Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Read online

  Headshot:

  Two in the Head

  Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy

  by Matthew Siege

  Copyright © 2018 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.

  Table of 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 1

  I didn't die. At least not yet. Let's just start there.

  I thought there might be a chance that I would, however small. If there really were hardcoded rules to Headshot, there was no doubt that I was breaking them. But the very fact that the game’s Artificial Intelligence had let me climb into the Eternal’s guild Vault and close the door behind me as the server came down led me to believe that everything was up for grabs. It was learning, and I got the feeling that, as long as I was able to justify a result with my actions, it was going to give me the leeway to make it happen.

  Or something… I mean, what do you want me to tell you? I’m making this shit up as I go…

  Anyway, the instant that the world went dark a lot of other things went away as well. Like my name. I don’t remember it. My family, assuming I have one, my “me” took the first train from the station and didn’t so much as look back out the window to wish me a fond farewell.

  Before I had much of a chance to poke around inside my seemingly empty skull, a system message sprang to life in front of my eyes.

  Welcome to Survivor Sunday!

  DISCLAIMER: As you are no doubt aware the Zombie populace that logs in to Headshot as your adversaries Monday to Saturday have not been informed of the existence of Survivor Sunday. As a Survivor, please remember that you have already signed Deep Dive’s Terms of Service. Foremost among the documents you have previously agreed to comply with was contractual in which you accepted PERSONAL LIABILITY for any damage that either Headshot as a product or Deep Dive Studios as an entity should incur, were you to reveal to anyone other than another Survivor that Headshot is playable on Sunday.

  Failure to abide by these Terms will result in A) the permanent termination of your Headshot account, B) a lawsuit seeking the aforementioned damages to Deep Dive Studios’ current and projected profits and C) blacklisting from all current and future subsidiaries of our parent corporation. This may affect but will not be limited to your access to obtain Internet services in your area.

  We really don't like to make threats, and so far we haven't had any information breaches. Let's keep it that way. We would also like to take this opportunity to kindly remind you, our valued customer, that you have already granted us access to limited areas of your brain’s higher functions.

  Rest assured, we will know if you go against the Terms of Service.

  Wow. I didn't know what to make of any of that. The only thing I could be certain of was that there was no way that I should be seeing that message. I wasn't a Survivor. Deep Dive had been right to think that the shit would hit the fan if word got out that their Pay To Win darlings got a whole extra day in Headshot to spend as they pleased. I couldn’t even grasp how much of an advantage that would give them. And, since they’d no doubt spend it preparing to fight us poor Zombies, skilling up and stockpiling supplies in anticipation of the waves of the hapless hordes that would fling themselves at them the following day, the disparity of it all was enough to make me start to see red.

  I tried not to let it get to me, mostly because right now I had a whole lot of other things to spend my time worrying about. Like how I got here and how the hell I was going to get out. Besides, no matter how furious I was about the inequity of it all, I couldn’t honestly say that it surprised me. The Survivors paid a pretty penny for the privileges they were given. Even when I’d been happily playing along in the Beta the last few months it had never really sat right with me that a powerhouse developer like Deep Dive Studios would need an entire twenty-four hours of downtime to keep their systems in order.

  I mean sure, they had mainframes to maintain and servers to service, but they’d also have so much computing power on their side that wasting such a huge slice of time had never made sense to me.

  Well, I guess now I knew the truth. Not that it would do me much good…

  I looked around as the message faded away to nothing. At least, I think I did. I couldn’t tell in the vast blackness that had swallowed me whole whether or not I was still in my Zombie body. I held the stump of my missing hand up in front of my face, but I couldn’t see that, either. I tried to bump my face with it and missed. As unlikely as that seemed, I tried a couple more times before I got the hint.

  The only me in here was my thoughts. The game hadn’t generated a body for me to use, which meant that I didn’t have a face to bump or a stump to bump it with.

  Great.

  If I had a mouth, it would have worn a wry smile. At least I wasn’t panicking, this time. I’d gone through something similar when Sasha had crashed the game a couple of days ago, which meant that I had this weird sort of calm that I could wrap around my mind and keep my thoughts from running away with themselves.

  Just like before, time was strange here. With no inputs and no stimuli, I couldn’t tell the difference between a second and an hour. Last time I’d been worried about my sanity, but this time I’d adapted to the treatment enough to actually be bored with it.

  Come on, I thought at the game, trying to get the AI’s attention. If I got caught, then I got caught. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about outsmarting either Deep Dive or the game mechanics and working out that a Zombie had a chance at surviving the reset by crawling into a Guild Vault. Get on with it!

