The walls, if there were any, were too deep in shadow to see. The ceiling, though also invisible, felt real. It had weight. It pressed down. Jessie felt like she needed to duck her head.
A filthy remnant of green shag carpet covered the floor; it was her mother’s bed.
It’s grass, not carpet.
She couldn’t be sure. Her mother’s face was smudged with soot. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were folded beneath her head. The red lipstick, always too thickly applied, in Jessie’s opinion, was smeared. It streaked from one ear to the other.
She looks like a hooker.
It’s just a dream.
She stepped closer and circled the prostrate figure. The ground beneath her feet was hard, uneven. The rasp of her boots scuffing—
“Last stop! Everyone off.”
Someone nudged her shoulder as they made their way down the aisle. Jessie blinked after them, the image of her dream still superimposed over the scene before her eyes.
“Hey!” the driver was saying, pointing at her. “You, too. Last stop! I’m going straight to the garage from here.”
Jessie was dimly aware of rising from her seat. She shuffled down the aisle and stepped off the bus, even as the dream image clung stubbornly to the air before her eyes. She turned left when her feet hit concrete.
The street was unfamiliar to her. She kept walking. Block after block, until she realized with a start that the dark room and her mother were gone. But the double image persisted. Now trees juxtaposed themselves over the urban landscape, a vibrant organic wilderness melting into a decaying urban one.
This is a hell of a strange dream.
Thick vines draped themselves over the burned out frames of buildings. Faded, hastily scrawled graffiti covered bricks and tree trunks alike. Creeper vines strangled rusted streetlamps. Green tendrils dangled everywhere, weeping dew, leaves, and frayed wiring.
Where am I?
She kept walking. Time slipped. The sun, high above her a moment before, disappeared in the shadow of a building she was passing, then reappeared low in the sky. The air was suddenly humid, thick with the smell of moss and water. She could smell the creek. And the sea.
Then, as stealthily as the double vision had come, it was abruptly gone. One image disappeared, and she was left with only the other.
Where the hell am I?
She turned slowly around, not recognizing the buildings leaning in close over her head, not liking their bland facades and the evening shadows spilling through their glassless cataract windows. Sheets of frayed plastic flapped out of several openings, like monstrous eyelashes.
This isn’t Greenwich.
Panic coursed through her as she realized she had never left Long Island.
The lonely wind moaned her own thoughts back at her.
She ran then, not knowing where or how far, down empty streets and past abandoned buildings, always fearing that around the next corner she’d find an army of the Undead.
She ran until her breath came in gasps and her heart pounded in her neck. It was only when she grew aware of the low grind of engines that she stopped, wondering what kind of machines would be churning in a place of the dead.
This isn’t Gameland.
She remembered getting off the bus, hearing the driver call last stop.
There were trees. A dark, low room. And—
Her mother. Her mother had been there. She’d seen—
“Hey! You! Stop right there!”
She spun around at the sound of the voice.
“I said: DON’T! MOVE!”
A shadow detached itself from a nearby building and stepped into the sunlight, and she saw that it was a soldier in camouflage uniform. He hurried over to her, a rifle in his hands, the muzzle pointed at her head. “Say something! Now!”
She opened her mouth to tell him not to shoot, but all that came out was a whisper of air.
He tilted his head until his cheek rested against the barrel and inserted his gloved finger into the trigger guard— she was close enough to see these things, to know what they meant. “On your knees,” the soldier commanded, “or I will shoot you!”
But her knees wouldn’t bend, and her mind wouldn’t obey. She wanted to scream: I’m not dead! I’m not one of them.
Instead, she turned and ran. And with each step, she could feel the gun sight on her back, the tiny pinprick of red light, and she knew that the bullet would shatter her spine at any moment.
But it didn’t.
“Stop!” the soldier shouted. There was a clatter of boots behind her, the echoes bouncing off the walls of the adjacent buildings. “I won’t shoot, but you need to stop right now!”
She stumbled, arms outstretched, nearly fell. Stopped. Turned. The bright burning spot on her back slid around to her chest. Slowly, she raised her hands.
“Damn it, girl, I could’ve shot you! Why didn’t you say something? I thought you were—”
“I’m not—” She started to say “infected,” but the hard truth made her stop. She feared the lie would show on her face. “I’m not a Reanimate.”
He slung the rifle over his shoulder and gestured with his hands open to show her he didn’t mean her any harm. “What the hell are you doing down here? This is a quarantine zone.”
“Where am I?”
“Lower Manhattan. How did you get here?”
How long was I dreaming?
The alignment, she realized. The engineer warned her she’d feel disoriented.
That’s an understatement!
“Well?” the soldier said, shifting the rifle.
Jessie waved her hand vaguely behind her. “I— I was on the bus from Hartford,” she stammered. “I fell asleep. The driver kicked me off at the last stop. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I—”
“You on drugs or something? Zoners? Drunk?”
