Chapter Seven

“What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?”

-Warm Bodies

It was ordinarily a fifteen minute walk from the high street where the bus had left her to her home on London Road, but this time was not so ordinary, and it took her half an hour.

Every building she passed had not gone undamaged by the first few hours of the end of the world. Shops had been decimated by looters, and everything else by people who just wanted a taste of destruction the second they realised there were no rules. Every ten paces something new was smashed or scorched. A street that she knew so well, almost unrecognisable, but not quite.

Reality, but altered. Different.

Augmented.

She burst into her house and slammed the door behind her, resisting the urge to plant herself on the hallway floor and stare at nothing, stunned, for the next day and a half. She had things to do. She had to make a plan, and stick to it. Number one on her list of priorities was already set in stone.

Liza was going to survive the apocalypse, by any means necessary.

It was the specifics that were a touch murkier.

McCray had said that he wanted humanity to win. That was why, at the college events, he had given a group of students at each meetup the unique ability to play the game as it was meant to be played.

To win.

Games were created to be defeated. As long as they were a challenge.

McCray had proven to everybody that he was a master gamemaker with Harp. The entire point of Harp, Liza was starting to realise, was to create an inordinate amount of hype for The Alpha Virus, ensuring that the most people possible worldwide went out and bought it first thing. The campus events across the world served to ensure that hundreds of thousands of fit young people were turned from potential zombie-killers to zombies. Swarms that would ripple outwards like the red points on that map, destroying everything in their path.

Liza gingerly pushed at her lower ribs and felt no stabbing pain, so assumed that meant nothing was broken, and then made her way to the living room. Which was empty, of course. She was tempted to squeeze her eyes together and do that loud scream-crying thing that seemed to make toddlers feel better — at least, just for a while — but she managed to curb that impulse and flopped instead onto one of the two cheap leather couches in front of the TV.

The room was a mess, but it was a cosy mess. It was a student house that was coming apart at the seams. The floorboards in the middle of the hardwood living room came up with just the prying of fingernails, and they had lovingly nicknamed the dark and cobwebby crater underneath the ‘body hole’, for just in case one of them ever murdered somebody.

The leather covering on the couches was split and cracked like a thirsty desert, there was a hole in the wall from that one time Tucker had gotten drunk and dumped by what was, by his standards, a long-term girlfriend because she’d cheated on him. The house was lived in, and comfortable; all the flaws and degradation made it quirky and comforting … and in the context of a zombie apocalypse, it was incredibly unsafe.

So incredibly unsafe. A sleepy zombie could just about breach the walls by leaning on them. She buried her head in her hands for a moment, knowing she really didn’t want to leave, but knowing that she really didn’t want to die.

And wishing that her friends were here.

But she could make preparations now, and they could wait out the storm, together, when they got home. Because they would make it back home. She was sure of it. They were all armed, and they knew the area. And zombies are slow, easy to trick, and stupid as a sack of rocks.

She traced her finger across the cigarette burn mark on the arm of the couch, and thought back to what McCray had said to her, again.

He wanted them to win. He had given them an advantage. Not just the weapons, but the headsets. Right? She had points and he said she could use them to get stronger.

Getting stronger was a pretty appealing thought right about then, sitting and listening to the screams and roars of the end of the world, and feeling exposed in a crumbling old house that would likely blow away in a stiff breeze.

So she pulled one of the collection of headsets from her pocket — not the one covered in blood; she would try to remember to clean that off before gifting it to somebody — and popped it onto her ear, wincing as she did so as if afraid that it would change its purpose out of nowhere and turn her into a creature like the green ones had. But nothing happened, not that she could see, anyway. A slight rippling sheen appeared, as it had before, on the surface of the objects in the room as it calibrated, and then nothing more.

Liza concentrated with one eye closed and her nose wrinkled, hoping to get back into the screen that held her weapons.

Weapon

Features

Power

Glock 19

Capacity: 3/15

25

Bowie Knife

None

10

It hovered in front of her and instead of ‘X’ing out of the page, she trailed her eyes over to the name of her gun and — noting that it was incredibly useful that she could take the time to check how many rounds were left — concentrated on it, wondering if anything was going to happen.

