Chapter Text
ABANDON QUEST?
The call had lasted forty-one minutes, and for the last ten of them Bryan hadn't said anything at all.
He knew that because the phone told him.
Call ended. 00:41:12.
The little green screen held it there like a receipt as he stood in the back hallway of the Lightfoot depot, between the mop sink and the broken water cooler, and read it again.
Forty-one minutes.
Forty-one minutes of airtime, too, which he'd see on the bill next month, because incoming calls cost the same as outgoing ones.
You could finish an entire show in forty-one minutes, he thought to himself nonsensically. Or you could have a whole argument, and then a whole second argument about the first argument, and finish that time having no idea what to do next.
Except, that wasn't even what had happened.
There hadn't been an argument. That was the part he kept snagging on. If there had been, maybe he would have felt better about the whole thing.
But, as things were, Michelle hadn't yelled. Instead, she'd had notes. Not on paper, probably, but he could hear them anyway, the way she moved from one point to the next without stopping for his answers, because she'd already had his answers. She'd had them for days.
I've been thinking about this for a while. A while.
He went back through the last week like he was checking a route he'd driven half asleep: the dishes she'd stopped leaving for him, the way she'd stopped asking what time he'd be home, Sunday night when she'd said "we should talk sometime" and then gone to bed before he could ask about what. All of it had been sitting right there, signed for, and he hadn't opened any of it.
He wasn't crying.
He checked, in the dark window of the fire door, and his face was just his face: two days of stubble, hair doing the thing at the crown, a guy in a navy Lightfoot polo who looked like he'd been told his car had failed inspection. He felt stupid more than sad, and he couldn't tell yet whether that was better or worse.
The battery icon blinked. One bar. Forty-one minutes would do that.
He put the phone in the courier bag, because the phone lived in the bag, and the bag lived on his shoulder. Then he went to clock out, because it was 6:20 and that was what you did at 6:20.
The front office of Lightfoot Medical Transport was one long room with a counter down the middle, a wall of pigeonholes, a coffee maker nobody had descaled since the first Clinton inauguration, and Donna.
Donna Pruitt had been dispatching for Lightfoot since before Lightfoot had a second van. She was in her fifties, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a box of tissues at her elbow that she'd been working through all week. She had the phone pinned to her shoulder and a pen in each hand, and she didn't look up when Bryan came in. Nobody ever looked up when Bryan came in. He'd decided a long time ago that this was a compliment. It meant he was reliable.
He did the end of shift the way he always did it.
Manifests in the wire tray, signatures facing up.
Mileage in the logbook: odometer start, odometer end, four runs, a hundred and twelve miles, his handwriting leaning right like it was trying to get somewhere.
The insulated cooler went back on its hook, wiped down with the spray bottle, lid propped so it wouldn't get that smell.
He was good at this.
Nobody would ever describe it as a talent, but he was good at it: the right specimen to the right lab, inside the time window he was allowed, and making sure that cold things stayed cold. He'd never once lost a package. He'd once driven a bag of blood samples to a neighbouring city through a hailstorm with the windshield wipers on the highest setting causing one of them to flap loose, but he had gotten there on time.
The lab tech had signed for it without looking at him.
"—no, I understand that, sir," Donna was saying into the phone, in the voice she used for hospitals as Bryan reached past her for his time card. "I understand it's time-sensitive. I've understood that both other times you called."
He was stopped mid-reach.
"Hold on," Donna said, to the phone or to him. She put her hand over the receiver and finally looked up at him over her glasses, and he knew immediately, from long experience, that this was not good.
"Don't," he said, before she could continue her sentence.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
She sniffed, wetly, and pulled a tissue from the box without looking. "Raccoon City General. The lab, not the hospital side. They've got a run that has to go up tonight."
She tipped her head toward the end of the counter, and he saw it then. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it before: a soft-sided insulated bag, green, about the size of a six-pack cooler, with a zipper across the top and a shoulder strap coiled beside it, sitting on the counter like it had been waiting for him. A white cross on the front, and under it, in white block capitals, ORGAN TRANSPLANT. A manila shipping tag was zip-tied to the handle, in someone's careful block capitals: RACCOON CITY GENERAL — LAB LEVEL — ATTN: DR. M. STOKES. DELIVER BY 2200. Someone had underlined 2200 twice.
