The California Voodoo Game

10

"Generally, an artful Loremaster will ensure that his lines of support, supply, and information are well maintained.

"He needs Barbarians and Magic Users for speed. Armored Knights for heavy combat. Locally (game-world or real-world) recruited troops and allies for cannon fodder. Actual provisions are usually supplied by the Gaming facility; therefore one need only stock nonstandard material relevant to strategic play within the Game-world; but these must be thoroughly stocked. Caches must be hidden and mapped, and strong backs recruited to carry them." — Nigel Bishop, The Art of Gaming, 2052

Thursday, July 21, 2059 — 8:20 A.M.

You expected glitches. Of course you did. You waited for them…

Those doors were supposed to lock, isolating the Gamers in their respective cars. The message would reach each team separately. The club car, empty, was to be shredded in the crash. Five cars would slide to rest within reach of five entries. Five teams would enter MIMIC separately, wary of enemies, fearing each other more…

Tony McWhirter was swearing under his breath, but it wasn't slowing him down. He put in quick requests for a repair team to examine the train and report to him. Not that they'd be using the cars again, but he had to know what had gone wrong. It would tell him where else to look for problems.

They'd worked around it. They hadn't shredded the club car; the Gamers were alive and walking. The secret message was no secret now. There would be less paranoia, and alliances among the five enclaves, probably. Not a ruined Game, just an altered one.

Still, it was a bad omen. Glitches were a lot like cockroaches. If you didn't catch them in time, they'd scuttle off into someplace dark and warm and begin to breed.

Alphonse Nakagawa was third through the door, his adrenaline pumping hard.

Nakagawa's Law #1: Something in the next shadow is waiting to eat your face. He never let himself forget that. It was this conviction that kept him alive often.

Fool-Killer, where are you?

For the moment, nothing. But it was lurking. Al knew it, and the beast knew it. If Al wanted to keep his face, he would have to remember that the beast knew he knew it.

First search the room. There were broken boxes and scraps of plastic everywhere. Peels of paper littered the floor. Madonna Philips pulled twenty pounds of anonymous metal motor part from under some torn cardboard boxes, hefted it, and discarded it. Storage room? Over the decades, scavengers would have stripped it clean. Probably.

Nakagawa's Law #2: Probably doesn't count. There might be weapons here, or clues, or traps…

"They've rifled this stuff a hundred times," Corporal Waters muttered.

"Search it anyway," Alphonse said. Acacia flickered him an approving glance, but possibly for the wrong reason.

Corporal Waters was right, of course. There was no treasure here that he need fear to leave in the hands of a rival team. Let them spring the traps. Al wanted an overview. Was there any clue to the nature or contents of this vast structure? What did the locals consider worthless? What valuables should have been there, but were not?

The others were piling in through the window. The room was getting belly-to-back pretty quick.

"Nothing here, children," Mary-em said, flinging a torn carton aside. "Let's go kick some heinie."

The others were gathering by the door. Al the B picked up the carton. Mary-em had seemed too casual. The box was empty, the logo illegible… the trace of a sketch remained: girl in a raincoat?

Drop the box before someone sees. Stand by the door. Check the hinges. They seemed in good repair, not too likely to squeal embarrassingly.

Let someone else open it. (When it rains it pours. Salt! The raiders had valued salt. Not a grain remained. There wouldn't be any tinned meat either.)

Another exchange of nods between the Troglodykes, and Tammi turned to Mouser, her Scout. "Enhanced hearing," she whispered. "Anything out there?"

The boy placed his fingers to his temples and tilted his mop of copper hair sideways. "No… distant. I hear feet. Distant. Shuffling. I don't like it."

California Voodoo. Images of sun-bleached beach bunnies cavorted nakedly around a titanic bottle of sunscreen lotion…

Tammi slipped through the door, followed by the hulking Warrior Appelion. He gave Alphonse the Evil Eye as he passed. It was impressively evil, too. It was his left, and it was swollen and bloodshot. A blue flame glowed in its depths.

Alphonse waited to see if the Fool-Killer was waiting outside. It seemed to be elsewhere. He chanced a swift, sliding passage through the door, halberd at the ready.

