Eastbound I-94 south of St. Cloud, Minnesota
Present day
Times were rough.
At least, that was the sentiment that stuck with Cole after his brief trip to Seattle. He’d been anxious to take care of some professional business after a nice long road trip in a rental car that came equipped with better air-conditioning than his old apartment. It was supposed to be a time for him to hang his arm out the window, feel the summer wind blow through the dark crop of hair stretching from a scalp that was normally buzzed to within an inch of its life, and listen to some music. Before getting too far away from Chicago, he’d stopped to purchase a new GPS so he could make the trip without having to rely on old-fashioned maps. There was a GPS function in his phone, but dropping some cash in an electronics store was another form of comfort to go along with the rest of the trip. After a few hours of fiddling with the options, he settled upon the voice of a British woman to tell him when to turn and which side of the road to shoot for.
Along the way, he’d slept in hotels that offered the barest essentials, ate his complimentary breakfasts, stocked up on gas station candy and spicy beef jerky, and had a generally perfect trip to the West Coast. Not long after his arrival at the offices of Digital Dreamers, Cole heard those dreaded three words.
“Times are tough,” Jason Sorrenson had told him.
Cole’s ears were still ringing from the constant flow of wind past his face when he’d been given that little tidbit. “I know times are rough,” he’d said. “At least I didn’t have to sell a kidney to afford the gas to get here.”
“You drove all the way from Chicago?”
“Yeah, it was nice.”
Instead of wearing his standard-issue Mariners cap, Jason had finally conceded to the fact that he and his hair were parting ways. Like many amicable separations, the man was left feeling beaten and somewhat ashamed. Most of the people in the building were clad in anything from T-shirts to light sweaters, but Jason was dressed to fit his role as their boss. His white shirt was starched, buttoned, and crisp. Slacks were freshly pressed and suspenders were straight out of a catalogue that must have fallen behind a sofa eight years ago.
“I wish you would have let me know you were driving all the way out here,” Jason said.
Cole glanced at the small group of programmers leaving a large break room on their way to the newly refurbished room marked ART AND LEVEL DESIGN. All four of the sun-deprived professionals wore Digital Dreamers badges, smelled of cigarette smoke, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of college. “I did tell you I was coming,” he said. “Remember my e-mail?”
“You’ve sent a lot of e-mails, Cole. You’ve also made a lot of promises, but I’ve learned to take them all with a grain of salt.”
“Well, that’s why I came out in person. I wanted to run some new ideas past you, go over some ground rules, and define some terms for a new contract.”
Jason’s eyebrows flicked up as he mused, “Define some terms? That sounds official.”
“It is.”
“Are you moving back to Seattle?”
“No. I thought I’d—”
“Then I can’t use you,” Jason interrupted while digging a tissue from his pocket and wiping his nose.
Cole stood in the wide hallway until another group of new faces ambled past him. When he looked around this time, he spotted fresh paint on walls adorned with awards that were won since he’d left, pictures of teams he’d never met, and sketches from games he didn’t recognize. “You can’t…what?”
Rather than ask Cole to follow him, Jason simply led him into the break room. A set of double doors opened into a space that would have been Cole’s favorite hangout if he was still in high school. Rows of arcade cabinets lined the walls on either side. The farthest wall played host to vending machines offering snacks ranging from the “diabetic nightmare” end of the spectrum all the way down to “brantastic.” Fridges, microwave ovens, and a soda machine filled the rest of the perimeter. The rest of the space was cluttered with tables and chairs. Forget high school. He wouldn’t have minded spending time there now.
Jason walked straight through the break room and out a glass door that led to a fenced-in courtyard populated by an ironic mix of smokers and people who wanted fresh air between work sessions. Blowing his nose and then tossing the tissue into a trash can, he mumbled, “Probably getting that damn virus that’s hitting the rest of the country.”
“You mean the Mud Flu? Yeah, that one sounds like the Black Plague of our generation. What’s it give you? The sniffles? Some crap in your throat? Big deal.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t know what’s worse. Having the press try to terrify us with a flu or having the Internet make us think there are werewolves in Kansas City.”
“So,” Cole said without mentioning the fact that he’d met those werewolves personally, “you get a new batch of rookies from a career fair at a technical school and I’m out?”
Slipping his hands into his pockets, Jason replied, “We’ve had this discussion before. There’s a place for you here, but only if you can make a genuine commitment to your job. Hammer Strike 2 is going to be announced, and I’ll want your input on that. If you can be a real member of the development team, you’re more than welcome. Otherwise, your contributions will have to be reduced to creative input and design ideas.”
“I’ve already been knocked down to work for hire,” Cole pointed out. “Now I’m just a consultant?”
“Times are rough. We don’t have the funds to pay a team as well as a bunch of freelancers.”
“But I’ve been with Hammer Strike since the beginning!”
