Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 14

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I’d considered calling Margaret to let her know I had to step out, but she really needed her rest so I didn’t want her to come running back to the hospital.

Plus, I didn’t know how I’d explain where I was going or the urgency I felt to make the trip in the middle of the night. And at this hour, I wouldn’t be contending with any traffic so I didn’t think I’d be gone for long.

Sure enough, within fifteen minutes, I’d arrived at my destination. That destination was GetGet—a regional chain of mega-stores that carries everything from groceries to lawn mowers. Aside from my own car, the parking lot was entirely empty. So far so good.

I got out and walked toward the store. The giant red logo loomed above me, still illuminated, but the store was indeed closed.

I picked up a decorative rock from the artfully-landscaped front terrace and approached the entrance. I paused for a moment to contemplate my plan. Would the alarm sound? Would the security cameras record my visit? Or would the game cover for me through a series of orchestrated technical failures and other tweaks to reality? There was only one way to know.

I hurled the rock. The right panel of the automatic sliding doors shattered and . . . no alarm. I frowned in amazement. I’d been convinced enough that this was a possibility to throw the rock, but I was still surprised. Was the game just fine with me doing whatever, or was it watching to see where I was going with this? Were there choices I could make where I wouldn’t be shielded from the natural consequences of my actions? I wondered if I could safely pivot from my current plan and go on a shoplifting spree. Then I pictured myself getting tackled and tased by a mall cop and landing in lockup to get the Life-O-Meter kicked out of me by a guy nicknamed “Cherry Stomper.” I decided to stick with my current plan.

I stepped briskly through the remnants of the glass door and passed through a sprawling showcase of patio furniture and electric barbecues backed by a wall of artfully stacked propane tanks and a banner that read “fuel to feed your BBQ need.” Summer was still a month off, but GetGet was getting ahead of the game. I walked along the main thoroughfare, scanning the overhead signage suspended mid-way down each aisle. In aisle nineteen, I spotted what I was looking for: toys.

The selection was dominated by Legos and RC cars, but there was a small section of dolls. And a small portion of that section was dedicated to Cutie Pants dolls. They’d been retro when I was a kid and they were uber retro now. Still, they’d stood the test of time, preserving their coveted claim to retail shelf space. Unfortunately, there were only two or three of them in stock. Not the all-you-can-eat buffet of XP I’d hoped to harvest. But they’d have to do.

I picked up one of the boxes and stared at the doll within. I had no idea what the next step was. Did I just stand there waiting for it to awaken and try to off me? I gave the box a shake, then put it back on the shelf and sighed pensively.

“Well, well, well . . . ” I heard Nancy’s mom say from behind me. I gave a start at her arrival, but I wasn’t all that surprised to see her. I turned to notice she was fully decked out in GetGet associate attire—red polo, tan khakis, and a branded name tag that read “Nancy’s mom.”

“Farming mobs? That’s actually quite clever,” she said as she stared at the doll in my hands. As she’d figured out what I was up to, I decided to skip the preamble.

“Why isn’t it waking up?” I demanded.

“Because you haven’t said the magic word, fathead,” she answered. “I’m sorry, I meant husky head. I know you’re sensitive about that.”

Clearly her earlier compliment had been a fluke.

I rolled my eyes and responded, “And the magic word is?”

“How should I know?”

“Because you know stuff.”

“Some stuff.”

“Well why do you know what you know and not know what you don’t know?”

“Don’t know.”

“You have to know.”

“Well, I did know but then I—”

“Forgot,” I cut her off.

“Exactly,” she said congenially. “Anyway, it’s your summoning, your incantation.”

“I don’t know any incantations!”

“Of course you do, you simpleton.”

I sighed in exasperation, then turned back to the dolls.

“Abracadabra!” I shouted at one of them.

Nothing.

“Hocus pocus!”

Nada.

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!

Zilch.

“Unimpressive,” I heard Nancy’s mom say in a breathy James Earl Jones voice. “Most unimpressive.” I looked over to see she’d dawned a Darth Vader helmet she’d found farther down the aisle.

