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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  But now she wondered what had drawn them here. She assumed it was the smell of Brother Walter’s blood.

  A pair of doors along that side of the building kept them out. Quietly, she tested their ability to withstand her pushing on them. The foot latches held, but the doors themselves felt flimsy. A good hard tug from the outside might defeat them. She knew that Uncontrolled Infected didn’t pull doors open, they only knew how to push. Nevertheless, she found some fabric and wrapped it around the push bars, then tied it into a thick knot. There was no telling when the Stream might come back on.

  Brother Walter was still asleep, his breathing quick and shallow. Some of the color had returned to his face and the bleeding had thankfully stopped. With the last of the compresses and much of the remaining tape securing the bandage in place, her efforts appeared to finally be working.

  His eyes flicked behind his lids as he watched some vision inside his head. He had dreamed during the night, too. In fact, his constant murmurings and occasional shouts had woken her up a few times. Once, he’d asked her for water, and he had taken it from her, so she knew he was lucid.

  “Brother Walter,” she said, gently prodding him. She needed to see if he could move.

  How is he? Micah asked.

  Jessie sighed and turned around. Although she knew his body wasn’t his to command anymore, she still felt strange not facing him when they were talking. “He looks better, but he’s exhausted, weak. I don’t want to move him. Unfortunately, it looks like I might have to. We need to find someplace else to hole up.”

  We? You need to think about yourself.

  “I’m not going to leave him. He needs help.”

  I’ll keep an eye on him for you.

  Jessie snorted. “Nice to know you can still joke about it.”

  Hey, my body’s dead, not my sense of humor.

  The smile slipped from her lips. She found she was unable to look at the trussed figure on the floor.

  You can’t blame yourself, Jessie. Not for what happened to me. Or for anything else, for that matter. This was my choice.

  She knew he was wrong. There was plenty to blame herself for. And she was sure this wouldn’t have been his first choice if given another option.

  “I- I’m going to check on the supplies,” she said, stepping quickly away.

  But even though he was out of sight, she couldn’t escape from his voice in her head. It followed her; it was inside of her. Jessie, look, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I’ve accepted it. At least this way I got a chance to tell you how I feel. At least now you know the truth about us.

  “There is no us, Micah. There never was.”

  I meant my kind. Us.

  Just a few weeks ago they’d called the Undead Them.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she murmured. She couldn’t bear the idea of Micah dying, of leaving this place and being gone forever. And yet she knew that he was already gone, beyond her reach. She wanted to pull him back, to save him. And yet she was helpless to do anything about it.

  She gathered up her backpack, inventorying what she had, then repacking it, discarding what she didn’t need. Food and water were critically low. Regardless of what happened with Brother Walter or the Undead outside, she’d have to go scavenging again soon. She wasn’t going to get far with what little she had.

  You can leave him here. He’s dying anyway. You know it.

  The voice was her own this time, not Micah’s, and she shoved it angrily aside, ashamed at herself for thinking such a terrible thing. Brother Walter had saved her life. He’d proven that he could be trusted. He deserved a chance to live.

  She found more food inside his pack, but no water. There was a length of nylon cord, much shorter than what they’d needed back there at the wall, plus some matches and a folding knife. Trinkets, none of it of much use.

  She pulled out a small, leather-bound book which had been tied shut with a pale green shoelace. It looked like some kind of journal. She was tempted to open it, but knew it would be wrong.

  She set it aside.

  The extra voices inside her head were still there, though by now there were more of them, maybe four or five individuals. The dead were gathering.

  The meager contents of Brother Walter’s pack formed a pitifully small pile on the marble floor. She picked up the tiny book and untied the string, knowing that he might never forgive her. Obviously he’d valued it enough to bring it with him.

  The cover was stiff and it crackled as she opened it to a random page in the middle. It took her several seconds to realize that the scratches and symbols, written in a tiny, meticulous script, weren’t English.

  It was some kind of code.

  * * *

  “Micah?” Jessie crouched down beside him. She resisted the urge to shake him. “You awake in there? Knock knock.”

  Very funny. Of course I’m awake.

  “You mean you don’t sleep?”

  The thing that was Micah’s prison grunted and writhed at her feet, but was otherwise unable to do much else. The tape was too constricting.

  She thrust the book in front of the zombie’s eyes. “Look what I found.”

  Okaaay? What is it?

  “I’m not sure. Brother Walter had it in his pack.”

  “So why don’t you ask him?”

  “I intend to. I just wanted to see if you recognized any of this.” She opened the book and showed him a couple pages of the dense script.

  Looks like code, maybe computer. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

  “Yeah, I got that. So, nothing looks familiar to you?” She showed him a few more pages. “Nothing rings a bell?”

  No. Should it?

  She opened it to the very last page. “What about this?”

  Is that an identifier code?

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Whose?

  “Mine.”

  She stood up and went back over to Brother Walter and shook him out of his torpor. He eventually opened his eyes.

  “Where did you get this?” she demanded, holding the book up for him to see.

