A Thousand Unblinking Eyes
Even without a blade at the throat or a muzzle pressed between the eyes, human beings possess an instinctive ability to sense death. Some call it a sixth sense. Others call it the knack for reading killing intent, or the last thrashing of the survival instinct. What actually matters, though, is whether that gut feeling turns out to be right.
In that sense, Lucy's instincts and mine had landed with perfect accuracy.
"……."
"……."
Maybe the mistake had been provisionally writing off the hospital as a farm and approaching the front entrance. Passing the reception desk, or simply drawing physically closer to the main doors, had apparently served as some kind of trigger, and this bizarre trap had snapped shut.
If we'd decided it was too dark outside and carelessly swept a flashlight across the glass—or if we'd tried to shove the front doors open without thinking—what would have happened?
The outcome was obvious enough without seeing it. Traps that manifested as environmental gimmicks in the Darkzone existed almost exclusively to inflict catastrophic physical and psychological damage on convicts. If we had done anything to defy those hundreds—thousands—of staring pupils, we would have paid a price to match.
Anyone who hadn't seen this trap coming, or anyone who had but couldn't hold it together mentally, would already have stumbled backward or broken and run. And that would have been game over.
A full minute had passed since the trap activated, and those eyes were still locked on us, sharp and unblinking. That told me plenty. This thing wanted to squeeze us psychologically until we moved—any movement at all—before the timer ran out.
Unfortunately for it, I had far too much experience to fall for a cheap trick like this, and Lucy's instincts were frighteningly sharp. One minute. Three minutes. Five. We stayed planted where we stood, frozen like plaster casts, and did not move.
Whether the trap had simply worn itself out or we had outlasted its time limit, the pupils packed across that black field began to close, one after another, like eyes sinking into a deep sleep. When the last of them finally shut, the alien wash of black vanished entirely. Beyond the clear glass, the buildings and the road outside came back into view.
"Hah…!"
"You were holding your breath too?"
"Weren't we supposed to hold our breath as well?"
"All that showed up were eyes. If there'd been noses or ears, maybe. Eyes alone just means it was checking for an action trigger."
"Then you should have told me, Leader!"
"I didn't think you'd actually hold your breath. How the hell did you last more than five minutes?"
As far as I remembered, the world record for holding one's breath sat around eleven minutes. An ordinary person topped out at two, no matter how hard they tried. Athletes in certain sports with exceptional lung capacity could supposedly manage three or four without much trouble.
Lucy was not an athlete, and she had no assistive implants. Lasting more than five minutes on a held breath was impressive in an entirely different way.
"…My body is unnecessarily sturdy. I also grew up, from a young age, in a space that was half underwater."
"……."
What kind of place was Russia, exactly?
I was starting to find snowy, extra-spicy Africa genuinely terrifying.
At any rate, the relentless barrage of traps had finally eased off. We needed to get out of this hospital, soaked as it was in the blood of its victims.
I opened the front doors without a shred of lingering attachment and stepped out first. Lucy glanced back through the interior once, then clicked her tongue with obvious regret.
"A hospital like this would have produced quite a few expensive items. Leaving them all behind is a little disappointing."
"I feel the same way, but this time we don't have a choice."
"If it's not too much to ask, might I hear the reason? The Leader I know would have gritted his teeth and scraped up every expensive item in sight. You gave up more easily than I expected today."
"It's simple. This hospital is the kind of place that's easy to walk into and extremely hard to walk out of."
As evidence, I pointed out the traces of holdouts that had existed on certain floors.
"In a disaster, survivor groups that dig in usually seal the first floor and the basement tight against outside intrusion and use the remaining floors. That's the most efficient approach. But as you saw, this hospital only had sloppy barricades on the sixth, fourth, and second floors. More than that, the beds and medical equipment that staff and patients would have shared were left sitting there, strangely pristine. Meaning the people who would have used them had already been swept away."
"Ah. So that's why there weren't holdout traces on every floor—only on specific ones."
The people on the floors without barricades had tried to escape first and been wiped out. The survivors who watched that happen had gone into their clumsy holdouts because they had no other choice. Supplies and time had not been on their side, and the vast majority, I figured, had never made it out of this hospital. They had become sacrifices.
"A place like this is basically dead inventory—a spot you steer clear of. The rewards themselves are sweet enough to rot your teeth, but the cost-benefit of risking your life to dig through it is terrible."
I was farming-obsessed, yes. That did not make me stupid enough to walk into a death trap on purpose. I ran the numbers in my own way, and I only moved when the calculation came back this is the play.
Once I had laid that out, Lucy seemed to let go of whatever attachment remained. She followed me out of the hospital without another word of protest.
The front doors we had opened swung shut again on their own—as if the building had no intention of missing its next meal, should another piece of prey happen to appear.
Almost like the building itself is alive.
If a pack of Native Species had come pouring out, I would have been happy to butcher them. This, though—unless I could drop a ballistic missile on the place, there was nothing to be done.
