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

by Saul Tanpepper

  Kelly rocks me like a child and weeps. A part of me grows impatient with him. He’s acting like I’m dying. I’m not dying.

  Am I?

  “Where’s Jake? He woke up. I saw him.”

  Reggie stares out through the door. He won’t look at me.

  No, that’s not entirely true. He’s doing more than just avoiding my eyes. He’s keeping watch.

  For what?

  “What the hell’s going on, guys?” Panic creeps up inside of me. My side hurts. “Kelly, let go. Reggie? Why am I…? I- I don’t feel right. I…”

  My head feels heavy, my body too light.

  Reggie turns and comes quickly over. He bends down in front of me. “You were bitten, Jess.”

  Kelly moans and rocks me. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be held. I don’t want to hear this.

  I want to tell Kelly to stop. And yet I want him to hold me and never let go. “What? How? No! I saw…I saw Jake. He was—”

  “It was him,” Reggie says, nodding, shaking his head, shrugging. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He’s all nervous movement, energy, restlessness. He won’t sit still. He still won’t look me in the eye. “Jake’s turned,” he whispers. “He attacked you. We got here and stopped him, but not before he… Before he…”

  I lower my chin to try and see and my gaze sweeps ponderously past Kelly’s arm wrapped around me like a wide-angled shot of some grand view, a panoramic picture of…nothing. I look down, past his elbow, past the muddy landscape of my shirt and—

  No, it’s not mud. It’s blood, bright red but appearing brown in this green light, and it’s leaking from my side, leaking through the bandage somebody wrapped around me.

  How long ago? How much blood have I lost?

  “We didn’t get down here in time,” Reggie whispers. “He was trying to eat you.”

  And suddenly the world is melting, metal and rock and ice and air dissolving and leaving an acrid sting in my head. It’s all pouring over me, roaring. Freezing me.

  I’m drowning.

  I’m turning to ice.

  I am freezing and soon I’ll shatter.

  † † †

  The stinging cold mist envelops me, heavy and sharp, like tiny needles. It condenses on my skin and freezes in the chill wind and flakes off my rented raincoat. Eric looks over at me and smiles and waves for me to join him at the railing. “Big, isn’t it?” he shouts.

  The water roars all around us, tumbling over the edge far above and shattering down here in the midst of the cataract below, showering us with its billions of tiny broken pieces.

  It’s beautiful. Niagara Falls is so beautiful.

  I scowl at him. But he shrugs it away. He won’t be discouraged by my negativity. Not today. Not the day he’s chosen to bring me here to tell me he’s joining the Necrotics Crimes Division.

  “Does Grandpa know?”

  “I told him this morning before we left the house.”

  Seven torturous hours of stony silence in the car as he drove us here across the heart of New York State on the coldest day in two decades. There was snow on the ground, real snow, and he was making me waste it by sitting in a car.

  Seven hours, and he could’ve said something to me about why, but instead he just told me he wanted me to see the falls just once, once when there was snow on the ground and the mist turned everything into a frozen wonderland, the lanterns into glowing angels and the railings like the railings of ghost ships like they used to have before the polar ice caps melted.

  Once before they closed the border.

  They never did close them, but they did put in checkpoints. So I’d listened to the Music Stream on my Link and zoned him out, watching the alien white landscape drift by. Snow. Snow and ice and there I was sitting in a car with the heater we never used blasting hot air on my face, smelling of burnt plastic and metal and dust.

  He scared me, Eric did, after he returned from the Marines. I didn’t like the way he drifted through the house like a ghost. Haunted. Haunting. Ever since he came back, he’d been acting strangely. It was a few weeks after we’d returned from Seattle. The outbreak had been in full bloom there by then, but all of a sudden there was this freeze all over and it was winter for a week. The infections suddenly stopped.

  “You’re crazy going into the NCD,” I’d told him.

  “Maybe I am,” he replied.

  “What did Grandpa say? What did Mom say?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” He shrugged. He actually looked like a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He looked more alive, less like a ghost. On this day of white, he had more color to him than I’d seen in a long time.

