Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  "What is that doing there?" Feargal asks. "Just lying there?"

  I kneel down and look into the thing's glazed gray eyes. There's nothing here though, no buzz, no feeling of cold, nothing on my radar. I touch the neck, turning it over carefully and looking for signs of a break, but find none. This zombie just laid down and died, and somehow I'm not surprised.

  "Drive more slowly," I say, standing. I walk back and Feargal follows.

  We drive on, and in a few minutes we hit another. This one's a demon sprawled across the country road, skin still a furious red.

  "What's going on?" Feargal asks me, standing over it, expecting an answer.

  "The center cannot hold," I say. "Run for the hills, Feargal."

  He blinks, too foggy now to really register that. We drive. It takes another hour to reach the Bordeaux bunker, going so slowly. For the last thirty minutes I drive, easing up on the laughing and madness so Feargal can launch a drone, which he sends ahead to scout for gun turrets and other automated defenses I can't feel on the line, but there is nothing, just a bunker mouth and about a thousand dead zombies and demons lying sprawled around it. Perhaps they used up all their defenses on the coast.

  We pull up and look around. Hundreds of scrawny corpses surround the hatch in concentric rings like straggles of gray and red hair swirled down the bath drain. No birds swoop here. It's a massacre with no wounds, brought on by changes in the line I'm beginning to understand.

  It's not just me causing this. These bodies have been here for weeks, perhaps caused by the moment on the stage when Lara linked Drake and I together, and her vision poured out.

  Strange things.

  Feargal wants to stay and look around, take the chance to resupply and absorb this, but there is no time. Anna left a cache nearby, and we drive for that.

  Tucked under the rickety aluminum roof of a faded red barn, a mile or so north on a dirt track, there are two Humvees, along with more weapons, several barrels of gas, food, medical supplies. It only takes ten minutes to transfer our few drones over to the trunk, then another thirty to bring the vehicle online; airing up tires wilted by a season's passing, refueling and loading in the barrels, tossing rifles in on top of the drones.

  If I was the shark-eyed man, I would have blown this depot, another cairn in the spine Anna built leading out to Istanbul. Probably he didn't know about it, though. This is our world, and it's gratifying to know they don't have eyes everywhere, at all times.

  I get in the passenger seat and wait for Feargal to take the wheel. There's a new look in his eyes when he climbs into the driving seat, even coming through the fog. He's seen me do this before, to Arnst.

  "Get us to the next bunker," I tell him. "Get us to Gap."

  14. HUMMINGBIRD

  Time passed Anna in a mélange of broken instances, endlessly sedated, with the soap-skinned man at her side looking down. Sometimes his face was gray and striped, like a patched pair of jeans, while other times it was a raw and bloody purple, like marbled venison steak. Moments shuttered forward as a flipbook, with his nightmare face jerkily bobbing up and down, dragging her on.

  She tried to get control.

  Like a prisoner who only saw their jailer once a day, in the brief periods she drifted up from the cotton wool of the sedative's solitary confinement, she tried to recognize patterns. At times her body was shifted in a different position; there seemed to be some kind of crane hung from the ceiling which rolled her. She caught the disinfectant scent of alcohol and felt parts of her belly and back being scrubbed.

  The white ceiling shone with different brightnesses of light, which could be the days turning. The suck suck smack sound of Ravi's dead breath changed in pitch and volume, which had to mean he was moving further away, moving closer. She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling through blurred Coke-bottle glasses, everything leering and strange.

  "Who are you?" she managed once, coming up from a dream of Ravi holding tiny little white eggs in his hands, each as big as a jellybean.

  "Hummingbird eggs, Anna," Ravi had told her. "Aren't they lovely? Don't eat them."

  "Just a survivor," the man said. His red mouth blabbed open like a spilling wound. "How do you feel, Anna?"

  She was still thinking of the jellybean eggs as he spoke, though every urge in her insisted that she find out some meaningful data; coax something from him that would help her escape.

