Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  They drove in silence for a time, but for the endless shushing of sparse grasses off the front fender. This was the A10, once the major highway leading from Bordeaux to Paris, and now it was just a shallow green belt through tall trees and dead villages.

  "A corruption," Anna repeated, and Ravi beside her chuckled again. "Ravi!"

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't help it."

  "And it's making us laugh?"

  "Not laugh," Jake said, still leaning his head against the window. "Or not only that. It's more like a systemic signal fluctuation, interrupting the way we think. It's very simple."

  Anna frowned. She could make guesses, but she hadn't been involved in the hydrogen line research for months, so she wasn't up to speed with the latest working model.

  "So make it simple. Spell it out."

  He sighed. "You talk a lot, you know that?"

  "Hey," Peters said, patting Jake's thigh. "Come down."

  "I'm down," Jake answered. "I'm here. She's the one excited."

  "I'm not excited, Jake," Anna answered, trying to keep her tone measured, trying to keep her head screwed on straight. "I just think this is important."

  He sighed and swiveled his shoulders. "All right, if you think so, Anna. I'll make it very simple for you. Imagine a radio station."

  "Got it," she said, a little more sharply than she meant to.

  "The station spews out a signal all day and all night. Radios all round the world, if it's long-wave or bounced off satellites, will pick it up. The radios play the signal, whether it's music or chat or whatever. Got it?"

  "Yes," she said through gritted teeth. This was perhaps a little more basic than she needed.

  "So the radios are us. The signal is the hydrogen line. The station was Amo, or maybe some combination of Amo and Lara. But now switch it, and make the signal something more like oxygen. Water. We need it. It keeps us afloat, it helps our brains run, like electricity powers the radio. Right?"

  She just nodded. "And the corruption interrupts that?"

  "Interrupts our thinking," Jake said. "Makes our brains not our own. Perhaps we're lucky the signal didn't cancel out altogether, because who knows what would happen then. Maybe we'd all be dead. Maybe all the ocean would wake up. Nobody knows."

  Anna focused on the road.

  "So is it long-term? Is it going to get worse?"

  "How can I know that, Anna?" he asked. "I don't have a magic wand."

  Peters tapped him again. "Shh, yes. Down."

  Jake eyed Peters, sitting almost on top of him, and his eyes welled up with tears. "Did you know they killed Lucas? Did you know that, Peters?"

  "No," said Peters. "I don't have the magic wand either. None here do."

  "We heard it," Jake said. "He's dead."

  "We don't know anything," Anna said firmly. "We heard a raid, that's all. We don't know."

  Jake put his head back to the glass, crying quietly, and they drove on.

  Ravi gave directions, tracking their progress up the map toward the base near Angoulême, and Anna turned the radio theory over in her head, trying to keep all pieces of it in sight at once. Perhaps the effects of the corruption would be cumulative, which meant they'd all only get 'madder' as time went by. They'd lose themselves more and more, until they were sobbing, fighting, laughing hysterically, howling up at the moon.

  Or perhaps they would turn into the ocean. They'd end up following the flows of hot and cold around the world, endlessly seeking demons to crush or humans to charge up off. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad fate.

  Ravi directed her, and she pulled off the A10 onto a smaller road. The tarred surface was heavily ruptured and jolted the stairs van constantly, slowing them to twenty miles an hour. Either side broad expanses of green corn crops rose, glinting in places with golden kernel-teeth peeking through husky brown lips. Into the midst of that they bumped along like a catamaran over choppy waters, rising and falling at each wave's peak and trough.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  It was hypnotic. It led to madness, in the end. What else was there? Where else was she headed? She tried to imagine what the attack on New LA would have been, to cause this loss of focus on the line. Perhaps another military squad, like Lucas had described? Dozens of them, all flown to California. Organized, he'd said, disciplined and precise.

  Ravi by her side nuzzled sleepily at her shoulder, his map-reading forgotten. The shush of the corn was like a lullaby. Here they were thumping across the countryside, fleeing who knew what in a van with a set of stairs on the roof, heading to nobody knew where.

