Chapter 63
More Backstories
Joseph
Joseph approached the school, hearing screams and the sound of shooting. He helped himself to a shotgun from a wrecked, abandoned police car in a nearby ditch.
Normally, he would never have done such a thing since he was sure taking a gun from a police car was illegal, but things were anything but normal. He checked his cellphone again. Still no service.
“Help! Help!” Gavin, a guy he knew slightly, was on top of a truck, trying to fight off a bunch of monsters. “I'm out of bullets!”
Against Joseph's better judgment, he charged, raising his shotgun. A moment of panic when it refused to fire. He took the gun off safety and tried again. It kicked his shoulder as it went off. A monster's head and neck exploded in a shower of green slime and tentacles. He pulled the pump action back to reload and fired again. They rushed him.
A minute later he was out of bullets, and the biggest, scariest person he'd ever seen walked through the parking lot, covered head-to-toe in blood, tentacles, and green alien goop. The huge boy held a crowbar in one hand and a candy bar in the other. He swung the crowbar back and forth like it was weightless. Smashing the heads of every monster that came near him.
And it was over.
“Well, ''bleep me, it's Chubs—I mean Byron,” Gavin said, jumping down from the truck.
“Yeah, Byron. That was amazing,” Joseph said, joining them.
Byron collapsed, dropping his crowbar and leaning against the large pickup truck. “The jock bleeps and their friends locked me inside the school. They left me to die,” Byron said through a mouthful of candy bar.
“Sounds like them. You should kick their asses,” Joseph said.
“What do we do now?” Gavin asked.
Joseph shrugged.
“I need to check on my mom,” Byron said.
“I'll join you, if you want,” Gavin said.
Joseph shrugged a second time. "I got nothing else to do."
Teresa
The aliens followed Teresa's drones around mindlessly as she used them to explore the nearby neighborhood. For some reason, the aliens were attracted to sound.
Teresa grabbed her high-powered flashlight and tweezers and walked to the bathroom, passing her parents' “wanted” posters as she did so. Her parents had been arrested for election tampering, attempting to hack the voting terminals.
Contrary to what the government claimed, her parents had no political affiliations. They'd only done it to raise money for her late grandfather's cancer treatments.
Teresa opened her mouth as wide as she could and shined her flashlight at her throat. She had to look closely, but what she saw made her shiver. Threadlike tentacles in the back of her throat. She was one of them.
Since she remained able to think and didn't seem to be turning into a mindless zombie, eating machine, she reached back into her throat with her tweezers, feeling a strange kind of pain as she grabbed a tentacle and pulled a piece of it from her mouth. She took the piece of tentacle back to her room, put it on a microscope slide, and examined it with her old microscope. “Cells are alien in origin, similar in shape and form to the alien microbes in our water supply,” she said into her cellphone/recorder. “The question is why has my alien adopted a symbiotic relationship with me, instead of turning its host (ergo me) into a mindless killing and eating machine?” She sighed and stood up. “Since those mindless killing and eating machines are at my door, I will have to take up this inquiry at a later date.”
She threw everything she thought she might need into a large pack. Then, after trying to pick up the pack and failing, she took most of it out again, leaving just the basic necessities. Enough to keep her alive for a few days, at which time she'd hopefully have found help and refuge, or be dead. All she had for weapons were her taser and her pride and joy, a Photon 10,000 laser, the most advanced and powerful battery-powered handheld laser on the market. It came with a large warning label.
CLASS 4 LASER
WILL CAUSE PERMANENT BLINDNESS
FIRE HAZARD
She'd even modified it with telescopic sights.
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One of her drones detected a pickup truck coming her way with two people inside. She didn't want to get her hopes up too much, but they could be potential friends and allies.
She directed her second drone to fly near her house, lower, activating its siren to draw the aliens away from her front door.
When the aliens were a safe distance away, following her drone, she opened the front door and stepped outside.
***
“You look familiar.” Sophie glared down at the smaller girl through the open window of her pickup truck over the barrel of her pistol. Her pistol pointed at the smaller girl's head.
Uh, oh. “Well, I've never seen you before,” Teresa said, looking up at the larger girl and her passenger, a girl with a katana on her lap looking straight ahead, not responding to her surroundings. “What's her deal?”
“Found her on the street. She's not one of them, so I picked her up. What's the deal with you and those drones following you around?” Sophie pointed her pistol at one.
“Please don't shoot my drones,” Teresa said. “I found broken government drones in a dumpster, fixed them up, deactivated the tracking devices and uploaded decent software, so they work for me now.”
“You're Teresa Volkov!” Sophie said. “You're part of that hacker terrorist family trying to destroy our country. I saw a picture of you on the news!”
“I'm not a terrorist!” Teresa shouted. “My parents were paid to hack some voting machines. They did it because they needed the money. That's it. They got caught. Let's move on.”
