S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus

by Saul Tanpepper

  “It’s simple, brah,” Reggie patiently explains. “If you break the iVZ programming language, you can read The Game. But you still need to be able to connect to the Players. That’s what the tracker does. That’s basically what the ArcWare codex does. It’s just a device. Anyone could build one, but without being able to speak its language, it would be useless. ArcWare uses a proprietary coding format written in interweaving layers, but now that we’re inside, the entire language architecture is completely exposed.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning after we return,” Reggie exclaims, “we’ll be able to build a descrambling device and play The Game!”

  Micah holds up his hand. “I still need to see if I can actually find and track Player signals. That’s why I needed to hack your L.I.N.C.s. First, to prove the concept, then so I can subtract them out as background.”

  “I don’t care about The Game,” Jake declares. “And I don’t want you tracking me!”

  Micah chuckles. “I’ll wipe all your numbers after we get back. Don’t worry. It’s only temporary.”

  Reggie slaps him on the back and says, “What are you doing standing around for, then? Get moving!” He rubs his hands together. “I can’t wait to get back and wreak some havoc on some real zoms. No more Zpocalypto for this guy.”

  Ash’s face lights up too, at the prospects. Even Kelly looks a bit more excited than a moment ago.

  But something bothers me. If Micah is able to hack and track the Players’ implants, then obviously the next step is learning how to control them. That’s essentially the point of all this. So, if he’s able to do that, what’s to stop him from doing the same to us? Other than his promise not to, I mean.

  I try to dismiss the thought. He said he’d get rid of our implant numbers. Besides, if it were even possible, then surely someone would’ve tried it already. As much as I distrust the government, they wouldn’t allow something like that to happen, would they? Our implants are supposed to be inactive until we die. That’s what the latent part of their name means.

  Nevertheless, I keep my thoughts to myself. I don’t want anyone else thinking it, or worrying over it. Or getting any ideas. Micah’s not the only one of us with the skills to accomplish such a thing.

  I turn around to retrieve my backpack and find Jake watching me. Our gazes lock. There’s worry on his face. Despite his admission of technical ignorance, somehow I suspect he’s made the connection. The same thoughts and fears are going through his head, too.

  ‡

  Chapter 17

  Micah repacks his bag and heads for the closest EM tower. “I’ll ping everyone once I get in,” he says. “And I’ll send your Links the app so you can track each other, too.”

  “I don’t want to track us,” Jake says, still protesting. “And I don’t want anyone to track me!”

  “Think about it like this, Jake: This way, we’ll be able to see any implanted zoms too. Not saying there are any here, but wouldn’t you want to know if there were?”

  “Lot of good it does us.” He points at the lone zombie and says, “You still can’t track them. IUs don’t have implants.”

  Micah shrugs. “IUs are harmless.” He shoots me a look and winces. “Well, maybe with one or two exceptions. We still don’t know if that one was a rogue escaped from one of the work details back on Manhattan, right?”

  Jake frowns, obviously not convinced. “How about some company then?” he asks. “Besides, you’ll be safer with someone watching your back.”

  Or watching over his shoulder.

  “No, but thanks, Jake. You’ll just distract me. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Go have some fun. You’d just be bored if you came with me.” He checks his Link. “Let’s plan on meeting back here around…two. If not sooner. Ping if anything comes up. We should leave by two thirty so we don’t have to fight the current again.”

  Ash and Reggie are standing off to one side whispering to each other. I’m about to ask what they’re planning on doing when she giggles and slaps his arm. Reggie glances over at us and grins.

  “Ash and I are going to check some things out,” he says. He looks around and his gaze stops in the direction of an old Holiday Inn. “Over there.”

  “Want some company?” Jake asks, again.

  I roll my eyes. He really is that clueless! Then again, could Ash and Reg really be that horny? We’ve got a couple hours to explore the abandoned city and they’re going off to mess around. Really?

  Reggie shakes his head. “Naw, brah.” He wraps his arm around Ash’s shoulders. She looks so small standing next to him. “I think I can handle this alone.”

  Ash cocks her head up at him and smirks. “A bit overconfident, are we?”

  Jake realizes too late what they’re talking about. He turns to me and Kelly, his face red.

  “No,” Kelly snaps, before he can say anything.

  “Why not? I said I was sorry about the zombie thing back there.”

  Actually, he didn’t. But while I may be willing to let that slide, Kelly clearly isn’t. “I don’t remember hearing any kind of apology from you,” he spits. “And even if I did—”

  “Kel.” I frown and tell him to cut the guy some slack.

  He sighs and says, “Fine, you can tag along with us. Like a little puppy. It’s not like I wanted to spend a little alone time with my girlfriend or anything.”

  “Really?” I say. “That’s what you want to do?” I jut my chin out at Reggie’s and Ash’s receding figures. “Is that all I am to you is a sex toy?”

  “That’s not what I meant! I got something else in mind.” He pats his pack. “But don’t ask, because as I said, it’s a surprise.”

