Micah nods and separates from me. The monster takes another step toward us, reaching out. Tatters hang from its arms as it reaches out, and at first I think it’s skin. But then I see it’s just its torn shirt, revealing the muscles it once possessed.
It’s actually in fairly good shape.
We accelerate until we’re both running as close to full speed as we can manage with the packs on our backs.
I focus on breathing. Two quick breaths, one long one. And when the thing is ten feet from us, I inhale and hold it. I swing my arms forward with all my strength, shouting, “Kiai!” for power.
But the shovel misses! It passes over the thing’s head without connecting and throws me off balance. The shovel flies out of my hands and skitters noisily across the road, then off the shoulder and into the grass.
“What the hell?” I yelp. “How the hell—”
“I got it!” Micah yells, ducking under the zombie’s arms. The knife slices its shirt but misses flesh. Micah spins and draws back his hand for a second try.
I grab him and yell, “Forget it. Keep running!”
“But—”
“One shot, Micah! We missed.”
The thing crouches as it turns. I’ve never seen one do that before.
I push Micah just as it leaps at us. I spin away, grabbing its wrist and pulling. It loses its footing and goes flying. I don’t wait around to see what happens.
“Run!”
Micah hesitates a fraction of a second, but then follows me as I take off again down the road.
“I could’ve…taken it!”
I risk a look back. It hasn’t gotten to its feet yet, but it soon will. It’s moving too fast, too purposeful.
“It’s coming.”
Micah looks back. “Holy shit! It’s fucking running!”
He whips his pack off and tucks it under his arm. I do the same with mine. For a second, I’m tempted to toss it over my shoulder as a distraction. It’s not a god damn bear! I scream at myself. It won’t stop to sniff it. It doesn’t want canned tuna and water. It wants us!
We both speed up.
“Still coming,” Micah says, his voice quavering, both with fear and excitement.
I can’t keep myself from turning around and looking. The thing is still moving awkwardly, its movements stiff and mechanical. And yet it’s frighteningly fast.
I let out a stifled cry. Fire sears my lungs and drips burning lava down my side. Beside me, Micah’s face twists in pain. He grabs his side. “It’s no fair, you know,” he groans, and his teeth flash. “Zombies don’t get cramps.”
“It’s a Player,” I gasp.
“No shit.” But his next words send an even bigger chill down my spine: “And it thinks we are, too.”
We round a bend in the road and the sounds of pursuit fade away, but we keep running anyway. There’s nowhere else for us to go but straight ahead.
I scan the road. Micah does the same. I hope he doesn’t suggest that we turn around and fight. I also hope he doesn’t think we should hide. Hiding from a normal IU would work, but not a CU. Not when there’s a living, breathing human being doing its thinking for it. Our best chance is to try and outrun it.
My chest tightens at the thought. I don’t know how much longer my lungs will hold out.
But Micah points and shouts, “There!”
“No. We have to…keep going.”
“Cut off,” he replies, “for Jayne’s Hill.” He tries to vault over the center guardrail and nearly ends up falling flat on his face. He pinwheels his arms, recovers, and keeps right on running. I slow and climb over it. I’m too weak to jump. Micah’s already heading down the entrance ramp. I try to catch up, but I’m too tired. When I hear the slap of the CU’s feet behind me, I somehow find something more inside of me.
Just as I slip down the ramp, I glance over my shoulder. The zombie is a hundred feet back, climbing over the rail. It falls, but gets quickly to its feet and continues the pursuit.
My shins cry out in protest as I run down the incline. The sound of my retreat echoes in the darkness. Sweat pours off of me. The distance between us and the creature has grown, but it’s still coming. This one won’t give up. It’s not motivated by its basal instincts to feed. Hunger propels it forward, but murder is its intention.
Murder and money and ratings.
How much for each kill? How much more if it’s a living person?
I wonder why and how it could happen. Doesn’t its Operator know we’re not dead? He has to know we’re not Infected. IUs don’t run, and we’re obviously not CUs, either. Even the freshest Player couldn’t leap over a guardrail like Micah just did, no matter how clumsily.
