I find the boys in the garage. Reggie is halfheartedly playing pinball, while Kelly sits on the couch looking lost. The Caseys’ crappy VR set is piled up in the corner, which is not surprising. The last thing any of us wants right now is fight more zombies, even ones that aren’t real.
I walk in and Reggie looks up and the ball he’s playing drains into the machine with a sad sound. A series of bells and chimes sounds as the machine records the points. I sit down next to Kelly. Neither of them speaks. They wait for me to go first. When I do, I tell them about the visit from the police this morning.
Reggie lets out a whoosh of air and says, “My parents are totally freaking out. They say they’re going to move to Canada as soon as Micah’s trial is over. My dad’s trying to get the permits, but I heard they’ve closed all the borders. Mom says this is all our fault.”
“It’s not all our fault,” Kelly tries to say.
But Reggie kicks the pinball machine and it judders across the cement floor and whistles that it has tilted. “It’s like we’re waiting for the axe to fall. Every time I look at someone I wonder what they know. Nobody wants to talk about what’s happening.”
“We shouldn’t talk about it,” Kelly insists.
“That’s bullshit!” Reggie cries. “Is that what you think, Jessie?”
I start to shake my head, hesitate, then nod. As much as I hate the idea of acting normally, the talk with Hank this morning convinced me coming forward won’t make a damn bit of difference.
Reggie scowls and begins to pace the edges of the room. Of the three of us left, he has the most to lose by us going public, but the frustration is driving him crazy.
“What’d your mom say about us getting married?” Kelly asks, changing the subject.
“I haven’t spoken to her yet.”
“Jessie, you can’t keep this—”
“Don’t tell me about keeping secrets. You still haven’t told yours.”
He’s quiet for a long time before saying, “You probably already know this, but you shouldn’t be so harsh on her.”
Reggie stops and looks over, expecting me to blow up. He’s seen my mom at her worst—they all have—and he knows how much it has always bothered me.
I brush it off. “I was thinking we’d go and file the paperwork on Friday. I don’t want to do it Thursday.”
Kelly nods, looking away. Wednesday is Micah’s trial, and Thursday follows too close afterward.
It’s obvious we’re all worried about the trial. We all know what’s going to happen. None of us wants to stop it—not that we think we really could, even if we wanted to—but, also, none of us wants to witness what might happen, either. Micah was our friend for a year—or at least pretended to be. And, yeah, he betrayed us, but a lot of the reason we were so close as a group was because of him.
“We don’t have to do this,” Kelly says. “Get married, I mean. Just because—”
“I want to.”
“What? Marry a corpse?” He grins and tries to make light of the situation. “Maybe I should have you sign a pre-nup.”
“Yeah, because she’s just after your money, brah,” Reggie snorts.
The room goes quiet. It’s awkward. I know that Kelly finally told Reggie about his deal with Arc—he’d probably have figured it out anyway—and why he did it. But rather than distancing them even more, it actually seems to have brought the two boys closer together.
“If I could give it all to her, I would,” Kelly murmurs. He takes my hand and holds it. His own hand feels hot, like he’s constantly running a slight fever. Or maybe it’s because I feel so cold these days.
“I wouldn’t take it,” I say.
† † †
Eric’s gone that evening, on duty and won’t be home till after midnight. His shifts have been unpredictable. He says it’s because of all the extra guards they’re putting on the civil duty CUs, but there’s something in his eyes that tells me that’s not the entire truth. The Stream had gone out again earlier in the evening and it was shortly afterward that he’d left.
I sit in Grandpa’s old chair in the living room and let the growing darkness overtake me. Waiting for her.
Finally, she comes home. I don’t even have to say her name or let her know I’m here. She comes in, floating like a ghost, drifting over to the couch, to me. She’s too pale and too thin, and her clothes hang on her like a sheet draped over a chair. Her eyes are twin pools of darkness in her full-moon face. Her hair is tied back in a torturous ponytail, white and black wiry strands.
“I’m marrying Kelly,” I say.
I wait for her to ask why so all of the sudden. I almost want to say he’s dying and so am I, hurling the words at her like arrows. Instead, I say, “Please, Mom. I need you there.”
She comes over to me and sits on the edge of the cushion. She’s so light that it barely sinks into the worn-out springs.
“I can’t do this alone.”
She cries then, weeping deeply onto my shoulder, promising with her alcohol-tinged breath that she’ll try, that she’ll stop drinking and treating herself the way she has. I know her words are empty—I’ve heard them before—but I wrap my arms around her and hold her because right now this is all I can do. I need this. I have always needed this. And she sobs into my shoulder and I can’t tell her what I know. I can’t tell her that I am dying. I let her believe that this is the beginning of something new between us, even as I know it’s really the end.
We hold each other like that until long after the moon rises and slips too high into the sky to see it through the window. Then we each drift away to our own bedrooms, she whispering her promises and me pretending to accept them.
I go to bed imagining what it would be like to wake up in the morning and be living a totally different life, one in which we’re a normal family, not all bent and broken the way we are.
