Soda Pop Soldier Page 9

  Light begins to illuminate more and more of the dungeon, and I can see cages and bars. Within the empty cages I find rusty manacles and chains. Broken furniture. There are long hallways leading off into other darknesses. I avoid those places.

  There’s no rhyme or reason to this dungeon. The cages and bars and cells cluster the debris-littered spaces between deserted hallways and gray silent passages. I weave through it all, carefully, ready for an attack that never comes, lost and getting more lost. This game world is nothing but a city of empty cages . . .

  . . . until I find the man dressed in rags chained to the stone wall of a small cell.

  “Hey there!” His voice is raspy and high. “Hey there, buddy. You wanna have some fun?”

  Emphasis on fun.

  Trap.

  I approach the cage slowly. Chock . . . Chock . . . Chock.

  “Samurai, huh?” asks the raggedy man.

  I say nothing.

  “Where’s your sword?” He begins to laugh. Coughing and laughing, he shakes his manacled wrists in delight.

  “Like I said, wanna have some fun? That is . . . if you’re interested?”

  “I’m looking,” I say over my mic, “for the way back to the tower.”

  He laughs. “The tower. That’s . . . now that’s just odd.” His avatar’s face seems puzzled. Then, “Tower’s a long way from here . . . or maybe it’s better to say it like this . . . you’re beyond the tower now. Yeah, that’s much better.”

  I’m in front of his cell. He’s chained to the far wall. Images float across the back wall of the cell, around his body and above his head. Like an old projection movie screen with pictures running across its dirty face.

  “Everybody’s watchin’, Wu. You got a big share right now. Over three hundred thousand subscribers just waitin’ to see what you’re gonna do next. They wanna see what you’re gonna do down here. Congratulations, you’ve made it all the way down to the bottom. Fun, huh?”

  “Is this . . .” I feel stupid saying this. “Is this hell?”

  The raggedy man laughs, coming closer to the bars. “No, man, this ain’t hell. More like heaven. Don’t you get it? This is what the Black is really all about. Not all that fantasy stuff up there. Slayin’ dragons and gittin’ treasure. Down here’s where the real action is. Trust me.”

  Treasure sounds good. Dragons, not so much.

  “What if I wanna get back up there? Is there a way out?”

  “Funny you should mention that,” says the raggedy man. “Funny indeed.”

  Within the moving images flashing across the wall at the back of the cell, a man sits in the corner of a small room. It’s almost a cell like the one in front of me. But it’s covered in green padding. Like it’s a drunk tank or something.

  “So here’s the game, Samurai. You a player? Well, we’ll see. This one’s called, ‘The way out.’ Just for you.”

  The man in the movie, in the padded cell, is thin. Bony thin. Gaunt. Drug addict gaunt. His tiny eyes dart in random directions every so often, as though he’s seeing something I’m not.

  “That there’s Yuri,” says the raggedy man from his place on the floor. “Yuri’s a real class ‘A’ drug addict. Multiple convictions. His case file even states that he is quote unquote, incorrigible, but it says that in Russian, so it’s the Russian word for ‘incorrigible.’ Never knew his father. Mother was a high-class prostitute until she got AIDS. Then she was just a low-class one. But she kept him in public school long enough for him to develop a nice drug problem. Then he became a criminal, ’cause even though drugs are legal, well, my friend, hell, they ain’t free. Hence the crime. Anyway, he’s a real waste of human life. His career highlight came when he beat an old lady into a coma for the thirty-eight dollars in her purse so he could score some meth. She lived another three years in an institution. She never regained consciousness. But what the hell. So be it. So here’s the game.”

  Within the moving images, a metallic drawer slides away from the padded green wall of the cell. Yuri pushes himself upward and off the wall and staggers unsteadily toward the drawer. He snatches something unseen from it quickly, then retreats back to his corner. Kneeling down, his mouth slightly agape, I can see what he’s holding.

  It’s a syringe.

  “Yeah,” says the raggedy man in the cell in front of me. “He’s an old-school, hard-core junkie. Anything’ll do. So we’ll start him off with just a little taste o’ the junk. Just something to get him going, y’know?”

