The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  THE LIST – Zombie Ocean 5

  7 billion zombies. 1 sheriff.

  At five years old Anna survived the first zombie apocalypse, but lost her father. At fifteen she survived the second, but lost even more. She won't allow a third.

  She has a list of the 11 remaining bunkers. She has the skills to take them down. But the bunkers have a secret weapon, and won't go down without a fight.

  The world will never be the same.

  Who will survive?

  'Kill Bill' meets the zombie apocalypse, packed with gore, twists and blood-splattered revenge.

  The List is the 5th post-apocalyptic thriller novel in the Zombie Ocean series.

  ZOMBIE OCEAN SERIES

  The Last (Book 1)

  The Lost (Book 2)

  The Least (Book 3)

  Box Set (Books 1-3)

  The Loss (Book 4)

  The List (Book 5)

  Buy Michael John Grist's books via links here.

  Join the newsletter and get the free Starter Library of 2 post-apocalypse thriller books here.

  For my readers. Yes, you.

  CONTENTS

  PRESENT

  1. FOX

  2. CONCOURSE

  3. QUARANTINE

  4. QUESTIONS

  INTERLUDE A

  PAST

  INTERLUDE 1

  5. TRIAL

  INTERLUDE 2

  6. ROOT AND BRANCH

  INTERLUDE 3

  7. THREE DAYS

  INTERLUDE 4

  8. WITZGENSTEIN

  FUTURE

  9. WAITING

  10. TESTS

  11. CONDITIONS

  ODYSSEY

  12. LANDFALL

  13. HYDROGEN LINE

  14. DUST

  15. RUN

  16. BUNKER #1

  17. SIGNAL

  INTERLUDE 5

  18. THE DEAD

  INTERLUDE 6

  19. SHIELD

  INTERLUDE 7

  EAST

  20. COMMAND

  INTERLUDE 8

  21. HOME

  About the Author

  Mr. Ruins (excerpt)

  PRESENT

  1. FOX

  Anna was on the beach again, looking out over the water. So often she found herself in this sad, bleak place, more and more these days.

  The water was gray and stretched on forever, with frothy white waves studded with the bald white heads of zombies, sticking up like spikes in a trap. Once her father had been here too, sitting on his island far out to sea. She would run to him over the frozen waves, but no matter how fast she ran she never drew any closer.

  "Anna," he'd call back to her from his island, his voice reverberating like distant thunder. "Dear Anna."

  The end of the world had stolen him from her, like it had stolen so much. Ten years later she'd crossed the world to find him, only for him to die a final time in her arms in a Mongolian desert, torn apart by a red demon that didn't even know his name.

  Now he was gone, and so the beach had changed.

  There was a new figure crawling down by the water now, a deep black man who had loved her when they'd both needed love so much, who she'd abused and abandoned in return, who still wore the silver necklace of their mutual adoption round his neck.

  Cerulean.

  His face was red and featureless but for a gaping black hole where his mouth should be. His arms were massive and bulging with muscle, his legs trailed uselessly behind him, curled up like rotten old red peppers, and he was crawling down to the lapping water line. Every night he crawled down to the water, and every night the ocean gathered him in to its cold, killing embrace, and every night for a time the tide receded.

  In this sacrifice he was saving her, she knew. Every night he drowned again and again to save her, but standing there on the edge of the beach, looking out to a sky black with billions of the dead, she didn't know if he'd managed to save her from anything at all.

  She'd killed thousands of people. She'd lied, cheated and brought pain to the ones she loved. So many people had died, and so many more were going to die, because there was no stopping now. The ocean was there and she'd been drawn to it all her life, never able to escape the pull of its great weight. Now every time she came to this place the gray disc of the sun sank a little further down on the horizon, and the waves pulled a little further out, and the darkness came on a little more deeply.

  Every time, she followed the tide out. She strode across the cold and lonely sands that the tide left behind, plunging into the night and the depths, searching for some lost thing that she couldn't ever name, and couldn't ever find.

