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  “May I ask where your son is?”

  “Gone,” Jimmy’s wife said. “Said he found a way into the game, that him and his friends discovered some kind of shortcut and were going in to take the whole thing down.”

  “What kind of shortcut?”

  Mrs. Mulvey shook her head. “He’s been planning things for weeks down in the basement. Him and the others on account of how they’re big into those games, those role-playing games. Studying details, asking questions, he was ready to go into one when it happened.”

  “Go into what?”

  “One of those godforsaken towers. The Black Spires, they’re called. Apparently, there are things hidden inside. Secret things. It’s all downstairs, the place he was going to, who he was going with, everything, it’s all there...”

  Kurtis stared down at Jimmy’s wife. “I’m sorry this happened.”

  She didn’t respond and Kurtis thought she’d retreated mentally to some far-off place. Then she grimaced and looked up. “Was he alone?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “When Jimmy crossed over. Was he alone?”

  “No, ma’am, I was with him,” Kurtis said.

  A smile gripped her face. “That’s good,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, the pistols slipping from her hands. “It’s not right to die alone.”

  Kurtis strode to her and grasped her hands. She hiccuped once and died. Her head hung limply against her chest. After closing her eyelids, he covered Jimmy’s wife in a blanket, grabbed her two pistols, which were added to his chattel on the HUD, sliding them under his belt near the small of his back. He froze at the sound of floorboards creaking.

  Spinning on his heels, he saw that he was no longer alone. Two tall male figures stood in the doorway. One wore a hockey goalie’s mask and the other sported a baseball catcher’s mask. Each had a sawed-off shotgun. They looked like a couple of rejects from an 80s slasher movie.

  “Motherfucker.” The one with the hockey mask scowled. “You killed Missus Mulvey.”

  “No, I didn’t…I—”

  “We were gonna do that!” the one in the catcher’s mask cackle-screamed. “You stole our points!”

  They whipped up their shotguns, but Kurtis brought the Glock up faster. He’d been doing this longer. Even though he’d never killed anyone directly before today, he’d made sure to pull fast, mostly in hopes of never having to pull the trigger, but this time he was ready to do what needed doing. Two loud bangs echoed in the small space.

  Two expertly placed shots thumped into their masks, blowing the sides of their heads off, but the shots hadn’t come from him. The bodies hit the floor and Kurtis counted the seconds. The figure with the hockey mask moved again, groping for his weapon. He was still alive, barely. Kurtis shot the man again in the head, acquiring an additional twenty-five points as Kurtis’s HUD updated to reflect:

  Species:Homo Sapiens (Evinrude, Kurtis)

  Chattel:9 mm G17 Gen-5

  Health:8/10

  Level:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:8

  Vitals:BP – 123/80; T – 98.09f; RR – 14bpm

  XP:209

  A flurry of motion drew his eye, something toiling in the shadows beyond the front door. Kurtis leveled his weapon. It was Tae. A little spiral of smoke rose from the barrel of her revolver. She stepped through the doorway and cast a sideways look at the bodies.

  “How?” Kurtis asked.

  She held up her hands. Her wrists were bloody, rubbed raw. “I had extra bullets in my pocket. You’re welcome by the way.”

  He half expected her to shoot him, and when she didn’t he nodded. “Thanks, but I was too late.” He pointed to Jimmy’s wife.

  They stood facing each other for several uncomfortable seconds. Kurtis had his hand on the Glock and Tae was white-knuckling her revolver. Anything seemed possible and then Kurtis lowered his gun and Tae did the same.

  “We’re even now,” she said.

  Kurtis nodded and Tae crossed the living room to get a look at Mrs. Mulvey. “Doesn’t look like she needs protecting anymore. You said she had a kid. Where is he?”

  Kurtis pointed to the floor, to the basement.

  9

  Underground Mysteries

  Kurtis and Tae entered through a basement door that creaked as they opened it. Kurtis flipped on a light and took the stairs one at a time. His HUD showed that the basement was empty, no participants other than the two of them. He was grateful for that, at least.

