Ranch Battle

With seven minutes left, the Walker brothers moved with desperate urgency. The kitchen table had become an assembly line of improvised weaponry—acid-filled jars, two makeshift aerosol claymores, and at the far end, a meticulously cleaned and loaded shotgun.

"Where should we place them?" Jonathan asked while carefully sealing the fifth and last jar of acid.

"Front door gets the first claymore," Arthur directed, his voice steady in their ears. "The first blast will give away part of the surprise in exchange for slowing them down." Hopefully, He resisted mentioning how ineffective slicing had been against the wrong-man in Mark's apartment. "Grab extra fuel as well and pour it over the porch. If we're lucky, we'll burn a few more."

"Are you sure we aren't over-reacting?" Asked Jonathan, worriedly looking at the domestic terrorist wet dream on his kitchen table and then at the house he had grown up in.

It was a reasonable question and understandable thoughts in the situation. Even Arthur didn't know whether he was going overboard, having only been exposed twice to the threats of the game world.

Another person, maybe one with a better understanding of social cues, would have understood the subtext and emotions of the question, but not Arthur, he dryly answered with a "I'm positive."

Going by Mark and Emily's missions, he was definitively over-preparing, and yet the extreme danger warning at the beginning had him jittery, expecting the worst to happen.

Javier nodded grimly. "And where do we position ourselves?"

"You'll need a clear escape route," Arthur replied. "The bedroom with the window facing away from the driveway. Hunker down there after setting the traps. Once they trigger the first one, bait them to go through the entire house before prepping the big one and then move out that window and run for the cows."

The last part would hopefully confuse their assailants or, if they got lucky, the cows might decide to defend their owners.

Knowing the plans, the two young men began setting up traps around the house, creating a veritable kill box of traps, it all depended on the enemy following a predictable pattern of going for the most direct route without caring about their own safety, as observed until now.

He prepared everything as best as he could... With just a couple more minutes, he could have turned the furniture into a corral-like path, guiding the invaders step-by-step into every trap from the front door to the bedroom.

Finally, the preparations were ready, and the two retreated to the master bedroom on the top floor, Javier carrying his rifle and Jonathan with an electric kettle prodder and a bag of acid jars.

Time crawled unnervingly. Javier tried again to make a call, but the signal hadn't come back yet. Jonathan kept staring out the window, hoping and not hoping at the same time to see something in the shadows.

Arthur instead spent the last minute investigating outside, looking for usable elements to support their escape and looking out for signs of the enemy's arrival.

He leaned closer, mesmerized by the night unfolding on his monitor. The digitally enhanced moonlight, unnaturally bright, illuminated the sleeping world below, dark and bright, peaceful and yet hiding danger in plain sight.

Once more the sense that he was looking at a game world felt shaken, his sense of disbelief screaming at him to open his eyes.

So immersed, he almost missed the moment the timer ticked to 0.

The world shifted subtly, looking unchanged, but the atmosphere turned sinister. The shadows of trees and crops that looked perfectly natural all of a sudden turned menacing, and right from the shadows, the wrong-men emerged.

As if summoned by the timer's completion, nearly two dozen malformed shapes materialized from the fields and wooded edges, swiftly encircling the isolated house.

Jonathan spotted them a heartbeat later, when the stark glare from a nearby streetlamp sliced across the wide-brimmed hat of a figure advancing from the road.

He nearly seized Javier's gun to fire upon them immediately. Doubts about Arthur's warnings had been at the back of his mind until now, but now, faced with these strange creatures and their movements both oddly mechanical yet awkwardly uncoordinated, denial gave place to fear.

"Jesus," Javier whispered, joining his brother at the window. "What are they?"

Arthur's answer came swift and cold. "Doesn't matter. Get ready."

The wrong-men moved with eerie synchronicity, spreading out to encircle the house in a textbook flanking maneuver. Their bodies jerked with each step—puppet-like yet purposeful. In the moonlight, their faces looked like melted wax sculptures, features flapping with each step as if not properly attached.

Jonathan's fingers tightened around the makeshift electric prod. "There's so many of them."

"Stick to the plan," Arthur commanded. "First wave hits the front door trap. The rest follow. When enough are inside, we light the gas and run."

The first group reached the front porch. Six of them. They didn't bother with stealth or caution. No knocking, no pretense of normalcy. The lead wrong-man simply tried using the doorknob, and when that failed, pressed his hand against the lock hole and a moment later the unmistakable click of the lock being opened sounded out.

A hiss of gas, loud enough to alert any normal human went ignored as thing after thing poured through the door, a moment later the room was lit by the gas being ignited by a nearby candle and two seconds later, the temperature in the bucket had increased too much for the can to remain whole.

BOOM!

The explosion rocked the house, the concussive force traveling up through the floorboards and rattling the bedroom windows. A flash of orange light briefly illuminated the yard as flames erupted from the fuel-soaked porch.

