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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  She already had their identifier codes typed in. All she’d have to do is reinsert the device and give the command.

  She reached over and her fingers brushed the surface of the Link.

  “No. You need to be stronger. One way or the other, you can’t do anything about it anyway.”

  But her fingers seemed to have a mind of their own. They slipped over the surface of the Link, skimming through directories, opening folders. She was delving deeper inside the codex than anyone had a right to.

  A dialog box popped open and asked if she was sure she wanted to open the next file. Even as she tapped YES, she frowned. This was the first time it had asked her that.

  The screen went completely blank.

  “What in the—”

  But a loud crash from the front of the building jolted her attention away. She threw the Link to the ground and hurried out into the darkened hallway. The automatic light sensor was smashed, a casualty of her earlier rampage. In the lobby though, between the inner and outer doors, lights blazed. The front door stood wide open, swinging back and forth. Above her, a vent rattled.

  “Just the wind.”

  But the wind couldn’t turn doorknobs.

  “Hello?”

  She’d never felt so alone in her entire life. Alone, yet anything but.

  The shut doors to several of the other rooms rattled in their frames, as if people were inside trying to get out.

  Just the storm.

  Or Live Players.

  “I have a gun!” she yelled.

  There was no answer.

  Her mind considered the dead in the woods surrounding the compound. Had they somehow managed to get in?

  She thought about Ashley. Now she regretted not doing to her what she’d done to Master Rupert. Would she come back? Had she been infected when Rupert’s bone impaled her arm?

  Should’ve broken her neck.

  It was too late now.

  The inner door slammed shut, pitching her into darkness, rendering her blind until her eyes adjusted to the new gloom. The feeble light from the room behind her was only a dim patch on the wall and floor, and it didn’t illuminate much.

  Step after agonizing step, she approached the front.

  She felt the knob tremble in her palm, felt the resistance as the wind wrestled her for ownership of the door. With some effort, she managed to get it open again, flooding her and the hallway behind with light.

  The reception area was empty.

  “The wind. That’s all. Just the wind.”

  It howled defiantly outside.

  Jessie took hold of the outer door and began to push it closed. This time she’d be sure to latch and lock it. The wind pounded at her, whipping her hair about her face. The knob was slick with rain and she lost her grip, wrenching her wrist and spinning her around. The edge caught her injured shoulder and she collapsed to her knees as her legs went to mush.

  “Son of a bitch!” she screamed.

  The door slammed against the wall with a terrible noise, then rebounded. Jessie drew back to avoid getting hit. Outside, the storm roared. Rain whipped in, dousing the carpet, spraying her.

  A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, and for a fraction of a second she thought she saw someone standing out there, arms extended, their fingers splayed in yearning. Thunder crashed over her, a living thing with weight, roiling and cursing, rattling its celestial chains and shredding the clouds until they fell to the earth in a million tiny pieces.

  Another bolt, distant this time, and in the afterglow, Jessie saw that the figure was only a tree.

  She hadn’t realized how loud the storm had grown. The rain wasn’t as heavy anymore, but it was blowing in parallel to the ground, first in one direction, then another.

  Jessie stood and caught the door to steady it. She stared out into the squall, her wet hair whipping about her neck. Several more bolts of lightning lit up the night, but like the last, these were distant, their thunder muted by the wail of the wind.

  In the distance, weakly illuminated by the security lamps, she could see the diaphanous veil of the chain link fence. Beyond it, the woods were a ribbon of black so complete that it seemed a chasm between the earth and the charcoal sky above.

  Another gust buffeted her, rocking her back a step. She decided she’d had enough fresh air and began to shut the door. The fence would hold. And as long as the power remained on, it would send its lethal charge through it and keep her safe.

  The moaning sound — it had been there all along, a low rumble, half whistle, half groan — suddenly grew into a fierce shriek. It lifted the hair on her neck and froze her in place.

  It’s just the wind.

  But it was unlike any wind she’d ever heard before.

  It charged up the hill, getting louder as it came. It roared through the trees, snapping the strong and diseased alike. She could hear them crashing to the ground, could feel the earth shudder beneath her feet. It was like a thousand elephants stamping their way to her.

  The wind reached the fence and passed through it like a spirit. Jessie could only see the wire shudder a moment before the tempest was upon her, a black shadow so huge it felt as if the world had fallen into a hole. The wind stripped the door from her grip and flung her hard against the counter. Her feet slipped on the slick surface and she fell. With a screech of tearing metal, the entire building began to quake.

  Then, just as suddenly, the wind reversed direction and sucked her forward.

  Jessie scrabbled for something to grab. The door clipped her thigh and slammed shut with such force that it would have taken off a hand or foot if they’d been in the opening. The frame splintered and the door was suddenly gone, sucked out into the night.

  Jessie lost her grip then. Screaming, she flew out through the opening and landed on the grass. She turned in time to see the corner of the roof peel away like the lid from a sardine can. A moment later it slammed back down again.

  She managed somehow to get back inside, but knew she couldn’t stay. Half the roof was gone. Windows were exploding in the rooms. Foam tiles were falling like leaves from the ceiling.

