S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  “Don’t just stand there!” she yelled at the Player. “Do something.” But while it stepped toward the zombies, it didn’t make any attempt to stop them. They passed it without interference.

  “Useless!” she muttered, knowing she’d never be able to concentrate enough to focus on controlling the Player. “Fucking useless. I knew I should’ve left you behind!”

  She chanced another glance back and realized it was already too late to run. The Undead were coming at her from all sides. Most wore the decade-old remnants of clothing from the island’s epidemic, but she spotted one among them, the skin on one side of its body charred away, wearing nothing but a Marine boot on the unaffected leg. It was one of the Omegas her brother had brought with him. She’d thought they’d all been killed.

  She poked at the last button and hit ENTER just as the naked feet of the closest zombie slapped against the concrete apron. Jessie spun and lifted the pistol and sighted at its head. The bullet carved a broad trench into the monster’s brow, and the thing dropped. Its knees cracked as they hit the pavement. A zombie behind it fell over the corpse, starting an avalanche of three more bodies.

  The buzzing in her head remained.

  Jessie whipped her head around at the guard shack and quickly calculated she’d last less than a minute inside against the onslaught. Even if she could manage to use her Player, she’d only buy herself another minute. Her only hope of escape was through the approaching horde and into the woods where there were likely hundreds more. The gun was essentially useless, and the sword was out of reach.

  She put a hand on the door of the shack and began to pull it open.

  At the same time, she felt the electricity shut off, heard the clank of the chains unwrapping around the gatepost. The first zombie loomed into view and reached out its rotting hands. The stump of its fingers brushed her shoulder.

  Jessie wheeled away, bringing her foot around and landing it against the side of the zombie’s head. She continued the spin and followed up with a back kick to its stomach, sending it timbering back.

  “Open the fucking gate!” she screamed, aware of the presence of a live person on the other side.

  There was a loud squeal as the chain link was drawn open. Jessie backed herself quickly toward it, trusting whoever was there to guide her through the opening. She felt a pull at the collar of her shirt and she yielded to it, raising the pistol one last time and delivering a slug of hot metal into the eye of the closest monster. The back of its head exploded in a cloud of red dust, and the thing collapsed sideways, crashing into the flimsy shack and leaving a large dent. The Plexiglas didn’t break, but the thin metal crumpled beneath the weight of the IU.

  She was flung to the ground, but she spun on all fours and managed to look up in time to see the gate slam shut. The horde crashed into it, pressing their decaying bodies against the wire until it bulged inward. It wouldn’t hold for long.

  Jessie gaped in shock as her rescuer turned back to the keypad, the twin of the one which had failed Jessie outside the gate. There were a half dozen flashes as the electricity coursed through it once more and arced into the bodies. They exploded off the wire and crashed into the next line of the encroaching horde.

  After the popping noises stopped, the two old friends turned to face each other.

  “Well,” Ashley said, “I never expected to see you again.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 58

  Jessie immediately sensed the anger pouring off of her best friend. It wasn’t just the roughness with which Ashley had yanked her through the gate and flung her to the ground. That could be excused under the circumstances. It was the bitterness in those first words which caught Jessie’s attention. Ashley was furious.

  She deserves to be.

  “Well?” Ash demanded. She ignored the clacking teeth and moans of the Undead not five feet away as if they weren’t even there.

  Jessie gawped at her friend. The moment for, “I’m so glad to see you. Thank you for coming back. I’ve missed you,” was gone. Ashley gave her exactly two seconds to respond before she reached down and jerked Jessie to her feet. The glower on her face didn’t change. “You’re lucky I heard the gunshot.”

  “I I don’t understand,” Jessie stammered. “How can you be alive? We thought—”

  “What? You thought I was one of them?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Is that what you hoped?”

  “No!”

  “Why did you come back then? And why now?” Her eyes narrowed briefly, then widened in understanding. “You came here to finish me, didn’t you?”

  “What? No!” Jessie shook her head. “I came back to find Mi—”

  She stopped herself, her skin prickling.

  Something’s wrong.

  Hell yeah, something’s wrong. She’s pissed because you abandoned her!

  “Your what?”

  “My . . . grandfather’s body,” Jessie finished.

  Ashley stared hard at her. There was a flicker of confusion. “His body?”

  “He’s dead. After Ben took you away, Eric came in a chopper. We went to get Heall and—”

  “Heall? You went to get some total stranger, and you left me for dead?”

  “Ben told me he’d killed you.”

  “That asshole lied to you! And you swallowed it all up without even batting an eyelash!”

  The shouting was riling up the Undead. They crushed forward, plowing the ones in front into the fence. There were several loud snaps and flashes of light as the current ripped through their bodies into those behind. The smoke from their burning flesh wafted over, stinging the girls’ eyes and noses.

  “We should get out of sight,” Jessie said. “They—”

  Ashley spun on her heels and marched off toward the building.

  “His body is still back at Brookhaven,” Jessie said, running to catch up. “My grandfather’s. He was killed by one of the survivors from the Long Island outbreak after he went to murder Father Heall.”

  “You came back for his body? You hated the man!”

