The Aftermath (16 page)

He doesn’t think I’m trying hard enough, so I tell him about The Badlands. We make a plan to take the trip into the mass of flesh-eaters at the first given opportunity.

But on the third day when Olivia zooms out on the game map and I’m able to easily locate Wesley, I realize the other reason why I couldn’t find him. He’s twenty miles away from here. No longer in Nashville like Declan believed him to be, but on the outskirts of town. And to my relief, his location is nowhere near The Badlands.

I can’t make out his picture, because his face is downcast, but he’s the only Wesley I’ve found and he’s in an obvious flesh-eater den. I can tell because that tiny spot on the map is so overrun by names in red it looks like a bloody palm print.

As soon as Declan and I get the chance, we’re leaving to find him. Then he’s taking me over the border.

Another week passes—no, it crawls at a snail’s pace. Olivia plays The Aftermath a few hours every day, but only when Ethan is around. She comes into the game late one evening while everyone sits around the bar comparing weapons they’ve stolen from the latest raid. She steers me out of The Save and down the steps, parking me nonchalantly on one of the bar stools. And she makes an announcement that gives me my way out.

“I’m going with my father to Calwas for a week as of tomorrow,” she says. “And you’re all going on Group Save.”

I hear them agree, see them nod, and my heart pumps a little harder. A little happier. But then April says, “That’s ridiculous. Don’t be such a selfish, greedy bitch, Olivia. I paid for the game, same as anyone else, so I get to play whenever I want.”

Tapping my fingertips on the counter, I look at Ethan. He smiles at me and shrugs. Then I say, “It’s not open for debate. Don’t like the rules, leave.”

April rises up from her spot on the floor by Jeremy. I expect her to argue with me, then disappear into The Save. Instead, she plants her palms on either side of my chest and shoves me down.

I fall off the stool backward and onto my hands. The old hardwood scrapes my palms raw. For a moment, Olivia doesn’t have me do anything. I don’t move. I don’t blink. This might be a test—Olivia might be attempting to see if I’ll react when threatened—and I’m smart enough to pretend like I’m not at all here. But then April rushes at me again, her fingers curled, flame-red hair flying around her face.

Olivia propels me to my feet. My vision blurs and my head spins, like a wobbling merry-go-round. I catch April’s fist just as it comes toward my face. Twisting her wrist, I kick her feet out from under her. She drops to the floor, and I straddle her waist, jabbing my knees into her sides. I can hear the others behind us—all of them admonishing April. Olivia forces me to repeatedly slam April’s face with her own fist.

I jump into her mind for a split second. She’s punching at her screens calmly—crisp, systematic movements that make me feel cold inside. When I return to my own head, I find myself kneeling over April. I wipe the blood—hers—that’s dripping down the back of my right hand onto her T-shirt and glower at her.

“As I said before, we’re going on a Group Save tomorrow. And if I were you, I’d look for a new clan while I’m away. Wouldn’t want to return to find your character deleted and all your points gone, would you? From what I hear, you might not be able to get a new one. It would be a shame for you to have to become a character yourself.”

My heart skips a beat.

Is it possible for Olivia to have someone else’s character deleted?

Does she hold that much power over the other gamers, and The Aftermath itself?

I walk away as poised as Olivia was in her gaming room, but my insides are pulled into tight, fraying knots. It’s not until I return upstairs later that I realize my own palms are bleeding.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The next afternoon, I stare around The Save for the last time. I am elated, breathless, but I’m also sad. I sit on the corner of the bed where Ethan lies. Landon left him flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. I slide my hand into his. There’s a silly part of me that expects it to be cold, like a corpse, but it’s not.

“I’ll figure out a way to get you out of here, too,” I whisper, although I know he can’t hear me. Just like I know that even if I find a way to free him from the game, he won’t be the person I thought was my friend. He might even hate me. But at least he’d be able to make that decision for himself.

Declan stands in the doorway, his bulging bag high on his back. The corners of his lips twitch. I can’t decide if he looks as though he’s about to smile or frown. Then he says, “Heart-to-heart talks with a comatose person are a waste of your time. And that means you’re wasting my time.”

“Don’t be so insensitive.”

“I’m just saying,” he says. “The person you’re talking to is somewhere else right now—and if that person were awake, he wouldn’t even know who you are.”

“You know, for someone who works for LanCorp, you sure as hell sound an awful lot like a sympathizer.”

“I’m just speaking the truth. Besides, I never said I liked my job.”

“Then quit.”

“After this assignment,” he promises. “Then I’m letting go of LanCorp. Now, say your goodbyes so we can get out of here.”

But why is this particular job so important? Why did he ever start working for a company he loathes in the first place? I imagine his assignment has to do with money. Declan will leave The Aftermath with an enormous paycheck, I’m sure of it.

