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

by Saul Tanpepper

  I push her aside and yank the lever down. A ratcheting sound comes from inside the frame.

  “Now push it back up again and then down. Do not let go!”

  I do as Kelly says and the cable tenses. The second pull is considerably harder than the first. The blade begins to rise. It’s very heavy. I repeat the steps until the blade reaches the bottom edge of the top crossbar. I hear a click and it catches.

  Kelly reaches over and unlocks the lunette and lifts the upper half. “Pull him out,” he yells.

  By now, Ash has gotten Stephen completely unbound. He’s visibly shaking, but he manages to curl himself away from the head of the table. He rolls off to the side and crumples to the floor.

  I turn to Kelly and scream, “What the hell are we saving him for?”

  “We need him,” Kelly pants. He rests his hands on his knees, trembling. “We need him.” And he slips to the floor.

  “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” Ashley says. She gives the guillotine a wary look, but the blade is locked into place and the triggers haven’t been reset. It’s not moving.

  “I’d like to know that, too, Kelly,” I say. “Just a few minutes ago, you were in Foxhurst. Now you’re here. And what the hell happened to you? You’re bleeding. You’re a mess!”

  He brushes my hands away. “We didn’t make it. We didn’t even get halfway when Jake started getting sick again.”

  “I told you,” Stephen says, coughing. He grabs the side of the table and tries to pull himself up. The table creaks under his weight and the blade rattles loosely in the upright. We all eye it uneasily. “I told you your feeble attempt wouldn’t work.”

  “Kelly, what happened down there? I just talked to Reggie a couple minutes ago. He said it worked. We were just getting ready to leave to come back.”

  Kelly’s head jerks up. “Did he tell you to shut off the servers?”

  Ash nods. “They’re all down. I just finished when I heard the shouting in here.”

  “Shit,” Kelly says. He stumbles to his feet and turns toward the door. “God damn it, I’m so god damn stupid! We need to leave. Now!”

  I move to stop him, pressing my hands on the bare skin of his arms. I can feel blood and grit beneath my fingers. There are oily smudges on his clothes and face; he smells of grease. “Where are Jake and Reggie?”

  “They’re coming.” He tries to get by me. “Open the door.”

  “Kelly, stop! What happened?”

  His eyes dart past me, then spin around the room. He sees the broken window, but realizes it’s no exit for him. The other door is locked and I have the only cardkey.

  “Kelly?”

  He blinks rapidly and finally focuses on my face, seeing me as if for the first time. “It didn’t work, Jessie. It’s not going to work. All we’ve done is alert Arc that we’re trying to leave. And now we have to. Now! We need to get as far away from here as we possibly can.”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” Stephen says. He leans on the table, barely able to hold himself up. “They’ll find you.”

  Kelly spins on him. “That’s enough bullshit out of you! You’re coming with us. You’re going to take us to wherever we have to go so we can leave.”

  Stephen stares at Kelly for a moment before lowering his head. He shakes it laughing.

  “I know they can track us,” Kelly says. “I know we can’t hide. Our only chance is to get to where we need to go before they catch us again.”

  Stephen looks up again and their eyes connect. Something passes between them, some sort of message. “And where do you think that is, Mr. Corben?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  Stephen holds his gaze a moment longer. Then he shrugs and says, “Okay. You win.”

  I pull Kelly’s arm. “Please, tell me what’s going on. Why won’t shutting the servers down work?”

  “Because that doesn’t block the failsafe,” Kelly says. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  For a moment I think he’s accusing me, but then I realize he’s looking over my shoulder. I turn my head.

  Ashley shakes her head. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Ash?”

  She looks like she’s about to cry. “I wasn’t sure!”

  “Damn it, Ashley! Tell me now!”

  “It was the root files. I searched every square bit on those machines. They’re not there because the programs don’t live on the servers. They live somewhere else. The servers are only a processing center for the Gameland data and a relay for the failsafe programs.”

