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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  “We can’t leave Ben Nicholas!” she screeched.

  Ramon glanced over at Lyssa, who was pinching the bridge of her nose. Do something, he wanted to shout. Help me out here. But it was clear she would be of no assistance.

  “Noooooo!” Cassie yelled, her voice an eardrum-piercing yowl in the closed space. “I want Ben Nicholas!”

  “Ben Nicholas is dead!” Lyssa screamed back, her hands exploding from her face and impacting the dashboard with such force that the glove compartment popped open. “He’s fucking dead! So shut the fu—”

  “Lyssa!” Ramon roared. “That’s enough!”

  “It’s not real,” Cassie whimpered. She collapsed onto her seat. “He’s not real yet.”

  She’s withdrawing, Ramon thought, panicking. Oh God, what’s happening? They’re falling away from me again.

  “We need Remmmmy,” Cassie wailed.

  Lyssa’s head spun so quickly her cheek hit the headrest. “What did you say?”

  “We can’t leave Ben Nicholas, Mama. Please.”

  Cassie grabbed the back of the seat again and started to shake it.

  “Stop it!” Ramon snapped. He turned off their driveway and headed for the highway. “I said stop it now!”

  But she wasn’t listening. “No, no, no! It’s not time!” She started to scream again. “It’s too soon! He’s not ready!”

  Lyssa threw her hand back to grab Cassie, but she was cowering in the opposite corner, beyond her reach. “Stop it, Cassie!”

  But as Ramon pulled up to the stop sign at the next corner, Cassie flung herself from the car and began to run away, back in the direction they had come. Her bare feet slapped the hot sidewalk and echoed against the silent houses.

  “Cassie! Cassie, come back here!” He turned to Lyssa. “Jesus Christ. Don’t just sit there! Go after her, damn it!”

  * * *

  They didn’t find her until several hours had passed and twilight was beginning to silver the sky. It was Lyssa who came upon Cassie, hands filthy with mud and her knees grass-stained. Lyssa was almost beside herself, frantic, hyperventilating. When she found the girl at the gravesite, all she could do was hold her, and together they cried over the torn fingernails and skin, at the blood seeping into the new mound of dirt. Clutching each other, they leaned against the cold granite. The sun began to set. Shadows crept over the cemetery.

  “Not ready,” Cassie kept moaning. “Not ready.”

  “Okay, honey,” Lyssa said, trying to console her. “Someday you will be. We won’t leave. Not yet. Not today.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  They woke Monday to the sound of the trash trucks outside their window, and it was something so normal, so irrefutably routine that Lyssa couldn’t help but lie there and listen to it.

  Privately, she wanted to believe that it had all been a bad dream, that maybe when she rose and went downstairs, that after she cooked breakfast, Cassie would pad in on her soft feet, her hair in tangles and the rabbit drooping in her arms like he always did, and all would be well. Ben Nicholas’s back feet would sway and Lyssa or Remy would tell her not to carry him like that. And Cassie would plop him down onto the linoleum floor, and Ben Nicholas would hop lackadaisically about, his nose poking into every crevice and corner. Then, as if some random neuron in its tiny brain had fired and triggered a memory of some urgent appointment, he’d pop up and spin, then suddenly tear off into another room.

  Lyssa felt the tension leave her face as the image passed before her like a movie, and she almost laughed out loud. The feeling — not quite happiness, though certainly not its opposite — began to bubble up inside of her as she lay there, her heart expanding.

  But then the smile soured as she heard the garbage truck do its mechanical ingestion, and the nightmare of the past few days slipped back into her thoughts. She remembered the rabbit’s death, its brutal murder and burial and exhumation. She wished that version of reality could’ve remained buried in the quiet crannies of her unconscious mind.

  The rabbit was in the trash bin out front.

  She rose, careful not to look at the figure occupying the other half of her bed, lest she make eye contact and be forced to address the terrible things that she’d had to do. She donned her thin robe and stepped out into the hallway and quietly made her way to the window overlooking the street.

