“Room 517!” I yelled out to Tong. “In the west wing!”
The elevators were shut down, so we had to walk up the stairs in the east wing. But once we got out on the fifth floor, we were shocked by what we saw.
Fresh burners. Two groups of them on either end of the hallway, blocking our way.
Tong told Elgin, and she marked waypoints for us to go down to the basement where there was a corridor that led to a service elevator that would take us right to Nyla’s room.
“Be careful though,” Elgin warned. “You’re going to pass a morgue, might be burners coming out of there.”
Down we went into the basement.
When we got to the morgue, I couldn’t help but take a peek.
Inside was the eeriest sight I’d ever seen.
In the center of the dark room, cast in a dead blue light, there was a big pool of formaldehyde. And inside the pool were dead bodies. Piles of them, stacked on top of each other. Floppy blue arms and legs mingled with one another like a disgusting morass of wormy spaghetti. Wet tangles of dark hair splayed out like brushes dipped in placenta on the bloated torsos of the obese, which appeared like a monstrous pimple about to burst with pus.
I thought I saw something move in there—maybe a body falling off the top of the pile—but Tong urged me to keep moving.
“C’mon, the elevator’s this way,” he said.
I jogged over to catch up, and got into the elevator with Tong.
I couldn’t believe it.
I was close to finding Nyla.
We reached the room that Nyla was in. The door was ajar. And I was afraid to open it.
I was scared that I’d open the door, and there’d be nobody in there.
Or worse.
Maybe I’d see a sick woman. Her skin pale with a film of clammy sweat all over her. Her hair wet and greasy, her eyes sunken and colored densely in red by burst blood vessels. Her flesh mushy from the voracious virus.
I didn’t want to open that door.
But I did.
And the moment that I stepped through the doorway, two things happened.
Something hard slammed right into my temple.
And I slammed right into the ground.
When my eyes were able to focus enough to see the figure hovering over me, I could see that it was priming up to hit me again with something in its hands. Instinctively, I held up my hands to defend myself.
I guess Tong rushed in and grabbed the person, because I saw the blur of his uniform and heard the ruffle of clothes and the yelp of a woman.
“We’re friendlies!” he yelled out firmly.
I shook out the stars in my eyes and blinked, trying to get my vision back. From the floor, I looked in front of me. Tong had tackled the woman and held her down.
It was Nyla.
My heart raced.
I’d finally found her.
I scrambled to my feet and took my mask off.
“Nyla!” I cried out. “It’s me!”
Her eyes widened, and the aggression in her body dissipated.
“Wayne! What the hell are you doing here?!”
“Why the hell did you attack me?”
“I was planning to get out of here, I thought you were one of the guards.”
Tong let her go and stood up. Then he turned to me.
“Your girlfriend’s one hell of a fighter,” he said.
Nyla shot me a dirty look, but didn’t say anything.
Tong helped Nyla up to her feet, and then she did the same for me.
“We gotta get outta here,” I said. “This whole building is gonna get demolished soon.”
She turned to me with wide angry eyes.
“What do you mean?” she said.
Tong darted towards the door.
“No time, move out,” he said to both of us.
Nyla and I followed Tong out of the door.
Then, we heard a dull boom rumble through the building.
The fire alarm system shrieked out in every hallway, and the sprinklers showered over our heads.
Tong radioed Elgin.
“The elevator’s out, we need a new route!” he yelled.
On my Cyclops, Elgin put up the waypoint.
“You need to cross the skybridge,” she radioed back. “It’s the only safe route.”
I looked over at Nyla. She looked like she was ready to bolt off in any direction at the first crack of a pistol.
Tong led the way, and me and Nyla sped along behind him. When we turned a corner, the skybridge was straight ahead. It was a pedestrian walkway encased in glass, with nothing supporting it underneath—just empty air all the way down to the asphalt. Tong sprinted forward.
Then, another explosion, this one not nearly as muffled as the first.
A concussive wave pulsed through the building.
The walkway crumbled.
Right as Tong passed the midway point, the middle of the skybridge cracked and the floor gave out right behind him.
The floor gave out from under me.
In an instant, I looked down where gravity was dragging me. There was nothing but empty air and concrete sidewalk under me.
I slid down the falling wreckage. My feet kicked to try to keep me from sliding, but the water from the sprinklers made the floor slick.
Instinctively, I whipped my body around and reached my hand up back towards Nyla.
She grabbed my hand.
Thank God.
She hung on to me with all her might. With trembling arms, she strained and pulled with her legs, dragging backward against gravity until I was back onto level ground.
Tong looked back behind him at us.
“You good?!” he hollered.
“Go!” I screamed as I got up on my feet.
He took off.
The building was collapsing around us. The dull thud of columns collapsing drummed through our chests. A blast of cold night air flooded into the gaping wound in the skybridge.
Nyla grabbed me.
“What the fuck do we do!”
I knew I could make the jump. The question was—could Nyla?
I couldn’t risk it. I radioed Elgin and she told us to take the emergency stairwell down, but to watch out for threats. The Fly didn’t detect a safe footpath, so we were on our own.
