Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller

by Leif Kennison

  Sarah was listening carefully. She raised an eyebrow and a question lit up her eye. “Pain?” Sarah asked.

  I laughed. “We don’t want our customers to feel actual pain,” I said. “And we do have a setting for users to adjust. Hardcore gamers will like the challenge of gaming with deeper simulation levels that include pain and exhaustion, and casual gamers can still enjoy the game without the physical difficulty. We have different servers for each level of difficulty.”

  Sarah took a moment to think about what I’d said, then nodded in approval. I continued with the demo.

  “Now that you’re hungry,” I said, “you have to get some food.”

  The report that Iris had generated said that Sarah’s favorite food was a California roll. That’s why I’d spawned some sushi for her in the house.

  “There’s a big fresh platter of sushi waiting for you in there, but you’ve got to go get it.” I winked at her.

  She looked at me with hesitation.

  I laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun. Go ahead! I’ll be following closely.”

  “Is the pain enabled?” she asked, her brow creased with stress.

  “No, not in this one,” I said in a reassuring tone.

  Sarah took a deep breath and went up the steps. Slowly and as quietly as she could, she opened the door and stepped inside.

  As I followed her inside, I checked to see that my console was still up. I needed to keep an eye on things to make sure she had a good experience.

  The level designers had crafted the house carefully. From the main entryway, there was a long central hallway that led straight ahead, with doorways leading to rooms off to each side. Most of the windows were boarded up with planks of wood, and the curtains were drawn. The entire house was dark and shadowy.

  There was one glowing light though, at the end of the hallway in the kitchen straight ahead.

  Sarah lowered herself into a low crouch and moved through the hallway silently. When she passed by the first room on the left, she peered inside. Something had caught her eye, so she entered. After a bit of rustling, she emerged with something in her hand. It was a baseball bat.

  She continued down the hallway, heading towards the kitchen. I stayed a fair distance away from her because I needed her to experience this on her own. From the doorway, she could see the kitchen counter. And on it was a pleasing platter of sushi, just waiting for her.

  She stepped through the doorway and into the kitchen, stepping out of view to explore. Then, I heard the dull moan of a zombie, and Sarah screamed.

  I looked at my console as I listened to the commotion.

  > Zombie_F1 attacked Sarah with hands for 2 damage.

  > Sarah has 68 HP.

  > Sarah is Slowed (3s)

  > Zombie_F1 attacked Sarah for 5 damage.

  > Sarah is 63 HP.

  > Sarah attacked Zombie with Baseball Bat for 10 damage.

  > Zombie_F1 has 20 HP.

  > Sarah attacked Zombie with Baseball Bat for 18 damage.

  > Zombie_F1 has 2 HP.

  > Sarah attacked Zombie with Baseball Bat for 22 damage.

  > Zombie_F1 is dead.

  > Zombie_M1 attacked Sarah for 25 damage.

  > Sarah is Bleeding (6000s).

  > Sarah dropped Baseball Bat.

  Sarah screamed. I heard the sound of crashing pans and dishes breaking. She burst through the doorway and ran right past me in the hallway and out into the streets.

  I followed her outside and watched her as she ran as fast as she could up the street.

  Then, just as I expected. The AI Director kicked in.

  It spawned swarms of zombies in the houses on both sides of the street. Fast zombies.

  Like a flood, they swarmed out of the houses and into the road. It was like a river of bodies, a tangle of flailing arms and pumping legs, and the sounds they made were like a thousand rasping hornets.

  And they were all chasing Sarah.

  The whole scene was getting too far from me, so I typed into my console:

  /fly 1

  I floated up into the air so I could get a better angle. From the looks of it, Sarah was pretty fast. She ran for blocks and blocks, looking behind her every so often. But it was inevitable. She ran out of gas. She slowed down. And the zombies didn’t.

  The massive swarm of zombies caught up to her. I came back down out of the air and close enough to see what was going on. Just as what must’ve been a dozen zombie arms grabbed her and dragged her onto the ground, I typed another command into my console:

  /pause npc.mob.all

  The zombies froze, and the ghastly noises they made stopped. All that was left was Sarah’s screams of fear.

  She flailed around, swiping at the frozen arms that were stretched out at her like spears. After a few panicked moments, her flailing slowed down, then stopped. She was down on the ground with her legs splayed out, and her chest heaved up and down with fast and shallow breathing.

  She sat up and scooted backward with wild eyes fixated on the zombies. Then she got up and looked around. When she saw me, she locked eyes with me.

  “You’re okay, Sarah,” I said as I offered my hand to her.

  She grabbed my hand, and I pulled her to her feet.

  Standing there, feet apart from the frozen mass of zombies that had just been clambering all over her, she caught her breath. From the look on her face, she was trying to make sense of just what the hell happened to her.

  A few moments later, she broke out in a nervous laugh. “Holy hell, Wayne,” she said in a dazed voice. “That was intense.”

  Then, she smiled.

  TWO

  Nyla

  The deal was sealed. Sarah put in a big order for the RealTwo.

