“You okay? What happened back there?”
“I’m fine. Nothing happened. I told you, I ran into a cabinet.”
We get to the end of the road and I alternate between gas and brake and maneuver our way around the cul-de-sac and back the way we’ve just come. A hundred feet ahead of us, the downed mailbox with its splintered post still rocks in the road, the faded red plastic flag jutting up in the air, as if asking for a ride. Fifty feet past it, the ground where we came out is torn up. The ruts sink deep into the mud. It’s a wonder we didn’t get stuck. Eric stares at it as we pass, but he doesn’t say anything.
Or maybe he’s staring at the crowd of IUs emerging from around the side of the house.
“That went well,” he says after a moment. “Nice driving.”
I let out a snort.
He leans back, sees me checking him out in the mirror and says, “Keep your eyes on the road.”
“Yes, Mom.”
He laughs but points up ahead. Several IUs are starting to emerge from their hiding places and are heading for the street. I worry about them less than the other obstacles. I don’t think a zombie or two would stop us, but a downed branch or trashcans might.
We turn onto another street that looks like it might lead to a major road, and at one point I have to drive through a narrow alley of debris and onto the sidewalk to avoid an old billboard that had been blown there from some other place. The going is so slow that we’re quickly overtaken by a handful of zombies. They smack the car with their wooden hands and try to bite us through the glass.
“Don’t look at them,” Eric tells me.
I almost reply with something sarcastic, but don’t. It’s obvious he still sees me as the little girl he left behind when he went into the Marines. And while I’m tempted to remind him that I’m not so helpless anymore, a part of me resists the idea. Some small part of me wants that back.
“Which way now?” I ask as we roll toward an intersection.
Eric doesn’t speak, just gestures for me to continue straight through. But as we roll beneath the dead signal light and weave our way between abandoned cars, he quickly checks the road in both directions.
“Go to the next intersection and take a right,” he says. “I saw a sign for the highway back there. We’ll circle around.”
I do as he says, and sure enough, we find the entrance to the Northern State Parkway that will lead us to the wall. I angle the car and begin the climb up the ramp.
And the car stalls.
Chapter 15
I try to crank the key, but my fingers slip. Behind us, the first IUs come into view. Eric looks, then whips his head back around and gestures, urging me to hurry up. I find the key again and give it a twist, but it won’t start.
“It’s dead, Eric!”
“Put it in park first, Jessie. You need to take it out of gear.”
I slam the gear shift into park and try again. The key turns, the engine screeches and rattles and coughs. But it still doesn’t start.
“Try again, but give it some gas. Not too much! You’ll flood the engine.”
I do it and suddenly the car roars to life. Eric checks behind us again.
“Okay, now, put it in low gear. Good, now slowly—”
The car leaps forward and we careen up the ramp and onto the merge lane.
“Okay, that works, too.”
“I hate this car,” I yell. “I hate driving.”
“You’re doing fine, Jess.”
“I am not doing fine.”
“No, really, you are. Better than I would have under the circumstances. I mean, look at what you’ve managed since you came here. You survived. That counts for a lot.”
“Jake’s dead. So’s Ashley. Kelly’s been bitten. I’ve been bitten. And there was this girl, Tanya—”
“Okay, I get it.” He shakes his head. “But you’re still alive. Against all odds, you’re still alive.”
“There’s something you should know, Eric. About us being here. About how we got here.”
But he holds up his hand. “I already know.”
“You do?”
“You were kidnapped.”
“No, I mean—”
“SSC kidnapped you, Jessie. End of story.”
I glance at him in the mirror. He holds my gaze for a moment before I have to look back to the road.
“Right now, Jessie, Arc is our friend,” he tells me levelly. “We need them on our side.”
I stare at him, wondering where this side of him came from, playing along, playing the liar’s game. I’d always thought of him as naïve, idealistic, trying to be something he wasn’t and failing miserably at everything. But now I see I was wrong. He’s not idealistic, he’s a survivalist, a man simply trying to get along in a world filled with monsters, living and undead.
“Arc had nothing to do with you being here, Jessie. I want you to remember that. Not them, not you. And not Kelly or the others. Only the SSC and Micah.” He’s quiet for a moment before adding, “And quite possibly that Esposito kid, too.”
I jerk my head up. “Jake’s not involved with SSC.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We know his uncle was.”
“Joe? The owner of the surplus store, Eppy’s?”
“Our electronics forensics team uncovered communications on his Link that tied him directly to the SSC network. I told you there were others involved, some close to you.”
“Jake wasn’t exactly close to me, Eric. I’d only just met him a couple weeks ago.”
“He’s not the only one. There’s—”
He frowns and looks down.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just got a ping. Did you?”
I shake my head.
He reaches into his pocket and checks his screen. “And I’ve got a Stream,” he says. “Looks like the network’s up and running again.”
“Yeah, but for how long?”
He shrugs and thumbs the screen. “No outside Streams, though.”
