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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  She was a terribly long way from feeling any kind of peace, but where she was now, she was a lot closer to it than she’d felt in a very long time.

  “I’m going to find that tablet,” she murmured to herself as she walked, “even if I have to move that entire building with my bare hands. I’m going to stop Arc and their Dead Reckoning contingency.”

  She realized that she wasn’t doing it to save the living, but to destroy Arc. And she would succeed. Then, when she was done, she would be able to go home. She would find Kelly and they would go somewhere far away where they would figure out a way to destroy the rest of it. She would uninvent Reanimation.

  And no one — no one! — would ever use it ever again to control anybody.

  Chapter 64

  “Do we have a timeframe?” Larry Abrams asks.

  Constipole refers to a series of charts and tables on his computer, and when he looks up, Larry already knows that the verdict isn’t good. He swings the screen around and points to a graph. There are two lines on it, one showing an upward trend, the other a horizontal red rule. They intersect at a future date and time.

  “It’s a guess, of course,” he says, “based on our own understanding of the codex’s security processes. Best case scenario indicates DR may not reach its inflection point for another forty-eight hours.”

  “And worst case?”

  Constipole swallows. He rubs a finger across his nostrils, pinches them. Every time a truck passes it stirs up the dust and irritates his nose.

  “Worst case is it could be any minute now. As of now, everyone in New Merica is living on borrowed time.”

  “We’re all living on borrowed time,” Abrams whispers.

  Constipole looks down at his hands. His face flushes with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “I know you didn’t. I should be the one apologizing.” He knows it was a pathetic attempt to garner sympathy. A moment of weakness. And frustration. He swipes the graphs to the side with a finger and asks, “What’s the latest on the outbreaks?”

  Constipole brings up a new site, the front page of the Dallas Herald Tribune. It’s the most reliable news source within the SSC. The statistics are grim, and the forecasts are even grimmer.

  “No confirmed numbers,” he says, “but observers on the ground are talking anywhere from about fifty thousand currently infected in New York City alone, to over two million across the nation. Outbreaks have hit every major city and about forty percent of the second tier metropolitan areas. Rural zones are showing the best numbers, meaning the lowest infection rates. Most of the deaths are, predictably, from the disease, but a significant proportion are incidental. Suicides are way up. So are murders.”

  Abrams leans back against the bench. Another truck passes them, a long hauler from Central America delivering bananas and rubber tires. For no apparent reason, the driver blasts his horn as he speeds away.

  The road is busy. It’s always busy, except maybe in that loneliest of hours between three and four in the morning, which is when Abrams finds himself most awake and the subject of his wife’s mortality eating away at his brain.

  “What the hell is Arc doing?” he asks.

  It’s a rhetorical question, and he doesn’t expect Constipole to provide an answer. He knows that the man’s shaking his head isn’t a reply. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the question warrants asking.

  “They’d rather lose everything than risk us getting it,” the former senator finally concludes. He has no way of knowing this. He just feels it in his gut. He asks, again: “What are our options?”

  And Constipole answers, again: “If we do nothing, we lose everything. DR goes to finality and every living implanted person in New Merica, estimated at two hundred and forty-seven million, dies instantly, leaving approximately eleven million people who had not yet received an implant behind. Most of those are children, young children. We predict the casualty rate to reach ninety-nine point nine percent within three weeks.”

  “Everyone dies, and the codex becomes irretrievably corrupted. New Merica becomes a nation of the Undead.”

  Constipole nods.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of children.”

  “Our second option is to try killing the codex with our own malware. If it works, everyone lives, but we lose the entire program.”

  “But that depends on getting hardware access in time.”

  “Yes. It’s en route and should arrive within the next six hours.”

  “En route.” Abrams shakes his head. It might as well be a million miles away for all the good it’ll do.

  “The final option is a compromise. It might work, or it might not. Timing is critical. If it does, then we could potentially save about a hundred and fifty million people in the northwest quadrant of the country stretching from Washington to Boston and as far east as Chicago. Coordination west of the Mississippi is less certain. We’d save the codex, of course. And a lot of people. Or we may lose both.”

  “Casualty predictions?”

  “About thirty percent after three weeks, mostly from defective implants. It would stabilize at fifty-nine percent around the three month-mark, just over half. This is coming from the New Merican government’s own modeling of infection spread. We’re talking nearly two hundred million survivors.”

  “And more than a hundred million dead and Infected.”

  “If for some reason it doesn’t work, for example if we can’t knock out the key transmission towers in time, or we’re too late with the pulse, then we lose everything as I said. Casualties are near one hundred percent and we destroy the codex. It’s best case-worst case all in one shot and the chances are fifty-fifty.”

  Larry Abrams places his hands over his face and breathes into them. They’re not the soft hands he’d possessed as a senator years ago. These are the rough hands of a rest stop janitor.

  “They could be bluffing, trying to force our hand, expose our capabilities.”

