S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (72 page)

“
I thought it was electrified.”

“
It is. A couple of them got zapped. They really stink, worse than burning meat.”

“
It's the plastination,” I tell her. “There's a protein that causes the tissue to turn into something like rubber. You'll learn about it this year in your Physiology and Behavior of Reanimates class.”

“
School,” she mutters. “I'd almost forgotten.”

“
Six days left of summer vacay,” I tell her.

She laughs a bitter laugh. “Not much of a vacation. I guess we got more than we bargained for, didn't we, Jess?”

“
Yeah, and the worst part is we'll never even be able to tell anyone about most of it.”

“
Screw that. I'm telling everyone how you kicked that IU's ass in the Midtown tunnel that first day.”

“
Kel was there, too. It wasn't just me.”

Mentioning Kelly makes me choke up. I don't know how I'm going to fix him. I don't even know if we can. I swallow the lump in my throat. “Besides, Ash, if you mention the tunnel, then everyone'll know we're responsible for bringing the IUs into south Manhattan. That wouldn't be such a good thing.”

“
Yeah, I know.” She sighs and looks away and I can almost read in her face that she's thinking we're fooling ourselves if we think we'll be able to go right back to our old lives again. There'll be an investigation, especially since we lied to the police about not knowing where Kelly went. And even if we could somehow convince the authorities that we just happened to drop completely off the Stream for a week, they're bound to connect us to Tanya. She'll never be coming back.

“
I miss home,” Ashley says.

“
Me too.” I smile. “I even miss Eric.”

“
Gross! What about the Colonel?”

“
Well…”

“
Hold on, Jess. Looks like they're coming back. They found the right building. I got to go. Jake and Reggie are high-fiving.”

I shake my head. Two weeks ago, would we have thought we'd be high-fiving each other after witnessing one of us murder another person? With dozens of zombies standing just a few feet away? It's all too surreal to believe.

“
Hey, Ashley?”

Her face comes back on-screen. “Yeah?”

“
Be careful, okay? And good luck with the hack.”

She nods. “Kelly's smart. We'll figure it out. He's going to relay what he can download to me through the tablet. I'll work the hack and send it back. And Jessie, I'm sorry about… Well, you know.”

“
Hey, it's cool. Looks like Jake got you there safe and sound after all. He found the tree and got you inside.”

She hesitates, then nods.

“
Now go get that thing out of your head.”

 

I click Ashley off my Link
and turn back to Micah, who's just standing there with his head in his hands. He looks like he's getting ready to pull out his hair.

“
Why can't I remember?” he asks, his voice thick with despair.

“
It'll come. You just need to relax.”

I edge away from him and stand up and ask him if he wants anything to drink. He shakes his head, then taps the tablet screen half-heartedly, as if simply connecting with the thing might jog his memory or magically transfer something to him.

“
You used to love staring at game architecture,” I say. “Why don't you start there?”

He laughs bitterly. “What do you think I've been sitting here staring at? I can feel it coming, and then everything shifts and none of it makes any sense to me.”

I sigh. “Tell you what. I'm going to go to the little girl's room and, when I get back, I'll run through a few things with you. Give you a refresher. I'm no hacker, but I do know a few things about coding. Maybe it'll help.”

As I make my way down the hallway, my eyes wander over the framed photographs hanging on the wall. It looks like a young couple used to live here, mid-twenties, their daughter of about five years old. She's blond, pretty, wearing a white dress with a crimson sash around her waist and a crimson bow in her hair. She's standing beside a metal swing set, her arms wrapped around an undeniably overfed white rabbit, which seems not to mind that its bottom half is dangling completely unsupported. It's even got that same happy smile the girl is wearing.

The pictures sadden me. Here is a family ripped from their home by the outbreak. I wonder where they ended up. I guess the girl would be about my age now, seventeen or eighteen.

Out of curiosity, I wander around the corner and toward the unlit back of the house and strain my eyes to see if the swing set in the picture is out there. The faintest glow leaks from the hallway and out through the sliding glass door and onto the grass. And there it is, the ghostly metal skeleton, a pair of swings, a slide, all stained brown by rust and covered in vines. In the darkness with the breeze blowing the grass, the image wavers and for a brief moment the little girl is out there, sitting on one of the swings, the rabbit on her lap, and suddenly I'm so very homesick.

I allow myself to sink into the image. The faint strands of an old forgotten lullaby come to me, a song sung by a mother, and I find myself humming along and feeling her fingers on my cheek, pulling my hair back and holding me close.

But I can't even be sure if these are memories or wishes. I blink them bitterly away, and the scene outside shifts again. There is no girl out in that ruination of a yard, no child sitting upon that swing and humming along with her mother. Both of them are gone to who knows where.

There is only darkness and unkempt grass and imaginary ghosts.

I turn away from the window and make my way through the room into a second hallway. The doors for the bedrooms are all open. Only one stands closed, the bathroom. There won't be any water in the toilet, but if I'm lucky there'll be paper, a luxury.

I grasp the knob and turn it and push open the door. A vanity twinkles in the gloom. Everything else is swathed in darkness as deep and mournful as a broken promise. I take a step in, feeling for the light switch, find it, flick it. The room remains dark.

“
Figures,” I say under my breath, as I step further into the gloom.

Should I close the door? Micah might decide he needs to pee, too. He and Reggie—and sometimes Ash—find it amusing that I'm such a prude about such things. At Micah's they almost never close the bathroom door all the way. I don't know how many times I've walked in on one of them peeing, embarrassing myself more than them.