  Stephen nods at the table. “You’ve done nothing but shunt those streams to another server bank somewhere else on the island.”

  “The program still runs,” I whisper, realization hitting me like a splash of cold water.

  Ashley nods.

  “Guys,” Kelly says, pulling me toward the door. “Arc is coming. We can’t wait any longer.” He reaches for his mangled backpack, still wedged in the guillotine. One of the zippers is caught inside the track. It’s all that stopped the blade from reaching the bottom and slicing through Stephen’s neck. He tugs it, but it won’t come free.

  Stephen just stands there watching. I’m still not sure he’s even grateful for the reprieve. I can’t tell if what he tried to do was just a threat or if he really did expect to die.

  “Leave it,” I tell Kelly.

  Kelly reaches through the upright and tries to twist the pack out.

  “I said leave it! We’ve got enough already.”

  He curses and starts to pull his arm back out. The catch at the top of the upright gives a loud snap! I watch in horror as the blade twitches at the top, then releases.

  Chapter 23

  The heat and humidity hit us the moment Reggie bursts through the security door to the underground shuttle area and we step outside for the first time in a week. But it’s nothing compared with the direct sunlight and glare that pound us as we hurry across Central Terminal Drive. The coolness inside the grungy windows of a Marriott Hotel looks inviting, but we pass it by, watching our ghostly reflections in the dusty glass, and instead plunge into the shade of the adjacent parking garage. Only eight-thirty in the morning and already the temperature feels like it’s approaching ninety degrees.

  “Going to be a hot one,” Reggie grumbles to himself. “Should’ve grabbed us some hats. And sunglasses.” His voice bounces off the walls of the garage. “And lighter clothes, and—”

  “Shh,” Ashley tells him.

  “We’ll stay under cover whenever we can,” Kelly whispers. “But we can’t sacrifice speed for comfort.”

  We ogle the parked cars as we hurry past them. It surprises me how many there are. I know the evacuation thirteen years ago happened very quickly and with very little warning, but there are still hundreds of cars left here, mute reminders of the hundreds of thousands of lives that were uprooted or lost when the outbreak took hold of the island.

  “Raccoons,” Micah says. It’s the first words he’s spoken since early this morning. Not once while we were hurriedly packing up and rushing through the terminal did he speak.

  He walks over and wipes a finger across the windshield of a van, which is covered an inch-thick with brownish-gray dust. Everything is. The only other thing marring the dirt is animal tracks. “Bat guano.” He looks up into the darkness above his head. We all do, but if there are bats here, they’re hidden away in the darkest nooks.

  “Come on,” Ash says, nervously pulling him away.

  “Why don’t we just drive?” Tanya asks, as we hurry along. The idea makes me shudder. Not being able to see inside any of these cars is really freaking me out.

  “Not an option,” Kelly explains.

  “It’d be quicker than walking.”

  Yes, it would, but even I know there are several problems with that idea. First, these are all old tech cars with old tech motors. Even if they still worked—and that’s a big if—and they still had fuel in their tanks—even more doubtful—none of us knows h
ow to get one started. And we’d probably need two to fit all eight of us. But the biggest problem is—

  “Too much noise,” Kelly replies. “Attracts the IUs.”

  “Just saying,” Tanya mopes. “If I had to choose, I’d rather be in a car driving away from zombies than to be captured by Arc again. In Survivalist, they—”

  “We’re not on Survivalist,” Kelly says, turning on her. “This is not The Game. The zombies that are out there? They have no implants. They only know one thing, and that’s to eat. Us. There are no Operators controlling them, no live people with consciences who can say, “Oh, look, those aren’t other zombies I’m sending my Player after. Those are living, breathing people, so I’d better pull back.”

  Tanya’s lips disappear as she frowns. “You didn’t have to shout.”

  “I wasn’t shouting. And I’m sorry. Besides, even if we could find one that still works,” Kelly says, sweeping his hand at the cars, “I’d still have to jumpstart it. That’d take too long.”