All about him, halls as wide as city streets stretched off to concrete horizons. The ceiling was ten feet above his head. A balustrade lipped a central well larger than most airports.

"Horseshit and gunfire," Alphonse muttered. The central well's ceiling was at least four floors above them. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. Who lived up there? Were they home? How could his people find their way in so vast a structure?

"We could spend a week mapping this place," Major Clavell said.

The hallway seemed empty in either direction. Alphonse tiptoed to the rail and looked down. An ocean of mist raged down there. It curled, lapping at the lower levels like some semisentient primordial soup.

Alphonse was a Warrior-Magician, with a spell or two of his own. His halberd, enhanced by past adventures, gave him a little extrasensory data With the tip of the blade he traced a symbol in the ground, a complex curlicue of power. Immediately he heard a chorus of low groans, a herd of shuffling feet. Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Tammi was already looking down in that direction. "All right," she whispered to Acacia. "Let's get the others."

Why did he get the feeling that these ladies were in bed together, pardon the pun? In addition, Acacia/Panthesilea might well be allied with Bishop the Living Legend. That notion put a spider in his shorts, for sure. Alliances were fencing him in. Al the Barbarian had best watch his backside.

A few at a time, the Adventurers filed out of the room and crouched down in the corridor. They coalesced into a loose diamond formation. Almost without design, the five individual teams formed themselves again.

Mary-em was right behind Al, with Crystal Cofax, his favorite Scout. His Engineer and Thief were with him, and he was damned glad.

Because something was waiting to eat his face.

The halls were musty, and reeked with decay. The corridors stretched off in all directions, fading in the mist. Vague light shone through the fog. It swallowed more than light: it was a sound baffle. Something that might have been voices, machinery, footsteps (of the Fool-Killer), echoed around out there, hovering just below the threshold of hearing.

Crystal had sensed a distant glow. She stared through her visor, flipped it up, and looked again. Then she motioned with one hand and crept down the hall.

So they filed through the darkness, keeping torches shielded and pointed at the floor. They passed the shattered, ruined shells of stores now: a shoe store with a sale still on, a TWELVE HOUR SALE!!! lasting for a thousand years. Al had a sudden, mad urge to rummage around and see if there was anything in a size 11.

A frozen-yogurt parlor. Next to that, a transdress shop offered over three thousand colordesigns per processor. Just plug it into the transparent dresses and dial a new fashion every day! He had heard stories of women whose batteries had died while they were walking down the street…

The entire column had suddenly stopped, and Al went to the alert. A moment later he saw why.

They had passed the commercial sector and were entering a park of some kind. Perhaps long ago it had been an alluring, restful pit stop for the overburdened, overstressed shopper. Now it was a graveyard. Epitaphs had been carved in elaborate, almost illegible curlicues on plastic rectangles that slanted at irregular angles from piles of dirt. Ancient topiary was wildly overgrown, to bizarre effect: rabbits seemed toadlike, a lion had grown tentacles and extra, misshapen heads.

A few graves were lying open. He inspected two of them. Their headboards bore different dates: Joseph Miller, died 2234. Millie Washington, died 2189.

He whispered to Mary-em, "Unburied?"

"It was a warm night. They kicked the dirt off." She touched her holstered, telescoping staff. She didn't bother to say, "Voodoo implies zombies," and neither did anyone else.

They continued deeper into the cemetery, spreading out as they did. There was little sound, but the ground thrummed with an irregular vibration like distant machinery going bad. Drumbeats? Lights flickered, hundreds of meters away. A far lantern… or glowing gases of decomposition?

From that direction came a distant scream.

There followed a quick, efficient pause during which everyone checked his or her equipment. Weapons up; visors down; duck as Ozzie the Pike assembled his twelve-foot weapon; noncombatants safely protected in a center pocket. Go.

It felt very strange to be moving en masse like this. Damn it, a section of floor could open up… anything could happen.

The Adventurers were stretched out in a thin line. Alphonse felt his heart in his throat. And if some of the others had made truce, or deals when would the backstabbing begin?

Right after we figure out the Game.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on Da Gurls. Give me half an inch and sayonara, suckers. Pearl Harbor time.

