S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus

by Saul Tanpepper

  I bend down to retrieve my sparring bag.

  “Leave it.”

  He grabs my arm and pulls me toward the door. “It’ll be fine there. We’ll be back in four or five hours.”

  The heat hits me like a baseball bat when we get back outside. Even Micah winces a bit at the glare. His forehead begins to glisten.

  I head for the passenger seat before turning around again. “I forgot my inhaler.” He gives me an impatient look, but taps his Link to unlock the front door to the house. “Grab a few more waters on your way out.” Then he gets in the car and starts it up to run the air conditioner. “I think we’re going to need them.”

  I go back inside and grab my inhaler out of my sparring bag and slip it into my pocket. As I turn to leave, my hip knocks against the side table. It tips and crashes to the floor, dumping the contents of a drawer.

  I reach down to pick everything up. There’s a tacky paperweight from the Alamo, one of the few things I’ve ever seen in Micah’s house with any direct connection to his former life as a citizen of the Southern States Confederacy. His family defected from the Republic of Texas years back. He still has the old twang in his voice. We always used to pick on him about it.

  There are a few other trinkets, typical odds and ends that people accumulate over time and then lose again in the forgotten nooks and crannies of their lives: an antique yellow and black smiley faced pin, an old digital music player with a silver apple icon, the electronic guts of some other unknown device.

  The last thing I pick up is card of some sort. I turn it over and see it’s an old fashioned college ID badge, printed on paper and laminated in plastic. Curious, I check out the image of the man on the front. His face is vaguely familiar, but he doesn’t resemble anyone I’ve seen in any of the family photos scattered about Micah’s place. I freeze when I see the name underneath: Eugene Halliwell.

  For a brief moment I can’t tell if I’m actually reading it correctly. But when I blink and check again, it’s still there.

  Eugene Halliwell, Professor of Immunology, Royce State College.

  Micah honks.

  I get up shakily, slipping the badge into my back pocket.

  I need to know how Micah knows the man who murdered my father.

  Chapter 11

  We spot Ashley and Reg at the corner of Amherst and Fourth. They’re coming from the direction of my house. Micah honks and they see us and hurry across the intersection looking relieved.

  “Your grandfather said you weren’t home yet from karate,” Reggie says, getting in behind me. “Hope you don’t mind if I say that guy scares the crap out of me. He said we should wait for you at your place, but…”

  “Yeah, I know. And I don’t mind. He scares a lot of people.”

  I do, however, suppress the urge to correct him about the karate reference. I’ve told him a million times that it’s hapkido. They’re actually very different martial arts. Karate emphasizes strength, meeting force with force; hapkido teaches using an opponent’s force against him. The misunderstanding probably bugs me more than it should, like when Kelly calls the dojang a dojo. I guess if they haven’t figured it out by now, then it’s unlikely they ever will.

  “So, Micah filled you in on the deets?” Ash asks.

  I turn to her and nod. For a moment I’m tempted to ask her about Rupert’s contact info on her Link, but that’s less important right now. “I can’t believe you actually finished the hack on The Game.”

  She shakes her head. “Just the first step, actually. We still need to incorporate the gaming algorithms into a control device. And it wasn’t all me. Micah helped a lot. He’s the one who suggested we go back and run a cladistic analysis of the programming structure that ArcWare’s been using for their various versions of their games over the years.” She shakes her head and laughs at herself. “I can’t believe it was as simple as that. Once we had that and Micah’s backdoor to the codex he created while we were on LI, it was just a matter of configuring the translator to extrapolate out until the syntaxes aligned.”

  “Yeah, um, you lost me at cladistic analysis.”

  Ash leans forward and pats Micah’s head. “I thought I was the hidden Markov modeling expert. Turns out Micah’s pretty good at optimal nonlinear filtering problems himself.”

  “Stop!” I yell. “You’re making my ears bleed.”

  “Ash did all the heavy programming,” Micah says, ignoring me. “I just suggested a few tweaks. She took them and ran with it.”

  “I’m with Jessie. Enough with the circle jerk,” Reggie says.

  “Yeah, we all know who’s the expert on gaming architecture. It’s only natural you’d want to look at the programming structure, Micah.”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” Micah says, “it sort of takes all the air out of the old ego.”

