“The hell is taking so long to reply? I sent a message to the ship and it sent fine, but it took 5 hours to reply and the reply is just a bass rumble.” Nicole asked as they searched the village for supplies. They ended up finding little more than burning barrels and single old truck parked at the rear gate. Gizzy checked the playback.
“Probably time dilation. This world is likely running faster than where the ship is orbiting, so the reply is slowed down and degraded. Let’s just assume everything is okay up there. Not like we can teleport up or do anything.” She said as Jack finished hotwiring the truck and Vinn returned from the perimeter check.
“Place is dry. Everyone’s dead, and no money. One dead guy had a double barrel shotgun with 2 rounds in it, but there was no other loot. The only food I found was a box of granola bars and some water jugs. This guy was basically just living in an abandoned camp.”
“Truck works, full tank and extra gas, generator in the back. I say we blow this and move on.” Jack sighed.
...
Vinn and Gizzy sat in the back, trying to relax as Jack drove and Nicole sat in the passenger seat. Jack spotted a gas station ahead and decided it was a good place to crash till morning. And that it would have good loot. Vinn kicked the door open and Jack lead in, pistol ready. The lights were on, but there was no power.
“Fan out, stay locked and loaded, check the coolers, the shelves, the break room, the office, everything. Meet back in the office when you’ve cleared your area." They all took a direction and began looking for anything useful. Jack opened the office door, noticing the dead clerk in a vest and sitting beside the safe, a paper notebook beside him, and another empty shotgun. He popped a shell into it, placing the barrel against the safe and yelling “fire in the hole” as he pulled the trigger, blasting the lock off, and awakening the dead clerk. Jack quickly put a round in his head, pausing and putting a second one in him as he still tried to get up. The third round kept him down.
“Oh shit.” He sighed, realizing the 22 problem. Everyone else began making their way to the office.
“Lotta gunshots, you good?” Gizzy asked.
“Clerk took 3 to the head to drop. We need bigger guns.” He said while using the shotgun stock to beat the bent safe door open. “2 grand.” He said with a shrug.
“I got 700 from the register.” Nicole listed.
“I got enough canned foods and Jerky for a lifetime, and a first aid kit.”
“Check it for the meds.” Nicole insisted. He opened it and looked surprised.
“I’ll be damned, one syringe and a bottle of green liquid. Video game logic strikes again.”
“Probably a healing potion. The syringe could be anything. Do the pumps work?” Nicole asked.
“No, power’s out, but we got a journal.” Jack said, tossing her the notebook.
“Oh finally a backstory tutorial guide…" Nicole sighed with relief, reading the book “The virus spread quickly, yatta yatta yatta, here we go, once bitten, the infected takes between 18 and 20 hours to die, in which the brain reanimates as a mindless killing machine. They need to feed on living flesh to slow the body’s decay, without this they wither and rot into nothing, dying in a matter of months. The longer a zombie lives, the more it evolves. A small percent of the population with the brain abnormalities will turn and become special zombie types based on their disorders. Their mind’s fears and delusions will evolve their bodies over time into manifestations of their disorders and their mind’s perceptions of it.” Nicole sighed. “See? Mutated super inner-demon zombies, and I bet my Glock that the response teams of military and police that turned are still wearing body armor.”
“Yeah, 22s were a bad idea. Is there any mention of a cure?” Gizzy asked.
“It says here that a vaccine was developed and distributed to stores and hospitals but once a victim has died and turned, it has no effect, so it has to be administered before you go full zombie. That looks like the syringe we found. And it’s one time use, so if you get bit again later on after it’s purged your system, you gotta do another one. So if you see any of these boxes…” she said showing the sketch. “Grab those. We may need them.”
“Just out of sheer morbid curiosity.” Vinn asked. “Does the virus affect only humans or aliens too?”
“I don’t know. It shows lab monkeys as zombies so it probably affects some animals but we didn’t get mauled by a million zombie squirrels and possums in the woods so I’m guessing mostly humans, and some animals.”
“Callin it right now, zombie dogs.” Vinn sighed.
