The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  Everything was falling apart.

  The red plastic ceiling phased in and out of darkness as the power to the lamp faded then returned, like a tide ebbing, and the pain gripping Lucas' body phased with it, shifting from his guts to his spine and back again. His fingers palsied like frozen claws, his feet twisted and his face convulsed. Spit dribbled frothily down his cheeks, piss and shit leaked out of the haphazard diaper he'd fashioned from a much-used velvet curtain, and tears poured from his eyes.

  It was his sixteenth time.

  "We can't do this anymore," Farsan said.

  Farsan knelt beside him, as ever, despite the stink and the fever, with his warm Persian eyes, his dark brown eyebrows, his mellow tan skin. He was the last faithful remainder of their motley group of genius biologists, physicists and geneticists who'd survived the revolution together, who together had waged a lasting, secret rebellion against the new and brutal rule of Salle Coram.

  Now his voice barely broke through the fog of pain that surrounded Lucas, but the resignation in it was clear. He said this every time, as Lucas sweated and shook through the dose, but this time something was different.

  "Nggg," Lucas managed to reply, gritting his teeth and forcing his throat to work.

  Farsan took his rigid hand and squeezed, though Lucas barely felt it. "You know it's true. Lucas, you're getting weaker. Salle Coram knows it too, or she will soon enough. They've started random blood sampling, and what happens when they sample you or me or one of the others? What if you die here, what am I supposed to do with your body? You're toxic beyond hiding. You'll be a beacon pointing back to us all."

  Lucas gritted his teeth, pushing briefly through the burning spasms in his gut and groin. "It's … OK."

  Farsan gave a dry, un-amused laugh. "It's not OK. You know, I used to think doing this was courageous, an important rebellion we were brave to keep driving ahead, but you know what I think now? 'Lord, give me the courage to accept the things I cannot change.' Alcoholics used to say something like it, and what are we but addicts now, hungry for a past that isn't coming back? Salle Coram is one of the things you can't change, Lucas. The infection, the end of the world, that's another."

  A fresh wave of pain rose up in Lucas' head, grinding him beneath its tremendous pressure. All he wanted to do was take a hammer and crack a hole in his head, but he couldn't move, and that wouldn't work anyway; he'd already tried.

  "She's got a plan, at least," Farsan went on, repeating words he'd said since the beginning, when Salle Coram had barred their research outright and they'd continued anyway, going deeper 'underground', into this long-walled off section of the Habitat ruined by the madness of the revolution. "She's talking about D-day coming soon, about the world above being cleared. We won't need to do this then. You don't need to keep risking yourself."

  Lucas pushed up through the gray pain and fixed his gaze briefly on Farsan's deep, warm eyes. Farsan was the strong one, always had been, though he didn't know it. He could accept Salle Coram's lash and live with it, while Lucas never could, and that was a more useful kind of strength. Flowers looked weak but they bent with the wind. A stubborn oak tree cracked and fell.

  "No," he managed.

  Farsan shook his head and squeezed Lucas' hand. "It's me too," he pressed on. "Not only you. If they find you they'll find me and the others, you must see that. This has to be the last time. I don't want to die, Lucas. I want to walk up above again, under the sky. I want to make a grave for my parents, I want to stand there and wish them well in the next life. There's so many things I want to do, and if I die here with you I'll never be able to do them."

  Lucas could barely think. The words surfed atop the ocean of gray pressure in his head, with little of their actual meaning seeping in.

  "I know what you're thinking," Farsan went on, "but it wouldn't be surrender. This whole thing, it's a phantom show anyway." He spread his free hand to encompass the dingy, dark, makeshift laboratory. "It's a dream we'll never even be able to test, because when will Salle Coram give us access to the world above, to samples of the infected? We've put on a good show, we've mixed some powerful serums, but what does that matter if we never get to test them against the activated T4?"

