* * *
“The rope broke,” was all the explanation he gave.
Jessie panted as she rested her hands on her knees. She was out of breath, but it was more from the ache in her back than the running. The ceiling in the tunnel was very low, forcing her to run bent over.
They emerged up a ladder and through the floor of a gardening shed on the edge of the property. Other tunnels broke off the one Brother Walter led her down, and she figured that one of them led to the chapel her father had used as a secret research laboratory.
Brother Walter snatched a rusting machete off the wall, then handed her sword back to her. “We may encounter some of the Children,” he told her.
Jessie hoped not. She didn’t think she could kill them, now that she knew the truth about them. And she wondered, Did he know? Did Brother Walter even suspect that there were still people inside those horrible shells?
“Ready?” he asked. She nodded, and they stepped out into the moonlight.
Through the trees, they could see the house burning, its windows lit up and the front porch engulfed like the sinister grin of a jack-o-lantern. The porch roof collapsed in a shower of sparks. Everywhere else, darkness reigned.
“Think they got out?” she asked.
She had set the cellar stairs on fire to assist their escape. If Jo and Andy had managed to get back down to the ground floor, they would have been forced to exit through the back door, which was on the opposite side of the house from where Jessie and Brother Walter were now standing.
“I think we have to assume they did,” he replied.
They turned away to allow their eyes to adjust. Then they headed through the trees toward the road. “They’re sure to be tracking your communication device now.”
“I can’t get rid of it.”
He sighed and nodded. “We best keep running.”
They alternated between jogging and walking, stopping only long enough for water and food, and so quickly put the miles behind them. One soon became two, and two gave way to four.
In Ronkonkoma, they came upon a crowd of the Infected, and Brother Walter led her down through a series of roads and alleys to get past them.
“They’re there in that same exact spot nearly every night,” he explained.
“Why?”
“Father Heale believed it was some sort of interference point, where the signal from the various towers cancelled each other out.” He shrugged.
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“It was just a theory.”
They were still six or seven miles from the wall when Jessie asked him how he’d met Father Heale.
He was silent for a long while. They walked in the moonlight, and the fall air was almost crisp. Jessie couldn’t remember a year when the leaves had begun to turn so early. It was only mid-September.
“I had a family,” he finally said. “Just my wife and me. We lived together with her parents in a nice split-level on the north shore, near Baiting Hollow.”
“No children?”
He shook his head. He had to take more steps than she, as his legs were shorter, and he was showing signs of tiring. “We tried for years after marrying. Both of us wanted children, but it never happened.”
“You cared a lot for Julia, didn’t you?” Jessie asked, referring to the young girl she’d met previously at the house, the one Jake had viciously attacked and infected.
“She meant a lot to me. To all of us. Children are such a rarity here.”
“Was Sister Jane your wife?”
“Jane?” He chuffed in amusement. “No. No, my wife’s name was Laurel.”
“What happened to her?”
When he didn’t answer, Jessie asked, “How did you get left behind?”
“Laurel’s parents . . . . They weren’t very strong, and we thought it would be better to just ride out the outbreak until the worst of the epidemic had passed. We had no idea how bad it would get, that it would just keep getting worse and that no one would come to rescue us.”
He spoke in a low voice, barely above a whisper, so that she had to walk very close to him to hear.
“Laurel’s parents passed a few weeks after the bridges were bombed.”
“Both of them?”
She sensed something unspoken in his words and wondered if they had had help. Or worse.
“In their sleep. It was actually a blessing; what happened here broke their hearts. They couldn’t understand it. We buried them in the back yard, erected a headstone made from the headboard of their bed. Their honeymoon bed. Laurel carved their names in the wood and we cried. They’d been married for nearly fifty years and were inseparable.”
“When did you . . . . When were you . . . ?”
“Infected?” He shrugged. “I first met Father Heale six or seven years ago. I’d heard of his group. There were maybe a half dozen stable communities by then, several hundred survivors. Heale’s group was the most well-established. They’d settled in Brookhaven very soon after the outbreak and made it their home.”
“Just several hundred? I’d heard there were hundreds of thousands left behind. Were there other groups?”
“There were a lot more at the beginning. And remember, not everyone wanted to be part of a community. Some continued to hold out hope for rescue.”
“Like you.”
“Then there were the others, the ones who, for whatever reason, shunned the company of others. There was little cooperation between groups and individuals, a lot of distrust. It was a lawless time. An embarrassment of riches had been left behind. Money had no value, so the currency was goods and services. You stole what you needed; bartering was the exception, rather than the rule.”
“Most of the houses I’ve seen look undisturbed.”
“The attrition rate was high. Most people died very quickly. The life expectancy here isn’t very long. Within that first year, hundreds of thousands became only a few thousand. Now . . . .” He shrugged. “I doubt if there are a hundred of us left, maybe a couple dozen still uninfected. Without Father Heale’s blood, all the other groups quickly died off.”
“What happened to Laurel?” Jessie pushed.
