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

by Saul Tanpepper

  Still no answer, but his feet twitch reassuringly. At least he’s alive. I push against the seat again, but there’s not much I can do with what little leverage I have. I need to find the lever and move it, but it’s behind me somewhere. I twist around, my fingers blindly searching. It’s too far out of reach. My foot screams at me; my hips and knees are quickly going from being numb to becoming painful. And now I’m beginning to get a crick in my neck.

  There’s blood on my ankle. I can feel it running down—up—my leg. I pull my fingers back and the tips are red and slippery with it. My blood. The other bleeding has stopped, the other blood, the bigger blood. At least it’s stopped dripping off of my arm.

  Oddly enough, the pool on the ceiling continues to expand.

  Brother Malcolm’s blood. Has to be. I don’t think he was wearing a seatbelt.

  Somewhere out in the rain I hear a bark. Then another. Shinji, I think. He sounds far away, fading quickly. Come back! I wish I could see him. I wish I could tell him to come back to me. I need him. Come back. But all too soon his barks get swallowed up in the crackle of the rain and the music of the Undead.

  I hear another piece of the road ahead crumble away. It sounds like an animal growling, or the earth crying, as another piece of it tears off and tumbles away.

  Brother Malcolm’s feet spasm again, then pull forward.

  “Malcolm?”

  A cough. He must be coming to.

  “Hey,” I say, under my breath. “Be quiet.” When he doesn’t answer, I raise my voice a half notch louder. “Can you see Brother Matthew? Is he okay?”

  The car judders and tilts slightly. Both of his feet slide forward simultaneously, a few more inches, then stop. Something’s wrong.

  “Malcolm? You okay up there?”

  Another moan sounds right next to my head, just on the other side of the seat. Then, in a blink, Brother Malcolm’s feet jerk away from my face and disappear toward the front of the car, smearing blood and yanking the syringes even further out of my reach. There’s a quick series of knocks and grinding noises, and the moaning outside suddenly grows frantic, almost ecstatic.

  Shh! I think. Please be quiet, Malcolm. They’ll hear you.

  But I know he can’t hear me. He’s already gone. They have him. They’re eating.

  There’s a rattle outside my shattered window, and I turn reflexively, even though I know what I’ll see, and I find his boots out there, dancing on lifeless toes like a marionette. They lift and spin, and the moaning becomes a serenade of cries and growls, a symphony of consumption. Blood soaks his jeans, sprinkles onto the wet ground. And then he collapses in a sudden heap and his head slams into the car, then bounces off the ground right beside me. His eyes are open and staring right at me and I let out a shriek because half his face is missing, torn away from the skull, exposing the glistening bone underneath, pink and white and—

  They fall on him then, like wild scavengers, growling and champing their staccato teeth. They drop to their knees and bow their heads, opening wide their blackened jaws and roll out their charcoal tongues, as if to paint him. Their yellowed rotting stinking teeth sink into the soft flesh of his arms and neck and rip and snap and tear away and blood spurts out of him and yet he just lies there with that lipless grin on his face, staring at me. You’re next, he whispers. You’re dessert.

  His head jerks, nodding at me.

  No…

  And then his cheeks draw back and what remains of his face smiles at me. Yes, Jessica, he whispers, nodding at me. When they’re done feeding on me, on my flesh, they’ll be coming for you. They like young, uninfected meat. They like the young hollow ones.

  The desiccated head of a long dead IU lowers. It has a bald spot where the hair has rubbed away. It tears off the last bit of skin from Malcolm’s forehead and half his scalp comes away. The monster gets shoved aside by another that bites into his eye sockets, but it too gives way to yet another. One of the eyeballs disappears into the mouth of a female zombie. I can hear them pop between her decaying teeth, inside that fetid mouth with its paper-thin lips. The tip of its tongue pushes through a hole in its cheek, the juices dripping out.

  The Undead even further back press forward, shoving Brother Malcolm’s body. His head enters the opening, as if he, too, wishes to feed, and I shriek before clamping a hand over my mouth. Now his skeleton face is just inches from mine, paralyzing me with terror. I can smell him, smell the coppery stench of his blood. The moaning grows louder. It comes from all around me now. It’s right next to my ears.

