Chapter Three

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

-Frankenstein

Liza had forgotten how difficult it was to get up before eleven in the morning. Her classes were usually at two or three, so rolling out of bed early was almost painful to her entire body. She sneered at her droopy self in the mirror for many more minutes than was probably socially acceptable, and then pulled her long fair hair up into a high ponytail and strolled out of the house in yesterday’s jeans and a slightly too small shirt.

The way up to the pretty Fairacres campus was a hill that she allowed herself to refer to as ‘steep’ as long as the person she was talking to had never visited. It was winding and it was definitely a hill, but it only felt steep to her because she wasn’t in the best shape of her life.

Before coming to university, Liza had been active out of necessity. Now that she was in university without the pressure of her patriarch, she had taken a break from the physical side of life and had invested her time in more cerebral activities, like the film club, and the wine-tasting club.

Her dad would be so mad at her for neglecting the hour-long workouts she and her four brothers had had to do twice daily when they all lived at home with her dad.

“The Volkov family take no shit,” her father had spat to them almost every single morning, pacing up and down. The only reason she and her brothers had been allowed to go to school, instead of living out in the English wilderness (was there even any?) was probably because it had been her mother’s dying wish, or something.

Her nature had won out, and she had gained the freshman fifteen. Fifteen extra pounds. In her opinion, the extra weight only served to make her look more feminine since she had worried she looked like a young boy before, but on her last visit her father had reacted to her new body shape with disappointment.

Oh well! Onward and upward to better things. Literally. Liza eyed the hill ahead of her with a bitter sort of distrust. “You won’t get the best of me,” she muttered, and strode on at twice her normal speed to ensure she wouldn’t be late for the testing of the game. The game.

The game!

She was so excited that her heart leapt into her throat every time she thought about it, almost as if she were on her way to meet a potential love interest. The game.

The game that she … knew nothing about, and hadn’t been excited about at all until weirdo Malcolm McCray had locked eyes with her through her television screen. But that wasn’t something she was interested in unpicking; c’est la vie. Magic did not exist. Something about his mysterious tactic of selling the game must be what was making her so damn excited. She had butterflies in her stomach at the thought.

The Alpha Virus. What a beautiful, perfect name for a game.

She sped up even further, her cheeks pink and her breath short and hanging in small clouds in the air with every breath. Did it have to be so damn cold? Liza hoped the event would be indoors.

Whatever it was going to be.

The competition they had won to earn McCray’s visit? The gaming society up at the campus had apparently come up with the perfect marketing slogan for The Alpha Virus, and won the right to host the promotional event. Liza had glanced at it when she had been unable to sleep the night before.

“The Alpha Virus — play here in life, stay here in death.”

Liza thought it was shit. There had been an interview with the head of the society who had okayed the slogan, Paul T-something, and she remembered his quote on the matter. “I was so confused to be chosen, honestly, because we’ve never played the game, we came up with it in five minutes, and I thought it wasn’t very good. But if there’s one thing to be said about Malcolm McCray … the man knows how to sell a game!”

The writer of the article had waxed lyrical about how Paul was right: Malcolm McCray did indeed know how to sell a game, as evidenced by the phenomenal global success of Harp. If McCray himself was a household name, the game Harp took up every room in the house. Liza figured somebody would have to search pretty damn far and wide to find someone who had never heard of the multi-award winning RPG experience. Despite the fact that it was horribly expensive. There had been a famous bank robbery a few years ago wherein the criminal had been caught, and asked why he’d done it, and had responded, “Fucking Harp, man. I need to play fucking Harp.” The video had gone viral. All over the internet she had seen it. ‘MRW my mom asks me why I haven’t tidied my room yet.’ Etc.

Even though Liza had never played it, she felt like she could recognise an out of context screenshot from the game nine times out of ten. It felt like she had played it, just because of the ubiquity of the thing.

She just wasn’t that much of a gamer. She’d always had other stuff to do. Since living with Tucker and James she had dabbled in a lot of multiplayer, but that was pretty much it.

