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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Brother Matthew,” she tells me. “He says he might be able to help.”

  “Help how?” I can’t imagine a few leaves is going to make much of a difference.

  “He said there might be a way to…” Her lower lip quivers. I can see she’s drained, both emotionally and physically.

  “What?”

  “We’ve been too busy to talk. Jake’s in a lot of pain.”

  “I know. He also mentioned that there’s another guy down here.”

  “Brother Nicholas.”

  She leads me over to the table. There’s a man standing on the other side. He’s short and thin and wiry. I hadn’t seen him behind Reggie. They’re both holding Jake down as he contorts and screams out in pain.

  “Keep away from his mouth,” Reggie warns me. He gives me a grim smile and says, “I told Kelly you wouldn’t be able to stay away.” Then he turns back to Jake, leaning more of his weight into him.

  It looks like the bite has clotted. The stain on Jake’s shirt hasn’t spread very far. In fact, there’s not that much blood at all. But he looks terrible. His skin has a pale, waxy husk to it, the first signs of shock, and his face is contorted. Beads of sweat stand out on his forehead.

  “Brother Nicholas figures he’s got another forty-eight hours at the most,” Reggie mutters.

  “Forty-eight hours?” I gasp. “Before he dies?”

  “Before he turns. He’ll be dead before that.”

  I go numb with shock. Usually there’s a delay, a good twelve to twenty-four hours after death, the window which the government uses to inject the virus for reanimation so the Life Service Commitment can be fulfilled. Then another twenty-four hours before turning. It means he’s very close to dying.

  “But…how? Why so fast? He barely got bitten. There’s not even that much blood!”

  “The disease has mutated,” Brother Nicholas explains. “We’ve seen this happen before, new cases. Now that there aren’t that many living victims to infect, the virus is changing. It’s had thousands of generations to evolve, festering inside one of the Elders for a very long time. Time to become a lot more potent.”

  Elders? I give Reggie a puzzled look.

  “They call IUs Elders and CUs Deceivers,” Reggie explains.

  “Deceivers?”

  “Because of the implants. They’re deceptively fast.”

  “Who’s the they you’re talking about?” I ask.

  “Us,” Brother Nicholas answers. “The Children, followers of Father Heall.”

  “They call themselves Brothers and Sisters,” Reggie adds, raising an eyebrow at Brother Nicholas even as another spasm wracks Jake’s body and nearly throws them both off. “They’ve been here since the outbreak.”

  “On the island?”

  A shriek issues forth from the table. We all wince. Reggie leans in to keep Jake from flinging himself to the floor.

  Brother Nicholas must see the look on my face, or at least correctly guesses what I’m thinking because he says, “We have to keep him still and not let him thrash. Movement speeds up the viral replication rate and accelerates the plastination process. If we could sedate him, we might prolong the infection long enough to…”

  “To what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says, deflating. “There’s not enough time. It’s best if we keep him as cool as possible and minimize his movements. Where is Brother Matthew with those leaves?”

  I hold up a hand. “Wait. You said long enough for something. I want to know what you mean.”

  Brother Nicholas sighs. “It’s too far.”

  Jake arches his body and screams. His hand slips free from Reggie’s grip and tears at his wound. He digs his fingers into the holes in his shirt while Reggie tries to grab it back, yelling for Kelly to come and help. Kelly rushes over and yanks Jake’s hand away, but his fingers are clasped around the torn shirt and it shreds, exposing the yellow and green bruise underneath. Dark purple veins radiate away like parasitic worms. Fresh blood trickles out. Beside me, Ashley cringes, shivering from the gory sight. She hides her face.

  “Where is Brother Matthew with those leaves?” Kelly roars.

  “I’m here,” a voice echoes from the far doorway. Then Brother Matthew appears. “Didn’t bother with the elevator. Too slow. Had some trouble on the stairs, though. I think there might be another Deceiver there.”

  Kelly looks over at me. “Can you deal with it?” he asks. He points his chin at a pile of bloodied knives and a hatchet on an adjacent table. “Take Micah.”

