Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  They were going to die. He would make it happen.

  Then he ran, scrabbling on all fours as the black fog drew in again, shutting him down. He barely reached the Humvee, barely climbed in with his load of bodies, and barely took the wheel. But he did. And he drove. And every mile he covered cleared the fog from his mind a little more, though it did nothing for the wracking pain.

  Gradually, some of the bodies in the back began to wake.

  * * *

  Lucas worked in a fever.

  Sulman joined him first, then Macy, then the others. Some of them were a help and the others a hindrance, but he gave them all work to do, to keep them essential in the eyes of the Seal. They didn't talk about Amo or Anna or anyone else that they'd lost, because there was nothing to say.

  They'd seen the videos. They knew the hideous fate that awaited them, too. They worked hard.

  Before the week had even run out, Lucas had formulated a fresh approach to the shielding helmets. There were so many assumptions the bunker science teams had made and held, many of which he'd shared, that the recent revelations on the line had shredded. Now he knew that the T4 and the line were linked in ways not yet suspected, and the secret to decoding both lay in a multidisciplinary effort to translate one to the other; mapping genetics directly onto theoretical waveform physics.

  It made him think of Jake, but Jake was gone, burnt to death in Bordeaux, so he pushed the thought away and worked harder.

  The chaos on the line was his Rosetta stone, and Drake's signature was the key. The odd combinations he'd created in New LA revealed the possibility of a new genetic language encoded in the T4's tiny head. He worked on feverish and wild theories, and the bunker scientists struggled to follow along behind him, watching his every moment. It felt like being under the microscope himself, studied as closely as he studied the T4, but in a way it was comfortable. The tight confines of their lab and living quarters felt like it always had been with Farsan tucked away in the Maine basements, pushing out the limits of human understanding with every experiment, potentially changing the world.

  So he worked.

  In an intuitive whirl he sprayed out orders to cameras that fed them to teams across the world. His experimental vision progressed in tandem across a dozen labs, with revelations about the path to ending Lyell's coming hard on the heels of fine-tunings for the helmets, along with a rudimentary map of potential gene codes that could be transmitted to control the ocean over the hydrogen line, plus a global breakdown and timeline of the earliest spread of the apocalypse.

  It took shape rapidly before him, and all of it was a clue to the truth; where the infection began, why it began, and how it could be stopped. In the throes of it he began to transcend even the need to sleep. It had been like this at times before; heady periods of mad productivity when everything just seemed to click. In snatched moments of brilliance he glimpsed seeing the whole vision in the details, as the world fell into order before him.

  Mongolia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia.

  Maine, Bordeaux, Gap, Brezno, Istanbul.

  Lars, Salle, Amo, Marshall.

  Fresh readings off the line poured in from a network more complete than any he'd hashed together from retro-engineered helmets and the shields of Maine and Bordeaux. The data was overwhelming, and Sulman at his computer fed it all in and worked the algorithms under the barked out instructions from Lucas, every tentative connection between the line and the T4's code building a rung in a ladder leading him upward toward something better, to some meaning, to finally knowing why all those people had to die.

  He saw the whole world in the line, and the line in the smallest things. Eating meal packs of mashed potato, peas and roast beef in gravy, when faceless attendants forced him to, he etched the lines of power that circled round the world in his mash like the madman in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Wavy lines, thin lines, rippling like weather systems across the globe.

  He had them build him a large globe so he could watch the pressure systems revolving in real time, seeking the pattern in the data that had to mean something, seeking a unified theory that would combine the real world's soup of magnetic resonation, background radiation, solar waves and space-time fabric with the hydrogen line; knitting them together like a four-dimensional needle, bringing sense to the senseless.

  He watched the T4 shiver and reproduce atop the head of a pin, and saw ten thousand worlds evolve and expand and die. The truth was there and he raced desperately to find it, growing hungrier by the day, the hour, the minute, as if somehow knowing would let him reach out and touch the face of God, let him have Jake back and bring peace to Anna, let the suffering end and bring heaven down to Earth.

