He doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t challenge me either. His silence might as well be an acknowledgement that he knows he’s every bit the failure Ben makes him out to be.
“I really don’t understand why you let him treat you like this.”
He sighs. “Ben’s a little rough around the edges, but he actually cares.”
“A pie crust is rough around the edges. Ben isn’t rough. He’s sharp and abrasive, like broken glass.”
“He gave me a chance when…”
“When what?”
“Nothing.”
“So, let me get this straight, he abuses you physically and verbally, and you’re okay with that? You’re like his little servant.”
Casey gives me a resentful look. “I’m not his servant. If anything, it’s those things out there that are servants. I’m a free man. I chose to come here.”
“Yeah, free to be abused.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me. Not really. It’s good for me. I need more discipline. He really cares.”
Cares enough to kick the shit out of you, I think to myself.
“Look, I really don’t want to talk about it. Okay? Just keep quiet.”
I shake my head. Turning Casey against Ben won’t be as easy as I’d hoped.
Up the road, Ben is circling the IU, toying with it, staying just out of its reach. I’ve seen Players do this in Survivalist, Players controlled by Operators. Hell, I’ve even done it myself to virtual zombies in Zpocalypto. It makes me wonder if Ben has ever played The Game. I wonder if he got tired of the virtual thrill and decided it would be better to try his hand at killing them live.
He pokes it in the back, provoking it, and the thing hisses. It’s clearly becoming more and more agitated. When he first approached, it was stiff and clumsy and slow, but its movements are quickly becoming more fluid. Almost instinctively I yell out to warn him, but I don’t. Where’s the downside if the IU managed to get a hold of him?
It swings for him, but Ben easily dodges out of the way, making the zombie’s attempts look slow and ungainly.
“Just do it, already,” I finally mutter, tiring of the game. “Waste of time.”
Ben slips around behind the IU and his hand shoots out and grabs it by the collar. The fabric of the shirt is so old and frail that it disintegrates in his fingers. He utters a curse and flings the scrap away from him and it flutters to the road.
“What the hell is he doing?” I ask. “Why doesn’t he just cut off its head? Why tease it like that?”
“Casey!” Ben shouts. “Get your ass over here. Bring the girl.” He reaches out again from behind and this time his fingers wrap around the IU’s throat. The thing struggles and tries to turn around to reach him, but it can’t. It flails uselessly about, looking like it’s trying to swim the backstroke. But Ben is too strong.
“I’ll watch from here,” I say.
“No you won’t, little lady.”
Casey gestures at me with the rifle and we both head over. I really don’t have a good feeling about this.
“Give me the gun,” Ben says. He reaches out with his free hand, fingers beckoning.
Casey obeys, giving the IU a wide berth. It hisses and tries to grab him. Casey flinches and skips back, but it doesn’t even come close. Ben cackles with amusement. I could run, I suppose, now that Ben is preoccupied with the IU and the gun, but I know I wouldn’t get very far. I could easily outrun the zombie, and maybe even both men, but there’s no way I can outrun a bullet.
Ben grabs the rifle around the stock, curling his fingers around the small just behind the breech and inserting his finger into the trigger guard. He nestles the butt against the crook of his elbow and holds it against his side. The muzzle is pointed at my chest. It never strays, not even when the IU tries to lunge at me.
“Get on your knees,” he tells me.
“Ben?” Casey says, sounding surprised. “What—”
“Stand over there, Casey!” Ben says, gesturing with his chin to the space off to the left of me. “Stand next to her and make sure she don’t move.” He turns his eyes to me and repeats his command: “Get down on your knees.”
Terror rushes through me, terror and a sense of finality. “What are you going to do?”
“Down, I said!”
“No, please, I—”
“God damn it! I don’t have time for this. Casey, push her down. Do it!”
I stumble away from him. Now it’s my turn to plead. “Please, Casey, you don’t have to do this. Please.”