A new table replaced the old one, and she took the time to familiarise herself and try to understand it. She did not have the greatest track record of being good at things like this. In the past, she would have had one of her brothers help her out with hard levels, preferring to play games for the story if she played them at all.

Glock 19

UP to Next Level

Features

Capacity: 15

400

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

Unlock an empty slot? What the hell would that do? She tried to concentrate on different parts of the table but nothing happened. She blinked a couple of times. In the top corner of the interface she saw a little ‘UP Available’ tab and she maximised it.

820.

She had 820 UP already. It seemed like a lot, but it almost certainly was not. If she unlocked the two options on her screen at that moment she would be down very low, and she wasn’t sure what else she could do with it — and if more capacity was worth it over another option she hadn’t yet discovered.

She bit the bullet — pun intended — and decided to go for unlocking the second slot, because the cost was low and she was very curious as to what she would be able to add. After ‘hitting’ Confirm with her eyeballs she was sent back to the same table.

Glock 19

UP to Next Level

Features

Capacity: 15

400

Empty Slot

?

Empty Slot (Unlock)

200

Well … OK, then. That just seemed like a giant waste of points, or was she missing something? In vain she figured she would try to stare at the words ‘Empty Slot’ until something magically happened, and to her surprise, another prompt appeared, overlaid on top of the table.

At that moment there was a loud splintering crash from outside that made her jump to her feet, the interface jumping forward with her to remain in front of her vision, but the noise had been at least two houses away so she nervously swallowed and brought her attention back to the upgrades — this was what she needed to be doing at that moment. This was what was going to save her life.

The prompt was simple. Too simple to make any sense.

You have unlocked a slot for a new feature for this weapon.

What would you like to add?

That … was it.

There was nothing else there!

Liza furiously looked up and down, did her best to will the interface to scroll, to move onto page 2 — anything! Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

“Shit,” she hissed.

Did she have to unlock actual features somehow? What kind of features even were there? Apart from increased capacity for bullets, what else could a gun do?

If her brothers were here they would be pissing themselves with laughter right now, and she knew that, but she still didn’t know the answer. A fucking paint job? What could she do?

She thought hard back to her father and her brothers, and the time they had spent together doing what her father considered bonding family activities. Peter Volkov was a man with very specific ideas and opinions that would never have been changed for anything; a second-generation Russian immigrant, he believed in hard work and little payoff. If an activity didn’t ‘build character’, what was the point in doing it?

If Liza really, truly, thought about it … it occurred to her that even though she had been a miserable little girl, with a childhood as cold as a Moscow winter, she was really far more prepared for the events that were about to unfold than any of her peers.

Her father had taken the five of them camping twice a year, taught them how to skin a rabbit — six-year-old Eliza had cried on and off for more than a week after that first one — and taught them how to shoot at targets and tin cans.

“The world is a cold and lonely place, Eliza,” her father had said to her. He had only been to Russia once to visit ailing family with his parents, as a boy, but in her memories of her childhood Liza always heard him speak with a slight accent. “No children of mine will grow up without knowing how to scare away the monsters under their beds.”

She did wonder if her family was doing alright in these critical first few hours. Two of her older brothers were in the military, so they were probably already on their way to quell some of the troubles, but the other two … one stayed at home playing games, and getting into screaming matches with their father almost daily on the subject of being a layabout, and the other was in grad school up in Scotland.

Her father was in his 50s but he was the hardiest goddamn human being that Liza had ever met. He would never die. She could imagine a zombie coming for him and then just turning around and sloping away because he shot them that look.

She thought back to the first time he had taught her how to shoot bottles, illegally, in the thick English woods with his father’s old pistol. She remembered how the awkward shape and weight of the old service revolver had felt in her teenage hands. The freezing air on her face; the boiling heat of her father’s disappointment when she had missed five shots in a row. The warmth that had washed over her when she had squeezed the trigger on the sixth try and the bottle had exploded in a shower of brown, shimmering glass…

She would never forget it.

“Eliza, having a gun is akin to having magical powers,” her father had told her that day, his hand on her shoulder with as much affection as he had ever showed her. “The problem is that in a world where everyone has superpowers, it might as well be nobody.”

