Joel didn't know that he was only minutes away from a breakdown. What he did know was that there was a reason he prefered this game in co-op. He was better at making decisions when he could talk through them.
Right now, for example, there were two grunts around the corner in this hallway. Should he go attack them unarmed? He knew of at least one grunt behind him, if it ever learned to turn a doorknob. Should he charge or hide? What Joel needed more than anything was a weapon. Second on that list, though, was someone from his clan to help him talk through this.
He always stank at doing this alone.
But, one way or another, that was the only way he was going to do this.
After taking a deep breath, Joel ran around the corner and saw the two grunts literally jump as he came hurtling at them. Putting his shoulder into the one closest to him, he punched the next one in the head with all the force he could muster. His hand hurt, but mostly he was startled that its skin felt like fake leather.
It went down, but it was still moving. Reflexively, he kicked it, hard. And again.
Then, he kicked the other grunt, which was crawling over the floor, probably towards its weapon. He kicked it again. And then again. Finally, he walked over to it's head and kicked it with all the force he had.
Then he did the same for the other grunt, even though it hadn't moved.
Collecting both plasma pistols, he quickly moved his hands over the outside of the grunts' uniforms, looking for extra ammo. He didn't find any, but he did find grenades. Deciding he'd rather risk them setting each other off than leave them behind, he dropped them in his backpack and zipped it back up.
The backpack on both shoulders, one plasma pistol in each hand, he started back in the same direction he'd been going. He had no plan. He didn't even know if anybody he knew was alive.
But he could punch grunts out. How badass was that?
Sticking one of the plasma pistols in his belt, he pulled his phone out to thumb through menus as he moved down the hallway. Facebook was alive. A lot of people were alive. He took a photo of himself, holding a plasma pistol in front of his face. When he looked at it, he realized that his head was in front of the dead grunts behind him. He took another photo.
"Shit is real." Was all he bothered to send, and then he pressed send.
After he put his phone away, he got it back out and set it to silent. Then, putting it away again, he listened as hard as he could.
He began to laugh.
What would campus police do if they found him with three plasma pistols and a backpack full of grenades? Did he risk censure for 'cultural insensitivity' because he killed three grunts?
The laughing turned to suppressed giggling, but it was hard to stop.
When someone commented on his selfie with the plasma pistol that he 'looked like a kid in the candy store,' it struck him as the funniest thing ever. He literally had to lean against the wall he was laughing so hard.
There was a chat room he used with his clan to coordinate games. That seemed a better bet than Facebook, which was mostly just hysteria mixed with religion and politics. Was this really the time to bring up the second amendment? The chat room, normally used to keep in touch and organize game times, was quickly morphing into some sort of information-swapping center on the various properties of the Covenants. It seemed the game, improbably, was remarkably accurate, right down to the grunt birthday party skull, which was creepy. Also, it was agreed that, if you stayed alert, the grunts didn't pose much of a problem. In small numbers, the jackals were also nothing to worry about, if you were able to arm yourself. The elites, however, were a bitch to kill.
There were a lot of people being reported dead at the hands of the elites, which was a sobering idea. And hunters. There were hunters. Joel had really only seen the few grunts in his building, but there were a lot of reports of hunters in groups of two or three, taking out entire police forces.
Joel had to start thinking further ahead. Move? Seek contact with the enemy on his own terms? Hole up and hope the situation is dealt with before he starved?
He chose what felt like a middle option: get a feel for the lay of the land. Drawing up his memory of this building from the outside, he realized that there weren't any windows in it. Terrible observation post.
Across the quad was the James Warns Administration Building, which was like a giant phallus of glass rising above the campus. Plus, there were one or two administrators who could stand a healthy dose of friendly fire. He was going to move there.
Finding the front door of the fine arts building wasn't easy. And, by the time he did, he'd taken out six more grunts in groups of three, two and one. His backpack was now heavy with grenades, and he had plasma pistols in each hand and sticking out of his belt at odd angles like a pirate.
