S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (48 page)

Jessie obeyed, turning after the counter but before reaching the wall. She stepped into the narrow space. She wanted to turn around, to face Ashley, to force the girl to look her in the eye. But she didn't think it would make any difference. She had no doubt that Ashley was deadly serious, and that she'd put a bullet in her forehead just as happily as the back of her head. Jessie'd known this from the moment she'd laid eyes on Ashley at the gate. Known it, but hadn't wanted to acknowledge it.

She heard the scrape of metal on the floor as Ashley pulled the folding chair to her, and she waited for her to sit down on it. Instead, Ashley barked at her to stand up again.

Just make up your mind already.

“Turn around.”

Do the hokey-pokey. Yup, that's what it's all about.

Shut up.

Jessie turned. Ashley had moved back, out of Jessie's strike-zone. She'd attended enough of her hapkido matches to know what Jessie was capable of doing.

“Down there.” Ashley said, tilting her head. “You know the room.”

Again, Jessie complied. “Where's Micah?” she asked as she walked. “What have you done with him? Did you kill him?” She paused at the door and turned to face Ashley. “Or are you working with him?”

You think Micah's in on this?” Ashley laughed. “You really are clueless, aren't you? Micah doesn't have the balls for something like this. He talks the talk, pretends to be all gung ho. But, in the end, he's nothing but a stupid code jockey. That's all he'll ever be. Real life scares him. It always has.”

“Sounds like you're the one who's clueless.”

“Whatever, bitch. Inside. On the floor. Back against the wall. Good.”

Without lowering the pistol or taking her eyes off of Jessie, Ashley bent down and unclipped the strap from the duffle bag and tossed it over. “Tie your ankles together.”

“Ashley, I don't—”

“Do it! And make it tight!”

When she was satisfied, she backed up to the door, grabbed the chair and opened it and sat down. “So, you want to know why all this?” She waved at the gear and the squalid living conditions. “Let me tell you a little story.”

“Like my mother used to tell me?” Jessie snarled.

Ashley smiled. “Funny you should mention her, after what I did to her.”

Jessie didn't bite.

Ashley crossed her legs and placed the pistol on her knee, the business end still pointed in Jessie's direction. She rocked her foot back and forth, and Jessie sensed she was trying to hide her shaking.

She's scared shitless.

Or just plain crazy.

“Once upon a time,” Ashley began, “people died. Because, you know, that's what happened, the natural course of things. Some people died of terrible diseases. Some of them in terrible car accidents. Sometimes, people just . . . died. Of natural causes. When they were really old.” She leaned forward and glared into Jessie's eyes. “Like when they were ninety-five. Or a hundred.

“But then there came a man who invented a way to bring the dead back, eliminating death altogether. And since this man worked for the government and the government owned the invention, the government decided it would be a good idea to use it, you know, to make our lives better. Except it made everything worse.”

“You can't blame me for—”

“
Shut the fuck up, bitch!”
Ashley screamed. She slammed her foot on the floor and lifted the pistol, thrusting it toward Jessie's head.
“I'm the one telling the story, not you!”

The girls stared at each other for a moment before Ashley spit at her. Jessie flinched, but the other girl turned her back and walked over to the pile of food. She plucked a bottle of water from the case and opened it and took a long drink, turning halfway to keep an eye on her prisoner. Jessie watched as water spilled out of her mouth and ran down her chin. She noticed how heavily Ashley was breathing, in obvious distress. Strangely, she felt unexpectedly calm.

She's lost it.

Ashley flung the half empty bottle into the corner, splashing the wall, then sat back down on the rickety chair with a grunt.

“Shall I continue?” she asked. “Good. Because this is where things get twisted.”

Yeah, because they weren't already?

“At first, the government used these dead people — prisoners, first, because who cares about the dregs of society, right? — they used them as soldiers. They were expendable. But the government pissed them all away by sending them out into the world to fight this conflict and that conflict. And lo and behold, we started running out of Undead soldiers. Then it became mandatory for everyone to serve, not just prisoners.”

