Z 2134 (19 page)

The girl opened her mouth as if to speak,
but before she said anything, one of the boys from the night before — the one
who had jabbed him — appeared behind her in the doorway.

“Hurry up,” the boy said.

The girl turned back, glared, then looked
at Jonah.

“Y’ hungry?” she asked in a weird accent
he couldn’t place and was sure he’d never heard before. He wondered, as he had
the other night, if it was accent or speech impediment of some sort.

“Yes,” he managed to push the single word
through the desert in his mouth. “Thirstier, though.”

She brought the cup to his lips, and he
swallowed a cool gulp of water. It tasted like the best, cleanest water he’d
ever had.

She then tore a piece from the hunk of
bread and shoved it roughly between Jonah’s lips. He slowly chewed, feeling
numb, then swallowed and opened his mouth for more. The girl tore another piece
of bread of bread from the hunk, her hand now shaking as she brought it closer
to his face.

The boy seemed like he was standing guard
behind the girl. Her eyes could barely meet his. Jonah wondered why she was
scared.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.

“I know,” she said, her eyes meeting his,
burning with the same hate they had the night before when she and the others
had saved him. “’Tis you who should be worried about me hurtin’ ya.”

“Why?” Jonah asked, confused.

The girl brought the cup of water to
Jonah’s mouth before he was ready, spilling it past his lips and down his
shirt. He choked as he stared into her eyes, glimmering with hate and maybe
glee from his choking.

“Calla!” the boy called out, shocking the
girl to attention.

She yanked the cup back, spilling more
water on Jonah, then retreated, leaving the room without another oddly accented
word.

The boy wasn’t guarding the girl from Jonah,
he was guarding Jonah from the girl.

The boy stood there, glaring.

“What was that about?” Jonah asked.

“Her name is Calla Egan. And you’re the
reason her mother died,” he said.

T
wilight threatened darkness as Ana crept
through the forest, too scared to slow her pace but too timid to keep from
worrying through every other step.

She inched her way south as Liam had
directed, following the Fire Wall and trying to remember how long it ran,
racking her brain as she tried to replay the insufferable song of Kirkman’s
annoyingly chipper voice from any one of the previous games, where he loudly
announced its length.

Ana felt a stab of guilt for the many
times she had enjoyed watching Darwin, especially the parts with the Fire Wall,
which she had found especially exciting. The bright blue at the bottom of the
seam, where plumes of screaming orange ascended twenty feet into the air. Ana
had to admit, the fire was more alluring when watching from the safety of City
streets, the comfort of their flat, or even the horrible wall of monitors in
Chimney Rock’s TV hall.

In person, it was nothing more than a
hissing promise of death.

Ana was wondering if the Fire Wall would
ever end when she spotted a swath of shadows in the distance, dark enough to
make her certain there wasn’t a flame anywhere near it.

Ana walked faster, nearing the end of the
fire and allowing herself to feel suddenly hopeful. She doubled her speed,
almost racing toward the end of the seam, running so fast that she nearly
crashed into a cluster of zombies swarming between her and the end of the Fire
Wall.

Ana bit her lip hard enough to draw blood
but managed to keep the scream inside her mouth. She dropped to her knees, then
looked to the cluster, confident that between her speedy drop, the forest’s
many shadows, and the zombies’ near-complete stupidity, she was, and would be,
free from their sight so long as she remained careful.

After a minute of zombie watching, her
confidence doubled. Ana rose to her feet and slowly moved to her right, deeper
into the woods, to navigate her way around the zombies. She inched through the
darkness a tentative step at a time; careful, scared, and half-certain that
every foreign sound was the song of a zombie beside her.

Well past the zombies, and ready to
circle back toward the Fire Wall, Ana was startled into a scream too sudden and
fierce to hold inside.

She brushed by a lone zombie standing as
still as a tree, almost as if it had been waiting for her to pass. It growled as
she screamed, then thrust its arms out, reaching for her. Its fingertips grazed
the edge of her arms as it moaned. Ana screamed, somehow managed to get away,
and ran as fast as she could, racing blindly into the belly of the woods and
farther away from the Fire Wall, hoping like hell she wouldn’t lose the seam
that could lead her back to Liam.

She kept running until the moaning
disappeared behind her. Just as she nearly settled into the comfort of quiet,
she heard moaning. It was coming from in front of her, behind her, and to her
left.

Shit, shit.

She moved farther from the seam and
spotted a cave to her right.

No way I’m going in there. Gotta find a
way back.

Moans suddenly multiplied in number and
volume, seeming to come from all four directions, pushing her closer to the
cave, even as she desperately searched for anywhere else to go.

Then she saw zombies moving among the
shadows. There were at least a dozen of them surrounding her, save for her only
path of escape — into the cave.

She looked around and thought there was a
small chance that the zombies had not yet seen her. She prayed the cave would
offer a safe harbor until the threat had cleared. She hunched over, trying to
make herself as small as possible as she quietly ran toward the cave, ducking her
head and crawling into its wide-open mouth.

She was inside only a handful of seconds
before the whoosh of a Network orb followed behind, throwing bright blue light
against the black walls. The color screamed loudly enough to alert the zombies
outside the cave.

The orb would get her killed.

As if to punctuate the threat, Kirkman
practically screamed: “And here’s City 6 fan favorite Anastasia Lovecraft,
daughter of murderer and winner of our most recent Darwin Games, Jonah
Lovecraft, seemingly trapped inside a cave! What WAS she thinking?”

