Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  Amo raises the belt higher, to the apex of his reach, then brings it down.

  CRACK

  It whips off Arnst's broad back, drawing a bead of blood through his clothes where the buckle strikes his shoulder blade. The big man wakes with a howl, and Amo greets him with another blow.

  CLUNK

  The buckle bounces off Arnst's skull and he drops back to the pavement. Amo places one foot on his head and looks down.

  "You take this," he says.

  Arnst looks up in terror, and I stare too. I don't remember any of this.

  "Say it. Say you'll take it."

  Arnst doesn't know what's happening, much like me. He's flat on the road, in pain, and there's terror in his eyes. He sees the others just watching. He blinks away blood that runs down from his gouged skull. He's on the verge of fighting back, then the cloud of black encircling Amo touches him, leaks into his face through his eyes, nose and ears, and he stops.

  His eyes flicker to black.

  The Drake-demon kneels at his side and grins up at me, pointing like he's posing for a selfie. "Do you see this?"

  I look between Drake and Arnst, with both of them trapped in the strange tides rippling from Amo; a palpable force in the air like the black light Drake vomited into Feargal, but I can't discern it clearly.

  "I'll take it," Arnst says.

  Amo lifts the belt and brings it down again.

  It's hard to watch. Five blows he strikes, ten. By the end Arnst is bloody and panting. Amo is bloody and panting. Hatya wails. Then Amo looks at Keeshom and holds out the belt.

  "Never!" Keeshom blurts out, his eyes flaring. "No, Amo, I won't."

  "Keeshom," Amo says, flat and cold. "You wanted to come. This was your decision."

  The strange glow of black light ripples harder in the air, rising off Amo in hot, mad waves, reaching out to Keeshom. It touches him, and the Drake-demon moves with it. Keeshom's eyes turn black, then Drake gives him a shove and he takes one step forward.

  "Stop it," Keeshom manages, but the fight has gone out of his voice now, and he takes another step further into the black. "Amo, please."

  "We do what we have to," Amo says dully. He doesn't see what's happening, not like me, though he's the one doing it. The black light comes from him. "Take the belt."

  Drake keeps on pushing, the black light keeps on pulling, and so he steps up to Arnst's body. Keeshom takes the belt and lifts it up. He shudders and tears spring down his cheeks, then he brings the lash down.

  CRACK

  A fresh band of blood rises up through Arnst's shirt.

  "Again," Amo says.

  Keeshom brings the belt down.

  I watch Keeshom give ten strokes, and realize I am witnessing a great crime. I don't think there was ever a law for this, but it's certainly against every notion of human rights I've heard. It is cruel and unusual.

  It doesn't stop there. Next comes Feargal. He takes the belt more easily, but the black cloud of compulsion is upon him too. He gives ten hard, sizzling strokes.

  After Feargal comes Lydia. After Lydia comes Hatya, each prodded forward by the Drake-demon, sucked by the black. Each blow rings a sharp CRACK off Arnst's back, until Arnst lies unconscious, his shirt torn away, his back chewed-up and bloody like a freshly tilled clay soil in Chino Hills.

  Last of all Amo takes the belt back. Though it is dripping with blood, he makes a long, slow show of feeding it back through the loops at his waist.

  "This is what we need," he announces. "This is what Drake taught me."

  He fastens the buckle, then his dark fog of control on the others pulls back, and they drop to their knees. They scream. Feargal tears at his own hair. Hatya vomits and Lydia holds her. Keeshom leans in and tries to stop the bleeding, but there is so much.

  I scream a little too. I don't believe it. I don't want to, but I can't deny what I've seen here. There is something in the air, something black and violent and just beginning, and it comes from Amo, rising off him in mad, random waves. It is the same thing that forced Feargal to his knees in my madhouse, and it's clear now that it's something I need to master.

  "You've already mastered it," the Drake-demon says. "What do you think we've been doing for the past two weeks? We've been sharpening, Amo. Honing your weapon. Who brought down the apocalypse? You. Who kept New LA together in the face of hopeless odds? You. Now you just need to embrace it."

