Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 29

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Yes, Nikolai believed magic might be science we don’t understand yet.

So he’d embraced the power of the printout. But he had his limits.

“This is bullshit!” he exclaimed.

Darla was inclined to agree with him. The implications of the newly-legible entries she’d just read were preposterous. Impossible. Inconceivable.

The information was still just a jumble of subject matter, shifting from topic to topic every few sentences, and Darla had been too scared and too rushed to parse and censor the document on the fly. She’d just read it aloud, in all its absurd glory. Alas, the consensus on what the last few entries had been suggesting had really rubbed Nikolai the wrong way.

“You think making up crazy story saves you? You think you scare us and we not crush head between boat and dock?” Nikolai went on. “No more!”

“Vzyat’ikh!” he shouted, with a violent backhanded wave. The heavies seized Darla and Merrick again, dragging them toward the door.

If what she’d just read was true, it might not even matter if her head ended up between boat and dock. But she wasn’t convinced it was true. And neither was her amygdala, which dumped more liquid fear into her bloodstream. She kicked and screamed and tried to break the iron grip of the man hauling her toward the door. But there was no more stalling. As the man reached for the door to open it, she knew it would be the last door she ever walked through.

But she didn’t walk through it. Because I did. And I brought along a whole bunch of vicious flying tomatoes.

###

The tomatoes had come hurtling out of the ether not long after I’d managed to dispatch the gate guard, at 10:16 on the dot.

I had an alarm set on my watch, but ironically, I didn’t need it. I’d been waiting for the tomatoes—or something like them—just outside the warehouse door, where I’d set up camp with the unconscious Russian’s body at my feet and his machine gun at the ready.

As my choices had dwindled to dealing with the RIP threat first or dealing with both at once, I’d remembered how handy the human shields had been during my battle with Becky Borgna. Granted, the guys in the warehouse weren’t half-baked NPCs like the kids in the classroom simulation. They were real-life dudes who would be decidedly less cooperative with my plans, but I didn’t want to overthink it.

As for the big reveal of my new RIP adversaries, I wasn’t overly surprised at the game’s choice. I knew whatever was coming would be inspired by something I hated. So, yeah, tomatoes—but with gleaming white razor teeth. The vile, fleshy, slime balloons dived down toward me, chomping at the air like little red Pac-Men.

I heard them just seconds before I spotted them, via a rumbling chorus that reverberated in my head, repeating a single, pulsing syllable: nom nom nom nom nom nom. Everything about them suggested that they wanted to eat me nearly as much as I didn’t want to eat them.

It was ludicrous.

It was terrifying.

It was perfect.

As they beared down upon me, I turned and kicked in the warehouse door.

I saw Darla, Merrick, and their escorts stumbling back from the door as it burst open. Seeing Darla alive and well-ish, I felt relief surge through me, fortifying my reckless resolve. I saw my relief reflected back in her eyes, along with a hefty dose of confusion. How had I found my way here? And what exactly was my plan?

I gave her a wink, because that’s what any action script worth its salt would have called for. Then I strode confidently forward, visualizing the next few minutes with crystal clarity. As the wave of chaos broke, I would leap to one side, raise the gatehouse guard’s body in front of me like a riot shield, and start blasting away at whatever came my way—be it Russian thug or garden vegetable. It was 80s action time. And not TV-grade, A-Team style stuff with cutaways to the bad guys clambering to safety after miraculously surviving a dozen rounds of M-16 fire. This would be R-rated, big screen-grade, with a body count to rival all the Rambos rolled into one. Shelving my moral compunctions through force of will, and leaning into the fantasy, I pictured my enemies cartwheeling through the air around me as hundreds of empty bullet casings sprang out of the ejection chamber of my rifle like hot rivets—all in spectacular slow motion, with inexplicable explosions in every quadrant of the warehouse. Yeah, it would have been glorious. If I’d ever fired a machine gun before.

As the two Russians in front of me threw Darla and Merrick aside and raised the rifles slung around their shoulders, I leaped to my right, raised my own rifle and fired. But I missed both guards as the recoil sent me wheeling over backward, crashing to the ground and pinning me beneath the body of the gatehouse guard. Granted, with my forty-three points worth of Muscles I could have shoved him off without much effort. But I was too busy writhing around in agony as two hungry tomatoes rocketed in from behind me and nom-nommed their way into my clavicle like a couple of giant ticks. As I thrashed around, clawing at the tomatoes, the unconscious guard’s body rotated ninety degrees, giving the other two Russians plenty of openings to pour bullets into my legs and abdomen.

The rescue wasn’t off to a great start.

