The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  Half the vineyard was on fire, and a dense pall of woody, sappy smoke rose from it like morning dew evaporating. The grapes smelled delicious, like a variety of candy gum drops Ravi had introduced her to, mixed with his homebrew beer. He had always been a maker. Amo would call him a hipster.

  On the other side Jake was sweeping through the ashes of the already burnt half with his adapted hydrogen line scanner, nudging stubborn twists of bark aside. It looked a little like a large black lawnmower, leaving neat lines of mown black dust behind him. Macy trailed along beside him, stuck for anything else to do.

  Soon.

  Down below Feargal was lining up their bombs and earth drills in neat, organized rows. He'd been doing it for twenty minutes, marching up and down their ranks like a sergeant drilling his privates on parade. Already he'd taken the drone out for a test run.

  She scanned the horizon, but there was no sign of Lucas. That was smart. He should know she would kill him on sight.

  "Don't you think it's strange?"

  She looked to the side. Peters was standing down there.

  "What?"

  "This," he said, and pointed at the mountain. "It shouldn't be here."

  "Of course it should."

  "No. The ocean was many hours away when we ran from this place," he said. "Wanda agrees. They were far. But the mountain is here. It is strange."

  "Why is it strange?"

  "Because the demon should have chased us. Bordeaux is miles away, it should have followed us. We stopped after we crossed the ocean's front line, and the demon should have kept chasing until it met them too. This mountain should be twenty miles that way." He pointed to the west. "Not here."

  Anna looked west. She looked at the mountain. "Here is a good place for it."

  He sighed. "You want to kill them. Good. I too want to kill them, after yesterday. But this is not a thing we should ignore. There is a reason for it."

  Anna studied the mountain. It was very large.

  "Would you prefer we move it? Should we lift each body and put them twenty miles west, to suit your theory?"

  He frowned. "That's not what I mean and you know it. The real Anna knows what I mean, even if this Alice in the looking glass won't see it. Anna. You think I haven't seen this, what you're experiencing now?"

  So he wanted to talk. "What am I experiencing, Peters?"

  "The far side of grief. You are untouchable now, am I correct?"

  "I am untouchable, you're right."

  "And if I moved in your way, you'd shoot me."

  This was easy. She'd already said as much. "I would shoot you."

  Peters nodded.

  "This is the easy way. For a time, I know, it is easier this way. But remember what I said, in that pit of Julio's. Remember what I told you, when you think you should stand above me and choose my fate. I lost my world, little girl. So now have you. What kind of man was I? What kind of man am I now? We all see. What you have now is the wrong way to lead. It is a bandage, not a way forward. Black and white, yes and no. Perhaps I can shoot you, if you press too far."

  Anna considered. That would be interesting.

  "You may be the faster pilot, Peters, but there are no planes here. I've always been the better shot."

  He grunted. "Better shot with a broken shoulder? I won't let you kill him. Lucas. This is not his fault, I believe that."

  "And the bunker?"

  He waved a hand. "Kill the bunker. They made their choice. But Lucas, not him. He is a good man. His cure is real."

  He believed that. It was sweet, really, if blind. "I understand your position. Now help Feargal with the bombs."

  Peters looked over and pulled a face. "He's been moving them into position for half an hour now. He needs a ruler, not my help."

  That was Peters all right. "Have you got a ruler?"

  "I think I left it in my other Humvee."

  She almost laughed.

  "There," he said, as if staking a claim, "my Anna."

  "The ocean's Anna," she answered, and that ended it.

  Three hours later Jake found a signal beneath the ashes of the eastern field.

  * * *

  Beneath a shallow coating of dirt and ash they found the manhole cover; sealed from the inside with magnetic locks. A controlled explosion tore it away along with a large drift of soil, which plumed into the air in the shape of a catamaran sail, before settling back across the burnt wasteland.

  Jake stood beside Anna with his fingers plugged into his ears, sheltered together behind the Humvee.

