Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 19
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As we burst out the front door, I glanced back to see a slowly-recovering Merrick limping down the stairs after us, hurriedly reloading his pistol.
The guy was fully unhinged and I was sure he’d open fire on us in the middle of the street. So as we hustled toward my car, I was too busy looking over my shoulder to see a cyclist blow through a stop sign and nearly kill me.
“Hey, I’m biking here!” he yelled as he peddled off.
“God, I hate cyclists,” I mumbled.
“You know I ride a bike, right?” Darla said in a fit of preposterously-timed indignation she’d apparently been repressing since the last time the subject came up.
I jerked open the driver’s side door and hurled myself behind the wheel as Darla dived into the passenger seat. As I started the engine, I checked the rearview. Merrick had just run out into the street behind us. He stopped dead, recognizing he wasn’t going to be able to catch us on foot then back-peddled toward a Jaguar I suspected was his. As I peeled out and fishtailed down the block, I saw him diving into the vehicle, confirming my suspicion.
I took a right—the first of several turns I was planning to take, to make it impossible for him to pick up our trail. But the block ahead was a winding, scenic affair, intersected by countless cul-de-sacs. We couldn’t risk being trapped in a round-about if Merrick spotted us. So I kept to the main thoroughfare, taking the curves as fast as I could without rolling my car. Unfortunately, Merrick chose a more expedient approach. In the rearview mirror I spotted his Jaguar jump a curb and bounce through several front yards, skipping the curves of the road and closing the distance between us rapidly.
“What is this guy’s problem?” I demanded.
“I don’t know!” Darla cried. “Somehow he knows about the computer and the code!”
“The code!” I repeated. “It was the same as the stuff I saw in my dream! And in the conference room at my office. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know!”
“What about the key he keeps ranting about?”
“I don’t know!”
“Stop not knowing!”
She pulled herself together enough to give my last question some thought.
“He obviously thinks the stuff that’s been translated has been translated manually, and I have some kind of code book.”
“Maybe you do.”
“What?”
“Well, not a code book, but . . . how did you get the stuff that’s been translated to be translated?”
“I didn’t. It just happened. After the beeping.”
“What started the beeping?”
“A ‘system anomaly’?”
“What was the system anomaly?”
“I don’t know!”
“I told you to stop not knowing!”
I stomped on the gas pedal as the road ahead straightened out. But then I caught a glimpse of something veering into my path from the right. I slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid flattening another cyclist as he rocketed off the curb and landed directly in my path.
“Share the road!” he shrieked as I pulled out ahead of him.
“God, I hate cyclists!” I snarled again.
“Hey!” Darla gasped. “If there were no cyclists, the world would’ve choked to death on smog by now!”
“Worth it!” I rebutted.
“You’re so weird!” she exclaimed. “Who hates cyclists? And tomatoes?”
“Any sensible person!”
“Seriously. Have you even ever had a tomato?”
“Eww! Bleh! No!”
“Open your mind! You’re in advertising, right? Don’t you spend your life convincing people to try something new?”
“No. I trick people into buying crappy cars.”
“Ick. You’re like those guys on Mad Men!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
I checked the mirror and saw that Merrick was only a dozen car lengths behind us now. But between him and us was the cyclist, and getting a good look at him now, I realized . . .
“That’s the same guy!” I gasped.
“What?”
“The guy on the bike. It’s the guy who almost ran me over!”
“That’s impossible,” Darla said. “There’s no way he could have caught up with—”
She looked back to see the guy peddling faster. And faster. And faster. He was gaining on us at twice the rate Merrick was. In fact, he was pulling alongside the car now—doing fifty miles an hour, easy. It was Marty Malomar all over again.
“Crap!” I yelled. “What time is it?”
“What?”
“What time is it!”
Darla glanced at her watch, then gasped and delivered the verdict.
“6:31!”
“Crap!” I repeated.
The next quest objective had appeared right on time as we got into the car. We just hadn’t recognized it.
“Share the road!” the cyclist screamed and veered in front of my car. I swerved to avoid him again.
“Is he . . . trying to get run over?” Darla exclaimed.
