Melee

by Wyatt Savage

  Stopping at the next ledge, we pressed ourselves against the wall.

  There were shouts coming from all around. I scoped my HUD to see that there were other participants appearing from every direction, streaming out of the woods, driving machines up to the edge of the wall. There eighty-seven in all now, either above, below, or to the right and left of us. Agent Pei pulled his rifle up and aimed at a bearded man who was on another ledge down to our right. There was a four or five-foot gap between our ledge and the other ledge.

  The bearded man was armed, but held his hands up to reveal that he was holding two pistols, his stats flashing:

  Species: Homo Sapiens (Cartwright, Kent)

  Chattel:.480 Ruger Super Redhawk (2)

  Health:8/10

  Level 1:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:132

  Vitals:BP – 129/80; T – 99.02f; RR – 14bpm

  XP:3540

  “I don’t mean you any harm, brother,” the bearded man said with a Texas twang. He was accompanied by two women and another man who were holding shotguns and rifles.

  “Put down your weapons,” Agent Pei said.

  “You first,” the bearded man said.

  “That’s not happening.”

  “I didn’t think it would,” the bearded man replied with a sly smile. “If you’re not in the mood for a surrender, how about a truce?”

  “What kind?”

  “The kind where we do not fire on each other as long as we’re on this side of the wall.”

  “And when we make it over?” I asked.

  “If we make it over, the truce ends,” the bearded man replied.

  Agent Pei searched our faces for a response and we all nodded because not having to worry about someone else shooting at us sounded like a pretty good deal. We agreed to a truce and began climbing up again and the bearded man and his team did likewise.

  The bearded man slotted one of his pistols in his belt, then used the other gun, a specialized one with a large barrel, to fire long spikes into the wall with loops at the end. After firing the spikes into the wall, one of the women threaded nylon rope through the loops. The bearded man then climbed up, shooting more spikes, tying more rope that the others used to climb up after him. It was a solid way of scaling the wall, but the process took time, which was something none of us had.

  “Thirty-five minutes!” Dwayne shouted from the ladder up above me.

  “Plenty of time!” the bearded man replied. “We’re all gonna be walking in tall cotton once we get over this damned wall!”

  My eyes found his as he continued using his gun to fire spikes into the wall that he fixed the rope to. He climbed up onto the next ledge and tossed the rope back down to his people.

  “Where you from?” the bearded man asked.

  Jesus, there we were, hanging off the edge of some alien wall in the middle of a game where tens of millions of people had died, maybe more, and this guy wanted to know where I was from? He read my look and sucked on his teeth.

  “I know, I know. You’re probably wondering why this jarhead’s asking you your goddamn home town, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, the way I see it, the only thing that’s gonna allow us to hold onto a scrap of our humanity is the small things. Like how’s the weather and what’s your name. Things like that. You feel me?”

  “I think I understand,” I answered, then added, “I’m from down past Bowie. You?”

  “Texas. Born and bred. Down in Brenham near the Blue Bell Creamery if you know the place. Kent Cartwright’s the name.”

  “I’m Logan.”

  Kent smiled and tapped his head as if to signify that he knew that on account of seeing my name and stats in his HUD. “I got stuck in D.C. for work when the shit hit the fan,” Kent continued before pointing to the two women. “That’s Lindsay and Kate by the way, and the dude over there is Johnny T. All good people.” We quickly acknowledged each other with tilts of the head.

  Kent pointed to the others. “Y’all have a rough go of it?”

  “Worse than you can imagine.”

  “Same here,” Kent replied. “We started with sixteen of the finest people you’d ever want to meet and here we are. All four of us.”

  “What do you think’s on the other side of the wall?” I asked.

  “Hell, I wouldn’t know. Only thing I’m worried about right now is trying to calm the feeling I got bubbling up in my gut…”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “That kind that tells me something’s wrong. Something’s off. This is too damn easy.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it to me.”

