S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (31 page)

My heart starts racing again. I'd had alternating visions of them showing up at my door and in the morgue. Either way, the cops would be with them, taking us into custody.

“
So…they're still there? You can see that? Why haven't they tried to come back yet?”

“
I don't know, but they are coming, Jess, that much I'm sure of. That's what I've been trying to tell you. As soon as Ash and Reg get here, we're going to go meet them.”

Excitement and relief wash over me, but then a new thought comes to mind and I gasp in panic. “You need to tell them not to come!”

He frowns. “I couldn't even if I wanted to. It's just a tracking app. It doesn't work that way. We can't talk to them and they have no idea we can see them.”

“
If they try coming back through the tunnel, they'll be shot! Manhattan is swarming with NCD officers and military right now. Eric's with them. They'll be seen the moment they surface, and I'm pretty sure it's shoot first, ask questions later right now.”

Micah's frown deepens. “What's going on in Manhattan?”

I tell him about the call Eric got last night and how he was gone half the night dealing with IUs. “He said lower Manhattan's been invaded. They're coming through the tunnel. Media's buzzing this morning, but they haven't come out and said exactly what it is.”

Micah looks shocked for a moment. “I haven't been on Media this morning.” He gets up. “Shit. It's because of us, isn't it?”

I nod.

“
Aw, Christ. What did we do?” he whispers. “But… Did the zombies come out alive? I mean…you know.”

“
Eric said they had to use shotguns, so, yes, they came out alive.”

He exhales heavily.

“
I don't think anyone was hurt. And Eric claimed they got them all. But I'm not so sure. I think he was just saying that so I wouldn't panic. You know how protective he is of me. I think that's also why it's not being reported on Media.”

Micah nods gravely. “Then it's a really good thing Kelly and Jake aren't taking the Midtown tunnel.”

“
What do you mean? How else would they come back?”

“
They were heading northeast when I last checked this morning. When they came online, they were about a mile east of the Midtown tunnel. They weren't moving and I kind of freaked out a little. But then they did move, so I figured they'd just set up camp or something to wait out the zombies. When I rechecked later, I saw that they were even further away. They'd moved almost four miles. They're clearly going somewhere with a plan in mind. I can't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure they were heading for the other tunnel.”

I close my eyes and picture the map Ash had gotten for us before our trip. There were two tunnels: the Midtown, which is the one we took, and the Brooklyn Battery. But the Battery was further south and west, not northeast.

When I mention this to Micah, he shakes his head. “Not the Battery. There's another tunnel—two, actually. They're further north. I think they were heading for one of those.”

“
I didn't know about any other tunnels.”

“
Kelly didn't either. Jake told us about them when Ash and I met with him that first day, when we asked him about the diving equipment. But we decided they weren't the best options.”

“
Are they far?”

“
Five or six miles up the coast from the Midtown tunnel. The closest one passes under Randall's Island and comes out into the old East Harlem neighborhood.”

“
Which is all swampland now, Micah. Nobody lives down that way anymore. And nobody goes there except to fish, old men on the edge of conscription and poor families.” I shudder at the thought of the fish they must pull out of the water there.

“
Which is a good thing. No one will see us when they come out.”

“
Fine, but how're we going to get out to the opening? I'm not swimming.

“
I still need to figure that out. A raft or something. I don't know how far from the road it's going to be.”

I frown. “You said there were two tunnels. Where's the other one?”

“
Further north and east, about another mile and half or so. According to Jake, very few people know about it, and it's not on any of the maps we dug up. He said his uncle once told him about it, when he worked as a baggage handler at LaGuardia, which is where the opening is. But they won't take that one. Even if they knew where it is, it's five miles long. The Harlem's only half that.”

I whistle. Two and a half miles underwater. Even freshly rested and with the current behind them, it would take almost three hours to swim, the maximum range of the rebreather cartridges. Five miles would be impossible, even with extra cartridges. It's just too long of a distance.

Micah checks the time on his Link. “At the rate they're moving, they'll have reached the opening by now. I just hope they find it quickly.” He thumbs his Link awake. “I was just about to track them again when you showed up at the door.”

A map of Long Island appears on his screen. He reverse pinches it to expand one section.

I expect to see a pair of tiny red blips, the signals from their implants, but there's nothing, just a schematic of the island and roads that haven't been used in thirteen years. He points. “The opening's right about here.”

“
I don't see anything.”

“
That's good news. It means they've found the tunnel and are in it. They're probably directly underneath the wall. The signal there would be blocked.”

He hands me the Link. While I stare at it in my hands, he goes over to the fridge. “We've got less than three hours to get there, find some way to float out to where the opening on our side is, and retrieve them.”

He hands me a couple water pouches.

For the first time I notice the circles under his eyes, and I realize he's probably been working night and day on the ArcWare hack. All this time I'd thought it was so he could play
The Game
, but it was really so he could find the boys. I feel guilty for doubting him.

“
Once they're back…” he says, exhaling heavily, as if he's been carrying the weight of the world solely on his shoulders. He holds up his hands and gives me a weak smile. “Then everything will be okay.”

I smile, too, and pray he's not being overly optimistic. I know things won't all be okay. After that cop this morning, just because Kelly and Jake show up again doesn't mean he'll back off. He suspects we're somehow connected with the IU invasion in lower Manhattan. Unfortunately, he's right.

But first things first: Kelly and Jake.

“
Come on,” Micah says suddenly. He offers me his hand and helps me off the couch. “We can't keep sitting around waiting. We need to move.”

“
What about Ash and Reg?”

“
We'll drive around until we find them.”

I bend down to retrieve my sparring bag.

