ROBERT LEADER
This month I'm putting up a piece of short fiction, especially for all you games players out there.
ZOMBIE KILL
Despite its limitations Zombie Kill was the best game ever and it was sweeping the world. All the young players in America were doing it, and in Europe, and China, and Russia, in India and in all those Third World little banana countries no one real had ever heard of. The game was awesome, and that was the really weird thing. It was so limited but it got you so deeply hooked. Somehow it just got into your head and wouldn’t let go. It was like some mind controlling addictive new drug, something that wrapped around your body and soul tighter than anything you had ever tried before. You just had to play with all the time you got.
Junior played Zombie Kill on his computer every night, always late into the night before he fell into a haunted, exhausted sleep. He rushed home from High School, gobbled whatever his mother had cooked without really tasting anything, and then went straight up to his room. He switched on his computer, booted up Zombie Kill, and was sucked straight into its enthralling world of blood and guts and gore.
He had heard about Zombie Kill at school. All the kids were playing it. All the kids were talking about it. Zombie Kill was the new craze.
Junior came home, googled it, and there it was. And it was free. He clicked download and brought it down on to his computer. He had nothing to lose. He could play for free and if the game wasn’t as hot and exciting as all the other kids said it was then he could just click delete. It would have cost him nothing, not even a cent.
But, of course, he never clicked the delete button, despite his initial doubts. That was the weird thing. The game was so limited, so basic, and if he had ever thought about it he would probably have wondered why he did not click the delete button and simply consign the game to offline oblivion.
The game had no choices. There was no choice of role-play. You were the zombie and you killed ordinary people. It wasn’t like all the other games. You couldn’t be a gung-ho military hero, or a spaceman, or a tough cop, or a street-wise kid who knew how to take care of himself. You couldn’t be any other sort of zombie either. There was no range of zombies with grotesque, distorted death’s head faces and diverse strengths and skills. There was just you, as a zombie, killing people.
And there was no choice of weapons. In most other games you could select a combat rife, or a woodsman’s axe, a claw hammer or a spade or a garden rake or any other tool that your average zombie might pick up to smash open faces and split heads. You didn’t get to use a futuristic ray gun or a rocket propelled grenade launcher. There was none of that. All you ever got to use was a big kitchen knife, like the one you could find in any kitchen in any house in America, like the one in your Mom’s kitchen downstairs.
Junior knew he should have got bored with Zombie Kill after the first five minutes, deep yawn, close your eyes, fall asleep, snoring bored. But he didn’t. And he didn’t know why. That was the weird thing. The definition, the description, the word weird, kept creeping vaguely into the back of his mind every time he played Zombie Kill.
And what was also weird, was that the word weird was the buzzword that resonated around the playground and the school corridors whenever the kids talked about their fascinating new game.
After a while Junior thought that he had spotted the cause, or part of it. Every time he as the player caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror or a window the reflected face did look strangely like a grotesque caricature of his own face. Windows and mirrors began to pop up more regularly in the game world. Somehow the computer seemed to have captured his own image and used it thinly disguised in the horror-warped face of the creature he was playing. The skull bones showed through, but somehow the general shape and design was his face, the lewdly grinning teeth were his, and so was the crooked curve of their smile. Now that was really weird weird.
Junior played on, wielding his on-screen kitchen knife with growing dexterity and skill. His fingers flickered over his command console faster and faster, cutting and slashing, severing limbs, decapitating, gouging and gutting with horrific, eye-popping realism. The game plot may have been basic but the graphics were stupendous. Blood spurted everywhere, deep and red, flowing and viscous. Heads rolled, stumps bled, gore dripped. Zombie Kill had its limitations but its special effects were mind blowing.
Junior was hooked. He didn’t want to play anything else. He just wanted to be a Master Zombie Butcher. Battle Cry, Call of Duty, all his other war and space and fantasy games were history. With this game it was not just visual. He could almost taste and smell the blood.
Junior was totally absorbed into his gruesome, on-screen world. He played and played and was unaware that there was more to the game than the clever trick of incorporating his own image into the flickering procession of windows and mirrors. The game was played on the night streets of a nameless city and there were plenty of glass shop fronts to return his gleeful grimace. For split seconds there was something else there in those dancing images, something that flashed and was gone so quickly under a drenching of gore that he was never fully conscious of what he had seen.
Subliminal advertising, the art of flashing tiny messages so small and so fast that only the subconscious brain could register them, had long been banned, but the programmer who had created Zombie Kill was not playing to the rules. The first blips were totally invisible on screen, but they were recorded and registered deep in Junior’s head. He just didn’t know about them yet.
The program offered him a vast variety of victims and kept count of the ones that he deliberately sought out. After a while it began to offer him more of the same. It could have offered him exclusively blacks or whites, or any racial group, male or female and any hair or skin coloring and any age group. Eventually, when the program was fully refined, the game-master would decide which sexual or ethnic group should be exterminated, but it was still in the experimental stage and so it allowed the user to choose his or her special hate group.
