Chapter 7

An explosion that I felt as much as heard erupted from Bear. The woman exiting the doorway was propelled right back through it in a haze of smoke and fire.

As she went down, windows began shattering on the front of the cabin. Both windows were broken by the barrel of a gun that immediately began shooting.

“What in tarnation did we walk into?” Coot shouted at us. He could have typed it into chat and kept shooting, but he clearly remembered that Winnie was producing our ‘show’ and adjusted accordingly.

“A trap,” I shouted back, but Bear was still firing the explosive rounds and I doubt anyone heard me.

“Bounty Hunters,” Bear shouted between blasts. He was a sitting duck in the middle of the path and was doing his best to shuffle toward the fence that I was using for my meager cover.

“How would you know that?” I asked before taking another shot with the rifle at the windows. The wood next to the window exploded from my shot. I needed to calm down and focus.

“That woman I blew up,” Bear explained. “I knew her. Saw her gun down somebody in my early days.”

“Players?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“They respond to bounties posted by players and by larger missions.”

“Did Lee send them after us, then?” Coot shouted.

Bear shook his head again. “It’s too early.” The volume of the gunfight was impossible to talk over and we were all too distracted to type. “Later,” Bear finally said, and we just accepted it.

That didn’t mean that my mind wasn’t still wondering. If this wasn’t Lee, then it was likely the Colossal Paynes, but given how vocal everyone had been about our stunt with the raid yesterday, it could be just about anyone in this digital landscape.

I pushed that from my head and kept an eye on the windows, waiting for someone to poke their head out.

“Riders!” Coot shouted.

My eyes were torn from the windows as my head spun to first see my friend and then spun further to where he was pointing.

Sure, enough, three men on horses were riding up the trail from the direction that we had come. They stopped next to our horses, but behind the fence line.

I spun and fired, hitting one in the side, but he seemed barely to notice.

I hadn’t had a chance to examine this newest group of attackers, so I didn’t notice that one of them had a bow until the arrow slammed into my thigh.

“They have a bow,” I shouted through clenched teeth.

Bear spun on the toes of his feet and fired almost blindly. The exploding shell hit the lead horse in the chest and dropped the animal with its rider. Coot had already shot the rider in the head by the time he had hit the ground.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be enough. We were exposed on all sides and needed to do something about that.

Bear spun back toward the door and fired again before shooting us a message to our HUDS.

Panda_Bear_Polka: Out of exploding shot.

I fired again at the horse riders and caught a glimpse of Coot. He was crouched behind the fence opposite myself with both his Volcanic and his Farmer’s Pistols out firing in both directions.

We had to get out of here.

I whistled.

Horse pulled away from where he was tied up and started my way, leaping over the fence between us and …

… immediately dying as the men he rode passed adjusted their aim from me to him.

His blood sprayed across me before he collapsed.

From my place, prone on the ground with an arrow in my leg and covered with Horse’s blood, I leaned over and fired, hitting my friend’s killer right in the face. I spared another quick glance to my downed friend when a bullet hit me in the arm.

From somewhere between Bear and I, I heard Winnie gasp.

I didn’t need to glance at my HUD to know my health was dangerously low. We weren’t going to last like this.

My rifle was my preferred weapon at this point, but I just wasn’t working fast enough. I quickly swapped it for my pistols and attempted to take stock of our options while my boys returned fire.

The forefront of my mind was the pain and how close to death that I was. Whatever plan I came up with would need to take that into account.

That was when I saw Coot with an arrow directly through his chest and another that seemed to be in his knee. He was moving entirely unhindered, leaping and rolling, as he fired and reloaded.

Video game rules, Sammy! I said to myself before getting to my feet and ignoring all the ghost pains of my past life. That’s what these were, right? Just a digital recreation of pain and how someone would feel if these things happened to them, but it was still a game. Almost every game that I had heard of wouldn’t count you out until your health hit zero, so if I ignored the pain, I should move as easily as any other time in my life.

I winced as I climbed to my feet, but I was so distracted, I didn’t know if that was the pain in my leg or the natural reaction to bullets whizzing by over my head.

Movement was much easier when I wasn’t thinking about it, only lending credibility to my theory.

That was also when I noticed that the three of us had started to clump together. Coot was now on the middle path only feet away from Bear and I was still climbing through the fence to join them.

