6
The glare off the hood of the ’67 Mustang made me squint, and the sweat beading down from my forehead stung my eyes as I tried to wipe it away. The police were just beyond the barricade, less than two hundred feet away, and I could hear them nervously loading their weapons and talking in short, staccato bursts into their walkie-talkies.
Waves of heat rose up from the tarmac that was melting the soles of my Converse. Hot rubber mixed with the smell of burned gunpowder and equal parts fear and body odor. Body odor.
Subtext—Bob to Sid: “Could you please dial down the BO?? I’m choking over here.” Sid looked over, sunglasses glinting, and cracked a smile as he pressed his back harder against the side of the car. He was soaked in sweat, too, but looked cool as a cucumber and totally in his element. Sid’s grin widened as he pulled out a ridiculously oversized handgun he had somehow hidden in the small of his back.
“What do you think, should we make a run for it?” I asked breathlessly.
“Hell yeah, little buddy,” came the reply as he magically produced a second cannon from somewhere on his person. “I’ll just crawl into the back and you squirm into the driver seat and get us going. We gotta meet up with the boys to have any chance at busting out of this one!”
“Okay, let’s do this.”
A voice came over a loudspeaker from the roadblock down between the derelict buildings and burned-out car shells up ahead. “Come on out with your hands up, we don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Rolling my eyes, I complained to Sid, who was already crawling cat-like into the back seat, “Can’t they come up with anything better than that?”
I immediately filed a request for snappier dialogue, and then stowed my anemic-feeling .357 into the breast pocket of my leather jacket. Reaching for the door handle, I squeaked the passenger side open, sliding in chest down across the stick shift, humping my body across.
A bullet ricocheted off the concrete.
“Hold your fire!” came the voice on the loudspeaker again. “Come on out, boys, we can still do this the easy way!”
“Bob,” Sid whispered urgently, “you ready?”
I rotated my body around, reaching down to test the pedals with one foot as I hunched over to put the key in. “You betcha, let’s hit it!”
With surging excitement, I turned the ignition to fire up the five hundred horses under the hood. Pushing down the clutch, I jammed it into first, and without looking over the dash, released it as I hit the accelerator. The unbridled power of the engine surged us forward, and we began peeling out in a cloud of vaporized rubber and exhaust.
I swerved wildly, trying to maintain some kind of control. The bullets started flying, and I could feel them hitting the car, punching through the windshield and shattering the glass, which rained over me. Sid was on his back, kicking upward with his feet, trying to knock out the sunroof.
We accelerated rapidly. I risked a peek over the dash through the destroyed windshield. An officer was walking out to crouch in the middle of the street, hoisting something onto his shoulder.
“Sid! Rocket launcher!”
“On it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engine.
I punched it into third.
With a final grunt, Sid kicked out the sunroof, sending it spinning out and away into space above us. In the same fluid motion, he popped up through the open roof with a lunatic grin. Swinging out both of his ridiculously oversized weapons, he began blasting away. Peeking out over the dash again, I saw the head of the cop holding the rocket launcher explode in a mist of red.
The rest of them ducked for cover.
The bullets were coming fast and furious as we neared the point of impact with the barricade. Sid rotated his body backward, jamming his back into the edge of the sunroof and bracing his legs underneath. He leaned out flat on the roof of the car, pointing both guns to each side. As we smashed through the barricade, Sid let go with a terrific volley of fire that took out four LAPD officers in an explosion of blood and guts as they looked up with surprise from their hiding places.
With a second crunching impact, we cleared the last of the cruisers, swerving hard to avoid the worst of the blow. Sid grunted in pain, but managed to lift himself upright as he swiveled around to face the gauntlet ahead of us.
Dozens of cop cruisers were parked on either side of the street, taking dead aim at us. I gunned us into fourth and slid as low as I could in the seat, reaching for my own feeble weapon.
The metallic tang of blood seeped into my mouth, and I looked down to see I was bleeding. I’d been hit, but the shock of the fight was staving off the pain, at least for now. This gameworld didn’t allow turning down your pain receptors—you just had to deal with it.
This was going to get messy.
Suddenly, one of the cop cruisers to our right exploded and lifted into the air, tumbling slowly back to earth in a fiery arc. Several cops ran out from behind the other cruisers, screaming in flames, wildly shooting their weapons. Sid picked them off as another cruiser exploded and incoming automatic-weapon fire began raining down on the police.
They all turned to look up the street.
Willy and Martin were hanging off a cherry red GTO, blazing away at the cops. Vicious was reloading what looked like a rocket launcher of his own. They waved at us merrily with their free hands. I gunned us into fifth and sat up higher in the driver seat, leaning forward to push some of the remains of the smashed windshield out of the way.
It was all about style points now, and Sid did a beautiful job double-fisting shots off both sides of the car. One after the other, he blew away police officers with geometric precision as he looked skyward and let loose with a deranged cackle.
Our audience stats started to spike way up. As one of the best crews in the world at this game, we had over four million people tuned in to watch our escape scene, and Sid was determined to put on a good performance for our fans.
