Chapter 24 – KS stands for Kill Secured

Current location: Confounding Cul-De-Sac

In a dejected mood, Brent led his crew back down the street they’d come in on.

It looked like any other quiet suburban neighborhood street in the evening, except for the few animated corpses ambling about.

Great, there were still more of them he hadn’t accounted for.

He didn’t know what it was. Maybe the reduced light was also affecting the zombies’ senses, or maybe they’d gotten good at sneaking around. But through careful steps and a few detours between houses, the four of them managed to make it back to the outskirts of the town without any zombies noticing them.

Brent let out a sigh, beginning to breathe freely again now that the need for stealth was gone.

“So what now, eh?” Harry asked.

Brent shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The sky was now fully dark, and Brent took out his flashlight.

“There he is,” Reisa pointed.

Brent squinted at the top of a hill, then shone the light on it, revealing an observing Ray.

He smiled as he shielded his eyes from the beam, unfazed at being spotted. He got up and came down the hill to meet them as Brent turned off the flashlight.

“Ah, there you are.” Ray said with a tone of pleasant amusement. “Wow. I didn’t expect all of you to make it out.”

“Yeah, no thanks to you,” Brent pouted.

Ray shrugged. “Hey, I said no guarantees. And you guys just kept going in until you were in danger of being surrounded, so I had to bow out.”

“Hey, let’s not play the blame game when we just met back up,” Harry interjected. “We’re all safe right now, all together, and that’s what matters.”

“I know, but it’s just that we were so close,” Brent replied. “The portal had like one hit left on it.”

Ray’s interest seemed piqued. “The portal? You mean that one over there?”

The frame was still visible from their position.

“Yeah, I hacked almost all the way through it on the left there,” Harry remarked.

He pointed out the spot. “The boxing zombies started spewing out though, so we had to back off.”

“Uh huh.” Ray squinted. “Hm, it’s still pretty well lit...” He took out his gray rifle and looked down the scope at the frame.

No way, he couldn’t be thinking of…

Karisma started. “Wait, are you-”

“Shhh.” Ray’s face scrunched up in intense concentration for a few silent seconds. Though he hadn’t said a word, everyone knew what he was trying to do.

He exhaled and fired, his shoulders shifting ever so slightly from the gun’s recoil.

Crack!

The sound of the shot pierced the air, echoing off the surrounding hills. Four pairs of eyes were drawn back to the soccer field.

The portal frame... wobbled. The tear in its side had been blasted completely through, and the pink plane of light had vanished. They were too far away to hear it, but if they had been closer the creaking of crumpling metal would have reached their ears.

After swaying back and forth a few more times, the frame bent inwards and collapsed.

The distant orchestral music stopped.

“Crikey,” Harry breathed, “He did it. He really did it.”

Ray slung his rifle over his shoulder, having a hard time believing it himself.

“Holy shit. I just thought I’d give it a try- agh!” He winced, shielding his eyes from apparently nothing. “Damn, all this stuff is popping up on the screen. The one in my head, I mean. Yeah, the portal’s destroyed. No more zombies.”

The already spawned zombies remained standing, though. Brent supposed it would be too much to expect that they would all just keel over from that.

It was still a hell of a feat though, and everyone was elated.

Ray rubbed the back of his head. “Wow. God damn. That was something.” His face, formerly in a state of calm detachment, was starting to break down into a smile.

“Are you kidding? That was amazing!” Karisma said, awestruck.

“Yeah, seriously nice shot, mate,” Harry added.

Ray basked in the attention and admiration.

Brent couldn’t quite share the same level of enthusiasm as it had been his hard fought plan and efforts that had done all the legwork, only for the finishing blow to be stolen away in one shot.

No, he had to stop thinking like that. Ray was part of his team, his party. A win for him was a win for all of them.

Predictably, Reisa was also not as impressed as Brent’s fellow Earthlings. He heard her mutter under her breath. “...could have made that, if arrows weren’t so scarce…”

Their celebration was cut short by the telltale jingle of a Dombey announcement.

