Ghouls'n Guns Read online

  Would Jason be able to quit the game if he bled out, they wondered? Or would they be forever trapped here, unable to be released, even by death?

  On the bed next to Jason’s, the third biker—Tron, presumably—lay with a lab assistant wiping blood from a nasty gash to his forehead as another tied a bandage around his upper arm. Another bandage had been attached around his leg and Davidoff saw that he had been reduced down to 287 / 435 HP. He had taken a beating, though nothing was anywhere near as bad as Jason’s injuries.

  “Rough fight,” he joked as Davidoff, Zeke and the others clustered around him. “Those zombies gave us a nasty turn. I didn’t know they could do that.”

  “They should not be able to,” Dr. Finkelstein said, walking over to them. His voice was somber and his expression was grim. He had a clipboard in one hand and a deep frown carved into his brow. “They should all have their Agility and Initiative set low. They are the chaff of the game. Or, at least, that was the coders’ intention. Only the warlocks and the ghouls should have been able to beat you one to one. The zombies are here just for mass.”

  “So something else has gone wrong?” Davidoff asked.

  “Something else?” Mara asked, looking around. She had been bending over Jason, inspecting the wounds to his body and the damage to his stats. “What do you mean… what does that mean? What else has gone wrong?”

  “You mean you haven’t realized yet?” Zeke asked.

  No wonder they were all so calm, Davidoff thought. They were treating the situation as though they had been landed into a strangely difficult, unpredictable game. The puzzlement they had shown so far was limited to the sudden about face in the zombies’ profiles and behaviors. They had no idea that it was possible to be stuck here.

  “Jeez,” Davidoff sighed, closing his eyes for a second. When he opened them, everybody was looking at him. As Tron lay with the assistant doing up his bandages, and as Jason dropped down a further -17 HP, teetering on the edge of death, Davidoff explained. He went through all of it: how they had tried to save their progress and exit the game, how the home screen had acted funny and then thrown them back into it, how the world had become pixelated and unclear before alerting them to a system error.

  “Yeah, yeah…” Tron murmured. He had been given painkillers to stop his Initiative from depleting as they worked on his injuries. “I think I saw something strange like that… a message, just before I was hit in the head.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Mara said, and Blight concurred, nodding her head.

  “No, you were all busy,” Tron said. “It was the same time the zombies turned. I was watching it as you all started to run… that’s how they caught me. Something about a system error?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Zeke said.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” Mara demanded, but Tron just laughed. It was a quiet, dispirited sound.

  “We were a little busy, if you remember,” he said. “And I’ve only just got my stats stabilized.”

  “God, so what does it all mean…” Blight began, but she was interrupted. Jason finally gave out, his HP going down to 0. His body disappeared, leaving nothing but a bloody mess where it had been lying on the bed. Presumably he had been taken back to the Home Screen, Davidoff thought. That is if it was even accessible any more.

  “Well, that’s one down, and there’s no telling when he will be back,” Mara said. “I don’t know where he will come back into the world, if he does at all. Knowing his luck, he will just be held in limbo until whatever bug has trapped us here is sorted.”

  “And there is no time to waste,” Dr. Finkelstein said. “There is another cohort of zombies coming, a couple of hundred, by the looks of things… along with… something else…” He looked confused as he spoke, his eyes shut as he tried to read the game’s programming. “It looks like a ghoul… no, three ghouls, a boss and two assistants, but… they’ve updated their AI software, somehow.”

  “Everything’s bloody faulty,” Blight snapped. She pulled out a handgun, emptied the clip and put a fresh cartridge in. She did the same with her assault rifle as Davidoff, Zeke and Mara all reloaded their own weapons. “How long until they’re here?” she asked.

  “Eleven minutes. The zombies are running fast, they do not seem to tire, and the ghouls have found a car.”

  “The ghouls can drive now?” Blight asked, incredulity showing in her face.

  Dr. Finkelstein nodded. “It would appear so,” he said.

