They took small trips, and he did OK. He was getting better. Then came the cruise.
"This is graduation," Jenny had said. "If you make this, you can make anything."
He'd signed up. She knew best, after all. He read brochures about what to expect and where the cruise's path would take them until his temples throbbed. He had to be ready. He had all the facts, knew the route, knew it all.
Now they had no corn soup.
It was a waiter, and that waiter's manner, that made it so bad. They were in the Seven Seas exclusive lounge, earned by their Commodore-level tickets. It was quieter than the main lounge, with a soothing view out to sea, but he was on edge.
"Just corn soup," he'd mumbled when the waiter, a tall and young Greek-looking guy, came round.
"Pardon, sir?" he'd asked.
"Corn soup," he'd repeated.
The waiter had looked at him then at Jenny and Lucy and back again.
"Sir, please could you speak up, I didn't hear that."
"Corn soup," Jenny spoke up. Probably that was the first humiliation. The second came fast.
"Corn soup? I'm afraid we do not have that on the menu."
"Yes," Drake mumbled. "Yesterday."
"We had it yesterday," Jenny said. "If you just check."
The waiter gave an annoying laugh. "Heh he, madam, I can assure you I know the menu. Corn soup is not on it. Perhaps sir would like something else. Sir?" He was needling now. Enjoying his position.
Drake looked up. The guy's face would look good under his wrecking ball.
"We had it yesterday, corn soup, it was on the menu yesterday. I can show you the receipt, I've got it here somewhere." Jenny started rustling in her purse. Never find anything in there.
"Heh he, perhaps madam is thinking of room service? I believe corn soup is provided there. If the gentleman so wishes to have corn soup, may I suggest you return yourselves to your room, and order it from there."
Jenny stared.
"Return ourselves?"
"Apologies, English is my third language," said the waiter, though there was not a hint of apology about him. "I mean only to get your corn soup, the best way is in the room."
"We had it here," Jenny said.
"No, madam," he said, and chuckled again. "You did not. We do not serve it."
Now she stood up. Perhaps this she had learned from Drake. "Are you calling me a liar?"
He didn't buckle. He didn't start apologizing. Probably they dealt with this all the time on the cruise. Drunken Brits starting trouble. Probably they'd been trained to be polite but firm. The joy he took in it was his own, though.
"No, madam, but I can only show you the menu." He did so, pointing. "Do you see corn soup?"
She fumed. "Get me your manager! Right now!"
"There is no manager," the waiter said. "I am on duty now. If you wish to complain, she will be here in five hours. I shan't, but she will."
"Shan't? You say your English is poor, but you say shan't?"
Drake put his hand on her arm. It was already too much.
"Honey," he croaked.
She deflated. She took his hand and glared at the waiter and left. Drake heard him mutter something about corn soup as they left, making their humiliation complete. There was nothing for it but to leave, now. They didn't speak on the way down, as Jenny and Lucy both knew he couldn't handle it. They had to get him into his bed and corn soup be damned.
They got him in. Under the covers, in his clothes, and he passed right out. Later on he figured it had to only have been for an hour or less. But still, in that short time while he slept, the zombie apocalypse reached out across the Atlantic and hit the Summer Wind, where it changed everyone aboard but him into a white-eyed, brains-hungry beast. And at the same time, it cured him completely.
* * *
He thumped the door with his head. How many had he killed by now? An official passenger list he'd found in the captain's office, up in the cruise liner's castle, listed 1,257 on board. Crew numbers were a little harder to gather, with no single manifest for them all. There were entertainment crew, cleaners, engineering, command, hospitality, chefs, babysitters, and many others, all with their separate manifests. He didn't care that much, but with them included it was getting close to two thousand.
At first it had been easy. THUMP THUMP THUMP, he'd used his bare fists on the first of them in the corridor outside his room. THUMP THUMP THUMP, he'd pounded until its whole head and neck dissolved against the fuzzy gray carpet in the corridor.
