Authors: Jen Alexander
CHAPTER EIGHT
“That’s what you’re doing, right?” the boy continues.
I grip the fence so hard, it feels as if the thin links are making indentations on my bones. Silly, frightened character. That’s what I am, because though he may not see it, I am shaking furiously, hoping against hope that his name appears on Olivia’s map in green and not red.
Even then, that wouldn’t mean that I’m safe.
“Well?”
What would Olivia say? Three years of her playing me and I have no idea how she’d respond. I loll my head back. Stare up at the rolls of barbed wire. Sweat drips between my shoulder blades, like lava drizzling down my flesh.
“I was curious,” I say slowly. “And I wanted to see what was out here.”
This isn’t how Olivia would have me respond. No, not at all. Olivia would taunt him—ask him why he cared. Then she’d reach my hand for the Glock, even though his gun or knife is probably already trained on the back of my head. Maybe I’d win—I usually do when Olivia’s in control—but as she made me shoot him down, I’d picture myself on the ground instead, and feel nothing but regret.
Now that I think about it, I’m glad I don’t answer like Olivia. Olivia seems to enjoy putting my life in danger.
“You were curious?” I hear the sound of his feet shuffling in the dry grass for a few seconds, and then he says, “Okay, turn around.”
The last time someone told me to turn around, that person died, tearing violently at the crown of her head. I hadn’t understood why she would fuss over her head when the wound was on her chest. But now I know we’re controlled by some technology that’s been placed within our heads. Maybe she felt it as she were dying.
Will I be ripping at my skull today?
I swallow hard and turn. My fingers tangle in the metal behind me, and I hold on to it for comfort before I lift my gaze to his.
My heart leaps into my throat.
Gray eyes stare back at me. Dark gray eyes partially hidden by a messy mop of dark hair.
I know this boy. He is the reason I’m here right now and not unresponsive, trapped in a room over a bar with three other characters. He’s the boy from the elevator.
“You,” I breathe, but then I catch myself, biting into my bottom lip so I don’t give myself away.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Of all the...” Letting his weapon arm drop to his side, he tilts his head and gives me a challenging gaze. “What are you doing out here?”
Why is he still asking me questions? Shouldn’t he be threatening to attack me again or trying to rob me or something, anything, other than simply staring at me? His lack of movement gives me an opportunity to size him up. He doesn’t look like any flesh-eater I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t look like a Survivor, either. Though he’s several inches taller than me, he’s nowhere near Ethan’s height. I try to remember ever seeing anyone in The Aftermath wearing clothes that didn’t look like tattered rags, but this boy is the first person who comes to mind, in his black boots, cargo pants and black T-shirt that he fills out rather nicely.
I’ve also never met a Survivor, or a flesh-eater for that matter, with meat on his bones.
“Too scared to speak?” he taunts.
“Funny.” I flash him my teeth in what I can only hope is a smile of confidence. “I’d almost think you were the one frightened of me.”
But there are beads of sweat trickling from the tip of my nose and between my parted lips. I’m trembling so hard that I’m afraid I might vomit. Then he’ll know I’m the one who’s terrified. I’m the one who can barely stand up straight.
He regains his composure, narrowing his eyes. The corners of his lips pull up. For a moment, he lowers his long eyelashes against his slightly sunburned cheeks and looks down at the grass, like I’ve embarrassed him. I flinch when he lifts his head and weapon at the same time. “Please, you’re as short and thin as a twelve-year-old. Now...why are you playing around at this?” He shakes his gun at the gate, drawing my attention to it.
His weapon is small and sleek and black. No surprise there. But the barrel is flat, and four metal probes extend from it. My gaze flicks from his hand to the fence. When I shift from the heat, he shakes his head, moving near me with both hands on his piece.
He is mere steps from where I stand. So close I can almost feel the probes sinking into the side of my neck.
“Careful now. You know what this is?” He jiggles the gun around, stares at it almost lovingly. When I don’t acknowledge his question, he says, “Electroshock. Tech Arms Special Edition. Only a thousand were made in twenty eighty-three.”