“It also says that over time the zombies wandering randomly seem to slowly end up drawn back to the city, so the older, stronger zombies in larger numbers concentrate the closer you get to this spot on the map, which I’m assuming is our goal location. Gizzy, that bite is looking bad. If you can’t turn we won’t waste the syringe, but you need to heal and the dried leaves we looted off the zombies are definitely healing herbs. I’ll see if that’s in the notebook, but it’s a lot to read so it may take me some time.”
“We’ll hit the liquor store next door for supplies and then you can read up on our way further out.”
...
They entered the liquor store through the unlocked front door, always a good sign. Jack made his way around the counter to loot the register, and heard something off. He shouldered his rifle and scanned the area for zombies, seeing nothing but still hearing an odd breathing sound. He then realized as it approached that it was above him, in the ceiling.
“Well, you’re a little different.” He muttered, following the sound as it moved rather quickly crawling through the ceiling gaps and finally hitting a weak tile, dropping behind a shelf before he could get a shot. Two hands grabbed the top of the shelf, and then 2 smaller hands grabbed it on either side of the first set. “What the hell?” he whispered. Suddenly without warning, the 6 limbed creature leapt from behind the shelf to the ceiling, gripping the metal supports and crawling upside down at an alarming speed. He fired 2 shots in rapid session before ducking mid-lever cycle as it missed him and rolled into the space behind the counter, smiling with a row of far too many teeth and twitching in rapid movements. He finished chambering the round and fired, missing it and racking the lever again, putting a round in it’s eyeless face just as it almost reached him. He hopped back as it slid to a stop bumping his shins. He put another round in the back of the head just to be sure. “Yeah, the 22s are a problem.” He huffed, Gizzy and Nicole rounded the area ready to fight, Gizzy looking down at the dead thing in front of Jack.
“I heard 5 shots.” She noted.
“After it took 4 to drop this crawly fast bastard, I gave him an extra to be sure. You didn’t see that thing move.”
“See?” Nicole said smugly “We need bigger guns.”
“550 cash in the register, 2250 in the safe. We’re making decent money at least. 9mm ammo. Glock behind the counter.” Jack listed.
“Seems to be a lot of loot. I guess that’s due to there being 4 players. Either that or shit gets bad up ahead and we need the buffs.” Nicole cringed.
“Hopefully it's just the 4 player thing. Let’s double back to the gun store in the village. Nobody buy a damn 22 this time, okay?” she asked as Jack and Gizzy rolled their eyes and muttered, "Okay..."
“Now just out of curiosity…” Gizzy asked. “In these games can you… ROB the gun store guy?” she squinted as Nicole’s eyes got alarmingly big.
“Don’t even go there.”
...
“Welcome strangers.” Said the old and cheerful robot.
“We were here yesterday. We need better shit.” Nicole said plopping the guns down on the table. “Gimme cash for the shotguns, the lever gun, the 22 pistol. Turn that into ammo, I want 2,000 rounds of 9mm, a thousand rounds of 22, 600 rounds of the 5.7mm, 300 rounds of 5.56mm, and 250 shotgun shells.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Excellent choice, any guns for ya?” he asked.
“Oh yes. I want the Banshee 45, extended magazine, red dot scope. Vinn will have a suppressed Glock, and an AR15 with a red dot, make them both big and gold. Jack would like an FN Five-Seven pistol, and Gizzy would also like a suppressed Glock, extended magazine, full auto, with a Saiga 12 automatic shotgun, drum magazine please.” She grinned.
...
They stepped out of the store, all carrying a rifle and pistol. Gizzy stopped, looking suspiciously at Nicole.
“Explain.” She said softly.
“All 3 of us have suppressed glocks, that’s easy ammo, basic zombie level damage and no noise, except Jack has a backup pistol that cuts through light armor if needed, and yours is full auto, because you have the best trigger control under handgun recoil and that gives you basic 1 and done, or hold down and mow down if you hit something tanky that doesn’t drop with 2 shots. That’s our main carry. Jack's main carry will be your old GSG because if anyone can take head shots quietly at a hundred yards, it’s Jack. So his job is to John Wick the basic bitch zombies and thin the herd with the cheapest ammo and no noise, the FiveSeven is just his gun for armor and thicker problems. Now Gizzy, since you seem to favor shotguns and, again, have the best trigger control, that Saiga is essentially crowd control and anything with high HP and no armor. I’m small, I cant handle the high recoil, so the 45 carbine is a compact high damage gun I can get some control with, Vinn’s backup option is also light armor piercing high damage, and even in big mode, Jack can theoretically snipe with that using the scope, giving us range and versatility.”
