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

by Tanpepper, Saul

She could hear her dead hapkido master moan somewhere near the grave she’d dug. He seemed so far away. Why wasn’t he obeying her?

  She whipped her head around, but he wasn’t there. The moan repeated, coming from behind the mound of dirt, from inside the hole.

  “So nice of you,” Ashley grunted, her voice like the ragged ends of shattered bones grinding against one another. “How nice that you’ve dug your own grave. Hope you don’t mind sharing it.”

  The shovel lay across the sidewalk, far from where Jessie had left it. Even at twenty feet, she could see the bloody handprint on the handle — Ashley’s hand — and she could picture the scene as if she’d witnessed it instead of being inside on her Link: Ashley lifting the shovel to strike the zombie, then dropping it to the ground as the wound in her chest sapped away her strength. Maybe she’d settled for pushing him into the hole instead. Either way, that’s where he’d ended up. Down there, he couldn’t get to Ashley. Down there, he couldn’t get out.

  But Jessie could make him climb out. She controlled him.

  Ashley’s footsteps scraped closer. Jessie crawled over to the grave. Now she could see him, chest-deep in the hole. Climb out! Pull yourself out—

  But Ashley was right behind her. It was too late for Kwanjangnim to help.

  Jessie lurched to her feet, letting out a short cry of pain before clamping her mouth shut. Ashley laughed weakly, her breath a drowning wheeze passing through her battered mouth.

  Jessie turned to face her. “I should have put the bullet in your skull.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Ashley replied. With each step, more blood pulsed from the blackened hole below her neck. The hole in her face had already stopped oozing.

  Jessie took a step back, felt her heel sink into the edge of the pile of dirt behind her. Why hadn’t she shot Ash in the head? Why had she jerked her arm down at the last possible moment and aimed instead for the heart?

  Because a bullet to the skull is something you do to quiet a zombie.

  And Ashley hadn’t been a zombie.

  “I’m sick of killing,” she said. She slid her foot back, feeling for the shovel.

  “Too bad. I’m not.”

  Ashley’s knee partially collapsed and she stumbled. Jessie took the opportunity to bend down and grab the shovel. The handle slipped through her fingers and slid down the other side of the dirt pile out of reach. Ashley was already getting back to her feet.

  How can she still be alive? How can she possibly have anything left to fight with?

  Hatred. If anyone knew how powerful a force it could be, Jessie did.

  She spun around to retrieve the shovel, but Ashley was too quick. Jessie’s wrist slammed into the metal handle as Ashley crashed onto her back. The movement brought another explosion of pain from her shoulder.

  They fell to the ground once again.

  “Stop,” Jessie begged.

  The pile of dirt collapsed beneath their weight. She tried to warn Ash, but they were already falling in.

  Jessie landed on her back on top of Ashley, knocking the air from both their lungs. Ashley groaned. Kwanjangnim groaned.

  Get out of the hole, Jessie!

  The order was in her master’s voice. Her thoughts seemed to alternate between her own and his. Sometimes they overlapped. Maybe she really was going crazy.

  She tried to get up, but her head jerked back and she fell, landing hard on Ashley’s stomach. She had a handful of her hair and wouldn’t let go. Jessie could hear the labor in her breathing, wheezing and bubbly, dying, and it made her both angry and sad. Why couldn’t the girl just give up?

  With some effort, she managed to turn herself around. Kwanjangnim had fallen beneath them both, his head stuck into a corner of the hole and twisted at an awkward angle. He was moaning, his mouth opening and shutting in the wet mud. One arm flailed blindly above him, snatching at the dirt and collapsing the sides onto them.

  “Let go of me,” Jessie shouted.

  Ashley tried to raise her other arm. Her face twisted and went white. A scream burst from her mouth. Halfway between her shoulder and elbow, a jagged end of a piece of bone had come through the skin. But it wasn’t hers, it was Rupert’s.

  “Let go of me,” Jessie repeated.

  She wouldn’t.