  The trash truck finally arrived in front of their house. She watched as it lifted the gray bin into the air over the cab and tilted it over, emptying its contents into the receptacle behind. There was a flash of white, too quick to tell if it was a bolt of the rabbit’s fur or the plastic trash bag she assumed Ramon would have put it in. She felt the tightness in her chest beginning to loosen.

  “Well, that’s that,” she muttered.

  Now Ramon was up. She could hear him moving about in the bedroom, opening drawers, the closet door, closing them. The soft shush of his footsteps on the carpet. By the time he came to her side, standing close but not touching her, bins all up and down this side of the street stood or lay haphazardly at the curb like drunken soldiers.

  He exhaled between pursed lips. “Everything seems so normal, doesn’t it? Like it’s just another normal day.”

  She wanted it to be so. But his words seemed only to drive home the horrid truth of their situation. Nothing was normal. It was all an illusion. All she’d have to do was look into his eyes to strip away the fantasy.

  She didn’t move, didn’t turn away from the scene. Not even when she heard him leave. She felt the air beside her expand, filling the space he’d just occupied.

  “You know, Lyss,” he said, loudly. He was back in the bedroom. Or maybe the master bathroom. Maybe he was shaving. “I’m glad we didn’t leave yesterday. This gives us another chance to fix things.”

  Lyssa grunted.

  “Cassie was right. How could we think about leaving now?”

  She heard the front door open as he went out to collect the trash bin. She waited for him to appear on the lawn beneath her, counting the heartbeats, expecting him to appear . . . .

  Any second now . . . .

  Where the hell is he?

  And then he was there, and she realized he’d stopped to collect the mail from Saturday, which they’d forgotten all about. He was sorting through it as he walked across the lawn, his slippered feet leaving a darker trail in the silvery dew on the grass. She watched him reach down and lift the bin up from where it had tumbled against the curb. She watched him roll it up the driveway, disappearing around the side of the garage.

  A moment later she heard his yell. “Son of a bitch! God damn it! Lyssa! LYSSA!”

  He appeared around the side of the house again and looked up at the window, as if he expected her to still be there. He gestured angrily at her to come down. Then he spun around and went back to the side of the house.

  She found him bent over what appeared to be a mound of dirt by their back gate. When he saw her, he reached over and pulled on it, peeling it off the ground. Lyssa gasped.

  “Didn’t you say Sam’s been setting out poison?” There was a fire in his eyes. He was furious. “Well, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Ramon brushed past her, knocking her shoulder. “Son of a bitch!”

  “No! Wait.” And she was surprised when he actually did stop. “What are you going to do?”

  He whirled around. “I’m going to teach that asshole a lesson!” He held up the carcass. “This is intentional! It was rats yesterday and I didn’t say anything. Now it’s raccoons. I think this qualifies as escalation.”

  It took her a moment to register what he’d said. “What do you mean rats? When?”

  “When we were looking for Cassie. They were all over the back yard, like they’d been flung there by that—” He passed her again and fumbled with the gate latch with his free hand, swearing under his breath until he finally managed to kick it open. “Jesus fucking Christ, Lyssa. Look!”

  She could see another of the small bodies j
ust inside the yard.

  “The man is sick!” Ramon sputtered and made an obscene gesture toward the neighbor’s house.

  “You can’t be sure it’s him, Rame, not after everything that’s happened. The epidemic. Or maybe it’s probably someone protesting.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s one way to find out. I’m going over there.”

  “Rame! Don’t take that.”

  But he ignored her. She watched as he marched past the end of the fence and into Mister Locke’s front yard. By the time she caught up with him, he was pounding on the front door and yelling, “Samuel Locke! Get your ass out here!”

  “Ramon!” Lyssa hissed, and tried to pull him away.

  “No! We need to get this out in the open. What he did— No, what he’s doing now is bullshit.”

