It was Vegas, as seen a hundred times in movies and TV, though of course all the lights were down and it was midday. Still they could pick out the flash of sunlight reflecting off the themed hotels along the strip. Jake started nattering to Cynthia about all the things he was going to do.
"Dice, of course some dice, then baccarat, is that dice? And we'll catch a show, and poker, of course slot machines, and roulette! How could I forget roulette!"
Cynthia cackled. Maybe she was sweet on Jake? Cerulean chuckled at that. The boy would have to watch out.
Julio kept honking his horn for a long time. That grew annoying quick, dampening everyone's spirits, but soon they were in the thick of the city and he stopped. They rolled all the windows down and hung out of them gawping while Julio led them at a stately pace up through the city's heart.
Anna gasped and pointed as they reached the strip, and the first of its hotels reared its head, The Mirage. "Look at that," she called, awed
Everybody looked. Next was Caesar's Palace, then the grand Bellagio, then Excalibur, the black pyramid of Luxor, until they hit the northern tip and the tilted oval disc of the UFO, crash-landed at a steep angle into the earth.
Masako laughed and pointed at the alien saucer. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
They all saw it. Drawn across the UFO saucer's silvery surface was the huge figure of a very familiar man; the Nike logo of Michael Jordan, legs spread and in flight, reaching up to the pinnacle of the flying saucer. Underneath the familiar logo had been adapted.
JUST LIVE ON
"I think that's probably copyright infringement," Jake said. Cerulean laughed good and hard, for relief as much as anything. Amo's tag was underneath it.
LMA
It was a vast relief. He hadn't realized how heavily the pressures of dealing with this little troupe had been weighing on him. He'd be more than happy to hand them over to Amo when the chance came. He'd be more than happy to see Amo at all.
In the saucer's lobby door they found the best news yet; two names written on a blackboard hanging over the main reception desk.
AMO & LARA 07/18/2019
Amo and Lara were together.
Masako came up and took his hand, squeezing tight. There were tears in her eyes. This was hope.
Amongst the goodies Amo left in the cairn there was a new section of his comic, detailing Amo's encounter with a man called Don who almost killed him. Instead Amo killed him and almost died in the process. Cerulean couldn't help but look up at Julio in the middle of reading it, as Don was cornering Amo in his battle-tank. Unfortunately Julio looked up and caught his eye at the same time, holding it for a moment.
Cerulean looked away.
Nevada flew by, and Cerulean pushed the RV to 80 miles an hour so the frame rattled and the floor shook. A few times he overtook Julio, which he didn't seem too pleased about. By early afternoon they crossed the state line to California, and Masako played 'California Dreaming' at full volume, so loud that Cynthia held her hands to her ears and Anna screamed along to the music and no one could even make out what she was saying.
It was dark as they hit the outskirts of Los Angeles, the sun setting far ahead off the edge of the continent. They slowed through the city's traffic-congested sprawl, all white-cement warehouses and blank condominiums with the stain of humidity and rot blooming at their corners. There were old newspapers blowing everywhere and the smell of salt and old sewage in the air.
They reached the coast in time to catch the last of the sunset off Newport Beach, burning like an orange ember over the waves. Cerulean pulled a hard right and took them tearing north up the Pacific Coast highway, tension burning in the air, leaving Julio trailing behind on the narrow roads.
When they saw the lights of the Chinese Theater up ahead, Amo's longtime destination, they cheered. As they wound up the coast, weaving around a steady tide of gray bodies traipsing down into the water to the left, they could pick out two figures standing in the theater's open courtyard.
"Is that them?" Anna asked hungrily. "Is that Amo and Lara?"
Cerulean could hardly answer, his throat was so thick with emotion. He'd never expected to reach this point, had never even wanted it, but now he wanted it more than anything. He wanted to see Amo in the flesh for the first time, and meet Lara, and hold onto them both.
They were all silent as they pulled up into the flashing Chinese Theater forecourt, with Amo and Lara standing there hand in hand before them. They piled out, Cerulean last out of the back, settling into his wheelchair.
