Dirt bikes! Bro hangs!

by anbrewk

Tonight, my cousin and I found a dirt bike, and a tractor and the tractor had been destroyed and there was a dead body beside it. If that isn’t the most terrifying way to start your evening, I don’t know what.

This, of course, all took place in the world of DayZ – a game I had taken a hiatus from about the time I wrote my last article for this blog on how disturbing the player vs. player experience has been for me. I was convinced by my cousin to give it another go. Not a terribly difficult thing to do as I really like DayZ, I’m just hesitant to go head long into the world by myself. He’s so kind-heart and fun oriented that it’s hard not to find pleasure in just surviving even if there is a constant threat of being murdered around every corner.

This last attempt at playing turned out to be a lot of fun. In part, because we were on a server near empty of players. But not empty enough for us to not come across any. Low and behold, as we came to the airfield my cousin spotted a once working tractor that had to have been driven there because drive-able tractors don’t spawn on the airfield. Now the airfield is the highest loot area in the game and a death sentence for new players who are likely to get ambushed by bandits there. Drive-able vehicles are rare, as rare as the kind of loot that maybe just might spawn at the airfield, but when we got there expecting good loot in no way did we expect to find a dirt bike.

But then there it was, not far away from the tractor and not far away from the dead body beside the tractor. My cousin was so into the idea of this dirt bike running that he didn’t worry at all about how that dead body got to be there or what happened to that totally ruined tractor. Maybe the driver got overwhelmed by zombies, drawn to the noise of the engine, but maybe he got killed by someone. Well, when I say ‘someone’ I really mean ‘Jake’ because Jake was the only other player on the server at the time. But who knows? I’m paranoid enough to think that in 225km2 I am likely to die to the other one player I am not related to.

As my cousin got closer to the dirt bike he happily reported to me (I was 100 meters away with my binoculars, not daring to get anywhere near Jake’s clever ambush) that the dirt bike was bright red with flames. A fact I soon confirmed as he assured me it could seat two. And oh boy was it ever nifty looking. As soon as I maneuvered my way past the zombies into that hanger, I found my cousin sitting in the drivers seat with room for just one more. Soon, I was hopping on the back and flying away from all the terribleness in the world.

It was amazing. After running around on foot for so long, riding in a vehicle felt like flying. Everything became so close. Now if only we had any more gas… it’s almost out so we hid it where it’s now waiting for us to bring it more of the sweet nectar it needs. Soon, soon we will ride it again but until then it waits in a secret spot atop a hill no one knows about. Soon we will ride it again.