The Long Dark Four-Way of the Soul

by Alden Odessa

  I can’t believe I am using the words nice and The Falls in the same sentence. The further away I was from my spawning point the more and more my level of expectations lowered.

  I was distracted in thought, thinking about why the game had led me here, it wasn’t just now that it did it. I had noticed it last night when we went to the laundry mat, I specifically remember seeing it and noting, in my mind, that I needed to come back. Why?

  Why had I even noticed this dump last night? And why did it log into my mind I needed to come back? That there was something here? Was the game implanting hints in my head? It seemed possible. Somewhere out there in the universe, I’m strapped into this thing. The goggles wrapped around my head, and connected, by Wi-Fi into my computer. No telling what kind of signals it was sending to my brain.

  In all my excitement from receiving the game, even the months leading up to it, I had never even considered any of the implications. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect any sort of trickery or ill will. I just thought it was a game.

  Shame on me.

  I was totally lost in thought and had of I not been I would have been paying attention to what was actually happening at The Show-Tel at that very moment.

  And maybe I would have been prepared for the gunshot.

  19

  Shoot Out at the Show-Tel Motel

  Instinctively I push April behind me. I don’t know where the gunshot came from and it didn’t take me long to see what was going on.

  The door to room number one had flown open, and a naked woman ran out, screaming, behind her a man appeared, he was wearing boxer shorts and was brandishing a revolver in his hand; he lifted it to fire. He shot, and the woman fell to the ground but was still moving.

  I didn’t know what to do, I’ve never been a man of action and had never found myself in such a situation before. I knelt, making sure April was behind me. There was nothing to duck behind, I realized. I was an open target in the middle of the street.

  From the office came an old man, holding a shotgun. He was yelling something at the man coming out of room number one, who instantly turned his attention to the old man with the shotgun. He fired, and the old man turned away, unharmed and leaned against the side of the office wall. The man in the doorway shot twice more, chipping off wood from the side of the building the old man was taking cover behind.

  The girl was screaming about thirty feet away from the first man. Suddenly another man seemed to come out of nowhere. He was coming from the other side of the motel, carrying a revolver of his own. He fired at the old man but missed just to the left with three shots. The old man turned his focus to the second guy, firing his shotgun. He hit the man, but seeing as how he was over fifty feet away, the spray of the shotgun didn’t do much except slow the younger man down.

  The man across the yard, knelt, having been hit with some shotgun blast in his side. He checked his wound; it was nothing he couldn’t walk away from, although it was clear that it was causing him pain. He looked up at the old man, who had opened his shotgun and was digging for new shells to load into it. The young man didn’t hesitate to re-aim and fire. He rattled off three more shots at the old man, and this time they all found their mark.

  The old man dropped his gun as he was pushed backward by the force of the shots. He took two in the upper chest, and the third one hit him directly in the head. Blood shot out as he fell back against the wall, dead.

  I still didn’t know what to do. So far it didn’t appear as anyone had seen me and I was frozen in fear. I looked at both men and then to the dead old man against the side of the building. I had never seen anyone get shot before and I felt like I would throw up.

  I had played plenty of warfare games before, and it accustomed me to that level of gameplay and that kind of killing. The characters all fell a certain way, almost as if the game let you know: This isn’t real.

  This was different, this felt as real as anything I had ever experienced. The gunshots, the girl in the middle of the motel yard, screaming in pain at the top of her lungs. Not knowing if she should run, or even if she could run. The men were yelling at each other. It all felt like this was happening in real life. This didn’t feel like a game.

  From room number one there was another scream, but it was not like the first girls. This was a scream of aggression. I saw another young, naked woman jump out of the room and onto the first man’s back. She bit him on the side of the face, and the man screamed in pain, taking his non-gun hand and grabbing her by the hair. He then tossed her over his shoulder with force onto the ground. He was considerably larger than she was.

  The second man noticed this and lifted his gun and ran to them. If I was going to do something, now had better be the time.

  I reached behind me and pulled my gun. I still hadn’t fired it. You always want to think that you will be prepared for what is going to happen, but in this case, I found myself wanting. Not only had I never used the gun, I had never used a gun. I guess it worked just like a movie, so I pointed it at the man and fired.

  Nothing.

  The trigger wouldn’t even budge.

  The safety.

  I pulled the gun to me and found the switch. The second man was already well on his way to the other man. The girl from the room was kicking at the first man with her legs, trying to keep him from firing with the gun in his hand. He was trying to shoot her, but her constant kicks impeded a clean shot.

  I flipped the switch and raised the gun and quickly fired off about five shots. None of them were even remotely close to the man. Three of them hit the ground five feet away from him.

  All it did was draw attention to me. He looked at me and turned his gun.

  I was saved by the sound of glass breaking and then a rapid succession of shots being fired.

