S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (108 page)

The memory froze her feet to the floor. She didn't really need to know about the water. She just needed to get back upstairs. She needed to leave.

With shaking fingers, she woke her Link and saw that it was just after five-thirty in the morning. Dawn would be breaking soon. The Live Players would be coming for her. She needed to be gone.

Assuming, of course, that the wind had stopped.

On a whim, she pressed the elevator button, but the door didn't open. With all the water, it was probably prudent not to take it anyway. But the stairwell was right across the hall from the bathroom, which meant she'd have to walk past it.

Ollie ollie oxen free . . . .
came the echo of that memory once again, and she shivered.

“Stop freaking yourself out!”

But she couldn't help it. That terrible moment when she'd turned around flashed through her mind, when Jake opened his mouth and she saw that swollen tongue of his, how it was already turning gray with the husk of death, how his breath held the faint perfume of rot, and moans spewed from between his chapped lips like gasses escaping an exhumed casket.

Ollie ollie oxen free.

I see you and you see me.

I'll bite you and dead you'll be.

Ollie ollie oxen free.

She pressed her hands against the sides of her head. It was buzzing now from the horror of that memory. She could still hear him screaming in pain, not from the infection he'd gotten himself, but from the infection she'd given him when she injected him with the treatment. She would never forgive herself for it.

You did everything you could to help. You went to find Father Heale. You got the treatment.

But the syringe carrying the precious blood had been contaminated. She'd known the risks of injecting him with it. She'd been warned it might give him meningitis, and that might make him even worse.

But the alternative was unacceptable.

The alternative happened anyway. He died and came back, but because of the meningitis he became a raving monster with a rage equaling his hunger. The way he tore into poor Julia with the fury of a pack of rabid wolves was a memory that would never leave her, not as long as she lived.

You did it. He was going to die anyway, but you tortured him with that diseased shot.

She squeezed her head even harder to push the memory away, but the cries in her mind only seemed to grow stronger. They filled her head with such pain and anguish, with hunger and anger.

It's your guilt.

“Stop it!” she begged. “Stop it! STOP IT!”

And, for just a moment, there was silence. But then it started again:
Jessssss . . . . JessEEEEEEE!

It was this place that was doing it to her, driving her insane. She had to get out. She grabbed her backpack and staff and ran for the stairs. Objects floating in the water bruised her shins. She slammed into the walls. She ran past the room where they'd piled the dead zombies Ben Wolfram had sent in after them. Past the haunted bathroom with the spectral Jake.

The red emergency lights painted everything the color of blood.

The door to the stairwell resisted her attempt to open it, so she pushed harder, not even bothering to check that it was safe. She could feel the water gushing out as it yielded, swirling about her ankles, rising past her calves like a river of blood. She could feel things floating in it but didn't want to see what they might be.

Jake's voice chased her from that place, so full of despair and torment. She needed to run. She needed to get him out of her head.

So she ran, even as she knew she'd never be able to escape him.

She took the stairs two at a time, blindly rushing up them in the crimson glow, slipping and bruising her knees, scraping her elbows, skinning her shins. She slowed only after reaching the second landing. The accusing voice in her head was starting to fade, blissfully falling behind, as if the memory and the voice it used depended on her proximity with the bathroom.

“I'm sorry, Jake,” she whimpered. “I'm so sorry.”

At last she reached the top, and the voice was little more than a whisper.

At some point during the night, the door to the stairwell had been forced open against the weight of the flood. The water had rushed down and piled up against the bottom door and seeped through.

What lay before her was a disaster. Mud-soaked debris lay strewn all about. In places the muck was several inches deep. One corner of the building appeared to be crushed, and it was here that the water had seemingly entered. The rest of the building seemed largely intact.

Through the holes she could see outside, out into the gray. It was still raining, but at least the wind was gone.

She picked her way carefully around the flotsam, down the hallway toward the front door.

Outside, the world was completely changed, not the same one she'd last set eyes upon just a few hours before. It looked as if a bomb had exploded. The orange building from which she'd fled after midnight now lay in ruin. The duffle with the rest of the gaming console was still buried somewhere underneath.

She turned around, taking in the destruction. Above the building, she could make out the skeleton of the Stream's main transmission tower. It had fallen in on itself and taken out the water storage tank as it went. In just a few minutes, it had emptied straight into the building. She'd been lucky she hadn't slept upstairs.

Turning left, she picked her way back toward the gate. There was nothing left for her in this place. She needed to get to Brookhaven and find her grandfather's Link. Dawn — or some dreary semblance of it, anyway — had already broken, and the Live Players were almost certainly on their way.

She paused when she saw the Undead at the gate and drew back against the building. They pressed their bodies against the fence, which meant the power to it was also out. A noise behind her made her turn and she saw that at least one had gotten inside the compound. By the timbre of its moan, it was clearly aware of her presence.

She pulled the katana from her pack and replaced it with her bo staff. But she only held the sword in her left hand just in case. In her right, she clutched the EM pistol's grip. Marching determinedly around the corner, she angled for where they were densest. Without breaking stride, she raised the gun and sighted it. Rain dripped into her eyes, forcing her to blink it away. But she didn't have to see very well. Precision wasn't essential.

The tree that she and the others had climbed to gain access weeks before had been uprooted by the wind and now lay over the chain link, burying it beneath its twisted branches. The dead were crawling over it to get inside.

“Hey you!” she screamed. “Over here!” Her mouth felt clumsy, her swollen lip unwilling to properly form the words.

They raised their voices in response, a disharmonious wail which somehow sounded too much like the wind that had blown across the compound last night.

She ignored the first ones, which took a second or two to register that she'd passed them, and waded straight to the edge of the horde. Now she pulled the trigger. She didn't even wait for the things to drop before shoving the pistol into the pocket at her side and switching the sword back into her right hand.

