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

by Saul Tanpepper

  Days that I’d gladly give too, if only I had some assurance I’d make it back home, for a chance to live long enough to reach my LSC age. All these things seem out of the question.

  I find my own Link, the one I thought I’d lost. There’s a message waiting on it from Kelly:

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  I text him back that I’ll be leaving in the morning and will be there by noon at the latest. After I send it, I close my eyes and hope I’m not wrong. Hold on, Jake, I whisper. Hold on, Kelly.

  I hope I’m making the right decision.

  Despite having slept only about five hours, I’m totally awake now, restless. I pace across the room and hear Shinji’s feet hit the floor, then pad over to me. He whines quietly, worried that I’m not taking advantage of what is so obviously the softest bed in the whole entire world.

  “I know, boy.” I smile down at him and pat his head. I want desperately to sleep. I want to slip away into that netherworld where I don’t have to think about the Undead and infections and people dying. And choices. A place where I don’t have to constantly be on the lookout. Where I don’t have to protect. And defend. And kill. Where my friends are exactly who I think they are and not stupid dumb betrayers.

  I’m so tired, but sleep has fled from me.

  I slip over to the door. The floorboards yield beneath my feet, letting out a somnolent groan. There is no other sound but the wind outside my window and the occasional low rumble of thunder. I find the knob and twist. It turns easily in my hand, the springs twanging softly inside the mechanism. But when I try to pull the door open, it doesn’t budge.

  “Locked,” I whisper, exhaling with disappointment.

  Out of frustration I give the door an extra yank and, to my great surprise, it pops open with a loud crack! as the old paint unsticks. I poke my head out. The hallway is dark, illuminated only by the soft glow of a nightlight in the bathroom.

  Shinji whines worriedly at me. See bed? Sleep good.

  “Shh,” I tell him. I pull him by his collar back to the bed and he eagerly jumps onto it. After a few minutes, he settles down with a contented groan. I rub his fur and wait for him to sleep, but his eyes glisten in the darkness. He won’t as long as I don’t.

  “Stay,” I tell him. He lifts his head. I repeat the command, then slip out into the hallway. I wait for him to bark, but he doesn’t. Ever so quietly, I shut the door behind me, lingering only long enough to make certain he won’t freak out.

  My first stop is the bathroom. There’s water in the bowl, a blessing after going primitive for the past two weeks. Even the tinkling sound it makes almost brings tears of happiness to my eyes. Silly, I tell myself. I don’t flush it down. I don’t want to wake anyone.

  A gust of wind buffets the side of the house and the walls creak and moan. The noise doesn’t mask the sound of my bare feet on the floor or the mad battering of my heart against my ribs. They are loud, at least to my ears. And I fear they’ll rouse the entire house.

  I pass by the room Micah and I were in earlier and I pause to listen through the door. I can hear him inside, talking quietly, incoherently in his sleep. I wonder if this is something he’s always done or if it’s something brought on by the stress of our situation or his weakened mental state. His voice rises and falls, lapsing into prolonged periods of silence before picking up again. I smile at myself and test the door, but unlike mine, his is locked tight. I am not surprised.

  I pause only for a moment outside Brother Jasper’s room and hear him snoring away. This makes me feel better, although I’m tempted to check to see if his door is locked like the others, wondering if they all lock their doors. Protection from the things that might wander these hallways, if they’re ever allowed to.

  My hand slides over the banister as I descend the stairs. Lightning slashes the darkness outside, filling a void of utter silence with blinding light. With searing clarity, the flash illuminates everything: the walls, me in my borrowed clothes, the stairs, the ancient piano below me with the warped lid and the vases of fossilized bouquets. The afterimage lingers behind my eyelids. Before it fades, I finish my descent.

  Thunder rolls for several seconds, low and distant. By then I’m in the adjacent hallway.

  I hope the storm passes us quickly. I’d rather not have to return to the hill during a drenching downpour. More than that, clouds increase the risk of running into the—

  Elders

  —Infected.

  More lightning. Visions of the other house where Micah and I had stayed last night come to me. I’m safe here, I tell myself. The doors are locked. Nobody is going to let the Undead in.

  Olly olly oxen free, my mind whispers. The monsters are already inside.

  A flash, a loud CRACK!

  The house slumbers away.

  What do the Undead do, when the wind howls so? Do they stand out in it, waiting to be blown away? I remember when we were kids and on those late fall days when the winds would pick up and rustle the leaves from one end of town to the other. I remember standing outside during recess and watching the other kids leaning into it to see how far they could go before the wind released them and they tumbled to the ground. I remember laughing, outside and away from the others, wanting to be inside their little circles, to be a part of their games, their lives, their happiness.

  Do the Undead play such games?

  Now I pause outside the door to the cellar, and there’s a faint light bleeding through the space underneath it. It’s not fully shut. I reach out and lay my palm against it and it swings silently open. It suddenly occurs to me that I might be dreaming, but then the smell of earth and wormwood tea wafts up to me and the wooden steps stretch out below me like a tumbling accordion, and my heart pounds so that it doesn’t feel like a dream at all.

