Velveteen (9 page)

I allow myself to sink into the image. The faint strands of an old forgotten lullaby come to me, a song sung by a mother, and I find myself humming along and feeling her fingers on my cheek, pulling my hair back and holding me close.

But I can’t even be sure if these are memories or wishes. I blink them bitterly away, and the scene outside shifts again. There is no girl out in that ruination of a yard, no child sitting upon that swing and humming along with her mother. Both of them are gone to who knows where.

There is only darkness and unkempt grass and imaginary ghosts.

I turn away from the window and make my way through the room into a second hallway. The doors for the bedrooms are all open. Only one stands closed, the bathroom. There won’t be any water in the toilet, but if I’m lucky there’ll be paper, a luxury.

I grasp the knob and turn it and push open the door. A vanity twinkles in the gloom. Everything else is swathed in darkness as deep and mournful as a broken promise. I take a step in, feeling for the light switch, find it, flick it. The room remains dark.

[…]

And that’s when the fingers touch my arm.

A Dark and Sure Descent
A Long Island outbreak novel
(coming winter 2013)

The drive from the Laroda Island Animal Research Center to their house during off-commute hours normally took between eighty and ninety minutes, but on this day, which had gone steadily downhill from the moment she awoke till Veronica called to tell her that Cassie was vomiting — this one day when Lyssa desperately regretted ever getting out of bed at all — she knew she’d be lucky to make it home in under three hours.

The traffic reporter on WAXQ had mentioned some sort of multi-agency police activity west of Medford, which was still a good half hour away. No word on whether Interstate 495 was impacted, though. Traffic on this stretch of 25 was still moving swiftly, but that didn’t mean much. Being so near the northeastern tip of the island, there were few who had business on this remote stretch of land. It’s precisely why she and Ramon had opened the lab where they had.

She tried to picture the main highway, to determine if she should try an alternate route. She knew what Ramon would say:
Go around
.

He was decisive by nature and had little patience for obstacles, no matter their cause, no matter the severity (or lack thereof) of consequence.
Better safe than sorry
, he’d say.
A stitch in time saves nine
.

He was a walking encyclopedia of idioms.

Expect the worst; hope for the best.

If he were with her now, he’d almost certainly suggest she take Northville south to Memorial Highway. Lyssa considered it for a moment, wavered. Although she was nowhere near as resolute in her mind as Ramon was, she was usually quick to assess her options and choose a safe path. Lately, though, she’d become tentative, unsure of herself. She’d grown to abhor changes to her routine, and even the slightest mishap often turned into the greatest distraction.

Before she could make a decision about the detour, she had missed the turnoff.

She grunted unhappily as she flew past the exit.

In the passenger seat beside her, the phantom Ramon sulked.

Well, there were other detours she could take. And if worse came to worse, she’d take side streets. Getting home quickly was what she needed to focus on.

She supposed it was fortuitous that they’d decided not to carpool today, though she knew it was just so much rationalizing.
They
hadn’t decided, Ramon had decided after she’d mentioned going to check on Drew, who hadn’t answered her phone calls. Carpooling today would probably have ended in one of them throwing the other out the door, no matter if the car was moving or not.

He’d been so short-tempered, ever since moving back in. Other hyphenated phrases came to her mind, just as descriptive:
easily-provoked
,
thick-skulled
,
bull-headed
. Other than the usual reasons, she couldn’t really understand why he was acting this way, and so the thought crossed her mind (more than once lately, in fact) that he might be having an affair. Instinctively, she dismissed the possibility as so much paranoia. Ramon wasn’t the cheating kind.

She sighed and flipped on her signal for the I-495 exchange. Traffic was still moving smoothly. Maybe the police activity near Medford had already cleared.

Before the pregnancy, they’d talked about buying a house closer to the research lab — somewhere in the nicer part of Yaphank, or possibly as far east as Manorville, despite its proximity to the Marine base at Riverhead — but she’d had a rough third trimester and the birth had been fraught with complications, so that everything had been put on hold. Poor Little Remy had pulled through the first night, but he never saw a second sunrise.

Now, two months later, it seemed their whole lives were being held in suspended animation: the new house, work, their marriage, the family. Even time itself seemed to have stopped. Lyssa just couldn’t seem to get past the pain of losing their son. And Ramon couldn’t seem to get past the idea that he’d have to properly mourn sooner or later.

She’d been the one to suggest the trial separation, a month after coming home from the hospital. This, after an especially bad fight had left poor Cassie terrorized, huddled and shivering in her bed with that rabbit of hers and the dog, which never left her side. How Ramon could possibly think the animals might help Lyssa get past the trauma was beyond comprehension. She needed time and patience in order to heal, not more things to take care of.

The fact that Ramon hadn’t argued with her about leaving, had gone right out and gotten an apartment in Medford the very next day, had hurt her even more than she’d been willing to admit. And while she tortured herself thinking about how he’d benefited from the shortened commute, she secretly knew he also suffered deeply. The distance prevented Cassie from staying with him overnight during the week. She knew he missed his daughter something terrible, and that offered a little guilty relief.

