She sat in the passenger seat of the truck and glared at the only two surviving members of her search party. The truck tore down the suburb streets, past row after row of houses they’d already combed through. Now she’d have to go back, get some more soldiers, and rain hell upon whoever was stupid and ballsy enough to challenge her.
The driver, a weak-chinned man named Jeffery, said, “Check the recent kills list?”
Florence glowered up at her HUD and swiped at it, making the screen shift.
The six most recent kills were all her gang members, which was both irritating and strategically damaging. Half of her power came from other players being too afraid to face her and her crew when they came rolling up.
There were only two names listed under killed by: Malina Ortiz and Clint Hawkins. She tapped at their faces and scanned their player profiles.
“What the hell is a level 12 doing helping a total fucking noob?” Florence said.
Jeffery offered a shrug as weak as his chin.
Florence had to suppress the urge to blow his fucking head off. It was never a good habit to kill your own soldiers just because you’re mad. Even if they did have a stupid vacant look that meant they probably deserved it.
Florence shoved the players’ stats away and fumed. She hadn’t felt this way in a long while. Not since she gathered her first ragtag party, and some asshole with a rocket launcher obliterated all of them.
It nearly killed her, too. She ran away trailing blood, staring at the 15 HP flashing in her HUD, waiting for that final bullet or explosion to follow her.
It had been a bitter, brutal defeat, too much like this one. But this time, she wasn’t powerless. She was pissed.
It wasn’t a huge loss, player-wise. They were all under-10s, veritable pawns. There would always be more desperate bastards to recruit. No one would stare down the end of her gun and tell her no if the choice was join up or die.
Really, she regretted having to leave their gear behind. Their items were worth more than all of them combined, and she had to just dump and run.
Florence glanced at the other player who managed to stay alive. He was sitting in the backseat, his machine gun resting casually against his thigh. His head was on a constant swivel, watching the street blur past them.
He didn’t speak much English. He was some kind of Slavic, but Florence couldn’t say much more than that. She kept him around because he didn’t start shit, and he could reassemble a field stripped AR-15 in about forty-five seconds.
Whoever he was, he was former military of some kind. Fuck if she knew much else.
The man mostly said yes, no, and Boots, which she presumed was a fake name he stuck with. His player name was all Cyrillic, which meant it might as well have been gibberish, for her. At least he understood the gist of what she said.
“Boots,” she said. She held up her gun and gestured toward the road behind them. “Bang bang, yeah?”
The man, Boots, gave her a thumbs up and said something completely incomprehensible before he turned away from her.
There was a look on his face, this unspoken irritation that she’d even said anything. She wished, not for the first time, that she could speak Russian or… whatever the hell he spoke.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Jeffery said.
“You’re going to drive us back with minimal small talk, and then we’re going to find those kids and teach them a good lesson about only starting fights they can finish.”
Florence flicked out her pocketknife and scraped dried blood out from underneath her fingernails.
Jeffery, to his credit, knew that was the time to shut his damn mouth.
Boots gave her another one of those critical once-over glances. He reminded her of a house cat that would eat its owner, if it was big enough.
She pulled the walkie-talkie from her belt and spat into it, “Atlas, you there?”
Her radio was silent for a few long seconds. She resisted the immediate urge to flick back to the recent kills list to check if she recognized any of her teammates there.
It couldn’t possibly be a coordinated attack. Nobody in this game could get that kind of firepower together without her knowing about it.
“Hey, boss,” he said, his voice staticky over the radio transmission.
The tension unwound from Florence’s shoulders, but only by a few degrees. Atlas was her second-in-command. He was the first player she convinced to team up with her after her first party got blown apart.
God, she hoped she wouldn’t have to kill him someday. But it always existed as a possibility in the back of her mind.
“You saw the kill list?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. You guys got fucked.” He had an airy South African accent that made him sound too gleeful when he said that. “And by a level 1, too. Kinda embarrassing, you know.”
Florence’s lips flattened into an unamused line. “So kind of you to radio to check in on me.”
“Eh, your name wasn’t on it. I knew everyone important was still alive.”
Jeffery hollered over the sound of the engine, “Thanks, jackass.”
“Don’t worry, Jeff. You’re at least my sixth favorite person on the team.”
“Wow. I’m flattered.” He glared at Florence’s walkie-talkie out of the corner of his eye. “And it’s Jeffery.”
“Seventh favorite, now.”
“You just drive, Jeffy.” Florence punched his shoulder, in a mostly friendly way, then turned and stared out her passenger window.
A face flashed in a house window as she passed, some pale and frightened bastard. She considered asking Jeffery to stop, just to give her a little dopamine buzz of wiping out a newbie and gaining some XP.
“Atlas, can you prep some guys?” she asked. “Level 10s and up only.”
“Already on it. I figured you’d want a nice vengeance mission.”
Florence smiled a blood-hungry smile. “You know me so well.”
“We’ll smoke them.”
“That’s a given.”
