The Aftermath (6 page)

Finally, the red name on West End disappears, along with the picture above it, and Olivia closes the map. I don’t need it anymore, though; while Olivia talked about strategy and raids and points—apparently earning them is an important part of playing the game—I committed it to memory.

Olivia plays me consistently for two days, waiting until my head splits from hunger and my stomach is about to cave in on itself to feed me. I use these forty-eight hours as an opportunity to practice getting in and out of her mind. I also have enough time to come up with various explanations for this ability I’ve gained that none of my friends seem to possess.

Brain tumors—her brain or mine.

Gamer–character telepathy.

A sudden blow to the head—one that came from a boy who was completely out of place in The Aftermath, at least if my faulty memory can be trusted. Despite my uncertainty about the boy, this is the theory that makes the most sense. Even though I’m still not entirely sure of all the events that took place afterward.

My chance at escape finally comes fifty-two hours after Olivia’s return to the game, on a Wednesday afternoon. She’s going on a trip with her father. She will be gone for five days. And she’s convinced the others to take a break right along with her.

“I’m putting us on Group Save,” she makes me tell everyone else as we huddle around in The Save. She has me standing in the middle of the room, with my hands on my hips. “So don’t get any ideas about going ahead without me.”

When April complains, Ethan and Jeremy come to Olivia’s defense.

Jeremy shrugs his broad shoulders and then sits in the chair by the door. “It’s not a big deal.” He shifts his body so that he’s sideways, draping his long legs over the armrest.

“He’s right, April,” Ethan says. I hear him moving behind me—his shoes make a scratching noise on the floor as he comes close. “It’s five days, not forever. Besides, I have schoolwork to catch up on.” He places his chin gently on the top of my head and circles his arms around me, locking my elbows in place by my sides. Suddenly, I’m dizzy.

Let go of me.

The pressure on my head—in the exact location I was recently injured—makes me nauseous. I can smell the acidic soap he used an hour ago when he washed up in the privy downstairs. Feel the tips of his fingers pressed into the flesh on either side of my belly button.

I’m not sure I want his hands on me anymore. Because nothing about the two of us is what I thought it to be. Our bodies are being used by Olivia and Landon.

Please, just let me go.

Olivia makes me turn slightly, smile up at him. She moves my hands so that they curl over his forearms. “That settles it. Group Save.”

Olivia sets my character on something called Self-Sustain Mode. I watch through her eyes as she configures my Self-Sustain list. One protein bar a day. Two bottles of water. Enough food and fluid to keep me alive, but nothing more. Well, as far as she knows. But I don’t plan on eating any more stale protein bars in the near future. Once I’m outside of the game, I hope I won’t ever have to even look at a protein bar again.

She leaves me in the room over the bar with the others, cloaked in semidarkness, lying next to Ethan. I use whatever link I have to her brain to make sure she is completely away from the game before I consider moving. Then, just for good measure, I wait about another two hours, staring at Jeremy, who’s motionless in the chair across from the bed. Finally, I unwrap myself from Ethan’s arms and ease up from the flat mattress. I grab a flashlight from my bag.

My legs are numb from the position Olivia left me in. I shake them out and pace the small room a few times before kneeling down to look for April’s holster of weapons. She’s on the floor with her blue eyes open, lying on her side on one of the ripped plastic mats we brought from the jail. I find her knives in her backpack, which she’s hugging to her chest.

“You’ll get more,” I whisper. But I still feel wrong for stealing them. Her arms tighten around my hands, and I let out a high-pitched shriek, sprawling backward to land on my bottom.

Slowly, April sits up. She presses her back to the wall and reaches into her bag. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck and arms stand on end, and my fingertips tighten around the Glock. Her blank eyes stare right at me. She starts to draw something from her satchel.

Her gamer is back. Her gamer has returned and she’s found me out and I’ll have no other choice but to defend myself.

But I shine the flashlight over the objects in her hand and realize she’s not holding a weapon at all. She’s just reached for food and water. I watch as she takes mechanical bites of her snack cake, a few sips of water. This continues for about five minutes. Then she wraps her forearms around her backpack again and resumes her position lying down.

What I just witnessed must be Self-Sustain in action.

We’re like robots.

