Soda Pop Soldier (18 page)

We're out of the smoke and running for the far side of the airfield. A Goat, one of WonderSoft's fast-attack dune buggies, has been left off in the high grass, probably driven in by one of the motorized companies that attacked us earlier. It's abandoned. Seconds later, we're in. I'm driving. Fever works the mounted minigun as we come around our burning Albatross, tires squealing on the wide aircraft runway. He rakes Enigmatrix's grunts, dropping more than a few as blood sprays away from them in bright misty smears.

Then there's this thing called payback.

It starts with Enigmatrix smiling and leaping in to shoot me in the chest as she laughs. Maybe it's just me transposing that onto her. Maybe she wasn't laughing from the other side of her screen. Or maybe being the top player in the game gives you the right to modify your avatar to one of a laughing shotgun-wielding sociopath. Or maybe everybody else has found some hidden command menu that lets them personalize their avatars with that particular taunt. Maybe. But whatever it is, her grinning, leaping, laughing avatar runs out of the smoke on the tarmac of the runway, right in front of me. All my grunts are dead and she's reloading.

And I'm driving.

She doesn't even look up as I run her down and tally up an in-game player kill.

Payback.

Chapter 13

I
stand up and stretch. The muscles in the back of my neck ache. My fingers feel cramped and my index finger seems beaten to numbness by all the mouse clicks. I walk to the window and look out at the night. Snow falls through orange cones of light from the few remaining streetlights that still work down in this part of town. I think about turning on the television and watching the postgame show but I don't. I like the quiet. My building has always been quiet. Not that many people live here. But lately it's gotten a lot more quiet. I never see any of the neighbors I didn't really ever know.

There's nothing in the fridge except a wedge of Brie cheese. Sancerré's favorite. The lonely cheese inside the empty appliance looks like a photograph of noble poverty. Like something Sancerré would have shown me at a gallery back when . . .

I'm still thinking about the battle as I stand with the refrigerator door open, the only light source in the tiny kitchen. There's a small hum as the appliance clicks into overdrive to compensate for the waste of my artistic contemplations. I'm thinking about Enigmatrix and why ColaCorp keeps losing and why JollyBoy picked such a bad LZ. It was a poor choice.

I'm starving and the cheese looks good. The first night she ever came to my apartment I'd served her Brie and sliced green apples. We'd had wine. She'd said Brie was her favorite forever from then on.

Forever.

I close the door on the cheese and wander through the apartment. I sit down on our bed in the dark, on her side. I notice the things she kept there.

Hand lotion.

A book.

Some nail polish.

They're all gone.

If I open her closet will I find nothing? Maybe a couple of hangers? Some random unwanted thing?

I don't open her closet.

It's dark and cool and quiet in here and it's just the break my eyes need for a few minutes.

Those minutes in between worlds.

And I don't really want to turn on the light because I might see how much of Sancerré's stuff is actually gone. So I just sit in the darkness and think about WonderSoft.

They're always a step or two ahead of us. It's like playing against a gaming clan that's all on mic and communicating. Running their plans, calling out targets, reacting with extreme force and numbers to all your old tricks. There's nothing you can do but lose when the game's against you like that.

I'd say they were cheating, but that's next to impossible with the way WarWorld runs its online security.

And maybe WonderSoft is just better than us.

Than me.

I think about the cheese in the fridge.

I listen to the quiet.

Maybe Sancerré will come back. So I'll just hang on to the cheese in case she does.

Chapter 14

A
t midnight I'm logging back into the Black.

I'm beat.

The fatigue of fighting my way back to our lines in WarWorld hits me as I wait for World of Wastehavens to dump all its gothic gloom into my computer.

It's the moments in between, the silence of load screens, that really gets to me. Makes me question what I'm really doing here and wonder if life, real life, is somehow passing me by. Real life. Real love.

I consider pouring myself a shot of something for whatever madness happens next, but I'm too tired to do it, so I sit in the dark listening to the computer click and hum its rattling way toward game start. It's the only noise in our apartment.

My apartment now.

