He looks at me and there’s a wildness in his eyes, insanity and terror and a recognition of the new reality of our situation. All of these things combine into one truth: hopelessness. Our only escape from this place is now packed with hungry zombies.
Ping.
I lift my Link to my eyes, thumbing it numbly, and expecting to see Micah there.
But it’s not Micah this time. This ping is coming from Ashley. Something snaps into place inside of me, a moment of hope.
“It’s Ashley!” I jab at the screen to connect. Outside the door, the Undead moaning crescendos at the sound of my voice. Kelly tells me to be quiet. The door rattles behind him.
“Ashley!” I hiss, “Are you okay?”
A face looms large in the screen, distorting by its closeness, then coming into focus. Ben smiles and my heart sinks. “Oh, that little bitch is a little busy right now,” he drawls. “Damn, but ain’t you kids resilient. I shoulda killed you when I had the chance.”
“Tell Micah when I’m finished with you, I’m going to kill him, too.”
Ben frowns for a moment, but he looks more amused than concerned.
I don’t give him a chance to reply. “Where’s Ashley? What the hell have you done to her?”
Ben’s grin returns, even wider. “You really are one bossy little bitch, ain’t you? Well, your friends cain’t help you now; nobody can help you; it’s too late. Not even Arc can help you now. Nothing.” He laughs and it hurts my ears.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“I just wanted you to know,” he says. He laughs again and now there’s a different kind of insanity in his eyes, the type of insanity that whispers of inhumane pleasures and unpolluted evil. “Did you get the package I sent for you?”
My face goes ice cold. “What package?”
“I guess not. Well, it’ll arrive soon enough.”
“What package?”
“Just a little partin gift. Just wanted to make sure there weren’t no loose ends. You can thank that gorilla friend of yours. I wouldn’t have known to send it, but when I found his little love note he tried to send, then I knew Lena had fucked up. Again.”
I feel my face flush. The message Reggie tried to send Ashley did get through after all.
Kelly realizes this, too. I see his jaw harden. He quickly swipes an angry finger across his throat and mouths for me to cut him off, that we have more important things to worry about right now. But I’m too angry to listen. And I need to know about Ashley.
“What did you do to her?”
“Oh, I’m treatin her nice and fine, just like a lady should be treated. Oh, and ain’t she a fine young lady, too.”
“If you so much as lay a finger on her,” I scream, “I’m going to—”
The door shudders and the moaning grows frantic.
“Disconnect the damn thing!” Kelly yells. “Screw him!”
“Oh, turns out you did get the package, then,” I hear Ben say. “And you didn’t want to say thanks? Shame on you.”
“You sent them in here? How?”
“Herdin them’s just a little trick I picked up.” The scene shifts and I can see he’s standing just outside the gate of the compound.
“You’re still here?”
“Well, had to come back.” He shrugs. “Didn’t want to, but you made me. So annoyin when people don’t die like they’re supposed to. But I’m off now for good. Goin to find that Father of yours. Gonna kill him, too.”
“Asshole!”
“Y’know, truth was, I wasn’t sure whether to send flowers or zombies, then I remembered about that filthy mouth of yours. Ladies deserve flowers, and you ain’t no lady. Hope you like them.” He cackles, stops. “But just in case they’re not a good, you know, fit for you, I’m also sendin you a little something extra, sendin ‘em real soon. I’m a real thorough kind of gentleman, you see.”
“You’re no gentleman,” I sneer. “You’re a monster.”
He laughs.
“You’re sweating,” I tell him. “You’re not feeling well, are you?”
This startles him, throws him off track. “What did you say?”
“Feeling a little feverish?”
His smile turns into a scowl. “You shut up, bitch!”
“That injection you gave yourself? You did it wrong, Ben. It’s not supposed to go into your vein. You infected yourself.”
Panic flickers across his face. “I told you to shut the hell up! Shut up or I’ll…” And then the scene swivels dizzyingly before suddenly coming to a stop on a corner of Ashley’s face. It’s dirty and streaked by tears. She looks scared.
“Ash!”
