It had been almost a year since Anna left New LA.
In that time so much had changed. Now they were in regular communication with three other bunkers; in the French Alps, in the hills near Monaco and in eastern Tunisia. There were seven more out there, and they were pressing steadily eastward to meet them, while work on the cure continued.
Some eight thousand people were with them underground; the tally of those three bunkers. It felt good, like a powerful prevailing wind filling her sails and driving her home, like Odysseus in his final stretch home to Ithaca.
In the last six months Peters had been tutoring her in the ancient classics, and she'd found in both The Iliad and The Odyssey much that was familiar. Odysseus' story was of a war between two peoples at irreparable odds, of a ten-year journey through the wilderness before finding a way home, with giants and great armies, an impregnable citadel and a voyage through the land of the dead.
She smiled to herself and pulled the plane around to the landing trajectory. Things were getting better all the time, and finally, after a long and winding journey, she was returning home, carrying two new survivors with her. They'd been drawn by cairns she'd left behind as they'd crawled across Europe, describing the cure in development and a homeland in New LA. Their names were Magnus and Rilla; survivors who'd escaped from their settlement in Latvia when a demon swept through.
Now they wanted to see New LA. They wanted to meet Amo, and Anna was happy to oblige. It was time for her to see Ravi too.
The Pilatus spiraled into position over New LA through the glorious, hazy winter sun. The Pacific spread away for miles, sparkling like a night sky full of stars. This was the only kind of ocean left in the world now. All the zombies were contained in Bordeaux, along with all the demons, lodged in each other's eternal embrace.
Peters, Jake, Lucas and Wanda remained behind. Feargal and Macy were coming with her, but others would go to replace them. Sulman, she expected; he'd wanted to be at the cutting edge of Lucas' experiments for most of the year. Josiah had been a civil servant in Utah, he'd expressed an interest in joining the bunker team, who moved across the map and initiated first contact. Jonathon wanted to be with Wanda again.
It was a good trajectory.
She took the plane down and landed smoothly on the LAX runway; recently scrubbed of weeds and repaired in places with branch-like lines of tar spreading along old cracks. It was an effortless run, and she pulled up to the main concourse where a small crowd was gathered, cheering and waving. They'd erected bunting and streamers, each adorned with the symbol Amo had taken to using for their new civilization, the new flag of New LA; a large white five-pointed star on a light blue field, ringed by thirteen smaller white stars.
"The blue's for hope," Amo had explained to her once over their video chat, "like a clear sky, full of possibility. The thirteen stars symbolize the twelve known bunkers plus all of us immune; everything that survived the end of the world."
"And the big star?"
"That's what we're going to become, once the cure is finished. One people, one world."
Anna had studied it. It didn't look like any other flags she knew, and that was good. There was something hopeful about it. The bright, light blue seemed like an open horizon. All the stars spoke of union.
"You like it?" he'd asked.
"I love it. What did the Council say?"
"You're the deciding vote. I made another design some of them prefer, but that's only because it looks more like the Stars and Stripes, and I want to get away from that. It needs to be a world flag."
She'd laughed. "I like it. You've got my vote."
That was that. He'd spent eleven years planning it. Now here it was, printed on waving flags and tablecloths.
She shut the engine down and took a breath, releasing the controls. That was the end of one chapter, for the most part; Odysseus come home. She looked out of the cockpit window at the crowd of faces she knew, mixed in with a few new ones she didn't. What must they think of her, she wondered? When last she'd been amongst them it was to banish Witzgenstein from the settlement. That flew in the face of everything the new flag stood for.
"Are you coming, Anna?"
Feargal was up from the co-pilot's seat. He'd recovered well from the bunker raid, though he still had a helluva scar on his chest where the ocean gored him.
"Sure," she said, and followed along behind.
Out through the side door, the hot, clammy air of Los Angeles hit her like a wet towel. A second later Ravi followed; hugging her tight and showering her with kisses. He was bigger than before; filled out with the build of a man, but just as bright-eyed and enthusiastic as ever.
"Goddamn, Anna, it's good to have you home," he whispered, then he was crying too much to talk properly. Over his shoulder she saw Amo and Lara waving. It really was good to be home.
* * *
It only took three days for her to be bored.
She took a tour of new facilities; everything they'd set up since the demons came so long ago. She hadn't seen any of these developments for real, not more than photographs uploaded through their rudimentary satellite uplink. There was a new solar-powered desalination plant and water tower by the beach. Several sections of the Chinese Theater had been given over to hospital wards housing the handful of comatose survivors from Maine, hoping one day they'd wake.
She toured the new farmlands, reworked and freshly irrigated after Cynthia left and her haphazard rotation system collapsed. Antwon from the Ukraine was in charge now, and he ran the planting and harvesting cycles with a sergeant-at-arms' rigid discipline.
There were a few more pigs and cows, a few more sheep and many more chickens in the coop, scavenged from supply runs around the state. There were two more babies, born of couples who hadn't even been together when last she'd been there. Vie and Talia had grown immensely, and were overjoyed their aunt Anna had brought all manner of souvenirs and hard candies from continental Europe, so far away.
