S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (144 page)

Kelly cut him off. “Kyle's donor was your husband? The man who was infected, the one from Seattle, he was your husband?”

“We were all working to find a cure, but they gave me nothing. They were holding me back. And I was so frustrated with the pace of Drew's — with Father Heale's — research, almost as much as I was with my husband's. Both of them refused to consider using human subjects. I told them we would never know for sure unless we could test our treatments on people. The day Ramon came to me saying he had the cure, he looked so sure of it. But he still only wanted to test it in animals. The only way to be sure of anything was to test it in an infected person.”

A change was happening inside Kelly. He seemed to be filling up, growing larger. His face was red and getting redder. “What are you saying?” he whispered. “Are you saying you infected Kyle on purpose?” He looked like he didn't want to know.

“I infected my husband. It was a very weak form, meant only to get him sick so that he'd be force to test his cure in himself. He was sick when he returned a few days later. I gave him his own cure, and waited to see if it would work. But the oncology surgeon harvested his marrow and injected it into Kyle. And I—”

“No!” Kelly backed away from her, his eyes wide with horror. The redness of his anger had bled away. Now his face was as white as a sheet. “No, you didn't do that. He . . . .”

“Doctor White leaned toward him, pleading with her eyes. “But I saved your brother. I treated him with Jessica's blood, kept him alive. And now he can be cured. Now we know it works!” She pointed at the girl on the couch. “I infected myself, too. And look at me. I'm alive after a week.”

“
WHAT DID YOU DO?
” Kelly screamed. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “Oh my God! Oh my God, you did— You infected Kyle!”

He leapt at her and wrapped his hands around her throat. Reggie didn't move. The doctor's confession had shocked him to the core. He'd strongly suspected the woman was unbalanced, but he'd had no idea just how badly.

“I'm going to fucking kill you!”

Kelly had climbed on top of her and was pressing down, choking her. She had her hands on his, trying to pull them away. She kicked and thrashed beneath him, but he was beyond reason now, beyond any sort of sensibility. He wasn't aware of what he was doing anymore, just reacting.

Four years of pent up fury, of simmering anger tearing him up inside, confusing his feelings for the girl he loved yet at the same time hated for what her family had created, all came to the surface. He cried out in anguish for his brother, whom this madwoman had sentenced to death on some pretense of granting him a reprieve which she didn't possess.

Her face turned blue and her struggles weakened, yet Kelly's hands squeezed even tighter. Tears fell from his eyes and splashed onto her face. Lips purple-gray, tongue protruding now, the woman was dying. Her eyes bulged while her brain tried to strip the last of the oxygen from her blood. There was not enough to save her.

Movement on the couch caught Reggie's eye. The girl had woken. She sat up and turned to look at them, and her own eyes were pearly white with cataracts. The deeper blackness in her own lips had faded to a dull gray. She opened her mouth. “Maaamaaa?”

One of Doctor White's hands slipped off Kelly's and drifted to the floor.

“Mama? I had . . . dream.”

A shiver passed through Reggie. He stepped over to the couch. Doctor White's struggles had ceased. Both arms now rested beside her, both limp. Reggie reached down and pried Kelly's fingers away. “Let go, Kelly,” he said.

He finally managed to get him off of her.

A moment passed, and nobody moved. Then Doctor White sucked in a huge breath of air, the air shrieking as it whistled past her crushed vocal cords.

“Noooo!” Kelly wailed, and twisted away from Reggie. But the larger boy refused to release him. He hugged his arms to his side and held him until he was sure the woman would live.

“Listen to me, Kel,” he hissed in his ear. “Cassie's awake! She's awake.”

“It's not fair!”

“No, it isn't. But you can't take her away now,” Reggie said. “She's alive. And for better or worse, she needs to be a mother again.”

Kelly sobbed openly. He leaned against Reg and the strength went completely out of his body. Together they collapsed to the floor while the blind girl on the couch watched and waited.

