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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “He was the one who suggested Ash go talk to Jake’s uncle for the rebreathers,” Kelly says.

  “And now I’m sure he was the one who pushed you over the railing at the Midtown Tunnel.”

  “So, you do believe me about that.”

  I nod. “I didn’t want to at first, but now I do. He did the same thing to Stephen. Remember? On the way to Gameland, he pushed Stephen down the embankment.”

  “Why?”

  I shrug. “Maybe he thought Stephen was going to expose him.”

  “But Stephen said he never met the Coder.”

  When I don’t answer, he says, “And there was that damn tracking software. I always thought that excuse of his was lame, telling us he was field testing a way to track the CUs. There weren’t CUs in that part of the island. They’re only in Gameland.”

  “There’s something else,” I say. “Yesterday, when we were in the stairwell, Micah tried to extract one of the Player’s implants. It exploded. You know what he told me?”

  Kelly shakes his head.

  “He said, ‘I always wondered if Arc made it so people couldn’t reverse engineer them.’ I didn’t think about it at the time, but now it seems so obvious what he was trying to do.”

  Kelly thinks about this for a moment before shaking his head. “You’re assuming the SSC doesn’t already know the devices were rigged to self-destruct.”

  “Why would they?”

  “Seems kind of obvious to me. I’d assume it. I can’t really believe the SSC wouldn’t know something like that already. All these years and they never got hold of a CU and tried to extract the implant?”

  “Maybe, but—”

  But the car jerks to a stop and the conversation stops. We both turn, bracing ourselves for whatever might be waiting for us on the other side of the doors. Kelly’s thumb hovers over the button, ready to close the doors in case we’re attacked and need to leave in a hurry. There’s a three or four second delay before they open, but when they do, nothing rushes in on us. Neither of us moves. The room is quiet and cool and dark. The only sound is the soft hush of air coming from the vent above our heads. It’s almost too quiet.

  We step out and quickly look around. The room is empty. Jake’s table glimmers in the gloom, reflecting the scant light leaking in from the hallway. His pale skin almost seems to glow. We pause, listen, step cautiously out, rotating slowly, taking care not to bump anything.

  “Guess we got lucky. Looks like they didn’t come down.”

  “No reason to,” I surmise. “All the food’s upstairs.”

  Kelly frowns at me and I shrug, then he signals and we split up. I slip into the hallway to check the staircase, while Kelly hurries over to check the other rooms. My inspection yields nothing out of the usual. I stand at the bottom of the steps for a few seconds, listening, but everything is as silent as a tomb.

  You had to think that. You had to think about tombs.

  It’s just a saying. And I’m tired.

  So cliché.

  There’s a reason it’s cliché.

  Tombs are ancient history, where the dead went to rest for an eternity. Nothing is as silent as a tomb anymore. Nothing rests anymore.

  That’s why we burn the dead.

  Only when we’re finished with them.

  In any case, nobody ever said something was as silent as a cremation furnace.

  Or a toe.

  As silent as a toe? Where the hell did that come from?

  I start to giggle.

  Shh!

  But I can’t stop myself. The relief of finding the place empty begins to loosen me up. Laughter starts to bubble out of me, and I have to push my hand against my mouth to keep it from escaping.

  Just get your backpack and Jake and get out of here.

  But the stillness and the quiet are suddenly shattered by a loud racket coming from the main room. It sounds like something heavy and metallic crashing to the floor. There’s a series of clatters, a loud thump.

  My body goes ice cold. “Kelly!” I hiss.

  Above me in the stairwell, the IUs begin to moan. They’ve heard. They heard and they’re coming.

  “Kelly?”

  “Jessie!” he shouts. “Get in here!”

  I sprint back. Kelly’s standing beside Jake’s table, except it’s on its side and Jake is sprawled out on the floor.

  “What did you do?” But then I see that Jake’s shaking. His head ratchets back and forth and an animal sound comes from his throat: “Unh unh unh unh.”