  Angoulême, of course, but where next after that? Where was safety now? If New LA was gone, if Lucas was dead, then it was just the four of them left. What would survival mean in that world? Always running from squads sent by the bunkers, always afraid, never being free, and to what end?

  Resisting would mean nothing if New LA was gone. She wouldn't kill thirty thousand people for vengeance alone. The only decent thing then was to stop and let them come. Let her world end, so it could begin again for someone else.

  Under the wheels the broken road thumped like a fevered heartbeat. Of course, she was only guessing. New LA might be fine. There was hope left, but it was hard to hold on to with the engine slowing and the gas gauge pointing deeper in the red.

  Thump thump thump.

  Steadily the stairs van slowed, like a clock finally winding down, like the world stopping its spin and rolling into cushiony corn to sleep.

  She let her eyes close. She was so tired, and it was a beautiful spot for it, swaddled on all sides by gold with the noonday sun beating through the grille. She let her hands drop from the wheel and turned the keys in the ignition. The engine stopped trying, which came as a relief. It was no big thing to rest her head on the wheel, with Ravi cozy by her side. It was all right. Snuggled together, if there was any way to go, then wasn't this a good one?

  Thump thump thump

  She smiled at the sound, like waves lapping on the catamaran hull. It was easy to imagine she was a little girl again and Amo was at the front, driving them through the desert. Robert would be alongside him, talking to Amo in soft tones, wearing that delicate pain in his eyes and two silver necklaces round his neck, both hers and his.

  "Anna," he said, as Amo drove them forward and the tires went-

  thump thump thump

  -on the road, and where were they going but back to New LA? There were at least ten good years ahead. Yes, there was Julio to come, and Witzgenstein, and all manner of disappointments, but on the whole it had been good. Maybe she'd appreciate Ravi more this time around. Robert too.

  "Anna," Amo said again, and this time she stirred, because the thumping was getting louder. She tried to shut it out but it pushed through the dream, ruining the last stages of the ride home, until-

  THUMP THUMP THUMP

  Somebody jerked her upright and she saw Peters before her, still in the stairs van. She felt angry and sad at once, to leave such a wonderful world behind, but the look of fear on his face dragged her fully awake.

  He turned and pointed through the window, past Jake's sleeping face, to where some kind of black fly was sailing in a straight line above the corn, making a terrible buzzing THUMP THUMP THUMP

  Its wings whirled and blew up dust. The corn swayed beneath the downdraft of each stroke. She realized it wasn't a fly.

  "It's a helicopter," Peters whispered urgently.

  It was a helicopter.

  A real helicopter. Here. The thumping black bulk of it jarred painfully with the reality of the corn and the van. She'd only ever seen them flying in movies, figments from a past she'd never known, a past that was now pouring into her world, bending reality to a new shape.

  It banked around.

  It faced the stairs van head-on.

  It began to fire.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Gerald '8 Lives' Marshall stood outside the Dome with his helmet on, listening to the progress of hi
s Black Hawk strike squad. Headed up by Manning, captained there by Davies, they were a team of highly competent soldiers. Back in the real world this would be an assault in Fallujah or Tikrit, some sand-swept compound in a sand-swept city, dropping in to flush out terrorists, bag up computers, evidence and bodies, leaving nothing behind but blood spray and boot prints in the dust.

  But here, in this addled facsimile of the real world, few of their maneuvers had gone to plan.

  "We have visual on their tracks," Manning had reported thirty minutes earlier, backed by the muted thump of the helo's blades. The bird had been wheels up for five hours, following the vague outline of a signature on the flattened hydrogen line. The trail had been clear, signs of a vehicle's passage up trampled grass roads heading north from Bordeaux. "It's like they're driving a damn snow plow."

  Marshall had let the obscenity slide. Including the Istanbul raid, Manning and his men hadn't de-helmeted for over twelve hours, which was nearing the operational kill-zone, when brain damage increased exponentially. They were good soldiers following good orders.

  Orders Marshall had given.

