“She didn’t kill anyone! Arc is lying about that. No, I mean how she managed to even get access to Arc’s ferry in the first place.”
Reggie shook his head.
“She got an invite to The Game. Someone paid for her to be an Operator with one of the new immersive suits.”
“Who?”
“We thought it might’ve been Micah. We thought he’d faked his conscription, but it turns out he hadn’t. We don’t know who bought the invite and the gear. When she’s in The Game, her Link connects her to her Player.”
“Yeah, just like always.”
“Except she’s with her Player now. If I use this to ping her, it breaks the connection and she loses control. I promised only to ping her at noon each day so she’d be expecting it.” He put on the goggles, but didn’t immediately connect. “I hope to god this isn’t a bad time.”
Chapter 33
A distinctive chime sounded from the direction of the door. It was the same tune Jessie used to alert her to a ping from Ashley’s Link. She stared at it for a moment, feeling disoriented, before realizing it was coming from the pocket of the jacket hanging on the wall.
“You do have my Link!” she cried. “That’s my brother pinging me! How did you get my Link?”
She reached out for it, but once again Brother Walter was quicker. He held up a hand, warding her off as he slipped it out and checked the screen. “How is this Ashley Evans pinging you?” he demanded, as the chime repeated. “Is she nearby?”
Jessie lunged. “Give me that!”
But he spun away and connected, again pushing her back. “Hello? Who is this?”
There was a pause, then a tinny male voice asked: “Who’s this? Where’s Jessie?”
“Eric!” Jessie shouted. “I’m here!” She grabbed Brother Walter’s shirt. “It’s my brother. Please, let me talk to him.”
“Tell me where he is! Is he inside the arcade?”
She snatched the Link away with a withering stare. Brother Walter’s mouth turned downward, but he didn’t try to wrestle the device back. “Put it on speaker so I can hear,” he said.
She didn’t. She held the Link to her ear. “Eric?”
But it wasn’t him. It was Kelly. “Oh, thank God, Jessie,” he exclaimed. “Are you okay? Is this a good time?”
And in the background: “Jessie! Hey, girl, it’s Reggie. We’ve been worried sick about you.”
“Reggie’s there? It’s good to hear both your voices.”
“I said, put it on speaker!”
Jessie turned away from Brother Walter. All of a sudden she was so terribly homesick. She felt like crying. Combing the hair from her face, she took a deep breath, and thumbed off the privacy setting.
“Are you okay?” Kelly asked again. “Where are you? What’s going on? Who was that guy that answered?”
“I’ve got you on speaker now. I’m with Brother Walter, back in Brookhaven. I managed to get out of Gameland, but now that I’m here . . . .” She turned to glance at the man, who stared unflinchingly back.
She still didn’t trust him, not in the slightest. And he obviously didn’t trust her.
There were all the other things to consider, too: The coincidence that he’d be at the site of the attack just when she needed saving. It was strange that he would bring her back here, to this place. Why would he even stay after Father Heale died when all the others had left? Strange that he’d taken her Link and Ben’s, and then accused her of being responsible for the outbreaks on the mainland.
Finally, it was strange that her grandfather’s body and his Link were missing.
“Brookhaven?” Kelly asked. “Did you get—?”
“Not yet,” she cut him off.
There was a moment of silence on the other end. The line clicked a few times before Reggie asked, “I don’t understand, Jess. Kelly hasn’t explained very much to me.”
“I’ll explain later,” she heard Kelly say, an edge to his voice that even he couldn’t miss. “Jess, listen, everything’s changed. The network is crashing.”
“And there was an outbreak at the hospital,” Reggie added. “Your brother and—”
“Reggie!” Kelly exclaimed. “Why would you tell her that?”
“What about Eric?” Jessie asked.
“He’s been arrested.”
Jessie ran her fingers through her hair. She wasn’t surprised. It was only a matter of time before they started going for the rest of her family. “You need to lay low,” she said.