"No," Bryan said.
"It's double pay."
"No."
"Ray's at his daughter's thing. Luis is already in Denver. It's you or nobody, and if it's nobody, they pull the contract, and if they pull the contract—" She spread her hands, and the tissue went with them, like a little white flag of the apocalypse. "Bryan. Honey. It's ninety minutes up the mountain. You'd be back by midnight."
"My car's making a noise."
"Your car's always making a noise."
"A new noise." He didn't know why he was lying about the car. The car was fine, by the standards of the car. He just knew that if he opened his mouth and said anything true, the true thing would be my girlfriend broke up with me forty-one minutes ago and I don't have anywhere to sleep, so I should probably look around for a motel or something, and he would rather drive into a lake than say that in front of Donna.
But, if he was being extremely honest, he wasn't refusing because of the noise, or because of the hours, or the mountain. He was refusing because it was the only thing all day that had asked him, and he could say no to it.
"You're the only one I'd trust with it," Donna said softly. It only took him a second to realize she had gone into her flattery stage. He'd seen her do this to Ray. He'd seen her do it to a hospital administrator once, over the phone, and the man had ended up apologizing to her. "You've never lost one. Not one. Do you know how rare that is?"
"Donna."
"I'll owe you."
"You already owe me."
"Then I'll owe you twice." She sniffed again, and pressed the tissue to her nose. "Please."
Behind her, on the shelf above the pigeonholes, the radio was going: the same AM station it was always tuned to, which played soft rock and traffic reports and, every half hour, local news that nobody listened to. —the Arklay County Sheriff's Office is asking anyone who hiked in the northern trails this weekend to come forward. Two more hikers were reported missing Sunday, bringing the total since May to—
Bryan punched his time card. The machine thunked. 6:23.
"Night, Donna," he said, and went out the side door, and let it swing shut behind him on her saying his name.
He heard the chair scrape back. He walked faster.
The sun had already gone behind the mountains, the way it did here a good half hour before it was officially supposed to set, and the parking lot sat in their long blue shadow. It was cold in the way September got cold here, all at once, as if somebody had opened a door. Above the peaks the sky was still bright, a thin pale gold going the color of weak tea at the edges, and against it the mountains were a jagged black cutout. Somewhere up in that black was Raccoon City, which Bryan had driven to maybe thirty times and could not have told you a single thing about except where the hospital loading dock was.
His car was where he'd left it, at the end of the row, by the dumpster and he was halfway to it when the bag beeped twice against his hip.
He knew who it was before he looked. Only one other phone could send him those. They'd bought the phones together last Christmas, two for one on the same plan, and the guy at the kiosk had shown them how to send each other little typed messages, and Michelle had sent him exactly four in nine months, all of them about groceries.
He looked anyway.
1 MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM: MICHELLE
It was short. It had to be; the phone wouldn't take more than a few lines.
PLEASE DONT COME BY TONIGHT. ILL BOX YOUR THINGS, GET THEM SAT. WE'LL BE OUT SAT AFTERNOON. USE YOUR KEY, LEAVE IT ON THE COUNTER. SORRY. HOPE YOURE OK. M
He knew how long that took. You had to press each number key until it cycled to the right letter, three times for C, four times for S, and wait for the cursor to move on between them. She'd sat somewhere and thumbed out every word of that rather than call him back. And she'd skipped every apostrophe but one, because finding the apostrophe meant digging through a menu of symbols. DONT. ILL. YOURE. Then, in the middle of it, she'd gone into the menu for the one that mattered.
WE'LL.
He read it once. He didn't let himself read it twice. He put the phone back in the bag and stood there in the cold with his hand flat on the flap, as if the message might get out.
It was her lease, he thought to himself. The apartment with the clanking radiator, the window that never quite shut, the couch they’d hauled up three flights together—her name was on the lease. He’d moved in with a duffel bag, a game console, and a box of cables he’d never gotten around to sorting, and in three years it had never once occurred to him that this might be a problem.
