“Stephen’s dead.”
He shakes his head. “No, I just checked. He’s still breathing. But I don’t think he’s got much time left. Looks like his neck is pretty torn up.”
“Great, another fucking IU to put down.”
“He won’t turn. Remember? He’s immune.”
Reggie returns then, dragging Jake and Ash with him. “We need to leave now,” he says. “It may already be too late. Daylight’s fading fast.”
He glances nervously at the window, at the golden streamers of evening sunlight spilling in. The dust we raised swims lazily around in it, giving the scene a dreamlike feel to it.
“It’s now or be stuck here till morning,” he finishes. Then he turns and addresses his next words to me. “Jessie, please. You’ll be more useful here.”
“Yeah, stay the hell away from us,” Jake snarls. “You’re bad luck.”
Reggie’s hand shoots out and catches Jake on the side of the face and he stumbles back against the counter. “You don’t get to talk to her like that, asshole,” Reggie snarls. “Do you understand me?”
Jake glares at him without moving.
“We may have agreed to go with you, Pukeboy, given how you’re all survival trained and shit, but so far you haven’t been much of an inspiration as a leader.”
Jake swallows.
“Good. I see you understand. Now, there’s one last thing you need to do before we go, Jake.”
“What?” he answers, his voice dripping resentment.
Reggie reaches over and snatches another knife from the butcher block. He flips it over and hands it to Jake.
“You need to finish what you started.”
Chapter 6
“Is he tied up good?” I ask.
Micah nods. He kicks Stephen’s foot, prompting a groan of misery from the prostrate figure. There’s a crude bandage on his neck, some socks from a dresser in the other room stuffed into the hole and held into place with duct tape from the garage. His face is ashen and twisted in pain, and a pool of blood is beginning to congeal underneath him.
“Good, because I don’t trust him when he says he’s immune.”
“The…vaccine…” Stephen murmurs.
“Don’t waste your breath,” I tell him. “Whether you are or not, it doesn’t matter to me. Frankly, I can’t understand why it should matter to you either. When you die, it’s not like you’ll know. We will, but not you.”
His eyes flutter open. He gives me a resentful look.
“You should have thought about that before you went and did what you did to us in the first place,” I continue. “And then you should’ve listened to me when I told you to take care of Tanya while you still had the chance.”
“She…wasn’t…dying.”
“Yeah, well, you were wrong about that, weren’t you? She died, all right and then she un-died.”
He struggles to lift his head. “You’re a…heartless bitch.”
“No,” I reply, “I’m actually a real softy. You’ve just gone and rubbed all my marshmallow coating away.”
Stephen stares blankly at me. Micah chuckles from the chair, where he’s monitoring the others’ progress with the tracker on his Link. They’ve been gone forty-five minutes now and are more than halfway there.
“Thirsty,” Stephen pants, sitting up.
I go back into the kitchen and find a half bottle of twelve-year-old scotch in the cabinet—except it’s twenty five years old now—and bring it back into the living room with a coffee mug. It’s a shame to waste such good liquor on such garbage, but what does it matter anymore? No one else will ever drink it.
After some struggling with the cap, I manage to crack the seal. I fill the cup to the rim.
“This’ll take some of the edge off.”
He grasps the mug with both hands—he has no choice, since Micah’s tied them together—and brings it shaking up to his lips. He takes a sip, makes a face, then takes another and lets the alcohol roll into the back of his throat and down into his stomach. Some of the alcohol spills out onto his shirt. He trembles. I can’t tell if he’s suffering from shock or pain. Frankly, I’m finding it hard to care.
He extends the cup back to me, still half-full, but I shake my head.
“It’s all yours, buddy.”
“I’m…dying.”
“Yeah. Probably.” I look more closely at the bandage on his neck. It’s already soaked through and the blood is beginning to seep down his shirt. “No. You definitely are.”
Over the next ten minutes, he manages to finish the cup. Each swallow gets easier. I pour in some more.
“How do we get out of Gameland, Stephen?”
“Same way you came in,” he says, his words starting to slur.
“Through the access hatch?”
“No. Can’t.”
“How?”
No answer.
“How? Over? Under?”
“Don’ know,” he mumbles.
“Rope?”
He winces. “Guesssso. Maybe.”
“There’s no EM field or anything extending upward?”
“Do’ need. Zomsss can’ climb.”
“No, but Players can.”
“No rea-s-s-son to.” Another shudder passes through his body, deeper and longer. The bandage begins to peel away. I don’t fix it. “No ‘perator woo try.”
I nod. It makes sense. Arc monitors every move an Operator makes his Player do and would know if one decided to help his Player escape Gameland. Although there’s no incentive to do that, as Stephen said. While an operator gets paid for keeping his Player alive in The Game, payment depends on ratings, which in turn comes from battling other Players and taking out IUs. A Player outside of Gameland wouldn’t gain any ratings.
I turn to Micah. “We’ll need rope. Lots of it.”
“The wall’s fifty to seventy-five feet high, Jessie. We can’t scale something like that.”