“Blocked bile duct. She died of an infection when her gall bladder ruptured. Father Heale’s group had two physicians in it, but neither of them was a surgeon. She died in extreme pain.” He wet his lips and looked around, as if searching for something.
“That’s when you started drinking, isn’t it?”
“Haven’t stopped since.”
She was beginning to feel the wall now in her brain. “The network’s still up.”
Brother Walter nodded.
They carried on for another hour without speaking, just walking. The sky had grown noticeably lighter. It was predawn, though the western horizon was still black, hiding the Gameland wall.
“I can hear them sometimes,” she said. “In my head.” Then, when he didn’t answer, she added: “The Infecteds, the ones with implants. Somehow, my implant is picking up their thoughts.”
Her admission affected him in a strange way. His paced slowed, and he seemed to mull this over.
“They’re still inside their bodies, after they die. After they come back, their minds are still intact, but they’re trapped. They’re aware.”
He exhaled and nodded. “Father Heale always suspected as much. That’s why he called them Children, instead of the Undead or monsters.”
“They are monsters, it’s just that the people inside have been imprisoned by their own bodies.”
He grunted. “I wish Father Heale had lived long enough to hear that. He used to say that one’s consciousness doesn’t just wink out of existence, but that it’s somehow intricately associated with the body. But in the Children, the bridge between the body and soul has been severed.”
Jessie nodded. It made sense to think of it that way.
“He believed that the mind decays only when the body decays. In fact, he could feel it happening in himself. His body
was beginning to fail, and with it, his mind.”
He turned to her now, his eyes dark in his face. “Just as will happen to me. Just as will happen to you too, one day. Not even your immunity will protect you forever.”
Chapter 37
Doctor Anne White leaned against the counter and shut her eyes until the cramp in her abdomen passed. This was, by far, the worst she’d experienced yet.
The pains had come on suddenly while she was at the Daniels’s house, cutting her search for the gaming console short and forcing her to leave before she was completely certain it wasn’t there.
Later, she decided, after she’d had a chance to rest, she planned to pay Kelly Corben a visit. She couldn’t do this alone.
She pressed her hand against her belly and tried to measure her breathing. Deeper breaths still caused her some discomfort, but it was nothing like the sharp pains she’d had just a few minutes before. They felt like really bad gas pains. Or menstrual cramps, though she’d stopped having the latter a few years back.
The onset of menopause at such an early age had surprised, though not upset, her. She would never have another child, not after watching both of her own die at such early ages.
Even so, she’d never lost that need to be a mother. If anything, it had only grown stronger. And now, with proof that she’d finally managed to develop a cure, being a mother once more was the only thing on her mind anymore.
She never doubted the efficacy of her cure. If anything, she had concerns about the virus she’d reconstituted from a bloody piece of her daughter’s clothing, whether it was still viable after being stored in the freezer all of these years. It was the same blood she injected into her husband four years ago, and it had worked then, even though the infection had taken several days longer to develop than the typical incubation period.
Her own disease progression had taken nearly five days, which was when she injected the cure. And certainly no one had ever survived eight days. She was the first.
No, what was happening to her now was just some stomach bug she’d picked up at the hospital. The institutions were hotbeds of diseases, and every doctor knew that very few patients ever went home without some sort of nosocomial infection.
A shiver passed through her. Her body had been wracked by them since escaping the hospital, but now they were fading.
She swallowed another handful of antibiotics, gagging at the taste. But they stayed down.
After plucking a spoon from the drawer in the tiny, sparsely furnished kitchen, she removed the pot of soup from the stove and stirred it. But she didn’t take it over to the table right away. She stayed at the sink until she was sure the cramps had passed.
Old cobwebs filled with the husks of dead flies occupied the corners of the dusty window. She wiped them away with her hand and looked out into the courtyard.
Years had passed since she’d actually cooked anything here in the apartment up on the outskirts of Greenwich, years since she’d stocked the pantry with emergency food rations and ammunition. She didn’t live here, only conducted her experiments here.
But now the work was finished.
A bubble popped on the surface of the old soup, releasing a jet of steam and the greasy smell of chicken. It was a couple years past its expiration, but she knew it was still edible. Maybe it wouldn’t taste all that good, but it was nutritious enough to keep them alive.
She removed a pair of bowls from the cabinet, blew out the dust and dead beetle skeletons, then ladled it into each. The idea of soup didn’t really appeal to her, even though she was very hungry. What she really wanted was something—
flesh
—fresh, something a bit more hearty than thin soup with tiny chunks of colorless chicken and blanched carrots and waterlogged noodles. Something she could sink her teeth into, like a—
heart
—hearty steak.
She frowned at herself. It wasn’t like her to be so distracted, especially by such strange and random thoughts as the ones she seemed to be having now.
It’s because you’re hungry.
She looked down at the soup and grimaced.
She placed both bowls on a cutting board and carried them out of the kitchen to where a figure lay asleep on her couch.
