Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (40 page)

The wooded path is densely overgrown, the narrow rotted plank walk nearly overtaken. I risk the light from my Link, shining it ahead of me; it's better than losing the path or walking into a low-hanging tree branch. I move as fast as I can, the snapping of the branches loud to my ears. But at this point, noise doesn't matter; it's too late to worry about that now. The forest has come alive around us, filling with the sounds of bodies charging through it and, as if there were any doubt what those bodies are, the moans of the lost.

How there can be so many in an empty place like this?

What better place to escape the sun?

Micah places his hand between my shoulders when I slow at a fork in the path. It's unmarked, no sign to tell us which way to go.

“Left,” he says without hesitation.

I turn and head up the right path before he can argue. Right seems to lead more directly uphill.

The path is even narrower than the one we were on, and the walkway disintegrates beneath our feet. The further we go, the farther away the sounds behind us grow. I slow to a walk, sweeping the wan light from my Link screen from left to right.

“You lost it, didn't you?”

“Shh. It's here.”

“I told you we should've—”

“It's here,” I say, climbing over a fallen tree trunk. The path reappears on the other side. “Ha!”

As I step down off of the trunk, I feel a set of cold bony fingers wrap around my ankle. I let out a strangled cry and fall into the brush. The hand won't release me. I turn and kick out with my other foot and try to scramble away, but it still won't let me go.

“Stop struggling!” Micah whispers. He bends down and hacks away with this knife. “It's just a vine. Christ! Or should I say, it's just one of those
man-eating
vines.”

“Very funny,” I manage to get out.

He finishes freeing my foot and leans back for a rest against the trunk. Something walks through the woods back the way we came. It's far enough away and apparently heading in the wrong direction that we stay where we are, panting as quietly as we can. The sounds eventually begin to fade. After several minutes have passed, I strain my ears, but I can't even hear a moan.

“How the hell did that Player get behind us?” Micah mutters.

I shake my head. If not for that dog, it might've bitten one or both of us. I give silent thanks for the animal. It scared the crap out of me, but it was the Player the animal didn't like. After Micah killed the monster, the dog pretty much ignored us.

Fatigue overwhelms me. I can feel the numbness slipping into my bones, stiffening my muscles. I can feel it pressing me down. How did everything come to this point? Who's to blame?

Is anyone?

Am I?

“I'm going to try Kelly again,” I whisper groggily.

Micah nods.

I wait for the Links to connect, silently mouthing a prayer to the stream gods that he's there and okay.

“Jessie?”

I let a huge breath and almost laugh with relief. “Kelly, are you okay?” I whisper.

The tiny image in the screen frowns, but nods slowly. “We're…fine.” He looks to the side. “Mostly. Look, things are a bit—”

“I saw. We're on our way.”

“No! Just stay where you are. Okay? Everything here is going to be okay.”

“Where are you?” I ask. I can't see anything behind him. It's all dark.

“Just stay put. I don't want you coming here! You're safer where you are. I'll see you soon. Love you.” He nods once, then disconnects.

A sense of foreboding comes over me. I struggle against it, pushing and tearing it away. No more, I tell myself. No more letting my body just flow. No more adapting and flexing. I will not stay put. I'm coming whether he wants me to or not. I'm almost there anyway.

“That didn't sound good,” Micah whispers.

“It's just because of Jake,” I say, and I move to push myself off of the ground. That's what I tell myself, but even I don't believe it.

The sky directly overhead has begun to lighten. It's a slightly lighter shade of gray, but the approaching dawn hasn't managed to make it this far down into the brush. I stand and turn and out of the corner of my eye I see a deeper piece of the darkness detach itself from the path ahead. It moves swiftly and silently, like a wraith, and it's on me before I can even cry out.

I fall backward, straight into Micah. I hear the crack of his head against the trunk of the fallen tree. I hear the air leave his lungs. And I know by the way he falls without making another sound that he won't be there to help me this time around.

The weight of the new attacker bears down on me, pressing me to the ground. The pain in my shoulder is incredible, a searing, ripping pain, as if my arm is being ripped from its socket. It's more than I can bear. I can't do it anymore. This thing…this un-human creature of darkness has broken me.

I turn my head away—away from that lipless mouth and its hot breath and its yellowed teeth—and offer it my neck. And it howls as if it knows it has won.

 

The last winter
I can remember with snow was the year Eric left for the Marines. His announcement had come as such a surprise to us all, given how much he seemed to hate the Undead. Not just them, but the whole idea of them and everything they represented. The Omegaman Forces had become ubiquitous, almost to the point where the living infantry was practically obsolete.

“I want to understand them better,” I remember him telling me, the day he packed up to leave.

Of course, I was in no mood to understand him. I didn't
want
to understand him. He was a hypocrite as far as I was concerned. My whole entire life he'd spent railing against the creatures—how they'd killed Dad and caused the destruction of our family and our social standing. What had changed?

It was because of the Undead that my beloved grandfather, once a proud military leader, was left broken, a shell of a man, a shadow of the leader he'd once been. He was still fearsome, intimidating, but he had lost all his authority. The destruction of his reputation had left him jobless and directionless, a ward of a parentless household with a grandson trying too hard to be a man, who resented his very presence there, and a granddaughter equally lost and adrift in self-doubt. He spent his days in forced retirement sitting in a darkened room in the back of a modest house, growing more bitter and resentful. There were days when he wouldn't even come out, not until dinnertime.

It wasn't that I shared my brother's feelings about the creatures. I was two when Dad died and have almost no memories of the man—certainly no feelings of attachment—so the idea of hating the Undead was more hypothetical than personal. I grew up in a generation where they performed essential duties, things that nobody else wanted to perform, tasks that were too dangerous for the living. I was just as grateful as everyone else for them.

