Soda Pop Soldier (14 page)

After a few minutes, I've gotten the hang of it and the chain is swinging in wide arcs out over the abyss, nearing other chains.

Now or never.

I left-click at the top of an arcing swing to the right and sail across the void toward another chain I'm aiming at. Again, far rushes to near in the brief moment of flight and I barely grab the next chain, realizing the timing of the grab is even narrower than I'd thought.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat . . .

I'm making good progress through the forest of chains, keeping my mind off the numbing sobriety of what the slightest misstep or failure to catch the next chain means. Soon I've lost sight of the edge of the abyss and the Cages where I started. Around me is darkness. Wherever I am, some indeterminate light source shines down from above. I can see the glint of light off distant links of iron chains.

Sometimes the chains are far apart. Sometimes they cluster like stands of trees. It's nearing four o'clock in the morning, New York City time. I'm wondering if there's an end to this when I see a tight cluster of bound and twisted chains ahead. Twisted into a giant hive. Almost like a bird's nest made of iron linked chains instead of twigs and sticks. I adjust my swings to get closer to it.

Maybe this is the way out.

Though I have a feeling it isn't. The nest of chains feels too dark and too ominous to be anything good. But then after tonight, after Yuri and the butchering Dwarves and the women in chains, I'm wondering if there's anything good in this game.

Is anything wrong with anything?

The Vampire.

Yeah, I think about the ten grand someone would've paid to . . . and then I finish the thought . . . to kill Yuri. I forget about it and concentrate on my swings and grabs.

I don't look at the darkness below. Recycle Bin was probably the wrong term. Looking down into the blackness, it feels more like the literal meaning of the word
delete
than anything else.

Deleted.

One missed grab and I'm deleted.

I'm near the nest of chains when she crawls out from within it. She's long legged, another programmer's fantasy of the perfect girl rendered in mythic proportions. She has a belt of silver coins across shapely hips. A too-small bikini top made of the same polished glimmering coins covers an impossible chest. Above her cat's-eye makeup, two short twirling horns rise to sharp points above her falling blood-red hair. Her feet are thick bird-of-prey claws. Her arms are wings with strange claw hands that erupt from the pinions.

She cries out, birdlike, after she catches the movement of the chain I'm resting on as it barely swings side to side in the darkness. A second later she begins to slowly beat her wings, running, then launching herself out into the void toward me.

Her wings sound like leather flapping in the wind.

Two others, one blond, the other brunette, similar and yet each stunningly different beauties in spite of their claws and crow feather wings, follow her out of their nest and circle the darkness around me. They make close passes, their leathery wings beating, flaunting their bodies and whispering.

“You're going the wrong way,” says one, which one I can't tell. The other two echo, “Yes, the wrong way.” They hover out over the darkness, their wings beating, beaconing.

I wonder if I am going the wrong way.

Then they begin to sing.

A lullaby.

It's haunting . . . it's beautiful.

In New York it's past four o'clock in the morning.

For a moment my avatar's POV suddenly blinks. Like the Samurai is getting sleepy. Which is weird, because I really am tired, and I'm starting to feel it. I think about another scotch.

The Harpies are drifting closer.

“Harpies,” it occurs to me, seems right. I didn't even think about it, but that's what they're called. Except why the song? That's like Sirens. The two are different. But both . . . both had bad intentions for heroes. In stories.

The Samurai's eyes close again and when they open, the Harpies are closer. Singing their lullaby. Beautiful . . . and drifting closer. Their skin glows softly under the mysterious light, making them erotic visions of sweat and myth. Their voices, deep and husky, blend in a trancelike harmony, and even though their words are somehow lost, or unimportant, I know it's a lullaby they're singing.

I think about opening my apartment window for some cold, fresh air, but if I do, I'll never get the apartment warm again. I think I'm even out of the masking tape I'd need to reseal the windows around the frame.

I'm not focusing on the screen and when I force myself to, they're even closer.

