The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  CRUNCH

  CRACK

  THUMP

  Each time they began to rise faster, with each fall padded more. The ocean had turned. The walkie fritzed at her shoulder. Jake was on his own.

  "Back!" she shouted down the elevator shaft. There was no time, not for her or for them. She took hold of the rope ladder and flung herself into the hole just as one of the ocean lurched for her. She barely caught her own weight as it fell past her, tumbling off the walls to CRUNCH at the bottom.

  "Oh shit," she panted, descending as fast as her wounded left arm would allow, as more CRUNCHes hit above and more bodies came toppling down past her, their hands whipping off her back.

  One, two, three lashed out as they plummeted by, raking her hair and shoulders with their nails, their legs ricocheting off her arms, until one snagged her sling and dragged it out of position with a horrible click in her collar, pulling her away from the ladder. She held on, but in the second it took for her to pull herself back in, a fifth hit her full in the chest.

  Her hand was torn from the rope. Her body was sent into a crazy somersault. She fell for a terrifying, aching few seconds with the zombie on her chest before CRUNCH they hit together against the concrete floor below.

  INTERLUDE 5

  "You don't have to leave," Jake had said.

  Lucas, Jake and Peters had sat in a boulangerie in the dark, two hours after the demon almost caught Anna in the first bunker. Feargal and Ollie were pacing restlessly in the street outside, while Macy and Wanda were watching over Anna in the house across the street, still unconscious from the sedative.

  Bordeaux.

  Lucas sighed and looked out to the silent street, barely visible through the reflection of lamplight in the dark window. He'd been here once, many years ago, before he got his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon. Back then he'd been a punk, sporting a purple Mohawk and listening to rock music. Punk was in a resurgence and in Europe, out of the stifling constraints of his hometown, he felt authentic in ways he never had when hanging around the malls and parking lots of Derby, Kansas.

  It was impossible not to think of those days now, sitting in this little restaurant that still, somehow, smelled of baking bread and butter. He only had to close his eyes to remember his first kiss, first proper kiss, stolen on the Garonne river with a fey-eyed canal boy.

  "Lucas," Peters said firmly, bringing him back to the moment. The moment was truly miserable. Perhaps it was his fault. Perhaps he was wrong to have thought he could save the world.

  "She will kill me if I stay," he said.

  "She won't," Jake protested. "She's a sweet girl, really, you just have to-"

  Peters laid his hand over Jake's. "She is not a sweet girl, Jake. Maybe once, but not now. Maybe never."

  "She won't kill him."

  Peters sighed and looked at Lucas. Lucas liked him. He carried himself like an old man, full of the worries of the world, though he wasn't much older than Lucas. It could come across as false, but it didn't. There was a deep understanding in those twinkling eyes.

  "Where will you go?" Peters asked.

  There was only one answer to that. "With the ocean. I'll keep looking for my friends. With your permission I'll take the electron microscope and other equipment. I still need to find the cure."

  "Still," said Peters.

  Lucas shrugged. He dreamt of Farsan most nights now, though never in a pleasant way. They were kissing, as they never had in real life, but it wasn't really Farsan, it was a gray-skinned, white-eyed version of him with blood splashed around his lips.

  That was guilt, or something. Fear.

  "There's nothing else for me. I'll follow them and do my research."

  "We're following them too. She'll see you."

  "She won't. Salle Coram never did."

  Peters shook his head. "That was in a bunker. Not on roads in a foreign land."

  He shrugged. There wasn't much more to say. Jake chewed on his lip.

  "We could give you gas. Food, too."

  "I have food. I can get gas."

  In the last month in Maine, when he hadn't been working to narrow down his best possible pathways toward a cure, isolating likely gene strands and ranges of treatment components, he'd focused on learning how to siphon fuel and fit a battery, how to jumpstart a car and replace the tires, how to get a generator going and so on, in case of something like this.

  Now it had happened.

  "So you'll want one of the Humvees."

  "I can find another vehicle. But yes, a Humvee would be good. To carry the equipment."

  Peters sighed. He leaned back and signaled Feargal over.

