It started here.
"I know, honey," she answered Ravi.
For three months they'd had a kind of holiday, waiting for the trans-Atlantic crossing, but now the question was here before her again. The zombie horde was almost to Europe, and this intruder in their midst meant they still weren't safe, and Anna wasn't going to be first to blink.
"I know."
* * *
If anything he looked weaker.
The feeding had taken it out of him. Nobody liked having a hose pushed down their throat.
Anna lifted herself onto her workbench, after Feargal dragged it closer. She'd wanted to stand, but that wasn't possible. Ravi had wanted to be there too, but she couldn't let him. She didn't want him to see her like this. She didn't want any witness.
They were alone. The man looked up at her. She looked down at him.
"You know Amo's name," she said to him. "Perhaps you know mine. I'm Anna. I'm guessing you've read the comics from our cairns, so you know something about us."
He gazed back. He was calm now, resolved perhaps. Perhaps he expected torture and was putting on a brave face. She owed as much to him.
"If so, you know who Julio is." She watched for a reaction, but he gave none. "He started off like you, in a way. Unwilling to join, unwilling to work together for the good of our community. You'll know how that ended."
He frowned.
"This is your last chance." She laid a hand gently on his throat. His eyes widened. "And I hope you don't believe I'm bluffing. You'll tell me who you are and why you're here, or I'll push. They won't know. I'll say you struggled, and by then it will be too late. You're going to talk to me."
He stared back. With her free hand, she placed the pen and clipboard on his chest. "Talk."
He glared at her. He was so angry, and that fired her up. So scream, so rage, but in the end buckle your head down. He stared, then reached for the pen and paper. Without breaking eye contact he wrote, three simple letters that filled up the paper.
AMO
Anna felt sick. But she'd warned him. Now she couldn't take the risk.
She pushed. His throat beneath the bandaging flexed inward. He struggled against the cable ties holding him down, but it was no use.
"Shhh," she soothed.
"Anna!"
She spun, letting go at once. Ravi was there, standing there with the tablet computer in his hand, staring at her. She hadn't heard him come in. Shit. He blanched white, and so did she.
"What are you doing?"
She pulled away from the man. He gurgled once but otherwise his raspy breathing continued.
"Nothing," Anna said, "what is it?"
He held the tablet out, trembling now.
"It's Amo."
INTERLUDE A
I go to see Jenny Gil.
Her house is nice, on the outskirts of Thousand Oaks close to Camarillo. There's a pool, a scrubby hill in back dotted with strangleweed and struggling redwood pines, a carport and a two-door garage. She lived with her parents, it seems, a middle class life, toward upper for LA. From the look of all the film posters on the walls her folks were in the movie business. I find a few awards downstairs; a silver plaque, a trophy cup on the den mantelpiece over a fake wood fire.
I wonder what her parents thought of her becoming- I check the papers again- a medical tech engineer. Were they upset she was going underground for ten years with Lars Mecklarin, or were they proud?
There are the regulation two pictures in her thick crimson psych folder, one a headshot and one full body. She was an attractive woman. Like all of Mecklarin's 'colonists' she was young on admittance, younger than I was at the time and slender like a young sapling, with very straight dark brown hair and wide, knowing eyes.
Now she's at the bottom of the Atlantic. Her hair is tangled with seaweed and krill. Her eyes are a blind, staring white. She's become a kind of slave, driven by a signal on the hydrogen line to sacrifice herself against the cold of the demons.
Caused by me.
I sigh and put the folder down on the dresser in her bedroom. The walls are a fawn-brown in here, like Lara's skin, with some posters of volleyball teams. Jenny Gil played defensive for her college team, I know that from Mecklarin's copious notes.
I open one of her dresser drawers and find mementoes, nestled together in a cardboard box decorated with glinting sticker hearts: some bracelets, intricately-folded letters that smell of perfume, a tiny little book of black and white photos bought in Europe on some old family holiday. There's also a little, frayed beanbag frog; it's probably mentioned in the file too.
