S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (30 page)

“Jessie?”

Eric was on the trestle gesturing down at her. “Anything?”

“I'll be up in a second.”

She made her way over to the concrete foundation and began to climb, leaning against it for support. The ground was slick with dew and she slipped back a couple of times.

“Where's Kelly?” she asked, once she reached the top.

Eric pointed across the road. “He thought he saw something down there, so he went to check it out.”

They waited for a line of cars to pass before hurrying over to the other railing. Jessie leaned over and looked down into the shadows. “Kelly?” she called.

“Behind you.”

He had come up on the other end of the bridge. His face and legs were smeared with mud, and he was carrying something small in his hands.

“What'd you find?” Eric asked.

“Just a shoe,” Kelly answered, extending his hand. “I thought it had blood on it, but I was wrong.”

He was about to throw it over the rail when Jessie stopped him. Her eyes went wide with recognition, and she reached out and touched it with the tips of her fingers.

“I think it's—”

But her words were cut off by the shriek of a siren.

“What is it?” Kelly shouted, spinning.

Eric pointed to the metal speaker mounted on the pole directly above them. “
Outbreak alarm system!
”

The speaker crackled: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ALL CITIZENS ARE INSTRUCTED TO SHELTER IN PLACE. PERSONS FOUND ON THE STREETS MAY BE NEUTRALIZED WITHOUT WARNING. THIS IS NOT A DRILL . . . .”

‡ ‡ ‡

“Get straight inside!” Eric shouted, as they sped in his car toward the house. He skidded into the intersection at the end of their street, narrowly missing a pickup truck going in the opposite direction.

From the back seat, Jessie shouted for him to slow down. She could barely hear herself over the blare of the siren, much less hear what her brother was saying.

“Lock the door,” Eric roared, “and don't come out until the all-clear!”

They hit the curb. Kelly was propelled to the ceiling. Jessie let out a surprised yelp.

“I need to get to my parents' house!” Kelly yelled, but Eric was already pushing him out the passenger side door.

“No time! Get inside NOW!”

“Aren't you coming?” Jessie screamed.

“I have to get to work!
GO!
”

The car sped off, the roar of the engine dully punctuated by the doors slamming shut. Jessie watched as Eric extended his arm out the window and slammed the bubble light onto his roof. Kelly grabbed her and started to pull her toward the front door. “Come on! We have to get off the street!”

“You can still make it to your house!”

“And get blasted by an EM pistol on the way? No thanks. Eric's right. It's going to be ‘shoot first, ask questions later.' ”

She remembered the soldier in lower Manhattan, how he'd threatened to shoot her but didn't. She'd gone over it in her mind and had decided he hadn't fired because she'd run— not toward him, but away. It wasn't typical zombie behavior. “You don't know that,” she said, pulling away.

“It's alright! I'll ping my folks after we get inside.”

But still she resisted. “I left the shoe in the car.”

“Too late!” Kelly wrapped his arms around her waist and picked her up. This time she didn't struggle.

Up the steps, onto the porch. He fumbled his keys, dropped them. A police car roared past on the street. Its siren was just another layer of noise over the blast of the outbreak warning system. “LIVING INSIDE! LIVING INSIDE!” the officer shouted. “VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT.”

Kelly finally managed to get the door unlocked. He pushed it open and shoved Jessie through, then closed it behind them with his foot. The noise level dropped immediately, though it was still too loud to talk without shouting.

He thumbed the contact number into his Link, the other hand covering one ear. “I'm trying my parents.”

“Are they even home?”

“It's Saturday.” He nodded and pushed past her deeper into the house to find someplace a bit quieter.

Jessie left him alone to see if there was anything about the alert on the television. She could hear Kelly shouting as he headed down the hall: “Dad? Dad, can you hear me? . . . . Yeah, I'm over at Jessie's. Is Kyle . . . . Okay. Good. Have you heard anything about what's happening? No, I know it's not a drill. . . .
What? Speak louder, I can't hear you!
”

Out of habit, she inserted her Link into the media cradle, then almost removed it before remembering it worked. Her thoughts were all jumbled.
On
, she thought.
News Four
.