  Use me, Sabumnim.

  Jessie’s eyes flicked over to her master’s face. It was slack, devoid of emotion, the eyes crusted over with dirt.

  She pictured the elbow of his free, unbroken arm bending, the hand twisting to reach behind Ashley. The fingers released the clump of dirt they’d been holding and drifted down as she imagined.

  “Let go of me, Ash.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The angle was wrong again. Rupert couldn’t get to her. Jessie pulled back, lifting Ashley up a few inches. Fresh blood spurted from her chest and she cried out as the bone piercing her arm shifted.

  Kwanjangnim’s hand disappeared behind her head.

  Ashley’s good eye fluttered open. “What are you doing?”

  “Let go of me or he’ll kill you.”

  Ashley didn’t speak for a moment.

  “I mean it, Ash.”

  “I lied,” she finally said. Something in the shape of her mouth told Jessie she was grinning. Or trying to. “Your mother’s alive.”

  She’s stalling. Focus!

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I can prove it.”

  “I said shut up!”

  The zombie’s fingers found their mark, the soft spot at the base of Ashley’s skull. “Do it,” Jessie said, and pictured what she intended for him to do.

  Alarm erased the grin on Ashley’s face. “Jessie?” she said.

  “You said I couldn’t finish anything,” Jessie hissed at her. She tried to pull away again, but Ashley’s fingers were too tangled, too locked in her death grip of her hair that even if she’d wanted to let go, she couldn’t. “But you’re wrong. I’m finishing this. Right here, right now.”

  “No, wait! I know things, Jess. Please. I can help you. I’ve cracked the codex.”

  The words were barely a whisper, so faint that Jessie almost lowered her ear to Ashley’s mouth.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “I know how to . . . . I can remove your implant.”

  This time Jessie hesitated. She’d always hated the device in her head, had always wanted it out. But now she knew that removing it would come at too great a price. She needed it now so that she could access the files on her Link. She was sure they contained the key to curing Reanimation. Her sacrifice was small if it brought Humanity’s salvation.

  She closed her eyes and formed the picture again in her mind, just as her instructor had taught her a few days before. She imagined his fingers digging through Ashley’s skin, down through the muscle to the vertebrae.

  “I can remove your implant,” Ashley begged.

  “Me too,” Jessie replied.

  She turned her head away just as Ashley began to shriek. It lasted only a moment before there was a soft pop. Ashley’s body jerked once, then went still. Blood coated the floor of the grave and what remained of Kwanjangnim’s fingerless hand.

  This time, she really was dead.

  Jessie buried her face in the folds of the girl’s shirt and wept.

  Be the stone, Sabumnin. It is time.

  The words kept repeating themselves in her head until, at last, Jessie raised her face and peered past the mutilated body of her one-time childhood friend, the girl she’d shared everything with. She laid a hand on her and detected no heartbeat, no rise and fall of her breathing. And if there might be any doubt whether she really was dead, the missing chunk of flesh from the back of her neck dispelled it.

  Finish the job, Sabumnin.

  Her master still lay were he’d fallen, his head still crooked and his mouth agape and filling with mud. He appeared to be chewing it.

  You must finish this, my dear. Finish it and then me. I’m useless to you now. I am a burden.

  W
ith some effort, and not an inconsiderable amount of pain, Jessie managed to disentangle herself from the dead girl’s grip and drag herself out of the hole. She lay on her back on the muddy ground and stared at the sky until the cloud covering the sun moved away. The heat pounded mercilessly at her, baking the blood on her skin into a thick, hard crust.

  Blood swear? Ashley’s voice floated up out of the darkness of the past. Promise you won’t tell my parents?

  How many times had she made Jessie promise some small, insignificant thing? How many times had they consummated the promise by cutting their palms with a shard of glass or metal? Their skin inevitably healed afterwards, no evidence left to tell of their secret conspiracies. But each one of those promises was like a scar on Jessie’s soul. Each one now felt as if it had been reopened. They would never heal. They would bleed forever.

