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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “It’s going to take me a couple more hours, at least. Figure on noonish, maybe. The road collapsed and I’m sort of stuck on the wrong side.”

  “Collapsed? What happened? How? Are you alright?”

  “We were driving and—”

  “Wait. Did you say driving? In a car?”

  “We crashed,” I say, glossing over his question, and yet, I’m sure, adding to it. I just can’t seem to stop myself from saying these things. Fatigue. “The road washed away. The water’s too deep and wide and the current’s too fast for me to swim across. But I can see the wall. If I can just get to it…”

  Kelly’s face twists with anguish. But then he squeezes his eyes closed to think of a solution. After a moment, he asks, “Which way is it flowing?”

  “The water? Left. South, I mean.”

  “Taste the water.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If the water is salty, then—”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then it’s coming from inside Gameland. It’s runoff from the rain. Which means the water’s getting through the wall somehow.”

  “Inside the wall?”

  He nods. “Follow it upstream. I bet you you’ll find a breach pretty close by.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The eastern wall runs north and south along the narrowest and shallowest section of the middle of the island, from what used to be Smithtown Bay in the north to Great Cove in the south.”

  “You remembered all that from the map?”

  “Geography of the wastelands, Jessie. Didn’t you even pay attention in school last year?”

  “I don’t particularly want to hear about school right now.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. “If it were tidal water, then it would taste like the ocean. Since it doesn’t, that means it’s got to be runoff from all this rain. And since there isn’t much elevation change along the length of the wall, it must be coming from inside, from east of where we are on this hill. Water running south means you need to head north.”

  “How far?”

  “Shouldn’t be far. If the breach is too far north, the water’d be running the other way.”

  I shake my head. “I hope you’re right.”

  He smiles. “Trust me, babe. Just follow it upstream.”

  “You realize you sound just like Reggie?”

  “What? The ‘babe’ thing?”

  “Yeah, that and being all cocky and sure of yourself.”

  “Ha! I can be sure of myself, too.” But then something catches his eye and he sobers up. “Got to go. Brother Nicholas is coming with the medicine. Where’s Brother Matthew?”

  “Dead.”

  Kelly blinks likes he’s just been slapped. His eyes drift over to the side again, presumably to look at Brother Nicholas.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” I whisper.

  “Nobody said it was.”

  “I know that look; you were wondering. Anyway, it might be better if you kept that detail to yourself for now,” I murmur. “We’ll talk about everything when I get there.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Jess?”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, Jessie. I know you, too. I know that tone of voice. You were never a very good liar.”

  “Okay, fine. I just can’t say right now.”

  “About Micah?”

  “Once we take care of Jake and get Ash and Reg off the island, then we’ll go back to Brookhaven and sort things out with him.”

  “Why don’t we just leave him?”

  “Because,” I tell him. “He’s not the only reason we have to go back.”

  Chapter 5

  I follow the mad rush of water upstream, just as Kelly instructed. I can’t help mulling over his logic. It’s infuriating. I mean, it makes total sense about the water, but that’s what bothers me: how much sense it actually makes. I should have figured it out.

  I’m forced to backtrack a little before I find a road that parallels the water. I could cut through yards between houses and take alleyways, but I feel safer on the main streets where things are more open. It’s still raining, but the sky has lightened considerably and the Undead have thinned out considerably. Singly, they’re not much of a threat. It’s when they gather that they seem to feed off each other’s frenzy.

  I watch them and they watch me and I see them come, but they’re too far away and too slow. As long as I’m quiet, they’re quick to lose interest.

  I eventually make my way back to the Long Island Expressway, the road we’d been on when we crashed. Stepping out onto it, I can’t see the torn edge a few hundred yards away. I can’t hear the rush of the water. The road looks intact. Beyond it is the wall, a starker, grayer blur against the melancholy sky. A quarter of a mile away.

  All evidence of the accident appears to have been erased. The IUs that attacked us have dissipated, gone now that there’s nothing to anchor them here, nothing more to feed upon. But the closer I get, the more I can see the horror that took place here. Bits and pieces of debris and hunks of metal and plastic litter the roadway. One of Brother Malcolm’s shoes rests against the center divider. A million pieces of glass—clear from the windows, colored from the head and taillights—glitter on the road. There’s a new gash in the cement, an inch deep, a thin runnel of blood still in it, looking as if the road itself is bleeding. To the side, the concrete barrier is chipped, marked with blue and white paint, and stained with blood.

  Most of it has already washed away. In another hour, all traces of it will be gone, leaving only shredded clothing and metal and plastic. I find no bones, no uneaten remnants. It reminds me of LaGuardia, after our return from the botched escape attempt. We’d found a bloody mess in the makeshift hospital, pieces accounting for only a single victim. We knew there had to be two—or thought we knew—and figured the other had been eaten. It was careless of us to think that. The woman—Novak—had somehow avoided Nurse Mabel. She’d nearly killed Kelly and Jake when they tried to leave the island days later.

  I won’t make that mistake again. It seems impossible to think that either Brother Malcolm or Brother Matthew survived those brutal attacks, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t get up and walk away afterward as one of the Undead. I’d seen IUs in much worse condition.

