“Who is going to spawn the game server?” I asked.

Faces appeared in boxes on my screen, little windows into the lives of my three best friends. Pete, at his IT job in Hawaii, was in the left slot. Ricky, the curly-haired jock who somehow got an intern job at a stockbroker firm in New York, was in the middle. Beth smiled at us from the box on the right. She was my oldest and best friend, but the stubborn girl was famous for keeping me eternally locked in the ‘look, but don’t touch’ zone.

“Why don’t you do it, since you’re between them?” Beth suggested.

It was best to have the person geographically in the middle spawn it, so it cut down on latency, or at least made it equally shitty for the most distant players.

Beth had recently come out of the shower. Her long, black hair was un-styled. I was glad to have her in the game, as it always worked best with four players, but when any girl doesn’t care enough to put on makeup while on a video call with three strapping young lads, it strongly suggests she has no interest in any of the men on the line.

I told myself it was a good thing she had no such desires for me, as she lived in Oklahoma City, and I was in the westernmost part of Nebraska.

The game we played was called Tank Assault Simulator, or TAS. Sometimes we called it Ass Simulator, or just Ass. As in, “I’m going to get some Ass today!” It was an online game where four human players control different roles in a World War II tank, like driver, gunner, and commander. As part of her request for joining us, Beth was going to be commander for this mission.

I’d hear about that from the boys on a side chat, I was sure.

“So, what else are you up to today?” I asked the group as my tank garage appeared on the larger portion of the screen. My fully-equipped Maus tank sat there waiting for me.

“You mean what am I doing while playing this game?” Ricky asked as he took a bite of a sandwich. “I’m taking a long lunch from work.”

New York was two hours ahead of me. Hawaii was three hours behind. To get us all in the game at the same time, I had to jump in around ten in the morning. While Ricky was eating lunch, Pete was chomping on his breakfast burrito.

We all laughed. All of us were at our jobs, except for Beth. She worked nights as a bartender at some honky-tonk dive. Still, she appreciated the irony.

“Me too,” I answered my own question. “They’re doing some kind of experiment today, so I might actually get some action.”

I didn’t go to college, but I’d worked enough years in my uncle’s suck-ass two-bay garage to pass some tests that said I could work professionally as a mechanic. Unlike servicing minivans for impatient moms with screaming children, I worked underground at a high-tech facility that shot experimental lasers deep into the earth.

The science was out of my league, but I did know how to maintain the gas-powered backup generators, which got me the high-paying gig. It got me my own place to live. The underground dorm room wasn’t much larger than a jail cell, but it was free, as was the food. Finally, it got me a laptop, so I could keep in touch with my friends when I was in between shifts.

“What kind of experiment?” Ricky deadpanned. “To see if Chuck can find a girl?”

Ricky and Pete both cracked up, as if my sex life was a knee-slapper.

I avoided looking at Beth.

I was working at the hotspot of science, and it was cool being on my own, but I’d mentioned to the guys a time or two how there were no attractive women at my place of employment. And, since I was living there full-time for the summer, my chances of getting laid were effectively zero. Those brainy ladies in lab coats didn’t fraternize with us mechanical-types, and it might come as a shock, but there weren’t many female wrench-turners on staff.

A rattle shook the laptop on my tiny table.

“We just had a little tremor,” Pete said in a casual manner.

“So did I,” I chuckled.

It must have been my imagination they were at the same time.

“I’m fucking with you, bro,” Pete added, back to our original topic. “I hope you do find someone in that top-secret bunker of yours.”

It wasn’t top secret, but I didn’t talk about it much, since I didn’t really understand what the fuck they were doing here. There was a huge 200-foot-tall steel derrick built above ground, like they were digging for oil, but under the surface was twenty stories of computers and gadgets surrounding an open, central shaft. Below the facility, a starter shaft went down another half-mile.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Yeah, I hope you do, too,” Beth said, sounding as if she’d picked her words carefully. The girl was the smartest of us all, and she had been a straight-A student throughout school, which is why it shocked us when she went to work serving drinks instead of going to college. At nineteen, she should have been farming dudes at a prestigious university.

