“Because Brother Matthew told me the medicine did something to the treatment, masked it or blocked it or something. He said the treatment wouldn’t work. If Hea— If Halliwell knew that, then Grandpa had to have as well, since he was the one who kept pushing me to take it.”
Sister Jane shakes her head. “Well, it obviously didn’t block the treatment. When we found you, you were clearly feverish. You were going to turn.”
“That’s because I ran out of the medicine days ago. It would’ve been out of my system.”
Eric’s face grows dark. The muscles in his cheek ripple and he struggles to control his emotions. “I always thought there was something fishy about it.”
“So, all this time,” I ask Sister Jane, “you knew I was Richard Daniels’ daughter. That’s why you distrusted me. Did Micah tell you?”
She shakes her head. “I actually didn’t know until yesterday morning, right after he told me to accompany that boy to fetch his son.”
“Father Heall told you who I am?”
She shakes her head. “It was Sister Dorothy who did. She said Brother Matthew accidentally let it slip at breakfast. She wanted me to know who you really are—who that boy I was supposed to watch was associated with—so that I could protect myself.”
“That’s why you were so cold to me yesterday. The other night, when Micah and I showed up, you didn’t know. You’d been really nice to me then. But yesterday…”
“It was your father who made the Deceivers, turned the Children into abominations.”
I tear my eyes from her and turn back to Eric. “And you don’t have an inhaler?”
“Me? No. My immune system is fine.”
“Well, turns out, mine is too.”
“I’m still not sure I believe all this,” Reggie says, “but why do you think Micah’s going to kill him?”
“Because that’s what Ben was planning to do. He said the SSC wanted him dead, out of their way. Arc was content not to kill him because they could control him here on the island.”
“Then you’d better get moving. Micah’s already got a good head start on you.”
“He’s right,” I say, turning to Eric.
“Even if you do find him,” Sister Jane warns, “Father Heall will never come back with you.”
“He has to. He’ll die here if he doesn’t, and I can’t let that happen.”
“They can’t bomb the whole island,” she argues. “Can they?”
“I don’t know. I suppose.”
“What about the others?” I ask.
“They won’t go, either,” Brother Walter says. “None of us will. We’d rather die here.”
“What about Julia?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“I’m not going to argue with you people,” Eric says. “You can do what you wish, but I have to take Halliwell back. On that point there is no debate. He’s just too valuable to the world.”
He turns to me. “I’ll pack up some supplies. You should eat something before we leave.”
I want to ask him if he thinks he’s up for a sixty-mile round trip across zombie infested lands, but I can see he won’t be swayed. Even as I watch him walk away clutching his side, I know it’s a moot point. He’ll go. He intends to find Father Heall.
Professor Halliwell.
He needs to find the man who can save me.
The man who killed our father.
He needs to bring him back to the world to right the wrongs my father and grandfather caused.
For revenge.
Brother Walter and Sister Jane walk off in the opposite direction, whispering anxiously to each other.
Finally, when we’re alone, Reggie asks the question he’s been waiting to ask since I got back: “So?”
I sigh, shake my head. “Ben’s dead.”
“And?”
“She shot him. It was the last thing she did.”
He nods once, then walks away.
Chapter 13
“It’s thirty miles, Eric.”
He adjusts his pack and keeps walking.
“Are you sure they’re going to bomb?”
“They were planning to already, Jessie. Air Defense was set to start last night. I got them to back off twenty-four hours once we learned you were still on the island. But there’s no way they’ll wait any longer.”
“You? You got them to postpone the bombing? Air Defense?”
He sighs, stops and turns to me. “I told Grandpa. He’s still got connections. He did it.”
I can imagine how much it pained him to beg Grandpa to help, even with something like this.
“So, he knows I’m here?”
“Yeah. We may not see eye to eye on much, Jess, but we do share one thing in common: our love for you. We’d both do anything to protect you.”
My throat threatens to close off. I try and swallow to loosen it, but it doesn’t help.
“He may not be very well liked anymore—none of us is, to tell the truth—but he still has friends in high places. When I pinged him and told him I’d found you, he managed to call in a few favors. Including the fly-over clearance so I could get here. And the evac. You may think he’s been out of the loop for a while, but he’s still very much involved where the Omegas are concerned.”
I don’t say anything for several minutes as we continue on our way. We’re heading due south, toward a residential area Micah and I had seen on our way here days ago. But without Micah’s tablet and the map, we’re relying solely on my memory of the area, and considering that we were being chased at the time, I just can’t be sure we’re even in the right place. When I mentioned this to Eric, he shrugged and said, “Do your best, Jess. We walk in any direction long enough, we’re bound to hit some houses.”
“Why houses?”
“Cars,” he’d answered. “Specifically, cars stored inside garages. It’s the gasoline inside the tanks I’m worried about. Stored properly, gas can last almost indefinitely. Exposure to heat and air can make it go bad.”
“But the noise…”
“It’s worth the risk, Jess. It’s the only way we’ll get there and back in time.”
“And when we reach the wall?”
“Find a way through. Then start again looking for another car on the other side.”
