The Last (Zombie Ocean 1)

by Michael John Grist

  "Don't you want an entourage like this?" I've titled it. I've drawn a picture of a zombie modeled on the famous Banksy image of a guy throwing a bunch of flowers, and used that as the cover image. I even draw that onto the hood of the car itself. The zombie isn't throwing flowers though, he's throwing a nice pink brain.

  You've got to laugh.

  I stand back and look at my work. It's the starting point of a new journey, one that will catapult me and any who follow to the West, and what we might find there. The destination takes on mystical power in my mind. It's a brave new world with such dreams in it.

  I get in my convoy and I rumble over the start line. It's only as I'm falling back into the monotony of the drive, watching the yellow fields slough by on either side, that I realize something vast and unavoidable.

  Cerulean is alive.

  It hits me like a punch. He had the coma like me. He remained uninfected like me. His mother was hammering at the basement door to get down, but I don't think she wanted to kill him, not if she was anything like these others. She would have knelt at his side until she was ready to go on, leaving him there in his basement, waking from his methadone dose.

  Oh my god. Cerulean is alive.

  The epiphany dizzies me and I have to pull to a stop. If Cerulean is alive then perhaps Lara is too. For whatever reason, she didn't become a zombie in the middle of the night like the rest. She left a sly note behind. Maybe the act of sex immunized her, present at ground zero for the infection's spread.

  The ocean will lap against them both, but it will not kill them. I feel that for certain.

  God damn.

  WEST

  22. UTAH, ARIZONA, NEVADA

  I press on, feeling the race biting at my heels, like blazing this trail is the most important thing I'll ever do. Day chases night and I chase after them both, always following the sun and the moon over my head and off to the west, always west.

  At night I dream of Cerulean and Lara, out there somewhere, perhaps together and united by the New York cairn, rolling and walking hand in hand with the ocean. Gray bodies lurch around them like emperor penguins in the Arctic, too damn docile to fight back, because they've never seen humans before and don't know that they should fear us.

  I drive and I sleep and time burns away behind me in dropped cairns. I place them in all the bigger towns, getting the process down to a fine art. In Nebraska I hit up Omaha and North Platte; in Colorado I drop them in Brighton and Frisco, tagging each one LMA. I leave my books and my digital footprint, I add large blackboards sourced from nearby coffee shops for a a register, with my name at the top.

  I drive on through the endless waves of corn, alternating at times with the leafy green soy plants sprung up from rich brown soil. On stretches there are hay bales lining the road that have been there for months, steadily mulching down. The high sweet smell of their fermentation carries in the air, along with the cloying scent of sugar-beet plantations in the distance. Water towers mark my progress, and by the names written across their bulbous flanks I chart a path from tiny town to tiny town.

  I walk with the ocean and I ride with them. When I sleep I sleep amongst them and we breathe together. Come the morning they are always gone, and I follow.

  In Denver I ricochet through streets clogged with emergency vehicles and milling floaters. I hazard a guess that out here they had longer to react to the infection as it spread. People had time to call for help.

  It didn't help. I don't see a single living soul, or any sign that anyone survived.

  I bulldoze my path gently.

  I smash my way into the Wells Fargo Center, fifty floors tall and laid out like a gridiron of perfect square windows with a wavy curve for a rooftop haircut. I rig a pulley in the stairwell then haul my gear up: drums full of bright yellow street paint, rollers, rope, generators, gas, food. Hiking fifty floors is an insane workout.

  I wander through bank offices around the fortieth floor. The view is epic, of course. Here I pass amongst desks and chairs, along static-rustling gray carpet looking into cubicles and offices. Nothing has changed since the world flipped on its axis, bar the people and the power. It wouldn't look any different from now. At one point a worn-looking security guard comes pelting for me.

  I sidestep at the last moment and he goes by, then I step up close so he can't charge me again. I pat him on the burly shoulder. "There we go."

  He puts his wrinkly hand on my shoulder too. No problem. We conga that way back to the stairs.

