S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  “No!”

  “And do you believe Reggie did?”

  “No, not Reg.”

  “Then how do you explain my finding him with her? How do you explain my finding your button there?”

  “I can’t.”

  “I didn’t think Jessie’d find anyone on Jayne’s Hill, but now . . . .” Eric took a deep breath. “Do you think Ashley would do something like this?”

  Kelly sighed and shrugged. “If it was just me she was messing with, maybe. She never really accepted me in their little club; she only tolerated me because of Jessie. I’m not much of a hacker, not like she or Micah were, and I’m not as good of a gamer as the rest.” He coughed lightly into his fist. “But it’s not just me. She wouldn’t do this to Reggie.”

  “He loved her, but did she love him back?”

  “Sure, I guess. I never really paid much attention to them. They were kind of embarrassing, to tell the truth. But they were never exclusive to each other— everyone knew that and was okay with that.”

  Eric nodded. “You could tell just by looking at them that they cared for each other.”

  “So, why would she hurt Reggie? And, for that matter, why Jessie? They were best friends for years.”

  “Because we all left her there. Jessie included. Especially Jessie.”

  Kelly shook his head. “So, you’re saying she’s punishing us by kidnapping your mother?”

  “Can you explain the coincidence that it was her house I found her in?”

  Kelly didn’t have an answer for that.

  “You should’ve warned Jessie,” he said. “If you think Ash is out to hurt us, then you should have told her about Micah.”

  “Ashley was standing right there. I couldn’t.”

  Eric crossed the basement, and when he came to the dryer, he stopped and leaned on it. “I need to know why her parents disappeared the way they did.”

  “They were embarrassed,” Kelly offered. “Hurt. Nobody knew how Arc or the authorities would react after we got back. We all thought we’d be arrested and conscripted, especially after Micah’s trial.”

  “They left before the trial.”

  Kelly shrugged. “Ashley was dead— or, we thought she was. Maybe they couldn’t bear all the reminders.”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t think it was that at all. I found a box of Ashley’s belongings in the house. If they were so brokenhearted, why would they leave anything behind?”

  He spun around and mounted the stairs, taking them two at a time. Kelly called after him, asking where he was going. “I want to take a look through that box,” Eric yelled.

  “You should’ve at least told Jessie about your mom.”

  Eric paused, and for a moment Kelly thought he was going to turn around. But he didn’t. In a moment, he was gone, through the house and out the back door.

  Kelly didn’t move for several minutes. Finally, he turned to the game console. He pulled Ashley’s Link out and typed a message on it. When he was finished, he reinserted it, flipped the console on and connected.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 60

  Ashley studied the photo on Jessie’s Link. Her mind still reeled from the shock of finding her outside the gate. Since discovering the complex abandoned over a week ago, she’d thought of almost nothing else than her best friend.

  They thought you were dead.

  She was angry. Much of it was directed at Jessie and the others. But she was mostly angry with herself for acting the way she had, letting her emotions get the best of her.

  After what you’ve endured, you have every right to lose your self-control. You shouldn’t have to apologize.

  She stood up from the desk she was sitting on and walked over to the elevator door and placed her ear against it. There was no sound coming from the bottom of the shaft, and she was beginning to get nervous that something bad may have happened to Jessie. It was possible that there might still be Undead down there. But Jessie had promised to be careful.

  Nevertheless, twenty minutes had already passed and there wasn’t a peep from below. All Jessie was supposed to do was remove Micah’s tablet from the mainframe and bring it back up so that Ashley could try and hack the firewall.

  She thought about what might be inside those files. Was it a cure? Something like that could be worth millions— billions, even. Not that Ashley cared about the money. Money didn’t solve problems, it only caused them.

  She didn’t think cracking the firewall would be all that difficult, especially once she got the program she’d written to break her way into the Arc codex, the one inside the tablet Jessie was supposed to be getting.

  Where the fuck is she?

  “Steady,” she muttered to herself. It wouldn’t help if she lost her temper again.

  Even without the program, she was already working out how to crack it. After all, Ulysses Daniels didn’t have the ability to write the firewall himself. He had to have had help. She’d bet anything it had been Micah. And everything he knew, he’d learned from her.

  The elevator bell finally dinged. Jessie was on her way back up.

  Ashley relaxed and smiled weakly to herself. Once she got the tablet, cracking the firewall would be a pleasure.

  She looked down at the stupid bitch’s Link — Relax, Ash! — and was startled to see a new message on it. She quickly read the text. Then, with the barest twinge of guilt, she erased it.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 61

  Jessie had forgotten how long it took the elevator to descend from the ground floor to where the mainframe was located. It gave her time to reflect. Too much time, in fact, so that when the doors finally opened, she found herself unable to contain the tears she’d been holding back. It was all she could manage to step out into the main room, fall to her knees, and bury her face in her hands as the emotions overtook her. First guilt. Then joy and relief. Finally grief.

  She knew that nothing would ever repair the friendship that had once existed between her and Ash. Even if everything wasn’t falling apart outside the island walls, the world she had once known was gone forever, irrevocably changed. The world had tilted off its axis, and it was about to fall away into darkness. She felt this to be true, down to her very core.

