The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4)

by Michael John Grist

  We stand around for a few hours, bearing witness. When it's done the interior is a bare black hole with everything gone; the generators and the heaters, the chains and the bodies, all reduced to dust and ash.

  Cement follows a day later. We keep working for hours to load the bags and mix the contents, keeping a steady flow of gray slurry flowing into the hole. Filling it to the brim takes a day and a night, a real commitment of our time and effort, but there's something transformative about doing it this way, something healing, like scattering dirt onto a coffin.

  Afterward Jake works in the Habitat, setting the hydraulics to their original task, while I peruse the files Salle left for me in the commander's office. There's nothing really about the cause of the infection, except as it relates to this bunker. Of particular interest is the inbuilt receiver their 'primary' demon had, connected through something called the 'Hydrogen line', baked in at a genetic level. This genetic switch would pass on to any 'secondaries' it infected, essentially providing a button Salle could press to deactivate them all, when the time was right.

  Though there is little on how they got their primary, it's clear that this switch won't deactivate primaries from other bunkers, and won't defend us against the hundreds that may be coming. Still, I find the button and push it; a protocol buried deep in the computer system, guarded by four banks of passwords and security identification, kindly left behind by Salle.

  Anna and I do it together; so simple. On the screen in the control room the seven blue lights wink out. We get a call from Lars moments later, confirming what we'd already briefed him on.

  "They're climbing down," he says. "They're picking themselves up and heading off! It's amazing."

  "Where are they going?"

  "East!" he cheers. "They're all going east."

  I look at Anna. We're both thinking the same thing. This will be another line of defense for us, and also an assault. We'll put trackers into as many of them as we can, and follow. We'll take the other bunkers one by one and flip all the underlying switches, each time releasing our army to press on again.

  "We're going to be OK," Anna says.

  I think so.

  "We're coming tomorrow," Witzgenstein says. "And I have some other wonderful news. Lara seems to be showing signs of improvement, Amo."

  My eyes quickly well with tears, sitting there in Salle's control room. Hope, in such an awful place, comes so strangely.

  "Here," she says, and then there's Vie and Talia on the other end of the line, shouting out about the things they built with their pinecones, and how they're going to start a forest back in New LA, and how mommy maybe smiled at them earlier, and maybe she moved her hand, and isn't it strange that she might be waking up just at the same time as all the zombies wake up?

  I cry and laugh and go along with them, approving their ideas to build snowmen out of pinecones and reed grass, agreeing it's strange mommy's waking up right now, though she's definitely not a zombie, don't worry about that, and I'll see them soon, and we'll have snowball fights together of course, and so on for thirty minutes until I can barely stop myself from blubbering and hand them off to Anna.

  She's beaming at me. She beams and cries a little too.

  Lara's waking up, with the zombies. That's a kind of beautiful thing, no doubt. My wife is coming back. I sit and listen to Anna try to get a word in edgewise while I watch the map of America, with not a single blue dot anywhere to be seen.

  * * *

  We each find our own work.

  Feargal heads outward, roaming the nearby mountains until he finds the bunker's drone base, dug into a natural alcove in Mount Abraham's northern side. It's an empty hangar now, with bays for four Predator X-class drones. Presumably they dropped out of the sky somewhere to the west when they were chasing Peters and the other survivors across the country.

  "The automation here is amazing," Feargal tells me on the walkie. "Automatic docking, charging, reloading of munitions. It's like clockwork, and it's still working. If I had a drone now…"

  "Who would you bomb?" I ask. "The IRS?"

  He laughs.

  I let him loose on the stacks of military information in Command, and on the fourth day he comes up with an explanation for why Cerulean wasn't shot by the gun turret.

  "It was automated too," he explains, sitting behind the Command desk and plainly enjoying it. I sit before him like an underling and indulge him in this. "A kind of AI program designed to recognize anything that looked like a zombie by its profile, posture, way of walking. Zombies were the threat, so your man Matthew running was a viable target, but Cerulean crawling across the field? The turret couldn't waste ammo on every deer or fox that came near, so it was set to ignore them. Cerulean must've looked enough like one of them, crawling along, to earn a pass."

  It's interesting information. Once I was so desperate to know the answer, but this is so banal and obvious that it doesn't satisfy. There was no human choice involved in sparing him, only a simple machine intelligence. Cerulean would have gotten a kick out of it.

  Ravi and Anna spend their time working in the farm halls to harvest the widest range of crops and seeds they can. Ravi takes to it with gusto, constantly smeared with dirt and happy to be at Anna's side, while I think Anna enjoys the quiet time, involved with nurturing things to life.

  "They've got strains here I've never heard of before," Ravi explains to me excitedly. "GM sorghum that reseeds year on year, with yields like you wouldn't believe. Rice that's drought-proof, corn with more calories per kernel than anything in all of Iowa. It's high-tech, gene-spliced stuff."

  "We'll take it," I say. "Load it up. Cynthia will want to marry you."

  He grins. Anna frowns at me. Has she said yes to him yet? Cerulean's not around to tease them anymore, so I suppose that job falls to me. I'm recovering some of my old self.

