Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?
It was overnight.
I've never seen the like.
I 'hear' the words coming to me through gusts of color, like digital brush-strokes, 130-point font and meaningless.
His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.
But what?
But what.
I rumble and roll forward on an ocean of bald skulls, so many shades like a million disconnected eggs. These are all heads and their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, like sausages bulging into life.
He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.
It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible?
Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.
Are we talking an infection?
Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.
His DNA shows no change, at least none we can be sure of. We didn't have his sequence from before.
So don't look at the genetic level, then. Look structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's been remapped completely.
The voices distend and balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend in and out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.
My mother's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere. It stumps up and pats me on the head.
My dear boy. My darling boy.
Later, much later with time as a food I chew on and shit out, she speaks again.
Not again, please. Not him too.
I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of the dead. There are great canyon-walls all around me made of bodies which are zombies, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.
Father.
They say.
Mother.
I reach out to them. I want to help them. I scoop their bodies up on my tongue, listen to them etching words across my skin, growing older and changing by the minute. I reach out and feel the barrier of this dream flex and twist, like an image trying to bend its way out of a television screen.
Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.
Like nanobots?
Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was always waiting in the brain to be turned.
You said his brain-
I said his brain looked like an infant in the womb's. It does. Have you compared the stills I showed you? The telomerase counts are all getting reset at a mitochondrial level for brief periods, so for each of those brief periods it lasts, he isn't aging. That's undeniable.
He's the fountain of youth. Your paper argues-
I can't publish that paper, not yet. I need more.
But he's waking up.
Drive him under again! Put him under and we'll see.
I am pushed back under, lost to the world beneath a layer of forget-me-nots, when all I want is to rise. They put me down and I'm scrabbling up a tower of a thousand bodies of the dead, fighting for breath.
It's stopped. Whatever it was, it isn't working any more. If anything it's starting to stunt him in ways that look necrotic. It's eating him alive. If we keep him under any longer he'll die.
Then let him die. This is research that affects the whole world. Directives from on high are to-
Directives say we study, collect the ones we can, but not this one. His parents are kicking up a mighty media storm. We can't keep him and keep this a secret. As for your paper, they already said-
Forget what they said! So let him wake up. We'll lose the greatest scientific breakthrough in the history of our race.
I think that's a bit-
What? Histrionic? Do you not see we're making history here? His brain was resetting itself, in different ways to all the others! He was getting younger before our eyes! He's at the forefront, and it's more than just a few papers in decent magazines now.
And now it's stopped. Whatever it was, it was wonderful, but it's over now and it's starting to curdle. We have to let him go. There are plenty of others to look at.
So wake him up. Screw you, and wake him up.
I rise. Everything hurts, from the back of my tongue down to the sound of my own pulse. I am inside out and upside down. I don't know where I'm thinking, what taste I'm seeing, everything is a jumble.
"It will be hard for a time," a voice said. How long had I been unconscious? There was cotton wool in my mind, fogging me up. "You've been in a coma for two weeks. We have no idea what happened. How do you feel?"
The first of the twinges got me then, that new and persistent companion. It got me good and hard and it laid me out. I didn't know, and I don't know now.
Others?
My thoughts chuttered and jolted like a faulty boiler, sweating like burned toast. I reached out against the glare and the movement tore new sinews in my mind.
My mother was there. My father was there, and I grew calmer. My doctor came and went, a new voice, an Indian with red glasses. I liked him, I trusted him, because the red and brown chimed perfectly together, though they did look a bit ridiculous.
"Think of it like diabetes," he said to me, days later. "Once you have it you can't go back, and one lapse can lead to serious complications. You have to clinical in everything that you do. Boredom is your bandage."
Now I remember my bandage, and how I tore it off. I remember Lara. I remember reaching out to reality, and what it became, and what I am now, surrounded by the dead.
* * *
I wake surrounded by them. They are everywhere, pressed up against me skin to skin, their gray faces in the still repose of sleep, their white eyes closed, lying beside me like family, like lovers, like breakers in some almighty, unknowable weave.
I am alive. I jolt and start up. I look down on my chest and belly, study my arms and my legs, pat my face and my neck and my shoulders urgently, but there are no bites. There is no blood, there are no wounds at all.
I am alive.
The deep wheeze of their breath is everywhere. It is dark but starlight shines over us. I am sitting on the road where I stopped, the corn swaying in a warm wind on either side like walls of water waiting to descend, and all around me are the ocean.
There must be thousands of them. Their bodies stretch from me into the distance, on the road and into the corn, all lying down, all skin-to-skin, all asleep, and in that moment I understand a truth that changes everything.
They don't want to kill me. They never even tried.
