And Cassie’s parents.
And Cassie.
A family I never knew, yet somehow feel closer to than my own.
For Brother Walter and Sister Jane. And Grandpa.
But I don’t see them. I never see any of them.
“You’re going back to school Monday,” Eric tells me through the door. “You’ve already missed a week.”
He waits for me to say something. I don’t.
“We need to maintain a sense of normalcy,” he tells me.
I laugh bitterly in reply. Nothing is normal. Nothing.
How can it be? We go about our lives, our routines, like nothing has changed, but we all know that nothing is the same. Ashley is gone. Jake is gone. Micah is in jail awaiting trial in a few days.
The house is as silent as a tomb.
Yet it roars like a crematorium furnace.
I sense Eric still standing out in the hallway, waiting, trying to think of something to say. Finally, he says the one thing I’ve been both dreading and yet waiting to hear:
“They’re arraigning him today, Jessie. You should be there.”
I stare at the ceiling and say nothing.
“Did you hear me, Jess? I think you should go. You need closure.”
And that’s what else kills me. Everyone holds their breath, afraid if they breathe too hard it’ll knock down this delicate house of cards, content to pretend that all is right with the world. Everyone just wants to keep moving on. Not all of us can.
Everyone wishes the world won’t tilt.
They don’t know that it already has.
Chapter 30
“It’s driving me crazy,” Reggie says. He finishes his Red Bull and crushes the can before tossing it toward the bin. It flies straight in. “I just wish they’d come and start interrogating us or something. All this pretending nothing happened is messing with my head.”
“The police have a lot on their minds right now,” Kelly says. He scratches absently at a scab on his arm. He wears long sleeves and hides a bite on the back of his hand with a taped pad. The bite on his leg, the one that had gotten badly infected, is still bandaged, the bulky wrap showing through his pants when he sits. He still walks with a limp.
“Yeah, underneath all this bullshit calm they’re all freaking out. That’s what worries me.”
Kelly gets up and moves out of the sunlight and into the shade beneath a scraggly maple tree. The tree looks half-dead, like it’s not handling the heat very well. The leaves are droopy, their edges burnt. Several people pass us as we wait outside the Criminal Hearings Building, waiting for our turn to go in. Eric was supposed to meet us here ten minutes ago, but he’s late. Looks like the hearings are running late, too.
“I went by the Evan’s place,” Reggie says.
Both Kelly and I snap our heads up. He hasn’t said anything about Ashley since we got back. This is the first time he’s brought her up, even if indirectly. We both notice that he doesn’t use her name.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “Your brother told us not to go by there, but I couldn’t stay away. I—I had to know.”
“And?”
“They’re gone. The house is dark, the windows are dark. Nobody’s home.”
“They could be off visiting relatives.”
He shakes his head. “You know the feel of a house no one is living in. That’s what this felt like. Besides their only other family was G-ma Junie.”
“Still doesn’t mean anything.”
“That’s right,” Kelly says, warningly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Leave it alone. Don’t push it.”
We don’t speak for a few minutes. We watch the people passing us. They don’t see us. They walk right by us and yet we’re invisible to them. They focus on their Links and their little lives and two seconds after they’ve passed us, the whole memory of seeing us—if they even do—is completely gone.
“I also went by Micah’s old place.”
“Jesus, Reggie! What are you trying to do?”
“I told you I couldn’t help it, brah.”
Kelly shakes his head, picks at his nails. The circles under his eyes are gone. Barely a week and they’re already gone. If you were to just look at him you’d never be able to guess what had happened, what he’d been through. I guess it’s the same for all of us.
But inside, we’re all dying. In one form or another, we’re dying.
“Police tape everywhere.”
“At Micah’s?”
He nods. “And shiny black unmarked cars.”
“Wonder who that could be.”
Reggie looks at me. “NCD?”
I chuff. “Hardly. They give them the old rusty crap vehicles.”
“Yeah, well I’ve heard they’re busy, too. I heard they arrested Smelly Deadhead yesterday.”
“The Physiology and Behavior of Reanimates teacher?” I ask. “Mister Dedham? Why?”
“I don’t think it was NCD at Micah’s,” Kelly says, interrupting. “Not in black cars.”
“Then who?”
He shrugs.
The front door of the building opens and Eric appears, looking annoyed. “What are you doing out here?” he barks. “Come on! They’re about ready to arraign Micah.”
We file in through the door. I’m the last to enter and he gives me a disappointed look.
“You told us to wait outside for you.”
“I said in the lobby.”
He shows his badge to the receptionist and she assigns us visitor badges. “Third floor,” she drones. “Elevator to the left. Turn left. Room three eighteen.”
We get on the lift and the thing lurches sickeningly before rising. Nobody speaks for the duration of the ride. When the doors open, Eric steps briskly through them and turns left. We follow quietly behind.
He stops just outside the door and instructs us not to speak. We all nod that we understand. Then we enter.