There'd been no sign of Jenny and Lucy in the room when he woke. Probably gone out for their dinner. Corn soup, he kept thinking.
The first was a woman, younger than him, and she'd just come at him with blood on her face and hands. He'd thought she had to be sick, had fended her off and even tried to help her at first, talk to her, but then he saw the whites of her eyes and shoved her away.
She kept coming. He shoved harder and shouted, then harder and louder, until finally he was kneeling astride her and pounding her head until her dry rasping breath stopped.
No Jenny at his side to stop him. No Lucy whimpering nearby. Just the little man in his wrecking machine, applying the great wrecking ball on autopilot. So easy.
He'd stood above her and gasped for a time afterwards. Looking at his fists, at the blood, and feeling the knuckles throb. Despite the fog of shock his head was clear for the first time in a year.
He'd just killed someone, but it didn't feel real.
"Jenny!" he shouted.
No answer came. The corridor was quiet.
He moved on, but the winding corridors of the liner confused him. He hadn't navigated them on his own, not without Jenny at his elbow, guiding him along. Now a small Middle Eastern-looking cleaning woman raced at him, her face all pale, and he pushed her aside. He found her cleaning cart and swept up a mop, which would help things along significantly. She came back, teeth gnashing, and he tried briefly to reason with her, stuffing the mop's wet end in her face to keep her at bay.
She wasn't interested, so he gave up and put the mop to good use until she stopped.
BASH BASH BASH.
Easy.
Doors banged from within, but he left them alone. He walked by. He didn't think too much about what was happening; it felt more like a dream than anything. His mission was to find Jenny and Lucy, and that was what he would do.
Along the way a few more people came after him. He crushed them with the mop, no longer trying to reason with them. Soon after he found an axe, behind a glass screen marked-
FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY
This was an emergency. Killing became easier still after that, dispatching the people who came after him in one or two blows. Terrorists, his brain told him. Had to be. Blood made his hands slick on the handle. It was a dream, but what choice did he have when they came rushing at him?
CHOP CHOP CHOP
They'd be all right.
In the Seven Seas exclusive Commodore area, he didn't find his family but he did find the waiter. His face was all pale, his eyes were white and he came charging like now he was desperate to serve corn soup, making up for past failures.
CHOP CHOP CHOP
It wasn't on purpose that it took ten blows to kill the waiter completely. He'd ask him a reasonable question, like "Where are my family?", then the waiter would dive in and he'd have to chop him again. His foot came off and he hobbled. His arm cleaved halfway through and dangled with blood spurting out. His chest cracked open and juice gushed everywhere, all over the floor.
"Where's my wife?" Chop. "Where's my daughter?" Chop. "Where's my corn soup?"
He was laughing and striking by the end, deep in his machine, working this new and improved destruction. It didn't help, and the waiter didn't speak once, but it helped. It didn't bother him either, because it wasn't really real. It was just like beating that groper in the club, which hadn't bothered him. He wasn't real either, not the way he was acting.
CHOP CHOP CHOP
> Three days of killing passed in a rampaging flash.
Somewhere in the midst of that he found Jenny and Lucy. They were as white-eyed and lost as all the others, stuck in a flood of bodies rocking back and forth along the ship, like water sloshing in a glass. At first he almost killed them, like the others, splattered off the walls, but at the last moment he stopped himself. He just managed to get them corralled in a room before the rest of the shorts-wearing guests could over-awe him.
CHOP CHOP CHOP
He killed them, then more came and he killed them too, getting pulled away from his family to follow a thick seam of their bodies, like a miner tunneling after coal. He was the father and the husband, and he had to make the world safe for his family. For a year he'd done nothing to help them, and now it was time.
CHOP CHOP CHOP
Worse still though, he didn't want to go to them. He didn't want to see them and face the truth that had been settling on him now for days.
This was it. There was no cure to whatever terrorist infection had struck his ship. There was no help. The radio in the radio room received no incoming signal, because there was no one left out there. He was alone on a ship of monsters. He was Theseus in a den of Minotaurs.
