The Last (Zombie Ocean 1)

by Michael John Grist

  She read Sophia's journal. It was miserable and ecstatic by turns, a record of ups as miniscule as spotting three zombies in red jackets in a row, of lows so deep she scrawled in a rabid scratchy hand, repeating the same words over and over again:

  What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?

  Poor Sophia. Lara smoked the spliff down to the quick, then left it there in the ashtray, another signal to others. She rooted out a ball pen from her pack and started writing in answers to Sophia's long-silent entreaties.

  You're all right now, Sophia. We're taking care of you. You are an important trailhead on the way out West. Your death was not for nothing. You will not be forgotten. I wish I'd known you, you sound like a lovely girl.

  Thank you.

  She wrote answers in Sophia's journal to her every moment of loss and misery. It did nothing, but it seemed to do something. These words were an unanswered plea that remained, and now they were answered. Sophia would never know, but that didn't make it any less real.

  The others would know.

  Lara signed it, Lara, Last Barista in America. LBA. She added the date.

  Then she started a new entry, on a clean page. She kept it short, but described how seeing Sophia's grave made her feel, and how it excited her, that others could be alive.

  I hope to meet you, at the Chinese theater. You, me and Amo will watch movies together. And whatever else we like too. Plant radishes and suchlike. We're going to be OK.

  She put the journal down where she'd found it. She hunted out the spliff papers; there was no more weed but there was some tobacco left. She rolled a fresh cigarette, to replace the one she'd smoked. She laid it up neatly in line with the others. It felt like a kind of offering.

  Poor Sophia. What a sad shrine, but strangely full of hope too. Amo's passage had made it that way. Her passage would make it even more so.

  A waypoint on their pilgrimage.

  She left.

  There were no signs of Amo for a long time after that. She saw evidence of destruction at the roadside, passing through Indiana; a destroyed burger joint, its ragged outer walls blackened and splintered; elevated billboards that were burnt and had chunks missing.

  That couldn't have been him, could it?

  She reached the rolling cornfields of Iowa. In the summer blaze, the golden spread looked like the fields of Elysium, stretching into forever. She drove on over flatlands that went on and on, wondering if she was gaining on Amo, wondering if others were coming up behind her even now.

  Were they in New York, at the first cairn? Were they at Sophia's shrine, the second? What would be the third?

  In the midst of the corn, on a long and lonely road in the middle of nowhere, she found it. It was immense, and it changed everything.

  20. REBIRTH

  I remember my coma.

  It was terrifying; I was a child again surrounded by colors I couldn't recognize and shapes I couldn't distinguish, shifting constantly like warping reflections on a soap bubble.

  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 a gust of color like a digital brush-stroke, 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 on an ocean of bald heads, so many shades like a million disconnected eggs. These are all heads and their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, conjoining from a flat weave to a tubular extrusion, like intestines curling themselves from to existence, 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. We checked that.

  Not at the genetic level, then. 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. It speaks.

  My dear boy. My darling boy.

  Later, much later with time as a food I chew on and excrete, 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 bald heads. 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, I see them growing older and changing by the minute. I reach out and feel the barrier between of this maddening reality 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.

  Put 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 again and again, until 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 could change the whole world.

  This is a man whose parents are kicking up a mighty media storm. We can't just keep him. We'll never keep his records to ourselves if anyone suspects. We need these records if we're ever going to-

  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! He was getting younger before our eyes!

  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.

  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, but I know now. They used me. Something was happening to me and they broke it. I was a butterfly emerging from my chrysalis, and they kept me in too long.

  My thoughts chuttered and jolted like a faulty boiler, sweating like burnt 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. "Once you've got it you can't go back, and one lapse can lead to serious complications."

  Now I remember my lapse. 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 the dead. 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. The ocean's breath wheezes like a great placid ocean 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 heads 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 are here now, with me. They are around me still, my brothers and sisters, my children all, 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. There are so many 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.

  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 zombies 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.

  * * *

  I walk, and like sleepwalkers in the midst if 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 they 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 they breathe as one. I 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?"

  I wink playfully. I nudge them and they nudge me back. I pour water on their heads and they lap at it wildly, like those memes of cats drinking from the faucet by dipping their heads under.

  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. It was wondrous. "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 ever before. 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 mi
sleading 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 lie 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.

  "Have you all gone for a pee?"

  No reply. I turn and 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 sparrow brains, forming something beautiful, chaotic and amorphous, but at once ordered and logical and 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 my mind and my body and the patterns buried in my immune brain, somehow bring them from their long hibernation?

  I hope so. I really hope so.

  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, 2018, 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 along the way I came.

  21. 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.