“And if we get trapped?”
His hand drops to his EM pistol. The meaning is clear. But even I know EM is of limited benefit. Its range is small—maybe thirty feet—and the avenue it clears for escape from attacking zombies isn’t very wide. “A forty-three degree arc,” he’d once told me. It scrambles implants for a good thirty minutes, and even messes up non-implanted IUs for about half that amount of time, but it also takes about three minutes to recharge. More than enough time for a large enough swarm of zombies to close any gap opened up by an EM blast.
I reach back instinctively for my pistol before remembering I no longer have it. I do have the rifle, though, slung over my shoulder. But it too has it’s disadvantages.
For being in such pain as he is, he walks quickly, stepping lightly over downed branches and making sure to place his feet on the soggiest leaf litter to avoid making any unnecessary noise. He’s much quieter than I am, and it makes me appreciate him a little more.
We emerge from the wood into the bright daylight on a road buried inches deep in a decade’s worth of fallen, rotting leaves. The only way we know it’s a road is by the relative lack of growth on it. Give it another five years, though, and I think it’ll be completely buried.
“Right or left?”
He points left. “We keep heading east.”
We walk through the shade for a few more minutes before he asks how I’m doing.
“Fine. You?”
He adjusts his pack again and I see him wince. “I’ll be better once we get a car.”
His face is flushed. Large beads of sweat drip down his face and neck and swirl into his shirt collar.
“We should drink some water,” he says, as if sensing me
watching him.
“I’ll get yours.”
“Thanks.”
After our break, we set off again. This time he stays by my side, rather than leading me. He glances over, his lips pressed tightly together.
“What?” I ask.
“You,” he answers.
I don’t ask for clarification. I don’t need to. I already know what he’s going to say, or at least I get the gist of it.
“Leaving for the Marines,” he eventually says, “leaving you and Mom, that was the second most difficult thing I ever had to do.”
“Mom.” I chuff. “She probably didn’t even notice for a month that you were gone. I doubt she even knew I was.”
“Don’t be so hard on her.”
“No? Why shouldn’t I? We needed a parent growing up. Where was she? Out getting drunk and screwing everything with a prick—”
He whirls around at me and gets in my face. “You don’t know what she went through, Jessie,” he hisses.
“I was there!”
“Keep your voice down.”
“You think she deserves my pity? Or my sympathy? I needed a mother. I needed a father. But all I got was you. No offense, but you just weren’t ready to be a grown up.”
“I tried.”
“Screw you. Screw you and her. You didn’t try. You ran away, too. The only one who didn’t was Grandpa.”
“I’m sorry, Jess. What more can I say? I tried. I really did. I was selfish and I ran away. Is that what you want to hear? But I came back. I came back because of you.”
I’m quiet for a while, unsure of my own feelings. Finally I sigh and say, “I know. I don’t know if it would’ve made any difference actually, if Mom had been around and sober when I was growing up. I’m not sure she could’ve done anything to stop the crap I was going through in school.”
We pass the driveway to a house and he stops and looks up before shaking his head. “Garage door’s open. No car. We’ll try the next one.”
We keep walking.
“Did they tease you in high school?” I ask.
“Brutally.”
“And the Marines?”
“What’s worse than ‘brutally’?”
“So why did you do it? Why did you enlist?”
“Because, I…” He hesitates before answering. “Because I thought I deserved it. I was punishing myself for what Dad and Grandpa did. Like Mom is punishing herself.”
I want to tell him she isn’t punishing herself. She just has no self-restraint. But all I say is, “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I eventually figured that out. That’s why I went into NCD.”
“But nobody respects them, either.”
“I don’t care about respect. I just want to understand, Jessie. I want to understand them, the Undead. And us, the living. Nobody takes time to do that anymore.”
We reach an intersection and the thicker bracken gives way to stretches of wild grass. Beyond us are the outskirts of a neighborhood, the silent gray houses standing mute and faded among the brilliant green trees and overgrown yards.
“We’ll find something here.”
He steps off the road and into the longer grass.
“Wait!”
He turns.
“What was the first?” I ask. “The hardest thing you ever had to do?”
His face softens. “Coming home.”
Chapter 14
It takes six tries and the combined juice of four extra automobile batteries—“a battery bank,” Eric calls it—before we manage to get a car to start. We don’t even need to hotwire it. The key was on a hook in the kitchen labeled, “J’s car.”
“It’s a sign,” Eric tells me.
“Kelly knows how to hotwire cars.”
“Who do you think taught him how to do it?”
It troubles me that I didn’t know that. I can’t help but feel a small pang of jealousy knowing they’d actually spent time together.
He must see the look on my face because he smiles thinly and says, “It’s no big deal. Wasn’t like we were buddies or anything. Just…sometimes he’d have a question about old tech and he’d come and ask me about it.
“You’ll have to teach me how to do it, hotwire a car.”
He shakes his head. “Someday, maybe.”
By the time we’ve gotten the engine to run, the Undead have heard us and have started to congregate outside the house. Eric sits in the driver’s seat and presses on the gas to clear the lines. When he’s convinced it won’t stall, he gets out, leaving the engine on. It chugs unevenly and sounds terrible.
