Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones

by Saul Tanpepper

  “That tells me she isn’t sure. The thing that worries me, Jess? We’re messing around inside people’s heads here. We’ve got no idea what might happen. We could really screw something up badly.”

  “Ashley wouldn’t do anything to hurt any of us. Especially Reggie.”

  Micah gives me a weak smile. “You know, I always suspected they’d hook up someday. Seriously, I mean. You could always tell. They had this…”

  “Chemistry?”

  “Chemistry, right. Like hydrogen and oxygen. Mix in a spark and—bam!”

  “What? Water?”

  He laughs and rocks his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Maybe I’m just being overly cautious.”

  “That’d be a first. I don’t think the word cautious has ever been used to describe you.”

  He studies his hands, frowning as if they’ve somehow betrayed him. “Yeah, and I don’t like feeling this way, either.”

  † † †

  Ashley pings us both after nearly an hour and a half has passed. Micah and I exchange glances, neither of us wanting to be the first to connect. Finally, Micah taps his Link.

  “I take it by your silence that you didn’t come up with anything,” Ash says. She looks disappointed.

  Micah shakes his head. “I tried. May actually have knocked a few cobwebs loose inside my head. Things do seem clearer to me now. Some things. But I didn’t come up with a better fix than what you did.” He looks over at me. “Even Jessie had a look at it.”

  I nod. “It’s definitely a strange little program,” I tell her. “Doesn’t look anything like what we’re used to seeing from Arc. But then again, I don’t think Stephen is your usual Arc employee, either.”

  “It doesn’t need to be complicated,” Ash replies. “Just effective.”

  “The problem is that we don’t know what the factory settings are,” Micah adds. “If we had those, it’d be smooth sailing.”

  Ashley coughs uncertainly. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t say that. We’ve been sitting here with our fingers crossed that you guys would come up with something better.”

  “So…you don’t think it’s going to help?” I ask. I glance over at Micah.

  “I wouldn’t have written it,” she snaps, “if I thought it was going to hurt!”

  I take in a sharp breath. She immediately apologizes. “I’m sorry, Jess. I’m just a little on edge. We had a little incident while we were waiting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s Jake.” She sighs. “He’s been trying to get the zombies to fry themselves.”

  “Yeah, Kelly told us. What happened?”

  “We’re not sure. Kelly had gone back down to check out the rest of the underground complex and Reggie was looking through the upper levels. I was just sitting here staring at the programming. You know how different coders have their own little quirks? Like how they do line returns and spaces and how they sequence certain commands and prompts?”

  I nod.

  “Well, it’s the strangest thing. I kept getting this feeling of déjà vu, like I’ve seen some of this work before, but I can’t figure out where.”

  “The ArcWare codex,” I tell her. “Stephen probably pirated some of it to build the failsafe.”

  “What happened with Jake and the zombies,” Micah interrupts.

  To me, Jake and the zombies sounds like a band.

  Ashley blinks. “Oh, right. So, I was just sitting here when all of a sudden I hear this loud pop! And then the floodlights flickered and everything went dark for a couple seconds. I got up and, just as they came back on again, I heard someone running toward me.”

  “A zombie?”

  “I said they were running. No, it was Jake. But, okay, this IU was chasing him. Like, not full-out running, but a hell of a fast shuffle. Faster than I’ve seen them go before.”

  “I guess you don’t remember how fast they were that first day,” I tell her.

  “It was inside the fence?” Micah asks.

  Ash nods.

  “How the hell did it get in?”

  “We don’t know. We checked. The fence is still intact all the way around. No holes. And it’s electrified. I mean, it could’ve been when the lights flickered. Maybe there was a power surge or a short or something, but it was only a couple seconds. There’s no way it could’ve climbed the fence so quickly.”

  I think back to what Kelly said about the IUs charging the fence. But Ashley just said it was still intact.

  “Maybe it was already in there from years back. Did you get rid of it?”

  Ashley looks nervously around. “That’s the weird thing. We don’t know where it went. After Jake reached me, we ran to find Reg. But when we went to go find it again, it had disappeared.”

