S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (134 page)

“
What other way is there, Jessie?” he yells back. “We're stuck!
We. Are. Stuck!
”

“
Stop yelling at me! I can hear you just fine. Why are you such an asshole sometimes?”

His face flushes. He steps down and comes over to me. I push him away, but he doesn't give up. Finally he wraps me in his arms. “Listen to me,” he says, and I can feel his breath on my hair. “I'm sorry. It's just that this is so crazy and… We'll get out of this, I promise you, Jessie. I'm going to climb up and see if I can get out. I'll take the wire cutters to pry the door open. If by some chance the IUs got into the room upstairs, then… Then we'll figure something else out. But we're going to get out of this. I promise.”

I made promises, too. I couldn't keep them.

I swallow and nod. I want to be positive. I know he's trying to as well, but hope takes so much effort and I don't know if I can keep it up. “Maybe we can fight our way through them in the stairwell.”

He doesn't speak for a moment. There are over thirty of them in there, maybe as many as fifty. We can't fight that many. We can't get through them. Our only chance is through the elevator, whether it's working or not.

“
I hope Reggie's all right,” he says. “If I can get through that way, then I'll come back down for you.”

Neither of us looks at Jake. He's just an undead body lying there on the floor, inert. Less than either of us put together, and yet his presence seems to fill every square inch of space around us. How are we going take him with us? Neither of us could possibly carry him up the ladder. Not even Reggie could do it.

“
It's the only option left, Jessie.”

“
Do you have a light you can take with you?”

“
Got a flashlight, but I can't hold it and climb the ladder at the same time.”

We settle with him taking it in his back pocket, along with the pistol. We rig a hook from some wire and he loops the wire cutters through it and attaches it to his belt.

“
Leave the latch open so we can talk,” he says. “And don't push any buttons. Hopefully Reggie won't, either. Or if he does, that the damn elevator doesn't decide to start working again. In fact, prop the door open.” Then he slips through the hole and into the darkness above.

I stand on the chair and watch him fade into the inky blackness. He disappears quickly. I can hear him for a long time after, the scuff of his shoes and his labored breaths, the occasional clang of the wire cutters hitting the metal rungs of the ladder. Every once in a while, I'll see a flash of light as he stops and checks his progress. After a while, even these are so faint and flickery that they remind me of distant campfires, of fireflies in the night and stars a trillion miles away. The shaft seems to go on forever, darker and deeper than anything I've ever seen. And Kelly's fallen into it.

Fifteen minutes after the last sound drifts down to me, I call out to him: “Kelly?” My voice sounds hollow and empty.

“
Here,” he answers a moment later, and his voice sounds even more ghostly, like it's coming to me from yesterday. “Still a ways to go.”

I step down off the chair, but I'm hesitant to leave him. Not that there's anywhere for me to go or anything for me to do. But I'm restless.

“
Kelly?”

Then, “Yeah?”

I can't tell if it's the distance or the distortion or the exertion of climbing a few hundred feet, but he sounds irritated.

“
I'm going to go check the stairs. Make sure everything's holding.”

[…]

“
Kelly?”

[…]

“
Kelly?
”

“
Still here. Be careful.”

I hesitate, then go.

I check on Jake one more time before heading over to the stairwell. He's still breathing, cool to the touch. Still unresponsive. I don't want to think about leaving him here.

“
Don't go anywhere,” I tell him.

The IUs have flooded the bottom level of the stairwell. From the tiny window I can see them in there, a sea of bodies crawling over each other and through each other, like worms in a can.

A hundred for a buck
, the guard at the Port Chester checkpoint echoes at me. Telling us about the bloodworms he used for fishing with his sister's kids.
Just don't eat the fish.

Hands and feet and heads, roiling like a stormy sea inside the stairwell. Not making much sound at all. It's an eerie sight.

But they must sense me out here because the moaning starts and soon they're all clawing to get to the door. The little square window fills with their horrid faces, empty eyes and mouths full of licorice tongues and gray teeth and rotting gums. I step back, but they can't get to me. They can't open the door. Unlike the door upstairs, this one is framed in metal and opens in toward them. Even so, the wall creaks and tiny sounds of strain tell me I shouldn't be standing here too long.

I slip silently back into the darkened main room and decide to detour to check the other rooms before heading back to the welcome brightness of the elevator car and the less-welcoming presence of Jake inside of it. The hallway leading to the mainframe is dark, but a drab green glow spills through the glass door, second on the right. The light drifts out and settles onto the floor and walls like radioactive dust. Now there's a soft hum of the machines seeping through. I feel it in my feet before my ears pick it up. A faint smell of ozone and burnt dust as they sit and do their endless calculations.

I pull the door open and the air whooshes out at me, so frigid that I almost expect to see my breath in it. But then the warmer air shedding off the wall of servers caresses my face, and the thousand blinking lights greet me like a long lost friend, a starry night in some foreign world.

It seems so strange to see all this equipment in there, an anachronism. Like finding an IU with a Link. It strikes me as strange to think of these computers here, a much larger and more powerful counterpart to the bank of computers in LaGuardia. It reminds me of a beast, alive and breathing. Dozing while it waits. Sleeping, and yet somehow aware of everything.

Micah's tablet dangles near the floor, held up like a marionette by a cable that sprouts from a jack in the middle stack. I wonder briefly why Kelly left it behind this time, then realize that he probably intended to grab it when Jake fell off the table. He just forgot about it in all the fuss afterward.

I'm about to pull the cable when Kelly's voice whispers at me:
Don't want to disconnect while there's programs running.
So, instead, I lift it in my hands and wake the screen. It immediately fills from top to bottom, a gush of green digits vomited from whatever process its running. I watch the code for several seconds before recognition hits me.