  Within an hour he was checking the load. No guns, no bombs, only scientific equipment. In the street a few pale stragglers from the ocean were drifting by, lighting their paths with their eyes. He studied each of them, standing by the oversized Humvee.

  Any one of these could be Farsan. The chances of it were infinitesimal, but still he looked and saw Farsan's face everywhere. Finding any of his people was a highly unlikely dream; fourteen needles in a haystack of well over one hundred thousand. Still he had to try.

  "You should go," Peters said. "She will wake soon. Good luck."

  They shook hands. He nodded. So this was the end. He slipped into the driver's seat and drove away.

  * * *

  He took a looping, circuitous route through the western ranks of the ocean. The demon was still out there somewhere and he didn't want to take any chances.

  Bordeaux faded away, and for a time he took a highway leading north along the Garonne river, allowing himself to drift, cruising at a stately thirty miles per hour where it was clear. Tree branches jutted out into the road. Pale bodies nudged up against the fender as he slowed through traffic-clogged sections.

  He pulled over at a rise in the landscape and watched the Garonne flow by for a time, rolling round a shallow bend marked with boulders and a small muddy beach. The zombies staggered down the incline to the side, traipsed through the dark mud, and walked directly into the river, leaving thin footprints behind. Moonlight frittered away on the waves.

  He drove on, pulling east steadily. It felt strange to be alone and on the outside again. Spying. For three months after his bitterly cold bicycle ride to the Maine airport, he'd spied on them. He'd found an outbuilding near the edge of the airfield, crawled in through a broken window, and begun.

  Everything that followed was a blur of loneliness and purpose. He was hungry a lot of the time, often forgetting to eat though he'd brought a bulging knapsack of rations from the Habitat. He spent his days asleep or lying on his low rooftop, watching them run their bunker assault drills through binoculars and listening to them talk on the radio. At nights he ran his generator and worked on the cure with what weak equipment he had.

  He took to stalking their encampment, growing bolder night by night. They ran patrols, but rarely did they come out as far as his little signalman's shack. One night he dared himself to enter Anna's laboratory in the quarantine bay of the airport, far better equipped than his own, and decided on a careless, defiant whim to use it.

  It was a risk, but he didn't have half the equipment available in the ward, and no other way he could access it. It was far better gear than he'd had in the bunker even, because it was all built for purpose; a real centrifuge, a flash-freezer, an impressive range of dyes and stains, even some genetic building block liquids he could mix and match.

  He found a gun in a security room and stripped the bullets. He knew he wouldn't use it, not even to save himself, but it was good to have. He accepted that at some point he would have to talk to these people. The ocean was gone, taking with them Farsan and his other test-subjects, and he had to follow, but he couldn't cross the Atlantic without their help.

  Yet he waited. He watched them, enjoying this small sense of fleeting power he held over the people who'd brought on the destruction of his world. He studied them and worked on his cure, so that when he took his case to them in the broad
light of day, they could not say no. He wanted to be sure.

  Loneliness became a problem. As the weeks passed he grew careless. Perhaps he went a little bit mad, in the run-up to Anna breaking his throat.

  Now he was here.

  He tapped the wheel and drove on. That she hated him was clear. What he felt for her was confused. It wasn't hate, perhaps, but it was strong. Admiration was part of it. Fear was another. She was so like Salle Coram it was sometimes hard to breathe around her. There was also, weirdly, a kind of pride. He'd never felt that before; pride for someone he didn't know, whose life he'd had no role in, who felt so negatively towards him.

  But still, she was human and so was he, and her achievements were impressive. A child in the outbreak, she had grown up strong. She was exactly the kind of person her people needed, which made him think again about Salle Coram, and the things she'd done to survive.

  He drove east, and gradually the ranks of the ocean grew thicker. He stopped for a time beneath a hickory tree on the edge of a field of wild rye grass and watched their bodies flow by. Some time around four they began to run, and he followed along in the Humvee, going off-road with a sense of raw excitement as they began to sprint. He rolled the windows down and cheered them on.