  Nobody says anything for a moment. Nobody wants to say IUs can’t hide because we all know otherwise. But even this seems like strange behavior.

  Olly olly oxen free, my mind whispers.

  “We’ve barricaded ourselves inside. It’s the building with the elevator. The boys blocked the entrance and are keeping an eye on it.”

  “You checked inside the building already?” Micah asks.

  Ash nods. “There are only six doors up here, four rooms. One door is a set of stairs that look like they go down to the basement where Kelly is. The rooms are filled with junk, old furniture and machines. The lights in one didn’t work, so instead of checking it, we just jammed some metal bars into the handle and managed to wedge the door shut.”

  “What about the elevator?”

  She shakes her head. “The car wasn’t up here at the time, so unless the IU came in and called for the elevator, waited for it, got in and pushed the button to go down, it’s not in there.”

  “But you don’t know for sure,” I say. I can feel my blood pressure rising, my heart racing.

  “I already told you—”

  “I heard what you said, Ash, but you don’t know if Kelly’s underground by himself or stuck down there with a zombie!”

  “Stop yelling at me. We’re trying to get a hold of him, but none of us can go down there, Jess!” She checks the time on her Link before adding. “There’s no way it got down there.”

  “Then why hasn’t Kelly come back up?” I ask. “We all agreed on an hour and already it’s been longer than an hour and a half! Was he supposed to check with you in case Micah wrote a new program?”

  Ashley doesn’t answer.

  “Well?”

  Micah steps toward me. “Jessie, it’s not help—”

  “Get your hands off me! I don’t give a crap if it’s not helping. You guys were supposed to be watching, Ashley. Jake was supposed to be watching and instead he was off making the IUs angry and one got in and where the fuck is he?” I scream.

  “He’s—”

  “You let a god damn zombie into the compound! No, not just the compound, but probably into the building! And you lost track of it!”

  Ashley flinches at every word I spit at my screen. I can feel Micah’s hands on my shoulders. I can hear him telling me to calm down, but I don’t want to calm down. I want to be there with Kelly!

  “What the hell are you guys doing there, having sex?”

  “What?” Ashley shouts back at me. “We weren’t—”

  “Don’t give me that crap! You two can’t keep your god damn hands off each other. Like two damn rabbits! Leave you two alone for one freaking minute and you’re off jumping each other like a pair of sex-starved—”

  “Jessie!” Micah yells.

  But I’m beyond reason. “You and Reggie in that Holiday Inn when the rest of us were getting chased!”

  “Shut up!” Ashley screams. “You stupid bitch, you don’t know!”

  I hear Reggie shout her name somewhere deep inside my Link.

  “We weren’t having sex, you idiot!” Ashley says. “We were…”

  “What, Ash? Huh? What the hell were you doing when Jake and I got attacked? Where the hell were you?”

&
nbsp; She looks sheepishly away from her Link, but she won’t answer.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I hear Reggie ask. His face appears in the screen of my Link, red with anger. “Why is Ashley crying? What are you yelling at her for?”

  “It’s nothing,” Micah quickly tells him. “The girls are… Look, we’ve all had a stressful night. Stephen attacked Jessie and nearly choked her to death. I had to… I had to kill him.”

  “Was he turned?”

  “No, just his usual asshole self. But now we heard about what happened there and Jessie’s worried about Kelly.”

  Reggie’s face darkens. “He’s fine.”

  “You don’t know that!” I yell.

  “No, but there’s no way in hell that zom could’ve gotten down the elevator.”

  “Then why isn’t Kelly coming back up? Where is he? Why is he so late?”

  But instead of answering, Reggie turns away. He looks like he’s listening to something. I strain my ears, but there’s nothing.

  And then there is: the distinct sound of a bell dinging once.

  Reggie turns back to the screen and says, “The elevator’s coming back up.”

  Chapter 15

  The screen of Ashley’s Link blurs dizzyingly as it swivels around. It finally settles unfocused on a spot of blue that has to be Reggie’s dirty jeans.

