“Micah said he had to go to the bathroom. He looked really unsteady, so I told him I’d get some help. But then I saw that he’d already…”
“What?”
“I got him back in bed and cleaned up the floor. By then he was crying and shivering.” He lowers his voice. “He was embarrassed. I didn’t know what else to do, so I stayed with him.”
“So why were you attacking him?”
Jake shoots Reggie another angry glare. “I wasn’t attacking him. We were talking. He seemed fine, but then, all of a sudden, he just started freaking out. I told you that!”
“Jake! Not so loud.”
“So, that’s it?” Reggie asks. “Just out of the blue he freaks out?”
“I told you we were talking. For quite a while, actually. Half an hour, maybe. He asked for something to drink. I gave it to him. He seemed to be totally okay. We were talking about what happened after we got separated, back in the Midtown tunnel. We talked about how we all ended up back here, about Arc and the failsafe inside our heads. We were talking, that’s all.”
“You told him about the failsafe?”
“I, uh— What do you want me to say? Was I not supposed to?”
“What else did you tell him?”
“I don’t know. About how you escaped and killed that nurse. And then finding Kelly. Trying to go back and everyone passing out. I told him we were planning on shutting down the servers to get out. He was just lying there, all quiet and listening. Then suddenly he just wigged.”
“Christ,” I say, running my hand through my hair. It catches on a tangle. “I was afraid this was going to happen. You shouldn’t have told him that stuff. It overloaded him.”
“It’s not my fault!”
“Jake—”
But Jake storms out of the room, leaving the rest of us in silence. Even Micah has completely withdrawn into himself.
“He’s just a kid, Jess,” Ashley finally says. She presses her hand against her cheek. I can tell she’s in a lot of pain. We don’t even have ice to put on it.
“We’re all kids! God damn it. You’re his age, for Christ sake, Ash, and yet I don’t see you going around freaking everyone out! He should’ve known better. He just needs to do his job and let the rest of us do ours so we can get the hell out of this place and go home.”
I’m so close to tears I can feel them pressing against the backs of my eyes.
Reggie takes in a long shuddering breath and lets it out between his teeth. “Listen,” he quietly says, “maybe we should just shut all the damn servers down right now. Just cut off all the sub-streams and leave. Take Micah in the wheelchair and go. Right now.”
“And what if it doesn’t work?” I ask.
The question seems to take us all by surprise, including me. I’d been having doubts, but I’d suppressed them, hoping against hope that I was just being paranoid. Ashley seemed to have every confidence that the plan would work. That, I’d thought, was good enough for me. But it has been bugging me. Shutting off the servers just seems too easy, too convenient. If Arc chose us specifically for our coding skills, then they’d have to know we’ve got the tools to sabotage the very machines that hold us prisoner here.
“It’ll work, Jessie.”
But now, even Ashley is beginning to look doubtful. She winces at Reggie’s assurance and says, “If we’re wrong, Reg, it could kill us.”
“What? You, too?” He huffs. “I’d rather die trying than to stay here another day.”
“Don’t say that.”
He throws his hands up in the air. “I just want us to go home, babe.”
“We all do.”
I glance over at Micah. I don’t know if I’m making the right decisions or not. Am I being overly cautious? But moving him now—especially after this manic episode—feels like the absolute wrong thing to do. He’s too unstable to take that risk. “One more night, Reggie,” I tell him. “Just a few more hours.”
“In a few more hours we could all be dead, Jessie!”
“Damn it!” I shout. Micah’s body jerks in the bed. I lower my voice. “We’re winging it here, Reggie. Doing the best we can. We’ve got one shot at this, one shot only. I’m sure of it.”
“Fine. One more night,” Reggie says, wagging his finger, as if to make his intent perfectly clear. “We go in the morning. Do or die.”
Ashley tentatively places her hand on my arm, like she’s afraid I might lash out at her. “Micah will be ready.”
“All right. Okay.”
“I’ll sit with him,” Reggie says, dismissing us. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t freak out again.” He moves to check Ashley’s cheek one final time, but she turns away. Tough girl. The friction between them is nearly as palpable as it is between all the rest of us.
“Come on,” I tell her, pulling her out by the arm. “We’ll get that cleaned up and bandaged.”
As we leave, I pray Micah recovers quickly. We desperately need to this all behind us, before we tear each other apart.
Chapter 18
When five o’clock arrives Monday morning, the first thing I do is check on Micah. He’s still asleep. Reggie’s nowhere in sight, but Kelly’s crashed in the chair next to the bed. Both he and Micah are snoring.
I leave them and hurry down the darkened hallway and out to the bathrooms. I end up sitting on the dry toilet pinching my nose from the smell. I sit like that for a good ten minutes. Wanting to pee, needing to cry. I can’t do either.
On my return, I pass INTERVIEW 1. I’ve been avoiding Stephen, but now I go in.
He turns his eyes to me and the corner of his mouth curls up into an infuriating sneer.
“Another visit, and so soon after last night?”
I frown. “I didn’t come in here last night. You must’ve been dreaming.”
“Whatever you say.”
“We’re leaving,” I tell him, not trying to mask the disdain in my voice. “We found the failsafe programs.”
