Return to the Arcade: ZPOCALYPTO - A World of GAMELAND Series, #10

By Saul Tanpepper

EPISODE 10: RETURN TO THE ARCADE

The survivors of the break-in to Gameland are back home and done with The Game, but it doesn't mean The Game is finished with them. As the days pass, Jessie becomes more and more convinced that someone is coming after them -- and not in a way she can fight back. Is her only recourse to go back into the arcade?

BONUS CONTENT:
This episode includes part 1 of INFECTED: Hacked Files from the GAMELAND Archive, a trove of top secret documents recovered from the Father of the Dead Army, Ulysses Daniels, which offer insight into the World of GAMELAND and the secrets Arc and Government would rather not go public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brinestone Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223892731

Saul Tanpepper

Subscribe for new releases & exclusive deals/giveaways: tinyletter.com/SWTanpepper Saul Tanpepper is the specfic pen name of author Ken J. Howe, a PhD molecular biologist and former Army medic and trauma specialist.  Titles include: The post-apocalyptic series GAMELAND (recommended reading order): - Golgotha (prequel, optional) - Episodes 1-4 - Velveteen (standalone novella, optional) - Episodes 5-8 - Infected: Hacked Files From the Gameland Archive (insights for the avid GAMELAND fan) - Jessie's Game #1: Signs of Life - A Dark and Sure Descent - Jessie's Game #2: Dead Reckoning Post-apocalyptic series BUNKER 12 - Contain - Books 2-4 (coming soon) International medical thriller serial THE FLENSE (a BUNKER 12 companion series) - CHINA: Books 1-3 - ICELAND: Book 1-3 - AFRICA: Books 1-3 - TBA Short story collections: Shorting the Undead & Other Horrors Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, and Horror Visit him at tanpepperwrites.com

Book preview

⁍ CONTENTS ⁌

EPISODE 10

RETURN TO THE ARCADE

CHAPTERS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

‡ ‡ ‡

« BONUS MATERIAL »

INFECTED

HACKED FILES FROM THE GAMELAND ARCHIVE

(Part 1)

‡ ‡ ‡

For more about the series, visit:

Tanpepperwrites.com/gameland

‡ ‡ ‡

For updates and exclusive perks, join:

Club Tanpepper

‡ ‡ ‡

Copyright

Acknowledgments

About the Author

* * *

Brinestone Press

(rv.231106)

Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

⁍ THE ZPOCALYPTO SERIES ⁌

EP01: Hacked Into the Game

EP02: Failsafe Codex

EP03: Deadman’s Gambit

EP04: Sunder the Hollowmen

(includes the prequel Golgotha)

EP05: Prometheus Mode

(includes the companion title Velveteen)

EP06: Every Dead Player

EP07: Cheat Protocol

EP08: Jacker’s Exploit

EP09: Live Another Play

EP10: Return To The Arcade

(includes supplemental material Infected pt 1)

EP11: Augmented Zeality

EP12: Reckoning The Dead

EP13: Glitch In The Script

EP14: Open-World Spawn

(includes supplemental material Infected pt 2)

Episode 10

RETURN TO THE ARCADE

Chapter 1

The sky is an unbroken ceiling of sooty white imposing itself upon the barren world. It’s raining, and the rain comes down hail hard and piss warm, without pity or remorse. And yet, it is welcomed. The dead stand and stretch their parched throats, arching their yawning mouths upward toward it. They stand as tall as they can and lift their cataract eyes, and they watch...

watch...

watch and wait.

The rain pours down from the ashfall sky, down into their bodies, down through them into the earth, and the earth blooms beneath their shredded feet.

There are so few Truths remaining in this world, but one of them is this: Rain is good.

Her mouth opens, not because she consciously thinks to open it. Rather, there is some primordial instinct to breathe in the water compelling her. This instinct, it drops her bottom jaw, and the rain pours in, all sweetness and wetness and purity, filling her to overflowing, gushing into her nose and running down over the channels of her body. She revels in the fact that it doesn’t drown her. She doesn’t need air.

That is another Truth.

The water drains down her throat and washes away the sin inside of her, the sin borne of her aching hunger. The Hunger That Never Dies. The water trickles into her lungs, and she doesn’t choke. The rain makes pliable what time stiffens and embrittles. So now, when she cries out, when her body expels the air that will later fill the dry sacks of her dead lungs, her words lift beyond mere whispers and moans. The air trills past her vocal chords so she may once more be heard.

