⁍ CONTENTS ⁌

A quick note about the series

Prologue

I

II

EPISODE 01

HACKED INTO THE GAME

« Part One »

CHAPTERS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

« Part Two »

CHAPTERS

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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For more about the series, visit:

Tanpepperwrites.com/gameland

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For updates and exclusive perks, join:

Club Tanpepper

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Copyright

Acknowledgments

About the Author

†   †   †

Brinestone Press

(rv.210325)

Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Hacked Into The Game (ZPOCALYPTO, #1)

Prologue - I

Prologue - II

Episode 1

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Two

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

⁍ THE ZPOCALYPTO SERIES ⁌

EP01: Hacked Into the Game

EP02: Failsafe Codex

EP03: Deadman’s Gambit

EP04: Sunder the Hollowmen

(includes the prequel “Golgotha”)

EP05: Prometheus Mode

(includes the companion title “Velveteen”)

EP06: Every Dead Player

EP07: Cheat Protocol

EP08: Jacker’s Exploit

EP09: Live Another Play

EP10: Return To The Arcade

(includes supplemental material “Infected” pt 1)

EP11: Augmented Zeality

EP12: Reckoning The Dead

EP13: Glitch In The Script

EP14: Open-World Spawn

(includes supplemental material “Infected” pt 2)

A RESURRECTION OF SORTS

First off, welcome to Gameland, the post-apocalyptic dystopian world I first introduced to readers in 2011, in the short story “Golgotha,” which later became the prequel to a bestselling cyberpunk series. Originally just called GAMELAND, the series was released in eight “episodic” installments. Readers quickly demanded more, and a “Season Two”, plus a number of standalone companion titles, were subsequently published.

And still my readers clamored for more.

Which is why I’m happy to announce that at least two new spinoff series are now in the works. Both are set within the same terrifyingly all-too-plausible near-future world. To prepare for their upcoming releases, I felt it was time to update the original series. Gaps have been filled in, loose ends tied up, and unresolved questions answered. With both seasons newly repackaged into one 14-episode collection, which now includes significantly refreshed and expanded content and gorgeous new covers, I am re-releasing the stories under new titles and branding. The legacy series is now called ZPOCALYPTO. It and the spin-off series will hereafter be incorporated under the broader WORLD OF GAMELAND banner.

“Golgotha” and all pre-existing companion titles and supplemental materials for the original series will hereafter be included within future ZPOCALYPTO episodes and boxsets, so you won’t lose a single word. But if you can’t wait to read the story that set this all in motion, you can find “Golgotha” in my short story collection, Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors.

Now, if you’re a returning Gameland fan, I thank you for your continuing support. It is my hope that with this relaunch, you don’t just rediscover the thrills and chills you experienced upon reading the original series, but that this literary resurrection further enriches your love and devotion to the world and its characters. At the very least, rereading it as we approach GAMELAND’s tenth anniversary will prime you for what is next to come!

So grab some snacks, settle into your comfy spot, and set your phone to “do not disturb.” Take my hand and hold on tight, because it’s time to enter The Game.

Happy reading,

Saul

March 2021

Prologue - I

Fifteen years after Golgotha*

It wasn’t Reggie’s idea to break into Gameland, not originally, though of course he took the credit when we actually managed to pull it off. He enjoyed being the go-to guy, especially when it was something the five of us could all get behind. He was funny that way— a big brute of a kid with all kinds of brains, which he tried hard to hide from everybody, a ton of muscles and good looks that he took just about every opportunity to flaunt, and a huge gaping insecurity complex that needed constant pampering. But if one of those ideas turned out to be not so great after all, he was always the first person to distance himself from it, claiming he always knew it was bad, right from the beginning, and that he had never said otherwise. That’s just the way he was. He was like one of those old-time weather vanes on the tops of barns, telling us which direction the wind was blowing after it had already passed.

The thing about it was, he had this really bad knack for jumping on the worst ideas ever, which is why we should’ve said no, when he picked up on the Gameland idea and ran with it.

And why I don’t blame him for everything that happened afterward.

We were in Micah’s basement. He and Kelly were team-playing Zpocalypto on Micah’s ancient homebuilt VR outfit. Zpoc is supposed to be based on the best parts of The Game, a super expensive, super massive multi-player on-line role playing experience that uses real-live zombies as avatars in a real honest-to-goodness urban arcade situated on Long Island. It’s called — you guessed it — Gameland. Most people just accept that the comparison between the actual and the virtual games is accurate, because they don’t know any better. But, as it turns out, just because one thing is based on another, doesn’t mean the experience is anything alike. First off, Zpocalypto was just holograms and basic haptic controllers, all running pre-scripted action. There’s no real VR, the programming’s totally lame, and the story’s about as uninspired as a ham sandwich on stale white bread. In Zpoc, you’re meant to beat the monsters and collect credits, because otherwise why play, right? Also, the holo graphics are mediocre at best. You just can’t get a feel for what it’s like to be in the actual real arcade, fighting real live zombies hand-to-hand, trying to stay alive. Trying not to get eaten and becoming part of the game.

Probably the only thing Zpocalypto shares with The Game is that if your avatar dies, you just have to shell out to buy a new one, whether it’s with credits or money.

Anyway, now we know better.

And that’s something, too, which is hugely ironic, because those rich pricks playing The Game in their plush, air conditioned high rise apartments with their ten-thousand-points-of-contact, fully-immersive, biofeedback-equipped gaming kits still don’t have a clue what it’s like to do battle with one of the undead. They just mindlessly plunk down a pile of cash for the invite, and then brag about their kill rates. Despite Arc Entertainment’s best efforts, there isn’t a state-of-the-art cybernetic setup available on the market that can simulate true reality, not even remotely. Nor is there a single gaming scenario that can generate the kind of genuine terror that comes with smelling real blood, fresh or otherwise, the fullness of it your mouth, the sting in your eyes. And when their bought-and-paid-for Player kills someone else’s Player, there’s not the same kind of rush you get when you take out a zombie that wants to kill you in real life.

Of course, you’ll never convince them otherwise. The invite itself is affirmation enough of their perceived self-worth to society.

Arc doesn’t guarantee to let you in, no matter how much money you throw at them. They say they only want the best gamers, because their feeds make the best Streams. Their highlights get packaged up for made-for-Stream docudramas, like Survivalist. They generate the most money for Arc, and that’s their highest priority.

But if they really, truly, honestly wanted the best, they’d take us. Because we are the best. How else would breaking in be so easy? It should’ve been impossible, and yet we made it on our first try.

We never should’ve tried.

Reg and I were bookending Micah’s beer-stained couch. Ashley was sprawled out between us, her feet propped up on his lap and her head on mine. She was drinking a Red Bull Nitrous through a straw, the orange and silver can sandwiched between two cushions to keep it from tipping over and spilling. Reg had chugged his, as usual. And when he tried to toss the empty into the old milk crate in the far corner for recycling, he’d missed badly. Just like his previous two attempts. He blamed it on the lighting. Admittedly, it was pretty dark down there, because the bulb in Micah’s projector was old, making it hard for those of us without goggles to make out the scene the boys were playing through. Micah didn’t really care; he said it made not getting killed all the more challenging.

Reg was pretty hyped up. Three RB-Ns will do that to you. He was always hyper, but definitely more so in that moment because of the caffeine. He kept asking us if we were finished with ours. It was obvious he was waiting for the empties to throw into the bin, as if making one of ours now would prove the others were flukes. That’s how self-absorbed he could be sometimes. But I’d barely even touched mine. I like the taste of the stuff, but it gives me a migraine if I chug it like he does. And Ash was intentionally milking hers just to make him wait. He knew what she was doing. And she knew he knew, which is why she kept doing it. Nothing got Reggie more riled up than when she teased him, and nothing got Ash’s motor running hotter than watching him get more agitated.

I was messing with her rough coppery hair, twining it between my fingers, straightening the curls and then watching them spring back. For some reason it struck me as amusing and I kept giggling, even though I wasn’t even the slightest bit drunk or stoned. Not like Micah, who in those days always seemed to be in one chemically-altered state or another. He was the druggie of the group. High functioning, mind you, but perpetually altered.

The rest of us got our highs playing video games or hacking them. That was our escape from our collective misfortune of being born into families that couldn’t afford to buy decent consoles. Or decent anything, for that matter. My family was once so lucky, having previously owned a big house in Virginia. But after my dad was murdered in it and Grandpa was fired from his prestigious command post in the Marines for something... questionable, which he never talks about, that all went away. Of course, this was some fifteen or so years ago, so as far as my personal life is concerned, we’d always been as poor and out-of-the-loop as everyone else sharing air in that room. Not that any of us dwelled very much on our poverty. You don’t miss what you’ve never known.

I caught Reg glancing over at the two of us, and even though he was all twitchy, he had this glazed look in his eyes, like he was envisioning me and Ash acting out one of his perverted girl-on-girl fantasies. So I obliged him. Sort of. I reached over and pinched Ashley’s nose until she squealed and slapped my hand away. The squeal must’ve done it, because Reggie’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. But as everyone knows, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Ashley’s upper body convulsed, while her legs straightened out, and her heels dug straight into Reggie’s crotch. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t intentional on my part. Reggie let out a surprised oof! and he immediately tried to hide the pain, but even in the gloom I could see the blood drain from his face.

I felt guilty, just not guilty enough to refrain from busting out laughing.

“Very funny, Jess,” Reg growled.

“What’s funny?” Ash asked, gazing up at me with those big, wide, brilliant green eyes of hers. Anyone outside our group probably thought she was the most innocent thing in the world, but I knew just how cunning and calculating the mind behind those eyes could be. She knew how to use her assets to their fullest effect.

“Nothing,” I answered, stifling another snort of laughter.

Reggie groaned out loud and pushed her feet off his legs. “I’m outta here,” he said, coughing to hide his discomfort. “This scene blows!”

“You want a turn?” Micah asked, though we all knew he had no intention of giving up his place at the altar of Zpocalypto.

“Screw that.” The color had started to return to Reggie’s face. “I’m sick of doing the same crap all summer. We should do something different, something, I don’t know, exciting. Like, out in the real world.”

“News flash: the real world sucks.”

“So’s doing the same thing day after day. It’s killing me.”

“What the hell are you talking about? This is the life!”

“We need a change. Something different.”

“Such as?”

Reggie took the time to study our faces, gauging our level of interest. Apparently finding it sufficient, he launched into full campaign mode: “Okay, you’re all gonna love this.”

“Or maybe we won’t.”

“Then forget it.”

“Will you just spit it out?” Micah snarled.

“We should break into Gameland. No, seriously, guys, just hear me out. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.”

“We’ve already been over this, Reg,” Kelly replied. “Remember? We already tried and failed.” He was referring to Ash’s and Micah’s joint attempt to hack The Game a couple weeks back. But I could see from the look on Reggie’s face that this was something altogether different, something that I suspected would be a hell of lot more involved than just poking at the firewalls around Arc’s proprietary game codex, something a crap-load more sophisticated, complex, and insane. Not to mention illegal.

I gazed lazily at the holo image. Kel’s and Micah’s zombie hunter characters were prowling through another dark warehouse for food and supplies. It was the same thing as always, just a change in scenery, which made me realize Reggie had a point. This basement scene, and the scenes within it, were just repeats of the same old tired theme we’d lived every day, all summer. We were caught in a fractal existence, and we needed to change the pattern to break out of it.

I saw that Kelly’s energy numbers were critically low— the script was designed to do that, to make the game more exciting. I had yet to reach this particular level, so I had no practical advice to give them. Nevertheless, I could predict exactly what was going to happen next. There were certain patterns to how Zpocalypto was written. Once you recognized these patterns, like I could, it made surviving and advancing to the next level so much easier. If my guess was correct, they were about to be ambushed by a bunch of the undead at any moment. And if I had to put money on it, they were going to fall through the rotting ceiling, right on top of their heads.

“I’m not talking about The Game, dweeb,” Reggie countered. “I’m talking about breaking into Long Island itself. We should actually physically go there.”

Kelly didn’t look away. “Yeah, man. We’ll just hop onto the next transit right now.” He exhaled with disgust when a zombie exploded out of a shipping crate and chomped down on his ankle, immediately crippling him. If he didn’t make it back to his antivenin kit within the next few minutes, his character would die and return to undo everything he’d accomplished to get this far, and he’d have to start again from the beginning. Kelly really hated that.

Antivenin was one of the many things that always irked me about Zpocalypto. First of all, a real bite causes a viral infection. It’s not a venom, like from a snake bite, but a manmade virus that grows inside you, kills you, then takes over your brain and revives you. They should’ve called the kit an anti-viral, but nobody likes to be reminded of the truth behind the actual pathogen. And like how, if you’re bitten in real life, there’s no cure at all. Get chomped, you die and reanimate. Then someone comes along and kills you again, for good this time. That’s where the saying “once bitten, twice dead” comes from. That university professor who infected himself and then tried his experimental cure fifteen years ago proved that. Halliwell. Grandpa calls it the Golgotha Event, whatever that means. Halliwell was the guy everyone says killed my father.

“I’m not talking about right this moment, brah,” Reggie countered. “There’s planning involved, preparations.”

“Well, then I’m up for it!” Micah chirped, as he lopped the virtual head off a virtual zombie with a virtual light saber he’d just pulled out of his avatar’s bottomless toolbox. For the record, light sabers aren’t part of Zpocalypto’s programming. I also noticed that his energy level was far better than Kelly’s.

Upon seeing this bit of illicit cyberwizardry, Ash rolled her eyes at me. I just shrugged. It didn’t surprise me anymore. Micah was always adding little hacks to Zpocalypto to give him advantages.

“But let’s make it sooner rather than later,” he added. He threw the severed head into his pack and watched as his credits finished loading. Then he raised a protective shield around himself so he could pause and address us directly. This allowed Kelly to continue playing. Or dying, if I’m being more accurate. “We could do it this weekend.”

I was about to explain why it was a dumb idea, but Kelly spoke up first. He demanded to know where Micah had picked up the light saber.

Micah smiled his shit-eating grin. “I did a little creative recoding yesterday.”

“You cheated? Figures. Cheater.”

“Um... yeah. That’s what I do. That’s what we all do.”

“I don’t.”

“Because you’re, like, ‘It’s not really winning, if you have to break the rules,’ ” Reggie mocked. “Laying blame ‘cause you lame and ain’t got game,” he sang.

“Shut up, Reg.”

“Alright, I’ll bite,” I quickly said. I didn’t want something to start between Reggie and my boyfriend. I still thought the idea was dumb and had absolutely no chance of succeeding. But where was the harm in contemplating something everyone knew was impossible? And the last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to think about committing a crime, just doing it. Besides, it would be much more entertaining than sitting here watching the boys play. Or argue. And since Ashley’s hair had lost its ability to entertain me, I needed a new distraction.

“And what’s the deal with this weekend?” Kelly asked. “You going somewhere?”

“The next two and a half weeks are going to fly by,” Micah replied. “And then our lives are going to be over. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, hello Greenwich High School.”

He was referring to the start of our senior year. Funny, considering he skipped whenever he liked, and since he was nineteen, he could get away with it. Which is almost certainly why he still hadn’t graduated, but was still a senior like Reg, Kel, and me. Ash was technically a junior, although she had enough units to graduate with the rest of us, and most likely would, just so she wouldn’t have to deal with senior year by herself.

The reminder was a real downer. Just three more weekends left before we started our last year of juvenile detention. That’s literally how we thought about it. Nineteen more days of parole before we got incarcerated into that mess of a penal system masquerading as a social welfare program. School was supposed to prepare us for the harsh realities of an even harsher world. But even before the events of that summer, when our illustrious education system’s inadequacies became glaringly apparent to us, none of us would have argued that it succeeded in any way. Well, except maybe Kelly.

The vast majority of kids my age felt as we did. School was just another useless, outdated relic from a different time. I mean, how was studying late-twentieth century climate fiction supposed to help us deal with rising sea levels in the mid-twenty-first century? We already know firsthand. We’re living it. And how was knowing the sum of the angles of a triangle going to alert us to the dangers of corporations masquerading as democratic governments? Or help us in the event of another outbreak? If it wasn’t for the fact that getting caught skipping school was pretty much a death sentence for the rest of us, signing years of our afterlife away into conscription, most of us wouldn’t even bother going. I say most because, again, Kelly didn’t feel that way.

I exhaled slowly, hoping to quell the feeling of claustrophobia rising up inside of me. I didn’t like to be reminded of time slipping away, and of what waited for us on the other side of August. I had convinced myself that if I could just survive one more year, then I’d be free to do whatever I wanted to do. We all would.

Most of us were planning on skipping college and going straight into one of those high-paying jobs as a coder with ArcWare Technologies. That was our only ticket out of the slums, and our best chance of getting an Arc invite to The Game. Kelly was the only one of us giving college any serious thought. He was always the one who had to be different from the rest of us. That’s what first attracted me to him, his long view and his commitment to it. He refused to become cynical or distracted. It’s actually what I love about him.

Out of all the guys I’d ever known, he was the kindest and most caring. Anyone who knew the Corben family — who’d ever seen how Kelly interacted with his little brother Kyle — would know that about him.

On the outside, Kelly wasn’t much to brag about: brown hair and eyes, average build, average looks. A girlfriend probably shouldn’t say this about her boyfriend, but he was... forgettable. Nevertheless, he more than made up for it with his sincerity. With Kelly, you knew what you were getting. I’d rather be with a guy who was totally honest with me than one who was easy on the eyes and hiding flaws. A guy like, for example, Micah. Or Reggie.

But things have lately changed between us. Kelly’s been acting all strange, moody and inattentive, unfocused. I know he’s got a lot on his mind, but he always does. He’d never let it get to him before. But now...

I just wished he’d lighten up and relax. We didn’t have that much time left together.

“Wait,” he said, still reluctant to pause his own avatar. “You’re actually serious, Reg?” He jerked his body to the left, then twisted it as he tried to get his character to respond faster in the game. Like everything else, Micah’s haptic sensors were cheap and slow, and Kelly’s feeble attempts to eke a little more response from them just made him and his avatar look like one of the undead, all lurchy and uncoordinated. “You mean, like, actually physically break into Long Island?”

“Dead serious, brah,” Reggie replied. He laughed, realizing he’d inadvertently made a funny.

Reggie was Kelly’s polar opposite. In fact, Reggie was pretty much the opposite of any of us. “Big, bald, and brash,” Micah always said about him, even though he wasn’t really bald, just that he kept his hair cut really short. A stark contrast to Micah’s own blond, blue-eyed, befreckled boyish good looks and intelligent charm. “Reggie’s a brute with a heart the size of Texas,” he once told me. “His parents should’ve named him Lenny Small.”

“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.

Seriously. Does anybody actually believe a bunch of fancy kicks and throws are going to be effective against a horde of the Infected Undead? They don’t fight like living, breathing, thinking human beings do. They just keep coming at you. They won’t stop and cry “Uncle!” when you’ve got their arm pinned behind their back. Dislocated shoulders and broken ribs don’t slow them down one bit. Punch them in the eye, knee them in the crotch, they don’t care. Guns and knives are much better options than going hand-to-hand, although you can still chop them to bits with a machete or riddle them with bullets, and they will still try to bite. They’re relentless.

Which is exactly why the government started about ten years ago requiring that everyone get these neural implants, so that in the event of an accidental outbreak, anyone who gets infected can be quickly and easily stopped by remote control. There’s presumably a master driver somewhere — that’s what they call the people who control the infected outside of The Game, drivers — sitting behind a desk, his finger on a button, or whatever it is, just waiting to take over after you’ve been bitten. That’s how the government plans to stop an outbreak.

In theory.

“And what about the anti-linkers?” Micah had once asked, one day when we were arguing about it in his basement. “Or if someone goes rogue and purposefully doesn’t take over control?”

“That’ll never happen.”

“You’re telling me you trust everyone working for the government to do the right thing? That’s some faith.”

“It’s for the greater good.”

“The greater good? That’s why you think the government’s doing this? Or maybe they’re just wiring us so they can take over our brains without our permission.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“It’s not just me. Why do you think so many people keep putting off getting their implants?”

“People are resistant to change,” I said. “Besides, there’s safeguards.”

“These implants,” Micah went on, “they’ve got nothing to do with protecting us in an outbreak. Look around you. We’re already in the midst of one. It’s just happening in such slow motion that we don’t even realize it. We’re frogs in a pot of water.”

“What do you mean?”

“All those undead they use to repair roads and transmission towers? They’re already out there, among us.”

“And none of them is attacking us,” I pointed out. “Proof the government controls are effective.”

“Until some unscrupulous civil worker, someone with an agenda or a vendetta, goes rogue. Then it’s See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!”

“They screen drivers. They do psych evals.”

“Like they did with your brother?”

“What does Eric have to do—?”

“Nothing. Forget I said that.”

I was stunned, not because he was out of line, but because he was right and I couldn’t deny it, despite my instinct to do so. Eric was messed up before he went into the Marines to be a driver, and whatever happened to him while he was in had only made things worse by the time he got out again. We don’t talk about it at home. I certainly don’t talk about it with anyone else. Micah usually knew better than to bring it up.

“Think about ArcWare’s network,” he said, changing the subject before I could go ballistic on him. “They’ve got safeguards against it getting hacked. Are they foolproof?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“It’s not.”

“Says the guy who’s tried a hundred times and failed. And you’re the best hacker around.”

“I’m not the best.”

“Better than most. Anyway, the network’s one hundred percent secure.”

He gave me a look that said there was no way I could possibly believe that. Maybe I didn’t. I just didn’t want to think about it, because doing so would lead me down very dark, terrifying path. I was in denial. We all were.

Since that talk, however, I’ve never been able to pass a CU work crew without wondering if their drivers are having a bad day. It’s happened before. Maybe not with the Controlled Undead, specifically. Think of all the mass shootings, people just losing it, grabbing a rifle, and spraying bullets. Or driving a car through a crowd. Different weapons of choice is all. Steel or flesh, the outcomes are always the same. We think we can control technology, but people break, eventually proving we really can’t.

My grandfather helped create Reanimation technology, and then deployed is as a weapon to kill other people. Those facts are indisputable. The Omegaman program? That’s his baby. We’ve all seen the propaganda videos in school. The damage they can do is— It’s supposed to make us feel invincible, but it’s just horrific. We just conveniently blank it out, because we also use the Controlled Undead for other, peacetime tasks, not to mention entertainment. But just because they’ve got someone at the controls, doesn’t make it any better. Eric knows that all too well.

So why he would think hapkido would protect his little sister from an outbreak, I don’t know. Martial arts might be useful for thwarting would-be muggers — unarmed would-be muggers — but if it was up to me, I’d rather have a gun in my hand, and unlimited supplies of bullets. That’s the only way to fend off a horde of unimplanted undead.

Now, that being said, I actually do enjoy the training, which is why I stick with it. The discipline also helps me manage my anger issues. And it keeps the bullies who know my family’s not-so-secret past from kicking my ass every day out in public. And at least for that, I’m grateful to Eric for making me go.

* * *

THE FIRST OUTBREAK took place on Long Island just over a dozen years ago. I don’t really remember it. I was almost four at the time. Eric says it was a terrifying few days for everyone, because no one knew what was happening, and everyone feared it would spread. They were lucky that it happened on an island, that it started at the end farthest away from the mainland, so that most people were able to get out before they locked it down. A lot of people still got trapped when they blew the bridges and stopped the ferries, but it kept the outbreak from turning into a much larger disaster.

The one in Washington five years later wasn’t nearly as bad. By then, the military had experience dealing with thousands of IUs — Infected Undead — swarming through highly populated areas. And nearly half the residents were implanted by then. DC was contained within hours, which is why it’s still a thriving city. Well, the parts of it that didn’t succumb to rising sea levels.

As it turns out, rising sea levels is what the boys decided to focus on in their search for way to break into Long Island.

Ashley pinged me last night during dinner to tell me that Micah and Reg had been thinking about how to avoid the EM barrier, which is generated by this giant wall the Army Corps of Engineers built around the entire island to keep any remaining undead from getting out. The signal it transmits fries our neural implants, which coincidentally also keeps people from trying to get in. “The boys think they’ve come up with a way!” she said. She was all wound up, breathless. Despite my own skepticism, I found myself getting swept up in her excitement. Anyway, it was all still theoretical, so where was the harm in playing along?

Except her timing couldn’t have been worse.

“So, listen, Ash, now’s not really the best time for this.”

“Dinner?”

“Yeah.”

Eric set his fork down and raised an eyebrow, his signal to me that I needed to disconnect. He’s always treated me like he’s my parent. Given how there’s always been a huge gaping hole in our lives in that regard, it’s not a surprise. But he’s such a mess, barely able to manage his own life, much less mine, that he always just ends up making things more difficult for the both of us. Even his department-mandated shrink tells him to focus on himself. Still, he persists.

“Okay,” Ash said, but then promptly disregarded my predicament. “You know how everyone knows about the wall and no-fly zone, right?”

I grunted. This was common knowledge. That and the mined waters and collapsed bridges make it literally impossible to get to Long Island now. Which is kind of the point. But I couldn’t very well mention any of these details with Eric and Grandpa sitting right there.

I turned around in my chair and pressed my Link communication device tight against my ear.

“Jessica?” Grandpa said, gruffly. “Dinnertime is family time, young lady. Disconnect, please.”

“I’m sorry. This is important. I really have to take this.” I got up and hurried from the room.

“Jessie!” Eric called. “It can’t be that important that it can’t wait!”

I heard Grandpa tell him to control himself, which, of course, led to them having their own argument. I never learned what was the root cause for the animosity between them — frankly, I couldn’t care less — except that I suspected it had something to do with our father’s death. Eric had been twelve at the time, so he has memories of Dad, as well as the events that led up to it and the aftermath. To say it really screwed him up is an understatement.

Pretty much everything in my family traces back to that singular event, like it was our own personal Big Bang Moment: my mom’s nervous breakdown; Eric’s rebellious phase, followed by his stint in the Marines, followed by his pacifist phase, all of it culminating on his creepy obsession with the undead; and then Grandpa’s scandal that got him booted from the Marines and caused him to come live with us. I’d never known my father, except by reputation, which wasn’t all that good, so I never really felt much interest in learning about him or the circumstances surrounding his death. At least he had the good sense to be murdered before the Life Service Law was passed. Not that the government would’ve had much to salvage in his case. From what little I’d learned over the years, most of his brain had never been recovered. And without a brain, there’s no chance of reanimation, so no chance of giving back through community service.

I hurried down the hall and slipped into the bathroom and closed the door. Ash was still jabbering away, saying something about tunnels. I barely caught the tail-end of it.

“What tunnels?”

“Micah thinks he can get his hands on some of the old subway maps and traffic tunnels connecting Manhattan and Long Island.”

“From where? How?”

As far as I knew, all of the old plans and schematics had been collected and destroyed after LI was militarized and the wall was built. It was against the law to possess anything related to them. It always seemed to me an act of oppression by the government, or maybe denial, rather than a matter of national security, as they claimed. If it was so dangerous, then why not just go in and nuke the place?

Because, Jess, the radioactive ash cloud would drift over to New Jersey, killing a million more people.

Yeah, and wouldn’t Arc just love that, all those fresh, intact bodies just waiting to be turned into Players. The optics might not be so great, but the profits would be astronomical.

“Micah says nothing’s ever totally lost,” Ash offered. “After something’s been in the Stream, it can never be taken back. There are off-line archives, sub-streams, secret places. Vestiges of the old internet. Something they called the cloud. If you’re looking for something, someone is bound to have their own file of it somewhere. Or a hardcopy. It just takes a little time and effort to find a person willing to sell it to you.”

“Where are we going to get the money? And isn’t that illegal?”

“Shh!”

I thought about this for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m sure the tunnels are all bombed out or filled in. It wouldn’t make sense to just leave them open for zombies to walk through to Manhattan. Otherwise, we’d be hearing stories about it, right?”

“First of all, honey, there aren’t any more IUs left alive on the island. Second of all, the tunnels were flooded before the first outbreak occurred. Remember? That’s why so many people got stuck: all they had was the bridges. And everyone knows zombies can’t swim.”

I snorted. Duh. She was right, of course. After that massive ice shelf collapsed in Antarctica nearly thirty years ago and caused sea levels to temporarily surge by thirty feet, most of the underground transportation networks in coastal cities had to be abandoned. I guess I hadn’t really paid very close attention in history class that day.

“What about the tunnel openings?” I asked. “They’d still be above water, wouldn’t they? Surely when the wall was built, they sealed them shut.”

“The wall was built ten years ago.”

“Okay...?”

“Don’t you see? After the second flood. The openings would’ve been totally underwater then. Micah thinks they wouldn’t have bothered blockading them since they’d already be covered by a good twenty feet of Atlantic Ocean. Out of sight, out of mind, as he says. What’s even better, if they’re still open, then we can totally bypass the EM barrier by going under it! No walls, no razor wire, no mines. It’s perfect!”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It sounds like a lot of ifs to me. And anyway, the last time I checked, I didn’t have gills. And neither do you or anyone else I know.”

“I got Reggie looking into that.”

“Reggie? What’s he going to do, rent us a submarine or something? Wait, that isn’t what he’s doing, is it?”

Ash laughed. “No, silly. The sensors would totally detect something that big, even going through the tunnels. He’s thinking a bit... smaller, something more individualized. We have some ideas.”

I asked her what they were, but she wouldn’t elucidate.

It seemed plausible, yet I still had serious doubts. It was almost too easy. If one of us could come up with a solution like that so quickly, then surely others would have already done so as well.

But then I realized why that wasn’t likely. Most normal people tried not to think about what was on Long Island. And locals tended to avoid lower Manhattan like the plague. And let’s say you had to go down there for some reason, like you worked there, the closer to LI you got, the harder it was to move around because of all the checkpoints you had to deal with. Besides, who in their right mind would seriously think about breaking in? No one was crazy enough to actually want to. They’re Forbidden Zones for a reason, not Arc Disneyland.

I asked Ash if they had a plan for the checkpoints.

“That’s where you come in,” she said.

“Me?”

“And your brother.”

I knew exactly what she meant: Eric’s police travel pass. But it’s not like he’d just give it to me. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell him why we needed it. He was a freaking cop, for chrissake. On the freaking Necrotics Crimes team to boot. I was going to remind her of this when someone knocked on the bathroom door.

“Jessica?” It was my grandfather. “Come out here, young lady, and finish your dinner.”

“Almost done,” I yelled.

“Now, please.”

“Ash, I got to go.” I lowered my voice to a whisper and added, “You know how the Colonel gets.”

“Yes sir!” Ash said, giggling. “I’ll get right back to spit-shining that dinner plate, sir!”

I laughed and told her I’d think about what she’d said. Then we disconnected.

When I stepped out of the bathroom, Grandpa was just making his way back down the hallway. He turned and gave me a stern look and told me to go finish my dinner. I was so excited that I almost shouted “Yes sir!” just as Ash had done.

I love Grandpa, but there’s one thing you never do, and that’s antagonize him. Then you take your life into your own hands. The only reason Eric gets away with it is because he’s just as bullheaded as Grandpa is.

And, honestly, I think Grandpa might even be a little afraid of him.

* * *

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL AUGUST morning by the time I leave the house for the dojang. The sun’s still low on the horizon and it’s not that muggy out for a change. Not yet, anyway. The cicadas are singing in the trees. I almost feel like skipping all the way to the studio.

It opens at seven, though I usually don’t show up until around eight-thirty. This morning, however, I’m too wound up to lie around in bed. As much as I don’t like to admit it, I’ve been kind of excited at the prospect of getting to see a part of the Forbidden Zones. Even though I know it’ll never happen, just thinking about the possibility makes me feel more alive than I have in a long time.

I arrive at the dojang so early that there’s only one other student there. He and Kwanjangnim Rupert are already sparring, leaving me without a partner, so I sit and wait. The kwanjangnim goes easy on him, since he’s only a green belt; all they do is practice movements and a few minutes of pad work. I soon get bored, so I scroll through Media on my Link to occupy my time.

Before I know it, they’re walking off the mat. They go straight to the leader’s corner and start their meditations. I can hear the master talking about Yu, the water principle: “The stream flows around and surrounds its obstacles,” he quietly says, “and so passes them by without slowing. Water is powerful. Dripping water patiently makes its way through the strongest rock. This is how your strength flows in and through and around your opponents and eventually defeats them.”

I smile inwardly, enjoying the coincidence that the kwanjangnim’s message for today would concern water, since that was all Ash could talk about last night. But while Yu teaches us patience and flow, it doesn’t explain how we’re supposed to breathe in it. If the flooded tunnels turn out to be a viable option for getting to Long Island, then we’ll have to figure out how to do just that.

As far as I know, none of the five of us has ever been scuba diving. In fact, I’ve never even been snorkeling, except with a piece of rubber garden hose in the neighbor’s makeshift pool when I was five. Obviously, that doesn’t count.

I ping Kelly to see if he’s awake yet. It sends me straight to his message box, so he’s either onstream playing or still asleep.

“Sunbae,” Kwanjangnim Rupert calls out, startling me. He walks over with his hands on his hips. He looks a little out of breath. I exit the script and slide the Link into my bag. I’ll try my boyfriend again later, or just stop by his house after I’m done here.

“Yes, Kwanjangnim!” I say, and jump to my feet.

“You’re early.” He smiles and winks. I have a reputation for being a late-sleeper.

“I wanted to get today’s exercises out of the way.”

He gives me a curious look. “What could be more important than your training?”

I quickly backtrack. “I mean, it looks like it’s going to be another hot one today. I figured I’d beat the crowds.”

“You never complained about the heat before. Is this the beginning of a new Jessica Daniels?”

The other student looks up from where he’s stretching on the mat and I notice his eyes widen. He’s young, possibly my age, although I think younger, but he’s big-boned, like he’s growing out of being overweight. Yet despite his boyish looks and wispy, curly hair, he has a certain ruggedness about him, like he would’ve been a football or rugby player, had those sports not been banned years ago. And now, without his headgear on, there’s something familiar about him. I can’t seem to place him, though. Does he go to our school? Perhaps he’s a grade or two behind me.

The truth of the matter is, I probably wouldn’t be able to recall his name, even if he was in my grade. Outside my circle of friends, our little gang of gamers and hackers, I don’t do much socializing.

“Ready to practice?” Kwanjangnim asks.

“Yes, sir.” I step to one side so he can lead me onto the mat, but he shakes his head.

“Oh no, not me. Today I’ll be taking it easy.”

“Why?”

He groans. “I strained my back.”

I steal another glance of the boy. I can’t imagine Master Rupert being injured by a lowly green belt. “Sparring?”

“No,” Kwanjangnim says. His laughter is thick and contagious. His face turns a little red. “I got hurt when I... To be honest, I strained it getting out of bed this morning.” He rubs his back and shrugs. “Either my mattress is getting old and needs to be retired, or I am.”

“It’s the mattress,” I say.

We both enjoy another laugh before he mumbles something about not being able to postpone getting his implant much longer. It kills the mood, leaving me standing in awkward silence with nothing to say. He apologizes and waves the boy over.

“Anyway, Sunbae, this is Jacob Espinosa,” he introduces. “This is Sunbae Jessica Daniels.”

“Jake,” the boy says, offering to shake. Meanwhile, I’ve bowed, as is proper, so he withdraws his hand. But now I’ve already straightened up and extended mine. Finally, we both clasp hands and bow awkwardly to each other. His grip is limp, like he’s conscious about hurting me. I’ll soon relieve him of the notion that he can.

Rupert laughs at us and says, “Jake’s new to the school, a transfer. His forms are really pretty solid. You two can warm up on each other, but for sparring, no kicks today. Okay, Jessica? Just hands, open fist hits, and holds. Keep it clean. And try to take it easy on him. He’ll be testing for his next belt in a week and we need him all in one piece.”

“I can handle it!” Jake says, slipping into a sparring stance. Rupert’s face scrunches up into an amused frown, but I return the challenge with a mock snarl.

“Keep it clean, guys!” he reiterates.

Despite the differences in our skill levels and Master Rupert’s restrictions on kicks, it ends up being a good workout. Jake’s quick and strong, almost as good as most of the red and black belts I’m used to sparring against. But he’s also a bit top-heavy, and I’m clearly a lot more seasoned. After dropping him to the mat for the fifth or sixth time, I get him in an arm hold he can’t escape out of.

He calls it quits, saying he’s got to leave, but just as my grip relaxes, he spins under me and wrenches my arm. The next thing I know, I’m lying face down on the floor with his knee resting on my back and my arm twisted painfully away from my body. He’s got me completely immobilized.

“That was a cheap shot,” I say between clenched teeth. “They didn’t teach you manners wherever you were before this?”

He immediately releases me and stands up. “Sorry.”

When I get up, I catch a glimpse of something dark and threatening in his eyes. It startles me for half a second. But by the time I’ve recovered enough to ask him what the hell that was about, he’s turned away, denying me the opportunity. I shrug and head back over to my gear bag.

While I’m packing up, he comes over. I wait for him to speak first, but he hems and haws, clearly unsure how to begin. I’m still ticked off by the unexpected throw, so I pretend I don’t notice he’s there. Let him work for it. That sort of poor sportsmanship isn’t allowed in here, and if Kwanjangnim Rupert or any of the other trainers had seen what he’d done, they would’ve severely reprimanded him.

He finally tells me he’s only been training for about ten months, and I tell him nobody gets a green belt in such a short amount of time. From the look in his eyes, you’d think I’d just called him a liar. Which I guess I did.

“What I mean, Jacob, is that—”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“Okay. Fine. It’s not that important anyway.”

He just stands there.

“Is there anything else?”

“So... how long have you been training?”

I stare at him a good long time before telling him I’ve been at it for eight years. “Off and on,” I add, so he doesn’t think I’m a slacker. It’s not exactly true. I did miss one summer when Eric took me on a trip to Seattle after he got out of the Marines. “I started in juniors, got my black belt. Had to start over again when I went into seniors.”

He snorts suddenly and shakes his head.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that...”

I narrow my eyes and wait for him to finish.

“It’s just that you’re Jessie Daniels.”

“So?”

“I had no idea you practiced hapkido.”

“Have we met somewhere before?”

“Um, no. But Ashley Evans talks about you all the time. She says you have mad gaming skills.”

“You know Ash?”

“She was my science partner last year in chemistry lab. She’s a jacker, too, right?”

“Jacker? What’s that?”

“You know, game hacker. That’s what the kids call you guys, you and Ashley and that big guy who’s always hanging out at her locker.”

“Reggie?”

“Yeah.”

I think about this for a moment, before deciding I like the term. Even though it doesn’t apply to me that much. It does describe Ash and Micah perfectly well. “I mostly just play. I don’t hack that much. I mean, I can, but I’m not obsessed with it like some people.”

