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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  He was told that he’d somehow been identified as a match for a little boy desperately in need of a bone marrow transplant. Could he come immediately? Yes, he’d replied, though he couldn’t remember ever signing anything. Or maybe it was automatic. In any case, how could he refuse a chance to save a dying child? After all, he’d dedicated the past eight years to trying to save lives with the aim of saving his own. He told them he’d be there early the next morning.

  And afterwards, when the marrow harvesting had been done, he thought he’d ask Lyssa — Anne, you idiot! — he thought he’d ask her out to dinner. It was time to put the pain of the past away for good.

  He just hoped these aches from the flu vaccine didn’t get any worse.

  ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡

  END OF A DARK AND SURE DESCENT

  ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡

  DEAD RECKONING

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part One:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

  17 18 19 20 21 22 23

  Part Two:

  24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

  32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

  40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

  48 49 50 51 52 53

  Part Three:

  54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

  62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

  70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

  78 79

  Redux

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  PART ONE

  All the world’s a stage,

  and all the men and women merely players.

  William Shakespeare

  (As You Like It II.vii.139-140)

  FOR IMMEDIATE TRANSMISSION

  FROM: Padraig Harrison, President, Arc Properties

  TO: Qi Jacque Ma, Chairman and Founder, Abalila HG

  DATE: August 6, 2043

  SUBJECT: RE: Gameland Long Island

  Dear Jacque;

  I am thrilled that your executive board has chosen to syndicate our flagship product into your Indo-Chinese market. At this point, I’d like to offer you an advance peek at some exciting new features that our development team is set to launch into our premium gaming package over the next several weeks, including the in situ insertion of live assets into The Game and a new immersive, fully haptic, biointerfacing body suit. I look forward to knowing your thoughts as we continue our demonstration.

  Warmly yours,

  Padraig

  Chapter 1

  When Jessie Daniels woke up that morning in an unfamiliar house on abandoned Long Island, her dead hapkido instructor rattling around a potting shed in the back yard, she already knew the day ahead was going to be fucked. And if she was lucky enough to survive it, the next day was bound to be even worse.

  Before her lay miles of broken highway, which she’d have to navigate on foot through some of the most perilous urban terrain on the planet. Above her was an unrelenting sun; and behind her, hot on her heels, were at least a half dozen Live Players pissed off as hell and looking for revenge because she’d made them look like incompetent pussies.

  Then, at the end of her trek, Micah Sandervol, the former friend and fellow gamer she’d believed had hacked into their neural implants after faking his own death and resurrection.

  And yet, despite all this, despite having to practically drag Kwanjangnim Rupert’s reluctant corpse along, hand in cold, lifeless hand, there had actually been a few brief high points during her day, moments when she didn’t feel the crushing weight of the world on her shoulders, when she felt like maybe — just maybe — she could actually pull this off.

  Like the moment she realized her best friend, Ashley Evans, was still alive.

  Ash’s sudden reappearance could not have been more propitious. Jessie had gotten herself pinned down by a ravenous horde of the Undead at the gate to Arc’s mainframe compound, no hope of escape and every expectation that she was going to become their next meal. Like an angel sent from Heaven, the tiny firecracker of a redhead had swooped in and saved her sorry ass, which was more than she could say about Master Rupert, who had been about as useful as a sack of salt.

  That high point was soon followed by an agonizing crash back down to reality.

  The first sign that something wasn’t right with their reunion came shortly after the gate closed and Jessie was safely out of the clutches of the Undead. Instead of being joyful, Ashley was clearly not pleased. And, okay, maybe the resentment was understandable given that Jessie and the other survivors had left her behind in this land of the walking dead with no intention of ever coming back. They’d assumed that Ashley had become one of the Infected herself, just as Jake had.

  On a scale of one to ten, with ten being totally unforgivable, the misunderstanding rated somewhere just shy of that extreme. At least in Jessie’s estimation. There was always room for forgiveness.

  But forgiveness was the furthest thing from Ashley’s mind. Despite saving Jessie, what she wanted was to see her and the others pay with their lives.

  Which was why the girl was now a corpse lying in a pool of mud and blood outside, her dead eyes staring at the puffy white clouds high above. The day had, indeed, turned out pretty damn screwed after all.

  Jessie could’ve argued that putting the bullet in the girl’s chest was self-defense, but the truth of the matter was, after discovering that Ashley had been the one to hack their implants and caused her mother’s death, not Micah, she’d gladly done it. And she’d gladly do it again.

  Ash had apparently been nursing a grudge for quite some time, even before Reggie proposed the whole idea that they break onto the island. It was a grudge based on some twisted belief that Jessie was somehow responsible for Ash’s grandmother’s early conscription. With that in mind, it was easy to see how there’d been so many mishaps. Ashley had been sabotaging their efforts from the very beginning.

  All her life, Jessie had been vilified for being the daughter of the man who invented Reanimation technology. People called her Zombie Girl. Zombitch. Everyone seemed to think that she was just as much to blame as he was, as if she had been there and contributed. As if she actually wanted society to sanction the murder of its citizens just so it could reanimate them as civil servants later on. These people were so disconnected from reality that even as they condemned her, they defended the very system which was truly to blame.

