We’re at the bottom of the entrance ramp and he jerks me to the left, past a sign that says West Hills Drive. Below it, an arrow and letters that spell out Jayne’s Hill, one mile away. We begin another excruciating uphill run, sprinting for another solid minute. When the road abruptly turns and ends in a parking lot, I’m almost relieved. I can’t run anymore.
“What…now?” I gasp.
There’s a single car in the lot, its color impossible to guess in the darkness and beneath its filthy blanket of dirt and moss. It sits on its rims, the tires long since deflated. Just its being here tells a story. What happened to the person who owned it? Are they still wandering the hills around here?
“We have to fight,” Micah says, panting.
My heart clutches. “We’d be better off hiding.” When he starts to protest, I say, “You saw that thing duck when I swung at it. It’s a damn Player!”
“I know it’s a damn Player! I saw what you saw.”
“That means there’s—”
“I know! I know. Okay, we hide. Shit, Jessie.”
He spins around, searching. “There’s a public restroom,” he says, pointing to a cinder block building. The corrugated roof sags under the weight of a dozen years of pine needles, and ivy crawls up the walls.
“It’s a Player, Micah!” How many times do I have to say it? “Hiding is too obvious. It’s the first place I’d look if I were its Operator.”
He grunts unhappily, then nods, once, quickly. “Okay, so we need to start thinking like we’re playing Zpocalypto.”
“No, we need to start thinking like we’re playing The Game.”
We should’ve been thinking this way from the beginning. Instead, we were treating our situation like we were actually in control. That’s what Stephen meant when he said we were all players and that it was all already scripted. That’s why we’ve done so spectacularly poorly, because we’ve always believed we could reason our way out. We’re lucky to all still be alive.
Most of us.
Except Tanya turned out to be a part of the story, too.
Christ help us.
I shut my eyes for a moment and try to push her face away from me.
“Better decide soon, because it’s coming,” Micah says. The hard, slapping sound of the Player’s feet on the road echoes in the night, sounding somewhere far away and yet frightfully close. Micah gestures to the bathroom. “Behind it then.”
I follow him around the side. There’s no time to argue, no time to think. I just wish I knew what he’s planning. He slips into the brush that encroaches on the cracked cement apron around the old building. Just behind us is the woods. I pause. From here, escape will be next to impossible. I step in and crouch down next to him. The rustling is loud to my ears.
“As soon as it comes around the corner,” he tells me, “we jump it.”
I want to choke him right then. I resist the urge. I want to stand up and turn around and race through the trees. In fact, I almost do, but then I feel his hand on my wrist, giving it a gentle but firm squeeze, and all further thoughts of moving get pushed away.
Chapter 25
I’m scared shitless. And yet there’s something—deep down inside of me—something strangely exhilarating and freeing in Micah’s plan. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just his excitement rubbing off on me. Or maybe it’s because I’m tired of running from the Undead. Running from anything, actually. I need to face it head-on.
I’ve been running away my whole entire life. Even my hapkido training has always been about bending and flexing, yielding to those who would harm me rather than resisting them. Kwanjangnim Rupert taught that the only way to defeat superior strength was to be like water: The stream flows around and surrounds its obstacles, and so passes them.
I tried to become a stream in my life, to flow. But all that ever happened was that the obstacles I encountered left me riven. I am not water. I am a person of flesh and bone, and my soul cannot mend itself like a fluid.
I can’t hear the Player, but it must be somewhere out there, wandering around the parking lot. Searching for us.
Micah grips his knife. I slip my hand into the backpack pocket and begin to pull out the pistol, but he shakes his head at me in the darkness and whispers no. “No guns. Too much noise.” He breathes the words into my face and they pass across my ears almost too quiet to hear. Of course he’s right. A blast from the gun now would only bring the entire horde of IUs who wander the woods here down to us.
The bathroom door scrapes open and my heart nearly stops. The door begins to creak closed, but it doesn’t slam. The tension in its springs must’ve bled away over the years; rust has probably eaten away at the hinges.
“We could trap it now,” I whisper.
Micah shakes his head urgently.
Something slams inside the bathroom, echoing hollowly. I flinch. “Stall door,” he guesses, whispering. There’s more rustling. The door scrapes open again. We wait in silence.
A couple minutes later, from somewhere to the left of us comes the unmistakable sound of a twig snapping. Micah tenses beside me. Several seconds pass without a sound.
I shift ever so slightly to ease a growing cramp in my side. Micah breathes through his half-opened mouth, making no sound. I try and mimic it. But my shifting causes my pack to sag on my shoulder and it slips down my arm with a soft shush and thuds to the ground.
The night explodes all around us then, filling with noise so close and so loud that it’s completely disorienting. Micah lurches back against me before catching himself.
“Dog!” he shouts.
It’s standing not five feet away from us, out on the cement. In the darkness I can see its glistening teeth and its scarred and graying muzzle. It’s snarling and snapping right at us.
No, I realize too late, at something behind us!
