The mind is a cage,
Mecklarin wrote in his book Life on Mars.
but even a cage has a door.
He'd built eleven cages so far, since Myra, and they'd all held, because they all had doors. He had the scars to prove it.
The first had been Lydia.
He'd found her on the outskirts of Brussels, nearly two years after the apocalypse. In those days after Myra died, he'd driven endlessly, working his circuit of Europe with a mobile concert trailer behind him, pumping out hundreds of decibels of sound across the still world, crawling along at five miles an hour. Sometimes he played music, warming classics like Marvin Gaye, Lou Reed, Aretha Franklin, and other times he played a recording of his own voice, promising safety and hope. All day he'd drive, drawing the dead out of their holes to follow him in long lines. At times he shot them. At times he just let them stretch along behind to the horizon, until they lost interest and drifted away.
At night he let off fireworks. He carried barrels of them and shot them into the sky for hours around a roaring fire, before falling asleep in the cab of his long-haul truck.
One morning he wasn't alone. He woke to his own music thundering out, and knew what it had to mean. Still he'd gone out bleary, fumbling for a gun, miming someone who believed the dead had somehow set it off by accident.
She'd been out there waiting for him, and she'd pointed her gun at his head.
"You're a big one," was the first thing she'd said.
Her name was Lydia Jones, an exchange student from the US, trapped in France when the apocalypse hit. It was winter again, and she held the gun to him while he set up a fire. It was hard not to cry while he worked, to feel that this was finally his chance at redemption.
It unnerved her.
"What are you crying for?" she'd demanded, jabbing the gun at him. She was younger, pale and thick-bodied. She wore her hair short like some kind of dyke, dressed in jeans, boots and a checked red shirt, nothing like Myra's wispy gypsy clothes, nothing like Myra's curving sexual frame.
It was like the Law wanted to make it easy for him, to remove any temptation of sexual attraction, and for that he was grateful.
"It's been so long," he said. "Since I saw anyone. That's all."
"Well stop it. I could just roll out any minute. Don't forget that."
He nodded and smiled at her. She was a wonder just because she was alive. Not his type at all, but a wonder still. Lydia Jones from Arkansas, only twenty-three.
He served her tea and a platter of caramel cookies. They talked across the fire, mostly about the old days; nostalgia for TV shows, about their families and jobs, highlights from the journeys they'd made, and he made himself amenable. Trust perhaps would be slow to come, he knew that, but still at some point he'd have to introduce the cage. Everything was a gamble now. There was a line to be walked, between her hating him enough and her coming to accept the vision he offered.
It grew dark and they separated. That night and every night after she retreated into the woods alone, like a fish drawing out the line, where she slept far out of his vision.
"Follow me and I'm gone," she said. "If I don't kill you first. You'll never see me again."
He didn't follow her. He let her come to him.
After a week they could laugh. Guardedly, carefully. They had a cooking roster, and even simple games they would play together, luxuriating in the company and the sound of each other's voices. Sitting around a fire over dinner one night he raised the question of the future, and she stared into the flames.
"I suppose we all die. I don't see anyone coming to save us."
"That's too desperate," he said. "There must be another way."
She snorted. "What? You and me, are we going to restart civilization?"
He'd shrugged.
"Dream on," she said, wagging her gun at him, never far from reach and often in her hand. "We're not even the same species."
After nine days they agreed to travel forward together. He bided his time. It took time for her to grow lax, but it was only natural. It was human nature. So on the sixteenth night he sprung the trap. It was a momentary lapse on her part, leaving her gun on a log behind her while she went to the pot on the fire for more Frank and Beans. It was the first mistake she'd made, and he used it.
He charged.
The moment he was up she saw it, and reacted with impressive speed, kicking the pot so it swung up and struck him on the hip as he came on, spilling boiling beans across his belly and thighs.
