The Aftermath Page 4

  “And let it be known, I am dedicated to this cause,” the man adds, and applause erupts around him.

  My nightmare disintegrates the moment I fling myself at him, my fist tight around the sharp needle I find hidden in the waistband of my starched pants.

  My eyes open, and I’m back in my body, staring around The Save.

  I am human.

  And I know with conviction that my dream—at least the second one about the crowd—was a memory, something that happened to me before The Aftermath. As I lie on my side, my arm falling asleep from the weight of my body, I’m ecstatic—or as ecstatic as a person who just found out her life is a fake can be. My first memory. My first genuine, frightening memory that doesn’t involve The Aftermath.

  I am not just some virtual person stuck in a reality that was created by computers. I am something else. Something called a character. A human trapped inside an intentional hell that’s been created by designers—other humans. These are my last thoughts just before the electric current that makes my teeth chatter descends upon me.

  And this time, it powers me down completely so that there are no more memories.

  * * *

  “We need to plan a massive raid,” I’m saying to my clan when the other girl inside my head flips the lights back on. I’m positioned on top of my sleeping bag in a sitting position with my legs crossed at the ankles. “It’s been too long, and I feel like I’m losing my touch.”

  “Losing your touch?” April turns her gaze toward me, and my shoulders lift in a shrug. “Okay, what are you thinking, Claudia?”

  “We could go to The Badlands,” Jeremy suggests, rolling a bottle of water to April. That’s where we’d found her a couple of months ago. The Badlands are a part of the city where a bunch of flesh-eaters live inside and around a football stadium—a death trap that’s only intensified by the massive sinkholes in the football field and where some of the buildings once stood. When the flesh-eaters are finished with their victims, those holes become a resting place for the dead.

  The Badlands are about five miles south of here, and the last time we made the trip there, we killed several flesh-eaters. Raided everyone we came in contact with, cannibals and Survivors. Everything we did was dangerous and reckless, and I remember it all.

  When I realize that I am inside the white room again, I don’t think I’m the only one those memories belong to.

  “If we go to The Badlands, we’ll have to use points to upgrade weapons. It’s not like we can just go in with knives and a few guns,” April complains. On the screen, she’s twirling the ends of her red hair around her skinny wrist. Three twirls. Unravel. Four twists. Unknot. I remember all the times I’ve told her she should upgrade to a haircut.

  “That’s how you’ll get caught,” I’d told her once. “Some flesh-eater is going to snag you by all that stupid hair and I’m not going to do a damn thing to save you. I don’t care how many points you offer me.”

  At the time, I’d inwardly cringed over how callous and heartless I sounded. How confusing my words were, when truly I’d do just about anything to keep my group safe. Now I don’t think it was myself at all saying that to April.

  “You have to spend points to make points,” the girl in the white room says in sync with me inside the game. “Unless you’re too afraid of failing, April. If that’s the case, maybe you’d be better suited for another group. One that moves at your pace. I’m sure you’ll finish up by the time you’re twenty-one.”

  “Olivia—” Ethan begins, but he quickly corrects himself. “Claudia...maybe we should save The Badlands for later. Give ourselves another month or two to load up on some better weapons, get some new supplies.”

  Olivia, the girl in the ten-sided room, doesn’t say anything for several seconds. She taps her foot against the white laminate floor. She’s wearing heels. Just like in the nightmare that I had after I was hit in the courthouse.

  But I don’t think that was a dream, either. It must have been what was happening to me at that very moment. Could it be that the Regenerator and Dr. Coleman are both real? At last, I hear Olivia sigh. “You, too, Ethan?” He nods. The way he moves his head so quickly can’t be good for the gash under his chin. “Fine. Let’s do things your way this time. See how well we manage.”

  I can tell she’s livid, though, by her sharp, jerky motions. She slams her hands out in front of her, which pulls up a screen that lists supplies. There are weapons—every knife and gun and hacksaw that’s come into my possession over the past three years, as well as my clothing and the little bit of food I currently have. The Glock is on this list, and so is the cold-weather jacket I took from the woman at the courthouse.

  More than thirty-six months of my life, summarized on ten oversize screens.

  “But just so you know, I’ve plenty of good weapons to go to The Badlands.” The center screen focuses in on April as Olivia and I say this. She starts to say something else, but then there’s a knock on the door behind her. “What?” she snarls, turning around.

  “Your car is waiting upstairs to take you to your academy,” a woman says.

  “I’m not going today.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Get off now or I’ll come in and disconnect you.”

  When Olivia twists back to her screens and the game, she is seething. Her hands are flushed as she works her way through the various menus, and I imagine her face is just as red. I wonder what she looks like. “Ugh...I’ve got to go to class. Hopefully, I’ll be back tonight.”

  A minute later she opens a screen with a square in the middle that reads, “Gamer Name” (GmrGrl06) and “Password,” which is so small I’m unable to read what it is. Below that information is a purple horizontal block with the word Logout inside of it. When she slaps her hand over the bar, the images on the screens disappear, leaving nothing but transparent glass.