Micah pushes me to the side as he jumps to his feet. I tumble to the ground. The air above my head whooshes as the dog hits Micah in the back. They both go down, tangled in the brush, but the dog is up again in a flash. I try to pull it away, but by the time I’m up, the attack is already finished. The Player crumples to Micah’s feet, the handle of the knife protruding from its throat.
Chapter 26
Micah wrenches the knife free, not even bothering to give it a twist. “We need to leave now!”
I nod, throwing a glance back at the dog. It’s stopped to sniff at the Player. It turns and lifts its leg and urinates.
Micah grabs my arm and pack and yanks me around. “Now!”
Other things are crashing through the trees, things drawn by the noise.
We stumble back out onto the parking lot and swivel around. I spot a small sign, half hidden in the overgrown brush and run over to it. “Trail marker,” I say. “Jayne’s Hill peak, point-eight miles.”
The wooded path is densely overgrown, the narrow rotted plank walk nearly overtaken. I risk the light from my Link, shining it ahead of me; it’s better than losing the path or walking into a low-hanging tree branch. I move as fast as I can, the snapping of the branches loud to my ears. But at this point, noise doesn’t matter; it’s too late to worry about that now. The forest has come alive around us, filling with the sounds of bodies charging through it and, as if there were any doubt what those bodies are, the moans of the lost.
How there can be so many in an empty place like this?
What better place to escape the sun?
Micah places his hand between my shoulders when I slow at a fork in the path. It’s unmarked, no sign to tell us which way to go.
“Left,” he says without hesitation.
I turn and head up the right path before he can argue. Right seems to lead more directly uphill.
The path is even narrower than the one we were on, and the walkway disintegrates beneath our feet. The further we go, the farther away the sounds behind us grow. I slow to a walk, sweeping the wan light from my Link screen from left to right.
“You lost it, didn’t you?”
/> “Shh. It’s here.”
“I told you we should’ve—”
“It’s here,” I say, climbing over a fallen tree trunk. The path reappears on the other side. “Ha!”
As I step down off of the trunk, I feel a set of cold bony fingers wrap around my ankle. I let out a strangled cry and fall into the brush. The hand won’t release me. I turn and kick out with my other foot and try to scramble away, but it still won’t let me go.
“Stop struggling!” Micah whispers. He bends down and hacks away with this knife. “It’s just a vine. Christ! Or should I say, it’s just one of those man-eating vines.”
“Very funny,” I manage to get out.
He finishes freeing my foot and leans back for a rest against the trunk. Something walks through the woods back the way we came. It’s far enough away and apparently heading in the wrong direction that we stay where we are, panting as quietly as we can. The sounds eventually begin to fade. After several minutes have passed, I strain my ears, but I can’t even hear a moan.
“How the hell did that Player get behind us?” Micah mutters.
I shake my head. If not for that dog, it might’ve bitten one or both of us. I give silent thanks for the animal. It scared the crap out of me, but it was the Player the animal didn’t like. After Micah killed the monster, the dog pretty much ignored us.
Fatigue overwhelms me. I can feel the numbness slipping into my bones, stiffening my muscles. I can feel it pressing me down. How did everything come to this point? Who’s to blame?
Is anyone?
Am I?
“I’m going to try Kelly again,” I whisper groggily.
Micah nods.
I wait for the Links to connect, silently mouthing a prayer to the stream gods that he’s there and okay.
“Jessie?”
I let a huge breath and almost laugh with relief. “Kelly, are you okay?” I whisper.
The tiny image in the screen frowns, but nods slowly. “We’re…fine.” He looks to the side. “Mostly. Look, things are a bit—”
“I saw. We’re on our way.”
“No! Just stay where you are. Okay? Everything here is going to be okay.”
“Where are you?” I ask. I can’t see anything behind him. It’s all dark.
“Just stay put. I don’t want you coming here! You’re safer where you are. I’ll see you soon. Love you.” He nods once, then disconnects.
A sense of foreboding comes over me. I struggle against it, pushing and tearing it away. No more, I tell myself. No more letting my body just flow. No more adapting and flexing. I will not stay put. I’m coming whether he wants me to or not. I’m almost there anyway.
“That didn’t sound good,” Micah whispers.
“It’s just because of Jake,” I say, and I move to push myself off of the ground. That’s what I tell myself, but even I don’t believe it.
The sky directly overhead has begun to lighten. It’s a slightly lighter shade of gray, but the approaching dawn hasn’t managed to make it this far down into the brush. I stand and turn and out of the corner of my eye I see a deeper piece of the darkness detach itself from the path ahead. It moves swiftly and silently, like a wraith, and it’s on me before I can even cry out.
I fall backward, straight into Micah. I hear the crack of his head against the trunk of the fallen tree. I hear the air leave his lungs. And I know by the way he falls without making another sound that he won’t be there to help me this time around.
The weight of the new attacker bears down on me, pressing me to the ground. The pain in my shoulder is incredible, a searing, ripping pain, as if my arm is being ripped from its socket. It’s more than I can bear. I can’t do it anymore. This thing…this un-human creature of darkness has broken me.
I turn my head away—away from that lipless mouth and its hot breath and its yellowed teeth—and offer it my neck. And it howls as if it knows it has won.
