by Sean Platt
Z 2136
Z 2136
Sean Platt and David Wright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Sean Platt and David Wright
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
E-ISBN: 9781477874790
To our readers. Thank you for joining us on the journey.
Table of Contents
PREVIOUSLY . . .
Episode 1
CHAPTER 1—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 2—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 3—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 4—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 5—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 6—PROVISIONAL LEADER OF THE STATE KELLER
Episode 2
CHAPTER 7—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 8—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 9—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 10—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 11—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 12—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 13—ADAM LOVECRAFT
Episode 3
CHAPTER 14—KELLER
CHAPTER 15—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 16—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 17—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 18—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 19—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 20—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 21—SUTHERLAND
Episode 4
CHAPTER 22—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 23—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 24—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 25—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 26—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 27—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 28—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 29—SUTHERLAND
Episode 5
CHAPTER 30—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 31—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 32—KELLER
CHAPTER 33—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 34—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 35—KELLER
CHAPTER 36—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 37—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 38—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 39—ADAM LOVECRAFT
Episode 6
CHAPTER 40—CHARLES EGAN
CHAPTER 41—ADAM LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 42—KELLER
CHAPTER 43—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 44—KELLER
CHAPTER 45—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 46—LIAM HARROW
CHAPTER 47—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 48—CALLA EGAN
CHAPTER 49—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 50—KELLER
CHAPTER 51—ANA LOVECRAF
CHAPTER 52—KELLER
CHAPTER 53—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 54—SUTHERLAND
CHAPTER 55—ANA LOVECRAFT
CHAPTER 56—CALLA EGAN
CHAPTER 57—ANA LOVECRAFT
About the Author
Kindle Serial
PREVIOUSLY . . .
Z 2134
Former City Watcher Jonah Lovecraft, a secret member of the rebel Underground, was framed for murdering his wife. Although he didn’t remember committing the crime, his 17-year-old daughter, Anastasia (Ana), witnessed it, and her testimony sealed his fate. He was thrown into The Darwin Games, The State’s televised reality game show in which prisoners are pitted against one another and zombies. The prize: freedom in the paradisiacal City 7.
When Jonah, against all odds, won The Games, he soon found out that City 7 was a lie. Instead of being delivered to a new life of freedom, he was dumped in a shack in the zombie-infested Barrens, the no-man’s-land outside the walled cities. He was left to die.
Jonah was soon rescued by some children but quickly found himself imprisoned yet again, this time by a man named Egan, who had lost his own family and held Jonah responsible. Jonah managed to win his freedom from Egan, but before he was allowed to leave, Jonah was told that The State had implanted two chips in him years before: an identity chip, which he had known about, and a mind-control chip, which he hadn’t.
In the process of flushing out the chips, Jonah learned that he had, in fact, murdered his wife.
Ana, with the help of Liam Harrow, an old friend who was also in The Underground, discovered that her father Jonah had been set up by forces within City 6. When Ana was found consorting with members of The Underground to uncover her father’s betrayer, she was also thrown into The Games.
Ana’s younger brother, Adam, was forced into a State-run orphanage. Jonah’s old boss, Keller, who’d lost his son years earlier when an Underground rebel bombed a parade, helped Adam navigate between friends and bullies, told him to fight back against the bullies, and even gave him a weapon with which to fight. However, when Adam inadvertently killed one of his tormentors, Adam was arrested and hauled out of the orphanage by City Watchers.
Liam wound up in The Games with Ana. He had, in fact, gotten himself arrested intentionally, with the purpose of entering The Games to protect her. Ana made her way through several challenges and was forced to kill or be killed. In the midst of The Games, the announcer informed Ana via a video that Liam had been a double agent, working for both City Watch and The Underground. She realized that Liam was the one who had outed her father and exposed his rebel activities.
Ana and Liam were eventually saved by Duncan, her father’s old friend and a member of The Underground. He helped them escape into tunnels beneath The Barrens.
Ana confronted Liam and he admitted that he had in fact betrayed her father, but it was only to save his girlfriend, Chelle, who was living in a hidden village—the same village where Duncan was leading them with the promise of freedom.
When they arrived at the village, they found it burned down, its citizens slaughtered, and heads, including Chelle’s, mounted on spikes outside what had been the village’s main gate.