  I look at Drake's bloody eyes, and know that he's right. I can feel it within me even now, the black crackle of madness rising, ready to blast out like a bomb, focused by the self-control of my art. It's in me, and always has been.

  And I know that this is necessary.

  I drop to my knees and tilt my head back. The Drake-demon moves over and grips my head like he gripped Feargal's; tenderly, with care. I open my mouth and he leans over, bringing his lips down to close over mine, and then the flood begins.

  I see the light.

  The false history of the past two weeks strips away like Arnst's skin, and what is left behind is the truth; in New York I destroyed my past, but it was on this desert road that I defined my future.

  When it's done, I stand. The empty skin of Drake lies spent on the floor of bodies before me, like a sad carnival mask, and I know that I'll never see him again, because now I don't need to. He's become a part of what I am.

  12. TRIDENT

  I find Keeshom and Arnst in one of the staterooms on the way back up. I must have seen them earlier without realizing it, but then there's a lot I haven't realized lately. The bandage of Drake has blinded me for weeks, keeping the true extent of what I've done a secret while the wound beneath festered and spread. You can't kill yourself inside and just be fine.

  I'm not fine.

  I stand in the doorway and Keeshom looks up at me with a crumpled kind of hatred, like his body is a wrecked car and his face the shattered grille. Once this kind of look would have had me bent double in discomfort, struggling to understand.

  Now I welcome it.

  Their room smells of alcohol disinfectant and ammonia. Arnst looks like shit, lank and pale lying on his front with his scarred back open to the air. His eyes are open and he's watching me too, but who knows if that's fear or not. His back is healing over, the lash marks and welts slowly shedding their carbuncles of scabs, while the dark continent of bruising from his neck to his hips has faded to a jaundiced yellow.

  "Get ready," I say.

  Arnst rolls off his belly, pulling winces from Keeshom, and slides up into a tilted sitting position. He probably can't sit properly without substantial pain. Keeshom knows it, and feels the weight. I hammered that guilt in deep.

  "We're closing on Europe," I say. "I'm going to need you both above decks, helping Feargal with whatever shit he's doing. Arnst, I need you on your feet."

  His eyes are heavily lidded.

  "What's your plan?" he asks.

  He's not afraid of me. Good for him.

  I tell them the plan. It's loosely connected to the nonsense I was filling sheets of paper with above, though all those sketches served a double purpose, honing a skill I didn't even know I had; a way to manipulate the hydrogen line.

  Drake taught me, I suppose. Experience made it plain, and I know I'm not the first to attempt it. I've seen the video of Cerulean's transformation in Julio's pit, and I'm sure he did it too. During his final moments as his body swelled into a demon, he exercised control just long enough to save Peters and the rest. He had seconds only to master it, but still he gave us all a chance.

  I've had nearly three weeks.

  Standing in the doorway, I work these new pathways Drake and I built in my mind, carved out of my own art. It does seem fitting, that the same creative outlet that once brought on the twinges has now made me master of them. I sketch the outcome I want to see in my head, and the black light swells out of me like a fog, thickening the air.

  Keeshom is the first to respond; just like Feargal in the madhouse, his eyes go black and his skin tinges gray.
Arnst follows. I don't understand it, but then I didn't understand the blast that began this apocalypse, I don't understand Lara's vision on the stage, and both of those still happened, so who cares? It's real, and it works.

  I push harder, vomiting paralysis into them even as I tell them their roles. When Keeshom starts to tremble and his breath wheezes in and out in synchrony with Arnst, I let my grip go. The sketches in my head fall flat, breaking into doodles that evaporate easily; a very temporary cairn. The effect won't last long, barely more than a few minutes with this kind of dose, but for that time they won't be in control of themselves. They'll listen to me and follow my law.

  "On deck," I tell them. "We've work to do."

  I find the women in the 'radar' room, set up and tuned by Hatya with equipment stolen from one of LaGuardia airport's control towers. On a plain green screen a green line circles, beeping repeatedly as it finds no high-altitude drones within range, again and again.

