Z 2136 (Z 2134 Series Book 3) (2 page)

January 2136

A half mile from the Halo . . .

Ana peered through the scope, focusing her rifle on the veering road below, watching and waiting for the transport vans to pass, trigger ready to free her brother.

There were three roads leading to the Halo, where The Darwin Games would detonate in a bloodbath known as The Opening Rush—always with host Kirk Kirkman’s untethered glee. Only City 6 came in from the West, and in the months that Ana had been spying on their routes, The State always sent two vans. She assumed one transported prisoners while the other carried City Watchers as backup in case the trip turned sour.

She adjusted her position, still chilly on the fresh-fallen snow despite her insulated jacket and pants, the outfit all black, scavenged from a group of bandits two months earlier. The jacket kept her relatively warm, and more importantly, allowed Ana to blend into the line of trees where she’d been ordered by Liam and Katrina to hide. She held her stare down the hill on a perfect view of the stretch where the vans were scheduled to pass at any moment.

Ana tried to ignore the rolls and roars in her stomach. There had been no time to eat—not that she would have been able to soak more than a morsel of bread in the stewing acid that sat in her stomach.

“How ya doing, baby?” Liam chirped in her earpiece, as if he could sense her unease from his spot on the road’s north side, where the line of trees crept closer to the old, cracked concrete. He and Katrina were waiting downhill from Ana.

“Scared as hell.”

“We’ve gone over this a dozen times,” Liam reminded her. “You’ve nothing to worry about. Two vans, like always.”

“I know,” Ana said, though she couldn’t quite shake the gnawing sensation that plans meant little and things wouldn’t be simple at all.

She flashed back nearly seven months to the caravan robbery gone wrong and the ambush that had claimed most of their party. “What if this is a trap?”

Katrina, with the most years of experience fighting The State, answered for Liam. “If it’s a trap, we deal with it. We’ve not come this far to abandon Adam on the off chance that it
might
be a trap.” A beat, then, “Have we?”

Ana paused, waiting for—
wanting
—Liam to back her up. Instead he said nothing, and Ana took it for the invisible nod to Katrina that it was. Lately it seemed that he and Katrina were on the same page more often than not. Nothing official, but if the trio chopping their way through The Barrens ever stopped to cast ballots, the vote would’ve gone 2–1 with Ana on the losing end, almost always.

She tried not to let her past annoyance poison her present thinking around Adam’s reality. Emotions weren’t part of the mission. Katrina was right. They had to get Adam
now
. It would be nearly impossible to find him in the chaos following The Opening Rush.

Ana sighed. “You’re right. Just getting butterflies is all.”

“It would be odd if you weren’t, Ana.” She imagined Katrina’s smile, not quite maternal but supportive in its own uncomfortable way. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine, and we
will
get your brother.”

“Damned right,” Liam chirped with a gusto that reminded Ana why she loved him so much.

“OK, I’m good.”

Black dots in the distance shut her up. She raised her rifle and narrowed her eye through the scope.

“They’re coming.”

“Copy,” Katrina and Liam said together. They too were likely watching—Liam through his scope and Katrina through a pair of fancy binoculars she’d stolen from Hydrangea before their flight from Sutherland’s madness a half year before.

Ana turned her scope to see Liam and Katrina rushing toward the road to place the spike strips about 10 feet apart. They were painted the same dull gray as the cracked road, but Ana didn’t think the difference in color was enough to keep a sharp eye from seeing the strips . . . which was why she was tasked to shoot at the drivers. She’d become an excellent shot since shedding her old life in City 6, though she still couldn’t match Liam’s or Katrina’s sniper eyes.

No—the real reason they’d put her up on the hill was to keep her from danger—in case things went south. Ana was the only known person who had contracted the zombie virus and come out the other side. Hydrangea’s doctor, Oswald, had placed an incredible burden on her when he claimed that she might be humanity’s last and only hope. He believed her blood was the final piece in finding a cure. Of course that was assuming the zombie-cyborg doctor ever got away from Sutherland, where he’d stayed behind to work in a lab filled with samples of Ana’s blood. Even if Oswald
could
develop the cure, it would do the world no good in the hands of a psycho like Sutherland—the very madman who had forced her father to unleash a strain of the zombie virus inside City 1.

