9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1

by Static, E. C.

  He lifted his gun, closed his eyes, and fired. Warm wetness speckled against his face. Blood and brain matter, probably. He wiped it away on his sleeve.

  Even behind his shut eyes, his HUD said, Double Kill (+75 XP). Just like that, he’d obliterated two people and gotten his XP halfway to level 4.

  Clint wished he felt anything other than nausea.

  “Nice,” Malina said. “Think there’s more?”

  She was already rooting through their pockets. Clint hunkered down beside her, absent, burying the memory of the woman’s terrified face deep in his mind. The back of his mouth tasted like bile.

  He wanted to be as unshakable as Malina just as much as he dreaded it. He didn’t know which was better: choosing to let go of his empathy or having no other choice.

  “Don’t know,” he mumbled, surveying the forest so he wouldn’t have to look at the people he’d just killed. He flattened his face into something like grim humor.

  “You could stand up and test it,” he said. “Become a human pincushion.”

  Malina scoff-laughed. “We can’t both be gimpy.”

  The sky started darkening over them. Gray storm clouds gathered. They waited another few minutes for any other players to come out, everything reeking of blood and gun smoke. If anyone else was left, they scattered when they heard the gunfire.

  Together, they searched the bodies and found two pistols (another Beretta M9 and a Glock G43) with no ammunition, an extra magazine (empty), a coin, and only fifteen arrows between them. Not even any body armor.

  Clint surveyed the meager pile of loot. He picked up the coin and turned it over in his fingers.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s just some random background item. Not logged in the system.”

  Clint frowned at it.

  It was the size of a silver dollar and had inset circular grooves, leading from the center to the circle’s exterior. The center circle was all white with two small black triangles, while the outer edge was a raised metal ring with white etchings along it.

  The markings looked like they could have just been scuffs. Or they could have been intentional. When he pushed on the outer ring with his thumb, it rotated with a solid clicking noise.

  “Fuck it.” Malina’s voice broke through his concentration. “Let’s move on. No one else would join a party that shitty anyway.”

  Clint nodded. He stuffed the coin in his pocket, along with Rachel’s hair bow. At the very least, it could keep his hands busy when his mind was spinning.

  He stood over the dead players and grimaced. “I would have left them alone if they didn’t shoot first.”

  “I know.” She consulted her broken watch and said, “Time to go. We’re nearly there.”

  Clint picked up his backpack, and they set off again, still following the boundary wall. He did his best to think of nothing but the present moment: the weight of his gun, the burn in his shoulder, the rustle of leaves all around them.

  As they moved, the sky became darker and darker, and distant thunder rumbled.

  The gunfire must have scared off anyone else hiding on this edge of the forest, or they just got lucky. The two of them made it to the northern edge of the trees without running into anyone else.

  Or maybe, Clint considered with a shiver, they had passed a dozen of them, silent, hidden.

  Maybe the only players who clung to the forest were the ones too scared to bet their own life. Anyone willing to risk it all was already out in the city, farming for XP, hunting for better and better items.

  Malina stopped at the edge of the forest, panting, grinning. They still hung back in the shadow of the trees, where they could scan the map beyond.

  The forest led down into a valley with a thin creek, a rusting and deserted playground beside it. There was a bullet-ridden statue of a smiling moose at the playground’s entrance.

  Beyond it, the valley sloped up, leading to a low grass hill with a brick building at the top. Only two of its front windows were shot out, which made the front entrance look like a grimacing cartoon face. Cars wilted on punctured tires in the parking lot.

  “That,” Malina said, “is the library.”

  Clint grinned and clapped his hands together. It made the wound in his shoulder sting, but he was too excited to care about that now.

  “Then let’s fuckin’ go!”

  “Wait. You see that, out there?”

  Malina pointed to another building just beyond the library, partially obscured by the hedge running along the library’s far wall. It was a sprawling structure, at least twice as big as Clint’s high school, just visible over another ridge.

  “That’s Florence’s base. There are fifty or sixty soldiers just beyond the library hedge. They’re above us on the hill, so they can see all of this shit down here.”

  Clint hesitated. He tilted his head and listened.

  Gunfire resounded from over the hill, but there was shouting, too. Laughter. A radio blaring music.

  “Are they having a fucking party?” he said.

  “That’s a new level of arrogance, even for Florence. It might help us out, though.”

  Clint nodded. He glanced at his player stats. Still at 32/100 NRG. Running at full speed, Malina had said, would burn up 10 NRG points every minute. He had exactly enough to run there, get what they needed, run back to the forest.

  It would work, if nobody saw them or started a fight.

  He said, “If they’re distracted, we could make a run for it. Hide behind the cars first, then make for the library.”

  “Right.” Malina’s grin was possessed. Manic. Clint wondered if she was an adrenaline junkie in real life. “And pray to fucking hell we don’t get shot.”

  That expression made Clint laugh. It was appropriate, of course; praying to God wouldn’t do any good in a place like this.

  Clint said, “I’m glad I met you.”

  “Don’t be sappy. We’re not dying.” But she gripped his forearm tightly, like it was the closest she could bring herself to hugging him. “Keep your head down. Try to make yourself as small as possible. Make yourself harder to hit.”

