S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (67 page)

They didn't say much to each other after getting into the car and leaving for work. All too soon they were on the highway, entering the flow of the traffic heading east. Ramon commented about the sun being right in his eyes. Lyssa nodded but didn't answer. It wasn't like the sun had just yesterday decided to start rising there to spite him.

He turned on the radio and set it to some music, though thankfully he kept the volume turned down low enough that it didn't intrude into her thoughts. It was just enough for both of them not to have to suffer the silence.

“There's something going on up ahead.”

Lyssa blinked and turned her head to the front. “We're in Medford already?”

“Next exit. Looks like they're not letting people off, though.”

He slowed and merged right behind a line of cars trying to exit. One by one they were being diverted back onto the highway by a solitary police officer standing in the middle of the lane, beads of sweat rolling down his hairy arms. A military truck was parked behind his patrol car. Ramon rolled his window down.

“Sorry, sir,” the officer said, squinting in at them, “but unless you're a resident or you can prove you have important business here, this exit is closed until further notice.”

“What's going on?”

“Are you a resident of the area?”

“We live over on Maycock,” Ramon lied. “Forest Glen Apartments.”

Lyssa frowned at him. Forest Glen was where his apartment had been. But the lease had been cancelled the week before.

Hadn't it?

The officer asked for proof of residency.

Ramon shook his head. “We just moved there and haven't transferred residency IDs yet. And our daughter's home alone. We just want to get her and we'll be on our way.”

The man glanced impatiently at him, then over to Lyssa. Finally he straightened and turned to look at the growing line of cars behind them.

“The rental agreement's somewhere in my papers on the backseat. I can get it if—”

The officer sighed and waved them through. “Go on,” he said. “But straight there and get your daughter. Then you have to leave. They're clearing out the town.”

“Why?”

“Before I change my mind, sir.”

Ramon steered the car slowly past the empty camouflage-painted truck, then accelerated up the ramp.

“Wonder what the hell is going on.” He pointed a finger at the line of cars across the road waiting to get onto the highway. Both the east- and west-bound ramps were backed up. “They really are trying to empty the town.”

Adding to the surreal effect were the emergency vehicles parked in each of the intersections, their lights flashing. And yet there was little sense of urgency at all. There were no sirens, no megaphone-wielding men demanding that people hurry. Everyone seemed to be taking it all in stride.

Lyssa straightened up in her seat and stared out through the windshield. “The radio said there was something happening east of here yesterday. I forgot all about it. This can't be related, could it?”

Ramon shrugged. “I doubt it, though I can't be certain. I heard about it, too, so I stayed on
25
to avoid the mess. Only took a little longer than usual to get home.”

She clenched her teeth and didn't say anything.

“Which way?” he asked, as they idled at an intersection.

“It's—”

Something slammed onto the hood of their car. It rose up and began pulling itself toward them.

“What the hell?” Ramon yelped.

The man raised his head and glared at them with his bloodshot eyes. Lyssa wanted to scream, but the stare cut her off as surely as if he'd wrapped his hands around her throat.

“Get out of the way!” Ramon shouted. He opened his window and stuck his head out. “Get the hell off my car. Move!”

The man dressed in the Liberty costume slowly pushed himself off the hood, but he wouldn't let them pass.

“Cops everywhere,” Ramon growled, “except when you need one.” He laid his fist on the horn.

The man started shouting at them. He was gesturing and pointing behind them.

“Rame!” Lyssa yelled, pulling his hands away from the horn. “Stop it! He's trying to tell us something.”

“The man's crazy.”

“Stand your ground,” the man shouted, his voice muffled by their windows. “It's your home! Don't let the government force you from it!”

“Hey, asshole, I said get away from my car!”

“Ramon!” Lyssa cried. He so rarely swore, and when he did it never failed to shock her. “Leave the man alone.”

“He's in our way!”

The cars behind them were starting to honk. Someone was shouting.

Lyssa opened her window. The man looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn't remember where she'd seen him before. Or maybe it was just the costume she recognized. “Can you tell us what's going on? Why do they want us to leave?”

“Lyssa! Close your window. It's the same whack job who stands out here on this corner every day. He's always protesting something. Last week it was the new tax proposals.”

That was it, the taxes. She remembered the flyer he'd handed to her, though now she couldn't remember what she'd done with it afterward. She was sure she hadn't thrown it away.

“Hey, come here.” She gestured toward herself, beckoning him to her window. “Can you tell me—”

“I said shut your window!”

The man edged his way toward her, his faded and tattered robe draping over the hood of the car. His skin — face and neck and arms — had been painted a sickly greenish-white. His eyes were dark, the edges of his eyelids red. “Beware the great corporate vampires,” he told her. “They've taken over the government and will bleed you dry!”

He grabbed the edge of her doorframe with the fingers of one hand and wouldn't let go. In the other hand he held a stack of printed flyers.

Lyssa shied away. Something about him frightened her now that he was so close. He didn't look right. He looked . . . deranged.

“Great, now you've done it,” Ramon complained. “You spoke to him and now he's never going to let us go. Well, I don't care. If he doesn't move, I'm running him over.”

“No, you'll hurt him!”

“A government which feasts on the flesh of the poor,” the man yelled at them, “is itself diseased and dying. They are infected with the sickness of greed! There is no cure for us but to rid ourselves of the scourge!”

“Let go of the car!” Ramon shouted at him. He started edging forward.

“They are a cancer! They're taking over your property, your income! What next? Your body? Your mind? Will they claim them, too? Stop the disease before it takes your soul! Resist! We have everything to lose!”

Lyssa's window began to close. With a startled cry, she pulled her head back. “Stop it, Ramon! I want to ask him something!” She fumbled clumsily for the control, arresting the window's rise.

