S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (44 page)

“How dare—!”

“
Mister
Sandervol,” he went on, holding up a hand, “is most assuredly
not
engaged in the type of activity you are referring to.”

“How do you know?” Eric asked. “How can you be sure? Why don't you go back and ask your people to check?”

The two men looked at each other, as if silently communicating. One of them shrugged. The other turned back.

“Mister Sandervol's LSC was purchased the moment he reanimated.” He paused. “You understand that what I'm about to tell you is confidential, and any attempt to disclose this information to anyone outside this room will be met with denial by Arc and its representatives?”

Kelly nodded numbly.

“As of the moment Mister Sandervol was conscripted, he became a Player in
The Game
. That is, he
will
be a Player, once your city's mayor's daughter activates him.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Jessie had badly overslept. She'd fallen asleep on a dusty second-floor bed in a house somewhere west of Deer Park, the pistol in her hand and a chair chocked up against the door, and she hadn't woken up until after dark. Nothing but silence all around her. Nothing but the pitch black of the night and a bubble of stale air about her head, stifling her, pinching her nose and chest.

Should've opened the window.

The alarm on her Link had gone off at the scheduled time nearly eight hours earlier, but she'd forgotten to reset the volume from silent mode and had missed it. Now it was approaching eleven o'clock and there was no way she was going to be able to leave the house till morning. One glance out the window convinced her of the foolhardiness of trying. The neighborhood was crawling with Undead. At least a dozen were visible on the streets from where she stood. And undoubtedly several dozen more where she couldn't see them.

The Link screen was all the light she dared to use as she searched the kitchen for food and water.

Finding nothing edible inside the house, she tried the garage. There, among the mouse droppings and termite dust, next to what appeared to be a survival box stowed at the bottom of a warped melamine cabinet, she found several cases of canned fruits and vegetables. Many of the cans had since swollen. Others had burst open or simply rusted through and leaked out. The dried juice had formed a hard glue which bound the cans together. A half dozen appeared okay.

She brought the kit inside and sorted through it, finding candles, matches, and a wind-up flashlight and radio. There were also a small gas-powered camp lantern and stove, and she was surprised to find the fuel canisters still full. The stove she used to boil a few cupfuls of the standing water collected in the bed of an old plastic toy truck she'd seen at the bottom of the back steps. There had also been a small wad of cash— a couple hundred dollars in old American currency, totally useless to her now, except maybe as kindling. And, in a thin plastic case at the bottom, another handgun.

After eating, she spent a couple hours working with her Player. The backyard under the cloud-veiled moon was draped too deep in shadow, and it was impossible to make anything out by eye, yet the image afforded by her optic implant was crisp and clear.

She finally managed to get the Player to execute several discrete, but simple actions with only what she considered a trigger thought. The whole process still seemed overly complicated and inefficient, and she certainly couldn't imagine how she'd ever be able to get it to perform decently in a battle, even if she were to give it her full attention. If she ever got into a jam, she'd have to fight herself while the Player stood uselessly by. She couldn't rely on it to fight for her.

It seemed obvious to her that Arc had seriously miscalculated the ease of the new Operator gear. Unless there was a trick she hadn't yet learned, there was no way it was any better than the old clunky equipment. If anything, it was worse.

She finally gave up and sent it back into the shed to stay for the remainder of the night. Then she planted herself on the downstairs couch to wait for morning. She was still tired, despite the long hours she'd slept, but this time her mind refused to release her.

You didn't once think of the Player as
Kwanjangnim Rupert.

For some reason she couldn't explain, this bothered her.

† † †

Jessie rose an hour before dawn and sat at the window at the front of the house and watched the shadowy figures of the IUs slip away in the gathering light. She was always surprised to see how many of them there were, how silently they appeared once the sun set, like ghosts materializing out of the ground itself, and how completely they always managed to slip away and hide during the day. All except the broken ones, of course. As she watched, there didn't appear to be any of those here.