He nods uncertainly, and looks around, as if searching for something else to say.

Before he can find it, I tell him I have to go. I wave and start to walk away.

“I really enjoyed you this morning!”

I stop and turn. “What?”

His face turns bright red. “The sparring, I mean. Not... not you. That is, you’re really good for me.” He half turns, groaning. “Damn it, Jake,” he mutters. “Pull it together.”

I recognize the discomfort. I’ve seen it happen a lot— to guys when they talk to Ashley. It never happens to me. So I can’t lie: I do relish the fact that it’s happening to me now. “Are you hitting on me, Jacob?”

Somehow, his blush deepens to the point where I fear he might actually pass out from the pressure of all that blood in his head. “It’s Jake,” he whispers.

“Right. Well, did Ash also happen to mention that I have a boyfriend?”

He looks like he’s about to choke. I smile. Now we’re even. But I can’t resist chipping away a another piece of his dignity.

“You really don’t want to mess with him.”

“No! I wasn’t! I swear!”

“Eh, who am I kidding. To be honest, you could probably take him.”

He snorts, and I see some of the tension leave his body. “I’m happy just to take you. Here, on the mat, I mean. Oh, god.” He groans again.

Other girls might find his discomfort charming, but despite my initial glee, I’m already starting to feel uncomfortable.

“Well, be careful what you wish for,” I offer in closing. I make a mental note to find out when he plans on being in the dojang, so I can avoid him in the future. “I will always kick your ass. In a clean fight.”

“Sure,” he says.

I turn, relieved to put this whole encounter behind me.

“But you know,” he adds, as if he has to have the last word, “out in the real world, nobody fights clean.”

Chapter 2

I ping Kelly again on my way out. As I wait for the connection to go through, I catch a glimpse of Jake standing inside the studio. There’s a glare off the glass, so I can’t tell if he’s watching me, but it sure feels like he is. I step closer, and he suddenly turns and vanishes into the gloom. It may have been totally innocent, but I can’t decide whether to feel threatened, creeped out, or flattered, especially after the way he’d acted inside.

“Hey, J,” Kelly says. “S’up?”

I hurry off and try to put Jake from my mind, but I can feel the kid’s eyes on my back, even after I’ve turned the corner.

“On my way home from practice. Mind if I stop by?”

“Mom’s here, but... sure. I’m just hanging out, not really doing anything.”

“Translation,” I say. “Still trying to figure out a way to beat Micah in level eleven. Without cheating. Good luck with that.”

He sighs and tells me I’m coldhearted. “I cheated,” he confesses. “But even with Micah transferring his extra lives over to me — which I never asked for, by the way — I just can’t seem to level up.”

“He gave you his extra lives? That’s so not like him.”

“He says he’s too busy with this Gameland thing now. Anyway, I’m lame. I’m just a lame gamer.”

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Kel.”

“Nothing lamer than a poor-ass gamer like— Wait a sec... Oh, my god, that’s how he did it! I’m through!”

“You’re playing right now, aren’t you? You’re playing even as I’m talking to you.”

“Um... maybe,” he says, and I can tell he’s already a million miles away, reveling in his success.

I’ve been feeling a little frustrated lately, and it quickly morphs into anger, even though I have no reason for it. What he does on his time is his business. But I’m drawing from a deep well of pent-up emotion, and not just in regards to us, although things haven’t been right for us a while. I don’t know what it is, only that it’s definitely not all in my head. It’s like everyone’s slipping away.

“You still there?” I say, half hoping he won’t answer.

“Yeah. Hold on, let me pause.”

“Playing flat sucks,” I say, referring to the 2D version. He doesn’t have a holographic projector.

“Yeah.”

“Not very satisfying.”

“A win’s still a win.”

“So... how about saving some of that energy for me?” I know it’s a pathetic ploy to get him to pay more attention, and I immediately feel terrible for being so needy, but it doesn’t stop me: “You up for a little multiplayer fun?”

“I only have the one controller. Kyle broke the other.”

“I’m not talking Zpoc.”

“What— Oh! I did mention my mom’s home, right?”

“Never stopped us before.”

I can hear him exhale shakily into the Link, and it brings a grin to my face.

When I get to Kelly’s house, his five-year-old brother Kyle answers the door. He gives me his trademark impossibly huge smile and wraps his arms around me in a bear hug. I enthusiastically return it, along with an extra loud raspberry in the hollow of his neck. He squeals, breaks away, and runs off giggling.

“Hey, babe,” Kelly says, and gives me a peck on the cheek.

“You better watch it,” I warn him. “You got competition.”

“Kyle? Robbing the cradle now, are we?”

“Not Kyle. You know he’ll always be number one in my heart. Sorry. No, I mean at the dojang. There’s this new kid. I sparred with him this morning. I think I embarrassed him when I accused him of hitting on me.”

Kelly turns, suddenly interested. “You did what?”

“Easy there, cowboy.”

“Who is it?”

“Jacob— Jake something. He couldn’t land a real hit, much less a figurative one, not unless I let him.”

“And... did you?” he asks, his face turning red. “Let him hit... on you?”

“Kel. Seriously?”

He sighs. “Do I know him?”

“Doubtful. He’s a junior. He knows Ash, though. And he’s not a gamer or hacker. They were science lab partners last year.”

I take Kelly’s arm and lead him back upstairs, already regretting I even brought it up.

“Keep the door open,” his mother yells up at us from the kitchen. “Behave yourselves.”

“Morning, Mrs C,” I shout back.

We keep the door open — a crack — but we don’t exactly behave. Even an open door doesn’t stop us from getting in some serious make-out time. And it sort of makes things a lot more exciting, too, knowing someone could walk in on us at any moment.

By the time his mother calls for Kelly to come down a half hour later, my whole body’s tingling and I feel like I could explode. Kelly has this glazed look in his eyes, like his head is short-circuiting. Or maybe it’s the lack of oxygen. I don’t know who’s in more agony, him or me.

We straighten our disheveled clothes and hair before heading downstairs.

“What are you kids up to today?” Mrs Corben asks innocently.

“Going over to Micah’s,” I answer. Kelly looks over at me, a puzzled frown on his face, but he says nothing.

If his mother notices, she doesn’t let on. Instead, she walks over and gives Kelly a good looking over. “Walk,” she says. “You could use the exercise. You’re starting to get a little flabby in the middle.”

“Mom! I’m not getting flabby!”

“Mm hmm. And those bags under your eyes—”

“You know why.”

“Don’t you blame your brother. What exercise have you gotten lately? Outside of your games, I mean.”

I’m almost tempted to tell her that if she were to check his pulse, she’d find he’s getting his share of cardio.

She tosses him an apple from the bowl on the counter and tells him not to stay too long. “Your father’ll be home early tonight and he wants to talk to you about colleges.”

Kelly grunts and slips the apple into his pocket. It’s small and soft, like the ones you used to find in the throwaway bins at the farmer’s market. The new apple orchards in Canada still aren’t producing enough fruit to replace the trees being decimated by the heat here in New Merica. That and the customs fees are why only the super rich can afford decent fruit these days.

After I drop my sparring gear off at home and get a quick shower, we head out to Micah’s.

“By the way, he pinged your Link while you were in the bathroom,” Kelly informs me. There’s a troubled look in his eyes. “Did you talk with him last night after we left?”

It’s not like Kelly to be jealous of Micah, but after my teasing him this morning, I figure he’s probably feeling a bit more sensitive than usual. Apparently, our little make-out session didn’t erase any lingering doubts. I’ll have to rectify that situation later.

I shake my head, then tell him about Ash’s ping to me during dinner.

Kelly grumbles. “This whole thing really is just a waste of time. You know that, don’t you? An exercise in futility. There’s a reason why they sealed that place off, and I’m sure they didn’t just do a half-assed job about it.”

I shrug. “So what if you’re right? Even if it turns out to be impossible, it still beats just sitting around watching you guys play Zpocalypto all the time.”

“I don’t play it all the time.”

“Dude, you’re totally obsessed with it.”

“I just want to pass this next level is all. What’s wrong with that?”

“You said that when you passed the last level.”

“I mean it.”

“Fine. Then what? Level thirteen? Fourteen? When does it stop?”

He gives me a resentful look.

“Last year you told me you didn’t just want to be a code jockey. You wanted to go to college and become something more.”

“I still do.”

“Well, you’re sure not acting like it.”

“It’s summer break. School doesn’t start for another two, three weeks.”

I’d worried that his entering the college track last year would put a strain on our relationship, since it meant we wouldn’t get to see each other as much during school, but it actually didn’t matter. It wasn’t like we saw much of each other during classes anyway. Our afterschool habits remained the same as always. In fact, all of last year was fine. The real problems started over the summer. Maybe he was getting bored with me. Or I with him.

“Yeah, well, you’re eating and sleeping and drinking that stupid game now! You were the one person that the rest of us looked up to as a reminder that there’s more to life than games and codes and Arc. But now it’s like you’re addicted. I’m worried.”

“You’re worried?” he exclaims, yanking his hand out of mine. “You accuse me of being obsessed, when you’re the one who’s obsessed. You and Reggie—”

“There is no me and Reggie. He’s just a friend, Kel! It’s us, all of us!”

“Yeah, you and the others. How could you even consider going into Gameland?”

“Keep your voice down,” I hiss. “You know that’s not what this is about, Kelly.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not, because you know we won’t be going anywhere near Gameland.”

“Gameland, Long Island— whatever. It’s all forbidden. And stupid. Not to mention illegal and almost definitely dangerous. But you’re talking like it’s already a done deal, like you’re all set and nothing’s going to change your mind.”

“It’s just LI, and it’s just for fun—”

“It’s not just for fun! This is serious. Micah’s all over it like flies on day-old dog crap! You think Reggie thought it up on his own? I’m sure he had a little help.”

“Who cares who thought it up?”

“You’re right. But I blame him for bringing it up like that. Such a goddamn stupid idea. He’s had some colossally bad ones in the past, but this one takes the cake.”

“Stop screaming at me.”

He raises his hands to his head and stumbles off like it’s killing him or something. I suddenly just want to kick him, to send him sprawling, to knock some sense into him. Or to knock him out of whatever funk he’s in. But to do so would be to violate all the principles of discipline I’ve learned studying hapkido. We never attack out of spite or anger. We only fight to diffuse those emotions and to defend ourselves.

The thing is, though, he’s right. For whatever reason, we are obsessed— with games, with breaking code, with hacking our otherwise dreary lives. All of us. And why shouldn’t we be? After all the crap my generation grew up with that we can’t control — global warming; a fractured, useless government bought and paid for by corporate interests; the undead — if we could just get even a semblance of control back into our lives, you’re damn straight we’d take it. In a game, the worst consequences of our actions are being forced to start all over again. In real life, you can’t do that. In real life, if you’re poor, you’ll likely always be poor. If you’re beaten, you stay beaten. And when you die, well, they make sure you keep right on playing. Just once, we want to be the ones making the rules. Changing the rules.

It’s telling that we escape into games where we have to fight the dead, since what we most want is to be alive and feel. We want to experience life. But we can’t. Our lives are so full of rules and restrictions and limitations. And nobody ever pushes us to do more; in fact, pushing goes against everything we’re taught.  “Go to school,” they drone at us. “Get a job with Arc.” On and on, like it’s some kind of karmic mantra, our destiny. “Become like everyone else.” Sometimes it feels like we’re just going through the motions, doing time till we reach the right age to be assimilated into a homogenous society, like a replaceable cog in a machine.

So we play to escape. That’s why we do anything. It’s why we hack.

But the worst part about it? Games are such piss-poor substitutes for life — flat and two-dimensional, even in HG — so unfulfilling that they only leave us hungry for more. For once in our lives, we want to do something dramatic, something that can make us feel whole again. Or even just feel anything at all.

“We’re just talking about breaking into Long Island,” I say. “Don’t make it more than what it is.”

Kelly stomps off, leaving me behind.

I sigh and think about retreating back home. In the end, I jog to catch up to him. I’m going to keep trying to make him understand.

At the same time, I fear he’s either unwilling or incapable of doing so.

Chapter 3

Ashley is sitting at the keyboard when we arrive in Micah’s basement. “Any hacker worth her salt,” she’s saying, “should be able to access the old pre-iVZ government systems.” She looks up and acknowledges our arrival with a nod, then goes back to typing.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

Micah waves us over. “We’re trying to hack through the firewalls to access the military’s old computers in the Forbidden Zones on Long Island.”

“How? Are they even still running?”

He shrugs. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out right now. Reggie thinks they probably kept them operating for non-essential functions, like environmental control and such.”

“Environmental control?” Kelly asks, rolling his eyes. The contempt is thick enough in his voice that Micah and Ashley don’t have to see him to know his reaction. They exchange wary glances. “What the hell would they need that for? UIs don’t need air conditioning.”

Micah raises his hands. “Don’t look at me. Ask Reg. This is his party. I’m just here as your host.”

“I know they’re up and running,” Ash says. “I can see their identifiers, stream locators— IP addresses, I believe they were once called. Hello, little computers, this is Auntie Ash knocking on your firewalls. Let me in, let me in. Ooh, what crude encryption you have!”

“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,” Micah croons.

Kelly shakes his head in disgust.

Ashley’s playful grin turns into a frown. “Micah? Does it seem like a lot of traffic’s going through those nodes? Like, a lot more than there should be?”

We all lean in closer, but the screen is scrolling too fast to make anything out. He shrugs.

“It’s a lot of data for basic maintenance programs, but you know how inefficient the old codices were.”

I grow bored of watching it. “Speaking of Reggie, where is he?”

“Yo.”

I turn around just in time to catch him coming out of the bathroom zipping up his fly. He stops to adjust himself. “Seriously?” I say, and consider telling him he might not want to wear his jeans so tight, not if he wants to have a family. He gives me a shit-eating grin. Thankfully he doesn’t say anything stupid, like, “I left you a present in there.” I don’t think I could bear his bathroom humor this morning.

“Okay, assuming you can find a way in,” Kelly says, leaning over Ash, “wouldn’t they have upgraded to iVZ? That stuff’s unhackable.”

“These systems were put into place before ArcTech even existed,” Micah explains. “Before the Stream, even, so nobody is supposed to have the equipment to access it.”

“That’s where having old tech comes in handy,” Ashley adds.

“They clearly never bothered installing the iVZ codex, probably because it would take too much hardware to transfer over and convert. They probably just wrote some bridge code to make sure the computers could also talk to the Stream and called it a day.”

“That’s exactly what they did,” Ashley says, nodding. Her fingers fly over the keyboard. New type scrolls madly across the screen, overlaid on the rest. “Which means we’re about to access pre-Stream databases and programming, what they called the internet way back when. Piece of cake.”

“Which also means nobody’s watching it anymore,” Reggie pipes up.

“We hope no one’s watching it.”

“Why bother?”

I remember talking to Grandpa about the internet age, which preceded the ArcTech systems that he had helped put into place before he was forced to retire. Back when Reanimation was first developed, and zombies were originally called Zulus, the internet was how everyone communicated. But it eventually got out of hand. Cryptocurrencies, identity theft, money laundering. Social media and the rise of adulterated news. Russian and Chinese interference. So the guy who invented it decided to develop a new technology, which people could control individually. He called it the Stream, and based it on LINC cybernetic communications technology. Our implants — latent individualized neuroleptic connections, or linc for short — and our handheld Link communication devices, all use the same iVZ programming to connect to the Stream. That’s another reason to get the implant: without it, you don’t have the same levels of access.

I reach my hand up to the back of my head and feel around until my fingers find the tiny scar. I got mine when I was three, long before they became mandatory. That’s what happens when your grandfather has a vested interest in the technology. Eric had been much older, and from what I’d learned, he’d resisted for a long time, arguing that it was just another example of government overstepping its mandate, trampling people’s rights, finding new ways to intrude on our private lives, and for assuming it knew what was best for us. But Grandpa convinced Mom — probably wasn’t that hard — and she signed the papers. Eric was eleven then, but he managed to hold it off until he was fourteen. We both got ours the same day, two weeks after Dad died.

They say the implants are really needed to prevent what happened during the outbreaks — so they can shut us down if we ever get infected — but it’s pretty obvious there are some serious flaws to the tech and its implementation. First off, you need a hundred-percent compliance. There’s no herd protection at eighty percent, or ninety, or even ninety-nine-point-nine. One infected unimplanted person can do a lot of damage. And the people who are at the greatest risk of getting bitten are the exact same ones who are most likely to keep putting it off: the elderly, the unhealthy, and the homeless.

I think about Master Rupert. He’s in his fifties, but he’s neither slow nor unhealthy, yet he’s still unimplanted. It makes me wonder why.

“If it’s pre-iVZ,” I say, “then don’t you need a physical uplink to connect? There’s no more wireless microwave towers anymore, right?”

I’m now drawing on information I’m straining to remember from school and Grandpa’s lectures, neither of which I’d paid much attention to. Back in the first couple decades of the century, everything either required a physical connection, which was called ‘wired’ because information was passed in the form of electrons through physical circuits, or was transmitted ‘wirelessly’ using radio waves. But all those wireless transmitters were disassembled years ago and replaced with LINC towers and satellites. The new signals are much more efficient and a trillion times more secure.

I remember Grandpa telling me how the old defcon management system was totally susceptible to hacking, and that it was a miracle nobody ever went in and triggered a bunch of missile launches. In fact, that’s why ArcTech was first founded, to design better, more secure computing systems. ArcTech’s proprietary codex and the Stream made communications a lot more secure and reliable, so it wasn’t long before the internet and the cloud became obsolete, not to mention the devices dependent upon them. And while many have tried to hack into the Stream since — including a few people right here in this very room — nobody’s ever been able to do it. The encryption is just too good.

Micah holds up a cable, which I can see he’s spliced into the guts of yet another piece of equipment, which I immediately recognize as highly illegal: an old tablet computer running something he calls Windows. “What’s the saying about necessity?” he asks.

“It’s the mother fucker of invention,” Reggie crudely replies, and he and Micah slap palms.

“We’re piggybacking off the Stream,” Ash says. “The old hardware makes us look like—”

She suddenly yelps, then reaches over and yanks out the wires. The screens go blank.

“Hey,” Micah cries, but then we all see the look of alarm on Ashley’s face.

“There was some fishy code flashing by in there. I think it was trying to embed tracker packets on us so I severed the connection.”

Getting caught hacking a government system — even an old one — would get us into serious trouble, enough to probably add six or seven years to the front end of our Life Service Commitment.

It reminds me of the close call we had a couple weeks ago when Ash and Micah tried hacking into the VR part of The Game. They’d spent a solid three days down here, barely sleeping, nourished by nothing but Red Bull and Little Caesar’s pizza. They said it was a hundred times harder than anything they’d tried before. Heck, maybe a million times.

Most of the API ArcWare deploys is open source. But it’s all barebones, just enough for people to mess around with. Arc keeps a close eye on things, monitoring us to see who’s got chops. It’s a great early warning system. Not very many people know that their programmers embed black boxes within their scripts. Outside the games, most of them are traps, so we don’t mess around with them. Inside the games, they appear to be mostly for keeping things interesting, cryptic code that allows a player to refine play to their own habits and skill levels. The best gamers and hackers actually go looking for them first, before starting their campaigns.

But Arc’s real purpose for them is to recruit hackers.

The Game, on the other hand, is a whole different animal. The Game is protected by ArcWare’s military-grade codex called iVZ, short for “intralink virtual zeality.” It’s got one of the most sophisticated firewalls any of us has ever seen and a proprietary base code that none of us could ever hope to break. In fact, iVZ powers the government. Figure out how to hack into The Game and you’d practically have the tools needed to hack into the national defense system and send Russia, China, and the SSC nice little radioactive Christmas presents.

It was Ashley who first concocted the idea to crack The Game. She’d built this crude translator for ArcWare programs. That’s how we found their back door. How she accomplished this is all beyond me. I’m not the hacker that she and Micah, and to a lesser extent Reggie, all are. She’s hacked into more of ArcWare’s black boxes than anyone I know. She said she used what she salvaged as sort of a new sort of Rosetta Stone to come up with her translator, a frankensteinian piece of software built from bits of scavenged code.

“It’s a heuristic program,” she once tried to explain to me, apparently oblivious to the fact that my eyelids immediately began to droop. I prefer nascent coding, creating programs. And I stick to the standard languages, like andro, Khartoum-four and MesmerZ. Going in specifically to break a program isn’t my idea of fun.

“Heuristic means it teaches itself,” she went on. Of course I knew what heuristic meant, but I didn’t bother to correct her. “The program essentially runs on a loop of testing, evaluating successes and failures, refining, and retesting, becoming smarter and smarter as it cycles.”

I remember thinking at the time that it was never going to work, not on iVZ.

But it did. Well, sort of. Between her and Micah’s mad coding abilities, they got as far as copying the software’s architecture before the program locked them out. Architecture is Micah’s specialty. He loves thinking about game structure and could stare at it all day long, drooling like a puppy at how clever some of the programmers can be. I can see patterns, but Micah sees patterns on a fractal level.

I remember Ash pinged everyone when they made the breakthrough. We all went running over.

I got there just in time to see Micah’s screens lighting up with error messages. Then everything went totally ape-shit.

“Yo, there’s suicide switches everywhere, y’all!” he shouted, far more gleefully than he really should’ve been and far less alarmed than any sane person would be. We stood in awe and watched, making sure to stay out of the way as he pounded away at his keyboard. It was fun just watching him. He and Ash were hopping from console to console, the whole time shouting at the top of their lungs. Then: “There’s another—” Micah screamed, and his voice filled with despair. “No, no! Aw, shee-it!”

Everything went blank. The game was throwing up firewall after firewall. Wouldn’t even let them log in with new fake identities, blocking everyone in eastern Connecticut out for hours, in fact. It was a huge disappointment, of course, and very scary. We’d gotten a glimpse inside The Game, but we’d almost gotten caught, too. Luckily, Micah had been using ghosting scripts and anonymizers to hide our identities and precise geographic location.

“We did get something,” Ashley says, as she holds up the tablet in triumph.

“You got the maps?” Micah asks, and when she nods: “Lady, I could just kiss you!”

“You wouldn’t be able handle the fireworks,” she said. “Besides, I’m not exactly your type.”

“Ash, you’re everyone’s type,” I say.

“Even you?”

I choke back a cough.

“Micah’d spontaneously combust if he ever got any of that action,” Reggie declares. Ashley beams.

Meanwhile, Kelly’s frowning, ignoring their banter. “What maps?” he demands.

“Maps to the tunnels,” I say. “Weren’t you even listening this morning when I told you about the plan?” I know I shouldn’t be so impatient with him, but I can’t seem to help myself right now.

He shakes his head and repeats the question.

Ash holds up the disemboweled tablet. Wires and naked circuit boards dangle everywhere. On the pixilated screen is an old graphic of the transportation system of Long Island. She points to a pair of lines connecting lower and eastern Manhattan to LI. The first is labeled Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The second, Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

“Schematics are embedded within the graphic files as pop-ups. Which one do you want to check out first?”

We exchange glances, but no one wants to make the first move. What we’re looking at is highly illegal. “Well, it’s now or never,” Micah drawls, and then we’re all speaking at once, each trying to be heard above the other.

“The Queens,” Kelly announces, after we’re unable to reach a consensus. I give him a surprised look, which he ignores. “The Queens tunnel first.”

Ash hesitates, then opens the embedded file and begins to read:

“ ‘Opened in 1940, the Queens-Midtown tunnel connects the Borough of Queens on Long Island with the Borough of Manhattan. It consists of twin tubes carrying four traffic lanes and is 6,414 feet long.’ ”

“Over a mile,” I murmur. I hadn’t been expecting it to be that long. It’s far too long to be swimming through, though. I know at least that much. “Well, that’s out of the question.”

“You could do it with scuba gear,” Reggie says.

“Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?” Kelly counters. The look on his face suggests he’d already calculated our chances being nil when he made the decision for us which tunnel to check. He’d expected the idea to die quickly. “Tell me which of us knows how to scuba dive? It’s not something you learn in a few days. Besides, we don’t even know if the mouth of the tunnel’s still accessible. Or if it’s open all the way through.”

“No reason to give up yet.”

“It’s not doable, Reg.”

“We won’t know until we know. We should at least keep an open mind.”

“How about the other tunnel?” I ask.

“It’s even longer,” Ash says, and starts reciting facts from the Brooklyn-Battery file. Not that it makes any difference. One mile or ten, scuba gear or not, Kelly’s right. We’re not trained for this sort of thing. And even if we were, if the tunnels aren’t open all the way through, we may as well be talking about swimming through concrete.

Which, now that I think about it, is what they should all be filled with. Or at the very least, blocked by iron gates. And for all we know, they could be caved in. They’re a hundred years old, for chrissake. And despite Ash’s assurances to me last night, I still seriously doubt they’d just leave the openings unsealed.

Micah asks where the Manhattan opening for the Queens tunnel is.

Ashley taps the screen. “The old midtown,” she says. “Between what used to be East 34th and 35th Streets.” She opens another file. Nods. “Yep. It’s totally underwater.”

“Okay, then,” Kelly says, plucking up a game controller from the charger and flicking on the HG projector to warm up. “Now that that’s settled, how about we—”

“I think we should check it out,” Reggie interrupts. “I mean, we won’t know for sure unless we see it for ourselves, right?”

Kelly scowls, but Reggie refuses to yield. He even stands between Kelly and the projector.

Ash turns to me and whispers, “That’s your cue, J. Did you bring it?”

I nod and pull out my Link. “Uploaded it last night, after Eric went to bed.”

“Uploaded what?” Kelly demands, although I’m sure he’s already guessed. He frowns at me like I’ve betrayed him. I give him an apologetic shrug.

“Road trip?” Micah suggests.

Reggie whoops. “I call shotgun!”

Chapter 4

The five of us pile into Micah’s beat up old Ford. It’s so ancient that it even has a docking station for the old Apple iCorp storage devices, rather than getting music direct from the Stream.

Micah drives. Reggie takes the other front seat, leaving the three of us to share the back. Ash is on my left, Kelly on my right. We head down Route 95, which is the quickest way to Manhattan, even though it means having to pass through about a half-dozen checkpoints, including the ones at each interstate border crossing. I have Eric’s pass; we feel invincible.

We hit the first checkpoint about twenty minutes in. The guard looks bored. He scans our Links and doesn’t say a single word.

I can see the abandoned Teterboro Airport off in the distance. The moss-covered hangars poke out of the swamp like giant moldy eggs that never hatched.

The guard waves us through. He couldn’t even be bothered to ask where we’re going.

“There’s the old Meadowlands,” Reggie says, pointing off to the side a minute later, and I think about how the old overgrown football stadium looks like a giant concrete bird’s nest to go with the eggs.

“Don’t you mean the Swamplands?” Ashley remarks, and we all laugh. “Not too many meadowlands left here.”

This leads to a discussion by the boys about banned sports, particularly football. Reggie argues that they should bring them all back, and Kelly counters that there’s no place for brutality in our world today, especially in sports. I want to slap him and ask what place Players have in our world, and isn’t the television show, Survivalist, or The Game, on which it’s based, equally as brutal? But I don’t. I don’t need to throw fuel on a smoldering fire.

We come to another checkpoint just before crossing the new elevated bridge that will take us into Manhattan. Here, the guard asks us where we’re going and what we’re doing. “School project,” Ash pipes up. The guard gives us a doubtful look, and she quickly adds, pouting for sympathy, “Stupid summer school.”

“Damn college track kids,” he replies, snidely. “Think they’re better than everyone.” But he scans our Links and asks if we’ve all been implanted. After recording our IDs, he lets us pass.

“School?” Reggie asks, once we’re clear. “Really? That’s the best you could come up with?”

Ash laughs and shrugs him off. “So I got nervous. You know me. I don’t think well under pressure.”

We’re soon zooming across the flyover above what’s left of Central Park. Looking down is enough to make anyone queasy, but Reggie sticks his head out the window and howls like a wolf. The wind whips the spit from his lips, and I’m suddenly grateful to be sitting in the middle of the backseat, even if it’s not very comfortable. If anyone gets sprayed, it’ll be Kelly. I glance over, but he just sits there glowering out the window. He doesn’t say anything.

I elbow him and give him a smile. He sighs and offers me half of a smile back, his way of compromising. He relaxes, resting a little more of his weight against my side. For reward, I give him a kiss behind the ear.

“Get a room, lovebirds,” Ashley groans, and pokes me in the ribs. I squeal, and we snuggle even more vigorously to tease her. It starts off as a joke, but it doesn’t take long before we get serious and forget about everyone else in the car.

I’ve practically relocated to Kelly’s lap when the road suddenly lurches right and nearly throws me across the seat. We’ve begun our descent toward South Manhattan.

“Another checkpoint,” Micah announces.

I quickly buckle in and wipe Kelly’s slobber off my neck. I reach down and squeeze his thigh and he nearly jumps through the roof of the car. I can’t tell if he’s so tense because of pent up energy or because we’re approaching our final destination.

I can smell the ocean now. We’re still over Manhattan, but there’s water everywhere, canals wending their way through and around the old skyscrapers, most of them abandoned now, all of them in some state of decay. This is our version of Italy’s Venice. Of course, the real Venice is long gone now, reclaimed by the Adriatic Sea years ago, before I was even born. What was once a paradise for tourists and lovers is now a museum for divers.

We pull up at the checkpoint. The guard, after getting an eyeful of Micah’s ratty car, flatly denies us access. “This is a commercial district, not a playground. Beat it, kids.”

Ash leans forward and tells the guard I have a permit. I flash him my Link with Eric’s pass on it and he inspects it for minute before handing it back. “Fine. Remember the curfew,” he says. We all nod dutifully and promise to be out of New York long before dusk.

Despite all the restrictions and the hassles of the checkpoints, the roads are crowded with business people. So are the waterways. Water taxis are everywhere, leaving trails of bubbles drifting in the deep gray-blue. Despite all the flood damage on this side of the East River, despite the proximity of LI, this part of Manhattan still somehow manages to be a bustling center of industriousness. And despite New Merica essentially isolating itself from the rest of the world, Wall Street retains its hold on the financial universe.

Every so often, though, as we cross intersections and the horizon clears, I catch another glimpse of the stark gray walls of LI rising up across the channel. It looks like a giant alien ship, or a prison. This is the closest I’ve ever been to it, and it sends a chill through me.

I wonder how these people can come here every day for work, knowing what lies on the other side of the river, less than two miles away. How can they look out over the water and see that thin forbidding line of a wall and not wonder if parts of it have fallen or been breached? It’s so close that it seems inadequate. Do they just pretend LI isn’t there, just put it out of their minds?

Immediately after the Long Island outbreak was contained, the military went in to evacuate the survivors. The state and federal governments had hoped to salvage the island, but the deeper they went in, the more they realized how much of it was lost. They eventually declared the entire island a disaster area. The army set up barriers and restricted access, preventing people from moving back in.

The government finally announced that it would seal off the island. They said it was to protect the living from the undead. But Eric once told me the truth was quite different. It was to protect the undead from illegal poaching by people who didn’t think it was right to let them roam free. As long as the infection survived, these people reasoned, the risk to humanity was too great.

“The government considers them assets,” he told me.

“Even without implants?”

“They can be implanted post-revenance. Think about it: every one they conscript means one less living soldier going off into a combat zone.”

So the island remained, and the Army built their wall to protect their reservoir of fighters.

Congress passed the Life Service Law soon after, now almost ten years ago. It mandated that every single person residing in America was legally designated government property upon their death. Before then, only current and former criminals were considered property. Naturally, the law has been challenged multiple times in the New Supreme Court, but the politicians and the judges are too spineless, too corrupt, too bought and paid for, to strike the thing down. And, honestly? Nobody except a few rights activists really wants it to be. No one looks forward to becoming undead when their Life Service Commitment comes due, but what’s the alternative? Go back and pay taxes like we did in the old days? And of course no one wants to fight and die in wars. Or clean sewers. Or toxic dumps. So we give up those years and rationalize it away. What do we care what the government does with our bodies after we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil? We’ll be dead. It’s not like we’ll know what we’re being made to do: the horrible, dangerous jobs the government assigns, so a living person won’t have to do them.

The road reaches to its lowest point. We’re still about sixty feet above the water, which is where the experts say sea level will be when all the arctic ice finally finishes melting in another century. But then again, they said the same thing forty years ago before the first major ice shelf broke off. Sure, the seas surged by thirty feet, but they subsided a lot, too.

“Times Square,” Micah calls out. We all look to the right. The place is a dump, abandoned, disintegrating, and overgrown with moss. All the screens are black, the neon lights dark. “We should be just about parallel with the tunnel now. A few more blocks to the south and we’ll be there.”

Traffic had quickly thinned out and is now almost nonexistent. We come to one last checkpoint. Here, the guard is all business. We sit dutifully mute as he checks our Links. He takes each one and carefully scans it, then does the same with each of us, making sure our linc implants match our Link IDs. He spends a lot of time with Micah’s, his face growing more and more pinched. Finally, Micah asks for his Link back. He messes with it for a moment before returning it to the guard.

“It’s been glitching lately,” he explains. “I’m overdue for an upgrade.”

The guard raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t respond. He stares at the screen, then at Micah, then back at the Link. His jaw clenches and he takes in a deep breath, and for a moment I think our little adventure is over.

“This is an inner zone,” he says at last. “Restricted. What’s your purpose for being here?”

This time, when Ashley explains that it’s an extra-credit project for summer school, he just stands there tapping his thumb on his own Link, waiting for us to come clean.

“We swear it,” Ashley insists. “It’s part of our community service commitment.”

“And the NCD permit? How does that fit in?”

“My brother works for the department,” I explain. “Eric Daniels? You probably know him.”

The guard just stares.

“We’re doing a survey in partnership with the police department. It’s on...” I struggle to think of something that won’t come out sounding ridiculous.

“Potential sources of outbreak transmission,” Kelly finishes for me. “Public safety is our most important concern.”

“For our lives, and the lives of future generations,” Micah adds, reciting the rest of the mantra we’re all taught in grade school.

The guard sighs. “Zombie freaks. Okay. Just heed the signs. Don’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to go. Don’t get into any trouble. Fines are doubled in an inner zone. And remember the curfew.”

We all breathe a sigh of relief as he waves us through.

“Outbreak transmission?” I ask Kelly, once we’ve pulled away.

“I had to say something. You guys were totally flailing back there.”

I lean over and pull his face toward mine. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”

“Aw, sheesh,” Ash complains. “Kill me now.”

We stop at a traffic light, and dutifully wait for it to change, even though there are no other cars around. I glance down and see an empty water taxi stand just outside the old Grand Central Station. A bunch of obsolete train cars had been hoisted onto the rooftop platform and converted into high-priced restaurants and hotels. They all stand empty and overrun with vines now. Grass sprouts out of every corner and crack not already taken over by trash. Graffiti marks everything.

“Take a left here,” Reggie says, checking his Link. Micah turns on his blinker. Reggie snorts, and Kelly shakes his head.

After a few more minutes, the buildings thin out, become shorter and squatter. We gasp simultaneously as the dull, gray desert of the East River suddenly opens up before us, as if it’s the most wondrous thing we’ve ever seen. The same chill as before spreads through me anew, only this time much stronger. The wall is much closer, much taller. I keep expecting to see bodies popping up out of the water, but the surface is smooth, unbroken.

“According to my Link, we’re almost where the opening should be,” Micah informs us. “Just a few hundred feet ahead.”

We all look down, but of course there’s nothing to see. It’s not like there’s going to be a blinking neon sign pointing the way: Access to illegal tunnel to LI.

Micah pulls into a deserted parking structure and into a random spot. We’re the only ones there, and I don’t know if he does it consciously or not, but he stays between the lines.

“Well, we’re here.”

“Someone remember where we parked,” Reggie jokes, opening his door. “I really hate it when we can’t find the car.”

Chapter 5

Reggie’s the first one out, and we follow his lead. He’s holding his Link out in front of him like a divining rod and letting the arrow on the screen guide him. After a few minutes, we reach the end of the building. He points to a spot about a hundred feet out. “Should be right about... there.”

All I can see is a big gaping pool of water, roughly three hundred feet wide. It stretches out for at least a quarter mile in either direction. It fades into the horizon to the west, merging with the gray-white sky.

“Look! You can see the sides of the entrance ramp there!” He swings his arm to the right and, sure enough, a part of the ancient roadway surfaces a few hundred feet away, looking like a tongue lolling out of an alligator’s mouth. He swings around in the opposite direction and adds, “That walkway there should be the old overpass covering the tunnel opening.”

Ashley pulls out the old computer tablet and boots it up. The thirty or so seconds it takes feels like forever. Old tech, I think to myself. How did people ever have the patience for it? Makes me realize how lucky we are to be constantly connected, constantly on, never having to worry about whether our batteries die.

When it’s done waking up, Ash opens an old photograph of the tunnel entrance and we all crowd around to see. The screen resolution’s horrible, but it’s good enough that we can make out some of the same landmarks. The walls look to have been constructed straight out of bedrock. The tunnel opening begins approximately twelve or fifteen feet below the top of the overpass. Now, only the upper three or four feet of wall are above water. There’s a muddy high tide line just below the railing.

“Must be connected to the river here,” I say, pointing.

Micah nods. “Half of lower Manhattan is.”

There’s no water in the ancient photo, of course, just funny-looking cars going into and out of the dry tunnel. It makes me wonder if Micah’s beat-up Ford ever made the trip.

“Shall we try and get closer, m’lady?” Reggie says, extending his elbow to Ashley.

She twines her arm around his. “We shall.”

They’re acting like this is all a game. And the truth is, I’m feeling a little giddy myself.

Micah, Kel, and I trail after them. We go down a couple flights of stairs and reach a walkway surrounding the building. To the left is a loading platform for watercraft. It’s probably less than fifteen years old, but it looks much older. To the right, the walkway arches out away from the building.

Kelly suddenly holds back. “Seriously, guys? What are we doing?”

“No time for cold feet, brah.”

“It’s a waste of time,” he persists. “Let’s say we actually find the opening. Then what? How’re you going to know if the tunnel’s open all the way through to LI?”

“We draw straws.”

“For what?”

“Winner gets to go for a swim.” He laughs, but the look on Micah’s face suggests he’s willing to give it some consideration.

“Count me out,” I say. “I left my medicine at home.”

It’s got to be one of the lamest excuses I’ve come up with in a long time.

Reggie snorts and shakes his head. “I was joking. Nobody brought their swim suits. Unless you want to go in au naturale.” He waggles his eyebrows at Ash.

“No one’s going swimming,” Kelly growls.