“Of course!”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a cyclist!”
She rolled her eyes at that, then conceded, “Fine, this particular cyclist is nuts. So what are you supposed to do?”
“You better not hit him, that’s for sure,” Nancy’s mom chimed in from the back seat.
“Ahh!” Darla cried. “Where’d you come from?”
“I told you,” I said. “She pops up all the time.”
Something hit us from behind and I looked back to see Merrick had finally caught up with us and was trying to run us off the road.
Nancy’s mom peered back at Merrick and said, “Who’s this maniac, then?”
“Dean Merrick,” Darla said.
“Who’s that?”
“Guy who wants my magic computer to tell him the future.”
“You have a magic computer that tells the future?”
“Yes,” I shouted. “And don’t act like it doesn’t have something to do with RIP!”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Nancy’s mom said. “Like I told you before, I just work here.”
“Work where?” Darla asked.
“I forget.”
I didn’t have time to have a conniption fit over her nonsensical amnesia because my attention was diverted as a second identical cyclist flew off the curb to my left and landed right in front of me. I jerked the wheel and barely avoided crushing him. I really didn’t want to run the dude over. I mean he may have been a cyclist, but he was still a human being. Sort of. Not to mention, it sounded like doing him in would be bad for me. I wondered how bad.
“What happens if I hit them?” I yelled.
“No XP for you,” Nancy’s mom replied.
Hm, I thought. Not too bad. I could sacrifice the XP, given the circumstances.
“Oh, and it’ll knock a hundred or so off your Life-O-Meter.”
“What?” I squeaked. “That’s twice as much as I’ve got!”
“Remember when I said you better not hit them?”
We felt the car jolt forward as Merrick rear-ended us again. I struggled to keep us from hitting either of the cyclists, who were now boxing me in from either side. Who knows how Merrick’s brain was translating what was happening with the cyclists, or if he was even seeing them at all.
“Okay, hold on a minute,” Darla said. “You said the game turns everything you hate against you, right?”
“Yup!”
“Well, stop hating cyclists and maybe they’ll go away!”
“Not gonna happen!”
“Why?”
“Because cyclists suck!”
On cue, the cyclist to my left yelled “Share the road!” and side-swiped us. He bounced off, then briefly lost control before recovering.
“Ooh, don’t let him do that,” Nancy’s mom warned. “He could wreck and it’ll count against you as surely as if you’d run him over.”
“What the hell!” I exclaimed at the nonsensical rule.
I sensed the collision had cost the cyclist a point off a Life-O-Meter that had . . .
“Five points?” I yelled. “Their Life-O-Meters only have five points?”
“Hm,” Nancy’s mom replied. “As fragile as they are suicidal.”
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“What the hell!” I shrieked again, bemoaning my infinitesimal margin for error.
“Just stop hating cyclists!” Darla insisted.
“I can’t!” I yelled. “And even if I could, they’d just turn into something else I hate!”
Darla looked back at Nancy’s mom.
“Is that true?”
“Hard to say,” Nancy’s mom replied. “Rules don’t really ac—”
Crash! Merrick rear-ended us again and she grabbed the seatback to steady herself. Then she glared back at Merrick, silently scolding him for his impertinence.
“As I was saying . . . the rules don’t really account for someone stopping hating something on the spot.”
“So it’s worth a shot!” Darla said.
“Don’t listen to her!” I yelled, jerking a thumb in Nancy’s mom’s direction. “She’s the worst person in the world.”
“Stop hating cyclists!” Darla yelled back.
“Impossible!”
“They save the world millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide every year!”
“Yeah, well, Hitler gave to charity!”
“Really?”
“Probably not. But he could have. And then, what, he’s a nice guy? Cyclists suck!”
The cyclist on the left tried to sideswipe us again and I yanked the wheel to avoid contact.
“Well just think about the ones who don’t suck. Like me!”
“You’re not a cyclist! You’re just a person who rides a bike.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You don’t wear spandex and stuff.”
“It chafes.”
“Maybe that’s why cyclists are such jerks.”
“I know some really nice cyclists.”
