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

by Saul Tanpepper

  Despite myself, I have to smile. I feel the tension leave me. Reggie always seems to find a way to do that, to diffuse my worry and my fear. I feel a twinge of jealousy. Ashley’s lucky to have him, warts and all, bad manners and childishness notwithstanding. He may be a bully sometimes, especially around Kelly, but he’s really kindhearted deep down.

  Even with Kelly.

  Kelly reaches over and grabs Reggie’s shoulder. “Help me up.”

  “You sure?”

  Kelly nods. “Let’s get Ashley’s program uploaded onto the mainframe and see what happens. I don’t think I’ll be able to rest until we know it works.”

  I think I see something cross Ash’s face, but I can’t be sure. She’s turned mostly away from me. I expect her to say something, raise her doubts, but she doesn’t.

  Micah clears his throat. “Maybe we should wait a couple hours. Let you rest.”

  “If you have something to say, Micah,” Kelly says, wincing, “let it out now.”

  Micah doesn’t.

  “He’s right,” Ashley whispers. “Maybe we should wait. Think about things.”

  Reggie turns to her. “I trust you, babe. I know you. If this doesn’t work, then waiting a few hours isn’t going to make any difference. It’ll just make us know a couple hours later than we will if we just go now.”

  I can see the familiar flame of defiance rise up in her eyes and I know she’s about to lay some heavy crap on him. But he doesn’t let her. He pulls her face to his and presses his mouth against hers. She struggles for a moment before relenting.

  When the kiss goes on longer than the rest of us deem necessary, Kelly clears his throat noisily. The couple separate with a loud smack. Both their faces are flushed. “Seriously, guys,” Kelly says, “as soon as we’re done escaping the Undead and overthrowing the largest corporation in New Merica, you guys need to get yourselves a room.”

  Reggie swallows. He stands up and helps Kelly to his feet. “Ready, brah?”

  Kelly nods weakly. I can see him trembling. He waits while Ashley retrieves the tablet, then he leans closer to the Link and says, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Jess.” He winks and adds, “Don’t go anywhere.” Then he turns to Reggie and tells him he’ll give a shout when he’s swapped out the programs and gotten the new one running.

  “We’ll wait about ten minutes for the signal to propagate through the system. Shouldn’t be more than a few seconds, but let’s be sure.”

  “Leave us connected,” I tell Ash, when she reaches for the Link. She pauses, then nods.

  “I’ll take the stairs,” Kelly says. He reaches for the bolt cutters where Reggie dropped them earlier. He intends to keep it for a weapon.

  “You sure, brah? If the zom is down there—”

  “I don’t trust the elevator, and neither should you. Stand by the door. I’ll go down slowly. When it’s your time to come down, go slowly, a flight at a time.”

  Ashley picks up the Link and carries it as she follows the boys to the stairwell.

  “Where’d Jake go?” Reggie asks.

  Nobody answers.

  “Damn him.”

  Kelly pauses at a door, then pushes on the handle. I can see his face twist in pain. He tries to hide it, but I see it. Reggie props the door open and they listen for a moment before Kelly disappears down it.

  The minutes pass, slowly and inexorably, like the sunlight waning from the sky, until at last Reggie announces that Kelly has gotten the programs uploaded. We wait another ten minutes.

  “You don’t feel anything?”

  He shakes his head. “Nothing. No difference.”

  Micah lets out an exhale that matches Ashley’s. I think they both held their breath the whole time.

  Then, from somewhere far away, sounding empty and echoey, I hear Kelly’s voice: “Everything okay up there?”

  “Yeah,” Reggie calls from inside the stairwell. “I’m starting down now.”

  “Go slowly,” Ashley says, following him down a few stairs.

  And he does go slow, at least at first. He takes it a step at a time, pausing on each one, resting for a good ten seconds on each landing. He calls out the steps, his voice fading the further down he goes. The last number I hear is fifty-three.

  Chapter 17

  “Did he make it?” Micah asks after several minutes pass without a sound.

