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  “It b…bit me,” Jimmy said, blood pooling between his teeth. “Fucking thing just up and took a chunk out of me like I’m a goddamn deer sausage...”

  “What did?”

  “It fell out of the goddamn sky. I swear…crashed through the roof…”

  Jimmy’s right hand came down. His face became slack and pasty. He flipped a ring of keys to the ground along with his pistol, extra magazine of ammunition, and his wallet.

  “You’ll need those,” Jimmy said, his wound making a sickening, sucking sound, as if it were a creature hidden in his belly fighting for air. “Spare mag has overpressure rounds in it. Better stopping power.”

  Kurtis slotted the chopsticks back in the cuff of his pants, reached over, and snatched up the keys, gun, magazine, and wallet. All three were slicked with Jimmy’s warm blood. He pocketed the keys and magazine as a young woman’s voice echoed in Kurtis’s ear: “Congratulations, you have acquired a nine-millimeter G17 Gen-5 pistol manufactured by Glock, Inc. in 2019. The weapon fires a 124-grain Parabellum-jacketed hollow-point round. You have fifteen rounds remaining in the magazine.”

  Kurtis dropped the gun and smacked his hands against his ears. His fingers trembled as his head shook in disbelief. This was happening, this was really fucking happening.

  “It’s the v-voice,” Jimmy sputtered. “You heard it didn’t you?”

  “I’m losing my mind,” Kurtis replied. “I’m seeing and hearing things.”

  “You need to focus.”

  “What’s going on, Jimmy?”

  “The game,” Jimmy answered, wheezing, fighting for breath, his life seeping away in a crimson puddle. “The Melee. There’s no time for tongue-clucking. It’s every man for himself, Kurtis. You get points for killing people and monsters.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Stop fooling around, Kurtis. I’m running out of time. Yes, monsters, real monsters.”

  A greasy length of what Kurtis thought was intestines, oozed between Jimmy’s fingers. Wet bloody tendrils dripped from his nose. “One of ‘em bit me.”

  “Let’s get going then.”

  “I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Jimmy said.

  “I’ll help you.”

  “I got a silver Camry in the South Loop garage on Federal,” Jimmy said, wheezing. “You know where that is?”

  “I remember it.”

  “It’s got a Boston Red Sox sticker on the right side of the bumper and a faded kid-on-board sticker. One of those yellow jobbers. You can’t miss it.”

  A flick of a nod from Kurtis. “I need you do something for me,” Jimmy said.

  “Anything.”

  “I need you to go and get my wife and boy and protect them.”

  “Jimmy—”

  “Promise me you will.”

  “Jesus, yes, I promise.”

  “They’ll be coming for you in a few minutes. Rig and the others. The cells are open and they hit the armory. They’re using the situation to bust out, but they’ll likely want to take one last dance with you before they go. Tables have turned. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  Kurtis held up the gun. “I know how to use it.”

  “Figured you did,” Jimmy spat, blood gurgling over his lips. “But you need to learn how to use those boxes in your brain. You need to focus, you need to drop down into your zone ‘cause you can make things appear.”

  “Like what?”

  “Crosshairs, a targeting reticle. You think hard enough and it’ll come to you.”

  Kurtis tried conjuring one up, but nothing appeared on his HUD. “It takes some time,” Jimmy said. “You can summon up shortcuts, maps, all kinds of shit, and that voice, whether it’s male or female—”

  “Female.”

  Jimmy sighed, his eyes fluttering. “You need to listen to it and do what it says.”

  Gunshots echoed close by followed by footfalls and harsh laughter.

  “Go, Kurtis,” Jimmy begged, pointing in the direction opposite the laughter, toward a long semi-dark corridor.

  Kurtis made a move to leave and then he leaned in close to Jimmy. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you always look out for me?”

  “Something about your eyes told me you were a good man once upon a time. The kind that maybe deserves a second chance.” Jimmy smiled. “Don’t make me regret this.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Mortem ne timueris,” Jimmy whispered.

  “What?”