  The sins of the father revisited upon the child.

  The real irony of that was that her real father had spent years secretly working to destroy Arc Properties, the company which now owned and profited from the technology.

  The fight with Ashley and its inevitable outcome had left Jessie in a state of near-catatonia, numb to what she’d done. Numb to the crushing world.

  The bitch deserved to die.

  That numbness had been the only thing which kept her from collapsing into a blubbering heap of self-pity. And it was in that state that she sought out and found the shovel leaning against a shed near the back fence, the one marked EMERGENCY GENERATOR. It was in that state that she decided to—

  hide the evidence

  —bury Ashley.

  Anger and betrayal aside, it felt wrong to just leave the girl like they’d left all the others she’d watched die.

  Besides, it felt good to use the shovel to slice into the world that wanted to only do her harm. It felt right to put Ashley inside of that hole and seal her up.

  So Jessie wouldn’t have to see what she’d done.

  So she could—

  be at peace

  —forget.

  The hole was just deep enough when Kelly pinged. And now Jessie wished she hadn’t answered it, because what she learned then stole that blessed numbness away from her, leaving her spirit even more crushed and bleeding.

  Rather than show gratitude for her efforts in exposing a vulnerability to their system, Arc had publicly branded Jessie as a traitor. What was worse, they invited others to hunt her down, like she was just another bit of code in their morbid game, another of their bought-and-paid-for Playe
rs.

  It didn’t take a genius to know what goal her death served. It would shut her up so Arc could go on acting as if nothing were wrong. It would boost their ratings. It would keep the money flowing into their glutted coffers.

  “Fuck it all!” she screamed in anguish. She hurled her Link against the far wall and buried her face in her hands. She just wanted to crawl into a corner and die. Tears of rage spilled down her cheeks. “Fuck them! Fuck Arc! Fuck everyone to fucking hell!”

  The voice inside her head kept nagging at her to move: Get going. Get the fuck going! They’re going to be here soon. They’re going to kill you.

  But she just couldn’t seem to do it. The strength was gone from her legs. She stumbled down the hallway of the empty building, crashing against the walls like one of the silver pinballs in Mister Casey’s antique machines. Unable to hold herself up anymore, she slipped down to the floor and sobbed into her hands. The tears mixed with the filth from the hole she’d been digging outside. They washed away the blood that both she and Ashley had spilled.

  She wished she could have it back, the numbness. Sitting there on the dirty floor, the rough, worn, moldy smelling carpet beneath her, guilt and rage flowed through her with no end in sight.

  Sabumnin?

  The whisper inside her head was her former instructor’s, like a second conscience chastising her, as it had so often done in the past. You must be water, the voice would always remind her. Remember: Flow around and beyond the stone which casts itself in your path.

  It was the third principle of hapkido: Yu. But while the idea had always helped guide her in the past, she shunned it now. She was tired of being pliant. Sometimes, bending around an obstacle wasn’t the answer. Sometimes you had to destroy—

  Sabumnin Jessica.

  The insistent whisper puzzled her, the way it intruded in her mind, competed with her thoughts. But even more than that, he had never once called her Sabumnin in real life. The title was reserved for masters of the art, instructors, like Rupert. So why would she think of herself as such? She was no master.

  Sabumnin Jessica, you must be strong now. It is time for you to be hard, like the rock.

  She shook her head, as if to dislodge his voice from her. It was her own mind mocking her for dismissing Yu by forcing her to see how ridiculous it was to ignore all of her training.

  She tried to push him from her mind, but it kept whispering to her, grating at her until she launched herself from the floor with a scream that tore the skin from her throat.

  “Stop it! Stop it stop it STOP IT!”

  She slammed her fists against the wall repeatedly as she staggered toward the door. But her survival instinct forced her to stop and retrieve her undamaged Link. To go outside without the device, without first connecting it to Kwanjangnim Rupert so he wouldn’t attack her, would be reckless.

  Taking a deep breath, she brushed the device off and returned it to the pouch in the thigh of her fitted gaming pants.

  “I’m going, all right?” she shouted. “You happy? Good! Now shut the fuck up!”

  She pushed the Link into the socket to connect. He wasn’t the boss of her anymore. Nobody was. All of them, all of the damn noisy voices in her head — Rupert’s and her mother’s, her grandfather’s, all of them now dead — they all just needed to shut the hell up and let her think for herself for once.

  The voice went silent. Satisfied, she slammed out into the bright sunlight, determined to finish what she’d begun, starting with burying her dead.

  Chapter 2

  Ashley was waiting for her just outside the door, just as she had when she attacked before, only this time she was dead. The muddy, bloodied corpse of her former best friend and worst enemy launched itself at Jessie just as she exited the building. Instinctively, Jessie turned, meeting the brunt of the attack head on, though she wasn’t prepared for it. All she managed to get out before being slammed to the ground was a startled, “No!”