  I realize I’m holding my Link so tightly that my hand has cramped up. “Ashley?” I say into it. “Are you there?”

  No answer.

  “Jake? Anyone?”

  Still nothing.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Micah’s lips tighten and his forehead crinkles.

  Then I hear Kelly, his voice a million miles away, shouting Jake’s name.

  Micah and I exchange worried glances. Why is he calling for Jake? Where’s Ash?

  As if on cue, we both begin to scream into our Links. We shout Jake’s and Ashley’s names over and over again. But nobody shows up in the screen.

  “Kelly?” I whimper.

  “He can’t hear us,” Micah says.

  Something smacks against the outside of the house and we both jump.

  “Shit,” I whisper under my breath. A scratching sound comes from the door, followed by a moan. It grows in volume until there’s a chorus of moans, rising and falling and rising again. Now it’s all around us. I repeat the oath, quieter this time, as if it’s a spell that can ward away the Undead.

  “No more yelling, okay?” Micah says. He gets up and hurries through the house, turning lights off and checking doors and windows. When he returns a few minutes later, I haven’t moved a muscle.

  Through my Link I can see into the stairwell of the building on Jayne’s Hill, but nothing has moved for at least five minutes now. I can hear random, indecipherable noises—sharp, mechanical squeals and thumps and something that sounds like talking—but no recognizable speech.

  “Where the hell is Ash?”

  “Where the hell is Jake?” I reply.

  Micah shoots me another impatient glance. He thinks I’m harping on Jake because of what happened here earlier, but I’m not.

  We wait without speaking for about another minute, waiting for something to happen. I pray it’s good news, but as each moment passes, I feel that hope slip away. Thankfully, the noise outside the house here soon begins to subside.

  Then we hear Kelly, calling for Jake again, louder this time, closer, his voice sounding echoey. A few seconds later, his head and shoulders appear through the doorway, then his whole body. He stumbles through, landing on his hands and knees and looking like he just ran a marathon.

  “Jake!” he shouts. “Esposito, where the hell are you? I need your help down here, now!”

  “Kelly?”

  He looks up and over at the Link. Using the door frame for support, then the wall, he makes his way over to Ashley’s Link.

  “Are you hurt?”

  He shakes his head. “Reggie passed out, fell down a flight and bloodied his nose. The fix wasn’t working, but he refused to stop.” He shakes his head. “Damn fool!”

  A mix of emotions comes over me: relief that it’s nothing worse than that, bitter disappointment that Ashley’s fix didn’t work, guilt for letting them go ahead and try anyway.

  “Where’s Ashley?” I ask.

  “She came down to help, started having problems herself. Luckily she backtracked. She’s okay—waiting on one of the upper landings. I had to drag Reggie up to her. He was having trouble breathing. He’s still out cold, but breathing easier. That bastard’s heavy as hell.”

  Micah turns away, bringing his hands to his head. I can see the disappointment in his body, the frustration at not being able to do anything. They mirror my own feelings.

  Kelly steps back to the doorway and calls down. Ashley replies, her voice weak and shaky. I hear her say that Reggie’s starting to come to.

  “Tell him to climb back up if he can. I’ll come down and help in a sec. I just…I ne
ed to get something to drink, I think.” He turns back to me, his legs giving out for a moment. His face is ashen. “Christ, I’m shaking like a leaf.” He lifts his bandaged hand to show me.

  I want to chastise him for pushing himself so hard and starting too soon after nearly electrocuting himself. I want to tell him to take a rest. But instead I give him an encouraging smile and tell him it’ll be okay. “Micah and I will take another look at the failsafe program. Maybe we missed something the first time.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. He knows it’s no use. Without a baseline or any idea how to reset the implants, it’s starting to look like Ash and Reg and Jake might be stuck here on the island much longer than we’d hoped.

  “Where the hell is—” I almost say “that jerk” before stopping myself.

  Kelly shakes his head.

  “Honestly?” I say. “I never understood why Ash and Micah got Jake involved in the first place. Dumbest thing I ever— Um, sorry, Micah.”