The television blinked on, but the official Connecticut Media Stream was either experiencing technical difficulties or was completely off the air. The screen showed nothing but static.

She tried several other news streams, jabbing the numbers through her mind as if she were jabbing her finger at the button on the side of the television. Several of the local media streams were transmitting the emergency broadcast system image and a high-pitched whine, but there were no bulletins, no live feeds covering the outbreak. The whine from the television and the siren seemed to resonate and thrum until Jessie felt as if her head might explode.

Mute
, she ordered.

The regional and national streams were still showing the standard entertainment fare.

Kelly appeared a couple minutes later. He headed directly for the front window and drew the curtains closed.

“Now's when I wish we had someone to ping,” he shouted. He was scanning the streams on his Link, but kept shaking his head in frustration. He would take a quick peek out the window every time a car sped past.

Jessie nodded. She knew what he meant. Their two usual sources for information — Ashley and Micah — were gone.

She pulled her Link out of the media console and tried to ping Reggie, wondering why she hadn't thought of doing so earlier, but it just went straight to voicemail.

The muscles in Kelly's face rippled with tension. He was chewing anxiously on his tongue and pacing. Jessie sensed there was something wrong.

“It's not a drill,” he told her.

“How do you know?” she shouted. Her throat was already starting to feel sore, and her head hurt. “I can't find anything on the streams.”

“They shot someone across the street from the house. Mom saw it.”

“Shot? With an EM pistol?”

Kelly shook his head and peeked outside again. “Bullets. To the head. Dad had to sedate her, she was so hysterical. She's lying down.”

“Oh my God,” Jessie said. “What if Reggie's still out there!”

Kelly grabbed her arm, stopping her from leaving the house. “You can't help him!”

Another car sped down the street spewing another proclamation for citizens to shelter in place. The voice sounded mechanical. The message repeated itself twice more before being swallowed up by the clamor.

Kelly reached over and hooked a finger around the curtain and checked outside again. The image took Jessie back twelve years, back to when the Long Island outbreak had happened. And suddenly she was six years old again and everywhere within a hundred mile radius of New York was under alert. She remembered sitting at this exact same window and watching the police cars and fire trucks rolling past, their sirens and lights going and the men inside of them shouting through their bullhorns for everyone to stay inside.

Her gaze passed over to the couch, and she realized she was expecting to see her mother there, younger and prettier, though still useless as a parent. At least she'd been sober when the alarms came that time— or that's how Jessie remembered it, anyway. She'd just sat and stared at the window, occasionally shushing her and Eric when their arguing had gotten too loud.

Her brother had stood in nearly the exact same place where Kelly was now standing. He'd have been fifteen at the time. The image wavered between the two men — her brother and her husband — and Jessie felt a sudden urge to laugh. Back then, she'd been giddy with excitement.

But the echo of that day soon faded from her mind. What was happening to them now was no fun at all.

“—some guy acting strange,” Kelly was saying.

Jessie jerked her head toward him. “What? Where?” She stepped closer.

“Not here. The guy my mom saw get shot.” He was trembling. “The cops never even checked. Just pulled right up, reached out of the car and shot him in the head.”

He pushed away from her and sat down and put his head into his hands. “God, I hope Kyle didn't see it.”

The sirens continued to wail. Outside, nothing moved, just the leaves of the trees fluttering in the breeze. The sun shone down, hard and bright. A bird flew past. Everything gave the appearance of complete normalcy . . . as long as you didn't listen.

Sirens
, she mused.
This is what the world sounds like when it dies. It wails.

“Aren't you even curious,” Kelly asked.

She turned and frowned at him. “About what?”

“How Doctor White managed to keep Kyle alive all these years? Why he hasn't died and been reanimated?”

She'd assumed it had been Father Heall's blood and said so.

He shook his head.

