S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (2 page)

The edges of the clearing blurred as the view changed, sweeping past with nauseous speed. What was she looking for?

A lurch and she was moving forward again, heading for a narrow opening in the brush. Now stepping sideways, edging through the tighter gap in the dangling ivy.

And there, concealed beneath blankets of leaves and mud, was the old creek bed. The path to it was blocked by a large tree. The fracture had left the trunk splintered. Black mold had already begun to cover it, and sap wept from the greener wood. But there was room enough to crawl underneath. The space dripped with dew and was guarded by a veil of webs.

She was kneeling. She heard another grunt and the ache which had been building in her arms was suddenly, blessedly gone. The view turned, shifted down, and in the shadows she caught a glimpse of fabric, a red button-down shirt, pale skin. Here was the back pocket of a girl's blue jeans, a butterfly pattern sown into the back pocket.

My jeans?

A flutter of panic. She tried to push it away.

And now her mind lurched as she gained her first glimpse of the hands of the body she was trapped within: dirt-blackened nails, mud-smeared, old cuts reopened and seeping blood.

It's a man?

Her heart fluttered.

She slammed back to her senses and tried once more to wake from the nightmare, and for just a moment she thought she might succeed. Her mind filled with that same terrible buzzing sound. The view before her eyes blurred, wavered.

The scene quickly returned with the same clarity.

The man was crawling backwards beneath the fallen tree, leaving the body (her body?) on the trail. Once through, he stood and turned.

This had been the creek's low point, and there was still a shallow puddle, the water dark brown from decaying matter. Around her (him!): walls of greenery, a ceiling of leaves, the sunlight piercing through and stabbing the ground in a hundred different places.

The scene shifted back to the darkness beneath the tree. A hand extending into the shadows. Grabbing and pulling. Fingers hooking the cuff of her jeans. Her foot: shoeless, the white sock splattered with—

blood

—mud.

Now her lower leg. Then a knee. The second leg, bent at the knee. The other foot was still clad in a black loafer.

That's not my shoe.

Relief.

The man arranged the legs together, pulled some more. Next came the waist. Above it, the bare skin and the sharp angles of the woman's hipbones. Her shirt—

And that's not my shirt.

—had come untucked, had worked its way up her torso. Bunched up beneath her arms.

Angry red scrapes on her side.

No human bite marks.

This definitely wasn't her.

Now came the bottom of a white lace bra, a bit of underwire showing through frayed fabric.

That's—

No!

She didn't want to watch anymore, yet had no choice. She closed her eyes, but the eyes of that—

killer

—man were unblinking.

The buzzing sound rose in her head a third time, tearing into her brain, splitting—

Jessie's body jolted and she shot upright. Her feet hit the worn carpet of her living room floor. Her breath tore through her throat in ragged gasps. Darkness enveloped her. Gone was the scattered sunlight, replaced with the glowing edges of a blurry rectangle were the blackout curtain covered the window. And there, on the opposite side of the room, was the wavering image of the television.

She blinked and the blurry shapes became people and the people became zombies. The sound on the television was turned down. The battle continued in silence.

Her Link pinged. She reached over and tried to pluck it out of the media cradle, but her fingers were still numb and she fumbled it. The device clattered to the surface of the coffee table, screen side up. She hit the connect button, and her brother's face snapped into view. “Eric?”

“Finally! I've been pinging you for the past ten minutes!”

“I— I was asleep, I guess.” She frowned at what felt to her like a lie. Whatever she'd just experienced, it wasn't sleep. She hadn't been dreaming.

Her eyes flicked over to the television. The two Undead Players had entered a junkyard. She could see a number of other figures gathering at the fence, drawn there by the noise. These others were the unimplanted Infecteds, victims of the outbreak on Long Island over a decade before. Jessie caught herself scanning the faces, looking for—

Why do you keep tormenting yourself, Jess?
Kelly's voice, pleading.