The room is frigid. And way too bright. And it smells strongly of disinfectant and sweat and moldy feet. It’s just like the room we sat in to watch the hearing of the man the police caught with my Link in Seattle. The bailiff gives us a distrustful look. His sneer deepens when he sees the NCD badge on Eric’s shoulder.
“Anywhere special?” Reggie asks. There are six rows of folding metal chairs, most of them empty. The people already here are either asleep or quickly dropping off. I wonder if they come here so they can get out of the heat.
Eric frowns at Reggie and points to an empty row. Soon we’re sitting.
Kelly scratches his scab. Reggie fidgets, asks where the bathroom is.
Eric glares at him and he shrugs and cracks his knuckles.
I just sit. And stare. At the wall. At the floor. At the window.
And wait.
For Micah.
They finally bring him in. We stand. Words are spoken. We sit. More words.
The trial for conspiracy to commit treason, for committing treason, will be on Wednesday.
They take him away. He doesn’t look at us. Not once.
Then we go home.
Chapter 31
“Media’s down again,” Eric says at dinner that night, checking his Link for the third time since we’ve sat down to eat. He sets the device next to his napkin and tries not to look worried, but forgetting his own rule about Links at the table tells me how distracted he is.
I push my soggy noodles from one side of the plate to the other. The sauce is separating, leaving behind a greasy pink congealing mess.
It’s just the two of us tonight. It’s always just the two of us now. Mom’s off somewhere, most likely off getting drunk with some loser. Her chair has been conspicuously empty these past few days, and Eric has been conspicuously ignoring it. Just like we’re both pretending there isn’t a fourth chair at the end of the table and that it’s empty, too. Grandpa may be gone, but his presence is still very much felt.
Mom hasn’t been able to bring herself to talk to me since I got back. Four words is all she’s said. Four wo
rds, and they were when we finally showed up at home and surprised her: “I’m glad you’re okay.” Five, if you count the contraction as two.
She was wasted off her ass and could barely stand up, so I guess I should give her credit for at least recognizing me and remembering I was missing. But ever since then, she’s been avoiding me, spending her nights away from home and showing up only long enough to grab a shower and a change of clothes before slipping out again. I stay in my own room. I have no desire to meet her latest boyfriend, or see her, or smell her.
The other night I heard her and Eric talking. I was surprised to hear him actually yelling at her, even more surprised to find myself getting defensive and wanting him to stop. But then, when I became aware of this, I just got even more pissed off at her. I almost went down to start yelling at her too, but a few minutes later the house was quiet. She was gone.
“It was out this morning, too,” I say.
“They’re probably messing with some new security programs,” Eric tells me. Like he knows anything about computers and programming. “There’s bound to be a few glitches.”
“Yeah, but those glitches are getting more and more frequent, and they’re lasting longer and longer. Arc’s not fixing anything, they’re covering their asses. You know that.”
“They’re writing new code, replacing their hardware.”
“Yeah, I know, Eric. I got the update ping, too. But don’t tell me you believe any of that. They’re not fixing anything. Things are breaking down.”
“Would they still be running Gameland if things were getting worse?” he asks. “Besides, even if you’re right, they know what they’re doing. And people need good news.”
“It’s all reruns, you know. They’ve been showing Survivalist reruns.”
“I don’t think so.”
I don’t argue. “And I heard their security network is totally fried.”
“Now that’s just a rumor.”
“Damn it, Eric. You are in such total denial. All you want to do is sit around the table and eat pasta and act like everything’s normal!”
“What else is there to do?”
“What else is there to do?” I ape. “What the hell does that even mean? Look at us. Look at you, sitting there, like everything’s peachy keen. Talk about needing good news. You’re totally in denial.”
I reach out a shaky hand and grab my glass of water and bring it to my lips and take a sip. I marvel at how easy it is to do that, at how much we take for granted something as simple as that. I sip and swallow and gently place the glass back down again, fitting it inside its watery ring. The ice inside tinkles quietly.
“I’m not in denial.”
I shove Grandpa’s chair with my foot so that it falls over backward. “We stood there and watched our own grandfather get shot in the back!”
“He killed Halliwell!” he shouts back. He quickly composes himself. “What do you want from me, Jess? You want me to feel sorry for the man? Well, I don’t. And neither should you.”
“I don’t feel sorry for him. I’m thrilled it happened! And that’s the problem, Eric. I’m happy and I don’t fucking want to be!”
“Jessie, don’t…” He sighs. “Please. Don’t yell.”
“I’ll yell if I want to! And swear. I’m pissed off. Pissed at Dad and Grandpa. Pissed at myself.”
“This whole guilt by association thing has got to stop. You’re not responsible for the Undead.”
“I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about how stupid we were to break in. I’m talking about what happened down in lower Manhattan when we came back the first time, the IUs that came through. How many people died because of that?”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t know how you can say that. And what about us letting Micah infiltrate Arc’s codex? All these network outages? Why do you think that’s happening? We let him back in!”
“We had no choice, Jessie,” he whispers. “We did it to survive. We had to.”
“Except we didn’t, did we? They didn’t bomb the island! That was just another lie. Just another of Grandpa’s lies to keep you from bringing Halliwell back. Now he’s dead!”
