Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (39 page)

“Quit procrastinating, Jessie.”

I lift my hand to adjust my backpack, but as I do the strap catches on the handle of the shovel and it slips and goes clattering across the road, shattering the silence of the night.

We both stare at it.

Up ahead, the IU slowly lowers and turns its head. It stares at us without moving. Behind us, the moaning has grown louder. Retreat is out of the question. A single zombie on the road is still a much better alternative to several behind us, even with the fence for them to contend with.

“Sorry
,” I whisper.

“Just pick it up and get ready to run,” Micah says, his voice low and urgent.

I reach down and grab the shovel without lowering my eyes.

“Now!
” And he leaps forward.

At the same moment, the zombie turns and steps toward us. Its first movements are awkward and slow, but it quickly shakes off its torpor. It raises its arms and howls.

And we're running straight toward it!

“Oh yeah. It's a fast one,” Micah pants. I don't dare look over at him. I don't want to see the look on his face.

“Go right,” I tell him, raising the shovel. My shoulder twinges, reminding me that it's still not up for a lot of physical abuse. I hope the thing doesn't decide to pop back out again. Not now. “Aim low,” I tell him, “for the thigh. I'll go left and go for its head.”

Micah nods and separates from me. The monster takes another step toward us, reaching out. Tatters hang from its arms as it reaches out, and at first I think it's skin. But then I see it's just its torn shirt, revealing the muscles it once possessed.

It's actually in fairly good shape.

We accelerate until we're both running as close to full speed as we can manage with the packs on our backs.

I focus on breathing. Two quick breaths, one long one. And when the thing is ten feet from us, I inhale and hold it. I swing my arms forward with all my strength, shouting,
“Kiai!”
for power.

But the shovel misses! It passes over the thing's head without connecting and throws me off balance. The shovel flies out of my hands and skitters noisily across the road, then off the shoulder and into the grass.

“What the hell?” I yelp. “How the hell—”

“I got it!” Micah yells, ducking under the zombie's arms. The knife slices its shirt but misses flesh. Micah spins and draws back his hand for a second try.

I grab him and yell, “Forget it. Keep running!”

“But—”

“One shot, Micah! We missed.”

The thing crouches as it turns. I've never seen one do that before.

I push Micah just as it leaps at us. I spin away, grabbing its wrist and pulling. It loses its footing and goes flying. I don't wait around to see what happens.

“Run!”

Micah hesitates a fraction of a second, but then follows me as I take off again down the road.

“I could've…taken it!”

I risk a look back. It hasn't gotten to its feet yet, but it soon will. It's moving too fast, too purposeful.

“It's coming.”

Micah looks back. “Holy shit!
It's fucking running!
”

He whips his pack off and tucks it under his arm. I do the same with mine. For a second, I'm tempted to toss it over my shoulder as a distraction.
It's not a god damn bear!
I scream at myself. It won't stop to sniff it. It doesn't want canned tuna and water. It wants us!

We both speed up.

“Still coming,” Micah says, his voice quavering, both with fear and excitement.

I can't keep myself from turning around and looking. The thing is still moving awkwardly, its movements stiff and mechanical. And yet it's frighteningly fast.

I let out a stifled cry. Fire sears my lungs and drips burning lava down my side. Beside me, Micah's face twists in pain. He grabs his side. “It's no fair, you know,” he groans, and his teeth flash. “Zombies don't get cramps.”

“It's a Player,” I gasp.

“No shit.” But his next words send an even bigger chill down my spine: “And it thinks we are, too.”

We round a bend in the road and the sounds of pursuit fade away, but we keep running anyway. There's nowhere else for us to go but straight ahead.

I scan the road. Micah does the same. I hope he doesn't suggest that we turn around and fight. I also hope he doesn't think we should hide. Hiding from a normal IU would work, but not a CU. Not when there's a living, breathing human being doing its thinking for it. Our best chance is to try and outrun it.

My chest tightens at the thought. I don't know how much longer my lungs will hold out.

But Micah points and shouts, “There!”

“No. We have to…keep going.”

“Cut off,” he replies, “for Jayne's Hill.” He tries to vault over the center guardrail and nearly ends up falling flat on his face. He pinwheels his arms, recovers, and keeps right on running. I slow and climb over it. I'm too weak to jump. Micah's already heading down the entrance ramp. I try to catch up, but I'm too tired. When I hear the slap of the CU's feet behind me, I somehow find something more inside of me.

Just as I slip down the ramp, I glance over my shoulder. The zombie is a hundred feet back, climbing over the rail. It falls, but gets quickly to its feet and continues the pursuit.

My shins cry out in protest as I run down the incline. The sound of my retreat echoes in the darkness. Sweat pours off of me. The distance between us and the creature has grown, but it's still coming. This one won't give up. It's not motivated by its basal instincts to feed. Hunger propels it forward, but murder is its intention.

Murder and money and ratings.

How much for each kill? How much more if it's a living person?

I wonder why and how it could happen. Doesn't its Operator know we're not dead? He has to know we're not Infected. IUs don't run, and we're obviously not CUs, either. Even the freshest Player couldn't leap over a guardrail like Micah just did, no matter how clumsily.

So, the Operator knows, and yet he's still coming after us.

I can just picture the fat, rich asshole grinning inside his fancy VR setup in some mansion somewhere safe. Where? Boston? Santa Fe? Los Angeles? He knows his Player is chasing two living human beings, and yet he's enjoying himself. He wants to catch us. He wants to kill us.

jessie

Would they even televise something like that on
Survivalist
?

stop

Does Arc think it could get away with it?

“Hey!” Micah grabs my arm and spins me around. “Where the hell are you going?”

