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

by Saul Tanpepper

  But then it hits me that Kelly was also working with Arc. In fact, Arc had hired him to steal Micah’s hacks for them. If Micah was working for them, why would they need Kelly?

  So many unanswered questions.

  “Jessie!”

  I look up, blinking stupidly, scared that he can see it on my face, the fear. The suspicion. He’s standing close to the fence, not touching it for fear of getting electrocuted. His hands are out, gesturing, imploring. He looks so vulnerable, so…

  So innocent.

  How can it be true?

  For a moment I’m beset by doubt. What if Kelly is wrong? Where’s his proof? He’s been wrong before.

  Somebody pushed me.

  That’s what he’d said to me, the day we’d gone to the Manhattan side of the Midtown tunnel. He’d told me afterward that he thought someone had pushed him over the railing. We’d all just figured he’d either slipped or gone in on his own.

  But he’d accused Reggie, not Micah. And then, more recently, it was Jake he was all paranoid about. Jake deserved the suspicion, though not for the same reasons Micah did. All he wanted was to fit in.

  And now Kelly’s saying it’s Micah we can’t trust? Maybe I should be worrying about him and not the others. This is classic paranoia, and I—

  I shouldn’t think that way. He’s only trying to protect me.

  I remember how angry he’d been when I’d shrugged off that first accusation. But what else could I do? There was no proof, and bringing it up would only have made things worse between him and Reg. They were already constantly needling each other. Who needs that?

  He’s your friend, Kelly. Our friend. Reggie would never do something like push him into the water.

  But what if Kelly had been right? What if he was just mistaken about who it was? What if Micah really did push him in?

  I can see Micah planting the seed of the idea to break into Long Island in Reggie’s head. Makes sense. Reggie wasn’t much for original ideas. More of a follower, actually.

  Come out, come out, my mind whispers. Come out, from inside that fractured little head of yours, Micah, and show me the monster sleeping inside.

  But he doesn’t come out. He just stands there and gives me this quizzical look. “What’s wrong, Jessie.” He pretends not to have a clue what I’m thinking.

  I swallow and nod, uncertain about what to do and how to respond to this newfound knowledge. But there really is only one thing to do, is there? We have to go inside and find the others. So I somehow steel my nerves and stumble over to the tree and prepare myself for climbing it.

  Shinji raises his head and smiles his toothy yellow smile at me as I grip the vines. No barking now; he’s as happy as a clam, content to just lie there in the damp grass underneath, his stomach full of tuna and the sun about to come up and dry everything. He doesn’t care that the Undead around us have died for the last time and now lay peacefully in their final resting places, their infected bodies twisted into unnatural poses of agony. He doesn’t care because he’s a dog and he doesn’t have to worry about things like his friends betraying him. All he knows is that he has a family again after all these years. So what if I’m not really his girl, his Cassie? Cassandra. The little girl from the family he knew before the living fled this forsaken land and left the Undead to tend it. He probably knows deep down that I’m not her, but he doesn’t care. To him, having a family is what’s important.

  It’s all that matters.

  I climb the tree without really being aware of what I’m doing. My body remembers the movements, but the rest of me is lost somewhere else. Only a ghost, my mind in attendance, possessing a body that seems not to need any control. I edge out over the murderous fence, the toe of my shoe dangling close enough that Micah shouts at me to be careful. It’s tempting to just let it relax another inch or two, to see what it would feel like. To feel alive just for a moment before I die.

  But I don’t have the guts; I never did.

  I drop to the other side and he rushes over to me, yelling in a hoarse whisper. “What the hell’s gotten into you all of a sudden?” The words snap and bite at me through his angry teeth, making me think of lizards for some odd reason. He grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me, and I recoil beneath his touch, feeling both revolted and guilty. How can he look at me like that? How can I so easily accept Kelly’s accusation without proof? Who’s the betrayer now?

