by Arthur Stone
His ears told him he had hit the beast in its teeth, slamming its lips up against them on the way. The blow staggered it, causing it to pull back and grope at him with a little less enthusiasm. This is my chance. Rock twisted and propped the back of his shoulders and head against the wall, pushing his legs into the reptile with such force that it could not help falling off the bed onto the floor, where a second later it received a follow-up body slam from a chair.
Rock tossed the frame of the unfortunate piece of furniture aside. The chair was no fighter, but its legs were relatively intact. Rock seized them and pummeled the growling, kicking slimeball. “You son of a bitch! Die, you bastard!” He screamed at it again and again, louder and louder.
The pain from the bite and the hot stream of blood pouring out of it did little to calm him. This mad beast had nearly taken him in the jugular. It was related to the bastards that had taken his memory, no doubt. Something was clearly wrong with it. Three seconds of beating with large wooden legs should have knocked it out or at least made it curl up and protect itself, but this thing looked ready to stand and come at him again.
Fury drove the last of his restraint out of him. Rock hammered the legs on the head of the creature, its outline only barely visible in the darkness of the room. He felt them dig in and heard a crunch. Not a wood crunch, a bone crunch. Perhaps he’d end up having to explain this to some law enforcement agency, but no matter the trouble it might cause him, that crunching sound soothed his heart as no medicine could. Take that, you grumbling bastard.
But Rock’s coup de grace failed to end the battle, though it weakened his unnatural opponent significantly. The beast no longer tried to lift itself up. It growled, smacked the floor with its hands, and muttered disgustingly monstrous epithets that made the hair on the back of Rock’s neck stand up.
Then a chorus of replies rang out. They’re coming from the hallway. Rock lunged, groping for the handle. He found it and pulled and held the door shut, using his other hand to try and find a lock, a bolt, anything.
Something crashed into the other side. From the shudder, Rock knew that lock or no lock, this sorry wooden obstacle would hold together little longer than the chair had.
There was no other way out of the room.
He held the handle shut with both hands, looking around in panic to find some way out. Something grabbed his leg, and his shin felt like it caught fire. Rock barely avoided screaming. Even with its head smashed in, the monster would not give up. The imbecile had crawled over and was using what teeth it had left on Rock’s leg.
Without letting go of the door, Rock bashed the creature’s head with a chair leg. Once, twice, thrice. He kept hitting. Take that, freak. Fucking die already! Yeah, how do you like that, huh? What’s that? Skull starting to crack? Suddenly he hit something serious, and all movement by his opponent ceased.
He pushed the fiend’s limp body away. He had been right: the creature was no longer responsive. But what now? Judging by the noise, one or two dozen of those things were gathering in the hallway, each of them lusting to break into his room. And break in they would. So should he step back with his chair leg and try to fight them off? He could try, of course, but if the odds were what he suspected, it would likely be his last battle. He was no Han Solo.
Or maybe he was Han Solo, for all he remembered. No matter. Whoever he was, and no matter whether his memory would ever return or not, he wanted to live.
Why were these things looking to munch on decent folks, anyway? What had he ever done to them? Was it his body odor, or that he couldn’t quite growl like they could? No human could growl like that. It was a rumbling sound, similar to what a starving cat might make when something delicious was placed in front of it.
Except these cats yearned for raw human meat. And they were a lot bigger than any house cat.
Infected destroyed. Level 0. Chance of valuable loot: 0. +3 Strength progress points. +1 Humanity point.
Rock paid no attention to the glaring red writing that decorated the air in front of him. He could speculate on the meaning of hallucinations later. All of his focus must now be on getting out of his predicament.
It wouldn’t be pretty, no doubt, but he had to find some way out. And soon.
The only option that didn’t involve a fight was the window. If Gray was right, Rock had taken that exit before. It had hurt, but he had survived. Not the best way, but it worked. Even though he had slept the day away under the influence of those pills, the scene out of the window was not the black of night but an ominously crimson twilight. It gave virtually no light to the room, but at least it was bright enough for him to see which way he had to run to reach it.
A new growl sounded then, not far from the door. It was unlike any of the others before it. Rock’s blood ran cold.
No human could growl like that. Maybe if it was about as big as an elephant. With the training of those deep throat bass singers. And if this pachydermo profundo made it to the door, Rock was done for, that much was obvious. All further meditation and planning went out the window, as did Rock. He rushed across the room as quickly as his rebellious knee allowed, scooping up another chair along the way.
There was no time to open it. By the time he got the latch open, he’d be surrounded.
Instead, he swung with the chair. It shattered as willingly as the first had. The window thankfully did the same. Ideally, he would be able to clear the sharp remnants from around the frame, but there wasn’t time. With a crash and the rejoicing grumbles of dozens of monsters, the door whipped open.
Ignoring the broken glass cutting into his feet and hands, Rock clamored out onto the windowsill, paused for a second, and carefully leaped into the high branches of a strong but unfamiliar tree growing alongside the building. He could see surprisingly well in the red twilight and guessed that he was four floors up, and above pavement. Too high up to jump down. He didn’t want to fall—his chances would be better if he fought from here.
