S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (120 page)

“Damn it!”

She jumped to her feet, grabbed her pack and swung it at the closest zombie, knocking it back a yard, and then fell back against the wall. The Infected immediately resumed its inexorable march toward her. She had no escape but through the portal, and she'd thrown away Grant's Link with the key on it.

Hoping against hope, she grabbed Grant's head with both hands and hopped over to the edifice, where she slammed his face against the portal's entry pad.

For a moment, nothing happened. The dead were crowding around her. Then a thin black line appeared before her eyes and began to widen. She could hear the Live Players shouting in anger and dismay. She heard them shooting their pistols, but they couldn't see her as she was crouched behind the wall of Undead behind her.

As soon as the opening grew wide enough, she slipped in. A bullet grazed the wall high above her head. She heard it pinging off the inside.

“Close, damn it! Close!”

The dead were reaching inside now, stepping in, beginning to crowd the opening. What if it didn't shut? What if the other side didn't open?

Another gunshot, the echo dulled by the material of the wall.

She had only one chance left. She yanked the EM pistol from the side pocket of her pack and squeezed the trigger, hoping desperately that it wouldn't short out the mechanism that powered the wall.

Two Undead fell across the entrance and the door ceased moving.

“Close, damn it!”

She pulled them in just as the portal shut, cutting off the yells of the Live Players.

 

“Well, Officer Daniels, the good news is you'll live.”

The staff physician quickly tapped a few notes into the medical record, then set the tablet aside.

“And the bad news?” Eric asked, wincing as he shifted position on the infirmary's gurney. He just couldn't seem to catch his breath no matter which way he lay, and it didn't help that his wrists were handcuffed to the sides.

“The bad news is you've got a contusion on one of your lungs, the side opposite your broken rib, as if you couldn't already tell. That you're even managing to breathe without passing out is something of a victory. I give you credit for that.”

“The pain is pretty bad,” Eric admitted. What little he could see of his bare arms and lower legs were covered in bruises. His clothes had been taken away, hopefully to be discarded rather than washed. There was no way they were going to get all that blood out of them. “I'm out of breath.”

“You'll feel like that for a few more days at least. Sorry, but it can't be helped. I'm giving you some pain meds, the strongest I'm allowed to prescribe in this place. They're not nearly as strong as what you need. Plus some heavy duty anticoagulants. We don't want you throwing a clot that might end up in your brain. Pulmonary embolism is a risk right now.”

“I'm sure some people wouldn't be upset if it happened.”

“Some people,” the doctor said, sighing, “need to be in a different line of work. But you didn't hear that from me.”

“You know who I am, don't you?” Eric asked. “I work —
worked
 — for NCD.”

The doctor took his time washing and drying his hands at the sink before returning to the side of the bed. “I don't subscribe to the same prejudices that most people in the police department seem to be susceptible to. I know who you are, who your father was. Frankly, I've always believed that medicine should be as blind as justice.”

“Turns out justice isn't very blind at all.”

The man chuckled cheerlessly. “I wouldn't have taken you for a cynic. Perhaps I have a more idealistic view of the world and how it should operate than is good for me. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned. I treat all my patients the same way, whether they're civilians or prisoners or peacekeepers. Bottom line, it doesn't matter to me who you are or where you came from.”

“How old are you?”

The doctor stopped and got a troubled look in his eyes. He nodded. “I'll be of conscription age in two years.”

“And that doesn't bother you?”

“Scares the shit out of me. Keeps me up at night. But being angry at you makes no sense. But you didn't—”

“Hear that from you,” Eric finished.

“Nevertheless, you are correct. I suppose this sort of personal philosophy is why I'm here in this dump instead of running my own practice. I won't play their games.” He shrugged. “I guess that's why you're here, too.”

Eric laid his head back and shut his eyes. “How long are you keeping me?”

“Overnight.” He pulled one of Eric's eyelids open with his thumb and shined a light in it to study his pupils. “Another five minutes in that cell and those men would've killed you.”

“Oh, I could've lasted at least seven or eight.”

The doctor snorted. “You'll want to thank Captain Harrick for stopping them when she did.”

Harrick. Eric couldn't figure the woman out. Whose side was she on, anyway? What was she trying to protect?

She's on her own side. Everybody is.

The discomfort filling his body distracted him from those thoughts. Plus, there was an itch on his nose that he couldn't get to. He tried to scratch it with his shoulder, but twisting wasn't possible at the moment.

“Can you tell me what's happening out there?” he asked, stifling a sneeze. He feared the pain which would wrack his body if he allowed it to happen. “Is it another outbreak?”

The doctor settled heavily onto a stool. He was a large man — not tall, just wide — a state he attributed to a glandular problem, but the truth was he just liked to eat. Almost as much as he disliked physical exertion. And his favorite food was malt whiskey.

“Waiting on further word from my colleagues,” he replied, drawing out his words. “At this point, we know there was a bit of a disturbance around town.”

He actually knew exactly where the main disturbance had been. He was just procrastinating, drawing out the conversation. His next patient was a pre-op examination on a capital punishment prisoner. The woman was scheduled for implantation and conscription, but he wasn't looking forward to yet another sanctioned murder.

“Was it an outbreak?” Eric asked again.

“To be honest, I really don't know. The news has been spotty and Media less than forthcoming. Nothing official yet.”

“So, the network is still up?”

“On and off. All Omegas have been deactivated until further notice, but you probably already knew that.”

Eric nodded. “So I figured.”

“At least there's no threat in that regard. Not unless you count the threat to live individuals having to assume some of their duties.”

“That would account for the absence of sirens.”

