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

by Saul Tanpepper

  I want that. I want it all back, not just for me, but for everyone.

  The hole inside of me opens up again. A hole which has been there all along, but now it flares so wide that the slightest push will send me tumbling headfirst into it.

  I glance over at Kelly. He stands stock straight, his body rigid with alarm, his eyes flicking between us. He weaves slightly from exhaustion. I look at him and I long for his touch, and yet, at the same time, I don’t want it. I think if he touched me right now, I’d suddenly just disappear.

  Or turn to stone.

  I already am stone.

  Crumbling to dust.

  Blowing away.

  Reggie gets up and stumbles over to where Brother Matthew’s body is lying on the floor. He stares down at him as if he’s suddenly just noticed him for the first time. The small pool of blood underneath his neck has already stopped spreading. When I’d finished him a few minutes ago—when I had thrust the knife blade into the notch at the base of his skull and felt the cord separate and then pulled the blade free so that it made that reluctant, wet, sticky sound—hardly any blood had come out. He was already dead, I knew that. There was no beating heart inside of him to pump it out. But that didn’t matter. He’d already lost too much. He was empty, a shell. There was nothing left of him. The Undead had taken everything he had.

  No, not everything. I had done that.

  The blood, the few teaspoons that leaked out of him, had been thick and dark, congealed. It had smelled sweet and rancid. Like spoiled meat buried in a shallow grave for a week. Already a skin has formed over it there on the floor, glazing it, shriveling.

  I hadn’t felt anything. Not like I had with some of the others. I would’ve expected something, a twinge of guilt or remorse, a sense of release, gratefulness for his sacrifice. Pity even. He didn’t have to come here. He didn’t have to bring the syringe for Jake. He was a good man, I can see that now. And yet when I did it, when I severed that cord and forever denied him of anything but an eternity in death, there had been nothing. Neither guilt, nor relief. Nothing.

  How can one be so numb and yet hurt so much? How can it hurt so badly that nothing can change or alter it? Nothing can make it go away. Nothing will ever take it away.

  I can’t even begin to imagine how he got away from the horde of Undead back there. How he survived. How he made his way all the way back here, half insane with pain and fever. Bleeding out. Or why he would even come. He didn’t owe us anything. And yet here he is. Was.

  He knew he was already a dead man. Would soon die.

  Would soon come back.

  Yes. He needed you.

  Is that why he did it?

  He didn’t want to turn.

  He’d already been infected once—or, quite possibly, more than once, who knows. But regardless, all these years living here, he knows—knew—what it must be like to live on a razor’s edge, teetering between life and a place that isn’t quite death. Like balancing perpetually on the edge of some great chasm, the dirt crumbling away beneath his feet, the muddy river of death rushing below. Or, at least, one of death’s many tributaries. When do you finally stop resisting and accept that you’ll fall in?

  But he never wanted to die like that. It would be like forever drowning.

  That’s why he came. The syringe was…

  The syringe was his ticket, his payment to you.

  He knew I’d honor his last, unspoken wish, even if I didn’t want to do it.

  He knew you’d understand.

  Any normal person would. And yet, I don’t feel like I understand anything at all.

  “Christ,” Reggie says, staring at the mutilated corpse, at Brother Matthew’s stump of an arm and the multitude of bites. Not an inch of his skin has been left untouched. Even his face has been shredded. He shakes his head and asks, “How? Why?”

  “She had to do it,” Kelly says, misconstruing what he’s asking. “She had to.”

  Reggie gawps at him.

  “We’ve all done things we never thought we’d have to do, Reg. Things we never thought we’d be capable of doing.” He looks at me while he says it. He’s talking about all the killing I’ve done, all the finishing. Defending me.

  Can he ever forgive me?

  Can I forgive myself?

  “We should burn him,” Kelly finishes. “It would be the proper thing to do.”

  Reggie looks at him in disbelief. “After everything we’ve done, all the bodies we’ve left behind? Now? When we need to move? You want to waste time on someone who’s already dead while Ashley’s out there somewhere—”

  “He deserves it, Reggie, for what he sacrificed to help us. For saving Jake.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Reggie cries. He leans on the hand pressing against his injured hip, wincing at the pain. His face is pale and beaded with sweat. “Brother Matthew liked the Undead.”

  “No.” I say, startling myself with the sound of my own voice. “Brother Matthew sympathized with them, with the IUs. They all did, the other brothers and sisters and Father Heall. But there’s a difference between sympathy and desire. They felt sorry for them. They feared them, too. They weren’t…jealous of them. Nobody wants to be Undead.”

  Suddenly another piece of some cosmic puzzle feels like it has clicked into place, the puzzle of my brother and his own obsession with the Undead. All this time, all Eric’s claims of wanting to understand them and the rest of us thinking he was on the slow road to Crazyville. It was sympathy, not desire. That’s what drove him into the Marines. Then, afterward, into the Necrotics Crimes Division. Sympathy for the Undead, not disdain or hatred or arrogance. Sympathy. Something our family hasn’t been very good at expressing.

  “All I’m saying, brah, is that Ashley’s somewhere out there. I just don’t see why you want to waste precious minutes by having a damn stinking funeral.”

