“That’s a damn understatement,” he grumbles. “I also think there’s a lot we haven’t been told about them either. Or were just plain lied to about.”
“Just keep it down, Reg. This barricade isn’t going to hold forever. The less strain we put on it, the longer it’ll last.”
“Any ideas yet?” I ask. “How are we going to get out?”
“Through them?”
“Is there any other way?”
“Maybe they’ll just wander off,” Reggie says. “Maybe they’ll get bored.”
“I don’t think so,” Kelly whispers. “They’re just standing there, like they’re waiting for something. And in case you forget, they can out-wait us.”
“Thanks for that little bit of news update,” Reggie says, giving him a dark look. He checks his Link again and once more I watch as he tries to boot it up. My own Link feels heavy in my pocket. I know he’s thinking about it, wishing mine into his hands.
Not Kelly’s, though. He’d never even think about asking for Kelly’s.
It’s not that we don’t trust him. We know he won’t try to contact Ashley again—and even if he did, it’s not like it’d make any difference now. Even if Ben hadn’t discarded it so we can’t track him, he already knows we’re here and alive. We’re just afraid Reggie will somehow figure out Ashley’s dead and go ballistic.
I think about Ben. I wonder what he meant by sending us something else. Is he really gone? Is he hanging around to watch us suffer? Is he that sick that our suffering is like a game to him?
The son of a bitch is long gone. Last thing he’s going to want to do is stick around here just so he can torment us.
“You’re wrong,” Reggie mumbles.
Kelly looks over. “Wrong about what?”
“Nothing,” Reggie answers. He walks over to one of the IUs we’ve killed and nudges it with his toe. Then he bends down to inspect it. “Never mind.”
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
But he doesn’t answer. He reaches over and grabs the knife and jabs it into the back of the IU’s neck. Kelly and I watch him warily, wondering if he really has lost it. Finally he sighs and shakes his head. “No implant.”
“They weren’t Players, Reg. I could’ve told you that.”
“I just thought… I don’t know. How could someone make them all come in here and attack us?”
“They attacked us because they’re hungry and we were making a lot of noise.”
“I’m glad they weren’t Players,” I grumble. “They were a bitch enough to kill. If they were CUs, we’d all be dead.”
“IUs shouldn’t be so hard to kill.”
“Says the man who slept through it all,” Kelly grumbles.
“Oh, so now it’s my fault?” Reggie hisses, the muscles in his face tensing.
“Guys, hey, let’s not start this right now. Please?”
The next several minutes pass without a word. Both boys continue their grumbling and fidgeting, but they keep their thoughts mostly to themselves. Nobody comes up with any ideas for getting out. Kelly keeps an eye on what’s going on outside while Reggie paces. He crosses the room, limping, then turns and comes back. Then he sits and stares at the wall or his Link. Then gets up and paces again. He looks everywhere but at me or Kelly. He smolders from Kelly’s implication that he didn’t help. He doesn’t remind us that if it weren’t for his help, we never would have been able to block the door.
We don’t blame him for not helping to fight. That’s not what we’re mad about. We’re mad because he let Ben know we were still alive. Same reason he’s mad at himself.
I want to pace, but the space is too small and I don’t want to get in Reggie’s way. I try to sit, but I can’t. I’m exhausted, yet restless, full of pent up energy. I’m also afraid if I sit down, I’ll never be able to get back up again. I think about going downstairs and checking on Jake, but I don’t want to leave. I tell myself I don’t want to leave the boys without the elevator, but the truth is, I don’t want to leave them alone with each other, nor do I want to leave Reggie alone by himself. That leaves Kelly to check on Jake, and I don’t think he wants to leave me with Reg, either, though for different reasons than mine.
If I’m being totally honest, I guess I don’t want Kelly to check on Jake. I don’t know why, I just don’t.
I exhale with frustration. Both boys look at me resentfully, as if they think I’m waiting for them to come up with an answer. As if they expect me to come up with it.
I glance at the elevator again. It’s a measure of last resort. Going downstairs to get away from the Undead might buy me and Kelly some time, but it would kill Reggie. Maybe we could just get into the car and close the doors and not go anywhere. We’d be safe like that for a little while. The zombies wouldn’t be able to get in.
Not unless one of them managed somehow to push the button.
This worries me. I go over and inspect it. It’s the usual recessed kind of button, but it wouldn’t take much, an elbow or a bony hip, and the doors would open. And then what? There’s no room inside to fight. They’d overwhelm us. We’d all die in there.
“What are you doing?” Kelly asks.
“Just looking for something to cover the button. Just in case.”
The boys seem to understand. They start looking around, too. It’s something to keep them busy, something to distract them from not figuring out how to escape.
“There’s nothing,” Reggie says. “No cardboard or tape.” He gets up and pulls the plastic trashcan over and places it on the floor in front to block it. We all know it won’t work.
I shake my head and start to pace.
I think some more about Jake downstairs. I picture him waking up, alone, scared.
He won’t wake.
“I should go check on Jake.”
The others don’t answer.
I keep pacing. Kelly keeps watching the hallway. Reggie keeps squeezing his Link.
