The convenience store door is closed when they arrive. The lights are on, and Jennifer glimpses the terrified face of Daphne, still in her vampire makeup, between two advertisements for cigarettes. She runs a little faster, towing Esther along with her, and slams her fists against the door. The salt she’s still holding makes it difficult, but this whole night has been difficult; what’s one thing more? Esther backs up a step, both hands wrapped around the baseball bat, scanning the parking lot for danger.
Baseball bat? The question is small and confused, originating at the back of her mind. Wasn’t it a fireplace poker a moment ago?
(In another place, in another time, in a world that might as well not have existed, Marline swore quietly and made an adjustment to the program, fixing the brief glitch that had caused some elements to be overwritten by the defaults. She couldn’t bring back the poker without drawing attention, but she could keep things from shifting further. The temptation to dial up the instability to eleven—to change the weakness of the walking dead from salt to pepper, or mustard, or something even less logical—was strong. She resisted it. If the program became “unfair,” unwilling to adhere to its own logic, it could trigger fail safes she lacked the ability to disconnect, kicking Esther and Jennifer out of their pods with their minds and memories intact. No. They had to play this out to its conclusion, while she ramped both the lethality of the scenario and the levels of psychotropic chemicals in their blood through the roof. They wouldn’t be walking away from this. Of that, she was absolutely sure.)
“Let us in, you asshole!” howls Jennifer, and hits the door again. Daphne gives her a terrified look, hanging back with the others already in the store. None of Daphne’s usual gang seem to be there. They must not have made it.
Under other circumstances, Jennifer might have been willing to stop and feel sorry for her, even if only for a moment. Losing a friend is a terrible thing, after all. But Jennifer is trapped outside, and so is her best friend, her gang, who isn’t dead yet. They need to be in that store.
“We know how to stop them!” she shouts, mouth as close to the glass as she can manage. Esther backs toward her, their shoulders bumping. Jennifer stiffens but doesn’t turn. She knows what she’ll see. She doesn’t want to see it. Not before she has to. So she hits the glass again, and yells, “Come on, you fucking cowards! Let us in! We need to stop them!”
Daphne says something to the others. Jennifer can’t hear her, but the shape of the word on Daphne’s lips is familiar, and Jennifer almost laughs when she realizes what it is: egghead. Daphne is saying that the egghead usually knows what she’s talking about. Daphne, who caused all of this, who drove them into the dark, into the place where the dead things waited, is going to save them.
It’s a gawky late shift employee who unlocks the door, face so pale that his acne scars stand out like brands. He re-locks it again behind them, and Jennifer finally turns, finally sees the swarm of the hungry dead walking with calm, placid inevitability into the parking lot. This is the place, then. This is where they make their last stand.
Some of the fear drains out of her. She and Esther, they’re both here. If they live to see tomorrow, they’ll have to admit that they’re alone in the world now, but for tonight, they’re still together, they’re still standing. They can do this.
She turns to the spot-faced boy. “We need all the salt you have,” she says. “Rock salt, commercial salt, even those stupid little packets you put next to the hot dogs. Salt kills them.”
“How do you know that?” Daphne asks. Her voice quavers at the beginning of the sentence, but by the end, she seems to be finding some of her old confidence. The high school pecking order lives on, at least in Daphne’s mind. Without nerds, she wasn’t a popular girl, because what is popularity without something to compare it to? Now the nerds are here, and she’s better than them again. All is right with the world.
Well. Except for the monsters outside, the ones who killed her friends and her little brother and her parents. But those are probably here because of something the nerds did. That’s the way monsters work, isn’t it? They show up because the nerds did something wrong.
“Is this your fault?” Daphne demands.
“No,” says Esther. Her voice is low, half-swallowed, almost wiped away by the angle of her chin, which is pointed down toward her chest as she tries to catch her breath. She never runs that much. Still, she finds the strength to raise her head, one agonizing inch at a time, until she’s staring directly at Daphne. “This is your fault.”
