Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  Victoria swung the light from side to side on the rock, and there was a large metal door twenty or thirty feet to the left, almost outside the range of the poor light. Once she'd made her sweep, she turned it off.

  It sounded distant, but Liam definitely heard her this time. Only a sharp pain remained in his left ear, but he could take it. “We need to save this light, in case we really need it.”

  He looked around and didn't like the fact he stood with Blue and Pink as they stared at the door. Almost without thinking, he took a step forward to be closer to Victoria—currently the only person who seemed to be doing something.

  She rattled the glass door, but it didn't budge. In return, he scooted next to the door, and tried to look inside. The door revealed no clues, save one.

  “There's a bar across it. Here,” he said, as he slid his finger from one edge to the other, “to here. This thing's keeping it closed.”

  Victoria gently pushed him back a step and gave him the “shush” symbol. Her eyes conveyed a similar message.

  He nodded, and tried to whisper, “Sorry.” The gentle blue light illuminated the two girls—one of whom was also named Blue, which he found hilarious—but nothing beyond them. A black void enveloped everything but the door.

  “Stand back, guys.” Victoria's voice was starting to register at a normal volume again. As he began to turn back to her, he heard the shattering of glass. When he looked at her, she had shattered the entire pane of the door. It had splintered into thousands of fragments, many of which fell to the ground as he watched. Victoria used her tire iron to scrape the remainder from the edges—causing shards to spray all over the rocks at their feet.

  Liam saw into the room. Security lights around the edge of banks of computers were bright blue. The main lights on the ceiling were all out.

  Victoria stuck her head into the room, then kept going. She had to duck under the heavy steel bar that had been placed into the handle of the door on one end, and into some kind of bracket on the other side. It ensured the door could not be opened in the conventional fashion.

  Here I am again, ruining someone's refuge.

  He hated to admit it, but dying on the doorstep of a refuge because he didn't want to break the glass seemed like a stupid option, too. He was too important to die like that.

  Too important, am I?

  Was he starting to believe his own press? Hadn't Hayes said something very close to that back when they were under the Arch? He claimed he was too valuable to the research effort to waste himself fighting hand-to-hand to protect others.

  He searched his feelings. He didn't think he'd told anyone to fight for him while he watched. That's how he'd know he'd gone round the bend.

  As it was, he was the second person into the room, and that was only because he didn't know Victoria was going to go through before him. Pink and Blue followed him in.

  The control room—he called it that, but he really had no idea what it was—had walls on three sides. The fourth side was covered by big glass windows. He walked toward it and immediately recognized he was looking through the glass at the big garage door he'd seen from outside the blue door.

  “So the computer guys are in here, and the worker guys are out there?”

  Victoria sidled up next to him. “What do you think they did in here?”

  They'd both seen the interior of Riverside Hotel and Casino, so nothing was off the table in terms of possible uses for the place. Even so, Liam couldn't fathom the purpose of the control room or the larger facility outside the glass. A lone door beckoned them.

  “We should look around here, first.”

  He thought that made perfect sense. Something about the blackness outside the windows made him uneasy. It was more pronounced than the fear he had for the zombies somewhere outside the now-broken glass window through which they'd entered. They were known unknowns. Whatever was in that other room was an unknown unknown. Big difference.

  They realized pretty quickly the bank of computers were in power-save mode. He moved a mouse on one of them and the screen blinked back to life. The bright light from the huge monitor forced him to squint until his eyes could absorb it all in comfort.

  He turned to Victoria, unable to control his excitement. He smiled, “I wonder if the internet's working?”

  “I have an auction ending, would you mind checking it.” She leaned to watch over his shoulder, and while there, rubbed her fingers through his hair, partly to tussle it, and partly—he hoped—as a sign of affection. But when her hand grazed his ear, he winced.

  She jumped back. “Liam. There's blood.”

  He'd forgotten all about it. His whole head hurt already, he'd almost overlooked the pain of having his ear partially shot off.

  All the girls looked as Victoria used the dying flashlight to observe the damage. She spent a lot of time prodding near the wound, and she even used her shirt to get some of the blood out of his hair and lower ear. Her analysis was that it wasn't that serious, though. The bullet had removed the top half-inch of his ear.

  “My God, you were lucky.” That passed for Victoria's official prognosis.

  He worried a little, as he realized he could hear almost nothing out of that ear, but even that was tempered by what he saw on the computer screen.

  The internet was up.

  4

  He decided now wasn't the time to worry about security. He logged into his online account, and found himself faced with pages of emails. Many had been sent in the last two weeks.

  “Ha! They must have automated emails. The most recent ones showed up just today.” He laughed quietly at the thought of computers continuing to send out spam long after mankind had lost the ability to receive them. He took a moment to force that into his memory; he wanted to include that in his book someday.

  He cracked his knuckles, and prepared to tackle the wall of spam. He wanted to see if anything important had been sent to him by friends or family. He may never get another chance to find out where they'd all gone.

  He'd just started to sort when a chat window popped up. Since he was logged into his profile, anyone looking for him would see that he was online. The words scrolled out a letter at a time. “Thank God! Worried about you, Liam.”