It's the tracking app program, the base code. We'd left it after Reggie had collapsed.

I switch back to the login level and am about to enter Micah's password when I stop. I remember we'd been talking about a ghost account. Now I look for it.

It's not hard to find. Most people wouldn't find it, but I know where to look. I know where these things like to hide. I try to access it.

Micah's password doesn't work.

I try a different login and hit enter. The tablet seems to freeze for a moment, then a new window opens. A map appears. I recognize Long Island immediately. It's covered with swarms of red dots, and they're all focused in the middle, and the sheer number of them makes me gasp.

I'm looking at
The Game
.

I'm seeing all the Players. All of them, not just a few. There are thousands. I pinch the screen and the map focuses in on the hill, and there a thick smear of red resolves into discrete dots, hundreds, dozens. I zoom once more and I find my identifier code in the middle of them. I see Kelly's and Jake's as well. I don't find Reggie's. Then I realize several things all at once.

First, why did Ashley have a ghost account on this tablet? I assume it's hers, since it was her password that worked.

Second, why is the tracking app only working here and not in Micah's account?

Third, how can it see us all, despite how far underground Jake and I are? It sees us
all
. Except for Reggie. His Link is broken. He's invisible to the tracker.

The fourth thing I notice—and I confirm this when I zoom out again and find the signal on the other side of the woods surrounding the hill—is that Ashley's Link didn't remain by the gate where Ben threw it away. It's not moving now though. But if I can see it, there's still hope she's alive and within range.

She might be Undead.

“
No.” I shake my head, but I can't deny it. She might have reanimated.

But this isn't what terrifies me now. What does are the two distinct swarms of Players in the vicinity of the compound. One of them is moving toward Ashley's location. If she is still alive, they'll overtake her soon.

The other swarm is converging on the compound.

 

I drop the tablet
and stumble to my feet. I need to tell Kelly. We need to get out of here. We need to get to Ashley and try to rescue her. We don't have much time.

I yank the glass door open, ducking instinctively when it slams against the wall, expecting it to shatter. But it bounces off and hits me on the shoulder, knocking me into the door jamb and adding to the bruises that already cover my body. I barely feel it. I carom off the wall and stumble into the hall, then down it. I burst into the main room and collide with a desk. Pain wakes in my thigh. I spin around, trip over an overturned chair, somehow stay on my feet.

“
Kelly!” I scream.

Moaning from the stairwell answers me. Those damn IUs.

Now I'm on the chair and peering up into the darkness above me, calling Kelly's name again and again, louder, not caring if I wake all the zombies from here to the Gameland wall. In less than half an hour, we're going to be surrounded by Players. This place will be overrun with them.

A thought crosses my mind. I remember the smattering of red dots approaching Ashley's signal and I realize that she might not be in as much danger as I'd first thought. Ben mentioned a second delivery. What if these Players are under his control?

Sendin you a little something extra, sendin ‘em real soon. I'm a real thorough kind of gentleman, you see. You got to get out of there, and that ain't goin to be so easy.

But how could they be?

Even more importantly, how does he know so much about what we're doing?

I step down off the chair and into the main room again. In the gloom, I scan the ceiling and in one corner I find what I'm looking for: a small, inverted dome of black glass. A camera. There's another in the hallway and on the wall in the stairwell. Another in the back hall and one in the mainframe room.

There must be tens of thousands of them in Gameland. Millions, all connected, all transmitting.

Ben's watching us, I can feel it.

I hurry back. There doesn't appear to be one in the elevator, but that's little consolation.

“
Kelly?”

Nothing.

“
Damn it!”

I step down off the chair again and rub my cheeks, thinking. Should I go after him up the shaft? What about—

“
Jake?”

I spin around the elevator car. He's gone. I left him lying on the floor in here and now he's gone.

“
Kelly? Jake?” I call. I don't move. I can't move. I'm frozen to the spot. My feet refuse to carry me out of here. “Guys, stop fooling around.”

Nothing.

The skin on the backs of my hands prickles. The sensation spreads up my arms, across my back and into my scalp. It's cool down here, cold even, and yet I'm suddenly feeling very hot. The air is stifling. A trickle of sweat leaks from my brow and drips down my face.

“
Jake?
” I whisper.

I poke my head out through the elevator doors and peer into the darkness. Suddenly every overturned chair, every table and cabinet hides him, and Micah's sing-songy voice whispers to me, except this time it's for Jake:
Olli, ollie, oxen free. Come out, come out, wherever you are
.

I remember the games of Hide-and-go-seek and Tag the neighborhood kids used to play. I'd watch them from the front window or the front step of the house, wanting terribly to be with them. And they'd let me play, but only if I would be It. They'd tease me if I ever caught them, calling me “Loser” and whining that they let me catch them. They'd poke me and say, “No tag backs.” And at some point, somebody thought it would be funny if instead of playing Tag, we played Zombie. “If you want to play” they'd tell me, “you have to be dead.” If you got touched, you'd reanimate and then you got to touch anyone else, so that by the end of the game, everyone was a zombie and finally I wasn't alone anymore. But then, pretty soon after that, somebody figured out that it was more fun to start off as the zombie and to get to chase the others. And we'd all run around, run away. Except they'd never touch me. I'd be the last one left alive. I thought it was lonely being It and everyone running away from me, but it's even lonelier when everyone else is It and nobody will chase you.

I shake these random memories from my head.

“
Jake?”

He regained consciousness, that's all. He's awake, but now he's delirious. He's probably wandering around and not even aware of where he is.