Daphne recoils. It feels like every eye is suddenly on her, and not in the way that she prefers. “What are you talking about?”
“You and your friends. This is your fault.”
“You assholes,” snarls Jennifer. She has a target for her anger now. The dead are outside, and she can hate them—oh, how she can hate them—but she can’t be angry at them the way she can be angry at a human being. It’s hard to be angry at what feels like an act of God. “You just had to show that you were better than us, didn’t you? You just had to play fuck with the geeks. So you chased us into a fucking curse, and now the dead are walking, and this is all your fault.”
A murmur passes through the other survivors in the convenience store. Daphne looks increasingly uncomfortable. She has nowhere to run. Anyone who looks at their situation can tell that, easily. If the crowd turns on her, she’s dead.
“You can’t really blame me,” she says. “It was a joke.”
“You broke one of my teeth,” says Jennifer.
“It was a joke,” insists Daphne. “It just got…it just got a little out of hand.”
Silence falls over the store, restless and uneasy and filled with the potential for violence. Jennifer turns back to the clerk.
“We need salt,” she says. “Fast. We don’t have time for this.”
She’s saved Daphne’s place in the store with her intercession and she knows it. So does Daphne. Esther watches as the former vampire queen fades back into the crowd, eyes glossy with shock and fear, skin the slightest bit too pale. If they all survive this night, Daphne’s power will have been broken. Her reign is over.
The clerk nods and leads Jennifer into the shelves, and Esther relaxes, ever so slightly. They have a chance. They’ll have salt, and they’ll have a chance. If they can make it until morning, if they can stay alive, they can survive this. They can walk away.
Something hits the glass. There is a smashing sound. Esther turns. Daphne screams.
One of the hungry dead has punched a hole in the window, and is reaching for them. He’ll widen that opening soon, if he’s allowed. Esther raises her baseball bat, ready to swing, only to fall back as Jennifer charges past her, a canister of salt in each hand, the spouts open and ready to pour.
“Get the fuck away from her!” she howls, scattering salt in all directions. When it hits the dead man’s eyes he falls backward, collapsing like the corpse he is.
Jennifer stops, catching her breath, and turns to beam smugly at Esther. “See?” she says. “You’re going to be fine. We’re going to be fine. As long as we’re together, you’re going to be okay. I—”
She never sees the hands that grab her from behind, jerking her through the hole, out into the night.
But she feels the teeth. Oh, she feels the teeth. The last thing she hears is Esther screaming, followed by nothing.
Nothing.
NOTHING.
Dr. Jennifer Webb opened her eyes on darkness, and the sound of an alarm shrieking high and shrill somewhere in the distance, warning of an impending systems failure. Her limbs felt like they were made of lead, and her head was pounding wildly, almost drowning out the din. Worst of all was the pain in her chest, a squeezing, compressing feeling that made it almost impossible to breathe.
I’m having a heart attack, she thought, dazed. Another thought came close on the heels of the first: I can’t be having a heart attack. I’m too young to be having a heart attack. Her father liked to tell her that
she was going to eat herself into an early grave, while her mother always insisted that she was big-boned like her grandmother and would settle into her own skin one day. Either way, sixteen is too young for a heart attack, and—
Wait. Sixteen? She hadn’t been sixteen in years.
Phase slipping. Shit. That was a consequence of bad scenario management. They’d seen it a lot in the beginning, people emerging from the pods with a bad case of the mental bends, unable to distinguish the scenarios they’d just lived through from the world they were coming home to. Since the changes wrought by the scenarios were designed to be permanent, deeply shaping the psyche, it made sense: the mind needed time to adjust. Her mind needed time to adjust.
Time is not a thing she has right now. Slipping back into the dreamlike present tense state of the scenario is easy—too easy. The drugs weren’t cleared out of her system properly before the pod woke her, and she’s flying, soaring on a pharmaceutical tide. The pain in her chest isn’t getting any better, and if she doesn’t do something soon, it’s going to kill her. She knows that. She knows that, and still she can’t move.
