Reckoning the Dead: ZPOCALYPTO - A World of GAMELAND Series, #12

By Saul Tanpepper

EPISODE 12

After returning to the arcade, Jessie finds herself the target of a nationwide manhunt. But just as her would-be killers close in, the Stream network begins to glitch. Will she be able to escape? And what consequences will there be in Arc's ability to control the undead elsewhere?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brinestone Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223897576

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

Chapter 1

FOR IMMEDIATE TRANSMISSION

FROM: Padraig Harrison, President, Arc Holdings

TO: Qi Jacque Ma, Chairman and Founder, Abalila HG

DATE: August 6, 2043

SUBJECT: RE: Gameland - Long Island

Dear Jacque;

I am thrilled that your executive board has agreed to syndicate our flagship product into your Indo-Chinese market. At this point, I’d like to offer you an advance peek at some exciting new features that our development team is set to launch into our premium gaming package over the next several weeks, including the in situ insertion of live assets into The Game and a new immersive, fully haptic, biointerfacing body suit and intradermal implants. I look forward to knowing your thoughts moving forward regarding the integration as we continue our discussions.

Warmly yours,

Padraig

Chapter 2

If I’m being honest, looking back to this morning, to the moment I’d woken up disoriented inside an unfamiliar house somewhere deep in the middle of Gameland, my resurrected hapkido instructor puttering around inside some probably long-dead Long Islander’s she-shed in the backyard amongst a collection of painted terra cotta pots and dusty sun hats, I should’ve known right then that my day was going to be bad, and that I’d be truly fucked before it was over. I mean, I’d just shot an innocent man — well, as innocent as anyone who works for Arc is — and made a mess of my sneaking back inside the arcade. I’d embarrassed the most powerful company in New Merica — or the world, for all I know — on the day they were set to announce a new gaming format. I’d hoofed it across miles of zombie-infested wastelands and abandoned cities with a dead man in tow thinking I was all that with my half-assed ability to control it. To Jayne’s Hill. On a hunch. That ended up being so completely wrong I, by rights, should now be dead.

Micah Sandervol hadn’t faked his own death and resurrection. He hadn’t hacked our implants. My best friend had. Ashley, the hot little fireplug of a girl — whom we had all believed was some scared little child wrapped up inside a prickly wrapper — turned out to be a vindictive, evil little psychotic bitch. She blamed me for everything, not just for her grandmother’s early conscription into The Game, but for the existence of The Game itself, for the Life Service Act and conscription, for Gameland. For the dead. Turns out G-ma Junie’s volunteering and her own parents’ willingness to go along with the plan so they could take the money and escape to Canada was my fault, too, even though I had had absolutely no idea what-so-fucking-ever about any of it.

I should’ve realized the truth the moment I saw that she was still alive, there at the gate, when her reaction to seeing me wasn’t relief but anger. A normal person would have set aside any feelings of betrayal, of abandonment or resentment, and assumed I’d come back specifically to save them, to get them out of the arcade and off the island. But not her. It was almost like she was...

Like she was offended I’d shown up there.

And she was, because it upended her carefully laid plans. She never intended to escape the arcade. Or the island. She’d expected to die here after getting her revenge.

Even if she couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive us for leaving her behind, for assuming she was dead and just leaving without conducting an extensive search for her, she should’ve recognized that we hadn’t done it intentionally. Especially me, her best friend. And Reggie, who was like a loyal little puppy dog to her.

Well, she got her wish, the last part anyway. Her blind obsession with hurting me had gotten her killed. By me.

I crawl into a corner and bury my head in my hands. I still can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe she made me do it. And now she’s dead, nothing but a corpse lying in a pool of filthy blood outside the door, a bullet to the heart, and her one good eye, now filming over and staring up at the puffy white clouds drifting lazily overhead.

So, yeah, the day has turned out pretty damn crappy. And that’s not even the worst of it.

I could argue that shooting my best friend in the whole entire world was an act of self-defense, but the truth of the matter is, after reading that text from Kelly announcing my mother’s death, I had wanted nothing more than to kill her, to make her hurt. I’d turned into the very thing she had become: blinded by my hatred and wanting nothing more than to inflict the pain I was feeling on the person who was responsible for it. It made me just as bad as her.

The only different between us is, I hadn’t been responsible for her pain.

I want to think that if I hadn’t been so blinded by my emotions, I would’ve stopped myself. But the truth of the matter is, I probably would’ve drawn it out more, made her dying more painful, because killing her hasn’t taken away any of my pain. It’s only made it so much worse.