I grasped the tomatoes burrowing into my shoulders and ripped them free. Seeing them close up, I noticed two tiny pinhole indents above their chomping jaws and took those to be nostrils. With no eyes, it was clear they navigated by smell—no doubt calibrated to my scent.

I hurled them toward a nearby wall, expecting them to burst like water balloons, as I’d sensed a mere three points on each of their Life-O-Meters. But I was dismayed to sense zero damage done as they bounced right off the wall like tennis balls. Then they circled back toward me as the rest of their pack closed in from the rear. And yes, I was still taking rounds from the two Russians standing over me. Blood spatter was exploding out of me like fireworks.

However, the bullet wounds were healing in real time and I felt my Life-O-Meter clawing its way up and leveling out at forty-eight points as it was counter-punched by the more persistent tomato damage. I was surprised at how minor a dent the two tomatoes had made. Maybe Robbie’s advice to use my Freebies to bump up my Skin Thickness to twenty-six was paying off. I still had a shot at Full-Johning this thing.

Propping my hands under the now-perpendicular gatehouse guard, I launched him toward the other two with a ballistic bench-pressing motion. As he piled into them like a rolled-up carpet, I clambered to my feet and stumbled forward, away from the main pack of tomatoes and past the two boomeranging back off my left flank.

One of the guards had fallen to the ground. But the other was still on his feet, attempting to bring his rifle back up toward me as I sprang up in front of him and grabbed his shirtfront, pirouetting around to put him between me and the tomato swarm.

My proximity made it impossible for him to aim the rifle directly at me, as it was pinned between us. But a few rounds exploded from the barrel and one of them ripped into my thigh. Meanwhile a second wave of guards advanced from behind me and grouped up to my right so they could fire on me without hitting my prisoner. One of them hit me in the face. Specifically, in the cheek. Who shoots a guy in the cheek? The bullet passed all the way through my mouth, knocking out a few of my teeth and I could smell the charred flesh from the entry and exit wounds. If I’m being honest, it kind of rattled me. But I could already feel the skin mending and the teeth miraculously re-growing.

I had no idea how the firing squad had rationalized my borderline bullet immunity. But that wasn’t the big question. The big question was: Would the tomatoes do what I was hoping they’d do? From the way the guards were reacting, I couldn’t tell whether they were even seeing the things. But that didn’t really matter. Dwight had ended up in the hospital after his run-in with Marty—even if his memory said he’d fallen down the stairs rather than getting tire-ironed. So it was a logical bet that the carnivorous veggies would, in fact, affect the guards. But then again, this game sucked. So as I hugged the guard tight while getting riddled by bullets, I thought there was a 50/50 chance the damn tomatoes would phase right through the guard and gnaw my bones clean, cartoon-style.

But no. They did exactly what I’d hoped. They slapped into the guard like a shotgun blast of piranhas and started the feast.

“Bozhe moi!” he screamed as blood sprayed out of his back. I felt a little bad. But not a lot. The dude was a Russian mobster who was trying to kill me.

The guards to my right stopped dead and stared in horror as their comrade was perforated by the teethy parasites.

Most of the tomatoes had buried themselves in said comrade, but a handful had missed him as he fell to the ground. One of them latched onto my chest, as I stumbled back. I needed more people between me and the remainder of the swarm, and as fate would have it, there were plenty of people to choose from. I sprinted to my right and ran in a zig zag through the dumbstruck guards, hearing the squelching sounds of the tomatoes colliding with them and ripping into them.

In a moment of inspiration, I yanked the one in my chest out, and tossed it into the air as I looped around one of the guys. It was like the guy was standing between two magnets.

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Squelch! Into his chest the tomato burrowed.

My strategy was buying me more time than I’d expected. I’d assumed the tomatoes would bop right back out of the guards to resume their pursuit of me. But they seemed to have inherited more than their teeth from sharks. They seemed to have also inherited the inability to move backward. And as they ate their way through their victims, they must have gotten a bit lost in there. From the way the guards were wailing and thrashing around, it looked super painful.

The guards who were still on their feet clawed at themselves in terrified bewilderment and ran out of the place, screaming. By now, the game was likely re-writing their memories. To this day, I have no idea what they were making of the situation. Well, in one case, I have some idea.

“Baba Yaga!” Boris bellowed as he sprinted by me, and out the open warehouse door into the night. The ease with which he’d welcomed the notion that the terrifying sister witch of Slavic myth was in fact a man showed some real progressive thinking on the big Russian’s part.

For the moment, it seemed the entire tomato swarm was occupied. I spotted Darla crouching behind a palette of steel drums in a dimly lit corner.

“You okay?” I called to her?

“Sort of?” she answered.

I supposed that was as good as I could hope for under the circumstances. I looked around for Merrick, but he was nowhere in sight. I assumed he’d fled.

