S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (153 page)

“
Did you know her? Jessie, who is it?”

“
Sister Dorothy,” I manage to say. I realize I don't know her real name. “I killed her.”

Eric shushes me. I fight him, but he hisses at me to stop. The look on his face startles me. “You didn't do this,” he whispers, and he bends down and flips her over. There's a small pool of blood beneath her, soaking into the ground. The back of her neck is stained, the blood already clotted. “Somebody quieted her, Jessie.” He rolls her back. Then, gently, pries at the collar of her shirt with a finger, exposing the top of one of her breasts.

“
What the hell are you doing?” I cry, slapping his hand away.

He points at the scars on her chest. “She was one of the bitten, wasn't she? One of the Living Infected?”

Does he realize what he just said? He's classified a new species of humans.

Is that what I am? One of the Living Infected? An LI?

LI, for Long Island. For Living Infected.

“
They all were,” I say, haltingly. “All except—”

I stand up and look around. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear but the soft breeze and the distant twittering of sparrows in the trees. “
Julia!
”

“
Damn it, Jessie! Stop it!” He grabs me with one hand, the other clutching his side, and shushes me again. “Whoever did this might still be around,” he whispers. “I don't like that they just left her here like this.”

“
Who? Micah?”

He shakes his head, shrugs. “Unless he found a working car and figured out the wall thing too, I don't know. It's possible. He did have an hour or two lead on us.”

I pull away from him and run for the front porch. When I get to the steps, I see that the door is standing open. Now I begin to notice other things out of place, things that whisper at me that something is terribly wrong. Of the three bikes we'd brought here and dumped by the side of the porch, one is now missing. There's a car sitting in the side yard that I don't remember seeing before, its driver-side door open. The whispers turn into silent screams: Blood on the steps, two drops, one of them smeared.

I scan the yard. Out by the woodpile, a lump, blue and brown, sun-bleached clothes. It's the IU Father Heall had patted on the shoulder yesterday morning. I can tell from here that it's been quieted.

“
Jessie, don't go in there!”

But I do. I step inside and wait for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I hear Eric taking the steps behind me by twos. I run down the hall and past the doors and hanging picture frames. I slide into the kitchen. Dirty dishes in the sink. Pail of water on the floor in front of it. Smell of eggs and coffee. I spin and race through the opposite door just as Eric appears in the doorway behind me.

“
Jessie!
”

“
Julia!” I call. “Julia, where are you?”

But except for the pounding of our shoes on the bare floors and the pounding of my heart in my ears, the house is utterly silent. I find another bedroom—a woman's room—the bed freshly made, but no sign of the girl.

“
Jessie?” Eric says, puffing. “Jessie, you need to stop. This is danger—”

“
I need to find Julia.” I sweep past him and he tries to grab me, but I slip away from him.

“
Jessie, stop! You don't know what—”

“
JULIA?
”

“
What are you doing? Who's Julia?”

I stop and blink at him, my thoughts too scrambled to form words. Step back into the hallway. Try the basement door. It's locked. “Julia?” Bang my fists on it. The sound echoes dully into the cellar below. “Julia? Are you down there? Father Heall?”

“
What about upstairs? Could they be—”

But I push him aside and try the next door, the storage pantry where Brother Walter fetched the testing kit the day Micah and I arrived. It's locked too, just like it was last time, but I don't bother with a key. I ram it with my shoulder. The door pops open, easier than I thought it would. I stumble into the room. Feel around for the light switch. Flip it on. The bulb buzzes awake, dim and yellow. The solar panels on the roof are old, weak, the light dull. What I'm looking for is on a hook on the wall. Key ring. Dozens of keys. Grab it. Head across the hall.

“
What the hell?” Eric says, as I brush past him. His eyes are wide, scanning the shelves. I stop, turn, see what it is he sees: shelves occupied by plastic bottles of various shapes and sizes, most of them white with red labels. He reaches over and pulls one down.

“
Polyethylene glycol,” he reads. “Molecular weight forty thousand.” Two others: “Sodium azide. Clelland's Reagent. These aren't cooking ingredients. These are chemicals.” Then his eyes settle on the boxes on the back shelf. He sees the label that reads INFECTION.

“
Testing kits,” I answer impatiently. I have no interest right now in chemicals or kits. I need to find Julia.

And Halliwell.

My hands shake as I fumble through the key ring. I find the right one on the fourth attempt. It slips into place. I turn the knob. The door slips open an inch on its own, loose on its hinges, as if recently oiled. I give it a nudge and the opening widens eight more inches.

The basement is silent and dark.

A hand drops onto mine, startling me. “What's down there?” Eric whispers.

The crazy part of me wants to say it's a tomb.

Quiet as a tomb.

“
Wine cellar.”

He raises an eyebrow questioningly.

“
It's where I met Father—where I met Halliwell.”

“
The door was locked. You think he's down there?”

“
I don't know,” I reply. “Maybe.”

“
And who's this Julia?”

“
A girl.”

“
Jessie, we can't keep—”

“
She's only fourteen, Eric. Never infected. She was just a baby when she and her father were trapped here after the evacuation. Her father's dead.”

“
I'm sure that's sad, Jessie, but—”

“
Because of me. Her father died because of me, Eric.”

He bites his lip.

“
I need to find them.”

I try to push past him, but he blocks me.

“
Slowly,” he says. “This rushing everywhere is only going to get you killed.” He presses a finger to his lips and eases the door the rest of the way open. A knife from the kitchen appears in his other hand. “I'm right behind you.”

