I don’t answer.
“But I know you’ll do the right thing. Not like that other bitch. You’ll save me, won’t you?”
“You’re wrong. If you think I’m going to save you, you’re—”
“Save me from undying is what I meant. Don’t want to come back.”
“You’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”
“No, the world ain’t got no one to blame but you. You and your cursed family, your father. Your grandfather. Life was simpler before the Undead.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, always led a sheltered life.”
“Screw you. What do you know about me? Nothing.”
“I know about your pretty little boyfriend.”
“Leave him out of it.”
He doesn’t answer. I wait on my side of the door, and he waits on his. Across the parking lot, I see the first IU emerge from the forest. It stumbles onto the pavement, as if confused by the unexpected change. But then it senses me and begins to amble over.
Time to go.
“They’re coming,” I tell him. “They’re coming for you.”
“You won’t leave me,” he says. “You’ll do the right thing. You promised. You’re a good girl. A good girl don’t break her promises.”
“I’m not good. Not anymore.”
I catch movement in the other direction. Two more. They’re slow, lumbering, still shaking off the chill and dampness of the night. The second of the two is just so much brown leathery skin and bone. Face a mask of horror, painted on. It ogles me with its gray eyeballs, afloat in their sockets, teeth a frightening jeer.
I shove the nose of his spent rifle into the space between the hinge and begin to push. The old wood splinters.
“What are you doing?” Ben asks, alarmed.
“Propping the door open.”
“Why?” More alarm.
“I told you, I’m leaving.”
“No! You promised,” he screeches.
“I made a lot of promises. I’ve broken a lot, too.”
“You cain’t leave me!”
“You’d better shut up.”
I finish with the rifle. The shaft is bent. It’ll never be used again.
“Goodbye, Ben.”
“Noooo!”
I can hear him screaming long after I’ve slipped back into the woods, maybe even long after he’s died. I can still hear him screaming inside my head. And by the time I stumble back through the gate, I’m so blinded by my own tears and so deafened by the screams—screams which I imagine are Ashley’s—that I’m barely aware of the hands grabbing me and pulling me in ten different directions at once.
PART TWO
Comings and Goings
Chapter 11
“Where did you go?” Eric screams at me. He grabs his side and says, “Tell me, Jessie!”
“Back off,” Reggie growls. “Give her some room.”
Eric turns to him stiffly, still leaning into his side. He opens his mouth to reply, but Reggie towers over him, glowering protectively.
“Just…give her a moment, Eric.”
Eric sighs. “You had us all worried, Jess. We thought…” He shakes his head. “I thought…”
“What?”
I look around and realize they’re all standing there waiting for an explanation, all except Kelly, who’s absent. Eric leans against a chair. He doesn’t look very good at all.
“Did you take Micah anywhere?” Reggie gently asks.
“What?” I ask, confused.
“He’s gone.”
I’m too stunned to answer.
“Jessie, where’s Micah?”
I shake my head, still unable to process why he’s asking me if I know where he is. “Wuh-what happened? I saw him when I got up. He was tied up. And gagged.”
“You checked his bindings? Jessie, did you check his bindings? Did you let him go?”
“No…”
Sister Jane gives me a doubtful look. “First the infected one disappears, now this one,” she says. I can see her distrust growing.
Reggie spins on her. “Don’t blame her. Jessie had nothing to do with Jake getting away. He ran off. So did Micah. Nobody let them go.”
“But she was the last one to see the other boy.”
“Why would I do that?” I ask. “Why would I let him go?”
Sister Jane glares at me, as if the answer is obvious.
Nobody speaks for several seconds, then Eric shakes his head and says, “It doesn’t matter. With or without him, it doesn’t change anything.” He checks his Link. “We’ve got a standing order to evacuate this place at four thirty this afternoon.” He looks at me and Reg. “It’s time to go home.”
“Today?” I ask. “This afternoon? No, we can’t. Not yet.”
“Jessie, don’t start with—”
“No, really. Even if Kelly hadn’t been bitten—”
“Wait. Did you just say that Kelly’s been bitten?”
I look around at the others. “Nobody told him? All this time, and nobody said anything?”
“We didn’t have time, Jessie,” Reggie says. “As soon as we woke up and saw Micah was missing, we started looking for you. We just got back.”
“You didn’t see the bites on Kelly this morning?” I ask Eric.
“I’ve been looking for you, Jessie!” His face crumples. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. How did he…”
I sigh. “It’s not just him.”
He stops, frowns, then his face blanches when he realizes what I’m saying. “Show me.”
I lift my shirt, exposing the bandage. “It’s getting better. See? Over twelve hours. I’m fine.”
“Damn it, Jessie! How can you be fine? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this last—” He stops and clutches his side and wheezes. His face pales and he bends over and rests his hand on his knee.
“Yeah, like you were in any state.”
“When did it happen?” he pants. “How…long ago?”
“Yesterday afternoon,” Sister Jane says. “She’s been treated. They both have.”
Eric looks up at her, frowning. “Somebody please explain to me what that means.”