  I find a second blood stain in the road, thick and sticky with congealed blood. From its location, I guess that it belonged to Brother Malcolm. It trails off, as if telling me which direction he went, either on his own or dragged.

  The only sign I find of Brother Matthew is a single syringe, its barrel shattered and the precious medicine spilled out. I search for the last one, but I can’t find it. And as for Shinji, he’s long gone, too. Hope turns to hopelessness as I stand and strain my ears against the quiet drone of the drizzle and the louder roar of the water below, but there is no barking.

  It breaks my heart to know he’s gone. I only hope he’s safe.

  On a whim, I edge over to where the ground is still crumbling away. The worst of the damage appears to have been done. The water below seems lower than before. Slower, too. The ground feels solid, but pieces of it still chip off and fall away.

  About eight feet down, caught on a protruding piece of rebar from a chunk of concrete, is the dark green bundle of my backpack, daring me to go down and fetch it.

  If it was just the temporary Link—penalty days for not returning it to Citizen Registration in Hartford notwithstanding—and the spare rebreather cartridge, then I’d probably just leave it down there. I can get another backpack. Hell, that one isn’t even the one I set out with two weeks ago. I’d picked this one up on the other side of Gameland.

  But there is something in the pack that I can’t bear to leave behind, so I begin the treacherous climb down.

  “You’re wasting precious time,” I mutter to myself between breaths. I have to breathe through my mouth, as the mud of the river has made my nose stuffy. The unstable ground shifts beneath my feet and I slip, then catch
myself with my hands to keep my balance. The edge of the road rises to the level of my waist. Then to my shoulders. Now it’s over my head. Just a few more feet to go. I look up and wonder how in the hell I’m going to climb back to the road again.

  Another foot. The ground begins to slide…

  Slows…stops.

  Step. Slide some more.

  “This is stupid.”

  Now the backpack is a couple arm lengths away. I step closer, test the footing. Reach. Grab. The pack is heavier than I expect, weighed down with rain. I find myself sliding down again, gaining speed.

  Scramble. Grab a chunk of the road. Tear a hole in the knee of my pants. Matching holes now. Pain. But I’ve stopped sliding.

  I look down to inspect the damage. There’s blood. Not much. After everything I’ve been through, I wonder that there could actually be any left to spare.

  But I’ve got the pack.

  “All for a god damn toy,” I murmur angrily. “Stupid stuffed rabbit for a stupid dog I’ll probably never see again.”

  The edge of the road looks too far away to get back to, the slope too steep and too unstable to scale.

  “God damn rabbit.” Blood is dripping down my leg and I have to climb again.

  But I feel happier.

  When I finally reach the edge and manage to pull myself over it, I feel stronger somehow. I’m shaking like a leaf and wondering how the hell I’m going to go on, but somehow I know I can do it.

  God damn sentimental bullshit.

  “Shut up,” I tell the sky. “Go away,” I command the rain that falls upon my upturned face. But the sky remains as impassive as it always was and the rain keeps falling. The world is unimpressed with my pathetic show of sentimentality. “Fuck you,” I tell the world.

  It doesn’t care about that either.

  So I get back to my feet and pick up the satchel with the pistol and the syringes and stuff it into the backpack, and then I throw the whole thing over my shoulders.

  “Kelly better be right. There better be a hole.”

  And I’ll be god damned if there is one there, right where he said it would be. But it’s not just a hole underneath to relieve the water, an opening for me to crawl through. It’s a huge gash in the wall itself. It looks as if an army blasted it down and marched through it.

  And they’re still marching through it even now.

  Chapter 6

  A hundred-foot section of the wall is completely missing, torn away by the force of the water. The edges of the gaping hole are jagged and warped. I’m just glad I wasn’t here when it happened.

  The water flowing through has cut a deep ravine along the left-hand side of the opening, but there’s solid ground on the right.

  By the time I’ve approached to within a couple hundred yards, the army of Undead streaming through the hole has thinned considerably; many seem to have disappeared without a trace. Along the right-hand edge of the gap stands a solitary figure, clad all in black. It doesn’t move. I can’t be sure if it’s an IU or a CU, but from the state of its clothes and the shine of the hair on its head, I’d guess it’d have to be a Player. Recently dead, in any case.

  My heart sinks. A couple dozen IUs is one thing. I could deal with them. But a Player—even a single Player—is a much greater threat.

  And there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to slip past it.

  I weigh the options. Limited. I can either confront the thing and hope it’s not too fresh or too fast. That its Operator isn’t very good—after all, why bring it all the way out here on the fringe of Gameland where the challenge is much smaller?

  I suppose I could wait for it to leave. Except it doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere. I can’t waste much more time.

  Or I could try and find a different way in.

  I check my Link. It’s already nine thirty. Even if I were able to slip past it without any problem, I won’t make it back to the hill before one o’clock. Something tells me Jake won’t last much longer than that.

