The Aftermath by Jen Alexander Read Free Book Online

shows my chipped canine. I practically lose my hold on Olivia’s head.
    I chipped my tooth not even a few weeks ago—this picture is that recent.
    And I’ve no recollection of it being taken.
    I do my best to push this thought out of my mind so I can concentrate on the task at hand. I want to see if I can find the spot where Olivia said the flesh-eaters were hiding.
    It takes me a couple of minutes to locate Union Street because there are so many words and lines and shapes that signify the places we frequently raid. Finally, I find it in the upper-right-hand corner. I scan a row of gray squares—they’re all labeled “Hotel.” When I come to the one with three pictures lying over it, though, I freeze.
    The names below those photos are all written in red.
    And at the very top of the game screen is a small box that explains what all these colors mean. Neon blue for current points (updated within the last thirty seconds). Green for Survivors, for us. Crimson for flesh-eaters.
    I look at the three red names on the gray square once again. Then I study my own spot on the game map. The number that must represent Olivia’s points within the game—80,973. The green font beneath my photograph. And I realize something that makes me feel sick.
    Olivia can see exactly where the people who want to kill me are.
    I have been attacked and I’ve had the crap beaten out of me and Olivia can see the threat’s precise location.
    There’s nothing I want more than to wrap my fingers around her neck and strangle her.
    I hear my voice say, “Nothing on Demonbreun.”
    “Demonbreun Street it is, then,” April replies. “Because Claudia Virtue is a boring wimp today.”
    I retreat from Olivia’s thoughts as easily as I crept in. The map remains in my mind, reds and greens swirling together in a sickening tie-dye. Do all those photos represent people like me? Prisoners inside their own minds, people being used by other people in white rooms?
    Are the cannibals pawns in this game, too? Being controlled by someone else who makes them attack and eat other humans?
    And are any of these people—red or green, Survivor or flesh-eater—aware that the person dominating them can at any time force them onto the wrong street or into the wrong building?
    Kill them in the flutter of an eye?
    For the first time in my memory, I don’t pay attention to my surroundings. I don’t listen to what Jeremy and April are saying, or the way the rain drenches my clothes, weighing me down, as we take the long route to the crumbling buildings on Demonbreun Street.
    I just focus on Olivia.
    “Go right,” she says through me, and I think of all the innuendos that I’ve ignored, all the strange things I’ve said that I chalked up to some neurological issue caused by the apocalypse and accepted with very few questions. Strange conversations. Lost time. The constant difference between my thoughts and what I say and do. Why we’ve never left this area, despite the hordes of cannibals. Why leave when food and supplies and enemy locations are only a screen away?
    Why leave when the person on the screen isn’t really you—and even if you do make a stupid decision, you won’t be the one suffering for it?
    There was no end of the world. There’s only a game called The Aftermath, and I feel stupid for just now realizing this.
    Back-alley ruins blur my vision. A liquor store sign swings from wires—it bangs the side of a building, making a noise like clacking teeth. A few feet away from it is an overturned garbage container that’s so rusted there are holes bigger than my fists throughout it. A man sags against the front of the trash bin with eyes wide-open and his head turned to the side in an unnatural angle.
    “Need to do a cleanup,” April says.
    I hear myself agree, but inside I am seething.
    Because on Olivia’s map, the man’s name is green, just like mine.
    Unlike mine, it’s flickering rapidly.
    * * *
    Olivia waits until we find a spot she determines