The Last (Zombie Ocean 1)

by Michael John Grist

  It starts to rain. It comes down hard and sleeting, it gets black overhead, and bright flashes of lightning fork the sky like Odin's wrath. Whoosh! My cheeks and forehead get peppered in a cold military drumbeat, driving in and out the pain. I open up my mouth and drink the water down. I'm dead but I'm not dead.

  The ocean patters happily below me, slapping and slipping in the slick water. It's filling up the streets and the sewers, it covers me and gathers me up, dribbling in and out of the holes in my brain, getting ice cold and slushy into my thoughts.

  A dog called Buddy comes to mind, and a little boy running up and down jousting with his older brother. He always let me hit him too. He was such a good brother and I loved him so much, until a faceless monster rubbed him out forever.

  I never think about this. I want it back. I want to see my brother again.

  "Can you show me that?" I shout into the rain. "Can you give me that?"

  We never talked about him. It got so bad that if I even saw his name I'd go into a migraine that lasted for days.

  "My dear boy, coming back to the world of the living."

  My mother flashes before me, standing at the top of the steps with a tray in her hands, smiling down with misery-filled eyes. I see the misery now, and the fear. We were all so afraid, we've all been so afraid for so long.

  "Aaron!" I cry into the rain, out to the floaters and the kelp and the ocean all around, because I don't have the words to say whatever it is I really mean. "Aaron!"

  My brother smiles in my face, so mischievous, and I remember we were planning to firecracker the school's mailbox to celebrate after prom. BOOM. Such fun. We would run away laughing, with the janitor on our tails and a security alarm going off from a nearby car.

  What have we done? What have I done? Oh my brother, what have I become?

  * * *

  When I next wake it is silent and still. Overhead the sky is a beautiful and clear black, graffiti-sprayed with stars. I shot a hole in my head, but I can still appreciate this.

  I think of Sir Clowdesley. He was a great British navy admiral, whose death prompted the rush to uncover the secret of longitude, which allowed European ships to traverse the great gulf of the Pacific Ocean to the Americas.

  He prompted the rush by failing. His ship foundered on rocks in the British channel scarcely fifty miles from land, because he didn't know where he was. All of his men perished, or so the legend goes. So progress was born from loss, and humanity advanced.

  I lift my arm to stroke the stars' patterns. My fingers are red and angry from trigger-work, but they paint the sky like delicate brushes in the most complex dot-to-dot.

  The air is chill and eats into me. The RV's roof is frigid under my back, but I can't complain. The ocean have fallen quiet and I'm at peace.

  My head lolls to the side. I see them, all lying down on the ground. Their bodies are entwined, and by moonlight they don't look so monstrous. They look like brothers and sisters holding close to each other through the night, waiting for the warmth of the sun. Despite their filth and raw wounds and tight gray skin, they seem content.

  I realize I can move.

  I lift my arms. They are my actual, real arms. I lift my legs and the RV roof flexes with a tinny clang.

  I lift my hands to my head. I feel the dry scab where I put the muzzle just above my ear. I probe it gently; it's tender and springy, because surely the bone is gone. I probe the other side, and find a large and ragged scab.

  The bullet blew out and took a good chunk of bone with it, but somehow it still sealed. Somehow I'm still alive, and thinking.

  It's impossible. I've heard of people surviving gunshots, but not like this.

  I push myself to my knees. The roof crumples and rolls. I'm unsteady, my balance is shot and the world whirls, but here I am on my knees. I pat my body down. All here. I look slowly around me.

  The ocean is on all sides, white and gray in the moonlight. Their eyes are closed and they all lie still, wrapped in each other's embrace, asleep.

  I've been spared.

  A shudder passes through me. I run my hand through my hair, down my neck to my spine, and make my guesses. This is what kills the zombies. Perhaps this is what kills me too?

  It reframes the infection. I imagine data shunting from my brain into my spinal column like gigabytes transferring to USB, changing the way I think, the way I eat, the way I live.

  I don't need my brain anymore.

  It's a bizarre and meaningless revelation, the purpose of which I am lost to explain, but it is a revelation still. It means the ocean are like me, and I am like them. After all, I made them.

