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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  She stabbed the trowel downward as hard as she could, snapping her wrist until it felt as if the bones in her arm might break. With a grunt she gave the tiny shovel a twist and drew out another soggy clot of mud and set it aside. The hole wasn’t very deep yet, maybe ten inches. The ground was just too saturated with rain to go any deeper. It kept caving in on itself. She looked over at the lump of fur beside her in the twilight and wiped an arm across her sweaty forehead. She could feel the grit from the loam scratching her skin, and she knew she’d just smeared mud on her face. But at least the sweat wasn’t dripping into her eyes anymore.

  The hole’s not going to be wide enough.

  For a moment she considered trying to make the carcass fit, but the thought of forcing it down, of feeling those broken bones shifting beneath her hands, crackling and oozing through the breaks in the pelt, made her gag. She stifled a cry and bent to the task once more, scraping at the sides and reaching down again to pull out the collapsed earth. Another heavy scoop landed in the muddy heap on the other side, making a wet, sloppy, smacking sound. She used her thumb to push the sticky mess off of the blade of the trowel.

  The soil had a musty smell to it, a dark scent, thick and earthy like an old log overturned after years of rotting undisturbed. Black and rancid, yet sweet, too. The whiteness of the dead rabbit’s fur caught her eye in the dim moonlight. The shape seemed to shift and take on a new form.

  Just a trick of the lighting.

  For just a second it had looked like the possum she’d smashed with her bare hands and stone along the side of the highway weeks back.

  She glanced over at the mound again, blinking away the sweat and mud which had resumed dripping into her face. Her nose was runny from crying. The rabbit’s fur was splotched with dark stains— blood and mud and streaks of rust from the pipe their neighbor, Sam Locke, had used to beat the poor animal to death.

  “ ‘Getting into my chickens,’ my ass,” she muttered as she reached down to scoop out some more mud. “ ‘Killed my prize-laying hens.’ What kind of asshole actually believes a rabbit would do something like that?”

  She knew it wasn’t about the rabbit. Or even the jerk’s chickens. It was about the disruption to his life caused by what had happened over the past several days. The disruption to all their neighbors’ lives.

  She’d seen them in front when she arrived home, a group standing off to the side, separate from the professional protestors and the press. There was only one police car now. In fact, there were fewer reporters as well.

  “Killed the poor animal because he was angry at us. That’s why he did it. Fucking asshole. God damn bully.”

  Probably pissed at Ramon for driving on his grass.

  She’d wanted to call her husband after having it out with Sam that afternoon, but she’d gotten sidetracked dealing with Cassie after she’d lashed out. The girl had been a wreck, traumatized by the sight of that plastic garbage bag, the blood smeared around the inside and spilling from the opening. The bloodstained metal pipe lying at Sam’s feet.

  What the hell kind of maniac does that!

  And Ronnie had simply slipped away without saying goodbye. Lyssa doubted she’d see her face ever again. Not after what had happened these past couple of days.

  Jesus. What the hell would she tell Ramon when he finally got home tonight?

  It’s wide enough now. Put it in and finish up already.

  And yet she hesitated. It wasn’t that she was squeamish or disliked the idea of getting her hands dirty. Not even a week’s worth of showers would be able to extract the mud from beneath her fingernails. It was the finality of it all. Cassie had so dearly loved Ben Nicholas.

  It’s just a rabbit. It’s not Rem—

  With a sob of pain and anger, she rolled the animal into the hole. It landed with a sticky thump and rolled onto its back, its legs pointing upward, the starlight catching one eye. She began to rake the dirt from the opposite side of the hole with her arms, pulling it toward her, harder and harder until the sides of her hands and arms were raw and her muscles ached. She grunted with each effort, panting for air and letting it out again in a sob. The hole slowly filled, hiding the rabbit. Mud and blood and salty tears falling from her chin.

  It’s not Remy. My Remy.

  She was babbling in her mind now.

  I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

  When she was finished, she stumbled senselessly to her feet and somehow made her way toward the house, insensate, unaware of the sounds coming from her throat and the accompanying chorus of crickets and frogs along the fence.

  She fell against the porch railing and pulled herself up the steps, hand over hand, sobbing openly now. She somehow opened the door and stumbled into the house.

  If she had looked up before coming in, she would’ve seen her mourning daughter standing at the window from the upstairs hallway, looking as if she expected something else to happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  It was the towers making everyone crazy. Had to be.

  Lyssa couldn’t know for sure, of course. She had no way to prove it. But it seemed as likely a cause for the inexplicable strangeness on the island as any other. The towers were putting out some kind of toxic radiation. Or maybe not radiation, but a signal of some sort that could affect people’s behavior. The new Stream signal was poisoning them.

  But just some people?

  Different people had different susceptibilities, just like some people were more resistant to certain biological diseases than others.

  If she was right, if it was the Stream, then the new phone devices might just be focusing it, making those who possessed one more likely to succumb. It would explain Drew’s sudden illness so soon after getting his new phone. It explained why their neighbor had suddenly gone apeshit and murdered Cassie’s rabbit in such a violent manner after years of living quietly next door. She’d noticed his phone that afternoon when he threatened to call the cops on her.