And then came Arc. In just a few short years, they reclaimed parts of Long Island, petitioned the government to allow hunting and finally received the okay. The rich and privileged took up the sport in droves, but permits were limited, driving up the price and the demand. But there was such a huge public outcry—driven more by the inequity of it than the inhumanity—that Arc was forced to temporarily shut down the program.

But the protests didn't stop. Now the humanitarians saw an opportunity. There'd been protests in the past, petitioning the government to stop the Omegaman project and find a cure for Reanimation, to stop them using our dead to make the lives of the living easier. Thousands died during the riots; a schism formed in the country with the Southern States Coalition seceding in a bloody revolt. New Merica was formed from the remaining bits, and it isolated itself from the rest of the world.

Arc eventually abandoned the whole idea of hunting, although, in truth, they had already started looking forward by then. They were secretly building Gameland, adapting the neuroleptic implants for use in something even more devious than civil and military applications: entertainment. Their scientists adjusted and tweaked the implants to get them to work better, become more reliable. Arc wanted to enhance responsiveness. They developed better VR and monitoring systems.

The military was all for it, of course. The government was all for it. The new advancements might help return New Merica to a global power once again. All because of the Undead.

And my brother wanted to understand them.

“What do you hope to achieve by doing that?” Grandpa had challenged Eric. “I hope you don't think you're going to change anything from the inside. All you'll end up doing is bringing the family more grief.”

“You deserve the blame for our grief,” Eric had replied. Nobody talked to Grandpa that way. Nobody except my brother. “You brought this hell down on us. On our family. On New Merica. On the world.”

If the family was fractured before that, if was hopelessly torn apart after Eric left. It was only then that I realized how much my brother had kept us together.

I was twelve and my family was that only in name. I had no father. My mother was a drunken whore. My grandfather a bitter and overbearing, though completely ineffective, patriarch. And my brother had abandoned us to seek out some sort of spiritual enlightenment by communing with the Undead.

Was it any wonder I didn't have any friends?

It was late January, I guess, and I was walking home from school, taking the long way to avoid the usual bullies who made it their life's purpose to torment me. I'd discovered this trail through the woods behind the house, one that ran alongside a creek, and I was lost in the dazzling brightness of the sun shining off the snow. I had my eyes cast downward looking for animal tracks. The woods had been home to badgers and skunks, but other, larger, creatures had recently been frequenting the still half-wild place: deer, fox, wild dogs.

I was following a set of large prints that I fantasized as belonging to a wolf—the creatures had supposedly gone extinct years earlier—when I stopped for a rest on a sunny stump. Earlier, the sun had melted the snow from the tops of the branches, but all was now layered in ice. The day had grown bitterly cold despite the clear sky. The air was so crisp and the sun so sharp that everything seemed to crackle. Even my breath coming out of me, freezing in an instant, felt crystalline. I had grown distracted playing with it, huffing balls of air from my lungs and watching them hover and dissipate, that I'd forgotten where I was.

That's when I noticed the shadow in the wood.

It was low in profile, shimmery, almost ghostlike. But then it separated itself from the tree and stood out in the open, staring and panting. Not a wolf, I realized, but a dog. A very large and vicious-looking dog. And yet I wasn't afraid of it.

When I stood up, it slipped silently away.

In the weeks that followed, as the snow grew deeper, then afterward as it began to melt away, I followed the tracks through the woods, thinking of it as some kind of game. I could tell the fresher tracks made during the night from the older ones, each carefully marked by spots of fresh yellow snow. At the end of each day, the dog would show itself to me, a little closer each time. One day, it was so close, that I reached out and touched it. And this time it didn't shy or run away.

Something passed between us that day, an understanding. And acceptance. I had a friend.

I was a lonely child, as could be imagined given my family's history, and this dog had somehow made me forget my loneliness.

But though I considered the dog my friend, I was never its. We met in the woods and I would watch it do its half-wild doggy things and sometimes it would play and sometimes I would do my half-wild girly things or practice my hapkido moves. And it would watch me. It was waiting for something to happen.

And the last day there was snow—it rained the whole next week and the ground was too mushy to walk on—was the last day I saw it.

It was also the day I met Kelly.

He'd later admitted that he had been secretly watching me too, from somewhere deeper in the woods. If I was any older, I might've been freaked out by the idea, but I wasn't older, and I wasn't afraid. I could tell that Kelly was a good person. The dog seemed to accept his presence there, too.

So it was that on that day, the last dog day of that long and coldest winter, Kelly became my friend, replacing the only other friend I ever had.

I never blamed him for making the dog go away. I knew he wasn't responsible. Rather, it was almost like the dog had brought Kelly to me.

But on that first and last day, I remember Kelly pointing to it as it rolled around in the newly exposed earth and running around as if it was the most wondrous thing that the snow had finally decided to leave after that horribly long and bitterly cold winter. He pointed and laughed and it was a wonderful sound to hear.

He looked over at me on that first day of spring, that last day of snow and the last dog day, and he smiled warmly and asked, “What's his name?”

 

“Shinji,” I say
, studying the dog's collar. The chain is old and rusting, the chrome flaking off. The metal tag is nearly worn smooth.
“Its name is Shinji.”

Micah nods and rubs the knot on the back of his head while I rub the slobber off my neck.

“I believe that means ‘faithful' in Japanese,” he comments.

I frown at him in amusement. He comes up with the randomest shit sometimes.

“So I've been told anyway,” he adds.

“How's your head?”

“Still hard. It's my neck that hurts. Must've wrenched it when I landed.”

“Yeah, well, you hit that tree trunk pretty hard.”

“How long was I out?”

“Couple of minutes only. Just long enough for this animal to rip my arm out of my shoulder in its eagerness to drown me in happy-slobber.”