S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (79 page)

“
Think it's one of them?” I whisper.

Micah doesn't answer. We watch a few more minutes until it moves away again.

I let out a whoosh of air. “So, what if we make noise? It's not like they can do anything to us, right? And if it's the guys, then we'll know they're okay.”

Micah considers this for a moment, then nods. “Just not too loud.”

I cup my hands around my mouth and lower my face until it's right next to my Link and call out.

Nothing.

I repeat it, once, twice…

Then there's a sound.

“
Was that a word? Did someone speak?”

I shake my head. “Don't know.”

“
Try again.”

“
Kelly? Reg? Jake?”

The rasping noise gets louder and the screen fills with a pair of old faded jeans, too close and too blurry to tell who they belong to.

“
Jake?”

The jeans-wearer bumps the table. Ashley's Link jitters and the scene shifts.

“
I don't think it's one of ours.”

I feel so helpless. We're sitting here waiting for them, watching the IUs from the safety of our Link screens. I hate not knowing what's happening.

“
Can IUs walk down steps?” I ask.

“
They can fall down stairs. IUs can't walk
up
steps, not like implanted Infecteds,” Micah answers. He asks how I think they got into the compound.

“
Not by climbing a tree,” I reply. What I don't say is that maybe it was Kelly's fault. Maybe by messing with the power, he accidentally let them in.

The jeans reappear, and this time it's clear they belong to an IU.

“
What's it doing?”

Micah doesn't answer. We both just watch as it shuffles around.

“
It's like it's looking for something.”

Something to eat.

“
I can't stand just sitting here.” I get up for the tenth time, then sit back down again.

He checks his Link. “It's just after two. We can't do anything for a couple more hours, I guess.”

“
We should get some sleep.”

“
How can I?”

“
You've already done more than any of the rest of us, Jess. You've probably just saved their lives and—”

“
You don't know that,” I snap. I can feel my self-control slipping away, leaving in its wake that hot, greasy, burning feeling of helplessness. If I could figure out a way to run from it, I would.

“
It'll work.”

I turn to him, squeezing my fists until my fingernails make painful half-moons in my palms.

“
It'll work, Jessie,” he repeats. “I'm as sure of it as I was sure Ashley's fix wouldn't work. Even if I don't understand why.”

I gesture at my Link in his hand. “What's it doing now? Is it still there?”

He nods.

I reach over and take it from him and yell into it loud enough so that it'll hear. “Hey, asshole!”

“
Trying to piss it off? Tell it to get a life.”

“
Very funny. You're a total crack—”

The unmistakable sound of the elevator dinging cuts me off. At the exact same moment, Micah's Link pings. He nearly drops it out of surprise.

“
It's Kelly! Kel, where are you? Are you okay? What's going on?”

“
Give him a chance to speak, will you?” I say.

Kelly's out of breath when he answers. He looks excited. “We're in the elevator, heading back up. Nearly there. Just got a sub-stream.” There's another ding. “Hey, whatever you guys did to the failsafe, it worked. Mostly. Everyone's fine, except Ash. She's still out.”

Micah tilts his head and gives me that
I told you so
look. I wave him off.

“
Had a scary moment there, though,” Kelly continues. “She was convulsing, gagging when we got her all the way downstairs.”

“
What happened? Where'd the IUs come from? Where'd they go? And there's a—”

“
That idiot Jake is what happened. He dragged a whole bunch of IUs in here.”

“
Hey! I didn't mean to!”

“
Shut the fuck up,” Reggie says, somewhere off screen. “You don't get to speak anymore!”

Well, at least Reggie sounds fully recovered.

Micah nudges me, pointing at my screen. I look down, remembering the IU that's waiting for them upstairs. But the view of the stairwell is completely gone now. Everything's blurry except for a fuzzy bright area in the corner of the screen. “I think it picked Ashley's Link up.”

“
Kelly?” I say, hurriedly. “There's more up top.”

“
We figured. We're all ready for them. Everyone except Ash. Poor girl. Look, you need to do for her what you did for us.”

“
Already done,” Micah says. “You just need to get her Link back.”

“
We sent the failsafe programs to everyone's Links,” I explain. “And Micah activated them. The Links are transmitting the signal. Ash's is too, but—”

“
But we left it topside,” Kelly finishes.

“
That's not all.”

“
What?”

“
An IU just picked it up.”

Kelly's shoulders sag. “It's never just easy, is it?”

There's another ding and he looks up. “We're almost there. I'll ping you back in a few minutes.”

“
Wait—”

But the connection is broken. I check the image on my screen. From somewhere far away, I hear the elevator ding one last time. There's a pause, then the familiar
shush
of the doors opening.

We wait. Soon, the tell-tale sounds of fighting come to us, the thuds of bodies falling and the heartrending moan of the Undead.

“
God, how many are there?” Micah asks.

I don't answer. I stare at my screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of something, anything. It suddenly flashes white. There's a loud clatter, telling me the IU dropped it. The screen blurs for a moment as the tiny cam tries to refocus. Then the ceiling tiles come into view.

“
Kelly!” I yell. “It's on the floor.”

“
See it!” I hear him say, his voice sounding far away. “Just need to…”

There's a wet smack, followed by another thud.

“
Kelly!”

“
I got it,” Jake answers this time.

“
Zombies first, Jake!” Reggie yells. “Keep them away from Ash!”