Drumbeats? Machinery? And smoke, or something like smoke, boiled out of the corridor ahead. Alphonse raised his hand just before it engulfed them. "Crystal," he whispered, and his Scout tucked her nifty little derriere beside him.

Crystal's body emitted a soft phosphorescence. Immediately, Alphonse could see crouched, misshapen figures creeping toward them through the smoke.

The Beasts awaken. Could they see in this smoke? Probably. Still, Al wouldn't give away his position by warning the others. If they didn't have enough sense to call for a Scout… "Stay behind me," he whispered. "Mary-em?"

"I register outlines. They flicker. I'll be okay."

Mary-em's staff, like his halberd, had seen enough campaigns to have magic of its own; her Vision rating was phenomenal.

Could the enemy see him? Couldn't they? He had to keep in contact with Crystal.

"Watch your hand, boss."

"Just business, darlin'."

"Get your business a little higher, then. Or let me." Her hand closed on his belt. "Leave your hands free to fight."

There were four attackers ahead, maybe more elsewhere. They carried maces of some kind. Bludgeoning weapons, and nasty ones at that. Shards of metal and glass projected at odd angles from the knobby ends.

One zombie shambled right at him.

All he had was a vague outline. When he twisted to avoid the mace, he broke contact with his Scout: as Crystal's hand left his belt, the attacker winked out of existence.

Duck! Where'd the beast go? He felt wind as the mace swished past his shoulder.

The combat computer in his brain figured angle and momentum, and he backhanded with the halberd. Nothing, and he was overextended.

If I were him…

Al the Barbarian rolled and brought his weapon up, and felt the blade slam into legs. Heard the unearthly howl of… pain? Did zombies feel pain? Wrath, maybe. The terrible beast, spawn of the undead, no longer recognised pain…

Or soap. Shitfire, they stank! Then again, rotting does that to a person.

Decomposing? Ordinary antiperspirants still leave 'em gagging downwind? Try new Vlad the T's, deodorant for the undead His thoughts returned to the matter at hand as a body thudded atop him. Teeth bit into his arm, through the thin fabric, and it hurt. Screaming, Alphonse kicked the zombie away from him and hacked at it until it stopped quivering.

All around him in the fog pealed screams of pain and fear, labored breaths, the groans of the undead. He rose shakily to one knee. "Crystal!"

"Here. "

Behind him. He backed up cockroach-quick, staying low to the ground, until her hand touched his ankle.

As they touched, glowing zombie outlines reappeared. They were almost upon him. He parried the swing of a mace, shattering it. Careful not to lose contact with Crystal, he backhanded the halberd into a face and saw the head peel back and open. Something thick and black bubbled out Elmo Whitman caught that one. The blunt edge of Alphonse Nakagawa's composition-plastic halberd had hit one of his zombie actors. He was always nervous about that, even with extra padding in face masks and at neck and groin and knees.

Some of the stuntmen had dotted red lines at arm or neck, visible only through Virtual visors. Strokes there produced an especially messy special effect, for the pleasure of the home viewers. Let's see

… should be breakfast time about now. Watch that over your Rice Crispies. Snap, crackle, and who ate Pop?

Live interactions were his responsibility, and as the actor stumbled back, El watched the program register a "kill," producing the requisite disgusting effects. He keyed in the stuntman's code and got an A/V link.

"You all right? Blow looked solid."

"Little English on it, but didn't penetrate. My nose stings a little." The stuntman chuckled softly.

El rang off and went to wide-angle again, watching the combat. Nobody had ever been seriously injured in one of his combats, but he had heard rumors…

Behind Alphonse, Acacia screamed, "Top Nun! Lift this fog!" Even as her scream faded, Al heard Top Nun say piously, "Though there was darkness in the land of Egypt, Israel's mishpoche had light!"

Light exploded behind him, and the fog disintegrated.

"Excellent, Sister," Acacia said.

"Darkness has its points," Top Nun remarked.

The undead enemy became partially visible. They seemed to wink in and out of existence. Their skin was pasty, like Caucasians smeared with mud, or Africans daubed with ash. A mixed breed they were, perhaps human and baboon, hair a beaver's nest of mud and sticks, facial skin drawn so tight across the bone that they resembled some heretofore-undiscovered tribe of mutant Java men.

