S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (128 page)

She suddenly let out a cry of triumph as her wrists burst apart. “Yes! Stupid bitch,” she uttered. “Thought that would hold me, did you?”

With a gleeful laugh, she reached up to her face. She looked like she was peeling off her skin. “I know you're coming back, zombitch. Well, I'll be waiting for you.”

The skin on her arms and the back of her neck glistened with sweat. Her whole shirt was soaked through, clinging to her body in places and in ways a father shouldn't notice. And suddenly he wanted to be away from here.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

He thought about the little fantasy world Arc had created for him.

Leave her alone.

He thought about going upstairs and waking Claire.

You're a sick man, Henry. Sick. You need help.

“Daddy?”

His eyes snapped open. Siennah had removed the goggles and was staring at him, frowning.

“Are you having a heart attack?”

“What? No, I'm fine, dear,” he said, choking on his own tongue. His mouth was suddenly very dry. “Just work,” he muttered. “I'm tired is all, overworked. It's not good for my health.”

“Well, your breathing is distracting me.”

He nodded. “You shouldn't be spending so much time playing. You need your rest.”

She watched him for a moment, her pale face never seeming to settle.

“Go to bed, honey. The sirens are off at last.”

She chuffed. “It's not like there's going to be school tomorrow.”

“You need to get some sleep.”

“You're the one who needs rest.” She pulled the goggles back onto her face, dismissing him.

He paused just around the corner and listened. He could hear her getting back into her gaming gear.

“I know you're coming back, bitch,” she said. “And when you do, I'll be waiting. You'll be begging me to die before I'm done with you.”

Henry Davenport's terror bloomed inside of him. It so filled him, so consumed him, that sleep would not come that night. And when, in the dark, dead hours of the morning, the emergency sirens came back on, he almost sighed in relief.

But the Stream was still up and his daughter was still playing.

He tried to ping Arc. He wanted to tell them no more. But though he tried several of his contacts there, all of his attempts went straight to their voicemail boxes.

 

The rope slithered through Jessie's fingers and disappeared into the darkness of the shaft.

“Brother Walter? Damn it!”

She heard the rope coiling atop the dumbwaiter far below. Downstairs, Andy and Jo were shouting, yelling at each other to put out the flames, to get upstairs and capture her before the house burned to the ground. Ten million dollars was at stake.

But Jessie wasn't planning on dying.

She ran out into the hallway. Already, the flames were licking at the ceiling at the top of the stairs, curling around the corner of the wall. An eerie red glow filled the place. Black smoke roiled above her like a living, breathing thing. She ran into her room and tore the sheets off the bed, then did the same in Brother Walter's. She was furious with him but refused to let her anger make her lose control. There would be time for that later, after she got away. After she caught up with him.

Don't waste your time.

She tied the corners of the four sheets together, producing one long knotted cord almost twenty feet long. But there was nothing to tie the end to. Her eyes darted to the fixtures on the sink and tub. Neither looked very stable. The sink itself was rickety, pulling away from the wall, and the tub was too far away and would require too much of her precious line. She didn't relish the idea of dangling from the end and dropping into the darkness.

Angling her light upward inside the dumbwaiter shaft, she made out the pulley mounted into the ceiling. Tucking the end of her improvised rope into her belt, she climbed up and onto the lip of the opening. There was nothing else to provide footing, so she had to lean back against the opposite wall at a precarious angle. She could almost feel the emptiness beneath her back tugging at her, drawing her down.

The shouts sounded closer, like Jo and Andy were halfway up the stairs. They were probably beating back the flames with the coats from the stand in the hallway.

She inserted one end of her rope through the spokes of the pulley and tied it tight, then gave it an experimental tug. The pulley felt loose. Another tug and something small fell into her hair. She batted it away and it dropped to the bottom of the shaft with a small, metallic clatter.

Shining her Link up again she saw that one of the mounting screws had come out of the dry wood. Another was pulling free. If it did while she was climbing down, she might be lucky enough to survive the fall without breaking a leg, even from this height, but the pulley would kill her.

She raced back out into the hallway, only to find their shadows on the wall at the top of the stairs. They were only a few steps away from reaching her. And Brother Walter had taken the pistol and her sword.

She ran back into the bathroom and shut and locked the door behind her. There was nothing she could do now but risk the loose pulley. She gave it another pull and the second screw slipped further out, showering her face in rust and splinters of old wood.

“Search the rooms!” she heard Jo shout. “Shoot the bitch and throw her out the window.”

“We can't kill her.”

“I don't give a fuck anymore!”

A door from one of the rooms crashed in.

“
Jessica!
”

Brother Walter was calling her from the bottom of the shaft.

She ignored him. There was nothing he could do for her now. She scanned the tiny bathroom for some other way to escape or something to use as a weapon. The window above the tub was too small for her to slip out. She could rip the towel rods out of the wall and use them as makeshift short sticks, but she wasn't very good at their use to defend herself. Besides, Jo and Andy had guns.

Her eyes lit on the shower curtain.

Too close quarters!

Another door crashed open beneath someone's kick. “Check the closets, too,” Jo yelled.

“Don't fucking tell me what to check!”

“And under the beds!”

Jessie tore the curtain down, then yanked the rod free.

“I heard something over here!” Andy shouted. “She's at this end of the hall!”

Without bothering to untie the sheets from the pulley, Jessie knotted a loop about six feet down and slipped the rod through it. Then she tossed the other end of her makeshift rope down into the shaft.

The door to the adjacent room crashed open. “Jo, I said get your ass down here. She's somewhere over here!”

“I'm coming!”

Jessie flung herself into the pitch dark shaft. For a split second as she fell, she thought it wouldn't hold, but the rod wedged itself against the frame. Palms burning, she half slipped, half climbed down into the darkness. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She couldn't tell how far she'd gone or how much further she had left.