I can see his throat working. I can see the struggle in his eyes, the turmoil on his face. “Do it,” he tells me. His fists clench and unclench. “Get down.”
“Do as I say or I will shoot you.”
I bend my legs and slowly lower myself down to one knee. “Why are you doing this?” I whisper.
“Casey…?” Ben says, gesturing.
Casey steps over and presses me the rest of the way down.
“We need proof that this medicine works, don’t we?” Ben asks. “You don’t want to give something to your friend you don’t know works, do you?”
“It won’t work on me because I’m not bitten!”
“Lies! First you said you were bitten, now you aren’t. Which is it?”
“I was, but it didn’t break the skin. Please…”
He shakes the IU and it lurches as it tries to step toward me, but Ben won’t let it go. Not yet. Its jagged teeth look like shards of blackened glass.
“Oh, god,” I plead. “Please, I don’t want to do this.”
“We all have to make sacrifices, honey. Don’t we, Casey?”
“Ben, really, I don’t think we should—”
“Shut up,” Ben says.
The IU continues to struggle. Now it’s moaning and clacking, and when it opens its mouth, there’s no trace of a tongue, and for some reason this terrifies me even more. I don’t know how that could be; I’m so scared I don’t think I could move if a train was barreling down on my right now.
“Please,” I beg. “Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”
“Casey,” Ben says, his eyes never leaving mine. There’s laughter in them. Laughter and insanity.
“Yes, Ben?”
“Don’t you try to stop it.”
And then he releases the zombie.
PART TWO
Cheaters Rule
Chapter 12
“See? The bleedin’s already stopped,” Ben says, as if this could somehow be taken for good news. Maybe in some alternate reality, some sick Hell, but not here.
It isn’t a deep bite, though deep enough. Deep enough to dislodge a tooth. Deep enough that Ben had to use the tip of his knife to dig it out of the skin. He slipped it into his pocket, like it was a souvenir.
Casey stands there in shock, whimpering. I’m beyond whimpering. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. The world freezes around me and the truth hits me that I’m going to die. We’re all going to die.
“Oh, quit being such a baby,” Ben says. “I stopped it before it could do any real damage.”
“Ben?” Casey says, and his eyes roll back in his head as he faints.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” He points the rifle at me, then reaches into a pocket and extracts a syringe and tosses it over. “Now we’ll see if the stuff really works like you say it does.”
“But, I can’t—”
“Of course you can,” he retorts. “Oh, and you damn well better pray it does work, or else you’ll be dead by nightfall.”
“I mean I don’t know how.”
“Just shoot him up in the arm. You know, just like they do when you’re a little wanker goin to see the doctor before school. Just think how grateful he’ll be to you when he learns you gave him the cure.”
“It doesn’t work that way!”
“Well, we’ll see, won’t we? A little time and we’ll see what happens. And there better be no mysterious side effects or nothing, neither.”
Brother Matthew’
s voice whispers inside my head, telling me that there can be complications in some cases. He didn’t explain what they might be or what to do about them, and now I wish I’d asked. But it seems to me that if Casey is going to have some sort of reaction, it won’t matter to him. He’ll be dead anyway. It’s me I worry about.
I pull off the needle guard.
“Well?”
“In the arm?” I ask.
Ben nods. “Just like a immu’zation,” he says. So I stick the needle in and push on the plunger. It’s viscous and resists going in. Ben watches me intently, noticing every detail. He comments about the thickness and suggests maybe it’d be better going into a vein rather than the muscle, but I don’t say anything. I’ve lost the instructions. I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not.
“Do you want me to switch?”
“Too late now. Better hope you’re right.”
When I’m done, my hand is sore. He tells me to throw the syringe away, off the side of the road and into the bushes. “Don’t want you accidentally stabbing yourself,” he says, smiling. I know what he really means. But I gladly get rid of it. It’s no good as a weapon. Besides, the damage I intend to inflict on him would require something much larger and sharper.