  "De-helmet," Control had told him, the regimented voice of O'Flanerhy down in the Istanbul bunker, handing down his own orders from the Seal's civilian Governance. "You've been live for fifteen hours, Marshall. We need you at peak capacity."

  Fifteen hours. You could do a lot in that kind of time. Back on the ranch in his youth, he used to ride the prairie fixing posts to keep their steers in; sometimes days ran longer than fifteen, beyond dusk and dawn.

  De-helmet, was the order. R and R.

  Marshall was not a man to harbor indecision. He made decisions swiftly then held fast until his duty was done. It was the primary reason he's shot up through the ranks, making General by the record age of forty-three, earning a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Presidential Medal of Freedom in the years before the Emergency Seal was founded and the world decimated.

  He had a prodigious gift for reading human nature. He saw a man and intuited who he truly was with uncanny accuracy; what his capacities would be, what his drives were and just how far he could be pushed, and he did not shrink from pressing when pressure was applied. He'd been studying the leader of New Los Angeles for twelve years now, a man known only as Amo, and he knew what was coming.

  It didn't allow time for R and R.

  The war was far from over. There was no time to de-helmet now, not when they needed to strike a decisive, finishing blow within the next twenty-four hours. After that the survivors of New LA would be too far in the wind to hunt down again, undoing years of patient waiting for them to gather together. It had to happen now.

  So, this.

  He surveyed the sweep of their temporary base a final time, meticulously angled on Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in the suburbs of Eastern Istanbul, as neatly ordered as his own mind. Clear sight lines spread in all directions, overseen by Sergeant Riggs in the makeshift crane-tower. Grass spread like a rich lawn across the runway, rising in unruly tufts, like clumps of pampas on the prairie round his South Dakota ranch.

  The Dome behind him was occupied now; Brocas and Reeler had dehelmeted, after entering the geodesic habitation ball under protest. They'd hauled it atop an eighteen-wheeler trailer from the arid depths of Eastern Turkey, along with two UH-60A Black Hawks, each representing a team's worth of lives to fetch and repair. The Dome itself represented dozens of scientists lost to the kill-zone; a composite sphere of octahedral crystal panels jointed by a thick, rigid armature of tungsten coils in a semblance of a Faraday cage, smaller than the lunar lander from Apollo 11. It could comfortably berth two at a time, four at a push; the best portable shield they'd been able to construct. Their resources were not the same as they had been before the decimation.

  He turned back to face the row of five cubes aligned in a perfect row to the west, each a temporary haz-mat tent built with a carbon-fiber frame and rigid plastic sidings. Bolt-gunning them to the asphalt had been the work of moments, but gave them the impression of sleek, technological strength.

  The decision was a simple one.

  He had no family now, no friends, no relations but the bond of respect between him and his soldiers, and that had been souring for years as the hope leached out of them. Too many times in the last years he'd buried his own people in the bunker walls, lost to a creeping enemy that murdered them with their own trembling hands. Young men and women with such opportunity ahead, lost on the doorstep of the empty world that was to be theirs.

  Suicide watch had done nothing to stop the trickle becoming a flood. Counseling was fruitless when the counselors themselves were unable to function. Hope had been a rare commodity ever since the cleansing primary agents had failed two years earlier, replaced by the insidious spread of despair.

  Despair had unraveled his ties to a country long dead, to a system of living eclipsed by the reality of what his leaders had done. The words of their great Declaration were losing their meaning every day, just sounds left in his head, and damage to his own mind was a small thing next to that. There was work here that only he could do, and the orders were wrong.

  So, mutiny.

  He advanced toward the first of the cubes. The door was clipped with a magnetic catch that opened with a satisfying click. In a slim vestibule beyond, Master Sergeant Yugyong Park was scrolling a ball-pen down a list mounted to a clipboard. She looked up, and through the dark glass of her helmet showed her surprise, then raised a hasty salute, snapping upright.

  "Sir! I believed you were in the Dome, sir."

  "At ease," he said, as old as the habit of geeing on a horse. "Control came through with new orders. I'm going to begin the interrogation."

  Park frowned. "Now, sir? Ought you not de-helmet?"

