Melee: Mexico: A LitRPG Adventure Read online

  “What about points?” Jackie blurted out.

  Will looked over. “Excuse me?”

  “Points. Experience points,” she said.

  “What about them?” Jorge asked.

  “We need to get more.”

  “You get points by surviving, Jack.”

  “That…that’s not enough. We, I, need more points than that.”

  “For what?”

  “I need to heal myself.”

  “I thought you said it was just a prick,” Will said.

  Jackie ignored this, the throbbing in her shoulder growing more intense with every second. She also started to feel something else, the disturbing sensation that something was moving, wriggling around under her skin. She’d wanted to be a veterinarian before going to med school. She remembered being fascinated by heart worms, how microfilariae develop inside a host animal, morphing into a first larval stage, then molting into a second stage, and then a third, in short order, eventually feeding off the infected host. Jackie had an image of her body aswarm with thousands of tiny, rapacious worms.

  “I need the points for other things besides health, Will.”

  “Like what?”

  “Weapons.”

  Will threw his hands up. “What are you talking about? An hour ago you said you weren’t going to fight!”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why? Because you got lucky with a few shots back there?”

  “No, Because we’re all alone. Nobody is coming to help us.”

  “The senora is right,” Jorge said.

  Will held up a hand to silence Jorge. “You want weapons because what? You’re scared now, Jackie?”

  “I’m not scared. I’m pissed and upset!”

  Good old Will flashed the kind of smirk that Jackie had seen him display several times in the past, usually when he was correcting her or making her feel like she was little more than a silly girl playing in a world created by the big boys. She’d always hated it. It smacked of the annoying habit he had of being condescending, of trying to insinuate that he was superior, that she lacked the mental rigor to understand his arguments and convoluted musings even though she was a physician and he was an underemployed IT freelancer.

  “You hear that, Jorge?” Will said, casting a look forward. He let out a harsh, nasty breath. “The lady’s ill-at-ease…Jackie’s upset.” He turned back to her. “That is a word you will never hear a man use. Upset. It’s bullshit, it doesn’t fucking mean anything.”

  She had to restrain herself from smacking him or putting the barrel of her gun in the middle of his chest and doing something else, something terrible. A ghostly voice told her that his death would net her the remaining points she needed to purchase a medpack. She banished the voice and the dark thoughts away. “Shut up, Will!”

  “No. I won’t. I won’t shut up because we made a plan.”

  “You did—”

  “It’s a good plan, and you stick to plans. You don’t change them because you’re upset!”

  “We are dead unless we do something more than just run,” Jackie said, surprised by her own words. “We have to take control of our situation.”

  “Which is why we need to reach the boat!”

  “And what if it’s not there!”

  “Then we find another way out.”

  “The wall,” Jorge intoned, leaning back, trying to separate the two. “The wall is the only way out.”

  “I’m not climbing over some fucking wall,” Will exclaimed.

  “Then you will reach your journey’s end,” Jorge replied, echoing the voices in their heads.

  This seemed to suck the air out of the taxi. The classical music swelled as Jackie and the others considered their options. She saw on her HUD that there were dots getting closer, red ones and yellow ones, lots of them.

  “I hate to break up the party, but we’ve got movement, boys and girls,” Jorge said.

  Jackie nodded. “Fine. We go to the boat, Will. But if it’s not there, we go to the wall, okay? Is that okay with you, Jorge? Compromise?”

  Jorge nodded. “Fine. Yes. I’ve made my bed and I’m stuck with you two until I don’t have to be.”

  Will muttered something under his breath, then nodded as the taxi rumbled forward. He blinked several times and then favored Jackie with a look.

  “I’m sorry about the whole upset thing,” he said, sounding sincere.

  “Don’t worry about it.

  “I mean it. I’m freaked out about everything and I don’t know what to do. I lost my cool.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” she lied.

  He manufactured a huge smile. “Ceasefire?”