  Hatya shrinks as I come in, as she always does. Lydia stares at me with hate. As usual, I just look at her until she looks away. It's not that I enjoy this, because I don't. It's that she really is only a tool to be wielded, and the best tools don't squeak when they're used.

  So I apply a little oil. I sketch my way deeper into the future, mapping onto her the plan. I dive like Cerulean and grapple with the threads of that slippery feeling, honing it into a weapon.

  Into a shield.

  Into a war.

  I keep on until both their eyes go woozy and black. It feels like tensing a muscle, and the level of control I have over it is sharpening with each exposure.

  "You're needed on deck," I say in a flat monotone. "We're nearing Europe."

  They follow me out.

  On the deck I stand under the hot evening sun and look at Feargal. He nods. His drone armada is ready. Around us the eight speedboats are prepared, having been towed across the ocean for three thousand miles. Under Hatya's careful hand the radar array is beeping to mark the French coastline, but it's not the only radar I have now. Like Peters or Crow or even Anna, I can feel each person nearby as hot red blips on my skin.

  I never used to have that, though I'd heard them talk of it often. Now I do.

  I feel the six red dots of us, and a faint sense of warmth from far back west, while ahead there is nothing at all.

  Standing at the prow I imagine the shark-eyed man out there blocking my path, a black slash of ink on the beach, waiting for the long siege of Europe. He's already tried to kill me and all my people several times, and he'll try again today, so I will too. There is no limit to the atrocities I will commit.

  "Prepare the boats," I order.

  Feargal begins. We rig a pulley from the yacht to the speedboats and transfer the equipment, then rig heavy-duty cabling to connect them together in three chains. Each chain has three speedboats in it, except for the master chain which includes the yacht. Each boat has a pair of mannequin figures settled in front of the wheel, fitted with a heating array so that from above, in infrared, they'll look passably like people.

  It doesn't take long. When it's done my team stand before me as the sun comes down, casting purple shadows across the yacht's deck like bruised fruit. This is the time for an inspirational speech, but I don't give speeches now. Instead I flex the black light, twingeing them all, reminding them where they've come from and what they've become.

  Then I get into my speedboat, the second in the central chain, and Feargal follows. Keeshom and Arnst get in the rear boat in the left chain, while the girls go to the yacht's wheelhouse, leading the chain on the right. We all fire up our engines, running the front ones with a remote control system Feargal and Lydia designed together.

  The gentle lap of the sea is torn by the three engines chewing up the water. It's getting dark now, which is as good a time as any. I give the signal, and Feargal and I start due east. Keeshom and Arnst angle northeast, the girls head southeast, and our devil's trident assault of the Bordeaux coast begins.

  * * *

  Three miles out, traveling over choppy and dark waters, we get our first pings on the radar. There are vehicles up ahead, and Predator-class drones high above, flying fast.

  "Ready for impact," I call over the radio.

  At the same time Feargal launches his first rotor drone. It is caught by the wind at once and batted hard toward the coast, where in seconds its light is extinguished in the ocean.

  "Rolled," he says calmly. "I can adjust for that. I'll take it higher."

  The second he sends shooting hard up, so that even when the wind snatches it and sends it tumbling east, it has time to catch the angle and ride it. Feargal works the controls with calm concentration, while I sit and wait, watching the radar blip noisily for the two enemy drones far above.

  The dark line of the coast is in sight now, a cut black line where the burgeoning stars begin. Their drones likely have bellies full of missiles, possibly six each. Enough to take out all our boats, both decoys and real, but it should be near impossible for them to distinguish which is which. I have to believe that with the dark, and our camouflage and this fast forward charge, we will make it through.

  The first blast comes two miles out from shore.

  FRUMSHH

  In the dark I don't see it, but I'd guess it strikes the ocean a few hundred yards in back of us, sending a wave to rock the rear boat in our chain.

  FRUMSSH comes another, then another, as the drone's first scattered volley from far above strikes, and then-

  BANG

  Something is hit. A fireball erupts in the dark from what looks to be a speedboat off to the left, one of Feargal and Arnst's chain, though there's no way visually to detect which boat it is. We declared radio silence to better protect our locations, so I can't check if they're dead, atomized on the water, or even now unhooking from the broken ship and driving on.

