Sweat pours down his face, and he winces just a little more with each jarring step down.
“He doesn’t deserve what happened to him,” I answer.
Reggie’s quiet for a moment. Then he nods. “No, but he did do it to himself. Nobody else did. I mean, nobody deserves to be infected, and nobody deserves what Jake’s going through—not even that asshole Ben for taking Ashley, or any of the others, for that matter—but Jake… He asked for it by trying to show off. He was trying to impress you, you know. And you know what he told me one night? He said he couldn’t understand why you and Kelly were together. He said you deserved someone better.”
I think about how similar it is to what Micah said to me last summer, and anger blooms inside of me. Jake didn’t know me. He didn’t know Kel and he certainly didn’t know either of us well enough to say a thing like that.
Jake and Micah. Why is everyone always trying to get between you and Kelly?
“It was his own stupidity that caused him to be bitten,” Reggie goes on, seeing the look on my face. “No one else’s.”
“Reg.”
He stops.
“Just… Let’s not talk about it. Okay? It was a stupid mistake on his part, that’s all. Now he’s paying the price. Nobody deserves what happened, not even Jake.”
He sighs. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. It just pissed me off hearing him talk about you two like that. You guys are like… Ashley and I always talked about you guys getting married and having kids. We joked about it, but now I’m not so sure it was joking as much as it was jealousy. But he shouldn’t have said any of that.”
I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about it. Finally Reggie gets the message and shuts up.
We reach the bottom of the stairs and he hits the door before I’ve even stepped off onto the landing. Another rush of guilt and panic hits me. He cares so much, not just for Ashley—well, especially for her—but for all of us, even Kel. But now his limping has gotten worse again. He doesn’t pay it any heed. He’s so focused. I think he’d keep trying, even if his leg was amputated. He’d do it for Ash. He’d do it for any of us.
He waits for me. “Ready?” he asks.
I nod, but he doesn’t pull open the door yet.
“Look,” he says, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about freaking out down here before. You were right. Kelly, too. Jake needed our help more than Ashley right at that moment. You were right to stay and take care of him first.”
I nudge him forward, pushing him with my hand. “We thought you were going to tear the place apart.”
“Ashley’s always telling me I’m a big, stupid brute.” He laughs for a moment before it chokes him. “I hope she’s okay.”
I don’t answer. I know the words he wants me to say—that she’s fine, that she’ll probably kick Ben’s ass just for looking at her wrong—but we both know that’d be a lie. And what’s worse, it’d just come out sounding like one. He knows that, so he contents himself with me giving his arm an awkward squeeze. I must pull on him a little too much because he loses his balance and grasps the doorframe to hold himself up. “Watch the hip, sister!” he warns. Then he pulls open the door and steps into the hallway.
“Meant to ask you when we were upstairs,” he says as he slides along the wall. “Did you notice the smell up there?”
I crinkle my nose at the question and wonder if this is his attempt to change the subject. The bodies will start to smell soon, but they haven’t yet. I shake my head.
“You didn’t smell that, when we were outside? Something was burning.”
I think for a moment. “No.”
“Like wood and plastic. It was faint, but, you know, wet and oily and definitely like smoke. It was really faint.”
“You sure it’s not that tumor inside your brain?”
“Got to have a brain first for there to be a tumor.”
“Well, you must have a brain, or else those zombies wouldn’t keep wanting to eat you.”
He laughs. “That’s an old wives tale,” he says. “We all know they’ll eat just about everything, not just the brains.”
“Yeah, all too well.”
He slips through the doorway into the main room and in the middle is Jake on the table, still half naked, his arm dangling over the side. The furniture is scattered all about, chairs lying on their sides and desks pushed up against the walls. Random pieces of clothing—Jake’s, mostly—litter the floor, along with our packs and old papers left here from years before. A thin, white dust covers the floor from the knockout gas, the black canister gone from sight, probably rolled under the desk. Several tracks lead through the powder.
Reggie’s still chuckling. It puts me on edge because I almost expect Kelly to be standing there watching us. He’d be wondering what’s going on that were in such good spirits. Would he think we were joking about him?
Kelly’s not like that.
But he’s not here. He’s dimmed the lights for some strange reason, but he’s nowhere in sight. He’s left Jake alone. A solitary light shines dimly down on his yellow-grey skin. It reminds me of a corpse in the morgue. Both of us sober up real quick.
“Where’s Kel?” Reggie asks, looking around, squinting into the darkness.
“Mainframe, probably. He was going to unhook the tablet, but he needed Micah’s password.”
“What, did he forget it?”
“Said he tried it. Didn’t work.”
“Yo, brah!” Reggie shouts. “Kel—” He winces and squeezes his temples.
“Headache coming back?”
“Buzzing, like a million bees trying to bust out of my head.”
“You should sit down.”
He tries to urge me forward, but his hand feels ungainly on my back. “I’m just running on fumes,” he says, swallowing drily. “I’ll be fine in a sec. Let’s go find that boyfriend of yours.”
He staggers off toward the room with the mainframe in it. As he goes, he raises his hand and mops his forehead. He’s sweating bullets, even though it’s so cool down here that I’m covered in goose bumps.
