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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  He pulled harder. She was strong, difficult to hold onto. He didn’t know where she got her strength — anguish and anger, he supposed — but it surprised him. “You can’t,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s too late.”

  “I will,” she growled back at him. “Let me go!”

  “No, I can’t. You’re pregnant.”

  His hands slipped again, slick with sweat, and she had a chance to break away. Instead, she fell to the grass. She turned toward him and stared. He didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He wrapped his arms about her and lifted her up. Then he turned and ran, the heat of the burning outbuilding on his back.

  Through the golden grass that was knee-high on him. Gnats rose like sparks into the afternoon air. Grasshoppers sprung away. Jessie beat her hands on his back and ordered him to put her down. He kept running.

  A smaller structure lay to his left, but he angled for the main one, not to get inside, but to go around it. He needed to get past it, back to the collapsed building where they’d dropped their packs. Then to the gap in the fence. It was their only way out, other than climbing over. He doubted Jessie would even try.

  He shifted her to his stronger side and backhanded the first Infected he met. The next one received the sole of his shoe planted square on its chest. A third he grabbed by the arm and spun it around. The thing was barely more than bones and leathery skin, and he feared the arm would break off and that it would keep coming at him. But the arm held. He planted his palm against the back of its head and slammed it against the side of the building. It slid down, leaving a dusty brown smear. It immediately began to rise again.

  He didn’t bother to finish it. He planned to be long gone before it got back up.

  Jessie stopped fighting him. He could feel her sobbing now, a loose sack of bones and flesh without any strength left to give. She asked him again to put her down, but it was just a ghost of a request. No strength in her voice, no sense of anything but defeat.

  “Yeah, in a sec,” he told her. “Just got to get us out of here first.”

  He barely broke stride when he reached their packs, just bent down and scooped them up and slung them over his other shoulder. As he stepped around the corner of the building, he expected to see Infected scattered about, but what met them instead stopped him in his tracks.

  There were only about a dozen inside the fence, but pouring out of the darkness beneath the trees came a hundred more. They moved en masse toward the smoke and flames, their arms swinging stiffly, as if from some stubborn muscle memory that refused to die.

  Most appeared not to have noticed them yet, but he knew it wouldn’t take long once they started. When the chorus of those that noticed them had reached a certain timbre, they would all key into it and give chase.

  “I need you to run with me now, Jess,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Can you do that?”

  “Put me down,” she murmured.

  “We can’t go back there.”

  “Put me down.”

  “Kelly’s gone.”

  There was a pause. Then: “I know. Put me down. Please.”

  Slowly, he crouched until her feet touched the dirt. The two Undead that had noticed them were taking their time shambling over. It hadn’t yet registered in their brains that they were food.

  Reggie straightened up. “Are you ready?” he whispered.

  She shook her arm. “You need to let go of me, Reg.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I know he’s gone.” She sounded more irritated than defeated. “It’s done. Kelly’s gone.”

  “He did it to save us, Jess.”

  The closest Undead opened its mouth, and several small, brown pebble-sized objects fell out. They were bits of its own tongue that it had chewed away.

  “It’s okay, Reggie. Let me go.”

  He loosened his grip. She pulled away, then reached over and grabbed her bag off his shoulder.

  The closer zombie moaned then and picked up its pace. The effect was almost instantaneous. Several more turned and zeroed in on Reggie and Jessie. The effect spread from there, rippling outward until dozens were converging on the spot where they stood.

  “Time to go.” He pulled the machete from his belt, but she grabbed him and shook her head.

  “No killing.”

  She swept past him, gesturing for him to follow. And she was fast, sprinting toward the downed tree. She leapt, springing off the ground and landing deftly onto the trunk. Without slowing, she scurried over it.

  Reggie slipped on the mossy bark and skinned his arm and back as he fell, but he popped right back up again.

  “Back the way we came,” he shouted after her. “There’s a car waiting for us.”

  She split the difference between two approaching Infecteds. But the gap closed behind her and forced Reggie to go around them.

  “There’s too many!” he shouted at her back. He tried to keep her in sight. If they got separated, their chances of surviving grew significantly smaller. But she didn’t answer. “We should turn around!”

  One stepped into his path and grabbed him. They both crashed to the ground. Reggie pushed it off and was back on his feet in a second, but by then he’d lost sight of Jessie. The Undead surrounded him.

  Jessie appeared out of nowhere and grabbed his arm, staying the machete he was about to swing. The Undead were all around them now. But she shook her head. “No killing.”

  She pulled him to the right, through a gap that seemed to open up the moment she stepped into it. He followed, gripping her hand so tightly that he feared he’d crush it, but she gripped him back with as much power. She led, winding a sinuous path through them, and they parted before her almost magically before closing again in their wake.

  Not magic, he thought. She just sees things you can’t see. She’s right at home here.

  The Infected began to thin away as they approached the place where they’d emerged from the wood earlier that afternoon. But the horde was still behind them, and they would only grow faster as their stiff joints loosened. They would always keep coming.

