S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (2 page)

“
I'm up for it!” Micah said, as he lopped the virtual head off a virtual zombie with a virtual light saber, something the game was obviously not programmed to provide.

Ash raised her head and looked at me in disgust after seeing this. I just shrugged. It didn't surprise me anymore. Micah was always reprogramming the game in his favor.

“
But we should try soon,” he added, throwing the severed head into his virtual backpack. “Like, this weekend.”

“
Where'd you get the light saber?” Kelly asked. He sounded jealous.

Micah smiled his shit-eating grin. “I did a little creative recoding yesterday.”

“
Cheater.”

“
Well…yeah.”

“
Why this weekend?” I asked, only because I was curious to see how far the boys were willing to take this conversation. Theorizing something as blatantly illegal as breaking into LI was much more entertaining than watching the boys play a game they'd hacked. It was also more entertaining than seeing how springy Ashley's hair could be. Or causing Reggie bodily harm and insult.

“
Because in two and a half short weeks, our lives are totally going to be over, girl. That's why.”

Micah was referring to the start of our senior year in high school. Well, Ash would technically be only a junior, but she had enough credits to graduate with the rest of us, and probably would.

Just three more weekends before our last year of incarceration. Nineteen more days of parole before we were all swallowed up in that mess of a penal system that masqueraded as a social welfare program. It was ostensibly there to prepare us for the harsh realities of an even harsher world, but it failed to do so on so many levels that it was almost ridiculous.

As far as the majority of kids my age were concerned, school was just another relic of the past. How was studying mid-sixteenth century literature supposed to help us deal with rising sea levels in the mid-twenty first century? How was knowing the sum of the angles of a triangle going to help us in the event of another outbreak? If it wasn't for the fact that getting caught skipping school was pretty much a death sentence, signing years of our afterlife away into conscription, we wouldn't even bother going.

I exhaled, trying to quell the sense of panic and anticipation rising up inside of me. I didn't like to be reminded of time slipping away, of what awaited us on the other side of August. I reminded myself that I had to suffer only one more year of that institutionalized prison, then I'd be free to do whatever I wanted to do. We all would.

Most of us were planning on skipping college and going straight into one of those high-paying jobs as a coder with ArcWare. Kelly was the only one of us giving college any serious thought. He was always the one who had to be different from the rest of us. That's what first attracted me to him, his long view, and it's what I so dearly loved about him.

Out of all the guys I'd ever known, he was the kindest, the most caring. Anyone who knew the Corben family—who knew Kyle, Kelly's little brother—could see that.

On the outside, Kelly wasn't much to talk about: brown hair and eyes, an average build, average looks. A girlfriend probably shouldn't say this about her boyfriend, but he was…forgettable. Nevertheless, he more than made up for it with his earnestness. I'd rather be with a guy who was honest with me than one who was easy on the eyes.

Lately, though, he'd been acting all strange. He was moody, inattentive, distracted. Just once in a while I wished he'd lighten up and relax.

“
Wait,” he said. “You're not serious, are you?” He jerked his body to the left, then twisted it as he tried to get his player to respond faster in the game, but the cheap sensors were low-res and iffy and it made his hunter look more like one of the hunted, all lurchy and uncoordinated. “You mean, like, actually
break into
Long Island?”

“
Dead serious, brah,” Reggie replied. He laughed, probably realizing he'd inadvertently made a funny.

Reggie was Kel's opposite. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite of any of us. “Big, bald and brash,” Micah always said about him, a stark contrast to his own blond, blue-eyed, befreckled boyish good looks and charm. “A brute with a heart the size of Texas.”

And Micah would certainly know about Texas. He was once a Republic good old boy before his parents defected to Connecticut. He always had a smile on his face and a reputation for never hurting a soul. A
living
soul, that is. When it came to zombies, on the other hand, he was a stone-cold killer. The Undead rarely stood a chance against him. He was the best game player I'd ever seen. Probably the best hacker, too.

Kelly wasn't nearly as good as Micah in the gaming department—or me, for that matter—but still a hell of a lot better than most. Better than Reggie, anyway. And while he could hack, he didn't like doing it. He was too uptight for any of that action, though not enough to not hang out with us.

Yet, as different as the three boys were, they were all brilliant, and they all shared the same passion for gaming. We all did, which is what brought us together in the first place. It's what kept us together despite the immense differences in our personalities.

“
Why would we even want to go to the Wastes?” Kelly asked without looking away. The Wastes were the places that had been decimated over the past thirty years by rising sea levels. Pretty much every coastal city had such areas, variably referred to as the Wastes or Wastelands. They were urban ghost towns, and LI was just one of many. Perfect breeding grounds for outbreaks.

Reggie shrugged. “Uh, no reason, brah, other than to see if we actually can. To say that we did.”

“
Sure, why not,” Ashley chimed in. “I'll try anything once. We haven't done a damn thing exciting all summer and it's almost over!”

I wanted to pinch her nose again just for reminding me of that.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how breaking into Long Island—even just
planning
something like it—would liven things up, take our minds off of school and the inevitable dreariness of those long winter days ahead, hunched over a desk in sub-zero classrooms, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Shakespeare-inflicted misfortune.

This time Ashley didn't ask why I was giggling.

“
Doing something just so you can brag about it isn't a reason,” Kelly argued.

“
Oh, don't be such a weenie,” Reggie retorted. It was his typical comeback whenever any of us disagreed with something he said. We usually let him get away with it because he was so damn big. That, and he actually relished a good argument.

But Kelly wasn't giving in so easily. They got into a heated discussion, mostly focusing on the actual logistics of breaking into what had once been a militarized zone and was now blockaded by physical and electromagnetic barriers.

