S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (20 page)

Jessie turned. Her last thought was whether the file on her Link would prevent them from shutting off the autodestruct mechanism. She was going to ask about it when she felt a pinch in the back of her neck. A freezing sensation filled her head and rushed through her body. She tried to scream, but she couldn't move. She was blind, paralyzed. There was only darkness and a high-pitched whining sound.

Then it was raining.

‡ ‡ ‡

The sky above her is an unbroken ceiling. Sooty white. Pressing its laden self upon the barren world. It's raining, and the rain comes hard, without pity or vengeance, unbidden. And yet she welcomes it. She stands and stretches her parched throat toward it. She stands as tall as she can and lifts her cataract eyes and watches, watches. Watches the rain pour down from the ashfall sky.

There are so few Truths remaining in her world, but this is one of them: Rain is good.

Her mouth opens, not because she thinks to open it, but rather from some primordial instinct to breathe in the water. Her lower jaw drops and the rain pours in, all sweetness and wetness and purity, filling her mouth and nose. She revels in the fact that she doesn't drown. She doesn't need air. And that is another Truth.

The water slips down her throat and into her body and washes away the badness inside of her, the badness that grows out of her hunger. The Hunger. And the water slips into her lungs, and she doesn't choke. The rain makes pliable what had grown stiff and brittle. And now, when she cries out, now her moans are no longer mere whispers. Now she can be heard.

The drops pelt her skin. Her cheeks. Her eyelids.

She can no more feel the rain hitting her than she can sense it soaking into her clothes. They are all rags anyway. They serve no purpose anymore, whether to adorn or to protect. The rags hang rotting over her withered flesh, but her flesh does not rot. It is flesh that frays, not by the day, but by the decade.

The water pelts her upturned eyes, yet she does not blink. It pools into the hollows beneath and around the blackened orbs until the solid gray of the sky bursts into brilliant prisms of color, vibrant lakes and oceans of molten light. And if she blinks, it spills out in a kaleidoscope of tears.

If she could only blink.

The water turns the darkness away from this dead, empty world and makes it bright once more.

Yes, the rain is good. The rain is as close to life as she can come.

† † †

She is not alone.

She can sense the moment it happens, when the stranger comes — not outside of her, but inside her mind, occupying that place where she once was, yet can no longer reach. It terrifies her. This other presence which somehow takes control of her in ways that she cannot. It steals her body away from her.

She calls it the Deceiver.

Against her wishes, the Deceiver lowers her head from the sky —

No! No! Please! The rain is good!

—
and begins to walk her body away.

She tries again and again, crying out:
I don't want to!
But this body does not obey her supplications— hasn't for so long. There was a time when she exerted some will over it, owned it. Then that time ended and there came a new age when it would allow only her feeble attempts to hide it from the drying sun, when she could bid the body out into the darkness to welcome the night or the rain.

But now her broken body no longer even hides; it is ruined and does not know how the sun beats down with reckless reckoning. How the sun hastens her to her end, though the end itself seems never to come. Now her body heeds only the memory of rain.

And Hunger. Hunger is the eternal Truth.

Oh God oh God!
she moans.

How she hates the Hunger; she wishes she could flee from this tiny room, this prison in this wretched corner of her mind. But here, she is forever and ever shut off from everything else and she cannot escape. No one can rescue her. Even her own body has betrayed her.

But when the Deceiver comes, then even the Hunger has no dominion over her body. The Deceiver takes control because it knows nothing of Truth. It is the antithesis of Truth. It steals her body from her, and she cannot even make known her presence. The Deceiver forces her to watch as it uses her own hands and her own teeth to rip and slash and kill.

Not to satisfy the horrible, honest Hunger, but simply for Sport.

Sometimes, when the Deceiver leaves her, it tears away from her in a way that leaves her soul bleeding. It casts away her body and leaves it to be ravaged by the relentless sun. She hates to see the Deceiver come, yet she fears even more when it leaves.