“Doctor White said there wasn't a cure,” Jessie stated.

Another emergency vehicle sped past outside, a fire truck, its siren coughing as it passed. Where was it going? How far away was the leading edge of the outbreak? When would the Undead arrive on this side of the city? On her block? On her front lawn?

“There isn't a cure,” Kelly said. “She's been working on one since she came here from Long Island twelve years ago.”

“Then how?” Jessie asked.

“You.”

She frowned at him.
Me?

“Your blood,” he told her. “It's been keeping Kyle alive all these years.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Jessie stared fixedly at her Link on the kitchen table, willing it to ping, willing it to be her brother letting her know that the situation was fully under control, even as she felt the chances of that growing vanishingly thin. The minutes ticked relentlessly by and nothing changed. The warning sirens continued to blast and every so often she'd hear the garbled, muffled recording of yet another verbal warning spewed from yet another roving patrol. No gunshots, though. No sounds of fighting. At least there was that.

Sitting inside the house, unable to do anything or go anywhere, Jessie felt trapped, like she was stuck at the center of a raging inferno, flames all around and no chance of escape. She could feel them closing in, the end drawing near. The fear of not knowing where or when it would come made breathing hard, as if the sirens were consuming all of the oxygen out of the world.

She had fretted for a while at the window, feeling her body thrumming until her skin went numb and her ears hurt and even the light seemed to vibrate just beyond her ken. Waiting. Wondering.
Where are the Undead? When will they come? Who will they be?

But, save the occasional emergency vehicle, the streets remained empty. Birds flitted busily about, heedless of the sirens, enjoying the expulsion of humans from their midst. It was a false serenity.

The sun shone merrily down and gentle breezes conspired with the leaves in the trees across the way. The tranquility was so utterly at odds with the thrumming, roaring, ear-splitting racket, so incongruous with the noise inside her own head, that she felt the only way she'd ever be able to relieve the pressure was to scream herself, to use the force of her own voice to shatter it, as if it were all an illusion under glass.

Kelly must have sensed her fragility. He'd pulled her away from the window and led her instead into the kitchen and bade her sit. The clamor reached them there too, but it was slightly diminished, the edges smoothed off. And there was no easy view of the street unless you leaned over the sink and craned your neck. From where she sat, she could see the side of the neighbor's house, the blank windows, the unmoving curtains. What were they doing in there? Were they even home?

She sat while her body vibrated, and she stared at her Link.

Please, Eric. Ping so I know you're alright.
She almost expected it to implode from the ferocity of her concentration. But the damn thing just sat on the table, as silent and inert as a rock.

Stupid thing.

She forced her eyes away and turned them instead to where, a lifetime ago, someone had hung a small decorative wooden spoon on the wall. It was dusty and cobweb-covered, and Jessie had stopped noticing it years back. She wondered where it had come from.

A garage sale, probably.

She thought about her mother, where she was right then and whether or not she was thinking of Jessie. And, for a moment, Jessie forgot about the noise and the approaching hordes.

Where are you? Are you safe? Did someone take you? Or am I going crazy?

The spoon made her think of the trinkets in Doctor White's office. And they, in turn, brought Jessie's thoughts back to all she'd learned over the past twenty-four hours. She had so wanted to dislike the woman, to find fault in her actions, her manipulations, her extortions. She'd wanted to distrust— No, to
hate
Doctor White. But then she'd think of Kyle. The woman had saved his life using Jessie's blood.

There came a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction in this knowledge. But there was also the insult of knowing that many people had kept the secret of her own immunity from her all these years— not just her own mother, but Kelly's parents, too.

“How?” she'd asked Kelly. She had tried to recall specific incidents when enough of her blood would've been harvested to treat Kyle. She couldn't. Certainly not at the frequency it would be needed.

As Kelly explained it, Doctor White had been purifying the vital prion protein out of the small samples taken from her whenever she went in for her twice-yearly allergy check-ups, the so-called routine blood draws her grandfather always insisted upon.