“That’s what the crane is for.”
“Crane, right.” He sighs. “Rope shouldn’t be a problem. There’s probably enough nearby in garages. But a crane? Where are we going to get one of those?”
“We’ve got another hour or so of daylight. Better start looking. Once the others get back, Kelly can jump start it.
He gets up with a grunt. “I’ll see what I can find. You… Just be careful around him.”
“I’ll be fine. You just make sure you’re back before the IUs come out to play.”
“There won’t be that many this close to the wall.”
“You say that now.”
He shrugs and starts to head out, but I stop him and hand him the pistol. “There’s only one bullet left. If you need to use it, make it count.”
I almost change my mind and ask for it back, but he needs it more than I do. With Stephen tied up, I’ll be safe. And I won’t let him out of my sight.
“I won’t need it,” he says.
“When you say things like that, you’re just inviting the Undead to come out and get you.”
“Olly olly oxen free,” he mutters, and takes it.
“What’s that?”
He pauses, frowning. “Not sure. It just popped into my head.”
“Another piece of your memory falling back into place?”
“I guess.”
“What’s it mean?”
His eyes unfocus as he tries to remember. “We used to say it when we were kids playing hide-and-go-seek. Olly olly oxen free meant it was safe to come out of hiding.”
A shiver comes over me. “Don’t be yelling that out there, then,” I tell him. “Let them stay hidden.”
He leaves, taking the gun and the butcher knife and telling me he’ll be back within the hour.
After he’s gone, I turn back to Stephen. He’s clearly suffering from the combination of blood loss and pain. The skin on his face is waxy. Sweat rolls off of him in sheets. Already I can smell the familiar festering stench of infection. Maybe the vaccine hadn’t had enough time to build an immunit
y.
“Who was the vaccine for, Stephen?”
He opens his eyes and blinks at me, panting through lips that are turning blue.
“You told me about the alpha, but what about the vaccine? You may have given it to yourself, but it obviously wasn’t meant for you. Who were you supposed to give it to?”
He closes his eyes and doesn’t answer, but pretty soon I can see his chest fluttering. He’s laughing, weakly.
“Was it for one of us?”
“Not give…take.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You don-n-n-n know…comes from?”
“How the hell should I know where it comes from? I never even knew there was a vaccine!”
“From-m-m-m…”
I lean forward to hear him better. His breath comes in short, shallow drifts and his voice is nearly gone.
“…your…father.”
At first it doesn’t register. Then I remember back a couple days ago, just before we left LaGuardia, how he’d surprised me by asking about my dad: What do you know about your father, Jessica? It had taken me by surprise then, especially when he’d added, He’s not dead. I remember telling him that there was no way my father could be alive. First of all, my mother buried him in Arlington. Secondly, half his head had to be scraped off the walls and floor of the house we used to live in. Not even enough left to reanimate.
“Not this again,” I say, shaking my head in disgust.
“Made…vaccine.”
“Shut the hell up. You’re so fucked you can’t even stop lying even as you sit here dying.”
“Not…a lie.”
I stand there for a good three or four minutes, not moving or saying anything, before my curiosity gets the better of me and I have to ask, “And it worked?”
“Yes.”
I knew my dad had helped develop the virus. I just never guessed he was interested in a countermeasure. He wasn’t an immunologist.
“If he did, then why the hell haven’t people been given it?”
Stephen laughs again, and I can tell it’s painful for him because his face blanches and he stops and clutches his side and gasps for air.
“Why would he…want to cure…it?”
It’s a rhetorical question. And of course he’s right. Why would the government want to cure Reanimation? They use the Undead for everything from civil to military service. It saves them a lot of money.
“But Arc has it now,” I say, before realizing Arc wouldn’t want to cure the disease either. The Undead are just too profitable, and not simply because of The Game and Survivalist and all the other crappy VR games they make to entertain those of us who can’t afford to buy Players, but because of all the implants they sell to the government to control us once we die.
The very people who have the power, the means, and the ability to fix the worst disease in human history, simply aren’t interested in doing so.
“Did my father want to stop it?”
He coughs and a new spurt of blood trickles down the outside of his bandage. “Yes-s-s-s.”
Everything I’ve ever been told about my father is suddenly wrong. He wasn’t some mad scientist working for the government, sacrificing his ideals. He wanted to stop what the government was doing. All those years of being teased about it and now I know the truth.
It makes me wonder what Eric knew. His relationship with our father was always something of a mystery to me.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
He nudges the empty cup lying on the floor. “Thirsty.”
I extend my hand to fill it, then jerk back expecting him to grab me. I already know he’s a good actor. He’s fooled us several times already. The act back in LaGuardia during our fight with Mabel had us all fooled. We’d thought he was infected. Only Jake had seen right through it. Jake had said Stephen was messing with our minds, and he was right.
Then, that last day, right before we tried to escape back through the tunnel using the tram. I’d gone in to question him for the last time. He’d pulled the deadman’s switch, convincing me he was ready to kill himself. He’d gotten me to tell him about our plans, to get us to let him go. To take him with us.