When he rolled around the RV's side the look on Amo's face was worth it all, as his jaw dropped and sudden joy shone in his eyes.
"Cerulean!" he shouted, and ran over, dropping to his knees to pull him into a tight embrace. "Goddamn, Cerulean!"
LANDING
D. STATES
The van headed east, and Julio called out states like a countdown. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, ticking down to some unknowable bomb.
It grew colder, and nightmares haunted Cerulean throughout the day, each a ghost of the long frozen night before; a red demon on his chest tugging at his tongue, another at his back pouring blood down his throat, so he gagged and choked all night and day.
Anna loomed in his mind. He saw her again and again, as she turned to greet him on the road ten years earlier. So young, so small, so fragile.
"Run away!" he tried to warn her, in his chair at the head of a wave of the dead, but she didn't listen. She needed him too much. She couldn't see the suffering following on behind.
He screamed. He woke screaming. Julio leaned back through the plastic screen from the driver's seat.
"I can cut your tongue out too," he said. "It's distracting when I'm trying to drive."
Cerulean buried his face in the mattress. Numbness was no use in his sleep. Soon even that would be gone. He'd be in a cold room somewhere, prone on a surgical table while Julio sliced into his skin. He had to be strong, but what did that mean now?
How quickly the changes were wrought. Despair came on hard and unstoppable. Amo had shot himself in the head and the world spun on its axis. Matthew fell and every last hope fell with him.
He blew on the embers of hope inside. If they went out then so would he.
"We're here," called Julio.
The van stopped and the engine died. The back doors opened, revealing a view of a scarred, pitted field coated thickly with snow. Bluish mountains rose through a frosty haze beyond, and scattered coppices of ice-laced forest circled the field's edge. The hint of a road curved through the snow to the right, leading in and out of stands of wintry spruce. Over it all hung a beautiful, cerulean sky.
"Familiar?" Julio asked.
It was.
Tears welled in Cerulean's eyes, both for the beauty of this scene and the memories it brought back. He wouldn't forget those mountains. The gun tower might be gone and the concrete block was missing, and the field had been torn up in dune-like troughs and peaks, but it was the same place.
A field in Maine, where Matthew had died.
He looked at Julio for the first time in cold, clear daylight. The blotches on his face were an angry red and his right eyeball had a musty pink tinge. His left shoulder was crumpled inward and lifted, a stretched reflection of his muscular right.
"I thought they might try to kill me, when I came back here," Julio said. "I was right." His breath steamed in the cold air. "I stopped that with a few hundred pounds of plastic explosives and an earth-mover."
Cerulean surveyed the field, a mess of roughly circular rises and falls, as though craters had been bitten out of the ground. Julio had said they were going back to the beginning, and perhaps this was it. It was here that he became Cerulean for real, leaving that poor bastard Robert behind.
The gun tower had been right there. The crowds of the ocean had been clustered there. Nothing now remained.
"What happened?"
"Their drones dropped bombs on me," Ju
lio said casually. "Protecting their secrets. It's the reason Matthew died. I think you're interested in that. Why he died. Why you survived."
Matthew again. And he was interested. He couldn't deny it. Ever since he'd been here the first time, crawling and alone, he'd wanted to know.
"So tell me."
"I will. First, why don't you come out?" Julio reached into a pocket and dug out a key, which he tossed into the van. It flopped against Cerulean's chest and trickled down to the mattress, where it sat and shimmered silver.
"You're not going to die in that van, I promise you," Julio prompted. "Unlock the chain and come out. There's real wisdom out here."
Cerulean took the key and tried it in the cuffs on his wrists, but that was too much to hope. Next he tried the padlock on the chain, and it turned, freeing his legs from the central pole.
Now was his chance.
He shuffled to the edge of the van, eyes fixed on Julio, and Julio watched back.
"No diving," Julio said, with a faint smile curling the edges of his mouth and an unusual gun tapping against his leg. It was large and round-barreled, big enough to contain tranquilizer darts. Surely the same one he'd shot him with in New LA. "I know what you're capable of."