“Brah, I said I was kidding. Chill. We’re just scoping things out today. Let’s just see how close we can get. Next time we come back — tomorrow, maybe, or Saturday — we’ll be better prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

“Duh. A little underwater exploratory research.”

This clearly doesn’t please Kelly. He drags his feet while the others follow Reg. I lag behind with him.

“What’s this all about?” I ask, when the others are out of earshot. “Why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”

“It’s not all of a sudden, Jess.”

I roll my eyes. I don’t know what else to say that won’t make things worse, so we walk together without speaking. Then he nudges me and gives me a wry smile. “I can’t believe you forgot your inhaler. Shame on you. What’s the Colonel going to say?”

“Grandpa doesn’t know.” I shove him playfully back. “And he doesn’t need to find out, either.”

I’ve used the inhaler my entire life. I’m supposed to carry it around with me all the time and puff on it three times a day, so it’s become almost habit. But I do miss doses on occasion, and whenever my grandfather finds out, he gets all OCD and interrogates me for like the next week. How am I feeling? Have I taken all three doses? Do I feel sick?

Most of the time I can honestly answer that I’m following my regimen, but sometimes I forget. Like today. I’d had it in my gear bag this morning and then neglected to retrieve it after I got home.

I shrug and remind Kelly that we’ll be back soon, and I’ll just take a double dose then. “It’s not like I’m going to drop dead if I don’t. It’s just an immunity booster.”

The truth of the matter is, I’m not exactly sure what it’s supposed to do. I’ve always been told by the doctors that it’s to help stave off infections, but they’ve never really clearly explained what’s wrong with me that I should need to take it.

Sometimes I hate having the inhaler. It makes me feel weak and vulnerable. Other times, though, I’m glad for it. Like, for example, whenever I want to get out of having to do PE class, I just hold it up and complain that I feel like I’m coming down with something. It’s a lot easier, and it’s certainly less embarrassing than announcing I’m having really bad menstrual cramps. Or that I think yoga is lame.

We reach the end of the walkway. Ash and Micah have stopped and are leaning out across the railing. “The opening’s right here,” Ash says, even though there’s no way she can possibly see it. “Does it look to you like it’s blocked?”

I stare down into the darkness, but the sunlight rippling on the water keeps blinding me. I try to lean further over. I can feel my balance shifting dangerously on the rail. Before I realize what’s happening, there’s a flash of color off to one side, a sensation of movement, and a splash. Water sprays up at us. I stumble back gasping and wiping my face.

“What the hell was that? What happened?”

“Brah’s crazy!” Reggie exclaims. He’s got that grin on his face again. “Kelly is what happened, that’s what. Crazy mother. What’d you say to him to make him jump, Jessie?”

“What? I didn’t! Kelly!” I run back over to the railing and look down. But there’s nothing to see. Kelly’s disappeared. “I didn’t tell him to jump, you idiot!”

This shuts Reggie up.

“Don’t just stand there!” I scream. “Do something!”

Nobody moves. Nobody wants to jump into that murky water. We all wait as the seconds tick by. I’m nearly out of my mind with panic. Ashley has to pull me back so I don’t jump in after him.

Thirty heartbeats pass. Then forty... Fifty...

Sixty.

“Kelly? Kelly!” I scream.

A minute and half is gone just like that and now I’m really starting to lose it. Ashley turns me around and her eyes are wide and filled with fright, too. She starts biting her lip to keep from crying. Even Reggie and Micah look like they’re about ready to jump in.

“He— he’s fine,” Micah says. “I can hold my breath for two minutes. Hell. I could hold it for three, if I needed to. He’s just—”

“No!” I snap. My voice echoes off the buildings. “He’s not fine! He’s not you! It’s Kelly!”

“Jessie, calm down,” Reggie hisses, warningly. But I’m beyond caring by now.

“How long?” I demand. Nobody answers. “How long has it been!”

“Three minutes.”

“Kelly!”

Reggie starts peeling off his shirt. He grabs the railing and begins climbing over. Micah kicks off his shoes. But everyone freezes at the sound of a shrill whistle. A man in a dark green uniform is running toward us from the far end of the walkway.

“You there! You kids! Stop right there! There’s no swimming here.”

Reggie’s poised to jump in. He looks like he’s going to do it, but the cop blows his whistle even harder and waves his EM pistol at us. He’s still a hundred feet away, sprinting. He’ll reach us in seconds.

“Our friend fell in!” Micah shouts. He climbs back over and moves to intercept the cop. “He fell in! It was an accident. We need help!”

The cop skids to a stop. He’s overweight and panting, and I’m sobbing. Through my tears, he looks like a big, fat, melting blob. Ashley’s crying, too.

“Our friend fell in!” Reggie yells. “We have to save him!”

“You can’t go down there,” the cop insists. I see now that he’s an older man, graying a bit at the temples. His face is rough and scarred, the flesh on his cheeks beginning to sag. He shoves his pistol back in its holster but keeps his hand on it. “It’s dangerous. Bad currents. Can’t you see the signs?” He points.

“But our friend—”

Just then, there’s a watery gasp from below us and Kelly’s head pops up. His face is blue and his eyes are bulging out of their sockets. He splashes around, searching for something to grab, but the edge of the walkway is too far out of reach. The cop bends down under the railing. He leans over and extends his baton. “Grab it, young man!”

Kelly gets a hold of the baton, but he’s too weak to pull himself up, and the cop isn’t strong enough. Reggie steps to the other side of the railing. He reaches down and manages to grab one of Kelly’s hands. With a grunt, he lifts him out of the water like he’s nothing but a sack of potatoes. Kelly rockets up and somehow gets hold of the rail. His feet scramble to find traction on the rim of the walkway.

“Hold on!” Reggie snaps. With one more tug, Kelly flips over and tumbles onto the overpass, where he lays quivering and gawping air like a fish.

I rush over and wrap my arms around him, pulling his face into the crook of my neck. His skin is cold and there’s a scratch on his cheek that’s just starting to pink up with fresh blood. I suddenly realize he’s making a point of angling it away from the cop’s view.

“There’s no swimming here,” the officer repeats. “I could have you all arrested.” He gives us a stern look and keeps it on us a few seconds longer than necessary. We all know what that means. An arrest in a restricted zone like this would go on our permanent record and almost certainly add time to our LSC.

He sighs and shakes his head. “What are you kids doing down here anyway? Restricted Zones are no place for young folks like yourselves to be. You should be at home enjoying the summer break.”

We all look around at each other. Finally, Ashley manages to offer up the same old lie: “School project?”

The cop snorts. “Right, like I’m supposed to believe that.”

“We were just looking for some privacy,” Reggie says. He sidles up to Ash and wraps his arms around her.

The cop sizes them up for a moment — giant Reggie and diminutive Ash — then he looks at me and Kelly. Finally his gaze settles on Micah and we can all see that he’s struggling to figure out the math. His eyes flit between us and the surrounding buildings, as if he expects to see one more person appear.

Finally, he shakes his head again and warns us that the next time he comes by we had better be gone. “This is a class B zone,” he tells us. “Only authorized individuals are allowed here. It’s not a... It’s not a damn playground. Or a motel room.”

To our surprise, he spins on his heels and marches away. He doesn’t even bother to scan our implants.

“Class B?” Reggie whispers in disbelief. “Man, we are so lucky he didn’t bust us.”

Class A would be the East River, of course. The penalty for trespassing there wouldn’t be arrest or more LSC years, it would be vaporization by one of the mines. If we were lucky.

When the crisp sound of the cop’s footsteps fades from earshot, I turn back to Kelly and shake him. “What the hell were you thinking jumping in there? You almost drowned!”

He slowly raises his eyes, but he doesn’t direct them toward me. It’s Reggie he stares at, the look dark and accusing. “Well, Reg,” he says at last. He takes in a shuddering breath. “I got your answer.”

“What answer? What are you talking about?”

Kelly doesn’t respond immediately. The air between the two boys almost freezes from the chill. “You wanted to know if the tunnel’s open.”

Reggie straightens up, studies Kelly’s face. Without a word being spoken, he deflates. “Blocked. Well, it was good while it lasted.”

Kelly shivers again and tries to stand up. “It’s open,” he says. “All the way through.”

Chapter 6

“How do you know?” Ashley asks. “How could you possibly know it’s open all the way through?”

“Currents,” Kelly answers, and it takes a moment for us to understand.

I realize he’s right when I recall the cop mentioning the currents being bad. In order for there to be one, the tunnel would have to be open on both ends.

“They’re actually pretty strong down there,” he says, and pushes me away from him. “It was almost like getting sucked into a drain. I was dragged into the tunnel. I don’t know how far. Lucky for me, there was a surge that pushed me back out. Otherwise...” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to.

He coughs, spits. “I ended up grabbing onto some old wiring or something and holding on.”

“That was some crazy-ass shit, man,” Reggie says.

The two boys lock eyes again, and it feels like something unspoken passes between them. After a few seconds, Kelly brushes the hair from his face. “My shirt got caught.” He lifts his arm to show us the tear under his left sleeve. “I was losing air, choking.”

I don’t know why the next thought pops into my head, but suddenly I wonder if the cop happened to notice the rip. Why that would matter I don’t know, but the whole encounter strikes me as odd. Why would he just take off like that without scanning us? And as for Kelly, why would he hide the scratch on his face? What was he afraid the cop might think it was?

Kelly laughs weakly and without humor. He shakes his head. “I sort of panicked, thinking it was one of those sewer gators you always hear about.”

“Urban myth,” Micah offers, as Reggie snorts and suggests it wasn’t an alligator Kelly was thinking about. Ashley hits his arm and tells him to shut up. Somewhere in our minds, whether consciously or not, we’re all sharing the same dark thought.

“I guess I freaked out. I lost the last of my air. I tried to kick away. Whatever had a hold of me finally let go. I could feel myself getting sucked in deeper. The next thing I knew, I was shooting back out. Another second or two...” He shook his head again. “I feel like I swallowed a gallon of water.”

“What do you think it was?” Ashley asks. “That grabbed you, I mean.”

Kelly shrugs. “Loose panel or something. Maybe a jammed log or a pipe. I don’t know. It was too dark to see. After all these years, there’s bound to be a ton of crap washed down into the tunnel.”

“Just not enough to block the flow entirely,” Micah says. “And if the current’s that strong, there’s got to be spaces wide enough for a person to swim through.”

I lean back and study Kelly’s face. Now, after what he just experienced, it’s the perfect time for him to put an end to this whole stupid idea. But he remains strangely silent.

“Could’ve been a zombie then,” Reggie teases.

“Damn it, Reg.”

“Joking. And just because we’re all thinking it, doesn’t make it any less of one.” He slaps Kelly on the back. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

Everyone nods, but now that the scary part is past, I’m furious again.

“Why?” I demand. “You’re the last person I’d expect to do something stupid like jump into the river!”

“Well, first off, this isn’t the riv—”

“I don’t care what it is! You could’ve drowned.”

He shrugs and sighs. “Yeah, maybe.” He studies my face, trying to read it. But I’m too angry to play that game right now.

“You know, you could’ve lied,” Micah quietly says. “You could’ve told us it was gated or something. You didn’t have to mention the current. We wouldn’t have known any better.”

“Except the cop did,” I point out. I turn to Kel. “But you didn’t know that, so why? You could’ve ended it.”

“Believe me, I thought about it,” he replies. “But while I was struggling to untangle myself, I don’t know, I guess I just thought, No one’s going to believe me anyway. You guys don’t listen. You just do what you want, and screw it.”

“That’s not true.”

“I just kept thinking that if the currents are that strong, if there were grates anywhere along the length, they’d quickly get clogged with debris. And I couldn’t help wondering why they would just keep it open like that. Why wouldn’t they block it off?”

“You’re curious, aren’t you? You want to know just as badly as we do.”

He glances over at Reggie. “I still think it’s a terrible idea. Nothing’s changed my mind about that.”

Reggie raises an eyebrow suggestively. “But...?”

“But nothing. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been the end of this. I know how you guys think. Even if I were to convince you this one was blocked, we’d just end up going over to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel to check that one out. Am I right?”

No one denies it.

“Um, guys?” Ashley says, glancing at her Link. “I hate to break this up, but we’d better clear out of here. I don’t know if that cop was serious about coming back, but I don’t want to find out.”

Reggie and Micah help pull me and Kelly to our feet. Despite the warmth of the day, Kelly’s still shivering. The scratch on his cheek has stopped bleeding, but now it’s puckered out white and angry-looking on his pale face. He lifts his shoulder to rub it and winces. A fresh thin line of blood appears. Then a second.

I take a closer look, and suddenly feel woozy. There are three parallel scrapes, each separated from the other by about a half inch. They look like claw marks. Only the top two are deep enough to break the skin.

“Just make sure you put some antibiotic on that when we get back,” I say. “Last thing you need is for it to get infected.”

“Yes, Mom,” he mutters.

Chapter 7

Ash’s grandmother, Junie, used to joke about how, when she was my age, having unprotected sex could kill you. She passed away last year quite unexpectedly. She could remember a time before the implants, before Resurrection technology, back when diseases like AIDS and diabetes, Covid and cancer worried people. She’d laugh her bitter laugh because she knew things were a lot worse now, when diseases don’t just kill you, they raise you back up again.

Shortly before she died, she started saying crazy things, like, “I hope they put me into The Game.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Ashley would tell her.

“Who says I’m joking? I’m serious, girl.”

Of course, we all knew it was highly unlikely she’d get her wish, even if that’s what she truly wanted. Only the freshest and fittest of the recently deceased get sold to Arc for Player assignments.

“Why would you want to end up like that?” Ash would say.

“Think of all the money it would bring the family.”

“We don’t need money, G-ma.”

But that was a bald-faced lie. We could all use more money.

“I’m joking, dearie. It’s not about the money. That’s not why I want this.”

“Can we not talk about it, G-ma?”

“If not now, when? Soon it will be too late.”

“You know the lifespan of a game zombie is only a few weeks. Months at best, depending on how good your gamer is.” Ashley shuddered, and I knew she was recalling some of the brutal highlights we’d watched on Survivalist. Some of the Operators could make their Players do things people couldn’t do when they were alive. Or wouldn’t. Most were downright physically mindboggling; some were disgusting. But the worst were the sadistic acts that were only featured on the pay-to-watch Streams.

It was addicting... until you realized it could be someone you knew.

“What they’re made to do in The Game can be pretty awful,” I’d offered, hoping my opinion might further discourage her from this kind of thinking.

“I’ve seen that program, dear. I know what it’s about. That’s why I think it would be better to spend my Life Service Commitment doing that.” G-ma Junie closed her eyes then and sighed, nodding. “A few weeks of abuse, then it’s over. A few days is all I’d last.”

“There are better ways to go.”

“If I’m dead, I want to be dead dead, not standing in some remote border outpost for months on end as a deterrent to trespassers, or on a street corner in Mexico, my insides emptied out to hold a bomb just waiting for a certain politician or drug lord to drive by. Or in one of those seditionist states like Texas. I just want to be laid to rest. My soul is tired of this life. And the next.”

Of course, nobody gets ‘laid to rest’ anymore. They don’t do burials. Everyone gets incinerated. After their LSC time is completed.

Since her G-ma’s death, Ashley’s been talking more and more like that, too. “I’d rather just go quickly in The Game, even if it’s to act out some sick fantasy of some sick rich fuck. Better that than be put to work cleaning sewers for three years, or pulling guard duty at the Canadian border. Although... getting blown up would be a quick way to go, don’t you think? Maybe I could be an Omegaman, one of those remote drone things, like your brother used to drive.”

I remember once how Eric told me we probably wouldn’t have to worry about reaching our LSC enrollment age. “You’re young. Your LSC’s still forty-five years away, roughly. A lot could happen between now and then.”

I knew he was trying to make me think about how the law could be repealed. Or how someone might find a cure for the Resurrection virus before then. But I really knew he believed this because he thought the probability of another outbreak happening was high, one that wouldn’t, unlike in the past, be quelled.

It was deeply fatalistic thinking.

Maybe G-ma Junie was onto something.

Chapter 8

By the time we reach the car, Kelly’s clothes have stopped dripping. He stops to dump the water out of his shoes and wring his socks and shirt out. Ash announces that she can see the cop from earlier walking by down below. He’s clearly checking to make sure we’re gone, but he never glances up toward the parking structure.

Micah complains about his seat getting wet, so we just hang out for a little bit while Kelly dries off some more.

“Do you really think we could do it?” Ash asks. “Do you think we could actually get to LI?”

I look out past the edge of the parking structure, past the tunnel opening, out in the direction of Long Island. I can’t actually see it because the view is blocked by another building, but I can feel it out there. And I imagine what it would be like to go that whole distance in the darkness under water. It scares the crap out of me.

Nobody answers her question, probably for the same reason.

Micah wanders off, and Ash eventually follows after him. They pace together the length of the garage, their heads bent over the tablet, as she undoubtedly presses him on the details of a plan that now seems inevitable. Reggie hovers by us for a while, like he wants to say something. He’s clearly anxious. After a while, he goes trailing off after Ash like a puppy dog.

I turn to Kelly. “You scared the crap out of me.”

He inhales long and deep. “I didn’t jump, Jess.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to say anything before. I didn’t jump in.”

“You fell?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh, so you just spontaneously floated up and over the railing.”

“I was pushed,” he whispers. He eyes the trio off in the gloom. “One of them pushed me. I don’t know who, but I have my suspicions.”

“Reggie?” He’s the only one big enough. “He wouldn’t do something like that!”

“How can you be so sure?”

“He’s your friend, Kelly. Our friend. He’s not—”

Kelly wraps his goose-fleshed arms around me. He buries his face in my neck and squeezes. I squirm from the clamminess of his skin. He smells of ocean, of fish and rot and old motor oil. He holds me tight and won’t release me. I can feel him shivering, and I realize it’s not from the cold. “Maybe you’re right,” he finally says, relenting. He lets me go. “Maybe I just slipped. I was leaning out pretty far.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Patronize me.”

He leans his head back against the cool concrete wall and shuts his eyes. I want to smack him again, but how can I? Something deep down inside of me knows what he said is possible. He and Reg have always been competitive. All the boys have, ever since we met years ago. But since Micah joined us, he’s been the undisputed alpha male, especially since their most frequent field of battle has been gaming and hacking. So, it could’ve been him, his way of reminding Kelly who’s really in charge. If so, it was childish.

But if I had to pick one of them, it’d be Reggie. He and Kel have always tried to best the other.

It’s so exasperating. Why does it always have to be about power with them?

Still, I just cannot wrap my head around it. As much time as they spend pushing each other out of the way, I just can’t see Reggie doing something as reckless as that. He can be impulsive sometimes, even a bit spiteful, but he’s not stupid. That’s just not him.

“You saw how funny he thought it was,” Kelly said. “He was laughing.”

“He was nervous.”

“And why do you think?”

Fortunately, Micah appears from around the other side of the garage, so I don’t have to remind him that Reggie laughs whenever he doesn’t know how to respond.

“Have you seen the others recently?” Micah asks. “We should get going.”

“I thought they were with you.”

He shakes his head. “Not for a while. They ditched me.”

Kelly rolls his eyes. I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am.

“Idle hands do the devil’s work,” Micah opines. “Probably don’t have to guess where Reggie’s hands are idling right about now.”

He unlocks the car, leans inside, and gives the horn a quick toot. I stifle the urge to tell him to stop, worried the cop might hear it and come looking for us. “Ash!” His voice echoes through the empty structure. “Reg! Come on, you pervs. Time to go!”

Soon, the sound of running feet reaches our ears, and the pair appears from one of the upper levels. Ashley’s face is flushed and sweaty. Her hair’s tousled. Reggie’s wearing his usual dopey grin.

Before any of us can say anything or tease them, Ash stops and appraises us. “Oh no,” she says. “Don’t even think it. We were just doing a little scouting.”

“Scouting, right. Hoping to earn your... explorer’s badge?” Micah levels at Reg.

Reggie gives him a sloppy two-fingered salute. “I’ll never tell.”

“We were scouting,” Ash repeats. “We’ll tell you what we found on the way back.”

Kelly takes the front this time, since he’s still damp and nobody wants to sit next to someone who smells swampy. I sit behind Micah, pushing Ashley onto the hump this time. I lean over to look at Reggie in the far right seat, directly behind Kel, but I can’t detect any suggestion he might’ve done what Kelly believes he did. When he glances over, he waggles his eyebrows and gives me a wink and a smile. No sign of guilt at all.

“The cop makes a regular pass,” Ashley says, once we’re out of the garage again and back on the road. “We timed him. He does a circuit of some kind. Must be his entire beat. Kinda boring if you ask me. We estimate it takes him just about an hour to do the whole loop.”

Nobody says anything.

“Okay then. And what did you guys do?” She taps Kelly on the shoulder. “We left you two alone for a long time. You’re welcome.”

“Just talked.”

“Sure you did.”

“Stop it,” I whisper.

“Geez. Someone’s in a bad mood. Guess I know why.”

Kelly plows his fingers through his matted hair. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that there’d be a cop patrolling down there on foot? I mean, why there of all places? Nobody’s going to be wandering around in that neighborhood. The place is deserted.”

“We were there.”

Micah’s shoulders lift and fall as he drives, but he keeps his eyes on the road. Kelly’s face pinches. He’s apparently unhappy that the rest of us don’t share his concern. The question hangs in the air and never gets a response.

After that, the conversation drifts. We pass through the checkpoints and the guards don’t even bother to scan our Links this time. Leaving the restricted areas is a hell of a lot easier than entering them. One guard halfheartedly checks the trunk of the car, but that’s the most any of them does. Maybe he thinks we’re carrying illegal contraband or something, like maybe we looted some of the abandoned buildings.

Micah drops me and Kelly off at my house. Nobody’s home, so we take a chance and jump into the shower together while Kelly’s clothes go through the wash.

We begin soaping each other down, but as desperate as I am to mess around, sex is clearly the farthest thing from Kelly’s mind. We quickly rinse and towel off. I throw his clothes into the dryer, while he sits in my room wrapped in a towel and my robe.

“You look cute,” I tell him, drying my hair. He looks over distractedly and turns back to his Link. I go over and peek over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Looking up whatever I can find out about LI. You know, history and stuff.”

“You know anything you find on the public Streams is unreliable.”

He nods. “Still, better to be prepared.”

“Prepared?” I ask. “But I thought...”

“What?” He looks up expectantly. “You thought what?”

“Nothing.”

He lets out a noisy exhale. “They’re going to keep pushing this.”

“I know.”

The official record of Long Island claims that the wall was first built around it to prevent the undead from getting out and spreading the infection. But it’s like Micah says: the infection’s already among us. Micro-outbreaks keep happening. It’s inevitable. The virus is everywhere now, doing road maintenance, mowing lawns, even unloading trucks and shipping containers. The outbreaks have usually been small, typically a few dozen victims in total. On the rare occasion, it’s taken a couple hundred people. But they’ve always been quickly and easily contained, thanks to the implants. In just about all of these cases, the government claims foreign terrorism, sabotage by enemies of the New Merican state. Infiltrators from the Southern States Coalition. Russian spies. Chinese agents. But most people don’t really believe all that. The simplest explanation is that they’re accidents, plain and simple.

Among the more recent events are the outbreaks in Seattle and Los Angeles. They didn’t get much play on Media, which people say proves their conspiracy theory that the government is suppressing the news. But why would we expect the same kind of coverage? They weren’t as large as the outbreaks here and DC. None of them caused the kind of panic and devastation that occurred back then, when nobody really knew what was going on.

Eric says it’s proof that we’ve gotten used to them happening. He says that nobody even bothers to be worried about the risks anymore, that we’ve all become desensitized. He believes that maybe that’s been the intention all along.

He’s paranoid.

He once brought it up at the dinner table, trying to get Grandpa to react. “Think about it: the governments triggers frequent little outbreaks everywhere, then quickly suppress them. Pretty soon it’s all just background noise.”

Grandpa usually won’t respond directly to Eric’s conspiracy claims. I could tell he was getting through to him, though, because his eyes get dark when he’s angry. Nevertheless, a lifetime’s worth of military discipline kept his emotions in check. I can’t say the same for Eric’s relatively short stint in the Marines.

Naturally, there are other theories circulating to explain the outbreaks. Some people believe they’re caused by vector transmission: a mosquito bites a CU or an Infected Undead, then bites someone else. There’s some logic to that idea. After all, the original genes used to make the first Zulus came from a virus called dengue, which was spread by mosquitoes.

Grandpa insists that’s impossible. He says dengue was eradicated after the plague of 2012 by this scientist who blocked the virus’ ability to replicate inside mosquitoes. The scientist’s name was Stephen something — Archangel, maybe — I can’t remember what he said it was. I’ve never been able to find any information about it on the Stream.

Other people think the infection can be transmitted through the water. That’s why I didn’t like Kelly getting scratched today. I know it’s just me being hyper-paranoid, since everyone knows that zombies themselves don’t last very long in water. But you never know. Maybe the zombie germ does.

The truth is, nobody knows for sure how the outbreaks spontaneously occur. And if the government knows, they’re not talking.

“Does it say there why they moved the Omegaman training facilities off LI?” I ask Kelly. “After the second flood, I mean.”

“Well, the island was pretty much a lost cause,” he answers, reciting history that we both learned years back. I’ve since forgotten much of it, but I know he’ll remember. The explanation he gives sounds familiar, but it also comes across as too convenient. “The Army Corps of Engineers went in and did a systematic search to find and evacuate any remaining survivors. Then they walled the island off. The Marines figured they might as well use the land for training purposes, since it was too unsafe for civilians.”

What was never said was what they would do with the undead.

“They moved the Omegaman training facilities to Washington State the year before Eric joined up,” I say. “Reggie says it’s because they ran out of IUs for target practice.”

Kelly shrugs. “More like it was too costly and too dangerous to try and track every last one of them down. There had to be tens of thousands. Cheaper and safer to just let them starve.”

Most zombies just sort of run out of juice after a while, contrary to the old myths and legends about them going on forever, against the laws of physics. Without human flesh to replenish their energy stores, most of them would last maybe a year, two tops. After ten years, the place would essentially be zombie-free.

It’s been almost thirteen.

That was supposedly the thinking when Arc Properties went in and reclaimed some of the zones, four, maybe five, years ago. They said they were going in to do a survey. While they claimed to have found a few active zoms, those were so slow they were essentially harmless. Of course, nobody cared a whit by then. Nobody wanted to go and re-inhabit an island that was half underwater, overgrown and moldy, and probably grossly contaminated with zombie excrement. Not to mention the corpses everywhere.

It was a bit of a surprise when Arc Properties announced that it was going to convert one of the interior zones into a new type of gaming arcade. That’s how Gameland came to be. They bought a bunch of Life Service Commitments, and those became the first Players. They still buy LSCs directly from the government, but they also have a waiting list. They can afford to be picky.

“Arc,” Kelly spits. “Bastards.” It’s the only time I’ve ever heard him say anything negative about the company. It comes as such a surprise now because all the rest of us have talked about for the past few years is joining Arc after high school. Kelly’s never really had strong opinions one way or the other. He’s always been focused on his own plans.

“What about Arc?” I ask.

He shakes his head spitefully. “Bunch of rich bastards. All they care about is money. Did you know it costs at least ten million bucks to buy into The Game? And that’s not even for a good zombie, either, but an older one, probably with a first-gen linc and second-hand hardware.”

I frown, wondering where this hostility is coming from all of a sudden, and why he’s now bringing up Arc and The Game.

“People who have that kind of money should use it for good, instead of just throwing it away. If I were that rich, I’d make sure Kyle got fixed.”

I lean away from him.

His eyes clear. “Sorry, Jess. I guess I’m just a little tired after everything that’s happened today.”

“It’s alright, sweetie.”

I give him a kiss on the cheek. The next one goes on his lips. But he stands up, pushing me away. “I’m late. Dad wants to talk colleges.”

I let him fetch his clothes from the dryer. I watch him get dressed without saying a word.

Something tells me colleges is the last thing he wants to talk about right now.

Chapter 9

Ashley pings me that evening. Thankfully, she waits until after dinner this time. Grandpa and Eric are still in the kitchen going at each other yet again. Which means Eric’s shouting, while Grandpa sits there stoically. He’ll throw out a comment every few minutes, just when it seems like Eric’s losing steam, and the whole thing’ll start up again.

I close my bedroom door to muffle them.

“What’s up?”

“Reggie wants us to meet at his place,” Ashley says. “Can you come?”

“Right now? Um, I guess. What’s this about?”

It’s a stupid question, of course. There’s only one thing it could be about for her to call at this hour.

“He’s figured out how we can do it.”

I snort. “The tunnel? Right.”

“Just be there, okay?”

As soon as she disconnects, Kelly pings me. “You hear?”

“Just got off with Ash, but she didn’t give any details. She just told me to meet at Reggie’s.”

“I guess they got equipment.”

I can hear the recrimination in his voice telling he told me so. They just couldn’t drop it.

“What equipment? Scuba gear?”

While Kelly tells me what little he knows, I slip into my sweater and sneakers.

“Apparently Ash knows this guy whose uncle owns a shop on the edge of town.”

“A dive shop? Really? I don’t remember any dive shops around here.”

“Not so much a dive shop as a military surplus store.”

I pause to think. “Are you talking about Eppy’s over by the old hospital?”

“I guess. I stopped by Micah’s on the way home. He said they were going to meet with this guy that Ash knows. They invited me to go with them.”

“Did you?”

“Had to get home.”

“Ah, right. How’d the talk go?”

“Didn’t. Dad had to work an extra shift.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Don’t be. Mom needed me to help out with Kyle. Finally got him calmed down. Micah pinged me just over an hour ago and said they got everything we’d need, even wetsuits.” He paused. “Apparently there’s a catch, though.”

“Yeah, money, that’s the catch.”

“Maybe. Micah didn’t elaborate, just told us to come to Reggie’s tonight.”

“You knew about this an hour ago and you didn’t tell me?”

“I know better than to ping you during dinner.”

I grumble, but he’s right. The last thing he’d want to do is interrupt my supper, especially for a second night in a row.

“Stop by and pick me up?” he asks.

“Yeah, give me about ten minutes. I think Grandpa and Eric are still downstairs, so I’ll try and sneak out the back way. Otherwise, I’ll have to think of something. I can’t just say I’m going over to Reggie’s.”

“Tell them you’re going to Ashley’s then.”

“That’s like two miles away. Eric’ll offer to drive. Then what?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“I always do, don’t I?”

Eric’s still ranting in the kitchen, going off about some plan to expand the duties of his department at work. He’s standing at the sink, his back to the door. He’s flinging soapy water around as he washes the dishes. “As if I don’t have enough paperwork to do already!”

Grandpa’s in his chair, leaning back with his fingers laced behind his head. Just as I’m about to turn the corner, he turns and looks at me. He doesn’t say anything, just stares.

“I’m, uh...” I point at the door. “I’m going over to Ash’s. Me and Micah and Reggie and... Kelly. They’re picking me up, so I don’t need a ride.”

He just sits there while I fidget with the strap on my backpack. Finally, he says, “Take your medicine.” Then he turns back around. Eric isn’t even aware of what’s happening behind him. He’s still talking a mile a minute.

I slip out into the night and hurry over to Kelly’s as fast as I can, afraid that if I turn around, I’ll see my grandfather standing there watching me.

“That was quick,” Kelly says.

“Yeah, well, things at my house are a bit... tense right now. Eric’s on a tear. Sounds like there’s some sort of shakeup going on at the police station.”

Kelly looks over. “Is everything alright?” I know he’s worried about my pirated copy of Eric’s inner zone permit.

I shake my head. “It was something having to do with more paperwork.”

“Wonder if there’s been another breach.” He tilts his head like he’s thinking about it.

“Breach? What have you heard?”

“Nothing.” Then he adds, “You’d know before I would.”

My brother heads up the Necrotics Crimes Division, which basically means that anything to do with offenses committed by or against the undead gets dumped on him. It’s the general consensus that NCD is the suckiest department on the force, but it fits Eric’s personality to a tee.

“Can we talk about something else?” I ask, and Kelly nods.

Ten minutes later we’re on Reggie’s front walk. We hear a low whistle and see Micah standing in the shadows beneath some tall bushes. He waves us over. “This way. We’re in back.”

“Why all the secrecy?”

“Reg’s mom.”

Kel and I both nod. Mrs Casey is the nosiest woman on the face of the planet. If she got even the slightest whiff of our plans, she’d be on us like a bloodhound after catching the scent of a killer.

We circle around the house to the garage. Reggie’s father had it converted years ago into a retro game room. There’s a pinball machine and some ancient video arcade games, a pool table with worn felt, and a ping pong table. It’s all totally lame, but the older generation seems to like it. That’s why we hang out at Micah’s instead, even though his basement is musty and the couch sags and smells like dogs and stinky feet, and the downstairs bathroom should probably be condemned. Or at least given a thorough scrubbing.

“Hey guys,” Reggie says, meeting us at the door. He’s grinning from ear to ear as he hands me and Kel one of his father’s beers. Micah’s bottle is nearly empty. “I hope your weekend’s clear, because we’re shooting for Saturday. Whoever can make it, that is.” He throws Kelly a pointed glance. “Right now, four of us are a definite yes.”

Kelly’s bottle stops halfway to his lips. “Four?” he says, confused. He looks over at me, but I give him a quick shake of the head and a shrug. I’m just as perplexed by the count as he is, since I haven’t committed to anything.

“I think you counted wrong,” I say. “You only got three so far.”

Reggie angles his beer toward the corner of the garage. “Four.”

Another boy steps out from the shadows. I recognize him immediately, and his name slips from my lips before I realize it.

Kelly does a double take. “The kid from this morning?” he yelps. “The guy who was hitting on you at the studio?”

Jake raises his hands. “Whoa, hold on a minute. I wasn’t—”

“What are you doing here?” I growl. I turn to Ash and demand to know what’s going on.

“Hey now,” Micah says. “He never said he knew you, Jessie.”

“I didn’t know she’d be coming,” Jake says, although I suspect he did. Everyone knows we’re a team.

I step forward. “Oh, didn’t you?”

“Let him finish, Jess,” Kelly says. His voice is low, rumbling. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“You two know each other?” Ashley asks. She seems genuinely surprised. And a bit amused by the new development.

“We don’t,” I retort. “Not really. We just met this morning. At the dojang.”

“Where I heard she kicked your ass,” Kelly sniffs. He’s actually bristling.

Something switches in Jake’s face. I recognize it immediately, and I groan inwardly. Here we go again.

“You’re right,” Jake says, stepping forward. “She gave me quite the workout. But that’s alright. I finished on top.”

“You sonofa—”

I pull Kelly back. “Stop it,” I snap. “It was nothing. Okay? We sparred, that’s all.” I glare at Jake, daring him to keep pushing. He knows I could embarrass him here if I wanted. These are my people, not his. He’s the stranger.

But then it hits me why he’s here, and I realize he’s got leverage, too.

“Let’s just hear what he has to say, Kel.”

“Was it just the two of you there?”

I sigh. “Don’t be silly. Rupert was there. It was practice, nothing else.”

Jake nods. “Nothing else.”

“Well then,” Reggie says. “Now that we got that out of the way...”

I turn to Ashley. “I don’t understand. Why is he here exactly? I thought we were going to discuss...”

“He knows all about LI.”

“But why? How?”

“He was my lab partner last year, so...”

“Lab partner, right,” Kelly grumbles. “Was that all it was?”

“Come on, brah,” Reggie says, and steps between them. “That’s out of line.”

“Jake’s here because we need equipment,” Ashley says. “He can get it for us. That’s all. There’s no conspiracy, no quid pro quo here.”

“Fancy words,” Kelly grumbles.

I elbow him in the side.

“His uncle owns Eppy’s,” Ash explains.

“Wait, you’re that Jacob Esposito?” I exclaim. “Little Jacob?” I almost say Little Fat Jacob, because that’s what all the kids called him.

Jake nods. “Nobody’s called me little in a while.”

“Okay, now I remember you,” Kelly says. “That punk on the playground in middle school, always picking on the smaller kids. What’d you, like, grow a foot over the summer?”

“That’s not me,” Jake says. “Not anymore.”

“Once a punk, always a punk.”

Kelly tries to stare Jake down, but Reggie wedges himself between them again. “Settle down, everyone. We need Jake. First off, because of the equipment. His uncle’s agreed to let us borrow it. Secondly, Jake’s a certified rescue diver.”

“Lotta good that does us. None of us knows how to scuba dive.

“Well, actually, it won’t be scuba gear,” Jake says. “And Uncle Joe doesn’t know.”

“So, you’re stealing it? That’s hardcore, man.”

“Borrowing it.”

“And what do you get?” I ask, casting a sideways glance at Ashley. I wonder what she had to give in return, since money is out of the question.

“Inclusion into your little outing, of course. I thought that was clear. I want to be included.”

“Why the hell would you want to break into Long Island?” I demand. “Don’t you know it’s illegal?”

“I do. So why would you?”

“Because we’re hackers,” I say. “Mostly anyway. Isn’t that what you called us this morning? Jackers? That’s what we do.”

“Maybe. But hacking isn’t the same as physically breaking into a Forbidden Zone.” He shrugs. “That’s where I can help. I’ve done all sorts of survival training. What can I say? I’m more of an outdoorsy type.”

“More like your parents sent you to military school.”

“Yeah, Kelly, that’s what happened.”

“It works out for the best,” Reggie says, giving Kelly a pointed look.”Now we’ve got an even number.”

“And why is that so important?”

“The first thing they drill into your brain in survival training is that you partner up,” Jake answers. “You can do threes, but it’s best to have twosomes, especially in a dive group.”

“I’m fine with threesomes,” Reggie jokes.

“Be serious.”

“Each partner watches the other’s back,” Jake continues. He glances at me, and I don’t know if it’s just my impression, but that hungry, animal-like look is back in his eyes. I sense Kelly tense up next to me, even though we’re not physically touching. The last thing I want is for them to start fighting over who’s going to partner up with me.

“And anyway,” Micah quickly adds, “once we told him we were looking for this kind of equipment, it’s not like we could exclude him.”

“You’d squeal on us?” I ask.

Jake hesitates before shaking his head, but he doesn’t fool anyone.

I sigh and throw my hands up in the air. “Fine.”

“I’m not fine with it!” Kelly shouts. “I don’t trust this guy as far as I could throw him.”

“You want to try?” Jake challenges.

“Oh, give it up.”

A hint of a grin twitches at the corners of Jake’s mouth. “If you want the equipment, I’m going. That’s the deal.”

“Then I’m not going.”

“If Kelly doesn’t go, I’m not either.”

Jake’s grin falters.