  I bend down, but Kelly stops me. “Careful, Jess!”

  “Let me go, Kelly! He’s going to hurt himself!”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Then do it!” I snap at him, exasperated. I jump back to my feet.

  “Where are you going?” he yells at my back.

  “The IUs are coming down. I need to close the door.”

  “Great,” he mutters.

  Now I can hear the distant thuds of the zombies falling down the steps and the sounds of their hungry moans.

  “Get Jake onto the elevator,” I instruct. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Damn well better be.”

  I skid to a stop inside the stairwell and I glance up. Elbows and hands flash over the railing as the Undead reteach themselves how to navigate stairs. Those that don’t just let gravity do it for them. It sounds like the whole lot are coming down after us.

  A hand clamps over my arm and spins me around and I let out a squeak.

  “Jake’s on. Come on, let’s go!” And he pulls at me.

  “No, wait!” I say. “I just thought of something.” I start clapping and shouting. “Come on!”

  “What the hell are you doing, Jess?”

  “Drawing them all down here. If they’re down here, they’re not up there and we can leave.”

  “Genius!” He starts yelling and banging, too. The noise floating down at us increases. Distorted by the confined space, amplified by the hard surfaces, it sounds like the braying of a thousand wolves.

  “Christ,” Kelly says, shivering. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I close the door on our way out and make sure it latches. It doesn’t completely mask the sound of their descent. Kelly hurries over to the elevator and hits the button and the doors swoosh open. I see Jake’s feet inside the car. “Hurry up!” he tells me.

  “I need my backpack. And Jake needs his clothes!”

  “Forget the clothes! Just get in here!”

  I gather Jake’s pants and shoes from the corner of the room and throw them into the elevator, then I hurry over to the back corner of the room, back where the shadows are deeper and debris is haphazardly piled up. Jake’s shirt hangs on the back of a chair, but it’s in pieces, torn up when Kelly bandaged my hand earlier.

  “Jessie!”

  The door dings and begins to close. Kelly stops it with his hand and it opens again, cursing.

  “I can’t find my backpack.”

  Another quick chime, and this time Kelly looks surprised. “What the hell!” He jabs the button inside the car and the doors reverse.

  “Where is it? I can’t find my stupid backpack! It was right here!”

  “Just leave it!”

  “No, I need it!”

  I won’t leave it behind. I can’t. My stuff is inside of it, stuff I need.

  Another ding. Then several more in rapid succession: Ding ding dingdingding!

  “What the hell is Reggie doing up there?” Kelly looks up at the ceiling and yells, “We’re coming! Stop calling the elevator!”

  I skid to a stop in the middle of the room and look over, worried. If Reggie’s calling the car, then that means he’s in trouble. “Go!” I tell him.

  “What?”

  “Leave me down here! I’m not leaving until I find my pack.”

  “The hell with that.” Kelly steps out, knocking his shoulder on the door as it starts to slide shut again. “Son of a bitch,” he screams, and he kicks at it. “Stay the hell o
pen!”

  “Leave, Kelly!”

  “No way!” And he punches the button. The doors judder to a stop short of being fully open. He pushes on them and they make a dull grinding sound.

  “What’d you do?” I ask. I run over and push the button, but nothing happens. “What did you do? You broke the elevator!”

  “I didn’t—”

  “How the hell are we supposed to get out of here if the elevator’s broken?”

  He turns toward the hallway, to the stairs. The IUs haven’t reached the bottom of the steps yet, but they will soon. Not that it matters. We can’t use them anymore.

  “It’s a pull, right? The door, from the inside of the stairwell, it’s a pull?”

  I nod.

  Kelly lets out a gust of air and turns back to the elevator. He steps inside and tries to push the button. Still nothing. Even the chiming has stopped. “Reggie!” he screams. But, of course, we don’t hear a response.

  “I think he’s in trouble. Why else would he call for it?”

  “He’s not in trouble. He’s just being impatient!”

