The Aftermath (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

A day and a half of wavering in and out of Olivia’s mind and consciousness passes. I can’t figure out why it’s happening, but being inside her head is better than being lifeless in my own. When she next comes back to the game, and I’m completely aware of myself, it is daylight, raining. Thunder rattles the skylights and reverberates off the sculptures. I’m immediately greeted by April. Ethan has told her we must find a new place to live because the museum is no longer a viable option. Apparently, he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d change shelters for me.

No, not for me. For my gamer.

For Olivia.

I shrug into a thin gray hoodie, and I’m powerless to stop myself from stupidly venturing out into the humid storm. Everything feels different now that I’m aware a stranger is in my head, responsible for my forgetfulness and the inconsistency between my thoughts and movements and words. I want time to absorb this revelation, to try and figure out why I can think for myself but not even lift my own hand if I wish to. What I don’t want is a new useless mission that may get me killed.

I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been.

“Jeremy’s coming, too,” April announces. She pulls her empty bag over her shoulder. I study her carefully. The way she buckles her holster of weapons around her waist—it shimmies down to hang low on her hips, just above the waistband of her shorts. I study the robotic way she flips her red hair over one shoulder. The way her blue eyes stare me down. Unfocused and glassy, just like the rest of my clan.

“Five minutes—that’s all I’m waiting. I don’t have much time today,” I say. I imagine Olivia in her brightly lit room, checking the time every few seconds as she glares at April’s image on the screen.

Jeremy takes another two minutes. He’s dressed in ragged jeans and a T-shirt with a faint stain on the sleeve. I remember this shirt—it’s the one he wore when he and Ethan ransacked a flesh-eater den several months ago. Looking at Jeremy in that T-shirt makes me think of the woman who died at the courthouse in my most recent raid. The one who, for the briefest moment, had reminded me of my friend Mia. A lump forms in my throat.

Olivia’s killed so many people for something that’s not even her reality. And she’s used me to do it.

“You are pathetically slow,” Olivia says through me.

Jeremy turns his head in my direction and gives me a dead smile. “This’ll be over quickly.”

I lift the padlock hanging from the ropes of chains on the door and begin picking it open with a rusty paper clip I find in the pocket of my shorts. “You say that every time we go out.”

Jeremy reaches past me and wiggles the bent metal around until the lock comes undone in his large hands. He dangles it from his thumb and index finger before dropping it into my palm, his fingertips brushing my thumb. My heart hammers painfully in my chest, and chills slink across every inch of my skin.

This is the first time I’ve ever been spooked by Jeremy’s touch.

He’d joined our group shortly after Mia. Back then I’d believed Jeremy was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Ridiculously tall, he has smooth olive skin, light brown eyes and a nose that hasn’t been broken repeatedly like Ethan’s.

Now that I know my life is a game, and I’m certain Jeremy and April and Ethan aren’t at all who I believed them to be... Well, I’m not sure what I think. His eyes frighten me. I want to release a sigh of relief as Jeremy lets go of my hand and begins joking about my fondness for drawn-out raids.

I smile and nod, agreeing with everything he’s saying.

But I want to vomit.

“...on Union’s a good start,” April is saying. Fat droplets of rain pelt her face. She doesn’t blink.

“Right,” I say. “Let me check—”

The accidental slide into Olivia’s mind is less disquieting than before, now that I know what’s going on, but it still manages to rock me.
THE AFTERMATH
is written at the top of the screen again. This time a gigantic map takes up the entirety of every display. I’m not interested in the way Olivia flicks her fingertips through the air to navigate our surroundings.

It’s the miniature headshots with names typed beneath them that lure me in. Each name is highlighted either red or green, and underneath each green name is a neon-blue number.

What the hell does all this mean?

“Flesh-eaters on Union in one of the hotels,” Olivia forces me to reply. “I refuse to deal with them today, so try again.”

I study the screen Olivia is looking at painstakingly. My photo is there. So are Jeremy’s and April’s. Our names are written in bold green, capitalized font and our information is positioned right over the gold-colored rectangle labeled “Museum.” My image is unsettling. Droopy eyes, as if I’m heavily medicated, and a giant smile on my face that shows my chipped canine. I practically lose my hold on Olivia’s head.