Through his interface, Arthur watched as nail fragments and shrapnel tore through the first wave of attackers. Their bodies jerked, and some even ripped like clay figurines under the impact, suits shredding, limbs twisting at impossible angles. But they didn't stop. Didn't scream. The damaged ones simply staggered back while others pushed forward through the flames.

"They're still coming," Arthur warned. "First trap got three of them and slowed a couple more."

More and more wrong-men poured inside the house, half crossing the sea of flame that was the porch, and another half from the back door. A couple remained outside, loosely grouped around the house.

More and more claymores detonated, forming a half moon of fire around the house and tearing down over half of the wannabe kidnappers by the time they got to the bedroom door.

Arthur, meanwhile, studied in devout attention the effects of various types of damages against the things.

Fire seemed to spread across their skin as if made of wood or paper. Nails and other shrapnel didn't seem to do anything much. Concussion, however, yielded mixed results; it either ripped off limbs as if they were held together by spit and glue, or, if the blast wasn't strong enough, failed to damage internal organs or crack bones, if they even possessed any.

If he was capable of tearing off his eyes off the monitor, Arthur might have been taking notes.

Finally, they reached the last line of defence, the bedroom door, with enough furniture pressing against it to furbish a new apartment.

"Propane's in position," Jonathan reported, his voice barely steady. "Ready to trigger the torch."

"On my mark," he instructed, watching them group at the door while the lead repeatedly slammed its shoulder against the frame, hard enough to crack the supports and the wall.

"Now!" Arthur shouted.

Javier activated the blowtorch, the white flame ignited and licked across the surface of the gas tank, turning the metal surface heated in moments. The propane tank groaned audibly, pressure building dangerously within its heated shell.

"Out! Now!" Arthur commanded, urgency sharpening his voice.

Jonathan threw open the bedroom window, glancing back once at the door bulging inward with each relentless blow. Javier followed swiftly, rifle slung across his back, gripping the window ledge as he swung himself into the night.

Just as Jonathan vaulted out, a deafening blast ripped through the bedroom, shattering glass and sending splinters raining across the yard. Flames roared from the windows, briefly illuminating the shadowy figures below as they converged on their targets.

"Javier!" Arthur shouted, his voice crackling through the earpieces as they sprinted towards the pasture, praying silently that the confusion and fire would buy them enough time.

Slightly concussed from the jump and explosion, Javier hesitated briefly, stepping backward and swinging his rifle muzzle toward the nearest wrong-man. The shot went wide, splintering a branch behind the creature.

Jonathan grabbed Javier's shoulder, pulling him toward the pasture. "Move! We have to reach the cows!"

The wrong-men closed in silently, undeterred by the flames. Javier steadied himself, firing again, hitting one in the head as the brothers retreated, stumbling into the moonlit field. Their heartbeats thundered in their ears, the farmhouse burning fiercely behind them, illuminating their desperate escape.

The wrong-men were faster, the remaining five came from around the house and were gaining ground rapidly. Unluckily, the last one was positioned directly between the brothers and the cow fence gate.

Somehow neither of the brothers had noticed it until now, either due to the chaos of the scene or the spectacle of lights and shadows from their childhood burning.

It took Arthur blaring the alarm in their ear for Javier to halt abruptly, raise his rifle, and fire. The bullet struck the creature squarely in the chest, causing it to falter briefly, but not stop. Javier fired again, and again, each shot hitting home but failing to drop it.

With an unnatural surge, the wrong-man closed the distance and tackled Javier to the ground, knocking the rifle away. Its misshapen hands closed around Javier's throat, choking him. Javier struggled desperately, his vision blurring at the edges staring at the unfeeling face of the human-like face staring back at him.

Jonathan acted without hesitation, smashing an acid jar onto the creature's back. The glass shattered, acid pouring onto its flesh. The wrong-man let out a guttural, distorted howl as the acid rapidly ate through its body like boiling water through paper, dissolving its back in moments.

Gasping, Javier pushed the dying creature away and scrambled to his feet. In a couple more steps they had finally reached the gate, and a moment later the latch rose in the air.

The cows, startled by the explosion, had scattered initially, a few ramming the fence, others bunching up in the center of the pasture, lowing in confusion. Now, with the pasture gate open and the fire throwing wild shadows across the grass, the herd hesitated. The air thick with smoke and fear.

Jonathan reacted to their hesitation with panic, waving his arms and shouting, trying to drive them forward. The herd shuffled and mooed, still reluctant. A sharp scream echoed behind them—one of the wrong-men, closing the distance.

Javier fired again, missing, but the sound cracked through the night like a whip. That was enough. One cow broke into a run through the gate, and the rest followed in a chaotic surge, hooves pounding the ground, pushing past the brothers and into the open field beyond.

Just in time, as the wrong-men had almost reached the duo, only for their path forward to be interrupted by a herd of stampeding beasts.

Nevertheless, neither fire nor explosions had halted them before, and the monsters charged in the stampede like starving wolves on a flock of sheep… Only to be impaled on horns, rammed by thick skulls and then flattened under hundreds of hooves.

As the last of the animals left the fence, nothing had remained of their pursuers.