Headshot: One in the Gut (Book 1 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Read online

  Headshot:

  One in the Gut

  Book 1 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy

  by Matthew Siege

  Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Siege

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 1

  Headshot was the newest, hottest game on the market and everyone who was anyone was playing it. Even though the only way to play it over the last few months had been to join the open Beta, it was still completely dominating the up and coming Absolute Reality industry. It filled your head, and then you watched it take over your life.

  Happily…

  It was getting hard to remember a time when I could have a conversation with someone, either face to face or online, that didn’t revolve around what the Zombies were doing and how those bastard Survivors were still managing to hold us off.

  Not that there were a whole lot of conversations going on, right now. Most of the people I knew spent every spare moment they had in Headshot, unless they’d already been killed that week. Even if they had, they were usually too pissed off to want to chat…

  I suppose it wasn’t surprising that everyone was obsessed with it, since I was too. Ever since the price of the gear that ran the game in your head had plummeted, Absolute Reality had been all the rage. Now that just about everyone could afford to “see” the game world without the aid of a screen in front of your face, things were changing fast.

  And these games were obliterating the competition. I suppose you could say it was an addiction, but only if you were willing to think of people’s reliance on things like oxygen and food was an addiction too.

  And Headshot was one of a kind, better than the rest in a million ways that were far too obvious or subtle to even bother thinking about. Not that I could, since there was no room in my head for anything other than the game.

  Besides, I wasn’t going to let anything as trivial as the real world drag me away from it.

  Chapter 2

  I did the bare minimum I needed to do to keep my body happy while I was in Headshot, which essentially meant that I took a few minutes to cram new food in and push old food out. Once I was done with that I got comfortable on the mattress in my sparsely furnished game room and the room I’d setup my gear now thought of as my gaming room and put the helmet on.

  Usually there’d be a menu that hovered in the center of my vision listing all of the different games I’d recently played, but everything else had fallen by the wayside once the Headshot Beta had dropped. I selected it and then tried to relax, even though I could already feel the adrenaline starting to roar through my veins.

  There was little countdown from ten to one that happened in front of my eyes as I closed them. I concentrated on trying to make sure my body was settled. There wasn’t much worse than getting dragged out of the game because the helmet had noticed that you were laying funny on your arm and had cut off the circulation, or whatever.

  I was ready to be in Headshot for a while. One of the features of the game was the lack of time dilation. They could make time go faster in these things if they wanted to, but Headshot didn't do that. Time was as precious a commodity as your hit points were, and you had to spend it just as carefully.

  At the bottom of my “vision”, even though my eyes were closed, a digital clock faithfully kept time. It was Sunday night. Actually, to be technically correct, it was Monday morning. Three minutes past midnight on Monday morning, to be precise, which meant that the new game was already up and running.

  It may even mean that I was late…

  Every week Headshot started over from scratch. When you were eliminated from the game, you were out for the remainder for the week. I could only afford to play on the Zombie side, which was both free and far more perilous. Zombies had fewer options, fewer hit points, and far lower chances of survival. A lucky shot or a well-placed Molotov could be the end of you in a flash.

  And, if something like that happened, you were gone. The rest of the week was gone too, at least for you. You’d get booted from the game before the flies even had a chance to land on the pool of gore you’d left behind, with only dark dreams of revenge to comfort you until the following week when it all started again.

  Obviously, the Zombies had it rough. I’d only made it past Tuesday once, when a group of gun-wielding Survivors did me the honor of riddling me with bullets on a Wednesday afternoon. At the time I’d been pretty proud to have made it that far, but now I wanted more.

  Saturday called to me. The end game, when the Zombies might be at the height of their power. I longed to walk the street with them, smashing and tearing Survivors left and right.

  The game was developed by Deep Dive Studios, and now that it was launch week they’d been shouting from the rooftops that Headshot had a raft of new features. There were a lot of promised improvements now that it was going live to the general public, and I couldn’t wait to see how they were going to make such a big part of my life even better.

  Not that the game had been without its faults. The Beta hadn’t had any skills or abilities, at least not on the Zombie side. There hadn't been any real progression of your character at all. That was fixed now, and I was chomping at the bit to start.

  As I watched the world of Headshot flicker into existence around me, slowly replacing the room that I lay in on the outskirts of Los Angeles with a post-Apocalyptic version of itself, I told myself that I was ready. This time, I wasn’t going to get sniped. I wasn’t going to get cheap-shotted or ambushed.

