The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  "Anna, I'm reading something," Jake came through on the radio.

  It startled her from a daze. That was a mistake. Falling from this high would kill her, without a doubt. She'd learned better on her long months at sea, but those lessons had since been eclipsed by other concerns.

  She rubbed her eyes awake. "Go on," she said, scanning the fields below to find some sign of them.

  "Is that you on the gun turret?"

  He sounded incredulous. She smiled. Ah, Jake; she loved him like a slightly mad older brother. She'd always regretted not being able to protect him better. He'd recovered from his concussion in the plane crash five months ago, but he wasn't exactly the same. He stammered at times, and odd tics occasionally worked their way round his face, like hesitant butterflies looking for a place to land.

  "I'm up here, yeah. What did you find?"

  "It was Lucas. He thinks he's found the demon's corridor. The signal's faint, we think because the demon's gone and the shield's off, but there's a residual charge still. We can go in and talk to the cameras."

  Anna cursed softly. They'd planned that little message thoroughly between them. "You're supposed to be looking for the Habitat."

  The walkie rustled. Changing hands.

  "We need to talk to them," Lucas said. "We agreed that with Amo. We've secured the area, so we should talk to them, and there are cameras and audio down there, we know that."

  Anna gritted her teeth. Yes, she'd agreed. It hadn't made her trust Lucas, but she couldn't deny the benefits his knowledge had brought them. It had been his idea to retrofit the Maine bunker shield mechanism into a kind of X-ray scanner. None of them understood how the hydrogen line worked, not even after reading all the data in the Command bunker, as it was some highly specific combination of deep physics with genetics, but Lucas at least grasped the outline.

  He'd theorized that there was a great range of triggers built-in to the T4, which responded to various signals transmitted on the hydrogen line, which in turn could cause it to interact with its host organism in any number of unpredictable ways. It had been his idea too to dig up the corpse of the primary demon from its resting place near Pittsburgh, and drag it back to the airport where they drilled in to uncover its secrets.

  The snow outside Pittsburgh had preserved it well. The main secret it held was a surprise. Within every cell of decaying red skin, there looked to be the remnants of a T4 bacteriophage. Anna had studied it through the electron microscope herself, between training exercises to take out gun turrets and drones.

  "It looks the same as the one in us," she'd said. "How is that possible?"

  Lucas had shrugged. She hated having to trust him, to listen to his explanations, but she couldn't argue with his obvious depth of knowledge.

  "It would take a lifetime to unpack all the coding in just one T4," he'd said. In those days he'd just recovered his voice, and it seemed he was drawing every scratchy breath in a labored way as reminder of the damage she'd done. "It contains more information than most libraries, and could dictate behavior and gene-expression in ways we've never seen before. Given the correct signal on the hydrogen line, the demons could change their behavior entirely. Getting them to switch off is just one possible pathway. I can imagine hundreds of others."

  Anna had frowned. The only pathway she was interested in was getting them to die. But still, she needed to know. "Like what?"

  "Like stand down. Like sleep. Like access the human brain inside and hand control back over. I think, from everything we've learned about Cerulean in his last moments, that he managed to somehow hot-wire that signal from within, allowing him time to fight off the main programming."

  Anna had considered. "You say the T4 code changes?"

  "Expresses," Lucas corrected. "The code in the virus remains the same, but which parts of it activate can change, and it's my theory that different messages on the hydrogen line can trigger them."

  It was a simple enough theory, as if the hydrogen line was a remote control changing channel on the demons. The real world impact could be immense.

  "So is that how you think you cured it? You activated a section that caused the T4 to erase itself completely."

  Lucas had shrugged. "I think something like that. It seems that the code to self-erase is in the T4 code somewhere, which is to say, I didn't actually kill the T4. With it so deeply ingrained in every cell, that kind of defeat is just impossible. It would lead to mass cell death, like using chemotherapy to kill a cancer but killing the human host first. Rather, what I did was more like a software uninstall. I accessed a part of it that was always there, triggered it somehow, and that part caused the T4 to let go."

  It was interesting. Fascinating, really. But fascinating wasn't enough.

  "Does it help with the cure?"

  "Not really. Not yet, at least. "

  "Is there any way to weaponize this code? To use it on the demons."

  He'd frowned. "I don't know. It's possible, if we knew what code to send, and what frequency, but that could be asking just as much as the cure."

  She'd sighed. "But you think you can make a scanner?"

  Lucas had looked to Jake. They'd been spending a lot of time together, working on various projects. She had to keep an eye on that.

  "It's the engineering side," Jake said. "With the bits of the shield I've managed to dig out, I think I can manipulate the hydrogen line enough to use it like a rudimentary radar. Or metal detector is a better analogy."

  "Go on."

  "I change the sensitivity, arrange a feedback loop, and that way I can detect another hydrogen line field. I don't understand it deeply, I couldn't make this scanner from nothing, in fact I don't understand the hydrogen particle emitter at all, but I can make a receiver that spots it, so I can make this work."

  "It works," Lucas agreed.

  "Like a metal detector?"

  "That's right."

  Sitting in the gun turret like a pirate in the crow's nest, she squeezed the walkie tight, as if she was squeezing Lucas' throat.