  * * *

  Anna jerked awake in the too-hot bed, in the RV in Portland International Jetport, Maine. The bed was narrow and she was slick with sweat, trembling as it chilled off her skin in the cold spring air.

  Ravi by her side mumbled something and rolled over, his face pressing against the metal wall of the booth. Though they'd extended it with a folding coffee table, the bed was still too slim for the two of them, and somehow his knees always ended up exactly in the spot her knees needed to be. There were so many new things to learn, as a couple.

  She kicked her legs gently out of the thin cover and sat for a moment on the creaking coffee table's edge, rubbing her eyes and working her fingers back through her tightly knotted braids. Ravi had had a big time learning how to knot them, weaving the knappy threads back and forth, and he took such pleasure in the long work of grooming that she didn't have the heart to tell him that she'd rather just shave it all off.

  Goddamn it.

  Three months had gone by, and the waiting was killing her. The fog in her head, probably brought on by the dream, didn't help. She got to her feet and padded unsteadily to the front, where the digital clock on the dashboard displayed the time in glowing green.

  3:25

  The middle of the night. It was still plenty dark outside, though the open expanse of runway shone with moonlight like a glistening lake. The sky was a rich dark purple, the moon was almost full, and stars filled the arc of heaven with a million little eyes.

  She slumped into the driver's seat in the dark and sighed. The dreams were getting worse, always the same, always so tantalizingly close to peering right into the coming dark, but never quite seeing through to the other side.

  Three months had passed and all she could do was wait.

  Three months since their blistering trek east across the continent, since the Yankee Stadium horde took down all seven demons sent by Salle Coram's bunker, since she and Amo had entered the Habitat together and watched the three thousand budding Mars colonists transform into soulless, white-eyed zombies. They'd pushed the button, the demon had died, and the zombie horde had started east.

  She sighed. After the debacle with Witzgenstein, three months of preparations, plans and trial runs had followed; of weapons practice, bomb runs and drone navigation; of meetings, politics and PTSD dreams. It was all good, all necessary, but she was exhausted with all the waiting.

  She sipped chilly water from a worn plastic bottle. Her breath came out as vapor in the cool air, lit faintly green by the dashboard clock, and she pulled her jacket on from the back of the chair. Everything was tired and breaking down out here. Maine above ground had been dead for a decade, lying largely undisturbed but for the pilfering Julio had done for supplies.

  There were no steaming croissants in the morning, fresh from Jonathon's New LA bakery; no warm milk straight from the udder poured over still-crisp, foil-packed Lucky Charms; no blueberry ice cream beaten and mixed that day. They had only rations of ancient canned leftovers left over from a past and ancient people.

  Images of the wa
ves danced before her eyes, and she ran a silent tally of all the ways they still depended on the old world for resources, infrastructure and equipment: preserved food, water, roads, vehicles, planes, runways, fuel and walkie-talkies. GPS, satellites, boats, buildings, electric lights. Space ice cream, first aid, the electron microscope, the remnant cables of the old Internet, DVDs, Ragnarok 1 to 3, and of course, lest she forget, the zombies.

  Something stirred in the darkness outside, likely a deer or a fox come to dig through their trash. All the zombies were long gone now, chasing demons in Europe, somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic in mid-ocean crossing. That left wildlife free to roam everywhere, wandering in and out of broken buildings like raiding Vikings. She squinted to try and pick this one out, but her eyes were blurry and she couldn't. All the trashcans had lids on anyway, for just this eventuality. The few wild chickens Cynthia had trapped for them were secure in their coop.

  She brought up her walkie and scanned the channels. One was open, as it often was at this time, playing a tinny instrumental version of 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. Peters loved that stuff.

  "Ho, Peters," she said softly into the receiver.

  "Anna, I thought you'd never show," he answered after a moment, in his lilting Swedish accent, comically like the chef off that puppet show Cerulean used to make her watch.