But not much better.
The plan made sense, but then the branches snapped. As Rock grasped for them, he realized with mortal terror that they were just too flimsy. They would never hold his weight. He groped and grappled in despair, trying to get a hold of something stronger, but found nothing but handfuls of leaves.
Downward he fell, pulling his worthless wooden lifeline down with him. It slowed his fall a bit, but then gave up with a snap.
Whether the ground was pavement or not, he had no time to check. It felt hard as diamond, and he landed prone. Stunned, wracked with weakness and pain, his whole body refused to move. His head jerked to the side for some reason, despite the fact that he could not bring his eyes to focus on anything. He saw something large, bright, swaying. It dawned on him that it was a building on fire.
That explains the crimson twilight.
The pain retreated. He could think now.
But thinking was the last thing he wanted. He wanted to sleep. Maybe losing your memory isn’t such a bad thing after all. He wished he could lose it now.
That instant, something fell on top of Rock. Something heavy, grumbling loudly. It crushed him further into the ground, tearing into him with its fangs and claws, snapping and grinding his bones. The pain returned now, multiplied a thousand times. He groaned and twitched, but his broken body was unable to move.
Then the pain disappeared. Along with every other feeling. Rock collapsed into blackness, as another irritating red message somehow intruded into his vision, even after death.
Attention: you are dead. You have lost one Strength point. Time to respawn: 174 seconds.
He saw numbers counting down, then. 173. 172. 171.
None of this made any sense. Who was he? Where was he? What the hell was going on?
Most importantly, what did he have to do to get out of this?
Chapter 2
Life Two: Even Shorter
Welcome, Novice. You are joining the Continent. Revive location: Cluster 434-09-62. Region: West Coast. Current revives re
maining: 98 lives (initial value minus 1). Active quests: Survive, Search, Learn Secret, Help, Ask Correct Question. Current status: Game Start. The cluster will reboot in 99 seconds.
Hint: You can discover more information about some objects in the game by looking directly at them and thinking to yourself that you wish to see more. (As you adapt to the game, try squinting.)
Note: You lost your first life without advancing any of your base stats. At your level, you need a minimum of 10 progress points to increase a base stat. Try to avoid dying again, and do your best to prevent your number of remaining revives from reaching zero. To help you out, you have been given 10 Luck progress points, raising your base Luck to 1. Considering your bad luck so far, you can use it. Enjoy your game.
There was that familiar wallpaper again. Same discoloring, same lousy pattern, same peeling. Everything else was basically the same, too. Even the number of beds was the same, though their placement differed slightly. The light was cracked, just like before, and the floor was covered in clutter. A motivational message about happy students now sat where the vulgar finger-drawn inscription on the glass had been before.
Rock was far from happy. He got up. No slippers this time. They weren’t just off to the side—they were absent. But the pile of blankets on the bed by the window shuffled again. An uncombed blond-haired face emerged, eyes swollen from sleep. The boy was about twenty. Apart from the obvious signs of recent revelry, he looked nothing like Rock’s single acquaintance from before, but he still had to ask.
“Is that you, Gray?”
“Huh? You gone blind, Drone? It’s me. Mosey.”
“I’m not Drone.”
“Who then?”
“I’m Rock. Drone... hmm. Is that from Drew or something? Is my name Andrew?” Rock tensed up in anticipation, waiting for the boy to announce that, yes, that was his real name. No such luck.
“When the hell did you become an Andrew? What’s wrong, Drone? You sleepwalking or something?”
Rock answered in a stupor both feigned and unfeigned. He made no attempt to unravel what was happening. As long as he could keep it together this time. “Sorry, just waking up. Hi, Mosey.” If Rock’s new friend had been called Gray, he might have suffered a panic attack from the exact repetition. At least things were different.
“Are you sure you’re OK, Drone?”
“Call me Drone one more time and you’ll regret it. Get your tablet out, quick.”
“What for?”
“Just do it. Look up what an amnesiac stuck in Groundhog Day can do to get out of it. Well, I guess it’s not quite Groundhog Day when little things change each time.”
“Afraid I don’t get the reference, Drone.”
Rock sighed as he stood and clenched his fists. Mosey didn’t look particularly frightened, but he backed down. Wisely.
“Fine, you can be Rock if you want. I don’t care.”
“There you go. Now, get out your tablet. And check to see if there’s any Wi-Fi. Or power. Wait—never mind.”
“Never mind what?”
“There’s no Wi-Fi. And none is coming. You have a SIM card in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Try using that. Or maybe your phone.”
“Is the router down?”
“I don’t think it works when the power is out,” said Rock. He remembered the odd clue about squinting and gazed narrowly at the router, hoping for some secret to be revealed. Nope. Nothing but an old dead cockroach wedged in the plastic, and he sorely doubted it was the cause of the outage. Rock looked at the tablet Mosey pulled out from under his pillow. Not because he was checking the signal again, but because something was just… off. He was still perplexed by everything that had been happening, including the red text he had seen again just a minute ago, in slightly modified form.
The differences had been minor, like the differences in this room.
