S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (71 page)

“It's that damn nutcase you always listen to,” Ramon had told her, after they'd locked themselves inside the house and shuttered their windows and silenced their phones. “It's people like him who spread these insane conspiracy theories, leaving innocent people like us to suffer when the fanatics who believe them act as if they're true.”

* * *

She and Ramon had driven to work the next morning in separate cars. It was his idea. He left first, thinking he'd draw the more fanatical away.

When Ronnie showed up at the door, her face was flushed and her eyes wild with fright. “What's going on? People have been calling my house asking about you since yesterday! How did they know my number? The phone won't stop ringing.” She waved her hands about.

Lyssa ushered her in.

“My roommates are really pissed at me, Missus S. They don't want Cassie at our house anymore. They don't even want me to work for you. Brad even said I should stay away from you.”

“I'm so sorry for all this, Ronnie,” Lyssa told her. “We've turned off the phones except for the one in front. As long as the police and news people are around, I'm sure you'll be safe. Just stay inside. Or the backyard.”

Ronnie frowned. “How's Cassie doing?”

“A bit tired from yesterday.”

“No . . . other problems?”

“Well, she did get a little too much sun again. I think you should probably just keep her home again today.”

The ride into work had been almost unbearable. She'd hated leaving Cassie behind with all of that. And there was no way she could concentrate on anything. She wasn't going to get any work done.

The message count on her phone had maxed out at ninety-nine sometime yesterday. Her email wouldn't load. In fact, she was unable to access the local area network at all and guessed that the server had crashed. Her desk was strewn with handwritten notes. She swept them all into the trash without looking at any of them, then reconsidered and dumped them all out again so she could go through them one-by-one, just in case there might be something important.

Like a message from Drew.

There wasn't.

Frustrated, she wadded the whole mess up into a giant paper ball and hurled it across the room. When it hit the wall, it exploded and rained scraps down onto the floor. Unable to sit still, she started to pace about the small room. Soon, paper was scattered into every corner.

She flung the door open and stalked down the hall and into the animal rooms. There, the news was even worse. The test rabbits were dead in their cages. She was horrified to find them hugely bloated, as if they'd been pumped full of air. Their food was entirely gone and they'd chewed through the plastic of their bowls and their polyethylene water bottles were shredded. Their hunger must've been terrible.

Leaning in to peer into the shadows, she saw that their hindquarters were matted with blood and feces, a consequence of massive internal bleeding. Their faces were also bloody, their lips and teeth mangled as a result of their chewing.

She'd never seen anything like it before.

But she couldn't deal with cleaning it all up, not right then.

Ramon found her sitting in the lab, alone. She could tell the moment he walked in that his day was going as spectacularly poorly as hers was. He stepped in and blinked at her, as if shocked to find her this way. Finally, something seemed to register in his mind and he frowned. “You okay?” he asked. His voice was trembling.

She didn't answer.

“Yeah, right.” He exhaled deeply and raised his hands in a gesture of futility. “The Ames team is threatening to pull out.”

All she could do was stare at him. The words, the meaning of them, seemed foreign to her. Yet, somewhere deep inside, she knew what he was saying.

“They want to give us another week to get our shit together before they try again. They say all this crap going on is too much unwanted attention.”

He left after several minutes passed in silence. She just sat there motionless until the automatic ceiling lights clicked off and plunged her into darkness, and the only light in the windowless room was from the instruments surrounding her.

The remaining staff members, those not out sick, were in a similar funk. Lyssa wandered past the courtyard and glanced through the door and saw several of them sitting at the picnic table, their heads bowed, hands rising listlessly to insert food into mouths which seemed unable to taste. Their faces told stories of grief and shock and fear.

Lyssa.

“Lyssa?”

She felt her arm being shaken, her attention being drawn away from the glass. She looked down at the proffered telephone receiver. The hand belonged to their receptionist. “It's your daughter's babysitter.”

Again? Please don't be something bad.

Lyssa frowned. “What is it?” She didn't want to take the phone.

“She says it's an emergency.”

All morning, Lyssa had felt as if the walls were threatening to fall. But when Ronnie told her what had happened, they did more than collapse. They annihilated her.

Cassie's rabbit, Ben Nicholas, was dead.

 

She felt like she was losing her mind.

I think maybe you are.

No, she was holding it together, and that's what was so amazing about the whole thing, that despite all the shit that was going down around her, she was the only one who was sane enough to see clearly.

She stabbed the trowel downward as hard as she could, snapping her wrist until it felt as if the bones in her arm might break. With a grunt she gave the tiny shovel a twist and drew out another soggy clot of mud and set it aside. The hole wasn't very deep yet, maybe ten inches. The ground was just too saturated with rain to go any deeper. It kept caving in on itself. She looked over at the lump of fur beside her in the twilight and wiped an arm across her sweaty forehead. She could feel the grit from the loam scratching her skin, and she knew she'd just smeared mud on her face. But at least the sweat wasn't dripping into her eyes anymore.

The hole's not going to be wide enough.

For a moment she considered trying to make the carcass fit, but the thought of forcing it down, of feeling those broken bones shifting beneath her hands, crackling and oozing through the breaks in the pelt, made her gag. She stifled a cry and bent to the task once more, scraping at the sides and reaching down again to pull out the collapsed earth. Another heavy scoop landed in the muddy heap on the other side, making a wet, sloppy, smacking sound. She used her thumb to push the sticky mess off of the blade of the trowel.

The soil had a musty smell to it, a dark scent, thick and earthy like an old log overturned after years of rotting undisturbed. Black and rancid, yet sweet, too. The whiteness of the dead rabbit's fur caught her eye in the dim moonlight. The shape seemed to shift and take on a new form.

Just a trick of the lighting.