I guess Sancerré's really gone.

Abandon All Hope . . .
appears on the screen, and the game begins. I ready myself for whatever happens next, thinking of that desert I'd glimpsed in the last moments of the last session . . . and of Sancerré. My fingers hover lightly over the direction keys. Ready. Waiting.

The scene my computer shows me is one of an endless sea of beautifully designed, sand-sculpted dunes of light and shadow, completely still and yet undulating into the shimmering horizon.

A desert.

Not the depthless black pit I'd been in, forgotten by the game. The Oubliette.

Instead . . .

Overhead the glaring white sun stares directly into my Samurai's eyes as I pan upward and out over an endless worn-out sky. Its blazing mirror is an image of angry silver rage. Faded blue skies surrender to the sand that covers the horizon in every direction. On-screen, the word
Begin
briefly appears in gothic spike script, then disappears.

There is nothing to do but move my Samurai forward, and I do. For an hour I head deeper and deeper into the trackless waste, nothing on ambient except the
scrunch scrunch scrunch
of my Samurai's wooden shoes as they grind their way up and down sandy dunes seemingly without end. The occasional cry of an unseen buzzard, a lonesome flute track, and a subtle discordant hand drum compose the musical score of the game.

I have no weapons. Just the few martial arts attacks that I can select under the
Posture
menu. I leave the Samurai in
Judo
mode and continue on. Off in the distance, a sprinkling of worn desert palms rises from the shimmering heat, and I know this is something because the soundtrack adds a guitar, barely electrified. It begins to strum some lost late-1970s reminiscent riff. Like something from the Eagles' “Hotel California,” its urgency rising by degrees. It cascades, then the mix repeats.

That tells me this oasis is something worth investigating. Even though there is something in the music that reminds me of a warning. A caution.

I think of water and that reminds me to glance at my health indicator, which I haven't looked at for some time. I'm down to 20 percent, barely above passing out. I have a feeling the blistering in-game heat of the desert is probably making it difficult to heal. Still, I trudge on toward the tall palm clusters, hoping for an oasis. Maybe if there's shade, I can hang out and heal up.

I've wasted my thousand bucks.

It takes me another half hour of skirling desert winds, lone flute, drum, and disembodied guitar music punctuated by the occasional cry of some an unseen buzzard to get to the oasis. The Troll that guards the oasis is large, mean, and ugly.

You know, a Troll.

He lumbers about the far side of the oasis, muttering and grumbling, unaware that I'm watching him from the top of a tall dune near a shimmering, shallow pool of crystal-clear water.

Above me the sun seems to have barely moved. My health meter hasn't managed to rise in the least. Instead, it's slipped to 19 percent.

Yes, this definitely has been a well-spent thousand bucks.

I low-crawl my Samurai along the top of the rising dune, slithering through its almost pure white sand. Below, the oasis is a pool of clear water, underneath which I can see the emerald-and-gold-colored flagstone paving of some lost and ancient civilization. Sand lies along the bottom of the pool in sporadic drifts. The paving stones beneath the water are covered in inky black pictoglyphs. Near the pool the Troll, black and warty, with oily hair and large misshapen features, walks tall and dangly armed into a red-and-white-striped large tent on the far side of the oasis.

At one thirty in the morning, real-world New York City time, I'm too tired to figure out how to defeat the Troll. Even if I do, what about the in-game “rescue the kid” quest I have to complete to earn any kind of return on my thousand? Forget all the bonus prizes and cash awards that are supposed to be scattered throughout most Black games. I have yet to find even one reward. Instead, I've managed to spend most of my time in some sort of lost and found bin. Now, I'm out in the desert with no sign of the tower on any of the horizons. I am well and truly lost. I was supposed to be fighting my way to the top of a tower full of horrors, and hopefully, prizes. Instead I'm still somewhere that feels a lot like nowhere.

Did the server mess up and dump me out here? Is this all just some big con job? If it is, there's no one I can complain to, being that it's a crime to even participate in a Black game. Oh, and I'll forget about addressing my concerns to Iain, due to the fact that he carries a gun as part of his customer service policy.