He roamed the ship and barely slept, killing them all. He killed and he killed. He found rolls of duct tape in engineering and wrapped his right hand tight around the axe handle to stop it slipping. He chopped and he chopped. At last he stood on the topmost deck, in the Mermaid bar area next to aluminum seats toppled by the wind and splattered with blood, and looked out over the ocean in every direction. The great liner was drifting on an open sea. Where even was this, not the Mediterranean or anywhere near Europe. The Atlantic? Somewhere off Africa, perhaps?
He'd had to search the whole ship again to find them. There were bloody trails everywhere; where bodies had crawled away after he'd half-hacked them, like Old Boy driving down his prison corridor. There were his own red palm marks in places, like something out of Blair Witch, and wavy clear lines from the head of his axe where he'd let it rasp along the walls in long, bloody rows.
He killed more still, the stragglers he'd somehow missed on a first pass, opening up their rooms and chopping them up inside, until on the whole silent ship, in the dark, there was just one door left unopened. Two people remained on the other side of it, hammering back at him for help and hunger and whatever else, as their only means of communication.
THUMP THUMP
He thumped back. This was their communication now. No more warm fingers in his hair. No more lovely Jenny guiding him home, telling him he'd only done what he'd had to. No more Lucy to feel proud of. He didn't need to open the door to see their white eyes and gray skin.
Man or boy? He didn't know. This was Jenny, who he needed, who'd made him. This was Lucy his darling girl, who needed him, who he and Jenny were making together.
THUMP THUMP
He stroked the door and whispered to them about all the things he'd wanted for them, all their dreams he was going to make come true, all the things he hadn't been able to think of or say for a year. They thumped and he thumped back and sobbed.
There didn't seem to be a lot of hope.
He didn't know how to get the liner's engine started. He didn't know where they were. He let himself slide down to his knees, resting his head against the cool door and listening to them thump on the other side. This choice he understood. He had to decide, and it could only be him. He was the only one here, and he couldn't just stay here, kneeling like this. It stank, for one. The bodies he'd left here days ago were putrefying, and the whole corridor smelt of raw vomit and rank meat. The stink was suffocating, crawling over his skin and worming into his body.
Flies droned. Maggots writhed. Near his feet a puddle of mushed brain had congealed, where a broken skull had disgorged it. It glistened and shone like rain on a dead jellyfish, while wriggling white maggots gorged themselves fatly.
The axe was right there, already cleaned and waiting. Ready. His family were behind the door.
Man or boy? Which was it? Which was it going to be?
5. COMA
One week after the demons died in Pittsburgh, Lara woke from her coma in a dark, cold RV, tucked snugly into her narrow bed. There was the low drone of a heater buzzing away somewhere out of sight, though the orange glow it cast rose up the walls of the tight, disheveled space.
Her head felt like a gong, rung too many times. Her body was a lead weight sucking her down, and every tiny movement ached. Breathing came unnaturally, with every suck in a conscious effort, as if it was possible for her to forget, or give up, and the bellows of her lungs would just stop working.
She remembered the demon snatching at her in the lead RV, squeezing her chest until it cracked, but the thoughts didn't come cleanly. They were mixed up with other memories, as if she was back in the water fountain in New York, with people grasping at her and some trying to calm her and some trying to tie a noose around her neck so they could tie her to a tree like Walter King.
A drum was beating somewhere. Her pulse.
She looked up and saw Cerulean standing in the corner of the room. He was smiling a weak, wan smile, echoed in a bloody gash on his throat a few inches down.
"It's a quote from the Bible," he said, as if continuing a conversation they'd already begun. Her head resounded, like the gong still reverberating. She tried to speak but the sound came out as a cough. Something foul tasting and slimy spat up her throat and dribbled out onto her cheek.
"As you do unto the least of these my brothers, so you do unto me."
