by Arthur Stone
He leaped back to move towards her. The shots were firing as quickly as possible. Too quickly. Nervously, even. She couldn’t be aiming—hoping to kill the enemy with quantity instead.
Breaking through the narrow trail where he had only a few minutes ago taken a stunning crossbow bolt to the head, he nearly crashed into a ghoul in the bushes. It was the slow kind, filthy and smelly, with the characteristically sagging pants. He hated to spend ammo on it, but he was in a rush. He shot from the hip, destroying the back of the creep’s head, sporesac and all, and then charged deeper into the thicket, fighting both the clinging branches and his gun as he struggled to ready it for its next shot.
Ahead, he saw Kitty, out in the open. She had her pistol out, pointed at a crooked monster approaching from the left. Nothing remained of its human form but its number of limbs. At that moment, the bolt snapped the next cartridge into the chamber. His finger pulled the trigger. As usual, he did not miss. The massive ghoul twitched, slumped backwards, and bumped into a tree, sliding down its trunk to the ground.
Kitty was extraordinarily jumpy for someone with a shattered shin. She squealed at him, “To the river, Rocky, now!”
He decided to refrain from his usual clarifying questions, instead firing another shot into the thicket—which something huge, fast, and grumbling was about to crash out of—and running to seize Kitty under the arm and drag her as quickly as possible, weaving so that his companion would not slam into the thick branches in their way.
Two ghouls were on their way to meet them. They seemed like nothing compared to the last—in some lighting conditions, one might have mistaken them for normal people. Rocky’s internal ammo counter switched on to tell him he only had a couple of bullets left for his big gun, his only weapon against the big monsters. So he threw his rifle over his shoulder, reached for his belt, and drew the pistol he had snagged from one of the robbers. He fired twice.
Surprisingly, Kitty was pulling away, holding the trunk of a tree with her free hand. She called out, “Biter, Rocky! My sword! Don’t leave it here!”
Shit, she remembered her sword. She had seen it stuck in the bandit’s corpse. Without arguing, Rocky charged the few steps towards the body, shot another small ghoul coming at them, and seized the sword by the handle. When he turned, he saw Kitty—quite nimbly, considering her condition—moving towards the drop-off, alternating behind hopping and leaning propped up on her rifle, grabbing branches along the way. Her speed on her own wasn’t much slower than Rocky’s speed with all he was carrying.
Why was she moving in that direction, though? Did she know the boat was there? Rocky hadn’t managed to tell her anything about it before the shooting started. Had she figured it out just based on where he had charged out of the branches? Maybe. Her deduction skills were excellent.
Or perhaps the explanation was simpler. She could have seen the sandbank down further and, driven to drastic action by the horde of approaching ghouls, hoped to leap off it and swim across to the other side.
Rocky caught up with her and shot his rifle at another higher-level infected, which was just about to tackle Kitty from their right. He heard the whole forest rumbling with them, ten of the monsters at least. Some of them were trampling not just brushwood but large bushes underfoot. Even small trees.
He had only one cartridge left in the rifle, and reloading it took time. His pistol was almost empty, too—and he didn’t have any spare ammo for that.
Tossing his rifle over his shoulder, he shoved Kitty’s sword in the sheath on her belt and picked her up like he might a small child. No longer taking any care for his companion’s crippled leg, he charged back down the path towards the boat and hopped off the drop-off. It wasn’t high up, and he landed just where he wanted, near the edge of the water, on a soft strip of wet sand. Too soft, too wet. His feet sank into the sand, but the gentle landing meant that his knees still obeyed him, even if they did not forget to voice their distress.
Kitty did not fare so well. She lost her balance, and Rocky couldn’t keep a hold on her. She stumbled a couple of steps into the shallows, awkwardly waving her arms in a bid to regain her balance. Crouching down, she managed to grab onto an oar, only then lifting her tortured leg at last.
