“Don’t go anywhere,” I tell him.
The IUs have flooded the bottom level of the stairwell. From the tiny window I can see them in there, a sea of bodies crawling over each other and through each other, like worms in a can.
A hundred for a buck, the guard at the Port Chester checkpoint echoes at me. Telling us about the bloodworms he used for fishing with his sister’s kids. Just don’t eat the fish.
Hands and feet and heads, roiling like a stormy sea inside the stairwell. Not making much sound at all. It’s an eerie sight.
But they must sense me out here because the moaning starts and soon they’re all clawing to get to the door. The little square window fills with their horrid faces, empty eyes and mouths full of licorice tongues and gray teeth and rotting gums. I step back, but they can’t get to me. They can’t open the door. Unlike the door upstairs, this one is framed in metal and opens in toward them. Even so, the wall creaks and tiny sounds of strain tell me I shouldn’t be standing here too long.
I slip silently back into the darkened main room and decide to detour to check the other rooms before heading back to the welcome brightness of the elevator car and the less-welcoming presence of Jake inside of it. The hallway leading to the mainframe is dark, but a drab green glow spills through the glass door, second on the right. The light drifts out and settles onto the floor and walls like radioactive dust. Now there’s a soft hum of the machines seeping through. I feel it in my feet before my ears pick it up. A faint smell of ozone and burnt dust as they sit and do their endless calculations.
I pull the door open and the air whooshes out at me, so frigid that I almost expect to see my breath in it. But then the warmer air shedding off the wall of servers caresses my face, and the thousand blinking lights greet me like a long lost friend, a starry night in some foreign world.
It seems so strange to see all this equipment in there, an anachronism. Like finding an IU with a Link. It strikes me as strange to think of these computers here, a much larger and more powerful counterpart to the bank of computers in LaGuardia. It reminds me of a beast, alive and breathing. Dozing while it waits. Sleeping, and yet somehow aware of everything.
Micah’s tablet dangles near the floor, held up like a marionette by a cable that sprouts from a jack in the middle stack. I wonder briefly why Kelly left it behind this time, then realize that he probably intended to grab it when Jake fell off the table. He just forgot about it in all the fuss afterward.
I’m about to pull the cable when Kelly’s voice whispers at me: Don’t want to disconnect while there’s programs running. So, instead, I lift it in my hands and wake the screen. It immediately fills from top to bottom, a gush of green digits vomited from whatever process its running. I watch the code for several seconds before recognition hits me.
It’s the tracking app program, the base code. We’d left it after Reggie had collapsed.
I switch back to the login level and am about to enter Micah’s password when I stop. I remember we’d been talking about a ghost account. Now I look for it.
It’s not hard to find. Most people wouldn’t find it, but I know where to look. I know where these things like to hide. I try to access it.
Micah’s password doesn’t work.
I try a different login and hit enter. The tablet seems to freeze for a moment, then a new window opens. A map appears. I recognize Long Island immediately. It’s covered with swarms of red dots, and they’re all focused in the middle, and the sheer number of them makes me gasp.
I’m looking at The Game.
I’m seeing all the Players. All of them, not just a few. There are thousands. I pinch the screen and the map focuses in on the hill, and there a thick smear of red resolves into discrete dots, hundreds, dozens. I zoom once more and I find my identifier code in the middle of them. I see Kelly’s and Jake’s as well. I don’t find Reggie’s. Then I realize several things all at once.
First, why did Ashley have a ghost account on this tablet? I assume it’s hers, since it was her password that worked.
Second, why is the tracking app only working here and not in Micah’s account?
Third, how can it see us all, despite how far underground Jake and I are? It sees us all. Except for Reggie. His Link is broken. He’s invisible to the tracker.
The fourth thing I notice—and I confirm this when I zoom out again and find the signal on the other side of the woods surrounding the hill—is that Ashley’s Link didn’t remain by the gate where Ben threw it away. It’s not moving now though. But if I can see it, there’s still hope she’s alive and within range.
