S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus by Saul Tanpepper

Author:Saul Tanpepper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror
Publisher: Saul Tanpepper
Published: 2015-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

The last winter I can remember with snow was the year Eric left for the Marines. His announcement had come as such a surprise to us all, given how much he seemed to hate the Undead. Not just them, but the whole idea of them and everything they represented. The Omegaman Forces had become ubiquitous, almost to the point where the living infantry was practically obsolete.

“I want to understand them better,” I remember him telling me, the day he packed up to leave.

Of course, I was in no mood to understand him. I didn’t want to understand him. He was a hypocrite as far as I was concerned. My whole entire life he’d spent railing against the creatures—how they’d killed Dad and caused the destruction of our family and our social standing. What had changed?

It was because of the Undead that my beloved grandfather, once a proud military leader, was left broken, a shell of a man, a shadow of the leader he’d once been. He was still fearsome, intimidating, but he had lost all his authority. The destruction of his reputation had left him jobless and directionless, a ward of a parentless household with a grandson trying too hard to be a man, who resented his very presence there, and a granddaughter equally lost and adrift in self-doubt. He spent his days in forced retirement sitting in a darkened room in the back of a modest house, growing more bitter and resentful. There were days when he wouldn’t even come out, not until dinnertime.

It wasn’t that I shared my brother’s feelings about the creatures. I was two when Dad died and have almost no memories of the man—certainly no feelings of attachment—so the idea of hating the Undead was more hypothetical than personal. I grew up in a generation where they performed essential duties, things that nobody else wanted to perform, tasks that were too dangerous for the living. I was just as grateful as everyone else for them.

And then came Arc. In just a few short years, they reclaimed parts of Long Island, petitioned the government to allow hunting and finally received the okay. The rich and privileged took up the sport in droves, but permits were limited, driving up the price and the demand. But there was such a huge public outcry—driven more by the inequity of it than the inhumanity—that Arc was forced to temporarily shut down the program.

But the protests didn’t stop. Now the humanitarians saw an opportunity. There’d been protests in the past, petitioning the government to stop the Omegaman project and find a cure for Reanimation, to stop them using our dead to make the lives of the living easier. Thousands died during the riots; a schism formed in the country with the Southern States Coalition seceding in a bloody revolt. New Merica was formed from the remaining bits, and it isolated itself from the rest of the world.

Arc eventually abandoned the whole idea of hunting, although, in truth, they had already started looking forward by then.

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