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

by Saul Tanpepper

  What he did was murder her.

  Not murdered, I remind myself. Quieted.

  I turn my shocked gaze to Stephen. If anyone deserves to die, it’s him. “Not Jake,” I whisper. “You did this.”

  He ignores my words and my gaze. He ignores us all.

  I get up from the dirt where I’ve fallen and stumble over to him and—

  And I stop at the sight of the blood. I can’t go any further.

  Oh, god, it everywhere! So much!

  “This was not to supposed to happen!” Stephen shrieks, jumping madly to his feet.

  His words carry away into Gameland. I grab him by the collar before he can get away. I’m fully prepared to hurl him back to the ground. I really want to kick his ass for what he’s done to us. For what he’s done to Tanya. And my Kelly.

  He raises his hands to defend himself, but there’s a flicker of movement below us and we both see it. Suddenly everything changes.

  Tanya’s foot twitches a second time. She’s not dead. Not yet. Jake thinks he’s killed her. He thinks he’s quieted her. A single thrust of Reggie’s knife into her neck. One and done. That’s what he thought it would take.

  But now Jake knows what I already knew: killing isn’t so easy.

  Unless you don’t mean it. Then it’s easy.

  Her body spasms and a moan escapes her lips, followed by a bloody froth. She’s still breathing—I can see and hear her doing it and—

  And the Undead aren’t supposed to breathe.

  They don’t breathe.

  “Ah! She’s okay!” Stephen exclaims. “I can save her. I have to—”

  I yank him away from her. “It’s too late,” I growl. “Are you blind? She’s lost too much blood already.”

  “No,” he says, pleading. “She’s special.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, shaking him. “Special how?”

  Kelly speaks up then, demanding answers, too. “What did you mean when you said you created a living, breathing zombie? What the hell does that mean?”

  Stephen gapes at our faces. “It— I, uh—”

  “Answer us!”

  “S-same as the dead ones,” he stammers, struggling against me. “Same as the Undead. Except alive. The Controlled Living.” He glances down at Tanya, then back at me, desperation in his eyes.

  No, it’s not desperation. It’s lunacy. He’s crazy. I let him go and he drops to his knees.

  “She can’t die,” he mutters, and he pushes desperately against her neck. But her blood—her infected blood—seeps through his fingers, pulsing through them like it’s alive and trying to escape the ruined ship of her body. Like fleas from a dead rat. Fleeing like the living from an undead land.

  Her blood seeps into the ground but it doesn’t spread. It soaks right in the very instant it makes contact. I half-expect something to sprout from the dirt, fed by her life-giving blood, but then I realize that this whole place has been completely corrupted by its proximity with the wall. As far as I can see in either direction, nothing grows within twenty feet of it. No grass or shrubs. No weeds. The wall is poisonous and the dirt is dry and sterile and when Tanya’s blood touches it, it too turns to dust, a black, lifeless mud. Nothing will ever grow here again.

  A sound escapes Stephen’s mouth, drawing my gaze back. His breath hisses between his teeth. “What do I do? I’m not— I can’t—”

  Nobody offers to help him. He lowers his hands again and shifts his weight over Tanya. He knows if he doesn’t push hard enough, the bleeding won’t stop. But if he presses too hard, she’ll suffocate.

  And still nobody moves. We know this: either way, she’s already dead. There is no compromise. It’s either finish the job or let her reanimate. And we can’t let that happen. She’ll be faster and stronger, much more dangerous. More destructive.

  I reach down to pull Stephen away again. “I have to finish what Jake started.”

  “No! This’ll work,” he pants. “I know it will. She’s tough. Please, God, help me stop her bleeding.”

  It angers me that he would dare to ask God to help him. It saddens me to think there might be a god who would allow such a thing to come to pass in the first place.

  “She’s dead,” I hiss at the back of his head. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  I push my way from him then, shoving Micah and Kelly aside as I walk off. They’re both dazed-looking. Micah reels and falls to the dirt, holding his head in his hands. He shakes it, as if trying to get rid of the buzzing in his ears.

