S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (124 page)

“
Reggie?”

Nothing.

A quick inspection tells me he's no longer in the building. I half expect him to be gone, to have gone after Ashley despite Kelly's warning not to, despite Kelly's promise we'd go instead. But then I see him outside sitting on his haunches, his back against the building and his head buried in his arms. I see his shoulders hitch, and at first I think it's a trick of the lighting. But then I hear his sobs.

I stop. I don't know whether to approach or not. He wouldn't want me to see him crying.

But he must sense me because he raises his head and looks over. His arms are up around his ears and he's holding his Link in his hand. His eyes are dry, but his face is pale.

“
You okay?”

He exhales and leans his head back against the stone wall and looks up at the sky. It's considerably brighter now. It's stopped raining and the sky is still gray, but the sun is stronger coming through the thinning clouds and the grass is an impossibly intense shade of green, so intense that it looks almost fake. I want to sink down into it. I want to lie down and be swallowed up by all that lushness.

“
What are you doing?” I ask. I give the Link in his hands another meaningful look, then swivel my eyes back to his face. There's a flicker of guilt. “Did you try to ping Ash?”

He swallows, looks away.

“
Reg?”

He nods slightly.

“
What?” I shriek. “How could you!” Panic fills my chest. I can't believe he'd do something as stupid as that. He has to know that we can't let Ben know we're still alive. We'll lose our advantage. “Damn it, Reg. Kelly was right! You—”

“
It didn't go through,” he whispers. “I tried, but…”

“
But what?” I ask, afraid to hear his response. “What happened?”

He shakes his head. “My Link froze. When I hit SEND. I knew I shouldn't do it, but I couldn't help myself. I guess somebody up there is looking out for us after all. God protects fools and children, right?”

“
You didn't think about what would happen if that psycho answered? He thinks we're dead.”

I reach over and rip the Link from his fingers. I don't want him to see how much my own hand is shaking. He should've known better than to try and ping her like that. Kelly knew. He warned Reggie. He warned me. And yet he let Reg come up here anyway. Alone. With his Link.

“
You were supposed to ping Micah's Link.”

“
Tried to. Same problem: froze when I tried to connect to the Stream.”

I exhale a shaky breath. “Did you try rebooting?”

He nods.

“
Well, it's not stuck now. And it looks like there's nothing in your OUTGOING box, so I think we're safe. The ping to Ash never got sent.”

I hand it back. I can feel the groove left by the bullet, and it amazes me that it's still working. These things really are almost indestructible.

“
Come on,” I say. “Let's go back down. Kelly's waiting.”

He looks up and what I see in his eyes I don't like. I can see he's lost hope. I don't know if he's reached the same conclusion Kelly had, if he's realized the same thing about Ben.

“
We'll save her,” I tell him.

The muscles in his cheeks ripple as he stares at me. Finally nods and he gets to his feet.

 

He looks over and gives me a tentative smile. “Good,” he says. “Better, anyway. Still feel like I'm a little hung-over.”

“
More like withdrawals,” I say, smirking, trying to make light conversation.

His eyes lose focus for a moment. He licks his lips and says, “Great, now you've got me craving an RB.”

“
I meant you're having withdrawals from Ash, not Red Bull.”

The smile slips from his eyes. “Oh. Yeah.” He sighs. “You know it's funny. We never really talked about us being together before. But being here…” He pauses. “Everything has changed.”

I nod, hiding behind him so he won't see my tears. Everything has changed.

He reaches over and pushes the elevator button. It dings, but the doors don't open.

“
Did you take the stairs?”

“
Elevator,” I manage to croak out.

“
Huh. Strange. Kelly must've called it back down then,” he says, distractedly. “Wonder why he did that.”

Then he turns around and sees me. I try to hide my face, but I'm not fast enough, and he immediately comes over and wraps his big gorilla arms around me and says, softly, “It's all right. Everything'll be all right.”

I laugh-cry and push him away, sniffling. “I should be the one comforting you. Your girlfriend is the one who's missing.”

He stiffens, then smiles, trying to cheer me up. “Nobody ever called her that before.”

The elevator dings, drawing our attention away from our awkwardness. I'd never imagined he and I would ever be this close, but here we are, and I can sense that he's uncomfortable by it. So am I. I reach over and jab my thumb at the button again, wondering when it was that I became so emotional. I never used to be like this. I don't like it. I don't like not being in control.

“
Thing's a piece of crap,” Reggie mutters. He gives the doors a resentful look. After several more dings, he flaps his arms and starts to walk away, still limping. “Let's take the stairs.”

“
Just be patient, Reg. It'll be here soon. You're leg won't—”

“
Never mind my leg,” he says. “Damn elevator's taking too damn long. We could've been down there already.” He pushes through the doorway to the stairwell and starts going down, half hopping, half sliding, leaning his weight on the banister.

“
We all want her back, Reggie,” I say, when I catch up to him.

“
I know. Right now, though, it's Kelly I'm worried about.”

This surprises me.

“
I mean,” he goes on, “why would he call the elevator when he knows you're up here?”

I frown. A bubble of fear rises up inside of me. “Maybe he's getting Jake ready to go.” I look back the way we came. “We should've taken the elevator, Reg. It was almost there.”

But he ignores me. He just keeps going. He won't be stopped. He's actually moving pretty fast for someone who nearly got their leg shot off.

“
I do feel bad about Jake,” he pants, when we reach the halfway point. “Honestly.” He pauses to look at the blood splatter on the wall from the implant Micah tried to remove from the CU. “But you… I mean, if anyone should want him to, you know, die, it would be you. I'm not saying you do,” he hastily adds. “But nobody would blame you if you did, especially after the way he treated you back there the other night. He was a total jerk. I just can't figure out why he'd act like that.”

