Chapter 11: The Bloody Road
Elena had three daughters, each sweeter than the last. When we reconnected after all those years, the oldest was almost the same age as she had been when we first met. Elena let them play on the playground, while we sat beneath a towering eucalyptus and caught up. Years had passed, but when we spoke it was like I had seen her but the day before. We were still the same, we were still in love.
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I stared through the thinning fungal trees at the cliffs that loomed in the distance. The sun had just crested the horizon, clambering over jagged spires that pierced the canopy to stab into the sickly green sky. Three days of relentless pursuit had etched the alien terrain into my bones. The predator perk, doping my body with hormones, kept the ache of my many injuries at bay. But ahead, on my minimap, the glow of Ariel’s pinned location pulled at me like a beacon.
The closer I came to the cliffs by the sea, the fewer aliens I’d seen. The battles once so frequent, were now replaced by churned earth, bleeding trees and old gore. Something cataclysmic had happened, and I drew closer to it by the day.
I waited for the daily announcement that came with each sunrise. Waited to hear how many billions had died the day before.
My armoured arm spasmed and I clenched my fist as pain flared through my predator perk. Whatever the showrunners had done to me meant that given time, I healed from most injuries. But the black veins crawling out from beneath the Gosporian carapace had worsened, spreading into a dense web that painted the entire limb black. Even through the numbing effects, it now thumped and burned constantly. I’d not turned my perk off in days and had no idea what might happen when I did.
The screaming guitar riff dimmed, and I tensed.
“Good morning survivors! And welcome to day six.”
I twitched as the voice blared in my head, but I was getting used to it.
“I am so excited to give you an update. Can you believe it’s been a whole day since we last spoke?! Congratulations to all of you on making it another day!”
Boxes appeared in my HUD, populating with numbers as she spoke.
“Of the 79 billion, 880 thousand, 291 contestants in this iteration of WARGAMES!-” The damn jingle started playing again. I hummed along, and hated myself for it. “Just under 35 billion of you have now died! Wow! Stage 1 usually lasts for fourteen to twenty-one days, so this is some incredible work on your part!”
“Four more civilisations have proven themselves unsuitable, and are now eliminated. Drrruuum roll please!”
The sound effect the followed was the kind I’d expect from a low-budget, late-night comedy show, and would have been cheesy and lame if it hadn’t signified the death of planets.
Their names appeared in my HUD, with lines through them.
The Chunders
The Philanthropic Conglomerate of Squee
Bob-Bob-Bob
The Tunx
The glee with which she announced the deaths of billions made my damn skin crawl, but knowing we were only five billion lives from the end of stage one… I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
“Now I don’t want to spoil anything… But gosh, I just can’t contain myself! There is one stand out civilisation this year that is really overachieving. For those of you in the Mesa, Tundra and Down Deep biomes, well if by some miracle you’re still alive, then you’ll know exactly who we’re talking about!”
She let out a high, baby like giggle that went on for way too long.
“But just a heads up, survivors! Just because you might not know who I’m talking about, doesn’t mean you’re safe! This incredible civilisation is present in almost every area of Stage 1.
Oh, my! Wasn’t that just deliciously ominous?!
Finally, I want you all to know that I’ve been listening to a lot of moaning and groaning about level ups over the last few days. It’s boring, so stop it, okay? We all get it! It was the most sublime pleasure you’ve ever felt. All of you received one in exchange for your first kill, but that’s the natural limit for the stage! Survive to Stage 2 and everything changes. Isn’t that exciting!?”
She seemed in fine form this morning, all sugar coated excitement.
There was little pause, and a glitch in the audio as though a recording had been switched over.
“Just a little reminder. Every now and then, one of us will pop into your head for an explanation of the rules, or to give you a piece of information that you have earned. These moments are often of critical importance. But for some reason, some of you seem determined to ignore us! This hurts our feelings, and really damages your chances at survival.”
Her honey-sweet, schoolteacher voice dropped a full octave. “So stop it. Or you will be punished.”
“Okay then! That’s all from me! By for now! Have fun!” All sugar again.
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I froze for a long moment. That last part. Besides the morning bulletin, I’d been resolutely ignoring the showrunner as she bleated at me, and I had sensed her growing frustration.
“Punished?” I muttered. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Don’t find out, Allan.”
The voice was bass and guttural and I nearly jumped out of my damn skin. I’d raised my axe on instinct, and studied it, remembering my revelation from days before. They were already giving me targeted loot, the last thing I needed was more attention.
I sighed and tried to put it from my mind. There was too much to worry about without adding pissed off alien overseers to the mix.
Gabe was out there and though I still had no idea what a tourist was, I had a feeling that he wasn’t playing by the same rules as the rest of us.
The infection in my black arm worsened every day.
Thousands of those damn drones still hovered high above us all, doing who knows what the fuck.
And Ariel, to whom I owed my life was now within arms reach, if my map could be trusted.
I opened my minimap and looked at her pin, then tried once again to get the search window up. It flickered, blinked and faded away before I could update her location. I’d been trying for days now with no success. Would she even still be there? I saw her eyes, so much like Elena’s, defiant in the face of the monstrous Gabe as she zapped them both away. Why had she done it? And how? A surge of guilt rose and almost overwhelmed the perk, so I leaped into action, descending to the jungle floor.
Setting off through the jungle, I avoided chunks of dead aliens scattered over the ground, and wove between fungal trees as I headed for the foothills, still a few miles distant. An hour passed with no signs of life, but I was pretty sure the guitar was slowly building to a crescendo. It raised the hairs at my neck.