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to.”

  I remember chewing on all this for a while. Did he mean that Grandpa said nothing and Mom everything? And what did he need from the Undead anyway? Revenge? What did he intend to give them? Retribution?

  In the end, I figured it didn’t matter. I didn’t really care.

  I turn back to the opposite railing of the boat, the Maid of the Mist. It’s covered in a thick layer of ice. I can see the lanterns far above me, the ghost lanterns that do look a little like angels floating above us on the cliff’s edge and the observation walkway looking like a ghost ship. I hang my head over the side and stare down into the water boiling below us, the mist so thick I can’t even see the surface of the frozen river. If I jumped, would I just keep falling through it? Would I evaporate away? Would I turn to smoke?

  “You’re not even looking at the falls,” Eric yells, grabbing my shoulder, a flurry of color in all this white. “Come on over to the other side.”

  “No,” I tell him. I like it just fine where I am.

  Here with the ghosts and the angels and the ice, I long for that sensation of drowning. I want to lose myself in it.

  † † †

  “We need to find him,” Reggie says. “We need to find Jake and… We need to take care of him.”

  I try to sit up, but the ache in my side is too big, a lake of pain, an ocean. I collapse back against Kelly. “He’s not turned,” I gasp. “You can’t… You can’t… He’s not Undead. He can be fixed!”

  Reggie spins at me, his lips pulled away from his teeth in a vicious sneer. “He was trying to eat you!”

  I push Kelly away, but he holds me down. “Let go of me!” I scream.

  “You need to lie still!”

  “He’s not dead. I know. I saw him. What he was doing when you saw him, I—I don’t know, but I do know he’s not dead. There was recognition in his eyes, a spark.”

  “Jessie, sit down—”

  “I won’t sit down!”

  Reggie steps over to intervene. He takes me by the arms and holds me for a moment. The world tilts and spins. “We need to find Jake.”

  “You can’t kill him!”

  His eyes flick over to Kelly. He nods once, quickly, and Kelly slips out. In one of his hands is the knife, in the other the pistol.

  “No!” I scream. I struggle against Reggie, but he’s too strong and I’m too weak and suddenly I’m so faint that my legs feel like stalks of grass that give against the slightest breeze. He guides me to the floor where I collapse in a heap. “You did everything you could for him, Jessie. You tried.”

  “Not hard enough,” I sob.

  “He bit you. We saw him biting you, Jess. He took a piece out of you. He was eating you.”

  “Nooo.”

  “Yes.”

  I pant and hold my side. It hurts terribly now. Reggie lets go of me and I feel like water again, slipping away into the cracks and seams of the world.

  “It shouldn’t be Kelly,” I moan. “It should be me.”

  “Shh. You’ve carried enough on your shoulders.”

  “It will kill him,” I whisper.

  Reggie doesn’t reply. He knows I mean it’ll kill Kelly, not Jake. And he looks away.

  Kelly returns a few minutes later. I check his face for any sign
of what happened out there, but it’s hard and stony and conveys nothing. It reminds me of Grandpa’s face. I’ve always hated that look. I hate that I see it on Kelly’s face.

  Reggie looks up and Kelly shakes his head and says he couldn’t find him. I let out a gust of air. They both turn to me, then turn away. I feel relief, but already I can see that something has died inside of Kelly. Just knowing what he had to do has killed something inside of him.

  “You checked the bathroom?” Reggie asks.

  Kelly nods. “I checked everywhere.”

  “How can that be? There’s no place for him to go!”

  “The tracker,” I murmur.

  They both turn to me. “The what?”

  “The tracking app. On Micah’s tablet.” I lift a shaky arm and point. “It was working before. I saw everyone, including Jake.”

  I don’t mention Ashley’s ghost account. They’ll find it soon enough. They’ll make up their own minds about what it means, if anything.

  By then, I’ll be gone.