Beep boop beep beep boooop. “Good evening, survivors in the Confounding Cul-De-Sac! Hope you are enjoying the zombies so far, because they’ll be here aaall night! Also, the third halo has now formed and will begin closing in 3 hours!”

Oh, so the event wasn’t over yet. The announcement had probably just coincided with the destruction of the portal.

Everyone checked their Maps. This time, the region they were in wasn’t in the Halo. In fact, it was pretty far out of it.

“Looks like we’ve got to get moving again,” Brent remarked.

“It’s getting dark, we should think about finding somewhere to rest for the night,” Karisma said.

“Well we can’t do it here, what with all the dead blokes walking about,” Harry pointed out the neighborhood.

“Okay, how about that research station from before?”

Brent looked at the Tumultuous Tundra on the Map, and the small orange dots on it that represented the domes.

He shook his head. “We can’t, it’s also outside of the circle.”

“Dang it.” Karisma pouted, looking forlorn as she crossed her arms under her breasts. “That was the nicest place we’ve slept in since we got here. I don’t wanna go back to camping outside like we had to on the first night.”

Brent had to agree. “It was a cave for me.”

“We should start walking south now,” Ray suggested, “That’s the direction the circle is in, and the Dombey guy said we only have three hours until it closes.”

“Three hours until it starts closing,” Brent corrected.

“Whatever. I don’t want to wait until the last minute and bet on being able to outrun that shit.”

“That’s not what I meant. The closing time gives us some extra wiggle room in case something happens.”

Brent fell silent, waiting for the others to chime in with their own ideas. But they didn’t.

Maybe they didn’t have any ideas. Or maybe they were waiting for him to say something? They did kind of awkwardly glance at him.

Just because the raid was over didn’t mean he stopped being the party leader. Unless it was a pickup group, which this kind of was, except it was one of those miraculous groups that happened to jive really well together and add each other afterwards…

He was overthinking it. Just say something.

“Yeah, let’s start walking south. It’s dark, so you guys be on the lookout for trouble, front and back. I’ll be staying in the middle and looking at the Map for places to go.”

They were all pretty much in agreement with this plan, and so off they went, even Ray who Brent had totally expected to object for the sake of it.

The five of them began walking south, leaving the suburbs and the Confounding Cul-De-Sac behind. The landscape of grassy hills continued, interrupted by the occasional lone pine tree.

Brent scrolled through the Map, trying to see where they were headed. Much of the island was still hidden, gray and featureless save for the shape of the coastline, but as they progressed a generous radius of terrain was being unveiled in front of them.

Annoyingly enough, the shading on the Map matched the time of day. As it was night Brent had to squint and zoom in really close to make things out.

To make things worse, the surrounding interface and the other holographic windows in his vision were as bright as ever, blue boxes with white outlines glowing against the dark. Brent knew that they were only visible to him, but his subconscious still felt very uncomfortable giving off all this light in a potentially dangerous environment.

There was a winding, squiggling line revealed to the south, with short lines crossing it at regular intervals. On any other map such a line would represent a railroad, but Brent recognized it as being the huge land-stitches delineating the borders between regions.

They were getting close to it, but what was on the other side? It was hard to make out anything in the “realistic” lighting, but the terrain looked lumpy and green. Maybe it was more hills like the ones they were walking through now.

Getting a bit bored, Brent started browsing around the rest of the interface as he hadn’t done so in a while.

47 remaining.

So more than half of the contestants had died. Brent hadn’t even noticed when they had passed the halfway point. It was probably sometime during the zombie battles.

There was one element he hadn’t noticed, that had apparently been there the whole time.

Current Kill Leader – Sastuku: 10 kills.

Another weird name. Ten kills didn’t seem like a lot compared to Brent’s zombie kills, but those weren’t zombies. Fighting a human (or elf; Reisa’s presence suggested that of other species) was an order of magnitude more difficult. His own kill counter was at a mere one, from Snello, and he hadn’t even wanted to kill her. He couldn’t imagine doing that ten times.