“Not much we can do. There’s an emergency shelter-in-place,” Reggie acknowledged. “Nobody’s supposed to go out, but the cops are AWOL. And NCD is . . . . Well, without your brother they’re pretty much nonexistent. It’s a mess, Jessie.”
“How bad?” She imagined the streets covered in Undead as dense as she’d seen in places on the island. “How many infected?”
“Not many. It’s mostly contained right now,” Kelly told her.
Jessie knew he was lying. She could tell when he thought he was protecting her by not telling her the whole truth. The operative term in his reply was mostly.
“The Stream seems to be holding,” he added.
Seems. Another subjective term.
“It’s different this time, though,” he continued. “People are taking it dead seriously now. Most everyone’s behaving, staying inside. The streets are empty.”
Jessie raised her eyes to Brother Walter. He nodded solemnly, acknowledging that it was consistent with what he’d just told her a moment before. She thumbed the Link back to private, and he didn’t argue. Instead, he wandered over to the window and stood looking out at the gathering gloom through a small opening in the curtain. She could tell he was listening, though.
“I don’t know how long this is going to last,” Kelly said. He let out a noisy breath. “You need to get off the island and come home.”
“Whoa! Kel!” Reggie exclaimed. He sounded dismayed.
“Just stay put,” she told them. “Stay together, if you can. Take care of each other. I have some things I need to do before—”
“No, Jessie, please. You don’t need to worry about the . . . thing.”
“It’s okay,” Jessie told him. “You can talk.”
“You don’t need the key, Jess. It doesn’t matter anymore because we already have a cure. You remember Doctor White?”
“I thought you said she d—” Reggie started.
“She has a cure, Jess. You can come home now.”
“That’s not what we agreed to, brah!” Reggie exclaimed.
“I can’t,” Jessie said. “I have to go back to Jayne’s Hill. I have to get the tablet and fix things.”
“No, Jess.”
“Yes. Micah warned me that this was going to happen. He said if we don’t fix it, then we lose control of everything.”
“Micah? What are you talking about?” Kelly cried. “When did he tell you this?”
“I can’t explain right now. It’s . . . . It’s too complicated.”
She glanced over at Brother Walter, but he was still staring out into the darkness. There was something in his posture that worried her.
“Just sit tight, Jessie,” Reggie said. His voice sounded so tiny, so far away. “You’re safe where you are. Me and Kel, we’re coming to get you.”
“No!” both Jessie and Kelly shouted.
“What are you doing, Reg?” Kelly asked. He sounded exasperated. “She needs to come home.”
“Dude, you need to step it up for her!”
Jessie could almost see Reggie bristling.
“No! We’re staying here. That’s for the best.”
“Fine, you stay here. You’ll have to lock me up to stop me, ‘cause I’m going. Our girl needs us.”
“Reggie—” Jessie started.
“No one else is going to Gameland!” Kelly shouted. “Let me try Arc’s headquarters in Manhattan first. There must be something I can do there. If not them, then Media. I’ll—”
“Jes
us, Kelly, are you even listening to yourself?” Reggie shouted back. “Arc? Really? Media? It’s too late for that shit! You’ll never get an appointment with those pricks. And here’s a newsflash: If they let you in, forget ever getting back out. Jessie needs us now. She could be dead before you—”
“Stop it, both of you!” Jessie shouted.
Brother Walter turned and shushed her.
She gave him an embarrassed look and said in a low voice. “Stop fighting, guys. Nobody is coming here. Anyway, you can’t. The tunnels are gone. The waterways are mined. You can’t fly. I need to fix this myself. Only when that’s done, then I’ll figure out how to get home.”
“Just don’t go back inside Gameland, Jessie. They’ll hunt you in there.”
She was going to tell him the rules no longer applied, but Brother Walter spun away from the window suddenly and hurried over to the desk and extinguished the lantern, throwing the room into darkness.
“What’s going on?”
“Shh!”
“Did you see someth—?”