  I need to think about what to do next. Sweat drips down my forehead and stings my eyes. The wall is blocking the late afternoon sun, but there’s no respite from the heat and humidity. My whole body aches from fatigue and hunger and the trauma from the past week. It aches from being so close to this toxic wall. My skin itches. My skull feels like it’s half a size too small for my brain.

  Jake is standing right up against the wall, leaning his head on it and crying. His fingers run over the seam where we came through, as if hoping to find a latch that will open the door for him. His tears paint pink rivulets down his dust-streaked, sunburned face.

  “I had to do it,” he sobs. “You made me do it!”

  Is he accusing you or Stephen?

  It doesn’t matter; we’re both guilty of something. We’re all guilty.

  “She didn’t deserve this,” he blabbers. “I liked her, too. She was a nice girl and I had to do it even though I didn’t want to. I had to—” He gags and tries again: ‘I had to—”

  “She’s not dead,” I whisper to myself. Then, louder: “She’s not dead, Jake. You only injured her. Badly. Bad enough that she won’t make it. You have to finish it.”

  He stops and looks up and tries to focus his eyes on me through his tears. “What? No. I can’t do it!”

  “Shut up!” Micah says, slurring his words. “Everyone just shut up or we’re all dead.”

  Reggie blinks at us, not comprehending, a mask of terror on his face. Fear and indecision roots him to the ground. The horror of everything he’s just witnessed overwhelms him. It’s one thing to watch someone kill an Undead, quite another to watch someone murder another living human being. Even if she was infected.

  Kelly’s infected, too.

  I look over at him. He stands there stock still, just staring, stunned like the rest of us. He has reason to be even more shocked, now that he’s learned of his own fate. He’s witnessing it happening right in front of him. In a few days, he’ll end up just like Tanya. The virus will take control of his body and Arc will take control of his mind. He’ll be Undead.

  Unless someone—

  Panic flutters up inside of me. Panic and hatred and something so enormous that I can’t fathom how it can be inside of me. I want to let it out, but it won’t come.

  At least now I understand why Kelly never told me about what Stephen had done to him on the tram. He was afraid. He feared that what just happened to Tanya would happen to him. That someone would…

  That Jake would quiet him.

  Ashley sits crumpled over by the wall, shivering, weeping into her hands. Her Link lies in the dust next to her. Was she taking pictures? Is that why it’s out? Who the hell is she going to ping in here? I’m tempted to yell at her to knock off the crybaby crap and be the tough girl she always pretended to be. I need that toughness now. I need someone to help me be tough so we can all get through this together. So we can go home.

  “Get me out of this place!” Jake cries. He slaps the wall, but the sound is weak. There’s something about the material that absorbs sound and light and heat. It’s completely inert. The slap sounds far away.

  He reels away from the wall and stumbles drunkenly over to Ash and tries to pull her to her feet. “We need to get out of here.”

  She cringes from his touch, but her eyes fall away. She turns and retrieves her Link from the dirt.

  Seeing Jake grab her seems to snap Reggie out of his own trance. He starts to nod. “Yes…leave. We need to get out of her
e.”

  “If you people don’t shut up,” Micah hisses, “you’re going to bring every god damn IU and Player in Gameland here!” He pulls at his hair, gawping like a fish.

  “You shut up!” Jake snaps.

  Micah steps back, blinking stupidly. His mouth opens, but he doesn’t say anything.

  What is wrong with everyone? I want to shout. Then I remember: the wall. It’s affecting me less than everyone else because my implant isn’t working. I can still feel the effects, just not as strongly.

  I watch as Stephen slips his arms underneath Tanya’s limp form and staggers to his feet. For a moment he looks like he’s going to collapse under her weight. The lack of food and sleep and his own injuries from the road are clear in the strain on his face.

  Blood throbs out of the gash in Tanya’s neck and runs down the back of his arm. It begins dripping off his elbow as he starts to walk away, leaving a blackened trail behind him.

  “Hey,” Jake yells, “where are you taking her? Bring her back. You need to come back here!”