  Soon the mountain of bodies rose up in the distance, over the flat expanse of vineyards and rye. He drew closer through the fields, crushing grasses under his tires, and stopped half a mile away. It amazed him when he saw the tiny figure standing atop the mountain. With binoculars he confirmed it was Anna, lit by moonlight. She was shouting something, but he couldn't hear over the heavy stamp of the ocean's feet.

  He left the Humvee and walked with the flood until he heard. She was calling out his name.

  "Lucas! I'm coming!"

  "I'm here," he said quietly.

  * * *

  Mid-afternoon the next day the mountain collapsed.

  Lucas was lying on the Humvee roof, watching through binoculars and listening to the radio, when the mountain blew. The steep white sides began rushing down like lava. He stared for long seconds, unsure if it was just his imagination or a strange trick of the light. He blinked hard and rubbed his eyes, but when the blurring continued, the implications finally registered.

  It had to mean they'd hit the button and killed the demon. That was good, definitely good, but it also meant another three thousand people were dead, which made him sick. He didn't know what to feel. Moments later Jake's voice came through on the walkie, raised in celebration. He went to switch it off, feeling no desire to celebrate another mass killing, then came Anna's reply. Her words weren't clear at first but she sounded concerned. He listened more closely to her garbled, staticky shouts, until gunfire rang down the line, followed by screams, and at last some of Anna's words came through clearly.

  The polarity of the hydrogen line had changed. The ocean had turned. Lucas stood up and watched the ocean through his binoculars, washing out and encompassing one of the Humvees like ants swarming a spider. He watched as Ollie ran and was gathered in, and he saw the first splashes of blood that followed, painting the ocean's surface red.

  Jake screamed. Anna shouted at him to run. There wasn't really time to think, only to react.

  Lucas jumped in the Humvee cab, revved the engine to life and set it tearing toward the disaster. Perhaps he could rescue some of them. Long grasses lashed the Humvee's hood as he climbed to thirty then forty and hit the edge of the field close to fifty. The vehicle tore through a wire fence with a series of damp firecracker POPs as rotten wooden poles yanked out of the ground. The Humvee hit the raised edge of a path, launched into the air and crashed down in the next field over like a charging bull. Lucas pressed the gas to the floor and tore ahead as more screams rang out through the radio and the terrible realization sank in that the zombies really were attacking.

  He caught glimpses of the gray mountain ahead through the heavily laden vines, sweating out bodies with a rhythmic pulse, until with one sudden pulsing gust it fully collapsed. A great whuff of dust blew out and reached him in seconds, washing over his windshield like the shockwave from a nuclear blast.

  "Jake!" he cried into the walkie as the Humvee skidded in the gray fog. "Where are you, are you in the Humvee?"

  No answer came other than static and the whipping rush of vines, until seconds later the curtain of dust pulled away and he plowed right into the tide of surging white bodies.

  THUD THUD THUD

  Bodies crumpled on his fender and ripped across the windshield as his mass and speed burrowed the Humvee deep into their tight ranks. His head hammered off the steering wheel, sending stars shooting across his vision and blood spurting brightly onto the dash. He blinked hard and held a hand to his forehead to staunch the bleeding, while the vehicle rolled to a dead stop in the midst of the ocean.

  "What the f-" he mumbled, then the Humvee started to rock.

  Their bodies were everywhere, an unstoppable flow of flesh that moved and pushed and couldn't be stopped. They crushed against the Humvee and it tipped sideways on the right-side wheels before dropping back to earth with a SLAM. He hammered the gas but there was nowhere to move and half his wheels were aloft again, lifting higher than the last time, only to slam back harder to earth.

  tip SLAM

  tip SLAM

  tip SLAM

  "Shit shit shit," he shouted and looked frantically at the wheel and the dash but there was nothing there to help him. He scanned the back but all he saw were bodies pressed to the bulletproof glass; no weapons in the trunk, only scientific supplies.

  SLAM

  It was a big one and it banged his head again off the wheel, followed by another that tipped so high there was no coming back. His stomach lurched, he gripped the wheel hard to brace himself, and SLAM.

