His heart heavy, he’d turn over onto his side, and there would be the faint shape of Ashley’s beautiful body in the bed next to him, the skin of her bare shoulder glistening in the soft moonlight, her red hair glowing with a fire all its own. And even though in some part of his mind he knew it was all impossible, he’d reach over, wanting so badly to touch her, to feel the silky smoothness of her skin, knowing that if he could just make contact for even the tiniest fraction of a moment, then none of what he was remembering could be real. Only she was real. They were real.
But he’d stop, afraid that the moment their skin touched, she’d wake and leave. The last thing he wanted was for her to leave. He’d rather not touch her if she only stayed.
But he couldn’t help himself. He’d watch his hand float over to her and he’d scream inside of his mind to stop, just stop. STOP! But no. There would be that spark, that sensation of knowing at the moment of connection. Her eyes would pop open and she’d look over at him and smile, her teeth so white in the dim light, but her eyes would be empty black holes and her mouth would open into a deep, dark, wide pit rimmed by razor sharp teeth, glistening crimson, chunks of gore and that blackened tongue slipping out like the snake of death. And nothing, no expression or emotion, on her face. Just the vacuous stare of the hungry Undead.
He’d wake for real then, gasping and sobbing, unable to turn his head to the side for fear that she really would be there— wanting her to be, loathing himself for wishing she would just leave him alone. And, somehow, he would still be able to feel her on his skin, the weight of her in his bed. He could smell her hair, the mixture of cheap shampoo and rotting flesh.
He’d lie there for hours, not moving a muscle, not even daring to blink. Finally . . . finally, he’d drift off to sleep again. Sometimes he’d be lucky and morning would come before the dream returned. Most nights, however, morning arrived too late to chase it away.
But as terrible as his days and nights were, he knew that Jessie was having a much worse time of it. Her moods had been all over the map. At any given moment, she might swing from one extreme to the other, often without rhyme or reason, frequently without warning. How she might react to something a person said was impossible to predict with any certainty. She was skipping school, not sleeping very well at night, if at all, crashing off at odd times during the day. Her eating habits were alarming.
He’d heard a couple students at school say that she was puking in the bathrooms. If she kept this up, she was going to collapse from sheer exhaustion before long.
And then there was her obsession with Survivalist.
She’d started spending an unhealthy amount of time planted in front of the television, her eyes glued to the screen, watching the very monsters they’d just escaped from, studying them as they battled one another. He knew what she was doing— looking for Ashley and Jake among the Infected Undead. He knew because he was just as desperate to find them, too. But if she hoped to do so, watching some stupid game show wasn’t going to bring her any satisfaction. And it certainly wouldn’t bring her closure.
The thought had crossed his mind — several times, in fact — that she might actually be wishing she were back there. It was a crazy idea, totally fucked. He knew that. But after what had happened to them in Gameland, it would be nuts if any of them weren’t a little crazy. He felt like he was barely holding onto sanity himself.
So, when he arrived home after school and found the door to his garage unlocked, he was surprised to find Jessie inside. But to say that he was shocked that she was geared up and playing would be an understatement of epic proportions.
“How long are you going to just stand there?” Jessie snapped, her voice muffled behind the head gear. “Perv.”
The old joke had never failed to elicit a grin from Reggie in the past, but today it fell flat. He winced.
“When were you going to tell me about this?” she demanded.
He watched her grapple with the other Player for a moment before stepping inside the garage. “Is this some kind of zombie foreplay I don’t know about?” he said, choosing to deflect the question as he tried to understand what he was seeing. “Just finish it off already.”
Jessie grunted as she grabbed the Player’s head and gave it a vicious twist.
“You know my implant doesn’t work,” she replied, panting with exertion. “Have to rely solely on the bioleptics, and this stupid equipment is crappy and slow and— And I notice you still haven’t told me where you got the Player or the gear. Or the money for the invite.”
“I can’t—”
“Get back here, you stupid bitch!” Jessie shouted. She yanked the Player back and slammed it up against a brick wall. “You like that, bitch?”
“I think that’s a guy, Jess.”
“Not today it isn’t. Today it’s—” She rammed her arms forward. Inside the holo projection, the back of the other Player’s head slammed into the side of a building.
Reggie frowned. He didn’t like seeing Jessie like this, like she was actually enjoying the battle. It bothered him even more than her depression.
“Today, it’s stupid Siennah Davenport.”
Siennah Davenport? What’d she do to catch Jessie’s attention?
Jessie twisted her hands, and the other Player’s head swiveled stiffly in her Player’s grip. But the neck didn’t break. The thing continued to flail against her attempts to kill it. Without a doubt, the real Siennah’s neck would have broken by now.
Jessie thrust the Player back up against the wall and knifed a knee upward. Her Player did the same, landing its own tattered knee into the groin of the Siennah effigy. Reggie instinctively flinched, and his hands flew to his own crotch.
“And this one’s for Monica—” Another vicious twist of the hands. “—ANderson!”
The zombie’s neck gave an audible crack and the head abruptly tore free with a wet squelch. The body went completely slack and slumped to the base of the wall. Jessie tossed the head aside.