“Come on, guys,” Ashley pleads. “Don’t be like that. Jake can partner up with Micah.” She gives Micah a wink. He rolls his eyes, but nods.

Something about the way she says it, like it’s more than a simple logistical remedy.

In the year or so that we’ve known Micah, I’ve never seen him with a girl. I mean actually with a girl and not just hanging out, like he does with me and Ash. Micah’s always been the spare tire of our group, though it never felt like that big of a deal. I’d always chalked it up to our little club being perfectly full. But maybe Ash knows something I don’t.

Reggie raises his bottle. “Shall we toast, then? Tomorrow, Jake’s going to give us a quick lesson on diving using this special gear he’s getting for us. But for tonight, we strategize.”

“For what?” Kelly demands.

“Well, we need to figure out what to bring with us.”

“I thought our new friend Jake was in charge of that.”

“I’m talking about after our lesson, brah. Long Island. We need to plan, like, check the tide charts and all that stuff. Gotta make sure the currents are right.”

Kelly shakes his head.

“I’m thinking we shoot for Saturday morning.”

“Day after tomorrow?”

“Why wait?”

“You only need a couple hours training,” Jake says. “As for tides, they’re on a roughly six-hour cycle. If we’re lucky, they’ll be in our favor. If we leave just at the peak of high tide, we should have a few hours to hang out on Long Island before it starts coming in again.”

Reggie slaps him on the back. “Good thinking, m’man.”

It bothers me how quickly Jake’s inserted himself into the plan. And into our group. It doesn’t feel right.

Reggie misreads the look on my face. “Aw, don’t worry about a thing, Jess. We’ll have you back home long before dinnertime with the Colonel.”

Micah and Ash clink bottles with him. I tentatively raise mine, too, but I don’t drink. I notice that there are only four bottles toasting. Jake and Kelly are too busy glaring at each other.

I sigh unhappily. Inside of me, excitement and worry are at war with each other. We’re really going to do this. Or at least try.

And I’m worried someone’s going to end up seriously hurt.

Chapter 10

“Oxygen rebreather technology was developed by NASA about a dozen years ago,” Jake explains. He holds up the odd-looking apparatus so we can all see it. “It was further adapted by the Navy for short-term underwater use and has applications in firefighting as well.”

It’s just after eight o’clock in the morning and we’re at the Page Mill levee. Except for some fishermen a few hundred yards away, we’re all alone. The fishermen don’t even bother to glance over at us. They look like they’re well into their second case of cheap beer. Their enthusiastic off-key singing seems to confirm this. I don’t think they really care if they catch anything.

“Great,” Kelly grumbles, “we’re using tech developed by a defunct government agency.”

“Where’s the air tank?” Ashley loudly asks.

It’s such a stupid question that I just know it has to be a set up.

Jake smiles. “I’m glad you asked that, Ash. By the way, I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you look really... nice today. Both you ladies do,” he pointedly adds, glancing more at Kelly than at me.

Kelly makes a sound of disgust and rolls his eyes. Ashley beams. Of course she looks nice, she’s wearing a signature Ronnie Marx white two-piece bikini that really highlights her red hair and green eyes. Not that any of the guys are looking at her hair or eyes. They’re checking out the other assets that skimpy white suit is meant to highlight. Next to her, I look like a blob.

I glance down at my own pair of dingy oversized gray workout sweatpants and loose tee. Underneath, I’ve got on a relatively modest rainbow-print two-piece with French-cut shorts.

“Thanks, Jake,” Ash says, tossing her hair. “You look nice, too.”

“What a loser,” Kelly murmurs. At least he says it so only I can hear. For once, I have to agree.

“Now, as I was saying—”

“Before you so rudely interrupted yourself?” Kelly finishes.

Reggie snorts.

Jake frowns, then tries to laugh. “The rebreather device was developed to take the place of an oxygen tank, but primarily for short-term use situations and tight spaces, such as between airlocks on spacecraft and certain search and rescue scenarios, like collapsed buildings and such.”

“I have a question,” Kelly says, raising his hand. “Are we traveling through any airlocks?”

“One could argue the tunnel is one long airlock.”

“Operative word being long. These are for short term use. You said so yourself.”

Jake shrugged. “Sure, but—”

“So... no.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Ashley snaps.

Jake clears his throat. “The cartridge has a hard outer casing. It’s perforated to allow pressure equalization. It protects an inner Mylar sack a pleated porous membrane that contains a matrix embedded with a chemical converter. They’re essentially microscopic beads cross-linked to a chemical that converts carbon dioxide back into good old fashioned oh-two.”

“Ah, where would we be without good old fashioned oxygen? It’s so much better than the new fangled stuff.”

I hip check Kelly. “You’ve made your point. Go ahead, Jake. Ignore him.”

“As I mentioned, the NASA rebreathers were reconfigured to be used in aqueous environments by having thinner Mylar sheaths and larger reservoirs. The ones my uncle stocks aren’t specifically intended for that purpose; they’re customized for infiltration into areas where poison gasses are an issue, like hazmat sites and spills. That being said, they’re largely interchangeable and are perfectly fine for use underwater. In fact, civilian spec-ops agents prefer these for certain strike missions such as rapid insertions and near-surface operations in confined spaces because they’re smaller and the cartridges have a quick-connect linkage so that they can be easily swapped out when they’re used up.”

He scans our faces to make sure we’re still paying attention. His gaze stops on Kelly. “Spec-ops stands for special operations.”

“We’re not idiots.”

“I didn’t want to assume anything.”

“Sounds to me like you’re assuming we’re not very smart.”

“I didn’t know what that meant,” Ash admits.

“Can we get to the good part?” Reggie begs. “The part where we all go swimming?”

“Okay, but first you should understand the risks. When you breathe air, you also inhale and expire inert gasses like nitrogen, as well as other gasses that can be dangerous. These do not interact with the membrane, so their levels remain constant. Cartridges used for scuba, however, have built-in monitoring systems that maintain a proper balance and concentration of nitrogen relative to oxygen, which is important so you don’t get the bends. It also ensures that your brain doesn’t think it’s either oxygen-deprived or in surplus. This is very important, because if either of those scenarios were to occur, you could faint. And I probably don’t need to tell you what happens if you faint while under water.”

“Maybe you should,” Kelly says. “You know, for Ashley’s sake.”

I tell him to behave. I’m not joking this time; he’s crossed the line by going after Ash. She gives him a nasty look, too, but Reggie chuckles, which redirects her ire. Micah wisely opts to stay out of it.

We turn back to Jake, who’s busy fiddling with the canister. He finally gets the device apart by disengaging the cage from the hose attached to the mask. The cartridge is roughly the size of a fat hotdog.

“So much for it being easy to swap out.”

“Just not used to it,” he explains, but his face is red, and he seems to have lost some of his bluster. He digs through his duffle and pulls out a larger canister. “We’ll start off with these larger capacity ones on the tunnel dive because they contain enough chemical converter to last roughly three hours, give or take. That should be ample enough time for us to get there and back again. However, just in case, each of us will carry one of these smaller cartridges on our belts as a spare. They’re sealed. All you have to do is insert into the hose, like this, and twist.”

Just in case of what? I think. I don’t want to be underwater for more than hour. Then I wonder: How long does it take to swim a mile?

“For today, however, we’ll use the smaller ones, because I’ve got more of them. Just keep in mind that they last only about an hour.”

“Why not just use scuba tanks?” I ask. “Don’t you guys stock those?”

“Well, first off, you have to be certified to even get the tanks to use them,” Jake answers. “Secondly, it’s illegal to rent them out to uncertified divers.”

“Like what we’re doing isn’t already illegal?”

“Look, guys,” Micah says, finally speaking up. “It’s either the rebreathers or we don’t go. Jake’s uncle would definitely notice six big dive tanks missing. But these?” He grabs the mask from Jake’s hand. “The cartridges are cheap and disposable. They’ve got cases of them in the store.”

“Cases?”

“Uncle Joe bids on closed crates at military auctions, and these came in on a pallet he won. He’ll never sell them all before they expire.”

“They’re expired?”

“No.”

“Then why are these surplus?”

“Because the military has more than they can use, especially now, with Omegas doing more of the risky work.”

“Are they close to expiring?”

“There’s nothing wrong with them.”

“We’re putting our lives in your hands, brah,” Reggie says, looking worried for the first time.

“They’re perfectly fine. Trust me. People come in and buy these all the time, and we’ve never had a complaint.”

“Kinda hard to complain, if you die.”

“Tell you what,” Micah says, steering our focus back onto the trip. “We’ll pack a third set of cartridges in a separate pack, just in case.”

“I’m not sure I can swing that.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jake. We won’t even need them. They’ll go right back into inventory when we get back.”

Jake’s face pinches, but he nods. “I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“If by sorry, you mean dead, then yeah.”

“Kelly! Stop it! Please.”

“How about showing us how they work,” Micah prompts.

“The rebreather mask works just like the old fashioned scuba masks. Bite down on the mouthpiece and inhale. Do the same to exhale. That’s the part that takes getting used to. You don’t want the waste gas escaping into the water and going to the surface. It needs to go into the bag to be recycled. In and out between you and the cartridge.”

He slips the unit into his bag and comes up with a pair of goggles.

“Before I talk about these, let me reiterate: you do not want to exhale through your nose, because...? Anyone?”

“You’ll lose your air,” Ashley quips.

“Exactly. The rebreathers can’t create oxygen, they just recycle it from the carbon dioxide you exhale. Lose it and it’s gone. So unless you have gills and can extract oxygen from the water, I’d suggest you pay attention and follow directions. It’s very important.”

“It sure sounds like a huge risk,” I say. “We haven’t been trained for this kind of discipline. Someone’s bound to exhale the wrong way, like out your nose. What then?”

Jake holds up a hand. “It’s not as hard as you think. Also, these goggles are designed to stop you from exhaling through your nose, which is what you’d normally do to get rid of any water. Not with these. They come equipped with their own clearing mechanism.”

He points to a silver cartridge inserted into the elastic headband. It’s also about the size of a sausage, and I realize I must be hungry, since I keep making food comparisons. “This is compressed air. To clear your mask, just tap the blue button on the top, right... here. It’ll force out a bolus of air, removing any water from the goggles. Not too much, or you’ll hurt your eyes. You get about a half dozen puffs, so make sure your goggles are a good fit to begin with, and make each puff count. They should be tight against your face and seal completely. Use up all of your purge air, and you’ll be looking out through tunnel water for the rest of the dive. But the reason I’m bringing this up now is because you can also—”

“Speaking of water,” Kelly interrupts, “are we actually ever going to get in it today? Or are we just going to sit here and listen to you blab on and on?”

Jake’s confidence crumbles. His face flushes and he fumbles the goggles. He was so confrontational just a few moments ago, but Kelly seems to have finally broken him down with his constant sniping. The sudden change in Jake worries me. What if he’s emotionally unstable? There’s enough drama in our group that we don’t need to add his baggage to it.

“I, um,” he stammers. “I was going to say it’s time to, uh, put on the equipment.” He quickly turns and picks up a box behind him. “There’s crates in my van with wetsuits, weight belts, and fins. Everyone gets a set. I had to guess on the sizes.” He looks at Reggie and adds, “Although yours might be a bit tight.”

Reggie grins and turns to Ash. “Skin tight is good. The tighter the better.”

She slaps his arm and sticks out her tongue. But then she thrusts out her chest at him in defiance. “That tight enough for you?”

He shrugs. “Let me know if you need help squeezing into your suit.”

“I won’t.”

“I might need some help getting into mine.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of room, I’m sure. Once we factor in shrinkage.”

The rest of us are used to this sort of thing between them, but Jake’s face turns so red that he looks like he’s about to spontaneously combust.

“Putting the suits on shouldn’t be difficult,” he offers, coughing. “I’ve got baby powder, which’ll help. It’s getting them on again when they’re wet that’s a pain.”

“What about getting it off?” Reggie asks.

“You won’t need any help getting it off,” Ashley tells him. “You practice every day.”

Jake practically chokes. He quickly instructs us on the proper fitting and preparation of our goggles so they won’t leak or fog up. When he tells us to spit on the glass, Reggie hocks a nasty ball of sputum into his and swishes it around.

Before we get to try the rebreathers, Jake has us snorkel around a bit near the shore so we get used to being in wetsuits and flippers and being neutrally buoyant.

I can’t seem to get the knack of it. I keep sinking. But rather than admitting this, I fight to keep myself at the surface. I quickly tire and start to flounder. Nobody seems to notice. Kelly ignores me as he paddles around twenty feet away, as if he’s suddenly very interested in what’s in the murky depths below us. But there’s nothing to see, now that we’ve stirred up all the mud and silt. I finally just give up and waddle ashore to take some of the lead weights off my belt.

Jake suddenly appears, startling me. “Let me help you,” he says. He yanks my belt and it falls from my waist. Holding one end up, he threads a pair of one-pounders off. “You don’t need as much weight because you’ve got so little body fat.”

I know what he really means. I may not be totally flat-chested, but I’m far from well-endowed. I consider joking that my fat ass more than makes up for it, but I suddenly don’t want to draw any attention to these parts of my body.

He secures my belt, checks to make sure it’s snug, then waves me back toward the water. “Just let yourself relax,” he says, confidently.

Without Kelly standing right there, his nervousness is nowhere in sight.

I look out over the surface of the lake to where the others are still paddling around, and find Kelly’s faded blue swim trunks and his lily-white legs. He hasn’t even noticed I’m not there with him. So much for buddying up, I think.

After the belt adjustment, staying at the surface turns out to be a lot easier. Diving down to the bottom and coming back up for air takes very little effort, too. It’s only ten or twelve feet deep and, with the flippers, requires only three or four quick kicks. Once I get to the bottom, I relax. My body just sort of sits there, swaying gently with the motion of the water, neither rising nor sinking. It’s just as I imagined being weightless would be like. I want to stay there forever, but my lungs force me back to the surface.

After a brief break and a light snack, we try out the rebreathers. Ash immediately gets into trouble with hers, complaining that she keeps forgetting and exhaling out through the side of her mouth, which means she has to surface to get a fresh lungful of air. I can see it in everyone’s eyes: What we’re doing isn’t just dangerous, it could be fatal if we lose our focus even once.

After about the fourth or fifth time this happens, Micah lays into her. He tells her there won’t be air pockets inside the tunnels. Frustration is written all over his face. He’s worried about her, and the only way he knows to get her to pay attention is to scare her into remembering. “Do not exhale through your nose, Ash!” he nearly shouts. “You do and you’ll be in deep shit.”

“I’m not!”

“Into the damn cartridge, then.”

Her lip quivers. I want to go over and protect her, but I know it’s for her own good. “I’ll try harder,” she promises.

“Do or do not,” Micah offers, his tone finally softening. “There is no try.”

Jake frowns. When Micah tries to explain the quote to him, he just shakes his head in confusion and asks what a yoda is.

“Dude,” Reggie says, laughing in disbelief. “When we get back from LI, we are so totally digging out my father’s old DVDs and having ourselves a marathon binge session.”

“What are DVDs?”

“Seriously?”

“You have to remember not to exhale anywhere but into your cartridge,” Micah quietly urges Ash. “Do whatever you need to do, even if that means sticking corks in your nostrils and gluing that mask onto your lips.”

Ash’s neck muscles quiver and we all stop what we’re doing and wait for it, the inevitable tantrum. I can tell she’s close to breaking. If there’s anything I know about her, it’s that she actually hates appearing weak and stupid. That’s why she’s always got this tough-as-nails exterior. Underneath, though, she’s as fragile as any of us.

By the look on Jake’s face, even he knows something’s coming.

She glances around at us, but then she suddenly laughs. “Anyone got any gum? I can stick that up my nose. ABC gum?”

“ABC?”

“Already been chewed.”

“Ew,” Jakes says, cringing. And the tension melts away.

After another twenty minutes, during which Ash stays completely submerged, Jake takes us to the other end of the levee, where there are some ruins. It gives us a chance to explore a little bit while we practice moving around and through obstacles.

“Make sure you always know where your partner is,” he reminds us. “The idea is to get used to swimming while always being aware of where the other person is. And remember, we’re not here to become underwater salvage experts or anything. No wandering off. Stay tight.”

He hands us each a waterproof flashlight and tells us to follow him. We all obey, glancing grimly around at each other. Underneath the seriousness, we’re barely able to restrain our excitement. Even Kelly’s eager to give it a go. There’s a glint in his eyes that wasn’t there earlier, despite his initial reluctance. I smile tentatively at him. He takes my hand and asks me if I’m having fun yet.

“I am now.” And I give his hand a squeeze. We quickly kiss, then splash into the water. We’re the last pair in.

The ruins are surreal, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before! I mean, it’s only an old two-story commercial structure that happened to be situated in a depression before the area flooded, but still. For the first time, I really begin to appreciate the old buildings and stuff we lost when sea levels rose. I think about how much is now submerged in the Wastes, whole worlds of forgotten places where, just a single generation before us, people lived and worked and played. They slept in these buildings. They made love and had children and—

And they died.

My excitement falters. I wonder if anyone died in this building before the flood. Or drowned here afterward. Would a person who drowned return if they were infected? What would a zombie do after reanimating underwater?

We emerge from the one ruin and float over to the upper story windows of a second building. All of the glass has been broken out, most likely by the rising waters themselves, but maybe also by scavengers and thrill seekers. Nothing’s left inside. All the old furniture and fixtures are gone; it’s just an empty shell, now covered in muck and storm debris.

Jake guides us through the rooms. I feel like I’m in the belly of a sleeping beast. Then, a big, black hole opens up before us, an elevator shaft, gaping like the beast’s gullet. We crowd around him as he enters it.

He waits until we’re all in, then he shines his light downward. It’s surreal to be floating over the emptiness. The darkness feels like it has its own gravity that pulls us down. We all look at each other and wonder the same thing: What’s down there? Jake’s beam of light gets soaked up before it finds bottom. The shaft might as well be endless, a doorway to the underworld. Anything could be hiding down there.

He signals, flips over, kicks twice, and begins to descend. Nearly as effortlessly, Micah does the same and follows. Then Reggie and Ash go, not quite as smoothly, but far more easily than they have any right to, especially considering the difficulty Ash had had earlier that morning. Kelly tugs on my arm and we head down.

The shaft continues for what feels like forever. I can feel my ears popping from the increasing pressure. Some of the others can feel it, too, because they’re puffing out their cheeks to clear their ears, just as Jake had shown us earlier. We rest for a moment until everyone’s ready again. I notice that Kelly keeps drifting upward and kicking himself back down. I make a note to remind him to use more weight tomorrow. I don’t want him to have to waste energy keeping himself down.

Suddenly, a thousand bubbles of air dance their way past me. I look down and see Ashley’s panicked face. Her flashlight, now forgotten, spirals down into the inky darkness as her hands flutter near her mask. Now I can see her trying to suck air out of a canister that has nothing in it. Her eyes widen in panic and she starts to kick herself upward. She shoves Micah aside. But I can already guess that she’ll never make it out in time. We’re too deep inside the building, and it’ll take too many twists and turns to reach the surface.

Jake shoots past us and grabs her leg. She kicks at him, but he doesn’t let go. I feel Kelly brush past me, aiming for Jake, thinking he’s trying to keep her from saving herself. But before he gets there, Jake has yanked Ash’s goggles off and is holding them below her face. His thumb finds the blue purge button and a rush of air surges out and envelops her head. I see her open her mouth. He repeats this. She stops struggling.

After she recovers, Jake gestures upward. I take one last look down into the depths, to where Ashley’s flashlight has settled on the bottom of the shaft. Its beam stabs weakly into the unseen chambers beyond, a solitary beacon. Then I follow the others up and out.

“I can’t do this,” Ashley gasps, as soon as her head pops out of the water. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Reggie swims over to her and pulls her close. “You can,” he says. “You’re tougher than the rest of us put together. You’re tougher than me. You can do this.”

She looks around at us and we all dutifully nod. None of us wants her to back out now, least of all me. I don’t want to be the only girl in the group. Yet at the same time, I’m deeply concerned, and not just for Ash. I don’t think Reggie truly understands how difficult and risky this little adventure will be.

If anything’s become clear today, it’s that our margin of error is thinner than a razor’s edge.

Chapter 11

After returning from our practice dive, we laze around in Micah’s basement. Micah’s halfway through a bottle of scotch he’s snuck from his parents’ stash. Kelly’s back to playing Zpocalypto, and Reggie and Ashley have disappeared.

Jake’s there, too, but he’s sitting on a folding chair on the other side of the room, watching from the shadows, staying as much out of sight as he can. Kelly had laid into him on the way back for not telling us we could use the air in the goggles in an emergency. “I was going to,” he insisted.

“Why didn’t you?”

He’d shrugged and offered no explanation, but I remember back when he was telling us about using the compressed air to clear our goggles, Kelly had interrupted him. I don’t think he remembers doing it. He’s convinced Jake forgot on purpose so he could play the hero. “What else haven’t you told us?” he’d charged.

“Nothing.”

“Somehow, I doubt that. Somehow I think we’re going to find out you’ve been holding out on us.”

“What do you want me to say, Kelly?”

“Nothing. I’d prefer you said nothing. In fact, I’d prefer it if you weren’t even here.”

“We need Jake,” Ashley reminded him. “Jessie, control your man.”

To be honest, I’m not even sure why Jake’s decided to hang out with us after all that. The boys haven’t invited him to play, not that I think Jake would take them up on it. He already said he wasn’t into any of that. He’s not drinking. So why is he still here?

The atmosphere in the room is thick with tension. I keep expecting Kelly to decide we should just nix the entire plan. He’d have every right to. So when Ash and Reg return from their shenanigans, and she asks me to follow her upstairs with the excuse that she’s hungry, I’m happy to get out of there.

I’m not really hungry, but I do feel shaky, so I search through the kitchen cabinets in search of anything with protein. All I can find is an open bag of stale peanuts. I take a handful and start chewing on them. They’re dry and a bit sour. I wash them down with water from the tap. Meanwhile, Ash digs into an old carton of mint chip ice cream with a thick layer of freezer burn.

“Want some?” she asks, holding it out. I shake my head and make the excuse that I want to keep my girlish figure. It’s lame, I know, although not too far off the truth. Sugar and I don’t play well together. A moment on the lips, as they say, an hour and a half on the treadmill. With my metabolism, even three solid hours a week of high intensity hapkido training can’t keep an ounce of chocolate from turning into a pound of butt-lard.

Ashley, on the other hand, can subsist almost entirely on sugar and caffeine. She never exercises, much to my dismay, and yet she never seems to gain a pound. Granted, the girl isn’t exactly skinny to begin with, but neither is she fat. Her compressed five-foot-five, hundred-and-twenty-pound curvy frame is one hundred percent condensed energy. She burns more calories just breathing for five minutes than I do on an entire tourney weekend.

“Besides, it looks too much like zombie flesh,” I tease, even though it doesn’t.

“Mmm, yum,” Ash replies, and we both laugh.

I wait for her to tell me why she wants me alone. No good will come from pushing her.

“You’d think Micah’s parents would have more food around,” she whines. “At least not expired food. Even the milk in here is old and chunky. What does Micah eat, anyway?”

I point to the trashcan. It’s overflowing with takeout containers.

I’ve actually never met his parents. Micah says his father is constantly away on business and his mother is always out of the country visiting relatives in Mexico. According to him, she’s pretty useless. That’s about all he says about them, and we don’t pry. He’s got a good thing going here, the kind of freedom from responsibility that the rest of us can only dream about.

If anyone knows about useless parents, it’s me. Dad’s dead, and my mom’s a drunk. Eric tries to make up for them both, but he ends up just being stupid and incompetent. And Grandpa is... Well, let’s just say he thinks of me as one of his Marine recruits. As for Micah, I’ve often wondered why he doesn’t criticize his father like he does his mother. Isn’t he just as bad by never being around?

I’d once privately mentioned this to Kelly, but he was eager to change the subject. Which is understandable, given that he had his hand stuck up my shirt at the time. He was having trouble undoing my bra, and it’d taken so long that I’d grown distracted.

“I mean, has anyone ever seen his parents? Have you?”

“Really, Jess? You really want to talk about Micah now?”

“Not him, his parents.”

“They’re real. Don’t worry about it.”

“I never said they weren’t.”

I mean, there’s certainly enough evidence supporting their existence: the pictures hanging on the walls and sitting on shelves, the female hygiene products in the bathroom (yeah, I’m nosy, shoot me). Micah’s an only child so they couldn’t be anyone else’s but his mother’s. Plus, the letters and packages addressed to them that I occasionally see sitting around on the counter.

Ashley scrapes out the last of the ice scream and gazes balefully into the empty carton. “Wanna make a run to the grocery store?”

I sense by this that she’s got a lot to get off her chest, but I shake my head. “It’s almost dinnertime.”

She carefully sets the carton down on top of the trash. We both wait for the precarious heap to suddenly collapse, and I have to resist the urge to go over and gather the top of the bag and take it to the bin outside before it does. I can just hear her teasing me about being such a mother, so I don’t.

She grabs my hand as we head back downstairs. “I’m nervous about tomorrow,” she confesses, just as we hit the landing. She slips off before I can respond, and I wonder if she’d been hoping I’d talk her out of it.

The party breaks up soon after.

“Meet back here by seven tomorrow morning,” Reggie tells us. “High tide peaks at four a.m., so we’ll have till about ten to take advantage of the outgoing current. That means we should be suited up and in the water by eight-thirty. Nine, at the absolute latest.”

I sigh, despite the bubble of excitement and apprehension in my stomach. I know I should be more worried about the plan than of the early hour, but seven o’clock is just cruel.

Chapter 12

I don’t sleep a wink all night, so I’m dragging when I finally get up at five-thirty the next morning. I’d spent the last hour checking the clock a hundred times, and it’s a relief when it finally buzzes. I feel like a lump of wet clay lifting myself out of bed. A frigid shower doesn’t help energize me. I don’t feel rested at all, just jumpy and irritable, and it worries me for what we’re about to attempt. We all need to be on top of our game.

The house is absolutely quiet when I sneak down the stairs. Eric’s already gone to work, his lone breakfast bowl in the sink waiting for him to wash it after his shift at the police station. I’d heard his every move, from the moment his alarm sounded at four — high tide — to the point at which he walked out the front door and drove off forty-five minutes later.

Grandpa doesn’t eat breakfast. I don’t know if he ever did, now that I think about it. I can’t ever remember him doing anything after getting up, other than going out to the back porch for a smoke, his only nourishment an extra large mug of black coffee. That’s his morning ritual, rain or shine, day in and day out. It’s such an old habit that I imagine he’d always had it. Connecticut hasn’t been cold enough to get snow for twenty years, but I imagine he’d done it even then.

I learned long ago to just leave him be during his coffee time. He doesn’t like company when he stands out at the railing. I’ve watched him, discreetly, just sipping his joe and looking out past our backyard, past all the other backyards in the neighborhood. Always facing south, as if his gaze carried him to a place where my own vision can’t take me. He never talks about what he’s thinking in these moments. It’s a secret he never shares.

What does he see? What does he ponder?

I don’t know. And, frankly, I’m not sure I want to know.

Thankfully, he’s not up yet, so I grab myself a quick bowl of cornflakes and a glass of juice and sit down at the table for a quick check on Media.

When I’m done and there’s still not a sound from the rest of the house, I raid the cabinets for food to take with me.

I avoid anything that might get ruined in water. In go a couple granola bars, each hermetically sealed in plastic, followed by a bunch of emergency waters in flexible containers. Then a couple oranges. I’m busy stuffing them into my backpack, when someone clears their throat.

“Mom?”

She stands in the entrance to the kitchen looking absolutely frightful, like she’s suffering from a hangover that just won’t end. I realize that that pretty much sums up her entire existence lately. She’s been in one everlasting hangover for the past fifteen years. Her hair’s a mess and her nightshirt is stained and worn down. There are holes in the collar. She smacks her lips unappealingly, then scratches her ribs underneath her left breast.

A shadow shifts behind her and some guy I don’t recognize appears and steps into the kitchen. He slaps her ass and grunts like an animal. It’s a different stranger than the one that was here yesterday afternoon when I got home.

I want to scream at him for being such a cliché. He looks like the wife-beater type, only scrawny, with a pot belly. I could probably take him, knock him down a few pegs. “Never be the aggressor,” Master Rupert’s ghostly voice councils me. But my angry self drowns him out: Don’t treat my mother like a piece of ass!

But I say nothing, because if she won’t stick up for herself, why should I?

She grunts at the man and takes a tentative step forward.

“What’re you doing up so early, honey?” she asks.

The man thinks she’s talking to him. He mutters something about beer.

I roll my eyes. “Just getting some snacks for later.” I stare lasers at the man’s back as he passes me, but they make no impact on him whatsoever. “I don’t know if I’ll have time to come home for lunch. In fact, I may be late for dinner.”

She slips away from the doorjamb, her body listing from one side to the other, then front and back, like a wobbly kid’s top losing speed. She actually seems to tumble into the kitchen, and for a split second I expect her to land flat on her face. But she catches herself, an overburdened ship rolling on heavy seas brought upright by some trick of gravity. She manages to sink into a chair at the table. “Don’t be late for dinner,” she mumbles, uselessly, and I wonder how much of this encounter she’ll remember after I leave.

Meanwhile, Sir Penis-du-Jour is bent over in front of the fridge scratching his nuts. His butt crack peeks out from between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his sagging boxers. He’s probably confused by the milk jug sitting directly in front of the unfinished six-pack of Hudson River Pilsner. Micah calls it Piss-ner and refuses to drink it. That’s how bad the stuff is.

“Did you hear what I said, Mom? I might not be home for dinner.”

“Okay, honey. Have fun.”

I huff in disgust, then snatch my backpack up from the chair and spin out of the room. Behind me, a beer can pops open, followed by a second. The front door slams. I can’t escape quickly enough.

* * *

KELLY SPOTS ME FROM his bedroom window as I approach his front walk, and he gets my attention with a thin whistle. I have to shield my eyes from the rising sun reflecting off the glass.

He opens the window and whisper-shouts, “Stay there. I’ll be right down.”

I find a patch of shadow beneath the porch overhang and wait. It’s already warm. The temperature is supposed to peak at just under a hundred today, and the air is saturated with humidity. Just another average August Saturday in Greenwich. The thought of slipping into some cool water actually takes the edge off the fear gnawing a hole through my gut.

The door creaks open, and Kelly slips out. He closes it gently behind him, wincing at the soft click of the latch as if it were as loud as a gunshot. I give him a puzzled look, and he shakes his head. There are dark circles under his eyes.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

“It’s Kyle,” he says. “He’s finally conked out now, but he had another rough go of it last night.”

Kyle’s had a tough life. He had kidney failure when he was barely two, and he almost died. He managed to get a new one, but he’s always sick. He often has these spells where he spikes a fever and screams as if he’s in terrible pain. Nobody knows why. The only thing that makes these episodes stop is exhaustion. But he’s a light sleeper and even the slightest disruption can rouse him, starting the cycle all over again.

The strain of this most recent episode is written all over Kelly’s face.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask. “I’ll stay home with you instead of going. They don’t need us.”

He shakes his head. “No, I’m going. Too late to back out now.”

“That’s not true.”

He shakes his head. “Someone’s gotta keep an eye on those kids.”

“You?”

“Us. We’re the mature ones.”

“I don’t know about that.”

I notice the empty driveway. “Your dad’s already gone.”

“I think he got in around one. Napped on the couch.”

I whistle sympathetically.

The financial strain has been almost unbearable for the Corbens. Kelly’s dad works two jobs, sometimes three, just so his mom can stay home to care for Kyle. That’s a full time job by itself, more so when you consider she can’t just hand it over to someone else until her next shift. Kelly has offered to start working a part time job — he’s even mentioned going to work for ArcWare after graduation — but his parents are adamant about him going to college.

“So, what’d you bring?” I ask, pointing to his backpack.

“Lunch. Drinks. A few... other things.”

His pack looks much heavier than mine. “Other things?”

He gives me an enigmatic smirk. “It’s a surprise.”

“Ooh, a picnic amongst the dead. You’re such a romantic.”

He laughs. “Not exactly.”

Micah, Ash, and Reggie are waiting for us when we arrive. We’re only a few minutes late, but I can tell by the way they’re standing around that they’re eager to get going. I throw my bag into the trunk of Micah’s car. A couple other backpacks and a pair of large rucksacks are already in there.

“About time,” Reggie says. “We took bets that you were going to back out.”

Reggie directs this to Kelly and gives him a pointed look, but Kelly doesn’t bite. He opens the back door of Micah’s car and slides in. I notice he’s still got his backpack tucked under his arms.

“Not much of a morning person, is he?”

I explain that Kyle had a rough night, and Reggie immediately drops it. He knows the deets. They all do. And they’re all smart enough not to keep pushing Kelly’s buttons. We don’t need the Corbens’ home situation adding to the tension we’re all already feeling.

Kelly’s got his Link out and is scrolling through it, when I slide in next to him. I peek over his shoulder and see the ArcWare logo flash by.

“Wait, go back,” I say.

“What?”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Just archiving a bunch of old messages.”

“I thought I saw the ArcWare logo. Are you applying for a job there? You said you wouldn’t. Your parents want you to—”

“I said it was junk, Jessie. Can we just drop it?”

“We ready, folks?” Micah says, leaning in through the driver’s side window. He calls over for Reg to get in. “We need to take advantage of the outgoing current. It’ll start switching around about ten o’clock, and I don’t want to be fighting it. We need to save our energy for exploring once we’re there.”

Reg settles into the passenger seat, while Ash squeezes into the back, once more relegating me to the hump. I don’t mind, as it’s just a short drive to the edge of town. We’ll be meeting Jake behind his uncle’s store, and transferring everything into his van. Once loaded, we’ll head out for lower Manhattan.

Upon arrival, Micah drives slowly around to the back. Jake’s already got the van doors propped open. All the windows of his uncle’s store are barred, and spotlights are still on, shining blindingly down on us, despite the sun having fully risen.

We tumble out but don’t shut the doors, afraid the noise will announce our presence. We speak sparingly and only in whispers. Micah whistles once, a brief chirp of a sound, and Jake comes out through the heavily-screened metal door. It bangs shut, and we all jump.

“Relax. Uncle Joe’s at an auction up in Albany,” he announces. “There’s nobody here.” He leads us over to the van and shows us the booty he’s gotten for our adventure. “We’ll divvy it up when we get to the tunnel.”

Looking at the hodge-podge of equipment, I suddenly realize how little planning we’ve actually done for this trip. Other than the diving part, that is, and figuring out when to go and when to head back. But even those preparations now seem woefully inadequate. For such a dangerous proposition, you’d think we’d have prepared more. But it’s like we’re all in denial about any of the risks. If we refuse to address them, they don’t exist. Maybe it’s because of how smoothly everything has gone so far, relatively speaking. Nobody wants to tempt fate by acknowledging how quickly our good fortune might turn bad.

Nevertheless, I decide I’d better say something. “What about weapons? You know, just in case.”

“In case of what? Worst thing we’re likely to encounter is rats,” Micah says.

Reggie drapes his arm over my shoulders. “I got my weapon right here.”

“Excuse me?” Ashley says.

“There’s enough of Jess to go around.”

“No, there isn’t,” I protest, and duck out from under his arm.

“You’re the only one who knows how to fight,” he whines. “Doesn’t your black belt make you some kind of lethal weapon? I mean, don’t you have to register yourself with local law enforcement or something?”

Kelly rolls his eyes. “That’s an urban legend.”

I’m impressed he didn’t freak out about Reggie’s arm. Apparently, he can only be jealous at one guy at a time, and right now he’s focused on Jake.

Thankfully, Jake doesn’t try to remind them that he’s been training, too. Probably realizes his green belt pales in comparison to my black one. Instead, he holds up a bandolier and pulls a blade out of the attached sheath. It’s six or seven inches long, black, and serrated on one edge. “We’ll each get one of these dive knives. Please don’t lose them. Don’t lose anything.”

Next, he pulls a couple of longer blades from one of the packs. “I’ve also got a couple machetes, if anyone wants one.” He runs his thumb along the edge so we can see that they’re not very sharp. They’re made for cutting brush, not people, although I’m sure they’ll be very effective should the latter need arise. No one says this out loud, but some of us must be thinking it. We don’t want to admit there might still be undead where we’re going.

“We won’t need them,” Micah confidently declares. “They’ll just be extra weight and get in the way. Besides, we’ll only be there a few hours. Four tops. We get in, take some pics for proof, do a little exploring, pick up a couple small souvenirs, and...” He pauses long enough to lock eyes with each one of us. I had smelled alcohol on his breath earlier, but there’s no trace of inebriation in his demeanor. “Then we get out. Remember, we need to leave by three o’clock at the absolute latest so we don’t miss the currents.”

“And so Jessie doesn’t miss dinner with the Colonel, either,” Reggie quips.

“The Colonel doesn’t scare me,” I say.

“But he terrifies the rest of us.”

“Let’s also not forget the curfew,” Kelly adds.

“Who’s the Colonel?” Jake asks.

“My drill sergeant grandfather. He’s got it in his mind that I have to be home every night for dinner. He runs the house like a Marine unit and I’m one of his mindless Omegas.”

Jake frowns in confusion. “Omega?”

I wave it off. “It’s a long story.”

“Bottom line,” Micah says, once more guiding us back on track, “we’re not there to go hunting and collect heads. Right, Reg? This ain’t The Game.”

“Or Survivalist,” Ashley adds.

“Aw, poop. I was itching to get some footage of me kicking some undead booty.”

“Weren’t you hiding behind a girl just a minute ago?”

“Jessie’s not a girl.”

“Well, gee, thanks.”

“She’s a lean, mean killing machine.”

“There aren’t any zombies,” Micah reiterates. “However, in the extremely unlikely event that I’m wrong, they’ll likely be so rotten and slow that you could sneeze on them and they’d fall over.”

“Speaking of sneezing,” Kelly says, turning to me, “did you remember to bring your inhaler?”

“You’re as bad as Grandpa,” I say. But when I pat my pockets I realize it’s not there. I remember taking it out right after breakfast for the first of my three daily puffs, but then...

Then Mom and her creepy new boyfriend happened. I must’ve left it on the counter.

I wince, waffle for a moment, then shake my head. “Can we make a quick detour at the house? I already missed two doses yesterday, plus this morning’s.”

Micah’s face pinches. He checks the time on his Link and grumbles. “We’re already running late. Why do you even need that thing? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you have an asthma attack.”

“It’s not for asthma,” Kelly answers for me. He sounds like he’s had to explain this a thousand times.

“It’s for her cocaine addiction,” Reggie says.