“Lana,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. She could feel another cramp coming on, and she quickly set the bowls down on the coffee table with a clatter. But the pain subsided before it could become unbearable. “You need to eat.”
Jessie’s mother opened her eyes. “No sirens?”
“They went off about an hour ago. Off and on, off and on.” She shook her head. “Wish they’d make up their minds.”
Lana pulled out her Link and squinted at it. “But the network’s down.”
Anne shrugged. Up or down, off or on, it didn’t make any difference to her anymore. Nothing was going to change her mind now.
“You shouldn’t have brought me here,” Lana scolded her. She sat up and eyed the soup warily. “My son will be looking for me. Kelly will, too.”
“Your home was too dangerous. You couldn’t stay there. The police went by soon after I brought you here. They went inside. They’re corrupt, paid for by Arc, and they’re looking for scapegoats. Even when they catch Jessica—”
“They won’t catch her!”
Anne White bit her tongue. She knew it was only a matter of time before they did, if they hadn’t already. Arc had every resource available to them, tens of thousands of cameras, and a whole gaming community to help track the girl down. She stood little chance of surviving against such odds.
“You need to eat, keep up your strength.” She picked up her own bowl, but her stomach clenched as she put the spoon to her lips. She forced herself to swallow some.
Lana turned away, a distant look in her eye. “What does it matter anymore? They have my son. They have Eric.” She lifted her Link helplessly. “I’ve been trying to ping him when the Stream is on. I know he’s here, not on the island, but he’s not answering.”
She tried to rise, but her arms and legs shook and she collapsed weakly onto the couch again.
“Eat,” Doctor White repeated. “Get your strength back. You have to stay strong so you can take care of yourself.”
“Myself? Why?” Lana asked, alarmed. “Where are you going?”
“Away.”
Chapter 38
Officer Hank Gilfoy sat behind the wheel of his car thumbing through the paper files he’d recovered during his search of the Daniels’s house the night before. Many of the records he’d seen before. Some were new.
Other than a quick nap at his desk sometime after two A.M., he’d had no sleep whatsoever since rising the previous morning at his usual four-thirty alarm for what would turn out to be an even longer shift than the one before.
It was barely seven o’clock now and he was late getting inside. The sirens were silent — he couldn’t remember them actually going off, just being aware at some point how blissfully quiet things were — though it seemed that the network was now down again. There was no rhyme or reason to either. In fact, nothing made any sense anymore. Including what he was reading.
Someone rapped hard against his window and he jumped, hiccupping in surprise. His partner laughed and gestured. Hank rolled down his window.
“You’re late getting in, too?” Al Castle asked. He handed in one of two large cups of coffee, along with a bag of donuts. “Truce?”
Behind him, Captain Harrick hurried up the sidewalk and inside, ignoring them both. The coincidence of her arrival with Al’s hadn’t been lost on Hank. He’d been aware the two engaged in certain extracurricular — and, in Castle’s case, extramarital — activities, though it never ceased to puzzle him why an attractive, intelligent and powerful woman like Lynn would lower herself to Al’s level, a man with little ambition, a mean-hearted streak, and absolutely nothing to offer in either the physical or mental departments.
The smell of the coffee infused the car and immediately
made Hank’s mouth water. He remembered he hadn’t had any dinner.
“Whatcha doing?” Al asked.
Hank glanced down at the papers on his lap. The file on top was an old field report. “Just going through some papers my dad left me.”
“Your old man was a cop? I didn’t know that.”
Hank shrugged, even though he knew Al was lying. It wasn’t exactly a secret that he came from a long line of cops. Cops and Mafiosi.
“You don’t talk about yourself much, Hank,” Castle noted. He bent down and stuck his uninvited head through the window. Hank was tempted to roll it back up and choke him. “Virginia, huh? Hey, lookit that. Your old man was the responding officer on the Daniels suicide?”
Hank wished he’d closed the file before opening the window. “Yeah. He used to talk about the case sometimes.”
Something fishy about this one, Hank Senior had once told him. Man supposedly commits suicide and the patriarch of the family, some military brass muckity muck, pretty much threatens to shut us down if we don’t close the investigation that night. He refused to be tested for gunshot residue, refused to let us talk to the victim’s wife and son.
“Whatcha looking at it now for?”
I just wish I could’ve spoken with the boy. I’m sure he saw something.
Hank had asked his father why he hadn’t interviewed Eric later about it, when he was old enough not to require parental permission.
I did, but the kid was messed up by then, traumatized is my guess. He said he couldn’t remember a thing.
What do you think happened?
Me? I think it was staged to look like a suicide, but he was really murdered.
And the rumors that came later?
Hogwash.
Then who?
Let me give you some context. Word on the street was that Richard Daniels was getting ready to pull the plug on the government’s Omegaman Project. Do you think his daddy would’ve wanted that?
So, you think he killed his own son?
Hank folded the right side of the packet over the left. “With everything going on here lately, I thought I’d dig it out.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Page 99