“Oh, you just work for foreign terrorists,” Sophie glared at Teresa. “You're a terrorist mercenary.”
“I believe my parents were working for a domestic group working with the opposing party,” she sighed. Arguing with some people was a waste of time. “Look, we're in the middle of an alien invasion and the aliens are starting to gather around us, so shoot me or let me in.”
“Get in,” Sophie said. “You have useful skills at least, and you aren't one of those libtards who got us into this mess.”
Teresa jumped into the truck next to the unresponsive Asian girl with the katana.
“I had to kill my uncle. He was one of them,” Sophie said, as she put the truck in drive and stepped on the gas.
“Sorry,” Teresa said.
They drove off.
“My drones see a bunch of armed guys in pickup trucks,” Teresa said, studying her surroundings through her drones' eyes. One of the truck's inhabitants spotted her drones and shot at them. “''Bleep,” she said, doing her best to move her drones out of range of the gunners. “We're moving towards them, so maybe we should go that way?” she pointed to one of the side streets.
“Is it possible they're friendly?” Sophie asked. “We can use all the help we can get.”
They heard the loud rap music the trucks were playing before the first truck came around the curve in the road and into view. “Hey it's women!” someone shouted. “The one thing Eric's shelter doesn't have! Let's get them!”
“And they're not friendly.” Sophie hit the gas and turned into the side street. There were shots behind them. A bullet ricocheted off the street nearby. They were aiming for their tires. “Bleep.”
“Turn that way!” the Asian girl said, grabbing the steering wheel and yanking it to the side. With a screech of tires, they shot down into a cull-de-sac.
“You just got us trapped!” Sophie snapped, hitting the brakes and stopping in front of a small, blue house. Two boys stood in the front yard next to a pile of food and supplies. “If we survive this, I'm going to kill you.”
One, two, three, four trucks full of people turned into the cul-de-sac, blocking their exit.
Byron walked out of his house, looking dead inside, carrying his mother's lifeless body. Tentacles came out of his mother's mouth and her neck was at an odd angle.
“Hey Chubs!” someone from the large group shouted. “You survived?”
“Is that your mother? Too bad she's an alien. Did you kill her?” another member of the group said.
“We're taking the girls,” the first person said. “They'll be a lot safer with us than with you losers.”
Chubs\Byron put down his mother's body. Without warning, he pointed at someone in the large group. “Tentacles! They're aliens!”
“Well bleep,” Gavin said. He pulled out his pistols and started shooting.
The air was filled with deafening gunfire as everyone either fired their gun at the other group, dove for cover, or both.
All their vehicles soon filled with bullet holes. Broken glass covered the ground.
Teresa checked her drones. “We've got company!” she shouted. “I mean more company!”
Screaming aliens converged on all of them. Hundreds, attracted to the noise, came pouring into the cul-de-sac from every direction, either by road or by climbing surrounding fences and pushing them over.
“Everyone! Into the house!” Gavin shouted, raising his gun to shoot at a charging alien, only to realize he was out of ammo. “Bleep.”
***
Everything went black.
With a groan, Leo dragged himself out of his pod and looked over at the other five people doing the same.
There was a rush to the bathroom. The pods claimed to have the ability to handle bodily waste, but they were all hesitant to take advantage of this.
“That was disappointing,” Mr. Osmond said, when they'd all finished and returned. “I realize we've only been playing for a four-hour trial run, but I was expecting to learn something by now.”
“We got a lead with that radio guy,” Jason said. “But knowing how these games work, I suspect the quest to rescue Crazy Zeke will turn into a bunch of side quests that may, or may not, tell us anything.”
“You've played this game before. Don't you know?” Mr. Osmond asked.
“We didn't get that particular quest playing as Gavin and Joseph. When it was just the two of us, we fought our way out of the city and went straight to rescuing the General's daughter,” Jason said.
“Wait,” Leo said. “Was that General the big boss monster we killed the last time we played?”
Jason shrugged. “No idea.”
“So playing as a full team is unlocking additional parts of the game. Excellent.” Mr. Osmond staggered over to the easy chair in the corner and sank into it. “Angie, I don't blame you for trying to kill the guys who tried to kill you earlier. However, if we'd stalled them for a minute or two, those aliens would have shown up and gone straight for the idiots making all the noise, giving us a distinct advantage in that conflict.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” Angie protested. “I've never played this game before. Talk to those two,” she pointed at Jason and Leo.
“If we're lucky, we should be able to start the game over when the girls arrive at Byron's house and the six of us get together for the first time,” Jason said. “Keep in mind, when any member of our group dies, we go back to the start of the game. Something a lot of players were upset about.”
“We'll be able to play another six hours before people have to go home,” Mr. Osmond said. “In the meantime, who wants pizza?”