Coot seemed to be focusing on the two still on their horses, so I joined Bear in covering the house. As I fired, I checked my minimap for movement, but everyone was jumping between crouched and standing as they poked out of the windows and back down. Their teardrops on my map were appearing and disappearing too quickly and I couldn’t get a count of how many were in there.

That was when some dude came running out the front door. He must have been paying attention, because Bear was still reloading and I almost didn’t notice him.

He ran at Bear with a machete over his head. I raised my pistol, lifted it a bit to drag the auto-aim up to the head, and fired.

Click.

Shit.

What happened next was entirely my body running on instinct. I put the pistol back into its holster and used my HUD to swipe through my weapon options. Normally, I would just grab what I needed physically so as to not ruin the illusion of reality that I had here, but I always had my digital inventory display that I could use without moving. I selected the hatchet I had and watched as my hand went down with the pistol and came back up with the blade. My feet were already moving and I met him two steps before he would have slammed into Bear.

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My hatchet sunk into his forehead and he fell to the ground in front of us.

“Screw this,” I said. Then I shouted. “Push into the house!”

There were still people in the house if the bullets were any indication, but we were running out of options. If the house was the only real cover, then we could at least die trying to do the smart thing.

Bear and I tried to clear the door and our path while Coot walked behind us covering the trail.

“More com-” Coot was suddenly cut off. Bear and I couldn’t help ourselves as we spun to check on our friend.

An arrow protruded from his stomach. Blood poured from the wound like a facet had been turned on. There was so much blood that I hoped it was just the game being dramatic and not some recreation of what would have really happened from an arrow wound to the gut that Eve pulled from someone’s memory.

I might have been slowed down by the shock of it all getting piled on by the shock of seeing my friend’s guts pouring out, but Bear was a surgeon on a battlefield.

I didn’t even see what he did with his shotgun, but he caught Coot with one arm as the man was dropping and with his other arm Bear pulled a bottle from his inventory and pressed it to Coot’s lips.

After killing the guy that came at Bear, I hadn’t reloaded my right pistol. My left pistol came around as I saw what Coot had been shouting about when he got hit. More riders were coming, and I couldn’t tell how many, yet. They were already firing.

“We gotta move!” I said.

Whatever liquid Bear had given Coot, Coot was now standing on his own and firing back at the folks behind us. I joined him, covering our tails while Bear moved us forward.

After another bullet shot my hat off of me, I crouched and continued to walk backwards toward the house.

“Left window,” Bear hissed out.

I twisted and checked my minimap for the attacker at the window and saw my pistol was almost empty. As I continued to twist, I did the same trick I had done before, using my inventory to put the hatchet back into my hand.

The first time I had seen this hatchet, someone had thrown it at me.

So, I replayed the incident in real-time. The hatchet was in my hand only a moment before it was sailing through the air and into the window of the cabin.

I barely noticed the experience notification confirming the kill as Bear ran up the stairs.

Right behind him, but slower, I swapped my pistol for my bolt action rifle again. I was too slow reloading the pistol versus the rifle. I don’t know if it was a skill issue on my part, a game mechanic related to the weapons, or what, but sandwiched between Coot and Bear was likely to be the only time that I would have to do so.

During that swap was when I saw my map expand, zooming into the house itself. I realized in the back of my head that it must be because we stepped on the porch. I pushed Bear to the right so that he could cover the folks on the left side of the cabin, and I slammed my shoulder against the wall to the left of the door.

I fired once at an old woman with pistols out. She dove out of my view as Bear fired twice and stepped in, sweeping right and taking out my target for me.

Coot came limping in behind us, slamming the door before he collapsed into a lone chair toward the back of the main room of the cabin. I could see that another, smaller, room was to the right side with the door wide open. I ran to inspect it and called out that it was clear.

“Well,” Bear was wheezing as he tried to peer out the windows without getting shot, “that sucked.”

I went over and inspected Coot. “How you doing?”

Coot was smiling, even though he was a bloody mess.

“Right as rain in just a minute, Cap,” he held up a slice of jerky. “Bear’s elixir got me up and the food is healing me.”

“Good,” I turned and tried to keep my eyes on the windows. I saw movement at the front and back. They were circling us. I slid my rifle back to my shoulder just to take the moment to reload my pistols. “How are we on resources?” My pistol ammo was almost gone. I had enough to fill one of the six-shooters, the other one wasn’t going to leave the holster anytime soon.

Coot answered first.

