Palumbi - Blood plagues and endless raids: a hundred million lives in the World of Warcraft

Copyright 2017 by Anthony R. Palumbi

All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61373-687-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover design: Marc Whitaker / MTWdesign.net
Typesetting: Nord Compo

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

As we wash our body so should we wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.

To the many millions who made their way
to Azeroth, whatsoever they accomplished,
whomsoever they played with, however long
they stayed. And to our parents, partners,
and friends, whose birthdays and baby
showers we missed.

I fell from sleep when the car stopped, cringing at the fluorescent glare of gas station floodlights. Acrid tobacco smoke curled like cream through a dark brew of muttered conversation. The windows were down, and even at four in the morning the South Texas air weighed warm and damp on our shoulders. The car emptied, three grown men unfolding themselves from the bench seat in the back. Id had the foresight to call shotgun back in Houston. A battered passenger van sat alongside us at the pump; a dozen migrant laborers milled about, crunching on bags of Doritos, their Spanish soft like they feared waking the sun.

Ten hours and a hundred dollars in bribes later, across the Rio Grande and past the seething, desperate border town of Reynosa, Erics dusty red station wagon soldiered along in the 115 degree Fahrenheit air. Shrubs, grasses, and stunted trees hugged the ground around usall shockingly green for a murderous Mexican August. The air conditioner roared against the heat with all the success of men cursing God. Heat had long since pacified the conversation when the car swerved dramatically to the right. We flailed about and were pulled left again, correcting back to the center of the road as Eric cut loose with a stream of incredulous profanity. The dogs, he bellowed when at last his brain made sense of things. Dogs in the road! And suddenly we were turning around, pulling a U-turn on the two-lane highway.

Horns? asked Tim from the front, too distressed to recall Erics real name, instead abridging his gaming handle, Hornsbuck.

Look at this! Eric insisted as we roared back to the spot. The hazard came into view: three dogs in the center of the highway. The one with the white-blond coat was the biggest. She lay dead in the road, the victim of an earlier passing motorist. The others had discovered the body and were attempting to mate with it. The little black one had climbed her corpse and now worked furiously at its summit. The ragged brown mutt sat patiently in the median, waiting his turn. The asphalts heat rose around them in shimmering waves. The regal iron-gray ladies of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains sat in quiet judgment. In the car, the odor of weed resin mingled with hours-old sweat. We turned around once more on a dusty service road, and as we continued on our original course we got a third and final look. Brett insisted the little black dog was lined up wrong; the humping was just a display. Ive chosen to believe him.

Our house outside Cadereyta was a pastoral dream of white stucco and cerulean tile inlay. A fountain loomed by the front door, dry and spattered with road dust. Storm clouds had begun to churn in the distance. Our hosts came out, and we exchanged greetings in the withering heat. They introduced themselves with the names we knew, names attached to a virtual world. This man was Modu; that one Plastico. We responded in kind, discarding the given names wed used in the car. It was instantly comfortable; they said there would be a mariachi band at dinner. When your World of Warcraft guild holds a retreat in Mexico, video games will not be the first priority.

Inside the ranch house waited a dozen young men. Many appeared to be Mexican and spoke Spanish, while others had the lighter pigmentation and uprooted bearing of foreigners. Some assembled a battery of computers against the wall while others napped on a flotilla of mattresses arrayed across the white tile floor. Wed never met, but we knew each other well. Plastico sidled up, put his arm around my shoulders, and pressed a cold glass bottle into my hand: Tecate, a Monterrey-brewed beer Id only ever seen in cans. He clapped me on the back and wandered offthe only acknowledgment Id see that week of the burden we shared. Leadership was a mantle he wore unconsciously, almost obliviously, and one Id taken up only recently and only in desperation.

I sucked down my beer and luxuriated in the air-conditioning. A very thin man from Singapore (by way of Malaysia, he explained, in a prim accent, before it went to the fucking dogs) introduced himself as Malicia. A warlock: one of our best, meticulous in his preparation, unforgiving of sloppy play. We shook hands, and his was clammy with sweathed overdressed for the heat in a long-sleeved white linen shirt and black slacks, and flowing strands of black hair clung to his cheeks. A shock of dyed magenta hair ran tastefully over his scalp. Not wanting to refer to this man by his female in-game handle for the next week, I asked his real name. He wouldnt tell me. Once, months before in the heat of battle, I had said some intemperate things to Malicia. He seemed disinclined to forget them.

Stepping out the back door, I took in the expansive coral-painted deck. There was a pool, its bottom striated with dark blue tiles matching the houses facade. Leaning against a tree in the backyard, admiring the wide landscape swollen green by recent rains, I felt a hard wind pull. A pair of threadbare ranch dogs sprinted past, one nipping at the others flanks. The clouds had descended; tall trees thrashed in the gale. I didnt know the time of day. A peal of thunder set the dogs to yelping. The smell of rain weighted the air and I stumbled inside, where my fellow gringos had busied themselves with what seemed like miles of Ethernet cable. Wire cutters in hand, they snipped and stripped and threaded the copper entrails into square plastic heads. Tim did his best to converse in Spanish with Plastico, who would occasionally break the conversation to bellow good-natured abuse at us.

Ey, Ghando!he addressed me as my avatar. I hear you so long, and I imagine your ugly face, and now I am in love, the last word pronounced lub. He was a small man, short and sporting a nascent gut, but his voice boomed nonetheless, the way Id grown accustomed to hearing through my computers headset. I had always assumed he kept the microphone too near his mouth. Clearly I was wrong.