* * *

“What would you do to save the life of your only child?”

Kelly didn't respond. He'd retreated deep inside of himself.

Doctor White took another sip of water and grimaced as she tried to swallow. Her voice was little more than a whisper, cracked and broken, without strength or inflection. Just like the woman it came out of.

She'd confessed everything— how she'd been secretly conducting her research on Kyle until she'd figured out how to use the stem cells to counter the disease. How she'd finally, at long last, tested it upon herself, injecting herself with the same attenuated virus she'd injected into her husband years back. All to save the daughter she'd left here over a decade before.

The admissions had been horrifying enough, but when she spoke about finding the Infected child in a house down the street and forcing it to bite Cassie to save her from dying of rabies, Reggie's horror reached a new level he never thought possible. In all of his life, he had never met anyone so depraved. It stunned him into silence.

But not into inaction.

If it weren't for the girl on the couch, he would have gladly finished what Kelly had started. He would have choked the life out of the woman, leaving her just shy of dead, and then thrown her out into the street to be taken by the Infected. There was no more fitting end for her than to spend eternity as one of them.

But the girl had spoken. She'd recognized her mother, after all these years and despite her blind eyes. It was beyond belief, and yet to see it himself was to accept that she really had been brought back from the dead. She was alive. The girl she had once been, was again.

He couldn't take her mother away from her, not now when she needed her the most.

He couldn't.

But neither could he be a part of this anymore. He needed to go, to put distance between this and himself. He needed to not think about any of this, not the living dead girl or the mother who had made her that way. Not Kyle or the thousands of Infected here on the island. Not the Infected elsewhere.

Not Ashley. Or Micah. Or Jake.

Because to think about them would be to admit that they really weren't. They were still there inside, just as Kelly had guessed. The little girl had proven it.

God, how many of them had he killed, thinking they were gone? How many people had he watched slaughtered in
The Game
?

The woman was still trying to explain herself, but Reggie had zoned her out. He stood up and went over to Kelly and pulled him out of the chair. He came easily, responding to Reggie's touch almost as if he were a Player himself and Reggie his Operator.

“We're leaving, brah. Now.”

He started to lead him toward the garage. Together, they walked to the door.

Reggie could feel Doctor White's eyes on them, on his back. If he turned from the doorway to the garage, he knew he would still be able to see her, and he almost did turn. But he didn't want to look upon her face. He didn't think he'd be able to control himself if he did.

He reached for the knob and turned.

“She's pregnant.”

Reggie hesitated. He had no idea what the woman was talking about, or who. Clearly she couldn't mean Cassie.

He gave Kelly a gentle push in the back to get him moving again down the steps into the unlit garage.

“I was getting some anomalous results with her latest blood test, so I had it checked. Jessica's almost two months pregnant.”

 

“Turn around,” Eric said.

“What? No!”

They'd just passed the last of the Infected at the mouth of the alleyway. It had been slow going, as Gilfoy tried his best to avoid running any of them over. Eric wasn't sure if it was out of respect for the victims, squeamishness, or if he worried that the car might get stuck or damaged.

“Turn around. We can't leave those people back there.”

“And how are we going to save them?” the police officer asked. He swerved around a burning car, its doors flung wide as if they'd been blasted open by some intense pressure. “I can fit four more people in here, max. Maybe five. There are more than twenty people back there. Let me get you out of here first, then I'll—”

“Now,” Eric said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead on his sleeve. He could feel the adrenaline leaking away from him already, leaving him exhausted and trembling with weakness. “There's not a single person back there who can deal with this situation properly. They will die, all of them. They need someone who—”

“They'll be safe, Daniels. They just need to get onto the roof.”

“And then what? They know they've got no food, no water. They're going to panic.” Eric reached for the door handle. “I'm not worried about what the Infected will do to them. I'm worried about what they might do to each other. Desperation and ignorance cause as many casualties in these sorts of crises than the Infected themselves.” He opened the door and stuck a foot out.