That reminded me of my dad, who’d gone pretty hard on the Star Wars catch phrases. And then it hit me. The game’s system was built on stuff rattling around in my brain—much of it relating to my dad. Suddenly, I knew there was only one “incantation” that would do.

I leaned in, so my face was just an inch away from one of the doll’s faces. I was close enough for my breath to fog up the thin sheet of plastic separating us as I growled, “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

It was a line from one of my dad’s favorite movies: the cult classic “They Live.” A brilliant intersection of 80’s action flicks and pro wrestling, the film had starred “Rowdy Roddie Piper” as a drifter who’d stumbled across a pair of sun glasses that revealed the many, many grotesque alien invaders walking among us, incognito. Fun fact: Piper actually improvised the timeless line. Not so fun fact: it seemed to have no effect on the Cutie Pants doll. The thing just stared back at me with its vacant, button eyes.

I looked to Nancy’s mom, but she’d vanished. Typical. Still, I was sure I’d nailed the incantation. I wondered if the packaging was the problem. Maybe the doll couldn’t come to life until it was free of its box. I yanked the thing off the shelf and hastily tore away the plastic and cardboard casing. Then I held the doll up with both hands and shouted into its face, “I said . . . I am all out of bubblegum!”

Still nothing.

I gave it a slap across the face—a front hand. Then I followed that with a backhand, and shouted, “Wake up, you stupid, creepy doll!”

It wasn’t my proudest moment. But how was I supposed to grind out some XP if the mobs wouldn’t cooperate?

I drop-kicked the thing down the aisle, feeling my hope drain away. But then, as it arced through the air, I thought I spotted a twitch. Was I seeing things? No. The doll landed in a crouch, with one knee and one fist planted on the ground. Then it looked up at me, baring a set of razor-sharp teeth it hadn’t had a moment ago. Huzzah! I felt a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t expect to feel as you stared down a doll who’d come to life to kill you. But these were strange times.

“Oh, you wanna dance, Cutie Pants?” I taunted. “Well, bring it on!”

Then an RC car hit me in the back of the head. I stumbled forward and turned to see the other two Cutie Pants dolls had escaped their packaging, and were pelting me with toys from the surrounding shelves. The spell had taken its sweet time to work, but now it had worked a bit too well. Rather than a series of mano a mano match-ups, I would once again be facing three dolls at once. Things weren’t going according to plan. What’s new? I thought.

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A Lego set hit me in the face. I staggered backward, toward the first doll, which had apparently been advancing rapidly. I felt its teeth sink into my calf. My stats were far better than they’d been when I’d taken on the trio of dolls in my apartment—but this trio was clearly at a significantly higher level than the first. I could sense the single bite wound had knocked my Life-O-Meter all the way down from twenty-two to sixteen. It seemed not all Cutie Pants were created equal.

I needed to regroup. I took off running down the aisle and hung a right, as a hail of Legos and action figures flew past me. I noted that my Skin Thickness of fifteen was deflecting any damage I might take from the ranged attacks, which was good news as long as I kept my pursuers out of melee proximity. Alas, that was easier said than done.

“Wanna be friendsies?”

I heard my adversaries let fly with a synchronized battle cry as they fell in behind me, the pitter patter of their little feet echoing through the store.

Fleeing along the back wall, I didn’t have a terribly well-formed idea of where I was headed.

“You could really use a weapon of some kind,” Nancy’s mom called out as she rolled up beside me on an electric scooter she’d apparently borrowed from the sporting goods section.

“You think?” I yelled at her.

Ahead, I spotted an “employees only” sign and a curtain of plastic strips hanging over the entrance to what must be a storeroom.

“Ooh, check in there,” Nancy’s mom said. “I bet there’s box cutters!”

But the storeroom wasn’t going to solve any of my problems. Because you know how sometimes a store doesn’t have the color or size you want in something and you ask if they have any more in the back but they never do? Well in this case, they did. I don’t know what the occasion was, but apparently GetGet had received a huge shipment of Cutie Pants dolls. Roughly two dozen of the little monsters flooded out from behind the curtains. And sure enough, at least half of them were brandishing . . .

