Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (31 page)

“He was alive?”

“Yeah, and a mess to boot. No idea how he managed to make it all the way here with half his neck chewed away like that.” He shudders and takes in a deep breath. “It's always the bad ones who are hardest to kill, isn't it?”

I don't know if he's talking specifically about Tanya or Mabel or just in general. I've tried not to think about them, especially Tanya, because I know I'll just lose it if I do.

Micah reaches over and wipes a tear from my face and tells me again to get some rest.

“Have you heard from Kelly and the others?” I ask. “It's been almost two hours.”

He shakes his head.

“They have to find the mainframe—
Kelly
has to find it,” he reminds me. “Remember, the others won't be able to go very far underground without triggering the failsafe. And then, once he does, he'll be awfully busy following Ash's instructions on finding and uploading the programs. Then she and Reg will be busy trying to come up with a strategy for defeating them. I don't expect them to ping back until they know for sure it's worked.”

I lie there for a moment, my breath rattling through my throat. Micah brushes the hair distractedly from my face while staring off to one side.

“I saw her, you know,” I tell him. “She was here, the little girl. Inside the bathroom. She touched me, touched my arm.”

Micah sighs. “I've searched the entire house. Locked the back door. We're completely alone in here.”

He leans back against the wall and closes his eyes and lets out a deep breath. “Is it just me, or do you feel like you haven't slept in years?”

I nod. I know he's slept more than the rest of us, but he was also the worst injured during the bombing. He's mended amazingly quickly—physically, anyway. At the same time, the effects of that day—now nearly a week and a half ago—have also lingered in him the longest.

“Micah?”

“Hmm?”

“What do you know about my father?”

His eyebrows knit together for a moment as he concentrates on the question. He lifts his head and shrugs. “I don't know. About the same as anyone else, I guess. Your dad was the advisor to the president and head of the project that created the first zombies—Zulus. That's what they called them, right? I'm assuming that's why you're asking.”

I nod and wait.

“Your grandfather—The Colonel—was in charge of the Marines. Together they built the first Omegaman Forces. Then your dad was assassinated and—”

“Murdered,” I correct. Stephen telling me he's still alive was just another of his lies.

Micah shakes his head, frowning. “Murdered, assassinated. What's the difference?”

“The man—the
zombie
—that killed my father didn't do it for political reasons. That's the difference.”

Micah chuffs. “Okay, so he was killed by a mindless monster. Everyone knows that when this zombie was alive he had a personal vendetta against your dad. The fact that he couldn't think about anything except eating human flesh afterward doesn't mean very much when all is said and done. You father's still gone. At least assassination makes it sound like it wasn't some random, senseless act.”

“It wasn't a random senseless act.”

“So…there you go.”

“And what do you know about the man who became the zombie that killed him?”

“Halliwell? Just the textbook stuff: he was a professor at some podunk college somewhere when he and your father won the Nobel Prize. The guy was a headcase, from what I've heard. He thought he could cure Reanimation.”

“Why does that make him a headcase?”

“Because everyone knows there's no cure.” He stops and blushes, remembering Kelly. “Sorry. What I meant is—”

“But what if there is one?” I press.

He doesn't answer.

I have to believe there is a cure. It's the only thing keeping me sane right now. I just can't think about the possibility of losing Kelly right now.

I reach into my back pocket and feel the old ID card still there. I hesitate a moment before drawing it out and flipping it over to him.

“I found this in a drawer in your house.”

He picks it up and stares at it for a moment, and I can almost see the change come over him. His eyes darken and the line of his lips tightens. His jaw clenches. His body goes rigid.

But then it all disappears in an instant. He hands the card back to me and says, “Are you sure? Because I've never seen that before in my life.”

I'm just about to challenge him when both our links begin to ping.

Micah jumps to his feet, looking relieved. “Kelly,” he says, glancing at the ID, “that was a lot quicker than I expected.” He activates the Link and asks, “Are you in?”

I see Kelly nod. “Yeah. But we've hit a few snags.”

 

“Why is it so light there?”
Kelly asks.

“We found a house with solar,” Micah explains. He stares hard at the image on his Link, purposefully avoiding looking at me.

As soon as I brought Professor Halliwell's card out, his whole demeanor had changed. I can't decide if it was surprise or confusion, but a definite wall came up between us. The sight of Halliwell's face must've triggered a memory. He'd denied it, so maybe he's not even aware he knows something.

Then again…

“The lights still work,” Micah continues. “Some of them, anyway. Speaking of lights, why is it so dark where you are?”

“I'm back topside with Ash and Reg,” Kelly answers. “Outside. The mainframe is down an elevator shaft in the smallest of the buildings in the enclosure. There's a whole underground complex here—computers and meeting rooms, bathrooms, storage. Even running water, though it's pretty grungy coming out of the faucets
.
Everything is climate controlled. Looks like the elevator is the only way up and down. Not sure, though. Still a few more doors I haven't checked.”

“What are the snags?” I ask, barely managing to croak out the words.

Kelly frowns. “What's wrong with your voice, Jess? You sound funny. ”He stares through his screen. “And what's that wrapped around your neck?”

“Stephen,” I say, in lieu of a full explanation. And then, before Micah can say anything more about the attack, I add, “But he's not a problem anymore.”

“You're not hurt, are you?”

“Bruised is all. Stephen's dead. Micah made sure of that. Just tell us what's going on there.”

“You know how I was supposed to go down and send the programs up to Ash and Reg to work out the new code?”

We nod.

“Well, I couldn't connect to a sub-stream. It's too far underground and there's no signal.”

I grimace. Without a stream, the Links are useless.