“Look, Jessie, I’m still trying to find out what his involvement was. It’s not easy. I don’t know who in the department I can trust anymore.”
“What about your old friends in the Marines?”
“I trust them even less. I’ll get to the bottom of this, figure out exactly what Grandpa’s role was.”
“Lot of good that’ll do. Ashley will still be dead. Jake’s as good as dead. Kelly’s going to die. Of course, he’s perfectly fine right now. Looks fine. In denial too, just like you. But he’s dying. Nobody knows when. Could be tomorrow—”
“It won’t be tomorrow.”
“—or a few weeks or months. Christ, Eric, does it really matter exactly when? He’s dying!”
“They’ll find a cure.”
“That’s bullshit! Who’s working on it? Nobody is. Nobody who can do it wants to find a cure. Halliwell was the only one and we don’t even have his body now!”
Eric stares at me for a few seconds, blinking, his face turned to stone, neutral and unreadable. He puts a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth and slowly chews it.
I can’t look at him. I can barely even look at my own plate without gagging. The food reminds me too much of the meal Sister Jane brought up to me that night in Brookhaven, and that makes me remember Julia and everyone else all over again.
I take another sip of water. I’m not even thirsty. And after all the antibiotics they’ve pumped into me the past several days, everything tastes funny, briny. Like blood.
“I made you an appointment at Citizen Registration,” he finally says, his voice calm and even. “It’s not till next week, though. They’re pretty booked up with all the new registrations and the recent push on implantations.”
“Lot of good that’s going to do when SSC takes over the network.”
He stares at me, frowning. “I’ll go with you this time. I’ll drive us to Hartford and explain how we found the old Link. Maybe they’ll give us a break. Heck, at this point, they’ll probably just rubber stamp it through.”
I watch the water drip down my glass. The world is going to hell and he’s worried about a stupid Link.
“Also, I think you should get some new clothes. I want you to go back to school on Monday.”
I roll my eyes and shake my head.
“And a new backpack. You need a new—”
“I already have a backpack.”
“That thing that’s been sitting on the floor of my car for a week? It’s filthy. It stinks to high heaven. I’m going to throw it away.”
“Don’t touch it!”
“Come on, Jessie. You have to stop acting like you’re stuck in time. What happened out there happened. I get it. People died. Your friends died and another betrayed you. I get it. But we need to move forward. We need to try and put this behind us.”
“Like Kelly can put this behind us?” I snap.
He glowers at his plate.
“You just got done telling me Media’s down. Again. Arc’s barely holding things together. Just last night I heard there was an outbreak in Boston.”
“The flu. That’s what—”
I bark out a quick laugh. “More bullshit. They say almost six hundred people died.”
“One small division of the municipal sanitation crew. They contained it. And it wasn’t six hundred, not even close.”
“Six or sixty or six hundred. What difference does it make? They lost containment. The Streams keep going in and out. Pretty soon it’s all going to go down and people are too busy watching Survivalist re-runs to even care.”
“Nobody wants a panic.”
“We need to panic!”
“That’s enough!” He lays down his fork and glares at his plate. “We are not going to talk about this at dinner.”
“I’m not hungry anyway.”
&nbs
p; I get up and leave the table and Eric calls me back, but I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t know where it is I want to be, but I know it’s not here, acting all normal and pretending nothing’s wrong.
“Jessie!”
I swear he’s becoming more and more like Grandpa every day.
Chapter 32
I go up to my room and lie down on my bed facing the window. I hear Eric downstairs talking on his Link, so I know the Communication Streams are back up again. The garbled sounds of his voice come and go, interspersed with periods of silence. I wonder who he’s talking to. A little while later he leaves and the house is quiet again. At some point the sun goes down. Light fades from the sky, leaving lighter patches of gray on the deeper black of night. I still don’t move. My muscles grow stiff and my joints ache. I lie there and watch the moon rise.
Eric returns home several hours later, sometime around midnight. I hear the familiar sound of his car in the driveway and the sound of his keys in the lock, the front door opening, closing. Footsteps on the stairs. He comes up and opens my door without bothering to knock and I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a dark pit. He sits down on the corner of my bed and doesn’t speak for a long time.
I don’t move.
“You awake?” he finally asks.
“Yeah.”
Silence.
No, not silence. I hear crickets and frogs chirping outside. A car. A distant police siren. A small crash down the street, like someone kicking over a trashcan. Kids laughing.
“I’m sorry about fighting with you at dinner. I know it’s tough, after all you’ve been through. I’m just trying to help ease you back.”
“You can’t.”
He exhales. The bed jiggles. “How’s Kelly holding up?”
I stare at the window, at the shifting moonlit clouds. I listen to the night noises.
“How’s he holding up, Jessie?”
“Kyle’s home, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, I know about that. I spoke with Mrs. Corben earlier in the day. She said the surgery was a success. They replaced both kidneys. Little Kyle’s even begun to gain weight.”
“Thanks for asking, by the way.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 115