Leaping over to her Rocky threw her into the small vessel by her waist, and pushed his feet through the mud along the bottom, dragging the boat out into deeper water, all the while keeping watch out of the corner of his eye. When he saw a ghoul’s head appear over the edge of the drop-off, he ignored it completely. It was clearly an early stage and posed no threat to them. The layout of the situation would change dramatically before it could catch up to them.
At last, when the water was waist-high, Rocky pushed off, climbing into the boat. Still, he hurried. He pushed Kitty towards the bow, flopping down on the bench in the middle and begin to row. Poorly. It was apparent that his body did not know how to row a boat. He would bury the oars too deep on one pass, then skip them across the surface on the next, spraying water everywhere. That last push, though, mattered, and the inertia carried them out to the middle of the creek.
Turning behind him, Rocky could see three ghouls proceeding into the shallow water. Two of them were pathetic, but the third had lost nearly all of his clothes and was starting to look so monstrous that no amount of makeup could conceal his defects.
Bullets might do the job, though.
He left the oars and drew his rifle, turning to fire at the most dangerous target, but Kitty stopped him. “Enough wasting our bullets. Let’s just get boat our way out of here!”
“But...”
“Dammit, Rocky. No buts! Those weaklings can’t go deep. If they do, they’ll flounder about like lost puppies. And if they get close, they’ll learn what Biter feels like. Now get back to rowing before I get mad. Jeez, who taught you how to row?”
“Sorry, but I’ve clearly never been a galley slave.”
“Even I row better than you do.”
“I believe you. Anyway, sorry!”
“Whatever.” Kitty relaxed, despite the situation. “If you don’t know how to row, you don’t know how to row.”
“I wasn’t talking about the oars.”
“Oh.”
“I threw you into the boat like a suitcase.”
“That was the right move, Rocky. Every second counts here. There is no time to be gentle.”
“You look pretty terrible. Does it hurt?”
“I had to take a few steps. I can’t put any weight on it yet.”
“At least it didn’t snap.”
“The bones have taken hold already. As long as I don’t do that all the time, they’ll stay in place. Wow, look at how many of them there are!”
Rocky turned. “Shit.” There were at least twenty of them, running back and forth along the edge of the river. Some were trying to navigate the shallows, towards the boat. Mostly weaklings, but three looked formidable, plus one that appeared close to the level of the monster he had killed in the town.
“Where did they all come from? This is a forest, not a city.”
“Right, but there’s a river here.” As usual, she offered no explanation.
“What does a river have to do with anything? They don’t like swimming. That’s obvious.”
“Right. And that’s why the river matters. When infecteds migrate, they often gather on the banks of rivers. They can’t get across, so they wander the banks. Their numbers accumulate. Water is like a fence for infecteds.”
“Ah, that makes sense. So it wasn’t necessarily strange for use to run into so many here. What do we do now? Crossing to the other side isn’t really an option right now. We made so much noise that the bushes over there are starting to look shaky, too. There’s a ghoul, even. Hey there, freak!”
“The current goes that way, so that way we go.”
“So we sail down and then cross? These guys are following us. You can tell they’re not about to leave us alone.”
“Rocky, just do what I say. I’m tir
ed of repeating myself over and over. We’ll go downstream first, and then we’ll see what happens.”
Chapter 24
Life Five: Rivers and Riversides
Rocky learned how to row quickly. Not like an Olympic champion, but without feeling like he was making a fool of himself. Kitty slathered the criticism on in generous portions, and neglected to praise his successes. But she wasn’t feeling well. She spent the time working to tie the strips of strong fabric more tightly around her splint.
Rocky looked to both sides. The infecteds weren’t going anywhere. They ran along both banks, at least forty in total now. They couldn’t land on either side, or they’d get eaten alive no matter how well they fought. And if they tried to thin them out from here on the boat, well, who knows how many others would come running at the noise?
