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  The rattle of gunfire could be heard in every direction. Overhead, multiple jets and helicopters streaked through the air. They stopped to watch the helicopters fire at the turtle monster, pounding it with rockets and tracer rounds from miniguns. The beast howled in agony, firing more of the fiery balls. Two of the helicopters were hit and broke apart in mid-air, the third and final one choppered off to the east to fire at the wall.

  Whole sections of neighborhoods lit up in flames like Roman candles. The air, frosty before, had been warmed by the fires and was filled with the heavy scent of burning flesh, fuel, and charred rubber and plastic. Kurtis covered his mouth as they trotted up on an ambulance that had crashed into the back of a minivan. The side of the vehicle was starred with bullet holes, and the bodies of the emergency personnel were visible in the back, lifeless. One of them had been decapitated.

  Kurtis hopped inside the ambulance, using the tomahawk to hunt through the various metal and plastic lockers. He set the tomahawk down and pulled out a few items worth salvaging, including bottles of analgesics, alcohol swabs, medical tape, bandages, and surgical masks, which he stuffed in the duffel bag.

  He slipped on one of the masks, handed another to Tae, and tossed the rest of the goodies in a small bag that lay near the outstretched hands of one of the dead emergency personnel, a white guy, bald as stone, whose eyes were still open. Kurtis placed the tomahawk in the duffel bag, which he carried, and Tae grabbed the small bag.

  The two dashed down the street as the power suddenly began winking out across the city, like some kind of rolling blackout. Sirens shrieked, people screamed, and the only illumination came from the fireballs as they crashed at seemingly random spots like meteors, creating devastation on impact.

  Kurtis stared into the light cast by the fireballs. The glow from the fires faded and something stirred. Misshapen, long-limbed things pulled themselves out of what was left of the fireballs. The monsters moved spastically, beset by tics and tremors. Tae saw this and Kurtis put a finger to his lips to silence her. The two stood and watched the beasts fan out across the streets, climbing light posts, scaling buildings, viciously attacking anything they came in contact with. Kurtis tried to get a read on the fiends, but their stats didn’t appear on his HUD.

  Kurtis and Tae continued their advance, passing a brace of dead participants and grabbed their discarded shotguns and bandoliers of ammunition. Kurtis’s HUD congratulated him on acquiring the new loot and he was worried, for a moment, that maybe they were carrying too much gear.

  The turtle monster vanished from sight and he and Tae took cover behind a sedan. They divvied up the weapons as best they could. Each took a shotgun and eight shells, Tae kept her revolver, and Kurtis secreted the Glock in the waistband of his pants, just above his groin.

  Peeping around the side of the sedan, Kurtis spotted shadowy forms streaking across an intersection up ahead, twenty participants according to Kurtis’s HUD.

  The sedan quivered and Kurtis noticed that it was a hybrid. The car idled and there was a bumper sticker on the back that said: “Be Patient – First Time Driver.” Kurtis crept along the left side of the car, shotgun in one hand, duffel bag in the other. The driver, a young girl who was probably all of eighteen or nineteen, was slumped over the wheel. From the direction of the blood spatter and the ragged, half-dollar-sized hole in the windshield, Kurtis reckoned a hunk of shrapnel from one of the explosions had found its way through the glass and into the girl’s forehead.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Tae asked, kneeling behind Kurtis.

  “Trying to come up with a diversion.”

  Kurtis set his gear down and opened the driver’s side door to see that the dead girl’s knee had shifted the hybrid into neutral. Grimacing, he reached over and pulled a lever under the dashboard, lowering the steering wheel. Then he repositioned the driver’s shoe over the gas pedal and wedged her knee under the steering wheel, hopefully forcing her foot to remain on the pedal.

  “Get back and get ready,” he said to Tae, as he leaned in and slotted the car into drive before lurching back.

  The car accelerated, but with no driver, it began veering wildly, scraping into another car before it curled into the intersection. The other participants fired on it, blasting it to pieces. The hybrid continued hard to the left and down another street. The other participants rose from their hiding spots and gave chase.

  “Now!” Kurtis said.

