“It was obvious. I used to be a Hunter myself.”
His real name was Harper. Like Conrad, he’d grown up in a family of Hunters—his brother a Hunter, his father a Hunter, his father’s father a Hunter. But Hunting wasn’t something Harper wanted to do with his existence. He felt bad for the living (“At least as bad as a dead can feel, if you know what I mean”), and while he went to Artemis, did well in his classes, graduated and was recruited, he never had any desire to kill zombies. But he stayed in it. He stayed because he had gotten in contact with the underground movement of zombie sympathizers, and they needed someone on the inside, someone who knew the system, who knew who all the top Hunters were and where they were located and how to get to them.
Now Harper held his flashlight up toward the low ceiling, so that they could all see each other, the small man who’d driven the tractor-trailer looking completely different to Conrad than he had on the long drive back to Olympus. It had been a part Harper had played, just as he’d played a part his entire time as a Hunter.
“That bomb Eugene planted?” he said. “It was the second one. The first was at the fuel station.”
Conrad glanced up from the pistol, stared back at Harper.
“I won’t lie to you, Conrad. You were always our target. You were the number one Hunter in the world, and we knew if we got to you … well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”
Right then the radio on his belt beeped. A voice said, “It’s time,” and like that, Harper turned off the flashlight.
They stayed motionless in the sudden dark, waiting silently. Harper had come with nine others in the zombie sympathizer underground, men who in their other existences worked as Special Police or Hunters. They had come prepared to do what Conrad and the three zombies had planned: to rescue Eugene Moss from his entourage of armed guards, to ensure that Eugene was not publicly executed by Philip.
Conrad pushed himself off from the wall, planted his two feet squarely on the ground.
Fifty yards away, back at the iron door they’d been waiting at before, there came a click as the lock was disengaged. Then there came a low screeching, rusty hinges scraping against rusty hinges, and the sound of voices and footsteps.
Conrad raised the pistol, flicked off the safety.
The voices and footsteps approached. Harper’s men were already hidden around corners, out of the way.
Conrad stepped forward silently, aiming the gun toward that direction.
Past the approaching voices and footsteps, the sound of the iron door being slammed shut traveled to the five of them waiting there.
Conrad fingered the trigger, ready now, certain that somehow Harper’s men wouldn’t come through and that it would be left up to him.
A few seconds passed and nothing happened, the voices and footsteps getting even closer. One of the men said something and the rest—what sounded like no more than a half dozen—laughed in response.
Harper whispered into his radio, “Now.”
At once Harper’s men opened fire, the cacophony of gunfire in the corridors deafening. The salvo was over almost immediately. Conrad found himself lowering his weapon and flicking back on the safety, knowing within just a few seconds that his help would not be needed. Harper’s men were more than prepared—they each wore night-vision glasses, so they had no problems taking down their intended targets.
He wasn’t aware of the silence until about a minute afterward, because his ears were still ringing. Then a voice came across Harper’s radio—“We got ’em all”—and like that, Harper’s flashlight turned back on.
Smiling at them, Harper said, “Let’s go meet our friend.”
Conrad brought up the rear as Harper led the way. Of this entire operation he’d been dreading this moment the most—the actual confrontation with Eugene Moss. Yes, the man had done a terrible thing, he was a criminal and he deserved to be punished, but at the same time Conrad had done nothing as the man’s living son had been tortured, nothing as the rest of his family had been expired. He’d just stood there, watching those floating dust motes, and he knew nothing could ever rectify that wrong.
So it was no surprise at all that when they’d met up with the rest of Harper’s men in the corridor, the night-vision glasses off everyone’s faces and flashlight beams slicing the dark, the six expired Hunters lying on the ground, Eugene Moss now getting his handcuffs undone, Conrad was the first person the man noticed.
The shocked smile fell from his face. His black eyes hardened. He said, “You fucking son of a bitch,” and charged right at Conrad.
