by Kirk Dougal
I took the grenades from Willie and made my way along the back of the hill, crawling when I needed to stay out of sight. I settled in a few feet from where Bling had disappeared into the pink grass earlier. “In position,” I whispered into my headset.
“Ready,” Dingo answered. “We go in three, two…”
I never heard the last number.
“We’ve got movement in the north …” The rest of Bling’s warning was drowned out by a grenade from Willie, followed by yelling and enough gunfire to tell me he and Dingo had set their weapons on full automatic rock-n-roll. I needed to trust Bling to take care of the problem at the other end of the valley. I would lose our trap if I waited to confirm who moved on our flank.
With a grenade in each hand, I rose to my knees, pulling the pins out with my teeth. I watched the Anks redeploying behind the orange wall, turning their defensive front to face Willie and Dingo. I grabbed the chance.
The first grenade bounced twice before it exploded but my second was still in the air when I ducked down to avoid shrapnel. When I rose to my feet, yanking the .45 from its holster and stumbling into a run, I noticed all but five of the Anks were dead and two of those still alive were hurt. My first two bullets dropped one of those as I sprinted forward and the back of another Ank’s head blew out when I hit him with my third shot.
Now I heard other gunfire and realized Willie and Dingo had joined the fight. I kicked the rifle out of one Ank’s hands before putting a half-dozen slugs into his chest. He fell with a snort. A rifle opened up a few feet away and I saw the fourth Ank firing toward Willie and Dingo’s position. My first two bullets spun him around but the third missed completely as my .45 stayed open against an empty chamber. The Ank shuddered, staggering back two steps under withering fire from outside the orange wall and then went down.
I was still reaching for a fresh magazine when I saw the Ank leader through the dust and smoke. He had ripped open one of the boxes Bling noticed and shouldered a weapon I had never seen before.
He pointed it at me.
I dove to the side but suddenly spun end over end, the world a blur of red sky and pink grass. I bounced twice before I realized most of the body armor on the right side of my body was either gone or shattered and my ribs hurt more than anything I had ever felt in real life. I spit out dirt and raised my head.
The Ank leader bared his teeth at me in a snarl, or a grin, I was never quite sure, and raised his weapon one more time. Then, he was gone.
A deep, thumping rush, the passing of a great wind, and the Ank landed thirty feet away on the side of the hill. His head and legs still appeared normal but his thick, muscular torso looked like a half-set bowl of jello. I glanced to the north and saw five soldiers, the man in front holding an identical weapon to the one the Ank had tried to use on me.
“Nice shot, Card,” said one of the trailing men.
“Go through the mess and see what we can find,” Card said. “They’ve got at least one more pulse rail we can take.”
I smiled. The soldiers may have been calling the leader Card but I recognized the voice immediately. It was Gonzalez.
Chapter 15
“I’m glad I caught up with you, Gonzalez.”
Card stopped and stared. The face mask was down on his helmet but I imagined the look of disbelief on his face.
“Dowland?” He walked closer and removed his helmet so his mic would not pick up what he said. “When you asked where we were on Prime… I mean, you’re inside? You don’t play.”
I removed my helmet, too. “I need to talk to the people who played with Jackson. We think this is all connected. The game and his murder.”
Gonzalez stared at the pink grass around his feet. “We barely played for the first few days after…after. I didn’t come back into Prime for a week and then the game just wasn’t the same.” He lifted his head. “You don’t think one of them…”
“No,” I answered, shaking my head. “We think Jackson was murdered by someone who had killed before and we’re looking for the pattern. That’s why I need to talk with the players in your group, in case they saw something when you weren’t around.”
“Beast.” I turned and noticed Bling standing a few feet away. “You need to see this.”
Gonzalez and I put our helmets on and followed my sniper through a hole in the orange wall. On the way by I noticed that what I had thought was metal was really nothing more than a metallic-coated paper not even as thick as cardboard. The rest of the soldiers stood around a body on the ground. The dead man was Dingo.
“That’s too bad,” Gonzalez said. “Will he reset?”
For everything the Beta Prime programmers had gotten wrong, this was one thing they had nailed. When Ghost and I had created The Kindred, we made the mistake of letting people pick up where they had stopped when they were killed in the game, just like with the old-style console games we were trying to replace. The decision was a disaster. People got inside the game and went insane, doing crazy things to see what would work, to give outlet to their anarchist side, to satisfy urges from the outside world that would have put them in prison. We had not installed enough of a penalty for taking big risks and losing. It wasn’t that we wanted gamers to be conservative; we wanted them to keep playing and build the world inside The Kindred. If everyone was killed within the first few days of game action, scenes like the upcoming rumored big battle with the Anks would never happen.
So Ghost and I changed the game with each successive upgrade, pushing each reset from death farther back into a player’s history until in version 8.4 they had to start completely over if they died. I sent more than my fair share of players to a reset, some because they deserved the penalty and some because…well, just because I could. A complete start over was what had to be so annoying to Raven; every time I killed him he had to reset, going through the same levels for the experience points, solving puzzles he had been through a dozen times before.