So she stands, upward and upright. The drops pelt her upturned face. And her neck and cheeks. Her eyelids. Her eyes.

She doesn’t blink.

She can feel the rain hitting her, but it’s a distant, foreign thing, like a reading of a story. Someone else’s story. She senses it soaking into her clothes, not firsthand but from memory, until they cling to her like a second skin. They’re probably all rags by now anyway. They serve no purpose anymore; they do not adorn or protect. They hang rotting over her unrotting flesh. Her body is withered, but it does not decay. It is made tough. It is meat that creaks and grows resilient. Her muscles fray, not by the day, but by the decade.

She watches the drops pelting her upturned eyes, and she doesn’t blink. The water pools into the hollows around the cataract-filled orbs until they are the same silvery gray as the tarnished sky. But what she sees are brilliant bursts of color, prisms of light, kaleidoscopic pools and lakes and oceans that have captured an ethereal light. If she were to blink, it would all spill out, like tears, only to fill again with ever more rainbows.

Sometimes she wishes she could blink.

The rain turns the darkness away from this dead, empty world and makes it bright once more. It is good. It’s as close to living again as she will ever come.

She is not alone anymore.

She can sense the moment it happens, when the stranger comes — not outside of her, but stealing into her mind, occupying that place where she once exerted control over herself. She can no longer do so. She has been losing control for a long time, but this wresting of that final little bit terrifies her most of all. The stranger uses her, making her do things that even she could never have imagined.

She calls the stranger The Deceiver.

Against her wishes, The Deceiver lowers her head from the sky and—

No! No! Please wait! The rain is good!

—begins to lead her body away from that sacred, peaceful, beautiful place.

She fights. She resists, again and again, crying out her unheard pleas: I don’t want to go! Don’t make me go! But they sound and echo only inside the walls of her own mind, and this body that once obeyed her no longer heeds her supplications— hasn’t, if she’s being truly honest with herself, for so very long. But there was a time when she exerted her will over it, owned it. It’s an old memory, dim and distant, blurry like the horizon on a hazy day.

But that time ended long ago. Then, for a while, it heeded only the instinct to hide itself from the drying sun during the day, and to welcome the darkness of night. And the rain, as in such moments as this one now. But only when there is no Deceiver.

Her body has fallen into ruin. They all do. Over time, as it became a shell of hardened leather and rigid joints, it also began to lose even those basest of instincts. For example, she can no longer remember when last it hid from the sun. Now, every day the sun beats down upon her with reckless reckoning, hastening the damage, hastening the end. And yet The End never comes. Day after day, weeks and months and years pass. All this body seems to heed now is the memory of rain and its irresistible call.

And the Hunger, for it is the Eternal Truth. It filled this body from the beginning, and it was never satisfied. Maybe if she could just eat something, it might go away. But there is nothing here to eat, ever, on this forsaken land. Nothing she has any appetite to eat, anyway.

Not that she has any choice.

How she hates the Hunger. She wishes she could flee from this place— not just from the wrecked ship of this body, but from herself, her consciousness, flee from this tiny prison she occupies, in this tiny corner of her wretched mind. But she is stuck here forever, forever shut off from everyone and everything else she ever knew and loved and hated and everything she ever paid attention to or ignored. She cannot escape. She cannot be rescued. Her own body has betrayed her. Everything else has simply forgotten about her.

But there is one thing she hates more than the Hunger. Or perhaps hate isn’t the right word. Fear is, she reckons, far more accurate. She fears only one thing now:

The Deceiver.

Whenever it comes, not even the Hunger has dominion over her body. The Deceiver has no respect for either of these things, because it knows nothing of Truth. The Deceiver is the antithesis of Truth. It usurps her tenuous claim over her own body, and she has no remedy, no mechanism of resistance. She cannot even make her presence known, though she tries and tries. She is another Truth that The Deceiver will never know. It forces her to witness the corruption it imposes upon her. It commandeers her own hands and her own teeth, deploying them to do terrible things, like rip and slash and kill the other dead.

Never to satisfy the horrible, honest, truthful Hunger, but simply for Sport.