  “I don’t think so. Arc’s people have been quietly leaving the country. Their headquarters in Manhattan is a ghost town.”

  “How much time would we need to prepare?”

  Constipole pulls up a new file. “It’d take about sixty minutes to spool up the drones and execute the attack. There’s a guy with Texas Air Command waiting for our signal. The moment DR reaches critical, we flip the switch. The bombs should hit nearly simultaneously about ten minutes after launch.”

  Larry Abrams, the former senator from Ohio and current toilet scrubber at the PenWay Service Stop just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, sucks in a deep breath of the diesel-choked air and slowly lets it out.

  After a moment, he pats Constipole on the knee and stands up. His break is over and it’s time to get back to work. “Do it,” he says. “God help us all if we’re wrong.”

  Chapter 65

  They had moved him from the front passenger seat to the back so that Gilfoy could get the rest of the group in quicker. Eric remembered watching them file in, still in shock, unable to believe their good luck at being rescued. Unable to believe that they were still alive. A man. A woman. Another woman. Two teenagers, their arms locked in tight embrace after finding a spot to stand in. The survivors kept coming, and he lost count after eleven.

  Until they stopped coming and it was time to leave.

  Gilfoy poked his head into the opening between the cab and the cargo hold and did his own count. Eric locked eyes with him for a moment, and he thought he saw concern in them, as well as a flash of disappointment. Of course he had every right to be angry. Eric had committed him to the rescue and then had utterly collapsed himself. He’d been useless, an obstacle.

  But they were all safe now, safe except for the one woman and her unborn child.

  “Everyone better sit down,” Gilfoy told them. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

  Then the door between the compartments slid shut.

  One by one, the rescued settled down along the sides of the truck a
nd lowered their heads into their arms. Three people sat in the middle, huddled together for support; there was no more room along the edges. Eric didn’t know if they were family. They might’ve been strangers before the ordeal.

  Nobody asked where they were going.

  The truck rocked as Gilfoy slowly drove it out of the warehouse. The tires rose and fell multiple times, shattering bones, crushing flesh. And then they were out and the Undead who had not fallen beneath the wheels followed behind them, slapping their dead hands against the sides and moaning in hunger.

  Nobody spoke.

  Eric felt as if he weighed a million pounds, yet there was this incredible lightness about him, too. His body possessed no more strength, yet he felt like he could just stand up and fly.

  He knew it was the exhaustion doing that to him. That and the pain medication Gilfoy had made him take. It separated the physical from the mental until they seemed completely disconnected.

  He lowered his head into his arms and closed his eyes and let the rocking of the truck carry him away.

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long he’d been out, a few minutes maybe, though it seemed much longer. The short nap had done him wonders, rejuvenating him. He remembered someone talking about a flat tire and the truck stopping for a while until it was fixed.

  Then they were moving again.

  He lifted his head and peered at the gloom inside the truck, recognizing the people they’d saved. Some were still sobbing. Some seemed asleep. Most were just sitting there in shock, their eyes wide and white. The roar of the engine seemed overly loud. The air was unbelievably hot.

  He turned to one side, where he sensed someone close by. Then to the other.

  “How much farther,” he wanted to ask, but the words came out of his throat without sound, no more than a whisper, nothing more.

  The truck slowed. He could hear the gears grind, then shift. They went over some kind of bump — a curb, maybe, or a speed bump, the front tires, left, then right, then the back — tilting the truck and jostling them all. He pushed himself up, lurching with the movement, astonished that his arm didn’t hurt anymore.

  It’s the pain meds.

  They had to be powerful stuff.

  Now standing, and he could feel their eyes on him, wary, curious, waiting to see what he was doing, where he was going. He hadn’t given it any thought, hadn’t even intended to stand, but now that he was up, he figured he’d go and check with Gilfoy.

  Except his feet didn’t take him in that direction.

  The truck accelerated suddenly, throwing him off balance. He fell into the huddled group in the middle. They yelled in surprise and anger, cursing him for his clumsiness. He tried to apologize, but his mouth didn’t seem to be able to form the words.

  Sorry. Sorry, he kept repeating, as he rolled into the back door. I didn’t mean to fall on you. Is everyone okay?

  He turned around again. The young girl was staring at him, leaning away. Her boyfriend, or whatever he was, glared too. Eric leaned over to apologize and the truck tilted as they went around a turn. He fell against her, pulled away. She was screaming now, clutching her cheek. It was bleeding. Somehow, half her face seemed to be missing.

  Her screams pierced his skull, drove him half insane. He watched his hands reach out for her, pull her close until her face blurred out of focus. Blood was everywhere now, on his hands, in his eyes.

  What the hell is happening? he screamed. His voice sounded like moaning to his ears.

  The boyfriend’s hand was bleeding now.

  Stop it!

  Someone else clutched at their neck, at the blood spurting out.

  Where? Where is it?

  He stumbled, clutched at a man—

  (Peter Fortini, he remembered, though he couldn’t remember getting back up on his feet again)

  —and wouldn’t let him go, despite trying to.