“I think he will,” I said. “Keep your eye on his body. I don’t want it to go yet.” Anks and other NPCs would stay in the game once they were dead, along with players who never played again after their avatars died. But players that reset, as soon as the scene ended—if we all left the valley and walked out of sight of Dingo, for example—Their bodies would disappear so they could start again.
“Gonzalez,” I said, “pull your men together. I want to talk with them.”
*****
“I’m one of the detectives looking into Jacks’ murder and I know you were his regular playing group.” They all had their helmets off so our talk would not go out over game communication lines. “In the last few days leading up to his death, we know his avatar was killed by another player. Did he ever die inside the game when he was with you?”
Most of them grimaced in reply and one laughed out loud.
“Jacks?” King scoffed. “Die in the game? He was way too good to do that. Wasn’t any Ank going to kill him.”
“What about strangers? New players, not NPCs. Were there any of those around?”
The group grew quiet. After a few seconds, Deuce raised his head up and stared back at me. “There were always a few around. Jacks brought different ones in every time we played toward the end.”
I thought I saw where the conversation was headed. “Was he stacking?”
Deuce and Gonzalez had the good sense to blush. The others looked away and stared into the distance.
“The game stops now, gentlemen.” I felt my heart pumping, the heat rising in my cheeks. It did not matter to me the color bloom was just ones and zeros, the heart I felt pounding my chest was in my body in the real world. I was pissed and I felt every bit of the anger here, maybe even more than I would have on the outside. “Your friend is dead and I’m searching for his killer. Jacks was going DIOD. Ask Gonzalez. His hands were shaking. He wasn’t sleeping. He was irritable unless he was doing something physical. Jacks was overplaying the limits and you all knew it. Now tell me what you know so we can catch this
bastard.”
Gonzalez nodded. “He was stacking. Jacks paid some guy to hack him into the game with new player avatars and then he would rack up points, find us new weapons, scout out new players for our group. That’s how Badger joined us a couple of months ago.” The player on the far right nodded his head.
“Did any of these new players stick out?” I asked. “Especially someone in the past few weeks.”
“There have been three or four really good players that Jacks found for us,” Gonzalez said. “But we’ve seen all of them since his murder.”
“Not all of them,” Deuce said. “Remember that one just a few days before Jacks was killed? A real creeper. Kept wanting to know when Jacks was going to be inside the game so he could play, too.”
“Damn good player,” agreed King, “but really obsessive.”
I tried to slow my breathing. “A name. Did you get a name?”
Badger shook his head. “Not his real one. He used the name of one of those writers they made us read when we were in school.”
“He called himself Poe.” The words were the first spoken by Queen since I started interviewing the group and I noticed how quickly the rest stopped talking and listened. “I picked on him once and called him Usher, you know, as in Fall of the House of Usher. It pissed him off. I thought he was going to try to kill me.” Queen looked me straight in the eye. “He was a real fuckin’ freak. Right down to his ink.”
“Ink?” I asked. “He had a tattoo? In the game?”
Queen nodded. “He was so mad about the Usher crack he ripped open his armor. A big black bird was tattooed across his chest. He told me—screamed it really—that the tat was a raven and it was his protector.”
Hearing what I already suspected did not soften the weight of Queen’s words. Suddenly the air smelled sour and I gagged. I turned away from the group.
“Does that mean anything to you, Dowland?” Gonzalez asked.
“Dowland? RJ Dowland?” Queen’s voice rose and echoed back from the valley walls. “The real Beast? You mean I’ve finally played a game with The Beast? Hey, wait! You’re supposed to be dead.”
I wondered if Ghost and Jackson would still be alive if I had died years earlier when everyone thought I had kicked off.
“Beast, we’ve got an incoming transport. They’re looking for you.”
I glanced up and nodded to Willie. If Strick needed to send me a message during the game I would have received an encrypted code from HQ. None had arrived. But if Strick needed me in the real world, they had made plans to use a transport to “pull me out of the action.” I shivered, thinking about being awake again, outside the game.
“Gonzalez, take on Willie and Bling. They’re still a little green but they’re good players.”
“Yeah, of course.” He stepped closer. “Dowland, you’re going to get this guy, right?”
I nodded as pink grass and dirt swirled around us. The transport landed a few yards away and the high-pitched whine from the rotors forced me to put my helmet on again. The jump gate slammed on the ground and a sergeant ran out.
“Lieutenant Dowland, we have orders to take you back to HQ, sir.”
I followed him onto the transport, pausing long enough in the doorway to look back at Gonzalez and the rest of the group. Queen was waving her arms and talking, the rest of them just staring at her excitement. Beyond them the ground was bare. Dingo had reset when no one was watching.
“Lieutenant, I have an encrypted message for you, sir.” The pilot handed me a small crystal disc.