  It was the exact same device Drew had.

  And the same one Ramon had gotten, too.

  All at once, her husband’s strange behavior over the past few weeks came into sharp focus. She’d just assumed it was related to their marriage troubles and Remy’s death. But now she knew it was something else entirely.

  The Stream.

  Was she in danger? Was Cassie?

  Was that what had sickened her poor little Remy, made him die in that hospital? He’d been born healthy, and then he died. Surely the hospitals would’ve been among the first to be switched over. The signal there would be more concentrated than most other places.

  She sat in her kitchen, listening to her radio station, to her Jay Bird make innuendoes about how the craziness and the towers and everything else were all tied together. And she’d made the leap before he had a chance to get to the punch line.

  The Stream and those new devices.

  She needed to listen so she wouldn’t miss it when he finally spit it out. Anyway, that’s why Ramon kept dismissing him. The Stream was telling him not to listen. Not to listen to the truth.

  She and that Liberty man in Medford and Jay Bird. They were the only ones who could hear it.

  She leaned in closer to the radio. She didn’t want to miss anything.

  Jay Bird was telling her that the towers were evil, that the government was evil because of what it was sending through the Stream to them, and she was thinking, “Amen, brother! Sing it!”

  Those towers, do you know what they connect to? You know the workers putting them up, the conscripted convicts? The government is controlling them through the signals in the towers. It feeds the Stream directly into their neural implants!

  Yes, Lyssa thought, the implants. And the new phones. That’s how they were controlling them. The bastards!

  She could see them in her mind’s eye, the work crews, could picture them. They’d always struck her as strange whenever they were working. Six team members and only one Operator to control and direct and manipulate them. It j
ust wasn’t practical. But now she realized he wasn’t controlling the conscriptees; he was their supervisor. Whoever was controlling them was somewhere else, sending their commands through the towers. That’s why the work sites always had one of those trucks there, the ones that looked like news vans with the portable transmission antennas.

  And once again, folks, I’m telling you those people they kidnapped out of our prisons — you know the ones, those killers and rapists and child abusers, the ones they had implanted — they’re dead.

  Lyssa nodded. Yes, the government took away their free will, their lives. They took—

  Let me repeat that: They. Are. Dead.

  They took their dignity.

  I’m talking reanimated, people! Undead.

  She frowned at the radio and wondered what he was getting at now. He had to be speaking metaphorically.

  I have just obtained proof of what I’ve been telling you all for over the past year. I have here in my hands a recording of an experiment conducted over two years ago in the laboratory of one Eugene Halliwell, a former professor at Royce State College and, let me tell you folks, this is some scary BLEEP BLEEP.

  There was a long pause, a stretch of static so thick that Lyssa began to reach for the dial thinking she’d lost the signal. She jumped when the man began to speak again.

  Still with me?

  I want you to think about this, people: All the wars we fought overseas, the battles we won. Why do you think nobody wants to fight us anymore? Because the soldiers we were sending into the battlefield, into foreign cities, they weren’t just mindless drones we could control remotely. They didn’t just have their consciousness commandeered. They had it ripped ruthlessly out of them. The government implanted these people. They murdered and brought them back without a shred of humanity left inside of them.

  This, my friends, is why there is no more conflict. But no more conflict doesn’t mean no more fear. Or oppression. Or exploitation. It’s just that nobody in the world wants to risk fighting these kinds of soldiers.

  There was another pause, shorter this time, but in the lull Lyssa thought she heard a noise from the back of the house. “Cassie?” she called out, loud enough to be heard if the girl had woken from her slumber — which didn’t seem likely, given the knockout pill Lyssa had given her — but quiet enough not to carry up to her bedroom if she was still up there.

  There was no answer.

  Why do you think they make them wear those masks and cover up their bodies? It’s not to avoid sunburn, folks. Puh-leeez. It’s so we can’t tell what they truly are. The government has been hiding the truth from us.

  “What truth?” Lyssa whispered.

  The government thinks we’re stupid. Or blind. But we’re not. We all know what’s happening. We can all see it. But we refuse to believe what our minds are telling us. We refuse to accept what we already know.

  We’ve been told how wonderful this new technology is, that with it we can finally do something good with the so-called dregs of society. We can ‘reprogram’ them into functional, useful, productive ‘citizens.’ How great is that? Hallelujah for the great United States.

  “Hallelujah,” Lyssa chanted, but she was still shaking her head. This discussion hadn’t gone where she’d expected it to go.

  From soldiers to slaves. What will we do with them next?

  Somewhere on the fringes of her consciousness, she heard the sliding door open and then close again. She registered the fleeting crescendo of the crickets and toads outside, of the murmur of the breeze through the trees. But while she filed that information away, she was too rapt with what she was hearing. Her nose hovered not four inches from the radio.

  That’s why we need to find out why the government wants to raise taxes, people. Is it so they can fund more of these experiments? So they can figure out how to do the same with the rest of us? You laugh, but we’re next. They’ll find ways to control us all.

