Chương 63: Book Two - Chapter 13: The Meat Magnet

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ZONE 2 INCINERATION: 02: 55: 37 We ran. Not that it helped. The disgusting skin monsters chasing us were as fast as greyhounds. Running away was the entirety of my leadership contribution to this moment. Six people and one duffel bag hauling ass down a corridor while six things that used to be people gave chase. I wasn't running with any real control; the sudden Fear spike, coupled with the relentless ache in my lower spine, made my footing sloppy, causing me to stumble a few times.

"Left!" Gen shouted as she and Kane ran past me, her voice ricocheting off the steel. The map in the corner of my HUD confirmed it as the white area around us cleared, the fog peeling back to reveal more of the maze ahead. Nora, don't look back. Tre in my head, from his position on Liam's shoulders. I looked back. They were fast despite their shuddery movements and appendages that only suggested themselves as limbs.

One of them ran with an arm that swung backward at the elbow, bending back and forth with every stride. Another ran on all fours. Why does that one look like our dead classmate? Liam over Mindbleed. Because it is! Isabel shouted at him in my head. Where are we running? Tre demanded, adding to the voices in my skull.

"Gen!" Kane was turned backward on Gen's shoulder with the Toothbrush Shiv already out, yelling something in German. He looked at the gap between them, then at the shiv, making some internal calculation. One of the Meat Men slashed at Gen with a clawed talon. Kane leaned out, intercepting it with the shiv. The thing drove its own arm down the blade, buried to the hilt. It split in half at the wound. The flesh tore like wet paper, and where there had been one Meat Man there were now two.

The smaller one was mostly arm, with a pair of legs pushing out of the bottom, and it kept coming, a new face resolving out of a smear near the thing's center. The one behind it caught an ankle on the mess, tripped, and hit the wall. It didn't get up so much as it split, too. The impact did it. I jumped over it as it squirmed on the ground, twitching and sprouting a new set of legs.

FEAR: 70% (PANICKED) Even with Rank III Box Breathing running in the background, panic-sprinting and meditating at the same time was basically impossible. Oooooohhh. Tre, in his most grating tone, the one he used when he knew the trivia answer before you did. They're not dying, Nora, they're—"I can see!" I yelled. A Meat Man pushed past me, gunning for Gen. Kane separated the hand from its arm as it reached for her. The hand hit the floor, grew tiny feet, and kept chasing us.

"Don't cut them! It makes more!"

"Sorry!" Kane said.

"Sorry. Sorry!"

"Keep'em off my back, Love!" Gen yelled as we rounded another corner. The slapping of feet on the floor doubled, then tripled behind me. Then it changed, and I made the mistake of looking again, and one of them wasn't on the floor anymore. NEW ENTITY DETECTED! MEAT DOG" They grill nicely and taste great with mustard." The Meat Dog was running along the wall as if it were a floor.

The formerly humanoid shape ran on all fours, the third leg now positioned in the air like a tail, and its body had warped to fit this new shape, the torso long and swollen like an overstuffed sausage casing. Muscle and semi-formed mass heaved forward as organs sloshed beneath its thinly stretched skin. The Meat Dog turned its face sideways so it could keep watching me; its body went one way, and its head stayed pointed another. The face was still a person's. Half of it, anyway.

A soft, jowly, middle-aged man, one eye lower than the other, and I recognized it instantly. Mr. Thornton, an NPC from the previous zone, was here now, stretched over the front of a dog-shaped bag of meat, staring at me. FEAR: 75% (PANICKED) Adrenal Cascade II sat live in the corner of my vision, and I wanted it so badly my thumb moved. Three hours of cooldown for three seconds of slowdown in a straight hallway wasn't worth the trade-off when I had no idea what lurked around the corner.

I tightened my grip on the Mother's Ruin and kept running. The map was all hallways and turns: no rooms or doors. More Meat Dogs appeared alongside us. We're fucked! Isabel stated it as fact over the Mindbleed. They're getting ahead of us. She was right. Three on the walls, passing us, getting ready to cut off our escape. Caretaker's Endurance worked overtime keeping me upright by taking my legs away from me, regardless of what shape my back was in. It kept me moving, even as my lower spine rattled itself apart.

Then the corridor opened up. The fog on the map cleared to reveal the area we'd just entered. The walls were thirty feet apart, wider than anything we had been in since the Entry Chamber. I could see to the far end of the room, which tapered back into a narrow hall. Several bright overhead lights hung from the large slab of ceiling suspended above the room, like the room where the ceiling came down. A sheet of steel the size of the floor plan, just hanging there, waiting.