  I was going to get to the very end of the week, even if it killed me. And, considering I was a Zombie in here, I guess I’d already died once, anyway…

  Chapter 3

  Headshot and I were fully in sync now. It took me a few seconds to get past how real it was.

  Everything was exactly the same, except that the power was out. The only illumination was provided by a stream of moonlight from the window. It was enough to see that Headshot was even showing me the empty bowls on my nightstand that had held my ramen only a couple o
f minutes ago.

  That was one of the things I didn’t think I’d ever get used to. They skimmed your brain and used it to fill in the details, the client-side software doing its work so that the massive server farms all over the world running Headshot could handle the rest. If any other player needed to know how many strands of cold noodles were in the bottom of one of the bowls, it scraped the data from me and fed it to them.

  I reached up and touched the top of my head. Instead of feeling the A R helmet on my skull, I touched my new flesh, my game skin. I still had hair, but beneath it I could feel that the dermis was stretched across it as tightly as a drum. As my hand flicked down into my own view again I saw that it was ashen and gray, covered in sores and lesions that the Apocalypse had given me like little badges.

  That was new. In the beta I’d looked like me, pretty much. I was grayer, but my skin had been unblemished.

  Now, it looked like a zombie didn't even make it to the start of these games without having fought a few battles, or at least having had a few close scrapes in the fictional backstory.

  Now that I was in Headshot, I got up out of the bed as quickly as I could and looked around the room. I moved with a deliberate, almost mechanical way that always took some getting used to. Zombies could move at more than a shamble, if only barely…

  I tried hard not to marvel at my own room. I could do that later, once they game booted me when I died. For now, all I could do was attempt to ignore the intricate details the AI had dragged right out of my cortex. Besides, it said right there in the terms and conditions that Headshot’s engine was selective. Although this was mostly a concern for the Survivor faction, there was no point in stockpiling food and weapons in the real world in the hope of “bringing” them with you. The game was smart, and it wouldn’t let that happen.

  Not that I’d benefit from it, anyway. I couldn’t afford a gun in real life, and in Headshot Zombies can’t use guns…

  I realized that, as hard as it was to overlook the way the game had recreated my room so well, it was pretty much impossible to get the Survivors out of my head. They were the real threat, and I hated them with an undying passion that had actually scared me on more than one occasion.

  For a start, they were rich. They had to be, in order to afford the twenty thousand dollar annual fee they paid for the privilege of being on that side of the game. Being a Zombie was free, but that meant that the real perks and advantages went to the guys who were forking out the cash.

  And, with my current job and the cost of rent in LA, that was never going to be me. Not in a million years.

  Los Angeles didn’t have it all bad, of course. For one, it was guaranteed to be a hotbed of action. It was far too densely populated for the Zombies and Survivors to not stumble across each other practically immediately. In a game where you start off in your own home, it’s all about location, location, location.

  Sometimes I envied the players in Kansas or Iowa or Idaho or Utah or wherever. They had a chance of making it to Tuesday without even hearing a gunshot.

  But that wasn't where the experience was. I may just be a worthless Zombie, with the numbers at the bottom left of my vision telling me that I was only starting the game with 10 hit points and a speed of 3, but in the Beta they’d set it so that the closer I was to Survivors the faster my experience would accumulate.

  Hopefully, that hadn’t changed. I’d already been hearing of people moving closer to New York or LA or Chicago, just to get a leg up in Headshot It sounded crazy, but I believed it. Some people lived for this game.

  There were so few Survivors and so many Zombies that the game rewarded you generously just for making a successful attack against one of them. I was sure that if I bit one of those rich, Pay-To-Play bastards I'd be rolling in experience points.

  And if I killed one? Well, I could only imagine what that would do to my rank.

  Don't get ahead of yourself, I tried to tell warn myself. Right now, a Survivor could pretty much look at me and end my time in the game, and that wasn't going to change anytime soon. One on one, if I got delusions of grandeur or thought for an instant that my mission in the game today was to do anything other than avoid contact with any real confrontations with Survivors and try to make it through the session alive, I'd be a goner.

  The power was out. Everything was dark, but it was my house, after all. It may not have been much, but at least I knew the layout.

  The clock at the bottom of my eyesight read 12:06, now. Like I said, time was the same in here. The game was on, and it was only just after midnight, and lit only by moonlight black.

  After all, what half decent zombie apocalypse doesn't involve a complete and total power failure to the grid? Not any that I’d be willing to believe in, at least…

  I made my way through my house, only a little annoyed that it was too dark for me to see my reflection in any of the surfaces I passed. I'd seen a ton of Zombies in the Beta, but now they’d upped everything for release I was more than a little curious to see what I looked like.

