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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  The van jumped backward, throwing Lyssa onto her back again. Her thumb pulled free of the skull with a loud shloop! The woman flipped out of the van and landed spread eagle on the hood of the Cadillac.

  Ramon switch direction and drove forward. They slammed into the car in front. Cassie tumbled over Lyssa’s body, screaming. She slipped toward the doorway and began to slide out.

  “Stop!” Lyssa yelled at Ramon. But she heard him shift again. If he reversed, Cassie would be crushed. The engine revved. Lyssa twisted and reached for her. She snagged her belt loop and pulled just as the van leapt backward. Cassie flew up and over Lyssa and landed on Shinji.

  The other woman, partner of the first, rose from beneath the car. She hissed, as if angry at Lyssa for lobotomizing her friend.

  This isn’t happening! This can’t be happening. She should be dead!

  And that’s when Lyssa finally accepted the truth: She’s already dead. It’s a zombie goddamn a fucking goddamn zombie . . . .

  Lyssa’s mind was on autopilot now.

  She still had a hold of the metal handle. She pulled on it now, crying out as the bones in her wrist ground against each other. On her knees. Flailing with the other hand, she managed to grab onto the door. She heard Ramon shift again, felt the van shudder beneath her as the gears engaged. Forward. She braced herself so she wouldn’t fall out. Cassie smashed into her, and another stab of pain shot up her arm. She almost lost her grip. She almost fell out.

  Another sickening CRUNCH from the front. Lyssa and Cassie and Shinji tumbled away from the door. It slammed shut against someone’s head.

  A zombie! Say it! It’s a fucking zombie!

  The door slammed shut.

  She didn’t know what Ramon was trying to do. There wasn’t any room to go anywhere. Was he trying to crush the zombies against the bumpers? It didn’t seem logical.

  She could hear other cars screeching around them, smashing sounds, screaming. Something large and metallic hit the side of the van, and they tilted.

  Cassie was crying, flailing. Lyssa tried not to hurt her, but all she could do was hold on herself.

  There was a loud CRUNCH , then the sound of wood splintering and metal bending, a terrible tearing sound. The van leapt forward, turning a wide arc to the right. Somehow, a way had been cleared through the traffic!

  But they began to sink. The floor fell away, first toward the front, then to the right. Gravel crunched beneath them. They were tipping!

  Over the curb, over several large obstructions. On four wheels again, still tilting forward, but apparently on solid ground.

  The van fishtailed as they descended the unpaved slope. They hit the bottom, knocking the breath from Lyssa’s lungs.

  Cassie was wailing, terrified. Blood beaded from a cut on her forehead. Shinji seemed to be in shock. He’d managed to crawl into the front and was cowering on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

  Lyssa managed to get up onto her knees and tried to look out through the windshield. Every part of her felt broken, bruised. The world was flashing past them— people were flashing past them. The afflicted were everywhere, stumbling about, their faces suddenly rising in the glow of the van’s remaining headlight.

  They jolted over the uneven surface, skidded on the slick grass. Ramon drove like a madman, heedless of the people he was hitting. Bodies slammed into them and were flung away.

  “Where are you going?” Lyssa screamed, horrified at what he was doing. He actually seemed to be aiming for them.

  A tree appeared out of the darkness directly in their path. Ramon wrenched the wheel to the right, only to find their way blocked by a low stone wall, beyond it nothing but darkness. He slammed on the brakes.

  “I’m trying to get us out of here!”

  He wrestled with the gearshift. The afflicted were everywhere now, closing in. Groaning in pain, Lyssa pulled herself onto the passenger seat; Shinji refused to budge.

  Dead hands poked through the cracked window, brushed her hair. She jabbed at the switch to close it, snagging several fingers.

  She caught glimpses of the highway above them, headlights stabbing the night in utter chaos. She heard gunshots, saw flashes. A woman stumbled toward the railing, tripped and cartwheeled over. She began to roll down the slope. Several of the afflicted followed after her. They fell as well, face-forward over the barrier, sliding and writhing down the hill like worms. At the bottom, they immediately began to get to their feet.