  But then he gives me this dark look and words come out from between his lips, and suddenly all my doubts flee. “Was that Kelly?” he asks. “What did he say?”

  Olly olly oxen free. The monster is peeking out, isn’t it? It’s sampling the air with its forked tongue.

  “Nothing,” I tell him, brushing him aside. “Never mind. Let’s just go find the others.”

  “Yeah,” he says, unconvincingly, “I just want to get out of here and go home.”

  The smile on his lips is all wrong, twisted into a mask of concern, hiding deceit. His words ring false to my ears. We both know going home isn’t going to be as simple as that, not now. Even if Jake wasn’t bitten. Micah’s betrayal has made that impossible.

  He turns and trundles through the tall grass, and everything about him screams to me that going home is the last thing he wants. And so I wonder: What does he really want?

  Chapter 2

  We peek inside the nearest building, but it’s immediately apparent to me that we’re looking in the wrong place. The inside walls are painted a sickly orange color instead of the light gray we’d seen through Ashley’s Link. It looks like the inside of a pumpkin.

  “Somebody was either color blind,” Micah says, making a face, “or made a really poor choice.”

  I grunt. I can’t help feeling resentful at his attempts at normalcy.

  Thankfully, the walls in the second building are the right color. An LED nightlight outside the door flickers, the detector either faulty or sensing the first rays of the approaching day.

  “Didn’t Kelly say it was the smallest building they were in?” Micah asks. “This would be it.”

  He stops and frowns at my silence, getting frustrated with me, as if I should be grateful that he remembered this little tidbit of information.

  The knob is smashed away, the fragments tossed carelessly to the cracked and crumbling cement outside. I reach past him and pry open the door with my little penknife. It swings open with barely a sound.

  One last glance behind me, east to where the sky has begun to lighten from black to dark purple. A thin blood-red line has formed low on the horizon. Morning is coming, and with it the end of a very long night. Above us, the strange cloud I’d noticed earlier on the road is now hidden behind the clotted thunderheads in the distance, a faint scar in the bleeding sky.

  Micah stretches and yawns as he waits. It triggers a yawn inside me, despite my anxiousness to find the others. I’m exhausted and need some serious sleep.

  “I’d kill for a Red Bull,” he says, a bit too jovially. A tad too normally. I want to scream at him to shut the hell up. “And some Golden Dragon cashew chicken.”

  Inside, the place is a mess. Furniture is strewn all about. Brittle, yellowed papers litter the floor. I pick a sheet up. The printing is faded to a light brown. It’s stiff and gritty in my hands, the dust of the years sheeting off of it. I squint at the words in the gloom. It’s a page from a technical manual of some sort talking about local area computing networks, something that undoubtedly became obsolete after Arc’s new Stream technology was adopted. I let it slip from my fingers. It settles back to the floor.

  We encounter the first corpse twenty feet in, just past the doorway into the main room. Micah stops and stands there, just staring at it. I push my way past him and force my gaze deeper into the room. It’s a battlefield. A dozen twisted bodies are strewn about the place. Beyond these killing grounds, along the opposite wall, is what I’m looking for: the elevator.

  “Are any of them…” Micah swallows and his throat clicks. “You know?”

&n
bsp; I shake my head. “No. They’re all Infecteds. I don’t see our guys.”

  We cross into the room, weaving between the carcasses. A few of them have been obviously Undead for a very long time, their skin gray and leathery and their scalps patchy and white. Infected Undead. IUs. Victims of the outbreak thirteen years ago. Rest in peace.

  The majority of the bodies, however, appear to be a lot fresher. These are CUs. Volunteers.

  “Players.” Micah’s lips curl into a snarl when he says the word. He exhales appreciatively through his nose, but he frowns. “A dozen or so, by the looks of it. I wonder how they got in. And why are there so many?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ever watch an episode of Survivalist that didn’t take place in one of the abandoned cities? Nothing happens out in the boonies, like where we are now.”

