“Stand down!” Josh ordered Firecracker, who he could see was itching to set something on fire. Reluctantly Firecracker lowered his weapon.
The figure came closer, and Josh saw that it was a girl. She wasn’t dressed in a Torcher uniform, which meant that she was part of the game, a character generated by the system itself. These characters made the game even more fun, but they could also make it more difficult, especially if they got in the way.
The girl was wearing a fluffy black fur jacket with a white hood. The hood had two small, round, black ears on it, and around the girl’s eyes were large black circles. Josh looked down and saw that she was wearing white fur shorts and knee-high boots made out of black fur. She’s supposed to be a panda bear, he thought.
“Great,” said Firecracker. “A Zooey.”
Zooeys were a problem. In real life they were people who liked to dress as animals. They listened to Japanese pop music and spent their time watching horror movies and eating candy. They were freaky but harmless, and Josh had no problem with the Zooeys generated by the game. In the game, though, they were unreliable. Sometimes they gave you good information, but sometimes they just made stuff up—stuff that would get you killed if you weren’t careful.
“What are you doing here?” Josh asked the Zooey.
“Nothing,” the girl said. She was breathing heavily and kept looking behind her.
“Nothing?” said Firecracker. “You mean you always run around the library playing hide-and-seek?”
“Okay,” the girl admitted. “We wanted to see them for ourselves.”
Firecracker groaned. “Of course you did,” he said. “Stupid tourists.”
“What’s your name?” Josh asked.
He wasn’t surprised when the girl answered, “Pandy.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just two,” she said. “Me and Monkey. Oh, and Rabbit. I guess that’s three.”
Firecracker looked at Josh. “Please just let me torch her,” he said.
“No,” Josh answered. “We could lose points.”
Pandy came closer, and Josh saw that there was blood on the fur of her jacket. He also saw that one hand was covered in a mitten that resembled a bear paw. The other mitten dangled from a string attached to Pandy’s jacket. The nails on that hand were painted bubble-gum pink.
“We were downstairs,” Pandy said. “In the children’s section. Monkey was reading to us from Alice in Wonderland,” she continued. “Then one of them came out of nowhere. It grabbed Monkey and it …” Her voice trailed off as she started to cry.
“Yeah, yeah,” Firecracker said. “It bit her. We know the routine.”
Pandy hiccuped as she tried to stop crying. “It all happened so fast,” she sobbed.
“It’s all right,” Josh said. “We’ll find your friends.”
“What about me?” Pandy asked. “Don’t leave me here.”
“Go outside,” Josh told her. “Wait on the front steps.”
“But my friends!” Pandy wailed.
“We said we’ll find them and take care of them,” Firecracker reminded her. He flicked his flamethrower on, and Pandy’s eyes grew wide.
“Go outside,” Josh said again. “Now.”
Pandy obeyed, running for the front door and disappearing outside. Josh checked his flamethrower to make sure it was on, then nodded for Firecracker to follow him.
“If I’d known we were going to be on a Zooey rescue mission, I would have picked the sewer assignment,” Firecracker said.
“Humans are humans,” Josh reminded him. “We get the same amount of credit whether we save a Zooey or the mayor.”
“I know,” said Firecracker. “But half the time they’re just lying. It drives me nuts.”
As they walked down the wide staircase that descended to the lower level, Josh looked for any signs of activity. Halfway down they came upon something that looked like a giant cotton ball. Josh bent down to look at it and saw that it was covered in blood.
“I’m guessing Rabbit didn’t make it,” Firecracker said.
“Looks that way,” Josh agreed. “Be careful. I have a feeling we’re close.”
They reached the lower level. The children’s section wasn’t as large as the upstairs, but it was big enough that they couldn’t see from one end to the other. The walls were papered with cheerful posters featuring favorite characters from children’s books, and the reading tables and chairs were less than half the size of those in the rest of the library. Josh felt like a giant as he walked through the room.
Suddenly a high-pitched whistling sound broke the silence. Josh looked up and saw a zombie shuffling toward them. It was a woman wearing a blood-splattered dress and shaking a finger at them. The whistling sound came from a jagged hole in her throat.
As the zombie got closer, Josh saw that she was wearing a name tag: MRS. JARVIS, CHILDREN’S LIBRARIAN.
“A meatbag librarian?” Firecracker said, sounding disgusted.
Josh aimed at her with his flamethrower. “Sorry, Mrs. Jarvis,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re overdue.”
“Josh!”
The noise made him jump. He ripped his helmet off and whirled around. “Emily, I thought we had a deal!” he yelled, expecting to see his sister standing behind him.
“Oh, really?” said his mother. “And what kind of deal would that be?”
Josh dropped the helmet and jumped up, trying to block the screen. “Mom,” he said. “I was just—”
“I see what you were doing,” she said. She walked over and turned the simulator off. The library disappeared.
“But Firecracker!” Josh protested. “And my points!”
“Josh, you know how we feel about that game,” his mother said. “You were supposed to be doing homework.”
