When we’ve reached the ground floor, he’s still trembling and drooling and making horrible choking sounds, even though the failsafe signal outside should easily be able to reach his implant. I’ve recovered some of my sanity, or a semblance of sanity. Or maybe it’s just shock. I sit huddled against the wall of the car and the sound of the doors opening doesn’t quite register. I hear it, but I don’t know what it means. I sense Kelly getting up and pulling Reggie out. I sense him coming back in for me, reaching down and grabbing my arm and I feel like I’m floating as I stand up and walk out. He leaves me then, just standing there, dazed in the middle of the room. Floating, falling, crumbling. He bends down and slaps Reggie across the cheek and the sound of it is like a massive explosion inside my head, like the airplanes bombing us on the other end of the LaGuardia tunnel and it shocks me out of the grip of whatever is smothering me.
“Reggie!” Kelly shouts, and he slaps him again.
“What are you doing?” I yell.
“Trying to wake him. He won’t wake. Why won’t he wake?”
I feel myself float over. I sense my hand reaching over and my knees bending. My hand swipes into view. Then it connects with Reggie’s face, and the crack! echoes sharply in the empty building, slams into my ears. Reggie’s head jerks to the side, but he doesn’t wake. And then I’m pummeling him, smacking him across the face and pounding on his chest and screaming at him to wake up.
Kelly pulls me away. I resist. He pulls, and then I have nothing left. He pushes me up against the wall and tells me something, but I don’t hear it. His voice means nothing. His words are meaningless. Or I don’t remember hearing them. I don’t know what he says, I just remember seeing his lips moving and his hands holding me, shaking me gently. I sink to the floor, burying my face in my hands, and I close my eyes.
Chapter 6
“You slap like a girl.”
Kelly looks up from Reggie’s Link. He’s got the backing off using my penknife and is digging around inside trying to figure out what’s broken.
It’s the first thing I’ve said since I sank to the floor, since he came and sat down with me.
“You’re probably right,” he mumbles, before lowering his head again, “but you were going to hurt him if I didn’t stop you. Or hurt yourself.”
I let out a puff of air and look away. My hand does hurt. I flex it and it feels bruised. “His head is too hard.”
“You can say that again.”
I sit and watch Kel for a few minutes more, biting my tongue. A part of me fears he’ll do something permanent to Reggie’s Link, break it or something. I want him to stop messing around and just put it back together. But then I remember it’s already broken. It’s not like he’s going to make things any worse than they already are. I remind myself that he’s better than any of the rest of us taking stuff apart and knowing how they work.
“Remind me to never pass out when you’re around,” he says. He sighs and leans his head back against the wall. “I’d have some serious whiplash.”
I picture myself hitting Kelly like I did Reggie and my heart immediately breaks. “Well, don’t pass out on me then.”
“I’ll try not to.”
He sticks the end of a paperclip into a space and gently pries it up to look underneath.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing with that thing?” I ask.
He squints for another second or two, then snaps the backing back on. After it’s secure, he shakes the Link up by his ear. “I can hear something jiggling around inside, something loose.”
I push myself away from the wall and go over to where Reggie’s still passed out on the floor. The bleeding from his nose has stopped, but he still hasn’t moved. Not once has he moved in the twenty minutes since we’ve been sitting here watching him breathe. No spasms. Just that slow rise and fall of his chest.
Just like Jake downstairs.
Another one of us down. I wonder if maybe Kelly was right. Maybe we should’ve cut our losses.
Kelly sets the Link down on the floor beside him, then asks me for mine.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I just want to check something.”
“Why don’t you check on yours?”
He rolls his eyes, sighs. “Fine.” But he doesn’t move.
“So, what do we do?”
“Well, I think going after Ashley is out of the question now,” he says. “Neither one of us could go up against Ben alone. He’s too strong.”
I flick a hand at Reggie. “And we can’t leave him here by himself, not with…”
“Not with Jake,” Kelly finishes for me. “I know. Someone should go check on him.”
“It’s only been a half hour since we left him. Nothing’s changed.” I drop my head and stare at the floor and repeat what Reggie said earlier: “Everything’s changed.”
Kelly reaches over and drapes his arm around my shoulders. It feels so heavy on me. I feel so heavy. I’m not even sure I want it there, but I don’t move or tell him not to touch me. After a few minutes, I find I do want it there. I lean into him, hoping the wanting grows, and it does. It comes back to me, why I love him, why I want him, why I want to be close to him. And why I came back to him after last summer. It feels right. It has always felt right. And when it hasn’t, it wasn’t because of him, it was because of me. “How did we ever get into this?” I ask.
His throat makes a clicking noise when he swallows. “At first I thought it was my fault. It was killing me, the guilt. I should’ve said no when I had the chance.”
“You did say no.”
“I know, but then I thought that maybe I didn’t fight hard enough for us not to go. I know I didn’t. And then I realized that I wanted us to come. Can you believe that crap? Me, wanting to do something stupid like breaking into Gameland, actually going along with it when there were so many reasons to back away.”
