S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (26 page)

“No. When I first learned about your plans, I didn't think it had a chance of working.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Arc forced our hand. We learned that they had employed your friend, Micah Sandervol, ostensibly to test their network vulnerabilities, but the timing seemed suspicious to us. They must've known we were trying to retrieve something, they just didn't know what. We decided to try and use you— not because we were afraid they'd get the information, but because we were afraid they'd destroy it.”

“And you didn't bother to think that maybe we'd get eaten?”

“The military cleared the western part of the island years back to prevent any Reanimates from breaching the barriers and getting to Manhattan. Arc's own surveys, conducted just last year, confirmed that that part of the island was unoccupied.”

“Arc's survey was wrong.”

“Yes, but not through any fault of their own. We now suspect the Coalition had been secretly herding Infecteds toward the western tip of the island for the past several months in preparation for starting an outbreak in lower Manhattan. It was they who opened the tunnel you swam through. LaGuardia was their base of operations.”

“What did Kelly know?” Jessie asked. She was surprised the doctor was answering her questions, and she wanted to keep the momentum going.

“Only that he was to write Heall's first name on a wall using a can of paint we provided him; then he was to take a picture of it and send it to your Link. That's it. The same instructions we gave the others we sent in.”

“And that extracted the file from Arc's mainframe?”

“Those were the triggers. All you were supposed to do was go there, have lunch, take a few pictures, and come back.”

“Except it didn't happen that way,” Jessie whispered. “That's why Kelly had to go back. After we escaped, he had to return because I'd left my Link behind.”

Doctor White nodded. “Once the packet was transferred to you, it was erased from the network. There was only one copy, and it was now on your Link. Kelly went back to get it.”

Once again, anger filled Jessie. She swept her hand across the desk, throwing everything onto the floor. The lamp crashed against the wall and broke. The phone jangled to a tangled heap, the handset striking the flowerpot and bouncing back. The glass in the photograph frames shattered. The skull thumped and rolled against a wall, the lower jaw broken off.

“You knew it was dangerous!” she yelled, spraying spittle from her lips. “Maybe you believed it wasn't at first, but after we got back, you had to know! I almost died in the tunnel on the way over. So did Kelly! Then we were attacked. You knew how bad it was and you still made Kelly go back all by himself? It was
my
mistake leaving that Link there!”

Doctor White shook her head, an imploring look on her face. “No! I ordered him not to go. I said we'd send someone else in to retrieve it. But Kelly went back on his own. He didn't tell me he was going. Ask him!”

Jessie's arms shook as she leaned on the desk, her face not six inches from the doctor's. A tear dripped down her cheek. Doctor White took in a slow breath, but she didn't try to move out of Jessie's reach.

“Then why
my
Link? You still haven't answered that. Why not Kelly's? He was your puppet, not me. Or why not send it to Reggie's Link? Or Ashley's?”

“Because your Link was the most secure. It's the only one with a firewall on it. That's why Citizen Registration can't alter it— not because of that file, but the firewall. It's also why we need that other key.”

“A firewall?” Jessie asked, confused.

“Your grandfather put it there. It was his decision that the file should go on your Link.”

“Grandpa? You were working with him, too?”

“No,” White said, slumping in her chair. “I don't know how he found out, but once he did, he dictated the terms.”

Jessie nodded. It sounded just like him.

“But he's dead. Where's the key to the firewall?”

“On his Link.”

‡ ‡ ‡

So this is what it feels like to have a real panic attack.

Kelly's heart was stampeding through his chest and his blood was coursing so loudly in his temples that he was unable to think straight. He tried to calm himself, to control his breathing and slow his heartbeat, but it wasn't working. As Eric slid his car out of the parking spot and the other vehicles drifted past him outside his window, Kelly found his vision tunneling. He opened the window.

His life was falling apart. Jessie hated him. After holding it all together on the island, how could it be falling apart now?

And he had no one to blame but himself.

“Got the AC on,” Eric said. He looked over. “Hey, you okay over there?” He turned right onto the street. “You're as white as a ghost. I know my air conditioning doesn't work very well, but come on.”

Kelly squinted down at the backs of his hands. There was a vague sensation of pain in his palms. He turned them over and forced his fingers to relax. His nails had left purple crescents in the skin. “No. Just worried about Reggie,” he muttered.

Worried about yourself, you hypocrite. How are you going to get yourself out of this mess?

He worked the tension from his hands, then reached into his pocket and took out his Link. Scrolling through to his messages, he found the one he'd received from Doctor White not ten minutes after they had argued in the hospital:

<< SHE'S HERE. SHE KNOWS. >>

He deleted it.

“I don't know what's going on with you and Jessie,” Eric said. “To say I'm confused is an understatement. First she thinks you're responsible for her implant, then she says maybe not.”

It's that Doctor White. She can be very convincing.

“So, which is it? What's going on?”

They approached a signal light and came to a stop beside a rumbling sedan. It had its windows open and the radio was blasting the latest music craze, a fusion of techno hip-hop and gangsta ska with a heavy bass track. The beat seemed to throb straight up from the ground, right through the tires and into the base of Kelly's skull, making talking impossible.

What could he say that wouldn't come across as a bunch of empty excuses and lies?

He'd always looked up to Eric, always thought of him as something like an older brother. But there had been a persistent tension between them, and it had grown as he and Jessie grew closer, became lovers. Eric was trying so hard to be both brother and father to Jessie, torn between protecting her and letting her go. Wanting to prepare her for the world after high school.

In Jessie's eyes, Eric was a failure in this regard, but Kelly knew it wasn't as simple as that. They both held terrible things inside of themselves, things which made them wall themselves off from other people. What they saw in each other, yet failed to see in themselves, they hated.