  Back in the room, she had an unobstructed view of the clouds through the girders. An air duct crumpled and crashed to the floor.

  She stuffed what she could carry into the duffle bag and backpack. Then, dodging panels as they fell, she slung everything onto her back.

  She made it only halfway to the front door before the foundation began to collapse, pulling the roof with it. Fluorescent light fixtures crashed, bulbs exploded. Darkness swept through the building.

  Jessie turned and ran for the emergency exit at the other end of the hall. But when she got there, she found it was chained shut. Both exits were blocked and the building was coming down.

  Chapter 8

  A cell phone rings in a darkened room. It’s a newer model device with satellite connectivity, four terabytes of storage, and a high resolution camera, though the owner has never found any need for pictures. Yet nearly every single spare byte has been used up. The memory contains a partial set of decryption keys to Arc Ware’s iVZ codex and supporting applications. Only two other people know of the phone’s existence and what it holds. One is the owner’s wife. The second is the man at the other end of the call.

  As for the room, it’s rundown, unimaginatively furnished, and smells distinctly of dirty socks. There are battered suitcases at the foot of the bed, already packed, toothbrushes on the cracked bathroom sink. The faucet drips. In the motel’s forty-year history, it has always dripped.

  The phone rings a second time, a harsh jangle, nothing fancy or jaunty or cute. It’s just a ring, like the old landlines used to do. The man often wishes he could go back to that time, when phones actually rang instead of sang, or chirped, or buzzed. When they were called telephones instead of Links and they talked to each other through wires and didn’t tap into a device implanted inside your brain. A time when corporations didn’t secretly monitor the traffic through those
devices, and governments were impotent to stop them.

  He answers before it can ring again: “Yeah?”

  His voice is gruff, gravelly as much from age as the lack of a good night’s sleep. From a good many such sleepless nights, in fact. He sounds resigned. It’s three-thirty in the morning and, to be perfectly frank, the call doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

  “You okay to talk?”

  No name, no self-identification. Not just yet.

  The man sits up in his bed and swings an arm around and rests it gently on his wife’s bare shoulder as she begins to stir. “Shh,” he tells her, pressing a thumb against the microphone hole on his phone. “It’s just Constipole. Go back to sleep.”

  He turns back, shifts the thumb to the side, and asks what’s changed. He doesn’t expect it to be much — it rarely is — but his instructions are explicitly clear: notify him first if anything happens, no matter what. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s nothing.

  So, convinced that this is just another one of those calls, he’s already halfway back asleep himself. “Go ahead,” he murmurs.

  “Senator,” the voice on the other end of the line begins. After all these years and contrary to the man’s requests not to call him that anymore, the caller occasionally slips. “We just intercepted a transmission on one of the black streams.”

  Lawrence Abrams, the former three-term senator from Ohio, is still not alarmed. He’s been monitoring those streams for years now, ever since his ouster from the government, indeed from the very country he so faithfully served. Very little surprises him anymore, especially not when it comes to things people say on the black streams. He grunts noncommittally.

  Most of the chatter is just self-masturbatory banter, bands of conspiracy theorists playing one-upmanship for their mutual entertainment. It amuses him that they’re right sometimes and don’t even realize it; most of the time, however, they’re dead wrong.

  Other times the chatter is from known anarchists pledging to blow things up, to disrupt “life as we know it.” They’re the ones who make his life difficult. They don’t even get the irony of their own words. Life as it currently is could surely benefit from being disrupted.

  “What is it this time?” he asks. He hopes the news isn’t about some new ploy to take down the Stream. As much as he wants to do the same himself, it would be disastrous if anyone were to actually succeed. At least in the chaotic manner those people fantasize about.

  His thoughts shift and he thinks for a moment that maybe it’s a group finally owning up to the recent spat of network outages. Curiously, nobody has taken responsibility for any of them, nobody credible, anyway. For the past week, the anarchists have all been playing a game of Guess Who.

  There have been three major metropolitan outbreaks in the last ten days, plus at least a dozen smaller ones in rural areas. All were quickly contained, yet he has no doubt that scores of people have been infected. It’s difficult to get actual figures, since Arc controls Media, and the coverage has been tightly restricted.

  “Is it about the girl? Have they caught her?” he asks. He still doesn’t know what to think about this latest development.

  “Maybe. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s the contingency, sir,” Constipole says. “It looks like someone might’ve triggered it.”

  Abrams’s body jolts at the word. He gets to his feet without thinking. The sheet covering him falls away, exposing his middle-aged body, the whiteness of his belly, and the ripples of cellulite on his thighs. The filtered Santa Fe moonlight coming in through the flimsy motel curtains does his naked torso no favors. Had he woken with a nocturnal erection (he hadn’t), it would be completely gone already. That’s how badly the words affect him.

  Of course, he’s not aware of his body at the moment, neither its flaccidness nor the hasty retreat of his testicles into his abdominal cavity. “What did you say?” he hisses. He’s wide awake now, electric.