Guilt, sickness and joy fall within me like stones plummeting down a deep well, each chasing the other and hammering off my heart on the way down, pulling me in and out of balance. Their breath wheezes like a tide in time to the clanging bell of my heart, lapping at my sides, ringing in the change.
They are touching me. They have their arms across my body. They have oriented themselves with their heads closest to me, like a thousand sunflower seeds pointing little dry peanut tips seed-first at me, so I am the center of their mandala, and this is all they ever wanted.
Tears spring from my dry eyes. The touch of those closest to me is cold but tender. Here I am adrift, but for the first time in days I no longer feel lost. I am finally reaching through to the truth, and seeing it with open eyes.
I killed so many of them. I burned them, I trapped them, I taunted and slaughtered them, I laughed while they died, and I never once waited to see what they wanted. I never even tried.
Waves of shame pulse through me. Waves of joy chase them, tsunamis that cleanse all my sins away, because they a
re here now, with me. They are around me still, my brothers and sisters, and all they want is the very thing I have wanted for so long, and fought for, and killed for.
Belonging. Acceptance. Forgiveness.
More memories slot into place, that I never saw them kill a single person, that though I fought them many times, and their bodies clashed with mine and their mouths grazed against my chest, they never once bit down. They never tried to infect me.
Because I had already infected them.
"Oh God," I whisper, the sound escaping me like it has been torn free.
I was the first. My body began this evolution or devolution or whatever it is, and in doing so rewrote them all. I incubated them, I made them, and then I killed them.
I rise to my knees. It's like Times Square again, only then I couldn't see it. I should have. I look over the expanse and silently give thanks. I have done such terrible things, and now I will do better. I will help them in any way I can, and I will bring all those left alive with me.
"Thank you," I tell them. They are asleep and dreaming whatever strange dreams the infected see, but I hope they can hear, as I heard every word uttered by my bedside in the days of my coma. They are in the wilderness, and maybe I can help guide them home.
28. WILDERNESS
I walk, and like sleepwalkers in the midst of a shared dream, they rise and walk with me. They buoy me on. At some point I wander through a barn, and fish out a keg of fuel. I carry it until I reach the convoy. Returning to it is like seeing a long-lost friend.
"I'm sorry," I say to it. I pat the JCB's flank. I pour the gas in.
I drive the convoy slowly with the dawn, and people part before me, following behind. I leave the music on endlessly. Stimulation hurt me, it made my brain twinge, but I got better. No baby wants to be slapped to breathe. Life is cold and hard, but there are such joys too. It is worth it.
I drive the convoy with the JCB door open. It has become a sunny day and the road is clear ahead for miles. I take selfie photos of the endless swarm in the road. I can't stop grinning. At times I get out of the cab and walk amongst them, reveling in the touch of something alive that doesn't want to kill me.
I film my passage, to show this is real.
"Here I am," I tell some future audience, touching the ocean's shoulders and backs as I pass. "They're harmless. They don't want to hurt us. Look at this!"
I hold my phone's lens up to take in the panorama. It records them reaching their withered arms across my chest, pressing their heads to my arms like affectionate cats. I smile and laugh.
"Hey, not there!" I crow, as one of them pokes me in the nuts. He backs up. A child takes his place and pats at my hand.
"What do you want, buddy?" I ask.
He doesn't want anything. He wants to pat at my hand, so I let him. I let them groom my hair and stroke my skin. I look into their wizened peanut faces and see not killers, but lost, sleepwalking souls. They may be in there still.
"You can hear me, can't you?" I ask a pucker-faced old man. "You're in there still."
His eyes glow. His mouth is a rictus grin, the skin pulled so tightly back. I touch his cheek, the tenderest expression I can think of.
Before I would have blown him to dust.
"What do you think of this?" I ask the phone's lens. I show my posse, many thousand strong, with me in the picture. "Can you believe this? Could you have ever imagined this? Would you like an entourage like this too?"
We drive slowly through the day, moving to be moving. They circulate amongst themselves, so the ones closest to me are always new. They gather near, suck in their fill of my presence like blood cells oxygenating, then radiate away. The ocean is breathing in whatever signal my brain is transmitting.
We walk and we drive and we listen to music. I hand out snacks for them to eat. They drop them from hands that have become useless claws. I imagine shooting out T-shirts from a T-shirt cannon. "And if you look under your seats…"
"It's a zombie armada," I tell Io that night, after my first full day as just another piece of jetsam on the ocean. "They're all boats on the waves, not the ocean itself."
"What waves are those, Amo?" she asks.
I shrug. I'm lying atop the battle-tank, weary but feeling more alive than in a long time. My whole body thrills to the sound of their breath below, and the despair is gone.
"Waves of thought? I don't know, honestly. I don't know if they'll ever come back as people, or if they're too far-gone now, but it isn't pain, is it? They're together with each other. They're roaming together, they're following a pattern that I can't understand, and they might still wake up."