  “Ha! Now you know how I feel,” Reggie complains. “Jessie’s been deflating my ego for years. Long before you ever came along, Tex-Mex.”

  “Yeah, and yet your ego somehow still manages to fill the car,” Ashley teases. “It’s probably big enough to be picked up by the Air Defense System.”

  I give Ash a high five. Everyone laughs. The mood is definitely brighter as we head off the side streets and onto the main roads, as if our inability to do anything about Jake and then Kelly before has been physically weighing us down. Now we’re going to get them. That’s enough to make us forget, at least for the time being, all our other troubles. We joke and tease like it’s old times again.

  “Too bad we can’t use Reggie’s ego to float us out over the Harlem swamps,” Ashley says.

  “I’m working on it,” Micah replies.

  “You always say that: ‘I’m working on it.’”

  “Have I ever disappointed?”

  Nobody defends him. There’s a kernel of truth to what Ash said. Micah’s not the most reliable one in the bunch. That would be Kelly. And with that, the good mood slips away. The car grows quiet, more subdued.

  It’s the first time I’ve been on the Old New England Thruway in many years. Apparently, very few people ever use it anymore. Micah says most people take the Bronx River Parkway, since it rests on higher ground.

  The inland scenery quickly gives way to the rainforest that lines the coast. It’s technically not considered a rainforest—we get too little actual precipitation—but with the constant high humidity, it might as well be. My brother Eric says that back when he was a kid, the temperature rarely reached a hundred in Connecticut during the summers. Now it hovers above ninety for five months out of the year and the number of hundred-plus degree days has grown steadily year over year. We get nearly a month of them now.

  Both sides of the highway are lined with moss-covered trees, thick curtains of growth that mask the Atlantic from our view on the left and the inland swamps on the right. Both press against us until we feel like we’re drowning.

  We cross into New York at the Port Chester outpost, where the guard seems both surprised and happy to see us. He’s actually very chatty. So chatty, in fact, that I begin to think he might never let us through. “Going fishing?” he asks. “There’s a great rental shack off Locust Point. I take my sister’s kids there sometimes. It’s so peaceful. Just don’t eat the fish. Catch and release, I always tell them.”

  “Can you rent rowboats there?”

  “Rowboats, canoes. Nothing with a motor, of course. You know about the mines right? They’re sound and vibration sensitive.”

  We nod.

  “And stay this side of the buoys, you’ll be fine.”

  Finally he lifts the gate arm and waves us on. He smiles cheerily as we drive through. “Use the blood worms,” he shouts. “A hundred for a buck. They work the best!”

  “We should’ve come this way before,” Reggie grumbles. “He didn’t even bother to check our Links or scan our implants.”

  “I feel sorry for him,” Ash says. “He looks so lonely.”

  “We still would’ve had to go through the other checkpoi
nts,” Micah points out. “The ones further south.”

  “No, I meant we should’ve gone through the Harlem tunnel instead of the Midtown.”

  I shudder. We shouldn’t have gone in the first place.

  “It’s more than twice as long,” Ashley says.

  Reggie shrugs and rotates his shoulders, as if a five-mile dive—there and back—is a challenge he’d be up for. Now there’s no chance of it happening, so he’s all Mister Macho again. He obviously forgot how hard it was just a couple days before when the distance was less than half.

  Remembering this myself makes me start worrying again about Kelly and Jake. I hope they remember to carry extra cartridges on their belts. And knives. And I hope there aren’t any blockages.

  We continue south. The land grows even swampier. The road is badly in need of repair. Micah doesn’t dare go any faster than thirty. “Don’t want to blow an axle or a tie rod,” he says. The road dips several times; every so often a shallow stream of gray water flows over it. Some parts of the road are covered in undisturbed mud or silt. We leave fresh tire tracks on it, making me worry that someone might follow them.

  The empty buildings this close to the river are even more desolate and decrepit than the abandoned ones we saw on Long Island, perhaps because of the repeated flooding and subsequent retreat of waters these have been exposed to. Dried moss and seaweed dangles from eaves and signs. The husks of ancient tree trunks stand stripped and bare, sun-bleached and water-worn. The place makes me think of dead things—not the Undead, but of ancient civilizations and long lost cities and ghosts and haunted places. It gets inside your soul and eats at you from the inside instead of the outside.