Finally I just give up. With a sigh, I go over and push the button and Kelly asks what I’m doing.
“Somebody needs to check on Jake.”
Reggie looks over at Kelly, but Kelly purses his lips and doesn’t say anything.
“I’d go with you if I could,” Reggie offers.
“I know,” I say. It’s a nice gesture, and all three of us are acutely aware that Kelly doesn’t make a similar offer. “I’d take the stairs, but—”
Kelly’s head whips around. “Damn it, Jessie. Christ, I’m so stupid!” And his face pinches. “They’re probably already downstairs.” He gestures into the hallway. “We left the door propped open.”
The three of us stare at one another for a moment, none of us speaking, realization dawning. I could go downstairs and walk right into a bunch of them.
“Do you think they’d bother with him?” Reggie stammers. “Jake, I mean. He’s already infected.”
The doors open, but I just stand there. I remember what Brother Matthew said in the car, right before the accident: The Elders still attack us. They make no such distinction among the living, whether infected or not. There’s something in the living brain that triggers the instinct to eat, some kind of electrochemical energy or something.
I remember how they took after Brother Nicholas, dragging him from the car. How they packed so tightly around to feed on him that he was actually suspended above the ground. How he finally fell to the road, his face half-chewed away.
When they’re done feeding on me, on my flesh, they’ll be coming for you. They like young, uninfected meat. They like the young hollow ones.
I shiver and the doors close without me in the car.
Kelly shakes his head. “You saw Brother Matthew, Reg. He was infected.”
Reggie shakes his head. “I still don’t understand them, how they could like—or sympathize—with the Undead.”
“Pity.”
Reggie frowns at me.
“They think the Players are an abomination. They can’t understand why anyone woul
d want to become a zombie.”
“Duh, for the money.”
I glance at Kelly, but he won’t meet my eyes. Apparently, there’s more than one way to make money from Arc, ways that don’t include volunteering.
“That’s another reason to check on Jake,” Reggie says. “To make sure he’s… That they haven’t—”
“I’ll go with you,” Kelly abruptly says.
Panic flashes in Reggie’s face. He sits up from his place against the wall, but doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t need any help,” I say.
Now Reggie stands up. “No, it’s cool. I’m fine, really. See?” And he weaves a little. “Okay, maybe still a little woozy. You should both go down and get Jake. It’ll only take a few minutes, right?”
“Fine,” I finally concede. “But we’ll come right back up once we see that the coast is clear.”
“You come right back up if it’s not!” Reggie says.
“Give us ten minutes,” I tell him. “Two or three minutes to get down there, seven or eight to check around and get Jake. If you don’t hear the elevator coming back up in ten minutes, you call it. No matter what, you call it.”
“I won’t leave you trapped down there.”
Kelly walks over and places a hand on Reggie’s arm. “Ten minutes, Reggie. Just like Jessie said. If you don’t hear the elevator car by then, it means we’re not coming back.”
Chapter 13
“Ten minutes,” I remind him, and Reggie nods. But I can see it in his eyes that he’s not going to press that button, not when he’s supposed to anyway. If the ten-minute mark passes and we still haven’t starting coming up, he’ll know we never will, and he’ll just stand there and wait and not do anything. Another minute will pass. Then two. Finally, at some point he’ll be forced to call the elevator—after ten or fifteen or twenty minutes have gone by and he’s absolutely sure. But it won’t make any difference. We’ll be dead.
Or worse.
And so, why would he push it then? To prove we’re Undead? To finish us off?
“Try not to miss us too much,” Kelly tells him, and he laughs lightly as he pats Reggie’s shoulder.
“Just sit tight,” I say. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, I’m not worried,” Reggie snaps. “I’m too fucking terrified to be worried.”
This hits me and Kelly both, but in completely different ways. We both stop in mid-stride and turn and look at him, and the amusement in Kelly’s eyes fades while the terror inside of me grows. Reggie stands there, his face pale, almost translucent in the dim light, so much like a ghost that for a moment the image wavers and I imagine I can see right through him. He never used to admit his fear. To witness this is like witnessing something secret and sacred, like watching a strange transformation where something solid fades away to vapor. It reminds me of this huge, gaping vulnerability inside of him.
I remember what Micah had said about Ashley, how she has this hard shell to protect her but inside she’s all marshmallow. It’s the same thing for Reggie. His shell is crumbling away, and inside is nothing but a few wisps of smoke.
“Hey, man—” Kelly begins.
But Reggie cuts him off: “You don’t know what’s down there, brah. Those…things… could’ve gotten down there. Jake could’ve—”
“Jake’s fine,” Kelly says. He steps forward and gets right in Reggie’s face. “Look, it’s cool. There’s nothing down there. We’re just going to get Jake. We’ll be back before you know it.”
“Just be quiet, okay?” I tell him. “Sit tight. Don’t do anything to rile them up out there.” I hand him my Link so he can watch the time. “And don’t ping anyone.”
Guilt flashes in his eyes. He nods, swallowing painfully. “I won’t. I promise.”
“On second thought,” I say, taking it back. I hate doing this, but we can’t have any more screw ups. I slip it back into my pocket and pull out the replacement Link. “Use this one.”