  Chapter 18

  Kelly steps over and wakes the screen and the image I’d left on it pops up again. He stares for a moment, and his eyes go large. “Oh my god!”

  The Players. I’d forgotten about them.

  “They’re here, aren’t they?” I ask. For some reason I want to laugh. I don’t find it funny. I’m scared to death, but suddenly everything just seems hilarious.

  But it hurts too much to laugh.

  “You knew about this?” Kelly says. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Excuse me,” I yell back. “Little busy dying here!”

  Reggie grabs the tablet, nearly yanking the wires out of it, and he starts shaking all over.

  “Oh god…Oh god! These aren’t… Oh my god, they’re fucking everywhere!” He nearly drops it. “Kelly?”

  “We need to try to climb out of here,” he says. He looks over at me, but I shake my head. “Jessie, we—”

  “I can’t. I’m too weak. You go. There’s still time.”

  “I’m not leaving you. I can’t leave you.”

  “You have to. For yourself, for Reggie. You have to go save Ash. Yes, I think she’s still alive. You have to warn Father Heall.”

  “I’ll carry you,” Reggie says.

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t carry me and climb the ladder at the same time, Reggie. Thanks, though.” I give him a weak smile.

  Something comes over me then, a sense of peace. I don’t know if it’s the infection eating into my brain or not, but I’m ready. I’ve been ready. Ever since the day Reggie first mentioned we should come here. I was ready to die then. Maybe I knew, somewhere deep down, that this would happen. Ever since the last day I saw the dog in the woods by my house, the day I met Kelly. I would’ve died then too, happy. Ever since losing my Link in Seattle and watching the judge laugh when he sentenced the thief to early LSC and telling us we had to watch him be reanimated. Since coming home to find my mother beaten up by her boyfriend, the first time. And the second and third and fiftieth times. Since the day I’d attacked Eric and made him bleed.

  I’ve been ready. I don’t deserve to be here.

  Reggie pulls at his hair, his eyes wide and jumpy. He’s on the edge. I can see it. “No…” he moans. He paces from one end of the room to the other in three steps, turns and comes back. “No…”

  “You’d better hurry.”

  “No!” Kelly shouts. “No! I’m not leaving you here. They won’t come down here. They can’t. We’ll be safe if we have to stay here.”

  For how long?” Reggie cries. “And what about Ashley? What about—” He looks at me, but doesn’t finish. Instead, he reaches over and picks up the tablet again and stares at it, shaking his head in disbelief. “Why are they coming here?”

  “Ben sent them,” I say.

  He looks over, frowning. “First the IUs, now CUs? How do you know?”

  I hold out my hand, asking for the tablet. He gives it to me and I widen the map’s coverage. Several new dots come into view. “There’s Ashley.”

  Reggie nearly knocks Kelly over in his eagerness to see. “She’s not moving! She’s so close, and she’s not moving.” His voice rises hysterically.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Kelly tells him. “You should go, Reg. You can still rescue her.”

  I nod. “You have to save her from those other Players.”

  He blinks, shakes his head. “It’s too late. They’re already there.”

  I glance at the screen again. The second group of CUs has surrounded her. Ben must be somewhere in the middle of them. Why would they do that if he was controlling them? Why not send them here instead? It doesn’t make any sense.

  Kelly looks worried. “I don’t see Ben’s signal. Where is he?”

  “I don’t think he has an implant. He’s SSC, remember?”

  “Ash?” Reggie moans. He pets the screen, like he’s connecting with her.” Ashley…”

  “It’s time you left, Reg,” I tell him. I look up at Kelly and nod. “You, too. Leave me here.”

  “No. I left you once and look what happened. I’m not leaving you again.”

  “It’s too late, Kel.” I shift and wince, try to hide it. But Kelly sees. He swallows. He clenches his jaw. His eyes fill up with tears.

  “We can still get out of this.” He reaches down and yanks me to my feet.

  “What are do—”

  “I’m not leaving you! We’ll get you to Father Heall.”

  The treatment won’t work for you, Brother Matthew whispers from somewhere far away, from another time, when he still lived.

