S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (147 page)

She spun again, crouching low. But instead of leveling another kick, she reached behind her back and pulled out Rosie's carbide blade. Slashing sidearm, she planted it hilt-deep into the girl's thigh. Siennah let out a keening, gurgling shriek.

Jessie stood up and pulled her close. “I told you this wasn't a game,” she whispered.

Siennah tried to laugh. The pain was still on her face, but somehow she'd broken through it. “I'm not dead yet,” she replied, and raised the gun.

Jessie wrenched the knife, then yanked it free. The air about her head seemed to sizzle for a brief moment, but the gun hadn't been pointed. Siennah collapsed to her knees. Somehow, she was still smiling. Her face, a twisted mockery of amusement and pain, had gone white.

“I don't want to kill you,” Jessie said.

But even as she was speaking, it was as if the knife had a life of its own. It spun in her hand and leapt upward, dragging her arm with it and the rest of Jessie, too. The tip entered the soft spot beneath Siennah's chin and traveled straight up and into her brain, puncturing the top of her mouth and the thin bones of her sinuses with a muffled crunch. Blood spurted from the girl's nostrils. And, for as long as she remained upright, she cried tears of blood.

Jessie stepped away, shaking terribly, shocked at what she had done. She collapsed onto the girl's body and began to weep. She hadn't meant to kill her, hadn't wanted to.

And yet, both of those things were not true. She had wanted to do it, and yet the killing had brought no relief, only emptiness.

Through the veil of her tears, she saw the first figures emerge out of the distant wood. But she couldn't face them. There was simply no more fight left in her.

 

The low drone of the Audi's engine soon faded off into the distance, and when it was gone, Doctor White, mother of Cassandra Lynn Stemple, collapsed weakly onto the unoccupied end of the couch with a heavy sigh. All was silent now, save for the dry wheeze of her daughter's breathing beside her. She turned her gaze upon Cassie, and her heart broke upon seeing that skeletal face, for she had once been so beautiful and vibrant.

A flicker of doubt took seed inside of her mind. For the first time since staving off the infection she'd willfully injected into herself, she began to wonder if the cure she had wrought might not be enough to save her or the girl.

The doubt had been a part of her for so long that she'd grown accustomed to it, had even learned to harness it. It was a desperate ache and it had driven her work as well as her mind through cycles of mania and depression, an insistently churning engine constantly compelling her to work harder, faster, smarter, despite failure after failure after failure.

But now she didn't welcome it. Now she wanted nothing to do with it or anything which might suggest that she had, once again, failed. She thought she had finally dismissed the doubt from her life.

After learning of the kids' plans to break onto Long Island, the need to cast it away had exploded like a supernova, infusing her with a white hot urgency that subsumed her every thought, incinerating away any consideration but saving her daughter.

She spent countless hours in her tiny kitchen laboratory in the rundown apartment on the outskirts of town, shunning company even more than she usually did and even refusing to take pings. She slept very little and ate even less. The liters of blood she had collected from Jessica over the years was removed from deep freeze, pooled, and processed with as much care as she could manage under such austere conditions.

Her theory of a cure was simple enough. Reanimation disease depended on tissue plastination, which was mediated by a mutant form of prion protein. In treating Kyle's illness, she'd learned that the variant form produced in Jessica Daniels's blood could interact with the mutant form and cause it to denature — unfold — and then renature into the harmless version. No longer held in a plastinated state, infected cells would be released from their disease-mediated stasis. They could be made viable again.

But the purified immune protein alone couldn't eliminate the disease, it just kept it from progressing. Eventually, the body made more mutant form and the injected protein would be cleared from the body by the kidneys or be metabolized. More immune variant would have to be added.

So she'd started injecting Kyle with Jessie's whole blood, hoping cells in it would continue to produce it. And they did, but only for a limited time before they too died off. The cells weren't stable.

What she needed was a stem cell germ line capable of producing high levels of the immune protein, yet would remain permanently in the body, divide, persist. With laser-like focus, she screened millions upon millions of cells in their sterile plastic dishes until she finally found the one which had those characteristics. With the care of a mother hen, she nurtured that cell until it multiplied into the millions she needed for a few batches.

She wanted to test them on Kyle, but his kidney dialysis prevented her. Her only recourse had been to test it on herself.

She remembered bargaining with a god she didn't believe in as the infection built inside of her: “Either save me or turn me into one of them.”

Right before she felt the cloak of death settle upon her, she injected herself with the cells which she had created (for that's how she thought of them, by that point, as hers, not Jessica's). It was with that syringe, contaminated with her infected blood still on the needle, which the attendant in the hospital had poked himself.

As she sat in her office dying, she felt the disease and cure battling each other. There came a moment when her fever broke one hundred and four degrees and weakness overtook her that she wondered where she had miscalculated.

The last thing she remembered before waking up in a hospital bed with bruises on her throat was a voice at her office door demanding to be let in. In her delirium, she had believed it was Death come to take her.

But she hadn't died. She had woken, alive. The cure worked. She was living proof. No more would she ever doubt.

That's when she knew that it would save Cassie, too.

Here was a girl who had not taken a breath in thirteen years breathing. Here was a heart which had not beaten once in five thousand days finding its rhythm again. A voice which had not sounded in over a decade was finally forming coherent words. She had cured her. She had brought her back from the brink of death, just as she had promised herself all those years before.

She had done it, Lyssa Anne White-Stemple.

Except . . .
had
she?

The way she'd woken up that morning had rattled her. She'd felt detached, outside of herself and yet trapped within. She knew she was attacking Kelly, yet seemed unable to exert control over her body for half a second, just long enough to make her wonder if her mind and body had lost their connection.