“You’re not here anymore, though. That’s the problem.” Jason sighed in a way that Cole recognized from countless meetings with testers, marketers, or anyone who was either difficult or dense. “You know how we always wondered how companies could keep so much dead weight on the payroll?”
Cole nodded.
“It’s like how I always wondered how a gas station could stay afloat when there was one on every corner,” Jason continued. “Or how so many restaurants could stay in business. When times get tough, those things have to go.”
In his last days as a steady employee at Digital Dreamers, Cole had been relatively healthy for a man in his thirties who rarely did more than try to climb an indoor rock wall on the weekends. Over the past several months, his exercise regimen had expanded to include running for his life with shapeshifters snapping at his legs or swinging a stick with enough force to drive it through a wall. Muscles newly rediscovered and honed through painful hours of sparring tensed beneath his faded plaid shirt. Not only did he want to choke Jason at that moment, but he knew four different ways to do it. “You’re saying I’m dead weight?”
Jason shook his head. “Forget I said dead weight. What I meant was…” Abruptly, Jason straightened his back and lifted his chin. “You left us in a jam, Cole. You were supposed to come back months ago, but you didn’t. I’ve known you forever, so I let it slide. Then you decide to stay in Chicago, but you still want your job here. You’ve given me some great ideas for downloadable Hammer content as well as the start of a new project, so I gave you another chance. We’ve got games to make and I’ve hired plenty of new talent who are willing to actually come here every day and make them.”
Choking back what he originally wanted to say, Cole grumbled, “I know, I know.”
“You’ve got talent as well as experience,” Jason said, “but you can only do so much on your laptop.”
“What about those ideas for that new game with the shapeshifting characters or those new tricks for the Hammer maps?”
“All of that was excellent, Cole. We could take that online and be huge with it. I intended on purchasing the rights from you as soon as possible. Since you’re here, I can issue a check. That is, unless you’d reconsider taking a prime spot on one of our dev teams?”
“You’d put me in charge of development?”
“Upper tier,” Jason clarified. “You’ve been out of the loop too long to be in charge.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
“That’s a long time in this industry. I don’t need to tell you that.” Jason crossed his arms and lowered his chin. That meant business. “You and I can put some real good stuff together, but not through e-mail. Whatever you’re doing in Chicago must be huge to prevent you from accepting the position I offered a while ago. If you came back, it wouldn’t be long before you’d see a raise, a chance to start another project, maybe your own office.”
That last part had been a last minute piece of cheese set onto the trap. Cole could tell as much by Jason’s expectant grin and the subtle angle of his head. But what was he going to tell him? That while he’d been away from his Seattle desk and keyboard, there was a massacre in Janesville, Wisconsin, and an attempted siege in Kansas City, Missouri? Werewolf activity had been down since then, but that wouldn’t last forever. Nymar lived in nearly every city, which wasn’t anything new. Skinners had even worse things to keep them busy, and Paige…
“What about this Paige you’ve been mentioning?” Jason asked. Nodding with the certainty of someone who actually paid attention during conversations, he added, “Is she the one keeping you in Chi-Town?”
“Don’t call it that.”
“Whatever. Is she?”
“The last I heard from her, Paige was headed off to try and hook up with some cop.”
“Does anyone say hook up anymore?” Jason mused.
“Fuck! Is that better? She went to fuck some cop because Lord knows she won’t fucking touch me!”
With Cole’s voice bouncing off the exterior walls, Jason glanced around nervously, as if he expected to be collared by one of his own security guards. “Okay. Calm down. Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
As Cole thought back to that conversation, he drove along a stretch of interstate that cut through a quiet section of Minnesota. Stress pushed against the back of his eyeballs and he did his best to alleviate that situation by digging a CD out from a case on the seat next to him. For most of the ride he’d been content to take his chances with local radio stations, but the tension cinching around his guts demanded a very specific kind of music to ease it.
When the first few raging bars of Black Label Society tore through the air, Cole gripped the steering wheel and snarled along with Zakk Wylde. Rather than rip his throat apart trying to compete with the metal legend, he stared at the road and thought about the rest of his visit to Seattle.
“What about Nora?” Jason had asked as he fed a dollar into one of the break room’s soda machines. “She’s still here, you know.”
“Is she waiting for me?”
Jason snickered, stooped down to get his plastic bottle of diet cola and then twisted off the cap. “Yeah. She’s been pining away, knitting your likeness into memorial quilts.”
“Smartass.”
“She asks about you all the time. Hasn’t she been calling?”
“A few times, I guess,” Cole admitted. “Just didn’t seem worth going through the motions since that’s all either of us would be doing.”
“She cares about you,” Jason insisted.
“Sure, in a ‘I hope he’s not dead’ kind of way. For all I know, that’s shifted to something less tolerant.”
“There’s nobody else in Chicago?”
