S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (160 page)

“
I'm not talking about that! I'm talking about how stupid we were to break in. I'm talking about what happened down in lower Manhattan when we came back the first time, the IUs that came through. How many people died because of that?”

“
That wasn't your fault.”

“
I don't know how you can say that. And what about us letting Micah infiltrate Arc's codex? All these network outages? Why do you think that's happening? We let him back in!”

“
We had no choice, Jessie,” he whispers. “We did it to survive. We had to.”

“
Except we didn't, did we? They didn't bomb the island! That was just another lie. Just another of Grandpa's lies to keep you from bringing Halliwell back. Now he's dead!”

“
Look, Jessie, I'm still trying to find out what his involvement was. It's not easy. I don't know who in the department I can trust anymore.”

“
What about your old friends in the Marines?”

“
I trust them even less. I'll get to the bottom of this, figure out exactly what Grandpa's role was.”

“
Lot of good that'll do. Ashley will still be dead. Jake's as good as dead. Kelly's going to die. Of course, he's perfectly fine right now. Looks fine. In denial too, just like you. But he's dying. Nobody knows when. Could be tomorrow—”

“
It won't be tomorrow.”

“—
or a few weeks or months. Christ, Eric, does it really matter exactly when? He's dying!”

“
They'll find a cure.”

“
That's bullshit! Who's working on it? Nobody is. Nobody who can do it
wants
to find a cure. Halliwell was the only one and we don't even have his body now!”

Eric stares at me for a few seconds, blinking, his face turned to stone, neutral and unreadable. He puts a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth and slowly chews it.

I can't look at him. I can barely even look at my own plate without gagging. The food reminds me too much of the meal Sister Jane brought up to me that night in Brookhaven, and that makes me remember Julia and everyone else all over again.

I take another sip of water. I'm not even thirsty. And after all the antibiotics they've pumped into me the past several days, everything tastes funny, briny. Like blood.

“
I made you an appointment at Citizen Registration,” he finally says, his voice calm and even. “It's not till next week, though. They're pretty booked up with all the new registrations and the recent push on implantations.”

“
Lot of good that's going to do when SSC takes over the network.”

He stares at me, frowning. “I'll go with you this time. I'll drive us to Hartford and explain how we found the old Link. Maybe they'll give us a break. Heck, at this point, they'll probably just rubber stamp it through.”

I watch the water drip down my glass. The world is going to hell and he's worried about a stupid Link.

“
Also, I think you should get some new clothes. I want you to go back to school on Monday.”

I roll my eyes and shake my head.

“
And a new backpack. You need a new—”

“
I already have a backpack.”

“
That thing that's been sitting on the floor of my car for a week? It's filthy. It stinks to high heaven. I'm going to throw it away.”

“
Don't touch it!”

“
Come on, Jessie. You have to stop acting like you're stuck in time. What happened out there happened. I get it. People died. Your friends died and another betrayed you. I get it. But we need to move forward. We need to try and put this behind us.”

“
Like Kelly can put this behind us?” I snap.

He glowers at his plate.

“
You just got done telling me Media's down. Again. Arc's barely holding things together. Just last night I heard there was an outbreak in Boston.”

“
The flu. That's what—”

I bark out a quick laugh. “More bullshit. They say almost six hundred people died.”

“
One small division of the municipal sanitation crew. They contained it. And it wasn't six hundred, not even close.”

“
Six or sixty or six hundred. What difference does it make? They lost containment. The Streams keep going in and out. Pretty soon it's all going to go down and people are too busy watching
Survivalist
re-runs to even care.”

“
Nobody wants a panic.”

“
We need to panic!”

“
That's enough!” He lays down his fork and glares at his plate. “We are not going to talk about this at dinner.”

“
I'm not hungry anyway.”

I get up and leave the table and Eric calls me back, but I don't want to be here anymore. I don't know where it is I want to be, but I know it's not here, acting all normal and pretending nothing's wrong.

“
Jessie!”

I swear he's becoming more and more like Grandpa every day.

 

I go up to my room
and lie down on my bed facing the window. I hear Eric downstairs talking on his Link, so I know the Communication Streams are back up again. The garbled sounds of his voice come and go, interspersed with periods of silence. I wonder who he's talking to. A little while later he leaves and the house is quiet again. At some point the sun goes down. Light fades from the sky, leaving lighter patches of gray on the deeper black of night. I still don't move. My muscles grow stiff and my joints ache. I lie there and watch the moon rise.

Eric returns home several hours later, sometime around midnight. I hear the familiar sound of his car in the driveway and the sound of his keys in the lock, the front door opening, closing. Footsteps on the stairs. He comes up and opens my door without bothering to knock and I feel as if I'm standing on the edge of a dark pit. He sits down on the corner of my bed and doesn't speak for a long time.

I don't move.

“
You awake?” he finally asks.

“
Yeah.”

Silence.

No, not silence. I hear crickets and frogs chirping outside. A car. A distant police siren. A small crash down the street, like someone kicking over a trashcan. Kids laughing.

“
I'm sorry about fighting with you at dinner. I know it's tough, after all you've been through. I'm just trying to help ease you back.”

“
You can't.”

He exhales. The bed jiggles. “How's Kelly holding up?”

I stare at the window, at the shifting moonlit clouds. I listen to the night noises.

“
How's he holding up, Jessie?”

“
Kyle's home, if that's what you mean.”