She might be Undead.
“No.” I shake my head, but I can’t deny it. She might have reanimated.
But this isn’t what terrifies me now. What does are the two distinct swarms of Players in the vicinity of the compound. One of them is moving toward Ashley’s location. If she is still alive, they’ll overtake her soon.
The other swarm is converging on the compound.
Chapter 16
I drop the tablet and stumble to my feet. I need to tell Kelly. We need to get out of here. We need to get to Ashley and try to rescue her. We don’t have much time.
I yank the glass door open, ducking instinctively when it slams against the wall, expecting it to shatter. But it bounces off and hits me on the shoulder, knocking me into the door jamb and adding to the bruises that already cover my body. I barely feel it. I carom off the wall and stumble into the hall, then down it. I burst into the main room and collide with a desk. Pain wakes in my thigh. I spin around, trip over an overturned chair, somehow stay on my feet.
“Kelly!” I scream.
Moaning from the stairwell answers me. Those damn IUs.
Now I’m on the chair and peering up into the darkness above me, calling Kelly’s name again and again, louder, not caring if I wake all the zombies from here to the Gameland wall. In less than half an hour, we’re going to be surrounded by Players. This place will be overrun with them.
A thought crosses my mind. I remember the smattering of red dots approaching Ashley’s signal and I realize that she might not be in as much danger as I’d first thought. Ben mentioned a second delivery. What if these Players are under his control?
Sendin you a little something extra, sendin ‘em real soon. I’m a real thorough kind of gentleman, you see. You got to get out of there, and that ain’t goin to be so easy.
But how could they be?
Even more importantly, how does he know so much about what we’re doing?
I step down off the chair and into the main room again. In the gloom, I scan the ceiling and in one corner I find what I’m looking for: a small, inverted dome of black glass. A camera. There’s another in the hallway and on the wall in the stairwell. Another in the back hall and one in the mainframe room.
There must be tens of thousands of them in Gameland. Millions, all connected, all transmitting.
Ben’s watching us, I can feel it.
I hurry back. There doesn’t appear to be one in the elevator, but that’s little consolation.
“Kelly?”
Nothing.
“Damn it!”
I step down off the chair again and rub my cheeks, thinking. Should I go after him up the shaft? What about—
“Jake?”
I spin around the elevator car. He’s gone. I left him lying on the floor in here and now he’s gone.
“Kelly? Jake?” I call. I don’t move. I can’t move. I’m frozen to the spot. My feet refuse to carry me out of here. “Guys, stop fooling around.”
Nothing.
The skin on the backs of my hands prickles. The sensation spreads up my arms, across my back and into my scalp. It’s cool down here, cold even, and yet I’m suddenly feeling very hot. The air is stifling. A trickle of sweat leaks from my brow and drips down my face.
“Jake?” I whisper.
I poke my head out through the elevator doors and peer into the darkness. Suddenly every overturned chair, eve
ry table and cabinet hides him, and Micah’s sing-songy voice whispers to me, except this time it’s for Jake: Olli, ollie, oxen free. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
I remember the games of Hide-and-go-seek and Tag the neighborhood kids used to play. I’d watch them from the front window or the front step of the house, wanting terribly to be with them. And they’d let me play, but only if I would be It. They’d tease me if I ever caught them, calling me “Loser” and whining that they let me catch them. They’d poke me and say, “No tag backs.” And at some point, somebody thought it would be funny if instead of playing Tag, we played Zombie. “If you want to play” they’d tell me, “you have to be dead.” If you got touched, you’d reanimate and then you got to touch anyone else, so that by the end of the game, everyone was a zombie and finally I wasn’t alone anymore. But then, pretty soon after that, somebody figured out that it was more fun to start off as the zombie and to get to chase the others. And we’d all run around, run away. Except they’d never touch me. I’d be the last one left alive. I thought it was lonely being It and everyone running away from me, but it’s even lonelier when everyone else is It and nobody will chase you.
