S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (16 page)

But now all of that was put into doubt. Now she feared him more than she had ever feared anything else in her life. How could that be?

“You checked the whole drive?” Reggie asked. He was scrolling through her other files.

“Um, excuse me!” Jessie said, pushing him away from the computer. “There's private stuff on there!”

“Ooh, nekkid selfies?” he said, but his face flushed, and he looked away. “Sorry, I didn't mean— I mean, that was—”

The redness on his face made her smile. Despite everything, it felt good to get rid of some of the tension, even if it was the tiniest of releases.

“Why don't you just delete the file?” he asked.

She turned back to it. “I tried. I couldn't do anything.”

“What do you mean? Just swipe it into the trash.”

“Yeah, duh. I tried that. I also tried transferring it to my grandfather's computer. Tried copying it, opening it. It won't do anything, just stays right there like a big, fat—”

“Booger.”

Jessie didn't laugh this time.

“Man, that's not good. Not good at all.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his own Link. “Do you think maybe Kelly . . . ?”

Jessie leaned over and watched as he swapped out the Links and did a quick check of the directory on his. “There's nothing like that on mine,” he said. “I mean, here's the pic Kelly sent me earlier that same day.” He showed her an image of the five of them standing around, their wetsuits peeled off their torsos, arms and shoulders and chests glistening from the water they'd just come out of. “But the file size is no bigger than any other photo.”

She saw why Kelly had sent the image to Reggie, and why Reggie had kept it: In the center stood Ashley, the sunlight shining brilliantly off her auburn hair. On her face was a huge grin, her teeth flashing white. She was standing beneath an umbrella she'd found inside the trunk of an abandoned car, the fabric in tatters and the canopy's spider legs radiating out.

A flash of jealousy passed through Jessie. Ashley was absolutely radiant, desirable. But grief quickly followed.

“That was right before we all split up that day,” she whispered. “Before Micah told us about his tracking app and left to find a node to connect to. Kelly and I got into a fight. I stayed behind with Jake. Oh, Christ, what have I done?”

“You didn't do anything,” Reggie said. “Kelly did.”

Jessie reached over and pushed the Link away. She didn't want to see anymore. The memory hurt too much. But Reggie was already back to searching his files.

“Here's the little program Micah sent, the one you came up with. Remember?” He exhaled through his teeth. It was the failsafe override proxy. “Saved my life.” He buried his face in his hands. “Do you think Micah was innocent then?”

Jessie gave a quick nod.

A strangled cry rose from deep inside Reggie's throat. He stood up and ripped the cord out of his Link and hurled the device at the wall, roaring in pain. The device embedded itself in the plaster.

“Reggie!” Jessie cried. She went over and pulled it out and dusted it off.

“Sorry, Jess. I'll fix the wall.”

“I don't give a crap about the wall. It's your Link I'm worried about. You're dead if it breaks again. Right now, I
need
you.”

He took the Link from her, but didn't reply, and for just a moment she thought she saw in his eyes a look of homicidal rage. A month ago, she would have sworn before a court of law that Reggie wasn't capable of inflicting serious bodily harm on anyone. Although it was true that he loved to kill zombies in
Zpocalypto
, and while he might get a little rough with people sometimes, she knew he'd never intentionally cause anyone pain. Not even Kelly, and they had always been the two most competitive people in their group.

But he'd changed since Ashley's death. Now she saw something new in him, something dangerous. Right now, right at this moment, Reggie looked like he wanted to kill Kelly.

He slipped the Link into his pocket.

“You should actually see if you can get your devices replaced,” she told him. “That would get rid of the failsafe in your implant.”

He shrugged, then immediately brightened. “
That's
how you get rid of that file on your Link.”

Jessie sniffed. Yesterday, getting new devices had scared the hell out of her. Today, she'd love nothing more. But she knew it would solve nothing.

“Kelly'd just resend the file to the new Link,” she said. “I need to find out what it is first and why he put it there.” She sighed. “I just wish Micah were still around so I could ask him. I'm sure he'd be able to hack into it.”

“Knowing Micah, he'd just reprogram it, turn it into a zombie wearing a tutu with a lightsaber. Remember how he hacked into Kelly's
Zpocalypto
account and turned all of his avatars into ugly girls?”

“I thought you did that.”

“Me? Dude, Micah was the mastermind behind all of my stunts, not me. I'm just a big galoot, just like they always said I was.”

“You're not a galoot.”

Jessie stood up and her joints cracked loud enough for Reggie to smile at her.

She turned off the computer. “Tomorrow, I'm going to ping CR and request that both my implant and Link be replaced. Screw this.”

“And Kelly?”

She sighed. “I don't know.”

She couldn't just throw away all those years together, the closeness, the trust.

Sentimentality will get you killed.

That was something her grandfather always used to say to Eric, whenever Eric complained that people just didn't care to understand the Omegas better. “To people, they're just machines,” Eric'd snipe. “When they break, we throw them away and get a new one.” He would say that if we could just understand the Undead a little better, then—

Then what?
Grandpa would always interrupt him, always with that infuriatingly bland look on his face, as if he really wasn't all that interested in the conversation and was just participating out of courtesy. The truth was, Grandpa wasn't just
interested
in the conversation, he was recording it in his mind. Analyzing and plotting. Deciding how the information fit into his narrow world view.
If we understood the Undead better
, she could almost hear him saying,
do you know what we would do?

“Kill them,” she whispered to herself. “Kill them all before they kill us.”

Beside her, deep in thought, Reggie nodded.

‡ ‡ ‡

“Jessie?” Eric shouted, slamming through the front door. “Jess? Where are you?”

“We're in the kitchen, brah,” Reggie called.

