Ninety minutes in and we’ve finally gotten into a rhythm. I break the silence by asking Kelly what happened back there in the tunnel.
He wipes the sweat from his face and looks around at the others. Curiosity draws Ash and Tanya in closer. Jake’s demeanor doesn’t change. He keeps right on walking, hands in his pockets and his head and shoulders hunched. Kelly throws Stephen an unreadable glance.
“Everything started off okay,” he says. “We got down there, me and Jake. Everything was cool. I got the fuse and showed him where it belonged in the control panel. We put it in, then made sure we had power. We waited for Ashley to ping us to tell us that things were ready on her end.” He shrugs. “We…got to talking, actually.”
This time Jake’s face contorts into something that’s between anger and anguish.
“What did you talk about?”
“You.”
I take in a startled breath. I’m the last thing I’d expect—or want—the two boys to talk about.
“I told him about our engagement.”
“Why would you do that?” I hiss. “We’re not out of this yet, Kelly Corben.”
His eyes slide sideways, over to Jake. It makes me wonder if he’s using this as something to rub in Jake’s face. I exhale slowly and concentrate on breathing.
“Okay, besides me, what did you talk about?”
“Nothing. Ash gave the go-ahead, so we rolled out of the terminal and into the tunnel.”
“No problems?”
“Not at first. Everything was running smoothly. Jake decided to go back into the passenger compartment. There’s more room back there. He was supposed to tell me if he started feeling anything. I told him not to go too far. I was watching the monitor and not paying much attention to him. At some point, I looked up and saw Jake on the floor jerking and twitching. I stopped the tram immediately and went back to him.”
“You used me as a guinea pig.”
“Jake, no. You know that’s not true.”
“Never mind him. After I stopped the tram, I heard a noise outside, but it didn’t register right away. The next thing I knew, the door between the compartments slammed shut.”
“It was that bitch,” Jake says. “I told you we should’ve gotten rid of her.”
“Who?” I ask. “Mabel? What are you talking about?”
“Novak. The other woman we caught and tied up.”
“But…how?” I ask, ignoring the obvious accusation in his eyes.
“She must’ve been hiding in the terminal the whole time, watching us. Somehow she got on the tram. Probably hiding in the second passenger compartment. We never went in there.”
“You didn’t check?”
Kelly turns to me and frowns, as if to ask me if I would have. I probably wouldn’t have either, but I don’t admit it.
“I knew we should’ve tried harder to find that third person. We all knew there was one body unaccounted for.”
“We looked. We never found any trace, no blood trail. Nothing. And she wasn’t on the tracker. We did what we could, Jess. We all made mistakes. I should’ve checked the second car.”
Micah’s feet scrape as he stumbles. I look over, concerned. He’s not strong enough for this.
“When the tram slowed, she must’ve slipped past me outside and gotten into the engineer’s compartment when I wasn’t looking. It’s on me. I should’ve been paying better attention.”
“Tell me about it,” Jake mumbles.
I shake my head.
“Before I knew it, we were rolling along again, not heading back toward the airport, but further into the tunnel. Jake’s spasms were getting worse. Scared the crap out of me. I thought he was going to start hemorrhaging or something. I couldn’t stop the tram, so I jumped. I had no choice. I dragged Jake to the door, picked him up, and jumped. That’s how I got this,” he finishes, showing me the scrapes on his arm.
“And that’s why it took them so long to get back,” Reggie adds. “He had to carry Jake.”
“I tried to ping you guys, but my Link couldn’t find a stream.”
I glance at the scrape on his arm. It had already stopped bleeding by the time he’d gotten back to the terminal, but now I see he’d also gashed his thigh. The darkness of his jeans and the black soot and grease had hidden the bleeding earlier. It’s still bleeding. I can see the wetness. And he’s walking with a slight limp.
He sees me looking. “Didn’t feel as bad before. I must’ve made it worse when I pulled out of the guillotine, knocked the corner of the table or something.”
“You’re losing blood. You should let me look at it.”
“I’m fine. It’s a slow bleed.”
“Jake wasn’t hurt?”
“He actually landed on top of me.”
“Don’t expect any thanks from me,” Jake says bitterly.
“Wow,” Reggie says, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”
Nobody says anything for a while after that. We keep walking, only the soft hush of the hot breeze and the scuffing of our shoes breaking the quiet. The bottoms of my feet and the top of my head are burning. I glance back, expecting Arc to come barreling down the road in a convoy of vehicles. But it seems we’re truly all alone in this place. Not even the zombies are out in this insane heat.
Along the way, we gather whatever we can find to use as weapons. We end up with a few brittle broom handles and a tire iron to supplement the broken machete, the poker and our one-shot pistol. Every so often we pass a shop that’s close enough to the road that we dare to venture out to it. Usually, a couple of us will run down, hoping to find the door open and bottled water and food inside. But all the doors are locked. Nobody suggests we break in. The last time we tried something like that, the noise of shattering glass brought dozens of IUs to us. Jake and I only barely managed to escape with our lives.
I touch the gun tucked under my shirt in the back waist of my jeans and give silent thanks for it. I feel a sense of kinship with it now. It’s the same pistol I’d found beneath the counter of that shop. If not for it, the zombies would surely have gotten us.
