Solonik's Game

7) Realization

A searing pain tore through Billy, and he felt himself propelled backwards. Pain exploded in his back and his vision jerked violently upward, coming to rest on the room's ceiling. The pain was as overwhelming as the sense of confusion, his mind temporarily oblivious to the whats and wheres of his consciousness. He placed a gloved hand on source of the pain and looked downward toward expecting to see the hand upon himself. Instead, what he saw from a distance was the figure with the concealed eyes, splayed on the floor, hand to his ribs, cartoon blood beginning to pool around him. It felt like his senses were undergoing some wild circular aberration, some hallucinogenic feedback loop that caused him to feel the scene rather than himself.

"What the fuck?" his confused mind mustered. He looked up and saw the ceiling. He looked down and saw the apparently wounded figure. He felt warmth above the pain now, spreading about him. He regarded the bloody figure again from his vantage point and held a hand aloft. The figure mimicked his action, in reverse, like an inverted reflection. Now he held two hands aloft and the figure did the same.

He recalled the headset he wore, reached a hand to it and watched the inverted figure mimic the movement, the hand touching the concealed region of its face. He felt weak. Nausea began to wash over him, his breathing beginning to labor. Sweat pricked him, and this was no creation of the technology he wore. He lifted the headset from his eyes, and battled to reorient himself to the world around him.

He lay on the floor of his bedroom, aching back against his armoire. He faced the open door of his bedroom and blood was pooling all around him. He cast his eyes about the room but saw no one. How could it be? He raised the headpiece to his eyes again and found he was regarding a wall with an armoire and a felled figure at its base. The image was not fully faithful to the actual room. Like the figures in this game, the furniture and structures appeared through a filter, just manipulated sufficiently to make them unrecognizable as their normal counterparts.

He dropped the headset from his eyes once more and lifted his gaze upwards. Now the dawning of realization took hold, and confusion began to metamorphose into the vague beginnings of understanding. There was no one in the room but him, no one standing in the doorway. Rather, hovering silently like a grotesque mechanized insect was a rotor driven drone. It hung in the air, seemingly blind now, regarding the room with silent indifference.

The thing was little more advanced than the models he had seen flown to capture aerial photographs or deliver small goods. The structure was triangular, each point of the triangle giving rise to rotors that turned with silent and invisible speed. It hung there steadily, just slim enough to pass through the doorway. Beneath the twin rotors at it rear hung two miniaturized gun fixings. At the front, a narrow, lightweight arm with a basic claw mounted at its end.

Billy tilted the headset in his weakening hand, watched the thing pitch forward, then backward in time with the movements of his hand. With the drone facing the wall high above him he made the shape of a gun with his free hand, mimicked the pulling of a trigger. The action was remarkably silent, but the rear left muzzle flashed light and something struck the wall behind Billy, sending plasterboard and paint flecks showering his shoulders and clammy hair.

He tore the gloves from his hands now, began to crawl toward the door of his room, painting the carpet with a broad stroke of crimson as he moved. The insectile thing hovered impersonally above him as he edged beneath it and into the horror of the hall.

Feet from the bedroom door lay Emily, her body lifeless and mutilated. The filter that had turned the people of this world to generic sprites, and converted blood to pixels was gone now. Blood coated the walls, the carpets, Emily's tattered skin and nightdress. An outstretched hand gripped a teddy bear grimly, the hand locked and lifeless and white. He began to scream now but his shouts held little momentum, his life pouring from him through the wound in his side.

His strength was rapidly failing but he crawled onward through the warm red spillage, mind still desperately hopeful for some revelation other than the inevitable. The blood beneath his hands squeezed between his fingers as he moved. He thought back to the darkened room in the building that had been named 'Solonik's Game' and of the dark figure in the back room.

"Each game is unique."

He reached the head of the stairs, attempted to crawl downward but his arms buckled and he was sent down them violently, snapping a wrist as he went. He landed hard at the foot of the steps but the landing was partially softened by something beneath his screaming body. He lifted his head and stared into the lifeless face of his mother, her features hopelessly broken and disfigured, the contents of her skull pooling about her, matting her hair, soaking into the freshly sliced homemade bread beside her. A grotesque death sound transpired through the corpse's devastated face. Billy fell to his side by his mother and vomited the scant content of his stomach weakly upon himself and the floor.

"Bonus points for family members."

He forced himself to his elbows, the broken wrist blazing pain through his arm as it dangled limp, flopping with every movement. He plowed further through the carnage, tears streaming down his face and choking in his throat. Here now by the front door was the game's primary target, his head now little more than a loose flap of grotesque, glistening topology. Blood trickled down the front door, pooling at its base along with that that oozed from the corpse. The body on the floor continued to jerk unpredictably. It lay face down, the porch lamp casting him in a merciless fluorescent light. Every detail of the carnage was evident and amplified here, accentuated and undeniable like a grisly display of morbid art. His father's arm lay outstretched, the hand still grasping a single piece of blood speckled paper that undulated gently in the breeze carried in by the night air. Billy looked at it dreamily and blinked tears out of his eyes, temporarily correcting his kaleidoscopic vision.

"Kill the crooked politician."

With trembling arm Billy reached for the letter, barely managing to free it from his father's dead grasp. He rolled onto his back now, feeling the hecatomb beneath and all around him. His breathing was shallow now, his vision wavering. He pulled the paper close to his face, blinked hard, fought to focus. "Dear Congressman," it began. "The time of you and your corrupt cronies is coming to an end..."

"...escape the scene to succeed."

Upstairs, unseen to anyone, the display within the headset flashed violently. A message appeared in the center of what should have been Billy's vision. "Scene must be evacuated. Mission failure in ten seconds..." Silently, the drone rotors slowed, bringing the contraption to a silent landing within the doorway of Billy's bedroom.

Billy breathed a hitching breath; the fragments of the terrible puzzle only beginning to come together in his fading mind.

Upstairs, the thing's internal mechanisms began to divert their energy into a series of highly conductive heating coils that surrounded a reactive metal powder.

Billy Baxter closed his eyes for a final time, lying amongst the remains of his parents. By the time that his last breath expelled, leaving his chest flat and motionless and silencing the panic and confusion of his dying mind, the hovering thing upstairs was no more than a scorch mark on a bloody floor.

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