  The vehicle toppled onto its side, throwing Lucas hard against the driver's side window, leaving a bloody smudge on the glass. He felt dizzy and now there was a rending, metal-tearing sound coming from the Humvee's undercarriage, mixing in with the desperate roar of the engine.

  His foot was still on the gas. He let go but the roar of the engine didn't stop, and now bodies were pouring over the top of the vehicle and leaping down beyond, and the Humvee was starting to rock again. The engine roared on and the tearing sound continued beneath his feet and then-

  SLAM

  It tipped over onto the roof. Lucas was dumped onto his head to roll limply across the ceiling. The engine became a backfiring cough and the scrabbling sound of feet stamping into the vehicle's underside above grew thunderous. He smelled gasoline and the terrible stink of burning rubber and knew he had to get out. He tried to right himself but just then the Humvee began to spin.

  Lucas hunkered on all fours on the ceiling, hardly believing it as the swollen mass of bodies pushed his vehicle round on its rooftop axis like a turnstile. Through the muddy, bloody windshield the world rotated, driven by bony legs and receding backs then-

  CRNNK

  Something in the engine burst, and there was a distinct smell of gas followed by an explosion that flattened him to the floor. His head beat off the reinforced metal roof and when he managed to lift it there was fire everywhere.

  The ocean was aflame outside. All around there was fire, running in liquid rivulets through the churned mud, leaping from dry zombie body to body, and now he felt the heat as two drops of burning gasoline leaked through the broken chassis above and sizzled on his hand.

  He screamed, clapped his palm into his armpit to douse the flame, then kicked at the driver side door. The lock held and he kicked it again unthinking, allowing more drops of flaming oil to fall on his head and thigh. He yelled again, patted them down wildly, and rolled to the door to frantically pick at the lock.

  It clicked, the door yawed open, and he rolled into a mad tornado whirl of fire, mud, bodies and thumping feet. He slipped and scrabbled for purchase in the churn, then the rear end of the Humvee struck him hard in the hip as it revolved, throwing him into a mass of zombies sid
e-on.

  Their arms rained off him and he rolled wildly amongst their feet, almost pitching into a burning puddle of gas.

  CRAKKK

  The guts of the Humvee blew upwards behind him, sending burning bits of shrapnel metal raining down on the bodies above. He crawled amongst them on the floor, and their feet kicked him from all sides and their hands pattered off his shoulders and face, until one more huge CRKKK finished off the Humvee. Knocked onto his side he saw it burst outward like a bomb, felling a swathe of the ocean around it, who dropped to the floor and went up in flames.

  "Arrghhh!" he cried out and rolled to his feet. He hadn't come this far to die here. He hadn't come this far to let the ocean be taken from him just as he was getting ready to cure it.

  The flow of the ocean to his right was thinner, broken by the Humvee's blast, and he forced his way into it, tossing elbows and pushing bodies to either side before they could pull him down. If only he could get out and find the other Humvees, maybe he could still salvage something from this. Jake might be alive, Wanda too, Macy. Anna was down below, perhaps they were safe in the bunker.

  He ducked and rolled through the forest of straining hands, no longer certain which way he was moving but moving fast. His fists and elbows throbbed already from impacting with hard bone and his legs shook from the effort of seeking purchase in the slick of mud and ash. Gritty black smeared him everywhere.

  Then he staggered into a circular clearing, through a fold in the storm-tossed bulk of the ocean, and there dropped to his knees. It was like an island, surrounded by a solid wall of impenetrable gray flesh, but all he saw was the thing in the middle. It wasn't possible, but there it was and here he'd been dumped before it like trash deposited by a wave. It wasn't fair, but Farsan was gone and how was that fair? Nothing was fair and that was just life, just the way life went, and this was his.

  Shaking on his knees, he watched the last few bodies peel away like gray skin from the raw, bloody muscle of the demon at the bottom of the heap.

  It was huge. It was powerful. It rose from a crouch, opened its eyes, and stared like the fires of hell right through Lucas' soul.