He listens for a moment, shaking his head, his face getting redder.
“Just meet us on the hill. I reckon because of me your job just got a hell of a lot easier. You’ll be back in your own bed by tomorrow night, out of this stinking hellhole.” He turns away. “Can’t say the same for the kids, though.”
I didn’t think my hopes could sink any lower. This day just keeps getting worse.
“Naw, she’s alone,” Ben says. “Brave little bitch…Don’t know why. Don’t really care. Rest of them jackers must be up there on the hill…Naw, going back.”
He wanders over to his pack and rifles through it for a moment.
“Cocky,” he says, laughing, “the little bitch. Got a mouth on her. Kids these days. They’re all like that. Wish Casey was, spineless piece of shit.” He listens for a moment, holding the Link to his ear, rolling his eyes, pantomiming impatience. “Three hours at the most. Not sure how fast the girl is on her feet. She’s a little worse for the wear. Think she got more than she bargained for during her little adventure. Don’t know yet…No, I told you she was alone.”
There’s a crackle on the other end and Ben chuckles and clicks off. Then he strides over to me and picks up my backpack and unzips it and starts to shake it out onto the floor.
“What are you doing? Stop that!” I say.
He doesn’t. The gun falls out, hitting the carpet with a dull thud. He sets the pack aside and snatches it.
“Funny lookin tampon if you ask me. You sure wouldn’t want to be stickin one of these up your twat.”
“Open your mouth,” I growl. “It’ll fit nicely in there.”
He laughs. “And to think I almost felt sorry for you, thinkin you were one of those Forgotten ones, the Left-Behinds. But turns out you ain’t. You’re just one of them gamers Arc hired.”
“Arc didn’t hire us!”
He slaps me again, backhanding me across the other cheek. My head rocks back and the pain flares and the can of beans goes tumbling out of my hand. “I told you not to lie to me no more!”
He checks my pistol, ejecting the last round and tossing it to Casey. “Hold onto this,” he says. Then he holds the gun up to the window and looks through the barrel. “Thing’s useless. Ain’t nobody never told you how to take care of your weapons?” He throws it back into the pack, then reaches into a pocket.
“Whoa, what are these?” he asks, holding up the syringes. “Blood?”
“Nothing.”
He turns them over in his hands, studying them, holding them up to the light and peering through the viscous liquid inside. After a few seconds, his eyes widen. “Why are you in such a hurry to get back?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“One of you was bitten, wasn’t they?”
I don’t answer.
“Who gave these to you?”
“No one.”
He pulls back his fist and I flinch. “I said no lyin! Who gave these to you?”
“A guy, okay? I need them. They’re medicine. Please, I need to take them back.”
The grin on his face widens. “Oh, we’re going back alright.” He lowers his face to me and the smile looks like a sneer. “I know what these are. I know why you were in such a hurry. And I know who gave these to you.”
I flinch with every word.
“Which one of you was bitten? Or was it two?”
Again, I don’t answer.
“Wait, Ben,” Casey says, leaning forward. He’s unable to restrain his curiosity any longer. “I don’t understand. What is it?”
Ben turns to him, his eyes wild with excitement. “Medicine,” he whispers harshly. “Medicine for the living. Poison to the dead.”
Casey looks confused. “What? A cure?”
“It’s not—” I begin, but Ben cuts me off.
He rolls the syringes in his fingers. “Is it just these two doses?”
I nod. “Please, I need one—”
“Have you seen it work? How do you know it works?”
“Please, I don’t know, I just—”
He sticks the cap of one of the syringes in his mouth and pulls it off. The needle twinkles in the dim light. “Maybe we should test it out, right?” he says through his clenched teeth.
“What are you doing!” I scream at him, lunging.
“Hold her,” Ben roars at Casey, as he scrambles out of my reach. Casey grabs me and twists my arm behind my back.
“Please,” Casey pleads into my ear. “Just hold still.”