“I was just playing for a few minutes,” Josh argued. “I don’t see why you make such a big deal about killing a few zom—”
He saw his mother’s face grow pale. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Sit down,” she interrupted.
Josh sat in the chair at his desk. His mother remained standing. “I really am sorry, Mom,” Josh said.
“Just—just listen for a minute,” his mother told him.
Josh nodded.
“I know that to you this is just a game,” his mother said. “You’re young. The war probably seems like ancient history. But for those of us who lived through it, it wasn’t a game.” Her voice caught.
“Aunt Lucy,” said Josh, feeling horrible for hurting his mother’s feelings.
His mother was quiet for a moment. When she looked at Josh, he saw sadness in her eyes. “She wasn’t much older than you are now when she turned,” she said. “I’ll never forget coming home from school that day.”
Josh didn’t say anything. His mother had never shared the details of what had happened. He found himself both wanting to know and wishing she wouldn’t tell him.
His mother continued. “We thought she just had the flu, so she’d stayed home for a few days. That day I’d gotten her homework assignments from her teachers so that she wouldn’t get behind. When I went into the kitchen, there was a pot on the stove. My mother had been making chicken soup.” She smiled. “She always made chicken soup when one of us didn’t feel well,” she said. “But it was boiling over, as if something had interrupted my mother while she was cooking.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s when I saw the blood,” she told Josh. “It started in the doorway and went into the dining room. I remember following it and wondering what it could be. My brain didn’t want to believe it was blood, even though I could smell it.” She shook her head. “I’ll never forget that smell, not as long as I live.”
Josh almost told her to stop, but his mouth wouldn’t work. His heart was beating more quickly, almost as if he were playing the game. He hated seeing his mother upset, but he wanted to hear the rest of the story.
“I followed the blood up the stair
s to Lucy’s room,” said his mother. Her voice was shaky. She stopped speaking, and when she looked at Josh she seemed to be looking right through him at something only she could see. “My father was on the floor,” she said. “One of his arms had been ripped off, and his head was turned so that it looked like he was staring at me, but he was dead. My mother was lying on the bed. Lucy was kneeling over her. Her face and her nightgown were covered in blood.”
The room was completely silent as Josh waited for his mother to continue. She continued to look through him.
“What did you do?” Josh asked, his voice barely a whisper.
His mother shook her head. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “Not for a long time. I told myself I was dreaming and that I would wake up and Lucy would be sitting peacefully in bed, eating chicken soup.”
She blinked, and now she was looking at Josh. “Then Lucy saw me,” she said, her voice harder. “She looked right at me, and when I saw her eyes, I knew my sister was gone. When she jumped off the bed and came at me, I ran to my room and shut the door. Lucy was screaming and grunting and clawing at the door like a rabid animal. I knew that if she got in, she would tear me apart. I had my cell phone, and I called 911 and told the operator that my sister had gone crazy. She stayed on the phone with me until the police got there.”
“The police?” Josh said.
“The Torchers hadn’t been established yet,” his mother explained. “They weren’t formed until things got worse. And when Lucy turned, we didn’t know about the zombies yet. I really did think she’d just gone crazy. When the police got there, I heard them shouting as they came upstairs. Then I heard Lucy run at them howling. And then I heard the shots.”
She closed her eyes as a tear slipped out. “A minute or two later someone knocked on my door and asked if I was all right,” she said. “I said I was, and unlocked the door. But they told me to lie down on the floor in the middle of the room, and when they came in they pointed their rifles at me until they could look at my eyes. Even then they took me to the hospital and kept me there for a week to see if I showed any symptoms of infection.”
Josh didn’t know what to say. He imagined his mother in the hospital, knowing that her entire family was dead, not knowing what she would do when she got out. She’d been younger than he was now. He didn’t know if he could handle something like that. He tried to find a way to apologize to his mother, but everything he thought of sounded stupid.
“It wasn’t just what happened to Lucy that was so terrifying,” his mother said after a while. “I mean at first it was, of course. But as the virus spread and changed, the fear became something worse. It was not knowing if, or when, you might get sick. It was not knowing which of your friends might be next. It was being afraid that the world was coming to an end.”
“But it didn’t,” Josh reminded her, looking for anything that might make the conversation less depressing.
“No, it didn’t,” his mother agreed. “But when I see people—see you—treating the war like it’s fun, it’s very upsetting. The war was not fun, Josh. It was not a game. Torching the zombies was something that had to be done, but nobody liked doing it.”
She paused for a moment, then continued, “I know you think the hologame is exactly the way it was. But you can always turn off a game. We couldn’t turn off what was happening to us. We couldn’t hit a button and get rid of the stench of burning flesh. We couldn’t remove a helmet and be back safe and sound in our rooms. We couldn’t hit reset and bring people back from the dead.”
She looked right at Josh. “You don’t know what it was like, Josh. And no matter how much you play that game, you never will.”
Josh nodded. “I guess you’re right,” he said.
“The game is disrespectful,” his mother said. “That’s the best way to put it. Turning a war into a game minimizes how horrible it was for the people who fought in it, lived through it—died in it,” she finished.