  “I didn’t hate him,” Jessie replied. “Okay, maybe I did. But it’s not his body I came back for, it’s his Link. It holds a key to the firewall he put on mine.”

  Ashley stopped, her face lit up with rage. “Your Link?” she shrieked. “You came back because of your fucking Link?”

  Jessie gawped helplessly.

  Ashley huffed. “No, I get it. A stupid piece of technology is more important than your best friend. Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

  “You’re not the only one, Ash,” Jessie said, getting a little angry herself.

  Ash waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever.”

  Jessie shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Ashley. We would never have left you behind if we’d known. I would’ve given my own life to save you.”

  The iciness in Ashley’s face persisted a moment longer before it started to slip away. “You would’ve?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  A sob rose in Ashley’s throat, and Jessie reached out and pulled her friend to her. Ashley’s body went stiff for a moment, then melted.

  The two girls held each other for several minutes, each sobbing and speaking incoherently. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t understand each other. It didn’t matter that the Undead were hissing at them a dozen yards away. Weeks of strain and bottled up emotion, regrets and guilt, came tumbling out of them both, and they didn’t need words to understand how badly they felt about it.

  Ashley pulled away first. She wiped the tears from her face and guided Jessie toward the buildings. “Those things’ll never go away if we stay out here.”

  Jessie nodded and followed. There were so many questions to ask, so much to tell. But where to start? What should she tell her now, and what could wait? She started to head for the orange building, but Ashley veered away from it and angled instead toward the building that housed the mainframe.

  “I suppose it’s too much to hop
e that you brought my Link back with you,” she mumbled over her shoulder. To Jessie’s ears, her voice seemed strangely unaffected. “When you guys left with it, I was trapped inside this fucking arcade. I couldn’t even get down to the servers to try and reprogram the failsafe.”

  “I left it at home. If I’d known you weren’t—”

  “Dead. Yeah, I know. You already said.”

  Jessie was quiet for a moment. Despite her apology, it was clear Ashley wasn’t going to forgive her so easily. “How did you get away from Ben?”

  Ashley stopped so suddenly that Jessie nearly ran into her. “I shot the fucker,” she said. “I shot him, but I made sure it wasn’t fatal. I wanted to make sure the zoms got to that asshole!” She was screaming again.

  Another loud POP! came from the fence. Jessie jumped.

  “I shot him with his own god damn shotgun, the bastard.”

  “Why didn’t you come back?”

  “I tried to! But by then the compound was crawling with those things.”

  “Not the whole time.”

  Ashley turned, and the hardness was back in her eyes. “What, you don’t believe me?”

  Jessie nodded quickly. She gestured awkwardly toward the door twenty feet away, but when she tried to pass, Ashley raised an arm to block her.

  “You left me.”

  Jessie sighed. “You have to believe me. I went looking for you the next morning, after Eric came. You don’t know how bad things were here, Ash. If you had been here, you would’ve known.” She raised her hands before Ashley could begin to protest. “I know it was just as hard for you. I can’t imagine what Ben put you through — I don’t want to know — but I accept that it was terrible. All I’m saying is, it was bad here, too.”

  She paused, but Ashley just glared at her without speaking.

  “Ash, Ben somehow managed to get inside the network. He made it so the Omegas on Eric’s chopper went rogue. They crashed in the woods. Eric almost died. Reggie and I had to fight through hundreds of them to rescue him.”

  She paused, hoping the mention of Reggie’s name might temper her anger. “He . . . . He misses you terribly.”

  Ashley looked away, her lips pulled tight against her teeth.

  “He’s the other reason I came, Ash. You don’t know how torn up he was.” She grabbed Ashley’s arm and turned her until their eyes locked. “He’s in trouble.”

  Ash’s face twisted, but she didn’t speak.

  “He’ll be so happy to see you.”

  Will he?

  “Yeah, me too,” Ashley quietly said, though she didn’t look like she meant it. She pulled her arm out of Jessie’s grip and erased the distance between them and the door in a half dozen steps. She jerked it open and disappeared inside, not bothering to wait for Jess.

  Just give her a few minutes to collect herself. It can’t have been easy, realizing your friends left you to die. You’d be pissed, too.

  But Jessie frowned. Sure, she’d be angry. But only for, like, five seconds. And it wouldn’t be the first thing she’d feel. Maybe after the shock and relief wore off she’d be mad, but not from the get-go.

  But Ashley’s not you.

  No, she wasn’t. Sometimes you couldn’t tell how Ash might respond.

  Jessie took a deep breath and went after her friend. She paused at the door just long enough to glance back one last time to make sure the Undead weren’t going to overwhelm the fence. She thought she could see Kwanjangnim Rupert’s ashen face among them, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Sighing, she pulled the door open and stepped inside.

  The familiarity of the building’s interior struck her immediately, especially when she saw the dried pools of blood marking where her SSC captors had died. Ben had delivered the mortal wounds with his own hands, but their misery and reanimation had been ended by her own. The bodies had since been removed — to where and by whom she didn’t know, nor did she particularly care — but the musky, coppery tang of their blood was still thick in the air, and bits of hair and dried gore were still embedded in the dark, dried pools on the linoleum tiles.