  Yuri, hands trembling, pulls back his sleeve, slaps a vein into shape, and spikes his way-too-thin arm. His shoulders slump at the end of the fix. He takes a shallow breath.

  “Fun, huh?” asks the raggedy man in the cell beneath the images. “Wanna play?”

  I say nothing. This is the Black’s idea of fun. I’ve heard rumors. Apparently they’re true. I’m pretty sure whatever the game is, I don’t want a piece of it.

  “You want out, don’tcha, Wu? Wanna get back in the game, said so yerself.”

  I do.

  I’ve got to make this thousand bucks pay off. Strike that. I need to make it pay off. If Sancerré ever decides to come back, I have to have a place for her to come back to.

  “Tell ya what,” says the raggedy man. “He’s an addict. So, y’know, anything’ll do. Now, how ’bout we play for just a little bottle of hard liquor, nothing serious. A little old liter of bum liquor. We won’t even give him a loaded revolver or nothing, I promise. We did that one time. It was hilarious. Ya ever see the video? It went viral.”

  “No.”

  Everyone’s heard about these dark little games on the Internet. They’re called “DIY Green Projects.” Or “Taking out the Trash.” Like it’s a public service or something. Make someone kill themselves. The truth is some people get a thrill out of watching people die. They’d do it to anyone if they could. It’s just that drug addicts are the easiest to do it to. No one will admit they like to watch people die. But then why do people always slow down at traffic accidents? What’re they hoping to see? Blood. A body. The paramedics working hard. A person begging for their life. Death. Here on the Internet no one will know you saw it happen. The Internet’s the place to see what you can’t admit wanting to see. No more having to cruise the toll highways looking for a wreck. Now you can watch some death just like back in the days before the Meltdown when open source almost destroyed civilization. Back then there were lots of videos of stuff just like this.

  A boy soldier shooting an infant in the head.

  A dictator begging for his life.

  Three thousand people dying as burning buildings collapsed into the street.

  Except this is real. This is live. This is right now.

  That’s what the Black is. What it really is. It just hides under the guise of a game where you might win some stuff. It attracts competitive people who will do anything to win.

  People like me.

  “Fun, huh?” says the raggedy man.

  He moves closer to the bars, his hair spiky and blond. He wears dirty boots and pants and a rumpled coat. I can see the manacles and the chains were just part of an act. They weren’t restraining him at all. He leans in close. I can see his protruding, fanglike canines. They’re sharpened to long points.

  Vampire.

  I hope the cell door is actually locked.

  His manacles weren’t.

  “Don’t worry about me, kid.” He wipes his wrist across his mouth. “I just wanna make you a star. So go ahead and off this piece of trash, and I’ll give you anything you want.”

  I’m not going to do that.

  But I do want something.

  I want to get out of here, wherever here is, and back into the game, wherever that is. I want to get to the top of the tower and along the way earn some money and maybe a couple of prizes.

  So . . . I’ve got to play along.

  “Anything I want?” I ask.

  The caged Vampire smiles. “Yeah, anything.”

  “What i
f I want a way out of here?”

  “Who would want to leave? We’ve got all kinds o’ games and a huge Internet audience. You could make some really good dough down here. Have some fun while you’re doing it. We got sex games, torture games, death games. We got this traffic cam hacked in Beijing. We can change the crossing signals and really hurt some people. You find that little game and you might win yourself a new house. You wanna new house, Wu?”

  “No, I want out. I want back in the game.”

  “Well, now, let me think about that.” The Vampire rubs his sleeve across his chin, his eyes searching. Whoever’s running him forgot to turn off their EmoteWare. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, there’s a way. Why not. So here’s what you gotta do. Yuri will take anything ’cause he’s a drug addict. He don’t know no better. There’s stuff, hidden and guarded, all over the Cages; that’s where you’re at.” He throws his sleeve wide encompassing our surroundings. “Each time you give Yuri a little something, I’ll tell you a little bit about how to get out of the Oubliette. How to get remembered by the game again, is more like it. I can’t get ya out. But there is a way out. If you can find out all you need to know before Yuri dies, then he lives. If Yuri dies, then you lose, and you might as well get comfortable down here. Deal?”

  I make a deal with the Vampire.