  "Raspberry," she said, slipping the word carefully past her sluggish tongue. But that was wrong, and she had to think a long time to get it right. "Vanilla."

  "Sounds good, sweetie," said Ravi.

  Suck, suck, smack, said Ravi.

  The darkness brought her back down.

  Periods of separation sent her aloft, where she was no longer Anna on a sailboat on the ocean, but an Anna thing in the air, floating from person to person like a happy T4 bacteria on the line, deciding who would live and who would die.

  "You," she would say from above, dusting them with a magic wand. "You too."

  The sky was white and wrong. Zebra-striped monsters lumbered around her, and she flitted amongst their heaving flanks like a child.

  "You," she said, saving and damning with the same strokes. "You."

  Far below the world burned around her people. New LA burned. Ravi burned. Amo burned in the very middle, a terrible look on his face.

  "You," Anna said, descending above him, but he only shook his head.

  "It's too late for me, Anna. Look to your own."

  He lit the touch paper in his hands, and the dynamite wrapped around his chest like a terrorist's suicide vest caught, and boomed.

  Anna woke weeping. Still she couldn't move. Still Ravi sucked and gasped nearby, and the room was dark, and she was so alone that all she could do was moan.

  "Ravi."

  She moaned his name again and again, because he was dead. He was dead and he was breathing next to her and she couldn't help, Amo couldn't help, and she was alone in this place and afraid.

  Fear came to her as an unfamiliar thing. She'd never been afraid like this before, not when her father turned to a zombie or when he walked into the water with the thousands of others, not when Julio threatened her or the demons came or ever.

  This was a deeper kind of fear, cutting into her bones and making her feel truly alone. Before there'd always been her father; even after he was gone his touch lingered on, blinking through the night on the screen of his phone. In those days she'd been the one rejecting the world, for him. At some point though she'd changed, and she'd started to want other things.

  She'd wanted Ravi. She'd wanted peace. She'd wanted a world where they could raise children together.

  She sobbed into the dark. Ravi sucked and smacked, answering her. Those things would never happen now, because she was going to die here, alone, suffering for nothing. The thought terrified her.

  At some point in that misery the voice rose up from the darkness.

  "I won't live to see this through."

  Anna jerked. She sobbed harder. She tried to flinch back into her bed. In the dark she couldn't see anything. Fear seized her on a primal level.

  "It's all right," the voice came again, warbling and wet now. Perhaps his throat was bleeding, and he'd drown on his own blood. "It's what I always expected. To be so close, though. I understand your pain, Anna."

  She couldn't speak for the fear. Any minute he was going to hurt her. Dull echoes of the things he'd already done filtered back to her, smothered by time and sedation. Her stomach throbbed hard and she wanted to wriggle free and curl around it, but the frame held her fast.

  "I lost everything I loved when the Seal came down. You're stronger than me, of course."

  He sounded drunk; his cadences leering, lost in mid-sentence gargles.

  "I've done things I'm not proud of. Just like you, just like your people. You haven't seen your leader yet, Amo." He paused, and Anna fitfully scanned the blackness, broken by tiny red and green lights spotted around the room like a diffu
se galaxy of power lights on fridges and specimen boxes and computers. "He's turned. Become something different, something destructive. It can happen to all men. And women. It's interesting how it displays so clearly on the hydrogen line. We never designed for that."

  Anna tried to stop herself from shuddering. The words he was saying didn't make much sense, but there was a meaning there. He was trying to communicate for the first time in, what, months? She had no idea how long she'd been trapped there, listening to Ravi suck at the air.

  "I-" she began, but couldn't get any more out.

  "I know," came his wet tones. "I know. I've hurt you, but what does an apology mean? I've been alone for so long. Pursuing the same goal for so long. I think you know something about this. Would you be surprised to know I've been watching you since the beginning? When you were only a child following your father. His signal on the line was particularly strong."

  A different kind of tear came to Anna's eyes. "My father?"

  "Yes. I watched you and him, traveling across the country. All of your people. I wasn't here then, of course. Before my cure, back when I still believed. Before my skin came away."