  Lucas wanted to answer, but Farsan always waited for moments like these, when it was all he could do to keep his own heart from exploding, when he could scarcely think. He wanted to list out all the progress they'd made: the iterations on their base treatment that signaled well on a dozen scales of bacteriophagic reduction; the regenerated sample cells in a simulated zombie outbreak scenario; the recent breakthrough with bacilli they'd made that had led to this latest serum, even now causing havoc in his system.

  But he couldn't say those things, and besides Farsan already knew them. Damn, faithful Farsan.

  "Tel-m'rase," he managed, more a burp than a word.

  Farsan smiled, humoring him. "Telomerase? Lucas, that's where we started. We've come full circle, hammering on the telomerase drum, and what has it gotten us? You're on the edge right now, and I'm tired. I want us to go up above under Salle Coram's instructions, after the demons sweep the world, and be free. We can get houses next to each other, white picket fences, a weeping willow that straddles our yards, and work on this puzzle all you like as an intellectual conceit, but we have to be alive to do that. Right now it's just dumb bullheaded stubbornness driving us on. It's you, and I can't let you do it anymore."

  Lucas stared up at him, with a sick longing no doubt obscured by the blood trickling down his nose and the brackish purple vomit seeping from between his lips. It wasn't twin houses he wanted, but one house. One yard. One family, but he could never say that to that Farsan. It was too much, even after all this; it was too hard.

  Farsan wiped his lips tenderly. How many times had they been through this? He cleaned the blood from Lucas' nose, then checked the drip bag feeding the clear serum into his arm. It resembled chemotherapy more than any other treatment; pumping poison into the body to toughen it up.

  But you couldn't toughen up against the T4. In all the models they'd constructed, based on dried up records from Command that Salle Coram had allowed out in the early days of testing when she'd allowed hope of a cure to exist, the T4 flitted between cells with ease, as if the membranes dividing them weren't even there. It went wherever it went and it killed or converted everything it touched, and nothing they did could stop it. It used the telomeres in every cell, those tiny wick-like strands that limited genetic lifespan, like an open door it came marching on through, taking over the existing control architecture and turning it gray.

  White eyes. Shuffling steps. Pale skin. They stole the world and Lucas had never accepted it, not for Salle, not for her plan, but could he for Farsan?

  For Farsan. Farsan gazed down at him now, hopeful and hungry for something, though it wasn't the same hunger Lucas felt. To him Lucas was a friend, a great friend perhaps, but that was all and it would have to be enough.

  Ten years of dreams. Six years of resistance and never losing hope throughout. He never expected the end would come like this, at the hands of the one he loved most in the world, but how else could it come in this cruel new existence? He looked up at Farsan and blinked tears away, then gave a nod. Everything he said was true. Salle was becoming more vigilant. He was risking them all every time he ran a test.

  He was risking Farsan.

  "OK," he managed.

  The great weight of relief in Farsan's eyes was a joy. In such a cruel, hopeless life, it seemed strange that surrendering hope could cause so much happiness, but it did. Hope was a cross that wore you down, and perhaps surrender was better. The relief washed over him, as Farsan blinked back tears and squeezed his hand. Farsan wouldn't have to lie any more, and that was worth so much. He wouldn't have to pretend, wouldn't have to live in fear every day, wouldn't have to watch every thing he said and suspect every person he met.

  For Lucas those things wouldn't change.

  Homosexuality was outlawed in Salle Cora
m's bunker, not for bigotry but for the simple belief that gays were a genetic dead-end in a world that would need repopulation. Wasting resources on someone unwilling to procreate was a criminal offence.

  It didn't matter that he wanted children. It didn't matter that he hoped to donate his genetic material to a birth mother and then do all he could to raise the child. In Salle Coram's black and white world he offered a sub-optimal pairing, and the wages of sub-optimal were death.

  In time they'd find him out. He'd kept the secret all his life, but this surrender would wear him down until there was nothing left but the truth, and he'd be done for. Shame would come, followed by death, but for Farsan's sake he could accept it.

  "Thank you," Farsan said, as tears trickled down his cheeks. "Can I?" He gestured to the drip.