I shake these random memories from my head.
“Jake?”
He regained consciousness, that’s all. He’s awake, but now he’s delirious. He’s probably wandering around and not even aware of where he is.
What if he tries to open the stairwell door?
He can’t. It’s a push from this side, and the zombies are piled up on the other side.
I strain my ears, but they pick nothing up, nothing but the faint scratching of the IUs in the stairwell.
Shadows leap out at me as I step through the main room. My own shadow stretches out and I realize that I’m totally exposed standing here, silhouetted in the light from the elevator. And yet I can’t seem to get my body to move faster. I feel like I’m walking through mud.
The air conditioner turns on again, rattling the vents and making me jump. Something catches my eye in one dark corner, a whisper of movement, slipping quickly from one shadow to another. I flinch. But it’s only a piece of paper slipping off a table. I let out a breath, slow and even, through clenched teeth.
“Jake?”
The building waits, ticking quietly, breathing. This is what emptiness sounds like. It’s what loneliness feels like. It feels like teetering on the edge on insanity.
But the building isn’t empty. And I know I’m not alone down here. Either somebody is playing a really bad, stupid trick on me or Jake is walking around here somewhere. Alive, or Undead.
Or maybe climbing up the elevator shaft.
This stops me as I start to take another step. Is it possible? An hour ago, he was dying of fever. Is it possible he regained consciousness and enough awareness that he got himself up and into the elevator shaft?
Or maybe Kelly came back and got him.
This seems just as unlikely. Kelly wouldn’t come back and not tell me. He’d have come and found me. He wouldn’t take Jake without—
Crash!
I spin to the left. The sound of glass breaking and tinkling to the floor comes to me. The glass in the reinforced window. The moans start again and grow loud for a moment. Louder, less muffled. I hurry over and peek around the doorway into the hall. Hands and arms reach out through the shattered window, slashed by the glass, squeezing through, breaking the thin metal wires. They wave yearningly, grasping at nothing. Do they remember I’m here? Did Jake come this way? Did he rile them up?
I slip silently past those yearning fingers and rest my ear against the door of the first of the two rooms down this way. I don’t hear anything, so I quietly turn the handle and crack open the door.
Nothing rushes out to attack me, but the room is dark as night. I hesitate, reach in, feel for the light switch. It’s not where I expect it to be. I have to stretch. I choke down my whimpers as I sweep my hand over the wall until my fingers find the switch and I flick them on and jerk away.
Light floods the room. It’s full of the Undead.
I stumble backward and into the far wall. The door clicks loudly closed before I realize they’re the bodies Reggie and Kelly put in here. I step forward and open the door again and make a quick visual inspection. Nothing moves. The stink reaches my nose now, the stink of plastination. The stink of rot hasn’t yet set in. I flick the light off and turn toward the second room, the bathroom.
There’s no handle, just a push, and that means no latch. As soon as I crack the door, the smell of urine wafts out at me, stale and pungent. Urine and the cloying aroma of shit and fossilized hand soap. The ceiling lights flicker and buzz. There’s a motion sensor on the light switch, cracked, pieces of the plastic crumbling away. The lights were already on when I opened the door. They should’ve been off. I don’t know if they were stuck on, if the sensor is broken. If it still works, they should’ve been off.
Two sinks line the wall to the left. Straight ahead, two stalls, their doors partially closed. Shadows behind them.
“Jake?”
I bend down and check underneath. Unrolled toilet paper litters the floor of one. The other is clear, only the silhouette of the toilet and an old Styrofoam coffee cup occupying it.
The paper in the other stalls moves. The cup rolls.
I freeze. I’m stuck in the doorway, the door propped open against my shoulder. Behind me the zombies in the stairwell move restlessly, chipping away at the last few pieces of glass, which fall ticking onto the floor. The air conditioner hums and rattles, clicks, shuts off. The air around my face grows still.