But when I get up in the morning, the house is silent. Eric is already come and gone, and so has Mom.
Chapter 35
It’s strange. I can’t say that I’m all that surprised to find her gone. Disappointed? Yes. And angry. But not surprised. Never again. I will never let her get to me like that again.
Until she walks in twenty minutes later, all breezy and sober, a smile on her face. I’m sitting there in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and fidgeting with the house Link and telling myself it doesn’t matter, it’s not worth getting upset over.
She drops a basket of groceries onto the table and gives me a smile and asks me if I’ve had breakfast yet. I’m so surprised that all I can think of is saying no, even though I’ve eaten a slice of toast and I’m not hungry at all.
“Good. Because I am going to make you pancakes,” she says. And I almost lose it. I feel like a helpless child again. The tears well up in my eyes and I wonder what the hell is wrong with me that I’ve suddenly become so damn emotional.
“Do you remember when you were a little girl,” she says. “Remember when I used to make you those funny shaped pancakes?”
I don’t. She never made me breakfast. If anything, she’s probably misremembering doing it for Eric. But I don’t resent her for that. Or him. I just smile and shrug, torn between screaming at her for waiting till now to be a proper mother and afraid if I do she’ll stop.
She jabbers on and on, acting like a totally different woman than the one I grew up with, lighter somehow, yet more there. She talks about nothing of any consequence, which is good, because I’m not sure I’d be able to hold up my end of the conversation. Her words gush out of her mouth, years worth of words. They flow at me and over me, warming, buoying me. She sets a plate down before me and my stomach growls and suddenly I’m so hungry it’s like I never ate before. I’m ravenous. I can’t stop.
She watches, smiling. What is she seeing?
“Aren’t you going to have some?” I manage to ask between bites.
She shakes her head. Her eyes dart to the fridge. She’s probably thinking about the beer in there. Now I see the st
ress in her face, the tension behind her eyes. It was always there, hiding, waiting to come out. It’s impatient. She won’t last. Day or two, max. Certainly not till the end of the week.
My appetite slips away. I manage to finish what’s on my plate, but now I feel like puking.
“Your brother told me about what happened,” she says. “Oh, honey…” She shakes her head.
The first gray cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky.
I try to smile. The pancakes in my stomach feel like rocks.
“Did you see him?” she asks, whispering.
I frown. “See who?”
She waits, watching my face carefully, trying to read my reaction.
I can’t tell if she means Halliwell or Grandpa. I don’t want to talk about either of them and I tell her so.
She sighs deeply. “We’ll have to talk sometime, honey. We should have talked sooner.”
Distant thunder, growing louder. The storm’s approaching.
She fidgets with the collar of her blouse. It’s clean for once, without holes. The buttons all match and have been inserted into their proper holes. I remind myself that she’s trying. You can’t fix in a day what took years to break.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I lie.
“You should have come to me. You’ve been avoiding me.”
Air full of static electricity now. This is going to be a big storm, folks, and I can’t do anything to stop it.
“You’re the one who hasn’t been home,” I reply. Cold front meeting warm. Lightning forming. The wind is starting to pick up.
But then she bends down over the top of me and kisses my head and the storm miraculously disappears. “Let’s not fight, okay? Not today. I don’t want to be like this.”
Like what? Like our true selves?
But I can’t hold onto the anger. It doesn’t obey my will. It slips away from and hides.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Micah’s trial. I have to go.”
“I know, honey. I’ll be there with you.”
She brightens then, and the last clouds flee from our sky. “So, what would you like to do today?” she asks. “You want to go shopping? Eric said he thought you needed new clothes. I want to take you shopping.”
“Let’s just… Can’t we just stay here?” I ask. “I don’t much feel like going out.”
So we do. And while we barely talk about anything, just being together in silence counts for a lot. I pretend her furtive glances to the fridge are nothing but old habit. I ignore the sneak peeks she makes to check the time on her Link. She reminds herself of the promise she made last night at least a dozen more times, but by early afternoon, we’ve both had enough. I make up some excuse. I can see the release of tension in her face. I leave the house in a hurry, feeling both relief and sadness. She tells me she’ll be home for dinner.
I don’t expect her to be, but when she actually is, I am pleased. Even if I’m too distracted by wondering when she’ll leave me next.
Chapter 36
Micah’s trial lasts slightly less than an hour, the sentencing phase roughly five minutes. It’s the carrying out of the sentence which takes considerably longer.
The hearing consists of a reading of the laundry list of charges against him—sedition, conspiracy to commit treason, treason, criminal electronic trespass, attempted criminal electronic trespass on governmental computers and networks, invasion of privacy, plus a whole slew of other less serious offenses—followed by a rather lengthy recitation of the evidence supporting those charges. Throughout the entire hearing, Micah just sits there in his shackles and white, tear-proof jumpsuit, stiff as a mannequin, unflinching, never once turning around to look at us.
We’re the only ones in attendance—me and Kelly and Reggie—besides the bailiff and the court clerk, who does most of the talking. They wouldn’t allow our parents in. They’re all sitting out in the hallway, waiting.
