S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (121 page)

“
When you're finished,” he says. It's almost a whisper. His finger twitches. It's all he can muster. “Just leave me here.”

“
In the arm? Into the vein? How?”

“
No!” He coughs, spits. “Spinal column. Lower back, between the bones. Anywhere else won't work, not for very long. In fact…” He shakes his head weakly, the pink drool swinging from his lips. “In fact…”

I look over at Kelly and he nods. I know he's thinking about Ben.

“
What happens if it goes into the vein?”

Slowly, Brother Matthew's head rises. He looks at me with bloodshot eyes, from a face barely recognizable as human. His hair hangs in clumps over his forehead, plastered with blood and mud. “Living Undead,” he answers. “The prion can't pass into the nervous system in that direction. The body is treated, but the brain won't be.”

Understanding builds in Reggie's eyes, the terror of knowing Ashley is with a man whose body will remain alive while his brain slowly dies, as he turns into an animal driven to feed.

“
We'll get her back,” I tell him.

“
On his side,” Brother Matthew pants. His voice is growing weaker. I gesture for the others to hurry. We need to finish with the treatment while Matthew is still alive. And then we'll have to finish him.

Kelly and Reggie do as they're told.

“
Knees…up to his chest. Won't be…easy. Stiff from disease.”

Reggie loops his arm under Jake's knees and pulls them up, bending him at the waist. The muscles strain in his neck and arms. Jake's joints pop.

“
Find the bony pro…tuberances at the base of the spine, then…”

Reggie points. I nod. We wait.

“
What, Brother Matthew? What then?”

“
Count up two, three spaces. Soft…area…Inject there.”

The three of us look at each other, uncertain we're doing any of this right.

“
Do your best,” Kelly says. “It's his only chance.”

Brother Matthew grunts out the next set of instructions painfully slowly: “Stick the needle in. Push slowly. Stop when you feel it give.” I do as he says, then draw back on the plunger to make sure I'm not in a blood vessel.

“
It's clear,” I report. “The fluid is clear.”

“
Give him the whole thing. All of it.”

It takes a very long time, but finally it all goes in.

“
Now what? Brother Matthew?”

But Brother Matthew is dead.

‡ ‡

[END OF EPISODE SIX]

I'm being torn to pieces.
Shredded by circumstances beyond my control, forces too powerful for anyone to constrain. There is a storm, an invisible storm, and it's tearing me up and scattering me in the wind.

“
Guys, come on,” Reggie pleads. He's desperate. Neither Kelly nor I had answered him the first time he tried to get us to move, but neither of us had responded. He won't leave it alone. He can't. “How long are we just going to sit here and wait before we're sure?”

Kelly shoots me a worried glance. I look away. We both know what Reggie is really asking:
Why are we wasting our time with Jake when we should be off rescuing Ashley?

I know we need to go after Ben. I know every minute we delay is another minute that madman has to kill her. Or worse. I hate to think what he's capable of doing. But I feel like if I leave Jake now—now, after we've given him this one last chance at surviving, and not just to continue on, but
to not come back
—I feel like if I abandon him now it'll be like admitting he has no chance at all. After everything that has happened lately—

You know he isn't going to make it.

—
it feels like a betrayal.

Betraying Ashley. Betraying Reggie.

I am being torn apart by my fears and doubts.

Would Jake do the same for you?

I look down at his face. It's twisted in agony. His body convulses as it struggles with the infection. Will the treatment work? Did we give it to him in time? Or did we just delay the inevitable?

He opens his eyes and they're startlingly clear, their usual deep brown now sunrise golden, sparkling with light, dancing with life. “I totally had a crush on you last year,” he whispers to me, smiling. I choke down a sob. But then the smile changes, twists into a misshapen sneer of hatred, and his mouth opens wide, wider, becoming a gaping black hole, and I'm tumbling into it. “You treated me like shit!” he roars. I gasp and stagger backward.

Kelly hurries over. “What? Jessie, what's the matter?”

I blink and the vision is gone. The feverish Jake is back, comatose, slack and gray, radiating heat, smelling of decay. Unmoving. Undead.

I'm being torn by ghosts and memories, by guilt and regrets.

Reggie paces. The shock of it all, of being shot at and the knockout gas, is starting to take its toll. Ashley's missing. Now the pain is returning. He's shattered on the outside, as well as within.

I keep a wary eye on him prowling the floor. His limping is getting worse. My hand slips over to Jake's arm and the heat hits me again. He doesn't wake. He doesn't open his eyes and whisper to me, neither his fears nor his wants. No accusations. He is inert. The whispers are inside of me, insinuating me. Defining and destroying me.

Jake never flinched when I was injecting the treatment, never showed any pain. Not one single twitch. Nothing. I knew then that he was too far gone. I knew. Knew as soon as the medicine was inside of him and the needle came out. Except… There's always a chance. Nothing left to do except wait and see. See if the infection stops building. Hoping for a quick end. Unsure what I'm really hoping for. Knowing that if I leave, I've made my choice. And if I stay, will I ever be able to live with the guilt?

Except for the occasional spasm and the slight rise and fall of his chest, his body lies still as stone. Nothing comes out of his mouth but the quiet rasp of his breathing, and his eyes never open.

Reggie winces each time he puts weight on the leg. He won't look directly at us. He's trying to hide the pain, as if he's ashamed of it. I want to scream at him that he was shot. I want to scream to stop pretending all the time like he's tougher than the rest of us, that the injury to his hip is nothing more than a mild annoyance. Shane's bullet must have left a huge bruise, maybe even cracked his hipbone. A normal person would've been crippled.

But that would make me a hypocrite, wouldn't it? I'm pretending, too.

