All Dogs Go To Heaven/Part 3
Part 3
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
Lunchmeat studied the scarred man’s face. Those were knife wounds – it looked like someone had done a number on him with a machete. Probably what took his arm off too. He’d won Vikendi in 2009 – but he hadn’t come out pretty.
"I don’t understand," Julie said. "You fight in their game and you win and this is your prize? They put you in a basement under some abandoned city? To do what, watch more of their Battlegrounds?"
The workstation chirped behind the man. Feeds switched over to a new batch of footage. Lunchmeat couldn’t follow what the machine was doing – it seemed to be analyzing what happened on Sanhok. Maybe some kind of computer algorithm to figure out how they had escaped?
But that didn’t seem right. Watching the machine work, he was struck that it was searching for something else.
Julie took a step away from the scarred man and scanned the displays. A faint giggle started to rise in her throat. "You remember wearing a camera, Lunch?" she asked.
He shook his head. He didn’t. And yet there it all was; the battleground at Sanhok on display.
In one feed, he watched a first-person point of view as a man nervously reloaded his rifle, taking cover in a quarry. Another screen showed a man struggling to stem the bleeding from a bullet wound to his thigh. Lunchmeat watched the man try to stand and fall.
Data filling the screen confirmed what Lunchmeat already knew; the man was gone. It was unnerving to watch someone die through their own eyes.
"I wasn’t wearing a camera," she said. "And you weren’t wearing one either. So where’d all this come from?"
"Julie, you can’t even remember how many people you shot that day," Duncan said. “How you gonna know if they stuck a camera on-
"Because I know!" She was shouting now. And there was a look in her eyes – that special kind of Julie-crazy. "Look at the screens, Duncan. Does that look like camera footage? We didn’t need to wear cameras because that’s what the chip’s for, isn’t it?"
Duncan put a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her. She shrugged it off and turned on the scarred man.
"ISN’T IT?"
Wham! She pistol-whipped him across the face as hard as she could. Lunchmeat heard the man’s nose break.
"I promise you, these scars are gonna be nothing compared to what I can do to you," she said. "Is this what the chip does? You put little cameras in our eyeballs? So the government can watch us die?"
"We do not work for any government, Miss Skels. And we don’t want to watch you die. We want to watch you live."
The scarred man was surprisingly calm, even as the blood leaked down his face from his broken nose.
"Understand, they cannot let you go," the man said, not trying to stem the bleeding. "The risks are simply too great. They will hunt you because they must. But know that they all adore you."
That pulled another nervous giggle from Julie. Lunchmeat didn’t remember much from Sanhok – but he remembered this was the way she laughed before she shot all the men in the bunker.
"Laugh if you must," the scarred man continued. "I promise you it’s true. You are the embodiment of what they value. What they’ve been searching for. You are Vir Solitarius. And so the game goes on."
"No, the game’s over, pal," Duncan said. "We’re done playing."
"Are you?" the man asked. He leaned forward and spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor. His next words came out raspy and wet. “Are you certain? Do you think they’re not all still watching?”
Lunchmeat felt a shiver run down his spine. He reached for the scar on the back of his head, fingertips grazing scab and scar tissue. They had tried to get it all out; the chip and the blood-caked filaments. He had been certain they’d disabled it.
Why had he been so certain?
"No, the game only ends when he calls it off," the scarred man said.
"Who?" Lunchmeat asked.
"Some call him The Russian. In the First Text they call him The Pawn. Before he was one of us, he was the lone survivor of Erangel. And that survivor was named Sergei Kalimnick."
He said the name with a kind of reverence. Like a biblical scholar speaking the name of an angel. Lunchmeat, Julie, and Duncan shared a look. None of them had any idea who the fuck Sergei Kalimnick was.
The silence was broken by a sudden static chirp from one of the stolen Pillar radios. "Redbird five… repeat, redbird five. All units in the area."
"You know what that means?" Julie said.
Duncan shrugged. "Some kind of call sign."
"What are the odds redbird means they found us?" Lunchmeat asked. "Cause I got a funny feeling there’s gonna be a dozen of those space-marine-looking assholes flooding in here any second now."
Duncan nodded – no argument there.
"Is there another way out of here?" Julie asked.
The scarred man nodded. "There’s a service tunnel that leads to a cargo elevator. My keycard will work."
"Get up. You’re coming with us, pretty boy," Julie said as she grabbed the man by the arm and placed her pistol against his forehead.
He didn’t resist. Instead, he leaned in close to her and spoke in a kind of hushed whisper.
"Prove us right," he said. "Magna Venari."
What happened next, happened fast.
Lunchmeat saw the man make a sudden move and then the top half of his skull seemed to pop open. Blood and bone chips splashed across Duncan and half the computer displays. Only then did Lunchmeat register the gunshot – a thundering boom that washed out all other sound. The body collapsed in a heap at Julie’s feet, seemingly in completely silence.
She stood there, pale and shaking, smoking gun in her hand. It took twenty seconds before the ringing in Lunchmeat’s ear faded enough to make sense of Duncan’s shouting.
"... are you out of your mind? What the fuck, Julie!?"
Duncan was down on his knees, examining the body. No amount of medical attention would do – half the man’s brains were painted across the computer.