  "The same dream," she said.

  "I have been cataloging bullets," he responded brightly, ignoring her. "We have thirty-five different calibers."

  Anna smirked. She could have told him that, as she'd stocked up their gun store, but it was better to let him get on with things. They'd become very friendly after falling out of the sky together, and she knew the rhythms of his depression about as well as he knew hers.

  "Did they cross the three quarters point yet?"

  "Two hours ago," he replied. "Blinky overtook Sergei just north of the island Angra do Heroismo. I think maybe he's caught on a coral. It was very exciting."

  Anna nodded sleepily. The fox or whatever it was moved again outside, slinking along the side of Hangar 2. "I always knew Blinky had it in him."

  "He's a trier."

  They were all triers now, trying not to go nuts with waiting. For three months they'd waited while the one hundred floaters they'd tagged with GPS transponders made their long trans-Atlantic undersea crossing. For three months they'd tracked them and bet on their progress. Blinky and Sergei, named for the tendency of one to drop his signal at times and the other to randomly surge ahead, had been in the lead for most of that time.

  It wasn't really very exciting.

  "The PC-12's fuelled up," Peters said. "Jake's given the all clear for a full day's loop over the water. We're go for another navigation test."

  Anna grunted. Navigation tests were grueling, marathon affairs. Their new twin turbo propeller planes, Anna's Pilatus PC-12 and Peters' Italian P-180 Avanti, were both million-dollar feats of engineering in their day, with the range to go coast to coast from their Maine airfield to London, but they were heavily reliant on the old world for navigation. All of their internal systems depended on the infrastructure of GPS satellites in the sky, which had been drifting out of position for a decade.

  It made it harder. It required long haul testing, with accurate note taking on precise compass bearings, wind factors, and extremely careful use of the GPS systems they had. It was hard, slow work, but it was essential, considering the fuel tanks on their planes were barely large enough to span the ocean-crossing. The last thing she wanted was to crash-land in the ocean thanks to poor map reading. And all of that was just a prelude to the macabre bunker-killing work that would follow.

  "The same dream," Anna said again, and let it hang in the air between them. "Like there's something I need to see out there, but can't."

  Peters left it there for a time, respectfully, before giving his reply. "Abigail used to tell me her dreams," he said. "Every day. I loved to hear them very much. Sometimes she said she dreamed in Swedish, but when she woke up all she remembered was the accent. Hurdy-gurdy-gurdy."

  Anna chuckled. "You do sound like that. Maybe it was you talking in your sleep."

  "I haven't spoken Swedish in ten years, Anna. I think I've forgotten much."

  "You still have the accent."

  He chuckled too. "Yes. At night in the quiet hours, I think of my Abigail and I count bullets. You think of your father and tease me for my accent. We should be asleep. We are sad, lost souls, Anna, are we not? Not so unlike Blinky and Sergio."

  She snorted. "I'd beat you in a foot race, any day."

  "Not in a plane, sweet child."

  Anna shrugged for no one's benefit. That was true; Peters was still their best pilot. She grunted acknowledgement and let herself slump in the soft, worn leather driver's seat. This simple, hypnotic back-and-forth banter always helped relax her. She let her eyes drift out of focus so the myriad lights of stars blurred into a pale glow in the sky. Against that backdrop the outline of her Cessna was clearly silhouetted in front of Hangar 2, like a heroic figure on the silver screen.

  A wrinkle of movement drifted around its wheels. The fox. She could almost make out its vermillion hide.

  "Hurry on, little beast," she murmured to it in a singsong voice. "If Cynthia catches you, you'll be in the pot."

  "I hope so," Peters answered. "I miss meat."

  The fox climbed the stepladder up to the cockpit, then stood for a long moment peering inside.

  Did foxes do that?