“Really?” Jake gapes.

“I just need it, all right?” I snap, irritated with myself for forgetting it and dreading having to confront my mother and grandfather again. “It’ll be quick.”

Micah huffs. “Fine. I’ll run you and Kel over to your house. We’ll catch up with the rest of you guys at the parking garage. Jake, you and Reggie can start getting the equipment ready. If we leave now, we should only be about fifteen minutes behind you.”

“How is Jake going to get through the checkpoints?”

Jake points to the back bumper. “Not a problem. I’ve got interstate tags for commerce. Uncle Joe uses the van when he does deliveries, and I’m on the registration, so it’s all good.”

“Are we set then?” Reggie asks.

“I just need to lock up,” Jake answers. He gestures for Kelly’s backpack. “Want me to take that?”

Kelly swings it out of his reach. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

Jake’s face reddens and he looks like he wants to make an issue of it, but Micah orders us into his car. Before I’ve even got the back door shut, he’s spraying gravel, leaving Ash, Reg, and Jake in a cloud of dust.

Chapter 13

“Finally!” Reggie exclaims, as we pull up beside him inside the parking structure. The empty space and bare concrete walls amplify his voice. Micah gestures anxiously for him to keep it down. I notice he’s a lot less cavalier about attracting attention than he was just a couple days ago.

I had pinged the others when we were still twenty minutes out to let them know we were going to be later than expected. Grandpa had decided to give us the third degree, which delayed our departure a lot longer than I’d expected. Then the guards at the checkpoints hassled us like crazy.

“Yeah, they gave us a hard time, too,” Ashley relayed. “Tore the damn van apart searching it.”

“What for? Did they find the dive equipment?”

“Of course they did. We just told them it was for the store.”

“They bought that?”

“What else could they do?”

Micah pulls into a spot, and Kel and I tumble out. “Is it too late to go?” I ask.

“The tide’s still going out,” Micah says. “We should be okay, as long as there aren’t any more delays.”

“The direction of the current will start changing in about an hour,” Jake says, checking his Link. “If we don’t leave ASAP, we’ll be fighting it towards the end.”

This gets us all scurrying.

Ash hands us our wetsuits. “I’ve been watching out for the cop,” she says. “Pretty much the same as the other day, and there’s just the one on patrol.” She steals a glance at Reggie, who gives her a quick shake of the head.

“What’s going on?” I ask. “Reg?”

He rolls his eyes. “It’s nothing.”

“They’re on this sixty-minute schedule,” Ashley says. “He comes, hangs around on the overpass above the tunnel for ten minutes or so, then leaves.” She checks the time on her Link. “Last time was twenty-six minutes ago, so we’ve only got about twenty minutes to get suited up, grab our gear and get under water before he returns.”

“That’s not much time.”

“Yeah, so cut the jibber-jabber and move,” Reggie says.

“I still think it’s odd,” Kelly says. “Why even bother patrolling down here? And why with such regularity? They might as well announce to the world, ‘If you’re looking to do something illegal, this might be the place to do it, as long as you’re done in under an hour.’ ”

“Bureaucracy,” I say. “Everything follows a strict schedule.” But it troubles me, too.

Ashley looks like she has something else to say, but once again Reggie gives her a look. “Still hearing jibber-jabber,” he says. “We don’t make our window, we’ll have to wait till tomorrow. That’s if we don’t get caught.”

“I’d rather not on either account,” Jake says. “Tomorrow’s tides are even earlier.”

He’s already arranged our gear. Luckily, I’ve thought to wear my swimsuit under my sweats. The guys did, too, but Ashley hesitates. It’s not like her to be so shy.

“You forgot?” Micah asks.

“Just go like that,” Kelly offers.

“In shorts? She won’t be able to wear her wetsuit leggings. She’ll be cold.”

“Sounds like someone might be having second thoughts.”

Ashley’s face pinches, then she strips off her pants and tee shirt, right down to her undies. Jake stares openmouthed until Reggie slaps him upside the head and tells him to give the girl some privacy.

Kelly smirks.

I go over and hold up a towel to block the boys’ view while she squeezes into her wet suit bottoms. A part of me wants to believe she just made an honest mistake, but I can’t help wondering if it might’ve been intentional, as Kelly had implied. But was it conscious? The way she’d feigned shyness, then didn’t even try to be discreet, makes me wonder. What is she up to? “I can’t believe you forgot your swimsuit, Ash.”

“Yeah?” she counters. “Well, you forgot your stupid inhaler and made us late. Now we have to hurry.”

I keep my thoughts to myself after that. I’m offended, of course, but she’s got a point. It’s not her actions that have put the trip at risk, it’s mine.

After tugging on our wetsuits, we don our knife belts and hoist the waterproof packs onto our backs. Each one contains a spare pair of oxygen rebreather cartridges, some light sticks, our food and water, and anything else we’ve brought. An extra cartridge is Velcroed onto our weight belt, along with a flashlight and yet another light stick. Jake must have reconsidered the extra equipment, opting instead for safety and security over the potential consequences if his uncle notices the missing inventory.

Lastly, we attach our flashlights to our wrists on a short tether. That way, if we drop it, we won’t lose it.

Kelly is off to one side, his back to us, transferring what he brought into the waterproof sack he’s been assigned. I want to go over and see what it is, but I know he’ll be upset if I spoil his surprise. Every once in a while, he gets a little romantic streak in him. That this surprise will be on LI guarantees I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.

Jake doles out our goggles and masks, snapping on the compressed air purge cartridges as he goes. “Kelly?” he says, tapping him on the shoulder. Kelly spins around, his eyes flashing. “You were number three, right?”

“I’m three,” I say, reaching over for it. “Kelly’s four.”

After our practice dive yesterday, Micah put numbered tags on the masks and goggles so we won’t have to readjust them. They’re in order by our first names.

Jake frowns for a second, then hands me the mask. “Ah, right. I forgot to count myself. Guess I’m just a little distracted.”

“We all are,” I tell him. “You going to be okay?”

“S-sure.”

He takes Micah’s and Reggie’s equipment and drops it in their laps. They’re busy discussing last minute details. They mumble thanks before resuming.

Still worried about Ashley’s level of readiness, I steal a glance over at her. But she’s back to her old self again, just as cocky as ever. Maybe it’s the way the suit molds to her curves that boosts her confidence. She struts around like she isn’t aware of how she looks, but I know she is.

Micah stuffs a last few things into his sack. Among the items is the old tablet computer and a few other odd-looking devices I don’t recognize. I don’t bother to inquire. I know he’s been hoping to find one of the military’s original computing nodes on the island to see if he can hack directly into the iVZ infrastructure. That’s what he’ll be doing while the rest of us explore. That’s what he considers fun.

Privately, I seriously doubt he’ll have enough time to find a working node, much less figure out a way to connect. He’d have to hard-splice his way into it, and while most of us are talented hackers, we’re not computer engineers, least of all expert iVZ engineers.

Reggie checks his Link and announces that we’ve got nine minutes at the most before the next patrol starts coming into view. Just getting down to the walkway will chew up a third of them, leaving us only six minutes to make any last second preparations before we take our last breath of fresh air on this side of the wall.

“Ready?” Micah asks. “Last checks. Let’s make sure everyone’s good to go.”

We buddy-check to make sure there aren’t any loose belts or straps and that everything that needs to be sealed is sealed.

“Everyone got their Links?”

We all dutifully hold them up. They’re leashed to our belts.

Micah points his Link at us and tells us to smile. Then we’re all snapping photos of each other and laughing. Already I’m dripping with sweat and thirsty from the dry heat of the approaching day.

“Okay, enough of that,” Reggie urges. “Let’s go.”

We waddle off after him, masks and goggles in one hand, flippers in the other, looking like a pack of upright seals that happened to get tangled up in a bunch of equipment. Kelly and I fall back. I look over and smile. He returns it with a tight smile of his own, then turns determinedly forward again.

Before we know it, we’re standing at our entry point, pulling on our flippers, and stepping over the rail. One hand grips the railing, eyes stare down into the depths.

Last chance to turn back.

We don’t take it. We refuse to spend one more second considering what we’re about to do, about the absolute insanity of our plan. Nothing will change our minds.

Micah takes a last quick look around, then slips into the water, doing a perfect scissors kick that barely makes any noise or splash. We all follow, trying to emulate him.

A moment later, we pop back to the surface: six black lycrene-covered skulls bobbing in the water. The cold feels good on my skin. I can feel it seeping in underneath the suit. I was seriously starting to swim in my own sweat, standing out there in that heat. Everyone else looks just as relieved as I am.

As one, we spit into our goggles, polish and rinse them, then slide them over our faces. No one speaks. We exchange nods and poke our thumbs up into the air. Micah signals to Jake, who slips his rebreather into his mouth, then his head sinks beneath the surface.

Within seconds, we join him. The world and the hot sun and the noises of the dry August wind all fade away.

Glow sticks are activated. A beam of light stabs the murk. Visibility is about thirty feet. One by one, five more beams join the first, each one thrusting boldly, if not coordinately, into the darkness.

At nine-thirteen on a Saturday morning in August, we slide into the gaping mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

Part Two

Breaking In. Getting Out.

We didn’t so much break into Gameland as sneak in, although putting it that way might suggest it was a piece of cake. While it was easier than it should have been, we encountered numerous obstacles, almost from the start. Each should’ve been a warning to us to turn back. But each time another issue arose, we pushed even more doggedly on. I’ve lost count of how many times we should’ve stopped and considered the folly of our actions. At least a dozen. We should’ve admitted from the beginning we were in over our heads, but we didn’t. No one wanted to be that person to ruin it for the rest. So we just kept right on going, digging ourselves ever deeper into a hole we had no chance of ever climbing back out again.

Stupid.

Of course, looking back, I guess it never would’ve mattered anyway, even if we’d shown some decent common sense. Our fates were sealed long before we entered that tunnel. We were just acting out a script concocted by other people far more informed than ourselves.

Chapter 14

Everything grows eerily quiet as the tunnel envelops us in inky blackness. The canned sounds of my own breathing and the ghostly inhales and exhales of my friends around me seem especially loud. Every once in a while, there’s a click or a tap or some other strange rattling noise coming from somewhere else. The sounds echo all around, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, telling us nothing about what might be creating them. We learn to tune them out.

Our eyes quickly adjust to the gloom. Five other glow sticks bob about me, looking like fuzzy St. Elmo’s fires: yellow for Micah and Jake, blue for Ash and Reg, and red for me and Kel. Six flashlight beams pierce the underwater twilight and cast an eerie glow. They offer us sparing and disjointed glimpses of a passageway that is surprisingly unobstructed.

Almost immediately, we arrive at a vertical divider separating what had once been the southbound and northbound tubes. We expect this, and by prior consensus we all kick to the right.

We’ve gone maybe another hundred yards — it’s hard to measure distances down there, especially since we’re also getting a definite push from behind by the current — when my Link pings. I look down at the glowing screen and see that it’s Ash:

<< U OK? >>

My fingers feel fat and clumsy as I type back. I keep one eye out for Kel’s light next to me:

<< YES U? >>

<< :o} >>

<< SO KUL >>

<< SORRY 4 B4 WS NRVS >>

<< NP >>

There’s a pause and I glance up and try to identify which of the two glowing blue orbs up ahead is hers. Then, I get another ping:

<< LV U >>

<< U2 >>

<< :o) >>

I smile to myself and show the messages to Kelly. He nods and gives me a thumbs up, then urges me to catch up with the others.

We get our first surprise about ten minutes later. I don’t notice it until Kelly puts his hand on my arm and gestures ahead with his light.

It’s a school of fish, small ones, thousands. Maybe millions. They move as a unit, like a ghost, disapparating from one spot and reappearing a moment later in another. At times, the water is so thick with them it seems as if they’re a single, unified organism. Other times, they explode into a million sparkling shards. We watch, entranced, until Micah waves at us and points to his Link, reminding us that we’re short on time.

The next surprise comes about twenty minutes later and is much more significant. And far more threatening.

The pile of debris — rotting wooden boards, plastic pipes, old furniture, tree trunks, tires — is jammed up against the hulking carcass of an old bus. All the color has been leached from everything. Silt and mud and slime coat every surface. It’s a monolith of gray-brown, of odd shapes and dangerous protruding edges, of precariously balanced junk. The windows of the bus are filmed over to the point of being opaque, and it makes me wonder what they might hide within. Its presence here makes the relative lack of vehicles all the more remarkable. We’ve seen all manner of debris on the floor of the tunnel, but so far very few automobiles.

I have this sudden urge to go down and take a closer look, but Micah bangs his flashlight on his Link and gestures forward, as if he knows what I’m thinking. I realize he’s right. We’re not down here to explore. I console myself thinking that there may be time on the way back. Or maybe another day. Of course, after seeing LI with our own eyes — probably as the first living people to do so since Arc’s surveyors left five years ago — old, empty, submerged buses and muddy junk just won’t hold the same appeal.

Jake finds an opening near one wall, about halfway up. It’s roughly six feet wide and just as tall. Since the flow of water is so restricted, the current is strongest at this point, and we have to be very careful as we swim through it. There may be sharp edges that could cut us, or we might dislodge something, causing an avalanche that could crush someone, or close it up for good.

The path through seems simple enough at first. Some sort of large metal frame appears to be holding everything in place while preventing the opening from clogging up. It also offers us suitable handholds. With the current tugging us forward, entering it feels like lowering ourselves into a shaft.

We encounter a mass of twisted wire and chain link fencing at the other end. It looks immovable.

I happen to glance up just as Reggie’s grip slips. He tumbles into Ash and together they slam into the wire. There’s a screech, and then it all falls away, and they’re able to swim free. The impact causes the pileup to shift above us. There’s a rumble as something comes loose and tumbles down. The cage jolts, and there’s a loud, hollow bong!

The rest of us, still inside, freeze.

A large wooden cabinet tumbles across the opening. The current catches it, and heads straight for Ash and Reg. At the last second, he grabs her and pulls her out of the way. The cabinet sinks ponderously into the darkness. A moment later, there’s a muffled crash.

A cloud of mud and silt overtakes us, but the current soon clears it away. I spot twin blue glows bobbing in the darkness ahead, moving in synchrony. My Link pings, Ashley telling us she’s okay. Kel and I let go of our perch and fall toward the opening. We flutter kick and make small motions with our hands to avoid dislodging anything else. Micah and Jake appear from the side, having drifted through before us. They reach Ash and Reg first.

Once the way ahead is clear, I send Ashley an encouraging message:

<< WAY 2 STAY KUL >>

I’d worried about her losing her air, but she seems to be handling things just fine.

She immediately pings back:

<< ABC GUM! >>

I nearly burst out laughing. A bubble escapes and roils across my cheeks. My Link screen blurs. Thinking my goggles have fogged up, I swipe a finger across the glass before remembering the condensation is on the inside. I carelessly burp out another breath before trying to suck it back in. Water fills my mouth. The space behind my eyes begins to throb. I start to feel lightheaded.

I’m dimly aware of Kelly grabbing my elbow, but I can’t seem to move. My limbs feel heavy. He turns and gestures forward before coming back to me.

He holds up his Link for me to see:

<< OK? >>

I don’t answer. Something feels wrong.

He shakes me.

Then Jake’s there. I feel him yank on my belt. My throat hurts and my eyes are really starting to burn. Everything suddenly seems too bright.

A moment later, the heaviness in my arms fades. The ache in my head is still there, but it’s diminishing, too. My vision clears.

He shows me the used cartridge he’d just swapped out, then thrusts his Link screen into my face:

<< USED UP >>

Kelly waves his hands angrily. His message is clear: How?

<< MAYBE FAULTY >>

Kelly gestures even more, but I push him away. I suddenly just want to get to the other end and breathe fresh air again. Dwelling on what just happened isn’t going to do us any good right now.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder, if my cartridge was faulty, how many of the others’ might be, too? Suddenly, the extras we carry feel like precious cargo.

The debris dam quickly vanishes into the gloom behind us. The tunnel ahead is wide and tall and, other than the occasional indistinct piles of garbage along the floor, still inexplicably unobstructed. I pray we don’t encounter another logjam.

Micah — or maybe it’s Jake, I can’t tell which of them it is, just that it’s someone with a yellow glow stick — directs their light onto the walls of the tunnel, illuminating old traffic signs and ancient graffiti. Old, loose wiring, like tendrils, dangle down from the ceiling. Disgorged pipes. Amputated light fixtures. Strands of shredded material dripping like tropical moss, a lifeless twin world to the tree-lined tunnel roads of Connecticut’s south shore.

A sudden burst of bubbles draws my attention to my right. We all hear it, stop and turn to look. It’s Kelly and he appears to be struggling with his mask. In a panic, I swim over to him, thinking another rebreather cartridge has failed. He sees me and waves me away. Then he points to the clearing button on his goggles. Relief washes over me. He was just purging the air.

Our Links all ping at once:

<< EVERY1 OK? >>

It’s Jake. We give him an OK signal. I can’t really tell with the masks and goggles covering our faces, but the look Jake shoots Kelly doesn’t seem like concern as much as impatience. I still don’t know what’s going on, but it’s like there’s an electric current running between them. I hate that I’m caught in the middle. Why would Jake harbor such strong feelings toward Kelly? Why is Kelly so jealous? I don’t know the answer to either question.

The look between them lingers a moment too long, then breaks, and we’re off again. I give a kick of my flippers and propel myself through the group. I want Kelly to catch up with me. I want to be in front for a while, instead of always in back and following. As long as I’m in front, I won’t have the urge to keep shining my light into the darkness behind me, fearful that we’re being followed. Alligators and sharks scare the crap out of me. I know the chances of encountering either are remote. We’re more likely to see a harmless catfish. But even they, with their alien whiskers and giant, unblinking eyes, frighten me. If there’s something out there, I’d rather see it coming than to have it slip up on me from behind.

Nothing’s coming for you, silly.

I try to convince myself that it’s just my lack of sleep letting my imagination run wild. The others don’t appear to share my concerns at all.

Still, I kick harder, propelling myself even faster. I cut through the water like a knife. I’m like the antithesis of Kwanjangnim Rupert’s Yu. I’m not the water, but the rock shooting through it. My Link pings. I ignore it. It’s just Kelly telling me to wait. I go even faster.

My heart pounds harder. Blood rushes through my head. My thoughts are clear. Vision’s clear. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a beam of light. It’s closing in, then the red glow of Kelly’s chemical stick, and I smile. He’s just a vague shape in the gloom off to one side. A ghostly hand reaches out, and his fingers brush mine. I keep pumping my legs. My chest hurts from breathing so hard. The burn feels—

I realize something’s wrong.

I stop, and Kelly glides up next to me. He holds his hands up and shakes his head, perplexed at my behavior. I look around and realize the others are far behind us. They’ve spread out: two dim blue dots, then, even farther back and much fainter, the yellow ones.

And I’m drifting back toward them.

I grab my Link and quickly type:

<< TIDE RVRSING >>

I send it to everyone.

Five new glowing spots appear, then I see five sets of goggles reflecting five Link screens. Messages scroll across my view, first from Ash and Jake, then Micah:

<< HOW FAR 2 GO? >>

<< WE R OK >>

<< PUSH ON >>

We regroup, and Micah motions for us to wait. He types into his Link and sends it out to the group:

<< STLL TYM MR THN HLF WY STY STDY >>

I can always tell his messages apart from the others’, because he avoids vowels like each one exacts a hefty price.

He gestures at me, as if to say I should continue to lead. Maybe he thinks I’ll keep up the pace and thus urge the rest of the group to push harder. I nod. If we don’t make the effort now, while it’s still relatively easy, we’ll struggle later. Once more, I thrust myself into the waiting darkness ahead. A quick glance back confirms the others are following.

I don’t immediately sense how separated I’ve gotten, not until I realize how faint Kelly’s labored breathing has grown. I slow a bit to let him catch up, but it’s Jake who reaches me first. Kelly’s right behind him. They’re both sucking hard on their cartridges. When I stop, I spot myself on a landmark on the wall next to me. But it immediately begins to race ahead. The current is definitely strengthening.

I hear another rush of bubbles, and we all stop and wave our lights around until they settle on Reggie. He’s just clearing his goggles. Ash and Kelly take the opportunity to clear theirs, too. I want to warn Kel to save his air, but I’d only be telling him something he already knows.

My mask is almost painfully tight against my face. I’ve sealed it with petroleum jelly, just like the others. A little water has leaked in, though, not much. I go ahead and raise my thumb and find the button just above the bridge of my nose and push.

The pressure hurts my eyeballs. My ears pop. There’s a sudden snap and my goggles slip away from my face. Everything around me goes blurry. I wave my hands around trying to find the goggles, but I can’t see anything. I release the flashlight and its beam swings around and down before bouncing on the end of its leash.

Air bubbles burst from my nose. I instinctively try to pull them back in, and suddenly I’m coughing, choking. My lungs constrict. The air leaves my mouth, but the canister is gone, too. More bubbles rush past my face. I quickly lose them above me. Now my lungs are empty and so is my canister. I can’t even find my goggles to use the compressed air.

My ears ring, my throat closes off. I want to open my mouth and inhale and my mind screams at me, No! No! Don’t do it!

I feel hands on me, on my arms and legs and neck. Then my goggles are pushed into place against my face while another hand presses on the back of my head. There’s an explosion of air and my vision clears. My lungs are beyond bursting; I’m desperate to inhale the rushing air.

The hand on my head forces me to look downward and another set of goggles is there. I’m not sure how many releases it takes before I realize there’s air rushing up and enveloping my face. I’m supposed to breathe it in. I cup my hands around my mouth and suck. A putrid mixture of river water and stale air slip down my throat. I cough and gasp and cough some more. I feel like I’m drowning. I feel like dying.

The air suddenly stops. But now my lungs are full. I feel my rebreather pushed into mouth. I still can’t see because of the hands holding my goggles in place. It feels like someone is trying to loop the headband around my head, but it won’t stay.

My mind is still cloudy. I reach up and try to push everyone away, but I feel clumsy. I bite down and exhale explosively into the canister. My next inhale is just as violent. The air tastes dirty in my mouth. It’s wet, contaminated. But it takes the edge off. I repeat the cycle, again and again, until the dizziness departs.

Finally, the hands holding the goggles move aside enough so I can see the Link held up into my field of vision. I blink until the screen comes into focus:

<< BROKEN >>

I nod. No shit.

The words scroll up and a second line of text appears:

<< OK NOW? >>

I nod again.

<< CANT FIX MUST HOLD ON URSLF >>

The text slides up.

<< CAN YOU GO WITHOUT? >>

I reach up with both hands and push against the goggles. I need them to see; swimming blind is not an option. I try to look around, but my hands narrow my field of vision. I see concern on every face. I manage to give them a thumbs up without relaxing my death grip on the goggles. Everyone nods and reciprocates.

They pull away, all except Kelly, who stays with me. Despite how little of his face I can actually see, what isn’t distorted by the bleary goggles and my hands. He’s worried. He holds up his Link so I can read it.

<< DONT DO THT AGN! >>

He removes the cartridge from his lips and leans forward to plant a kiss on my cheek. It feels cold, but it sends a surge of warmth through me.

Then he snatches up my flashlight on the end of its tether and flicks it off. If I can’t hold it, it’s no use to me. No sense to wasting the batteries.

Jake slides into view, gesturing that we need to go. I’m not sure how much ground we’ve lost in just the few minutes that have passed. But it’s distance we have no choice but to make up, and the current is growing even stronger. Once more, I’m the one holding everyone back.

Embarrassed, I let the others go ahead now. There’s no way I can lead. I hesitate, wondering once again if we should turn around. I won’t be able to use my hands to swim, putting even more strain on my legs.

But Kelly tugs me forward, his hand on my elbow. Despite what I’ve just gone through, he doesn’t push going back. It pisses me off that the others are already moving on, assuming that’s what I want.

I have no choice but to follow.

Chapter 15

My arms ache. My back is stiff. My legs burn. We’re all miserable, and yet we push on.

If not for Kelly’s hand on my arm, I don’t know how I’d make it, since I can barely steer using just my feet. Even with him assisting me, I feel like I’m fighting an invisible presence. I move as much sideways as forward. I twist my body to realign. I overcorrect, correct, slip again. The extra effort is exhausting.

The yellow and blue glow sticks pull farther away and begin to fade into the distance and murk. I kick harder, burning energy reserves I know will soon run out. My breathing grows ragged. My body’s not used to this particular kind of exercise.

Kelly’s straining, too. Then, without warning, he jerks me to the side. His hand slips off of my arm and I’m smothered in inky blackness as the beam from his flashlight winks out.

Kelly?

I spin, but all around me is nothing but black. I strain to see through the goggles, and my grip on them slips. Water leaks in. I shove them hard against my face, and twist around to find him.

Kelly!

But then I see the beam from his flashlight. It’s off to one side and seems to be drifting away. It swings around, twists suddenly, then drops down toward the floor. Did his tether somehow get detached?

I kick to get myself turned, and my flipper connects with something. It doesn’t feel like the wall; there had been some give. I wince, believing I might’ve just given my boyfriend a mouthful of rubber flipper. I reach out with one hand, and more water seeps underneath my goggles.

Kelly?

The quality of light below me changes. The distant beam swings up, and I see the faint outline of an arm, a torso. I see Kelly’s red glow stick. I glimpse his head. The beam swings around again, sweeping through the darkness. He’s searching for me. The dancing light is disorienting. He should be able to find me by my glow stick.

I kick again and feel the same resistance behind me. There’s something floating in the water. Something buoyant. A log, maybe.

It coils around my ankle.

Kel? Please be you.

But it’s not him. I know it isn’t, because he’s below me.

The coil tightens. Is it a snake?

A bubble of air escapes between my lips. Water rushes into my goggles.

I twist again, jerk my leg away, and I’m free. The beam from Kelly’s flashlight stabs upward, blinding. And then I feel it around my ankle again.

It’s one of the others, I tell myself. They’ve come back. I try to relax. I want to see, but I can’t because of the darkness. Panic rises in my chest. I feel exposed, vulnerable, helpless.

The grip tightens. It has weight. Catfish! I think. It’s trying to eat me!

I grunt and pull. It’s strong, too strong. Maybe it’s Reggie; he doesn’t know his own strength. I look: no blue glow. Not him, and I revert back to the snake idea.

Until my other leg is grabbed.

I nearly scream. Now I can feel individual fingers digging into my cramping calf muscles, loosening, sliding upward toward my knee.

The beam from Kelly’s flashlight starts to swing wildly below me. I reach down to push the hands away. The knuckles are bony, slimy. The skin feels rubbery and stiff.

A face drifts out of the gloom, illuminated by my glow stick. Skin’s ghostly pale, eyes black and deep-sunk. A few scraggy, moss-tangled strands of hair. It opens its mouth and its teeth are yellow and broken. Seeing them, I’m suddenly bereft of reason. There is only terror, and the panic it induces.

I lash out. Air explodes from my lungs. I lose my goggles.

It climbs my leg like a rope. In flashes of light, I see a tongue loll out, waterlogged and swollen, putrescent, gangrenous.

I draw my knees up to kick it away, but flippers push my feet in directions I don’t intend. The movement only draws it nearer. Its grip is like steel, all bone and hardened sinew. My calf is burning in agony now.

It reaches up, grabs me just below my knee. I kick and thrash some more. The lower hand releases, reaches up, paws, finds my lower thigh. It leans in to bite. It plants its face against my leg. I feel the motion of its jaw, and a scream fills my chest.

Its teeth can’t penetrate the rubber of the wetsuit.

It’ll keep trying until it succeeds.

Suddenly, the hand slips off the slick material. I feel its fingers rake down my leg. I kick to escape, but it grabs my flipper instead. The process immediately resets. This time it’s quicker, as if it knows it nearly had me. Icy iron bands find the bare skin of my ankle, then my calf. I kick, and again my flippers get in the way. It opens and closes its mouth in some horrifying mockery of chewing. It gnaws on its own swollen tongue. Its teeth clack. It’s desperate to feed.

My head swims. My limbs grow heavy. I’m growing weak. Light flashes before me; I can’t tell if it’s real or not. I don’t have the energy to fight.

I feel my body jerk violently to one side. There’s the sensation of movement across my face. The pressure on my legs vanishes, replaced by a strong sensation of warmth. It spreads across my belly, and I realize I’ve urinated. Embarrassment brings me to my senses. I look down, and I see a hand reaching up, fingers flexing. Beyond the wrist, there’s nothing. I must be hallucinating.

The water is crimson. I kick at the drifting, detached hand. It tumbles away.

Another bump, this one against my lower back. I spin. The monster tries in vain to grab me with its stump. I see the white of exposed bones. There’s an odd thumping sound and a glint of steel. Kelly suddenly appears. He lunges, pushing me away with one hand. His knife plunges into the zombie’s neck. He twists, yanks it out. The slash gapes. Bits of atrophied muscle spill out. A fish zips in, takes a bite, spits it out, then disappears again.

I suck hard from the cartridge in my mouth, but it’s empty. My thoughts, foggy to begin with, grow even more fuzzy. Blackness suffocates me. My vision tunnels. My stomach spasms.

With my last coherent thought, I remind myself that to vomit now would be fatal.

Whiteness and warmth infuse me. My brain is shutting down.

I open my mouth and water flows in. I cough, sputter, and open it again. I fill my lungs just as another balloon of air envelops me. Kelly shoves my mask into my mouth and holds it there, pinching my nose, compelling me to exhale into my canister.

After several more breaths, I open my eyes. He holds me immobile for several minutes, until the blinding light inside me and the whispers of death fade away from my mind. I don’t think my heart will ever stop racing.

When I’m ready, he points the beam of his flashlight down into the darkness below us. I can’t see much without the goggles. I don’t know if he’s showing me the zombie he’s just killed. I kick to get away, but he clutches me tight until I stop struggling.

Once more he points the light down, then at his eyes, then at me. My goggles, that’s what he means. I’ve dropped them.

Weak from lack of oxygen and the rush of adrenaline, I try to kick. I’m feeble, dead weight. He swims slowly, dragging me.

When we reach the bottom, he begins sweeping his light back and forth. The floor is carpeted with objects washed in over the years. I can’t see much more than a couple feet ahead of me. Beyond that, everything’s a blur. Shapes without form, grayness without shades.

I begin to think it’s hopeless when his light glints off something shiny. Kel dives down and comes up with my knife. He pushes it back into my sheath. I don’t remember taking it out.

He goes back down.

After a few more minutes, he returns, shaking his head. He points to his own goggles, offering them to me. I gesture that we need to go. We’re completely alone now. There’s no sign of the other four glow sticks. They haven’t even noticed we’re not with them anymore.

Kel grabs my hand and together we rise toward the ceiling. In the struggle, we’ve lost our sense of direction. Which way is out?

He points at the wall, and I see a large crack sliding forward. Kelly gestures that we should follow it. It doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t think clearly. I let him lead.

After a few minutes, I notice that the darkness doesn’t seem so complete. Then a new light appears, piercing, moving. It catches my eyes and blinds me. A second beam joins the first, and I realize the others have finally noticed we’re not with them. They’re coming back. I push now, tapping some last reservoir of energy. Two yellow glow sticks. I can’t remember who they belong to.

A moment later, Micah and Jake pull up beside us. They’re gesturing frantically. Micah holds up his Link.

I reach down, find my own Link hanging from my side. I pull it up to my face. There’s an old message:

<< WHR FK R U? >>

I scroll to the next message, sent a minute or so after:

<< ANSR PLZ! >>

A new message appears, Micah’s third:

<< MV IT! >>

Anger clears my head. He doesn’t bother asking why we’re so far behind. He doesn’t know or care about what held us up. He offers no apology for going on without us. I want to scream that I was attacked by a fucking zombie! And all I can see is impatience in his eyes.

He jabs his thumbs once more at his screen. My Link flickers on:

<< NRLY THR >>

I want to cry. I want to scream and kick and lash out at him, at anyone, everyone. The immensity of what we’ve set out to do is overtaken with the immensity of what we’re about to accomplish. But I feel no excitement, only dread. We’re so close now, and I am absolutely terrified at what we’ll find.

Kelly gently prods me forward. I’m exhausted— body, mind, and spirit. I am enraged. I am paralyzed by fear. I follow, because I can’t think what to do.

We’re close, and yet it feels like hours pass before the twilight in the tunnel yields to daylight. A square patch of light grows before us. The tunnel begins to angle upward and suddenly the light becomes our ceiling. Above it, I can see blue sky, rippling.

We pop up out of the water a minute later, and even before I can fill my starving lungs with air, my breath is stolen away from me at the sight of a city left abandoned to the undead.

Chapter 16

It’s too loud.

That’s the first thing I think, when I’m finally able to catch my breath. Everyone just needs to shut the hell up, because they’re being too loud.

They’re speaking all at once. Jake and Ashley are excitedly pointing out one decaying building after another, laughing like children at an amusement park. Reggie’s saying how he knew this would be fun. He glances over and scoffs that it took us so long. They haven’t a clue what Kelly and I encountered down there. They don’t know how close I came to becoming infected. Micah’s the only one refraining from celebrating, because he knows something happened. But he’s not even close to imagining the truth. “What was the hold up back there?” he asks.

Kel brushes him off. “Not now,” he growls. He’s just as shaken as I am, but at least he can talk. I’m barely able to string together two coherent thoughts; I doubt I’ll be able to assemble the words to express them. “And tell the others to shut the fuck up.”

Everyone immediately goes silent. We’re not used to hearing Kelly use such foul language. He’s usually more careful than that, so when it does come out of his mouth, we tend to pay attention.

He guides me back toward the edifice of the tunnel overpass, searching for a way to climb out. I’m grateful for his presence of mind. I’m still in shock. Somehow, he manages to keep me moving. “Once we’re on dry ground again, it’ll be okay,” he says. But even in my state, I know it’s only half true, at best. Safety is relative. It’s contextual. That zombie down there came from somewhere, and it had to have been from here. And where there’s one, there’s bound to be more.

What if it wasn’t even the only one down there? What if there are a lot more, and we just happened to slip past them all except that last one? It was dark; we could easily have not seen them.

Knowing this, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the trip back.

Jake’s the first to notice my missing goggles. When he mentions it, I want to snap at him that he’s more concerned about them than me. I don’t really care that he’ll have to explain to his uncle what happened to them. We have bigger things to worry about than a few pieces of lost equipment.

Micah’s pulling Kelly back, telling him we can’t go that way. It eventually sinks in that we can’t get out by climbing up the overpass. The railing is too high to reach. The vertical wall extends several feet up and at least fifty feet to either side. It angles back around us like arms in an embrace. It’s another hundred and fifty feet before those arms descend to where we can climb out of the water. The moment Ashley realizes this, she whines that we’ve got more swimming to do.

But then Reggie sees where the fencing has pulled free of its posts and has fallen down into the water near one corner. “We can climb out there,” he says. “It’s only about thirty feet away.”

He’s still excited, although subdued now. He also sounds tired. We’re all drained by the long, dark swim, and they’re finally picking up on my silence.

I let Kelly drag me toward the fence. I can’t seem to find the strength to move, so I just float. Where does he find the energy? I look over at him and notice his head barely breaches the surface. But it’s not weariness, it’s caution. He’s keeping a low profile in the water on purpose. The way his eyes flick everywhere tell me he’s searching for signs of life. Or death. But he can’t see much beyond the walls. We’re too low in the water. We have no idea what might be waiting for us just out of sight.

We reach the fence before the others. Kelly makes sure I’ve got a hold of the chain link, then he peels off his flippers and tosses them over. They clatter in the unnatural silence. He waits a moment, then climbs up. The fence sways and bangs against the cement wall, making far too much noise.

After a quick glance all around, he gestures. “Looks clear.”

I let the others clamber up first, as I will my tremors to subside. When it’s Jake’s turn, he stops to ask about the mask again. Kelly snaps at him to leave me alone.

Finally, I’m ready. Kelly reaches down and helps me out. My arms are still weak and I can barely hold on. With the flippers on, I keep slipping. He practically has to drag me up.

The moment I’m on the ground, I sink to my knees. The others are already peeling off their equipment and unzipping their wetsuits. They’ve quieted, but more in expectation of an explanation than in fear. There’s something else, too, something fleeting in Ashley’s eyes. For a moment I think it’s disappointment. Had she been expecting something more out of the abandoned city? All her ogling the ruins, was she really searching for something else than empty buildings to explore?

Now that we’re on the ground and the vista’s opened up for us, the city’s wretched decay becomes clear. Everything’s dirty and run down, faded, broken and rusty, used up and falling down. The husks of intact and burned out cars litter the roads, many abandoned in whatever direction the drivers happened to leave them, their doors swung wide open. The hollow shells of buildings, windows blown out by fires, bullets, and storms. Overgrown weeds. Choking vines. We hadn’t expected Long Island City to be in a perfect state of preservation, as if it had been hermetically sealed away since the day of the outbreak, but this is far worse than any of us had imagined.

Everywhere I look, the more alone and vulnerable I feel. Other than the six of us, there’s not a single soul in sight, alive or otherwise. We’re in a ghost town. Long Island City is utterly desolate, as empty as Reggie had insisted it would be.

I should be relieved, but I’m not.

Kelly finds the highest ground in the immediate vicinity, an abandoned car on the tunnel overpass, and he climbs up onto the roof. It’s covered in dust. The panels are rusted and the paint is flaking off. The springs creak and the frame rattles. The metal roof dimples under his weight, popping like a gunshot. He cups his hands around his eyes and scans the horizon.

This makes Reggie laugh. “Check out the brah! Switching on his game mode and hunting for IUs to kill. I told you there wouldn’t be any.”

Kelly’s eyes flash and he slides back down off the car. His face is red with fury. He slams Reggie in the chest before any of us realizes what’s happening. “No zombies?” he hisses. “That’s what you said! No fucking zombies!”

“Sorry to disappoint, brah.”

“You stupid, fucking—”

“Dude, chillax,” Reggie grunts, and pushes Kelly off of him. “If I’d known you wanted—”

“What the fuck was that down there then?” He grabs Reggie by the arm and spins him toward the tunnel opening. Confused murmurs fall from everyone’s lips.

“What are you talking about, brah? Where?”

“In the goddamn tunnel, asshole! Where the hell were you?” Kelly shoves him again. He turns to the others, glaring. His face is as red as a tomato. “One of them attacked Jessie down there! She could’ve been—”

He stops, and his eyes grow wide. He rushes over to me. “Were you bitten?”

I shake my head.

Nobody speaks. No one moves. They watch us in stunned silence, unsure if this is an act or not. Finally, Ashley steps forward. “You saw one? Down there?”

“It fucking grabbed Jessie. She almost fucking died!”