  “Four hours and eighteen minutes,” Tae warned. “We don’t have time to be overly cautious.”

  Kurtis nodded. He could see the timer at the top of his HUD, but preferred not to think about it—out of sight, out of mind.

  The pair reached the bottom of the stairs. A chill in the air gave Kurtis the creeps.

  “Holy shit,” Tae said, startling Kurtis. “Look at that.”

  Kurtis had already focused in on the object in question. He peered out over an elaborate diorama made of plywood and other materials, positioned atop what looked like an old ping-pong table. He circled the table to see that it was an incredibly accurate representation of the city of Chicago with pieces of string and wire running between different locations.

  “Looks like one of those boards in a movie where the police mark all their leads and whatnot,” Tae said. “Kind of cool, right?”

  She was right. Kurtis stooped and spotted the wall at the edge of Lake Michigan. The lake was simply the plywood painted blue and the wall was made of stacked Legos. There were tiny toy monsters placed strategically in and around the city and the wall, and all of the streets and side streets had been marked off in black pen next to buildings that had been painstakingly created with pieces of paper and tiny bits of wood glued together. What drew Kurtis’s attention was the black tower. It was a large black bong positioned on top of a hunk of Playdoh. A loop of red string circled the bong and led back to a tiny toy house marked “my house” in white paint.

  “The tower is up near Millennium Park,” Tae said, tracing the roads on the diorama, pointing at the bong. “Where the Pritzker Pavilion used to be.”

  “Used to be?” Kurtis asked, having been out of the loop and locked away in a dark cell for far too long.

  Tae nodded. “One of those spires just appeared out of nowhere one day. Bam, came down right on top of it.”

  Kurtis spotted a stack of notebooks on the ground. He passed several to Tae and began flipping through the rest. The pages were filled with scribbled notes and crude drawings of the wall, monsters, the black spire, including size estimates, theories on what both might be made of, how to scale them, how to breach them, and how to theoretically destroy them. On the ground he spotted something more ominous. Torn jackets, vests, duct tape, boxes of wires, cans of black powder, electrical switches, and copied pages from a manual that contained chemical formulae and instructions on how to make explosives. There was also a magazine of ammunition. Kurtis held up his Glock, released the magazine, then ejected the round from the chamber. He thumbed a few rounds out of the new magazine, filled up the first, then slotted it back into the gun.

  “How old is this kid?” Tae asked, looking around.

  “Over eighteen apparently, since he’s a participant.”

  “Kid got a name?”

  Kurtis pointed to a white wooden door at the back of the basement. There were photos pinned to the door along with a sign that said, “Gabriel’s Lair.”

  “Well, Gabriel did his homework,” Tae said, running a finger over an image of the black tower in the notebook. “Although he’s wrong about a few things.” Tae held the notebook up and pointed to a list of ways to destroy the wall and tower. “Military already tried to burn and blow up the wall and tower a few weeks back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not a fucking thing. They’re indestructible.”

  Kurtis rolled up the notebooks and stashed them in a duffel bag below the table along with the two pistols he’d recovered from
Jimmy Mulvey’s late wife. Bag in hand, he pointed to the black bong. “That’s where we’re going.”

  “If we’re going, we better get our stroll on, Kurtis. ‘Cause time’s a wasting.”

  The two grabbed several other items, a few freeze-dried snacks and scattered notes, a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, then headed back up and quickly collected every weapon and bullet they could find from the deceased before stealing back to the Camry.

  As a result of delivering the kill-shot to the man in the hockey mask and surviving additional time in the Melee, Kurtis had two hundred and fifteen experience points. He decided to use twenty-five of the points for a medpack, what Nadine called a “Rejuv,” thereby regaining the two health points he’d lost since escaping from prison. Hell, even the pain in his jaw finally went away.