“
Yes, I know about that. I spoke with Mrs. Corben earlier in the day. She said the surgery was a success. They replaced both kidneys. Little Kyle's even begun to gain weight.”

“
Thanks for asking, by the way.”

He stiffens at my sarcasm. “I wish I'd known about all that sooner,” he tells me. “I wish you'd told me.”

“
What difference would it have made?”

He doesn't say anything for a long time, just sits there, probably staring at my back. I know what he's thinking. He's thinking about how much money it must have cost to buy those kidneys, and where that money must have come from.

“
Anyway,” he finally says, “I'm glad to hear it. Kyle's a sweet little kid.”

I think about how ironic it is, how all these years Kelly took care of his little brother. It was slowly killing him, eating away at his soul piece by piece. And now that Kyle is finally going to be better, it's Kelly who needs saving.

And I can't do anything about it.

I wait for his next question, the one where he asks me if I've been sharing my inhaler with him, despite Grandpa's admonition before he died not to do it. I have been sharing, if he must know, though honestly it's none of his business. So what if my prescription runs out? When it happens, it happens. If it keeps Kelly alive a little longer and shortens my own life by a lot, then it'll be worth it. I mean, what's the use of living if Kelly dies?

“
I've been doing a little digging around,” he tells me. “I pinged the pharmacist and asked about the— Jessie, please, turn around and talk to me face to face. This is important.”

I don't. I don't move at all. I'm curious and angry, surprised and yet not. Mostly curious.

“
I asked about your medicine. I know you get it straight from your doctor, but I wanted to talk to someone else about it, get a second opinion. You know? I asked him about the deprolidone.” He pronounces the word carefully, as if he might trip over his own tongue and set off an alarm or something. “I asked what it's used for.”

“
And?”

“
He said he wasn't familiar with it and would get back to me. When he did, he was acting real strange. He asked me why I needed information about it and how I'd heard about it. I told him it turned up in one of my investigations. I didn't mention your name. Probably a good thing I didn't.”

Now I turn over. The feeling of vertigo is much stronger now, the edge of that hole much closer. I'm teetering, ready to fall. “What else did he say?”

“
He refused to answer any more questions. Told me not to contact him again. I decided then to pay an old friend at New York Med a visit, a biochemist. Well, that's what he used to be anyway, before. I drove down tonight. That's where I've been for the past few hours.”

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folded scrap of paper. It's strange to see it here, in this setting, like a relic from the past. Nobody actually writes notes on paper anymore. That's what the Memo App on the Link is for.

“
He told me deprolidone is a Class Z drug. It's on the government's top-five most-controlled chemicals list. Jessie, he warned me to stop asking questions about it.”

“
Controlled? What for? They afraid I'll get addicted to it or something?”

“
He couldn't say. Or wouldn't. But he was adamant. He told me to drop the whole matter.”

“
But you didn't.”

He shakes his head and exhales deeply. My brother's only twenty-five, and yet in this light he suddenly looks years older. “I tried the black streams. Got nothing. I'll keep trying. Something doesn't fit here.”

After he leaves, after his footsteps fade down the hallway and the sounds of his snores hit my ears, I slip out of the room and down the stairs. Grandpa's office is locked, but I know where he kept the key. I let myself in and turn on the light. Then I search.

It's almost three o'clock when I find what I'm looking for, a single paragraph in a report given in testimony to Congress by then-senator Lawrence Abrams about an experimental treatment called RDL-418, chemical name of deprolidone: “
RDL-418 was found to bind tightly to the infective prion and its various subforms. But rather than blocking disease progression, it actually prevented the prion's detection in all known diagnostic assays. It is the opinion of this expert that the chemical be hereby banned, as its use may in fact counter any effective treatment at such time when one is discovered.
”

Not a treatment, but a mask, just as Brother Matthew had said.

I reach for my Link. Kelly answers my ping almost immediately, as if he'd been waiting for me.

“
Okay,” I tell him. “Let's do it.”

The line is silent, just the usual low electrical buzz of the Stream. I can almost hear him thinking, wondering why I've changed my mind, and then this irrational fear comes over me that he's going to back out. But he says, “Okay. When?”

“
The sooner, the better. Friday.”

I disconnect, but I don't close my Link. Instead, I stare at the photo he sent to me back in Long Island City, the one from that day we first broke onto the island. I stare at it until the first traces of light begin to seep into the sky.

I replace the papers in their files, lock up Grandpa's office, and get ready for the day.

 

I finally get a visit
from my two police friends the next morning, Fat Al Shithead and his slightly less intolerable partner Hank. Just like last time, they pull up to the curb in their patrol car just as I'm leaving for hapkido practice. Unlike last time, I don't invite them in. In fact, I pretend I don't even see them and instead continue on down the street.

“
Miss Daniels!” Fat Al calls, huffing after me down the sidewalk. He gets in front of me and tries to stand in my way, but I sidestep him and keep going. “We need to have a word with you.”

“
I'm late for hapkido practice,” I say. I consider striking an exaggerated karate chop pose, but I doubt he'd make the connection to our last conversation. And even if he did, he still probably wouldn't get the irony. And, frankly, I'm too tired to really care anymore.

The other car door slams and then I hear Hank running to catch up. “I'll walk with her,” he tells his partner. “Why don't you bring the car around and meet me downtown in an hour?”

Fat Al mutters. “Too fucking hot out here to walk anyway.” And he turns and leaves.