S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Read Free

the time on her Link. “I’m supposed to meet at Kel’s before heading over with his parents and Kyle.”
    Eric hesitated before nodding, his face still tight with worry. “Okay, I’ll ping Mom, make sure she didn’t forget. See you in a bit.”
    â€œShe’ll be there,” Jessie whispered.
    But Eric had already disconnected.
    â€¡ ‡ ‡

Part One - Survivors
Chapter 1
    Nothing about any of this felt real.
    The bodies packed around her, pressing, suffocating. Jessie hugged herself ever tighter and wished she could just break away, find a place to hide. Her first full day back at school, and already she was wishing she’d never returned.
    The two-minute warning chime sounded and the tension in the hallways ratcheted upward several notches. Lockers slammed, and kids shouted to one another over the din.
    How could she possibly be here? How could she go and sit in a classroom and listen to even one more lie, acting as if everything was okay? As if nothing had changed since she’d last walked these hallways three months ago. As if nobody had died.
    Nothing else has changed, Jessie, only you have. You’re the only one who knows what a farce this all is.
    She wished it weren’t true.
    She had killed people, murdered them. She had witnessed the deaths of a dozen souls— some of them well deserving of it, granted, but it didn’t change the fact of what she had seen and done. She had watched some of them reanimate. Had quieted a few of them herself.
    Three months ago she could never have envisioned doing what she’d had to do to survive being inside that gaming arcade. Up until then, her battles with zombies had existed only inside of a computer program. Those monsters hadn’t been live. They’d been hackable by code, not by machetes.
    All this time, playing that stupid game Zpocalypto , she’d never realized how much she was cheating.
    In the real game, the one Ashley and Jake were now a part of, you couldn’t just reboot.
    And that’s what this was like, being here in this brick building with people her age. This was nothing but an illusion.
    She stood lost in the middle of the hallway while they streamed past her. Oblivious, these kids. Oblivious of the terrible truth of the world outside their tiny, narrow lives. And who else but their teachers to blame for spreading the lies. None of them could ever truly understand the terrible truth, because they’d never witnessed firsthand the reality inside that gaming arcade.
    None of them knew. It was all simulated to them. There was nothing real to connect them with it.
    Just that morning in homeroom, for example, they’d practiced an emergency outbreak drill. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d practiced one in school. Sixth grade, maybe. Or seventh. They were supposed to do them once a semester, but nobody cared anymore, since the likelihood of an outbreak was essentially nil. That’s what they kept getting told, anyway.
    The students had treated it like a party. They were supposed to be quiet when the lights got turned off, not say a word, but people were laughing, making rude noises, pinging each other’s Links. Taking none of it seriously. Not even the teachers.
    All the drill had done was to remind everyone of the hollow threat of the Undead. The kids dredged up the old chants:
    Brains, brains, what you say?
    No more taxes shall we pay.
    We’ll play until we’re sixty-four.
    Then we’ll work just three years more.
    But I’ll be dead, so I won’t care.
    Three short years is more than fair.
    And when the lights came back on again, nobody cared that a couple were going at each other hot and heavy in a back corner of the classroom. The teacher had ahem ed and the class had sniggered in amusement. At least the two still had their clothes on.
    Stop. Lock. And barricade.
    That was what they were told to recite. But what good was that when you