The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language. They laid siege to the tomb all night, but the following morning, both force fields remained intact.
In desperation, the clans decided to break out the heavy artillery. They pooled their resources and purchased two very expensive, very powerful antimatter bombs on eBay. They detonated both of them in sequence, just a few seconds apart. The first bomb took down the outer shield, and the second bomb finished the job. The moment the second force field went down, thousands of gunters (all unharmed by the bomb blasts, due to the no-PvP zone) swarmed into the tomb and clogged the corridors of the dungeon below. Soon, thousands of gunters (and Sixers) had crammed into the burial chamber, all ready to challenge the lich king to a game of Joust. Multiple copies of the king appeared, one for every avatar who set foot on the dais. Ninety-five percent of the gunters who challenged him lost and were then killed. But a few gunters were successful, and at the bottom of the Scoreboard, listed after the High Five and the dozens of IOI employee numbers, new avatar names began to appear. Within a few days, the list of avatars on the Scoreboard was over a hundred names long.
Now that the area was full of gunters, it became impossible for the Sixers to put their force field back in operation. Gunters were mobbing them and destroying their ships and equipment on sight. So the Sixers gave up on their barricade, but they continued to send avatars into the Tomb of Horrors to farm copies of the Copper Key. No one could do anything to stop them.
The day after the explosion in the stacks, there was a brief story about it on one of the local newsfeeds. They showed a video clip of volunteers sifting through the wreckage for human remains. What they did find couldn’t be identified.
It seemed that the Sixers had also planted a large amount of drug-manufacturing equipment and chemicals at the scene, to make it look like a meth lab in one of the trailers had exploded. It worked like a charm. The cops didn’t bother to investigate any further. The stacks were so dense around the pile of crushed and charred trailers that it was too dangerous to try to clear them out with one of the old construction cranes. They just left the wreckage where it was, to slowly rust into the earth.
As soon as the first endorsement payment arrived in my account, I bought a one-way bus ticket to Columbus, Ohio, set to depart at eight the following morning. I paid extra for a first-class seat, which came with a comfier chair and a high-bandwidth uplink jack. I planned to spend most of the long ride east logged into the OASIS.
Once my trip was booked, I inventoried everything in my hideout and packed the items I wanted to take with me into an old rucksack. My school-issued OASIS console, visor, and gloves. My dog-eared printout of Anorak’s Almanac. My grail diary. Some clothes. My laptop. Everything else I left behind.
When it got dark, I climbed out of the van, locked it, and hurled the keys off into the junk pile. Then I hoisted the rucksack and walked out of the stacks for the last time. I didn’t look back.
I kept to busy streets and managed to avoid getting mugged on the way to the bus terminal. A battered customer-service kiosk stood just inside the door, and after a quick retinal scan it spat out my ticket. I sat by the gate, reading my copy of the Almanac, until it was time to board the bus.
It was a double-decker, with armor plating, bulletproof windows, and solar panels on the roof. A rolling fortress. I had a window seat, two rows behind the driver, who was encased in a bulletproof Plexiglas box. A team of six heavily armed guards rode on the bus’s upper deck, to protect the vehicle and its passengers in the event of a hijacking by road agents or scavengers—a distinct possibility once we ventured out into the lawless badlands that now existed outside of the safety of large cities.
Every single seat on the bus was occupied. Most of the passengers put on their visors the moment they sat down. I left mine off for a while, though. Long enough to watch the city of my birth recede from view on the road behind us as we rolled through the sea of wind turbines that surrounded it.
The bus’s electric motor had a top speed of about forty miles an hour, but due to the deteriorating interstate highway system and the countless stops the bus had to make at charging stations along the way, it took several days for me to reach my destination. I spent nearly all of that time logged into the OASIS, preparing to start my new life.