In Junior’s case it was high school girls with blue eyes and long, loose blonde hair. In particular it was Mary-Anne McCluskey who had spurned his first clumsy attempts to impress and date her. She had scornfully turned him down and had even told him to go and play with his own dick. Worse, she had said it in front of a group of her friends and they had all laughed at him as his face turned red. She had pressed all his repressed hate and fury buttons. His hurt and humiliation burned hot and savage inside him He could neither forgive nor forget.
With simple mathematical logic the program deduced where his antagonism lay and offered him more All-American, blonde-haired, blue-eyed schoolgirls as victims. Junior carved them up with a frenzy of satisfaction that could not be abated. He erased Mary-Anne McClusky’s face a thousand times with oceans of blood but it was never revenge enough.
The game-playing hours added up until they passed a crucial level and an encrypted instruction was activated. That was when the subliminal messages began to flash more slowly and in larger letters. Soon he could almost read them.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.”
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
The message began to be repeated with every tenth kill he made. With every stab and cut and slash the screaming Mary-Annes dissolved into rapidly blossoming petals of gore. They screamed silently, as though the game did not want its player to be disturbed. The graphic blonde girls shrieked through slashed mouths with no sound, but the subliminal messages promised that their screeching could be heard.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.”
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
The flashing letters were unmistakable now but they had become familiar long before they became visible. They were part of the game and somehow it seemed okay. Junior ignored them, or so he believed. Indelibly they were imprinting themselves deeper where they had begun, down in the darkest depths of his psychic being.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.”
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
And then they changed color, from black to red. They would have been more difficult to read between the swirls of gore, but now he knew them by heart. He could see the repeated message without having to read the letters or even the words.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.”
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
The message hammered home and at last the game began to lose its appeal. His head was lost in the virtual world but at the same time he was still sitting on a chair and confined to his bedroom. His fingers danced ever more quickly across the console buttons, controlling the images, killing the images, cutting up the Mary-Annes, but somehow it was not the same as holding a real knife. He couldn’t actually smell the blood. He couldn’t feel the hot red splatters as the virtual blood flew across the screen.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
Junior stopped playing. The images of prospective victims still darted across his computer screen. They fled or advanced along the darkened streets, appeared from and disappeared into black alleyways. But the red, dripping knife he controlled remained immobile in the bottom right hand corner. It wasn’t enough anymore. It was just a kid’s online game. And he was being offered something more. The message that had flickered in and out of his vision had suddenly stopped. The words were now static, filling the screen with their urgent promise.
“You can do this for real.”
“Try it and smell the real blood.”
“Hear your victims scream.
“There is a kitchen knife in the kitchen you can use.”
Junior stared, his eyes glazed and unblinking. Slowly he pushed back his chair and stood up from his play station. He turned and walked slowly from his bedroom. He stood for a moment on the landing, listening to the sounds coming up from the TV set in the living room below. His Mom and Dad were in there, watching Judge Judy or some stupid reality show where stupid people argued their stupid arguments on stage before a studio audience. My girl friend slept with my boy friend. My boyfriend slept with my other boyfriend. All that stupid stuff which was all they ever watched.
Junior padded silently down the stairs. He had taken his shoes off earlier and his socks made no sound on the soft carpet. The door into the TV room was partially closed. Mom and Dad had their backs to him anyway and were engrossed in the pseudo drama that was being played out on their screen. Junior walked past the half closed door and went into the kitchen.
The kitchen knives stood tall in a black box full set that stood at the end of the black marble worktop. His mother kept a clean kitchen and everything in here was black marble and shining steel. The handles of the kitchen knives were all polished black hardwood. Junior selected the largest and drew it from the block. It was twelve inches long and almost two inches wide, a heavy vegetable chopping knife that was razor sharp along one edge.
The subliminal message was right. He guessed that there would be a knife like this in almost every kitchen in the United States, maybe every kitchen in the whole wide world. It was the kind of knife that featured as the only weapon for a player on Zombie Kill. It felt good in his hand, real good, much better than a console.
With the knife in his hand Junior walked into the hall. He opened the front door, stepped through and carefully and quietly closed the door behind him. It was dark in the street outside. The time was somewhere after midnight. He listened and heard shrieks and screams. Terror ruled the night. He guessed all the brain-washed kids must have been playing Zombie Kill as much as he had. They had all reached the same point.
He headed down the steps to the street, hearing those gut-wrenching sounds of pain and terror, some far away, some closer. There were blood splashes on the steps and on the pavement and trickles of blood running down the gutter. His free hand ran down the short stair rail and felt something wet and sticky. It was as though someone had reeled against it, bleeding, dying. He brought his hand to his face and smelled blood, fresh blood. He tasted it and savored it.
He gripped his knife tighter. His heart hammered faster. He was alive. Really alive, and he was hunting.
He was grinning ecstatically.
He was going to play Zombie Kill.
The ultimate Zombie Kill
FOR REAL.
YEAAAHHHH