Melee Read online

  MELEE

  WYATT SAVAGE

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Afterword

  MELEE CHICAGO

  Melee Chicago Chapter 1

  Melee Chicago Chapter 2

  Foreword

  SHORT BLURB

  Trapped in the middle of an alien invasion, Logan James, a down-on-his-luck dollar store cashier, discovers there’s only one way out…

  Compete in an alien-imposed game, a global battle royale called the Melee.

  Forced to fight with his best friends Dwayne and Alicia, he finds that the rules are simple: compete with and kill the other participants and an army of the galaxy’s worst monsters and villains, level up, amass experience points and loot, and use any means necessary to reach the center of the Earth in 19 days.

  Hundreds of people will live.

  Hundreds of millions will die.

  LONGER BLURB:

  What was once virtual, is now reality.

  Logan James wanted nothing more than to make his parents proud and get his life back on track. Once a promising athlete, he suffered a terrible injury in a car crash that robbed him of his smarts and marooned him in a crappy dollar store along with his best buddy, Dwayne, and a cute cashier named Alicia.

  Things are finally looking up for Logan when an alien armada arrives and announces to the world that a game is going to be played that will result in unimaginable benefits to the victors.

  The game, called Melee, involves all humans between the ages of 18 and 54 and has been imposed on countless worlds since the dawn of time. The rules of Melee are simple: compete in a global battle royale, kill other participants and an army of the galaxy’s worst monsters, amass experience points and loot, level up, and use any means necessary to reach the center of the Earth in 19 days. Accompanied by Dwayne, Alicia, and an alien guide named Sue, Logan sets off to battle his way through the Melee, realizing that while hundreds of millions will play, only a few hundred will make it out alive.

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  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.

  Thanks to all the great beta readers and everyone who took a stroll through the Melee before publication. Couldn’t do it without you guys.

  Created with Vellum

  Prologue

  “Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”

  -Aldous Huxley

  “Thou shalt kill.”

  -Noctem proverb

  It was several hours into the game, and twenty minutes after the acid rain stopped, that the sky opened up and it began to rain spiders.

  Fucking. Spiders.

  Not the crappy little fly-stalkers you shoo away with a broom, by the way. No, these suckers were bigger than a mousepad and had bulging white sacs on their asses filled with piss and venom.

  One of us was the cause of it. I knew that because that’s what the aliens did. They loved calling audibles during the fighting, conjuring up nightmarish things out of the nothingness that fed on your deepest, darkest fears.

  I smacked the side of my head and my SecondSight HUD flickered back to life. My vision swam with boxes, icons, and a targeting reticle that I panned left to right, up and down. The alien ghost voice in my head, the one that had been with me since their arrival, whispered:

  “Soon you shall know the peace of the great void, Logan James. True virtue lies in the shedding of blood. The engine of the universe is lubricated with the souls of warriors.”

  “Fuck off,” I said, shrugging on my flamethrower backpack, dodging the corpses, and running across the field with the others to fricassee some arachnids.

  That’s the only way to make it out, you see. You have to block it all out, forget everything you thought you knew, and concentrate on killing. You have to kill and keep killing until there’s nothing else left alive. That’s the only way to get enough points, level up, fight your way to the pyramid, and find a way out of the hellish game known as the Melee.

  1

  DAY ONE

  I don’t think I’ve ever looked for trouble a day in my life, but I’ll damned if it doesn’t have a way of finding me. On the day it happened, and it is some truly mind-bending, alien-invading, world-changing kind of shit, I was busy stocking shelves and pricing items at Barry’s Market + Convenience Store, a place I liked to call “99 Cent Dreams,” a rundown Maryland discount shop alongside my buddy Dwayne F.X. Jackson, who had a habit of picking at his afro while waxing poetic about the beauty of dollar stores.

  “Now take your Dollar Tree for instance,” Dwayne said as we used our pricing guns to mark down some Chinese knockoff landscaping tools. “Everything is priced at a dollar whereas the DG—”

  “DG?”

  “Dollar General, Logan, c’mon focus...”

  He took my gun and flipped the number roller over to 7.99. I’d screwed up and was marking a collection of hedge shears at 69 cents. “Sorry,” I said with a sheepish smile, wondering why the hell we were selling landscaping stuff in December.

  “The DG sells things that cost more than a dollar, by the way,” Dwayne said, adjusting the glasses he’d been given three years before on his twenty-first birthday.