  “Huh?” He leaned back. “Look at this.” He meant it for Victoria, but all the girls crowded around him.

  The white box waited for his reply. The identity of the person on the other line just said, “Anonymous User,” and no other information was given in Anonymous' profile.

  “Who is this?” he typed back.

  “Go into WOUS.” The chat window showed the other person had logged off.

  He turned around and pointedly looked at the broken window on the door. Somewhere out there, zombies were trying to get through the dump truck road block. Would he have time to play a silly game?

  Part of him really desired to play. He hadn't touched it since just before the sirens went off. That game was, more or less, the last normal thing he did before the zombies came. After that, it was survival all day, every day.

  He had no other plan, and whoever was on the other end knew who he was. That alone made it worthwhile to see what they had to say. With a few clicks, he found the game installer and had it loaded onto this computer in sixty seconds.

  “Wow, this computer is fast!”

  The girls continued to hover around him. Victoria's hand was on the back of his neck. He took a deep breath as he fired up the game.

  He guessed none of them had ever seen it, so he took the time while it loaded to explain what he was doing. “So, this game is about...”

  The words got caught in his throat. His eyes watered as emotion surged. With a cough, he tried to play it cool—he had three girls hanging on his every word—but his efforts failed. Where seconds before he was ecstatic at being able to play this game, he was now losing it. He had no idea why.

  He felt Victoria stroke his back.

  She can read me like a book.

  The tears rol
led down his cheeks; he continued to stare at the screen. It waited for his input.

  “Liam?” Blue asked. “Are you cryin'?” She kind of laughed, though Liam felt his chair move and heard something that sounded like a kick.

  After a short pause, she continued, “Seriously, you OK?”

  Is anyone good, anymore?

  The game represented an era he would never get back. It was the past, just as sure as cavemen or covered wagons. Though both, he dourly noted, would find homes in the current world more readily than a video game. He desperately wished he could jump in the game and never look back.

  “I, uh,” he shook his head and tried to wipe his tears like it was no big deal, “just got a little nostalgic, I guess. I played this game on the very last day of...how things were before the zombies.”

  As his vision cleared, he could see the game wanted his login information. He prepared himself for the laughter.

  “Meat me in Yonkers? What kind of a name is that?” Blue asked.

  The loading panel popped up once he was in the game world, and the three girls saw his avatar in all its glory—all her glory.

  “What. The. Hell?” Blue actually pointed to the girl avatar.

  The game designers let players build their own characters. It was very flexible, and Liam was proud he had chosen an avatar that would stand out amongst the millions of other players in the game. “Meat me in Yonkers” was a tiny young black woman, with her hair in a tight bun on the back of her head. She wore exactly what you'd imagine of a sixteen-year-old boy's imagination: black combat boots, a tight-fitting red dress cut low so her cleavage showed. He liked to think of her as part Lara Croft and part Alice, and just as tough. He'd never seen another player with the same look.

  The girls were stunned to silence. He started talking to compensate for the awkwardness.

  “So yeah, Yonks has lots of weapons she can use, but right now she has a Katana on her back while she holds her M16. I gave her raw meat gauntlets for her arms—the zombies bite on those if they get up on her. She's got knives and a couple of guns strapped to her legs under her dress. And—”

  “Why is she black?” It was Pink.

  “Yeah, Liam, why is your super-hot chicky player avatar black? Why isn't she a super-hot brunette future nurse avatar?” He could hear the smile in her voice behind him. She took things even less seriously than he did sometimes. She had described herself.

  He admitted his earlier sadness was sloughing off. He turned to the pair of part-black young girls standing next to him, seeing them, not as colors this time, but as parallels to the woman he had built inside the game. A woman he admitted he found to be a very attractive, though fake, amalgam of strong females from the movies. He'd never, until that moment, thought of why he made her black, other than it made her look exotic. If he squinted his eyes, he could imagine either of the twins stepping in for Yonks. That unsettled him.

  Unable to answer beyond a shrug, he turned back to the game. Inside the virtual world, the pretty young woman stood inside a convenience store.

  “This is where you start. It's a safe base to stock up on supplies.”

  A virtual man walked in and a voice bubble popped up over his head. Yet, they heard no sounds. He turned up the volume on the computer and heard a woman's voice. No one was ever what they seemed, inside the game.

  Just like the Apocalypse.

  5

  “—hear me, can you?” came through the speakers.

  He spoke at the screen, hoping there was a microphone attached. It was too dark to see for sure. “I hear you. Who are you?”

  “Don't worry about that. The less you know, the safer we both shall remain.”

  The woman's voice had a tinny quality to it, like it was coming from the far end of a long tube. It had a vaguely non-human quality, though he could still understand it perfectly.

  “OK, then what are you doing inside this game?”

  “Extra layers of protection. Your email is almost certainly monitored. Chat from there would also be tracked. I knew you had this game and while we are in here, our transmission is encrypted.”

  Inside the game, another text window came on screen. It was used by players who didn't have microphones, though that was so rare, he almost never used text chat. Now a text message appeared.

