S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (102 page)

But she just couldn't seem to do it. The strength was gone from her legs. She stumbled down the hallway of the empty building, crashing against the walls like one of the silver pinballs in Mister Casey's antique machines. Unable to hold herself up anymore, she slipped down to the floor and sobbed into her hands. The tears mixed with the filth from the hole she'd been digging outside. They washed away the blood that both she and Ashley had spilled.

She wished she could have it back, the numbness. Sitting there on the dirty floor, the rough, worn, moldy smelling carpet beneath her, guilt and rage flowed through her with no end in sight.

Sabumnin?

The whisper inside her head was her former instructor's, like a second conscience chastising her, as it had so often done in the past.
You must be water
, the voice would always remind her.
Remember: Flow around and beyond the stone which casts itself in your path.

It was the third principle of hapkido:
Yu
. But while the idea had always helped guide her in the past, she shunned it now. She was tired of being pliant. Sometimes, bending around an obstacle wasn't the answer. Sometimes you had to destroy—

Sabumnin Jessica.

The insistent whisper puzzled her, the way it intruded in her mind, competed with her thoughts. But even more than that, he had never once called her
Sabumnin
in real life. The title was reserved for masters of the art, instructors, like Rupert. So why would she think of herself as such? She was no master.

Sabumnin Jessica, you must be strong now. It is time for you to be hard, like the rock.

She shook her head, as if to dislodge his voice from her. It was her own mind mocking her for dismissing
Yu
by forcing her to see how ridiculous it was to ignore all of her training.

She tried to push him from her mind, but it kept whispering to her, grating at her until she launched herself from the floor with a scream that tore the skin from her throat.

“Stop it! Stop it stop it
STOP IT!
”

She slammed her fists against the wall repeatedly as she staggered toward the door. But her survival instinct forced her to stop and retrieve her undamaged Link. To go outside without the device, without first connecting it to Kwanjangnim Rupert so he wouldn't attack her, would be reckless.

Taking a deep breath, she brushed the device off and returned it to the pouch in the thigh of her fitted gaming pants.

“I'm going, all right?” she shouted. “You happy? Good! Now shut the fuck up!”

She pushed the Link into the socket to connect. He wasn't the boss of her anymore. Nobody was. All of them, all of the damn noisy voices in her head — Rupert's and her mother's, her grandfather's, all of them now dead — they all just needed to shut the hell up and let her think for herself for once.

The voice went silent. Satisfied, she slammed out into the bright sunlight, determined to finish what she'd begun, starting with burying her dead.

 

Ashley was waiting for her just outside the door, just as she had when she attacked before, only this time she was dead. The muddy, bloodied corpse of her former best friend and worst enemy launched itself at Jessie just as she exited the building. Instinctively, Jessie turned, meeting the brunt of the attack head on, though she wasn't prepared for it. All she managed to get out before being slammed to the ground was a startled, “No!”

Stars exploded before her eyes when her head hit the dirt. Her vision tunneled. She was dimly aware of the zombie's clumsy attempt to pull itself back onto her body, aware that it wanted to feed. But the darkness crowded in until consciousness was no more than a pinprick of light in her mind.

Use me
, her former master's voice instructed.
I can stop her.

She tried to focus, to envision him coming to her aid, but the image before her mind was only of darkness and dirt.

Searing pain exploded in her as Ashley's teeth sunk deep into the meat of her shoulder. The pinprick of white expanded, became bright red, wrenching Jessie back to herself.

She screamed, as much in anger as in pain, and brought the fist of her other hand blindly up and across her body in the direction of the weight bearing down on her. She felt her knuckles glance off Ashley's back, but it didn't stop the attack. The angle was wrong.

She tried again, ratcheting her arm back and twisting her torso, then firing the fist across her chest at a more acute angle. This time she felt the impact, jarring up her arm and into her elbow. Agony tore through her other arm, arced down her side as the bite cut deeper. She repeated the motion, again and again and again, thrusting her arm back and forth like a piston in an engine. Yet Ashley still would not unclamp her teeth from her shoulder.