  Kent rubbed his beard. “This ain’t like the aliens. They’re not the type to just let someone climb over one of their goddamn obstacles.”

  “Maybe we’ve gotten past all the hard stuff.”

  Kent spit. “Maybe.”

  “We’re halfway there!” Sylvester shouted from overhead. I looked up to see the doctor frantically lengthening the ladder.

  “Who is that?” Kent asked. “The fella who’s able to build that ladder?”

  “Doctor Throgmorton,” I said. “He’s a builder.”

  Before Kent could respond, rumbling tremors hit the wall, coursing through everything like brushfire. Deep clangs echoed from somewhere behind the structure, followed by a grinding sound, as if there was internal machinery within the wall that was starting up.

  We were both thrown by this as the wall bent and swayed, feeling as if it might collapse at any moment.

  “HOLD ON!” everyone screamed.

  I white-knuckled the ladder and began climbing up. There was a halo of light overhead as Doctor Throgmorton used the Ex Nihilo to craft something, filaments of white light that dangled down.

  “Grab hold!” Dwayne shouted. “Synch it around your waist.”

  I did, stealing a glance at Kent and his people who were holding onto their rope, which was whipping back and forth. They had to leave their ledge and grab onto the ladder, I thought. It was the only way.

  “Come on!” I said, waving my arm. “Jump over!”

  Kent hesitated and then one of the women, Lindsay, motioned for him to go in the other direction. “Over here!” she screamed. “It’s not as bad over here!”

  I watched her take a step and then a huge section of wall, a large black square, opened up to reveal something long and thick and yellow.

  A tongue.

  A tongue the size of a firehouse.

  40

  Like a serpent striking, the tongue shot out and wrapped around Lindsay’s legs. She was pulled screaming into an opening in the wall, a yawning chasm where something else, something unseen and horrific with large teeth that were barely visible, had been lurking the entire time.

  Kent and the rest of his team reacted. They fired on the wall and grabbed Lindsay’s legs but she was already gone. The wall closed back up and her screams lost some of their vigor. The cries rose and fell and then the wall began reconfiguring itself in a series of resounding booms.

  The others above me were screaming as whole sections of the wall began drumming, then shot out, slotted up, down, or withdrew into hidden recesses.

  Some of the ledges vanished and new ones emerged. Portions of the wall continued to shift at odd angles as new objects appeared: sharpened blades or hooks or whirling pieces of gleaming metal that resembled the blades on circular saws. The wall had been transformed into a torture chamber designed by a madman.

  I felt my breathing speeding up as I wrenched my body like a contortionist to avoid one of the blades. I fear-gripped the filament which was the only thing that saved me from falling to my death.

  Still, I pointed at Kent and his people, urging them to jump over to where we were, to relative safety. If they could just make it over, they could use the things created by Doctor Throgmorton to climb to safety. “Hurry!” I said.

  Kent crabbed back and then set off on a loping run, working to build up enough momentum to h
urtle over the space between our still-existing ledges.

  He soared through the air.

  He was close enough for me to reach out and then he smacked face-first into something.

  I couldn’t see what it was, but the aliens had planted another wall in the space between our ledges.

  An invisible barrier.

  “NOOOOOOO!” I screamed.

  Kent’s face mashed against the invisible material. His nose broke and blood flowed and then he fell straight down.

  My eyes followed his descent as he smacked against the wall, dislodging four other participants, tearing them from their ledges. The audible pop of joints dislocating and bones splintering filled the air before Kent and the others hit the ground and broke apart.

  The man and woman who’d been accompanying Kent (whose names I’d forgotten) grew understandably agitated. Uncertain about what to do, the woman wheeled around, tripped and fell, plunging down onto a circular blade that turned her body to pulp.

  The man grabbed onto the rope and commenced pulling himself up the wall as a huge, demonic bird of prey swooped out of the inky blackness and plucked him off the wall like he was an insect on a windshield.

