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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  She felt herself relax. She couldn’t believe they actually let him go, but there he was.

  He stopped.

  “Call him,” Jo said.

  “What?”

  “Call Grant over to you.”

  Jessie frowned. Call him over?

  “Do it now! Loudly.”

  “G-Grant?”

  “Louder.”

  “Grant!”

  He started walking toward her again.

  “Good. Now stand up.”

  “No.”

  “Stand up or we shoot him.”

  “You’re just going to shoot me.”

  “We’re not joking.”

  “He’s got a family.”

  “We’ve all got families, chicka. Why do you think I’m in this hell hole? I got mouths to feed too, you know.”

  Jessie could feel the last of the sunlight illuminating her face as she stood. Her last chance to untie herself was gone, wasted away while she just sat there like a complete idiot. Grant had given her a perfect opportunity and she’d just let it pass her by.

  She watched him come. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Had they drugged him? Or maybe he was afraid they’d put a bullet into his head if he made any sudden movements. She kept expecting to hear a gunshot, but none came.

  He stopped again.

  “Call him to you.”

  Don’t do it, Grant told her. It’s a trick.

  Jessie sucked in a lungful of air, held it. For a second she thought she’d heard him inside her head.

  “Grant?”

  “Louder,” Jo said.

  “No,” Jessie whispered.

  Can you hear me?

  “Grant? What did they do?”

  You need to run now, honey. Untie yourself and run.

  A terrible noise started coming from his Link, loud and grating. They were sending some sort of interference. Startled, Jessie stumbled onto her side. The noise only got louder.

  Run!

  She looked up to see Grant shambling toward her again, his arms outstretched. Other figures had joined him, stumbling, lumbering out of the shadows, drawn by the noise from his Link.

  “You killed him!” Jessie screamed. “You killed him.”

  She stuck the end of the rope on her wrists into her mouth and pulled. The knot quickly came undone. She flung the cord away. Now her feet.

  Grant was more than halfway to her now.

  She bent down and tugged at it, but the knot remained. She’d pulled on the wrong end before, and now it was hopelessly tangled.

  A shot rang out, and the noise coming from the Link stopped. “Stand up, bitch!” Jo told her.

  “No.”

  Jessie, I’m sorry.

  “Shut up, Grant,” she mumbled as she pried at the rope at her ankles. God, why didn’t her fingers work?

  Can you hear me?

  “Yes, I can fucking hear you, Grant! It’s this god damn knot!”

  I should’ve believed you sooner.

  She could hear the scraping of his feet now on the road. The scraping of dozens of feet. The sound of their moaning.

  “I said stand the fuck up!”

  She reached over and picked up the Link and tried to smash it against the cement. Finally, the screen cracked, but the horrible sound wouldn’t quit.

  Throw it. Get it away from you!

  Yes, she needed to get rid of it. She stood up and hurled it back up the road. It skipped along past him and he started to turn.

  An instant later, the noise stopped.

  “Sure, now you fucking break.” But she knew it wasn’t broken. They’d stopped sending the interference.

  The Undead hesitated. They were confused. Gone was the noise attracting them to her. Back inside their heads was the irritation pushing them away.

  “Go on now,” Jessie whispered. “Leave me alone.”

  But now the Link inside her pack was making that noise, drawing them back. They resumed marching toward her. And by the sound of their moans, they’d sensed her, sensed her fear, smelled her sweat. They knew she was there. Now, not even the wall was going to stop them.

  To her left, she saw a flash of movement, and a person stepped out from behind the rusted truck. But it wasn’t Rosie. It was the other woman, Penny Smith. They had lied. Emerging with her was her partner Henry Jayco. Rosie wasn’t with them, not that Jessie could see.

  To her right she saw Jo Vail. They were all standing out in the open now, watching, waiting for the Undead to do the job.

  She wondered if Arc would pay them extra for doing it this way. After all, it was good entertainment.

  She didn’t have enough time to figure out the knot. She stood up again and hopped backward until the barrier was at her heels, then she flipped herself over it. The wall was now fifteen feet away. More importantly, so was her sword.

  The long shadows cast by the Undead reached out for her along the ground before disappearing against the wall. Grant was still in front, but now less than twenty feet away. He was moaning and hissing up a storm while inside her head he was telling her to hurry, that he’d been a stubborn ass. He called her Rachel and said he was sorry for what he’d done.

  Jessie glanced up. He was close enough now that she could see how they’d killed him. A thin line of blood glistened beneath his chin. They’d slit his throat. He would’ve died almost instantly.

  That’s what had taken them so long. They’d had to wait until he was reanimated.

  She crawled to the sword and grabbed it and inserted the tip beneath the knot. Grant took another step.

  Fifteen feet.

  She began to saw away.

  Twelve feet.

  But the damn thing was too dull!

  Ten.

  Eight.

  Six.

  He leaned down over her, a mountain of a man, and opened his dead mouth. I’m sorry, Jessie.

  The rope wouldn’t cut!

  Jessie!