  "This has to be it," he shouted in the aftermath.

  "Take out your fingers," Anna said.

  He did. "The signal showed the outline," he explained, pointing at his topographic map of the field, where the underlying structure of the bunker was laid out in sketched blue lines. "We found the mass elevators first; they were bigger, so stronger signals. It looks larger than Maine."

  Anna took the graph paper and turned it, calculating angles of fire inside and what she might face. Presumably there would be more traps.

  She turned to Peters. "How long?"

  "Six hours, give or take."

  They had six hours to kill three thousand people.

  She started across the burnt wasteland, toward the crater where the smoke was already dispersing. Ash kicked up in glowing cinders and black dust. Around the narrow blast crater there was a raised lip of rich loam speckled with cement chips, and in the middle lay the chute; open and blackened inside, narrower than the turret shaft but less dusty, with only its upper lip damaged, where the lock bolts had been. The manhole cover was long gone. She stood over the hole and peered down. Even from here she could feel the buzzing in her head.

  "That's their shield," Jake said, drawing to her side.

  He was a good man; one of the best she knew. "Go back, Jake. I don't want you to see this." Three thousand people was too much to ever scrub off your conscience.

  His face clouded over, his dark-gray brows drawing in, but he didn't argue.

  "Nobody should have to do this," he said, as if reading her thoughts. "Be careful, Anna."

  "Of course." She turned. "Macy."

  Macy was staring at the hole and chewing her lip.

  "Go with him. Ollie you too, in case Lucas comes."

  Ollie looked relieved, and shrugged off his RPG. Feargal took it, perhaps more out of respect than any sense of need.

  She looked to the others. "Wanda or Peters, one of you go back. I can't have you both in danger at the same time."

  Peters looked to Wanda. "Do you want this?" he asked.

  She stared at him with wide eyes. Perhaps she needed it, but she didn't want it.

  "Wanda," Anna chose, "go back."

  Relief washed over her face.

  Feargal and Peters alone remained. Feargal carried an assault rifle and Ollie's RPG, now shrugging on a bandolier of rockets across his chest. Peters had a shotgun and the drone. Anna carried grenades, flares, and only a pistol herself, in a holster at her waist, because with her damaged shoulder she couldn't use any more than that.

  "We go," she said.

  * * *

  The first grenade was percussive. It clanked at the bottom of the chute and a moment later blew with a BANG and flash that shot out of the earth like the shreds of paper and sparks from a shotgun shell.

  An explosive grenade followed, producing an almighty BOOM that would further buckle any doors behind which soldiers in suits might be hiding.

  They were taking no more risks.

  Next went the small, camera-equipped drone. It buzzed easily down the chute, four rotors whirring like a helicopter, and they watched the video feed of its descent on a monitor screen. The chute walls were blackened at the top from the bomb and blackened at the bottom from the grenades.

  "What the-?" Feargal muttered, pointing at the screen as the drone leveled off at the base. "What is that?"

  The bottom of the chute was much like the one in Maine; a flask-shaped way station,
narrow and sheer, made of concrete set in a single pour, but there was one important distinction. Where Maine had two elevator doors leading down, one to the Habitat and one to Command, this had only one, and it was wide open.

  Where the metal elevator door should be, inset neatly into the cement, there was an opening leading into an empty, dark shaft. Peters tweaked the drone forward into the shaft and turned the little craft around to take in the walls, illuminated by its lights. It was an elevator shaft much like in Maine, but there was no elevator cab or even any cable, only an open vent. Peters clicked, but the down-facing camera couldn't resolve much detail from the receding shadows below.

  "Perhaps our grenades blew the door down," Feargal guessed.

  "And the cab, and the cable?" Peters asked. "No. This is not right. Anna?"

  Anna was already starting down the chute, using rungs recessed into a channel in the concrete.

  "Wait," Peters urged.

  She looked up. "Why?"

  "Something is strange here. It isn't right."