A crash sounded from downstairs, one of the windows being broken. Then a second. And then someone shouted: “Come on out, bitch! We’ve got you surrounded.”
Chapter 34
“Jessie,” Kelly shouted. “What’s going on?”
“I have to go! I’m sorry.”
“Wait! We—”
Jessie thumbed off her Link and slipped it into her pocket. Then she crossed the floor in the darkness, knocking her shin on a chest at the foot of the bed before reaching the window. It was still too early for the moon to be out, and though the sky still held the slightest tinge of color, she could see nothing but the vague shapes of trees below her.
“Get away from there!” Brother Walter hissed. He pulled her away by her arm, just as an upper pane shattered and a small puff of white powder fell from a hole in the ceiling. The bullet would not have hit her, but it clearly hadn’t been meant as a warning shot. It was just poorly aimed.
She spun around and headed for the door, fighting with it for a moment before realizing it was locked. He came over and placed his hand on it. “What are you doing? You can’t possibly think about going down there.”
“I’m going to get my things,” she snapped. “And to get dressed. I refuse to die in pink pajamas.”
He unlocked and opened it for her, gesturing for her to hurry. “We need to get to the cellar.”
There was another crash from downstairs, another shout.
“Do you have any weapons?” she asked, quickly stripping off her shirt. She realized she was braless after finding the garment in the pile of clothes on the chair. But there was no time to wonder about the implications. “Besides the one pistol, I mean?”
Across the hall, she heard Brother Walter throwing open drawers, gathering whatever he could find. Jessie pulled off her pajama bottoms and quickly slipped into her panties, which were more tattered than she had ever noticed before. But at least they were clean again, and so were her jeans.
“Let’s go,” he hissed from the doorway. He’d donned a backpack and was carrying a long knife in one hand.
“How about another gun?” she asked, pulling on her second sneaker. He’d even washed them, and they were now stiff and tight. She tugged, thankful that her shoulder no longer hurt as much as it had. The rest, even if it had been only a couple days, had done her a world of good.
But it was clearly all the rest she was going to get.
“Guns, yes,” he replied. “But bullets are limited. We have only what I took off the bodies back there the other day. We ran out of rounds months ago, and any place with ammo within five miles of here has been stripped clean.”
The front door crashed open. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Jo sang.
“Son of a bitch!” Jessie hissed. She used the light from her Link to search through her pack. “Where’s my EM pistol?”
Brother Walter crossed the room and lifted the bag. Jessie stared at him, surprised that he’d let her keep it.
But then he pulled a small object from his pocket and inserted it into the grip. He slapped the whole thing into her palm and said, “It’s going to need a half hour to charge.”
He hadn’t trusted her at all.
“Then it’s of no use to us now.” She grabbed the pistol in his hand and quickly checked the magazine. It had only a few rounds in it, just as he’d said. “Four bullets, a dead EM pistol, and a sword. And your fillet knife. Great.”
He shrugged.
She brushed past him into the hall and crept toward the staircase. Two circles of light swam across the wall at the top, like dancing Will-o-the-Wisps. She could hear footsteps at the bottom, their shoes scraping the floor. One of the stairs creaked. Jessie waited for the second, and when it came she flung herself to the floor and fired blindly around the corner.
Someone cried out as they tumbled back down to the landing. “Fucking bitch shot me!” It was Andy.
Jessie didn’t know how good the shot was. The way he was yelling, he sounded more angry than hurt.
There was another gun blast and Jessie felt the air beside her left cheek sizzle as the bullet plunked into the wall behind her. She rolled back around the corner of the wall.
“Don’t kill her, you stupid fuck!” Jo shouted. “We need to take her back inside the arcade!”
“Get the hell out of this house,” Jessie warned. “Or I’ll put the next one in your skull!”
Jo laughed. “I’d like to see you try, bitch! You’re stuck up there. If you think I’m walking away from five million bucks, you’re crazy.”
