That’s why those IUs are coming through here. The wall isn’t repelling them anymore.
But who—or what—did it?
I’m less than fifty feet away now.
Now thirty feet away. Twenty.
At fifteen feet, I slip behind the dead trunk of a tree. The Player still hasn’t noticed me.
Another IU steps into view from the other side, a small one, missing an arm. The Player waits until it’s a couple feet away, then it quickly—almost casually—raises the machete and swings down. The child’s head explodes in a wet powder that drifts for a moment like a ghost, then settles to the ground. The Player leans forward and lashes out with a kick. The tiny body flies over the edge and into the raging waters below.
A choked sound slips from my throat. The Player begins to turn. It’s now or never. I step from behind the tree and lunge forward. In that exact moment, the air around my head explodes in a blast of sound and light. My lungs empty. It feels like someone has tied an invisible rope around my head and jerked it.
My feet leave the ground and I float in a sea of pain as the gunshot reverberates over the land.
The pain is so clean, so pure and white that it seems almost sterile. It burns through my vision, crowding my head from back to front and drawing with it darkness. From my position on the ground, I see the Player complete its turn. Its eyes find me and it steps toward me.
I can’t move. Nothing works. I have to struggle to remain conscious as I watch it raise its arm. The machete glints in its hand, dull gray and stained brown.
And then it begins to swing down toward my neck.
Air escapes my mouth. With a voice of its own, it says, “Don’t.”
Chapter 7
The machete thuds into the ground beside my ear.
“Who in the holy fuck are you?” the Player hisses.
I blink stupidly, not believing I’m still alive. I can’t move or speak. It takes my shocked brain several seconds to reboot, then several more to register that the thing standing over me isn’t an Undead at all, but a living, breathing person.
“I asked you a question, little lady!” The words slur together, though each one hits my ears like tiny fireworks, crackling with anger. “One of them exiles, I wager. Forgotten.”
With the initial shock passing, I’m able to move again. I reach around to the back of my head to assess the damage. It’s slick with blood. My blood. Strands of my hair stick to my fingers. The world tilts crazily, spinning as the reality of what happened hits me. “I’m…”
For a moment everything fades to gray, everything except a bright tiny dot too far away to reach. I bite the inside of my cheek and the dot rushes forward again. “You— you shot me.”
“Not me. Casey.”
The shooter, a second man—boy, actually, as he’s quite a bit younger than the other—steps into view, smoke still rising from the barrel of his rifle. He hasn’t lowered it from my head yet, and that muzzle looks like a giant black eye staring straight at me. The look on his face is one of shock. His eyes flick wildly between me and his partner.
“Point that thing away,” the man quietly says. The fury is gone from his eyes, replaced with a deep coolness, a sense of control.
“You fucking shot me,” I whisper. And then the contents of my stomach—the eggs Julia cooked for me this morning and the toast and apple juice—come pouring out and splatter all over the ground.
“Aw, Christ!” the man says, disgusted.
“I— I didn’t know, Ben!” the boy says, his voice rising in alarm. “I thought she was a—”
“Get a fuckin hold of yourself,” Ben says. “Now!”
He steps toward me and I flinch back. He stops and sheathes his machete, then shows me his empty hands and says, “Ain’t gonna hurt you, little lady. Not much older’n a little girl, are you?” He moves with the grace of a hunter, lithe and quick, like someone used to making snap decisions and then quickly acting on them. He looks like someone equally at ease with snapping necks.
Everything about him screams at me to keep my distance. Run. Run!
He bends down over me, telling his partner over his shoulder to go watch the hole. “Those things were comin through like shit on flies while you were out lollygaggin a few minutes ago.”
“I wasn’t lollygagging, Ben. I was—”
“Takin a shit. Yeah, I know, Case. I could smell the stink, even with those walking corpses surroundin me.”
I watch them and listen and try to understand what they’re saying. Who the hell are they? What are they doing here?