  This is when I completely lose her, and I find myself in the exact spot I was the night before. Flickering in and out of consciousness. One moment there’s blackness—so dark it’s as if I don’t exist at all—and the next I’m in her head for a few seconds, observing flashes of what she sees. A world made of buildings that are whole and vehicles that aren’t rusted and broken and people who aren’t emaciated and hopeless. A world that is vastly different from The Aftermath. This change in cognizance happens so often and so quickly that when I find myself partially awake inside the museum, surrounded by a bunch of blank faces, my head is reeling from dizziness.

  My hands ball into fists.

  Because I will them to.

  “Wake up,” I try to say between my clenched teeth. It comes out sluggish and barely audible—the static current is slinking down my face. “Get up and fight this.”

  Before I go to sleep again, I think of Olivia, the girl in the decagon room. The girl I’ve dreamed about.

  The girl who operates a character named Claudia Virtue in The Aftermath.

  It’s all a game to her, and she’s controlling me. Olivia.

  My gamer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A day and a half of wavering in and out of Olivia’s mind and consciousness passes. I can’t figure out why it’s happening, but being inside her head is better than being lifeless in my own. When she next comes back to the game, and I’m completely aware of myself, it is daylight, raining. Thunder rattles the skylights and reverberates off the sculptures. I’m immediately greeted by April. Ethan has told her we must find a new place to live because the museum is no longer a viable option. Apparently, he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d change shelters for me.

  No, not for me. For my gamer.

  For Olivia.

  I shrug into a thin gray hoodie, and I’m powerless to stop myself from stupidly venturing out into the humid storm. Everything feels different now that I’m aware a stranger is in my head, responsible for my for
getfulness and the inconsistency between my thoughts and movements and words. I want time to absorb this revelation, to try and figure out why I can think for myself but not even lift my own hand if I wish to. What I don’t want is a new useless mission that may get me killed.

  I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been.

  “Jeremy’s coming, too,” April announces. She pulls her empty bag over her shoulder. I study her carefully. The way she buckles her holster of weapons around her waist—it shimmies down to hang low on her hips, just above the waistband of her shorts. I study the robotic way she flips her red hair over one shoulder. The way her blue eyes stare me down. Unfocused and glassy, just like the rest of my clan.

  “Five minutes—that’s all I’m waiting. I don’t have much time today,” I say. I imagine Olivia in her brightly lit room, checking the time every few seconds as she glares at April’s image on the screen.

  Jeremy takes another two minutes. He’s dressed in ragged jeans and a T-shirt with a faint stain on the sleeve. I remember this shirt—it’s the one he wore when he and Ethan ransacked a flesh-eater den several months ago. Looking at Jeremy in that T-shirt makes me think of the woman who died at the courthouse in my most recent raid. The one who, for the briefest moment, had reminded me of my friend Mia. A lump forms in my throat.

  Olivia’s killed so many people for something that’s not even her reality. And she’s used me to do it.

  “You are pathetically slow,” Olivia says through me.

  Jeremy turns his head in my direction and gives me a dead smile. “This’ll be over quickly.”

  I lift the padlock hanging from the ropes of chains on the door and begin picking it open with a rusty paper clip I find in the pocket of my shorts. “You say that every time we go out.”

  Jeremy reaches past me and wiggles the bent metal around until the lock comes undone in his large hands. He dangles it from his thumb and index finger before dropping it into my palm, his fingertips brushing my thumb. My heart hammers painfully in my chest, and chills slink across every inch of my skin.

  This is the first time I’ve ever been spooked by Jeremy’s touch.

  He’d joined our group shortly after Mia. Back then I’d believed Jeremy was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Ridiculously tall, he has smooth olive skin, light brown eyes and a nose that hasn’t been broken repeatedly like Ethan’s.

  Now that I know my life is a game, and I’m certain Jeremy and April and Ethan aren’t at all who I believed them to be... Well, I’m not sure what I think. His eyes frighten me. I want to release a sigh of relief as Jeremy lets go of my hand and begins joking about my fondness for drawn-out raids.

  I smile and nod, agreeing with everything he’s saying.

  But I want to vomit.

  “...on Union’s a good start,” April is saying. Fat droplets of rain pelt her face. She doesn’t blink.

  “Right,” I say. “Let me check—”

  The accidental slide into Olivia’s mind is less disquieting than before, now that I know what’s going on, but it still manages to rock me. THE AFTERMATH is written at the top of the screen again. This time a gigantic map takes up the entirety of every display. I’m not interested in the way Olivia flicks her fingertips through the air to navigate our surroundings.

  It’s the miniature headshots with names typed beneath them that lure me in. Each name is highlighted either red or green, and underneath each green name is a neon-blue number.

  What the hell does all this mean?

  “Flesh-eaters on Union in one of the hotels,” Olivia forces me to reply. “I refuse to deal with them today, so try again.”

  I study the screen Olivia is looking at painstakingly. My photo is there. So are Jeremy’s and April’s. Our names are written in bold green, capitalized font and our information is positioned right over the gold-colored rectangle labeled “Museum.” My image is unsettling. Droopy eyes, as if I’m heavily medicated, and a giant smile on my face that shows my chipped canine. I practically lose my hold on Olivia’s head.

