S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (132 page)

Reggie crossed his arms over his chest. “I'm curious, though, about how you plan to get there.”

“By boat,” she replied, without hesitation.

“So, you're planning on getting us all killed in the process. Nice. You do know that the waters around the island are mined with explosives, don't you?”

“Us?” she asked.

“He's coming, too,” Kelly said. “It's not negotiable.”

She frowned. “The bombers took out most of the mines during their runs. We stand a good chance of—”

“That was weeks ago,” Reggie interrupted. “They'll have lain new ones by now.”

“Except I'm pretty sure they haven't.”

Reggie turned his gaze to Kelly. Clearly he wasn't buying her half-assurances.

“Listen, it's a risk,” she conceded. “You boys can stay here if you want, if it's too much of a risk for you.”

Reggie barked out a laugh. “Risk? Our lives have been nothing but risk for the past six weeks. Lady, I've watched more people die than—”

“Reg,” Kelly said. He put a hand on his arm. “We're all going. Just tell us what we need to do.”

“It'll be tonight,” she told them. She handed Kelly a slip of paper. “After dark. It's all there, what you need to bring, where, when. And no more using your Links. It's too dangerous.”

“Can't anyway,” Kelly said, checking his. “Stream's down again.”

“You mind if I ask
why
you're going?” Reggie said.

“Same reason you're going,” she replied. “There's a girl who needs saving.”

“I don't buy it. What's your story?”

She smiled thinly. “That's it, nothing more.”

 

Crossing the rooftop wasn't as easy as Brother Walter had intimated it would be. They'd extended the ladder up through the hole in the office ceiling and climbed through, then pulled it up after them. But much of the roof covering had rusted, fallen, or blown away. It was mainly just thin corrugated metal, not meant to be walked on. One wrong step and they'd crash through. If they weren't lucky enough to slice themselves in half on the girders, the fall would certainly finish them off.

They each took an end of the ladder, an old wooden one with a wide base and narrow top. The wood was so dry that it felt like balsa and was hardly any heavier. But the strain and concentration of crawling over the metal girders, the sun beating hard and hot upon them, and the fear of falling through quickly exhausted Jessie. She was relieved when they finally reached the edge of the roof and were standing right up under the wall.

“I can't feel it anymore,” Brother Walter observed. He was testing different areas of the roof for their firmness, looking for a place to anchor the base of the ladder so it wouldn't slip as they climbed to the top of the wall.

Jessie's shirt was soaked through, and her hands felt blistered. “The network's down again.”

She looked up at the top of the wall, but then just as quickly looked away again. The view made her dizzy. Sitting on corroded sheet metal thirty-five feet in the air wasn't her idea of fun. And with the wall towering another fifteen feet over her, the sooner she got back on solid ground the better.

“This is the best we can do.” He set the top of the ladder against the rim of the wall and jostled it to check its stability. Then he picked up the coil of nylon twine he'd set on the roof, tied one end to his belt and looped the rest over one shoulder. “There's seventy-five feet of this,” he told her, “enough to tie off to one of these beams and reach to within a few feet of the ground on the other side.

“That's assuming the wall's no more than a few feet wide at the top.” It was impossible to tell from below.

“It'll stretch a bit, too,” he assured her.

It wasn't the stretching or the reaching that worried her. It was the possibility of the rope breaking. She'd already been betrayed by rope not even twenty four hours before. And this one looked too thin, too brittle to be able to hold her weight, much less the two of them.

“You climb up first,” he told her. “I'll hold the ladder steady.”

She thought about complaining, then thought better of it.

The ladder jiggled, creaking beneath her as she went, and the rungs felt loose.
Just keep going
, she told herself, trying not to look down.
See? It's not so bad.

But if it started off hard, the climb became absolutely torturous the higher she went and the narrower the ladder became. She passed the halfway point, where she hovered over open space between the end of the building and the wall. The ground, a sheer forty feet below was a graveyard of old metal parts, rusted gears, and wire that would chew her up if she fell.