  “We had best secure the perimeter,” Zeke said, his bolt rifle held tightly across his chest, ready for action. “I’m a decent sniper and this gun packs a punch, so I’ll find a good spot to pick out the big guys from. Davidoff’s a bloody ninja, so we’ll chuck him at their front lines in front of the gate. He can hold a few of them up, at least. What’s everyone else good at?”

  “I’m heavy weapons, too,” Blight said. “Though I’m more into explosives than bolt weapons.” She smiled, picking up the case with her RPG launcher inside. “I’ve seven rounds in this bad boy. I’ll make them count, then come and join Davidoff on the frontline.”

  “I’m a ranger,” Mara said. “I’m good from a distance, and I’m good at laying traps. Let me take a look in your store cupboard. I reckon I can rig a couple of surprises for our guests out there.”

  His injuries taken care of, and his HP stabilized, Tron stood up from the bed, a determined look on his face. “I am primarily a techie,” he told them. “But I gave myself very good Ballistic Accuracy, so I’m good in a scrap. Medium range type stuff, you know?” Davidoff looked over Tron’s profile and saw that he was right: at 64, Tron’s Ballistic Accuracy was almost as good as Zeke’s. If it were not for Zeke’s Marksman ability, Tron would be nearly as good a shot.

  “I’ll cover Davidoff,” Tron continued. “I’ve half my ammo left in my rifle, as well as three reloads—12 rounds each—for my side arm.”

  “We can give you plenty of ammo,” Dr. Finkelstein said. “Take four or five reloads for your rifle, as much as you can carry. And we will do our part too, naturally,” he continued as all around him, scientists and assistants were leaving to man their stations once more. “We have our own defenses. We can weather this storm.”

  There would be enough firepower to see the zombies off comfortably, Davidoff thought. “Right, let’s get to it, then.”

  Despite the situation, despite the peril of being stuck in a grisly world, he was excited. There is real danger here, he thought. And besides, imagine how much XP we will get from this fight.

  He did not care that the game system was quite obviously broken. XP was XP, whichever way you cut it.

  ***

  A few minutes later, as Davidoff stood by the inner gate to the military compound, the trees at the bottom of the peak began to rustle once more. The zombies had arrived. The sound of a running motor cut out. No doubt the ghouls would send in their minions first, before coming up the hill themselves when the walls were breached and undefended.

  They want what the doctor and the others have all been working on, Davidoff thought. But it might be our only weapon against them, and I’ve no idea how long we will be here. “Over my dead body,” he whispered. They would not get past him; they would not get to the doctor’s work.

  I will not let them, he told himself.

  He had full clips in all of his guns, alongside a couple of reloads, all taken from the supply room. He had his Uzi out and ready, and his knives were sheathed at his waist, freshly sharpened to give them maximum damage output. There was a crate before him, over which he was watching and waiting. Should the zombies breach the main inner gate to the compound, he would meet them head on. Behind him, sheltered behind another crate further back, Tron had his rifle leveled at the gate, ready to give suppressive fire or else to cover Davidoff.

  Davidoff knew that the others were near at hand, in place. Zeke was on the roof of a single story barn, just fifty yards to his left. He would aim at any
larger targets, blowing them to kingdom come. Blight was with him, her RPG launcher ready to put holes in the main horde. Meanwhile, Mara was lurking about, setting up a couple of things which Davidoff did not quite understand, but which he knew would be spectacular enough. He had already seen her tactics at work against the zombie elephant, and anything more like that would be very welcome indeed.

  At the bottom, the hastily fixed outer gate was being swarmed. The hut in which Zeke had conducted his repairs came crashing down as fifty or so zombies smashed straight into it, their limbs moving with ferocious speed and power. The gate buckled inwards as a dozen zombies were crushed to death against its wire, and, with all that weight bearing down on it, it crumpled, pulling down much of the outer fence and leaving the rest of the zombies free to head up the track towards the main compound.