  Stars exploded before her eyes when her head hit the dirt. Her vision tunneled. She was dimly aware of the zombie’s clumsy attempt to pull itself back onto her body, aware that it wanted to feed. But the darkness crowded in until consciousness was no more than a pinprick of light in her mind.

  Use me, her former master’s voice instructed. I can stop her.

  She tried to focus, to envision him coming to her aid, but the image before her mind was only of darkness and dirt.

  Searing pain exploded in her as Ashley’s teeth sunk deep into the meat of her shoulder. The pinprick of white expanded, became bright red, wrenching Jessie back to herself.

  She screamed, as much in anger as in pain, and brought the fist of her other hand blindly up and across her body in the direction of the weight bearing down on her. She felt her knuckles glance off Ashley’s back, but it didn’t stop the attack. The angle was wrong.

  She tried again, ratcheting her arm back and twisting her torso, then firing the fist across her chest at a more acute angle. This time she felt the impact, jarring up her arm and into her elbow. Agony tore through her other arm, arced down her side as the bite cut deeper. She repeated the motion, again and again and again, thrusting her arm back and forth like a piston in an engine. Yet Ashley still would not unclamp her teeth from her shoulder.

  Jessie’s cry turned into a whimper. She could feel the teeth close to the bone, clamping down like a vise, reaching to the sinew at the very heart of her shoulder. It felt like her arm was being torn away. She thought she was going to vomit.

  Her arm was tiring. The blows pummeling the dead girl about the neck and head grew weaker, less effective, not that they had been very effective to begin with. One blow reflected off the girl’s ear. Jessie felt the delicate flesh break open, the cartilage snap and tear. She kept aiming for the same spot until her hand was covered in blood and bits of gore and her knuckles were shredded. But Ash remained attached.

  Jessie knew she couldn’t keep this up. The burning in her good shoulder was beginning to equal the raw pain in the other.

  She did the only thing she could think of, which was to reach up again, her arm shaking with exhaustion, and pressed her hand against the dead girl’s face. She found the soft cavity that had been the eye socket, the same one she’d nearly blinded over an hour before. The flesh was thick and swollen from the earlier injury.

  Her thumb sank in with a wet squelp.

  Ashley’s jaw immediately unhinged. The monster backed away howling and raised both hands to her head.

  “You fucking cunt!” it screamed as it rose to its feet. But then it collapsed again to the ground, where it curled into a quivering ball.

  The shock of hearing Ashley speak froze Jessie where she lay. She clutched at her shoulder, panting, and stared at the girl she thought she’d killed.

  How? How could she still be alive?

  Her shoulder felt swollen and stiff. It felt infected.

  Ashley writhed on the ground, cursing. High above them, the clouds were beginning to fill the sky, crowding out the deep blue with a new palette of grays and whites.

  “Oh, you stupid . . . fucking . . . whore,” Ashley gurgled. She coughed, gagged, then spat up a bloody clot. “You fight like a fucking cunt!”

  Jessie tried to raise herself onto her elbow. New pain flared in her arm, thrusting her onto her back with a grunt of pain. Sticky blood pulsed from the bite, spilled through her fingers and onto the sidewalk. Her shirt was soaked with it.

  She could hear Ashley moving, trying to push herself up. Was she getting ready to attack again? Jessie forced herself to roll onto her side, then pushed up onto her knees to crawl away.

  “You’re . . . you’re dead,” she panted at the ground. Her eyes refused to focus. Blood dripped from her face, from her mouth. She’d bitten her lip when she fell. “I shot you. I saw you die. You’re dead.”

  She glanced back past her injured shoulder. Her arm was dragging, knuckles scraping the rough, hot surface. She tried to lift it, but the effort caused her even more pa
in.

  Ashley was kneeling on the dirt, her hands covering her face. Like water seeping from a cracked dam, blood pulsed between her fingers and ran down her arm. More poured from the side of her head where Jessie had torn off her ear.

  “I killed you.”

  “You wish,” Ashley grunted. “I told you . . . . You’re . . . too soft. Can’t . . . finish anything.”

  She dropped her hands and Jessie could see that the eye was gone, leaving nothing but a ragged hole from which a clear yellowish liquid dripped. The upper lid had been torn away and now dangled by a thin strip of skin. A spasm spread through her body, causing a small spout of blood to erupt from the empty socket.

  Jessie could see the hole in Ashley’s shirt where the bullet had gone in, directly over her heart, just above her left breast. But the shirt was twisted, pulled down. The collar hung open, exposing the hole in her flesh higher up. The bullet had entered closer to her shoulder, missing Ashley’s heart altogether.

  “I checked,” Jessie said, gagging on the blood in her mouth. “You were dead. You should have stayed dead.”

  “And let . . . you have . . . all the fun?”

  Ashley lurched to her feet, fell, then tried again.

  “No, Ash. Please. I—”

  Pain and hatred twisted her old friend’s face. She laughed weakly and a thick red bubble appeared on her lips, then burst. She stepped toward Jessie, stumbled sideways, overcorrected.

  Get her! Jessie commanded Master Rupert. Stop her!