At some point Ana, Liam, and Katrina might have to liberate Oswald and actually work towards that cure. Until then, Liam and Katrina treated Ana like a fragile Old Nation porcelain doll.

Ana stared at Liam through the scope. The past seven months had been cruel. He was thin, though his gauntness was cloaked by oversized clothes and a thick, dark beard that made him look more like a bandit than she liked.

She turned her scope back toward the approaching vans, now 300 yards away: large dusty transports with tinted windows driving side by side like those that had taken her to The Games.

“Three hundred yards away.”

“Copy,” they said, assuming position in clustered shadows along the tree-lined road.

Ana inched her finger toward the trigger, barely breathing as she waited for her moment. She had to wait until the vans were close enough to the strips that a sharp turn would be deadly and a full stop impossible. Hitting a pair of moving targets in rapid succession had seemed improbable while she’d been waiting in her perch, but now it seemed nearly impossible.

She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and tried to shove her fear as low as it would go.

Focus.

For Adam.

As the vehicles drew nearer, Ana could see two men through the front window of the left van—wearing City Watch dark-visored helmets, though they worked for The State–run Network and weren’t really Watchers at all.

Focus
.

She lined up her first shot, anticipating where the van would be by estimating its speed and accounting for the slight breeze and the angle of her shot—skills Katrina had taught Ana during the long months leading up to their mission.

Ana squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if she hit her target, quickly turned the rifle toward the second van . . . but it raced by in a blur through her line of sight before she had a chance to shoot.

Ana took her eyes from the rifle and looked down as the tires of the second van ripped into the strips. The first van, the one she’d shot at, screeched to a stop, meaning she probably hadn’t killed the driver—or the man in the passenger seat was quick-thinking and reached over to slam on the brakes. The second van kept going before sliding to a stop on the right, putting about 40 yards of road between the two vans, which made Ana’s job harder as it was now impossible to see both vans at once through her scope.

Her heartbeat somehow found a way to speed up even more. Ana wished she could get closer to the road, where she might be able to do something useful.

Instead, she raised the rifle and trained it back and forth between the two vans, watching and waiting for doors to open, men to emerge. Ana hoped Liam and Katrina, racing from the trees, would reach the drivers before either had the notion to harm Adam or any of the other passengers.

“Get out!” Katrina yelled, firing her blaster at the first van. The window and driver disintegrated into a bright shock of dust. Ana scowled from the top of the hill, hating that someone else was doing her job.

The helmeted passenger got out of the van with raised hands, likely begging for life.

Liam approached the second van with his rifle aimed, yelling, “Get out!”

Ana noticed how much darker the windows were on the second van—dark enough that both driver and passenger were barely suggestions.

The gnawing in her gut tightened.

She flashed back on the zombies pouring from the transport truck during last year’s failed mission . . .

“Something’s wrong,” Ana said into the radio.

“What?” Katrina asked.

“The windows of the other van. I’m having trouble seeing through them.”

Liam seemed not to hear and stepped closer to the van, rifle raised. “Get the fuck out!”

Ana turned her scope back to the passenger of the first van, frozen behind Katrina’s aim. His gloved right hand was shaking ever so slightly above his head. At first, Ana thought maybe her nervous hands were shaking the view. Then she zoomed in and saw that his hand held something—a small black square with a blinking red light.

She remembered the driver they’d pulled over, how he’d opened the truck doors to unleash a horde of zombies.

“There’s something in his hand!”

Ana yelled so loudly that the passenger turned to her spot on the hill. Time started crawling, as if to amplify Ana’s distance and inability to intervene. She watched as the man’s fingers curled around the device—one pressing down on the flashing red light.

For a moment Ana could only hear the rapid pulse throbbing in her ear.

Then the suspicious van exploded.

Adam was dead.