  We fired at the creature, wounding it, but it flapped off into the darkness with the man in its talons.

  A sense of hopelessness gripped everyone. Gunfire rang out and whatever uneasy truce had existed before was no more. It was everyone for themselves.

  Struggling with my footing, I felt something reach down and saw that it was Dwayne. I grabbed his hand and he helped me up as we climbed up the ladder even as the wall continued to change shapes.

  “We’re down to nineteen minutes,” Dwayne said.

  I could see on my HUD that we still had another ninety feet to climb and it wasn’t going to be easy.

  The panel under us fell away, knocking Dwayne and I from the ladder.

  We screamed, holding onto the filaments, swinging back and forth like Tarzan from a vine.

  “Climb higher,” Sue whispered. “You need to climb higher.”

  “I’m working on it,” I replied.

  My momentum caused me to swing out from Dwayne, carrying me toward an opening on the wall.

  I swung my legs up in the nick of time as a burst of flames leaped from the opening.

  Dwayne tugged back on the filament and I swung in the other direction, pulling my feet up to avoid one of the spinning blades as I smacked hard against the wall.

  My fingers pressed into the wall, which was soft and wet, like an old cardboard box left out in the rain.

  Something tickled my fingers and I looked down to see slug-like creatures emerging from the wall.

  Species: Parasitoid Ferox Worms

  Level:1

  Class:Monster

  Health:10/10

  Attributes: Adept at penetrating orifices; once inside the host they inject a mix of secretory products that paralyze the host and allow their eggs to develop, eventually devouring the host from the inside out.

  One of the worms reared back, opened a mouth full of needlelike teeth, and spat blood at me.

  “Up!” I shouted to Dwayne. “Pull me up!”

  He did, but I lost my grip and fell back only to be stopped—

  WHACK!

  By a hand that grabbed my wrist, stabilizing me. I looked up into the face of the person who’d saved my ass. It was a woman in black. Literally. Her clothing was coal-colored and her face, aside from the whites of her eyes, had been concealed with greasy, black camouflage. She had a backpack on that bristled with melee-style weapons: hammers, clubs, and one of those curved Kukri knives that dangled from a loop on her combat vest.

  I searched her face because there was something about her I recognized.

  I had a vague recollection of seeing her back near the Severn River Bridge when the aliens took the water away. Yes! The gym-toned woman!

  “You!” I said.

  She stared into my eyes, searching for something to recognize.

  “A few w-weeks a-ago,” I stammered, realizing she could drop me to my death if she wanted to. “The Severn River Bridge. When the aliens made the water go away.”

  She kept staring at me with mounting desperation and then there was a flicker of something, recognition? Whatever it was, she bared her teeth and pulled me back up onto the ledge she was perched on and—

  WHAM!

  I threw a punch at her head.

  Past her head actually, mashing one of the worms that was preparing to take a nibble on her neck. She didn’t say anything, just grunted and nodded. She handed me a hammer with an oversized head.

  Someone shouted overhead and I looked up to see Dwayne, Noora, and the others. They were passing one of the filaments down.

  “You can come with us,” I say.

  “Why the hell would I want to do that?” the woman asked.

  “I guess…safety in numbers,” I reply.

  She stared at me and I continued. “Thank you for saving me—”

  “Charlotte,” she mumbled. “Charlotte Frost.”

  “I’m Logan.”

  The filament kissed my head. I tugged on it, stretching it like one of those elastic exercise bands I used to use to warm up my arms and shoulders when I was playing baseball. I held the filament out and Charlotte grabbed it and began climbing up. I did the same. More worms appeared and I smashed them to pieces with my hammer.

  We used the filament and scaled the wall and then hopped back up onto the doctor’s ladder as more of the worms emerged from crevices in the wall, thousands of them. Some followed after us and others dropped down on the participants below us who feebly fired at the things with their guns. I saw the worms slither into the participants’ mouths, or down their shirts and pants, the little devils eager to find other orifices to invade.

