S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (145 page)

Open your window.

That's it. Except he couldn't find the switch.

Crank. It has a crank.

God, why was everything so damn hard all of a sudden? He felt hot, then cold. He was hungry, but also nauseous. And his damn arm hurt like a son of a bitch.

Someone was knocking on the top of his head. He needed to answer the door. He turned to open it, but a foot appeared from the ceiling.

That's a foot. Someone's in the ceiling.

“Open the damn window!”

The foot kicked at the glass.

Gilfoy appeared in the windshield and slapped it, drawing his attention. Eric smiled at him. They were playing a joke on him.

“Open your window!”

He felt a presence next to him and looked over and there was someone sitting in the driver seat looking over. And more feet on that side. It was like they were falling out of the sky.

“What's wrong with you?” the man asked. “Open the damn window and get out of the way!”

Everyone was talking all at once. He couldn't hear them, couldn't make sense of any of it.

The man next to him tried to pull him out of the seat. Eric resisted, slapping at him. Pain rocketed up his arm.
Oh, God
, he thought.
I'm having a heart attack.

He felt his seatbelt release, felt hands on his shirt, pulling, grabbing.

“Let go of me!” he yelled, except his words sounded like the wind.

Something slammed into the hood. He looked over and was surprised to see a woman there, the pregnant one. She had slipped and fallen onto her back. She tried to get to her feet. Eric cheered her on, but the people below were pulling on her.

Tug of war! Tug of war!

She was laughing. Hysterically.

No, screaming. She was screaming.

“I think she's having her baby,” he told the man next to him.

“Get out of the way!” the man screamed back.

“Are you a doctor?”

The woman disappeared beneath the forest of arms for a moment, then reappeared as someone pulled her back onto the hood. Eric saw the truck's hood ornament rake across her distended belly. He cringed. It looked painful. It must've been really painful, given how much she was screaming.

“Get her back. Get her back!” someone shouted.

The team on top was winning. He wanted to urge them on. It was fun. But the team on the ground just gave up. They let go at once and the woman and the pullers fell back against the windshield.

“Yay!” Eric cheered, but vomit spewed from his mouth and splashed against the windshield and he couldn't see them anymore.

Hands beside him grabbed and shook him, pulled him away from his seat
HIS SEAT NOT ANYONE ELSE'S!

The woman had stopped screaming. He could see her again, a vague shape through the scrim of puke on the windshield. It looked like she'd cut her leg. Blood was running down it. Everyone had let go of her. The game was over.

We'll get you a bandage
, Eric thought.
It's just a small cut. No worries.

“Oh god,” he heard her say. “Oh god, I've been bitten! I've been bitten!”

Bitten? By the snake?

And then it all came back to him. He pushed the hands away from his arms and leaned forward and swiped at the windshield. The woman locked eyes with him for just a moment, just a heartbeat, before she turned away again. She stood up and turned toward the mass of arms waving at her, beckoning. Nobody touched her. Nobody tried to stop her as she stepped out and plunged into their midst.

“Noooo!” Eric yelled.

But the Infected, their arms waving like snapping turtles, had already swallowed her up.

Jessie avoided the Infected wherever she found them. By this point she felt as though she understood them, understood what drove them and the way they behaved. It was so different than in a game.

In
Zpocalypto
, the zombies all acted the same way: they were one dimensional, without . . . life, without individuality. They all ran with the same lurching gait— well, not really running as much as walking fast, the same pace everywhere, every single one.

In the game, it was better to run as fast as you could to get away, because once they were out of sight, they were pretty much out of the game.

But in real life, it was totally different. Here, the Infected all acted differently. Some were faster. Some were harder to kill. Some seemed smarter than they had any right to be.

Here, they were like people. Because they
were
people. Real people.

That was the biggest reason she avoided them now. She knew that within each one of them was a person who was probably terrified as hell, lonely as hell, angry as hell over what had happened to them. She knew that they all probably hated themselves for what they'd become, for seeing themselves doing what zombies do, and for not being able to stop. They were unwilling murderers who couldn't keep from murdering again.

But she could stop. She didn't want to be a killer, not of them, these
people
. They'd done nothing wrong.

Unlike the living, both hiding behind their iVZ gaming gear. The people wearing the Arc jumpsuits. The people who knew what they were doing, who were consciously making decisions and acting on them.

What did it say about her that she found it easier to kill the living?

As she walked down the middle of the road, her eyes constantly scanning the shadows for the Infected, her ears pricked to every sound, she realized that there was a certain peacefulness to this place, a tranquility. She could see why Father Heale — her father — would choose to stay here after the outbreak. Aside from the arcade, the island was the only place away from the insanity of the living. Unlike the constantly monitored and guided and constrained world in which she had grown up, this place had been allowed to return to its native state.

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.

 

“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.”

 

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 and 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.