S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (49 page)

(green)

white liquid inside.

“
We thought he'd injected me, but I'm not sick.”

“
So, we definitely should shoot him.”

“
I am not going to shoot this man! Not until we know for sure he's going to reanimate.”

“
Jess.” Kelly reaches out, but he stops himself. It's like he's seeing me now for the first time, seeing the blood on me. Back there, when we were both sure I'd been injected, we hadn't known what was inside that syringe. It might've been a virus; it might've been something else. Now…

Now, based on the limited knowledge we have of disease transmission, how could I not be not infected? Reggie might be too. But it's clear to me that Kelly doesn't want to touch me now.

“
Maybe Jake's right,” he says, barely managing to keep his voice under control. But his face flickers with emotion—fear and anger and hatred—and his fists clench and release with helplessness.

“
First of all, we don't know for anything for sure.
Any
thing. Second, Stephen does. We kill him now, we lose our last chance to find out how to get out of here.”

“
Jess, you need to think ab—”

“
Those other two Arc people? I'm pretty sure they're dead,” I say, standing back up. “Did you see the blood behind that security door? I did. There was a hell of a lot of it. Stephen's the only one left who can tell us anything about these implants and how the failsafe mechanism inside us works.”

“
He's dangerous, Jess,” Kelly says. “If not biologically, then psychologically. He's putting us at even greater risk than we're already in.”

“
We'll tie him up.”

Jake throws his hands in the air.

“
If he so much as blinks like a zombie,” I tell them, “I promise, I'll be first one to put a bullet in his head!”

“
Really?” Jake asks, challenging me. “Just like that? No hesitation? What if it was one of us?”

“
What the hell are you talking about? It's not one of us!”

“
It might be, if he's infected. He could bite one of us. And then where would we be?” He turns to Kelly. “What about you? What if it was Jessie?”

Kelly looks at me and in this moment I hate Jake more than I have ever hated anyone else.

“
I'd do what I needed to do,” Kelly whispers.

“
Yeah, well, I wouldn't hesitate, either,” Jake says. “Not even for a second.” He stalks away. “I'm going downstairs to watch.”

“
Hey,” I shout at his back. “I made a promise to bring everyone home. You can count on that!”

“
When the time comes, Jessie. I'll hold you to it.”

“
Christ,” Reggie breathes, when Jake's finally gone. He gives Kelly a weird look. “You'd really shoot us? Damn, brah, that's seriously messed up.”

 

After tying Stephen up
, Kelly, Reg and I head across the terminal and back to the security door. We each give Mabel's body a long, hard stare as we pass it, but it's pretty clear she's really dead this time. She won't be reanimating. Finally, we work up the courage to open the door.

We fully expect to find two bodies inside, a man's and a woman's, the two Arc employees we fought down in the baggage claim area when we made our escape early this morning. Or at least
most
of their bodies.

It's possible that they could've survived, but from the carnage I'd glimpsed earlier, I doubt it. I can't imagine anything could have survived such brutality. But we need to know: Did either of them escape? Are they infected? Have they reanimated?

“
Ready?” Kelly whispers.

I swallow what feels like a boulder stuck in my throat, then insert the cardkey. The light blinks green. Kelly wraps his fingers around the handle.

“
No!” Reggie says, placing his palm on the door and pushing against the door. “Wait. Maybe we should, you know, bang on it first. In case there's another one of them wandering around inside. That'll get them riled up if they're in there.”

“
Why the hell would we want them riled up for?”

“
I'm just saying, then we'll know for sure.”

“
We'll also know for sure if we just open the door and look, Reg.” I hold the gun in my fist. He's got the broken machete. It's not the best arsenal in the world, but it's better than using the stump of Mabel's arm.

“
Just saying. I'd rather know with the door closed and locked and us on the other side of it.”

Kelly rolls his eyes.

I unlock the door again and Kelly cracks it open as quietly as he can. We listen for several interminable minutes, but nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound.

Slowly, he pulls the door open the rest of the way. There's blood everywhere, pooling in thick puddles on the floor, splashed onto the walls. Even the ceiling hasn't been spared. I glance down. Bloody handprints are smeared at the base of the door. Bits and pieces of flesh and bone and fabric are strewn all about. A pile of body parts litters the floor, focused just a few feet shy of the exit; the blood trail begins down the hallway in front of SCREENING ROOM 3 and ends at our feet, where the slaughter seems to have been concentrated.

“
Holy mother.”

“
Reminds me of one of those Wall Street suicide bombings we sometimes see on Media,” Kelly whispers.

I look at the gristly scene with growing horror. My first reaction is that this could've been me. It could've been any of us. But then a deeper understanding comes over me, a horror much more terrifying: This is all my fault.

I told those people where they'd find Mabel, but I purposefully hadn't mentioned what she'd become. All I'd said was:
I think she'll be happy to see you.
I knew exactly what I was doing when I'd said it, too. I knew what I was sending them into. I wanted them to be attacked! I'm the monster, not Mabel. Mabel may have killed and eaten them both, but I'm the one who made it happen.

The blood of three people is now on my hands.

“
Christ,” Reggie mutters. “Even on
Survivalist
the Players don't do this kind of damage. It's like Undead hyped-up on steroids.”

“
The Players on
Survivalist
don't have uninfected people to eat,” Kelly reminds him.

I lean my head against the wall and squeeze my eyes shut, wishing the scene away. Wishing I hadn't been so smug about sending them up here. I'm not fit to lead anyone. I'm not trustworthy.