"Tell me a story, auntie!" Vie demanded. She was eight now and very bossy, so Anna told her about running with the zombies, and how amazing it had felt to stand atop the heap and bay at the moon.
Vie's face wrinkled when it was done. "But didn't they try to kill you after that?"
Anna chuckled and tousled her hair. How strange, Vie was only half her age. Soon she'd be sixteen too, and Anna would be, what, twenty-four? It seemed like an impossible number. "One story at a time, kiddo."
Throughout, she and Ravi were barely ever apart. Everything they did, they did together. It was strange to tour the expanded New LA campus with him, as he excitedly pointed out their new coffee shop a block over from the Chinese Theater, essentially Lara's office, where all the coffee makers were kept clean and functioning, and a Nespresso pod of carmelito espresso was completely free. He showed her the bowling alley, returned to working order with a single generator powered by rooftop solar cells. They could only play in the daytime, but who wanted to bowl at night? He held her hand and ran through their advancements and jabbered on incessantly, and when he wasn't jabbering on he was kissing her or hugging her, and to her surprise she loved every bit of it, without any feelings of being smothered.
She'd been worried about that, in the months running up. She'd found reasons to delay her return several times; because Lucas was on the edge of a breakthrough, because they were about to meet with another bunker, because the weather wasn't right for trans-Atlantic flight, but really it was about Ravi.
She'd been afraid he would annoy her. He always had in the past, back when the old Anna was at the driving wheel. His undying enthusiasm used to drive her crazy, as he fixated on things that to her seemed completely pointless. It was good he was so happy waxing down her catamaran hulls, because it was something she'd never had time for. Her thinking was that she could always find another catamaran.
He nurtured, and she never stopped long enough to care. He'd overwhelmed her before, asking for too much, giving too much, but now?
Now she felt at peace around him. He was like a buoyant, frothy wave crashing against her still, solid rock. He made things interesting, and he brought a new kind of life to her that she'd never attracted before. When she was with him, people smiled at her, like he was some kind of good-feeling lightning conductor. She didn't feel grumpy or angry, not urgent or always rushing to get something else done, and people didn't look at her with barely concealed concern.
She was happy.
They lay in bed together late most days, in a tent on the beach or atop the tenth-floor roof of an off-limits building, holding each other, looking up at the blue sky and dreaming.
"Let's make a baby," she told him at last, summoning the words from her hallucination nine months earlier to life.
His eyes lit up like she'd struck the jackpot on a Las Vegas slot machine. He nodded and grinned and shook her hand and cried, and then they got down to the task at hand.
In all she was deliriously happy, but still she grew bored, and set about preparing for the next work that lay ahead. She was ready to do it now.
She packed the RV; not much was needed, not for where they were going. Amo spoke to her at the last, as she loaded up two crates of frozen fish in white polystyrene boxes and three large barrels of Wynn's homebrew ale, along with sundry other items; some blueberry-cheese, a few loaves of rye bread, several medium-sized sacks of dried quinoa, an assortment of foil-packed seeds including rhubarb, chamomile and squash, three chickens and a cockerel, along with a large bag of the candies she'd brought from Europe.
Amo gave her a hug, then Lara. "You look after him," Lara warned, nodding at Ravi. She looked so much better now; back to her old cheerful, vigorous self. "We need him for the karaoke prom."
Ravi reddened and ducked away. He had a terrible singing voice, and for perhaps that reason they always made him emcee the parties.
"You're sure you want to lead this?" Amo asked.
She nodded. It was easy, really. After all she'd done before, having to blow up autocannons and shoot down drones just to get near the impenetrable bunker-citadels, this was child's play.
"I'm sure."
"Then good luck."
She drove away with Ravi, listening to Tracy Chapman and Bob Dylan and other deep, thoughtful songs. They sounded different to her now, coming from a whole other angle. She saw the hope in them more easily, the small triumphs that balanced out the despair. Like in Chapman's Fast Car, it meant something to escape the small town, even if it was not all you'd hoped for. It had value to love and dream even for a short time, because the dream would keep you warm at night and for the rest of your life.
People needed dreams. She had lots of spare printed flags in the back of the RV, because that was a dream too.
It took less than a day, as advertised. The roads all the way had been cleared, driving up through the deserts and Las Vegas, up past San Francisco and Sacramento, through throngs of giant redwoods by Redding and Red Bluff, onto the verdant green hills and ripe vineyards of Oregon.
Past Medford and Roseburg they went, by Eugene and Salem, to where the head of the Willamette Valley was waiting; brightly alive and thickly forested with tall chokecherry, bigleaf maple and black oak. The air hung heavy with the smell of maple sap and wood smoke.
The settlement was where she expected it to be, standing behind a proud wooden stockade toward the northern end of the great valley, overlooking a gorgeous sea of trees and the quilted land stretching into a heat haze beyond, bounded by the Oregon Coast mountain range. They had a watermill on a Willamette river tributary, flowing fast with melt water, and several plumes of smoke rose into the air over the tall log wall. Standing before it reminded Anna of the days immediately after the demons were crushed in Maine, when everything seemed so perfect, as if frozen in amber for eternity.