The mobsters’ numbers had dwindled substantially, but . . . ping! A bullet glanced off the steel rollup door to my left. Nikolai and three of his more loyal guards had taken cover behind some of the shelves and opened fire on me—presumably hoping that killing me would put an end to whatever they thought was happening.

A round caught me in the shoulder and I felt my Life-O-Meter fall to twenty-three. That made me a little more than half dead. And as several more rounds caught me in the legs and abdomen, slowing my recovery, I knew I couldn’t just stand there.

I snatched up one of the fallen guards’ rifles, braced for recoil and returned fire. As I did, I saw another muzzle flare to my left and looked over to see Darla had gotten ahold of a rifle and joined the party, blowing holes in the walls and ceiling and even some stuff that was pretty close to her targets.

“Who’s the golden goose now, you big Russian jerk!” she shouted. The taunt didn’t make much sense, but she’d had a long day.

We both kept firing. Alas, Nikolai and company had taken proper cover and they knew the shoot-the-other-guy-before-he-can-shoot-you game a lot better than we did. But they didn’t know the stop-the-other-guy-from-sprinting-right-at-you-while-a-swarm-of-man-eating-flying-tomatoes-chases-him game very well at all. So that’s the game I decided to make them play.

I just needed some tomatoes. I turned and gave the nearest Russian’s body a kick to get the attention of the tomatoes eating their way through him. Keeping my moral compunctions at bay was getting easier. It was unsettling that I’d gone from regular guy to corpse-kicking psychopath inside of a day. But one of these dudes had shot me in the face. So corpse-kicking it was.

Alas, the kick didn’t get results, but I was convinced my plan was workable. So as another few bullets tore into my back, I booted him again and yelled, “Hey! Tomatoes!”

Half a dozen of the things rolled out of him like bloated, bloody softballs and one floated up in front of me, menacingly. I took that one to be the leader of their little squad and addressed him accordingly.

“Come at me, bro!”

And it did. They all did. I turned and ran directly at Nikolai’s position. Whatever they thought was happening, they seemed very sure that more bullets was the answer. So they kept blasting away at me as I closed the distance between us and dived into their midst.

“Svoloch!” Nikolai cried, as I grabbed him and spun him around. Unfortunately, there was just enough space between us for him to prop the muzzle of his rifle against my chest and fire a shot, point blank.

The bullet exploded into my rib cage, and a blazing inferno spread through me. But as I stumbled back, Nikolai’s eyes met mine and I knew I’d gotten the better end of the deal.

“Gav no!” he screamed as a tomato plunged into his back directly between his shoulder blades and ripped into his spine. As he fell limply to the floor, I could see the tomato still boring its way into him like a child rummaging through a toy chest.

The rest of the tomatoes continued on toward me, so I lunged at the three guys behind me. I grabbed two of them and swung them around like rag dolls, as they continued to fire their rifles into my torso at a rate that outpaced my insta-healing and would have done me in pretty quickly had the remainder of the swarm not latched on to them and dug into their spines, disconnecting their brains from their trigger fingers. The final guard dropped his gun, turned, and ran. I guess loyalty has its limits.

It was good to see the last of the Russians, but my problems were far from over. The mini-tomato swarm I’d just weaponized was busy with its new meal, but the rest of them had begun to peel off from the other guards to reform a mega-swarm. It wasn’t as orderly as it had been at the outset, as its members were disorganized in their exits from the various bodies. A few had gotten their teeth lodged in exposed bits of bone and were jerking around violently trying to extricate themselves. But enough of them had taken to the air to worry me.

As they buzzed around the warehouse, their tiny pinhole nostrils twitched spastically, taking in the surrounding odors. Most of them were slow to draw a bead on me. They kept floating down toward puddles of what I realized was my blood. (I’d left a lot of it around the place.)

But one lone wolf wasn’t fooled—rising above the rest, it turned and seemed to spot me. Then it swooped down toward me. There was furniture and such that I could use to shield myself, but none of it would provide a meal that would detour the tomato for any appreciable amount of time. It was time to go on the offensive. Spotting the baseball bat still lying beside the card table, I snatched it up and swung for the fences. Smack! The sturdy pine connected cleanly with the vicious vegetable. Again, I expected a satisfying explosion of tomato guts, but got no such satisfaction. The thing just bounced off the bat like a pinball and veered back toward me again!

I needed to go bigger. Hurling myself to the ground, I clumsily gathered up a discarded rifle and took aim as the tomato closed in on me. The chances of hitting it in flight weren’t all that high, but I figured it was worth a try. Surprisingly, as I pulled the trigger, my aim was true. Of course, it didn’t matter because the bullet was no better than the bat. The round just bopped the tomato away twenty feet before it swung back around at me again. It was impossible. It was like they were protected by some kind of invulnerability spell. How the heck was I going to beat that?