A shame was a shame. Once you were dropped into a Darkzone, a convict had to keep moving.
We used the vehicles abandoned at random along the street as cover and the faint moonlight as our landmark, and we moved. We also did not forget, along the way, to rummage through the interiors of those wrecks for miscellaneous parts and whatever valuables their owners had left behind.
"Oh. A Rolex."
The genuine article, solid gold. As a usable item its value was extremely low, but as a collectible its trade value was enormous.
What kind of lunatic would pay real money for something like this? Surprisingly, the primary clientele for collectibles like these was not other convicts. It was the rich fools outside the prison.
As the EFD storyline progressed in earnest, collectors had started to appear—people who acquired rare objects pulled out of Darkzones through the prison or corporate intermediaries. Otherwise, how would convicts who spent every day hauling back piles of junk ever get their hands on real money?
Every market has demand, and so it has supply. Where there are people, money moves.
But this kind of farming was, in the end, just a lucky break.
We walked the main road in earnest, looking for a building that was not as dangerous as the hospital we had just left and that we could farm at a reasonable pace. We kept the flashlights off in case a Native Species made a surprise appearance, picking our way forward by faint moonlight and the soft fluorescence of a Glow Stick.
That was when it happened.
—Bang. —Bang.
"Gunfire confirmed, southeast."
"There was a gap between the shots. Means it's a fair distance out."
The reports had a fair amount of weight to them. Not a pistol, then—probably a shotgun or something in the rifle family. The handguns convicts used were mostly cheap 9mm pieces or homemade pipe guns; you couldn't expect a report that heavy from those.
Most likely the convicts who had jumped from the aircraft a beat later than we had landed wherever they landed and been thrown into something dangerous—or a trap had gone off and given away their position.
Could it have been infighting among the convicts? Not a chance.
By now most of the convicts had already chosen their affiliations, and I had heard they generally avoided picking fights with each other. Clans that were not even allied would go out of their way to ignore one another, worried about face and retaliation. Even the ones moving in parties held back on first strikes, because a bad rumor afterward would make it that much harder to join a party later.
In other words, unless you were a death-row maniac who lived for murder and plunder, convicts now treated each other less as tacit rivals and more as collaborators.
And if it really had been convicts going at each other, we'd have heard a mess of different gunshots all tangled together. So that is bait.
Staying faithful to my role as Pathfinder, I turned southwest instead of heading southeast on a living-backpack hunt.
"A lure, then? To draw us in?"
"Sharp as ever. Yeah. Anyone who knows enough about how Darkzones work and still opens up with a gun in the middle of downtown has something they think they can rely on. Either they're deliberately pulling Native Species so another party can farm and hunt more easily—or they're trying to reel in a small, isolated party like ours and hunt us instead."
"On the way to the Darkzone insertion point, I noticed a few people watching us carefully in the elevator. They didn't look like a particularly impressive party, so they were probably put up to it by another convict."
"When someone's out in front of you, you want to trip them. You want to smack them in the back of the head, too. This time it was so obvious I can't even laugh."
We would not hesitate to use our guns if we truly ended up in danger. But the shots that had just rolled through the dark had been far too staged. They hadn't sounded like someone hammering the trigger in a genuine emergency. They had sounded like someone announcing, I'm over here.
Those idiots seem to think a Darkzone is a convenient place to murder people and bury the evidence. A Darkzone is not that leisurely a location.
I pulled out a cheap telescope and checked the far end of the long four-lane road. The southeast was crystal clear. The southwest, though—a haze like pale fog had swallowed about half the street.
It was the same unidentified fog I had spotted while falling from the sky, the kind that occupied entire districts throughout the city, zone by zone.
An ordinary person would not throw themselves into suspicious fog like that.
But we had to keep in mind that the Darkzone we had been dropped into was no ordinary Darkzone.
"Lucy. If it were you, in an environment this restricted, with no clear exit in sight—where would you hide the extraction gimmick?"
"Hmm. Somewhere like that hospital we just left, I suppose. Or the dead center of the city, the place that looks farthest from any exit. Or… fog like that would be an excellent place to hide something."
"That's what I think too."
A Survival Theme Darkzone was, put simply, high risk, high return. Every Darkzone was like that to some degree, but Survival Theme ones took it to an extreme. There was a reason that even a fossil like me—a longtime EFD veteran—had only ever run them on purpose with a fixed party of elites.
If you farmed and made it out alive, the payout was enormous. Drag your feet or fail to read the room, though, and this place was an antlion pit you would never walk out of in one piece.
Lucy and I were the only ones who knew that. I was almost looking forward to watching the expressions change on the faces of everyone who still thought this was a normal Darkzone.
"Let's move before a trap goes off."
Noise. Light. Body heat.
Careful not to expose the three things you least wanted to advertise in a downtown stuffed with traps, we threw ourselves into the fog zone without hesitation.