  Along the way he saw the most recent of their lies.

  He saw how they'd tried to hide it from him.

  Satellites shifted, he knew that. The world turned and reality turned with it, but they didn't do a good enough job of hiding their secrets, and they never really stood a chance. He started doing his work on the helmets on autopilot, while digging deeper into the only thing that mattered now, seeking out the truth in the echoes, because there was an enormous discrepancy in the global flows.

  Yes, there were hydrogen line 'bands' that striped the world like strips of longitude, limiting the activity possible in any one section. Days ago that had explained to him why there was only one bunker per every two time zones, because any more than that would override the delicate balance of the line too much, like putting water under so much pressure that it atomized to steam. At some point these people must have understood the theory and constructed it into their plans for the bunkers, but they'd never told him.

  He'd found it himself.

  Twelve bunkers that circled the world in even, segregated bands.

  It explained why the infection began in the East, why the largest gathering of demons had originated there by far, because just like the system of longitude had a zero point in Greenwich, England, so did the line have a zero point in the northeast of China. There was a magnetic north pole and a south pole, with ley lines of magnetic activity striping the planet, and so the hydrogen line had poles too, and at one of them lay a little town in China called Da Hingang Ling.

  At the other lay a town he knew well, and that explained a lot: New York.

  He laughed when he picked that out, ostensibly working on the sixth generation of the helmets with the potential to replace the heavy apparatus with a kind of moderating skullcap. He laughed and probably they all thought him crazy, but of course he was crazy now, working for the enemy just to keep the skin on his back, because without skin what would he be?

  He laughed.

  He spun the world.

  And rippling through his models like the trails of a dying bug in a skin of butter, he saw the truth in their deception. It skittered across the Atlantic unevenly, hidden by false wave fronts that had never added up. There was a trail there, and in the echoes it left around it he could track it in real time.

  He could reproduce its signature, running the deep Euclidian calculations in the back of his head, comparing it to the radial graphs he'd ordered up himself, and coming to the final realization.

  Amo was alive.

  Amo was alive and trekking across the ocean to the East. He was coming to find him, to save him and the others, which meant New LA was surely alive, and maybe Anna too, and maybe even Jake. They all could be, and everything Marshall showed him was a lie, and there was hope yet.

  It took him only three hours more to figure out a way to blow the lab up. He made his preparations without switching speed and with no undue alarm; working and hiding his intentions just like he always had under Salle, playing three-dimensional chess at a level none of them could understand, because none of them saw the things he saw.

  It was a data bomb, built into their algorithms at the root. With the next update it would corrupt all the helmets and infect their understanding of the line in such a way that even their own central shi
eld, modulating constantly against the regular shifts in the hydrogen line 'weather', would turn against them.

  Destroy them.

  He laughed and worked. He gave orders and grinned manically. He delved deeper toward the truth, while sowing the data at his back with the same lies that they'd fed him.

  It was easy. It was destructive. It was complete.

  13. THE DEAD

  I wake on the road, slumped in the passenger seat of a tiny electric car, humming along through desolate city streets rife with tall grass in a low, gravelly silence. My knees jam into the glove box, and there's a deep twinge behind my eyes, settled in like an old friend.

  I blink and watch a city in France pass by. This is Bordeaux, I suppose; glimpsed so many times through satellite link-ups with Anna. The tall buildings look much the same. The old ones are largely 18th century, with neoclassical pillars and triangular pediments stuffed with Greek gods, which we don't have much of back home. Not that culture and heritage matter much now. The sun is low and yellow, morning still, slipping between gaps in the buildings like a sharp kaleidoscope.

  I look away, focusing on the dashboard. There's a sat-nav map with the radar screen duct-taped next to it, blinking green. No more missile strikes, I hope. By my feet there's a drone box crammed in. I shuffle backward in the seat, trying to find a more comfortable position and stretch the kink out of my neck, but there's no room to move into.

