Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones

by Saul Tanpepper

  “I’m telling to you to go home, Jessie.”

  Rage begins to fill me. How dare he tell me what to do?

  “Please…”

  I hear Master Rupert’s voice in my head: Yield to your opponent’s greater power. The advice is loud, insistent. It drowns out the other voice inside me screaming at the top of her lungs, pleading for me to just listen to her for once. I’ve been ignoring her my whole life, the tiny voice that speaks to me in words that are my own. She tells me: Stop letting everyone else tell you what to do.

  “No,” I tell Kelly, and the voices inside me quiet. “We’re staying together.”

  I retrieve the gun, check my Link, then look up at the sky. It’s a little darker now, a deeper blue than when we opened the hatch to come in. Or maybe it’s a trick of the wall. It doesn’t matter. Evening is coming either way. “We’ve got three more hours of daylight. Jayne’s Hill is about four miles from here. We can make it easily.”

  Kelly looks around at the rest of the group. They shift uneasily. We’re all tired, exhausted, drained emotionally and physically. Confounded by the effects of the wall.

  “Maybe we’d be better off if we rested for the night,” Micah suggests. “We can decide in the morning.”

  I shake my head. “Four days is all we’ve got to get rid of this thing in our heads—their heads.” I point at Ash and Reg and Jake, now standing in a close circle. “Plus, we need to figure out how to escape Gameland and the island. I want to get back to Arc’s headquarters in Manhattan by Friday morning.”

  “Whoa, whoa! Wait a minute,” Micah says, stepping forward. Kelly frowns in confusion. “Why would we want to go to Arc’s headquarters? And why Friday morning?”

  “Tanya was injected eight days ago,” I explain. “Kelly was four days after that. That gives us till Friday before whatever just happened to her happens to him. We’ll go and demand that Arc give him the cure. They have to have one.”

  “And if they don’t, Jessie?”

  I turn to Micah, and he must sense the anger boiling up inside of me because he takes a step back.

  “No, I won’t accept that.”

  Chapter 2

  “There’s not enough time,” Kelly tries telling me. He grabs my arm as I hurry across the road. “Wait a minute, Jessie!”

  With every step away from the wall, I can feel its effects on me weakening. I feel lighter, stronger. Even my shoulder feels better. Soon, I won’t be able to feel it at all.

  Nor will the Players.

  Thinking this, I scan the horizon for movement. In the late afternoon sun, everything seems sharper, more clearly defined. But I don’t see anything move. We’re the only people out here, living or otherwise. But I’m seeing only about a square mile of the over one hundred square miles of Gameland. We’re on its outer fringe; most of the action takes place in the cities, closer to the middle. That’s where the highest rated Survivalist episodes originate, Players battling each other in abandoned cities and taking out IUs like tin cans at the county fair. Survivalist fans love watching urban warfare.

  “Did anyone see which house Stephen went into?” I ask.

  Reggie and Ash look at Jake. His face is streaked and his eyes are red from crying, but I notice something else flash in them, something determined. He stares straight past me, as if I’m not here. When I try to catch Ashley’s attention, she quickly looks away. She won’t meet my eyes. An uncomfortable feeling settles in the pit of my stomach.

  “What’s going on?”

  Reggie purses his lips and gestures. “Let’s get off this road. It’s too bright.” He grimaces against the glare. “And the shadows are too dark. I feel like every IU and its cousin is looking at us right now, smacking its lips.”

  Standing atop the crest of the road, I can see down across the overgrown berm. There’s a fresh path beaten through the golden grass. A warm breeze caresses my cheek, smelling faintly of swamp water and decay. There must be a lagoon nearby that turned over after this afternoon’s rain. Below us, the moldering houses stand mute against the beating sun, their windows curtained against the glare. I know what Reggie means. It feels like they’re all watching at us, as undead as the Undead themselves. What will happen when the living return?

  Will the houses consume them, too?

  “Remind me again,” Kelly asks. “Why are we looking for Stephen?”