I turn and push the door halfway closed—a compromise—leaving it open just enough to let in some of the light from the hallway, then I reach out to feel along the wall.

And that's when the fingers touch my arm.

 

Micah collides into me
in the hallway as I go running through the house, knocking several photographs off the wall. He grabs my arms and holds me.

“
Stop yelling!” he says, shaking me. “Jessie!”

“
I— It— There's—”

His eyes pong between me and the back of the house. “Jessie! What's the matter?”

“
It was in the bathroom!” I scream, pulling on him, collapsing beneath his arms. “It's coming! It grabbed me.”

“
What?”

“
I didn't see it!”

He turns, straining his neck to see into the shadows. “There's nothing there, Jessie. Calm down!”

“
No, it was in the bathroom! It touched me.” I shudder at the memory of its tiny, bone-dry fingers on my arm, the whisper of that plastic flesh.

He steps back, but doesn't let go of me. He's still looking down the hall. I tilt my head to see, too. But there's nothing there. He pulls me up and back into the laundry room and tells me to stay.

“
No! No, don't leave me, Micah.”

“
Listen, Jess. I'm just going to go check. If it's an IU, we'll deal with it. We already have enough times by now.”

I can see the doubt in his face, not about dealing with the IU but suspicions over what I thought I saw or felt.

I know what was in there: the little girl. But how can I tell him I was scared of something half my height? How can I explain what terrified me even more was that she was holding a fossilized mummy of a rabbit? The horror is much deeper than anything I've encountered thus far, horror not at what she might do to us, but of what I might have to do to her.

Did her parents leave her here because they couldn't do it? Would they have if they'd known she was going to spend an eternity locked up in there? Or at least until the house crumbled to the ground around her?

Did they watch her die and reanimate?

Did they do this to her?

I grip his wrist harder, not allowing him to leave. He winces and looks down, but nods. “Okay. I won't leave you alone. But we still need to check. Together, okay?”

I don't move.

“
We need to check, Jessie. You know that.”

I finally manage to nod, but he practically has to pull me out of the laundry room by brute force. Even once we're back out in the hallway and he's in front of me, my shoes feel like they're made of lead.

“
You're going to have to let go of me, Jessie. It's cutting off my circulation. And I might need to use that hand later. Hell, I might need it now, so—”

“
Okay, I get it,” I whisper. It's hard for me to breathe. It's hard to take in a breath big enough to even exhale. It takes everything I've got to loosen my fingers and let him go so we can walk down this darkened hallway.

He pulls his arm out of my grip and rubs it, cursing under his breath. “I think that's going to bruise.”

It almost makes me laugh, and I feel the ropes around my chest loosen.

He steps forward, stops, listens. There's not a sound. I step forward to match him, and I wait. We repeat the cycle until we're at the end of the hallway and coming around the corner. He quickly bobs his head out and then back in again, then slowly inches into the other room. I force myself not to look outside, out into the backyard. I don't want to see that forlorn swing set. I don't want to imagine her sitting on it again. I tell myself there's no such thing as ghosts, only zombies.

“
Nothing in here,” Micah whispers. “Is the bathroom down the other hallway?” he asks, pointing.

I raise my eyes and nod.

“
You didn't turn on any lights?”

“
The light in the bathroom was out.”

We get to the second hallway and Micah reaches over and flips the light switch. Every shadow instantly flees back through the doorways of the adjoining bedrooms.

“
Second door on the left,” I whisper.

“
Did you shut it? ‘Cause it's closed now.”

“
I don't remember.”

He straightens a bit, relaxing. “Stay here. I'll check the bedrooms first.”

“
Screw that. I'm coming with you.”

“
Fine, just… Give me a little room to back up if I have to, okay?”

I nod. He steps quickly down the hall and turns to the first room. His fingers find the switch and flip it on.

“
Nothing,” he says, after quickly searching all the obvious places: closet, behind and under the bed. He even pulls back the moth-eaten sheets.

He repeats the procedure with each of the other rooms—an office and two unfinished rooms. All yield the same result: empty. Nothing but dust and old forgotten junk.

“
I know what I felt, Micah,” I tell him, resentfully rubbing my arm where the fingers touched me.

“
I know, Jessie,” he answers tiredly. “I'm not saying you didn't. We're all hyped up right now and it might not have been what you thought. Let's go back and check that bathroom.”

I don't argue. I just follow him out to the hallway and back to the closed door. It mocks me, taunting me with its unrelenting muteness. Micah raises his hand, looks at me, then quickly raps his knuckles on it. Somewhere in my mind, I hear an echo of his voice saying,
Olly olly oxen free. It's safe to come out now.

But there's only silence.

He tries again. I listen and—

“
Be out in a second
,” a girl sings.

I practically jump through the wall behind me.

“
Shit, Micah! I still have to pee!” I hit his arm. “Why'd you have to do that? You almost made me wet myself.”

He laughs. “There's no one here.” He turns the knob and kicks the door open and steps back, waiting. The light from the hallway floods in, illuminating the vanity along the one wall and the toilet in the back. He tries the switch and, sure enough, it doesn't work.

“
You probably felt that,” he tells me. He moves over so I can step into the bathroom. He's pointing to the shower curtain behind the door. One end of the rod has broken free of the wall and is now dangling into the room. The fabric hangs limply from it, right about where I would've been standing.

“
It's cool,” he says, turning and smiling. “I won't tell anyone you were attacked by a phantom shower curtain.”

“
Yeah, well…” I sputter. But I'm so glad that relief floods through me like a rush of warm water. “Well, I've seen you naked.”