  "You've found the hallway."

  "Yes."

  Amo's orders were to try to talk. "Of course they'll try to attack you," he'd said. "They'll use their turret and their drones, but we can take them out. We have to give them a chance."

  She'd argued that it was better to talk with their actions first, before they used their words, but he'd an answer for that too.

  "You think they'll become more likely to surrender after we kill a few more of them? Do you think they'll be more likely to listen then? No. They'll never trust us, and they'll see no benefit in trying. You have to try to talk to the first one, Anna. If they're communicating with each other, as we suspect they are, then they'll pass it on. Then even if you have to kill the first one, or the first few, it's certain one of them down the line will want to take the risk. They'll have nothing to lose."

  It made sense. It was her job then to minimize risks.

  "Peters, how long?" she called down.

  He looked up. "Twenty hours, give or take. It's just one demon, I think."

  Twenty hours. The ocean would be here by then, which covered them, and the next wave of demons was probably two or three days away. They had time, perhaps.

  "You sure the corridor down there is empty?"

  "I've felt nothing since we got here, only the one that is a day away. Wanda agrees."

  Wanda nodded.

  Anna looked at the pole beneath her; wide enough around to transport a demon from underground to the surface. There'd been no concrete block or turret in Maine, already destroyed by Julio, but there were schematics of the corridor in Command. They laid out the original plan: the freezer the demon was kept in for ten years, the long corridor that would give the experts in Command the chance to observe it in motion before admitting it to the pole-elevator.

  She could go in. She hadn't planned it, not on the first bunker, but everything had gone according to plan so far, better than to plan. They had the time, and now she had th
e chance to talk to them directly. She knew she shouldn't, that she should just kill them all, but where did that lead?

  Shit. It was a question of judgment. What if they agreed, and switched off their demon? There wasn't any danger, with the corridor standing empty. At worst she'd learn something, and maybe be able to offer a better pitch at the next bunker along, when these people were all dead.

  Shit. She decided.

  "Keep looking for the main bunker," she barked into the radio. "I'm going in."

  "I want to-"

  "No, Lucas," she answered sharply. "I'll go in. You help Jake or I relieve you right now."

  "I can best explain the cure," he went on anyway, "I can-"

  "You accepted my terms, Lucas. Understand this. You are never going into a bunker before me, not until we're all cured and running happily through the fields, do you understand? Don't make me keep telling you this. We don't have time."

  The walkie fuzzed static back at her.

  "Jake?"

  "We're looking for the main bunker," he said, acting as go between. Did he sound sullen? "Lucas agrees."

  "Good."

  She rang off and climbed down. If she was Salle Coram she might have had Lucas executed for such disobedience. Whipped at the least. The thought warmed her a little.

  At the base she told Wanda and Feargal the plan. They went to get explosives.

  * * *

  They drilled eight holes two feet deep into the cement box, itself around eight feet high, then dropped in military-grade sticks of C4. Ollie rigged each of them to a wireless trigger, they backed into the vines and took shelter behind their Humvees, then pressed the trigger.

  The blast rang powerfully and the earth trembled. Bits of shattered cement spattered off the Humvees' gored blast shields.

  "All eight?" Anna asked as her ears rang.

  "All eight," Ollie replied. "A clean burst."

  Anna strode over to the box. It looked to have been cut in half horizontally, with the cement inside a ragged and raw pale gray. The section of the gun turret that had long been sheathed in cement was a cleaner white, undamaged by the elements, like a thick root pulled up to the light.

  "Once more," Anna said.

  They drilled, and inserted, and Ollie blew it. The blast rang out the same, but this time the cement block was obliterated down to the ground, and the gun turret began to waver. About two feet up from the ground there was an alcove framed into the turret. Anna ducked down and peered in. It was deep enough and broad enough and tall enough to contain a demon.

  "It's the elevator car," Jake said by Anna's side.

  She looked at him through the fine mist of powdered cement, then reached out and stroked his cheek. He smiled.

  "Come in with me," she said.

  His smile widened.

  With all three Humvees taking the strain on chains fixed tight to the turret's top, they uprooted it completely. It sucked out of the elevator shaft with a wrench and a twist, as the metal twisted and the cement walls cracked, then fell with a thump to the ground, plowing a long diagonal slice through the rows of vines.

  Anna was first to the wide hole. She shone a flashlight down, but there was little to see for all the floating dust. From one of the Humvees she unraveled a rope ladder, tied it off at the bumper and tossed it down.

  Another bunker. Another pit.

  Kill them all, that was what she'd said to Amo. That was what she wanted to do most, because it was safest. These people had murdered Cerulean. These people had forced her community under such pressure that it tore itself apart.

  "We should send a drone first," Feargal said. "To be sure."

  Anna looked at him. He meant well, and ordinarily she'd agree, but they were already pressed for time as it was. They had to drop this message, then find the main bunker and blow it, get inside if the response was negative, locate Command and figure out the shutdown code, all ideally before the first demon, or demons, returned.

  "There's no time," she said. "That dust will take hours to clear, and we don't have hours. There's no demon, every reading confirms it, correct Lucas?"