Lyssa had emotional problems, she knew it. Problems which would probably require professional help at some point. Rame had let it be known that he had serious concerns about her wellbeing, about her ability to cope after Remy’s death and her seeming unwillingness to fix their marriage. Hell, so did she. But she hadn’t expected the depth of his doubt. When she had suggested after only three weeks apart that they try patching things up again, the look on his face had said it all.

Still, in the end, he had come back. “It’s just as well,” he told them, as Cassie helped carry his bags back inside the house. “That place was making me claustrophobic.”

According to Cass, the apartment was small and stuffy, without air conditioning or the reliability of solar power. Ever since Long Island had become the testing ground for the towers for the experimental Stream network, it seemed like there were power outages at least once a week.

But it didn’t stop him from ending the lease on the apartment.

She guided the car along the inside curve of the interchange and had barely begun to accelerate onto the interstate when traffic came to a sudden standstill. She slammed on the brakes, cursing when her purse thumped to the floor in front of the passenger seat. It and her phone were out of reach.

She was about to lean over and grab it so she could call Veronica to tell her about the delay, when the first Army truck barreled past on the shoulder, probably from the Omegaman base at Riverhead. Hanging out of the back were at least a dozen soldiers equipped in full gear, rifles propped between their knees. The looks on their faces told her they weren’t heading out to just another training exercise. They had the look of men about to head into combat.

Something serious was going on up ahead.

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Jessie’s Game
GAMELAND Book 1, Season 2
(coming fall 2013)

The Arc technician had been telling her about the state-of-the-art VR setup when she heard the whisper:
jessie

“It comes complete with—”

“
Shh!
” The harshness of her whisper cut him off like a scythe through dense grass. He gave her a puzzled look.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

“Hear what?”

She cocked her head to the side, frowning. But the voice didn’t repeat itself.

Several seconds passed with neither of them returning to the setup. The tech — she glanced at the tag on his ArcTech shirt and was reminded that his name was Tony — raised an eyebrow at her and fidgeted.

He probably thinks I’m some kind of nutcase
, Jessie thought to herself,
hearing voices that aren’t there
. Actually considering the type of clientele he was used to dealing with, she’d probably fit right in with them.

“Nothing,” she finally said, shaking her head as if to dislodge a bug. “It was nothing. I just thought I heard someone say something.”

Tony-the-Tech cleared his throat and looked pointedly around them at the unadorned sound-deadening walls. Even their voices seemed to be swallowed up in the room, leaving no trace of echo. He checked the system’s mic in his ear, adjusting the volume. Shrugged.

Jessie watched this with a mix of confusion and apprehension. She was afraid to tell him what she’d heard hadn’t come from the device in his ear. It hadn’t even come from anywhere outside of her own head. Worst of all, it was a voice she recognized from her terrible ordeal inside Gameland, from someone she’d watched die.

Maybe it was her subconscious starting to chicken out.

She wished she could oblige.

“Maybe there’s a glitch with the equipment?” she said, hopefully. “Or in
The Game
’s programming.”

“Ha!” Tony barked in amusement. “Not likely. This gear is fresh out of the wrappers. And I happen to know that QC checked it a half dozen times once we got your specs. As far as the codex, it’s foolproof.”

This, she happened to know, wasn’t true.

He proceeded to babble on about the care which had gone into the gear’s manufacture and customization for her planned entry into
The Game
, but she found herself drifting, only faintly aware of him as he proceeded with the checklist, marking each step’s successful passing on the computer’s screen. She found herself straining to hear, not just her ears, but beyond the limits of sound, beyond the limits of her conscience even. But the voice did not repeat itself.

She’d almost convinced herself that it had just been her overwrought imagination, the consequence of a guilty conscience for all the terrible things she’d seen and done in the past few weeks — the people who had died or been lost because of her decisions when they were trapped inside the very same arcade she was about to break into a second time — when the voice came again, once more whispering her name.

Jessie’s body spasmed wildly and she pulled away from the tech with a choking gasp, her eyes wide with fright. She scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping over the low bench which spanned the length of the wall.

“Look,” the technician said, managing to look both amused and impatient, “it’s understandable that you’re nervous. Most new Operators get cold feet. It’s a butt-load of cash to be dropping all at once. And on a Player you’ve never even seen before . . . .” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. She could hear him muttering into his chest: “Never heard of anything like it before in my life.”

“I’m not nervous,” she snapped, suddenly forgetting her fright.

And why should she be nervous? It hadn’t been her money that had paid for the equipment or the million-dollar entrance fee. She didn’t know whose money it had been, to tell the truth, though she did have her suspicions, but it didn’t matter anyway. Only one thing mattered, and that was getting back into Gameland.

“I don’t give a crap about the money,” she said.