Liza had wondered whether that was why he had stayed in England despite complaining about the country almost daily. Most of the Volkov family had emigrated from Russia when it looked like nuclear war was starting to rear its ugly head around 2020, but most of them had gone elsewhere. Poland, America, Canada. His parents had moved to England, and he had stayed there and acquired a hunting license.

But he never hunted, and he had far more guns than he had reasons to own any. Including handguns, which were almost impossible to find in Britain.

She had always wondered what the consequences would be if they were ever found, but she had never even come close to asking. There was plenty that Peter Volkov did that Liza was not sure was entirely above board.

Feeling helpless — and disliking the feeling immensely — Liza opened up the Glock’s menu again and stared at it.

Glock 19

UP to Next Level

Features

Capacity: 15

400

Empty Slot

?

Empty Slot (Unlock)

200

“Fuck, Dad,” she muttered, and got up, realising that if she hadn’t left her bag with her phone in it back up at the field, she could still probably have called him and asked how to best improve a pistol.

And made sure that they were all OK, sure, but honestly Liza was way more worried about herself than any of her highly capable brothers or her father. She lay down again and allowed herself to close her eyes for a second, trying to clear her mind of adrenaline and fear, for just a moment.

“For small prey you can use any kind of ammunition, if you just want them dead,” she remembered him saying. “If you want to use the pelt, or the meat, it’d be best if you used a knife.”

The memory was completely useless in terms of figuring out how to upgrade gun, but Liza had the idea to open up her knife’s menu as well to take a look.

Bowie Knife

UP to Next Level

Features

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

Empty Slot (Unlock)

200

Well, that had nothing at all that was available to her to upgrade, and since she knew that the next menu contained nothing if she unlocked one of the slots, she held off.

15 rounds in one gun was perfectly alright with her for now, too, so she wasn’t quite sure what to do. McCray had told her that this was the way to gain the upper hand in this new world, and she just couldn’t quite figure it out.

She was about to resign to her desire to wallow in uncertainty for several hours — or maybe just sit and watch Netflix with glazed-over eyes while her college town outside burned — when there was a small explosion sound outside, and then crackling, and screaming. It sounded like fireworks. More and more went off, and the screams got louder, and suddenly there was a furious, desperate pounding at the front door.

“Hey. Hey! Anybody in there?” a voice was crying, so broken and terrified that she couldn’t even identify the gender of the speaker. Liza bolted through the hallway to look through the peephole — not willing to take any chances in a situation where people were setting off fireworks at what sounded like windows.

She threw open the door and Yana shoved past her to get inside, and slammed the door shut before pressing her back against the wall and sliding to the ground — much like Liza herself had wanted to when she had returned.

The other girl was a mess.

Yana was normally so put together and had that trademark air of bored beauty, with her shiny burnt caramel hair, olive skin and almond-shaped green eyes. Everything about Yana apparently reminded Liza of food.

She lifted her hands to scrape through her messy hair and clenched her fists, trembling violently. “They’re dead,” she said quietly, and then before Liza could answer she looked up, mascara smudged across most of her face, and glowered. “Didn’t you hear me? I said they’re dead!”

“Wh-who?”

“Everyone. Everyone is dead.” She lowered her face into her open palms again, still quivering uncontrollably. Liza felt numb.

“All of them?” she asked quietly. “Tucker, James, Celia?”

There was a pause, and then a shrug, and Liza’s knees felt weak with relief. “I was with a couple of those other boys. I ran and ran and then I had to stop, I thought I was going to throw up. Then two of them caught up with me and we ran together. For forever, it felt like. Through the trees. Somehow we curved backwards and ended up at a farm just beside where it … happened.”

“Yeah?”

Yana nodded, sick. “There were a couple of sheep in the field. Nothing dangerous, so we hopped it and kept going. There was … a gap in the fence. The things got in. One of them got distracted by a sheep so we kept running. But it was disgusting, Liza, it tore the thing apart.” She sniffed. “But better it than us.”

There was a silence. “What happened to them?” Liza asked quietly.

