This was going to be a great show.
“You hit?” asked Sid. He climbed down out of the sunroof.
“Yeah,” I replied, putting a hand under my shirt and wincing. My finger found a small hole on the side of my ribcage. “Not too bad. A through-and-through I think. Could you wrap me?”
He grunted. “Sure.”
I glanced back at him. “You hit?”
“I think my ear got blown off.” He held one hand to a bloody mess on the side of his head, doubled over in pain. “But the real problem is the gut shot.”
“Bad?”
It looked bad.
“Hurts like hell, but it’ll bleed out slow. I should live another couple of hours.”
Ah, not so bad then. I smiled. Maybe we’d make it out of Los Angeles after all.
As we sped up the street, something walked into our way up ahead.
A pedestrian? I squinted, trying to make out who it was. Not cops, anyway.
It was someone in a green suit, hunched over, and then there were dozens more of them, blocking the road. Cars lined both sides of the street so I couldn’t swerve off, and I could hear growing sirens in the distance as flashing lights started coming at us from all angles. Up ahead, it looked like a herd of little green men directly in our way.
What the hell?
I jammed on the brakes and we skidded, squealing to a halt as we plowed into the first couple of greenies, bumping over them. The other car skidded to a stop behind us. Furious, I threw open my driver-side door with weapon in hand to confront whatever was going down.
Sid popped back out of the sunroof, grimacing, with both cannons out aiming front and center.
A short, stocky green man with pointy ears and a broad forehead, wearing spiked shoulder pads and holding an enormous axe, ambled up to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
I could see he had some vampires with him.
“We are against the discrimination shown to the Bangladeshi.”
“What?” Then it dawned on me. “Sid!” I yelled. “Did you set the authenticated login to this world when you created it?”
Silence. Except for the growing whine of the approaching sirens.
“Sid?!” I asked again, looking back at him.
“Ah, shoot,” he replied, wincing in pain. He looked down at the blood oozing from his gut wound. “I forgot.”
Dejectedly, he banged both of his weapons down on the roof of the car. These were obviously Comment Trolls.
Without authenticated login, people could connect into this world anonymously, which was fine if all you wanted to do was watch, but anonymity tended to bring out the worst in people.
With the massive audience we’d accumulated for this game, and with the login anonymous, we’d just attracted the motherlode of Comment Trolls. Hundreds of them were now blocking the road. They’d use the opportunity to broadcast their opinions, whether they had anything to do with our gameworld or not.
“I’m sorry, dude,” continued Sid, waving a gun in the air. “I was just so busy. My mother was over, I had a splinter set the world up—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Perhaps I could reason with them. “Dude, please, this is 1988 Los Angeles,” I complained to the lead troll. “We’re just trying to get out of here. There were no trolls in Los Angeles in 1988, and no vampires either.” On closer inspection, those were Forum Vampires he had with him. They might be useful. “Okay, maybe there were vampires. But guys, please.”
My dimstim stats were dropping as fast as our gameworld audience. I had to do something entertaining, and quickly. The head Comment Troll was right in my face, smelling bad with some butt-ugly, oily pimples going on.
“Master,” he growled at me.
At least he’s playing in character and not a total asshole. Maybe there’s an opportunity.
“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”
I nodded my head.
“Sure, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a singsong tone, smiling to expose my two gold-capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “If you want to join the Bloods or the Crips, I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”
The troll frowned. It was hideous. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.
Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head, as I’d intended. The bullet only glanced off his thick skull, ricocheting in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.
As I was musing on this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand, which I’d been in the process of lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.
Blood spurted from my wrist, and I quickly backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting indiscriminately with the gun still in my right hand. Sid covered my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons-of-bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing fire that Vicious and Willy laid down as we ran back.
Breathlessly, we rallied behind the GTO. I ripped off my T-shirt and mashed my forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M-16s.
“Where the hell is Martin?” I panted.
He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give these assholes something to think about.
Sid ducked up to look inside the car. “Aw man, I think Martin’s dying.” He tightened up my tourniquet.
I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.
“Goddamn baby.” I turned back to Sid. “Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the hell did he get so messed up?”
This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional, and me missing an arm.
“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.
He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry, Bobby, I didn’t mean to.… ”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.
Sid stared at me disapprovingly, shaking his head. “Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time. You going to talk to him?”
I said nothing, but then nodded.
“Yes?” demanded Sid between bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”
“Yes, yes, I promise. But let’s get out of this first, okay?”
Looking back up over the GTO, the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast.
I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip. We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat with my one remaining hand when, all of a sudden, a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.
The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium broke out for a while as it turned into a three-way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken to wing and began swooping down on the helpless police officers, who just screamed in disbelief.