  "It's a bunker," Anna said. "The grenades worked. This is what we're here for and we don't have time to wait."

  She continued down. It should be difficult with only one working arm, but it was easy. At twenty rungs the buzzing in her head grew stronger, then faded, which meant she was inside the shield. Soon they would start dying. She wondered if this bunker would be as bright and colorful as Lars Mecklarin's.

  Feargal followed above; his boots made a clinking sound on the metal. Some thirty rungs further down she reached the bottom. The floor was black and the air stank of exploded grenades. She studied the hole in the wall where the elevator door ought to be.

  "They've removed it," she said to Feargal as he arrived beside her.

  "What?"

  She stepped up to the edge and touched the edges of the hole; rough cement with rusted bolt marks and holes leading inward, but no bolts. She leaned in close to the hovering drone, into the shaft that roared with the echo of its rotors, and shone her flashlight upward.

  "Yes, there was an elevator cable strung up here," she said, pointing. Feargal leaned in beside her. "You can see where it was mounted."

  "Why would they remove it?" Feargal asked, as Peters arrived at the bottom of the ladder.

  "To bring something in," Peters offered. "Something large."

  Anna snorted. "There is no demon down here. They'd all be dead."

  "We need to think about this," he pressed. "Anna, something's not right."

  Anna ignored him, and turned to study the wall where the Command door should be, but it was only smooth, unbroken concrete, set in a single circular pour. Any internal infrastructure like pipes, wires and the Faraday cage-like lattice of the protective shield were buried inside without any hint of a hidden exit.

  "Anna," Peters went on. "Think, please. This wasn't some minor piece of work. Stripping a whole elevator this close to the shield? Even if they had Salle Coram's suits, they would have lost people. It had to be for a reason."

  She looked at him. This was where command differed from support.

  "The next demon arrives in less than six hours, yes?"

  He frowned. "Yes."

  "So what would you have me do? We've planned this. They moved their elevator, I see, but does it change the reality for us? This is the plan. If we don't shut down the demon under the pile, we might not have the numbers to take the next. We don't have time to think."

  She struck the tab on a flare and dropped it down the open shaft, past the whizzing drone. At the bottom it bounced and settled, a hot pinprick at the bottom of a long, glowing well.

  "Send the drone or I'm going now," Anna said.

  Peters grunted but lifted the stick and screen from his pack and guided the drone down. The sound of its rotors faded as it descended, while on the screen the flare's red glow grew brighter. Peters turned the down-facing camera off and they watched the flat elevator shaft wall pass by, dappled with the drone's own reddish shadow.

  "Like descending into hell," Feargal muttered.

  At the bottom there was one metal door in the wall.

  "No elevator cab," Peters said. "No blockade either." He spun the drone fully around. "Nothing."

  "Maybe they needed another air shaft," Anna said, then pulled the pin on another grenade and dropped it. They all covered their ears.

  BANG. The sound reverberated chaotically for seconds. Peters barely got the drone up out of range in time. In the ringing aftermath Anna unwound a light rope ladder from her pack and tossed the end down the shaft. The other end she knotted to the ladder rungs, then started down.

  The descent was cool and smooth. At the bottom she studied the door by the bright red fizz of the flare. It looked heavy, a solid metal affair with a single handle. She tried it, and to her surprise it moved. She drew her gun, lifted the handle enough to disengage the lock with a loud clank, and pushed.

  17. SIGNAL

  The door swung slowly in, revealing the bunker beyond.

  Ahead lay a dark metal walkway leading in under a low cement ceiling, lit by the guttering orange flashes of a few distant, dying electric lights. To either side were railings that guarded a sudden drop down into a dark, square well of levels and levels of inky flooring, stacked one below the other, only illuminated by haphazard bursts of orangey light.

  It was nothing like Maine. It was industrial and brutalist, standing here at the top of some kind of central access stairwell. Everything was built out of metal bulkheads, raw cement or perforated flooring gantries, which cast a stuttering array of wild shadows every time one of the flagging lights spat on and off.