Jessie’s heart skipped. What had she done with the baggie of Zoners? She couldn’t remember.
“I just fell asleep. I got off the bus and started walking.”
The soldier, who looked to be in his late twenties, stepped up to her. He was shorter than she, and had a square jaw which he thrust out in front of him like a cow-catcher. “You stay away from Zoners,” he told her. “Those things’ll rot your brain.”
“I don’t—”
The Link on his shoulder pinged, and he held up his hand to stop her from speaking.
“Yes?”
“Why are you away from your post?”
“Got a live one. Near—” He looked around him. “Near Piccard Ave. Civilian. Female, young.” He turned to her and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Jessie Daniels,” she told him. “I’m from Greenwich, Connecticut.”
“Says her name’s Jessie Daniels, from Greenwich. Claims she fell asleep on the bus from Hartford and got kicked off. Should I bring her in?”
“Negative. Return to your post ASAP, and maintain your position. Situation at sierra echo is gray.”
“What should I do with the girl?”
“Hand her over to the locals. Out.”
† † †
“I told you, Jessie!” Eric slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Straight there and back. Didn’t I say that? I don’t remember telling you to break into the quarantine zone in Manhattan!”
“Stop treating me like I’m a child, Eric! It’s not my fault.”
“I’m not treating you like a child, Jessie.”
“Yes, you are!”
He sighed. “I’m just worried about you.” He gripped the wheel hard, the muscles in his jaw rippling. “I had to leave work.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You could’ve been shot. Or at the very least, arrested for trespassing.” He shook his head. “Things are touchy right now. We need to be careful.”
“Touchy how?”
“I can’t— Nothing. Never mind. Just try and stay out of trouble.”
Jessie pulled her feet up onto the seat and star
ed out at the passing scenery. “Right,” she muttered.
They reached the first checkpoint and Eric slowed. He showed his NCD badge. The guard glanced inside the car at their faces, then waved them on.
“What does ‘gray’ mean? As in, ‘The situation is gray’?”
Eric looked over, frowning. “Where did you hear that?”
“What does it mean?”
“It means it’s deteriorating. Did someone say that to you?”
She studied his face. He doesn’t know what’s happening in Manhattan? Why doesn’t he know? What aren’t they telling us?
He took a deep breath. “You shouldn’t be listening to the black streams, Jess.”
Neither of them spoke again until they reached the state line, though Jessie could sense that he was itching to ask her what she was doing trying to get inside a quarantine zone.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “They told me I might become disoriented. I just didn’t think it would be anything like that. I guess I lost track of time or something and missed the stop in Greenwich. When the bus driver told me to get off, I just did it without even thinking about it.”
Eric turned to her, questions in his eyes. “What do you mean disoriented? What the hell happened at CR? I told you not to let them do anything to you.”
“They didn’t do anything! It was just some examination. They hooked me up to a device that could tell if the implant was connected to the Stream.”
“Your implant? How? I thought it was rejected!”
She blinked stupidly at him, realizing what he was saying, knowing he was right. How could her implant have any effect on her if it wasn’t connected?
Eric stared intently at her for a moment. She could feel the car slow as he tried to parse this latest revelation. Finally, he pulled over until they were sitting on the shoulder of the road. Drivers whizzed past, some honking their horns. Eric ignored them.
“What the hell is going on, Jessie?”
She turned toward the window and stared out over the swamps of the southwestern coast of Connecticut. She was scared. And when she turned back to face him, she could see it reflected in his own eyes. She blinked, and it was gone, and all that was left was the same guarded look he usually wore.
“Talk to me, Jessie.”
When she didn’t answer, he grumbled something to himself, started the car, and pulled back out into traffic.
‡ ‡ ‡
Chapter 13
“Eat,” Eric instructed. He set a plateful of reheated casserole in front of Jessie and handed her a fork. “And when you’re done, get some sleep. No television. We’ll figure this out after I get back from work.”
He left shortly afterward.
Jessie pushed the mush from one side of her plate to the other with her fork. Even though her stomach ached and her head was throbbing from lack of food, she wasn’t the least bit hungry.
Her Link pinged and she snatched it up from the table, but it was only Kelly messaging her to say he was with Kyle at the hospital for a checkup. Jessie lowered her head to her arms and couldn’t be bothered to reply.
She kept going over the exam in her head, the conversation with the tech. The collection of her vital signs. Then, later, that singular moment of pain. There’s good neuroleptic connectivity, the engineer had said. In other words, her implant wasn’t rejected.
So, why had she refused to accept the truth when it was thrust in her face like that?
Because you wanted the device to be rejected.
Even after they arrived home, she wanted it not to be true. She’d stepped into the darkened house and walked straight over to the television and inserted her Link into the media console. Eric stood behind her and watched.
“Mute,” she said when it came on.
The sound immediately disappeared.
But that didn’t prove anything. There was still voice control.
Up stream, she thought.
The channel changed.
“Fuck,” she uttered, and for once Eric didn’t chastise her for cursing.