  “Remember those words. Mortem ne timueris.”

  “What do they mean?”

  Kurtis waited for an answer that would never come. Jimmy was dead. Kurtis crouched backward, then stopped and focused with as much intensity as he had when trying to kill twenty-four hours in the witch box.

  He opened his eyes and something strange and unexpected appeared in front of him—miniature crosshairs. He didn’t know how or why it had happened, but there it was. He quickly found that he was able to maneuver the crosshairs through his field of vision simply by willing it, up and down, panning left to right in a short arc.

  Somebody whistled and he looked over his shoulder. A man was staring at him from the other end of the corridor. An enormous mountain of a man with a bald dome of a head. He leered at Kurtis, rubbing a bloody stump of a right hand against the wall. It was Big Rig. He’d come to take that last dance with Kurtis.

  3

  Unfinished Business

  The information on Kurtis’s HUD reflected Big Rig’s status:

  Species:Homo Sapiens (Hankerson, Rignal)

  Chattel:Mossberg 590A1

  Health:5/10

  Level:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:4

  Vitals:BP – 147/80; T – 99.01f; RR – 17bpm

  XP:109

  The titanic inmate grinned as blood spritzed from his gory stump. His other hand cradled around the kind of shotgun Kurtis had only ever seen the overwatch guards, the ones specifically deployed to prevent riots, carry.

  “I made a special trip down here for you,” Big Rig said.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Kurtis replied.

  Big Rig laughed. He grabbed his sex. “Whatever I give you, you’re gonna take.”

  “Did you bring a magnifying glass?”

  As Big Rig scowled, Kurtis thought back on the real reasons he’d originally tussled with the oversized Neanderthal. Something about one of the other inmates fingering Kurtis as a snitch, somebody who’d ratted on the Rig’s operations and was trying to put the blame on him. It was bullshit, but in prison the truth didn’t matter. What mattered was how pissed off the biggest, toughest, meanest S.O.B. was at you.

  “I’m gonna kill you dead, Evinrude,” Big Rig said.

  “You can surely try,” Kurtis said, taking only a second to adjust to having been called by the name that had popped up in his own stats earlier. “But if you kill me when I’m already dead, and if you make me dead after I’m already killed, isn’t that overkill?”

  Big Rig shook his head, confused and annoyed. He brought up his gun and let loose and Kurtis did the same. With the aid of only his targeting reticle, Kurtis’s shot hit the slug from Big Rig’s shotgun in mid-air.

  There was a burst of light as the bullets ripped each other in half, the fragments ricocheting off the walls. Big Rig ducked, drawing back, and Kurtis used the moment of confusion to pivot and run.

  There was no time to gloat about a mini-victory. Kurtis galloped down the corridor, imagining the sound of his favorite drummers hammering an incredibly fast beat to block out extraneous sounds and the nausea welling up inside.

  The corridor terminated at a black metal door. He booted the door open and tore up a staircase. Bodies littered the stairwell, along with the things they’d used to do combat with: canisters of chemical spray, stun guns, and the like. Sirens echoed along with gunshots and screams, and when Kurtis met the first-floor landing he paused, pressing his back against the wall, being more cautious than he normally would.

  “Hey,” Kurtis
said at a low volume, thinking back on Jimmy’s advice to listen to the voice in his head. Silence. “Hey, you,” he said. “Voice. You there?”

  “If you are referring to me, I am here,” the woman’s voice said.

  “How?”

  “There is so little time, Kurtis.”

  “You know my name?”

  “I know everything about you, but we really don’t have time for pleasantries. Every moment in the Melee is precious.”

  “What’s your name?” Kurtis asked, not really taking her advice as well as he should have.

  “I have no identifier,” the voice said.

  “How old are you?”

  “I have no age.”

  “You some kind of alien?”

  “I am one with the Noctem, yes.”

  “What’s a Noctem?”

  “The civilization that has come to your world to play the game.”

  An explosion rattled the walls. Kurtis fortified himself with a few gulps of air, holding his sidearm with both hands, expecting hell and ready for anything.