“We rounded the corner in the field, thinking we were safe, but there were … fifty, sixty of them there. Eating the sheep. Picking them clean. They all looked up and saw us. It was nightmarish. The guy, Tommo, he turned and ran for it without a word. We yelled for him to come back and be careful, but I think he just couldn’t hear, he was too afraid. He ran right into a clump of them coming up behind them. Struggled.” She swallowed hard. “Dead.”

Liza opened her mouth but she had no idea what to say. She hadn’t known him, but she remembered that he hadn’t been a bad guy. And even if he had been one of the annoying ones … no one deserved to die like that. Ripped to shreds, surrounded by sheep guts, on a day you’d woken up and thought was like any other.

“The other one. Fosters. We stared at his friend getting killed for so long, we could barely move, and then there were hands on us. We both bolted, but he … fuck, I think he tripped me on purpose. Then he left me there.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. I blasted the closest thing with my gun, right in the mouth. I remember that, but somehow I lost my gun somewhere. I don’t…” She was shaking, eyes darting.

“It’s OK,” Liza assured her, unsure what else to say.

“Then I ran again. I saw … I saw the farmer come out. He shot at the zombies who were eating his sheep, he got a few of them, and he shot at me before I managed to get too far away. Then I heard the dude screaming, Fosters, and then a gun blast, and then complete silence.”

“The farmer?”

“He was just shooting, and shooting.” Yana let out a shaky breath. “I saw him reloading, and then I just saw zombies. Like a hundred. And then I couldn’t see him anymore.”

“They’re all still out there.”

“And I ran into one on the road. I kicked it right in the crotch and ran.” She cracked a small smile, and Liza helped her up.

“We have to make a plan. I was thinking … we could stay in this house and wait out this portion of the apocalypse. The looting and the shooting. Wait for the army to get here or the police to regain control, and then come out when it’s safe. But the streets aren’t safe. We’re more likely to be killed by another person than a … a zombie.”

“Fuck’s sake, I don’t want to have to call them that with a straight face.”

“I know, but what else do you want to call them? You want to make up another word for them?”

Yana’s brow twitched. “No, that’s stupid.” She made her way into the living room to slump down onto the sofa and process all the things she had just seen, while Liza moved to look through the peephole onto the street again.

The pub across the road from their house was on fire.

“Didn’t like it much in there anyway,” she said to herself.

Their road was the busiest one in the town of Fairacres: London Road, which led to the capital city. There were always cars and buses zooming up and down the residential road. But there were no cars today; not even parked. To the left, an abandoned car completely blocked the road, and Liza imagined that there were only more further on.

People dashed across her fish eye lens field of vision every so often, holding things, chasing each other, screaming. Always screaming. The screaming hadn’t stopped. Two zombies shuffled around the corner, up the hill towards the university, and then for a moment there was silence … and then another deafening shattering sound from one of the houses next door, and Yana screamed from the living room.

“Was that us?”

“No, but I think we need to board up our windows,” Liza said, peeling herself away from the door and turning to walk through the short hallway. “Check the news.”

She expected the other girl to switch on the television, but she pulled a tablet from the side table and searched her Facebook feed to see what people were saying.

“Any good apocalypse memes?” Liza asked dryly, but Yana never knew when she was joking, and looked up with narrowed eyes.

“What?”

“It was … nothing. Just because people tend to take stuff pretty lightly. It was a joke. It’s all very sad.”

“How many people have you seen die today, already?”

Liza shuffled awkwardly. “A few.”

“Yeah,” Yana said. Liza hated feeling like she was being told off, especially by someone she considered a peer. Yana didn’t consider anyone a peer, though. She flicked her eyes back to the tablet and scrolled. “Looks like … it’s everywhere. People are doing that thing where they’re labelling themselves ‘Safe’; you should do it. For your family.”

“Sure,” Liza said. “Honestly, if I don’t survive this, my dad will posthumously disown me anyway,” she said. “It’s exactly the kind of character building he would have wanted me to go through.”

“Everyone who tried out the game.” She was on a news site now, ignoring Liza — which was probably for the best. She tended to babble when she was at a loss for something else to do. “It’s worldwide. Deaths got to an estimated mid five figures in the UK before counting stopped. That’s only counting the people who died in the first couple of hours this morning, after the release.”