At least he wanted to be. His father, Jonah, had been murdered in front of any citizen who cared to watch the cruel display on the ample widescreen monitors plastered across all six cities, murdered by a man whom Adam had looked up to almost as much as his father—Chief Keller.

Since that moment every breath had felt harder to draw. Yet strangely, Adam had not cried.

Prison had withered his tears. Time felt borrowed but was a debt he didn’t care to repay. His strongest recurring thought was the aching certainty that Ana was still alive somewhere, pursued closely by a bruised and ever-swelling need for revenge.

The Darwins were coming. Adam didn’t know why he hadn’t been cast outside The Walls with an army of cameras already, but the trip was inevitable. What happened to his father was all the more powerful because of its rarity. While death seemed so pervasive to Adam now, with his eyes finally opened to what was going on in the cities, public executions weren’t a regular thing behind The Walls. Outside, among the charred and rotten hands of the undead, it happened all the time. Adam would one day blink into the bright light outside The City, but the thin sliver of hope that he
might
one day see his sister kept him hanging on, like a cupped palm to a wind-flickered flame.

Adam’s back was pressed to the cold metal of a pitch-black van, on its way to the Halo. He hoped they would return to asphalt soon. The dirt, snow, or whatever they were driving through was doing terrible things to his already tangled gut.

Soon, the door would open and he’d be yanked from the van into blinding light. A cannon blast would herald the chaos of a mad dash by contestants, all willing to kill for supplies, murdering to live through The Opening Rush.

The chaos Adam was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive.

In this, the beginning of Adam’s end, darkness was his blanket. The van’s only light bled from lights on a black metal cuff glowing blue around his wrist. A small gray screen sat atop the cuff, with blue lights running around the top and bottom of the cuff, with tiny holes running beneath the screen. Though Adam had theories, he didn’t know what the bracelet was. The man who had fastened it to his wrist grunted as he did so, but his coward’s face was buried behind a black visor, stripping Adam’s chance to search for truth in his eyes. The bracelet felt cold, as if it couldn’t absorb any warmth from his body. After a while on his wrist, it made Adam feel colder than he was, and despite more than a half year spent mostly in isolation, the new frost in his body made him feel twice as alone.

In every game Adam had ever seen, vans almost always carried more than one passenger. He didn’t want to wonder why he was the only one in this van, because the truth was likely as ugly as every other truth he’d come to know since his father was first accused of murdering a mother whom Adam still missed every day. But he couldn’t help dwelling on his solitary transport, remembering how much he used to enjoy this part of The Darwins: The Pre-Game. Those citizens who did watch The Pre-Games loved getting to know the players and picking their favorites before the cannon was shot. That was always Adam’s favorite part, because there was never any killing, and often there were jokes.

Now he was in the dark alone, save for small cameras in all four corners, giving citizens a bird’s eye view of his death ride. He wondered how many people were watching him, as he’d watched so many in the past. And what kind of contestant did he appear to be? Was anyone voting on him as a potential winner? Some contestants were quiet, most tried to seem braver than they were, keeping quivers from speech and flinches from eyes. A few always cried. Some picked fights. Adam’s favorites pretended that being in a van on its way to the Halo, and the promise of spending their final few days on the run—gasping and hoping for bullets instead of a death by feasting undead—wasn’t so awful at all.

Adam wanted to be strong enough to pretend and bury his fear behind jokes like those men and women. But there was no one else to joke with, and that absence made everything worse.

Something was wrong, because things were so different. Every Game he’d ever seen had
at least
two players from each City, yet Adam hadn’t heard a second van rolling ahead or behind them.

I can’t be the only one from City 6, can I?

Adam had spent seven months in prison.

He had been on a fairly fixed schedule, in which he was moved from his cell to the yard for an hour each weekday, two on the weekends. The consistent routine made it easy to tick off the time—which was important when trying to preserve a sense of normalcy. The other thing that had helped him hold onto sanity was knowing there were others around him—others
like
him. When he’d first arrived, Adam had done his best to track prisoners as they came and went, but it grew increasingly difficult as the block’s population stayed in constant flux, with guards ushering ever-larger groups around the prison. Adam saw what little he did only by staring through a large window in his cell that looked out over the yard, the view somehow designed for his torment, trapping him in the dark even as he was bathed in the day’s brightest light. Like his glowing blue bracelet, the sun never quite warmed his body as he sat for long hours in his cold cell alone.