  Micah shrugs. It was he and Ash who had invited him, back when we were trying to figure out how to break in. “Ashley knew this guy. I only met him for the first time that day we went over to his uncle’s shop.”

  “Well, you remember that part, anyway,” Kelly says, before turning back to the stairwell again. Micah frowns, as if he’s sensed more to Kelly’s words than he’s said.

  “I’m going back down to help Reggie,” Kelly says at last.

  I lean back, pinching the bridge of my nose. It’s something I’ve seen my brother do and when I realize I’m repeating his habits I stop. It gets me thinking about home.

  I wonder what Eric is doing right at this moment—sleeping, probably. I wonder what all of our families are doing. What about the police? Do they know? They must. We’ve been gone for over a week now. Are they even looking for us? Have they given up searching?

  It troubles me. Somebody has to know we’re here. They would’ve traced our Link signals down to Manhattan in the days before we disappeared, to where the IUs were getting through. Why hasn’t someone not made the connection that we might be here on LI?

  Or, what about that last checkpoint we went through, down in Port Chester? The guard there was so chatty, telling us where to get fishing gear and boats. Use the bloodworms, he’d told us. A hundred for a buck. He’d laughed and told us that he liked to bring his sister’s kids down there to go fishing, then warned us against eating anything we might catch. The fish in that part of the East River are too contaminated. Chemicals or no chemicals, anyone who eats the fish that close to the island has to be a little crazy.

  But he hadn’t scanned us. The guard. He’d just waved us through. Nobody knew we were there.

  But what about after the bombing? The hospital, New York Medical? I don’t remember that part, but people always said the place was a pit. People died there from colds. People disappeared into its bowels. At least according to the rumors. But Arc found us there. If they did, the police had to have known we were there, too.

  Except, Arc owns the police.

  I shake my head, trying to dislodge the thoughts and refocus on the Link screen.

  “We should’ve gone,” I say.

  “Kelly insisted. We would’ve just been in the way.”

  “It’s Jake’s fault. He’s the one who secretly turned Ash and Reg against me, not Kelly. Jake’s been a prick ever since Kelly came back for him.”

  “Seems to me he should be grateful, then.”

  Yeah, I want to say, except he wanted me to rescue him, not Kelly. He’d confessed that he had a crush on me. When Kelly came back, he took it as me rejecting him.

  A few more minutes pass. Neither of us makes any attempt to work on the failsafe program. We both know we’d just be wasting our time.

  I wonder if Micah’s thinking what I’m thinking: that it might be time to cut our losses and get off the island while we still can. At least then we’ll be able to let people know what’s going on in here and ask for help.

  No! I will not leave without them.

  I close my eyes, shutting out the image on the Link screen, but it hovers in my middle vision and doesn’t change. I can’t just sit here and watch nothing. Besides, I need to pee again, but walking through the darkened house and seeing the swing set outside might just be enough to finally unhinge me.

  “Is there a bathroom upstairs?”

  Micah nods. I don’t move.

  I rest my head in my arms and think about the failsafe. Stephen’s nasty little evil application. He’d told us it was unbreakable. I fear that those might be the only truly honest words he’d spoken.

  “What if we activate the implants?” Micah asks, as if sensing what I’m thinking. “You rejected yours and now the failsafe won’t work on you. Maybe the others will reject theirs.”

  “Tanya didn’t reject hers. Besides, we have no idea how to activate them.”

  Micah sighs.

  I snap my head up. “Damn! Why the hell didn’t we think of it before? Oh, Christ, it’s so simple.”

  Micah frowns. “What?”

  “The failsafe. We’ve been trying to defeat it.”

  He nods, puzzled.

  “That’s the wrong approach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all about the signal right? What if we—”

  But the rest of my words are cut off by a scream coming through our Links.

  “Ashley!” I shout, forgetting for the moment that there are IUs outside the house.

  But I already know it’s not Ashley who screamed. It didn’t have that hollow-sounding quality like it had come from inside the stairwell.