Chapter 27
The last winter I can remember with snow was the year Eric left for the Marines. His announcement had come as such a surprise to us all, given how much he seemed to hate the Undead. Not just them, but the whole idea of them and everything they represented. The Omegaman Forces had become ubiquitous, almost to the point where the living infantry was practically obsolete.
“I want to understand them better,” I remember him telling me, the day he packed up to leave.
Of course, I was in no mood to understand him. I didn’t want to understand him. He was a hypocrite as far as I was concerned. My whole entire life he’d spent railing against the creatures—how they’d killed Dad and caused the destruction of our family and our social standing. What had changed?
It was because of the Undead that my beloved grandfather, once a proud military leader, was left broken, a shell of a man, a shadow of the leader he’d once been. He was still fearsome, intimidating, but he had lost all his authority. The destruction of his reputation had left him jobless and directionless, a ward of a parentless household with a grandson trying too hard to be a man, who resented his very presence there, and a granddaughter equally lost and adrift in self-doubt. He spent his days in forced retirement sitting in a darkened room in the back of a modest house, growing more bitter and resentful. There were days when he wouldn’t even come out, not until dinnertime.
It wasn’t that I shared my brother’s feelings about the creatures. I was two when Dad died and have almost no memories of the man—certainly no feelings of attachment—so the idea of hating the Undead was more hypothetical than personal. I grew up in a generation where they performed essential duties, things that nobody else wanted to perform, tasks that were too dangerous for the living. I was just as grateful as everyone else for them.
And then came Arc. In just a few short years, they reclaimed parts of Long Island, petitioned the government to allow hunting and finally received the okay. The rich and privileged took up the sport in droves, but permits were limited, driving up the price and the demand. But there was such a huge public outcry—driven more by the inequity of it than the inhumanity—that Arc was forced to temporarily shut down the program.
But the protests didn’t stop. Now the humanitarians saw an opportunity. There’d been protests in the past, petitioning the government to stop the Omegaman project and find a cure for Reanimation, to stop them using our dead to make the lives of the living easier. Thousands died during the riots; a schism formed in the country with the Southern States Coalition seceding in a bloody revolt. New Merica was formed from the remaining bits, and it isolated itself from the rest of the world.
Arc eventually abandoned the whole idea of hunting, although, in truth, they had already started looking forward by then. They were secretly building Gameland, adapting the neuroleptic implants for use in something even more devious than civil and military applications: entertainment. Their scientists adjusted and tweaked the implants to get them to work better, become more reliable. Arc wanted to enhance responsiveness. They developed better VR and monitoring systems.
The military was all for it, of course. The government was all for it. The new advancements might help return New Merica to a global power once again. All because of the Undead.
And my brother wanted to understand them.
“What do you hope to achieve by doing that?” Grandpa had challenged Eric. “I hope you don’t think you’re going to change anything from the inside. All you’ll end up doing is bringing the family more grief.”
“You deserve the blame for our grief,” Eric had replied. Nobody talked to Grandpa that way. Nobody except my brother. “You brought this hell down on us. On our family. On New Merica. On the world.”
If the family was fractured before that, if was hopelessly torn apart after Eric left. It was only then that I realized how much my brother had kept us together.
I was twelve and my family was that only in name. I had no father. My mother was a drunken whore. My grandfather a bitter and overbearing, though completely ineffective, patriarch. An
d my brother had abandoned us to seek out some sort of spiritual enlightenment by communing with the Undead.
Was it any wonder I didn’t have any friends?
It was late January, I guess, and I was walking home from school, taking the long way to avoid the usual bullies who made it their life’s purpose to torment me. I’d discovered this trail through the woods behind the house, one that ran alongside a creek, and I was lost in the dazzling brightness of the sun shining off the snow. I had my eyes cast downward looking for animal tracks. The woods had been home to badgers and skunks, but other, larger, creatures had recently been frequenting the still half-wild place: deer, fox, wild dogs.
I was following a set of large prints that I fantasized as belonging to a wolf—the creatures had supposedly gone extinct years earlier—when I stopped for a rest on a sunny stump. Earlier, the sun had melted the snow from the tops of the branches, but all was now layered in ice. The day had grown bitterly cold despite the clear sky. The air was so crisp and the sun so sharp that everything seemed to crackle. Even my breath coming out of me, freezing in an instant, felt crystalline. I had grown distracted playing with it, huffing balls of air from my lungs and watching them hover and dissipate, that I’d forgotten where I was.
That’s when I noticed the shadow in the wood.
It was low in profile, shimmery, almost ghostlike. But then it separated itself from the tree and stood out in the open, staring and panting. Not a wolf, I realized, but a dog. A very large and vicious-looking dog. And yet I wasn’t afraid of it.
When I stood up, it slipped silently away.
In the weeks that followed, as the snow grew deeper, then afterward as it began to melt away, I followed the tracks through the woods, thinking of it as some kind of game. I could tell the fresher tracks made during the night from the older ones, each carefully marked by spots of fresh yellow snow. At the end of each day, the dog would show itself to me, a little closer each time. One day, it was so close, that I reached out and touched it. And this time it didn’t shy or run away.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 60
