S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (114 page)

Other shouts of panic reverberated through the stairwell.

Kelly exited at the next landing and headed for the Medical Ward. The reception station there was empty. Links rung unanswered. Some of the ambulatory patients were standing at their doorways, the openings of their hospital gowns gathered behind them in their hands, looks of confusion and wonder on their faces. He ignored their inquiries as he checked the names on each door until he found the one he was looking for.

“Doctor White!”

The sight of the woman occupying the bed horrified him. She seemed to have aged twenty years overnight. Her skin had turned a sickly, pasty white. He called her name again, then stepped over and shook her until she opened her eyes. They were the eyes of a woman on the fringe of death.

She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a dry puff of air which smelled faintly of burning plastic.

“Are you okay?” he asked, handing her a plastic cup with water and helping her drink.

“
Kelly?
” she whispered. “What's happening?”

A rattling cough came from the other bed, but he couldn't see the patient behind the curtain.

“I don't know,” Kelly lied. “Something down in the ER. Maybe someone with a gun. They've called for security.”

He could hear sirens now outside the building. He thought about going to the window, but for some reason he didn't want to see what was in the other bed.

“NCD?” White asked.

He shook his head. “What's a Code Gray?”

Her already pale face lost its remaining color. “Outbreak,” she said, and started pushing herself up.

There was a muffled bang from outside the room, then a double
pop pop
.

“Gunfire,” Doctor White said. She didn't sound surprised or alarmed.

Kelly thought it might be coming from outside the building, but he couldn't be sure.

The patient in the other bed coughed again, and the rattling noise followed for a moment before it stopped. There was more gunfire, this time clearly coming from outside, probably visible from the window. More sirens rose in the distance as additional emergency vehicles arrived.

He reached the window in six strides and pushed it open. The noise level trebled. Below him was a scene out of the disaster films Reggie's dad liked to watch.

“What do you see?” Doctor White asked. Her voice was still a whisper, though it seemed to be growing stronger.

He scanned the crowds, trying to make out what the people down there were doing. Men and women were running everywhere, screaming, some in hospital gowns, some in scrubs, some in street clothes. Uniformed police were trying to control them, but they weren't having any success.

Another gunshot drew his eyes to a bunch of people near the edge of the parking lot.

The gun fired again and thick blood spouted from a woman's head as she fell. Kelly felt his body go cold. He recognized the ungainly walk of the Undead in the crowd.

A man running past tripped over the curb. He was quickly overtaken by two of the monsters that broke away from the huddle of people.

More of the dead stepped away, including one Kelly recognized. It was the attendant he'd spoken with at the elevator earlier in the morning. He wore a beard of crimson and his blue hospital scrubs were splattered as if he'd spilled grape juice on them.

The patient in the other bed took another noisy breath. He looked over at her and gasped.

She was ancient — was, in fact, the oldest person Kelly could remember ever seeing in real life — and he realized that she was one of the few who'd been granted a waiver from conscription. Her toothless mouth hung open and her cheeks sunk like inverted sails into the gaps. She had come here to die, but her death was from the rarest of all diseases: old age.

“Why aren't you getting dressed?” he cried, when he saw Doctor White just sitting there. “We have to leave!” He ripped open the plastic bag holding her clothes and began to pull them out.

“Why haven't they sounded the emergency sirens?”

“I don't know,” Kelly panted. “The network's down. Maybe there's a power outage, too. Damn it! Where's your shoes?”

She reached for the shirt and began to pull it over her head, over the hospital gown.

“Can you finish on your own? I have to get Missus Daniels.”

“Go,” Doctor White told him. “Just put the bed rail down for me. I can manage.”

“Sit tight and I'll come back for you. My car's just outside.”

He didn't wait for her to respond. He bolted through the door and made his way to the main stairs. He didn't worry about the police anymore. They had their hands full and weren't going to be looking for him.

He found Missus Daniels slumped in the hallway and very nearly passed her before recognizing the clothes she wore. “I told you to wait upstairs,” he scolded her, throwing her arm around his shoulders and lifting her to her feet.

“I thought I could walk.”

Back down the hallway they went. She dragged her feet. Down two steps, three. He nearly stumbled. The second floor landing was six more steps down and she had no more strength. Her feet kept tangling, making it hard for him to assist her. He picked her up in his arms.

“Where are we going?”

“There's a wheelchair in Doctor White's room.”

Doctor White had managed to get herself sitting up, but she still hadn't put on her shoes. Kelly shouted at her to hurry. She waved him off. “Get her down to your car,” she said. “Close the door on your way out. I'll be here.”

There was no time to argue, so Kelly did as she said. He raced back down the hall with Missus Daniels in the wheelchair, threading his way between patients and staff to the utility elevator. The sounds of gunfire were now all around. Muffled bangs came from overhead and below. They reverberated through the hallway. He punched the button again, and cursed the lift's slowness.

The main elevator doors at the other end of the hallway dinged open, and he considered making a run for them. But he was surrounded and helpless to do anything but watch as the crowd surged ahead of him. A half second later, they started to push back, shouting with dismay. Even with the noise, Kelly could hear the moans.

Behind him, the scratched green doors of the utility lift began to open. He braced himself, but no one came out at them. He had to jostle with a dozen others to get in, then squeezed into the space along the side wall that was still wet with fresh blood.

After exiting on the ground floor, they careened past the unmanned security desk before detouring through the nearly empty Radiology Department. An officer rushed past him without looking. He screamed into his Link that they needed to “call in the Zombie Squad!”

