GAMELAND Episodes 1-2: Deep Into the Game + Failsafe (S. W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND)

by Saul Tanpepper

  Careless gestures, completely natural and completely unnoticed by either of them. I can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. They’ve grown so comfortable around each other, even as Kelly and I seem to be drifting apart.

  It never used to be like this with them. The first few years I knew Reggie and Ash, they were constantly clashing with each other. Two insecure kids thrust into adolescence, both overwhelmed by new feelings, both helplessly attracted to the other, neither wanting to be the first to admit it. A sign of weakness. They were like magnets on strings, bumping into one another, repelling and spinning and finally aligning. Finally attracting each other.

  Then, at some point—probably within the past few weeks—they started aligning. I guess it was inevitable, two people as passionate as they are. They were bound to end up together.

  Ashley grabs Reggie’s elbow and points past the line of buildings. “What’s that?”

  He shields his eyes against the glare of the sun off the water. I squint to see what they’re looking at. There’s a tiny spot in the air, way off in the distance, a glint of something shiny hovering over the edge of the wall surrounding Long Island.

  “Is that an airplane?”

  “Looks like it, but I thought that was supposed to be a no-fly zone.”

  We watch as the dot slowly moves. It appears to be circling. At some point we realize it’s not actually out over Long Island, but over southern Manhattan.

  Micah returns with a pair of old wooden oars. The paint has long since worn off of them and the wood appears brittle with age and dry rot. “I got us a rowboat,” he announces. “It’s not the greatest, but it’ll get us out to where we need to go. Told you I’d think of something. Although, we might have to bail.”

  Nobody answers. He turns and follows the direction of our gazes. “What are you looking at?”

  “Plane,” Reggie says.

  Micah finally spots it. “Strange.”

  “It looks like it’s circling over lower Manhattan,” Ashley says. She turns toward me. Micah and Reggie follow suit, all of them waiting as if I’ve got the answer.

  “A surveillance plane?” I guess.

  “It might have something to do with the zombies,” Ashley says.

  “Hey!” Micah hisses, pushing his palms down. “Keep it quiet. Our voices carry out here. Now let’s get that rowboat and head over to where we’re supposed to be.”

  Reggie drops his hand, immediately losing interest in the airplane. “Just paddles? No fishing gear, brah? I was so looking forward to trying those bloodworms.”

  Ashley laughs and slaps his arm. “That’s my Reggie, always thinking about his stomach.”

  He smiles and nods, then frowns. “Hey.”

  We all laugh as we pass the shack. I notice it’s built on plastic pontoons, presumably so it’ll rise during high tides. It’s attached to the cement by a long thick chain, which is crusted with dried moss. I glance back, but there’s not much to see. The door’s closed and the dark glass in the window is shuttered against the heat and glare. But I feel like whoever’s inside is watching us.

  We reach the bridge abutment and find a boat tied up to it with a frayed piece of twine. It leans against a cement block. Reggie tries to untie it, but the rope is hard, stiff. It refuses to come undone. Finally he just grabs the ends and snaps it apart. He tilts the boat over into the water with a splash, where it settles onto its bottom, rocking. We watch it for a few minutes to make sure it doesn’t sink.

  “Well, if there’s a leak, it’s not a bad one,” Micah finally says. He hands the oars to Reggie. It’s understood who’s going to row.

  While he climbs in and seats himself at the front, I notice a bronze placard embedded in the cement next to us. It reads, “Willis Avenue Bridge, Opened 2010.” Of course the bridge is no longer there. Presumably not a victim of the bombing campaign, since it doesn’t lead to Long Island. More likely a victim of the floods.

  The rowboat is barely large enough to hold the four of us, and it makes me wonder how on earth it’ll ever fit six. Micah assures us that it will, so Ash and I clamber aboard while Reggie holds it steady with his hand. He’s the last one in and he seats himself in the middle. Ash pushes us off.