But Ben’s face reappears. “I knew I shouldn’ta trusted that bitch Lena to do the job. Amateurs.” He shrugs.
A calmness settles over me then. I’d hit a nerve. “I’m going to find you, Ben. I’m going to hunt you down, and I’m going to put a bullet right between your eyes. I saved one for you, you know.”
“Too bad you’ll never get the chance.”
“That’s if you’re even still alive, Ben. You might be Undead by then. Doesn’t matter. I’ll still shoot you. Too bad you won’t realize it. That’s okay, because I will. Oh, I won’t kill you. I’ll just shoot off your bottom jaw so you can’t feed. And I’m going to enjoy it.”
“Jessie, stop,” Kelly hisses.
“Well, first you got to get past the zombies. Then you got to get out of there, and that ain’t goin to be so easy. Then you got to find me. That’ll be impossible.”
“We’ve been tracking you.”
“You cain’t track me.”
“Yes, we can.”
“Jessie!” Kelly glares angrily at me, and I realize I’ve just made a stupid mistake. I’ve tipped my hand.
The screen goes blurry and there’s a muffled sound as Ashley’s Link hits the ground. Then I’m looking up at the sky and there’s a tiny patch of blue.
I hear hurrying footsteps, muffled by grass and distance.
Then there’s a high-pitched scream.
Then nothing.
PART TWO
Dark and Deep
Chapter 9
The Undead scratch and claw with their tattered fingers at the door, pressing their grizzled bodies against it, knocking it against its hinges. The tiny glass window fills with nightmare views of their rotting flesh, streaking it greasy brown and black. They moan their hungry moans and cry their breathless cries. The door rattles and groans, straining beneath their weight, and Kelly pushes back on it to keep it from breaking. He leans his whole body and his shoes slip on the dusty floor, slipping with every knock and judder. He clutches the knob with his fists, as if the Undead might remember how to turn it to disengage the bolt.
But then it jiggles in his hand and he gives me a scared look and my heart leaps into my throat and I wonder if maybe, somehow, they can remember.
“Get something to block the opening!” he screams.
I scramble to my feet and look wildly about me. The room is furnished with a half dozen metal and plastic chairs, three metal desks, a plastic trashcan, which Reggie is still using. He still hasn’t moved.
“The filing cabinet!” Kelly cries. “Next to the water cooler. Get the cabinet!”
They slam against the door and plaster dust sifts down from the seams between the frame and the wall, dusting Kelly’s hair and shoulders. In a few minutes, it won’t matter whether or not they know how to turn the door knob. The weight of their bodies will rip the frame out of the wall and overwhelm Kelly and then they’ll be flooding in here, and while Kelly and I could retreat further into the building by going down the elevator, what would we do with Reggie? We can’t take him downstairs with us, not while his Link is broken.
I hurry over and pull on the cabinet, but it won’t move. “It’s too heavy!”
“It’s filled with papers. We need it to be heavy!”
But it’s also stuck to the floor after years of slowly sinking into the soft linoleum, glued by t
he ancient floor wax. I knock my shoulder into it, but it doesn’t move. I can’t even tilt it.
“Damn it, hurry up!” Kelly yells. He drops his head down and leans at an even more acute angle. But he’ll never be able to hold them. He’ll never stop them once the door breaks free. He’s too light.
By now the Undead are really in a frenzy. Now their moaning has intensified so that it fills the building, the toneless wail of fifty parched throats, stiffened with age, turgid, plastic lungs expelling stagnant air.
I throw my shoulder against the cabinet, but it won’t tip.
“I can’t. It won’t—”
And then a hand clamps over my shoulder and tightens and begins to pull me away. I let out a piercing scream and try to jerk myself away, but the claw squeezes, the fingers digging into my skin. The full weight of the thing falls onto my back, pressing me hard against the cabinet and the metal handles jab me in the ribs and rake against my neck and face as I fall to the floor. The thing wrestles me to the ground and I gasp, unable to breathe, unable to catch my breath, and all I can think is How the hell did it get past Kelly? It claws at my back, pressing its dead weight against me, and I cringe at each new touch, sure that it’ll be full of teeth. I try, but I can’t move. My arms are trapped beneath me and it’s too heavy to push away, so all I can do is wait for the inevitable bite to come.