We descend slowly into that dank basement, leaving the dim light from upstairs behind. We descend past the point where the shadows lose their clarity and become part of the twilight. We step from that twilight into darkness. When we reach the bottom step, we turn, one hand on the wall, the other on each other's arm.

Out of the darkness comes a new light, the brilliant stabbing, yellow light of a single bulb nestled in a distant corner of the basement, light scattered by rows upon rows of empty wine racks. We thread our way into that maze and finally emerge in the room where I sat two days before. The bare bulb dangles from the ceiling, the metal coil inside it looking like an electric worm. It shines onto the table and the two empty chairs. It shines on a teacup and saucer.

“
He's not here,” I say, a mixture of relief and apprehension washing over me.

But Eric squeezes past me and steps to the back of the room. “Jessie?”

Then I see the body on the floor beneath the table.

“
It's him.”

Eric reaches over and places a couple fingers on his neck and feels. An eternity later, he looks up at me.

“
He's dead.”

 

I recognize the voice immediately, but I don't turn. If I turn and see him, it'll make this all real and Halliwell will truly be dead, and I can't have that.

“
I couldn't let him live. You understand that, don't you? He killed your father, after all.” The words freeze my soul. “He killed my son.”

Eric slowly rises. He pulls himself up with a hand on the back of the empty chair and his other gripping the knife. His knuckles are white and the look on his face is one of utter hatred, void of the physical pain that he must be feeling. “You don't know what you've done, Ulysses,” he says in a low voice.

I want to shake my head. I want to deny any of this, all of this. I want to scream at my grandfather, demand that he undo this. Halliwell can't be dead.

I reach down and touch his face. He's so cold, cold and stiff and hard. No give to his skin, nothing that even faintly resembles life anymore.

“
Look at me, both of you,” Grandpa commands, the old military general. He expects us to obey.

I stand up and turn around. Grandpa's standing there on the edge of the circle of light. For some reason my eyes zero in on a spot of blood on his neck, a knick from his razor. He holds a gun in his hand, pointed at us. At Eric. His face a mask, the same one I've known all my life. The lines in it are a lot deeper than they used to be, but even they seem as devoid of emotion and humanity as cracks in stone.

Eric pulls me away, draws me behind him. “Just stay right there,” he warns.

Grandpa takes a leisurely step forward, defying Eric, challenging him. “Whatever you think I'm doing here, son—whatever you think I've done—I've done it to protect you.”

“
I said, stay where you are!”

He stops, sighs dramatically. “I didn't expect you to come. Certainly not so quickly. If I had known…”

“
We had to hurry,” I say, my voice sounding far away. “There wasn't time—”

“
Jessie,” Eric says, cutting me off. He never takes his eyes off Grandpa. “Why?” he asks. “Why did you do this?”

“
So you wouldn't have to.”

“
Eric?” I croak. “You said you weren't going to kill him.”

“
Don't listen to him, Jess.”

“
She knows I'm right.”

“
No, you're wrong. You have no idea how wrong you are, Ulysses.”

“
Educate me then, son. Tell me what you think I've done.” He takes another step closer.

Eric raises the knife higher, holds it out. Like it's any defense against a gun. “He had a treatment,” he says. “For the infection. And it works. I've seen it.”

“
Hell, I know it works. I've always known that.”

“
And you
still
killed him?” I ask, incredulous. “Why? After all we've been through, Grandpa. This would've made things right for us.”

“
Don't be so naïve, young lady. The world doesn't want what he had to offer.”

He shakes his head, piercing me with those steely grey eyes. They feel as if they're slicing straight into my soul, flaying me wide open and exposing me to him.

“
That thing at your feet was a monster, nothing more. It may have looked like a man—to some, I suppose—and it may have even acted like one, pretending to breathe and speak, drinking that damned herbal tea—but it was a monster.”

“
You're saying they are monsters, then?” Eric asks. “Your own creations. Is that what you're saying?”

“
That thing wasn't created by me. It wasn't alive or Undead. It was an abomination.”

Aren't they all?
I'd asked Brother Matthew.

No
. Only the Deceivers, the CUs. Turned into abominations by the things inside their heads, by the people controlling them.
Was Halliwell a Player?

“
No,” I whisper. “We're all abominations.”

Eric gestures at me. “Jessie was bitten. She's infected. If you knew that—if you knew that only his blood will save her—you wouldn't have done this. You've killed your own granddaughter.”

The truth of this hits me hard. I blink, stunned, once again realizing my own mortality. Coming from my own brother's mouth with such irrevocability, I begin to crumble.

Something flickers across Grandpa's face, but it's gone so quickly that I can't tell what it was, whether it was doubt or surprise or anguish. Then he snorts. “You were always so melodramatic as a child. She won't die.”

“
I'm not lying!”

“
And neither am I. But truth and lies, Eric, can both be slippery things, like eels, glinting differently depending on how you shine the light on them.” He sticks a hand into a pocket. Both Eric and I tense up. But when he pulls it back out again, we immediately see that the small silver and white object he's holding is harmless. He tosses it onto the table and it slides across and comes to a stop at our end. “Thought it might be time for a refill. Three times a day, Jessica,” he says. “Take your medicine like you're supposed to and you'll be fine.”

I blink stupidly at the inhaler. It's a new one, fully charged. Nobody moves.

“
Go on, take it.”

I reach over with a shaky hand.

“
Jessie, don't,” Eric says. He sweeps it away, but I scramble after it. I don't know why. Maybe because Grandpa believes it will save me. It has to save me. I pluck it up off the floor and cradle it like it's the most delicate thing in the world.