  Maybe it responded. Then again, maybe I hung there like a fish on a hook for another few hours. In any event, the next thing I knew my vision was restored and my User Interface was completely different.

  As a Zombie I’d been able to track my hitpoints and experience. There was a clock as well, I think. The game had stopped letting me see all of that toward the end, but whether that particular fiasco was a bug that the coders needed to squash or a feature that was meant to make me feel more and more like the flesh eater I was playing as I got toward the end game I had no idea.

  The only thing I could be certain of was that the minimal, unobtrusive design aesthetic that had sat at the periphery of my Zombie point of view had been completely thrown out the window. In its place blossomed ten or
twelve little windows, each of them eager to fill my head with information.

  Hit points were still there, and experience too. Now there was an Armor indicator as well, with a little percentage symbol and a blinking zero beside it. There was a box labeled Primary Weapon with an “X” to indicate that I didn’t have one, and another marked Secondary Weapon. The experience bar had the words No Boost Available in blocky text beside it. Ammo counter, Inventory Weight to Carry Ratio, Endurance, Class… I was swamped by the game showing me how much it was willing to fill me in on the world around me, and when a big square popped into view in the upper right and happily informed me that the “map of my current area is loading,” my wry smile turned into a shit-eating grin.

  Whatever was going on, I was way out of my depth. Maybe Sasha’s money transfer had been grabbed by the game and automatically applied to my account. Would Deep Dive had simply upgraded me to a Survivor without my permission?

  I realized that there was another option, one I hadn’t put much thought into last week because it had seemed so out of reach. When the game had started having problems and they’d had to bring it down, the outrage had been severe enough that the developers had started throwing out a lot of carrots. One of them had been that the top ranking Zombie players in each Zone would be automatically given the option to become Survivors.

  Maybe that had happened. I couldn’t imagine that after all I’d gone through last week there’d be very many players with more points or experience or whatever metric they were using to score us than me. Sure, I didn’t expect to be the top overall, but judging by the fight I’d led in Beverly Hills, most of the Zombies I’d gotten to fight on my side had been at least a level or two below me…

  Well, it wasn’t like I could check my emails or look at my phone while I was in the game to see if they’d sent me a message. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a Survivor in the first place, but I sure as hell wanted to be asked before it happened.

  There was a clock in the new UI as well.

  12:01 AM - SUNDAY

  That threw me for enough of a loop that the panic I’d been so proud of keeping at bay swam back up. It meant that everything I’d been thinking just now, all of the getting used to the new Interface and the vastness of the void before it had only taken up the sixty seconds or so that had passed since I’d climbed into the Eternal’s Vault…

  Before I could come to terms with that, the blackness was gone as if it had never been there in the first place. In its place shimmered a white room. The walls, floor, and ceiling all emitted the same slightly pulsing light. It wasn’t exactly blinding, but it did make everything blurry. If there were a video game heaven, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a room like this might be exactly the sort of place you’d be stuck in while you waited for them to call your number and judge your sins.

  I ignored the room that had materialized around me and checked the readouts one more time. Everything was blank and zeroed out. As soon as I got used to seeing all of that stuff, a single door appeared on the far wall. It was just as bright as the rest of my surroundings, but the blackness leaking out of the seam around it gave it enough contrast for me to spot it.

  Better yet, there were words slowly appearing in the space above the door, the chunky font as dark as the wall was white.

  Character Creation

  I felt a little pulse of a dozen mixed emotions shove through the meat body I’d left back in the real world. Fear, elation, even a touch of guilt. Did I dare go in there?

  This is when you log out, idiot, that rational voice that continued to pipe up inside of my head whispered to me. You aren't supposed to be here. Nothing good lies through that door, and once you’re in there, you can’t plead innocence.

  A week ago, I probably would have listened. The message from Deep Dive had been pretty clear; anyone that got the information they’d accidentally given me was going to be on their shit list for all time if they gave up their secret. They practically came out and admitted that they were monitoring the thoughts of the survivors. Did I have it in me to pretend that they weren’t doing that to the Zombie players, too?

  I hesitated, wondering what would happen when their invasive little algorithm filtered its way through my head. I’d probably get kicked out of the game unless they were desperate enough to trust me to make a deal with them in return for my silence. And I’d be blacklisted from more than just Headshot. They were pretty much the only guys making Absolute Reality like this, and I’d be sitting on the sidelines of their current game and all the rest of the ones that they’d be developing in the years ahead.