We’re both relieved to find Kelly sitting on a metal chair in front of the stack. He looks up when we enter. His eyes flick once between us, then returns to the tablet, though not before I catch the troubled look in his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“The tracking app,” he says.
“How’d you get in?”
“Back door. I’m in, but without admin privileges. Found the app. At least that’s available and running.”
“Can you see Ashley?”
He shakes his head.
I go and check over his shoulder. Superimposed on the map of the island is…nothing, no little red dots. “Can you zoom in?”
He nods and says, “Doesn’t make any difference.” And he shows me. Now we’re looking at a detail map of the hill. I can see the surrounding woods and the road where Micah and I and Brother Matthew came out on our way to Brookhaven. I can see the parking lot where Micah and I were attacked by the Player—where Shinji rescued us. And I can see the outline of the buildings we’re in. But there are still no red dots. We should at least see ourselves.
“Where are we?”
I look over at Reggie. He’s staring at the screen, not moving, not speaking. He looks pale. He suddenly sways and for a split second I think he’s going to faint, but he catches himself. He shakes his head and moans. Kelly gets up from his seat and gestures for Reggie to sit down, which he gladly does.
“Maybe it’s because we’re down here,” I suggest to Kelly. “The towers can’t pick up our Link signals.”
Kelly shakes his head. “I didn’t even see you guys when you were topside. I should’ve been able to, but I couldn’t. It’s not working.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re not in as an admin? Let me try Micah’s password.”
He shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t forget the password. Somebody changed it.” He lifts the tablet and waggles it
in front of himself in frustration, looking like he wants to throw it against the wall. The cable attaching it to the computer jiggles. Reggie coughs weakly into his hand. He doesn’t look so good. The walk down the stairs took a lot more out of him than he knows or is willing to admit.
“Maybe Ashley did?” I ask Reg, but he doesn’t respond. “Here, Kelly, let me try.” He gives me the tablet and I swipe the screen. Then I back myself out to the login level. There I find Micah’s account and a guest account. Neither of them is running any programs. “I thought you said the tracker was running.”
Kelly nods.
I tap the screen and type in his password and the desktop pops open. Nothing’s running. Kelly takes in a sharp breath. “How’d you do that?”
I open the tracker app. The map unfolds and there, far to our east, is a single red dot. “That’s Micah,” I say. “But where are the rest of us?”
Kelly reaches over, closes the program, and navigates back out. He shakes his head and stares at the screen. I didn’t get this before. There was only one account before, and it wasn’t Micah’s.”
“There’s no other accounts.”
“There was. And the login page didn’t look like this. It was just a black dialogue box.”
“A ghost account?” I say.
I check the process registry, and sure enough, there’s an application running in the background, sucking a tiny fraction of the processor power. We’d never have noticed it if we hadn’t gone in specifically to look for it.
“I closed out of it when I exited Micah’s account,” Kelly says.
“It’s still running on the ghost account. He must’ve set it up so the SSC could keep track of us.”
Reggie groans and leans over his knees.
“What’s wrong with him?” Kelly asks. “He looks like he’s going to be sick.”
“Headache,” I answer.
Reggie sniffs and sits up again. “I’m fine,” he slurs. But he leans his head into his hands, propping his elbows on his knees. One slips off and he almost falls out of the chair.
“You don’t look fine.”
“…ffffiiine…”
“Breathe through your nose,” Kelly suggests. “Long, deep, even breaths.”
He turns back to me and asks what we should do.
“Let’s just forget the stupid tracker for now,” I say. “We know where Ben’s going.”
“But we don’t know which way they went.”
“Well, what do you want me to say, Kel? The stupid app’s not working. If I were to guess, Ben’ll probably take the same route we took to get here. We can move faster on the main roads. We’ll cut them off.”
Kelly purses his lips. “So, we’re still going then. How is Reggie supposed to deal with Jake when he can’t even stand up on his own?”
“…ssshudddupppp…mmm finnne…”
We both turn to Reggie, worried.
“Reg?”
“…shoooold goooo…geeetttt…shleeee…”
But then he tumbles off the chair and falls heavily to the ground, landing on his side.
“What the—?” I bend down and roll him over onto his back. “Reggie? Reggie!”
His back arches and his eyes roll back inside his skull. He starts twitching, and the twitches turn into violent convulsions.
“Kelly!”
“Get out of the way,” Kelly shouts. “He’s having a seizure!”
Chapter 5
“What the hell’s happening?” I scream. Kelly drops to his knees, shoving Reggie’s chair out of the way. “Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know! Just clear everything out of the— Unh!” One of Reggie’s knees catches Kelly on the chin and knocks him back on his heels.
“Is it from the knockout gas?”
Kelly scrambles to pick himself back up. He moves away just enough so Reggie can’t reach him. “Get back. Give him some room.”
“But he’s going to choke, Kel! What if he’s got a brain hemorrhage? Or a concussion?”
“From what? He never got hit on the head. I don’t think it’s that.”
“But what if it is?”