And yet, for some reason, all she could think about was the intense desire she had to get her hands on this game. To progress through it, hit milestones, see what happened. She wondered if this was what addiction felt like, even though she hadn’t had even a single taste of the thing yet. And she remembered what had been said on that interview.

It wasn’t possible that she was addicted, of course; she was clearly just easily influenced. She cursed herself for it, but still she kept walking.

Because whatever the reasons for it, she really, really had to get her hands on this game.

*

Tucker was bouncing from foot to foot when Liza arrived at what was clearly a massive event. Almost every student must have been out there in the field, most of them under one of the large white marquees because the clouds above looked a little grey and threatening. It had taken her a little while to find her friends, and she was surprised when she approached them to find that both Yana and Celia were there as well.

Five thousand students doing their undergraduates at this university, and an extra ten thousand doing postgraduate study. Liza couldn’t gauge the numbers perfectly, not by a long shot, but she would have put the number of attendees at around two thousand.

“Hey,” James greeted, the first to see her, and Tucker immediately spun around to grab her shoulders, making her jump.

“They’re giving out free copies,” he was babbling, and repeating himself over and over. “They definitely are. To all of us.”

“Someone’s excited,” she said, turning back to James, who shrugged. He was playing it cool, but Liza could tell from the way he was shifting and rubbing at his own arms, and glancing at the stalls under the nearest marquee that he was just as excited as she was, and he probably wasn’t even completely aware why either.

“Free copies,” she said again, looking over to Yana and Celia who were both on their phones. Yana played a Candy Crush lookalike and grinned as she got a sparkling match that set off a bunch of others, while Celia was just scanning over some sort of article on her own. “You guys gonna play too?” She tried to sound like she didn’t care much but it was hard to hide it when her heart was pounding so hard.

Celia looked up with a blank expression behind her magnifying glasses and Yana shrugged.

“The maker is here,” Celia said quietly. “That’s why I came.”

“The maker?” Liza repeated, wondering with some concern if Celia thought God had attended this lowkey gaming event on a university campus. It would be a hell of a time for him to announce his existence. Everyone would be too busy speculating about ways to kill some pixelated undead to even notice him.

“McCray is here,” she said again, her eyes darting left and right as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear, but surely they all already knew. “The game creator. Here in Fairacres, can you believe it?”

“You’re a fan of his,” Liza remembered. Come to think of it, she had probably heard Celia and Tucker excitedly discuss some of his previous accomplishments, but since she herself knew nothing about technology outside of the basics, she wouldn’t have been able to join in. She also had never been that interested in searching to find out more.

“Huge fan,” Celia said, brow twitching as if she was a little hurt that a friend of hers would even have to ask. “He’s a genius. He’s one of my role models.”

Liza thought back to how completely insane the man had seemed, but she smiled and nodded anyway. “It’s great to have goals,” she said, and then kind of immediately regretted it, because that didn’t mean anything.

“He’s here,” Tucker squealed like a preteen, and James tipped his head back and roared with laughter at the sight of his friend forgetting to act like a dude.

Malcolm McCray stepped up on a short platform underneath the largest marquee, and luckily the others had reserved a space close to him so Liza could see and hear him across the field without straining.

Beside him was that same assistant: the supermodel. Seeing her closer up, Liza noticed the totally self-assured vibe around her. She was almost impossibly tall and thin, with zero curves, and she wore red leather pants, a white ruffled blouse, and a tailored red jacket with shoulder pads. Her black bob was choppy and feathered, and her eyebrows were intense and arched. Liza found herself weirdly a little jealous of the woman’s apparent self-confidence. She clicked onto stage a pace behind Malcolm, and a foot taller than him. Her heels struck the wooden stage with precise echoing ‘click’s and her gaze travelled coolly over the hundreds of students staring up at her.