“So, everyone who bought the headset has turned, pretty much?”

“Yep. It’s chaos.” Yana massaged the bridge of her nose.

“Who knew it would take something so small as to witness a couple of people eating people for society to completely break down.”

As if on cue, a shattering explosion and an ear-piercing scream made both girls flinch.

“Boarding up the windows sounds good,” Yana said, straightening up. “Then what? It’s still not exactly safe in this house.”

Liza looked at the scuffed white plaster walls they had tried to spruce up by tacking up curling movie posters. Their house was a heap of crap, it had to be said. Ideally they would go somewhere else, but where?

“We should stay here to let the others in,” she said. She had had her house key in her jeans pocket, but the others may very well have left theirs in their bags on the stage.

“Then go somewhere else?” Yana asked.

“Maybe we could just stay down there for a couple of days,” Liza suggested, nodding to the door beside the TV that led down to the kitchen basement that had made the house seem so quirky when they’d come to view it. What it actually had meant, though, was a constant smell of mildew and an unending slug problem, and Liza had barely used the house’s kitchen in the year they had lived there.

“All five of us?”

It was a small kitchen. Counters wrapped around the far two walls, and a four-seater table took up the rest of the room. The floor was cold exposed red brick. It didn’t exactly scream welcoming apocalypse bunker. But if they got enough food and barricaded the door, and maybe covered the floor in blankets, it would be alright for a day. They could fit if they all lay side by side without moving, probably.

Except for the fact that there was no bathroom. Yikes. Scrap that plan.

The familiar sound of a key scraping into their front door lock had both of their heads snap towards the door as it swung open.

Tucker arrived, blood splashed on his cheek and staining the front of his dark shirt, his mouth and eyes wide and open with shock, his chest rising and falling.

“It’s … it’s insane out there,” he breathed. “Thank god you’re here. Is it just you two?”

Liza got up and took his arm to help him onto the couch.

“It’s just us so far,” she confirmed. “Tommo is definitely dead. Fosters is almost definitely dead.”

Tucker swallowed, his glazed eyes flicking up to catch hers. “One more,” he said. His face was and unhealthy shade of grey, and Liza braced herself and squeezed his hand.

“Who?” she asked.

Tucker’s eyes dropped again. “Me.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, and he gripped the bottom hem of his shirt and with shaking hands he lifted it up. His abdomen was slick with dark red blood, and Liza felt instantly like she was going to be sick.

“Oh, god, no,” she moaned. “Tucker, were you bitten?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said through cracked lips, his eyelids fluttering shut. “I ran into … Ben. I thought … everyone was going to shit. People were beating the hell out of each other all around us. So I got in a good punch. I think I broke his nose.” He gently smiled. “Just thought he deserved a punch. Can’t fuck someone else’s girlfriend with no consequences.”

“What happened?” Liza urged, pulling the shirt off his head to no resistance from him, and dabbing it on his stomach in vain. The bleeding wasn’t stopping, but it wasn’t gushing. She knew that he needed medical attention, and soon. But there was no way that any of the hospitals would have time to see him. They’d already be completely at capacity.

“Fucker had a knife,” Tucker chuckled. “Guess he wasn’t in the mood to be punched.” For a second his head lolled, and then snapped up again, and he blinked in confusion. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have come home just to die here.”

Yana stood up and sat next to him, pressing her hand against his wet forehead. His head lolled against her shoulder, and she started to cry, the tears she had been holding back coming thick and fast. “We need to call an ambulance,” she said, and pulled the oblong from Tucker’s red-stained basketball shorts, unlocking it with the ease of a trusted friend, and lifting it to her ear, her lip quivering.

“Hello? Ye—” She cut herself off, frowning.

“What?” Liza prompted.

Yana selected the speaker icon and held it out. It was a crackly and hasty recording of some kind, on repeat.

“—zz the emergency services. Every single car is currently dispatched. Leave a message and we will get to your emergency as soon as we can. Please get inside and block your windows and doors as best you can. If you cannot get inside, get to your nearest designated safe area. You have reached zz—”

Safe area?

