S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (107 page)

But there is something in the pack that I can't bear to leave behind, so I begin the treacherous climb down.

“
You're wasting precious time,” I mutter to myself between breaths. I have to breathe through my mouth, as the mud of the river has made my nose stuffy. The unstable ground shifts beneath my feet and I slip, then catch myself with my hands to keep my balance. The edge of the road rises to the level of my waist. Then to my shoulders. Now it's over my head. Just a few more feet to go. I look up and wonder how in the hell I'm going to climb back to the road again.

Another foot. The ground begins to slide…

Slows…stops.

Step. Slide some more.

“
This is stupid.”

Now the backpack is a couple arm lengths away. I step closer, test the footing. Reach. Grab. The pack is heavier than I expect, weighed down with rain. I find myself sliding down again, gaining speed.

Scramble. Grab a chunk of the road. Tear a hole in the knee of my pants. Matching holes now. Pain. But I've stopped sliding.

I look down to inspect the damage. There's blood. Not much. After everything I've been through, I wonder that there could actually be any left to spare.

But I've got the pack.

“
All for a god damn toy,” I murmur angrily. “Stupid stuffed rabbit for a stupid dog I'll probably never see again.”

The edge of the road looks too far away to get back to, the slope too steep and too unstable to scale.

“
God damn rabbit.” Blood is dripping down my leg and I have to climb again.

But I feel happier.

When I finally reach the edge and manage to pull myself over it, I feel stronger somehow. I'm shaking like a leaf and wondering how the hell I'm going to go on, but somehow I know I can do it.

God damn sentimental bullshit.

“
Shut up,” I tell the sky. “Go away,” I command the rain that falls upon my upturned face. But the sky remains as impassive as it always was and the rain keeps falling. The world is unimpressed with my pathetic show of sentimentality. “Fuck you,” I tell the world.

It doesn't care about that either.

So I get back to my feet and pick up the satchel with the pistol and the syringes and stuff it into the backpack, and then I throw the whole thing over my shoulders.

“
Kelly better be right. There better be a hole.”

And I'll be god damned if there is one there, right where he said it would be. But it's not just a hole underneath to relieve the water, an opening for me to crawl through. It's a huge gash in the wall itself. It looks as if an army blasted it down and marched through it.

And they're still marching through it even now.

 

A hundred-foot section of the wall
is completely missing, torn away by the force of the water. The edges of the gaping hole are jagged and warped. I'm just glad I wasn't here when it happened.

The water flowing through has cut a deep ravine along the left-hand side of the opening, but there's solid ground on the right.

By the time I've approached to within a couple hundred yards, the army of Undead streaming through the hole has thinned considerably; many seem to have disappeared without a trace. Along the right-hand edge of the gap stands a solitary figure, clad all in black. It doesn't move. I can't be sure if it's an IU or a CU, but from the state of its clothes and the shine of the hair on its head, I'd guess it'd have to be a Player. Recently dead, in any case.

My heart sinks. A couple dozen IUs is one thing. I could deal with them. But a Player—even a single Player—is a much greater threat.

And there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to slip past it.

I weigh the options. Limited. I can either confront the thing and hope it's not too fresh or too fast. That its Operator isn't very good—after all, why bring it all the way out here on the fringe of Gameland where the challenge is much smaller?

I suppose I could wait for it to leave. Except it doesn't seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere. I can't waste much more time.

Or I could try and find a different way in.

I check my Link. It's already nine thirty. Even if I were able to slip past it without any problem, I won't make it back to the hill before one o'clock. Something tells me Jake won't last much longer than that.

As I stand there thinking about all this, another string of IUs comes through. The Player doesn't move, not until they get to within a few feet of it. Then, with a swiftness that startles me, it lifts its arm and swings it forward. There's a flash of metal and the IU takes another step before crumpling to the ground, its head separating and tumbling into the river below. The Player kicks the body in after it. Two more IUs stumble through in the next few seconds. These meet the same fate; both end up below. Easy kills.

An old saying comes to mind, something Grandpa used to tell me on days he'd take me to the shooting range:
Shooting IUs is like shooting fish in a barrel
. Out there with the smell of gunpowder burning our noses and the sharp reports of the guns assaulting our eardrums, it was the only time I ever really saw him relax.

In later years, after I'd gotten over the thrill of firing a gun, his words would come back to me, striking me as odd. Here was the man who'd introduced the world to zombie soldiers, and now he was reveling in ways to kill them.

I didn't realize until several years later, when I pressed him on this seeming contradiction, that I'd gotten a rare glimpse inside his mind: he actually feared the Undead as much as the rest of us; he was terrified by them.

“
Every nation in the world wants an Undead Army,” he'd answered. “But they wouldn't know how to control it. This is why New Merica has isolated itself from all the other nations.”

“
So we can keep the technology to ourselves?”

He was silent for a moment. I knew my answer was wrong, or at least incomplete, but I also got the sense that the right answer was something he would never say.

“
It's inevitable, honey,” he told me instead. “No matter how hard we try to contain the technology, it will surpass us. The Undead will spread beyond our borders.”

“
Other countries will use zombies to fight, too?”

His face had hardened for a moment, a flash of emotion. “If you're asking me whether zulu armies from other nations will battle one another, the answer is yes.”

But then the hardness disappeared and his eyes seemed to be watching some far away view, some distant battlefield carved out in his mind's eye. He jolted, as if aware that I was watching him, and he looked down and gave me a look I couldn't understand—which I still don't. It spoke of emotions raging inside of him, of horror and regret. But underneath it all: a manic excitement at the possibilities. It frightened me terribly to see it. And thrilled me, too.

