S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Read Online Free

caught the tail-end of it.
    â€œ What tunnels?”
    â€œ Micah thinks he can get his hands on some of the old subway maps and traffic tunnels connecting Manhattan and Long Island.”
    â€œ From where? How?”
    As far as I knew, all of the old plans and schematics had been collected and destroyed after LI was militarized and the wall was built. It was against the law to possess anything related to them. I think it was more an act of denial by the government than one of defiance or security. They probably would’ve gone in and nuked the place if they could’ve gotten away with it, if the radioactive ash cloud didn’t take out a million more people, making them ripe for reanimation.
    â€œ Micah says nothing’s ever totally lost, not once it’s been in the Stream. There are off-line archives. Someone somewhere is bound to have their own file. Or hardcopy. It just takes a little time to find someone willing to sell the information.”
    â€œ Where are we going to get the money? And isn’t that illegal?”
    â€œ Shh!”
    I thought about this for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m sure the tunnels are all bombed out or filled in. It wouldn’t make sense to just leave them open for zombies to walk through to Manhattan. Otherwise, we’d be seeing a lot more of them, right?”
    â€œ First of all, Jess, I think Reggie’s right: there aren’t any more IUs alive on the island. Second of all, the tunnels were flooded before the first outbreak. Remember? And everyone knows zombies can’t swim.”
    I snorted. Duh. She was right, of course. After that massive ice shelf broke off of Antarctica nearly thirty years ago and caused the sea levels to surge higher by thirty feet, most of the underground transportation networks in coastal cities had to be abandoned. I guess I hadn’t really paid very close attention in history class that day.
    â€œ What about the tunnel openings?” I asked. “They’d still be above water, wouldn’t they? Surely when the wall was built, they would’ve closed them—”
    â€œ The wall was built ten years ago.”
    â€œ Okay…”
    â€œ Don’t you see? After the second flood. The openings would’ve been totally underwater already. Micah thinks they wouldn’t have bothered blockading them since they’d be covered by a good twenty feet of Atlantic Ocean. Out of sight, out of mind, as he says. What’s even better, if they’re still open, then we can totally bypass the EM barrier by going under it! No walls, no razor wire. It’s perfect!”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know… It sounds like wishful thinking to me. And anyway, the last time I checked, I didn’t have gills. And neither do you or anyone else I know.”
    â€œ Reggie’s looking into that.”
    â€œ Reggie? What’s he going to do, rent us a sub or something?”
    Ash laughed. “No, silly. The sensors would totally detect something that big, even going through the tunnels. He’s thinking a bit…smaller, something more personalized.”
    I asked her what, but she wouldn’t elucidate.
    It seemed plausible, and yet I still had my doubts. It was almost too easy. If one of us could come up with a solution like that so quickly, then surely others would have already done so as well.
    But then I realized why that wasn’t likely. Most normal people avoided lower Manhattan like the plague. And even if you had to go there, the closer you got to LI, the harder it was with all the checkpoints you had to cross. Besides, who in their right mind would seriously think about breaking in? No one was crazy enough to actually want to. They called them Forbidden Zones for a reason, not Disney-Arc Land.
    I mentioned this to Ash.
    â€œ That’s where your brother might come in handy,” she said.
    I knew exactly what she was talking about: Eric’s permit.