White Eyes in the Dark
After stowing the parachute so the wind couldn't snatch it away and give up our position, we forced open the locked rooftop door.
"Current temperature is twenty-three degrees. No hazardous compounds detected in the atmosphere yet."
Lucy ran the numbers on temperature and air quality before we started down the darkened stairwell.
"A bit on the chilly side. I scanned the area on the way down from the plane, and there wasn't anything like an ocean nearby."
So it wasn't a maritime climate. More likely it was simply a cool season. The sun had gone down early, too — whatever real-world place this had been modeled on, it had probably been autumn at the time.
"I'll take point."
Outdoors I was the all-rounder and the Pathfinder. Indoors, we'd already agreed that Lucy would take vanguard. She moved out first, a Glow Stick washing the dark with a soft fluorescent haze and a heavy club in her other hand, and I followed at a measured pace, covering her six.
Anyone watching us now would have wondered why two people with perfectly functional firearms were wandering around with melee weapons. The truth was, you couldn't just spray bullets whenever you felt like it.
Even with a suppressor fitted, the distinctive crack of a powder firearm was the first problem. And even if you decided to ignore the noise, the supply problem would have you by the throat soon enough. Bullets did not, contrary to every game I'd ever played, go poof into existence the moment you needed them. And even if you got lucky and found some, there was no guarantee they'd be compatible with the weapons we were carrying.
That was why Lucy and I were exploring the Dark Zone with firearm use kept to an absolute minimum. The terror that washed over you when you pulled the trigger at a truly critical moment and felt an empty magazine click dry… that was something you could never understand unless you'd lived it.
"The interior is… considerably deteriorated. It looks as though it's been abandoned for quite some time."
Lucy swept the Glow Stick's fluorescent wash down the corridor on the floor immediately below the roof, offering her honest assessment. I was of the same mind. Paint peeling off in patches. A ceiling that had half-collapsed and then simply given up. Old, rusted junk scattered everywhere. Most of what human civilization built ended up like this the moment people stopped putting their hands on it.
"What on earth could have happened here? For a hospital this large to be abandoned and left to rot, something truly catastrophic must have occurred."
"Probably a disaster. If it'd been a war, the whole city would've been flattened."
"Ah. That's true."
Apparently this world had had its own war between Ukraine and Russia, because Lucy, who was Russian herself, accepted the point at once. War was not the romantic, gentlemanly affair people liked to imagine. It was a mud fight on a slightly larger scale, one in which nobody hesitated to use whatever desperate measure would kill the other side.
Which meant there had been no war here. There were no traces of large-scale bombing, and none of a fierce firefight either.
"The patient rooms are all empty as well. Some of the medical equipment and the beds are still here, but there are no people."
"Normally, if an emergency hits that's big enough to force a mass evacuation, a hospital will do everything it can to take the medical equipment and the portable beds with them — as many patients as they can save. Everything here was just left."
"Perhaps they didn't even have time to prepare a proper evacuation?"
"Could be the opposite."
A situation, for instance, in which evacuating was meaningless to begin with. Once that thought had taken hold, I suggested we skip the patient wards and head for the medical center, where the doctors would have actually worked. No matter how sprawling a ward full of patients was, no matter how many rooms it had, there was precious little worth farming. What kind of lunatic patient or family member left valuables sitting in a hospital room?
Of course, given the nature of a Dark Zone, you also had to account for Dynamic Farming — randomized loot spawning in unpredictable locations. I just had no interest in grinding myself down in a high-dummy-ratio zone for a handful of cheap returns. The cost-to-benefit on that was miserable.
And this isn't an ordinary Dark Zone. It's a Survival Theme Dark Zone. We don't have time to linger.
Lucy seemed to read my intent, because she picked up the pace. We moved at a clipped, almost running alert-speed, descending the stairs as quietly and as quickly as we could, and along the way we found corridors choked with beds and equipment — crude barricades, as if someone had thrown them together to hold a position.
The traces themselves are so old it's hard to get a read off them.