  She nodded. He reached over and squeezed her knee. “Just you wait and see. We’re going to reach the coast, and find that boat, and then everything’s going to be platinum.”

  He flashed his arrogant smile again. She smiled back. And then a bullet smashed through his window, cratering the left side of Will’s head, shampooing his skull in a red froth, showering Jackie in his gore.

  8

  Silver Pieces

  Despite being covered in her boyfriend’s blood, Jackie didn’t scream, but she did shudder in disgust and pull away. Will’s lifeless body had fallen on top of her. The massive hole in his temple sprayed blood everywhere, sheeting Jackie, who fought to shove him aside. She didn’t need to feel his pulse because she saw Will’s stats on her HUD: -10 Health Points.

  Will was dead.

  “They’re coming!” Jorge screamed. “The participants are coming!”

  The unmistakable sound of machine-gun fire rang out. Bullets thumped into the side of the taxi and several explosions sounded. Jackie heard the sound of rubber flapping, and realized the tires had blown. There’d be no fixing them this time. The taxi coasted for thirty or forty seconds, as bullets continued hitting the vehicle and flying all around, and then the vehicle came to a stop.

  Jorge pulled Will’s body away from Jackie and urged her to flee.

  “Run! We need to run now!”

  Jackie opened her door and tumbled outside. Under the silvery haze of a partial December moon, she spotted movement in the distance, the silhouettes of fighters. Red laser beams sliced through the darkness and Jackie stole a final glimpse at Will’s body. Tears in her eyes, she placed a hand on his shoulder. His body was already growing cold. Seconds ago, she’d been talking to him, the guy she’d hoped to marry, a man she’d known for eight years through good and bad, and now he was gone forever. How could that be? How could the world work that way?

  Jorge grabbed her. “There is no time!”

  They stumbled through the countryside, her hands sticky with Will’s blood, clambering into the brush. Cacti ripped Jackie’s fingers and branches slashed at her face. Jackie’s run deteriorated into stumbling and she tripped, hitting the ground, rolling over. Her HUD reflected that there were dozens of red dots gaining ground. She stood and tried to use her HUD to navigate in the pitch, but wasn’t familiar enough with the technology and didn’t have the time to query Simon. Suddenly a flurry of yellow dots appeared. What the hell were they?

  Before she could process what was happening, a fist struck her in the jaw. She fell to the ground, biting her tongue, tasting her own blood, losing another health point.

  Jackie looked up into the face of a woman who was oiled with sweat. The woman’s eyes were wild and wide. She had a hatchet in hand. The woman brought the hatchet back over her head and Jackie thrust up her hands defensively when—

  WHOMP!

  The woman vanished.

  Jackie blinked and spotted an outline; the massive silhouette of something, some creature had dropped out of the sky and grabbed the woman before she could split Jackie’s skull.

  The beast was one of several monstrous fiends with leathery wings and long, torpedo-shaped bodies. They were partially obscured by the darkness, but were swooping down to the left and right, plucking up several of the other participants, carrying them off into
the night. Waves of nausea assaulted Jackie’s innards as she watched the creatures fly away, listening to the mewling cries from the participants as they were carried off to their deaths.

  “Wha—what are those things?” she mumbled to herself.

  “There!” Jorge shouted, grabbing Jackie’s arm, pointing to a burst of light in the distance. “We need to get there!”

  They flung themselves forward in unison as gunshots rang out. Bullets fired by the remaining participants hissed through the air. Jackie held the pistol in her right hand, realizing it wouldn’t do much good against overwhelming numbers. She only had five bullets left.

  Jorge unexpectedly fell from sight. Jackie planted her foot and felt the ground give out from under her. She crashed down over the edge of a ravine, falling on her ass, sliding down into a dry gulley. She ran a finger down her thigh, noting all of the places that had been scraped and bruised. Laid out on her belly for several seconds, she pushed herself up, only to see something move inches away from her.

