S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (45 page)

Jessie walked over. After checking around her again, she bent down to inspect the body. It lay just as she remembered it. There was a fair amount of blood splashed about, more than could be accounted for by the trickle she had seen leaking from the Player's nose. The ground beneath the neck was saturated.

“What the hell?”

Setting the sword down, Jessie anchored her feet in the still-wet grass and grabbed a handful of shirt with her free hand. With a grunt, she rolled the zombie stiffly over, gasping at the unexpected mutilation at the base of its skull. Her grip loosened and she nearly lost her balance.

Bile crowded up her throat. The Player settled stiffly onto its stomach, fully exposing the gaping, cauterized hole. The bones of its vertebrae showed dully through the matted hair and gore. Despite the mass of seething maggots, she knew that the implant was gone.

Micah
, she thought.

Once again the incident in the stairwell came back to her. At the time, it had seemed a reckless, senseless thing to do. Now, she wasn't so sure there hadn't been a reason.

She bent down and probed the wound edges with the tip of the pistol. But what she'd thought was burnt flesh was really plastinated muscle and bone beginning to rot away. There was no evidence that the implant had exploded.

She stood up again and backed away, but her heel hit something solid and twisted. As her knees collapsed, she fell back. Her finger hooked the trigger and the gun jumped in her hand.

The sound of the gunshot ripped through the air, rippling through the complex of buildings and into the woods. The slug pinged off a fencepost fifty yards away. Jessie gasped and spun away from the zombie which she'd fallen against before realizing it was Kwanjangnim Rupert.

“Son of a bitch!” she screamed, as the echoes died away. Her advantage now gone, she quickly pushed herself to her feet, air tearing through her teeth as she tried to calm herself. “
What the fuck is wrong with you?
”

The Player didn't move.

Jessie retrieved the pistol and scrambled back to the gate, shoving the zombie out of the way as she went. The edge of the woods seemed to loom close, and the first moans reached her ears. She jabbed her finger against the buttons, hitting the last number of the code to turn off the fence as ghostly shapes began to emerge from the trees. One, at first. Then another two. Then ten and twenty marching out from along the entire perimeter.

She spun around to the gate, but the buzzing in her head remained. The fence was still live.

“I told you to stay put!” she screamed in fury.

She reentered the code, stabbing the tiny buttons as carefully as she could, forcing herself to slow down. Then: ENTER. She remembered she hadn't done that before. And she stepped toward the gate a second time.

Twenty zombies had doubled to forty. The closest was a hundred feet away.

And electricity was still coursing through the fence.

“What the hell!” she cried, if only to drown out the growing chorus of moans piling up behind her. She tried the code a third time, reciting each number to herself before her finger pressed the button. On the third, her finger slipped and she had to start over again.

“Don't just stand there!” she yelled at the Player. “Do something.” But while it stepped toward the zombies, it didn't make any attempt to stop them. They passed it without interference.

“Useless!” she muttered, knowing she'd never be able to concentrate enough to focus on controlling the Player. “Fucking useless. I knew I should've left you behind!”

She chanced another glance back and realized it was already too late to run. The Undead were coming at her from all sides. Most wore the decade-old remnants of clothing from the island's epidemic, but she spotted one among them, the skin on one side of its body charred away, wearing nothing but a Marine boot on the unaffected leg. It was one of the Omegas her brother had brought with him. She'd thought they'd all been killed.

She poked at the last button and hit ENTER just as the naked feet of the closest zombie slapped against the concrete apron. Jessie spun and lifted the pistol and sighted at its head. The bullet carved a broad trench into the monster's brow, and the thing dropped. Its knees cracked as they hit the pavement. A zombie behind it fell over the corpse, starting an avalanche of three more bodies.

The buzzing in her head remained.

Jessie whipped her head around at the guard shack and quickly calculated she'd last less than a minute inside against the onslaught. Even if she could manage to use her Player, she'd only buy herself another minute. Her only hope of escape was through the approaching horde and into the woods where there were likely hundreds more. The gun was essentially useless, and the sword was out of reach.