Kirkman filled his delivery with the
usual dramatic pause, then said, “What
will
Anastasia do next? Will she
display her father’s derring-do and inventiveness? Or will she die a vicious
death like her poor, dear mother?”

“Shut the hell up!” Ana growled.

A handful of zombies ambled into the cave
as Ana fell several steps back, terrified, wondering how deep the cave went and
how many minutes — if not seconds — she had before her inevitable death.

Ana kept backing into the depths as the
tunnel grew musty and murky and wet all around her. She turned around, staring
into the darkness beyond the orb’s glow, then took a step forward as the orb
floated beside her. She managed one more step before the floor beneath her
disappeared.

Ana screamed, fell flat on her ass, then
spiraled down a sliding metal chute, spinning faster and faster, round and
round for what seemed like forever before it finally spit her hard onto the
ground and into darkness.

Ana tried to stand, rubbing her head with
her right hand while massaging her bruised ass with the left. Halfway to her
feet, a row of red lights flickered above, then turned brilliant, fully
illuminating her long and narrow glass-box prison, the bridge in front of her,
and the enormous cavern she’d fallen into.

Two orbs dropped from the darkness, one
of them coming closer to her and the other moving ahead of her into the
darkness.

The box was placed on one end of a long
and narrow bridge. A second light clicked on at the far side of the expanse,
where the second orb had gone, about 200 yards away, bleeding crimson light on
a second glass box. Inside the box stood a young man, whom she saw on the orb’s
monitor, no more than a few years older than she, wearing the blue coveralls
they wore in City 3.

The guy on the other side looked enough
like one of her oldest friends, Barnum, to make her uncomfortable. She
swallowed the thought as a third row of lights lit a wide, round platform in
the middle of the bridge. The center of the platform had a wide pedestal with a
big red button on top of it. A short sword leaned against the pedestal, glowing
red from the glimmering light above.

Oh God, not The King of the Bridge.

She peered down as bright white lights
flared to life beneath the bridge, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

One hundred feet below them was The Pit,
well stocked with vicious mutant boars, many of which were said to weigh more
than 600 pounds. Even through the glass box, she could hear the boars grunting,
waiting to be fed.

Ana remembered cheering as Jeffrey
Ramirez was torn to tatters about ten games before, after his expulsion from
City 6 following his verdict of guilty for six counts of rape. The memory gave
her a shiver. Ana hoped that if she lost her balance, the fall would kill her before
the boars got the chance.

The orb continued to hover beside her.
Kirkman said, “That’s right, folks, it’s The King of the Bridge Challenge! What
are the odds that two players would trigger the trapdoors so close together?
How fortunate they are that they won’t have to wait!”

Kirkman read the rules, which he probably
knew by heart, “The rules are simple, but the challenge is anything but. In the
center of the bridge is a platform that is actually an elevator to the surface.
Whoever gets to the platform first gets the sword, which they’ll need to defend
the platform once they press the button. Because in The King of the Bridge
Challenge, there can be only one king! But be careful, contestants, because the
bridge is narrow, and the fall is steep. And then, of course, there are the
boars!”

Kirkman paused as a third orb’s camera
zoomed in up close to a particularly ugly boar with sharp, disfigured fangs.
The audience roared in applause, which made Ana’s stomach roll.

“Anastasia Lovecraft, are you ready?”

Ana said nothing, but Kirkman laughed as
if she’d cracked a joke.

“Like father, like daughter; not very
talkative, eh? Well, let’s ask our other player, Cody Samuelson, playing for
City 3.

“Cody Samuelson, are you ready?”

The orb’s screen lit with the image of
the boy who resembled Barnum. He was scrawny, with curly brown hair, just like
her old friend. She swallowed, wondering if it would be harder to eliminate
someone who looked like a friend than it would be to kill a stranger.

The boy who wasn’t Barnum said nothing,
so Kirkman loudly repeated: “Cody Samuelson, are youuuuu ready to kill?”

Cody’s face twisted into an angry scowl.
“Death to the murderer’s daughter!” he said, raising his fist as if in mock
tribute to the “To Jonahs” Ana saw all too often while her father was playing
The Games.

Ana would have liked another minute, or
even thirty seconds, to assess her situation, but both glass boxes raised into
the rocks above as the lights burned brighter and the sound of the audience’s
cheers filled the cavern, almost in sync with the horrible screeching and
squealing from the monstrous boars below.

“Run!” Kirkman shouted.

Ana and Cody took off at the same time,
tearing from their glass boxes, then moving as fast as they dared along the
narrow bridge. Ana kept telling herself not to look back, knowing that doing so
would likely bring death.

Kirkman continued to talk, but Ana
ignored his every word, like she ignored the strobing from the orb above and
the screaming boars below.

Ana held her arms horizontally to her
side, turning her body into a “t,” focusing only on the certainty of her steps
as she set one foot in front of the other, maintaining momentum and forcing
herself not to consider Cody’s progress on his side of the narrow course.

Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him.
Just keep your mind on the path ahead. One foot in front of the other.

Her mind raced faster with every step,
wondering if she would be able to reach the platform before Cody, and if she
could, whether she could actually bring herself to murder someone.

Yes, it was in self-defense. But still,
it was murder.

Don’t look, don’t look.

Nearly there, Ana succumbed to temptation
and was shocked to see Cody was almost twice as close as she was to the
platform. Realization fueled her doubt; doubt nearly caused her to fall.

Ana gasped, thrusting her hands out in
front of her, swinging wildly to regain her balance as the heel of her left
foot planted itself hard against the ground, righting her body just seconds
before falling off the precipice and into the pit of hungry boars.