We're at the bottom of the entrance ramp and he jerks me to the left, past a sign that says West Hills Drive. Below it, an arrow and letters that spell out Jayne's Hill, one mile away. We begin another excruciating uphill run, sprinting for another solid minute. When the road abruptly turns and ends in a parking lot, I'm almost relieved. I can't run anymore.

“What…now?” I gasp.

There's a single car in the lot, its color impossible to guess in the darkness and beneath its filthy blanket of dirt and moss. It sits on its rims, the tires long since deflated. Just its being here tells a story. What happened to the person who owned it? Are they still wandering the hills around here?

“We have to fight,” Micah says, panting.

My heart clutches. “We'd be better off hiding.” When he starts to protest, I say, “You saw that thing duck when I swung at it. It's a damn Player!”

“I know it's a damn Player! I saw what you saw.”

“That means there's—”

“I know! I know. Okay, we hide. Shit, Jessie.”

He spins around, searching. “There's a public restroom,” he says, pointing to a cinder block building. The corrugated roof sags under the weight of a dozen years of pine needles, and ivy crawls up the walls.

“It's a
Player
, Micah!” How many times do I have to say it? “Hiding is too obvious. It's the first place I'd look if I were its Operator.”

He grunts unhappily, then nods, once, quickly. “Okay, so we need to start thinking like we're playing
Zpocalypto
.”

“No, we need to start thinking like we're playing
The Game
.”

We should've been thinking this way from the beginning. Instead, we were treating our situation like we were actually in control. That's what Stephen meant when he said we were all players and that it was all already scripted. That's why we've done so spectacularly poorly, because we've always believed we could reason our way out. We're lucky to all still be alive.

Most of us.

Except Tanya turned out to be a part of the story, too.

Christ help us.

I shut my eyes for a moment and try to push her face away from me.

“Better decide soon, because it's coming,” Micah says. The hard, slapping sound of the Player's feet on the road echoes in the night, sounding somewhere far away and yet frightfully close. Micah gestures to the bathroom. “Behind it then.”

I follow him around the side. There's no time to argue, no time to think. I just wish I knew what he's planning. He slips into the brush that encroaches on the cracked cement apron around the old building. Just behind us is the woods. I pause. From here, escape will be next to impossible. I step in and crouch down next to him. The rustling is loud to my ears.

“As soon as it comes around the corner,” he tells me, “we jump it.”

I want to choke him right then. I resist the urge. I want to stand up and turn around and race through the trees. In fact, I almost do, but then I feel his hand on my wrist, giving it a gentle but firm squeeze, and all further thoughts of moving get pushed away.

 

I'm scared shitless.
And yet there's something—deep down inside of me—something strangely exhilarating and freeing in Micah's plan. I can't explain it. Maybe it's just his excitement rubbing off on me. Or maybe it's because I'm tired of running from the Undead. Running from anything, actually. I need to face it head-on.

I've been running away my whole entire life. Even my hapkido training has always been about bending and flexing, yielding to those who would harm me rather than resisting them. Kwanjangnim Rupert taught that the only way to defeat superior strength was to be like water:
The stream flows around and surrounds its obstacles, and so passes them.

I tried to become a stream in my life, to flow. But all that ever happened was that the obstacles I encountered left me riven. I am not water. I am a person of flesh and bone, and my soul cannot mend itself like a fluid.

I can't hear the Player, but it must be somewhere out there, wandering around the parking lot. Searching for us.

Micah grips his knife. I slip my hand into the backpack pocket and begin to pull out the pistol, but he shakes his head at me in the darkness and whispers no. “No guns. Too much noise.” He breathes the words into my face and they pass across my ears almost too quiet to hear. Of course he's right. A blast from the gun now would only bring the entire horde of IUs who wander the woods here down to us.

The bathroom door scrapes open and my heart nearly stops. The door begins to creak closed, but it doesn't slam. The tension in its springs must've bled away over the years; rust has probably eaten away at the hinges.

“We could trap it now,” I whisper.

Micah shakes his head urgently.

Something slams inside the bathroom, echoing hollowly. I flinch. “Stall door,” he guesses, whispering. There's more rustling. The door scrapes open again. We wait in silence.

A couple minutes later, from somewhere to the left of us comes the unmistakable sound of a twig snapping. Micah tenses beside me. Several seconds pass without a sound.

I shift ever so slightly to ease a growing cramp in my side. Micah breathes through his half-opened mouth, making no sound. I try and mimic it. But my shifting causes my pack to sag on my shoulder and it slips down my arm with a soft
shush
and thuds to the ground.

The night explodes all around us then, filling with noise so close and so loud that it's completely disorienting. Micah lurches back against me before catching himself.

“Dog!” he shouts.

It's standing not five feet away from us, out on the cement. In the darkness I can see its glistening teeth and its scarred and graying muzzle. It's snarling and snapping right at us.

No, I realize too late, at something
behind
us!

Micah pushes me to the side as he jumps to his feet. I tumble to the ground. The air above my head whooshes as the dog hits Micah in the back. They both go down, tangled in the brush, but the dog is up again in a flash. I try to pull it away, but by the time I'm up, the attack is already finished. The Player crumples to Micah's feet, the handle of the knife protruding from its throat.

 

Micah wrenches the knife free
, not even bothering to give it a twist. “We need to leave
now
!”

I nod, throwing a glance back at the dog. It's stopped to sniff at the Player. It turns and lifts its leg and urinates.

Micah grabs my arm and pack and yanks me around. “Now!”

Other things are crashing through the trees, things drawn by the noise.

We stumble back out onto the parking lot and swivel around. I spot a small sign, half hidden in the overgrown brush and run over to it. “Trail marker,” I say. “Jayne's Hill peak, point-eight miles.”