  “And?”

  “And the DG is much more than a dollar store. It’s what we in the African-American community call an urban discount retailer. It sells everything, even seafood.”

  “And that’s the reason why you’re planning on leaving here to go work there?”

  “Absolutely,” Dwayne replied, beaming.

  “Well, I guess if somebody has to sell week-old shrimp it should be you, homie.”

  “I’m gonna let the homie thing slide, but keep hating and I won’t bring your sorry white ass on board once I get in good with the manager.”

  “Me at the DG, Dwayne?” I replied, making a happy face. “A fella can dream.”

  Dwayne rolled his eyes, then paused and leaned in close to me. “Don’t look now, but the new girl has eyes on y
ou.”

  I looked back and caught the eye of our willowy new cashier. Somebody mentioned her name before and I think it rhymed with Tricia, but my mind hadn’t been firing on all cylinders after the accident, so I’d been forgetting a lot of stuff.

  Whatever-her-name-was moved toward me and my eyes skipped between her piercings and the spidery ink running up and down her exposed arms, the kind of stuff that seems cool when you’re in your early twenties. She was hot in a bad-girl kind of way, the type of chick who’d probably have three kids or be a meth dealer’s main squeeze in three or four years.

  She tossed aside her mane of chestnut-colored hair in the manner that pretty girls are wont to do, and flashed a killer smile. Dwayne patted my shoulder, grimaced as he stood on his bum right foot, and headed off.

  “Can I ask a huge favor?” the brunette asked as I set my pricing gun down.

  “Anything.”

  “I’m going to talk and maybe smile a little and I’d really love it if you could respond and smile back so that it looks like we’re having a real conversation.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because someone wants to know something about you,” she replied.

  “Who?”

  “That glorious specimen of womanhood currently laboring in aisle eight.”

  The girl she spoke of, the wasp-waisted blonde firecracker reflected in one of

  those chrome security balls pinned to the ceiling, had just started two or three days before. I’d seen her around, but her name, like so many other things, escaped me.

  “She sent you to get information?” I asked.

  “Intel was the word she used.”

  “What does she want to know?”

  “Your name’s a good place to start.”

  “Logan James,” I said, gesturing to the upside-down name-tag on my shirt to remind myself.

  “She’s Emily Willard Thames.”

  “That’s a great name.”

  “Sounds like someone who just stepped off the Mayflower, no?”

  I nodded. “What are Emily’s likes?”

  “Reality TV, Taylor Swift, and long walks on narrow beaches.”

  I made a face. “What about you?”

  “What about me?” the brunette asked.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alicia Giandomenico, which sounds like the person who was probably scrubbing the

  deck of the Mayflower.”

  I instantly liked everything about Alicia. I liked that she had the vibe of a girl raised in a family of brothers instead of one of those weak-lipped damsel-in-distress types. I also liked that she’d drawn a pentagram on her name-plate in black marker, and most of all, I liked her sass. Folks can say what they want, but Sass is a very underrated quality in a woman.

  “I bet you don’t like reality TV, Taylor Swift, or long walks on narrow beaches do you, Alicia?” I asked.

  “I go by Lish and those are not my faves, no.”

  “What do you like?”

  “What’s the opposite of collecting intel on random dudes for a friend of a friend?”

  Lish and I headed out through the rear entrance ostensibly to toss the day’s trash, but really so we could cop a smoke away from the prying eyes of our manager, an uppity ball-buster named Bryson Fincher.

  “What’s up with Dwayne back there?” she asked.

  “For starters, he’s black.”

  She smirked. “You don’t say…”

  “He’s also got the three traits I look for in a person: honesty, humor, and I’m pretty sure I could take him in a fight. In short, he’s good people.”

  “How come he walks like he’s got a pebble in his shoe?”

  “Because while the human foot generally has 26 bones, the good Lord saw fit to only give Dwayne 24.”

  I fired up two cigarettes and handed one to her. My mom was forever nagging me to ditch the lung rockets and I’d quit for a good while, but after the accident I started up again. The scolds at the American Cancer Society can say what they want, but a hit of nicotine in the middle of a shift is a hard habit to break.

  We spent a few minutes going over the operation of the store’s trash compactor, a raggedy old thing that looked like it belonged in the Smithsonian. I was surprised when Lish popped the top of the activation button, stripped and jiggered a few wires, and got the thing to work more smoothly than it had in months.