It took some effort to tear her eyes off of the woman and look at her boss instead, which was probably an interesting choice for him to have made for an event where he would surely want rapt attention.

McCray was wearing something equally bizarre, but the way he walked — a sort of sheepish, wide-eyed shuffle — just didn’t hold anyone’s attention quite like the bullheaded swagger of the woman taking up the rear. His suit was an intentionally crinkled silver-grey pleather material with cowboy fringe on the upper arms and down the sides of the legs. His shoes and belt were a down to earth brown, which cut his body into two weird silver segments.

“The guy looks like an alien,” James leaned over and whispered to her, and she smirked in agreement, but she didn’t look away from the stage. “Seriously. What do you think his deal is?”

The outfit, the sharp-featured, sneering assistant, and his trademark dilated pupils and long, wild hair made Liza almost willing to believe that he was a man from outer space.

“There’s no drug I can think of that could allow him to consistently be some kinda technological genius, while still having him make zero sense most of the time, dress like an expensive homemade Halloween costume, and stare into people’s souls without ever blinking.” The words left her in a rush, but to her relief James nodded rapidly as though he had felt that last bit too.

Tucker turned and looked over his shoulder. “Ketamine, I’m telling you,” he said.

“Fuck off,” James said, shoving his shoulder. Then after a pause, “...maybe quaaludes.”

“Thank you, beautiful people, for bringing your young bodies to join me in this field while we discuss, rather one-sidedly, my video game,” McCray said, his voice booming surprisingly well through the field with only a cheap mic borrowed from one of the university’s societies.

Liza shook her head. “Bath salts,” she whispered. James smirked.

“I have gathered you all here for a surprise event.” There was a pause where every die-hard fan of Revelations Software held their breaths collectively. “This game is rather unusual for a brand new release, in that it has never been playtested before. Never been played before at all. Today, in the field behind me, you are going to be playing the game together. For the first time. Something of an alpha test of The Alpha Virus.”

A beat, and then genuine screams broke out.

“Calm, please, calm!” McCray said, and Liza thought he sounded jovial until her eyes returned to his presence on the stage — wide-eyed and running his shaking hands through his curly hair. He was genuinely nervous. “This must go as planned! Children!”

“Bring out the game!” a tall, beefy-looking guy near to Liza yelled up at the stage. “We ain’t hear for you, mate.” His friends all laughed.

The students weren’t stampeding like he was making it sound, but they were chatting excitedly with each other and exchanging looks left and right. At the sound of his voice again, the hubbub mostly died down and McCray semi-deflated with relief.

“This needs to go perfectly,” he said again. “Rayna. Are you hearing me?”

He was still speaking into the microphone but he was clearly addressing the scowling supermodel beside him, her hip jutting and her hand resting on it. She swivelled her eyes to meet his gaze, and gave a sharp nod.

“This needs to go perfectly,” he said again. She replied with something that Liza couldn’t hear. “Yes. Exactly. Children? Listen to me.”

The crowd of excitable students looked to him once again. “This is important. I want to speak to you about something very important to me.”

“His home planet,” Liza suggested.

“Drugs,” James countered. The whole situation was becoming so close to surreal that they all giggled.

“This planet,” McCray finally stated.

The five of them couldn’t help it — they all just about collapsed in fits of barely stifled giggles.

Luckily they were far away enough that the man on stage wrapped in tin foil couldn’t see them falling about laughing at him, and the fact that he had accidentally played into their in-joke. The immediate people around them, however, shot them glares and shushed them.

“This planet is the most important thing to me because it houses all of humanity,” McCray confidently continued as the group choked back more laughter. “Humanity fascinates me, you know.” At this, he pulled the mic out of the stand and began to very slowly pace from left to right on the stage, thoughtful. “Humanity fascinates me because there are two facets to it: there’s society, with politeness and rules and laws and expectations … and there’s the primal instinct that we still have, which we ignore, to hunt and to kill and to dominate and subjugate.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Yana hissed, looking up from her phone to crease her brow.

