Chicago

by Wyatt Savage

  Melee Chicago

  Wyatt Savage

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Welcome to the Party!

  2. Intruder

  3. Unfinished Business

  4. No Free Lunches

  5. Don’t Blink!

  6. Rage

  7. Apocalyptic Regret

  8. A Simple Misunderstanding

  9. Underground Mysteries

  10. No Mercy

  11. The First Trial

  12. Resurrected

  13. The Darkness Within

  14. Into The Fire

  15. Battle Met

  16. Resurrection

  Afterword

  Melee Mexico Sneak Peek

  It Begins

  Balance

  Foreword

  What happens in the black spire, stays in the black spire.

  Kurtis Evinrude was a broken man, a convict who’d lost his job, his family, and everything he’d ever cared about. But when the global game known as the Melee begins, Kurtis is given an opportunity. Saved by a mortally wounded guard, Kurtis breaks out of prison and escapes into the mean streets of Chicago. Teaming up with an asskicking female fighter, Kurtis battles nightmarish monsters and bloodthirsty game participants as he goes on a quest, gaining points, stashing loot, leveling up, and fighting his way through the different levels of a mysterious black spire to fulfill the guard’s dying wish that he track down and protect his young son.

  Come check out the second book in the Melee series, which is a mashup of Fortnite, Monster Hunter, and good old-fashioned battle royale.

  *Note: this book follows Melee Book 1, but functions almost as a kind of side quest. That is, while this book takes place during the Melee, it focuses on different characters in a different city. Some of these characters will reappear in a later book or books, potentially joining forces with or squaring off against characters from Melee Book 1, and the other Melee books, including the upcoming Melee: Mexico. You’ll have to stop back by to see how everything ties together. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

  MELEE: CHICAGO - Copyright © 2019 by Wyatt Savage. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction and no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without permission in writing from the publisher and copyright owner, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by GameLitRPG, an imprint of Discover GameLit.

  *Special thanks to all the great beta readers and everyone who took a stroll through this book before publication. Couldn’t do it without you guys.

  Created with Vellum

  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

  -T. Roosevelt

  1

  Welcome to the Party!

  In the profound blackness of the witch hole, Kurtis Evinrude learned to love pain. It called to him when he sat in the five-by-five concrete box, knees wedged under his chin, and when he massaged the stitches in his lower jaw, still raw and leaking red, burning when he slurped at the gray gruel the guard passed to him through a gap in the metal door that was no larger than a mail slot. The pain sharpened his senses and it meant that he was alive, at least for another day. Staying alive was a full-time gig in the MCC, Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, a twenty-six-story tower of concrete and steel straight out of the Brutalist school of architecture.

  Someone knocked on the metal door. A man’s voice asked, “How’s life, Kurt?” Kurtis recognized the voice. It was Jimmy Mulvey, one of the COs, a correctional officer, a big Lummox of an Irishman in his late-forties.

  “Taking forever,” Kurtis replied.

  With a hollow chuckle, Jimmy pushed open the slot, which caused a section of metal, maybe half of a TV dinner tray, Kurtis thought, to unfold and extend into the witch hole. Kurtis shielded his eyes as a few daggers of light crept through the slot. A metal plate was on top of the tray, steam rising from a little mound of pureed mystery meat and riced cauliflower.

  “I do believe this is some Eighth Amendment stuff right here,” Kurtis said, squinting, turning up his nose even as he took the plate. He picked at the grub with a set of worn chopsticks he kept hidden in the cuff of his pants. “Definitively cruel and totally unusual.”

  “I’ll get you that BP-8 form so you can lodge an objection,” Jimmy said, chuckling.

  “Right, ‘cause it worked so well the last time I complained...”

  “Bureau of Prisons doesn’t take kindly to malcontents.”

  “I was just following the handbook, Jimmy,” Kurtis replied, tongue-firmly-in-cheek. “Page thirty-two says in order to prevent sexual assault you must be firm and direct if others ask you to do something you don’t want to do. Sea claro y firme si otros…”

  “You stabbed the bastard in the ear with a toothbrush.”

  “I didn’t want to send any mixed messages.”

  “He was in the infirmary for nearly two weeks.”

  A few heartbeats of silence, then Kurtis asked, “So…did the bastard die?”

  “Nope, made it out of surgery seven days ago.”

  Kurtis balled up his fists, thinking about the man he’d shanked, Rignal Hankerson, a nearly seven-foot-tall scarecrow of a thug that the lifers called ‘Big Rig.’ Kurtis took a few bites of the food and pushed the tray over to a wall etched with twenty-two slashes to denote the number of days he’d spent in the witch hole.

  “Big Rig’s gonna want to have a word with you when you get out of DS,” Jimmy warned, using guard talk for disciplinary segregation.

