“Computers aren’t human beings, shithead.”
“It’s an analogy, Reg. Just try and stay with me.”
Reggie kicks a metal panel out of frustration, making it rattle.
“But if the immune system is too strong, it begins to attack its host. That’s what the Arc firewall is doing. All SST has to do is sit back and wait for the codex to eat itself. Arc’s installing patches to fix their native programs, but that’s the wrong approach. Giving the firewall and the virus both something to chew on is the key.”
“So, what are you doing?”
“Hacking them both.”
“To do what?”
“I’m going to try and kill them.”
“You kill them and SST will have unfettered access,” Eric says.
“Maybe. But if I don’t, we die.” He lifts his hands from the screen and sits up. “It’s your choice. I’ll stop right now if you want me to.”
The three of us look at each other. Nobody speaks. Nobody wants to be the one to decide.
“Do it,” Eric says. He nods once.
“Are you sure?” I ask him.
“No, but we’re out of options, aren’t we? We can sort out the consequences afterward, whatever they may be.”
Micah waits. Finally I nod. “Whatever you have to do,” I tell Micah, “it damn well better be quick. Even if it works, we may not even have enough time to get to the airport.”
He resumes coding.
I pull Eric aside and ask him about the tunnel, about whether it’ll still be open.
“Assuming SSC hasn’t blocked it, it should be,” he answers. But the look on his face doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
“How much longer?” I ask Micah.
He shrugs, doesn’t answer right away. “Hard to say. Once I’m finished, I’ll need to test it. Half hour, maybe.”
“You got three minutes,” I tell him. “Keep an eye on him, Eric. I’m going out to check on Kelly and Reg.”
Five minutes later they all come out. Micah’s got his hands tied up again behind him again.
“It’s done.”
“And?”
“Well,” Micah says, shaking his head, “we’ll see. Both the firewall and the hack are still running, but I’ve diverted them to allow the basic system processes to function unhindered.”
“Is the wall up? That’s all I want to know! It doesn’t feel up.”
“No time to run any diagnostics.”
“Can we just get in the fucking car and go?” Reggie says. “Christ.”
We get in and he cranks the engine. It sputters and coughs. He tries again, pumping the gas, but the engine just lets out a choked belch.
“Shit,” he breathes, and tries again with the same result.
“Take it easy,” Eric tells him. “I think you just flooded it. Just give it another crank without the gas.”
“But don’t run down the battery,” I add.
Reggie gives me a dark look in the mirror. “Not helpful.”
He turns the key again. The motor clicks and chugs. Around us the shadows begin to shift. We all see them coming again, but nobody speaks.
“Third time’s a charm, right?”
“That was the third time.”
“Who’s counting?”
He turns the key and the engine spits, catches, fails, then catches again. This time it stays on. “Better hope that wall is on, brah,” Reggie tells Micah, as he puts the car into gear. “Or we’re going to hold a raffle to see who gets to shoot you.”
Chapter 27
I start feeling itchy almost immediately. I don’t know if it’s the wall or nerves, so I keep it to myself. I don’t want to say anything that might hex us.
Reggie keeps his eyes on the road, his chin hanging over the steering wheel and his knuckles white. He speeds back out onto the highway, sideswiping a parked car and taking out a bicycle that has mysteriously appeared in the middle of the street. “I don’t remember that being there before,” he says through clenched teeth.
“Slow down,” Eric warns. “Or we’ll never get there.”
But Reggie doesn’t. He jumps the curb, then slams on the brakes. He grabs Eric’s Link and sprints to the wall, waving it over the surface. For a moment nothing happens. Then there’s a momentary increase in the itching inside my head and the opening appears.
A second later, Reggie’s back in the car and edging into the darkness, swearing under his breath that we’re not going to fit.
“Better hope the wall doesn’t shut down while—”
But the back wall closes and the front opens up. Reggie guns it and we rocket out the other side.