I chipped my tooth not even a few weeks ago—this picture is that recent.

And I’ve no recollection of it being taken.

I do my best to push this thought out of my mind so I can concentrate on the task at hand. I want to see if I can find the spot where Olivia said the flesh-eaters were hiding.

It takes me a couple of minutes to locate Union Street because there are so many words and lines and shapes that signify the places we frequently raid. Finally, I find it in the upper-right-hand corner. I scan a row of gray squares—they’re all labeled “Hotel.” When I come to the one with three pictures lying over it, though, I freeze.

The names below those photos are all written in red.

And at the very top of the game screen is a small box that explains what all these colors mean. Neon blue for current points (updated within the last thirty seconds). Green for Survivors, for us. Crimson for flesh-eaters.

I look at the three red names on the gray square once again. Then I study my own spot on the game map. The number that must represent Olivia’s points within the game—80,973. The green font beneath my photograph. And I realize something that makes me feel sick.

Olivia can see exactly where the people who want to kill me are.

I have been attacked and I’ve had the crap beaten out of me and Olivia can see the threat’s precise location.

There’s nothing I want more than to wrap my fingers around her neck and strangle her.

I hear my voice say, “Nothing on Demonbreun.”

“Demonbreun Street it is, then,” April replies. “Because Claudia Virtue is a boring wimp today.”

I retreat from Olivia’s thoughts as easily as I crept in. The map remains in my mind, reds and greens swirling together in a sickening tie-dye. Do all those photos represent people like me? Prisoners inside their own minds, people being used by other people in white rooms?

Are the cannibals pawns in this game, too? Being controlled by someone else who makes them attack and eat other humans?

And are any of these people—red or green, Survivor or flesh-eater—aware that the person dominating them can at any time force them onto the wrong street or into the wrong building?

Kill them in the flutter of an eye?

For the first time in my memory, I don’t pay attention to my surroundings. I don’t listen to what Jeremy and April are saying, or the way the rain drenches my clothes, weighing me down, as we take the long route to the crumbling buildings on Demonbreun Street.

I just focus on Olivia.

“Go right,” she says through me, and I think of all the innuendos that I’ve ignored, all the strange things I’ve said that I chalked up to some neurological issue caused by the apocalypse and accepted with very few questions. Strange conversations. Lost time. The constant difference between my thoughts and what I say and do. Why we’ve never left this area, despite the hordes of cannibals. Why leave when food and supplies and enemy locations are only a screen away?

Why leave when the person on the screen isn’t really you—and even if you do make a stupid decision, you won’t be the one suffering for it?

There was no end of the world. There’s only a game called The Aftermath, and I feel stupid for just now realizing this.

Back-alley ruins blur my vision. A liquor store sign swings from wires—it bangs the side of a building, making a noise like clacking teeth. A few feet away from it is an overturned garbage container that’s so rusted there are holes bigger than my fists throughout it. A man sags against the front of the trash bin with eyes wide-open and his head turned to the side in an unnatural angle.

“Need to do a cleanup,” April says.

I hear myself agree, but inside I am seething.

Because on Olivia’s map, the man’s name is green, just like mine.

Unlike mine, it’s flickering rapidly.

* * *

Olivia waits until we find a spot she determines is “perfect for shelter” before she mentions leaving again. I know what this means, and I’m prepared for it. Still, it’s as though my breastbone and spine are slowly shrinking in on my heart, squeezing each beat out of it until it stops completely.

I don’t want to go wherever it is I go when Olivia logs out. I don’t want to wait for Olivia to go into her game room for the chance to think for myself again. I want to think now—because my brain is the only thing about myself that’s partway mine.

We place empty water bottles in the alleyway so that we can gather rainwater for drinking and bathing, then start the process of securing the building. Out of all the ones we checked, it’s the only structure with no broken windows and a somewhat decent bathroom and that’s not attached to a half-dozen others. When Olivia finds the spot on her map, it’s also the only one that’s several minutes’ walking distance from any other
character.