  He opened his lips and tried to speak, but no sound came forth. Finally, he coughed weakly and asked for water. Jessie gave him a sip, then raised the question once again.

  He tried to take the book from her, but he was too frail. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Then why does it have my identifier code in here?”

  “To your implant?”

  “Don’t act stupid.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Don’t lie to me! Does this have anything to do with Father Heale’s file? Tell me! Is this the key to unlocking the firewall inside my head?”

  “No.”

  She rocked back on her heels. “Is there a cure? I need to know! Is the file in my Link, the file Father Heale planted in the mainframe, a cure?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Heale tried for years. Came close a couple times, but there were terrible side effects— rage, hunger, pain. And madness. There is no cure. It can’t be done.”

  “There’s a woman I know who’d disagree with you,” she told him. “She’s a doctor at Sisters of Mercy Hospital.”

  “I know of her. Never met her, but Heale did. He said she couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Why?”

  “She had some sort of mental breakdown when her daughter became infected during the outbreak here.”

  “Any parent would,” Jessie said. She couldn’t believe she was defending the woman, after all she’d done to use them, but in this case, it felt justified.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Brother Walter said. “She intentionally caused the girl to become infected.”

  “How?”

  By forcing one of them to bite her.”

  Jessie felt like she’d been punched in the stomach so hard that she couldn’t breathe. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Heale watched it happen.”

  “No,” Jessie moaned. “No no no.�
��

  Kelly had trusted her. They all had. They’d had no choice in the matter.

  “No,” she repeated, this time with conviction. Doctor White was the only reason little Kyle was even still alive. Whatever she’d done in the past, it didn’t negate every single thing she’d done since.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” he said, “but it’s true.”

  “The file on my Link. Is it Father Heale’s research?”

  “No.”

  Again, she felt the wind knocked out of her.

  “What is it?”

  “An antidote.”

  “You just said there’s no cure!”

  “Not to Reanimation. It’s an antidote to you.”

  He’s delirious, Micah told her. He’s not making any sense.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded of Brother Walter.

  “You,” he panted. “You’re a weapon against Arc, against the codex. Your grandfather . . . . He was willing to sacrifice you to destroy them, to destroy everything.”

  Chapter 51

  Reggie couldn’t remember ever having been happier to see the sun as he was the moment he climbed out through the creek’s drainage tunnel. He was normally not claustrophobic, but there was something about getting stuck inside of it that drove him to the very brink of insanity. As far as he was concerned, he was never getting back inside of it again.

  He sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, then hopped to the ground.

  “Well, we’re in,” he said, plastering a grin on his face, though he knew from the look on Kelly’s that he wasn’t fooling anyone. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  Kelly chuckled.

  “What are we standing around for? Let’s get this party started.”

  “Pace yourself,” Doctor White said. “We’ve still got a ways to walk. Eight or nine miles. We should be able to reach the house before dark, assuming we don’t run into any trouble.”

  She led the way up the creek, which was densely overgrown and tangled with downed branches. The walls of the small canyon they’d emerged into were steep. A tapestry of raspberry bushes covered the rocks, preventing them from climbing out.

  “Stay together,” she said, and quickly slipped through the brush along the creek bed.

  “No rest for the wicked,” Reggie murmured. And then, when White turned her stony eyes on him, he added, “Because, you know, the evil here doesn’t rest . . . .” His voice trailed off as the stare turned into a scowl.

  Kelly brushed past him. “He didn’t mean anything by that, Doctor White. Let’s just go. Like you said, we’ve got a long way to go, and we’re all tired.”

  After ten minutes of fighting dense brush and clouds of mosquitoes, they came to the rusted, burned out shell of an abandoned car. It was a strange thing to see, down here in what was practically a jungle with no roads around.

  “Must’ve been some kind of flood,” Reggie wondered aloud. “Otherwise, how’d it get washed down here?”

  The others had already climbed over it and pushed on. Reggie hoisted himself onto the crushed frame and stood up. Beyond lay a graveyard of vehicles, looking as if they’d been thrown there by some giant. The glass was broken out of them all, and weeds and vines grew through and over their hulking bones.

  Doctor White stopped in front of a large semi truck and stared at the mummified, headless corpse hanging out through the busted windshield.

  “She looks like she’s seen a ghost,” he whispered to Kelly.

  Once more, she turned to Reggie, though this time her face was as white and blank as a sheet. Shivering, Reggie looked away.

  “There’s a bridge,” she finally said, her voice barely perceptible above the low moan of the wind through the trees. She pointed straight up through the thick canopy to where the bridge’s trusses peeked through. “Once we get out of this creek bed, it’ll be easier going.”

  Kelly slapped at a mosquito, making the others jump. Then he stepped to one side and began to tug at the vines.

  Beside his head, a mossy branch peeled itself away from a thick, gnarled tree trunk and began to swipe at his face. Shouting out in alarm, Kelly fell backward to the ground.

  The Undead tried to untangle itself from the vines, but it couldn’t.

  “Jesus Christ!” Reggie hissed. “They’re everywhere!”