On his ninth weekend, the other prisoners disappeared and never returned—and he realized they
weren’t
like him at all. Adam was led to another part of the prison that he had never known about, even as a Junior Watcher. The second cell was smaller, colder, and—impossibly—even more alone. He found himself surprised to miss his horrible view.

It was then that he started hearing the whispers, from the few guards in this new area. They all wanted him to hear, and to be afraid, because fear in isolation rotted the body. There were whispers among the Watchers of a special edition of The Darwins brewing, with additional (or fewer) players, perhaps an extended play length. Different rules. New weapons. Harsher environments would make sense, but Adam was only guessing from the few snippets he was allowed to hear. It turned out that, for him, guessing without knowing made him sicker, as he waited to see what Keller—a vengeful man, moving his diseased breed of justice from father to son—was planning.

After his move, Adam saw no one except his daily interrogators. Each day he stayed strong, giving them nothing and hoping to make his murdered father proud—a sentiment he would have sneered at just a few months ago. Regardless, they came in at different times, most often in the morning when Adam was still blurry-eyed, and ordered him to rat out members of The Underground. Other than for the interrogations, they only came in to bring Adam rancid food or drag him out of his cell for the occasional shower. He always trembled as the door cracked opened, certain that this time he’d see Keller instead of the guard and finally suffer the ugly man’s wrath.

Now, in the back of the van and Halo bound, Adam wondered if he’d ever see Keller again . . . and realized that Keller could be watching him right now. Bile rose in his throat as the van came to a grinding halt and jostled the thought from his head.

Adam’s heart started to race. Even though he’d been numb for months, the Halo’s “promise” poured fresh life into his body. After what felt like an eternity, the rear door swung open. The bracelet finally felt warm as it hummed, then shone a brighter blue. A speaker blared from the guard’s helmet.

“Exit the van, Lovecraft! Stand in line and wait for the cannon.”

Pointing a gun in Adam’s face, the guard yelled, “Now.”

Adam stepped into the snow, boots sinking as he shivered and rubbed warmth into his arms. He looked around, wondering where in the hell he was. Somewhere he’d never seen: the center of a giant stadium, surrounded by ancient and mostly rotten seats.

Games were usually confined to wilderness areas. It made for better shows to see contestants fleeing through forest to escape the swarming hordes of undead. Adam couldn’t remember ever having seen anything in an arena like this one.

The guard spun him around and shoved him toward what looked like a hundred or so contestants—the most Adam had ever seen waiting for The Games. Four oversized hunter orbs buzzed overhead, hovering a few feet above the line. A pair of men—behemoths in black suits and mirrored helmets—stood at the line’s rear, rifles ready. Many more guards—they seemed more militant than those usually assigned to The Games—were scattered through the snow, black on white like a sickness on flesh.

Everything seemed larger in the flesh: the stadium, contestants, guards, and weapons—The Games.

Adam swallowed hard, looking up and down the line at all the soon-to-be-dead. Contestants were outfitted in the same blue jumpsuits that he’d been wearing for months. Each City usually had an assigned color—that made it easier for viewers to identify and root for their favorites. The hundred or so contestants in the same blue didn’t make any sense.

The line started on the far side of the field from where Adam was standing, and wrapped the perimeter spooling back toward him. In the center of the field there were mountains of crates stacked four high and many more deep. All except the smallest were wide and tall enough to hold many humans . . . or creatures that used to be.

Adam saw four exits and, rising above the stadium walls, a crumbled city with old buildings like diseased fingers raking into the sky. After months of solitary confinement, Adam had hardened himself for this reality, preparing himself to be the killer he would have to become. But as the moment raced toward him, he wondered if he’d be able to be as ruthless as he needed to be.

