The Aftermath (22 page)

I can’t watch this. Can’t stomach it. But Bennett knew that all along.

“He’s going to kill Lancaster,” I gasp. “Declan’s going to go kill Thomas Lancaster. Are you happy?”

Bennett holds up his hand, and the men stop. “Now was that so hard?” He grins down at me, winking. “We’ve already caught them, by the way. Your boyfriend and the other two are in custody. In a holding facility.”

Suddenly, my chest is on fire and I can’t catch my breath. These men just beat my friends—and for absolutely no reason. And LanCorp has Declan. I force myself to breathe in, breathe out. I look up from my lap just as Ethan glances up. Our eyes lock. There’s so much fury in his, anger directed toward me, it almost knocks me breathless again.

Then Bennett says to the two guards, “Take these two back to the cellar. Ms. Virtue and I have to catch our ride.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In the past several weeks, I’ve had hundreds of fantasies about the day I would leave The Aftermath. In each and every one of my fantasies, I exit the game happy—utterly unsure of my future but so ecstatic that I made it to Olivia and Declan’s world, to the Provinces, away from the horrors of The Aftermath, that nothing else matters.

I am leaving the game now in a car, one of those self-driving vehicles I witnessed once before through my gamer’s eyes. I’m so close to the border that if my wrists weren’t shackled, I could reach out the car window and skim my hand along the metal. But I’m not happy. I’m not free. Instead, I’m preparing myself.

For whatever will happen to me at The Aftermath’s holding facility.

For meeting with Lancaster himself.

For more torture and pain.

For death.

The gates rattle open, and the car speeds through it. For some reason, I expect to feel something—a tingle in my head or a temporary loss of consciousness—but nothing happens. I rest my head against the window. Stare out the tinted glass into the night. There’s nothing but forest on either side of the highway. It looks just like the game, and my chest goes numb. Was I fooling myself, thinking that the outside world was something worth fighting for?

Was everything in Olivia’s head my imagination—some other sick effect of the injury that started all this?

I feel heat behind my eyes. I drag my gaze down to my fingers. The inside of the car is dark, but I can see the bruises on the backs of them, running up my wrists and forearms. Knocks from the moderators I fought off with Declan and Wesley and Mia. Blows from the guards who killed Jeremy—who may have killed...

Just thinking about my friends sends me reeling forward. I cast a glance at Bennett sitting on my left side. Does he know if the rest of my friends are still alive? Or would he tell me they’re gone already.

Deleted.

Dead.

Casualties of The Aftermath.

A few minutes later, the car rolls to a stop in front of a building—the only one around as far as my eyes can see—that must be at least 150 floors high. The wide tinted-glass doors at the lower level slide apart, and the car moves forward, parking on a lift. Is this the holding facility that Bennett had mentioned?

I bounce in my seat to try and peek out the car window as the lift rises up, but Bennett sinks his fingers into my shoulders, slamming me back. Out of instinct, I clasp my hands together and fling them up at his face in an attempt to shake him off me.

He grabs his forehead, and I clamber to the far side of the bench seat. I see a bright green light reflecting off the glass—the lift is on floor number seventy-nine and steadily climbing. Is the creator of The Aftermath waiting for me on one of these floors?

Something slams into the left side of my face—it feels like a brick—and I sag down with my head spinning. Bennett’s face hovers over mine, contorted with rage. There’s a gash in the middle of his forehead where the sharp part of my shackles hit him. Blood trickles from it, making a thin line down his nose.

“I will use force against you if necessary,” he says. There’s a dangerous edge to his voice, and I notice his fingers are wrapped around the hilt of a knife. My knife. I hold back a whimper. “Stay put until we get clearance to go inside.”

Waiting for this to happen seems to take an agonizingly long time, and by the time two guards come to the car for me, I’m shaking. They escort Bennett and me into an elevator and take me down more than one hundred stories to the ground floor of the building.

And into a large white cell.

Before Bennett slams the cell door in my face, he says, “Get dressed for your meeting with Mr. Lancaster.”

Then I’m left alone. Cold and shivering, with my head spinning from everything that’s happened and my stomach in tangles from the quick ride here. I’m so alone it hurts my chest. I sit down on the corner of the small bed in the far corner of the cell. I drag the neatly tucked white quilt over my shoulders. Drape it around my body.