FEAR: 72% (PANICKED) Panicking was doing me no favors. Panicking was going to get everybody killed. I locked my jaw and started counting. In for four. My heels hit the concrete twice, and the room breathed at me. Hold for four. Out for four. FEAR: 59% (PANICKED) Rank III Box Breathing was doing what it could. The upgrade granted a brief immunity to hallucinations, but in practice, it only worked while I was actively in the four-count cycle.

When I stopped counting, my vision wobbled at the edges, reminding me of the back end of a mushroom trip where the walls ripple like water, but you're mostly sober. I took a headcount. LIAM BECKER FEAR: 85% (TERRORIZED) ISABEL HOYOS FEAR: 73% (PANICKED) TRE CARTER FEAR: 42% (NERVOUS) Nothing over Gen or Kane; two of the six people I was responsible for, and because they hadn't joined the party, I had limited information on them.

Liam was at eighty-five with Isabel close enough that Calm Presence was already shaving three points off everything he took. That was him buffed. He hadn't said a word since he asked about the dead classmate. I'd hit the Fear limit in Zone One and woken up in an ambulance with no idea how long I'd been down. If Liam went down, Tre went down with him, because Tre had been riding his shoulders since the alcove. Tre's Comic Relief passive had been shaving five percent off my Fear gain, but only mine.

Not the guy carrying him. Tre's Fear was sitting at forty-two. He'd always been the one cracking jokes while everything fell to shit, so maybe the game had set his baseline lower than mine. Or he was just better at this than I was.

"Backs together!" Gen yelled, Strobe Blade up.

"All of ye, NOW!" Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Tre came off Liam's shoulders, and Kane came off Gen's, both hitting the floor at the same time, as the six of us made a messy circle. Gen's back against mine. Liam on my side with the Bowie knife in a grip that told me he had as much fight training as me. None.

Beside him, Isabel, Maytag Flail already up and swinging over her head, as Tre and Kane moved to the middle of our circle, turning in place, looking for angles to be of most use. Three more Meat monsters dropped off the walls to join the others, and the ring closed. Twelve total. Every droopy, mismatched face surrounded us. Austin's was among them. So was Sheriff Hardin's, or half of it, the other half a melted run of Deputy Nathan Rowe.

"Jesus…" Gen sucked in a breath beside me.

"It is Kelli." She was staring at another one of the creatures, still labeled a Meat Man in my HUD, but this one had grotesque suggestions of a female body with malformed breasts and the crooked face of a young woman with stark blue eyes.

"It's not her, Pug," Kane said gently as he clambered up her back.

"I know," she replied, the words hollow.

"Who is she?" I asked.

"First NPC that woke up on my run." Gen didn't take her eyes off the face. I looked past Liam for Isabel, who was already staring at me.

"Now would be an awesome time for a plan," she said. We were caught in a slow, awful dance. We'd packed into a tight knot, and the creatures ringed us, and as they circled one way, we circled the other. From above, it would have looked like a Busby Berkeley number, another reference I thanked Mom for.

"Liam," Tre said, making a running start.

"Fastball special!" Tre launched himself into Liam's arms. They were nose to nose, and in that half second, the Bowie knife passed from Liam's hand to Tre's.

"Fuck yes!" Liam pivoted his whole body in one motion, hips and shoulders and arms all moving in sync, and threw him across the room. Tre spiraled like a football, rifling through the air with the Bowie knife held out in front of him. I got one full second to feel an intense swell of pure, stupid pride. My best friend, and a nineteen-year-old, had workshopped a play at some point. The knife caught the lower part of a Meat Man's thick neck, embedding itself like a grappling hook.

The impact swung Tre into the thing's chest. He dangled from the knife handle, steadied himself, and planted his feet on its sternum, working the large blade left and then right. A geyser of black blood spewed from the wound. Tre jumped off and stuck the landing a few feet away, one knee down, one fist to the floor, mimicking the pose every superhero hits after a big jump.

"Show off," I yelled. The thing's head hit the ground. Then the rest of it dropped. It did not split this time. Whatever tension had been holding all that packed flesh upright let go at once, and it came down in a loose, boneless heap of meat. And it never moved again.

"THE HEADS," Gen screamed.

"GO FOR THE HEADS!"

"LIAM!" Kane sprinted across the circle, leaping just as Liam turned around.

"Ooof!" Liam caught Kane, the impact driving the air straight out of his lungs.

"Do me! Do me," Kane bellowed.