Lara looked at him and around him. To her right there was another person, slumped in an unnatural pose in an armchair, head lolled to the side. Amo. He looked sickly and pale, like he was the one in a coma. Flashes of the flight from Pittsburgh tolled through her head, as Amo trying to pull her out of the demon's grip.
"It comes for us all, in the end," Cerulean said. "The demon. The least of these, the most, we're all weak inside. There's a weak place, and if it ever breaks, then we too break. Did I ever tell you that, when I was alive?"
She looked at him. He was two Roberts now, perhaps three, standing in a soup of orange glow and cold.
"You want to ask me, I can see it. What is my weak place, Cerulean? What is his?" He pointed at Amo. "The answer is simple, and it's a strength as much as a weakness. You are each other's, of course."
She remembered to breathe, and it came in as a painful gasp.
"If he loses you, he'll be broken. Oh, he'll still function. He'll shuffle along. He did so before, but then he was always going to LA to die. You saved him; he saved you."
She gulped.
"But there have been moments, haven't there? When you had doubts. When he failed you. So the question becomes, how much can you forgive? How much can any soul forgive, when they see the true depths of another?"
She watched him. At the same time she was in the plane above LA, a brand new nightmare then, while fire consumed the world below. Robert was at the controls and the plane was diving. Her stomach lurched and the horizon jumped upward; LA filled the cockpit glass, with the broad forecourt and impressive red tile roof of the Chinese Theater front and center.
"When is the crime too great?" Cerulean asked. "How can you forgive when the hole inside is too deep? How do you love when you find your love is a monster?"
The little plane shook as they fell. The wind rushed outside, tearing at the wings like a growling beast.
"Where do you go when you're alone, Lara?" he pressed on. "What do you do when there's nobody there to help? What kind of terrible seeds would you sow?"
The plane's propeller whined, and the Chinese Theater grew so close she could reach out and touch it, then there was a burst of light, and…
"Lara?"
Amo was there, leaning into her field of view, his hands clamped to her hand. His eyes were already wet and his lip trembling. The explosion played out over his face.
She managed one wea
k sob.
"You're here," he said, squeezing her hand like he was trying to squeeze his love into her. "You're safe. Thank God."
The coma was over, but she didn't feel safe. She knew that. Cerulean had told her and nothing could be clearer. The explosion kept playing out over Amo's face as he spoke.
* * *
Clarity came and went in degrees. People came to her bedside like she'd once stood at theirs: Amo as he recovered from Don's shotgun blast; Peters as he reeled from the loss of his Abigail; Anna as a little girl, waking up in night sweats screaming for her father.
They came to her, Amo and Peters and Anna and others, and some of the time she was lucid enough to see them. Sometimes she spoke to them, and was certain for hours at least that they really had come, but then Cerulean came too, and it seemed she talked for hours to him, but she couldn't have.
"You know I'm not here," he said, while she lay still at night with Amo on a makeshift cot by her side, snoring gently. "You know I'm a symptom."
"Of what?" she asked. Her throat was better, the pain in her ribs easing, and Macy had said soon she would be up and about. "What kind of sickness?"
Cerulean only swirled one hand in the air. "The underlying sickness. The T4. The hydrogen line. We all are, this plague, but perhaps you most of all."
"Me?"
He nodded. "You didn't have a coma, did you? But you're still here. You survived. What does that say?"
She cast her mind back. Casting back was easier, better than trying to remember things from today or the last week. Hours slipped through her fingers like little silver fish. "I'm stronger. Or a different kind of immune."
Cerulean shook his head. "You're not immune, Lara."
"I had a panic attack right around the time Amo had his coma. The dates line up."
"They don't. You're just a person who gets panic attacks, I'm afraid. Or used to. When was your last?"
"I don't remember."
He weighed this information for a quiet moment. "Your secret, then. Your deep inner well. Does Amo know? Of course not. We all have our demons, an original sin that makes us. Our shame."
Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Page 7