Conrad had already slipped his gun back into his pocket. Though he knew he shouldn’t, he went for it anyway, and it was the extra few seconds of standing there, reaching for his pistol, that gave Eugene the advantage. He plowed past the rest of the men, all who hadn’t been expecting it, grabbed a rifle out of someone’s hands, and fired at Conrad.
The bullet struck him in the chest, right where his dead heart lay. He staggered back, tripped over his own feet, and fell to the ground.
Eugene went to fire again, aiming now for Conrad’s head, but the men intervened, grabbing the rifle out of his hands, pulling him away, Eugene screaming at Conrad that he was a bastard, that he was fucking going to expire him.
Harper shouted, “Enough!” and somehow that seemed to work, Eugene going momentarily quiet. He looked up at Harper as Harper approached, and listened as Harper explained that Conrad had come with the three other living to save Eugene’s existence, believe it or not, even though Harper himself wasn’t quite sure why. Turning toward Gabriel then, he said, “Maybe now you could tell us why?”
Gabriel was watching James and Eric help Conrad to his feet, Conrad now with a hand over the spot where he’d just been shot, as if trying to hold in all the nonexistence blood.
Harper cleared his throat. “Gabriel?”
Gabriel looked at Harper.
“Make it quick. More Hunters will be coming along any minute, and this time we won’t have the advantage of surprise on our side. So tell us, why are you here?”
Gabriel regarded Conrad once again. “We came for Eugene to get in contact with people like you.”
“Great. Now you have us. So what do you want?”
“What I have to say I don’t have time to explain right now. I certainly can’t do it in less than a minute.”
Eugene, still being held back by Harper’s men, spat at Conrad.
Harper said, “Well then, I’m sorry, but we have to leave.”
“Wait,” Gabriel said.
Harper turned back to Gabriel, raised an eyebrow.
“I know a place we can go.”
Through the corridors
again, hurrying along with everyone else, Conrad was barely aware of where they were going or why they were going there. Instead he was concentrating on his chest, on the hole that was there, and how he felt no true pain. He remembered Kyle just recently in the emergency room, complaining because it hurt so, so bad, but his son really hadn’t been feeling anything. It had all been in his mind, just like now Conrad’s mind told him he should be in excruciating pain, that he should be too weak to walk on his own. But here Conrad walked with no trouble, sandwiched between two nameless men in the army Harper had gathered to go up against Philip.
They weren’t in darkness anymore, about half of them using flashlights. Word had spread down the line that already Hunters were scurrying the Labyrinth, posting men at every known entrance and exit.
Still, Conrad barely noticed. He was thinking about where he had just been shot, how if Gabriel or one of the other living had been shot there they would now be dead. But Conrad wasn’t. The only way to kill a dead like that was to shoot them in the head, something everyone knew, and this made Conrad wonder about his own existence, about the many different pieces that made up the whole. How if you took a number of those pieces away he was still him, he was still Conrad, the man who had once been a boy whose mother had read him stories, who had told him to question everything, who had done everything she could to make sure he made his own decisions. If he were to have his hand cut off, he would still be him. The same with his leg, his ear, his nose, maybe even his torso. Right now his body was decaying at a very rapid rate, he was losing more hair and skin than normal, but at what point would he stop being Conrad? At what point would he lose too many hairs, too much skin, that the person he had been all his existence suddenly was no more?
These were the things he was thinking about as they hurried through the corridors, Gabriel up front leading them, these were the questions that kept flitting through his dead mind so much that when they started to slow, when they stopped, when there was a sound farther ahead, a door being opened, and the line began moving again, he barely even knew it. He only became aware when the man in front of him ducked through the door, and in the faint glow of someone’s flashlight behind him his eyes caught something on the wall right beside the door and he stopped and stared at three words he thought he would never see again.
CONRAD LOVES DENISE
, those words said, carved there into the cinderblock wall by the tip of his own broadsword, words he had put there because they were true and because they were all he was able to express with his dead mind. Words that, like the Labyrinth itself, had become lost and forgotten but which now welcomed them into the subbasement of what was left of the original Hunter Headquarters.