  I spy a dark bundle beneath a chair and run over and snatch it. I can feel the comforting shape of the stuffed rabbit still inside.

  “What the hell was so important that you couldn’t leave your pack behind?” Kelly demands. He tries to pull the doors closed, but they resist. They make that angry grinding noise again and he stops.

  I sling the pack on my shoulders. Then, instead of answering him, I bend down to check Jake. His skin is cool now. The fever’s completely gone. The shivering has stopped. I wonder if it had to do with his brain, the seizure. Maybe there was swelling and it suddenly went down. Or because the fever broke so quickly. I wish I knew.

  “Answer me, Jess. What was so important?”

  He jostles the door and it rattles in its track.

  “Nothing. Don’t do that.”

  “It’s not nothing, Jessie. We should be on our way upstairs. We would be now if you hadn’t stopped to get that god damn pack.”

  “Don’t blame me! We would be stuck here if you hadn’t broken the elevator!” I scream back.

  He grabs at the pack and jerks me up, yanking it off my back. I tell him to stop, but he ignores me and unzips it.

  “Stay out of there! Kelly, stay out! That’s mine!”

  “This?” he screams. “This is what you needed so damn badly?” He throws the rabbit to the floor and for a brief moment I think he’s going to stomp on it. “A god damn rabbit?”

  I pick it up and brush it off. He wouldn’t understand. How could he? He wasn’t there when Shinji found me, when he dug the rabbit out of my pack and took it as proof that I was his family. Kelly wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there.

  He doesn’t know what it’s like to finally be accepted.

  Chapter 15

  “It’s fucked,” Kelly says. He slaps the elevator door one more time before sitting down next to me. When I don’t respond, he nudges my shoulder with his.

  Like that’s going to make things better.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

  So much for Mister Mechanical.

  Shut up. I want to tell the world to just shut up. I want my own head to just shut the hell up.

  “Truth be told, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, either, lately.” He sighs and watches me holding the rabbit. I rub my thumb over its face, over its plastic eyes and plastic nose. The softness has long ago left its fur. It’s dirty and matted and smells of—

  —dead girl. It smells of someone who died thirteen years ago, of rot and—

  —old dry dust and emptiness. It smells of abandonment.

  Wetness trickles down my cheek.

  Stop being so damn sentimental!

  “I’m sorry,” he finally says, awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have done that. I guess I just freaked out. I’m—”

  He gets back to his feet. “I just wish things weren’t so bad.”

  “I know,” I say. How many times have we all thought this? How many times in the past two weeks have we said it to ourselves as we’re trying to fall asleep and can’t? I’d laugh at the irony if I weren’t so tired.

  He sighs and tries the buttons one more time. They still don’t work. “I’m going to try the breakers.”

  “You already did. What makes you think it’ll work this time?”

  “Well, what else do you want me to do?” he starts to say, frustrated. He bangs his fist in the door again and falls back against the wall. The car shudders. “We can’t get upstairs now because of those—those things out there! Damn it!” he screams.

  “Hey, you thought it was a good idea, too!” I yell at him. “Besides, they were already coming down after Jake fell of the table. Don’t blame me.”

  He glances over at Jake. No more shivering, still barely breathing. Is this how it’s going to be with him from now on? A coma? It would’ve been better if he’d just died.

  I squeeze my eyes closed. I’m sorry, I whisper inside my head. I didn’t mean that. It would’ve been better if he’d never been bitten.

  “—and who the hell knows what’s happening with Reggie up there,” Kelly finishes gruffly.

  I shake my head. I missed the first part. “He probably just saw the zombies leaving.”

  “He wouldn’t freak out about that.”

  “Who said he freaked out?”

  “He’s the one who broke the elevator. He probably— You know what he’s like. He doesn’t know his strength.”

  “Don’t blame him, Kel. I’m tired of all the blaming.”