“
They'll fight each other,” he said. “And what will the living do? Sit back and relax in the comfort of their homes and watch it all on television. Picture it, Jessica: entire wars played out for all the world to see, like some video game.”

If I'd thought of it, I should have asked,
What's the purpose?
But I hadn't. Maybe I'd believed I knew it back then. I don't now.

“
Anyway,” he had told me, “that's not why we're here learning how to fire a gun. We're here because of leakage in the system. Every system has its noise. The Infected Undead is that noise, and it's our responsibility to minimize it whenever it gets too loud. If you like, you can think of it as population control.”

“
By shooting them?”

“
Like fish in a barrel, honey.”

Now I'm not sure what to do as I stand here and watch this Player dispatch IUs as they stumble through the gap, not to control the population or minimize noise, but for the entertainment of the masses. I wonder how much money its Operator is making with each kill. Would Grandpa be proud? I wonder how many people are watching it on Media right now. You'd think they'd get bored with it. Where's the challenge, the excitement? Where's the risk?

What risk?
Sitting on their comfy couches, chugging Hudson River Pilsner—
Pissner
, as Micah used to say—and thinking this is what it means to be alive.

But then I realize that Arc probably wouldn't even allow something like this to go public. They wouldn't want the country to know the wall around Gameland isn't as indestructible as they had us believe. And it makes me wonder whether what I'm seeing has anything at all to do with
The Game
.

Two more IUs come through and the Player kicks one into the water without even bothering to behead it first. It takes a swipe at the second and it, too, falls to the ground. Its head remains partially attached, flopping on a stiff rope of muscle.

I know if I don't act soon, it'll eventually notice me. It hasn't turned this way yet—maybe because its Operator doesn't think it'll be attacked from this side of the wall. A fatal mistake.

I start to edge forward. I don't have much of a plan. It consists only of rushing up to it and knocking it over the edge and into the water.

The surface of the ground is littered with chunks of black gravel, which I dismiss at first. But then one glints and I bend down and pick it up. It's shiny and smooth, like molten glass, and surprisingly heavy. It reminds me of the obsidian G-ma Junie once showed to me, years ago, black, prune-shaped rocks which she'd collected during a trip to California back around the turn of the century. Before the dead walked. Before New Merica and checkpoints, when anyone could drive from one ocean to the other without being questioned. “Apache tears,” she'd called them. “Volcanic glass.”

But these came from no volcano. They're bits and pieces of the wall.

On our way to Gameland, Stephen had mentioned that the wall was made up of some kind of synthetic titanium blend.
Resistant to just about anything you can throw at it
. The chunk slips from my fingers as I realize three things almost at once. First, the wall didn't shatter from water pressure. These pieces are molten, charred.

The second thing I know is that it had to have happened very recently, within the past few hours.

I know this because the third thing I realize is that my head isn't buzzing and my skin isn't itching. The wall is broken, and so its effect on me is broken, too. It was there yesterday when we came through, but now it's gone.

That's why those IUs are coming through here
. The wall isn't repelling them anymore.

But who—or
what
—did it?

I'm less than fifty feet away now.

Now thirty feet away. Twenty.

At fifteen feet, I slip behind the dead trunk of a tree. The Player still hasn't noticed me.

Another IU steps into view from the other side, a small one, missing an arm. The Player waits until it's a couple feet away, then it quickly—almost casually—raises the machete and swings down. The child's head explodes in a wet powder that drifts for a moment like a ghost, then settles to the ground. The Player leans forward and lashes out with a kick. The tiny body flies over the edge and into the raging waters below.

A choked sound slips from my throat. The Player begins to turn. It's now or never. I step from behind the tree and lunge forward. In that exact moment, the air around my head explodes in a blast of sound and light. My lungs empty. It feels like someone has tied an invisible rope around my head and jerked it.

My feet leave the ground and I float in a sea of pain as the gunshot reverberates over the land.

The pain is so clean, so pure and white that it seems almost sterile. It burns through my vision, crowding my head from back to front and drawing with it darkness. From my position on the ground, I see the Player complete its turn. Its eyes find me and it steps toward me.

I can't move. Nothing works. I have to struggle to remain conscious as I watch it raise its arm. The machete glints in its hand, dull gray and stained brown.

And then it begins to swing down toward my neck.

Air escapes my mouth. With a voice of its own, it says, “Don't.”

 

“
Who in the holy fuck are you?
” the Player hisses.

I blink stupidly, not believing I'm still alive. I can't move or speak. It takes my shocked brain several seconds to reboot, then several more to register that the thing standing over me isn't an Undead at all, but a living, breathing person.

“
I asked you a question, little lady!” The words slur together, though each one hits my ears like tiny fireworks, crackling with anger. “One of them exiles, I wager. Forgotten.”

With the initial shock passing, I'm able to move again. I reach around to the back of my head to assess the damage. It's slick with blood. My blood. Strands of my hair stick to my fingers. The world tilts crazily, spinning as the reality of what happened hits me. “I'm…”

For a moment everything fades to gray, everything except a bright tiny dot too far away to reach. I bite the inside of my cheek and the dot rushes forward again. “You— you shot me.”

“
Not me. Casey.”

The shooter, a second man—boy, actually, as he's quite a bit younger than the other—steps into view, smoke still rising from the barrel of his rifle. He hasn't lowered it from my head yet, and that muzzle looks like a giant black eye staring straight at me. The look on his face is one of shock. His eyes flick wildly between me and his partner.