S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (32 page)

Eric looked doubtful.

“What else do you have for me?” Harrick snapped.

“The initial report was seven lost CUs, but now they're claiming they had them the whole time. I managed to question one of the tower techs before he was muzzled. He told me the connection's back up but it's spotty. Ten minutes later, he's claiming the system never lost continuity. Pretty sure someone's pulling his strings. Baskins is my tech guy, and he's done a little snooping and says the signal strength is fluctuating like crazy, spiking one minute, then below baseline the next.”

“What's your take on this?”

Eric shrugged. “Arc's trying hard to blind us about why the alarms sounded to begin with, but I don't think they'd turn them off if they thought the situation was still volatile. If anything were to happen, they'd completely lose public trust, and right now it's not that great.”

“So, you think the situation is contained?”

“There are no casualties. The CUs in question are fully quarantined with no access to the general population. So, from their standpoint, yes. From mine?” He shook his head. “We're walking a tightrope. Have been for weeks.”

“After the sewage plant and the break in at their server site near Frye Lake, you'd think they'd want our help.” Captain Harrick shook her head. “Sign over responsibility to whoever their incident commander is, then report back here.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She put the Link down on her desk and drummed her fingers for a moment before remembering that Officer Castle was sitting there. She looked up. “Davenport ping back yet?”

He shook his head. “So, we all clear?”

The captain exhaled and nodded. “For now. But whatever this shit Arc is pulling, I don't like it.”

Castle stood up. “It's certainly keeping the Daniels kid busy.” He was smirking. “He and his team of losers.”

“Whatever your personal feelings for the man,” Harrick growled, “keep them to yourself, Al. Don't make me have to chastise you.”

“Like you chastised me last night?”

She smirked at him.

“Oh, and that implant trace Daniels requested? I got the report back.”

“And?”

“Nothing on the open network. No signal at all.”

“So, not in the country?”

“I did a little snooping on my own. Got a friend with a friend in ArcTech's Jersey operation, has access to the secure networks. The target, he says, is on Long Island. In Gameland.”

Captain Harrick looked startled. “Implant status?”

“Full latent mode.”

“Alive?” she mused. “That's interesting.”

“Alive and kicking. Should I give him the report?”

The captain thought for a moment. “No,” she decided. “Let me deal with this myself.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Even before the last echoes of the siren receded away, Kelly and Jessie had risen to their feet. In the hours that it had filled their world, the sound had assumed an almost physical aspect, pressing them down, weighing upon their bodies as much as their minds. But now that it was gone, the vacuum which followed felt just as stifling.

“I'll check the streams,” Kelly said. He stumbled over to the television, looking dazed. “See if there's an update.”

Jessie jerked away from the holo projector. The bulb was taking its time getting up to temperature. She dropped the goggles back into the pile.

The ringing in her ears seemed almost as loud as the sirens had been, and her head felt like a thousand bees had woken inside of it. She could even feel their stings all over her skin.

The television came on behind her, and she heard Kelly scan through the stations. Jessie looked for her Link, realized she'd left it in the kitchen, and went to go find it so she could ping Eric. There was a new message waiting for her:

<< STATUS UPDATE: MATCH REASSIGNED. AWAITING AUTHORIZATION. >>

“Nothing,” Kelly shouted, from the other room, his voice sounding hoarse.

Jessie shoved the Link in her pocket.

What the hell is happening?
her mind shrieked. Why was Arc sending her these texts? What did they mean?

Someone's screwing with you.

She hurried back into the other room. Kelly had already drawn back the heavy curtain and light flooded in. The streets were still empty, but, here and there, front doors were being cracked open and faces materialized out of the gloom. It was late afternoon, and the air had turned golden.

“It's strange,” Kelly said. He spoke in a low voice, as if he feared the sound of it might get sucked out of the house. “Not a single word about an outbreak, nothing about a possible cause or location or even if it really is over.” He stopped flipping through streams. The emergency beacon on the local Media Stream was gone and in its place was a still image of the front of the Carcher Building in Hartford. “That's helpful.”

“It has to be over,” Jessie said. She could hear her voice trembling. Her whole body was shaking. “They wouldn't turn off the sirens if it wasn't.”

“They might've been cut off.”

He stepped over next to her and peered up and down the street. “Nobody's come out of their house yet. I think it's best if— Jess?” He turned. “Hey, where are you going?”

“Outside.”

“Wait! Jess—”

But she was already across the front porch, her eyes set on the curb. She needed to move, to get away. But from what, and to what, she couldn't say.

The street was totally empty in either direction. Silence hung over the neighborhood like a heavy mist.

“
Jessie! Get in here!
”

She turned and stared. Her Link pinged in her pocket and she almost cried out. But she drew it out and looked at the screen without registering at first that it was Eric.

“You guys okay?”

She nodded. “What's going on? Why are the sirens off? We haven't been able to find anything on the Streams.”

“Still working on that,” he said. “Arc hasn't been very forthcoming.”

“So it's an outbreak?”

“No, nothing that serious.”

She imagined the dead guy lying on the ground in front of the Corben house, a bullet in his head.
Wonder whether he thinks it's nothing serious.

“Are you coming home?”

“I'm wrapping up my investigation in the next ten minutes, once I hand over the reins. Leaving a couple of my officers to monitor the situation. But then there's the follow up back in the office, reports to file, interviews. Plus, I've got a couple quick things to do on the way. I'll try and swing by the house in about an hour, hour and a half.”

“Can you say what happened?”

He sighed. “A portion of the CU network grid went down over on Main Street. There was an underground work detail in the area.”

Jessie remembered the Arc team she'd passed in the cab on the way home last night and wondered if it was the same one. “Is that what triggered the early warning system?” she asked.