  When they reached the trail, Jessie pulled him past her and slid to a stop. Only then did she turn. There were hundreds now, hundreds more behind them.

  “No killing,” she said yet again, and raised the EM pistol she’d pulled from her pack. Her hand twitched only slightly as she squeezed the trigger.

  It gave them a small cushion, just enough for them to catch their breath. It was all they needed.

  Without a word, they turned and slipped into the wood.

  Chapter 71

  “You can stop staring at me like that,” Jessie said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m some kind of freak.”

  They were back in the car and on the road. Thick black smoke rose from the hill behind them, drawing Jessie’s eyes to her mirror. Such a strange thing to see without the wail of accompanying sirens. No fire trucks or police cars to pull over for, nothing to indicate that something was terribly wrong. If not for the growl of the engine and the whine of the tires on the road, the world would be completely mute about the horror they’d just left behind.

  It was really the first time she felt the utter desolation of the place since returning, and she wondered how she’d ever thought it could be anything but what it really was: Hell on earth.

  “I wasn’t staring.”

  “Right.” She sighed and adjusted her gaze to the scenery beside her. She tried not to look, but her eyes kept drifting back to the mirror.

  Kelly. Kelly. It’s all my fault.

  She felt numb, senselessly achingly numb, like her body and mind were simply unable to process anymore pain and had shut down. She knew that she should be hurting terribly, and she did, she just couldn’t seem to get the pain to mean anything. Kelly was dead. He’d died a terrible death. All because of her.

  And yet the pain felt far away.

  “You couldn’t have done anything,” Reggie said.

  She igno
red him. What would it matter to argue now? It wouldn’t bring him back. It wouldn’t change any of the things that had happened.

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  Except she had. She’d heard Jake, days ago when she first arrived at Jayne’s Hill. And then again right before he attacked Kelly. She’d heard him in her mind, just as she’d heard Micah. She should have paid heed to it.

  Because of her, Kelly was dead.

  It was a cruel irony. Kelly had always distrusted Jake, always been jealous of him. He thought the boy was going to take her away from him, and, in a sense, Jake had. He’d returned and split them apart for good.

  “Kelly did it for you, Jess. He sacrificed himself for us.”

  She could sense Reggie watching her again. Or still. Whichever. She could feel his concern and it only made her angrier. She wanted him to be angry with her. At her. She didn’t want his pity.

  “You’re still doing it,” she said, turning to face him. “Still staring.”

  He didn’t deny it this time, though he did go back to looking at the road. Redness spread over his cheeks. “How long have you known?” he asked. “About the baby.”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “For a while now, I guess,” she finally admitted. “I wasn’t certain, just suspected it. There were . . . signs. Morning sickness. Strange cravings.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But how did you know? Was it Kelly? Did he say something to you?”

  He shook his head. “So, he knew then? I mean, before today.”

  “What do you mean today?”

  He told her about what Doctor White had told him.

  She grunted and shook her head, but didn’t push it.

  God, she was tired. So damn tired.

  She looked into the mirror, but she couldn’t see the smoke anymore.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Western wall.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s still another tablet, remember? And if I know Micah, it’s going to have a copy of his script on it. We get it and we can still hack into the codex . . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized the folly of his plan. With the mainframe shut down, the codex was completely inaccessible to them.

  He let off on the accelerator and the car slowed. They stopped in the middle of the highway about a mile east of Woodbury. After a moment of just sitting there, he reached over and shut the engine off. “Maybe it’ll find a solution on its own. The codex is pretty advanced. It’ll fix itself.”

  Jessie shook her head. “The Stream’s been out for too long this time. I think if there was a solution, then it would’ve come up with it by now and reset the network.”

  “If there’s no Stream, then they can’t activate our implants.”

  “I don’t think it works that way, Reg. The Stream is off to prevent the virus from spreading. It’ll come back on to send that one last command.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe not. We have to believe.”

  She exhaled through her teeth and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We’re all dead anyway. We just don’t know it.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  She threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat. “What else is there? It’s not like we can go back to our lives.”

  “Not back, Jess. Never back. But we can still go forward.”

  “Just stop with the feel-good platitudes, Reggie.”

  “Look, I’m sorry Kelly’s gone. It fucking sucks. It hurts like fucking hell, like a part of me has died inside. I know it’s much worse for you, but you can’t give up, Jessie. I refuse to let you. You have to think about the baby.”

  She chuffed. “I’d be doing it a favor by dying here.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Everyone out there is dead, Reg, dead or dying. Eric’s gone missing. He’s probably dead. Mom’s dead. Everyone’s gone.”

  “Your mom’s not dead! Why would you think that?”

  Jessie turned to him in surprise. “What?”

  “She’s not dead. I just spoke with her two days ago.”

  Jessie felt dizzy. She tried to push it away, but it was like a lead blanket smothering her.

  “Ashley said—” She gasped with sudden realization. “She told me Mom had died. She lied?”