Sometimes, when The Deceiver leaves her, it tears away from her in such brutal fashion that it leaves a gash in her soul. It casts away her body like so much unnecessary ballast, leaving it to be ravaged by the merciless sun. She fears when The Deceiver comes, but she hates when it leaves even more.

Now it is taking her along a trail in the woods. It’s a different place than before, and she doesn’t remember how she arrived here. Everything feels different this time, even her body and the way The Deceiver fills it. A rivulet of water caresses her feet and she yearns for the wetness, to take it in her. The Deceiver notices none of this. Or, if it does, it does not care.

The ground is uneven, yet somehow her body knows what to do, how to walk, where to go; it seems wondrous that her feet do not trip or fall or fail her. That is The Deceiver’s doing. It is a tragic irony that it has better control over her than she does.

The ground slopes upward. They climb, higher and higher, ever upward until the shadows around her break and fall away. She’s now in a grassy field.

Where is it taking me?

The Deceiver never shares its plans with her. She’s a mere passenger, gagged and tied up, occupying the back seat of herself.

She can see where the hard rain has beaten down the grass, matting it so that it tugs against her bare ankles, catches in the webbing between her toes. It plows her through the growth without regard for the damage that hidden sticks and stones render upon her exposed skin.

Lift, she urges. Lift your feet. But of course her body heeds none of her commands, not even this simple one. The Deceiver forces her feet to push harder through the deep, rigid grass, trusting that it will yield before her flesh. The world will yield. That is the way of The Deceiver.

And the world always yields.

Her body does not know fatigue. She longs for it, for that bone-deep weariness and the satisfaction of a well deserved rest. But her body creaks and groans and continues without weariness.

The mind, though... How it grows tired. She is exhausted, and yet she cannot sleep. Instead, she becomes distracted. She drifts, slipping away from herself, from the prison of her body and its hijacker of flesh. She slips down into that place, which both time and death work together to erase: her past. Time is alone in this endeavor now. Death has abandoned her.

A memory comes then. She’s at home, sitting in a chair, a cold bottle of beer in her hand. She looks down at it and sees the gnarled knuckles of a laborer. She cannot remember what she did for occupation when she once had full control over herself and her body. How did her hands grow so gnarled?.

The television is on and she’s watching—

What?

Someone. In a suit. Talking.

A man (the president) is giving a speech, saying that this is the beginning of a New Age: one without taxes, one where a new breed of worker will do all the things the living would rather not do. Or can’t do. She can sense that this is a world where she no longer plays a vital role. She is obsolete. Her mind weeps. What good is a man who cannot work?

Wait. I’m a man?

I was a man.

Are these someone else’s memories?

How can that be?

The scene shifts. Here’s another memory from another time. Someone’s speaking to her (him?). She can’t see the speaker’s face, but she senses something corrupt about them: Think of your family, this person says. Do this for them. They could sure use the money. Think of your children.

Whose children? My children? I don’t remember having children.

Another psychic flicker, a shift in time and space. This time, she’s in a room, lying on a table with bright lights, and there’s a sharp pain in the back of her head, and the darkness covers her and leaves her with only the sound of a little boy crying in the darkness and the wetness of tears on her cheek and her heart is torn into pieces inside of her. Or, it would be, if she could feel her heart.

It’s dead, just a lump of hardened plastinated flesh in the shape of a heart inside a hardened, plastic barrel of her chest.

But the ache fades and is replaced by that everlasting, undying, undeniable Hunger.

That’s the last of the memories. She forgets them as they pass through her mind, leaving her now for the last time. She knows nothing anymore but the Truth of this moment, the Here of this prison and the Now of her immortal incarceration.

She realizes the rain has stopped falling. The clouds remain, a stark white canopy, streaked and feathered and whorled gray. She can sense the heat of the sun wanting to come through, although she can’t feel it yet. And she never will. Her skin knows nothing anymore. There is only a whisper from somewhere inside her head that tells her that the air around her is warming. A memory of a memory. An echo of echoes. She is riven, herself from herself, and even from that.

The Deceiver is moving her again, forward, upward, toward what appears to be a thin curtain of metallic gray. Is it water? It’s a silvery, shimmering, transparent veil. How she wishes for the rain. But the gray wall is still too far away. She stumbles and suddenly she is falling. She opens her mouth to cry out— rather, she opens it in her mind, but her body doesn’t react in a complimentary way. Besides, there’s no breath inside of her, no utterance of surprise. The memory of speech dies on her dead lips, unfulfilled, unuttered. Unheard.