Leading the way, I ran into the stairwell. When I got down to the second floor, the stairwell had been destroyed. I still had my climbing rope, so I tied it around a pipe and I climbed down with Nyla following close behind.
We ended up in the basement. Tong yelled on the radio.
“Wayne, where you at!”
I yelled back, “I’m in the basement!”
Nyla and I continued forward and turned a corner.
Then, we stopped in our tracks, stumbling from the slippery floor.
There were burners. They blocked up the entire corridor. It was the only way back to the other side.
Sheer terror struck Nyla’s eyes wide open.
“What the fuck are those?!” she screamed.
We had no weapons.
We were dead.
Then, the crack of a rifle rang through the corridor. Two shots in quick succession, followed by another.
Tong double-tapped a burner.
The horde turned and ran at him.
He sprinted away.
“I left my pistol there,” he yelled over the radio. “I’m leading them away!”
Most of the horde chased after Tong, but there were still a few burners lingering at the doorway of the morgue. Crossing them was still dangerous.
I turned to Nyla.
“Listen, I’m gonna try and run past them, grab the gun, and kill the burners.”
She had a bewildered expression buzzing in her eyes.
“Burners?!”
“Zombies! Stay here and out of sight,” I told her.
She hid behind a stack of crates and I bolted off, streaking through the heavy mist.
There were at least three burners
at the door. As I neared them at blinding speed, they took notice of me. One of them lunged at me, and I tic-tacced of the wall. But a second one had caught my ankle when I bounced off the wall. It threw me out of balance and I fell to the floor.
Between the shrill chirps of the fire alarm, I heard Nyla shriek out my name.
The burners surrounded me. I fought them off, grappling with them. But in just a few seconds, they’d dropped me to the ground.
A severely obese burner fell on top of me. Thank God for that, because its massive bloated body was what prevented the other burners from getting a clear shot at other parts of me. I was getting crushed under the weight of the burner though. It was compressing my ribcage and squeezing the breath out of my lungs. My arms were trembling as I tried to push it off of me. Grunting and finally out of breath, the muscles in my arms gave, and the burner’s mouth slammed forward, towards my face. I turned away. It was just inches away from biting my nose off.
Blam.
The burner’s body turned slack.
More gunshots rang out.
My ears were ringing.
The burner’s body was pulled off of me.
Nyla offered me her hand. I took it, and she pulled me up. My hand in hers, and a gun in her other hand. She looked back at the morgue.
“Holy fuck there’s more!” she screamed.
A horde flooded out of the morgue and into the corridor.
We ran.
Nyla and I burst through the main entrance and onto the streets. Behind us in the lobby was a trail of bodies. We hurdled over them with burners chomping at our heels. We ran and ran, operating on pure instinct. I was scared that Nyla was going to be slow, but she kept up.
I turned down a street and then down another, hoping to lose the burners, but no such luck.
Nyla and I kept sprinting. I could feel my legs starting to grow weak. Anymore sprinting and I’d just collapse. When I encountered a fence, I boosted Nyla up and then bounced off the wall to vault over.
The horde smashed right into the fence. It bulged and kept them at bay, but I knew it wouldn’t hold for very long. The fence was cheap and the horde was piling up. All those bodies would push right through.
Nyla and I paused right around the corner. We really needed to catch our breath.
In between gasps for air, Nyla asked, “What the fuck are we gonna do, Wayne!”
“Keep running. Find high ground. Follow me. I’m gonna get on top of a building and I’ll pull you up.”
And that’s when fear struck me.
In my eyes flashed the image of Addie and Halstead getting swallowed by the horde as I tried to help them up.
Around the corner, the sound of the chain-link fence turned from a rapid rankling rattle into a long scratchy moan. I glanced over there. A lot of burners had been trampled, and they formed a strange grotesque ramp of wriggling bodies. Other burners were standing on top, pressed into the fence.
It was time to run.
As me and Nyla bolted off, I heard the sound of the chain link fence crashing to the floor, and the roar of a stampede.
We ran onto a residential street. There was a tall apartment building on the corner. Too tall to climb. So I kept running down the street until we found a two-story house that looked like one I could jump up to.
We had a short lead on them, but the gap was closing dangerously quick. Using a few wall jumps, I caught the ledge of the gutter of the gabled roof of a section of the house. Then I reached my arm down so Nyla could grab a hold and I could pull her up.
Nyla jumped up and grabbed me. As I pulled her up, I felt something dig into my arm with piercing pressure.
Then, a warm and wet sensation flowed out of my wrist and down my hand.
Adrenaline was coursing through my veins. I pulled Nyla up onto the gable.
She cried out.
“Wayne!”
I looked at her. Her eyes were fixed on my wrist.
A burner had sunk its grimy teeth into me.
And blood was pouring out of my gaping wound.
She tore her shirt off and wrapped it tightly around my wrist.
“You’re losing a lot of blood!” she screamed. Tears were glistening in her eyes.
Dizziness spun the world around me, and my eyes glazed over. I collapsed.
Nyla held me in her lap and grasped at my face in fear and panic.
At least I’m going to die in the arms of the woman I love.
