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  “Roger that.”

  “Jevo, get ready for dessert.”

  “Here comes my morning bacon.”

  Little did we know.

  Level 6

  It got ugly. It got ugly very quickly.

  Mi was true to her word and her aim. As soon as the nose of the massive buggy was even with the second stop sign, the front gunner’s helmet exploded into crimson spray. Chunks of brain splattered the roof of an abandoned minivan. On cue, Dakota took out the other, and it looked like we’d gotten the upper hand.

  A vehicle that size, especially towing a trailer, could never turn around and scoot for cover. It was a sitting duck, and the only way to go was right into the teeth of our ambush.

  The enemy’s back gunners opened fire, but fortunately, Dakota and Mi had planned their shots perfectly. The gamers were spraying wildly. The idiots had no clue.

  I pulled up my scope, was off at a 90 to the enemy’s right, and surveyed the remaining force. The front two players were dead and useless. Gone from this world. I panned over the back two gunners, looking for their tags floating over their heads. I’d take any advantage to try to isolate a target.

  But that’s when I saw the bad news.

  The big buggy wasn’t just a big objective. It was a moving screen.

  Behind the rig were four gamers, and I knew they were the shot callers by the gold lettering floating over their helmets. Gold is the prime color. That’s the highest level you can achieve online. And they were waiting, like a second wave. True veterans. Thousands of hours playing vids between ’em. Mad skills, to be sure.

  Each was throttling a modded dirt bike with machine guns where the headlights should have been. The tires were rimmed with razor-sharp spikes. On the back, where another passenger might sit, a robot gunner added even more firepower to the arsenal.

  The big buggy had been used to get the cycles in close. A mobile diversion. Nice move. We’d been so focused on the strange contraption and taking out the easy targets that we’d never realized those were just sacrificial offerings to our snipers.

  I’d blown it. Now, unfortunately, they’d had a chance to narrow in on our positions. And get close.

  Clever jerks. Gamers just have to show off, don’t they?

  Two of the riders broke left and the other two went right. That was a small mistake; they didn’t know it yet, but I was to their right.

  I hoisted an AK-47 on one arm and a giant revolver in my other hand. I’d only get one chance, but they had no idea I was hiding over here. A good spot too. Down behind a rusting mailbox. They split up to move around it, zipping past me on either side.

  One motorcycle raced by, then the second, the riders’ backs fully exposed. I stood, steadied my legs, and opened fire. The AK was full auto and cut the rider on my left in half; he died, tumbling like a rag doll into a low wall.

  But on the right, my hand-cannon’s first shell bounced off the mechanized soldier in the passenger seat. No damage. Still, the rider felt the impact or heard the ricochet: he ripped a neat cookie in the street and zeroed in on my spot.

  Bummer for me now. Before, I’d had perfect cover. Now I was just a guy in the open with a machine gun that needed another clip and a mailbox behind me that was of no use whatsoever.

  I dropped the AK and tried to sight down the barrel of the nickel-plated handgun. I had five shells remaining, but this next shot would have to be perfect.

  If I hit the charging rider in the body, it wouldn’t do enough damage. Anyone who games knows that only head shots are any guarantee of a fatal blow.

  The bike’s front-mounted guns started peppering bullets, but they were wild, hitting my legs, arms, shoulder, nothing vital. Sure, it hurt, and it knocked down my health a lot, but he too would need a head shot to guarantee a kill.

  The notch on my gun centered right over his facemask. That was the most vulnerable point. Any revolver these days, in any game, packs a massive damage rating. The downside? Slow rate of fire. Slow reload. Only six bullets in the chamber. Each bullet does a good job, you just have to make sure every shell counts.

  KABOOM! I fired. I missed. It did occur to me, so you know, that Mi would have picked him right off.

  But he was, after all, on a motorcycle, speeding and weaving. A tough shot. You try to make it.

  KERPOWWW! The third bullet glanced off his temple. Not a direct hit. No solid damage at all.