His face remains impassive.
“We’re going to shut the servers down,” I tell him, watching for any reaction. I think I see a flicker in his eyes.
“It won’t work,” he tells me. I expect him to say just that, and yet his words still hit me like sheets of ice, shattering over me and leaving me shivering and bitterly cold.
“It will.”
He doesn’t argue. He lies there on the table and stares at me until I can’t stand it any longer.
I circle him, disappearing from his view around the guillotine, running my hands over the metal frame, hiding the terror it induces inside of me. My mind screams at me that this is wrong, that no one should be subjected to such torture as this. I come back around the other side and stop.
“You still haven’t figured it out, have you?” he whispers.
“I don’t have the time or the patience to figure things out. I only need to know how to go home.”
He coughs. “Don’t suppose I could get some water.”
“Ask your employer for some when they get here.”
“I really have to go to the bathroom.”
I remember Jake telling us about Micah last night, the embarrassment he must’ve felt after Jake found him the way he did. All my anger and frustration come boiling to the surface. Before I know what I’m doing, my fist slams into the table. It makes a loud metallic boom. Stephen flinches.
“You can just lie in your own piss,” I whisper into his face.
Then I wheel out of the room like a leaf on a gust of wind.
When I get to Micah’s room, it’s like my prayers from last night are answered. He’s awake and resting, apparently no worse for last night’s meltdown. He sees me walk in and smiles. I kick Kelly’s chair and he jumps up in surprise. “Can you get Reg?” I ask him. “We’re almost ready to leave.”
He nods and exits the room.
“Remember anything from last night?”
Micah frowns. “I’ve been lying here trying to remember what I’m doing here. It’s all a blank.
”
“But you remember who I am.”
“Duh. How could I not remember you? I just… The last thing I remember is us sitting in my house tracking Kelly and Jake on my tablet. I guess it worked. They came through the tunnel fine. It’s good to see Kel and to know Jake’s okay.”
“So, you don’t know where we are?”
“Yeah, Kelly wouldn’t tell me that either.”
Amnesia, I think. It might be better this way.
“I just… I can’t…” He shakes his head hard, like he’s trying to dislodge something. “It’s like this fog settled inside my head, like I’m trying to see out some window, but there’s this heavy mist blocking everything from view.”
“All you need to know is that we’re going home. The rest will come back to you.”
He makes fists with his hands and pushes them against his eyes. “Going home. We’re still on Long Island, aren’t we? But how can that be? Did we never swim back?”
“We’ll straighten it all out later. We’ve got more important things to do right now. Are you strong enough to walk?”
He shrugs, nods. “Kelly helped me out to the bathroom earlier. I could see that we’re in an airport. LaGuardia?
I nod. “Good.”
“Guess I better get dressed, then.”
Reggie comes in and helps him with his clothes. I take the opportunity to brief Kelly, and he goes off to gather his stuff. Then Micah walks out, mostly under his own power.
“Feel like I’ve got to pee again,” he says.
“At least the plumbing’s back to normal,” Reggie says.
“Yeah, thanks for that image.”
I catch a glimpse of the bandage on the back of Micah’s neck as he walks away and remember what Ash said about not finding his implant identifier in the servers. The white cotton is half hidden by Micah’s long hair. It looks to me like he got a new implant, just like the rest of us. So why wouldn’t it be in the system?
“How’s your neck,” I ask, pointing.
Micah reaches up and feels the bandage. I can see him digging a fingernail underneath an edge, but he stops short of pulling it off. “Still sore,” he says. “Itchy.” He turns and they exit through the security door.
When they return, Micah settles back on the bed and reaches shakily for the package of Slim Jims. “Anyone seen my Link?”
Reggie digs into his pocket and pulls it out. He flips it over and Micah’s hand moves quickly to catch it. He’s recovering much faster than I could’ve hoped for. Physically, anyway.
“Kinda feel naked without it,” he explains. I feel myself blushing, imagining it. He doesn’t notice.
Reggie pulls me out into the hallway. “He’s strong enough to walk downstairs, but not much farther. Might need a little assistance.”
I nod. I know what he’s saying. He’s ready to go. He won’t let Micah stop him.
I head for the server room. Ash is already in there on the floor, the tablet on her lap. She raises her bleary eyes. One side of her face is puffy. The cut on her cheek is bandaged, but the edges are beginning to darken.
“Are we set?” I ask.
The look she gives me is about as miserable as I’ve ever seen on her. She shakes her head and says:
“Bad news.”
Chapter 19
“What’s the problem?”
“I’ve been analyzing these sub-streams, the ones with our identifier codes in them.”
“The failsafes?” I ask. “What about them?”
“There’s something strange about them, something…I don’t know. Familiar.”
“Familiar? You said they looked a little like Micah’s tracking app.”
She nods, then shakes her head. “I can’t place it. I wish I had copies of my files from home to crosscheck them. But that’s not the only thing. I told you yesterday I can’t find the root files.”
“There has to be root files. Or maybe they’re more like viruses than we thought. Maybe they use the ArcWare codex base files for themselves? Could they be hitchhiking on The Game’s programming.”
She purses her lips. “I can’t even find root files for the codex in here.”
“Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means. Are you saying the application actually lives somewhere else?”
She nods.
“Okay. So…what? So we don’t knock out the programs. Shutting the servers should still block them.” She doesn’t answer. “Look, Ash, if you know something, now’s the time to speak up. We’re all about to head out and if this doesn’t work, there will be no second chance. Once we shut these servers down, Arc is going to go ballistic.”
“There might be a way to test it first,” she says. “Before we fully commit.”
“Without them knowing? How?”
“What if I block just one of the streams?”
“Arc might still know. There’d be a hole in their Stream.”
“Not if I dub in a copy of one of the other sub-streams.”
“A duplicate? Whose?”
“Yours. You’re insensitive to it anyway.”
“So, why not make enough copies to run them in all the sub-streams?”
She shakes her head. “Pretty sure they’d notice that.”
I clench my jaw. My gut has been telling me that there’s something inherently wrong with our plan. Hope and desperation have been blinding me.
“Kelly,” I decide. “He’ll take Reggie with him, but they’ll go only far enough to make sure we know this works. The rest of us need to be ready to go when they get back.”
Ashley nods and starts shifting through her screens.
“No, wait, Ash. On second thought, I’ll have him take Jake instead.”
“Why Jake?”
“I kind of feel bad about everything. We’ve been picking on him. He needs to know we’re not against him.”
Ashley frowns but nods. “Okay. Reggie’s not going to be happy.”
“He’ll deal.”
I find Kelly and tell him what we’re planning. He expresses doubt, and tries to launch another argument that we should all go, but I nip it before it gets very far. Finally he shakes his head. “All right. We’ll do it your way. I’ve always trusted your instinct,” he says.
“No you haven’t.”
He looks hurt.
“Ping us when you and Jake get onto the tram; we’ll let you know when Ash has got the streams diverted. Then head out. Halfway only. No farther. If the failsafe is blocked, you should be able to make it that far without any problems. But if Jake starts having any symptoms—headache, nausea, sleepiness—stop and come right back.”
Kelly’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t say anything. He just nods, gets up, and leaves.
Chapter 20
“That girl’s awake,” Reggie calls out as soon as he sees me in the gloom.
I’m sitting on one of the baggage carousels downstairs, waiting for Kelly and Jake to return. It’s only been twenty minutes since they left. “Tanya,” I tell him. “Her name’s Tanya.”
“Right, Tanya. Anyway, she just snapped out of whatever fog she was in. It was weird, like a switch being flipped. Ash saw her wandering around the hallway. She’s with her right now.”
I look up, feeling both surprised and irritated. Ashley was supposed to be watching the streams for anomalies, either on our end or anywhere else she could see.
Together, we head back upstairs and into Tanya’s room. She’s sitting on the edge of her bed, her back toward the door. Ashley’s talking to her while she stuffs a handful of Doritos into her mouth.
“It was so strange,” Tanya says, bits and pieces of chips spraying from her mouth. “It wasn’t like I was asleep. I mean, I was, like, sort of aware of stuff happening around me. Like I was in a trance. Hypnotized.”
Four or five empty chip bags litter the floor, along with a couple cans of Red Bull. She takes a swig from another before going on.
“These are soooo good,” she croons. “I am so totally star
ving! I haven’t eaten in, like, whole days.” She shakes the empty bag. “Is there any more?”
“You might want to eat something with a little more substance to it than that,” I tell her, though I realize how wrong it is given the circumstances for me to say something like that. Ashley rolls her eyes and shakes her head and mumbles something about me being the house mother. It’s an old thing between us. I can’t help it.
Tanya turns her head. When she sees me, her eyes widen. She leans away, like she’s afraid I’m going to hurt her. “I saw what you did to that woman.”
“I guess you weren’t really aware of everything, then,” I tell her. “Because if you were, then you’d know she was IU and I saved you from her.”
She slowly licks her fingers, her gaze flicking doubtfully between me and Ashley.
“Look,” I say, “nobody’s going to hurt you. I promise you that. None of us here, anyway. But there are people out there who want to, so I need you to tell me everything you know and everything you’ve heard since you were brought here. And you need to be quick about it.”
“Why should I trust—?”
“Tanya,” I say, firmly, “there isn’t time, and this isn’t a game.”
“Easy, Jessie! You’re scaring her.”
I ignore Reggie, irritated at him, too. Kelly and Jake are in the tunnel and what are these guys doing? Sitting around eating chips and telling stories to little Miss Airhead here. “Ashley, who’s watching the servers?”
Ash frowns, but she gets up and walks out. Reggie excuses himself and says he’s going to watch the tunnel.
After they leave, I turn back to Tanya. “Tell me what you remember.”
She swallows, then nods. “I was telling—Ashley?—that the only other person I saw was that woman you killed.”
“You’re talking about the nurse?”
She nods nervously.
“She was already dead, Tanya. She was an Infected Undead.”
She frowns and shakes her head. “No. I remember her talking to me.”
“That was before she died. She worked for Arc and they injected her with something that made her turn IU after. She attacked us when we came back here.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 39