Kelly rests a hand on my shoulder. I can feel myself shaking beneath it. “You didn't do this, Jessie,” he says. “
They
did it to themselves. They were going to do something like it to us. It's self defense. We're just trying to survive.”

I wish I could believe him, but I can't. How can I when I know he doesn't even believe himself?

“
Looks like they were initially attacked there,” Reggie mutters, pointing to the door of my former room. He slowly and carefully edges his way into the hallway, trying not to touch the walls or step on anything. It's almost impossible not to. “They must've opened the door and let Nurse Bitch out, then tried to escape. Guess they should've knocked first.” He gives us a pointed glance before going on. I can't tell if he's being ironic or not. “Obviously, they didn't quite make it all the way out.”

“
I think we're lucky they didn't,” Kelly says. “We'd have a much bigger problem to deal with—three IUs instead of one—if they had. At least in here all the damage is confined to this one space.”

“
And the bodies,” Reggie adds.

“
I only see one,” I note. “Where's the other?”

“
Christ, how can you tell?”

Jake walks in right then, jerking the door open and nearly slipping on the wet mess. We all jump.

“
Jesus, Jake,” Reggie shouts. “I thought you were—”

But Jake's eyes grow wide. He immediately turns around and stumbles back out the way he came. Before the door slams shut, we hear the sounds of him being sick.

“
Pukeboy strikes again. Thanks to him, there goes our element of surprise.”

Kelly shakes his head. “Found one,” he says, nudging a mangled object with his shoe. It rolls off to the side, still connected to the dismembered torso by a single tendon. The face is missing. He swallows a couple times, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously.

“
Yeah, but which one is it?” Reggie asks. “The man or that Novak woman?”

Kelly looks away. “Thing's too shredded to tell. There's not even much hair left on it.”

I suddenly feel very light-headed and nauseous. A chill passes through me, sapping my strength. Reggie grabs me before I fall down. He doesn't even grimace when he touches the gore on my arm. Maybe because he's covered with it, too. “You okay?”

Kelly's still staring at the head. He hasn't sensed how ill I've become.

I nod and quickly move away from Reg. I can feel his eyes tracking me, full of worry. I have a feeling he's going to be watching me very closely.

We find a single complement of limbs—or limb parts, anyway; too much is missing—but no sign of a second body, whether dead or alive or otherwise. No second skull, no clothes, no nothing.

“
That was one hungry, hungry zombie.”

Kelly steps away from us and begins making a circuit of all the doors in the hallway. He cocks his head at each one, listening. They're all closed except for the one that Mabel was using as a makeshift quarters before she died; the door to that room has been propped open with a piece of cardboard stuck underneath it since before I escaped. The computer server room also stands open, the pieces of the door Reggie and Jake destroyed stacked up against the wall. Kelly approaches this room with extreme caution before peeking inside.

“
Clear.” He starts the circuit again, this time placing an ear against each door and gently tapping.

“
What're you doing now?” Reggie asks. “Is he always this thorough?”

I shrug.

“
We found one body. Which means one person is unaccounted for. They could be hiding in one of these rooms,” Kelly quietly explains. “We don't know if they're infected or not. If they are…” He clears his throat. “They may not be. Anyway, now that the doors are all locked again, they won't be able to get back out. Either way, we need to know.”

“
I say screw them.”

After Kelly finishes the entire circuit, he shakes his head. “Didn't hear a thing. No active zombies, anyway. Now comes the hard part.” He exhales deeply through his nose and looks at us.

“
When's it going to get easier?” Reggie asks.

We go through and inspect each room thoroughly, one by one. It takes a half hour and we find nothing. They're all empty. The only clue we come across are the man's shoes inside room 3. They look like they were thrown in there. We each have our theories about what happened, but in the end, we know no more than we did before we found them.

“
Shoes. Huh. No Link. No other clothes. Weird.”

“
Think it's possible Nurse Bitch ate him?” Reggie asks. “Or her?” His gaze flicks between the dried-up blood on the floor and the blackened smears on the wall where I trapped her against the bed last night. Old blood, not new.

The IV stand still dangles by its base, still embedded in the drywall where I'd swung it to keep her from biting me when I relieved her of the cardkey.
How is it possible that it was only a few hours before?

“
A whole person?” Kelly says, shaking his head incredulously. “Bones, clothes and a pair of shoes, too? I've never heard of a zombie doing that. It's mostly the brains they go for.”

“
Yeah, but we don't really know what we're dealing with here, do we?”

Kelly frowns. “What do you mean?”

“
Nurse Bitch,” he says. “She was, like, ten times faster than I've ever seen the Players in
Survivalist
ever move. Ten times more vicious, too.” He glances quickly at me, and I can't tell if it's because I was the one who killed her in the first place or if it's something more, something related to my family's personal history with creating the Undead.

It was my father and grandfather who made the first Reanimates; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows my father was murdered by one of them as a direct result of what he'd done. I was teased incessantly about it in elementary and middle school, which partially explains why I took up hapkido. I was tired of always being a defenseless victim, the butt of every bully's taunts. It wasn't so I could defend myself against the Undead, but so I wouldn't have to suffer as much from the heartlessness of the living.

“
The first zombies were developed by people to be weapons,” Reggie explains. “But weapons are constantly being updated, strengthened, made bigger. And more destructive.”

“
Well, don't look at me. Grandpa got out of that business years ago. You know that.”