He made sure Kitty was looking OK, with enough confidence in her movements to show she wasn’t suffering too badly. Then, he asked about something that had been worrying him since the very beginning of the episode at the river. “So why didn’t the System reward us for killing those two bandits?”
“What do you mean?” Kitty clearly didn’t understand.
“As we were sailing away, a bunch of text about those ghouls came up. XP and all that, as usual. But the System didn’t say a word about the two humans.”
“And?”
“Well, lots of information was written there when we killed the guys in the lumberyard. And the helicopter. But this time, total silence.”
“Globes and his gang were as red as overripe tomatoes. Killing them is like taking out high-level infecteds rather than immunes. Those two were greens. You should thank the System for not reducing your Humanity. Thankfully, the System decided that they had shown aggression first.”
“That much was obvious!” Rocky tapped the dried blood left by the crossbow bolt.
“Only one of the shot you. It could have decided not to count the other one—or to count the first as aggressive but with a high Humanity score. It’s hard to get anything by killing a green. Well, anyone can get plenty of things from killing greens, but to pull that off you need to be seriously red. I don’t think red would suit you. You’re not the type to hang around with people like Globes.”
Rocky looked along the river again, then asked another question. Hopefully it didn’t sound stupid. “Where did this river come from?”
“Where everything else comes from. It came in on a reboot.”
“That can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“You said that most clusters in this area are small. A few miles across. Several dozen at most. But a river can’t survive in something that small. It would dry up so quickly!”
“Where’d you get that from? You have a degree in rivers?”
“No, the thought just occurred to me.”
“Hey, there you go. Thinking better already. The System does its best, Rocky. Usually the clusters that arrive are similar to the ones that preceded them. The digis in them even live at the same addresses. Since the resets are just bringing in the same clusters over and over, changes are minimal. And one cluster wouldn’t just fit into the space meant for another. Were you paying attention when we crossed into another cluster, back we ran into that police car?”
“Well?”
“Weren’t you surprised that the road continued in the new cluster?”
“I was surprised by everything back then. Especially when that helicopter appeared.”
“Do you remember the wires on the telephone poles? The poles became different, and the wires hung at the border of the cluster, dangling, cut. That’s because the System tries to connect linear structures together. Roads, pipelines, paths, bridges, dams, power lines, rivers, and streams, for example. This stream could be fed by dozens of pieces of different rivers, canals, even long lakes. Somewhere up high, perhaps far away, there’s a continual flow of water, flowing slowly.”
“Does the System always connect things like that?”
“No. It’s unpredictable. But it usually tries. Some clusters have huge reservoirs, big enough that you couldn’t hit one side from the other with a cannon. The merchants even put floating bases out on them.”
“You have merchants?”
“Wherever there is property, there are merchants.”
“That makes sense. So how’s your leg? Not so bad?”
“Yeah. If I leave it alone for another day or two, I’ll be able to jog on it.”
“No way.”
“Don’t even try to argue with me. You’ll lose.”
“What do we do about these would-be stowaways?” Rocky asked as he pointed to the dead lining the beach.
“What can we do? Nothing at all.”
“We can’t just stay on this boat forever, and they just refuse to fall behind. Ghouls aren’t our only problem, either. We could run into somebody like Ironpot and Carp. Or worse. Their bullets are afraid to jump out over the water. We’re sitting ducks. Lame sitting ducks.”
Kitty frowned and looked around uncertainly. “I don’t know what this creek is, but sooner or later it should widen, or branch into two. Infecteds aren’t as interested in a boat on a wide lake. And if they lose sight of us, they’ll forget us in no time. So we’ll throw these guys off our trail somehow. And we’re unlikely to attract new infecteds, since we’re being so quiet. We have other things to think about right now.”
“Like what?”