Ash turns and points at Jake and Reggie. “I told you guys! I said we should’ve warned them.”

“What?” Kelly gasps, spinning around. His eyes narrow. “Warned us about what?”

Reggie positions himself between them. “We didn’t know, okay? How could we have known what it was? It was too far away.”

Ashley ignores him. She steps to the side to speak directly to Kelly. “They didn’t want to tell you.”

“Tell us what?”

“What they saw.”

“You saw a zombie?”

She hesitates, then nods.

“We don’t know that!” Jake insists. “We don’t know what it was.”

“You saw something?” I manage to squeak out. It’s painful to speak at all, and my voice keeps breaking. My chest burns. My eyes feel puffy. “You saw something, you should’ve stopped right then! But you didn’t even bother to, did you? You didn’t want to because you wanted to be the first ones here. You couldn’t even wait for us to catch up. Or go back to warn us! You just left us back there and kept going!” The more my voice rises, the more it cracks. “What the hell were you thinking? I almost got bit! I almost fucking drowned!”

Nobody speaks for a moment, then Jake steps forward. “We didn’t know what we saw.”

Kelly starts sputtering. He clenches his fists, and veins pop out on his temples. Finally, a single word explodes from his lips. The f-bomb shatters into a million pieces and the echoes spread across the city. In the distance, a flock of pigeons lifts off the ground, before settling back down again nearby.

“Everyone needs to just shut up,” I try to say. My mouth is dry, so the words turn to dust on my tongue. “You’re being too loud.”

“It was at the other end,” Jake says.

“The other end of what?” Kelly demands. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Kelly! Shh!”

Ashley crouches down beside me. “I told them,” she pleads. “I said we should have let you know what we saw.”

“Thought we saw, Ash,” Reggie interjects.

I remember back to the moments before we left, back there in the parking garage. The looks they’d exchanged. The unspoken words. “What did you see?” I ask.

“An NCD team,” Reggie answers. “They’d just pulled something out of the water. It was on a stretcher and covered.”

“They pulled a zombie out of the water right before we went into it?” Micah asked.

“It could’ve been anything, a homeless person.”

“You said it was a dead alligator,” Ashley said.

“I was joking.”

“But it was NCD. Necrotics Crimes, for fuck’s sake!”

“They have to call them for any body they find, you know that.”

“Was it Eric?” I ask. “Was my brother there?”

Reggie turns away, shaking his head. Jake sits down, his hands clutched over his stomach, like someone’s just used him for a punching bag. Kelly looks like he wants to kill someone. Instead, he reaches down and picks up a chunk of concrete and heaves it out over the water. The splash sounds hollow. The echoes barely carry.

“They just loaded it up and left,” Reggie says. His eyes are pleading. “If we’d arrived two minutes later, we wouldn’t have seen anything.”

“But you did,” Micah quietly says. “You saw them with a body, and you didn’t tell us.”

“It had to have come through the tunnel,” I reason. “That’s why they patrol down there by the opening. They’re watching for swimmers.”

“You think it drifted there from here?” Ashley asks, incredulous.

“Where else?”

“One of the work crews, maybe.”

“If it came through,” Kelly says, “then that means they’re still here.”

“No.” Reggie shakes his head. “Doesn’t make sense. It’s been too long. And besides, if they’re so concerned about swimmers, why not just block the opening? You said so yourself, Kel.”

Nobody speaks for a moment. It’s a valid point, and a puzzle we’ve all been wondering these past few days. Why make it easy for the Infected Undead to get through? And, for that matter, why make it easy for the living, too?

“I just—” Jake stammers. “I didn’t think it was a swimmer.”

“Don’t call them that,” Micah says. “IUs can’t swim.”

We all know this, of course. They’re just as helpless in the water as fish are out of it. And their buoyancy means they can’t walk along the bottom. They just drift with the currents. How long would it have taken to make it a mile underwater?

“But CUs can,” Reggie points out. “Maybe they use them to clear the tunnels.”

“Are you saying the one that grabbed Jessie was a CU?”

“Maybe.”

“And how the fuck does that make things any better?” Kelly demands. “It doesn’t matter if it came from here or there, you should have told us! Goddamn it, Jessie almost died!”

They all glance over at me.

“He’s right. You should have said something,” I murmur.

“And you would’ve nixed the plan,” Reggie says.

“Of course we would’ve, you fucking idiot,” Kelly hisses.

“Based on what we thought we saw?” Reggie counters. “We saw that they had pulled something out of the water. It was wrapped up and carted away and we never saw a body. That’s when we decided not to mention it.”

“When you decided,” Ashley corrected. “You and Jake.”

“They didn’t use gloves, so whatever it was, they didn’t consider it infectious,” Jake explains.

“You can’t catch it just by touching them!”

“What about the water?”

“What about it?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t the water be contaminated?”

“That’s never been proven,” Micah says.

“It’s never been disproven, either,” Jake insists.

“That’s an urban legend.”

“But what if it’s not. A lot of people say you can.”

“Who says that?”

“Ashley’s grandmother,” Reggie offers.

Ash leans in and whispers into my ear, “She didn’t know what she was saying. Okay?”

I know she’s just trying to reassure me, but it doesn’t help. I know the scientists say the virus doesn’t survive in the water. But what if that’s not true? What if it can? What if when Kelly stabbed it, it released a whole bunch of active virus? What if I swallowed it?

I push her away just as the mushy half-digested stew of cornflakes and river water gush out of me. Ash scampers off to a safe distance. Everyone watches in horror. I can see it in their eyes, they’re waiting for me to turn. Everyone freezes. I glance over at Kelly. He hesitates, then comes over and asks how I feel.

“Better, actually,” I say, and it’s true. I feel a lot better, so much so that I feel silly for all the fuss. And embarrassed for vomiting. Yes, I’m furious that they didn’t say anything about the body in Manhattan. And of course I’m still angry about what happened down inside the tunnel. But it’s like throwing up helped clean out the worst of it. I feel almost euphoric.

I push myself to my feet. Keenly aware that they’re all still watching me, I bare my teeth and hiss. It’s worth it just to see the looks on their faces, even Kel’s.

“Kidding,” I tell them, chuckling. “Relax, everyone. I’m fine.”

Stunned silence is all I get for a response.

After several long seconds, Jake laughs uncertainly. “Okay then,” he says, wiping an imaginary bead of sweat from his forehead. “Phew!”

They eye me a little longer, then Micah claps his hands, and everyone jumps. “Right then! We’re here, so we might as well do what we came for.”

“Seriously?” Kelly says.

“He’s right, Kel,” I say, resigned. “We are here. And no worse for the wear.”

He sighs heavily and shakes his head.

The boys finish stripping off their gear and stowing it. Ash ditches her wetsuit top, but keeps the bottoms on. Out of solidarity, I do the same.

After a while, they all stop glancing worriedly at me. I’m clearly not going to turn. But in a moment of distraction, when Jake wonders aloud if anyone thinks the abandoned vehicles might still work, I take a long, deep drag from my inhaler. I don’t know why, but I tell myself it’ll protect me. Then I take a second, just for good measure. It’s silly, but you never know.

Because, what if G-ma Junie and the others are right? What if you can catch it by drinking infected water? How long would it take before it became apparent?

Chapter 17

Reggie decides that the trunk of the abandoned car Kelly had climbed onto earlier will be a good place to stash all our equipment. Or, as he puts it: “hide.” Privately, I wonder why we need to hide anything anywhere. Who’s going to take it? There’s no one here. And the undead, which I’m still not convinced are all gone, wouldn’t want our stuff anyway. “Keep your knives with you,” he adds, as if he truly believes we’re not alone. But no one else argues. We strip the sheaths off the bandoliers, then strap them onto our thighs.

He opens the driver’s door, reaches in, and yanks the latch to release the trunk. It pops, releasing a puff of dust, but barely opens. Its hinges have gone stiff and the rubber seals are hard and brittle. Jake pries it up and we all brace for what might come out. He chuckles as he removes what’s in there: a spare tire, a men’s shoe — size nine-and-a-half — and a child’s pink umbrella. He tosses in his pack, mask, and goggles. The rest of us follow suit, except for Micah. He’s standing off to one side, messing with his Link and muttering to himself. Reggie goes over to fetch his gear, but Micah waves him off. “I got it. Just give me a sec.”

“Ooh,” Ashley says. She lifts the umbrella over her and tries to open it. Pieces of the material crumble off and drift down. What remains looks like an old carcass of skin and bones. She dances around like a child, twirling the umbrella. More pieces of the fabric flake off. They fall like flower petals.

Everyone takes my snort of laughter as a sign that I’m finally recovered from the trauma of the attack. They visibly relax. I whisper in Ashley’s ear that I’m glad she came, and she gives me a brilliant smile back.

“So,” Reggie says, pouncing on the uptick in our moods, “what should we do first?”

Kelly glances over at me. There’s still worry in his eyes.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Really. I’m actually up for a little distraction before we head back.” I lower my voice and add, “But just a little. No zombies, no surprises. If I never see another one as long as I live, I’ll die a happy woman.”

“But then you’ll be one,” Jake reminds me.

Everyone stops and stares at him.

“Why the hell would you say a stupid thing like that?” Kelly demands.

“It was a joke.”

“How dumb can you be?”

“It’s okay,” I say. “Forget it.”

“I don’t know why we all agreed to let him come. He’s clueless.”

Jake’s face burns and there a darkness in his eyes that unsettles me.

“Uh, guys?” Micah says. He’s drifted off a bit. He’s standing about fifty feet away, staring into the distance. He turns slowly to us, raises his hand, and points. “You might want to see this.”

“Is that...?” Reggie asks.

About a quarter of a mile away stands a solitary figure. It doesn’t move.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Could be a statue.”

“Wearing pants?”

We squint, but it’s too far away to make much out.

“Anyone got binoculars?”

Jake curses and pulls a pair out of his bag. He trains it on the figure and takes his time adjusting the focus.

“Any day now.”

He exhales slowly, then shakes his head. “It’s a zom as far as I can tell, unless it’s some sort of weird street art or something, like a mannequin or movie prop someone dressed up and put out there.” He doesn’t seem convinced.

“Why would someone do that?’

No one answers.

“Well, I doubt it’d be still standing since the outbreak.”

“Arc’s people have been here more recently. They might’ve done it. Or the military. I wouldn’t put it past a bunch of jarheads to put it up for target practice.”

Reggie grabs the binoculars and trains them on the figure. “It’s not a mannequin. Might be a bronze statue, though I doubt it.” He shivers. “And now we can pretty much guess what sunbathing for thirteen years will do to your skin.”

“So, you think it’s real?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but is it dead dead,” Ashley asks, “or just... dead?”

“Well, it ain’t moving, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He scans all around us before declaring it’s the only one.

Where there’s one, my mind whispers. I shut it down before it can finish.

“Maybe we should just leave,” I say. I hate to be the party pooper, but knowing it’s there, knowing we really aren’t alone, brings back every moment of my encounter in the water in vivid detail.

“It’s really not moving, Jess. It’s probably fossilized.”

“Look,” Micah  says, “it’s just one, and it’s far off, so it’s not a threat.” He comes over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “But it’s up to Jessie.”

I look from face to face. If we’d seen it ten minutes ago, I’m sure the call would’ve been much easier for all of us. But they’ve gotten their hopes up again.

“As long as it doesn’t move...” I say, reluctantly.

“Great! We’ll keep our eyes and ears peeled, though. I’m sure it’ll be fine. If it moves, we’re out of here. No argument from me. Okay? I mean, it’s not like it’s going to sneak up on us.”

Still, that nagging question keeps repeating in my head: If there’s one...

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” Ashley says, “but zombie or no zombie, I’m wasting away to nothing if I don’t get some food in my stomach. I am not going anywhere, not doing anything, until I’ve eaten.”

“I’m with her,” Reggie says, and hands Jake’s binoculars back. “Kinda weird, but I got a hankering for beef jerky now.”

Everyone groans. But when he really does pull a bag of jerky from his pack and stuffs a piece into his mouth, the groans grow louder. And when Micah laughs, I know they’ve already dismissed the zombie as representing any kind of threat.

“I’ll bet you were really hoping we’d see one, just so you could do that,” Ash says.

Reg bites off another chunk. “Might’ve crossed my mind.”

My stomach clenches and I press a hand over my mouth. Reggie thinks I’m being overly dramatic, so he waves a piece under my nose.

“Stop being a jerk,” Ashley tells him.

“I’m okay,” I say, and take a deep breath.

“You’re not okay,” Kelly says. He opens a Red Bull from his pack and hands it over to me. “At least drink something. You’re probably dehydrated.”

“It’s warm. And my stomach—”

“Drink.”

When we’ve all finished our snacks, and Jake has confirmed that the zombie still hasn’t moved, Ashley lines us up so she can take pictures of the group. She whips out her Link and hands it over to Jake, who’d offered to be the photographer. Micah snatches it away and orders him to line up with us, but he’s reluctant. I get the sense he doesn’t want a record of his part in our crime. Kelly glares at him, daring him to insert himself into our photo. I can’t help but feel bad for the poor kid. He wants so much to be a part of the group, and there are so many reasons why he’ll never be.

Ashley props the stripped umbrella onto her shoulder and twirls. “I feel like one of those flappers from a century ago.”

“More like a century and a half,” Reggie says.

“Not quite,” Kelly further clarifies. “Flappers were from the Roaring Nineteen-Twenties, so it was more like a century and a quarter.”

“Seriously, dude,” Reggie grumbles from the other side of the line. “Do you have to be so freaking literal all the time?”

“Not literal. Accurate.”

Reggie snorts. “Yup, literal.”

Micah snaps a couple pictures of everyone in various positions, including a few with Reggie and Jake hamming it up with zombie poses. It strikes me as both unsettling and reckless. Ash appears amused. Micah then hands Ash’s Link back and says he’s got things to do.

“Like what?” Jake asks.

“Like computery things.” He pulls the old tablet from his pack, trailing the usual tangle of loose wires.

The four of us know what he means, but Jake hasn’t a clue. He throws Ash a puzzled look. She’s apparently the only one he feels comfortable enough to ask. Or who will provide an answer that doesn’t come with a side of sarcasm.

“He has this plan to hack into the iVZ stream.”

“Is he nuts?”

Micah shrugs. “Why not? We’re here. I don’t have much hope it’ll actually work, but I still want to try.”

“You’ll get us all arrested!”

“Brah, may I remind you where we are and how we got here?” Reggie says.

The ancient tablet computer finishes booting up, and Micah shows us the screen. “Here’s a map I was able to download from one of the dark streams. We’re here. And over here’s a node. That’s where I’ll be.”

“Yeah, but why?” Jake presses. “And... and how?” He checks his dive watch. It’s coming up on noon. “We’ve only got a couple hours. Don’t you want to explore, collect souvenirs, have fun?”

Micah chuckles. “This is my idea of fun. If there’s a way to hack into The Game, it’s going to be from inside the ArcTech firewall.” He points to a spire in the distance, one of many rising every quarter mile or so from the top of the wall surrounding the island. They’re radio transmitter towers and, according to Micah, communications nodes between Gameland itself and Arc Entertainment Headquarters in New Jersey.

“Just don’t cross the wall,” Ashley reminds him.

“Can’t,” Micah replies.

“Why not?” Jake asks.

“EM transmitters’ll fry your implant. The military installed them to prevent CUs — Controlled Undead —from breaching the perimeter.”

“But we’re not CUs.”

“You still have an implant, idiot,” Kelly interjects. “That wall is there to keep people out, too. People like us.”

“And the reason it didn’t fry ours was because we came in underneath the wall.”

The actual wall is hidden from view by the distance and the buildings surrounding us, but we can see the top of the EM tower where Micah’s heading. It’s probably my imagination, but the air around it almost seems to shimmer. But whether illusion or not, I have no desire to go anywhere near them. If Micah wants to, that’s his choice.

He taps the screen a few times, then holds it up for us to see. A cluster of tiny red dots have appeared on the map. When he zooms in, the dots assume labels.

“You hacked our implants?” Ashley exclaims. She covers the back of her head with her hand, as if it’ll block whatever connection Micah has made to hers.

“Not directly,” he replies. “I hacked your Links and got your unique L.I.N.C. identifiers. After that, it’s a simple task of emulating the implant interface in this old tracking app, which I’ve synced up using a basic geolocator centered on this position.” He points into the distance again. “The signals triangulate off the antennas within range.”

“Translation, please,” Jake says.

“It means he can track us wherever we go in here,” Kelly explains.

“Wherever your Links go,” Micah corrects.

“W-why?”

“For everyone’s safety.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Does that mean anyone can track us? At any given moment?”

Micah frowns at me. “You don’t think the government isn’t already tracking each and every one of us.”

“So, they know we’re here?”

Micah shakes his head. “No one outside the wall can track us in here. The EM barrier masks our signals, so no one on the outside can see anyone inside. And vice versa. The system’s designed that way to make it impossible for people to hack the Players’ implants and hijack them. That’s what a firewall does. The only way to connect with them is through ArcWare’s iVZ codices, which are tuned specifically to those nodes. Which is why I need to gain hard access to them, for the communications protocols.”

Jake’s still looking totally lost, and more than a little worried. But the rest of us take a different view of Micah’s hacking. If he manages to figure out the right protocols, then we’ll finally have a way to access The Game — not to sabotage it, but to play for free — and Micah’s plan gives us our best chance to do that.

“Let me break it down for you, brah,” Reggie explains. “If you can hack the iVZ codex, the programming language at the core of The Game, then you can read and manipulate the raw code in real time.”

“You still need the handshake protocols,” Micah reminds him.

“Right. And I’m guessing the trackers on us are more than just for our security, they’re proof of concept. Am I right?”

Micah nods.

“Because if he can make this work reliably after hacking the framework, then we know for certain that we’ll be able to connect to the Players themselves inside Gameland, no matter where we are. That’s pretty much how those rich pricks playing The Game connect to their avatars. Still on the right track?”

“Mostly. The ArcWare codex is a proprietary coding format written in interlaced layers. It’s impossible to delace without the right key. But once I’m inside the framework itself, I won’t need a key. Each individual layer of the language architecture is completely exposed and presumably readable.”

“And after we return,” Ashley says, “all we’ll need to do is build a simple descrambling device, a fake key, and we can play The Game!”

“But you still need a Player.”

“We can highjack any Player we want, whenever we want.”

“That’s stealing! What if you get it killed?”

“Then someone’s out a few million dollars.”

“Exactly.”

“Cry me a river.”

“If you can control a Player, then you can control anyone with an implant.”

I know what Jake’s getting at. Assuming Micah can hack and track CUs, then the obvious next step is learning how to control them. That’s essentially the point of all this. If he can do that, what’s to stop him from doing the same to us? Or other people? It’s the very scenario he’d once posed to me for why we couldn’t trust L.I.N.C. technology.

But it’s Micah, I tell myself. He’d never do anything like that.

And I honestly believe it. But what about other people? If word ever got out he had that ability, they’d try to buy or steal it. In the wrong hands, such a hack would be extremely dangerous.

“Not anyone,” Micah replies. “Our implants aren’t activated. Remember? That’s what the latent part of the name means. Activating them requires a whole different level of access, which I wouldn’t be able to get, even from in here. We’d have to break into Arc Headquarters itself.”

“Maybe there’s a flooded tunnel in,” Reggie jokes.

“The most I can do is track you guys through your Links, and I certainly can’t hijack your implants. Unless you die, of course,” he teases. “Then your implant automatically activates.”

“It does?”

“You didn’t know that? Anyway, I think we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. I still need to confirm that I can actually find and track these signals with any precision.”

“I really don’t like being a guinea pig.”

“All I’m really doing is refining the program’s triangulation accuracy, Jake. That’s critical for VR play. The tighter the geolocating ability, the lower the latency and the better the haptic response.”

Jake’s still unconvinced, but the rest of us feel various degrees of excitement at the prospects. We see the potential that Jake is incapable of, because he isn’t like is. He’s not a gamer. It’s just another example why he’ll never fit in.

Reggie smiles. “I hope it works. I can’t wait to get back and destroy some real zoms. No more Zpocalypto for this guy.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t give a damn about The Game,” Jake asserts. “I just don’t want you in my head.”

“I’m not in there. And it’s only temporary. After we leave, I’ll wipe all your numbers from my files.”

“Satisfied?” Reggie says, slapping Jake on the back. “You worry too much. Now, anyone ready for a little fun?” He rubs his hands together with relish. “Ash?”

Her face lights up. And when I glance at Kelly, I can tell he’s a bit more willing to explore than he was just a few moments ago.

I turn to retrieve my backpack and find Jake staring at me. Our eyes lock, and I suddenly get this feeling he’s not going to let this go so easily.

I just hope he doesn’t decide to tell anyone after we get back.

Chapter 18

Micah repacks his bag and heads for the nearest EM tower. “I’ll ping everyone once I get in,” he says. “And I’ll send your Links the script, so in case you decide to split up you can see where everyone else is.”

“How about I go with you,” Jake offers. “Someone’s got to watch your back.”

“I don’t need anyone breathing down my neck,” Micah says. “You’ll just distract me. Go have some fun. You’ll be bored if you come with me.” He checks his Link. “Let’s all plan to meet back here around two. No later. Ping if anything comes up. If we don’t leave by two-thirty, we’ll be fighting the current again, and I’d rather not.”

“I still don’t want you tracking me,” Jake says.

Micah turns. “Think about it this way, Jake— with the tracker, you’ll also be able to see any implanted zoms in the vicinity.”

“There’s not going to be any here,” he says, not falling for Micah’s diversion. “They’re only in Gameland.”

“Well, there you go.”

“Lotta good that does us,” he grumbles, and points at the lone zombie in the distance. “You can’t track them. IUs don’t have implants.”

“And I think we’ve already decided twelve-year-old Infected Undeads are harmless.”

“Like the one in the tunnel?” Jake counters.

“That was a CU.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Impatience flashes across Micah’s face. He shoots me a pleading look, hoping I’ll bail him out. But I have nothing to say. “Look, Jake, any IUs still here are long past their expiration date. The one in the tunnel was most likely from a work detail back on Manhattan.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not. Now just stick with these guys and you’ll be safe.”

Jake’s gaze bounces between me and Kelly, and Kelly shakes his head. He points over at Ash and Reg, who are off to one side whispering to each other. Ash giggles and slaps his arm. When they glance over, they try to look innocent, but they’re not fooling us.

Reggie gestures in the direction of an old Holiday Inn. “We’re just, uh, gonna go explore... over in that general vicinity.”

“Mind if I join you?” Jake asks.

Reggie wraps his arm around Ash’s shoulders and starts to pull her toward the hotel. “Three’s a crowd, brah.”

But Ashley extricates herself. She looks so small standing next to Reg, yet she’s the one with the real power in their relationship. “Now hold on,” she teases. “This could be interesting. You can come, but only if you think you can handle it.”

“Ooh, threesome,” Reggie croons.

Jake’s face reddens, and he staggers back a few steps.

Reggie laughs. “Guess not.”

Jake’s face fall when Ashley laughs, too. They turn and walk off, and for the first time I hate her for being so cruel.

“Looks like you’re with us,” I tell Jake. “Come on.”

“Jessie, no.”

“I’m sorry, Kelly, but we can’t just leave him alone.”

“Why not? Micah’s alone?”

“Micah can take care of himself.”

“Well, so can Jake. Isn’t he supposed to be some kind of hapkido pro, too?”

“He’s a green belt, and that’s not what I meant. Micah is, I don’t know, street smart.”

“And Jake’s a survival expert.”

“I’m not an expert.”

“Just cut the guy some slack for once, Kel,” I say. “You’ve been riding him all week.”

He chuffs. “Maybe I wanted to spend a little alone time with my girlfriend.”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve said something sooner. Or do you always get your cues from Reg and Ash?”

Kelly pulls me away and whispers, “For your information, it’s possible to spend time alone together that doesn’t include sex.”

“Are you saying you’d rather not?” I ask, spitefully.

“Seriously?” he sputters. “Is that the only reason we’re together?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Hey, guys,” Jake says, but we ignore him.

Kelly takes one of those long, deep breaths, like he’s trying not to get angry. “Maybe I had a little surprise planned for the two of us.”

Despite myself, I’m intrigued. “What kind of surprise?”

“Look, it’s okay,” Jake tries again. “I don’t have to hang out with you.” He starts to walk off. I tell him to hold on, that I need a minute with my boyfriend.

“Come on, Kelly,” I say. I feel bad for them both now.

He rolls his eyes. I can see him thinking through his options. Finally, he points at a cluster of high rises due south of us, maybe three blocks away. “We might be able to see over the wall from the roof. I was just thinking it might be cool to get a pic of Manhattan from there, don’t you think?”

“You just came up with that, didn’t you?”

He shrugs, and I don’t know why, but it makes me angry— not at him, but at myself for forcing him to compromise. I mean, why should I care about Jake? He’s not my boyfriend.

“You guys go on,” Jake says. “I’ll just hang out here and make sure our stuff is safe.”

“Safe from what exactly?” Kelly snaps. “Who’s going to mess with our equipment? Pigeons?”

“The equipment’s safe, Jake,” I tell him. “You can come with us.”

“No, let him stay. He’s a big boy. He can make sure that zom doesn’t come and take our dive fins.”

Jake glances over at it, squinting. He lifts his binoculars to his eyes and says, “I think you mean zoms. There’s two now.”

“Sure there is.”

“No, seriously.”

“Let me see,” Kelly demands. He swipes the glasses from Jake’s hand and takes a look. Then he swears under his breath.

“There’s more?” I ask. “Where did it come from?”

“It was probably standing right behind the other one and we just missed it.”

“We didn’t miss it.”

“If they moved,” I say, “then they’re still alive. Or... you know.”

“Sure, but if that’s how fast they move, then we’re safe. By the time it gets here, we’ll be long gone.” He lowers the binoculars. “We don’t have anything to worry about them.”

“Easy for you to say,” I grumble. How quickly he’s forgotten that his girlfriend was attacked less than hour earlier. But then I realize why he’s being so cavalier. It’s for Jake’s sake. He wants Jake comfortable enough to be here on his own.

“We should tell the others,” Jake says.

“Just stay here and keep an eye on them. Come on, Jess.”

“I don’t get to explore?”

“You found them. You’re the one with the binoculars.”

“We can’t just leave him here on his own now, Kelly.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. They’re too far away. And they’re slow.”

“Stop being so selfish.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Kelly demands.

“Because if it weren’t for Jake, you wouldn’t even be here.”

“Is that why you’re here, for Jake?”

“You know something, you can be an insensitive prick sometimes.”

“What did you just call me?”

I cringe. I hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but it just came out.

“You know, I didn’t even want to come in the first place!”

Jake steps closer. “Hey, guys. It’s fine, really. You don’t need to argue—”

“We’re not arguing!” Kelly shouts.

“Stop shouting,” I hiss. “You want everyone to hear us?”

Kelly laughs and waves his arms about in a dramatic manner. “Hey, dead people! Look! We got brains! Come get some. Over here! See? They’re not interested.”

“Knock it off! You’re being stupid.”

“Like your shrieking earlier wouldn’t have drawn their attention.”

“Shrieking? I was attacked!”

“And I saved you!”

“Took your damn time.”

“You know something?” Kelly says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Screw this. I don’t have to take this crap. Stay here with Jake-the-Flake for all I care. I’m out of here!”

“Kelly! Kelly, stop!”

He stomps off.

I know I should run after him, but I also know that’s what he wants me to do. This is all about him and Jake and whatever stupid male thing they’re doing. I can sort of understand Jake’s deal: he’s trying to find a place in our group. But Kel? He’s just been so moody lately, so impatient. I don’t know how to deal with it without losing my patience, too.

“Fine!” I scream at his back. “Fuck you!”

I’m deeply sorry the moment it leaves my lips, and I just want him to turn around and see how hurt I am. But when he does turn, there’s an ache in his eyes that I’ve never seen before.

He doesn’t say anything. He just shakes his head.

I want to tell him I’m sorry. I want to run to him and apologize.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he says, before I can tell him I didn’t mean it. “Maybe two. If you’re lucky.”

Then he turns around and walks stiffly away.

Chapter 19

“So, who’s G-ma Junie?” Jake asks. He pauses before adding, meekly, “You guys mentioned her earlier.”

I flick a pebble off the railing into the water. It makes a soft plunk and sinks away. The sun’s frying my back, and my shoulders are starting to burn. Now that I’ve dried off I’m starting to sweat. I consider taking off my wetsuit pants, but I just can’t be bothered.

“Ashley’s grandmother,” I tell him. “Well, she was, anyway. She died recently.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Why would you?” I snap, a bit more harshly than I mean to. But seriously, it’s not like he and Ashley are best friends. They were just lab partners. And that’s not likely to change after this, no matter how much Jake might want it to. Once we’re back home from our little adventure, she’ll erase him from her life like so much redundant code. We all will. Yeah, it’s cruel, but it’s the truth. He just doesn’t belong.

By the same token, I’m not even sure our group will survive after this, either. Kelly and I are seriously broken. We’re drifting apart, faster and faster it seems, zooming toward the start of our final year in school. And that’ll be end of that. Or, if not then, if we somehow manage to stay together, then the fracture will only get wider and wider the closer we get to graduating. Meanwhile, Reg and Ash are looking more and more like a full-time couple, off doing their own thing. They’re already squeezing the rest of us out of their lives. And without those two, Micah’s only reason to hang out with us is so he has someone to beat in Zpocalypto. Except I don’t know how long Kelly will stick around to quietly mooch cheater hacks off of him.

But in no scenario do I see Jake staying. He’s our group’s fifth wheel. Or, more accurately, sixth.

“What happened to her?” he pries, once more intruding into my thoughts. He flicks a stone off the railing, and it erases the last of the ripples from mine. “Does Ashley know where they sent her?”

I turn to stare at him. “That’s not how it works.”

“Sorry. I just...”

But now I can hear G-ma Junie’s voice inside my head again, telling us how she’d rather be a Player than be stuck pulling one of those menial civil service duties for three years. Or, god forbid, sewer cleanup.

I take in a deep, shuddering breath and peer out over the water. Except for the sound of the wind and birds, the place is disturbingly quiet. I realize we haven’t seen any land animals, not a single rat or raccoon or coyote. The place should be teeming with scavengers taking advantage of all these abandoned buildings to make their homes in, no longer at risk of extinction by pesky exterminators.

Then I remind myself that there are more ways to get rid of pests than with poisoning or trapping. Could the Infected Undead be hunting them? If so, the island’s former human inhabitants might be in better shape than the boys keep insisting they’re in.

I glance nervously around again, before remembering that they don’t eat meat to stay alive, but to spread the disease, and on that account, no one has ever proven they can transmit the virus to other species. Besides, it’s well established that they only go after humans. So, if the animals all died off, it’s probably because we left. No more garbage to scavenge, or half-eaten fast food bags dumped along the side of the road. No more well-tended vegetable gardens to raid. No more cat food left out for strays.

It’s hard to believe that in just a short dozen years or so, the entire island has gone from being overrun with hundreds of thousands of living, breathing people and millions of animals, to being almost completely bereft of mammals. It’s now just a pathetic, empty, jungle wasteland. The Decay Duo standing out on that distant plaza are the last of their kind. Or, as Reggie might call them, Slim Jim and Quirky Jerky.

Where’s there’s two there’s three. Or four...

It’s still a hell of a lot fewer than the tens of thousands that became infected during the outbreak.

Which begs the question, now that Long Island is nearly empty, why hasn’t anybody come to reclaim it? You could house a hundred thousand people here quite easily. And the infrastructure’s already in place.

But they have come, haven’t they, Jess?

Arc Properties, the mega conglomerate with their fingers in every major industry, did a few years ago. They could’ve turned the island back into the bustling place it once was, filled with people and enterprise. Think of the profit. Heck, they could’ve even used the CUs to do the job of cleaning up and repairing the infrastructure. But I guess there’s more money in entertainment, isn’t there? Build an arena and fill it with a bunch of Controlled Undead purchased from the government for pennies on the dollar. Make rich people buy them for millions so they can fight each other like cyberpunk gladiators. Use that money to invest in R&D so you can make your technology better. Players become stronger and faster. You start to recruit younger, pay better. You charge higher. Reap more.

People will pay ungodly amounts for a chance to play. People want to act out their worse, most violent tendencies without personal repercussions. To realize their darkest secrets. Their most sadistic fantasies.

Arc knows this. They also know people will pay to watch.

They knew there’d be buckets of money to be made here, because there’s profit in death. But no one would want to live here, so close to the arcade.

We’re nowhere near it, actually. According to Micah, it’s located some thirty miles from here, centered on a place called Jayne’s Hill, the island’s highest point. That’s where the main transmission tower is. And the game’s central processing plant. I don’t know how he knows all this. I’m sure the details are highly classified. But with Micah, he can do anything, get anything, once he sets his mind to it.

I glance east, but of course I can’t see the arcade wall. We’re too many miles away.

I clear my throat, and wince. My mouth is dry, so I take a drink from my collapsible water bottle before turning back to Jake. The expectant look on his face tells me he’s still waiting for an answer to his question. He doesn’t know how to let the subject rest.

“I don’t know why the Evans think they know anything,” I finally say, “but Ash says her parents believe she may have gotten sent to some remote place up in North Dakota. I’m sure it’s just pure speculation, though. After the wildfires this spring, they needed a lot of new Conscripted Undead to clear brush, plants trees, and patrol the border where the fences burned down.”

“Don’t you mean Controlled Undead?”

“Same thing. Anyone who reaches their LSC — Life Service Commitment — is conscripted. If they’re not already implanted, they are then, so they can be controlled.”

“Right.”

“That’s how we keep them straight from zombies without implants: CUs have implants; IUs don’t. Controlled or Conscripted Undead versus Infected Undead.” I chuckle. “Confused yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Then file a complaint with Arc. They’re the numb nuts who come up with these stupid terms.”

He sniffs. “When I go, I hope they put me into the Omegaman Corps.”

I look him over for a second. “If that’s what you really want. But the real money’s in The Game. And if you want a shot at becoming a Player, then make sure you die young and easy. Heart attack would do it. Or a bullet to the heart, something that does little other physical damage. Manage that and you’re pretty much guaranteed. Poison’s a good way to go, too.”

“I want to be a soldier.”

“Kill a cop, then. That’s the fastest, most surefire way to become an Omega drone.”

“You seem to know a lot about this.”

I chuff derisively. He obviously doesn’t know about the other members of my family.

“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I think you’d make a good foot soldier.”

“You think so?” He grins and straightens himself a little bit.

The way he preens, I can’t help rolling my eyes. He sees my disdain and his cheeks redden.

“It’s everyone’s obligation to serve,” he chides. “Just think how it would be, if we had to send the living into battle.”

I don’t need a lecture. I’ve heard it all before. All the arguments, I know them by heart. It doesn’t help being related to the person who first proposed that the government militarize the dead. Grandpa considered himself a hero for thinking he’d found a way to end all wars, or at least end fatalities. For our side, anyway. But what it really did was split the country into two and isolate us from the rest of the world.

“But I’m happy to serve in any capacity,” he adds.

“Well, it’d sure be nice to have a choice how you serve, wouldn’t it?” I shoot back.

“Then who’d want to do the nasty stuff?”

“You, since you’re so gung ho about it.”

He doesn’t respond right away. He can see how angry I am. “They could at least tell you where they send your deceased relatives for their conscription,” he finally says, in compromise.

“You know how secretive the government is about sharing that sort of information. People would just want to go visit their relatives or...” I let the thought drift off.

Or they’d try to put them down for good.

“Anyway, unless you’re young and have a suicide wish, or you’re highly connected, you can just forget about writing your own ticket. And if you’re that well connected, then you can probably afford to buy out your LSC anyway and be incinerated immediately after death instead.”

Jake turns and leans his back on the railing. He makes like he’s stretching, but out of the corner of my eye I can see him scanning the horizon. He dwells in the direction where we’d seen the zombies earlier, and for a moment I think he’s going to say they’ve moved again.

“I suppose it could be worse,” he says instead. He casually lifts the binoculars to his eyes, and fear spikes through me, because now I know he’s seen something, and he’s not to alarm me.

“How can it be worse than getting blown to bits somewhere in China or Texas?” I ask, waiting.

He shrugs and adjusts the binoculars. “You could spend three years cleaning up nuclear waste.”

“Right. As if you’d last that long. But at least then your family’d have something to incinerate afterward.”

“Not if you’re a border guard down south. I hear the Southern States Coalition is always bombing them into smithereens.”

“They use flame throwers,” I counter. I’m dying to know what he sees, but I don’t want to seem concerned. “Why do you think they call them Texas Barbecue?”

He glances over at me, appalled. “I wonder if it hurts. When you die the second time.”

“They don’t know heat or pain.”

“You can’t know that, not for sure.”

“They’re dead, Jake.”

“Are they? Then why do they hide during the day?”

“That’s a myth. Besides, they obviously don’t,” I remind him, gesturing to our friends in the distance.

He returns to his binoculars, and I watch him for any clue. Finally, I can’t wait any longer. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“We’re back to just the one again.”

He hands the binoculars over so I can take a look. He’s right, and I feel that familiar icy rush of fear through my veins.

“Maybe it crawled back into its hole. Odd that the other one still hasn’t moved. Maybe it’s really dead and fossilized.”

“Terrible way to spend eternity,” I say. My voice shakes, though I don’t think he notices. “Forever on your feet.”

I study the lone figure for several minutes, willing it to move. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I might catch it in the act of doing something, like scratching its ass. Or picking its nose. I’d feel better then, I suppose. Actually, if I could get any clue as to how stiff and slow it really is, I’d be happy. As long as it remains not moving like that, I just don’t know what to think about it. Is it dead dead or just dead, as Ashley says. It’s like Schrödinger’s Cat, except it’s a corpse.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, after a bit. “I totally had a crush on you all last year.”

The words startle — and unsettle — me. But they also explain a few things. “Look, Jake,” I tell him. I keep the binoculars up, so I don’t have to look at him. “You’re a nice guy and all, but you know I’ve already got a boyfriend.”

“Aaand you took it the wrong way.”

I sigh and shake my head. “How the hell else am I supposed to take it?”

He swallows and nods. “Fair enough. It’s just that you and Kelly— He doesn’t treat you very well.”

“You think you know us? We’re fine, okay?”

“I’m just saying.”

“And I’m saying it’s none of your business. Okay?”

“Okay.”

But I know he won’t drop it.

“You wouldn’t like me, if you knew me better,” I confess. “I can be a total bitch sometimes.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Can we talk about something else for a while?”

He’s quiet for a few minutes. Then: “You ever know anyone who got sent to The Game? Like, as a Player.”

