“Yeah, well…” I sputter. But I’m so glad that relief floods through me like a rush of warm water. “Well, I’ve seen you naked.”
“A lot of people have seen me naked.”
“With a tube coming out of your Wee Willy Wokka Wokka.”
He snorts and takes my still-shaking hand and squeezes it. “Never heard it called that before.”
I yank my hand away. “Excuse me if my mind happens to be having a meltdown!”
He just stands there smiling like a dope.
“I still have to pee.”
“Oh, right.” He gestures with his thumb. “I’ll be back in the laundry room. Just make sure you turn the lights off when you come back. No reason to attract any more attention than we probably already have.”
He leaves. I wake my Link and set it on the sink, then close the door and lock it—not because I think he’ll come back, but because I know what I felt.
It wasn’t a damn shower curtain.
I glance sourly at the offending thing, wondering if I’m just getting myself worked up again. I reach out and rip it off the wall and toss it into the tub, where the rod lands into the shadows with a clatter. I’m sick of being scared all the time. I wish I could be as carefree as Micah is. But I can’t.
I sit down on the toilet and wait for my bladder to do its job, but it takes me a long time to get the valves to open up again.
Afterward, I step back out and hurry back to the laundry room, turning off the lights as I go: bedroom, hallway, family room. I’m just about to head up the other hallway when I feel a whisper of cool air on my cheek.
Ancient papers flutter to the floor from a coffee table.
The sliding door is wide open.
“Micah?”
The swing creaks quietly. A little Undead girl is sitting on it. In her arms is the mummified rabbit.
I’m frozen in shock. This is no vision, no displaced memory. She’s really out there, the girl from the bathroom. The tattered remains of her hair covers her desiccated face. I don’t have to see it to know what’s hiding beneath it: dark, hollow eyes, burning cold with hunger, a mouth full of tiny rotten baby teeth.
As my mind finishes the final arc of its meltdown, it doesn’t register the presence behind me until it’s too late.
Chapter 10
A ghost of Stephen rises up in the glass of the sliding door and he reaches out to grab the girl standing before him. She looks vaguely familiar, a bit older, perhaps, than I remember her. The lines on her face are sharper, and the circles under her eyes are darker. He grabs her around the neck at the same moment I feel hard, cold fingers curl around my own. Both squeeze, the Stephen in the reflection and the one behind me, and neither version of me makes a sound. I watch myself fall to the floor.
Each finger is an iron vise, each digging into me and bearing me down with his inhuman weight and newfound strength. Stephen’s turned. Despite the vaccination, the infection Tanya gave him has turned him into one of the Undead.
And then I feel his fetid breath on my cheek and I swear I hear him say, “Now we will be the same.”
But the Undead do not speak. They can’t. They can only moan.
His teeth clack as they draw near to my face, a foot away, inches. I struggle to breathe. Darkness pushes in from all around me as my lungs scream for air that my body can’t deliver to it, no matter how wide I open my mouth to invite it in. His body drops on me, pushing me to the floor, and I’m beneath him as his teeth clack and his lips smack and the smell of his contagion sweeps into my mouth where I am already choking. I can’t even let out a whimper.
A sigh escapes from him. I know that this will be the last thing I will ever hear, this moan of longing and hunger, of hatred and agony. For me, it is a moan of despair for all of the things and all of the people lost in our lives.
My mother’s voice comes to me then as my body crumples beneath the newly dead and risen. She whispers to me in words I haven’t heard spoken in years, telling me empty promises, broken not once but repeatedly. I want to cry. I want to tell her that I forgive her, but I can’t. I’ll die in this forsaken land and reawaken to walk it myself as one of them, emptied out, devoid of everything except their unholy desire. I am already hollow.
I feel his lips on the skin behind my ear and I wait for the pain that will come with the first bite. Please make it quick, I pray.
But then his body judders and his grip tightens. I hear him draw in a breath of pain. He rises and a second shock passes through him to me. Then his hands are gone from around my neck and he collapses and rolls off. Another set of hands pulls me to my feet. And I can’t see anything through the whiteness of my own dying. I can’t hear through the tidal roar of the ocean of darkness. My body knows nothing of itself or where it is and what surrounds it, save for a vague sensation of movement, of being moved as if by tides, like a boat vaguely aware of its own sinking.
And then I’m on the floor and the lights are bright above me and I’m coughing and hacking and the air burns through my damaged throat and into my ravaged lungs, feeding my starving brain until it feels like I’ll never be able to satisfy its hunger. My body jerks with the effort of my breathing, and pain floods in and through me, infusing every cell until I can feel every single part of me. I feel it all with a sense so keen that I fear every single part of me will soon fly away. I am torn asunder. My mind is fractured and my body is broken and my soul
…jessie…
spills
Jessie
out.
“Jessie!”
Micah’s face appears above me, shredding the clouds of oblivion. I cough and turn my head and a bolt of lightning sears through me.
I feel Micah leave my presence. I hear him off somewhere and a door slams and feet stomp. I hear him yelling. Something hits the floor somewhere near me—or maybe far away, I can’t tell—and then there’s more running and all I can do is gasp, grasping at tendrils of air while a freight train attempts to emerge from the tunnel of my lungs.
