S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (105 page)

If only there were some way to prove to herself what was true.

There is, Jessie. All you have to do is connect to your mother's implant for a second or two.

No! It would be a violation. And it would make Jessie a hypocrite. After all, wasn't that why she'd come here in the first place, to stop whoever was hacking Reggie's and Kelly's implants?

And yours.

But this was different, wasn't it?

“No,” she repeated, out loud this time. Once again she was startled to find that she'd wandered back into the room. The gaming console was at her feet, and she was reaching for it.

She recoiled in horror.

“Ashley was lying the second time,” she said. “Mom's dead.” She kicked at the machine and sent it crashing into the wall. “She's dead, and that's all there is to it. Move on.”

Moving on was the only way she was going to survive.

She kneeled down and began to gather the supplies she'd need for her departure in the morning. Once the storm abated and at first light, she'd go. She'd get the key from her Grandfather's Link to unlock the firewall inside her head. Then, somehow, she'd get back home where she'd figure out how to bring Arc down.

 

Kelly pulled open the stairwell door and cautiously stuck his head out. The hallway was empty, save for a heavily-bearded orderly busily pushing a linen cart away from him and whistling some tuneless song whose notes varied only in rhythm. He waited for the hairy man to disappear into a room before stepping out into the hall.

His timing could not have been worse. At the same moment, a man in a police uniform emerged from a connecting corridor and turned briskly toward him. He looked up from his Link, met Kelly's gaze, then turned back to his conversation without registering any recognition. He passed by and disappeared around another corner, murmuring something about a prisoner going to lockup as he went. Kelly guided the stairwell door quietly shut behind him.

Doctor White's office was three doors down. He didn't know if she was there. She hadn't answered any of his pings, not for the past day or so. And the last time they'd spoken, she'd acted strangely, snapping impatiently at him, answering his questions with evasions and ambiguity.

He needed to talk with her, let her know what was going on with Jessie. Maybe she knew people who could help hide her from Arc's Players, keep her safe, maybe even help get her off the island. It was a long shot, but it was all he could hope for given the circumstances. Going back was simply out of the question.

The office door was shut, as it always was. One of the doctor's pet peeves was doors left open to public places, and it bothered her whenever he'd forget to close it during his visits to see her.

Raising a knuckle, he rapped lightly against the wood while keeping an eye on the hallway. If it looked like someone was coming for him, he'd run for the stairs. His car was parked in the garage below, giving him a quick escape.

There was no answer.

“
Doctor White?
” he whispered harshly.

A Link pinged distantly, somewhere down another hallway. A canned voice came over the intercom and requested that someone go to the pharmacy to pick up their prescription.

“Doctor White, it's Kelly.”

He considered knocking again. Instead, he pressed an ear to the door and was surprised when it yielded to his touch and creaked open a couple inches. The wood where the deadbolt entered the frame was splintered. Someone had forced their way in.

Hot air rushed past him, carrying with it the smell of something old and slightly rotten.

The office had been ransacked, he could see that much. The contents of the desktop were scattered about the floor. One of the visitors' chairs was overturned. The top three filing cabinet drawers had been yanked open and papers were strewn over the sides and onto the floor.

A slight breeze caressed his cheek from the open window in the back wall, bringing with it the metallic tang of rain and the promise of thunder. A few stray raindrops materialized out of the darkness and spattered against the glass, exploding like vitreous insects onto a windshield. Hot air rushed in from the vent directly above his head.

“Doctor White?”

Maybe Eric had warned her, just as he had warned him earlier. He imagined her grabbing whatever she could carry and skipping town, fleeing from the police. Was that who had broken in?

Or maybe it was Arc. If they found out she had a cure—

He stepped inside, feeling suddenly short of breath. If she was gone, then he and his little brother were in big trouble. For years, Doctor White had been treating Kyle's infection with proteins she'd secretly purified out of Jessie's blood. Now, with Jessie gone, he realized he had been counting on the cure to save them both.

Because she's not coming back.

He hated admitting it, even refused to, but as much as he loved her and cared for her, despite their recent vows to stay together, he knew deep down that this was something from which she might never escape. The moment she left him to return to Long Island he knew the vows were little more than words. And he couldn't depend on words. Not where his brother was concerned.

“Records,” he said aloud, and stepped around the desk. “There have to be records. Something to—”

He nearly tripped over Doctor White's body. It was splayed on the floor beneath the kneehole of her desk, arms and legs akimbo.

“Jesus.
Oh, Jesus!
”

Her face and neck were covered in bruises, four on one cheek and one on the other. Startled, he realized they formed the shape of a hand pressing down against her mouth and nose. It looked like someone had smothered her.

With shaking fingers, he searched for a pulse but couldn't find one, though he did locate her Link beneath her body, which he used to ping the emergency dispatcher. “I'm at the hospital,” he told the woman. “Sisters of Mercy. There's been a murder.”

They asked him for his name.

“Just send someone to Doctor White's office now! Room 2214. It's on the second floor.”

Behind him, the doctor's foot twitched. Kelly didn't notice. He did, however, hear the low moan that escaped her lips.

* * *

Hidden behind a supply cart at the end of the hall, Kelly watched the crowd of doctors and nurses pile into White's office. He heard muffled yells, calls for an IV, vitals. Someone shouted Doctor White's name and asked her a series of questions.

He had been so certain that she'd been murdered that when she moaned, he nearly reacted by smashing the old antique telephone into her skull. By the time he realized she wasn't dead, the emergency code team had already been summoned and was on its way. He barely had enough time to get himself out of there before they arrived.