“Does that mean the EM wall is active?”
“I think so.”
“Good, because…” I point. We’re coming up over a ridge and the top of the Gameland wall is coming into view.
“Let’s find an access portal. I’m not exactly sure what they look like or how they work.”
“I do,” I answer.
“I figured.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Sending a message to Air Defense. It won’t get to them until they get past the EM barrier, but at least they’ll know we’re still alive. I’m telling them that it’ll be eight passengers for the evac.”
“Eight?”
He nods. “You know I can’t let Brother…What’s-his-name and the Sister stay here, Jess. You know that. They have too much information.”
“You told them you didn’t care whether they stayed or not.”
“I had to say that.”
“But they don’t know anything about the SSC.”
“They do about Heall and the treatment.”
“There’s nothing to know, Eric. The treatment is his blood. It’s in some kind of activator or something. That’s it.”
“That’s more than we know now.”
“Then they can ask me.”
“No! Jessie, I can’t tell you how important this is. You don’t know anything.”
“Well, you better tell that to Reggie and Kelly then.”
“I’ll speak with them when we get back.”
I can feel my old frustration coming back. I thought I was ready for someone to come and rescue us. I thought I’d be glad that Eric was here to take over. But it feels like we’re falling into the same old roles again, him telling me what’s right, thinking he knows what’s best for me. Me fighting him. I find I’m not ready to relinquish control just yet, not when it means lying to people.
How can I relinquish control to someone I barely even know?
I check the time on my Link. It’s nearly eleven o’clock and the
wall casts only the thinnest shadow on the ground. Despite the damage to it further south, it seems to be working now like it’s supposed to. I can already feel its effects on my brain.
And it’s making me real jumpy.
Chapter 16
I notice the plaque for the access portal as soon as we pull up to the wall a couple minutes later. Eric tells me to leave the car running. “Just in case.” He gets out and walks over and stands there for several moments before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Link. I realize the digital key must be on it.
Sure enough, when he presses the Link against the wall, a panel slides to one side. The opening is big enough for the car. Eric gestures me forward. As I pass him, he smiles at me through the open passenger-side window. “I wasn’t sure what would happen. I was hoping Arc would need some way to transport large loads in and out of the arcade.”
Eric climbs in and closes the door. We pull in. The buzzing inside my head intensifies. I expect the car to stall or something, but it keeps chugging away. The wall closes behind us, cloaking us in a stifling blackness. I switch on the headlights, but they soak into the dark and reveal nothing, instead seeming to fade into dull points of light rather than spreading like they’re supposed to, as if there’s some kind of fog compressing them.
“God, my head itches,” Eric says, sounding like he’s speaking from beneath a pile of blankets. “My eyeballs burn.”
The wall finally opens up again in front of us and the sunlight shines in. I’m eager to get as far away from this thing as quickly as I can. I’d gun it, as Eric says, but the sudden light blinds me and, with my luck, the road will probably be filled with the Undead. Or bunches of abandoned cars. I edge out and my vision clears. The road is empty.
“That was easy,” Eric says. “Remarkably so.” He tells me to stay on this road and take the next major interchange south. “We need to hop over to the Long Island Expressway.”
We drive east, but the road begins to curve north. The sun comes through Eric’s window and hits his face and pools on his lap. I see his head begin to bob. Even though I’ve got the air conditioner on full blast, it barely manages to counter the heat. I feel myself growing sleepy too, and I pinch myself to stay awake.
We pass a few exits—Wolf Hill Road, Deer Park and Deforest. I approach each one slowly, but they all look too small, too narrow and too cluttered with debris and abandoned cars. I don’t want to risk getting stuck on one of them, so I keep going. Fifteen minutes later, I have the option to head south on the Sagtikos Parkway and I take it. Soon after there’s a sign for the Long Island Expressway. As I guide the car into the cloverleaf, Eric’s head tilts and he wakes with a start and looks up and asks where we are.
I tell him.
He blinks numbly for a moment before shifting in his seat, forgetting for a moment about his ribs, till he suddenly buckles forward with a gasp of pain.
“You okay?”
He doesn’t answer, just gestures at me to keep driving. After a few minutes, he leans back and closes his eyes, but this time he doesn’t go to sleep.
“You remember that trip we took up to Niagara Falls a few years ago?” he finally asks, his voice thin and reedy. “I was so tempted to just take us into Canada, to just keep driving north until we ran out of road or gas, until there were no more people and there was nothing but the snow and the wind.”
I look over, but I can’t see his face. He’s staring out the window at the passing scenery flashing by. After two weeks of walking or biking, thirty-five miles an hour seems fast.
“We’d never have been able to get through the border.”
He laughs. “I know. And we were so close, a few hundred feet away.”
“Uh, yeah, on a boat on a river churning a trillion gallons a minute. What were you going to do? Jump in and swim?”
“Could’ve stolen the boat.”
“Ha!”