“
You're in no shape to go anywhere, Reggie,” Kelly finally says, cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

Reggie glares at him. “I'm fine,” he says, but then he takes another step and something gives and he goes down to one knee with a grunt.

I hurry over to him. “Look, Reg—”

“
We need to move now!” he shouts. He tries to wave me off. I brace myself, stiffening. He accidentally hits my thigh, and by rights it should easily knock me over. Instead, the motion throws him off balance and back to his knees. With a howl of frustration and despair, he lurches to his feet, then almost immediately collapses again. “Son of a bitch! I wish that son-of-an-asshole who shot me wasn't already dead, because I'd kill him myself.”

“
What you need is to sit down and rest,” Kelly quietly says. “Give your leg a chance—”

“
Don't fucking tell me what to do, Kelly!” he roars. He gets to his feet a third time, and this time succeeds in staying upright. He towers over us, as if he's grown ten inches, but he looks unstable. “I need to go help her!”

We both back away from him.

For a moment, nobody moves, but then Reggie's face flushes and he turns to the side, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair and it catches on a snag and it only makes him all the more angry. His body trembles with tension. He yanks at the tangle, uttering angry sounds, pulling and crying until I swear he's going to rip half his scalp off. Again, I want to shout at him to stop, but I'm too torn myself to make an effort.

“
We're all tired and anxious,” Kelly says. He watches Reggie a couple more seconds, then tries to pull his hand away from his hair. It goes willingly enough, but then Reggie just stands there looking stunned, and when Kelly pulls over a chair and instructs him to sit down in it, he does. He collapses with a sob, and his fingers return to the knot in his hair and begins to worry it again, tweezing it. He laughs listlessly and mutters that he could use a bath. “I've never been so filthy in my whole entire life.” He scratches absently at the dirt on his arm with fingernails that are too long. He makes himself bleed.

It's the sight of his blood that makes the world snap back into sharp focus with an almost audible
pop
. “Stop it!” I scream. “Stop it!”

We're all tired, in shock. They look at me with their terrified eyes. Suddenly, my nose fills with my own stench, the stink of the clay on me, the thick cloying earthy aroma. My clothes are stiff with dried mud—except the shirt Casey got for me in that house we waited in after I ran into him and Ben—and there's more of it caked in my hair and behind my ears. My pants are chaffing my thighs. My toes feel like they've been swimming in muck for days. Despite that sponge bath last night and the clean clothes I'd put on afterward, I feel like I haven't been clean and dry in months.

I close my eyes and try to gather myself. I picture the bed I'd slept in up in Brookhaven, in the old dilapidated house with the warped piano and the grand staircase with the threadbare carpet, the peeling wallpaper, the photos of the white-haired man and the old woman. Where are they now? I feel the sheets on the bed, so nice and cool and clean on my skin. Had the bed belonged to one of their children? I remember the warm spaghetti I'd eaten for dinner and the smell of the kitchen this morning as Julia made my breakfast. What was the old man's and old woman's last meal like, the day of the evacuation? I think about Shinji lying next to me, his cold, wet nose on my skin and his snout a comforting weight on my arm. The tuna fish smell of his breath. The soft wheeze of his breathing.

I want that. I want it all back, not just for me, but for everyone.

The hole inside of me opens up again. A hole which has been there all along, but now it flares so wide that the slightest push will send me tumbling headfirst into it.

I glance over at Kelly. He stands stock straight, his body rigid with alarm, his eyes flicking between us. He weaves slightly from exhaustion. I look at him and I long for his touch, and yet, at the same time, I don't want it. I think if he touched me right now, I'd suddenly just disappear.

Or turn to stone.

I already am stone.

Crumbling to dust.

Blowing away.

Reggie gets up and stumbles over to where Brother Matthew's body is lying on the floor. He stares down at him as if he's suddenly just noticed him for the first time. The small pool of blood underneath his neck has already stopped spreading. When I'd finished him a few minutes ago—when I had thrust the knife blade into the notch at the base of his skull and felt the cord separate and then pulled the blade free so that it made that reluctant, wet, sticky sound—hardly any blood had come out. He was already dead, I knew that. There was no beating heart inside of him to pump it out. But that didn't matter. He'd already lost too much. He was empty, a shell. There was nothing left of him. The Undead had taken everything he had.

No, not everything.
I
had done that.

The blood, the few teaspoons that leaked out of him, had been thick and dark, congealed. It had smelled sweet and rancid. Like spoiled meat buried in a shallow grave for a week. Already a skin has formed over it there on the floor, glazing it, shriveling.

I hadn't felt anything. Not like I had with some of the others. I would've expected something, a twinge of guilt or remorse, a sense of release, gratefulness for his sacrifice. Pity even. He didn't have to come here. He didn't have to bring the syringe for Jake. He was a good man, I can see that now. And yet when I did it, when I severed that cord and forever denied him of anything but an eternity in death, there had been nothing. Neither guilt, nor relief. Nothing.

How can one be so numb and yet hurt so much? How can it hurt so badly that nothing can change or alter it? Nothing can make it go away. Nothing will ever take it away.

I can't even begin to imagine how he got away from the horde of Undead back there. How he survived. How he made his way all the way back here, half insane with pain and fever. Bleeding out. Or why he would even come. He didn't owe us anything. And yet here he is. Was.

He knew he was already a dead man. Would soon die.

Would soon come back.

Yes. He needed you.

Is that why he did it?

He didn't want to turn.

He'd already been infected once—or, quite possibly, more than once, who knows. But regardless, all these years living here, he knows—
knew
—what it must be like to live on a razor's edge, teetering between life and a place that isn't quite death. Like balancing perpetually on the edge of some great chasm, the dirt crumbling away beneath his feet, the muddy river of death rushing below. Or, at least, one of death's many tributaries. When do you finally stop resisting and accept that you'll fall in?