Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws

by Michael John Grist

  But truth was truth.

  "Demon," the woman called again, sagging to her knees now.

  He walked toward her, through the wreckage and the smoke, over bodies and parting his flood of children around him. All eyes were on him now; people in the doorways of RVs, gathered at the windows, wide-eyed and terrified.

  "Where are your demons?" he asked her. Not a shout, but loud enough for everyone to hear. "Where?" He spread his good arm and looked into terrified eyes all around. In most places his children were standing again, returned to position by their respective RVs. His adults, including Lydia, were now moving amongst the wounded, tending where they could. Sally came running toward him, holding a bandage with worry on her face, but he waved her away. It was a flesh wound in his shoulder only.

  "Where are your demons?" he asked again, louder now, into the terrible silence. The wreck of the RV was no longer blazing so loudly, and all engines had been turned off, so his voice rose over everything.

  This was his first challenge to Amo's propaganda, and he had to make it hit. There was no way he could have planned it, but it was perfect. Amo had encouraged these people in their delusion like a cult leader, living off their adulation. It was true that under his leadership they'd done wonderful things, things Drake would never have considered attempting. Amo clearly had a power to inspire that he'd never shared. But still he'd led them on the wrong path.

  He hadn't been strong enough. He hadn't taken that blind leap into darkness, like Drake. Even though all the genetics textbooks he'd read hinted that you needed at least a hundred base genetic pairs to have any hope of sustainable procreation, he'd still tried. He hadn't given up when he'd failed, and he'd pressed on again and again, refining his Stockholm cycle down to a science and an art.

  Now he had forty-six people before him, minus however many had just died in the blast. This would be his largest cage yet, and everything rested on it. With New LA as part of his genetic pool, for the first time since he'd started following the First Law, he had a real chance at lifting the human race out of the abyss. He could make it work. He just had to make them take those first few steps into the real world.

  And he knew just what to say. He knew just how to put them into the cage with him, and make it stick.

  "New LA!" he said, his voice a deep bass that demanded attention. Even the dark woman fell silent now, slumped on the RV's steps. He turned to take them all in, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and the growing cold in his belly. "You say you're afraid of demons? I say you're afraid of the wrong ones. My name is Matthew Drake, and I've come to remake your world."

  ANNA 2

  The Pilatus was in Istanbul airport where Anna had left it, Hangar 7, with a bellyful of chemically rejuvenated jet fuel and a freshly painted white star flag on its flank.

  "Your Air Force One," she'd said, when she'd proudly presented it to Amo a month or so earlier via Skype.

  He'd given a wry, obviously flattered smile. "Capacity seven."

  "Eight at a squeeze," Anna had corrected. "Though who would sit in the mayor's lap, I don't know."

  He'd laughed. He'd obviously been getting better. The cost of what he'd done so long ago in Maine was finally getting paid off, and as if in sympathy the world was moving forward.

  Now this.

  "Chocks and engine," she called to Jake, then, "please scan the runway," to Ravi.

  By the Pilatus' side she heaved on the access hatch and it unfurled smoothly down, like a slit segment of an orange. The door tip clanked neatly onto the oil-stained cement floor, offering five steps leading up and in, which she took and slid easily into her leather cockpit seat. The air inside smelled of ozone and over-polished leather.

  She fired up the battery and ran a quick visual diagnostic on all systems. Lights blinked on the instrument panel, all within parameters. The display screen booted and started automated pre-flight engine testing.

  "Anna, pick up."

  The familiar voice came over the walkie and she clicked to respond.

  "Here, Peters, what is it?"

  "You asked Lucas for a way to see the demons. It is me."

  She'd considered that. He was sensitive after his time with Julio. "Are you getting anything now?"

  "No. Perhaps. Something big is happening, it is hard to distinguish. I'm coming now."

  It was unavoidable that he would, though she'd hoped if she got away quickly, he might stay behind and look after the rest of them. Leaving half her crew behind without a single flight-trained pilot made her very uncomfortable, but Peters would be essential to the success of her mission too. How else were they going to track demons without him?

  "We're waiting," she said, and clicked off.

  "The runway south is looking cracked," Ravi reported in, his voice a crackle. "We'd have to do a lot of positioning. But one of the feeder lanes is completely clear."

  Anna frowned. "Feeder lane?"

  "Yeah, from the terminal to the runway. They're not very long, but they are the only flat section."

  Anna started calculating. "How long?"

  "Long enough. I'd guess a few hundred feet. Say three hundred."

  Take off in three hundred feet, slightly more if she got up to a low lick of speed tracking up the terminal beforehand. It was possible, but she'd have to near break off the steering wheel to achieve it.

  Jake's head popped into the cockpit beside her. "The engine's good, Anna, cleared for flight, just as we left it."

  "Peters is coming," she answered. "Let's get her ready to go."

  "Aye aye," he said, and rolled into the co-pilot's seat as she walked through the pre-ignition sequence. Even with the Pilatus, one of the most advanced single-prop planes in existence, there were dozens of tiny, subtle things that could go wrong, from flooding the engine early to not flooding it enough, misfiring a sparkplug, failing to switch engine gear rapidly, not warming the propeller belt gradually.