  It was cold and the air smelled of rusted metal and death. Somewhere a fan droned feebly.

  And there were bodies. Directly ahead on the walkway lay three bodies, reduced to raw bones. Their stained white lab coats and khaki pants lay deflated like old birthday balloons. The blank, dry eye sockets of one gazed emptily at her.

  Anna dropped to one knee with her gun leveled, scanning the shadows of this strange, half-dead industrial space, searching for any kind of movement.

  "Jesus," Peters said, emerging beside her. "What the hell happened here?"

  She blinked, coming out of a lull to realize the bunker door was still moving to her left, driven by some hidden mechanism. It glided through a gap in the railing and settled into a metal alcove in the wall with a clank.

  "Holy shit," Feargal said from behind her, "are those-?"

  "Yes."

  It was nothing like Maine, but that didn't change the mission. If anything this was more what a bunker ought to look like. Crude, masculine, bare bones and cold. If there were no people left alive, that would just make the job simpler.

  "We still have to clear it," she said, rising to her feet and walking forward. "We still have to and locate Command."

  The walkway was solid. The drop to either side teetered a long way down into darkness, but there were no signs of movement anywhere. She knelt at the cluster of bodies and rifled through their coats and pockets, navigating by the guttering lights. Three ID cards with faces and names. This one was called Reyes. The scent of rotting was long gone, though in places patches of skin hidden by clothing had dehydrated rather than decomposing. It felt papery and rough when her hands stroked it. These people had died a long time ago.

  She looked ahead. Were they all dead?

  "This place has been dead for years," Peters said. "Anna, there's something very wrong here."

  "Agreed," said Feargal.

  She strode over the bodies and went on, leaving Peters and Feargal to follow. In a way it was disappointing. Had she really come this far just to find a dead bunker with no one inside left to kill? Who had activated the demon, then?

  "We should send the drone first," Feargal called after her, but she was done listening to anyone else.

  The stairs clattered noisily as she descended to the top level, where a square gantry encircled the large central stairwell. The metal flooring grates flexed
and groaned as she walked a circuit on them, running her hand along the metal guide rail. She peered over the edge, down into the sporadic dark of four, perhaps five more levels.

  Nobody, but for scattered clusters of white jackets, like half-melted snowmen.

  She scanned the walls of the gantry. Ahead there was a heavy security door, locked with a security scanner at the side. There were more bodies nearby, lying in small tangled knots of two or three, all long dead and reduced to bones. She knelt by one and rummaged in its ribcage, coming up with a browned pass on a rotten lanyard.

  CHARLES GREY

  "Charles Grey," she read. His photo showed him to be a man in his twenties, not so unlike Jake. Dead now. "Let's try your clearance."

  She held the pass to the scanner, but it beeped and flashed red.

  "We may need to blow it," Feargal said.

  Anna dropped the card. "Rockets won't move this. We're not equipped. We need the drill and C4."

  Feargal radioed it through to above, while Anna continued around the stairwell square, pausing in front of the only other exit point; a set of two swing doors on the opposite wall. She kicked them open and peered down a near-black corridor leading away; long and bare but for more ragged body clumps on the floor. At the far end a light crackled on and off. Open doorways without doors lined the walls.

  "More doors missing," Peters said. "It's not normal."

  "On me," Anna said, and advanced. At the first door on the left she paused, cocked her pistol, then peered through.

  Beyond lay a huge, military-looking dormitory hall, filled with rows and rows of double-decker beds that stretched away into darkness.

  "That's a lot of beds," Peters said.

  Anna shone her flashlight in, picking out contours suggesting the hall was perhaps a football field in length and half that in width. Each bed was appointed with a matching black locker, brown bedding, and a single white pillow. Round lights were mounted on the walls, but only one in around twenty were operational, and many of those were guttering or so faded to a burnt sienna that they barely cast any light at all; offering a flickering porthole on a sad, grand tableau.