  “Since when do you know how to jumpstart a car?” I ask.

  He sighs and shakes his head at me.

  “What? I didn’t know you knew how to do that. Why are you being so pissy to me for?”

  He checks his Link, then shakes his head at Jake, who’s falling behind already, and urges him to hurry. “We need to put some distance between us and Arc.”

  Tanya goes back to help Jake. He’s still not fully recovered from his second encounter with the EM

  “What if Arc does have cars?” Ashley asks.

  “We’ll just have to deal with that if they do,” Kelly answers. He sees the concern on Ashley’s face and adds, “I don’t think they do.”

  But he doesn’t look all that convinced.

  We walk through the garage as far as we can, stopping only when we reach the end of the structure.

  To the left, the tarmac stretches out like a dingy, gray lake, nearly indistinguishable from the murky waters of what used to be Flushing Bay. From up here, we can see how much of the runways have been swallowed up by the encroaching seawater seeping in from underneath the wall. In the distance, the hulking form of a rusting and moss-covered commuter jet rises above the surface of the concrete swamp, its side caved in from the relentless battering of years of storm surge. Levees were built when the ocean levels started rising some thirty-odd years ago, but now they’re gone, washed away by the tides and tidal waves and the absence of people to maintain and fortify them, replaced by the fifty-foot wall that now surrounds the entire island.

  But even the wall hasn’t kept the water out. It wasn’t built for that. It was built to keep the Undead in.

  A jagged line of salt at the very edge of the pan, alternating crystalline layers of brown and green, is our only clue to where the dry land ends and the water begins.

  To the right is a highway, now empty except for a few stranded vehicles, overgrown with ivy, crumbling into decay.

  Reggie shoves Stephen out in front and into the bright sunlight. He stumbles, but catches himself. “Which way, asshole?”

  Stephen turns and glares, but he finds himself staring down a fireplace poker Reggie picked up in a bar on the top floor of the terminal.

  “And remember,” Reggie adds, “you survive only as long as we survive.”

  “All right, take it easy,” Kelly says. He studies the horizon, his hand arched over his brow.

  Ashley moves forward and places a hand on Reggie’s arm, calming him. Micah looks around in wonder, his face twisted in confusion. It’s becoming an almost permanent expression. I catch Stephen glancing smugly over at him, and suddenly I want to go over and smack him with Reggie’s poker.

  “About time you caught up,” Ashley tells Tanya and Jake. Tanya’s got her hand on Jake’s arm and he’s leaning a little on her for support. I roll my eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Jake was milking the attention.

  “Remind me again why we’re dragging this piece of trash along for?” Reggie asks.

  “Because he’s going to tell us where we need to go to debug our implants,” Kelly quietly answers. “Isn’t that right?”

  Stephen shrugs.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. So, can we just do this without bickering, okay? First things first: getting a little breathing room from Arc.”

  Reggie frowns at Kelly’s unexpected—and totally uncharacteristic—power grab. It’s so like the old competitive Reggie that for a fleeting moment I almost laugh as images rise from sodden memory, the two of them trash-talk each other while playing Zpocalypto in the basement of Micah’s house. Kelly relying on logic and reason and objective ideas. Reggie simply bashing away with whatever he can come up with and trusting that as long as he can out-shout and out-last Kelly that he’s winning the argument-du-jour.

  “Which way, Stephen?” Kelly asks. He looks at him like he expects the man to cooperate simply because he asked and didn’t have to resort to name-calling or slurs against his family.

  To my surprise, Stephen raises his hands from his waist and points. “East.”

  “That’s south, idiot,” Reggie spits. He points out over the water toward the sun. “That’s east.”

  “East is where we need to be, Mr. Casey,” Stephen replies. It constantly surprises me that he knows all our names, but then I realize that he probably knows as much about us as we know about each other. “South is how we’re going to get you there.”

  “Why east?” I ask. “What’s there?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Holding out on us isn’t helping.”