My cell is an extravagance compared to the shelters I lived in while I was in The Aftermath. It’s large—the size of four of the prison cells. There’s a large square piece of glass on the wall to the left of me and beneath it is a desk complete with a cushiony chair. In the opposite corner of the room is a standing shower with frosted glass. And hanging on the door handle is a towel and a mesh bag with some sort of digital tag attached to it. I’m so dazed that I’m not even aware I’ve gotten up until I stare directly down at the text scrolling across the thin screen.

Name: Claudia Virtue

ID #: 001-002

Location: THE AFTERMATH

Procedure: Inpatient/Chip Configuration

I know I should be freaking out right now, wondering what the procedure means. But all I can think about is the day I met Declan and how I made up an ID number when he questioned me. Maybe I’m an idiot for thinking about him at a time like this, but there’s nothing I want more than to have the chance to tell him he was wrong. There are identification numbers!

I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to rub it in. Angry and hopeless, I let the tag drop to the floor and step on it. It crunches under my worn sneakers, a tiny pile of broken machinery on the polished floor.

Someone clears his throat. I spin around, dropping the bag, but there’s nobody behind me. Not physically anyway. The glass above the desk shines. A hologram of a man comes out of it and walks across the room toward me. He’s staring at me intently. “Good evening, Claudia.” Surprisingly, his voice isn’t cruel. It’s hesitant, questioning.

I take a step in his direction. When I hesitate, stopping halfway between the shower and him, he motions me forward. “Please, come closer. I promise I won’t bite.”

I comply. Even though he’s a hologram and I know he can’t possibly hurt me, I keep some distance between us. Hell, even if he could hurt me, there’s not a thing I can do to stop him. I’m caged in. It’s impossible for me to run. “Who are you?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

I do. He’s the same man I saw in my gamer’s mind the day she complained about the newest version of the game being inadequate. He sat next to Dr. Coleman and he was just as angry as Olivia. But he’s not referring to that day. He expects me to have memories of him from the past, before The Aftermath. I don’t.

I barely remember myself back then. The few memories that have flitted through my head the past several days are so foggy, I’m unable to separate reality from illusion.

Maybe it’s all a fantasy.

When I don’t answer him, he says, “I’m Thomas Lancaster. Do you...remember me, Claudia?” I shake my head, and his lips curl down in disappointment. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Are you afraid of me?” I counter.

He chuckles—a sound so creepy, it sends a harsh shudder through me. “Of course not. You’re a child, my dear.” His expression turns serious and he rubs his chin. “But I’m happy to have a conference with you as soon as I come to the premises. Your...glitch caught me off guard.”

A conference. He makes it sound as if we’re business partners instead of a diabolical game creator and one of his characters. The corner of my mouth quirks up. “Sorry, maybe next time I glitch I’ll try and accommodate your schedule.”

“Oh, no, Ms. Virtue. You’ll never glitch like this again.”

My breath whooshes out of my nostrils as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. I wrap my arms across my chest. It helps control my trembling. “You’re going to delete me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Claudia. We’ve had this conversation before, remember? Now, be a good girl and get dressed. The guards will bring your dinner along in an hour or so and I’ll be there to speak with you very, very soon.”

I’ve got so many questions. When did we have this talk before? And if he’s not going to delete me, what will happen to me? Before I can murmur even a syllable, he holds his hand up and shushes me.

“Do as I’ve told you,” he says. Someone must be speaking to him, because he turns his eyes to the right and shifts his head down slightly, as if he’s listening to something. He frowns and growls a command before he addresses me again. “And, Claudia? No fighting the guards. Let’s do this without anyone getting hurt. We’ve already wasted a large sum of money tonight.”

Then the image disappears, and the screen looks like thin glass again. “I’m dead,” I say over and over again as I stand beneath a heavy stream of hot water in the shower, letting motorized arms that extend from the tile walls wash my body with soft sponges and soaps and perfumes.

I dress in the clothes I find in the bag—baggy underclothes and oversize starched pants and a shirt. There are white sandals, too, that hurt my blistered feet when I slide them on. I wait huddled on my bed until there’s a high-pitched sound at the desk and a tray of food comes up on a stand. When I pull the tray off the platform, it disappears, and the wood closes back together. As I turn to go back to my bed, I catch a glimpse of Bennett outside my cell door. I rush forward.

“Is Lancaster here yet?” I ask, but he shakes his head. He’s covered the gash on his forehead with a large white bandage. Probably just a placeholder until he can get to a Regenerator.

“Eat,” he orders. Then he disappears.