I suppose I should’ve known she’d blame someone for her grandma’s death, and if I’d given it any thought at all, I guess I would’ve expected that person to be me. She’s nursed grudges for far smaller infractions, sometimes directing them at people who didn’t deserve her wrath. I should’ve assumed that when they took her G-ma, she’d be anything but okay with it. The fact that it didn’t seem to have affected her should have been a warning sign. And being her closest friend and all, the one person who probably knew her the best, I should’ve been the one to expect it. But I’d dismissed her grandmother’s conscription entirely from my mind after it happened. Why? Because of my family. And when Reggie proposed trying to break onto the island, I should’ve known it would trigger resentment in Ash.

So when all these odd things kept happening to us, I should’ve read the signs and known what was really going on. I’m such an idiot for missing the clues and not recognizing that someone was intentionally trying to sabotage us, and that that person was my best friend.

All my life I’ve been vilified for being the daughter of the man who invented Reanimation technology. People call me Zombie Girl or some variation of it: zombitch, z-bitch, zitch. Everyone seems to just accept that I’m just as much to blame as my father, as if I had been there and had somehow had a chance to offer my input. As if I actually have this secret desire for society to sanction the culling of its citizens just so it can redefine them as civil servants and soldiers later on. Let’s just call it what it really is: murder. Do really think I condone that? Christ. These people who take out their latent anger at the system on me are so disconnected from reality that even as they condemn me, even as they blame me for it all, they continue to prop up the very system they despise by supporting Arc and Government. We’re all guilty of it.

And so the sins of the father just keep being revisited upon the child.

The real irony of this is that my real father, my biological father, spent years secretly working to neutralize the technology and dismantle Arc, the monopolistic, monolithic, Government-controlling entity that partially owns and profits from it. They’re the ones who built the system. They’re the ones people should be angry with, not me.

I feel numb now, numb to what I’ve done. Numb to the crushing world.

The bitch deserved to die.

That numbness is now the only thing holding me together and keeping me from crumbling into a blubbering mass of self-pity and self-loathing. And it’s with that same sense of feeling absolutely nothing that I now glance back over at the door and remind myself that I need to finish what I started. I need to—

hide the evidence

—bury her.

I’d found the shovel leaning against a shed near the back fence, a small sign on the door marked EMERGENCY GENERATOR. Because, anger and bitterness aside, I just couldn’t leave her lying there, not like we’ve left so many others. Not to hide what I’ve done, but to do the right thing by her. I can choose to remember the past couple hours of bitter acrimony, or I can remember the last few years of our dear friendship instead.

I had dug the hole but hadn’t yet put her in it. I’d sat there for an hour putting that part off, the finality of it weighing on my mind, when Kelly pinged. And it had come as a relief, a welcome distraction that gave me another reason not to place her into that grave just yet. I was never going to see my best friend again. Burying her made it real that I’d lost her forever.

Of course, what I’d learned on that ping has made an already horrific day catastrophic. I wish I’d never taken it. As if not knowing was better. It wouldn’t have changed a thing.

I just can’t understand how, instead of showing gratitude that I’ve exposed potentially fatal flaws in their system, Arc has branded me Public Enemy Number One. What’s worse, they’ve invited — no, sponsored — others to come and hunt me down, like I’m just another bit of code in their morbid game, another of their bought-and-paid-for Players. Another Volunteer.

But all I am to them is just another piece of their profit puzzle.

It doesn’t take a genius to know why they’ve chosen to go this route. They want to shut me up so they can go on acting as if nothing’s wrong. Not only will they avoid any negative PR, they’ll boost their ratings and gain ever more paying customers. The money flowing into their already-glutted coffers is about to become a tidal wave.

Fuck it all! I scream. I hurl my Link against the opposite wall and tear at my hair. I just want to crawl into a corner and die. I swipe bitterly at the tears of rage spilling down my cheeks. Fuck them! Fuck Arc! Fuck everyone to fucking hell! I’ll kill anyone who tries to kill me.

The voice inside my head keeps nagging at me to move: Get going. Get the fuck going! They’re going to be here soon. They know where you are and they’re going to kill you.

But I just can’t seem to move. The strength is gone from my legs, from my soul. But then I hear Kelly again, his last words on the ping still echoing inside my head: Run, Jessie. Get out of there! Please, Jess. I love you.

I don’t want to die. I want to go home and find Kelly and run away. I want to feel safe. I want to hide and never be found.

So I somehow get myself off the floor and to my feet. I stumble down the hallway, crashing against the walls like a silver pinball in one of Mister Casey’s antique machines. I make it to the front door before collapsing again to my knees as the unbearable reality of my situation crushes me down once more.