Friar Duck threw fire. The spell was simple and dependable, if expensive. Two zombies came straight through it-unfair! — and slashed him with dirty claws. Friar Duck went down in a swirl of brown robes.

Corrinda threw salt. The monster grinned and licked the crystals from its lips with a long, greasy pink tongue. Corrinda scuttled back to safety, limping on her bad knee.

Then Al had no more time for judgment or appreciation, because they were around him. A glancing blow hit his left shoulder, and the arm glowed red; if he tried to lift that arm, red would fade to black.

He saw Madonna Philips die. It shouldn't have claimed his attention, but it was a mistake so classic. The Army team had her enclosed, protected. She stood tall with her saber straight above her head, unable to do anything, letting her frustration show. Then Clavell faced left to block a zombie's club, Evil Poule clove an enemy with a left-to-right swing of his scimitar, and Lieutenant Philips stepped forward and split a zombie head-to-crotch. Overwhelmed with her success, she took a classical fencing pose and thrust into another zombie's body. Her telescoping blade collapsed as she ran him through.

Al saw her snarl of triumph change to dismay and knew what had happened.

A little whisper in her ear. The Game Masters, damn their souls, had just informed her that her sword was stuck fast in the body of an undead.

Instead of springing back to the protection of her comrades, she tugged, hoping to get it free And a zombie threw her to the ground and bit her throat out. For an instant she seemed about to bite back; then she must have believed the voice and collapsed, dead.

Al got his attention back in time to block a blurred motion, a club that would have split his head.

He had lost Crystal again, but the spell shielding the zombies was coming apart now, and he had enough glimpses of them to zero in. He twisted sideways, heard a mace shoosh over a shoulder, drove his halberd into a stomach. Yech-it actually stuck there. Some kind of mucilage sack?

The zombies were an arc around Ozzie the Pike, who fought alone, back against a wall. For an instant Al considered trying to reach him. In his first Game, Oz had played as "The Great and Powerful," a Magic User. He'd frozen up and been killed out. An accountant, he'd admitted later, with no imagination. The pike had been the saving of him. He was agile and strong and he could wave that pike like a magic wand… and he was too far away and doing fine without Al.

A zombie approached from behind, and Al wrenched his halberd free and drove it into the juncture of neck and shoulder. A red-black gash opened up, splitting the undead from chest to crotch.

Mary-em got behind him now, and they formed a protective sandwich around Crystal. Mary-em's staff spun in figure eights, and she bounced it from head to crotch to ribs, leaving glowing red and black wherever it touched. "Hiyahhh!" she screamed, and drove its end into a face with a horrific crunch.

If she had put the boot to a beetle's carapace, the effect could have been no more dramatic.

The face actually crumbled. The zombie flapped its arms and stumbled back against the wall. Its (un?)dying scream was a gurgle, oily black fluid splashed in a starburst, and it slid to the ground, arms and legs flopping. Locusts crawled out of the shattered head, fluttered their wings, and flew away.

Mary-em was hypnotized for a moment Then she ducked as a mace whizzed over her head. She howled with battle fever as she cut the zombie's legs from under it.

One leg came off. The zombie crumpled at her feet. Filed teeth filling a hideous, limp twitch of a grin.

As quickly as it began, it was over, except that in the mists around them, from every direction at once, came a horrific moaning.

Then the mist disappeared.

Alphonse turned over one of the bodies with his axe.

"Is it dead?" Crystal asked breathlessly.

"Too late for that," he muttered. The body had two black borders undulating about it. Dead-dead. Somebody upstairs was a joker.

It had dropped its weapon. Al hefted it: a stick with a tin can wired to the top, and a chunk of concrete wedged inside the can for weight. Nasty.

One zombie was still "alive."

He was pale-skinned, and again the flesh was drawn so tightly across the bone that he seemed to have just barely enough substance to animate him.

Nigel Bishop pushed his way through a phalanx of groggy Gamers and shook blood from the end of his sword. He knelt over the creature. "Who is your master?" he asked.

Nothing but a hissing sound. The creature writhed.