***
Z 2135
A tired and starving Jonah Lovecraft wandered The Barrens in search of his daughter, Ana, months after events of Z 2134. He met a soldier named Katrina who told him that Ana was living in freedom from The State’s tyranny in Hydrangea, one of many secret underground camps in The Barrens. Suspicious, but without any other options, he went with her to Hydrangea.
There Jonah met a man known as Sutherland, who in fact was a former cult leader named Dennis Weaver. Weaver had supposedly died in The Darwin Games.
Sutherland told Jonah that Ana had not yet arrived in Hydrangea, but that he had already sent a courier to get her; if Jonah would wait, he would be reunited with his daughter. However, Sutherland needed a favor first—Jonah must go into City 6 and bring an old friend of Jonah’s, Dr. Liza Goelle, back to Hydrangea with him. Goelle, it appeared, was part of Sutherland’s plan to help the camps strike back at The State and bring freedom to The Cities.
Jonah reluctantly agreed, though Sutherland gave him no details of his plan.
***
Meanwhile Ana, Liam, and Jonah’s old friend Duncan had found refuge in a village called Paradise, where they’d lived in the months following the events of Z 2134. They received word that Sutherland wanted Ana to come to Hydrangea, where her father was waiting for her. They would leave the next day.
Duncan, however, w
as hiding a secret—he had been bitten some time before and was taking drugs to fight off the zombie infection. Dr. Liza Goelle had been providing him with a serum to stave off the virus as she searched for a cure.
Without access to Goelle and her drugs, Duncan planned to leave on his own. He felt it was only a matter of time before he turned. The night before Ana and Liam intended to go to Hydrangea, Duncan lost his battle. At dinner, he turned into a zombie and attacked Ana, biting her arm.
Duncan was killed, and Ana was saved, but she was excommunicated by Oli, the leader of Paradise, due to a strict rule barring the infected from entering the camps.
She and Liam headed off to Hydrangea.
After nearly being killed by bandits in The Outback, Ana’s condition worsened. She begged Liam to kill her. Liam refused and nearly lost her during a long, horrible night. When she woke, however, she was better, somehow having survived the infection.
They eventually found their way to Hydrangea.
***
After Jonah brought Dr. Goelle to Hydrangea, Sutherland told her that she would work on a cure alongside the zombie-cyborg Doctor Oswald, who had managed to survive a zombie infection by cutting off parts of his own body and replacing them with robotics.
With Ana not yet arrived, Sutherland asked one more favor of Jonah—to go into City 1, the ruling City of The State, and deliver a package.
Jonah didn’t want anything to do with the plan, but Sutherland persisted, saying that it would help their cause to bring freedom to the people. He then told Jonah how he wanted to bring down The State. Katrina told Jonah how she also wanted revenge against Jack Geralt, the One True Leader, who had once kept her as a child sex slave, horribly abused her, and left her for dead. Katrina and Sutherland convinced Jonah that Ana would be far safer, and allowed to stay in Hydrangea if she wanted, if he helped their cause.
Jonah agreed to deliver the package.
It wasn’t until Jonah arrived in City 1 that he realized that he was not just delivering a package. He was met by a 200-year-old man named Denton Sinclair, who told Jonah how he was one of the survivors of The Old Nation. Along with Geralt and others, Sinclair had released the zombie virus in the 1980s to destroy humanity. They saved only a few thousand of the country’s best and brightest and put them into underground cities that would later rise up and become The State.
Sinclair said he wanted to right past wrongs and bring down the corrupt powers of City 1. He demanded that Jonah release the zombie virus—which was in Jonah’s package—aboard a City 1 train. When Jonah refused, Sinclair called Sutherland, who informed Jonah that he had no choice if he ever wanted to see Ana again.
Jonah reluctantly agreed to carry out the terrorist plot.
He unleashed the virus on the train and then fought past the zombies as well as The City Watchers and their orbs, which tried to catch him. He managed to escape, only to be discovered by more City Watch orbs and taken into custody.
Meanwhile, Jonah’s son, Adam Lovecraft, had become a City Watch cadet, taken under the wing of none other than City Watch Chief Keller, his father’s former boss.
When Ana’s old friend, Michael, told Adam that Keller was an evil man, Adam realized that Michael had joined The Underground.