  It comes again. Micah and I lean into our Links. A moment later, Jake flies past, shouting Reggie’s and Ashley’s names. He returns, grabbing the doorjamb and swinging himself into the stairwell.

  “They’re inside!” he yells down. His voice echoes eerily and the slap-slap of his feet tell us he’s racing down the stairs.

  I look over at Micah, who stares at the screen with a grim intensity. “Who’s inside? Aw, shit, if he means the IUs are inside, then…”

  Don’t say it, Micah. I beg you, please don’t.

  But the next sound that comes to us is unmistakable: the chorus of the Undead, and it’s quickly growing louder. We sit, unable to move or intervene, wanting desperately to call out to our friends, afraid to do so. The noise will only draw them closer. It doesn’t matter. The first IU passes our view, followed by a second. Then three more stumble past. A shout echoes up the stairs and the zombie in the screen turns and enters the stairwell.

  And then Micah does say it: “This isn’t good.”

  Chapter 18

  “What are you doing?” Micah asks me.

  “I’m going.”

  “What? Where?”

  “To Jayne’s Hill.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute, Jessie.” He pulls on my backpack, trying to stop me. I spin around, slapping his hands away.

  “You can come with me or you can stay here. I’m going.”

  “We’re surrounded by IUs outside. You know that, right?”

  The truth of this only makes me hesitate a moment. “I don’t care. I need to get to Kelly. I need to get to them and help. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

  “Stop and think about this, Jess. You’re going to get yourself killed going out there right now. Worse, you’re going to get yourself bitten, and then what? It’s not worth—”

  “The failsafe! Christ, I almost forgot.”

  I throw my backpack to the floor. “Give me the tablet!”

  “What for?”

  “The programs,” I say. “Hurry! We need to send everyone their failsafe program.”

  “I’m not seeing—”

  “We can’t defeat the failsafe,” I tell him. Booting up the tablet takes a painful thirty seconds. “Come on, already! Okay.” The desktop screen appears. “Where’s the— Never mind. I found it.”

  I tap open the PROJECT REWIRE folder. The files are labe
led with alphanumeric codes. I don’t know which failsafe program belongs to whom, but it doesn’t matter.

  “How do I send files to people’s Links on this thing?” I ask. “Come on, quickly!”

  Micah frowns and grabs the tablet from me and attaches a cable to his Link. He doesn’t ask for an explanation. “Which files?”

  “All the failsafe apps. Send copies to Ashley’s, Reggie’s and Jake’s Links.”

  He taps a few things, then swipes the screen and taps a couple more times. “Okay. Done. You want to tell me why?”

  “Can you open the apps remotely?”

  “You want to run the programs on their Link’s?”

  “Yes. Come on, hurry. If they go too far underground we’ll lose their streams.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t—”

  “I know you can do it, Micah. You hacked our Links before. You got inside them. I know you can control what’s running and what’s not.”

  Actually, I’m not sure at all. But maybe if I can make him believe he used to be able to, then maybe he’ll remember.

  If he knows how.

  I can’t believe I’m actually hoping he does.

  He takes in a deep breath and frowns intently at the screen. He swipes a shaky finger across it and opens the command line program. The cursor blinks patiently; I sit impatiently not blinking.

  Finally, he starts by typing in a few characters, stops, types some more. He stares at the screen before shaking his head. “Can’t.”

  “You can do it. Keep working on it.”

  My initial panic falls away and I realize he’s right. There’s no way I’d be able to leave this house right now. It’s the middle of the night and we’re surrounded by zombies and who knows how many more are filling the streets between here and the hill. As desperately as I want to be with Kelly, I’ll only get myself bitten trying.

  “Where are you going?” he asks, startled by my standing up.

  “Bathroom.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to pee?”

  “Oh.” His face flushes before he turns away to stare at the tablet again. “Okay then.”

  I scurry down the darkened hallway and find the stairs and start climbing them, keeping my hands on both walls for reassurance. I’m feeling imbalanced, scared for everyone on Jayne’s Hill, exhilarated at the simplicity of the solution to the failsafe, worried that it’s too simple.