The Aftermath Read online

  “We thought we’d find you here, Virtue,” a voice says behind me. I turn around slowly to face a man. He’s dressed differently from the other moderators—in a light-colored uniform with the LanCorp insignia on the front. And he’s smiling. “If you’ll kindly come with us so that nobody gets hurt, we have a few—”

  I lift the Glock and pull the trigger, cutting him off midsentence. There’s a look of surprise on his face as he falls next to the blood on the floor.

  I don’t really care that three other people come barging in and send electricity thrumming through my veins.

  This time when I pass out, there’s no other Claudia. No memories. No voices or out-of-body experiences, either. There’s just me, suspended in blackness and silence and pain. Like a puppet dangling in a dark room with a million needles poking into her flesh. I don’t have time to ask myself if I’m alive. Something shocks the back of my neck, and I convulse. I open my eyes, shrieking and choking on my own vomit, unable to move because I’m cuffed to a chair.

  “Welcome back,” a man says, placing one hand on either side of my seat. He leans down so that his face hovers right over mine. He glances at his watch. “You’ve been out for nearly half an hour, Virtue.” My vision is hazy, and I have to squint so I can get a clear view of him. Short and stocky, with close-cropped auburn hair and a smooth face. He’s wearing the same outfit as the man I killed upstairs.

  As he smiles down at me with straight teeth, I picture him with longer hair that brushes his collar, gapped teeth and a pockmarked face. Before he’s able to speak again, I hear myself murmur, “Bennett.”

  “Glad to see you remember me, Claudia. I’ll be escorting you out of the game, to meet with Mr. Lancaster,” he says.

  I remember him almost too vividly. He escorted me just over three years ago, too. To a blue-lighted laboratory where I was surrounded by machines—some transparent, some stainless steel and others the same metallic white of the Regenerator. I’d turned to him, with tears streaming down my face. “What he’s doing to me is wrong.”

  “You’re a character now in LanCorp’s newest game.” He’d avoided my eyes, but when I tried to jerk away from him, he’d pressed an electroshock gun to my rib cage. “And if you try something reckless, I will electrocute you, Virtue. I don’t care who you are.”

  As the memory dissolves, I look up into his eyes. “You killed Jeremy,” I whisper accusingly. I won’t say anything about the memory. Why bring up something that doesn’t fully make sense to me?

  He leans back. “Well, you killed Anthony, did you not?”

  I don’t even flinch when he tells me the name of the person I shot. Nor do I point out that Jeremy was dead before I made the move to do it. I swallow hard and choke out, “Where’s April and Ethan?”

  “Where’s Hastings?”

  I stare at him, unblinking. Unsure of what he’s talking about. After a moment of silence, he grits his teeth and shakes me. The cuffs around my wrists bite into my flesh. “Where’s Hastings?” he repeats.

  “I’ve no idea who the hell you’re talking about,” I say.

  He hits me. So hard I taste blood and spit. “Don’t be an idiot, girl. Declan Hastings, the boy you’ve been traveling with. Dark hair, gray eyes—a sarcastic little prick?”

  Declan. Of course that’s who he’s talking about. I feel stupid for not catching on to Bennett immediately and even more ignorant for never asking Declan what his last name was. Funny to halfway fall for a boy when I don’t even know his full name.

  But even if I’d asked, what’s to say he would’ve told me the truth? Just about everything that came out of Declan’s mouth was a lie.

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  Seething, Bennett draws back to hit me again, but then he catches himself. Balls up his fist. He looks over his shoulder to where the two other men stand at attention with their hands behind their backs and feet spread apart.

  “Get me the other two characters,” he orders.

  My heart jumps as the men go into the basement. They wouldn’t bring back dead bodies. Ethan and April must be alive. A few minutes later, my thoughts are confirmed when the rest of my former clan is led into the bar. The men force them down on their knees and position electroshock guns on the backs of their heads, execution-style.

  I try to keep all emotion off my face. If I pretend as though these people mean nothing to me, they won’t be hurt. I narrow my eyes. “What are they here for?”

  Bennett gestures to the man behind April, and he nods. He tangles his hand into her red hair, then jerks her head up. Her face is bloody, bruised. And when our eyes meet, there’s fear in hers.

  She’s sentient.

  I draw a painful breath into my lungs. Shift my eyes away from her quickly. “You get off on torturing someone who’s helpless?” I ask, my voice cracking midsentence.

  “Where’s Hastings?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.”

  April lets out a scream that echoes throughout the room, and she sags forward, her face down toward the floor. I can see her tears dripping onto the hardwood.

  “You would go off with a stranger with no clue where he’s going?” Bennett demands.

  “Of course I knew where he was going. The border. Out of the game.”

  “And after that?”

  I shrug. “Why would he tell me that? I told you—I don’t know.”

  Bennett flicks his hand, and there’s a loud thud, followed by Ethan coughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him curled into a ball, holding his stomach. He’s spitting up blood.

  I cringe and squeeze my eyes shut. “Stop it.”

  “I don’t know how,” Bennett says, mocking me.