  My lungs were burning by the time I neared Dwayne. We could see the others crawling onto another ledge. I introduced Dwayne and Noora to Charlotte and then we followed after the others.

  Espinosa was sucking in a breath, gesturing down the ledge that would allow us to get near another one that was only twenty feet away from the top of the wall.

  We were very close to getting over the wall.

  “Take five for yourself!” Espinosa said, holding up five fingers to count how long we had to breathe. Then he pointed down to his right, to where the ledge led to another one that provided a good spot to climb up to the top of the wall.

  We wiped sweat from our brows and then Espinosa whistled and we were on the move again.

  “We’re almost there!” Espinosa said. “It’s just right down the—”

  A hidden explosive went off, tearing through Espinosa, who absorbed the brunt of the blast. The upper half of his body vanished in a red mist that spattered each of us. The only thing that remained of him was a set of smoking, blood-soaked legs.

  Sarah and the others screamed, but I was too shocked to do anything. I wiped Espinosa’s gore from my face and neck slumped on the ledge, watching Agent Pei use the end of his gun to push Espinosa’s legs away.

  “Jesus,” Dwayne said, blinking away Espinosa’s blood. “Jesus.”

  Sarah vomited and Sylvester screamed and punched the wall. I turned to the side, fighting off the shock and that’s when I saw it.

  A small object pinned by a knife to the wall.

  I’d seen the object before.

  It was the prayer card that Justin Best had clipped to his belt. The card from the funeral for his son Marvin.

  I removed the card and stared at it.

  God almighty. Either Justin had come this way or someone had stolen it from him and left it up here.

  I pocketed the card and shrugged off Espinosa’s death. The only way to honor his death was to keep going.

  Down the ledge we went, climbing over boobytraps and slithering under obstacles and keeping our eyes on the sky for any sign of monsters.

  “Eleven minutes!” Doctor Throgmorton shouted, building the final section of ladder.
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br />   The others climbed up and I stared down the face of the wall, watching the other participants climb toward us. They had looks on their faces. They knew they were running out of time, but they weren’t stopping, they weren’t quitting.

  A furious rattling built somewhere overhead.

  There was a collective gasp that went up from the people down below me. The kind of sound that people at a football game make when someone absorbs a particularly vicious hit. Next came another note, the sound made by small metal objects when they’re dropped in a bucket.

  I was so focused on getting to the top of the wall that I didn’t notice when it stuck through my right hand.

  A black metal dart.

  Roughly the size and shape of a decking screw.

  Then another stuck in my shoulder and I looked up to see that the sky had opened and it was raining death down on us.

  I grabbed the ladder and climbed the remaining ten feet as Doctor Throgmorton fashioned a barrier around us.

  The darts pounded down, making it seem like we were inside a house with a steel roof in the middle of a hailstorm.

  Screams filtered up from the other participants.

  I swung back and looked down and saw several of them tottering, quivering, bodies filled with metal darts before they fell from the wall.

  “SEVEN MINUTES!” Dwayne shouted.

  The darts stopped falling.

  I yanked the darts out of my hand and shoulder and climbed.

  Each rung seemed to take an eternity.

  The wind suddenly picked up and I heard a sound.

  A note that reminded me of canvas tarps flapping in the wind.

  Glancing back, I saw the silhouette of the flying monster that had plucked the man off the wall. It was coming back for me!

  Realizing the hammer I’d been given was of little use, I fumbled with the spark-hammer gun, trying to balance myself while aiming at the creature, whose mouth distended. What looked like sparks shot from the inside of its mouth as it swooped down toward me.

  That was when something flew out of the darkness and slammed into the thing’s beak.

  It was a baseball!

  My eyes zoomed up to see that Dwayne had tossed the baseball I’d given him. He’d thrown it with everything he had and smacked the creature in the mouth.