Chapter 42: Chapter 40

“Fall back! Regroup, now!” Rayna barked. We moved. The red wave covered the map, moving much faster than we could. Dots began to separate and move around us, in varying sizes, and tendrils of them extended from the main bulk.

 

We entered the primary medical hub and ran down the hall toward our two rear-guard hobbs. They opened fire, both facing the hallway coming from the hangar. As we ran, the ceiling in the room caved in, and a giant gelatinous cube rode the mud-crete and metal chunk of the ceiling directly between us and our only escape.

 

We ran as it enveloped Ordo, without warning. It just convulsed at him, and the Hobb was bubbling in its ample innards, cheeks puffed out as he winced with pain, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to hold his breath against it. 

 

I raised my shotgun and stopped to aim. Rayna and the others kept running, but kept a path open for me. I fired a slug into the cube, and it squealed an unhappy fart as its body wavered and vibrated. The embedded slug burned the cube with sparks, but it did not turn from its assault. Another cube dropped from the hole in the ceiling as Rayna and Tollya entered the room.

 

Tollya jabbed the cube holding Ordo with her Sleem Stick and it vomited the Hobb onto the concrete. Another of the BlueCleave hobbs darted between us all and grabbed Ordo by the back of his collar. Ordo ripped open his own first aid package as his team-mate hauled him around the corner of the escape hatch tunnel, and they vanished from sight. A third cube jiggled into sight at the top of the room, squeezing its form through the vent. 

I shot it with a taser slug, and it froze in place, squealing in anger. The first cube had vomited the taser slug when it vomited Ordo and recovered enough in a split second to fling itself at Rayna.

 

She lit it on fire for its efforts. The flame thrower swung between the first and second cube in the room, and I shot the one in the ceiling again, just to keep it there. In the flickering light behind Rayna, I could see a wall of slime moving forward. Hundreds of oozes were locked together in front of the wall, pushing down the hallway in a solid mass. The hungry wall of slimes’ excitement was palpable. 

 

Rayna turned and opened up the flame-thrower on it, and for an instant, the hobbs were all deafened by a squealing fart of pain that rose so high it cut through their ear protection. My helmet saved me, it just cut out the sound once it reached a certain pitch. Then the still burning cube enveloped Rayna from behind.

 

It didn’t get her all the way in, as Tollya was there to slam a Sleem Stick into it with a scream of rage. The Sleem cube convulsed and heaved its burning bulk away. Or, it tried to, before Rayna turned and sprayed it down heavily with napalm. 

 

I turned back and saw that the cube in the ceiling was dangling further out of the vent, so I shot it again. It screamed and froze in place again, jiggling. 

 

When I turned back to Rayna, I saw the smoke rising from her back. She realized it in the same moment, and Tollya scrambled to help her get out of the flame thrower. Rayna pushed the nozzle away as Tollya got the tank loose, and I immediately dove to tackle them both. 

 

I had seen what was about to happen. 

 

The second cube, scorched and bubbling on one side, lunged at us from the doorway, and Tollya hurled the sizzling flame thrower into it as the lines ruptured and liquid napalm began to erupt from the pressurized system. I slammed into her, and then Rayna, and we went down in a heap. Flames raced along the lines and straps sailing through the air, and the cube gulped the entire mess as it exploded.

 

Acidic slime rained across my chest and legs, as I covered Rayna and Tollya from the worst of it. We collapsed, and Tollya shoved me off as the remnants of the Sleem cube slumped, torn apart and burning. Boiling Sleem juice coated my jacket and pants, and the pain began to tickle on my legs almost instantly. 

 

My immediate instinct was what got me in such bad trouble. I wiped the caustic slime off my pants with my hands, while I was getting up to run away, and the instant regret, pain, and pure chemical shock that provided to my brain led me to run down the wrong hallway. 

 

I’d run down the hallway to the office block, not to the escape hatch, like the rest of the hobbs.

 

My hands were repaired by a very concerned cartoon starfish suit, using the tendrils to spray neutralizing solution over them, and then laser and regrow the skin. More tendrils neutralized the acid on my legs and jacket too. As soon as the screaming agony of acid eating my flesh was eased, I realized the lethal mistake I had just made and turned back.