I leaped a bloody pit and cursed as I brushed against a cluster of glowing, fruit like nodules that hung from a trunk. One had glued itself to my ragged trousers. The previous day, I’d gotten three of them stuck to my skin and spent the better part of an hour trying to detach the sticky bastards. In the end I’d had to damn near shave them off with my axe blade. This one I cut free along with the section of my trousers, and stored the sticky orb in my inventory with a dozen others I had collected through my journey.
Gazpacho had a chronically itchy arse and a thick hide. He used to rub himself on prickle bushes, the nastier the better. I couldn’t count the amount of time I had spent as a kid, picking prickles from his rump while his stumpy little tail waggled furiously. The discarded seeds had ended up colonising in our lawn, so I had to wear shoes whenever I ran in the yard. If these fungal plants were at all like those from home, the sticky nodules would have evolved to transfer to animals in a similar way to the prickles. I sighed, it was ridiculous, with all the horrors of this world, all the conveniences and comforts I’d left behind, I missed that damn dog most of all.
As I eyed the rocky low hills, just visible through the thinning trees, I ran my fingers over runic alien writing, carved into the trunk beside me. Rivulets of dried sap ran down the trunk to the dirt. Sights like these had grown more frequent as I approached the coast. I wondered what they were saying to each other. I had a feeling they were warnings, but wasn’t sure why. I scanned the jungle, high and low, but saw nothing but the remnants of days old battle, and bloody streaks that converged, painting lines towards the hills that were my destination.
A new scent blew on the wind, like death, burning metal and ozone.
After spending days beneath the jungle's thick canopy, leaving it made me feel suddenly vulnerable. The thrumming of Gosporian wings filled the air, and as I gained elevation I could see them by the thousands, motionless in the sky. A cluster of the drones hovered only a handful of yards from the top of the ridge, and as I drew closer the vibrations of their wings grew so intense that sand and small stones juddered down the hillside.
The music raised in volume, screaming but even it couldn’t drown out the sound of their wings.
I moved between boulders, low and quick. The bloody lines of gore that lead from the treeline converged here into a dark, crusted road that lead to the top of ridge. I had a feeling I knew who waited beyond.
Bringing up my minimap, I saw that Ariel’s pin was close now, half a mile or less. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled the last few yards to the top of the ridge, peeking over into the valley beyond. A gust of wind carried with it the stench of slaughter and I almost gagged.
A pyramid constructed from the corpses of hundreds, no, thousands of dead aliens sat in the valley beyond. It was grotesque in its artistry, bodies arranged almost ceremoniously.
I ducked back below the rise, heart thundering, then slowly rose to peek again.
Gabe was coiled atop the pyramid’s summit, still as a statue. His manlike upper torso ramrod straight, tentacle arms spread wide, hammerhead tilted upward as though raised to the sky. Piled around him like a birds nest were hundreds of severed alien heads.
Do aliens have gods? The thought filled me with rage. The idea that this fucking monstrosity could worship a deity, while my own people burned my grandma’s house to the ground, with her trapped inside for praying in secret.
I watched, taking deep breaths and took control of myself. Time ticked by. The music of my perk, initially roaring with such ferocity that it had drowned out the Gosporian wingbeats, now walked through a series of familiar tunes. I’d gotten to know the soundtrack after days of travel, and this one usually played when it thought I was being a little bitch. I was getting better at ignoring it.
I had to think this through, I had to be smart. But I couldn’t turn off my perk, not with my arm the way it was.
The valley in which Gabe had nested ran for miles in either direction, flanked by cliffs too exposed to climb. I tightened my grip on my axe as pain flared in my infected arm, the black veins pulsing like a second heartbeat. Could I even swing the axe properly if it came to that? The thought gnawed at me as I stared at my blackened fist, the carapace creaking under the strain.
I’d come so far for her, it would be stupid to throw my life away on a suicidal run. What if I could just wait out the end of the stage, and meet her on the next? But I had no idea what would happen when Sticks and Stones ended, no idea if our situation would be improved.
Atop the pyramid, the tourist didn’t move. Did aliens sleep? His hammerhead had no eyes, it was impossible to tell.
I scanned the valley for another way around, but in my heart I knew there was none. The depression stretched for miles, flanked by steep ridges too exposed to climb without being seen. My grip on the obsidian axe tightened as I forced myself to look at him again. Gabe hadn’t moved—not even a twitch—but the monolith of corpses beneath him told me that anything foolish enough to cross his path would be added to the pile.
Ariel’s pin was so close now, the glow burned into my vision like a second sun. I pictured her eyes—wide with fear but ever defiant. Elena’s eyes as the agents had come for us. I owed her that much, didn’t I? To fight for her like I should’ve fought for them. If she was alive, she was somewhere beyond that monster. If she wasn’t… The thought hurt worse than the throb in my infected arm. I couldn’t lose another.
The music in my head surged, the guitar riff swelling, screaming, urging me to act. It knew what I was thinking, and it was excited. I took a deep breath, massaging my temples as I considered my options.
There weren’t any.
This was it.
But then a flicker of red caught my eye. A strip of cloth fluttered on the ridge opposite mine, snapping in the wind like a signal. My jaw dropped as Ariel’s blonde hair rose beside it, her familiar blue eyes meeting mine even from this distance. She raised her hands, waggling her fingers like she knew sign language. I sure as shit didn’t. Was it a warning? A signal? And how the hell had she known I was coming to this exact point, at this exact time? This kid was so damn suspicious.
I flicked a glance back to the pyramid, and my blood ran cold.
Gabe’s head had turned, hammer-shaped and eyeless, but somehow I knew he was locked onto my position.
The bastard had been watching me the whole time.