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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Please, Kelly… Reggie.” He tries to look at us, but the bailiff forcefully turns his head back toward the front of the courtroom. “Jessie, please,” he yells, his words muffled.

  “This concludes the hearing phase of the trial,” the judge abruptly announces. He slams the gavel once into his block.

  I expect him to retire to his chambers to consider the evidence—just like the judge in Seattle did—but he doesn’t. He sets his Link on the bench in front of him and says, as if reciting, “Micah Raymond Sandervol, I find you guilty of all counts before you. I hereby sentence you to conscription, to be executed without delay. Upon death, you will be assigned to either military or civil service. As a formality, I am obligated to ask if you have a preference, although in good conscience I must also inform you that there is no guarantee whatsoever it will be considered.”

  He pauses and stares down at Micah, who’s leaning over his lap, as if his stomach is cramping. Reggie has his face buried in his hands and Kelly’s face is blank and white. He stares at Micah, though I don’t think he’s seeing Micah anymore. He seems focused on something about a foot past him.

  Panic flares up from deep inside of me. It builds and threatens to erupt. I try to squelch it. I know what it is: doubt, self-loathing. How could we just sit here and do this? Are we even doing the right thing?

  Let the Undead bastard rot in some sewer somewhere.

  No!

  Another sob slips from my lips. The judge looks over, frowning. I turn away, ashamed, horrified.

  This time, when he slaps his gavel on the block, I jump. “This court is now adjourned. Bailiff, please prepare the guilty party for execution. You three,” he says, glancing over at us, “are to remain seated until you are called to be witnesses for the execution.”

  Chapter 37

  We don’t have long to wait. In fact, just about when we all get over our shock at the abruptness of the trial’s conclusion, another guard comes in and tells us to follow him. We stand and file out of the jury box and exit through the same door Micah had just disappeared out of. Now we’re in a sterile hallway, much like the one inside the Carcher Building in Hartford, totally bereft of color and detail. Even the shadows feel amorphous, shifting between eyeblinks. We follow along, one behind the other, our footsteps muffled despite the hardness of the floor. A faint tinge of antiseptic, overlaid with the musty smell of a damp mop permeates the air.

  “In here,” the guard says, unlocking an unmarked door and opening it up for us. “No speaking.”

  Reggie steps in first, then me. Kelly’s last. As soon as the door is closed, Kelly reaches over and tests the handle. “Locked,” he whispers.

  There are two rows of metal chairs, four in each, all facing the left wall, which has only a large viewing window. The room on the other side is dark. We move to the back row, where the chairs are elevated, not for the view but because we want to get as far away as possible from that window.

  “Reminds me of the room in LaGuardia,” Reggie says. “The one next to the guillotine. That fucking place gave me the creeps, but this one—”

  Kelly shushes him. It doesn’t work. Reggie keeps jabbering away, saying everything that crosses his mind—how they’re going to do it, whether they’re going to strap Micah down on a table or a chair, how long it’ll take, whether or not it’ll be painful. He grows steadily louder until a voice comes over the loudspeaker: “Quiet, please!”

  The lights in the other room snap on, while the lights in ours dim. There’s a stainless steel table situated square in the center of the room, orange straps attached at each corner and a pair coming through a central opening about a quarter of the way from the end to our right. The lights buzz so loudly that we can actually hear them. A door opens and a woman enters rolling a strange-looking machine on a cart, all stainless steel and lights and buttons and a small, dark screen. Every sound she makes is amplified and sent in to us through speakers over our heads. We can even hear her breathing.

  “Wonder if she can hear us,” Reggie asks. But if she can, she doesn’t acknowledge it.

