Neb sat at the back of the transport with his rifle balanced on a mount that was intended for a larger weapon. Cold air rolled over him in a freezing river. The Game clock was almost down to fifteen hours. The engine roared as Meathead gunned it, the machine bouncing and skidding on the rough surface of the main north-south road.
Neb tracked their progress on the map, their dot moving slowly but steadily on the zoomed-out view. They could take this road to within a few klicks of Circle Bend, as they were calling their destination, eventually turning off to the east and driving cross country. The land there seemed hilly but passable from what they could see on the map, with many small roads and trails running through it.
Somewhere far off to their left was the zoo and the cages and the lowcrawlers, and Neb found himself staring in that direction. We’re doing okay, he thought. But then he saw the Game clock again, and any sense of equilibrium evaporated. So little time was left.
Meathead seemed to have a symbiotic relationship with the transport, constantly monitoring the readout dials, easing off the engine when it needed a break, sometimes muttering encouraging words under his breath. The vehicle was so loud Neb was sure they would have contact with other players sooner or later, but it seemed as if the Circle world had been abandoned. Like so many other moments in the Game, this would have been a wonderful experience under different circumstances, he thought -- racing through an unknown country, learning ever more about the Main. But as it was, all he felt was pressure and anxiety and fear.
They were already over half way there, and Neb found his heart beating hard at the thought of their arrival. They had discussed the idea of skipping the compound altogether and instead trying to break into Edgetown and just steal the weapon, but what put them off in the end was the way the Edgetown guards had frozen the goblins. If the humans ended up in the Edgetown cells they could find themselves watching the Game clock run to zero without being able to do a thing about it.
The engine note of the transport changed as Meathead slowed, and then they bumped off the surface of the road onto an old rutted trail. They passed by overgrown fields and a ruined house, and from the shadow of the remaining walls two eyes gleamed brightly, making Neb twitch for the rifle trigger.
‘An animal, I think,’ Mallory said, and Neb nodded, heart still thudding. Could have been fucking anything, he thought. But he said nothing.
They followed a narrow road with wild hedgerows on either side, untended for generations. They pushed past branches which then swung back dangerously. Meathead and Buzz got some protection from the low windshield but the rest of the team caught a few painful blows as the machine forced its way through. Mallory seemed to hardly notice, his eyes restless, body loose, not wound up tight but ready to jump explosively into action. Neb felt a surge of affection for the big man, and for all of them. He wished he knew them better, but with the constant press of events, there just was never a moment.
After about two kilometers the narrow track joined a larger road, where at least the overgrown hedges were a little further apart. The road surface had disintegrated in places and the going was rough. They drove down a steep bank and splashed through a stream, bumping over the pieces of what had once been a bridge. The transport fishtailed and struggled up the muddy bank on the other side, but Meathead never looked anxious. He feathered the machine gently to the top, and they roared on.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
They were now only a few kilometers from Circle Bend. Neb found it surprising that they had seen no other players, or any hostile animals or locals. He found himself wondering again about what the Game ‘wanted’ them to do. At times it seemed that Game was uncaring, and it was all random. At other times it seemed to be trying to guide them towards certain decisions and away from others. Perhaps if they knew more about the Main they could make more sense of it. But even from within the Game, the Main seemed as unknowable as ever.
‘Not far now,’ Meathead yelled back to the others. They came out of a small wood and into open, flat country. In the distance they could see the line of the Circle wall, a too-big presence. The road was overgrown but solid, as though it had risen up from within the earth and got stuck just beneath the surface. The huge wheels gouged deep channels into the growth.
‘Eyes, everyone,’ Buzz ordered. Neb had found himself slipping into tiredness but now he was hyper-alert again. The road took them through the center of a little village where the buildings were still barely holding together. The houses were built with thick, solid stone walls that spoke of safety and reliability. Each dwelling was small but there was something about this place that made Neb think people had been happy here. Or, at least, they had been happy in whatever real place this village was copied from. He swept left and right with his rifle, but there was no movement.
Once they passed the village, the wall was huge and close. They could see where the endless regularity of the Circle kinked outwards to form the space for Circle Bend. The enclosed space was about a kilometer wide, and it was an area of powerful natural beauty. Hills rose into sheer gray stone-and-snow mountains that ran back past the wall itself, as if the wall had been sliced down into the peaks like a great blade. The snow glinted brightly. At the foot of the mountains they saw a temple, dwarfed by the size of the mountains but a huge thing in its own right. It had a great circular door that stretched up over half of its height, and no other adornment. They were still far back, but a message appeared in Neb’s overlay: The Emorist compound.
‘Eyes!’ Buzz commanded. ‘If I was running an ambush, this would be the moment.’
Meathead eased them forward, the transport running smoothly on the level road. The mountains ahead seemed unreal, like a projection, but they could feel frigid air rolling off the slopes. Even the light of Circle Bend seemed different, as if the day was at a different stage to the rest of the Circle. The fucking Main, Neb thought. What were they up to here? It had been a while since he had felt the old sense of partially-enraged awe.
‘Take us close,’ Buzz ordered Meathead. He was in his tense, hyper-alert state. Meathead eased the vehicle forward. The road bent away and they turned off it into a field of thick grass that led up to the temple, and Neb felt they were more like a ship than a vehicle. Meathead stopped fifty meters back. The transport engine bubbled but everything else was silent and still and cold. The temple door loomed over them vastly, drawing the eye so powerfully that it seemed the building itself faded away. It was enormous, unyielding, impregnable, built to keep out the world for a thousand years.
But up close, they could see something that had been invisible from further back, and which made them exchange shocked, suspicious glances. Neb stood up in the transport disbelievingly, feeling once again that there were no patterns, and the Game was simply impossible to predict or understand.
The great door of the Emorist compound stood open.