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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “We’ll also know for sure if we just open the door and look, Reg.” I hold the gun in my fist. He’s got the broken machete. It’s not the best arsenal in the world, but it’s better than using the stump of Mabel’s arm.

  “Just saying. I’d rather know with the door closed and locked and us on the other side of it.”

  Kelly rolls his eyes.

  I unlock the door again and Kelly cracks it open as quietly as he can. We listen for several interminable minutes, but nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound.

  Slowly, he pulls the door open the rest of the way. There’s blood everywhere, pooling in thick puddles on the floor, splashed onto the walls. Even the ceiling hasn’t been spared. I glance down. Bloody handprints are smeared at the base of the door. Bits and pieces of flesh and bone and fabric are strewn all about. A pile of body parts litters the floor, focused just a few feet shy of the exit; the blood trail begins down the hallway in front of SCREENING ROOM 3 and ends at our feet, where the slaughter seems to have been concentrated.

  “Holy mother.”

  “Reminds me of one of those Wall Street suicide bombings we sometimes see on Media,” Kelly whispers.

  I look at the gristly scene with growing horror. My first reaction is that this could’ve been me. It could’ve been any of us. But then a deeper understanding comes over me, a horror much more terrifying: This is all my fault.

  I told those people where they’d find Mabel, but I purposefully hadn’t mentioned what she’d become. All I’d said was: I think she’ll be happy to see you. I knew exactly what I was doing when I’d said it, too. I knew what I was sending them into. I wanted them to be attacked! I’m the monster, not Mabel. Mabel may have killed and eaten them both, but I’m the one who made it happen.

  The blood of three people is now on my hands.

  “Christ,” Reggie mutters. “Even on Survivalist the Players don’t do this kind of damage. It’s like Undead hyped-up on steroids.”

  “The Players on Survivalist don’t have uninfected people to eat,” Kelly reminds him.

  I lean my head against the wall and squeeze my eyes shut, wishing the scene away. Wishing I hadn’t been so smug about sending them up here. I’m not fit to lead anyone. I’m not trustworthy.

  Kelly rests a hand on my shoulder. I can feel myself shaking beneath it. “You didn’t do this, Jessie,” he says. “They did it to themselves. They were going to do something like it to us. It’s self defense. We’re just trying to survive.”

  I wish I could believe him, but I can’t. How can I when I know he doesn’t even believe himself?

  “Looks like they were initially attacked there,” Reggie mutters, pointing to the door of my former room. He slowly and carefully edges his way into the hallway, trying not to touch the walls or step on anything. It’s almost impossible not to. “They must’ve opened the door and let Nurse Bitch out, then tried to escape. Guess they should’ve knocked first.” He gives us a pointed glance before going on. I can’t tell if he’s being ironic or not. “Obviously, they didn’t quite make it all the way out.”

  “I think we’re lucky they didn’t,” Kelly says. “We’d have a much bigger problem to deal with—three IUs instead of one—if they had. At least in here all the damage is confined to this one space.”

  “And the bodies,” Reggie adds.

  “I only see one,” I note. “Where’s the other?”

  “Christ, how can you tell?”

  Jake walks in right then, jerking the door open and nearly slipping on the wet mess. We all jump.

  “Jesus, Jake,” Reggie shouts. “I thought you were—”

  But Jake’s eyes grow wide. He immediately turns around and stumbles back out the way he came. Before the door slams shut, we hear the sounds of him being sick.

  “Pukeboy strikes again. Thanks to him, there goes our element of surprise.”

  Kelly shakes his head. “Found one,” he says, nudging a mangled object with his shoe. It rolls off to the side, still connected to the dismembered torso by a single tendon. The face is missing. He swallows a couple times, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously.

  “Yeah, but which one is it?” Reggie asks. “The man or that Novak woman?”

  Kelly looks away. “Thing’s too shredded to tell. There’s not even much hair left on it.”