  A lot of that had been automated, but after flying for over a year Anna had learned to trust her instincts over the machine's. If it screwed up it often wouldn't know it had screwed up, and would keep on doing whatever the mistake was until the plane tore itself to bits.

  In the old world they had program updates and ultimately insurance for such unlikely software glitches, but not any more. Now it was grit and oil and grind it out.

  "Check," Jake answered as she worked down the list, until the engine itself coughed to life and she eased the plane out of the hangar with Ravi waving her on. In back Peters pulled in in his BMW.

  "Your tailfin is listing, Anna," he called.

  Of course. He never liked it that she took off like that. For her it was a kind of lucky precaution.

  "Hop in," she called back, as she brought them up to the start-point Ravi had picked out, with just enough feeder lane to take off on a wing and prayer. "You too, Ravi."

  Peters climbed up, and Jake ceded the co-pilot's seat to him smoothly. Ravi followed and pulled the ladder-door up after him with a slam.

  "Your fuel gauge is well," Peters said, then turned his plain, Nordic face toward her. "This plane is fit to fly."

  "Fit to fly," she answered, and punched the accelerator.

  The propeller revved up, the wheels turned, and they began the hard acceleration on the lane.

  "You are mistaken," Peters said, alarmed in his calm, flat way. "This is not a runway. That is the runway." He pointed.

  "The runway's buckled," Anna answered. "Picking a route through will take too long, and we don't have time."

  Peters nodded. "Then you must go faster, Anna."

  She answered by pushing the propeller beyond its safeties. You could take all the precaution in the world, but when it came down to it, hell, you were lifting a chunk of metal into the air. Risk was baked into the cake.

  The Pilatus rushed and rumbled, the propeller span at a high, dizzying whine, and the runway raced by. Anna was pressed back in her seat, the controls went loose and wobbly as they always did as the nose began to l
ift, then the craft bounced once, caught, and took to the air just as the feeder line ended in a hard wrinkle where it conjoined to the main runway.

  "Phew," Jake breathed from behind.

  They climbed up, and after a moment of gaining altitude Anna swung them toward the west.

  * * *

  Three hours in to the five-hour flight, somewhere ten thousand feet above Italy, Lucas came in on the radio.

  "You need to see this, Anna. Jake."

  Jake accessed a passing satellite and, with the help of Sulman in their basecamp in Istanbul, downloaded a new set of graphs and data. While Peters piloted the plane, Anna, Jake and Ravi hunched over Jake's tablet in the back and scrolled through fresh datasets while Lucas explained what they were looking at.

  "In trying to decode the hydrogen line changes, I hit on something that seems to be the key. But it's strange, not at all what I expected, and really I only included those variables by accident, as they were part of a larger table I was using for the most recent experimental set."

  "What variables?" Anna asked. "What did you find, Lucas?"

  "Something that may shift our whole conception of the hydrogen line, the T4, all of it," his crackly voice answered. "Look at the first graph again, with the divergence. You see how those five markers were on similar paths before they spread out? We'd assumed that was some sort of resting state. The hydrogen line in nature, as it always has been, with the current divergence as abnormality. But here's the kink, where things get strange: what if they're both abnormalities? Neither is 'right' or 'wrong', they're just different."

  "What?"

  "I mean neither the line before the divergence or the line after are natural."

  Anna frowned. It didn't add up to much, but she could follow the logic. "I'm with you."

  "So take that idea, and look at the second set of data."

  Jake selected, and an array of spiral diagrams popped up, each with a range of spiky lines and columns radiating out in a circular shape from a central point, like strange hands on a clock, each stretching to varying lengths and with a range of thicknesses. Some had very short, stubby protrusions, while others were long and thing and some had a mixture.

  "What's this?" Ravi asked.

  "I recognize them," Anna said. "But I didn't even realize we'd hung onto that data."

  "What data?" Ravi asked.

  "I keep it all, Anna," Lucas answered. "And Ravi, these are human hydrogen line signatures from the Bordeaux bunker. You remember the long halls with the map screens? They were tracking every coma survivor on the planet, to see when and where the infection would begin. This is that data, transcribed. It was by using this data that we gained our first insight into how the hydrogen line works, and isolated the five markers you see in that first graph."

  "How does it play into the divergence?" Anna pressed.

  "I fed all this data into a pattern-seeking algorithm, and I got a result. Something matched."

  Anna frowned. "What would that even mean? We ran pattern matching on that data to the hydrogen line a year ago and came up with nothing."

  "Exactly," Lucas said crisply. "Back then we had only one data set: how the hydrogen line looked 'at rest'. Now we have two, before and after divergence, and that opened up the possibility of correlation, which was the key."

  "So you've correlated one of these signals to the divergence?"

  "Almost. Yes. There's one more file I fed in, and that was all the hydrogen line signals we had Sulman take of the New LA people a year back, right after Bordeaux. Most of them were identical, unchanged since they were first mapped eleven years earlier, all except for one."

