Live Bait
"I told you, dammit! A light sitting out in the open in the dark is suspicious as hell!"
"Shut the fuck up and run!"
The towers stood packed together like cells in a honeycomb, a vast forest of concrete tangled into a maze. Once you went in, getting out was another matter entirely. Maybe that was why the ones who had charged into the Apartment Complex so carelessly still couldn't find their way out, even after they finally understood that something had gone very, very wrong.
"Fuck! A fog zone would've been better than this! If I'd known those things were just wandering around out in the open—!"
"Save the bitching for after you're dead. If you're not, then run!"
"Shit! Shit!"
A typical four-man inmate squad had already been whittled down to three for a good ten minutes. Carelessness, bad assumptions, a single mistake, and a whole lot of panic — and just like that, they had lost a teammate. All they wanted now was to get out of this lethal game of tag.
A crash thundered behind them. What came charging after the three men was a four-legged creature with a body that glowed from within. Monster or not, it wasn't some nightmarish shape out of mythology. If anything, it looked unnervingly human — except for the head, swollen and round as a lightbulb, and the dull yellow light spilling from its eye sockets like a lantern left burning in the dark.
Picture it. A figure pouring out that unnaturally bright eyeshine, galloping on all fours, closing the distance with everything it had. Whether the thing was even human could wait. What mattered was that one of their own had been shredded in an instant by those claws.
"Hah— hah— why don't we just stand and fight?! We can't keep running forever!"
"You saw Number Four get torn apart with one swipe! That thing's strength is at least on the level of someone packed with artificial muscle fiber!"
Inmate #3's shout was met with fierce opposition from Inmate #2. Inmate Leader #1, running point at the front, didn't bother snapping at either of them. He just kept his eyes moving, hunting for a way out. He didn't say it aloud, but as the team's leader, he was of the same mind as Number Two.
Go at that thing head-on and we'll die like dogs. Best play is to set a trap and lure it in, or wipe it out in one shot with overwhelming firepower.
Unfortunately, they had charged in grinning the second they found this Apartment Complex. They had neither the time to rig a trap nor the kind of firepower that could put a monster like that down in a single burst. The leader at least had a handmade pipe shotgun — welded together from scrap pipe — but he had brought it to scare other inmates, not to fight something like this. Most convicts were so short on firepower that sticking a muzzle in their face made them surrender or run. Very useful. Threats, however, did not work on monsters.
And even if I actually pull the trigger, is there any guarantee I'd drop it?
Of course the odds were low. And it wasn't just the odds. The moment a gunshot cracked through this place, the whole area would turn into a living hell. He was not about to throw away even the slimmest chance of getting out.
A long, hissing wash of sound rolled through the dark, like surf dragging over stone.
And more than anything, this weird wave noise keeps gnawing at my head. It's pissing me off.
Glass exploded as he smashed the window in front of him with everything he had. He jerked his chin at Number Two and Number Three coming up behind him.
"We're jumping from here!"
"This is the third floor!"
"The emergency door's locked, and we came up the central stairs, so we don't have a choice. Or do you want to punch through that thing head-on and go back down?"
Number Two spat a quiet curse and vaulted the outer window of the third-floor corridor. There was a planter bed of soil below. Land it right and they wouldn't die.
Number Three was next. The leader, breathing in ragged, frantic pulls, waved him in as the man sprinted toward him.
"Run!"
"Aaaaaaah!"
The instant Inmate #3 poured every last ounce of strength into the leap, Inmate Leader #1 swung the shotgun stock without a shred of hesitation and smashed it across his face.
"Guhhk—?!"
"Shit! Number Three!!"
The leader didn't so much as blink. He went over the window himself amid a scream that was closer to a shriek.
"W-wai—!"
Inmate #3 had been about to jump defenseless when the blow caught him in the face and sent him sprawling. He was unlucky. The monster had him by a hair's breadth. In the instant before he dropped, the leader saw the thing — still running full tilt — drive its claws into Number Three's twitching body on the floor. The roar that followed was hideous. Number Three's body came apart like meat on a butcher's block.
"L-Leader! Number Three—!"
"...We were a step too late."
"...!"
The two of them put as much distance as they could between themselves and the building where a man's screaming and a monster's roaring were still tangled together. They hadn't even gotten their hands on anything worth real money, and already the team's fighting strength had been cut in half. Further exploration was impossible. Getting out, and getting out fast, was the only sane move.
Then how the hell do I pay off the debt?
The irony was almost funny. The second they put a step between themselves and dying, another crisis slid into his head. The leader glanced back at Number Two trailing him, his own face still half gone. Originally they had been set to finish their sentences this year and walk free, so they had burned through money like it was nothing and lived it up — until they were converted to death row overnight and became debtors in a single stroke.
We'd been dropped into a Dark Zone a few times already, so I figured we'd clear the debt easy this time too. Never thought it'd turn out like this.
He chewed his lip and kept his eyes moving, scanning without rest. The wave-sound scraping at his eardrums didn't matter now. He knew monsters like that were roaming this rotten Apartment Complex. That meant it was time to go hunting, if only out of spite. Not monster hunting. Human hunting.
"Number Two."
"...What?"
"You didn't lose the gear, right?"
"Got all of it. Including the kit Number Three was supposed to use."