  Stephen turns. “Please,” he says. “Help me. There’s a house right over there, across the road. I can fix her. I know I can.”

  It’s empty, of course. They’re all empty. No one has lived here for almost thirteen years, no one but the Undead. Long Island belongs to them now. Not us.

  “She’s too far gone,” I say. “You’re just prolonging the inevitable, putting us all at risk. It’ll only make things worse once she dies. You need to—”

  “The virus protects the brain against anoxia,” he tells us. “She could lose almost half her blood and still function.”

  “Well, she’s not functioning!”

  “Wait!” Jake says, pulling me away. “You think you can save her? Can you cure her? You said there was a vaccine. You gave it to yourself. Do you still have some left?”

  Stephen stares at Jake but doesn’t answer. Slowly, he turns away and heads for the road once again.

  Jake takes a tentative step forward to follow him. “You said there was a vaccine, right?”

  “A vaccine isn’t a cure, Jake,” I tell him. “It’s too late for that.”

  Jake looks stupidly at me. He blinks and something comes over him then. He turns away.

  “You can’t leave, Stephen,” I say. “Stop! You’re not going anywhere.”

  He falters at the sound of my voice, but only for a second before continuing on.

  Kelly touches my elbow tentatively and flinches when I turn to him. I realize the gun is back in my hand. I don’t remember taking it out. I don’t remember aiming it. I let it slip from my fingers. I hear it hit the dirt at my feet.

  “It’s too late for her, Jess,” he says. “You need to think about getting everyone home now.” And when he says that, I know what he’s really telling me. He said everyone, not us. He thinks it’s too late for him to go home. Because he’s infected. Like Tanya.

  But it’s not too late. It can’t be.

  “Kelly’s right,” Reggie says. “We need to stick to the original plan.”

  “The original plan?” I sputter. It seems like the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. “Remind me again, Reg, which part of the original plan had Kelly getting infected?” I wave my hands desperately around me. “Which part had Tanya turning into an IU? This is all fucked. I can’t— I can’t think about this!”

  And then I spin on Reggie, shoving him. He falls to the dirt, not expecting my attack, and he lands on his ass, a look of surprise on his face.

  “This was your god damn idea, Reggie! We were supposed to just come here and take a few pictures, grab a few souvenirs. That’s what you said. It was all for laughs. None of this was supposed to happen. No one was supposed to die. You promised!”

  His eyes flick over to Stephen’s receding figure. Then back at me. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Kelly reaches a hand out to touch me and I hit it away. There’s pain in his eyes. He thinks it’s because I don’t want him to touch me. He doesn’t know that it’s because I need him to touch me. I want so desperately to connect. But I can’t. I just can’t do it right now.

  “Listen to me,” he says. “You can still leave here, you and Micah. There’s time. Go. Get the hell off the island. Go home. I don’t know how—I don’t even know how you’ll get through this wall again—but you have to. I’ll take the others to Jayne’s Hill, or…as far as I can, anyway, before… We’ll hack the mainframe and get rid of the failsafe.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Kel.”

  “I don’t want you here,” he tells me evenly, his face stony, emotionless. The light in his eyes has dimmed, replaced by the darkness of my pain.

  Somewhere, far away, a dog barks. Nobody looks up. Everyone’s eyes are on me and Kelly.

  “I’m telling to you to go home, Jessie.”

  Rage begins to fill me. How dare he tell me what to do?

  “Please…”

  I hear Master Rupert’s voice in my head: Yield to your opponent’s greater power. The advice is loud, insistent. It drowns out the other voice inside me screaming at the top of her lungs, pleading for me to just listen to her for once. I’ve been ignoring her my whole life, the tiny voice that speaks to me in words that are my own. She tells me: Stop letting everyone else tell you what to do.

  “No,” I tell Kelly, and the voices inside me quiet. “We’re staying together.”

  I retrieve the gun, check my Link, then look up at the sky. It’s a little darker now, a deeper blue than when we opened the hatch to come in. Or maybe it’s a trick of the wall. It doesn’t matter. Evening is coming either way. “We’ve got three more hours of daylight. Jayne’s Hill is about four miles from here. We can make it easily.”