The stockade walls were manned, but of course she recognized the guards, and of course they were shocked to see her approach.
"Hello," she called up, with Ravi behind her beside the RV. "Is she in?"
It was a lot easier than approaching a bunker. Doing that so many times, each time taking her life into her hands as she strode over to the figure in the black suit, never knowing who it was, whether they held a weapon or the suit itself was a bomb, had inured her to fear. She was Odysseus in front of the gates of Ithaca, demanding entry.
Nobody called down. Ravi paced about nervously behind her, but then this was his first time, and she didn't blame him. No one liked a rifle being pointed in their face, and up there Anna counted three black barrel-holes aimed at her chest. Best was to wait, so Anna just stood and waited, while the gears of little bureaucracy turned beyond, atop the gate, until at last, wearing her cowboy hat and her denim jacket, she appeared.
Anna smiled. Witzgenstein. Yes, she looked good. Natural living, in accord with God's law or however she saw things out here, had done her good. Command had filled her out. Hopefully she wasn't lying any more, wasn't cheating, wasn't underhand, but so what if she was? She had people, and people were the real purpose now.
"Anna," she called down, in that rich, luxurious voice. "You're a long way from home."
Anna beamed back up at her. She couldn't resist. "Not that far. You ensured you were only a day's drive away."
Witzgenstein didn't let that fluster her. "What can we do for you?"
Anna's beam widened. This was the best part. "I've got big news, Janine. I've also got cheese, and beans, and back bacon too. Some ale, if you God-fearing folks are allowed to drink it. This is a trade mission with news from the world. We don't have any weapons. Would you open the gate?"
Witzgenstein stared down, and in that gaze Anna saw the white flag in the black-suited figure's hand again. It wasn't the same, she hadn't trapped Witzgenstein in a bunker underground, defenseless and hunted, but it was just as real; hope mingling with uncertainty in pursuit of something greater than themselves.
This was what coming together looked like. You didn't make peace with your friends, after all. All Witzgenstein could do now was open the gate. Or shoot her where she stood. Or ignore her until she went away.
"It's great ale," Anna added. That wasn't a line she'd often been able to say in France, Italy, or Tunisia, because back there she'd had nothing concrete to offer. Here though it seemed to do the trick, because Janine turned back to make a gesture to her people below, and the gate began to open.
Author's Note
Thank you for reading The List! I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. As an indie author I'm keenly aware of how many great books there are out there, and I appreciate you taking the time to try this one. Would you consider reviewing it on the site you bought it and/or Goodreads?
It doesn't matter how many stars you give or how long/short your review is, as long as the review is honest. Honest reviews from readers like you are the lifeblood of indie authors, affording us visibility and social proof in a highly competitive market.
Thank you!
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As a thank you for sampling my work, I'd like to offer you my free Starter Library of 2 post-apocalypse thriller books- one of them is The Last, the other is titled Mr. Ruins, and tells the story of an ex-marine after an apocalyptic global resource war, and his battles with a monstrous figure who wants to swallow his soul- Mr. Ruins.
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In addition, I'm always looking for readers to join my ARC (Advance Review Copy) Squad, who get free copies of all my books, a month before anyone else, forever, in exchange for reviews on launch day plus any beta-reading/typo-spotting you (generously!) care to provide.
If you'd like to join the ARC Squad, please send me an email at [email protected] and I'll happily make you a member.
Now, read on for the first chapter of Mr. Ruins, Book 1 of the Ruins War!
- Michael Grist
ACKN
OWLEDGEMENTS
Huge thanks to the fastest reader in the West, Pam Elmes, for picking up on a host of typos that somehow slipped through the net, and letting me know within a day of getting the ARC! Thanks to Rob Nugen, as ever, for his incredible work of encouraging, as well as catching plenty of typos, a few lingering Britishisms, important plot points that had been overlooked in the drafting process, and the odd stray it's when it should be its. Gotta catch 'em all. Thanks to Megan who offered invaluable feedback on slow sections at the beginning along with typos, and to Chris Hooker who pointed out the somewhat choppy back and forth-ing of the PAST section, which I did my best to smoothe out. Thanks also to Michelle who caught several tricky typos, and to Ray Ferguson offered a final, thorough once over that snapped up hopefully the last few mistakes. Thank you!
- Michael
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael John Grist is a British writer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years and now lives in London, England.
He writes science fiction and fantasy thrillers, and used to explore and photograph abandoned places in Japan, such as ruined theme parks, military bases and underground bunkers. These explores have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.
OTHER WORKS
Zombie Ocean (zombie apocalypse)
1. The Last
2. The Lost
3. The Least
4. The Loss
5. The List
Ruins War (science fiction thriller)
1. Mr. Ruins
2. King Ruin
3. God of Ruin
Ignifer Cycle (epic fantasy)
1. Ignifer's Rise
2. Ignifer's War
0. Ignifer's Tales (short stories)
Short fiction
The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) Page 27