“Eva Braun thought Hitler was nice. Then he poisoned her and shot himself.”
“Why do you keep bringing up Hitler?”
“Because Hitler sucked and cyclists suck.”
Bam! The second cyclist sideswiped us, dropping a point from his Life-O-Meter. But Darla continued, undeterred.
“What about Caligula, Genghis Kahn, freaking Jeffrey Dahmer? They all sucked too. Why go right to Hitler?”
“Do you . . . feel sorry for Hitler?”
“I’m just saying there’s a lot of terrible people to choose from, and it’s a cliché to pick him.”
Crash! Merrick rear-ended us again.
“If you love Hitler so much, why don’t you marry him?”
“I don’t love him!”
“Sounds like you do!”
Pow! Pow! The front windshield shattered as two bullets tore through it, abruptly ending our debate.
“Christ on a crutch!” I bellowed as I turned to see Merrick firing off wild shots from his pistol as he struggled to keep the car straight with his other hand. He needed Darla alive, so he was probably aiming at me. But his margin of error was massive.
If I kept plowing along right in front of him, her survival was a coin toss. But if I took evasive action, I’d run over at least one of the cyclists. Either option left Darla or me or both of us dead. But there was a third option that would only occur to someone who had, say, watched sixteen thousand action movies with his dad.
“Hold us steady!” I yelled to Darla as I took my hands off the wheel and scrambled into the back seat.
“What?” she squawked in surprise. But she grabbed the wheel and did her best.
If my plan panned out, she wouldn’t have to avoid the cyclists for more than a few seconds. After that, whatever happened didn’t matter. The way I figured it, I could only take the wrap for running them over if I was in the car. And I’d decided not to be.
“Excuse me!” Nancy’s mom exclaimed indignantly, as I shoved her aside and climbed through my busted back window onto the trunk.
Merrick’s eyes widened in surprise, then he shrugged and took aim with the revolver. Pow! Pow! One of the shots connected with my shoulder, sending electric agony surging through my body. But the wound healed as quickly as before as I rose to a crouching position.
“Are you crazy?” Darla screamed. “What exactly are you planning?”
“I’m going jump onto the hood of his car, smash through his windshield, and punch him out!”
“Are you crazy?” she repeated.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her as I lined up my leap. “Chuck Norris does it all the time.”
A perennial favorite of my dad’s, Chuck Norris had smashed through many windshields to dispatch many bad guys. (When it came to martial artists turned movie stars, I’d controversially preferred Jean-Claude Van Damme, but more on that later.)
Suddenly, I felt that strange rush I’d felt just before launching into battle with the Cutie Pants horde. But this time, it waned, as I was overwhelmed by a fit of sanity. I started to second-guess myself. Chuck Norris had stunt men and stunt coordinators and what not. I had none of that.
But then I third guessed myself and prepared for launch, remembering I had one thing Chuck Norris didn’t. I had a Life-O-Meter with fifty points. That is until I slipped, mid-take-off, bounced off Merrick’s hood, and landed on the street in front of the Jaguar. I tried to roll to the side, hoping that I could dodge the front tire or the back tire or both. But apparently after the front one bumped over me, crushing my trachea, the vehicle skidded sideways and both back tires took a turn crushing my ribs and internal organs.
Stupid Chuck Norris had made it look so easy.
I was dimly aware of my Life-O-Meter bottoming out at two points before rebounding as aggressively as it had when I’d taken the bullets. Apparently, RIP didn’t count the car as an in-game combatant that needed to be vanquished before my Life-O-Meter could recover.
Even better, my unintentional self-sacrifice had paid off. As I blinked myself back to the land of the living, I noted Merrick’s car had hopped a curb and crashed into a tree after slipping on my squishy body. From his bloody-faced, unconscious state, I surmised that the collision had triggered the airbag which had busted his nose and knocked him out. His seatbelt was the only thing holding him upright.
Down the block, I saw my Corolla pulled over. I guessed Darla had hit the brakes as soon as Merrick was off her tail, neutralizing the risk of running over the cyclists. All in all, my plan had worked. More or less.
