Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 29

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  Yes, Nikolai believed magic might just be science we don’t understand yet.

  So he’d embraced the power of the printout. But he had his limits.

  “This is bullshit!” he exclaimed.

  Darla was inclined to agree with him. The implications of the newly legible entries she’d just read were preposterous. Impossible. Inconceivable.

  The information was still just a jumble of subject matter, shifting from topic to topic every few sentences, and Darla had been too scared and too rushed to parse and censor the document on the fly. She’d just read it aloud, in all its absurd glory. Alas, the consensus on the meaning of the last few entries she’d read had really rubbed Nikolai the wrong way.

  “You think making up crazy story saves you? You think you scare us and we not crush head between boat and dock?” Nikolai went on. “No more!”

  “Vzyat’ikh!” he shouted, with a violent backhanded wave. The heavies seized Darla and Merrick again, dragging them toward the door.

  If what she’d just read was true, it might not even matter if her head ended up between boat and dock. But she wasn’t convinced it was true. And neither was her amygdala, which dumped more liquid fear into her bloodstream. She kicked and screamed and tried to break the iron grip of the man hauling her toward the door. But there was no more stalling. As the man reached for the door to open it, she knew it would be the last door she ever walked through.

  But she didn’t walk through it. Because I did. And I brought along a hand truck full of Russian gate guard and a whole bunch of vicious flying tomatoes.

  ###

  The gate guard had rounded the corner of the dumpster expecting to find me near death. Instead, thanks to my Life-O-Meter having had a moment to rebound, he’d found me flying through the air to tackle him. My plans for dispatching him weren’t particularly well-formed, but in the end, it didn’t matter. As we both crashed down to the ground, the back of his head bounced off the pavement and he went limp.

  As my choices had dwindled to dealing with the RIP threat first or dealing with both at once, I’d remembered how handy the human shields had been during my battle with Becky Borgna. Granted, the guys in the warehouse weren’t half-baked NPCs like the kids in the classroom simulation. They were real-life dudes who would be decidedly less cooperative with my plans. But I didn’t want to overthink it. I just bungie corded the unconscious guard to a hand truck I found behind the gatehouse and hunkered down beside the warehouse door with his gun in hand.

  The tomatoes had come hurtling out of the ether not long after, at 10:16 on the dot. I wasn’t overly surprised at the game’s choice. I knew whatever was coming would be inspired by something I hated. So, yeah, tomatoes—but with gleaming white razor teeth not unlike the chompers the Cutie Pants dolls had been sporting. I heard them before I spotted them, via a rumbling chorus that reverberated in my head, repeating a single, pulsing syllable: nom nom nom nom nom nom. Everything about the flying veggies suggested that they wanted to eat me nearly as much as I didn’t want to eat them.

  It was ludicrous.

  It was terrifying.

  It was perfect.

  As they beared down upon me, I turned and kicked in the warehouse door.

  Darla, Merrick, and their escorts stumbled back from the door as it burst open. Seeing Darla alive, I felt relief surge through me, fortifying my reckless resolve. I saw my relief reflected back in her eyes, along with a hefty dose of confusion. How had I found my way here? What exactly was my plan? And why was I pushing a sleeping Russian on a dolly?

  I gave her a wink, because that’s what any action movie script worth its salt would have called for. Then I pushed off and rolled the hand truck forward with the bungie-bound guard jostling about like a dozing Hannibal Lecter and the storm of flying tomatoes flooding in behind me.

  I’d visualized the next few minutes with crystal clarity. I’d wheel my prisoner of war through the warehouse like a battering ram, blasting away with his machine gun, now propped over his shoulder like a tripod. I would lay waste to whatever came my way, be it Russian thug or garden vegetable, while playing them against each other. It was 80s action time. And not TV-grade, A-Team style stuff with cutaways to the bad guys clambering to safety after miraculously surviving a dozen rounds of M-16 fire. This would be R-rated, big screen-grade, with a body count to rival all the Rambos rolled into one. Shelving my moral compunctions through force of will, and leaning into the fantasy, I pictured my enemies cartwheeling through the air around me as hundreds of empty bullet casings sprang out of the ejection chamber of my rifle like hot rivets—all in spectacular slow motion, with inexplicable explosions in every quadrant of the warehouse.