“Engaging in a little revisionist history, are we?” Jessie grunted.

Ashley ignored her. “Eventually, the wars ended. When you're fighting an army where the casualty count makes no difference, it's kind of pointless, isn't it? So the government had all these Undead with nothing to do with them, and Arc said, ‘We'll lease them out to do all the crap nobody else wants to do. Now the citizens of New Merica can relax and enjoy themselves till they're sixty-five. Ain't life grand? And no more taxes to boot.' Well, that's
BULLSHIT!
”

Jessie tried not to flinch from Ashley's fury.

“So then Arc says, ‘Since we're having such fun, let's capitalize on that, too!' And like the unimaginative brain-dead zombies they exploited, they decided to call their game — yep, you guessed it —
The Game
. And, lo and behold, everyone wanted to play it, but you had to have money, of course, which most people don't have.”

She stopped and stared at the wall above Jessie's head, her chest rising and falling as she gulped air. She was clearly visualizing something in that madness churning inside her head. Slowly, she lowered her eyes until they reached Jessie's.

“But they made it so there's a way to get into
The Game
. Because, there's always a way, isn't there?”

Ashley stopped, and Jessie realized she was waiting for an answer. “By hacking?” she offered.

Ashley laughed. “God, you're just like all the rest of them. No imagination. Makes me sick. Think harder.”

“Early conscription?”

“No, you stupid bitch! I'm talking about volunteering.”

Jessie stared back, confused. She thought she'd been following where this was going. She'd thought Ashley was going to lay the blame of their ill-conceived foray into Gameland square on her shoulders, even though she hadn't been the one to conceive of it. If anything, she had been the one who fought hardest and longest to get them out of it.

“Do you know,” Ashley whispered hoarsely, “how much money Arc pays you if someone in your family volunteers for
The Game
? Say, someone who's old and broken and unlikely to last very long against professional Players?”

“Volunteering is illegal, Ash. Everyone knows that.”

Ashley let out another derisive snort as she stood up. She began to prowl the edges of the room. She tapped the barrel of the pistol on the wall with each step. “Forty thousand dollars per year volunteered. Forty fucking thousand dollars. Same as a kill.”

Jessie's mind churned.

“Sounds like a lot of money to you or me, doesn't it?” Ashley asked. She stopped, turned toward Jessie. “But do you really have any clue how paltry that sum of money is, how little it buys?”

Jessie's eyes unconsciously slipped down to Ashley's feet. The Nikes she'd acquired just before their second trip to the island were gone. She couldn't remember when.

This is personal. It's about her grandmother.

Jessie remembered what G-ma Junie had said, right before she died:
I hope they put me into
The Game
. Think of the money it would bring the family.

“You can't blame me for what happened to your grandmother,” Jessie said. “It was her decision.”

“She still had three more years to live before her LSC! And who knows how long she would've been around without that damn law!”

“If she volunteered—”

“I lost three years, maybe more!”

“Ash—”

“And you want to know what my fucked up parents did? They bought a house in Canada, so they could escape the damn conscription laws! What a bunch of fucking hypocrites!” She laughed bitterly. “They were planning to move us right before school started. ‘It's going to be okay,' they told me. They bought me a lousy pair of sneakers, as if that could replace my grandma. A god damn fucking pair of sneakers!”

She picked up the chair and hurled it into the wall above Jessie's head. Jessie ducked, screaming, but it still hit her as it fell, bruising her back. Ashley stepped over and yanked it away and made to throw it again.

“Sneakers for my G-ma Junie!” she screamed into Jessie's face. “Does that sound like a fair trade?” She stumbled blindly backward, tripping over the chair and crashing into the wall by the door. Somehow she managed to stay on her feet. The look on her face was a mix of pure rage and pain.

“I miss her, too.”

Ashley whirled toward her. “
You don't get the right to miss her!
” She kicked at some packages, screaming incoherently.

“When,” Jessie asked. “When did you start planning—” She gestured around her with both hands. “All this?”