I wish I could have it back, the numbness from before. Sitting here on this dirty floor, the rough, worn, moldy smelling carpet beneath my hands, guilt and rage flowing through me with no end in sight.

Sabumnim?

The whisper inside my head is in my former hapkido instructor’s voice. He would always remind me to be water. And so the advice comes again, like a second conscience chastising me. Remember: water flows around and beyond the stone that casts itself into your path.

It’s almost like I can feel him inside of me, alive, his younger self. Like we’ve traded places, me now old and dead, and him young and alive and vibrant again.

That water thing, it’s the third principle of hapkido called Yu. But while the idea has always helped guide me in the past, I push it angrily away now. I’m so damn tired of being pliant all the time. I need to be firm, resolute. Constantly bending around obstacles is not a solution to surviving, not in a place like this. Not under Arc’s rules. Sometimes you have to destroy—

Sabumnim Jessica.

The insistent whisper is like a nagging mosquito by my ear in the dead of night, the way it intrudes into my thoughts. Once more, I try to dismiss it, before puzzling over that word: sabumnim. He’s never once called me that. The title is reserved for masters of the art, instructors, like Rupert. So why would my subconscious deploy the term? I’m no master. Why would I choose to call myself a master of an art whose tenets I’ve just decided no longer work for me? Am I really that arrogant?

This is larger than Yu, Sabumnin Jessica. Now you must be firm, like the rock.

I shake my head, as if it’ll dislodge the voice my mind has usurped from my past, a voice of someone I’ll never hear again. It feels like there is a part of me, the cynical part, mocking me for always dismissing Yu in the past, trying to get me to finally see how all of my failures have been because I somehow always let my worse nature take control.

Great, now I’m using reverse psychology on myself. I really am going crazy. ‘Be the water; don’t be the water.’ 

Sabumnin Jessica, you must—

Shut up! I scream, and launch myself off the floor. Just fucking shut up and get moving!

I slam my fists against the wall and scream until the voice finally goes quiet. Then, shaking and gasping for air, I retrieve my Link and slip it into the holster on my hip. I can’t explain why I’d been able to connect to and control Kwanjangnim Rupert before without it. In fact, in hindsight, I’m now convinced I hadn’t. Considering how erratically he’d responded, sometimes doing what I’d commanded and other times not, I now see that none of what had happened had been me. It had all been coincidence.

But I’ll need him going forward, and the only way to do that is to connect and start operating him the proper way, like I’d done last night at that house. Because when I review my circumstances and options, it’s pretty clear I’m going to need all the help I can get just to stay alive.

I’m moving, all right? I shout, more to myself than that thing waiting for me outside. You happy now?

Nothing.

Good! Now shut the fuck up! I tell my own mind.

She is waiting for you.

I sigh in resignation. Yeah, Kwanjangnim Rupert, I know Ashley’s waiting. Well, let her a few more minutes. She’s not going anywhere.

Finish what you started.

The day may have started off bad and gotten worse. I may have killed my best friend, but at least I’m still alive. That counts for something, right? And maybe I don’t know whether to be the rock or the water, and maybe I’m hearing voices in my head so maybe I really am going crazy, but if there’s one thing I do know for certain, it’s this: it’s even more critical that I succeed in carrying out my plan, because my life depends on it. And that’s all I can really control.

Ashley’s waiting for me outside this door, and that’ll be the first thing I do. I’ll lay her into her grave and say my farewells. Then Rupert and I will make our way east.

I must survive.

Chapter 3

Ashley’s waiting for me outside, just like she was when she attacked me before, only this time she’s dead. The muddy, bloodied corpse of my former best friend and worst enemy launches itself at me the moment I step through the door. I hear her coming a split second before she hits me, and I turn instinctively, taking the brunt of her attack head on. All I manage to get out before I’m slammed onto my back on the ground is a startled, No.

My head hits the dirt, and stars explode before my eyes. I’m lucky the attack comes from the other side of the walkway and launches me off the cement apron, or else I’d be unconscious now. Instead, my vision tunnels, and for the briefest of moments I’m powerless to defend myself. I’m dimly aware of Ashley trying to get control of her dead body. The fall carried her away from me, and she—

it!

—clumsily tries to get back to her feet. My consciousness wavers, still little more than a pinprick of light and threatening to collapse.

Use me, Sabumnim, Rupert’s voice instructs me. I will stop her.

No, I grunt again. The utterance seems to refocus Ashley’s attention. She regains her feet and steadies herself, then turns around, a blank stare on her face, as if she’s trying to remember what she was doing before I interrupted her.

Sabumnim, let me—

Jesus, stop it! I