  Oh well, there’d be time for that later. It probably didn’t matter anyway. Guys were guys and girls were girls, but other than that there were probably not a lot of distinguishing characteristics between us.

  And why should there be? We were the faceless horde. We were the wall of tooth and claw that was designed solely to drag a Survivor underneath us and grind them up, right down to the meat and the marrow.

  And, I had better not forget, we were completely expendable. After all, none of us had paid a dime to get into Headshot. The Survivors were where all the money was. The game catered to them, and as I finally reached the front door and put my hand on the doorknob I grinned with grim determination as the pop of a gunshot already split the night.

  Shit. Fucking Los Angeles.

  I opened the front door a little and peered out, glad that it was so dark outside. The moon lit up the street a little, but I couldn’t pierce the shadows on the other side. Even the end of the street was obscured in blackness, and I hoped to hell that meant that whatever was out there couldn't see me either.

  My eyes might have been stymied by the night, but my ears weren’t. All up and down the row of houses on the street where I’d lived for the past five years I could hear other players doing the same thing as me, staring out into the blackness, making that age-old estimation so close to the heart of hunters, gamers and gamblers alike. What was the risk, and what was the reward?

  I could stay here if I wanted to. I could go back inside and hide under the bed, for all the game cared. It was a tactic, that was for sure. But the virtual front door of my virtual house didn't have a lock, at least not one that I could operate in my current condition. I had no way of securing myself, and the slow trickle of experience points that I was even now receiving just by being active in the game world would do nothing for me when a survivor kicked in the door and hunted me down.

  Because I was the prey. If I waited here, I’d be a sitting duck, a victim just waiting for the end to come. The only safety I could hope to find lay in the shadows. That, and my own ability to stay one step ahead of whatever was going to be after me. Ambush, cunning, and even luck were the only tools that I had at my disposal.

  Or were they? I didn't have abilities before, since they weren’t in the Beta version of the game. Were they implemented now?

  As soon as I thought of them, a little menu came up.

  Congratulations. We thank you for playing the release version of Headshot As a free, nonpaying member of the Headshot community we encourage you to play our game on a weekly basis. You are a Zombie. You are level -1-. Your starting area is -Los Angeles, California, United States of America-. You currently have -2- experience points. When you reach -100- experience points, you will become level 2. Your current abilities are -Hide in Shadows- and -Low Light Vision-. Would you like to activate these abilities now?

  "Hell yes," I said, though I wasn’t surprised when all I did was growl. Just
like in the Beta, it looked like Zombies couldn’t communicate through much more than a series of unintelligible slurry of grunts and moans. Zombies and Survivors couldn’t speak across factions, both to stop griefing and to make it so that plans couldn’t be overheard.

  Oh well. At least I wasn’t constantly mumbling, “Brains!”

  Instantly, I could see all the way down the street. The moonlight and the twinkling stars, were now more than enough for me to activate my new passive ability. In a weird shift, even as I could suddenly see more clearly, I felt myself shrink into the shadows around me grow to embrace my shape with even more intimacy.

  Kick ass. Hide in Shadows was really going to come in handy, and the Low Light Vision was as well. I knew I didn’t stand a chance in a fight if the Survivor saw me first. They could take me out in an instant, and with hit points this low it would only take a table leg to the head to end me.

  No, at least I’d be able to see them coming. Maybe I’d even have a chance of ambushing one of them, if I got lucky and they got sloppy.

  I never liked to stay in one place in games like this. It's just too damn easy to get picked off like that. I knew from the braggarts on the forums, those rich kids whose mommy or daddy had bought them Survivor status, that one of the best ways for them to gain early, quick and easy experience was to just go house to house and slaughter newbie Zombies as they were still standing around and reading the games prompts.

  It had been cutthroat in the Beta, but now that the game had officially launched, the Survivors would probably be even more brutal.

  I knew I should get going, but as soon as I took the first few steps away from my house and headed across my shadowy yard I remembered how slow I was, now.

  It was pathetic. My speed got a little better once I got rolling, and at least it wasn't quite the limping stumble or the drag-foot shamble that you see in the horror movies, but it wasn't much faster than that either.

  I booked it as quickly as I could to the cracked sidewalk and took a right, heading north toward the middle of Los Angeles. It was the first tactical decision I had to make, and I didn’t second guess myself. Heading toward Survivors or away from them was always going to be a gamble. Los Angeles would be a hotbed of conflict, but I was hoping the reward was worth the risk. If I could get near the front lines and not be killed, I'd certainly raise levels faster.