“I was afraid,” he whispers. “I was afraid that anything I did might make you suddenly just disappear, like you were a candle and all it would take is a tiny puff of air to blow you out. That’s why I took you on such a long drive. I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t go out before I told you.”
“Well, at least you didn’t say I was a delicate butterfly or something.”
He laughs weakly. “That was wrong, what I did. What I thought. I see that now. You’re not weak. I was always the weak one, running away.”
“You took care of us.”
“I pretended to. I couldn’t, that’s why I left. You saw right through that.”
“Don’t blame yourself—”
“You were the tough one, Jess.”
Not so tough, I want to say. How many times in the past two weeks was I ready to give up? How many times did I actually do it? Only to have someone or something jerk me back into this terrible life of mine again.
“You don’t need me anymore.” He sighs, shakes his head. “Not that you ever did.”
“That’s not true.”
“You needed a parent. But me?”
I reach over, touch his arm. “Well, you’re here now.”
“Because of you. I came here to rescue you, but you rescued me.” He pulls his hand away from his side and looks at it, as if expecting to see blood. He sighs and drops it to his lap.
“You came. That’s what matters.”
I can sense him thinking, staring out through the windshield and thinking… What? Why is he telling me all this?
“You shouldn’t be so harsh on Mom,” he says.
“I don’t want to talk about her right now, Eric.”
We may have left the wall behind, but another is going back up between us. Why does it always happen this way? Why am I always throwing up walls between myself and others?
But he persists. “She tries. She loves you, Jessie. It’s just… It’s got to be hard for her, too.”
“She’s a grown up! She needs to act like one.”
“She went through some terrible stuff.”
“She did? What about the shit I’ve been going through all my life? What about the past two weeks? Don’t tell me about terrible stuff. She doesn’t know terrible.”
Anger flashes in Eric’s eyes. “You were two years old, Jessie. When Dad died, you were two. You didn’t understand—”
“Understand what? Dad was killed. I get it. That he was killed by Halliwell, the man we’re going to go find, I get that, too. But here’s the reality, Eric: Halliwell, or Father Heall—or whatever else he wants to call himself—saved my life and Kelly’s life. With his own blood! I think that makes it more than even.”
“We’re not talking about Halliwell, we’re talking about Mom.”
“What do you want me to say? That I should avenge Dad by killing Halliwell? Do you think that would make things better for Mom?”
“No, Jessie! That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying, Eric? Because excuse me for being so thick, but I’m just not understanding.”
“I’m saying you don’t know what she’s been through.”
“And how would you know? How could you possibly know what she’s been through?”
“Because, Jessie, I was there!”
“Oh, so just because you’re old enough to know better, maybe remember what life was like before Dad died—I heard it wasn’t that great, so I don’t know how that could possibly be much of an argument—that you’ve got this unique insight into Mom’s head? She’s a drunken whore. She was a shitty mother. She was never there!”
“Don’t you ever say that, Jessie! You don’t know.”
“But you do.”
“I do!”
“Why?”
“Because I was there! I saw it happen, Jessie.” He stops and his face goes slack while mine freezes. “The man we’re going to find—the thing that calls himself Father Heall—I saw him kill Dad. So, yeah, I know what hell she’s been going through because I have been going through it, too.”
Chapter 17
>
“I was there,” he repeats, mumbling this time. “I saw Dad die.”
“How come you never told me this?” I cry. “I always thought you were asleep in bed when it happened. We were all in bed.”
“That’s just what Mom told the police when they arrived the next morning. They never believed the story. They couldn’t understand how we weren’t woken up by the gunshot.”
“But you just said you were awake. Why didn’t you go get Mom?”
“I was in a state of shock, incoherent. Grandpa found me curled up in a ball in the back of a closet.”
“Grandpa wasn’t living with us then.”
“After Mom found the mess in the morning, she called him in a panic. She couldn’t find me and thought I’d been kidnapped or something. It didn’t take long for Grandpa to realize what had really happened.” His voice cracks and he swallows a few times before going on. “It’s not easy for me to talk about.”
He says he hates Dad, but does he really? He says he won’t kill Halliwell, but will he?
I look over and wonder if maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. He’s obviously too emotionally involved. What will he do once we find him?
If we find him.
I never knew my father, had never felt all that close to him. In fact, I resented him, even hated him. For me, this trip is strictly a matter of survival, not just for me and Kelly, but also for humanity.
“Grandpa found me in the back of the hallway closet,” Eric continues. “Mom wanted to take me to the hospital, but he was adamant about us staying out of the media circus that was bound to happen. He knew I’d seen something and was afraid of what I might say. I laid in bed for the next three days, totally unresponsive, catatonic.”
“So, you know what happened? What aren’t you telling me?”
He frowns. I can’t tell if the question troubles him or if he’s just trying to remember. Or maybe he’s trying to untangle conflicting memories, both the real as well as what might have been planted. “That’s the thing,” he says. “I don’t know. All I can remember is the blood. Lots of it.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 109