  The woman appeared to have been stunned by the fall. She sat up and was quickly overcome by the afflicted.

  The infected! The dead!

  The woman cried out, but her shouts were quickly stifled.

  The van shook as Ramon tried to force the transmission to shift. A face appeared outside Lyssa’s window. The skin was pale, almost gray, darker about the lips and eyes. Her shirt was torn down the front, tattered and dangling. A strip of flesh had been pulled away from her chest, beginning at the collarbone and arching to the base of her sternum. The exposed breast was a pendulous mound of skinless flesh attached by the merest whisper of skin.

  Lyssa leaned away, a scream crawling up her throat. The woman stared in at her for a moment, and there was a flicker of something in her eyes. Something almost human.

  Recognition.

  “The children,” Lyssa whimpered. “Oh god, what happened to the children?”

  The mother slammed her forehead into the window. The force of the blow shook the whole van. She did it again and again, leaving bloody, greasy streaks and broken teeth on the glass.

  “Get out of here!” Lyssa screamed at Ramon.

  Blood oozed from the woman’s nose. It cascaded down her lips in a curtain of red. Her tongue flicked out, as if tasting the blood. Then the lips pulled back in a sneer and another terrible hiss came from her throat.

  SMASH!

  Her bottom jaw shattered.

  SMASH!

  A cheek collapsed.

  SMASH!

  An eyeball popped. The fluid was thick and clear.

  The gears finally engaged and the transmission caught with a loud thunk! The engine sputtered and threatened to die. But Ramon nursed it with a little gas, careful not to flood it.

  Now they were moving, backing away. The woman fell.

  Ramon picked up speed. The engine whined. Lyssa fumbled for the window button to release the two people still attached. She watched in horror as they stumbled. One fell, his arm stretching, shoulder popping. The joint dislocated, and the man’s body began to swivel, tearing at the shoulder, twisting his shirt into a rope. With a thump, his feet caught beneath the front wheel. Skin and muscle peeled away from the fingers, leaving only the last few joints.

  Lyssa finally managed to open the window, and the last person fell away. The severed fingertips dropped into the darkness beneath Lyssa’s feet. She forced Shinji deeper into the well, but he seemed uninterested. She could feel him shivering. He seemed to be in shock.

  Ramon spun the van around. They were headed down a narrow path, the white globes lining it dimly lit in some horrific parody of a romantic walk. They raced across a manicured lawn, past volleyball courts and swing sets, a bocce pit. And there, incredibly, was a duck pond. The birds rose out of the dark pool in raucous panic and flew off into the night.

  “Where the hell is the exit?” Ramon cried.

  “Where are we going? You’re heading east! We need to turn around!”

  “And go where?!” he shouted back. “We can’t leave! The entire island is being written off. Why do you think they shut down the bridges and the tunnels? It’s not because of some power outage. They have backup generators.”

  He paused and scratched his cheek viciously, drawing a thin line of blood.

  “They’re flooding the tunnels. They don’t want us to get out.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

  Lyssa realized Ramon was right. The island was lost, and everyone along with it.

  How long had the officials known? Why didn’t they g
ive any warning? It had to have been since very early that morning. Why else were there no military or police? They’d known, and they left the rest of them to fend for themselves.

  A couple million people trapped on an island with a disease spreading like wildfire, a disease which killed and then brought its victims back to kill some more.

  “We should head north,” she told him. “There’ll be boats in Middle Neck.”

  But Ramon didn’t seem to hear her. She could see the madness in his eyes. And now they were heading straight back into the heart of the outbreak.

  They were deep into the park now, further from the highway. There were fewer of the infected here, but each time they stopped, more would appear out of the darkness.