Strangely - did nobody else play Halo? - it seemed as though he were the only person alive in the building. He came across the bodies of four more faculty, but no students. Later, when he thought about this, it was clear: students carried phones, checked them. They were warned.
The quad wasn't filled with Covenant, but it was liberally sprinkled with them, doing that milling-about thing that they did when they weren't fighting, but also weren't really going anywhere. Joel shook his head. What he wouldn't give for a sniper rifle.
Mostly it was grunts, but he saw the shields of several - a half dozen, maybe - Jackals and one, two… four Elites. One of them in that gold armor that probably meant something more than the fact that it was going to be a pain in the balls to kill him, but that was all Joel could remember about it.
Suddenly, Joel was reminded - don't ask why, there was no surface similarity - to a moment in the original Halo, just after the Masterchief took some weird antigrav elevator up to a Covenant mothership with some Marines who were destined to be short-lived. He'd played through the carnage of that level maybe a hundred times before moving on, because that was when active camouflage was introduced to the game.
These fuckers didn't have active camouflage, did they?
Never even opening the glass doors at the front of the building, Joel decided to head back to the emergency exit he'd come in and to skirt around the whole thing. He wasn't ready to run head-first into the quad just yet.
Joel was sneaking up on a pair of Jackals who were just walking aimlessly on the street behind the fine arts building when he met Ella, who was doing the same on the other side of the street. At first, of course, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, he almost shot her with a plasma pistol - all this time and he still hadn't used it - but, with her dark eyes and curly hair it was clear she wasn't Covenant.
She was moving along the side of a building on the opposite side of the street, going from bush to bush when the Jackals' backs were turned. He was doing about the same in the bit of yard between the fine arts building and the street. The obvious thing to do was to coordinate their attack, but it turned out that there really was no universal sign language. Or, if there were, neither of them could use it.
The Jackals would walk closer, facing them, and the two of them would hide behind their respective bushes. Then, the Jackals would walk away and they'd make weird gestures in the air. Joel really thought that his 'walking man' illustration with his fingers was pretty clear, but she just shrugged.
This happened three or four times before Ella took the initiative. When the Jackals turned their backs again, she sprinted across the road and flopped down next to him behind the bush. Joel saw her coming and turned his attention to the Jackals, in case they heard her and turned around. They didn't even flinch.
"Never really thought about how stupid those guys are." She said. "I mean, if they, you know, would turn on seven or eight brain cells, they'd be fine. Lucky for us they don't."
"You armed?" Joel asked.
"Was going to take something from these guys."
Joel handed her a plasma pistol. "They're pretty easy to get from grunts."
"Hmm." She said and then, when it was clear that the conversation was stalled, "plan?"
"You take one and I take one?"
"I'd kill for a grenade right now."
Joel looked at her. "Why didn't I think of that. I've got a bag of them." He was already opening his backpack. "You any good at throwing them?"
"I don't know. I'm pretty good with a softball."
They both looked the grenade over and tried to figure out how to arm it. There was no visible pin to pull but, when they did figure it out, Ella looked at him. "These are the sticky ones, right?"
"I think so. The frags are human grenades. Got these from Covenant."
"Okay."
The two Jackals were still walking the same stretch of road back and forth, stupidly. As they approached, Ella got up on her fingertips and toes, like she was at a starting line. When the Jackals turned around, she sprung upright, armed the grenade and threw it overarm. It flew straight as a baseball pitch.
The Jackal it hit stumbled forward two steps and then spun around in alarm. The other Jackal was already firing in their direction. Ella flattened herself to the ground again and said, "after the boom, we go."
"Got it."
The explosion wasn't as loud as Joel expected, but it was more visceral. Loud though it was, it was something felt more than it was heard. As soon as he heard it, Joel pushed himself up and began running. And, even so, found he was behind Ella.
