Page 48 of Single-Minded
“Fire, fire,” yells Dane, looking directly at me. I indiscriminately mash a bunch of buttons, unsure of which one is supposed to fire my weapon. Suddenly a grenade goes off, taking out our entire team. I can’t even see who fired it.
“What the fuck, Dane?” yells somebody in the headset. Dane starts swearing and the first round is over.
“You’re not supposed to take out your own guys,” he says to me tersely.
“Wait, what… that was me?” I ask.
“Yeah, that was you. Just be more careful,” he says.
“Sorry, guys,” I say into the microphone. “Sorry, my bad.” For the first time in the game, everyone is silent.
The next round isn’t much better. I’m stuck in a corner and I can’t seem to make my way out. We’re inside and I keep going around and around what looks like an endless room with no doors or windows. I’m starting to feel dizzy.
“Get outta there!” yells Dane.
“There’s no door,” I say. “I’m trapped! I think I’m trapped in a circular room! There’s no way out.” And thenboom!I’m dead. This time it only took me about fifteen seconds to get myself killed. The comment section goes wild.
Dane stands up, dragging his cast and pointing to the upper TV screen, which shows his character’s point of view. There’s my character crumpled in a heap, apparently trapped in a corner. No circular room. Just a corner. Lots of windows, at least two different doorways, and a bombed-out wall. Not trapped.
“Look straight ahead,” Dane admonishes me. “If you look straight up at the ceiling you can’t see where the hell you’re going.”
My untimely death is probably the best thing to happen to D34TH2C@MPERS, because without my help they manage to blow up a bunch of stuff, kill a lot of bad guys, and make some serious progress in completing their mission. I sit on the couch beside Dane while he plays, pretending like I’m interested. I’m trying to watch to see what he does so that I won’t get myself killed in, like, three seconds next time, but his fingers move with lightning speed on the controller.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Will ya get that, babe?” Dane asks, never taking his eyes off the screen or his hands off the controller.
I stand up and answer the door. Pizza delivery. Dane is engrossed in the game, so I take forty dollars out of my purse and pay the guy. He looks thrilled at a ten-dollar tip, he’s clearly used to delivering to college students.
I bring the pizzas over to the coffee table and set down the boxes. I search the kitchen for plates and napkins, but come up short. I probably have wet wipes in my purse, but feel weird about the idea of whipping them out.
“Thanks,” says Dane, still glued to the screen. I sit there watching him, smelling the pizza, for another twenty minutes until Dane’s character gets killed. He pushes open the box and grabs a slice.
“Do you have napkins or paper towels?” I ask.
“Nah,” he responds, licking some sauce off his finger. He’s watching the action on screen, and swears as the rest of his team gets killed off a second time.
The final round goes a bit better. Dane shows me once again how to make my character run and jump and change direction, and suggests that I avoid shooting or bombing anyone, for the safety of the team. This is the best idea I’ve heard all night.
“Just stick behind me, don’t worry about doing anything else,” he says.
“Okay,” I agree, trying not to let myself read the mean stuff people are saying about me in the comments section. Who knew people could be so cruel with just punctuation marks and emoticons?
“Eyes straight ahead,” he says, making a weird signal with his hands like he’s special ops or something, and not just some gamer guy sitting on some dead relative’s horrid old couch.
“Eyes straight ahead,” I repeat, following closely behind Dane. The herky-jerky movement of the game is starting to make me feel seasick, but I keep trotting behind him like we really are saving the world from evildoers.
Dane, and the other guys on our team, GuerillaBl?d?, and ~*Iron?olySin*~, are clustered together behind a wall of rubble when we’re suddenly surprise-attacked by snipers.
“Run!” yells Dane, and I take off backward. The three of them are shooting and swearing, and I keep scrambling along the side of a long building, trying not to look up.
Two things happen almost simultaneously: at the end of the long building, I suddenly find myself face-to-face with one of the bad guys—Dane, GuerillaBl?d?, and ~*Iron?olySin*~ are screaming something about a bomb carrier… and then all three of them are wiped out in rapid succession by the sniper.
“Fuck!”
“Jesus, you’ve got him at point-blank range!” screeches one of the voices in the headset. “We’ve got him!”
“Shoot him!” Dane yells at me. “The guy right in front of you, kill him! Kill him and we win!”