Esther, she thinks suddenly. The name is accompanied by a rush of serotonin, love and loyalty and fear and concern all mixed into a potent natural cocktail that is, miraculously, strong enough to let her rock onto her side in the limited space provided by the pod. She can’t remember the code to get out, can barely remember where she is, but muscle memory is sometimes stronger than mental memory, and when she raises her shaking hand to the keypad, her fingers know what to do.
There is a hiss, and the pod swings open, allowing the colder air from the lab to flow inside. It strikes—struck—Jennifer across the face, slapping her back into the slower, calmer tempo of the real world. Slowly, with shaking hands, she disconnected the sensors from her body and half-slid, half-tumbled out of the pod, rolling clean off the edge of the table to land on the floor with a painful, bone-shaking thud. Even that pain wasn’t as bad as the throbbing in her chest, which kept getting bigger and bigger, seeming to take up the entire world.
This isn’t a true heart attack, she thought, doing her best to ignore the steady “because I’m too young for that” beating at the back of her mind. Pushing herself onto hands and knees, she crawled toward the wall, and the emergency response kit. Her heart wasn’t going out of sync because of any innate damage. She had no history of hypertension or heart disease, despite her father’s dire predictions about her weight. This was all shock. This was only shock. This was something she could stop. This was something she had to stop, because Esther’s pod was still closed, and the scenario that had just killed her had been far more dire than it was supposed to have been.
Dimly, she remembered dialing Esther into a scenario set at a middle school, where the darkest enemy she should have faced was a much younger, less violent Daphne. Someone had modified the scenario. They hadn’t been prepared for that, mentally, pharmaceutically, to go that deep. No wonder her mind and body were both in open rebellion. They had been put through something they hadn’t been prepared for.
The situation flickers back into the present tense as she drags her way across the floor. She doesn’t fight it. In the present tense, she’s still more than half the brave teenager who dies saving her best friend from an impossible foe. In the present tense, she can do anything, if anything will mean saving Esther.
Hand over hand, she drags herself, until the first aid kit is only inches away. The pain in her chest pulses, intensifies, and takes the world away, with Jennifer fighting it all the way down.
MARLINE SIGHED as Jennifer Webb stopped moving. It was almost a pity. The woman had fought so hard, and had almost been able to make it. Ah, well. Maintaining a perfect record meant a lot of people had to die, no matter how hard they tried to fight.
The drive beeped. The data transfer was finally finished; everything had been pulled down from the cloud storage and out of the facility hardware, and she could go. Really, despite the extra deaths, this day had gone better than she could possibly have asked. The data was secure. The doctor was down. Whether the reporter lived or not was irrelevant, because she had no idea of the events that had transpired outside her pod.
It took less than a minute to disconnect the drive and secure it inside her jacket. The scenario was still running; a glance at the screen showed her a small band of survivors on the roof of the convenience store, scattering salt in all directions as they struggled to stay alive. No time to stay and watch Hoffman die. It was a pity, really. What was a horror movie without a gory and cathartic ending?
Profitable, that was what. The data she had stolen was going to make her even more comfortably wealthy than she already was, and the fact that she had been able to perform this trick in the face of tight security—lax once she was inside, but getting in had been the trick—would bring still more work her way. This was the sort of job she lived for. A hard shell, a soft center, and all the profit in the world.
Stepping over the body in the middle of the floor, she walked calmly to the door and pulled it open. Then she stopped, cocking her head to the side.
“Ah,” she said finally. “I suppose you’re not dead after all.”
Dr. Jennifer Webb, holding the doorframe with one hand to steady herself, holding the empty syringe of epinephrine in her other hand, glared. “Who the fuck are you?” she snarled.
“I am an independent contractor,” said Marline, and punched her in the throat—or tried to. Dr. Webb wasn’t there anymore.
Dr. Webb, the thirty-seven year old scientist with no athletic tendencies, who worked out only when she had absolutely no choice, had dodged. Marline blinked. Then, delighted, she laughed.