“So, how do we do this?” I ask, loading our packs into the backseat along with some packages of food and water we’ve managed to scrounge up in the houses we’d searched.
Eric unhooks the daisy chain of batteries and heaves them one by one onto the floor in back, grunting even more deeply with each one. In the trunk is a shovel, a hatchet and a couple hockey sticks. In the back seat are a nest of kitchen knives. “You’ll drive,” he finally answers.
“I don’t have my license on me.”
He rolls his eyes, smirks.
“I meant, how are we going to get past them? They’re right outside blocking the driveway. As soon as we open the door, they’re going to come in after us. I can’t just run them over.”
“I’ll go around to the other side of the house and draw them away. When I get back and am in, gun it.”
“Gun it?”
“Yeah, go. Fast enough to ram through the garage door. It’s fine, really. Nobody cares. Just make sure you don’t drive us into the house across the street.”
“Why don’t you drive?”
“Because, Jess, I can’t turn the steering wheel. And there’s no way I’m going to let you try and draw them away while I sit inside the car and wait for you.”
“That’s a pretty chauvinistic thing to say.”
“It is what it is, Jess. I’m your brother. Cut me some slack. Now, once we’re on the street, keep the speed over ten miles an hour, but not too fast. Without a map, we’ll have to use road signs. I don’t want to end up on a dead end.”
Once more I wish we had the tablet. If I hadn’t left it behind when I’d gone on my little jaunt this morning, Micah wouldn’t have snagged it. Not having a map is bad enough, but what if he tries to do something? What if he manages to get back into the network? If it should come back up, he’d have access to everything again, including knowing exactly where each and every one of us is.
“No paper maps inside?”
Eric shakes his head. “People stopped using paper maps years before the evacuation. Just take it nice and easy and hopefully we won’t have to do much backtracking.”
I remember how quickly the IUs surrounded the car after the crash. If we have to stop or—God forbid—if the cars stalls out, chances are we won’t be able to escape on foot.
He steps to the door leading into the house and says, “Keep the car door open. Then, as soon as I’m in—”
“I know, gun it. Just…”
He stops and waits for me to finish.
“Just hurry up, Eric. I don’t have all day.”
I sit inside the car, listening to the irregular chug of the engine as it struggles not to fail. It shakes for a time, then runs smoothly for a few seconds, then starts to shake again, coughing and sputtering. The air is thick with the stink of unspent fuel.
I press on the accelerator and the engine keeps complaining, just a lot louder. Something starts to clank. I let go and the clanking goes away, but the car nearly stalls.
“Hurry up, Eric,” I mutter, applying a little more pressure on the gas. I find a place where the engine runs a little more smoothly and the clanking isn’t so bad. I tell myself that we just need to get to the wall, two and half miles away.
Then you’ll just have to start the whole damn process all over again.
It wasn’t so bad. An hour, at the most.
And who knows how long before you figure out a way to g
et through.
I remember Eric telling me he had keys, but with the wall off-line, they won’t work. Our best bet would be to go back to where Ben blew a hole through it.
If you can even remember where that was.
“Come on, Eric,” I say, louder this time, wishing I could drown out the voice inside my head.
And suddenly the door to the house slams open and he stumbles out. I take my foot off the gas. The engine begins to sputter. He waves at me to get back in.
“I’m fine. Just bumped into a cabinet. Hurts like hell. Go. Go! Should be clear.”
I pull my feet in and close the door as he climbs into the back seat and flops down on it, sweeping the knives onto the floor. His face is as white as snow and he’s sweating terribly.
“What are you waiting for?”
I turn around, put the car into gear, and slam my foot onto the pedal. The engine screams and the tires squeal. We don’t move. Smoke begins to fill the garage. The engine threatens to quit.
“Parking brake! Release the parking brake, Jessie!”
“Where the hell is it?”
“The pedal, next to your left foot. Push it!”
I do and it springs up and since I’ve still got my right foot on the gas the car lurches forward and slams into the garage door and the steering wheel gets wrenched out of my hands and suddenly it’s daylight and I’m careening across the yard, heading straight for a large decorative boulder that’s now surrounded by a hillock of weeds.
I grab the wheel and jerk it to the right and the boulder flashes past me and the car fishtails and the back slams into it. Eric shouts and I yelp. A zombie flips over the hood and crashes into the windshield before slipping off to the left. I hear it go under the back tires as we slide. There’s a muted crunch, and then we’re on the street.
“Wrong way! Turn around. You’re heading straight toward the cul-de-sac.”
“Damn it. I knew you should’ve driven, Eric.”
“Just calm— Jesus! Watch it.”
The mailbox I clip teeters, then falls into the street behind us.
“Slow down. Just follow the circle around and come back. That’s it.”
I let my foot off the accelerator and the engine coughs but keeps going. I chance a glance back in the rearview. Eric’s sitting up now, a look of agony on his face. He’s clutching his chest, squeezing a fistful of shirt. The tendons in his neck stand out as he strains.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 108