  Lyssa was whimpering, the numbness of her own shock beginning to wear off. Images of the woman, of her chest torn open and the tattered muscles inside, the ribs spreading and contracting like an accordion. It was almost like she had been breathing.

  A loud rattling sound was coming from beneath the van’s hood. Whenever they accelerated, it rattled like a machinegun.

  There was still nothing on the radio. The stations were saying that all highways and surface roads from Queens westward were parking lots. They were blaming emergency services for the poor way the evacuation had been handled and estimated that it would take another twenty-four hours before the traffic jams would clear. The reporters sounded very bitter and were quick to lay blame, but none of them seemed to understand the utter horror which was sweeping over the island; they clearly didn’t have any first-hand accounts.

  “We’re going in circles,” she said after a while. “I’ve seen that building before.”

  “We’re not going in circles.”

  “Well, we’re sure as hell not getting anywhere, either.”

  “We need to find shelter. We need to get inside. Regroup.”

  “You don’t think those people’ll come and find us and attack us?”

  “They’re zombies, Lyssa. Let’s call them what they are.”

  She wanted to scream at him that she knew that, and yet she still wanted to tell him he was wrong.

  “Just because you’ve seen a zombie movie or two,” she said, “suddenly you’re an expert on them?”

  “I’ve never seen— I never said I was an expert!”

  “Then how do you know they’re dumb, stupid, mindless things, Rame? If you’re wrong and we go inside some building somewhere and they follow us, we’re dead.”

  “They couldn’t even open a car door. They were tripping over their own feet.”

  She shook her head at him.

  Cassie was laying on the floor in back, her body tucked into a fetal position. As a mother, Lyssa knew she should go to her, hold her and help her understand what was happening. Reassure her. But she couldn’t do any of those things. How could she reassure her daughter if she couldn’t convince herself they were going to be all right?

  She pulled Shinji from the floor by his collar and pushed him into the back to be with Cassie.

  “Where did they come from?” she asked Ramon.

  He turned to her, frowning.

  “The . . . zombies.” She still had trouble saying it. It just didn’t sit right in her mind. Everything she’d ever learned said it was impossible for the dead to come back. “Up there, I mean. One minute they weren’t there, the next there were hundreds of them. It was like they were waiting for dark to attack us.”

  “Dozens,” he corrected. He sighed at the look on her face. “There were dozens, not hundreds.”

  They drove on over the uneven ground, skirting ponds, walls, and trees, looking for a way out of the park which might get them somewhere they could escape. But they didn’t even know where that point might be, or whether it even existed anymore.

  “That must be 25 up ahead,” Ramon said, nodding at the line of cars in the distance. He cracked a window and put his ear next to the opening while easing up on the gas. “I don’t think they’ve gotten this far yet. I don’t hear anything.”

  Four miles. Maybe five. That was all the difference in the world. Just a few miles back, the world had gone to hell. A quarter mile ahead lay a pocket of sanity.

  “We need to warn them.”

  Ramon nodded once, but she could see he was only acknowledging that she’d spoken, not agreeing with what she’d said. Telling the people on that road wasn’t high on his list of things to do.

  “They need to know what’s coming, Rame.”

  “And then what? We don’t even know how to get ourselves out of this mess. How are we going to help ourselves if they’re panicking?” His blunt words made her wince. He sighed and shook his head. “We barely got out of there alive. We got lucky because I took us down into this park. What do you think would’ve happened if everyone else had, too?”

  “You want to sacrifice thousands — hundreds of thousands, maybe — so you can be safe?”

  “So we can be safe.”

  They came to the highway from the south and were surprised to find the eastbound lanes open, a sure sign that incivility hadn’t yet spread here. In fact, the smell of barbecuing meat drifted through the air. Out of sight over a slight rise, just a few miles to the west, the world was going to hell. But here, people were acting as if they were on a campout. The night was quiet, just the occasional sound of a motor being started to keep a battery from going dead, and the low burble of a few scattered radios. Most Long Islanders considered themselves much too civilized to devolve simply because they’d been told to evacuate. They’d already been there and done that. This was nothing new.

