S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (14 page)

One by one, she started going through them, still not sure what she was looking for, yet hoping she'd recognize it when she saw it.

An hour passed. Her eyes grew bleary from staring at the dim computer screen. Her hand was cramped from using the clumsy pointer-clicker. And her headache had grown into the beginnings of a migraine.

When the Link suddenly pinged, startling her from her trance, she jerked and grabbed for it. The device slipped past her fingertips, separated from its connection, and dropped to the floor.

With shaking hands, she retrieved the device and connected. “Hello?”

Silence.

She pulled the Link away and stared at the tiny screen, watching the ping counter tick from ten to eleven to twelve seconds. They were still connected, but there was no identifier code. Who would ping her like this, then not say anything?

“Mom?” she said, tentatively. “Is that you?”

Nothing.

There was a faint click and the timer stopped at seventeen seconds.

Anger grew inside of her, filled her, choked her.

She jabbed her thumb at the screen until she found her mother's Link code and connected. But it went straight to voice mail.

“Mom?” She tried to channel the anger she'd felt just a moment before, but was surprised to find it quickly fading away. All she could manage was fear.

“It's me. Listen, Mom, it's okay. I don't  I don't hate you for staying away. I think I even understand why you did, why you didn't want to come to City Hall for me and Kelly. But I'm worried. Please, Mom, please just ping me. You don't have to come home, just ping me.”

She swallowed, suddenly aware that if she kept going that she might very well break down. She finished by saying, “I just want to know that you're okay. And to say that I love you. And you can come home anytime.” She took a deep breath. “When you're ready.”

She set the device on the desk. A moment later, the screen blinked off into sleep mode. She sat in silence for the next half hour, breathing and listening to the house tick around her. Finally, she leaned forward and reconnected the Link to the computer.

When she finally found the file, it felt to her as if the world was collapsing. She didn't want to believe it, but there it was, clear as day. The file she'd been looking for, the one which didn't belong, hadn't been hidden away deep inside the bowels of her Link. It had been sitting in plain view the whole time.

And that's when she knew that Micah hadn't betrayed them.

Her own husband had.

‡ ‡ ‡

“I'm not going to school,” Jessie groaned. “I'm sick.” And she really was. Her heart was racing and she was short of breath and her body felt feverish. Her face was burning while her feet were freezing. She was sweating, yet shivering.

Is it possible for a body to reject itself?

Because that's what she felt like was happening.

She heard Eric clear his throat on the other side of the bathroom door. “Jessie, this can't—”

The world, which had been content to perform lazy loops and twirls around her, suddenly began to gyrate faster and wilder. Jessie lurched off the edge of the tub and collapsed to her knees in front of the toilet bowl. She clutched at the rim with shaking hands. The sound of her retching seemed terribly loud to her ears. But nothing came up. Saliva dripped from her lips. She grabbed a wad of toilet paper and wiped it away.

Eric was silent, waiting.

“I'm not faking it,” she groaned. She spit into the toilet, where a couple slightly grayish, barely recognizable noodles floated.

She had spent the night on the floor of the bathroom, the door locked. If Kelly had come home last night, he hadn't bothered to come looking for her. Jessie knew he wasn't here now, because Eric had gone looking for him and returned empty-handed.

“Is there anything I can do?” he now asked.

She didn't want him to see or hear her like this, but she also didn't want to be left alone either. She didn't want to be alone if Kelly returned.

“Jess?”

“Stay home,” she whimpered. “Please.”

Eric didn't answer. And that was enough to tell her that he wouldn't. Couldn't.

She leaned her head on the rim and closed her eyes, waiting for him to leave. Waiting for this horrible, terrible sickness to leave her. She was so exhausted, so utterly spent, tired of the constant weariness and the unending, overwhelming sense that the world was going to come crashing down on her at any moment.

It already did, last night.

“I have to go, Jess. Work is—”

“Why can't someone else do it?”

“You know why.”

