"We d-don't know, Anna," Jake stammered between pants, picking up the thread. "But it's big. We're w-working to map these five markers to a meaning based on patterns we've observed before, but you have to remember that these markers are only five of hundreds embedded in the line. It's far denser in its information signature than, say, a fingerprint. We're talking t-terabytes of data. All we know is that the hydrogen line has gone wild, and it's not just limited to us here. At first we thought it might be d-demons incoming, I know that's what you're thinking now, but it's not."
She'd just reached that supposition. If it was demons that was huge. It was an imminent threat. "How do you know?"
"Because none of us feel a thing. That's still the best early warning signal, especially amongst the sensitives like Peters. Plus Sulman sent a ping off the hydrogen line relays we set up in Maine and Bordeaux, and they're both reporting the same crazy readings. This change seems to be global, and whatever it is, it's seismic. There's no telling what havoc it could wreak."
Anna took a mental step back, trying to grasp the entirety of what they were telling her. The whole hydrogen line? Not demons incoming, but then…
"Is this the bunkers? Are they cheating us?"
"There's no way to know. We can't triangulate on a source for the signal, not now and not before. It's just everywhere at once, in the air. We can't track it."
Anna's mind raced on. Both the ocean and the demons operated on the hydrogen line, controlled from outside. It plucked the strings of their brains, it directed them, and for a time she'd used that as a weapon against them. She'd baited the Bordeaux bunker with the bodies of her team, then used simple locally transmitted codes through the hydrogen line shield to entrap every demon that came, by reversing the behavior of the ocean.
A thought dropped into that knowledge like a cold, shiny dime down a wishing well, splashing into the water and sending ripples out in every direction.
"Bordeaux," she said, and turned urgently to Lucas. "What are your readings?"
"The same. Sulman pinged it. But yes."
But yes, that was all he had to say. The enormity of it grew as the ripples spread, becoming tsunami waves that threatened to shoot up from the well in a huge, wrecking geyser.
"What?" Ravi said, still a step behind.
Anna couldn't speak, still reeling with the repercussions, so it was Jake that answered.
"It means Bordeaux may be c-compromised. The ocean may change their programming and let the demons out. They could go free."
The demons could go free. More ripples flowed out, hammering at her mistakes. If she'd insisted they'd kept the Bordeaux shield tuned to an enforced signal, perhaps they'd be safe now; but then there'd been no hint of a global change in the hydrogen line back then, and Lucas and Jake had lobbied to use that shield and transmitter as part of their research. She'd agreed because it made good sense with minimal risk. If they'd just sealed the place up with cement they'd be fine, but once again, there was valuable experimental data down there, trapped in the ocean's bodies.
But, but, but.
"So, they're out again?" Ravi asked. Disbelief vied with fear in his voice; so different to the playful, flirting tone of a few minutes ago.
"They may be out, or they may be worse."
"Worse?" he asked, while Anna was already three steps ahead and planning her response.
"We don't kn-know," Jake said. "The hydrogen line could control any element of behavior. It could t-turn all the ocean against us again. Perhaps it could turn them all into demons. Maybe it could make them all grow to be twenty foot tall. We just don't know."
"Shiiiit," Ravi breathed. "You guys should've said that on the walkie."
"We did," said Lucas coolly. "Now Anna, we need to-"
She interrupted him, taking control, which was what she had these periods of rest for, to make her better at leading in crisis.
"We need to get to Bordeaux, I know. The Pilatus is at the airport, I'll take it, Ravi will fly with me, and Jake too. We sealed the bunker up with the hatch covers, which may hold for a time if they're trying to break out. Perhaps we can get down there close enough to switch the shield back to containment remotely. Jake?"
Jake nodded. "It's possible, if I can just remodulate the-"
Anna cut him off. "Good. Lucas, I need you on this," she tapped the graph on the tablet, "break it down however you can. I need to know what these markers mean and where they're coming from, and I need some way of tracking the demons, if they really have escaped. I'm not going back to living in fear, not knowing what's out there. Is that clear?"
The things she was asking were probably impossible, but Lucas swallowed them down with a nod.
"Take my Jeep," he said, handing over the keys. "You can be in the air in an hour, at Bordeaux in a few."
"Has anyone contacted New LA?"
Jake shook his head. "We tried after the ping to Maine, but nobody's answering."
That wasn't unusual. Amo usually kept the comms room staffed, but it was harvest over there now and it wouldn't be strange for them to have pulled all bodies in, especially with their numbers split to Sacramento.
"Keep trying. If you get through you warn them, then you get Amo and you patch him to me. I'll leave my walkie tuned to base."
"Understood," Lucas said, "you should go."
Anna cast a glance to Ravi by her side, to Jake just ahead, and for a moment was struck by how beautiful the setting sun was over the ancient city's skyline of mosques, like soap bubbles rising off the hot dry streets. Racing toy boats was already a thing of the far distant past.
"Come on," she said, and started across the square at a run.
INTERLUDE 5
More dead.
Drake stood in the midst of the wreckage, with some people screaming, some people dying, and blood, flames and smoke everywhere.