  It’s inside my head.

  They Undead are inside the car.

  I lose control over myself then. My hands scramble and push and swat at them. I try desperately, futilely, to untwist myself from my deathtrap, to avoid the hands reaching in, to escape further into the car where there is no escape but only the inevitable, horrifying, painful end. Something near my hips pops and there’s a tearing sound and suddenly I’m free, slipping to the hard surface, sliding across that pool of rancid blood. I spin around, trying to get anywhere but where the hands are—those dying putrid Undead hands—and they reach for me through shattered windows fingers broken and skinless and lacking fingernails and hands missing whole fingers and stumps of bones and cartilage and dried muscle. They know I’m here. They know now. They won’t give me up.

  It’s your turn now, Jessie. Time for dessert.

  Somewhere, my damaged mind recognizes a new sound: clothes ripping. They’re pulling Brother Malcolm’s coat off, and his shirt, and now his corpse lays there on the ground, bared, the old scars of an even older attack exposed. They shine in the soggy gray midmorning twilight like warning beacons. But the Undead lower their mouths and feed on the flesh anyway. Marred and unmarred alike, infected or not, they make no distinction. The din grows and the moaning crescendos into that frantic high ululation of animal hunger, now joined by the timpani of joints popping and bones crunching. The Undead will leave nothing from this banquet. Not even marrow it seems. They are starving.

  One body won’t slake their needs.

  Another cough, behind me, distinctly human.

  “Matthew!” I scream.

  He coughs again and spits blood onto the spider webbed windshield beside his face. Incredibly, the glass is still intact. It’s the only reason they haven’t gotten to him yet. I can see their fingers slipping over the surface, trying to get in.

  I reach forward and shake him. “Brother Matthew!”

  But he’s barely conscious. I grab the satchel and dig inside it for the pistol. One bullet, not much of a help. But a single bullet aimed true will bring this all to an end. At least for me.

  I throw it back in along with one of the syringes. Two more syringes on the ceiling. I find the knife and use it to saw at Matthew’s seatbelt. I need to free him. I don’t know why—

  You need to sacrifice him—

  No!

  My jostling causes him to moan even more. It doesn’t matter now. The Undead know. They already know.

  A hand closes around my ankle, cold and rubbery. I draw myself up into a ball without even thinking and kick and the foot connects with a satisfying smack, but I’m too busy, too frantic, to appreciate it. The knife is halfway through the seatbelt. I need to free him.

  “Matthew, listen to me. If you can hear me, you need to wake up now!” I slap his face and he groans.

  The seatbelt suddenly gives with a pop! and he crumples to the ground. I manage to turn him around and get him onto his back. He’s bent over nearly double and his breathing is labored.

  The hand grabs my foot again. Or maybe it’s a different hand. I kick out a second time. It won’t let go. I glance back.

  “Nooo…”

  What I see nearly shatters my already fragile mind.

  Seven—maybe eight—years old when it turned. Its mummified skin clings to its miniature skull like brown papier-mâché and its eyes have long since shriveled up and fallen out. Its teeth are missing; its tongue is missing; a chunk o
f its arm is missing, the wound cauterized by time and desiccation. It tells me all I need to know about how it died.

  It’s small enough that it can squeeze through the shattered and partially collapsed back window. It pulls itself along with its spindly arms, climbing my leg like a rope. The remaining shards of glass slice into its naked abdomen, shredding the rubberized muscle and spilling out a tangled mass of greasy, ropy, yellowed intestines. It doesn’t slow at all.

  Another IU grasps the intestines and pulls, stuffing them into its mouth and chewing. It soon loses interest.

  The tiny monster keeps pulling. It’s incredibly strong. The intestines stretch, then snap, and the thing suddenly lunges toward me.

