Blow Me Down (3 page)

“Piece of cake. I was an officer in, like . . . well . . . really quickly.”

I knew how those computer games worked—to advance you had to open a secret passageway or collect some object or run over a magic spot or something silly like that. It shouldn’t be much of a challenge, and if it kept the peace, it would be worth the sacrifice of my time. “Hmm. All right, since it means so much to you, I will give the game an hour or so and become an officer.”

“Woohoo! You can use my laptop—it has the game client on it already. I’ll bring it and the VR parts down here right now. You can play on the battery so you don’t have to be plugged into the wall in case the power goes out. Thanks, Mom!” She gave me a quick hug before running out of the room. “I’m going to go tell my captain really quickly that you’re logging on later, so if he sees you he’ll be nice to you and stuff.”

“Wait. Tara, I didn’t mean this second—oy.” The door to her bedroom upstairs slammed. I started to roll my eyes again but switched to a flinch when another loud peal of thunder and gust of wind made the windows rattle. As quickly as I could I finished typing up the press release, e-mailed copies of it to the organization’s director, the media contacts, and my work e-mail address, then made a quick backup of all my recent work.

“You are so anal it’s not even funny,” Tara said fifteen minutes later as she deposited her laptop on my desk, plugging the power cord into the wall. On top of it sat a pair of thick black wraparound glasses.

I filed the CDs I’d burned with the week’s work away with the other backups, one in the collection organized by date, the other in the one organized by subject. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth having backed up. Why are you plugging that in? The storm is almost on top of us.”

We both were silent while another
flash-boom!
shook the house.

“I don’t get a good connection to log on to the system on the battery. It’s just to log on. Once you’re into the game, you can unplug it. Here is the VR unit. Cool, huh? Looks just like a pair of shades. There’re speakers built into the part of the glasses that sits behind your ears, so you hear everything, and here”—she flipped down a fiber-optic-sized black extension from the sides of the glasses—“here is your microphone. The software has speech recognition capabilities, so you can talk to other characters just like you normally would. It’s so totally cool.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to avoid her as she shoved the glasses toward my face, but it was useless. A few seconds later I was wearing the VR glasses. “I can’t see anything.”

“They’re not turned on. Here, let me do it. Okay, you’re set. Gotta go do the rest of my homework before we lose the lights,” Tara called over her shoulder as she hurried out of the room. “It’s all set up for you to log on with a new name, and I told Bart to watch out for you. Oh, and I put you on the list of workers at my weavery, so you can look around there. Have fun!”

“Hey! Don’t think I don’t see through your hit-and-run tactics! I know full well what you’re doing!” I sighed as her laughter spilled down the stairs after her. “Manipulative little so-and-so,” I muttered as I turned my attention to the colorful screen that seemed to float in the air before me.

A game client screen that read “Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game” blinked slowly at me.

“Right. Let’s get this over with.” I reached out somewhat blindly for the keyboard, able to see only dark, vague shapes of the computer and desk behind the virtual images that danced before my eyes. “Name . . . Amy Stewart.”

“That’s supposed to be your pirate name, not your real name,” came a slightly tinny, ethereal voice drifting from the heating duct in the wall.

“Do your homework and stop listening at the heater,” I yelled, backspacing over my name. “Pirate name. I don’t have a pirate name. Um . . .” I tipped the glasses down my nose and looked around the room for inspiration, my eyes lighting on a Van Gogh print. “Earless . . . er . . . Erika. That sounds very piratical.”

I typed in the pirate name, picked a few character traits (female, blond, with a short bob, and a Rubenesque, curvy body type that most closely matched my own). As I was about to click the CREATE PIRATE button, a tremendous crash of thunder hit simultaneously with a blinding flash of lightning. Upstairs, Tara shrieked as a second crash rocked the house. The lights flickered into a brownout. Mindful of the cost of her laptop, I leaned across the computer and grabbed the power cord at the same time another flash of lightning struck. As I pulled the plug free, a blue arc of electricity shot from the outlet, connecting with me at the same time another deafening roar of thunder shook the house.