“Nothing heavy armor piercing?” Gizzy asked.
“Did you read the signs on the boxes? The smallest rounds that go through heavy armor are the 308, they’re twice the price of the 556, and you need either a SCAR H or sniper rifle to use them, and we don’t have 3 grand to blow on one rifle. So if we encounter heavy armored boys, we run. Anything else from soft high HP, to mass horde, to panic spray, we got covered. You don’t get the best guns right off the bat, you just shop like a gamer. Let’s crash for the night. The gas station is as secure as anything.” She winked.
“Hot, right?” Vinn smirked. “Just me? Okay.”
“I refuse to say anything.” Jack muttered.
...
The Medusa hovered silently as the Mechanovore ship approached. Zhoren and Vicki stood in the cargo bay as the screen lit up with something that used to resemble Vicki smiled and awaited response.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“Zhoren. I’m new here. Everyone else is busy, can you come back another time?”
“Listen you replacement, I want the captain on screen immediately.”
“They’re not here. It’s just me and Vicki. Everyone else is down on the planet if you’d like to talk to them. We have no communications through the cloud cover. What I do have is a hostage.” He said holding up a remote and tapping on the glass of the cryo pod.
“You think I give a shit about a spare body that hasn’t been perfected yet?” she scoffed. "I’ll make this simple. You give me Jack, the cloning tank, the artifacts, and you can have the ship. I’ll spare anyone you want or nobody, just give me the cryo tank with Jack in it, the cloning tank, and the artifacts in the lab. Understand?” she said powering up weapons.
“He’s not here, I guess you’ll have to wait. Or you can check for yourself.” He suggested. “Except I don’t have access codes, I’m just food for this Vicki they took from the prison you destroyed.”
“Oh, very interesting. So they kept you as livestock for Vicki. Don’t tell me you got attached to this girl feeding off you. Men are so predictable. You’re not using her as leverage, you’re stealing her like she stole you. Access codes.”
“I can’t give you what I don’t have. And you know very well that Gizzy has rigged everything to blow if stolen and used without them. So Jack is not here, the machine will self destruct, the lab is probably trapped, and I would even wager the entire ship. With the crew on the planet, the only thing up here is a robot, a prisoner, and the Vicki Gizzy already thinks is better off dead. So do you wish to lose everything on a trap, do you wish to wait for them to return, or would you prefer to land and get Jack yourself?” he asked.
“If your plan is to assume I am impatient and reckless, then you won’t survive this. You mean so little to me that letting you live would not inconvenience me. Inconveniencing me may change my mind. So we’ll wait.” She smiled, signing off and leaving him standing with the remote.
...
The truck slowed down as Gizzy squinted at something a good hundred yards off the road. They stepped out, guns ready as they approached the roughly ten foot high grey metal sphere. Like tree roots, several dozen bundles of electrical cable spouted from the dry dusty soil and connected to it, like a giant battery. Gizzy, gun in her teeth, took a good running leap, grabbing the rim near the top and pulling herself up.
“What is it?”
“No idea. But it’s either something that takes enough electricity to power a city, or it generates enough power to power a city… because those larger cables run towards the city, and there’s a few more of these spheres connected together.” She said, turning the locking wheel on top and popping open the hatch. Inside was just a hollow area with dust and stale air. “Shit, I know what this is.” She sighed.
“I’m all ears.” Said Vinn.
“On Osirian worlds we power things using RNE reactors. Rift Network Energy. Basically, we generate a singularity and cut a hole in the universe into a smaller universe we discovered millennia ago. It’s a baby universe, still in its early stages of expansion, so it’s just packed with energy instead of empty space like ours. Think big bang but it fizzled and did a very slow bang, and the expansion will take millions of years to cool down. By magnetically holding the singularity open, you get a constant beam of superheated plasma that runs indefinitely if kept balanced. If the magnetic ring loses power, it collapses the singularity and dies. If you overload it, the containment shielding goes nuclear and it explodes, also closing the singularity but doing so with about a 12 kiloton antimatter blast. Except this isn’t Osirian tech, it’s very half-assed, and the markings are unknown. So this is alien technology, badly retrofitted to run human power needs, by humans that didn’t understand the technology. These reactors are all dead and collapsed.”