Why would it?
Nobody plans for the floor to disappear. And now he had nowhere to go unless he found a nice little motel to spend the night.
He didn't finish the thought. Because at that moment, someone behind him called out his name.
"Bryan!"
Donna was coming across the lot in her cardigan, with the green bag held out in front of her like she was bringing him a casserole. She was out of breath. Her nose was red. Her reading glasses bounced on their chain.
"I'm not—" she started.
"No." He had his hand on the car door. "I said no, Donna. Find someone else. I don't care about the contract. I don't care about Lightfoot. I don't care if they pull every contract we've got and turn the building into a Blockbuster."
It came out harder than he meant and he felt bad immediately afterwards. Donna had never done anything to him except want things from him. That was what everyone did. That wasn't a crime.
"Sorry," he said quietly. "I'm sorry. I just—"
Donna opened her mouth to answer, but then her eyes squeezed, and her chin went up. She took a deep, shuddering breath in, the kind of breath that only goes one place.
Ah—
And stopped.
The first thing he noticed was the sound, because it went away.
Not quiet. Away. The radio inside, the highway on the other side of the fence, the hum of the sodium light that had just flickered on over the dumpster, the wind he hadn't known he was hearing until it wasn't there: all of it was simply gone, as cleanly as if someone had pulled a plug out of the world. The silence pressed on his ears like deep water.
Donna was in front of him, mid-sneeze. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her mouth was open. A strand of grey hair had lifted off her forehead with the force of the inhale and was standing there, sideways, in the air, not falling.
"Donna?"
His voice sounded wrong. Flat and close, like talking into a pillow.
She didn't move. Not the way people didn't move when they were holding still, with that tiny tremor, that sway. She didn't move the way a photograph didn't move.
Bryan stepped back.
His heel hit the car. Two spaces down, someone's Buick had its engine running, and the exhaust had stopped in mid-curl: a grey plume coming out of the tailpipe and just staying there, solid-looking, like cotton wool somebody had glued on. Above the dumpster, a single dry leaf hung a foot off the asphalt, turned halfway over, showing its pale underside.
He grabbed the phone out of the bag. The screen was lit. The clock said 6:31 and the colon between the numbers wasn't blinking.
Stroke, he thought, quite clearly. This is a stroke. This is what it looks like from the inside, you get stuck between one second and the next, and somewhere out there in the real world you're falling down in a parking lot and Donna's going to have to call someone, and they're going to find Michelle's number in your phone.
His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He pressed a hand flat to his chest. He was breathing. He could move his arms, his fingers, his face. Very carefully, with one fingertip, he touched Donna’s sleeve. It was just cardigan—soft, ordinary, warm.
And the warmth was the worst part, because a photograph wouldn’t be warm.
"Okay," he said, in his pillow voice. "Okay okay okay okay."
And then, in front of his eyes, something drew itself.
It didn't fade in. It built, the way a screen builds when a game is loading: a thin rectangle first, a hairline frame, then the fill behind it, dark and slightly translucent, so that Donna's frozen face showed through it in shadow. A line of small grey text appeared along the top edge, SYSTEM EVENT, and below it, in clean white letters that had no business being so readable in this light:
Abandon Quest?
[ Yes ] [ No ]
Bryan looked at it for a long time.
It sat at exactly the height of his eyes, about an arm's length away. It wasn't on anything. It wasn't projected onto Donna, or the car, or the air. It was just there, in the way that the edge of your own nose is there, if you think about it.
He did the stupidest thing he could think of, which was the only thing he could think of.
He reached out and pushed Yes.
His finger didn't touch anything. But the button went bright under it, and there was a sound, the first sound in the whole silent world: a soft, pleasant, utterly meaningless bip.
The box changed.
Are you sure?
[ Yes ] [ No ]
Bryan made a noise that was not quite a word. He pushed Yes again. Bip.
Really sure?