“Kiss your boyfriend so we can go, Virtue,” he says.

Before I can respond, he’s gone. I hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs, then a bunch of slamming noises on the first floor. Rolling my eyes, I turn back to Ethan. I touch a hand to his cheek.

“If you’re in there—in Rehabilitation or wherever—just know I’m breaking you all out.” My eyes dart around the room. At Jeremy and his dark good looks. And April, whose face is bruised and bloodstained from our gamers’ fight last night. Will she even still be here if I manage to come back for her?

When I head downstairs, Declan is pacing in front of the side door. He holds out my backpack, and I sigh. It’s heavy. Full of weapons and bottles of water. Another day of travel, lugging around a bag that weighs as much as I do. Lucky for me, this is the beginning of the end. I pull the bag onto my back and follow him out of the bar. Away from the life I know.

Away from the game.

* * *

We make the trip in seven hours and arrive during that part of the day when the heat makes everything seem as if it’s moving in slow motion. The flesh-eater den is inside an antebellum home. In my opinion, it’s a strange place for a group of cannibals to hole up. The home is strangely beautiful, majestic, for a pseudoapocalypse—two stories, rows of windows and at least a dozen columns. There’s a balcony, too. It wraps around the second story of the house, and I can imagine stepping out on it, gazing up at the cold night sky.

I imagine Declan with me, our bodies close, our mouths touching.

I breathe deeply. Where did that come from? Heat burns through my body, and I try to avoid making eye contact with him as we sneak past the flesh-eater den.

Use him and get away, I remind myself.

Instead of barging right in, we set up camp across the street in a two-room shack. Declan lays all his gear out on the threadbare carpet while I take inventory of our water. There are sixteen bottles left—eight for each of us. Hopefully, we’ll bag more when we go in to get Wesley.

“How are we doing this?” I ask once I’m done. I twirl his electroshock gun between my fingers. He looks up at me and freezes.

“Don’t play with weapons, Virtue.”

I slide it toward him. It rolls two times, then snags on a piece of the carpet. “Scared I’ll shock you?”

“Scared you’ll shock yourself,” replies Declan. He goes to the window and peeks out the dusty blinds. “They probably won’t log off for another five or six hours at least. There are two guarding the front, two more in the back. Organized. Kind of impressive, if you ask me—usually the people who get these jobs are pretty low on smarts.”

I don’t care much about the flesh-eaters’ organizational skills—not when Declan has a signal jammer in his bag. “Why can’t you just interrupt their signal like before? We go in, get him out and then we can head for the border.”

“Not this time. We already know he’s in there, so we’re better off waiting until their shift ends and they log off the game. Sometime this evening.” Placing his head against the window frame, he winds the looped shade strings around two of his fingers.

“Seems like a lot of work for one character.”

He shrugs. “It’s my last job. Have to go out with a bang. You understand, right?”

I nod, but I don’t comprehend. Not completely anyway. I join him at the window.

“You didn’t mention the dead bodies on the front porch,” I say, lifting one of my eyebrows.

“Didn’t think you wanted to know.”

My shoulder brushes his upper arm, and he smiles down at me. Touching Declan leaves me blinded, electrocuted—but in a good way that also makes me confused and out of breath.

I try and convince myself it’s not him I’m attracted to. I’m enticed by the fact he’s not a character and has the ability to tell me what he’s really thinking. Even if it’s usually something sardonic and irritating.

Yes, that’s it.

“What are you grinning like that for?” he asks.

I didn’t realize I was. Rubbing my lips together, I turn away to hide the warmth rising to my cheeks. And then I catch a glimpse of a familiar face standing guard in front of the mansion.

Mia.

Mia is less than five hundred yards away from where I stand.

Mia, my best friend. The girl who left our clan behind.

Why is she here, living with a group of flesh-eaters?

I somehow manage to keep calm. Declan suggests we move away from the window, and I nod, not really hearing him. We eat CDS meals on a makeshift table—our backpacks shoved together in the middle of the room—and share a bottle of water. The entire time we eat, I’m silent. He thinks I don’t notice, but I can tell he’s staring at me from beneath his long eyelashes.

“Are you okay?” he says at last.

I frown and look behind me, toward the window. “No. I mean, yes. It’s just that—that girl, the one on the front lawn—she reminds me of someone I’ve seen before.”

“In the past few weeks?”

So much longer than that. But I say, “Yes. She was a Survivor then on the map. Guess her gamer finished her treatment, huh?”

“Maybe, or her gamer may have just had to buy a new character. Remember, it’s one of the punishments when a gamer has to restart the game after breaking one of the big rules.”

I feel my chest tighten. Mia disappeared after she was stabbed in the abdomen during a rescue mission in The Badlands. Back then I worried, though of course, I didn’t voice that concern aloud. She’d left no note, no explanation as to why she was going, and nobody else seemed to find it strange that she’d disappeared in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. And now...I swallow the last mouthful of water. My throat is so tight I have trouble forcing it down.

