Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones

by Saul Tanpepper

I hurry away, anxious to get out of sight. I thread my way through the aisles to the changing rooms. The murmur of voices comes to me. Jake and Tanya are standing just outside, holding a tarp over the opening to block any light from escaping. I suspect they’re really doing it so they can listen in.

  “I told you,” Stephen is saying, “I ran when everyone else ran, same direction as you guys did. But the next thing I knew I was flying through the air, crashing down off the side of the road. I was pushed.”

  “By an IU?”

  “They weren’t that close to us. No, I don’t know who it was. They pushed me from behind. I flipped over the guardrail and was sliding down the gravel. Tore me up something good.”

  “Nobody would push you.”

  In the darkness, my eyes meet Jake’s. He holds the stare for a moment before turning away. “It wasn’t me,” he mumbles. The thing is, I know he’s right. He and Tanya were out in front, screaming. I was helping Micah. Which leaves Reggie, Ash and Kelly.

  “He’s lying,” Reggie growls. “Why would any of us push you?”

  Why indeed, especially since he still hasn’t told any of us exactly where we’ll find the failsafe program. Why would we want to get rid of him until he had? And yet…

  All I can keep thinking about is Kelly telling me someone pushed him over the railing at the Manhattan end of the Midtown tunnel, back when we were first thinking about breaking in. Nobody knew if the tunnel was even open. We were there because we’d had nothing better to do, poorly prepared to do a decent job of checking things out.

  And the next thing we knew, Kelly was in the water. We’d all thought he’d jumped, but afterward he told me in secret that he’d been pushed. Since then, I’ve wavered between doubting him and knowing with absolute certainty that it had to have been Reggie.

  Reggie just being stupid. Reggie being petty.

  No, reason argues. Reggie wouldn’t do something like that. Could he have?

  Could he have pushed Stephen? Why?

  I hear a low curse. “You’re ripping off my skin.”

  “Well, at least one part of his story appears to be true,” Kelly says, apparently ignoring Stephen’s complaints. “The skin on half his back is scraped off and there’s a buttload of gravel still stuck in his shoulder.” He raises his voice a little to ask, “Jake, is anyone else out there besides you and Tanya?”

  “I am.”

  “Get some water, Jess, and a bunch of towels and some bandages. And something to pick out these stones.”

  “We’re going to waste good drinking water on this piece of trash?” Reggie snarls.

  Kelly ignores him.

  I gather the requested supplies and a smaller version of the same Anaheim Ducks jersey Reggie is wearing and slip them underneath the tarp. For the next couple hours, no one speaks. Stephen hisses and grunts as Kelly and Reggie take care of him. When they’re finished, they shut off the lights and emerge. It’s nearly dawn.

  Stephen’s wrists are bound with the laces from a pair of boxing gloves. Reggie shoots darts at me from his eyes when he comes out. He strips off his jersey and stalks off to find something else to wear. Jake and Tanya give me a quizzical look and I just shrug, too puzzled to even smile.

  “Now,” Kelly says, nudging Stephen toward our sleeping mats, “you’re going to tell us how you managed to escape those IUs. They were everywhere.”

  “I’d like to know how he found us,” Jake adds.

  I think I have an answer to the second question. I was sure I’d seen something coming over the crest of the overpass just before we went around the corner of the building. It had to have been Stephen. But if there’s one question he needs to answer, it’s the one nobody has yet asked:

  “Why did you come back?”

  † † †

  “Why did you come back?” Kelly asks.

  “If you think I tried to run away, you’re wrong,” Stephen says. “I could’ve gotten away from you kids a half dozen times already.”

  “Kids,” Jake sputters. “That’s a lot of bullshit coming from a guy whose hands are tied up.”

  Stephen shrugs. “Then why do you think I came back?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Keep it down, Jake.”

  “Mr. Corben said it best back there at the airport: We need each other.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” I say. “You were ready to die back there. You pulled the deadman’s switch. Remember? That sort of weakens your argument about wanting to live.”