  The first thing I did was look at the man who was about to fire at me. Everything was happening in the space of seconds if that. The man had turned his attention to the sound of the new gunshots, looking at his friend standing in the doorway. The gunshots were still going off, and it sounded like multiple guns were being fired. The man in the doorway started exploding in bullets. Blood shot from his chest and head, the force of the bullets knocking him back but still seeming to hold him up as he stepped backward.

  Over a dozen holes erupted in him until the firing ceased. The man was now a bloody carcass that was missing half of his head when he fell to the ground in a pool of his own blood.

  Real life.

  Game.

  Movie.

  This was the most violent thing I had ever seen.

  It stunned the man in the front of the motel; he turned his gun to the place that the gunshots had come from. I wasn’t for sure where they came from, but they sounded like they came from the office. The man was ready to fire; he just didn’t seem to know where to do so.

  Before he could figure it out, I heard the sound of automatic gunfire, within a spilt-second the window of the motel office burst out and gunfire shot forth. I looked at the man in front of me, and he lit up in an array of violence as bullets riddled his body. His body was doing a macabre dance of death as he sputtered and spun.

  I had to turn my head to look away; it was just too much. I myself had just fired a gun for the first time, and the feeling had made me sick to my stomach; the fact that I was firing a gun at an actual person. I know it’s just an NPC, but it felt like real life, real enough to make my heart sink into my stomach.

  If I couldn’t handle shooting intending to kill, I certainly couldn’t stomach the feeling of someone actually being filled with lead.

  I looked at April; I don’t know how long she had had the good sense to look away, but she wasn’t seeing what was happening. Good for her. She need not see this.

  Soon the gunfire ended, and all that could be heard was the pain of the girl on the ground who had a bullet somewhere in her body. I looked up, trying to divert my eyes from the dead men on the ground. I searched for the girl; she was on the ground, clutch
ing her leg and writhing in pain. I instantly stood up and went to her. Taking April’s hand as I did so to bring her with me.

  I instantly realized my mistake as I heard a loud voice call out, “HEY! YOU!”

  Shit, they thought I was one of these other guys. Or maybe they didn’t, either way, they were trigger-happy, and I waited for the gunfire to sound and zero me out.

  In my first instance of good reflexes. I instantly threw down the gun and put up my arms. “Don’t shoot, just trying to help the girl!”

  I’m not sure that was my best course of action. I had just thrown down my gun, and I was in a wide-open space. If they wanted to kill me, they would have no problem doing so. I saw two men come out of the office door. They were young men, younger than I was, even as Buster. The first man had an uzi. Seriously, a motherfucking uzi! He was reloading it with another clip, and the man behind him had his pistol aimed right at me.

  The one with the pistol yelled out to me. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Name’s Buster!”

  “You with these fuckers?”

  “No, sir. Just passing through,” I said, as April hid behind me. I had one of my arms behind me, keeping my hand on her hip to make sure she stayed there.

  “Lemme see both your hands!” he yelled.

  I lifted my other arm in the air to let him know I was unarmed. The man with the pistol looked at the other man and told him to check on the girl. Katie, he called her.

  “You a doctor?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not. Just a concerned citizen,” I said. He wrinkled his nose as if to say: What the fuck does that mean? He waved me forward with his gun, letting me know that I could go to the girl.

  “Did you see any others?”

  “Any others?”

  “Guys like these fuckers, did you see any?”

  “I just got here; I was actually looking for girls.”

  “You got a girl,” he said, motioning towards April as I reached the injured girl, holding her leg.

  “Let me get back to you on that.”

  “I’m gonna scope out the rest of the place, make sure there’s no more of Balderson’s men.”

  “Who’s Balderson?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said as he skirted away with his uzi held at the ready.

  I leaned down to the girl; she was trying to muffle her screams as I spoke to her; she was obviously in a lot of pain. The violence here at this moment was staggering. Besides the blood on her, we were only a few feet away from the still warm body of the man that had been shot to death by the fully automatic weapon. Blood was everywhere. The way the gunfire had spun and pushed the man's body, causing the blood to fly, made me wonder if his body even had any blood left in it.

  She was rocking side to side on her back, clutching her leg. I tried to calm her down. “Quiet,” I said, as soothing as possible. “What’s your name?”

  At first, she didn’t respond, she was trying to catch her breath, trying to fill her lungs with air after the constant screaming that she had just ended. “A-Allie,” she managed to get out.

  She was young. In her lower twenties if that. She had brown hair and dark eyes. She was thin but looked like she was once heavier. Her skin hung off of her bones. She looked malnourished. Not emaciated as Betty had been, but she looked like she hadn’t eaten in a while, at least nothing with any nutrients. If my thinking here was correct, then that mixed with her blood loss was a dangerous combination.

  “Okay, Allie,” I said. “I need you to move your hands so I can see what’s happening with this wound.” She did as I said and removed her hands and looked down. I stopped her abruptly. “Don’t look at it,” I said. I had seen enough doctor TV shows to know someone seeing their own blood was never a good thing.

  And there was a lot of it.