  The two hoisted their gear and ran as fast as they could toward the intersection, hoping the car had sufficiently drawn away the participants. They were in luck because the hybrid had continued on for twenty or thirty yards before sideswiping a van and coming to a rest on top of a concrete barrier. The participants were busy emptying out their weapons into the vehicle. Kurtis and Tae moved like dark cutouts across the intersection.

  Kurtis’s HUD fluttered. Boxes and icons appeared, including one that blinked “View Outcome Probability.” He’d never been big into technology, always preferring to get by on instinct, on the reptilian portions of his feeble mind, his Spidey-sense for lack of a better word. He made the boxes mentally disappear and focused on something he could get his hands around: a simple map and distances. His map showed that they were one point four miles away from the black spire. On either side of them were seventy-eight hundred participants. His gut told him to keep running and not look back for anything.

  Faster now, they were shuttling up South Michigan Avenue, faces concealed by the surgical masks. They passed a Panda Express and Starbucks, which were in the process of being looted. Up ahead, fires raged and groups of participants were exchanging shots across the street and from the tops of nearby buildings.

  They stopped outside of a sculpture garden, set down the duffel bag and small bag, and checked their weapons. Kurtis loaded the shells into his sawed-off shotgun and grabbed his weapon, leaving the duffel bag behind. Tae took notice and did the same, discarding the small bag and medical supplies, the two removing their masks.

  “If something happens, been nice knowing you, Tae.”

  “Same here, pops. Sorry our working relationship got off to such a rocky start.”

  “Maybe if we get out of here you can take me to that joint you worked at. The one your uncle owned.”

  “Best chicken and waffles in the city,” she replied. “They even give a senior citizens discount.”

  “I keep telling you I’m thirty-nine!” he said, taking the insult in stride.

  “You’re so old I’m gonna call you Betamax!” she replied as he led her forward, darting down the smoke-shrouded street.

  His eyes watered, flicking right to left, picking up potential adversaries here and there. Somebody screamed off to the left. An object flew through the air, crashing through the front window of a Cosi restaurant, setting off a blast that nearly knocked the structure down.

  Dark-clad figures poured out of the Cosi like bees from an overturned hive. Some of them were on fire, others weren’t, but everyone started shooting wildly. Kurtis and Tae dove behind a turned-over city bus. There were other figures up ahead who were running toward the Cosi. The staccato sound of gunfire filled the air.

  “Go!” Kurtis shouted, and motioned with his gun for Tae to run and leap forward.

  A man in a ski mask with an assault rifle reared up in front of Kurtis.

  Kurtis recognized the weapon from his days running drugs and from his HUD, which flashed the weapon’s statistics. It was a knockoff AK-47.

  The knockoff came up, but Kurtis was a second faster. Kurtis hip-fired his shotgun, sending a slug into the ski-masked man as Nadine congratulated him on killing another Level 1 participant. The recoil nearly knocked the man out of his shoes, sending his assault rifle flying into the air.

  The rifle clattered to the ground. Tae grabbed it and squeezed a burst from the weapon, stitching four other participants from their groins to the crowns of their heads. They collapsed to the ground, twitching in death throes.

  The other par
ticipants heard the commotion and swung back. Kurtis cursed, spotting a woman with a buzz cut charging down the sidewalk. She fired a pistol, the bullets from her gun wavering the air near Kurtis’s head.

  Tae was still busy shooting at the other figures so Kurtis drove the shotgun into his shoulder and fired. The round from his gun entered the space between the woman’s brows and took the top off her head.

  The woman, whether operating on instinct or muscle memory, continued to stagger forward. The shotgun jammed and Kurtis pulled out his tomahawk and brought it down against the woman’s neck, nearly taking her head off. She collapsed to the ground and Kurtis’s HUD added the additional 25 experience points for the two kills, along with the additional time survived in the Melee, reflecting:

  Species:Homo Sapiens (Evinrude, Kurtis)

  Chattel:9 mm G17 Gen-5; Tomahawk (Melee-class)

  Health:8/10

  Level:1

  Class:Fighter

  Kills:10

  Vitals:BP – 128/80; T – 99f; RR – 15bpm

  XP:272

  “Back! Get back!” Kurtis shouted, as more participants appeared. Tae fired out her rifle as Kurtis shoved her forward, the stats in his HUD spinning to accommodate the experience points from his kills and the time he’d stayed alive in the Melee.