  “Jimmy mentioned maps. What kind do you have?”

  “There are many,” the calm voice replied.

  “I want to see some.”

  Images populated Kurtis’s HUD, including the prison. There were red dots everywhere along with three or four yellow ones.

  “What are the red dots?” Kurtis asked.

  “Other participants.”

  “Inmates?”

  “Everyone in the world between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four is a participant. There are approximately one hundred and sixty-five thousand participants in a twenty-block radius.”

  “How many inside the prison walls?”

  “Four hundred and twenty-three,” the voice answered.

  “What about the yellow dots?”

  “Other species.”

  Kurtis massaged his face. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Creatures from other worlds.”

  Kurtis didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There was a part of him that still thought the whole thing was a hallucination, the result of being locked up twenty-three hours a day in a hole for nearly a month. But the dried blood on his hands—Jimmy’s blood—that was real.

  Scanning the map, Kurtis noted a paucity of red dots outside the corridor. He pressed the barrel of his gun against the closest door, opening it to reveal an administrate hallway in the middle of the prison. He knew from memory and the map that freedom was only a few hundred feet away. If he could just pass through populace, the courtyard in the middle of the prison, the one wreathed by inmate cells, he would then be able to make it through the security vestibule to the outside world. Big if, a really big if, and an almost certainly doomed one.

  A shadowy shape romped in his peripheral vision at the end of the hallway. Best he could figure, it was the outline of a man. He checked his map and his HUD populated with the stranger’s stats. He was armed and healthy.

  “Stop!” Kurtis shouted.

  The stranger didn’t stop. Instead, scuffling feet, ragged breaths.

  “I SAID STOP!”

  An orange tongue of flame leaped from the weapon the man was holding. A round wavered the air and clipped Kurtis’s left ear, drawing a dash of blood. Kurtis dropped to the kneeling position and squeezed off three shots. One of them struck the figure in the thigh and the other punched through his chest.

  “Congratulations,” the female voice said. “You have killed a Level 1 participant and gained 25 experience points. You also have survived eight minutes in the Onslaught. For each minute you remain alive you receive one experience point, thus, you have obtained an additional 8 experience points.”

  Despite having no choice but to listen, Kurtis had tuned the voice out. He was more concerned with the body of the man he’d just killed. Striding over the corpse, he tensed, looked down. He’d seen dead bodies before, but this was the first time he’d been directly responsible for one. Gunfire rang out behind him. Shotgun blasts. Steel pellets filling the air like a swarm of pissed-off bees. It was Big Rig.

  The shotgun sang again and Kurtis dove for cover. He fired back and belly-crawled forward to an intersection in the hallway. He shot to his feet, covered his head and ran past a wall of windows.

  Shotgun blasts from Big Rig shattered the windows, pelting Kurtis with glass shrapnel. He yanked a piece of glass out of his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers. A little blood was good for the nerves his old man used to say. Something about the color and the way it reminds you that your mortal. His HUD blinked: -1 Health Points!

  Kurtis instantly noticed a change as a result of the loss of a health point. His steps were a little slower; his vision, just at the outer edges of his sight, a tiny bit obscured. Eyes on the map, Kurtis saw that he was drawing near to populace, which sounded like it was being torn apart. There were shouts and shots and the thunderous boom of what sounded like an elephant.

  Kurtis realized he was trapped. Behind him was Big Rig and his goons, and in front lay the unknown terror of populace. He mentally cycled through a variety of scenarios, calculating the odds, and they weren’t good.

  Mustering as much courage as he could, he ran forward, bursting out of the hallway and into the courtyard, obscured by drifting banners of smoke. What he witnessed next was something out of the fevered imagination of a madman.