Amo lay prone at his feet, the mayor of this town. He'd ruined things. He'd made his choice and now he was going to own it. One of Drake's own children had just died, because there'd been no time to set up the bombs properly, because of this damn superstition about demons. One child plus how many people had been on that RV?
It was a waste, the worst crime possible under the First Law, but he couldn't have let them leave, couldn't have given them time to regroup and prepare. This had been his only chance to take control.
The dark woman across the way was still calling out, "Demon!" She looked sick, slouching against the doorframe. There was something strange about her, not just because she was pointing directly at him. She raised a strange cold sensation in his belly that ran back into his spine; not fear or even anticipation, but something different and not unpleasant. It intrigued him and he marked it out for later investigation.
For now he had work to do.
Faces gazed at him in fear from the fleet of stationary vehicles. Faces gazed up at him from the floor, spattered with blood. His shoulder throbbed where Amo had shot him, and a trickle of blood flowed smoothly down his chest.
He pressed his hand to it. It was funny, really. If he'd been better prepared, Amo wouldn't have gotten a single shot off. Maybe nobody would have needed to die. But then he'd been making mistakes since the start, and wasn't that the only way to learn?
Myra came back into his thoughts, as she often did. She'd been his first mistake.
She hadn't even looked at him after the rape. She hadn't looked at him when he fed her, holding food to her lips because she couldn't do it herself with her hands tied, or when he poured it in liquid form down her throat when she wouldn't chew. She hadn't looked at him when he washed her, or when he talked to her, or when they watched DVDs together, or when he talked about possible baby names.
She didn't look at him when he did it again.
It seemed to him then that it was never as bad as the first time, out there in the cold snow, flattened to the frost like a piece of crushed liver, but perhaps in other ways it was worse. He couldn't really tell, because she didn't make a sound in compl
aint, didn't say a word at all.
The change in her stunned him. She'd gone from vivacious, aggressive, outlandishly sexual and overtly extroverted to this silent, gazing body in the bed to which she was tethered. In conversations that were all one-sided, he tried to reason this out with her.
"I don't want to keep you tied up, Myra," he'd say. "Honestly. I don't want to do this either. Don't you see, I'm just the messenger? It's in my genes, it's in yours. I don't enjoy it any more than you. If you just speak, say something. If you look at me, maybe I can let you go. If you promise not to run. We're remaking the world here."
He was a child, back then.
Now, standing before the smoking RV and this town's terrified people, he felt very differently, and that was because of Myra. She had beaten the last of the doubt out of him, in the eleven long months it had taken for her to conceive, carry and birth his first child into the new world.
When he looked out at the scene before him, these people of New Los Angeles, he saw his failure with Myra writ large. He didn't take any kind of sadistic pleasure in such destruction. It wasn't good that they were broken while he was high, it didn't bring him any kind of satisfaction. It was simply necessary. For all the sacrifices so far, for all the billions of his people lost, this was necessary. Because without this, without the First Law, what was left?
No happiness. No joy. No fathers and no daughters, no lovers and no friends. Just a sad whimper into the night, bodies crumpled under their own weight and beginning the slow march into decay. Emptiness. Silence. A sad and lonely Earth covered in the scars of its own dead, forever.
Only the First Law could prevent it.
The Law had come to him in fits and starts during those long winter months in Germany, where every night trying with Myra became a torture for them both. Afterwards he'd lie there and hold her, or sit and stare at the side of her face, attempting to put words to what he was feeling and frame excuses that would make it all right.
All self-pity, he knew now. For a time he looked outwardly for guidance, reading whatever books on human interaction and spirituality he could find in English in local bookstores. There were few, dominated by the rows of bright, optimistic books by Lars Mecklarin; a pop psychologist whose ideas about controlling behavior to achieve happiness inspired him, but offered no valid excusing philosophy to underpin what he'd done.
So he looked wider. He made a brief foray into the Bible, at first feeling foolish for every word read, having been a casual atheist for as long as he could remember, but it quickly sucked him in. He read it from cover to cover in a matter of days, fascinated by the insights it offered. Within its pages he found a balance of both recrimination and permission. In the first few chapters lay the exact thing he'd been looking for; the pivotal underlying message of the whole damned book, rendered in the clear, clean prose of the King James version:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Go forth, multiply and rule, was what it boiled down to. In that ancient book this primal message came long before Moses and his commandments, before the wrecking of Sodom and Gomorrah, before Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego entered the lion's den, before Joseph's coat and Job's trials and Jesus' stations of the cross, before any of those others whose lives and teachings formed the basis for so much of Western civilization.
At the base of it all was this simple message, this fundamentally aggressive order of acquisition: Go forth, multiply and rule.
He had to read the whole book to fully understand, but then his prior bumblings and fumblings towards a muddled form of righteousness all snapped into diamond-bright focus. It was the first law in the Bible, from back in a time when the Bible was the ultimate guide to survive and thrive in a hostile, terrifying world. Go forth, multiply and rule meant out-populate the enemy. Crush him under your numbers. Find spiritual meaning and safety through sheer weight of bodies, then bring with that weight the judgment to brand order atop chaos and raise reason from confusion.
