by Arthur Stone
Among other things.
Cheater shouldered the gun and turned towards the tent owner, who was gaping at him with something an order of magnitude deeper than religious veneration. “You know what, do you have anything besides popcorn? My friend and I would like to have a bite.”
“Sure, anything you want,” the man said as he rushed inside.
Cheater followed, to the sound of the mumbling crowd—and to the dying echoes of a hysterical scream ripping into the village.
“He didn’t even aim!” they were saying. “A quick scope. He really is Cheater. He quick scoped him, did you see that? I saw it. And right in the testicles!”
Cheater hadn’t been certain of that last part, actually. Not that it would have mattered though. His ammo type and caliber made a fearsome combination. Glock would have been nearly torn in half. No matter where it hit.
He also doubted that anyone was about to go and verify any of the gory details.
His first contract with this town’s citizens was a resounding success. Neither Cheater nor Clown were being dragged off to the gallows, at least. They might even score a good meal.
Cheater was a legend here, and it was bad luck to refuse to feed a legend.
Chapter 4
Life Nine. Search for the Dead
It was not a good meal. Only the simplest dishes—all noticeably undercooked or overcooked— supplemented with processed snacks from normal clusters and alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The salad was flavorless, and the vegetables in it somehow managed to wither before their eyes. Not only was the juice not fresh, they doubted it was really juice. A cheap powdered drink, most likely.
It was a common beverage on the Continent. Bottles of drinking water came in huge quantities with nearly every reset. It was much simpler to collect these than try to establish water bottling plants in stable clusters. But the quality of the selection still varied from one stable to another. Some places even grew their own fresh herbs, along with some vegetables and berries.
Cheater was not about to turn his nose up at the meal. He had been so famished in the wilderness that he’d eat rubber.
Clown, however, barely touched the food. He held an extended, whispered conversation with the owner of the establishment, and only then sat down at the table, winking conspiratorially. “So I asked some questions. This cluster has just the person we need. He’s not very experienced, but he’s good enough for us. I hope.”
Cheater was trying to saw into a brutally overcooked bacon slice. “What are you talking about?”
“About finding March,” Clown winked. “That’s still the plan, right?”
“Of course. March is the top priority.”
“And you remember my derisive comments about your search tactics.”
“Right.”
“We found him, sure, but not exactly in the best of circumstances. We didn’t even have time to say hello. They took him out right away, once their blocker noticed us. It’s a good thing they shot him, really. Makes our mission a little easier. By this point, anyway.”
Cheater blinked. “How does that make things easier?”
Clown turned to face the tent entrance. Two people had just stepped in: the owner of the establishment and some inconspicuous young man with the fussy eyes of a petty thief perpetually caught red-handed. “Time for you to learn some tactics. Is this the guy, Kegger?”
The owner approached the table and nodded. “This is Clams. He can do what you need, as I said before.”
“Then have a seat, Clams,” Clown pointed to a nearby chair. “We have some work for you. Important work! They say you can quickly find anyone’s respawn.”
Clams shook his head, “No, that’s too hard. The System doesn’t like anyone being able to do that. After all, you could spawn kill a player twenty times in a row like that, before they’re dumped in a new region.”
“Then why the hell are you here?” Clown snorted.
Clams jumped back, startled. “How should I know? I heard someone needed to find the respawn point for a good player. So here I am.”
“I don’t understand. You just said it’s too hard.”
“Yes. If it’s just anyone’s respawn point. But the point of someone in your party? That’s much easier. It’s no guarantee, but it’s quite possible.”
“Got it. Yes, the man is in our party. We want to know where he’ll show up. Can you help us?”
“So when was he... uh...”
“When did his unfortunate death last occur? The day before yesterday. Midday. More than 40 hours have passed by now. He might be respawning as we speak.”
“Was that death far from here?”
“Not that far.”
“Invite me to your party and I’ll take a look.”
“Cheater, you’re the leader—can you invite him?”
As was customary for her, Kitty had quickly returned him his party role, which Cheater was quite thankful for. That would have been awkward to explain.
Clams nodded almost immediately. “Yes, we can try finding him.”
“Try?” Clown squinted.
“This is the System, guys. The System never gives guarantees. But in most cases like this, I can find who I’m looking for.”
“Then look!”
“Fifty,” Clams said, nervously.
“Fifty!?” Clown grimaced as he stroked the top of the manmincer’s head.
“Well... I can give you a discount, then. Thirty. But you’ll need to wait. The ability takes a while to activate.”
Cheater interrupted Clown’s next offer. “Go ahead. Thirty is fine.”
They waited nearly ten minutes. Never before had Cheater encountered such a slow ability.