  I chipped my tooth not even a few weeks ago—this picture is that recent.

  And I’ve no recollection of it being taken.

  I do my best to push this thought out of my mind so I can concentrate on the task at hand. I want to see if I can find the spot where Olivia said the flesh-eaters were hiding.

  It takes me a couple of minutes to locate Union Street because there are so many words and lines and shapes that signify the places we frequently raid. Finally, I find it in the upper-right-hand corner. I scan a row of gray squares—they’re all labeled “Hotel.” When I come to the one with three pictures lying over it, though, I freeze.

  The names below those photos are all written in red.

  And at the very top of the game screen is a small box that explains what all these colors mean. Neon blue for current points (updated within the last thirty seconds). Green for Survivors, for us. Crimson for flesh-eaters.

  I look at the three red names on the gray square once again. Then I study my own spot on the game map. The number that must represent Olivia’s points within the game—80,973. The green font beneath my photograph. And I realize something that makes me feel sick.

  Olivia can see exactly where the people who want to kill me are.

  I have been attacked and I’ve had the crap beaten out of me and Olivia can see the threat’s precise location.

  There’s nothing I want more than to wrap my fingers around her neck and strangle her.

  I hear my voice say, “Nothing on Demonbreun.”

  “Demonbreun Street it is, then,” April replies. “Because Claudia Virtue is a boring wimp today.”

  I retreat from Olivia’s thoughts as easily as I crept in. The map remains in my mind, reds and greens swirling together in a sickening tie-dye. Do all those photos represent people like me? Prisoners inside their own minds, people being used by other people in white rooms?

  Are the cannibals pawns in this game, too? Being controlled by someone else who makes them attack and eat other humans?

  And are any of these people—red or green, Survivor or flesh-eater—aware that the person dominating them can at any time force them onto the wrong street or into the wrong building?

  Kill them in the flutter of an eye?

  For the first time in my memory, I don’t pay attention to my surroundings. I don’t listen to what Jeremy and April are saying, or the way the rain drenches my clothes, weighing me down, as we take the long route to the crumbling buildings on Demonbreun Street.

  I just focus on Olivia.

  “Go right,” she says through me, and I think of all the innuendos that I’ve ignored, all the strange things I’ve said that I chalked up to some neurological issue caused by the apocalypse and accepted with very few questions. Strange conversations. Lost time. The constant difference between my thoughts and what I say and do. Why we’ve never left this area, despite the hordes of cannibals. Why leave when food and supplies and enemy locations are only a screen away?

  Why leave when the person on the screen isn’t really you—and even if you do make a stupid decision, you won’t be the one suffering for it?

  There was no end of the world. There’s only a game called The Aftermath, and I feel stupid for just now realizing this.

  Back-alley ruins blur my vision. A liquor store sign swings from wires—it bangs the side of a building, making a noise like clacking teeth. A few feet away from it is an overturned garbage container that’s so rusted there are holes bigger than my fists throughout it. A man sags against the front of the trash bin with eyes wide-open and his head turned to the side in an unnatural angle.

  “Need to do a cleanup,” April says.

  I hear myself agree, but inside I am seething.

  Because on Olivia’s map, the man’s name is green, just like mine
.

  Unlike mine, it’s flickering rapidly.

  * * *

  Olivia waits until we find a spot she determines is “perfect for shelter” before she mentions leaving again. I know what this means, and I’m prepared for it. Still, it’s as though my breastbone and spine are slowly shrinking in on my heart, squeezing each beat out of it until it stops completely.

  I don’t want to go wherever it is I go when Olivia logs out. I don’t want to wait for Olivia to go into her game room for the chance to think for myself again. I want to think now—because my brain is the only thing about myself that’s partway mine.

  We place empty water bottles in the alleyway so that we can gather rainwater for drinking and bathing, then start the process of securing the building. Out of all the ones we checked, it’s the only structure with no broken windows and a somewhat decent bathroom and that’s not attached to a half-dozen others. When Olivia finds the spot on her map, it’s also the only one that’s several minutes’ walking distance from any other character.

  Just thinking that word turns my stomach, and I wonder briefly if Olivia, in her safe little room, can feel everything I do.

  “There’s a box of food up here,” Jeremy shouts from upstairs.

  It probably belonged to someone with a green name, I think. Like that man against the trash bin. But I say, “Bring it on down.”

  April’s behind the bar, sifting through partial bottles of liquor, and doesn’t even flinch when Jeremy slams the box on the countertop. “Anything good?” I say.

  “Protein bars, water bottles—not sure if it’s safe for drinking or if it’s contaminated, though. And there’s—” he grins at us, slowly pulling a handful of dusty black wrappers from the worn cardboard “—beef jerky.”

  April snorts, and I imagine her vacant blue eyes rolling. Glass clanks together behind the bar, and she asks, “Find The Save?”

  My ears perk up. I still haven’t discovered what The Save’s purpose is within the game, but I’m determined to find out. I want to know everything about this manufactured world I live in.