  “Ashley?”

  She found her sitting on the floor in the corner of the room where the elevator was located. It was the same room where she, Kelly and Reggie had held off the CUs Ben had sent in to kill them. The door, which had started to break away, had since fallen off and was on the floor next to the desk. Pieces of the shattered jamb puckered away from the wall, torn by the force of the horde that had tried to get in at them. The scene brought back terrible memories she thought she’d buried forever.

  Turning, she saw that somebody had scratched FUCK YOU in the paint on the elevator door. I WILL KILL ALL YOU FUCKERS.

  She lowered her eyes. She didn’t know who had scribbled those words, whether it was Ashley or Micah, but she was fairly sure she knew who they were meant for.

  “I couldn’t go down there,” Ashley muttered, holding her head in her hands. She looked up and her eyes blazed through the puddles of her tears. “You left me here, trapped among these—”

  She waved her hand tiredly toward the front of the building.

  Jessie went over and kneeled down. She wanted to hold Ashley, but the girl had wedged herself in tight between the wall and the heavy filing cabinet they had used to block the door.

  “I thought if I could just get down to the mainframe, I might be able to figure a way out of this place.”

  Jessie shook her head. “When they come to get us, they’ll bring your Link.”

  Ashley stared off to the side, her eyes unfocused. “Firewall?”

  Jessie pulled her Link out— she wanted to check the time anyway, since she knew it was getting close to noon and pretty soon Eric or Kelly would connect.

  “I’m not sure when, but my grandfather had it installed, supposedly to block Arc from activating it. This photo was the last thing added.”

  “Kelly’s proposal?”

  “There’s a packet of data embedded inside of it. Father Heall’s research. It was supposed to go to this woman, a doctor at Sisters of Mercy, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather wanted it for himself.”

  She knew it was the oversimplified version of events, but there would be time later to fill in the details.

  “The problem is the government’s going after anyone without a functional implant. Citizen Registration tried to replace mine, but they can’t turn off the autodestruct. Now, they want to lock me up.”

  Ashley stared at her for a moment. “Why all of a sudden now?”

  “Things are getting bad out there. We had an outbreak alert in Greenwich a couple days ago. Manhattan has been on lockdown since we broke in. And there have been isolated network problems in other places throughout the country. Arc’s not taking it seriously, and neither are most people. They think the government’s overreacting.”

  “Wait, so the firewall blocks access to your Link?”

  “Yeah.”

  Noon was only minutes away. Now she worried how Ashley would react when Eric or Kelly connected. Would she get angry all over again?

  “The other reason I came back is to find Micah.”

  “He’s here, too? You think he’ll be able to hack the firewall?”

  Jessie shook her head. “That’s not why I want to find him. He betrayed us, Ash. We found out he was working for the Coalition. He was supposed to be conscripted, but it was faked, and now he’s hacking our implants.”

  Ashley straightened in surprise. “He faked being conscripted?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “And you think he’s here?” Ashley raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t seen anyone.”

  Jessie let out an exhale of frustration. “He—”

  Jessie? You there?

  Ashley’s eyes went to Jessie’s Link.

  “Is that your brother?” she asked. “He’s on the island, too?”

  Jessie shook her head. Holding up a finger to stop her, she whispered, “I’ll explain in a second.” Pulling the Link to her
face, she said, “I’m here, inside the complex. And look who I found!”

  She swung the screen around to Ashley, who just stared at the blank screen.

  Silence came from Eric’s end as well.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Jessie asked.

  “I’m . . . just surprised, I guess,” Eric said. “We thought she was—”

  “Yeah, I already explained that,” Jessie cut in. “I only got here a little while ago and I was just trying to get her up to speed.”

  “Jess, don’t you think we should talk first. In private.”

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  “Eric?”

  Another long pause. Jessie wished she could see what was happening at home.

  “Eric? Are you there?”

  She stood up and shook the Link, as if there was a loose connection. “Eric?”

  “What happened?” Ashley asked.

  Jessie shook her head. “I lost him.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 59

  Kelly reached over to flick the console back on. “Why’d you disconnect?”

  But Eric grabbed his hand to stop him. “Because Ashley’s alive. Jessie’s with her now.”

  Kelly stared at Eric, his eyes flicking between the goggles cocked up on the top of his head and back to his face. “You saw her? But, how?”

  “I can’t explain it. But they’re inside the Arc complex. Together.”

  “Okaaaay. I still don’t understand why you disconnected.”

  Eric pulled the goggles from his head and stood up. “Think about it, Kelly. If those Arc guys are to be believed, then it’s Ashley you two saw up on Jayne’s Hill, not Micah. Who else do you know that’s capable of something as sophisticated as hacking implants?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t believe that,” Kelly said.

  “I said I needed proof. It doesn’t mean it’s not true. And since Jessie first proposed it, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with an alternative explanation. I can’t.”

  “But you believe it now?” Kelly shook his head. “You’re confusing me.”

  “Did you kidnap my mother?”