“Jessie! Listen to me. He wasn’t hit on the head. Even when he was shot he didn’t hit his head.” He gives me this resentful look, as if to say if anyone knows what it’s like to be knocked out, it’s him, not Reggie. The red mark from the butt of Shane’s rifle is still there on his face. It’s starting to bruise. “This is… This is something else. Where’s his Link?”
“What the hell do you want that for? Going to call an ambulance?”
“Damn it, Jessie! Where is it?”
He starts digging through Reggie’s pockets and finds it in the second one. He pulls it out and thumbs the screen to wake it. “Damn it. I was afraid of this.”
“What?”
“Your fix, Jessie! His Link shut down and it won’t boot up, and now his implant is starting to activate because it’s not sending the failsafe signal to his implant!” He jabs the screen, trying to get the thing to turn on. “We need to get him upstairs! Now!”
Kelly begins to drag Reggie by the arms. He whips open the glass door and pulls Reggie through. And now it finally registers what he’s saying. The implant in Reggie’s head thinks he’s died. It’s starting to turn on. “Open the elevator doors,” Kelly shouts.
“Stick something in his mouth. He’s going to bite his tongue!” I yank one of the spare computer cables from Ashley’s backpack for him to use, then I run out to call the elevator. I end up pushing the damn button about a hundred times in ten seconds, cursing that we’d called it up before coming down the stairs. I told Reggie we should’ve brought it down.
“Where the hell is it?” Kelly shouts. Reggie’s tremors are getting worse.
“Check his breathing.”
“He’s breathing, Jess. I can hear it. Where the hell’s that elevator?”
“Don’t yell at me! You called it back down after I went up to get Reggie. We called it, but Reggie couldn’t wait! He decided to come down the stairs.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t call it! You left it upstairs? Damn it, it should be down here!”
He lets go of Reggie and jabs at the button, cursing at it. Then he pounds his fist on it.
“Stop it, Kelly. You’re going to break it!”
“I’m not going to break it.” He jams it again and this time it sticks in. The light inside the button blinks a few times, fizzles, and goes out.
“You broke it!”
“It’s not broken,” he says, hitting it again. “It’s just…stuck. I can hear the car coming. It’s still coming.”
I glance down at Reggie and gasp. Blood has begun to drip from his nose, from both nostrils. “Shit. Kelly…”
But Kelly’s trying to do everything at once, call the elevator, get the stupid Link to turn on, keep Reggie from hurting himself.
“Kelly!”
He looks up at me, then at Reggie’s face, and another string of curses tumbles from his lips.
I pull the penknife from my pocket and try to dig out the stuck button, as if it’s going to make any difference. I can hear the car coming, I can hear the dings. The thing is just going to take its damn time getting down here. The button pops out, though the light stays off.
“It’s taking too long,” Kelly says. “We need to take him up the stairs.”
“No! We can’t carry him!”
“He’s going to die, Jessie! What the fuck do you want me to do? We can’t just stand here and—”
But then it dings and the doors open. I throw the knife into the car, then we both reach down and drag Reggie in. I stab the button to send us up and the doors start to close. They get halfway before opening up again.
“What the hell?”
“Reggie’s foot!” I scream. “His foot’s in the way.”
Kelly trips trying to reach over him. He sprawls over Reggie’s body and grabs both of Reggie’s legs and folds them into the car with a grunt. I hit th
e button and the doors close for good this time. The car jerks once, then begins to rise.
“Is he still breathing?” I moan. He’s stopped seizing, but another trickle of blood leaks from his nose.
“Yeah.” Kelly reaches over and uses Reggie’s shirt to wipe it away. A fresh stream quickly forms. “Jesus. What a god damn mess.”
“I told you not to push that button like that.”
He doesn’t answer, just wipes away the blood and watches it pool again before it spills over the side of his jaw.
“Is he going to die? Kelly?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand being trapped like this. I turn around and start banging on the walls, pounding with my fists and kicking, and I can feel the car juddering as I hit it. Kelly doesn’t stop me. He stands there looking stunned. I bang and I can feel the bruising in my bones. But it’s not my pain. It’s someone else’s. It’s some distant thing, far away and foreign, not a part of me except only in some remote impersonal way, like a memory of something witnessed, but not personally experienced. I pound and I’m crying, slamming the walls and kicking at them and finally Kelly wakes up and he comes over and wraps his arms around me. The car rises and the bell dings. I sink to the floor, onto the bloodstained carpet worn nearly to bare rubber and stained by mud and dust and gore, and the sobs wrack my body and Kelly gently pulls my bloodied knuckles away from my chest and gently pries open my fingers and holds them in his hands and kisses them as I cry and yell and shake. I just want it all to end. I’m so tired. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of everything and I want it all to end but everything stays and it doesn’t end and the elevator rises and Reggie bleeds and the pain stays far away. It doesn’t end. Not even Kelly can change that.
The ride is interminably long, long enough for me to cry the bitterness from my system. Reggie begins to convulse again. Neither of us knows if this is a good sign or a bad sign, but Kelly reaches over and tries to rouse him. He doesn’t wake. He lies there on the blood that other people spilled, his own blood trickling into it, and he breathes and bleeds and shakes, but he doesn’t wake.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 90