Dan woke with a start, grasping for the Ruger LCP in his lap to perforate the enraged dipshit who would be breaking down the apartment door any second–only the gun was gone. Had it fallen on the floor? Had someone taken it?
As his eyes flapped open wildly, he saw that he was not on the sofa anymore at all, but outdoors—somewhere. He was stark naked, lying on a patch of grass at the edge of a clearing surrounded by towering trees. The wall of green leaves was so dense he could not see any sign of civilization through it.
Glancing up, the sun looked wrong.
It was hard to say with much more specificity how it looked wrong. After all, it was the sun. He could not stare directly at it without squinting and hurting his eyes, and even when he forced himself, he still could not make out any precise details in the burning ball of fire. It perhaps seemed more angular than it should.
Dismissing the weird sun as a trick of the light, Dan tried to piece together some explanation for his whereabouts.
His first thought was that Mary’s ex had crashed through the door while he was asleep and dragged him into Central Park, but that did not add up. Central Park was far from Mary’s apartment–far from Dan’s apartment too, if that mattered. It was way too far for some drunk scumbag to haul a grown man. And why would he strip him naked and leave him there?
Clearly, something had gone horribly wrong–and that would be par for the course.
That course was eighteen years of Section-8 hovels, watching his junkie mom smoke and snort her way through more tricks than David Copperfield, and then nine years on his own, working crummy minimum wage jobs while he tried to get his band off the ground.
That was how he ended up in Mary’s apartment with the gun. Mary was the 40-something AGM from Dan’s current crummy minimum-wage job. She had a chain-smoking habit, a coffee table covered in scratch-offs, a six-year-old daughter, a baby daddy with a mile-long rap sheet, and a restraining order that was worth dogshit.
The same baby daddy had called Mary at work four times that night, drunker and drunker, making it clearer with each call that he was going to kick her door in and take the kid. That was why Dan said he would sit on the sofa and watch the door. It was not that he was into Mary or anything like that. Shit, she was almost his mom’s age and she looked like Axl Rose. He just felt bad for that kid, and he had an unfortunate tendency to butt in and try to help with problems that were not his. It was what got him kicked out of high school–but that was another story.
He sat up and felt instantly dizzy. His heart raced and the world dimmed from hypertension. He leaned against the conifer to steady himself while his blood pressure came back up. He really needed to do more cardio…
He did not have a phone. He did not know where he was. He did not even have pants. He figured the best course of action was to cover his twig and berries with his hands and walk into the woods until he encountered some sign of civilization. Progress through the foliage was slow, because he had to examine the ground ahead as he went, making sure he did not step on thistles, thorns, dung, upturned twigs, or some other hazard with his bare feet. He made it about ten yards into the woods before he encountered a muddy embankment and slipped, despite all the caution in the world. He landed on his ass, and ended up half covered in muck. He had to slide down the slope the rest of the way, to a skinny little creek in which brown water flowed slowly to his left.
As he stood at the bottom of the slope, a black sheen caught his eye only a yard from his foot. He shrieked like a girl when his brain caught up to his eyes and he realized what it was. It was a dead snake, a solid black one, maybe a racer or a rat snake. It freaked him out like dead things always do, but there was something far more bizarre and terrifying about this dead snake than any roadkill or rat cadavers he had ever run across. This dead snake had words floating over it—English words, suspended in the air above it like a holographic projection:
|a snake’s corpse|
“What the Hell?” Dan whispered to himself as he stared in horror and confusion. After the initial shock subsided, he had a thought to try to poke the floating words with his finger, but he also did not want to get any closer to the dead snake. He backed away slowly and then watched the corpse from a distance, trying to decide where the floating words had come from. It looked like something from a video game—a name plate over a character or a character’s dead body. He was not playing a video game though. He was looking at something in real life. He thought it could be an elaborate prank, but he did not see any wires holding the red letters up. He scanned the surrounding area for a video projector of some sort, but he did not see anything like that—just mud, weeds, trees, and brown water.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Before he could come up with an explanation, some short weeds beside his feet rustled, and something leapt from between the leaves, darting with blurring speed across the muddy forest floor. It crashed furiously against his toes and a stinging pain shot up his foot.
It was a furry little pest. He would have called it a rat if it were not for the floating name tag over its head identifying it as |a shrew|. It was just like the lettering over the dead snake back at the stream, only this thing was alive, and it was biting his toes!