 

The ceiling vent had been the victim of a large back-up, due to my trick with the taser slugs. But once the first cube yanked itself out of the vent, the rest poured out one after another. Like deadly sentient wombat diarrhea.

 

The room filled, and even the sounds of the hobbs retreating in the distance was cut off as their hallway filled to capacity with different sized cubes. One of the cubes was aggressively moving my way, and its body filled my hallway entirely. The last thing I heard from Rayna before our hallways were full of slurping, farting slime monsters was the word ‘run.’ So I did.

 

I jammed the switch on a mud-crete grenade and tossed it over my shoulder into the approaching cube, as I ran for my life toward the nearest gaping black hole in the ground. The cube was angry at me, and I could see why, with three slowly dissolving taser slugs embedded in it. My helmet kicked in higher night-vision and the world turned into washed out green as the grenade went off behind me. 

 

The cube scream-farted and I turned to watch it die horribly.

 

Mud-crete flooded through the gelatin, great spikes of it hardening from the inside out. Folds of calcifying slime jutted from its body and the scream petered out as it stopped moving. 

 

Then it surged forward again, as something shoved it from behind. The dead Sleem cube slid slowly toward me, so I clicked another grenade toggle and threw it as hard as I could at the body, aiming for a portion of it that had collapsed at the top.

 

The grenade went off and blew a bubble of mud-crete forcefully down and into the crumbling remains of the cube. It ground to a halt and shuddered there. I threw one more activated grenade at the body, in an attempt to wedge it in place, and then ran for my life down the nearest dark stairwell. 

 

My first dungeon crawl had started so well, too.

 

In front of me were two holes in the ground with layered concrete steps leading down. I had entered the wing where everybody went to live and work, so on my way past the large lobby I noticed the dayglo orange paint labeling places for a receptionist’s desk, as well as a lounge area surrounded by planters. My imagination filled in the blanks with imaginary furniture as I walked through, desperate to think about anything but the dead-Sleem cork I had left behind me, and what was behind it.

 

I gave half a thought to jumping down the elevator shaft, but quickly shook it off. It was hard to tell if the thought had come from a desperation to escape, or a quickly deepening sense of fatalism that was starting to cloud my senses. The anger and stress and fear was sizzling through me too rapidly and burning me out again. I was getting numb as I turned and walked down the nearest stairs.

 

The effort was pointless, I knew. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that maybe I could slip past them and get back out the way I had come in if I delved deeper and made myself a more difficult target to find. 

 

“Maybe there’s some place to hide down here,” I tried to convince myself. “I can call for rescue and wait.”

 

You are reading story BuyMort: Rise of the Windowpuncher – How I Became the Accidental Warlord of Arizona. Apocalyptic GameLit at novel35.com

Call for rescue, excellent idea. I immediately grabbed my shitty plastic phone, and gray fog filled it. The area around me stayed pitch black, I noticed, and wondered if the phone did anything at all, or if it was all in my head. MortMobile’s face was staring at me expectantly, but this time he didn’t look impatient. Just ever so slightly sad.

 

“Hey, I need to call Rayna.” I breathed. Even just my whispers were deafening in the dark.

 

The face in the phone shook his head slowly at me. “I’m sorry, Tyson. I can’t do that.”

 

“Okay, Tollya. Molls. Mr. Sada! Whatever, just get me someone from the campground, please!” I looked around as I spoke in a rush, but the only sound came from the dead Sleem behind me. It scraped against the walls around it every so often.

 

“This area is under a MortMobile blocker. I am bound by contract to prevent any communication from entering or leaving this area, until the blocker is deactivated.” I blinked rapidly as he spoke, processing what he was telling me.

 

“And the Sleem will deactivate it once I’m being digested,” was all I could manage to say.

 

The face of the ancient psychic god in my phone slowly nodded. “Only communication inside this zone is permitted.”

 

As I was putting away my phone again, I heard him whisper in my head, “good luck.” I pushed down the feelings of despair and dread and continued fumbling my way through the dark.

 

My helmet was a life saver a thousand times over, with both low and no light features that came in extremely handy as the tiny amount of light from the burning Sleem cubes had vanished when I mud-creted the cube in the hallway. 