  Malina paused and swung her backpack off one shoulder to unzip the front pouch and pull out a granola bar. “And eat this. Just in case.”

  Clint took it (Granola Bar (+10 NRG)) and scarfed it down.

  “This is fucking stupid,” he told her with his mouth full.

  “Definitely. But not the stupidest thing we’ve done yet.” She slipped her arm under her backpack strap and coiled like a greyhound, ready to launch. “Ready?”

  “I guess—”

  Malina didn’t wait for a full reply. She gripped her shotgun in both hands and took off sprinting, down into the valley.

  Clint plunged after her.

  CHAPTER 22

  T

  HE PARTY WAS IN FULL swing, and Boots was having none of that bullshit.

  When Florence finished her empty speech, most of the soldiers weren’t convinced she was the glorious commander they had taken her for in the first place. Boots had lingered in the crowd for a few more minutes, smoking a cigarette, listening to the gossip.

  The consensus, from what he could glean, seemed simple: at least with Florence, they weren’t dead yet. They would stay with her for the vague sense of security, as long as that lasted.

  A low fucking bar, as far as Boots was concerned.

  But Florence was smart, and Boots resented her for that. She saw the safest strategy and took it: admit fallibility, but plant fear and doubt in their minds that anyone else could do better than her. If she had strutted out all arrogant and indignant, Boots was sure the talk would have ended in a total bloodbath.

  Shame. He would have enjoyed picking through the aftermath.

  Now Florence had broken out the beer and a dozen bottles of the good whiskey. All those stupid goats were getting trashed and goofy and playing target practice on the burnt-out jeep. Jus
t wasting bullets, none of them caring, not even Florence. She probably figured it was better for them to obliterate a couple cars instead of her.

  Boots stood at the western edge of the school yard, leaning against a tree near the deserted track field, where he could see the library and the valley, spread below him.

  The forest was motionless. The library looked like a mausoleum to a forgotten king. Nobody was stupid enough to venture this far north of the map anymore.

  But Boots volunteered to play guard so that he wouldn’t have to fake amusement at the beer-and-bullets party happening behind the school.

  At this rate, someone was going to get wasted and blow their own head off. Or Boots’s. He wasn’t interested in being around for either.

  The sky threatened rain. Boots wrinkled his nose. If he was going to be wet and cold and miserable, he could get himself a glass of whiskey and at least be a little drunk for it.

  He cast one more lingering stare at the library, the playground, the edge of the forest.

  For a moment, he thought he saw something moving at the forest’s edge. A twitch of brush.

  His hand went for his walkie-talkie. He squinted, looking for shadows among shadows.

  After a long few seconds, a bird fluttered out from the brush and lighted upon a tree branch.

  Boots rolled his eyes and walked back toward the blacktop behind him, where the party was raging strongly now. Someone had started a fire inside a garbage barrel, and they were cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over it, like this was a neighborhood block party in an American movie.

  If Florence got all those drunk bastards killed, Boots thought, they deserved it.

  He slipped past soldiers who were staggering, laughing, playing beer pong with empty shotgun shells. Boots ignored them and made for the drinks table, where he grabbed a quarter-full handle of whiskey.

  Someone stumbled against the table beside him and slurred something that Boots would have struggled to understand if the bastard was sober.

  “No English,” Boots muttered without looking at the guy.

  “Wait.” The guy grabbed his arm.

  Boots snapped his head toward him and felt his fist tighten at his side. He couldn’t keep the glare off his face, a look that needed no translation: don’t fucking touch me.

  Atlas. Second-in-command, technically his senior officer. Florence’s whipping boy. But the glare worked. Even through his alcohol haze, he let go of Boots’s arm.

  “Boots, right?” Atlas slurred.

  He was fall-over drunk, just swaying there, gripping the table for support.

  “Da,” Boots answered, flatly.

  Atlas, like any good drunk, couldn’t process the look on Boots’s face any more than a dog can recognize a pissed-off cat. He raised his cup and pointed at Boots with it, mumbling some string of words Boots only caught pieces of: good job, Jeffery, fight.

  “Jeffery die?” Boots asked, keeping the hope out of his voice.

  “No, no.” Atlas gestured vaguely inside. “Mamiko’s got ’im,” he said, then a string of completely incoherent sounds.

  “Too bad,” Boots muttered in Chechen.

  He paused and glanced over Atlas. The guy might be too drunk to remember anything Boots said, or at least that he had said it. He’d always been carefully sparing with his words around Florence and Atlas. Let them think he was just some confused foreigner, nodding along with the group.

  “Florence?” he asked, gesturing toward the crowd behind them.

  “No, she’s working. Making a something and something something she always something.”

  Of course, those somethings were words, but Boots had no holy clue what. He could guess, at least.

  She was probably inside, absolutely scrambling. Trying to figure out how to make it to the next level before everyone sobered up and remembered they were furious with her.

  “Da, okay.” Boots patted Atlas’s shoulder and told him, “Have fun,” before he walked away, the whiskey pressed against his leg to hide it.