Cerulean climbed out with a graceless oomph to the snow. After three days in the sunless back of the van it felt like freedom, but he was under no illusions; Julio had him still.
Julio pointed past the ravaged, pitted field to the slope leading up. "Under the mountain, there's a bunker. There are thousands of people a hundred meters below the surface, squirreled away since before the apocalypse. The gun tower here was theirs."
Cerulean listened. They'd always surmised something like that; a bunker, survivors. It was never clear though what were they hiding from, or why they'd slaughtered the dead. The ocean had never actually harmed anyone.
Julio seemed to see this question in Cerulean's eyes. "To understand their plan," he said, "you have to understand what we are to them. You, me, your friend Matthew, everyone who might come here drawn by the ocean."
Cerulean looked up at Julio. It seemed he liked saying Matthew's name. Perhaps he thought it had a special kind of power. "So what are we to them?"
Julio grinned. "We're the zombies."
Cerulean just stared.
"We are all of us infected," Julio went on. "You, me, Amo, Anna. We may be immune to the virus that casued all this, but we're still infectious, and constantly transmitting that infection. It means we can't be part of their new world, when they emerge from their bunker. It means they have to wipe us out, before we can infect them. We're the zombies."
Cerulean looked at the mountains.
The rest of it could be true or not, but the mountains were certain, as massive and solid as ever. You couldn't remove the mountains. You couldn't fool them or take advantage of them, they simply were. But perhaps there was a bunker. Perhaps there were people clustered below, waiting out the apocalypse for a sunnier day when all the infectious peoples were gone.
More importantly, it meant Julio was not alone. Anna and Amo wouldn't stand a chance against drones and bombs. The cold milk of uncertainty rose high in his throat. It explained the gun tower, and why they' killed Matthew, but then…
"Why did they spare you?" Julio asked, as if reading his mind. "It's the main question, isn't it? I'm sure it's haunted you."
It had, for ten years. Now he began to suspect.
"I wasn't a threat."
Admitting it wilted him. Julio nodded, pleased. "You weren't a threat. As a cripple you weren't capable of damaging their tower, or digging down to the bunker below. You weren't worth a bullet."
Julio reached into his other pocket and produced a single silvery slug of metal. "Not one." He tossed it at Cerulean. It bounced off his dead legs.
He felt his world turning again. After so long, it seemed such a petty, unsatisfying reason.
"What threat was Matthew?"
"As much as me. Able-bodied and strong, as well as infectious, and weren't they right to do it, Robert? Consider the last ten years of your life. Consider Amo's lies. What have you done but extend the misery of a few in LA, selling them a future you never had a claim on? Amo's dream is seeds on barren rock. What we'll start here is a sacrifice for the good of thousands." He pointed at the mountain. "They're in there, the best and brightest of mankind; those who were worth saving. Not the dregs, but best of humanity. Do something of value with your life, and help me birth them into the light."
Cerulean felt himself crumpling. His head felt frenzied, a wasp's nest full of intersecting revelations, and what was the point of any of it?
A single bullet. That's what it came down to. The bullet Julio had thrown lay on the frosty grass before him, a gleam of tarnished silver. To save one bullet, they'd left him alive. For that one act of unwitting mercy he had come to know Anna, had watched her grow up and loved her, all for this single chunk of metal.
It was nonsense. It was perfect, and tipped him over the edge.
He started to laugh.
Julio's face soured.
He laughed louder, reigniting the fire inside and washing away all doubt. He'd always regretted not killing Julio earlier, when he'd had the chance, before the atrocities that saw him driven out of New LA. Now he knew for a fact that he finally would. It was the only truth that mattered.
The disappointment spread wider across Julio's face, turning his blotchy grin south.
"Not what I expected," he admitted.
"Thank you," Cerulean said through his laughter. "Do you know how much that one bullet haunted me? You've just set me free."
Julio frowned, his eyebrows working hard, then nodded. "I suppose so."
