeth said, then remembered the dream house. She did have a third copy in the game, one she didn’t think about that much because she was more concerned with the house than the occupant. After Elizabeth had gotten a little bored with torturing Davey, Betty and Albatross, she decided that going in the opposite direction might be fun, utilizing cheats and hacks to create the house of her wildest dreams. It had taken her quite a while to get to that level of expertise. She thought of her sprawling and yet ever-expanding dream house farther down the street. She would go there after investigating here. It might hold the secret to escaping this world, though given her total lack of understanding of the situation, any place might.

  “Yes, over in the unfinished high rise. Well, she went by Elizabeth at first, but now she’s Liza. You know, that house might be bigger and fancier than ours, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s always under construction. Half the time it has open walls!”

  “Really?”

  “You haven’t seen it yet?”

  “No, I came here straight from the torture house.” Elizabeth’s breath caught in her chest as she wondered if she’d given herself away by calling it ‘the torture house.’ But Betty gave no indication of having noticed anything amiss.

  In fact, she became even more friendly, but in the way that a politician might.

  “You’re not missing anything. It’s showy, sure, but we have the nicest home in the neighborhood. Sometimes a house can be too big. I’d say ours is just right. Besides that, there’s gossip that Mary from the street over went in and never came out. Her family says Liza phoned her right before she left their house, never to be seen again, but they don’t dare go into that crazy place to look for her.” She looked Elizabeth up and down and a bit of that same distasteful expression crossed her face that had been there when she’d confronted Albatross.

  “Do you need to go home?” she asked, using her high Politeness rating to try to mask the face that she wanted this dirty, naked woman out of her house. “Which house is yours? The empty lot to the south?”

  “I actually don’t have a home here,” Beth said.

  “Really?” Elizabeth’s face, though strangely smooth, seemed poor at hiding her emotions. She gave Elizabeth another appraisal, a long look up and down, giving Elizabeth the impression that she was even remembering and judging her exposed body, something Elizabeth was accustomed to being judged on but which ma
de her feel a little indignant given the situation.

  A blend of emotions unified into one in an instant on Beth’s face, as if multiple processors each working on different problems suddenly snapped to conclusions, and she said, “You can live here. We have the extra room. She can stay here, can’t she, Dave?”

  “Whatever you want,” Dave said, strangely unconcerned with this major decision being suddenly made without him. “I have some reading to do if I want that big promotion.”

  “We want that big promotion so we can get started on the expansion.”

  Elizabeth remembered that Dave did indeed have some skill points to gain and then he would be eligible for a promotion at his job, coming with both more pay and higher community status. This place really was her game, her families, all come to life.

  Beth guided Elizabeth lightly by the upper arm, a gesture so familiar that it took her off guard, though this woman was herself, or at least her own ideal of herself. She led her up the stairs, to her own dressing room. There was even a computer in there, though Elizabeth couldn’t imagine this Beth spending all day playing The Wards in her bath robe.

  The woman was efficient and no nonsense. She went to her closet and pulled out a party dress.

  “Here, we want you looking nice,” she said, handing it to Elizabeth, who took it because she took things that were handed to her, then held it out away from herself because it didn’t make any sense.

  “Why? I’m not going anyplace fancy. I just need a bit to think, to figure out how to get out of here.”

  “What, do you already have money to buy a lot?” Beth asked. She looked Elizabeth up and down, sizing her up, always sizing her up, one minute as if assessing what quality an ally she might make, the next, how dangerous a rival.

  “What? No.” The question surprised Elizabeth. Did she really just seem like another Ward? Albatross had figured her out quickly, but he seemed, for all his flaws, to be more perceptive than the others. “No, I need to leave. Not just your house, I need to figure out how to get out of here, out of Wardville.”