  "Correct," he said. "A residual charge in the shield only. Jake?"

  Jake put his hand on her shoulder. "I wouldn't let you go down if I thought it wasn't safe."

  She spared him a smile. That was sweet, so like Jake. Even after all this time he was trying to reassure and support her, like a big brother should.

  "Thank you," she said, and patted his hand. He gave his goofy grin, delicately handsome. He was a good man, and a good friend to have at your side.

  She took hold of the rope ladder and started down.

  14. DUST

  The descent led into a fine dry mist of floating cement dust. Short breaths through a scarf wrapped around her mouth kept her from coughing, while flashlights angled from above lit the route, though their effectiveness faded as she went, swallowed by the dust.

  In places large shadowy tires emerged smoothly from the walls like vertically-aligned fins. She touched one and it revolved slightly.

  "Contact motors for the turret," Jake whispered reverently from above, as if they were climbing down into a tomb. "It must be how they drove it up and down."

  "And that?" Anna asked, gesturing at a dark, narrow slit running down the wall behind her, out of which a kind of blocky gear train emerged a few feet above her head, a foot thick and warped at the end.

  "The ammunition carriage," Jake whispered. "There must be a cache behind the wall to feed the autocannons. The feed would have gone up and down with the turret. It would've snapped off when we pulled it out."

  Anna grunted and kept climbing. Everything here had been so carefully designed, and had worked so well for ten long years. It put her on guard.

  She reached the bottom, where the dust fog was so thick and dark that she could hardly see a thing, and every breath tickled at her throat, threatening a sneeze. Underfoot lay an uneven rubble of concrete and twisted machinery, fallen as they'd wrenched the gun turret/elevator out. To her left was a heavy metal blast door recessed into the circular shaft wall, probably several tons in weight. It hung open in a thick metal frame.

  "He came out through here," Anna said, as Jake arrived beside her. He unclipped his flashlight and shone it around the foggy circular space.

  "Fascinating." He leaned in to the point where the slit ended. "Here, there's a drainage trap in the floor. Where does that go, I wonder? And here, it looks like a motion sensor in the wall."

  "It's like being at the bottom of a well," Anna said, looking up. Very little light from above filtered through the dust.

  "You OK down there?" came Feargal's voice on the radio at her shoulder.

  "Fine," she replied. "We're moving in."

  She nodded to Jake, then aimed her flashlight through the doorframe and into the corridor. She'd never properly examined the Maine bunker; Amo had ordered it filled with cement too quickly for that, but she'd seen the schematics, and it seemed likely this corridor would be similarly equipped. That one had had a set of seven cameras; three infrared, two ultra-violet, two motion-detecting, plus seven high-capacity microphones spotted around the ceiling and walls.

  According to the diagrams their original purpose, before Salle Coram repurposed them to communicate with Julio, had been to monitor the demon; when it slept, when it woke, as it exited. There was a book outlining a demon's normal stride parameters, breathing and pulse wave forms, speed and pace and frequency of eye movements, down to the most minute measurements of skin pigmentation. There was a program built into the Command override which analyzed it all, and perhaps, on some hidden coded level, had the capacity to modulate the hydrogen line signal in order to bring the demon into order, if something was amiss.

  "We need that," Lucas had said, when he'd heard of it. "That manual, those modulations."

  There hadn't been any manual, of course. Anything to do with the hydrogen line had always been a closed, heavily encoded system. There was no way in or out. But
the cameras should be there, the microphones too, which Salle Coram had reversed to serve as speakers. It could be done.

  The corridor was pitch black and swam with dust, though the worst of the fog peeled away a little as she started inward. Jake shuffled along the smooth floor just behind her. She scanned the tall ceiling and walls as she went by, trying to pick out the pinprick glints that would give away the cameras, and after fifteen strides she found them in the ceiling, three tiny insect eyes gleaming back.

  "There," she said.

  Jake stopped beside her, staring up, but didn't say anything. Perhaps they were watching her now, from so far below. Anna looked at the three little glints and wondered if they knew how helpless they were. Did they realize she held the power over all their lives? She had penetrated this outer bunker with ease, so surely the message was clear; she could enter their Habitat any time she wanted.

  It fell to her. What she said now could influence everything to come. She looked up at their cameras and spoke in a clear, authoritative voice.

  "My name is Anna, and I came here to kill you."

  Jake shifted uncomfortably beside her. She hadn't told anyone the exact content of her speech, so this was a surprise, but he held his ground. It felt good to have him there, adding depth and sincerity to the words she was about to say.

  "I killed your bunker in Maine four months ago," she went on, the words ringing off the walls before dying in the fog. "In less than twenty hours I'll kill you too, if you don't shut down your demon. You may already know that I have a zombie army. You've seen my equipment. I'm offering you a chance I never gave Maine."

  She fell silent then, giving them time. She didn't expect a response, not yet, and none came. Jake began to tremble beside her in the cold.

  "We have a cure," she announced.

  That half-truth floated in the powdery mist for a time, as frail as a solitary flake of snow. Let them swallow it down and begin to doubt. Everything rested on this as the hinge.