But it didn't stop him. He came on still, striding through the fire, and she sent one meaty right hook that caught him wildly in the throat, but it didn't put him down. Instead he fell on her, and beneath his much greater weight she was crushed. She cried out and kicked, she dug her fingers into his cheeks and pried for his eyes, reminding of Myra so long ago, crushed to the snow.
But he was a different man now. He defended himself enough to keep his eyes intact, though he couldn't stop her nails raking deep weals into his cheeks and throat. Her fists around his back dug into his kidneys and her knees gouged away at his thighs, trying to jab into his groin. But he didn't relent. He lay atop her and waited for exhaustion to come, defending himself where he could, until finally she stopped and began to sob.
He lifted her then, arms trapped at her sides, and her thrashing started with renewed, desperate vigor. Her feet hammered at his legs, her head lashed back and beat on his cheeks. He carried her toward his trailer, toward the enclosed section at the back where the concert techs and roadies had once worked on speaker cables and amplification, which he'd since made into a narrow but workable living space.
She'd never seen the door before; neatly recessed into the pattern on the trailer's side. She'd never seen him go in and out. When she saw it now she began to scream.
"No! Let me go! Matthew, let me go!"
He carried her in, flicked on the halogen light, and then set her down awkwardly in the corner. There was a bed and a toilet, a sink and a shower hooked up to water tanks he'd installed on the roof. There was a desk and a TV, and posters from movies on the walls, a cooking range and even a little refrigerator humming quietly.
Her eyes bugged wide as he stepped back, and she saw all this. She saw the door behind him close; sheer metal like the walls, reinforced with a touchpad lock. She watched as he keyed in a code and the locks bolted electronically. She stared as he turned back to face her, and she mumbled, "No."
He knew what she expected, what she feared, but that had to be quashed fast. There were different kinds of fears, and if his plan was to have any chance of success, she had to have no fear of that.
He dropped to his knees by the door. He opened a nearby counter drawer and took out a sharp kitchen knife, which pulled a gasp from her, but swiftly he slid it across the floor to her. For a long moment she stared before snatching it up.
"You said we were all going to die," he said, as softly as he could, though he too was quivering with the blows she'd landed and his own kind of fear; that this would fail, that there was no real way to make this system work, no matter what Lars Mecklarin suggested in his book. There were so many ways it could fail.
"You said we were different species," he went on. "So let's stop lying, Lydia. Stop pretending there's any point to us being alive. Kill me, if you want. Kill yourself too. But I've had enough of aimless roaming. We are not leaving this room until we decide, one way or the other."
She stared at him, at the knife, at the door code-panel, then rolled to her knees.
"I knew you were a psycho. I knew it. What the hell do you want?"
He slumped lower, making himself no threat, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She had the knife. He had nothing, only the door code in his head.
"I want hope," he said. "It's the First Law in the Bible. Go forth and multiply."
It was the first time he'd said the words out loud. Even with Myra he'd kept it to himself, fearing ridicule. Now he got it.
She laughed, loud and a
ngry. "Go forth and multiply? Are you goddamn kidding me?"
"It's the only way," he said. "I'm sorry for this. Truly, I am. And if you want to kill me, I won't stop you. I swear. But at least let's be honest. Let's not be selfish any more, Lydia. Out there, we are the walking dead. And we just keep on, roaming the world like we'll ever find something that can save us, but we won't. I lost my daughter and my wife, I was a good man, but I won't find them out there, because they're gone. They died for nothing, and we're going to die out there too, achieving nothing. Building nothing."
He paused, feeling the dramatic effect build. "But what we do here could save us. You and I. Because we are the same species, Lydia. We are compatible, when pleasure isn't a part of it. It's not love, it's simple biology. All that we need, we have right here."
She stared at him, the last of her fear curdling to rage.
"You want us to screw? I told you, I'm gay! You goddamn idiot. I'm gay!"
"You're a woman," he said calmly. "I don't find you attractive physically and I'm sure you're not interested in me, but this is not about that. This is about having a child, about breathing some damn life back into the world out there, because it's too empty now. Don't you agree with that? Don't you stand out in the forest alone at night, and just goddamn weep for all that we've lost?"