The light turned green and Eric rolled through it, slowly accelerating. Kelly had expected the noisy vehicle beside them to pull ahead, or at least to keep pace, but it remained idling at the intersection. He watched it in the mirror, tilting his head to keep it in view. The throbbing noise soon faded behind them.

“We'll stop off at Reggie's,” Eric announced. “I want to pick up that gaming equipment and check it out. Jessie seems to think it's faulty, but I can't see how it might explain Reggie's condition.”

Kelly nodded slightly, but didn't speak. He turned away, his eyes following the houses as they drifted past, trying to figure out how to explain what he'd done.

“If you have any theories, now's the time to air them,” Eric told him.

You know something's wrong with that gear.

Yes, he knew. But did it have anything to do with Reggie's seizure? Or could Jessie be right and that he'd somehow electrocuted himself?

And how would she even know, anyway?

The first time it happened to him was the day he'd brought it over to the Casey's garage and set it up. Reggie had been adamant about him taking it away, but Kelly had managed to convince him to keep it there. He told him that they'd use it to find Ashley and Jake. “It's the only way we'll ever be able to move on from all this,” he'd said.

And then he played his trump card: “Finding them will help Jessie, too.” And, just as he knew would happen, Reggie had acquiesced.

He didn't say what the real reason for the equipment was, or why he needed to go back. To do so would have required him to confess what he'd done, and he knew that Reggie would blame him for Ashley's death on top of everything else.

All of which he deserved.

The whole process of getting the system powered up and connected to the game stream had gone a lot smoother than he'd expected. Doctor White had warned him when she'd handed it over that there might be some software issues. Some of the control capabilities would likely also be unsupported, since several upgrades had been made to the network since the gear had last been used. “Just give it a try,” she'd told Kelly. “Right now it's our best chance of getting that key.”

But it had worked, and the Player appeared to be in good condition. The gear's previous Operator had apparently stowed it inside the restroom of an old Starbucks coffee shop somewhere in the southwestern part of the arcade.

“The equipment's not registered,” White had reminded him. “So it's best if you stay off the
Survivalist
clips.”

In other words, try not to engage other Players.

Despite his initial resistance, Reggie had stayed and watched for a little while, his face a mix of hope, pain, and curiosity. Around nine, he finally got up and went to bed. “Lock the door when you leave,” had been his last words.

Kelly remembered walking the Player around as he got used to the gear's sensitivity— or lack thereof. He remembered seeing the unlit Golden Arches of an ancient McDonalds looming up over the treetops in the moonlight right outside the Starbucks.

The next thing he knew, he was standing over by the pinball machines on the other side of the garage, staring at the wall. The goggles had somehow gotten off his head; he was holding them in his hand. At first he thought he'd simply walked himself over, though he couldn't understand why he didn't remember doing it. And it was strange that he was as sweaty as he was, and his legs felt tired. It felt like only a minute or two had elapsed.

Except it hadn't been a minute or two. It was almost three in the morning and he'd been in
The Game
for nearly eight hours.

He hurried back over to the console, and there in the holo projection was the Player, its head raised to the full-moon sky and the unmistakable outline of the very same McDonalds sign. Behind it was the same Starbucks store, the door still askew. He'd apparently been walking for hours, yet the Player hadn't gone anywhere.

The light blinked; his connection with
The Game
had been interrupted.

Confused, he reconnected, then hurriedly stowed the avatar and the gear and went home. After the trauma they'd all suffered, it seemed reasonable to think that his conscious mind had disconnected itself so he wouldn't flashback to those horrible experiences.

But then it happened again, this time early Friday afternoon. He'd found himself miles away from Reggie's garage, his clothes and shoes covered in mud and his arms scraped up. This time, he was certain it wasn't him, but the gear.

The experience had scared him so badly that he planned to tell Doctor White they needed to find another way. But then Jessie fell into a deep funk when her mother didn't show for the marriage filing. And Reggie changed his mind about the gear. But he never said a word about having any blackouts. The first Kelly suspected anything was the other night.

“I don't know what's going on with the equipment,” he told Eric. “Jessie's implant, however . . . .” He exhaled and turned away. “Yeah, that's my fault.”

Eric's jaw tightened. “Explain.”

“I put a file on her Link. It was the day we first broke onto the island. It's why all of this happened.”

Eric slowly turned his face from Kelly to the road. The line of his jaw had tightened, and his eyes had gone dead. Kelly knew these as warning signs; the more blank his demeanor, the deeper and more troubled his thoughts. The car edged toward the curb and came to a stop.

“You did what?” Eric said, carefully enunciating each word.

“When we broke into Gameland, I was told to take a photo and send it to Jessie's Link. That's all I knew at the time. Later I found out that the transfer protocol passed the image through Arc's internal network where it picked up a packet stored inside their servers.”

Eric stared at him for a moment, his face showing no emotion. Then he turned off the engine, opened his door and stepped out. Kelly was afraid he might walk right into traffic, but he made his way to the front of the car and sat down on the hood. Kelly watched as Eric ran his hands through his hair a few times. After a few minutes, he stood up again and began to walk back.

Kelly leaned against the window and closed his eyes and exhaled unhappily.

Well, what else did you expect, you idiot? You totally fu—

His door jerked open. Eric grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the car. The blank stare was gone. Now it was twisted with venomous rage. He slammed Kelly against the side of the car, and pain ripped through his side. His head rocked backward, wrenching his neck.

“
You did what?
” Eric growled at him, his face now only inches away from Kelly's. “Tell me, you son of a bitch! What did you do to my sister?” He slammed Kelly again and the car rocked beneath him.

“I —
unh
 — I didn't know!”

“Who told you to do this? God damn it, Kelly!
Who?
”

A man shouted at them from a passing car. Eric's eyes never strayed from Kelly's face.