  “I’m just sick of leaving them like this. I feel like we’re—we’re discarding them, hiding them in rooms like they’re nothing more than broken furniture.”

  “Are you even listening to yourself? What difference does it make to them now?” Reggie cries.

  “Guys, please—” I say.

  “Brother Matthew is gone!” Reggie shouts, ignoring me. He glares at Kelly, who turns away. “He won’t come back.” He stands up again and gestures toward Jake. His face twists, and what I see in it isn’t just anguish and desperation, but also resentment. “They’re all gone. But we can save Ashley. We have to. We—”

  But he doesn’t finish. His eyes lose focus. He shakes his head groggily, pinches the bridge of his nose and groans.

  “You need to get off that leg,” Kelly tells him.

  Reggie stumbles into Jake’s table, leans on it panting. It squeals as it scrapes across the floor. One of Jake’s arms flops over the side. Drool drips from Reggie’s lips as he regains his balance.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, newly concerned. “You look terrible. Reggie?”

  He swallows, wipes his mouth, shakes his head. “Fine. I’m fine, just…” A sob rises in his throat, escapes. “Damn headache’s coming back.” He lets out another long, deep, shuddering breath. “I just want to go home. I want us all to go home. We have to get Ash.”

  And this finally convinces me. Staying here won’t make a damn bit of difference to Jake. If there’s going to be a miracle, it’ll happen regardless of whether I’m here or not.

  “Look, Kelly,” I say, turning, “Reggie’s right. I hate what we’ve done, too. I hate that we’ve hidden all these… They were once people. We tend to forget that. I hate that we’ve just thrown them into some room—”

  Where their flesh will rot and their bones will never be discovered.

  “—but we have more important things to worry about right now. Ashley needs our help.”

  “That’s all I’m saying,” Reggie quietly says. “That’s all I’m saying. She needs our help.”

  Kelly purses his lips and glares at me, as if trying to communicate something. But wha
tever it is, I’m just not getting it.

  He lets out an explosive breath, shakes his head. “Fine. Okay. But you’re in no shape to walk, Reg. Jessie and I will go—no, Jess, you’re not going out there after them alone. I’m coming with you.”

  There’s relief in Reggie’s eyes, but I sense something else as well: defiance. He’s going. Even if he has to crawl on his hands and knees, he’ll go. Nothing is going to stop him, not his hip, and certainly not Kelly or me. He’s going to save the girl he loves.

  Chapter 2

  We roll Brother Matthew’s body onto an old rubber floor mat and drag him into one of the smaller rooms in the back. It’s not one of the rooms where the boys stacked up the IUs or Players that attacked them yesterday. We give him his own. It just seems right. As we’re leaving, Kelly hesitates at the door. He looks back and crosses himself. His lips move in a silent prayer, and then he closes it, shutting Brother Matthew in. These little acts startle me. As long as I’d ever known him, Kelly had never indicated he believed in any of that religious stuff.

  He sees me watching and he shrugs, then walks back into the main room.

  Reggie almost immediately starts up again with the pacing, looking like a wounded animal in a cage. He’s still limping, though not as badly. He seems to be trying to work the ache out of his hip. But now I’m noticing something new: he’s started rubbing his eyes. He acts like they’re dry and irritating him, but if anything, they’re watering heavily. And they seem to be bulging from his sockets. I wonder if the knockout gas affected him worse than we realized.

  I ask him again if he’s feeling okay. He doesn’t answer, just grumbles impatiently, urging us to get ready to go.

  The whole process of moving Matthew had only taken a few minutes, not long enough for me to come up with a way to convince him it’d be best if he stayed behind and let me and Kelly go. He won’t buy the argument that it’ll be faster if he sits tight. He thinks he can overcome his injury simply by force of will.

  “We should see how far they’ve gotten,” I say. “We’ve got the tracking app on Micah’s tablet. It’s still attached to the mainframe.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kelly volunteers.

  “We also need to warn Father Heall.”

  “How?”

  “Micah’s Link,” I answer.

  “I’ll ping him,” Reggie says, thumbing the elevator button. He leans his head against the door, blinking rapidly. “I need some fresh air anyway. It’s hot down here.”

  I frown. It’s even hotter upstairs. But all I say is, “Don’t wander off too far.”

  “And don’t do anything stupid,” Kelly adds. Reggie rolls his head to give him a sharp look, but he doesn’t respond.

  I wait for the doors to close before turning back to Kelly. “Do you have to always be so mean to him? He’s not stupid, you know.”

  “I never said he was stupid. I told him not to do—”

  “I heard what you said.”

  “Look, Jess, you know him as well as I do. You know what he’s like and what he’s capable of. He’s reckless. If it weren’t for that injury to his hip, he’d be off running after Ashley himself, not a thought in his head or a plan to follow, and the rest of us be damned.”

  “He’s stressed. Just…just cut him some slack.”

  “We’re all stressed, Jessie. He’s in denial, willing to sacrifice everything so he can save Ash.”

  “Sacrifice what? What do we have left to give?”

  “Our own lives.”