She put a hand on the door of the shack and began to pull it open.

At the same time, she felt the electricity shut off, heard the clank of the chains unwrapping around the gatepost. The first zombie loomed into view and reached out its rotting hands. The stump of its fingers brushed her shoulder.

Jessie wheeled away, bringing her foot around and landing it against the side of the zombie's head. She continued the spin and followed up with a back kick to its stomach, sending it timbering back.

“
Open the fucking gate!
” she screamed, aware of the presence of a live person on the other side.

There was a loud squeal as the chain link was drawn open. Jessie backed herself quickly toward it, trusting whoever was there to guide her through the opening. She felt a pull at the collar of her shirt and she yielded to it, raising the pistol one last time and delivering a slug of hot metal into the eye of the closest monster. The back of its head exploded in a cloud of red dust, and the thing collapsed sideways, crashing into the flimsy shack and leaving a large dent. The Plexiglas didn't break, but the thin metal crumpled beneath the weight of the IU.

She was flung to the ground, but she spun on all fours and managed to look up in time to see the gate slam shut. The horde crashed into it, pressing their decaying bodies against the wire until it bulged inward. It wouldn't hold for long.

Jessie gaped in shock as her rescuer turned back to the keypad, the twin of the one which had failed Jessie outside the gate. There were a half dozen flashes as the electricity coursed through it once more and arced into the bodies. They exploded off the wire and crashed into the next line of the encroaching horde.

After the popping noises stopped, the two old friends turned to face each other.

“Well,” Ashley said, “I never expected to see you again.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Jessie immediately sensed the anger pouring off of her best friend. It wasn't just the roughness with which Ashley had yanked her through the gate and flung her to the ground. That could be excused under the circumstances. It was the bitterness in those first words which caught Jessie's attention. Ashley was furious.

She deserves to be.

“Well?” Ash demanded. She ignored the clacking teeth and moans of the Undead not five feet away as if they weren't even there.

Jessie gawped at her friend. The moment for, “I'm so glad to see you. Thank you for coming back. I've missed you,” was gone. Ashley gave her exactly two seconds to respond before she reached down and jerked Jessie to her feet. The glower on her face didn't change. “You're lucky I heard the gunshot.”

“I  I don't understand,” Jessie stammered. “How can you be alive? We thought—”

“What? You thought I was one of them?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Is that what you
hoped
?”

“No!”

“Why did you come back then? And why
now
?” Her eyes narrowed briefly, then widened in understanding. “You came here to finish me, didn't you?”

“What? No!” Jessie shook her head. “I came back to find Mi—”

She stopped herself, her skin prickling.

Something's wrong.

Hell yeah, something's wrong. She's pissed because you abandoned her!

“Your what?”

“My . . . grandfather's body,” Jessie finished.

Ashley stared hard at her. There was a flicker of confusion. “His body?”

“He's dead. After Ben took you away, Eric came in a chopper. We went to get Heall and—”

“Heall? You went to get some total stranger, and you left me for dead?”

“Ben told me he'd killed you.”

“That asshole lied to you! And you swallowed it all up without even batting an eyelash!”

The shouting was riling up the Undead. They crushed forward, plowing the ones in front into the fence. There were several loud snaps and flashes of light as the current ripped through their bodies into those behind. The smoke from their burning flesh wafted over, stinging the girls' eyes and noses.

“We should get out of sight,” Jessie said. “They—”

Ashley spun on her heels and marched off toward the building.

“His body is still back at Brookhaven,” Jessie said, running to catch up. “My grandfather's. He was killed by one of the survivors from the Long Island outbreak after he went to murder Father Heall.”

“You came back for his body? You hated the man!”

“I didn't hate him,” Jessie replied. “Okay, maybe I did. But it's not his body I came back for, it's his Link. It holds a key to the firewall he put on mine.”