  The woods were alive. Eyes appeared out of the dirt and in the folds of trees. Mouths opened in lichen-crusted mounds. The ground and the canyon sides began to move as moldering torsos, beneath a decade of growth, began to extract themselves.

  One Infected managed to peel itself completely away from the cliff wall, tearing the tendrils of moss which had held it to the rock. Tiny toadstools covered the top of its head and shoulders.

  Doctor White grabbed a vine and began to pull herself up. “I suggest we hurry.”

  Chapter 52

  Cutting through the skin had been the easy part— relative to everything else, of course. Eric had expected the pain, had become quite used to it, in fact. He just hadn’t expected it to be so bad. And the hard part was still yet to come.

  Next came the tendons, and there were so many of them and they were so tough to cut through with the makeshift knife, and there was so much god damn blood everywhere — his blood — even with the tourniquet applied and twisted as tight as he could make it using his one free hand and his teeth, that he’d very nearly passed out before finishing the job. He cried silently as he cut through the last tendon, but he couldn’t hold back the sob when his hand fell to the floor.

  Darkness swept over Eric then, threatening to consume him. He gulped air, panting like an overheated dog as he struggled to keep from slipping into that blissful sleep. He couldn’t afford to faint, not because he feared bleeding to death, but because there were worse things than never waking up again.

  He cast a quick glance at Marco’s body. It hadn’t moved during the entire amputation. Not even a twitch. He kept expecting it to at any moment, and that thought had kept him moving. He had no idea how much time had elapsed.

  Eric opened his cramped fingers, intending to drop the shiv, but it remained in his hand, glued to him with his own blood. He had to use his thigh to dislodge it.

  Afterward, he gingerly withdrew the stump from the metal shackle, which clanged against the frame of the bunk.

  Once more, blackness threatened to take him. It swirled about his head, crowded his eyes. He dry-retched until the nausea passed, then forced himself off the floor and onto the bed with his mangled arm resting on his chest. He realized he was still weeping, mourning the loss of his hand.

  Finish it.

  The ceiling above him was blurry through his tears, tinged a strange shade of green, which he knew was an illusion. It should be red from the emergency lights. The green meant that his mind wasn’t processing the sensory data properly. He’d lost too much blood, wasn’t getting enough oxygen. His body was going into shock.

  Finish him, Eric. Before he wakes.

  With a grunt, he dropped his foot back to the floor and this time the scream that had been cycling up and down in his throat burst through. Outside the cell, something close by gurgled in response, a moan that spoke of death and longing. He wondered how many others there were, still trapped in their cells, cowering in back corners away from the pawing hands. He was surprised there were none at his cell door now, wanting in, crooning in the way that only the dead know how.

  He laughed. Crooning. Maybe they’d start singing One Enchanted Evening or something.

  I left my hand in San Francisco.

  He was starting to lose it.

  GET THE HELL UP, ERIC!

  He pushed himself to a sitting position and the world tilted. When it stopped spinning, he stood, which set the world gyrating again. Every step was a herculean effort, a mile of slogging through the thickest, most intractable mud.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  The walls crowded in.

  The floor tilted, then rose up as he stumbled.

  Ma
rco lifted his head and smiled at him.

  Eric landed hard over Stu’s headless corpse, hard on the stump of his wrist. He screamed out and the world righted itself, flashed white and hot and cold and dark all at the same time. He knew he had to get moving, but the pain was so big, so very big.

  At last he looked up.

  Marco was still lying on the floor, not sitting up. Not standing. He hadn’t woken yet.

  But a foot twitched.

  Then a finger.

  Eric stared at the movements, mesmerized.

  Move!

  It’s too hard. I can’t.

  Gimme a hand.

  Oh, that’s funny.

  Kill him!

  He’s already dead.

  Shoot him!

  I don’t have a gun.

  Here it is, in your hands. Now do it. Be a man.

  “I can’t.”

  Don’t you give up on me, son! Kill him. Pull the trigger!

  Marco moaned. Eric moaned.

  Marco sat up and looked over.

  Marco raised his one good arm.

  Look, we’re twins!

  Eric lurched off Stu’s corpse. He crawled on his elbows, fingers scrambling to find the shiv. He saw it under the bed under the bed under—

  can’t see

  —the bed under the bed—

  where is it?

  He wrapped his fingers around it and a shudder passed through him. It was too soon. The blade was too familiar in his hand, too comfortable. It wanted to cut. What should he cut this time? A foot?

  Marco moaned again, and this time his mouth snapped shut with such force that Eric heard teeth shattering. Snap! it shut again. Snap! SNAP!

  He tried to push his way out from beneath the bed, but pain erupted like lava up his arm and he cried out. Marco began to stand. Eric could see him beneath the bed frame. Marco stood and everything north of his knees disappeared from view. He moaned again.

  Under the bed! Get under the bed!

  But Eric couldn’t move.

  Marco stepped, stopped. His feet jerked, and then his head dropped to the floor and rolled out of view. Eric frowned, confused.

  What remained of Marco crashed to the floor a moment later. Next to his buddy Stu.