I don’t want to eat the food. Thomas Lancaster puts kids and anyone else he can find into role-playing games to be controlled by other people. There’s a good chance he’s lying about not deleting me, and I don’t want to take anything from him. I return to the bed, where I curl into the fetal position.

But when the screen lights up again and a woman starts talking, I’m lured to the desk. And I can’t resist popping food into my mouth as I sink down into the chair.

“A leader in defense and medical technology, LanCorp introduced cerebrum links to the public over five years ago with War, the first reality role-play game in history,” a woman says. Her voice is soothing, melodic. It almost makes up for the footage on the screen. Blood and death and violence. The same images from the memory I had the day Declan told me about deletion in the playground by the bar.

“Today, LanCorp continues to provide quality characters and a variety of games tailored to treat those diagnosed with the various violence disorders, including The Aftermath, the number one reality RPG for three years running, designed for patients with VG-B.”

Clips from The Aftermath alternate with promotional images. I see a boy and a girl sneaking stealthily into a parking garage—there are visible shadows in the windows and I gasp. They’re the Survivors we saved, just before I almost prevented Olivia from killing Reese.

Next comes an image of some gamer girl smiling in her white screened room with her thumbs up. She wears a shirt that says, “Honor, VIRTUE, Loyalty: The Aftermath.”

The video flips to a cut scene of a girl with short blond hair, green eyes and a deformed ear turning a Glock on two flesh-eaters. My mouth freezes midbite. I feel as if my stomach is balling up on itself as I rub my fingertips across my ripped ear.

The last image is the side of a building that’s been transformed into an enormous promotional glass poster for the game. The same thing that was on the girl’s shirt is written on it, except at the very bottom of the poster, it says, “Choose Your Clan with Care.”

And in the middle of it all is a picture of me, holding a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. Eyes narrowed into slits. Hair flying around my face as though I’m in the middle of a fight.

Now, the blond moderator’s words and Declan’s initial surprise when we met and some of the other characters’ reactions to me all make sense. Claudia Virtue is the face of The Aftermath. And I’m the last to know.

I nearly fall out of the chair when the door swings open and my two guards enter.

“Mr. Lancaster will see you now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They take me to the room that reminds me of a black diamond. The one with the windowed walls that show game footage. I’ve seen this room before in Olivia’s mind. “Don’t try anything stupid,” Bennett warns, shoving me into one of the thin metal chairs.

There’s not much damage I can do in here. Aside from the table and the chairs, the room is bare. “I’ll try my best,” I say. I consider making a joke about jumping out the window, but he starts to leave, and I decide I’d rather not have him stick around. Besides, the windows are outrageously thick. I can see that even from where I’m sitting.

The door locks behind Bennett. I wait about a minute to make sure he won’t return; then I pace the room, from column to column, up one set of stairs and down the other, like erratic connect-the-dots. Every few moments, my feet snag the hem of my starched white pants and I have to roll the waistband again.

“You’re looking well, Claudia.”

I twist around, pressing myself to the side of a column. Lancaster stands above me at the top of one of the stairways, a serene smile on his face. He glides down the steps toward me. My eyes flick to the open door, but he wags his finger to one side. “You know you’ll make it no further than the elevator. Why try it again?”

An image of Thomas Lancaster, surrounded by a group of men and women in business attire, slithers through my mind. His hand was cupped over the left side of his face and he was cursing. “I’ll kill you,” I had said as guards pinned me to the glass wall. My voice was scraped raw from screaming. “Can’t you see what you’re doing?”

Blood oozed through his fingers as he bellowed, “Sedate her.”

I shake the memory from my head. I want desperately to hold on to it—to try and remember more—but there’s too much at stake right now, I have to keep focused on the present. “I’ve no plan to try to escape,” I say. He’s so close I can see the scar I put on his face. And every curve of the electroshock gun in his hand. It looks much more lethal than Declan’s. I’ve no doubt he’d be willing to use it on me. “I’m not going to attack you, either.”

“Compliant, are we?”

“No. Just tired.”

He chuckles, motioning me to approach him. I dig my nails into my palms, raking them back and forth, and fight back the bile in my throat before I obey. He smiles down at me. Placing a hand on my shoulder, he says, “Would you like to see the newest testing programs?”

“In here?”

His eyebrow lifts in surprise. “No, dear. Out there.” He points to the open door.