  “We could just get on and drive straight home.”

  Lyssa looked to the west, her eyes tracing the line of the empty lanes to the ridge of the East Hills. The sky there did seem a little brighter, as if dusk still hadn’t completely ceded itself to night. The lights of Queens were now a dozen miles distant.

  But then a pair of headlight stabbed the gray from the other side of the overpass. A moment later, a car hurtled over, engine roaring and its horn blaring. It swerved across several lanes and someone was screaming from inside the car— not screams of pain, but of terror. The words were garbled by the automobile’s speed and the rumble of the engine, but the message was clear. The driver was telling people to get the hell away from there.

  As it passed, a few people stepped out of their cars in the jammed westbound lanes. They peered curiously at the fleeing car. Some laughed and stabbed their fingers derisively after it and called the driver a moron.

  “See?” Ramon said. “I told you.”

  But another car appeared, following the first. Then three more, and soon dozens of headlights were stabbing the night.

  They flashed past, almost too quickly to see inside. But then there came one vehicle, and it was riding the left guard rail, sparks flying out as it ground against the metal. The driver was bent over the steering wheel, his head thrust forward as if to escape the madness following them.

  But the madness was not trying to catch up with him, it already had. It rose up out of the back seat and lurched forward. The window fogged up with a spray of blood. The car swerved away from the rail and spun across the lanes heading straight for the Stemples. Another car hit it, dragging it away, tipping it onto its side. The car began to roll. With a loud crunch, it flipped over the guard rail and caromed into a line of cars in the opposite lanes.

  Suddenly the scene of chaos was falling far behind them, and Lyssa realized Ramon was driving again, taking them away. He was trying to escape by fleeing into the heart of the infection.

  Long Island’s living would soon be chasing them.

  And so would all of its dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  “We’re almost out of gas.”

  But fuel seemed the least of their concerns at the moment. The van was shaking and rattling in the most alarming way, threatening to blow apart. And while they’d managed to keep pace with the handful of bobbing taillights ahead of them, a sea of headli
ghts was swiftly rising behind.

  The exit for Syosset was ahead— their exit, if they were going home.

  “We can make it to Oyster Bay Harbor,” Lyssa said.

  Ramon hit the brakes and skidded onto the ramp. “We’re going home!” Ramon shouted. “We can get your car.”

  But she knew what he was doing. Oyster Bay Harbor wasn’t much further than their house. He was stalling. He was thinking they could still hole up somewhere. He didn’t believe they’d be able to get off the island, but that’s exactly what they needed to do.

  He raced through stop signs without even slowing. They were still several blocks away when the engine began to chug and stall.

  The van failed just as they turned down their street, heavy smoke rising from the hood. Ramon guided it to the curb. A couple blocks separated them from the house.

  They remained inside for a minute, peering out into the darkness, listening. Nothing moved into the golden halos cast downward by the streetlights. Nothing walked out of the shadows or moaned.

  Lights were on in several houses. Lyssa guessed that most, if not all of them, had been left on in the chaos of their owners’ exoduses. Strangely, the light only made the neighborhood seem that much more abandoned.

  Ramon slipped out of the van and headed around back. Lyssa followed from her side. It was only then that she saw how extensive the damage had been. Deep dents scarred the van all the way around, and blood covered nearly every surface from the rims of the tires to the windows.

  She heard Ramon beckon to Cassie, cajoling her to come out. “We need to go now, honey. Quickly.” He appeared around the side with the girl in her arms, hurrying up the sidewalk. Shinji trotted dutifully at his heels. “Come on, Lyss. Just leave the stuff there.”

  Their footfalls on the cement sounded loud in the still night, echoing off the houses. They passed one with all of its lights blazing, the front door standing ajar. Lyssa recalled that it belonged to a family with three children, a girl about Cassie’s age named Lucy and twin boys still in diapers. She hoped they got out.