Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (22 page)

“Jake!”

At the moment she yells, Ashley lunges at Jake. She hits his back and he crumples forward. The pistol goes flying from his hands and skids across the rooftop. Jake lands with an “
Oof!
” and immediately rolls to the side, upending Ash, just like we've been trained to do in hapkido. He spins around and pins her.

Reggie and Kelly wade in and pull the two apart. I look for the gun, but it's not there. It suddenly appears in Stephen's hands. For a moment, everyone stands still, then he flips it and hands it to me. He holds my gaze for a moment, and I can see in his eyes that he's begging me not to let anyone kill him. Not yet. He doesn't want to die. Not this way. He knows he will soon. He knows he'll reanimate.

What's worse, he looks like that's the path he has chosen for himself.

“Everyone, settle down,” I say. They all retreat a step or two, ducking, and I realize I'm waving the gun around. I lower it and say, “Let's just settle down, okay?”

“You're a dead man,” Jake snarls, lunging against Reggie's and Kelly's arms.

“I think that's already been established, Mr. Espinosa.”

“So, you
were
bitten down there.”

He shakes his head. “No. I was infected before this.”

“On the highway?”

Another shake of the head.

“The injection. On the tram. I hadn't expected it to take hold so soon. Our past attempts took several days longer.” He shrugs. “It doesn't matter now.”

I narrow my eyes. “Why?”

“It's complicated.”

“You… Are you saying you Volunteered?”

“Okay. Maybe not so complicated after all.”

“I don't understand. You work for Arc. You developed the failsafe. What do you get out of volunteering?”

“I'm a lowly researcher in their R and D group. Do you know what I make a year? Barely enough to feed my children.”

Hearing those words tears away at my insides. This man, who subjected us to the worst kinds of horrors imaginable—who invented such evil, terrible things—has a family, a wife, children? How could he do this to us? To them?

“Do they know?”

He shakes his head. “They wouldn't understand.”

“God damn it! Of course they wouldn't understand!
I
don't understand.” I raise the pistol and point it again at Stephen's face. But there's no will in me to use it and he can see that. He's always seen it. I've killed, but I'm no murderer.

“I think I understand,” Kelly whispers. He gently pulls my hands down and away.

“Yes, I thought you might, Mr. Corben,” Stephen says.

“What's he talking about?” Reggie asks.

“Son of a bitch! Just shoot him,” Jake pleads. “You're making a mistake.”

Reggie shakes him and tells him to be quiet.

“So, what happens when you die?”

“Same as any other person with an implant: it activates. Once it does, I immediately upload into a sub-stream and, if I'm in Gameland, my Operator takes over control. I become part of
The Game.
More importantly—at least for me—my children get to eat and have good medicine. Like your inhaler there, Miss Daniel. You didn't think that was free, did you? Somebody paid for it. Dearly, I would guess.”

Confusion stops me for a moment. I'd never thought about what it cost to buy my inhaler every month, who paid for it, how.

“My father?”

“In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Shit,” I exhale. I run my hands through my hair. “God damn Arc. God damn those bastards. This is— We can't let them do this.”

Kelly shakes his head. “Yes, we can. We have to.”

“What?”

“There's no other choice at this point. I'm already infected and the disease is progressing rapidly. If I don't enter
The Game
, my contract is void. I join the IUs already here, and all this…” He gestures around us. “All this will have been for nothing. Including everything that you've been put through.”

“And he'll have died for nothing.”

I narrow my eyes at Kelly, wondering how much of this he figured out and much he already knew. Did he know?

“How do we fit in all this?”

“No, wait!” Jake says. “That's not the only choice. Don't believe him.”

“How do you fit in?” Stephen asks. “You were my ticket into LI.”

“It's all a lie,” Jake says, tugging. Reggie and Kelly don't let go.

“And I'm your ticket into Gameland,” Stephen finishes. “Your only chance to escape is inside its walls.”