  Kneeling in the dark, I make my vow. I will not treat them like this again. I will not exact revenge. They are what they are, an ocean, and there is world enough for us all.

  I leave most of my guns on the roof behind. I climb down the ladder on the RV's back, then dizzily weave my way through their sleeping bodies.

  They let me pass. I don't understand it. I accept it for the forgiveness it is.

  14. PIED PIPER

  It's a new world. I climb to the top of the Sir Clowdesley building for the first time and look out. Eight stories high everything looks different, smaller and more manageable, like I'm viewing it through a tilt-shift lens. Buildings look like Deepcraft blocks, and everything is a resource I can mine.

  The ocean are inconsequential. They are the trucks and cars going back and forth in a huge game of Frogger, part of the natural environment now, and it's not worth the cost to my soul to destroy them en masse. It wouldn't even be right.

  I bring up my phone, holding a nice charge now since I plugged in the battery packs, and double-click it.

  "This city is a grave," I tell Io.

  "New York, New York," she says. I nod along. I realize I have that track in my library somewhere.

  "Play Frank Sinatra, New York New York."

  "Playing," Io says.

  Frank comes in. What a crooner. He sings an elegy for the lost city. His rich voice rings out over the rooftops and down the building sides, swooping like Spiderman. I get shivers down my skin. I look over the grand towers of the Big Apple, these monuments proclaiming all the amazing things we did, and feel pride. We did good things, and maybe, just maybe, we still can.

  The idea comes to me full of cheek and irreverence, and I embrace it.

  I need to make something of this. I look across the skyline to the skyscraper that was always my favorite: the Empire State.

  Cerulean could be right, there may be other survivors. Lara could still be alive. I need to give them a sign big enough to see, a lighthouse of sorts for this transformed world, guiding my people safely in.

  I start to smile. I am an artist after all, and a Deepcraft adept. I'm going to remake the world.

  * * *

  I start small, sourcing cleaning equipment: stout wooden brushes, chemical scourers, bleach, a hundred water cooler tanks, from hardware stores up and down the streets outside. I find a few gallon drums in the back-end of a pizza shop. I roll them to my truck and stack them with all the rest.

  As long as I avoid the throng developing outside my slice of 23rd street, I can move with relative freedom. It takes them time to notice me, and I don't give them that. I sometimes stumble upon a few by accident, but I feel no qualms to shoot them like this, to save myself. I do it clinically, as neatly as I can, clipped through the necks. They drop. I finger the scabbed holes in either side of my head. It isn't revenge, it's just getting along.

  I get along.

  On the street of 23rd I pour the bleach into the drums and splash in chemicals. The liquids fizz. I dip the first of my brooms in and wonder if it's going to come up with the head comically dissolved. It only steams faintly in the air.

  I put on safety goggles and long gloves, and I get to work scrubbing down the black grease stains covering the walls, caused by the firestorm.

  It's worse in certain areas, I suppose where they w
ere gathered densest, but it comes away fairly easily, like soot, and runs down to the sidewalk in gloopy dark trails. I splash water to push it on to the sewer grates and move on.

  In a day I clear the ground level of a few walls. The painted bricks, store windows, and doors look brighter than they probably have for years. I stand back and admire my work. It feels like I'm polishing a toy train set to a fine buff, before I show it off to my friends.

  I won't whitewash though. I'm not trying to undo the past. I'm going to leave a clear record of what happened here, so if I'm to be judged, let me judged for the things I truly did.

  In Sir Clowdesley the stink remains, like the stale tang of cigarette smoke that lingers in your hair all day. The fresh food in the bar is now wilted, rotting and brown. I dump it in a bucket and toss it down a sewer. In the pokey office I dig out a spare key and open up the front door for the first time.

  It feels good to walk in and out like a human, no longer crawling through the broken window. I drag the dead floaters out by the heels, to the bus-wall. They're rotting quickly, their gray skin falling in on itself. I can already see bone. I wonder if touching them can infect me. I avoid it.

  If they continue to rot at this pace they'll dissolve in a few weeks, and I can inter them in the sewer.

