“Is that really Dud-o-Mort as a freaking gnome?”

Identical smirks spread across Zack and Sarah’s faces.

Yeah, I really hate this guy. He's been calling me Dud-o-Mort since he demolished me in Final Fantasy 7. Right before he decided to go off to a new game, and new player friends.

Total jackass.

That had been before I’d shelled out seventy bucks on Cyberpunk 2077. So, I really only had myself to blame for that one. What’s that saying? When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Or maybe it was what they are. As in a total asshole.

Whatever.

“Dude,” Jesse chuckled, his eyebrows knitting together, “how on Earth did this happen?”

Projectile gnome versus my face. And then some asshole alien intervention. What I said, though, was, “None of your freaking business, dick-wad!”

Yeah, that's me. Eloquent to the core.

Jesse couldn't stop chuckling. The aforementioned Zack and Sarah just smirked wider.

“Well, Lost Cause Boys, I've gathered some troops here,” he hooked his thumb back to the 20 or so people behind him. “So if you know of any nasty monsters that need eradicating—that you all can't handle—just point the way.”

I clenched both of my fists, wanting to pull out my frying pan and smash him over the head a few times. But just because I hate the guy doesn't mean I should lay down on him. After all, it's kind of like the monsters and aliens against all humanity.

And, technically, Jesse was human.

That's when he got this look in his eyes. Some kind of zealous light shining right out of him. He took a big breath and called out, “It's the end of the world, YOU FOOLS! Why aren't you killing something?”

He had rebranded his catch phrase. That was just—

BANG!!!

One second Jesse was standing there, and the next he was replaced by a refrigerator. Oh, and something warm and wet splattered me.

Time stopped. There was no sound, there was no movement, nothing. The wind wasn't even blowing anymore.

A stats box popped up over the refrigerator, and a TV gameshow announcer voice started to go off in my head.

“Beware of Falling Appliances!!! Specifically, this KitchenAid 48 inch wide, 30 Cubic Foot, Side By Side Refrigerator with a Stainless Steel finish featuring fingerprint resistant PrintShield, a FreshChill Temperature-Controlled Drawer, Ice Maker, Water and Ice Dispenser, and SatinGlide Drawers. Product weight: 568 lbs. Actual Retail Price: $10,568.00 plus tax where applicable.”

And then time started up again. I felt even more warm wetness splash on me. I looked down at myself. I was completely covered in blood and gore—all kinds of things, from pieces of intestine, to human hair. That's when I looked back to the refrigerator… and then down.

Jesus-fucking-Christ…

What had been Jesse was now just a soup of smashed-up, skinless body parts, oozing out from under the refrigerator. Half Jesse's face poked out at the top of the splatter of chunky gore. There was some skin still left at the top of his face, and some hair. His eyeball was starting to slide out from its socket.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

For a moment I wasn’t able to look away. That was until Sarah started screaming. That snapped my attention right up to her. She was covered in blood and gore too, as was Zach. He stood there, eyes wide, expression blank. I think he was in shock.

Sarah dropped to her knees by what was left of Jesse, sobbing, her tears cutting through the smear of blood covering her face.

I looked back to Zach and realized there was something sticking out of his arm. It was a bone. I think it was one of Jesse's finger bones.

“Dude,” I said gently. “There's something sticking out of your arm.”

Zack’s shell-shocked eyes turned to me, and then slowly he looked down at his arm. That's when emotion started to flood back into his expression, and he started to hyperventilate. He grabbed at the finger and tore it out of his arm, throwing it away from him in horror.

“Oh god,” I heard Teddy say from behind me.

The twenty or so people huddled behind the now smashed-to-a-pulp Jesse all looked like they couldn't believe their eyes. The front row of them were splattered in red and pink gore. One of the people in the front had something sticking out of their eye. I think it was a rib bone. And a few seconds later that kid fell to the ground, dead.

“Fore!” A gruff female voice bellowed. My eyes went straight for the source. A huge green female troll, with a disproportionately large head and multi-colored hair, lumbered into the clearing, scattering Jesse's little army in her wake. Beside her was a smaller version of herself.

Lorelai and Rory.

I chanced pulling up my stats box on them, and saw that the smaller troll was level 98, and the mama troll was level 165.

“Ah, there’s my refrigerator!” Lorelai thundered.

Holy fucking shitballs!

Sarah sprung up onto her feet, her eyes flashing with insane rage. “You fucker!!!” She hollered, and she ran straight up to the trolls. Zack stopped hyperventilating long enough to turn and run after her.

This was not going to be good.

Sarah suddenly had a sword in her hand, probably pulled out of her inventory, and she tried to stab the bigger troll in the heart. But the annoyed troll swatted the sword out of her hand, then grabbed that hand and gave it a mighty yank, ripping Sarah's arm right off her body.

Teddy started to move forward, but both Wood and I reached out and pulled him back. He gave us both disbelieving looks as we dragged him back with us, as we retreated back away from the battle.

Lorelai used Sarah's ripped-off arm to smack Zack so hard he slammed against a tree and was knocked unconscious.

Sarah fell to the ground, holding onto the spot where her arm used to be, trying to apply pressure before she bled out.

“We need to help them,” Teddy said.

The assembled army of Jesse we're all flinging themselves, some with weapons, some without, at the trolls. They were no match. Even the smaller Rory troll just wrenched their heads off their bodies and threw them off into the woods.

Maybe The Big Heads would use those heads to play bowling with next time?

“We can't win this fight,” I said. “Remember, your arrows didn't do a thing, and all I got was smacked around by boulders.”

After a few more feet of walking backwards, Wood and I turned, keeping our arms around Teddy to make him turn with us. As we walked away, leaving the battle behind, we heard less and less screams, probably as more and more of Jesse's army died.

We were going to have to figure out a way to fight those two. Try to find a way to kill them. But right now, we didn't have a chance.

***

“I can't believe he's gone,” Teddy said after a while. We were almost to the edge of town.

I knew what he was saying. Jesse had been a staple of our online gaming lives. We met up in real time only because he lives… lived only a half hour away in Moon Township, by the old airport.

Teddy was quiet for a few moments, and then he said, “I really hated that guy.”

I had to chuckle. It just showed how freaking insane this world was now. Someone we’d known had just gotten SAW-style murdered, and I was laughing about it.

Maybe I was crazy.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“He just had that way of making you feel so important…” Teddy said. “For a while. And then he’d get bored with you and ghost you. Go find someone new to play with.”

Teddy sounded so sad.

I reached over and clapped him on the forearm. That was the only part of him I could reach, besides maybe his butt.

“Same here,” I said.

Wood gave me a hard look. Something I’d said made him go all angry with me again. I felt myself wither inside. What was going on here?

A human head crashed into the brush a few feet away from us. Lorelai and Rory were literally ripping those guys apart. Again I felt the stab of guilt that we weren't back there helping. But then a leg clad in faded blue jeans went thwap against a tree trunk, blood splattering all over the ground in front of us.

“We should walk faster,” I said, and Wood and Teddy nodded their heads in agreement. We all started to jog our way out of the woods and towards town again.