  Something like a chuckle came from the dark, sounding like a dog vomiting. "There are so many things you need to know. So many lies I've kept to myself for a decade. Maybe, do you think, that is what's consuming me from inside? I think that sometimes, when there's no one to speak with, as if it's not just a perverse addition to Lyell's. It's my punishment for hypocrisy. My stomach is stripping itself. My throat, my lungs. I've studied the genome for the internal damage; it's a highly elegant time-delayed interpretation of tuberculosis. Beautiful in its simplicity. What a death he designed for me. For all of us."

  Anna's tears stopped. Her head was clearing. For the first time in so long she felt the tide of the drugs ebb.

  "He?"

  His voice laughed back at her. "He. Yes. And who is he? That is the question I have asked for so long. Who did this to me? Why did I deserve to be punished so completely?"

  Anna blinked, the fear falling behind her now, replaced by a desperate curiosity. Something was changing in the air. "The infection was made."

  The voice laughed again, and coughed, and spat thick fluid. "Yes. But you always knew that, didn't you? I've been listening. You knew it from the moment you first saw the T4, just as I knew. It is a truly great work, such intricacy, perhaps mankind's crowning achievement, standing atop a pyramid of giants."

  He fell silent. Anna came back to herself more every moment passing, growing aware of the bed beneath her, a slight draft over her left cheek, and the dull cold pressure on her stomach from the restraining belt. She began working the angles in her head. Perhaps this conversation could lead to her escape.

  "You were one of those giants," she said, aiming to play into his vanity. "You designed it too."

  He laughed again. He spat again. "Perhaps the smallest. I was no challenge for the greater intellects in our compact. Pierce. Romirez. Al-Abra. They towered above me, and humored me like I was a child fumbling in the darkness. Like now."

  Anna ran those names through her head, but they matched nothing she'd heard before. "Who are they?"

  "Nobody. Dead, now, all of them. So it wasn't them, I know that. Whoever did this to me, to all of us, is still watching. I can feel them out there, enjoying seeing the pieces of me fall away. They take pleasure in my feeble efforts to bring a cure. They enjoy the depths I sink to, the depravities I commit, just to fail time after time."

  Her eyes flicked to the left, where the ceaseless soundtrack of Ravi sucking at the air continued.

  "What have you done?"

  "I? What terrible things." He paused. "Many. Morality is a prison, Anna. It binds men together, and it blinds them. For so long I didn't see what had to be done. Perhaps he hid it here, so I would stumble upon it at the end. What have I done? You would weep even more, to hear the number of survivors just like yourself that I have taken apart in this lab. Some of the greatest tortures ever committed, I wager, peeling down to the code. Extracting. Removing. Seeking answers in the pattern of the mind as I change the fundamental programming of thought. Digging, always, looking for the key, and failing. Failing time after time, all that suffering for nothing. And then you came to me."

  Anna shuddered. Memories of another time returned, before this whiteness took over her world. "I didn't come to you. I came for Bordeaux, because there was a change on the line. The zombies were all dead. Was that you?"

  More chuckles. "No. But it drew me also, like a fly to carrion. It's what I am, what he made me; the living dead." He sighed. "Anna, no. The depths, I can't see how to express them to you. Your role, what you might do. But above it all is the key. I will not survive the maturation, that is the only reality that counts. My fuse is close to running out, so you will have to carry that burden yourself."

  "What burden?"

  "A burden of nine months."

  He let the words hang. He said no more. He'd said it earlier, and it came back to Anna now with a flattening finality.

  "Ravi's baby?"

  Just the words made her want to be sick.

  "Yes. There are terrible secrets blooming within you now. A code that may be the key for us all, though too late for me. With that task completed, now I can afford to be selfless, though I remain the coward I always have been. I get to die like this, both my crime and my punishment in one. More elegance."

  Anna wormed her feet. She could feel them. She could feel her back, her thighs, the cold weight on her belly which she'd thought to be the tight band, but now had to be something else.