  Micah stays me with his hand. “I’ll be fine. You stay here.”

  I shake him off. I’m eager to be anywhere but in here with Jake, not while he’s thrashing around and making those horrifying sounds. Not while his tongue is doing that snake thing that some of the Undead do. I can’t stand looking at it.

  Micah doesn’t stop me. I head for the doorway to the stairwell and stop just outside of it to listen. There’s definitely something moving above us. It sounds like something being dragged across the floor. Then there’s a series of thumps followed by some more dragging noises.

  Bodies litter the stairwell. Blood splatter covers the walls, dark brown and thick and chunky. Coagulated blood. Clotted before it was spilled.

  “Why the hell are there so many Players here?” Micah asks again.

  Deceivers, I think. Not Players. It seems a more appropriate term.

  “It’s like Arc sent a whole battalion of them,” he says, but then he stops climbing the steps and turns toward me. “Do you think they’re Omegamen?”

  “The military?” I shake my head. “No, it’s Arc. It has to be them. We know they’re tracking us. They have to be telling the Operators where we are. It’s what Stephen meant when he said we were already in The Game, that there’s a script. Arc wanted us to come to Gameland. We’re now part of the ratings game.”

  Micah checks where the walls meet the ceiling, looking for cameras. I push my way past him. He can worry about being on television. I’ve got a Player dragging its way down here and I intend to stop it.

  We reach it about six landings up. Its neck is broken, just like the others, though its spinal cord was apparently severed too low to kill it. It has no use of its legs, though. I stop at the other end of the landing and wait for it to slowly pull itself toward me, wondering how I should finish it off. Wondering if I still have the stomach for it.

  I lift my foot and place it on the Player’s back, then rest the tip of the knife in the hollow at the base of its skull. I can feel Micah come up behind me, watching and waiting. I tighten my fingers around the handle and close my eyes for a moment. After a quick, wordless prayer directed at no one in particular, I raise my other hand and bring it smartly down. There’s the bone-rending judder as the blade enters the Player’s neck, slipping into the soft space between two vertebrae, instantly severing the spinal cord higher up.

  The Player relaxes with a sigh. Free at last. Free to rest. Free from its deceiving ways.

  “You just cost some guy in Boston a million bucks,” Micah says.

  “I hope it was five times that much,” I growl.

  Micah bends down and gently pulls my hand away, then grips the knife and gives it a vicious twist. “There, you little shit. That’ll teach you to volunteer. Now, stay dead this time.”

  I wonder if it’s just for show. I wonder if he’s trying to make me believe he’s dead set against all this.

  Before I realize what he’s doing, he thrusts the knife into the CUs neck and levers the tip underneath the implant. He starts to needle it out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

  “No, I—”

  But then there’s a sudden high-pitched whine and an electrical-sounding pop. Micah freezes. I grab him and yank him away just as the Player’s head vaporizes in a wet spray of red and black. Bits of recently plastinated flesh and coagulated blood spray all around us. We both manage to turn our faces before the bu
lk of the gore hits us.

  “What the fuck was that?” I shout. My voice ricochets off the walls.

  “Self-exploding implants,” Micah sputters. He spits, just in case any got in his mouth. “I always wondered if Arc had a way to keep people from reverse engineering their L.I.N.C. devices.”

  I glare at him. Of all the stupidest things to do.

  He rubs a few flecks of hair and bone off his cheek with his shoulder.

  “Yeah?” I say, angrily. “Well, now you fucking know.”

  Chapter 4

  By the time we return downstairs, Jake’s asleep. I don’t know if it’s because of the leaves or from simple exhaustion, but he’s out cold, taking in short, rapid inhales and letting out rattling exhales. To help keep his body temperature down, the boys have stripped off his clothes, all the way down to his underwear, and are sprinkling him with water. It’s already pretty cool down here with the air conditioning for the huge bank of computers along the far wall. Just looking at him nearly naked gives me goose bumps.