  Yeah, it would have been glorious. If I’d ever fired a machine gun before.

  As the two Russians in front of me threw Darla and Merrick aside and raised the rifles slung around their shoulders, I pulled the trigger on my rifle. But I missed both guards as the recoil sent me wheeling over backward, jerking the hand cart along with me so that it tipped over and landed on top of me as I tumbled to the ground. As I hit the deck, most of the swarm of tomatoes missed me and flew on by. But two of them managed to veer down toward me sharply, nom-nomming their way into my clavicle like a couple of giant ticks.

  As I thrashed around, clawing at them, the hand truck rotated ninety degrees, giving the two Russians in front of me plenty of openings to pour bullets into my legs and abdomen.

  My plan wasn’t off to a great start.

  I grasped the tomatoes burrowing into my shoulders and ripped them free. Seeing them close up, I noticed two tiny pinhole indentations above their chomping jaws and took those to be nostrils. With no eyes, it was clear they navigated by smell—no doubt calibrated to my scent.

  I hurled them toward a nearby wall, expecting them to burst like water balloons, as I’d sensed a mere three points on each of their Life-O-Meters. But I was dismayed to sense zero damage done as they bounced right off the wall like tennis balls. Then they joined the rest of the pack as it circled back around from the far end of the warehouse.

  It would have been nice if the tomatoes had served as a distraction to the two gunmen standing over me—but apparently the RIP mindwipe machine was reacting in real time. The gunmen seemed blind to the tiny crimson Pac-Men, as they enthusiastically continued firing their guns. Blood spatter was exploding out of me like fireworks.

  My Life-O-Meter was doing its best to buffer the bullet wounds, and the tomato damage I’d taken had made its job harder. But not that much harder. I was surprised at how minor a dent the little red demons had made. Maybe Robbie’s advice to use my Freebies to bump up my Skin Thickness to twenty-six was paying off. I still had a shot at Full-Johning this thing.

  I brought my right leg up and hooked my toe over a section of the hand cart’s frame. Then I kicked out hard, spinning the cart and its slumbering passenger around in an arc that caught both the gunmen in the shins.

  Then, using the momentum to roll to my feet, I launched myself forward. One of the guards was still on the ground, but the other had just clambered back up. As he attempted to raise his rifle, I grabbed his shirtfront, pirouetting around to put him between me and the tomato swarm.

  My proximity made it impossible for him to aim the rifle directly at me, as it was pinned between us. But a few rounds exploded from the barrel and one of them ripped into my thigh. Meanwhile a second wave of guards advanced and grouped up to my right so they could fire on me without hitting my new prisoner. One of them hit me in the face. Specifically, in the cheek. Who shoots a guy in the cheek? The bullet passed all the way through my mouth, knocking out a few of my teeth and I could smell the charred flesh from the entry and exit wounds.

  If I’m being honest, it kind of rattled me.

  But I could already feel the skin mending and the teeth miraculously re-growing. I had no idea how the firing squad had rationalized my borderline bullet immunity. But that wasn’t the big question. The big question was: Would the tomatoes do what I was hoping they’d do? The guards may not be able to see them, but that didn’t really matter. Darren had ended up in the hospital after his run-in with Marty—even if his memory said he’d fallen down the stairs rather than getting tire-ironed. Hence, it was a logical bet that the carnivorous veggies would, in fact, affect the guards. But then again, this game sucked. So as I hugged the guard tight while getting riddled by bullets, I thought there was a 50/50 chance the damn tomatoes would phase right through the guy and gnaw my bones clean, cartoon-style.

  But no. They did exactly what I’d hoped. They slapped into him like a shotgun blast of piranhas and started the feast.

  “Bozhe moi!” he screamed as blood sprayed out of his back. I felt a little bad. But not a lot. The dude was a Russian mobster who was trying to kill me.