  Hello?

  The walls are rough, made of unfinished wood. My fingers travel over the grain, catching on splinters. I step down into that feeble glow, no longer frightened, just curious. My toes check the surface of each step, find each edge, feel their firmness. They don’t creak.

  Olly olly.

  Not even the sound of the wind finds its way down here. Only silence.

  Silence which finally yields as I descend, giving way to the first faint murmur of voices.

  I close my eyes and try to remember the path through the maze, but it doesn’t come to me. I’d been so terrified earlier that none of it had registered. I take a deep breath and step out, letting my ears be my guide.

  I begin to make out their conversation before I see them, snippets of sounds coalescing into words, words joining together into sentences, sentences forming questions and replies. I realize with a start that they’re talking about me and Micah when I hear Brother Matthew say, “You are letting her leave?”

  “It’s time,” Father Heall replies. “You must have faith. We all must.”

  Brother Matthew grunts, and despite myself I smile. It seems Father Heall’s sermonizing isn’t just frustrating to me. “She tested positive,” he says.

  I hold my hand over my mouth to hide my gasp. I’m infected?

  I don’t feel infected.

  “Yes, I could’ve guessed.”

  No! The test is wrong. It has to be!

  There’s a heavy sigh and Father Heall murmurs something I can’t hear. I edge closer, nearing the last set of racks, and squint through the slatted wood and into the brightly lit room where I’d spent the previous evening. My heart is a snare drum in my ears.

  “The boy was negative.”

  “Of course.”

  “Uninfected, I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  Brother Matthew is standing at the edge of the table with his back to me, blocking my view. He moves his arms like he’s sewing. For some reason it makes me think of that movie again, the one he’d mentioned before we arrived here. Frankenstein. I imagine him sewing Father Heall’s body together. First what? I wonder.

  “That’s the first one,” he says. There’
s a pause, then, “We searched his computer but weren’t able to find much on it. The encryption is too sophisticated for Julia to crack. Nobody uses that kind of encryption without having something to hide.”

  “You’re assuming that that something needs to be hidden from us.”

  “I’m sure of it. Anyway, I gave it to Brother Ezekiel to look over. As far as the girl goes, I don’t think she knows who he really is.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Father Heall answers, and I frown.

  What don’t I know? Who is Micah? Please, tell me!

  “But I think she suspects,” he continues. “I sensed a distance between them. They’re close, but also suspicious of each other. And when I mentioned to her that he hadn’t been very helpful, she didn’t seem at all surprised.”

  “You trust her?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Are you just saying that because—”

  “The girl wears her heart on her sleeve. She’s just like her mother in that regard.”

  Another gasp. I freeze as I experience another moment of panic when I’m sure they’ve heard me. They’re talking about my mother. But how do they know her?

  “You saw how much she cares for that dog. It’s the same for her friends.”

  “We could use that—”

  “No! Let her have the dog. We need her trust.”

  Brother Matthew nods and says, “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”

  “I’m getting old in my old age, that’s all.”

  “Well…there. That’s the second. Two down. The boy said she picked it up right after they entered the arcade. It just started following her around. Does that hurt?”

  “You should know better than to ask that.”

  I shift to try and get a better angle to see what they’re doing, but I can’t. My arm knocks one of the racks and it begins to tilt. I grab it before it crashes to the floor and steady it, terror numbing me. Brother Matthew turns around and looks into the darkness for a moment before turning back. He raises his hand and something glints in it, something long and thin and metallic. The image of sewing returns to me.

  “How many did you want?”

  “Four.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I must do what I can for my children.”

  “We’re all your children, Will.”

  “I know that, Matthew, but you know why this is different.”

  “The others may not even be infected.”

  “So test them.”

  “It’s a waste.”

  Father Heall chuckles. “There’s more where that comes from.”

  “Now, but for how much longer?”

  Silence. Then: “Go ahead and say what you’re thinking, Brother.”

  “What?”

  “You’re thinking about Enoch. What he did, going to the enemy, was wrong. I can never forgive him for that.”

  “You shouldn’t—”

  “Criticism doesn’t blunt a father’s love,” Heall says. “It only whets it.”

  “That’s three. One more.”

  “Mix it well, make sure it’s properly activated.”

  What the hell are they doing?

  Brother Matthew raises his hand again and this time I see the object in it. It’s a syringe. Inside of it, a viscous red and white liquid swirls around. He gently flips it end to end to mix. When he’s done, the liquid is a pale crimson.

  “Other side?” Brother Matthew asks.

  “Yes.”

  “The light’s wrong. Turn your head some more.”

  The conversation lapses for a few minutes. Brother Matthew lifts another syringe and mixes it like the one before and I realize with horror that he’s drawing Father Matthew’s blood. Is this the treatment? How does he expect me to inject his blood into Jake?

  Or Kelly?

  “Rest a moment, Matthew,” Father Heall says. “You’re shaking.”

  “Thank you. This gets harder and harder.”

