Dale
The moment Dale’s feet hit the ground he triggered his parachute’s release and pulled it toward a nearby low building. The chute caught on an old pipe that protruded near the ground so he gave it a hard yank.
He had landed on the outskirts of the abandoned town. Homes that had long ago fallen into disrepair lined a cracked sidewalk that butted up to a pothole-filled street. To the east rose a low line of hills that would make for a great place to set up a sniper’s nest. To the west there was a large open field he wanted to avoid at all costs. The most interesting place was an industrial section that lay about a mile away. If he hoofed it he could be there in ten minutes, but first he needed to reconnoiter his present location.
He shoved his parachute under an old car that was missing the driver’s side front door. Dale peeked inside but found the interior was just as dilapidated as the exterior. The rear bench had been torn to shreds and a potato chip bag with a Cheetos logo from the ‘70s made up the only contents. He leaned in, shoved the bag aside, and then paused because of the bag’s weight. He dumped the bag, and a bottle of pills rolled across the bench.
Aware of the camera attached to his chest, he picked up the bottle and turned the label.
“Nice,” he muttered, then held the bottle up for the camera and shook it. “All of the college kids out there probably recognize this. Adderall.”
He could take one or two, but that might ruin his plan. He already had a singular purpose and that didn’t include being hyped-up on pills.
Dale had some familiarity with the drug thanks to a hectic year of college. Back then it had been easily obtainable if you had a little extra money. He tucked the bottle into his jeans pocket, then thought better of it. If he tried to sneak up on someone and they heard the pills rattling around like a fucking can of popcorn, it would literally be a dead giveaway. He emptied the half a handful of pills into his hand and shoved them into his pocket. Then he tossed the bottle into a copse of nearby weeds.
Dale dropped next to the car and didn’t move for at least thirty seconds because he thought he had heard someone call out in pain. A pair of loud gunshots popped in the distance and the moaning stopped, but that meant there was another player in the general vicinity.
Dale looked into the car and ran his hand under the front seat in the hopes he would find a hidden weapon, but came up with only a palm covered in dust and debris.
Shit. At least one parachute had landed ahead of him, but it had been a quarter of a mile or more to the west of his location. As he had fallen toward the ground, Dale had full view of dozens of parachutes in the distance. Still, a man moving on foot, and fast, meant someone could have crept up on him.
Dale nearly jumped when his watch tapped against his wrist. Good. Another one eliminated. Had the moaning man been the fresh corpse? Or girl? Dale had been surprised that several women had been on the flight, and even more surprised that some of them had been convicts.
He looked down and found the camera attached to his vest. It had a thick glass cover and pointed out from the right side of his chest.
“You all getting this?” he muttered as he smiled for the camera.
Goddamn. He had wanted to be in the game for years, and now that he was here, he was scared. How many times had he watched the live feed, the replays, the non-stop analysis that occurred for weeks after a game had concluded, and made notes on what he would have done differently?
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He kept meticulous documents detailing how each player had been killed. How the most successful at the game had survived the longest. He had spoken to a man at Google who had helped develop neural net technology. Together, they had created an algorithm that helped define the best strategy for winning the game. Then Dale had talked to some experts, or self-professed geniuses, who claimed to know the game was rigged, and it had data to back that up.
If it were true, it meant that there was one surefire way to win.
Cheating.
So they had set about learning the location of Chicken Dinner, and come up with a big fat goose egg.
Dale rose to his feet, and ran as fast as his legs could carry him straight toward the first house. It may have been yellow at one time but now it was more of a faded piss color. The front door was unlocked and he closed it as he entered.
No one shot him in the face, but he didn’t have time to breathe a sigh of relief. Dale moved into the main room and immediately rushed to a pile on the floor.
Under a long flannel shirt that smelled faintly of mothballs, he found a belt with a sheath, a long blade, and a handful of bullets. Dale knew guns, and he also knew, just from picking up the rounds, that they were 9mm. He hurriedly pocketed them.
The belt was too big so he tied it in front and then pulled out the blade. It was serviceable, but had a little bit of rust. Hopefully the first person he stuck it with wouldn’t come down with tetanus. He grinned ruefully.
The kitchen had long ago been stripped of cabinets and appliances. He moved into what might have been the living room, but judging by the moldy and waterlogged carpet, which might have been tan at one time, no one had set foot in the room in years.
He moved into a larger room and found there was a hutch. Sliding open the largest drawer, he let out a little gasp of revulsion. A rat the size of a fucking Chihuahua scrambled back toward a hole that had been chewed into the rear. It’s tail whipped to the side as it disappeared. Once upon a time Dale would have lost his mind if he saw a rodent. He had been a happy husband at one time. Then he had joined the working class and that’s when things had gone a little bit off-kilter. One morning he’d woken up and felt like he wasn’t himself. He wasn’t delusional in that he felt like he was someone else, it was more a feeling of disconnection from his wife of six years and their three children.
Paula had started complaining almost a year ago that he liked to “check out.” That was an understatement.
He blamed the guilt. The overriding burden in the back of his head that what he was doing for the Kaiser corporation was fucking wrong on so many levels. Taking money from the elderly, as well as repossessing their houses. Dale hated shady banks. They had foreclosed on his family when he was fifteen years old. He had decided then and there that he was going to work in the industry and make changes from within.
Then the money had come. As he had advanced in the ranks he had been offered larger and larger bonuses. Paula, his college sweetheart, hadn’t ended up being a lawyer. She was a paralegal and didn’t make as much money as he did. Dale didn’t care. He just wanted a home that was cozy, warm, and had a man cave. He liked to collect guns, so he had purchased a large safe and placed it in the corner. He also liked nice things like Italian leather furniture, designer clothing, classical art, and a big screen TV so he could watch The Discovery Channel every night while sipping from increasingly more expensive bottles of bourbon.
Then the change had begun in earnest.
One morning he’d woken up in bed, fully dressed, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. After that he’d begun to have weirder and weirder blackout spells.
“You were drunk. Kept raving about the idiots you work for. You got a gun out of your safe, Dale, and you waved it around. You made threats.”
“I’d remember something like that,” Dale had protested.
But the episodes had become worse until one day he’d awakened in his office, surrounded by security personnel, and he’d had a gun in his hand, a gun on his desk, and an AR-15 on the floor. It was only later, after Paula had taken the house, his kids, and most of their money while he was in the looney bin, that he had been diagnosed with a host of disorders, chiefly bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They had taken his weapons away and put him on a regimen of drugs that had turned him into a zombie. With no money left, and no job to fall back on, he had simply left his little town of South Haven, Michigan, gotten on a bus, and set out to find himself.