“Twenty eighty-three?”
He stares at me as if he’s expecting me to continue, but when a long moment of silence passes between us, he lifts an eyebrow. “The year.”
Coldness washes over me. The year 2083? It’s 2039. My ID card says I was born in 2023, so it has to be 2039, right?
“And?” I ask. My voice is icy and hard. Good. Let him think he doesn’t bother me, that I’m not frightened out of my sunburned skin.
“And I can control whether I hit you with fifty milliamps or five amps. It has a motion detector. You run, it finds you. But—” he waggles his thick eyebrows “—you run away from me and I’ll probably just crank the full five amps into your skinny ass.”
I glare at him. “Obviously I’m not running, but if you want to do it, go right ahead.”
He grins. Squats down with his head cocked to one side as if I am a joke. I droop back against the fence and slide my body down the hot metal until I sit on the grass. It’s rough and scratchy against the backs of my legs but much better than standing. I draw my knees up to my chest and stare at him. Part of me wants to test my luck and just run. I think that must be the sadistic portion of my subconscious still linked to Olivia.
“So you’re going to electrocute and eat me? Or do you have some other plan? Because I’ve already had the hell shocked out of me. There’s not much else that will surprise me.”
His mouth quirks up—there’s that sardonic expression again. “I’m not into you like that.” Gray eyes skim my body, from the worn soles of my shoes to the bruises on my knees and finally to my green eyes. He’s studying me with that confused expression again, and it makes the tiny hairs on my arms and legs stand on end.
I hug myself tighter. “Then why not let me go?” My voice is low, shaky.
“I will.” He shifts the electroshock gun between his hands. “As soon as you tell me what you’re doing here,” he says.
“Strange request from someone whose name I don’t even know.”
“Declan. Satisfied—”
“Claudia.”
“You’re sneakier than I gave you credit for.” He sneers. “Do we really have time for this? Just...confirm who you are already.”
Sneaky? We’ve been in each other’s company for less than fifteen minutes and he thinks he already has me pegged? “I just confirmed it for you,” I say stubbornly.
“You’re making my job really,
really
difficult, you know.” He points his weapon at me. “Tech Arms. Fifty milliamps. Does that make it easier for you to remember?”
As if I could forget the power of his electroshock gun. My heart beats wildly, but I somehow manage to evenly reply, “I don’t break, Declan. My name’s Claudia Virtue.”
“Come on, you’re seriously going to pull that gamer crap when I’m holding a gun on your character? Why would you refuse to confirm who you are—who’s playing this character—when I could so easily hurt her? Just tell me already.”
But he has hurt me already—I’m just not going to mention that to him. If he isn’t going to admit to seeing me before, I’m not bringing it up, either—maybe it’ll be useful down the line.
When I refuse to say anything, focusing instead on a bald patch in the grass right by my left foot, he moves in closer. One step. Two more. His boots make a solid thud each time, and I swear it’s in rhythm with my heart. He crouches down again—this time right in front of me. I have to fight to catch my breath.
“What’s your Gamer ID?”
This is something I don’t know. Up until just a moment ago, I wasn’t even aware Olivia had a Gamer ID. All those times I witnessed her flipping through the multiple game screens and not once did I have the brains to look for something like what he’s asking for. I was too concerned with the map and the location of flesh-eaters.
“117908.” It’s the code that Olivia had typed into her tablet. A lie that sounds so confident, I come close to believing it myself.
I gasp when he tucks his calloused index finger under my chin. I yank my arms away from my knees and pull myself farther into the metal gate, hoping I’ll dissolve through it. Then I could take off running. Then I could be free of this boy and, maybe, this game.
Declan lifts my face, tilts it so far up that the uneven tips of my hair brush my sweaty shoulders. There’s little space between our lips and noses and foreheads—just a few inches between my eyes and his. Gray eyes that are dangerous and mocking and something else.
Questioning.
Accusing.
“There are no Gamer IDs,” he whispers. “Wait...you really are Claudia Virtue.”
