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

were confronted with a horde of monsters that could smell you, hear you, would never stop coming for you? What good did it do to remain calm, seated quietly at your desk?
    She knew now how useless the drills were. She wished she didn’t.
    Somebody bumped into her, jostling her school tablet out of her hand. It clattered to the linoleum floor, was kicked away, stepped on. The boy snarled as he passed. “Get out of the freaking middle of the freaking hallway, stupid zombitch.”
    She spun around, blinking in confusion. It wasn’t the first time someone called her that. She didn’t recognize the boy, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know who she was. When your father helped create Reanimation technology, everyone knew who you were. Everyone blamed you. Nobody gave you any credit.
    Another taunt drifted through her mind. This one had followed her since elementary school:
    Brains, brains, everywhere.
    On the walls and on the chair.
    The zombie wouldn’t eat it all.
    The brain was rotten, much too small.
    It was the story of how the former professor at Royce State College in Montana had turned himself into a zombie and gone to kill his rival. The latter had been Jessie’s father— or the man who, until last week, she’d always believed to be her father. The popular version went that Professor Halliwell had infected himself with an antidote in a vainglorious attempt to destroy all Reanimates. Instead, he became the very monster he’d tried to eradicate. How he’d made his way across the country to Virginia to eat Richard Daniel’s brain.
    Jessie Daniels had read other accounts of the incident on the black streams, seen pictures of her former house in Boyce, Virginia — supposedly “un-Pshopped” — where brains and blood splattered the walls and a gun had been found at the scene. They hinted that what really happened was suicide. Most people, however, chose to believe the more incredulous version. Irony has always enjoyed greater persistence and popularity than cold, dry facts.
    As it turned out, the real irony was that Halliwell — or Father Heall, as Jessie had come to know him — was her true father, not Richard Daniels. The truth was Halliwell wasn’t the monster society had made him out to be. He hadn’t reanimated. He’d been immune.
    And he had passed that immunity on to her.
    The boy who’d snapped at her slouched away into the crowd. She wanted to stop him, to challenge him. The palms of her hands were suddenly wet with sweat. They ached with tension. An image flashed through her mind: her fingers circling his scrawny neck, squeezing. She could practically hear the brittle sound of the bones snapping.
    Relax, Jessie. Let it go.
    After retrieving her tablet from the floor, she turned against the tide of students and began to make her way toward the front exit of the school. She didn’t belong here. She didn’t know where she belonged, she just knew it wasn’t in this sheltered parody of reality.
    She nearly reached the door, was only a few steps away, when she heard her name being called.
    Ignore it. It’s just someone else going to tease you: “How do you starve a zombie? Lock it in a room with—”
    â€œMiss Daniels?”
    She hesitated. This wasn’t the voice of a teenager.
    â€œClasses are the other way,” Mister Patterson, the school principal, said. He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Thirty seconds till the late bell.”
    He waved a screening device at the back of her neck, then peered myopically at what it said. “Ah, Socialization of Implanted Reanimates with Master Bledsoe.” His smile made her shiver. “A truly fascinating elective. Not very popular among the students, I’m afraid.”
    Jessie didn’t answer. She didn’t tell him that Master Bledsoe was creepy, or that she hadn’t chosen her electives this semester, since