My stomach pitches violently, and I fight back nausea as I crawl back to April and take her knives from the bag. I drop the weapons into my own backpack and start to leave, but something stops me. My world may not be what I thought it was, but these are the people I had believed I cared about. That I still can’t help caring about, even if everything they’ve ever said to me were someone else’s words.

I have to try to wake them.

“April?” I touch her shoulder, shaking it softly. I bend until my face is close to hers and our eyes meet. “Do you... Are you in there?” She doesn’t move. No blinking, not even a muscle twitch. She just continues to look straight ahead, clutching her bag like a child would her favorite toy.

I try the same thing with Ethan and Jeremy, but it’s no use. They’re just as unconscious as she is.

Shoulders slumped in defeat, I walk to the door and grab the knob. A sharp jolt of electricity streaks up my arm and through the rest of my body. I fall to my knees, screaming.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I’m on the floor facedown, convulsing and choking, for what seems like an eternity. When I finally work up enough strength to push myself onto my hands and knees, the current is still pinging its way through my bones. I squint up at the doorknob and rake my nails over my palms.

Why hasn’t this ever happened before? I’ve gone in and out of this room plenty of times, and not once have I been shocked.

But I should have anticipated safeguards built into the game’s system. The prospect of getting out of The Aftermath made me so giddy, I forgot caution. Never again. I get up carefully, trying to pretend I don’t feel the pain or smell the stomach-churning odor of singed hair. Supporting myself against the wall, I look around the room and weigh my options.

There’s the window. It’s over the bed, but not so high up I won’t be able to reach it. I could put the crate on the bed. Stand on it while I try to pry the window open. And then what?

I’m skinny, but not so thin I can squeeze through such a tiny space. And even if I could, I’m on the second floor. There’s nothing in here I can use to climb to the ground. Attempting to walk fifty miles with a broken arm or leg is a death wish.

If I want to leave this building, I’ve no other choice but to use the door. I rip a large piece of cloth from the tattered hem of my jeans and wrap it around my hand before I grab the knob again. It does nothing to help me. The shock is just as horrible as before, but at least I know what to expect. I hurl the door open and stumble through the current and into the hallway, gripping the banister for support.

Hopefully this was the only surprise, and the front door won’t set me on fire.

As I pack as many protein bars and bottles of water as I can into my bag, I start breathing heavily—an overwhelming surge of feeling is pulsing through me. Physical pain and anticipation and, most of all, absolute dread.

“I’m strong,” I whisper, shrugging my arms through my backpack straps. I tighten them and groan at the weight. It has to be at least forty pounds. “I’m strong. I can do this by myself and survive.”

But before I leave for good, I find myself upstairs, standing across from the electric door and gazing into The Save at the three people I’ve no other choice but to leave behind.

* * *

A couple of years ago, during one of our missions to a warehouse that was on the verge of collapsing, I discovered an old compass. It was bright orange, made of a thick, grainy plastic, with a broken lid. I’ve never used it—or rather, Olivia has never made me use it—but I’ve always carried it around in the front pocket of my backpack. Maybe...keeping it on me meant extra points for my gamer.

Whatever her reasons were, that compass quickly becomes my salvation, and I grip it in my hand as I walk, glancing down at the little arrows every few minutes.

I can’t afford to make a mistake.

I am small enough to stay hidden and keep out of the way of other characters, so when daylight breaks and I realize that I’m at least fifteen miles into my trip, I decide to stop. It takes me another mile of stumbling through overgrown weeds and avoiding the holes in the ground—probably purposefully dug just large enough to catch someone’s foot and result in a broken ankle—to find safe refuge. It’s not a building or a house like I hope for but a crumbling underpass, nearly hidden from the world thanks to gutted and rusted cars and honeysuckle vines.

“Twenty minutes and then I have to leave. No more than that,” I say as I sit next to my bag on the concrete. I take a careful sip of water, wincing at the way it burns my dry throat.

“What happens in twenty minutes?” a voice asks from the far end of the underpass, and I lose my breath.

As I scramble to my feet, the bottle of water I was trying to preserve falls over and liquid seeps into the hot, dry ground. I don’t have time to try and save it, so I sling my backpack around my shoulders and prepare to run. But then a second voice—this one coming from the direction I planned to go in—stops me.

“Where are you going, girl?”