Then again, her soldiers shouldn’t have lost in the first place. She was fucking level 19, and she had to just retreat from what should have been a stupid-easy fight.
As if reading her mind, Atlas said, “Tough words from a chick who just lost to them.”
“Oh, fuck you. They’re lucky I brought mostly under-10s with me.”
“Mhmm.”
She could practically hear his smug smirk.
“Keep it up and you’ll be the bait on this mission, buddy.” She wondered if he could hear her barely-hidden smile.
“You know you couldn’t get rid of me that easily.”
“God, don’t I.”
Florence ruffled her fingers through her afro. A tiny blessing of the way Hell dealt with time: her hair stayed amazing, as if it was always freshly conditioned. Maybe she was just lucky she died on a good hair day.
“We’ll be there in fifteen,” she said.
“We’ll be ready for you, boss.”
Florence clipped her walkie-talkie back onto her belt. She caught Boots staring at her in the side view mirror, his face unreadable.
She twisted around in her seat and asked him, holding up her gun as a gesture, “You ready to fight with us again?”
Boots nodded.
He understood more than he let on. She was certain of it, and it made her leery and impressed all at once.
“Good. We’ve got a reputation to defend.” She turned around again and scanned the road.
They were out of the neighborhood now and onto the open stretch of fields and thin forest that led to her base. It was unofficially her territory, because anyone willing to venture into it was stupid, suicidal, or both.
There was little probable chance of an ambush out here. A roadside bomb, maybe, but she’d killed the last couple random players who figured out the craft recipe to make their own. She hadn’t had a vehicle blown up since.
Florenc
e flicked open the kill list again and glared at those two names. Clint and Malina. She opened their player profiles and scanned their pictures until she had their faces memorized.
They’d officially made the top two slots on her shit list. And nobody got off it without dying first. Nobody.
CHAPTER 7
M
ALINA WAS RIGHT. THEY WERE better boots, even with the cold layer of someone else’s blood soaking the soles.
They stood together in Malina’s ruined kitchen. The dead players’ gore carried bootprints all through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. It would have looked like a house from a Norman Rockwell painting if not for all that blood.
Clint tried not to look at the faces of the dead. He nodded at the back door. “Should we go?”
Malina snorted at him. Now that the panic was wearing off, Clint finally noticed the streak of blood on her cheek. He wondered whose it was.
“What did we just talk about? Always loot the bodies, kid.”
He smirked. “Don’t call me kid unless you’re trying to make yourself sound old.”
Malina scowled at him. “I died tragically young, thank you very much.”
“Not that young,” Clint muttered under his breath, but there was a smile at the corner of his mouth.
Malina didn’t smile, but the look in her eye was almost amused. “Shut up and help me search them. Then we’ll put the bodies in the basement.”
Clint looked between her and the dead players. Flies hummed over the bodies and their thickening blood.
“What?” he said. “Why?”
“Slows down the crows.”
“The… crows?”
Clint leaned forward to peer through the shattered window. The sky was an empty perfect blue, broken only a by a black crow sitting on a power line, watching the house intently.
Malina shrugged and pulled the backpack off a dead woman. She dug through her pockets and tossed a few boxes of ammunition to the side.
“I don’t know, it’s the way they’re coded, or… whatever. If there is coding.”
Clint hid his grimace. Then she didn’t know what this place really was, either. Death called it a game, but it felt too real to be digital. Real but not real. What word was there for that?
“Right. And you’re scared of birds?”
Humor kept him calm. Gave him a little piece of normalcy.
“You should be, you no-gun, no-armor prick,” Malina said.
Clint caught himself smiling. Even if he was in Hell, at least he was lucky enough to wake up just down the road from a sarcastic sharpshooting nurse.
He tapped his pistol, which he’d wedged into the waistband of his jeans. “Just a no-armor prick now, thanks to you.”
That did win a smirk. Malina hooked her arms under the dead woman’s armpits and dragged her backward, smearing blood across the cheery yellow tile floor.
“The point is, crows show up when a dead body sits in the open for long enough. People watch for them, because it means some free loot, maybe. We’re all just scavengers.”
Malina heaved. The body fell forward, through the hole, and hit the ground with a wet slap, like soup in a plastic bag.
She stood back and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t want to cross paths with anyone if we can help it.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s smart.”
He knelt down beside one of the bodies, a man with scarlet-caked hair, and twisted the dead man’s arm to wedge it through his backpack strap. The body felt real. Flesh-heavy and limp and already getting a strange, stale smell, like uncooked chicken.
He tried not to think about the blood soaking into his sweater as he hauled the dead body to the trapdoor and let it fall.
They worked quickly, grabbing backpacks, rummaging through pockets, piling up their findings just outside of the blood-puddle. Malina offered him tips as they went: take any and all ammunition, take the medicine, leave the beer—seriously, leave the beer, do you think you’re gonna have time to get drunk?—take the best weapons, hide the rest.