  He glances anxiously over his shoulder at his wife, but she’s back to snoring in the delicate way that he finds both adorable and annoying. A breeze from the window stirs the air, causes her wispy hair to flutter like ancient cobwebs. He notices that the shadows on her cheeks are especially dark tonight. The cancer has worn her body away, though not as badly as the years of running and hiding he’s subjected her to.

  “On purpose, sir. It looks intentional.”

  For Abrams, the elaboration is completely unnecessary. He knows exactly what Constipole meant the first time.

  He takes a moment longer before responding. He lets the news rattle around inside his head while he composes himself, composes a reply that doesn’t show how much the news has thrown him. Ever since his team uncovered the countermeasure Arc developed to prevent anyone from stealing the codex, he’s been living in fear of those words. The Contingency, if allowed to run to completion would threaten years of hard work and leave them with nothing to show for it.

  He passes his fingers through his hair and exhales through lips drawn tight against his teeth. “Okay,” he says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. He’s not just scared, he’s terrified. Shitless. “How do we know? There’ve been a lot of disruptions lately. Maybe Arc is just reconfiguring the codex in response to the hacking.”

  “Unlikely, sir. We’ve analyzed the pattern of outages, and it has all the characteristics of being programmed. We’re seeing non-essential towers being taken offline, and the signal strength is being heavily modulated over the heaviest usage areas.”

  “Why would Arc—?”

  “It may not be them,” Constipole cuts in. “From the chatter we’ve gathered, none of it is coming from their headquarters. They’ve gone totally dark, which suggests this may have taken them by surprise, too.”

  Abrams needs more time to think, so he asks a question he doesn’t really need an answer for: “What’s the latest damage?”

  Constipole obliges: “Several rural communities are currently under quarantine. Arc has sent civilian subcontractors to contain their assets, but they’re just going through the motions. Nebraska’s been hit especially hard. They’ve got a lot of mining operations and at-risk assets. Our man inside the governor’s mansion says they’re about to declare a state of emergency.”

  “If not Arc, then who triggered it? And how?”

  “We still don’t know yet. All we can say is that a codex access request was traced to somewhere inside the arcade.”

  “The girl? The hacker?”

  “We don’t know who, sir.”

  “Well, how long before we do know?”

  “That depends on how the response progresses. The contingency was built to give Arc time to identify and isolate the breach and eliminate the threat if necessary. Non-essential and remote functions are the weak points in the system, which is why they’ve been shut down first. We expect their diagnostics to run over the next few days. There’s a lot of code to wade through.”

  “And if they can’t remove the threat?”

  “Shutdowns will accelerate and spread into increasingly larger and more vital functions. A week, maybe.”

  “How much access have we lost so far?”

  “About five percent.”

  Abrams sucks in a sharp breath. He’s been working for years for just the right moment to usurp control of the entire network, and now he senses it’s about to slip right through his fingers. “Damn it!”

  His wife rolls over. She’s awake now. Her worried eyes are dark pools that make him feel cold and alone. Dead eyes. Eyes that resurrect memories of the first Omegas. He shivers, as if to shake off the way they feel on his skin.

  “Honey?” Janey whispers. She holds her head in that way that tells him she’s worried about him, and this makes him feel terrible. She’s given herself selflessly to his cause, while he has been helpless to reciprocate. “Everything okay?”

  He doesn’t answer, only sighs. There will be time to comfort her in a moment. He
already knows that nobody will be getting any more sleep tonight.

  “We need to get inside,” he says into the Link. “Do whatever it takes.”

  He can almost sense Constipole nodding hundreds of miles away. “I thought you might say that. One of our sleepers is already there, sir. I took the liberty of activating them.”

  “Make sure Arc doesn’t catch a single whiff of our involvement. And once they figure out the trigger, take it out. We can’t risk anything at this point. We’re too close.”

  “Are you sanctioning lethal force?”

  “If it’s necessary to stop this, then yes.”

  Chapter 9

  Jessie woke from a dead sleep to the sound of splashing water, like someone was pouring it out of a bottomless pitcher onto the floor.

  She realized she was thirsty, which made her lick her lips. Which made her wince and reminded her of how close she’d come to being buried beneath the walls of a collapsing building. She’d barely escaped, but not before almost knocking herself out.

  She raised her fingers to the bruises on her face and groaned at how tender everything felt.

  The storm last night had been like nothing she’d ever seen in her life. She’d been in downpours before, some much heavier than this one had been, but the wind—

  It was like the inside of a hurricane.

  With the building practically disintegrating around her and with one door inaccessible and the other one chained shut, she did the only thing she could think of at the time, which was to go out the window.

  As she jumped, the duffel on her back caught on the frame and threw her off balance. Her instinct was to roll as she fell, but her foot slipped and caught at an awkward angle beneath her. She got a mouthful of knee as a result, and she collapsed to the ground.

  The hit should’ve knocked her unconscious, and under normal circumstances it probably would have except that she had too much adrenaline pumping through her.

  Fighting the squall for every inch, she’d barely made it twenty feet with only her pack and bo staff before the walls of the building folded in on themselves and the whole thing came crashing down behind her.