Chapter 2: First Night
Marcus opened his eyes to gray light and the taste of blood.
He'd bitten the inside of his cheek during the night. His tongue found the torn skin, probed it, sent a lance of pain through his jaw. He spat red onto the concrete floor. Added it to the stains already there—two centuries of other people's misery, ground into the foundation.
His body ached in places he didn't know could ache. The jacket had done nothing against the cold. His joints felt rusted, his muscles tight as wire. The trembling from yesterday had faded to a dull vibration in his hands, manageable, present.
He stood. It took two attempts.
[BINDING PROGRESS: 22%.]
[HOST VITALS: POOR.]
[DEHYDRATION: WORSENING. FOOD RESERVES: ZERO. RADIATION ACCUMULATION: MINIMAL.]
[STATUS: MOBILE. RECOMMENDATION: TRAVEL DURING COOL HOURS.]
The green text had stabilized overnight. Less flickering. Sharper edges. Whatever the System was doing to his brain—to his soul, it had said—it was settling in. Getting comfortable. The thought made his skin crawl.
The highway stretched east toward Goodsprings. Pre-dawn light painted the desert in shades of gray and bruised purple. Cool air. Maybe sixty degrees. By noon it would be over a hundred.
Marcus picked up the empty water bottle. Shook it. A mouthful of sediment sloshed at the bottom. He drank it, chewed the grit, swallowed.
Then he walked.
---
[Highway 15 — January 16, 2290, 6:47 AM]
The road was worse than it had looked from a distance. Cracked asphalt gave way to bare dirt in places, the surface buckled by centuries of thermal expansion and neglect. Rusted car hulks dotted the shoulders—doors hanging open, interiors stripped, weeds growing through split dashboards.
Marcus counted his steps. It gave his mind something to do besides panic. Two thousand steps, roughly a mile. Goodsprings at three miles meant six thousand steps. He could manage six thousand steps. Probably. If his legs held.
At step eight hundred, the System chimed again:
[BINDING: 28%.]
[BASIC INTERFACE STABILIZING.]
A new window opened in his peripheral vision—a stat block, green on black, formatted like the world's most depressing character sheet:
[SOVEREIGN SYSTEM — HOST ASSESSMENT]
[STR: 5 | PER: 6 | END: 4 | CHA: 6 | INT: 8 | AGI: 5 | LCK: 4]
[SYSTEM LEVEL: 0 (UNBOUND)]
[HP: 42/100]
Marcus stopped walking. He read the numbers twice. The body he was wearing—the one with the scarred knuckles and the too-large boots—was slightly below average in almost every physical category. Strength of five. Endurance of four. Agility of five. In game terms, this was a character who'd lose a fistfight with a determined mailman.
Intelligence eight, though. That was his, he suspected. Whatever crossed over during the transfer.
"Great. I'm the smartest dead man in the Mojave."
He kept walking.
At step two thousand, the sun breached the eastern ridge and the temperature climbed. By step three thousand, sweat had soaked through the leather jacket. He stripped it off, tied it around his waist. The shirt underneath was thin cotton, stained, offering no protection from UV radiation that no longer had an ozone layer to filter it.
[RADIATION EXPOSURE: INCREASING. MINIMAL SHIELDING DETECTED.]
[RECOMMENDATION: LIMIT SURFACE EXPOSURE. SEEK SHELTER DURING PEAK HOURS.]
"Thanks. Very helpful. I'll just duck into the nearest Starbucks."
At step four thousand, his vision started swimming. Heat haze or dehydration—probably both. The road wavered. The car hulks shimmered like mirages. His feet felt like they belonged to someone else, moving on automatic while his brain floated somewhere above, detached and gray.
Then he heard the sound.
Not heard. Perceived. A scraping, rhythmic and wet, coming from behind a burned-out sedan forty feet to his right. Like someone dragging a bag of meat across gravel.
Marcus stopped. His heart rate spiked—he could feel it in his throat, in his wrists, behind his eyes.
[BINDING: 34%.]
[HOSTILE DETECTED. CLASSIFICATION: FERAL GHOUL. COUNT: 3.]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: MODERATE-HIGH GIVEN CURRENT HOST CONDITION.]
[COMBAT ADVISORY: FLEE IF POSSIBLE.]
The first ghoul came around the sedan's hood. What had once been a human face was now a landscape of raw tissue—no lips, no eyelids, the skull visible beneath translucent skin stretched tight as shrinkwrap. Its eyes were milky and unfocused. It moved in a stuttering lurch, head cocked, sniffing the air.