Now it takes her body along a trail in the woods. A rivulet of water caresses her feet and she yearns for the wetness, to take it in her. But the Deceiver notices none of this. Or, if it does, does not care.

The ground is uneven, yet somehow her body knows what to do, how to walk, where to go; it seems wondrous that her feet do not trip or fall or fail her.

The ground slopes upward. They climb, higher and higher, until the shadows around her suddenly shatter and flee and the woods thrust her out into a grassy field.

Where is the Deceiver taking us?

The Deceiver shares nothing of its plans.

She can see where the hard rain has beaten down the grass, matting it down so that it pulls against her ankles, resists her feet. She plows insensibly through it. The heavy growth barely slows her.

Lift
, she thinks.
Lift your feet.
But her body will not heed even this simple command. Her feet simply push harder against the lush grass, trusting that it will yield. The world will yield.

And the world yields.

Her body does not know fatigue.

But the mind . . . .

The mind grows weary, distracted. She drifts, slipping away from her prison, herself, this hijacker of flesh. She slips down into that place which both time and death work so hard to erase: her past.

At home, sitting in a chair, a cold bottle of beer in her hand. They are the gnarled knuckles of a laborer. The television is on and she's watching—

What?

Someone. In a suit. Talking.

A man (the president) is giving a speech, saying that this is the beginning of a New Age: one without taxes, one where a new breed of worker will do all the things the living would rather not do. Or can't do. She can sense that this is a world where she no longer plays a vital role. She is obsolete. Her mind weeps. What good is a man who cannot work?

I am a man.

I was a man.

Another time and another memory. Someone speaking to her (him?). She can't see the speaker's face, but she senses something filthy about them: “Think of your family,” they say. “Do this for them. They could sure use the money. Think of your children.”

My children?

A flicker and she's somewhere else, in a room, lying on a table with bright lights and there's a sharp pain in the back of her head and the darkness covers her and leaves her with only the sound of a little boy crying in the darkness and the wetness of tears on her cheek and her heart is torn into pieces inside of her. Or, it would be, if she could feel her heart.

It is dead.

All she feels anymore is Hunger.

The memories fade. She forgets them. She knows nothing in this moment but the Here of this prison and the Now of the moment.

The rain has stopped falling. The skies remain a stark white canopy, streaked, feathered and whorled gray. She can sense the heat of the sun; she cannot feel it. Her skin knows nothing; only a whisper from somewhere inside her head tells her that the air around her is hot. A memory of a memory. An echo of echoes. She is riven, herself from herself.

The Deceiver is moving her again, forward, upward, toward what appears to be a mesh of metallic gray. Is it water? It's a silvery, shimmering, transparent veil. How she wishes for the rain. But the gray wall is still too far away. She stumbles and suddenly she is falling. She opens her mouth — in her mind she opens it — but there is no breath inside of her, no surprise, and the memory of speech dies on her dead lips, unfulfilled, unuttered. Unheard.

If I shout in my own mind and nobody hears it, do I make a sound?

The ground rises frighteningly fast as she falls, like a tree, its roots rotted away.

Timber!

It is a curious thing, to watch the earth rising to meet one's self, to fall without pain or fear. To be suddenly lying upon the ground, blades of grass pressed up against the surface of her eyes. Her vision fills with its greenness. She wants to cry out in alarm, in pain, to breathe in the wetness down here, but her body knows to do none of these things. She wants simply to lie here and sleep. But fatigue, like surprise and pain, no longer exist, and want and sleep are no longer truths of this world. They are as everything else: the lies of the Living.

It was my decision to come here.

If I could just sleep.

But already her body is lifting itself. The Deceiver is pushing her up, standing. And now she is witness to what she has become as she sees her own wilted hands and tattered feet planted on the slippery ground in front of her face. The gnarled knuckles. Something akin to fear and revulsion sweeps into the room of her mind, but these emotions are smoke, wispy thin and elusive, and she cannot grasp them anymore than she can grasp a wish and hold it.