  Of course, Atlas was so drunk, he probably wouldn’t have noticed if Boots took half the bottles and just strolled off.

  On an impulse, Boots paused and plucked up a plastic cup from the table. Someone might have used it, maybe. He was already in Hell; germs couldn’t make it that much worse.

  He took the bottle and the cup and ventured into the school.

  Boots tapped the glass as he walked, trying to unwind the tense thistle of his nerves. This idea would either ingratiate him or get him on Florence’s shit list for the next who-knew-how-long.

  No middle-ground.

  He’d been chewing over Death’s “hint” ever since the Lord of Hell’s voice crackled suddenly over his walkie-talkie. The message had been in English, but Russian subtitles helpfully appeared in Boots’s HUD.

  He wondered if the system just didn’t have Chechen, or if it was one of the dozens of smaller languages throughout the world lumped into some bigger language family for the sake of easy programming.

  If all this even was a program. Apart from Death’s occasional appearances and endless daytime, the game felt real as living ever did.

  He wandered down the empty halls. Someone had shot up the transformer days ago, back when Boots first joined the party, and the school hadn’t had any electricity since. The halls were dim and the classrooms even dimmer. It felt shadowy and cool, the closest thing to night Boots had seen since he died.

  Boots knew exactly where to go. Past the nurse’s office, where he could see Mamiko, her back to the glass-paned door, reading a book while she watched over an unconscious Jeffery.

  He scoffed and kept going past the armory, the gym, the locker rooms, down to the front office.

  The office looked like a set from an American movie. A bulletin board with flyers in English, pictures of smiling students, a neatly-organized secretary’s desk.

  It would have looked picture-perfect, if the front windows overlooking the hallway hadn’t been shot out. Glass still glittered on the floor, crunching under Boots’s feet as he walked in.

  Boots went to the shut door marked PRINCIPAL ALIGHIERI and knocked, lightly.

  “What?” Florence grumbled from inside like a bear.

  Boots hinged the door open and said, “Hey, boss.”

  Florence sat at the desk, which had a huge reproduction of the Level 1 map, spray painted on a chalkboard. She had pages of handwritten notes around herself, probably observations and guesses and clues and logs of who had seen what where. Bookshelves lined the walls behind her.

  When she looked up and saw Boots, her stare darkened. “Why are you here?”

  Boots held up the whiskey bottle and the cup.

  “I’m not drinking.”

  He put on his best innocent, confused face before he poured a couple shots in the cup and held it out to her.

  Florence’s eyes narrowed, but she took the cup without drinking from it.

  “Thanks. You guard. Now.”

  Boots barely kept the irritation from his face. He hated when she did that, even if it did prove he had sufficiently convinced her his English was worse than it really was.

  “I have idea,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Death. Next level.” He held up two fingers to demonstrate.

  Florence sat glaring at him for a long few seconds before she gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit.”

  Boots relaxed into the chair and drank from the mouth of the bottle. He sized her up, the rigid line of her shoulders, her tight-pressed lips.

  He considered his next action like picking between which knife to cut her with. Just enough to sting, not enough to really make her bleed.

  “I hope you have a good reason for leaving your post,” she said.

  “I think much. Death, he…” He gestured at the small television, suspended in the upper corner of the ceiling.

  “Yes?” Florence said, impatiently. B
ut she picked up her whiskey and took a sip of it at last.

  Boots swigged back a bit more whiskey and wiped his mouth off on his sleeve. He had an idea of a direction to move in, a guess at what Death meant.

  But he had no reason to just give Florence his idea for free. Not when there was a chance to get something out of it.

  “You have — uh, you say loot box? Yes?” Boots mimed the shape of the wooden crate Florence always put her self-made loot boxes in.

  “Oh, I get you. Give a prize to whoever finds the answer?”

  For the first time since they met, Florence was sizing him up like he was an equal, not just a Slavic idiot who was good with guns.

  Boots nodded and smirked at her with the whiskey bottle pressed to his lips. “Is good idea.”

  “Yes. It is.” Florence drained her cup and held it out to him. It was a request for more that didn’t need translation.

  Boots leaned forward and tipped more whiskey in.

  Florence gave him an unreadable stare over the lip of her cup.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve never heard you talk this much, Mr. No English.”

  “I have idea, I talk. No idea, no talk.” He stood and gave her a lazy, two-finger salute, sarcastic enough to make her mouth tug upward, just a fraction. “Dasvidanyia, boss.”

  Boots stood up. He had his hand on the doorknob when Florence’s walkie talkie started to crackle. He didn’t recognize the voice on the other end. Some poor bastard who would probably die here like the rest of them.

  “Boss,” the voice huffed, breathless. “It looks like there’s movement inside the library.”

  Boots froze and turned to look from Florence to the radio.

  Florence pulled the radio from her belt. She said, “Where are you?”

  “By the track field. I didn’t see much. It might be nothing. Just—”

  “Boots is coming out to meet you. I want you two to scout it out. Make sure it’s all clear.” Her stare held Boots’s sternly as she released the call button. “You’re not going to pretend you didn’t understand that, are you?”