Liza felt very cold, watching Tucker’s head roll again, his eyes twitching beneath his lids. “You’re not going to die, Tucker,” she said. “You’re just in shock.” She had no idea what she was talking about, but it occurred to her that she had grabbed that roll of bandages from the crate.

“Try to wake him up,” she told Yana. “Or is that just concussions? Whatever. Keep him awake.”

“Maybe it would be better to let him sleep,” Yana sniffled, fresh tears coating her cheeks again. She smoothed Tucker’s dark hair from his forehead and kissed his damp skin.

“I really feel like it’s better to keep him awake,” Liza said, but she had honestly no idea. She rummaged through the pockets of her jacket and spread the clips she had grabbed out across the coffee table before pulling out the bandages, which looked completely pathetic in the face of a real emergency.

A rapid, desperate pounding on their front door and a shriek pulled Liza to her feet again. “Shit!” she cried, fumbling with her attempt to unwrap the bandages. “They’re so fucking small and thin, I don’t … I don’t know…” More, furious pounding. “Tucker,” she yelled. “Yana, keep him awake.”

“Hey, Tuck, you wanna watch some TV?” Yana asked softly, her voice wobbling and her fingers tracing his cheeks. “Can you hear me?”

Liza threw the door open. “Please be someone who can help!” she said aloud, barely even aware of it.

Celia blinked at her through cracked glasses, holding tight to her dangling left arm. She was breathing awkwardly, raspily, and Liza let her in without a word, and shut and chained the door.

“Good,” she wheezed, when she saw that Yana and Tucker were on the couch, and then she stomped up the stairs to the bedrooms, her breathing laboured and painful-sounding.

“Asthma?” Liza yelled up to her.

“Sec,” Celia rasped, and kicked her bedroom door open. Liza ran back to Tucker and pulled the tight roll of bandages apart with her fingers as it sounded like a drawer was emptied onto the floor above their heads with a loud clatter.

“Celia, punch the floor if you need help,” Liza yelled upstairs. “Finally, our ridiculously thin walls can do some good.”

The mood refused to be lightened. Yana was shaking with sobs, her lips pressed to Tucker’s temple, and his eyes were fluttering shut again.

“Celia!” Liza yelled, at a total loss as to what to do.

What kind of an advantage over the masses was this, really? They were all going to die; they were flesh and blood like everybody else. Tucker’s quick temper had gotten him killed the second people stopped following the rules. Liza felt her eyes start to well up with tears. If she couldn’t make dumb comments, make jokes and try to make people crack a smile, she wasn’t sure what she even had. Her sense of humour, more than her affinity for any type of weapon, had been the reason she had survived her childhood.

I survived eighteen years with Peter Volkov and all I got was this lousy apocalypse.

So much for becoming an adult and finally being free.

“Celia,” she cried again. “Are you OK?”

There was a slam and then the thundering of feet down the stairs and Celia burst, gasping and smiling, still clutching at her arm. “I needed to find my spare,” she said, holding up a little white inhaler. Her eyes trailed over to the slumped over boy on the couch. “Tucker?” Her eyes widened behind her one cracked frame.

“I need your help, I don’t know what to do,” Liza said, holding out the unfurled bandages. “Just wrap them? I don’t want to waste them.”

“The ambulance isn’t coming, we didn’t even leave a message,” Yana howled.

“I’ve got this. Liza. Put your headset on his ear.”

“W-what?”

“The headset you’re wearing.” Celia tapped her own, which was still on her ear. Liza reached up to touch hers. “Quickly, you have to give it to Tucker, Liza. Put it on him..”

She pulled one of the spares from her pocket, and clipped that one onto Tucker’s ear instead, hoping that was good enough — she didn’t want to lose hers, just in case. Celia nodded once and pulled the bandages from Liza’s hands.

“Did you hear the things he said?” Celia asked.

“What?”

“McCray. He told us that he wanted us to have an advantage and spread the news. He wants us to beat them back. I’m pretty sure he chose ten of us because he expects only one or two of us to actually survive long enough to get a decent body count.”

“What?” Liza said again.

“So he gave us the ability not just to gain points for kills and exchange those points for upgrades — I’m guessing that none of you have tried to figure out how to do that yet, no offense or anything, but I am assuming you were all busy running — but he also made it so that we can check each other’s vitals.”

