S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Read online

  But Eric had already disconnected.

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  Part One - Survivors

  Chapter 1

  Nothing about any of this felt real.

  The bodies packed around her, pressing, suffocating. Jessie hugged herself ever tighter and wished she could just break away, find a place to hide. Her first full day back at school, and already she was wishing she’d never returned.

  The two-minute warning chime sounded and the tension in the hallways ratcheted upward several notches. Lockers slammed, and kids shouted to one another over the din.

  How could she possibly be here? How could she go and sit in a classroom and listen to even one more lie, acting as if everything was okay? As if nothing had changed since she’d last walked these hallways three months ago. As if nobody had died.

  Nothing else has changed, Jessie, only you have. You’re the only one who knows what a farce this all is.

  She wished it weren’t true.

  She had killed people, murdered them. She had witnessed the deaths of a dozen souls— some of them well deserving of it, granted, but it didn’t change the fact of what she had seen and done. She had watched some of them reanimate. Had quieted a few of them herself.

  Three months ago she could never have envisioned doing what she’d had to do to survive being inside that gaming arcade. Up until then, her battles with zombies had existed only inside of a computer program. Those monsters hadn’t been live. They’d been hackable by code, not by machetes.

  All this time, playing that stupid game Zpocalypto, she’d never realized how much she was cheating.

  In the real game, the one Ashley and Jake were now a part of, you couldn’t just reboot.

  And that’s what this was like, being here in this brick building with people her age. This was nothing but an illusion.

  She stood lost in the middle of the hallway while they streamed past her. Oblivious, these kids. Oblivious of the terrible truth of the world outside their tiny, narrow lives. And who else but their teachers to blame for spreading the lies. None of them could ever truly understand the terrible truth, because they’d never witnessed firsthand the reality inside that gaming arcade.

  None of them knew. It was all simulated to them. There was nothing real to connect them with it.

  Just that morning in homeroom, for example, they’d practiced an emergency outbreak drill. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d practiced one in school. Sixth grade, maybe. Or seventh. They were supposed to do them once a semester, but nobody cared anymore, since the likelihood of an outbreak was essentially nil. That’s what they kept getting told, anyway.

  The students had treated it like a party. They were supposed to be quiet when the lights got turned off, not say a word, but people were laughing, making rude noises, pinging each other’s Links. Taking none of it seriously. Not even the teachers.

  All the drill had done was to remind everyone of the hollow threat of the Undead. The kids dredged up the old chants:

  Brains, brains, what you say?

  No more taxes shall we pay.

  We’ll play until we’re sixty-four.

  Then we’ll work just three years more.

  But I’ll be dead, so I won’t care.

  Three short years is more than fair.

  And when the lights came back on again, nobody cared that a couple were going at each other hot and heavy in a back corner of the classroom. The teacher had ahemed and the class had sniggered in amusement. At least the two still had their clothes on.

  Stop. Lock. And barricade.

  That was what they were told to recite. But what good was that when you were confronted with a horde of monsters that could smell you, hear you, would never stop coming for you? What good did it do to remain calm, seated quietly at your desk?

  She knew now how useless the drills were. She wished she didn’t.

  Somebody bumped into her, jostling her school tablet out of her hand. It clattered to the linoleum floor, was kicked away, stepped on. The boy snarled as he passed. “Get out of the freaking middle of the freaking hallway, stupid zombitch.”

  She spun around, blinking in confusion. It wasn’t the first time someone called her that. She didn’t recognize the boy, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know who she was. When your father helped create Reanimation technology, everyone knew who you were. Everyone blamed you. Nobody gave you any credit.

  Another taunt drifted through her mind. This one had followed her since elementary school:

  Brains, brains, everywhere.

  On the walls and on the chair.

  The zombie wouldn’t eat it all.

  The brain was rotten, much too small.