  Peters mostly wanders, rolling quietly in his chair, looking at this place that he was tortured for. I catch sightings of him round the Habitat and Command, soaking it in. I know he's weighing all of this. That's good.

  In a week Jake has the system figured, and he hands me the plunger.

  "This'll do it?" I ask.

  He nods. It's a plunger like you'd see attached to TNT in a Road Runner cartoon.

  "Does it have to be so dramatic?"

  "It's like the cement," he says. His voice is back to normal and the wound in his skull is healing nicely, the gory gash from before fading to a tight pink line with scabbing round the stitch holes. It makes me very happy to see him heal. "You have to really mean it."

  "And it'll start explosives?"

  "It starts a process which begins with twenty explosives they planted, and moves on to the hydraulics."

  "Good work."

  We wait for the others to come. Seven more RVs join us in two days time, lined up neatly along the winding mountain road to get the best view.

  One by one we bring everyone down into the MARS3000 bunker and show them around. I show it to my kids. The zombies have long since lost interest in us, having fully charged, but Talia finds them fascinating. She's never seen this many together before, except for the battle with the demons. Now she walks between them holding their hands, like an enthusiastic, very friendly dog. They tolerate her. Vie is more interested in the layout of the Habitat and all the various controls in Command.

  I get Witzgenstein and the other Council members down too, and they vote on some things: order of ceremonies, the words to use, who gets to speak when and what comes next.

  In the end, it's me who pushes the plunger and blows the cap off the bunker. It's not something I'm hungry to do, as it symbolizes the death of all these people, but for that same reason I don't want anyone else to bear the weight of it. It's on me already.

  It's not so dramatic as I'd expected. The explosions are disappointing, with all of them taking place underground. The earth shakes, some snow jumps up in the air on a section as big across as a volleyball court, then for a long time there's nothing. We al
l sit on our RVs watching the smooth slopes, like the ranks of scientists, soldiers and government people who watched the early atomic explosions.

  "These explosives are more like fracking," Jake whispers to Anna, respectful of the somber mood. "The charges fracture the earth above; they're not designed to blow it all out. The elevators will do the rest."

  In a few minutes they do, with a grinding bass vibration that shakes the earth. Gradually the volleyball court's worth of snow begins to lift up and roll to the side, as a dark gap yaws open like a big metal jaw. A moment later the first flush of a hundred zombies steps out into the light, lifted a hundred feet up a pre-built shaft by an industrial grade elevator.

  They hobble out. The snow and the cold don't bother them. They start as one toward the east.

  "Next demon," Anna says, below her breath.

  "Next demon," I repeat.

  In the RV below I sit with my kids and hold Lara's hand, looking into her eyes and explaining everything to come.

  She's weak still, but she's awake. She can't speak well at the moment, still recovering from the battering the demon gave her, with a bruised throat and healing ribs, but I understand every croaky whisper she attempts.

  She loves our children. She loves me. She's glad to be alive.

  I hold her hand and press it close to my lips.

  "Honey," I say, so glad that she's here with me again. "We've both been in comas now."

  She laughs but that hurts her a little, so she just smiles.

  "I missed you," I say. She squeezes my hand.

  "I'm here," she answers, in a faint and croaky voice. Though she's sick and she's been in bed for nearly two weeks, she still looks as beautiful as the day we first spoke in Sir Clowdesley.

  She's here, and that's what matters.

  I kiss her hand. The kids hug in. Outside, the rumble and grind of another elevator load rises up, and another hundred of the ocean are released from their prison, to trudge steadily east.

  Did you enjoy The Loss?

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  Book 5 in the Zombie Ocean series is coming soon!

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  Now, page forward to read chapter one of Mr. Ruins, Book 1 in the Ruins War (included in the free Starter Library).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A big thank you to Advance Review Squad members Nicole Esquibel, Katy Page and Pam Elmes, who really helped improve the book by nailing down typos, spotting Britishisms (soya is the Brit version of soy? I had no idea) and pointing out redundancies. Thank you!

  - Michael

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael John Grist is a British writer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years, and now lives in London, England.

  He writes dark surreal science fiction and fantasy, and used to explore and photograph abandoned places in Japan, such as ruined theme parks, military bases and underground bunkers. These explores have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.

  OTHER WORKS

  Zombie Ocean (zombie apocalypse)

  #1 The Last

  #2 The Lost

  #3 The Least

  #4 The Loss

  Ruins War (science fiction)

  #1 Mr. Ruins

  #2 King Ruin

  #3 God of Ruin

  Ignifer Cycle (fantasy)

  #1 Ignifer's Rise

  #2 Ignifer's War

  Short fiction

  The Bells of Subsidence - 9 science fiction stories

  Bone Diamond - 9 weird fiction stories

  Non-fiction

  Into The Ruins - Adventures in Abandoned Japan

  EXTRAS

  Want more books by MJG?

  If you enjoyed The Loss,

  look out for battles with the devil

  in the sci-fi thriller

  Mr. Ruins.

