Respawn: Lives 1-5 (Respawn LitRPG series Book 1)

by Arthur Stone

  “What’s my name, then?” asked Rock, his heart skipping a beat.

  Could it be that, at long last, he was to receive the answer to this his absurdly simple yet profoundly difficult question?

  Would that it were so simple. “Eh, not really a soccer fan,” the driver replied as he pulled out “I prefer boxing.”

  “Yeah, everyone in town has been thinking I’m some famous soccer player all day,” lied Rock, crossing his legs and putting his hands over his knees. The scars were obvious, and they poked out of his shorts. The surgeons had cut deep into him. Rock didn’t want to explain his amnesia or the strange red messages right now—he just wanted to get across the river before he ended up dead again.

  He couldn’t imagine there was any death more painful than the last two, but he didn’t want to find out.

  “Yeah, your face sure looks like his,” the driver babbled on. “Hey, your phone got GPS? Try it. Maybe it’ll work.”

  Rock lied again. “Left my phone at home.”

  He didn’t want to admit he didn’t have a phone. For all he knew, that might lead to a trail of questioning that ended with him admitting he had no ID, either. And that he had no idea who he was. And that he was trapped in a recurring nightmare narrated by text straight out of the credits from Stranger Things.

  “Strange shit going on, man. I don’t need service all the time, just GPS, you know? But this—I’m not getting anything. Like I’m running taxi in a basement. There’s nothing. It doesn’t see any towers, any satellites, nothing at all.”

  “Reset the phone, maybe. Might help.”

  “Tried that. Twice. Besides, the car’s GPS can’t see a thing either. There’s no way both could have gone down at once, especially since they both seem to be running fine otherwise. Could somebody be jamming the signals, maybe?”

  Rock shrugged. “No idea, but I bet the military could jam it. They can do pretty much anything.”

  At that instant, the taxi driver cursed and jerked the wheel. A car blew by them at breakneck speed without so much as a honk, its rear bumper and muffler rattling and racketing along the ground. “Looks like it’s Field Day at the madhouse today,” fumed the driver. “Damn, and they let them loose on everything, from top-of-the-line race cars to rusty old traps like that one. Where are they all going? The main roads are all blocked up, the lights are down, and the cars are gridlocked at the worst spots. No way anyone’s getting to the hospital in time, short of a helicopter.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Rock, furious at himself for not predicting this would happen.

  “We’ll avoid the center of town entirely. Cut through somehow. Across yards and lots if we have to. Couple of ugly spots we should avoid, but once we’re past those we’ll be good to go. I hope.”

  Another mindless racer whizzed past, evoking more cursing from the driver and nearly knocking his mirror clean off. That vehicle didn’t get far. A few hundred feet later, they found it overturned. Onlookers were gathering, and the bravest were trying to enter the cab. The taxi driver didn’t slow down, just dropped a comment about the mob of rubberneckers and would-be heroes.

  “Fools! Unless you know what’s up, don’t touch the man. His spine could be crushed, and the slightest movement could leave him a cripple for life. Best case scenario. But no, they all just cram themselves in there. All the clumsy ones dying off, that’d be the day. That would be heaven on Earth.”

  Rock was troubled by the driver’s words. They had the same unnatural intonation that the three roommates he had encountered in that dorm room had. They weren’t as pronounced, but that and the awkward changes in pace, the choice of phrase, the sorts of gestures—all four of these people were very similar.

  And they were very different from the two men who had advised Rock to go to this bridge.

  He wished he could have talked with them longer. Even befriended them. After all, the conversation had hinted that those guys knew how to get to places where property values weren’t struggling as much. He earnestly did not want to keep “pumping,” or whatever they had called it, since for some unknown reason that apparently meant dying over and over again.

  And how many times would it be? At what number of deaths would he start to understand what was going on?