I sit in her dresser chair. Through the window there's a view of the street; a calm black snake winding through this bland residential zone, like a million others just like it across America. Sandy brown dust coats the graying asphalt road top. There are overgrown palm trees lining the sidewalk with thick rushes of cast-off brown fronds about their feet, like someone's pulled all their pants down. There's a rusted lawnmower across the way, sitting in the middle of a patch of dead brown grass like a piece of modern art.
Cars wilt up and down the street on melted rubber wheels like faithful aged dogs; at a limp kind of attention, ever ready to take their lost owners to work, to the store, chase a tennis ball. No one's coming back, though. A sepia layer of dust on the window glass makes everything seem even more hazy and unreal.
I touch it with a finger. I could write anything here; something witty or glib, something reverential or mournful, but nothing comes to mind. Maine and Witzgenstein both hammered some of that out of me, so I spend a lot of time in quiet reflection these days, watching what I do and say. Everything has an impact, and I'm tired of watching the ripple effect of the actions I take, causing pain. These days I can hardly bear to take a step for fear of treading on a bug.
"Jenny," I muse, as I always do at these places. Jenny Gil, medical tech engineer, the twenty-third of twenty-three of Mecklarin's colonists who lived in LA before they entered the Maine bunker. I've been to the other twenty-two already, and Jenny Gil is the last. I want to stretch this last one out, because after this it becomes a little crazy.
There are seventeen addresses in San Francisco. Five in San Diego. Many more scattered across the smaller coastal towns like San Jose, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and that's just in California. I could spend the rest of my life visiting the homes of my three thousand victims, but it'll never change how dead they are.
I only have to close my eyes and I'm back in Salle Coram's bunker with Anna at my side, watching as person after person turns gray. Perhaps these visits are my new addiction. Once upon a time I used to drink, back when I thought I truly was the last man alive. I drank to get through the terrible things I'd done, then I did penance with all the admissions I left across the country as cairns.
I sigh. My absolution is in every comic book I printed, but I can't make this home a spot on the cairn trail. I can't tell the truth to New LA, not after Witzgenstein, because this is not the kind of weight that gets lighter with sharing. This is the weight that tears communities apart; a wound around which the skin can never knit, and New LA can't bear another wrench like that. So I'll bear it alone, along with the knowledge that I'm sending Anna east to do it all over again, eleven more times.
I can't bear to think about that at all.
In the distance a car's coming. Good.
I hear its engine for a time before I see it; a rough barking that many of our vehicles make now that they're burning the reclaimed, rehydrated fuel we scavenge from the old world. This one has a guttural cough, a signature I recognize. Soon there's a trail of black exhaust smoke rising up from nearby, like a Wild West steam train approaching the station.
It pulls up the dusty street; a Jeep Wrangler in cherry red with the windshield pushed down across the hood. I smile. At the wheel there's Crow, long black hair gleaming in the sun, wearing a solemn pair of shades that make him seem incredibly wise, like Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse from legend. He spots me in the
window easily, through all the wind-blown grime of years, and raises a hand.
I smile. I like Crow.
He's strong, with that seamy face and that calm way about him. I like that he wears flowers in his hair sometimes, that when he touches the grass he says a prayer, that he looks at the sky with a kind of wonder in his eyes. He was buried with Julio and the demon for almost a year, and now he looks at everything with a glorious appreciation. I want to be like that.
I find the clasp and open the window.
"Crow," I call as he gets out and comes over. He stands for a moment looking up at me, like a statue. He'll have followed the copies in my study, where Salle Coram's files of the three thousand are spread everywhere; pinned to walls, organized in geographical batches, lying in stacks. He's spent more time in there with me than anyone else.
"It's enough for one day," he calls up to me. He sees this for what it is, an addiction, and that's an honesty I appreciate. "You're needed."
I nod. Of course.
* * *
He gives the overview on the road back, and it wakes me up like a punch in the nose. Halfway there I get on the walkie to Lara.