“Hurry!” Brother Walter shouted again. He sounded so far away.

“I'm coming!”

“The top of the lift is a metal plate! You won't be able to break through.”

The bathroom door crashed open, flooding the top of the shaft with light for only a moment before Jo's shadow filled it. She gave a shriek of rage and triumph. “I found her!”

Metal glinted in her hand as she aimed her pistol down.

Jessie spun around and kicked off the back wall and crashed through the thin wooden door into the kitchen just as the blast shattered her eardrums. She heard the round ping off the top of the lift. Then she was on the floor inside the pantry, wooden shelves splintering against her weight and cans of food raining down on her.

“She got away!” Jo screamed. “Get back down stairs!”

Jessie didn't wait to see if she'd been hit. She jumped to her feet and fled across the hall, crashing through the door into the basement.

* * *

“The rope broke,” was all the explanation he gave.

Jessie panted as she rested her hands on her knees. She was out of breath, but it was more from the ache in her back than the running. The ceiling in the tunnel was very low, forcing her to run bent over.

They emerged up a ladder and through the floor of a gardening shed on the edge of the property. Other tunnels broke off the one Brother Walter led her down, and she figured that one of them led to the chapel her father had used as a secret research laboratory.

Brother Walter snatched a rusting machete off the wall, then handed her sword back to her. “We may encounter some of the Children,” he told her.

Jessie hoped not. She didn't think she could kill them, now that she knew the truth about them. And she wondered,
Did he know?
Did Brother Walter even suspect that there were still people inside those horrible shells?

“Ready?” he asked. She nodded, and they stepped out into the moonlight.

Through the trees, they could see the house burning, its windows lit up and the front porch engulfed like the sinister grin of a jack-o-lantern. The porch roof collapsed in a shower of sparks. Everywhere else, darkness reigned.

“Think they got out?” she asked.

She had set the cellar stairs on fire to assist their escape. If Jo and Andy had managed to get back down to the ground floor, they would have been forced to exit through the back door, which was on the opposite side of the house from where Jessie and Brother Walter were now standing.

“I think we have to assume they did,” he replied.

They turned away to allow their eyes to adjust. Then they headed through the trees toward the road. “They're sure to be tracking your communication device now.”

“I can't get rid of it.”

He sighed and nodded. “We best keep running.”

They alternated between jogging and walking, stopping only long enough for water and food, and so quickly put the miles behind them. One soon became two, and two gave way to four.

In Ronkonkoma, they came upon a crowd of the Infected, and Brother Walter led her down through a series of roads and alleys to get past them.

“They're there in that same exact spot nearly every night,” he explained.

“Why?”

“Father Heale believed it was some sort of interference point, where the signal from the various towers cancelled each other out.” He shrugged.

“In other words, you don't know.”

“It was just a theory.”

They were still six or seven miles from the wall when Jessie asked him how he'd met Father Heale.

He was silent for a long while. They walked in the moonlight, and the fall air was almost crisp. Jessie couldn't remember a year when the leaves had begun to turn so early. It was only mid-September.

“I had a family,” he finally said. “Just my wife and me. We lived together with her parents in a nice split-level on the north shore, near Baiting Hollow.”

“No children?”

He shook his head. He had to take more steps than she, as his legs were shorter, and he was showing signs of tiring. “We tried for years after marrying. Both of us wanted children, but it never happened.”

“You cared a lot for Julia, didn't you?” Jessie asked, referring to the young girl she'd met previously at the house, the one Jake had viciously attacked and infected.

“She meant a lot to me. To all of us. Children are such a rarity here.”

“Was Sister Jane your wife?”

“Jane?” He chuffed in amusement. “No. No, my wife's name was Laurel.”

“What happened to her?”

When he didn't answer, Jessie asked, “How did you get left behind?”

“Laurel's parents . . . . They weren't very strong, and we thought it would be better to just ride out the outbreak until the worst of the epidemic had passed. We had no idea how bad it would get, that it would just keep getting worse and that no one would come to rescue us.”

He spoke in a low voice, barely above a whisper, so that she had to walk very close to him to hear.

“Laurel's parents passed a few weeks after the bridges were bombed.”

“Both of them?”

She sensed something unspoken in his words and wondered if they had had help. Or worse.

“In their sleep. It was actually a blessing; what happened here broke their hearts. They couldn't understand it. We buried them in the back yard, erected a headstone made from the headboard of their bed. Their honeymoon bed. Laurel carved their names in the wood and we cried. They'd been married for nearly fifty years and were inseparable.”

“When did you . . . . When were you . . . ?”

“Infected?” He shrugged. “I first met Father Heale six or seven years ago. I'd heard of his group. There were maybe a half dozen stable communities by then, several hundred survivors. Heale's group was the most well-established. They'd settled in Brookhaven very soon after the outbreak and made it their home.”

“Just several hundred? I'd heard there were hundreds of thousands left behind. Were there other groups?”

“There were a lot more at the beginning. And remember, not everyone wanted to be part of a community. Some continued to hold out hope for rescue.”

“Like you.”

“Then there were the others, the ones who, for whatever reason, shunned the company of others. There was little cooperation between groups and individuals, a lot of distrust. It was a lawless time. An embarrassment of riches had been left behind. Money had no value, so the currency was goods and services. You stole what you needed; bartering was the exception, rather than the rule.”

“Most of the houses I've seen look undisturbed.”

“The attrition rate was high. Most people died very quickly. The life expectancy here isn't very long. Within that first year, hundreds of thousands became only a few thousand. Now . . . .” He shrugged. “I doubt if there are a hundred of us left, maybe a couple dozen still uninfected. Without Father Heale's blood, all the other groups quickly died off.”