“We should have thought about that,” I murmur. Micah nods, though he still won't look at me.

“It's not that big of a deal,” Kelly continues. “Just taking a little longer than we expected, and the elevator is slow. But we're stuck here till morning anyway.”

“Any problems getting hooked up?”

“Your interface worked like a charm, Micah. And Ash gave me a heads up on what to look for. Took me a bit longer to find the actual failsafe programs. I had to write a new command-line search app and instruct it to look for bits of the programs' outputs, since we don't know what the application files are called. It's crude and buggy. Plus, I had to narrow the search parameters so it wouldn't bog the system down, which meant limiting myself to only about a hundred parallel streams at a time.”

“How many sub-streams are there on the mainframe?” Micah asks. He has that distant look in his eyes, the one he gets when he's hacking. I hope it mean he's remembering.

“Over twenty-seven million. They're partitioned into about a dozen main bundles. No dynamic switching, which is nice. Fortunately we got lucky and hit pay dirt on about the six thousandth search iteration. All the root applications and registry files were in a packet called PROJECT REWIRE.”

Micah types this into the tablet. I give him a quizzical look and he shrugs and whispers that it's so he won't forget.

“I got all the files uploaded onto the tablet,” Kelly goes on, “and then I hand-carried it all back up for Ash and Reg to work on.” He hesitates and the look on his face grows serious. “I'll be honest, guys. I'm not sure we'll be able to pull this off.”

“What do you mean?”

“I took a look at the coding. The apps themselves are fairly rudimentary, not even close to the level of sophistication we saw with
The Game
. Or even
Zpocalypto
.”

“So, it should be a piece of cake,” I say, trying to make my voice not sound so hoarse. “You or I could probably do it, if we had to.”

Micah nods. “The apps wouldn't need to be very complex.”

“From what Stephen told us,” Kelly says, “the failsafe is just a simple override. Unfortunately, simple doesn't always translate to easy. Reprogramming the implant might be nothing more complicated than flipping a switch back and forth, as long as we know how to do each of those flips. Or it might be irreversible, like picking an apple. Once it's off the tree, you can't put it back on.”

“Luckily, we're not talking about apples,” Micah contends. “We're talking about programs. If you can code something, and then recode it, you should be able to reverse it back to its native state.”

We'd been taught in school that the neural implant is designed to remain quiescent as long as it receives a neurological signal generated by the cerebral cortex of the brain, the center where higher cognitive functions reside. Upon death, as this part of the brain dies, the signal wanes, and the implant becomes active. During outbreaks, the implants give the government a way to incapacitate Infecteds. Of course, the implants weren't created to be a preventative measure. That just happened to be a side benefit. They were created to fix spinal damage. Then they were adapted for use in the Undead, to fight our wars.

Since then, the uses for the Undead have expanded. Now they guard our borders and clean our sewers and mine for our precious metals and coal. More recently, they've become avatars in live action survival games.

Stephen's failsafe program—or
programs
, rather, since there's a slightly different version to match each implant's identifier code—generates a set of instructions that do two things. First, it reprograms the implant so that it's no longer responsive to the neurelectric signal generated in the brain. The second is that it replaces that impulse with its own. As long as the implant receives it, it remains inactive. Cut the new signal off—like when we went underground during our escape attempt—and the implant activates, triggering a nociceptive response: excruciating pain, nausea and, if allowed to continue long enough, coma and death.

And after that, if the host has been infected, Reanimation.

The programs run within the mainframe under Jayne's Hill and the instructions are sent, in coded form, to the transmission tower via a wired connection. The tower broadcasts the instructions to any number of relay towers scattered about the island, which receive and decode the program's output into a language that our implants can understand.

Simply deleting the failsafe program or the signal or sabotaging the transmission tower to prevent the program from transmitting won't work. The only way we can defeat it is by instructing the implants to return to their default states.

“We know which lines of the failsafe program encode the actual override,” Kelly continues. “What we don't know is the original code it replaced. Right now, Ash and Reg are taking guesses at how they can reconfigure it to its nascent programming. That part's over my head, so all I can do is sit here and wait.”

“And where's Jake?” I ask. “What's he doing to make himself useful?”

Kelly's eye twitches. I doubt any of the others would even notice it, but I know him better than anyone else, except maybe his family. What I can't understand is why he'd agree to let Jake lead the group if the guy bugs him so much.

“Reg sent him to go patrol around the perimeter to make sure the IUs don't get in.”

“But…?”

“Nothing. It's cool. At least he's out of my hair for the moment.”

“Have there been very many IUs?”

“Couple dozen, I think. I haven't checked lately. Saw a few on our way here—not many, and they didn't follow us. The place was clear when we arrived, but once we started making noise digging, and then trying to break in, that's when things started getting a little hairy.”

“What do you mean ‘hairy'?”

“They started trying to get through the fence. The first few pretty much exploded electrocuting themselves. The noise really started to draw them out of the woods.”

“Exploded?”

Kelly nods. “They'd try to grab the fence. There'd be this loud bang and a flash and a puff of smoke. The stink was terrible, like burning rubber. But after about ten minutes, it stopped.”

“Is the fence losing voltage?”

Kelly shakes his head. “No, they just stopped touching the fence. It was like they'd…”

He shakes his head.

“Jake had this idea that if we got them all riled up, they'd go crazy and throw themselves into the fence. Easy way to get rid of them. I disagreed, but you know how stubborn he can be. He actually went out there to taunt them. They got riled up all right, but they still wouldn't attack the fence.” He pauses again, looking dismayed. “It's like they're learning.”

Micah lets out a snort. “They can't learn. They're not cognizant.”