  A snake, a very large snake, coiled, ready to strike. God, she hated snakes worse than Indiana Jones did.

  Hands grabbed Jackie’s shirt from behind and pulled her backward a second before the snake thrust itself at her. Jackie suppressed a scream and looked up to see Jorge. He pressed a finger against his lips to silence her. Then he dragged her down the ravine.

  “When I was twelve, my parents took me to the coast, to Manzanillo,” Jorge whispered, wiping pearls of sweat from his neck. “I was in the water, maybe five feet of it, when it happened.”

  “What?” Jackie asked, not sure she wanted to know the rest of the story.

  “I felt something, a presence, an electrical current you might say. Something that let me know that I was not alone.”

  “What was it?”

  “An eight-foot shark, hunting, approaching me from behind. The shark tried to attack me, but it missed. Do you know why?”

  Jackie shook her head. “Because that electrical current was the universe’s way of warning me, of letting me know that it was not my time to go.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I have no reason to disbelieve,” Jorge replied. “And I tell you that because I’m getting the same feeling right now. We are not destined to die here, Jackie, so let’s go. Run as fast as you can, because our lives are bound now. Run!”

  He took off first, and Jackie raced after him. The two galloped across the gulley that dropped down into the bottom of a valley. Jackie’s side began to ache as she cramped, and she noticed that she’d lost another health point as a result of the infection. Climbing over a rock, she saw that there was a battery of lights several hundred yards away. Cars, spotlights, and what appeared to be a cluster of police cruisers.

  Her HUD showed that the pursuers were still behind them and now there was a yellow dot out to the east, getting closer. It was a monster of some kind, and she knew better than to risk being caught. The gulley dipped to a crude path of packed earth and Jorge raised up his hands, shouting for help.

  In the glare of the spotlights, Jackie saw that the people assembled up ahead were indeed law enforcement of some kind. They were heavily armed and stood erect like soldiers and police officers always do. A chorus of organized, authoritative shouts sounded in the gloom.

  Jackie’s foot clipped an unseen object and she crashed forward, skidding on her stomach. She elbowed herself up to see a body, lots of bodies. Men and women were strewn across the desert ground, the crimson splotches on their flesh and clothes shiny under the moonlight.

  Jorge stood ten feet away from her, hands up in the air. Jackie rose to see that the armed men they thought were police had guns trained in their direction. There were other people on the ground in front of them, kneeling, hands behind their heads. When Jackie squinted, she could see that the armed men wore police uniforms.

  The Mexican cops shouted for Jackie and Jorge to drop their weapons and approach them slowly. They did. The cops hissed something at Jorge that Jackie couldn’t make out. Jackie’s HUD flooded with information. The cops, all nine of them, were level one fighters at full strength.

  She coughed violently and looked down to see a ball of mucous and blood in the palm of her hand. Her heart sprang like a trap. Eight or nine things were visible moving through the blood. Tiny, nearly translucent worms. Jackie flung the ball away,

  “Manos arriba!” the police shouted. Hands up.

  Jackie did as she was ordered, moving through the glare of the spotlights. The police laughed, massaging their automatic weapons. A few bickered with the other fifteen to twenty people kneeling on the ground, unarmed civilians who were bloodied and bruised.

  “Fifty points!” one of the police shouted, waving his gun at Jorge and Jackie. “Who wants the fifty points!”

  Jackie didn’t know what to do at first. Her moral compass said to reserve judgment, but there was more than enough evidence already to know what these participants intended. Her heart hardened a little, and she shuffled in close to Jorge, but they were quickly separated.

  “We didn’t do anything,” she said. “We were being chased.”

  The police roared with laughter. More figures appeared from the countryside, men and women in civilian garb. All were heavily armed. They moved with ease into the ranks of the police and Jackie realized they were jointly operating, probably one of the vigilante groups Jorge mentioned earlier. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine people cooperating with the cops, operating as teams to fight in the Melee.