“If it was just that, no. But I just heard a Sys-Patch report from NYHP that someone plowed their car into an outdoor breakfast café just over the state line in Crawford. Six people dead on scene, another two en route to the hospital.”

“That's horrible, but I don't see—”

“The implant monitoring system registered that cluster of activations shortly after the control grid went down here. The outbreak detection system interpreted the separate events as an outbreak.” He paused, looked to the side, then back. “I have to go. Have you got the TV on? Arc is supposed to be transmitting some sort of announcement any minute now.”

“Yeah. Can we leave the house?”

He took a deep breath. “To be safe, you better stay inside until the all-clear is sounded.”

‡ ‡ ‡

Kelly was standing in the living room when she came back in, the flickering light from the holo projector forming a halo around his silhouette. The door clicked closed behind her, sounding unexpectedly loud in the relative quiet.

He didn't move, and for a moment she believed he wasn't actually there, that someone else had taken over control of his body.

But he must've sensed her presence, because he turned. “It's dead.”

“The holo projector?” she asked. She was confused, because she could see the glow.

He moved aside, and now she could see what he meant. She looked down at the base of the image— down, not up, because the Player was lying on the ground, rather than standing. Instead of its head towering over them, brushing the low ceiling of the room, it was nestled in the unkempt grass. Instead of staring up into the sky, its eyes were blinded by thick mats of flies, hungrily sucking up the first of the evening condensation which was beginning to pool in the sockets.

Jessie pushed her Link into the control console and connected.

Stand up.

Nothing.

Get on your feet!

Now she saw the husk of fresh decay as it spread across the shredded remains of its ashen cheeks. The body lacked tension — not in a way that could be seen with the eyes — but rather felt, as if whatever last traces of vitality the Player once held within its rotting core had been finally extracted from the body. Maggots, not a full day old, boiled over the brim of its rotting lips and poured from the vent on its cheek. An enamel ribbon of gore traced an unbroken path from a nostril and gathered in the bowl of a half-eaten ear.

Kelly reached over to flip the projector off.

“Wait!” Jessie yanked his hand back.

She circled the image, staring through the vertical shaft of light, orbiting twice before stopping and shaking her head. Kelly had moved back to give her space, and now he asked what she was doing.

“I saw someone.”

“Another Player?”

She shook her head. “On the other side of the fence.”

Kelly bent down and set the timer back four minutes. “Where did you see it?”

She came back around the front and stood where she'd first seen the shadow. “There.”

Kelly pushed the PLAY button, and together they leaned toward the holo projector, staring into the image. Half a minute into the replay, the shadow along one blurry edge of a building pinched itself off and began to move. The indistinct figure paused, then disappeared through one of the doors.

“What was that?” Kelly whispered.

“Micah,” Jessie replied. “I think it was Micah.”

‡ ‡ ‡

They spent most of Sunday searching for Reggie in town. Eric dropped them off at Sisters of Mercy before heading off to work, insisting that he'd try to get free so he could help. “No promises, though.” And Jessie had gotten a sense that he wasn't just telling her about a few little things, but that there was a whole lot of big things happening behind the scenes.

She and Kelly made their way from the hospital on foot and headed steadily in the direction of Micah's house. Both were quiet, chatting occasionally and only about the likelihood of finding Reggie, never about why he was acting this way or what might've happened to him. And they avoided the subject of White's manipulation of Kelly entirely, as if understanding that their relationship was currently too fragile to withstand further scrutiny and criticism and doubt.

They stopped at every shop and alleyway to ask or search for any sign of their friend. But no one claimed to have seen him.

They split up after a quick lunch in the shade at the Yale Drive Bridge. Kelly headed out to Micah's, while Jessie made her way down into the greenbelt again. She was still convinced she'd missed something there, despite yesterday morning's utter failure. She wasn't ready to reject her theory that Micah was alive and in Gameland, that he had somehow used the game stream to take control of Reggie's mind and used him to abduct her mother. Without the theory, she was left with only one other possibility, that she was going crazy.

Maybe you are, to think of something
that
whacked out.

Was it so far-fetched? After all, Micah was brilliant. She had no doubt he could hack an implant if he wanted to. Managing to take control without killing Reggie was a bit more difficult. And she knew Micah'd found a way to use the game streams to track Links, despite the barriers Arc had put into place. If he could do all that, then, faking his own conscription wasn't out of the question.

When she got to Reggie's house, she stopped and knocked on the door. Missus Casey seemed startled to see her. “Bob's out coordinating one of the search teams,” she said, staring at her hands. She wouldn't look Jessie in the eye, and only reluctantly invited her in.

“Kelly and I are looking, too.”

“The police have submitted for a warrant to track his Link,” Missus Casey told her. “But they haven't heard back from Arc yet to access the secure streams.” The look on her face soured, and she lapsed into an awkward silence.

“Missus Casey, I need to ask you something. Yesterday morning, when you called, you said Reggie didn't say anything when he woke. Was that the truth?”

She flapped her hands. “I told you I was asleep.”

“So, you're saying he might have? Did Reggie's dad say if he spoke?”

The woman stood up so suddenly that she knocked the chair over behind her. She walked from the table and leaned against the counter. “My little Reggie would never hurt anyone,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Jessie asked. An image of her mother prostrate on the mossy ground flashed through her mind again. “What makes you think he might?”

Missus Casey whirled around, her face red with anger. “I just told you he wouldn't hurt anyone, least of all you!”

“M-me?”

“I told Bob he must've misheard. Reggie wouldn't say such things. Oh, my poor baby,” she wailed. “I should never have let him get involved with you people!”

“What did he say, Missus Casey?” Jessie pushed. “Please, I need to know. Maybe it'll help us find him.”