  “Doesn’t mean there aren’t CUs out here fighting. Just never makes it onto the show.”

  He chuffs. “Why? Why here?”

  “Same reason that one on the road came here: it followed us,” I say. “These must’ve followed Kelly and the others.”

  He makes his way through the rest of them, kicking each one with the toe of his boot to make sure they’re really dead. It’s strange to see them lying there in the same awkward position as their counterparts outside the fence, their necks violently snapped, their heads twisted nearly fully around. It makes me nauseous to look at them. And even if I don’t say it, it does bother me that there so many of them.

  “Never seen a Player break an IU’s neck,” he mumbles. “Or even another Player’s neck, for that matter.”

  I shrug.

  “Neck snapping doesn’t get the same ratings as a beheading. People like violence. They like blood and dismemberment. This looks almost personal, almost…respectful.”

  He chuffs. We finally reach the elevator. The doors are closed and there’s another body lying directly in front of them. I turn it over and recognize the face of the IU that bit Jake. Its face is frozen in a parody of animal hunger. There’s blood on its chin. Fresh blood.

  Jake’s blood.

  The handle of a knife sticks out from the base of its skull. It’s one that Reggie snatched from the kitchen of the first house we were in.

  I yank it out and wipe it on the zombie’s shirt, even though there’s no blood on it, just a thin black, waxy streak. I see the worried look on Micah’s face and I say, “We don’t know what happened here. Would’ve been chaotic. Maybe they didn’t need this anymore.” But the knife sits in my hand feeling guilty, like it knows a terrible secret, one I don’t want to know. And suddenly I’m tired of looking around. I want to see them right now. I want to know.

  “Kelly!” I scream. The word bounces around inside the empty room, clanging off the walls, bruising my ears. “Where are you? Ash? Reg?”

  “Be quiet!” Micah hisses. He snatches my arm and yanks me to him, but I pull myself free and call out again. “Jessie! We don’t know if there are more of these things here.” He looks around in alarm, as if he expects more of them to start coming out of walls. “Stop yelling. We’ll find them. Look— Hey! Jessie, look at me. I’m pinging them right now, okay?”

  He points to his Link. I can hear the faint mechanical sound of it searching for a sub-stream. Then Kelly’s voice: Hello?

  “Kel, it’s Mi—”

  You’ve reached Kelly Corben. I can’t connect right now, so plea—

  Micah swiftly thumbs the connection dead. “It doesn’t mean anything, Jess.”

  I start tearing through the place, ripping open doors, calling their names. I don’t care anymore if there are IUs or CUs around. I don’t care if a Player comes. I just want to find my friends. Everything’ll be okay once we do.

  Micah tries to grab me again, but I fling his hand off me. My shoulder tweaks, but the pain just pisses me off even more. I am so freaking tired of hurting. “Leave me alone,” I growl.

  He’s about to reply when the elevator dings.

  We both step back. He brings his knife up and holds it in front of him, ready for whatever might come out at us. I reach around behind me for the pistol and almost panic when I don’t find it in my waistband. But then I remember it’s in my backpack.

  There’s no time to get it.

  I grip the knife harder with both hands. The bell dings again. The doors stay closed.

  “It’s coming up.” He steps forward, extending a shaking hand to hold me back.

  “It’s not them,” I say. Something tells me I’m right.

  “It is, Jessie,” he answers, trying to reassure me. “It has to be.”

  Another ding.

  “Christ,” he mutters, “this has got to be the slowest elevator in the world.” He shifts from foot to foot, making me all the more agitated. He can’t stand still. He never could.

  We stand in silence and wait, hoping for a miracle and expecting something short of one, until the distinctive chuff of the cables and pulleys tells us that the elevator car has finally arrived. It dings one last time and the doors open and someone steps out.

  But it isn’t Kelly.

  In fact, I don’t recognize him at all.

  Chapter 3

  “Who the hell are you?” Micah demands.

