I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s stick to the neighborhood for right now since we have the map. We’ll hunt down the remaining red dots. We need all the easy experience we can get. Then we’ll go back to the safe room and watch the premiere.” Mordecai had said the show would air on the screens in the safe room. “After that, the stairs will open up. We’ll go hunting for both the stairs and this guy.”
“You’re not scared of that guy? Really?” Donut asked, looking between me and the corpse.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Well then, you’re crazy. I don’t like you being crazy. I’m scared of him. We need to stay away from him. What if he’s like one of those murder hobos you hear so much about?”
“Just two seconds ago you said, and I quote, ‘Some imbecile with a gun doesn’t scare me!’”
“Yeah, that’s when I thought you were being a pussy. I didn’t realize you were getting all Charles Bronson Death Wish on me!”
“How do you even know what that is?”
“You two always leave the TV on when you go to work. I absorbed all that stuff. Miss Beatrice always leaves it on Lifetime and HGTV, and you leave it on that channel that plays the A-Team and Charles Bronson movies all day.”
“We’ll be careful,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
Nearby, a group of three red dots was steadily moving through a hallway. The map didn’t say what they were, but based on our earlier encounters, I guessed them to be more of the rats. I suspected we wouldn’t see any more Scatterers in this neighborhood.
“Come on, Donut. Let’s hunt.”
14
The premiere of Dungeon Crawler World: Earth was easily the most bizarre thing I’d ever witnessed in my life.
Apparently, alien television shows were presented in a completely different way than a standard, 2D television screen. Viewers were virtually placed within actual scenes, as they happened. This virtual rendition and recap of the moments presented on the show was fully experienced by the viewers, including the smells and physical sensations just short of feeling the actual pain.
However, Tally explained, many viewers didn’t like the VR version of the action, so they watched using a method where they had a bird’s eye view, and they could zoom in and out and switch angles at a whim.
We didn’t have any of that. The show streamed on the center of the three televisions over the fast food counter. Tally came out from around the back to sit with us at the booth to watch.
4,006,002. That’s how many people were left when the show premiered. The number continued to steadily tick down while the show aired. It made me sick to look at it, so I tried to tune it out.
“This is not good way to watch show,” Tally announced as the title appeared on the screen. The screen jerked around, like I was watching someone play a game on Twitch. The view kept randomly zooming in and out, sometimes focusing on nothing in particular. Sometimes lights flashed for no reason.
It started with a commentator in the top right of the screen. I stared at the orange-hued, four-eyed lizard-like creature as he-she-it, I couldn’t tell, breathlessly gave a recap of last season. The sound kept cutting in and out, and I couldn’t tell why. The creature sounded like it had gravel in their mouth when they spoke anyway, and even though it was speaking in Syndicate standard, I could barely make out what they were saying. It started with a shot of a planet that looked remarkably like Earth, but with the continents all jumbled up. It zoomed in on the planet, showing buildings that appeared to almost be made of plastic, all on stilts with round, pod-like mechanisms zipping about underneath. The collapse came, but instead of the buildings all sinking into the ground, they swept away, rolling to the side like they’d been sucked up by an invisible vacuum.
Next came a view of a building that looked similar to the Roman Coliseum, only bigger. The arena had multiple floors, mazes, and a level filled entirely with water. On the exterior of the building, which appeared to be the size of an entire city, was written The Squim Conglomerate Presents, Battle for the Planet Aryl.
Next showed thousands of furry, gorilla-like creatures screaming and rushing into battle against another group of similar creatures. Later, it showed a single, heavily armored gorilla stick a spear into the throat of a smaller, gray-colored gorilla riding a massive pig thing. The word WINNER appeared on the screen.
The winning gorilla fell to his knees and appeared to start sobbing before the screen cut away. A round metal tube that looked like a barrel appeared on the screen for 15 seconds straight. There was no sound. Tally said it was a commercial.
“I do not like last season’s version of game,” Tally said, shaking his furry head. “They break the people into groups, tell them their loved ones will be safe if they kill others. Then everybody kill one another.”
“Are they?” I asked.
“Are they what?” Tally asked.
“Are their loved ones safe if they win?”
“Aye, they are safe, but they are not safe. Is better dead. Squim saps the planet dry. It leaves planet, moves on. No more atmosphere. People live after the big fight, but they don’t live. Not really. Borant at least gives people a chance. Tally’s people had chance.”
“So, you were a crawler, then?”
“No,” Tally said. “Not all worlds are mined or picked for the show. Sometimes they come and offer to take people in exchange for not mining world. They came, and I went. This was very long ago.”
“Shush,” Donut said. “They’re introducing us now.”
Next came a view of Earth. Music swelled, sounding almost like mariachi with an EDM beat. Three lines of text scrolled across the bottom of the screen, all in different languages I couldn’t read. Another two lines, one going up, one going down scrolled on the right side, shrinking the viewing area. A generic, naked human male and female appeared on the screen, and the next 10 minutes was a discussion of human anatomy with an inordinate amount of time spent discussing male testicles and female ovaries. I still couldn’t understand most of what the commentator was saying. Next came a long line of shots of earth, focusing mostly on urban areas. It quickly became clear that the show was cherry-picking the shittier parts of the planet, showing shanty towns and garbage dumps. Bubbling pits of mud, and abandoned buildings. They were throwing in scenes from disaster films. I recognized a shot from the latest Godzilla movie. They were going out of their way to make earth look like a nightmare.
Then came the people. They were showing people shooting up drugs, killing each other, a group of kids beating the crap out of another kid, a scene from the movie Basket Case, a dead horse for some reason, a scene from that serial killer movie that won Best Picture last year, an elderly woman crying, the kid from the “Charlie bit My Finger” Youtube video.
“Wow,” Donut said, shaking her head sadly. “I didn’t realize Earth sucked so badly. Disgusting.”
“That’s not how it really is,” I said. I paused. Not is. Was. The world is gone. “They’re making it look like they’re the good guys, saving us from ourselves.”
Next came a sky-view version of the collapse, over a dense city I didn’t recognize. Next was what appeared to be a CGI rendition of the dungeon forming below the Earth’s crust. It only showed the first three levels, which was like an upside down, tiered pyramid.
The next forty minutes was nothing but scenes of people getting killed over and over.
The vast majority of people who entered the dungeon appeared to be from India and Africa and South America. Some of them were in massive groups of 1,000 plus people. I watched them trample each other as they ran from mobs I’d never seen, from spine-covered wolves to shapeless blobs of fire to floating, stingray-like creatures which shot magic missiles from eye stalks, like the alien ships from War of the Worlds.