  Feeling much-improved, although still surprised at how much he was affected by the stats-driven health status, and with a renewed sense of purpose, Kurtis drove the Camry hard over the backstreets of Chicago. Guided by their HUDs, he and Tae did their damnedest to steer clear of other participants and monsters.

  Kurtis turned the radio back on, but everything had gone to static aside from an eerie, Emergency Broadcasting beep. He punched up the car’s CD player and a country music song came on.

  “Seriously?” Tae asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Don’t like it?”

  “I prefer my music with more than one or two chords,” she replied. “And with lyrics about something other than trucks and dogs.”

  “Snob.”

  “Well, it is your car,” she said. “You can blast whatever you like. Maybe put on some Al Jolson next.”

  “Right, ‘cause I’m a hundred.”

  She laughed.

  “You want me to ask my voice to play some tunes?” Kurtis asked.

  “It ain’t Alexa, Kurtis.”

  “I don’t know what that means. And I’ll have you know I like all kinds of music, though I’ve got a soft spot for drummers. Bonham, Porcaro, Neil Peart.”

  “Question is: are those dudes better than Nicki Minaj?”

  “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask that…”

  He amped the volume as Tae shook her head and replaced the cartridges in her revolver. He caught the silver flash of the cartridges and a question danced on his lips. “Knowing what you know now, would you have done it?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Would you have killed me?”

  Tae paused, building an uncomfortable tension in the gap between them.

  “See, now’s the time when you say no,” Kurtis added.

  “No,” Tae finally said. “I wouldn’t do it.”

  “That pause of yours was incredibly reassuring.”

  “Just being honest,” she said. “I’m not exactly the trusting kind. Seen a lot of shit go down in my day.”

  “You’re not old enough to have a ‘my day.’”

  “Chiraq has a way of aging you, Kurtis.”

  “What’d you do anyway? Before this started, what did you do?”

  “I worked the front counter at my uncle’s place over on Wells Street.”

  “What kind of place?” Kurtis asked.

  “Mostly chicken and a little fish.”

  “This place got a name?”

  “Mother Cluckers.”

  Kurtis laughed. “That’s an awesome name!”

  “Best one ever,” she said with a grin. “And I was plenty friendly and a helluva employee too.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly got the people skills…”

  She grinned and flipped him a middle finger. Kurtis felt the smile leave his lips. He stopped the Camry in the middle of the street. He clicked off the headlights as darkness washed over the car. It took several seconds, but then the very thing they’d been heading toward materialized, barely visible in the distance—the black spire. It rose up imposingly, looming over the city like some titanic, pagan idol. Kurtis held out his hand because even in the car the spire seemed to be casting off vibrations, like a thousand tuning forks plucked all at once.

  “There it is,” Tae whispered. “If it weren’t so deadly, I might even find it beautiful.”

  “Can you feel that? Can you feel those…vibrations?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded.

  “Once we go up there, I’m pretty sure there’s no turning back,” Kurtis sniffed, apprehension in his tone.

  “I am aware,” she said.

  “What about your family?” Kurtis asked.

  “They’re either dead, turned to green dust, or heading toward the wall.”

  “All of ‘em?”

  She scrunched up her nose. “My brothers for sure. Most of them were in the army. They did a bunch of rotations overseas. The bad places, y’know? ‘The Big Sandbox,’ ‘The Suck,’ they called it. They’re used to harsh times and killing.”

  Kurtis nodded. “Still. You sure you don’t want me to drop you off somewhere? I’m happy to do it. I understand if you want to team up with someone more inclined to shoot first, and not still on a mission to save an eighteen-year-old he’s never even met, based on a promise.”

  “I don’t have enough points anyway,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Ask your voice how many points you need to reach Level Two.”

  “Nadine?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many points will we need to reach Level Two?”

  “Experience reveals that you will need, at minimum, seven hundred and fifty points to gain the equipment and weapons needed to ascend to Level Two, at which time you will be awarded an additional two thousand points.”