  It was the story of how the former professor at Royce State College in Montana had turned himself into a zombie and gone to kill his rival. The latter had been Jessie’s father— or the man who, until last week, she’d always believed to be her father. The popular version went that Professor Halliwell had infected himself with an antidote in a vainglorious attempt to destroy all Reanimates. Instead, he became the very monster he’d tried to eradicate. How he’d made his way across the country to Virginia to eat Richard Daniel’s brain.

  Jessie Daniels had read other accounts of the incident on the black streams, seen pictures of her former house in Boyce, Virginia — supposedly “un-Pshopped” — where brains and blood splattered the walls and a gun had been found at the scene. They hinted that what really happened was suicide. Most people, however, chose to believe the more incredulous version. Irony has always enjoyed greater persistence and popularity than cold, dry facts.

  As it turned out, the real irony was that Halliwell — or Father Heall, as Jessie had come to know him — was her true father, not Richard Daniels. The truth was Halliwell wasn’t the monster society had made him out to be. He hadn’t reanimated. He’d been immune.

  And he had passed that immunity on to her.

  The boy who’d snapped at her slouched away into the crowd. She wanted to stop him, to challenge him. The palms of her hands were suddenly wet with sweat. They ached with tension. An image flashed through her mind: her fingers circling his scrawny neck, squeezing. She could practically hear the brittle sound of the bones snapping.

  Relax, Jessie. Let it go.

  After retrieving her tablet from the floor, she turned against the tide of students and began to make her way toward the front exit of the school. She didn’t belong here. She didn’t know where she belonged, she just knew it wasn’t in this sheltered parody of reality.

  She nearly reached the door, was only a few steps away, when she heard her name being called.

  Ignore it. It’s just someone else going to tease you: “How do you starve a zombie? Lock it in a room with—”

  “Miss Daniels?”

  She hesitated. This wasn’t the voice of a teenager.

  “Classes are the other way,” Mister Patterson, the school principal, said. He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Thirty seconds till the late bell.”

  He waved a screening device at the back of her neck, then peered myopically at what it said. “Ah, Socialization of Implanted Reanimates with Master Bledsoe.” His smile made her shiver. “A truly fascinating elective. Not very popular among the students, I’m afraid.”

  Jessie didn’t answer. She didn’t tell him that Master Bledsoe was creepy, or that she hadn’t chosen her electives this semester, since she’d missed the first couple weeks of school. She’d been a little busy trying to stay alive.

  “Room one-fifteen is down the hall in the other direction,” he told her. He seemed oblivious to the fact that the smile on his face had grown stale. “Hurry off now. You don’t want to be late for Bledsoe’s lecture. He reports all tardies. And I happen to know that you don’t want any trouble right now.”

  She frowned at him, wondering what he meant by that, but he wiggled his fingers at her. “Hurry now.”

  She sighed and turned toward room one-fifteen. She could feel his eyes on
her back the whole way.

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  Chapter 2

  “Damn it, Reggie! Move it!” Kelly shouted. “Come on! Wake up!”

  Reggie gritted his teeth. “Will you shut the hell up!”

  “Watch out behind you!”

  “I got it, damn it! Just stay out of my way.”

  Reggie hopped off the zombie he’d just killed with a crushing blow to the back of the head. A second one was coming in fast, reaching out to grab him. Reggie ducked, and the flayed hand, not much more than bones and tendons, passed in a blur before his eyes. He reacted instinctively, sweeping the rusty steel pipe he was holding in his right hand in a broad arc. But he missed, and the sharpened stump of a finger bone raked the air an inch from his nose.

  “Shit!” He reached reflexively to his cheek and repeated the curse. “It fucking got me!”

  “Don’t worry about that!”

  The zombie took advantage of the distraction and rammed into him. Reggie lost his grip on the pipe, and it went skittering over the uneven pavement, coming to a stop at a clump of weeds breaking through a crack in the middle of the highway.

  “Move!” Kelly growled.

  Reggie started to scramble away, his heart slamming into his ribcage.

