TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE GAMELAND SECOND SEASON OMNIBUS
Signs of Life
(Jessie's Game, Book One)
A Dark and Sure Descent
(Being a True Account of the Long Island Outbreak)
Dead Reckoning
(Jessie's Game, Book Two)
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Full copyright notice
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Tanpepper Tidings Newsletter
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Excerpt
The Last Zookeeper
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THE GAMELAND SEASON TWO OMNIBUS
Signs of Life (Jessie's Game, Book 1)
A Dark and Sure Descent
Dead Reckoning (Jessie's Game, Book 2)
by Saul Tanpepper
© 2015
All rights reserved (full notice)
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SIGNS OF LIFE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Part One: Survivors
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Part Two: Players
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42
Part Three: Operators
43 44 45 46 47 48 49
50 51 52 53 54 55 56
57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69
Epilogue
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Prologue
It was the woods behind her house. Jessie recognized the place immediately, though she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there. She’d last been conscious of the television in her house— on the screen a pair of unfamiliar Players battling it out to the death, although they hadn’t been the reason she was watching the show. But that setting had been the typical urban wasteland of the arcade and not the lush greenness of this place.
The actual gaming arena was located sixty miles away by road, roughly half that by air over the mined swamps and deeper waters of Long Island Sound. Physical access to Gameland was, of course, restricted to the Undead. For just a moment, before she recognized the woods, she’d thought she was back there.
The narrow strip of greenery was one of the last in southeastern Connecticut; it was certainly the largest. Like a hastily stitched tear, it followed a meandering cut in the bedrock where water once flowed, drawing the two irregular halves of the city of Greenwich together. The ghost of the stream, once called Rockwood Creek, had its origins in the warrens of the old Mianus River State Park to the north; its opposite terminus disappeared into the concrete culverts on the Port Chester side of town.
Yet, despite its vibrant, verdant beauty, few people ever visited the place anymore. For most, the abundance of mosquitoes kept them away. The fear of becoming infected, though largely unfounded and routinely discredited, remained stubbornly persistent.
Being a low point in the city’s topography, storm wash naturally accumulated along the edges of the greenbelt. The city had long ago decided to stop sending in cleanup crews, since the Undead laborers had an annoying habit of getting themselves tangled up in the dense undergrowth. It was both a hassle and a risk to the living to have to cut them free.
It’d been years since Jessie had last walked these overgrown trails. She hadn’t planned on coming here. Hadn’t even been thinking about the place.
It’s a dream. You must’ve fallen asleep.
Except it didn’t feel like a dream. The visuals were much too vivid. The brilliant sunlight. The trees. This just felt too real.
What the hell’s going on?
The stream was mostly gone, of course. Not a surprise. Years of drought and sweltering heat had whispered away all but the deepest pools. During the dry season, there was barely enough moisture left in the ground to nourish the native growth. Maple trees grew stunted, disfigured leaves, like arthritic hands curled into fists. They bore a permanent reddish-yellow hue. The willows seemed to tolerate the persistent heat better, perhaps owing to their more extensive root systems. But the vines, recent invaders to the place, thrived. They strangled the tree with their varicose ropes, and seemed perfectly suited to this new clime. They had an ability to suck the moisture from the very air itself.
The rains had come early this year— not enough to flood the creek bed, but enough to saturate the dirt where it pooled. There had been an explosion of recent undergrowth. Grass and mushrooms flourished, but it was the long-dormant reeds and cattails which currently dominated the low-lying areas. The air was redolent with the aroma of their pollen, moldy and sweet. The underlying scent was musky, organic— the cloying pong of decay.
Jessie smelled none of this. She knew only what she saw. Her memories filled in the other sensory details.
There was a time when the stream had been deep enough and wide enough to wade into past her waist. The cool water had been a guilty pleasure, the mud and algae squishing between her toes. The mesmerizing way the dappled sunlight would play off the oily streaks on the surface. No one ever told her not to swim in it, although once she became older, she knew better. She’d heard stories that much of the runoff came from the waste water treatment plant across town.
Here, the ground was still a soggy bog, the water seeping invisibly through some unseen rift in the porous bedrock, soaking the thin spongy layer above. Down here, clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes and gnats puffed from cattail chimneys, and the breeze was cooler than any beneath a patio umbrella.
She was standing on a trail. The narrow path ran just above and parallel to where the old creek used to be. Several trees in the vicinity had fallen recently, their strength sapped by the vines and their flesh atrophied by disease. Some of the fallen leaned precariously against their neighbors. Others rested on their sides. Their roots peeled back the skin of the forest floor.
Jessie stumbled, her toe catching on an exposed knuckle of wood.
No, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t her toe. She didn’t stumble. This body wasn’t hers— it didn’t feel like it belonged to her anyway, and it certainly wasn’t under her control. She had tried to make it do something, but it hadn’t obeyed even her simplest or most urgent commands.
Has to be a dream.
Another stumble, the same foot snagging beneath another root. Clumsy, she muttered in her head. Lift your feet higher. The world wobbled in the windshield of her mind’s eye, rising suddenly and tilting in that telltale way that comes after an ankle is twisted, then juddering dizzily. Finally correcting. She felt a stab of pain shoot up her leg and into her side. But the pain wasn’t her own. It registered in her mind, which seemed to record and annotate and file it away like numbers or facts. The pain wasn’t real.
She heard a grunt— again, only in her mind, not in her ears. Coming from her own throat, though it was no sound her throat would ever make.
The view righted itself, realigned with the trail. Forward movement recommenced.
The strain of exertion registered in her mind as well, a tightness in the chest, burning of the arms. Strain in the body’s back and legs. It wasn’t her brain receiving this information, not firsthand, at least. It really was like watching a movie, listening to recorded sounds, like somebody whispering descriptions of what was happening to her.
She was ins
ide someone else’s mind— inside, yet unable to connect with the owner.
Not someone else, your own. You’re dreaming, that’s all.
Still more curious than concerned, she tried again to get her head to turn to the side, to direct her eyes to take in a different view than what was directly ahead. But her efforts were ignored.
She’d been having nightmares lately, dark dreams in which she was completely at the mercy of whatever script her subconscious mind had written for her. This felt a little bit like that, only in those dreams she’d been able to exert control to an extent. Here, she was helpless.
She tried anyway. She told herself to wake, found she couldn’t. And now the first tendrils of apprehension began to worm their way into her mind— her own mind. This distant sense of alarm was hers to feel. It originated within her rather than being transmitted to her.
The eyes (not hers) remained stubbornly fixed on the narrow trail straight ahead, providing her only with a jouncing image. The motion kept time with the body’s plodding footsteps.
It had to be a dream. There could be no other explanation.
This is most definitely not a dream.
She became aware of a buzzing sound in her head. There was pain. The view blurred momentarily.
Then cleared.
Strange.
Shadows and flashes of sunlight alternated. Sunlight on her face— on the stranger’s face. On her arms. Warmth. She registered the relative coolness of the shade. Sweat trickling down the body’s neck. Exhales hot on her face. The stranger’s face. Imprints of heat and wetness and light only.
The view swiveled dizzyingly to the side, and passed over a board nailed to a tree. The old and faded sign had lost all but one of the mounting nails and now tilted sideways. PROPERTY OF GREENWICH MUNICIPAL TRANSPORTATION DISTRICT. NO TRESPASSING.
Impossible to read when you’re dreaming.
Yet the words were clear, unmistakable.
More walking, more straining, and now she realized she was carrying something heavy in her arms. The stranger was carrying it, not her. Again, the effort wasn’t hers, nor the fatigue. She wanted to look down, to see what the object was, but the eyes would not stray.
Ahead, a small opening in the trees. She knew this place, too. The sky above, unobstructed, cloudless. She was filled with surprise at how overgrown the glade had become. The old tree stump where she’d once sat so many years ago. It was now a misshapen hump of moss, a riot of browns and greens, one side sprouting mushrooms, leprotic disks of fungi larger than her outstretched hand.
Nostalgia swept through her. This was where she’d fallen in love with Kelly.
Is that why she was dreaming of this place? Kelly would’ve been on her mind. They were going to file the marriage documents later that afternoon.
The edges of the clearing blurred as the view changed, sweeping past with nauseous speed. What was she looking for?
A lurch and she was moving forward again, heading for a narrow opening in the brush. Now stepping sideways, edging through the tighter gap in the dangling ivy.
And there, concealed beneath blankets of leaves and mud, was the old creek bed. The path to it was blocked by a large tree. The fracture had left the trunk splintered. Black mold had already begun to cover it, and sap wept from the greener wood. But there was room enough to crawl underneath. The space dripped with dew and was guarded by a veil of webs.
She was kneeling. She heard another grunt and the ache which had been building in her arms was suddenly, blessedly gone. The view turned, shifted down, and in the shadows she caught a glimpse of fabric, a red button-down shirt, pale skin. Here was the back pocket of a girl’s blue jeans, a butterfly pattern sown into the back pocket.
My jeans?
A flutter of panic. She tried to push it away.
And now her mind lurched as she gained her first glimpse of the hands of the body she was trapped within: dirt-blackened nails, mud-smeared, old cuts reopened and seeping blood.
It’s a man?
Her heart fluttered.
She slammed back to her senses and tried once more to wake from the nightmare, and for just a moment she thought she might succeed. Her mind filled with that same terrible buzzing sound. The view before her eyes blurred, wavered.