  His machine guns kept up their chatter—RAT-A-TAT! RAT-A-TAT!—the bullets stinging off my knees, elbows, making it almost impossible to line up a fourth shot.

  Still, that’s what they pay me for. I make my living putting up a good fight, right to the very end.

  The sights finally found a home. Right over the middle of his helmet. It would be a nose shot. Nice splat on impact. Nothing left inside but cerebral soup.

  I win.

  I pulled the trigger.

  CLICK!

  What?

  Out of bullets?

  I began counting. One when he passed. It hit the robot.

  Two more at him after he spun around to take me out? Had I gotten trigger-happy and emptied the cannon by spraying fire . . . ?

  Wait! No! I’d only fired one at the bike as it passed. Then two. I should have had three left.

  Had I forgotten to reload earlier? Yesterday? Had I been packing a half-full gun all this time? No way. Not a chance. I never forgot to reload. And the weight of the gun would’ve felt funny.

  CLICK! I tried it again.

  CLICK.

  Click.

  What was the use? I was a sitting duck. No shots left. So much for unlimited ammo . . . What kind of crap game was this where the NPC ran out of bullets? Or was loaded with duds? How could that be fun?

  “Go shoot hillbillies whose weapons are empty or jammed!”

  It’d never sell.

  So I waited for the guy on the motorcycle to finish me off. Or run me over with those spiked tires. Or rope me with a steel cable and drag me to my death all over that scraggy landscape.

  But he didn’t. The rider fishtailed to a stop right at my feet. We were almost nose to nose, but I still couldn’t see a face behind the smoked helmet visor. Nor could I pick out any skin behind his full-body riding armor. Bullet marks and skids were all over him, including a big dent where my last bullet had very narrowly missed center-skull.

  “Gotcha!” he yelled.

  Funny. When those guys spoke into their wireless headsets, we usually picked up the chatter. Now this one was talking to me. Directly?

  What the . . . ? OK. Why not talk back?

  “I ran out of shells,” I told him, popping open the chamber to show him six spent cartridges.

  “Lucky for me,” he responded. “You’re Phoenix, right? The Phoenix? Your scores are off the charts.”

  Scores? Charts?

  Not me. I have no tag. I’m an NPC. I have no rating he could access. I die for a living. How could he have known?

  He lifted a hand-cannon of his own. At least this time, for me, the end would come quickly.

  In just a few digital seconds, I’d be back home. Climbing out of the Re-Sim. Good thing, too. This had been a really long session. I was starving.

  “You win . . .” I smiled at him through my gnarled, inbred teeth.

  He nodded.

  “. . . this time,” I added. “Next time, who knows?”

  He shrugged too, taking his time with the mercy kill. Why? Behind him, I could see his crew laying waste to the rest of my team.

  And still he waited. Why not shoot? He just sat there on his bike, pointing the massive barrel at my forehead, in no hurry at all. What kind of juvenile, violence-crazed, prepubescent carnage machine was he? Get on with it, already! I was hungry!

  “Game’s over,” I finally told him. “Finish it. You’ve been chasing us for days, I’m starved.”

  “Starved?” He cocked his head.

  Then I heard the crunch behind me. That unmistakable crunch. You already know nothing in na
ture sounds like that. Tires on gravel.

  The buggy. It had driven up.

  And then the gamer said one last thing, and it completely gave me the creeps.

  “It’s not over yet, cannibal.”

  A harpoon fired and a shaft of metal as big as a baseball bat sliced clean through my leg. It hurt, it hurt bad, but that wasn’t the death blow.

  No death blow would come. The gamer was right; the contest was not nearly over yet.

  The harpoon was attached to a steel cable that hoisted me up, over the buggy. The arm of the crane then swung me like a sack of dirt. At the last moment, the hook released and I was tossed, very roughly, in the back cage. Into the circus trailer.

  Quickly, the whole craft lurched forward. On with the mission.

  These guys weren’t killing.

  They were hunting.

  What kind of game was this?