  This wasn’t your idea, he reminded himself. Kelly was the one who pushed you to come back.

  “You know we’ve got unfinished business,” Kelly had reminded him, nearly a week ago now. And Reggie hadn’t argued — hadn’t wanted to argue — despite how obviously fucked up the idea was. He didn’t want to think about any “unfinished business,” especially not the kind Kelly was talking about.

  “We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, Reg. Ash and Jake, they deserve better.”

  “I can’t do it, Kelly,” he’d said, close to tears.

  How screwed up is that?

  Never in a million years did he ever think he’d break down in front of Kelly.

  But Kelly had taken him by the shoulders, looked straight into his eyes, and said, “It’ll be different this time. I promise.”

  Yet somehow the truth felt like a lie. It wasn’t any different. Not really.

  The Player stepped forward, moving faster than a zombie should be able to. It slammed its foot down, trapping Reggie beneath it.

  “Get the hell up!” Kelly shouted.

  “Would if I could, brah!” Reggie panted. Though he knew it was just his imagination, Reggie thought his protests seemed to antagonize his assailant further. It roared and thrust its bony hands at him, grabbing a handful of hair. Reggie felt his feet go out from underneath, and he was momentarily stunned and disoriented at the strange sensation of falling.

  “Focus, Reggie!”

  A crowd of Infected Undead had begun to gather, lured from their hiding places by the noise. The IUs were slower, less coordinated than the Players— at least until they got into a feeding frenzy. Then there was almost nothing that would stop them.

  Dark memories of the room inside Jayne’s Hill, the Undead piling against the door. Watching the wall begin to cave beneath their mass.

  He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to remember. It just brought back terrible memories, made the nightmares he’d been having even worse. Why couldn’t they have just stayed away in the first place?

  Why the hell did you come back?

  The answer to the second question was easy, at least according to Kelly. They needed to find Ashley and Jake.

  And then what? What will you do when you find her? She’s not the same. She’ll never be the same.

  Quiet her. That’s what he’d do.

  But did he have it in him to break her neck?

  The Player stumbled backward, pulling away from him. There was a clump of hair in its bony fist. Reggie let out a yell of fury, but it swiped up with its other hand and managed to hook an iron finger into a piece of loose clothing. Reggie felt himself being jerked forward. The Player opened its mouth and let out another moan.

  It’s laughing!

  Now it lifted. Reggie was helpless, unable to grab anything, unable to run.

  You’re dead. Your first full day back and already you’re dead!

  He started to fall. The ground rose upward at him with dizzying speed.

  But the Player wasn’t dropping him. It hadn’t thrown him down onto the hot asphalt. Instead, it spun him around, as if to stare into his eyes, as if curious what they might hold within.

  Infuriated, Reggie grabbed the Player’s tattered shirt and thrust his head forward. There was a loud CRACK! The force of the collision rocked the Player backward. It staggered and began to fall over its own feet. Yet, it still wouldn’t let go; Reggie felt himself being pulled on top of it, felt himself falling.

  The back of the Player’s head collided with the unyielding road with such force that it bounced right back up.

  Everything went white.

  He heard Kelly, his voice sounding far away. “Get up, Reg!” Felt an arm on his shoulder, pulling.

  Reggie thrust his arms forward to push away. “I can’t . . . see,” he moaned. On his feet, staggering, arms held out. If this were Zpocalypto, he was sure Kelly would be laughing at him by now. But it wasn’t, and Kelly wasn’t laughing.

  Reggie’s vision cleared. He looked around him, spinning on his heels, ready for the attack. But the Player remained splayed out on the road and didn’t move. One arm was wrenched to the side, its fingers still twitching. The other hand hovered in the air for a moment before dropping with a thud to the pavement.

  Reggie started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. He’d never been so scared in his life and yet here he was laughing like a maniac. The Player was finally dead. Again. For good.