The mass of bodies before her collapsed and grew still. The EM blast had cleared a swath roughly seventy feet deep and just as wide. It was enough for her to get past the perimeter, but then she'd have to head for where they weren't as numerous.

She sliced across the neck of one as it stepped within arm's length of her. Her arm jerked as it fell, the blade caught between bones. She cursed the dullness of the edge; as a ceremonial gift, the sword had never meant to be used to remove heads.

Grunting with effort, she jerked the metal free. Another precious second wasted. She could hear more of them coming at her from behind. Still she ignored them and turned toward the gap in the fence. She took a running start, knowing that stepping carefully over the shifting bodies would save her no time. Her foot landed square on the back of the first body with a wet
thwack
. She felt it shift, but already she was leaping to the next.

Ribs and sternums cracked beneath her feet. Chests collapsed. She tried not to think about it.

She slowed only as she reached the fence. The barbed wire had snapped and the ends threatened to snag her like it had snagged one of the Undead. It hung unmoving in midair. She stepped past it. Then she leapt.

To her right lay the woods and dozens more Undead coming straight toward her out of the mist.

To the left was the road and only a solitary figure. But that one was running.

Jessie cursed beneath her breath and turned right toward the horde.

 

After the night's storm, the streets felt strangely deserted. So did the hospital. It was as if a bad vapor had stolen into everyone's homes and sickened all the people.

Kelly slipped in through the Radiology entrance to avoid passing by the security desk, but it soon became apparent the extra precaution wasn't warranted. Nobody gave him a second glance as he made his way down the subdued hallways looking for Doctor White.

He needed to know what had happened with her. He needed that cure. After walking in on his parents fighting yesterday, he was desperate to get it.

It hadn't been so much them disagreeing with each other as them venting their frustrations, but it killed Kelly to hear his mother crying. “I wish we could just run away,” she said, unaware that he was in the hallway by the front door and listening to them. “They don't have these kinds of problems in Canada.”

“You know we can't, honey. Without his treatment, Kyle will eventually get sick and die. And then . . . .”

“What treatment? Huh? Jessie's gone now. She'll never come back.”

“Honey, don't—”

“It's all her fault. We should never have let Kelly see her. If I had known what would happen, I would never have allowed it.”

“You can't blame Jessica. She had nothing to do with Kyle's infection, you know that. And if it wasn't for her, he would have died a long time ago.”

“It's because of her that Kyle is sick! Her and her family.”

“You know how much Kelly adores her.”

“Well, obviously she doesn't feel the same way about him!”

“You don't know that.”

“If she did, then she wouldn't have left like this, especially right after marrying him. I knew she was bad news from the first.”

“Honey, don't.”

They stopped when he appeared in the doorway. His mother's face flushed red and she wouldn't meet his eyes. His father asked him where he'd gone, and he told them about finding Doctor White ill in her office.

“Did she tell you she has a cure for Kyle?” he asked his parents. He thought it might help set their minds at ease, but it only emboldened his mother into saying to his face what he'd already heard.

“We don't need Jessie Daniels, then,” she said. “
You
don't need her.” She told him he should file for an annulment. “We can't have our family name tarnished by the likes of her.”

The fighting continued for another hour after that. A lot of terrible things were said.

Later, after his father had finally managed to get his mother to fall asleep, he pulled Kelly aside to apologize. He asked if he knew anything about how Jessie was doing. But Kelly had nothing new to report.

“I've got a friend scanning the entertainment streams,” Mister Corben confided. “He's going to ping me as soon as they air anything.” He pulled Kelly into an awkward hug. “I'm sorry about all this. I know neither of you asked for it.”

Kelly thought he was finished, but when they separated, his father said, “We need that cure. You and Kyle need it. We can't just sit back and hope Jessica succeeds in accomplishing what she set out to do there. Do you know what I'm saying, son?”

Kelly stared at his father without speaking.

“I'm saying it's a long shot she'll make it, Kel.” He put a hand on his son's shoulder. “And I can see it in your eyes that you think the same way too, which means whatever cure Doctor White has, we need it. The sooner, the better.”

It hurt to hear his father say it out loud. Kelly had resisted doing so. Outwardly, he told himself that she had a chance, but now he knew it was just because that's what he thought people expected of him. But he couldn't waste anymore time or energy hoping. For Kyle's sake and his own, he needed to focus on Doctor White's cure.

As the night wore on and the storm grew in strength, he attempted to ping both Doctor White's and Eric's Links several more times. Neither answered. Media was reporting that the storm blowing in from the Atlantic had stalled over western Long Island and Manhattan. There it sat, battering Arc's headquarters like some apocalyptic judgment being delivered. The weather forecasters couldn't agree whether the system was going to move inland or head back out to sea. All they knew was that it was dumping a tremendous amount of rain and the winds were approaching hurricane force.

Seventy miles away in Greenwich, the winds and rain, though strong, were an order of magnitude less severe. Trees were coming down, but the destruction wasn't as bad as it was in New York City.

As expected, Arc downplayed the risks to the network. Nevertheless, they called upon their subcontractor, the Department of Civil Projects, to immediately shut down and contain all CU assets. It was a tacit acknowledgment that they believed the network might suffer a breach. Old episodes of
Survivalist
continued to air, but nothing live came from the arcade.

His father's friend never did ping with news.

Shortly after three in the morning, Kelly finally gave up checking the television and went to bed. He was up again just past six and arrived at the hospital less than a half hour later.

The nurses' station at the Emergency Room was sparsely staffed. A doctor sat in one corner drinking a cup of coffee and reading what Kelly assumed was a patient record on a tablet. A tired-looking nurse emerged from a back room and sat down at the desk with a sigh.