  That morning, Rock had started to think he was in some kind of Grecian hell, paying the penalty for sins he had completely forgotten, but his meeting with that pair had convinced him otherwise. It seemed there was nothing godly or ungodly about the place. Those guys hadn’t been serious saints or sinners, to be blessed by some benevolent or malicious deity. Just ordinary guys, if a little strange. Too bad his biggest questions were still unanswered.

  He wasn’t sure he knew how to even ask those questions, anyway.

  And to be honest, what he did know already was enough to make an educated guess. This was no hell, no mystic level of torture or paradise, but it also wasn’t reality in the usual sense. He was in a game. A strange, cruel, confusing, and frankly lackluster game. Rock had the feeling that he wasn’t really into all the modern methods of killing time in real life, the video games and VR and so on, but he was somehow familiar with all of them. Kids would sit for days in front of dusty monitors, giving themselves nearsightedness and carpal tunnel syndrome, not bothering to take any breaks between their countless violent deaths to actually learn something about themselves or the world. How he knew that despite his amnesia was anyone’s guess.

  But there were no monitors here. This game reality was pretty convincing, besides the ritual deaths and “enjoy your game” messages, and...

  Idiot. I’m completely wasting this time.

  “Menu,” said Rock quietly, more mouthing it than speaking it.

  He didn’t want to have to explain himself to the taxi driver if the man overheard. Rock had already put him on edge with his request to avoid crowds and traffic. Best not to push his luck.

  Alright, so what did he need right now, more than anything else? He knew next to nothing about eSports, but every game had an Exit button, right? And if this game had one, it’d be in the menu, for sure.

  He only had to find it, to press it, and he would find himself back in the normal world, where he could start looking for the person that took his memory and shoved him into this cruel world. There had to be someone responsible, somebody who deserved to be grabbed by the neck and slammed up against the wall. And maybe kicked until nearly unconscious.

  But it wasn’t to be. A minute later, Rock was fully convinced that the menu was just there to distract and confuse people like him. Why was this multi-page “Skills” window even necessary? It was empty as a beggar’s pockets. Then there were seven bars of various colors, obviously scales or meters of some kind, but with no explanations.

  And of course, no sign of the coveted Exit button. Perhaps it was expertly concealed behind endless overlapping modal windows that he would have to resolve one by one, but Rock had a growing suspicion that wasn’t the case. He shouldn’t have expected to so easily escape this place when he couldn’t even remember his name.

  All this time, the driver was cruising through yards and lots, moving past ancient five-story apartment buildings, rows of rusted garages, and piles of garbage and garbage cans. Rock could see this in the background, in the gaps between the multicolored clutter of the menu. The car encountered a school fence then and turned into an alley to go around it, leading out onto a wide avenue with no traffic.

  “Hah, did you see that?” said the driver, pleased. “The traffic jam is back that way. Everything at a dead stop. Worst spot in the city. But here, we’re the kings of the road!”

  “Then why is nobody coming from that way?” asked Rock, distrustful of the situation. The center of town couldn’t be more than a few dozen yards away. He whispered “menu” again to clear his vision.

  Before the taxi driver had time to reply, the answer arrived. A column of vehicles, only a few of them for civilian use, emerged, including an armored personnel carrier. The street h
ad been somehow blocked off so the convoy could move through, and the vehicles themselves were invisible until the very last moment. They were moving at a serious clip.

  “Whoa.” Rock was at a loss for words. “This kind of thing come through here a lot?”

  “I’ve been in this town for eight years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” replied the taxi driver, puzzled. He looked at Rock “They’re turning towards the south intersection. Must be where the bulk of the trouble is.”

  “What trouble?”

  “You know, no power, no cellular, no GPS, and then these guys show up. That doesn’t just happen, man, you take it from me. There’s been an earthquake, and flooding. Or a terrorist strike. You see water or ruins anywhere around here? Feel the ground shaking? No. So my bet’s on terrorists. But nothing happened over here. This area’s been nice and quiet.”

  “How did they bring in a force like that without any phones?” Rock pointed at the column. It just kept going, one vehicle after another.