“Ticket?” Reggie says. “I'm not liking what that sounds like.”

“The only way in is through one of the access points,” Stephen explains. His voice is growing weaker, more strained. “The code to open them is uploaded into my implant. Each Volunteer gets one. Each is unique; each is good only once and only to enter, not exit.”

“So you take us in?”

Stephen stumbles to his feet. His balance is whacked and he nearly falls over.

“We can't take him!” Jake argues. “He's infected.”

“We've got no choice,” I say. “You heard what he said. He's our only way in.”

“I don't believe that. There's got to be another way. I don't even think we need to go to Gameland.”

I turn to him and say, “Look, I made a promise to get everyone off the island. I tried, and failed. Now we have another chance and I intend to keep my promise. If you know of another way, I'd be happy to hear it, because walking into a place where CUs can do shit that IUs can't, where they don't just bite you but can actually shoot back, where they aren't all that easy to kill, well, that just isn't my idea of fun.”

Jake stares at me for a moment. He's got nothing and he knows it.

“Yeah? Well, what about your other promise?”

I frown. “What other promise?”

“To be at the front of the line to quiet any of us if we became infected.”

I look at Stephen, then turn back to Jake. “He's not one of us.”

“You're…wasting time,” Stephen pants, sweat pouring off of his face. His skin has taken on a gray tint. A trickle of blood leaks from the corner of one of his eyes. “It's time to make up your minds. Do you want to go home, or not?”

 

 

“What was in that syringe?”
I ask Stephen.

He lurches ahead, hands bound, moving more and more stiffly with each step. Jake had wanted to gag him too, to prevent him from biting or spitting, but I overruled him. I need answers. Now. It's our last chance to get any before we go inside. Before Stephen dies and reanimates. I finger the trigger of the pistol resting in the crook of my left elbow, held in my good hand, nestled inside the sling. He knows it's there. He must know what I'm thinking, that once we get inside, there's no way I can let him live. One bullet. Hopefully it'll do the job. I want him to do the right thing, if not for him, then for us.

“What was in it? The green stuff. You need to tell me now.”

For someone as sick as he is, as quickly as he's worsening, Stephen sets a brisk pace. We're out in front, the others trailing behind, not all of them convinced we're doing the right thing. Well, the time for suggestions has passed. We've run out of options. We're a mile from Gameland; behind us is Arc.

My only worry right now is that we won't make it there in time, that he'll die and turn before we can get inside. I push harder and he keeps pace. Getting stranded outside with him when he reanimates as an IU is not part of the plan.

I glance back to make sure no one is dropping too far behind. Jake and Tanya are lagging. I ask Kelly to go back and hurry them up.

“The syringes. There were two, weren't there? One green and one white.”

He coughs and nods.

“I knew it. What happened to the green one?”

“Lost it.”

“Don't bullshit me. What was it?”

Drool falls from his lips, tinged red. I make sure I'm close enough to hear what he has to say, yet far enough out of his reach to minimize the risk. Though, at this point, I'm pretty sure if I was going to be infected by bodily fluids, I already would have been.

“Alpha and Omega,” he tells me. “One was the virus, the other a vaccine.”

This surprises me. “There's a vaccine?”

He nods.

“You gave yourself the virus?”

It's now obvious that the green one was the cure, since he gave himself the white. But if that's true, then why would he try to give Kelly the vaccine?

Unless that was part of Kelly's agreement with Arc. Did he make a deal before coming back to rescue Jake?

Stephen coughs. “It was never intended for you, the white one.”

Kelly catches up. “He going to make it?” He checks the time on his Link, then looks up and utters something under his breath.

I raise my eyes and get my first glimpse of the scorched black walls of Gameland coming up over the horizon, shorter than the wall surrounding the island, yet somehow more imposing. Watching it grow, all thoughts are stripped from my mind. All save the knowledge that a vaccine exists and Arc hasn't let the public have it.