But his hands are slick with sweat and I manage to slip out. I drop and spin before he can react, jerking him off balance. He stumbles to his knees with a yelp. As he falls, I drive an elbow into his face and he grunts and falls away. I step into a defensive pose, but my foot twists on the can and I go to my knees. Casey recovers and he shoves me the rest of the way down, yelling for me to stop. “Please,” he says, “I don’t want to hurt—”
But the can is in my hand and I slam it against his face. He crumples to the floor and doesn’t move.
“That’s enough!” Ben hisses into my ear. Before I can move, he has me in a headlock, his knee pressing into my kidneys. I can see the needle in his hand, ready to push that serum into my veins. All I can think about is telling him that it won’t work.
He grabs my hair instead, yanking my head back. “You did say you were bitten, didn’t you?” My bandage slips off. He flings it away in disgust and when he lets go, I try to jerk away. Pain flares inside of my neck. He grabs me again, jerking me to my feet, and I scream in pain. I try to reach up and grab his hand to hold myself up, but he shakes so hard that I lose my balance and fall. Using my own weight against me, he throws me back down onto the floor. It slams into my jaw. Blood fills my mouth. I cough, sputtering, but he’s sitting on top of me, pinning me down.
“That’s not for me!” I try to say, but my tongue is fat and numb where I’ve bitten it and my lips are mashed into the carpet. “You’ll just be wasting it! I need it for—”
“Your friend,” he finishes. “So I heard. Must be the one who wasn’t playing so well. You must think me a fool not understandin your little codes. But you ain’t so smart, little bitch. And it can’t be just one. You got two doses, so which of you are sick?”
I don’t answer.
“Okay, I’ll guess, then. Let’s see. Is it that prick of a boyfriend of yours? Kelly? Did he get bitten? Is that why he let you go off on your own? Because you and I both know how controlling he can—”
I twist under him, shrieking in rage, but he’s too heavy, and he knows exactly where to place his knee to immobilize me and make it hurt.
“I heard what this does. I heard how it changes you. He’ll never be the same again,” he whispers into my ear. “Once bitten, twice dead, ain’t that right? Tell me who the other one is and maybe—maybe—I’ll let you go free. Yeah, you heard me right.” He laughs quietly and I can feel his wrenched hot breath on the side of my face.
“It’s just Jake,” I cry.
“Aw, not Mister Corben, then? Too bad. So, you won’t be needing other one then.”
“It’s extra,” I lie. “Just in case.”
“Good, that’s good. Cause I couldn’t bear it if it was one of you girls what got bitten.”
“Fuck you.”
“Now, tell me, and no more lyin. You tell me right now who gave these to you. Who gave you the vaccine? Was it—”
“It’s not a vaccine.”
He shoves my head into the floor. “You’re trying my patience!”
“Fug oo,” I say into the carpeting, my teeth mashing into my lips. Tears leak from my eyes. The floor smells like nothing—no, it smells like sunlight and earth. It’s dusty, but it smells somehow clean. After so many years, the stench of wet socks and bare feet has faded away. “Ah hade oo.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Gonna kee oo.”
“You really shouldn’t speak like that. Ladies where I come from don’t speak this way. Now,” and he yan
ks my head up by my hair. “Last chance. Who gave this to you?”
“I know who your Coder is. But you’ll never find him.”
“Find him?” He laughs. “You don’t know shit. Where did you get these?”
“I pulled them out of my ass!”
He grunts and shifts on my back, grinding his knee harder into it until it feels like my ribs are going to break.
“I’m going to kill you.”
He’s quiet for a moment. I wish I could see what he’s doing, but I can’t. His weight shifts above me. There’s a sudden coolness on my side. He’s lifted my shirt and understanding floods through me. I know what he’s going to do. “I wasn’t bitten!” I scream. “It won’t work! Please. Please, don’t do it.”
He holds the syringe next to my eyes. It’s blurry, but I can see that it’s still full. “I wouldn’t waste this on you,” he whispers. “Useless bitch.”
“Please, my friend is dying. Why would I lie to you? I need to give it to him! Every minute—”
Ben stands up then and the sudden absence of weight makes me cough.