  Kelly looks around at the rest of the group. They shift uneasily. We’re all tired, exhausted, drained emotionally and physically. Confounded by the effects of the wall.

  “Maybe we’d be better off if we rested for the night,” Micah suggests. “We can decide in the morning.”

  I shake my head. “Four days is all we’ve got to get rid of this thing in our heads—their heads.” I point at Ash and Reg and Jake, now standing in a close circle. “Plus, we need to figure out how to escape Gameland and the island. I want to get back to Arc’s headquarters in Manhattan by Friday morning.”

  “Whoa, whoa! Wait a minute,” Micah says, stepping forward. Kelly frowns in confusion. “Why would we want to go to Arc’s headquarters? And why Friday morning?”

  “Tanya was injected eight days ago,” I explain. “Kelly was four days after that. That gives us till Friday before whatever just happened to her happens to him. We’ll go and demand that Arc give him the cure. They have to have one.”

  “And if they don’t, Jessie?”

  I turn to Micah, and he must sense the anger boiling up inside of me because he takes a step back.

  “No, I won’t accept that.”

  Chapter 2

  “There’s not enough time,” Kelly tries telling me. He grabs my arm as I hurry across the road. “Wait a minute, Jessie!”

  With every step away from the wall, I can feel its effects on me weakening. I feel lighter, stronger. Even my shoulder feels better. Soon, I won’t be able to feel it at all.

  Nor will the Players.

  Thinking this, I scan the horizon for movement. In the late afternoon sun, everything seems sharper, more clearly defined. But I don’t see anything move. We’re the only people out here, living or otherwise. But I’m seeing only about a square mile of the over one hundred square miles of Gameland. We’re on its outer fringe; most of the action takes place in the cities, closer to the middle. That’s where the highest rated Survivalist episodes originate, Players battling each other in abandoned cities and taking out IUs like tin cans at the county fair. Survivalist fans love watching urban warfare.

  “Did anyone see which house Stephen went into?” I ask.

  Reggie and Ash look at Jake. His face is streaked and his ey
es are red from crying, but I notice something else flash in them, something determined. He stares straight past me, as if I’m not here. When I try to catch Ashley’s attention, she quickly looks away. She won’t meet my eyes. An uncomfortable feeling settles in the pit of my stomach.

  “What’s going on?”

  Reggie purses his lips and gestures. “Let’s get off this road. It’s too bright.” He grimaces against the glare. “And the shadows are too dark. I feel like every IU and its cousin is looking at us right now, smacking its lips.”

  Standing atop the crest of the road, I can see down across the overgrown berm. There’s a fresh path beaten through the golden grass. A warm breeze caresses my cheek, smelling faintly of swamp water and decay. There must be a lagoon nearby that turned over after this afternoon’s rain. Below us, the moldering houses stand mute against the beating sun, their windows curtained against the glare. I know what Reggie means. It feels like they’re all watching at us, as undead as the Undead themselves. What will happen when the living return?

  Will the houses consume them, too?

  “Remind me again,” Kelly asks. “Why are we looking for Stephen?”

  I step onto the trail Stephen left behind, brushing my hands against the tops of the dry grass. “I need some answers before we leave for Jayne’s Hill.”

  “What makes you think he’ll talk to you?”

  “He’s vulnerable right now.” I finger the pistol in my waistband and Kelly’s eyes drop to it. I can see him wondering what I’m thinking.

  Micah steps impatiently past me and follows Stephen’s trail. The others are huddled by the side of the road, whispering. Jake looks over at us, then ducks his head down again.

  “Let’s go, guys,” I call, irritated.

  And worried.

  We come out at the end of a cul-de-sac and test the front door of the house on the left. It’s locked. Micah and Kelly cautiously circle around to the back, going in opposite directions. They keep their eyes peeled for potential Undead hiding places. I hear a gate creak open, then close, and I know it’s Kelly returning because it doesn’t slam against its post. He reappears, shaking his head.