S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (150 page)

“There's still another tablet, remember? And if I know Micah, it's going to have a copy of his script on it. We get it and we can still hack into the codex . . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized the folly of his plan. With the mainframe shut down, the codex was completely inaccessible to them.

He let off on the accelerator and the car slowed. They stopped in the middle of the highway about a mile east of Woodbury. After a moment of just sitting there, he reached over and shut the engine off. “Maybe it'll find a solution on its own. The codex is pretty advanced. It'll fix itself.”

Jessie shook her head. “The Stream's been out for too long this time. I think if there was a solution, then it would've come up with it by now and reset the network.”

“If there's no Stream, then they can't activate our implants.”

“I don't think it works that way, Reg. The Stream is off to prevent the virus from spreading. It'll come back on to send that one last command.”

He shook his head. “Maybe not. We have to believe.”

She exhaled through her teeth and shrugged. “It doesn't matter. We're all dead anyway. We just don't know it.”

“Don't say that!”

She threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat. “What else is there? It's not like we can go back to our lives.”

“Not back, Jess. Never back. But we can still go forward.”

“Just stop with the feel-good platitudes, Reggie.”

“Look, I'm sorry Kelly's gone. It fucking sucks. It hurts like fucking hell, like a part of me has died inside. I know it's much worse for you, but you can't give up, Jessie. I refuse to let you. You have to think about the baby.”

She chuffed. “I'd be doing it a favor by dying here.”

“That's not true.”

“Everyone out there is dead, Reg, dead or dying. Eric's gone missing. He's probably dead. Mom's dead. Everyone's gone.”

“Your mom's not dead! Why would you think that?”

Jessie turned to him in surprise. “What?”

“She's not dead. I just spoke with her two days ago.”

Jessie felt dizzy. She tried to push it away, but it was like a lead blanket smothering her.

“Ashley said—” She gasped with sudden realization. “She told me Mom had died. She lied?”

She told the truth in the end.

Reggie's fingers wrung the steering wheel until it groaned from the strain. “God damn fucking bitch,” he whispered. “God damn stupid fucking . . . .” He laid his forehead on his hands. “God, Jess, I'm so sorry about her. Really, I am. I don't know what I ever saw in her.”

But Jessie brushed his apology aside. “Are you sure? How was she?”

“Weak, but recovering. My parents are taking care of her. Kelly's parents, and Kyle, too. They're all together.” He reached for the ignition. “We should be with our families. Let's go home.”

“Home,” she said. The word felt strange on her tongue, hollow-sounding and unfamiliar. She tried to picture what home looked like, but nothing would come to her. She couldn't even seem to remember what her mother looked like.

She sighed deeply and nodded. “Fine.”

Reggie reached down and turned the key in the ignition. The starter motor clicked. He tried again, but the result was the same.

“What's the matter?”

“The engine won't start.”

 

She knew she was being followed. She could see it slinking along in the shadows behind her, and once, when she'd turned around real fast, she'd seen its face for the briefest of moments before it disappeared again.

Lyssa couldn't be bothered with it. There had to be thousands of them on the island now, breeding uncontrolled, preying off the abundant wildlife.

She frowned. Come to think of it, she hadn't seen much wildlife to speak of. Lots of birds, certainly, but very few mammals. And this was the first dog she'd seen.

Well, she didn't care what it did, as long as it kept its distance. At least it wasn't being aggressive. If anything it seemed more curious than hungry.

She kept moving. The cemetery wasn't very far from the house, a mile at the most. Maybe closer. She couldn't remember exactly. And Cassie's body was as light as a feather, no more than twenty, twenty-five, pounds.

Once more, tears welled up in her eyes. She felt them slip down her cheeks when she blinked, as if her eyelids were miniature guillotines slicing away her grief little bits at a time. She had been sure it was going to work. So sure.

So sure.

But it hadn't.