And so we’ve come full circle, back to G-ma Junie again.

I hand him back the binoculars. “No. Anyway, they don’t usually last very long.” I know it totally avoids the question, but I’m really uncomfortable right now. “Mostly just a few weeks, before some other Player comes along and kills them.”

“I’ve seen some of those epic battles on Survivalist. Some of those Players leave The Game after only one day. I feel so bad for them. All that sacrifice for nothing.”

“Screw them, especially the sellouts.”

Arc Entertainment has a monopoly on options to buy out a person’s LSC. The company then sends a portion of the Player’s winnings back to the family. The longer they stay in, the more money the family gets. So do their Operators— the gamers at the controls. That’s why they’re willing to pay top-dollar for the best, freshest, and strongest zombies.

“This isn’t about Ash’s grandmother,” Jake says, “but do you think it’s true that some people sell themselves into The Game?”

I shake my head, not in denial, but because I could never understand how some people would actually, willingly, give up their lives to become a so-called volunteer long before their LSC time has arrived. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, though. Unscrupulous gamers have created a black market for such Players, even going so far as to pressure some families to sign over their LSCs, families in dire financial straits.

Families like the Corbens.

But despite his disclaimer, I know it’s G-ma Junie he’s thinking about, not Kelly. And I have to admit that the thought has crossed my mind, too. One day she’s a young fifty-three-year-old woman with several more years left before her LSC date. The next day she’s gone. Just... gone. And what’s more, Ashley’s parents suddenly seemed to have extra spending money. How else could they have ever afforded to buy her a Ronnie Marx bathing suit?

And she sure talked a lot about wanting to be a Player.

But, no, I remind myself. That couldn’t be what happened. Who’d want to buy someone as old and worn out as she was? She most definitely wouldn’t make a good Player.

But Kelly would. He’d do anything for Kyle.

Chapter 20

Two more IUs have joined the first, but their slow motion dance now feels more like a curiosity than a threat. We discuss what we think they’re doing, and why. What’s causing them to congregate in that one spot? What’s there? Did an animal die or something?

And where are they coming from?

“It’s like they’re having a conference or something,” Jake says.

“Yeah, probably just exchanging small talk. ‘Hey, Bill, how you feeling today?’ ‘Same as always, Frank, a bit stiff.’ ”

Jake snorts.

“They must draw each other by their movement and sound.”

“Glad we’re too far away for them to notice us then.”

I nod and squint at the distant figures. They seem to have a knack for appearing out of nowhere when we’re not watching and disappearing just as furtively. It’s creepy as hell, but creepy in a detached sort of way, like we’re watching them on a Stream.

Another half hour passes and the group has grown to a half dozen. We decide to call them a herd. Although the term ‘swarm’ comes to mind, I quietly dismiss it. Herd is more their speed. It also sounds more docile.

They’re nearly impossible to tell one from the other. All are naked from the waist up. All visible skin has turned a uniform dark brown. Their hair has fallen out. They’re literally skin and bone and completely sexless.

We’re debating notifying the others — there’s still no urgency — when Micah pings us:

<< IN! TRYNG 2 ACCSS GL SNDNG SCRPT >>

Jake and I install the program on our Links and open it. A map of the surrounding area pops up on our screens.

“How come this is only tracking me?” Jake asks. He tilts his screen so I can see.

I look over, then down at my own screen. There’s only a single red blip, and when I tap it, my name’s the only one to appear. “Me, too. Probably decided to just send us our own after you complained.”

“I didn’t complain.”

“Right.”

I wouldn’t care one way or the other, since I’m just as wary as Jake about others having access to my L.I.N.C. identifier, but I’d really like to know where Kelly is.

Jake’s wondering if we should ask, when our Links ping again.

<< SML GLTCH PTNCE >>

“That’s Micah’s way of saying, ‘Don’t ping me right now. I already know.’ ”

Jake nods. “One of the others probably did. Must’ve been Kelly.”

“What makes you say that?” I demand.

“You think Reggie and Ashley would’ve noticed?”

I have to give him that, but my worry for Kel grows. I shouldn’t have let him go off alone.

“We could go looking for him,” Jake says, correctly reading the look on my face.

“I don’t think that’d help.”

“Well, we can at least get out of the sun. There’s shade nearby, and we can still keep an eye on the undead reunion.”

I glance uneasily at the zombies. Without the binoculars, they’re just indistinct shimmering lines, made increasingly hazy by the rising heat of the day.

“Come on,” he urges. “You’ve got be baking. I’m not even wearing my wetsuit bottoms, and I’m sweating like crazy.”

I don’t know if he’s trying to get me to remove mine. As hot as I am, it’s just not going to happen. But he is right about the heat. I gesture over at the closest building, an old fueling station with a repair bay and store. Towering over the partially collapsed structure is a giant sign on a long metal pole. The plastic is shattered in one corner, bleached and faded. Only a hint of the original red and yellow logo persists. The remaining letters spell out HELL. It seems quite apt.

We duck under the overhang covering the fueling islands. Most of them are electric, but there’s a solitary gas pump, and it makes me wonder if there’s still gasoline in the underground tank. Would it still be usable? How many of the vehicles here would work if we tried them?

The shade offers little respite from the heat. The air underneath is just as stifling. Jake kicks aside a small mound of trash piled up against the door.

I’m surprised that the glass in the windows and doors is still intact. A thick layer of dust on them makes it impossible to see inside. But then I remember how quickly the infection overran the island, and how quickly the military came in and evacuated everyone who hadn’t yet been infected. Zombies don’t loot and ransack. They wouldn’t bother breaking glass unless they were trying to get to someone inside.

The irony doesn’t escape me that the living can be so much more destructive than the undead.

Jake pulls a rusted metal trashcan loose from a tangle of debris. The noise it makes scraping across the cement seems excessively loud, as if the overhang is amplifying the sound. He disrupts a nest of mice, which skitter off in every direction. It happens so quickly that neither of us has a chance to react. The spiders that follow are slower to escape. We make a game of stomping them.

“Tumble weed?” he asks, lifting up a scraggly bundle of twigs. “Never actually seen one before.”

He tosses it out onto the cement apron, but it bounces once and ends up in a pothole. There’s no wind to send it tumbling.

He tests the door handle. “Locked. Well, I guess we won’t be getting any—”

The quiet explodes. Shattered glass falls like rain. With a squeak, Jake leaps back, cursing. “What the hell! It’s not funny! You could’ve warned me!”

I kick the remaining shards loose and duck underneath the push bar. “Sorry. I guess we’re even now.”

“Even for what?”

“For that dirty trick you played on me in the dojang. Also, for not saying anything about the zombie back in Manhattan. And for being such an asshole to my boyfriend. Now that I think about it, we’re still not even.”

His face turns crimson and pinches with anger. “I wasn’t the only asshole,” he mutters.

“I know. Kelly’ll get his, too.” I smile. “Chill. It’s time to do a little souvenir collecting.”

He grumbles and follows me into the store.

It’s dark inside, the kind of shimmery twilight that daylight can’t dispel. The air is full of dust, and it just lingers, as if suspended in both time and space. To our delight, the shelves are still fully stocked. It doesn’t take long, however, to realize there’s nothing worth taking. It’s all just crappy food, all of it at least a decade past its expiration date. And what isn’t stale or expired is mouse-eaten. Even the liquor looks questionable— not that I’d want it, even if I were much of a drinker. Micah might, but not me. In fact, just the thought of consuming anything that’s been sitting in zombieland for twelve years makes my stomach clench.

We wander aimlessly up and down the aisles, gawking at how cheap everything was before the outbreak, before the civil war that saw the secession of the Southern States Coalition. We keep bumping into each other and saying excuse me, as if we’re just two shoppers browsing for groceries in town on a normal day.

I stop to check out the old paper magazines. They’re yet another relic of a different time. Everything’s strictly digital now. Gone are the days of printed material, forced by the demise of the old postal system and environmentalists finally winning legislation to ban pulp paper production.

The covers of the magazines on top are faded completely away and covered in dust and mouse droppings, leaving only the ghosts of whatever images originally adorned them. I slide one out from behind the others. The paper is stiff and rippled, but the colors are still vivid.

“Got something for you, Jake.” I toss it over, and he reacts by clumsily batting it out of the air.

He picks it up, then drops it like it’s radioactive. “It’s full of naked women!”

I pluck the Playboy Magazine off the floor and thrust it into his hands. “You know how much you could get for this back home? You’d be a hero among your classmates.”

The digital versions of soft porn magazines like this one were banned from the Stream nearly a decade ago, but there are black streams where you still can find all the pornographic images you could ever want. It’s dangerous, however. If you’re caught, you get labeled a sexual predator for life, plus they add years to your LSC. A lot of magazines like this one, as well as others that had absolutely nothing to do with porn, like Scientific American and Popular Mechanics, were blamed for the moral downfall of our society, which in turn was blamed for causing the zombie outbreaks. Puritan logic. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to tweak the right emotions.

“This is extremely illegal,” he says.

“Well, yeah. That’s why people’ll pay a mint for this kind of contraband. No digital footprint.”

“But...” He turns the magazine sideways.

“Stop, before your eyes fall out.”

“I was reading the text.”

“Sure you were. You’re such a prude.”

“I’m not a prude.”

“Then keep it.”

“If they catch you with one of these—”

“Yeah, yeah. They take another year or two or ten away from you. So don’t get caught. Anyway, what does it matter anymore? They always find ways to add years.” I’m suddenly feeling fatalistic.

“Doesn’t mean we have to make it easier.”

“Says the guy breaking a dozen laws to be here. What do you think they’d do if they caught us? They won’t just slap us on the wrist and say, ‘Kids’ll be kids.’ ”

He sighs and rubs the shiny paper between his fingers, as if he wants to always remember what it feels like.

“Go ahead,” I prod. “Take it.”

The cover shows a tall, buxom, elf-like woman. Her skin is as white as a two-week old zombie, but her lips are the brightest red I’ve ever seen. She’s standing in a fake pine forest in fake snow, one hand placed coyly over one corner of her mouth. Pine boughs strategically cover her naughty bits. It’s the cover, after all. Young boys might come in and accidentally on purpose see it. Inside, however, the boughs — and all pretenses — are gone.

I snatch it back and flip it open to the centerfold. “What would you like to know about our lovely Miss March? Her name’s Tatiana Lovinescu. Yeesh, what a name. Totally fake, just like the rest of her. ‘This all-natural Romanian beauty boasts a bountiful—’ ”

Jake takes the magazine back. In the gloom, I can’t tell if he’s blushing. He carefully closes it and slides it into his pack.

“Better take a second copy. One for personal use, one to sell.”

“I don’t need one for myself.”

“You don’t have to deny it. We’re all adults here.”

“Can we drop it?”

“You really are a prude. I’ll bet you’re still a virgin.”

He chokes, but doesn’t deny it. “Let’s get out of here.” He turns toward the exit. “It’s getting really hot in here.”

I can’t help but chuckle as I follow him to the door. Just as we reach it, there’s a thump from somewhere behind us, deep inside the store. We both whirl around.

“What was that?” he whispers

“Quiet!”

I lift my Link and thumb the screen to wake it. The program Micah sent comes to life, but it still only shows my personal red blip.

“What are you doing?” he whispers.

“Making sure it’s not one of the others.”

Jake tries his, but he gets the analogous result.

“What do you think it was?”

I hesitate, then swivel on the pads of my feet, and start edging my way to the back.

“Hey!” he calls.

I put a hand out to shush him.

The store is arranged in four aisles running front to back. I make a full circuit, taking an indirect route toward the source of the sound. Nothing appears amiss, not until I reach the end of the farthest aisle and see a bunch of cans lying on the floor. Cans that weren’t there before.

I try to blink away my panic. Blood pounds through my skull, sounding like a freight train. A zombie could be snapping its teeth right behind me and I probably wouldn’t hear it.

I glance into the mirror mounted in the corner of the ceiling. From my position I can see most of the aisles. I creep forward until I reach the fallen cans. Nothing jumps out at me.

Moving carefully, I pick one up. Half of the label is missing, eaten away by mice and bugs. The rest is faded, so for all I know, it could be stew or beans or dog food. The paper crumbles in my fingers. Bits drift like snow to the floor. Rust grows like mold along the crease and the lid, and it reeks of urine.

You know why it smells like urine here? Reggie once joked, after Kelly complained one too many times about the bathroom in Micah’s basement. Because urine here. Get it? Because you’re in here.

Several more cans lay on their sides on the top shelf, their labels similarly peeling and eaten away. Boxes of some other foodstuff sit nearby, holes chewed into their corners. They might be cream of wheat. I lift one and it’s completely empty. Tiny mouse droppings spill out like chocolate cake sprinkles. The shelf rocks when I lift a can up and set it upright again. Before I can stop them, two more cans roll to the floor.

“Jessie?”

“I’m fine,” I shout, straightening up. “It’s cool. Just some cans that fell off a loose shelf back here. Probably mice.” I drop the can I’m holding onto the floor and head toward the front again.

Just mice. But the incident has put me on edge. I walk stiffly, my skin tingling. I keep my eyes locked ahead of me so I don’t jinx myself. If I turn around, the monsters I’d been imagining will be there.

The last few steps feel like miles. My scalp prickles, and my heart pounds. I’m sure I’d jump out of my skin if another can happened to drop off the shelf behind me. Thankfully, it doesn’t.

We say nothing, just slip out through the broken glass, out into the blinding light. I breathe a huge sigh of relief. We both laugh, and he checks his Link. “The others should be heading back soon,” he mumbles.

“We won’t tell them about our little fake scare,” I say.

Jake bends down and sweeps the broken glass off the step so he can sit. “Might as well stay here, take advantage of the shade.”

My Link pings, startling me, and I almost drop it.

“Who is it?” he asks.

“Kel. He’s coming back.”

“You know, you two’ll still have time before we have to leave.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

He looks down, fiddles with his own Link. “You could...” He shrugs.

“Pull a Reggie and Ashley?”

For the life of me, I can’t understand this boy. I think he tries so damn hard that he just makes things worse.

I send Kelly a reply, telling him where we’re waiting.

“Maybe we could find an old bookstore nearby,” I say. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve held a real book in my hands?”

“The more contraband we take back, the more likely we’ll get caught.”

My Link pings again. Kelly’s sent a photo. Seeing it, I start to tear up. It’s a picture of the surprise he’d been teasing the past day or so. I turn away so Jake can’t see my face. I want to ping Kelly back, but I’m too choked up.

I hear Jake stand up. I can feel him right behind me. He sucks in a sharp breath, and I swing around to tell him to mind his own damn business for once. But the look on his face isn’t what I’m expecting. In fact, he’s not even looking in my direction, but out toward the collapsed repair bays.

He steps back suddenly, nearly knocking me over. I stumble and he reaches out and grabs my arm. I drop my Link. I hear it hit the ground and skitter away, but I ignore it.

Less than thirty feet away are a dozen Infected Undead, and more are coming.

Chapter 21

Jake’s panting like he might pass out.

I can’t breathe at all.

As if on cue, they begin to turn and lurch toward us.

The most terrifying thing about them isn’t the blank stares in their eyes, or their gaping mouths, it’s that they’re so quiet. Other than the shush of their shuffling feet on the concrete, they make no sound at all.

“Back inside!” Jake hisses, and nearly knocks me off my feet in his haste to get to the door.

“No, we’ll be trapped! We need to run for it!”

But more undead appear from around the other side of the building, nearly doubling their numbers.

“We’re already trapped!”

“There’s an opening! We can still run through them!”

I step forward to retrieve my Link, but he grabs my arm.

“We’re going to lose our chance, Jake!”

He ignores me and ducks through the door. My feet slip on my Link, and it skitters across the concrete and comes to rest at the feet of the approaching zombies.

“Jessie, hurry!”

“Let go of me!”

“Get inside!”

I glance at my Link. I can hear it grinding into the pavement. I’m not worried about it breaking — the devices are made to withstand pretty much anything short of a nuclear explosion — I’m worried about not getting it back.

And now, because of Jake’s stupid decision to run back inside, my chances of doing that are gone. As are our chances of escaping through them. They’re not fast, but they’re fast enough. And while they’re definitely not coordinated, there are now too many, and their ranks have closed. I back in after him, cursing his name.

Jake’s already halfway down the nearest aisle. He stops and wrenches one of the metal shelves off its bracket, ignoring the items crashing to the floor. He sprints back and wrenches it between the door’s push bar and the frame.

“That’s not going to keep them out!”

He ignores me and yanks another shelf free and adds it to the first.

The first zombies are pressing against the display windows now. The glass quivers beneath the weight of their bodies. It buckles and threatens to break. Some of the undead fall. They get trampled by the ones behind. Then, a solitary moan rises from among them, the first sound I’ve heard them utter. I freeze. Soon, the others join in, and it becomes an ungodly chorus that’s somehow more terrifying than the silence.

One of them reaches the door. Its knees buckle, and it falls through the gap between the frame and Jake’s partial barricade. The skin on its head is so dry and macerated that it looks like tree bark. There’s a large gash that goes down to the bone, but it doesn’t bleed. It opens its mouth, and its teeth and tongue are as black as licorice. As the herd behind it surges forward and pushes back, its body saws against the unyielding doorframe. More flesh peels off its head and arm. It reaches in. Then comes the ratcheting sound of its exposed ribs scraping on metal. It tries to get to its feet, but more bodies crush it to the ground. Its pelvis collapses, and its upper torso levers up and then falls back down. Its head smashes into the floor. A puff of gray dust rises from the hollow gourd of its skull.

“Jake?” I say, half in shock at what I’ve just witnessed. “Jake, what now?”

He runs forward and kicks the twice dead corpse back out, then adds a third shelf, covering the gap. He uses a fourth to lock it all into place. There are still spaces underneath large enough for hands to come through.

“Jake, listen to me! We need to find another way out! They’re not going to stop trying to get inside! And those windows aren’t going to hold.”

Shadowy silhouettes span the glass from one side to the other, like some kind of horrific, unfixed skyline, a cityscape of the restless undead. Greasy hands and faces and bare torsos sweep the dust off, and through the cleared window I begin to make out distinct features— silent, howling faces, ogling eyes. Jake’s metal shelves creak and dimple against the pressure. The window pane in the far corner bulges. With a pop, it warps out again, then bows back in even more. The store is breathing, and we’re the living, beating heart they want to still.

The glass starts to crack.

I slide behind the counter and tear through the pile of old trash that’s collected there. A decade’s worth of cobwebs, bug carcasses, and mouse droppings fall through my fingers, until I find exactly what I’d would be there.

I yank the pistol out of its bracket and lift it up into the dim light. Its cold, black lines are flecked with red. But the discoloration isn’t blood, it’s rust. A decade’s worth of dust fills its creases. A quick check of the chamber and I know it’s loaded. I don’t have time to eject and inspect the magazine. It feels like it’s full. I just pray it is, and that the rounds inside it are still good.

When I was eight, my grandfather took me to the shooting range, in direct defiance of my brother’s vehement demands that he not. Eric was still a self-avowed pacifist at the time, which had always infuriated Grandpa. And Grandpa was still young enough and intense enough, that Eric didn’t stand a chance against him. Also, Mom was completely AWOL. “Your brother may be a spineless idiot, Jessie,” he’d told me, driving me to the range. “I won’t allow that to happen to you. You need to learn how to fire a weapon. You need to know how to defend yourself.”

Now that I think about it, it was probably what prompted Eric to push me towards the martial arts soon after.

Call it whatever you will — irony or spite, or maybe even reluctant acceptance that the world would never be what he wanted it to be — but after Eric went and enlisted in the Marines, in direct contravention of what he was about. When he asked specifically to join the Omegaman Corps, Grandpa’s former command, I realized he was doing it all for an audience of one. He’d probably expected Grandpa to blow a gasket, but the man just pretended like he didn’t even care.

Eric drove RGDs — remote ground drones, which is what they call the military’s zoms — operating out of a repurposed shipping container somewhere here in New Merica. After he got good at it, he requested assignments closer to home, on the border with the SSC, quelling the Texas uprisings. And all the while, Grandpa said nothing, not even when Eric came home on leave.

Eric became so good at his job that they sent him to train the Omegaman units in Asia, where I know he must’ve done a lot of killing.

Is he a hypocrite? He’d wanted to insulate me from violence and violent things, but then he went and embraced them. He even wears a gun on his hip now. Okay, it’s an EM gun, and it’s meant for CUs, but still. He may no longer be the boy I remember growing up with, but as far as I’m concerned, he is a hypocrite. He’s betrayed everything he ever stood up for.

Grandpa’s opinion of him is a bit less refined: he thinks Eric’s crazy.

“Did Mom say it’s okay?” I’d asked him, only because I knew it was the proper thing to do, even as I’d hoped he’d just lie and say she had. I was thrilled for the chance to hold a real gun in my hands and fire it. Any eight-year-old would be.

“It’s okay, young lady,” Grandpa said. “I’ve got your mother’s blessing.” And from that moment on, I was fully and willingly complicit in our little conspiracy. The weapons training continued for the next three years, until Eric left the Marines and returned home for good.

During those three years, I’d learned that the pistol I trained on was the same gun found by my father’s side on the night he died.

I wrench open a drawer behind the counter, hoping to find the box of remaining rounds. There has to be one. You can’t just buy a few loose bullets. Nor would it make sense to only have the ones in the gun on hand.

“Jessie!” Jake screams.

The moaning and banging from the front of the store has grown even louder, more insistent, spurred on by the racket Jake made trying to barricade us in and continues to make now.

I steal a quick glance toward the front. The metal shelves are just thin sheets of aluminum. They’re already buckling.

Jake flies past me and disappears in one of the displays near the back. I hear him curse, then the slam of a door. I hear what sounds like a bathroom stall being flung open. And I think that this is a terrible time to be dropping a deuce.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shout. I’m still not finding any ammunition in the drawer.

“There’s a window in here!” Then, “Shit! They’re out back, too. We’re surrounded!”

“Get out here, Jake!”

The only thing that’s saved us from being overtaken already is how slow the zombies are. We’re the first prospects they’ve had a chance to nosh on in years.

Although, they do seem to be moving somewhat faster now, and with more purpose than just a few minutes ago.

It’s the noise! my mind screams. It’s agitating them! Stop making so much noise!

I need to find that box of spare rounds.

“There’s an exit back here,” Jake shouts. “Christ, where the hell are they all coming from?”

I want to tell him to draw the ones behind the store toward the front. If there’s an exit back there, that’s where we’ll make our escape. But how?

My eyes skim over the counter, and I realize the bullets are probably in the back of the cash register drawer. And without electricity, the thing’s locked tight.

I pry at the edges, but it won’t budge.

Get into that drawer, Jess!

I remember seeing the sign for a fire extinguisher in a back corner. Running over to it, I hear the first splinter of glass from the front, a sharp crack, followed by the lightning crackles of the fractures spreading. Somehow, the windows are holding. It’s like a miracle. But then I see that the pieces are being held together by a coating of thin plastic. It won’t hold for long.

“Jake, get the fuck out here! I need you!”

I find the extinguisher, but the object I really want is hanging on the wall next to it. I yank the axe free and sprint back to the front. I don’t even slow down when I get there. I raise it over my head and bring it down on the register in midstride. The blade buries itself deep into the counter a half foot away from my target.

The window explodes inward. As the undead tumble in, glass showers down. Several large pieces fall like guillotine blades, slicing through bodies. They barely slow down.

Through the gap they come, the first ones getting forced to the ground by the ones behind. More fall, tripping over the bodies, and they get trampled by a third wave, a fourth, a fifth. The bottleneck buys me precious seconds.

I manage to wrench the axe free and bring it up again. This time my aim is true, and the old machine chimes and buckles beneath the force of the blow. The drawer, however, remains stubbornly shut. I hack at it again and again. Finally, it pops free.

I risk a glance up. The closest zombies are now less than ten feet away, approaching my counter. I grab the handgun and aim. With one hand yanking the drawer open, I squeeze the trigger.

The recoil knocks my feet out from under me. Coins and bills shower down. I jump back up and aim again.

I’m shaking so badly that the second shot is as wild as the first. But it counts. A zombie further back twitches. Its upper chest explodes in a spray of brown and gray. The bullet ricochets with a loud ping and another window shatters, unleashing another torrent of the undead into the store.

“What the hell was that?” Jake screams from the back.

I aim more carefully, and the third shot strikes the nearest zombie. Its head completely disintegrates and leaves in its place a puff of gray powder in the shape of a skull. The IU collapses where it stands; the dust cloud slowly dissipates. I drop two more with the next two rounds, all the while thinking that this isn’t going to cut it. There are too many, and I’m about to run out of bullets.

Jake emerges from the back at a full run. “This way, Jessie!” he screams. His arms pinwheel when he sees the horde, and he skids to a stop.

I manage to get off another three rounds, but only one zombie goes down. The noise is driving them berserk.

“Come on! You can’t shoot them all!”

Even if I had more bullets, I’d never be able to reload the magazine in time to stop them. And even if I had the time, I’d need a thousand rounds. I fire again, and my shoulder and elbow burn from the abuse of the recoil.

I find myself wishing I had an EM gun. Until I remember it won’t stop IUs.

I duck quickly down and sweep my hand over the floor until it encounters an object with some heft to it. I shove it into the elastic waistband of my wetsuit. Then I grab the axe in my free hand and run toward Jake, knocking a withered zombie dressed in the tattered remains of a faded muumuu out of my way. She collapses into a shelf of cleaning supplies. Bleach burns my nose and eyes.

“You better have a way out,” I shout, “and not just a plan to barricade us in the bathroom.”

He points to a metal door. There’s a small window in the middle of it. He runs over to look through, saying that he’d found it hidden behind a stack of boxes.

“What are you waiting for? Open it up!”

“Unless you got a key—”

“Break the damn thing!”

The sounds of the undead behind us grow. They still haven’t found the entrance into the back half of the store, but the law of averages and Brownian motion says it won’t be long before they do.

“Get out of my way!”

“I got this,” he says. He reaches down and sweeps his hand over the floor. He comes up with a tire iron and something else, which he tries to hand to me.

“Toilet plunger?”

“Take it!” he insists, as he wedges the tire iron into the padlock and tries to pry it loose, but he can’t get any leverage.

“Move!”

“No, I got—”

“Now!”

I don’t wait for him, I just swing the axe. It barely misses his head as he ducks away. The padlock bounces from the force of the blow, but it doesn’t break.

“Let me try!”

I swing again, aiming instead for the hardware holding the lock in place. The old wood splinters.

He grabs the handle and wrenches the door open. The broken bracket and lock tumble to the floor.

We’re out in a flash, staggering into the blinding sunlight. I squint around us and count a half dozen zombies. They’re still following the main horde past the collapsed repair bay and toward the front, but the noise has caught their attention. They slowly turn, and our sudden appearance gives them new urgency.

“How are they moving so fast?” Jake cries.

“Be thankful they’re not any faster.”

I step around him and quickly dispatch an IU. Half its face disappears, once more leaving a strange, ominous cloud of dust. It’d been wearing the tattered remains of a business suit, the jacket and tie anyway. From the waist down, it’s naked, except for the upper part of one sock. The powdery residue lingers a moment before slowly settling toward the ground.

“What the—?” Jake shrieks.

“Don’t breathe it in!”

“What the hell is it? Is that virus? Jesus Christ!”

“Jesus is dead and he ain’t rising! Now move!”

Another zombie quickly takes the place of Dead Executive. I swing the axe one-handed like a sword, and the spike end sinks into its eye socket. It collapses immediately, falling like a sack of potatoes. The unexpected motion nearly yanks me off my feet. Jake makes a desperate grab for my arm but ends up hitting me in the face with the plunger. I stagger to the side, blinking away stars.

He screams and whirls around, still swinging both arms wildly about him. By chance, he strikes the nearest zombie on the shoulder, again with the plunger. It makes the same dull thwop sound it made when it hit me. Unlike me, the zombie remains on its feet. It reaches out, and Jake thrusts upward, aiming for its head. I expect to see the plunger stick, but the zombie tumbles over backward instead.

“Really?” I shout, regaining my balance. “You couldn’t find anything better for a weapon?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, a toilet brush? Soap-on-a-rope?”

“Closest thing to a second dahn bohng I could find,” he says, referring to the short sticks some hapkido students use for close fighting.

I try to dislodge the axe from the IU on the ground, but at first it doesn’t want to come free, and it costs us precious seconds. “What I’d give for a long staff, right about now.”

“You seem to be doing just fine with that pistol.” He points to an opening in the line, and we make a break for it.

He’s surprisingly quick, despite his ungainly run. His backpack bounces loosely on his shoulders, but it doesn’t slow him down. He spins the plunger and tire iron in his hands like batons, ready to strike at any zombie that gets too close. But we’re quicker than they are, and we break through without any problem.

The horde in front has begun to circle back. Jake heads straight for them, then suddenly veers off in a different direction.

“What are you doing? Our gear is the other way!”

“Yeah, I know,” he says and, zigs again toward an alleyway. “We need to lead them away from it, not towards! Otherwise we’ll never be able to leave.”

“Right.” For once, he’s not totally useless.

We exit down a side street and take a circuitous way back toward the plaza. The façade of the former Holiday Inn suddenly looms up before us. I wonder if Reggie and Ash are still inside. They should’ve finished up by now. I hope they’ve come back already. Do they even realize what’s going on out here? How could they have not heard the gunshots?

And then I envision them inside the hotel, and it’s filled with zombies. What if they were all in there, and they didn’t know it? What if they were caught in the middle of—

“Where the heck did they come from?” Jake pants. I steal a glance and see he’s nearly in tears. Now that the initial shock has worn off and his fight-or-flight instincts have had a chance to hand the reins over to his rational mind, he’s starting to lose it again. “Were they hiding somewhere? How did they know where we were? Did someone sic them on us?”

The questions make me pause. I know I’m to blame. I must’ve woken them when I broke the glass to get inside the store. It was stupid, reckless, and I should’ve known better. But it does seem strange that they would hone in on the store so quickly and so precisely.

“No one sicced them on us,” I say. “These are IUs. They don’t have implants.”

“But what if they do? Check your Link!”

“Fuck! I don’t have it!”

“Where is it?”

“In front of the gas station! You knocked it out of my hand. I left it back there!”

He stops and looks back. “We can’t— Crap!”

He begins to run again.

“Use your Link, Jake! Check the tracker on your Link! Jake, listen to me!”

“I’ll listen when we’re safe. We’re not safe!”

“We can’t just keep running around like this. We need a plan. And we need to warn the others.”

After checking behind us, he stops again. This time he nods. “I’ll ping them.” He pulls his Link out.

“Check Micah’s tracker!”

From somewhere behind us, we hear them moaning. Jake freaks out and begins running.

“Jake!”

“Sent!” he shouts back at me.

“Stop, Jake! Just wait! We could be heading straight toward more of them. We don’t know where—”

He stops a third time, and I plow into his back. He turns, and there’s a new look in his eyes: recrimination.

“What the hell, dude!”

“It’s your fault!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The glass! They heard you break it.”

“Seriously? You want to lay blame now? Did you check the tracker?”

“This isn’t Gameland!” he snaps. But he checks it anyway. “No red dots.”

“So, they’re not implanted. No one’s controlling them.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s not even seeing me anymore. Your friend wrote a piece of crap program.”

I want to defend Micah, but I can’t for this. He’d promised to fix the tracker, and now it’s not working at all.

We take a moment to assess our situation. Other than the zombies still milling around the refueling station and the few shambling in our direction, the city appears empty. But that’s how it looked before, too.

After a few minutes catching our breath, we peek around the corner again. There seems to be more of them.

“Where are they all coming from?” Jake asks.

The question I’m wondering is where had they all been hiding. My knowledge of undead behavior from school never mentioned concealment, although I do remember something about them exhibiting photophobia. Some people have reported that, when left alone, they tend to favor shade over direct sunlight. But I can’t shake the feeling that these had been here waiting for us, and that they only came out when we had separated and were vulnerable.

The undead don’t think, Jess. They don’t strategize.

“Jake?”

He’s staring back toward the Holiday Inn. “They went in there, didn’t they? Ashley and Reggie?”

“Yeah, and that’s why we can’t stay here. We need to lead those things away from there, too, because they might still be inside.”

“We should check. What if they’re in trouble?”

“You want to go inside?”

He shakes his head.

“You just pinged them,” I remind him. God, I feel naked without my Link, vulnerable and helpless. “I mean, you did, right?”

He doesn’t answer. His attention is on the zombies we’ve drawn away from the fueling station. “Crap,” he mutters, and starts backing away. He slips the Link back into his pocket, then starts to yell.

“Stop!” I hiss.

He turns. “Time to go.”

“You did ping everyone?” I ask. “Jake?”

He takes off running again.

“I only tried Micah,” he calls over his shoulder. “I didn’t have time to key in anyone else’s number, just responded to the last one on my Link.”

“Damn it! We need to tell everyone!”

“I will, first chance I get!”

“Did he at least respond?”

“Not yet.”

“Check again!”

“He hasn’t! I’d know!”

I notice he’s heading toward the tower where Micah said he was going. It’s still a good quarter mile off, far enough away that we should be able to lose the zombies before we get there.

“Jake? Damn it, listen to me!”

I force him to stop and face me. But when he does, his focus is over my shoulder. His eyes widen in fright. I spin around.

“Shit,” I whisper.

The horde has somehow doubled in size yet again. There must be close to a hundred now.

And they’re definitely faster than before.

Chapter 22

Jake’s Link pings just as we reach the first row of industrial warehouses. We slip around the corner to get out of sight. The street we’re on appears to have been in the process of gentrification when the outbreak hit. There’s a row of upscale shops at street level, and I think, wouldn’t it be ironic if one of them was a bookstore? Except for us and a few abandoned cars, overturned garbage cans, and litter, the road’s empty.

“What’s it say?” I ask, leaning against a wall to catch my breath. The heat and humidity are taking their toll on us both. He angles the screen so I can read it.

<< ON MY WY >>

Jake opens a voice line, but Micah doesn’t respond. “Come on, man!” he grunts. “Why won’t he accept? Darn it!”

I have to remind him to keep his voice down. The last thing we need is to draw out even more from wherever they’re hiding. I’m now convinced there may be hundreds, if not thousands, just waiting for their cue to emerge.

“Okay, leave him a message. Those things are going to make their way here eventually. We need to keep moving.”

Jake tells Micah to stay where he is. “We’re coming to you.” He disconnects and says he hopes he gets it in time.

“I’m not sure staying put is the right move for him to make, Jake. We all need to get back to the equipment and leave.”

“As long as those things are in the plaza, we’re not going anywhere.”

He pockets his Link, then brushes past me to peek around the corner. “Damn it. They’ve stopped again. They’re just shuffling around now. We need to draw them away from there.”

I take a look. Now that we’re out of immediate danger, I can make a clear-headed assessment of our situation. They don’t look like they’re going to be wandering off anytime soon, not without further prompting.

“How many do you think there are?” he asks. “Here, on this part of the island, I mean. In this vicinity. And how did they manage to survive this long?”

It’s clear they’re old, victims of the outbreak thirteen years ago and survivors from whatever the military did when they abandoned the island a few years later. Chocolate colored, genderless, ageless. No longer human. Their clothing — what little of it remains — is faded and threadbare. Their bodies are mere skeletons vacuum-packed in stiff casings of leathery skin. The virus causes the soft tissues to plastinate, making it resilient to decay, but they’re still biological entities and, like us, prisoners of natural laws. They still need energy to move about. Lack of a steady source of nourishment has meant that all their energy is being converted from their own flesh. Without the living, they’re consuming themselves from the inside out.

Jake steps out into the middle of the road and starts waving his arms. “Hey, you!” he shouts. “Hey, over here! We’re over here!”

“Jake!” I dart out and grab his shirt. “What the hell are you doing? Stop it!” I glance nervously back toward the street behind us, suddenly certain it’s going to start filling with zombies from out of the shops. Nothing there, but I have an awful feeling it won’t stay that way for long. “This isn’t how—”

He pushes me off of him and shouts even louder. Now he’s jumping and waving. The buildings echo his shouts and funnel them straight down toward the plaza.

The undead turn, stiff as scarecrows, and start to stalk us again.

At a distance, they appear slow, ungainly, but the illusion quickly dissipates. The main horde still shuffles along at a walking pace, but a few emerge from within their ranks. They don’t shuffle like the others, they almost seem to jog. Their skin isn’t as dark. They appear less atrophied. Their clothes are brighter, more intact. It doesn’t make any sense. They look fresher. But how could that be?

“Let’s circle back around,” Jake says. He grabs my arm and turns me. “Maybe we can lure them into a dead-end alley, and then we can go up a fire escape or something.”

“You want to use us as bait to draw them into an alleyway?”

“Corral them in like cattle,” he says. “If it means not fighting through them, then yes.”

I shake my head. “We just need to draw them away. Besides, they’re too scattered for us to try something like that. We’ll never get them all.”

“I think we can do it.” He points to a pair of tall buildings with a narrow gap between them, barely wide enough to fit through single file. We hurry over, but as soon as we turn the corner we can see that it won’t work. The other end is open. I can just imagine us getting trapped in the middle with the undead coming at us from both ends.

“We’re wasting time, Jake. We need to notify the others, get back, grab our stuff, and get the hell out of here. We’re still faster than they are.”

“Not all of them,” he says.

The first whisper of their moans reaches our ears and gets us moving again. We hurry back onto the main road, and we see that the first of the zombies have nearly arrived.

“Crap,” Jake gasps. “Does it seem like they’re all getting faster?”

I don’t answer, but from the look on his face I think he’s starting to make the same calculations I did moments before. The faster ones can’t from the original outbreak, not unless they had food recently.

We spin back around and sprint toward the other cross-street. When we reach it, we turn again, angling once more toward the wall and the tower. We try to run quietly, but we’re tired, and our shoes slap on the road and sound like clapping hands.

“This way!” I hiss. I reach out for Jake’s arm and spin to the right, but my fingertips find only empty air. He continues straight. “Jake! Jake!”

He spins around. Panic has returned to his eyes, and I sense he’s about to lose it again. I gesture for him to follow me. He hesitates, then obeys.

“Listen, we need to get back,” I gasp. “You pinged Micah, so he knows. It’s the others we need to warn. Do it now!”

I’ve still got the gun and the axe. He looks at them and asks how many bullets I have left.

I remember the box I’d snagged from the cash register drawer. It’s been digging into my hip, but in the mad rush to escape, I’d ignored it. I pull it out.

“Paperclips?” he exclaims.

“Son of a bitch!” I hurl the box against the side of a building. The cardboard, soggy from my sweat, disintegrates, releasing a dozen shiny brass objects. “Oh, thank god!”