“Box cutters!” Nancy’s mom exclaimed triumphantly. “See, I was right!”

“Not helping!” I yelled as I slipped and scrambled to hang a hard right up the nearest aisle. The evasive maneuver lost Nancy’s mom, but not a single one of the dolls. As I headed for the front of the store, a blood-curdling chorus rose from behind me.

“Wanna be friendsies?”

I could feel the floor shaking as the stampede closed in on me. I started grabbing blindly for items on the shelves around me and hurling them ineffectually at the killer dolls. I threw a tire gauge. Then an air freshener. Then a rubber floor mat. Apparently, I’d ended up in the automotive section. I thought maybe I’d run across my very own Cross of Closing. Alas, no dice. But as I approached the aisle’s end cap, I saw a display of roadside flares. I grabbed one on my way by, yanked off the cap and struck it against the igniter button. The flare glowed to life and I hurled it back at the advancing horde. Flares aren’t exactly grenades, but I hoped it would ignite a few of the little monsters and maybe the flames would spread to the rest.

But no. I glanced back to see that one of the dolls had caught the flare and was holding it high above his head like a standard bearer as the mob gained on me.

“They are really moving!” Nancy’s mom remarked as she veered in from a neighboring aisle on her scooter during my transition to the front half of the store.

I ignored her and quickened my pace, scanning the next aisle for something useful. Sleeping bags. Bed rolls. Tents. I was in the camping section. I swiped the only thing that might be of any use at all—a two-pronged s’mores fork.

“Oh, that’ll be a great help,” Nancy’s mom said. “If you run into a marshmallow that needs roasting.”

“Shut up!”

“Ooh, look the TV section!” she went on, gazing casually to her left as she pulled out ahead of me on the very speedy scooter. “Is this the lauded ‘store’ where you bought your revered ‘new’ TV?”

“I said shut up!”

“You’re no fun at all,” she said and sped away, cruising right out the front door, forty yards ahead.

I didn’t think I’d make it that far, but even if I did, what difference would it make? Inside the store or outside the store, the pack of crazed dolls would eventually catch me and bite, stab, stomp, and chomp my Life-O-Meter down to nothing.

“Eventually” turned into “right freaking now,” as one of the dolls leaped into the air and landed on my back, burying its fangs in my shoulder.

As I clawed at the thing, trying desperately to unseat it, I stumbled and collided with a patio set, sending the plastic table and chairs flying as I crashed to the floor and half-rolled, half-slid across the linoleum toward the front door.

I finally wrenched my passenger free and hurled it at the approaching tidal wave of its comrades. Seeing that my escape prospects had narrowed, they slowed their pace, savoring the kill. The keeper of the flare was at the front now, waving the thing like an angry villager come to exact revenge on Dr. Frankenstein.

I wasn’t going to make it out of this. But if there was one thing I’d learned watching and rewatching Missing in Action, Escape from New York, Red Dawn and every other 80s action movie, it was that the hero never went down without a fight. Suddenly, I felt a rush I couldn’t quite explain. It was more than adrenaline, more than fear—it was something almost spiritual. Whatever it was, it waned as the business at hand came into focus.

I rose to my knees, s’mores fork in hand and lunged forward with a savage roar. Tackling the lead doll, I drove it back into the nearby wall of propane tanks and ran it through with the s’mores fork. I realized I’d actually punctured one of the tanks with the force of my thrust, pinning the doll in place. When last I’d checked, my Muscles stat was sitting at sixteen. Apparently, that was just a little bit superhuman. But as the torrent of murder dolls converged on me, I knew “a little bit” wasn’t going to cut it. Still, I’d take some of them down with me. I wrenched the fork free and plunged it into a second victim. Then, channeling my inner 80s action hero, I bellowed at the rest, “You want s’more?”