  “Ooh, I can’t wait.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  There’s a cluster of high rises due south of us a couple blocks away. Kelly points in that direction and says he wants to see how high up off the ground we can get. “Maybe we can see over the wall from one of the windows. Wouldn’t it be cool to get a pic of Manhattan from here?”

  “Pictures? That wasn’t the type of surprise I was expecting,” I say, but he just smiles like he already knows that.

  Jake looks doubtful. “Shouldn’t someone stay here and make sure our stuff is safe?” he asks.

  “Safe from what? Look around you. Do you see anything that’s going to mess with our equipment? Pigeons?”

  “Zombies?”

  We all turn and look at the solitary figure in the distance. It still hasn’t moved.

  “Are there two?” Jake says, squinting.

  “Shut up.”

  “No, seriously.” He lifts the binoculars and looks through them. “There are two of them.”

  “Let me see,” Kelly says.

  He looks for a moment, then shrugs. “There’s two. But maybe the other one was standing behind the first and moved a little. At that pace, they’d reach us in, oh, about six weeks.”

  Despite what happened in the tunnel, I have to laugh. Besides, Jake’s concern is misplaced. What would a couple of zombies want with a bunch of diving equipment? The only thing that drives them—drives their ‘life force’ or whatever you want to call it—is human flesh.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say.

  “On second thought,” Jake says, “you guys go on. I think I’ll just hang out around here.”

  “Yes!” Kelly says.

  “Kelly, no.”

  He frowns at me.

  “Safety in numbers. Remember? Jake should come with us.”

  “He wants to stay here.”

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea, Kel.”

  “You didn’t say that when Micah left, alone.”

  “Micah can take care of himself.”

  “And Jake can’t? He’s a big boy.” Kelly smirks at him. “He seems to think so, anyway.”

  This makes my anger flare again. “Why are you acting this way, Kelly? It’s Jake, not Reg! Or Micah.” I whirl around to face him. “I don’t know what’s going on between you
and Jake, but you both better knock it off!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Kelly complains.

  “No, but if it weren’t for Jake, you wouldn’t even be here. You’re being a thankless prick.”

  “Prick? I didn’t even want to come here in the first place!”

  “Hey, guys,” Jake says, “I’ll be fine. Really. You don’t need to argu—”

  “We’re not arguing!” Kelly shouts.

  “Stop shouting,” I say. “You want the zombies to hear us?”

  He laughs and makes a show of waving his arms and shouting. “Hey! Hey! Look! Brains! Come get some.”

  “Quiet!”

  “Like your shrieking earlier wouldn’t have drawn their attention?”

  “Shrieking? You make it sound like it was over nothing.”

  “Guys! I—”

  “You shut up! You weren’t even there when I was attacked,” I scream.

  “You know something?” Kelly says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Fuck this. I can’t take it. Stay here with Jake the Flake for all I care. I’m outta here!”

  “Kelly—”

  He stomps off.

  I know I should run after him, but I also know that’s what he wants me to do. This is all about him and Jake. It’s about their false idea that I’m supposed to make some imaginary choice between them. I don’t know why he’s become so moody over the past couple of weeks, but it’s really getting on my nerves.

  “Fine!” I scream at his back. “Fuck you, too! And I will stay with Jake!”

  I’m sorry as soon as it comes out, but then he turns back around and gives me this look. There’s a darkness in his eyes that I can’t ever remember seeing in them before. And sadness.

  I expect him to yell back at me. I expect him to react in kind.

  But all he does is shake his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I want to say. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he says. “Or two.”

  Then he turns around and walks away.

  ‡

  Chapter 18

  “So who’s G-ma Junie?” Jake asks.

  “What?”

  “I heard Ashley mention her to you earlier.”

  I flick a pebble from the railing into the water. It makes a soft plunk and sinks away. The sun’s baking my back and my shoulders are starting to burn. Now that I’ve dried off I’m starting to sweat. I consider taking off the wetsuit completely, but I just can’t be bothered.

  “Ashley’s grandmother,” I tell him. “Was, anyway. She…died. This past spring.”

  He nods. “I didn’t know.”

  I turn my head to stare at him, wondering why he’d assume he would. All he was to Ashley before this was her lab partner. It wasn’t like they were friends or anything. And after this little jaunt of ours, it’s likely she’ll drop him like shoddy programming. I just don’t see him continuing to be a part of our group.

  On the other hand, I’m beginning to wonder if any of us will be able to go back to the way we were before all this. Kelly and I are drifting away from each other, faster and faster it seems. Meanwhile, Reg and Ash are looking more and more like a full-time couple, squeezing the rest of us out of their lives.

  Even if we continue to hold it together, I just can’t see how Jake might fit into the new scheme of things.

  “What happened to her?” he asks. “Do you know? Where’d she get sent?”

  I hear her voice again inside my head, telling me how she’d rather be a Player than be stuck on guard duty or sewer cleanup.

  Probably the last words she ever spoke to me were that very wish.

  I take in a deep, shuddering breath and peer out over the water. Except for the sound of the wind and birds, the whole place is quiet. Disturbingly so.

  It’s so hard to believe that in just a short dozen or so years, this entire island has gone from being overrun with thousands of the Infected Undead, killing the living, turning them into thousands more, to being this deserted. But it has. It’s now just a pathetic, empty wasteland. Well, almost empty.

