El Sexorcisto Z! Read online

  The leveling made a difference. Now that I was 9 levels ahead at driving a motorcycle, I could control any similar machine well enough to keep balance automatically. As for my levels in weapon proficiency, my aiming and stability was higher by nature. Before this game, I’d never held a gun in my life. And while I was still ass at it, I could hold my own against some amateur hunters at the very least.

  These hands have killed. Virtual NPCs whose lives are nothing more than scripts and neural networks and, thus, hold no worth, but I still killed them. As I lay drying, I pressed my hands together and asked any higher power for help in this struggle. I didn’t like this fight. I didn’t like being in the game. The warmth on my face felt like blackened sunshine. Though I loved her dearly and hoped against hope that she was still alive, I could not help but hate my sister for sending me here.

  Once I was dried off, Olga helped me get dressed by literally putting clothes on me. I tried to stop her because I didn't want to feel like a helpless baby, but she insisted until I was fully dressed.

  I lost my jeans and t-shirt to an evil washing machine, so after I leveled up at one-handed weapons killing that son of a bitch, I decided to mingle in with Amville's usual crowd and start going old-school— I had a fine white suit, complete with a white fedora. I looked like a Texas pimp.

  Well, one of the girls' allies wanted them to recruit more pimps, so perhaps this was all part of their plan.

  To go along with my suit, Tatiana brought me a briefcase shaped like a violin.

  She said, "This is full of happy things, so be careful." I eagerly unlocked it to see what I could abuse, but I groaned when I just saw more guns.

  "You said there were happy things in here. Where are they?"

  "They're in there. It's just behind the felt—"

  Before she could finish, I turned the briefcase over, causing all the high-octane weaponry to spill onto the floor, and began breaking the briefcase down bit by bit. Behind the structure, I saw little dime bags and candy wrappers. "Jackpot!" And then began a morning of acidic purple neon dreams.

  Once that was over, I got down to business along with Ana, who had donned her old usual black catsuit— jet-black, shiny, and leather. Damn dangerous.

  She said, "So we're going to go downtown and find Doctor Shotgonavan, who should be able to parse through your memories to see if you have any brain damage, but before we do that, I wanted to stop by an old friend's pad and fill him in on some news."

  I corrected my fedora and said, "That's fine."

  She added, "Do you wanna go by car or walk there?"

  "We could walk. It'd give me some good mental map building skills."

  She squinted her eyes and met and thrust her hands onto her hips, bending forward to say, "We're seeing him because your brain is broken."

  I was looking into a mirror, straightening my maroon tie. "I'm not senile. You're the one who brought him up in the first place. The only gap in my memory is from before I woke up outside of Victory."

  Maria was munching on one last hash brown when she said, "About that. Why do you think Mya wanted to load you there?"

  I bristled at my sister's name. When I collected myself again, I turned to Ana and said, "Are we going to need any heavier weaponry in case the Rocket 88s try ambushing us?"

  She shrugged. "They don't own this city, so if they actually tried, they'd probably be turned into cheese by the police." This reminded me that we had somehow managed to escape a six-star wanted level in the past week. It took a while for the stars to evaporate into the digital ether behind the graphics, but once they did, the military and police presence on the streets fell exponentially until, finally, normalcy restored itself.

  The radio switched on again and started playing some Bing Crosby tune that had been all but on repeat over the past week. However, the song finished a few seconds after and switched to a new track that I recognized as Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare”. As if there was not enough gloom to the atmosphere, the doomy clarinets and horns drew tension like a knife across skin.

  Maria tried again, "Did Mya have any attachment to Victory? Or do you think she sent you there at random?"

  I sighed and said, "I don't know." Then I walked out of the bathroom, my tie fixed beyond any reasonable point, and grabbed a giant supersoaker-esque ray gun from the floor. It was sleek and sexy, pure retrofuturism if not outright Art Deco sci-fi. As to where it came from, I didn’t need to know. "What about Sam? Isn't he next door?"

  Maria was about to say something, but then her face took on strange shapes and she rubbed the back of her neck. "Yeeeeahh... about that..."