At last, Clams looked up. “Cluster 749-208-91. Start clusters usually contain a city or town. If this one does, March will be there. If there is no city in the cluster, it means that March has a perk that lets him choose a quieter respawn point. But this makes no difference to you, since chat should work across the whole cluster. As long as he doesn’t leave the party as soon as he respawns.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Clown muttered.
“Who’s this Kitty in the party?” Clams ventured timidly. “Is it really that Kitty?”
“Clams ought to keep their mouths shut. It protects their insides.”
“Calm down. I was just asking.”
“Cheater, toss this curious young man his thirty pieces of silver so he can get out of here before I get angry. And pin that cluster on your map. You’re the man with all the maps, after all.”
Searching for clusters by their numerical ID was a special kind of torture that Cheater soon doubted the Devils could match. The ordering of the clusters was beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, if there was an ordering system at all. Cheater spent twenty minutes poring over description boxes, slowly expanding the radius of his search. At last, he smiled. “It’s pretty much due east of us. Fifty miles out, and nearly all of it open. It’s outside of the Cauldron. There is some black land between us and there, but afterwards the dark clusters are few and far between. Looks like a clean shot.”
“That’s good news. East is just where we’re heading, after all. We’ll pick him up along the way.”
“Are we going on foot?” Cheater frowned. “That’ll take a hard twenty-four hours of marching, if not more. March might leave the cluster as soon as he spawns, too.”
Clown nodded. “Perhaps. And this stable doesn’t seem like the place to ask for good information. They won’t know when the reboot is due to hit. Well, you stay here while I go try to whip up some transportation. We shouldn’t stick around. We attracted a lot of attention back there, and you’re famous enough that there’s probably someone here looking to strangle you. And your traveling partner, if he’s around.
* * *
Transportation took too long to acquire. Cheater was so close now that he could feel his heart pounding in his ears. He was nearing the final region border that he needed to cross—after pickin
g up March along the way. Every delay heightened his anticipation and anxiety.
Still, he made good use of the time. A quick trip around the stable was enough to restock on decent clothes and equipment. Two dozen top-of-the-line rounds for his rifle, plus food, medicine, and spec. They could have found all of this in the Devils’ fortress, but they had been in a rush and had seized nothing but the most valuable items. There had been no time for stew and spec.
All delays end in delight or disaster. In this case, the result was positive. Clown found a suitable vehicle. And a driver. They had negotiated a single ride from her, with half paid in advance.
She was basically a taxi driver.
Taxis, as in the world before, were pricey.
Very pricey.
Cheater had looted the fortress well enough, for the haste they were in. The Devils had kept all kinds of goodies within its walls. Including sporesac loot. Nothing like the loot he had retrieved from the Unnamed, but decent enough. They must have found Bugler’s personal treasury, or perhaps the Devils’ main treasury itself. Clown and Cheater had collected a mass of trophies—and been careful to observe their schedules. Each item, of course, had a value, and they didn’t have time to fight over stray spores here and there. Cheater understood the expense. But the decision did raise some questions. Clown was not only a mechanic. He was a first-rate driver. Why did he hire an outsider for the job? Ordinary vehicles on the Continent weren’t worth much. Buying a car outright for a one-way trip and then ditching it was a common occurrence.
Clown explained this away by saying that the road and the vehicle both were unfamiliar to him. The car’s owner knew it like the back of her hand. She also knew the area, down to each pit and pothole in the roads. She assured them that if anyone knew the fastest way to their destination, it was she. Finally, a group of three was bigger than a group of two, so they’d have better chances if they ran into trouble.
With some Devils about to come back, trouble was not hard to find. But not from the Devils themselves. As information spread at the speed of thought from chats in one region to the next, everyone had become aware of everything that had happened. They had started killing all of the Devils, in all stable clusters. Some they hung, leaving piles of black dust underneath the gallows. This disturbed the Devils, of course, so those still alive all left the towns and settlements they were residing in. Yes, they were also being killed in the country, but not as often. Anarchy reigned. Avengers and vigilantes fired first and checked identities later. Of course, the Devils wouldn’t exactly treat Cheater and Clown kindly. So they could encounter vigilantes or villains along the way, each of which would pull the trigger without a moment’s hesitation. They were both best avoided.
The vehicle was a Continent-adapted pickup truck, and the driver had hiked her fee up due to the danger of their situation. No one would take such risks without a serious reward, paid up front.
It was a nice truck, but it was no tank. Clown said it was the best they could find in the stable. Looking further out would make them lose more of their priceless time.
A pickup with laughably oversized armor was far from the worst option, and besides, they didn’t have far to go. As the crow flies, they had a little over 50 miles ahead of them. The ways the roads wound and wove would push it closer to 65 or 70. They could clear it in a couple of hours.
Assuming conditions were good.