“You have a younger woman’s reflexes,” she said, delighted. “Your psychological changes carry over into the physiological. Oh, that’s a rich surprise. How long do the effects last? Have they been documented?”
Dr. Webb responded by snarling and stabbing her in the arm with the empty syringe.
Marline’s expression never changed. “That was a mistake,” she said, before grabbing Dr. Webb by the forearms and using her leverage to fling the other woman into the bloody abattoir of the observation room. Dr. Webb landed with a squawk and a thud, unable to get her feet back under herself. Marline stalked after her, producing a fishing knife from inside her coat.
“Hurts more this way,” she said, and drove it into Dr. Webb’s belly.
Jennifer Webb had experienced pain in her life, but never like this, never like a firework going off in a dark sky, so bright and violent that it eclipsed everything else. Even the lingering ache from her abortive heart attack and the needle she had shoved into her own chest was pushed to the side, chased away by the agony of the stab wound. Her eyes went wide.
“Guk,” she said, small and tight in the back of her throat.
“Yes,” said Marline, letting go of the blade. “Perhaps you should have chosen a less dangerous career.”
“Uck,” said Jennifer, even smaller, even tighter, the sound dwindling even as it was made.
Marline smiled as she turned to go, and found herself nose-to-nose with Esther Hoffman.
Esther didn’t speak. Esther didn’t flinch. She brought the scalpel she had stolen from the medication prep station in the hall up in a swift arc, slicing across Marline’s throat in a single concussive motion. Blood erupted from the opening in a hot red geyser, spraying everywhere, liberally coating Esther in the stuff. Esther didn’t blink.
(blood is nothing blood is nothing new blood is already everywhere; when she blinks, blood is everywhere, she went after Jennifer, she went to save Jennifer, and she woke up in a strange white place surrounded by machines and her body is too long and too slow but it doesn’t matter, because she was covered in blood just a few seconds ago and now she’s covered in blood again and this is only right this is only right this is the world setting itself right again)
Marline did blink, several times, shocked and pained and unable to believe what was
happening to her. Then, without any fanfare, she fell backward, into the blood. She landed next to the body of the last technician she had killed.
Esther dropped the scalpel and ran to Jennifer’s side, dropping to her knees in the soupy mess. Jennifer’s eyes were rolling wildly, and her breaths were coming short and sharp, like she no longer quite remembered how breathing was supposed to go.
“Jennifer? Jennifer! Don’t die. Don’t leave me again.” Esther moved so that her friend’s head was in her lap, stroking her hair. She didn’t touch the knife. It scared her. There was too much danger in it, barely contained, begging to break free. Instead, she folded herself forward, around her friend, like she could protect her. “Don’t die.”
The world is wobbling around her, shifting from strangely solid to waving and dreamlike so quickly that her head spins. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there or why her body feels so wrong, but she knows this is Jennifer (even if she looks older, worn down, strange), and she knows she has to protect her.
“Don’t die,” she whispers again, and closes her eyes, and waits for a miracle.
___7. Miraculous.
“IT'S A miracle I survived,” said Dr. Jennifer Webb. She was sitting at prim attention, naturally good posture improved and encouraged by the healing stab wound in her belly. “The doctors were able to counteract the sepsis, although I lost nearly a foot of intestine.”
“A miracle—or a problem?” The interviewer leaned forward, expression schooled into one of studious concern. “There have been several lawsuits brought against your institute—”
“All of which have been dismissed. The people claiming mental damage knew what they were risking when they chose our treatment plan, and we’re still helping far more than we could ever have harmed.” Dr. Webb shook her head. “The intruder modified the running scenario so dramatically that the chemical combination we were using to balance the brain chemistry of the subjects couldn’t possibly keep up. They were trying to cause permanent damage. Our normal therapies don’t carry half that much risk. The people who have filed lawsuits against us were trying to profit off a tragedy, not responding to tragedies of their own.”