“I did intend on seeing this one woman while I was out and about,” Cole said. “Her name’s Abby.”
“Ah, let’s hear about her.”
“I’ve only seen pictures of her and talked to her a few times on the phone. We’re supposed to meet on my way back to Chicago, but I don’t know.”
“Christ, Cole. Is this some kind of Internet dating thing?”
“No!” Now it was Cole’s turn to glance around nervously. There were plenty of young faces pointed his way, surely chattering back and forth about various reasons why some unshaven, shabbily dressed man with messy hair was talking to one of the biggest executives of the company. “She’s someone I’ve met. That’s all.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“She works for the Midwestern Ectological Group.”
“Ectological? Is that a real word?” Before Cole could fully roll his eyes, Jason snapped his fingers and said, “Wait! You mean those ghost-hunting guys with the cable specials?”
“That’s them.”
“They’ve got a new show coming up about all the werewolf stories and monster sightings in the news. I was going to DVR it. Should be…interesting.”
“Abby’s a field investigator. She’s on a job in Minnesota.”
“How’d you meet her?” When he didn’t get an answer to that, Jason gnawed on the inside of his cheek and nodded slowly. “Part of your new Chicago life, huh? By the looks of it, that life may not be so good for you.”
“Why do you say that? I’m in better shape than ever.”
Jason no longer tried to mask his disapproval. “You smell like you’ve been sleeping in your car.”
That was because of the newest batch of soap Paige had cooked up. The stuff was supposed to hide their scent from shapeshifters, but it wasn’t exactly minty fresh.
“You’ve got scars and bruises all over the place,” Jason continued, pointing to the marks left behind by Cole’s sparring sessions and the many times he’d been forced to trade blows with creatures that had recently become Internet celebrities. “I don’t even know what to make of this,” Jason said as he grabbed Cole’s wrist so he could get a look at his hand.
The scars from Cole’s weapon crossed his palm. They were thick in some places and stretched thin in others. Thinner layers of scar tissue formed a web pattern on his flesh that reacted like an allergy to shapeshifters and Nymar. It was a good early warning system, but not much of a fashion statement.
“Did you burn yourself?” Jason asked. “Is this from a disease? Drugs? What happened, Cole? Is it from that accident in Canada?”
Cole broke his friend’s grip with ease. “I can still type. That’s all you need to know.”
“Why won’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
Once his pulse slowed down, Cole asked, “Have you seen the stuff on the Internet about those wild dogs in Kansas City?”
“You mean those videos with the ‘werewolves’?” Jason asked while framing his last word in air quotes.
“Yeah. I’m one of the people who kept those things from tearing through Kansas City and probably a few other nearby cities.”
It was the complete truth, and it went over as well as a stick of phony dynamite at an airport security check.
“I’ve held onto your job for as long as I could,” Jason said dryly. “We can use your ideas and the designs you’ve done so far, but only as a jump-off point. Digital Dreamers no longer has the funds to pay for outside consultants when we’ve got plenty of fresh talent on-site.”
“You’ve sure got the funds for a fancy new break room and a bunch of new programmers,” Cole griped.
Jason steeled himself and replied, “Your consulting check is waiting for you downstairs.”
“And what if I have some more ideas about that new project?” Cole asked.
“Then you join the team.”
“What about Hammer Strike? The people on the forums are crying for more levels.”
“If you put something together, I’ll consider it. If we use your templates, we can pay you the standard fee. I know the fans will appreciate your input.”
Cole nodded as his anger began to dwindle. Oddly enough, relief soon took its place. He hung his head low and chuckled softly. “I’ve never been fired from anything. This sucks.”
“What else can I do? Times—”
“Save it. My check’s downstairs?”
Jason nodded. “And there’ll be more Hammer royalties coming. That should tide you over while you clean up after those dogs in Kansas.”
“Kansas City,” Cole said.
“Sure.” No matter how many freshly hired faces were watching, none of them were close enough to hear Jason say, “The moment you decide you’re finished doing whatever it is you’re doing, there’ll be a spot for you here. Any one of these kids can carry the torch of our game licenses, but none of them can come up with new stuff as good as yours. Pull your head out of your ass, get it back into the game, and we’ll make ourselves richer.”
“Ourselves? As in both of us?”
Jason winked in a way that proved he didn’t wink very often and followed up with an awkward nudge. “Wait till you see the check that’s waiting for you downstairs. It’s got your most recent royalty statements for Hammer Strike and the downloadable content. Not too shabby considering all the griping on the forums.”
Now that he got a look at the more familiar Jason beneath the executive mask, Cole said, “I’m sorry I left you in a lurch. Things have come up that are pretty important.”
“They must be. When we were starting in this business, you said this was all you ever wanted. Now, you’re willing to let go of the dream. Please tell me it’s worth it.”
“It is.”