Do something.

What?

I tap the keys, getting the chain going using momentum and direction.

The Samurai's eyes close again.

This time, in the darkness behind my avatar's closed-eye POV, my screen reveals a scarlet and velvet vision of one of the Harpies, the blonde. She's languishing on a bed of crushed velvet, surrounded by rich cabalistic tapestries. Her flesh is nubile. Her lips full and pouting. She blows me a kiss . . .

. . . and then the eyes of the Samurai are open and I realize that I've almost actually fallen asleep in the real world. I felt, for a moment, like I was there with her. In that bedroom.

The chain swings out and away from them. I aim for another chain to leap onto and it's a bad aim, but I make it. Barely.

Get away from them,
is all I can think.
Get away from their song.
I use the momentum of the next swing and launch out toward another chain farther away from their nest.

They follow, their song slithering softly through my speakers. Their voices pleasantly scratchy and warm . . .

. . . and my eyes close.

No, the Samurai's eyes closed. I'm still looking at the screen. I shake my head and blink to make sure.

On-screen all three of the Harpies are writhing and revealed. Each different. Each stunning.

The Samurai's eyes open, and I catch the oncoming chain at the last second. I can hear the leathery slap of their wings, beating as they get closer and closer to me.

I tap the other direction keys and get the chain moving in a wide spinning circle, coming back on the three relentless Harpies, and faster than I can focus, I land the blade beneath my avatar's feet right in the belly of the brunette.

Her eyes widen in terror at that last onrushing instant before I connect.

The other two scream and circle frantically.

I leap away from the spinning, Harpy-impaled chain, flying off into another cluster of chains.

Risky.

The other two follow.

I miss with the next pass, but on the try after that, I stick another blade right through the chest of the blonde. I pan my POV down, seeing her head cast back, blond hair flying out in the wake of our flight, drooling a thin trickle of blood as we swing through the darkness.

The last one, the redhead, is tricky. She keeps dodging my attempts to run the swinging chain's blade into her. But at least their song has stopped. They all must've needed to be alive for that kind of attack. But now she's making close passes with wicked curved little daggers in each of her claw hands. I dodge her attacks and almost lose my grip.

I can't get her lined up for an attack with the chain blade, and in the end I juggle the inventory window, hot key my whip, and just as I get the momentum going to the maximum peak of the chain's arc, I let go of the chain, hot key the whip, and grapple her around the neck with its secondary attack. In midair, with just seconds before I fly past a cluster of chains, I sling the whip and the strangling Harpy into a hanging chain, aiming for the blade. I don't even have time to see what happens as I slew my POV back to watch the Samurai's hand just get hold of another chain.

When I look back, searching for the Harpy, I see she's missed the chain and blade. Alone in the darkness, she's fluttering around wildly, clutching at the whip wrapped around her slender neck. I hear her gagging as her wings cease to beat. Then she drops, spinning off into the darkness below.

Deleted.

I'm hanging there in the darkness.

I can see the nest, and I think about searching it. There should be some kind of loot drop. But there could be more trouble.

I don't have the health or the alertness to do much else tonight. It's going on 4:30. I'm actually hoping the game will shut down for the night when a small message appears at the top of my screen.

Shut down in five minutes.

I look around.

Where's the exit? Where is . . . anything besides these chains? I don't know.

I see a line of chains leading off into the darkness. The intervals between chains are wide. Each will be an extremely hard jump.

That feels like something worth investigating.

I make a few jumps and land on the first chain. Now that I've got the hang of it, the jumps aren't all that hard, but they take longer and longer to get the momentum up to reach the next chain. When I'm at the extent of my highest possible arc and momentum, I leap and barely catch the last chain I can see in the distant darkness. Holding on, it careens off into nothingness with my Samurai clutching the last possible link I could have caught. I begin to swing the chain again, gaining momentum, looking for the next chain. But it isn't there.

“I won't tell you the last part”: that's what the Vampire had said. Without it, I wouldn't make it.