Ashley paced by the door, panting through her mouth. Her face was deep red. To Jessie she looked like a caged animal.

“Which part?” she growled. “Hacking Arc's network? Getting control of your implants? Or the part where I just wanted to kill you, kill your mother and your brother? Kill everyone who you ever cared about?”

“What about the people
you
cared about? What about Reggie?”

She chuffed. “He left me here, too. I hate him most of all.”

“We all thought you were dead.”

“You were all wrong.” She righted the chair and sat down in it again. Now she was visibly shaking. “I got the idea to neuro-hack your implants after remembering how Stephen had mentioned the Coalition was trying to do the same. And after you left me on this godforsaken piece of shit island with nothing but time on my hands and all this equipment Ben had conveniently left behind, that's when I realized how I could still get back at you. All I needed was for you to connect to one of the streams. It was a one in a million chance, but then it happened, first Kelly, then Reggie.”

“You're the one who sponsored me!”

Ashley jerked her head up. “What?”

“For
The Game
.”

Ashley didn't speak. Jessie could almost see her working it out and she realized that it hadn't been her.

“You wanted to hurt me
before
we left you here?” she quickly asked.

“Oh, you don't know how long I've hated you. Whose idea do you think it was to break onto the island in the first place? Mine! That idiot Reggie's always trying to take credit for shit he had nothing to do with. He should've been the first to die here. How could someone as stupid as him possibly survive as long as he did?”

Jessie felt her face burn. All these years she'd known Ashley— this wasn't her. Sure, she'd always been a little flaky, a bit immature, and needy. Always fishing for compliments, for someone to tell her how pretty she was, or smart, or sexy. For acknowledgement that she was an awesome gamer or hacker. But that Ashley had died the day her grandmother had been conscripted. And like the things waiting outside the gate, a monster had risen to replace her.

“
I
planted the idea.
I
pushed Kelly over the railing that day we checked out the tunnel.
I
switched the rebreather masks and cartridges.
You
were the one who was supposed to die down there. It was supposed to look like an accident. Except that stupid Jake was like a stupid puppy dog around you. He numbered them incorrectly. You're all stupid!”

“You were the Coder.”

Ashley frowned. “The Coalition's Coder?” She shook her head. “I had nothing to do with them. I don't care about their stupid little war. Do you think I'd have their damn failsafe program inside my own head — be trapped
here
 — if I was with them?”

“But Ben took you—”

“He was just a sick pervert. You think he singled me out because I was his secret partner in crime? Are you really that blind? Look at me! Why do you think he made me go with him?”

“Then it really was Micah, their Coder.”

“Of course it was! He had you all fooled.”

Jessie scowled up at Ashley. “Maybe. But he still got what was coming to him. We watched him get conscripted— me and Reggie and Kelly. Just like we're going to watch them put you down for what you've done!”

Ashley stopped for a moment, looking as if the idea hadn't crossed her mind before. But she quickly recovered and started to laugh.

“What happened to you, Ash? You never used to be like this. We used to be best friends.”

Ashley sneered. “I thought I made myself perfectly clear.”

Jessie shook her head. “No, this is about more than G-ma Junie and your parents flaking out on you.”

But Ash wouldn't answer. She bent down so their faces were close, and she said, “I tried to hack your implant, too. I had your code, had everyone's code. Copied them off of Micah's tablet weeks ago. But for some reason I couldn't manage to get control of your brain. I couldn't figure it out. Sometimes, the gear would say I was connected. But I couldn't make you do a damn thing. Kelly and Reggie were easy, except I think Kelly must've suspected something because he stopped connecting. That's alright, though, because I got what I needed from him. I made him kidnap your mom.”

She picked up another bottle and took a long drink. Her throat worked up and down as she gulped noisily.

“Then Reggie—” She pouted mockingly. “I think I must've broken his puny little brain. I could partially control him. It wasn't easy. I wanted to send him down to where Kelly had dumped your mother. I wanted him to finish her off, but then the dumb oaf stopped responding to my controls. I think some of his wires got crossed when he touched the fence.”