  They moved in to try to capture Mi, but she got shot down. York and Reno were fried to a crisp when the gas tanks went up. The rest of my team, unfortunately, was wiped out soon after by mortar fire.

  I watched them try to do the same thing to Jevo. They cornered him, put a spear through his neck, then stood there and watched him bleed.

  That same rider, I believed, was over there talking to him. Then he was talking to his buddies. For some reason, Jevo wasn’t the right catch. A bigger guy knocked my bigger guy to the ground, sat his rear motorcycle tire on our goon’s head, twisted the throttle, and ground the skull down to the pavement. Jevo died. Mercilessly. Never saw the big man again, either. Not like that, anyway.

  Then, as it always happens in war, everything went from pure chaos to dead silence.

  Nothing marred that perfect quiet. Even the tires had stopped rolling.

  And that’s when I heard her voice.

  Dakota.

  She was lying in a heap on the other side of the cage, pinned down under some concrete debris. Her leg, too, was sporting the shaft of one of their whaling harpoons.

  “I really, really do not like your world.” She grimaced my way, covered in dirt.

  I helped her up, brushed off the dust, but by now, the monstrous craft was leaving town. Heading off across the barren desert. Wherever we were pointed, it looked to be a long journey. At least the sun was finally going down.

  “What kind of game is this?” she asked with a lot of menace in her voice.

  It was exactly the same feeling I was having. Gamers never take prisoners. Why would they? They get no points, no thrill, no “delightful” death graphics like spurting blood or exploding rib cages or careening body parts. Those guys live for rag-doll physics. Not for building a zoo.

  There was no point in capturing even one of the enemy.

  “I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “But this is by far the longest session I’ve ever been assigned to.”

  “You’re sure it’s a game?” she asked softly. The sun had just reached the distant horizon. We had maybe five minutes of light left. And we’d been in here twenty-four hours, easy.

  Sure it’s a game? I just shook my head. I really didn’t know. I had no clue where we were headed. Or why. From the gamers’ perspective, those guys on the motorcycles, why would they ever want to play anything that lasted so many hours and didn’t end with the thrill of killing a disgusting enemy like us? What was the point?

  We rolled across desert. Yard after yard. Mile upon mile. Answers seemed a long way off.

  “Did you see their tags?” Dakota asked.

  She seemed to be getting a second wind. And her wounds, like mine, were healing up. Limb damage was never permanent for us.

  “Their tags?”

  “Gamer tags.”

  “I know what tags are.” I laughed at her.

  “But did you read them?”

  I thought back. No. I never did anymore. They’re always something stupid like God_of_Destruktion or Apocalypse_Cow or Killin_Machine_666 or Im_da_Bomb! Whatever. Most are ridiculous. You go blind to them after a while.

  “The rider who captured me was called BlackStar_2.”

  I just stared at her. That short a tag? That, well, nonviolent?

  I had to clarify. “BlackStar_2? That’s it?”

  She nodded.

  “Where’s the evil mischief? Where’s the dastardly, juvenile-stupid name in that?”

  She shrugged, then added, “The one who had that gun pointed at you was BlackStar_3.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  She shook her head. “The first motorcyclist you shot in half was BlackStar_1.”

  Whoa.

  Weirder and weirder.

  Maybe this wasn’t a game after all.

  Level 7

  They dumped us in a cell and, well, since you’re familiar with video games, you know it could only go two ways.

  One kind of cell is like the dirtiest, scummiest, most rodent-ridden pit ever created by graphic artists. Old skeletons, rats eating rib meat, spiders the size of a principal’s butt, the works.

  The other kind can be even more frightening, as it inevitably leads only to cruel medical experiments performed by insane scientists.

  Unfortunately, the other kind was where we were stuffed.

  The walls were clean, the table immaculate, and the bunks looked as if they’d never been used. Maybe they hadn’t. We are, as you remember, the cutting edge of gaming NPCs. This might have been an entirely new environment. Unsoiled and untouched. Maybe something made for a top-secret military training game. Or a test arena for the next generation of combat.

  What were our captors waiting for? What kind of game has long breaks in the action where you do nothing?