  I propel us forward, as more loud splashes kick up with expended missiles, one digging out a cavity in the water right ahead of us that sends spray across our faces and drops us briefly into its trough. The engine splutters as it loses its grip, but catches hold again just in time for-

  BOOOM

  The boat behind us blows in a firestorm of orange and yellow light that sears across my retinas. Feargal is busy hunched over his tablet, organizing his drone assault in return along with Keeshom and Hatya on their respective boats, so it falls to me to run back and pull the emergency halter to disengage the chain.

  The line slips just before the sinking boat tugs us down after it. In the conflagration I see the mannequins at the wheel, burning hot, then we're pulling away and-

  FRUMSHH

  Another missile hits right next to us, almost tipping the boat, then BANG, another strikes the boat ahead of us, and I'm running again to the front where I disconnect us. The waves toss us but I manage to drop in beside Feargal, take the wheel and pedal the accelerator hard forward. The boat responds at once, chopping violently over the waves and past the burning, broken hull of the lead decoy.

  A mile out, and hopefully they're out of missiles.

  "Nothing yet," Feargal reports, focused intently on his tablet display. The sound of his drone's rotors is long gone now, lost in the melee and hovering somewhere over the beach. I lean to look at his tablet display, where the infrared camera mounted on the drone's belly gives a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the surrounding coast.

  "That's us," says Feargal, pointing at a cluster of tiny red punctuation marks at the left of the screen, amidst a minefield of hot red blasts. It's hard to make out anything on the beach in the cold blue dark, though there is the ghost of a road there, retaining more of the sun's heat than the undergrowth or the sand. It leads inward, to a circular road that bypasses Bordeaux to the north.

  I'm expecting them to be well dug-in here. With the drones overhead, it makes sense that they've prepared this as their first line of defense. Our course for the last two weeks has been clearly aimed at this for just that reason; to force them to gather i
n one spot, where we can see them coming. Perhaps they didn't expect our group to fragment into three chains though, offering three attack vectors with few clear targets. I try to imagine the man with the shark eyes now, making rapid calculations about how best to head us off.

  How many men has he got? How many suits do they have? Are there more drones waiting to launch?

  "Drop the flare," I say, and Feargal pushes a button on the control tablet. Like a Yangtze book delivery, the drone drops the flare, which triggers on impact and shoots up, bursting red and smoky across the starry sky three seconds later.

  It's a tiny echo of the bloody white eye over New LA.

  His drone turns its lights to full and races along the beach, switching from infrared to regular video. I watch on the screen with my heart in my mouth as our hull beats forward over the waves. Feargal scrolls the drone up and over the dunes to the road, where something gray and tall extends out of a squat concrete block, and-

  RATATATATATATAT

  Bullets spray from the gun turret, audible even this far away, and Feargal lofts the drone upward. My heart runs a double beat, because this even more than the drones confirms they're nearby, in waiting. We scan the tablet screen as the beach slaps closer; the sand and road and nearby buildings look bloody in the red glow, but there is no sign of Shark-eye's people. They must have a signal on us now, so another missile or artillery blast is surely incoming, but the radar only bleeps for the circling drones and now the gun turret.

  "Take it out," I hiss at Feargal, and he navigates the drone through the RATATATATATAT air, easily coasting above the furious hail of bullets. Four metal hoods shield the machine gun barrels like silver petals, spitting out fiery pollen, and the drone comes to roost atop them like a cuckoo in a foreign nest. We both study its visual on the world below, hunting for any signs of movement before this camera is lost, but still there is nothing.

  Feargal taps the button for detonate, and over a mile away the explosives taped to the drone's underbelly blow. The sound of the blast carries cleanly across the water, and we watch as the puff of flame ignites like a tiny lighthouse, then is gone. The drone's feed cuts out and the RATATATATATAT halts, just as the red flare falls to earth and we are blind again.