I must have hit the RETURN button as I jerked with the flow of electricity through my body, because the last thing I remember seeing before I sank into an abyss of darkness was a little spinning sign on the game screen saying “Entering Buckling Swashes. . . .”

—Ibid, Act I

It was the sheep snuffling my face that woke me up. I didn’t realize it was a sheep at first, not being in the habit of keeping sheep in my house, where my last conscious moment was, but when something moistly warm blew on my face, followed by a horrible stinky scent of wet wool, my eyes popped open and I beheld the unlovely face of a sheep staring down at me.

“T’hell?” I said groggily, pushing the sheep face out of mine as I sat up, immediately regretting the latter action when the world spun around dizzily for a few seconds. As it settled into place I blinked at the hand I’d used to shove away the sheep—it tingled faintly, as if I had whacked my funny bone. I shook it a couple of times, the pins-and-needles feeling quickly fading . . . but that’s when my wits returned.

“What the hell?” I said again, a growing sense of disbelief and horror welling within me until I thought my head was going to explode.

I used the rough wood wall behind me to help me get to my feet, my head still spinning a little as I looked around. I was in a short alley between two buildings, half-hidden behind a stack of what looked like whiskey barrels, the sheep who’d been snuffling me now engaged in rooting around through some garbage that slopped over from a wooden box. Sunlight filtered down through the overhang of the two buildings, spilling onto a lumpy cobblestone street behind the alley. Vague blurs resolved themselves into the images of people passing back and forth past the opening of the alley.

The game . . . the virtual reality game. I was seeing images from the game. I put my hand up to my face to pull off the VR glasses, but all my fingers found were my glasses-less face. Had they gotten knocked off when I got the shock from the computer? If so, why was I still seeing the virtual world? I lurched my way forward down the alley, stumbling once or twice as my legs seemed to relearn how to walk.

“What the . . .
hell
?” As I burst out into the open, I staggered to a stop.

Two men in what I though of as typical pirate outfits—breeches, jerkins, swords strapped to their hips, and bandanas on their heads—walked by, one giving me a leer as I clutched the corner of the nearest building.

Beyond them, a wooden well served as a gathering place for several women in long skirts and leather bodices, each armed with a wooden bucket or two. Pigs, sheep, chickens, dogs . . . they all wandered around the square, adding to the general sense of confusion and (at least on my part) disbelief.

A couple of children clad in what could only be described as rags ran past me, each clutching an armful of apples. A shout at the far end of the square pierced the general babble, what appeared to be a greengrocer in breeches and a long apron evidently just noticing the theft of some apples.

It was like something out of a movie. A period movie. One of those big MGM costume movies of the 1950s where everything was brightly colored and quasi-authentic. I expected Gene Kelly to burst singing from a building at any minute.

Instead of Gene, two men emerged from a one-story building across the square, both staggering and yelling slurred curses. One man shoved the other one. The second man shoved the first one back. Both pulled out swords and commenced fighting. The first man lunged. The second screamed, clutched his chest, and fell over backward into a stack of grain sacks. The first man yanked his sword out, spit on his downed opponent, and staggered away around the back of the building, wiping his bloody sword on the hem of his filthy open-necked shirt. A wooden sign hanging over the door he passed waved gently in the wind—a sign depicting a couple of mugs being knocked together beneath the words INN COGNITO printed in blocky letters.

No one bustling around the square gave the dead man so much as a second look.

“What the hell?”
I shouted, goose bumps of sheer, unadulterated horror rippling along my arms and legs as I ran toward the body lying sprawled on the dirty grain sacks. I was about to go into serious freak-out mode when I remembered that none of this was real—it might look real and sound real, but it was just a game. No one had actually been murdered in front of me. It was just a bunch of computer sprites and sprockets and all those other techno-geeky things that I didn’t understand. “Okay, stay calm, Amy. This is not a real emergency. However, I’m not willing to lose points or bonus power chips or whatever this game hands out for acts above and beyond the norm. Let’s approach this as a non-life-threatening emergency, and go for the next power level. Yeargh. How on earth did they manage that?”