This was a Dark Zone, which meant there would absolutely be entities or environmental gimmicks hostile to convicts. Pinning down exactly which threats would appear based on nothing but the era and the environmental backdrop, though, was a tall order even for me. Even Dark Zones sharing the same space theme were no guarantee of identical Native Species. You might get a Machine Spirit. You might get Xenos. You might get the Unspeakable. I wasn't a fortune-teller. How was I supposed to call all of that in advance?
That was why the Pathfinder and the vanguard mattered. You had to find the route, and you had to identify the enemy.
Which was why I had no choice but to snag the shoulder of Lucy, who was still taking point.
She startled, a tremor running through her, and slowly turned to look at me, asking with her eyes alone what the matter was. I put a finger to my lips, demanding complete silence, and picked up a chunk of concrete that happened to be lying nearby.
We were on the fourth-floor ward. From the third floor down, it was the medical center. And that was the strange part. The same clumsy barricade we'd seen on the sixth floor was here on the fourth as well — and it wasn't blocking the central staircase. It was sitting awkwardly in the middle of the corridor.
The seventh floor was the one directly below the roof, and there was no barricade. The sixth had one. The fifth didn't. And then another one turned up on the fourth.
By this point, a little curiosity would have sparked. Maybe the third floor had none and the second floor had one? It was the kind of information that didn't matter at all for exploring a Dark Zone, the kind of trivia with no practical use — and yet it lodged itself in the brain with weird, stubborn precision. Why? Because human beings were animals of curiosity. And to verify a piece of worthless information like that, a person might well do something careless, just to check the third floor and the second.
I tossed the chunk of concrete toward the stairs leading down to the third floor.
The instant it landed, the flat landing snapped shut like a folding mattress folding cleanly in half. No — that was already well past folding mattress. It was a giant bear trap.
"…!"
Lucy carefully withdrew the foot she had been about to set on the stairs. If she had gone down without thinking, that folding landing would have pressed her into human jerky. Most people, seeing something like that with their own two eyes, felt a phantom pain so vivid it might as well have been real — even though they hadn't actually been caught. That was the tragedy of being an animal with too much empathy and too much imagination.
I gave Lucy's shoulder a couple of light pats, signaling that the silence could lift. She let out the breath she'd been holding and slowly turned to look at me.
"What is that? Why did the landing suddenly—! Wait. Is that a type of Native Species as well?"
"Calm down. That's not a Native Species. It's just an ordinary landing."
"There is no way that's an ordinary landing!"
Fair enough. A landing that turned people into jerky was not, by any reasonable definition, ordinary. Least of all when it was a murder trap designed to read human psychology and hit you where you weren't looking.
"I think I know how the people in this hospital vanished without a trace."
"…Anyone would, after seeing something like that."
"Right. They all fell for 'something like that.' Trying to escape the hospital. Or scavenging for supplies to stay alive. Or maybe they just couldn't hold on anymore, and threw themselves down in despair."
"But situations like that only happen in a Dark Zone, don't they? How could something like that occur in the real world…?"
"There's no way to know whether the events actually happened in the world this Dark Zone was based on. Who's to say if a Dark Zone just copies the architecture, or if it copies the entire incident that took place there? For all we know, it takes a perfectly ordinary backdrop and reinterprets it however it likes, just to screw over convicts like us."
The truth was, we might simply have been the ones in the dark. Ghosts and aliens might exist outright. Somewhere out there, a fantasy world where the old myths were still breathing might be real. If a Dark Zone was a one-off world — a splinter of that kind of possibility — it wasn't even that far-fetched.
Which was why I never explored a Dark Zone through human eyes, and never thought inside a human frame. In a world of one-eyed people, the guy with two eyes was the freak. So if I wanted to survive in a world of one-eyed people, of course I gouged out one of my own.
That was what a Dark Zone was.
"This Dark Zone is a Survival Theme to begin with. A Survival Theme is exactly what it sounds like — a Dark Zone that forces convicts to survive and extract by any means necessary. Flip that around, and it means there are gimmicks and Native Species in here that will use any means necessary to kill you. I thought it was too quiet from the moment we hit the hospital. That's on me for not briefing you properly, so I'll apologize."