Just thinking that word turns my stomach, and I wonder briefly if Olivia, in her safe little room, can feel everything I do.

“There’s a box of food up here,” Jeremy shouts from upstairs.

It probably belonged to someone with a green name, I think. Like that man against the trash bin. But I say, “Bring it on down.”

April’s behind the bar, sifting through partial bottles of liquor, and doesn’t even flinch when Jeremy slams the box on the countertop. “Anything good?” I say.

“Protein bars, water bottles—not sure if it’s safe for drinking or if it’s contaminated, though. And there’s—” he grins at us, slowly pulling a handful of dusty black wrappers from the worn cardboard “—beef jerky.”

April snorts, and I imagine her vacant blue eyes rolling. Glass clanks together behind the bar, and she asks, “Find The Save?”

My ears perk up. I still haven’t discovered what The Save’s purpose is within the game, but I’m determined to find out. I want to know everything about this manufactured world I live in.

“Upstairs,” Jeremy says. “It’s the only door on the right. Bed and everything—there’s another privy inside of it, too.”

I leave them talking about the room over the bar and what items they’ve found so I can check the alley door once again. Olivia has me jiggle the knob, bang hard on the dead bolt with the palm of my hand. It’s secure.

Olivia talks to April and Jeremy as she steers me toward each window to take a look at the locks. “I’ll be gone for a few days,” I say. I’m used to whispering little conundrums like this and even more accustomed to being completely confused by what it means. Now I know exactly what it means—I’ll be unconscious until whenever Olivia chooses to return. My stomach rolls.

“I hate that you’ll be away,” April says. Jeremy agrees with her.

My head bobs up and down. Olivia’s likely doing the same thing. “Hey, do me a favor?” I call over my shoulder as I grab my bag and walk to the staircase. Resting my arm on the splintered banister, I turn to look at them with my other hand on my hip. “Lock up when you leave, okay?”

Jeremy nods quickly. “Mmm-hmm.”

The stairway sounds as if it will collapse at any moment as I sprint up the steps, taking two at a time, sometimes three when I come to a stair that’s too risky to test my weight on. I go into The Save and toss my bag onto the bed. Olivia makes me climb in next to it, maneuvering me into a lying position with my back against the wall.

It takes me a moment to comprehend that she has no plan to go with the others back to the museum. She’s leaving me here, on this mattress that sags in the middle—in a bar with spray-painted windows and a floor that smells like cooking oil—with no way to defend myself. She will leave me motionless with a gun in my waistband, staring with unseeing eyes at a bag of food inches away.

Passive.

Dead, breathing.

The purpose of The Save is obvious to me now: it is here so gamers can leave their characters in a safe place while they’re away from the game.

My head starts to buzz just as I hear the noisy click of the padlock on one of the doors downstairs. I stare up at the only window in this room, watch the rain splatter in places where the spray paint hasn’t completely blocked the glass. I wait.

An eternity passes by with me sitting and staring, staring and waiting. What is Olivia doing? I don’t understand why I haven’t blacked out yet, and for a moment, I wonder if I have and this is me waking up again.

“Just do it already!”

These four words echo through the empty building, like hundreds of bullets going off all at once. I’m breathless when the silence returns. Are these my words? My whole body trembles at even the idea.

“My name is Claudia Virtue, and The Aftermath is not real,” I whisper. “The Aftermath is just a game.”

Years of conflicting thoughts and words, and the first ones that are truly mine are agitated, partially psychotic. I’ll take it. Right now, I’m too afraid to try and move. I feel as though at any moment, Olivia will take over my body. Then she’ll make me let this go.

When another several minutes pass and I am still looking up at the window, I move my right foot off the bed, then my left. I am hungry. I am thirsty.

I am free.

I raid the box of food Jeremy left on the counter downstairs. I eat a chocolate protein bar slowly, and then I think of the sustenance gauge—bright red with a disgustingly low percentage—on Olivia’s screen and devour two more. I twirl around in dizzying circles on a ripped bar stool. Scream at the top of my lungs until my throat is raw and my chest heaves up and down.