He frowns at me, but doesn’t argue.
We step into the elevator. Kelly pushes the button. The doors close.
Once more, the ride down seems to take forever. Kelly stands in one corner while I move into the opposite, and we stand there like opponents in that old sport they used to have before the LSC Personal Safety Commission outlawed it. We face each other but avoid looking in one another’s eyes. He glances over and happens to catches me looking. I turn away. A few seconds later, I look over and he’s the one turning the other way.
“Go ahead,” he finally says, exhaling with a whoosh. “Say it.”
“What?”
“You blame me. You think I should never have gotten involved with Arc.”
“That again?” I sigh. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I’m not even sure what I was thinking about, but it wasn’t that. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. I wanted—”
“We’re in this effed-up situation because of Micah,” I tell him, “plain and simple. Not because of you. Even if you had said no to Arc, we’d still be here. I thought we cleared this up.”
“I could’ve stopped it.”
“You tried.”
“I could’ve tried harder. I should have.”
“Look, Kel, Micah planned this from the very beginning, probably even before we first met him over a year ago. He needed physical access to the system and we helped him get inside.”
He shakes his head in frustration. “He infiltrated Arc. Why not just get the codex from them?”
“Maybe he tried. In fact, I’m sure he would’ve. But Arc isn’t going to just give anyone access to the base code, not a total stranger like him, especially someone whose family defected from a Republic state like his did. We were their backup plan. And I don’t mean just to get physical access to the towers and their codex, but to Arc’s brain center.”
“The mainframe downstairs.”
I nod. “Yeah. I’m convinced that was their plan all along. When’s the last time you talked with someone at Arc?”
He looks up sharply.
“Come on, Kel. I’m not that stupid. You’ve been sending updates back on all of us. You had to be.”
He looks away for a moment. “I haven’t heard anything in several days. I think they’ve completely wiped me from their systems. Most likely Micah, too. They’re trying to disavow any connection with us.”
“Maybe. I think it’s actually worse than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“On the way here, Ben said something strange. I tried to push him on it, but it was right before we found the IU and he made it bite Casey. He said that Arc is busy right now, preoccupied. I thought it might be another outbreak from the IUs that followed us back through the tunnel, but now I’m not so sure. Yesterday, I saw this strange black cloud in the sky to the west. It looked like smoke. I forgot all about it, but then this morning Reggie said something about smelling smoke.”
“The SSC? You think they might be scorching Gameland?”
“I don’t know. Maybe LaGuardia, getting rid of evidence. We know they have explosives. Ben took out part of the wall and whatever makes it keep the Undead away. It’s inert now.”
“But why?”
“There’s a war going on. Father Heall said so. I thought he was speaking figuratively, but what if there really is one, and we’ve been caught in the middle? The Southern States Coalition is here, we know that now. Heall wasn’t just talking about some survivors masquerading as some new age religious order. He isn’t just talking about some ideological differences. This is Arc. If the SSC is involved, then so is the government, and you know how they feel about my family. A lot of people blame us for what happened to the country.”
Kelly’s face darkens. “So, SSC gets the codex, then what? They take over the Players? What’s that get them? They’re stuck here in Gameland. Or, rather, they were. Are they trying to break them out?”
“Not the Players. They’re nothing but pieces. It’s Arc’s code
x that’s the basis for everything, Kel. All the other CUs the government uses, the ones in the military and in civil service. All of the government’s computational systems. All of our defense.”
Understanding comes to him then. “With Ashley’s algorithm, SSC can hack the codex, reprogram it, plant viruses. They can control everything.”
“Not everything,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I think that’s why they were doing those experiments on us back in LaGuardia. They were trying out those new implants with the new materials and new programming, trying to find combinations that wouldn’t be rejected when activated. They don’t want to just control the Undead, they want to control the living, too. You and me, Kelly. New Mericans. They want to control us.”
He stands there and stares at something that’s not there, something in his mind. A vision of a dark future where the living become conscious zombies, aware of everything yet unable to stop ourselves. This is the future he’s come close to becoming himself.
“The injection Stephen gave me,” he whispers. “Maybe it’s that thing he was talking about, the other part of getting the body to not reject an active implant.”
“That’s why we need to find Ben and stop him. That’s why we need to find Micah. We need to stop them. That’s why we can’t leave. This is bigger than any of us.”
Chapter 14
The car slowly descends, sinking like a bathysphere into the pitch darkness of the deepest ocean. It chimes out twice more before Kelly speaks again: “What have we done? I should’ve known better.”
My first instinct is to argue, but I know he’s right. None of us is blameless, not entirely. I think about how often Ashley and I talked about the strangeness surrounding Micah, the way his parents never seemed to be around, how we’d never ever seen them even once. How he always had all that computer and gaming gear. How it was all just slightly better than the rest of ours, good enough to keep us going back to his place but never so good that we’d become suspicious.
“We knew,” I say. “Some part of us did, anyway. There were clues all along the way. We just never picked up on them.” I think about Professor Halliwell’s identification card in his house. The clues were definitely there, too many to ignore or deny. And, yet, that’s exactly what we did.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 95