The toilet paper moves again.
No, it’s the vent.
I wait.
The paper jerks back a few inches, as if an invisible hand is pulling at it.
More moaning behind me. I filter it out. Every nerve of mine is focused on that stall, on that toilet paper, on the shadows I can’t seem to see into.
“Jake?”
I take a tentative step in, and in the deepest recesses of my mind I hear that chant: Ollie, ollie, oxen free.
Something tiny quickly shoots out from under the stall and it heads straight for me. I squeal and tumble back against the door before realizing the tiny thing is just a mouse. The little creature veers off to the left and disappears into a crack in the wall beneath one of the sinks. The door shuts behind me.
“Jesus Christ!” I cry, swiping the tears away from my eyes. “Jesus Christ. Just a god damn mouse!” I’m crying with fright, but also relief. “Scared the fucking crap out of me!” I scream at it, laughing hysterically, and the zombies behind me grow restless and begin to call out. But I don’t care. I don’t care. A god damn fucking mouse.
I get up off the floor and wipe myself off. More habit than anything. I turn around and pull the door open.
And Jake is standing right there. His arms are reaching for me, and his eyes black and his mouth hanging open, as if preparing to speak. And in my mind, I hear the other kids chanting in their mocking voices:
Tag, you’re dead.
PART THREE
Sleep
Chapter 17
I’m drowning again.
If insanity has a sound, it would be the roar of a trillion gallons of water crashing down all at once. It would be the sound of Niagara Falls on a crisp, clear winter day, the tinkling of ice cracking. It would feel like cold sleet striking my face. Like the deepest ocean. It would feel as wet and as hard as all of that, and it would annihilate all sense.
If insanity had a smell, it would sting of plastic smoke, like burning hair and scorched metal. It would stink of the inside of a volcano and taste of ash. It would be the rot of death and blood and the insides of bones.
“Jessie?”
And if it had a name?
I open my eyes and look into his face. But it’s all wrong. He looks like so much like Kelly, thinner, hollow brown eyes, curly hair turned brown from the dirt and grease. I blink and he blinks back and now I see his eyes a
re blue.
Reggie?
I must be dying. I’m dying because I see everyone I ever loved.
I feel myself being shaken, my body, numb and stiff. My head wobbles on my neck and my jaw clacks. I want to cry out in pain and despair, but only the slightest whisper of a moan escapes my lips.
And the lighting is all wrong. And the angles, the angles don’t fit right. And sounds are…are too quiet.
No rush of water. No roar, just a quiet insectile drone…
Computers clicking their digital thoughts…
Lights buzzing…
And the cold, cold air.
“Kelly?” Another whisper. Did he hear me? Did I speak?
Kelly rocks back on his heels and exhales before lunging suddenly back into me, grabbing me. I’m falling. He’s holding me and I’m falling. I don’t react. I can’t move. I’m stone. I’m water. Air. Ice.
He sweeps me up in his arms and holds me to him and whispers into my ear, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. I shouldn’t have left you.” And he’s crying, sobbing. “Aah, God,” he wails. “I’m so sorry. I did this to you!”
“R-reggie?”
Reggie looks over. I can see the wetness in his eyes, the redness. He wipes away the tears and sniffs. A thin smile plays over his lips, but his eyes betray pain and guilt. “It’s okay, now, Jess,” he says. He stands by the door and looks out. It’s the same glass door I smashed that first day we broke onto the island, at the fueling station. Except it’s not the same door. There’s still glass in this one. And we can’t be there.
Was it all a dream?
But the lighting is all wrong for a dream. It’s too… green.
The mainframe. I turn my head. It feels stiff and resists my efforts. We’re back inside the computer room. Under the hill. In Gameland.
All of it was real. None of it was a dream.
But that’s not possible. Reggie can’t be down here.
“Where’s…Jake?”
Nobody answers.
“H-how did I get in here? How did you get here, Reg? Down here? You’re not…?”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 97