Snappy one-liners are an important part of an action hero’s mystique, and it wasn’t bad for my first at bat. But as it happened, my adversaries did, in fact, want s’more. They piled onto me—slashing with their cardboard cutters and gnawing with their piranha teeth. With my elevated Skin Toughness, the pain wasn’t as bad as it should have been. But it wasn’t good. I screamed and thrashed desperately as I felt the blades and fangs plunging into my arms and legs, whittling my Life-O-Meter ever downward. It sank from sixteen to fifteen to fourteen, as the mob of pint-sized atrocities chanted “Wanna be friendsies?” in droning harmony.

But even amidst that racket and all the dying I was doing I could hear a hissing sound. I wondered what it was, then realized it was just gas spewing out of the propane tank through the puncture hole I’d inflicted.

No big deal.

Except for the flare, now lying just beyond the growing dogpile of dolls heaped on top of me. Fire plus propane: bad.

I knew that sooner or later I was going to be done for. But survival instincts always push for later. I struggled to my feet, barely able to bear the weight of the writhing mass of dolls, and staggered toward the front door. I visualized myself diving through the door to safety just ahead of the explosion as it unfurled in glorious slow motion. But that’s not how it panned out.

As everything went boom, I caught on fire. Like a lot.

Stumbling outside, I felt most of my clothes and hair burning away. I fell to the pavement and rolled around, frantically trying to extinguish myself. Skin Toughness aside, it hurt. It hurt like hell. Literally—because of the fire and such.

I was vaguely aware that most of the dolls had gone up in flames, but the smell of my own flesh burning was tempering my celebration.

And yet, amazingly, as the flames died down, I discovered I wasn’t dead. I was nineteen-twentieths dead. But that made me one-twentieth alive. Make that two-twentieths . . . three-twentieths . . .

Apparently, with my victory, my super healing was kicking in, and my excruciating pain abating.

I propped myself up on my forearms, noting all but one of the dolls that had been clinging to me had been reduced to nothing but severed limbs, innards, and smoldering ruins. Mind you, the sole survivor hadn’t really survived per se.

“Warner bey fernzeez?” the melted mini-monster warbled before falling silent. I grabbed it and slammed it against the concrete several times just for good measure. Then I collapsed, facedown, giving my Life-O-Meter time to breech the halfway mark.

“Well, another stunning triumph,” I heard Nancy’s mom say from somewhere on my right. She started a slow clap. “Really flawless strategy. It was like watching Sun Tzu at work.”

“Get bent, you soul-sucking she-devil,” I replied as I dragged my head up to look at her. “A win is a win. And a dead doll’s a dead doll.”

And there were a lot of dead dolls. I scanned the area, trying to count them.

“There’s gotta be thirty of them,” I guessed.

“No,” Nancy’s mom said. “There’s . . . forty-three.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she replied with what I now realized was a note of dread in her voice.

I looked back at her, seeing that her face had gone white and she was starting to vibrate. She was vibrating faster than usual. Much faster.

“Too . . . much . . . XP,” she croaked, as if under tremendous strain.

“Are you . . . pooping?” I asked, suddenly terrified that my XP slips were going to be delivered via a new orifice. But then, to my relief, Nancy’s mom exploded.

There was no gore, just a whirlwind of XP slips, swirling through the air in the spot where she’d been standing. I stared, slack-jawed at the spectacle. Was that the end of Nancy’s mom or just an elaborate exit? I had no idea.

“Did that lady just explode?” a voice asked from my left.

I turned with a start, and saw a red-headed, freckled woman was staring at me from a bicycle as she rolled to a stop. She gestured to the rubble and doll guts littering the battlefield.

“And were those freaky, bloody dolls biting you? And stabbing you?”

She’d seen everything. And she wasn’t forgetting it. No blank-eyed trance. No mind wipe.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“I’m Darla. Darla Cunningham?” she said. Her voice seemed to be filled with hope that her name would mean something to me. It didn’t. So, I was thrown when she asked, “Are you Henry Hubble?”