Page 117 of Looking for Group
They were not fine.
They had a bad spawn in the first building, and Drew got bitten by a zombie, which cost him one of his frying pans. As predicted, everyone else was getting cool shit and he just…wasn’t. His inventory was filling up with bottled water that was useless in this scenario, extra ammo for the guns he didn’t have, and half the components of a Molotov cocktail.
And to top it all off, Kit was still on his phone. He had it on his lap and was doing his best to be discreet, but in a lot of ways that made it worse. Everyone had clearly noticed and was clearly being too polite to say anything. Drew kept having to nudge him when it was his turn and remind him of the rules, like for example not gunning down your allies by accident. Worse still, despite his constant distraction, Kit was having a much better game than Drew was. He’d wound up with a chainsaw in one hand and a scoped sniper rifle in the other, and had personally taken out more zombies than anyone else. He was living the Zombicide dream and didn’t even seem to care.
Then, when they weren’t even halfway through the scenario,Drew got killed. He’d been desperately ransacking a police car, looking for any weapon better than a crowbar, when he’d found a zombie in the boot. He’d spent his last action trying to kill it, failed, and promptly had his face chewed off.
An awkward silence fell over the table.
“And that,” said Sanee finally, “is why you shouldn’t search when you’re playing last in the round.”
Drew sighed. “Dude, I didn’t have a weapon, searching is my only skill, and frankly, I was kind of dead weight anyway.”
“It’s a swingy game. All you need is one shotgun and you’re back.”
“Yes, which is why I was searching the police car. And why I am now dead.”
“Shall we stop?” asked Steff, before the argument could build any further. “It seems a bit unfair for Drew to have to sit out.”
He really didn’t want that to happen. The only thing more depressing than getting knocked out of a game early was feeling like you’d wrecked everything for everybody. “No, it’s fine. You guys carry on.”
At that moment, Kit looked up from the text message he was blatantly sending. “You can take my character, if you like. I don’t mind.”
Drew didn’t want to be an arsehole, but it kind of happened anyway. “I can tell you don’t mind. You’ve been on your phone for the wholefuckinggame.”
Everything went silent.
“I’m sorry.” Kit gazed at him, wide-eyed. “Something came up in guild.”
There was a dull roaring in Drew’s brain. “Fuck the guild. I’m sick of the fucking guild. You’re supposed to be out, here, with me and my friends. But if you seriously want to be in an imaginarydungeon full of pretend monsters with randoms off the internet, then, y’know what? Go do that.”
Somehow it got even more silent.
Kit got up, tucked his phone into his breast pocket, and left the room. The door closed with aclickbehind him.6
For a little while, nobody moved, and then Sanee began packing up Zombicide. There was an almost funereal air about it, as if he was laying to rest a good game, taken from us too soon.
“Are you going to go after him?” asked Steff.
Drew hadn’t thought that far ahead. To be honest, he hadn’t really known what was going to come out of his mouth. And he was in this confused, stuck space where he felt stupid for having made a massive scene, but was sure he’d feel even more stupid if he backed down now. “He was the one being the antisocial dickhead, not me.”
“I’m with you, mate.” Sanee glanced up from the reboxing. “You just don’t come to a thing, then not be at the thing.”
Tinuviel was busy dividing the zombies up by type so they could go into their separate bags. “I think,” she said, “that you may be failing to account for the essentially arbitrary and constructed nature of social conventions, and for their variability between seemingly similar groups.”
Drew was so not in the mood for this.
“If someone gave me a quid every time you saidarbitrary,convention, orconstructed, I would own all the expansions for this game by now, and there are a shitload.” Apparently neither was Sanee.
She blinked. “I just meant that maybe he didn’t know how rude you’d think he was being.”
Steff squeezed behind Sanee’s chair and wrapped her arms around him. “He was definitely being a bit weird, but youshouldn’t just let him walk out like that. You know the rule, Squidge, never go to bed angry.”
There was a thoughtful moment. Then Sanee shamelessly one-eightied.
“She’s right.” He turned his head and nuzzle-nibbled the inside of Steff’s elbow. “That’s how we do it, and look at us. If I don’t deal with stuff when it comes up, it just bugs me forever.”
Steff nodded. “It’s true. He got super angry at oneXKCDstrip and then never read it again.”