  The guards to my right stopped dead and stared in horror as their comrade was perforated by the teethy parasites.

  A lot of the tomatoes had buried themselves in said comrade, as he fell to the ground. But a bunch had veered off to double back around at me. One latched onto my chest as I staggered back, but I ignored it and focused on the big picture. I needed more people between me and the remainder of the swarm, and as fate would have it, there were plenty of people to choose from. I sprinted to my right and ran in a zig zag through the dumbstruck guards, hearing the squelching sounds of the tomatoes colliding with them and ripping into them.

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  In a moment of inspiration, I yanked the one in my chest out, and tossed it into the air as I looped around one of the guards. It was like the guy was standing between two magnets.

  Squelch! Into his chest the tomato burrowed.

  My strategy was buying me more time than I’d expected. I’d assumed the tomatoes would bop right back out of the guards to resume their pursuit of their prime objective. But they seemed to have inherited more than their teeth from sharks. They seemed to have also inherited the inability to move backward. And as they ate their way through their victims, they must have gotten a bit lost in there. From the way the guards were wailing and thrashing around, it looked super painful.

  Most of the guards in the vicinity were down for the count. The lucky ones who had only taken a tomato or two clawed at themselves in terrified bewilderment and ran out of the place, screaming. As RIP reality collided with regular reality, the game had to be working overtime to implant some rational explanation of what was going on in the mobster’s minds. Though in some cases, the game’s take on “rational” might have been a skosh off the mark.

  “Baba Yaga!” Boris bellowed as he sprinted by me, and through the open warehouse door into the night. The notion that the terrifying sister witch of Slavic myth was in fact a man was a progressive twist and the big Russian was coming away from this more open-minded.

  Anyway, for the moment, it seemed the entire tomato swarm was occupied. I spotted Darla crouching behind a palette of steel drums in a dimly lit corner.

  “You okay?” I called to her.

  “Sort of?” she answered.

  I supposed that was as good as I could hope for under the circumstances. I looked around for Merrick, but he was nowhere in sight. I assumed he’d fled.

  The mobsters’ numbers had dwindled substantially, but . . . ping! A bullet glanced off the steel rollup door to my left. Nikolai and three of his more loyal guards had taken cover behind some of the shelves and opened fire on me, presumably hoping that killing me would put an end to whatever they thought was happening.

  A round caught me in the shoulder and I felt my Life-O-Meter fall to twenty-three. The hodgepodge of damage I’d taken had left me a little more than half dead. And as several more rounds caught me in the legs and abdomen, slowing my recovery, I knew I couldn’t just stand there.

  I snatched up one of the fallen guards’ rifles, braced for recoil and returned fire. As I did, I saw another muzzle flare to my left and looked over to see Darla had gotten ahold of a rifle and joined the party, blowing holes in the walls and ceiling and even some stuff that was pretty close to her targets.

  “Who’s the golden goose now, you big Russian jerk!” she shouted. The taunt didn’t make much sense, but she’d had a long day.

  We both kept firing. Alas, Nikolai and company had taken proper cover and they knew the shoot-the-other-guy-before-he-can-shoot-you game a lot better than we did. But they didn’t know the stop-the-other-guy-from-sprinting-right-at-you-while-a-swarm-of-man-eating-flying-tomatoes-chases-him game very well at all. So that’s the game I decided to make them play.

  I just needed some tomatoes. I turned and gave the nearest Russian’s body a kick to get the attention of the tomatoes eating their way through him. Keeping my moral compunctions at bay was getting easier. It was unsettling that I’d gone from regular guy to corpse-kicking psychopath inside of a few minutes. But one of these dudes had shot me in the face. So corpse-kicking it was.

  Alas, the kick didn’t get results, but I was convinced my plan was workable. So as another few bullets tore into my back, I booted the body again and yelled, “Hey! Tomatoes!”

  Half a dozen of the things rolled out of him like bloated, bloody softballs and one floated up in front of me, menacingly. I took that one to be the leader of their little squad and addressed it accordingly.