Liza felt her heartbeat kick up again, like it had before, but this time she thought maybe she understood why. Malcolm was staring at her again, right in the eye, and though his face stayed still, there was a smile dancing behind his gaze. A sinister one. She turned to look around, and then looked back at him, and he was still staring at her.

And only her.

She was scared, almost frozen to the spot, and this time she knew why he had this effect on her: For the first time in her life, even if just for a second, she felt like she like prey.

“Now what happens when we build up society and we ignore the primal?” he asked. “Well, you’ve all seen the news. War happens. So many of your countries are in turmoil, children. Dictatorships are rising and falling left and right, and the population are signing their ballots in blood!” He ceased his pacing and raised his arms violently to the sky, making a couple of the nearby students flinch, but luckily his gaze left Liza, and she felt like she could breathe freely again.

“If you ignore the primal parts of humanity, it heats and heats unchecked and then one day the pot boils over and the entire kitchen is ruined. Do you get my meaning?”

Liza heard several people around her mutter ‘No.’

“Is he OK?” she whispered to James, closest to her. He shrugged emphatically, so she turned to Celia on the other side, who was squinting through her glasses up at her idol, her mouth having fallen open slightly as if she was trying to decipher a particularly complicated equation.

“Something seems really off about this,” she said to the smaller girl, who tore her eyes away and looked up at her, blinking.

“It does,” she said simply. “I think … because there is. He doesn’t normally talk this much. He barely ever talks at all.”

“What’s his point?” Liza whispered.

“That modern civilisation and human nature cannot coexist,” Celia suggested, her words cutting through McCray’s ramblings. “Not at the same time as each other. Something has got to give. But what’s that got to do with a dumb zombie shooter?”

“Fucked if I know,” James tutted from her other side.

“... and if they cannot,” McCray concluded, as if he had taken on Celia’s point as his own and was completing her sentence, which made Liza uncomfortable with how surreal it appeared to be, “then humanity will surely perish. Just as every other advanced civilisation has before now.”

“What?”

Murmurs around her pricked up her ears. Other advanced civilisations? Jokes aside, the man was really starting to sound an awful lot like…

“Is he actually an alien?” Tucker demanded, spinning around to face them all.

“I think … I think he might believe he’s an alien,” James replied, rubbing his forehead in disbelief.

“Yes, you heard me right,” McCray said. As soon as society advances to a certain point of civility and expectation, the heat gets too much and the primal wins out. It happens without fail. I can assure you that. But humanity is special. We will beat the odds, together.”

“Where’s The Alpha Virus?” that same dude near the five of them roared. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, and had the exact same haircut as the gaggle of boys around him who were vehemently agreeing.

“Just give us the game!” another one laughed. They actually high-fived each other.

McCray expertly ignored them. “I have witnessed the self-destruction of too many societies and I am tired. I do not wish to see any more.”

“The gaaaaame!” one of them yelled.

“This will be the world on which I will hang my—”

“Game! Game! Game! Game!”

“I mean … they have a point. Where is this stupid game?” Liza asked, but her words were drowned out by the steadily increasing volume of the chanting all around.

“Have any of you heard of the, um, the uh…” McCray was getting incredibly flustered up there, and Liza couldn’t believe she had felt unnerved by him before. He was clearly just a nutjob, not someone who wanted to eat her, or whatever. “The … the Great Filter is a theory that…”

He squeezed his eyes shut hard. His assistant hovered a nervous hand over his shoulder, the first time Liza had noticed emotion on her face.

“Please, be quiet, let me talk. I—”

“Game! Game! Game! Game!”

“I just wanted to … communicate with you; I want to explain why I’m here. What I want … can’t have it be senseless.”

“Game! Game! Game! Game!”

McCray’s hands were clamped on either side of his head now. “Can’t have it be senseless,” he repeated, and there was no doubt that his words would have been pretty much silent if it weren’t for the microphone in front of him. “Need you to tell everyone.”