“Jessie, sit up!”
Micah grabs me and pulls me up and leans me up against the wall. He reaches over and grabs a bottle of water and I can see a pair of feet behind him. And legs. A body.
It’s Stephen.
“He’s dead for good this time,” Micah says, noticing where I’m looking.
“He…reani—”
Micah waits for me to stop coughing before shaking his head. “No, he was still alive. Barely. He must’ve followed you. He came in through the back door.”
“The girl?” I manage to croak out. My throat is a mountain, crumbling into gravel. Swallowing is an agony. Talking feels like sand dunes shifting, piling up in the desert.
“What girl, Jess? Tanya?”
I push him away and lurch to my feet, slamming into the wall before slipping down it again. He protests, but I ignore him and stand again. I step over Stephen’s lifeless body—Are we sure he’s dead?—and I see that the back of his head is caved in. A bronze statuette of Lady Liberty lies nearby, the base stained with a thick, red goo.
Are we sure?
But then I see it: the knife handle protruding from the base of his skull, half hidden by the tangles of hair. It makes me think of Micah’s bandage for some reason. But the memory flies from me as I let out a shuddering exhale and stumble to the back of the house. I wrench open the sliding door.
Micah calls after me. I can hear his feet pounding after me, but he’s too slow and I’m too far for him to stop me.
I stagger down the steps, grasping the railing, reeling across the yard, my left hand finding the trunk of a small tree, my right hand grasping empty air.
I come to the swings. The silent, empty swings. They glisten with the evening dew and the light that spills from the house and the swing gently rocks in the gentle breeze and makes a quiet creak.
There is no girl here. The grass is trampled, and she’s gone into the night.
But there, buried in the tall grass by my feet, lies the bundle of white fur.
I pick it up and clutch it to my chest, my sobs wrenching the sorrow from my heart—sorrow for little girls lost, for families rent apart by this humanmade madness, for the innocent with names like Tanya and Kelly and Ashley—and my tears fall upon the dark, empty eyes of the tiny, dead figure in my hands, of the plush toy rabbit that lost the loving embrace of a little girl so many years ago.
PART TWO
Repair
Chapter 11
I won’t let it happen.
I have to fix the things that are broken. I need to fix everything.
Only then will I be able to go home.
Chapter 12
“You’re not going anywhere, Jessie,” Micah tells me. “You need to rest.”
He guides me back to the laundry room where he’s laid out some blankets for me to lie down on. I’m so shaky that I don’t argue.
“Am I going crazy?” I ask, my voice still scratchy from the trauma it suffered.
He shakes his head. “No more crazy than any of the rest of us.”
He places a wet towel on my forehead and inspects my neck. “You’re going to bruise something horrible from this.” His face twists with fury. “If I could, I’d kill that damn son of a bitch again.”
“He was alive?”
“Yeah, and a mess to boot. No idea how he managed to make it all the way here with half his neck chewed away like that.” He shudders and takes in a deep breath. “It’s always the bad ones who are hardest to kill, isn’t it?”
I don’t know if he’s talking specifically about Tanya or Mabel or just in general. I’ve tried not to think about them, especially Tanya, because I know I’ll just lose it if I do.
Micah reaches over and wipes a tear from my face and tells me again to get some rest.
“Have you heard from Kelly and the others?” I ask. “It’s been almost two hours.”
He shakes his head.
“They have to find the mainframe—Kelly has to find it,” he reminds me. “Remember, the others won’t be able to go very far underground without triggering the failsafe. And then, once he does, he’ll be awfully busy following Ash’s instructions on finding and uploading the programs. Then she and Reg will be busy trying to come up with a strategy for defeating them. I don’t expect them to ping back until they know for sure it’s worked.”
I lie there for a moment, my breath rattling through my throat. Micah brushes the hair distractedly from my face while staring off to one side.
“I saw her, you know,” I tell him. “She was here, the little girl. Inside the bathroom. She touched me, touched my arm.”
Micah sighs. “I’ve searched the entire house. Locked the back door. We’re completely alone in here.”
He leans back against the wall and closes his eyes and lets out a deep breath. “Is it just me, or do you feel like you haven’t slept in years?”
I nod. I know he’s slept more than the rest of us, but he was also the worst injured during the bombing. He’s mended amazingly quickly—physically, anyway. At the same time, the effects of that day—now nearly a week and a half ago—have also lingered in him the longest.
“Micah?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you know about my father?”
His eyebrows knit together for a moment as he concentrates on the question. He lifts his head and shrugs. “I don’t know. About the same as anyone else, I guess. Your dad was the advisor to the president and head of the project that created the first zombies—Zulus. That’s what they called them, right? I’m assuming that’s why you’re asking.”
I nod and wait.
“Your grandfather—The Colonel—was in charge of the Marines. Together they built the first Omegaman Forces. Then your dad was assassinated and—”
“Murdered,” I correct. Stephen telling me he’s still alive was just another of his lies.
Micah shakes his head, frowning. “Murdered, assassinated. What’s the difference?”