  "It's all I could find," says Feargal, at the wheel. "Honda Accord. Voted best car, 2005."

  I snort. He looks sideways at me as if I'm sick, and I remember that this is not who I am to him anymore. I'm not the Amo who laughs easily, who can take a joke, who may even be fun to be around.

  "We're lucky I found this," he says, both angry and afraid. That he wants to take me to bits is obvious. That he's worried he'll fail is just as plain. "The cache we left behind only had two trucks."

  He points to the rearview mirror, and I turn. Behind us, shimmering in a heat haze rising from the asphalt, I see them. Maybe Jeeps; Arnst at the wheel of one, Lydia at the other.

  "Arnst and Keeshom hit another autocannon; they took it out. Lydia and Hatya came in clean, but for two guys in helmets, but they were already down when they landed. We got the brunt of it."

  I grunt, and we drive on. I don't squirm in the seat anymore. No one cares about my headache, just like no one ever did before, except my parents and Cerulean. I sit up straight.

  It looks like downtown. There's a warm gloaming to the air, burning off a low-hanging mist of dew that shrouds the old city like a phantasmal second skin. Of course, there are ghosts here everywhere.

  "How many did we kill?" I ask Feargal.

  He looks at me again with that same expression; half fear, half anger. Maybe he thinks it's incredibly callous that I don't know or remember. Maybe it just seems like deaths are so far beneath my sphere of attention that I didn't notice.

  "The four in the helicopter. Two for the ladies. That's it. The rest got away."

  Six. There's no relief in knowing this number, just as there's no disappointment. If we didn't kill them yet, then we will later.

  "Taking them out like that, it's what you did to me, isn't it?" Feargal asks. Now he doesn't meet my eyes. He bites his lip. He glances nervously in the rearview mirror, watching the curls of mist behind us swirl to fill our slipstream, before Arnst rams through. I can just feel the emptiness of the shark-eyed man fleeing along my skin, many miles to the east.

  "What?" I ask, not willing to give anything away. He can say it, if he thinks he knows.

  "That feeling," he says. Ripples pass over his cheeks as his jaw works underneath the skin. "Whatever you did to that helicopter, to the soldiers on the beach; I've felt it before."

  I look out at the road. What would Drake say now, I wonder?

  "That feeling," he keeps on, scratching at an itch he doesn't understand but can't let alone. "I barely remember, but I know you did it to me."

  "What did I do to you, Feargal?"

  His jaw grits hard. I'm not surprised to see tears shining in his eyes. Yes, I can say to this. This is what it takes, where we're all going.

  "I whipped Arnst," he says. "We all did. But I would never have done that, not for that reason. And other things. On the yacht, you humiliated me."

  I frown, because I only remember that faintly. I could say it was Drake, in the days when I wasn't in control, but that won't help him any. I pan for memories of what he's talking about, mixed in with all the sketching and visions of things that weren’t there. Perhaps Drake called him up to my room and made him get on his knees? Maybe he made him lap whiskey from a saucer placed on the floor?

  That sounds quite funny. Lots of things do, now. That I blasted a helicopter out of the sky with my mind. That I can feel the shark-eyed man like a burr clinging to the tail edges of my thoughts. That I know I'm going to kill him.

  It's all training, Drake would say. Victory's a bitch; hard to savor.

  At that I do laugh. You have to let it out sometimes. You can't hold it in forever. Feargal shrinks away, the anger redoubling. It looks like I'm laughing at the memory of his humiliation, but then I suppose I am.

  We drive.

  I forage for the radio, tucked down by Feargal's feet. I call the others for a report, keeping it short and sweet. They're all clear.

  Within a day the first bunker will be within our grasp.

  We pass a large yellow museum with broad wings, like Versailles, and cross the Garonne River on a broad stone bridge, the Accord humming sweetly.