Eric appeared in the doorway, his face flushed, his coat sprinkled with silver droplets from the light rain which had begun to fall. He hurried over to Jessie's side, placed a hand on her shoulder and looked down into her face. “What happened?”

“Nothing. I'm fine,” she assured him, but she winced when his fingers brushed her cheek. Her skin everywhere felt hypersensitive. “I just fainted. I'm fine now.”

Eric glanced at Reggie, who crossed his arms and shrugged.

“She fell down the basement stairs.”

Jessie glared at him, but he just shrugged again.

“Nothing's broken. We checked.”

“We?”

“Kelly was here.”

“He left?” Eric frowned, confused. He slipped off his jacket and placed it over the back of the empty chair beside Jessie, then sat down. “Why?”

Jessie opened her mouth. “Because he's an asshole,” she was going to say.

“Kyle's in the hospital,” Reggie explained. “Kelly was here for a while, but left after we figured out Jessie was okay.”

“Are you okay?”

“Everything's fine,” Reggie answered for her. “Well, except you're going to need a new clothes basket, ‘cause the one you got's trashed.”

Eric gave Reggie a confused look. When he swallowed, his throat made an audible click. He turned back to Jessie, clearly not in the mood for humor. “I shouldn't have left you this morning. You said you were sick. You asked me to stay. Damn it! Why didn't I listen?”

“It's not your fault. I was actually feeling better after you left. I decided to clean the house. I guess I overdid it.”

Reggie pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Think I'll go.” He bent down and kissed Jessie on the top of her head, something he'd never done before, and squeezed her shoulder gently. “Ping me later,” he told her, holding up his Link.

Jessie met his eyes and nodded. “Thanks for everything.”

“No problem, sister. Get some rest.”

After he left, Jessie briefly explained that she'd tired herself out cleaning and fell down the cellar steps. She didn't tell him that she thought she'd heard phantom voices down there. And she didn't say anything about Kelly and the file on her Link. She just didn't know how to tell her brother that the man she had married wasn't who they all thought he was. She felt . . . embarrassed, like it was her fault.

And the voices had only been her imagination. After all, no one was down there. Reggie or Kelly would have seen them.

“I have something for you.”

Eric reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “It's a note for you. From Mom.”

Jessie's eyes went wide with surprise. She took the small square of pink parchment with shaking hands and carefully unfolded it. Few people actually bothered to write anything by hand anymore, much less on paper. It wasn't that paper was expensive or hard to find; it was just that people preferred to use their Links to send messages. Links were so much more personal and immediate and the messages never got lost, or misdirected, or destroyed in the laundry.

The paper was thin and delicate. On one side were the faded markings of an ancient receipt from the Golden Dragon restaurant, the order delicately scribbled with dancing stick figures. On the other side was her mother's note:

My dear daughter,

I know how much pain you have endured, and it kills me so to know that I am the cause of so much of your suffering. You didn't ask for it, yet you always bore whatever came. You always forgave, and each time I betrayed that gift. When I promised you I would stop drinking, I knew full well how hard it would be not to break that promise. I have tried. I can't change the past, though I am determined not to repeat it. I can't bear the thought of letting you down again. I won't.

I will always love you, even if you stop loving me.

Your mother,

Lana

“It's dated last Thursday,” Eric said. “The day before you and Kelly got married. I think this means she's not coming back, Jessie.”

“No.”

“It's her handwriting.”

“No!”

Jessie knew it was her mother's writing. She'd seen it enough times to recognize the tight cursive, the way she always wrote her capital ‘L' with all the extra loops and curves, like the delicate path of a falling maple leaf. She knew the note was genuine, she just didn't believe what Eric said it meant.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded.

“Jessie, I don't think—”

“
Where?
”

“I asked a friend of mine to check on some of the guys she'd been seeing recently. As a personal favor.”

“
Been seeing
.” Jessie spat the words from her mouth like they tasted bitter. She pushed herself stiffly out of her chair and crossed the kitchen to the sink, gripping the edge and panting like she was going to be sick. But it wasn't her stomach this time that felt like ejecting itself, it was her whole entire being. The physical aches and bruises were nothing compared to this.

She spun around, her eyes narrowed. “What friend? Who? Someone on the police force?”

Eric nodded.

“What's the address? Tell me the address where she's staying!” Jessie was screaming, slapping the counter, sending waves of pain reverberating through her battered body. She didn't care. Her mother had made promises. But then, instead of keeping them, she'd copped out entirely! “I want to see her, now!”

Eric shook his head. “I can't—”

Jessie swore as she crushed the paper in her fist and hurled it at him. The tiny ball hit him in the face, bounced away and rolled under the refrigerator. Eric barely flinched.

“I want her to look me in the eye and tell me she's sorry herself! She expects me to forgive her after this? There's no god damn way
that's
ever going to happen now!”

“Jessie, sit down.”

“No! I want to go see her right now! You take me there right now!”

“I can't.”

“Why the hell not? You said your friend got this from her—”

“No, Jessie. The guy she'd been staying with gave it to my friend to deliver to me. To . . . you. She's not there anymore. She's moved on.”

Jessie stared at him. The fact that he'd used the past tense didn't escape her. “Where is she now? Sponging off some other creep? Can't you track her down?”

He raised a hand to calm her. “You know I can't do that, Jess. It takes a warrant, and to get that I have to provide evidence of a crime. Or get a notice from Arc that her implant was activated. If there were some other way to track her . . . .”

Jessie narrowed her eyes at him, trying to read his face, his intent. Of course there was another way to track her— using Micah's illegal tracking app. Problem was, the program was on his tablet, and that was inside Gameland.

“I think she doesn't want to be found right now,” Eric finished.

“You don't know that.”

“This guy she was seeing, this George character, he said that she just up and disappeared a few days ago. He says it might've been Friday morning. She didn't even take her clothes.”