  She heard a noise in the garage. She told herself she needed to check it out.

  I don’t know how much longer the government will allow me to transmit here. I don’t know how much time I have, but I’m going to continue to tell the truth as long as I can. We need to stop what they’re doing. We need to stop the government creating these things. It’s not just a matter of holding onto our freedoms, but the freedoms of those we have cast away from us. It’s about preventing something worse from happening.

  “What?” she whispered. “Keep what from happening?”

  Until next time, this is Jeremy ‘Jay Bird’ Burt reporting to you live from Long Island. Good night, stay safe.

  Lyssa straightened after a moment, as if waking from a deep sleep. The hairs on the back of her neck were prickling. She was suddenly certain she wasn’t alone. Slowly, she turned.

  The figure in the darkened hallway stepped forward into the light.

  “I thought you agreed to stop listening to that bullshit,” Ramon said, a look of pure disgust on his face. “How can you actually believe half the crap he comes up with?”

  Lyssa blinked at him, but didn’t speak. She wasn’t angry, not anymore. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t understand the truth. It was the Stream. It was the government sending him messages into his brain, screwing him up, making him into one of those things. He was blind and couldn’t see, not like she could.

  He was weak, but she was strong. And she would resist.

  “Where’s Cassie?” he asked.

  “Asleep.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. “And the rabbit?”

  “I buried it.”

  A thump came from overhead. They both raised their eyes to the ceiling.

  Ramon stepped further into the room and dropped his keys onto the table with a clatter. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said, scratching the angry red spot on his cheek. “Sorry you had to deal with this on your own. But I’m here now. We’ll get through this.”

  “Through it?” she replied. “It’s only just beginning.”

  Another sound from above, a scrape and a clatter. Cassie was definitely up and moving about her room.

  He shook his head. “Lyssa, you can’t really believe—”

  “What? What he’s saying? Why not?”

  “Well, first of all, you heard what he said. There’s no such thing as zombies. Come on, Lyssa. You have to admit that.”

  Zombies? Who mentioned zombies?

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The government discovering a way to reanimate the dead.”

  Lyssa frowned.

  “The government,” he repeated, his voice rising in exasperation. “He said they created this technology that can reanimate the dead. He said the Omegaman soldiers are zombies.”

  She stared at him.

  “I was standing right here, Lyssa. You didn’t hear him say that?” He looked concerned and reached for her, his eyes pleading. “I’m worried about you. Are you feeling all right?”

  “He didn’t say that. And even if he did, he was speaking metaphorically.”

  “No, Lyssa, he—”

  She jerked her arm out of his grip.

  “I don’t want you listening to him any more,” he warned, his voice turning hard. “You don’t need this kind of bullshit right now. A smart woman like you—”

  “A smart woman like me can figure out what she wants to believe in and what she doesn’t. She doesn’t need anyone to tell her.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Ramon waited until she was out of earshot before pulling out his phone. The shiny black device, though more compact than his older one, had a nice heft to it. It packed a lot into such a small volume. Amazingly agile and easy to use, he was already hooked on the design and functionality, even though its access to content wasn’t yet quite as good as the old Internet. Soon it would be. That’s what the rep had assured him when he’d brought it over for him to test.

  He quickly located the right identifier code and thumbed the button to
ping.

  “It’s Lyssa,” he said, when the connection went through. “I’m worried about her, about what she might do. She seems very . . . . I don’t know.”

  “Agitated?”

  “Vulnerable. Impressionable. I’d like to bring her in to see you.”

  “Very well. I’ll pencil you in for Monday morning.”

  “You’ve got nothing sooner? I’m not sure waiting over the weekend is a good idea.”

  “It’s my first opening. Just do what we talked about. Don’t fight her, guide her. And Ramon?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not your fault. You did everything within your power. You did the right thing reaching out for help.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  The first siren woke her up while it was still dark. Lyssa lay in her bed and listened to it, wondering if it was getting any closer. The wail rose and fell and was joined by another and another until there was a full chorus of them, swirling through the night. They seemed to come no closer or go any further away. Finally, as if beckoned by them, she rose and went to the bedroom window.

  Ramon stirred in the bed but didn’t wake. How could he possibly sleep through the noise? As distant as the sirens were, she couldn’t imagine them not reaching deep inside anyone’s slumber for long without rousing them.

  But she couldn’t see anyone or anything in the narrow slice of view of the street afforded to her from the window. The lights in the neighbor’s house, the Blanchett’s, came on and she saw a shadow pass across the window behind the drapes. The material fluttered in the breeze, and she considered calling out to them.

  The old man, Tony, was nice enough. She’d had many pleasant conversations with him. But his wife Edna was a sour woman. Everything about her seemed pinched and tight, from her clothes to her skin to the way she talked through her stern little mouth that looked as if it had been sewn on with thick twine. Watching her speak always made Lyssa feel itchy.

  She decided she’d check on Cassie and turned from the window and began to slip across the room, her feet whispering along the carpet.