Celia eyed Liza. “Look, check out Tucker.”

“Hey, we’re just friends,” Liza said weakly.

Celia entirely ignored her comment, and quite rightly too.

“Concentrate on him for a second. Try to will his health to be visible to you, or whatever. Not exactly sure the device tracks anything other than your eye movement, but it can’t hurt to pretend like it’s psychic too.”

Liza blinked, and then stared at Tucker, which she had been doing already … but this time she specifically tried to concentrate on the outline of his body and think about his health as though it was something that could be measured and visualised. Like in a video game.

And it popped up.

A red bar above his head appeared, and she almost laughed out loud with excitement; how fantastic was that? But then her smile quickly dissipated when she realised that it was draining, visibly, and it was getting somewhere close to empty.

“What do we do?” she hissed to Celia. Yana was wracked with sobs and didn’t seem like she would be able to answer — Yana and Tucker were pretty close friends, and it was tearing Liza apart to watch how heartbroken she was.

“Well, watch. Just a theory, but we got these bandages from a starter crate, correct? We were promised an advantage, and … this was written like a video game.”

“What was?”

Celia turned to her with a frown like it was the most obvious thing in the word. “The apocalypse, Liza. This whole situation, McCray wrote it, programmed it, and set it in motion. It’s a video game. And we’re the only ones with controllers.”

“What happens to the people without these?” Liza asked, tapping her headset as Celia carefully untangled the bandages, keeping an eye on Tucker’s HP, and then carefully pushed him back against the cushions and removed the ball of his ruined shirt from the open stab wound.

Now that a lot of the blood had dried or been absorbed it was clear that the wound was a lot smaller than it had first appeared to be. Celia began the long, arduous task of wrapping the bandages tight around his abdomen. After three firm circumferences, the redness inside the health bar stopped slipping away and remained still, stuck at maybe 10% of his full health.

Liza swallowed hard. It was unnerving to see just exactly how close they had come to losing their friend, in front of their faces, in the form of a video game HP bar.

“You did it,” Liza said quietly.

“I’m going to guess that with the headsets on, we’ll be slightly easier to heal. As if we were players in a game. You see? The people without the headset are essentially NPCs, uh, that’s non-player characters—”

“We know,” Liza said quickly.

“I didn’t,” Yana said, finally breaking her face away from Tucker’s and staring at him. “That really worked. It really worked?”

“It really did. Now, he can’t get hurt or remove the bandages until he’s healed up a little. Let’s treat him like a china doll until his health is up to 50%, guys, OK?”

“I see nothing,” Yana said, and Liza had already fished out a headset and handed it to her.

“These things are way more important than we thought at first,” Liza said. “Let’s make sure that we all wear them.” She felt in her pocket for the final one, coated in dried blood, and thought about James. A shudder ripped through her. If Yana and Tucker were the closest pair in the house, she and James were probably the second closest. They spent a lot of time together just goofing around — losing him would damage her, for sure.

“So let’s get Tucker to bed,” Celia said. “Did anyone get bitten on their way back?”

“No,” Liza said, wide-eyed. “Did you?”

Yana shook her head, and the three of them gingerly helped their friend to his feet. His eyes were only open a crack and he mumbled something that they couldn’t quite hear.

“You did great,” Yana told him quietly, and they repositioned themselves so that they could get him into his bedroom. Tucker slept in an extension at the back of the crumbling student house, through a door at the back of the living room and overlooking the tiny garden. To get him there required the three small girls to half-carry him past a little shared bathroom and through a tight few feet of corridor before figuring out how to help each other open his door and get him through it.

Then his single bed was right at the other end of the bedroom, past piles of dirty clothes and a hamper of clean clothes. It was like navigating around a maze, with all three of them working together to make sure that his bandages weren’t snagged or tugged, his head didn’t loll too far, and most importantly that they didn’t drop him onto the floor.

When Tucker was all tucked up safely in bed, the girls stared at him for a moment, unspoken words hanging in the air.

This kind of thing was going to happen again.

Nobody was available to help them.

And where the hell was James?