  I leave him grinning and coughing out his raspy laugh as I go in search of the things that will kill Yuri.

  I feel like I need a hot shower after that conversation.

  I wander the Cages, rattling barred doors and checking open, empty rooms. In a distant cell, beyond its creaking, rotted door, I find a once-human thing hunched over a low table, muttering. Its skin is dark and when it looks up, I’m confronted by two luminous green eyes. I ready the whip.

  I’m down to 28 percent health and still combat disadvantaged by the missing hand.

  I strike and watch as the whip passes straight through the thing. It grins, rising off the floor.

  Creepy’s whip must be normal. This monster probably requires some kind of special weapon to damage it. Slowly the thing begins to float toward my Samurai, its rotting arms following its torn fingers and scabby palms as it reaches out for me.

  I back out of the cell and retreat into the moonlit area of cages and bars. I turn to see what it’ll do. If it’ll stay within the room or follow. The open door looks like a gaping dark void. A moment later the thing, eyes wide and glazed over while at the same time staring directly into my screen, floats out the cell door, coming for me.

  I run away, and the thing begins to cackle. A quick check behind me and I see it’s following swiftly. I double-tap the forward key and hear the rapid staccato of the Samurai’s wooden sandals over ambient. One wrong turn and this thing corners me. Game over. I’ve got nothing to attack it with. I know this as I run deeper and deeper into the senseless maze of cages.

  Eventually, I do take that wrong turn. I turn down a blind alley of dark-stained stone walls and worn-out wooden doors. It’s a short hall that dead-ends quickly. I can hear the maniacal cackle of the thing getting closer. I try all the doors. They’re all locked except for one. I can hear my Samurai beginning to breathe heavily as he reaches the extent of his stamina and temporary exhaustion sets in.

  The last door opens on a beautiful, barely clad woman strapped to a long wooden table with gutters and runnels. Three small men, Dwarves, stand around the table, holding bone saws and wicked knives. Their beards flame red; their eyes are dark, and their hair, short and cropped.

  “Come to cut her up?” says one quickly. “Or come to just watch?” asks another. “Tell us where you want the first cut made.”

  Man, this game is twisted.

  Greedy bulbous dwarven faces shine in the light of a lone torch as they stand around the whimpering woman. Sweat runs down their wide foreheads. Their hair shifts and writhes in the flickering light of the torch. They cluster about their nubile captive.

  Just outside I can hear the cackle of the thing chasing me.

  “The Wight Strangler’s a coming,” mutters one. The others seem not to care.

  “Let’s cut her . . . here?” whispers another and makes an incision along her oversize chest. Her breasts quiver with lifelike reality beneath what little clothing she wears. Blood begins to run down onto her ribs.

  “Do you like that?” asks one of the Dwarves. “Hot stuff, huh?”

  No, I don’t like that, I’m thinking just as the Wight Strangler bursts through the cell door, its hair writhing, its green eyes burning, its necrotic hands already reaching for me. Apparently it strangles, that’s its thing. Its lips snarl, sneering.

  I use the whip’s secondary grapple attack, targeting the lone torch on the wall. The whip snakes away from my POV with a solid sonic craaack, wrapping itself around the sconced torch as I hold down the left-click button. I pivot back toward the oncoming Wight Strangler and double-click the left mouse button again. The whip jerks the flaming torch into the oncoming Wight, striking it in the chest. Instantly the thing recoils in pain, on fire, the flames spreading across its grisly torso. It raises its bony head and wails, fleeing from the room in pain.

  I follow it into the hall, picking up the still-burning torch as I leave the room. I equip it. Behind me I hear one of the Dwarves say, “Let’s take off her pretty legs and see what she looks like then?”

  “Yeah, but one at a time, I want to enjoy this,” murmurs another. I slam the door behind me.

  The Wight is whimpering mournfully in the dark passage outside, sobbing as it crawls away from me, leaning itself against one dirty stone wall. Smoke curls up in thin wisps from around its narrow abdomen and up over its hunched back. I follow it, standing over it for a second. Then I shove the burning torch into its back, holding it there. It screams, catching fire. It screams even more as the flames consume it whole and it burns, turning to ash quickly. Its screams reverberate through my speakers long after it’s gone. After it’s nothing but ash, it’s still screaming bloody murder through my speakers.