Two more emerged from behind the car. Slower. One dragged a leg. The other made a sound—not a moan, not a growl, something in between. Something that bypassed Marcus's rational brain and hit the lizard part underneath.
"Run."
He ran.
The boots—half a size too large, remember—caught on a crack in the asphalt. He stumbled, caught himself, pushed harder. Behind him, the ghouls shrieked. A chorus of broken-glass voices that said prey in a language older than words.
They were faster than they looked. The dragging one fell behind, but the other two ate ground in those lurching, spastic sprints—arms windmilling, jaws clacking. Marcus's legs burned. His lungs burned. The world narrowed to the road ahead and the slap of dead feet on asphalt behind him.
He couldn't outrun them. Endurance four. He was already redlining, vision tunneling, each breath a knife in his ribs.
A pipe. Rusted, three feet long, lying in the road ditch like God's own last resort. Marcus scooped it up without slowing, felt the weight—solid, heavy, good—and spun.
The lead ghoul lunged. Arms out, jaw wide, close enough for Marcus to smell the rot. He swung two-handed, baseball grip, everything from the hips. The pipe connected with the ghoul's skull. Bone cracked. The thing dropped sideways, twitching, legs kicking at nothing.
The second ghoul didn't slow. It crashed into him chest-first, ninety pounds of sinew and exposed muscle, and they went down together. Marcus hit the asphalt. His head bounced. Stars exploded. Fingers like dried sticks clawed at his jacket. Nails—or what was left of them—raked down his left forearm. Skin opened. Blood came fast and hot.
Marcus screamed. Jammed his right elbow into the ghoul's throat. It wheezed but didn't let go. Those milky eyes inches from his, that rotten-meat breath in his face. He got the pipe between them. Shoved. The ghoul reared back just enough for him to swing—short, brutal, no room for technique. The rusted end caught it below the jaw. Its head snapped back. Marcus swung again. And again.
It stopped moving.
The third ghoul—the one with the bad leg—reached him. He was on his back, covered in blood, shaking, the pipe slick in his grip. It lurched the final steps and dropped on him. Marcus got the pipe up horizontal, caught the thing by the throat, held it back with arms that shook and burned. Its jaws snapped inches from his nose. Snap. Snap. Snap. Patient. Relentless.
His arms gave out in centimeters.
Marcus twisted sideways. The ghoul's teeth caught air. He rolled, got a knee under himself, and drove the pipe into its eye socket with everything he had left. It went deep. The ghoul spasmed once, twice, then went limp—a puppet with cut strings.
Silence.
Marcus sat in the road, surrounded by three dead things, blood running down his forearm in a steady drip. His hands wouldn't close around the pipe anymore. His whole body vibrated like a struck tuning fork.
[COMBAT RESOLVED.]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: +25 XP.]
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: FIRST BLOOD — Survive your first hostile encounter.]
[REWARD: +5 XP BONUS.]
[HOST VITALS: HP 28/100. BLOOD LOSS DETECTED. LACERATIONS: LEFT FOREARM, DEEP.]
[IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION RECOMMENDED.]
A laugh tore out of him. Raw and ugly and halfway to a sob. An achievement. He'd just beaten three reanimated corpses to death with a pipe in the middle of a highway that shouldn't exist, and the thing living in his head gave him an achievement.
The laugh broke apart. He pressed his forehead against the warm asphalt and breathed until the shaking slowed enough to function.
"They used to be people."
The thought landed like a stone in still water. These things—these ghouls—two hundred years ago, they'd been someone. Had names. Families. Jobs. Favorite songs. Then the bombs fell and the radiation twisted them into something that couldn't remember any of it, that could only shuffle and hunt and snap its jaws.
His eyes burned. Not from the sun.
He sat up. Tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt. The cloth was grimy, probably crawling with bacteria, but the alternative was bleeding out on Highway 15 while the System offered helpful notifications.
The makeshift bandage turned red the moment it touched skin. He wrapped it tight, pulled the knot with his teeth, hissed at the pressure.
Goodsprings was visible now—a cluster of low shapes on the horizon, a mile out, maybe less. He could see rooftops. The angular outline of a water tower, listing badly to one side.
Marcus picked up the bent pipe. Wiped it on his jeans. Stood.
His left arm throbbed with each heartbeat. His head swam. His mouth tasted like iron and sand.
One mile. Two thousand steps.
He started walking.
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