  “You wouldn’t have let it happen,” he says, smirking.

  “Easy to say now,” I tell him. “You nearly shit your pants when that blade came down. Whatever this little game is that you’re playing, it almost bit you on the ass.”

  His smile falters.

  “I was simply making a point.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That you’re not a murderer, Miss Daniels.”

  “Really? Because I’m the one who killed your Nurse Mabel.”

  “Anyone who kills for self preservation is not a murderer. The more relevant question is, would you kill when your life isn’t on the line, as was the case back in that room. I don’t think so.”

  His accusation steals the air from my lungs. It’s practically the same claim Jake made about me.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” he tells me. “But it’s something you’ll have to overcome if you’re going to leave here alive. I guarantee you: you will have to kill one of your own before you can leave.”

  Jake steps back in surprise, tripping over his own feet and falling into a rackful of clearance items.

  “Why are we even wasting our time with this guy?” Reggie asks. “All he does is talk in circles and riddles. I haven’t heard a single thing out of him that helps us.”

  Stephen chuckles. “I’ve already given you the biggest clue.”

  “What?” Reggie asks. “That we need to go east? That’s helpful. Or that Jessie is going to have to kill one of us. Ooooh, spooky. I hope it’s not me.”

  Kelly puts a hand on Reggie’s arm to quiet him. “We know we need to go to Gameland,” he says.

  The only one of us who shows any surprise at this is Jake. And maybe Tanya.

  “We can’t go there,” Jake says. “The place is infested with Controlled Undeads!”

  Everyone else had pretty much come to accept that we were headed there, even if we still don’t know exactly where and how we’ll get in, or what we’ll do once we’re inside. It’s the reason we stopped making a fuss about coming this way. Deep inside, we knew. We always knew.

  “Now, you need to tell us where the failsafe program resides.”

  Stephen doesn’t hesitate. “Same place The Game codex resides.”

  “Jayne’s Hill,” Kelly says. “Right smack in the center of Gameland.”

  “Correct. Underneath it, in fact. Deep down inside the hill.”

  “Of course,” Kelly says. “It’s the only place Arc would feel is safe enough to keep something like that from people like us. That’s where we need to go to hack into the failsafe.”

  “You know we can’t just walk into Gameland,” Jake says. He just won’t give up. “And you are aware, aren’t you, that it’s crawling with Players?”

  “We’ve already dealt with IUs.”

  “These will be different. They’ll be controlled.”

  I turn to him. “Controlled by people who’ve never even set foot in Gameland. No matter how good the VR is for The Game, it doesn’t compare with actually being there in person.”

  He scrunches up his face. He’s never even played Zpocalypto. How can I expect him to understand?

  “So, now that you’ve told us, why do we need you anymore?” Reggie asks.

  “Trust me. You do. You need me to get in. You need me for the hack. It’s not a simple thing. And remember, I said it’s deep inside Jayne’s Hill, which means—”

  “Which means Ashley, Jake and Reggie can’t go in,” Kelly says. �
��Only Jessie and Micah and I can. But neither Jessie nor I are hackers. And Micah is… is…. He’s…”

  I turn to Micah. “You think you’re up for a little hacking?”

  He frowns. “I… I don’t know. I don’t know if I remember how.”

  Kelly and I exchange glances.

  “Shit,” Jake says. “He fucking useless.”

  Chapter 29

  “Bicycles,” Reggie suggests.

  We peer out the window at the low gray sky, at the roiling clouds, a mass of silver and black, full of hot rain and thunder. When I look at them, I want to duck so that I don’t hit my head. They feel like they’re pressing me into the ground. A few sprinkles splatter the glass, even as the sun shoots spikes through holes in the sky, a war between light and shadow.

  The parking lot is empty, no trace of the Undead. No evidence that they walked here just a few hours before.

  “Where the hell are we going to get bicycles?” Jake asks.

  “There’s a Toys R Us next door.”

  “Bikes would get us there faster,” Kelly notes. “And they’re quiet.” He looks around. “Does everyone know how to ride?”