  Bodies and internal organs littered the concrete floor. There were so many corpses scattered about that it might as well have been a slaughterhouse. The inmates that remained alive were battling it out with each other and a creature, a twenty-foot-tall beast with the lower body of a dinosaur, a swanlike neck, and the oversized, angular head of a viper. The thing’s skin was black and covered in silvery scales that gave off a strange light. Kurtis raised his sidearm as information flashed on his HUD:

  Species: Serpentem Monstrum

  Level:1

  Class:Monster

  Health:9/10

  Abilities: Additional neck vertebrae allow it to whip its heavy skull around like a club; multiple membranous pit organs allow it to detect infrared radiation from warm bodies up to five meters away; has 65 teeth with grooves that secrete a neurotoxin that paralyzes prey.

  A chain of strange colors outlined the reptilian skin visible on the thing’s back as it hissed and snapped at anything that moved. Kurtis watched the monstrosity lurch down and grab a female inmate around the midsection, shaking the woman like a dog with a plastic chew toy.

  The woman’s body broke apart like a twig. The upper half hit the floor hard and rolled toward Kurtis, leaving a dark, arterial blood trail.

  The monster then turned its attention to Kurtis, who fired a shot that pierced one of its three eyes. The eye burst like a squashed grape, spewing grimy liquid.

  The beast reared back, roaring. Kurtis took a chance and bolted left.

  A male inmate with long, greasy hair, swung a metal bar at Kurtis, but he dipped under the swing just enough and kept on running. Sure, he could’ve taken the man down rather easily, but was it really worth it? He imagined that wasting too much time on lower-level combatants was akin to grinding for miniscule points.

  Ahead, he had no choice but to lower his shoulder and upend a female inmate before she could shank him with the sharpened end of a hairbrush. The woman rose up quickly, and Kurtis had no choice but to shoot her through the mouth. His HUD blinked, updating his stats based on his kills and survival time.

  He slipped past a pair of inmates who were fighting to the death, only to see that the door out of populace, a heavy metal and glass one, was being protected by Bobby Pelham, a short, squat member of Big Rig’s posse with feral eyes that were as clear as winter ice. Bobby sported a blood-stained axe and a poisonous look that made it clear he wouldn’t hesitate to use it. He hopped from foot to foot, cracking his neck.

  Kurtis aimed at him, but a salvo of gunfire hit the column to his left. Dropping to his haunches, he saw Big Rig and four other bulky inmates. Before he coul
d get a shot off, the big man fired at him. Kurtis dove for cover, but lost his grip on the sidearm. The Glock struck the concrete and slid like a hockey puck.

  Big Rig fired again and the round kicked up a stone chip that winged Kurtis in the jaw, costing him another health point.

  He dove for the gun and a boot came down on his hand. It was Pelham!

  “You’re out of quarters and the game is over! I’m gonna eat your fucking soul!” Pelham shouted.

  “You ever heard that rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength?”

  Pelham hesitated, nose scrunched up. “What?”

  Kurtis torqued his body and kicked the little man in the nuts.

  Pelham yelped, knees clenched. The axe still came down, but the kick had altered its trajectory. The blade struck the floor inches from Kurtis’s head and bounced back, striking Pelham in the hip. His boot lifted off of Kurtis’s hand and Kurtis socked the dirt bag in the face, knocking him out.

  Kurtis grabbed for the axe, but a slug from Big Rig’s shotgun knocked the bladed weapon out of his reach. Cursing his luck, Kurtis vaulted forward, grabbing the Glock. He fired at Big Rig, who ducked behind a steel pillar. Kurtis studied his HUD, waiting for his pursuer to make his move. Instead, Big Rig’s men bum-rushed Kurtis, charging at him from across the courtyard.

  Kurtis had little choice but to focus on them. He fired several expertly placed shots that cut the men down mid-sprint, killing two of them before he turned to face Big Rig, who was already on top of him.

  Big Rig’s boot snapped out and caught Kurtis in the chest, knocking him to the ground. Kurtis used his arm to break the fall, but his jaw bounced off his bicep. Jags of pain coursed through his body from the place where he’d had several teeth extracted. Warm, salty blood filled his mouth. He dropped the sidearm again as Big Rig placed his boot on Kurtis’s chest, bringing his shotgun around, balancing it across his arm, the one that was missing a hand.