If I shout in my own mind and nobody hears it, do I make a sound?

The ground rises frighteningly fast as she falls, like a tree, its roots rotted away.

Timber! she thinks.

It is a curious thing, to watch the earth rising to meet one’s self, to fall without pain or fear of pain. To be upright one moment, then suddenly lying upon the ground, blades of grass pressed up against the vitrified surfaces of one’s eyes. Her vision fills with its greenness. She wants to cry out in alarm, in pain, in embarrassment. Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! But there is none of that anymore. She wants to breathe in the lush, wet aroma of life down here so close to the ground. But her body cares nothing for such things anymore. And The Deceiver cares nothing for them, either. She thinks that it’ll be nice to lie here and sleep. She understands fatigue, but she can’t feel it. Like surprise and pain, these things no longer exist. Want and need and rest and work are no longer truths of this world. They are as everything else: the Lies of the Living. And she is Dead.

It was my decision to come here.

She realizes this now. Or maybe just remembers it once again.

If only I could sleep. Forever this time.

But already her body is lifting itself. The Deceiver is pushing her up, standing. And now she is witness to what she has become as she sees her own skeletal hands and the tattered remains of her feet. The gnarled, scored knuckles of hands that have forgotten how to heal.

Something akin to fear and revulsion sweeps into the cell of her mind, but these emotions are smoke, wispy thin and elusive, and she cannot grasp them anymore than she can grasp a wish and hold it to her chest.

She is ruined— her hands and feet and undoubtedly all the rest of her. Her skin is flayed. The flesh on her arms dangles in ribbons and tattered folds; her cartilage is dried, yellow and hard. Her nails are gone. They have been torn away, leaving the exposed nubs of bones that glisten greenish-gray with the first mossy signs of stubborn rot.

I am dead, she remembers for the first and thousandth time. That’s right. I died. I am dead, and this is what has become of my body.

She tries to recall something again, anything, about her life before. But now her memory is as blank as the sky above her.

No! No, I had a life. I was someone!

And then she does remember: There is a thing, a very small thing, a boy.

He loved me.

Kyle?

Daddy! The boy shouts. And she (he) shouts back a different name (timothy) . The shout echoes and fades.

No! No, these are not my memories. You are the imposter! You are The Deceiver! Get out of my house! My prison! My mind! Get out! GET OUT OF MY BODY LEAVE ME ALONE GO!

But she is not he. No. She is she, and he is he, and The Deceiver is The Deceiver. He (timothy’s father) and she can sense The Deceiver, but The Deceiver cannot sense them. The Deceiver knows nothing, is not welcome, heeds nothing but its own selfish plans.

It’s taking her (his? their?) body now, taking it somewhere, always walking, searching.

Fighting?

Playing.

I am in The Game!

I can’t remember how it happened.

Or he can’t?

I can’t!

No! It’s just another dream, like before! I’m dreaming!

But she has a weapon: Hunger. If only she can—

Stop it!

—wake it up. She beckons it forth.

But the Hunger slumbers. It cannot rise against the will of The Deceiver. In the battle between Truth and Lies, The Deceiver’s will always wins.

The silver, shimmering wall grows distinct now. It’s not water, but wire. A fence, chain link. She senses that The Deceiver wishes to move past it, needs to get past it to the other side.

Why? she wonders. What’s there beyond the other side? Do I want to know?

These are her thoughts. Or maybe his. Or The Deceiver’s. But of course her (their!) body does not obey. Because it—

Something smells, sharp and metallic.

—knows what awaits. And yet she waits, does not touch the fence. She knows what will happen if she tries. The fence is not good. The fence is dangerous.

She beckons forth her anger, but it refuses to come. She is frustrated, yet uncaring. These things, these ideas, rumble and roil deep down inside of her mind, far away in the deepest pits of her memory. They are disconnected from this body, so she cannot feel them, except maybe on the skin of her mind, far from the land where emotions are mapped. They have faded away into nothingness, like ancient tapestries left out in the sun.

Because feelings, too, are lies of the Living.

The Deceiver walks her along the fence. She can feel the life inside the wire prickling her skin, wanting to bite her. She