  “This must be for bailing,” she says, pulling a squared-off scoop from its cubby under the seat. I look down and see a thin line of water bleed across the bottom of the boat. The leak looks like it’s coming from the front.

  Micah doesn’t look concerned though. He pulls the old computer tablet out of his pack and turns it on so he can more accurately locate our end of the Harlem tunnel. “Just head in that direction,” he says after a minute passes. He points without looking up. Reggie angles us in that direction.

  Then Micah’s arm swings south like a compass, past the stumps of several buildings, past a line of red buoys to where a point of land rises in the distance. “That’s Randall Island. Keep us away from there. It’s probably mined.”

  Reggie has to strain to keep us on course. He guesses we’re passing over the old Harlem channel connecting the East and Hudson Rivers. He points the boat toward the shell of the tallest building a few hundred feet away. The corners look like someone took a giant sledgehammer and chipped away at them. The façade is pocked by holes.

  “Welcome to East Harlem,” he says. “Keep your eyes open for street signs.”

  “Can you see the guys on your Link?” I ask. Ash looks up from where she’s playing with the ribbon of water below her feet. Micah’s got his face down near the screen of the tablet, trying to block out the glare. He reaches absently into his pocket and extracts his Link and hands it over. Reggie grabs it and passes it back to me. I start scrolling through to find the tracking app while Ash glances over my shoulder.

  “Okay,” Micah says, turning around. “According to this, we’re a couple thousand feet from the tunnel opening. Take that passageway between those buildings there, Reg.”

  Reggie puffs from the exertion and the heat. I reach into my pack and grab one of the waters Micah gave me and hand it over to Ash so she can help him drink. Then I turn my attention back to the Link. He’s got it all set up weird and I can’t seem to find the tracking app.

  A shadow overtakes us as we pass between buildings, blocking out the sun. The air is still hot, but I can’t help shivering a little as the blank, dark windows drift by just out of arm’s reach. Reggie keeps us close to take advantage of the shade, but far enough away so the oars don’t hit. He’s already dripping with sweat.

  The buildings act like a wind funnel. It’s a wet wind, humid and laden with decay. It pushes and pulls us in every direction but the one we want to go in.

  “Did you hear that?” Reggie suddenly asks. He stops rowing for a moment, docking the oars. We all listen, but nothing comes to us but the wind, the dripping of water from the paddles, and the cries of gulls.

  “What soun—”

  But then we do hear it: a low rumble, like thunder. Actually, we feel it rather than hear it.

  “What the hell is that?” Reggie says. “A storm?” He looks up at the drab gray, cloudless sky.

  “Sounded more like an explosion,” I say. “But it was too far away.”

  “A mine on the river? They sometimes go off, if there’s a school of fish or a shark or something.”

  “There’s no sharks here.”

  “Are too,” Ashley says. “My cousin said he saw—”

  There’s another low rumble, this one more distinct. Ashley looks up in alarm. The noise gives me the creeps. I’d once read in a banned book—Tom Sawyer—that they used to bomb the Mississippi River to bring up dead bodies. I always wondered if it really worked.

  “Let’s just keep going,” Micah murmurs. He turns his attention back to the tablet. I try and turn mine back to his Link, but my mind keeps drifting back to that book.

  I finally give up after cycling through all the menus. “This thing’s a disaster, Micah. I can’t find it.”

  I tap Reggie on the shoulder to hand
it forward, but Ash says she wants to give it a try, so I give it to her instead. She passes me the scoop. There’s barely a quarter inch of water in the bottom of the boat. Not enough to bail out yet.

  “Looks like the opening comes out on East One-Twentieth Street,” Micah announces. We all look up. “Where are we?”

  “One-Twenty-Fifth. Have we passed it?”

  Micah shakes his head. “The numbers go down. Head left the next chance you’ve got. The tunnel opening is about three blocks inland.”