  An EXCERPT follows.

  Mr. Ruins

  A mind-twisting thriller through the tsunami-ravaged future.

  The Arctic ice is gone, blown apart in desperate resource wars. Global tsunamis have left the world an apocalyptic wasteland, and survivors cluster on lawless floating slums, living in fear of the next big wave.

  Ex-marine Ritry isn't afraid. He lost more in the Arctic wars than anyone, and it left him numb. Now he works in the slums as an expert graysmith - diving into living minds to inject and erase memories - until he meets the shadowy Mr. Ruins.

  Ruins offers Ritry a better life, but demands a terrible price: his memories, his morals and his soul. Ritry must dive deep into his own mind to escape. There, in a terrifying maze where plastic soldiers man the trenches and a massive worm eats all invaders, the battle for Ritry's uniquely powerful soul will begin.

  'Inception' meets 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', packed with blood, twists and space marines of the mind.

  MR. RUINS (EXCERPT)

  The needle enters Mei-An's eye socket smoothly, nestling beside her bright white eyeball and passing back into her brain. She barely flinches, though I know it's uncomfortable as hell.

  She's a pretty young half-Asiatic, maybe 28, and I can't imagine what she's doing out here in the skulks. She came in to my graysmithy building an hour ago with a hunted look in her eye, asking for a very specific inject: a hand-made combination of languages and vocational skills. It's plain she's running from something, but it isn't the job of a graysmith to ask questions.

  I steadily depress the syringe plunger, injecting its silvery contents into her mind. It's dangerous stuff, enough to radically change her brain content and chemistry, but she doesn't seem too phased. A moment passes then I draw the needle out and lean back, giving her time to blink away the discomfort.

  "How do you feel?" I ask.

  "Shivery," she says. As her mouth opens I see the black tattoo on her tongue: DZ. The brand of Don Zachary, king of the skulks. OK then. "It's cold, like brain freeze."

  I force a smile and study her, sitting there on the input tray of the bulky ElectroMagnetic Resonance machine. She's clearly strong despite her slight frame, and determined as hell. Her stark black hair is a stark contrast against the dive room's simple gray walls. Her long thin legs dangle down the EMR machine's side like a child's, though she's clearly no innocent. You don't get Don Zachary's brand and stay innocent for long.

  A silvery tear beads from her eye and I dab it away with a surgical cloth.

  "Let them settle for a few moments," I say, "then we'll dive."

  She nods.

  I leave her, exiting the spartan gray dive room to stand in the polished steel corridor alongside my assistant Carrolla. He's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I think he must have had marine training, though he never fought in the Arctic skirmishes. Working here in the lawless skulks is his war.

  He raises an eyebrow, and I know what he's thinking.

  "She wants a dive," I say.

  "I heard the Don crucified the last guy who crossed him," Carrolla says conversationally. "Nailed him to the tsunami wall. Does that sound like fun to you, Rit?"

  I shrug. There are no shortage of legends about the Don. "I'm not turning her away."

  "You fucking should."

  "I'm fucking not."

  "Don fucking Zachary," Carrolla mutters under his breath, "he'll pull your face right off."

  I let it go, and we stand quietly for a moment, waiting. In Mei-An's brain the silvery inject will be spreading, starting to make connections and change the architecture of her mind.

  "I need you tight on me for this," I say. "It's a bigger job than usual."

  Carrolla nods sharply, like a marine. He's got discipline, I'll give him that.

  We go back into the dive room
together. Mei-An is sitting there like a dab of milk on a slate. Carrolla takes up position at the control panel by the EMR machine's large hollow hub. I sit on the stool before Mei-An and look into her artificially widened eyes. I offer my hand and she takes it. It's good to get the skinship started in small ways, to start our systems aligning.

  "There are serious risks to this," I tell her, though I've already told her it once. "Potential damage to your memory, to your wits, to your personality. I'm good, but there's always a risk. I need to hear you say you're sure."

  She nods. "I'm sure. I don't have a choice."

  I understand that.

  "Lie down on your side," I tell her, "facing me."

  She does. I climb onto the tray and lie down beside her, face to face.

  "It'll be OK," I say. "Carrolla."

  Carrolla pushes the button to fire the EMR up. Inside the large ring hub at its head electromagnets start to whir and thump, forming a soupy electromagnetic static between us. The thumping gets louder and I can feel the tide rising. The input tray jerks into motion, drawing Mei-An and I into the machine's hollow heart.

  Electromagnetic waves wash over us like an ocean, and I reach out with my mind to begin the synchronization of our thought patterns. Dimly I sense the outline of her brain, a hazy sphere of heat barely glimpsed through murky waters, transposed atop her face. I focus closer, building the bridge across which I'll pass into the outer reaches of her mind, then-

  "Shit!"

  It's Carrolla. I hear his shout tinnily through the waves, followed by a red flash splashing across my field of view, like blood in the water. Then I feel it, fuck. Her mental immunity is kicking in fast, the Lag, reaching out to take a bite. It's a goddamn shark out here, and already furious at the presence of the silver inject.