S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (98 page)

She didn't want to say goodbye. She couldn't say it. She wouldn't.

Cassie was burning up now, her skin almost too hot to touch, dry and papery, rough like leather. A vein had popped in one of her eyes, flooding red into the white, a bright red canal overflowing its banks. The inner membrane of her eyelids was swollen and protruded from the strain of her disease.

“I should've known,” Lyssa said, apologizing again. “I should've seen the signs.” They had been there all along, staring her in the face, the cycles of coherence and silence, the growing dislike for water. And light. The rise in aggression. “I could've stopped it.”

She could've blamed Ramon. But, really, there was only one person to blame, and that was herself. She was the mother, and she had fucked up by not being attentive enough.

But now she would fix it.

“It's time, honey.”

Cassie arched her back, raising her body off the ground. Her cheeks puffed out, but the tape prevented the explosive exhale, leaving the air to whistle out through her nose. Neck muscles strained, tendons rose. A blush rose on her skin, coloring it from gray to deep crimson, then fading as she relaxed again with a sigh.

Lyssa waited, and when Cassie had calmed down, she bent over and kissed her cheek for the last time.

 

He heard the sounds on the front porch, the clumsy, shuffling footsteps and the creaking of someone or something leaning heavily on the railing. He should check. But the boy couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from the scene playing out in the back yard. The door rattled and the knob jiggled.

He raised an arm to wipe away the fog his quick, shallow breaths left on the glass of the sliding door, but it faded in the warm air before he could. And now there was scratching, the sound of someone trying to get in.

Little pig, little pig
, his mind plucked from some long lost fairy tale memory.
Let me come in.

Except he'd always cheered for the wolf. He'd always hated the pigs and their smug, know-it-all superior attitudes. Just because he was a kid didn't mean he wasn't smart.

He knew he was supposed to be watching for the men to come back. He was supposed to make sure none of the infected came. But hadn't she brought one of them here herself?

The excited thrum of his heart in his chest was too insistent to ignore. He felt that teasing, empty, thrilling tickle he always got inside his belly when he watched another animal die.

Or person.

The little brown girl with her big brown eyes had been easy. Too easy. So terribly unsatisfying. The older boy, though, the twin . . . .

Well, it would've been better if all three had been there and the mother could watch, but he'd waited long enough. The impulse had come and he hadn't been able to resist it.

He wished he could've seen their faces when they found the bodies.

Damn it. Hurry up!

The woman was taking her damn time, and for a while he feared she might not do it. But then she looked up into the sky and the weak light spilling out from the upstairs window showed the glistening of her tears on her cheeks, the anguish in her eyes. And by the way her shoulders slumped, he knew as sure as he knew his own name that she was going to do it.

So he waited.

His heart began to race faster. The excitement in his belly bloomed into something bigger than him.

The mother pushed herself unsteadily to her feet, wobbling as if drunk. She made her way over to the dead girl and untied her from the tree.

She was being careless. The tiny thing — even smaller than he was — immediately lunged and almost broke free from her tether. But her shirt caught on a branch and spun her sideways. Her feet slipped out from beneath her. The branch splintered and dropped her to the ground. The girl's snapping teeth missed their mark and instead found only empty air and dirt.

He hadn't previously considered the bonus of two deaths for the price of one. He weighed how much greater the pleasure would be seeing them both suffer and die. But in the next moment he discounted it. If the mother died, there would be no one's pain for him to relish.

The mother was forcing the little dead girl closer now, over to the twisting shape of the daughter on the grass. He thought about the worms he liked to burn with his magnifying glass, and the grubs he dug up in his mother's rooftop tomato garden. He liked the way they smelled when they crackled. It reminded him of the burnt way his father smelled.

Part of the sheet had pulled away, exposing the back of the daughter's left thigh. The skin was pale there and smooth. He longed to touch it, to touch her skin, her hair. He felt himself stiffen at the thought, and another spark of excitement rose and filled his body. The fog ghost reappeared for a moment on the glass.

The zombie didn't seem very interested in the little girl. She only wanted to bite the mother. She kept twisting around and opening her mouth, her neck straining and her jaw so wide that the boy thought the skin of her cheeks might have to tear to accommodate it. The mother forced her to turn around, guiding her ever closer to the girl on the grass, to that small, silky, bare spot of skin.

Eight feet away now, then six. Four. The dead girl still had not noticed the offering. The mother, he saw, was sobbing openly now, nearly overcome with her grief, and he couldn't help but smile. He reached up with his hand to feel his own face, as if unsure he really was grinning. But what he found there seemed like a foreign landscape. He couldn't tell what it was doing. So he leaned away from the glass until he could see his reflection.

The movement must've caught the mother's attention, because she stopped and began to turn toward the house.

He slipped back against the curtains, careful not to move them, hoping she hadn't seen him.

Just do it
, he silently urged.
Do it!

The woman turned her attention back to the dead girl in her grip. She thrust her forward once again. Toward her own dying daughter. Hoping to stave off the certainty of one death with the uncertainty of another.

Three feet.

Two.

Forcing her to bend over until the dead girl's eyes could see nothing but the tender, young flesh. The girl moaned and pawed at the air, but still she resisted. She still wanted to bite the woman.

The mother kicked at the backs of the dead girl's knees, forcing her to kneel. Pushing her down so that the living skin was only a few inches away from the other girl's rotting teeth.

The zombie girl snapped her jaw. He could hear it through the glass, the sharp clack. Ready to bite, wanting to tear into human flesh. Just not the flesh of the prostrate child on the ground.

What the hell is wrong with that fucking zombie?

And then:
Do it! DO IT!