Breathe slowly.

She knew she was hyperventilating. She stopped and rested a knee on a rung and tried to calm herself. Brother Walter didn't say anything. He just waited, and somehow that seemed worse than if he'd tried to urge her on. It was like he was testing her and didn't expect her to finish.

She pushed away and began to climb again: another rung, another, another. Hand over hand. Foot over foot. And now she was six feet from the top, and the ladder was a mere fourteen inches wide.

It slipped to one side and she hugged herself to it, almost too frightened to continue.

“Don't stop,” he told her.

Another step. Another. Now less than four feet from the top and the latter was only twelve inches wide.

Now two feet away.

One.

She reached out. The wall felt cool, inert.

And then she was stepping off and onto the smooth surface. It seemed unnaturally clean, as if it repelled dust as effectively as it discouraged birds from landing and shitting on it. From where she crouched, she could see well out into the arcade. She could see network towers poking up from the tree line, above roofs. She'd never really noticed them before. There had to be thousands of them.

Stretching off into the distance on either side ran the wall, a flat, solid, narrow surface, like a highway with no exit.

By the time she'd turned, Brother Walter was halfway up. He climbed steadily, his face straight ahead, his eyes level. Loops of the twine uncoiled beneath him, slack enough to allow him to climb without hindrance.

A shot rang out, shattering the silence. The sound ricocheted off the buildings and passed over them, rippling the air. Jessie dropped to her belly and scanned for the source of the attack.

Brother Walter had stopped climbing. He clutched the ladder, his knuckles white with effort.

“Hurry!” Jessie urged. And then she saw the blood. It dripped from the cuff of his pants. “Oh god! Brother Walter?”

A second report came, startling the birds roosting in a distant tree. They flew off, circling widely, before settling raucously in the very same one. Brother Walter had resumed climbing, but it clearly took considerable effort. His hands shook, and his feet stumbled before finding the rungs. The second shot had missed, but it may not have been necessary.

“Get away from the edge!” he told her.

She saw Andy Emerson sprint across the empty tarmac to the right of them and disappear into the building below. She scanned the area but saw no further movement, and it surprised her that he had been the one to survive the fire at the house, rather than Jo.

“You should have used your own gun,” Brother Walter said. His face was twisted in pain.

“Just hurry!”

He tossed the rope onto the top of the wall. The movement made the ladder jump to one side, tilting dangerously off balance. The rope began to uncoil into the gap below, dragged down by its own weight. Jessie scrambled to catch it, but by then Brother Walter had stepped off the ladder and stopped her. He still had the other end tied to his belt.

He quickly unknotted it and threw it over the Gameland side.

“Go!” he told her.

The bottom of his shirt was drenched with blood. Jessie wanted to check him, but there was no time. And no time to argue either.

Over the side went her backpack, hitting the ground with a dull thud a moment later. She donned the leather gloves he'd found in the shipwright's workshop, then looped the rope behind her like he'd shown her. There was no time to be afraid of heights.

And then she was dangling, her heart thrumming with fear. The lip of the wall was above her and there was no going back.

Don't look down. Don't look down.

Hurry. Hurry!

She slid more than rappelled. Fifty feet rushed past her, and in a matter of seconds that felt like years, her feet were on the ground again. She called up to Brother Walter. “And bring my sword!”

But he didn't appear. A third gunshot sounded. Then a figure toppled over the edge. Jessie dove out of the way as the body plummeted toward her. It landed with a sickening crunch where she'd been standing just a moment before.

 

From the driver's seat of her mother's ArcTic Explorer LE, Siennah Davenport watched the two boys exit the rundown shack the Daniels called a home. She slid down in her seat in case they happened to look over. Unlike her own car, a flashy red ArcTouris Coupe which she'd bought with her gaming earnings, the off-white Explorer was much less ostentatious. The last thing she wanted to do now was draw anyone's attention. That was certainly not the case with her coupe.