He raised the gun and shot Cerulean in the chest.
16. SETTLING IN
The party at the Chinese Theater was chaotic and glorious, like a school reunion where nobody really knew anyone though they all shared the same past. The apocalypse had stolen everything from them all.
Amo looked much the same as he'd been in Times Square, a sensitive hipster wearing the last generation's fashion in baggy cargo shorts and polo shirt, with a scraggy goatee and sandals. The scar on the side of his head where he'd shot himself was prominent, a jagged circle of mottled skin in amongst his dark hair, but he seemed to be the same Amo he'd known in Deepcraft, with warm brown eyes and an easy, confident grin.
To the others he was like an A-list movie star, grinning and laughing at the center of their new world.
Cerulean couldn't stop grinning and laughing himself. Anna clung to Amo's pant leg and Cerulean's at the same time, looking up with wild admiration. Jake babbled endlessly like a star-struck fan, about what a stroke of genius the Pac-Man was, about how cool the Nike logo had been. Cynthia asked Amo bluntly what it had felt like to shoot himself in the head, with respect plain in her rusty old voice. Masako tried to thank him for bringing them hope, but couldn't get the words out for crying.
He met Lara; she was everything he'd expected and more: gorgeous, kind, warm, with a look of deep, relaxed happiness in her swimming blue eyes. They held each others hands and talked about Amo and the infected and the world to come.
Only Julio hung back. He loitered at the edges of the party while the others hugged and talked and laughed, shooting murderous glances at Cerulean throughout the greeting, but he didn't care. Even that miserable bastard couldn't ruin this moment.
Talking to Amo, sharing their experiences and talking together with Anna and the others, he felt the new world taking on real, solid shape. This could be good. For a while he couldn't find words, and when Amo saw he was on the edge of tears, he fell silent too. They just looked at each other and smiled while looked up at them and laughed.
At some point they fired up the generators and fell into an easy, dizzy, laughing collaboration to boil up a feast of canned roast beef and fresh asparagus, fry fresh potato slices, grill baby carrots and of course SPAM, with onion consommé soup for starters and a melted Hershey b
ar fountain for dessert. There was beer and champagne on ice and Nespresso and whiskey. Cerulean worked coffees then manned a fry station, while all around people were digging in and contributing like it was the 4th of July.
Everyone except Julio. Cerulean caught glimpses of him in between taking snippets of latte foam lessons from Lara and guiding Anna in arranging the plates and napkins. He was standing at the doors with his back to the rest of them, looking out of the glass as if at any moment he thought an attack was coming.
Cerulean looked away. Screw him, if he couldn't enjoy the best moment any of them had had in the new world.
* * *
They set up makeshift camp beds in one of the theaters, and as the party gradually ebbed they began to retire, wobbling down the aisle arm in arm, lit by yellow glow-in-the-dark nightlights left lying near the exits, shushing each other, abundantly drunk and giggling at every misstep.
Cerulean waited until everyone was in, and Anna was curled up with Masako, and Amo and Lara were switching off generators and lights in the lobby, and Julio took up position by the front doors like a guard on watch.
He waited until Amo came back to bed, and gestured to him. Amo padded over sleepily, half-drunk.
"Come on," Cerulean whispered, and started rolling away from the lobby, into the deeper dark of the Theater.
"Oh?" Amo said. "OK."
They sat in the darkness, watching the door to the bedroom theater and the lobby beyond.
"What is it?" Amo asked, already sobering.
Cerulean felt bad to lay this on him now, but it had to be done. "We have to talk,"
"I figured. Shoot."
Cerulean wondered where to start. First things first. "What do you make of Julio?" he asked.
Amo frowned. "The quiet one? Julio, watching the doors, nice Mustang." He rubbed his chin. "He's out there now, on watch?"
Cerulean nodded. Amo was tough, after what he'd been through there was no doubt of that, but he was trusting. He'd done terrible things, he'd killed a man, but he hadn't been in Maine when the guns turned on their own.
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