The doctor sighed. “Couldn't hear them down here in the dungeons anyway, even if they were going off.” He rolled the stool back to the cabinet, which he unlocked and opened. Inside was a stack of laundered blankets. He could delay his next appointment no longer. “I'm ordering you to spend the next twenty-four hours here. Hopefully you'll be able to get some rest and heal a bit. If it's any longer than that, I'll have to send you up to county, and since I have no privileges up there and can't control what they do or how they take care of you, I recommend you get better as much as you possibly can.”

He stood up. “When you get back into holding, it may get rough again. You wouldn't stand a chance in county lockup.”

“Where's the disturbance?” Eric pushed. “Where in town?”

“Sisters of Mercy Hospital.”

Eric tried to sit up, but both his manacles and the bruises to his torso prevented him from rising more than a couple inches off the table. He settled back with a pained grunt and squeezed his eyes shut until the wave of nausea passed. “My mother,” he said through gritted teeth. He settled back down.

“What about her?”

“She's a patient there, in ICU.”

The doctor turned around, frowning. “From what I hear, they've evacuated the entire medical complex because of a fire. Look, I'll be honest with you. There have been casualties. Most of the staff got out.”

Eric gritted his teeth. Alarm bells were ringing in his head. “What about patients?”

“The fire gutted nearly the entire complex.”

“How many patients died?”

“Most of them. I'm sorry.”

He hurried out of the exam room without telling Eric that most hadn't burned to death. They'd been Infected.

 

Jessie crashed through the icy surface of her sleep with her heart pounding in her chest as if it were trapped beneath the crust of a frozen lake. Her blood coursed so loudly through her ears that she couldn't even hear herself gasping for air.

Something had woken her, something outside of her dream. Outside of the memory of her dead hapkido master's whispers, taunting her, haunting her mind, pinning her down and suffocating her. The release from that dream came as a relief, but was instantly replaced with a new sense of dread: Someone was inside the bike shop with her. Someone or something.

She forced herself to stop gulping for air, clamping her mouth shut and metering her breaths through her nose so she could hear a little better. So she wasn't broadcasting her location.

The EM pistol was in her hand and aimed out into the pitch blackness around her, pointing at nothing specific. She couldn't remember snatching it from between the folds of the sweatshirt she'd pulled off the store rack and was now using as a pillow.

Slowly, the rasp of her pulse diminished and the silence enveloped her. Yet inside of that vacuum of sound nothing was revealed. The stingy night kept its secrets. She might as well be the last person alive on the planet, or even the last dead one, that's how still and empty the night felt.

Except she knew it was just an illusion. People were out there somewhere, people who wished to kill her for profit. Would they come after her? Would they leave the Gameland arcade?

Grant's behavior implied that Arc's bounty only applied if she was captured and killed inside the arcade while the Stream was up, but was that true? Did that mean she could afford to stop worrying now?

She didn't think so.

It seemed so ironic. All her life she'd feared the dead, feared what they had done to her family. Now she pitied them. It was the living she had come to fear and despise.

You're just in shock. Snap out of it!

That was only partially true. Her chaotic exit from inside the wall had left her dazed and traumatized, not to mention feeling more than a little culpable for yet another death. She hadn't liked Grant, hadn't trusted him, but he hadn't deserved to die. Not like that. And now his blood was on her hands.

You warned him.

Yes, she'd warned him, had tried to get him not to go out there where the other Live Players were. They'd killed him, sacrificed him in front of the millions of viewers who were undoubtedly following along.

But when she needed to, she hadn't hesitated. She'd taken what she'd needed from him and used it to procure her escape from the arcade.

He knew the risks. And he was already dead.

After the wall had opened up on the other side, she'd run without regard to where she was going. She didn't know, didn't care. She just left Grant's severed head behind inside the cursed structure. Only much later did she stop and wonder about his family, his wife and daughters. For the next half hour, as her mind operated on autopilot, she ran to escape— not just from the other Live Players who wanted to kill her for money, but from the horror she'd just been a party to.

Some part of her had known exactly where to take her, and it hadn't been Brookhaven. That place was still fifteen or so miles away, more than six hours by foot, unreachable long before total darkness smothered the world and drew out the Undead. To try would have been foolish in the state she was in. Instead, her mind took her to the one familiar place she might feel safe, the bike shop where Brother Matthew had brought her and Micah the day they'd gone to meet Father Heale— her father.

She'd arrived just as the last rays of light fled from the sky, and the dead were emerging. They scared her less than what she knew might be chasing her.

Using only the light from her Link, she managed to assemble a bicycle to take her the rest of the way. The tires held air. She planned to rise before dawn and be on her way as soon as the streets cleared. She could be in Brookhaven within an hour of leaving.

She ate a small meal, and then, and only then, did she allow her exhaustion to take her. She shut herself behind a thin wooden door inside the back office and fell into a deep sleep while the street outside the shop's glass storefront filled with dozens of the Undead. If they whispered to her, she did not hear them.

But now someone was inside the building with her. She could feel the other presence, not in her mind, but on her skin, a buzzing, tingling sensation. A fullness in the air. A smell. She wasn't alone.

As her eyes gradually adjusted to the meager light that found its way in from the tiny, filthy window in the corner, she began to make out the familiar details of the room— the walls which formed its borders and the few objects which populated it.

The office was actually quite large, though meagerly furnished. It had a door with a lock and enough space on the floor to lie down.

She listened, straining her ears to pick up even the slightest sound. Whatever had woken her hadn't been a voice, she knew that intuitively. If it had been, she might've passed it off as just another whisper of some zombie walking around outside in the moonlight, even though her rational mind told her it was impossible, especially since these were pre-implant victims of the outbreak.

No, the sound had been something else, something non-verbal, something faint and discreet and furtive, like the brush of clothing against a cabinet. Or the sound of air returning into a space after being displaced. Of a breath taken or exhaled. A heart beating.