“Getting as far away as possible, finding new shelter, and resting. An island is a good option. The little infecteds can’t even try to get out to it, and there aren’t very many big monsters in this region. Too bad our cases and bag stayed all the way back there. Retrieving them would be suicide, of course. Meaning most of our ammo is gone, along with all our food and water. Thanks for holding that flask of lifejuice, at least.”
“What about the spores?”
“I have them. I’d never leave them anywhere.”
“So we won’t have lifejuice problems, and that’s what really matters.”
“Right, as long as we find some more alcohol. I’ve heard stories of survival masters who dissolved spores in an acid made from ants, but I really doubt there’s any truth to them. How much ammo do you have left?
Rocky stopped rowing and counted. The results were not good.
“Twenty-six bullets. For this pistol, though, I’m out.”
“I have two full magazines and seventeen more cartridges. Thirty-seven shots in all. Plus six in my pistol. Here, take three for yourself.”
“Three bullets won’t save me.”
“A weapon is a weapon—until it has no ammo. Take it and quit arguing. Thankfully it’s the right kind of ammo. Reload and get back to rowing. One of those things is already trying to swim for us. He’s no elite, but he’s pretty pushy. I’m going to go through the stuff here in the boat. Maybe those bastards left us something useful.”
Kitty was referring to a pair of threadbare backpacks sitting at the bottom of the boat. From the looks of it, they were despondent. There was hardly anything inside but smelly rags. He was thankful not to have to grope around such dubious places in search of treasure.
The girl was done in a minute, and showed him everything she thought was valuable: a cigar in an aluminum tube, a ribbed hand grenade, some sealed army ration packs, and a bright orange plastic canteen.
Rock stared at the final item.
“Is that lifejuice?”
“Yeah, more than a liter here. We don’t have to worry about our spore balance for a while.”
“What’s up with the cigar? I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“What?”
“That’s a cigar tube. What do you need it for?”
“This is a cigar tube?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Kittle uncorked the tube, sniffed, and nodded. “Yeah, it smells like tobacco, but there’s no cigar in there. It’s something else.”
The girl tilted the tube and shook out its contents. It was a
thin, disposable capped syringe with a yellow liquid inside.
“So you’re not into tobacco because it’s too weak, huh?” Rocky joked, knowing that his companion was certainly into nothing of the sort.
“Yeah, I been needing a trip down H Street, man. Nah, this is spec. Not just any spec, either. Goldspec.”
“Great. That clears things up. Except for one point. What the heck is goldspec?”
“Of course you don’t know. But I already told you about spec.”
“Yeah. Four pounds of web to make a dose, and it’s a drug of some kind.”
“Good boy, remembering that. So, goldspec requires eight pounds of web. And five radspores. Those are like normal spores, but three times bigger, and bright green in color. Greener than a young forest in spring. They’re only located in some infecteds living in or near radioactive clusters. Those places are unbelievably hazardous, even for me. You wouldn’t be able to get near them. Goldspec is very valuable. I don’t know where those losers picked it up. They don’t exactly look like they’re rolling.”
“Right, they looked like tramps. So we can sell it to druggies. Any other use for it?”
“Normal spec reduces pain and fatigue. It boosts your strength and bit, and your regeneration. But goldspec, by comparison, turns you into Superman. Just temporarily, of course. It boosts all your stats. As long as your arms and legs are still attached, you forget about all of your wounds and injuries completely. If I took this and went up on the shore, within a few minutes there wouldn’t be a single infected left. Biter would destroy them all. Or most of them, anyway.”
“Cool stuff. So one easy way to take out hordes of ghouls is with narcotics?”
“Well, it’s not that simple. Spec is very dangerous. It can even cause addiction on the first dose. Not everyone reacts that way, of course. Only people with very low Willpower, but even the most stalwart can’t use it for long, if they take it, say, once a week. They’ll be hooked in a month, and that’s terrifying, because then it gradually turns you into an animal. Many reds started out with spec. It just stops all inhibitions. So it’s a last resort. Best to stay away from the stuff. Got it?”