  “I figured,” Kurtis scoffed. His battle with Big Rig had sent him to the infirmary for two days and then, once his jaw had semi-healed, the Discipline Hearing Officer had chucked him down into the witch hole for twenty-four more to think about what he’d done. He’d been away from the other inmates, out of “populace” was the preferred term, for nearly twenty-seven days, so far removed from the daily rhythms of the MCC that it was like he’d stepped off the edge of the world.

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “Course, your situation could be worse…”

  “Couldn’t possibly be,” Kurtis replied, thinking about how Rignal and his crew would likely be the first to greet him when he was released from the hole in forty-eight hours.

  “You could be getting ready for the game,” Jimmy said.

  “Cubs or the Bulls?”

  “The Melee.”

  Kurtis rubbed his ear. He hadn’t heard Jimmy right. “The what?”

  Jimmy moved so close to the slot that Kurtis could see a portion of the guard’s face. Something flickered in Jimmy’s eyes. Something he’d never seen before. What was it? Uncertainty? Fear?

  “What were you doing twenty-six days ago?” Jimmy asked.

  “Comin’ out of surgery.”

  “Christ, then you didn’t see it…”

  “See what?”

  “The aliens.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Jimmy?” Kurtis asked, thinking he was being messed with.

  Jimmy loo
ked around as if to see if anyone was eavesdropping. “They appeared to everyone. They just, poof, materialized in the goddamn air and showed us things—”

  “What kind of—”

  “Terrible things, and then they told us about the game, ‘cause it’s gonna involve almost everyone in the world—”

  “Jimmy…”

  “’Course the game has its own fucked-up rules—”

  “Jimmy!”

  Through the slither of a peephole that Kurtis had, he could see Jimmy hesitating, mouth a-droop.

  “Are you shitting me?” Kurtis asked.

  “I shit you not, Kurtis,” the guard said, wide-eyed, a quiver in his voice. Kurtis had gotten to know Jimmy as well as one could ever know a guard over the last eighteen months, and he was tougher than a woodpecker’s lips. He didn’t brook discontent and he didn’t scare easy. “And that’s not all,” Jimmy continued. “Other things have started to happen. Strange stuff appearing all around the world. Black walls pretty much constructed themselves and split neighborhoods in half. These giant towers rose up out of the ground, spires, some people are calling them. And these things, like cargo containers, appearing at random in the middle of cities...people fighting over them, not even knowing what’s inside.”

  Kurtis let out a derisive snort. “This is all a joke, right?”

  Jimmy’s face told him that it wasn’t. “There are people rioting and looting all over the country ‘cause they’re scared about the game, Kurtis. There’ve been bombing at military bases, airports, and it ain’t terrorism. It’s all over social media.”

  “I’m not exactly the social media type, Jimmy.”

  “I didn’t think you were…”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “’Cause it’s all coming to a head…tomorrow is when it’s supposed to start.”

  “This game of yours?”

  Jimmy nodded, wiping his forehead, which was covered with sweat. This was no prank; Kurtis could tell that he was scared shitless.

  “Well…, then I guess given my present predicament, I won’t be playing,” Kurtis replied, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Pretty sure you won’t have a choice, Kurtis.”

  The slot closed and darkness devoured everything.

  2

  Intruder

  Kurtis had nearly lost his mind in the first seventy-two hours he spent down in the witch hole. He’d seen phantoms climbing up and through the mildewed walls, as well as tiny boxes and grids wavering in and out of sight with no explanation. His head thrummed and his nose bled. The worst part was when he heard voices, including what sounded like a young girl whispering in his ear. Even at its clearest, the voice, which came from the air itself, was garbled and the only thing Kurtis could make out was something about the universe being lubricated with the souls of warriors.

  “Division,” Jimmy Mulvey had whispered to Kurtis when he was at his lowest point. “The only way to stay sane is to divide the day into four blocks of six hours.” That also included the one hour each day Kurtis was permitted to leave the hole for a brief and still-isolated respite in an open air six-by-six cinder block ‘courtyard’ with dried-up and hardened dirt. “Each block has to be dedicated to a different subject and you need to maintain strict focus, or else your mind will start to play hooky.” Kurtis had taken Jimmy’s advice and it was the only thing that got him through those initial dark days with a few sanity cells left.

  On the last day he’d ever spend in the witch hole, Kurtis focused on drumming, selecting the late, great John Bonham to work the first six-hour shift. His life was going to change no matter what on this day. What was the harm in a little indulgence to keep his edge before it all went to shit?

  Kurtis whipped around his chopsticks and began plumbing his memory, searching for the right licks. He’d been a damned-fine drummer in high school and community college, back before his life went sideways after running with a crew of pill-heads and Oxy slingers in Ford Heights.

  Working up to getting in the mood, he began beating out a variety of Bonham crossover triplets. He didn’t have a kick drum, but the sticks sounded good enough as he segued into a half-time shuffle, a lick from “Fool in the Rain” that was heavy on ghost notes and an imaginary high-hat. He dipped back into the triplets from “Good Times, Bad Times,” whacking them for two bars, before sliding into the beats from “Poor Tom”, a more obscure entry in the Zeppelin catalogue. He soundlessly repeated the lyrics from “Poor Tom,” substituting his name and changing it up, singing, “poor Kurtis, seventh son, always knew what the hell was goin’ on.” If only that was true.