"OKAY!" Liam threw him. Kane didn't spiral. He flew end over end, turning sideways almost immediately, arms and legs flailing, missing his target by a wide margin, and slammed into the steel wall about nine feet up with the sound of a bug hitting a windshield.

"KANE!" Gen howled his name with a desperation I hadn't seen the woman exhibit yet. Kane slid down the wall slowly and landed on his feet. His health bar dropped another ten percent.

"Alles gut," he said to nobody in particular.

"Fuck!" Liam screamed.

"Sorry!" Mother's Ruin came into my hand, and I stopped thinking about anything other than cutting necks. The hook had four feet of reach, and the curve to it meant it didn't stab so much as it caught and tore. I brought it around into the space where a Meat Man's head met what passed for shoulders and wrenched it straight through. The head came away with a gooey ripping sound, and the body folded in half. DROWNED MEMORY: 1 STACK (+10% DAMAGE) I swung at the next one, and it shifted its weight.

The hook missed its target, biting deep into its side instead of its neck. DEEP WOUND APPLIED The gash smoked at the edges; blood pooled out of the unhealable wound, which would have worked perfectly on anything that actually died from its wounds. This one stumbled for a moment, then kept coming. I reset and took its neck on the backswing, killing another one. DROWNED MEMORY: 2 STACKS (+20% DAMAGE) That second hit was easier, and I fucking hated it.

Everything I killed with this weapon made the next thing come apart cleaner, the hook biting deeper with less and less force behind it. Drowned Memory. And somewhere deep, deep down, a small dead part of me was pleased. Gen, to my left, was fucking terrifying in action. She wound up with the Strobe Blade like she was chopping wood, and the swing dragged. I could see it drag. I had held that thing, and swinging it was like punching into wet cement. Despite its intended purpose, Gen swung it fast anyway.

Her arms shook, jaw clenched so hard the muscles in her cheeks flexed. The blade came around in a bright, dragging arc and took a Meat Man's head off at the jaw and kept going into the one behind it. I don't know how strong you have to be to make that weapon look like a weapon. Gen was that strong. Isabel swung and caught one across the chest, and the counterbalance drove it back three feet without opening it up at all. A status appeared above its head: STAGGERED (5s) It stood there.

Just stood there, arms down, face slack, for five full seconds while she got her weight back under her. I used the opportunity to lop off its head. Another went down in the space of maybe forty seconds. Twelve became nine, became eight, became seven, and I had the brief hope we were going to win. Then Isabel screamed. Three of them surrounded her. Two behind, one in front. She only focused on the threat ahead. She swung the flail with her entire body.

The heavy, spiked counterbalance whistled through the air and crushed the Meat Man's head against the wall. The head burst. The flail bounced hard off the steel, the recoil ripping Isabel completely off balance. The two behind her immediately lunged. One swept her legs. The other crashed down on top of her, bulldozing her into the concrete. The whole sequence took less than five seconds. I was thirty feet away with a Meat Man between her and me. Liam got there first, crossing the distance in three strides.

He pummeled the thing with his shoulder, driving it off her body and into the wall with the full weight of a linebacker who had been waiting his entire life to make a hit with that much force behind it. The guy didn't even have a weapon. The creature hit the steel with a thud and stayed down. Isabel didn't jump back up either. She pushed onto her side, coughing dark, thick blood onto the concrete, her hand clamped tight over her collarbone. I rushed to her, helping her back to her feet.

"Heal!" She nodded, and her pupils dilated as she used her menu to consume the Salve. Her chest made a sound like popping bubble wrap as the fractured bones forcibly snapped back into alignment. She gasped, her health bar ticking back up.

"One left," she said.

"Get outta here," Liam screamed.

"We gotta get—" The second one came in on his blind side and put its shoulder into his ribs. Liam went backward and hit three inches of rusted bracket sticking out from a sloppy weld seam. It went through the navy flannel and into the meat under his left shoulder blade. The Meat Man leaned in, pressing the bracket deeper into his back. Liam roared. His health dropped to seventy-two.

"OI!" The whole room heard it.

"That's it? That's the best ye've got? Ye can't finish six half-dead eejits in a corridor? God, yer mothers must be MORTIFIED." Six mismatched faces swiveled toward a five-foot-nothing Irishwoman alone in the middle of a room full of corpses. Liam ripped himself free of the bracket the moment the monster holding him shifted its focus. Isabel and I were on him immediately.

"Take this." Isabel handed him a salve.

"RUN," Gen screamed.