  “Come at me, bro!” I jeered.

  And it did come at me. They all did. I turned and ran directly at Nikolai’s position. Whatever he and his guys thought was happening, they seemed convinced that more bullets were in order. So they kept machine gunning away at me as I closed the distance between us and dived into their midst.

  “Svoloch!” Nikolai cried, as I grabbed him and spun him around. He managed to prop the muzzle of his rifle against my chest and fire a shot, point blank.

  The bullet exploded into my rib cage, and a blazing inferno spread through me. But as I stumbled back, Nikolai’s eyes met mine and I knew I’d gotten the better end of the deal.

  “Gav no!” he screamed as a tomato plunged into his back directly between his shoulder blades and ripped into his spine. As he fell limply to the floor, I could see the tomato still boring its way into him like a child rummaging through a toy chest.

  The rest of the tomatoes continued on toward me, so I lunged past the three guys behind me. They turned and continued to fire their rifles into my torso at a rate that outpaced my insta-healing and would have done me in pretty quickly had the remainder of the swarm not latched on to them and dug into their spines, disconnecting their brains from their trigger fingers. The final guard dropped his gun, turned, and ran. I guess loyalty has its limits.

  It was good to see the last of the Russians, but my problems were far from over. While the mini-tomato swarm I’d just weaponized was busy with its new meal, the rest of the tomatoes had begun to peel off from the other guards. The mega-swarm wasn’t at full strength yet, as its members were disorganized in their exits from the various bodies. A few had gotten their teeth lodged in exposed bits of bone and were jerking around violently trying to extricate themselves. But alas, enough of them had taken to the air to worry me.

  As they buzzed around the warehouse, their tiny pinhole nostrils twitched spastically, taking in the surrounding odors. Thankfully, most of them were slow to draw a bead on me. They kept floating down toward puddles of what I realized was my blood. (I’d left a lot of it around the place.) But one lone wolf wasn’t fooled. Rising above the rest, it turned and seemed to spot me. Then it swooped down toward me. There was furniture and such that I could use to shield myself, but none of it would provide a meal that would detour the tomato for any appreciable amount of time. It was time to go on the offensive. Spotting the baseball bat still lying beside the card table, I snatched it up and swung for the fences. Smack! The sturdy pine connected cleanly with the vicious vegetable. Again, I expected a satisfying explosion of tomato guts, but got no such satisfaction. The thing just bounced off the bat like a pinball and veered back toward me again!

  I dived to the floor to avoid its next pass but found two other tomatoes had now taken noticed and were barreling toward me. I needed to go bigger. Scrabbling to my left, I grabbed a discarded rifle and took aim. The chances of hitting the tomatoes in flight weren’t all that high, but I figured it was worth a try. Surprisingly, as I pulled the trigger, my aim was true. I caught both the approaching tomatoes with a spray of bullets! Of course, it didn’t matter because the bullets were no better than the bat. The rounds just bopped the tomatoes away twenty feet before they formed up with the lone wolf and swung back around at me again. It was impossible. It was like they were protected by some kind of invulnerability spell. How the heck was I going to beat that?

  I dived to the right, dodging their next pass and glanced over at the other end of the warehouse. Eyeless and earless as they were, the ruckus hadn’t attracted the mega-swarm. Yet. There were only so many puddles of my blood to check, and they’d be on me soon enough.

  “Henry!” I heard Darla yell.

  “Yeah?” I yelled back.

  I was comforted by her voice and the fact that she seemed to be as yet unharmed. But what she had to say was less comforting.

  “Henry, you know what you have to do!”

  I looked over at her, peeking out from behind the steel drums. Her eyes said it all.

  Smashing or shooting the things wasn’t going to get it done. By now, we’d both begun to understand the basic logic—if you could call it that—of the game. Every stage was harvested from the darkest, most horrific corners of my psyche. That meant breaking the spell would require . . . I felt a knot form in my stomach.

  “No,” I called back at her. “No! I won’t do it!”