“Good fucking riddance to that place.”
“Just hurry. We’ve got nineteen minutes.”
Nineteen minutes to drive twenty-five miles. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with his wrist and says, “We’re not going to make it.”
“It’s a straight shot on the Long Island Expressway.”
He shoots me a panicked look. “We’re not on the Long Island Expressway! We’re on the freaking Northern State Parkway!”
“Just go west!” Eric shouts.
We fly through the town of Jericho and the road feels like it’s veering south, away from LaGuardia. The sun slips over the hood over to the right hand side of the windshield. Reggie squints through the dust and tries the wipers, but there’s no washer water inside them and all it does is make the glare worse.
We pass a sign for Wantagh, and we all stare at it as we go, trying to remember where Wantagh was in relation to LaGuardia.
“Don’t you have a map on your tablet?” I ask Micah.
“Yeah, but I left it hooked up back there.”
“You did what?”
“I had to. It was still running. How do you think—?”
“Sonofabitch,” Reggie mutters.
“Can’t you speed this thing up?” I cry.
“We’re going eighty-five as it is. The damn thing’s going to fall apart.”
“You need to go faster!”
“Don’t tell me how to dri— Fuck!” He spins the wheel to the right and we all slam to the left. The car screeches along the barrier and for a second it looks like we’re going to crash. Memories of the IUs attacking the other car come to my mind, of them pulling Brother Malcolm out and eating him. Of Brother Matthew trying to escape.
The tires screech on the cracked asphalt, spraying loose gravel. One moment Reggie’s losing control, the next the tires catch and the car rocks and judders and careens, but holds its course. “Sonofabitching hell! Who the hell built this road! You don’t put a freaking turn like that on a highway!”
Nobody speaks. We’re all still trying not to be sick. A moment later we’re screaming down the Long Island Expressway and sign flashes past: “LaGuardia Aprt 17 mi.”
I catch Eric checking his Link. He looks up at me, his lips pressed into a thin line. He gives his head a single shake. But I’d seen the time. Six nineteen. Eleven minutes to get seventeen miles. We’d have to be going a hundred to make it.
Nobody says anything. The engine noise is too loud anyway. Instead, we all sink into our own thoughts and worries and watch with terrified eyes as the scenery flashes past. We roar over the Cross Island Parkway, screaming past the shopping center where we’d spent the night in the sporting goods store. I can’t even remember now what happened to the autographed bat Kelly found, nor who it was supposed to be signed by. Tom something-or-other. Selleck, maybe. Tom Selleck. The name rings a bell. It doesn’t matter. The guy’s long dead. Or Undead.
The car rises up over the Clearview expressway, hurtles over the hump in the middle, the tires nearly leaving the road. A zombie flashes past the passenger side window.
“Close one.”
“Look out!”
Reggie doesn’t have time to react. We hit it square in the center of the car. The body flips over the hood, shatters the windshield, flies over us before we can even blink. Then it’s on the road behind
us, tumbling, rolling, limbs breaking, a puff of powder as its head explodes. It happens so quickly that we don’t have time to react. Reggie squints through the cracks in the glass and we keep right on going.
Micah lets out a long breath. “Darwinian selection, eh?”
Eric and I both turn to him, frowning. “Darwin was quack,” Reggie snaps. “Didn’t you pay attention in school?”
But Micah ignores him. “Natural selection. Survival of the fittest, for zombies who look both ways before crossing.” He snickers.
Why did the zombie cross the road?
Reggie orders him to shut up.
BRAINZZZZ!
Three minutes later, we come to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where I’d seen the egrets. They’re not there now, and I wonder if they somehow know what’s about to happen. I wonder if they’ve flown off someplace safe.
Memories.
Everything unwinds. Like time going backwards, spooling out again.
Not unwinding. Unraveling.
The world is unraveling. Soon, we’ll be nothing but loose threads.
“Six thirty,” Eric quietly says.