“How are you feelin?” Ben asks Casey, almost charitably, when he wakes a moment later. “Anythin yet? Pain?”
Fuck yeah it hurts, I want to say, but the shock and anger still have a hold of my throat. Casey stumbles to his feet and over to a sign post, a wild look in his eyes. He leans, panting and spitting.
The IU lies in the middle of our triangle, motionless, headless. A single quick swipe of Ben’s machete and its biting days were over. Its head is somewhere off in the weeds now.
Ben walks over and slaps Casey on the back. “Get a hold of yourself, son. It’s time we went. You keep me apprised of how you’re feelin, okay son?”
Casey nods.
“Good. You can thank me later. Now, let’s go.”
Casey pushes shakily away from the post. I can see the strain on his face. And the terror. He can’t stop looking at the teeth marks on his arm, just below the elbow, the ragged twin incisions forming a broken oval. He’s trying hard not to go insane.
“You’re a god damn fucking bastard,” I tell Ben as he passes. “How could you do this to someone? How could you?”
He shrugs. “If you’re tellin me the truth bout them syringes, then you ain’t got nothin to worry about, right? But if the infection takes him and he dies, then you’ve only yourself to blame. Either way, I’ll know if it works.”
“I don’t even know if that’s how it works!”
“Ain’t no difference. What matters is what I’ve heard about this stuff.”
“What?”
He chuckles. “It makes you strong. And Lord knows Casey could use growing a pair.”
“What?”
“Stronger and faster and meaner. That’s what I heard. More resistant. One mean sonofabitch is what it turns you into!”
I stagger to my feet. My hands are still tied behind me and my balance is whacked so that I almost fall over. “You’re confused,” I tell him.
“Well, we’ll see.”
“What you did to Casey is wrong! Look at him. He’s not—”
“He’ll be fine. Won’t you, Case?” He laughs. “Look here, jacker, think of it this way. I did you and your little sick friend on the hill a favor.” He pats his breast pocket. “Don’t want to go injectin somethin you don’t know nothing about into your friend, now, do you?”
He keeps saying that, but something tells me he has no intention of ever letting me have it back. This little experiment is for not for my benefit. Or Jake’s.
And it sure as hell isn’t for Casey’s.
“That’s a good girl.”
He walks over to Casey and slaps the rifle back into his arms. Casey lets out a puff of air and tries to stand up straight. His face is pale and beaded with sweat. The infection is already taking hold. But will the treatment? I may only have a few more hours left to live.
Maybe less.
“Come on, now,” he announces. “Can’t be late for our little rendezvous.”
Chapter 13
I’m told to take the lead, though I don’t know the way back, not exactly. Ben instructs me, periodically referring to a map on a tablet computer he pulls from his pack, instructing me on which roads to take. I notice the same silver logo on the back that was on the tablet Micah had found a couple days ago, and it makes me wonder if it’s just a coincidence.
Because there aren’t any highways running north-south, we take residential streets, sticking mainly to the broader ones. Many of the narrower roads are still clogged with long-abandoned cars—plenty of places where IUs and Players could be hiding.
The further in we go, the more evidence I begin to see of battles: burnt-out shells of cars and houses, torn up roads. But I can’t tell how much of the damage is due to events during the evacuation or if they’re a result of The Game.
The sky is still splotchy with storm clouds. Despite periods of silvery twilight when they cover the sun, the day grows hotter. Steam rises up off the roads, swathing us. It smells clean and fresh but clutches its fingers around our throats and makes it hard to breathe.
We walk in silence, not wanting to rouse the Undead, neither the ones still populating the landscape, nor the ones which have slipped away into their hiding places. We pass several broken ones, all solitary, except for one strange cluster of four standing next to an ice cream truck on four flat tires, as if they’re waiting for the window to open and the ice cream man to start selling.