But it was hard to feel smug as I wiped all the blood and guts I’d coughed up off my face. And it was going to get even harder. Just beyond my car, something glimmered in the early morning light—a reflection off a bike frame. The cyclists had doubled back and were headed my way. I didn’t need Nancy’s mom to explain what was happening. Based on the attempted hit-and-run when I was getting into my car, I knew how this worked. The bastards had tried to get me to run them over while I was driving, but they’d try to run me over while I was on foot. Classic cyclists.
I rose to my feet and regarded them as they approached at ever-increasing speed. I knew one of them had four points left on his Life-O-Meter and the other just three points. The points had come off easily enough when they’d gotten whacked with the car, but I didn’t know how my hand-to-hand attacks might compare. Nor did I have any sense of how much damage their bikes would do if and when they managed to ram me. I started to do some math on Muscles, Skin Toughness, and Life-O-Meter stats, but I didn’t have enough data to even guess at possible outcomes. I just needed to get the hell out of the way. I faked left, I faked right, I faked left again, and . . . basically ended up right back where I’d started. Damn my Twinkle Toes stat. I could have picked the Snow Leopard race but noooo, I had to wimp out.
“Share the road!” the first cyclist bellowed as his handle bars bashed into my mid-section, catapulting me head-first into him. His helmet smacked into my forehead and I felt like I’d been headbutted by a rhino. But impossibly, he seemed to get the worse end of it.
There was a distinctive bicycle bell chime and then . . . he exploded. Yup. It was kind of like when Nancy’s mom had blown up, but instead of XP slips, he was full of some neon green goop which splashed all over me. As I tumbled to the ground and rolled to a stop, I thought I understood what my Noggin Weaponization stat was all about. Again, it was only at level 1, but apparently that was more than sufficient, given the Skin Thickness and dwindling Life-O-Meter of my adversary.
Of course, there was the matter of the second cyclist, but he didn’t prove to be much more trouble. As I sat there on the ground trying to gather my wits, he rammed me from behind, launching himself over the handlebars and hitting the pavement with another pleasant bicycle bell chime before bursting into his own splatter of green goop.
While the cyclists had taken eight and sixteen points off my Life-O-Meter respectively, they’d fared much worse. It seemed they only did significant damage if their target ran them over in a car. So being as “fragile as they were suicidal” was an asset—unless they were dealing with a mark who was on foot.
I stood up and looked myself over. Sustaining twenty-four points of damage wasn’t nothing. But all in all, the finale had felt a little anti-climactic after the brutal lead-up.
I realized some of the cyclist goop had landed in my mouth. I started to gag, then recognized the taste: Gatorade. Seemed about right.
“Son of a bitch!” I heard someone exclaim as I got to my feet and ambled out of the street. I looked over to see a man standing on his front porch in a bathrobe and slippers, holding his morning cup of coffee.
“Your buddy still breathin’?” he asked, staring over at Merrick’s wreck.
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”
The guy’s manner was one of neighborly concern, which didn’t jibe with witnessing what had just gone down. I wondered what version of events had been uploaded to his brain.
“Did you . . . see all that?” I asked.
“Sure,” he answered. “Guy on the bike jumped the curb as your pal was pulling away from dropping you off. Your pal barely had time to swerve. And then the guy on the bike just pedaled off like nothing happened. Cyclists suck.”
“They really do,” I agreed.
And that was that. The reality record had been amended.
“Wilkinsons are gonna be pissed about their tree,” the guy commented, assessing the damage Merrick’s Jaguar had done. The impact had taken a chunk out of the enormous Crape Myrtle, and a shower of pink flowers continued to drift down, sprinkling the scene with ironic cheer.
The guy shrugged and said, “I’ll call an ambulance,” before turning and heading back into his house.
Meanwhile, I turned to see Darla pulling up on the other side of the street. She leaped out of the car and ran over to me.
“Are you okay?” she cried, gripping both my shoulders and looking me up and down. The worry in her eyes took me by surprise and made me feel warm all over, once again slashing through my trust shields. For her part, she was clearly struggling with the notion of me bouncing back from getting shot and then being crushed in spectacularly grotesque fashion by a speeding car. I hoped it wouldn’t happen often enough for her to get used to it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I . . . guess I’m okay.”
