Chapter Four

“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”

-The Girl with All the Gifts

Ham Sandwich handed Liza a pistol, but first made a point of peering at it, cocking it, and then winked at her before pressing it into her hand. “Hey, babe, maybe w—”

“Not with that name you’re not,” she said, taking it from him as well as its holster, which she secured around her waist. She posed and aimed, winking one eye, and then after checking that it was fully loaded she popped it into the holster where it sat comfortably.

You have equipped your first weapon.

Glock 19

Compact, light and effective, this Austrian-made pistol was primarily used by law enforcement officers.

Check your weapons page to learn more about this weapon.

Liza looked at the link for a second extra, wondering how she was supposed to click on it, when it opened right in front of her eyes. The thing must have been closely tracking her eyeball movements. How cool was that?

Weapon

Features

Power

Glock 19

Capacity: 15

25

Not really sure what most of this meant, Liza flicked her gaze over the ‘X’ in the top corner and watched it fall away to reveal the world around her again.

“This whole thing is so cool!” she said to the others, but everyone else had long-since finished getting their weapons together and now they were all staring behind her at what was approaching.

Oh yeah. The horde.

Two thousand limp zombies with their dried out mouths stretched into silent hungry yawns were steadily making their way towards the group of ten. They were not running, they were not desperate or scrabbling — which Liza figured must have taken the students an awful lot of self-control — but they were getting closer and closer, spreading around the marquee stage and converging like river water around a stone.

“Let’s test this puppy out,” Ham Sandwich said, unnecessarily cocking his own pistol and sending her another wink.

“Where did you get that name?” Liza asked, raising her pistol to squint past it.

“Mine?” he asked. She didn’t say ‘no’ so he continued. “It was pretty legendary, to be honest with you. We had a challenge for the uni rugby club initiation. There was a pile of ham sandwiches and we had to take turns and get as many in us as we could. Everyone else only got one, maybe two, in their mouths but I got my turn and I managed six.”

“Fascinating. You must have a huge mouth,” Liza said dryly, focusing on her stance. The zombies were a couple of minutes’ lurch away from them.

“Nah, only got one in my mouth,” he said. There was a pause, and then Liza turned to frown at him. He winked at her for the third time since she’d met him, and she grimaced and turned back to the horde.

“Longest-ranged weapons,” Tucker said. “Crossbow, rifles, take aim.” He raised his shotgun and took careful aim, but he was right — the pistols and shotguns were not going to be as effective at this range.

“They’re all loaded already,” said Blazer, the stockiest and loudest of all the other group, “but how do we figure out who gets the priority ammo when we run out?”

“We divide it equally,” Liza yelled over, without quite breaking her gaze from the horde. “What did you think we would do?”

“I think the better fighters should take priority,” Blazer replied. “The people with better aim.”

“That’s fair,” she conceded after a pause. “But no one should be left without.”

“Right, so all of us are more active than you lot, obviously, and I always fucking nail it in the arcade, so I think I should be given ammo priority,” he continued. James made a disgusted face behind his rifle.

“Well, whatever keeps you quiet,” Liza called back with a fake honeyed smile. It didn’t really matter.

“And no offense but the girls should be last on the priority list.”

There was a record scratch moment. Liza lowered her pistol and whipped her head over to face him. “You what?”

“It’s just smarter. You haven’t played as many games like this, I’ve never met a girl who has been able to beat me at a shooter.” He shrugged coolly. He wasn’t trying to rile her up, just stating what he thought was fact.

“Lol,” Ham Sandwich actually said, out loud. Liza resisted the urge to look over at him, dreading wink number four.

“Seriously, no offense intended. Genuinely,” Blazer said, and she knew he at least thought he meant that. “It’s just that we’re the first to play this game and I want to do well. And being a leader means making tough decisions, so I’m sorry if I’ve offended you ladies.”

“That’s a bit sexist, mate,” piped up the one Liza thought was called Tommo. She guessed his actual name was Tom, but you never knew with these people. He was lanky and tall, with terrible-looking spiked up black hair. “Just because you’ve never met a girl who was better than you doesn’t mean they exist.”

“Please, feel free to prove me wrong,” Blazer said with a big, kind smile down at Liza, which then got a lot wider when he turned it onto Yana. He ignored Celia completely.

“Tool,” Liza muttered.

“Crossbow, rifles, shoot now,” Tucker said, addressing James, Celia, Spitfire and Tommo. “And Blazer, stop talking. Please.”

The four he had named aimed carefully.

“Aim for the heads, lads,” Blazer roared, and pointed to the shuffling horde like he thought he was Braveheart.