  I suddenly feel very light-headed and nauseous. A chill passes through me, sapping my strength. Reggie grabs me before I fall down. He doesn’t even grimace when he touches the gore on my arm. Maybe because he’s covered with it, too. “You okay?”

  Kelly’s still staring at the head. He hasn’t sensed how ill I’ve become.

  I nod and quickly move away from Reg. I can feel his eyes tracking me, full of worry. I have a feeling he’s going to be watching me very closely.

  We find a single complement of limbs—or limb parts, anyway; too much is missing—but no sign of a second body, whether dead or alive or otherwise. No second skull, no clothes, no nothing.

  “That was one hungry, hungry zombie.”

  Kelly steps away from us and begins making a circuit of all the doors in the hallway. He cocks his head at each one, listening. They’re all closed except for the one that Mabel was using as a makeshift quarters before she died; the door to that room has been propped open with a piece of cardboard stuck underneath it since before I escaped. The computer server room also stands open, the pieces of the door Reggie and Jake destroyed stacked up against the wall. Kelly approaches this room with extreme caution before peeking inside.

  “Clear.” He starts the circuit again, this time placing an ear against each door and gently tapping.

  “What’re you doing now?” Reggie asks. “Is he always this thorough?”

  I shrug.

  “We found one body. Which means one person is unaccounted for. They could be hiding in one of these rooms,” Kelly quietly explains. “We don’t know if they’re infected or not. If they are…” He clears his throat. “They may not be. Anyway, now that the doors are all locked again, they won’t be able to get back out. Either way, we need to know.”

  “I say screw them.”

  After Kelly finishes the entire circuit, he shakes his head. “Didn’t hear a thing. No active zombies, anyway. Now comes the hard part.” He exhales deeply through his nose and looks at us.

  “When’s it going to get easier?” Reggie asks.

  We go through and inspect each room thoroughly, one by one. It takes a half hour and we find nothing. They’re all empty. The only clue we come across are the man’s shoes inside room 3. They look like they were thrown in there. We each have our theories about what happened, but in the end, we know no more than we did before we found them.

  “Shoes. Huh. No Link. No other clothes. Weird.”

  “Think it’s possible Nurse Bitch ate him?” Reggie asks. “Or her?” His gaze flicks between the dried-up blood on the floor and the blackened smears on the wall where I trapped her against the bed last night. Old blood, not new.

  The IV stand still dangles by its base, still embedded in the drywall where I’d swung it to keep her from biting me when I relieved her of the cardkey. How is it possible that it was only a few hours before?

  “A whole person?” Kelly says, shaking his head incredulously. “Bones, clothes and a pair of shoes, too? I’ve never heard of a zombie doing that. It’s mostly the brains they go for.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t really know what we’re dealing with here, do we?”

  Kelly frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “Nurse Bitch,” he says. “She was, like, ten times faster than I’ve ever seen the Players in Survivalist ever move. Ten times more vicious, too.” He glances quickly at me, and I can’t tell if it’s because I was the one who killed her in the first place or if it’s something more, something related to my family’s personal history with creating the Undead.

  It was my father and grandfather who made the first Reanimates; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows my father was murder
ed by one of them as a direct result of what he’d done. I was teased incessantly about it in elementary and middle school, which partially explains why I took up hapkido. I was tired of always being a defenseless victim, the butt of every bully’s taunts. It wasn’t so I could defend myself against the Undead, but so I wouldn’t have to suffer as much from the heartlessness of the living.

  “The first zombies were developed by people to be weapons,” Reggie explains. “But weapons are constantly being updated, strengthened, made bigger. And more destructive.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. Grandpa got out of that business years ago. You know that.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t the government we’re talking about here,” Kelly argues. He can see how much this is upsetting me. “It’s Arc.” He spits the last word out. I suppose it tastes bad in his mouth, now that they’ve betrayed him, used him. Lied to him.

  “Arc would have its own reasons to roll out a new and improved zom,” Reggie says. “Entertainment. Blood and gore and viciousness have always been good entertainment. Good for profit.”