  With the fence down and a horde of over a hundred zombies rushing out of the forest to join the first wave, the front thirty or so of their number began to run up the track towards the summit. Almost at once, a landmine erupted, blowing a cloud of smoke and rock out of the side of the mountain’s peak. The graphics were sharp and Davidoff’s eyesight was keen; he saw in great detail as a dozen zombies were ripped apart, their bodies ruined, the meat and the bone spraying everywhere. He knew that wherever she was, Mara was being granted an awful lot of XP for her successfully rigged trap.

  Ranger indeed, he thought and smiled.

  However, the satisfaction was short-lived. Whereas human AIs would usually lose enough morale to either panic and run, or at least to falter in their advance, the zombies were unheeding of their own safety, of the risk of going forwards or the casualties they had just suffered. They carried on, emerging through the landmine’s smoke as more and ever more poured out of the forest below.

  They were a couple of hundred yards off, now, and a couple of shots began to crack the air from the compound’s snipers. Zeke attempted to bring down one of the larger zombies, a monster of a man at nearly seven feet tall. However, he was still relatively inaccurate at this range—he managed to whip a shot across the shoulder, barely slowing it down.

  Another few shots rang out, pinging into the horde, and then a great roaring, churning sound thundered out from one of the scientists’ sentry towers. They had a minigun up there and, although it was imprecise at any range, it was spitting out enough bullets to cause some real damage. Whoever was aiming it kept it focused on the front couple of lines as the zombies ran up the hill, churning through earth and rock, ripping holes out of their bodies until the first few began to stagger. As they went over, they were crushed. They began to roll back down the hill and their storming, undead comrades trod them into the dust, killing them.

  Then they were upon them.

  Another landmine went off twenty yards from the front gate, blowing a great hole in the ground beside the road and flinging five more zombies to their deaths, drastically wounding a couple of dozen more. As the various body parts fell to the ground, however, and as the remaining hundred zombies charged through, Davidoff stopped thinking and began to act.

  He came out from behind his crate with his Uzi braced against his shoulder, as the first few zombies leapt onto the high, wire fence and gate, climbing with disjointed, clumsy movements. They were slow, giving him enough of a chance to mow plenty down. He squeezed his trigger, lightly, bursting a couple of seconds each time. The recoil was shocking, punching back into his shoulder muscles, making his sore ribs ache once more as the immersion suit held him tight.

  Five zombies went down to his fire, then ten and, by the time the first one was on top of the fence, pushing its uncaring body through the razor wire on top, a full twenty were dead and more had fallen, injured. For each one, he gained between 1-3 XP points, depending on the kill and the accuracy of his shots, so that with the twenty first he was up by 42 XP, giving him a new total of 108 XP. Behind him, the steady thump of an assault rifle bursting three or four bullets at a time pummeled the air as Tron helped him out, taking down a fair number.

  The first zombie on the fence’s top was joined by two more, hastily and clumsily throwing themselves over. Tron took care of two of them, shooting one in the head for an instant kill and taking the other in the abdomen, making it fall back down to the earth. It landed on the heads of some of its comrades, crushing them and itself dying with a sickening crunch.

  But they are not planning to climb over, Davidoff recognized. The fence could not take the weight of so many; it was beginning to bow over with the horrible screech of bending, sheering metal. They plan to knock it over, to prepare the advance for their allies behind!

  “Aim for the ones at the top!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Get the weight off the highest parts!”

  He began to focus his own fire at the top of the fence, emptying his clip over ten seconds and knocking five away from the razor wire. As they fell, a few dragged a couple more with them, so that eleven went down in total. Davidoff could see the devastating effect of Zeke’s bolt rifle doing its work: each time a bolt landed, a zombie exploded and one or two more fell from the ensuing chaos, dragging down a few more as they went. Though the bolts came slowly, one shot from Zeke seemed to deal with four or five at a time.

  All the while, as Davidoff threw his Uzi over his shoulder and unholstered his handgun and his luger, explosions were rending through the steady stream of zombies as they ran up the hill to join the raging bottle neck at the top. Blight was clearly using her RPG launcher to great effect, landing them all on the side of the peak and blasting apart half a dozen zombies each time.