  "So let me go," she said. It was the gambit he was offering. It was the next step; a world away from the place she'd been just a short time earlier, but everything had changed since then.

  He hacked in the darkness and spat. "I can. But there are promises I must extract. Truths you need to know."

  "What truths?"

  "The truth that there is a dead creature growing inside your body. It is your and Ravi's child, but it is not alive. It is something fundamentally different. It may be another species, or another trap in the disease he designed for. It could chew its way out of you at any moment, or perhaps reach into your nervous system and take you over from within. I can't predict those futures. I just know that it is something wholly new."

  Anna shivered at the thought of something chewing its way out her stomach. She'd seen the movies, and it was best not to think about it too directly. It helped that she couldn't move, perhaps. Couldn't touch her own belly.

  "So it's in there," she said coldly.

  "It is. It's healthy, if such a thing can be said of the dead. It will grow. It may kill you in any of a hundred different ways. Or it may save you."

  "And you want me to protect it."

  A shuffling sound came from the darkness to her right. He was moving. He took a step, and like a planetary body blocking the light from distant stars, his passage was marked by the little lights around the room blinking as he passed.

  "I want your promise that you won't kill it. That you won't dig it out."

  She shuddered. "Why would I?"

  "Because I put it there. Because it's horrible. Anna, are you ready to see? I wish we had longer, but I feel the cliff edge approaching."

  "Ready to see what? It's inside me."

  "Yes. But you can still see."

  The lights flickered on sharply, hurting her eyes, but through the film of tears she glimpsed him and flinched. He was far worse than before, stripped down like a standing slab of meat, with barely a shred of skin left. He was a raw, glossy red, naked and oozing slow, pale blood. His chest was a ripe, striated peach of muscle fiber glistening beneath a thin layer of waxy fat. Only tiny patches of skin tasseled with tiny shoots of hair remained in places, like dirty ice floes lost on a red ocean, waiting to melt. His thighs were thin and wasted drumsticks, pocketed with sallow swellings of muscle that bunched and contracted as he moved, revealing glimpses of bone beneath
. His face was an empty red mask with bloody red balls in his eye sockets.

  She gasped. She pulled away. It was a miracle he was still alive.

  "I kill the nerve endings," he said, lurching to the base of her bed. "It helps for a time, but the T4 forces them to regrow. It would be all right, if not for that. But the skin always returns." His voice cracked. "I can't stop that. So it grows, and then it comes away. Have you heard the story of Prometheus?"

  Anna nodded, her eyes wide. In all her days of zombies and demons, she'd never seen anything as horrific as this. That he was alive, and moving, made her sick to her stomach.

  "He lost his liver. I lose my skin. I can only hope it is worth the pain, and all the many sacrifices I have made. An irony, perhaps." He stopped at the foot of her bed. There was a tight white sheet over her, covering her from the chest down. "But I don't know. Nobody will know, until your baby comes. Maybe then, yes? Maybe then."

  He reached to the sheet at her side. The overwhelming smell of bile, blood and vomit came with him, and Anna gagged. "Brace yourself," he said, and took hold of the sheet, leaving dry bloody smears on the white. Slowly, carefully, he walked backward, stripping the sheet away.

  First she saw the tubes. Second she saw the swelling. Third she saw the creature within.

  Then she vomited.

  Three tubes ran up to her stomach, each as large around as an apple, and there they slotted into a kind of transparent goldfish bowl wedged into her spread-eagled stomach. Her dark skin had been folded and gathered back, held now in clamps to make room for the bowl; glass or plastic, it served as a viewing window inside what had to be her own womb, revealing a tiny shred of matter inside, floating in a murky stew.

  She gagged and vomited again.

  It was gray and so thin, not yet recognizably a baby, more a chunk of mottled bark in dirty sea foam.

  "Naturally I will remove the viewing piece," he said, continuing as if this was normal. "I will seal you up and remove the gene treatment hoses. Then it will fall to you to protect this creature. To keep it in its steady state until the code growing within it is complete. Then it can be extracted, and a cure may be created."