  “Please, don’t swear. You—”

  The front door opened, revealing the tall, thin man. The lower half of his face was covered in a dark shadow of beard and his hair was in disarray. He wore short pants, and his chest was bare. It was strangely pale and sunken, covered in freckles, the skin pulled taut against his ribs. His feet were shod in knee-high plastic boots. They were spotted with brown paint. “You,” he said, sneering at the Stemples. A hardness filled his eyes. “You’ve got balls showing your face in public.”

  “We need to talk,” Ramon said.

  “About your rabbit? I already told you I ain’t paying for it. You can try and collect, but then what about my hens?”

  His eyes dropped to the carcass in Ramon’s hand and widened.

  “What the hell is that? Is that a—?”

  “A raccoon,” Ramon growled. He thrust it into the man’s face.

  “Hey! Get that the hell away from me!” He stepped back into the darkness of his house, holding up his hands. His fingernails were filthy, stained with thin lines of black. Droplets of crimson paint glistened in his hair and on his face. “What the hell, Stemple,” he shrieked. “Are you freaking crazy?”

  “I found this outside my gate, Locke. There’s another one inside my yard. Dead. Yesterday it was a half dozen dead rats.”

  “I didn’t do— Hey, you sure that thing’s dead, man?”

  “Of course, I’m sure! What I want to know is why you’re throwing them there.”

  “Rame,” Lyssa interrupted. She was staring at the dead raccoon, unable to meet Mister Locke’s furious gaze.

  Mister Locke’s gazed flicked between them. If he seemed grateful for Lyssa’s intervention, he didn’t show it. In fact, he didn’t show anything on his face but confusion. “It’s not my poison. I swear to you! I only used it that one time. I stopped after I found the dead bat.”

  “What dead bat?”

  “I threw it away! I figured it was just someone angry at you two for — well, you know — and they just got the wrong house. It was on my front porch.”

  But Ramon was beyond reason. He flung the limp corpse at Mister Locke. “That’s bullshit! Don’t you fucking lie to me! You stay away from my family, and if I catch you coming anywhere near my property or my family again, I’ll call the police!”

  “God damn it, Stemple! I just told you— You know what? Go right the fuck ahead and call the police, because I’ll tell them you just threw this thing at me! Now get the hell out of my house! And take this with you!” He stepped forward and dragged the carcass across the floor with his foot. “I told you I had nothing to do with this. Now get the fuck out of my house!”

  Lyssa stopped at the door. “Sorry to interrupt your painting,” she said.

  She got a faceful of pine for her response.

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  “He’s lying.”

  Lyssa glared at her husband. She was shaking so badly that she could barely stand. She slumped into a chair in their kitchen and set her hands on the table. But even that didn’t seem stable enough to hold her.

  This is what it feels like to lose control. This is what it would be like to melt down.

  Ramon was pacing, muttering beneath his breath.

  “The goddamn coward is lying through his teeth. Did he think we wouldn’t know it was him?”

  “He said it wasn’t.”

  “And you believe him?” Ramon shrieked. There was a madness in his eyes, an insanity that scared Lyssa. “After what he did to Cassie’s rabbit? He fucking murdered it!”

  “Ramon! Shh!”

  There was a sound from the second floor. Cassie was awake.

  Ramon straightened up, but his gaze never left hers.

  “I told Cassie yesterday that we wouldn’t leave yet,” Lyssa told him. “But now I think we should try again. Please. I keep getting the feeling that something bad is about to happen.”

  “You want to leave now? With that . . . that nutcase over there killing animals and throwing them into our yard? I’m calling the police!”

  “But you attacked him!”

  “I did no such thing. I threw the raccoon onto the floor.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to matter.”

  A siren rose in the distance, and they both immediately quieted. It continued to grow louder.

  “Good,” Ramon said. Standing tall and straightening his shirt, he repeated himself. “I hope he did call them. When they hear what he did . . . .”

  He walked over to the window and looked out, even though it was impossible to see much of anything from this angle.

  But the siren was drawing away from them now. They listened to it fade into the distance.