  “Henry, there’s no other way,” she replied with a forceful calm that made me realize she was right. There was only one path through this. It was savage. Disgusting. Unthinkable.

  I was going to have to eat the tomatoes.

  Of course I’d employed a similar strategy against one of the ferrets. But that was different. That was just a dirty, mangy, diseased rodent. This was a tomato. Arguably, the fact that it was a self-aware tomato with teeth and some sort of digestive track currently filled with human flesh made it even worse. But whatever. Once you’re talking about eating a tomato, you’ve already maxed out the gross factor.

  I steeled myself against the overwhelming dread of the moment and set my feet as the three tomatoes rounded back toward me. Summoning all fourteen points of my Twinkle Toes stat, I juked right, giving them a split second to whiz halfway past me, before lunging back, face first. I chomped into the nearest one, forcing it into my mouth with both hands. As the foul, coral juices sprayed out of it and ran down my chin, the thing unleashed a blood-curdling, otherworldly shriek. But I just crammed it farther into my face.

  Somewhere along the line, my action movie had morphed into a camp horror. To wit, every other tomato in the place froze in mid-air and rotated slowly toward me with a quivering grimace on their lips, as if reacting to the death wail of their fallen brother. Maybe there was a frequency of sound they could sense, even without ears. Maybe they could smell the blood of their own kind being spilled. Whatever the case, they looked pissed.

  “Oh boy,” I heard Darla mutter.

  Then they charged. They hit me like an avalanche, knocking me onto my back. As I rolled around on the floor screaming, I knew my Life-O-Meter was somewhere south of ten. The damage done by the bullets had been all but repaired, but every bite from a tomato would linger until the battle was done. So I shifted back into full John gear and made my dad proud.

  As the bastards attached themselves to me, I plucked them off, one after the other, feasting on their bulbous bodies with a feral rage. Some of them fell still after just a few bites. Others needed more convincing. But before long, I was laying spread eagle in a puddle of tomato entrails.

  The stuff was in my hair. It was in my ears. It was in my eyes. Worst of all, it was in my mouth.

  ###

  I guess I blacked out for the second time that day, because when I opened my eyes, my head was in Darla’s lap. She was holding a whole mess of XP slips. Apparently, Nancy’s mom had dropped by.

  She looked down at me and gave me an exhausted, delirious smile.

  “I bet you hate tomatoes even more now.”

  “Impossible,” I replied wearily.

  It had been messy in every way, and I didn’t feel like John Rambo or John Matrix or John McClane. But Darla was okay, and I was too—I could feel my Life-O-Meter inching back up. Heck, my clothes were even mending, and the various gunk I’d been covered with was just fading away.

  Still, neither Darla nor I made a move to get up. I think we were both suspended in the moment, floating in the afterglow of our respective near-death experiences.

  “Did you try to mow down a bunch of guys with a machine gun?” I asked.

  “I think I did,” she answered.

  “Seems out of character.”

  “Well, I’m nuts, remember?” she answered. “What’s your excuse?”

  It was a good question. Full John fantasies aside, I didn’t know how I’d been the person I’d been for the last half hour.

  “I guess you never know how you’ll respond to Russian mobsters and killer tomatoes until you’re in a room full of Russian mobsters and killer tomatoes,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Darla agreed. “Life is all about self-discovery.”

  I felt like I could’ve lived with this particular part of myself undiscovered, but c’est la vie.

  We both seemed to be coming out of our here-and-now trances and I leaned forward to get to my feet. Darla helped me up and our eyes met again.

  I smiled.

  She smiled.

  But then her expression changed. She stared pensively up at me for a moment, then grabbed my shirtfront and kissed me. As she pulled back away, she looked at me appraisingly. Then she frowned a frown that was part wonder, part worry, part something else.

  “You and me,” she said. “It’s real. Even if it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to happen, it’s real.”

  There was a note of quiet exaltation in her voice. But that dropped off as she went on.

  “Maybe that means the rest is real too.”

  “What do you mean ‘the rest’?” I asked.

  She scrunched up her face apprehensively and answered, “I have to show you something.”