Snippets of reports from the Media Streams. Rumors everywhere, in school and on the bus. Reggie pinging her last night, leaving on her Link a list of cities possibly affected, either under lockdown or with new curfews or quarantined: Philly and Boulder and Chicago now, in addition to St. Louis. The situation wasn't just gray in Manhattan, it was gray everywhere. The whole world was deteriorating.

“The network's on the verge of collapsing, Jess,” Reggie told her voice mail. “And there's a hundred thousand people still without implants. I'm worried. Jess, ping me when you get a moment.”

But what did those people matter? If Arc was losing control, if the networks were crashing, implants weren't going to help. Without a network, every infected person, every zombie, would no longer be controllable. It would be like they'd rejected the network.

Jessie hadn't pinged him back. She'd listened to his messages, read the texts, all while cowering in the corner of the bathroom, the unending tears flowing down her cheeks. She hated being so emotional, but, lately, she just couldn't seem to help it.

Eric coughed lightly on his side of the door. “I'll ping Kelly, see if he'll stay with you.”

“No!”

She could almost feel her brother's alarm, the questions that must be piling up inside his head. She knew she should tell him about the file on her Link, but she knew that once she did, it would just make it that much more real. And, oh God, she wanted so badly for it not to be.

“Jessie?”

“I'm fine. Please, just go. I'll be okay.”

She could hear him shuffle his feet outside the door. “If you're sure . . . .”

“Go,” she said. It came out sounding hard, bitter.

“Ping me if you need anything.”

“Don't worry. I won't,” she managed to say, before her throat closed off and her stomach cramped again.

She heard him gather his keys, then the low murmur of his voice as he spoke with someone on his Link. She didn't know if he'd pinged school, or someone at his work; she didn't care, as long as it wasn't Kelly.

The front door clicked shut. Eric's car started up. She heard the engine modulate from idle to drive. Heard the sticky sound of the tires as he backed out of the driveway. The brief crescendo of the motor as he drove away. After that, when everything was quiet, she pinged a message to Reggie, asking him to come over after school.

Without Kelly.

† † †

She woke up on the floor around ten. Sunlight streamed in through the uncovered window of her bedroom, and she briefly tried to remember why she was there. When it hit her, she wondered why she'd even left the safety of the bathroom.

Her tee shirt and shorts reeked of sweat and vomit. Her hair was a mess.

She went downstairs and stood in the living room for a few minutes before sitting down on the couch. Then standing up again.

The heat of the day pounded oppressively on the walls of the house, seeking to displace the coolness inside. She went around and closed all the curtains to shut it out. Then wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water.

She felt jittery, light-headed and heavy-hearted. She forced herself to eat an egg, quelling the hunger, but the unease remained. It was a nervous sort of agitation, expectant and full of vague anxieties and self-doubt.

What if you're wrong about the file?

She just couldn't believe Kelly would do something like this to her.

And yet he had sent it to her. That much was incontrovertible.

Unable to sit still for very long, she took to cleaning, at first avoiding the kitchen and the greasy smell that seemed to clot in her throat and stick to the walls of her belly until she was forced to go in and open the window to air it out again. Her head swam and her skin was clammy. The hot air swooped into the house and enveloped her. She swooned for a moment.

She decided to start upstairs and tackled the bathroom first. She scrubbed the toilet until it gleamed, then the sink and mirror. Finally the tub, scraping away the mold between the tiles with an old toothbrush, and then finishing with a cold shower to wash the sweat and dirt from her skin.

Feeling reenergized and grateful for the distraction the cleaning provided, she moved onto the living room. She vacuumed the floor, pushing and pulling the couch away from the wall to get underneath. She was working up another sweat, and it felt good, cleansing. The whine and roar of the vacuum abraded her ears, but it was better than the scratchy whispers of her thoughts; the vacuuming seemed to suck them all away, leaving everything inside of her swept clean.