“No, Lyssa, we're going now! We're leaving this whack job. We're going to be late as it is.”

“He's not crazy— Wait! Mister . . . . What's your name?”

“Adrian,” he answered, his voice raspy from shouting. He handed her a flyer from his stack, which he seemed to have just remembered. “Adrian Bowman, ma'am. And I'm not crazy. Please, read this.”

And for just a moment she could see the madness behind his paint, in his bloodshot eyes. But it wasn't insanity. It was terror. It was a fear so coherent, so
aware
, that it reached into the deepest depths of her soul and moved her.

“I beg you,” he whispered, before straightening up and shouting at the line of cars behind them to resist.

“Christ bullshit!” Ramon snapped.

The man turned to Lyssa one last time. He reached in and grabbed her arm. “Christ won't help you. Only the bird. Listen to the bird. The bird sings the truth.”

“Wait—!”

But he was already gone. Lyssa twisted around in her seat and saw him slamming his palms onto the hood of the car behind them. He was shouting again, “Go home! Resist the corporate vampires!”

“
A little birdie told me
,” Ramon said in a mocking voice, as he pulled forward. “See? I told you he was cuckoo.”

But she frowned and stared blankly at the paper in her hands.
Listen to the bird
, he'd said.

“Fucking nutcase.”

“Okay,” Lyssa said curtly. “I get it.” She wasn't sure why the man had angered her husband so much. “He actually sounded halfway articulate to me.”

“And halfway freakazoid.”

“Maybe if we read—”

Ramon snatched the paper away from her, wadded it up and threw it out the window. “I told you he's out there every morning spewing his self-righteous, antigovernment, delusional crap. Reminds me of that asshat on the radio show you always listen to. It's all the same garbage.”

Lyssa sat stunned for a moment by the vitriol. “Asshat?” she sputtered.

“That stupid Jail Bird.”

“Jay, not Jail!”

“I don't care!”

And then the man in the Liberty costume's words echoed in her mind:
The bird sings the truth.

 

They arrived in front of Drew's house five minutes later. The street was visibly empty, completely devoid of people. Lyssa had this overwhelming feeling that the residents had left in a hurry, although there was nothing obvious to suggest this. No doors left wide open. No hastily packed and improperly latched suitcases spilling their guts out on the front lawns.

Ramon parked at the curb and shut off the engine. Lyssa felt uneasy, exposed. Her eyes strayed to the opposite curb, as if expecting to see a dark sedan parked there. But Ramon's Audi was the only car visible on the entire block.

They got out and proceeded up the front walk and onto the porch. Ramon stood behind her, a frown of impatience deepening his brow. “Well, aren't you going to knock?”

The sound reached into the house and came back to them, dull and lifeless, the telltale knell of abandonment.

“Try the doorbell.”

“Just wait, Rame.”

He sighed. “I don't think he's here.”

Lyssa knocked harder, rattling the door in its frame. She shouted Drew's name. This, too, seemed to hang in the lifeless air.

“It must be some kind of military exercise.”

She looked over at him, frowning.

“You know. A drill of some sort. Or maybe a tsunami evacuation exercise.”

“They still have those?”

It'd been at least a dozen years since the last one she could remember. And that had occurred when she and her family were camping down on the shore. They'd been forced to leave the beach, but after checking in at the staging area, they'd been allowed to return.

The drills were all about paperwork and response times and route planning, a way for the emergency services to coordinate logistics in the event of an actual emergency. They wanted to know which traffic corridors would be most impacted.

Back in the days right after the ice shelf broke off and caused the floods — it was nearly twenty years ago — the drills had been regular occurrences. A major inconvenience for those who lived close to the coast or in flood plains, but like all things routine, people simply got used to them.

Just like when they stopped occurring.

Ramon shrugged. “That's the only thing I can think of that makes sense. It couldn't be anything too serious, otherwise they never would have let us in.

Lyssa stepped to the edge of the porch. She glanced up and down the street. “There are no cars,” she grudgingly conceded. She was still upset over his outburst at the costumed protester. But when she moved to step down from the porch, he stopped her.

“I'll circle around the house and meet you back here,” he offered. “Why don't you try calling him again on the phone? If he's inside, you might be able to hear it ringing. That'll tell you if he's home.”

He bounded down the steps and disappeared around the corner.

Lyssa dialed Drew's number, but when she stuck her ear against the door, she heard nothing coming from inside. And neither another loud knock nor even the doorbell elicited any kind of response. On a whim, she called his home number. In the distance, as if from very far away, she heard its harsh jangle. She disconnected when it failed to pick up or go to his answering machine after about the twentieth ring.

The leaves in the trees fluttered in the dry breeze. The morning's warmth foretold another unbearably hot day. Already, she could feel it pinching her cheeks and the corners of her eyes, scratching at the inside of her nose.

Where the hell is he?

And where, for that matter, was Ramon? He was overdue.

Several houses away, a sprinkler popped on, ratcheting lazily. The water arced over the lawn, splashed onto the sidewalk. The sound was like the scritching of a thousand crickets in unison.

She heard the deadbolt turning behind her.

“Drew!” she exclaimed whirling around. But it was Ramon standing there instead.

“Back door was open,” he explained.

“You went inside his house?”

“I mean it was
wide
open, Lyssa. What would you expect me to do? I was worried and checked around. But the house is empty. And his car's not in the garage.” He shrugged and gave her a sympathetic look. “Nothing appears taken, so he's still around. But he's not inside.”

Lyssa's mind whirled. “Let's take a drive over to the hospital.”

Ramon held up his phone. “Already thought of that. They have no record of him checking in.”

Lyssa scowled. “If he's sick, then he would be there or at home. Why isn't he here?”

“Because, Lyssa, he's not sick.” He gave her a disgruntled look. “He's off working for someone else.”