  When the tears ended, she stumbled to her feet and wiped away the wetness on the hem of her shirt, cringing at how filthy she was already and how badly she smelled. Only now did she bother looking around her. She became aware of the quiet and the doors behind which the corpses of the zombies they had slain now rotted. The filtration system was doing a decent job of keeping the stench from polluting the air.

  She made her way into the back corner of the room and into the hallway that led to the glass-walled chamber which housed Arc’s computer mainframe. There was dried blood everywhere, and even scraps of clothing and bits of hair and flesh. Evidence of the battle they had waged here only three weeks prior. She didn’t want to see it, to relive those moments, so she kept her eyes from straying to the side and tried not to think about it.

  She pushed into the coolness of the air conditioned room, into the thrumming hum of the servers with their flashing lights and their soft chiming, their constant clicks and ticks. Now she relaxed. Her eyes traveled involuntarily to the corner of the ceiling, to the black glass globe which she had shot out with the final bullet she had saved, the one she’d been too chicken to put into her own head, or Kelly’s, as he’d been overrun, bitten, infected. The globe had since been replaced. She stared at it a moment. Then, in a fit of bitter anger, thrust a middle finger up at the thing.

  A quick glance down confirmed that the tablet was gone, and her anger bloomed.

  “Screw you, Arc!” she screamed at the camera. “You and your fucking game. I don’t need you, you assholes!”

  Nevertheless, she searched in the narrow space underneath the computer drives and in the crack between the last server rack and the wall. She checked on top of the stacks. But the tablet was gone, most likely taken by whoeve
r had come to fix the camera and removed the bodies.

  She trudged back to the waiting elevator, her anger a roiling mass in the pit of her stomach, rising into her throat like a greasy ball. Why did everything always have to be so damn hard all the time? One single break is all she needed. Was it too much to ask?

  † † †

  “There’s another attached to one of the nodes by the western wall,” Jessie glumly reported to Ashley.

  She’d seen a flash of anger cross her friend’s face when she told her the tablet had been removed. But a blink later, it was gone, replaced by a sympathetic smile. The change had been so quick, so complete, that Jessie immediately wondered if she’d seen it at all.

  “I can still fix this,” Ashley had said, shrugging nonchalantly. “It’ll just take a little longer.”

  “It’ll be quicker if we just head out to Brookhaven, find my grandfather’s Link.”

  “No, no. I got this. Promise.” She stood up and squeezed Jessie’s arm reassuringly. “Please, let me do this for you. For acting like such a witch back there. It’s the least I could do.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  But Ashley was already sitting down on the desk again, her head bent low over the small black device, her fingers swiping and tapping.

  “I guess I’ll go check the gate.”

  Ashley gave her a grunt, and Jessie got the feeling she was being dismissed.

  She shook her head, then turned and slowly walked out, troubled by Ashley’s behavior, yet even more disturbed by her own need for some sort of validation that things were going to be alright between them. Was she really that needy?

  She pushed out into the sunlight and the heat smacked her square in the face, taking her breath away. She thought about the water bottles in the backpack on her Player’s back. And she reflexively reached into her pocket to connect her Link. Of course, it wasn’t there.

  A half hour, that’s how long she’d give Ash. Then they needed to get moving again. They’d be lucky to make it through the wall before sundown.

  That was assuming, of course, that the IUs at the gate would soon wander off.

  She took in a deep breath of the searing air — her chest hitching slightly from the effort of the cry she’d had downstairs — and she looked around. Her gaze panned across the zombies and toward the open area before coming to rest on the orange building. Jessie walked over.

  The IUs had grown silent, but with her emergence, a few of them started to moan again. The chorus was quickly picked up by several others. They jockeyed at the fence, but didn’t touch it.

  Go back to the woods, she willed them. Get out of the sun.

  The dark door — a dark-green she could see, not the gray-black she’d thought earlier — seemed to absorb the light and spit it out as heat. She could feel it coming off the surface in waves, battering her neck and face with its rough hands. The tarnished brass handle looked hot to the touch, but after giving it a quick test and confirming it was unlocked, she managed to open the door without burning herself.

  “Hello?” she called into the gloom inside.

  Silence was her only reply.

  What did you expect?

  She wasn’t sure, just that she wouldn’t have been surprised if Micah had answered.

  The air inside was stale, dead — not the dead of decaying flesh, but the dead of unbreathed air — which seemed to confirm the emptiness of the building. Jessie reached into the darkness and patted the wall for the light switch, but the lights flickered on automatically, sensing the movement.

  It was some sort of lobby. There was a temporary partition made of fabric and plastic, a narrow desk and cubbyholes behind, all empty of effects. A metal folding chair leaned against the wall in the corner. A single door, propped open and chocked with a small wedge of wood, occupied the center of the opposite wall.

  Jessie stepped over to the opening and squinted into the darkness, then waved a hand through until the lights flickered on. One of the bulbs, roughly halfway down the hall, blinked rapidly on and off and emitted an angry buzz.