“Then I guess that’s all there is for now. Are you staying in Seattle long?”
“No,” Cole lied. “I just wanted to touch base here and try to sell you on the idea of making me the highest paid independent contractor in the industry. Since that plan tanked, I’m gonna snag some coffee and be on my way.”
Cole didn’t leave the building right away. He and Jason were sidetracked by an old fighting game collecting dust in a corner away from the newer version that was fresh off the boat from Japan. They played without once discussing anything more important than what perverted uses they’d find for the other’s virtual corpse after the next battle.
It was nice.
When it became uncomfortable again, Cole excused himself so he could walk to the HR Department and collect his check. That was even nicer.
“Hot damn,” he sighed when he looked at the amount that made him wonder if he wasn’t the biggest idiot on the planet for turning down the rest.
He went straight to the bank to deposit his check. After that, he drove past his old apartment building on Yale Avenue, ate at one of his favorite burger joints, drove past the electronics stores he used to frequent, and even swung past Nora’s place. She wasn’t home, which was probably for the best. It had been a long day, so he checked into a hotel and crawled under the sheets. The next morning, he headed east.
Abby would only be on her assignment for another couple of days, and now that he was so close to meeting her, Seattle faded into mental clutter. Cole covered some serious ground in a short amount of time. After a few strenuous days and several near-misses with maniacal semis, he made it to St. Cloud, Minnesota. Once he realized just how close he was to his exit, he gave Zakk Wylde a rest and checked his hair in the rearview mirror. After fussing with the tussled mess, he swore to buzz it off again as soon as he could get a hold of some shears.
The land on either side of I-94 was thick with trees and took him directly between Middle Spunk Lake and Big Spunk Lake. Cole did a triple check to make sure he’d read the signs correctly, indulged in some juvenile laughter, and checked his GPS. According to the female British voice who’d gotten him this far, he needed to drive for another 1.2 miles and take the next exit. He did just that, followed her prompts along the side roads, and then patted the little monitor lovingly when he realized he would have been irrevocably lost if he’d followed his gut instincts.
“Thank you, Romana,” he said, naming the British GPS voice after the companion from a classic Doctor Who storyline. “Don’t know where I’d be without you.”
The restaurant was a little place that took up the first floor of a two-story brick building marked by a single wooden sign. Judging by the frillier curtains and knickknacks in the upper windows, the second floor was someone’s residence.
Cole parked along the street and got out, leaving his varnished wooden spear on the floor behind the passenger seat. Having been treated with shapeshifter blood, the weapon was able to change its shape when commanded to do so by its owner. It took a lot of practice to get the spear to twitch, but he was getting the knack of it. One of the most practical tricks he’d recently learned was to make the weapon collapse into a more manageable size so it could be carried and hidden much easier. He always kept the weapon close, but decided it could wait in the car for a change while he lived his life. He walked in front of a large picture window, and before he got to the restaurant’s front door, Abby was rushing outside to greet him.
“There you are! It’s great to see you in person!” she said excitedly.
Abby wasn’t much shorter than Cole’s six-feet-and-some-odd inches. Dressed in jeans that wrapped nicely around slender legs and curvy hips, she moved almost fast enough to make smoke appear from the soles of her white sneakers. Despite the fact that it was a warm August day, she wore a thin cotton button-up shirt over a dark brown tee adorned with the logo for the Midwestern Ectological Group. His eyes naturally took in the sight of her smooth, generous figure, but didn’t linger. Long hair flowed in a thick wave past her shoulders and swirled around her face thanks to a gentle breeze. Abby batted it away and smiled while using the back of her hand to nudge the boxy plastic frames of her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her nose.
Cole smiled effortlessly at the sight of her. “Yep. Here I am. You look great.”
Abby immediately shook her head and pulled her over-shirt closed. “I’m in the field, which means I need to wear dirty clothes and these things,” she said, placing both sets of fingertips on the edges of her glasses.
Reaching out to smooth her hair back, Cole told her, “I think the glasses are cute.”
“No you don’t. Nobody does.”
“Did you change the color of your hair?”
“Yeah, I’m going back to the red. Actually, the box says Intense Auburn, but that’s a little too dramatic for me.”
“Well, it looks nice.”
“You’re only used to seeing me on a webcam, so you don’t know any better,” she added, “but thanks. Are you hungry?”
“Starved. All I’ve been eating is road trip food.”
“Burgers and trail mix?”
“More like beef jerky and candy bars,” Cole said. “Your road trips sound healthier than mine.”
Cole had met Abby through Stu, his regular MEG contact, and chatted with her at any opportunity. Phone conversations and the occasional picture weren’t anything like the real thing, however. “We don’t have to do this if you’d rather not,” she said.
He leaned forward to place a simple kiss on her cheek. Grinning as if the gesture had been more of a playful joke, he said, “Let’s just eat.”