  I let out a long, shuddering breath and shake my head. It troubles me to think of the possibilities: zombies who might devour their entire victims. What next? Zombies that can heal? Zombies that can…think?

  “This is all very interesting,” Kelly says. “But it doesn’t tell us anything about what Arc wants to do with them. Or us. Nor does it tell us where the other person might be.”

  “We have to assume they’re still alive,” I say.

  “Yeah, but alive alive? Or alive undead?”

  I’d almost rather deal with an IU. A living, thinking human being? No matter how smart or quick or strong a zombie might be, it’s nothing compared with what a living person can do.

  Reggie sighs and looks around us with resignation. “So, what now?” he asks. “We can’t stay here.”

  “And we can’t leave—”

  A muffled cry of surprise interrupts me. It’s followed by a scream, almost certainly from Ashley.

  We race down the hall and slam through the security door just as the scream hits us a second time. But now I can see that it’s not coming from Ashley, but from Jake.

  “What the hell is going on?” Kelly demands.

  Jake points at Stephen and wails, “He spit on me! I’m infected. I’m infected!”

  “Christ.” Reggie says under his breath.

  I turn to Ashley. “I blame you,” I tell her.

  “Why?”

  “You’re the one who invited Pukeboy to come with us in the first place.”

  Chapter 11

  I feel bad about calling Jake Pukeboy, so, as a compromise, I agree to put Stephen in INTERVIEW 1 with the guillotine. I don’t like it, but it’s not worth arguing over.

  “It’s the safest thing we can do,” Kelly assures me.

  Stephen struggles a bit as we strap him to the metal examination table, but he quickly yields and just lies there staring at us. Not once does he look at the blade hanging over him. Not even when we lower the block that locks his head in place.

  “It’s called a lunette,” Jake explains, snapping the latch closed.

  “How the hell would you know crap like that?” Reggie asks.

  He shrugs. “I just do.”

  “You’re whacked.”

  I lift my eyes to the medieval-looking torture device dangling directly over him, and a shudder passes through me.

  “What kind of monster would create such a thing?” Kelly wonders.

  What would someone be doing that they might need to use it? is the question that plagues me.

  Jake laughs. “Who cares? This is a lot easier that shooting him if he reanimates. And a hell of a lot more certain. Just pull the switch and, voila, he’s quiet. No fuss, no muss.”

  I don’t like that that’s how he puts it: quiet. I don’t like that term. Maybe because it means more than killing Stephen. Quieting him will forever shut him up, and right now getting him to talk is our best hope of figuring out how to escape.

  As if he knows what I’m thinking, Stephen looks straight at me. His eyes bore into my skull and he says, “You need me.”

  Everyone’s silent for a moment, either stunned by his audacity or doubtful of his veracity. Then Jake launches into an explanation of how the contraption works, as if Stephen hadn’t spoken at all. He explains the series of levers that extend from the device through the tiles of the dropped ceiling and into the adjacent room. Anger roils inside of me, seeing how the trigger can be controlled by someone standing on the other side of the safety glass, who could watch without any fear of personal harm if things go terribly wrong. Just a squeeze of the finger and the person lying on the table is no more. A life snuffed out. A death stolen.

  After that, I make sure both rooms stay locked. I don’t trust Jake. Frankly, I don’t trust any of them. They all think I’m wrong and that we’d be better off not letting Stephen live. Even Ashley tells me I’m being stupid.

  “That shithead was going to inject you with whatever he injected into himself,” she tells me. “He was trying to inject Kelly, too. What if he’d succeeded?”

  The image flashes before my eyes, the struggle between them on the tram as Stephen tried to stick the needle into Kelly. The green—no, white—solution inside the syringe.

  It was green.

  In my memory, the liquid is always green.

  That’s what I’d seen in the moments before my body fully rejected the implant. I was in pain. I wasn’t thinking clearly. It had to be white.