Passing the last of the cruisers, he dragged a grenade out, pulled the pin with his teeth, and sent it sailing right into the open driver-side window. It exploded with a satisfying crunch, and a few uniformed body parts bounced off a nearby chain-link fence.
I congratulated him, “Nice work, Sid!”
Martin, Vicious, and Willy peeled off and followed closely behind in their GTO, and the low throaty growl of both engines mixed together in a bone-shaking symphony. By now they would have put a general call out to all the special weapons squads, so we’d have hundreds of cops chasing us down as we tried to leave the city.
This was going to be a great show.
“You hit?” asked Sid. He climbed down out of the sunroof.
“Yeah,” I replied, putting a hand under my shirt and wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through-and-through I think. Could you wrap me?”
He grunted. “Sure.”
I glanced back at him. “You hit?”
“I think my ear got blown off.” He held one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head, doubled over in pain. “But the real problem is the gut shot.”
“Bad?”
It looked bad.
“Hurts like hell, but it’ll bleed out slow. I should live another couple of hours.”
Ah, not so bad then. I smiled. Maybe we’d make it out of Los Angeles after all.
As we sped up the street, something walked into our way up ahead.
A pedestrian? I squinted, trying to make out who it was. Not cops, anyway.
It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were dozens more of them, blocking the road. Cars lined both sides of the street so I couldn’t swerve off, and I could hear growing sirens in the distance as flashing lights started coming at us from all angles. Up ahead, it looked like a herd of little green men directly in our way.
What the hell?
I jammed on the brakes and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we plowed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them. The other car skidded to a stop behind us. Furious, I threw open my driver-side door with weapon in hand to confront whatever was going down.
Sid popped back out of the sunroof, grimacing, with both cannons out aiming front and center.
A short, stocky green man with pointy ears and a broad forehead, wearing spiked shoulder pads and holding an enormous axe, ambled up to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
I could see he had some vampires with him.
“We are against the discrimination shown to the Bangladeshi.”
“What?” Then it dawned on me. “Sid!” I yelled. “Did you set the authenticated login to this world when you created it?”
Silence. Except for the growing whine of the approaching sirens.
“Sid?!” I asked again, looking back at him.
“Ah, shoot,” he replied, wincing in pain. He looked down at the blood oozing from his gut wound. “I forgot.”
Dejectedly, he banged both of his weapons down on the roof of the car. These were obviously Comment Trolls.
Without authenticated login, people could connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if all you wanted to do was watch, but anonymity tended to bring out the worst in people.
With the massive audience we’d accumulated for this game, and with the login anonymous, we’d just attracted the motherlode of Comment Trolls. Hundreds of them were now blocking the road. They’d use the opportunity to broadcast their opinions, whether they had anything to do with our gameworld or not.
“I’m sorry, dude,” continued Sid, waving a gun in the air. “I was just so busy. My mother was over, I had a splinter set the world up—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Perhaps I could reason with them. “Dude, please, this is 1988 Los Angeles,” I complained to the lead troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in Los Angeles in 1988, and no vampires either.” On closer inspection, those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They might be useful. “Okay, maybe there were vampires. But guys, please.”
My dimstim stats were dropping as fast as our gameworld audience. I had to do something entertaining, and quickly. The head Comment Troll was right in my face, smelling bad with some butt-ugly, oily pimples going on.
“Master,” he growled at me.
At least he’s playing in character and not a total asshole. Maybe there’s an opportunity.
“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”
I nodded my head.
“Sure, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a singsong tone, smiling to expose my two gold-capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “If you want to join the Bloods or the Crips, I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”
The troll frowned. It was hideous. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.
Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head, as I’d intended. The bullet only glanced off his thick skull, ricocheting in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.
As I was musing on this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand, which I’d been in the process of lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.
Blood spurted from my wrist, and I quickly backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting indiscriminately with the gun still in my right hand. Sid covered my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons-of-bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing fire that Vicious and Willy laid down as we ran back.
Breathlessly, we rallied behind the GTO. I ripped off my T-shirt and mashed my forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M-16s.
“Where the hell is Martin?” I panted.
He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give these assholes something to think about.
Sid ducked up to look inside the car. “Aw man, I think Martin’s dying.” He tightened up my tourniquet.
I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.
“Goddamn baby.” I turned back to Sid. “Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the hell did he get so messed up?”
This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional, and me missing an arm.
“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.
He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry, Bobby, I didn’t mean to.…”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.
Sid stared at me disapprovingly, shaking his head. “Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time. You going to talk to him?”
I said nothing, but then nodded.
“Yes?” demanded Sid between bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”
“Yes, yes, I promise. But let’s get out of this first, okay?”
Looking back up over the GTO, the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast.
I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip. We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat with my one remaining hand when, all of a sudden, a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.
The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium broke out for a while as it turned into a three-way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken to wing and began swooping down on the helpless police officers, who just screamed in disbelief.
A few of the braver cops continued to take pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members dissipated after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul-smelling demon spawn wielding their skull-topped axes. Sid and Willy got off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then finally gave up, laughing.