[ Yes ] [ No ]
And just like that, it all felt familiar—the same question, asked again and again. That was what got under his skin first, before he’d even figured out what he was supposed to be afraid of.
He knew this trick the way he knew the inside of his own mouth. Every memory-card screen he’d ever squinted at. Every Overwrite existing data? Every Data will be lost. Continue? Some designer, somewhere, deciding exactly how many times you had to be asked before they’d finally believe you meant it.
He didn't push anything. He stepped to the left, sideways, along the car.
The box came with him. Not like it was following. Like it had never been anywhere except in front of him.
He stepped right. Same.
He turned around and faced the dumpster. Really sure? hovered over the dumpster, perfectly centred, Donna's sneeze now somewhere behind his left shoulder. He turned back. It was over Donna again.
He shut his eyes.
Really sure?
He opened them, slowly, and swept his hand through the box, left to right, like clearing a cobweb. His hand went through it without feeling anything, and the box didn't ripple or break, and for one second his own fingers were in front of the words and the words were still in front of his fingers, which was not how anything worked.
"Okay," Bryan said. "Okay. That's. Okay."
And something in him settled.
It was so strange that he noticed it happening. It was like the moment in a pool when you stop fighting to keep your head up and find out the water holds you. His heart was still going, but it had stopped climbing. His thoughts, which all afternoon had been a car with no one driving it, slowed, and lined up, and started taking turns.
It had rules. That was the thing. A box that followed his eyes, that didn't care about walls or eyelids, that went bip and asked you the same question multiple times: it was ridiculous, it was impossible, it was probably a stroke. But it had rules, and it was showing them to him. He could learn them. He'd learned the rules of a thousand stupider things than this. He'd once spent an entire summer learning the rules of a game where you were a marble.
For the first time in weeks, maybe months, the world was giving him instructions.
He pushed Yes. Bip.
Abandoning this quest may have consequences. Abandon anyway?
"What consequences?" he said out loud. His voice was still flat, but it had stopped shaking. "That's not information. That's not— you can't just say 'consequences.' That's what you say when you don't have a consequence."
The box did not engage with him.
He pushed Yes. Bip.
Okay. This is the last time we'll ask. Abandon Quest?
"Who's we?"
Nothing.
"I didn't even take the quest," he told it in utter exasperation, waving his arms around like a madman. "That's the thing. I said no. I said no, like, four times, ask Donna, Donna was there. You can't abandon something you never accepted. That's not how quests work. You have to talk to the guy, and the guy has the exclamation mark, and you say yes to the guy." He pointed at Donna. "That's the guy. She's the guy. And I said no to the guy."
Silence. The leaf hung over the dumpster. The exhaust hung over the Buick. Donna hung over her sneeze.
"Fine," Bryan said, and pushed Yes so hard his arm went through the box up to the elbow. Bip.
The box went blank. It stayed blank long enough that Bryan's heart started climbing again, a long, horrible half second with nothing in the frame, as if somewhere something was deciding.
Then:
Quest abandonment is unavailable during the Prologue.
[ OK ]
There was only one button.
Bryan read it three times. Not the first part. Unavailable, he could have predicted; he'd known the moment it said "this is the last time we'll ask" that it was lying, because that was what this is the last time we'll ask meant in every language that had ever had a menu. It was the last word that sat in his stomach like something swallowed wrong.
Prologue.
You didn't have a prologue to nothing. A prologue was the part before. It was the gentle part. The tutorial road, the house you start in, the first town before the first monster. You had a prologue because something was coming after it, something big enough to need the run-up.
And it meant something else, too, and he felt that one more slowly: it meant he'd been in it already. Before the box. Before the freeze. When Donna held out a green bag across a counter, and some part of the world had written his name next to it, whether he said yes or not.
He pressed OK, because there was nothing else to press.
The box folded up into its own top line and vanished. For a second there was only the frozen lot, and Bryan thought, wildly, that's it, it's over, I'm going to wake up on the asphalt.
Then a new box built itself, smaller, plainer. No SYSTEM EVENT line this time. A single word at the top, and under it an empty white field with a blinking cursor, and under that, a grid of letters, A to Z in tidy rows, like the name screen at the start of every role-playing game he'd ever rented.