There must be some type of catch. Why else would he take me around the facility? “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I promised you last time you were here that I would and I didn’t follow through. We had certain...distractions. And, after all, you deserve to see this,” he says. He holds out his arm and jerks his head toward the door. “Your friends are excited to see you, my dear.”

I go completely still. My heart pounds violently in my ears.

Boom.

Boom, boom.

BOOM.

“What?” I demand.

He casts a satisfied smirk at me and nods. “Yes, they’re here. Wesley, Mia.”

Wesley and Mia are alive. I let out a sigh of relief, and then I whisper, “Anyone else?”

“Are you referring to Declan Hastings?” I look up at him helplessly, and he continues, “Because he’s facing imprisonment and likely death.”

“Declan’s here,” I croak.

Mia and Wesley—Declan—are all still alive.

Thomas points to the door again. “Shall we go?”

I keep my face down, but I watch him carefully as we walk into the hallways. He wears a tranquil smile, one that makes me cold and nauseous. It makes me want to knock him down, but then I catch a glimpse of beige out of the corner of my eye. My guards are right behind us.

We stop at the elevator. He presses his fingertips down on the reader and then types in a numeric code: 951208. The steel doors fly open. Thomas places his hand on my elbow, squeezing it, and guides me inside. I yank away from him and slink to the corner of the box.

Bennett nudges my shoulder with the tip of his electroshock gun. My eyes jolt up to his face. He nods to the back wall of the elevator. “Turn around, Virtue.” His hand is on the opening to the door, so that it won’t shut. I don’t think he’ll let go until I turn to face the wall.

Like a prisoner.

I follow Bennett’s directions because I just want to get whatever horrible thing that’s going to happen over with as soon as possible.

The elevator comes to a stop on the fifth floor. I hear Thomas punching in his code and the doors reopen. This hallway reminds me of Olivia’s original gaming room. It’s warm and empty and pristine white. And it makes me feel dead inside. “What’s with all this white?” I ask.

“It promotes peace and pure thoughts,” Thomas replies.

Maybe that’s why he seems so passive when it comes to his line of work. He surrounds himself with a sterile white space so he doesn’t feel guilty about creating The Aftermath, selling humans to other humans for the sole purpose of entertainment. No, that’s not what he calls it. Rehabilitation and therapy.

“You’re a monster, Lancaster.”

“You’ve told me that before, right before you tried to kill me.” Shrugging, he stops in front of another door and opens it. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “If I hadn’t made the games, someone else would have. Now, no more questions. Welcome to The Aftermath facility’s deletion chamber.”

I feel as if someone spit in my face. This is the last place I want to be. “Why are we here?”

“So you can see a deletion,” he says. He smiles over his shoulder at the female guard. “Initially, I planned to show you on a screen upstairs, but I want you to see what you’ve done. You’ll watch from the other room.”

No.

Please, no.

Bennett presses me forward into the windowed room on the other side of the deletion chamber. It’s freezing, and I rub my hands up and down my arms to warm up. I’m surprised I don’t exhale condensation. “Enjoy, Claudia.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t need to see it— Take me back upstairs. Take me anywhere else.” Just please don’t make me watch this. Please. But Bennett closes the door behind them, leaving me.

A moment later, the door opens again and the sound of footsteps thud across the hard floor. “Claudia?”

My eyes fly open as Declan stumbles toward me. He’s wrecked and battered, with bruises and cuts covering his face, but he’s alive. I race toward him. “You’re all right. Thank—” he starts.

I throw myself into his arms, knocking the air out of his lungs. “I thought you were dead. I thought—” But then I remember Thomas’s words about all my friends being excited to see me, and fear claws through me. “What about Wes and Mia?”

“They’re fine. We’re all fine for now.” He covers my lips with the tips of his fingers. “But, Virtue, you’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to go now.”

“What?” Then something hits me. “Declan, are you being deleted?”

A strangled noise comes from the back of his throat, and I feel my chest freeze up. Before I can say a word, something flat and rectangular presses against my stomach, and when I glance down between us, I see that it’s Declan’s tablet. “I stole it from the guard,” he whispers. “As soon as you get out of here, you need to enter the code 734598. Find the file with your name—it will tell you everything.”

I shake my head. “But what about you. What about—”

“I’m sorry, Claudia. For lying to you. For getting you into this mess.” I gasp when he spins me around and his forearm locks around my neck. “I’m sorry for this.”