Nigel struck a pose, and he swelled with a sudden, fierce inhalation. "By my forefathers!" he called to the ceiling. "Spell of revelation!"

Alphonse leapt back a step.

Light pulsed, and something peeled away from the zombie's body. It hovered in the air above him like glowing smoke, but smoke with eyes and ears.

Its eyes were dead flame. As they watched, it expanded, then dissipated, seeping through the walls.

"Goddamn," Alphonse whispered. "What was that?"

Nigel shook his head. "That's what we were really fighting. Demon of some kind, wearing a mutated corpse."

Alphonse kept quiet, watching as Acacia joined Bishop. Captain Cipher crept up beside her. "Ridden by the Loa, milady. Possessed," Cipher stage-whispered. Then, briskly, "Voodoo or santeria deity. Loa or Orisha. Possession's a way they use to get around."

The zombie hissed and tried to get up. Nigel was lightning, pressed his sword into it. The creature's back arched as if it were a serpent. Its mouth overflowed with black fluid. Then it lay still.

The Clerics scuttled about, healing what wounds they could. There were enough wounded to allow them all to test their powers in this unknown domain. Chaim Cohen, Top Nun, Black Elk, and Tamasan chanted in four languages. Gamers winced at the hideous chorus.

Black Elk, blocky in leather chaps, beads, and medicine feathers, reported to Clavell. "We've lost Lieutenant Philips." His impressive facial scar was peeling a little at the lower edge.

Waters said, "I saw her go down. She tried to macho it."

"It looks like every team's down one or two," Black Elk said.

"Now we're screwed," Waters said. "Without a woman on our team, there are things we just won't learn. Major, think hard about forming an alliance somewhere."

Clavell's face set. He didn't like losing Philips so fast.

Alphonse was already scanning his own team. He had lost an Engineer and a Cleric: Peggy the Hook and Friar Duck.

Al did some quick addition. In the first engagement there had been six fatalities: one each for Apple and Army, two each for Tex-Mits and General Dynamics. Acacia, damn her soul, hadn't lost anyone.

Al felt queasy. "Well, we got stretched a mite. Hardball, is it?"

Smoke tendrils still wafted through the graveyard, muffling the anguished sobs of the injured and mourning.

Nakagawa's Law #3: There are no expendables. A Loremaster takes the best he can get, in every slot, and loses them only when he must. Law #3 fit the California Voodoo Game better than most. Each dead Ganner was a serious loss.

Alphonse shook himself out of his trance. "Scout!"

He got Crystal, and Acacia's Scout, Corrinda. "Scan, please."

They joined hands and pointed toward a side corridor. Warriors Holly Frost and Appelion joined them.

En masse they moved down the corridor, Alphonse in the front. He tested the flooring with the tip of a toe. "Crystal, can you do a structural check?"

Crystal Cofax checked her power ratings and gritted her teeth. "I can give you an eighty-percent yes. Best I can do, chief."

"Let's get it done."

"All right." He studied the older man. "No offence, Trevor."

Trevor's smile was tight and plastic. "None taken."

The weeping was closer now, and Alphonse flattened himself against a wall.

A woman's voice: "Please. Please help us…"

She was no more than twenty, and dressed in rags. She was dark-skinned, with a face like a Michelangelo cherub in negative, but her nose was narrow and her lips were thin. What was she? A darkly tanned white person?

At her feet lay a young boy.

"O, gevalt," Top Nun whispered.

He'd been eviscerated.

But was still alive.

The girl looked up at them earnestly, sniffling, wiping tears away from her cheeks. "Oh," she said. She batted huge, incongruously blue eyes at them, and then continued rapid-fire. "My name is Coral, and this is my brother Tod, and those zombies got him all icky and everything and he's like probably going to die if we don't do something but I can't figure out what to do 'cause like there's guts everywhere and did you like maybe bring a Band-Aid or something?"

A beat of five passed in shocked silence. Then somebody passed a Band-Aid to the front. A big one. Alphonse watched, aghast, as she put the adhesive strip onto a rubbery wet red length of intestine. She looked up at them brightly, an edge of hysteria in her voice. "There," she said. "That should be all better now "

Then fell over sideways in a faint.