  Reggie snorts. “Inland from what?” He lets go of the oars and shakes the strain out of his hands.

  Micah grins. “If you see a sign for First Avenue, take a right.”

  “Should I use my blinker?”

  Ash and I laugh. Micah’s driving habits are more insane than my road instructor’s last summer. He not only follows all the rules, but with a wide margin of safety to boot.

  We pass a massive storage tank of some sort. It was once painted white but is now mostly rust-red and black. Beyond it, several cross-shaped buildings break the surface of the water.

  “First Ave,” Reggie announces.

  We pass through the buildings. They remind me of the pictures of old cemeteries that Ash’s G-ma Junie once showed us. “We used to bury our dead,” she’d once told us.

  “Buried? In the ground? That’s disgusting,” Ash and I had both exclaimed. Incineration is so much more tidy. A guarantee that the dead will never come back.

  “East One-Twentieth,” Ash says. She points to where a moss-covered streetlamp arches out of the water. The green sign that hangs from it barely reaches above the surface.

  “This should be it, then. Reggie, let’s tie up to the sign. Ash, let me have my Link back, please.”

  “Fine, I couldn’t find it either. This thing’s as messy as your house is.”

  Micah grins. He reaches over the side and splashes us with water.

  “Hey! Yuck!”

  But she reciprocates. Pretty soon the three of us are splashing each other while Reggie yells at us to stop. “I’m trying to row here!” But we keep it up until the front of the rowboat bumps into the sign. Micah ties what’s left of the rope to it and we rest for a moment drinking water from our packets. There’s no respite from the glaring sun.

  “What’d you do to this thing?” Micah complains after a moment. He looks up from his Link.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say.

  “I might’ve moved a few things around,” Ashley confesses.

  Micah makes a sour face. “I can’t find anything now.”

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t find anything before.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hey, guys,” Reggie interrupts. He gestures south. “I don’t think those are surveillance planes.”

  The tiny dot circling over lower Manhattan has now split into three separate dots. We watch as one dips and disappears past the edge of a building in our way. A moment later, it appears around the side and begins rising up again. The water underneath it seems to reach a finger up toward the sky.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  A second plane dips down like the first. Then the dull sound of the explosion reaches us.

  “Holy shit,” Reggie exclaims, laughing in amazement. “They’re bombing the goddamn city!”

  “Not the city,” Micah says after a moment. The sound of another explosion rolls past us. We expect the third plane to follow its companions, but it doesn’t. Instead, the other two planes line up behind it and together they turn away. “I think they’re bombing the river.”

  “Dead bodies,” I murmur.

  They all turn and look at me. I shrug.

  “What are they doing now?” Ash says. Her eyes grow large in her face. “Are they getting closer? I think they’re heading this way!”

  “Don’t worry, Ash,” Reggie says. But our fascination soon turns to concern as the dots grow larger. They do appear to be heading straight for us.

  “Just act natural, guys,” Micah advises us. “Remember, we’re just out for a day of fishing. We’re not doing anything illegal.”

  But we can’t help but stare with dread and fascination as the planes come ever closer. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m aware that my toes are wet inside my shoes. I’ve forgotten to check the leak. Ash even says something about the wetness, but neither of these things seems to register as all that important right now.

  It’s only when the first plane descends and heads straight for us that our concern morphs into terror. Micah reaches around to untie us from the sign, but by then it’s already too late.

  The plane is over us in an instant. We watch with horror as an object disengages from its belly and falls toward the water.

  PART TWO

  That’s Why We Have Contingencies

  Chapter 13

  Awareness comes so abruptly that I feel like I’ve been startled awake from a deep sleep.

  But I don’t feel rested. I don’t feel like I’ve been asleep. I’m bone tired and hurting all over.

  I don’t open my eyes. I’m lying on my back and I can feel sunlight searing my face. The light presses against my eyelids. They glow a deep, fiery red. But the air is cold, frigid, colder than I’m used to. My skin stings. Without moving, I know I’m naked.