  RealTwo is an immersive reality system. It’s made by a company called Immersiant. This is where I work as a sales engineer. The company is the civilian subsidiary of its parent company, Kimberland Defense Systems Engineering Company, or KDSec.

  Before the virus hit, Kimberland was already supplying the Department of Defense with top-secret virtual reality machines to train soldiers. They started with special operations groups like the Green Berets and Navy SEALs. Then, because the nationwide lockdown created an enormous demand for in-home entertainment, the company decided to expand into the consumer market. That’s when they started Immersiant, a company tasked with creating a consumer-grade virtual reality immersion system.

  When I first got to Immersiant, I was a system administrator. It was my first job after I graduated from college. I worked there for a few years and learned a lot about how the technology worked. I wrote patches for the software, hooked up terminals and set up servers. Eventually, I got promoted to software developer getting involved with the actual coding and information architecture. I got to know the ins and outs of the system—the state managers, the loops, the net code, everything.

  Then, the company downsized. I got to keep my job, but they said that I only had another eight months before my job was no longer available. They gave me two choices: leave and go on unemployment without severance pay, or transfer to a different department.

  The managers were trying to boost morale after a round of layoffs, so they invited everyone to a company happy hour. It was at the local pub. I’m usually not one to get too cozy with my coworkers, but I needed a drink, so I went.

  That’s when I met Nyla.

  Nyla was the top salesperson. She was in no danger of being let go. She was great at working people. She could be cute and goofy when she needed to be. If she needed to turn a frown upside down, she could do it, guaranteed. And she could be sexy whenever she wanted. She’d flash that big white smile and flip her long, shiny black hair. Everyone thought she looked fantastic all the time. Whether it was an office skirt and shirt or sweatpants and a sports bra, she was amazing.

  I have no idea how I did it, but I worked up the courage to ask Nyla out a few months after that party. And she said yes. We went on a few dates and had a great ti
me, so I asked her to be my girlfriend.

  Nyla was my girlfriend for just over a year, and it was one of the happiest times of my life. When I was with her, I felt like the world beamed with energy. I was madly in love with her. But she broke up with me because, as she put it, I wasn’t going anywhere in life.

  I still remember that day that she moved out. We were living together in a three-floor walk-up in Brooklyn at that time. She and I were sitting at the top of the stairs on the third floor of the three-floor walk-up apartment, chatting as we waited for her friend to come over with her van.

  “You don’t have any regrets?” I asked her.

  She smiled brightly. “Of course not! Everything happens for a reason. And our relationship was a part of our journey in life.”

  That’s the kind of person Nyla was. Always positive. I remember how she had this one T-shirt that she always wore. It had a cartoon drawing of a person walking on the sidewalk, and written under the drawing were the words, Always walk on the sunny side of the street.

  She touched me on the shoulder and kissed me on the cheek. Then, with that charming wink of hers, she said, “Show me you can take the world by the balls, Wayne.”

  “So you want a hero,” I said, laughing.

  She laughed back, her black hair cascading in the sunlight. “You just don’t get it, Wayne…I want—”

  I never got to hear what she wanted. She got a text from her friend. And next thing you know, I was moving boxes down to the curb.

  Nyla was moving closer to her new workplace. She’d quit her job at Immersiant to be a freelance investigative journalist, and she’d gotten a pretty steady gig at this publication called The New Dawn.

  Most of the people she knew thought she was stupid to give up the money she’d been making—it wasn’t like the economy was doing so great. And a lot of us thought she was crazy for going into a field that was pretty much dead. Journalism itself was barely surviving. But to go after big corporations and politicians? To go after their money? Good luck finding someone to pay you a steady paycheck to go do that. At least she’d had a sizable fund to live off of from her commissions and residuals.

  It was about a year before the virus hit that Nyla came back to me. She called me, and I was excited that she wanted to meet up. I guess I was just too eager to get back with her to hear the seriousness in her voice when she asked if she could come over.

  Laughing, I joked, saying, “You sure you wanna come over? New York City is the epicenter of the pandemic. And Queens is the epicenter of the epicenter.”

  “Yes, it’s really important.”

  “Okay, but don’t be surprised if I have an isolation bubble,” I said, laughing again. I didn’t catch that she didn’t laugh at all.

  I got off the phone and tidied up my room. I lived with two other roommates—a Bengali guy and a Russian guy—in an apartment in Jackson Heights, in the borough of Queens. Corona, the neighborhood where the bodies were piling up from the virus, was just to the south. Corona is mostly a Hispanic neighborhood, with some Chinese families. Jackson Heights though is brimming with people from all over the world—Bangladesh, Ecuador, Tibet, Russia, India, Colombia, more.

  When Nyla came over, the first thing she did was sit me down on my bed.

  “Wayne,” she said to me quietly. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She looked at me in a measured way. “You still work at Immersiant, right?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, nodding.

  “Well, you remember what I’ve been working on?”

  The truth was that it was a little hazy. Even though we’d broken up, we stayed in touch and she told me all about her adventures chasing down dirty local politicians. But you know how it is after a breakup. After a while, you just don’t have the energy to focus your attention on that person. Anyway, I told her to refresh my memory.

