S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (150 page)

“
Right or left?”

He points left. “We keep heading east.”

We walk through the shade for a few more minutes before he asks how I'm doing.

“
Fine. You?”

He adjusts his pack again and I see him wince. “I'll be better once we get a car.”

His face is flushed. Large beads of sweat drip down his face and neck and swirl into his shirt collar.

“
We should drink some water,” he says, as if sensing me watching him.

“
I'll get yours.”

“
Thanks.”

After our break, we set off again. This time he stays by my side, rather than leading me. He glances over, his lips pressed tightly together.

“
What?” I ask.

“
You,” he answers.

I don't ask for clarification. I don't need to. I already know what he's going to say, or at least I get the gist of it.

“
Leaving for the Marines,” he eventually says, “leaving you and Mom, that was the second most difficult thing I ever had to do.”

“
Mom.” I chuff. “She probably didn't even notice for a month that you were gone. I doubt she even knew I was.”

“
Don't be so hard on her.”

“
No? Why shouldn't I? We needed a parent growing up. Where was she? Out getting drunk and screwing everything with a prick—”

He whirls around at me and gets in my face. “You don't know what she went through, Jessie,” he hisses.

“
I was there!”

“
Keep your voice down.”

“
You think she deserves my pity? Or my sympathy? I needed a mother. I needed a father. But all I got was you. No offense, but you just weren't ready to be a grown up.”

“
I tried.”

“
Screw you. Screw you and her. You didn't try. You ran away, too. The only one who didn't was Grandpa.”

“
I'm sorry, Jess. What more can I say? I tried. I really did. I was selfish and I ran away. Is that what you want to hear? But I came back. I came back because of you.”

I'm quiet for a while, unsure of my own feelings. Finally I sigh and say, “I know. I don't know if it would've made any difference actually, if Mom had been around and sober when I was growing up. I'm not sure she could've done anything to stop the crap I was going through in school.”

We pass the driveway to a house and he stops and looks up before shaking his head. “Garage door's open. No car. We'll try the next one.”

We keep walking.

“
Did they tease you in high school?” I ask.

“
Brutally.”

“
And the Marines?”

“
What's worse than ‘brutally'?”

“
So why did you do it? Why did you enlist?”

“
Because, I…” He hesitates before answering. “Because I thought I deserved it. I was punishing myself for what Dad and Grandpa did. Like Mom is punishing herself.”

I want to tell him she isn't punishing herself. She just has no self-restraint. But all I say is, “It wasn't your fault.”

“
I eventually figured that out. That's why I went into NCD.”

“
But nobody respects them, either.”

“
I don't care about respect. I just want to understand, Jessie. I want to understand
them
, the Undead. And us, the living. Nobody takes time to do that anymore.”

We reach an intersection and the thicker bracken gives way to stretches of wild grass. Beyond us are the outskirts of a neighborhood, the silent gray houses standing mute and faded among the brilliant green trees and overgrown yards.

“
We'll find something here.”

He steps off the road and into the longer grass.

“
Wait!”

He turns.

“
What was the first?” I ask. “The hardest thing you ever had to do?”

His face softens. “Coming home.”

 

It takes six tries
and the combined juice of four extra automobile batteries—“a battery bank,” Eric calls it—before we manage to get a car to start. We don't even need to hotwire it. The key was on a hook in the kitchen labeled, “J's car.”

“
It's a sign,” Eric tells me.

“
Kelly knows how to hotwire cars.”

“
Who do you think taught him how to do it?”

It troubles me that I didn't know that. I can't help but feel a small pang of jealousy knowing they'd actually spent time together.

He must see the look on my face because he smiles thinly and says, “It's no big deal. Wasn't like we were buddies or anything. Just…sometimes he'd have a question about old tech and he'd come and ask me about it.

“
You'll have to teach me how to do it, hotwire a car.”

He shakes his head. “Someday, maybe.”

By the time we've gotten the engine to run, the Undead have heard us and have started to congregate outside the house. Eric sits in the driver's seat and presses on the gas to clear the lines. When he's convinced it won't stall, he gets out, leaving the engine on. It chugs unevenly and sounds terrible.

“
So, how do we do this?” I ask, loading our packs into the backseat along with some packages of food and water we've managed to scrounge up in the houses we'd searched.

Eric unhooks the daisy chain of batteries and heaves them one by one onto the floor in back, grunting even more deeply with each one. In the trunk is a shovel, a hatchet and a couple hockey sticks. In the back seat are a nest of kitchen knives. “You'll drive,” he finally answers.

“
I don't have my license on me.”

He rolls his eyes, smirks.

“
I meant, how are we going to get past them? They're right outside blocking the driveway. As soon as we open the door, they're going to come in after us. I can't just run them over.”

“
I'll go around to the other side of the house and draw them away. When I get back and am in, gun it.”

“
Gun it?”

“
Yeah, go. Fast enough to ram through the garage door. It's fine, really. Nobody cares. Just make sure you don't drive us into the house across the street.”

“
Why don't you drive?”

“
Because, Jess, I can't turn the steering wheel. And there's no way I'm going to let you try and draw them away while I sit inside the car and wait for you.”

“
That's a pretty chauvinistic thing to say.”

“
It is what it is, Jess. I'm your brother. Cut me some slack. Now, once we're on the street, keep the speed over ten miles an hour, but not too fast. Without a map, we'll have to use road signs. I don't want to end up on a dead end.”