“I never thought of it that way,” Josh admitted. “But I’m not killing people. I’m killing meatbags.”
“What did you call them?” his mother asked. Her face was reddening.
“It’s just what we call the zombies,” Josh explained. “It doesn’t mean anything. Besides—”
“Is that what you think your aunt Lucy was?” his mother cut in. “A bag of meat?”
“No!” Josh objected. “But that’s different. She was a person.”
“All the zombies were real people,” his mother said. “Every last one of them. Don’t you ever forget that.”
“I said I was sorry,” Josh said defensively. He thought his mother was being a little unreasonable. The z’s he torched in the game were not real people.
His mother sighed, and Josh waited for her to tell him he was grounded, or that they were going to take away his computer. He held his breath, hoping his punishment wouldn’t be too bad.
“I’m not going to tell you not to play the game anymore,” she said. “I’ve told you how your father and I feel about it. I’m going to leave the decision about whether or not to play up to you.”
“Me?” Josh repeated.
His mother nodded. “It’s up to you,” she affirmed. “And I think you’ll make the right decision.” She walked to the door. “Dinner’s in five minutes.”
When she was gone, Josh leaned back in his chair. The right decision, he thought. He knew what she thought the right decision was. But what did he think? After hearing his mother talk about what had happened with Aunt Lucy, he felt horrible about ever having played. He understood now why the game upset his mother so much. But like he’d told her, it was still just a game. Not playing it wouldn’t erase what had happened.
He wondered if this was some kind of trick, if his mother was testing him to see what he would do. She’d said the decision was up to him, but if he chose to keep playing, would she punish him anyway?
A beeping sound interrupted his thoughts, and Josh looked over at his desk. The light on his computer screen was blinking, signaling a message. It’s probably Firecracker letting me know what a loser I am, Josh thought as he went and clicked on the message.
Josh:
Good game. Meet me tomorrow.
1600. Yancy Square Park.
Charlie
Charlie? Josh thought. Charlie who?
Then it dawned on him. The Charlie. The best player in the game Charlie. Charlie wanted to meet him? But how did he know who Josh was? Josh read the note over but couldn’t make any sense of it. Why had Charlie said “good game” when Josh had blown it? Again.
“This has been a really weird day,” Josh told himself as he stood up to go downstairs. “A seriously weird day.”
4
The boy with the skull mask was the least bizarre of the people waiting on the platform when Josh got off the elevated train at Yancy Street the next afternoon. Two girls dressed identically as baby dolls, complete with pigtails tied with pink ribbons and holding oversized lollipops, turned their heavily made-up faces toward him and laughed loudly as he passed by. A man wearing a Santa suit held a burning stick to his mouth and blew a cloud of fire into the air as a small crowd watched and clapped. When he held out his fur-trimmed hat for them to put coins into it, a little boy not more than five years old snatched it from his hand and ran down the long flight of stairs. Santa followed him, cursing loudly.
Welcome to the Docklands, Josh thought as he descended the opposite set of stairs. It wasn’t that the Docklands was dangerous, exactly. It was just weird. The Docklands was where the city’s street people lived—not just the outright homeless (although there were lots of them there) but also the runaways and castoffs and people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. Walking around there always made Josh feel like he was at a Halloween party. He wondered why Charlie had chosen this part of town to meet in.
“Hey, guy. Want some dust?”
Josh shook his head at the person speaking to him, a boy about his own age whose skin was the light blue of a Duste
r. His eyes, like those of everyone who used a lot of dust, were a peculiar mix of iridescent blue and purple swirling around a gold pupil in a hypnotizing pattern. He wore only white leather shorts and a harness from which sprouted a pair of white feathered wings. As soon as Josh passed him, the boy asked the same question of someone else: “Want some dust?”
Josh walked to the corner and entered Yancy Square Park. Like the streets, it was filled with all kinds of people. Some sat or slept on benches. Others stood in small groups, talking loudly and smoking. Josh walked through the park, looking at the faces for someone who might be Charlie. Eventually he came to a large fountain. In the center was a raised cube of brushed aluminum that stood on metal legs a dozen feet tall. Water poured from holes in the cube, falling down into the deep aluminum bowl below. On top of the cube stood the statue of a man.
Josh knew who it was. Drax Jittrund, the most famous Torcher of all time. He had led the forces that had cleaned the city of zombies. He’d fought bravely alongside his men, torching thousands of zombies himself before he’d been bitten during a final mission deep in the city’s sewers. He’d ordered his men to torch him.
Josh sat on the edge of the bowl. He looked at his watch. It was just past four. The school day had been torture. All he’d been able to think about was meeting Charlie. As soon as the last bell rang, he’d raced out of there.
“Waiting for someone?”
Josh turned to see a girl looking at him. Her features were Asian, her eyes as dark as her hair. She was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt underneath a battered leather jacket. The T-shirt said MISSION OF BURMA. Her feet were encased in heavy black boots with thick heels that made her a good five inches taller than she really was.
“A friend,” Josh answered. “I’m meeting him here.”
“Want to see a trick?” asked the girl. She held out a pack of cards. “Take one.”