“My pistols are low, but I have a shotgun I can switch to when they are out.”

Bear never looked away from the window as he answered. “My shotgun is almost empty. I have pistol ammo though.”

“I’m about the same as Coot,” I shared. “Once my pistol is empty, I’ll be switching back to the rifle, but I have plenty of ammo there.” A thought resurfaced and I said out loud, “It’s a video game!” Then I dove at the nearest corpse.

“Oh yeah,” Coot laughed as he slowly stood from the chair. “I forgot we could loot the bodies.”

I found about five pistol bullets and fifty cents. “Yeah, some shells over here. Check the others.”

It wasn’t a lot, but we were desperate at this point.

“Make this easy and come on out!” some man outside shouted.

“Can I take a minute to discuss with my companions?” I shouted back.

There was a chuckle that washed over our attackers before the original voice shouted, “Sure. Get your prayers in and all that.”

I hadn’t expected that to work, but I didn’t waste a second. “Coot? What ya got?”

Coot’s brow furrowed. “Blood outside before we got here.” He shook his head. “I don’t like that. The bounty hunters are likely someone who heard of what we did, but would have to be someone who knew about the train robbery.”

“Has to be Larry,” Bear said.

“Then what about Lee?” I asked. “Is he dead, or in on this, or what?”

Coot shrugged. “Not enough data. We need to save the Scooby-Doo stuff for later, right now we need to be thinking on how to survive this.”

A thought struck me. “Coot, you thought this was going to be a trap anyway, right? You thought Lee was going to try and catch us off guard?”

He shrugged. “Nah, I thought we’d get ambushed by the story he was selling when he was in the middle of explaining our second part.”

I shook my head and waved that thought away. “But you were expecting us to be taken by surprise?”

Coot nodded slowly.

“Then give me the damned dynamite you brought.”

Coot’s eyes lit up. “Oh, I forgot about that.” He rummaged in his satchel and gently pulled one out. “I only have the one. Just haven’t had a chance to restock since our raid.”

I took it from him with much less gentility than he showed, making both of them flinch.

“Relax boys,” I said. “There’s only one way we’re winning this and that’s if they can’t collect on this bounty. If I accidentally blow us up, we still win, but that’s not the plan.”

“What’s the plan then?” Bear said, pulling away from the window. “They are edging closer to the porch.”

There was a small table behind the chair that Coot had rested in.

I kicked it over.

“Bear, get as many of them in here as you can,” I whispered and then turned to Coot. “Get your shotgun out and get behind the table. Shoot anyone that’s outside of Bear’s control. If shit hits the fan, everyone get behind the table.” Bear was eyeing the window and the door, trying to figure out how to do what I was asking. “Bear, push open the door, slowly.”

Bear shook his head, but did what I asked. He scooted along the floor until he was between the door and the window he had been standing at before. Using that bit of wall for cover, he prepared himself with a few deep breaths. When his hand touched the door and he began to swing it open, I called out.

“Hold your fire! We are surrendering.”

There was a bit of silence and I could see near the door the cloth of a man’s jacket peaking out. That was the man Bear had seen coming up on the porch. He was sitting directly opposite that same piece of the wall that Bear was hiding behind.

Sammy#0421: Bear - there’s a man on the other side of that wall you’re at. Get ready to grab him.

Bear nodded that he got my message and put away his gun before pulling out a large knife.

Slowly, with my hands raised, I lowered to my knees directly in front of the open door.

Seeing me in such a vulnerable state really put some gas in their engines and they started marching closer.

I hissed at Bear, “Now,” and he reached around the door frame and grabbed the dude on the other side.

With his one hand, Bear yanked him around and onto the floor before plunging his knife into the man’s face.

I flinched from that mess.

“Was that necessary?” I asked, but Bear just rolled his eyes at me.

After seeing their guy get grabbed, the rushing bounty hunters all slowed down, but didn’t stop, instead raising their guns, they returned to shooting.

I pulled out the dynamite and used the HUD to light it. This was either going to be really cool or lame as hell.

I reared back, aimed at the mass of hunters, and threw it.

“Yippee kay aye, mother-aww shit, damn!” A bullet hit me in the shoulder as I threw the explosive and it spun me.

The dynamite’s trajectory was shit and it slammed into the door frame before bouncing on the floor and rolling between myself and Bear.

The last thing that I heard before a sepia image of my body consumed by fire and force was Bear laughing.