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    Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play: Run With the Hunted
    Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play: Run With the Hunted
    Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play: Run With the Hunted
    Ebook135 pages2 hoursRun With the Hunted

    Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play: Run With the Hunted

    By Jennifer R. Donohue

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    About this ebook

    In the fast-paced, tech heavy future, all work and no play makes a dull team. Bits scores an invite for the game: a real-world, multi-day puzzle and travel challenge with big prizes for the winners. Dolly and Bristol join the road trip, solve puzzles, take in the scenery, and bicker about snacks. But when Bits does what she does best and takes a look behind the code, all is not what it seems, and now the trio is playing against a different and deadlier clock.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJennifer R. Donohue
    Release dateOct 31, 2022
    ISBN9781945548192
    Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play: Run With the Hunted
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    Author

    Jennifer R. Donohue

     Jennifer R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and their Doberman. A member of the SFWA, she works at her local public library where she also facilitates a writing workshop. Her work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Escape Pod, Fusion Fragment, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Exit Ghost, is available now. She tweets @AuthorizedMusin and you can subscribe to her Patreon for a new short story every month: https://www.patreon.com/JenniferRDonohue

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      Book preview

      Run With the Hunted 5 - Jennifer R. Donohue

      For Jim

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Run with the Hunted © 2022 by Jennifer R. Donohue 

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

      Ebook ISBN:  978-1-945548-19-2

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-945548-20-8

      Chapter One

      H ow long should this take? Dolly asks after her second cigarette and I shrug. Bristol’s entering our team in the game while Dolly and I wait in the parking lot, Dolly sitting on the hood of the car and smoking, me drinking my first iced coffee of the day or my final iced coffee of the night. I didn’t mean to not sleep, it’s just how it happened. 

      We weren’t all in the same city when I floated the idea of the game for our next job, and after we got her from the airport, I had to make sure Bristol was prepared for the entry challenge. And then we had to make sure equipment we needed was ready to be packed in the car. Could some of it have been done this morning? Yeah but I was already awake. 

      I’m not worried yet. After all, Bristol could just be chatting with and charming people, entry already secured. She likes socializing, and even though she prefers to be a little snobby, she likes to be able to talk to anybody. So practice is practice.

      Okay but when will you be worried? Can you set a timer or something? She grins at me and I laugh. 

      Nobody in there is going to have a gun or anything but the casino guards, I say. And not all of them will.

      Yeah that’s true. Hey, maybe I’m lookin’ at this wrong, and it’s the nerds I should be concerned about. They’ve never talked to anybody like Bristol, she’ll eat them alive.

      That might be true. Granted, a lot of people haven’t talked to anybody like Bristol. It’s part of how she’s so effective. 

      While I’m not technically banned from entering this game, it seemed like a good call to let Bristol be our point of entry instead, just in case. This isn’t life or death. We don’t even really need the money. A lot of games like this don’t even have a prize, but in this case, the prizes are lucrative (cash, crypto wallet) and fun (a motorcycle referencing a classic manga/anime that’s so respected that there have been few remakes though many dreams, with a matching jacket) and interesting (a 20th century IBM computer chip.) And it’d be nice to have a payday where we aren’t necessarily risking our lives or breaking the law. 

      Not that breaking the law bothers us much, obviously, or we wouldn’t keep doing what we do. 

      Due to the nature of the setup, I didn’t put a wire or camera on Bristol before she went in. She even took out her earbud. If a thing like that was discovered, she’d be accused of cheating and barred. We don’t even know what the entry challenge is, beyond the roll of actual physical quarters that gets you through the door. If it’s a puzzle or riddle or game or what. The challenges vary throughout the game itself, and the gamerunners aren’t totally the same from year to year, adding some newer winners, dropping some past winners. Just the way these kinds of games work.

      The automatic doors woosh open, and Bristol click-clacks out. I told her there might be locations in the game that she won’t want to be in a dress and heels for, but she told me she’ll do a costume change if and when it comes to that. We’ve seen her run in heels, we know she can, but she might not want to crawl in a faux dungeon dressed like that. Well. She doesn’t want to crawl in a faux dungeon at all, but the game is the game.

      How’d it go? Dolly asks, hopping off the car.

      They were both so sweet, Bristol says, with a particularly sharp smile. And the entry test was a simple little logic puzzle that I just breezed through, thanks to your tutelage, Bits. She hands me a manila envelope. "One of them gave me his number in case we ‘ran into any problems,’ which I think perhaps he was not supposed to do. He said his name is Ant."