"No. If anything, I was the one being complacent, basing my assumptions on the Dark Zones we've encountered so far. If something like this comes up again, please don't hesitate to tell me."
"Heh. If I were a university professor, I'd have kidnapped you as my graduate student already."
Wasn't there a saying that people capable of self-reflection were the ones who went far? At this rate, Lucy and I would be ready for a Mars-themed Dark Zone in no time.
"Anyway. This Survival Theme Dark Zone looks like a trap-escape setup. The objective is to get out as fast as possible, weighing fat rewards against your own life, in a Dark Zone littered with trap-type gimmicks."
"By 'fat rewards'… do you mean this Dark Zone pays out better than the others?"
"A Survival Theme pays at least one and a half times a normal Dark Zone. Sometimes it spikes as high as three. It's one of the Dark Zones with the nastiest screw-job gimmicks in the pool, so the farming is that much sweeter."
If this had been a future-city backdrop instead of a modern one, I might have needed a change of underwear. A future-city Dark Zone rolling as a Survival Theme would have dropped loot valuable enough to make your hands shake.
Still. This isn't bad either.
I lashed the parachute cord we'd brought down from the roof tightly around the stair railing and built us a route that would get us down without ever setting foot on a landing. This was a general hospital, and the central staircase was enormous — wide enough, with a yawning open well between the flights, that if you dropped straight down through that gap you would inevitably reach the first floor.
That was how we arrived on the first floor, and found ourselves facing a lobby far cleaner than I had expected. No scuffs from crowds of people coming and going. No sign that anything had been destroyed. Not even a sense of age or decay. It was that clean, stable feeling you got the moment you walked into the first floor of any hospital anywhere.
"This place is… remarkably clean compared to the floors above—"
Rrrring! Rrrring!
A telephone at the reception desk went off as if it had been waiting to cut her off. In a space this wide and this silent, a bell ringing out of nowhere had a way of startling you worse than someone screaming for no reason.
I drew my compound bow without hesitation, put the phone jutting up from the reception counter in my sights, and loosed.
A sharp thwip, then a crack. The phone shattered, and the noise that had been tearing the silence apart died with it. Peace returned to the hospital.
"…Judging by the pattern so far, that was definitely a call we weren't supposed to answer, wasn't it?"
"Wrong. That's a phone that fucks you if you pick up and fucks you if you don't."
"But we didn't answer it."
"More precisely, I forcibly severed the connection itself. I didn't just let it keep ringing until it went to missed-call, did I?"
Obviously a phone wasn't going to ring in a Dark Zone for any honest reason. But if you walked over to answer it without thinking, something would come out of it nine times out of ten. Ignore it and let it ring, and some other gimmick would trigger off that and screw us just the same. So I had taken the best available option: cut the call without ever touching the phone.
"Survival Theme trap gimmicks are almost all like this. They make sure you notice. They make sure you can't ignore them. And they make sure they catch you off-guard. So when you're dealing with gimmicks like these, don't think normally, and don't jump to conclusions. Rotate your thinking one more turn. Don't you let the Dark Zone climb up over the top of your skull."
"Rotate my thinking one more turn… I really do learn a great deal from you, Leader."
"What, I like having someone worth teaching."
I just wanted Lucy to grow fast enough to graduate into a first-rate human backpack, that was all.
A backpack that actually listened AND could fight? Yeah. I wasn't going to survive that kind of temptation.
We were heading for the front entrance, stepping past the reception phone that had tried to catch us off-guard and died a glorious death for its trouble, when Lucy and I both noticed it at the same time: beyond the transparent glass, it was far too dark.
Night had come early, yes — but that dark?
The thought crossed both our minds almost at once. And without either of us needing to say a word, we both stopped moving.
That was when it happened.
From the pitch-black landscape beyond the glass, stark white pupils bloomed in dense clusters, and every last one of them locked onto us.