Enter Username
[ _____________ ]
Bryan let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.
This, at least, he knew. This was the most ordinary thing that had happened to him in the last six minutes. He'd filled in this box a hundred times: on the Lightfoot onboarding forms, on the clipboard at every hospital loading dock, on the beige terminal at the medical center in Colorado Springs that made you type yourself in on a green screen before the security guard would buzz the door. Driver ID. Unit. Role. They always wanted to know what you were, not who.
Nobody at a loading dock had ever wanted to know who.
So he reached for the letters and they lit up under his finger with the same soft bip.
T-H-E. Space. C-O-U-R-I-E-R.
[ THE COURIER ]
He looked at it. It looked official. It looked like what was printed on the back of his polo, in smaller letters, under the logo. He felt, absurdly, a tiny flicker of pride at having got it right.
There was no OK button. He looked for one. He had just enough time to think, wait, where's the—
Username locked.
No confirmation. No Are you sure? It had asked him five times whether he wanted to quit a job he'd never taken, and it asked him nothing at all about the thing it was writing down forever.
"Locked," Bryan repeated. "Locked like... locked? Hey. Locked how?"
The box was gone. And the world came back.
It came back all at once, like a held breath let go. The hum of the light, the hiss of the highway beyond the fence, the Buick's idle and the radio inside the building, and the wind, cold and dry and full of the smell of the dumpster. The exhaust plume came unstuck and rolled away. The leaf dropped the last foot to the asphalt and skittered under his car.
And Donna sneezed.
"—chhh!" It was a big one, a full-body sneeze that folded her nearly in half over the bag. She came back up red-faced, blinking, and wiped her nose on her wrist, and looked at him like nothing at all had happened. Because for her, nothing had.
"Bless me," Donna said. "Ugh. Sorry. Okay, look." She pushed the bag into his chest, and his hands closed on the sides without asking him. "Just— drive safe, Courier."
She frowned.
It was a small frown, a tiny crease between her eyebrows, the frown of someone who's just used the wrong name for a coworker's kid. She opened her mouth as if to correct herself and then didn't, because whatever she had been going to say instead didn't seem to come.
Bryan wasn't looking at her face.
He was looking at the air above her head, where, about a foot over her permed grey hair, a thin grey bar had appeared. It was smaller than the boxes, a tag, the kind of thing that floated over people in games so you'd know who to talk to. It said:
Donna Pruitt NPC · Lv 4 Skill: Guilt Trip Lv7
He read it twice. He read Lv7 a third time, and something rose up his throat that he was almost sure was a laugh, and he trapped it behind his teeth so hard his eyes watered.
"What?" said Donna. "What is it? Is something on me?" She patted her hair. Her hand passed straight through the bottom of the tag, and the tag didn't move.
"No," Bryan said. "Nothing. Sorry. There was a— bug."
She looked up, suspicious, at exactly the wrong spot.
He made himself stop staring at it.
He stood there holding the bag by its sides. Across the front, under the white cross, white letters he’d been not-reading across a counter all evening: ORGAN TRANSPLANT. It was heavier than it looked, and cold right through the padding, a dense, packed cold, like something nested in ice. And he realized that at some point in the last thirty seconds he had stopped trying to give it back.
It wasn't one reason. It was three, and they arrived on top of each other, like a pile-up.
He had nowhere to sleep tonight. That was one. He could drive to where his home had been and sit outside in the dark and watch the windows, or he could drive ninety minutes up a mountain and hand a bag to a doctor and drive ninety minutes back down, and at least the second one had a destination at the end.
Double pay was two. Double pay was half of a deposit on somewhere with his name on the lease.
And three. Three was the one he'd never in his life say out loud, not to Donna, not to anyone. There was some force out there that hadn't let him quit. That thing had written his name beside this bag before he'd said a word, and when he'd tried to walk away it had stopped the entire world to ask him five times if he was sure. Nobody had ever asked him if he was sure. Nobody had ever cared enough about what he did to stop anything.