  Tatiana sat on my bed and said, "We actually don't know where Sam is right now. He should have been in the hotel next door, but—" She thumbed to Maria.

  "I tried sneaking to check on him, but he's never there. I think he may know we're here."

  My pulse increased. "What are we doing here, then?"

  "Don't panic," she said as she bit the side of her finger. "It's under control. If he wanted us dead, he'd have killed us by now. He'd have leveled the entire block, in fact. So either he's waiting for us to make the first move, or..."

  Ana finished for her, "He doesn't know we're here! But then, why wouldn't he be at his place, then?"

  Maria walked to the window. "That's what I've been wondering. I didn't want to tell you, Alex, because I didn't want to get you all worried about us."

  I blushed. She failed at that, because I started worrying about them to make up for lost time. To think we could have been wiped out all this time! And I wasn't buying that everything was under control.

  "You think that, maybe, he's on the run from someone else?" Tatiana said absent-mindedly. We all stopped and stared at her. Something about the way she said that rang to me as being drenched in worry. Or perhaps that's the wrong word— she sounded sure of a threat, but the way she said it made her sound as if she wasn't sure if she was sure. My thoughts weren't making much sense, but only because I was getting too concerned for the girls.

  I asked, "Why? Who else would be after him? Besides, you know, everyone with a heart."

  Tatiana sulked by the window and said, “Don’t think that I know anything more than I do, but it’s possible that there’s a third party at play.” She pulled an LSD-tinged lollipop out of Ana’s mouth and began sucking on it herself— how she could do that when Ana’s supposed to be a ghost, I’d never learn if I understood the previous pattern of events well enough. Then she pointed at me all coy like. “You keep angsting over a disappeared submachine gun, right?”

  That damn MP-40. What did I do that caused it to disappear? “Yeah.”

  “Well, listen here.” She leaned in and the lolli popped from her lips. “What if I said that someone else may be doing things beyond our attention? Someone who—”

  The phone rang. We all started. Even the ghost. I walked over and picked up the rotary phone, setting down my smartphone next to it.

  “Hello, hello.” And there were three deep and heavy breaths on the other line.

  BANG. Glass shattered. A bullet exploded against the wall. We all ducked. The window fell apart. The remnants of the bullet rolled near my face. By instinct, I grabbed it and winced from the heat.

  Olga equipped an assault rifle, one that I thought was an AK-47 until I noticed the complete black finish and wooden butt of a WWII-era STG-44.

  She crawled to the window, set the grip through a gap in the glass, and fired blindly. The rest of us screamed as we saw a long silver barrel slip into the room through the top of the window. That open maw aimed right at Tatiana. Someone on the other side let loose a wild, trilling yell. Olga fell back and fired straight up.

  Right on cue, the Who’s My Generation started on the radio. ‘Thanks,’ I thought to the universe, ‘I hate you.’

  Tatiana rolled behind the bed and I crawled over on top of her, shielding her with my body. Every fiber in my body hoped and prayed that she had not been shot. I whispered to her, "Are you okay?"
r />   She smiled and said, "Don't worry, Alex! I'm alright. It's exactly what I was talking about though, you know?"

  I looked up and out the window. The sniper barrel disappeared, and Olga kept firing the assault rifle into the air blindly.

  I asked, "Wait, this? You're saying this is part of the reason why that guy's gun disappeared?"

  She kept smiling and said, "Kinda."

  "Got 'im! I think..." Olga stood and kicked away a chunk of jagged glass. Ana sat on the bed and grabbed her lollipop off the floor and set it into her mouth.

  Then she yelped. "Ow!"

  Maria shook her head. "Picking up a lollipop off the dirty floor, and you even know that there's bits of glass everywhere to get stuck on it, and you put it right into your mouth. Just plunge it in there."

  And what did Ana do? Kept it in her mouth. "I had hash browns earlier, you can't blame me for this." The rest of the girls all groaned and rolled their eyes, and I was lost on what was going on.

  Perhaps because someone just tried assassinating us. "Hey, yo, did you know there's a killer outside?" I screamed.

