"The f-" he started, then my shoulder caught him in the middle and drove the both of us clear off the box. We fell together for long seconds, I felt the heat of the flare on my back, then we hit the fallen ocean.
"Oomph," said Julio, taking the blow across his back while I took it headfirst, nearly breaking my neck. Some gristle inside popped horribly and the rest of my body came on afterward, tumbling awkwardly amongst the dead.
RATATATATATATATATATATAT
RATATATATATATATATATATAT
Bullets raked either side of me, tearing the bodies to meat. My head spun and I couldn't breathe. There was a cold in my neck and I wondered if I'd broken my spine like Cerulean. Then my arm moved.
"Idiot!" Julio hissed, shifting it as he rolled into a gap beside me.
"I can't move," I said though I doubt he heard it over the roar of the bullets.
"Then lie here and die," he shouted, and started crawling away. Soon he was gone.
I did lie there for a time, waiting for the sickness in my neck to ease, while the guns laid waste all around. Somehow they didn't reach me, I don't know why. Were they steered from below, or was it just blind luck? Was it that I was lying down, while the ocean were standing, that saved my life?
I accepted my impending death, whatever the case. I'd sacrificed myself for these people, and death would be my reward. I tried to find a calm center, but there was no peace in that shell-riddled field of corpses, with bodies shaking fiercely as bullets ripped furrows through them. I did find a kind of resolve though, and in that place remembered Lara, and Anna and Cerulean. Would I send Julio back to them with news of my death? Would I let this be my legacy?
I started to crawl. It was hard but it got easier.
RATAT ATATATA TATATA TATAT
The scream of bullets grew intermittent, as the last standing targets were taken down. I crawled like Cerulean once had, through foul guts and slicks of blood and rotten flesh infested with maggots, every second expecting the next RAT TAT to be a bullet burning through my middle and into the bodies below. Flies buzzed round my face and I kept on through puddles of gore until I reached the road.
There I rolled on my side and looked back at the pole. The guns were pointing at me again, the lens flashing. Beside the box a patch of zombies were on fire, sending up a familiar, thick and greasy smoke. The flare had fallen into the spilled gas, but not down the hole, and for that I was grateful.
I crawled the rest of the way up the road just behind Julio, scratching my knees and elbows to bits on the asphalt. At some point the pole sank back into its box but we both crawled on anyway, until we were safely over the peak in the road and behind the cairn line.
The cold in my neck was spreading out through my left shoulder and arm. I'd trapped a nerve or something, but hopefully it wouldn't leave any lasting damage. For now I could hardly move my head at all without sending twinge-like spikes of pain into my skull and down my side.
Still I got up onto my feet. I drew my gun and pointed it at Julio a moment before he could get his. He looked into the barrel's dark eye and slumped against the Porsche's wheel, staring up at me with a deep, simmering resentment. In that moment, I now know, all our fates were sealed. It was only a matter of time before he went off, a bomb that would hurt us all. I should have shot him and left his body for the damn maggots.
"Stick your finger in it," I said, repeating what he'd said to Anna. "See if the inside is swirled."
He snorted. "Fuck you. You idiot." The hatred in his voice was rich and thick. We'd been doing so well, but now I saw that all of that had been a crust only, etched over the top of this. A body-check off a concrete box was a definite way to not respect him enough. "Do you think they'd do anything for you? You're such a child. You are not going to last in this world."
I held the gun on him.
"We're leaving now," I said, glad my voice wasn't shaking, though my knees were trembling so hard I thought I might drop at any second. "The cairns are warning enough. These people get a chance, I don't care if they'd give me one or not. Three thousand survivors are my people too, and you will not try to hurt them again. We're going home now, and if ever a day goes by when I don't see you, when you don't check in with me, I'll know where you've gone, and I'll come find you. And Julio, I will kill you then. Understand that. Push me enough and you'll be the next Don. You think I'm weak? Try me."
The resentment sank deep into his skin. He was covered in blood and guts, sticky with green and purple fluid, and he knew that he was beaten, again. At last he looked away.
We washed up with hot water and soap from the RV, scraping bits of flesh and blood out of our fingernails and hair. I did my best to hide the painful crick in my neck. Around 10am I looked over the ruined field a final time, where the patch of zombies was still burning like candlewax at the edge of the concrete box, then we drove home, neither of us sleeping at all the whole way.
* * *
In my closet I grasp this knife as it runs through my guts. I did this, I made this horror. For years I watched Julio, waiting, but he never broke cover. Five years in I stopped watching long enough for him to rape Masako and kill Indira, and when we shot him, it never crossed my mind that he would survive and go back to Maine.
It should have. But it didn't, and for that I only have myself to blame.