It was insane. It was probably a stroke. And some small, shameful, stubborn part of him, the part that had spent its whole childhood being the easy one, the one nobody had to worry about, liked it. Something wanted him. Specifically him.
Bryan sighed, finally giving in.
"Well, I'll be back soon," he said to Donna before he flipped open his courier bag.
It was a grey canvas messenger bag he’d bought secondhand, the reflective strip on the flap long since cracked. On a good day, it held a phone, a clipboard, his lunch, and a little bit of hope.
Donna stared at him.
"Why are you putting it in there?" She asked incredulously.
Bryan didn’t answer. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. He didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing. It just seemed, suddenly and with absolute certainty, like that was where it went.
He put the green bag in.
It went in. It went all the way in, the whole green padded bulk of it, strap and all, and the flap closed over the top, and the bag hung against his hip with a weight that was completely wrong for its shape, like a backpack full of library books. In the corner of his eye, very small, a line of text slid in and out:
Key Item acquired: Package (cannot be discarded)
And right after it, a second line, smaller still, faintly gold:
Prologue: Last Run
Deliver the package to Raccoon City General.
He didn't look at Donna. He was very careful not to look at Donna.
"Huh," Donna said, blinking a few times. "That's a deep bag."
"Yeah," said Bryan weakly. "It's. Yeah. They make them deep."
She patted his arm, twice, the way she patted the coffee maker when it finally worked, and turned and went back across the lot, into the building, rubbing her nose with the side of her hand. Her tag went with her. It hovered over her head right up to the door, and then the door swung shut, and he couldn't see it through the wall.
The parking lot was just a parking lot. The gold over the mountains had gone to a dull bruised orange, and the shadow had climbed the side of the building. Somewhere up the hill a dog was barking, and the sodium light over the dumpster buzzed, and none of it was frozen.
He realized his hands were shaking, and that he had no idea how long they had been doing that.
The car smelled like old coffee and the pine air freshener that had stopped smelling like pine sometime in June. He got in, shut the door, and the noise of the world got muffled and ordinary as he sat with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like his dad had taught him in a church parking lot when he was fifteen.
Once he was inside, he slipped the bag off his shoulder, set it on the passenger seat, and buckled the seat belt over it.
Then, he did the same for himself and turned the key.
The engine caught on the second try. The heater came on with its usual rattle, like there was a marble loose in the vent, and the windows started very slowly to fog.
He took the phone out. The screen glowed green. One bar. The envelope icon sat in the corner, still lit, because he hadn't deleted it.
He opened it again. He'd told himself he wouldn't. He read it from the top, slower this time, the way you go back over a road sign you passed too fast. PLEASE DONT COME BY TONIGHT. Boxes. Saturday. SORRY. HOPE YOURE OK. WE'LL.
He shut it. Opened it again. Read just the one word.
Then he put the phone face down on the passenger seat, and looked at the bag it was now lying next to.
Nothing glowed. Nothing floated. There was no tag over the steering wheel, no box over the dashboard. The flap of the bag was just a flap, with a cracked reflective strip, and the dashboard clock said 6:35. Outside the windshield, the lot was empty, and past the fence, the road ran out of town toward the foothills, toward the black line of the mountains and the last of the light going out above them.
Maybe he'd imagined it. That was possible. People imagined things when they'd had a bad day. He'd read about it. Your brain did things. It made up stories to get through. Maybe he'd stood in the lot holding Donna's bag and had some kind of little episode, a small, private one, the brain's equivalent of the car making a noise, and in a minute he'd drive away and in a week he'd barely remember it.
It didn't matter either way. Someone up there was waiting for what was in his bag, and the clock on the tag said ten.
He reached for the gearshift.
Something slid across the windshield.
It came in from the left, smooth and unhurried, a dark translucent box with white letters, and it stopped dead in the middle of the glass, right in front of the road, right where he would need to look.
It didn't fog.
It didn't reflect the dash lights.
It sat on top of everything, the way the first one had.
Tutorial: Look Around
He looked for the little X in the corner, the one every pop-up had.
There wasn't one.