"What happened to Number Three is a shame. The guy's stamina was so shit I figured something like this would happen eventually. But the living have to live."
Number Two nodded quietly. One way or another, the living had to live. Plenty of inmates died every day even back in the prison. Spend a few years in a cell packed with vicious bastards and you go numb even to the death of the man on the bunk beside you. Money came and went. An inmate's life was the same — here one moment, gone the next.
"Just the two of us keeping up the exploring and the farming is a stretch. But we're not the only ones targeting this Apartment Complex. Other inmates will be pouring in too."
"You want to go after them? That's still just the two of us. Won't that be hard?"
"Yeah. So we slip in and put one in the back of their heads. We tail the first inmates we find, and if we need to, we make contact and form a temporary alliance. Then when extract comes around, we do it the usual way. Not that hard, right?"
The leader lifted the shotgun as he said it, and Number Two had nothing to argue. The tactic had actually worked pretty well. If they were the type you couldn't easily get close to, you just tailed them quiet from the start, then at the end jammed the shotgun into the back of their skull and hit them. Done. Against fellow inmates, it was as close to a guaranteed win as you got.
"Fine. But how do we find other inmates first?"
"Simple. We track the ones who got baited by those monsters like we did and took heavy losses, or the ones getting chased in real time."
They had already been hit, so other guys were likely to get hit the same way. Use that. And more than anything, having lost two teammates to the monster, they didn't have any other options left.
A crash rolled through the complex from not far off. Both men whipped their heads around. It was louder than their smashed window by an order of magnitude.
"Looks like one's already taken the bait."
"...Let's move."
They crossed one maze of apartment towers and pushed into the next, hunting the source of the noise. Sure enough, they found a building with the same yellow light flickering inside that they had seen before.
Something was pounding. Hard. At that volume it was basically shouting here I am to the whole neighborhood, which made them hesitate for a beat — but the two of them had no way back either. They could barge in midway, pretend to help, and then put one in the back of their heads. Or they could just tail them on the way out. Maybe, unlike them, these guys would actually kill the monster. Even better. The payoff from a backstab would be that much bigger.
Shotgun in hand, the leader sent Number Two and his machete in first as they walked through the building's central entrance. Glass crunched under their combat boots, an irritating little noise, but compared to everything else flooding their ears it barely registered. Waves crashing. Something breaking. Just processing those sounds had already pushed their eardrums to the edge.
"There's a trace of the emergency door being cracked open."
"Someone went up that way. Let's follow."
The moment Number Two opened the first-floor emergency door and stepped through, his boot came down on something.
"This is...?"
A Glow Stick had been stepped on by a boot already studded with glass, the casing torn just enough to split. The viscous fluorescent liquid leaking from the tear would have reeked to high heaven, but they were wearing gas masks, so they never knew.
And that was the interesting part. Right then, the noise that had been shaking the emergency stairwell went dead.
A brief silence. Then, from the floor just above — or a little higher — came the sound of someone frantically coming down. No. It felt less like running and more like tumbling.
What slammed into the stairwell wall and burst into view was a familiar monster, the same one they had already shaken off once. It looked at the two of them with eyes glittering yellow, nostrils flaring like a beast. Then it growled, low in its throat, and let out a warped, piercing shriek — the same kind of roar it had used when it pounced on Number Four — and launched itself off the stairs to take them.
A razor-fine mesh, stretched taut in midair, caught the charge.
Viscous fluid and chunks of flesh spattered down across the goggles of both men's specialized gas masks. Stair railings, ceiling, fire hose cabinet, door handles — every surface near the first-floor emergency door was tied into the web. It was a kill zone, and even Number Two, who had eased the door open with care, had never seen it.
"Leader, this is—!"
"That's right. A trap meant for bastards like you. Though it ended up getting used for something else entirely."
A blade whispered against skin. At some point, an unidentified man had pressed a knife to the leader's nape, and he was the one doing the explaining.
"...Where the hell did you come from? If the monster was upstairs, that means you were upstairs too. You couldn't have come back down the central stairs... right?"
"The window was open, you moron."
He was right. The first-floor corridor window had been open from the start. They had just been in too much of a hurry to notice.
"Guys like you, if I leave a trail on purpose, you trust that trail completely and walk right in after it. That's why I set it up so carefully. Didn't expect it'd turn out like this, though."
"Wait! I think there's a misunderstanding. We were going to help you."
"Then you would've come charging up the central stairs, not the emergency stairwell."
He added, almost as an afterthought, that thanks to them he had had a hell of a time hopping down floor by floor from a fourth-story window. Then he jerked his chin at Number Two — a signal to drop the weapon. Number Two didn't. With the monster already dead, he seemed to think that if they put their minds to it, they could take at least one of them.
It did not go well. A throwing dagger came in from above, from the emergency stairs they had been sure were empty, and buried itself in the back of his neck.
"Aw. That's a shame. Looks like he was dreaming of a last-second comeback even if it meant throwing you away. Guess you weren't all that popular with your teammates."
"...Just kill me."
"Why would I?"
"What?"
The instant the words left his mouth, the knife tip punched into the vertebrae at the small of Inmate Leader #1's back.
"While we farm, you're going to draw those bastards' attention for us."