INTERLUDE 4
A squad of men in full black gear were holding the corridor outside, and they dragged Salle and Mecklarin along it toward the stairs in fluid, practiced silence, ignoring their complaints and demands to know what was happening.
"Climb," one of them barked when they reached the broad stairwell, prodding Mecklarin with his rifle. No amount of explaining that he was the head of the whole Habitat made a difference. Up they went to the first floor, to the red corridor where people were fighting and drinking and vandalizing what they could.
"Look at these guys!" someone shouted. A wine bottle flew their way and cracked off the wall, and a gunshot barked out in reply. Salle caught a glimpse of a man's arm burst outward like a firework, then she was jerked onward.
"Stop it," Mecklarin shouted, attempting an authoritative tone, "these are US citizens, they have rights under-" but he fell silent when one of the men cuffed him sharply in the head. Salle was about to shout in protest, but another of the men lifted his visor and looked her in the eye. He looked like any other person out there, if a little paler.
"I wouldn't do that, princess," he warned.
More gunshots followed as the squad fought a shooting retreat along the corridor, dragging Salle and Mecklarin past scientists rioting and fighting in the rooms to either side. Mecklarin moved without arguing now, as a cut over his cheekbone trickled blood down his jawline. Salle let herself be shoved on, until they reached the summery arrival hall, still painted orange and yellow, though scuff marks of black soot now marked the walls and there were three bodies on the ground in puddles of blood.
Lars vomited whiskey. It didn't seem to effect Salle, like she was floating far above it. An elevator ride, a climb up the ladder, and finally they would be free.
She patted Mecklarin's back as he heaved beside the elevator. "It's all right."
The gunman who'd raised his visor laughed. "It's very far from all right, sweetheart."
The elevator door opened and two men bundled in with Mecklarin pressed closely between them. He gave Salle a weak, syrupy smile, then the doors closed. An awkward moment passed, in which Salle looked at the man with the visor up. He was swarthy, perhaps of Mediterranean stock, with a slight scar cut down across his left eye and running across his nose. He was probably in command of this squad, but what did that mean?
"You're not running the big elevator," she said.
"We're not," he answered.
"All these people-"
"Are staying right here. We're all staying right here. You've got a helluva debriefing to look forward to."
The elevator chimed softly and the door opened, and he marched her inside. It shot them up,
the door opened, and she was back in the circular white space where the ladder ascending into darkness had been. But the ladder was gone now, replaced with sheer white plastic.
She stared at it, even as the man pushed her round and stuffed her into the now open second elevator on the right.
"But-" she managed, "it doesn't…"
"No buts," he said, "and it does."
The elevator door closed and they shot back down. Up close he smelt of sweat and gunpowder. Her mind was racing through the fog of shock, reaching for the only possibility that could make any sense of this.
"The rumors are true."
The man grinned. "That'll make this next bit easier. Come on."
The doors opened and they lurched out into a shabby, dark, utilitarian corridor that smelled of frost and raw concrete. Lighting along the walls was harsh, echoes bounced sharply as their footfalls rang off the stone, and it was cold. She hadn't felt cold in four years.
"This way."
"Where's Mecklarin?"
"This way too. Come on, you'll learn to love it."
Down the corridor they went, marked by sharp angles, harsh white lighting and not a speck of color or life. He pushed her through a door into a large dark hall, with rows of tiered desks facing a big screen.
Mecklarin was standing nearby, held up by two of the men in black, watching the screen and sagging. On it was a split screen of four video feeds, each showing a scene of violence in a place she recognized.
In the swamp three men were raping a woman she recognized; Kathy from botany. She recognized them all. Two of the men, Jimmy and Reza, were laughing and high-fived. In the third-floor bar a gaggle of engineers had built a barricade out of wooden desks and chairs and were engaging in a fight with some others out of shot, throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding clubs. Another scene depicted only fire, within which a body slowly roasted, perhaps in one of the convenience stores. The fourth showed some kind of torture happening in a bedroom; one man with a gag around his mouth, the other wielding a knife…
"Salle," Mecklarin said, staring at her. He was so pale he looked dead, and his voice was flat and defeated. "This is out. This is where all our signals came."
"He's right," said a figure standing at the forefront of the room. It was a tall man, slender and bald, wearing a sharp gray suit. In the flickering light cast from the screens Salle guessed he was late fifties, with a distinguished air to his bearing and a neat New York accent. "No one else is receiving these signals, and indeed no one else will come to our rescue, because we," he moved his hand in a graceful circle, encompassing everyone in the room, "are all that is left."
Mecklarin sagged so hard he almost broke free of the men holding him up.