  “Liam, continue talking. This chat window is secure.”

  “Seems legit. I guess. But why should we listen to you?” Liam spoke, continuing the charade.

  On the screen, the words popped up as the person on the other line keyed them in. The same person, he assumed, spoke over the speakers, though he had to focus on the text to read it.

  “Liam. Can't trust anyone. The triplets with you are something new. Not sure if can trust. I erased the data on the chip you got from Colonel Rufus McMurphy. If you were caught with it, you'd be shot on sight.”

  He was less concerned about the three girls with him being spies, than with the data chip. The colonel had entrusted it to him, and he'd allowed it to be deleted back in Cairo.

  He talked, probably with inane babble, to the computer screen as a distraction while he typed. “Who is listening in?”

  In seconds, a reply came back. “You met them already. They are the group most responsible for unleashing the plague on us Americans. But plague was already overseas when they did it. It was cover-up to blame others.”

  Liam had a hard time with the timeline of the various plagues ravaging the world. He'd need an outline when he wrote his book. Hayes and Duchesne had both agreed it was the NIS—National Internal Security—that released the plague that infected humans in such a horrific way that Liam could only describe them as zombies.

  The NIS is listening.

  He typed back, “All right. Nothing secure anymore. How do I know I can trust you?”

  The reply came back after a delay. All the words splashed on the screen at once. “You don't. But I hope to gain your trust after I show you this. Sadly, unless you have headphones there is no way to prevent this from behind heard, and possibly recorded on your end.”

  The screen froze, then returned to normal. The male avatar moved inside the virtual store until he stood next to a TV on the wall. On the screen, totally incongruous with the game itself, was an image of Colonel McMurphy. When Yonkers stood close to the screen within the screen, the video began. It started with the colonel speaking into the camera. Liam recognized the backdrop as the tent at Elk Meadow—the research facility where he'd met the man.

  He looked around for headphones, wondering if it was even worth it—anyone listening in would have to come deep into a mine full of zombies to give him a spanking. Before he could do more than glance around, the video started.

  “Hi Susan. I hope this makes it to you. If anyone knew I made these videos, I'd probably be tossed into the zombie pen I've got out back. This is conspiracy stuff beyond anything I thought possible. I don't even know where to begin...”

  At his desk, the colonel picked up a picture frame and showed it to the camera. It had a red-haired woman and a young teen about Liam's age. It was the photo the colonel would give to him later. When stuff went nutso at the camp...

  “This is why I'm doing this. Why I'm risking everything. These two people right here.”

  He put the frame down as he spoke faster, and slightly quieter.

  “Two days ago, I was shown something. I know you'll find this hard to believe, but I'm not crazy. Please know that. I...I've seen the dead walk. I mean real dead people, putting one foot in front of the other. These people, these government pinheads, think they've stumbled on the secret to immortality. Argh, how do I say this without sounding crazy here?”

  The gray-haired man looked away, then back at the camera with a direct gaze at him—though Liam knew he was really talking to his wife.

  “I saw a dead man rise from his pine box. They threw the lid open, and as God as my witness, something wicked and evil possessed that body and it pulled itself over the edge and it fell onto t
he floor. Then, with great effort, it stood on its feet and ambled toward us...”

  Liam saw fear in his eyes, even two days removed from the event.

  “The eyes, dear. The thing had no eyes...but it could see. I could feel its stare on me. It came for me.” He laughed a nervous laugh. “But they turned on special lights which froze it in its tracks. Then they ushered us out of the control room and back to our trucks. They said we had to know what was coming so we had the stomach to do what needed doin'. I've been thinking about it ever since. Not getting any work done here, and Hayes is riding me hard to have things ready.”

  He again looked off camera. This time when he continued it was almost a whisper.

  “Susan, I have to tell someone. I can't trust anyone here with me as it's clear Hayes has ears everywhere. I don't think he works for who he says he does. He has more power than he lets on. They have me doing research, but his team—his Riverside team—is light years ahead of the rest of us. I asked where they got the man, coffin and all, and all they said was the man did his duty for his country once when he died, and a second time when he came back to life. That can only mean one thing: they pulled him from an actual cemetery. Why would they do that, Susan? Why?”

  He readjusted himself at his desk, almost pleading with his wife to believe him.

  “I do know this much: the dead man was dressed in army fatigues. They were very old, perhaps World War II vintage. I think he came from the National Cemetery over at Jefferson Barracks. It's by that big quarry—”

  The screen froze inside the game.

  Everyone was frozen outside the game, too.

  6

  “Is that the answer?” Liam asked it rhetorically, though he didn't really intend to ask it at all—at least not out loud. He'd been trying to square the men and women he'd seen suffer under the effects of the zombie plague since day one. Were they dead people infected with something that brought them back to life, or were they living people so sick they appeared dead? The word “zombie” was something he ascribed to them, though the more popular, and he had to admit more accurate, term most people used was infected. They had been stricken with a sickness, but the disease process remained a mystery to him, even after meeting the guy who concocted the disease in the first place.