  He gave her a warm country smile. Even now, she could still upend his decision. The disparity in rank would mean nothing if she resisted, and she might. His soldiers still loved him, he knew that, and would protect him even to their own detriment. "Old minds last longer," he said, tapping his helmet. "You know that from the briefing. It's just another resource."

  Her frown faded though a trace remained. She was a good soldier. "Sir. It's been twelve hours. Well into the kill-zone."

  "I don't feel it. Trust me, soldier."

  Park looked at him a moment longer, wavering. Perhaps she knew. It wasn't hard to grasp. The failure of the raid, the failure of the missile, these facts were undeniable. They were all facing their end, and what difference did a few more hours in the helmet make? "Very well, sir."

  He gave a short, perfunctory nod, as if this were normal. "De-helmet," he said. "Take your Dome-time. I'll begin here."

  She saluted again, rattled off a sharp, "Yes, sir," then hurried out into the sun.

  Marshall faced the partition wall; another magnetic catch, another plastic door, and the possibility of salvation beyond. He picked up the man's file from Park's desk. He'd memorized every piece of intelligence a year earlier, back when today had been a strategy of last-resort sketched out on a whiteboard. Now it would serve as a useful prop.

  He entered the inner cell.

  The man was sitting at a table, cuffed at the wrists to a metal loop embedded in the tabletop. He had short salt and pepper hair that in his last MARS3000 photograph had been a rich black. He had a slim face with angry blue eyes and a taut, wiry build. On his chin were the wisps of a thin beard. The rich scent of his old sweat carried even through the helmet's particulate matter filter.

  The traitor, still in his yellowed lab coat.

  "Lucas Fallow," Marshall said. "It's time we talked."

  * * *

  "I have nothing to say to you," Lucas answered.

  The square cell was hot, and the chair uncomfortable. He'd been sitting there for hours, ever since the stunning violence of the raid. Rendition, it was called, he remembered. He'd been rendered to a black site, and now they would do what they wanted with him, and most likely he'd die.

  Well, that was one path. Eve
ryone else in his life had died, from Farsan to Salle Coram. One more wouldn't mean much.

  "Nothing to say," repeated the man, his voice a rich mid-Western timbre. He was older, his gaunt face darkened by his helmet's visor. "Not even a question. You wouldn't like to know what has become of your colleagues?" The man consulted a clipboard. "Sulman. Macy. Jonathon. Josiah. Wanda. I don't know their last names yet. The only person we have records for is you."

  While he spoke he advanced slowly, then put the clipboard down on the table. He pulled the chair out and sat, placing his gloved hands flat on the table's surface, fingers splayed symmetrically. He took a moment to appraise the angles, as if checking everything was in order.

  "I assume they're dead," Lucas said.

  The man regarded him. "You shouldn't make assumptions. They're not dead, Lucas. They're here, within several feet of you. Sat on chairs at tables much like this one, in square tents like this. Waiting for me."

  Lucas looked into his cold, gray eyes. This was a man who had lived in a bunker for twelve years. Who didn't want to live in one anymore. "And you've come for answers."

  "No. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've come to help you. I want to answer your questions; I'm sure you must have many. So, in your own time."

  It was a gambit. Lucas had lived long enough in the Maine dystopia to know a handling technique when he saw one. This was the first stage of rapport building, establishing a relationship. But a rapport relationship could work both ways, even in an asymmetrical power dynamic like this. He'd always played Salle Coram on both sides, extracting more information of value than her brutal security ever drew out of him.

  "Then tell me your name."

  "I am General Gerald Marshall," the man said, "of the Emergency Seal, restored Congress of the United States-in-waiting. I've been wanting to speak to you for a long time."

  "Why?"

  "Because you're a genius. Because your research into the hydrogen line has catapulted our understanding a decade ahead. It's thanks to your input that we've been able to iterate these new helmets." Marshall tapped the darkened faceplate glass. "I'm sure you remember the ones in Bordeaux. Crude devices, capable of scrambling a brain irreparably in less than half a day. No glass apertures, only a video camera and a screen. Not maneuverable. We owe this to you."