Recoil

by Joanne Macgregor

  The Game had existed before the plague began, in a really simple version. But after kids stopped going out to clubs and movies and malls, home entertainment took off in a big way. Soon, an updated virtual reality version of The Game was released with awesome graphics, multiple roles to play and a new Big Bad — Jakhil and his invading Alien Axis Army. And within a year of the plague breaking out, it seemed like every kid in the US was playing.

  It was a fantastic game — all the parts and roles intersected with each other and you could track how the overall war was going, and there was something for everyone. Recently, they had even brought out fun cartoon versions for really young players.

  Robin had tried sniping and code-breaking before he’d settled into playing as a programmer, though I reckon he would have played as a poet if that was possible. He was excellent at writing code, but not as obsessed with playing as most kids were. I was pretty much addicted to The Game — I played it every spare moment I had, especially since Dad died. When I played, I didn’t have to remember, or think, or even feel very much. Not about losing Dad, or worrying about Mom, or wondering whether I’d be stuck at home for the rest of my life.

  “We’ve got one more stop to make across town,” the driver said, “and then we’ll head back to headquarters and it’ll be game-time for all four of you. Strap yourself in.”

  I clicked my seatbelt closed. Not wanting to appear unfriendly by taking a seat further back, I had taken one of the front seats which faced backwards, directly opposite Leya and Bruce, but I regretted it now. Bruce was staring at me intently, scrutinizing the cobalt-blue streaks which striped my long blond hair, looking into my eyes, and assessing my height —about three inches shorter than his own — as if trying to place me.

  “I’ve never met you,” he said.

  I shrugged. That didn’t surprise me, I didn’t meet many people.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I live only a few blocks away from you, but I’ve never met you at one of the socials.”

  “Yeah, well, my mom’s not too keen on us leaving the house unless we absolutely have to.”

  We were obliged by Health and Wellbeing Regulation 223 to attend a mandated minimum number of socials — six per year — but Mom made sure that we didn’t go to a dance or a game more. She was convinced that Robin and I would contract rat fever if we were out of her sight for more than a few minutes at a time. Today I’d be gone for hours, and that would be hard for her. Robin didn’t much mind being stuck at home. He was too introverted to find the socials anything but an ordeal, and usually took a book along with him so he could find a quiet corner and read while the rest of us used the opportunity to “practice our interpersonal social skills” and tried to “meet others with a view to pursuing relationships with them”, or whatever it was the regulation advocated.

  “Anyway,” I added, “you may well have met me. With these things,” I tapped my respirator, “it’s hard to tell.”

  “I’d have remembered,” said Bruce with a smile that was almost a leer. He looked me up and down as if to emphasize his point.

  His unwavering attention made me uncomfortable. I exchanged a glance with Leya, who raised her eyebrows and tilted her head at Bruce as if to say, “Get him.”

  “Are you going to the social next Saturday?” Bruce asked me. “It’s a picnic in the city park. I’ll be there.”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  I stared out the window, hoping he would stop looking at me and drop the subject. Our westbound highway was largely empty. Six-lane traffic jams were a thing of the past — the upside of a pandemic which kept people inside. It wasn’t a scenic drive, but still it was good to see something more than the unchanging sameness of home. As we drove under an overpass, I read graffiti sprayed in black paint on the passing pillars: World-War-Rat-atat, and directly beneath a security camera on the wall to our right as we emerged, someone had painted the message: One Nation under Observation.

  “We could hang out together,” Bruce persisted.

  I looked an appeal at Leya. In the unwritten code of friendly behavior, girls were supposed to have each other’s back at moments like this, weren’t they?

  “We —” Bruce began, but Leya interrupted.

  “So, when did you qualify?”

  “Day before yesterday. I must have been the last of the four,” I said, relieved at the change of subject.

  “You’re not … You’re not the one who killed Jakhil, are you?” she asked, sounding incredulous.

  I nodded and shrugged. I was trying to act casual but beneath the respirator, I was grinning.

  “Dude!” she said, leaning over to bump elbows with me again. “Props!”

  “Thanks.”

  “You won? You?” said Bruce.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to take offense at the note of disbelief in his voice. “I got lucky, I guess.”

  “No way was that just good luck. You must be hot, girl!” said Leya.

  I tried to look modest. “You guys must be really good too, to qualify.”

  “I took out my fair share of the invaders and repbots,” said Leya.

  “Oh, I’m good alright,” said Bruce, nodding and smiling. “And I’m looking forward to getting my game on with you.”

  Was I imagining the double meaning? I could be. Being cooped up inside and kept away from others for the last four years hadn’t given me much experience dealing with people face-to-face. I frowned at him.

  “I like a challenge,” he said to me. It sounded a bit like a threat.

  I asked Leya about her Game history, and for a while we three chatted about our favorite hobby, trading war stories and comparing scores. I heard enough to know that while Leya was no slouch in the sniping department, Bruce, unless he was exaggerating, was an exceptional player. On another day he might well have been the one to take down Jakhil.