  I shriek and kick at it, pistoning my foot in and out with unrestrained terror. Its face crumbles under my heel, the jaw shatters and teeth fly. Each hit is another strike to my mind. When I finally stop, its jaw dangles to one side, the ends of shredded tendons poking out. It still comes, slower now, chewing its own shattered lips and clicking its ruined mouth with a noise that makes me think of cockroaches. Millions of cockroaches.

  “Get away from me!” I scream, and the moaning outside grows in pitch and more hands reach in from all around. Cold fingers twine in my hair and scrabble at my shoulder and arm. Others find my leg. They pull themselves into the car using me for traction, fighting against each other. I kick and thrash wildly, but they keep coming.

  Brother Matthew groans and coughs again and says something.

  “What do I do?” I scream at him, and from behind me I hear another cough and then a gasp and what sounds like a curse. “What do I do?”

  Another kick. It connects solidly and something snaps inside the child monster’s neck and it flops to the ground and finally lies still. A whimper escapes my lips. But the others still come.

  “Where’s…Malcolm?” Brother Matthew asks, his words slurring a bit. It sounds like he says, “Smack ‘em.”

  “Taken! Gone! Get away from me, you fucker!”

  “We have to get out.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “We’re dead if we stay!”

  I turn and kick another in the face. Brother Matthew reaches past my head and snatches two of the syringes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We have to run for it!” He coughs again and a clot of blood splatters across his arm. His lips are shredded from smashing into the steering wheel. He spits again and something hard and pinkish white catches on the ceiling fabric next to me. Tooth. “Grab the other syringes and follow me!” he yells weakly.

  “Don’t you dare open that door!”

  Two more Undead receive new facials, courtesy of my shoes.

  Matthew doesn’t listen. He spins around and kicks feebly at the door. It suddenly pops open, knocking several IUs back. He pulls himself out.

  “Get back in here!” I find the satchel and grab it.

  But he sees too late that there are too many of them. They’re on him without mercy, pulling at him, biting.

  “Brother Matthew!”

  He screams and falls back against the car, shaking it, and now there are more of them coming in through the shattered back window. More coming in through his open door. They’re coming in from all sides.

  Blood splatters onto the ground outside the car, fresh blood, and I scream. It’s all I can do now. I scream as the Undead close in on me, crawling on hands where the skin has been worn off, on knees which have been ground to stubs, baring their gumless teeth and licking their lipless mouths with tongues thick and black as tar. I scream and scream and it fills my head so that even the rain grows silent. The Undead stop their moaning, too. And my screams fill my ears and flood my mind so that I don’t even hear the earth when it gives one final shriek of pain. But I know it’s happened when the car suddenly tilts, and we plummet toward a different sort of madness, one of raging mud and broken earth.

  But even then, the screaming doesn’t stop.

  Chapter 2

  I grab the end of Brother Matthew’s seatbelt and wrap it around my hand as the car jounces down the crumbling embankment on its roof, tilting and spinning with bone-jarring speed, threatening to eject me. Dirt and rocks and mud flash by and my throat slams shut with panic: the embankment is disintegrating over me.

  A flash of sky.

  Malcolm’s backpack floating before my eyes.

  The satchel sliding away.

  The car slams into something, throwing me and the zombies inside the car crashing toward the front. Bodies crush against me, broken fingers and blackened nails and gaping mouths, elbows and teeth and knees. Their stench overwhelms me. The cold, dead feel of their plastic flesh pressing against my face, their bony joints, all trying—

  The car tilts upward, crushing me beneath the weight of the squirming Undead, and it flips over and suddenly I’m on top again and then it tips with a metallic groan and falls with a thunderous crunch. The Undead are thrown backward and away. I dangle above them, clinging desperately to the broken seatbelt. My hand burns, and my shoulder screams as I scramble to find footing. My arm wants to pop out of its socket again.

  As soon as the car settles into its new cradle, I try to let go of the belt, but it’s twisted and the Undead are already coming again, unfazed, undeterred. They scratch through the ruined interior, pushing rocks and floor mats aside. They come because all that matters is feeding. Driven by the proximity of fresh meat, guided by the smell of blood. I kick at one, but it stubbornly persists. Two more kicks and it tumbles out where a door no longer exists. Another takes its place dragging itself up at me with one good arm, the other permanently wrenched backward around its own neck, its hand flopping on its back with each lurch forward, as if patting itself for a job well done.