  Get up, Sabumnin.

  Jessie closed her eyes and wished the thought away, but the tears welled up behind her lids.

  Get up. Get up! They’re coming.

  Her eyes snapped open. The Live Players were coming for her, coming to kill her, whether for sport or spite, coming to collect their reward so that Arc could keep running their precious game while millions looked on in mindless fascination.

  But as the sun disappeared behind a cloud and a warm breeze caressed her cheek and dried her tears, Jessie closed her eyes and drifted into an exhausted sleep.

  * * *

  The rain woke her hours later, splashing its big, fat, sloppy tears over her face. Jessie didn’t move until it turned into a steady downpour.

  She could hear Kwanjangnim Rupert moving around at the bottom of the hole. With a start, she jerked upright, then swooned as the wave of nausea, fatigue, and pain swept over her. Her arm was stiff, but the worst of the pain had slipped away. And though the wound had largely stopped bleeding, the rain dissolved the clots, which ushered forth new blood. The skin felt hot to the touch.

  She looked over the edge of the hole and saw the two corpses still in the position she’d left them. Ash’s skin had turned to the color of the sky, the color of her name.

  Jessica. Jessica . . . .

  The voice was little more than a whisper now inside of her head.

  Kwanjangnim Rupert’s stump of a hand pawed at the collapsing mud. One leg lifted, fell, lifted, and fell again, as if he thought he was walking.

  Sabumnin Jessica. Be the stone. Finish the job. Keep fighting.

  Slowly, stiffly, she lowered herself into the shallow grave. She brought the point of the shovel down until it rested against his throat. Then, saying only that she was sorry, she placed her foot on the blade and pushed.

  The last whisper she heard in her mind was Thank you.

  Chapter 3

  “Answer, damn it!” Eric muttered. He glanced over at the slumbering form on the bed and winced when his mother turned onto her side and murmured something. But she didn’t wake. “Come on, Harrick. Answer your damn Link!”

  He slipped silently over to the corner by the window, the furthest point in the hospital room away from where the frail body lay, yet still within sight of the television mounted in the corner near the ceiling. Someone had already muted it. But though he flipped through the Streams, there was still nothing from the island, no news, no live feed.

  His mother had thankfully been asleep when the press conference was made announcing his sister as a traitor. The shock would’ve killed her for sure.

  And on the subject of betrayal, he too had been betrayed. He had confided in Harrick, his boss, the details of Jessie’s break in to the island. And she had assured him that Arc was going to finally go public that their system was vulnerable, that it had been breached, and that someone was using the Stream to assume control of the implants inside people’s heads while they were still alive. This was the very scenario the public had feared when the devices were first recommended for widespread use a decade back. Both Arc and the government had promised to put systems into place to prevent such abuse, but obviously they were not infallible.

  He’d believed Arc would be happy that Jessie had gone back to stop it. He’d been wrong. They had all been wrong.

  The press conference opened, not with the admission, but with an announcement that a new twist on The Game, one where live gamers would be allowed into the Long Island arcade to battle the dead, would be introduced. And both he and Kelly had been shocked. How could Arc possibly continue as if nothing were wrong? It was as if all the network glitches lately weren’t a problem, as if they had been intended. But people had died during those outages. They were still dying.

  Finally, when the reporter pressed them on the subject of hacking, Arc simply lied about the details, both the severity and the cause. They accused Jessie of being the hacker; the accusation allowed them to invite their gamers to kill her, both remote Operators who controlled Undead Players, as well as Live Players.

  Jessie might’ve stood a chance against the Undead. But real people? She was sure to be captured and killed within a day or two. The odds players put it at just under forty hours, and that long only because the day was more than half over and a storm was rolling in.

  He could see in the ticker scrolling along the bottom of the screen showing the company’s stock. It had soared since the announcement. It should be falling, crashing. There should’ve been panic. The network was fragile; the incidents he’d been called upon to respond to over the past couple of weeks, not to mention the reports of outbreaks elsewhere in the country, should have put everyone into a state of high alert.