  We were still talking about The Game and whether Jakhil’s second-in-command would automatically become commander of the Alien Axis Army now that he was dead, or whether there might be a leadership challenge, when we pulled up in front of a huge two-story brick house in a subdivision of similar McMansions.

  “Check it out,” said Bruce, peering out the window, “it’s a starter-castle.”

  The boy who came out the front door decon unit was tall with orange hair. When he got closer, I saw that his eyebrows and lashes were pale, and his skin was the color of milk — I reckoned this boy saw the sun even less than I did. He, too, looked to be a couple of years older than me, and he also wore only an E97 mask. I was beginning to feel like an idiot, like an overprotected little girl.

  The new guy’s name was Graham. He seemed friendly enough, but I soon grew irritated by his constant fidgeting. He tapped his feet, fiddled with the cuff of his gloves and worried at a loose thread in the seat upholstery. Bruce studied him for a few minutes, asked about his game scores, and then apparently lost interest and returned to looking at me. Graham told us in detail all about the formulas and calculations he used when playing.

  “It’s all mathematical,” he kept saying. “It’s a science.”

  He had just said it again when we stopped at a traffic light and Leya pointed out of the window and said, “Look.”

  We all turned to follow her gaze. At once, the driver checked the doors were locked, then reached for his phone to call in the sighting, relaying our exact GPS coordinates to the operator while we stared at the man clinging to the pole of a street light a few feet away from us. On the left side of his body, he was wearing exactly half of a stained, white PPE suit, which looked like it had been torn vertically down the middle seam. His right side was completely naked.

  “Ugh, gagnasty,” said Graham, swallowing hard. “Imagine what he smells like.”

  The man’s lips were moving furiously. Was he literally talking to a lamp post? Then he banged his head against the pole. And again. Over and over he banged it, perhaps in time to the inner rhythm of some hallucinated music that only h
e could hear. The skin of his forehead split open, and blood ran down into his eyes and mouth and beard and dripped onto the remnants of the PPE suit and the skin of his chest.

  Without warning, he turned and hurled himself at the van, banged on its sides and windows, and screamed loudly enough for us to hear it through the sealed windows and reinforced panels. His bulging eyes were wild, unseeing, and washed red with blood. His skin was stippled with the purple-red rash and blotched bruises of the disease. His swollen lips twisted and split open as he howled. Then he slammed his head against my window, and the driver cursed and pulled off at top speed. Immediately he called ahead for a decontamination and disinfectant squad to meet us at our destination.

  “Effing rabid!” said Bruce, his face twisted with disgust.

  I stared at the smear of blood on the window. It looked black against the tinted glass. My heart was thudding somewhere in the region of my throat, and I fought the urge to throw up.

  “I’ve never seen a rabid before,” said Graham who looked, if possible, even paler than before.

  “Don’t call him that. He’s a human being,” I said.

  “Not anymore he isn’t,” said Bruce. “They should take them all out.” He mimed aiming a rifle out the window and taking a shot, his lips popping a sound.

  “How can you say that?”

  “What?” Bruce held up his hands. “It’s not like there’s a cure for rat fever. Might as well put them down and save them the suffering. We do it for rabid animals, why not people?”

  “Put them down, dude? Really?” said Leya. She turned to face Bruce, or maybe she was turning her back on the window so she didn’t have to see the blood. “Talk about a mouth-fart.”

  “They’re people. They have a right to compassion and proper treatment,” I said.

  Bruce made a dismissive noise. “What treatment?”

  “President Hawke said they’re making progress with developing a vaccine.”

  “As fast as they isolate and study the virus, it mutates. My aunt is an epidemiologist at the CDC, and she told me it evolves in two ways: gradually through random mutation, and very rapidly as different strains of the virus. It can even swap genes inside a single animal or person. Nature is always one step ahead,” said Graham. He sounded almost smug.

  “One day there’ll be a cure,” I said.

  “One day in the next week?” Bruce mocked. “By then, that one will be dead.”

  “He might live,” I said. It was extremely rare, but some survived the initial illness.

  “You can’t call that living. Going blind and lying like a dead vegetable with your skin peeling off. Just existing for a few more months until pneumonia or rotting bedsores take you out. There’ll never be a cure for that kind of brain damage. Once they’ve gone rabid, there’s no coming back. They’re not human anymore, they’re oxygen thieves.”

  “You’re wrong. That man is someone’s son, maybe someone’s father or husband or brother.”

  “Not for long he isn’t,” said Bruce.

  “For an average of thirteen days and two hours,” said Graham. He was picking bits of lint off his PPE suit.

  “You don’t agree with him, do you?” I asked Leya.

  “Mostly I just feel really sorry for them. And their families,” she said.

  “Me too, it’s freaking tragic.”

  “Well, of course I feel sorry for them. Everyone does,” said Bruce. “But I think we should rather use all the money we put into trying to treat them and keeping the survivors alive into research. You know, trying to find a cure, or come up with a vaccine or treatment that actually works. Or into fighting the terrs.”