      No, I don’t think so. He also wouldn’t have given me or Dolly his number, so sending Bristol was the right call either way. I get in the back of the car and open the envelope, sliding out its contents. The welcome letter isn’t anything to be concerned with at a glance, but I’ll look at it under different lights later, just to be sure. We’ve got a team AR badge which is also a little GPS/RFID tag so that the gamerunners can keep track of the players, both for safety and planning. I’ll look at it more closely later, but from the looks of it, it’s factory, hasn’t been popped open or anything. There’s a cheap cell phone, for similar reasons, I assume. The gamerunners can always call or text a team, and the only number saved in the phone is labeled The Game. There’s also, very generous of them I think, a rudimentary flatpack of lock picks, a utility knife, and a game-branded plastic case of band aids. 

      And, finally, a smaller manilla envelope that points us at the first location. I thought you were joking about the mineshaft thing, Dolly says, reading over my shoulder.

      I sent you the article about that one game. Years and years ago, and with every game anybody has run thereafter being even more careful and safety-aware, but still. It really sticks out in the narrative. 

      Yeah I didn’t read it.

      That figures. I though about 50/50 that she would. Anyway this one is a cave so that they can pretend it’s a dungeon crawl. Or that this portion is a dungeon crawl. So not a mine, technically. I guess. Dolly nods, but from her face, she doesn’t really know what I mean by this usage of dungeon crawl.

      Shall we, darlings? Bristol asks, settling herself in the front passenger seat. Much as I love bickering in parking lots.

      It’s almost its own sport, Dolly says, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the car. Definitely a pastime. 

      We’re practically specialists by this point, I add, pulling up my VR headset. I want to scout the location and get a sense of the history of it, and I want to see if anybody else playing has posted on social media yet. They probably shouldn’t, it’s better for security, both to keep other players honest and also to prevent outside interference. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t, and during last year’s game, or one of last year’s games, I tracked the players pretty easily using that. It wasn’t this duo’s game.

      The gussied up cave that we’re going to is one that the gamerunners, or the Incorporated Entity of this Game™, bought years ago, and went through extensively, shoring things up and leveling things out and ensuring there were no horrible drops or too tight squeezes or way for it to unexpectedly flood. There are a couple of pictures online from past players, and I circle around local municipal websites until I find the one that it falls under the jurisdiction of, and then root around for the blueprints and permits that would be on file for the kind of work that the game’s site describes in the most circumspect of ways. Is having that kind of information on a location cheating? I don’t think so, and I don’t think the rules speak against it anyway. Maybe it just takes some of the fun out of it.

      It’s listed as a theme attraction now, like it’s part of a park with rides, which is kind of funny. It’s got lots of ventilation, it’s been checked over for hazardous materials, and is in general as safe as a short network of tunnels in the ground can be made to be. They aren’t well lit, of course, but it’d be silly to expect that. Everybody who has a phone has a flashlight, anyway. Has for decades.

      So what do we think the first puzzle’ll be? Dolly asks while I’m doing this.

      Probably we’ll have to find and open a locked chest, I say. That’s one thing that past players did stick with: none of them posted any of the puzzles they found and solved online, or at least not in unsecured channels.

      Makes sense. I think all of us can lockpick pretty well by this point. Bristol is a quick study in nearly everything. And you said we won’t know how many teams there are?

      Well not officially, during the game.

      Meaning...

      Well they gave us this GPS tag which means every team has a GPS tag.

      Uh-huh? Dolly glances at me over her shoulder as she backs out of the parking spot.

      Which means I can see if I can follow the signal back and then chase who else they’re tracing.

      Does it matter, how many other teams there are? Bristol asks. 

      Not particularly. I have a look at our gametag, just with my eyeballs, and then I scan it. It’s for both safety tracking and so that it can give updates about how far ahead anybody is, who’s gaining on who, to ratchet the tension and competitive spirit, via an app on the provided phone. And it has the team’s name. I thought they’d number or color us, but no, there’s a name here. If I wanted to, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take me long to figure out how to nudge our locations, but I don’t want to. Yet, anyway. Instead, I mess around until I essentially find the lines of code that broadcast, and then chase that to the game’s mainframe, which seems to be an actual mainframe and not just,

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