Ashley stopped, her face lit up with rage. “
Your
Link?” she shrieked. “You came back
because of your fucking Link
?”

Jessie gawped helplessly.

Ashley huffed. “No, I get it. A stupid piece of technology is more important than your best friend. Do you have any idea what I've been through?”

“You're not the only one, Ash,” Jessie said, getting a little angry herself.

Ash waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever.”

Jessie shook her head. “I'm so sorry, Ashley. We would never have left you behind if we'd known. I would've given my own life to save you.”

The iciness in Ashley's face persisted a moment longer before it started to slip away. “You would've?”

“Yes. You know that.”

A sob rose in Ashley's throat, and Jessie reached out and pulled her friend to her. Ashley's body went stiff for a moment, then melted.

The two girls held each other for several minutes, each sobbing and speaking incoherently. It didn't matter that they couldn't understand each other. It didn't matter that the Undead were hissing at them a dozen yards away. Weeks of strain and bottled up emotion, regrets and guilt, came tumbling out of them both, and they didn't need words to understand how badly they felt about it.

Ashley pulled away first. She wiped the tears from her face and guided Jessie toward the buildings. “Those things'll never go away if we stay out here.”

Jessie nodded and followed. There were so many questions to ask, so much to tell. But where to start? What should she tell her now, and what could wait? She started to head for the orange building, but Ashley veered away from it and angled instead toward the building that housed the mainframe.

“I suppose it's too much to hope that you brought my Link back with you,” she mumbled over her shoulder. To Jessie's ears, her voice seemed strangely unaffected. “When you guys left with it, I was trapped inside this fucking arcade. I couldn't even get down to the servers to try and reprogram the failsafe.”

“I left it at home. If I'd known you weren't—”

“Dead. Yeah, I know. You already said.”

Jessie was quiet for a moment. Despite her apology, it was clear Ashley wasn't going to forgive her so easily. “How did you get away from Ben?”

Ashley stopped so suddenly that Jessie nearly ran into her. “I shot the fucker,” she said. “I shot him, but I made sure it wasn't fatal. I wanted to make sure the zoms got to that asshole!” She was screaming again.

Another loud
POP!
came from the fence. Jessie jumped.

“I shot him with his own god damn shotgun, the bastard.”

“Why didn't you come back?”

“I tried to! But by then the compound was crawling with those things.”

“Not the whole time.”

Ashley turned, and the hardness was back in her eyes. “What, you don't believe me?”

Jessie nodded quickly. She gestured awkwardly toward the door twenty feet away, but when she tried to pass, Ashley raised an arm to block her.

“You left me.”

Jessie sighed. “You have to believe me. I went looking for you the next morning, after Eric came. You don't know how bad things were here, Ash. If you had been here, you would've known.” She raised her hands before Ashley could begin to protest. “I know it was just as hard for you. I can't imagine what Ben put you through — I don't
want
to know — but I accept that it was terrible. All I'm saying is, it was bad here, too.”

She paused, but Ashley just glared at her without speaking.

“Ash, Ben somehow managed to get inside the network. He made it so the Omegas on Eric's chopper went rogue. They crashed in the woods. Eric almost died. Reggie and I had to fight through hundreds of them to rescue him.”

She paused, hoping the mention of Reggie's name might temper her anger. “He . . . . He misses you terribly.”

Ashley looked away, her lips pulled tight against her teeth.

“He's the other reason I came, Ash. You don't know how torn up he was.” She grabbed Ashley's arm and turned her until their eyes locked. “He's in trouble.”

Ash's face twisted, but she didn't speak.

“He'll be so happy to see you.”

Will he?

“Yeah, me too,” Ashley quietly said, though she didn't look like she meant it. She pulled her arm out of Jessie's grip and erased the distance between them and the door in a half dozen steps. She jerked it open and disappeared inside, not bothering to wait for Jess.