Because it's my fault. I left them behind.

We
left them behind
.

Trapped in Gameland. Undead.

There's nothing you can do about it now.

She still couldn't seem to stop herself from watching.

The Players grappled into the shadow of a rusted crane, the larger one forcing the smaller, fresher one back. Both had new gashes on their arms and sides, the wounds gaping. Dry on the older Player; seeping gore from the newer, smaller one. The monsters passed into the sunlight. Naked bone glistened from the skull of the second Player, the scalp torn freshly away.

The wound would have been fatal if inflicted on the living. On the Undead, it seemed to have had no effect whatsoever.

“Jessie? You still there?”

She sucked in a sharp breath and blinked, startled by how easily her thoughts seemed to drift these days.

“Sorry. I guess I'm having trouble waking up.”

“Well, I'm glad you're finally getting some sleep.” The tension in her brother's face loosened a bit. “You need the rest. It'll help you heal.”

Physically, maybe. Spiritually, she didn't think the dying would ever stop.

She glanced over to the window, to the corona of sunlight burning onto the walls. It was still afternoon, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't slept the whole day away.

“I've just a few more things to wrap up here at work, then I'll come home,” Eric said. “Just wanted to see if Mom's taking you to City Hall.”

“She's out,” Jessie replied. “I haven't seen her.” She coughed to clear the stiffness from her throat. Mention of her mother reminded her again of the vision she'd just had. She shook her head to try and cast the image away. Her mother wasn't dead. They'd just spoken a few hours ago. They were all going together to file the documents. Kelly was supposed to ping any minute now.

Where the hell is he?

Eric's face darkened slightly. Even on the scant three-inch diagonal of her Link screen, Jessie could see his concern. “Don't worry, she'll be there,” he told her, though he didn't sound very convinced.

“I think maybe she's planning on meeting us there,” Jessie said. She frowned at the time on her Link. “I'm supposed to meet at Kel's before heading over with his parents and Kyle.”

Eric hesitated before nodding, his face still tight with worry. “Okay, I'll ping Mom, make sure she didn't forget. See you in a bit.”

“She'll be there,” Jessie whispered.

But Eric had already disconnected.

‡ ‡ ‡

Nothing about any of this felt real.

The bodies packed around her, pressing, suffocating. Jessie hugged herself ever tighter and wished she could just break away, find a place to hide. Her first full day back at school, and already she was wishing she'd never returned.

The two-minute warning chime sounded and the tension in the hallways ratcheted upward several notches. Lockers slammed, and kids shouted to one another over the din.

How could she possibly be here? How could she go and sit in a classroom and listen to even one more lie, acting as if everything was okay? As if nothing had changed since she'd last walked these hallways three months ago. As if nobody had died.

Nothing else has changed, Jessie, only you have. You're the only one who knows what a farce this all is.

She wished it weren't true.

She had killed people, murdered them. She had witnessed the deaths of a dozen souls— some of them well deserving of it, granted, but it didn't change the fact of what she had seen and done. She had watched some of them reanimate. Had quieted a few of them herself.

Three months ago she could never have envisioned doing what she'd had to do to survive being inside that gaming arcade. Up until then, her battles with zombies had existed only inside of a computer program. Those monsters hadn't been live. They'd been hackable by code, not by machetes.

All this time, playing that stupid game
Zpocalypto
, she'd never realized how much she was cheating.

In the real game, the one Ashley and Jake were now a part of, you couldn't just reboot.

And that's what this was like, being here in this brick building with people her age. This was nothing but an illusion.

She stood lost in the middle of the hallway while they streamed past her. Oblivious, these kids. Oblivious of the terrible truth of the world outside their tiny, narrow lives. And who else but their teachers to blame for spreading the lies. None of them could ever truly understand the terrible truth, because they'd never witnessed firsthand the reality inside that gaming arcade.

None of them knew. It was all simulated to them. There was nothing real to connect them with it.