We take the ramp for the Grand Central going sixty-five. The tires shriek and the car skids and twists, tires bouncing. Once again we hit the center divider, bounce off, overcorrect. Nobody so much as blinks. We all hold on, clenching our jaws and fingers and toes, gripping anything we can—seatbacks, consoles, each other. Micah and Eric stare out their respective windows. Kelly’s blissfully unconscious. From where I’m sitting, I can’t see very much.
“Anything yet?”
They both shake their heads.
Five miles. Five miles to the terminal. Then we have to make it to the tunnel. We have to get underground as far as we can go. Six thirty-two. Still no planes.
I turn to Eric to ask again about the tram. I want him to tell us it’s there and ready to take us away. But before I can, Reggie points out into the sky through the right-hand side of the shattered windshield.
“Here they come,” he says. “Still far away, just dots in the sky. We can make it. We can make it.”
Four miles, now three. We might. We might beat them. Just don’t stop. Don’t slow down.
Reggie starts growling under his breath, rocking in his seat. His hands are like claws on the steering wheel. He glares at some spot in the road perpetually a hundred feet in front of us.
“Come on,” he says. “Come on come on come on! They’re still far away. We can make it.”
But then Micah starts to laugh. We turn to look at him and his laughter becomes almost hysterical. “You idiot!” he says, still laughing so hard he’s barely coherent. “You stupid idiot!”
Chapter 28
“Birds,” he says. “They’re birds, not planes.”
Nobody speaks. We’re all too stunned.
“Shut him up,” Reggie snaps.
“Regrets,” Micah says.
“What?”
Egrets! He said they’re egrets, not regrets. I doubt Micah knows what a regret is.
Seeing the birds, I think it must be a sign of good luck.
“Somebody, please, shut his trap,” Reggie growls, but now his eyes flick between the road and the flying objects. By now it’s clear they’re not airplanes.
We pass into the shadow of the outer wall near Willets Point and suddenly our view of everything to the north and east is blocked off.
Two miles.
One and a half.
One, and it’s six forty one.
Reggie opens his window and listens for the sound of airplane engines, but the roar of the wind is too loud. I want to yell at him to close the window. I want to tell him to slow down.
I want him to keep driving straight off the island and never stop.
LaGuardia loom large in the windshield, and for a moment it seems as if that’s exactly what he’s going to do is just keep driving. But at the last second he spins the wheel and we shoot into the arrivals lane and the sky disappears from view. There’s the Marriott to the left, the parking structure where Kelly discouraged us from getting the car. I almost laugh at how ludicrous his excuse sounds to me now. Did he know something back then? Was he just trying to stall, to buy time before we got to Gameland?
Reggie slams on the brakes and we all crash into the backs of the seats in front of us. Halliwell half-crumples to the floor. The tires screech as we skid to one of the entrances, but Reggie tells us to hold on. He jerks the wheel to the right and presses on the gas. The car jumps the curb, flattening both front tires and slamming my head into the roof of the car, wrenching my neck. We head straight for a cement pole going at least forty. It flashes past. There’s a crash and we’re inside the terminal, glass flying everywhere. Now Reggie’s trying to stop, but the floor is too slick and we leap a baggage carousel, crash down the other side, then slide to a stop against the Welcome kiosk.
“Get out!”
We tumble out. Eric reaches back in and yanks Kelly out, screaming in pain. Micah tries to open the door with his knee, but he can’t, so I reach over and tug on the handle and he pushes against it and falls out. Then there are hands on me, pulling me, dragging me out of the car.
Kelly’s already on a luggage cart, Reggie shoving it ahead of him, starting to run, heading for the employee-only door where the tram is located.
“What about Halliwell?”