Jessie's cry turned into a whimper. She could feel the teeth close to the bone, clamping down like a vise, reaching to the sinew at the very heart of her shoulder. It felt like her arm was being torn away. She thought she was going to vomit.

Her arm was tiring. The blows pummeling the dead girl about the neck and head grew weaker, less effective, not that they had been very effective to begin with. One blow reflected off the girl's ear. Jessie felt the delicate flesh break open, the cartilage snap and tear. She kept aiming for the same spot until her hand was covered in blood and bits of gore and her knuckles were shredded. But Ash remained attached.

Jessie knew she couldn't keep this up. The burning in her good shoulder was beginning to equal the raw pain in the other.

She did the only thing she could think of, which was to reach up again, her arm shaking with exhaustion, and pressed her hand against the dead girl's face. She found the soft cavity that had been the eye socket, the same one she'd nearly blinded over an hour before. The flesh was thick and swollen from the earlier injury.

Her thumb sank in with a wet
squelp
.

Ashley's jaw immediately unhinged. The monster backed away howling and raised both hands to her head.

“You fucking cunt!” it screamed as it rose to its feet. But then it collapsed again to the ground, where it curled into a quivering ball.

The shock of hearing Ashley speak froze Jessie where she lay. She clutched at her shoulder, panting, and stared at the girl she thought she'd killed.

How? How could she still be alive?

Her shoulder felt swollen and stiff. It felt infected.

Ashley writhed on the ground, cursing. High above them, the clouds were beginning to fill the sky, crowding out the deep blue with a new palette of grays and whites.

“Oh, you stupid . . . fucking . . . whore,” Ashley gurgled. She coughed, gagged, then spat up a bloody clot. “You fight like a fucking cunt!”

Jessie tried to raise herself onto her elbow. New pain flared in her arm, thrusting her onto her back with a grunt of pain. Sticky blood pulsed from the bite, spilled through her fingers and onto the sidewalk. Her shirt was soaked with it.

She could hear Ashley moving, trying to push herself up. Was she getting ready to attack again? Jessie forced herself to roll onto her side, then pushed up onto her knees to crawl away.

“You're . . . you're dead,” she panted at the ground. Her eyes refused to focus. Blood dripped from her face, from her mouth. She'd bitten her lip when she fell. “I shot you. I saw you die. You're dead.”

She glanced back past her injured shoulder. Her arm was dragging, knuckles scraping the rough, hot surface. She tried to lift it, but the effort caused her even more pain.

Ashley was kneeling on the dirt, her hands covering her face. Like water seeping from a cracked dam, blood pulsed between her fingers and ran down her arm. More poured from the side of her head where Jessie had torn off her ear.

“I killed you.”

“You wish,” Ashley grunted. “I told you . . . . You're . . . too soft. Can't . . . finish anything.”

She dropped her hands and Jessie could see that the eye was gone, leaving nothing but a ragged hole from which a clear yellowish liquid dripped. The upper lid had been torn away and now dangled by a thin strip of skin. A spasm spread through her body, causing a small spout of blood to erupt from the empty socket.

Jessie could see the hole in Ashley's shirt where the bullet had gone in, directly over her heart, just above her left breast. But the shirt was twisted, pulled down. The collar hung open, exposing the hole in her flesh higher up. The bullet had entered closer to her shoulder, missing Ashley's heart altogether.

“I checked,” Jessie said, gagging on the blood in her mouth. “You were dead. You should have stayed dead.”

“And let . . . you have . . . all the fun?”

Ashley lurched to her feet, fell, then tried again.

“No, Ash. Please. I—”

Pain and hatred twisted her old friend's face. She laughed weakly and a thick red bubble appeared on her lips, then burst. She stepped toward Jessie, stumbled sideways, overcorrected.

Get her!
Jessie commanded Master Rupert.
Stop her!

She could hear her dead hapkido master moan somewhere near the grave she'd dug. He seemed so far away. Why wasn't he obeying her?

She whipped her head around, but he wasn't there. The moan repeated, coming from behind the mound of dirt, from inside the hole.