* * *
We stare at each other for a lifetime. He doesn’t flinch. I don’t breathe. This boy has me figured out after mere minutes, and I can’t help but wonder if I was so obvious to the two kids I met on the way here.
“Of course I’m a character—this is a game.”
“You know exactly what I mean,” he says harshly. “Now, don’t move.”
And I listen. Stupid, really, because he pulls something navy blue from his bag and pushes a button on the bottom of it. Every muscle—every nerve—in my body tightens, leaving me as still as a corpse. I hold my breath. He swipes the flat, triangular-shaped tip of the object across the top of my head, and my skull tingles. I grit my teeth. At any moment, I’ll likely be a corpse.
After about a minute of sliding the blue thing back and forth over my crown, he presses the button again and tosses it back into his bag. Air rushes out of my lungs in a low hiss. He’s not going to kill me. At least not at the moment.
Declan sinks down in front of me on his knees. He’s still too close for my taste.
“You’re actually sentient,” he says incredulously.
“You said that before.”
“How?”
“I was...I was injured.” There’s no point lying to him—at least not completely—so I inhale a deep breath and add, “Something happened about a week and a half ago that woke me up.”
If he recalls being the one who struck the blow that brought about my sudden ability to control myself, he doesn’t show it. His expression is void of any emotion as he studies my face and head. “And your Cerebrum Chip is still linked.” This is not a question, but I nod anyway.
There’s a name for why my brain is so wrecked. And there is a boy sitting right in front of me who knows exactly what it is. “Who are you?”
“Declan,” he says.
“You know what I mean. You’re not a character, are you?”
“I’m...I’m a moderator.”
“A
moderator.
” The word sounds funny when I say it, and I narrow my eyes at him. I repeat the word a few more times as I wait for him to explain what it means.
“I make sure everything in The Aftermath goes exactly the way the game’s creator envisioned it. I work for LanCorp.”
If there were even the slightest chance of him letting me go, it’s gone now. My heart breaks a little more. I’ve been chased by flesh-eaters and starved to the point of wishing for death, yet somehow this is the most hopeless I’ve ever felt.
“Oh,” I say.
He laughs then. I gnash my teeth together as the sound of his voice rubs over me like sandpaper. He’s making fun of me. And I hate him for it. I curl my hands into tight balls, hoping it will help control my violent trembling. “That’s all you’re going to say. Oh?” he asks.
I slam my fist into the center of his nose. He sprawls backward, clutching his face. “Why the hell did you do that?”
I stumble to my feet and kick out at him. My foot strikes his stomach hard, knocking the breath out of him. He rolls over on all fours, and I take off in a sprint. I hear him behind me, wheezing. Cursing. Threatening horrible things. “So you have something to remember me by when I’m dead,” I say over my shoulder.
He tackles me before I make it fifty yards, pinning me facedown. I struggle wildly. This only makes him dig his knees deeper into my sides, and I scream in agony.
I feel his torso lower down on me. His weight numbs every part of my body. “Stop moving.” His lips touch my right ear—the mutilated one—and I taste bile in the back of my throat.
I thrash harder, whipping my head until it catches him in the mouth, and he swears. If he’s going to kill me, the least I can do is hurt him first. Suddenly, I feel the cold metal probes of his electroshock gun press into my scalp.
“Quit. It. Claudia,” he says between clenched teeth.
This can’t be how it ends for me. I’m unsure if this makes me a coward or sensible, but I don’t want to die today. My breath hitches, and suddenly I’m inhaling heavily. Sucking in rasping, broken breaths that shake my entire body.
The noises coming from me are so loud and pitiful, I almost miss what he says next.
“I’m not going to kill you, because I need your help. Do what I tell you to do, and I’ll personally show you the border.”
This from the boy who hurt me. This from a boy who will, without a doubt, hurt me again if I provoke him. This from a boy who works for the people who took away my ability to think for myself.
“And if I don’t?” I ask, surprising myself by saying exactly what Olivia would say in this situation.