Liza noticed that many of the people around her who weren’t busy punching the air with every chant had their cellphones out and trained on Malcolm McCray.

“He’s having some kind of public breakdown,” she said, shaking her head. “This is just sad … should we be getting someone?”

Celia crossed her arms across her chest and tilted her head. “It’s just strange that he has hardly made any public appearance until the last couple of days. Ever. And now he has something that he seems to really want to say, and he can’t get it out.”

“That’s sad,” Liza agreed. She took a couple of steps through the crowd to the initiators of the chanting and waved her arms above her head. “Hey. Hey!” she yelled.

“Game! Game! Game! G—”

The head thug turned to her with a quizzical brow.

“Let the guy speak! He’s trying to give you the damn game!” she yelled over everybody.

The dude stared at her for a while, and then he let out a chuckle.

“Chill out, blondie. We all came here for the GAME! Not a fuckin’ lecture about humanity!” he yelled, punching the air. His friends roared wordlessly again.

“I think you’re the one who needs to chill out,” James countered, his arms folded and a scowl across his face. “You’re not hurrying him up, you’re just pissing everybody off.”

“You what?” the dude yelled over to him. He was immediately a lot less patient with James than he had been with Liza.

“He said, you’re pissing everybody off!” Tucker snapped over his shoulder. “Just cut it out!”

“The weird guy is just trying to speak and you’re screaming in my fucking ear,” Yana agreed, glaring up at him.

The dude was about to say something to her, and Liza had the feeling it was going to be terrible, when the mic squealed with feedback. Rayna, the leather-clad assistant, grabbed it and yanked it to her own mouth. Behind the wail of the feedback — so loud that a couple of people nearby grimaced and clamped their palms over their ears — was a gentle electrical thrumming.

“You, you, you ... all ten of you,” Rayna demanded, jabbing her finger in their direction. The crowd turned to stare at Liza, her friends, and the chanting tank-top wearers. “All of you. Up on the stage, please. Now.”

They were there voluntarily but Liza certainly didn’t feel like she was allowed to refuse. Rayna spoke as if nobody had ever even thought to contradict her before, and maybe they hadn’t. Beside her, Malcolm stood, his posture defensive and yet defeated, looking up with baleful eyes.

She slowly made her way through a crowd that parted for her, and behind her strutted the five men in shorts and flip flops with grins and nods to everyone as they went, and her four housemates as well. Up on the stage and seeing so many faces staring up at her, slackjawed, gave her a kind of stage fright that made her palms begin to sweat, even though she wasn’t expected to do anything. She tugged on the hem of her shirt, which rode up a little too high and exposed her navel. Not for a fashion reason; it had just shrunk in the dryer and she hadn’t bought any new clothes in a year.

“You understood what he said, yes?” Rayna asked. Up close now, Liza wondered if the woman actually needed the microphone at all. Her voice was harsh and grating and seemed to cut right through any other sound she could hear. Close to her she could see the gritty-looking silver grey of her eyes. Liza swallowed, and then nodded, because it seemed easier to lie a little bit. “Good. You’ll do just fine.”

“We’re going first?” the head douchebag said with a pearly white grin of such smugness that Liza kind of wanted to casually shove him off the stage and onto the faces of the students gawping up at her.

“You’re testing it first,” McCray confirmed, his voice hoarse and his eyes sad. “I … am sorry. You are the ones who will be in charge of sharing the message that I have shared with you today. Here, I’m going to show you where the other campus outbreaks are going to be. Pretty much every other major university in the world.” He bent down and grabbed a tablet, from a laptop bag on the stage.

“He’s definitely crazy if he thinks Fairacres is a ‘major university’,” James said. The douchebags who heard him laughed appreciatively, but head-bag remained focused on McCray.

The silver-clad man tapped on the tablet a few times before showing it to her. “Are you looking? This is important.”

“For the game?” the douchebag confirmed.