  His skin glistens. The unforgiving glare of the old-fashioned fluorescent bulbs makes the deathly green husk spreading over him seem that much worse. A clean bandage now covers his wound and a thick strap is wound around his middle, lashing his body to the table to keep him from thrashing around. His hands and feet have been bound to each of the table’s four corners. But despite all this and the coolness, he’s still flushed and hot to the touch. Suddenly, forty eight hours seems far too optimistic a prognosis. He looks like he’ll be lucky to last through the night.

  Both boys and the two men are standing to one side talking. Reggie is gesturing angrily, waving his hands around. Brothers Nicholas and Matthew actually look a little frightened by him. Kelly sees us and he waves me over to meet him in a different corner of the room. He gives Micah a look that clearly indicates he only wants me. Micah hesitates a moment before joining Ashley, who’s sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. She looks like she’s ready to crumble.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Kelly asks, seeing the fresh splatter on my clothes. He keeps a wary eye on the rest of the room.

  “Micah happened. He tried extracting one of the Player’s implants and it exploded.”

  “Jesus Christ almighty,” he exhales. “I never would’ve guessed.”

  “What’s the latest on Jake?”

  “Can’t say really. But you and I both know where this is going, right?”

  I don’t want to think about. I refuse to accept that there’s nothing we can do for Jake. I have to believe that there’s a way to get rid of the disease because if there isn’t, then Kelly’s screwed, too.

  I open my mouth to ask him about Micah, but right them I see him staring at me. I wonder if he can read lips. I ask about Ashley’s Link instead.

  “Any idea how to get to it?” I ask.

  Kelly shakes his head, then throws a quick nod in Ashley’s direction. “She tried sticking some bandaging tape on a broom handle to try and get it that way, but it didn’t work.”

  “You can see it?”

  Kelly nods and takes me over to look. I have to put my eye right down to the crack in the floor and squint, but then I see it about three feet down in the darkness.

  “The tape’s not sticky enough to lift it out.”

  “Well, we know it’s there. That’s half the battle,” I say. I pull out my Link and thumb in her number. In the darkness below me, I can see her screen light up.

  When I stand back up again, I find Reggie with Ashley, trying to calm her down. The men have huddled even closer together and are whispering between themselves. From the looks of it, they’re having a pretty heated discussion.

  “So, are you going to tell me who those guys are and what they’re doing here?” I ask Kelly. “And don’t tell me they’re ‘the Children” because I don’t know what that is.”

  Kelly shrugs. “Can’t tell you much. They showed up while we were fighting off the Players—just appeared out of nowhere, lucky for us, and started taking them out.” He shivers. “Fast, too. They use their bare hands.”

  “Are they with Arc?” I ask.

  Kelly shakes his head, then says in a whisper, “I get the feeling they don’t like Arc at all. They come across as some kind of secret cult or something. Their leader is this guy they call Father Heall.”

  “Father Heal?”

  “He-all. Two syllables. Personally, I think they’re a couple of whack jobs, but they did come and help us out. And, as you can see, they managed to get Jake quieted down.”

  “Or not. He might just be exhausted.”

  Kelly shrugs. “In any case, we owe them. If they hadn’t arrived when they did, Jake probably wouldn’t be the only one of us bitten. So let’s not antagonize them, okay? I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, but if they can help…” He turns and sighs. “On the other hand, they could just as easily be another sick twist in Arc’s sick little game.”

  “Speaking of which, you mind telling me what’s the deal with Micah? How do you know he coded the failsafe? I thought Stephen had done that.”

  “Ashley. She’s the one who figured it out that he’s with Arc.”

  “Just a few days ago you admitted to being with them, too.”

  He nods and swallows. “I know. They used me. I was such an idiot. They had me pegged for a sucker, making me believe I was spying on Micah when it was all to keep track of how close we were getting to learning who he really is.”

  “And who exactly is he?” I ask.

  His face darkens and he pulls me into the elevator car for added privacy. “So, remember that day in Manhattan, down at the Midtown tunnel—remember that?”

  “Yeah, you said you were pushed. I was just thinking about that. But you thought it was Reggie.”