  “Leverage.” He grins. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you there. What you do when we arrive is up to you.”

  Reggie groans at the sky in frustration. “Why should we believe him? Mr. Asshole says we need to go east, so he points south. He says it’s because that’s where we’ll find the program, but then he clams up. Why are we even listening to this guy? I say if he wants us to go east—or south—then we should go in the complete opposite direction.”

  “Reggie,” Kelly says, shaking his head once, quickly, “we can’t go straight east from here because of the water and the wall. If we want to go east, then we have to head inland first. That means south.” He turns to me. “And if you’re thinking about the tunnels, Jessie, forget it. They’re gone. We can’t leave that way.”

  How could he even think I’d consider abandoning Reggie and Ash? I would never leave them here. I wouldn’t even do that to Jake, even despite all the crap he’s put us through.

  Reggie sighs heavily and clenches his jaw. I can see him wanting so badly to argue with Kelly. It’s in his nature, especially with Kelly. But even he knows we can’t waste time standing around discussing this. No matter which way we go, once Arc gets here, they’re going to track and follow us. We could stay here and defend ourselves against them, but we have no idea what they could be bringing. Our only option is to run, hard and fast. And if there’s a way to neutralize the failsafe mechanism, then we have to keep heading toward it while buying ourselves some time to figure out how we’re going to do it.

  The irony of all this is, I was the lone voice arguing to save Stephen in the first place. Now, it’s Kelly alone making that argument. It just seems like the two of us can never agree on anything anymore.

  Kelly steps out into the sunlight and the rest of us follow. He sets a brisk pace, and soon we’re all miserable from the heat and humidity. None of us is used to this; all of us are still physically and emotionally weakened from what has happened to us over the past week and a half. Kelly has suffered the least. He’s also the one pushing us the hardest.

  I hope he realizes how close we are to breaking. I hope he senses it.

  I look back at Jake and Tanya. They’re already lagging behind again. But at least Jake’s not acting like such an invalid anymore.

  “Try and keep up,” I tell them. Jake scowls.

  The road ahead rises to an overpass, but before we reach it Kelly directs us off the shoulder and toward the sh
adows underneath. The shade is a welcome relief.

  We walk another fifty yards before he freezes. The signal to stop passes through the rest of us like electricity. Slowly, he raises a finger of one hand to his lips while pointing into the darkness with the other. “Movement,” he whispers.

  I strain my eyes, but I don’t see anything. The others shake their heads, too. We step forward slowly. Then, without warning, the grass explodes and there’s a blur of color and a vague sense that the creature rushing toward us is actually several creatures. I barely have time to make out three or four distinct shapes before they’re on us. Tanya screams and shields her face, but the danger is already past us by then. The deer bound off into the distance, leaving us trembling and unable to move.

  “Shit!” I gasp, barely able to even hear myself over the pounding of my heart. Kelly grins and waves us forward. Ash and Stephen let out a few nervous twitters. We finally move on, still breathless, yet somehow more eager, as if the encounter with the harmless animals has left us renewed, reinvigorated, and invincible.

  But the relief provided by the shade of the overpass proves to be disappointingly short-lived. A few minutes later we reach the Grand Central Parkway.

  Kelly stops again at the edge of the shadows and turns to us. “Everyone get a drink.”

  We obey. Then, without another word, we step out into the unyielding sunlight and head south on the unforgiving asphalt, straight toward the wild heart of Long Island, while the monolithic wall built to keep in the Undead rises a hundred feet into the brilliant blue sky.

  Chapter 24

  We trudge down the parkway for the next hour or so, stopping only briefly for quick rest and water breaks. Everyone is moving quicker now, clustering closer, the urgency of our situation and our exposure to hidden eyes and ears finally hitting home. We wonder if Arc has arrived on the island. We wonder how close behind us they might be.

  But our biggest worry is the IUs. We still haven’t seen any, but we know they’re out there. Nobody strays much farther than a couple arms lengths away from anyone else.