At last was the kitchen. Except for the faintest of odors, the greasy egg smell had dissipated. The kitchen was baking hot, and a thick, dry breeze was blowing the curtains back, but she didn't bother closing them or the window. She washed the breakfast dishes, emptied the refrigerator of old leftovers and spoiled meat, took out the trash. Sweat began to pour off of her again, soaking her sundress to her body.

When she was finished scrubbing the surfaces, she looked around, inspecting her work. The sink gleamed, much to her satisfaction, but the stains in the worn Formica countertops stubbornly persisted. In her eyes, they even seemed to stand out more.

She took the dirty towels to throw into the laundry basket in the hallway by the cellar door and saw that someone had tracked mud in from the back porch. It looked days old, and she frowned at it, complaining to the empty house that Eric needed to wipe his feet before coming inside. She swept up the loose dried clumps, scraped at the more resistant ones with a screwdriver, then went to go find another old towel under the kitchen sink to wipe up the rest.

Standing up again, she caught sight of what looked like a shadow sliding across the window over the sink. She froze, then lunged forward and strained her neck to look out into the side yard, but no one was there.

Nothing outside the living room window, either.

The heat hit her with relentless fury as she burst out the front door, but it swept past her nearly unnoticed. Her body had gone ice cold with fear. She was certain that someone had been watching her. Looking down, she became aware of the way her dress stuck to her skin, and the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra underneath.

She raced around the outside of the house, first to the side with the kitchen window. Again, there was no sign of anyone. She continued on until she'd circled the entire property, pausing only long enough to check for evidence of trampled grass or disturbed dirt.

The cicadas played their buzzing song from the trees, and the leaves fluttered in the parching breeze. A car slowly passed, sped up briefly before screeching toward the stop sign at the corner. Jessie ran to the curb, her forearms covering her chest and her fists tucked beneath her chin. The tires screeched again as the car turned the corner, the raucous laughs of high school kids trailing behind in the exhaust.

School's out.

She hadn't realized how late it was.

She did another lap around the house before wandering into the back yard and pausing by the opening in the fence. All was quiet in the woods.

You're seeing things, hearing things.

She wondered if it was time to acquiesce to Eric's suggestion and see his shrink. She remembered what Reggie had said the other, about going crazy, and she rolled her eyes.
Nerves
, she thought.
That's all it is. Just nerves
.

Once back inside, she finished cleaning the back hallway floor and tossed the towel into the overflowing basket. She paused, noticing the pile of dirty laundry. How long had it been since anyone had done a load? A week? Two?

She picked up the heavy basket and pushed the bottom edge against the handle until the cellar door popped open. A musty smell wafted up from below, and suddenly the closed, dark space of the basement felt menacing. She envisioned her mother lying down there in the dark, like the image in her dream the other day—

Yesterday? Could it really have only been yesterday?

—saw her tripping on the flimsy wooden steps and falling, breaking her neck. Lying dead at the bottom. Rising.

Stop it!

“Mom?” Jessie croaked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

The basket slipped from her numb fingers and tumbled down the steps into the gloom, ejecting its cargo along the way. Jessie grabbed the door handle to steady herself, her eyes wide as she tried to penetrate the darkness below. Except for the dim shapes of the clothes strewn onto the wooden steps, she could make nothing out.

The damp, sweet earthy smell turned rancid, full of rot and mold. An icy finger of air caressed her cheek.

Mom?

She didn't know if she'd spoken the word out loud; she didn't dare repeat it for fear someone — or something — might answer.

From below, there came a tiny sound, the barest whisper. Jessie leaned forward, not sure she'd even heard it.

Mom? Oh, God, please no.

Her heart was hammering a thousand times a minute, drumming in her ears. A scream rose in her throat, caught, and held inside of her.

Breathe.

She forced herself to calm down. Nothing moved in that inky blackness below, nothing made a sound.

Because there's nothing there.

Forcing a dry laugh up her throat, Jessie straightened up again and readied to step down into the darkness. And that's when she heard it, a dull rasp of sound like the scraping of skin on the packed dirt floor.