Keller asked Adam to help him root out Underground rebels, and Adam considered snitching on Michael. However, when Michael presented evidence that The State had lied about Ana and Liam and that they were still alive, Adam reconsidered his loyalties.
Michael convinced Adam to help The Underground get Keller alone so they could get some answers from him. Michael promised that Keller wouldn’t get hurt and that they would film the interrogation and use it to discredit The State once and for all.
Adam reluctantly agreed.
When he arrived at Keller’s, the Chief showed him a video of his father unleashing the virus on City 1. Keller revealed that Adam’s father was now an enemy of The State.
When Adam and The Underground attempted to interrogate Keller, things went horribly wrong, and Keller managed to kill everyone but Adam. He then took the boy into custody.
Back in Hydrangea, Ana was given a place to stay because Oswald and Goelle intended to use Ana’s blood to create a cure for the zombie virus.
However, Sutherland had other plans, which included killing Goelle.
Oswald then went to Liam and Ana’s room to warn them that Sutherland had killed Dr. Goelle and that they had to plan their escape, but they would have to wait because if they tried to leave right away, Sutherland would kill them all.
Later, during dinner, Katrina stormed into the dining hall to tell them to follow her to another room where something was happening on television.
Keller was being named Provisional Leader. He then revealed that he had two traitors with him on stage: Jonah Lovecraft and his son, Adam.
Keller then shot Jonah dead. Ana watched and dropped to her knees horrified.
***
And now, the conclusion of the Z series.
Episode 1
CHAPTER 1—ANA LOVECRAFT
January 2136
A half mile from the Halo . . .
Ana peered through the scope, focusing her rifle on the veering road below, watching and waiting for the transport vans to pass, trigger ready to free her brother.
There were three roads leading to the Halo, where The Darwin Games would detonate in a bloodbath known as The Opening Rush—always with host Kirk Kirkman’s untethered glee. Only City 6 came in from the West, and in the months that Ana had been spying on their routes, The State always sent two vans. She assumed one transported prisoners while the other carried City Watchers as backup in case the trip turned sour.
She adjusted her position, still chilly on the fresh-fallen snow despite her insulated jacket and pants, the outfit all black, scavenged from a group of bandits two months earlier. The jacket kept her relatively warm, and more importantly, allowed Ana to blend into the line of trees where she’d been ordered by Liam and Katrina to hide. She held her stare down the hill on a perfect view of the stretch where the vans were scheduled to pass at any moment.
Ana tried to ignore the rolls and roars in her stomach. There had been no time to eat—not that she would have been able to soak more than a morsel of bread in the stewing acid that sat in her stomach.
“How ya doing, baby?” Liam chirped in her earpiece, as if he could sense her unease from his spot on the road’s north side, where the line of trees crept closer to the old, cracked concrete. He and Katrina were waiting downhill from Ana.
“Scared as hell.”
“We’ve gone over this a dozen times,” Liam reminded her. “You’ve nothing to worry about. Two vans, like always.”
“I know,” Ana said, though she couldn’t quite shake the gnawing sensation that plans meant little and things wouldn’t be simple at all.
She flashed back nearly seven months to the caravan robbery gone wrong and the ambush that had claimed most of their party. “What if this is a trap?”
Katrina, with the most years of experience fighting The State, answered for Liam. “If it’s a trap, we deal with it. We’ve not come this far to abandon Adam on the off chance that it might be a trap.” A beat, then, “Have we?”
Ana paused, waiting for—wanting—Liam to back her up. Instead he said nothing, and Ana took it for the invisible nod to Katrina that it was. Lately it seemed that he and Katrina were on the same page more often than not. Nothing official, but if the trio chopping their way through The Barrens ever stopped to cast ballots, the vote would’ve gone 2–1 with Ana on the losing end, almost always.
She tried not to let her past annoyance poison her present thinking around Adam’s reality. Emotions weren’t part of the mission. Katrina was right. They had to get Adam now. It would be nearly impossible to find him in the chaos following The Opening Rush.
Ana sighed. “You’re right. Just getting butterflies is all.”
“It would be odd if you weren’t, Ana.” She imagin
ed Katrina’s smile, not quite maternal but supportive in its own uncomfortable way. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine, and we will get your brother.”