“Get up!” He reaches down and grabs my arm and pulls me up. “Well, what are you waitin for? You want to go back to the hill, then we’ll go.”
He kicks at Casey, cursing when he doesn’t move.
“I got my eye on you, jacker. My eye and this rifle. And don’t try any of that fancy karate shit on me.” He whispers in my ear: “I know it, too.”
He throws me to the floor next to Casey. “Go wake that shithead up.”
I climb stiffly to my knees, gasping for air. My hair spills over my face and I swipe it angrily away. There’s a brassy taste in my mouth, and a red mouth-shaped smear stains the carpet. I spit at him, not caring anymore, a sticky pink glob that hits his leg. He laughs. Tears of frustration and anger blur my vision.
“Wake him up.”
I jiggle Casey to rouse him, but he doesn’t move. I can see him breathing, so I didn’t kill him, but he’s out cold.
“He’s not wak—”
Ben strides over and crushes a water packet over Casey. When the water splashes on his face, he wakes, sputtering and coughing.
“I really have to do everythin, don’t I?” Ben says. The man is a sadist. No, worse that. He’s fucking lost his mind. “Get on your feet!”
When Casey doesn’t immediately respond, Ben shoves me to the side, then slams the toe of his boot into his thigh. “I said get up! We got to be goin!”
Casey groans, but he holds up his hand and scuttles away. “I’m up,” he says. But he stumbles getting to his feet.
“Leave him alone!” I yell.
Ben throws Casey’s pack into his chest and tells him to put it on. “Stop being a pussy!”
“I’m up!” Casey insists. “Okay, Ben, I’m up.”
“Give him a chance, will you?” I snap.
Ben just ignores me. “Let’s go,” he roars. “I don’t want to be late.”
Chapter 11
I am going to kill him.
It’s as simple as that. No doubt about it. No if. No maybe. I am going to kill Ben, just as I told him. I don’t know when, or how—gun or knife or with my bare hands, it doesn’t matter to me—but the first chance I get, he’s a dead man.
You’re not a murderer.
But even the voice inside of me doesn’t sound so convinced of that anymore. How can it? I’ve already killed.
“Damn it, keep up!” he tells us, and he picks up the pace.
“Kind of hard to walk with my hands tied behind my back,” I mutter, loud enough so he can hear, yet softly enough that I don’t wake half the IUs on the island like he’s doing. “Better tell your partner to keep it down or we’ll never make it to Jayne’s Hill,” I tell Casey.
“You’re lucky I don’t gag you as well,” Ben retorts.
I glance backward at Casey. He’s holding the rifle and is pointing it at me, using it like a cattle prod. The look on his face tells me the last thing he wants to do is to shoot. Well, shoot me, anyway. I’m sure the thought of shooting Ben has crossed his mind once or twice.
Ben makes me carry my own pack. He made sure I knew the pistol was inside of it, as if he knew how much it would torment me. But even if I could get to it, which I can’t with my wrists bound, it’d be useless. The last bullet is in Casey’s pocket, probably meant as yet another torment. So close, and yet so far. Testing Casey’s resolve. The man is pure evil.
Casey grimaces as he limps along. Ben kicked him hard; I can only imagine the knot in his thigh. Probably makes the zombie bite on my own thigh look like a hickey. He also holds his head cocked a little to the right, but I can still see the bruise on the side of his face, starting from behind his ear and spreading forward. The ear itself is swollen and angry-looking, but at least there’s no blood.
I don’t know what sorts of abuses he might have suffered at Ben’s hands before we crossed paths this morning, but there’s no way they could be as bad as what I went through since just this morning. And yet he still manages to look even more miserable than me.
“Why does Ben treat you like this?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. Just lifts the rifle and jerks it forward.
“I guess we’re even then,” I say.
Guilt flashes across his eyes. He knows I’m just saying that. He deserved what he got; I didn’t.