“Not Gameland. That never was the plan, not initially. We were just supposed to come to LI. Then Jake got stuck and…”
“I don’t think any of that was accidental.”
I look up him and frown. “Are you saying Jake wanted to get stuck here by himself?”
He shakes his head. “Arc wanted us here from the beginning. I don’t think we were supposed to leave so easily. And I do think Gameland was the ultimate goal, maybe not for Arc, but for the SSC.”
I shake my head out of confusion. I still haven’t figured out how the SSC and Arc fit together.
“The SSC infiltrated Arc,” Kelly says, reading my thoughts. “I’m sure of that. In fact, I think it might’ve been the Coalition’s plan right from the beginning, to get us in here. They made Arc think it was some kind of new beta test for live participation in The Game. Or to see if we actually could hack their system. I can just imagine Arc wetting itself over the idea of live Players. Especially after their hunting fiasco years back. Once they got people used to the idea of CUs hunting each other, bringing living folks back in here just seems like a natural next step for them.”
“So why would they ask you to keep an eye on Micah?”
“I think they must’ve suspected there was something strange about him. Or maybe they knew from the beginning. Or maybe they were just being overly cautious. Who knows, they may even have had someone spying on me, for all I know. I still have my doubts about Jake.”
The idea would make me laugh if it weren’t so scary and real.
“Arc wanted us here. They probably cleared out the Midtown Tunnel for us. It was too easy.”
Something comes back to me then, a man’s voice: They were supposed to stay on the island the first time. Why else would our guys go down there and block the tunnel? The man I’d heard speaking to Nurse Mabel outside my door in LaGuardia.
“In any case,” Kelly goes on, “I think Arc lost interest when we came back. And when we all disappeared again, maybe they panicked. And when we stayed disappeared, they probably breathed a sigh of relief. Pretty sure it’s been SSC’s show si
nce then.”
“But why us?”
He shrugs. “Because of our hacking skills? For Ashley’s codex breaker? Maybe even to get to Heall. I don’t know.”
“I think Stephen ended up being the bridge between Arc and the SSC, though he didn’t realize it. He thought he was working for Arc, but he was actually reporting directly to that Elena woman, Ben’s partner.”
Kelly nods. “Yeah, Arc seriously screwed up.”
“We deserve some of the blame, too,” I say. “If we hadn’t wanted to come—”
“Nobody wanted to be kidnapped.”
“Yeah, but wanting to come here, we made it easy. We kept right at it, despite everything bad that happened. Ashley nearly drowned that day at the reservoir. And yet we kept trying. We should’ve just stopped right then and said it was too dangerous. But nobody did. Not you. Not me. Not even Ash.”
He lets out a long breath.
“How much did you know?” I ask. “About Arc? About the SSC and Micah? And when did you know it?”
He’s quiet for several seconds before answering. “About the SSC? I knew nothing—suspected nothing—until Ashley showed me Micah’s hacker signature on the tracker app. That was—what?—two days ago? And about Arc wanting us to come here?” He pauses, looks away. “We were in Micah’s basement. You were at your karate—hapkido, I mean. You were at hapkido practice, and we all were sitting there and Micah brought up the idea of hacking into The Game and Ashley jumped all over it saying she’s been wanting to test out this new program she was working on.”
He stops then doesn’t say anything, and when I look up he’s frowning. “What?”
He shakes his head after a moment. “I don’t know. Just thought of something… Never mind. It’s probably nothing. Anyway, Ashley jumps up and starts messing with Micah’s computers and starts going off about the ArcWare codex and how she thinks she could write a program that would be able to teach itself how to speak the same language. After that, I pretty much zoned out. That was maybe two weeks before Reggie brought up the idea of coming here. Coincidentally, Arc pinged me that same night. I thought it was strange, but after they asked me if I’d keep an eye on Micah, I figured they had his place bugged.”
“Was Reggie there that night?”
“No.”
“So how did we go from hacking into The Game to him suggesting we break into the island? I can’t believe he’d come up with the idea all by himself. You know how he is.”
I feel the slight lift of his arm as he shrugs. “I always figured he made the connection. It’s not much of a leap, when you think about it, seeing Ash hacking The Game to thinking about breaking onto the island. We’ve all been obsessed with the Undead since Zpocalypto came out years ago. And with all the Survivalist brainwashing lately—”
“I hate that show.”
“Yeah, you and three other people in all of New Merica. As far as Reggie goes, I suppose it’s possible Micah mentioned it to Reggie in passing. Maybe Reg didn’t remember it until later. He probably actually believes it was his idea from the start.”
“He does.” I push my foot out and nudge his still body with my toe. It jiggles, but he doesn’t respond.
“Do you think the damage is permanent?” I ask. “I mean, how many times can you start to activate an implant before it causes permanent brain damage?”
“I don’t know, Jess. This is the third time. The previous two didn’t seem to have any lasting effects, but who knows? What worries me is that one of these times his implant won’t revert back into its quiescent state. What’ll happen then?”