  Cruelty is banal, I think. I whistle a tune to myself. Drake's done me a favor in this. The old Amo would never forget the fleeting look on that man's face in the water as he tried to swim away, then got chopped up by his own helicopter blades. Now I play it back and it just seems funny, him getting so finely diced by his own machine. Anger and fear are both a big show, but when it comes down to it and the numbness sets in, cruelty is banal, like eating and drinking. It makes vampires of us all, sucking down the suffering of someone else like a source of sustenance, because if you don't swallow then it will drown you.

  Drake did it. I've learned it. Feargal will too.

  We roll through a tight business district of glass and steel, and out the other side.

  It makes me think about Don.

  I imagine the world from his viewpoint; what he must have felt when he saw me in the emptiness of Las Vegas, a weird hipster rocking up in a JCB with a battletank school bus in back. I laugh out loud and drum on the glove box, then wince with the old pain in my head.

  He must have thought I was a prize idiot when I called myself 'Ammo', boasting about all the rockets I had. What could he have been thinking when we got on the bus and it became clear all I had was comics?

  I have another good laugh.

  "What the hell is this?" Don said, holding up my comic.

  Zombies of America

  Probably he should've cut my head right off then. I was a loony Left Coast Liberal, a sugar-headed Social Justice Warrior, pleading for the zombies.

  Pleading for the zombies?

  "Don't you know they have feelings?" I chided him. "Have you really been having illicit sexual relations with the dead?"

  It's a good laugh.

  It was the ocean that killed him, and that gets me thinking about what Drake said, and how I've been broadcasting on the line since the start. Sending out the things I wanted to happen, and making them happen. Maybe they turned on him for me.

  The Accord hums onward. I look at my squashed legs and think this is probably the tiniest vehicle I've been in since the apocalypse. That seems such a potent thought that I repeat it out loud.

  "This is a tiny car. The tiniest."

  Feargal's head shifts as if he thinks he heard something, but he's too far gone now, under the thumb of my madness.

  I smile at the memories. Ah, I must have been insufferable. Smug, glib, self-satisfied hipster, rolling in and claiming a superior moral order
because I'd done a bit of graffiti. I can clearly see how Julio would have thought I was a joke.

  In my head I sketch Julio punching old Amo in the face. I sketch an alternate history where Don rules New LA, making sure to keep a stable of zombies on hand for taking care of business. Real women chained up too, and why not? Drake did it, and they were faithful. Lydia hates me more than any of them. It would've been fun. It's better to throw off the shackles.

  My madness pumps out across the land. Feargal drools beside me, getting the full wattage. It's a good remedy for me, actually, keeping the twinge at bay. Who would've thought I could take refuge in my art now, when it used to be the thing I hid from most?

  "Feargal," I say. "Buddy, wipe your chin."

  He does. I laugh. It's like having a tamagochi electronic pet.

  Time fades, and the city tapers away around us as we advance into wild country, tangled thick with grape vines. The haze of dew rising off asphalt is replaced by the low steam of rotten, fermenting fruit. I open the window and whistle my way into it, grasses rushing off the little Accord's front bumper like paddling pool waves, getting drunk on the air.

  I spy a windmill off in the thickets. I spy a wild dog sitting beneath a bowing power line, pink tongue lolling. I spy birds swooping into the dense weave of vines either side like seagulls bobbing for fish.

  I sketch it all.

  The first zombie in the road almost flips the car.

  Feargal shouts and fights with the wheel as we hit it hard in the river of grass. The car hops and we rattle left, skid, rattle right and finally pull to a stop; the others drawing up just behind.

  Arnst's voice comes through on the radio but I click him off.

  "What the hell was that?" Feargal asks, pulled out from under my control.

  I get out and walk back, Feargal following. Our trail is pretty clear, marked in crushed grass that seeps a clean sappy scent in the alcohol-fogged air. We go past Keeshom and Arnst, past Lydia and Hatya, and I signal for them to stay inside. Soon I'm standing over the blockage that tripped us, burst open now at the belly and spewing a few shriveled purple organs like a stillbirth on a bed of hay.