  “The police and other security forces have radios and even their own hard lines for things like that. I bet landline phones still work. But who still has a landline phone these days? Oh man, look at that!” The driver pointed at a heavy vehicle running on caterpillar treads and whistled. “That thing can blast down walls or just drive clean through houses. It’s weird that they’re out so quick—usually by the time the authorities act, the emergency’s over, you know?”

  At last the final car, a normal-looking minibus, passed by the alley. The driver looked around mischievously and hit the gas. “Hey, if this road is closed off, we don’t know it, understand? I was waiting for you back in that lot for a long time, picking you up, and we just only now got going, OK?”

  “Works for me.”

  “If I knew it would be like this... Damn.”

  “What?” Rock didn’t get it.

  “No way we’re getting through here. This is just the wrong place and the wrong time, mate.”

  A flood of cars was following behind them. The leaders of the pack were practically flying, like racers just a hundred meters from the finish line of a Formula One match. The driver nudged the car to the right, attempting to hug the curb, which Rock thought was a futile maneuver. The madmen raced towards them three columns across and two rows deep, plus another few running towards them, against the way traffic was supposed to go, with no regard for the ground-based armada which was still in sight.

  At the last second, somebody lost their nerves, and two cars squealed their brakes, one going into a full skid. From the passenger seat, Rock couldn’t make out what happened or who ended up crashing into whom. But going by its sound, the crash was more than a fender bender.

  Then the whole conglomeration crashed into the taxi. The impact was less severe than it could have been but jostled Rock violently. He had already been craning his neck in an attempt to see, so the additional twist caused a sharp flash of pain that retreated only slowly and left its mark of soreness.

  “The fuck! I should have never come here. God damn you and your forty bucks, boy!” With those words, the driver resolutely threw open the door of his car—only to immediately slam it back closed and whimper, “What is happening? What the hell is that? Shit, shit, shit, SHIT!”

  Rock was busy manipulating his neck: massaging it, turning it in circles and back and forth, trying to restore it to working order. But the driver’s words and tone made him join his stare to the terrified man’s. They looked straight ahead.

  A couple of seconds more of staring, and Rock would have almost certainly been reading another obscure hint and a wish for him to enjoy his game. The taxi driver saved him, despite his hysteria, with his whimpers. Without hesitating to question his next move, Rock threw the door open with all his strength and fell out onto the litter-covered grass between the street and the sidewalk. He grimaced with pain as he jumped up, that same damned knee acting up as always. It didn’t like tricks.

  From the other direction, where the opposing cars had come from, another rush of vehicles sped towards them. They took up all of the lanes, and the sidewalks with them. The worst part was the heavy truck at the front, picking up speed faster than the most careless truck driver would on the safest abandoned desert highway. The buzzing monster quietly destroyed a tiny car which was racing across towards the bridge and then took out a sizable Jeep in much the same fashion without so much as slowing down. But the small bus that came next was too strong for it.

  Too heavy, anyway.

  The crash thundered throughout the neighborhood, sending massive barbs of twisted metal in all directions and shearing the bus in half. The truck veered sharply to the right, slamming a car that wanted to pass it up onto the curb and into a second car. The crash cascaded from one vehicle to another, a terrifying chain collision whiplashing down the avenue.

  Rock had the presence of mind and body to push himself away before the truck­—still sweeping anything and everything it had collected under its bumper—swiped the left side off of the taxi, from headlight to trunk. The truck would have pressed on, but it at last met a worthy opponent. A large, pristinely painted van, as white as an angel of righteousness come to slay the villainous dragon. The van was much too clean for a day like this. For a city like this, even. Revoltingly white.

  The vehicles slammed into one another, deafening Rock until the taxi driver melted into a miserable piece of the chaotic scrap heap and a piece of iron glanced off Rock’s head and stunned him for real.

  He sat at the far edge of the scene, amazed as the epic clash and burial of dozens of vehicles unfolded in mere seconds on the road. The rulebreakers and rulekeepers alike were sucked in, including bystanders who had evidenced no desire to rush headlong into maiming and death. Drivers had hit the brakes at the sight of the crash, as normal drivers do, turning themselves into targets or obstacles for those hurrying on their way to the smelting pot of insanity.