  “Look at you,” I said, beaming. “Mad skills, girl.”

  She blew a ring of smoke in my direction as the machine hummed and crushed our bags of refuse. “Speaking of skills. Word on the street is that you were a baseball player once. A pitcher.”

  I nodded, mimicking a pitch. “The word is right.”

  “A pretty good one, people say...”

  “Only if you believe the scouts from the Orioles and Yankees.”

  She giggled and it was adorable. “Seriously?”

  “As serious as an orphanage on fire.”

  “Why are you hanging around this dump?”

  “’Cause someone forgot to wear his seatbelt,” a voice said, dripping with sarcasm.

  I stole a sideways look as Bryson peeked his ferret-face out of the back door. He was four years younger than me, but at twenty-five was nearly bald, sporting an enormous dome of a head and catastrophic skin that looked like someone had started a fire on his cheeks and put it out with an ice pick.

  He moved forward with these strange herky-jerky movements which I attributed to a gangly, scarecrow-like frame. As he walked, he rolled up the sleeves on a pair of reed-thin arms that nearly came down to his knees. I made a move to toss my smoke and our glorious store manager flicked his hand.

  “Don’t trash a perfectly good cancer stick on account of me, James,” he said.

  I’d toss it in his face if I could.

  “Sorry, sir,” I mumbled.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Bryson replied, snatching the cigarette from me. He took a long drag from it with his super-moist lips before handing it back. “Smoking on premises is only prohibited under section six-b of the company policies and procedures, but what’s a little violation between friends? Did I interrupt something, by the way?”

  “No, sir,” Lish said, eyes downcast as she stubbed out her smoke.

  “Oh, I think I did. See you’d just asked Logan why he wasn’t playing ball and he was just about to lie to you.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  Bryson sneered. “Course you were. You were just about to tell her something other than how you and your friends got into an accident after a night of carousing and weren’t wearing your seatbelts.”

  I stared right through the bastard. At that moment my hatred for him was white-hot. For starters, what the hell kind of person under the age of fifty says carousing?

  Bryson’s gaze ratcheted to Lish. “Logan was the only one that walked away, although he lost something in the crash. You ever heard of a cochlear implant, Alicia?”

  She nodded.

  Bryson slapped me on the shoulder. “Well our boy here has something similar, only it’s for his brain.”

  My face flushed and I had the strongest desire to throw a punch, but the truth is Bryson was right. The man that came out of that mangled car fourteen months earlier, and hell no I hadn’t been drinking, was not the same one that went in. One of the side effects of the crash was a diminishment of reaction time, which meant my brain, specifically the CBI, the computer-brain interface that the doctors had implanted, was wonky and sometimes failed to send the right signals to the right body parts. I wanted to sock Bryson in the mouth, but I couldn’t will myself to clench a fist and by the time I did, he’d already vanished back into the store after muttering something about me being a retard.

  “I’m sorry, Logan,” Alicia said. “I’ve only been working here a few days, but Bryson’s a dick.”

  “Sometimes I think it’s not his fault. When you’re born with a name like Bryson Fincher it’s almost preordained that you’re gonna be a douchebag.
”

  “What’s it feel like?” she asked. “That implant of yours.”

  “There’s a line from a song I used to like that went, ‘sometimes it feels like I’m watching the world and the world ain’t watching me back.’ It’s kinda like that. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “A little.”

  She summoned a beautiful smile and placed a finger on the edge of my temple, several inches over my right eye, and traced the seam from the beginning of a hellacious scar that ran nearly to the other side of my skull. There was something incredibly intimate about the gesture and, if I’m being completely honest, sexy as all get-out.

  Leaning down, she whispered, “Chicks dig scars.”

  I smiled, watching her twirl a tendril of her hair, the sun setting behind her like burning gold and that’s when it happened.

  The sky wavered and appeared to catch fire.

  And then there was a flash of brilliance, what I imagine happens when a star explodes, and a nerve-shredding boom knocked me to the ground.

  2

  Whether it was from shock or the impact of hitting the pavement, I blacked out for a few seconds. I woke to the sound of shrieking car alarms, footfalls, and distant shouts and screams.

  My eyes flapped open and all I could see for several seconds was boxes of light, grids, and icons, as if I’d been transported into a video game. I blinked, and the boxes and icons vanished, replaced by Dwayne and Lish.