The door slams and Kelly screams. “Help me! I can’t— Help! Reggie!”
I try to face the monster, but it presses my head into the floor.
“…keh…” I gasp. “Keh…heh…lee…”
And the thing shifts on me, pushing, digging its elbows and knees into me, breathing its hot, hot breath on the skin of my neck, prickling it, and I want so much to scream but I can’t. I can’t.
But then it lifts off of me and think that maybe Kelly has somehow gotten free and has come and—
—but then it’s lifting me up like I weigh like nothing and—
—like I watched them lift Brother Nicholas by the car—
—lifting and biting and tearing into his flesh as his toes dangled and jangled and danced on the roadway and—
—and now I’m being lifted by the seat of my pants and my arm and my injured shoulder all scream out in agony and—
—and only then do I find my voice. The air surges into my lungs, burning like molten air, entering me in a mad, red rush of heat and pain before gushing out through my throat in a frigid flood of ice, a roar of ice, the scream of ancient glaciers and frozen waterfalls.
The thing shakes me and says my name and tells me to stop screaming with its hot, hot breath, and my head whips back and forth on my neck and—
And suddenly I realize I’m not going to die, not right this moment. I realize because zombies don’t have hot breath. They don’t speak or say names.
“Jessie!” Reggie says.
And I turn and it is him, and his eyes are still mostly unfocused and the right side of his face looks horrifyingly slack, but he’s holding me up and swaying and my feet are barely touching the ground.
Dancing and jangling.
He holds me up.
And then, without warning, he drops me. My feet slam into the floor and my knees buckle and his knees buckle and he begins to sink—we begin to sink—to the floor. I reach out and grab his shirt and pull him to me and he collapses against me and somehow our knees find strength and straighten, but his weight is too much. I can’t hold him up. We overbalance. I tilt backwards.
Once more we tumble to the floor. One more time the air explodes from my chest.
And tries desperately to find its way back in.
“Reggie,” I gasp. “Get up. Hurry! Get off of me!”
He rolls off and struggles drunkenly to his feet.
“Bring the god damn cabinet over here!” Kelly screams. The rattling behind him sounds ominously loud, dangerously brittle.
“Reggie!”
Now the moaning and banging and clawing roar at us like jets ready to release their bombs, and the door slams against its frame and the frame squeals in protest. More dust cascades down, dust and now larger pieces of plaster as the ancient wall begins to crumble away. A bulge suddenly appears to one side, a seam in the underlying paper, and then a crack forms, a small one. It quickly unzips toward the ceiling.
Reggie grunts behind me. I turn and he’s standing, barely, leaning into the cabinet, trying to dislodge it using the handle of the top drawer. The cabinet tilts with a sickening ripppp as the floor tiles release their grip on it, and the whole thing suddenly snaps free and for a moment teeters and threatens to fall over. Reggie stumbles and pushes back. He grunts and spins and then leans against it and it teeters even further on its front edge, hovering like a man on a high wire, standing on one foot and spiraling his arms before he falls off. But then the front bottom corner collapses from the weight of the papers inside. Reggie’s feet slide as he slips and the cabinet starts to come down on him.
Without thinking, I step over and shove my palms beneath the top corner and shove, and for a moment I think we won’t make it. The thing keeps falling and it’s going to fall on us. “Rrrrarghhhh!” I scream, and I hear Reggie grunt and the cabinet shudders and wavers and pushes against us. I shove even harder, feeling the muscles in my neck and back straining. I scream until there’s nothing more to scream with. I throw everything I have into pushing the cabinet back. Finally it begins to right itself. “Push, Reggie!”
He growls and gets up onto a knee, then a foot, and then he’s standing and he shoulders me out of the way and the cabinet slams back onto its base with a loud CRUNCH! Without even catching his breath, he lets go of the handle and grabs another two drawers down and the muscles in his neck become thick cords as he lifts and begins to drag the thing toward the door, slowly walking it corner by corner, inch by inch. The floor rips and the metal squeals as the corners dig in and begin to distort. I step behind it and push from the bottom, placing my feet against the wall for leverage. The cabinet ratchets forward. The door splinters down the middle, ripping through layers of paint and separating at a seam where the cheap sheet metal plates meet. The wall judders from the strain outside.