  I step onto the trail Stephen left behind, brushing my hands against the tops of the dry grass. “I need some answers before we leave for Jayne’s Hill.”

  “What makes you think he’ll talk to you?”

  “He’s vulnerable right now.” I finger the pistol in my waistband and Kelly’s eyes drop to it. I can see him wondering what I’m thinking.

  Micah steps impatiently past me and follows Stephen’s trail. The others are huddled by the side of the road, whispering. Jake looks over at us, then ducks his head down again.

  “Let’s go, guys,” I call, irritated.

  And worried.

  We come out at the end of a cul-de-sac and test the front door of the house on the left. It’s locked. Micah and Kelly cautiously circle around to the back, going in opposite directions. They keep their eyes peeled for potential Undead hiding places. I hear a gate creak open, then close, and I know it’s Kelly returning because it doesn’t slam against its post. He reappears, shaking his head.

  “Back door’s wide open. No way in hell I was going inside.”

  We check the next house over and find the doors closed, but unlocked. Inside, the air has a stale smell to it and feels tired and neglected. The cabinets in the kitchen stand open, ransacked.

  “Looters?” I ask. “During the evacuation?”

  Kelly shrugs, then shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe the owners. Except they only took food, not valuables. Definitely not zoms. Not unless they’ve developed a taste for canned goods.” He lifts an old laptop computer from a desk in the kitchen nook and blows the dust off. But when he opens it up and presses the power button, nothing happens. He sets it down again.

  “I heard there were people left, after the evacuation,” he says. “People who refused to leave or were ditched because they were too slow getting out. No shortage of food for stragglers here on the island.”

  “Kelly.”

  He looks over. “Sorry. Mind’s running a mile a minute. Whoever did this, they’re clearly long gone. Nobody’s been here in a while.”

  I wipe a finger through the dust on the counter and nod. “Like anyone would choose to stay, especially after Arc started building the wall around Gameland.”

  We head back outside where the others are waiting. I shake my head to let them know Stephen’s not here.

  “What now?” Micah asks.

  “Yeah, we’re wasting time,” Jake snaps. “We shouldn’t be looking for that asshole. We can’t trust anything he says.”

  I glare at him in disbelief. He’s already moved on from Tanya. The girl’s still alive—though not for long—and he doesn’t even care what happens to her now. All he thinks about is himself.

  I glance across the cul-de-sac to the house to the right of the path where we came out, then quickly step off the porch and hurry across to it. There’s a spot of blood on the sidewalk, then another, a trail leading around to the side door.

  “Window’s broken,” Kelly says, stepping beside me. He nods at the small pane above the knob. There’s a large smear of blood on the grass beside us—fresh blood—and it’s been flattened down. Several more spots color the mat and the door. The blood on the knob is still tacky.

  “Bring the others,” I tell him, before heading inside.

  The entryway opens directly into a kitchen. The blood trail leads through the room and toward the back of the house. I pluck a long thin knife from the butcher block before following it, and there, in the living room, I find Stephen kneeling over Tanya’s limp form on the couch. He doesn’t look up when I walk in, but I can tell by the way his back straightens that he knows I’m there. />
  “I tried,” he finally says. “I tried, but I couldn’t save her.”

  I don’t speak. Behind me, I hear the side door creak open and the sound of footsteps. I can feel the others gathering around me.

  “This was my one chance to prove what I could do. It’s ruined…all gone.”

  The man is a pathetic liar, I remind myself. Tanya’s gone, and his mourning for her is a desecration of her memory. I’ll mourn in my own way later. Right now, I have five others who need me to get them home, one of them in need of a cure.

  I move around so I can see his face. “How do we turn off the failsafe, Stephen?”

  He stares at Tanya, his eyes glassy. Finally he opens his mouth. He takes in a shuddering breath and says, “There’s only one way to access the programs, and that’s directly through the mainframe beneath the Jayne’s Hill radio transmission tower. Each program runs on an infinite loop and transmits wirelessly to the tower. It’s unbreakable.”