NINETEEN
Vagabond
That’s all I remember about that.
Nyla told me all about what happened next. The horde had swarmed us. They surrounded the entire house, a crowd of at least four bodies deep. She thought it was over. She thought that I was going to die up there.
Then, apparently, some kind of heavy armored vehicle rolled up on the horde and blasted away with a mounted machine gun.
It was the military. They saved my life.
Then they took me and Nyla to a camp where they interrogated us. What branch they were from, we don’t know. Their uniforms were sanitized, no name tapes or service badges. Nothing. After we told them everything we supposedly knew, they let us go. Only we didn’t really tell them everything.
Why did they let us go? I thought maybe it’s because Nyla’s a journalist and well, a disappearing journalist wasn’t good for business. But Nyla thought that wasn’t a good enough reason. She said they could cover things up if they wanted to. No, she said it was because they were just going to watch us. We’d be more valuable to them that way. But we were both wrong. They let us go for different reasons that we realized after the Collapse…
After Nyla and I were let go, we went home. She to her place, me to mine. We needed time to process what the hell happened.
When I got back into my apartment, I fell into my bed and just slept. I don’t know for how long, but when I woke up, it was because my computer had woken up and there was an incoming call.
It was my manager, which meant that it was Tuesday. He explained to me that there was a huge development. Apparently, the president was going to buy a RealTwo for every single American citizen. The re-election was in a few months, and he said that the mental health and emotional well-being of the American people was at risk; he would be providing the people much-needed relief from the national lockdown.
Business was booming. And he said he was putting me up for promotion. I’d be getting a raise. A big one. But it would also mean more visibility to the higher-ups.
He gave me a week to think about it.
I spent those days feeling lost. That apartment, that room of mine…it just didn’t feel like home anymore. I tried going back to the same routine that I had before. Wake up. Log into Salesplex. Make coffee. Eat leftover pizza. Chat with Yakov about crime and the news. Joke with Ishrak about the women he was having so-called virtual sex with. Complain about the subways and how shitty New York City was.
But I just couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t sit there in that chair. When I logged into Salesplex, I just couldn’t stand the thought of sitting there on my ass, behind a screen, taking orders from a goddamned AI bot. And when I laid down on that bed, I couldn’t sleep.
I didn’t know what happened to Elgin and Tong.
I didn’t know what Nyla was going through, what she was thinking. What she was feeling.
I couldn’t forget about everything that happened inside STESIS. About everything that I’d done when I got out. About the burners.
How could I keep doing the same damn thing as before?
One morning, Yakov told me about the latest news he’d gleaned from his radio scanner and from the news. There were riots starting up all over the place. People were getting fed up with the lockdown. There were a few things of interest that he heard on his radio scanner. First, there was an increase in calls for NYPD Emergency Services Units to assist officers. And second, he said he heard radio chatter on frequencies that weren’t usually supposed to be used, chatter that reminded him of
military communications.
It corroborated what the public was fearing.
Martial law.
And it wasn’t just New York City that was developing in this direction. There were armed protesters all across the country, demanding their freedom. They were suspicious—and rightfully so—about the sandy green soldiers that were multiplying.
But…there weren’t any reports of zombies, so it seemed like the government had successfully covered up the first horde of burners.
I met with Nyla to talk about what happened. About the dead guy, how I met Tong and Elgin, how I ended up finding her. We ended up talking from sunset until dawn. Together, we unpacked everything that had happened in that short amount of time. By the end of the conversation though, we had more questions than we had answers. What the hell were those zombies? How were they made? What was the military’s role in all of this? How were they using STESIS? What were they predicting was going to happen?
By the time the sun rose, I knew I couldn’t go back to work.
I would join Nyla on her hunt for the truth.
But as for our relationship…she needed time.
“I’m not saying no, Wayne…and I see how you’ve grown…but just give me time, I’ve just been through a lot. I have a feeling we’re going to end up where we belong.”
She gave me a gentle reassuring smile, and I had every confidence that we’d be together again.
After we launched our investigation, we found out that that there was something much bigger stewing under the pot. Nyla thought that the RealTwo deal was basically just a bread-and-circuses tactic. But when we stuck our noses in deep enough, we saw that there were more reasons that he was pushing to get everyone the RealTwo. It wasn’t just because the president wanted to pacify the uprisings.
It turns out that the software that ran the RealTwo games was stealing computing power. Even if the games that people played on the RealTwo would eat up just fifty percent of the CPU or GPU cycles, the software would use an extra thirty percent—not something that they put in the TOS. That extra computing power was being put to use for developing STESIS and BPMS. And they were stealing data from the games and using it there. You remember how I said I couldn’t taste the milk or the croissants when I first got into STESIS? Well, the machine learns from the user’s feedback and expectations. The government was crowdsourcing what people thought the world should be like so that they could create a convincing facsimile through machine learning. It was using people’s memories of things that weren’t easy to just have a 3D artist create. Imagine trying to hand-make a million different homes. The different carpets, lamps, kitchen utensils, toilet paper. All the different brands of potato chips, jeans and boxers and t-shirts and laptop sleeves.
Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller Page 19