They are ruined, her hands. The skin is flayed and dangles in ribbons; her cartilage is dried yellow and hard. Her nails are gone. They have been torn away, taking the tender flesh and leaving the exposed stubs of bones. They glisten greenish-gray, blackened with the first mossy signs of rot.

I am dead,
she remembers
. That's right. I died. I am dead, and this is what has become of my body.

She tries to recall something, anything, about her life before. But now her memory is as blank as the sky above her.

No! No, I had a life. I was someone!

And then she does remember. There is a thing, a very small thing: a boy who loved her—

Kyle?

Daddy! The boy shouts and the shout echoes, fades.

No! No, these are not my memories. You are the imposter! You are the Deceiver! Get out of my prison. Get out of my mind! GET OUT OF MY BODY LEAVE ME ALONE GO!

But she is not he. No. She is she, and he is he, and the Deceiver is the Deceiver. He and she can sense the Deceiver, but the Deceiver cannot sense them. The Deceiver knows nothing, is not welcome.

It's taking her (his? their?) body now, taking it somewhere, always walking, searching.

Fighting?

Playing.

I am in
The Game
!

She can't remember how it happened.

No! Resist!

But she has only one weapon: Hunger. Now she beckons it forth.

But the Hunger cowers; it lowers its head in defeat. It cannot overcome the will of the Deceiver. In the battle between Truth and Lies, the latter always wins.

The silver, shimmering wall grows distinct. It is not water, but wire. A fence, chain link. And she senses that the Deceiver wishes to move past it, needs to get past it to the other side.

What's there? No! Please, no.

These are her thoughts. Or maybe his. Or the Deceiver's. But of course her (their!) body does not obey. Because it—

smells

—
knows what awaits. And yet she waits, does not touch the fence. She knows what will happen if she tries.

She calls forth her anger. She beckons her frustration. But while they bubble and roil deep down inside of her, far away in the darkest pits of her memory, they are too weak to rise. They reside too far from the skin of her mind, from the land where emotions are mapped. They have faded into nothing, like ancient tapestries.

Because feelings, too, are lies of the Living.

The Deceiver walks her body along the fence. She can feel the life inside the wire prickling her skin. She doesn't touch it. She can feel it in her mind. She can sense the low hum it makes inside her skull, inside this tiny little box that tells her in whispers not to touch.
Stay away; dangerous.

Before her, a building materializes out of the gloom, small and orange, like a giant square pumpkin. And suddenly another memory comes to her. She knows where she has come, where the Deceiver has brought her. She has been here before.

And she knows why she has come.

The Deceiver waits.

She (they) wait.

What?
she wonders.
What will happen?

And finally something happens. Someone is coming. She can almost sense it, can almost feel the expectation coming off the Deceiver, like steam off cement after a rain.

Get out get out GET OUT!
she wants to yell, and is surprised when her mouth opens and her ears pick up the low croak that her throat makes.

But the Deceiver only waits.

Until, finally, the thing they have all been waiting for is here and now it's really here yes YES! And when she (it, they) sees it, the Hunger awakens and blooms inside of her body like the sun rising, spreading its warmth through her and driving her mad with its want. And everything inside of her rushes up to the surface, boiling and exploding with such naked fury that now she can feel it—
she can FEEL it!
Everything: the anger and pain and hope and love and dying and living and everything that she remembers about being Alive. They come and propel her forward.

She raises her hands and lunges —
No! No! Stop! Danger! 
— but she can't stop herself because she cannot control this body. Her fingers curl around the wire and suddenly there's a blinding white light and all that she had felt a moment before, everything that she once was before the time she became Forever, suddenly collapses and sinks back into the darkness. It coalesces again deep inside of her. It turns into a tight dark stone without light and sinks away.

And the sky darkens to night and the rain dries up and all is silent.

She suffocates.