So, the Operator knows, and yet he’s still coming after us.
I can just picture the fat, rich asshole grinning inside his fancy VR setup in some mansion somewhere safe. Where? Boston? Santa Fe? Los Angeles? He knows his Player is chasing two living human beings, and yet he’s enjoying himself. He wants to catch us. He wants to kill us.
jessie
Would they even televise something like that on Survivalist?
stop
Does Arc think it could get away with it?
“Hey!” Micah grabs my arm and spins me around. “Where the hell are you going?”
We’re at the bottom of the entrance ramp and he jerks me to the left, past a sign that says West Hills Drive. Below it, an arrow and letters that spell out Jayne’s Hill, one mile away. We begin another excruciating uphill run, sprinting for another solid minute. When the road abruptly turns and ends in a parking lot, I’m almost relieved. I can’t run anymore.
“What…now?” I gasp.
There’s a single car in the lot, its color impossible to guess in the darkness and beneath its filthy blanket of dirt and moss. It sits on its rims, the tires long since deflated. Just its being here tells a story. What happened to the person who owned it? Are they still wandering the hills around here?
“We have to fight,” Micah says, panting.
My heart clutches. “We’d be better off hiding.” When he starts to protest, I say, “You saw that thing duck when I swung at it. It’s a damn Player!”
“I know it’s a damn Player! I saw what you saw.”
“That means there’s—”
“I know! I know. Okay, we hide. Shit, Jessie.”
He spins around, searching. “There’s a public restroom,” he says, pointing to a cinder block building. The corrugated roof sags under the weight of a dozen years of pine needles, and ivy crawls up the walls.
“It’s a Player, Micah!” How many times do I have to say it? “Hiding is too obvious. It’s the first place I’d look if I were its Operator.”
He grunts unhappily, then nods, once, quickly. “Okay, so we need to start thinking like we’re playing Zpocalypto.”
“No, we need to start thinking like we’re playing The Game.”
We should’ve been thinking this way from the beginning. Instead, we were treating our situation like we were actually in control. That’s what Stephen meant when he said we were all players and that it was all already scripted. That’s why we’ve done so spectacularly poorly, because we’ve always believed we could reason our way out. We’re lucky to all still be alive.
Most of us.
Except Tanya turned out to be a part of the story, too.
Christ help us.
I shut my eyes for a moment and try to push her face away from me.
“Better decide soon, because it’s coming,” Micah says. The hard, slapping sound of the Player’s feet on the road echoes in the night, sounding somewhere far away and yet frightfully close. Micah gestures to the bathroom. “Behind it then.”
I follow him around the side. There’s no time to argue, no time to think. I just wish I knew what he’s planning. He slips into the brush that encroaches on the cracked cement apron around the old building. Just behind us is the woods. I pause. From here, escape will be next to impossible. I step in and crouch down ne
xt to him. The rustling is loud to my ears.
“As soon as it comes around the corner,” he tells me, “we jump it.”
I want to choke him right then. I resist the urge. I want to stand up and turn around and race through the trees. In fact, I almost do, but then I feel his hand on my wrist, giving it a gentle but firm squeeze, and all further thoughts of moving get pushed away.
Chapter 25
I’m scared shitless. And yet there’s something—deep down inside of me—something strangely exhilarating and freeing in Micah’s plan. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just his excitement rubbing off on me. Or maybe it’s because I’m tired of running from the Undead. Running from anything, actually. I need to face it head-on.
I’ve been running away my whole entire life. Even my hapkido training has always been about bending and flexing, yielding to those who would harm me rather than resisting them. Kwanjangnim Rupert taught that the only way to defeat superior strength was to be like water: The stream flows around and surrounds its obstacles, and so passes them.
I tried to become a stream in my life, to flow. But all that ever happened was that the obstacles I encountered left me riven. I am not water. I am a person of flesh and bone, and my soul cannot mend itself like a fluid.