I'd envisioned more, at least something other than what I'd gotten so far, a whole lot of nothing. No prizes. No loot. No money. Every
Darkness
character I'd managed to eliminate I would have gotten a one-hundred-dollar bonus paid into my online account. Twenty down and I could've quit just on that. So far, no one and nothing, and Creepy must not be dead because there's no bonus in my account. It's one thirty in the morning and I'm very tired.

Frustrated too.

I add up the two thousand that's due in rent, the empty checking account, and tonight's defeat in WarWorld, and this is it. This is all I've got. I either do something here and now or I start finding boxes for my stuff.

Thanks, Sancerré.

I move forward silently after unequipping the Samurai's shoes. I make no sound as I descend the sandy dune and make my way toward the edge of the pool and enter. Delicate bells dancing slightly at the mere thought of a breeze play across ambient sound as I enter the crystal-clear water of the desert pool.

I listen and hear nothing else.

I cross the pool, studying the green-and-gold pictoglyph-covered flagstones along its bottom where the drifting sand hasn't collected in long fingers. The soundtrack introduces a woman crooning Middle Eastern–inspired throaty wails of passion and desperation. I listen beyond the low soundtrack and hear only my robed legs moving through the pool, and even a light desert breeze passing gently through the fronds of the tall palms that surround the oasis.

I've formed a vague plan on how to take out the Troll, and I reason out the method of my approach once again as I stand in the pool, hoping the Troll won't suddenly appear. I need to sell myself before I commit to any plan. At 19 percent health, one misstep, and I'm dead.

Trolls are creatures of the dark, serving evil, doing generally despicable things. It's daylight right now, so maybe he's weaker, maybe he's even resting inside his tent. Who knows what midnight party he has planned? But I'm betting, if he's resting, I can either get by him or set a trap and get the jump on him. Whatever I do, I have to start doing something quickly. The server has reset me way off the beaten path. Somewhere the game is progressing and all kinds of loot and prizes are being handed out as players climb the tower. Or at least try to. Meanwhile, I'm facing an enemy I have neither the health nor body parts, nor even weapons for that matter, to fight.

I move closer to the edge of the pool, near the red-and-white-striped tent as the breeze carries the coughing snore of the Troll out over the sand and water. Stepping from the pool, I spot the Troll's wicked-looking gigantic scimitar stuck into the sand near the tent.

The weapon is far too large for me to use with one hand, but I take it anyway. I don't have much else. I see a miniature representation of the gigantic scimitar in my inventory screen and it's grayed out. I can't use it. It most definitely will need two hands to wield and I only have the one, but I keep it anyway. At least the Troll won't get it. Besides, I've got a plan.

In
Crouch
mode, I slip softly across the sands toward the tent, and just outside the front of it, I find two stakes at the ends of long ropes connecting them to the tent. With a quick bit of submenu juggling, I manage to anchor the loose ropes between the two tent pegs just outside the entrance to the tent, along the well-worn path down to the pool. I drop the large, shiny, scroll-worked scimitar and, using my mouse cursor, manage to sink the hilt of the scimitar a short distance back from the trip rope, angling the wide wicked blade so that it points upward toward the gently moving flaps.

Then, I circumvent my trap and enter the tent.

The Troll is sleeping on a large pile of shining silver coins sprinkled with intermittent bits of gold. His face is protected by one large hairy arm as his swollen belly rises and falls in halting rhythms. The Troll's armor is better than what I'd normally expect to find in most games. Usually, in the few other fantasy games I've played, the average Troll is wearing leather, gruesomely constructed from the hides of humans. Maybe it'll have an occasional scrap of some random piece of armor or a gold earring or tooth set among a cavalcade of rotting friends. But this Troll is wearing fine scale mail constructed with delicate circled plates, each carved with runes. In all likelihood, this Troll is a boss. A major NPC that players usually find at the end of a zone, guarding a fantastic weapon or treasure, loot of some sort. There is no way I should have started this game anywhere near him.