It was too real. Despite the stats, the interface, the random events, this didn’t feel like a game at all.

Back to the Map. The edge of the halo was further south of the border, so they’d need to walk for some distance into the new region before they were safe on that front.

Brent searched for a good place to set up camp. Ideally it would be a house or large building, which would show up as a square or rectangular shape. So far he could only see trees.

“There!” Reisa started, her hand pointing out into the darkness. Brent scrambled to close his interface windows and everyone was on high alert. But she dropped it just as quickly and amended her statement. “Sorry, it’s just a small animal. Never mind.”

It was hard to make out, but in the direction she had pointed was a tiny mouse-like creature partially concealed by blades of grass, its eyes two white pinpricks. It sniffed, then scurried out of view.

Everyone slumped in relief, and Ray let out an exasperated sigh.

They kept moving. Brent wanted to get back to the Map but they were coming up on the region border and he felt it was important to see it with his own eyes.

As much as he could at night, anyways.

The last hill they traversed sloped gently downwards before ending in the land-stitches, the gigantic threads of unknown metal piercing the land. They gleamed in the light of the rising moon.

Plink. Harry kicked at one of the stitches.

“Hm, these things still kinda creep me out every time I see them. I wonder what they’re made out of. Steel? Titanium?”

“Well don’t kick them,” Karisma chided, “What if they- I don’t know, unravel and the whole world falls apart or something?”

Harry shrugged. “Eh, I think if it was like that, some bloke would have made it happen already. As you may have noticed, the folks around here aren’t the most cautious,” he added dryly.

Then he frowned, sniffing. “Huh. What’s that smell?”

Brent caught it too, a strong, earthy odor wafting in from the new region that made him scrunch up his face. “Yeah, I smell it too. It’s uh…”

“Oh, like rotten eggs? That’s sulfur,” Karisma volunteered. “Well, hydrogen sulfide, to be precise. But that kind of smell would normally be present in…”

They all looked up, and gazed upon the scenery beyond the border.

Wide swathes of tall grass- no, they were more like reeds- stretched out ahead, interspersed by pools of rippling water. It was all very… green, even at night. Some of the pools had bits of greenery floating in them, and further in gnarled trees rose up here and there with lime foliage drooping from their branches.

“It’s a swamp,” Ray finished. “Great.”

“No, they’re wetlands. Swamps are a very specific type of wetland, and…” Karisma trailed off, sighing. “Crap, I forgot how to tell the difference. Yeah, we’ll just call it a swamp.”

Brent gingerly took a step forward. The ground below didn’t quite squish, but it did give way a little under his foot, feeling very moist.

“Well, are we just gonna stand there or keep going?” Ray asked. “I think we’re down to about two hours now and I don’t see a nice and cozy bed anywhere.”

The prospects weren’t good. What if they went around it? Brent wasn’t sure what was to the west, but he knew to the east was that area with the volcano. In any case, it would be more time consuming and he didn’t know if it would be worth it.

“Let’s keep going,” Brent declared with a shrug.

Squish, squelch. Into the swamp they went. The ground got squishier and a thin layer of liquid pooled around Brent’s shoes with each step. They tried to stick to the areas with more vegetation, so the water level didn’t get uncomfortably high. He would have preferred there be no water level at all, but the discomfort was really too minor to warrant complaining about at this point. It was the worry that things would get worse that plagued Brent’s thoughts as they proceeded further inward.

He opened up the Map again, scrolling about. More of the region had been revealed around them, and the name had been revealed: The Ponderous Peat. There was still no sign of any houses or buildings, which didn’t do anything for Brent’s mood.

They reached a more forested area, the trees growing larger. There was an ambiance in the air, the sound of small eddies of wind accompanied by the chirping of crickets.

Splish. A bit of muddy water got onto his left shoe. Brent sighed. He was swamped, both physically and mentally.