Just that morning in homeroom, for example, they'd practiced an emergency outbreak drill. She couldn't remember the last time they'd practiced one in school. Sixth grade, maybe. Or seventh. They were supposed to do them once a semester, but nobody cared anymore, since the likelihood of an outbreak was essentially nil. That's what they kept getting told, anyway.

The students had treated it like a party. They were supposed to be quiet when the lights got turned off, not say a word, but people were laughing, making rude noises, pinging each other's Links. Taking none of it seriously. Not even the teachers.

All the drill had done was to remind everyone of the hollow threat of the Undead. The kids dredged up the old chants:

Brains, brains, what you say?

No more taxes shall we pay.

We'll play until we're sixty-four.

Then we'll work just three years more.

But I'll be dead, so I won't care.

Three short years is more than fair.

And when the lights came back on again, nobody cared that a couple were going at each other hot and heavy in a back corner of the classroom. The teacher had
ahem
ed and the class had sniggered in amusement. At least the two still had their clothes on.

Stop. Lock. And barricade.

That was what they were told to recite. But what good was that when you were confronted with a horde of monsters that could smell you, hear you, would never stop coming for you? What good did it do to remain calm, seated quietly at your desk?

She knew now how useless the drills were. She wished she didn't.

Somebody bumped into her, jostling her school tablet out of her hand. It clattered to the linoleum floor, was kicked away, stepped on. The boy snarled as he passed. “Get out of the freaking middle of the freaking hallway, stupid zombitch.”

She spun around, blinking in confusion. It wasn't the first time someone called her that. She didn't recognize the boy, but that didn't mean he didn't know who she was. When your father helped create Reanimation technology, everyone knew who you were. Everyone blamed you. Nobody gave you any credit.

Another taunt drifted through her mind. This one had followed her since elementary school:

Brains, brains, everywhere.

On the walls and on the chair.

The zombie wouldn't eat it all.

The brain was rotten, much too small.

It was the story of how the former professor at Royce State College in Montana had turned himself into a zombie and gone to kill his rival. The latter had been Jessie's father— or the man who, until last week, she'd always believed to be her father. The popular version went that Professor Halliwell had infected himself with an antidote in a vainglorious attempt to destroy all Reanimates. Instead, he became the very monster he'd tried to eradicate. How he'd made his way across the country to Virginia to eat Richard Daniel's brain.

Jessie Daniels had read other accounts of the incident on the black streams, seen pictures of her former house in Boyce, Virginia — supposedly “un-Pshopped” — where brains and blood splattered the walls and a gun had been found at the scene. They hinted that what really happened was suicide. Most people, however, chose to believe the more incredulous version. Irony has always enjoyed greater persistence and popularity than cold, dry facts.

As it turned out, the real irony was that Halliwell — or Father Heall, as Jessie had come to know him — was her true father, not Richard Daniels. The truth was Halliwell wasn't the monster society had made him out to be. He hadn't reanimated. He'd been immune.

And he had passed that immunity on to her.

The boy who'd snapped at her slouched away into the crowd. She wanted to stop him, to challenge him. The palms of her hands were suddenly wet with sweat. They ached with tension. An image flashed through her mind: her fingers circling his scrawny neck, squeezing. She could practically hear the brittle sound of the bones snapping.

Relax, Jessie. Let it go.

After retrieving her tablet from the floor, she turned against the tide of students and began to make her way toward the front exit of the school. She didn't belong here. She didn't know where she belonged, she just knew it wasn't in this sheltered parody of reality.

She nearly reached the door, was only a few steps away, when she heard her name being called.

Ignore it. It's just someone else going to tease you: “How do you starve a zombie? Lock it in a room with—”

“Miss Daniels?”

She hesitated. This wasn't the voice of a teenager.

“Classes are the other way,” Mister Patterson, the school principal, said. He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Thirty seconds till the late bell.”