“For the game,” McCray agreed, but Rayna laughed. McCray smiled as well for a moment. He showed it to Liza, but the d-bag pulled the tablet from in front of her so that he could see it as well.

“Here,” McCray said again, and Liza realised she was looking at a map. There were rippling red circles like radar at different points of a map of the UK. There so many in the cities that the entire areas just looked like pulsing dots, and then they were scattered around the rest of the country, here and there.

“These are the stores that are going to hold the game. In fact, the stores that are currently handing them out to those who have queued for hours. These are the hotspots. The campuses like this one holding promo events simultaneously right now.”

“Simultaneously?” Liza repeated. “I thought we were the only one?”

He laughed and didn’t reply. She furrowed her brow. “We estimate that several thousand have been bought already, in the UK alone.”

“OK…” Liza said, shaking her head. Why did he think she cared?

“These are the zombies. The people you’ll be playing with,” he explained.

“Oh, I get you; the game takes place across the whole of the UK, that’s pretty cool,” said the tank top wearing dude beside her. “Can we get started? Where are the consoles?”

“Rayna is handing out the AR systems,” McCray said, turning back to use the microphone. His assistant had indeed descended the steps and was handing out fancy-looking bluetooth headsets, a green colour with white biohazard symbols stamped onto them. “Install them as quickly as you can so we can get started.”

The crowd looked confused, but slipped the devices into their ears all the same. Some of them whispered excitedly to each other, some just concentrated hard on getting it in as quick as they could.

“When do we get ours?” one of the douchebags demanded.

“Right now,” McCray said, his voice like the cold deliberate steps of a spider across Liza’s skin.

“I’m not sure I want to play anymore,” she said, but it was so quiet that only Yana heard her, and the other girl raised her eyebrows in agreement but said nothing. She looked at the sea of students again. Why was she up here? She could just quietly walk down the steps and make her way home, but … everyone was looking at her. And it was just a game; it wasn’t the game’s fault that the creator was a bit reclusive and weird.

She’d have her fun and then get home and into her PJs and watch Netflix. And this would remain a hilarious story. Liza looked at her friends. James and Tucker looked just as confused by everything, but from the way Tucker was clenching and unclenching his fists she could tell he was very excited. Celia was regarding Rayna in the crowd with a deep confusion, and Liza wondered why she wasn’t taking the opportunity to bombard McCray with questions, being only two feet away from him. Yana wasn’t on her phone, but she wasn’t really paying attention either. The five lads in tank tops, shorts and sandals all grinned and exchanged looks.

Liza figured that they were still so excited about the game because they hadn’t been paying enough attention. What had McCray meant with all of those strange and ominous things he had said? The civilisations he had seen fall?

He meant in games, perhaps?

“Here.” After a short rummage he pulled out ten bluetooth headsets that were almost identical to the ones in the crowd, but they looked a bit bigger and were a deep red. The symbol on them was not quite the same. Upside down, and rough-looking. “Put ‘em on.”

“Yeah, let’s get it over with,” Yana said with a shrug.

“Why’d you even come?” Liza couldn’t help but laugh. “You could be drinking milkshakes in bed right now.”

Yana’s eyeline trailed across to land, just for a second, on Tucker as he laughed and shook his head at some comment a douchebag made, and then Yana’s eyes flicked back to Liza’s and she shrugged. “Who knows? I’m unpredictable like that.”

“Ah,” was all Liza said in return. No point in teasing her about a crush just yet, when there were zombies to kill.

“I’m guessing we put these on and we can see zombies?” James asked, reaching out to take the set that was offered to him.

“Exactly,” McCray said. “Turn them on and have a look.” He nodded his head at James encouragingly as he installed it in his ear. At a button press, a light turned on, his eyes grew wide and his pupils shrank to the size of pinpricks.

“You alright, man?” Tucker asked.

“Yeah,” James breathed, scanning across the crowd. Liza looked in the same direction, but all she could see was a crowd of people jamming headsets into their ears and giggling with each other. “Is that…” He switched it off and blinked a couple of times before looking back around him. “OK. That just … it’s so real, guys, you have to try it.”