The scene quickly returned with the same clarity.
The man was crawling backwards beneath the fallen tree, leaving the body (her body?) on the trail. Once through, he stood and turned.
This had been the creek’s low point, and there was still a shallow puddle, the water dark brown from decaying matter. Around her (him!): walls of greenery, a ceiling of leaves, the sunlight piercing through and stabbing the ground in a hundred different places.
The scene shifted back to the darkness beneath the tree. A hand extending into the shadows. Grabbing and pulling. Fingers hooking the cuff of her jeans. Her foot: shoeless, the white sock splattered with—
blood
—mud.
Now her lower leg. Then a knee. The second leg, bent at the knee. The other foot was still clad in a black loafer.
That’s not my shoe.
Relief.
The man arranged the legs together, pulled some more. Next came the waist. Above it, the bare skin and the sharp angles of the woman’s hipbones. Her shirt—
And that’s not my shirt.
—had come untucked, had worked its way up her torso. Bunched up beneath her arms.
Angry red scrapes on her side.
No human bite marks.
This definitely wasn’t her.
Now came the bottom of a white lace bra, a bit of underwire showing through frayed fabric.
That’s—
No!
She didn’t want to watch anymore, yet had no choice. She closed her eyes, but the eyes of that—
killer
—man were unblinking.
The buzzing sound rose in her head a third time, tearing into her brain, splitting—
Jessie’s body jolted and she shot upright. Her feet hit the worn carpet of her living room floor. Her breath tore through her throat in ragged gasps. Darkness enveloped her. Gone was the scattered sunlight, replaced with the glowing edges of a blurry rectangle were the blackout curtain covered the window. And there, on the opposite side of the room, was the wavering image of the television.
She blinked and the blurry shapes became people and the people became zombies. The sound on the television was turned down. The battle continued in silence.
Her Link pinged. She reached over and tried to pluck it out of the media cradle, but her fingers were still numb and she fumbled it. The device clattered to the surface of the coffee table, screen side up. She hit the connect button, and her brother’s face snapped into view. “Eric?”
“Finally! I’ve been pinging you for the past ten minutes!”
“I— I was asleep, I guess.” She frowned at what felt to her like a lie. Whatever she’d just experienced, it wasn’t sleep. She hadn’t been dreaming.
Her eyes flicked over to the television. The two Undead Players had entered a junkyard. She could see a number of other figures gathering at the fence, drawn there by the noise. These others were the unimplanted Infecteds, victims of the outbreak on Long Island over a decade before. Jessie caught herself scanning the faces, looking for—
Why do you keep tormenting yourself, Jess? Kelly’s voice, pleading.
Because it’s my fault. I left them behind.
We left them behind.
Trapped in Gameland. Undead.
There’s nothing you can do about it now.
She still couldn’t seem to stop herself from watching.
The Players grappled into the shadow of a rusted crane, the larger one forcing the smaller, fresher one back. Both had new gashes on their arms and sides, the wounds gaping. Dry on the older Player; seeping gore from the newer, smaller one. The monsters passed into the sunlight. Naked bone glistened from the skull of the second Player, the scalp torn freshly away.
“Jessie? You still there?”
She sucked in a sharp breath and blinked, startled by how easily her thoughts seemed to drift these days.
“Sorry. I guess I’m having trouble waking up.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re finally getting some sleep.” The tension in her brother’s face loosened a bit. “You need the rest. It’ll help you heal.”
Physically, maybe. Spiritually, she didn’t think the dying would ever stop.
She glanced over to the window, to the corona of sunlight burning onto the walls. It was still afternoon, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t slept the whole day away.
“I’ve just a few more things to wrap up here at work, then I’ll come home,” Eric said. “Just wanted to see if Mom’s taking you to City Hall.”
“She’s out,” Jessie replied. “I haven’t seen her.” She coughed to clear the stiffness from her throat. Mention of her mother reminded her again of the vision she’d just had. She shook her head to try and cast the image away. Her mother wasn’t dead. They’d just spoken a few hours ago. They were all going together to file the documents. Kelly was supposed to ping any minute now.
Where the hell is he?
Eric’s face darkened slightly. Even on the scant three-inch diagonal of her Link screen, Jessie could see his concern. “Don’t worry, she’ll be there,” he told her, though he didn’t sound very convinced.
“I think maybe she’s planning on meeting us there,” Jessie said. She frowned at the time on her Link. “I’m supposed to meet at Kel’s before heading over with his parents and Kyle.”
Eric hesitated before nodding, his face still tight with worry. “Okay, I’ll ping Mom, make sure she didn’t forget. See you in a bit.”
“She’ll be there,” Jessie whispered.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Page 1