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

Rain streamed down the window outside, making his reflection look like he was crying.

“What about the quarantine in Manhattan?”

Kelly shrugged.

“Do you think they're telling the truth about it?”

“What's there to lie about, Jess? Everyone already knows what happened. The basics, anyway.”

“Not that we brought them here.”

“We didn't bring them here.” He sighed and shook his head.

“They're claiming it's been fully contained.”

“Then it is.”

“And you believe it?” Jessie stood and watched his back. Even without being able to see his face, she could still sense his tension. “Since when do you just swallow everything Media tells us?”

He turned, drying his hands on a dish towel. “Why are you doing this, Jess?”

“Doing what? I'm just trying to have a conversation. Or has it been so long that you've forgotten what that's like?”

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “We aren't responsible for what happened there. It doesn't help to keep dwelling on that.”

She looked away. Nothing he could tell her would ever convince her that they weren't at fault. The zombies had been coming after them when they returned through the Midtown tunnel. If they hadn't come back, then neither would the zombies. It was just luck that the tunnel was submerged in water, which slowed them down. Luck that Lower Manhattan was only very sparsely populated. Luck that NCD had responded as quickly as they had to contain the invasion.

Too much luck and coincidence begins to look suspicious.

“That part of New York is still off-limits,” she said. “Why is it taking them so long to clear the quarantine?

“I don't know, Jess. I'm sure it takes time to check all the buildings, to make sure there aren't any IUs hiding in any of them. Since they're not implanted, it's not like they can run a device scan.”

Jessie frowned. “It's just that Eric has been working so much lately. Why would they make him do that?”

“I guess they have to involve Necrotics Crimes if they're getting ready to lift the restrictions. He's probably got a ton of reports to file, IDs to match to the old missing persons reports from the Long Island outbreak. Plus, there's the new federal standards everyone has to meet. They came to your class, didn't they? NCD officers have been attached to the screening teams, so that's got to be taking up a lot of his time, too.”

She was going to tell him that she'd missed the screening, but he took her face in his hands and kissed her lips, and that put the thought on hold. She could smell his scent, the body soap he used, the shampoo and the underlying sweetness that was him, and suddenly she didn't want to talk. She wanted him,
all
of him, to the exclusion of everything else. She wanted to pull him close, to hold him against her and never let him go.

They kissed for another moment, then her stomach let out a rumble even louder than the rattle of the rain on the glass and the clatter of the wind battering and shaking the window in its frame. Lips still locked, teeth and noses bumping, they both began to laugh.

“I've got to finish these dishes,” Kelly said, turning back to the sink.

She let him turn, but said in a husky voice, “You can try, anyway.”

“Ooh, a challenge. What do I get if I win?”

She slid her hands from his shoulders and down his back. They dove beneath his shirt and began to trace the ropes of muscles running up and down his spine. She leaned in and rested her forehead on his back and concentrated on her fingers swimming the channels of his scars. She heard his breath quicken, and she smiled.

Outside, the thunder rumbled.

The pad of her thumb brushed the edges of the bandage on his side, but she was careful not to put any pressure there. That one bite was taking its time healing. Her hands joined in front, spiraled around his belly button, fingers twining in the soft hair. They began their slow slide down, down past the tightness of his waistband. The quickening of his heart was unmistakable against her cheek. He was a statue, motionless, entranced by her teasing. Jessie's smile widened. She closed her eyes and pictured them upstairs.

Neither of them pulled away from the other. They simply breathed and rocked, their bodies one with the rhythm of the gathering storm. And for now, they were satisfied to just simply exist.

† † †

The last of the dishes was dried and put away just as the storm outside was ending. It had come slowly, built throughout the evening, then crashed down with a sudden fury as they made love upstairs in her room. Thunder ricocheted around them. A couple times the lights had flickered, and one thunderbolt had sounded so loud and close that they both stopped and Jessie had jumped from the bed and rushed over to the window with a thin blanket wrapped around her. She wanted to see if the lightning had hit somewhere nearby. The trees lashed about in the wind and the sky flashed with frightening regularity, piercing the clouds and burning their ghostly shapes into her mind. But the streetlights continued to glow in the lashing wind and the power remained on.

They held each other for a long time afterward, just listening to the storm beat itself up. Jessie ran her hands through his hair and Kelly closed his eyes and softly moaned her name.

When he was asleep, she slipped downstairs and finished cleaning up. She wrapped the leftover casserole and stuck it into the fridge. Resting her hands on the edge of the sink in front of her, she gazed out into the dark night. Their lovemaking was a sweet, strong memory, and she closed her eyes and re-imagined it, enjoying a moment of fantasy that switched their roles: him sneaking up behind her and reaching around her waist.

This was how their lives should be. Maybe, someday, they could get it all back again.

Another sudden boom shook the window and she jumped. And then Kelly really was there, as if the thunder had somehow wrenched the fantasy from her mind. She turned in his arms. They kissed, and their hands explored the old familiar landscape of their backs, their necks, their hair.

“Jessie?”

“Hmm?” she replied.

“Why do you have these?” He tossed the bag of pills onto the counter. “I emptied your pockets to put your pants in the laundry.”

Jessie frowned. “They're not mine. I mean, I knew they were there, but—” She sighed. “It's a long story.”

She pulled him close and kissed his lips.

He pushed away. “Are you zoning?”

“No, Kelly.”

After a moment, he yielded to her and they embraced. But the moment had passed and their kisses felt empty.

She broke away. “I'm going to go take a shower,” she said, swallowing awkwardly, pushing past him. Her stomach was starting to act up again. She could feel the pressure building inside of her.

“Want company?”

But she didn't answer. She ran up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door, whipping up the toilet seat. Her stomach refused her, clamping down with such ferocity that she felt like she was being sliced in half.