  She told the truth in the end.

  Reggie’s fingers wrung the steering wheel until it groaned from the strain. “God damn fucking bitch,” he whispered. “God damn stupid fucking . . . .” He laid his forehead on his hands. “God, Jess, I’m so sorry about her. Really, I am. I don’t know what I ever saw in her.”

  But Jessie brushed his apology aside. “Are you sure? How was she?”

  “Weak, but recovering. My parents are taking care of her. Kelly’s parents, and Kyle, too. They’re all together.” He reached for the ignition. “We should be with our families. Let’s go home.”

  “Home,” she said. The word felt strange on her tongue, hollow-sounding and unfamiliar. She tried to picture what home looked like, but nothing would come to her. She couldn’t even seem to remember what her mother looked like.

  She sighed deeply and nodded. “Fine.”

  Reggie reached down and turned the key in the ignition. The starter motor clicked. He tried again, but the result was the same.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The engine won’t start.”

  Chapter 72

  She knew she was being followed. She could see it slinking along in the shadows behind her, and once, when she’d turned around real fast, she’d seen its face for the briefest of moments before it disappeared again.

  Lyssa couldn’t be bothered with it. There had to be thousands of them on the island now, breeding uncontrolled, preying off the abundant wildlife.

  She frowned. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen much wildlife to speak of. Lots of birds, certainly, but very few mammals. And this was the first dog she’d seen.

  Well, she didn’t care what it did, as long as it kept its distance. At least it wasn’t being aggressive. If anything it seemed more curious than hungry.

  She kept moving. The cemetery wasn’t very far from the house, a mile at the most. Maybe closer. She couldn’t remember exactly. And Cassie’s body was as light as a feather, no more than twenty, twenty-five, pounds.

  Once more, tears welled up in her eyes. She felt them slip down her cheeks when she blinked, as if her eyelids were miniature guillotines slicing away her grief little bits at a time. She had been sure it was going to work. So sure.

  So sure.

  But it hadn’t.

  She blamed the doubt which had grown inside of her since morning, since before the boys left. It was the doubt which made her attack Kelly. It was the doubt that robbed her of her daughter. Poisonous uncertainty infecting her like a virus. Infecting Cassie. Destroying everything.

  She cursed it.

  She should’ve had more faith in herself.

  She turned around and looked again, but nothing moved. Nothing made a sound but her shambling feet on the sidewalk. She couldn’t seem to lift them high enough so that they wouldn’t scrape. That and the whispering breeze through the trees. She turned forward again and resumed her slow trek to the family plot.

  After recovering from Kelly’s strangling her, she’d waited for Cassie to wake, checking every few minutes and finding Cassie’s heart growing stronger, her breathing deeper and more regular, her body warmer and warmer.

  All she wanted was to hear her little girl’s voice again, because then there would be no more doubt. But it wouldn’t leave her, and the longer Cassie failed to wake, the stronger it grew.

  Just one chance was all she wanted, one last chance to tell her that she loved her and had missed her so terribly much all of these years. To say she was sorry for what she had done.

  Her beautiful, precious little girl.

  It was probably around eleven that she finally got up to go to the bathroom and to find something to eat. Five minutes was al
l she was gone. And when she returned, Cassie hadn’t been breathing anymore. In a panic, Lyssa shook her, maybe a bit too hard. The bones in her neck had been so delicate, so brittle after all these years. “Breathe, Cassie! Breathe!” But Cassie didn’t breathe. She didn’t wake.

  Stabbing the earpieces of her stethoscope into her ears, she could hear nothing inside that tiny chest. Not a sound.

  “No no no NO! Oh nooooo!”

  She pounded on her daughter, first with an open palm, then with her fist, until she heard the ribs crack, but the heart was still. Nearly mindless with grief by then, she bent over the girl and pried open her stiff, gray lips and began to breathe air into her unwilling lungs, forcing herself not to be sick from the wretched smell that the girl’s exhales carried out of her and propelled into her mother’s mouth and nose.

  But nothing she did brought her back. The cure had failed.

  The cure had failed and her daughter was dead again.

  An hour passed.

  Then two, and Lyssa found herself standing in front of the mirror on the bathroom door. She remembered she’d always hated the damn thing there. She hated the ways she’d always looked in it.

  The reflection that filled it now terrified her.

  The cure failed.

  Her daughter was dead and was never going to come back.

  The cure failed.

  Which meant that she would die, too. It was only a matter of time before the virus inside her body overwhelmed the cells she’d injected to kill them. Because they had failed.

  There was no cure.

  As she stood there naked, save for her underwear, she could see that the bruises around her neck had grown darker. The circles under her eyes had grown more pronounced. Her tongue had developed a film of gray.

  And she was hungry . . . .

  The hunger. It was good that the boys had left without her. She was—

  sad

  —glad that they were gone, relieved that she’d sent them away. Perhaps she’d known even then that the cure had failed and that she would become—