  The two men begin beating April and Ethan. Kicking and punching until their fragile bones give, the crunching sound even more deafening than the cries for help. I don’t know if either of them realizes that the men have drawn their electroshock guns, but I do. And a moment later, the scent of burned flesh mixes in with the odor of blood and vomit.

  I can’t watch this. Can’t stomach it. But Bennett knew that all along.

  “He’s going to kill Lancaster,” I gasp. “Declan’s going to go kill Thomas Lancaster. Are you happy?”

  Bennett holds up his hand, and the men stop. “Now was that so hard?” He grins down at me, winking. “We’ve already caught them, by the way. Your boyfriend and the other two are in custody. In a holding facility.”

  Suddenly, my chest is on fire and I can’t catch my breath. These men just beat my friends—and for absolutely no reason. And LanCorp has Declan. I force myself to breathe in, breathe out. I look up from my lap just as Ethan glances up. Our eyes lock. There’s so much fury in his, anger directed toward me, it almost knocks me breathless again.

  Then Bennett says to the two guards, “Take these two back to the cellar. Ms. Virtue and I have to catch our ride.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In the past several weeks, I’ve had hundreds of fantasies about the day I would leave The Aftermath. In each and every one of my fantasies, I exit the game happy—utterly unsure of my future but so ecstatic that I made it to Olivia and Declan’s world, to the Provinces, away from the horrors of The Aftermath, that nothing else matters.

  I am leaving the game now in a car, one of those self-driving vehicles I witnessed once before through my gamer’s eyes. I’m so close to the border that if my wrists weren’t shackled, I could reach out the car window and skim my hand along the metal. But I’m not happy. I’m not free. Instead, I’m preparing myself.

  For whatever will happen to me at The Aftermath’s holding facility.

  For meeting with Lancaster himself.

  For more torture and pain.

  For death.

  The gates rattle open, and the car speeds through it. For some reason,
I expect to feel something—a tingle in my head or a temporary loss of consciousness—but nothing happens. I rest my head against the window. Stare out the tinted glass into the night. There’s nothing but forest on either side of the highway. It looks just like the game, and my chest goes numb. Was I fooling myself, thinking that the outside world was something worth fighting for?

  Was everything in Olivia’s head my imagination—some other sick effect of the injury that started all this?

  I feel heat behind my eyes. I drag my gaze down to my fingers. The inside of the car is dark, but I can see the bruises on the backs of them, running up my wrists and forearms. Knocks from the moderators I fought off with Declan and Wesley and Mia. Blows from the guards who killed Jeremy—who may have killed...

  Just thinking about my friends sends me reeling forward. I cast a glance at Bennett sitting on my left side. Does he know if the rest of my friends are still alive? Or would he tell me they’re gone already.

  Deleted.

  Dead.

  Casualties of The Aftermath.

  A few minutes later, the car rolls to a stop in front of a building—the only one around as far as my eyes can see—that must be at least 150 floors high. The wide tinted-glass doors at the lower level slide apart, and the car moves forward, parking on a lift. Is this the holding facility that Bennett had mentioned?

  I bounce in my seat to try and peek out the car window as the lift rises up, but Bennett sinks his fingers into my shoulders, slamming me back. Out of instinct, I clasp my hands together and fling them up at his face in an attempt to shake him off me.

  He grabs his forehead, and I clamber to the far side of the bench seat. I see a bright green light reflecting off the glass—the lift is on floor number seventy-nine and steadily climbing. Is the creator of The Aftermath waiting for me on one of these floors?

  Something slams into the left side of my face—it feels like a brick—and I sag down with my head spinning. Bennett’s face hovers over mine, contorted with rage. There’s a gash in the middle of his forehead where the sharp part of my shackles hit him. Blood trickles from it, making a thin line down his nose.

  “I will use force against you if necessary,” he says. There’s a dangerous edge to his voice, and I notice his fingers are wrapped around the hilt of a knife. My knife. I hold back a whimper. “Stay put until we get clearance to go inside.”

  Waiting for this to happen seems to take an agonizingly long time, and by the time two guards come to the car for me, I’m shaking. They escort Bennett and me into an elevator and take me down more than one hundred stories to the ground floor of the building.

  And into a large white cell.

  Before Bennett slams the cell door in my face, he says, “Get dressed for your meeting with Mr. Lancaster.”

  Then I’m left alone. Cold and shivering, with my head spinning from everything that’s happened and my stomach in tangles from the quick ride here. I’m so alone it hurts my chest. I sit down on the corner of the small bed in the far corner of the cell. I drag the neatly tucked white quilt over my shoulders. Drape it around my body.

  My cell is an extravagance compared to the shelters I lived in while I was in The Aftermath. It’s large—the size of four of the prison cells. There’s a large square piece of glass on the wall to the left of me and beneath it is a desk complete with a cushiony chair. In the opposite corner of the room is a standing shower with frosted glass. And hanging on the door handle is a towel and a mesh bag with some sort of digital tag attached to it. I’m so dazed that I’m not even aware I’ve gotten up until I stare directly down at the text scrolling across the thin screen.