  Lucas wanted to wail. The pain was terrible, the sense of losing his own body tore him apart, but worse still was giving up and accepting he couldn't save himself, couldn't save Farsan or any of their number, and all he could do was accept Salle Coram's tyrannical way.

  But he nodded, and Farsan's nimble fingers went to the drip and closed the little yellow tappet. With a sterile pad in position he extracted the needle and bandaged the pinprick hole it left behind, on a forearm traced with old needle grooves.

  Almost at once the pain and pressure began to diminish, but that only made Lucas feel weaker, prying loose his tight grip on consciousness. Gray waves lulled him down into darkness, and as he sank the last thing he saw was the relief on his friend Farsan's face, so very long in coming.

  * * *

  A new kind of pain woke him.

  It throbbed in his chest with an almost pleasant kind of lightness, like the gentle electrical shock you got when pressing your tongue to a worn-down battery.

  He blinked and looked about, at the bar/laboratory in the flickering dark. It was hot and stuffy and he could hardly breathe. No fans operated down here, no air conditioner, nothing beyond the lamp and the equipment he'd managed to scavenge, improvise and steal. Now those items were like ancient standing stones in the hot dark, shadowy and vague around him: a centrifuge for spinning blood samples; a powered-up digital microscope and a precision slicer adapted from a 3D printer's innards; a super cooling freezer rigged with external tubes to a Freon supply.

  Artifacts from the past, all of which he'd promised Farsan he wouldn't use again.

  "Farsan," he called weakly, his voice a croak, but Farsan wasn't there. Perhaps he'd gone to check on the power linkage; it seemed the halogen lamp was failing worse than usual.

  He looked down to where fresh towels had been laid under his body. The soiled diaper curtains had been removed and now he was back in his uniform, as dictated by Salle Coram. He smiled sadly at the thought of Farsan stripping him and dressing him again, while unconscious. That was a feeble kind of pleasure.

  Still, Farsan was happy.

  A new drip tube emerged from his forearm, leading back to a bag of yellowish liquid. They'd made these themselves, a recovery pack of essential sugars, salts and other trace vitamins and minerals, enough to kick-start his system after another failed serum-inject.

  He didn't feel too bad, at that. Normally a post-serum session involved a migraine that lasted for days, whole-body weakness, incontinence, vomiting, but not this time. There was just the almost pleasant, insistent throb in his chest.

  What time was it, how long had he been out?

  The drip needle came out easily and he pasted another bandage in place.

  "Farsan," he called hoarsely again, but still nothing. Getting onto his knees wasn't a problem, surprisingly, and because he could, he pushed a little further and got to his feet. His legs wobbled stubbornly, almost tipping him forward, but he caught the drip stand and rebalanced.

  He took a few steps, off the mattress and over toward one of the workbenches by the door. They kept a radio here, hacked to receive Command's private communications; the only way they'd stayed under the radar for so long. Thank Mecklarin he'd seen fit to stock his Habitat with free-thinkers who also had the expert cryptography and engineering skills to break open Salle Coram's airwaves.

  He cycled the dial on, but there was no transmission going out, which in itself was not unusual. Sometimes days went by and nothing was said on any of the Command channels, probably when Salle was engaged with some other puzzle. There hadn't been a single transmission in almost a week, as far as he remembered.

  He picked his wallet, key card and watch off a clipboard scrawled with equations, theories and diagrams of molecular connections, and checked the time. 4:20pm, meaning he'd been out for seven hours. He had a shift coming up in protein-formation, in Farm Hall 3. It was odd Farsan hadn't come back to wake him, but he was up now, and able. It was surprising how good he actually felt, perhaps even better than he had before the serum.

  He shuffled through the lab door, out into a pitch-black corridor beyond, lit only by the faint glow of the halogen from behind. He could collect it, but it was better to leave it there; Farsan would be coming back anyway, and he'd made this short walk through the maze of corridors a thousand times. The dark wasn't a problem.

  He let the door close with a reassuring clunk and started down the hall into blackness, tracing his fingertips along the wall to his right. Here was a vending machine's broken glass front, long since emptied of candy and soda. Here was an open archway where the door had been torn off. Here was a crazy kind of modern art mosaic, burnt and stippled down by a Molotov cocktail.