  She positions the machine at the right end of the table and adjusts the middle straps, splaying them open. The machine is plugged in and appears to run through some sort of diagnostic startup procedure. The lights blink on then off, one by one, or turn from red to orange to green. She ignores all this and instead reaches into a drawer and pulls out a syringe and fills it from a vial she removes from the pocket of her paisley vest. With a start, I see that the fluid has the same fluorescent green appearance as the fluid Stephen injected into Kelly, the stuff that was supposed to turn him into a living, breathing zombie in a week. It’s been over two weeks since that happened, so either it’s not the same, or it is and Kelly’s injection didn’t work, or Halliwell’s blood somehow countered it. Only time will tell.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Kelly give a start of recognition. He turns to see my reaction, but I don’t meet his gaze. I just can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the scene in front of us.

  The woman finishes adding fluid to the syringe, flicks the air out, then snaps it into a bracket in the machine. She then begins to prepare a second syringe, this one with a thin, clear fluid. When she’s finished, it goes into its own bracket in the machine.

  “Ready in the Procedure Room,” she says into the intercom.

  “Give us a minute,” comes a canned-sounding male voice. “We’re having trouble with the scan.”

  She hesitates a moment, uncertain, before asking, “What’s the matter?”

  We all wait. The reply is long in coming: “Nobody checked for an implant. Scanners aren’t picking one up.”

  “We can’t proceed if—”

  “Hold on. We’re getting an x-ray.”

  Reggie turns to me, frowning. “Micah doesn’t have an implant?”

  “Of course he has an implant,” Kelly hisses.

  “I don’t think he does,” I say. “Do you remember when we were driving down to Manhattan to check out the tunnel opening? The guard at one of the checkpoints had trouble scanning it.”

  They both shake their heads.

  “He was checking our Links, pulling our implant identifiers off them and he kept trying with Micah’s, but it wasn’t working. Then Micah asked for the Link back. He did something to it. I can’t believe you don’t remember. He said something about getting his Link upgraded, but the strange thing was, his was one of the newer models.”

  “I know for sure he’s got an implant,” Kelly says, “because I went with him to Hartford last October when he had his procedure to put it in. It was right before Halloween and he joked about maybe going as a zombie. I mean, we didn’t really know the guy that well back then, but I kind of felt sorry for him, that his parents didn’t care enough themselves to take him for his implantation. I guess now we know why.”

  The intercom crackles and the male voice says: “We got it, Audrey. The scanner wasn’t finding it, but it’s there.”

  The woman inside the room steps over and asks, “Rejected?”

  “There’s no encapsulation.”

  “Then it must be one of the faulty ones. We can’t proceed until—”

  “I said there’s no sign of encapsulation, Aud. It’s functional. Something’s interfering with the scanner’s ability to query it. Sit tight. We’re bringing in one of Arc’s engineers.”

  “One hour,” she says. “I’ve already prepared the virus and it’s unstable. If it takes longer than that, then we’ll have to scrap the set-up and start fresh.”

  “Just sit tight,” the man repeats for the third time. He sounds impatient, like this is more of an inconvenience for him. Like maybe he has a date or something and doesn’t want to be late for it.

  The woman, Audrey, stares at the intercom for a moment, then gives it the finger.

  Reggie snorts.

  Kelly looks over at me and asks if I know what encapsulation is. I shake my head.

  “It’s when the body forms a sac around
the implant,” Audrey says, turning to the window. “Because of rejection.”

  Shit, Reggie mouths, hiding his face with his hand. She can hear us.

  That’s when I notice the camera in the corner of the ceiling, similar to the one I shot out in the mainframe room underneath Jayne’s Hill. I point it out to them.

  So they’ve been watching and listening to everything we’ve done and said. Probably recording it, including what Reggie said about the guillotine and LaGuardia. Kelly leans over, pressing his hands between his knees. He stares at the floor without moving. We’re afraid to do anything now, afraid of speaking or even gesturing.

  Audrey shakes her head and returns to the head of the table and fidgets some more with the machine.

  A couple minutes later, the door opens and two orderlies guide Micah into the room. He’s dressed only in a paper medical gown and it’s obvious he’s been drugged. His head lolls slightly with each toe-dragging step and his eyes don’t focus on anything. But he’s speaking—or trying to. Most of his words are slurred, incomprehensible. I don’t have to understand them to know he’s asking them to stop.