“Shit!” Dan screamed as he hopped away from the angry shrew. The little creature was not discouraged. It continued to charge at him with reckless abandon, biting into his big toe again. That time, Dan noticed a little red number 1 fly from his toe when the vicious critter bit him. “Get off!”
When it was clear that the shrew was not going to get off, Dan began stomping at it with the balls of his feet. He missed with the first five panicked stomps, but caught the shrew on the sixth, crushing its head under his right heel. It did not exactly splatter like a bug, or even die immediately. It sputtered and shook to death over the course of half a minute while Dan looked on with a disgusted cringe, half expecting the thing to flip back to its feet and come after him again. It did no such thing.
The shrew’s name plate changed from |a shrew| to |a shrew’s corpse|. In that same instant, Dan saw a message appear in his view:
You have slain a shrew! You have gained 75 experience points.
As he read the message, he saw a horizontal yellow bar, barely more than a hair’s thickness, grow from the left side of his field of vision toward the right. It felt like the image was on his eyes—the same way as those little floaters people see during moments of stillness—and should therefore avoid his focus as he shifted them to look at it, but it stayed put for him to see clearly. It seemed like it knew somehow.
It was a straight yellow bar of color—except there was something around it. There was a miniscule white border extending beyond the end of the yellow. On closer inspection, it looked almost like a thermometer—or a video game meter, that was filling up with yellow color. That was the fourth item Dan had seen in the forest that appeared to have come from a video game.
Dan had played a good deal of video games in his twenty-seven years. Who didn’t? He had a pretty good idea what that yellow meter was for. It was an experience bar—like in a roleplaying game. He did not play a great deal of roleplaying games. He preferred games with more ludicrous gibs than were common in that genre, but he had played his share and had a working knowledge of the systems that commonly governed them.
Just then, a mosquito landed on Dan’s forearm and stabbed its tiny proboscis into his skin. A little number 1 popped into existence over the site of the mosquito bite and floated up into the air like a child’s lost balloon.
“Motherf—” he grumbled as he swatted the filthy little parasite.
You have slain a mosquito! You have gained 75 experience points.
That was unexpected, Dan thought. Although, so was everything else that happened since he woke up.
As anyone who ever played World of Warcraft might predict, Dan’s XP bar filled a little more. It looked to be about 1/8 full. That was just eyeballing it. He did not know any way to see raw numbers for an exact measurement. If two little critters moved it that far, then he just needed to find six more…things. Apparently, there was no size restriction on what he could kill for XP.
Dan had a strange thought right then. He reached out and grabbed the nearest green weed he saw, yanking it up from the dirt, roots-and-all. He turned it in his hand and examined it for a moment. It had no name tag like the other things he killed. Even the mosquito had a tiny little |a mosquito’s corpse| over its crushed form as it fell from his arm to the forest floor. His XP bar did not progress. It seemed that plants did not count. He could only kill animals for XP. Whether bacteria counted was a question for another day, and Dan did not think about it. He just knew he had to find something at least as big as a mosquito to squash.
He wandered through the forest for a few more minutes before he had a clever idea.
He backtracked a few yards to a fallen tree trunk he had just passed. With a grimace and every effort to keep his bare feet as far as he could, he reached out for the cracked nub of the trunk’s only branch and used it to roll the rotting timber out of the divot it had sunken into in the forest floor.
The collection of insects that scattered from under the trunk was too varied for anyone but an entomologist to identify in total, but there were three blue beetles that made for good crunching, a couple of crickets, roaches that escaped due to their obnoxious ability to flatten themselves, and a cicada. When Dan smashed the cicada, he saw the usual slaying message.
You have slain a cicada! You have gained 75 experience points.
This time, that was followed by a new message, unlike the ones he had already seen.
You gained a level! You are now level 2!
With the level message, a red square containing a white ‘+’ sign also appeared in front of him. It did not fade away, even after the message dimmed and disappeared. The box remained, blinking like it was trying to get his attention. Dan reached out to poke it, but nothing happened. It was annoying, and he was still trying to decide what to do about it when he heard a low snort from behind him.
Startled, he turned to see what made the noise. He was greeted by a hulking mass of brown fur that reared up on tree trunk legs, baring fangs like daggers and raising claws like sickles. Dan screamed as |a Kodiak bear| roared and brought its massive forelimbs down on top of him.