  “There’s another forty thousand dollars we’ll never see,” he grunted.

  He realized that the Undead clawing at the fence were moaning now.

  Something’s got them riled up.

  But he ignored them and gave the Player beneath him a vicious kick. The head jerked to the side. He could hear Kelly telling him to stop, but he couldn’t control himself. He kicked it again. Then twice more.

  I shouldn’t have come back. I SHOULD NOT HAVE COME BACK!

  Bones snapped, skin tore. The thing was dead, but he wanted to kill it again and again and again.

  He raised his foot and brought the heel down onto the zombie’s face. The skull crumbled and burst open, letting out a small puff of grayish dust. What remained of the beast’s brain that hadn’t desiccated away began to ooze out onto the baking pavement.

  “This is not what I signed up for!” he screamed. He swiped a fist over his runny nose. Sweat poured down his face. “God damn it sonofabitch assholes!”

  Kelly grabbed his shoulder.

  “Why can’t you just leave us alone? All I want to do is—”

  “Reggie! You’re going to have to freak out later.”

  “Let go of me,” Reggie growled.

  “There’s more.”

  “They’re just IUs.”

  “Not them,” Kelly said, his voice low. He spun Reggie to the right. “I’m talking about them.”

  “Where? I don’t see—”

  But then he did, a Player standing next to an abandoned car not twenty feet away. Reggie stepped back and nearly stumbled on the body.

  “Damn it.” He pushed Kelly away and lowered into a crouch. The new Player stepped away from the car and began to advance. “Was it there the whole time?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

  “You’re supposed to be keeping watch,” Reggie hissed.

  “I am keeping watch!” Kelly complained. “You almost clocked me back there with your elbow. You need to stop flailing around like that. It’s just wasted energy.”

  “It’s just wasted energy,” Reggie parroted.

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Then stay out of the way!”

  Reggie slid his feet backward and his shoes made a soft shushing sound on the carpet of
his garage. The Player he was controlling mimicked the movement by shuffling backward over the surface of the cracked road. When he sensed the resistance of the dead Player’s body against his heels, he stopped. Carefully, he stepped backwards over empty air. The Player did the same, placing the corpse between it and the new arrival.

  “I’m just saying,” Kelly whined, as he slumped onto the couch, “I can’t keep looking out when you’re flinging yourself around like that.”

  “Well, would you rather take over then? I’ll be happy to switch places with you.”

  “It’ll take too long to switch out our Links,” Kelly said.

  “Excuses,” Reggie growled. But, inwardly, he was almost glad Kelly didn’t want to take his turn.

  Two more zombies appeared behind the other. Reggie knew immediately that they were also Players. They moved too purposefully to be anything but Operator-controlled.

  The implanted Undead approached him cautiously, spreading out in a coordinated fashion.

  “Isn’t team play against the rules?” Reggie hissed.

  “Since when do the rules matter anymore?” Kelly replied.

  Reggie raised his hand threateningly at them, but his Player’s hand was empty. He’d forgotten he’d dropped the pipe. “I need a weapon.”

  “Just use your hands like everyone else does.”

  “Everyone else does it because of the points. I say screw the points, brah. Where’s that pipe?”

  The three newcomers spread out, covering his flanks. Reggie took another step back. He needed to keep them in his field of vision. “Kelly?” he asked. “I need some advice. Quick!”

  “Just don’t die,” Kelly replied, from somewhere to Reggie’s right. “That’s the only Player we’ve got.”

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  Chapter 3

  Jessie lifted her head off the toilet seat and stifled a groan as yet another wave of nausea rose from the pit of her stomach. Burning fingers of vomit clawed into her throat, stung her nose and eyes. A bilious string of spittle dangled from her chin; she wiped it away and tried not to think about the cramps in her stomach, that they might be the infection returning despite her immunity. Her eyes came to rest on the shit-colored rust along the bottom edge of the stall’s metal partition; it was as good as anything to focus on.