  What the hell is going on here?

  Everyone was screaming now, pushing at each other, pushing him away. He tried to look around to find the Infected person that seemed to have made it onto the truck with them, but his head wouldn’t obey him. Or his hands. Or his own legs.

  His mouth opened, as if to sound the scream in his mind, but all that came out was a whistle of air. He lunged at the boyfriend and tore off the muscle from his arm, ripping it from shoulder to elbow. And he started to chew.

  Stop it! he screamed, horrified at what he was doing. Oh god, please. No!

  Instead, he took another bite from someone’s arm.

  And swallowed.

  Chapter 66

  Jessie jogged, and the miles passed quickly beneath her feet. She really did feel lighter, physically as well as mentally, now that she’d come to terms with the victims of the outbreak. The term Undead now sounded distasteful to her ears, even insulting. These people weren’t dead, and they certainly hadn’t died. Their bodies had been severed from their minds is all, allowing the former to revert to some primal state while the latter remained trapped. She’d come up with a new term to describe them, one which seemed more appropriate as well as more accurate: Discorporated.

  She tried to figure out how it all worked, why the mind remained tethered, yet unable to exert itself on the body. This led to other questions. What happened to the mind after death, for example, when there was no Reanimation virus to keep the body from decaying?

  She assumed it also died. Or was released. Maybe it traveled to some other spectral realm.

  And what about the ones whose brains had dried to powder? Did their minds still exist?

  At some point she pushed the thoughts aside. She wasn’t religious, nor was she any kind of philosopher. She preferred to operate in the physical, logical world, not the metaphysical, though her recent enlightenment had forced her to accept the alternative. As someone had once written, there were more things in this world than she could possibly conceive.

  She reached the outskirts of South Huntington shortly after noon and knew that Jayne’s Hill was well within reach in less than an hour. It was a punishing pace, yet she felt cleansed by it, as if the miles she’d put behind her had some sort of healing effect. Maybe it was just getting away from the wall that did it, the wall and the Live Players she’d had to kill.

  Or maybe it was knowing that with each passing minute she’d cheated death yet again, and would continue to cheat it until Death itself were defeated.

  She came to the first sign for Jayne’s Hill, and it was there that she saw the figure up ahead, standing as still as a statue, like so many others she’d seen along the way. And yet, there was something different about this one. It wasn’t one of the Discorporated. The clothes were too clean, too new, too intact. Was it another Live Player?

  Jessie slowed to a walk. Her heart was racing, and she was out of breath, which she now realized wasn’t the best way to be facing someone who might want to kill you.

  The person was alive. She knew that before she figured out it was a woman. She had been watching Jessie approach without making a move. The Discorporated wouldn’t do that.

  A hundred yards away, the woman stepped forward. There was something vaguely familiar about her that made Jessie uneasy. She pulled out her sword and slowed her pace even more.

  The woman was wearing tan-colored clothing, rather than the usual Arc black. Her head and face were covered. She carried a short stick in one hand, polished and lethal-looking. On her back, pulled tight against her, was an expensive-looking pack.

  A hundred feet now. The woman reached up and pulled back her hood.

  Recognition slammed into Jessie, stealing her breath away and knocking all sense from her mind. “You?”

  Siennah Davenport smiled, but even from that distance, Jessie could tell there was nothing but madness behind it. She raised her sword and said in as loud a voice as she dared, “You need to stop right there.”

  In response, Siennah raised the stick. For a fleeting moment, Jessie thought it was a rifle, but the way her classmate was
holding it, she realized it was a policeman’s baton.

  “I said stop.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that, bitch,” Siennah hissed. “I didn’t come all the way here just to have you tell me to turn around and go home.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “We followed your husband.”

  “Kelly? He’s here?”

  “He and that ape friend of his snuck onto the island a couple nights ago. Them and some old hag I’ve never seen before. We followed them in my car, me and the Anderson twins, except they got caught.”

  “Caught?”

  “I told them to run when the police showed up, but the stupid cows were too slow.” Sienna shrugged. “Probably for the best. They would’ve ended up zombie bait here anyway.”

  Jessie didn’t say anything.

  “I almost got lost coming across the Sound. Thought a few times that I’d get blown out of the water. But if your husband didn’t, then I figured I wouldn’t either. ‘Course, once I got inside, I totally lost sight of him. Couldn’t keep up. Always hated running. But that’s all right, because I knew they’d be headed here to find you. Turns out my hunch was right.”

  They were fifty feet apart now, Siennah still closing the gap, though at a much slower rate.

  “I don’t want to fight you,” Jessie said, keeping her voice low.

  “I get it. But I’m still going to kill you.”

  “Siennah, please, this isn’t a game anymore.”

  “Fuck the game. I mean, fuck The Game.” She raised her hands and made air quotes with her fingers. “Think I care about Arc? No, this is about you and me and working out our mutual hatred for each other.”

  She’s crazy.