Kelly, Stephen and I are the first to reach the wall. It towers above us, dark, featureless, smooth. The late afternoon sun shines fully upon it, and yet it seems to shun the light. Or absorb it. It's hard to tell. There's no sheen, no reflection. Nothing.

“What the hell is it made of?”

“Titanium dalcron ester,” Stephen grunts, leaning against it. “It's a polycarbonate alloy, harder than titanium, resistant to just about anything you can throw at it.”

I place my hand on the surface and it seems to hum. It's neither hot, nor cold. It feels greasy, but when I take my hand away and rub my fingers, they're dry and calloused and rough.

“Where is there an access point?” Kelly asks.

We look around. Reggie, Micah and Ash are just stepping up to the wall, but Jake and Tanya have fallen behind again. They're a good two or three hundred feet back. Tanya's got her arm around Jake's shoulder.

“What's up with them?”

I shake my head.

“Over here,” Kelly says. He's standing about twenty feet away, running his fingers over what appears to be a seam in the wall. We walk over and I see that the slight indentation runs in a rectangle roughly the size of a normal door. A small recessed sign warns us that access is restricted to authorized personnel. As if they actually expected someone unauthorized to try and break in. I guess they were right.

Kelly slaps the wall with the palm of his hand. There's a muffled thump, barely audible. It even seems to swallow the sound. “How does this thing work?”

Stephen leans against it and gestures weakly. He's no longer sweating and his skin actually looks slightly better than earlier. But his eyes are darker, redder. “Proximity,” he says. “We'll wait for the others before opening it. I don't know how long it'll remain open.”

Jake and Tanya finally catch up. Tanya looks absolutely exhausted. She's leaning heavily on Jake now.

“She really needs a rest,” Jake says.

“We will, once we're inside and at a safe place,” I tell them. I try not to think about the unlikelihood of that happening.

I turn to Stephen and he nods, but his knees give out before he can move. He slips down the wall. Kelly and I go over to him and help him up.

“Everyone needs to gather around. Get close.” I turn and ask Stephen what we should expect once we're in.

“You'll be safer near the wall. It's protected by a short-range signal which both blocks communication between the implant and the stream and induces a mild nociceptive stimulus—pain—that's somewhat effective in keeping CUs away. You'll feel it, too, but it shouldn't be anything too bad—a mild irritant is all. More importantly, Operators avoid sending their Players close to the border because it renders them blind and their Players uncontrollable. Once in, you'll need to leave me. As long as you're quiet and remain out of sight, you'll be safe.”

He looks at me when he says this. He's telling me not to use the gun. He better be right, because I'll do what I have to do. If it means blasting his head off, then I will.

“Follow the wall, get as far away from me as you possibly can as quickly as you can. Once I turn, all bets are off. I won't remember you, of course. I won't remember anything. I'll be drawn away from the wall and toward the center of Gameland because of the neurelectric irritant, so you needn't worry about me following you.”

“Until your Player takes over,” Jake says.

“There's a script for
The Game
: kill other Players or be killed. You don't fit into it.”

His body shudders and he clutches his stomach.

I take in a deep breath and ask, “Are we ready?”

Nobody nods. Then again, nobody says no, either.

We turn Stephen around and slide him over to the access point.

“Closer,” he says. “Hold me up. Press me up tight.”

Kelly grabs him under the arms and holds him against the wall, positioning him inside the area marked by the indentation. The humming sound stops.

Nothing happens.

“Did we break it?”

But then there's a hiss of air, a thump, and the panel draws inward and begins to slide to the right, exposing a darkened recess a few feet deep.

“Everyone, hurry up. Get inside!”

Kelly drags Stephen in. Jake carries Tanya. The rest of us crowd around. Every fiber of my being screams at me to turn around. The looks on the others' faces tell me we're all feeling it. I pray we're doing the right thing.

“Shit, this is fucked,” Reggie mutters. He takes a deep breath and then, as if on cue, the door slides shut and we're plunged into darkness.