  Name: Claudia Virtue

  ID #: 001-002

  Location: THE AFTERMATH

  Procedure: Inpatient/Chip Configuration

  I know I should be freaking out right now, wondering what the procedure means. But all I can think about is the day I met Declan and how I made up an ID number when he questioned me. Maybe I’m an idiot for thinking about him at a time like this, but there’s nothing I want more than to have the chance to tell him he was wrong. There are identification numbers!

  I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to rub it in. Angry and hopeless, I let the tag drop to the floor and step on it. It crunches under my worn sneakers, a tiny pile of broken machinery on the polished floor.

  Someone clears his throat. I spin around, dropping the bag, but there’s nobody behind me. Not physically anyway. The glass above the desk shines. A hologram of a man comes out of it and walks across the room toward me. He’s staring at me intently. “Good evening, Claudia.” Surprisingly, his voice isn’t cruel. It’s hesitant, questioning.

  I take a step in his direction. When I hesitate, stopping halfway between the shower and him, he motions me forward. “Please, come closer. I promise I won’t bite.”

  I comply. Even though he’s a hologram and I know he can’t possibly hurt me, I keep some distance between us. Hell, even if he could hurt me, there’s not a thing I can do to stop him. I’m caged in. It’s impossible for me to run. “Who are you?”

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  I do. He’s the same man I saw in my gamer’s mind the day she complained about the newest version of the game being inadequate. He sat next to Dr. Coleman and he was just as angry as Olivia. But he’s not referring to that day. He expects me to have memories of him from the past, before The Aftermath. I don’t.

  I barely remember myself back then. The few memories that have flitted through my head the past several days are so foggy, I’m unable to separate reality from illusion.

  Maybe it’s all a fantasy.

  When I don’t answer him, he says, “I’m Thomas Lancaster. Do you...remember me, Claudia?” I shake my head, and his lips curl down in disappointment. “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Are you afraid of me?” I counter.

  He chuckles—a sound so creepy, it sends a harsh shudder through me. “Of course not. You’re a child, my dear.” His expression turns serious and he rubs his chin. “But I’m happy to have a conference with you as soon as I come to the premises. Your...glitch caught me off guard.”

  A conference. He makes it sound as if we’re business partners instead of a diabolical game creator and one of his characters. The corner of my mouth quirks up. “Sorry, maybe next time I glitch I’ll try and accommodate your schedule.”

  “Oh, no, Ms. Virtue. You’ll never glitch like this again.”

  My breath whooshes out of my nostrils as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. I wrap my arms across my chest. It helps control my trembling. “You’re going to delete me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Claudia. We’ve had this conversation before, remember? Now, be a good girl and get dressed. The guards will bring your dinner along in an hour or so and I’ll be there to speak with you very, very soon.”

  I’ve got so many questions. When did we have this talk before? And if he’s not going to delete me, what will happen to me? Before I can murmur even a syllable, he holds his hand up and shushes me.

  “Do as I’ve told you,” he says. Someone must be speaking to him, because he turns his eyes to the right and shifts his head down slightly, as if he’s listening to something. He frowns and growls a command before he addresses me again. “And, Claudia? No fighting the guards. Let’s do this without anyone getting hurt. We’ve already wasted a large sum of money tonight.”

  Then the image disappears, and the screen looks like thin glass again. “I’m dead,” I say over and over again as I stand beneath a heavy stream of hot water in the shower, letting motorized arms that extend from the tile walls wash my body with soft sponges and soaps and perfumes.

  I dress in the clothes I find in the bag—baggy underclothes and oversize starched pants and a shirt. There are white sandals, too, that hurt my blistered feet when I slide
them on. I wait huddled on my bed until there’s a high-pitched sound at the desk and a tray of food comes up on a stand. When I pull the tray off the platform, it disappears, and the wood closes back together. As I turn to go back to my bed, I catch a glimpse of Bennett outside my cell door. I rush forward.

  “Is Lancaster here yet?” I ask, but he shakes his head. He’s covered the gash on his forehead with a large white bandage. Probably just a placeholder until he can get to a Regenerator.

  “Eat,” he orders. Then he disappears.

  I don’t want to eat the food. Thomas Lancaster puts kids and anyone else he can find into role-playing games to be controlled by other people. There’s a good chance he’s lying about not deleting me, and I don’t want to take anything from him. I return to the bed, where I curl into the fetal position.

  But when the screen lights up again and a woman starts talking, I’m lured to the desk. And I can’t resist popping food into my mouth as I sink down into the chair.

  “A leader in defense and medical technology, LanCorp introduced cerebrum links to the public over five years ago with War, the first reality role-play game in history,” a woman says. Her voice is soothing, melodic. It almost makes up for the footage on the screen. Blood and death and violence. The same images from the memory I had the day Declan told me about deletion in the playground by the bar.

  “Today, LanCorp continues to provide quality characters and a variety of games tailored to treat those diagnosed with the various violence disorders, including The Aftermath, the number one reality RPG for three years running, designed for patients with VG-B.”

  Clips from The Aftermath alternate with promotional images. I see a boy and a girl sneaking stealthily into a parking garage—there are visible shadows in the windows and I gasp. They’re the Survivors we saved, just before I almost prevented Olivia from killing Reese.