By the tilt of her head, Reggie knew she was watching the credits for the kill scroll by on her goggles. He’d noticed them too, when he was playing the other day. In a single hour, he’d racked up enough to match both his parents’ yearly income and it made him sick to think about how much that money would’ve helped them out. He knew they scrambled and scratched every month just to make the mortgage payment on the house.
Just one kill, forty thousand dollars—
He sighed and shook his head. No use wishing for something that wasn’t going to happen.
After a moment, Jessie removed the head gear and wiped the line of sweat from her brow. “Too bad the ugly bastard died so easily. I wasn’t done, yet.”
“Kicking it in the goolies was a nice touch,” Reggie noted. “Not sure it made any difference, but I give you style points.”
“Figures you’d appreciate that,” she said, now turning to face him.
There was a large, bruised lump over her right eye and a cut on her cheek. “Holy crap, Jessie!” Reggie gasped. “What the hell happened to you?” He raised a hand toward her, but she flinched away.
“It’s nothing.”
“But it’s—”
“Just drop it, Reg.”
He frowned at her, for a moment not understanding, then making the connection. “Siennah? She did that to you? Why? How?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it!”
He stepped back and eyed her warily. He didn’t want to push her into one of her rampages. They’d been coming more frequently since they returned and they scared him. As much as he liked Jessie, liked her dry sense of humor and her no-nonsense attitude, he’d found himself dreading her company of late.
Eric insisted that they all just needed to be patient. They needed time to adjust, time to heal. Time to mourn the deaths of their friends and to accept Micah’s betrayal and fate. But Reggie didn’t think there would ever be enough time to come to terms with all that. He was sure one or more of them might do something ra
sh sooner or later.
He’d been most concerned immediately after Micah’s trial and sentencing. Jessie’s despair had taken a sharp turn for the worse then. Micah had once been their close friend, a confidante, the last person they could possibly imagine betraying them. Learning what he’d done to them had been a bitter enough pill to swallow, but then to be forced to watch him being infected and reanimated? That was an even crueler punishment.
Kelly didn’t watch, the wimp. He’d covered his eyes.
Part of Reggie envied Kelly for it. Maybe if he’d had enough guts, he would have hidden his eyes, too. Instead, he’d watched — both he and Jessie had — believing that it would help them heal.
All it had done was to tear their wounds wide open again.
Then, quite unexpectedly, Jessie had risen up out of the depths of her despair. It was the day she and Kelly announced their engagement. The celebration buoyed them all. They were moving on, trying to get their lives back.
Except the feeling had been fleeting. The day after the filing, the darkness seemed to fall back over them with a vengeance.
“Looks like old military surplus,” Jessie said, pointing to a sticker Reggie hadn’t noticed on the bottom of the game’s control console. “Eppy’s?” she asked, referring to the store Jake’s uncle had run before being arrested up in Albany.
Reggie stared at it for a moment, his mind whirring with white noise and confusion. Had it been a gift from Arc? Or had Kelly somehow gotten it from Jake’s uncle? But if it was military surplus, did that mean the Player was one of the original Omegas? They were supposed to be decommissioned after their three years of service, but he’d heard that often wasn’t the case.
He hoped his shrug would satisfy her curiosity, and he was glad when she didn’t push the subject.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Skipped final period.”
“You missed the screenings?”
“What screenings?” she asked. But her shoulders dropped. “Crap. I totally forgot about that.”
The announcement had been made in homeroom just that morning, Mister Patterson droning on and on about it over the public address system: “As part of the new Inoculation Initiative passed by Congress earlier this week, Citizen Registration is sending official screeners into classrooms. They will be accompanied by NCD agents who will assist in the verification of your implant status. Any student not in compliance will be afforded an opportunity to become compliant. All screenings and implantation procedures will be performed at Arc’s expense. The new federal standards require that one hundred percent of the populace past the age of ten months be inoculated with a functional neuroleptic device. There is no reason to be concerned. It is only to ensure that every individual have full and unfettered access to the streams and services which are provided through them.”
In other words: Everyone must be implanted so that in the event of an outbreak, if you become infected, Arc will be able to control you.
“They should just call it what it is,” Jessie spit. “Mind control.”
Reggie didn’t answer.
“What? You don’t agree?”
He shrugged. “You can’t avoid it, Jessie.”
“I wasn’t avoiding it. I forgot!” Jessie barked. “I’ve been a little distracted lately, if you hadn’t noticed!” She sighed and immediately apologized.
“There were a couple Necrotics Crimes officers there.”
“Eric?” Jessie asked.
Reggie shook his head. “A couple of wide-eyed fl—” He was going to say ‘flunkies,’ but he caught himself. Her brother was NCD, though most definitely not a flunky; he had asked for the assignment. “Coupla noobs. They tried to look all stern and business-like, but you could tell they were straight out of the academy.”
