by Wyatt Savage
I moved over and glanced back at the field we’d just covered.
There was movement out in the darkness. I studied my HUD and saw little red dots on the field.
“Don’t tell me those things are coming back to life,” Dwayne said.
Lish shook her head. “Nope.”
“Thank God.”
“But, remember those things that were back at the house. Those little squirmy fuckers. Well, I think they’ve kinda regrouped and are coming this way.”
Lish removed an item from the holo-lift. What looked like a glorified road flare. She pulled a wire on the end and the flare sizzled to life.
She trotted back, then ran forward and heaved the flare out over the field.
It landed and burst to life to reveal the scorpion creatures.
My HUD reflected that there were a lot of them.
And they were bigger than I remembered. The size of house cats.
“How many points does everyone have?” I asked.
“Enough,” Lish answered. “But what about the wall?”
Dwayne nodded. “We’re gonna need mad points to get over that thing.”
“What do we do?”
“How about running like hell,” Lish said.
Sounded good to me.
I took one last look at the area where my brother’s house was and said a prayer for him and his family. I couldn’t forget what happened, but I had to find a way to blot it out of my mind. Otherwise, it would just weight me down, eating at me. The thing that mattered was to continue forward and find some way to avenge them. I followed the others onto the holo-lift, which began carrying us slowly over the field toward the secret vault.
28
Ten minutes later, we’d exited the field, crossed down over a dirt path, and coasted onto a one-lane road wreathed by stands of barren trees and frost-slicked undergrowth.
There were four abandoned trucks and cars visible, little fires burning around most of them. Wounded, we moved like ghosts down the one-lane road, trying not to look at the bodies on the ground even though I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
A woman and man lay inside and outside of a minivan, shot to pieces. There were trash bags all around them overflowing with clothes, food, and religious icons, little statues and figurines and the like.
Next to this was a carbonized sedan. A blackened corpse was still behind the wheel and the rear of the vehicle was filled with twisted metal cages that held the charred corpses of animals. Apparently, the driver had been trying to get his pets to safety when he was caught in the Melee.
The more corpses you see, the more you realize corpses have a language all their own. This can be discerned from the positioning of the body and the expression on the face. The lucky few who died instantly usually have their eyes closed or a kind of bemused smile splashing their faces. The others, the ones who watched their lives seep out in red pools all around them, sport a “I can’t believe I’m dying” look. It’s a very distinct expression and usually involves the corpse’s hands, which resembled talons or hooks, positioned at or around the face as if the grim reaper could be scared off with a flick of the hand or a wagging of a finger. The people lying in the mud before us died horrible, violent deaths, that much I could tell. Their eyes were open, their hands were near their mouths, which were tugged back in silent screams, and their tongues were bitten off.
I watched Dwayne close his eyes and mutter a prayer for the dead. Lish stopped and picked up one of the figurines, pocketing it before moving on.
For several moments I stood and stared at the smoking vehicles. They looked oddly familiar. The way the frames were crooked, the way the bodies lay like sculptures, broken beyond repair. One of the bodies took on the appearance of Justin’s son, Marcus, on his back, eyes wide, arm bent at an impossible angle.
For a moment I was back at the site of the accident that took a portion of my mind, reliving the moments after the crash. We hadn’t been drinking but we’d been speeding, which is generally what young men our age do. Me and Marcus were up front urging the driver, our buddy Teddy Hitchens to drive faster, faster. He took a corner at the wrong angle and things slowed down as they often do right before something terrible happens. Then came the silent fireworks of the car crash, the feeling of weightlessness as I was shotput through the front windshield. I have no idea why I lived and the others died, but sometimes that’s what happens. You can chalk it up to fate or divine intervention or some such thing, but it’s dumb luck. That’s all it is.
A hand slapped my shoulder and I jumped.
“You okay?” Lish asked.
I nodded, wiping a few pearls of sweat from my forehead.
“You want to talk about it?” she pressed.
“I’d rather not. I know it’s not the right thing to say, but talking hasn’t ever done all that much for me.”
“Typical man.”
“Are you disappointed?”
She shook her head. “That’s the beauty of not expecting anything from anyone. You’re rarely disappointed,” she replied.
“At least you’re not cynical,” I said.
She smiled and we moved out away from everything.
“You can count on us, Lish. You can count on me.”
“I’d really like to believe that…”
I eased my head in close to her and she didn’t turn away and then we kissed. It was only for an instant, but it was everything I’d hoped it would be. It’s a silly thing to say, but for that moment, for those two or three seconds, we were transported to somewhere else. To somewhere better. And then Dwayne whistled and the moment was gone and we were back in the Melee. We shared an awkward smile and rejoined him.
Five minutes later, we saw it out in the distance, just past the end of the road and behind a gate where a partially collapsed chainlink fence was visible. The silhouettes of a large complex, bigger than I’d imagined, including an enormous central building connected by walkways, parallel lines of gravel, that led to a series of low-slung buildings. On the periphery were several satellite dishes, and clusters of antennae.