  Or is Father Heall drawing his?

  Matthew settles into the chair with a sigh. Past his shoulder I can see Father Heall lying on the table, his head toward us, his toes pointed up at the light bulb.

  “We’ll have to move again,” Brother Matthew says.

  There’s a long silence before Father Heall responds. “Let’s see what happens.”

  “We can’t risk—”

  “I’m tired of moving. So, let them come, if that’s what she chooses.”

  “You don’t mean that. You’re not thinking straight because of her.”

  Who, me? Are they talking about me? What the hell do I have to do with him? Who am I going to bring?

  “—deprolidone in her system might have masked the test results.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Father Heall sighs. “I always suspected The Colonel knew.”

  Grandpa? And then I remember something he once told me: You’re special, Jessie. Someday you’ll see. He’d been talking about my medicine. My inhaler.

  Something tells me that day has arrived.

  “Does she know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Let her have it back. It won’t hurt anything.”

  Brother Matthew raises the final syringe. “Will you see her off in the morning?”

  There’s another long pause. Father Heall grunts as he sits up. He rubs his neck with a cloth and looks at it, then wipes his eyes.

  “No. I don’t think I better.”

  Chapter 22

  I’m still in the chair by the window at five thirty when the sky begins to lighten, still awake and still trying to process everything I’d heard and seen. Still unable to parse the idea that the treatment might very well have come out of Father Heall’s body. Could it be an anti-serum? Still trying to understand why there are only four syringes when there should be five. Who doesn’t get one?

  Still wondering what the hell my grandfather gave me in my inhaler and why.

  Still trying to wrap my head around the idea that I’m infected.

  I shiver and wrap my arms around myself. I don’t feel infected.

  It must’ve happened when we killed the thing Nurse Mabel had turned into, after the first time I killed her.

  I shudder at the memory of my hand sinking into the hole in her chest as I’d fought to keep her from biting me. The offending hand suddenly feels heavy and bloated and feverish. I thrust it deeper beneath my other arm, as if ashamed of it. I imagine the insidious infection that started in it spreading through the rest of me.

  The hole in Mabel’s chest that Jake had blasted with the pistol that I—

  I jerk upright in my seat and snatch the backpack from the floor at my feet and tear open the zipper and begin to search inside of it for the gun, even though I already know it’s not going to be there. They’ve taken it away from me, just like they said they would. They’ve even taken my little pocketknife.

  Stay calm. Just ask for it back when we leave.

  The red tinge on the edge of my vision blooms then fades as I work on controlling my anger. They’ve only taken the gun for safekeeping, I tell myself. I’d do the same thing if the tables were turned.

  A few drops of rain splatter the window pane, rippling the world outside. A gray stream trickles across the gravel drive and drains into the flooded field. The moon reflects on it, fractured by the wind, which howls like a coyote. No one in their right mind would want to go out in this weather.

  I count backwards from today and realize the infection couldn’t have been from Mabel. That was a week ago. Too long. Could it have been from Stephen?

  Or did Kelly infect me with a kiss?

  I still don’t feel infected.

  Maybe I heard wrong.

  Another gust and scattered raindrops batter the window. The approaching day begins to lighten the world. The sun struggles against the clouds. And just when it seems the clouds are going to win, the first rays of sunlight pierce through them from somewhere behind the house, casting a golden spotlight o
nto the lawn. It lingers for a moment, then fades and reappears elsewhere.

  There’s movement out there. The light strengthens and the IUs on the grounds below begin to take heed of it. They start to thin out. I try to watch them, to see where they go, but they’re strangely elusive. I lose them in the trees or past the edge of the window frame. They slip away like smoke through cracks in the day. One catches my eye while another disappears. I try to watch this one and another vanishes. It’s so frustrating, because I want to see how they do it, how they manage to hide so completely.

  I’m about to give up when one stumbles across the road, lurching on a foot bent completely backwards. Every time it steps on it I wince and imagine the pain it doesn’t feel. It pauses and looks up and, for just a moment, it almost seems to be looking straight at me. I don’t move. It’s silly, I know, since those cataract-filled eyes are blind and even if they weren’t, it can’t get to me in here. It stands there staring in my direction as I stare back, afraid to breathe, unable to move.

  Somewhere down the hallway, a couple rooms over, I hear Micah’s voice. It rises in anger. But my attention is outside and I tune him out. The IU’s face shifts slightly, as if listening. It looks like it’s sniffing the air.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper. “Why are you just standing there?”

  My breath forms a ghost on the glass. It quickly fades away.

  Another voice rises, a counterpoint to Micah’s protests.

  The front door shuts below me, rattling the house. The sound of footsteps crossing the porch, descending the steps. Someone is leaving. Look out for the Undead! I want to yell, but by then the owner of those footsteps has come into view: a large head, nearly bald with wispy hair.

  Be careful, Father!

  He walks briskly down the driveway and heads straight toward the IU. How could he not see it? The zombie drops its head toward him, but it doesn’t move. It just stands there and waits.