  He looked away and then a woman screamed and Kurtis saw Tae crumpling to the ground, a knife quivering in her thigh. The man who planted the knife, a rangy guy with a mop of brown hair in a shirt that read “Haters Gonna Hate,” fumbled for a pistol. Kurtis flung his tomahawk, which struck the man in the face, cleaving most of his mouth and jaw.

  The man flopped to the ground like a fish on the deck of a boat, trying to scream without a mouth. Tae pulled the knife out of her leg and fought the man, the pair punching ineffectively at each other until Tae planted the knife in the man’s neck, silencing him.

  “Can you walk?” Kurtis asked, picking up his bloody tomahawk, wiping it clean on his pants.

  She nodded and cursed. “Measly little knife cost me a health point.”

  “You’ll get it back.”

  “I know.”

  “How many points do you have anyway?” he asked.

  “Nearly four hundred.”

  Kurtis whistled. He was impressed, even if it still wasn’t enough to get them where they needed to go.

  “That’s not even a lot,” she said. “Check the message I just sent.”

  A message appeared on Kurtis’s HUD, a popup with dozens of names like Ram-Jam, Hotshot, Jetstream, Turbo Jones, Windchill, DC Slayer, Santa Muerte, and The Death Defier. Next to the names were numbers like 1876, 2099, 1255, and 1408.

  Below this were other names like Dark Daze, The Duchess, SeekNdestroy, Xenomorphing, Streetsweeper, MGMT, and The Crimson Parson, who had higher numbers. The Crimson Parson was up to 5205 points, and MGMT was close behind at 4760.

  “You believe that shit?” she asked.

  “What are those?”

  “Someone told me those are the top players in Melee. The high-scoring participants.”

  “This isn’t a goddamn video game.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” she replied. “We’re all players now, playa. Only now, the aliens are the ones calling the shots. They’re watching us, scoring us, probably evaluating us. Think of the Melee as the world’s biggest, nastiest game of Fortnite.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Kurtis muttered.

  “Jesus, how old are you? You don’t know Fortnite?”

  “We didn’t have Fortnite when I was growing up. We had real games, cool games like Dig Dug and Crossbow.”

  Tae silently mouthed the words Dig Dug. “Yeah, I think I remember seeing those when my sixth grade class took a field trip to the Smithsonian.”

  Kurtis smirked.

  “What’s yours gonna be by the way?” Tae asked. “Your go-by, your player name. Keep in mind that Methuselah is probably already taken.”

  “I’m not using one,” Kurtis said.

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause it’s a game. Duh.”

  Kurtis tapped a finger against his forehead. “IM Dunfore.”

  She scrunched up her nose. “What?”

  “Y’know, ‘cause we’re both done for.”

  Recognition washed over Tae’s face. “Very funny, Kurtis.”

  “I thought so.”

  She smacked her hands together. “Oathkeeper. Bam. That’s the one for you. Y’know, ‘cause you made a promise to that dude in prison and kept it.”

  Kurtis thought about how ironic that was. About how a man who’d had an aversion to keeping promises in his adult life, finally founds the mean to do so after the world ended.

  “I’ve heard worse nicknames I s’pose,” he ventured.

  “What about me?” Tae asked.

  “What about you?”

  “I need a name too.”

  “I can’t come up with one.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re too hard to read.”

  “Enigma,” she said, snapping her fingers, busting a few dance moves.

  “That’s not half bad,” Kurtis replied. “I dig it.”

  They took shelter behind a church. They crept along the back of the structure, tiptoeing toward a window that was glowing green. Tae tapped Kurtis’s shoulder. She pointed up and he followed her gaze. The sky was full of long loops of green dust. They were coming from every corner of the city, spiraling through the sky toward the top of the church which had been destroyed. Kurtis watched the loops of green dust vanish down into the church.