  After a few minutes, Lyssa tried to stand, but her feet kept tangling in the chair legs. She pushed back and the chair tipped and fell to the floor with a clatter. She still couldn’t seem to extract herself from it. It was trapping her against the table, holding her there. With a whimper of frustration, she kicked it away.

  But not even that caused Ramon to turn and face her.

  “I’m going to check on Cassie,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “I’m going to tell her that we’re leaving.”

  She hesitated a moment, waiting for him to say something, anything, but he didn’t. She wasn’t even sure he’d heard her.

  * * *

  She found Cassie in a crumpled heap in the hallway, and when she tried to rouse the girl she was alarmed at how hot she felt.

  “Cassie!”

  Lyssa grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a quick shake. “Cassie, wake up!”

  But the girl’s head lolled limply on her neck, her breaths coming in quick, rattling puffs.

  “Cassie, please.” She pressed a thumb against one of her eyelids and forced the eye open. The pupil instantly contracted to a pinpoint and Cassie flinched and tried to turn away. “Wake up, honey. Can you hear me?”

  A low moan escaped the girl’s lips. “Mama?”

  “Listen, honey, we need to pack up. It’s time to go.”

  Cassie raised an arm a few inches and tried to push her mother’s hands away. “Noooooo . . . . Sssstay. Readddy.” The hand dropped and her body relaxed again.

  “Let’s get you dressed and ready to go.”

  She left her lying in the hallway and hurried into the bathroom for the thermometer before remembering it was still on the bedside table. Once again, the earthy smell in Cassie’s room assaulted her nose. This time, she didn’t hesitate to draw back the top sheets. She let out an explosive breath when she found the bed empty.

  And yet, that smell . . . .

  She checked under the bed and in the closet. Finally, she checked her daughter’s dresser. But there was no body. Not even a trace of dirt.

  Snatching up the thermometer, she went back into the hallway and swiped the sensor across Cassie’s forehead. The display showed a slight fever of a hundred and one, though her skin felt a lot warmer than that. A second reading confirmed the first.

  Nothing worth getting excited about.

  Nevertheless, Lyssa took a moment to grab the medicine kit from the bathroom and stuffed it into her pack.

  “Cassi
e?” She bent down and placed her mouth next to her daughter’s ear. “We’re going for a ride. Just for a few days, I promise. I need you to wake up.” She tried to pull the girl’s arms and once more became alarmed at the girl’s lethargy. Why wouldn’t she wake?

  The sudden banging at their front door startled her. She let go of Cassie, who dropped back to the hallway floor, her head bent at an awkward angle.

  “Answer the fucking door, Stemple!” Sam Locke shouted. “Open this goddamn door right now! I’m sick of this shit!”

  She could hear Ramon’s footsteps as he ran out of the kitchen and into the back of the house somewhere. She heard a cabinet open, some rattling. Then more footsteps, this time toward the front door.

  “Get off my porch!”

  “Open up!”

  “I’m through talking with you! You’re a god damn maniac. You should be put in jail for animal cruelty!”

  “Let me in,” Sam growled, his voice almost too low for Lyssa to hear.

  Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.

  “Screw you, Locke! Do you realize what you’ve done to my little girl? And the bullshit with the rac—”

  Sam started hammering on the door, harder and harder until Lyssa could feel the house shaking. But what frightened her more was the way his words were getting all jumbled, as if his anger had taken away his ability to speak.

  “Get off my porch, Locke,” Ramon shouted above the din. “I’m warning you!”

  She heard what sounded like the ratchet of a gun slide.

  “I’m giving you till the count of five, Locke, and then I’m going to start shooting.”

  Lyssa’s face went ice cold. She jumped to her feet. She needed to stop what was happening.

  “One!”

  “Let me in.”

  “Two!”

  “God damn it, Stemple sonofabitch fuckingstempargghhhhh!”

  “Three!”

  The pounding stopped. Lyssa could hear the man shuffling about now, his shoes scraping the wooden floor of the porch. The doorknob rattled. “Stemp— huhn Arghhh! Open up!”