  The boring kind, I guess.

  Dakota and I got cleaned up. Robots removed all the hillbilly clothing and makeup, and they rinsed us off in four-nozzle showers. Any nonfatal wounds, as usual, were healing quickly. The water was hot and felt great. My thick arms and legs finally relaxed after that marathon on the run. The smell washed down the drain along with about a pound of the barren landscape we’d been tromping across.

  Crazy, the water, it was nice and warm. Not freezing. Not boiling. Just perfect.

  Then they fed us. Now, this was also strange—consuming food in a video game? Not once in all the years I’d been running the team had we stopped in the middle of a session to eat. Recharge, whether it was a meal or sleep or just some time off, always came after the session. Back at Central Ops. After we died or the gamer saved and let us go home. At no point did the actual gaming platform include fried chicken and gravy and big bottles of Coke and a huge mound of mashed potatoes.

  It tasted great. Absolutely great.

  “We’re not in the HILLS HAVE TEETH world anymore,” Dakota slurred to me through a mouthful of spuds. “Not a chance. We got pulled or pushed to another environment.”

  I didn’t agree. The two were linked. Some kind of door or portal. Maybe this was just the next level, but still, the main question, why capture us? It wasn’t like we knew anything . . .

  Or did we?

  I didn’t know squat.

  But Dakota had been grabbed too. And nothing had been the same since that day on LB-427.

  How long would it take, really, before gaming environments mirrored real-world challenges even more realistically? What if this was the next generation? Instead of the gamer having to decimate every enemy, what if now, in this new arena, the NPC had information you had to extract in order to continue to level up through the game?

  Interesting twist. And innovative game tech always sells.

  One thing backed that theory up: our gaming worlds never sat still. Those designers out there were always trying new things. This might just have been one of those tests. A trial environment. Made some sense. Introduce a torture chamber or an interrogation challenge. Still, what could we possibly know? Or have seen? Why imprison us? Why feed us? Why not just get to the information extraction part of the session?

  “Think it’s a game glitch?” Dakota ask
ed me, stuffing calories in as fast as her hands could shovel.

  “It’s new to me,” I admitted, then took some time to really look at Dakota. She was still so fresh. We’d had a couple of weeks together. And it was true that over the years my team kind of came and went. Lately, we’d been pretty solid. Mi and I had been partners the longest. York and Reno, eons together. There were a dozen other NPCs in the system whose moves I knew as well as my own; guys like Jevo, or this other one, Deke, who ran his own team now.

  But Dakota, she was a wild card.

  Sure, teammates moved. It happened. They got burned out, they lost a step, they took too many frag grenades to the chin. Most of the time they’d be assigned to a less stressful team. Maybe driving computer-controlled cars in GREED FOR SPEED. Or playing Bowser or Luigi or Clank or Ratchet or Jak or that rat-thing he carries around on his shoulder. There were plenty of jobs out there.

  Then, of course, we’d get a replacement.

  And that’s how we got Dakota. She just appeared one day. She looked the part, like Mi, with blond hair instead of Mi’s black. Both were about the same size with the same athletic build. Both could run, jump, fight, shoot, and hold their own day in and day out. Both ate when hungry, went to sleep when tired, and rolled with the punches as well as any other stud on my team.

  But Dakota, she was off a bit. I thought back to that first battle. That day she was pinned down, not fighting, and thinking she could talk her way out of the carnage?

  Didn’t work then. Wasn’t going to work now.

  The door clanked open and four very serious men strode in, clamped huge restraints on our arms, and dragged us out of our cell.

  I looked this time. I took notice. They had no overhead tags. This was all programmed; these guys were the same as the robots, sent to manage the NPC leaders.

  Still we had no clue why.

  Level 8

  I was bolted to an upright board and leaned back at about sixty degrees. Bright lights. Probes on weird machines. An EKG machine or whatever was attached to one arm over my holo-tattoo, beeping away, telling me or them or whoever that I had a pulse, and it was going off like a trip hammer.