  We get Micah settled in a bed in one of the other rooms, then Reggie leaves to see if he can find us some water to clean up in. He returns a half hour later. “There’s a tank behind one of the maintenance trailers outside. It’s filled with rainwater. Not the nicest stuff. Kind of smells oily. But it’ll do.”

  The walls of the container are covered an inch thick in slimy green algae and the surface is carpeted with mosquito larvae and a grayish-green sludge. Kelly skims it off as best he can before dumping in a couple gallons of bleach we tote down with us from the storage closet. Then I climb in to wash the gore off. But neither the smell nor the slime nor the mosquitoes bother me. I scrub until my skin is raw and even the dirt under my nails disappears.

  After everyone is cleaned off, Kelly and Jake go back downstairs to watch the tram entrance. They’re an odd team, particularly because of the friction between them over me, but also because of the way Jake has been acting in general. He’s unpredictable. Kelly is logical and consistent. And secretive. I’m not sure I can trust either of them.

  I go back and sit with Micah. He finally regains consciousness a couple hours later.

  “What time is it?” he asks, bleary eyed. He’s obviously still out of it, though, since he thinks he’s late for school.

  “Classes don’t start for another week and a half,” I tell him. But this only makes him more agitated.

  Last week, we’d all sat around dreading the inevitable horror of the first day of our last year of high school. Now there’s nothing I’d be more happy to do than to sit in a boring, overheated, overcrowded classroom.

  “Where are we?”

  I limit the information I give him. How do you tell someone in such a delicate mental state that he’s stuck on an island full of zombies, not to mention people intent on adding us to their Undead rosters? How do you explain you’ve just dumped an IU with a gaping hole in her chest and a bunch of body parts with human teeth marks on them into the room right next door? How do you explain that we’ve been kidnapped by a company that makes—of all things—video games?

  “You’re in the hospital.”

  It’ll suffice for now. Maybe later, when he’s stronger, I’ll tell him some more.

  Ash, Reggie and I take turns making sure he stays in bed. He protests, but he’s weak and doesn’t put up much of a fight. Kelly returns a couple hours later. He holds up a bottle of antibiotics he retrieved from the medical car
t on the abandoned tram. After chastising him for not telling us what he was doing, I inform him that the pills won’t help if it’s a virus.

  “They won’t hurt, either.” Later, when he divvies them up between us, I watch as Reggie and Ash pocket theirs. I do the same. Jake swallows his.

  Kelly settles into a chair next to the door of Micah’s room. “I figured out what was wrong with the tram. The emergency brake needed to be manually disengaged. Wish we’d known about it before.” He reaches into a pocket. “Pulled the fuse from the control panel after I brought it back. Same with the rest of the trams. Hid the rest down there where we can get to them when we need to. Now no one else can use any of the trams, only us.”

  Fuses are old tech, just like my brother’s jeep and Micah’s car, so a bit mysterious to me. It continues to surprise me that Kelly knows so much more about such things. More than I ever knew he did, anyway.

  “One of us should go back to the mainland,” I say. “We could get help.”

  “From who? The police? Arc owns them.”

  “My brother. Grandpa.”

  The way Kelly’s face hardens tells me he doesn’t trust either of them. Eric works for Necrotic Crimes Division, and Grandpa… Well, the Undead are his children, so to speak.

  But I know Kelly’s wrong.

  “I think we’re on our own here,” he says.

  He stands up and says he’s going to go relieve Jake. “You should get some rest, too.”

  “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “Rest first,” he urges. “You need rest.”

  What I need to do is get us all off the island. But I nod and watch him leave without arguing. I stay in Micah’s room for a little while longer, watching, praying for his recovery.

  It alarms me, how much weight he’s lost. I realize with a sudden jolt how frail he looks, lying there, his skin sallow, the rings under his eyes.

  He’s been a close member of our group since he moved here just over a year ago, and yet he’s never really been a part of us, instead always somehow…above us. He slipped right into the leadership role that none of us wanted to fill. We willingly followed.