“It’s not a cure,” I tell him. “It’s a treatment. It blocks the infection, but it doesn’t last.” I point at Brother Walter and Sister Jane. “They were bitten, too. Years ago.” I let that sink in.
“The caveat being,” Brother Walter says, “we have to stay here to get the injections.”
Eric shakes his head in disbelief. “No. I don’t believe that. How can that be? We—we’d know about it. We wouldn’t need these damn implants. We’d—”
“Arc knows,” I tell him. “They’ve been keeping it a secret, hiding Father Heall here.”
“What?”
“Arc knows about the treatment and—”
No, Jess. The other part. You said a name, Father—”
“Heall.”
He stares at me. Then, slowly, “Will Heall?”
I nod.
“He’s here? In Gameland?”
I shake my head. “Outside. In a place called Brookhaven. Outside the arcade.”
“The old research institute? You know this for a fact, Jess?”
I nod. “We were there yesterday, me and— Damn it.”
“What?”
“That must be where Micah went. We have to stop him.”
Sister Jane steps in, waving her hands at me. “He won’t find the Father there.”
“Tell me who you are again?” Eric says, grabbing her arm. The look on his face is dark and troubling. “You know this guy?”
“Never mind who I am, Mister Daniels,” she says, spitting the name out like it’s a piece of dirt on her tongue. “I’d worry about who you are.” She turns to me. “And you.”
“Wait,” Reggie say, stepping forward. “Eric, you know about Father Heall? Who is he?”
Eric frowns, shakes his head. He turns to me and asks, “You went there yesterday? You met him?�
��
I nod.
“Face to face?”
I shrug. “Yeah. Sort of. We talked.”
“You…talked. About what?”
“I don’t know. Stuff. About Arc and stuff. Eric, what’s going on?”
He pulls his Link out of his pocket and wakes the screen, then curses when it’s unable to connect to a Stream. “You’re taking me there,” he tells Sister Jane.
She shakes her head defiantly. “Oh no I’m not!”
“Fine. Reggie, you stay here with Kelly. Jess, can’t you show me?”
“Yeah…”
“Father Heall won’t be there,” Brother Walter repeats.
But something tells me he will be. Something tells me Micah knew it, too. That’s where he’s headed. He’s going to finish what Ben couldn’t. He’s going to kill Father Heall.
Eric wipes his hand over his face. “Can we make it there and back in…eight and half hours?”
I shake my head. “It’s thirty miles one way.”
“We’ll find a car—”
“No, Eric, you don’t know. I’ve been here for two weeks now. It’s not that easy.”
“It’ll have to be.” He checks his Link again. His lips move as he thinks to himself.
“Why?”
“Because, at eighteen-thirty hours tonight, Air Defense is going to napalm everything to hell.”
Sister Jane gasps. Brother Walter’s face goes white.
“Why?” I whisper.
“I told you things are bad on the mainland. The military wants Arc shut down, everything. The virus wreaking havoc in their computer systems originated from here, from Arc’s Gameland network through to the Streams.” He points at the building housing the mainframe and takes in a sharp breath as a flicker of pain crosses his face. “I had twenty-four hours to get you out. Then they’re going to bomb everything into oblivion.”
“Why?” I repeat.
“They think it’ll stop the spread of the virus in their defense systems. They want to take out all the towers, all the Players. Everything.”
“That’s idiotic!”
“Typical government overreaction. Arc’s going along with it, but only because it’ll erase all evidence of their involvement in you being here. They want deniability. For once, I agree.”
“But Father Heall will be killed! Sister Jane… All of them will be killed!”
“I can’t stop them. I barely managed to pull the strings I did.” He shakes his head. “Listen Jess, you said this guy has a treatment, right? You said you need the injections to stave off the infection?”
I nod.
“Then we have no choice. We have to go and find him. We’ll get him and bring him back with us.”
Sister Jane steps forward. “Don’t you really mean you want to kill him?”
“Why would he do that?” I demand. “Heall is the only person who can keep me alive. If he dies, I die.”
Sister Jane shakes her head. “Is your sister’s life worth getting your revenge?”
“What’s she talking about, Eric?”
“I’ll tell you, since he won’t,” Sister Jane answers.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls something out. I don’t immediately recognize the small rectangle of laminated plastic. “I found this with those photos you left behind in your pants.” She hands it over.
Eric gasps and asks me where I got it.
“I found it at Micah’s house.”
But then it comes to me, the connection.
Nobody speaks for a minute. Finally Reggie can’t stand it anymore. “Somebody want to tell me what the hell this is all about?”
I give him the card and he takes and stares at it for a moment, frowning. “Eugene Halliwell, Professor, Royce State College… Wait. Isn’t this the guy who killed your dad? What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“That’s Father Heall.”
Chapter 12
Did I know before I knew? Did I know that the man I’d sat alone with in that darkened basement, just the one naked bulb illuminating him from behind, did I know he wasn’t who he said he was? I guess maybe somewhere deep down I had sensed there was something…off about him. But it’s one thing to have a feeling and quite another to have the truth shoved in your face. The realization that I’d been sitting not six feet away from the man who had killed my father leaves me stunned for a moment.