  Kelly stands up and makes his way to the aisle. Reggie tries to grab his arm. Kelly shrugs it off. “They can put us in here,” he says in a loud voice, “but they can’t force us to look.” He leans against the wall, his back to the window, and slowly slides down it until he’s kneeling. He cups his eyes in his hand and breathes through his mouth, looking like he’s trying not to be sick.

  “He did this to himself, brah,” Reggie says. “He did this, not us.”

  “No talking in there!” Audrey barks.

  A third man follows the orderlies, carrying a plastic case. After Micah is situated on the table and strapped in, still struggling weakly, the man removes a small black rectangular object from the case. It resembles a Link, but has wires extending out of it, which he connects to leads stuck to the back of Micah’s head.

  “Did you figure out the problem?” Audrey asks him.

  “Interference,” he replies. “Some sort of software glitch. Doesn’t happen very often.”

  “So it was a defective implant.”

  “The glitch was in his Link. See, the scanners function by querying the implant every six milliseconds, just like the network. His Link had a faulty program running on a perpetual loop, preventing us from querying. I’m working on a fix. In the meantime, we simply shut down his device and replace it with this.”

  “So, we’re ready?” Audrey asks.

  “Good to go,” he replies.

  I put a hand on Reggie’s arm. I can feel him shaking. I can’t tell if it’s anticipation or trepidation. I can’t tell which of those I’m feeling, though I know I’m shaking too. Reggie places a hand over mine, but he doesn’t look away from the window.

  Audrey flips a switch on the machine and the air fills with a high-pitched whine.

  Micah’s eyes go wide and he starts to struggle again, but he’s too tightly bound now to do much. Audrey wraps the remaining straps around his chest, then reaches down and pulls another set from under the head of the table. These she wraps around his forehead.

  “…please…” Micah begs. “…no…scent…”

  “Still claiming his innocence. Should we gag him?”

  “…luh…luh luh luhv…”

  “Can’t you shut him up?”

  “I would if I had a bite stick!” Audrey snaps. “Damn it. Whoever used the cart the last time didn’t restock it. I’ll be right back.”

  She hurries out, leaving the orderlies and the Arc engineer. The door stands open. For some reason, this fills me with anxiety.

  “…luhver…” Micah says, gagging. “Ah ah ah…luhver…”

  “Sounds like he’s saying he loves her,” one of the orderlies says, chuckling.

  “He said, ‘Oliver’s my lover,’ ” the other one jokes.

  “Fuck you,” the first man says.

  The engineer snickers and asks if Oliver is his name. The orderlies sneer at him.

  “…jag…go…” Micah mumbles.

  “Shut up.”

  “Da jag grode.”

  Audrey returns carrying another strap and pulls it under Micah’s jaw. This seems to snap him out of his daze. He twists out of the head strap and starts screaming and trying to bite her. “Nonono! I wooont tray tray…not tray.”

  “Damn it,” Audrey shouts at the orderlies. “Give me a hand here.”

  “Look for the jaggerco! Look for the jaggerco donner link!”

  “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  “Jagger scoe!”

  The three wrestle with Micah for a couple minutes. When they step back, Micah’s back in the head restraint, unable to move. Audrey is untangling the strap that will hold the bite stick in place.

  Micah moans once. The fight seems to go out of him. “I lover I love you IloveyouilovejejejessJESSIE—”

  The first needle hits him in the neck and starts emptying.

  Chapter 38

  “It was just babble,” Reggie whispers to me, after it’s all done.

  After the first injection, the clear one, when Micah’s eyes had rolled back in his head and his body had seemed as if an electric current was running through it, I’d realized I was biting my lip so hard that I’d made myself bleed. I don’t know how long that part lasted. I was in shock. I think we all were.

  “Just another of his tricks,” Reggie says.

  We’re back in his garage and he’s pacing again, wearing a hole in the thin carpet his father installed a couple summers ago.