“The man—the zombie—that killed my father didn’t do it for political reasons. That’s the difference.”
Micah chuffs. “Okay, so he was killed by a mindless monster. Everyone knows that when this zombie was alive he had a personal vendetta against your dad. The fact that he couldn’t think about anything except eating human flesh afterward doesn’t mean very much when all is said and done. You father’s still gone. At least assassination makes it sound like it wasn’t some random, senseless act.”
“It wasn’t a random senseless act.”
“So…there you go.”
“And what do you know about the man who became the zombie that killed him?”
“Halliwell? Just the textbook stuff: he was a professor at some podunk college somewhere when he and your father won the Nobel Prize. The guy was a headcase, from what I’ve heard. He thought he could cure Reanimation.”
“Why does that make him a headcase?”
“Because everyone knows there’s no cure.” He stops and blushes, remembering Kelly. “Sorry. What I meant is—”
“But what if there is one?” I press.
He doesn’t answer.
I have to believe there is a cure. It’s the only thing keeping me sane right now. I just can’t think about the possibility of losing Kelly right now.
I reach into my back pocket and feel the old ID card still there. I hesitate a moment before drawing it out and flipping it over to him.
“I found this in a drawer in your house.”
He picks it up and stares at it for a moment, and I can almost see the change come over him. His eyes darken and the line of his lips tightens. His jaw clenches. His body goes rigid.
But then it all disappears in an instant. He hands the card back to me and says, “Are you sure? Because I’ve never seen that before in my life.”
I’m just about to challenge him when both our links begin to ping.
Micah jumps to his feet, looking relieved. “Kelly,” he says, glancing at the ID, “that was a lot quicker than I expected.” He activates the Link and asks, “Are you in?”
I see Kelly nod. “Yeah. But we’ve hit a few snags.”
Chapter 13
“Why is it so light there?” Kelly asks.
“We found a house with solar,” Micah explains. He stares hard at the image on his Link, purposefully avoiding looking at me.
As soon as I brought Professor Halliwell’s card out, his whole demeanor had changed. I can’t decide if it was surprise or confusion, but a definite wall came up between us. The sight of Halliwell’s face must’ve triggered a memory. He’d denied it, so maybe he’s not even aware he knows something.
Then again…
“The lights still work,” Micah continues. “Some of them, anyway. Speaking of lights, why is it so dark where you are?”
“I’m back topside with Ash and Reg,” Kelly answers. “Outside. The mainframe is down an elevator shaft in the smallest of the buildings in the enclosure. There’s a whole underground complex here—computers and meeting rooms, bathrooms, storage. Even running water, though it’s pretty grungy coming out of the faucets. Everything is climate controlled. Looks like the elevator is the only way up and down. Not sure, though. Still a few more doors I haven’t checked.”
“What are the snags?” I ask, barely managing to croak out the words.
Kelly frowns. “What’s wrong with your voice, Jess? You sound funny. ”He stares through his screen. “And what’s that wrapped around your neck?”
“Stephen,” I say, in lieu of a full explanation. And then, before Micah can say anything more about the attack, I add, “But he’s not a problem anymore.”
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Bruised is all. Stephen’s dead. Micah made sure of that. Just tell us what’s going on there.”
“You know how I was supposed to go down and send the programs up to Ash and Reg to work out the new code?”
We nod.
“Well, I couldn’t connect to a sub-stream. It’s too far undergr
ound and there’s no signal.”
I grimace. Without a stream, the Links are useless.
“We should have thought about that,” I murmur. Micah nods, though he still won’t look at me.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” Kelly continues. “Just taking a little longer than we expected, and the elevator is slow. But we’re stuck here till morning anyway.”
“Any problems getting hooked up?”
“Your interface worked like a charm, Micah. And Ash gave me a heads up on what to look for. Took me a bit longer to find the actual failsafe programs. I had to write a new command-line search app and instruct it to look for bits of the programs’ outputs, since we don’t know what the application files are called. It’s crude and buggy. Plus, I had to narrow the search parameters so it wouldn’t bog the system down, which meant limiting myself to only about a hundred parallel streams at a time.”
“How many sub-streams are there on the mainframe?” Micah asks. He has that distant look in his eyes, the one he gets when he’s hacking. I hope it mean he’s remembering.
“Over twenty-seven million. They’re partitioned into about a dozen main bundles. No dynamic switching, which is nice. Fortunately we got lucky and hit pay dirt on about the six thousandth search iteration. All the root applications and registry files were in a packet called PROJECT REWIRE.”
Micah types this into the tablet. I give him a quizzical look and he shrugs and whispers that it’s so he won’t forget.
“I got all the files uploaded onto the tablet,” Kelly goes on, “and then I hand-carried it all back up for Ash and Reg to work on.” He hesitates and the look on his face grows serious. “I’ll be honest, guys. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull this off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I took a look at the coding. The apps themselves are fairly rudimentary, not even close to the level of sophistication we saw with The Game. Or even Zpocalypto.”
“So, it should be a piece of cake,” I say, trying to make my voice not sound so hoarse. “You or I could probably do it, if we had to.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 53