The screen jerked on Beth’s video feed.

“Whoa!” she blurted.

“What was that?” Ricky asked. Oddly, his picture also vibrated from side-to-side. His red hair blurred on the screen for a moment.

A vibration shook the floor under me, too.

“They are really going for it,” I said.

The public announcement system kicked on in my dorm room. The man’s deep, monotone voice sounded as if he’d come straight out of a James Bond villain lair.

“DRILLING ANOMALY DETECTED. MECHANICAL TEAMS ON STANDBY.”

“Well, fuck,” I said to my friends. “I may not even get into the game today. I was right, they are doing something with the drill. I thought it was a test, since they didn’t order me to my station, but they just put me on standby.”

“We’re shaking like crazy here,” Beth said with alarm.

“Here, too,” Ricky said.

But she was in Oklahoma, and he was in New York…

My laptop jerked a few inches to my left. No, it was the table being shoved to the right. A strong vibration coursed through the concrete under my feet, circled my shins, looped around my knees, then launched into the rest of my body. If such a thing were possible, my eyeballs seemed to rattle in their sockets, making it difficult to see. I leaned forward and held the laptop for a moment to try to steady the picture.

Was the whole world shaking?

The guy on the PA spoke again. “WARNING: EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN IN PROGRESS.”

“We’re shaking here, too,” I added to my friends’ conversation. “The drill is already shutting down. They must have hit a snag.”

Finally, the vibration shook out and the room became still.

I turned to box one. “Pete, what’s going on, there?”

His brows furrowed as if he were looking at bad news on an internet browser on his screen. “Chuck, I think the whole city was shaking. The civil defense sirens are screaming, like tornados are striking outside.”

“You mean your whole city felt that?” He was in good-sized city called Honolulu.

He nodded grimly.

I glanced toward the small LED light above my door. It was put in all the rooms to give underground residents and workers a heads-up as to whether they were safe, or not. Green meant everything was running normal. Sometimes, it showed orange, which meant an experiment was in progress. I’d expected to see that color now, but instead I found it had turned to red.

It had never been red.

Red was always a bad omen.

When I turned around to my friends, I noticed a figure standing behind my buddy in Hawaii. “Hey, Pete, who’s in there with you?” I asked him.

Pete’s face bled to white as he pointed toward his screen.

My pulse rate nudged into its orange zone.

“What is it?” I asked him.

Beth became agitated, also motioning to her screen. “R-Ricky…”

It was then I recognized the same look of terror on the face of my New York friend.

“What’s the matter with you guys?” I said in jest, hoping for confirmation this was some sort of prank. My breath caught in my throat as I saw someone behind Beth—Fuck, and someone was behind Ricky.

“Guys, what the hell is going on?” I pressed.

I gestured to the screen, aligning a finger with each person in turn. “I see a dude standing behind all of you. How did you coordinate that?”

Beth looked directly at her camera, not her display screen, which made it feel as if she were peering into my soul. “Chuck, someone is behind you, too.”

My heart pounded into the bad-omen zone.

An electro-static energy coursed over my skin.

All the hairs on my body stood straight up.

My neck.

My arms.

Everywhere.

A rotten, cool air blew in, leading me to clench my mouth shut and hold my nose. It stank like an outhouse had been built above my room and some dickhead chose today to open the hatch and let the contents of the holding tank drain into my room.

“What. The. Fuck.”

The looks on my friend’s faces made me want to turn around, but my soul was begging me not to do it. A part of me knew the last few minutes had been fucked up. Earthquake tremors here in Nebraska, there in Hawaii, and on the screens of Ricky and Beth. However, the real reason I couldn’t turn around was the figure I saw on the screens of my friends. They had turned around to meet their intruders, and I saw his face. It was the same on every screen…

“No. God no.”

My next act was inevitable.

I spun slowly on my chair, almost an inch at a time.

Please don’t be…

Please don’t be…

Death stood before me.

Fuck. I’m dead.