  Olga looked out the window over her shoulder, shrugged, and slapped the lollipop out of Ana's mouth. "Seriously, stop doing that. And hold on a second— aren't you supposed to be dead right now? What happened to the whole dead thing?"

  Ana shrugged and look off into space. “Oh, I decided to respawn. Which is nice. But I forgot how itchy things can get."

  "When did you respawn?"

  “Turns out there’s an option for NPCs to respawn or not. And of course, I’ll stick by Alex’s side any day of the week!”

  All of the girls whooped to that one as if I was their king and they were loyal subjects. You know, that was nice to hear. But I didn’t care about that. You know what I was doing?

  I was dancing in place, jumping up and down point at the figure in black that picked itself up and darted away from the motel. "Killer!" I gasped over and over again. "Killer! Killer, right there, goddammit!" I snatched the STG-44 out of Olga's hands just so she could put her now freed hands on her hips, then rushed out the door and trained the iron sights onto the back of the villain. However, he moved at a terrifying speed like he was Spring-Heeled Jack. When I pulled the trigger, the gun clicked. No ammo. Then I ran back into the motel, threw the gun through the wall— that cost $200, which lifted from the hole and deducted itself out of our wallets to sap what little money we had left— and grabbed the ray gun.

  "Why aren't you doing anything?!"

  "Huh? Oh, right, the assassin. Yeah, you can go deal with that. Have fun," Maria said.

  Ana waved at me. "Bye, Boss!" Maria then shoved me out the door. I was about to jump through the broken window, but the frustration had peaked within me and I broke off running after the shape.

  Where had it gone? I knew not where to start. Defeated, I threw my ray gun at the ground and swore. When I thought I was finished swearing, I decided to invent some new swear words to keep it going.

  "Son of a fuzz-chewing funk-whore! Why does all this goofy bulging eyed bilge keep happening to me? This goddamn skittle-faced fuckwonton of a cold, gentle, piss-stained luck valley! Why?" I beat at the ground. "Why won’t they just do something that makes sense?!"

  Someone tapped my back. "WHAT?!"

  Ana beamed at me like an anime girl. "You're not wearing any pants."

  I looked down. There, on my legs, were my polka-dot boxers. This brought renewed swears, including mentions of hatred and misery. I could hear Dick Dale’s Misirlou kick off in my ears as I frantically blasted the world with my blackened hate. There I was, jumping up and down, jumping all around, punching up and punching down, thrashing and mashing like a chimpanzee.

  Ana kept laughing while Olga and Tatiana chortled. Maria shook her fist and said, "Keep your profile low, El Sexorcisto! Goddammit, you're drawing too much attention to yourself!"

  "Watch your mouth, missy!" shouted someone. He was an older gentleman in a suit much like my own (but with pants), a white panama hat with a thick brim, and a cigar hanging off his lips. “The public doesn’t need to hear your stinkin’ mouth.”

  Maria revolved to him and unleashed more swears than heard in ten years of a seaman's salty, wet career. She and the man got into a shouting match as Maria accused him of being sexist.

  "Damn it, woman, of course I'm a sexist. I enforce it." He snapped his fingers around her face before smacking her across the cheek. “Now take off your shoes and find a kitchen before I show you what for.” She returned with a fist to his nose. But still he did not fall. They brawled as I crawled on my knees, watching on with a quivering lip as the other women cheered on their comrade. The shape was still in the corner of my eye and I feared that, at any moment, another sniper bullet would rip through one of our skulls. That surfer riff was out of control.

  I sat there on my knees, throwing out my arms, screaming, "Why?! Why do this?!” My voice began breaking as I exasperatedly gasped, “Someone's trying to kill us! He's getting away!"

  Tatiana shook my shoulder. "Why are you so concerned about that, my good boy? You know that we can respawn now."

  I got to my feet and said, "But I don't know if I can. Sure, you can all respawn, but what if— bloop, one .45 to my head, that's it. Goodbye Alexei Sistar!"

  Olga giggled with her hand over her mouth. "This entire game is filled with ultraviolence, though. It's just how things work around here. I'm surprised you're so angry about this.”

  “Why are you not angry? We didn’t even know NPCs could respawn until a few minutes ago. What if she just got lucky?” I pointed to Ana, who waved.