  The man stops and gives us a startled look. “I could ask the same of you, except I think I already know the answer. You’re with those other kids, aren’t you?” He shakes his head in disgust. “High school kids.”

  I step forward, bristling. The man doesn’t even flinch. “Where are they? What have you done with our friends?”

  He holds his hands up. “They’re all fine. Well, all except the one who was bitten. They won’t tell me their names, but they’re all down below in the basement. Brother Nicholas is attending to them now.”

  He makes a move to step past us and Micah blocks him. “Wait a minute, Mister…?”

  “Brother Matthew.”

  Micah frowns. “Brother…? What are you, some kind of monk or something?”

  “Or something. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go pick some leaves.” And then, when Micah doesn’t move: “Look, your friend is in a great deal of pain. Mugwort and willow leaves are the only thing we’ve found that can effectively alleviate it.”

  He slips past us before we can even react.

  “Mugwort?” Micah says. “What the fu—?”

  I step past him and into the elevator car. “Are you coming or are you just going to stand there like an idiot?”

  Micah blinks after Brother Matthew, then follows me into the elevator. I push the button and the doors close.

  “Who the hell— I mean, what—?”

  “Never mind that right now. All that matters is that he doesn’t want to eat us, so we’ll worry about him later. Right now, Kelly and the others are downstairs. Let’s go find them, then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  The car jerks down, then catches and begins its painfully slow descent, the obnoxious ringing of the bell marking out every few seconds but otherwise telling us nothing about how far we’ve gone or how far we have left to go. Micah watches me, astonishment and hurt on his face. I don’t look back.

  We finally reach bottom and the doors take forever to open. I squeeze through them as soon as the opening is wide enough.

  Kelly, Reggie and Ash are standing in a line, their backs toward us. On a table in front of them is Jake, but all I can see is his legs and feet, twisting and writhing. Sounds of utter agony come to me.

  “Kelly?”

  They all turn around, surprise on their faces. Kelly’s eyes flash with delight for a moment, but then his face goes blank when Micah exits the elevator and steps to my side.

  “I thought I told you not to come here, Jess. Jesus! What the hell happened to your neck?”

  Anger and hurt flair up inside of me, but it’s quashed by a sudden and desperate need to hold him. I hurry over and lean into his body. He finally relents, wrapping his arms around me. I’m so happy to see him t
hat I want to cry. I take a deep breath and breathe him in.

  “Pew, Kel, you stink.”

  His body stiffens against mine, then he chuckles.

  “You’re not so springtime fresh either, babe.”

  He releases me and I go to Ash. I ask her how she’s feeling.

  She frowns. There’s pain in her eyes. They flicker to the bruises on my neck, but thankfully she doesn’t ask. “Fine, as long as I stay down here. I can’t even ride up the elevator without passing out.”

  “You’re Link fell inside the shaft, didn’t it?”

  She nods and gives me a baleful smile. “You’re such a brilliant girl, Jessie, figuring out how to use the Links to transmit the failsafe signal…” Her eyes flick up to Micah and she pauses and the same change comes over her that I just saw with Micah. It makes me wonder what exactly happened that caused this sudden change in everyone. I don’t turn around, but I can almost sense Micah noticing the coldness in the place. He can feel that it’s directed toward him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I quickly tell her, drawing her gaze back to me. “We’ve got more important things to worry about right now.”

  “Like Jake.”

  I flinch. If Jake hadn’t been trying to act like such a hero, Ashley would still have her Link and he wouldn’t have gotten bitten. We’d all be able to leave Gameland right now. But instead, Ashley’s stuck here for now, and Jake’s suffering from an infection that will kill him unless we can get him back to Arc in time for a cure.

  If there even is one.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she whispers, and once more her eyes flick past me. I can hear Kelly and Micah talking in hushed tones. I think it must be about Jake. From the snippets I pick up, it doesn’t sound very good.

  “How is he?” I ask.

  “In a lot of pain.”

  “We passed someone up top—”