  “How do we find it? How do we get to the mainframe?”

  “I’ve never been there. I don’t know how big the place is. I just know you have to go down an elevator to get to it. Several stories, I think. As far as getting in, the place is surrounded by chain link and razor wire. The fence is electrified, running off solar panels.”

  “What if we just cut the power to the transmission towers?”

  “The lines are embedded in cement.”

  “And if we shut down the mainframe?”

  “Won’t work. The satellite servers, like the one you shutdown in LaGuardia, are designed to endlessly transmit last instructions. So, even if the program itself somehow ceases to run in the mainframe, or to be transmitted from there, the signal still gets sent out to your implants. Built-in redundancy.”

  “Cut to the chase. How do we leave?”

  He looks up at us, despair in his eyes. Beside him, Tanya’s chest rises and falls, shallowly and rapidly. “I told you: It’s unbreakable.”

  Ashley makes a sound of disgust. “No program is unbreakable. I cracked The Game’s codex, I can crack this one.”

  He turns his gaze to her. “The program is only one part of the failsafe.”

  “We got that, asshole,” Jake says. He stares at Stephen’s face, careful not to look at Tanya.

  Stephen sneers at him. “I should’ve killed you all when I had the chance.”

  “Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You’ll be lucky if we don’t kill you for what you’ve done.”

  “Don’t let him get to you, Jake,” Kelly mutters. “He’s just a tiny cog in a much bigger machine.”

  “And you’re all just players in a game,” Stephen whispers.

  Tanya’s body spasms and gush of dark blood erupts from her mouth and gurgles down her cheeks. Jake turns away. I almost feel like going over and forcing him to look, but a part of me doesn’t blame him for stabbing her, the way she was acting inside the wall…

  Stephen brushes the hair from her face and whispers, “Shhh, there there. Shhh.”

  My stomach clenches, wanting to be sick. I turn to Reggie. “See if you can find some wire cutters. Maybe downstairs or in the garage.”

  Reggie glances at Jake, who nods. Then he turns and heads off through the house, leaving Jake behind. Micah disappears, too.

  “Ashley, can I talk to you?” I say. “In private. Kelly, keep an eye on Stephen. You too, Jake.”

  Jake tries to protest but Kelly quiets him. I pull Ash into a bedroom down the hall. It used to be a girl’s room, twelve or thirteen years old. The walls are lined with faded posters of once-famous music idols and little pink pigs. There’s an overabundance of the color, and the shelves are lined with hundreds of paperback and hardcover books. The board sags in the middle where a half dozen or so inordinately fat and colorful volumes sit.

  I pull one out and glance half-blindly at the cover. It’s got a drawing of a boy with wild hair on it waving a magician’s wand. I put it back, resisting the urge to open it, to feel and smell the pages.

  A faded picture on the bedside in one of those old Record-a-Note frames shows a brown-haired girl in a ponytail. I push the speaker button near the bottom and expect to hear childish titters of laughter and a happy message from a ghost of the past. Maybe a happy birthday squeal. Or, “I love you, Mommy and Daddy.”

  But there’s nothing. It’s dead, too.

  Ashley sits down on the bed and waits. A cloud of dust rises around her. I turn around and shut the door before facing her.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  She shakes her head. “What do you mean?”

  “The three of you are acting all secretive. I want to know what’s going on between you two and Jake.”

  She looks away for a moment, then turns back at me. Her mouth pinches. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “Reggie agrees. And… Well, so do I.”

  I wait, crossing my arms.

  “Look, I’m sorry Jessie. It’s nothing personal, but…” She stops and looks down at her hands, scraping the dirt from her fingernails. “We don’t think you should be making the decisions anymore.”

  Ice water flows over my head and freezes my body. I can’t move or speak.

  She looks up, pleading. “We talked it over. Please don’t be mad. It’s just—”

  “What, Ash? You think Jake will make a better leader than I will, make better decisions? You think I’d be mad about that? I’m not mad. You’re right. If we’d have listened to Jake, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?”