  It’s just the three of us again. Mom had dropped us off. She hadn’t said a word on the ride back, and neither had we. I was afraid she’d try to tell me to come home with her, but I guess she’d seen the looks on our pale faces and somehow knew that we needed to sort this out ourselves.

  “He was just trying to screw us over.”

  We’d all heard what he said. It was unmistakable. It wasn’t babble.

  “You heard what that Arc guy said,” he continues. “He said Micah had a ‘glitch’ on his Link. That wasn’t a glitch. That was something he wrote so the network couldn’t control him! And to think, if he had died when we were with him, guess what? No fucking control!”

  Neither Kelly nor I remind him how ridiculous that is to focus on, especially given what we had to deal with on Long Island. But we don’t have the energy to do it.

  Reggie rages on for another half hour, but I stop listening to him. I can’t stop hearing Audrey announce the time of death. Strangely, I can’t for the life of me remember what that time actually was.

  Then the second injection, the green one. The virus.

  Then waiting.

  And waiting.

  Hours, it seemed. Days.

  Until a finger twitched.

  I’d gasped, not sure I’d seen it.

  Another twitch. No question that time.

  Reggie exhaling next to me, squeezing my arm. Relaxing. He’d been holding his breath the whole time, or close to it. Breathing shallowly, lungs already full of air. Holding for just that moment when Micah came back.

  Kelly was still on the floor against the wall, still hiding his face. I think he was crying.

  Time of Reanimation, Audrey said, three-oh-six.

  I remember that. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

  By the time they took him away, he was struggling against the straps again. The engineer, messing with something inside of his case, didn’t even seem concerned. We watched as the straps came off. He watched as Micah—dead Micah, Undead, blank-eyed, slack-jawed Micah—sat up, stood up. Snap of the fingers in his face, a momentary sharpening of his gaze, as if his eyes were focusing, a switch coming on inside. A low moan, a step toward Audrey. The other orderly—the one not named Oliver—had shied away reflexively. Both Oliver and Audrey had laughed at him, yukking it up. He’d turned a little red in the face and chuckled good-humoredly. Micah turning toward the sound of their laughter, moan turning to a
rabid hissing. Another step, sudden stop and a quick step back, as if he’d been jerked on an invisible chain.

  “That was me,” the engineer announced, fiddling with something inside the case. “Looks like we’ve got full control.”

  They walked him out then, both orderlies joking now. Audrey cleaning up. The engineer hanging back, discretely checking her out. His Link pinged and he jumped with surprise.

  “Bought? Already? Damn, that was quick.” Drifting out of the room, carrying his conversation with him.

  Bought?

  Audrey leaving.

  The lights snapping off.

  Our door opening.

  Mom standing there.

  “He didn’t love you,” Reggie says. “He only loved himself. Fucking liar.”

  Kelly looks at me. He knows what he heard. He’s thinking, thinking back over the past twelve, thirteen months. To when we broke up.

  You don’t deserve to be treated like that, ignored. Micah’s words to me, right before. Kelly’s ignoring you. You have needs, Jessie. You can do better.

  He was talking about himself.

  I love her. I love you, Jess—

  I squeeze my eyes shut.

  Would never betray her.

  Would never betray me is what he meant.

  What have we done, Micah? What did we do to you?

  Chapter 39

  I confess everything to Mom the next day, starting with my doubts about Micah’s guilt, his last words, right before—

  we

  —they killed and reanimated him. I tell her about his Link and the program and how obsessed he was with trying to hack into Arc’s systems. She listens. She doesn’t ask very many questions, but I can tell she’s trying to understand, trying to be a good mother.

  I tell her about the tracking app and about Micah hacking into our Links. I want her to tell me we didn’t make a terrible mistake.

  Look for the Jacker’s code on her Link.

  Did he mean me? Ashley?

  I still have her Link.

  “He deserved it,” Mom says, trying to reassure me. “He betrayed you. That boy came to this town and he found you and he used you. He betrayed your trust and your friendship.”