I scanned my HUD, reading off the information about the location.
“This used to be the military transmission site,” I said. “Nine hundred acres of defense department goodness. We’re talking high-frequency transmitters and antennas, digital microwave systems, everything that was needed to route and reroute intercepts between every civilian and military signals slurper in the National Capital Region.”
“I’m not following you and don’t say ‘please don’t tell me you’re this dense,’ because you know me by now, Logan,” Dwayne said. “I am this dense.”
“Check your HUD.”
“I’m checking it, but I still don’t get it, brother.”
“My old man used to work at places like this,” I replied. “I’d forgotten about it after the accident, but the quick and dirty is that this place provided voice and data transmit capability for every signal that was beamed around D.C. We’re talking the Mystic Star Network, and all the communications systems for DoD, the Defense Information Systems Agency—”
“You mean it was a giant listening device?” Lish asked.
“Sort of, but not really.”
“What the hell does that mean?” she asked.
“Let’s go inside and I’ll show you.”
We dismounted the holo-lift and moved through the gate and across a patch of frozen ground, following the contours of a rutted road. Dwayne and Lish had lost health points so they were moving slowly.
We stopped near a hedgerow and dropped to our haunches and waited to see if anyone else was around.
All was quiet.
My HUD showed that we had four hours and nineteen minutes to reach the wall.
I turned my gaze back to the path ahead, which included a ditch several feet in front of us, and then beyond that a stretch of open ground that led to the large central building and the low-slung ones near the satellite dish and antennas.
The entire area bore the sig
ns of the Melee. The open ground was pockmarked by craters, some of them twenty feet in diameter, the roofs on the buildings were partially collapsed, and there was an enormous hole in the center of the satellite dish, which I imagined had been caused by a bomb of some sort. Smoke rose up from the installation, but there were no fires and from the look of my HUD, whoever had been here before was long gone.
We trekked across the open ground, passing a handful of bodies lying face-down in the muck.
Lish stepped down into a sinkhole that filled up her shoes with ice-cold water. She managed to yank her foot out of the mud.
“This better be worth it, James,” she said.
“It already is for me,” I replied, grinning.
A clutch of birds suddenly rocketed up into the sky with witch-like shrieks. We dropped low and surveyed the field beyond the installation where the birds had just been. There was a barely visible fenceline and a carpet of what appeared to be vines or undergrowth. We watched the birds vanish into the sky and waited to see if anything was hiding down below the trees. Nothing stirred so we continued on.
Stepping over a series of smashed concrete blast walls, we eased around a forest of exposed rebar, sliding through the shattered front door into the main building with the holo-lift following us.
The unlit foyer reeked of stagnant water and mold. Signposts of the days after the world ended were everywhere: charred metal, blackened stone, the remains of some unlucky men or women who’d been caught here during the opening stages of the Melee.
The building had also been plundered at some point during the game. Electronic machines had been ripped from the walls, stripped of wire while other devices appeared to have been gutted or cannibalized for parts. I was worried that someone else had found the vault.
We inched through the rear of the building, shouldering open one door after another, the holo-lift right behind us.
“Exactly what kind of work did your dad do anyway?” Lish asked.
“That’s classified,” Dwayne replied, trembling as he was forced to brush aside a few clots of spider webs.
Lish pointed to the ground and I saw footprints in the dust.
Dozens of them.
My HUD noted that they were participant footprints.
“We’re not the only ones who knew about this place, apparently,” she said.
I scanned my HUD, but didn’t see any lifeforms in the building. I wondered whether someone might be lurking inside, using a spoofer to jam us.
We nosed down a corridor, following Lish, who stopped in front of a black metal door. The footprints appeared to continue to the space on the other side of the door. Lish reached out and touched the knob, then pulled her hand back as if she’d been scalded.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Is it just me or is something really wrong.”
“Everything’s wrong,” Dwayne said. “Hello.”
“I didn’t mean that, Einstein,” she snapped. “I mean…this building…it shouldn’t be this big.”
I glanced at my HUD and mentally sifted through a few screens, tracing the path we’d taken. Then I examined a schematic of the structure. Lish was right. In terms of measurements, we should have already reached the other side of the building.
“How is this possible?” Dwayne asked.
I heard the sound of movement and wheeled around, ready to blast anything that stirred. My heart lurched because things were different. The path we’d taken, the corridor we’d just walked down had…changed.
The hallway was gone, replaced by a series of walls and corridors that zigzagged like some kind of maze.
“Sue, what’s the SITREP?” I asked via Mindspeak.
“You have entered a lair.”
“No, we’ve entered a building.”
“A building that has become a lair.”
“Okay, that’s…impossible.”
“Impossible things happen every day,” Sue replied.
A sulfurous smell suddenly filled the air and something popped up on my HUD.