  The roof of Wells Fargo is a weird wavy pompadour, so I can't go down in a window-cleaner's basket. Instead I hook into the rappel points and hack my generator into the in-coil system. It all works fine, and after working on the Empire State for so long I have no problem with heights.

  From the slippery glass top I look out over the Colorado countryside. There are skyscrapers and suburbs then an endless flat plain of scrubby brown and green fields. This is Middle America, the plains, and it goes on forever. This new cairn will be visible for miles, so I better make it a good one.

  I rappel down the building's side and work fast, running myself left to right along the windows like a dot-matrix printer, slapping the paint in place hastily but with deft familiarity. I don't work from sketches painted in the interior this time, because I'm not too worried about accuracy. A splash that looks jagged up close will look like a razor-straight line from a mile away. Distance forgives a lot.

  I get high on the sway of it, spending the first day on the east-facing side swaying around between floors 48 and 40, covering most of the building's façade in yellow.

  When it's done I set myself up to sleep in the dizzy heights of the top floor, along with my pal the security guard, hunkered down in an executive suite where probably the CEO stayed when he was puling an all-nighter. The TV in there is a hundred inches wide. There is champagne in the fridge and thirty-year-old brandy in the liquor cupboard. Sadly the ice machine in the corner doesn't work, and I can't be bothered to figure out how to hack it with the generator cables.

  I lie on the massive bed in the massive silence of this stilted mausoleum to high finance, and laugh, with lukewarm brandy in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. I wasn't a big drinker before and I'm certainly not now. I sip at both and watch a movie on my laptop. It's the first in the Ragnarok series, picked up on DVD from a carousel in a gas station somewhere. In it our mythological superheroes are climbing all over buildings in Shanghai, fighting off aliens.

  I'm not a huge fan but it is good fun. It feels good to watch it after so long and not twinge at all. The noise and light fills the room for a little while, and I can forget where I've been and what I've done.

  The next day I do two more sides of the building, and wonder if my security guard has found his way down the stairs and out through the hole I smashed, or if maybe he's glitching round the top floor still, banging into walls.

  The third day I finish with the north-facing angle and set up the cairn in the ground floor lobby, like a booth at comic-con, featuring my books and the digital file and the rest. I sign a few bits and bobs, authentic LMA merchandise, and intersperse these amongst the piles. I should get some T-shirts made.

  I drive away. On the outskirts of Denver I look back along I-76 at my handiwork.

  It's a giant yellow Pac-Man. I tried to do it like a stop-motion animation, though who will notice that I don't know. Starting at the east his mouth is mostly open, then clockwise he clamps it closer to shut, until at the north it's just a slim wedge of pie.

  His eye is a black dot the size of a double-desk. It looks good. It's a bit of fun.

  I rumble on.

  * * *

  I tell jokes to Io and she tells them back to me. I try to think of puns about zombies. Most of them revolve around the similarity of 'brains' to other words, like drains, grains, flames. I theorize aloud about why zombies have always been so interested in brains, and figure out it's probably because they haven't got any of their
own.

  "Remember, I sawed open that head?" I ask her.

  "What head is that, Amo?"

  "It was like a coconut husk."

  "I like coconut ice cream."

  I laugh. "Me too, Io, me too. Good luck getting that now, though."

  "You're near a Wal-Mart. I'm sure they have it."

  I'm impressed she knows where we are anymore. "That's a great idea."

  We pull off the highway and into a Wal-Mart in the scrubby forests near Grand Junction, where the ice cream is rotten sludge in tubs, though that's not what I'm looking for. I've come for the astronaut's ice cream. I find it in dehydrated wafer-form, sealed in brick-like silver packages. There's no coconut but there are vanilla, strawberry, and Rocky Road. I grab a handful and on the way out pick up some cans of bolognese and a box of green tea.

  It's a feast that night on the border between Colorado and Utah, camped out in my battle-tank with the bitter tang of the green tea's tannins in the air. Nostalgia overcomes me, and while chewing down bolognese I fire up the darkness in Deepcraft, slipping my goggles over my eyes.