“Damn it, Daniels!” Gilfoy slowed down. “You're in no shape to— All right! Stop! I'm turning around, but we need a plan. And really, you're not going to last long with your arm like that.” He shook his head. “Honestly, I don't know how anyone could do something like that.”

“Desperation,” Eric replied. He looked out the window. “Like I said, it makes people do stupid things.”

If he'd just waited another twenty minutes . . . . But how could he know anyone was coming for him? He'd had to do it to survive.

“There,” Eric said, pointing at a delivery truck parked in front of a bakery. It took all his strength just to lift his arm. “We can fit everyone inside that. Pull over next to it, and keep an eye out for me for Infected. I'm going to jump it.”

“With one hand? You can barely even sit up.”

“You have a better plan?”

Gilfoy pulled up next to the driver's side door and got out, leaving his own door open and the patrol car's engine running. When he folded the truck's visor down, a key fell out, which he held up for Eric to see. “It's a stick, so I'll drive.”

He helped Eric into the passenger seat, then climbed into the cab and started the truck up.

“You really are not looking so hot,” Gilfoy said.

Eric gave him a weak nod. “You keep saying that, but I'm fine.” In truth he felt like collapsing.

The road ahead was nearly empty, a deep canyon between the cliff walls formed by the warehouses. Only a few stragglers remained wandering aimlessly about outside and—

mooing

—moaning. They apparently hadn't gotten the memo that breakfast had been relocated indoors because of inclement weather.

Eric rolled his head onto his shoulder and pressed it against the window and looked up. The sky was green. Not a turtle in sight.

There were snakes, though. A lot of them, fat and slow, slithering across the sky. They were biting his hand again.

Daniels

“Hey, Daniels!”

Gilfoy grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “You still with me?”

Eric blinked a few times, then nodded. “Yeah, I'm good.”

The cows and snakes were gone, and the sky was back to being the same slate gray it had been all morning. Tendrils of smoke billowed out from the roof. He thought it might rain.

Gilfoy pulled around to the door, then backed in. He had a couple feet of clearance on either side. “You stay here,” he ordered, and climbed out through his open window onto the roof of the cab. “Hey! Anyone up there hear me?”

The dead inside the warehouse began to attack the truck, slapping their hands against the sides. Only the tallest of them could reach the bottom of Eric's window. He watched them warily, wondering if they might be able to climb onto the step beneath his door. From his time in the marines, he knew they couldn't, not without someone live thinking for them, controlling their bodies. But these were freshly deceased, and he'd seen some of them do things that surprised him, even without cybernetic help.

Gilfoy climbed back in. “They're all up on the roof, apparently trying hard to burn themselves to the ground.” He gave Eric a slight nod, as if to say
You were right
. “We'll back up against the ladder and they can climb down and get in through the windows. It's the safest way, I think.”

Eric grunted. He didn't like the way the walls were pushing in at him. And they smelled. They smelled like cottage cheese.

He didn't like cottage cheese. It gave him gas something terrible, made his stomach hurt.

The truck jolted backward. He wasn't expecting it and nearly hit his head on the dash.

“You might want to move into the back once I stop,” Gilfoy said. “And open your window so people can climb in. The quicker we can get everyone in, the quicker we'll be able to leave.”

Eric nodded, but he couldn't find the switch on the armrest.

“It's got a hand crank, like the cars from the beginning of the century,” Gilfoy said. He was checking the mirrors on both sides.

Eric frowned. The truck didn't look that old.

The bumper hit the ladder, and the metal squealed as it bent. Once more, Gilfoy climbed out, disappearing onto the roof. Eric could hear him up top. He opened his door to get out before remembering the Infected and slamming it shut again, catching his foot in the opening. Pain spread up his leg. He pulled it in and slammed the door shut.

He was supposed to do something, he just couldn't remember what it was. So he sat there and watched the people on the ground.