He laughs again, but this one isn’t teasing like before. It’s harsh. Serious. Lethal. “Don’t, and I’ll turn you in, and you’ll die a horrible death. Decide now, Virtue.”
CHAPTER NINE
Declan does not wish me dead.
At first, I do what he’s asked me to do. I stop moving. I lay with the left side of my face against the ground and replay his words over and over in my head.
Do what I tell you to do, and I’ll personally show you the border.
There’s still a chance I’ll get out of The Aftermath. A jolt of excitement rushes through my body, but it quickly turns toxic, squeezing my insides until I feel nauseous.
No, Declan does not want to kill me. Instead, this boy—this moderator—wants my help.
He wants to use me for something.
I dig my hands into the grass. “Turn me in to whom?” My voice is strained.
“Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, that’s common sense. It goes right along with the threat I made a couple minutes ago.”
He shifts his body, and I moan as the bulk of his weight settles onto my lower back. I mumble something even I don’t comprehend.
“I’m going to let you go now,” he says in a tone that reminds me of an adult admonishing a small child. “Just because I’ve no plan to kill you doesn’t mean I won’t electrocute you if I have to. Understand?”
I grunt.
As he lifts his body from mine, I release a long breath and roll over onto my back. He juggles his precious electroshock gun from his left hand to the right. I lash my foot out at him, aiming at his kneecaps. With almost unbelievable grace, he steps out of the way, then stretches out a hand to help me up.
Glaring up at him, I knock his fingers out of my face and struggle to my feet. Tiny prickles annoy my legs from where they’d lain trapped beneath me for so long. When I finally steady myself, I whirl on him. “I’m not going to help you do anything.”
“Why the hell not?”
Because I am inches away from the fence I’m positive will lead me to my freedom and I don’t need his help getting through it. Because if I don’t get out now, I may die in The Aftermath. I might be able to last another day or even another three years, but it’s almost inevitable that this game will be the end of me.
Because I am tired of being used.
“I want to leave,” I say. My throat is sore from my breakdown a few minutes ago, so I clear it a few times. “I’m one person. You could turn your back. You can pretend—”
“Nobody’s ever escaped the game. Nobody’s ever tried.”
My voice finally collapses, and I sound like a lost child when I whisper, “But it’s possible.”
“Up until today I would’ve said no. Nobody escapes because nobody is sentient. Except you—you are wide-awake, and I want to know why. What went wrong with your chip to make you become self-aware on your own?”
“Why does it matter? Why do you care if I’m dead or alive? Sentient or not? Just let me go. I—”
“Stop mewling, Virtue, and catch your breath, will you?” Declan says, thrusting a metal canister under my lips. Liquid sloshes around inside. When I stare at it for a long time, he snaps, “Don’t be such an elitist—just take it. This game is crawling with cannibals and you turn your nose up at filtered water?”
I turn my nose up at fresh water given to me by the people who are responsible for designing this twisted game, is what I want to say. Not to mention that I have no idea why he hasn’t fessed up to being at the courthouse—meaning I can’t trust him one bit. But Declan wiggles the canteen a few more times and eventually my thirst outweighs my better judgment. I take the container in both hands. The water doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever had. It’s sweet and there’s a hint of some type of flavoring. I finish drinking so fast I’m left coughing even more violently than before.
“Don’t worry about me—I’m not thirsty,” he says dryly as I thrust the empty canteen back at him. He fumbles it, dropping it to the ground. When he bends to retrieve it, I pull the Glock from its holster. Then I kick the electroshock gun out of his hand. It clinks against the metal gate four feet away from us. After a few seconds of silence, during which his only movement is his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, he cocks his head to the right. The corners of his mouth twitch. “What are you doing?” he asks calmly.
“I’m not helping you, Declan. Moderator. I’m getting out of this game today.”
Sighing, he drops to a sitting position and shakes his head to each side. “Virtue, you—”
“Shut up,” I say. I keep the gun positioned on his chest, right over his heart, as I walk backward. I grab his electroshock gun, then the pair of pliers I dropped earlier. Placing his weapon on the ground next to me, I stoop to the section of the fence I was trying to pry loose when he caught me and begin working on it again. One-handed. And with my eyes locked on him.