Only then could you have Jesus. Only once you outnumbered your enemy, once you'd sown the world with your seed, could there be kindness and love.
It resonated with him, and he refined it further while Myra lay silently by, her belly steadily swelling. At times he got drunk like Noah in his tent, and in his drunkenness fell from the dizzying heights of righteousness, and took her again, because wasn't she the aggressive one now, refusing the reality of their lonely situation? Wasn't her resistance a form of satanic defiance, her snake in the tree of good and evil? Even then, fuelled by an inbred mish-mash of biblical rhetoric and his own endless need, he'd believed he was following the First Law.
Of course those childish days were behind him now. The days when it was rape, when he allowed the liquor to make his excuses for him, when he eased his own suffering through her deeper pain, were long gone. The temptation was there as ever, to see this great mayor 'Amo' felled and his people cowed, to ravage his women and grind his men into dust, but he wasn't tempted to indulge it. He couldn't, and it was Myra who taught him that too.
The birth had been horrendous. It lasted days, with her screaming wordlessly on the bloody, stinking bed like an animal. He'd prepared, he'd read everything he could on midwifery and the right kind of drugs and how to ease the baby out, but in the end he could do little more than stand by and encourage her on, though she wouldn't hold his hand and she wouldn't look him in the eye.
On and on it went, but still the child didn't come. He'd read about twists in the umbilical cord that could choke it, about the baby facing the wrong way and blood flow being cut off, about Caesarean births and premature births and birth abnormalities, and he thought about them ceaselessly as she wailed and bled. In the end he made the hard decision, that there was only one way to save either of them now.
Myra was pale and barely breathing when he approached her with the scalpel, glinting silver in the morning light. She didn't speak, only let out intermittent cries. Her blood was everywhere; so much leaking from inside her that she surely couldn't last much longer. It was a mercy, he told himself, as he bent to her stomach and made the first cut.
He didn't do it well. He didn't do it right, and in all the mess he dropped the blade. There was her pale tan stomach, and here was a ribbon of slit muscle, and here were plump organs bathed in dark blood, and here slit the amniotic sack, and…
Of course the child was already dead. Stillborn, too long in the birthing and already turning gray. With the last of her strength Myra finally looked at him, and cursed him with some Portuguese word he didn't know, and attempted to spit in his face, though the saliva only dribbled down her chin.
So she died, in ignominy and despair, and it was his fault.
That was a hard time, probably harder even than losing Jenny and Lucy. At least with them there'd been good memories to cling to once they were gone. With Myra though all his pleasant memories of early frolics and wild sex had been replaced by the ungainly, grunting emptiness of the last eleven months.
All for this, for a baby, and now here lay the baby before him, nestled like an acorn in its seed casing, never to breathe, never to go forth, never to multiply.
It broke him for a time, and he wandered the forests and drank. He left her body there, not daring to face the accusation in her eyes. It soon became clear to him that what he'd done to her was not only a crime, but the greatest crime of all. Even his readings of Lars Mecklarin had taught him as much.
He'd wasted her. She was an instrument of life, the only route for the human race to survive, and he'd used her up just to balm his own suffering. Even a dog treated that way would rebel, but this had been a woman. When he hadn't been abusing her physically he'd abused her mentally too, spending all those hours weeping into her hair and begging for her understanding and forgiveness. He'd drained and sucked the life ou
t of her, and was it any surprise her own body had killed the child inside it?
He had poisoned the well with his own endless need.
Realizing that, and his guilt, was the moment he began to truly grow up. Standing now before all these people, preparing to change their world forever, he took pride in the man he had become.
Better. Wiser. Stronger.
In their eyes there was terror, just like Myra before he crushed her into the snow, and that was good for the beginning. He'd seen it many times now, and learned how to channel it into something far more productive. Everything he'd built so far had come on the back of that revelation.
The Law had to be unbreakable. They had to accept that from the outset, and understand that no force on Earth could change it. The Law was simply an objective reality, hard to look at but no less true for being ignored. But these people had ignored it for far too long.
Because of that, they were going to die. It was simple and certain. From fifty-seven people they had produced only five children in twelve years. In a generation their numbers would halve, in two they'd be cut to a quarter, and there'd be no hope of having the genetic diversity to bring the race back. Those that remained would inbreed, sicken and die.
The best cure came before the patient even got sick. What seemed mad, too cruel, too demanding was really just a necessity, and he, Matthew Drake, just held up a mirror so they could see the truth.
He'd refined his tactics in the ten years since Myra. For her he'd offered no choices, nothing better for her to hope for or worse for her to fear. He'd offered only cruelty around the clock, and her silence had been her only means of revolt. He'd offered no hope of relent, and Lars Mecklarin himself confirmed that that was a hopeless path. For cogs in a machine it could work. For dumb animals plowing a field it could work. But not for people.
The true path to controlling people lay not in the stick but the carrot, in offering hope for the future. To never offer that to Myra showed how weak, how truly unprepared he'd been.
Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Page 18