  The hours passed and Kurtis worked himself into a lather, transitioning into beats from Jeff Porcaro, Neil Peart, and Carmine Appice, drumming until his hands grew numb. When this was done and the first six hours in the bag, he switched things up and began etching names in the brick walls.

  First was Dorthe Lauritzdotter. She was the one they’d originally brought in for questioning at the Vardohus fortress in 1662, the first witch cast down into the trollkvinnefengeselhulleta, the very first witch hole, the place where an accused was forced to await judgment. He’d memorized the names of the Norwegian witches from a book in the prison library, scrawling Ingeborg Iversdatter and Karen Iversdatter, along with Maren Olsdatter and many others. He liked the Nordic names. There was a rhythm to them. He leaned back, running down a mental list of names, checking hundreds off, wondering what the ladies had done to pass the time back in the seventeenth century.

  That’s when it happened. His big moment had come. Not much he could do other than wait and see just how bad it was going to be.

  A humming filled his ears, setting his teeth on edge, making the tiny hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand at attention. He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the air was filled with little boxes and icons. There were words in the boxes, things like “vitals,” “kills,” “class,” “health,” “chattel,” “species,” and “sass?” The majority of the icons and labels fit together pretty well. He wasn’t a hardcore gamer, but he’d had his fun. But sass? He couldn’t wrap his mind around that one.

  After several seconds of trying to make sense of it all and get his bearings, as if it were just any ordinary game, the reality of it walloped him. He smacked his head and closed his eyes, but the boxes wouldn’t go away. With some effort, he found that he was able to mentally shift the boxes around, up, down, and sideways, stacking them, reordering them as if he were using a HUD, a heads-up display, in a full-immersion video game. Words filtered across his “screen,” scrolling out all at once:

  Species:Homo Sapiens (Evinrude, Kurtis)

  Chattel:Wooden Sticks (2)

  Health:10/10

  Level:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:0

  Vitals:BP – 121/80; T – 98.03f; RR – 12bpm

  XP:0

  Kurtis reached out his hand, to manipulate the words, only to find that they were holographic. His fingers passed right through, which was actually pretty cool in the aesthetic sense, yet not helpful in the slightest.

  He blinked repeatedly, attempting to will the images to make sense. Nothing changed, aside from a cursor with the words, “Do you have questions?”

  “Y-yes,” Kurtis stammered.

  Nothing happened. There was only silence in response.

  “Um…hello?”

  The cursor winked again. Before he could respond, a concussive note echoed from somewhere overhead, a deep resounding boom that shook the walls, showering Kurtis in dust and debris.

  The sirens and klaxons sounded next, followed by screams. Kurtis closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of men and women shouting intermixed with other noises, including the braying of what sounded like animals. What the fuck was going on?

  A status message screen appeared in Kurtis’s view and read:

  Congratulations, the Melee has begun. You have entered Level 1, the Onslaught!

  Objective: Reach Wa
ll #1

  Reward: 2000 XP

  Time limit: 6:00:00

  Penalty for failing to reach the wall: You will reach your journey’s end.

  Kurtis had no idea what that meant so he crawled over to the door and placed his ear to it. What sounded like firecrackers echoed in the distance along with more shrieks and a soulless howling.

  Fingers out, Kurtis grabbed the edge of the metal slot when something big crashed into the other side of the door.

  He flinched and collapsed backward, heart in his throat. He grabbed the only weapon he had, the chopsticks, which were canted at an angle. He began rubbing them against the stone floor, trying to sharpen an edge. It was the only thing he could think to do.

  The slot began opening with a rusty creak. Kurtis tensed, daggering the chopsticks, ready to plunge them into whatever awaited him.

  After several more seemingly endless seconds, the slot opened in full, and Kurtis watched statistics populate in his HUD, even though he wasn’t actually wearing a physical headset. The stats reflected the identity of the intruder on the other side of the door:

  Species: Homo Sapiens (Mulvey, James)

  Chattel:9 mm G17 Gen-5

  Health:2/10

  Level:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:2

  Vitals:BP – 143/80; T – 98.03f; RR – 18bpm

  XP:30

  It was Jimmy Mulvey. His face was streaked in gore and his eyes bulged.

  “Jesus…Jimmy, what’s happening out there?”

  Jimmy didn’t answer. Kurtis heard the sound of jangling keys and then the door opened and Jimmy was visible, slumped against the wall outside, clutching his abdomen with his left hand, trying to stop a coil of sausage-like entrails from leaking out of a nasty blackish-red gash. Kurtis fought the urge to vomit. He held out his hands as if to assist Jimmy, who shook his head.