  The hallway appeared to bisect the building into equal halves, left and right. A door at the opposite end mirrored the one she was standing in; it looked like an emergency exit. There were eight more doors, four on each side. The second one on the right was open.

  Jessie stepped quietly down the carpeted hall. A whisper of a breeze caressed her cheek from a vent overhead, an unending mechanical exhale of air circulating through the rooms and into the unknown depths of the ceiling. There was a hint of age-old dust and mold, but not of rotting flesh. She reached the edge of the open door and slowly turned and looked inside.

  Light from the hallway spilled in, illuminating only a narrow swath directly in front of her. But the room was small enough, roughly twelve feet on each side, so that she could discern most of it. The walls were windowless. It appeared to have been some kind of storage area at one time. In the right corner was a bed of blankets. Beside it, a large black canvas duffle bag. Piled to the left were cases of packaged food and bottled water. In another corner, the empty cans and bottles.

  Jessie’s stomach growled at the sight of the food. Her throat was parched. But she didn’t go to it. It was the duffle that drew her curiosity. It and the gaming goggles poking out through the top.

  Before stepping inside the room, she glanced back toward the main door. Then, quickly, she crossed over the threshold, bent down, and began to dig through the bag. Beneath the goggles were a set of gloves and foot attachments. Pivoting on her toes, she located the gaming console against the wall a few feet from the door. There was a Link inserted into the slot and the green light was on but blinking. Someone was connected, but The Game was paused.

  No holo projector, she thought, looking around the room again.

  She rotated back again to the bag and extracted the goggles and slipped them over her head. At first glance, she thought the viewer was empty. Nothing showed but a blank panel which appeared to be light blue in color. She tilted the head gear up to the top of her head, crawled over to the console and connected, then pulled the goggles down again.

  Turning her head, she saw a series of pipes swivel into view. They were painted the same color as the blue wall and arranged vertically. She panned past them and found a metal bunk covered with a thin mattress. She realized she was looking at the inside of a jail cell.

  I’m looking through Reggie’s eyes.

  Her pulse pounded in her temples, and she could hear the strained wheeze of her breathing. Turning further, a square of polished metal came into view, and in the reflection, she saw his face.

  The sight of his blank stare shocked her.

  She yanked the goggles off her head, then bent down and wrenched the Link out of the console. A pair of wires trailed out from the seam on one side. The other end of the wires connected to a small disc-shaped object about the size of a pea.

  The console beeped unhappily at her, drawing her attention back to it. The light blinked green twice more, then turned red. There was no way to know if disconnecting had hurt Reggie; she hoped it hadn’t.

  Her curiosity getting the better of her, Jessie raised the Link above her head and caught the tiny object in her other hand. It appeared to be a small pebble, and it was covered in a black tarry substance. She scratched a bit off with her fingernail, revealing a glass capsule underneath. Tiny circuits crisscrossed the face. With a jolt of recognition, Jessie flung the implant and Link away from her.

  Micah!

  But how? And where was he now?

  She was about to hurl the goggles to the floor, when something caught her eye.

  With shaking fingers, she tweezed the delicate thread out of the headband and held it up to the light in the doorway.

  The strand of hair was curly, just like Micah’s was. But Jessie knew immediately that it hadn’t come from his head. Instead of being short and blond, like his had been, this strand was long and red.

  It belonged to Ash
ley.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 62

  Eric knocked on Captain Harrick’s door, but there was no answer.

  “She’s supervising an interview,” a passing deputy offered. “She didn’t ping you?”

  Eric shook his head, frowning. He pulled out his Link and checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten to unmute it after his check of the Evans place. He hadn’t, and there were no new messages or texts.

  He had hoped to find something in the boxes Ashley’s parents had left behind, some clue as to why they’d so suddenly left town. He didn’t buy Kelly’s rationalization that it was to avoid further scrutiny. The police had been instructed not to pursue any investigation against the kids or their families. And as far as he knew, word of it still hadn’t been broken to the community.

  It was inevitable that knowledge of the break in would eventually get out. Something so stupid as that, so outrageous, was impossible to contain forever. But he also knew that the longer they avoided the day when it did become public, the less of a furor it would make. The public’s appetite for old news, no matter how big, paled in comparison with the latest, greatest scandal. It wasn’t the main reason why he’d tried to impress upon Jessie the importance of acting as if nothing had happened, but it wasn’t a minor one, either.

  His own theory of the Evanses’s disappearance took into consideration what he now knew, or strongly suspected— that Micah was not the implant hacker, Ashley was. And despite Kelly’s protestations to the contrary, he intended to follow up on that hunch until the evidence proved him wrong. He’d already wasted valuable time by not believing Jessie, and he was determined not to repeat the mistake.

  But the forsaken items in the house had yielded no clues at all.

  The deputy pointed. “They’re in Interview Two. I figured you’d already know, since it’s your case.” He started to walk away, but Eric caught his arm.

  “What do you mean, my case?”

  “Your mother’s kidnapping. They’re interviewing him now.”