“What are you—”

“Shut up. Just be quiet—and when we reach the lower levels, run.” He drags me over to the observation window. “Hey!” He bangs on the glass with his free hand. As all the faces in the other room turn toward the sound of his voice, I feel cold metal press against the crown of my head.

“Declan,” I plead.

“Struggle,” he orders in a soft voice. So I do. I scream and flail, kick against him until finally the doors on both sides of the room open.

Thomas Lancaster races into the room, his face a mask of fury. “Put the gun down, son.” He puts his hands up defensively and takes a few steps toward us, two guards following right behind him. “Put it down.”

Declan moves us closer to them. “Not on your life, Lancaster. What you’ve done to her—to all of us—is sick. She’s better off dead than having you sticking her back in that game just so you can make even more money.”

“Put the gun—” Lancaster’s words are cut off the moment the current hits him in the chest, and he crumbles to the floor. Declan releases his hold on my neck as one of the guards fires his own electroshock gun at us. The jolt hits me in the knee, and I stumble away as Declan takes down both guards.

“Get their weapons, Virtue. Hurry. They’ll get back up at any moment and we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Grinding my teeth, I limp toward the bodies on the floor and grab the guards’ guns—and one of their knives. I hand one of the guns and the knife to Declan as he joins me at the door. Grabbing my arm, he jerks me into the hallway, firing at a guard who rounds the corner. “The entrance to the building is on the first floor. As soon as we reach that staircase, you keep going until you’re out of this building.”

“What about you?” I rub my hand across my neck where he had gripped me. “What about—”

“I’m going back for Wesley and Mia. But I need you on the outside.”

We race down the hall, firing at anyone we come in contact with until we reach the staircase. The loud pounding of boots follows us as we race down the steps, but we keep running. It’s ironic when I think about it—that the same people who put us in a game where we were molded into mindless, deadly creatures are feeling the effects of that now.

“Almost there,” I choke out, struggling to breathe, dragging in so much air that my lungs burn.

When I drop my gun as soon as my foot hits the final step and turn to pick it up, Declan pulls me in the opposite direction. “No time to stop,” he wheezes as we burst through the parking garage door.

Declan kicks out one of the back windows of the third car we find—a sleek black sporty thing that looks as if it could fly. He opens the door and unlocks the rest, resting his electroshock guns on the floorboard. As he dusts glass onto the concrete, I say, “What am I supposed to do?”

He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, shaking his head. Something loud crashes behind the parking garage door. “Nothing if we don’t hurry up,” he says.

“Get out of the vehicle!” a voice says.

I turn to see a guard standing several feet away from us. His gun is positioned right at my chest. “Surrender, Virtue. Then nobody gets hurt,” the guard says. He takes a hesitant step in the direction of the car. “No sudden movements, either.”

I have no way to fight. The electroshock guns are in the car. I’d have to bend over to reach them and by then the guard will have fired at Declan or me or both of us.

Declan catches my eye and he shakes his head slightly. He lowers his eyes, and I see his knife where it has fallen on the ground...right next to my feet.

“Virtue, step away from the car, or I’ll be forced to shock you.”

I slip my toe under the knife and kick it up. I catch it, wrapping my fingers around the hilt, keeping my eyes focused on the guard.

“Where are the rest of you?” I demand.

He sneers. “Oh, they’re coming.”

I blink away tears, and, just as I open my eyes, I see his trigger finger move. I act without thinking. I act like Olivia. The knife sinks into the hand holding the electroshock gun and he drops it, screaming.

The car engine comes to life and Declan jumps out. “Go, Claudia,” he orders, shoving me into the driver’s seat. “I’ll be...I’ll be fine.”

“What do I do?” I shriek as he closes the door, leaving me alone in the car. He’s condemning himself, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“The code is 789312,” he says quickly. It’s not the same code he gave me in the building, but I say nothing as Declan continues, “Type it in and hit the
Chauffer
button. It’ll take you where you need to go.” He looks down at me, his gray eyes full of emotion, and I lose my breath. “And, Virtue? I’m so sorry.” The sound of more guards rushing into the parking garage pulls him away from me. “Go!” Declan yells.

Trembling, I touch the flat screen, swiftly entering the six-digit code. “Welcome, Phoebe Coleman,” the AcuSystem’s robotic voice says as a menu appears on the screen. I jab the flashing
Chauffer
button, and the engine revs. The words
Park
and then
Drive
flash across the screen, and a second later, I feel the car lurch forward.

As the car speeds off, I see Declan crumble to the ground in the rearview mirror.