  We come to a place where a beaten, faded sign points south. It says Locust Point. A hand-carved sign is tacked to it announcing cheap rentals. But there’s nothing there to see. The road ends abruptly and the trees clear. The Atlantic opens out in front of us. In the distance, a small rocky island juts out of the water. The stark gray walls of Long Island rise up behind it, looking like a long, low battleship a hundred miles long.

  “Now what?” Reggie asks. “It’s high tide. We can’t get out there to rent a boat.”

  Micah doesn’t answer. He steers the car to the right and follows the road as it heads west through these wastelands.

  “There used to be a bridge back there,” he says. “The Throng Neck. Two bridges, actually. I remember them from the map.”

  The three of us strain our necks back to look, but of course we don’t see anything. All the bridges were bombed out after the outbreak, after the military went in and evacuated and closed the island off. Nobody thinks to ask why he remembers their names. They would’ve been gone long before he came from Texas, so there wouldn’t be a personal connection.

  But that’s Micah, I remind myself. His brain works in ways that are mysterious to the rest of us.

  We hit the remnants of the Cross-Bronx Highway. If we were heading for lower Manhattan, we would go inland from here, crossing the Hudson into New Jersey before turning south again. Today, however, we stay along the coast. We pass signs for the old towns of Trinity and Castle Hill, Hunts Point-Longwood—where the LaGuardia tunnel is supposed to come out—Foxhurst and Melrose. All neighborhoods that were wiped out by the floods. They’re now reefs for the strange fish that have learned to survive with the poisons bleeding out of the ground here.

  Finally a sign tells us we are about to cross the Harlem River—though it’s impossible to tell where the swamp ends and the river begins. The highway veers right and disappears into the distance, the opposite direction from where we need to go.

  The bridge over the Harlem River is gone. A shallow ribbon of gray leads out to where it used to stand, an old road that’s barely even there anymore. Our way is blocked by concrete barriers. The surface is too unstable, too broken down to permit automobile traffic. Now only weekend fisherman and checkpoint guards and their nieces and nephews use it.

  “I guess we walk from here,” Micah says as he turns the car off. “Or swim.”

  Chapter 12

  “My new shoes are ruined,” Ashley complains as she high-steps over the muddy parts.

  I look down at her feet and notice for the first time that she’s wearing a new pair of Nike sneakers. I want to ask her how her family can afford them—not to mention the two-hundred dollar Ronnie Marx bikini she wore on Friday for the practice dive—but Micah interrupts the thought.

  “There’s another rental shack.” He points off to the right. “Looks like they’ve got two-man kayaks.”

  “Or two-woman kayaks,” Ashley says.

  We head over to it. I’ve only got a few dollars in my pocket, so I wonder how we’re going to pay. Maybe Ash can sell her shoes.

  “I’ll talk to the owner,” Micah says. He looks at Reg when he says this. Everyone knows Reggie doesn’t do tact. He’s not the subtlest guy in the world. “I’ll see what I can negotiate. Just wait here.”

  We watch as he walks over. He has to take a winding course, since there are puddles everywhere and sinkholes that could swallow him up in an instant. The shack stands on the edge of an expanse of water that stretches out beyond it. Several hundred feet away, a line of crumbling buildings rise, the tops of second-floor windows peeking up a few feet above the water, one foot below the high-water mark. Micah disappears around the corner of the shack.

  I turn my gaze to Reg and Ash. I have so many questions I want to ask, but I need to get each of them alone and that’s not going to happen here.

  “Freaking hot out here,” Reggie mumbles. He turns and wipes away a bead of sweat on his face and adds that he wishes he’d worn a hat. He rests a hand on Ashley’s shoulder for a moment before dropping it. His thumb catches on where her knotted-up tee shirt bunches up at the middle of her back. Her skin’s bronze, making the few wisps of hair I can see back there look blond like mine, rather than red. Her hand twitches reflexively at the touch. She curls her pinky around his for just a moment. Then the moment passes.

  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 Man
hattan,” 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.