She blamed the doubt which had grown inside of her since morning, since before the boys left. It was the doubt which made her attack Kelly. It was the doubt that robbed her of her daughter. Poisonous uncertainty infecting her like a virus. Infecting Cassie. Destroying everything.

She cursed it.

She should've had more faith in herself.

She turned around and looked again, but nothing moved. Nothing made a sound but her shambling feet on the sidewalk. She couldn't seem to lift them high enough so that they wouldn't scrape. That and the whispering breeze through the trees. She turned forward again and resumed her slow trek to the family plot.

After recovering from Kelly's strangling her, she'd waited for Cassie to wake, checking every few minutes and finding Cassie's heart growing stronger, her breathing deeper and more regular, her body warmer and warmer.

All she wanted was to hear her little girl's voice again, because then there would be no more doubt. But it wouldn't leave her, and the longer Cassie failed to wake, the stronger it grew.

Just one chance was all she wanted, one last chance to tell her that she loved her and had missed her so terribly much all of these years. To say she was sorry for what she had done.

Her beautiful, precious little girl.

It was probably around eleven that she finally got up to go to the bathroom and to find something to eat. Five minutes was all she was gone. And when she returned, Cassie hadn't been breathing anymore. In a panic, Lyssa shook her, maybe a bit too hard. The bones in her neck had been so delicate, so brittle after all these years. “Breathe, Cassie! Breathe!” But Cassie didn't breathe. She didn't wake.

Stabbing the earpieces of her stethoscope into her ears, she could hear nothing inside that tiny chest. Not a sound.

“No no
no NO!
Oh nooooo!”

She pounded on her daughter, first with an open palm, then with her fist, until she heard the ribs crack, but the heart was still. Nearly mindless with grief by then, she bent over the girl and pried open her stiff, gray lips and began to breathe air into her unwilling lungs, forcing herself not to be sick from the wretched smell that the girl's exhales carried out of her and propelled into her mother's mouth and nose.

But nothing she did brought her back. The cure had failed.

The cure had failed and her daughter was dead again.

An hour passed.

Then two, and Lyssa found herself standing in front of the mirror on the bathroom door. She remembered she'd always hated the damn thing there. She hated the ways she'd always looked in it.

The reflection that filled it now terrified her.

The cure failed.

Her daughter was dead and was never going to come back.

The cure failed.

Which meant that she would die, too. It was only a matter of time before the virus inside her body overwhelmed the cells she'd injected to kill them. Because they had failed.

There was no cure.

As she stood there naked, save for her underwear, she could see that the bruises around her neck had grown darker. The circles under her eyes had grown more pronounced. Her tongue had developed a film of gray.

And she was hungry . . . .

The hunger. It was good that the boys had left without her. She was—

sad

—glad that they were gone, relieved that she'd sent them away. Perhaps she'd known even then that the cure had failed and that she would become—

She hoped they'd come back. She wanted to see them again. She wanted to—

eat them

—apologize.

She came to the corner of the graveyard, where the black wrought iron fence met a cinderblock wall. The grounds were now weed-choked, the tombstones sunken beneath a withering kelp forest of old tangled vines and the husks of dead grass. This was a sanctuary now, a reef for birds whose layered shit created grotesque shapes on them like some macabre coral.

The entrance was just around the corner. The gate was open.

There was a moment of panic when she couldn't remember where her son was buried. She couldn't even remember his name, not right away.

Remy. Little Remington.

He hadn't lived even a week.

She looked back along the sidewalk before entering, half expecting to see the dog slinking along beneath the waves of grass that spilled out onto the sidewalk. She knew the mutt was somewhere close by. She could smell—

the disease

—its fusty pelt, could smell the—

life

—mange on it.

But the street behind her was empty.

She swam through the sea of grass with the corpse of her daughter held out before her, and she laid Cassie down beside Remy's headstone. The ground before it had sunken in a long time ago, as if the thing it once held had gotten out and crawled away. The hollow was just large enough for her to lie down in, so she did. She lay down in a tight ball and closed her eyes.