When the cramps passed, she went and stood in the shower and rinsed off.

Kelly was waiting in her room— their room, though it was still decorated only for her, a girl's bedroom. She realized with a sense of loss that it spoke not at all of him. He was a visitor here, as if he was just passing through.

He gave her a worried look, but she tried to brush it off with a flippant wave of the hand. “I think it was the cheese,” she said, and she tried to laugh. He watched her for a few seconds, then he got up and went into the bathroom.

After she heard the shower turn on and was sure he was in it, she retrieved his Link from the dresser. She sank down on her bed and stared at the device in her hands, ashamed of what she was thinking, afraid of what she might find if she actually went ahead and did what she knew she shouldn't do.

The communication device was exactly like hers, a thin black rectangle of nearly indestructible plastic, a single recessed button. The silver paint on the Arc emblem was beginning to rub off, and there were faint scratches over the entire surface. When she pushed the button, his home screen popped up, an image of the two of them before last summer's breakup-slash-makeup. She wished she could remember who had taken it. Was it Ashley?

Micah.

Yes. Micah was the one who had shot it. A backyard barbecue, sauce smeared on Kelly's shirt from the food fight Reggie had started.

I love you, Jessie.

Kelly's words. Except, somehow, it was Micah's voice speaking them.

The image blurred before she blinked the tears away. After scrolling down to R
ECENT
P
INGS
, she pushed the button.

The number at the top of the list wasn't one she recognized, and there was no identifier beside it to tell her to whom it belonged. In fact, except for her own number and those of his parents' Links, this was the only identifier he'd sent pings to or received pings from in the past week.

Her thumb hovered over the connect button for a moment, hesitating. She knew this was a breach of trust, but she just had to be sure.

The hard plastic felt hot beneath her thumb. She set the Link on the bed and closed her eyes. She was so confused. On the one hand, she wanted to trust Kelly — did trust him — yet on the other something inside of her kept saying she was wrong to.

She had to be certain.

She picked up the Link again and quickly pushed the button to connect before she could stop herself. If Kelly had been honest with her earlier and he had indeed been speaking with the hospital, then all would be resolved in a matter of seconds. She'd live with her guilt, and he would never have to know she'd ever doubted him.

She waited for it to connect, heard the click as it did.

“
Sisters of Mercy
,” came the response.

Jessie closed her eyes and let out a deep breath through her mouth. She hadn't realized she'd been holding it.

“
If you know your party's extension, please say or key it in now.
”

‡ ‡ ‡

Jessie woke with a start from a deep sleep, gasping for breath. She sat up and looked around the room, blinking at the bright sunlight streaming in through her window. The space beside her on the bed was empty, only the imprint of Kelly's body in it, the mattress already cold.

She lay back down and closed her eyes as guilt from doubting him washed over her. Not even the best night's sleep she'd had in a month could erase it.

How could she have suspected him of hiding something from her? Of course he was acting strangely since their return. They all were!

She sighed and swung her feet over the side of the bed. The cramping in her side suddenly flared, accompanied by a wave of dizziness. She waited for it to pass before standing. She could hear someone downstairs in the kitchen and, as she approached the top of the steps, wanted to call out her mother's name. But another spasm sent her scrambling into the bathroom. She'd never had menstrual cramps this bad in the past, and she wondered if the infection or the trauma she'd suffered had somehow messed things up inside of her.

She had a high tolerance for pain, something she'd developed over the course of her hapkido lessons. She'd had a broken collar bone when she was fourteen, the result of an ill-timed lunge straight into a front kick. She broke a toe a few months later; dislocated her thumb when she was sixteen. None of that compared in any way to the pain she'd suffered while on Long Island— the sprained wrist, the dislocated shoulder. The bite. But this was a different sort of pain, a new kind of suffering that exploded from deep inside of her and burned with such intensity that it made her feel as if her stomach and intestines were trying to force themselves up and out of her body through her throat.

She fought the impulse to vomit long enough to turn on the shower, and then waited until steam began to rise. Her skin screamed as she stepped into the scalding spray, but this was pain she could deal with. It was pain she'd rather focus on, pain which came from outside of her.
That
she could deal with. The scalding swallowed the other pain, though not entirely.

Lowering her head into the blast, she let the water run over her until the cramps subsided and the water turned cold. After she finished washing, she turned it off and roughly toweled her goose-pimpled skin dry.

She found Eric in the kitchen.

“Did I hear Mom?”

Eric was leaning over the stove and he jerked his head up at the sound of her voice.

“No.”

She cinched the tie of her robe tighter about her waist and stepped over to the fridge. “Where's Kelly?”

“Left already. Grabbed something to eat and took off, said he needed to stop off at home— his parents' house, I mean. To check on Kyle.”

He knows you sneaked into his Link. Why else would he leave without waking you?

She tried to dismiss the thought as so much paranoia and guilt.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Cleaning,” Eric answered, as if that wasn't already obvious. “I couldn't sleep.”

She regarded him out of the corner of her eye as she went about pouring herself a bowl of cereal. He was scrubbing away at the stovetop with such force that it looked as if he were trying to remove the enamel. He swiped a forearm across his forehead. The back of his shirt was wet with sweat.

“You have to stop skipping school, Jessie,” he told her, his words punctuated by the ratcheting motion of his arm. “I can't keep covering for you.”

She didn't answer. She hadn't been aware he even knew.

“Keep this up and they'll start adding days to your Life Service Commitment.”

She chuffed. “Like I care about that.”

“Well, I do! As your legal guardian, I—”

“You're not my legal guardian.”

He pulled the burner grill off and started cleaning the gas jets beneath it. His silence seemed to validate the truth of his claim.