They were carrying a large, heavy-looking cardboard box, which they set on the porch railing so Kelly Corben could shut and lock the front door. She could hear him give that Neanderthal, Reggie Casey, directions while backing awkwardly down the porch steps: “Careful now. Don't push!”

“I told you, dude, you should just let me carry it. I can handle it myself.”

“No,” Kelly answered. “It's too important to—”

His foot missed the last step and he fell. Reggie tried to adjust, but something inside the box shifted and everything crashed to the ground.

“A gaming console?” Siennah whispered to herself.
And an old one at that, from the looks of those goggles and the size of that drive.
“What the hell are they doing with that?”

“Dude,” Reggie cried out. “You just told me to be careful! How're they going to ping Jessie and let her know we're coming if it's broken?”

“Keep it down!” Kelly snapped.

Ping Jessie? Coming?

Ever since her last confrontation with the bitch in
The Game
, it had been driving Siennah batshit trying to figure out how she'd known who was operating Micah Sandervol. Now she suspected she knew. The boys had told her with that machine.

Although she wasn't a computer tech geek, she did have a rudimentary understanding of Arc's firewall restricting communication between Gameland and the outside world; only the gaming systems were capable of slipping through.

She chuckled and nodded appreciatively. It was a simple, yet brilliant hack.

The boys hurriedly repacked the box and placed it into the trunk of the junker car the Corben boy drove. Siennah shrank down even further in her seat when they shut the hatch and looked around, as if sensing they were being watched. Then they got in the car and pulled out.

“Start,” Siennah said, and the electric motor hummed quietly to life. If not for the gentle vibration beneath her and the gauges leaping on the dashboard, she wouldn't have known the Explorer was even on.

There were surprisingly few vehicles on the road. Most people were being good little citizens and obeying the mandatory shelter-in-place order. But rumors were spreading that the outbreak was getting worse and that the police were too busy trying to contain it to bother with arresting those who ignored the travel ban. The official statement from the mayor's office was that there was no risk, and yet they still asked everyone to stay indoors. Siennah knew her father was lying. She could always see it in his face when he did, and this had been one of those times.

Not that it bothered her much. To be perfectly honest, she thought the whole outbreak thing was kind of overdue. The damn town was in a coma and badly needed to be woken up. Or shaken up. And it wasn't like she'd actually seen any Infected walking around anyway.

She really wanted to see one. She thought it might be cool to watch one go berserk on some stupid idiot who couldn't run fast enough or fight hard enough to prevent becoming lunch. If they were that stupid and that slow, they deserved to become one of them.

She had a long list of people she wouldn't mind seeing becoming a zombie, her parents being two of them. At least then there'd be something beneficial to the network going down. Seeing them die would totally make up for all the money she was losing by not being able to play.

The thought of lost earnings drove her into a fit of pique. She took the so-called glitches as a personal affront, as if Arc really didn't want to make it easy for anyone to capture and kill Jessie Daniels. But it really was unfair, especially after all the money she'd spent to buy Micah. She still had every expectation that she would be the one to kill that zombitch and collect the ten million dollars. But if the fucking network wouldn't work, how was that going to happen?

Her father insisted the glitches weren't intentional. They weren't directed at her. Or at anyone specifically.

But he was lying again. She could see it in his face. He didn't even believe himself.

Well, whatever. One thing at a time. First, figure out what the bitch's stupid husband and that ape were up to. She might as well do something useful while she waited to get back on-line.

She followed them from a distance, her irritation growing in inverse relationship to the slowness of Kelly's speed. “Who the fuck goes twenty-four miles an hour in a fucking residential zone?” she screamed. The few other people driving had raced past them, obviously in a hurry to leave town. That boy was such a fucking goody goody, always following the rules and shit. “Damn college track fucker,” she spat. “Thinks he's better than anyone else.”