I dart my gaze between the two boys who’ve trapped me in. I had hoped this wouldn’t happen, but I do my best to appear calm as they circle around me, their ragged shoes sliding dust and trash and scraps of glass and green metal from one of the cars about the concrete. They greedily eye my bag.

“What do you have in there?” the short, bone-thin one with the bright blue backpack asks. He looks ten years old but I’m guessing he’s twelve or thirteen, judging by his squeaky voice. My body tenses as I remember awakening three years ago. It had been dark, very dark. The walls around me had been coated with blood splatters. And then I’d noticed the shackles—rows of them extending from the baseboards and dangling from the ceiling.

I was thirteen then.

“Energy bars, water,” I say. “Enough knives to make you wish you were dead. I’ve got a gun, too. Come too close and I’ll show you how it works.”

This is a partial lie. I’ve already decided that I refuse to kill anyone else. Still, if I’m threatened, I’m not above injuring someone.

“Where are you going?”

“Meeting up with my clan.”

The taller one stares out toward the west at the miles of trees flanking either side of the underpass. “We just came from that way,” he says, fingering the strap of my bag. I dart away from him. “Didn’t see anyone.”

“You didn’t look hard enough.”

“We need food,” the short one says. “We ran out and our health levels...”

I don’t feel any sympathy toward the gamer saying these words, but my stomach tangles into a million knots as I take in the boy who is slowly being destroyed by him. My arms tremble violently as I fumble through my backpack.

“Here,” I say, shoving two protein bars and a bottle of water at each boy. I’ll probably regret my decision later when I’m hungry and thirsty, but there’s no way I can deny how gaunt and wrecked these boys—these characters—are.

“Take care of your characters.” I zip my bag. “They look like they’ll die at any moment.”

When I take off again, this time through the woods, I hear the taller boy say, “Sympathizers make me want to hurl.”

I take a short break every few hours. By the second evening, when I have walked at least forty-five miles, I force myself to stop in the woods to rest. I take shelter on the forest floor on a bed of weeds I pray aren’t poisonous. I remove my shoes, but my feet are so blistered they’re hot to the touch, and I instantly regret taking them off. “Five more miles,” I say. “Ten at the most. I have to do this.”

When daylight appears again, I start walking. I don’t even know why I bothered resting so long. I didn’t get any real sleep—the kind of rest I’m just getting used to now that I have some freedom from Olivia. Every time a leaf crunched or the breeze ruffled a tree limb, I startled, coming to my aching feet with my gun drawn.

I am ready to rest without a weapon and not stare over my shoulder.

Four hours later, I am still walking, the sun rubbing viciously on the back of my neck and a heavy pain coiling in my stomach. I know I’ve traveled at least ten miles. Every muscle in my body feels as if it’s been beaten to a pulp. My skin is on fire. And I’m still inside The Aftermath. Tears squeeze through my squinted eyes and spill down my dry cheeks like rain trickling through dirt. This is the first time in my memory that I’ve cried, and it hurts, both physically and emotionally. I slump against a tree, not caring that the rough wood chafes the skin on my sunburned back.

And then I see it.

Through the maze of trees, something glints in the sunlight. For the longest time, I gape at it. Breathe and stare. Swallow and breathe. The knots in my belly loosen and swift fluttering replaces them. “Please...” I whisper. I don’t realize that I’m on my feet and running until I break through the trees and find myself on the road again.

Several hundred yards in the distance, a silver fence stretches across the landscape. The only intact fence I’ve ever seen in The Aftermath is the one around the recreation yard of the jail. Perhaps this fence will be the one that secures my freedom.

I don’t care about the soles of my feet or my tired legs. I run as fast as my legs will carry me, pumping my arms and letting a hot breeze blow my hair from my forehead.

When I reach the gate, I curl my fingertips in the metal and fall against it. In the thirty-nine months of my life that I can remember, I cry for the second time.

Several minutes pass before I’m able to calm myself down enough to think rationally. I pace the fence, looking for a way out—a torn part to crawl under, a latch, anything. Twenty feet above me at the top are coils of razor wire. This puts scaling the fence out of the question.

I sift through the pack of weapons I took from April until I find a pair of rusted pliers. I run my fingertips along the bottom of the fence. I am about to start pulling at a corroded section of the metal when a male voice behind me says, “You do know escape is against the law, right?”