A foul-smelling, wet patch of asphalt was all that remained of the Jackal that the grenade stuck to. The other was prone on the ground and it wasn't clear whether it was dead or not. Running to it, Ella performed a maneuver Joel had never seen before. She jumped and, as she landed with both feet on the Jackal's head, she stomped with such force that it looked as though she bounced off. The wet sound that the head made under her impact and the uncomfortable sight of wrong-colored blood spilling from its mouth made it clear that, whether the grenade killed it or not, this Jackal was no longer a danger.
There was a needler and a carbine, as well as four more grenades.
"Should have brought a bag." Ella said.
"The dead have bags." Joel said. "I'll carry the grenades until you can get one. Take whatever weapon you want. I'm equally bad with all of them."
"I thought all boys were Halo experts." Ella picked up the needler and held it in her right hand, the plasma pistol in her left.
"Eh." Joel shrugged, "I always played more to talk smack."
"You play Halo like a girl." Ella said in a tone of mock teasing. "We shouldn't stay here."
"I was going to James Warns," Joel said, meaning the administration building. "Got a better plan?"
"Nope."
They continued moving around the outside of the buildings surrounding the quad. As thick as the Covenant were in the middle of the quad, they were strangely thin here. So much so that Ella asked Joel to let her 'practice' on some Grunts they came across. And, again.
Whenever they came across groups stronger than two grunts, Ella used her overarm grenade throw and then they rushed. It worked well, and Joel wondered if the Covenant was capable of learning. Did they have satellites in the sky now, watching? Were they seeing the strategies that worked and thinking of ways to counter them?
When they made it to the James Warns administration building, none of the doors not facing the quad were unlocked. "Should we knock?" Ella asked. "Walk around the front?"
"Think a grenade will do the trick?" Joel asked. "When I looked, there were a lot of Covenant on the quad."
"Right." Ella said. "There are not a lot of us. It's worth a try."
The grenade was a mixed blessing. It blew a hole in the door, but so warped the door that it was stuck tightly in it's frame. It took the two of them pulling together on the sharpened, bloodthirsty edges of the twisted metal to get it open.
Inside, there were a lot of bodies. Almost entirely human.
"Think there are still Covies here?" Ella asked.
Joel shrugged. "Won't hurt to assume there are."
There were. In fact, Joel got his first wound when needler fire exploded the glass of a door he was hiding behind and it left him with cuts on his face and right arm. But, the two of them successfully cleared the aliens, and Joel made use of the trick of holding down the trigger on the plasma pistol. It took a Jackal out in one shot, but the recoil traveled painfully up his arms, through his elbows and to his shoulders such that, when they reached the top floor, he was still shaking his arms out, trying to chase the pain away.
On the top floor there were, of course, quite a few Covies. They had some kind of communication equipment. Apparently, the Covenant had the same idea that Joel and Ella had had: control the top floor.
Joel and Ella backed slowly into the stairway they'd just come out of.
"How is your grenade arm?" Joel asked.
"Bigger question is, how much is this like the game?"
"What do you mean?"
"In the game we could never destroy their equipment." Ella's idea was pretty straightforward: if the first grenades took the communication equipment out, the Covies couldn't call for reinforcements.
"I'll throw for the radios." Joel said. "You're doing better with the actually hitting moving targets bit. Hit everything big."
Ella nodded. "We pop out, throw three grenades each, pop back in."
Joel nodded.
They opened Joel's backpack and each took three grenades. Then, Ella gave Joel a nod which he understood to mean 'you first,' and he activated a grenade and slammed up against the door's crashbar.
The radio equipment was, of course, still where it was when they'd looked the first time. He threw. Then, he activated another grenade and threw it. There was an elite firing wildly, apparently unable to see because of the glowing plasma grenade on its faceplate. Good job to Ella. There wasn't time to think and he'd activated his third grenade before picking a target. He looked for the biggest clump of Covies he could find, and tossed before running back to the stairs.
Or, he wanted to run back to the stairs. Instead, he ran squarely into Ella, who was still looking for a target for her third grenade, and they both tumbled into the stairs.
Joel slammed the door behind him and pressed his back against the coarse cinder block wall. Ella looked down at her hand as though she couldn't believe she had a grenade in it and, as the grenades they'd thrown began to explode with a noise that was at once sharp and thumping, she began to panic.