“If you weren’t pointing that thing at me, I’d tell you I find multitasking attractive,” he says. When I snort, he grins and adds, “So’s your determination, but I’m faster than you, you know.”
I picture him knocking me to the ground again. My ribs hurt just thinking about it. I tighten my grip on both the gun and the pliers. “Go ahead and try it.” This sounds so much like something my gamer would say, a shudder races through my body. “But just so you know, I’ve killed before.”
He doesn’t need to know that I’ve never really been the person doing the killing, or that the act itself leaves me feeling numb for days afterward.
Declan doesn’t respond. I almost think he plans to stand still and let me finish jiggling at the metal fence but then he begins to laugh. And he doesn’t stop until I face him, hunched over and wheezing, with both hands on the gun.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” he says. “And me. It’s...let’s just say I never saw this coming.” When I give him a look that borders between disgusted and confused, he quickly adds in a cocky voice, “Look, I don’t even know why we’re going back and forth. We both know you’re not going to shoot me, so you might as well put the gun up, Virtue. Look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly believe I feel threatened by you.”
Spitefulness seems to be a common trait in the world Declan and Olivia belong to, and yet I’m still willing to do just about anything to find my way there. “Just shut your mouth before I shoot out your kneecaps.”
I work in silence for a few minutes, pulling with all my might at the metal. Both of my arms hurt from the weight of the Glock and the constant jerking on the fence. The throbbing in my skull is back, along with erratic tremors that pulse through my whole body.
Apparently Declan notices, because he murmurs something under his breath and moves his left leg as if he plans to get up.
“Don’t even think about it,” I snap, swiping the back of the hand holding the pliers across my damp forehead.
“I’ve decided to cooperate.”
“Well, then do what I say and just be quiet.”
“No, I mean, I’ve decided to tell you this isn’t the way out of The Aftermath,” he says.
The tool nearly slips from my hand. “Stop it!”
“What? Trying to help you? You want to get out, fine by me, but at least listen to what I’ve got to say. You’re wasting your time digging away at links and chains when your way out is—” he points to the east, the direction I traveled from “—that way.”
He’s wrong. He has to be. This is where I saw the change in the game map. This is where I found the fence with so much barbed wire. It’s got to be here for something. “Don’t lie to me.”
Declan holds up both of his hands and shakes his head. “Let me ask you this. What would I gain by lying to you? You’ve got a gun—even if it’s an antique that you may or may not be able to use properly—aimed at my heart. And you have my weapon. I’m at a disadvantage, Virtue.”
But he doesn’t feel threatened by me—he said so himself. “This has to be the way,” I whisper.
He grunts. “The best way to die before sunset, yes. The way out of The Aftermath? Definitely not.” When I draw in a deep breath and my shoulders sag a little, he adds, “The worst flesh-eaters in the game are outside that fence. Trust me—I was just out there searching for another character. You leave and I can almost guarantee you’ll be over an open fire before the sun comes out.”
I grind my teeth together. “They don’t work like that. They don’t kill their victims right away.”
Declan lifts one of his shaggy eyebrows. Slowly, he stands up, his palms still lifted in front of him in submission. He turns to the fence, staring out at the flat landscape beyond it. “No, they don’t. But their players are the ones making the rules, and out there, you’ve got a quick death sentence.”
I want to scream at him. Call him a liar again. But there’s something in his voice that makes me hesitate. Anger? Pity? And then I realize what it is: self-loathing. The same thing I heard in my own voice when I barely helped those two boys who begged for water and food.
What if he’s telling the truth? What if I’m wrong and I’ve come all this way for nothing? What if—
“How do you get out of the game?” I croak. “Is it...even possible to get out?”
“I got in, didn’t I? The way out is southeast of here.”
Southeast?
Southeast.
He’s saying I traveled sixty miles in the wrong direction.
“Prove it,” I say.