Liza felt really uncertain about this. The weapon in her hands felt totally real. It was even loaded; she had seen what looked like completely real ammo inside it, and the people they were aiming at only looked like zombies. Really they were her classmates.

And McCray was insane.

Liza saw the four of them carefully and slowly taking aim and shooting. “Wait…” she said, but everyone was concentrating too hard. Their aim was all terrible, but one zombie was blasted in the chest with rifle fire. It jerked and then continued to walk.

That made her feel a lot better about the whole thing. Of course it was fake. She was being paranoid. Her father would be proud.

If the weapons were real, that person would have fallen. Liza looked at her own Glock, satisfied for now that it wasn’t a real weapon — no matter how real it looked — and tried to bring up range stats for it.

Weapon

Features

Power

Range

Glock 19

Capacity: 15

25

50m

“OK, shorter ranges. Pistols, it’s your turn now,” Tucker said. Liza raised her weapon and then lowered it again. She wanted to shoot, to join in with the game, but this was all so weird.

“Don’t be scared, girls,” Blazer said to Liza and Yana, who had also yet to shoot. “You just have to try it.” He appeared to be completely ignoring the fact that Celia had just landed her second hit right beside him. “No one is going to be mad if you miss — unless you shoot one of us, that is. Aim straight ahead...”

“Fuck that,” Liza snapped, lifting her pistol up again to aim. The headshotted zombies had fallen, but those that had been nailed elsewhere on their bodies continued to shuffle forward like nothing had happened. That was good enough evidence to her that McCray had not orchestrated some kind of massacre here and forced them to off each other. Whatever was happening … the zombies would have been screaming and running if they were in pain.

And now she had something to prove.

She checked her stance, sighted down her arm, and shot four times, felling four zombies one after the other beside each other.

Headshot COMBO! x4

80 UP

80 UP (+10)

80 UP (+20)

80 UP (+30)

400 UP

Smug, she turned to Blazer to see his reaction, but he was swearing and struggling with his own weapon.

“Yes, Liza!” Tucker roared, readying his own shotgun. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?”

“Shooting stuff,” she replied with a grin. “Four brothers. You know.”

“You shot your four brothers?” James fake-screamed.

“Look, there’s four hundred of them and we’ve taken out maybe twelve,” Liza pointed out, ignoring him. “We have to gather up these supplies and retreat while we still can.”

“Never surrender!” Spitfire screamed, and continued to wildly — wildly — miss with every single crossbow bolt.

“How much experience did you get from four headshots, Liza?” Tucker asked, risking a blast from his shotgun and splattering one zombie’s chest with buckshot, causing it to miss a step. “Shit,” he muttered, pulling back to open it and reload with two more shells.

“400,” she said. “Some kinda combo bonus happened.”

“Fuck me, that’s a lot,” James said. “You for real?”

“Yeah, I guess it’s because it was four in a row.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m bad at games because of the controllers.” She shot a look at Tucker. “Told you that was why. They make no sense!”

“You take that back!” he yelled. “A poor workman blames his tools, Liza.”

“I just got 50 for shooting something four times until it fell,” James laughed, “just to compare.”

“What’s a UP anyway?” Tucker said, pronouncing the letters carefully. “Or is it an ‘up’?”

“Something Points,” Blazer said with confidence.

“We gotta move back,” Liza said, sighting down her arm again before lowering it. The horde, still thousands strong, realistically, was maybe twenty generous seconds from reaching their delicious flesh. “You said you didn’t wanna lose the game.”

“Bet we don’t have much time left,” Spitfire called out from the back of the group, clumsily slipping bolts back into his crossbow before shooting them limply three feet forward and into the grass.

“You’re wasting so many goddamn bolts,” Tucker snapped. “I shoulda taken the crossbow.”

“Fuck yourself, it’s a learning curve!” Spitfire yelled. “Am I the only one with no points?”

No one replied for a second as they continued to shoot. Liza stepped back and took aim again. 15 rounds in her gun. She didn’t want to waste them all if she didn’t have to, but then again … it had been really satisfying to get that number of points. She raised her gun again and shot twice, getting one gaping zombie through the eye, but the second one got away from her a little and grazed another zombie’s upper arm. It didn’t notice, or bleed.

Headshot!

80 UP

So the combo system reset after a couple of seconds without shooting? That was fair, but annoying. She lowered her gun, put off by that miss, and opened her mouth to tell the others to help her gather up the rest of the supplies in the crate and move out, for the third time, but was put off by the sudden feral screaming of the crossbow-wielding Spitfire.

The dude threw his crossbow over his shoulder and flailed a machete above his head — clearly nobody had wanted to grab any of the melee weapons from the crate; Liza hadn’t even seen them — and launched himself fully at the approaching horde.

