The ZPOCALYPTO Book Bundle (#1 of 4), page 40
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
If anyone knew about Texas, it was Micah. In fact, he was once a Good Old Boy from the CSS Republic — Confederation of Southern States — before his parents slipped through the wall and defected to Connecticut. He always had a smile on his face and a reputation for never hurting a soul. A living soul, that is. When it came to zombies, on the other hand, he was a ruthlessly efficient, stone-cold killer. The undead rarely stood a chance against him. He was the best game player I’d ever seen. Probably the best hacker, too.
And as I mentioned before, Kelly wasn’t in the same league as Micah in the gaming department — or me, for that matter — but he was still a hell of a lot better than most of our peers. Better than Reggie, that’s for sure. But then again, so were Ash and I. And while Kel could hack, he wasn’t particularly fond of doing so. He was way too uptight for that action, though not uptight enough not to hang out with us or play one of our many hacked versions of the game.
It was this shared passion for gaming that brought us all together in the first place. It’s what kept us together despite the immense differences in our personalities. And it would be the one thing to come between us in the hard times that were yet to come.
Prologue - II
“Why would we even want to go there?” Kelly asked.
One of the virtual motion detectors his avatar had set was flashing red, sending pulses of light out from the hologram and into the basement. It indicated the presence of an undead somewhere close in the virtual city Kelly was exploring. He stared hard into the hologram, searching for the killer we all knew was about to pounce.
“Just to see.”
“There’s nothing worth seeing in the Wastes.”
The Wastes was a general term for the coastal areas that had been decimated by rising sea levels. Pretty much every city along the Eastern seaboard had such areas, variably referred to as the Wastes or Wastelands. People were forbidden to enter them, lest they become havens for anti-linkers and thus potential hotspots for outbreaks. They were now urban ghost towns, empty shells of buildings slowly being taken back by Mother Nature. Long Island — LI for short — was one such place. It also just happened to be the site of the country’s worst outbreak.
Reggie shrugged. “You need more reason, brah? How about to see if we actually can do it. So that we can say we did.”
“Now who’s lame?”
“It’s not lame, brah.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Ashley chimed in. “You know me. I’ll try anything once.”
“Anything?” Reggie asked, waggling his eyebrows suggestively at her.
Ash gave him a withering look. “I’m saying we haven’t done a single damn exciting thing all summer, and it’s almost over!”
I wanted to pinch her nose again just for that last part.
“Well, I can think of a few new and exciting things we could try,” Reggie said. “Just me and you. Perhaps some forbidden lands we can explore.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, loverboy.”
For a moment, I felt jealous of their little game. I wanted that for me and Kelly. I also resented that Kelly would expect me to take his side and dismiss the whole idea, even though I’d already been prepared to do just that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how breaking into Long Island — well, planning something like it — would liven things up for all of us. It would at least take our minds off of school and the inevitable dreariness of those long winter days ahead, hunched over our desks in soul-sucking classrooms, where the heaters were so bad the risk of hypothermia wasn’t just theoretical. Of our teachers delivering the same old boring monologues, like worn out Shakespearean actors. To teach or not to teach, who the hell cares? Whether tis nobler to suffer learning about the slings and arrows of America’s Twelve Day War, or to rehash the Life Service Commitment debates. To die or not to die, not really up for debate anymore. Either way, our brains get eaten.
Ashley didn’t ask why I was giggling this time. She and Reggie were too distracted exchanging suggestive glances. And Kelly was back to his game.
“Think of the bragging rights,” Micah said, apparently the only one still interested in keeping the discussion alive.
“That’s no reason to do anything,” Kelly rebutted. “Especially something this stupid and illegal. Who’re you going to brag to?”
“It was just a suggestion. Don’t be such a weenie!” It was Reggie’s typical retort whenever any of us disagreed with something he supported. Geniuses if we liked his idea, weenies if we didn’t. We’d usually let him get away with it because he was so damn big and lovable and often didn’t mean anything by it. We also knew that he liked starting arguments, though he rarely stayed to finish them, so egging him on wasn’t a good idea.
That got Kelly going. He started reciting a litany of reasons why it was stupid: the impossible logistics of breaking into what had once been a militarized zone, the physical blockades, the electromagnetic barriers.
With Reggie no longer paying her any attention, Ash quickly grew bored and dragged me upstairs with her. She said she needed to use the bathroom, and the one down in the basement was nastier than the ones at highway gas stations. But I knew she never liked wandering around Micah’s upstairs by herself. She said it felt spooky, like his parents were ghosts watching over her.
By the time we rejoined the boys, the argument had burned itself out again. Micah and Kelly were back to playing Zpocalypto, still on the same level they’d been on when we left, and Reggie was asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. His lips were crinkled into a bit of a smile.
Ashley kicked him. “Hey, perv! Make some room. Quit hogging the couch.”
Reggie opened one eye and the smile broadened, but he didn’t immediately move. “Where’d you guys go? I missed you.”
“Upstairs to have hot lesbian sex in Micah’s bed.”
“That was quick.”
“Yeah, well, you know easy Jessie is. A touch here, a rub there, and BAM! She’s done.”