When they were through, together they started moving the bodies. Clint’s stomach was empty, but he almost vomited acid when he saw a dead player whose face was gone, leaving her esophagus and lower jaw exposed, teeth gaping.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.
“Yeah. You get used to it.”
Malina planted her boot on the corpse’s side and tipped her through the trapdoor, onto the ragdoll pile, which was surrounded by a massive blood splatter.
Clint leaned over to look and swallowed a dry-heave. “How are we supposed to get the food out of there now?”
“Food just refills your energy. It’s useful, but it’s heavy. We made better use of it, anyway.”
“Did we?”
“Well, it kept us alive. Just not in the way the game design intended.” Malina smacked his chest and nodded over her shoulder. “C’mon. We’re almost done.”
They got to the sixth and last body. Clint picked the man up by his shoulders, wincing as the shattered skull spread scarlet gore all over his sweater.
He seethed through his teeth and asked, “How long have you been doing this?”
“I don’t know. There’s no time in here, not really.” She hinged her injured left arm forward and backward, as if testing the ache of it, then hauled him up by his boots. “God, he’s a heavy bastard.”
They swung together and let him fall with another wet-meat slap.
Malina staggered back, wiping her brow. “Anyway. It’s always day time. The weather changes, once in a while. And sometimes Florence gets bored and comes looting. Usually, I don’t have any shouty idiots on my porch getting their attention.”
Clint almost replied, Well, I’m not the one who fired a shotgun, but he bit back his sharpness.
Instead he said, “Who is this Florence chick, anyway?”
“She’s been here as long as I have. She amassed the biggest collection of guns and beer and boys.” Malina swept her shell casings down into the trapdoor with her boot. “People found out real quick that you either join Florence, or she kills you. Bottleneck effect. She gets her boys to camp where all the new players spawn and picks them off.”
“What happens when she runs out of people to kill? When it’s just her people left?”
“I think she’s close to finding out.” Malina squatted and started upending backpacks. “I’m sure they’ll get rabid on each other. That’s the point of this game, anyway.”
“Yeah, I got a tiny hint of that.” Clint crouched beside her to help.
He’d always been good at first-person shooters, but they got repetitive, after a while. The real thing left him adrenaline-high and somewhere between terrified and invincible.
“So how do we get to the next level?”
“No one knows.”
“Are you serious?”
Malina scowled at him, a don’t-be-a-jackass kind of scowl. “What kind of question is that? If I knew how to get to the second level, I wouldn’t be here. And you can bet your ass Florence wouldn’t be, either.”
She stooped over the loot pile and tossed him a bulletproof vest. “Put this on.”
“Oh, cool. I get to be an armed, armored prick.”
Malina laughed, a surprisingly sweet sound. She said, “Don’t make me regret working with you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
They stuffed everything they could carry into their backpacks. Clint cinched on a belt he’d stripped from one of the bodies. It had a pistol holster and a sleek leather sheath for his knife. Then he strapped on an undamaged Kevlar vest that Malina handed him (Simple Kevlar Vest (+15 DEF)).
For the first time since he woke up in literal Hell, he was ready to face whatever waited outside that door.
“Alright,” Malina said. “Strategy time. Obviously, we should stop at your spawn point and see what loot you missed.”
“Do we know for sure I missed someth
ing?”
“If you didn’t find your basement, you definitely missed it.”
She hunkered down against the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, and Clint followed.
From here, he could see if someone opened the back door before they even walked in. It seemed like the best cover they could hope for in the bullet-ridden house.
Malina pulled out her map. She had a good two-thirds of the circle filled, but the map only seemed to follow the inner edge, about an inch deep. The interior remained vastly empty, except for the words THE FIELD stamped in the middle. The little houses were drawn in squares of yellow and blue and green.
Malina’s location dot blinked on the southeastern edge of the circle, above one of the brightly-colored houses.
It looked like one of those cross-stitch patterns Rachel always loved, random and ordered at the same time.
No, he corrected himself. Loves. Rachel is present tense.
She was so good at color. That’s what he thought of, when he closed his eyes and tried to imagine her. Her bright green eyes. All her colors, and the way she wore the light.
The faraway rattle of bullets snapped Clint back to the present moment.
He and Malina sat together like startled rabbits, frozen, listening for the hawks.
Then, when it went quiet, Malina tapped one of the X-marked houses. “These are all houses that Florence and her buddies use for outposts.” She traced the northern edge of the map. “Her base is up north. She and her boys are hiding in the school building.”
“So we avoid that.” He pointed at the field. “Have you been here yet?”
“Yeah. The usable map is a ring. In the center, there’s just…” She frowned at the map and folded it up. “This massive empty field. Goes on for a couple miles. Nothing in it, just grass. It’s a death sentence.”
Clint remembered that feeling of being hunted. He nodded, grimly. He was getting better at packaging up his fear and tucking it into a dark corner of his mind, where it could not touch him.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“Chart out the last bit of the forest I haven’t finished. I don’t want to go much further north, if we can help it.”
“Right, makes sense.”
9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1 Page 4