A large form was moving slowly through another section of the building. I mentally swiped to another screen as the form’s statistic blinked:
Species: Jorogumo – Whore Spider
Level:2
Class:Monster
Health:10/10
Attributes: Adept at calculating trajectories and enemy movements; possesses an exoskeleton of double-layered chitin, the ability to create and propel necro darts, and a charged hemolymph which provides advanced locomotion.
“We’ve got company,” I said.
Dwayne nodded. “Checking it out now.”
“How the hell is there a Level 2 monster in here?” I asked Sue via Mindspeak.
“The Melee allows for it,” Sue answered. “You can receive 50 experience points for killing the monster.”
“Is it protecting the vault?”
“Yes.”
Lish clicked her tongue. “Unbelievable. Even the aliens are sexist. Whore Spider. What happens if it was a male?”
“Manwhore Spider,” Dwayne and I replied at the same time, laughing nervously as she made a face.
“You do know what this is, don’t you?” Dwayne said.
“What?”
“We’re in a dungeon.”
“Building.”
“A building that’s become a dungeon, Logan. Look around.”
I did and the more I looked, the more the increasingly narrow corridor resembled a passage in a dungeon, complete with flickering lights somewhere in the gloom that appeared like torches. I half-expected to see that my rifle had transformed into a sword.
“They’re changing shit up,” Dwayne said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw it happen before. Before I met you guys at the store. I was leaving my friend’s place when the Melee started and boom, right out of the box, they decided to switch things up. They created this kind of maze in the air.”
“Get out.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “Like it was made of this huge interlocking set of metal Legos or something. It was stacked high, maybe eighty feet up and it covered the entire neighborhood.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I chose not to go in. The aliens are treating this like a straight-up game now. They’re moving things around, changing the composition. In order to find that vault of yours, the treasure, we have to defeat a Level 2 monster. We’ve got to kill the proverbial dragon.”
“We’re like that guy in the maze with that bull,” Lish said.
Dwayne gulped. “Theseus and the Minotaur.”
Lish held our looks, then she removed her cellphone.
“I’m setting a timer,” she said, tapping on her phone. “If we don’t find the vault in fifteen minutes we’re out of here. Agreed?”
We nodded as she set the timer. Then she pocketed the phone and opened the door. A gust of wind buffeted her. She reacted by firing a nervous burst of fire down into the inner passageway.
We paused, examining our HUDs, searching for any hint of movement.
There were multiple objects up ahead, but nothing was moving.
Weird.
Lish held up her cellphone and bit back a scream because the hallway in front of us was littered with bodies.
Human bodies.
29
The people who’d left those footprints, I imagined.
Their bodies, or what was left of their bodies, were hanging from the walls, the ceiling. There was a human torso dangling from the right wall by a web of the cottony material we’d seen back at my brother’s place, several raggedly severed heads lying on the ground, and a smattering of feet and arms and long ropes of shiny intestines on the ground. It looked like a slaughterhouse.
The coppery stench filling the air was unbearable as we covered our mouths and moved past the other participants, the adventurers, who’d fallen in their quest to reach the vault.
We moved forward and the door slammed loud
ly shut behind us.
I stopped at one of the bodies and retrieved a medpack that was intact, along with what looked like a road flare, both of which were included as chattel on my HUD.
“How many bodies are there?” Dwayne asked.
“Kinda hard to tell when they’re not all in one piece,” Lish replied.
I traded looks with Dwayne. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m giving some pretty serious consideration to turning and running in the other direction, but I’m guessing that’s not what you mean.”
Dwayne looked down and spotted a tiny object on the ground.
A large bottle of amber-colored booze near an outstretched hand that had been gnawed off right below the palm. He grabbed and perused the bottle before pocketing it.
My HUD blinked again to reveal that the whore spider was on the move.
It was leaving the vicinity of the vault, moving slowly towards us.
I noticed that the spider mimicked our movements, moving in synch with our steps as if it was able to track us just as we were tracking it.
“Are you seeing that?” I asked.
“I see it.”
“How’s it tracking us?” Lish asked.
“With these,” Dwayne said, pointing down.
I stooped to see that there were hundreds of tiny cotton ropes that covered the floor. The ropes continued on up the walls and disappeared through cracks in the ceiling.
“That’s how spiders hunt,” Dwayne said. “They play tricks, they set up strands of silk that vibrate to let them know where prey is.”
Suddenly, an idea struck me.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out the child’s wind-up toy I’d recovered from my brother’s house. The one his kids had been playing with when the Melee began.
“Reverting to your childhood?” Dwayne asked.
I remained silent while winding the toy up. Recognition gripped his face. “Strike my prior statement,” he said. “I think you’ve got yourself a pretty good idea.”
“I get a good one every now and again,” I replied.
I set the toy down amidst the tiny cotton ropes and looked up. “Get ready to run.”