“Ashley!” I squealed.
“I’m just repeating what Kelly says.”
“He never said that!”
I glanced over at Kel, but he clearly hadn’t heard.
My face burned. I may have lost my virginity at fifteen, but I was still a bit of a prude when it came to talking about my sexual experiences, especially around her. She could be so over-the-top sometimes that, as the only other representative of our gender in our group, I often felt obliged to act as a sort of counterbalance.
It wasn’t that she was slutty. Ash’s shtick was that she cared little about what people thought about her. She always said whatever was on her mind. That was the general consensus, anyway. Secretly though, I believed she did care, a lot, because why would she say things like that all the time unless she did? It was like some kind of self-defense mechanism.
Reggie snorted, thrilled to see my discomfort. But he didn’t dwell. He turned his attention back to Ash, probably hoping for more details, even if they were made up. “There’s room right here,” he said, patting his lap.
Ashley put her hand on her hip and tapped her foot impatiently.
Reggie’s smile widened. He gave her a good, long, appraising look, beginning with the thumb she’d hooked into the waistband of her jeans, pulling it down over the arch of her hips and showing a hint of her purple lacy underwear. His eyes moved up and dwelled overlong at the low neckline of her tee shirt and her more-than-ample breasts. At last, his gaze reached her eyes. Not once did she flinch or blush. If anything, the look on her face grew even more defiant.
“Sorry I missed the show,” he said.
Ashley glanced pointedly at the bulge in his jeans and smiled. “I’m sure you can fill in the details just fine with that imagination of yours.”
Reggie chuckled. He pulled his legs up and swung them over the front of the couch. Ash plunked down next to him with a heavy exhale, her arms crossed over her stomach, lifting her breasts. He swung his arm over her shoulders and reached down until his fingers dangled a hair’s width away from them. This thing between them wasn’t official, but everyone knew they were doing it. At least whenever there wasn’t anything better going on. Or anyone.
I glanced past my boyfriend to the flickering HG image he was so focused on in front of him. Still on level eleven— his new nemesis. If I were a betting girl, I’d wager he was on his last life and was about to die. Again.
Poor Kelly. As good as he was, he just couldn’t seem to make it past this level no matter how many times he tried. But I didn’t feel much pity for him at the moment. Sometimes, like right now, when he wasn’t paying any attention to me, his obsession with the game kind of pissed me off. He could learn a thing a two from Reggie.
“So... what’d you guys decide?” Ashley asked. “About Gameland.”
I noticed that Reggie’s thumb was now making contact with exposed skin. He was slowly brushing it back and forth, each time moving slightly deeper underneath her shirt. Ashley had to have been exerting some kind of superhuman willpower not to react, because even I could feel this electric sensation passing through my own body. It was quickly accompanied by a twinge of embarrassment and jealousy. Reggie was a real code geek, just like the rest of us, but no one could say he didn’t have interests outside of the virtual realm.
“Well, technically, it wouldn’t actually be Gameland,” Reggie told Ash. “It’d be one of the Forbidden Zones on LI— an outer zone. I think the Gameland arena is closer to the center of the island. That’s what Micah says, anyway. The arcade’s pretty heavily barricaded to keep the Players from getting out, but not so for the rest of the island.”
Players were what they called the implanted zombies that get recruited into The Game, real life flesh and bone avatars for the people who manage to get invites. Players with a capital P. That’s how Arc Entertainment brands everything, with capital letters, like product names. Like they owned them. I guess they technically do.
“There’s still the Infected Undead on the rest of the island,” I pointed out, referring to the zombies left behind after the outbreak.
Reggie chuffed. “Yeah, like there’d be any IUs left after thirteen years. They’re all dead by now. And by dead I mean double dead. There’s been nothing for them to eat.” He waggled the fingers of his unoccupied hand spookily at me and added, “No brains, anyway.”
“You don’t know that.”
He shook his head. “You’re beginning to sound like your downer boyfriend. He says it’s not even worth discussing because it’s not doable.”
“I never said it wasn’t doable,” I argued. “Or worth discussing.”
“So, you do think it’s possible?”
I hemmed and hawed.
Reggie smiled, and I realized too late that he’d been egging me on, willing me to contradict Kelly. And I’d fallen for it. I should’ve known better. Anything Kelly said, Reg always said the opposite. And now that Kelly was saying it was impossible to break into LI, it just made Reggie even more determined to get everyone else to say it was.
Kelly paused his game so he could once more tick off the reasons on his fingers why he was right and we were wrong: “Fifty foot wall around the entire island, electrified razor wire, all the bridges demoed, no-fly zones, biometric mines in the East River, electromagnetic barrier—”
“Told you EM doesn’t count, brah. We’re not talking about hacking in, we’re talking about breaking in. Remember? So chillax about the EM.”
“It’ll fry your linc,” I pointed out, reminding him of the federally-mandated neural implants we all had in the backs of our heads.
“Implant shmimplant.”
“Even assuming the EM’s not an issue, there’s just no way,” Kelly persisted. “I’m telling you, it’s physically impossible.”