“
Leave it.”

He grabs my arm and pulls me toward the door. “It'll be fine there. We'll be back in four or five hours.”

The heat hits me like a baseball bat when we get back outside. Even Micah winces a bit at the glare. His forehead begins to glisten.

I head for the passenger seat before turning around again. “I forgot my inhaler.” He gives me an impatient look, but taps his Link to unlock the front door to the house. “Grab a few more waters on your way out.” Then he gets in the car and starts it up to run the air conditioner. “I think we're going to need them.”

I go back inside and grab my inhaler out of my sparring bag and slip it into my pocket. As I turn to leave, my hip knocks against the side table. It tips and crashes to the floor, dumping the contents of a drawer.

I reach down to pick everything up. There's a tacky paperweight from the Alamo, one of the few things I've ever seen in Micah's house with any direct connection to his former life as a citizen of the Southern States Confederacy. His family defected from the Republic of Texas years back. He still has the old twang in his voice. We always used to pick on him about it.

There are a few other trinkets, typical odds and ends that people accumulate over time and then lose again in the forgotten nooks and crannies of their lives: an antique yellow and black smiley faced pin, an old digital music player with a silver apple icon, the electronic guts of some other unknown device.

The last thing I pick up is card of some sort. I turn it over and see it's an old fashioned college ID badge, printed on paper and laminated in plastic. Curious, I check out the image of the man on the front. His face is vaguely familiar, but he doesn't resemble anyone I've seen in any of the family photos scattered about Micah's place. I freeze when I see the name underneath: Eugene Halliwell.

For a brief moment I can't tell if I'm actually reading it correctly. But when I blink and check again, it's still there.

Eugene Halliwell, Professor of Immunology, Royce State College.

Micah honks.

I get up shakily, slipping the badge into my back pocket.

I need to know how Micah knows the man who murdered my father.

 

We spot Ashley and Reg
at the corner of Amherst and Fourth. They're coming from the direction of my house. Micah honks and they see us and hurry across the intersection looking relieved.

“
Your grandfather said you weren't home yet from karate,” Reggie says, getting in behind me. “Hope you don't mind if I say that guy scares the crap out of me. He said we should wait for you at your place, but…”

“
Yeah, I know. And I don't mind. He scares a lot of people.”

I do, however, suppress the urge to correct him about the karate reference. I've told him a million times that it's hapkido. They're actually very different martial arts. Karate emphasizes strength, meeting force with force; hapkido teaches using an opponent's force against him. The misunderstanding probably bugs me more than it should, like when Kelly calls the dojang a dojo. I guess if they haven't figured it out by now, then it's unlikely they ever will.

“
So, Micah filled you in on the deets?” Ash asks.

I turn to her and nod. For a moment I'm tempted to ask her about Rupert's contact info on her Link, but that's less important right now. “I can't believe you actually finished the hack on
The Game
.”

She shakes her head. “Just the first step, actually. We still need to incorporate the gaming algorithms into a control device. And it wasn't all me. Micah helped a lot. He's the one who suggested we go back and run a cladistic analysis of the programming structure that ArcWare's been using for their various versions of their games over the years.” She shakes her head and laughs at herself. “I can't believe it was as simple as that. Once we had that and Micah's backdoor to the codex he created while we were on LI, it was just a matter of configuring the translator to extrapolate out until the syntaxes aligned.”

“
Yeah, um, you lost me at cladistic analysis.”

Ash leans forward and pats Micah's head. “I thought I was the hidden Markov modeling expert. Turns out Micah's pretty good at optimal nonlinear filtering problems himself.”

“
Stop!” I yell. “You're making my ears bleed.”

“
Ash did all the heavy programming,” Micah says, ignoring me. “I just suggested a few tweaks. She took them and ran with it.”

“
I'm with Jessie. Enough with the circle jerk,” Reggie says.

“
Yeah, we all know who's the expert on gaming architecture. It's only natural you'd want to look at the programming structure, Micah.”

“
Well, when you put it like that,” Micah says, “it sort of takes all the air out of the old ego.”

“
Ha! Now you know how I feel,” Reggie complains. “Jessie's been deflating my ego for years. Long before you ever came along, Tex-Mex.”

“
Yeah, and yet your ego somehow still manages to fill the car,” Ashley teases. “It's probably big enough to be picked up by the Air Defense System.”

I give Ash a high five. Everyone laughs. The mood is definitely brighter as we head off the side streets and onto the main roads, as if our inability to do anything about Jake and then Kelly before has been physically weighing us down. Now we're going to get them. That's enough to make us forget, at least for the time being, all our other troubles. We joke and tease like it's old times again.

“
Too bad we can't use Reggie's ego to float us out over the Harlem swamps,” Ashley says.

“
I'm working on it,” Micah replies.

“
You always say that: ‘I'm working on it.'”

“
Have I ever disappointed?”

Nobody defends him. There's a kernel of truth to what Ash said. Micah's not the most reliable one in the bunch. That would be Kelly. And with that, the good mood slips away. The car grows quiet, more subdued.

It's the first time I've been on the Old New England Thruway in many years. Apparently, very few people ever use it anymore. Micah says most people take the Bronx River Parkway, since it rests on higher ground.

The inland scenery quickly gives way to the rainforest that lines the coast. It's technically not considered a rainforest—we get too little actual precipitation—but with the constant high humidity, it might as well be. My brother Eric says that back when he was a kid, the temperature rarely reached a hundred in Connecticut during the summers. Now it hovers above ninety for five months out of the year and the number of hundred-plus degree days has grown steadily year over year. We get nearly a month of them now.