  “Hello?” Micah calls out. “Reggie?”

  The elevator bell dings again. The view through the Link doesn’t change.

  “Reggie!”

  The scene shifts and Reggie’s face comes into view, but he’s looking away, presumably toward the elevator, which we can’t see.

  Another ding.

  “How many floors are there in that place?” Micah asks me. I shrug out of habit. I know he doesn’t expect me to answer.

  We hear a clacking noise and another ding. Then Jake’s voice, cursing. “What the fuck is going on in there? Is the door stuck or something?”

  “Reggie!” I shout into my Link, desperate to be able to see. “Ashley!”

  The Link jostles. Flesh colored haze covers the screen. Then Ashley’s face appears. She alternates between glancing at the screen and away. “Hold on, guys. The elevator door isn’t opening.”

  She disappears, and by the way the background slides past, I guess that she must be walking over to the door.

  There’s a knocking, someone’s palms slapping a surface. Reggie calls, “Kelly? Are you in there?” The bell dings again. Another series of slaps. “Kelly? Can you hear me?”

  “The door won’t open,” Ashley repeats, whispering this time.

  Micah and I turn the volume up on our Links and strain to hear.

  Slap, slap!

  “Kelly?”

  “What’s going on, Ash,” I ask. “Why isn’t it opening? Where’s Kelly?”

  “Shh!” someone says. “Did you hear that?”

  It’s the muffled sound of something inside the car thudding against the doors. It’s followed by a low moan.

  “What was that?” I demand. “Ashley, what the fuck was that?”

  The screen goes dark, but we can still hear. She’s covered the cam with her hand. There’s a series of muffled cries, more banging, then Reggie shouting for Jake to help him.

  Micah turns his terrified eyes to me. I try to move, but I’m frozen in panic. Ice-cold fear overtakes my body. I can’t feel anything but this mind-numbing horror of what must be happening three and a half miles away. My vision closes in and my mind threatens to shut down, like a vise squeezing in on me from all sides.

  Kelly’s face comes to me then—not on the screen, but in my mind, and not the way he is now but the Kelly I knew when we were thirteen. Back when I first realized I might be in love with him. His young, open face that rarely smiled, but when it did, it lit up the room.

  We’d met the year before, right around the time his brother Kyle was born. I remember because it was right around the time my own brother, Eric, came home from the Marines and announced that he was taking me out to Seattle for a visit. He didn’t actually come out and say it in so many words, but I knew almost instinctively that he wanted to move us all as far away from the East Coast and the outbreaks that had happened here—that were continuing to happen.

  We’d only known each other a couple weeks by then, but already Kelly was my best friend.

  It wasn’t until after Eric and I had returned, right before the first cases of the virus were announced in Seattle, that I realized how I felt for Kel. I would’ve been devastated if I’d had to leave him behind.

  He’s the only boy I ever seriously dated. The only boy I ever kissed or loved, or made love to. He still has that serious boyish look to him, and his smile still makes my heart rush a little faster, but he’s become so much more solemn these past five years. Kyle’s illness has weighed heavily on him.

  It’s only made me love him all the more.

  And then there’s a clatter and he’s gone and the view in my Link returns. I blink, startled, my eyes focusing, on what appears to be a tiled ceiling. My chest is heaving as I gasp for air.

  Someone’s fingers reach for the Link, blurry and fat, and I hear Ashley say, “Sorry, guys. Reggie’s getting something to pry open the door.” I hear her curse under her breath.

  The scene swivels again and we get our first glimpse of the elevator. The doors are painted a flat avocado green, the walls beige. There’s only one button beside the doors, the arrow pointing down. No lights. No numbers.

  There’s another ding. A muffled thud and the door actually seems to shudder. Jake appears, but Ashley turns the Link before I can get a good look at his face. “I need to put this down,” she whispers into it.

  “No!” I shout, breaking out of the spell. “Don’t you dare disconnect us!”