  He stops and looks at me for a moment, nothing on his face but hurt and irritation. We’re both avoiding the real issues, arguing about nothing. Reggie might be dead up there. We can’t leave. We have no way of warning Father Heall. We can’t rescue Ashley. We don’t even know if she’s still alive. And the rest of the world might, right at this moment, be turning into a zombie wasteland.

  “I’m going up.”

  “What?” I say, startled. “The stairwell is full—”

  “Not the stairs.” He drags a chair into the elevator and steps up onto it and pushes up against the hatch in the ceiling of the elevator car. “Through here.”

  “Are you crazy? You can’t go up the elevator shaft!”

  “What other way is there, Jessie?” he yells back. “We’re stuck! We. Are. Stuck!”

  “Stop yelling at me! I can hear you just fine. Why are you such an asshole sometimes?”

  His face flushes. He steps down and comes over to me. I push him away, but he doesn’t give up. Finally he wraps me in his arms. “Listen to me,” he says, and I can feel his breath on my hair. “I’m sorry. It’s just that this is so crazy and… We’ll get out of this, I promise you, Jessie. I’m going to climb up and see if I can get out. I’ll take the wire cutters to pry the door open. If by some chance the IUs got into the room upstairs, then… Then we’ll figure something else out. But we’re going to get out of this. I promise.”

  I made promises, too. I couldn’t keep them.

  I swallow and nod. I want to be positive. I know he’s trying to as well, but hope takes so much effort and I don’t know if I can keep it up. “Maybe we can fight our way through them in the stairwell.”

  He doesn’t speak for a moment. There are over thirty of them in there, maybe as many as fifty. We can’t fight that many. We can’t get through them. Our only chance is through the elevator, whether it’s working or not.

  “I hope Reggie’s all right,” he says. “If I can get through that way, then I’ll come back down for you.”

  Neither of us looks at Jake. He’s just an undead body lying there on the floor, inert. Less than either of us put together, and yet his presence seems to fill every square inch of space around us. How are we going take him with us? Neither of us could possibly carry him up the ladder. Not even Reggie could do it.

  “It’s the only option left, Jessie.”

  “Do you have a light
you can take with you?”

  “Got a flashlight, but I can’t hold it and climb the ladder at the same time.”

  We settle with him taking it in his back pocket, along with the pistol. We rig a hook from some wire and he loops the wire cutters through it and attaches it to his belt.

  “Leave the latch open so we can talk,” he says. “And don’t push any buttons. Hopefully Reggie won’t, either. Or if he does, that the damn elevator doesn’t decide to start working again. In fact, prop the door open.” Then he slips through the hole and into the darkness above.

  I stand on the chair and watch him fade into the inky blackness. He disappears quickly. I can hear him for a long time after, the scuff of his shoes and his labored breaths, the occasional clang of the wire cutters hitting the metal rungs of the ladder. Every once in a while, I’ll see a flash of light as he stops and checks his progress. After a while, even these are so faint and flickery that they remind me of distant campfires, of fireflies in the night and stars a trillion miles away. The shaft seems to go on forever, darker and deeper than anything I’ve ever seen. And Kelly’s fallen into it.

  Fifteen minutes after the last sound drifts down to me, I call out to him: “Kelly?” My voice sounds hollow and empty.

  “Here,” he answers a moment later, and his voice sounds even more ghostly, like it’s coming to me from yesterday. “Still a ways to go.”

  I step down off the chair, but I’m hesitant to leave him. Not that there’s anywhere for me to go or anything for me to do. But I’m restless.

  “Kelly?”

  Then, “Yeah?”

  I can’t tell if it’s the distance or the distortion or the exertion of climbing a few hundred feet, but he sounds irritated.

  “I’m going to go check the stairs. Make sure everything’s holding.”

  […]

  “Kelly?”

  […]

  “Kelly?”

  “Still here. Be careful.”

  I hesitate, then go.

  I check on Jake one more time before heading over to the stairwell. He’s still breathing, cool to the touch. Still unresponsive. I don’t want to think about leaving him here.