I look back along the way of chains. I can barely tell if I'm lined up along their path off into nothing. I can see the vague outline of the last one I'd jumped from.

The Vampire said I'd never make it out if I didn't know the last part.

What's the last part?

One minute to shut down for the night.

4:30
A
.
M
. New York time.

The storm has stopped outside my window.

I get the chain going as fast as I can. The momentum brings me up a tall mountain suddenly going vertical, then down into a valley and then rising again, climbing the arc to the next mountain. At the top of the next arc, as high as I can imagine the swing will possibly go, with as much momentum as I can possibly extract, I let go and fly off into . . .

What other choice did I have? If there's something out there to grab on to, then . . .

There is nothing.

My Samurai flies forward into a nothing-colored darkness.

Then I take 10 percent more damage as I tumble forward, my POV rolling end over end across the screen.

Thirty seconds to shutdown.

I'm standing. But on what I can't tell. Everything is pitch-black.

I take a few steps forward.

Stars begin to swirl at my feet.

I take a few more.

The stars swirl and coalesce and then I'm sucked down into their whirlpool.

Ten seconds.

Blinding white light.

Five seconds.

I see a desert.

Chapter 11

W
histling winter wind is slipping through a crack in the tape that surrounds my windows, windows that look out onto an empty snow-covered Thirty-Third Street. I don't need to look out and know that Thirty-Third Street is blanketed in snow, empty, and quiet out there. Instead, I lie here on my couch and just know that it is. I fell asleep here in the last moments of night. I woke up here this morning.

The morning sky is bright, too bright, and my eyes ache. Reaching up to shield them from the glare, I discover I'm still holding a tumbler of scotch. Nearby, a series of mostly unsmoked cigarettes litter our old coffee table. The few that I'd managed to ignite sometime in the night have turned into long ashy fingers.

I'd gotten pretty drunk.

After the game went down, the power went out as the storm slammed into the city. The world outside my windows turned gray tweed, like a grainy black-and-white photograph Sancerré once showed me when we were first getting to know each other. Later, thunder rolled through the long canyons of the desolate city in the moments after sudden flashes of lightning. The storm was directly over the city and it mixed well with my Sancerré-infused melancholy and the frustration of a thousand dollars disappearing into a dark abyss called the Black.

I'd tucked the character disk I'd gotten from Iain back into my trench, inside a secret compartment I'd cut and sewn myself. Then I drank and watched the storm. Sancerré didn't call, and the storm passed.

The morning felt bright and clear and the opposite of everything in life. To the east I could see chromatic blue sky. The streets below were empty now that city services had moved up onto monolithic arches of the Grand Concourse of Upper New York spanning the old city below. It was quiet down here and I sat watching the snow-covered street, waiting for the coffee to brew.

I've been drinking too much lately.

I had to find Iain this morning and find out when the game was going back up. Hopefully not tonight. Tonight I had a fight in Eastern Highlands for ColaCorp's few remaining sponsorship venues. A loss tonight might mean the end of my career as a professional.

If it came down to it, I'd probably have to write off the thousand bucks I'd spent on the Black.

I turned on my computer and got an e-mail from RiotGuurl.

“Hey,” she wrote. “We're gonna kick butt tonight! Meet you in loadout at five thirty. I won't let you down this time.—RiotGuurl”

She was taking her first defeat hard.

I felt responsible, but I didn't know why I should.

Maybe she was one of the few innocent people left in my life. That seemed like something valuable to me right now, like it was something worth holding on to or even protecting. I'd never met her, I didn't even know her real name, but somehow I knew she was good. Call it a hunch.

I had to find Iain and quick.

I hit the streets twenty minutes later, still nursing my thermos of coffee. I always carry a thermos of coffee, scotch plaid. I stuff the smokes inside the trench to get me through the hangover, and as I catch one of the last, and very few, old subway trains for Grand Central, I try to phone Sancerré.