  “Really, brah?” Reggie says. “Who doesn’t know how to ride a bike?”

  I almost expect someone to raise their hand and say they don’t, but nobody does.

  “What about him?” I ask, pointing at Stephen.

  Kelly inhales slowly and deeply as he considers what to do with him. He looks back at me. “What do you think?”

  Great, I think. He’s turning it back on me. And he was doing such a good job leading us yesterday. But even those few hours seem to have sapped him of so much of his energy. His face sags and his voice sounds tired, lifeless.

  “Give him a pack with all our extra clothes,” I say. “Nothing essential. No food and no water. No weapons. Pack it tight and heavy. He’ll carry it. Once we get the bikes, we untie his hands. He’ll ride in front.”

  “Your fearless leader has returned,” Stephen says, smugly. “All it took was telling her she needs to kill someone and she’s raring to go.”

  “Ignore him, Jess.”

  “So now we just need to figure out how to get inside the Toys R Us,” Reggie says. “That should be easy.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, right?” Jake asks.

  Reggie gives him a big grin. “You’ve got the magic touch with doors. Come on.”

  Jake groans, but he follows Reggie out through the service exit. We watch them jog as quietly as they can across the parking lot. The other building is about a hundred yards away.

  Kelly gives me a worried look. “I hope they get in. Bikes will help us make up some of the time we lost yesterday.”

  As they approach the toy store, I notice a gray van parked directly in front of them. Something moves in the shadows underneath. I grip Kelly’s arm and am about to yell out when Kelly clamps his hand over my mouth and shushes me. Yelling will only draw out the Undead. We can only hope they see it before they get to close.

  But they don’t. They keep running, straight toward the van. Just as they pass it, something streaks out, tripping Reggie. He stumbles several steps, then falls. The sound of his hands hitting the pavement reverberates against the buildings and across the parking lot.

  “It’s just a cat,” Kelly says, exhaling.

  The creature dashes off across the pavement and slips beneath another car thirty feet to the left. Jake helps Reggie up. From this distance, it’s impossible to know what they’re saying to each other. I can’t imagine Reggie being very happy about what just happened, even less about Jake helping him up. I can see by the way he holds himself, looking over at us still standing in the door, that he’s embarrassed.

  “Better him than me,” Kelly breaths, amused.

  We watch as they disappear around the corner of the building. Ashley comes and deposits several filled backpacks next to us, then goes back for more. I test one and immediately wonder if she actually thinks Tanya’s going to be able to carry one of these. It’s really heavy. Kelly might even have some difficulty with it.

  “It’s Jake,” Kelly says, nudging me to attention. “He’s waving us over.”

  We wave to let him know we’re on our way. Then, when the six of us are ready, we dash across the parking lot carrying the packs.

  My eyes slip to the left when we pass the car that the cat disappeared under. I don’t expect to see it come out again, but I want to know if it does. The thing was probably startled and got the fright of its life when it got tangled up in Reggie’s feet. I take a final glance back and nearly choke. The cat is lying a few feet away, its head torn nearly completely off its body, a trail of blood leading underneath the car. It spasms as it takes its dying breaths, then its eyes glaze over.

  Kelly yanks my collar. I can see that he’s seen it, too, but he says nothing. His eyes are hard and black, and they tell me to keep moving or the cat’s fate will be our own. Somehow, I get my feet moving. Thunder rumbles and rain wets my cheeks. The sky is crying. It’s crying for me and this cat. It’s crying for us all.

  It may even be crying for the undead thing that lives beneath that car, whose hunger never dies.

  † † †

  They’d gotten in through a bathroom window, prying at the dry wood with Reggie’s knife until the molding came away and the glass could be levered out. The panes are stacked neatly to the side.

  Inside, there are more than enough bikes to fit us all, and within a half hour, we’re back on the road, pumping hard against the swirling wind, straining against the spitting rain, hoping that sunshine will prevail, at least enough to keep the Undead from climbing back out of their hiding places.