“So they were pulling power from another universe. What if they pulled something else through WITH the power?” Nicole suggested.
“Maybe the source of the undead mutation. Alien virus, exotic radiation causing rapid evolution, maybe they tried to weaponize it with genetic experiments and it went badly. Who knows, but this is can’t be coincidence. Either they made an alien virus with this, an alien virus stowed away in the pods and was let out, or they opened a portal to hell and something came through. I bet you a shiny new shotgun that there’s at least 1 active reactor in the city.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because the map leads into the city, you said in a horror survival zombie game, everything gets bigger and meaner as you progress, so the closer to the city we get the nastier shit’s gonna be, and that’s where the goal happens to be. Since the city has power and the outskirts don’t, unless zombies are operating a power infrastructure and fueling coal or gas plants, something is still running on its own after everything went to hell. So there’s one or more of these still active and automatically generating power to the grid, hence the big city lights still being lit. The cannon should be there. Hell, maybe the cannon is connected somehow.” Gizzy shrugged.
“We got company in the distance, so let’s get back in the truck and moving.” Jack suggested. Gizzy hopped down, jumping in the back of the truck with Vinn as they rolled down the dusty road following the power lines. Jack looked back at the sparse peppering of zombies in the wasteland and as he looked back a the road, he slammed the brakes and came to a stop, barely thumping into a deer. Nicole had half a mind to check on it and see if it was okay until she noticed it getting up and glaring back, exposed rows of monstrous teeth and decaying flesh. Jack floored it, running over the animal and picking up speed.
“Let’s try and keep it under 40.” He huffed, sweating a little as one headlight flickered and the truck’s rattling stopped as a piece of sheet metal fell off and bounced down the ditch. Jack suddenly slammed the brakes again and stopped.
“Guys, we need cover fire.”
“Run em over.” Vinn suggested, grabbing his rifle
“Not this guy.” He said as Gizzy grabbed the shotgun and Nicole flipped through the notebook, finding a sketch of the thing in front of the truck standing about 7 foot, skinless and smiling with oversized pointed teeth.
“Regenerator.” She said.
“So shoot it fast, gotcha.” Gizzy said dumping 6 rapid shots into it. It just stood there.
“Is it armored?” Vinn asked, taking aim center mass.
“The fuck armor, it doesn’t even have skin!” Nicole said, looking for more information and just finding a name. Vinn took 3 paused shots, noticing the bullets going right through and the headlights illuminating the blood mist behind it. Jack grabbed the GSG and put a round through the eye socket, jerking it back as it let out a scream and ran towards them. He quickly fired 3 more headshots, and it dropped.
“Aim for the head guys. Double tap.” Jack sighed in relief as Gizzy opened fire behind them.
“We got more smiley boys behind us. 40 fuck, move ass.” She said before cranking out the rest of the drum and reloading as the got smaller in the distance.
“You get em?” Jack asked.
“Dumped 14 rounds at them and not one of them gave a shit.”
“Probably out of range.” Nicole said. “Game logic, you’re probably doing very little damage past 35 yards.
“Oh come on. Do slugs not exist?” she bitched, reloading and questioning if the Glock would have been better. Jack veered off the road into the hard dirt to avoid another, grabbing Nicole’s Banshee 45 and slowing down to put 2 in the head, it dropped.
“Gizzy, hand me your glock.” He hollered. She passed it through the back window as another approached the left side. Jack aimed low, doing a mag dump in the body, pushing it back and pissing it off. He reloaded and took 2 shots to the head, pausing and firing another, dropping it on spot.
“Yeah, these smiley bastards only seem to respond to headshots… and several of them at that.” He said while passing it back and flooring it, dodging the rest of them as they moved back to the road. “If we run into those with helmets, don’t even bother unless you got the big gold rifle.”
“This is a great sign.” Vinn sighed. “We’re not even near the city and the bad guys are turning into bullet sponges.”
“Well, we’re not gonna stop till morning and not until we find a place to bunker for cover. Open air at night is suicide.”