* * *
Clown and Cheater sat in the back. There was no machine gun or flamethrower, just a sad turret mount without an actual turret. At least they were personally well armed.
The border area had belonged entirely to the Devils just the day before. It was fenced in by the black area Cheater had mentioned. Inside of this fence, the number of infecteds allowed to live there was strictly controlled. Sadly, their primary enemy was players, not infecteds.
This was, of course, arguably always true.
Five miles into the trip, they saw a truck smoldering on the side of the road, with the familiar piles of black dust nearby. A little further, the way was nearly blocked by a real vehicle pileup. It had been a chokepoint at some recent time, but a bold and well-armed convoy had punched through. The operation had cost them dearly—about a dozen vehicles, by the looks of it, and a good number more players.
Their dust piles were just beginning to blow away. Everything had happened quite recently. In the past few hours.
Cheater gripped his rifle more tightly, waiting for some unknown mob of opponents to take an interest in the solitary pickup. He began to regret his decision to take a vehicle. Making their way on foot would have been much slower, but also much less attention-grabbing. March was unlikely to wait for his comrades in the new cluster, sure, but he would not be too difficult to find either. After all, Cheater doubted he would be dense or brash enough to head west, back into the Devils’ territory.
But here we are, on the road, making a racket. What’s done is done. No sense complaining now. They cleared one mile after another, and despite Cheater’s fears, no one had disturbed the pickup. Not long left now, and no major population centers on the way. Maybe this’ll be a smooth ride after all.
* * *
He shouldn’t have jinxed it.
They were about ten miles from the finish line. The road they took was a flat two-lane highway sandwiched between two strips of trees. The lack of elevation changes and the density of the forests reduced visibility to nearly nothing. It was the kind of road you only took if you had a long-distance sensor with you. Flash of Omniscience had a trivial range. Even at low speeds, Cheater could not help predict an ambush. At least not with Omniscience.
He could only rely on his eyes. And his Luck, of course.
The pickup truck suddenly swerved. The pavement was smooth, so Cheater doubted the maneuver was intended to dodge a pothole. A machine gun roared in the vegetation to their left, clearing his mind of conjectures. By the sound of it, it was not a large-caliber weapon—perhaps just an ordinary automatic rifle. But the pickup’s armor proved to be more for looks than actual protection, and the gun was close. Even a pistol round could pierce the truck in some places at that distance.
But the driver had somehow noticed the enemy before the firing began and had spun the wheel to dodge some bullets and to present less of a target to others. Most missed, despite being fired from a stone’s toss away. Only a few bullets hit the armor.
The abrupt maneuver caught Cheater by surprise. He dropped down to stay covered inside the truck in the face of the inertia. This disoriented him for a second. That moment’s pause perhaps saved his life as a jagged hole appeared in the side of the truck, a hand’s breadth to his left.
He couldn’t jump out to take a shot; the vehicle was rocking back and forth, throwing him about. The driver was desperately dodging new volleys from some location behind them. The enemy machine gunner, though he had sprayed them at first, was firing in economical bursts of two to four rounds now. That spoke a bit to his experience, yet still he rarely hit.
Clown managed to peak over at the enemy.
Then he swore, as usual. “Shit! Damned invisibles!”
Cheater had no idea what he meant. Perhaps he was confused, or overcome by the stress of the situation.
He had to get a look for himself. He stood up.
The rifle remained on the floor, so that Cheater could grab the side of the truck with both hands. Otherwise, he would risk being tossed overboard.
As he looked behind, Cheater saw something he had never seen before.
The evening had just begun to impinge its dark on the daytime light, and there was enough visibility to see everything around clearly without needing his Darkvision. The twilight may have been better, even: He could see flashes from firing guns more easily than he might during the day. One such tracer zipped by his head.
He felt like it grazed his temple.
But the machine gun itself was, in fact, invisible. The fire was coming from the middle of the road, a short distance above the
asphalt. It was the height at which you’d expect a turret to be mounted on a smaller vehicle. The source of the volleys was pursuing the pickup, at vehicular velocities.
But no vehicle could be seen. The machine gun, the turret, the car, the gunner, the driver, the cab—all of it was utterly transparent. The tracers were the only visible sign.
In a past life, Cheater would have stared in disbelief, but by this point, he was barely affected. He didn’t need Clown to explain in order to understand that this was yet another spectacular ability bestowed by the System. Everyone knew that some people, among them Cheater himself, knew how to mask themselves and their allies from the eyes of those people, monsters, and even machines who might wish them harm. Usually, there were several time restrictions on such abilities, since the System hated to give overly powerful advantages to any one player. But one minute would be plenty of time for the pursuers to riddle their truck, driver, and passengers with bullets. They could then finish them off and loot them without any rush.