I placed a data disc in the slot on the side of my helmet and the heads-up display lit. The screen asked for my ID and without thinking I pulled my tags out from under my body armor. I stared at them as they sat on my glove, feeling like an idiot.
The ID tags must contain my player information, the information that in the real world would show where I was playing the game.
The information Raven needed to kill sleepers. The information he needed to find Jackson’s apartment to kill him.
I placed the tags in front of the faceplate and the screen switched over to a typed message:
I am pulling you out of Beta Prime. REM told us at least five of the victims were playing The City. All of them died and reset inside the game within a day or two of dying in the real world. Talbot is preparing some help for you when get inside The City. Good luck.
Strick
A tingle shot down my back at the realization I would remain inside the games. I signaled to the pilot and the transport lifted off.
Chapter 16
Stink hung over the city like a blanket over a corpse, feeding on the body until all that remained were the shadows and ghosts of dreams.
Garbage in the streets and the not-so-occasional body washing up near the docks were the smells you knocked off your shoes at the end of the day or chased away with gin you hoped would not leave you blind.
No, the stink smothering the city, clinging to skin and clothes until you almost drowned in the stench, that was the smell of corruption.
I walked through it when I could, dog-paddled through the muck when I had to, and dove down through its black depths when that was all that was left to do, emerging from the filth smelling like the garbage I hated so much.
I did it with the hope of one clean breath of air.
I did it because I loved the city.
My city.
The City.
Chapter 17
Fingers of fog hung low to the street, waiting to snatch an unsuspecting walker and drag them into shadowed alleys. The haze did not cross into the circle of light where I stood but the smell of garbage and car exhaust, food and factory smoke, and people—lots of people—crawled into my nose and settled. The street lamp I leaned against held back the night but the glow was powerless against the stench of the city.
I pushed the fedora back on my head and made sure the street was empty before I started searching my pockets. This situation was new to me. I had never gone into a game cold, not knowing the rules or how to take advantage of holes in the system. I assumed Gwen had built my avatar for me. My heart beat faster at the thought of her, my breath a little quicker. I wondered for a moment if I had ever felt this way in the real world.
My overcoat was no help except for a matchbook and a set of keys so I moved on to my suit and hit pay dirt. A .45 weigh down the right side pocket and a half a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes lie in the bottom of the left. The inside breast held a few business cards with my name on them under a man holding the world on his shoulders and the words, “Titan Detective Agency.” There was also an office address in the Baxter Building so at least I knew where I worked. My wallet revealed a detective license with a permit to carry the gun. It also gave up twenty-nine dollars and, not quite hidden under the ripped lining in the back, a cracked and yellowed photo of a pretty young woman I did not recognize.
Footsteps on the sidewalk drew me out of the search. I slid sideways so the lamp post gave me some cover while I watched the figure draw closer. My hand gripped the gun in my pocket. The menacing shadow lurching toward me shrank as it approached, dwindling down until the shape became a middle-aged man wearing an overcoat that had seen better days.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Mr. Dowland. It took a while before the missus fell asleep so I could sneak out of the apartment.”
I took my hand off the gun and pulled out the cigarettes. “I was about ready to leave.” I lit a Strike but did not offer him one. “Tell me why I stayed.” Like the first battle in Beta Prime, I was sure this was a preset situation placed in the game by the programmers to put new players into the right mindset, hook them into their roles. I was a detective so this man—almost certainly a NPC—was here to give me my first case.
“Can we go inside to talk? There’s a place a few minutes from here.”
I nodded and he led the way down the block. As soon as we turned the corner, a few cars drove into view and people walked along the sidewalk. Again, the scene was just
part of the game. I would have bet real money if I turned around and went back to the same lamp post where I entered, people would be on that street now, too.
I stayed a half-step behind the man and out of reach as I tried to remember everything I could about The City, which turned out to be precious little. Mobsters, corruption, post-prohibition, 1930s-era big city life—that was about all I could drudge up. Every player we passed, from the men in suits and fedoras to the women in skirts and coiffed hair, showed me I was right.
The man I followed glanced behind us before ducking into a narrow side street. The shadows were deeper here, held at bay by only a handful of lights, their bare bulbs and covers hanging over nondescript doors, a holdover from the speakeasy days. He turned at the third one and led me inside. A man seated by the door nodded but I had already turned my attention to the bouncer in the center of the small room. He had the swollen finger joints, cauliflower ear, and crooked nose of a back room brawler.
The muscle stared back for a few seconds before the smaller man gave him a signal. He stepped to the side and my client walked past through the opening that had been hidden previously. I let the corner of my mouth creep up and nodded once before I followed.
The short hallway turned in front of us and the next thing I noticed was women’s laughter and men talking loudly. We walked into a long, narrow room with a bar taking up most of one wall. Down the middle were rows of tables and near the back were several booths that started on one wall and curled around in a U-shape.