  “What happens if we don’t have seven hundred and fifty points?”

  “You will likely reach your journey’s end,” Nadine answered.

  Tae read Kurtis’s expression as he mulled over their options. “I’ve heard that if you quest inside one of the black spires you don’t necessarily need seven hundred and fifty points,” she said, suggesting a daring plan. “Or that if you do, there are lots of ways to get the points.”

  “All the more reason to go in,” he replied, nodding.

  “I’ll make you the same offer you made me, Kurtis. If you need to roll-up with someone else, it’s all good. I’ll go it alone.”

  “There ain’t no one else. I’m on my own,” he answered.

  “Guy like you? No wife, no family? Nah, I’m not buying it.”

  An image of Ali, his long-suffering wife, and his little boy Aidan, flashed in front of them.

  “I had those things once.”

  “What happened?”

  “My wife and son went away.”

  “Far away?”

  He nodded. “So far away I’m pretty sure I’ll never see them again and maybe that’s a good thing. Not sure I could handle seeing them go through this…game.”

  Kurtis considered this, brooding on the issue of grief. The way he saw it, some folks are able to consume their grief and others get consumed by it. When it happened, when he lost his wife and son, he ignored it, turning to the bottle and that in turn led him to do things, terrible things that he didn’t even want to think about. Truth was, he’d never come to terms with any of it, never faced the fact that he’d let them down, that he’d been ringing up zeroes for as long as he could remember.

  “I’m sorry,” Tae said. Off Kurtis’s dazed look, she added, “’Bout your family.”

  He shrugged. “Shit happens, then you die.”

  She was about to respond when the darkness ebbed. A light built in the sky. Kurtis looked up. Fireballs soared through the air, heading directly for the Camry.

  10

  No Mercy

  “OUT!” Kurtis screamed. “GET OUT!”

  The pair scrambled out of the Camry, Kurtis grabbing the tomahawk from under the seat and the duffel bag as five flaming balls slammed down to the ground with percussive bangs that shattered the windows on nearby cars and houses. Kurtis grabbed Tae and shoved her to the ground beh
ind the twisted wreckage of a tractor-trailer. The fireballs cratered the road and the lawns of nearby houses, setting them on fire.

  “What the hell was that?!” Tae asked, rising.

  Kurtis didn’t know. He clasped her hand and they checked on the Camry. The tires had been blown out by one of the fireballs. In the distance they spotted an enormous beast hidden partially inside a shell, like a turtle, opening its ginormous mouth to launch a steady stream of fireballs. The stats on Kurtis’s HUD reflected:

  Species: Testudo Ignis Monstrum

  Level:1

  Class:Monster

  Health:9/10

  Attributes: Armored scutes are nearly impervious to small-arms fire; two internal reservoirs contain hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide which, when mixed and heated, can be expelled in the form of flaming projectiles.

  “That is one ugly mother,” Tae said.

  Kurtis studied his HUD. The black spire was one point seven miles away.

  “Nadine?” he asked, mentally communicating with the alien voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m having trouble sorting through all the data,” he said.

  “It can be overwhelming at first.”

  “What’s the quick and dirty? How many bad guys are between us and that spire?”

  “Nine thousand, three hundred and two. Would you like to know how many casualties there have been nationally?”

  “The game hasn’t been going for that long,” Kurtis answered.

  “Three million, one hundred and sixty-two thousand.”

  The number of dead was so ludicrously high that Kurtis couldn’t process it. He looked over at Tae. He figured she already knew about the dead and the odds they faced and if she didn’t, he wasn’t about to tell her how many black hats they’d have to slip past or confront before they reached their destination. “You ready?”

  She nodded. “Four hours to find a way over the wall. Let’s do this.”

  They took off on a mad dash, weaving through the flames left by the fireballs. Kurtis was impressed with the manner in which Tae moved, with a kind of loose-limbed precision that hinted at a former athlete or maybe a dancer. He struggled to keep pace with her.