  The revolution had been at its worst down here. Salle's soldiers had come in force, to dig out a drunken cabal of farmers who had started forming their own feudal kingdom. Things had gone crazy, but not Lucas.

  He'd taken the chance to grab the supplies he'd known he'd need, and stash them in a place he could access later. He hadn't been the one to start the rumor of a zombie apocalypse above ground, which ultimately brought the Habitat down, but he'd believed it. It fit the observable phenomenon better than Lars Mecklarin's dream of Mars, so he'd prepared, gathering the equipment and materials he'd need.

  He smiled to mask the bitter taste of his current situation. All his preparations had come to this; not even true failure, just surrender. At least the serum hadn't left him feeling sick.

  He circled sightlessly round a heap of broken pallets from the abandoned farm hall. Now he used the soil in the ravaged hall to culture bacteria for his serums. A few grow lights used sparingly were enough to harvest a wide range of bacteria genotypes. He passed the spot where the walls were still stained with old blood. Salle had had three men shot there, followed by three more men caned to death, as a warning to all that might follow.

  Heady days.

  Up a flight of metal stairs and through a labyrinth of winding access corridors, he finally reached the access port, where they'd drilled around the barricades Salle's soldiers had put in place. All this area had lost power and much of its carbon dioxide scrubbing ability in the chaos of the revolution, with the wiring, machinery and plumbing stripped or so badly damaged that they'd deemed the whole floor irretrievable. After a few forays to scavenge all that they usefully could, Salle's black-clad soldiers sealed it up.

  It hadn't been too hard to drill a way in, though. Lucas was supposed to be a genius, after all. Figuring out the best spot to break through, memorizing the soldiers' patrols, planning his slow second revolution, was child's play. Now in the dark he worked on a small hatch at eye level, opening it on an oiled hinge to rest on a cushioned pad, to reveal a peephole to the corridor beyond. No one came down here really, since it was a dead end, but it was safer to check every time.

  Corridor Blue two stretched ahead beyond the wall, itself poorly lit and still scarred with the bullet pocks and scorch marks of the revolution. A hundred yards on it reached a sharp corner, but for now no one was there. Lucas reached down and worked the latch for the crawlway door, which swung open. He dropped to his knees, reached in and extracted the heavy metal block that filled the cavity, then peeked
once more through another peephole drilled in a screw hole. Still empty.

  Swiftly and with practiced motions he opened the outer hatch, crawled through the wall like a pet going through a pet door, then pulled the metal block back through after him; slotting it into position so it resembled the interior of the fuse box through which they'd made their passage. He reached beyond it and pulled the inner door closed, then closed the outer fuse box door and stood up.

  His heart thumped hard, as it always did when he did this, and his head spun.

  Nobody was coming still.

  "Farsan?" he called.

  There was no sign of him. There wouldn't be, though, not lingering out here.

  He walked along corridor Blue two, rounded the corner and passed a series of storage halls to a lesser-used part of deck one-minus where three corridors intersected.

  Along corridor Blue three ahead a woman was walking towards him. He recognized her vaguely, she was Stacey or Tracy or something like that, possibly a psychologist but maybe an engineer. He might have had drinks with her once or twice, but that wasn't unusual. For ten years, three thousand people was not much. There was also an odd low rasping sound now, like the carbon scrubbers were cycling up.

  He waved at Stacey/Tracy, preparing his excuse for being down here at this time. He had a lot of excuses, which his job in requisitions gave easy cover for with all the storage rooms down here. She waved back. They would probably stop and chat, catch up a little. She'd ask him if he'd managed to pair-bond yet, and he'd lie. He'd ask her, and she'd say she had three or four pair-bond matches lined up, for the day Salle Coram gave them the green light to go ahead and have children.

  But that didn't happen.

  Instead she abruptly stopped walking, with her hand still raised awkwardly in the air, and the faint smile faded from her face, leaving behind an empty mask, as if she'd just seen a ghost.