  Exactly, the coward in me was quick to agree. Is that what you want? The whole damn world will be escaping the crap they wake up to every day in this world and a whole bunch of others, and you’ll be locked out. And for what? Why risk that simply because you don't have the balls to man up and let Deep Dive know that Sasha is the one that dragged you in here against your will. And oh yeah, she’s breaking the game, too. You’ll be a hero, man. They’ll shower you with gifts. What do you owe her, anyway?

  It would have been easy to listen to that voice, after all, it had been the driving force of my life for so long already. I rarely stuck my neck out, preferring to fly under the radar. I did my work and went home, and that was it. I never aspired to be much more than that.

  But things were different, now. I knew I hadn’t beaten the game by climbing into the Vault and escaping the reset, but I had out-thought most of the rules. There was a sense of victory that came along with the act that was completely alien to me.

  For the first time, I could listen to that voice and be critical of its cowardice. For most of my life, I hadn't even been aware that it had been steering me down the safe path, the one of least resistance. It didn’t want greatness from me. It didn’t demand valor or bravery. It didn’t expect anything, other than for me to avoid being singled out.

  I’d obeyed it for too long. Last week had taught me that nobody, not the developers and not anybody else in the world was going to give me something that I wasn't willing to work for. With that in mind, I shoved the impulse to retreat to the real world aside.

  I wasn’t going to log out. If they found me, fine. If they threatened me, I was fine with that too. They weren’t the only ones with leverage. I knew something they didn't want me to know, and I didn’t doubt that they’d bend over backward to keep me happy; if it came down to that.

  I was ready to take the next step. My doubts were as quiet as they were going to be, and I wasn’t going to advance in the game if I just stood there like a moron in this bright, white room doing nothing more than patting myself on my back for not being a weakling.

  In what I told myself would be a glorious, no, a momentous milestone in my life, I took a step toward the Character Creation door and began my journey into the vast unknown.

  Chapter 2

  I didn’t go anywhere. I tried to look down at my feet, forgetting that I didn’t have any. If I had a head, I wasn’t in control of it. I can’t even truthfully say that I just stood there, since standing requires a body and I was pretty sure I was lacking one of those, too.

  Moving around in these games requires just as much thought as it does in real life. Next to none, in other words. But try as I might, no matter how much I raged and battered the user interface with whatever passed as willpower, I couldn't move. I was locked in position, just as much a prisoner in this space as I had been in the Vault.

  The clock was still there, right along with all of the other useless crap in my vision. I watched as it ticked over.

  12:02

  12:03

  It was maddening, and it didn’t take me long to prefer the way I’d been viewing the game before. What good was all of this, if it didn’t let me manipulate the world and it let me know about things I had no access to? I would have preferred it without a UI, just like I’d had at the end of the game last week.

  The room I was in was part of the problem, too. At least the pitch b
lack of the void that had surrounded me had let my mind drift. Here, surrounded on all six sides in a cube of glowing white, lit from every direction so brightly that all shapes took on a fuzzy, indistinct feel that made my brain buzz. Well, I started to wonder if this would be the room where I lost my mind.

  How long can I take this? How long could anyone? How long could I stand in this room without control over my movements, watching the minutes slide slowly past?

  I had no answer, and as my thoughts ran away from me and once again I felt the false confidence I’d managed to trick myself into start to fade away at the foundation the game didn’t bother with pity.

  12:04

  I couldn't look away from the door I was staring at. I couldn't close my eyes. I didn't even know if I had eyes. The absolute silence was everywhere, pressing in from all directions. My head wasn’t quiet, though.

  The voice was still inside me, and now it tried again. They've got you already. You see that, right? You can't get away. You're locked in here, alone until they come for you. And when they do, do you think they’ll be happy that you managed to sneak in and discover their little secret? Do you, Ryan? Or are you still so much of a worthless shit that you’ve convinced yourself that you can blackmail them? Because if you have, answer me this. Why would they bother to bargain with you? Why risk trusting you, when they can no doubt just pinpoint your location and, say, throw a couple of hundred thousand volts down the grid and cook your brain without anyone being the wiser? Or maybe that’s the best they’ll do to you. Maybe they have even worse in mind…

  Now the panic was clawing at me, tearing my will to remain in the game to shreds with ease. I gave in and tried to log out.

  It didn't work.

  12:05

  I tried again, and then again. Hundreds of times, each subtly different from the last. I said the kill word, the one that you’re supposed to use in case you needed an exit, and you didn’t care what kind of damage you did to your equipment and possibly even yourself.