Now she’s a flesh-eater who’s being played by a LanCorp employee in a world supposedly free from violence.

“It seems like a bad dream. All of it. And you know what really makes me sick?” I say. He shrugs and gestures for me to tell him. “I don’t know what I would be if I weren’t in this game. Would I be a sympathizer? Or am I truly violent— Would I be one of these people who live and breathe a bloody fantasy?”

Declan scoots closer to me and takes my hands into his. “You wouldn’t,” he says. His hard fingertips close around my wrists. I inhale. Exhale. Suddenly, I can’t remember how to breathe. “They hacked you up pretty good,” he whispers. “Sensors—they’re supposed to be discreet but yours...”

He rubs his thumbs across the puckered scars, his touch a static current. The hair on the back of my neck and arms stand on end, and it leaves me wanting so much more.

If I’m not careful, his touch will be my downfall.

“Sensors,” I repeat.

He lifts my arms until the slivers of light filtering through the blinds hit the scars. “I keep forgetting—your memory. The sensors transmit your vitals to LanCorp. They’re a little like our AcuTabs except these are internal. Every character has them. Here.” He runs his hands down my body and touches the insides of my ankles. I shiver. Then he presses his fingertips over my heart. “And here, too.”

There are more crude scars in all the places he touched.

“Do you remember any of it? The procedures, I mean?” he says.

The only procedure I have a complete memory of is the one with Dr. Coleman, when I was outside my body and in Olivia’s head. I wish I could trust Declan enough to talk about it. About the Regenerator that looked exactly like a casket and the cold mechanical arms restoring my features. About how I woke up unable to scream because my lungs refused to expand or contract.

About a new memory forming in my head right now—one where I am screaming because there are several physicians installing sensors in my body, sticking sharp needles into my skin. Speaking quickly, excitedly the whole time.

“...have to prepare her fast.”

“He said she’s going into the game tonight, and—”

“Heard she shined last night in War. Ten kills in less than three minutes. Olivia and Claudia will be an incredible force.”

I’m grinding my teeth when my thoughts return to the present. No, I can’t tell Declan about any of those things. Because this boy works for the company that messed with my head and body in the first place.

I pull away from him, coming to my knees, and stuff my hands into my back pockets. Lift my head until I’m staring into his dark gray eyes. “None of it,” I say. “Why’s it matter?”

“Because I’m starting to think I’m losing my way.”

“Why?”

“Because of you.”

But what about me? “It’s hard to be around one of us who has the scars to prove how corrupt LanCorp is, isn’t it?” My reply comes out harsher than I intend. I realize I’m trembling. “Hard to be around someone who thinks for herself?”

“I wouldn’t be able to stand you if you didn’t think for yourself—if you were her.”

I don’t like this feeling, like my mind is being scrambled. I’ve spent too much time with no explanation for the things I know and don’t know. And now that everything is starting to make sense, it’s all falling apart again.

I want to hate Declan for tearing that logic to shreds.

He returns to the window, this time with a pair of binoculars we stole from my clan’s supply stockpile. “Won’t be long now.”

Declan’s right. At any moment this will all be over. Then I’ll be free and he’ll leave.

* * *

When we rest, I dream of Mia.

We’re standing on the roof of the theater we used to live in. I’m on the edge, watching for flesh-eaters across the street, and she’s behind me, talking. Laughing.

At me.

“You won’t ever get out,” she says. I hear her shuffle closer—her boots skid on the hard surface.

My shoulder blades involuntarily jerk together, and I squint at a tiny speck in the distance. “Don’t say that.”

“Don’t kid yourself, then. You’ll die if you leave.”

I shake my head. I can’t afford to believe that—even if this is a nightmare. “No, I’ll die if I stay.” At last, I turn to look at her. She’s an arm’s length away from me now, wearing one of those emotionless smiles I’ve started to despise. Blood coats her chin and neck, like a thick circular layer of drying red paint.

But it’s her eyes that give me reason to pause. They aren’t empty. Her eyes are mad and gleaming. Hungry.

My breath catches, and I take a tiny step backward. My heel slides along the edge of the roof. I clutch at the air to balance myself. She doesn’t help me—she just stands there, with her hands clasped in front of her.

“I’m going to figure out a way to save you all,” I say once I’m upright.

She laughs. “Don’t—we’re better off in here. I’m starving, Claudia. I’m so hungry I can’t think straight.” She takes another step toward me, and her metallic odor burns my nose and throat. “You know how this goes.”

I just want it to end.

Her teeth rip into the right side of my face, my ear, as we tumble from the roof. And right before we crash to the ground, I wonder if there’s anything I could have done to change things.