  Into that first new night I clean Sir Clowdesley. I scrub the living bejeezus out of it. I clean every book's spine lovingly with a toothbrush. I degrease the floors and walls and set all the tables right. I tidy up the bar display, clean the windows, and set my chalkboard L A R A back in position.

  I made that less than a week ago. It feels like a lifetime.

  I sponge clean the sofa and set it up with fresh bedding. I polish the floors. As a final touch, I make some coffee. I set a big pan of beans percolating over a generator I dug out of the building's cellar. Ah, roast coffee. I drink a slug of my first brew and it is delicious; dark, bitter, and life-giving.

  I clean for the whole week. I barely need to think.

  When I finish at ground level I drive one of the cars around as a movable scaffold. I get blisters from scrubbing which pop and heal. My back hurts and gets stronger. It rains and that helps clean the mess away. For the stains that reach especially high I use a ladder.

  My cleaning stocks deplete. The street gets clean. I line up the cars just so. It is a wonderful day in my neighborhood. I whistle along to Mr. Rogers as I stride upon my bus battlements, looking down on the ocean. They're piling up again, climbing over their own desperately to reach me. I'm causing this too, which is a kind of needless suffering.

  I move to the next stage of my plan. First though, I must leave behind a record.

  I find tools in a trophy-maker's shop on 47th off Madison. Learning how to etch a bronze plate is tricky business, lit by a gas lantern picked up at the Army Surplus on 17th, but I get it slowly. It's rather like developing a photo. The laser etcher is too high-powered, but I can still use the old stencil-cups and acid.

  I set them out and leave the metal to score, while looking out of the window at a batch of posters on the building opposite, for a movie. I remember how hotly anticipated this movie was: Ragnarok III. It makes me feel warm to think about it, the memento of a world gone by. What comic artist doesn't love and identify with superheroes?

  It takes a few trial efforts to get a plaque which looks moderately professional. It comes with holes pre-drilled, so I don't need to do that. I set it up over the door to Sir Clowdesley.

  RIP

  Here I committed a genocide of some thousand of the ocean (zombies).

  I burned them alive with gas and lighter fluid.

  I will not do it again.

  Come find me at the Empire State Building.

  I hesitated for a long time over how to sign it. I could use my name, of course, but that seemed too simple. Banksy was Banksy, like a legend. There was JR and Space Invader and others.

  It comes to me on a dime, and I use it. It is, after all, what I am, and the mantle I am assuming. Arrogance be damned. Plus it's fun, and I get to decide.

  Last Mayor of America (LMA)

  * * *

  The lighthouse is coming. First I have to make the streets safe.

  I go to Yankee Stadium and survey the task ahead. Members of the ocean drift here and there and I avoid them with care.

  I ram into the stadium through the glass doors of Gate 1, just like I did in the Police Academy. A few floaters come running and I race ahead, driving my RV around inside with the headlights on, through the broad circular shopping esplanade, until I find the access stairs to the field.

  I climb up and emerge. It's gorgeous, a beautiful diamond marked onto the earth like Nazca lines, though already the grass down there is starting to look a bit unkempt. It is wide open though, and empty. It will make a beautiful home. I count the banks of seating, well over a hundred. I make notes on my phone. I know the capacity is 50,000, of course that's for the seats. It doesn't include the ground itself, or all the shops inside. I wager I can get about 100,000 inside, maybe more.

  I mark out hospitals on my tourist map; New York Presbyterian on 68th, Mount Sinai on 57th, New York Hospital in Queens, Bellevue on 1st Avenue. I only need to hit one though to get over a hundred generators, Bellevue. They are tucked away in a huge dusty storeroom in the basement. I load them up in the back of a construction truck I find at the building site down at Coney Island, where they were redeveloping the amusement park. I tip out its sand and fill it up with gas drums siphoned from a tanker parked by the Shell station at the east end of 23rd. I raid two electric shops to pick up all the stereos and CDs I'll need.

  It takes a few days to get them all in position, spread out throughout the Yankee Stadium stands, the shopping area, and a few down on the field. I stand on the pitcher's mound and look around at this stadium I've only been to once before, when it was alive, and pick out all my little black hi-fi installations. Banksy never did anything like this.