She took a step back, as if suddenly aware of the intimacy of the moment. Then we exchanged awkward glances and she looked for a way to change the subject. She found it in the splashes of Gatorade on the pavement.
“Why did they blow up?” she asked. “The dolls at GetGet didn’t blow up.”
Her tone was almost academic. I marveled at how quickly she’d taken the world of RIP in stride. There was something extraordinary about that. There was something extraordinary about her. I just didn’t understand what it was. Not yet anyway.
“Some stuff gets cleaned up,” I answered as I climbed back behind the wheel. “Other stuff gets blown up. Other stuff gets stuffed with pig guts and left right where it is because that’s apparently funny.
“Pig guts?” she asked, climbing in on the passenger side.
“That’s what’s in the dolls.”
“How is that funny?”
“Ask her,” I said, jutting a thumb back at Nancy’s mom again.
But just then, Nancy’s mom started vibrating.
“What’s happening now?” Darla asked nervously.
“The usual,” I sighed as two XP slips spewed forth.
“That’s as weird as you said,” Darla commented to me as Nancy’s mom chucked the slips at me, one at a time. I caught one and the other fluttered down to the seat next to me.
“A measly 120 XP each?” I lamented as I examined the slips and felt their contents registering on my forearms. Glancing down, I saw I had a newly-emblazoned crossed-out entry in my Quest Summary titled “Road Kill Race.” None of my stats had changed at all, and my level indicator had barely budged from its fresh level 7 position. Plus, when I thought back to my twenty-two point Life-O-Meter before my trip to GetGet, I realized it got worse.
“If I hadn’t figured out how to bump my stats I would have died here,” I said.
“Probably,” Nancy’s mom replied. “But then I wouldn’t have had to get exploded which was very unpleasant, thanks for asking.”
“You didn’t explode because of the XP,” I snapped back. “It was all those catch-up rewards the game forgot to grant!”
“Eh,” Nancy’s mom replied dismissively. “Bit of column A, bit of column B.”
“Wow. So it’s like your nephew said,” Darla chimed in. “The game is all over the place. It’s busted.”
“As can be,” I confirmed. “But if I don’t win that Kool-Aid . . . ”
I think she saw the worry in my eyes—the fear that I wouldn’t be able to save Robbie. Then she set her jaw firmly and said, “Well, we’ll just have to get lucky then.”
We. When had we become we? I didn’t know, but I didn’t mind it. I gave her a weak smile. Heavy-handed as it was, her positive thinking offset my dread just a little.
“But can you not get run over anymore?” she added. “That was freaking terrifying. Really freaking terrifying.”
“I’ll do my be—”
“What the . . . ?” she cut me off as her eyes fell to the floor beneath her feet. She reached down and retrieved the printout she’d left there. From my position, I couldn’t make out whatever she was reading, and while my curiosity was piqued, I didn’t want to break her trust and threaten her role as guardian of the future.
So I just asked, “What is it?”
“There’s a phrase I can read here but didn’t highlight. I guess I . . . missed it.”
“What’s it say?”
“Darla Cunningham tests in the top ten for psycho fort,” she read. “It’s dated a few weeks ago.”
“What’s psycho fort?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe another game stat?” Nancy’s mom guessed. “A ranking for how psycho you are? Sounds like you’re a real nutter.”
We both glared back at her. It wasn’t the worst guess, but it also wasn’t a welcome one.
“Let’s just get back to my place,” Darla said, tossing the printout back to the floor beneath her feet. “Hopefully the computer’s translated enough by now to answer some of our questions.”
I nodded and started the car. But there were complications.
“Hm. Headed back to your house, then?” Nancy’s mom asked. “Better wear your asbestos underwear.”
“What?” Darla asked.
A siren blared as a fire engine flew by in front of us. I watched it scream off down the street to my right and noted a column of smoke climbing skyward in the distance.
“What’s going on?” I yelled as I turned back to Nancy’s mom. But she was gone.