“Well, you ain’t been hit,” Ben tells me, peeking around at the back of my head. “Leastways, not by a bullet.”
“I thought you were a Player.”
He rolls his eyes. “Honey, ain’t we all just players? Hell, ain’t this a whole fuckin kingdom of players?” He spreads his arms and looks up at the sky, as to indicate not just Gameland, or even long Island, but the whole entire world.
“Whuh—what happened here? Why are you doing that to the Infecteds?”
He turns around to look where I’m pointing. “EM generator’s knocked out.” He shrugs carelessly and grins.
“Did you blow up the wall?”
He raises his hand and I flinch again, but he just shakes his head in amusement.
“Said I ain’t goin to hurt you, didn’t I?” He tries to soften his face to help me relax, but he can’t keep it that way for long, and soon the lines deepen again, like it hurts him to smile. “Ain’t no threat to you, little lady, s’long as you behave yourself. But, I can promise you this, if you so much as flick a fingertip or look anywhere ‘cept right here at my face—” And this time when he smiles, it’s with an unmistakable seriousness. “—I swear, by god, I will snap your thin, pretty little neck in an instant. Do we have an understandin?”
I nod. My instincts were right. He’s a killer, and not just of zombies.
“I’m so sorry,” Casey apologizes. He raises his hands to his head, as if it hurts him. The rifle swivels forgotten with his finger still inside the trigger guard. “I thought she was one of them corpses, Ben! I mean, look at her. She’s— her skin’s all covered in mud and she’s nearly half-naked.”
I cross my arms over my chest. I am covered in mud.
“I thought she was one of them walking corpses.”
“I told you to go watch the openin! Now shut your fuckin pie hole, Casey.” His deep blue eyes never leave mine as he speaks. His face is crisscrossed with lines and covered in dark stubble, but he smells freshly bathed and faintly of menthol. “Get over there. Those things ain’t goin to kill themselves.”
Casey hesitates a moment longer before heading over to the gap.
“Who are you?” I ask. My head is starting to pound and the pain feels thicker.
“Never mind that. No one you know.”
“How bad is it? You said I wasn’t hit, so why am I bleeding? Why does my head feel funny?”
He reaches around again. “Hold still, honey.”
“Is it—”
He presses his hand on my head and the stinging intensifies for a moment before fading. Then I feel a slight jerk and the pain inside of me flares again, except this time it doesn’t seem to want to stop growing. A scream rises in my throat.
“Shut up!” he tells me, clamping a hand over my mouth. “Shut the fuck up or we’ll have more of those dead fuckers’n we can deal with.”
He drops something into my lap. It looks like a splinter of bone, nearly as long as my finger and dripping with fresh blood. “Now, you’ll be fine as long as you shut up. The tree, on the other hand, well…” He looks up at it and chuckles. “It was dead anyway. Somethin about this wall…”
I’m whimpering now, but he purses his lips unsympathetically and glares at me until I stop.
“You got lucky,” he tells me. “Casey don’t usually miss with that rifle of his. He—God damn it, Casey! Pay attention over there, will you?”
He jumps to his feet an
d yanks his partner to the side before body slamming an IU that was just about to grab him. It falls over the edge without a sound, and even the noise of the splash is cut off from my ears by the ground. Then he spins and does a roundhouse kick, doubling over a second IU as it steps into the opening. Before it can straighten up again, his machete is out. With a shing! it slices through its neck, and the thing crumples to the ground and doesn’t move again.
“Nasty fuckers,” he says, panting lightly, though not from exertion. He gives the head a kick. “Diseased pieces of shit!”
When he turns, there’s a ferocity in his eyes that raises my anxiety up several notches. He’s crazy—controlled crazy, but still crazy. He points the machete at Casey’s chest, and the poor boy drops his eyes and mumbles an apology, but Ben doesn’t say a word back.