I can’t hear the Player, but it must be somewhere out there, wandering around the parking lot. Searching for us.
Micah grips his knife. I slip my hand into the backpack pocket and begin to pull out the pistol, but he shakes his head at me in the darkness and whispers no. “No guns. Too much noise.” He breathes the words into my face and they pass across my ears almost too quiet to hear. Of course he’s right. A blast from the gun now would only bring the entire horde of IUs who wander the woods here down to us.
The bathroom door scrapes open and my heart nearly stops. The door begins to creak closed, but it doesn’t slam. The tension in its springs must’ve bled away over the years; rust has probably eaten away at the hinges.
“We could trap it now,” I whisper.
Micah shakes his head urgently.
Something slams inside the bathroom, echoing hollowly. I flinch. “Stall door,” he guesses, whispering. There’s more rustling. The door scrapes open again. We wait in silence.
A couple minutes later, from somewhere to the left of us comes the unmistakable sound of a twig snapping. Micah tenses beside me. Several seconds pass without a sound.
I shift ever so slightly to ease a growing cramp in my side. Micah breathes through his half-opened mouth, making no sound. I try and mimic it. But my shifting causes my pack to sag on my shoulder and it slips down my arm with a soft shush and thuds to the ground.
The night explodes all around us then, filling with noise so close and so loud that it’s completely disorienting. Micah lurches back against me before catching himself.
“Dog!” he shouts.
It’s standing not five feet away from us, out on the cement. In the darkness I can see its glistening teeth and its scarred and graying muzzle. It’s snarling and snapping right at us.
No, I realize too late, at something behind us!
Micah pushes me to the side as he jumps to his feet. I tumble to the ground. The air above my head whooshes as the dog hits Micah in the back. They both go down, tangled in the brush, but the dog is up again in a flash. I try to pull it away, but by the time I’m up, the attack is already finished. The Player crumples to Micah’s feet, the handle of the knife protruding from its throat.
Chapter 26
Micah wrenches the knife free, not even bothering to give it a twist. “We need to leave now!”
I nod, throwing a glance back at the dog. It’s stopped to sniff at the Player. It turns and lifts its leg and urinates.
Micah grabs my arm and pack and yanks me around. “Now!”
Other things are crashing through the trees, things drawn by the noise.
We stumble back out onto the parking lot and swivel around. I spot a small sign, half hidden in the overgrown brush and run over to it. “Trail marker,” I say. “Jayne’s Hill peak, point-eight miles.”
The wooded path is densely overgrown, the narrow rotted plank walk nearly overtaken. I risk the light from my Link, shining it ahead of me; it’s better than losing the path or walking into a low-hanging tree branch. I move as fast as I can, the snapping of the branches loud to my ears. But at this point, noise doesn’t matter; it’s too late to worry about that now. The forest has come alive around us, filling with the sounds of bodies charging through it and, as if there were any doubt what those bodies are, the moans of the lost.
How there can be so many in an empty place like this?
What better place to escape the sun?
Micah places his hand between my shoulders when I slow at a fork in the path. It’s unmarked, no sign to tell us which way to go.
“Left,” he says without hesitation.
I turn and head up the right path before he can argue. Right seems to lead more directly uphill.
The path is even narrower than the one we were on, and the walkway disintegrates beneath our feet. The further we go, the farther away the sounds behind us grow. I slow to a walk, sweeping the wan light from my Link screen from left to right.
“You lost it, didn’t you?”
“Shh. It’s here.”
“I told you we should’ve—”
“It’s here,” I say, climbing over a fallen tree trunk. The path reappears on the other side. “Ha!”
As I step down off of the trunk, I feel a set of cold bony fingers wrap around my ankle. I let out a strangled cry and fall into the brush. The hand won’t release me. I turn and kick out with my other foot and try to scramble away, but it still won’t let me go.
“Stop struggling!” Micah whispers. He bends down and hacks away with this knife. “It’s just a vine. Christ! Or should I say, it’s just one of those man-eating vines.”
