S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (129 page)

“What happened to Laurel?” Jessie pushed.

“Blocked bile duct. She died of an infection when her gall bladder ruptured. Father Heale's group had two physicians in it, but neither of them was a surgeon. She died in extreme pain.” He wet his lips and looked around, as if searching for something.

“That's when you started drinking, isn't it?”

“Haven't stopped since.”

She was beginning to feel the wall now in her brain. “The network's still up.”

Brother Walter nodded.

They carried on for another hour without speaking, just walking. The sky had grown noticeably lighter. It was predawn, though the western horizon was still black, hiding the Gameland wall.

“I can hear them sometimes,” she said. “In my head.” Then, when he didn't answer, she added: “The Infecteds, the ones with implants. Somehow, my implant is picking up their thoughts.”

Her admission affected him in a strange way. His paced slowed, and he seemed to mull this over.

“They're still inside their bodies, after they die. After they come back, their minds are still intact, but they're trapped. They're aware.”

He exhaled and nodded. “Father Heale always suspected as much. That's why he called them Children, instead of the Undead or monsters.”

“They
are
monsters, it's just that the people inside have been imprisoned by their own bodies.”

He grunted. “I wish Father Heale had lived long enough to hear that. He used to say that one's consciousness doesn't just wink out of existence, but that it's somehow intricately associated with the body. But in the Children, the bridge between the body and soul has been severed.”

Jessie nodded. It made sense to think of it that way.

“He believed that the mind decays only when the body decays. In fact, he could feel it happening in himself. His body was beginning to fail, and with it, his mind.”

He turned to her now, his eyes dark in his face. “Just as will happen to me. Just as will happen to you too, one day. Not even your immunity will protect you forever.”

 

Doctor Anne White leaned against the counter and shut her eyes until the cramp in her abdomen passed. This was, by far, the worst she'd experienced yet.

The pains had come on suddenly while she was at the Daniels's house, cutting her search for the gaming console short and forcing her to leave before she was completely certain it wasn't there.

Later, she decided, after she'd had a chance to rest, she planned to pay Kelly Corben a visit. She couldn't do this alone.

She pressed her hand against her belly and tried to measure her breathing. Deeper breaths still caused her some discomfort, but it was nothing like the sharp pains she'd had just a few minutes before. They felt like really bad gas pains. Or menstrual cramps, though she'd stopped having the latter a few years back.

The onset of menopause at such an early age had surprised, though not upset, her. She would never have another child, not after watching both of her own die at such early ages.

Even so, she'd never lost that need to be a mother. If anything, it had only grown stronger. And now, with proof that she'd finally managed to develop a cure, being a mother once more was the only thing on her mind anymore.

She never doubted the efficacy of her cure. If anything, she had concerns about the virus she'd reconstituted from a bloody piece of her daughter's clothing, whether it was still viable after being stored in the freezer all of these years. It was the same blood she injected into her husband four years ago, and it had worked then, even though the infection had taken several days longer to develop than the typical incubation period.

Her own disease progression had taken nearly five days, which was when she injected the cure. And certainly no one had ever survived eight days. She was the first.

No, what was happening to her now was just some stomach bug she'd picked up at the hospital. The institutions were hotbeds of diseases, and every doctor knew that very few patients ever went home without some sort of nosocomial infection.

A shiver passed through her. Her body had been wracked by them since escaping the hospital, but now they were fading.

She swallowed another handful of antibiotics, gagging at the taste. But they stayed down.

After plucking a spoon from the drawer in the tiny, sparsely furnished kitchen, she removed the pot of soup from the stove and stirred it. But she didn't take it over to the table right away. She stayed at the sink until she was sure the cramps had passed.

Old cobwebs filled with the husks of dead flies occupied the corners of the dusty window. She wiped them away with her hand and looked out into the courtyard.

Years had passed since she'd actually cooked anything here in the apartment up on the outskirts of Greenwich, years since she'd stocked the pantry with emergency food rations and ammunition. She didn't live here, only conducted her experiments here.

But now the work was finished.

A bubble popped on the surface of the old soup, releasing a jet of steam and the greasy smell of chicken. It was a couple years past its expiration, but she knew it was still edible. Maybe it wouldn't taste all that good, but it was nutritious enough to keep them alive.

She removed a pair of bowls from the cabinet, blew out the dust and dead beetle skeletons, then ladled it into each. The idea of soup didn't really appeal to her, even though she was very hungry. What she really wanted was something—

flesh

—fresh, something a bit more hearty than thin soup with tiny chunks of colorless chicken and blanched carrots and waterlogged noodles. Something she could sink her teeth into, like a—

heart

—hearty steak.

She frowned at herself. It wasn't like her to be so distracted, especially by such strange and random thoughts as the ones she seemed to be having now.

It's because you're hungry.

She looked down at the soup and grimaced.

She placed both bowls on a cutting board and carried them out of the kitchen to where a figure lay asleep on her couch.

“Lana,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. She could feel another cramp coming on, and she quickly set the bowls down on the coffee table with a clatter. But the pain subsided before it could become unbearable. “You need to eat.”

Jessie's mother opened her eyes. “No sirens?”

“They went off about an hour ago. Off and on, off and on.” She shook her head. “Wish they'd make up their minds.”

Lana pulled out her Link and squinted at it. “But the network's down.”

Anne shrugged. Up or down, off or on, it didn't make any difference to her anymore. Nothing was going to change her mind now.

“You shouldn't have brought me here,” Lana scolded her. She sat up and eyed the soup warily. “My son will be looking for me. Kelly will, too.”

“Your home was too dangerous. You couldn't stay there. The police went by soon after I brought you here. They went inside. They're corrupt, paid for by Arc, and they're looking for scapegoats. Even when they catch Jessica—”

“They won't catch her!”

