He saw Tom crumpled in the opposite corner, and staggered across the room to get a closer look. The head was barely recognisable. The helmet and top of his head were missing, while his lower jaw appeared to be hanging off. The eyes were somehow still intact. Zak looked into them, and the look back was blank. Previously, he had only been able to see a mask when a team-mate or soldier was dead. All his life he’d been looking at the equivalent of stuffed toys. Now, he was looking at a mutilated dead body. He suddenly felt very sick.
‘It’s only a game,’ he muttered, angry at himself for being so overwhelmed. He thought he should be enjoying this, but right now it was hell – all his wounds screamed for attention. He tried to get a grip on himself, but the pain battered every positive thought away.
Desperate for some respite, what had seemed unthinkable a few minutes ago, now became a serious temptation.
He plunged a shaking hand into his pocket, and pulled out the piece of paper with the cheat code. The paper was sticky from the blood and the writing was smeared.
He searched for the book. The wall was riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel, but the video sheet was still active, displaying its content as before, except that most of it was unreadable or missing. He found the image of the book. A bullet had lodged right in the middle of the entry form, warping the sheet around it. To his frustration, he couldn’t interface with the computer in order to simply move the book.
The keyboards had been scattered, and some were in pieces. Zak hit keys on the usable ones until he found the one that generated characters in the entry form. The letters appeared as a mangled mess. He cleared the form and attempted to deactivate the cheat in the standard way, by entering the code backwards.