They wouldn't last very long in Gameland. They'd be easy pickings by Players.

Not for the first time, she wondered where they all went, how they found their hiding places, and whether they returned to the same ones day after day. And it freaked her out to think how they were all around her in this place of the Undead, buried beneath piles of rotting leaves, under porches and squeezed into the tightest crawlspaces, burrowed down into thickets where the sunlight couldn't penetrate.

Like vampires.

Except vampires weren't real.

She now knew, as she walked along the abandoned streets during the daylight and through neighborhoods long deserted by the living, that they were there. But they remained unaware of her intrusion into their world as long as she didn't make too much noise or stay too long in one place. Ten thousand soulless creatures roamed Long Island, but by day the place appeared deceptively deserted.

When at last the streets were clear, she connected her Link by inserting it into the socket on her hip, and brought the Player once more out of the shed. As she did so, she studied the face that had once belonged to Kwanjangnim Rupert, almost expecting it to cringe when the sunlight hit it. But there was no emotion there, no inflection or sense of fear or hatred of the light. Just the blank gawping expression of the Undead, the hollow blackness of the eyes, and the tiniest spark of the underlying hunger whenever she stepped too close.

Her old hapkido master was gone, dead. What was left was just a shell. Whatever vital force compelled it now and kept it moving forward, it wasn't the same as the force which drove the living. If Father Heall had been right about their souls remaining inside of them, then she saw no suggestion of it now.

“Would you be happier if I left you here, Kwanjangnim?” she quietly wondered. But, of course, the monster offered no opinion of its own. “I've still got miles to go, and I can't be stopping every five minutes to wait for you to catch up.”

She turned away, convinced it would be better this way, and reached down. She'd disconnect her Link once she was out of sight. But it stepped forward, much to her surprise, and followed her. When she stopped, it stopped, too.

“You really are like a puppy, aren't you? Fine, you can come, as long as you keep up.”

As she exited the back yard and made for the road, the Player stepped forward.

Am I doing that? I am, aren't I?

She kept a wary eye on it as she went, hyperaware of her strange companion, wondering when and how the connection between them had grown stronger. She wasn't sure she liked it; at the same time, she couldn't help but feel newly responsible for its wellbeing.

“This doesn't mean we're a team,” she said, keeping her voice low as they reached the highway. “The first sign of trouble and I'm ditching you.”

Neither the road ahead, nor the one behind, showed any danger. Nevertheless, she reminded herself not to be lulled into a false sense of security. The closer she got to Jayne's Hill, the denser the CU population would become.

“Maybe I'll get you a hat,” she mumbled, “see if maybe we can get the sun off your face.”

She shook her head and chuckled at herself as the Player walked stolidly on, ten feet to her side, ten feet back. “Christ, listen to me, talking to you like you can understand.”

‡ ‡ ‡

They arrived at the Jayne's Hill complex without incident at a quarter past ten, which was a bit later than Jessie had wanted. The sun was a bright white spot in the hazy sky, and the air was so humid that she felt if she made a sharp noise, all the moisture in it would suddenly coalesce and it would begin to rain.

Her stomach had been feeling queasy all morning, hot and crampy, which she had attributed to the canned mush she'd forced down her throat before leaving the house, and wondered if she was going to regret eating it. She hoped the cramps would pass. Instead, the discomfort spread into her back. Yet she pressed on.

The fatigue and shakes hit nearly simultaneously around nine, forcing her to break into an office supply store and rest there until the symptoms passed, which they finally did about forty minutes later.