  Fire erupted in several places at once, smoke filled the air in a matter of moments, and people were screaming in all directions. An old woman hobbled past Rick. For some reason, she was dressed in nothing but lingerie, and she cradled her arm, which was bent into an unnatural angle. A man limped after her, then suddenly crouched on the sidewalk and whined like a dog receiving a beating. Another man fell to his knees, barely off the road. No dreams of movie stardom for this one. He was covered in blood from head to toe, wheezing like a broken bagpipe, and had a huge glass shard stuck in his face.

  Rock wasn’t feeling so good. He groped around on his head and found a quickly growing, damp bump. Thankfully the piece of metal had been small. If he had been wearing the wool beanie from the last life, he might have barely felt it. But it had stunned him. His ears were ringing and he felt like he was floating, even falling in and out of reality. The continuing crash of more and more cars and vans and trucks generated no reaction. He watched them like an overdone summer “thriller.” Detached, nonchalant, unimpressed. Even when the bright red sports car broke through the carnage factory and swept by a mere two feet from his face, he didn’t flinch.

  His brain had disconnected, at least for the most part. But the blow wasn’t that severe, was it?

  Someone grabbed Rock’s arm and pulled him up with ease, like he was an eight-year-old. The middle-aged, tall, broad-shouldered man dragged him to the edge of the sidewalk moments before another car whizzed through where he had just been sitting. The man shouted in Rock’s ear in a harsh, anxious tone. “Yo, dumbass, you got a name? Yeah, you. You mute? Don’t speak English?” He gave Rock a slap on the cheek. “Sober the fuck up, man. Say something!”

  Rock turned his head and struggled to peer through the veil pouring into his vision. The man was a redneck in his forties, with a stocky build like he was built of bricks and eyes at once unpleasantly sweet and impudent. The kind of fellow you’d never lend money to. He wore a light gray-green shirt, unbuttoned almost halfway down to reveal toned muscles and concerningly overgrown chest hair, over which—or in whi
ch—he wore a long black crystal with a double-pointed top on a simple cord.

  Rock wasn’t the greatest reader of people, but if he saw this guy coming on the street on a normal day, he would cross over to the other side. Yet the man was fixated on learning his name. That was something.

  Rock fought back the fog and faint metal-knocked into his skull and at last opened his parched lips and gave a stammered shout over the roar of the accumulating accident. “Let go of me! I don’t have a name. Don’t need one.”

  The red-faced man grinned at that and winked mysteriously. Ignoring the de-carred tire rolling by a few inches away, he announced, “We all been zeroes once. Ain’t no disrespect in that. How’s life been, brother? How much Luck you hit?”

  Rock glanced at the taxi, which at that moment was crushed and sliced through by a motorcyclist who had somehow screamed right into the center of the calamity. “Two, for now.”

  “Oh man, you just a kid.”

  “And I’m in no rush to grow up.”

  “That’s the spirit. Continent likes to whip the hasty ones, and ain’t nobody need that. So you’re new. Brand new. Well, you’re in real luck, meeting me. Pumping up your ‘Luck’ don’t make no difference. 5 Luck, 10 Luck, nobody can prove it does shit for you. You got to find somebody with a little know-how to learn the ropes from, brother. Somebody like me. Name’s Horsefly, by the way.”

  “My name is... well, I don’t know. Rock for now.”

  “Rock? What for?”

  “Dumb roommate called me that way back, when all of this started.”

  “Your level zero respawn a dorm or something?”

  “I don’t know. I always wake up in a dorm.”

  “Got it, Noob. Happens. So how are the girls at your school?”

  “Wouldn’t know. Haven’t had much time to date.”

  “Sure. Not all the digis are easy, anyway. And if you force them you lose Humanity. Plus ain’t nobody want that. Boring. But since then, what you been up to? What’re you doing here?”