“So nice of you,” Ashley grunted, her voice like the ragged ends of shattered bones grinding against one another. “How nice that you've dug your own grave. Hope you don't mind sharing it.”

The shovel lay across the sidewalk, far from where Jessie had left it. Even at twenty feet, she could see the bloody handprint on the handle — Ashley's hand — and she could picture the scene as if she'd witnessed it instead of being inside on her Link: Ashley lifting the shovel to strike the zombie, then dropping it to the ground as the wound in her chest sapped away her strength. Maybe she'd settled for pushing him into the hole instead. Either way, that's where he'd ended up. Down there, he couldn't get to Ashley. Down there, he couldn't get out.

But Jessie could make him climb out. She controlled him.

Ashley's footsteps scraped closer. Jessie crawled over to the grave. Now she could see him, chest-deep in the hole.
Climb out! Pull yourself out—

But Ashley was right behind her. It was too late for Kwanjangnim to help.

Jessie lurched to her feet, letting out a short cry of pain before clamping her mouth shut. Ashley laughed weakly, her breath a drowning wheeze passing through her battered mouth.

Jessie turned to face her. “I should have put the bullet in your skull.”

“Why didn't you?” Ashley replied. With each step, more blood pulsed from the blackened hole below her neck. The hole in her face had already stopped oozing.

Jessie took a step back, felt her heel sink into the edge of the pile of dirt behind her. Why
hadn't
she shot Ash in the head? Why had she jerked her arm down at the last possible moment and aimed instead for the heart?

Because a bullet to the skull is something you do to quiet a zombie.

And Ashley hadn't been a zombie.

“I'm sick of killing,” she said. She slid her foot back, feeling for the shovel.

“Too bad. I'm not.”

Ashley's knee partially collapsed and she stumbled. Jessie took the opportunity to bend down and grab the shovel. The handle slipped through her fingers and slid down the other side of the dirt pile out of reach. Ashley was already getting back to her feet.

How can she still be alive? How can she possibly have anything left to fight with?

Hatred. If anyone knew how powerful a force it could be, Jessie did.

She spun around to retrieve the shovel, but Ashley was too quick. Jessie's wrist slammed into the metal handle as Ashley crashed onto her back. The movement brought another explosion of pain from her shoulder.

They fell to the ground once again.

“Stop,” Jessie begged.

The pile of dirt collapsed beneath their weight. She tried to warn Ash, but they were already falling in.

Jessie landed on her back on top of Ashley, knocking the air from both their lungs. Ashley groaned. Kwanjangnim groaned.

Get out of the hole, Jessie!

The order was in her master's voice. Her thoughts seemed to alternate between her own and his. Sometimes they overlapped. Maybe she really was going crazy.

She tried to get up, but her head jerked back and she fell, landing hard on Ashley's stomach. She had a handful of her hair and wouldn't let go. Jessie could hear the labor in her breathing, wheezing and bubbly, dying, and it made her both angry and sad. Why couldn't the girl just give up?

With some effort, she managed to turn herself around. Kwanjangnim had fallen beneath them both, his head stuck into a corner of the hole and twisted at an awkward angle. He was moaning, his mouth opening and shutting in the wet mud. One arm flailed blindly above him, snatching at the dirt and collapsing the sides onto them.

“Let go of me,” Jessie shouted.

Ashley tried to raise her other arm. Her face twisted and went white. A scream burst from her mouth. Halfway between her shoulder and elbow, a jagged end of a piece of bone had come through the skin. But it wasn't hers, it was Rupert's.

“Let go of me,” Jessie repeated.

She wouldn't.

Use me, Sabumnim.

Jessie's eyes flicked over to her master's face. It was slack, devoid of emotion, the eyes crusted over with dirt.

She pictured the elbow of his free, unbroken arm bending, the hand twisting to reach behind Ashley. The fingers released the clump of dirt they'd been holding and drifted down as she imagined.

“Let go of me, Ash.”

“Fuck you.”

The angle was wrong again. Rupert couldn't get to her. Jessie pulled back, lifting Ashley up a few inches. Fresh blood spurted from her chest and she cried out as the bone piercing her arm shifted.