For just a second it had looked like the possum she'd smashed with her bare hands and stone along the side of the highway weeks back.

She glanced over at the mound again, blinking away the sweat and mud which had resumed dripping into her face. Her nose was runny from crying. The rabbit's fur was splotched with dark stains— blood and mud and streaks of rust from the pipe their neighbor, Sam Locke, had used to beat the poor animal to death.

“ ‘Getting into my chickens,' my ass,” she muttered as she reached down to scoop out some more mud. “ ‘Killed my prize-laying hens.' What kind of asshole actually believes a rabbit would do something like that?”

She knew it wasn't about the rabbit. Or even the jerk's chickens. It was about the disruption to his life caused by what had happened over the past several days. The disruption to all their neighbors' lives.

She'd seen them in front when she arrived home, a group standing off to the side, separate from the professional protestors and the press. There was only one police car now. In fact, there were fewer reporters as well.

“Killed the poor animal because he was angry at us. That's why he did it. Fucking asshole. God damn bully.”

Probably pissed at Ramon for driving on his grass.

She'd wanted to call her husband after having it out with Sam that afternoon, but she'd gotten sidetracked dealing with Cassie after she'd lashed out. The girl had been a wreck, traumatized by the sight of that plastic garbage bag, the blood smeared around the inside and spilling from the opening. The bloodstained metal pipe lying at Sam's feet.

What the hell kind of maniac does that!

And Ronnie had simply slipped away without saying goodbye. Lyssa doubted she'd see her face ever again. Not after what had happened these past couple of days.

Jesus. What the hell would she tell Ramon when he finally got home tonight?

It's wide enough now. Put it in and finish up already.

And yet she hesitated. It wasn't that she was squeamish or disliked the idea of getting her hands dirty. Not even a week's worth of showers would be able to extract the mud from beneath her fingernails. It was the finality of it all. Cassie had so dearly loved Ben Nicholas.

It's just a rabbit. It's not Rem—

With a sob of pain and anger, she rolled the animal into the hole. It landed with a sticky thump and rolled onto its back, its legs pointing upward, the starlight catching one eye. She began to rake the dirt from the opposite side of the hole with her arms, pulling it toward her, harder and harder until the sides of her hands and arms were raw and her muscles ached. She grunted with each effort, panting for air and letting it out again in a sob. The hole slowly filled, hiding the rabbit. Mud and blood and salty tears falling from her chin.

It's not Remy. My Remy.

She was babbling in her mind now.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

When she was finished, she stumbled senselessly to her feet and somehow made her way toward the house, insensate, unaware of the sounds coming from her throat and the accompanying chorus of crickets and frogs along the fence.

She fell against the porch railing and pulled herself up the steps, hand over hand, sobbing openly now. She somehow opened the door and stumbled into the house.

If she had looked up before coming in, she would've seen her mourning daughter standing at the window from the upstairs hallway, looking as if she expected something else to happen.

 

It was the towers making everyone crazy. Had to be.

Lyssa couldn't know for sure, of course. She had no way to prove it. But it seemed as likely a cause for the inexplicable strangeness on the island as any other. The towers were putting out some kind of toxic radiation. Or maybe not radiation, but a signal of some sort that could affect people's behavior. The new Stream signal was poisoning them.

But just some people?

Different people had different susceptibilities, just like some people were more resistant to certain biological diseases than others.

If she was right, if it was the Stream, then the new phone devices might just be focusing it, making those who possessed one more likely to succumb. It would explain Drew's sudden illness so soon after getting his new phone. It explained why their neighbor had suddenly gone apeshit and murdered Cassie's rabbit in such a violent manner after years of living quietly next door. She'd noticed his phone that afternoon when he threatened to call the cops on her.

It was the exact same device Drew had.

And the same one Ramon had gotten, too.

All at once, her husband's strange behavior over the past few weeks came into sharp focus. She'd just assumed it was related to their marriage troubles and Remy's death. But now she knew it was something else entirely.

The Stream.

Was she in danger? Was Cassie?

Was that what had sickened her poor little Remy, made him die in that hospital? He'd been born healthy, and then he died. Surely the hospitals would've been among the first to be switched over. The signal there would be more concentrated than most other places.

She sat in her kitchen, listening to her radio station, to her Jay Bird make innuendoes about how the craziness and the towers and everything else were all tied together. And she'd made the leap before he had a chance to get to the punch line.

The Stream and those new devices.

She needed to listen so she wouldn't miss it when he finally spit it out. Anyway, that's why Ramon kept dismissing him. The Stream was telling him not to listen. Not to listen to the truth.

She and that Liberty man in Medford and Jay Bird. They were the only ones who could hear it.

She leaned in closer to the radio. She didn't want to miss anything.

Jay Bird was telling her that the towers were evil, that the government was evil because of what it was sending through the Stream to them, and she was thinking, “Amen, brother! Sing it!”

Those towers
,
do you know what they connect to? You know the workers putting them up, the conscripted convicts? The government is controlling them through the signals in the towers. It feeds the Stream directly into their neural implants!

Yes
, Lyssa thought,
the implants. And the new phones. That's how they were controlling them. The bastards!

She could see them in her mind's eye, the work crews, could picture them. They'd always struck her as strange whenever they were working. Six team members and only one Operator to control and direct and manipulate them. It just wasn't practical. But now she realized he wasn't controlling the conscriptees; he was their supervisor. Whoever was controlling them was somewhere else, sending their commands through the towers. That's why the work sites always had one of those trucks there, the ones that looked like news vans with the portable transmission antennas.

And once again, folks, I'm telling you those people they kidnapped out of our prisons
 
— you know the ones, those killers and rapists and child abusers, the ones they had implanted
 
— they're dead.