We turn off the exit ramp for the Long Island Expressway and begin heading east.
A sign points off to our left: Flushing Meadows Corona Park. But there’s no park anymore. It’s all swampland now, scattered skeletons of dead trees interspersed among astonishingly green moss-draped willows. A flock of egrets nests in a copse on one high point of land. We watch them as several rise, circle and then dive toward the water. They glide gracefully to a stop and do their awkward broken-kneed walk, their legs bending in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.
“It’s beautiful,” Tanya whispers, and for once I have to agree with her. I tear my eyes away because it hurts to see something to serene, so peaceful, when I know that violence and evil is chasing us and death and the Undead are all around.
A few minutes later we pass the Van Wyck Expressway and enter Pomonok.
“This is too freaking hot, brah,” Reggie complains. “We should try and get out of this sun.”
He points off to one side where a tree-lined road threads its way like a wet ribbon through an old residential neighborhood. In the distance, the specter shapes of taller buildings rise up. The old town of Queens.
Kelly purses his lips. “We can see better from up here. And it’s faster going.”
Nobody argues. Up here, the road is almost completely clear and we can see for several hundred feet in every direction. On the secondary roads, every abandoned car, every building, every tree and house and dumpster is a potential hiding place for an IU.
So we stay on the LI Expressway, grateful for the openness, yet cursing the exposure at the same time. We slowly head east to wherever it is Stephen is taking us.
† † †
We’re well into the fourth hour when we stop beneath a huge highway sign tilting on bent supports until it’s almost horizontal. It looks like an army tank hit it. The sign announces the exit ramp for the upcoming Clearview Expr
essway a quarter of a mile up the road and, further on, the Cross Island Parkway.
“Pull up some shade, folks,” Kelly announces.
Nobody argues. Soon we’re passing around cans of fruit and tuna.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” I ask.
Kelly shrugs. “Based on the road signs, close to seven miles.”
“Any clue how much farther?”
Kelly gives me a dark look. “I have an idea,” he mutters, “but I’d rather not say right now.”
I don’t push him. If he’s thinking what I’m thinking, then it’s better left unsaid.
After we’ve eaten and rested, I inventory our supplies. It doesn’t take but a few minutes. “We’re going to have to think about food and water,” I tell him.
He nods. “We also need to think about where we’re going to spend the night.”
“I’ve been giving that some thought,” Ashley says, edging closer. Her voice is strained, tired, barely making it past her cracked lips and to our ears. She reaches up and unties the string holding her hair. She’d tied it up on top of her head, presumably to keep the sun off her scalp. Out in the sunlight, it made her head look like it was on fire, but now her hair just looks drab and flat and wiry, and the shade highlights the dirt on her face and neck. “We know the tracker can’t see us in the tunnels, right? Well, maybe we can find someplace underground.”
“It’d have to be pretty deep to block the signal,” I say. “There aren’t any subway tunnels on the island. Would a sewer be deep enough?”
She shakes her head. I’m actually relieved. The thought of spending the night in a sewer does not excite me. And not because of the rats.
“How about the basement of some building? The vault of a bank?”
“Won’t work,” Stephen says, speaking up for the first time since we left the airport. He points smugly to the back of his head. “Remember?”
Kelly frowns at him. “What do you mean? I thought the failsafe only kicked in when we came close to the EM barrier.”
“Has nothing to do with the EM or kicking in. It doesn’t work that way.”
Kelly walks over. For a moment I’m sure he’s going to grab Stephen and throttle the information out of him or something, but instead he offers him some water. Stephen looks at the bottle for a moment before accepting it. Reggie shakes his head and mumbles darkly to himself.
“Listen, you know what they did to us back there is wrong,” Kelly says. “You can still make things right.”
Stephen’s eyes flick between us. I can see him making the calculations in his head, weighing his chances of escaping us and returning to Arc. Considering all the possible permutations. What would happen to him if we took him back to the mainland? How many years off his LSC would they take? Could he survive out here if he managed to escape?
“I told your girlfriend over there that I was a master at deadman switches,” Stephen says. “I wasn’t just talking about the one I designed on the guillotine.”
“So you’re the genius behind the failsafe?”
“I can’t take all the credit. I had some help, naturally. Needed access to your Links to finish the product specs. But, essentially, yes.”
Reggie stands up. “Access? When the hell did this happen?”
“Weeks ago.”
“What the fu—”
“Reggie, back off!”
“Back off?” he sputters. “Where’s that gun? I say we shoot the bastard right now!”
“Keep your voice down!” Kelly urges. “It won’t help us if we get rid of him now.” He turns back to Stephen. “Who helped you?”
“The Coder.”
“What is that? Give me a name.”
“I never met him in person. That’s what we called him.”
“But you know it’s a man?”
Stephen shrugs. “Can’t say for sure. They used a voice distortion device. But that’s my guess.”
Coder?
I think back to the conversation between that mysterious man and Nurse Mabel I overheard the night before I escaped. She’d mentioned something about a coder. I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate, trying to recall what it was they said.