Jake's face appears, red and sweaty, blurry. He reaches down for the Link just as I hear Kelly shout out for him to look out. A shadow fills the screen behind him and the Link refocuses on the grotesque face of an IU above Jake's shoulder. Its leathery and withered flesh has shrunken up tight against the bones of its skull. The eyes are gunmetal gray, blind, yet seeing. Its mouth opens, exposing a gap-toothed maw filled with a swollen, blackened tongue.

“
Jake! Behind you!” I yell.

He turns just as the monster's teeth close over his shoulder. He shrieks and falls. The view on the screen blurs.

Jake screams again.

The image wavers. There's a clatter, then the screen turns black and everything goes silent.

After a moment, a message appears on my Link:

<>

 

I'm too shocked to speak. I've just watched Jake get bitten.

“
He'll be fine, Jess. I don't think it actually broke skin. That zom was missing most of its teeth.”

I trip over my backpack, then numbly pick it up and head for the end of the hall. This time Micah doesn't try to stop me. He figures I won't leave, but I'm this close to actually doing it. I don't give a rat's ass if there are zombies waiting just outside.

But when I get to the end of the hallway I turn around and pace back.

“
It bit him. I saw. I saw blood right before…before…”

“
We got disconnected.”

“
We didn't get disconnected,” I snap. “It fell into the elevator shaft, between the floor and the car.”

His face pinches. He knows I'm right. And he knows what it means. Ashley's screwed.

But that's not the bigger problem right now. Jake is. I know what I saw. I know he was bitten. I watched that IU's teeth sink into the muscle between his neck and shoulder. I saw the blood on his shirt when he yanked away. I saw the tooth still embedded in his skin.

Right before everything went black.

Before we lost the stream.

Right after everything seemed to finally be coming together.

“
Just sit down, Jessie.”

“
Don't tell me to sit down, Micah! I can't. I want to leave. I can't. I want to go home. I can't do that either. I mean, I can.” I wave my hands hysterically around my head and keep pacing. Micah moves out of the way. He doesn't want to get hit. “I want us to all go home and just when it seems like we finally can… It's all fucked.”

I sputter, kicking at nothing. I almost punch the wall before stopping myself. My shoulder sends me a painful reminder that it was recently dislocated. I'm almost too far gone to heed it.

“
That stupid son of a bitch had to try and be the hero!”

Micah doesn't say anything. He's staring at the opposite wall with the same look on his face as when he had his breakdown in LaGuardia. I step over to him and grab his shoulder and shake him. “Don't you dare wig out on me!”

He snaps out of it, then launches himself off the floor. Without saying a word, he whirls around and heads for the front of the house.

“
Where are you going?”

“
Knives. There must be some in the kitchen.” He stops and turns. “Gather whatever we can find to defend ourselves. We're leaving.”

“
It's still dark.”

“
I don't give a crap.”

“
Whoa. What just happened? Just a minute ago, you were—”

“
I just realized you're right, Jessie. You've been right all along. You were right about the failsafe. You were right that we shouldn't have split up. We need to go to Jayne's Hill.”

I shake my head. Now he's the one thinking irrationally and I'm the one trying to keep him from committing suicide by going out there. But then my own need to be with Kelly overrides everything. “I'll search upstairs,” I say.

He turns and disappears into the kitchen. I stare at the empty hallway for another moment or two, listening to him opening and closing drawers. At least he's got the presence of mind to keep the noise down and to use his Link for light. I turn and make my way up the stairs again.

The first room I stop in is the parents'. I'm not looking forward to seeing the little girl's bedroom.

I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me I've become obsessed with her. Or to tell me why. I know why. It's because I feel connected to her. We share something: we've both been abandoned by our parents.

My father was killed when I was two, murdered by the monster that Professor Halliwell turned into after his attempt to create a cure for Reanimation went wrong. He, along with that fellow Nobel Laureate from Germany named Geena Bloch, and my father, had all been friends. Eric told stories about us having barbecues with the Halliwells. Of the families camping together. Apparently my mother and Mrs. Halliwell were pretty tight, too. I wonder whatever became of her.

But then Bloch disappeared under suspicious circumstances and Dad went to work for the president. He and Halliwell became terrible enemies. Halliwell accused my father of scientific abuse. “He was a nutcase,” Grandpa always said, whenever Halliwell's name was mentioned. “A crazy, arrogant, old man who betrayed your father. He betrayed us all.”

Grandpa was the general in charge of the Omegaman Project at the time, the group that created the first Undead Marine forces using Bloch's neural implant device that Arc eventually adapted. The predecessor of our own L.I.N.C. devices.

“
How did he betray me?” I'd asked. The look Grandpa had given me had been withering and, for a moment, I thought I might be in serious trouble. Grandpa is one of those rare people who can give you a heart attack just by looking at you. He rarely shows emotion on his face, even if you know he's just waiting to explode inside.

“
By taking away your father, Jessica. He tried pulling some crazy, half-baked stunt, and all he got for it was ironic justice: he died and reanimated. But then the bastard—”

“
Ulysses!” my mother exclaimed.

“
He came and murdered your father.”

Nobody could ever explain how the monster had managed to escape his lab and make his way from the university to our house in Virginia from so far away.

Zombies don't commit premeditated murder.

But, apparently, that's what happened.

My mother became a basket case after that. She worked her way through men and booze like they were both going out of style, and all she ended up doing was losing herself. Talk about a crazy experiment in selfishness.

Eric was thirteen at the time. Thirteen and suddenly forced to become the man of the household. The parent. He never had a chance to be a kid, not after that.