“Five million, huh?” Jessie said, lying on her back, her head resting on the wall. “Fifty-fifty split between you and Andy, huh? Bet you were happy as shit when those Infected attacked your little party back there the other day. I watched how you abandoned the rest, Penny and Henry. Didn’t see what happened to Rosie, though.”
“Bit it back there on the road with the rest of them fuckers. Zombie bait. She was never cut out for this shit anyway, just like her partner.”
More laughter, this time sounding like it came from the back hallway, somewhere close to the kitchen. She’d have a good line of sight on the stairs if Jessie tried to descend. There was no way she and Brother Walter were going to get down them without being shot.
“Just the two of you then, huh?” Jessie said. “I guess you don’t really have the house surrounded then.”
Jo didn’t answer.
“You must be feeling pretty confident.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s two against one. Odds are in our favor, bitch.”
Two against one. She didn’t know that Jessie wasn’t alone.
She could hear Andy’s pained breathing around the corner to the right, somewhere in the direction of the library. “You okay down there, Emerson? Bet Jo’s hoping you eat it so she can collect the whole ten mil all for herself. ‘Course, maybe she’s already counting on that happening.”
“Fuck you, bitch.” He fired up the stairs, notching the corner of the wall. “You barely grazed me. Put a hole in my uniform is all.”
“Well, don’t bleed all over my floor.”
Another shot, another plugged round in the wall.
“Save your ammunition,” Jo snapped.
There was a third blast, a wild shot. The railing opposite the opening from Jessie splintered, sending flecks of wood flying across the hall. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do, Jo,” Andy growled. “It’s because of your stupid shit that we had to come all this way.”
Jessie heard movement and looked to her left. Brother Walter stepped closer. He bent down and whispered for her to follow him. “There’s another way down.”
“I’m not going out through any of the windows,” she whispered back. She’d seen the drop to the ground, and other than the porch, there was no ledge, no sloping roof to assist them. It was a straight fifteen to eighteen feet drop. Chances of breaking her leg were pretty good. And there was no way in hel
l she was going to climb down knotted bed sheets. They’d shoot her for sure.
“Well?” Jo shouted.
“Seems we’re at a stalemate,” Jessie called down. “You can’t come up and I can’t come down.”
“No worries, girl,” Jo replied. “I got all the time in the world.”
“Except you’ve busted down the front door and Andy’s shooting is bound to have attracted Infecteds.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about them.”
“Are there Infected outside?” Jessie whispered at Brother Walter.
He nodded. “Several in the yard.”
“Coming up to the house?”
Another nod. “They’ll be on the porch soon, and the door’s busted down. But your friends would know that. I’m sure they blocked them somehow.”
“They’re not my friends!”
He gestured behind him, ignoring her protest. “We can escape, but it’ll have to be through the basement.”
“The tunnels? But how do we get down there?”
“There’s a dumbwaiter in the bathroom. It’s manual, ropes and pulleys, counterweighted. Hasn’t been used in years. Julia played in it as a child, and even then the thing was rickety, noisy.”
“So they’ll hear.”
He nodded.
“We’ll need a distraction.”
“Yes. I’ve got an idea, but you’ll have to draw the one away from the kitchen while I go down. Since the lift passes right through it, she’ll hear.”
“Wait, why do you get to go first? It’s me they want.”
“They clearly intend to take you alive, not me. They won’t hesitate to kill me to get me out of the way. Besides, if you think I saved you just to ditch you at the first sign of trouble, you’re wrong.”
“What’s it going to be, girlie?” Andy called. He sounded winded. “We can outwait you any day. Shit, we’ve already been sitting for two days watching a god damn empty fucking church. Haven’t we, Jo?”
“Fuck off, Andy. That wasn’t my fault.”
Jessie reached around the corner and fired the pistol blindly. If anything, it’d keep them honest a little longer while she figured out their escape.
Brother Walter showed her the dumbwaiter, which was built into the wall in the bathroom. The pulley squeaked when she tested it.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Page 97