  But the thing about hope? It has no place in a land like this. Within an hour, the sprinkles have turned into a drizzle. The clouds have healed the wounds the sun inflicted. Twilight rises around us, spattering off the road, creeping out of corners. We keep riding, because it feels good to put distance between us and Arc. We keep riding because there is nothing else we can do.

  The first hour yields to the second and the second to the third, until the thunder and rain threaten to drown us, until the winds buffet us from all sides, until blackness descends from the sky.

  And the Undead begin to emerge from their holes.

  Chapter 30

  Micah is the first to spot one. He slaps my arm and points to the right. Since we’re bringing up the rear, no one else sees the lone figure standing by the side of the road. Everyone else has already passed right by it.

  It turns its hollow gaze at us as we pass and spreads its blackened lips. Its teeth are coffee brown; its lips and tongue missing. The temperature outside is in the lower eighties, but inside of me a coldness grows and won’t let go. A shiver passes through me. It shakes me so badly that my front tire begins to wobble.

  “We should tell the others,” Micah says.

  “Of course.”

  It gives me something to do, so I stand up and pedal faster to catch up to Reggie and Ash.

  “We just passed a zom,” I gasp.

  Ashley’s eyes go wide. She twists her head around and nearly causes us to crash.

  “Damn it, Ashley!” Reggie says. “Pay attention.”

  “It was just one,” I say. “Maybe it’s lost.”

  “If there’s one, there’s bound to be others,” she replies. The wind tries to strip her words away, but I still hear them.

  When we first got to Long Island, we’d spied a lone zombie standing way off in the distance, all by itself. It just stood there, statue-still in the baking sun. Occasionally, we’d see another IU or two wandering around it as if investigating, moving slowly. But they’d soon disappear and leave that one alone.

  Was it somehow broken?

  It makes me wonder if the one we just passed is like that: broken.

  I speed up again to where Tanya and Jake are riding side by side and tell them to keep their eyes open. Tanya looks over at me, pain and misery on her face. Water drips
from her unkempt hair, from her chin and her doleful eyes. If looks could kill, I’d drop down dead right now.

  “Micah thinks he saw an IU,” I say.

  “Just one? That’s nothing.”

  “There’s bound to be more, Jake,” I reply. “And it’s only getting darker. This might be a good time to find a place to stop and rest.”

  He glances over at Tanya, then the sky, then at me. “Now’s our chance to put some distance between us and Arc.”

  “Won’t matter if we run into zombies, Jake. We should wait out the storm.”

  “Fine. Whatever. It’s not like you guys listen to me anyway.”

  I bite my tongue. “I’ll go and see what the others think.” I start to speed up, then pull back. “Listen, Jake. Nobody’s picking on you. You just need to stop…I don’t know, stop trying so hard. We’re all just doing what we can to survive and get out of here alive, okay?”

  “You know what’s bothering me?” he says. “I’ll tell you. It’s that I thought you were my friend. After what happened back in Long Island City, I thought…”

  “What? That I liked you? Jake, I love Kelly. Letting me know you had a crush on me doesn’t change that at all. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. All of us.”

  “You should have come back for me, not your boyfriend. It should have been you.”

  “I did come back,” I reply, confused.

  “You only came back because you were kidnapped.”

  I shake my head. It’s the wrong time to be having this discussion.

  Jake mumbles something under his breath. I don’t bother to ask him what it was. I speed up again and leave them behind. That boy has a hell of a lot of growing up to do.

  Kelly and Stephen are about fifty feet ahead. They’re just passing the exit sign for Jericho and the Jericho Turnpike. I remember that name because Kelly told us that once we reached it, the border for Gameland is only three or four miles away.

  My tires hiss on the wet road, but it’s no louder than the wind or the rain around us, certainly much quieter than the thunder. I look around, suddenly doubtful of what I saw back there. Maybe it was a tree, or a signpost. Maybe what we saw was just our imagination, because all I can see now are trees whipping in the wind, stripping leaves. The tall grass alongside the road, rising and falling like waves on the sea. There are no Undead. There’s only us.