I peek around the edge of the cabinet. I can see the door frame tearing free. A half inch, the cracks widening, spreading, ripping, releasing from its base. Plaster showers down. Then a huge triangular piece rips away, dangles for a moment, rolls away, crashes to the floor. A ceiling tile comes down. More dust. The whole building seems to be falling apart.
Now the drywall collapses, exposing the underlying lathes, thin metal strips that bulge in and out like ribs breathing beneath the skin. Red and blue electrical wires tumble out. I push even harder, grunting and gasping, and Reggie cries out as he tugs the cabinet from the front.
“Hurry!” Kelly screams. “Or we’re not going to make it in time!”
Another BANG! and one side of the door breaks free. Kelly tries desperately to shove it back, but it won’t go into the doorjamb right.
The glass in the tiny square window shatters, showering him, and it looks like ice crystals falling. Fingers reach through, sliced by the wire mesh down to the bone. The wires strain and one breaks with a twang!
“Get out of the way!” Reggie shouts. He sounds weak and faraway. “Move, Kelly!”
“I can’t!”
“Get out of the way!”
I can see that we’re nearly there. Three feet, two and a half. The cabinet stops and Reggie spins around to the back. I step away. He bends down and punches his shoulder against the bottom half of the cabinet, careful not to overturn it. His hands rest against the floor and he begins to pedal. At first the cabinet refuses to move, but then it starts to slide and it picks up speed. Reggie grunts with pain and effort.
“Get out of the way!” I shout to Kelly, and he jumps away from the door a split second before the cabinet slams into it.
But the Undead have begun to come in. The gap is a foot wide and it’s suddenly filled with arms and legs and heads,
all fingers and teeth and flensed bones. There’s a moment when I fear the door is just going to splinter into pieces, but it rights itself against the cabinet as the zombies pile up behind it and Reggie bulldozes them back through the opening. Kelly and I push, too, our feet slipping on the floor. I hear the sickening crackle of bones snapping and arms and legs breaking off and hitting the floor with dull wooden-sounding thuds. I realize something then: not even the cabinet will hold them.
The moaning floods my ears and brain and soul.
I let go, spin away and Kelly shouts at me to come back. But I circle around one of the desks and begin to push it over. It’s a lot easier to move. I jockey it into position, then go grab another.
“We need to line these up!” I shout. “We need to use the back wall to keep them in place!” And I grab whatever else I can find and bring it over and begin to fill in the spaces.
Reggie collapses and the door yawns open again, but now Kelly is up.
“Get the hell away from there, Reggie!” he screams. “They’re getting in!”
Chapter 10
I see three—no four! Three intact zombies and one that’s missing both arms. It makes up for it with a full complement of teeth.
The door slams back into place, only slightly askew, and I wedge the final piece of furniture into the remaining gap, jumping on it until it’s in good and tight.
“Get up, Reggie!” Kelly yells, kicking at an IU while grabbing the front of Reggie’s shirt. He pulls, but Reggie just slides unconscious to one side. I hurry over to help, but Kelly waves me away, shouting, “Leave him!” He kicks another of the Undead back. It folds from the impact and crashes into the one behind.
Two more immediately step into its place, bumping each other before the smaller, speedier one jostles to the front. A strange whistling, hissing sound comes from it, though not from its mouth. It comes again and it shocks me for a moment when I realize that its mouth has been sewn shut. Who the hell would do such a thing? my mind screams. But now it’s trying to rip through the stitches so it can feed. The skin on its neck sinks inward, then flaps out again, and there’s the hissing sound. It’s coming from a long, narrow wound, probably an ancient bite. And now there’s a thick, swampy smell. I stand there in shock, because it’s breathing, or going through the motions, anyway. Does its body remember how to breathe? It reaches a hand up and tears at the flesh of its face, pulling at its lips, trying to rip off its own jaw, and—
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 93