He looked down the row, dividing contestants into two halves: those Adam thought he could kill, and those he knew to run from. He searched for familiar faces, not really expecting to find one. About twenty people down, he actually did.

A stout, dark-skinned man in his 40s, with thick hair, a scruffy beard, and a pair of piercing green eyes that Adam would recognize anywhere: Derek Colton, a friend of his father’s from City Watch.

He hadn't seen Derek in forever, let alone thought of him. He had no clue why the man was waiting to be zombie food now. His dad had always spoken fondly of his friend. Adam wondered if he was an ally, as he watched the man trying not to shiver, 50 feet away. Was he Underground? A traitor like Michael—and now Adam? Or something else? Something worse? Maybe a murderer from The Dark Quarters?

A dark thought crept in:
Better to be killed by a friend than an enemy.

Derek Colton must have thought something similar. He barely turned but gave Adam a mostly imperceptible smile. Like a ray of sunlight on his face, it flickered and faded before he looked ahead and left Adam to wonder if he had seen what he thought—and whether he could trust what he thought he saw.

All four orbs crackled to life with a loud shriek. Their screens lit with Kirk Kirkman’s weaselly face. Adam’s blue bracelet glowed brighter and buzzed, clearly in response to the orbs. A familiar crescendo of The State’s National Song swelled the air with the usual fanfare as the screens showed fireworks erupting over City 6. Adam saw the usual rowdy—yet still somehow orderly—crowds of people watching from a large studio in City 6, waving plenty of flags, swaying in time with the orchestra. And adding to his confusion, the cameras never cut to another city. Usually The Games showed all the cities. Now cameras panned through the many varied pockets of City 6, catching swarms of rapt citizens staring up into the lenses so Adam could see them on-screen. Cameras seemed to crawl into every corner of City 6, but there was no footage from 5 or 4, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Finally, the broadcast cut back to Kirkman. Cheery as ever, he chirped, “Welcome to a Special Edition of The Darwin Games!”

He waited as the audience erupted with pent-up excitement, then boomed:

“We welcome you to this very special edition of The Darwin Games, our first ever
All-Traitor Edition
. The men and women standing before you are Underground scum,
each and every one!
These are the people who threaten our safety. These are the people who endanger our lives. These are the people who have turned on their neighbors and conspired to weaken our State. Who conspired against
you
. And since the heart of this dark cancer was thriving most
in
City 6, we’ve decided to host the show here this time
for
City 6. Now, who’s ready to watch these traitors pay?”

Kirkman paused for applause—no shortage from the overly enthusiastic crowd. Cameras continued to flicker from pocket to pocket showing just how invested the entire City was to witness its enemies punished.

“The All-Traitor Edition has a record number of contestants. There are exactly 104 traitors who had direct ties to the terrorist attack on City 1. Killing these people isn’t just our duty, but our obligation for a healthy, prosperous State. And to be clear: there will be no glory for anyone. This time, for the first time in Darwin Games history, there will be no winner. In The All-Traitor Edition,
no one
will get to see City 7.”

Another pause for applause, then the camera cut to Adam, standing surprised in the snow. “After all, we wouldn’t want to chance The Game being won by Adam Lovecraft, now would we?
Of course not!
Just look at what his father did with
his
second chance. I hope you’re ready for the best Games we’ve ever had, knowing that when they end—however they end—we will have justice for what happened to our fine citizens in City 1.”

Another pause for applause, the longest so far. Adam imagined the many months of advertisement, preceding this
Special Edition
of The Games. The State would have had every citizen drooling by the time the contestants were being marched out onto the snowy field. He thought of all the commemorative wrappers with The Special Edition’s colorful logo that would cover the arcade food. An ugly thing to admit, but as Adam stared up at the screen, steeling his gaze at the view, he couldn’t help admiring it: the logo was pretty amazing—The City Watch eye surrounded by flames like a blazing star. Adam thought back through most of his life and knew that in a different present where his father was still a decorated Watcher, he would have loved seeing traitors like himself getting shredded to pieces.