  Anna rubbed her eyes, but now the fox was gone. Too tired; her eyes were playing tricks on her mind. She couldn't fly a navigation test like this, she needed to sleep, but now the fox had got her thinking about the security of those chicken coops. If it could climb a ladder maybe it could capture a hen, and that would mean no eggs in the morning.

  "I'm going to the farm," she mumbled to Peters, "hold down the fort."

  "I'm sat on it already."

  She slipped the walkie into the glove box, rustled around behind the seat for her mud-splattered rain boots, shrugged them on over her pajama leggings, and pushed the RV door open. A chill wind blew in through the gap and she wrapped her jacket tight.

  "I'm just going out for a bit," she whispered back down the RV aisle, far too quiet to actually wake Ravi, but with these things it was the thought that counted.

  Out on the runway side her foggy thoughts slowly began to clear. The grass verge was overgrown with stinging nettles, and for some reason that made her sad. It looked like neglect, like a baby left wailing into the night.

  She pinched her own wrist and picked up the pace, leaving the small cluster of three RVs behind and heading across an open stretch of asphalt for Hangar 2. The Cessna that had saved them all sat parked under the broad awning, bumped into the cold for the Pilatus and Avanti, which stood on stocks inside.

  She reached the Cessna but there was no sign of the fox around the ladder, and nothing obvious there to attract it anyway, so maybe she'd imagined the whole thing. She rubbed her eyes again and stalked across the front of the hangar. Through a glass porthole in the big door she caught a brief glimpse of Peters inside, sitting in a ball of orange generator light and studying the bullets on his desk, each stood on end in order of size like a series of Matroska dolls.

  He grinned and gave a brief wave, which she caught and sent back, then continued round the hangar to stalk down the side, shadowed from the moonlight. Here they'd dumped a whole mess of rusty garbage that had been clogging up the hangar: broken air conditioning units, faulty engine bits, warped wing panels they couldn't beat back into shape, shelving units and metal desks and three big filing cabinets lying on their sides like sleeping hippos.

  The air smelt of sour rust, New England rain and the faintest tang of chicken shit. Sometimes it amazed Anna that eggs and shit both came out of chickens, in such close proximity.

  The farm lay kitty-corner to the back edge of the hangar, on a stretch of scrubby grass they'd cleared when Cynthia caught the first bird in the ne
arby spruce forests, before she headed back to New LA with the rest of them. The empty glass face of the airport terminal sheltered much of the westerly winds, while two ground support stair cars broke the wind to north and south, effectively corralling the chickens in their coop and fenced-in run. It was half-assed and ugly, not built to last, and that pissed her off.

  But there was the fox, sneaking alongside the chicken cage. Except it wasn't a fox.

  The last drifts of fog fell away from Anna's mind in a second, replaced by a sudden spurt of adrenaline. Comparisons rushed through her head in a flurry, but Jake was slimmer, Feargal was bigger, Peters was in the hangar and she'd left Ravi behind in the RV, Macy was surely in their RV, Wanda and Ollie would be on patrol somewhere on the outskirts, as usual.

  This wasn't any of them.

  For a long few seconds she stared. Who the hell was this, dressed all in black and stalking through their camp? Had it come for the chickens?

  No, already it was past the coop. Anna's heart pounded against her ribs. Where was it going? Her hand went automatically to her waist, where she kept the walkie on one hip and a gun on the other, holstered in her heavy engineer's belt, but of course she was wearing pajamas.

  The figure turned to scan back along its tracks, and Anna melted sideways against the hangar, into the midst of the cast-off garbage down the side, her mind racing. Who the hell? She strained for any sound of it approaching, but only heard the hangar wall creaking in the wind, the soft rustle of tall grass, and bugs somewhere droning, pulled together by the wild thump of her heart. This was truly unprecedented.

  She peered out from her cover and saw the figure had already cleared the stair cars. She watched it go, trying to guess the destination, but there was nothing that way but the airport terminal itself; a wide concourse lined with fashion boutiques and perfumeries selling hats, bags and floral-scented water, and of course her lab.