"I didn’t pull the trigger. I swear to god, I didn’t shoot," Julie stammered.
Duncan seemed to only now realize he was covered in the dead man’s gore. He started spitting, wiping palmfuls of blood from his face.
"He killed himself," she said. "He grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger." She looked to Lunchmeat for support. "You saw it, right? He killed himself."
Lunchmeat just shook his head. He didn’t know what he saw – it all happened so fast.
"Why? Why would he do that?" Duncan asked, still trying to get the taste of the dead man out of his mouth.
"Cause he didn’t want to be caught," Julie said. "Cause he’s a fucking crazy person who lives in a bunker watching murder videos all day. I don’t know."
"What did he say before he blew his head off. Was that Spanish or something?"
"Magna Venari. Sounds Italian," she said.
"How do you know it’s Italian?"
"Because it sounds like a fucking tortellini, I don’t know," Julie screamed back. Lunchmeat couldn’t tell if they were both screaming because they were angry or because everyone was half-deaf from the gunshot.
The radio chirped again, another distorted squawk, "redbird five, red bird converge."
Lunchmeat searched the corpse for the keycard the man had mentioned. He found nothing but a half-empty pack of chewing gum.
"Magna means big, right? Like Magnum? Maybe that was his code name. Big Venari." Duncan seemed not only sure he was correct, but proud that he had cracked the code.
"The fuck are you talking about?" Julie said. "His name’s not big Venari."
"OI!" Lunchmeat screamed. “Stop bickering and help me look for his keycard. We need to get the hell out of here.”
Julie and Duncan snapped to it, scouring the workstation for anything that might help. Lunchmeat found the card in a desk drawer alongside a datastick and a wrinkled photograph of a smiling Asian girl. No way to know, but there was a bit of a resemblance and she seemed the right age to be his daughter.
"I have it," Lunchmeat said. "Let’s get the hell out of here before they find us."
"Too late," Duncan said. Lunchmeat followed his gaze toward the far stairwell where a dozen heavily armed Pillar soldiers in tactical gear were streaming into the hangar.
Lunchmeat sighed. Shit…
They took cover behind the server towers, ready for the inevitable wave of machine gun fire. The final shootout had come and there would be blood.
Except the bullets never came.
Instead Lunchmeat heard a metallic thwump! followed by the sound of a metal cannister skidding across the concrete floor.
"Gas! GO!" Duncan shouted.
Lunchmeat didn’t have a chance to even close his eyes before the pop came and the hangar filled with white gas. His throat seemed to close up immediately. His eyes felt like they were on fire and his vision blurred to a wall of white.
He had been tear-gassed in the Czech Republic decades ago during a riot. That was bad. This was worse. This didn’t feel like tear gas at all. This felt like some devil was ripping the oxygen right from his lungs. What little was left of his vision started to spin. He staggered forward, fearing he’d fall up into the sky.
"Wrap this around your face." It was Duncan. He had a wet rag – soaked from his canteen. Lunchmeat placed the rag over his mouth and took a breath. That seemed to help. Barely. But it was enough for him to get back on his feet.
He pulled one of Ramon’s flashbangs from his belt and chucked it back toward the approaching soldiers. He heard the explosion but in the smoke he couldn’t tell if it had done a damn thing to disorient the soldiers.
And so they ran.
The scarred man’s keycard worked, unlocking a rear security door. Beyond, an access tunnel stretched out for half a mile – by the looks of it, it ran under most of the island.
They had no time to try to barricade the door behind them. No time to do anything but run for their lives. They turned back when they could, firing blind into the gas at vague silhouettes of masked soldiers.
They sprinted past more labs, more workstations endlessly processing footage from the Battlegrounds. And it wasn’t only Sanhok. Lunchmeat saw images from other islands – a rocky desolate shoreline. A snow-covered hill. Another scene from what could have been some Alaskan wilderness. But he had no time to make sense of these images.
At the edge of the tunnel they found the cargo elevator. Duncan and Julie provided covering fire as Lunchmeat swiped the keycard and jammed the buttons. It felt like an eternity before the doors closed and the elevator actually started to move.
How far had they run? Lunchmeat secretly prayed that they’d made it under the entire bay – that the cargo doors would open and they’d be safe and clear in some dilapidated Milwaukee office building.
But no. The elevator dumped them on the ground floor of an empty warehouse on the West edge of Haven. Another abandoned building under the watchful gaze of the Tythonic billboard actors.
He sucked in a deep breath. It tasted of metal and sewage and that was far better than being trapped underground in that stinking cloud. No sign of the scout helicopter in the sky. No platoons of masked soldiers moving in for the kill.
For just a moment, Lunchmeat thought they were safe.
Then the far wall blew open and a wave of gunfire flooded the warehouse. Lunchmeat dove to the ground as his world became shrapnel and brick dust. He crawled on his belly as salvo after salvo of heavy machine gun fire ripped through the warehouse.
It felt like an army was unloading on them. But this wasn’t an army.
Lunchmeat peered from cover and got a glimpse of the iron behemoth. The XMC-4800. The Bane of Haven.
It was finally time to meet the Kill Truck.