He almost clapped in glee when the mother echoed his own thoughts, shouting the words. He felt the anguish in her voice and he let it wash over him like warm milk.

The front door rattled again, and this time he heard new voices, more moaning. He wanted badly to stay right there and watch some more — he was beyond fascination now, almost euphoric — but the thing at the front door was getting quite insistent. It was starting to worry him that they might get in and interrupt what was happening.

“Hurry!” he whispered, almost shouting. “Bite her!”

But he saw the mother hesitate. He saw her pull the zombie girl away and lower her own head down. He saw the jaw of the daughter moving, trying to speak, pleading one last time before Death silenced her.

With her free hand, the mother pulled the tape away.

He leaned and silently placed his ear to the door, and he heard the girl say: “I want to be real, Mama.” And the mother replied: “You are.”

 

Drew spun through the radio stations until he found his old friend and colleague, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Jeremy was back at his usual antics, cloaking his message within exaggeration so that the casual listener would not notice the threads of truth embroidered within its fabric.

Told you it would happen, people,
his voice belted out through the car's speakers.
The government has finally fallen! Oh, it's the same old bought-and-paid-for politicians we foolishly elected into office, but now we know who's really pulling the strings. Pirates! Excuse me. I meant to say special interests. Corporations, businesses, whatever. Terrorists. They're all the same, folks— profiteers!

Drew chuckled dryly at the radio. Typical Jeremy. He wasn't sure how this was related to what was happening here now, or where he was planning on going with it. But that was his usual MO.

He wondered if there was anyone left listening anymore.

They've gone and gutted the Constitution, people! They've stripped us of all of our rights! And if that ain't terrorism, then I don't know what is!

Still nothing new.

But now the government has become complicit in mass murder!

Well, that was a daring statement. If he was referring to the outbreak—

You know that martial law has just been declared on Long Island, right people? But did you know that it now gives the military
 
— a military with private stakeholders demanding returns on their investments, mind you
 
— complete freedom to conduct whatever atrocities they want here? It was the same people who created this mess in the first place, and now their solution to cleaning it up is to murder all its witnesses and pay the rest off to keep them silent! Anyone who wants off the island must agree to be implanted.

Drew's amusement turned to consternation. It was one thing to declare martial law, quite another to carry it out. And so far he hadn't seen any evidence of military activity. If anything, the island had descended into complete lawlessness.

I have also just been informed that the FCC has been completely dismantled. The communications network is being shut down! Oversight of any and all broadcast activities is being transferred to a new Department of Homeland Communications and broadcasts will only occur over the new Stream network.

Consternation quickly yielded to alarm. Drew knew Jeremy had his own sources of information, some within the same government he now ridiculed, but certainly this couldn't be true.

Existing television and radio stations are being forcibly shut down, their signals jammed, beginning in the entire tri-state area, on the heels of a government order for a complete review of reporting practices! Given the emergency situation, they're claiming the steps will put a stop to the dissemination of misinformation, arguing it has led to loss of life. Clearly that's bullshit, folks! The real reason is so they can
control
the information. Folks, fight back! They're rebuilding the entire communications network from the ground up in their image!

There was a series of muffled noises, as if the microphone was being shoved into a canvas bag. Then:

I have to keep moving, folks. I can't sit in one place or transmit on one frequency for too long. They're looking for me. Keep scanning your dial. It won't be long before they start jamming everything.

The radio went silent.

Drew puzzled over what he'd just heard. He knew it was part of Jeremy's act to overstate in order to get his point across. It was the only thing that ever kept the very people who had the power and interest to shut him down off his back. But if the government — or whoever was passing for the government now — was shutting everyone down, then it spoke to something much worse than a repeal of the First Amendment. It spoke to something much more disturbing.

“Let's hope he's wrong for once,” Drew muttered as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot.

He saw his first army tank not twenty seconds after getting back onto the highway. It was behind him, spewing long, viscous ropes of fire from its narrow dragon's snout turret, sweeping the flames from side to side. In its wake, the corpses of the infected stumbled about, burning like birthday cake candles until the fat of their flesh had been exhausted and the bones crumbled into blackened, smoldering heaps. The tank rolled over them, pulverizing the remains into the ground. Drew jammed his foot against the accelerator and sped between the empty cars, hoping he wouldn't come face to face with one of the iron beasts himself. Would they blow him off the road? Would they realize he wasn't one of the infected? Or would they not even care?

The choppers came next, a pair of them roaring low over his head with their searchlights panning the ground below. They circled over an intersection where a large crowd of the dead had gathered. Sparks leapt from the dark openings in the choppers' sides, followed by the percussive tapping of the gunfire and bullets hitting metal and concrete. He could feel it on his skin and eardrums. Scores of people were mowed down, their bodies exploding like bloated fruit, liquefying and then raining down in sodden heaps.

Drew understood then that Jeremy had been right. The government was systematically murdering survivors. They were targeting groups of the dead because where they gathered, there had to be the living.

They're all dead now.
We're
all dead.

He felt suddenly exposed out here on the highway, so he turned off his lights and took the next exit. Beneath the canopy of a maple-lined lane, he stopped the car, got out and knocked the taillights out with the grip of the pistol. He tried not to think about the military's night vision capabilities.

After he got back in, the driving was much slower. He had to be careful not to hit anything. And he tried to stay away from the larger groups of people he could see.

Especially the live ones.

With his window rolled down, he listened for the sounds of their engines and tried to move away from them if he could ascertain their direction. Between the scattered and distant gunfire in the direction of the highway, the night was broken only by the sound of his own motor and the tires on the road. Yet over and beneath and through it all were the ever present moans of the dead.