“Very funny,” I manage to get out.
He finishes freeing my foot and leans back for a rest against the trunk. Something walks through the woods back the way we came. It’s far enough away and apparently heading in the wrong direction that we stay where we are, panting as quietly as we can. The sounds eventually begin to fade. After several minutes have passed, I strain my ears, but I can’t even hear a moan.
“How the hell did that Player get behind us?” Micah mutters.
I shake my head. If not for that dog, it might’ve bitten one or both of us. I give silent thanks for the animal. It scared the crap out of me, but it was the Player the animal didn’t like. After Micah killed the monster, the dog pretty much ignored us.
Fatigue overwhelms me. I can feel the numbness slipping into my bones, stiffening my muscles. I can feel it pressing me down. How did everything come to this point? Who’s to blame?
Is anyone?
Am I?
“I’m going to try Kelly again,” I whisper groggily.
Micah nods.
I wait for the Links to connect, silently mouthing a prayer to the stream gods that he’s there and okay.
“Jessie?”
I let a huge breath and almost laugh with relief. “Kelly, are you okay?” I whisper.
The tiny image in the screen frowns, but nods slowly. “We’re…fine.” He looks to the side. “Mostly. Look, things are a bit—”
“I saw. We’re on our way.”
“No! Just stay where you are. Okay? Everything here is going to be okay.”
“Where are you?” I ask. I can’t see anything behind him. It’s all dark.
“Just stay put. I don’t want you coming here! You’re safer where you are. I’ll see you soon. Love you.” He nods once, then disconnects.
A sense of foreboding comes over me. I struggle against it, pushing and tearing it away. No more, I tell myself. No more letting my body just flow. No more adapting and flexing. I will not stay put. I’m coming whether he wants me to or not. I’m almost there anyway.
“That didn’t sound good,” Micah whis
pers.
“It’s just because of Jake,” I say, and I move to push myself off of the ground. That’s what I tell myself, but even I don’t believe it.
The sky directly overhead has begun to lighten. It’s a slightly lighter shade of gray, but the approaching dawn hasn’t managed to make it this far down into the brush. I stand and turn and out of the corner of my eye I see a deeper piece of the darkness detach itself from the path ahead. It moves swiftly and silently, like a wraith, and it’s on me before I can even cry out.
I fall backward, straight into Micah. I hear the crack of his head against the trunk of the fallen tree. I hear the air leave his lungs. And I know by the way he falls without making another sound that he won’t be there to help me this time around.
The weight of the new attacker bears down on me, pressing me to the ground. The pain in my shoulder is incredible, a searing, ripping pain, as if my arm is being ripped from its socket. It’s more than I can bear. I can’t do it anymore. This thing…this un-human creature of darkness has broken me.
I turn my head away—away from that lipless mouth and its hot breath and its yellowed teeth—and offer it my neck. And it howls as if it knows it has won.
Chapter 27
The last winter I can remember with snow was the year Eric left for the Marines. His announcement had come as such a surprise to us all, given how much he seemed to hate the Undead. Not just them, but the whole idea of them and everything they represented. The Omegaman Forces had become ubiquitous, almost to the point where the living infantry was practically obsolete.
“I want to understand them better,” I remember him telling me, the day he packed up to leave.
Of course, I was in no mood to understand him. I didn’t want to understand him. He was a hypocrite as far as I was concerned. My whole entire life he’d spent railing against the creatures—how they’d killed Dad and caused the destruction of our family and our social standing. What had changed?
It was because of the Undead that my beloved grandfather, once a proud military leader, was left broken, a shell of a man, a shadow of the leader he’d once been. He was still fearsome, intimidating, but he had lost all his authority. The destruction of his reputation had left him jobless and directionless, a ward of a parentless household with a grandson trying too hard to be a man, who resented his very presence there, and a granddaughter equally lost and adrift in self-doubt. He spent his days in forced retirement sitting in a darkened room in the back of a modest house, growing more bitter and resentful. There were days when he wouldn’t even come out, not until dinnertime.
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