Mosey flickered, then. Rock almost missed it. He was already beginning to doubt his surroundings. It was as though Mosey were not a living person but an impossibly high-res three-dimensional image. A rectangle the color of poisonous green flashed alongside him, with a dashed arrow pointing from it to the man’s body.
The arrow and everything else that followed looked like nothing out of this world. It was alien, unnatural, abnormal, like something from a cartoon injected into reality. Maybe Rock’s problems went deeper than memory issues. Hallucinations. That was probably it. A disturbing symptom, indeed.
Damn.
Rock’s confidence that he would never again pass a psychiatric exam was growing, but still he intently studied every word inside the green box.
Object: human, potentially infected. ID 197-529-341-832-272. Has identified himself as Mosey. Presumably unarmed. No Continental skills detected.
As soon as he stopped squinting, the “overlay” on his vision vanished, which was not very reassuring. Rock probably just had to squint again to bring it back. And maybe this time it would be accompanied by little green pixies.
Perhaps he was indeed under the influence of some intense drug, stuck in some never-ending nightmare.
“Nope, no service, you were right,” said Mosey, who had no idea that Rock had mentally moved on. “How did you know it was out? I saw you wake up. You haven’t checked anything since.”
Rock decided to add another prophecy. “Let’s go two for two, Mosey. I predict that if we look out into the hall, the door across the way will be open and some idiot will stare at us and ask why the power and cell service are out.”
“I believe you, but how do you know that? I’ve been up for half an hour now, just loafing around, and you didn’t even move that whole time.”
Rock just ignored the question. Still tormented by the final memories of his last life, he asked, “Tell me, have you ever heard of psychos jumping on sleeping people and eating them alive? Or crushing them flat from above, breaking all their bones and tearing them to pieces?”
“What are you on, Rock? Come on, I’m your friend. Share some with me!”
It was so strange that this Mosey fellow didn’t look like Gray at all—but his vocabulary, his tone, his sleepy indifference, and his fixation on drugs, those were all the same. He was unpleasant to look at, though apparently harmless. There was something inexplicably terrifying about him, reminiscent of something terrifically bad. No matter how hard Rock tried, he couldn’t figure out what it was.
Rock continued ignoring all of Mosey’s questions, grabbed the thick jeans draped over a chair and threw them on, and asked, “Is there a hospital nearby?”
“Why?”
“I need to see a doctor.”
“I know that. But what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“So why go?”
“Uh, I want... a circumcision,” I joked.
“Doubt it,” laughed Mosey. “Seriously, why?”
“Nothing hurts yet, but I have this suspicion that things will start to hurt if I stay in this bed for long.”
“Doc—er, I mean Rock—you’re starting to scare me.”
“I just asked about the hospital, that was all.”
That elusive, cunningly hidden, unpleasant thing he sensed in his roommate was pumping up Rock’s aggression higher and higher. Soon he’d be fist-bashing chairs and heel-bashing skulls again.
Mosey shook his head. “Damn, you should stop getting so fucked up, you know? If you need to visit the student hospital, well, it’s in building two.”
“Where’s that?”
“What’s the matter with you, Rock? How about I give you some pills? They’ll do you good.”
“Mike’s sleeping pills again?”
“Sleeping pills, yeah, but who’s Mike?”
“From the clinic.”
“Well, yeah, they’re from the clinic, but I got them from Lena, not Mike. You remember her, right? All painted up, lips big as two sausages.”
“The one who always ran naked around the hall?” he fabricated.
“He
ck, really? I’d watch that. Wouldn’t surprise me. The girl’s low on restraint. And low on brains. So you actually heading to the hospital, Drone?”
Rock stopped paying him any attention, even letting the slip back to the “wrong” nickname go, and stepped into the hall. He froze as he realized what was troubling him about Mosey. He resembled the man who had tried to chew him up while he was sleeping. Of course, it had been dark, so he couldn’t be sure, but the creature’s movements and, well, its aura, had been like Mosey’s.
Gray’s face, he remembered. It was nothing like Mosey’s. But he had had the same figure.
Rock touched where he had been bitten again, just to be sure there was no trace of the wound. He had an intense desire to return to the room, go up to Mosey’s bed, flash an evil smile, and smash the chairs across his face and then beat him senseless with their dismembered wooden legs. To bash his stupid head into bloody bits and splinters. To feel the pleasure of his hated skull crumbling into his collapsing brain.
Somehow, he managed to resist the temptation. He took a couple of hesitating steps—then hurried away. His sense of logic was screaming at him. If the beginning of everything in this room was so similar to last time, the ending might be similar, too.
The total confusion, the rumbling sounds, the weight of that monster, and the tearing of his body to shreds. He preferred not to hear the song of his bones crunching again. Ever.
Of course. He had gone the wrong way, bumped right into a dead end, and had to turn around and look for a staircase out. Along the way, he dealt with the same old dumb questions from boys and girls, ages seventeen to early twenties. There were three questions, to be exact: why the power was out, why the cellular was down, and whether the water worked. None of them knew how to test that last one out for themselves, evidently.