“Cool,” Liza said, “thanks.” She took her offered headset and carefully fitted it into her ear, feeling the coolness of the metal. She slid her fingers over it and found the tiny groove of the button and clicked it. There was a gentle metallic hum in her ear, and then a screen swished across her field of vision from nowhere, that she could still just about see through.

Welcome to The Alpha Virus!

You have taken on the responsibility of being a PLAYER.

You must spread the message to the world.

You must try your hardest to survive.

We at Revelations Software WANT you to survive!

Good luck.

It disappeared the second her eyes had swept over the final word, which was slightly jarring, and she let her eyelids flutter a couple of times to get used to the weird sheen over everything in front of her as she stared off the side of the stage, across the field at the trees far away. The shiny overlay lasted just a moment, as it the headset was making sense of the world around her. ./,

Calibrating...

Then it all looked completely normal and natural again. Liza stared at the trees, wondering what she would see for a moment, and then she turned to her friends. They all looked totally normal. In fact, everything did.

Awkward, stilted movement from the crowd caught her attention and she turned to look at them, which was where everyone else up on stage was staring.

Thousands of people, the same people she had just seen, except … they all looked wrong.

Their skin was now grey and drooping, their eyes pale and faded, and their lips stretched, dry and cracked. Their brows were swollen, their hair missing in clumps. They swayed, open-mouthed, and gnashed their exposed teeth.

And it looked just as real as anything else around her. Liza shuddered and turned to exchange a look with her friends. The other guys were waving their hands in front of their faces and whooping with amazement.

“I just have one more thing to say,” McCray said quietly. Liza turned to him, wide-eyed, and feeling her skin crawl even more intensely at the way that he spoke. “You ten are the Players, or the Hunters. You will kill the zombies and collect the loot, and upgrade things around you in order to survive. It’s simple.”

“Awesome,” one of the guys announced.

“Remember that life is pain and life is struggle. If a shark stops swimming, it dies. If you stop working to survive every day, you aren’t really living a life at all. You might as well be spending your days playing a video game and waiting for a nuclear apocalypse. So take your lives into your own hands. That’s what The Alpha Virus is all about.” He nodded, seemingly happy that he had said all he needed to say.

“This guy is really into his own game,” Yana whispered. The skin on Liza’s neck was pricking up and she wasn’t sure how to respond. “And I swear he was staring right at me during his speech. Like, into my eyes. I thought he was going to eat me.”

Huh.

“Rayna, let’s go. Initiate the Alpha Virus.”

“Everyone! If you haven’t already, click the ‘on’ button on your headset. Raise your hands if you haven’t. Drop them when your headset turns on,” Rayna barked to the crowd.

It was an efficient system. Finally with one each, all two thousand or so crowd members slowly dropped their arms from the air. One by one, two by two, until there was no single hand in the air. Liza still saw them as glassy-eyed zombies, tongues lolling, unable to quite keep their balance where they stood.

“Initiating,” McCray called.

“Ready,” Rayna called back to him.

“Connected to all headsets worldwide. Alright … Three … two … one … and … welcome to the new Earth!” McCray tapped at his tablet and Rayna had a smartphone in her hand. They both did an identical mini motion: a swipe, and then a four-digit tap.

Go.

“Collect loot, kill the zombies, and most importantly — survive,” McCray reminded them. “The headset will help you; it is the key, Players. Good luck, and work together!”

Liza frowned, wondering what was going to happen next. The crowd … they would probably be briefed quickly on how to be zombies and what their objectives were, right? How were they supposed to try to kill each other without hurting each other? They had no weapons, and … honestly, wasn’t a game like this kind of a health and safety nightmare? What if somebody freaked out and actually attacked a zombie?

They looked so real.