Five minutes, Harper
said, Gabriel only had five minutes to speak his mind, and Gabriel went right to it, starting with the Government’s secret research, Living Intelligence, and Pandoras. Harper held up a hand, said he knew about all of this, and Gabriel, seeming very relieved, said, “Good. So then I’m sure you’re aware of the Ripple Effect.”
The last time Conrad had been in this subbasement was when he was searching for boxes. He had then gone up to the basement, had collided with Eugene Moss, who he had questioned too briefly and because of that now over one hundred Hunters and pedestrians were expired. That’s where his thoughts had shifted to in the past few minutes, how in a way he was at fault for the loss of all those existences, but when Gabriel spoke those two words—
ripple effect
—he immediately looked up.
The subbasement itself had somehow survived the explosion. Conrad guessed it was because, like the Labyrinth, it had been designed to withstand just about anything. Some of Harper’s men had already gone up the steps to explore the basement, and they had come back, saying that whatever crews had been at work had cleared much of the damage, and that they would be able to make it back to the surface from here. Harper had then called someone on his radio, told them the address, said that they would be out in ten minutes, and then he’d looked at Gabriel and told him five minutes and now those five minutes were nearly up.
“Yes,” Harper said, nodding, “I’m aware of the Ripple Effect.”
“Then you’re aware of the possibilities it may hold.”
Harper just stood there, his arms crossed, staring back at Gabriel. Everyone else was quiet, the silence thick, the only light that of the few flashlights.
Gabriel said, “If you know everything you say you do, then you know about the Warehouses. You know that the Government has been storing Pandoras since soon after the Zombie Wars. All over the world, huge
buildings
of Pandoras. And all it will take is the energy in one Pandora being released at the right time, at the right place.”
Conrad found himself reaching into his pocket, gripping the handle of his pistol.
“His son,” Gabriel said, pointing at Conrad, “is ten years old. He just tried turning. He even touched the Pandora, which means now only he can open it. They have him committed at Psyche, and all we need to do is get him, take him to his Pandora back at the Warehouse, and …”
The zombie let it trail there, hoping everyone else could fill in the blank, and Conrad pulled the pistol from his pocket, placed it behind his back.
Harper was shaking his head. “You must not have heard the latest. Philip is now aware of the Pandoras. He’s having them all destroyed.”
“But he can’t. They’re indestructible.”
“Maybe so. But he knows they’re a threat and right now as we speak he’s having every Warehouse unloaded of their Pandoras. He’s planning to take them to the South Pole, drop them all there, send a hydrogen bomb to wipe them out.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“No,” Harper said, and glanced at his watch, “what’s crazy is your theory. And that’s just what it is. The Ripple Effect has always been a theory. Yes, I’ve heard about the experiments, I know there is some truth to it, but that just isn’t the goal we’re playing for right now.”
Conrad stood back in the corner, in the shadows, the gun behind his back well concealed. He had a good view of Gabriel, and he knew that he could take the zombie out without any trouble at all.
“And what’s your goal?” Gabriel asked.
“We’re going to attack Philip. Tonight, if we can. We’re going to raid the Herculean, expire him and the rest of his Hunters, and if it looks like we’re going to fail, then we’ll bomb it.”
“You can’t fight violence with violence.”
“Who says we can’t?”
“If you expire Philip, someone else will just rise up in his place.”
“Then we expire all of them.”
“You sound just like Philip.”
Harper smiled and shook his head. He pulled the radio from his belt, said, “We’re headed out,” and motioned for his men to go.
“There are Pandoras at the Herculean,” Gabriel said quickly. “Do you know that? At the start they didn’t know where else to put them, so they locked them under all the city’s major buildings. We could—”
“I’ve given you more than your five minutes,” Harper said. He was already moving through the subbasement, going past the cardboard boxes, the old desks and chairs, his men following him. “Good luck, Gabriel, and I’m sorry I can’t give you anymore help.”