Io contemplates this for a time. "I hope it makes you happy, Amo."
I smile, and click her off. It's another misleading response the geeks thought up for her, so she wouldn't have to say something disappointing and banal like, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'
I don't care. It does make me happy. I climb down so I can be amongst them. I lie down on the still-warm asphalt, and they lie down beside me.
* * *
In the morning they are gone entirely. I stand atop the tank and look out.
"Hello!" I call. "Where are you all?"
No reply comes from the tangled corn. I scan every direction but there is truly no sign of them. It is amazing. It touches me in a new way, like when I first saw a flock of sparrows massing and changing direction in the air, driven by the deep imperatives in their tiny bird brains, forming something beautiful, chaotic and amorphous, but at once ordered and logical, driven by an invisible calling.
They've had their fill of me. What I denied them in New York, with barriers and walls and locked doors, they've now gorged on, and are moving on. Will it save them? Will proximity to me, to the patterns buried in my immune brain, somehow bring them from their long hibernation?
I hope so. I really do.
It feels empty now with them gone, here on this barren stretch of road, but not lonely. My body remembers their presence, and my hands remember the dry rasp of their skin. They're out there now, wandering the wilds, heading for God only knows what, perhaps the very thing that can save them.
The sun is coming up on a new day. It's July 7th, 2019, and I know exactly what I need to do. I know what the contents of the next cairn will be, and what I need to put in every cairn after that, because I can't let anyone else kill any more of them, not when contact and time is all they want.
I know where to go. It isn't even that far from here. I get in my cab and I roll back the way I came.
29. INDIANOLA
The building is immense, a warehouse without any windows, and I pull the convoy up in the staff parking lot just outside Indianola, where my mother used to drop me off. I wasn't allowed to drive, back then. She'd hand me my lunch, sandwiches in plastic wrap, and kiss me on the cheek.
"You're doing so good," she'd say.
Perhaps there is hope for my mother and father. They could have been in the horde that came to me yesterday. Perhaps I touched them fleetingly as I walked amongst their ranks. I wouldn't know, but I think they would remember. That makes me feel good.
The JCB engine winds down, and I reach behind me for my shotgun, then stop and chuckle. I don't need that now.
I climb down from the cab and look around. There are none of the ocean here; I haven't seen any all day. There are just trees circling the parking lot, and cars already fading in the sun. Their windows have the white hoar of sun-warp in the glass, and weeds are growing in the dust accumulated against their tire rims.
There's a pink Cadillac, maybe Hank's. I think he used to work a night shift. And that has to be Blucy's little VW Bug. I laugh. When I went to her house to play Deepcraft for the first time, we drove in that.
I walk over and rub at the rain-dust on the side window, holding my eyes to my cupped hands to look in. The glass is hot to the touch. In the back bucket seat are two plastic cartons filled with books.
Vampires of the Amish Plain
I laugh
out loud. "No way."
It's one of the covers I did for her. There must be two hundred books branded with my image stacked in the crates. That is crazy. They've been sitting here for months, slow-roasting.
I peel back and look up at the fulfillment center. There is only the smallest of signs to let me know it is Yangtze. This is not a customer-facing location. It is an immense cairn, filled with all the stuff we humans ever needed to survive.
It is a supply depot for me, now. It holds resources I can mine and craft into something better, if I can just get through the zombies alive.
I start across the parking lot. The staff door is metal and red, and the knob is hot in the mid-day heat. Summer has come, and it's a scorcher. The door is unlocked and opens easily, of course. These places never close; they serviced our needs 24/7.
Inside is the corridor through the admin offices; a kind of smaller intestine, snaking past a little canteen, toilets, changing room, staff room, meeting room, supervisor's room, and center manager's office. All of us passed through this system the same way, before heading beyond into the greater intestine that is the Darkness itself.
It's hot and dim in the corridor, and the air smells of linoleum and plastic-wrap. I fire up my head-mounted flashlight. It feels strange to not have a shotgun and bandoliers of ammo across my chest, or the familiar weight of my handgun at my hip, but I couldn't bring any of them. I'm too afraid that, in the rush of an ocean charge, I'll use them.
In my pack I have my laptop and my USBs. That's the only heat I'm packing.
I advance. I peer in to the staff room, centered around a circular table where we used to sit, and the others would laugh and tease each other. I'd always try to get in and out fast. There's a soda machine in the corner and a good-sized window onto a square plot of parched yellow grass. I go by the offices and the changing rooms.
"Anybody here?" I call softly as I go. "Blucy, Hank?"
They don't answer, and nobody comes out to meet me. Perhaps they all found their way out. I hope that, but I expect it's not true. They couldn't have opened that metal door, and I've seen no broken windows yet.
The Last Mayor Box Set 1 Page 16