Reggie crossed his arms and made a serious face in imitation of the officers. It brought a thin smile to Jessie’s lips. “Someone asked them if they’d ever actually battled a real live zombie, and, man, you should’ve seen them choke. You could tell they’d probably shit themselves if they ever did. ‘I want my mommy.’ ”
Jessie didn’t seem amused by this last part.
Reggie coughed. “Their answer was, ‘We don’t refer to them as zombies, young man. The official term is Infected Undead, or IU.’ ” He sighed. “But I wouldn’t worry too much about missing the screening. They said that anyone who wasn’t there would just have to go up to Citizen Registration.”
“Oh, that’s good news,” Jessie said, sneering.
Reggie chuckled. “So you’ll get your implant replaced. What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t want it replaced.”
“You’d rather run around infecting people?” He gestured to her side where she’d been bitten. “We both know it’s not a matter of if, but when. Both you and Kelly.”
That was the other thing they both seemed completely unconcerned about. They had both been infected, then treated by Father Heall’s blood. But the treatment only lasted a few months, and Father Heall was dead. They acted as if they had all the time in the world.
Or maybe they know something you don’t.
Jessie ignored his question. “Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious they’re doing all this now?” she asked. “First the outbreak drills during homeroom, then this new initiative.”
He shrugged. “The drills are mandated—”
“When’s the last time you remember doing them?”
“I don’t remember. A few years ago, I guess.”
“And you don’t think that’s strange they’re suddenly doing it now?”
He sighed. “Manhattan’s still in lockdown. Everyone’s just a bit touchy.”
“Everyone’s in denial, Reg.”
He shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors. But nobody puts that much weight on what they say on the black streams. Arc says there’s nothing wrong.”
“And you buy that?”
He hesitated a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, Jessie. We know about Manhattan because we caused it. But St. Louis?”
Jessie choked. “What’s going on there?”
“Some people are saying it’s an outbreak. You haven’t heard?”
Jessie shook her head.
“It’s just one. But there have been a lot of small local network outages, civilian Omegas dropping off the streams.”
Jessie stared. “A lot? Here?”
Her brother would have told her, but he hadn’t said a word about anything like that. Then again, he’d been putting in a lot of hours at work.
And you thought he was just avoiding you.
‡ ‡ ‡
Chapter 5
The Greenwich Waste Treatment facility had been on-line fewer than ten years, so it boasted the most advanced monitoring technology and a minimal salaried staff. With a zero casualty rate, it could also claim a perfect operating record.
Until today.
Leased from ZedPower Staffing Services, a contracting arm of Arc Properties, were a half-dozen Controlled Undead whose full-time role at GWT included facilitating the remote inspection and manual degreasing of the sewage intake ports. In an environmentally-controlled room in the center of town, nearly six miles away, sat three Operators. Their jobs were to make sure that flow of material through the system occurred at maximal efficiency, which they achieved by maneuvering the CUs through the toxic environment of the aeration pools. This was accomplished using cybernetically-linked controllers not very dissimilar to the one in Reggie’s garage.
At shortly past three that morning, an alarm had been triggered. All six CUs simultaneously disappeared off the plant’s tracking systems. After attempting to locate the missing units using the company’s remote surveillance system, the three Operators finally realized that the video playback they’d been watching for two hours was stuck in an endless loop, most likely as a consequence of the same software glitch which had taken the CU controls off-line in the first place. ZedPower
was immediately notified, but, in a breach of safety protocols, neither they nor GWT relayed the alert to the Necrotics Crimes Division of the local police department.
One Operator was selected to perform an eyes-on inspection. The security logs showed that he arrived at the remote site on Dunhill Road at precisely 5:29 AM. When Arc finally managed to get a software patch installed eighty-six minutes later, their implant activation alert system immediately lit up. The unfortunate Operator had almost certainly been dead long before then, because he’d already reanimated.
Sergeant Eric Daniels, head of the eight-member Necrotics Crime Division of the Greenwich P.D., was standing on the metal walkway overlooking one of the six aeration pools. The body of the former Operator was between his feet. Thick, congealed blood still leaked from a single shallow bite on the victim’s throat. A chunk of muscle was missing, perhaps no larger than a small kiwi fruit, probably made by a single well-placed bite.
Eric wasn’t a coroner, so his opinion was essentially worthless, but it was his estimation that the bite hadn’t killed the man. He guessed from the presence of a deep gash in the victim’s skull (correctly, as it would later turn out) that death had been instantaneous, delivered by the sudden forceful meeting of the back of the man’s head with the lip of the top metal step just inside the large aeration enclosure. The blood, hair, and chunks of flesh deposited there further supported this conclusion. So, either the Operator had fallen backward, or, more likely, he had been pushed.
The bite probably occurred immediately post-mortem.
Eric had stunned and bound the deceased Operator, so he posed no risk to the facility’s staff or himself and his team for another fifteen to twenty minutes. Arc’s network continuity was at one hundred percent and the new CU’s implant had been fully activated; it was now under complete neuroleptic control. But a crime had been committed and it was standard procedure to fully incapacitate all Reanimates known or suspected to be involved while the investigation was still active. It wasn’t like they could be interviewed anyway.
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