But he just sits there without moving, his eyes closed, the air passing through his lips, rattling in his lungs. He’s not acting now. He really is dying.
“You’re not just some prep nurse, are you?” I ask, adding some more of the whiskey to his cup and setting it on the floor where he can reach it. “Or some lab scientist working for Arc. Who are you?”
I wait for several minutes, watching his labored breathing, before repeating the question.
“I’m—”
His face contorts and his body goes rigid.
“I’m—”
He takes a final quaking breath. His eyes roll back in his head. Then he lets the air out in an explosive exhale and he sags to the floor.
Chapter 7
I ping Micah as soon as I’m sure Stephen’s dead. I leave him tied up, just in case he reanimates. He won’t.
“Yeah, well, good riddance to him,” Micah says. “He was a pain in the ass. He deserved to die.”
“Nobody deserves to die,” I mutter.
As bad as he was, I still feel sorry for him. And Tanya. Especially Tanya. There’s been too much killing: Mabel; the man from Arc, who Mabel killed, though only because I killed her; and now these two.
Has it really only been four people? It seems like so many more.
You had to kill Mabel and Tanya twice. And all those IUs…
It has to stop.
“Have you found a crane?” I ask.
“Not yet. I’m starting to head back, though,” he tells me. Through the Link’s viewfinder I can see several loops of rope over his shoulders and the darkening sky beyond.
“Any IUs?”
“One. Too far away to worry about.”
“Better hurry then. It’s getting dark.”
He looks away for a moment. “Oh, I also found another tablet computer.”
“So? We found a laptop in the first house we came to here. It won’t work. The battery’ll be dead.”
Batteries are another piece of old tech we don’t use anymore. Pretty much anything we use now is all powered by remote charging.
“It works.”
“Really? How is that even possible?”
“Found it plugged into the wall at a house with solar panels.”
“Honestly? I thought Chinese products were banned during The Embargo.”
“Well, look who’s been paying attention in History Class.” His Link jiggles as he walks, making my already-queasy stomach even more unsettled. “Must’ve been American-made. Anyway, this house still has the panels and they still work. A few houses do, it seems. And what’s more, Jess, there’s other stuff inside that still works.”
“What else could we possibly need? A coffeemaker?”
“That would be nice. But no. I’m thinking more like lights. It’s going to be a long, dark night without them.”
He tells me where the house is and I tell him I’ll meet him there in a few minutes.
I gather my pack and stop one last time to check on Stephen. He’s still lying on the floor where I left him.
Before I leave, I grab a couple blankets from the beds and use them to cover the bodies. I don’t know what’ll happen to them, and I wish there was something more I could do or say, but I’m not a religious person and cremating them like we do in the real world is out of the question.
I find the other house less than five minutes later. A lamp shines dully above the door, covered in cobwebs and filled with the carcasses of thousands of flies. Dusk is quickly rolling in, turning the sky orange. I hurry over and try the knob and find it open, but I don’t go inside. Instead, I sit in the far corner of the porch and watch through the openings in the railing for movement. Even with artificial lighting inside, there’s no way I’m going into the house alone. I’ll wait for Micah first.
&n
bsp; He arrives just as the last bit of orange fades from the sky and dark blue turns to purple. He slips like a ghost across the yard and is at the door before I even realize it.
“Psst!”
He doesn’t even pretend to be surprised. “Knew you were there the whole time, Jess. Come inside. It’s safe.”
“You checked?”
“Earlier. There’s nothing here,” he insists. He points at the Gameland wall a few hundred feet away. “I doubt there’s even an Undead within a quarter mile of here.”
“You said you saw one.”
“Yeah, but it was far away.”
“Besides, it only works on implants,” I add. “IUs don’t have implants.”
He gives me a look. “I know you can feel it, too, Jess. Just not as much as the rest of us. Besides, it looks like Arc and their Players have decimated the IU population.”
“Why?”
“So, Arc can reclaim the entire island. They tried hunting. Remember? Now they use Players to do it and call it a game. Same outcome, less protest. They’re clearing the island so they can rebuild and repopulate it with the living.”
I remember the plaque at the Citizen Registration office in the Carcher Building the day I went to get my replacement Link in Hartford. Edwin Carcher had made his fortune buying land devastated by flooding and then reselling it at a premium when the waters receded. It’s the same principle. Arc would stand to make an ungodly amount of money selling the property here. After all, it’s already built up. All the infrastructure is still intact.
“Do you think we’ll get any coming by because of the light?”
“Like moths, you mean?” He laughs and shakes his head. “They won’t.”
“How do you know?”
He points. “The grass in the yard isn’t trampled down. Now, are you coming?”
He opens the door and waits for me.
“Oh, by the way, I found a crane. It’s behind some fencing and there’s a gate—chained up, of course and topped by barbed wire—but we should be able to get in pretty easily.”
“Have you heard anything from the others?” I ask.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 51