  She nods, smiling uncertainly. “I’m glad you understand.”

  I can feel the emotions roiling inside of me, wanting to burst through. I can feel my face wanting to twist into a mocking sneer and the anger wanting to form words and hurl them at her until she bleeds and her bones break. I hate that I feel this way.

  I take in a shaky breath and say, “I just want you to remember something, Ashley. First, I’m the one who helped everyone escape from Arc at the airport. I’m the one who…who killed that nurse.”

  “We know that, Jessie. We know and we’re grateful. You got us out of there. But any of us would’ve done the same thing.”

  “I’m not finished! Yes, I made some bad decisions, but you all agreed with them.”

  “Not always.”

  “If you didn’t agree, then why didn’t you say so?”

  She clenches her jaw, but doesn’t answer.

  “Jake isn’t always right either, you know.”

  “He’s smarter than you about some things, Jessie. He’s had survival training. He fixed your arm.”

  “He knows basic first aid. He knows how to start a fire. He can tell what time it is by the position of the sun. Big fucking whoop, Ash. Did his training teach him how to kill a zombie? Because even back when we first swam here through the Midtown tunnel, when he and I were first attacked on Long Island City, all he ever did was run away from them.”

  “And you keep running toward them.”

  I stop, openmouthed. The accusation stings, not because it’s not true, but because, regardless of my intentions, it is.

  “Not on purpose,” I manage to spit out.

  “I know, but we need to follow someone who’s looking to avoid getting killed.”

  “Are you saying I’m trying to get us killed?”

  She opens her mouth and gawps for a moment before shaking her head. “No, but…”

  “But what?”

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “Not now!”

  But it opens and Reggie sticks his head in. “We need to leave soon if we’re going to make it before dark.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to Stephen.”

  He blinks and doesn’t answer.

  “Did you find wire cutters?”

  “Even better: bolt cutters.”

  I turn back to Ash and say, “Okay, Ash, if that’s how you guys feel, then…fine. Let Jake lead for a while. I’m tired of always having to make
the tough decisions, anyway. I’m glad to let someone else step up and do it. But no one else has, other than Jake. And, honestly? I think he’s a train wreck waiting to happen. But if you want to follow him, then fine. We’ll do it his way for a little while, see how badly that turns out.”

  Her eyes flick to Reg. “See, the thing is, Jessie,” she says. “It’s not just that. We don’t want you to come with us.”

  “What? Why not?”

  Reggie clears his throat. “You’re bad luck.”

  Chapter 3

  I blink stupidly for a moment.

  “What did you say?”

  “Look, it’s nothing personal, Jess. Jake thinks—”

  “You know what? Screw Jake and the whore he rode in on!”

  Reggie quickly slips into the room and sweeps the door shut behind him, gesturing for me to keep quiet. “Please, Jess, it’s—”

  “No! Don’t you start this crap on me, too. You’re supposed to have my back. Instead, you…you go and pick sides with Mister Freaky Boy out there!”

  “We’re not talking about picking sides for a game of Zpocalypto here, Jess. This is serious, real life-and-death shit. If we don’t figure this thing out that’s inside our heads, we’re dead. Do you understand? No. Worse than dead. We’re Undead.”

  “I understand perfectly well, brah. It’s not a fucking game. Is that what you think I’ve been doing, treating this like a god damn game? You’re right. All this time I’ve been busy whupping zombie ass, it’s because I’m counting points and keeping track of who gets to go first and all that shit! What the hell are you guys thinking? I’m trying to get us back home!”

  Ashley gets up off the bed. Her arms are crossed over her chest and she stares at the floor.

  “Well?”

  “We’ve already decided. You and Micah should stay behind.”

  “Micah?” I say, choking. “That makes even less sense. He’s our best hacker—”

  “He’s useless,” Ashley says, and she quickly blushes. “He can’t remember, I mean.”

  “This is bullshit! He’ll remember. You think you three can handle crossing Gameland all by yourself?”