We hurry over, but before we can collect the rounds, a new sound draws our attention.

“Shit!” I whisper, glancing back the way we came. “We gotta go, Jake. Jake, leave them! They’re here.”

He snatches one up and bends to retrieve another, but the bullets are spread out all over the place, and the zombies are running now. They’re actually fucking running.

“Jake! Now!”

At the opposite end of the road, a figure flashes past.

“That was Micah!” I exclaim. I call out his name, but he’s already disappeared.

We start running after him, and he reappears a couple seconds later, skidding around the corner. “Jessie? Stop!” he yells. “Go back! Go back!”

He starts running toward us. It makes no sense. Can’t he see what’s behind us?

But then the first undead appears from the road behind Micah. It lurches after him, followed by two more. Then six.

We spin around, realizing we’re trapped. Zombies already crowd the road behind us. And they’re filling the intersection ahead.

“Oh no!” Jake cries. “No no NO!”

“Calm down. You need to calm down.”

“There’s no way out!”

Yeah, and whose fault is that? I want to say. I push him toward one of the buildings, and he lamely tries one of the doors. It’s locked, of course. They’re all locked.

I smash the axe into the display window of a bridal shop. The delicate gowns inside are yellowed and matted with cobwebs. The force of my blow causes a mannequin to tip over. It crashes to the floor, shattering. The head rolls off in one direction. The dress, made brittle by years of sunlight, shreds.

“What the hell is it with you and breaking glass?” Jake screams.

“Just get inside!”

Micah reaches us. He doesn’t hesitate. He vaults over the brick sill of the display window and into the store. He slips on the glass and falls to his hands and knees before scrambling to his feet again. When he reaches down to help us in, his palms are bleeding.

Jake hesitates.

“Get your goddamn asses in here,” Micah growls. He grabs my hand and pulls me through.

I don’t stop. I head immediately toward the back of the store, searching for the emergency exit or a loading door or whatever the hell they’ve got back there. There must be at least a fire exit. All I know is that I don’t want to die in here, in a bridal shop. Not today.

Footsteps sound behind me. The boys appear out of the gloom.

“You’re bleeding,” Micah says, and pulls the sleeve off a dree on the rack beside us to make me a bandage. He ignores his own cuts. But I have graver concerns right now than a little cut on my arm.

“I’m bleeding, too,” Jake whines, holding his elbow. He squeezes and blood seeps out of the pucker. “The shop next door had a wider window,” he complains, like it’s my fault he’s cut.

Micah yanks the veil off another hanger, thrusts it into his hands, and tells him to shut up.

I kick at a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and find what I’m looking for on the other side. There’s an emergency exit in the opposite wall. This one’s secured with a thick chain and another padlock.

I don’t hesitate. I swing the axe.

“Give her some room, dummy!” Micah shouts, and yanks Jake back. “Jesus!”

The blade glances off the chain, throwing off sparks. I try again, but the chain holds.

Micah grabs my arm. “Give it to me. From the front of the store, the sounds of moaning and breaking glass come to us.

Jake retreats to barricade the inner door.

Micah lifts the axe with both hands and brings it down on the latch that holds the chain to the jamb. It bends. He tries again, taking smaller, more precise swings. Then he slips the pick underneath the bent latch and pries. It finally pulls away. He hands the axe back. The handle’s sticky with blood. He reaches over and cautiously pushes the door open.

The alleyway is narrow. It’s also open on both ends. Most importantly, it’s still empty, but zombies continue to stream past on the road from which we came, drawn forward by the main body of the horde, like a snake. We edge out of the shop. Back here, there are no windows in any of the buildings, very few doors, and no reachable fire escape ladders. Thankfully, the other cross-street is clear.

Micah puts a finger to his lips to make sure we all stay quiet, then he lifts a pallet from a stack next to a dumpster and wedges it under the handle of the door we just came through. It scrapes against the ground, sounding loud. But it doesn’t draw the attention of the zombies lumbering past.

“Help Jessie with this,” he tells Jake, and hands him the bandage for my arm. Then he pulls out his Link and begins to type.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jake demands.

“Calling for a pizza.”

“Now?”

“Shut it! Just get that on Jessie’s arm. And keep an eye out!”

I let him wrap the bandage as I check the two nearest doors. Locked, as I’d suspected.

“Okay, let’s go,” Micah whispers. He puts his Link in his pocket and leads us back toward the street he was running down earlier. “We might have to take out a few,” he says. He glances at the gun in my hand and raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what you guys did to wake up the entire island.”

“It’s her fault,” Jake says.

I throw him a betrayed look, but it’s Micah who feels like the real traitor right now. Why isn’t he more surprised that there are zombies here at all?

He gestures and takes off running. Jake and I follow.

For someone who spends ninety percent of his free time in his basement stoned and drunk and hacking games, Micah’s surprisingly fit. He’s light on his feet, and nearly as quiet as a cat.

He slows at the end of the road and stops to peek around the next corner. We can see a few zombies milling about. They seem to have lost whatever urgency got them moving in the first place.

Micah leans against the cool brick. “I was just finishing up my hack and making my way out of the tower, when I got your ping. Was about to reply when I stepped out and found myself surrounded. Maybe a dozen. I thought I was a goner. Would’ve been, if I’d hesitated. I just barreled right through them and headed straight back toward the tunnel. That’s when I ran into your little gathering.”

He chuckles.

“It was Jessie,” Jake says. “She made noise.”

Micah shakes his head. “Wasn’t the noise. Those damn things were at my door, waiting, and I didn’t make a damn sound. They just seemed to know I’d be there.”

“Same here,” I say. “And now I’m really worried about the others.”

“You haven’t pinged them?”

“I can’t. I lost my Link.”

He frowns at me, and his frown only deepens when I give him the extremely abbreviated version of what happened to us back at the service station. He pulls his own Link out. “We’ll have to retrieve it when we get back.”

“Not if they’re still down there.”

“No choice in the matter, Jess. We’re screwed if you try to leave without it.” He shakes his Link and frowns at the screen. He taps it a few times, and the frown turns into a scowl. “Jake, let me see yours.”

Jake pulls his out, but before he can hand it over, there’s a terrible scraping noise behind us. We watch as the pallet we’d wedged into place slides several inches. One of the boards shatters and flies across the road. Another piece strikes the side of a dumpster and sends out a loud boom. The door bursts open, and the bridal store vomits zombies.

Jake shoves me to the ground as he flees. By the time I’m back on my feet, he’s thirty feet ahead of us, running toward the plaza.

“Come on!” Micah hisses.

I don’t need another warning. I run.

Chapter 23

“I see the others!” Jake shouts.

He’s at least a hundred feet ahead of us, coming to the top of a rise and running like the hounds of hell are on his heels. I want to shout at him not to get too far ahead, but I’ve developed a painful stitch in my side. Micah glances back, but I tell him to keep going. Jake disappears over the other side.

Soon, his voice drifts back to us. “Ashley! Reggie! Hey!”

I should be relieved to hear their names. But one name is conspicuously absent.

I push myself harder, and the pain erupts into a burning geyser. Now I wish I’d stripped off my wetsuit bottoms, like the boys did. I’m lightheaded from the heat.

I finally reach the rise, and now I can see the others far below. Jake’s still running full tilt, his arms flailing like he’s about to crash. Ash and Reg are helping each other into their suits. They act like they haven’t noticed us yet, despite Jake’s shouting. But then I see why. Another group of the undead are approaching them from the other side of the plaza. Jake screams that we’re coming, and half of them break off and begin to move toward us. It’s a race to get there before they cut us off.

I don’t see Kelly anywhere, and I start to panic. But then he appears from behind the car. He’s already geared up. As I draw closer, it becomes apparent that they’ve already had to defend against at least one attack. Bodies are strewn about on the road spanning the overpass.

Kelly starts running toward us.

I wave him back. “Get the gear!” I yell, but my voice sounds weak. My mouth is as dry as dust, and my throat burns.

“Grab our stuff!” Micah roars. “Get it into the water!”

Reggie and Ash start throwing our equipment bags over the rail. Jake reaches them and nearly dives into the trunk of the car. Micah arrives seconds later. Then me. I fling the axe away, but keep the gun.

Jake’s sitting on the bumper of the car trying to get his legs into his wetsuit. He’s the only one of us with a one-piece. Reggie’s trying to help him, but Jake’s hysterical with panic. Ashley runs over to help Micah with his suit. Kelly throws me my bandolier. I strap it on. “Where’s the rest of your suit?” he asks.

I glance over to the railing. I’d draped the top there to dry, but now it’s gone.

“Never mind,” Micah snaps. “Just get your gear and let’s go!”

“That water’s too cold!” Kelly says. “She’ll get hypothermia!”

“There’s no time, Kel,” I say. “Just give me my mask!”

“Take my top.”

“No! It won’t fit.”

Jake’s finally got one leg in and is trying to cram his beefy thigh into the other, but he’s got the suit all twisted and inside out. He screams in frustration.

“Get some water!” I shout at Reggie. “Wet down Jake’s suit!”

The closest zombies are about a hundred feet away now.

I point the gun at the closest one and squeeze the trigger. All it does is click. I know Jake’s got at least one bullet, but I also know I won’t be able to load it in time. I chuck the gun and slip my knife out of the sheath. It feels small and inadequate. I glance around for the axe, but I don’t see it. I grab the broken umbrella instead.

“I got your mask,” Kelly says. “Take my goggles!”

I push them both away. “Get in the water! I’ll slow them down!”

Reggie scrambles up from the water’s edge. He hurries over to Jake with his hands cupped, but the water spills out before he gets it to him. The two of them start fighting over how to get the suit on. Reggie just starts shoving parts of Jake’s body into places inside the wetsuit where they don’t belong. Jake’s now a quivering mess. His suit’s impossibly tangled. Reggie keeps trying anyway.

“Get into the water!” I scream.

Kelly sprints past me, my axe in his hand, and he runs over to the nearest zombies, swinging as he goes. He drops two and turns toward a third. Behind it are a dozen more. Then another fifty. They’re swarming from everywhere now.

“Kelly!”

He pitches the axe at another. It smashes into its chest, right in the center of its DEMARRIS FOR PREZ tee shirt. It falls and its head makes a hollow thunk when it hits the road. I expect it to explode into a black powder, like the others. But it seems no worse for the wear. The back of its head is caved in, and a thick ichor oozes from the wound, and yet it immediately begins to rise. It makes it to its knees, then another IU crashes into it and they both fall. This causes a chain reaction. Kelly runs back to me. He snatches up another backpack and hurls it into the water. “Let’s go!” he shouts. “Everyone in now!”

Micah’s already helping Ashley climb down the fence. She reaches the water first and dives in. She surfaces a second later, pushing her gear and flippers ahead of her. Micah shouts for us to hurry. I snatch my flippers and mask and head for Jake and Reggie, who are, incredibly, still struggling with the suit.

“No time!” I grab Jake’s arm and get him to his feet— or foot. He hops to the railing, still reaching down to fix the wetsuit. “Into the goddamn water!” I order.

I grab another set of flippers and toss them in. Kelly gets the boys’ packs and uses them to knock over another zombie before throwing it over the railing. Reggie does a decent back kick at another. Jake’s sobbing and babbling incoherently. Reggie’s zombie comes at them again and again Reggie kicks it away. He reaches over to help Jake, and he doesn’t see the IU coming from the other side.

I shout and yank Jake back. The zombie swings its blackened, desiccated arm out, but Reggie ducks out of the way. He’s got the large spare equipment bag now, and uses it as a shield and charges toward a cluster of IUs. He disappears into a blur of limbs and rags.

“Reggie!” I scream.

“Get out of here!” Kelly yells. “I’ll get Reg!”

I turn and shove Jake up against the rail. “Over you go!”

“No!” he shouts, but I use his momentum against him, and he flips easily. A second later, he splashes into the water below.

A hand rakes my back. Instinctively, I step to the side and swing my arm blindly up and back. The tip of the umbrella pole connects. There’s a moment of resistance, then something pops, and it breaks through the skin. Without thinking, I lift and spin, using my attacker’s weight to continue the motion. My side smashes into the railing. By the time I realize what I’m doing, it’s too late to stop. There’s another dry pop, followed by swish of air on my face. I watch as the zombie tumbles through the air. It hits the water right next to Jake.

Someone screams. It might be him, or it might be Ashley.

“Get in, Jessie!” Kelly shouts.

“Where’s Reggie?”

“He’s safe!”

Kelly shoves another IU back toward the horde, then spins and grabs me. We climb the railing, and just as they reach us, we jump.

The surface of the water rises fast. It’s a roiling, chaotic mass of bodies and bags and foam. Micah’s slashing at something with his knife. Reggie’s swimming over as quickly as he can. He doesn’t have his flippers, though. There’s a lot of splashing but very little headway. The larger gear bags have gathered against the wall of the overpass, along with several flippers, pushed there by the current. I see all of this in the fraction of a second before I hit.

The coldness of the water shocks me for a moment, and I nearly lose my breath.

The moment I resurface, Kelly shouts for me to get my flippers. “I’ll help Jake.”

I swim over and find them. I’ve just managed to get the second one on and grabbed the other pair, when there’s a splash right beside me. Above me, another zombie leans over the railing, blotting out the sun. Then another.

“Get out of there, Jessie!”

I kick away from the wall just as the second one tilts over. It lands right where I’d been a moment before. Suddenly, it’s raining bodies. Some of them pop right back up. Others sink. Moans turn to gurgles as water pours down their throats.

“The gear!”

“Forget the damn gear,” Reggie says. He’s got his flippers on now. “We need to go! Look!”

Dozens of the Infected Undead now crowd the overpass. The line presses forward. They tumble over in bunches.

“Shit!” Ash screams. “Oh, my fucking god where are they all coming from!”

Jake’s finally managed to get his suit straightened out. I throw him his flippers. We reassemble about thirty feet back from the overpass.

“We need those spare canisters,” Jake gasps. He makes a halfhearted attempt to swim toward them, but Micah holds him back and tells him it’s suicide. The water is frothy with writhing, thrashing bodies.

“But some of our masks still have the used cartridges in them!”

“You didn’t switch out all the canisters?” Ashley screams. “What the hell were you doing?”

“I’ll get them,” Reggie offers. “Which bag are they in?”

“No,” Micah tells him. He turns to Jake. “You said these last about three hours, right? Well, it took us half that to get here. Just pray you’re right.”

“Jessie’s on one of the smaller spares. Hers won’t last.”

Something surfaces a few feet to my right, and I turn and kick out instinctively. “Whoa!” Kelly says. He swims over to my side. “It’s just me.”

“Jessie’s cartridge won’t last,” Reggie repeats.

“I’ll be fine.”

Micah nods. “We may have to share.” He checks his Link one last time and curses.

“What’s wrong?” Ashley says.

“Nothing. Just... We can’t wait.”

“Why would we?” Reggie asks.

“It’s the current. It hasn’t shifted yet. We’re going to be fighting it for another half hour.”

“I think it has,” I say, noting how the gear bags are piled up against the overpass.

But Micah shakes his head. “Not according to the tide table.”

“I don’t care,” Ashley says. “I’m not waiting. I’m getting the hell out of here now!”

We all nod in agreement. The longer we wait, the more IUs we’ll need to get past before entering the tunnel entrance.

“Okay fine, but this time we all stick together,” Kelly says. “No getting separated.”

Chapter 24

We join hands underwater. There’s terror in everyone’s eyes. I can see it, even without my goggles. Even with everyone else wearing theirs.

The scene we encounter is surreal: a 360-degree panoramic horror movie of bodies drifting all around us, most of them sinking in slow motion into the murkiness below. They lurch and twist as they try to get to us. They remind me of earthworms dying in a puddle after a storm. Except worms are harmless. They don’t want to bite you and turn you into more worms.

I remember an old video file Reggie had found in his parents’ cellar while searching for archival footage of the first decade of the twenty-first century for a school project: bodies falling from a burning skyscraper, plummeting to the ground, dropping one after the other in what seemed like slow motion because it took so long. Then the whole building suddenly implodes in a massive ball of smoke and dust, which just keeps growing higher and higher. Within minutes, an unfamiliar Manhattan skyline is obliterated and the sun turns blood red.

“Is this real?” I’d asked him, horrified to see such images. This was before we’d really come together as a group. In fact, it was the day I introduced him to Ashley, so I couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time. Reggie had invited me over to check out his father’s old arcade games, and I’d asked Ash to tag along. But instead of playing, we just sat around in the dark watching those old clips. “This can’t be real,” I remember saying. “We’d have heard about it.”

Afterward, we went to Ashley’s house and asked G-ma Junie. She’d told us to hush up about it and never bring it up again. “You tell that boy if he’s smart he’ll destroy the video and any others he might have. It’s illegal to speak of things that happened before the War.”

It was more than just a tacit admission that the footage was, indeed, genuine. It was my first real exposure to the idea that our government wanted to control our lives, to the point of deciding which memories we were allowed to keep.

Micah points to an opening, to where the bodies aren’t falling as thickly, and we make our way toward it. The IUs can’t swim, only squirm. They slowly drift down, so we don’t have to worry about them coming to us. We just need to stay out of their reach.

I think about the one that attacked me on our way in, and it now seems clear where it came from. Because the virus plastinates flesh, they don’t decay like normal. How long had it been down here? How long could it last, away from the sun? Forever? Would the fish eat it? Would other creatures? I can easily imagine some of these eventually making their way to the Manhattan end, not in days or weeks, but in months or years. That has to be why they patrol.

There’s a sort of game we play when we get bored, imagining what it must be like to be undead. It assumes that there will be at least a remnant of self-awareness persisting after resurrection, not that we ever actually believed it. Now I wonder what it would be like to spend an eternity in a watery grave, at the mercy of the tides, until the final, the very last spark of life — or whatever it is that they have — winks out. It almost makes me feel sorry for them.

Almost.

They continue to rain down, splashing here and there, making it impossible to proceed straightaway into the tunnel. The writhing mass is like a single living, breathing organism. Limbs tangling, disengaging, parts separating and tumbling away. The bottom of the mass begins to ooze down the ramp toward the tunnel. Kelly holds up a finger and points to himself, then to the dark opening before us. Finally, he points to each of us in turn, counting. One at a time, that’s what he’s saying. He pulls out his knife, gives us a quick nod, then kicks furiously toward the opening. Another zombie splashes into the water nearby, but he deftly kicks to the side and is past it before the thing can grab him. Then he’s gone, vanished into the darkness.

A moment later, our Links light up. I reach for mine before remembering I’ve left it outside the fueling station. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I grab Jake’s hand to read Kelly’s message. He’s telling us he’s safely through.

Ash goes next, then Reg. Micah points to me, but I gesture to Jake, who shakes his head. The look in his eyes tells me all I need to know: he’s terrified. Micah grabs his arm and tries to force him through, but Jake resists. I swim over and signal that it’s okay. I point to my rebreather cartridge and give him a thumbs up, and he nods. With Micah’s help, he makes it to the edge of the drop zone. Then they squirt through. I’m the last one to leave Long Island.

Three more bodies splash down, two to my left, one farther off to the right. They bob back to the surface, then slowly begin to sink. Instead of dropping straight down, they drift toward the mouth of the tunnel. Again, I take this as a sign that the current is in our favor, aiding and abetting our escape. It seems we’ve finally caught a break. We’ll need all the breaks we can get.

I glance blearily up through the watery surface, pick a spot where the railing and sky above are clear of shadows, and kick my way through.

Chapter 25

The Infected Undead watch us as we glide past. They twitch and reach up to grab us, but we’re out of reach. Their mouths gape open and close again in slow motion. Discolored and engorged tongues protrude through gaps in their teeth, though holes in their rotting cheeks; they flick hungrily at jagged fraying lips. Blackness fills their eyes, a blackness full of longing. Full of hunger. And death.

Earthworms, I tell myself. That’s all they are.

Earthworms don’t want to eat you. At least not while you’re still alive.

The current gently tugs us forward, releases, tugs again. So much for the accuracy of Reggie’s tide tables. Or Jake’s. There’s something odd about the way it’s behaving, shifting sooner than expected, just as it had this morning.

We were fools to come here, criminally reckless idiots, impossibly naïve. It was stupid to think it would be fun. I wonder what Reggie must think now. I know what he’ll say when we get back. If we get back. He’ll disavow ever claiming it was his idea. Or that it was good.

I should’ve listened to my first instinct the moment he proposed it. I should’ve listened to Kelly. We should’ve fought harder to stop them. It’s only by some miracle that we’re all still alive and unharmed.

We’re not back yet.

We enter the same bore we used earlier. We know the dangers it holds— at least one zombie and the pileup of debris to get through. The other bore could be safer. It might be easier. Then again, it might be certain death.

We now share only two flashlights between the six of us. Reggie holds one and takes the lead. The rest of us form a chain, each holding the hand of the person in front: Ashley next, then me, followed by Kelly and Jake. Micah brings up the rear with the other flashlight. We push ourselves hard, eager to get away from that terrifying place.

I’m not hungry, but I am thirsty and I feel faint from lack of eating. My feet and knees hurt, and my thighs already burn from running. My arms aren’t in any better shape. They ache from swinging the axe, and the recoils from the pistol have taken their toll on my elbow and shoulder. The cut on my arm stings. But all of this pales next to my psychological turmoil. Without goggles, I can’t see very much, and it doesn’t help. Everything is a blur. I feel claustrophobic. Vulnerable. Helpless.

So I close my eyes and concentrate only on breathing and kicking, and for once I’m glad Reggie is the one leading us. He’s always been the strongest among us physically. I feel his strength flowing through all of us now.

We must be near the place where the zombie attacked me. I don’t know this for sure, but I feel Kelly’s grip tighten, and he kicks harder, as if he can propel us all beyond the danger by sheer will. I keep my eyes shut. Soon, I think. Soon we’ll be home. I never want to come back. I never want to see another zombie again, real or otherwise.

I focus on my breathing — in, out, in again — synchronizing my kicks to that rhythm. It becomes a part of me, a part of my very existence. I imagine my heart beating in time to it.

Everything becomes automatic. My mind drifts, then yields to the memories of the day’s events— the attack before arriving, the encounter inside the store, running for our lives, jumping off the overpass. My fingers twitch as I remember squeezing Kelly’s hand as we fell. I feel him hesitate a moment, as if puzzled, before continuing onward. Memories of heads exploding like sacks of moldy flour.

I had never seen anything like that before, not in Zpocalypto, nor in Survivalist. What does it mean? Is that what happens when they get old? Do their brains dry out? How can they still function then? What drives them?

I think about the ones who leaked clotted blood and rotten brain matter instead. All of the zombies we’d killed on the overpass had been of that category. Faster. The IU Kelly beheaded, and the one Reggie took out. The man with the campaign tee.

My eyes pop open. Clyde Demarris has run in only one presidential election that I know of.

Three years ago.

Reggie stops and asks us via Link if we’re all okay. Kelly notices for the first time that I don’t have mine. He gives me a curious look. I shake my head. He types something into his screen, then shows it to me:

<< LFT BHND? >>

I nod. His face pinches. He knows that’s not good. I’ll have to report it missing when we get back. There’ll be an investigation, which means we’ll have to come up with a plausible explanation to give to the Department of Citizen Registration. The form for a lost Link is over a thousand questions long. There’ll be a fine and possibly time added to my LSC. I know, because it’s not the first time for me.

But I’m more worried that someone else might find it.

I hope that no one ever does.

I think about that Clyde Demarris shirt, and I know I’m spitting into the wind.

The second time Reggie stops, I immediately notice the drag on us. If the others have noticed it, too, they don’t remark on it. I ask for Kelly’s Link and type in the word with a question mark. Micah sees and shakes his head. He’s got no explanation for why the current’s not flowing the way we expect it to. He points, urging us to keep going. I can see from the look on Ashley’s face that she’s exhausted. We all are. Our energy reserves are low, and any adrenaline we’d been running on has since been depleted.

We quickly re-form our chain and carry on. We don’t know how much longer our cartridges will last. I’m certain mine will give out first. Once more, I close my eyes and let the others guide me.

Minutes pass. They feel like hours. Then I feel Ash and Kelly release my hands at the same time. I open my eyes, thinking we’ve arrived at the end. But everything’s still dark, except for our two beams of light, spearing the darkness.

I push myself toward the closest flashlight. Jake’s face emerges from the gloom. I grab his hand and hold on. He stops and looks at me, confusion and tension filling his face.

He holds up his Link and types:

<< BLOCKED >>

He easily reads my frown, since I have no goggles to hide my face. He points downward with the light. Below us is the blurry outline of the old bus we’d passed on our way in.

I look up again. The debris dam looms high over us, tall and monolithic. It stretches all the way from floor to ceiling and spans the tunnel from one side to the other. A large tree trunk pokes through it halfway up, its stunted roots looking like a gorgon’s head, a tangle of unidentifiable flotsam trapped within its tentacles.

Jake swings the light over to the side. I’m barely able to make out Kelly and Reggie. They’re at the opening we came through earlier. But now something’s blocked it. I can see them trying to move it out of the way. Ash and Micah hover nearby with the other flashlight.

I guide Jake’s light over the surface of the logjam, scanning for a different way through. Below us, a stream of mud eddies out of a narrow gap underneath the bus. The murk spreads upward toward us, then partially sucks back in before spreading out again.

The current is definitely strengthening, but it’s pushing equally hard in both directions, alternating. It’s more rocking than tidal.

Jake seems to figure this out, too. He swings the light back up at Reggie and Kelly. They’ve got a corner of what looks like a box spring mattress and are trying to dislodge it from the pile. Jake makes an urgent noise with his throat, but we’re too far away for them to hear. I begin to kick my way up toward them.

Just as I reach Ash, I hear a soft plinking noise. I look around, then down, and I see Jake urgently banging the handle of his knife on the flashlight, trying to get our attention. Ashley forgets what she’s doing and swings the light away from Kelly and Reg.

Jake gestures madly, but we don’t understand. There’s a low grinding sound, distant and ominous and deep enough that I feel it in my bones. The sound crescendos, and more silt rises from the tunnel floor. I sense the entire world starting to shift.

Jake makes that urgent sound in his throat again, but no one else hears him. He darts up and past me, frantically waving his light. But Kel and Reg are still struggling to free the mattress.

Kelly loses his grip with one hand, and he flails and kicks to keep hold with the other. Muddy water surges past them through a new opening. I scream in my throat and pull Ashley away.

From below comes a loud metallic groan. The bus lurches and skids several feet. Ash twists out of my grip. I grab her again and kick to pull us away. The boys have finally recognized the new threat, but they’re still hanging on.

Jake grabs Kelly, and they begin to wrestle. Reggie tries to pull them apart with one hand.

Something shoots through the fresh opening. It envelops Jake’s head, knocks him backward. He tumbles as he tries to dislodge it. Kelly returns to the mattress and renews his efforts.

I’m waving my arms now and throat-yelling, but they don’t see or hear me. Jake frees himself of the plastic sheeting and swims over to Reg. He thrusts a finger downward. Reggie points at the mattress. It’s starting to bulge from the pressure on the other side. Jake tries again. He waves his hands in a sweeping motion, like a bomb exploding. Reggie shakes his head.

The mattress shifts suddenly. Kelly starts to move away, but the mattress shoots out of the gap, striking him and tossing him like a rag doll. Reggie gets it full in the face. Air boils out of his mouth. The bubbles rise, lost forever. He reaches for his mask and it pops free. Somehow, he manages to hold on to the metal bars that had been holding the mattress in place. The other hand sweeps through the murk, searching.

I dive into the darkness, not knowing where I’m going, only moving by instinct. I sweep my arms around until I feel something light brush against the back of my hand. It seems like a miracle, but I immediately wrap my fingers around the tube connecting the cartridge to Reggie’s mask. I turn and kick my way back to the lights. They seem so far away now, and I have to fight even harder to close the gap.

Kel and Micah are back at the debris pile. The water’s cleared. Reggie drifts toward me, twisting like an IU, his hands pressed against his mouth, as if he could dam what’s left of the air inside him from spilling out.

My ears fill with ominous thumping and screeching sounds. I can’t tell if they’re coming from our side of the heap or the other. There’s a deafening scrape, and the boys draw away from the opening again. I try to cut Reggie off, but he slips past me before I can grab him. I get a glimpse of his eyes just before he disappears: they’re wild and bulging behind his goggles.

I hear the telltale sound of rushing air and I know he’s resorted to using the purge canister. There’s another release. Then a third. How many more before he’s out?

I need to find him.

But then Kelly’s suddenly there, grabbing me and pulling me toward the opening. Micah’s hanging onto the edge of the metal cage with one hand, the other holding onto Ash. He’s kicking against the current, aiming the light inside to see if it’s clear all the way through. Thick mud swirls about them, and the current looks even stronger.

I push Kelly away and turn back.

Jake’s flashlight sweeps erratically through the murk. On one pass, I see Reggie up at the ceiling, clutching an old light fixture. I know he must’ve gone up hoping to find trapped air, but there is none. Another cloud of bubbles envelops his face. They quickly run along the surface like mercury and disappear into the cracks. Jake shoots past me. I follow.

We finally reach him. Reggie reaches out in desperation. He grabs my arm and, even starved of oxygen, he’s incredibly strong. I thrust the mask toward his face. Jake and Kelly help reposition it. Reggie exhales into the canister, then inhales. The canister wheezes from the force, and I worry the bag inside will burst.

We tow him back toward the heap, but our progress is excruciatingly slow. He’s dead weight. It’s like dragging a boulder through quicksand.

Thankfully, he recovers quickly. At last we reach the opening. Pieces of trash are pulling away from the entire blockage. We have to be careful not to get hit.

Kelly pulls out his Link. He flashes the screen at us:

<< 2 DANGEROUS 2 STRONG >>

He points back the way we came, back to Long Island.

Ashley shakes her head. She grabs for Kelly’s arm, misses. She tries again and manages to grab his ankle. She points in the other direction. The look on her face says there’s no way she’s going back.

Reggie pushes against me. He’s still trembling. He grabs the edge of the metal cage and pulls himself into the opening. The pile shifts.

Kelly shakes his head at us and points again to Long Island, but Ashley slips past him and jockeys her way into the gap. She loses her grip and begins to tumble. Her flippers knock the walls of the opening. Kelly grabs me and swings me away. But then Reggie appears. He grabs Ash and begins to drag her back inside. Jake moves to follow, but the metal frame buckles, and the gap starts to collapse. He kicks away, afraid of being crushed.

There’s another eerie metallic squeal, and another puff of silt clouds the water.

Micah grabs me. I feel him pushing me toward the shrinking hole. We’ve got no choice. Going back is out of the question. Kelly must finally accept this, because he’s right on my heels. In the dim, wavering light, I see Reggie wedged into a tiny recess, offering up his own body to support the pile. He grabs my arm and pulls me past him. Ahead of me, Ashley’s flippers disappear into the void on the other side.

Something brushes against my face. Something else hits my injured arm, and I nearly let out a yelp of pain. I grab desperately for anything that’ll keep me from sliding back. I fight the terrible current. Right now, I’m running on pure fear, but my arms tremble and my legs feel like lead weights.

I push and pull and kick. Then I’m through the opening. I move to the side, out of the main thrust of the current. Ash returns with a tree branch. She pokes it through, and Kelly grabs it and starts climbing.

There’s a loud rumble and it feels like the whole pile slides several feet toward Long Island. Ashley belches out her air. She drops the branch and flails for her goggles. I grab it, wrenching my back as Kelly’s weight yanks me toward the opening. Then he’s through, and he takes my place. I spin around in search of Ashley. She’s gulping purge air. I have to force her to stop and conserve what’s left.

The entire debris pile shudders again. Then Micah emerges. We’re all through except for Reggie and Jake. I pray Jake overcomes his terror and follows us. There’s no time to guide him like Micah had to do back there at the tunnel opening. I wait, holding my breath. But then there’s a loud squeal and the steel bars of the cage crumple and the hole closes. Micah drops his flashlight. It tumbles toward the debris heap, then is swept into a tiny gap. Darkness swallows us up.

A Link screen glows. Kelly appears and grabs me. He starts to drag me away from the pile.

I point back, gesturing madly. Jake and Reggie never made it through!

But Kelly shakes his head. He points toward Manhattan. Ash has her Link out. Micah’s helping her put her goggles back on.

I don’t see the others. I grab Kelly’s Link and type their names. I feel a hand on my elbow, and it’s Reg. I don’t know how he managed to escape.

I type again:

<< JAKE? >>

He shakes his head, and types into his own Link:

<< MST GO CANSTER FAILNG >>

<< HOW >>

<< WATER >>

<< CANT LV JK BHIND >>

Kelly nods and begins to swim back toward the pile. But then he stops. I see him press his mouthpiece against his face. Panic rises in his eyes, and I realize his cartridge is beginning to fail, too.

I reach up to give him mine, when my vision blurs. In all the excitement, I hadn’t noticed the dull pressure building behind my eyes. My mind is telling me to breathe harder and faster, but it doesn’t help. And suddenly I’m terrified. We’re about to lose half our rebreathers. How many more breaths do we have left? How much farther is the end of the tunnel?

I shove Kelly’s Link back into his hands, then grab Ash’s Link and quickly scroll through it to find Jake’s contact. Thumbnail pictures of people flash by, some I recognize, others I don’t. One passes by so fast that it doesn’t register at first, someone I know. Someone Ash shouldn’t. There’s no time to question her.

I find Jake’s image and ping him.

There’s no response.

Reggie grabs Ash’s hand and begins to pull her. She tugs at her Link, but I want to try Jake again.

Still no response.

A message pops up on her screen:

<< HES GONE >>

I glance over at Reg. Even with his mask and goggles, I can see he’s devastated.

Then Ash’s Link vibrates, and I look down.

<< DONT LV >>

I show it to the others, but Micah shakes his head. He points further along the debris heap, then back toward Manhattan. There’s no way through. Jake’s on the other side, and we know he’s alive, but he can’t reach us.

And we can’t reach him.

Reggie gestures at his mask. The look on his face says it all: We need to go now!

After a moment’s hesitation, I ping Jake one last time:

<< GO BK WILL RETRN 4 U >>

I hand Ashley’s Link back to her before he has a chance to respond. I don’t want to read it. I know what it’ll say.

We form a chain again. I take one last look back, hoping against hope that he’s somehow found a way through. I think I see a flash of light. I stare for a moment, but it had been too sharp, too defined, to be real. It’s my brain beginning to hallucinate because of the failing cartridge.

We swim on in near total darkness, the light from a single Link to guide us. I know I’m crying, but my tears are lost in the filthy, salty water.

I swim on knowing we’re leaving Jake to die.

Reggie’s and Kelly’s cartridges fail nearly simultaneously. Then mine minutes later. We use up the air in our goggles and share the remaining rebreathers between us until all we have left is the one unused cartridge that Micah had on his belt. The tunnel opening is still an unknown distance ahead of us.

I know what we’re all thinking. Will it last until we reach the end? What if we encounter another obstacle?

Reggie leads, guiding us as best he can against the strengthening current. At times, we have to pull ourselves along on an old electrical conduit mounted into the wall so we don’t slip back. We pass the last remaining mask between us: front to back to front again, clutching it with weakening fingers. Our pace slows.

And the suffocating darkness draws in ever tighter.

‡   ‡

YOU’VE REACHED THE END OF EP01: Hacked into the Game

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‡   ‡

WHAT IS GOLGOTHA?

LOCKED INSIDE HIS MEDICAL research lab, biochemistry Professor Eugene Halliwell is about to begin the most important experiment of his life, a test of a new, highly speculative vaccine designed to counteract a controversial virus-based technology developed by the military: Reanimation. But in order to verify that his vaccine works, he’ll first need to infect a test subject. The stakes are incredibly high. Should he fail, not only will he create a flesh-eating monster, but he could trigger a deadly new pandemic with the potential to decimate humanity.

"A tightly written, fast paced short

that quickly convinced me to read Gameland."

-Goodreads reviewer

“Golgotha” sets the stage for a world where the living coexist with the undead. Prequel to the original GAMELAND series, this short story will be included in Episode 04 of the ZPOCALYPTO series. But you can read it now as part of my short story collection Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors.

‡   ‡

CAN’T WAIT FOR THE NEXT ZPOCALYPTO EPISODE TO DROP?

How about a little taste of the Flense?

THE BUNKERS WERE SUPPOSED to protect them. They failed.

Finnian Bolles fled to Bunker 8 as a teenager. Three years later, he's about to be thrust back into an unrecognizable world forever changed by the devastating plague called the Flense, a world now inhabited by once-human creatures known as Wraiths.

Finn leads a ragtag band of survivors, who will have to fight like never before just to survive, even as they search for a cure that may or may not exist in a place that some believe is a lie, the mythical Bunker 12. But as mounting troubles threaten to splinter the group, the horrifying truth about the real cause of the Flense and why it was released into the world begins to emerge...

...and of the one individual hiding among them who will do anything to keep those secrets buried.

Even if it means unleashing the Flense against them.

Check out my BUNKER 12 series here

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MY undying thanks to the devoted people of Brinestone Press for their keen eye and gentle but firm touch in helping me bring this story to life, for believing every step of the way that I could raise the dead.

To my devoted fans and followers on Twitter (http://twitter.com/saultanpepper), especially the zombie apocalypse junkies. Everything’s better with the #zombie hashtag.

My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their unflagging support. Without them, I would not be able to create worlds with such richness to them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Tanpepper is the speculative fiction pen name of Kenneth James Howe. A former combat medic and molecular biologist originally from Upstate New York, he now calls Northern California home.

If you are enjoying his ZPOCALYPTO series, then make sure to check out his other titles, including the post-apocalyptic series BUNKER 12 and the international thriller companion series THE FLENSE. All are available in digital and print form.

For more information about the author and his writings, please check out his website: http://www.tanpepperwrites.com and Facebook page at http://facebook.com/SWTanpepper.

Hacked into the Game

Episode 01 of ZPOCALYPTO

by Saul Tanpepper

Copyright © 2012, 2021 by Saul Tanpepper

All rights reserved.

Previous edition published May 1, 2012 as

Deep into the Game

Episode 1 of S.W. Tanpepper’s GAMELAND

by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046

Cover: Deranged Doctor Design

Copyright © 2021

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

THIS BOOK IS A WORK of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LICENSE NOTES

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

http://www.brinestonepress.com

Tanpepper, Saul (2021-03-25). Hacked into the Game (Episode 1 of the Zpocalypto series)

Tanpepper, Saul (2012-05-01). Deep into the Game (Episode 1 of S.W. Tanpepper’s Gameland series)

Brinestone Press Digital Edition

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For more information about this and other titles by this author:

authorsaultanpepper@gmail.com