Loudly.
"Woo!" She said in a high-pitched tone, and made many syllables that might have been an artistic interpretation of 'uh-oh' and she began to turn and run in place. At least three of the grenades they'd thrown had already exploded and she was standing there holding an activated grenade.
"Down the stairs!" Joel shouted. "Throw it!"
Instinctively wanting as much of the solid building between her and the grenade, Ella leaned over the railing and threw it under their own landing, before collapsing against the wall. More grenades thumped on the other side of the door and then, after a brief pause, the grenade below them exploded, sending vibrations up through their shoes and hammering their ears with compressed air. Both of them sank to sit on the floor and Joel needed a moment to process the fact that he couldn't hear anything before training his rifle on the door.
His vision wasn't fading to white, but the whistling that alternated with alien, unnatural silence did remind him a lot of his Modern Warfare games. Hopefully, they weren't going to start coming true, too.
The way he could tell his hearing was returning was because he could hear Ella's laughing. He looked at her and, chastened, she made a visible effort to stop, but soon exploded with the pent up energy of it all.
"That was close." She said.
Joel had to laugh. "Yeah."
"If I die today," Ella said, using the backs of her thumbs to wipe tears from her eyes, "I want them to kill me. I don't want to die of stupid."
Joel snorted a laugh. "Sorry about pushing you in here."
Ella laughed. "Yeah. Whatever. . ."
They were quiet for a moment. Ella gestured at the door. "What do you think?"
"I don't hear anything."
Ella laughed. "Right now, I don't think it means anything. I mean, that was pretty creepy."
"Yeah."
"Plan:" Ella said in such a way that Joel could hear the colon after the word. "Same thing, but no grenades, plasma pistol fire. Dash out, shoot shoot shoot, you give the word and we dash back."
Joel smiled. "Shoot shoot shoot."
"Ideally, we'll hit whatever is out there."
"Sounds good." Even though they'd been talking full voice, something about the impending action made Joel want to be a little sneakier. He held up his left hand - he'd taken a plasma pistol in his right - with the fingers spread. Then, folding his fingers in, he started a slow count-down. When only his thumb was still up, he pulled the door open.
"Shoot shoot shoot!" He called, both as a joke and a kind of battle cry.
His first two shots were unaimed, just in the direction of the action. Then, he saw some grunts milling about the busted radio table. Communicating? Trying to fix the radio? He began firing into the group. None of them had gone down when he saw the distinctive blue glow of a plasma grenade arch into the group.
"Back!" Ella screamed.
In the stairs again, Joel realized his hands were shaking. "Think there's a coffee machine up here?" He asked.
"I know you were supposed to give the. . ." Ella stopped mid-sentence and looked at him. "I would kill for a coffee. In fact, I would kill just to kill. But, yeah. Coffee."
"That's what I'm saying."
"Just the grunts there?" Ella asked.
"I didn't see anything else. What do you say we take them out and go scavenging."
"Woo hoo! Scavenging!" Ella grinned. "Makes us sound like jackals."
"Would you like me to call you the jackal?" Joel said. "To be honest, I've forgotten your real name."
"Ella," she provided automatically. "But my friends call me the jackal." She grinned.
"We gonna kill these guys?"
"How many are left?"
Joel opened the door and leaned out a little. He pulled it back in when the needler fire started. "Two? I didn't see any more than that."
Ella was silent a moment, and then nodded.
"We move up, shooting, and then just beat the crap out of them if they're still alive."
"I gotta tell you, my ass-kicking muscles are getting worn out." Ella sounded tired.
"Think of the coffee." Joel said. "And tomorrow you get to say that you've got a cramp in your ass-kicker."
Ella smiled and pushed herself upright from the wall she'd been leaning against. "That's reason enough to do almost anything."
In the end, it went fairly quickly. Concentrated plasma fire and Joel beating the grunts with office implements. The second one had been so weakened by Ella's plasma fire, that it died when Joel kicked it as hard as he could in the chest. Just crumpled together and fell to the floor.