His friends began to laugh, slowly at first, and then they bent over to slap their knees, wipe tears from their eyes, their faces contorted and red as Spitfire slashed and swiped through the air. In front of Liza’s eyes she watched as he jammed his weapon straight through the skull of a female zombie with waist-length red hair, and then kicked her in the stomach to dislodge his machete. Liza covered her mouth with both hands — what the hell was going on here? How had McCray ensured that stuff like booting other players was safe?

How had anyone approved of this game if it wasn’t? She let out a small breath. The answer, of course, was that this wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t safe. Somehow, for some reason that she couldn’t see, the other students were safe.

Maybe they weren’t even there at all! AR could do anything, right?

“Shit, guys!” Spitfire screamed, turning around. “I just got 100 points for a melee h—”

Another zombie approached and grabbed his arm, yanked it, and then chomped down on it. Blood spurted and dribbled down his pale skin and dabbed the grass below. Spitfire’s gleeful face instantly became devoid of all colour and his eyelids flared wide as he bared his teeth. “Ow,” he breathed, and a tear slipped down his cheek. “That hurts.” His voice was small, and croaking, and he looked close to unconsciousness.

“Jesus, guys, help him,” Liza stammered. The other boys were still absolutely dying with laughter.

“He’s messing. He’s a daft twat!” Blazer assured her, swatting her shoulder with the back of his hand.

Liza looked into Spitfire’s eyes, and his opening and closing mouth, and she raised her pistol and squeezed on the trigger.

Headshot!

80 UP

The zombie fell to its knees and then folded backwards like it was a department store mannequin, dead as anything could ever be. Spitfire was trembling, and looked up at her to mouth something.

“Get away,” she interrupted, unable to hear him.

“I think th—” he screamed. He enunciated, his veins bulging, sweat crowning on his brow, all of his energy going into making sure she 100% understood exactly what he was trying to say, but just then the rest of the horde reached him and clawed at his body. His sentence was reduced to terrified, hoarse screams as his already bitten arm was torn off by two zombies and the stump spurted blood. The screams became gurgles as two other zombies bit without hesitation into his collarbone and jugular, and the spray of blood almost made it ten feet to hit Liza herself.

She backed away. The horde had stopped advancing because every single one of them was attempting to pick at the boy’s body, as he burned as bright red as his nickname suggested. In moments it seemed like all that was left of him was a sizeable smear of bright red on the grass below.

“So realistic, it’s insane! Do you think he’ll respawn at the stage or somewhere else?” Blazer asked.

Liza felt the familiar sensation of her stomach contracting and hot bile working its way up, just like she had that time Tucker had gotten drunk and tried to slice a pizza, and had ended up carving right into the palm of his own left hand.

She had swallowed it back then and she pulled herself together now. It was a game.

It was a game, it was a game, it was a game. But it was no game she wanted to be a part of.

“Nope,” she cried, and while the zombies were still occupied lapping at the grass for any stray morsel of Spitfire — the sight of that solitary tear of absolute terror sliding down his cheek stuck in her mind forever — Liza yanked off her bluetooth set and threw it to the grass.

McCray was insane. She wasn’t about to get any goddamn PTSD from a video game … she would march back to the stage, past all the students, and she would shove the headset into Rayna’s manicured hands and tell them she was not going to be taking part any further … and that they needed to cool it on the realism! No one was going to buy a game so that they could see the flashes of total fear on their friends’ faces as they succumbed to a brutal death. Where was the fun?

But Liza didn’t do any of that, because when she looked up again, the horde was done with Spitfire. With bloodied mouths their gazes locked right on her, and once again they began to advance.

She looked at the AR system on the ground, and then back up at the horde, at the bloodstain that used to be a boy, and then back to the AR and its symbol. Wait. Why hadn’t anything changed back?

What…

...the…

...fuck?

“No … what?” she said in a small voice. It was a dream. It was fake. It had to be. What the hell was going on here? She squinted beyond the advancing tidal wave of hungry teeth at the main marquee, and she saw Malcolm McCray, a tiny blurry stick figure of a man from where she was standing, with his hand above his eyes as if he was casually watching a baseball game from behind the tent.

“Guys,” she said, backing up. James had already removed his, looking as pale and disgusted as she knew she probably did, and on watching the two of them, Celia pulled hers off and punched Tucker in the arm so that he did the same.

Yana was off, running through the trees behind her, her headset lying nestled in the grass.

“Is … is he respawning?” Ham said, squinting through the mass of dangerously close zombies. “Is he going to respawn right there?” His voice had an edge of panic.