  It makes me wonder why nobody has come to take the island back.

  Actually, somebody did, didn’t they? Arc Properties came, the big conglomerate of companies spanning every major industry there is. ArcTech. ArcWare. ArcBio. But what they wanted wasn’t to bring the living back to this place. It was to fill it with more of the Undead: new zombies, stronger and fresher and faster, implanted zombies that can be controlled. Players.

  What people are willing to do in the name of profit.

  The Gameland arcade, at least according to Micah, is thirty miles east of us, centered on a place called Jayne’s Hill. That’s where the transmission tower is, the island’s highpoint. But how he could know all that when the exact details are a secret is beyond me. Regardless, we’re miles outside its boundaries.

  I clear my throat. It’s dry, so I take a drink from my collapsible water bottle before answering Jake’s question.

  “Her parents think she got sent to some remote place up in North Dakota. That’s where they’re guessing, anyway. I hear they use a lot of CUs there for border patrol.”

  “CUs?”

  “Conscripted Undead. Or Controlled Undead. Depends on who you ask. Zombies with implants.”

  He nods. “When I go, I think I’d rather be one of the Omegamen.”

  I look him over for a second. “Yeah, well, die young and easy—a bullet to the heart or from massive internal injuries from an accident or something—and you can pretty much count on it. Or commit murder. That’s the fastest way to become an Omega. You’d make a good soldier.”

  He smiles and straightens himself a little bit. “You think so?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “It’s everyone’s obligation to serve,” he lectures me. “Just think how it would be if we had to send the living into battle.”

  I don’t say anything. I know the arguments by heart. All too well, in fact. It doesn’t help being related to the person who first proposed that the government militarize the zombies they’d created. Grandpa considered himself a hero for envisioning an end to all wars. But in the end, it broke the country apart and lead to its total isolation from the rest of the world.

  “You don’t get a choice,” I tell him.

  “They should at least tell you where they send your deceased relatives for their conscription.”

  “You know how the government is about sharing that sort of information. People would just want to go see them or…” I let the thought drift off.

  Or try to put them down.

  “Unless you’re highly connected, you can just forget about finding out. And if you’re that connected, you can probably afford to buy out your LSC and be incinerated right away.”

  Jake turns around and leans his back on the railing. He makes like he’s stretching, but out of the corner of my eye I can see him looking around. He stares off in the direction of the zombies for a moment.

  “I suppose it could be worse,” he says, lifting the binoculars to his eyes. “The idea of getting blown to bits somewhere in China or Texas gives me the creeps.” He shudders. “At least if you’re a sewer cleaner or a guard there’s something to incinerate after your three years are up.”

  “Yeah, turkey jerky,” I say. He gives me a strange look and I add, “You said it yourself: that’s what happens to a zombie after standing out in the hot sun for a few years.”

  “The Undead don’t know heat or pain.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “One of them’s gone.”

  He hands over the binoculars and I look. “Probably crawled back into its hole. The other one hasn’t moved at all.”

  We stay there like that for several minutes. The next time he speaks his words both surprise me and explain a lot: “I totally had a crush on you last year.”

  I turn to him, trying to keep my face neutral. Trying not to look surprised. I don’t know if I succeed. “Look, Jake,” I say. �
�You’re a nice guy, but…”

  He waits. I want to tell him he’s not my type, but it’s such a cliché. And, besides, why would he tell me this now? Kelly and I had a little fight is all. It’s not like we broke up, leaving an opening for Jake to step into.

  I sigh and shake my head. “You wouldn’t like me as much if you knew me better. I can be a total bitch sometimes.”

  “I don’t think you—”

  “How about we talk about something else for a while?”

  He swallows, but the way he holds my gaze makes me feel like I’m the villain.

  “You ever know anyone who got sent to The Game?” he asks after several more minutes pass.

  And so we’ve come all the way back to G-ma Junie again.

  I hand him back the binoculars and say, “They don’t usually last very long.” I know it totally doesn’t answer the question. “A few weeks at most.”

  “I’ve seen Players on Survivalist leave The Game after only one day. God, that’s got to be so embarrassing.”

  I can see why people would want to become Players. At least then a portion of the winnings goes back to the family. The longer you stay in, the more money you get. That’s why Operators—gamers who control CUs—are willing to pay top-dollar for the best, the freshest, and the strongest zombies. Even if they have to obtain them illegally.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Jake asks, as if he can see inside my thoughts. “Do some people sell themselves into The Game?”

  I shake my head. But once more it makes me think about G-ma Junie. I know it’s just my own suspicious nature, but it was like she was there one day, a young fifty-three-year-old woman with a good eleven years left before her LSC, and then, the next day she was gone. Just…gone. And what’s more, Ashley’s parents suddenly seemed to have some extra money. How else could she have ever afforded a Ronnie Marx bathing suit?

  But, no. I can’t believe something like that. I just can’t see G-ma Junie as a Player. No Operator would ever buy someone as old and worn out as she was.

  I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so,” I finally reply.