But Eric grabs my arm in one hand and Micah’s in the other, shoving Micah ahead of him. We run. We run like the devil himself is after us. And he is, except he is fire and noise and annihilation. We run into the dark tunnels and the tram is not there. We run and run, heading deep beneath the East River toward what used to be Hunts Point. We run and we run and we run some more, and the tunnel is dark and the only light keeping us from slamming into the walls and tripping over the rails is from our Links. We run until we can’t run any more. Then we walk. And only the rasps of our breathing and the slaps of our footsteps reach our ears. No explosions. No collapsing tunnels or sudden rush of air or water.
By the time we reach the other end and emerge from what seems to be an abandoned warehouse, we’re too exhausted, too drained to celebrate our escape. The sun has gone down by then, and the sky above is clear and the stars are out and twinkling high above us.
We turn our faces to the south, to the long, low darkness that hovers over the water, at the shadows that dwell there. And hunt there. And live and hide there. We marvel at the unexpected quiet and the calm and realize there never was going to be any bombing.
We curse the lies. Eric curses Grandpa, spitting and fuming angrily, even though we should be celebrating our safe escape.
And I can’t help but wonder if Eric really knew. I wonder if Grandpa might not be dead after all.
PART THREE (B)
New Beginnings
Chapter 29
Each night I lie in bed and think I’ll never fall sleep, yet somehow I always do. That’s what kills me, that I can. Sometimes it’s after tossing and turning for hours upon hours, my mind running circles around itself. Sometimes I can’t remember a single thing after lying down until I wake up the next morning. It’s like my body and mind are two completely unsynchronized entities, neither of which I have any control over.
Each morning when I wake, it’s always the same: the sound of Shinji’s barks in my ears and his name on my lips. Not Ashley’s name. Not Jake’s or Julia’s. Not Kelly’s. I wake and rise and go out into the house and, since our self-imposed quarantine ended, out into the world. It’s like nothing ever happened. Like nothing has changed. Except everything has changed. It’s changed, and yet everything still appears the same.
On our fourth day back, Eric knocks on my bedroom door and tells me for the fiftieth time that I need to make an appointment to go to Citizen Registration so I can explain to them about my Link, how I have the old one back and no longer need the new one. “See if they’ll reduce the fine or something,” he says.
Kelly fixed Reggie’s Link, dug an old solder
ing set out of somewhere and somehow managed to reattach the wires to the transmitter. They tried it out for a couple days, giving it a thorough workout, before returning my replacement. It still has the dent in it, but at least it works properly and doesn’t shut down. More than once, however, I’ve wondered if Reggie worries about it crashing again. Something tells me he’s moved past the point of worrying. We’ve all become detached from the idea of living. Death feels imminent, inevitable.
Very few people know about what happened to us, where we were and why and what happened. Which is strange. Then again, nobody’s really paying all that much attention to us. It was a big deal when we disappeared, but quickly forgotten after we returned. There are even bigger problems to deal with right now, greater concerns. Not outbreaks or invasions, but rather problems with the Streams, with Survivalist, with… with the minutiae.
And that’s the really frustrating thing of all. I look around and it seems like everyone and everything everywhere is normal, like all hell hasn’t broken loose, or about to. The Streams still spoon feed us the same old propagandist bullshit—that is, when they’re actually working, which is less reliably. Media still runs Survivalist, although most of it’s older material. Nobody cares. As long as they get their daily dose of zombie beheadings they’re happy. As long as the world doesn’t suddenly tilt ninety degrees and go apeshit. That’s all they care about.
But apeshit is what I’m waiting for. I can feel it coming.
Long Island is still there. Gameland is still there. Slumbering. About to wake up.
This morning I saw an episode of Survivalist and I thought I heard a dog barking in the background. I couldn’t be sure. I plan on watching again on the evening Stream.
That kills me, too. It kills me that I’ve become obsessed with the show, watching it for hours on end. I can’t get enough of it. Day and night, looking, searching. Always searching.
Not for Jake.
Or Ashley.
I know I won’t see them.
But for Shinji.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 114