  I try to move—a finger at first, then a hand—but it hurts so badly that I have to stop. Everything about me hurts: my shoulders scream out in agony and my spine has been replaced with a hot steel rod. Even my eyelids hurt.

  Hours pass, but the pain never ends.

  Finally I crack open an eyelid. My need to know where I am wins out. White light scorches my brain. I close my eyes, then open them again. Slowly. Just a slit. Then a little wider.

  A hospital lamp materializes from the blur. It’s the only thing I can see above me. I try to look around, but new pain shoots through my neck. It reaches down my back and squeezes my lungs until breathing itself becomes a wish to die. But death doesn’t come, and I keep on breathing and hurting. I lie as still as death and stare at the light until it no longer blinds me. Until the agony is no longer the biggest part of me.

  I raise a hand to my face. There’s a sound. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but I hear it now. Buzzing. A million tiny angry wasps. They’re stinging me. The sheet covering me slips off, tearing mercilessly at my skin, shredding it. My skin flows like hot oil to the floor. The wasps settle down after a while, crawling all over me.

  Later, I move a leg. This angers the wasps so that they buzz and sting me some more, but not nearly as much as before.

  Kwanjangnim Rupert’s words come to me: Don’t fight your enemy’s strength; use it. Flow with it; yield to it or it will break you.

  Pain is my enemy right now.

  So I yield to it. I close my eyes and focus on breathing.

  I slowly edge to the side of the bed, letting the pain flow through me and over me. I learn to use it, the pain, to move with it, to let it carry me like a current. My feet drop over the side and the pain flows freely past me and onto the floor. An endless tide of agony bearing me from unknown seas to unknown shores.

  I’m in a hospital room. The décor is spartan, a few older-style instruments, bare walls, no clock. Just a barred window and sunlight passing through it. One of the public hospitals, nothing fancy.

  Am I back home?

  Something ropy caresses my thigh. I look down and nearly scream seeing the snake in my bed. I reach down and grab it and try to hurl it away, but it’s latched onto me—attached inside of me! I feel it tug at my belly, see the bag of golden fluid it drains from my body. My fingers trace it to where it enters me.

  Then I really do scream.

  I tumble out of the bed and scream and scream until the pain consumes me and I flee from the hoard of angry wasps until I leave it so far behind that I know they will never find me again.

  But they flow with the tide of pain.

  They find me.

  And they sting.

/>   † † †

  The second time I’m aware of waking, it’s dark. My body tells me it’s nighttime, but I have no way of confirming this. I’m back in bed and covered, though still naked underneath. The buzzing is gone and the silence is blissful. The cold is gone. So is much of the pain.

  The tube still penetrates me between my legs. I try to pull on it, sobbing drily, but it refuses to let go.

  Everything’s so quiet that I can almost believe I’m totally alone in the world. I peer at the darkness above me until details emerge: shadows cast on the ceiling, the faint reflection of instrument lights around me. The hospital lamp above me is gone, replaced by the stained tiles of a drop-ceiling. It’s a different room than before. The walls are even barer than the other. There’s no window.

  Where am I? What happened? Why am I here?

  The pain awakens deep inside of me, so I know I’m still alive. It tells me I haven’t died. I haven’t reanimated.

  I think I haven’t, anyway. Are zombies self-aware?

  I lift my arms and stare at them. They’re covered in dark spots, days-old bruises and half-healed scrapes.

  Why can’t I remember?

  I groan as I rotate my head all the way to the left. There’s an IV machine, blinking away, dripping liquid into a tube that snakes its way beneath the sheet, but not into my arms.

  I reach up and find it sunken into my neck. I want to rip it out, but as my fingers dance carefully over the tape that binds the needle to me, something inside of me warns me to wait.

  I call out.

  My throat is dry and it comes out as a low moan.

  “Can someone help me?”

  Nobody answers. Nothing moves.