  With a yell, she swept her hands up to the side. The blade caught up against the bone before slicing through, wrenching her arm and sending another bolt of pain through her hurt shoulder. At the same time, she rolled in the direction of the swing, narrowly evading his falling body. Grant’s severed head rolled up against the base of the wall and his voice disappeared from her head.

  Grunting now with effort, she jabbed the sword back beneath the knot and began to hack away. It started to fray. But now there were ten, fifteen more Undead closing in on her, blotting out the sun. There were too many now. Even if she could get free—

  “Damn it!”

  She jumped to her feet, grabbed her pack and swung it at the closest zombie, knocking it back a yard, and then fell back against the wall. The Infected immediately resumed its inexorable march toward her. She had no escape but through the portal, and she’d thrown away Grant’s Link with the key on it.

  Hoping against hope, she grabbed Grant’s head with both hands and hopped over to the edifice, where she slammed his face against the portal’s entry pad.

  For a moment, nothing happened. The dead were crowding around her. Then a thin black line appeared before her eyes and began to widen. She could hear the Live Players shouting in anger and dismay. She heard them shooting their pistols, but they couldn’t see her as she was crouched behind the wall of Undead behind her.

  As soon as the opening grew wide enough, she slipped in. A bullet grazed the wall high above her head. She heard it pinging off the inside.

  “Close, damn it! Close!”

  The dead were reaching inside now, stepping in, beginning to crowd the opening. What if it didn’t shut? What if the other side didn’t open?

  Another gunshot, the echo dulled by the material of the wall.

  She had only one chance left. She yanked the EM pistol from the side pocket of her pack and squeezed the trigger, hoping desperately that it wouldn’t short out the mechanism that powered the wall.

  Two Undead fell across the entrance and the door ceased moving.

&nb
sp; “Close, damn it!”

  She pulled them in just as the portal shut, cutting off the yells of the Live Players.

  Chapter 25

  “Well, Officer Daniels, the good news is you’ll live.”

  The staff physician quickly tapped a few notes into the medical record, then set the tablet aside.

  “And the bad news?” Eric asked, wincing as he shifted position on the infirmary’s gurney. He just couldn’t seem to catch his breath no matter which way he lay, and it didn’t help that his wrists were handcuffed to the sides.

  “The bad news is you’ve got a contusion on one of your lungs, the side opposite your broken rib, as if you couldn’t already tell. That you’re even managing to breathe without passing out is something of a victory. I give you credit for that.”

  “The pain is pretty bad,” Eric admitted. What little he could see of his bare arms and lower legs were covered in bruises. His clothes had been taken away, hopefully to be discarded rather than washed. There was no way they were going to get all that blood out of them. “I’m out of breath.”

  “You’ll feel like that for a few more days at least. Sorry, but it can’t be helped. I’m giving you some pain meds, the strongest I’m allowed to prescribe in this place. They’re not nearly as strong as what you need. Plus some heavy duty anticoagulants. We don’t want you throwing a clot that might end up in your brain. Pulmonary embolism is a risk right now.”

  “I’m sure some people wouldn’t be upset if it happened.”

  “Some people,” the doctor said, sighing, “need to be in a different line of work. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “You know who I am, don’t you?” Eric asked. “I work — worked — for NCD.”

  The doctor took his time washing and drying his hands at the sink before returning to the side of the bed. “I don’t subscribe to the same prejudices that most people in the police department seem to be susceptible to. I know who you are, who your father was. Frankly, I’ve always believed that medicine should be as blind as justice.”

  “Turns out justice isn’t very blind at all.”

  The man chuckled cheerlessly. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a cynic. Perhaps I have a more idealistic view of the world and how it should operate than is good for me. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned. I treat all my patients the same way, whether they’re civilians or prisoners or peacekeepers. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter to me who you are or where you came from.”

  “How old are you?”

  The doctor stopped and got a troubled look in his eyes. He nodded. “I’ll be of conscription age in two years.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “Scares the shit out of me. Keeps me up at night. But being angry at you makes no sense. But you didn’t—”

  “Hear that from you,” Eric finished.

  “Nevertheless, you are correct. I suppose this sort of personal philosophy is why I’m here in this dump instead of running my own practice. I won’t play their games.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s why you’re here, too.”

  Eric laid his head back and shut his eyes. “How long are you keeping me?”

  “Overnight.” He pulled one of Eric’s eyelids open with his thumb and shined a light in it to study his pupils. “Another five minutes in that cell and those men would’ve killed you.”

  “Oh, I could’ve lasted at least seven or eight.”

  The doctor snorted. “You’ll want to thank Captain Harrick for stopping them when she did.”

  Harrick. Eric couldn’t figure the woman out. Whose side was she on, anyway? What was she trying to protect?

  She’s on her own side. Everybody is.

  The discomfort filling his body distracted him from those thoughts. Plus, there was an itch on his nose that he couldn’t get to. He tried to scratch it with his shoulder, but twisting wasn’t possible at the moment.

  “Can you tell me what’s happening out there?” he asked, stifling a sneeze. He feared the pain which would wrack his body if he allowed it to happen. “Is it another outbreak?”