For a moment, the world stops as the tip of the machete hovers near Casey’s neck. Even the wind seems to hold its breath and the water ceases flowing. Then Ben turns back to me.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” he mutters. His eyes focus on something behind me, and that familiar prickling sensation comes over me.
Out of the drizzle, from our side of the wall come the Undead, wakened by the sound of the gunshot, drawn by our voices. Dozens of them, and, further back, hundreds more. They pour from the side streets and out of shadows, joining together like silent marchers in a solemn parade. They haven’t started moaning yet, but they will. And when they start, it’ll bring even more of them. They jostle and bump, shoving their way to the front, only to fall beneath the feet of the ones behind. But they get right back up. They keep right on coming.
“Aw, Jesus!” Casey cries. “There’s too many!”
“Knew I shouldn’ta let you take that rifle with you, Casey. Now lookit what you done.”
Ben slips over to me and wrenches me to my feet before I have a chance to move.
“Ow! Hey!”
“If you want to keep on living, little lady, you’ll come with us. Now!”
He pulls me toward the opening and into Gameland. Casey complains— “Back inside? We just came from there!” —but Ben ignores our protests. He drags me until I have to run to keep up. His hand on my arm is a vise that won’t let go. I tell him that he’s hurting me, but he pays me no heed. And he doesn’t release me until were safe inside a house and the Undead drift by, carried by the wave of some fading memory of seeing us.
Chapter 8
Their names are Ben Wolfram and Casey Kiram and, despite my earlier assumption, they are not father and son. They have the same thick drawl—that is, when Casey isn’t stuttering and stammering. They both look ten years younger than their ages. Casey’s twenty six, and Ben’s exactly twice that. But outside of these similarities, they’re very different people. Casey acts like a scared little boy constantly about to wet his pants. And Ben…
Well, he’s as hard and impenetrable to see through as obsidian and about as unsettling as the wall.
We hole up inside a house that Ben manages to gain access to without rousing more of the Undead. And it comes to me, now that it’s clear they don’t intend to do me any harm, to wonder why the explosion at the wall didn’t bring any of the Undead like the gunshot did. “I mean, it had to have been an explosion, right?” I ask Casey.
“We waited till—”
“Shut up, you idiot!” Ben tells him. “You don’t know who she is, so shut your yap!”
He tells Casey to go do a thorough search inside the house, checking all of the rooms and closets. Casey obeys without question while Ben posts himself at a window and keeps watch outside. After Casey returns, he insists on tending to my wound. Ben doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s watching and listening carefully. He’s acutely aware of everything that’s happening inside the room as much as what’s going on outside.
Casey avoids looking me in the eye. I can tell he’s still genuinely upset about shooting me—well, shooting at me, anyway. But even though remorse pours off of him like stink off a zombie, I just can’t find it in me to forgive him. He was just damn lucky I’d moved when I did, or the bullet would’ve taken a chunk of my spinal cord instead of a chunk of that dead tree.
I guess I can understand why he fired. I do look more dead than alive, half naked and covered in muck. And because of the cut in my ankle and the bruise on my thigh, I probably look about as coordinated as one. I bet I smell as bad as one.
But, mostly, because I was about to attack Ben.
“I thought he was a Player,” I mutter. It’s as close to an apology as they’re going to get.
“Ain’t no Players,” Ben answers.
Casey offers me a button-down shirt he’s found in one of the bedrooms and he gathers water so I can wash the rest of the mud off my face and arms. These gestures help take the edge off a little.
He fusses over my wound, and I try and sit still while he picks out the remaining splinters. My head pounds like there’s something alive in there trying to get out. I’m nauseous, but I’m anxious to get moving again. I can’t let the injury or the IUs outside keep me here much longer. All I can think about is getting back to Jayne’s Hill. I keep picturing Jake slipping closer to death with every moment I delay.
“Just a flesh wound,” Casey murmurs. “Lucky. I think I got all them splinters.” He shows the last one to me, his fingers covered to the second knuckle with my blood.