Just as she thought that, her eyes scanning across the crowd once more with a shiver running continuously up and down her spine, they all seemed to lurch in unison, their heads lolling and their bodies convulsing from the bottom up, like they were about to throw up. Liza flinched backwards instinctively; watching people vomit was disgusting. But of course they were fine — it was probably just a little feature of her AR intended to freak her out.

The way they moved, like spiders, with their limbs arching and flailing deliberately, was so unnatural that it freaked her out in the same way arachnophobia did.

“Let’s go,” James said, tapping her on the shoulder. The other guys were already away, tearing off down the field behind the marquee, making a beeline for something or other. “They found a map feature that shows a weapons cache. C’mon, girls. Don’t lag behind — let’s get a perfect score!” He grinned and turned and ran away, following the boys who were somehow sprinting in sandals.

Before she followed along, Liza watched as a vast number of predatory human beings stepped forward, their eyes lit up by something she had only seen traces of before.

Hunger.

It was definitely hunger. Their nostrils flared and their mouths gaped and, singularly, they all locked on her — the only remaining Player on the stage, and waded through each other blindly to get to her.

She was frozen, watching them, for a couple of seconds. Her own mouth opened and shut while she tried to think of something to say, but there was no reason to speak. And nobody to speak to. The zombies treated Rayna and McCray like they were other zombies, and ignored them completely. They ran bodily into the stage and reached for her with grasping, wrinkled hands. A couple managed to happen to use the stairs, but it seemed like luck.

Was the AR altering her perception of their behaviour? Had they been told to ram into the stage instead of to ascend the stairs to get her?

It didn’t matter! She wasn’t going to be the only one to lose the game and get killed instantly. So she turned, hopped off the back of the stage, and ducked through the tent flap that the others had disappeared through.

Immediately she felt the sensation of something raking against her back, and let out a squeal and spun around. What used to be some kind of girl stood in front of her, mouth wide and drooling, blonde hair lank and hanging in clumps. She wore a tight top and a miniskirt that exposed her saggy grey midriff, and raked again at Liza’s front with long talon fingernails. The thing was desperate to get something in her fingers, to clench and then trap her.

Liza had no way to kill her, and didn’t want to push or strike a student, no matter what she looked like. Her instincts were screaming for her to exterminate the threat before she got into trouble, but she fought it back and sprinted away instead.

Luckily she was wearing tennis shoes that day instead of something like pumps or kitten heels. She tore across the grass with a pumping heart and a dry mouth and reached the others panting hard.

The other nine players stood around a large wooden crate, black with the same symbol stamped on the front as was on their headsets. That jagged biohazard sign.

“What do we have?” she managed to ask. The two groups: her friends and the men she 100% assumed to be rugby players were bickering and sniping at each other about everything they were doing.

“Yes, it’s mine, because I touched it first.”

“You didn’t touch it first, you grabbed the crossbow first! I saw you!”

“I d—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

Liza raised her hands and waved them in the air. “Everyone shush! OK? We are the first people who are able to play this game ever, let’s not go down in history as the worst gamers in the world. Alright?”

That sentiment actually seemed to work to calm down most of the boys. Yana sighed emphatically at them to really bring the point home. Celia squatted nearby and took apart a rifle and put it back together, her mouth open wide.

“Yeah, so I should get the shotgun,” Tucker said, jamming his hands grumpily into his pockets. He was almost wearing the same outfit as the group of d-bags, which was kind of funny. Liza realised that they were all looking over at her, as though she had something else to add after her first point.

“Uh, well, weapons should go to whoever is best with them,” she said. “I did some shooting with my dad, so I’ll be comfortable with a pistol.” She shrugged.

“I don’t want the crossbow,” a dude snapped and clenched his jaw.

“Well, first thing … what are all of your names? I can’t keep calling you the Douchebags.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah, so…” the largest one, the ringleader, began, and jabbed his thumb towards all of his friends in turn. “That’s Fosters, Tommo, Spitfire, Ham Sandwich, and I’m Blazer.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Liza muttered under her breath.