“Maybe there is a way,” Micah said, still playing. He was one of those freaky types who could give a hundred percent of his attention to something like Zpocalypto or Warlock Four and yet still be fully engaged in a conversation, all while being stoned off his gourd. I could never understand how he did it. The guy was more than just scary smart. It was like he could partition his brain into distinct segments — one for gaming, one for being wasted, one for everything else — yet still use them all at full capacity. He was like a quantum computer processing multiple simulations simultaneously. “I’ll give it some thought tonight.”
“I know!” Ashley exclaimed. “We’ll just sprinkle a little fairy dust on our bodies and fly ourselves over the wall.”
“I volunteer to sprinkle fairy dust over your body, if you do mine,” Reggie offered.
I snorted.
He looked over at me with mock pain in his eyes. “Every time someone disses a fairy, another zombie gets its wings. You know that, right?”
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t help laughing. “It should be teeth. It gets its teeth.”
“That’s just stupid, Reggie!” Kelly griped. I could see he was getting frustrated with his performance in the game, and now he was taking it out on us. “Besides, you’d have to get through Manhattan’s restricted zones first. They check IDs.”
“That’s true,” I said. I’d gone there on occasion with my brother, who was a cop and had a special pass. I recalled the checkpoints and the guards questioning us.
Kelly smiled and nodded at me, thinking I was siding with him. “So, can we put this stupid idea to bed?”
I went over and tried to pull him out of the game. He started to complain, but stopped when I made him sit down in the unused, overstuffed armchair, and then plopped myself down on his lap. “Yes,” I said, “let’s put this bad boy to bed.”
Kelly glanced past me to give Reggie a smug look. But I knew he wouldn’t like what I was about to say next:
“If Reggie and Micah say they can come up with a plan, then let them. I’d like to hear what it is.”
Kelly’s face pinched from my betrayal, and he leaned away from me, hurt.
Before he could say anything, I leaned in and smushed my lips against his. It wasn’t one of our usual hot-n-heavy lip-bruising kisses — I didn’t want to look like I was competing with Ash and Reg, and I didn’t want to start anything Kelly wasn’t ready to finish, I just wanted to soften the blow. “It’s the only way Reggie will ever shut up about it.”
Reggie whooped in triumph. “This is going to be so much fun!”
That was weeks ago now. How many exactly, I don’t know. I’ve lost count of the days.
Reggie is leaning on me, concentrating his entire body weight on the bandage at my side, as if he’s afraid my guts are going to explode out of me at any moment. He no longer looks so sure of himself.
“I knew this was bad,” he growls. “Right from the start I knew we shouldn’t have come here. That’s what I tried to tell you guys.”
I look up at Kelly on the other side of the glass door — what’s left of him, anyway — and I see now that if anyone was right, it was him. He was right all along. I just wish he’d tried harder to stop us.
I don’t blame either of them, though. I don’t blame anyone. Not myself, not even the asshole who first planted the idea in Reggie’s brain. We each had our own reason for coming. That’s what really drove us to do it. But would we have come if we knew then what we know now? Would we still have agreed to try?
I don’t know. I like to think not.
But then again, I don’t think we really had any choice in it at all.
As I lie here dying, lost somewhere in the middle of Gameland with zombies closing in and wanting nothing more than to feed on those of us still drawing air, the truth finally hits home: It never really mattered what we wanted or didn’t want. Arc Entertainment had this all planned from the very beginning. They wanted us in The Game. That’s why it was so easy for us to break in.
And why getting out has been such a killer.
I slowly reach behind my back, to the cold metal of the gun tucked into my waistband. I’ve got one bullet left. Just one. I know it sounds cliché, but I’ve been saving it for just this moment.
My fingers wrap around the grip; they find the safety and flick it off. They touch the curve of the trigger, test its resistance. Reggie sees the wince on my face as I struggle to pull it free, but he thinks it’s just the last stage of the infection. He hasn’t yet noticed the gun. All he knows is that the disease is spreading, growing, taking over. He knows the agony I’ll soon be going through. He knows the monster I’m about to become. And he also knows what he’ll need to do before that happens.
I cough. “Got any antivenin?” I ask, trying for a little humor. “Might have some in my virtual backpack.”
He smiles a wistful smile and whispers my name.
I draw the gun out and hold it away from me. It’s so damn heavy. They all see it at the same time, though it doesn’t register with any of them right away what I’m about to do with it. Then, all at once, they figure it out, and they start yelling for me to stop.
But I don’t hear them. All I can hear as I aim and squeeze the trigger is Kelly — my poor, dear, lost Kelly — whispering inside my head how much he loves me.
He was a far better player than any of us realized.
Or deserved.
Episode 1
HACKED INTO THE GAME
Part 1
The Plan. Or Rather the Pathetic Lack of One.
Chapter 1
Two days before breaking in.
Thursday mornings during summer break are set aside for open sparring at my dojang. I’ve been studying hapkido since I was nine and recently received my 1st white tip for my black belt. What prompted my older brother Eric to push me into martial arts was the second outbreak, the one that happened down in DC. It was quickly contained, but he thought a little personal self-defense training might come in handy, just in case something were to go wrong with the Stream network up here and unimplanted zombies got unleashed into downtown Greenwich, Connecticut.