  Cerulean is there waiting for me. I turn on my diviner and go with him down the aisles, toddling along through the bicycles and the exercise equipment, circling around past the book machines and down narrow passages filled with large cardboard boxes containing all kinds of Barbie dolls.

  Hank passes me but he's mute now, with his Internet feeds cut off. The real Hank is out there somewhere, wandering with his darkness herd. The real Cerulean is out there too.

  In the morning I drive on into Utah, replenishing my gas barrels at a Shell station because there's a tanker sitting on the forecourt, and that's a lot easier to siphon than the underground tanks. I get a pack of Big Red and some lukewarm grape soda and sip and chew my way into the desert.

  The land turns brown and burnt red, in this our long approach through Mormon country to Las Vegas. To either side great sandstone buttes rise like the mittens in Monument Valley. It is a gorgeous, wasted land, as pure as driven sand, dotted with hardy green cacti and mountainous termite mounds. Scrappy shoots of dune grass crop up everywhere, and sand has begun to reclaim the road.

  I pass through various National Forests, fed on water stopped up behind Bryce canyon to the north, and am enveloped in verdant Douglas fir and Bristlecone pine. I spot squirrels and turkey in the branches and the undergrowth, starting as I rumble by. I drink water from a fresh tributary stream, damn it is cold and fresh. I get on my knees and smell the sweet resin of the pine needle carpet. Just beautiful.

  I drop more cairns, in Richmond and Beaver, in Cedar City and St. George. Of course I'm saving something special for Vegas itself. It's got to be grand, surely, for a place like that. I ask myself, what would Banksy do with all the world as his canvas? What would JR do? How far does fighting back against the man take you, being defiant against the new world order, when there's not a shred of that order remaining?

  I'm not them, though, and I'm not in their world. I'm me, Amo, and I'll do what I've got in my head.

  After Zion National Park I hang a left off the main track, and drive a few hours east for the first time since backtracking to the darkness. I've always wanted to see 'The Wave', a part of Coyote Buttes that has the most gorgeous sandstone escarpments, like the eye of Jupiter made flesh on planet Earth.

  The terrain gets redder and harsher around me, Arapaho land, and I get misty-eyed and awed with it. Of course I've seen the Grand Canyon before, but there's something more intimate about this. Soon I pass through the parking lot and by the visitor's center. There I unhook the battle-tank from the JCB, loading the cab with a gas burner and some tea and bolognese, a blanket and an inflatable pool lilo, a pack of marshmallows, Graham crackers and Hershey slabs. With all that I take the JCB up the ranger trail.

  It's already straining toward dusk as I ascend up into the wave. It is a perfect half-pipe of red and cream sandstone deliciousness, like freshly scooped raspberry ripple, so smooth and perfect I want to reach out and bite it. That all this was formed by water and wind just blows my mind. It feels as alien as Mars, and I am the last man alive to see it.

  I park the JCB at the trailhead and climb one of the buttes by dusk light. The sandstone is slippery and a fine rain of sand shivers off at my touch. There are stairs cut into the rock and a rail bolted in, and I climb to a viewing platform atop a twisty crag, left behind when the softer sedimentary layers around it were worn away. So says the sign.

  On top I set up my burner and sit on my lilo, and toast marshmallows on the open fire. They crackle and catch fire, quickly going black, melting the lovely inner layer to sugary goodness. I love this bit. I sandwich it with chocolate and crackers, watch the white distend and bulge through cracks in the black outer skin, and take that first luscious bite.

  Oh my lord above, that is sweet.

  The intensity brings back so many memories; hay rides with Aaron and my parents, my dad driving us in the little hay-trailer attached to his John Deere round the three acre wilderness farm he bought so we could play there and build proper tree-houses. We'd wade in the creek and catch crawfish, barbeque venison and have burgers, and tell stories by firelight while watching the fire crackle, munching on s'mores.

  After a while we'd take the ride to the hilltop crest and lie back to watch the sky. There were always shooting stars, and we'd give them names and shout out when we saw them, sometimes pretending we'd seen one when none had come, just to tease along the others. My mom was the best at calling us out on that game, while my dad just nodded along and claimed to see them all.