  I drive my RV down to 23rd. The throng clamoring for my brains has only grown more massive, spreading over multiple blocks. It's getting quite difficult even to get in through the embassy backdoor. They're starting to pile up in siege mounds of the fallen everywhere.

  I turn up the music. For this part of the journey, I've selected a long-loop of the Beatles discography: Let It Be, Abbey Road, Help, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and so on. It's over two hundred tracks on my phone, feeding the system via Bluetooth. Modern technology is beautiful.

  I've got a pretty good idea where the main clumps of the ocean are. Now I just need to go pick them all up.

  The music kicks in and I crank it to maximum. The ocean turn. More than ever, they look like zombies now. It's been nearly a month and they're wholly gray. Their skin is gray, their hair is gray, even what ragged clothes they still wear are faded almost completely gray after constant exposure to the sun. They are a gray tide, slowly emaciating, with tight rictus skin and those glowing white eyes.

  If anything though, the loss in weight has made them faster. The first few come off after me like whippets. Great. I pull away.

  Weaving a path through New York now is like a massive game of Centipede. I can't double back on my own trail because I'll run into them, and there's not enough ammo in the world to spray them all down. I can't stop because they'll catch up to me. I can only go on and on, and pray this whole thing is going to work.

  It is exhilarating. My heart yammers like a drum and bass line. Fresh air blasts in through the RV's open windows, and the Beatles pulse out from the generator-fired speakers mounted on the top. John Lennon sings about peace and imagining a new world, and those crazy bastards rise up from their floating haunts around the downtown quaysides to follow me. Ringo does his Yellow Submarine bit and they shuffle away from the killing fields of Times Square, where they have since regrown.

  The music calls to them like the Pied Piper, and they follow. These brilliant, hideous, kelp-like floaters float my way, and I lead them
in their tens of thousands. At times when I switch from eastward to westward, a few blocks north of my earlier track, I can see the centipede trail of them stretching behind.

  They go on and on. It is the conga line of the century. It's one for the Guinness Book, surely.

  "Come on!" I shout out at them. "Lots of candy at grandma's house, come on!"

  They come on. Some of them peel off the pack and come straight for me, cutting up 7th or 8th Avenue.

  "The more the merrier, bring it on!"

  I lead us onward and they follow. I weave the gridiron streets of Manhattan like I'm darning a sock, east to west and west to east, always heading north. When I come across a horde I circle round it to the north and add it to my centipede's mass.

  Twenty thousand now? Fifty? I have no way of knowing. It's a goddamn ocean of bobbing gray heads back there, stretching to infinity.

  I pull up to Yankee Stadium. I park the RV round the side, near the bank of three buses I have set up to seal the doors, and turn the music off. I'll need this baby to escape.

  I stand in the entrance of Gate 1 and watch the leaders of the pack sprinting for me. Good. I wave. I reach up to the spot where I've mounted the speakers overhead and fire up the generator. It gutters to life, and one hundred decibels of Taylor Swift boom out at the entranceway.

  I duck under it and head in, stopping at each of the wall-mounted generators in this trail of crumbs through the lobby to punch them all on. They gurgle, spit smoke, and the music dials up.

  I run on, circling the shopping mall that runs the whole stadium's periphery, flicking on switches as I go. Gap streams by on my left, a McDonalds, a Burger King, a TGI Fridays. My feet clap on the marble floor and the interior echoes with the raucous yawling of dozens of simultaneous pop tracks.

  At two hundred and seventy degrees I stop, not daring to look back, and ascend up the Gate 12 steps into the open air of the stands. There I do the same thing in another grand clockwise circuit, switching generators and stereo systems on behind me, blaring out discordant, mismatching music. I had to take whatever CDs I could find: vintage Kanye, The Sound of Music soundtrack, Prince. I'm just glad it isn't raining.

  Halfway round the stadium I spot the first of the ocean emerging tentatively, like woodlice, back into the light. They turn left and follow the trail of sound. Pretty soon they're a flood. They halt to hammer at the first machine making the noise, but that only forces them to bunch up. They fill up the rows and ranks of seating beautifully around it as they all try to get closer.