  I looked at April and got her attention. “Hold her hand,” I said to her. April hesitated at the thought of holding her bloody hand.

  “I-”

  “Just do it,” I said.

  She did so, and I focused back on Allie. “Allie, this is April, I need you to squeeze her hand okay?”

  “O-Okay,” she said weakly. I didn’t want her to pass out. I don’t think alone this wound would kill her, but if it had been a while since she had any food or water, it might be dangerous and difficult to wake her back up to give her some.

  The blood was pouring out of her leg, and I had nothing to make a tourniquet with as she wasn’t wearing any clothes. I suspect that she had either just finished with sex, getting ready to have sex, or had been currently having sex when all of this went down. Either way, she had no clothing I could tear off of her to make a bandage with, much less clean the wound.

  I hated to be selfish, but I only had one shirt, and I didn’t want to fill it with this hooker’s blood. “April, give me your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt, I need it.”

  Once again, she hesitated. I don’t know why I wanted her to be quick in a precarious situation when nothing up to this point had led me to believe she would be good in one. “Quickly,” I said, motioning my hand to get a move on.

  She did as I said. I see why she had been hesitant as she wasn’t wearing a bra, so by taking off her shirt, it left her half naked. She was shy, even with me to a degree, so being naked out here was outside her comfort zone. Not to mention she probably has a little PTSD about being naked in The Lower Bottoms.

  She pulled off her shirt, and her light pink nipples stared me in the face and even though this was a high-stress situation my mind instantly went to thoughts of sex. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I blame the biology of the avatar I was walking around in. After all, it had been eight hours or so since Buster Rockknocker had gotten any, so this body was already craving sex.

  Am I really wasting precious seconds thinking about this?

  I took her shirt—a peach-colored tank top — and brushed the blood away from the wound. April was a small woman, and thin on top of that, the tank top did not have a lot of cloth to hold all the blood. There was no way I would be able to use it as a bandage since it was already full and sopping wet.

  It did buy me enough time to get a good look at her wound. The bullet had clipped her thigh and was lodged into the meaty part of her leg. It is in the muscle. I didn’t know much, but I knew this was going to be a bitch to get out.

  About that time, the man with the handgun and Katie had made their way to us. Katie instantly got down on her knees and got close to Allie, taking her other hand. In turn, April got shy with the entrance of another man and used her free arm to cover her breasts.

  “What’s your name,” the man asked me.

  “Buster,” I said.

  “Buster, is she going to die?”

  At the sound of the word ‘die’ Allie bolted open her eyes and looked at her leg and screamed.

  “Shit,” he said. “I probably could have worded that better.”

  “It’s okay Allie, close your eyes, you’re not going to die, just hold on to the girls.” I turned my neck back to look at the man.

  “Do you have any cloth or bed sheets I could use to wrap her leg to stop the bleeding?”

  “Nothing clean.”

  “I’ll take anything at this point,” I said.

  He looked down at Katie and barked orders at her. He told her to try room two, see if there was anything that looked clean in there. She paused, she held onto Allie’s hand with both of hers. She took one away and petted her head, the matted hair that was there. Allie’s hair wasn’t matted from blood but just matted from dirt and grime. Who knew how long it had been since she had seen the working end of a shower head?

  Katie let go and ran back to the room.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the man while holding my hand over the front of her wound. I don’t know if I was actually doing anything since I have no medical training or knowledge. Everything I know comes from movies and TV, and in movies keeping pressure on the
wound always seemed tops on the list.

  “Kyle,” he said.

  “You know this girl, correct?”

  “Yeah, Allie, she’s one of ours.”

  His response surprised me, but I don’t know why. It made sense she worked for him, but with everything going on, obvious things were passing me buy. “She works for you?”

  “Yeah, the motel,” he paused. “I don’t know now,” he looked behind him to the dead old man that was shot against the motel office, “We didn’t run the thing, he did.”

  “Then what’s your job?”

  “Protection.”

  I look at the dead owner and the shot hooker in my hands, “Bang-up job you’re doing.”

  “I don’t follow,” he said, unsure what I meant by my comment. It goes to show that the ability to use an uzi isn’t I.Q. based.

  Speaking of stupid, I realized a mistake I was making. Why the fuck did I send him to get a piece of cloth when it would be smarter to take her to the cloth. “Let’s get her inside,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Can you pick her up?”

  “Why me?”

  “Because she’s your fucking hooker.”

  He groaned and leaned down to pick her up. I told him to be careful with her leg and then we all three walked, hurriedly, to room number two.

  Once inside the room, I decided that she had been better off in the street.

  This place was an unmitigated disaster. He had been right about the sheets, they were disgusting. I could see the laundry mat from the front door of this room. The fact that these sheets didn’t seem to have been cleaned in months showed a real lack of motivation.

  The fucking place stunk to high hell too. I felt like I needed a gas mask. He had closed the door when we all got in the room, but I told him to leave it open. I then told him to crack open the window.