“No,” Reggie says, shaking his head in disbelief. He fans the air with the ID card, as if the news is a fly that won’t leave him alone. “It’s not possible. He died.” He throws it into the dirt and jabs at it with his finger. “That man died. Fifteen years ago. He died because he fucking injecting himself with the stupid virus thinking he could cure himself. Except it didn’t work.”
“Reg—”
“No! Everyone knows what happened. Everyone knows the story. We had to fucking memorize it in school! And that stupid song… It’s history. Everyone knows it! He died and he came back as a zombie and he killed your father. He killed your father, Jessie. You didn’t meet him. You didn’t fucking talk to him. Zombies don’t talk. Everyone knows that. The man you met is someone else.”
“You’re right. The man I met wasn’t a zombie.”
“Then it’s not Halliwell! Halliwell was a zombie. The song, Jessie. Remember the song? Brains, brains everywhere. On the—”
“That’s enough!” Eric says, raising his voice for the first time. “You don’t have to remind us of that.” He paces, muttering to himself, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“When I was in the Marines,” he says, “I thought the other guys were just screwing with me, telling me some urban legend about a guy living in the wastes, teasing me because of who I am, who my father was. I never believed them. ‘Heall, that’s his name,’ they told me, as if it was some kind of sick joke. ‘Get it? Will Heall.’ Just some stupid pun. The guy who thought he could cure reanimation. The same stupid letters as in Halliwell. Everyone said he was here somewhere, still trying to find a cure. The mad scientist, half living, half dead. But these were marines, so I didn’t believe them. They hated what Halliwell stood for.”
“You hated him too,” I whisper.
“No, Jess. I didn’t.”
“He killed Dad. I understand how that makes you feel, but you can’t kill him. Not now.”
“No, Jessie, I hated Dad just as much. For what he’d done to the world. For what the world was doing to you. I hated him and I hated Grandpa for making him do what he did. I wanted to believe that there was someone out there looking for a cure—mad scientist or not. It didn’t matter if it was the same man—or thing—who had killed Dad.”
They lied to us. All these years, saying Halliwell had turned into a zombie. The whole time he was immune.
Not just immune, something more.
Walking right past that IU. Immune to the infection. Immune to them. Half alive, half dead. Whatever he did to himself all those years ago, it pushed him right to the edge. Now he straddles two world, one living, the other not.
Reggie doesn’t speak. He blinks rapidly, still shaking his head. “He escaped his lab. That’s the history. He went to your parents’ house and killed your father.”
“From Montana all the way to Virginia?” I ask. That part had always bothered me. Nobody had ever explained how that happened.
“So what? Everyone knew Halliwell hated your father.”
“Zombies don’t think. They don’t hatch murder plots. If Heall is Halliwell, then he didn’t die.”
“But he did die,” Brother Walter quietly says. “That much is true. And he did come back.”
For a moment the world stops. Even the breeze falters and the birds in the forest pause their singing. Everything is quiet and still.
“No—”
“The cure he was working on did fail. But not because it was faulty—although we’ll never know for sure now, since his records have gone missing. It failed because he miscalculated the titer of the virus and injecte
d himself with a thousand times too much. Even if the cure had been effective, tested like that on anyone else, it wouldn’t have been able to save them. They would have died and been reanimated from so much virus. But not him. Instead, his body—his own immunity—brought him back.”
“Brought him back from what exactly?” Reggie asks. “And to what?”
“I don’t think anyone really knows, least of all Father Heall himself.”
But Reggie is beyond simple logic. He’s mired in horror and denial. He turns to me, a look of revulsion on his face. “You did not put zombie blood into your spine!”
“Stop it, Reggie!”
“What?” Eric cries, shocked. “Put what where?”
“It’s okay,” I tell them. “Just calm down. Everybody calm down. Reggie…Eric.”
I turn to Sister Jane because if I don’t hold onto what little control I have left, I think I’ll go insane. “You knew? About Father Heall being Halliwell?”
“Of course I did. We all knew.”
“Before?” I ask. “Did you know before you were treated?”
She takes in a deep breath, slowly lets it. She and Brother Walter look at each other. Then Brother Walter shakes his head. “No. Not before we were treated. Just like you didn’t.”
“I think very few of us did,” Sister Jane adds. “Not till afterward. But it doesn’t matter. He saved our lives. Just as he’s saved yours.”
I reach into my pocket to fetch my inhaler, but it isn’t there. I can’t remember what I did with it. “Did Grandpa know?” I ask Eric. “Did he know the truth about Halliwell?”
He frowns. “I don’t know. Probably.”
“What about my medicine? What’s the truth about that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The medicine in my inhaler, what is it for?”
“Your immune sys—”
“Don’t feed me that bullshit line, Eric. What was it for?”
“Honest, Jess. I don’t understand why you’re asking about that.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 107