  As I stand there thinking about all this, another string of IUs comes through. The Player doesn’t move, not until they get to within a few feet of it. Then, with a swiftness that startles me, it lifts its arm and swings it forward. There’s a flash of metal and the IU takes another step before crumpling to the ground, its head separating and tumbling into the river below. The Player kicks the body in after it. Two more IUs stumble through in the next few seconds. These meet the same fate; both end up below. Easy kills.

  An old saying comes to mind, something Grandpa used to tell me on days he’d take me to the shooting range: Shooting IUs is like shooting fish in a barrel. Out there with the smell of gunpowder burning our noses and the sharp reports of the guns assaulting our eardrums, it was the only time I ever really saw him relax.

  In later years, after I’d gotten over the thrill of firing a gun, his words would come back to me, striking me as odd. Here was the man who’d introduced the world to zombie soldiers, and now he was reveling in ways to kill them.

  I didn’t realize until several years later, when I pressed him on this seeming contradiction, that I’d gotten a rare glimpse inside his mind: he actually feared the Undead as much as the rest of us; he was terrified by them.

  “Every nation in the world wants an Undead Army,” he’d answered. “But they wouldn’t know how to control it. This is why New Merica has isolated itself from all the other nations.”

  “So we can keep the technology to ourselves?”

  He was silent for a moment. I knew my answer was wrong, or at least incomplete, but I also got the sense that the right answer was something he would never say.

  “It’s inevitable, honey,” he told me instead. “No matter how hard we try to contain the technology, it will surpass us. The Undead will spread beyond our borders.”

  “Other countries will use zombies to fight, too?”

  His face had hardened for a moment, a flash of emotion. “If you’re asking me whether zulu armies from other nations will battle one another, the answer is yes.”

  But then the hardness disappeared and his eyes seemed to be watching some far away view, some distant battlefield carved out in his mind’s eye. He jolted, as if aware that I was watching him, and he looked down and gave me a look I couldn’t understand—which I still don’t. It spoke of emotions raging inside of him, of horror and regret. But underneath it all: a manic excitement at the possibilities. It frightened me terribly to see it. And thrilled me, too.

  “They’ll fight each other,” he said. “And what will the living do? Sit back and relax in the comfort of their homes and watch it all on television. Picture it, Jessica: entire wars played out for all the world to see, like some video game.”

  If I’d thought of it, I should have asked, What’s the purpose? But I hadn’t. Maybe I’d believed I knew it back then. I don’t now.

  “Anyway,” he had told me, “that’s not why we’re here learning how to fire a gun. We’re here because of leakage in the system. Every system has its noise. The Infected Undead is that noise, and it’s our responsibility to minimize it whenever it gets too loud. If you like, you can think of it as population control.”

  “By shooting them?”

  “Like fish in a barrel, honey.”

  Now I’m not sure what to do as I stand here and watch this Player dispatch IUs as they stumble through the gap, not to control the population or minimize noise, but for the entertainment of the masses. I wonder how much money its Operator is making with each kill. Would Grandpa be proud? I wonder how many people are watching it on Media right now. You’d think they’d get bored with it. Where’s the challenge, the excitement? Where’s the risk?

  What risk? Sitting on their comfy couches, chugging Hudson River Pilsner—Pissner, as Micah used to say—and thinking this is what it means to be alive.

  But then I realize that Arc probably wouldn’t even allow something like this to go public. They wouldn’t want the country to know the wall around Gamel
and isn’t as indestructible as they had us believe. And it makes me wonder whether what I’m seeing has anything at all to do with The Game.

  Two more IUs come through and the Player kicks one into the water without even bothering to behead it first. It takes a swipe at the second and it, too, falls to the ground. Its head remains partially attached, flopping on a stiff rope of muscle.

  I know if I don’t act soon, it’ll eventually notice me. It hasn’t turned this way yet—maybe because its Operator doesn’t think it’ll be attacked from this side of the wall. A fatal mistake.

  I start to edge forward. I don’t have much of a plan. It consists only of rushing up to it and knocking it over the edge and into the water.

  The surface of the ground is littered with chunks of black gravel, which I dismiss at first. But then one glints and I bend down and pick it up. It’s shiny and smooth, like molten glass, and surprisingly heavy. It reminds me of the obsidian G-ma Junie once showed to me, years ago, black, prune-shaped rocks which she’d collected during a trip to California back around the turn of the century. Before the dead walked. Before New Merica and checkpoints, when anyone could drive from one ocean to the other without being questioned. “Apache tears,” she’d called them. “Volcanic glass.”

  But these came from no volcano. They’re bits and pieces of the wall.

  On our way to Gameland, Stephen had mentioned that the wall was made up of some kind of synthetic titanium blend. Resistant to just about anything you can throw at it. The chunk slips from my fingers as I realize three things almost at once. First, the wall didn’t shatter from water pressure. These pieces are molten, charred.

  The second thing I know is that it had to have happened very recently, within the past few hours.

  I know this because the third thing I realize is that my head isn’t buzzing and my skin isn’t itching. The wall is broken, and so its effect on me is broken, too. It was there yesterday when we came through, but now it’s gone.