Anne White bit her tongue. She knew it was only a matter of time before they did, if they hadn't already. Arc had every resource available to them, tens of thousands of cameras, and a whole gaming community to help track the girl down. She stood little chance of surviving against such odds.

“You need to eat, keep up your strength.” She picked up her own bowl, but her stomach clenched as she put the spoon to her lips. She forced herself to swallow some.

Lana turned away, a distant look in her eye. “What does it matter anymore? They have my son. They have Eric.” She lifted her Link helplessly. “I've been trying to ping him when the Stream is on. I know he's here, not on the island, but he's not answering.”

She tried to rise, but her arms and legs shook and she collapsed weakly onto the couch again.

“Eat,” Doctor White repeated. “Get your strength back. You have to stay strong so you can take care of yourself.”

“Myself? Why?” Lana asked, alarmed. “Where are you going?”

“Away.”

 

Officer Hank Gilfoy sat behind the wheel of his car thumbing through the paper files he'd recovered during his search of the Daniels's house the night before. Many of the records he'd seen before. Some were new.

Other than a quick nap at his desk sometime after two
A
.M
., he'd had no sleep whatsoever since rising the previous morning at his usual four-thirty alarm for what would turn out to be an even longer shift than the one before.

It was barely seven o'clock now and he was late getting inside. The sirens were silent — he couldn't remember them actually going off, just being aware at some point how blissfully quiet things were — though it seemed that the network was now down again. There was no rhyme or reason to either. In fact, nothing made any sense anymore. Including what he was reading.

Someone rapped hard against his window and he jumped, hiccupping in surprise. His partner laughed and gestured. Hank rolled down his window.

“You're late getting in, too?” Al Castle asked. He handed in one of two large cups of coffee, along with a bag of donuts. “Truce?”

Behind him, Captain Harrick hurried up the sidewalk and inside, ignoring them both. The coincidence of her arrival with Al's hadn't been lost on Hank. He'd been aware the two engaged in certain extracurricular — and, in Castle's case, extramarital — activities, though it never ceased to puzzle him why an attractive, intelligent and powerful woman like Lynn would lower herself to Al's level, a man with little ambition, a mean-hearted streak, and absolutely nothing to offer in either the physical or mental departments.

The smell of the coffee infused the car and immediately made Hank's mouth water. He remembered he hadn't had any dinner.

“Whatcha doing?” Al asked.

Hank glanced down at the papers on his lap. The file on top was an old field report. “Just going through some papers my dad left me.”

“Your old man was a cop? I didn't know that.”

Hank shrugged, even though he knew Al was lying. It wasn't exactly a secret that he came from a long line of cops. Cops and Mafiosi.

“You don't talk about yourself much, Hank,” Castle noted. He bent down and stuck his uninvited head through the window. Hank was tempted to roll it back up and choke him. “Virginia, huh? Hey, lookit that. Your old man was the responding officer on the Daniels suicide?”

Hank wished he'd closed the file before opening the window. “Yeah. He used to talk about the case sometimes.”

Something fishy about this one
, Hank Senior had once told him.
Man supposedly commits suicide and the patriarch of the family, some military brass muckity muck, pretty much threatens to shut us down if we don't close the investigation that night. He refused to be tested for gunshot residue, refused to let us talk to the victim's wife and son.

“Whatcha looking at it now for?”

I just wish I could've spoken with the boy. I'm sure he saw something.

Hank had asked his father why he hadn't interviewed Eric later about it, when he was old enough not to require parental permission.

I did, but the kid was messed up by then, traumatized is my guess. He said he couldn't remember a thing.

What do you think happened?

Me? I think it was staged to look like a suicide, but he was really murdered.

And the rumors that came later?

Hogwash.

Then who?

Let me give you some context. Word on the street was that Richard Daniels was getting ready to pull the plug on the government's Omegaman Project. Do you think his daddy would've wanted that?

So, you think he killed his own son?

Hank folded the right side of the packet over the left. “With everything going on here lately, I thought I'd dig it out.”

“You know what they say about beating sleeping dogs,” Al said, his eyes suddenly turning dark.

“I think you mean dead horses.”

“Dead horses, dead corpses. Whatever. All you need to know is that that whole family is fucked, especially that kid. Wouldn't surprise me if he had a hand in it himself. He would've been old enough.”

He extracted his head from the vehicle and straightened up, then pressed the back of his hand against his chin to crack his neck. It always gave Hank the creeps the way his partner could do that.

“Of course,” Castle went on, “he can't help it, coming from a bloodline such as that. Explains why his sister's such a fuck up, too. Just a buncha losers.”

He gestured at the bag. “Yours is the jelly-filled. Leave me the bear claw.” Then he turned to go inside.

Hank watched him mount the steps. The man really was stupidity personified.

“Oh, and speaking of records,” Al said, turning around halfway up the steps. “Captain says no reports from yesterday. As far as we're concerned, we patrolled in the car all day, and we didn't see any fucking dead people walking around neither. Makes it easier to deal with the paperwork.”

 

“Paperwork snafu,” the doctor said. “You know, with everything going on, someone didn't file the transfer request right away. Sorry.”

Eric nodded and gave the medico a wan smile. He knew when the second day rolled around and he hadn't been returned to the cell or transferred out that he'd caught a break. Someone was looking out for him. Someone didn't fall for the typical NCD bull crap that everyone else did.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Don't thank me. I submitted the requisition on time.” He winked. “Though I'm certainly glad for the screw up. Unfortunately, I have no other choice than to move you out of here now. I requested a holding cell at the department pending a hearing, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.”