I was listening with interest, but Ash got bored and made me go upstairs with her. She needed to use the bathroom and the one down in the basement was nasty. But she never liked wandering around Micah's upstairs all alone. She said it felt spooky, like his parents were ghosts watching over her.

When we came back down, it appeared that the argument was over. Micah and Kelly were back to playing
Zpocalypto
and Reggie was asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. He had a smile on his face.

Ashley kicked him. “Hey, perv! Make some room,” she said. “Quit hogging the couch.”

Reggie opened one eye and his smile widened, but he didn't move. “Where'd you guys go?”

“
Upstairs to have hot lesbian sex in Micah's room.”

“
That was quick.”

“
Yeah, well, Jessie's super easy to bring to climax.”

“
Ashley!”

I could feel my face burning. I may have lost my virginity at fifteen, but I was still a bit of a prude about it, especially around her. It was like I needed to balance out her own over-the-top sexuality.

Ash didn't care what people thought. She always just said whatever was on her mind. In fact, I'm sure she said things just to try and elicit a reaction.

I looked over at Kelly, but he hadn't even heard what she'd said. He was too absorbed in the game.

Reggie snorted. He gave Ash a good, long, appraising look, beginning with the thumbs she'd hooked onto the waistband of her jeans, pausing at the low neckline of her more-than-ample breasts, then finally reaching her eyes. Not once did she flinch. If anything, the look on her face grew even more defiant.

“
Sorry I missed it,” he said.

She glanced pointedly at the bulge in his jeans and smiled. “I'm sure it was just as exciting as you imagined it.”

Reggie laughed and pulled up his legs, then swung them over the front of the couch. Ash plunked down next to him with a heavy exhale. He swung his arm over her shoulders, letting his fingers dangle a hair's width away from the top of her breast. Though the two weren't technically together, everyone knew they were doing it. At least whenever there wasn't anything better going on. Or any
one
.

I glanced past my boyfriend to the flickering HG image in front of him. He was back to level eleven—his nemesis. If I were a betting girl, I'd wager he was on his last life and was about to be attacked. Again.

Poor Kelly. As good as he was, he just couldn't seem to make it past this level no matter how many times he tried. But I didn't feel much pity for him at the moment. Sometimes, like right now when he wasn't paying any attention to me, his obsession with the game kind of pissed me off.

“
So…what'd you guys decide?” Ashley asked. “About Gameland.”

I looked over. Reggie's thumb was now resting on the exposed skin of her breast. He was slowly brushing it back and forth. I felt a tingle pass through my own body, then a twinge of jealousy. Reggie was a code geek, just like the rest of us, but at least he had broader interests outside of the games.

Kelly could learn a thing or two from his example.

“
Well, actually, it wouldn't technically be Gameland,” he told Ash. “We'd just be breaking into one of the Forbidden Zones on LI—an
outer
zone. I think the Gameland arena is more toward the center of the island—that's what Micah thinks, anyway—and it's probably pretty heavily barricaded to keep the Players from getting out.”

He was talking about the implanted zombies that were recruited into
The Game
. They called them Players.

“
There's still the Infected Undead on the rest of the island,” I pointed out.

Reggie chuffed. “Yeah, like there'd be any IUs left after thirteen years. They're all dead by now.” He waggled his fingers spookily at me and said, “No brains to feed on.”

“
You don't know that.”

He shook his head. “You're beginning to sound just like your boyfriend. He says it's not doable.”

“
I didn't say that.”

Reggie smiled. He was egging me on, and I'd fallen for it. I should've known. Whatever Kelly said, Reg always tried to say the opposite. And now that Kelly was saying it was impossible to break into LI, it just made Reg even more determined to say it wasn't.

Kelly paused his game so he could tick reasons off on his fingers: “Fifty foot wall around the entire island, electrified razor wire, all the bridges demoed, no-fly zones, biometric mines in the East River, electromagnetic barrier—”

“
EM, brah? Really? Chillax. I'm not talking about
hacking
in, I'm talking about breaking in. Remember? The EM's nothing to worry about.”

“
It could fry your implant,” I said.

“
Implant, shmimplant.”

“
There's no way,” Kelly insisted. “I'm telling you, it's impossible.”

“
Maybe there is a way,” Micah said, still playing. He was one of those freaky types who could give a hundred percent of his attention to something like
Zpocalypto
or
Warlock Four
and yet still be fully involved in a conversation, even while being stoned off his gourd. I could never understand how he did it. The guy was more than just scary smart. It was like he could partition his brain into distinct segments—one for gaming, one for being wasted, one for everything else—yet still use them all at full capacity. He was like a computer. “I'll give it some thought.”

“
I know!” Ashley exclaimed. “We'll just sprinkle a little fairy dust on our bodies and fly ourselves in.”

“
I'll sprinkle fairy dust over your body if you do mine,” Reggie said.

I snorted.

He looked over at me. “Every time someone disses a fairy, another zombie gets its wings.”

I rolled my eyes, but I was laughing.

“
That's just…stupid!” Kelly snapped. “Besides, you have to get through Manhattan's restricted zones first. That can be a hassle.”

“
That's true,” I said. I'd gone there on occasion with my brother; he had a special pass. I remembered all the checkpoints and the guards questioning us.

Kelly smiled and nodded at me, thinking I was actually taking his side in the argument. “It's crazy talk.”

I went over and plopped down on his lap and planted a kiss on his lips. It wasn't one of our usual hot-n-heavy lip-bruising kisses—I didn't want to start anything—but I hoped it was enough that he'd not take what I was about to say the wrong way.