  I’m beyond sense by now. I’m only reacting. The fingers of my free hand curl around something and I thrust it in front of me without looking, just as the IU lunges. The blade of the knife pierces its eye and forces its lifeless, deathless skull backward until the weight of the thing moving forward snaps its brittle spine.

  For a moment, everything is still. Even sound ceases to exist. It’s just me and that creature. I give the knife a final vicious twist and it collapses against me and pats itself one last time. Good game. You win, fair and square, it whispers, it’s remaining eye jeering at me.

  I don’t know how much time passes from that moment. Finally, I unwrap the seatbelt from my ruined hand, now purple and bruised, the skin badly misshapen, scored by deep runnels. A thin line of blood seeps from the soft spot between my thumb and forefinger. I flex it to bring some of the sensation back, and I realize how lucky I am that my arm didn’t get torn right off at the shoulder.

  No broken bones, but pain assaults me from every part of me, from my body, from my soul. Bruises seen and unseen. I feel like I’ll never heal.

  Cautiously, I look around me. The new river rushes past, ten feet away. Only now the roar comes back to me, angry, deafening. The torrent cuts a path a hundred feet wide through the softened earth, and from my vantage I can see chunks of ground on the other side falling away, showering the water, disappearing into that viscous torrent. A jagged piece of the road juts out over the edge—fragments of concrete and rebar—thrusting out against the sky like a severed spine protruding from a headless corpse. Another piece falls away, tumbling down the bank and slamming into the muck.

  Mud flows down around me, a thick, chunky sludge. Rocks pelt the car, jolting it, some of them large enough to knock me closer to the water’s edge. I need to get out. But I don’t dare move.

  Then the windshield explodes in on me and a large object slides past inches from my face, a blur of muddy brown. A tree trunk. It slams into the backseat with a thud! and the car shudders and begins to slide again, jolting and skipping over the loose gravel, picking up speed. It cants sideways and threatens to flip over again. There’s one final horrendous grinding crunch before I’m thrown into the air and slammed into the ceiling. I try and grab for the h
igh side door, for the empty window frame, but it’s slick with mud and rain and my fingers slip off and I tumble back into the car, into the space between the seats. Next to the tree trunk.

  Except it’s not a tree.

  A hand thrusts out and clamps around my neck and pulls me down, and a mouth opens like a cave. The car jolts from another impact and the hand jerks off my neck. The jaws snap an inch from my cheek. I pummel it, slamming the thing’s face with fists and elbows and knees and feet.

  Pressure on the back of my neck. I reach back and grab it and swing it around. It’s the satchel. I slam it forward, no longer caring whether the remaining syringes are still inside. But the IU is no longer there. Now it’s beside me, and it reaches over and clamps its mouth on my thigh and no amount of hitting will dislodge its jaws from me.

  “Get the fuck off me!” I scream, hammering away at it with the bag. My thumb sinks knuckle deep into its eye socket. I push, wrenching its head backward, but it won’t let go. The pain is intense and burning. “Get the fu—”

  But the world turns upside down again. We’re tipping, rolling the last few feet to the water, plunging into the torrent, and the water’s cold and thick. I only have time for a lungful of air before darkness descends over me and the current is pulling at my body. And yet, even then, the IU won’t let go. The car drags us down, down, and the monster tries to tear a chunk of my leg away.

  Don’t let go of the bag! one part of my mind screams.

  Get out! screams another.

  But I can’t move with that thing attached to me, so I kick and punch and pry and my throat cramps and my lungs burn. It feels like my leg is being torn in two. I punch as the air in my lungs turns cold and black and shadows crowd against the edges of my mind. I tear at the wretched thing, and then, just as my lungs feel as if they’re going to burst, it’s gone.

  I kick away, blindly pulling myself against the frame of the car. The current batters me with mud and sticks and rocks. I find an opening and pull, but the bag in my hand catches and I yank and it still won’t come free.