She reached a hand over and set it on Cassie's forehead and was relieved to find it felt almost normal now. The girl shifted, but didn't wake. Soon, though, she would, and Lyssa was determined to be ready for her when she did. She didn't want to sleep, not because she didn't want to miss it, but because she feared what might happen if she did.

And yet, sleep tugged at her with more strength than she could resist. It pulled her thoughts away from her body as if each was a strand to be cut.

Mama?

She jolted upright, gasping, and for another second or two she found herself a helpless observer once again. There was a delay, but she managed to take control of herself.

With a grunt she got stiffly to her feet. She needed to keep moving.

She didn't want to sleep.

 

Nothing's changed
.

That's what Reggie kept telling himself as they drove down the barren streets, avoiding the burned out shells of cars and the larger cracks and sinkholes that had formed. They skirted downed branches and other blown debris.

Nothing's changed.

He wasn't sure if it was wishful thinking or dread which planted the thought inside his head.

Nothing's changed.

Had to be wishful thinking, because he could easily see how much everything had changed. Nothing was the same anymore.

The leaves, which had been so vibrant and green just a couple weeks before, were already starting to turn. When looked at from a distance, Long Island was beginning to explode with color. But from up close, the turning leaves combined with the ever present aroma of decay were not-so-subtle reminders that they were surrounded by death. It was coming for them. It was already here.

The recent storm had also physically altered the landscape. Where there had been a fair amount of debris before, now it was everywhere, making the drive much more perilous. Twice, they had to backtrack and go around because the roads were impassible, either blocked or actually washed out.

The doctor's last words came back to Reggie. He wondered if Kelly had heard them. Had she been telling the truth? He didn't trust her. Her behavior earlier that morning had been more than erratic, it had been disturbing.

Each time he recalled the scene, new shivers traveled up and down his spine. She had attempted to explain it away as stress and lack of sleep, but these rationalizations felt disingenuous, evasive. She was lying.

And then to hear about the things she'd confessed to doing over the years! How could anyone possibly trust anything she said?

He'd be happy to never see her again.

Maybe that's what's eating Kelly
, he thought. He had lost it when he found out about Kyle. Hell, anyone normal would have. But Kelly wasn't normal. He was always rock solid, something Reggie secretly envied about his friend. Losing control like that was something he had never seen Kelly do before.

Now, the only emotion he showed was in the way he gripped the steering wheel. He refused to talk. Twice Reggie tried before giving up for fear that he'd snap the thing off.

They finally arrived at the parking lot below Jayne's Hill nearly an hour after starting out, even though they'd covered only about five or six miles as the crow flies. After getting out to clear away some more brush, Reggie offered to take over the driving, but Kelly refused.

The Audi's tires rolled over the thick carpet of wet leaves, sometimes sliding, often snapping bits of buried gravel and fallen twigs. Occasionally, there'd be the shotgun report of a larger branch breaking and Kelly's face would twitch. But that was all the emotion he showed.

They saw only one Infected Undead, which turned to follow them for a short distance before disappearing around a curve in the road.

He kept on, never speeding up or slowing down, just the same infuriatingly monotonous pace, as if he was intentionally drawing out their torment. As if he wasn't sure he wanted to find Jessie.

Reggie wasn't sure he wanted to go on, either— not for Jessie, but because he knew it would bring back his last memories of Ashley, and he didn't think he was ready.

A gentle breeze blew through the wood, showering them with yet more leaves. The deeper they went, the more wreckage they were forced to steer around.

Reggie put his window back up, leaving it open only a crack. The air conditioner in the car hadn't worked since they'd gotten in. Out on the open road, the sun had pounded relentlessly down on them, and so the open window had been a necessity. But here, under the trees, the air was cooler, wetter. It might actually have been quite pleasant, except for the cloying smell, not of human flesh, but of burnt chopper fuel and wood.

Reggie sighed at the window. The closer they got, the harder his heart pounded in his chest. He definitely wasn't ready. He thought he would be, but he wasn't. He didn't want to see the place where Ashley had died. Where Jessie had—

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Where Jessie had murdered her.

The car came to an abrupt stop, jolting him out of his seat. “What the—?”

“Looks like we're walking from here,” Kelly said. He raised a finger from the steering wheel and pointed at the road ahead. A tree had uprooted and fallen across it. “It's less than a quarter mile anyway.” He turned to Reggie. The muscle in his jaw was rippling with tension.

“She'll be there, Kel.”

He received only a stony glare for an answer.

They left the keys on the seat and the doors open and made their way around the downed tree and back onto the road. Except that the road was nearly gone now, buried beneath even more trees and brush. Only the cave-like tunnel through them marked where it had once been.

Kelly pointed to a path through the trees. It went straight uphill. “That way. It'll be faster.”

Reggie gripped his machete even tighter. “Right then,” he said, and swallowed. He looked back the way they'd come, suddenly feeling as if they were being watched, as if the entire forest had been watching them and waiting.

It wasn't until they came to a clearing overlooking a town far below that they realized they'd taken a wrong turn. Reggie exhaled in frustration and spun around to go back, but Kelly didn't follow. He stared off across the tall, dry grass.

“Jessie?”

Reggie looked back in time to see him take off running. In the distance, a figure rose from the field, like some disembodied spirit. A thick mat of dirty hair masked its face, and all he could see were the red stains of blood on its face and arms.

“
Jessie!
” Kelly screamed. “Oh, god, please, no!”

 

Startled by the shout, Jessie jerked away from where she'd laid Siennah down. Someone was running toward her. Actually,
two
someones. And they were coming fast.

She swiped the tears from her eyes, and stood up to surrender. She was so tired, so exhausted. She just wanted to be done with everything.

“Jessie!” the lead runner shouted. “You're alive!”