  He nods. “I was never sure about that. It never felt right. Reggie’s a big galoot, but he’s not mean-spirited.”

  “Pissing into your Red Bull is mean-spirited. Pushing you into the water might be dangerous, but not mean-spirited.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not his style, either. Not like hacking into my Zpocalypto account and changing all of my avatars to females. Ugly females.”

  An involuntary snort of laughter bubbles out of me. “Sorry. I’d forgotten about that.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway, ever since that day, I’ve had this bad feeling about Arc. I thought maybe it was Jake, which is why I didn’t want you going back for him.”

  “Jake? Ha! Right. Jake doesn’t know the first thing about coding.”

  “He’s wicked smart, Jess. Dumb, too. But I’m pretty sure he’s got a few secrets we don’t know about.”

  Secrets, yes, I think. Like having a crazy insane crush on me.

  He lets out a long exhale. “I just never would’ve thought Micah’d be the one to betray us.”

  “I still don’t know why you think it is.”

  “Okay. Remember when Ashley said there was something familiar about the code for the failsafe program?” His eyes flick over my shoulder to the others, then back to my face. “Well, she thinks Micah wrote it.”

  “Stephen said he wrote it.”

  “Nothing Stephen told us is reliable. You know that, Jess.”

  “Regardless, I can’t believe Micah wrote something that would’ve kept us all trapped here, including himself. Hell, it could’ve killed us all!”

  “Shh!”

  “Why would he, Kel? He’s always been about sticking it to companies like Arc, hacking their software and trashing their firmware. Why would he work for them?”

  “I don’t know. But Ashley has proof. She showed me. Remember when she sent him her fix and he was supposed to be checking it? She knew it wouldn’t work; she knew Micah would easily have figured that out, too. But he never said a single word about it.”

  “He did to me. He knew.”

  Kelly frowns and steps back. “No.” He shakes his head. “There are way too many similarities in the failsafe program’s code with his hack
s. Too many of his signatures. I didn’t want to believe it at first, either, but it’s undeniable.”

  “Like what?”

  “Remember that light saber hack he’d written for Zpocalypto? Turns out the sequence of codes he used for that little bit of magic was the exact same sequence used for part of the failsafe—not just the code, of course, but the god damn architecture of the executable files.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “He used the exact same registry codes, Jess.”

  I shrug. “So? You sent Arc the hack, didn’t you? Remember? You told me you had. Maybe Stephen got a hold of it and—”

  “Yeah, like one or two days before,” he says. But then he balks. “Shit! I also sent Arc the tracker Micah wrote. Christ Almighty.”

  “I don’t know, Kel…”

  He runs his fingers through his hair and exhales. “Please, you have to believe me. We can’t trust—”

  I bump him with my elbow. “He’s coming over.”

  Kelly turns around in time to see them getting up and walking over to us. We step out of the elevator car to meet them.

  “We’re going to try again to get Ashley’s Link,” Reggie tells us.

  “How?”

  “There’s a small access hatch in the ceiling. I’m too big to fit through it and Ashley’s too short to reach the ladder on the wall.”

  “I could do it!” Ash protests. “I’m not that short.”

  Reggie throws his arm around her shoulders and squeezes, but he doesn’t argue. “I don’t want Jessie trying it, not with her shoulder hurt.” He gives me a sad grin. “You look like someone used you for a punching bag.”

  I open my mouth to protest, then change my mind. “Okay, so it’s either Micah or Kelly, then.”

  Reggie stiffens at the mention of Micah’s name, which tells me he knows, too. He doesn’t want Micah anywhere close to Ashley’s Link. I guess I wouldn’t either, except what’s to stop Micah from doing something to her Link remotely? He could do it. Still…

  “I’ll do it,” Kelly says. Reggie hands him a flashlight.

  “There’s not enough space beneath the floor of the car and the bottom of the shaft for you to crawl into, so after you’re on the ladder inside the shaft, we’ll ride the car up topside again to move it out of the way. I’ll take Micah up with me to scout around.”