He stared at her, trying to help her see with the force of his gaze. "I do. It hits me again every day. So I need you, and you need me." He looked around then, at the small prison cell. "Could I have done this differently? I wish I could, but if I'd told you any other way, would you have listened? No. You'd be gone in an instant, just like you said. So I'm saying it here. I want you to make the choice for us both. Does the human race die with us, in this shitty box? Or does it go on?"
She stared at him. His words probably sounded mad, but there was truth in there too. Enough truth for him, hopefully enough for her.
She pushed herself to her feet. She was still exhausted, but she had strength enough to stand.
"Do you really think I'll say yes to this mad bullshit? I'd rather die." She pointed the knife at his face. "You don't get to offer me that choice."
Then she darted in, and she plunged the knife down, and he didn't move. It slid right down into the gap between his shoulder and collarbone, like a hand into a glove. She gave a surprised little gasp, he grunted, then out came the blood. He took a breath and toppled sideways.
"I-" he mumbled, then he was lying on the floor, his head pressed against one of the cabinets. He'd installed all these himself, teaching himself to weld, dreaming of the day they'd get their use. Now, for however long it took her to eat all the food he'd laid in stock, they'd be used.
His vision was getting dark already, with the blade probably pressing against his heart or his lungs, but he could see enough to watch her jerk back. She looked horrified. She looked at the bloody knife in her hand and dropped it.
"Don't … let me … die," he managed in a croak, before the darkness closed in.
It was touch and go for a time. He almost died. He lost a lot of blood. But in the end, he didn't die.
She stopped the flow of the blood, and put crude stiches into him. She bandaged him well and made him comfortable with a pillow and blanket there on the floor, so when he woke a day or so later it was into a different atmosphere.
She tended him. There was food and she fed him. Days later, it was hard to tell with only a bulletproof window in the roof for natural light, she sat him up and they spoke.
"Now seriously," she said, neither angry or amused, just flat and serious. "What's the code?"
He looked back. "You haven't chosen yet, then. You have to, Lydia. I can't let you go out there just to die alone."
She tried a time longer, perhaps thinking he'd soften, thinking he'd grow warm and relent, but he didn't, and in the end she went ballistic. She smashed up the room. She beat him with her fists, and he didn't fight back. She took a go at torture, slicing his body with the knife in different places, breaking one of his fingers, burning him with hot metal glowing from the stove. At the peak she held a glowing red fork an inch away from his eye and demanded the code on pain of being blinded.
"You need to choose," was all he said back. "We die or we don't. I don't need my eyes for either."
She almost did it. He could feel the heat of the fork singing his eyelashes. But then she relented. She went to her corner and quietly started to cry.
Days followed where she barely responded. She didn't eat. It seemed like she'd made her choice. He never went too near her, but now he cared for her. Not like he did for Myra, not forcing her to eat, but offering food and drink. She didn't eat it. She grew weak and thin.
He'd been in this place before, back on the Summer Dawn, outside the door where his family lay dead. He'd been there after Myra died, roaming the forests and waiting to die. There was only one way to keep her alive now. After all, every cage had a door.
So he let her out.
It was a brilliant sunny day, and she was so weak she could only exit with his help. The road outside was warm, the green trees blowing in a gentle wind. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Your children will know this," he said to her. "Our children. You'll share it with them, and isn't that worth something? Once you're pregnant, you can lock me in there if you want." He pointed to the prison trailer. "You can change the code and leave me to die. You'll be free, you could even try to give yourself an abortion. But why would you? I will love our children, Lydia. I'll try to make them happy. There is nothing I want more in the world than to make these forests ring with their laughter."
She wept, and he escorted her back to the trailer prison, though he didn't close the door. She didn't fight. She lay down on her bed and he left her there, gazing up at the blue sky through the roof window. Outside, he did the things required of him. The device he'd found was simple, just a syringe with a section of soft but sturdy rubber tubing. He filled it, and set it on a silver tray alongside an unopened pregnancy kit, with a little tub of lube and a candy bar for a treat.