  The doctor settled heavily onto a stool. He was a large man — not tall, just wide — a state he attributed to a glandular problem, but the truth was he just liked to eat. Almost as much as he disliked physical exertion. And his favorite food was malt whiskey.

  “Waiting on further word from my colleagues,” he replied, drawing out his words. “At this point, we know there was a bit of a disturbance around town.”

  He actually knew exactly where the main disturbance had been. He was just procrastinating, drawing out the conversation. His next patient was a pre-op examination on a capital punishment prisoner. The woman was scheduled for implantation and conscription, but he wasn’t looking forward to yet another sanctioned murder.

  “Was it an outbreak?” Eric asked again.

  “To be honest, I really don’t know. The news has been spotty and Media less than forthcoming. Nothing official yet.”

  “So, the network is still up?”

  “On and off. All Omegas have been deactivated until further notice, but you probably already knew that.”

  Eric nodded. “So I figured.”

  “At least there’s no threat in that regard. Not unless you count the threat to live individuals having to assume some of their duties.”

  “That would account for the absence of sirens.”

  The doctor sighed. “Couldn’t hear them down here in the dungeons anyway, even if they were going off.” He rolled the stool back to the cabinet, which he unlocked and opened. Inside was a stack of laundered blankets. He could delay his next appointment no longer. “I’m ordering you to spend the next twenty-four hours here. Hopefully you’ll be able to get some rest and heal a bit. If it’s any longer than that, I’ll have to send you up to county, and since I have no privileges up there and can’t control what they do or how they take care of you, I recommend you get better as much as you possibly can.”

  He stood up. “When you get back into holding, it may get rough again. You wouldn’t stand a chance in county lockup.”

  “Where’s the disturbance?” Eric pushed. “Where in town?”

  “Sisters of Mercy Hospital.”

  Eric tried to sit up, but both his manacles and the bruises to his torso prevented him from rising more than a couple inches off the table. He settled back with a pained grunt and squeezed his eyes shut until the wave of nausea passed. “My mother,” he said through gritted teeth. He settled back down.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s a patient there, in ICU.”

  The doctor turned around, frowning. “From what I hear, they’ve evacuated the entire medical complex because of a fire. Look, I’ll be honest with you. There have been casualties. Most of the staff got out.”

  Eric gritted his teeth. Alarm bells were ringing in his head. “What about patients?”

  “The fire gutted nearly the entire complex.”

  “How many patients died?”

  “Most of them. I’m sorry.”

  He hurried out of the exam room without telling Eric that most hadn’t burned to death. They’d been Infected.

  Chapter 26

  Jessie crashed through the icy surface of her sleep with her heart pounding in her chest as if it were trapped beneath the crust of a frozen lake. Her blood coursed so loudly through her ears that she couldn’t even hear herself gasping for air.

  Something had woken her, something outside of her dream. Outside of the memory of her dead hapkido master’s whispers, taunting her, haunting her mind, pinning her down and suffocating her. The release from that dream came as a relief, but was instantly replaced with a new sense of dread: Someone was inside the bike shop with her. Someone or something.

  She forced herself to stop gulping for air, clamping her mouth shut and metering her breaths through her nose so she could hear a little better. So she wasn’t broadcasting her location.

  The EM pistol was in her hand and aimed out into the pitch b
lackness around her, pointing at nothing specific. She couldn’t remember snatching it from between the folds of the sweatshirt she’d pulled off the store rack and was now using as a pillow.

  Slowly, the rasp of her pulse diminished and the silence enveloped her. Yet inside of that vacuum of sound nothing was revealed. The stingy night kept its secrets. She might as well be the last person alive on the planet, or even the last dead one, that’s how still and empty the night felt.

  Except she knew it was just an illusion. People were out there somewhere, people who wished to kill her for profit. Would they come after her? Would they leave the Gameland arcade?

  Grant’s behavior implied that Arc’s bounty only applied if she was captured and killed inside the arcade while the Stream was up, but was that true? Did that mean she could afford to stop worrying now?

  She didn’t think so.

  It seemed so ironic. All her life she’d feared the dead, feared what they had done to her family. Now she pitied them. It was the living she had come to fear and despise.

  You’re just in shock. Snap out of it!

  That was only partially true. Her chaotic exit from inside the wall had left her dazed and traumatized, not to mention feeling more than a little culpable for yet another death. She hadn’t liked Grant, hadn’t trusted him, but he hadn’t deserved to die. Not like that. And now his blood was on her hands.

  You warned him.

  Yes, she’d warned him, had tried to get him not to go out there where the other Live Players were. They’d killed him, sacrificed him in front of the millions of viewers who were undoubtedly following along.

  But when she needed to, she hadn’t hesitated. She’d taken what she’d needed from him and used it to procure her escape from the arcade.

  He knew the risks. And he was already dead.

  After the wall had opened up on the other side, she’d run without regard to where she was going. She didn’t know, didn’t care. She just left Grant’s severed head behind inside the cursed structure. Only much later did she stop and wonder about his family, his wife and daughters. For the next half hour, as her mind operated on autopilot, she ran to escape— not just from the other Live Players who wanted to kill her for money, but from the horror she’d just been a party to.