  Maria and the man were engaged in a bare-knuckled brawl, and they were keeping up with each other. This despite the fact that the man was wide, muscular, and fit while Maria was trim and muscleless due to the standards of masculinity-centric advertising meaning that no female in this story was allowed to have any muscle tone whatsoever so as to not offend any penis in existence. But that didn't mean much to me because I just wanted to find the killer and make sure he wouldn't bother us anymore. Preferably through the means of several full metal jackets.

  Ana strolled on over and said to me, "Hey, listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I really need you to come with me already. I've got to get to Johnic in, like, half an hour."

  "Johnic?!" I was manic. She was frantic. "His name is Johnic?! Is he a hedgehog?"

  She pulled me away. "No, no, he's a rather cute fellow. Not as cute as you, of course."

  Oh, there it was. "Everything about this game is a wailing scrotum-sniffing fuck-weisel! Somebody liberate me from this ghastly piss-soaked mung-sucking pooch pump!" I beat at the air some more because even if I was El Sexorcisto!, I was very much willing to become El Bitchenstein if it meant I could get all this rage out of me. All that rage, and yet I just wanted to be a rat in a cage. Anything to escape the nonsense. AND THE WOMEN WERE HOPPING UP AND DOWN SHAKING THEIR BREASTS AGAIN, WHY?

  All had degenerated into a mess of insanity.

  What happened? Why did I fall apart? Jitters and nerves, maybe. Or maybe it was all because of the HASH browns and LSD mixing with my latent rage. I wanted to kill. I wanted to hate. I wanted to cry. I wanted to escape.

  And then it happened again. Something within me snapped until I was finally able to achieve a sense of Zen.

  I stood up, brushed myself off, proudly walked into the motel, put on my pants, stepped back out, picked up my ray gun, cocked the motherfucker, and grabbed Ana.

  "Let's roll."

  Known Unknowns

  As we strolled away from the pandemonium, Ana found the time to coyishly come up to me and ask, "Oh wow, it took you 3/4 of the last book to break. But now I see we haven't even hit the double-digit page numbers and you're already trying to prepare yourself mentally."

  "Patience and enlightenment, my dear neko," I said with a flawless Mid-Atlantic accent. "If you will, I am in full understanding of absolutely everything that plagues me even if I do not have t
he vocabulary with which I may describe my emotions. Yes, quite the frantic pace of consciousness I've suffered from ever since my awakening around Victory. Quite the... excessive fight to force sanity upon a world that thrives upon the insane. Would you not agree?"

  I turned around and she stared at me, her mouth twisted into two curls and eyes small.

  "...What?"

  "Elementary, my dear Ana. All of this," I swept my hand over the skyline, though the clouds hung so low that I scarcely managed to drift my fingers through them, "It is actually quite easy to understand. I understand now what I could not before. Indeed, we no longer require the efforts of your friend, the kind Doctor Shotgun-a-thon."

  "Shotgonavan, by the way. And yes, you do. You're mentally unstable, and he told me to bring you to him in the case you had such an affliction." She pouted and gathered herself in front of me. "So what if I was able to respawn? You're right, you know." After a few steps, she had to fall by my side as her backwards gait could not keep step with my brisk power walking. "You may not be able to respawn."

  "What a queer little man," I said.

  She turned and said, "Eh? How do you know?" at the man in question, one clad not so differently from myself though having chosen to wear navy blue over all white.

  "Standing out here in the elements. I might chance him as suspicious."

  Again, she looked at me. "What's with that funny accent you got, anyway? Do you just develop new personalities whenever you get angry like Sam?" Then she squished her cheeks together and gasped. "Oh, now it all makes sense! Johnic's gonna love to hear all of it be explained."

  With my ray gun over my shoulder and my other hand in my pocket, I turned to keep Ana in my sights. By accident, my eyes laser-focused right onto the T-cleavage of that catgirl ass. Even in the dark lighting of a tropical storm's overcast, I found enough detail.

  "What's this, you say? Sam suffers from anger issues as well? All this grief you put upon me and come to find out, I ain't as unique as I thought."