Eric couldn’t come. He went to work last night and pinged me this morning to apologize that he wouldn’t be able to be there for me, which is rather ironic given that Mom is. “They’re sending me up to Hartford,” he told me, and though he tried to hide it, I could see the worry in his face on my screen, could hear it in his voice. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on up there.
As soon as I disconnected with him, I tried getting onto one of the black streams, but outside of Media and Government, I couldn’t access a thing. I just kept getting error messages saying the stream I was searching for doesn’t exist. No black streams either. I wonder if they’ve finally cracked down on them.
The Media and Government Streams were useless, just a couple little blips about a block of streets being shut down in the capital due to a gas leak, nothing specific. Nothing about the Undead. They wouldn’t send NCD up for just a gas leak. Not unless it involved at least one of them.
Mom was told to wait in the hallways, so it’s just the three of us in the courtroom to act as witnesses. We sit in what once was, a decade before, the jury box. It hasn’t been used for that purpose since the government passed the Life Service Bill, which eliminated ninety-nine percent of civil obligations for the living, including jury duty. Apparently, zombies don’t make for very good peers, but rather than fix the law, they just did away with juries altogether.
Throughout the hearing not a word is said about Long Island or Gameland. Nothing is mentioned about us going there, or about Ashley or Jake or Halliwell or any of the other people who are missing or have died. Nothing about our own culpability in the hacking. It’s like none of that ever happened. It’s like they don’t want to acknowledge it did. They got someone to blame, and they’re going to pin it all on him.
We’d been warned by the bailiff not to speak unless first spoken to, and to only answer the question being asked, being as brief and succinct as possible. “Your words are being recorded and may be used in future proceedings as evidence against yourself or others.” So we sit through it all in total silence while the judge goes through the farce of weighing the evidence against the charges.
“Do you have anything to say in your defense, young man?” he asks when the clerk finally finishes scrolling through his list. Judge Marino is an older gentleman, clearly past his LSC age, one of the privileged few who could afford to purchase a waiver. I can smell his expensive cologne from where I’m sitting. The stench of dirty money. He doesn’t even look at Micah when he addresses him, just squints distractedly at the screen of his Link.
“I’m not guilty,” Micah replies.
“Yes, yes, of course. Is there anything else? Anything a bit more…material you’d like to present as evidence?”
“How can I present anything material when I’ve been locked up in a jail cell for a week?”
“So, you have nothing to present in your defense?” Nonplussed. He probably hears the same arguments a dozen times a week.
“Just my word. I am not some secret agent with the Southern States Coalition. I could never be. They’re why I defected here in the first place!”
The judge lifts his eyes from his Link and says, “Let me remind you, young man, that you are under oath, son. The penalty for perjury is conscription.”
“The penalty for jaywalking is conscription.”
The judge grunts. “We know that you blame New Merica for your parents’ deaths.”
I gasp and the judge turns in our direction, his eyebrows raised. It’s the most engaged in the proceedings he’s been since making his grand entrance. I shrink in my seat.
“Why would I blame New Merica for that?” Micah asks.
Judge Marino ignores him and instead inquires of us if we ever thought it strange that he had no parents.
Both Kelly and Reg look at me. “He always told us they were visiting family,” I finally answer, finding my voice after one or two stuttering attempts to speak.
He seems satisfied with the answer and turns back to Micah. “So you lied to your own friends.”
“I didn’t want t
o talk about what happened!” Micah cries. The judge warns him to lower his voice. “I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want anyone’s pity. I just… I know it was an SSC soldier who shot and killed my parents, so why would I work for them?”
“You lied to your own friends; you betrayed them, tricked them into helping you hack into national defense networks.”
“I didn’t trick them! I would never do that to my friends! I would never do that to…” He looks over at us, his eyes pleading. Our eyes lock for a moment before he lowers his face to his shackled hands. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Speak up, young man. And sit up! I don’t think you understand the gravity of your situation. This is your last opportunity to sway the court.”
“The court has already decided my fate,” he mumbles.
“That is not true. I am giving you every opportunity to defend yourself. Given the exigent circumstances of your family being dead, disregarding established court protocol, I allowed your closest friends to speak on your behalf.”
Once more he turns to us, this time to ask if we have anything to add.
We had talked it all over in the car on the way here, and we all agreed that what Micah did to us was wrong. None of us wants him to be conscripted, but how can we just ignore what happened to Ashley and Jake? Someone has to pay.
“We have nothing to say, Your Honor,” Reggie says, and both Kelly and I nod in agreement.
“No!” Micah shouts. He tries to stand, but the bailiff wrestles him back to his seat. “Please, guys.”
I let out a sob and the judge bangs his gavel and demands order.
“Don’t do this to me,” Micah pleads. “Don’t let them do this to me! I’m innocent! No, please, no!”
“Order! Sit down, Mister Sandervol! Sit down or I’ll have you gagged.”
The bailiff slams him into the chair again and it creaks beneath him and tilts before rocking back onto all four legs.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 117