As I squatted next to the dead man, the stench from his unwashed body hit me. I pushed away the skitter of repugnance as it rippled down my back, and rummaged around the dusty recesses of my brain for any knowledge of first-aid techniques. “Thank God for all of those first-aid classes I arranged when Tara was in middle school. Let me think—a sword wound. CPR?”

A glance at the sluggishly seeping hole in his chest had me eliminating that option. There was no way putting pressure on that would help matters. “Mouth-to-mouth?”

The man’s smell took care of that as a choice. “Hmm. Maybe I should apply a splint?”

I looked around for something to act as a splint but didn’t see any handy splintlike boards, not to mention I wasn’t absolutely certain that a splint was a suitable treatment for a sword wound. “Okay. What’s left? Er . . . raise his feet higher than his head? Yeah, that sounds good. That should stop the flow of blood or something. Inhibits shock, I think.”

I scooted down to grab the man’s mud-encrusted tattered boots, intending to swing them around to a stack of grain bags, but was more than a little disconcerted when one of his legs separated from the rest of his body.

“Aieeeeeeeee,” I screamed, staring in horror at the limb that hung stiffly from my hands.

Just as it was dawning on me that the leg was a crudely fashioned wooden prosthetic and not the ghoulish severed limb I had first imagined, a whoosh of air behind me accompanied the loud slam of a wooden door being thrown open. Before I could do so much as flail the false leg, a steel-like arm wrapped around my waist and hauled me backward into the inn.

Air, warm and thick and scented heavily with beer and unwashed male bodies, folded me in its embrace as I was dragged into a murky open-beamed room.

“Found me a wench, Cap’n,” a voice rumbled behind me. “Toothsome one, too, ain’t she? Don’t look like she’s been used overly much. Can I keep her?”

Now, this was taking virtual realism a bit too far. I pushed aside the issue of how a game could make me smell things and feel the touch of another person, and beat the hand that clutched me with the booted end of my fake leg. “Hey! I am not a wench, and I am not a puppy to be kept, and how dare you invade my personal space in such a manner! Do it again, and I’ll have you up on charges of sexual harassment and physical assault so fast, your . . . er . . . hook will spin.”

The man whom I’d surprised into releasing me stood frowning at me for a second before glancing to the right, where tables—some broken into kindling, others rickety but mostly whole—lurked in a shadowed corner. The dull rumble of masculine voices broke off as the man asked loudly, “I don’t have no hook, do I, Cap’n?”

“Nay, lad, ye don’t,” a deep voice answered. One of the darker shadows separated itself from the others and stepped into the faint sunlight that bullied its way through two tiny, begrimed windows. The man who swaggered forward was an arrogant-looking devil, with thick shoulder-length blond hair, a short-cropped goatee and mustache, and dark eyes that even across the dimly lit room I could see were cast with a roguish light.

He was a charmer through and through—I knew his kind. I’d married one.

“I believe the lass was being facetious, Barn. As for yer request—we’ve no need for a female on the
Squirrel
. Grab yer things and we’ll be off, mates. We’ve pillagin’ to do.”

The man who’d grabbed me—a blocky giant with black hair and a huge beard—frowned even harder. “What be facetious, then?”

“Later, Barn.”

The behemoth named Barn looked back at me, disappointment written all over his unlovely face. “But the wench—she’s mine. I found her. Ye’ve said we could keep what we pillaged.”

“She’s probably got the French pox,” the arrogant blond said as he started for the door, giving me nothing more than a disinterested glance. “We’ll find ye a woman a little less tartish at Mongoose.”

“Oh!” I gasped, outraged at the slur. I wasn’t going to stand around and let some cyber-gigolo insult me. “I will repeat myself for those of you with hearing problems or general mental incapacity—I am not a wench, nor am I a tart. I do not have the pox, French or any other sort. And I would rather go without my PDA for an entire year than be with
that
man.”

The blond captain paused in the act of following Barn out the door, slowly turning to face me. “What did you say?”