She spent another ten minutes checking the store for supplies. It had been years since the water jug in the staff lounge had held anything but spiders, but she found a case of individual bottles in the supply room, brushed the dust off one and tested it. It tasted of plastic but slaked her thirst. After she stuffed a dozen more of the bottles into her pack, she broke into the manager's office and was thrilled to find a decorative samurai sword mounted in a case on a shelf, awarded in appreciation by management “for slashing costs.” The weapon was never meant to be used as such, but it felt solid enough in her hand, had a nice heft, and the edge was reasonably sharp. She slung her pack over Kwanjangnim Rupert's shoulders, feeling guilty for doing so, yet trying to convince herself that it would be stupid not to use him.

It, not him. It's not Rupert. It's just a machine now.

Upon arriving at the base of Jayne's Hill, she took the forest road which Eric had driven in their desperate flight ahead of the bombers that had never come. She now doubted they had been anything but a lie by her grandfather, meant only to hasten their departure and prevent them from interfering with his own plans to find and murder Father Heall.

In the three weeks that had passed since then, the rains had fallen, but tire tracks and skid marks remained in the thick soggy leaf litter and were now intersected by the trails of the meandering Undead.

Why did the zombie cross the road?

Because it was a left-brain kind of guy.

She knew that the forest around them was full of the creatures, but no IUs crossed her path today. Nothing forced her to retreat.

She stopped when she reached the edge of the wood. She squinted out into the bright hazy space separating her and the perimeter fence and watched for evidence of movement.

Her Player shuffled to a stop beside her. Her teacher had been shorter than she when he was alive. Now, in death, he was a looming presence, larger than the space he occupied.

She detected no signs of life. And no Undead. None upright, anyway.

The corpses of several zombies still littered the ground, the humps of their bodies barely visible in the tall grass. The stench of decay hovered low over the place like a heavy fog. Laced within it was the tang of wet, burnt wood from the fire that had been started by the chopper crash, and a trace of unspent fuel.

The gate, with its keypad alarm system, was to the left and at the end of the gravel drive. About a hundred and fifty feet separated the edge of the wood and the fence.

When they had left here weeks before, they hadn't bothered to close the gate or rearm the electrified barrier. They had never expected anything to survive the firebombing. But, sometime between that terrifying day and last Friday, someone had come along and secured the site— when Reggie had arrived here with his Player, and she along with them.

After scanning the grounds, every corner and every shadow, for another fifteen minutes, Jessie stood and shook the tension from her joints. She'd grown stiff from crouching. The Player didn't move.

“Stay here,” she mumbled, then, as she stepped out into the daylight, she shook her head at herself once again.

Pistol in her left hand, the sword in her right, she trotted up the slight incline. Her palms and neck dripped with sweat. She scanned left to right to left again while keeping a low profile. Occasionally the packed gravel crunched beneath her feet, but otherwise her approach was in near complete silence.

Long before she reached the fence, before her ears picked up the low hum, she could feel the electricity in her head, a dull vibration at the base of her skull and on her tongue. She walked the final twenty feet, her eyes pinned to the small guard shack outside. She partially raised the pistol and pointed it at the ground ten feet in front of her. She removed her finger from the trigger and pressed it against the side of the guard. She didn't want to use the gun if she didn't have to. The report alone would draw the IUs from the woods.

A quick peek through the filthy glass established that the shack was empty. Old blood streaked the inside window of the door, which hung crookedly on broken hinges, the gap an inch or two at the most. The thin plastic and aluminum sheeting had been crimped. Although she hadn't noticed it the last time she was here, she could now see that the damage was quite old, as the steel rivets in the framework were hoary with rust. Leaves had found their way in and were piled into a corner. Brown water had collected where the floor had sunken.

She checked the keypad between the shack and the gate. There was newer blood smeared on several of the buttons.

From the gate, she could see the door which Micah had entered. The building now appeared to be shut tight. None of the other doors was open.

Twenty feet to her right, half buried in the deep grass, was Reggie's Player.
Doctor White's Player
, she reminded herself. It had cut a trail through the grass, which she now tracked back to the edge of the woods near where she had just emerged. But that's not what drew Jessie's attention. Someone else had made a trail to it from the gate.