Once more I wish we had the tablet. If I hadn't left it behind when I'd gone on my little jaunt this morning, Micah wouldn't have snagged it. Not having a map is bad enough, but what if he tries to do something? What if he manages to get back into the network? If it should come back up, he'd have access to everything again, including knowing exactly where each and every one of us is.

“
No paper maps inside?”

Eric shakes his head. “People stopped using paper maps years before the evacuation. Just take it nice and easy and hopefully we won't have to do much backtracking.”

I remember how quickly the IUs surrounded the car after the crash. If we have to stop or—God forbid—if the cars stalls out, chances are we won't be able to escape on foot.

He steps to the door leading into the house and says, “Keep the car door open. Then, as soon as I'm in—”

“
I know, gun it. Just…”

He stops and waits for me to finish.

“
Just hurry up, Eric. I don't have all day.”

I sit inside the car, listening to the irregular chug of the engine as it struggles not to fail. It shakes for a time, then runs smoothly for a few seconds, then starts to shake again, coughing and sputtering. The air is thick with the stink of unspent fuel.

I press on the accelerator and the engine keeps complaining, just a lot louder. Something starts to clank. I let go and the clanking goes away, but the car nearly stalls.

“
Hurry up, Eric,” I mutter, applying a little more pressure on the gas. I find a place where the engine runs a little more smoothly and the clanking isn't so bad. I tell myself that we just need to get to the wall, two and half miles away.

Then you'll just have to start the whole damn process all over again.

It wasn't so bad. An hour, at the most.

And who knows how long before you figure out a way to get through.

I remember Eric telling me he had keys, but with the wall off-line, they won't work. Our best bet would be to go back to where Ben blew a hole through it.

If you can even remember where that was.

“
Come on, Eric,” I say, louder this time, wishing I could drown out the voice inside my head.

And suddenly the door to the house slams open and he stumbles out. I take my foot off the gas. The engine begins to sputter. He waves at me to get back in.

“
I'm fine. Just bumped into a cabinet. Hurts like hell. Go. Go! Should be clear.”

I pull my feet in and close the door as he climbs into the back seat and flops down on it, sweeping the knives onto the floor. His face is as white as snow and he's sweating terribly.

“
What are you waiting for?”

I turn around, put the car into gear, and slam my foot onto the pedal. The engine screams and the tires squeal. We don't move. Smoke begins to fill the garage. The engine threatens to quit.

“
Parking brake! Release the parking brake, Jessie!”

“
Where the hell is it?”

“
The pedal, next to your left foot. Push it!”

I do and it springs up and since I've still got my right foot on the gas the car lurches forward and slams into the garage door and the steering wheel gets wrenched out of my hands and suddenly it's daylight and I'm careening across the yard, heading straight for a large decorative boulder that's now surrounded by a hillock of weeds.

I grab the wheel and jerk it to the right and the boulder flashes past me and the car fishtails and the back slams into it. Eric shouts and I yelp. A zombie flips over the hood and crashes into the windshield before slipping off to the left. I hear it go under the back tires as we slide. There's a muted crunch, and then we're on the street.

“
Wrong way! Turn around. You're heading straight toward the cul-de-sac.”

“
Damn it. I knew you should've driven, Eric.”

“
Just calm— Jesus! Watch it.”

The mailbox I clip teeters, then falls into the street behind us.

“
Slow down. Just follow the circle around and come back. That's it.”

I let my foot off the accelerator and the engine coughs but keeps going. I chance a glance back in the rearview. Eric's sitting up now, a look of agony on his face. He's clutching his chest, squeezing a fistful of shirt. The tendons in his neck stand out as he strains.

“
You okay? What happened back there?”

“
I'm fine. Nothing happened. I told you, I ran into a cabinet.”

We get to the end of the road and I alternate between gas and brake and maneuver our way around the cul-de-sac and back the way we've just come. A hundred feet ahead of us, the downed mailbox with its splintered post still rocks in the road, the faded red plastic flag jutting up in the air, as if asking for a ride. Fifty feet past it, the ground where we came out is torn up. The ruts sink deep into the mud. It's a wonder we didn't get stuck. Eric stares at it as we pass, but he doesn't say anything.

Or maybe he's staring at the crowd of IUs emerging from around the side of the house.

“
That went well,” he says after a moment. “Nice driving.”

I let out a snort.

He leans back, sees me checking him out in the mirror and says, “Keep your eyes on the road.”

“
Yes, Mom.”

He laughs but points up ahead. Several IUs are starting to emerge from their hiding places and are heading for the street. I worry about them less than the other obstacles. I don't think a zombie or two would stop us, but a downed branch or trashcans might.

We turn onto another street that looks like it might lead to a major road, and at one point I have to drive through a narrow alley of debris and onto the sidewalk to avoid an old billboard that had been blown there from some other place. The going is so slow that we're quickly overtaken by a handful of zombies. They smack the car with their wooden hands and try to bite us through the glass.

“
Don't look at them,” Eric tells me.

I almost reply with something sarcastic, but don't. It's obvious he still sees me as the little girl he left behind when he went into the Marines. And while I'm tempted to remind him that I'm not so helpless anymore, a part of me resists the idea. Some small part of me wants that back.

“
Which way now?” I ask as we roll toward an intersection.

Eric doesn't speak, just gestures for me to continue straight through. But as we roll beneath the dead signal light and weave our way between abandoned cars, he quickly checks the road in both directions.