 

There was no light source at all in the underground hallways, and the helmet began drawing my surroundings for me to navigate in visual form. My world became walking through a dark sketch of concrete walls, like a partially animated 90’s music video. It was extremely disorienting at first, because the image was desynched when I moved. As I walked and looked around, the helmet learned my movements and began adjusting for them, and the image became much smoother.

 

A thought crossed my mind, while I still had some time. I dropped a taser slug on the ground and pointed at it. “I’d like to sell that BuyMort.” I had been thinking that if I could attack a pod, or even a series of them, to summon a bunch of BuyMort bugs, I could slow or distract my pursuers, give myself time to find a place to hide.

 

Of course, BuyMort pods don’t just appear when you call them.

 

I stood in the dark, feeling more and more antsy as I waited for a pod. I thought about the hallway behind me, cut off by a cube. Where would the pod even come from? I didn’t have time to wait, so I pointed at the taser slug and said “BuyMort, I’d like to sell this right now.”

 

An error popped up. “Value of the item is not enough to cover trans-dimensional pod dispatch. If you would like to sell the item immediately, an additional charge of forty-three thousand morties will be deducted from your account.”

 

The pipes in the walls groaned again, above me this time, and I saw the flood of red moving back the way it had come. The floor vibrated with their passage, and I snatched up the taser slug and started jogging again. “Never mind, BuyMort. No sale.” That plan was never going to work, and waiting around trying would get me killed.

 

The second floor down was an empty, open floor plan. The same holes in the floor and ceiling formed staircases and elevators, and the level was simply open floor space for a distance that the helmet couldn’t fully draw for me.

 

I made the decision to descend another level instead of exploring the one I was on. The dayglow paint on the floor made me think it was mostly for administrative work. Areas for cubicles were marked everywhere, and as I walked back, what was clearly a private office opened up on my map in the distance.

 

The surfaces I walked on had old signs of Sleem passage, but nothing new. Nothing wet, and therefore recent. The slime they left behind turned into a kind of waxy crumble as it dried out and lost much of its caustic ability. My simple shoes were fine to walk on it, which I tested accidentally before realizing what I was standing in.

 

Once I reached the third floor, my heart rate began to slow. I hadn’t heard anything from the Sleem cubes in the hallway above, and so far I hadn’t seen any drains in this section. It was starting to feel at least temporarily safe. Maybe I had stopped up that hallway better than I thought.

 

A long, loud scraping sound sunk those thoughts. My Sleem cube cork had been pushed out. I could hear them slurping their way toward me already, and my vision was caught by sudden movement.

 

The elevator shaft was dripping.

 

Mixed cubes and oozes plummeted past the open door, vanishing into the dark. I heard something burble behind me and turned to see a cube attempting to force its way through the stairwell I had come down.

 

I fired the last slug in my shotgun, and it froze in place. Its body was wider than the stairwell, and without the ability to control its entire body, it seemed unable to continue sliding through. Something wet hit the concrete behind me and I whirled to see several oozes pulling themselves back together from the force of landing on my level. I counted at least five separate puddles rapidly becoming oozes.

 

The cube behind me was closer, so I dug in my satchel for a grenade and clicked the toggle on the side. It released a screaming fart as I wound back, but the grenade still landed in its guts and went off. Dark mud-crete flowed through it as the cube screamed and vibrated. Its body cracked and hardened where the mud-crete reached air, and it quickly stopped moving or making sound at all.

 

I raced around the corner of the stairwell, happy with my temporary plug, and ran down the next flight of stairs. My shotgun was empty, so I began reloading it from my second bandoleer. By the time more Sleem oozes caught up to me, I was ready and started blasting.

 

Magnesium sparks erupted in the dark with the first blast and my helmet shaded itself to protect me from the sudden light. By the time I pumped another shell into the chamber and fired again, it had adjusted, and the sparks showed up as small glows, with muted lighting effects in the room. This helmet had been worth every Mortie I spent on it.

 

Two Sleem oozes burned and died, slumping with burbling screams as their brethren raced past. More of them slapped into place from the elevator shaft near me, and I started running again. Fighting them and wasting ammo was getting me nowhere.

 

I ran down, again. Deeper into the bowels of the residential block, where apartments with predictable layouts appeared on my map, spreading out from central areas where the stairs and elevators met. One broad, open hallway on either side led to smaller offshoots, and larger open areas. Each with staircase openings and elevators at the end. 

 

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