He slid the items in through the open door. Leaving it open now terrified him, but it was necessary. At some stage she had to want this too. She wasn't Myra, and the cage had to be of her own making, brought on by a shifted vision of what the world was. He couldn't keep her in a cage forever, not if he wanted a healthy new world.
Now was the time for deciding, and he already knew his decision. If she ran, he would let her go.
There was no benefit to keeping her any longer. To run this 'Stockholm' cycle on her again would only be needlessly cruel, and break her in the process. She would never build her own cage. She would just hate him forever, and he didn't want another child birthed in hate, birthed stillborn. He'd never get a second, and what use was she to him if she wasn't a sustainable resource? It would just be a greater, deeper waste.
"I'll be out here," he said softly. "You can kill me, if you want. You can run. I promise I won't stop you."
She didn't leave the cell again that day. The next morning when he woke, sleeping in a camping bag by the fire, he found she'd closed the door on herself. He knocked before typing in the code and entering. She was sitting on the bed, watching an old movie. The silver tray lay on the floor untouched.
He made her a meal. He served it on the table. He took away the silver tray with its syringe, and left her alone with the door open and 'Atonement' on the TV. That evening he slid a fresh syringe in, and again she slept with the door closed.
For those few days it felt that his world hung by a single gossamer thread. Inside that cell she might be transforming, like a caterpillar turning to a butterfly. It was terrifying and beautiful. He had no idea what would emerge, or if anything ever would. Perhaps she would choose to die, and he'd find her lying on the floor in a puddle of blood.
It took two months. They barely spoke, no more than grunts, but she started using the syringe, and then the pregnancy test. When she returned the silver tray one day with the test showing tw
o blue lines, he'd wept. He climbed in and knelt beside her and held her hand and sobbed and made all kinds of promises about what kind of father he'd be, and she petted his head, like a dog.
"I'll kill it," she said, as she ruffled his hair. "When it's born. You'll see."
But she didn't. When it was born she cried, a little girl, and she held her close, and whispered into her tiny ear.
Soon they were moving again. She fell pregnant a second time. They met a man in Belgium, and another woman in Amsterdam, and he ran the cycle again. Moaning, in shock, reaching for rifles and guns they wouldn't fire. They were adults and children at once, like he had been, like Lydia had been, so he showed them the truth.
The First Law. He made their responsibility plain. He gave them their cages and when the time came, with Lydia's help now, he opened the door. And one by one, man-by-man and woman-by-woman, they stayed.
Now there was New LA.
Its people lay spread before him, outwardly strong but living far more in denial than he'd ever dealt with before. He knew the sickness they harbored in their hearts, had battled with it many times himself; that there was some kind of hope outside themselves. They still believed some higher force would come and save them, whether it was other survivors, or the bunkers, or somehow the zombies themselves, returned to life with some miracle cure.
It was a deep sickness. He'd read the comic, spread far and wide with a disturbing degree of confidence, as if there was no other possible way to be. They had overcome challenges before, but never even imagined a man like Drake.
It made for a community filled with falsehood. They believed in demons and friendly zombies, in bunkers and cures and in one man in particular. Amo, who lay on the floor bleeding now. It wasn't pretty, it didn't make him glad, but there was no peaceful way to undo all that propaganda. He had to make them see the reality that the only cure lay within each one of them.
They were still living in the past. They still took the freedoms of the past for granted. Drake missed those days too, he missed his wife and their life together, but they were gone, and it was a terrible waste to pretend otherwise. It was a crime against the First Law to live falsely, but for twelve long years these people had lived that way, because to face the real truth was too hard for them. He understood that, even had some sympathy. To accept the true reality, that you were now a breeder generation, and the same would be true of your children and their children and so on for many decades with no hope of anything else, that was the hardest truth of all.
Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Page 19