  I was only half-listening. I’d heard all the arguments before — or, at least, read them on online forums and discussion boards aflame with the debate. We never spoke about the plague at home. Whenever conversation approached the topic, even tangentially, Mom would change the subject or leave the room, clearly upset, so Robin and I had learned not to mention it in front of her.

  “Hey Jinx,” Leya said to me, “you’re really upset. Big hug.” People didn’t give hugs anymore, they only said them.

  “It’s just … It could be any one of us.”

  “Huh, not if I can help it,” said Bruce.

  “We’re here,” said Graham, and I turned to look out a window. One without a smear of deadly blood.

  Chapter 4

  The Weapons

  PlayState’s headquarters were located on a large, wooded area of land a couple of miles down a private road. As the Hummer paused for the security check at the gate, we all craned our necks to get a better view. Bruce gave a low whistle, and Graham said what I was thinking.

  “It looks more like a military base than a gaming company.”

  The perimeter fence was at least four meters high, topped with a double layer of razor wire, and then a six-strand crown of electrical fencing above that. I could see ground-level and elevated guard huts at regular intervals, pole-mounted LED floodlights and surveillance cameras everywhere — fixed on the poles beneath the lights, attached under roof eaves and on the corners of buildings. I smiled, pleased that my trained sniper’s eye apparently observed details in real life too.

  “Can’t be too careful these days, what with industrial espionage and piracy. The Game is big business. We’ve even had gamers trying to break in to get their hands on new versions not yet released,” the driver said over his shoulder.

  We were directed to an external decontamination bay, where cleaners in full suits with integrated hoods and full-face respirators hosed down the van with kill-juice — a mixture of chemical foam and decontaminant spray. The blood was soon washed away, but the image of the man at the window remained, seared onto my mind.

  Then we passed through a car wash. I enjoyed the sense of being in a watertight capsule as the van passed under the high-pressure water sprays and was slapped by the multi-colored ribbons of the gyrating cloth wraparounds. It reminded me of Sunday afternoons with Dad. He used to take Robin and me out on drives around the city, perhaps stopping at a park or a museum, and we always finished up by getting the car cleaned at the automatic carwash around the corner from our house. Every time he would buy us an ice cream. I liked one scoop each of vanilla and bubblegum, while Robin’s favorites were caramel and choc-mint, and Dad preferred plain chocolate. We’d lick them down to the sugar cones while sitting inside the car as the conveyer belt pulled us through the bubbles, past the blue bristles and under the drying cloths, all the while discussing mean teachers and new friends, and why leaves turned red in autumn. Dad never gave a simple explanation when he could invent an outrageous story, and wouldn’t stop his exaggerations until we were wriggling and giggling. Then we would drive home in the gleaming car, him singing his favorite show tunes, Robin nibbling his cone and reading, and me licking around my lips for any remaining traces of sweetness. Damn, I missed Dad. I missed those times.

  Graham, I noticed now, did not seem to be enjoying the carwash. He had stopped fidgeting and was gripping his knees, staring fixedly at the floor. Claustrophobic? The boy was tightly wound, no doubt about it.

  We emerged from the decontamination bay and took the road leading around the right of the main building, following colorful signs reading “To the Gaming Zone”, and finally pulled to a halt outside what looked like a supersized warehouse.

  We climbed out of the van, Graham jiggling, Bruce cricking his neck, and Leya and I stretching the kinks out of our muscles. A middle-aged man was waiting for us at the entrance, standing very straight and tall, with his feet apart and his hands clasped behind his back. Beside him stood a younger man and woman. All three wore black jump-suits, with the small red-and-yellow PlayState logo high on their right sleeves, as well as protective gloves and black respirator masks. The older man was completely bald, or perhaps he shaved his head. It shone as brightly as his polished boots in the sunshine. His eyes were a very dark brown, maybe even black, and they studied each of us in turn. Then he p
ulled his respirator to rest below his chin, and a wide smile, startling in its suddenness, cracked his mouth below a neatly-trimmed, dark mustache.

  “Welcome, gamers,” he said. “Welcome to PlayState and to your sniper simulation exercise — the prize for your exceptional abilities and achievements. This here is Juan and Fiona. I’m Wayne Adler, but you can call me Sarge. We’ll be your guides, instructors and opponents today.” His smile vanished as rapidly as it had appeared.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” said Bruce, stepping forward to bump elbows.

  Leya followed suit, but I settled for a nod — I hadn’t been within sneezing distance of an unmasked person, other than my brother and my mother, in years — and Graham stared at the ground, where his foot rubbed at some gravel.

  “Come on inside,” said Sarge. “Y’all can grab a cup of coffee and a bagel, and get geared up before we start killing each other.” He barked a laugh and pulled his mask back over his nose and mouth.

  Once we’d each passed through the decon unit at the entrance, Sarge took us to a changing room of sorts and told us to help ourselves to coffee and snacks from a refreshment table in the corner. I grabbed a bagel with cream cheese filling and popped another, unsliced and unfilled, into a side pocket of my suit along with a bottle of water.