I scowl at him and he averts his eyes. “Feels like half of the back of my head is shot off. Can I go then?”
“Just need to dress it.”
“Well, hurry up,” I snap. It pleases me to see him cringe. Pleases me and makes me feel guilty at the same time. “I need to leave,” I add, softening my voice.
I glance over at Ben, but he just stands there by the window leaning on the wall. He doesn’t indicate he even heard me.
“You might want to wait a little bit,” Casey quietly tells me. He pours water from a canteen over a cloth to clean his hands. “From upstairs I could see those things all around.”
“I’m not scared of them,” I say, though that’s not exactly true. They do scare me, just not as much was what scares me inside this house. I can’t exactly say why Ben frightens me, especially since he hasn’t done anything to hurt me, but something about him makes me very uneasy.
Casey wraps a bandage around my head to hold the dressing in place, but he’s not very good at it. Already I can feel it slipping. He shrugs. “Don’t want to use tape because of your hair,” he says, and Ben looks over at me, as if noticing for the first time I actually do have hair.
I get up and make my way to the door. I can feel their eyes on my back. When I reach down for my backpack on the floor, Ben speaks.
“Sit down, little lady,” he says.
Casey nearly runs into me when I stop, he’s following that closely. The skin on my arms feels dry and tight as my hands curl into fists. I turn around. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
The muscles in his face ripple as he chews on a piece of grass. He turns back to the window, his brow furrowing. “Ain’t no one going nowhere for a while.”
“And why not?”
His eyes travel over my body, appraising what he sees. “You clean up pretty, you know that? Especially that hair of yours. How do you keep it short like that?”
I draw the shirt close around me and finish buttoning it up. It’s a little small and it gaps in places that would make a modest woman blush. The wetness of my bra bleeds through, darkening the fabric, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
“Probably not used to wearing clothes, ain’t you?” He laughs dryly.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I demand.
“Just sayin I’d hate to see you get hurt out there.” The stalk of grass waggles as he talks. “Horrible way to go, if you ask me. Chawed to death, festerin from infection. Terrible way to be dead, walkin around oozing blood and secretions and whatnot until everythin’s all dried up and scabby.” He pronounces it suck-ray-shuns. “That’s what’ll h
appen to you, if’n you try to leave now. There’s too many of those things out there.”
Casey nods. “Yeah, last thing you want is to get bitten,” he says in a low voice, as if I’m stupid or something and the warning bears repeating. “I once saw a man—”
“You think I’m afraid of getting bitten?” I chuff and shake my head at them both. “If you actually knew how many times I’ve come close to being bitten. Hell, I was bitten just an hour ago.”
Ben’s head swivels and he stares hard at me. Casey gasps, his eyes growing wide.
“Right here on my leg. Want to see?” I start to undo my pants. I can see the conflict in Casey’s eyes, the blush on his cheeks. Ben watches with renewed fascination.
“Don’t,” Casey says, stopping me.
“Aw, let the girl show us.”
“Never mind,” I mumble. “It didn’t break the skin anyway. I won’t go infecting anyone. Not today.”
Casey exhales noisily. “Let me fix that bandage. Please, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Well, you won’t tell us your name.”
“Why should I? Why should I trust you? You say you don’t know who I am, well, the same goes for me. I don’t know who you are.”
Ben lets go of the faded curtain and lets it falls back against the window. The gloom deepens. “Casey, whyn’t you go see if there’s somethin halfway edible in the pantry? Me and the little lady need a little privacy.”
Casey hesitates a moment, then leaves.
I watch Ben walk over to me. I can feel my skin prickling. Once more I’m surprised by how catlike his movements are. “Have a seat,” he tells me.
“You have a seat.”
He chuckles and shakes his head. “Fine. Stand if you want, but I can’t let you leave. Not with them things out there just itchin to chew you up.”
“What’s it to you if they do?”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 78