  What the hell is wrong with us?

  Just as they always seemed to do, Arc simply spun the situation to keep the money rolling in.

  He made a fist. He wanted to punch the wall. Instead, he cupped his hand over his mouth and waited as the connection made its way through the Stream to its intended target. The long delay was just another indication that something was wrong with the network.

  Outside the window, thunder rumbled. Clouds were rolling in.

  Finally, the connection clicked. “Harrick here,” his boss said.

  “What the hell did you tell them?” Eric demanded. “Why is Arc going after my sister?”

  “Officer Daniels? Where are you? Are you at the hospital?”

  Alarm bells went off in his head, but he was too upset to heed them.

  “You were supposed to tell them that Jessie was going after the hacker, that she’d found out who it was, not that she was the hacker!”

  “You need to calm dow—”

  “I will not calm down! There’s a death warrant out for my sister!”

  He ducked around, anxiously hoping his body would block his voice. His mother was still very weak. She’d been starved for several days, hadn’t had any water. Her kidneys had failed and for a little while it seemed she might not make it. Or, at the very least, she might need an organ transplant. After an especially aggressive series of hydrating treatments and dialysis, the organs finally kicked in. But she was still not out of the woods. She needed her rest.

  “I told them exactly what you told me, Officer Daniels, which I’ve since come to find out wasn’t the whole truth, was it?”

  “W-what?” he stammered. “What are you talking about? I never lied to you.”

  “Lies of omission. You withheld vital information that might’ve helped us avoid this whole unfortunate situation in the first place. If you had told me sooner that your sister was attempting to gain access to Gameland, I might’ve been able to intervene. Now one of Arc’s security guards is dead. Understandably, they want blood. An eye for an eye.”

  “Jessie wouldn’t have shot anyone without good reason!”

  “Where are you, Daniels? Why don’t you come in so we can talk?”

  The alarm bells jangled ever louder. This time he heard them. He looked out the window, drawing the flimsy curtain to the side. The afternoon had turned a silvery gray and the low clouds threatened to spill at any moment. But he saw nothing out of the ordinary
on the ground.

  “I’m home,” he lied. “Talk about what?”

  “About why you knew your sister had stowed away inside Arc’s shuttle, the one carrying the Live Players, and yet you didn’t think it was prudent to pass that bit of information along to me? The commissioner and mayor are riding my ass hard. They want answers. They want to know why you cherry picked what you told me.”

  “I told you what you needed to know to bring this whole charade to an end.”

  “That wasn’t your call to make.”

  “It was Jessie, my sister!”

  “We pulled last night’s Stream lugs. We know the time and duration of the ping between her Link and yours.”

  “You’ve been spying on me?”

  “At Arc’s request, I’ve been keeping tabs on all of you, actually. After that little escapade of hers and her friends, did you really think everyone would just forget about it?”

  Eric leaned his forehead against the cool wall and tried not to hyperventilate. How could he have been so stupid? The department had made him believe the subject of the kids’ break in to Gameland was not to be pursued by anyone. He’d believed the directive had come from the highest levels in Arc, by people who just wanted to sweep the whole incident under the rug. But now he saw that he’d been naïve.

  “Of course they weren’t just going to drop it,” he mumbled.

  “This is Arc we’re talking about.” There was a long silence. “I don’t know what to say, Eric. Maybe she’ll get lucky and they’ll send her someplace easy to serve out her conscription.”

  “There won’t be anything left to conscript,” he told her, turning once more to check on his mother.

  “I think your time would be better spent worrying about yourself now. Your sister’s gone. It’s only a matter of time before they catch her.”

  “What do you care about me?”

  “I care about all my officers, but you in particular. Ever since I took over as captain of the department, I’ve been in your corner, fighting the stigma that the Necrotics Crime Division has always had to bear. You see, unlike so many others, I can see a future where the Controlled Undead play an even greater role in daily life, which means that NCD will also become more important.”