  “Okay. Hold on. Just… I’m going to set it down on its kickstand.” The ceiling slides dizzyingly past and she disappears for a moment before reappearing. The image stabilizes.

  “I found a screwdriver,” Reggie’s voice comes to us from somewhere off-screen, breathless. There’s a pause, then, “What are you doing, Ash?”

  “Setting this up so Jess and Micah can see.”

  Reggie’s face comes into view. He looks grave. “Look guys—”

  There’s a louder bang coming from behind him. He looks away for a moment. Another thud and another moan.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea—”

  “If you disconnect us,” I spit into my Link, “I will personally come there and knock you back into last week.”

  The doors thud and rattle. Reggie nods once then hurries over and gets the driver into the seam and wedges it to the side. There’s one last ding and the call button lights up.

  And then, with a whoosh, the doors slide open.

  Chapter 16

  I catch a glimpse of the back wall of the elevator car just before Jake’s and Reggie’s bodies fill the screen, blocking our view. I want to scream at them to move out of the way, but I know they can’t. They’ve got to deal with whatever’s inside that elevator car, whether it’s Kelly or something…Undead. Or both.

  Ashley lets out a gasp and steps into view, her hand held up to her mouth. She’s looking down at the floor in front of the three of them. Reggie shoves her back with his hand. Jake raises his and I catch a glimpse of something in it.

  “Is that a hatchet?” Micah asks.

  Reggie places a hand on Jake’s chest to stop him. Nobody moves. They just wait.

  “Guys?” I say, my voice trembling. “Reg?”

  He waves his hand behind his back, urging me to be quiet. “Ashley,” he whispers. Then, shouting: “Get my backpack! Now!” He leans forward. “Kelly? Hey, brah, can you—”

  There’s a moan, some gurgling. Then I hear a weak cough.

  “Ashley, hurry up! And Jake, back up! Give her some room.”

  “Is it Kelly?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

  “He’s hurt,” Reggie says over his shoulder. Ashley rushes in
with the pack. “Open it up and get the first aid pack out. I need a large bandage. Look for the burn cream.”

  My hands itch. My arms ache. I want to reach right into my Link and through Ashley’s and push them all aside. I want to leap through and go to my Kelly. I want to see him. But I can’t do any of those things. And nobody will tell me what’s going on.

  “Burn cream, I said,” Reggie snaps. “The white tube there. No, Ash, the white tube!”

  “Don’t yell at me! I’m doing the best I can.”

  Reggie looks to his left. “Make yourself useful, Jake. Get some water from the kitchen. Clean water. And something to drink.”

  “Guys, please tell me what’s going on,” I beg. I don’t know if they can hear me. “Ashley?”

  “He’s burned,” Reggie says. He reaches over and snatches the tube from Ashley’s hand. A moment later, he gives it back. “Bandage. Okay, tape.”

  “There’s no tape.”

  “Yes, there is, Ash. Just look harder, damn it! Kelly? Hey, brah, can you hear me? What happened down there?”

  There’s a grunt of pain. I see a hand reach up and grab Reggie’s shoulder and pull. The knuckles are white, the beds of his nails gray. I shudder. They look like the hands of a dead man. Please, I pray, don’t let him be dead.

  “Electric…panel,” Kelly pants.

  “What the hell were you messing around with that for?”

  “No power…half the hallway…breaker.”

  “You shocked yourself? Damn it, Kel. What’d you have to go messing around with that shit for?”

  Jake returns with a bottle of water and a wad of wet paper towels. Reggie takes them both, but I can’t see what he’s doing with them.

  “Can you sit up?” he asks. Then he bends down and helps Kelly sit. I see a shoulder. Reggie shifts and Kelly’s face comes into view. He looks terrible. The hair on his head is standing on end. A line of blood trickles down his forehead and across his face. Reggie wipes it. Kelly winces.

  “Is he bit?” I ask.

  Kelly hears and looks over. “Jess? Not…bit,” he says. “Burnt.” Then he frowns at Reg, asking without words why everyone is suddenly so uptight.

  “We had a breach. An IU got in.”