"Check them for weapons." Joel said. "I'll get on the coffee."
It was an administrative building and the top floor had obviously been for some pretty high muckity-mucks. They were in a very nice reception area, with the remains of potted palms in front of the windows and a high countertop where a receptionist had clearly sat with the university logo on the wall behind her. She was lifeless on the floor behind the countertop.
Joel listened a moment very carefully but didn't hear anything. He moved down the hallway, looking in the glass doors at the offices, many with people dead at the door or even slumped over their desks.
In the middle of the hallway was a small room labeled 'coffee kitchen.' He quickly found what he wanted and started heading back.
It was with his hands full that he heard Ella scream something and then say "You cowardly bastard!" Running to the room, he got there just in time to see an elite raise a particle sword over its head. Ella literally threw herself over a table to get out of the way of the particle sword.
Joel dropped the coffee and pulled his plasma pistol from his belt, but before he could line it up the elite exploded, hitting Joel with a fist of compressed air that was only a little smaller than what he'd felt in the stairs. He was dazed for a moment, but, when he saw Ella come up from behind the desk, he breathed a sigh of relief.
"Think we should be doing something?" Joel asked. They were sitting now, drinking coffee and looking out the broken windows at the quad. There were an unusual number of Covenant there and Joel idly wondered why they'd pick the university. Were they attacking everywhere? Was the university well situated? Did they have resources that the Covenant wanted? Were they taking out the highest concentration of Halo players first and then planning to roll up everyone else?
"I told you," Ella said after a pause so long that Joel had to think a moment what his question was, "my ass-kicker is getting worn out. Lemme get another cup or two of this and then we'll talk."
"No way we can attack them." They were milling about, so it was impossible to count them accurately, but Joel figured there were at least fifty Covenant - and at least half a dozen elites - on the quad, and none of them showed any signs of leaving.
"Not without a respawn, no."
"Seriously."
There was another long pause - several sips of coffee - before Ella spoke again. "Think the Army is doing anything?"
Joel got his phone out. "I'm in the National Guard and. . . hey, yeah, they called me like seven times but my phone was on silent. So, I guess they're getting ready."
"You gotta go?"
"It's an hour drive. And there are Covenant everywhere. My phone was busted."
Ella nodded. "A couple of those purple scooter things on the highway would clean traffic right up."
"Ghosts." Joel said, unable to stop himself from making the correction. "Think they really have unlimited ammo like in the game?"
"Hmm." Was all Ella answered. Her ass-kicker really was worn out.
A moment later, they both jumped up as the door to the stairwell was slammed open. Ella was up with a grenade in her hand and Joel had his rifle trained on the door. After a moment, a human voice called out from the stairs "Hello?"
"Hello?" Joel answered. "Let's not go shooting here."
Six people - four men and two women - came out of the stairs. "Glad to see you." The first said, he was tall and had shaggy black hair that he wore long in wavy locks. He took note of the Covenant bodies laying around. "Been busy."
"Yeah." Ella said, "It was fun, but not my ass-kicker's tired."
There was scattered laughter. "I hear that," the man who'd apparently appointed himself the speaker said. He had an honest-to-god beam rifle in his hands. "My name is Scott, and these are Mary, Professor Hidgens, Karl, Ward, and Stewart."
They all waved when he said their names. Mary looked to be in shock or, perhaps, Joel thought her ass-kicker was just tired. Professor Hidgens was a brunette who looked too be too old to be a student, but far too young to be called professor. Karl, Ward and Stewart all obviously knew each other before the Covenant showed up. They were a sort of unit, standing together in clothes that should have been in the laundry and looking a little shocked for all their bristling with Covenant weaponry.
"Been here long?" Professor Hidgens asked.
Joel and Ella looked at each other. They didn't have an appointed speaker. "About a cup of coffee." Ella said. "Ten minutes?"
"Time feels weird now, doesn't it?" Karl asked. He didn't seem to like not being the one who spoke.