* * *

The dog stood at the end of the row and watched the woman for a very long time. Something about her triggered an old memory, and he began to whine with longing. But the woman's smell was fading, and a new smell was leaking out of her, a smell he had come to regard as “bad.”

Finally, she rose and walked away, her arms limp at her sides.

As the sun began to dip lower in the sky, he turned from that place and made his way home. More bad smelling things would soon rise, and some instinct he'd long since developed told him that it was time to hide until the sun came out again.

 

“It's not looking too good,” Robert Casey told the group assembled around the tiny kitchen table in the rundown apartment on the outskirts of town. There were only two chairs. One was occupied by his wife, Vickie, the other by Lana Daniels.

The chairs were old, the legs uneven, and the plastic cushions were badly torn. The tabletop, ancient Formica with the empty cocoon scars of ancient cigarettes left burning on its edges, similarly rocked on legs whose connections were questionable at best.

“We have food and water for maybe another two days, if we're careful. And,” he added, glancing over at Officer Gilfoy, “if we don't add any more people to our group.”

Gilfoy didn't react. His gaze was directed out the window overlooking the apartment complex's courtyard, where a number of Infected had fallen into the pool and were floating in various poses and states of buoyancy. The scene reminded him of a picnic he'd taken in the Blue Ridge Mountains as a child, back when his family lived in Virginia. There had been a lot of people attending, though he couldn't remember the occasion or who the people were, other than his parents. He remembered watching the women setting out the food on the picnic tables while the men played lawn games. The pool scene was like a gruesome interpretive performance art piece of a Jell O fruit bowl.

Every so often, one of the zombies would flinch, and that would set off a chain reaction resulting in the rest of them thrashing about in the water for a little while. The noise would attract even more into the courtyard, and invariably some of the new arrivals would fall in, too.

He could feel their eyes on him, the people in the kitchen, could feel the undercurrent of hostility and blame that came with telling them what had happened. He knew it wasn't his fault, and they knew it too, but it didn't stop them from resenting him.

He'd barely made it out of the truck alive. Most of the passengers hadn't. With the door shut on the freight compartment, he hadn't realized until it was too late what was happening. Not until the screaming forced him to stop the truck to investigate. By then, nearly everyone had been bitten.

He didn't tell them that it was Eric who had died and come back. He couldn't even be sure of it himself, though it seemed the most likely explanation. He thought it best to keep that part to himself.

“I'll make a supply run,” he volunteered, turning away from the window. “I think it'll be better if we go in a team of four, no more and no less. One person will remain in the car as a driver, one to gather supplies, two to provide security.” He glanced at the four remaining survivors of yesterday's mishap and waited.

“I'll go,” Robert Casey volunteered. His wife grabbed his arm, but he shook it off.

“If you're afraid we'll just leave without—” Gilfoy started to say.

“We were doing fine until you came and brought . . . them.”

“Robert!” Missus Casey exclaimed.

“I think we should reconsider finding a better place to hole up,” Gilfoy said. He'd made the argument shortly after arriving. From what he'd learned, most of the apartments in the complex were packed with survivors, all of them seeking refuge as they fled away from the center of town. More people meant better chances of fending off the Undead, but it also meant more risk. And too many people meant the supplies in the area would quickly be depleted.

Lana Daniels shook her head. “No, I'm not moving. Not until we know for sure what happened to the kids.” She reached up to her shoulder, where Kelly's mother was resting her hand, and grabbed it and squeezed.

“We can leave them a note.”

One of the people from the truck, a man who went simply by the name of Walter B, pushed himself away from the wall he was leaning against. He picked at a scab on his cheek, inspected his fingernail for a moment, then flicked the fleck of skin away. “Speaking for myself only,” he said with a thick New York drawl, “and this is just my opinion so take it or leave it, but what makes any youse think those kids is even still alive?”