  I sigh and lie back. The tea and bolognese can be breakfast. I look up at the sky. Of course it's the same sky. These are the same stars, though the shooting ones aren't.

  "They're not really stars," my dad told us once. "They're just little bites of interstellar dust, or the screws and nuts that come off falling satellites, burning up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere."

  This awed us even more. That there was a layer of sky up there so hot that it burned, that interstellar dust was reaching out to our little planet across the gulf of space, then falling down upon us all like a fine rain, like fairy dust.

  * * *

  In the morning I head out, wordlessly, after the breakfast I promised myself. I hook the JCB back up and rev off, back to I-15, for the road through Las Vegas and out to the coast. It's the final leg now, and I'm excited about what I'll find.

  Will anybody be there already? Will I find a copy of Ragnarok III tucked away in a producer's office, ready for distribution nationwide? Will it all be what I hoped, or am I going to end up swinging like dear Sophia within a week?

  Whatever. I'm not worried. I feel good regardless of the outcome. I'll have done what I set out to do, and if it just leads to me dying there alone, then that's fine too.

  I pull through the desert corner of Arizona and then into Nevada at the fastest clip yet, down largely empty roads. Soon Las Vegas dawns like an abandoned theme park from the wastes, and I blow into the strip hard, roaring between outsized casino-hotels with my music pounding, bound for the UFO, a massive silver saucer sticking edge-into the ground, surrounded by faux-rubble, like it crashed there.

  They only finished building it a few months before the zombies; one of the largest hotel-casinos yet, surrounded by giant green alien sculptures. I saw it on the news, distantly, back when I could barely handle TV. It's where my next-to-last major cairn will go. I heard they screened movie-launches across its massive circular façade.

  Everything is still and silent but for me, and sand blows down the streets in cute twisty zephyrs. I see the UFO dawn like a dark sun over the faux-city.

  Before that though, I see the man in the road.

  Two floaters trail behind him, on leashes tied about their necks. For a second I think I must be dreaming, I blink but that doesn't change the reality. He's there. He's real, and he turns and waves as I roll near.

  I pull the JCB to a st
op and race out to meet him.

  23. DON

  I run over and he runs to me with his pet zombies dropped behind, and we stop an awkward distance apart, sizing each other up.

  "Jesus," he says. His eyes are wide and watery. His face is thin and he's tall, he's got almost a foot on me. Across his thick chest he wears bandoliers of bullets just like I used to. There's a sword in a sheath at his waist and a handgun, and a shotgun in a sleeve down his back like Ash in the Evil Dead. "I thought everyone was dead."

  I laugh. "Me too. Damn, it is good to see another living person."

  He holds out his hand. I spread my arms. We pull into a braced, manly hug. He stinks of old sweat and the sour saltpeter tang of expended gunpowder, but then I probably do too.

  We pull away and we laugh in the awkward gap between us.

  "Don," he says, holding out his hand. He has a southern drawl. We're both grinning like idiots. "I'm from Texas, I've been roaming all the highways for months, looking."

  I take his hand and give it a firm pump. "Amo, from Iowa, though I've just come from New York."

  He raises his eyebrows. "New York, in that rig? It must've taken a month."

  I shrug. "Yeah. I was looking out too, for others."

  His eyes narrow eagerly. "Did you find any? Are there others?"

  I consider telling him about Lara and Cerulean, but despite the natural ebullience of meeting a survivor, I hold back. I don't know this guy at all. "No. Well, yes, but she was dead. A girl. She committed suicide before I reached her."

  This casts a pall over our jubilant meeting. He runs a hand through his thick blonde hair. He looks to come from Scandinavian stock.

  "And you?"

  He shakes his head. "You're the first, man. Damn, it is good to see someone."

  I nod. It is.

  "And you said your name was ammo? Like, bullets?"

  I hold in a laugh. Shall I tell this huge man that my name actually means love, and my parents were hippies? Maybe later.