  It doesn’t matter. There’s not enough time. It’s too hot outside. I’d die of the fever and then come back before they could get me very far. I don’t resist. I don’t have the strength.

  “I can’t climb the ladder, Kel. We’ll both die if you don’t leave right now.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Reggie wails. “It’s too late, even for us.”

  We look over. He tilts the tablet until we can see. The red dots are crowding the fence, forty or fifty of them. He looks up and I can see it in his eyes. He knows. It’d take them twenty minutes to climb up through the elevator shaft, even without me. By then the Players will be everywhere, inside the compound, inside the building.

  Kelly gently lets me back down to the floor. He takes the tablet and his face changes. It twists and reddens, and for a moment I think he’s going to rip it out of the mainframe and hurl it across the room like Reggie did the chair earlier.

  But he sighs and lifts his eyes to the ceiling. His shoulders drop and he shuts his eyes and tears roll down his cheeks.

  “We’re dead,” he sighs. “There’s no way we’ll make it out of here.”

  On the floor next to me is the pistol. I know it’s selfish, but I slip my hand over and quietly pull it to me and slide it behind my back. I thrust it into my waistband and settle back against the wall. One bullet. That’s all I’ll need.

  I can’t let Kelly suffer.

  I don’t care if I do—I probably deserve it—but I can’t let him come back.

  Chapter 19

  “How did you do it?” I ask Reggie. “How can you be down here with the failsafe?”

  “Shh. Don’t talk.”

  “Why not? It takes my mind off the pain.”

  His face pinches and he looks down for a moment.

  “Is your Link working again?”

  He sighs and shakes his head and says, “Sort of.” Then he reaches into his pocket and carefully pulls something bulky out. It’s his Link bound to the replacement I’d given him upstairs. “I remembered what Kelly said about something being loose,” he explains, “so I thought I’d take a look while you guys were down here. Kelly’s always been a lot better at fixing shit than I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally useless, either. It’s these fat fingers of mine that always get in the way.” He chuckles, but it sounds half-hearted.

  “Nobody ever said you were useless,
Reg,” Kelly says. “Maybe you have this way of coming across too strong—”

  “Kelly,” I mumble.

  “No, Kel’s right. It comes with the territory.”

  He chuckles and flips the thing in his fingers like it’s a deck of playing cards.

  “It was the transmitter,” he says. “It was broken. Must’ve happened when the bullet hit it. I disconnected the wires and taped them to the transmitter in yours.”

  I frown. “The replacement Link doesn’t have a transmitter. They said it couldn’t ping in or out.”

  He grins a little and shrugs. “It’s actually a fully functional Link. It’s just programmed so half its functions are disabled. You could’ve unlocked it, I’m sure. Here, look, it still works.”

  He shows me the screens, both facing out. He taps a few things on the Link I’d given him and it appears to be working just fine. So is his.

  “Can’t get a Stream down here, of course,” he says. “Mine wouldn’t boot up before because the diagnostic check couldn’t find the transmitter, so it just shut down.”

  “Pretty smart of you figuring that out,” I tell him.

  “I do have to be careful,” he adds. “The wires aren’t very stable. All I’ve got holding them in place is these rubber bands, and they’re all dried up and ready to snap. A little jostling and they’ll come loose. Then—bam!—back to La La Land I go.” He looks at the thing in his hands, a hard grin on his lips, but his eyes tell a different story. He’s holding onto a time bomb.

  He looks up at me and there’s this new look in his eyes and suddenly I’m relieved for him. Now he’s got his own way out. If worse comes to worse, all he’s got to do is pull those wires and his implant will start to activate again. It would almost certainly kill him this time. And if it doesn’t, then, well, at least he won’t be aware of anything that comes after.

  “You be careful with that thing,” I say. I gesture weakly to my backpack. “There’s medical tape in there if you want it to be safer.”

  “Yeah, I think the rubber bands’ll do.” He smiles grimly at me and nods knowingly.