"He asked to speak only to me?" I ask.
"He wrote it down," she answers. "He can't speak since Anna broke his throat." There's definitely a note of pride in her voice, which worries me a little. Once she found violence so distasteful, but now I think she quite likes it. After the demon crushed her ribs she acquired a new edge. It's one reason she won't go in my study and look at Salle's files; she doesn't want to dilute her hatred for them with sympathy.
"But only me," I puzzle, rubbing at my temple as the Jeep catches air for a second, going eighty miles per hour over a slight rise on the 405, down through Santa Monica. "How would he even know who I am?"
"Everyone knows who you are, Amo from the cairns, though Sulman says he could've been listening in to our walkie frequencies too, for who knows how long. We don't use encryption, it's all just up there in the air."
I curse beneath my breath. The cairns, of course, but radio too? I thought with Julio gone we wouldn't need to worry about that again. "So he knew about Anna's lab. He could've known their guard rotation. He could even know about our plans and what we're aiming to do in Europe."
"He could," Lara confirms, "but why would he want to interfere with that? That's what we can't figure out here; his motivation. He's out in the air, a survivor like the rest of us, so it's in his interests for all the demons to be crushed. What's his game?"
"It's got to be something else," I say, as Crow revs us into a sharp right turn onto 187, bypassing the section of 405 that collapsed in the 2026 quake. "He could've just walked up if he wanted to join us."
I remember words I said a lifetime ago to Anna, that we might not be alone above the ground. There could be others, groups less welcoming than us, with very different ideas of what survival was. There's already one out there.
Witzgenstein. Could she have sent him?
I change my tone. "Lara, tell me we've pulled everyone back from the farms and the university. We need a tight cordon, gunners on the roof, guards on every entrance to the Theater, and the radar scanning the streets."
"Already done," she says, and that brings some relief. "You're the last one out there, and your walkie was off."
There's no rebuke in this, no nagging, just a fact plainly stated. She is of course right, and that's all the rebuke I need.
"And Anna's team?"
"They're clustered in the airport concourse near the quarantine zone, where they're keeping him. They've rigged the sat phone to a keyboard so you can talk. He's not said anything else since he requested you."
I nod.
We fly past the Marina Del Rey and down to the Vista Del Mar by the beach. It's a foggy, humid day and the ocean is a grayish blue, with skirls of sand swirling up in little zephyrs on the beach. I get myself ready. I grit my teeth. That's enough being Amo the apologist. It's time to turn the spikes outward again.
* * *
Everyone's gathered in the Chinese Theater lobby. There isn't the air of terror there was three months ago, when Peters' van rolled in and changed the world, but the anxiety is blooming.
People have roles though; they've been through worse before and they're ready. Even the children have a look of steel in their eyes, while everyone of age is carrying a weapon at their hip. Ross and his crew are on the roof even now, manning the machine gun pillboxes. Sulman will be monitoring our makeshift 'radar', really a system of motion detectors installed on every intersection for three blocks around. We're covered.
Council members move amongst the people, touching arms, calming fears and relaying orders. The missing faces amongst us are hardly noticed now; lost to the demons, lost to Witzgenstein's dream. Here's Darius, a Council member who inherited Masako's position, talking in a tight little circle. Here's Kasey who took Witzgenstein's seat, talking with her new boyfriend. Here's my kids, Talia and Vie, sitting on a bench. I know they both miss Lin still, ripped away when Alan left. I wave at them and Vie waves back, while Talia nods seriously. She reminds me of Anna; always so serious. They're becoming their own people already.
I pass by without making any kind of proclamation. I don't go in for big speeches now.
The radio room is waiting, as ever, in what used to be the smaller screen 11. Sulman is sitting at his desk, with the blocky, wire-spouting satellite unit he and Jake built beside him, rigged by a thick red cable to the dish on the roof, targeted at whichever satellites still remain. There's a computer screen and a keyboard with mouse, just like the old days.