Ben keeps up a hard pace, and I have to jog every so often to make sure I don’t lag behind. I give Casey a resentful look every time he pokes the muzzle into my back, and the redness in his face intensifies. I can hardly blame him for what he’s doing, not when the alternative is almost certainly more abuse at Ben’s hands. To his credit, he doesn’t poke me very hard, just enough for show, though I doubt it’s fooling Ben at all.
I know Ben’s keeping a close eye on us both. Every time he looks to the side—“Got to keep an eye out for them walkin corpses,” he says—I know he’s really watching us both, making sure I don’t try anything, making sure Casey doesn’t suddenly decide a bullet to his partner’s back might just be called for.
“How’s your eye?” Casey asks, panting. He swipes a forearm across his face to wipe away the sweat. We’re all sweating, despite the grayness of the sky. The rain has stopped, but the air is thick with moisture, oppressive and hard to breathe.
I turn my face to him and he winces at my scowl. My eye is swollen fully shut now, giving me a weird sort of monocular vision. The whole right side of my face feels hot and thick and I hate the way everything on that side is blurry and cut off.
“I’ve been worse,” I grunt. “How’s your leg?”
He shrugs.
We continue on a few hundred more steps in silence. Every so often, the clouds break and a beam of sunlight shoots through like a celebration of the new day. But I doubt any of us feels like celebrating. Except Ben. He seems downright chipper. Even the occasional rumbling and the constant threat that the rain could start up again at any moment hasn’t soured his mood.
“What does Arc want with us?”
Casey frowns at me. “How should I know? Why do you keep asking about them?”
“So, you really aren’t with them?”
Casey lifts his eyes to Ben’s back, but doesn’t answer. He doesn’t nod or shake his head.
“Okay, so, you’re not with Arc,” I say, trying to speak softly, though I know Ben’s got to be listening, “then who do you work for?”
“Enough jabberin back there,” Ben snaps.
But I disregard him. What have I got to lose now? “You know they’re going to send in a bunch of people, don’t you? Once they figure out there’s a hole in their wall. They probably already know. Maybe there’s a whole bunch—”
“Arc’s got bigger fish to fry right now,” Ben says. Then he chuckles.
“What do you mean?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What fish?”
Finally he stops and turns and gives me this contemptuous look. “You really don’t know,
do you?”
“What?”
He shakes his head and resumes walking. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. How long you been here now? Two weeks?”
I open my mouth to say something back, but I know it’ll just give him more satisfaction. His reminding me of how long we’ve been here just makes it finally seem real. And permanent.
“Why is Arc too busy?” I ask again.
“Manhattan…” he starts, but his voice trails off.
“What about Manhattan? Ben?”
But he just stands there staring at something off the side of the road up ahead. I follow the line of his vision, and what I see is an IU, its back turned toward us. We’ve passed a couple of them already, mostly way off the road, in the bushes or standing in the shadows. None of them have bothered us, not yet. This one is looking like it could get in our way.
It sways slightly, as if there’s a breeze and it weighs nothing. But there’s no wind down here on the ground, even if thunder clouds roil in the sky above.
“What’s it doing?” Casey asks.
Nobody answers. The clouds shift and a sunbeam pierces through, rolling over the ground like a golden tumbleweed. It engulfs the IU, but the thing just stands there right in the middle of it, glowing like an angel, and so I guess that it must be one of the broken ones. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to run off and hide from the desiccating sunlight.
“Hey!” Ben suddenly shouts at it, making me jump. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and lets out a shrill whistle.
“What the hell?” I hiss at him. “Are you crazy? That thing’ll start coming after us. They’ll all start coming!”
Ben laughs, and he doesn’t stop laughing, even when the IU starts to turn its face in our direction and it raises its arms. Ben heads right over to it, striding with a smile on his face like it’s an old he hasn’t seen in ages. He unsheathes his machete and sends back a warning to Casey that he better not let me escape. “Not like last time.”
“What does he mean last time?”
Casey scowls.
“Your partner is freaking nuts, you know that?” I mutter.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 80