Now she squeezed her eyes closed as she sat at the table, and she watched the disjointed movie of past events which her mind tried to reconstruct, reordering scenes so that they made sense in this new reality where her implant was still intact. This new truth was too incongruous with everything that had happened to her on the island.
It all came down to the day they had tried to escape from the airport, the day they’d learned their implants had been hacked. They had ambushed their captors and taken the tram beneath the Sound. They’d managed to get maybe a quarter of a mile before the trouble began. Everyone started throwing up, convulsing, passing out.
All except Kelly.
They’d been forewarned, told they wouldn’t be able to leave. But they hadn’t believed it, had tried anyway to go. It was only after they’d been forced to return, after they’d recovered days later that they learned about the computer code inserted inside their heads. The failsafe was designed to prevent escape by activating their implants should they try. If they strayed too far for too long from the override signal transmitted by the island towers, they would die.
She remembered collapsing to the floor of the tram, aware that something terrible was happening to them, yet unable to act. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the paralysis and pain had vanished. Later, she’d labeled that moment as the one when her body had finally severed its connection with the implant.
So if the device inside her head was still fully intact, fully connected, how then could she explain her immunity from the failsafe?
She tried to work it out, but her mind felt clumsy; it kept tripping over itself and backtracking, wandering off onto tangential paths. The harder she tried, the more elusive the answer seemed to become, and the more lost she felt.
She gave up with a frustrated slap of her palm on the table, and immediately regretted it. The pressure between her eyes flared in a rush, but took its time fading away.
She checked her Link. Five hours had passed since she’d left CR, and there was still no ping telling her the alignment had been completed. Did that mean it was still running? Did it mean it had failed?
It doesn’t appear to be hardware related. This may be why the firmware check was requested.
A pair of voices floated up out of her memory. First, the nurse who had guarded them, talking about having to adjust the implant’s interface parameters: But the system hung on me. I had to reboot.
And Micah’s.
Jessie sat bolt upright. He’d mentioned a code on her Link.
She slid the device toward her and woke it. Under RECENT DOWNLOADS, she sorted the files by date, the most recent at the top. She expected to find the proxy they had created to replace the tower’s failsafe override signal — the portable signal which eventually let them leave the island — but it wasn’t there.
Strange.
In fact, the most recent file was the photograph Kelly had sent her that first day they’d broken onto the island, the one where he’d written his marriage proposal to her on the side of a building in bright orange paint.
The absence of the proxy was puzzling, but it wasn’t what she was looking for anyway. She scrolled down, past older files. Nothing seemed out of place. Nothing looked like it could be what Micah had been talking about.
Unless it’s hidden.
She pushed the Link away from her. Then pulled it back again. If there was something hidden there, possibly in a separate directory, then she’d need to dig down past the user interface to find it. And she couldn’t do it like this.
Link in hand, she hurried down the unlit hallway to her grandfather’s old office. Once there, she slipped into the chair behind his desk. On top was an ancient computer, an odd wedge-shaped monster, lime green and white, nearly as wide as it was deep. Grandpa had always been so attached to the thing, despite the screen’s poor resolution and its missing pixels and the processor’s glacial speed. He asserted that since it wasn’t con
nected to any outside network, it was safer than any modern device. But Jessie had always wondered what good a computer like that would be. You couldn’t possibly store very much information inside such a confined space. That’s why Arc had developed Stream technology, because it was essentially limitless.
While she waited for the clunker to boot up, she searched his desk drawers for a cable that would fit both her Link and the ports on the back of the computer.
Micah would have one.
Near the bottom, she finally managed to find a cable and she connected the two devices, then sat back and waited.
The processor whined and rattled alarmingly. Finally, with an exultant chirp, a new window opened on the screen containing a directory of the files on her Link. She grinned at the whimsical paper folder icons.
One by one, she started going through them, still not sure what she was looking for, yet hoping she’d recognize it when she saw it.
An hour passed. Her eyes grew bleary from staring at the dim computer screen. Her hand was cramped from using the clumsy pointer-clicker. And her headache had grown into the beginnings of a migraine.
When the Link suddenly pinged, startling her from her trance, she jerked and grabbed for it. The device slipped past her fingertips, separated from its connection, and dropped to the floor.
With shaking hands, she retrieved the device and connected. “Hello?”
Silence.
She pulled the Link away and stared at the tiny screen, watching the ping counter tick from ten to eleven to twelve seconds. They were still connected, but there was no identifier code. Who would ping her like this, then not say anything?
“Mom?” she said, tentatively. “Is that you?”
Nothing.
There was a faint click and the timer stopped at seventeen seconds.
Anger grew inside of her, filled her, choked her.
She jabbed her thumb at the screen until she found her mother’s Link code and connected. But it went straight to voice mail.
“Mom?” She tried to channel the anger she’d felt just a moment before, but was surprised to find it quickly fading away. All she could manage was fear.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Page 10