  He peeked into the window and immediately wished he hadn’t. Several of the aliens were visible in a large, circular room. Their mouths were wrenched open, the creatures shrieking things in a foreign tongue.

  The air wavered and warped around them as they waved their arms, the green dust swirling around their hands. They were able to form and compress the dust into something elemental, shimmering cores, emerald orbs the size of soccer balls. The orbs glowed and the aliens appeared to converse with them, whispering words before tugging and pulling them to fashion larger constructs.

  Kurtis thought the aliens looked like clowns at a child’s birthday party forming balloon animals. The orbs soon took on the shape of immense limbs, torsos, skulls. These were then stretched and shaped into the vague outline of larger things. Creatures. He watched the Noctem breathe life into the things which shivered and roared in anger. My God, Kurtis thought, they’re building fucking monsters.

  He drew back from the window. Tae asked him what was happening and Kurtis grabbed her arm and led her away from the church. They ran as fast as they could, zigging and zagging down an alley and across Millennium Park. Bodies were everywhere, lying in all attitudes of death, on the grass, in trees, and bobbing like apples in a bullet-pocked fountain.

  Twenty yards out in front of them a stand of trees was instantly consumed by a fireball. The flames flickered and guttered. Kurtis thought it was a fireball from the monster, but then he saw the silhouette of a man striding forward, encased in some kind of battle suit. The man clutched a huge flamethrower and was firing plumes of angry red fire in every direction.

  “Christ, what is that?” Kurtis asked.

  “An Immolator,” Tae answered. “Bastard bought a primo Ragetag.”

  “We need to get one,” Kurtis said.

  “You want some bling you better start killing, because we don’t have enough points to buy any of ‘em yet.”

  The Immolator sprayed fire on a section of shrubbery and out ran five or six participants, smothered in flames. Two of the figures fired on the Immolator, who let them have it, dousing the entire area in a messy plume of orange-red flame that quickly ended the participants’ screams.

  “That dude is not messin’ around,” Tae whispered.

  “You have to spend points to make points,” Kurtis whispered back. “Makes you wonder what the real intent behind the ‘game’ is.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t read into it,” Tae replied. “All that matters right now is that we survive.”

  They backtracked and headed north, giving the Immolator a wide berth. Sprinting up through Millennium Park, they drew near to the black spire that was now only a half mile away. A church rose up a half block north and Kurtis saw a tall figure at the back of it, standing near a pick-up truck.

  The duo crept silently forward, worried that it might be a trap. Kurtis registered his HUD, noting that there were no other participants around the rear of the church. Closer now, Kurtis could see that the tall figure was a bedraggled, middle-aged black man in the clothing of a Catholic priest. The priest spotted them and held up his right hand.

  “God bless you,” the priest said.

  “Back at ya,” Kurtis replied, noting a green cross that had been drawn on the priest’s forehead in what looked like chalk or dust.

  “No need for the guns. I am not a participant.”

  Kurtis lowered his gun. He saw that the back of the truck was filled with weapons, dozens and dozens of weapons.

  “Building up your own army, padre?”

  The priest smiled. “The name’s Father Sabina and in a sense, I am, my son.”

  Kurtis and Tae stole quick looks into the truck’s bed. “There are all manner of tools there, rifles, ammunition, things that go boom,” Father Sabina said.

  “Why are they here? And how are you not a participant with that kind of weaponry?”

  “I’m handing them out in the name of Saint Sylvester.”

  “Never heard of him,” Tae said.

  “He’s a saint of my own making,” the priest said, his eyes pinballing in the moonlight. Kurtis wondered whether the priest had been sampling too much of the sacramental wine.

  “What’s he a saint of?” Kurtis asked.

  Father Sabina smirked. “Kicking ass and taking numbers. Take as much as you can carry.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Tae asked.

  “Remember the words from the Book of Ephesians. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. This game, this Melee, is from the devil himself, and the only way to send the devil back to hell is at the end of the barrel of one of these.” Father Sabina held up two assault rifles and handed them over at no charge.