A gurney was angled through the open door, but it wouldn't fit completely inside the tiny office. People were shouting instructions, some inside, others stuck out in the hallway. He saw her being placed on her back on the thin mattress, a nurse's hand beneath her head. The gurney was backed out and quickly rolled toward the elevator.

Doctor White raised a shaking hand and pushed weakly at the attendants. Kelly could hear her protesting, but her words were scratchy and incoherent.

One man told her to calm down. “We're taking you to the Emergency Room,” he told her. “You've got a fever, so we're going to put in an IV and give you some fluids.”

He told the nurse next to him to draw some blood for some tests.

Doctor White tried once again to protest, but the words were cut off as the elevator doors shut.

Kelly straightened up, unsure about what to do next. Should he stay? Should he go home? He needed to talk with her.

The last two people emerged from the office and closed the door behind them. One fiddled with the knob until the other told him not to bother. “You need to get that checked ASAP,” he said, gesturing at the other man's hand. “At least get it disinfected.”

“Stupid,” the other replied. He shook his head disgustedly. “What the fuck was she doing with a bloody needle in her pocket? Hate to say it, but I always thought she was a little off. Probably a damn junkie.”

His coworker patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “I'm sure it's nothing, but don't wait to take that syringe down to the lab for analysis.”

 

It was clearly no ordinary storm. Jessie could hear it rumbling around outside through the cinderblock walls, whistling through the vents above her head in the steel-trussed roof. Every once in a while the ceiling tiles would flutter from an especially strong gust. The wind would force its way into the ventilation ducts, and the flaps in the grates in the wall would slap against their metal cages. The noises did little to settle her nerves. If anything, they reminded her of how alone and vulnerable she was, making her that much more anxious to move on.

Nevertheless, she knew that leaving was out of the question for the time being. It wasn't the rain or the darkness which discouraged her now, but the wind.

She had traveled at night before, though she preferred not to, as that's when the dead were out in greater numbers. Even so, the risk would've been worth it to get a few more miles between herself and those chasing her. But with the wind being so loud, she might miss hearing any sounds warning her of trouble. No, it was better to stay put and hope that the others chasing her were doing the same.

Unable to sleep, she busied herself by trying to understand how Ashley had figured out the hack that allowed her to control Reggie and Kelly. She studied the neural implant that the girl had somehow managed to extract from the Player. The device was the size and shape of a pea and was programmed to self-destruct if tampered with, but somehow Ashley had neutralized that capability while keeping the rest of its functionality.

A pair of spider silk-thin wires trailed from one side of the device, and it was with these wires that Ash had connected it to the Link which she'd used to control the boys.

I know how to remove your implant.

The insinuation bothered Jessie, not that Ashley would try and use that bit of knowledge to negotiate for her life, but that it had almost worked.

If the implant in her head hadn't needed to stay where it was, would she have spared Ash's life in exchange for the knowledge?

She thought the answer might be yes.

“What was she trying to do with you?” she muttered as she stared at the tiny object pinched between her thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Was it part of the hack or something else?

Earlier, after discovering it and realizing what it was and where it came from, Jessie had yanked it from the Link to which it had been attached. The Link belonged to Ben Wolfram, the man who had been sent by the Southern States Coalition to find and retrieve her biological father, Professor Halliwell— or, as he had been known by the living refugees here, Father Heale. It hadn't taken Jessie long to see, after the misfortune of running into him, that Ben was a complete psychopath. Thinking the syringes of her father's blood, which she'd been transporting back here to treat Jake's infection, were the cure, he'd stolen them from her. But after self-injecting one, he'd gone even further insane and ordered his teammates to murder Jessie and the rest of her group.

All except for Ashley, for whom he'd apparently had other plans.

Jessie smiled thinly. He'd had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Neither did you.

Anger flashed through her again, then guilt as she recognized the sinister thought in her head. For just a split second she found herself wishing the man had had his way with Ashley before killing her himself.

She hated herself for thinking such a terrible thing.

It would've been better for everyone if he had just killed her outright.

She plucked Ben's Link from the floor beside her and brought the two devices together in front of her eyes, as if their mere proximity might provide a clue as to what connecting them this way did. But, of course, nothing happened, and no flash of insight came to her.

The Link was very similar to hers— a plain rectangle of black plastic and metal, a nearly indestructible sheet of synthetic sapphire glass for a screen. Upon waking, it showed a familiar array of icons.

Curious, she opened up his contacts folder.

Most of the listings were identified by nonsensical alphanumeric codes, but as she scrolled through them, she noticed one labeled
BLOCH
.

Her half-brother's name came to mind: Enoch Bloch. He had insisted that they call him Stephen, a vanity he'd believed would endear him to his father—
their
father. He had apparently gone to the most horrific of lengths to gain that attention by getting himself infected. All it had managed to do was further alienate the two men.

In a fit of pique, Stephen — Enoch — made his way off the island and gained a position within Arc. But even then his actions were selfish. He was also secretly assisting Arc's most powerful threat, the Southern States Coalition.

The Coalition had been formed ten years ago, after several states' requests for greater access to the tech were denied by the federal government. In a bitter but blessedly brief civil war, the states seceded. They'd been trying ever since to steal Arc's technology.

Jessie wondered what secrets Stephen might have shared with them. The Coalition was known to be waging an ongoing aggressive campaign to build up their own military capabilities in order to take control of New Merica. At least, that's what the Media Stream reported.

While the subject of warring nations in which both sides possessed Undead soldiers was an entertaining one in school, most people agreed that the government needed to do everything in its power to keep the technology from ever falling into outside hands. No one wanted to envision such a scenario where it might be misused, but it seemed obvious that misuse was inevitable. In fact, it had already happened.