  “What, so you’re saying it’s time to cut our losses? How could you? What if it was me out there instead?”

  “I’m not playing the What-if game, Jess.”

  “You think I’m playing a fucking game? How could you give up on her?”

  “This isn’t about giving up. It’s about facing reality. Ask yourself, Jess. Why would Ben take her? He has no use for a hostage. He thinks we’re dead. Ashley will just slow him down. If all he wants to do is find Father Heall, why would he take Ash?”

  “Obviously, because he thinks she knows where Heall is.”

  “How would she know? Did you tell her?”

  I open my mouth to say no, but then I realize she must know. Knowing her, she’d have kept tabs on me and Micah with the tracker. That’s what I would’ve done. But how would Ben know that? She must have told him. He broke her and she told him.

  “And even if she does,” he continues, “why not just take you instead? He knows for sure that you know how to get to Brookhaven, how to find Heall.”

  “Because he knows I’d never tell him! He knows I’d snap his neck the first chance I got.”

  He considers this for a moment, then frowns. “Ashley is weak.”

  “She’s not weak!”

  “Christ, Jess, we all saw it upstairs. She was crying like a baby.”

  “She was scared!”

  “You were scared, Jess. We all were. Face it, Ashley isn’t as strong as she always let on. She’s not this tough little firecracker of a girl we always knew, or thought we knew. I mean, we always thought she was tough, because no one else would stand up to Reggie like she did. But now we know there was more to their relationship, don’t we? All that toughness was just an act, like some kind of caveman courting ritual.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Face it, Jess. We were never really in any serious danger before coming here, so, yeah, it was easy for her to pretend to be tough.”

  I remember what Micah said about her: tough on the outside, soft inside. Micah knew it, but I hadn’t ever really noticed it before. Or I’d conveniently denied it. So, how could it have been so easy for someone like Ben to see that right away?

  Because she cried. Like a baby.

  “He figured she’d cave if he pressed hard enough,” Kelly says. “And she will if she hasn’t already.” He sighs. “But that’s not what scares me the most.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He waits for a moment, and when I don’t answer, he explains what he means.

  After he’s finished, my first impulse is to lash out at him, to rip his face with my fingernails like I’d ripped Eric’s chest years ago, to beat him until he admits he’s wrong. But inside I know he’s not. He’s right. Maybe I hadn’t thought about it because I’m a girl. Or maybe I’d blocked the possibility that Ben might do something worse than kill Ashley after extracting Heall’s whereabouts out of her. But Kelly figured it out. He’s a guy, and even as different as he is from most normal guys, he’s still one of their breed. There’s always that same primal instinct inside of him. Or reflex. Whatever you want to call it.

  The same evil.

  “If he so much as lays a finger on her like that, I’ll… I’ll…”

  “The reason I’m telling you this, Jess,” Kelly says, his voice going soft. He takes my arms and looks deep into my eyes. I can see it’s killing him to make me understand. I can see that, and yet I hate him for making sure I do. “The reason is that if Reggie ever finds her like that, he’ll completely flip. It’ll kill him inside. There’s no telling what he’ll do. If Ashley has been—”

  “All the more reason we need to leave now.”

  “It’s probably already too late.”

  “It’s not too late!”

  He pulls away, rubs his face with both hands, as if trying to scrub away whatever vision is filling his mind. He shakes his head. “We should head back to LaGuardia. Now. We should just go home. It’s not worth taking any more risks.”

  “I am not leaving Ashley behind.”

  He glances once more at the table and the creases on his forehead deepen. “Ashley and Jake both. They’re both already gone. We’ve been trying to save everyone, but we can’t. It’s too late. We need to cut our losses.”

  I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m shocked that he would even consider it, much less suggest it. I’ve never seen him give up like this before.

  “Y-you can’t,” I stammer, grasping at str
aws. “You can’t leave. You need the treatment. What about that injection Stephen gave you? You’re infected too, you know.”

  He shrugs. “So, we go to Arc’s headquarters like you said, demand a cure. Or treatment. Or whatever. But we need to leave here. We need to get off the island.” There’s determination in his eyes, but behind them is panic. He’s terrified.

  “Do you know something I don’t?”

  He shakes his head. “Just that it feels like we got caught up in the middle of something much bigger than we could even imagine. We need to get out while we can.”

  “You know there isn’t a cure, Kelly. Not out there. There isn’t a treatment either. You need to go to Father Heall.”

  He shakes his head. “No, I need to get you home safe. Before it’s too late. You’ve already been put in too much danger.”

  “I won’t leave them, Kelly! I won’t.”

  He sighs, waits. Finally his shoulders collapse and he says, “I didn’t think I’d convince you.” He starts to walk away.

  “Where are you going? Come back here! Kelly!”

  “I’m getting the tablet,” he snaps. “Why don’t you just—” He flaps his hands. “Just get Jake ready or something. Get him dressed. I don’t know. I don’t care. I give up. I can’t talk to you anymore.”

  I watch him walk away, my frustration reaching its limit. “Fuck you!” I scream at his back.

  Tears stream from my eyes. Just when it seems like one piece of the puzzle slips into place, ten more snap out of it.

  And scatter to the wind.