  A young Mexican cop began patting her down, thrusting his hands into her pockets. “I’ve got money,” she croaked. “Take all of it.”

  “Your money means nothing now,” the cop replied. He grabbed the bills and tossed them into the wind, then thumped Jackie in the stomach with the end of his gun. “Your crime is being worth twenty-five points, and you are guilty.”

  She doubled over, spitting out more blood and worms. She didn’t say anything and several of the worms shimmied onto the boots of the young cop and began crawling up his leg. A part of her wanted to warn him, but she didn’t.

  “Get down!” an older cop said to Jorge. “Get down with the others!”

  They shoved Jorge to the ground next to the others being held captive for their point value. Jackie was forced into the same position, her arms wrenched behind her head.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Remember how I said before that it wasn’t our time to die,” Jorge said, off Jackie’s nod. “Looks like I was wrong.”

  “Simon?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do?”

  “There are only two things to do, Jackie. Find a way to fight back or you will reach your journey’s end.”

  A gunshot sounded. Jackie flinched and the others screamed. The executions had begun.

  The cops moved down the row of people, shooting them in the backs of their heads execution-style. Jackie thought about Will and her family and how they’d want her to fight back. But how? Then a thought came to her. She might not have a rifle or a pistol, but she still had a weapon, something that was deadly. Something that was inside of her. She motioned at another cop, a woman with black eyes. The female cop approached, and when she was close enough, Jackie spat a wad of blood in her face.

  The woman shrieked and slugged Jackie in the jaw. Jackie fell back but noticed the woman clawing at her eyes. The worms were squirming into the woman’s sockets. And several feet away was the young cop, the one whose legs the worms were crawling up. He was scratching himself violently, tearing at his clothes, drawing blood from how deep he was digging into his own flesh.

  “Que mierda esta pasando?” the older cop asked. What the fuck is happening?

  Another cop grabbed Jackie, but she spat at him too. In seconds, the other police and onlookers were freaking out. The young cop was screaming, tearing chunks out of his flesh as the female cop jabbed her fingers into her eyes. “Gusanos!” the woman screamed. Worms!


  The older cop ordered his people to kill everyone and they began firing wildly, mowing people down when a voice boomed, “STOP!”

  The firing stopped and out of the darkness appeared three men on horses. They rode into the spotlight, barely visible. The man in the middle, rising up from his saddle, face obscured by the shadows and the fedora he was wearing, trotted over next to the young cop and the female cop, who’d both been infected by Jackie’s worms. He shot both of them dead, then carefully, slowly, and calmly lit a match and dropped it onto their bodies, exposing the worms for a brief moment.

  “Who fucking did that? Que hizo eso?”

  The older cop grabbed Jackie by her hair, careful to keep her mouth facing in the opposite direction, and dragged her over. “She did.”

  Jackie looked up and saw the underside of a colossal horse. Then the man in the saddle leaned over and Jackie gasped, because she knew who it was. It was the tall gentleman with the fedora and horn tattoo from back at the market in Mexico City—the very same man whose son Jackie had saved from choking to death.

  9

  Hope

  Maybe the world hadn’t gone to hell after all. Maybe there was still hope that people could be better than killing machines and still look out for one another.

  Jackie began to feel guilt over some of the thoughts she’d been having about how she simply needed to accept the reality of a dog-eat-dog world. Her hope that things could still turn around and doubts about how bad it could get were squashed, however, by a tug at her hair that snapped her head back. She forced her eyes up to see that the older cop had yanked her back and put a gun to her right ear.

  “Stop!” the man in the saddle shouted. “La conozco. I—I know this woman.”

  He dismounted the horse and caucused with the older cop. The older cop, in turn, moved over and began conversing with the rest of his people. The man in the fedora lowered a hand and helped Jackie up to her feet, not shielding his face, as if he knew not to be afraid.