  Then I realize the screaming is actually coming from behind the door. The woman is screaming, filling my tiny snowbound apartment with bloody murder.

  I loot the Wight’s corpse and find only a small bottle. The quick description pops up when I hover my cursor over it. It’s a bottle of NarcoDex. Twenty doses. Even I know NarcoDex is a powerful surgery-grade anesthesia. A lot of people party with it on just one dose. A lot of those people die. This will kill Yuri for sure. I have no doubt about that.

  I stare at the bottle, listening to the woman scream as the Dwarves cut her. They’re giggling, murmuring among themselves as they do it. They must be NPCs creating a tableau for any players that might happen down this way, something for the subscribers to watch between the games that are the main event, like kill Yuri, or change the traffic cam in Beijing. Maybe you can even make the cuts. I’m sure you can. It probably all looks very real. That’s why the game went in on so much anatomy programming.

  Make it look real. For the fans.

  She’s still screaming. Begging them to stop.

  I hope they are NPCs. I at least hope she is.

  Either way, I’ve had enough.

  I cut into my music cloud and select a track to drown out the screaming.

  “Mama Said Knock You Out.”

  I crank it to full . . .

  “Don’t call it a comeback.”

  . . . then I open the door and beat the living hell out of the three sadistic Dwarves with Creepy’s whip. I’m left-clicking so hard my finger goes numb by the time the song ends.

  When I’m finished, they’re dead.

  Or at least they’re not moving.

  Except for the last one. I’ve practically flayed that Dwarf alive. He grins up at me through blood-bubbling lips. Then whispers, “Look at her face.” He giggles weakly. “Just look . . . at it.”

  They’ve dismembered her.

  Her eyes are vacant. Staring upward.

  I swivel away from my screen, clut
ch the sweating glass of scotch, and guzzle it in one go. I stand up, walk purposefully to the bottle, and reload. It’s hitting me hard, softening the edges. I watch the snow fall across the night outside. Watching beyond its twirling, drifting flakes and into the blackness there.

  I sit back down at the computer.

  I’ve got to do this.

  I loot the Dwarves’ corpses and come away with a meat cleaver and a bottle of aspirin.

  My fingers are like claws, stretched out over the keyboard. Hovering. Waiting to strike down at any key. Except I don’t know which one to hit.

  I don’t know what to do next.

  I find my way back through the warren of bars and cells called the Cages. I pass other shadowy passages to somewhere else, watching them diminish in perspective as they disappear off into the darkness.

  I find the Vampire’s cell.

  I’ve equipped the meat cleaver instead of the whip.

  I can’t kill this Yuri, whoever he is, just to make rent.

  “But you were thinking about it,” I hear myself say.

  I wasn’t.

  There’s a way out and back into the game. The Vampire said so. He’s probably being controlled by one of the Black runners, the people who organize and put on Black games.

  The mafia.

  “Did ya get somethin’ for poor old Yuri?” The Vampire appears against the bars of his cell. His bloodless hands grip the bars tightly.

  “Yeah,” I say over my mic. “I got him something. But first, tell me about the way out of here.”

  The Vampire shakes his head. “Nah, nah, nah . . . that’s not how it’s done. You gotta give Yuri some stuff first. People wanna see that happen.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “What kind do you think, Wu?”

  I wait. I’m hoping he’ll just talk, babble, ramble, or whatever. Give away some clue as to how to get out of here. I’m not counting on it, but I’ve got to give him the room to make a mistake. So I wait for him to say something. He does the same.

  “The kind of people who’ve tried everything in the world to make themselves happy,” I say, trying to provoke him into explaining everything in the world. Or why the world is the way it is, as he sees it. He seems the type. Whoever’s behind the Vampire’s mask seems the type. Maybe he’ll get carried away and let something slip. “And they just can’t,” I continue when he doesn’t jump at the bait. “And now they’re hoping this’ll do the trick. Hoping that watching someone cross over the line between life and death, taken by those that will instead of those that won’t . . . they’re thinking, ‘Maybe this will make me happy?’ Make them enjoy life just a little more. Those kind of people?”