  Anna's eyes widened as his meaning became clear, then grew all the muddier. There was only one survivor in New LA, in the whole world that she knew of, who'd never had her hydrogen line signal read before, because she'd never had a coma and never been immune.

  "Lara?"

  "That's right. Lara had no record in Bordeaux, because there was nothing special about her. She was never a signal producer."

  "And she had no signal when Sulman scanned her," Anna said. "I remember that, she was like a blank."

  "Almost a blank," Lucas corrected. "She had a tiny signal that we disregarded at the time, barely a variance from zero when compared to the strength of the other signals, but something. Along with the rest, her signal got fed into the pattern-matching algorithm too."

  He fell silent for a moment, presumably allowing this to sink in. The Pilatus engine droned on, and the A/C flowed, and the metal balls in a Newton's cradle in Anna's mind steadily clanked together, reaching toward some greater meaning.

  "And?" she asked, failing to keep the frustration out of her voice.

  "And Lara was the key. With her in the mix we can see a clear correlation between the hydrogen line both before and after the divergence. We always wondered what her role was, how she survived the infection when every other non-immune succumbed? We theorized she was randomly unique, or else her proximity to Amo somehow conferred immunity. I can't answer that now any more than then, but I know for certain that she plays an essential role in the makeup of the hydrogen line, influencing both the signal that Amo puts out and the way the ocean behave."

  Anna found herself on the edge of her seat. It had been a theory for years that the ocean could be programmed, but there'd been no way of testing it, with no understanding of the underlying 'language', no Rosetta stone to provide a translation. Perhaps Lara was that key.

  "It could change everything," Anna said quietly. "It could propel the cure forward."

  "It could," Lucas replied. "We can see the hydrogen line pre-divergence was a kind of combination of her weak signal and Amo's strong one. They're interwoven in ways I'm only just beginning to grasp, but Anna, the key here is what happened after divergence. If we take Lara's quiet signal and combine it with one other from the experimental set, we get the wild fluctuations in the hydrogen line we're seeing now. If anything it's a seesaw between the two signals, her and Amo and her and this new one; a man called Drake. You may even recognize the name; he was the second-strongest signal in Bordeaux.

  Anna slumped back in the seat, stunned. She did know who Lucas was talking about. She'd made him part of her studies, the man whose signal was second only to Amo's, who she'd studied at length seeking some deeper meaning to the variations in the hydrogen line. Absent an unlocking key, though, she'd found none, and if anything, she'd assumed the man was dead, swallowed up by the demons when they were roaming abroad in Europe.

  Evidently not.

  "Why?" she asked. "Why now, why Drake?"

  "I don't know why," Lucas said, "but I think proximity must be a factor."

  That was another punch. Matthew Drake was in New LA?

  "New LA are still not answering," she said into the radio, a question phrased as a statement, and now Sulman replied.

  "No Anna," he said, "I've been trying every ten minutes."

  No reply. She checked the clock; Istanbul time three in the afternoon. That would make it one in the morning in New LA. Possibly they were still out in the fields, having opted to stay overnight, but she didn't think so. Not with all this going on, not if proximity was a factor.

  Proximity meant Matthew Drake was there, in New LA. Perhaps he'd found the cairn trail. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It could be good.

  But it didn't feel good, and she'd learned to trust her instincts.

  "Keep working on it," she said. "Dig into the data, Lucas. Find out what it means. And Sulman, get me through to Amo."

  "Roger that," he said and clicked off.

  There was nothing more she could do.

  * * *

  The Pilatus flew on.

  In two hours they were cruising over the wild and rambling vineyards of western France. Cities and towns buzzed by far below like landed alien craft, gray and insect-like in their blocky sprawl. A lost world washed by like the meaningless, ever-changing waves of the ocean, and she fell into a slow, silent fugue
.

  Soon these cities would be their stars, the only means of navigation across a world slowly turning to blank spaces on the map. The GPS guidance that had brought her here so easily would one day be gone, as the satellites that fuelled it failed and fell, and she'd be left with her compass and her maps. For a time she would navigate by cities and old roads, perhaps using a high-power telescope to read the highway numbers and town names written on signs.

  But at some point even those signs would blister and peel, and the roads would crack and vanish beneath the spreading tides of green. Already it was happening, as windblown dirt gathered in cracked asphalt, piled over with leaves that fell season after season, mulching down to soil. Seeds landed and sprang up into saplings which one day would become forests.

  Eventually the cities would be swallowed, colonized at their outer reaches and cannibalized from within as nature burst out from inner city parks. Swamps would blossom on rooftops and fields of wildflowers would flutter across intersections. Creepers would crawl onto skyscrapers like skin, steadily prying into their joints and cracking them apart like a slow motion echo of the infection that stilled their makers. The buildings would fall and be consumed.

  In time all of it would be gone, sunk beneath a verdant green ocean. It was a world she'd never really known, had never missed, but the thought of this now brought her to the edge of the immense loss they'd all suffered. It was a wound, deeper and crueler than any that came before. The knitting frontlines of green were a healing balm, but the depth and beauty that had been lost were irreplaceable.

  Unless there was a cure. Unless Lara was the key.