  “The Kimberland story,” she said. “Remember when we were wondering where this immersive reality tech came from? Well, when I started poking my nose around, I found out that the tech comes from the military. And guess what? The military’s been paying a lot of money to Kimberland. And Kimberland’s been funneling that money to Immersiant. There’s something suspicious about all of this…and to top it off, there’s a facility in Brooklyn Navy Yard that was put up right after the National Guard got here. My sources say that all kinds of troops have been going into that facility—Army and the Marine Corps. They make it look like some kind of medical facility, but the roads leading to it are closed off. And it uses a lot of electricity. Before it got hooked into the grid, they were going through tanks and tanks of diesel fuel every day.”

  “So what? We’ve already got martial law.”

  Nyla shook her head. “This isn’t just martial law, Wayne. Something’s going on. I know it. I just have to prove it.” She bit her lip, thinking. Then, she said, “You know how on TV, they showed footage of hundreds of sick people lined up in front of that hospital?”

  I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was one of the biggest hospitals in Queens.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They played that footage for days. It was crazy...people lined up around three sides of the building, and it’s a huge building.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “You know, they said that we were going to reach the apex of the pandemic within the next few weeks. But I went there myself to see it with my own eyes...there was nobody there, Wayne. If there are supposed to be more and more people getting new infections every day, and the governor said that they’re still running low on supplies, then where are all these people?”

  “Maybe they went to other hospitals,” I suggested.

  “I checked the other ones.” Nyla had a steely look in her eyes. Intense. “All three in Queens: Elmhurst, Forest Hills, and Astoria. They were dead quiet. It’s not the picture that the media’s painting.”

  I had to admit that there was something that wasn’t quite adding up. I didn’t like the way that the National Guard was patrolling the streets. It just felt...un-American.

  Then, something pinged in my head. “You know, I remember seeing that clip from someone in the area, it was on Twitter.”

  Nyla nodded. “Yeah, that one. That bus driver who said she saw people looking like soldiers, driving around in the black vans that had some spinning device on the top. There’s been ideas about what that thing is. It might be a thermal imager to pick up on people who have fevers. Other people are saying that it tags people for surveillance. Nobody knows. And that’s why I’m on the hunt, Wayne.”

  I looked at her with a questioning gaze.

  “The public has so many questions,” she said fiercely, “and nobody is giving any answers. This is an American free country, Wayne. The public deserves answers. What the hell is the National Guard doing in our city? Cleaning schools and courts doesn’t take that much manpower. Delivering supplies doesn’t require convoys of Humvees and soldiers armed with rifles. It’s all camouflage for something. They’re secretly moving supplies and forces into place. I’ve even seen special operators, Wayne. Those guys with the long hair and beards in sanitized uniforms, baseball caps and no name tapes or service badges.”

  Nyla grabbed my hands firmly and looked me in the eyes.

  “Wayne,” she said. “We need to figure out what the military is hiding.”

  The air was thick, and I was sitting with my shoulders on my knees. She was right. She was always right. And I had those questions too.

  “So what do you need from me?” I asked Nyla, sighing.

  “I need you to gain access to the Kimberland systems,” she said.

  I was silent.

  “Wayne,” she said, “I need you to do this for me.”

  I frowned and asked, “Why?”

  “Because something is going on and it’s not right,” she stressed. “The government is hiding something, and the public deserves to know what they know. It’s not right that they’re out there with all
this information and making plans about the country without telling the public.”

  “Breaking into my company sounds like a really bad idea, Nyla. I could get arrested. I could get fired.”

  “So what?”

  I looked at her as if she were crazy.

  “If I get fired,” I said, “that means no paycheck. No paycheck, no rent, no food. Nothing. So no, that’s not an option.”

  “There’s always an option, Wayne. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  I scoffed. “Easy for you to say.”

  “Look, we’re literally living through a historical event right now. A pandemic hit the entire world. The United States is gearing up for something. And they’re not telling us what it is that has them so scared. My research has shown that a lot of money has been going to a contract with Kimberland Defense Manufacturing Company, which is the company that owns your company. You have access to corporate systems and people who work there.”

  “Nyla, I don’t know, we’re just a subsidiary. We sell glorified gaming machines.” I said, sighing. “We’re a civilian company.”

  “Don’t forget, I worked there before. Remember the downsizing?”

  I nodded. How could I forget? That’s the day she and I met.

  She continued.

  “I know that the system administrators were consolidated into one user group that handles support for the entire company. And I checked: during the downsizing, when you moved to sales, your admin account didn’t get migrated or suspended. It still works. So you have admin privileges on Kimberland systems too.”

  I swallowed in displeasure. If she really had checked, then she was right. I would be able to get into the Kimberland systems. I probably couldn’t get into the most sensitive files, but I’d snooped around on the corporate intranet before and was shocked at how much sensitive information was there for the browsing. There were unsecured sharepoints and internal application pages that pointed to files that weren’t meant for the employees to see. I remember reading personnel files where the managers took notes on the employees. I even found the hiring documents with personal information like addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers.