Tanya raises her hands to her head and frowns. “This is all too confusing. Are we in Gameland? Are they taping us for Survivalist?”
“No,” I tell her, struggling to keep my voice steady. She thinks this is a big production. “This is not Gameland. We are not on Survivalist. We are on Long Island and unless we can find a way off of it soon, I have a feeling things are going to get a lot worse for us.”
“Oh.” She blinks a few times, glancing down, thinking. She looks almost disappointed. After a moment she crumples the empty bag and reaches for her RB. “FYI, these are so much better cold.”
“FYI, we’re in the middle of a shit-hell crisis here!” I tap my foot impatiently.
She wipes her mouth and stares at me. “You don’t have to yell.”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“That woman—her name was Mabel? She came in during my acting audition. Right in the middle of it. So rude! I got flustered and forgot my lines. I thought for sure I’d lost the part.”
That’s right. I remember. She told me she was an aspiring actress. She’d mentioned that to me the day we met on the bus back from Hartford. The day I’d borrowed her Link to ping Kelly. Her day job as a recorder with ArcWare was just a chance to get her foot in the door of Arc Entertainment.
She had been going on and on about this one Player on Survivalist, a young zombie that was having a lot of success knocking off the others. The way she’d spoken about him had given me the creeps. I’d pretty much dismissed her as another new age Survivalist wingnut. Now I see that she isn’t crazy, just a product of Arc’s unrelenting entertainment propaganda, a willing participant, a hopeful cog in their Media machine.
“I just stood there like an idiot, gulping air,” Tanya says. “I couldn’t remember my lines. The woman flashed her Link to the casting director and the next thing I knew she’d whisked me off in a black car with dark windows. She told me she was a talent scout for Arc. I couldn’t help it; I believed her. I was so excited! But then she brought me to this little fishing shack out in the middle of nowhere. She took me down into this basement and I just knew she wasn’t who she said she was.”
“She was from Arc all right,” I tell her, “just not a talent scout.”
“I thought she was going to kill me or, like, sell me as a Volunteer. I tried to fight her—you know, but she punched me. In the face!” She touches her cheek and winces, as if it still hurt.
I do better with people than with machines. That’s what Mabel had claimed. What a bullshit liar.
“What kind of person does that?” Tanya asks.
“The kind of person that kills and sells someone as a Volunteer.”
Tanya is stunned by my sudden outrage, at the bitterness in my voice. After a moment, she continues, haltingly. “She tied me up, kept asking me all these questions about that other guy, Kelly. I didn’t know who he was. I kept saying, ‘I keep telling you I don’t even know who this Kelly person is.’ No matter what I said, she wouldn’t believe me.”
Tanya looks around, as if expecting Mabel to suddenly appear.
I check my Link impatiently, cursing under my breath that the time seems to be passing both so slowly and so quickly. Forty minutes now since they left. They should be back in another twenty or so. I wish Tanya would just get to the point.
“She kept saying, ‘Don’t lie to me, Miss Saroyan. We know you tried to contact him recently.’ Except I never did. But then she showed me the ping records on my Link. I didn’t even know how his contact information got on there. Except, I guess, now I do.” Her eyes lock on mine, full of hurt and accusation. “I never made the connection until I saw you come into my room the other day. It was you who planted it, not me. I never had anything to do with this!”
“If I’d known then what was going to happen, I never would have asked to borrow your Link. But now we’re here, so we need to work together and figure out how to get out.”
She makes a doubtful face, then looks down, away from me. She picks absently at the crumbs on her shirt and eats them.
I soften my voice, hoping to appeal to her. “I know you’re just an innocent victim, here. But so are we.”
She sighs. I can see her struggling in her mind whether to believe me or not. Finally, she seems to come to a decision.
“That woman brought me on this little train and into a room just like this one. Then she gave me something that knocked me out. I remember waking up, but in a different room. It had all this equipment in it. And there was, like, this giant scary…thing hanging over me.” She shivers. “It looked like some kind of ancient torture chamber thingy. I couldn’t move. I thought I was going to die. I could hear people in the next room over, but I couldn’t see them through the glass.”
I try not to show my surprise. Whatever they did to her, they did it in INTERVIEW 1. They did it with that damn guillotine hanging over her. And she was totally conscious the whole time. What the hell did they do?
“She came in again and gave me a shot of something. I don’t know what it was, except that I saw it was green and it burned like a fire inside of me, except I was freezing.”
“Green?”
She nods.
This startles me so much that my legs nearly give out.
“Did they say what it was called?” I ask her. “Any names?”
She frowns. “I remember hearing the woman say something strange.” She taps her forehead and thinks. “It was one of those old-timey words. Gothic, I think. Or gotham. Graphic. I don’t know; I can’t remember.”
“Not alpha?”
“Alpha? No, definitely not that. She left after that. It seemed like days passed. Sometimes I could hear people talking. Most of the time it was really quiet. A couple times I heard screaming. It scared me. I thought it might be me doing the screaming, but after a while I was sure it wasn’t.”
I wonder who it was screaming. Was it me? Ash? One of the guys?
“She finally came in and took me out. I guess whatever they thought was going to happen didn’t. I mean, a couple times I thought I might be getting sick, you know, since my body was all achy. Later, she brought me back there to that room. She did something else to me, something different. This time I was on my stomach. I couldn’t talk or move. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I couldn’t. After that is when I started feeling strange.”
“Strange, how?”
She reaches up and touches the base of her skull. “It was like I was in someone else’s body, looking through someone else’s eyes and hearing through their ears.” She frowns, then shakes her head. “No, that’s not right. It was more like someone else was in my body, pushing me out, taking over control. All I could do was watch. Does that make any sense?”
“None of this makes sense, Tanya,” I tell her.
“Then they put me in a room with that boy, handcuffed me to the bed. I was paralyzed! How was I going to escape? And I kept having these strange thoughts, too, like I was listening to someone speaking inside my head.”
“Voices?” I ask, but before she can answer, my Link pings. It’s Reggie.
“It’s been an hour,” he tells me. “They should’ve been back by now.”
“Give them another ten minutes.”
“But—”
“Ten minutes, Reg.” I disconnect and pocket my Link.
“Not voices,” Tanya says. “Whispers inside my head.”
“Whispers?” Suddenly I can’t get out of her room fast enough. “Stay here,” I tell her as I jump to my feet. “Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be right back.”
Chapter 21
I shove the cardkey into the electronic lock for INTERVIEW 1 and curse when I bang my face into the door because the latch doesn’t release fast enough. I try again and see that the card won’t slide all the way in. Someone’s jammed the lock.
“God damn Jake!”
After I get inside OBSERVATION 1, I pick up a chair and hurl it at the glass. It cracks, but doesn’t shatter. It takes me several more tries before I c
an make a hole big enough to climb through.
“Arc activated my implant, didn’t they?” I demand.
Stephen stares at me. He doesn’t look surprised at all that I’ve just broken in to see him.
“The new implants. Tell me about them now!”
“Tell me what you know about Professor Halliwell,” he says in return.
The statement throws me for a moment. I blink stupidly, trying to process it before reaching into the back pocket of my jeans. The laminated ID card is still there from where I’d picked it up off Micah’s floor the day we drove down to East Harlem. I pull it out and flip it so I can see the image of the man. Just looking at it sends a bolt of anger through me. I’d never gotten the chance to ask Micah why he had an identification card at his house of the man who killed my father. Now I may never.
“How did you—?”
“We know all about you, Miss Daniels. Your whole history.”
I shake my head. “No. No!” I shove the card back into my pocket. “You’re not— This isn’t going to work. The implants. Arc activated mine, didn’t they?”
He chuckles and turns his head away. There’s a faint stink of body odor about him.
“Smart girl,” he says. “But also very naïve. Yes, they did. Tried to rush through it. I told them you weren’t ready, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”
Despite my certainty after hearing Tanya speak, his admission still shocks me. The possibility that the implant might be activated had dawned on me a few days ago, during our escape. Tanya was acting too much like a drone. It wasn’t at all like she was drugged. The best explanation I could come up with was that Arc was inside her head. It was a possibility I’d instinctively suppressed.
Until now.
I had good reason not to think it was possible. Past attempts to activate a live person’s L.I.N.C. always triggered a strong auto-immune response in the body, resulting in near-instantaneous rejection. An implant can only be permanently activated after a person dies. It’s the only reason we allow the government to mandate implantation of the devices in the first place. It’s what the Latent in Latent Individualized Neural Connections means: dormant. Nobody wants them, but it’s better than living in a world where the Infected become uncontrollable monsters during an outbreak. Nobody wants that even more.
After listening to Tanya, however, I realized I had to be right. Arc had somehow found a way to neutralize the body’s immune response to activation, or at least delay it for a few days. They must’ve done it to me, and when my body finally rejected the implant, they did it to Tanya. Now her body has rejected it, too.
The look on Stephen’s face tells me everything I need to know. Arc hasn’t just been monitoring us through their tracking app, they’ve been watching and listening to everything we’ve said and done, at least when we were in Tanya’s presence. Every observation she’s made has been recorded, digitized and sent straight to Arc.
“Who else have they tried it on?”
Stephen’s body twitches a little as he strains his arm against the bindings. His hand grips the edge of the table, then there’s a click and it rises. He’s holding something. I hear some sort of mechanism ratcheting as he raises his hand, then a metallic tink as it sets.
“What are you doing?” I demand. “What is that?”
“It’s called a déclic. I’m sure your Mr. Espinosa could explain to you what it is and what it does, but in the interest of time, I’ll tell you. It’s a trigger for the guillotine. This particular trigger is of the type called a deadman’s switch. As long as I hold it, the blade above me stays put. But if I let go, the blade falls and I die. If I fall asleep, I die. If I relax—even just a little—zip, the end of me.”
I’m confused. “Is that supposed to scare me?”
“You see, I’m a master of deadman’s switches, triggers that must constantly be on in order to maintain the status quo.”
“Really. I don’t care. We don’t need you anymore.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold this up.”
“Let go.”
“The thing inside your head—inside all your heads—that’s keeping you from leaving? I can tell you how to get rid of it.”
My face grows cold. “You had your chance.”
“If you allow me to let go of this switch, then you will never leave this island.”
“We’re leaving. We’re shutting down the servers and leaving.”
“I think you already realize that’s not going to work.”
I check the time on my Link. The ten minutes I promised Reggie have come and gone. And when it pings right then, I almost shout with surprise.
“Jess,” Reggie says.
“Five more minutes, Reg. Just wait five more minutes.”
“It worked, Jessie!” he cries. “I’ve already pinged Ash. She’s shutting the servers down now. All of them. We’re leaving!”
“How do you know?”
He turns his Link and the scene spins dizzyingly, then quickly comes to a stop. Now I’m looking at what appears to be a map, a loose tangle of colorful strings on a black board. There’s a single blinking red light on one of the strings.
“I just found the main control room,” I hear him say. His hand appears, his finger pointing at the blinking light. “Here’s the tram. It’s on the Foxhurst side. I expect it’ll start coming back soon. The point is, they made it through.”
Excitement and relief flushes through me.
“I’ll get the others. We’ll meet you down there.”
“You’re friends will die if you go through that tunnel,” Stephen says.
“No, they won’t.”
He frowns. “You’ll get through, of course. We can’t stop you. You and Mr. Corben. You’re right about the implant activation and the rejection, so the failsafe won’t work on you anymore. I warned Arc about that, but they didn’t listen to me.”
“Now I’m not going to listen to you. You can just lie there holding that—that hangman switch—”
“Deadman’s switch.”
“That thing until your arm gives out. You better hope Arc finds you before that happens.”
“You know as well as I that my arm won’t last that long. You can see it’s already shaking from the effort. I haven’t eaten anything in three days.” He winces, as if to drive home the point.
I stare at his hand, at the white knuckles and the tendons standing out, almost mesmerized by the way it quivers. He won’t last five more minutes, and I know it. But he’s the one who pulled that switch, not me. I can leave with a clear conscience and he can die by his own hand.
“I’m leaving,” I tell him, one final time. I turn back toward the door.
He laughs drily. “What do you know about your father, Jessica?” he asks.
The question feels vaguely familiar, though at first I’m not sure why. Then I remember: Eric had asked me the same thing the night after we returned from Long Island, the night he was called down to deal with a sudden influx of IUs into lower Manhattan, zombies that I and my friends accidentally brought back with us from here when we escaped.
“He’s not dead, Jessica.”
“Half his head was splattered over the walls and floor of the house we used to live in. “So, yes, he is dead. Dead and buried.”
His hand jerks, trembling wildly now. Now I can see the strain on his face from holding it up.
I turn away. He’s not worth it.
“No!” he shouts, startling me. Behind me, I hear the heavy blade rattle in its track. The cable twangs.
I step to the door. Other than confirming something I already suspected, coming to talk to him was a mistake. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I insert the cardkey, then place my hand on the handle and twist it. “You had your chance,” I say. I yank the door open.
Kelly stumbles in. He’s bleeding and his face is smudged.
He pushes me aside.
“No!”
I hear the cable twang again, then the SHING!
of the blade as it falls.
PART THREE
Promises Kept
Chapter 22
Kelly flings his backpack at the guillotine, catching the descending blade just before it slides into the upper half of the lunette. But the blade slices through the fabric like butter. There’s a loud screech! a thunk! and it comes to a sudden, shuddering stop.
Kelly and I tumble to the floor, our feet entangled. We both stare at the horrific scene, the vibrating cable thrumming like a swarm of wasps. Neither of us moves.
After a moment, Stephen blinks open his eyes and lets out a shuddering exhale. He raises his empty hands. The guillotine lets out a loud groan and the cable makes the sound of a spring tensed beyond breaking. Neither of us dares to move—Kelly, out of fear that we’ll trigger the blade to fall the rest of the way and sever Stephen’s head from his body, and I out of fear that it won’t.
Slowly, carefully, Kelly stands up again. There’s a long scrape down his arm and his shirt is torn and filthy. It’s one of the I♥NY shirts from the gift shop upstairs. Right now I can’t say I share that sentiment. He cautiously approaches the table, then he grabs the blunt edge of the blade and puts all his weight into lifting it.
“Get him out,” he shouts at me, as he struggles to raise the blade. “Untie him and get him out. We need him!”
I push myself off of the floor. The door swings shut, but before it latches, Tanya and Ashley come running through it.
“What’s all the shouting about?”
I work on loosening the bindings around Stephen’s legs and yell at Ash to untie his arms. Tanya looks on in shock, unsure of what to make of the scene.
“We need to lift the blade,” Kelly says, grunting. He sees Tanya and frowns, then turns to me for an explanation.
“She can help,” I say, freeing one ankle and moving over to the other. “Just tell her what to do!”
“Pull that lever down,” he tells her, gesturing with his chin.
She hurries over and reaches for the handle. “Pull it down,” Kelly repeats. “Hard!”
She tries, but the lever slips from her grip and slaps back up against the frame of the guillotine. She yelps and jumps back.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 40