A few of them notice us as we go by and they begin to follow, but they don’t get very far before either Ben’s machete takes them out or they fall behind. If I could, I’d try to escape. I’d shout at the Undead to draw them to us for a distraction, but I know I wouldn’t get very far, not with my hands tied up. But even if I could run away, Ben knows where I’m heading, and he’d just be waiting for me when I arrived.
I wish there were some way I could warn Kelly and the others, but without my Link, there’s nothing I can do. Nor can I prevent or further delay our arrival, not without putting Jake at further risk. Any chance he has now of getting the treatment depends on me getting us back to the hill and convincing Ben to relinquish it. Or taking it by force.
Neither of which seems all that likely.
I almost pity the Undead here, especially the ones that notice us, their hunger reawakened. I don’t pity the ones Ben kills. I envy them. Now they can rest.
We don’t encounter any Players. Most likely they’re concentrated in the cities. I have no doubt that’s the reason Ben has chosen for us to skirt the more built-up areas.
I’m getting more and more concerned about Casey. He’s in the middle, behind me. Ben is at the rear. Casey’s breathing is getting more and more raspy. It sounds unnaturally loud in my ears. There are times when I think I feel his breath on my neck, growing ever hotter, but when I turn, he’s a good eight or ten feet back. Ben keeps a constant watch over us both. The rifle droops in Casey’s hands. I’d make a grab for it if my hands weren’t tied up. But Ben stays too close and he’s too fast. He swings the machete like he’s just itching to use it.
Casey stumbles and catches himself. Ben’s eyes flick up at me. The amusement in his face has disappeared. He’ll blame me when Casey dies.
Another twenty minutes pass and Casey’s breathing is even worse. I’m afraid to look behind me. I’m afraid of what I’ll see. How much longer before Ben decides the treatment has failed? When Casey dies of his infection? Before then? I told him I didn’t know if I was doing it right. I should’ve injected it straight into his vein.
Another hour or so and we finally reach the edge of the parkland. Jayne’s Hill slopes gently up ahead of us. Ben tells me to stop, and he consults his tablet for a moment, then nods. “Almost there. Looks like your magical elixir does work after all.”
I’d zoned out
for the past twenty minutes or so. Now I jerk my head up and around, looking for Casey. He’s sitting on a rick to one side, resting quietly, slouched over with the rifle held across his knees. His face is still pale and sweaty, but he doesn’t look as bad off as he had when I’d last looked at him. He’s definitely breathing much easier now.
“How’re you feeling, boy?”
“Okay,” Casey wheezes. He doesn’t meet Ben’s eyes. “Better.”
Ben chuckles and pats his breast pocket again. “Worth its weight in gold,” he says. “More, even. Lots more.” It reminds me of Brother Matthew telling me nearly the same thing just this morning.
Should I tell him that Casey will need to keep taking it for the rest of his life?
“Something tells me you’re not going to give that last syringe back to me,” I mutter.
Ben scratches his chin with the corner of his Link and makes like he’s considering it. “Well, now, that depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, first, on you tellin me where you went to get it. And second, whether or not there’s more where this came from.”
“Of course there’s more!”
He pulls it out and rolls it in his fingers for a moment. He makes like he’s going to toss it over to me, but then stops. “Maybe I’ll hold just onto it a little while longer.”
He thumbs something on his Link, a text message. Then he sits down and gestures for me to sit, too.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Waitin.” He doesn’t elaborate.
A few minutes later his Link pings and he connects. He talks into it, holding it tight up against his ear so I can’t hear what the other person is saying.
“We’re at the base of the hill. Ten minutes away. Can you give us access? Good. I’ll ping you.”
“Who were you talking to?” I ask, when he thumbs the Link off. He ignores me, turning his back. A moment later he lifts the Link to his ear again. “Lena, it’s Ben. Just got confirmation. The Coder’s in place. How close are you? Uh huh. Good. Got another little surprise for you. Naw, it’ll wait till you arrive.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 81