  The minigun’s end came as Davidoff began to empty his clips into the throng. They must be out of ammo, he thought. No wonder, the way they have been tearing through the zombies. He killed six zombies with nine shots, as Tron carried on bursting rounds into them. But they were all running out of firepower. With the zombies now mostly at the top of the hill, explosives were too risky, and the heavy guns were all but useless.

  Time to fight dirty, Davidoff thought. No sooner had he thought it than the fence gave out, falling down with the pressure of the forty or so remaining zombies all hanging onto its side. They landed in a seething mass, disoriented for a few seconds. Davidoff used their confusion to empty his last few bullets, blowing the brains out of two of their number and wounding three more. He holstered his handgun, reloaded his luger and drew his kukri, ready for melee now.

  Five or six zombies staggered to their feet and charged in towards him, their manic speed scaring him. Reflexively, and making the most of his new ability to fight accurately under pressure, Davidoff let off a couple of shots from his luger, bringing one down with a crippling shot to the chest and breaking another’s shoulder clean off from its torso. As the remaining ones lunged in towards him, he stepped backwards and jumped, backflipping away from them.

  In midair, and once more reflexively, he managed to aim and shoot, catching one zombie full in the face. As it went down, a full 11 XP was added to his profile from the well-executed combo. Davidoff landed as Tron finished off another, sniping it, and he found himself smiling despite himself. He immediately sidestepped the last zombie, lashing out with his kukri, planting the blade into the top of its spine.

  Pulling it out with a hard wrench, Davidoff saw that there were twenty-five zombies left, all on their feet now and readying their charge. He had yet to suffer any damage and all his stats were at full. Bring it on, he thought.

  But when he saw another fifty zombies break from the forest below, he berated himself, Damn, don’t be so cocky! A saloon car raced along among them, clearly stolen and being driven by ghouls.

  “You are right, they should not usually be able to drive,” Dr. Finkelstein had told him when they were raiding the weapons supply cupboard, muttering half to himself in exasperation. “But who knows, anymore? The rulebook seems to have been thrown out, all of a sudden!”

  Davidoff ducked and span, kicking the leg out from one zombie, shooting another in
the navel and whipping the blade of his kukri across another’s cheek. Then, suddenly, he found himself unable to keep track of anything. The flow of combatants was too thick. He leapt over the heads of a couple and shot them in the back as he landed, before slashing about with his kukri, killing another and wounding several more.

  Tron was beside him now, emptying the last of his ammo. Three went down, then another and another, and, emptied, Tron backed away. He led a decent sortie, Davidoff thought. Jumping in quick, killing a few, then out again. He was reloading when Davidoff lost sight of him, getting his rifle ready for another sortie. Then Davidoff spotted both Blight and Mara running in, standing on the edge of the throng, firing in with their own rifles. Blight had her RPG launcher strung awkwardly around her back. She emptied her gun, killing six zombies, and then threw it down and turned as Mara continued, fighting her way towards Davidoff through the last remaining undead.

  When she got to him, covered in gore, it was over. The last couple died as Davidoff stabbed one and Mara smashed another’s head in with the butt of her now empty rifle. Behind her, Blight was aiming the last of her rockets, laboriously reloading each time. They landed amidst the remaining throng of zombies running up the hill, tearing them apart even as a couple of Zeke’s bolts caught yet more, blowing them clear off their feet.

  The zombies continued, however, and Davidoff was sure that he saw more arriving in the trees. Will this never end, he wondered?

  Then Blight managed to land a rocket right in front of the speeding saloon. It blew the earth apart and, with it, the car’s hood. The whole car bucked; it jumped and rolled, fire licking its edges as it span down, plowing through a good four or five zombies, before coming to rest. There was movement inside. A window smashed as a gnarly hand punched through it, then a face emerged. They were trapped and it took them a few seconds to break free, but the ghouls seemed unharmed.