"Yeah." Joel said.
"Anyway," Scott looked at his watch. "The plan is like this: at half past - ten minutes - we're supposed to provide supporting fire for the attack on the Commons."
"The commons?" Ella asked.
"The quad." One of the three who stuck together - their names were already forgotten - answered. "There was a big discussion. For the purpose of coordination, it's to be called the commons."
Joel had an involuntary and entirely negative reaction to the phrase 'for the purpose of coordination.' Glancing at Ella, he saw her glancing at him and realized she'd had the same reaction. "Okay?"
"Me and Ward are going to do some sniping. These guys" - Scott's gesture clearly meant everyone else - "are going to try and keep any bad guys from coming up the stairs."
"For the purpose of coordination," Ella said, "could we refer to them as Covenant. I'm attracted to bad guys, but haven't yet felt any chemistry with the Covenant."
Joel looked at her dumbfounded. Ella's face was completely serious, but there was the same spark in her eyes as had been there when she talked about being called the jackal.
Scott didn't seem to realize he was being mocked. He just slumped a little as though the thought of a discussion along those lines wore him out. "Right," he said a little curtly, "the Covenant."
"I think we could help with the stairs detail." Joel said. "Not that I can speak for the jackal here."
Ella grinned when she heard it. "Glad to help."
Joel wound up starting coffee while they all waited for the remaining eight minutes to pass so that this attack on the quad could take place. Scott settled in to set up as a sniper breaking the remaining glass out of the bottom of the windows and cleaning the floors. Eventually, Ward felt compelled to go and act all sniper-like as well and headed over.
The others made awkward small talk at the top of the stairs.
"Think we should get set up somehow?" One of the women, the younger one asked.
"Don't know how." Someone else said.
"To be honest," Joel volunteered, "if there's going to be an attack, I kinda want to watch."
"You don't think they'll be shooting at the windows?" The professor asked.
"Hmm." Ella said. "We could go down a few floors."
And so, coffee cups in hand, they were all standing at a window with coffee cups in their hands when the attack started. In retrospect, the best word for the attack was tentative. It was as though all the people in all the buildings knew they were supposed to attack, but were all waiting to join an attack in progress.
Grenades were thrown from isolated windows. When the Covenant reacted with plasma cannon fire, there were more shots from other windows, more grenades. Someone in the room, Joel couldn't tell, mumbled under his breath "I don't need a plasma cannon when I'm rockin' these guns."
None of them opened the window and it was impossible to tell if there were shots coming from the snipers they were ostensibly defending. Joel walked to the stairs to give a listen.
"Son of fuck!" Someone said.
"It's not fair." Someone else added.
"What level is this set on?" Ella asked.
Joel walked back. A Covenant drop ship was at the end of its characteristic looping approach. The turret under its chin was firing and Joel's stomach sank as it hovered in the air and the side doors opened.
And the drop ship exploded in the air and sank to the ground heavily. The impact shook the building, several of the windows broke in their frames, but nobody seemed to care.
"That's what I'm talking about!"
"Who the fuck was. . . ?"
A moment later, some kind of huge airplane - obviously an American fighter, but nobody had time to see what - thundered overhead. There was scattered applause. "I wondered why we didn't have any help." Ella said, looking out the window.
"Looks like we're winning." Someone said.
Down in the quad, they could see more human than Covenant. There was no clear front, it was more a mixed melee with both sides evenly distributed throughout the quad.
"Wish I had more coffee." Joel said.
"Better than TV." One of their new friends said.
A moment later, the fighter jet roared overhead at a ninety degree angle to its first approach. This time, before they could cheer, there was a stunned silence as explosions peppered the quad.
"Fuck. . ." Someone said in the stunned silence.
"There were. . ."
The yellow-orange of the explosions lasted only for a moment and was quickly replaced by billowing, white smoke which seemed to grow darker as it dissipated. When it cleared, the quad was stilled. They just. . ."
"That doesn't happen on TV." Ella said.