“He’ll either stroke out or his body rejects it.”
“So, one way he dies, the other he’s free of it.”
“What if we could somehow encourage his body to reject it?”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I mean, look at me.”
Kelly frowns. “That’s too big of a gamble.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. When I was with Father Heall, I overheard him talking to Brother Matthew about my inhaler. I think it may have helped.”
I feel him stiffen up beside me. “You actually still got that thing? I thought you’d thrown it away. I haven’t seen you using it in a while.”
“It’s empty.” I reach into my pocket and pull it out. I stick a thumbnail under a corner of the label peel it off to show him the ArcBio logo. “Whatever’s inside this does something, either to my immune system or…I don’t know. It masks something or does something. It’s definitely related to the virus somehow. So are the implants. If not for Reanimation, there wouldn’t be any implants and certainly no LSC. I think whatever is inside of this thing, it caused my body to reject mine.”
He looks like he wants to say something, but doesn’t.
“What?”
He shakes his head. “Some of the others were talking about you rejecting the implant.”
“Others?”
“Ash, Jake. Reggie too, a little. Jake was saying it was suspicious that only your implant and no one else’s was rejected.”
“Jake was…”
“It doesn’t matter now, Jess. What matters is Reggie, and I don’t think we should risk trying to force his body to reject his implant. He could die. We just need to wait.”
I throw the empty inhaler across the room. It clatters against the wall and rolls halfway back. “Grandpa knew what was in this. He was the one who kept pushing for me to have it, kept reminding me to take it. Three times a day, Jessica. I hate him! He always said it was because I had a weak immune system. That’s exactly what the doctors said too, word for word.”
“But you don’t think it was?”
“My immune system is fine.”
Kelly doesn’t answer, but I know he’s thinking about it, trying to figure out the angles.
“You know,” he finally says, “if the government can’t control you—”
“They can’t.”
“Then you what happens when you die? They’ll give you the shot, thinking they can control you. But then you’d reanimate and they wouldn’t be able to stop you.”
“So?”
“So you go around and bite people until somebody takes your head off with a machete That’s bad enough to think about, but what about all those other people you’d infect, Jess. What if you caused another outbreak?”
“That wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Like you’d have any choice in the matter.”
“I don’t care.”
“You were in Seattle when the last one happened, Jess.”
“We left before it started. I never saw anything.”
“But it still happened.”
“Yeah, and that was how long ago? Five years? They got it under control.”
I exhale and shake my head. It’s so hard to think of those things when it’s everything I can do to just focus on the situation at hand.
He reaches into his pocket and digs out his Link, then thumbs the screen to check the time. “He’s been out an hour. This is the longest for any of them. I’m starting to get worried.”
I sit there and stare at Reggie and watch the tidal movement of his chest, and I think about Jake downstairs. I really should check on him, make sure he’s not getting any worse.
“I wish there was some way to wake him up,” Kelly says.
“Damn it!” I slap my forehead.
“What?”
“Back when I first escaped from Nurse Mabel, when I was trying to rescue the others so we could leave LaGuardia—this was before we ran into you—I used smelling salts to wake Ashley up. I think I still have a couple in my pack!”
“They’re probably smashed by now. And maybe you don’t want to use them. His nose was bleeding.”
I jump to my feet. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere!”
Kelly stands up. “I’ll go with you.”
“No! You stay here with him, in case he wakes. We don’t want him wandering off. I’ll only be a few minute
s.”
But I can see the worry in his eyes. He’s walks over to the knife I’d earlier pulled from Shane’s body, the one I’d used to finish all three of Ben’s victims off with. I’d thrown it into the corner in disgust after taking care of Casey. But now he picks it up and holds it out for me to take. “Just in case,” he says.
I look at it, not taking it. But finally I do. “Jake’s not going to turn.”
“I know, but I’d feel better if you took it,” he insists, and I can see it in his eyes that he doesn’t trust his own judgment. Or mine. Or the treatment.
The problem is, neither do I.
Chapter 7
Jake’s skin feels considerably cooler, tepid almost, and somehow that seems so much worse than the fever. Instead of getting over the infection, it’s like he’s dying and his body is beginning to chill. His arm still feels like a sack of water, like a liquefying jelly-flesh. I imagine it filling up with dying virus.
On the other hand, his skin color does appear to be a little less sickly. It might just be my imagination, or the inconsistent lighting, though. And there’s also a stronger smell about him, not rancid, but of something ancient, like old leaves and dust, and also mediciny. It reminds me of one of those post-mortem injection centers Eric once told me about. I’ve never been in one, but that’s what it makes me think of. It makes my nose and eyes sting.
I stand there for several seconds watching him breathe, listening to the rattling sound of his struggles. He’s taking in stronger breaths now, deeper. It’s noisier, like whatever invisible fiend had its fists wrapped around his throat is slowly loosening its grip. He’s not struggling as much to live.
For the first time since arriving yesterday, I actually begin to believe that he might still make a recovery. Maybe not a full one, but some kind of recovery.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 91