It took Mathew a few seconds to come out of his dazed state. He’d rolled down a steep incline and smacked the side of his head against a tree trunk. Luckily for him the tree was huge, and when he pulled himself around, he was able to use it as cover.

He wiped blood from his forehead and shook off the dizziness.

He put his back to the tree and concentrated on the woods around him. He had seconds, maybe not even that much time, before the shooter arrived. But he had a plan. Maybe not the greatest, but it was better than waving his hands in the air and shouting “come and get it!”

A crackling of wood. Crunch on leaves. Mathew sucked in his breath and held it. He angled his head around, but kept himself behind the tree. More shuffling from above.

From his angle he used his peripheral vision to judge the other guy’s movement. A shadow appeared, and then disappeared almost as quickly. Then it was back, but this time on the right.

Mathew didn’t move a muscle. His stomach flip-flopped at his current predicament. Head bloodied, gun almost out of ammo, and he was facing an uphill battle. It didn’t take a military genius to tell you that fighting uphill was a bad fucking idea.

His head swooned, and he had to grip the tree back to keep himself upright. He closed his eyes for a second, and then opened them. He lifted the gun and slowly came around the edge of the tree. The man above didn’t even see him. Mathew put the guy’s head in his sights and pulled the trigger.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The gun clicked.

His eyes widened as he pulled the gun back, racked the slide to eject the dud shell in a well-practiced motion that took less than a second, then he had the weapon back to ready as he aimed at the other player.

The guy had dropped to a squat as he scanned the woods. Thanks to all the foliage, Mathew, twenty or twenty-five feet away, must have blended into the brush. The other man fired a half dozen rounds, but they went wide of Mathew’s position.

Too bad for the guy because this time the gun worked. The bullet struck the man in the chin and threw him off his feet. Mathew launched himself around the tree and advanced up the incline. The guy’s feet kicked as he tried to get away, but Mathew was almost there. Just a little five or six foot climb and he would have another kill.

As he crested the hill, he hit the dirt because the guy carried a submachine gun of some sort in one hand. He triggered a blast that ripped the air, and practically parted Mathew’s hair. Mathew panic-fired, but his first round went right into the guy’s chest, while the second entered his throat and blew blood and sinew out of the back of the man’s head.

His quarry flopped back and didn’t move again.

“Holy balls,” Mathew uttered as he tried to catch his breath.

Then one of the worst noises in the world arrived as his watch buzzed against his wrist, warning him that he had to, once again, move into a safe zone.

He quickly snatched up the man’s gun, grabbed an extra magazine stuck in the guy’s belt, and then ran back down the hill and faded into the woods.

“I’m still in the game, friends. Time to go and find another kill,” Mathew said for the benefit of his streamers.

There was still plenty of game time remaining, but he looked at his watch again and found that the number of survivors was decreasing by the minute, and soon the end game would arrive.