I remember something about a coder being unavailable and Nurse Mabel asking if another programmer could be used.
What had the man said? Something about protocols, that it would take too long to get another one up to speed, another ArcWare engineer. There was something peculiar about the way they were speaking, like they were being very careful not to say any names.
Without realizing it, I catch myself staring at Micah. His eyes catch mine and he quickly looks away.
Micah’s not the coder, I tell myself. He wouldn’t do that to us. Would he?
I shake my head. What am I thinking?
“How does the failsafe work?” Kelly asks. He throws Stephen a package of stale Oreos. They land in his lap. Stephen looks at them for a few seconds before opening them. The guy went three days without eating anything. He should be ravenous, but he acts like he couldn’t care less if he ate or not. Something tells me this paltry bribe to get him to confess isn’t going to work.
“Everyone’s implant requires a constant electrical input from the cerebrum,” he explains. “That’s where your higher cognitive functions exist. They’re active, even when you’re asleep. The input is required in order to keep the implant dormant; a suppressor of sorts. When you die, cerebral activity quickly wanes and the absence of that suppressor allows the implant to become activated.”
“We already know that, you idiot,” Reggie snaps. “That’s basic neuroleptic technology. We learned that in ninth grade science class. He didn’t ask you how the implants work, he asked you how the failsafe works.”
Stephen shrugs. “You may have learned it, but most people never really understand the technology.”
“We’re not most people.”
“No, you aren’t. In fact, that’s why Arc chose you, because of your…gifts.”
“Fuck you. If that’s supposed to make us feel better—”
“Okay! Enough,” Kelly says. “Just tell us about the failsafe.”
“The failsafe is really a tripartite technology: part code, part organic, part hardware. Working together, it reconfigures the implant’s internal programming to become independent of cerebral input and instead makes the implant sensitive to external input. It’s similar to what Arc uses for its Players, except that this blocks neurelectric input.”
“The code we found on the servers?”
“That’s the digital fingerprint of the signal your implants are currently receiving. As long as your implants receive it, nothing happens. The implants remain dormant. But when the signal gets cut off—whether because you’re passing through the EM barrier or blocked from the transmission towers underground—the implant thinks you’re dead and it becomes active. A side effect is that chemicals called tachykinins are released. These control pain sensation in the brain, induce nausea and vomiting and affect consciousness. Sudden increases can induce coma-like states; too much can result in death.”
We all stare at him stunned.
After a moment, Reggie walks over, his fists clenching and releasing. Kelly quickly stands and blocks him, but Reggie shoves him aside. “You son of a bitch!” Reggie screams. “You knew this the whole time!”
“Reggie!” Kelly hisses, pulling on him. “Stop it.”
Reggie shakes his arm to dislodge Kelly, then he reaches down and yanks Stephen up by his shirt. “You god damn shithead!” Spit flies out of his mouth and onto Stephen’s face.
Now we’re all on our feet. Ashley and I run over and begin pulling Reggie’s arms apart, but he’s too strong, even for the two of us. “God damn son of a bitch,” he keeps screaming. “You fucking did this to us! I’m going to kill you!”
Kelly jumps into the fray and the extra weight finally forces us all to the ground. Reggie’s still holding onto Stephen, still throttling him and yelling.
“Stop i
t!” Kelly cries, trying to pull us all apart. Now we’re all screaming for Reggie to stop. “We need him! Don’t hurt him. It’s the only way we’ll be able to fix this. He made the failsafe, he’s the only one who can fix it.”
Reggie violently shakes Stephen a couple more times and we all flop around like rag dolls. Then he finally lets go. He stands up, shedding the three of us like a loose blanket, and stalks off to the far side of the shade. He picks up a chunk of broken asphalt to hurl it, but then stops and slowly lowers his arm, as if he’s changed his mind.
Stephen wipes the blood from his lip, flicks it off the back, spits. A snarling laugh grows in his throat, and he plants his feet, as if to resume the fight.
But no one’s paying attention to him anymore. We’re watching Reggie. There’s something in the way he’s moving that doesn’t seem right. He slowly turns around, his eyes scanning all around. Even from twenty feet away, I can see the blood has completely drained from his face. His mouth moves. No sound comes out, but the message is clear:
Oh shit.
Chapter 25
“Everyone, back onto the road!”
We grab our packs and weapons and climb the guardrail. Behind us, the Undead swarm from under every conceivable object and out of every conceivable hole. Right behind me, Ashley lets out a scream before she clamps her hand over her mouth. But the scream continues to assault my ears.
“Shut her up!” Kelly whisper-shouts, gesturing frantically at Tanya.
“Don’t talk to her like that,” Jake yells back, but he hurries over and grabs Tanya’s arm and pulls her close to his face to shush her. By the time I’ve made sure Micah has made it onto the road, IUs are starting to scramble over the guardrails on both sides. They’re still moving slowly and clumsily, but we know from past experience that they limber up pretty quickly.
“Go!” Micah pants, pushing me out of the way. Kelly pulls on my arm and says the same thing.
“Micah needs help.”
We get him between us and, with an arm flung over each of our shoulders, we begun to run as fast as we can without tripping over each other’s feet.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 42