“Take off the AR,” Liza said quietly. “All of you. Take it off, see for yourselves, and then run.”

Blazer was still laughing a little, but when every one of his friends pulled off their headsets and choked on the shock of what they saw — or rather … didn’t not see anymore? — he finally yanked his off and rolled his eyes.

“What?” he said. “Is this a prank or something? Spitty? Spitfire?”

A pause. Blazer stared into hundreds of advancing blank eyes.

“Spit?”

“Run,” Liza gritted out again, pausing to pull a knife from the chest, as well as a handful of clips and a roll of bandages. The zombies were four feet from her by the time she got up, sucked in a breath, and ran.

She didn’t have time to see if everyone else had finally followed her advice. She just ran. The trees behind the field led out to a dual carriageway, and beyond that there were private farms and orchards. Fairacres University was a campus college in rural Kent, many miles east of London, and was named that for a reason. It was a stunningly beautiful campus surrounded by rolling green hills, farmland and trees. The campus itself was the most highly populated two square miles for about thirty square miles.

It made sense that McCray would choose somewhere like a college campus to do something like this.

Whatever it was that he had done, exactly…

Once over the road, and having hopped a private fence, Liza ran until she was breathless, and then walked until she was terrified, and then ran until she had to double over and cough.

When she had enough breath to move again, she shimmied up to the lower branch of a tree at the edge of the empty grass field, and then up to the next branch, which was thick enough that she could lower herself down to a safe sit and look over the field in front of her, and the road to her right. Beyond which, she knew, was a disaster zone.

Had everyone else escaped?

Liza allowed what had just happened to sink in. They had … they had just witnessed something completely impossible.

She thought back to McCray, and the things that he had done with his life so far. The things that Celia worshipped about him. He had introduced at first a form of renewable energy made from lichen. It had been in the news nonstop for a couple of weeks and he had been hailed as a sort of saviour, until it had proven to just be too expensive. Then it had sort of fallen out of the news, and though McCray was fairly famous and had plenty of money by that point, he never did manage to finalise that plan.

Liza remembered there had then been news like ‘frustrated scientist trashes mansion after energy plan falls through.’ He had been devastated, moved out of his huge house and downsized. Then he wasn’t heard from again until maybe five or six years later, when he founded Revelations Software and launched Harp, the game that had changed the face of entertainment forever. ‘And we expected nothing less from one of Earth’s greatest minds,’ the news had said, the only true nod she recalled to what McCray had originally been in the public eye for doing.

Then came the hype for The Alpha Virus, and now … now this.

Had McCray done this by accident? Turned students into creatures? No way. No way in hell that this was an accident. He meant for whatever he had done to exist outside of the AR headset.

But how?

Was this the end of the world?

Liza thought back to the map he had taken care to show her. Those pulsing red dots in the cities and scattered elsewhere where the game was being sold. Right this second, and had been available since the morning. Was this happening everywhere? She couldn’t even check; she had left her phone in her bag back on the stage.

He had wanted so badly to give a speech and no one had listened. Would there have been clues as to why he had done this, if they had paid attention?

I don’t want it to be senseless.

This was not a zombie apocalypse yet, but he had definitely created real actual hungry zombies. Zombies that looked like they had been dead for weeks. If he had done something like injected them with a virus like the name suggested, they would have all looked about the same, but hungrier.

No, he had turned them into zombies. Not dead people who ate people, but actual pop-culture, recognisable, zombies.

If his intention had been to begin a massacre, and he had figured out a way to make humans want to kill and eat each other … then why go through all the trouble of the AR headsets and the zombie aesthetic?

Liza had nowhere near enough information to come to a conclusion about what had just happened. It just wasn’t going to be possible.

She didn’t know what his motive could possibly have been, and she didn’t know how he had done what he had done. One thing was fairly certain, though … McCray had killed all of those people out there.

But he hadn’t killed her.

Liza rearranged herself to get ready to hop down from the tree, her jacket pockets filled with ammunition that clicked and rattled as she moved.

If she alerted the media quickly enough, she could stop this. She had to get back to the stage, where she had left her bag. She had to reach her phone, record this teeny tiny apocalyptic event, and then distribute it to the right people. She could do that. She could…

Her thoughts were interrupted when, as her shoes hit the ground, the deafening sound of a low-flying helicopter clipped across the canopies across the road, and the jet black flying machine lowered itself into the field of zombies, and out of her eyeline.

The military? Already? Or someone else here to help destroy the horde? Whatever it was, she thought it might summon her friends, so she swept the bark and dirt from her jeans, and took off once again in a run.

This time back in the direction she had come. To find her friends, to get more answers, she would once again need to navigate past the horde.