“
Can't spare anyone
,” the Link squawked. “
Head of NCD's in lockup.
”

Missus Daniels's head swiveled and she frowned at Kelly over her shoulder. All he could do was shrug. “At least we know where he is,” he said.

“You need to get him out, Kelly.”

“It's probably the safest place he can be right now. Right now, it's you and Doctor White I'm worried about.”

The back parking lot was just as bad as the front. Traffic was snarled as drivers tried to escape the chaos. As far as he could see, the dead hadn't yet made it to this side of the hospital, but the noise would draw them soon enough unless the police could stop them first. He had little confidence they would.

After getting Missus Daniels into the back seat of his car, he spun around and headed back with the wheelchair, but then abandoned it at the elevator. It would be easier to just carry Doctor White out.

He took the stairs three at a time, but when he arrived at her room, the door was open and the bed was empty.

The adjoining bed was also empty, but her sheets were covered in blood.

 

Tighter.

“Yeah, I think I got this, Micah.”

I'm just saying.

“I know what I'm doing.”

Okay, maybe you do, but I don't. You realize that, right? You know I can't control myself. You know how strong the dead can be. They're not like they once were.

“That's something I never really understood,” Jessie said as she bit off another two-foot strip of tape from the roll she'd taken from Ashley's pack. She wrapped it tightly around Micah's wrists. “How can they be so strong? I mean, it's all the same muscles you had when you were alive, right?”

Micah didn't answer.

Jessie leaned back and covered her face. “God, I'm sorry. That was stupid of me.”

It's not your fault.

“No?” she said, standing up. She hurled the tape into a corner of the room with a frustrated cry. “Then whose fault is it that you're dead? If we'd never met, you'd still be alive!”

That's not true.

“How can you say that? We dragged you off this island and took you straight to the police! We watched you die!” She was sobbing now. “I was so . . . . I was so god damn angry with you, you know that? I couldn't understand how you,
you
of all people, could betray us.” She wiped a sleeve across her face.

Why did you come back?

She told him about Kelly and Reggie kidnapping her mother and starving her to death, until she realized that someone had hacked their implants.

And you thought it was me? You came back to stop me?

“It wasn't you. I know that now. It was Ashley.”

I would never betray you, Jess. You know that.

“Then why the hell didn't you try to defend yourself? You never even tried! You— you just let yourself be executed!”

I had to do it. It was the only way to know for sure. Jessie, you know I—

“No!” she shouted, spinning back toward him. “Please, Micah. Don't say it. I can't take anymore guilt.”

He didn't say anything for several seconds. Then:
It wasn't just me, you know. We all love you, Jessie, every single one of us.

“Why?”

Because — and even though I can only speak for myself in this regard, I'm pretty sure the others felt the same way — we love you because we all saw how badly the world misjudged you. We all felt like we needed to make up for what the rest of the world failed to see in you.

Jessie went and stood over the tape roll. She wanted to stomp it flat against the church's wooden floor. She was trembling now, both with anguish and guilt.

“Ashley hated me,” she whimpered.

Of all of us, she loved you the most. And that's actually saying a lot. That girl was terribly unhappy inside. She couldn't even love herself, but I know she loved you.

“She hated me.”

Hate is just another face of love. You can't hate someone without loving them.

“Do you hate me?”

No, Jessie. Of course not.

She returned to him and kneeled down. She tried not to see the shell before her, not as a monster, but as a broken machine he was trapped inside. “I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

She had securely taped his feet to the end of one pew. Now she grabbed his bound wrists and pulled them grimly toward the other end. She had to strain against the zombie's struggles, but she finally managed to get him stretched out and secure. His body still writhed and sounds of hunger came from his throat.

“That should hold you while I'm gone,” she told him. “What will you do? You'll be so bored.”

She thought she could feel him chuckle inside her head.
No more bored than I have been.

She smiled wistfully down at him. “You were always the smartest one of us, you know that? A genius trapped inside a body that couldn't seem to be able to keep up with its own mind. Is that why you took drugs and drank? They helped slow your mind down.”

I was still always the best gamer of you lot.

“Because you cheated! You hacked your way through all the levels. I was the only one who ever made it through fair and square, on my own merits. I did it by following the rules of the game.”

And that's why you've got the best chance of any of us to survive this. You play the game you're given, Jessie, not the one you wish you were in. You learn its limits and you adapt to them, rather than forcing the game to adapt to you.

She sighed. “To be honest, I don't know if I'll survive this. I'm not even sure I want to anymore.”

You will.

She stood up again and made to leave.

You should probably cover my mouth with tape, too. Otherwise, I'll just chew through my arms to get free. You know Siennah won't stop at anything to send me after you, not even if I were to chew through both arms and both legs.

She looked at him in shock for a moment before bursting out in laughter. “Do you remember that old movie Reggie's dad played for us once, the one where the knight gets his arms and legs cut off, yet he keeps thinking he can attack?”

‘
It's just a scratch!'
Micah aped. Even in her mind she could hear him trying to say it with a British accent, which was hilarious since his southern accent kept creeping through.

“ ‘A scratch? Your arm's off!' ”

‘
No, it isn't! I've ‘ad worse. Come on, you pansy!'

“ ‘You, Sir Knight, are brave indeed, but the fight is mine!' ” She pointed at him. “ ‘You've got no arms left!' ”

‘
Oh, I see! Running away, eh? Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!'

Jessie's laughter faded away even as Micah's echoed inside her head. “I wish we'd never come here this summer.”

I don't think we had any choice, not about coming, or about what happened or what's going to happen.

“What do you mean?”

There's a war coming. I can feel it. The network is the battlefield—
we
are the battlefield. And the spoils.

“What do you mean?”