"All of ye. NOW." I recognized the look in her eyes because behind it was the same vacant detachment I felt before every stupid thing I have ever done. One of the six slashed a jaundiced claw at Kane, catching him across the right shoulder blade and knocking him off Gen's back. He was still getting his feet under him, shiv down, when it came in low and got a hand on his left ear and pulled. The top half tore away like a shred of paper. Kane howled.

Green blood spurted from the wound and his health plummeted to twenty-three. A roar tore loose from Gen's chest, more animal than human. I wondered if she was about to turn into a werewolf. Certainly plausible in a horror game. What happened was weirder. She grew. Three or four inches in height, and significantly wider across the shoulders. Her clothes grew with her, which was honestly the most unsettling part. Her jacket seams expanded where they should have split, and the legs of her jeans stretched.

The Grindhouse had tailored her outfit to accommodate the change. She was using a skill. Then she was across the floor, sinking her fingers into the back of the thing holding her husband. She yanked her hand out with a yell, pulling a spine from the monster. With the other hand, she put its head into the wall hard enough to split it, and that weird brownish brain stuff sloshed out of the crack as it dropped.

"Kane!" Liam shrugged us off, then tossed the salve across the hall. It landed an inch from Kane's hands. Gen scooped up the salve and her husband in one motion." Drink!" Kane slurped down the salve, and his health ticked up to forty-eight.

"Zero salves left," Isabel yelled.

"You didn't take it," Isabel said to Liam.

"Kane needed it." Tre, holding onto the duffel bag strapped across Liam's back, glanced at me.

"We got the cache. Now what?" The squelching sounds behind us started as we neared the mouth of the corridor. The ones we thought we'd killed, the ones with the heads off, the ones lying in pieces all over the hall, were coming back together. They dragged themselves across the ground toward each other, headless bodies finding headless bodies. The five remaining Meat Men walked into the middle of the whole mass as it absorbed them, folding inward, then growing taller.

"Watch out!" Liam screamed, shifting his weight to shield Tre on his back. A mouth formed, and the creature shrilled in rage. Or agony. Hard to tell because its many faces were doing everything from pain to euphoria all at once. As the towering heap of flesh consolidated, a loose limb (a fusion of three human arms ending in a cluster of grasping fingers) whipped out from its side, catching Isabel square across her newly healed chest with an audible crunch.

She let out a sharp, watery gasp, boots slipping on the bloody concrete. I caught her before she hit the floor.

"You good?" She steadied, nodding.

"Here." Her face was ashen, sweat streaking her cheeks, but with no salves left to give, I accepted the nod along with the weapon she passed me.

"Hands on a Hardbody," Isabel shouted. Everyone's eyes shut but mine. I got a fistful of Liam's jacket, chucked the Chemy Blinder into the middle of the thing, and squeezed my eyes closed. The corridor went white behind my eyelids. Hands on a Hardbody was the code we'd developed for exactly this moment. We ran with our eyes shut and our hands on each other, and something was screaming behind us in a lot of voices at once. I followed the map in my HUD, unspooling ahead of us as I led the way.

Right at the first junction. Short hall. Right again. More fog dissipated, and I saw two things at the same time. Left, a door in the right-hand wall, twenty feet in. Straight ahead, maybe eighty feet down, a supply cache marker. We had no salves left. Whatever was in the duffel bag, which we couldn't check until we were somewhere safe, was all we had to heal with. Kane was at forty-eight percent, Liam was banged up to hell, and my health was still under a hundred; a second cache would help. It would help a lot.

"Left," I said.

"LEFT, GO LEFT." They went left. I stayed at the mouth of the corridor, debating a run for that other cache. NORA! It wasn't Tre's voice in my head. Well, not only Tre's voice. It was all of them. I threw myself sideways as the Meat Magnet came around the corner, a claw carving the air where my head had been, and sprinted toward my friends. They were bunched against the right-hand wall, pushing. This door was hinged, heavy, and it opened inward unlike all the others. I threw my weight in with theirs.

The six of us heaved it open and fell through in a jumble of limbs and duffel bag and ginger and gremlin. Liam and I got up, put our shoulders into it, and shoved the door closed. Something inside the frame clunked into place.

"Is anybody," Liam managed, "dying. Right now. Immediately."

"Working on it," Kane said from the floor. I turned around. The room was brighter than the corridors, and it took a second to make sense of what I was looking at. There was a wheel. A woman was strapped to it, upright, turning slowly. Off to the side, against the wall, a man sat strapped into a chair with a cap clamped over his skull, staring at us. His whole body jerked hard, like a hiccup that used every muscle he had." Look at these sorry dick blisters," he said, and laughed, high and delighted.

The wheel spun faster, and the woman screamed.