Then comes the shouting.
“Ginger468! I’m here! Are you okay?”
My stomach is in my throat.
Nobody—not a single human being other than the person behind Grak—knows my username in Deadsky.
And that voice is most definitely familiar.
But that can’t be right.
I must still be asleep.
Groggily, I make my way to the outside door that I never use, because the steps are covered with snow and ice.
Do I answer the door? It seems like a really dumb move. At the same time, if he keeps carrying on like this, he’ll wake up my mom, who needs her sleep because she goes for treatmenttomorrow. Also, I have a particular quirk that makes me morbidly curious. Call it the opposite of survival instinct.
Okay, so I’m dumb. But not that dumb. I reach for my brother’s old baseball bat that I keep by the door, just in case. We get a lot of customers wandering around, and sometimes even in the middle of the night. It’s one of the drawbacks of living where you work. You never know what you’re gonna get.
I grip the baseball bat in one hand, place the other on the doorknob, and twist.
Well, if I’m about to get murdered by a weird stalker from the game, at least my family will get to be on Dateline.
Dammit, my sister had better fucking call Dateline. True crime is the one thing we still have in common.
What stands on the other side of the door is, incredibly, like a real-life version of Grak from the game.
As impossible as it seems, someone has copied his entire look, and he’s here. It’s three a.m., and I’m face-to-face with an eight-foot carbon copy of my friend.
This is the sickest joke that anyone has ever done to me, and I’m furious.
“Who the fuck are you?” I whisper, my voice shaking as hard as the bat in my hand.
“Hello. You are Ginger? I am Grak.”
It sounds like Grak. When he opens his mouth, two small tusks appear to be jutting up from his bottom row of teeth. This is wild. He’s even wearing very lifelike green paint on his skin and wears a furry kilt. On his feet are fur boots.
As cosplay goes, it’s impressive. And also completely fucked up.
“Who are you and how did you find me?” I demand to know.
The man in front of me blinks. “You know who I am. I wished to be with you, and you wished for me. And now I am here. Well, that’s the short version.”
It sounds like Grak. He even uses words like Grak.
I can’t think straight. All I know is I’m freezing to death, standing here in the doorway.
“What do you want from me?” I say. “I don’t have any money.”
“Money. I didn’t come here for work. I came to be with you. My wife.”
I’m now feeling lightheaded and strange, and the bat in my hand feels impossibly heavy.
My vision blurs.
My knees no longer seem to work.
And my fight-or-flight instinct is replaced with an overwhelming need to sleep and reboot my entire consciousness.