“Henry!” I heard Darla yell.

“Yeah?” I yelled back.

I was comforted by her voice and the fact that she seemed to be as yet unharmed. But what she had to say was less comforting.

“Henry, you know what you have to do!”

I looked over at her, peeking out from behind the steel drums. Her eyes said it all.

Smashing or shooting the things wasn’t going to get it done. By now, we’d both begun to understand the basic logic—if you could call it that—of the game. Every stage was harvested from the darkest, most horrific corners of my psyche. That meant breaking the spell would require . . . I felt a knot form in my stomach.

“No,” I called back at her. “No! I won’t do it!”

“Henry, there’s no other way,” she replied with a forceful calm that made me realize she was right. There was only one way I was going to make it through this. It was savage. Disgusting. Unthinkable.

I was going to have to eat the tomatoes.

Of course, I’d employed a similar strategy against one of the ferrets. But that was different. That was just a dirty, mangy, diseased rodent. This was a tomato. Arguably, the fact that it was a self-aware tomato with teeth and some sort of digestive system currently filled with human flesh made it even worse. But whatever. Once you’re talking about eating a tomato, you’ve already maxed out the gross factor.

I steeled myself against the overwhelming dread of the moment and clambered to my feet as the tomato hurtled toward me. Then I juked right, giving the thing a split second to whiz halfway past me, before lunging back, face first. I chomped into it, forcing it into my mouth with both hands. As the foul, coral juices sprayed out of it and ran down my chin, the thing unleashed a blood-curdling, otherworldly shriek. But I just crammed it farther into my face.

Somewhere along the line, my action movie had morphed into a camp horror. To wit, as if responding to the death wail of their fallen brother, the other tomatoes all froze in mid-air and rotated slowly toward me.

“Oh boy,” I heard Darla mutter.

Then they charged. They hit me like an avalanche, knocking me onto my back. As I rolled around on the floor screaming, I knew my Life-O-Meter was somewhere south of ten. The damage done by the bullets had been all but repaired, but every bite from a tomato would linger until the battle was done. So I shifted back into “full John” gear and made my dad proud.

As the bastards attached themselves to me, I plucked them off, one after the other, feasting on their bulbous bodies with a feral rage. Some of them fell still after just a few bites. Others needed more convincing. But before long, I was laying spread eagle in a puddle of tomato entrails. The stuff was in my hair. It was in my ears. Worst of all, it was in my mouth. But I was too tired to do anything about it, so I just laid there with my eyes shut.

###

I guess I blacked out for the second time that day, because when I opened my eyes, my head was in Darla’s lap. And apparently, Nancy’s mom had dropped by. Darla was holding a whole mess of XP slips. She looked down at me and gave me an exhausted, delirious smile.

“So, how do you feel about tomatoes now?”

“About the same,” I replied wearily.

It had been messy in every way, and I didn’t feel like John Rambo or John Matrix or John McClane. But Darla was okay. And I was too—I could feel my Life-O-Meter inching back up even as I laid there. Heck, my clothes were even mending and the various gunk I’d been covered with was just fading away.

Still, neither of us seemed intent on getting up or even moving. I think we were both suspended in the moment, floating in the afterglow of our respective near-death experiences.

“Did you try to kill a bunch of Russians with a machine gun?” I asked.

“I think I did,” she answered.

“Seems out of character.”

“Well, I’m nuts, remember?” she answered. “What’s your excuse?”

It was a good question. Full John fantasies aside, I didn’t know how I’d been the person I’d been for the last half hour.

“I guess you never know how you’ll respond to Russian mobsters and killer tomatoes until you’re in a room with Russian mobsters and killer tomatoes,” I said.

“Yeah,” Darla agreed. “Life is all about self-discovery.”

I felt like I could’ve lived with this particular part of myself undiscovered, but what are you going to do?

We both seemed to be coming out of our here-and-now trances and I leaned forward to get to my feet. Darla helped me and our eyes met again.

I smiled.

She smiled.

But then her expression changed. She stared pensively up at me for a moment, then grabbed my shirtfront and kissed me. As she pulled back away, she looked at me appraisingly. Then she frowned a frown that was part wonder, part worry, part something else.

“You and me,” she said. “It’s real. Even if the way it was supposed to happen got derailed, it’s real.”

There was a note of quiet exaltation in her voice. But that dropped off as the rest came out.

“But if that’s real, maybe the rest is too.”

“What do you mean ‘the rest’?”

“I have to show you something.”