With his hands still in the air, he moves toward his bag. I take a few steps closer, too. Kneeling beside the fence for such an extended period of time has made my legs useless, and when I move, it feels as if I’m waist-deep in sludge. I keep my face blank so he doesn’t see how much pain I’m in, how easy it would be to overpower me.
“I need my tablet,” he mutters, twitching his head down to his belongings. “Not much I can prove if you shoot me between the eyes the moment I—”
“Just get it,” I growl.
Declan keeps his word. He grabs a tablet just like Olivia’s and presses one of the icons, bringing up a holographic keypad. He spends a couple of minutes entering a succession of codes into it. Then he places the tablet on the ground between us and walks five, six, seven steps in reverse.
“Tap it once. I’ve disabled the touch recognition for the next ten minutes so you might want to hurry,” he says when I pick up his device.
It takes me a few tries to get the tablet to work—I have trouble holding it and the gun and keeping an eye on Declan all at once. When it finally glows in my hand, a 3-D map of the area pops up in front of my face, rotating in a slow circle. I’m disappointed to see that it doesn’t show any street names or character locations like Olivia’s map. I search up and to the left of the image, yet there’s nothing significant about the northwest, where I am right at this moment. But just over sixty miles southwest of Demonbreun—the street I left forty-eight hours ago—is a thin line slicing across the map. On the other side of the border is a yellow landform with two words written across it in bold black print: UNITED PROVINCES (U.P.)
I feel as though I’m choking.
“I’ll just have to go southeast then,” I say, keeping my voice as hard as possible.
“You’re welcome to try, but you won’t make it two miles in that direction.”
“And why is that?”
“Because—” But then he pauses and drops his gaze to the grass for a moment. He clenches his hands by his sides before his dark eyes lock on to mine again. “Because I’ll have the mods all over you before you lose sight of this fence,” he says as he approaches me. He doesn’t seem concerned that I still have my gun raised. All he seems to care about is coming close enough so that I’m within his reach. “I can promise you one more thing. You’ll wish they just shocked you to death.”
“And if I kill you before you can tell the other mods?”
“Then maybe you’ll get out before they review the game records for the quarter. You have about—” he glances at his watch “—twenty-nine days before they check the footage, review your character stats and schedule you for maintenance. But even then, you’re screwed if you manage to escape. You can’t fake your identification in the U.P. Everything is done by fingerprint or retinal scan or biometric verification. Even the AcuTabs have touch recognition, and, trust me, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t have one—they’re linked to everything. And just because you go outside the border doesn’t change the fact your brain is linked to someone else’s head through your chips. Your gamer can just log in and march your ass back into the game. She’d probably just kill you, though.”
I open my mouth to say something, but he interrupts me. “But I can make sure your chip is destroyed the moment you leave The Aftermath. No tracking. No gamer. Just you. I’ve got friends who can make you whoever you want to be in every national database in less than ten minutes, who’ll make sure you have anything you need to survive in the Provinces. All you have to do is say yes.”
Twenty-nine days is a long time to plan and execute an escape. And if I managed to make it this far so rapidly, I can do it again when the time is right. All I need is for Olivia to disappear one more time and then I can give it another go.
But if Declan is right—like he is about the border—I won’t last in the world outside the game once I break free. It doesn’t make sense to risk so much just so I can immediately stare death in the face. He’s offering to fix me so she’ll never use my head again.
If I say yes.
If I let him use me.
“What is it you need me to do?” I spit out.
He grins like someone who’s won a major battle. This must be what a flesh-eater looks like right before snacking on his victim. Or, at least, what his gamer looks like behind his wall of screens.
“I’ve been sent into the game to retrieve a character with a glitch that’s affecting the characters around him. His last known location was Nashville.”
Another glitching character? “Where do I fit in?”
“The navigation on my AcuTab doesn’t work in this game—too many firewalls—and all I have to go on is a general direction. You know the area. You can help me find him quickly, so I can get out of this place. This is a very sensitive and special assignment and I have a limited amount of time to get it done.”
No, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But I hear myself ask, “And you’ll get me out, too, if I help?”
“I swear on my life.”
“How long will it take?”