Lara pings up from her seat and grabs me in a hug.
"I'll be right here," she says.
"He's just one man," I reply.
She nods and I take the seat. People bustle around me. Buttons are pushed, dials spun, the dish on the roof targeted manually with a joystick, but I focus on the screen. Just like Skype. The pale blue of the logo is strangely calming.
It boots up as the connection is established. Sulman does something to dial us in, then looks at me. "She's standing by."
I nod and at the other end the phone rings. Seconds later it's answered and the screen wakes in a wash of white light, broken by Anna's dark face.
She looks older and tougher than ever. I hear she had 34 stitches in her feet but walked on them still, just to make a point.
"Amo," she says, all that we need by way of greeting, "he's here. He's got the keyboard."
"Let me see him."
She steps aside. The screen whites out again as the contrast adjusts, then resolves to a pale figure strapped to a bed in a seated position. The bruising on his throat is a vivid black creeping out from under the bandaging. His hands rest on a keyboard on his lap, but his eyes are focused intensely on me, staring as if we know each other, as if he's willing me to see something that I can't possibly see.
And I see it.
I take a shallow gasp. He stares and I stare back, even as his fingers start to click over the keys and his first words to me shoot up into the sky and back down again from three thousand miles away.
Hello Amo.
I know him. Those eyes, that jaw, those high cheekbones.
"What is it?" Lara asks quietly. "What do you see?"
My throat goes dry. I watch transfixed as more words appear on the screen.
It's good to see you again.
"What does that mean?" Lara asks. My mind races ahead, working out the connections. Did I? Could I have? Then his third message comes, and perhaps it shakes something loose in me.
I know what you're planning to do. I have a better idea.
He is as flat as a face on a printed page. Anna steps in to the picture and holds her hand open by his neck. The message is clear.
"What does he mean?" Lara repeats. "What does he know?"
Anna has the back of her hand almost touching his throat now, and I know she's seconds away from killing him. She's done it before to keep our secret safe, to
keep New LA safe. She did it to Witzgenstein three months back and I didn't stop her then, so why should I stop her now? Her eyes flash in the bright lights and I try to make one more impossible decision; does this man need to die?
Salle Coram flashes into my mind; locked in her bunker, crushing her people down to ensure the ends justified the means. Am I like her, will I end up like that? My mind flashes back to my study and all those files, all those names and pictures so carefully collected by Lars Mecklarin and jealously guarded by Salle Coram; a power that only she could wield.
Now they're all dead, and doesn't that make me worse than Salle already? They were a danger to my people, and did that end justify the means?
I look into Anna's eyes, into her certainty, and just as her hand touches his bandaged throat, the revelation hits.
"His name is Lucas," I say. Abruptly my voice sounds very far away, like it's coming through on the end of a satellite call from Mongolia. Faces from the files rush up; every name and every face memorized as my own private penance, so there's no denying what I'm seeing on the screen.
"He's a geneticist. He was in Salle Coram's bunker."
PAST
INTERLUDE 1
Seven hours before the zombie apocalypse destroyed the MARS3000 Habitat, Lucas Fallow lay on a stained mattress in the corner of his dark and dirty makeshift laboratory, shuddering in agony. He'd taken too much this time, or too little. The dosage was wrong, or it was right. There was no way to know if he would live or die.
Shadows flickered with the guttering halogen lamp, hung from an extendable arm on the wall where once a 52" plasma screen had hung. Six years ago this had been a bar, and the walls were still a gaudy array of Plexiglas primary colors: red, yellow, orange, though in the dying light they looked dark and sickly.
The TV stood propped against the wall now, spider-webbed with cracks that dated back to the revolution. Dust lay thickly over chairs and tables that were scattered and burnt, where rampaging mobs had left them six years ago. Heaps of broken glass rested in mournful little mounds in corners, where Lucas had brushed them aside at the start of this sad, hopeless endeavor.
The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) Page 4