Sweat pours down his face, and he winces just a little more with each jarring step down.

“
He doesn't deserve what happened to him,” I answer.

Reggie's quiet for a moment. Then he nods. “No, but he did do it to himself. Nobody else did. I mean, nobody
deserves
to be infected, and nobody deserves what Jake's going through—not even that asshole Ben for taking Ashley, or any of the others, for that matter—but Jake… He asked for it by trying to show off. He was trying to impress you, you know. And you know what he told me one night? He said he couldn't understand why you and Kelly were together. He said you deserved someone better.”

I think about how similar it is to what Micah said to me last summer, and anger blooms inside of me. Jake didn't know me. He didn't know Kel and he certainly didn't know either of us well enough to say a thing like that.

Jake and Micah. Why is everyone always trying to get between you and Kelly?

“
It was his own stupidity that caused him to be bitten,” Reggie goes on, seeing the look on my face. “No one else's.”

“
Reg.”

He stops.

“
Just… Let's not talk about it. Okay? It was a stupid mistake on his part, that's all. Now he's paying the price. Nobody deserves what happened, not even Jake.”

He sighs. “Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. It just pissed me off hearing him talk about you two like that. You guys are like… Ashley and I always talked about you guys getting married and having kids. We joked about it, but now I'm not so sure it was joking as much as it was jealousy. But he shouldn't have said any of that.”

I don't answer. I don't want to talk about it. Finally Reggie gets the message and shuts up.

We reach the bottom of the stairs and he hits the door before I've even stepped off onto the landing. Another rush of guilt and panic hits me. He cares so much, not just for Ashley—well, especially for her—but for all of us, even Kel. But now his limping has gotten worse again. He doesn't pay it any heed. He's so focused. I think he'd keep trying, even if his leg was amputated. He'd do it for Ash. He'd do it for any of us.

He waits for me. “Ready?” he asks.

I nod, but he doesn't pull open the door yet.

“
Look,” he says, “I just wanted to say I'm sorry about freaking out down here before. You were right. Kelly, too. Jake needed our help more than Ashley right at that moment. You were right to stay and take care of him first.”

I nudge him forward, pushing him with my hand. “We thought you were going to tear the place apart.”

“
Ashley's always telling me I'm a big, stupid brute.” He laughs for a moment before it chokes him. “I hope she's okay.”

I don't answer. I know the words he wants me to say—that she's fine, that she'll probably kick Ben's ass just for looking at her wrong—but we both know that'd be a lie. And what's worse, it'd just come out sounding like one. He knows that, so he contents himself with me giving his arm an awkward squeeze. I must pull on him a little too much because he loses his balance and grasps the doorframe to hold himself up. “Watch the hip, sister!” he warns. Then he pulls open the door and steps into the hallway.

“
Meant to ask you when we were upstairs,” he says as he slides along the wall. “Did you notice the smell up there?”

I crinkle my nose at the question and wonder if this is his attempt to change the subject. The bodies will start to smell soon, but they haven't yet. I shake my head.

“
You didn't smell that, when we were outside? Something was burning.”

I think for a moment. “No.”

“
Like wood and plastic. It was faint, but, you know, wet and oily and definitely like smoke. It was really faint.”

“
You sure it's not that tumor inside your brain?”

“
Got to have a brain first for there to be a tumor.”

“
Well, you must have a brain, or else those zombies wouldn't keep wanting to eat you.”

He laughs. “That's an old wives tale,” he says. “We all know they'll eat just about everything, not just the brains.”

“
Yeah, all too well.”

He slips through the doorway into the main room and in the middle is Jake on the table, still half naked, his arm dangling over the side. The furniture is scattered all about, chairs lying on their sides and desks pushed up against the walls. Random pieces of clothing—Jake's, mostly—litter the floor, along with our packs and old papers left here from years before. A thin, white dust covers the floor from the knockout gas, the black canister gone from sight, probably rolled under the desk. Several tracks lead through the powder.

Reggie's still chuckling. It puts me on edge because I almost expect Kelly to be standing there watching us. He'd be wondering what's going on that were in such good spirits. Would he think we were joking about him?

Kelly's not like that.

But he's not here. He's dimmed the lights for some strange reason, but he's nowhere in sight. He's left Jake alone. A solitary light shines dimly down on his yellow-grey skin. It reminds me of a corpse in the morgue. Both of us sober up real quick.

“
Where's Kel?” Reggie asks, looking around, squinting into the darkness.

“
Mainframe, probably. He was going to unhook the tablet, but he needed Micah's password.”

“
What, did he forget it?”

“
Said he tried it. Didn't work.”

“
Yo, brah!” Reggie shouts. “Kel—” He winces and squeezes his temples.

“
Headache coming back?”

“
Buzzing, like a million bees trying to bust out of my head.”

“
You should sit down.”

He tries to urge me forward, but his hand feels ungainly on my back. “I'm just running on fumes,” he says, swallowing drily. “I'll be fine in a sec. Let's go find that boyfriend of yours.”

He staggers off toward the room with the mainframe in it. As he goes, he raises his hand and mops his forehead. He's sweating bullets, even though it's so cool down here that I'm covered in goose bumps.

We're both relieved to find Kelly sitting on a metal chair in front of the stack. He looks up when we enter. His eyes flick once between us, then returns to the tablet, though not before I catch the troubled look in his eyes.

“
What's the matter?” I ask.

“
The tracking app,” he says.

“
How'd you get in?”