"Yes, the rumors are true," the man went on. "Yes, we used you Lars. You are not going to Mars, and much of your research these past four years has been useless, but not all of it. That's why you're here now, both you and the rather composed Ms. Coram. We need you. We needed you to keep the three thousand in line before, and we need you even more now."
Mecklarin began to sob. Salle looked at him with only a faint stirring of pity. There was too much shock for anything else.
"What was it?" she found her voice asking. "Nuclear? Plague? Global flooding?"
The thin bald man smiled. "Zombies, actually."
She felt like laughing. She didn't laugh.
"You see these images," the man said, "on the screen? They are there for a reason. Every death down there is a cost to us. You have no idea the lengths our organization has gone to to preserve the knowledge held in your 'Habitat'. You have no idea how necessary every one of these people will be in the new world, and look."
Another body fell into the pit of fire and began to burn. "That's one more. We've studied you two all this time, even as you've studied your people, and I believe you are the ones best placed to tell us what surgical strikes are required to end this madness."
Salle stared. Mecklarin hung with his head down.
"Zombies?" he slurred. "Everyone's really dead?"
"Yes, everyone above is quite dead, a global apocalypse. Could you please?"
He spoke the last to someone in the room, and the four images on the screen abruptly swapped for four others. In the top left was a looping scene of a man in a white hospital gown, transforming. He started normal; olive tan skin, blue eyes, looking into the camera against a white background, then he changed. His eyes fogged over and became a solid, glowing white, the color leached out of his skin in seconds to gray, and his steady gaze ahead shifted as he started trudging to the left.
In the top right there was a scene against a bright orange desert, shot from above, perhaps in a helicopter, showing a horde of the same kind of figures walking over a low dune. They all had white eyes and gray skin and moved in a cloud, like swallows. In the bottom right was a nondescript city street at night, with all the traffic stopped and in the distance a car burning, while the gray-skinned zombies ran together like a pack of dogs. In the bottom right was a bloody shot of three of the zombies, half-naked and showing more of their eerie gray skin, dug in to the belly of a fourth person still clutching a shotgun. Blood was everywhere, guts were everywhere, worse even than the chaos in the Habitat.
Lars sagged lower in his captors' arms. Salle looked defiantly at the bald man. "It's bullshit, movie special effects."
"On the contrary," the man said. "It's quite real. I'd take longer to explain it, but it's rather old news to the people here. I assure you, there's no one left alive up there. The apocalypse happened four years ago, the night you came down in fact, Ms. Coram. You squeaked in under the deadline."
She stared at him, then at the screen.
"This is my passion project," the man said, spreading his arms. "You, him." He pointed at Lars. "Your three thousand. I'm invested in our race surviving, and right now it's falling apart. The trouble is, we are confined here in earnest. We can't go above until all the zombies are gone, until the infection blows over, and that will be some time, as they take a long time to die, as long as another six years. Ms. Coram, are you with me? Mr. Mecklarin, can you focus on the matter in hand? You have a bunker filled with rage and we need to calm it in the smoothest, least destructive manner. We need your help, and we need it now."
Mecklarin raised his head. Now his eyes were burning with vision again. Something about it scared Salle, just as he'd once pulled her in.
"You lied to me. You made me lie to all of them."
"All for the good," the man said. "Would you rather be roaming the wilds above, arms outstretched, staggering blindly in search of brains?"
Salle almost laughed. Mecklarin didn't. What he did was straighten up and shove one of the men holding him with surprising force, hard enough to send him reeling sideways over a desk and crunching to the floor. Lars had always been an athletic man, and now he used that speed and strength to pivot sharply and send an elbow into the helmet of the one guard left standing, cracking his visor and dropping him like a sack of soil.
How he came up with the handgun, Salle never remembered, but he pointed it at the man in the aisle while holding one open palm out to the guards holding Salle. They stopped in the middle of pointing their rifles at him, looking to the bald man for guidance.
"You lied to me," Mecklarin said again.
The bald man smiled. "Brave, resourceful, ever ready. Lars Mecklarin, all-American hero. Did we lie to you? Yes we did. We saved your life in the process, for which you should be grateful. Please, don't be a child. You see the situation. I'm asking for your help for the good of everyone here. We-"
Lars shot him.
The gun retorted and the bald man's brains blew out the back of his head, some splattering up onto the screen.
"Ugh," somebody at their desk uttered.
Lars turned, and now the fire in his eyes had turned to madness.
"Forgive me, Salle," he said, "and think kindly of me." Then he turned the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.
&nbs
p; BANG
The shot echoed and a terrible silence descended. Somebody whimpered. Lars fell to the floor where his blood and brains poured out of the hole in his head onto the dark cement floor.
It was like something from the videos above. The chaos had followed them here, inside Lars. Her eyes blurred with tears. She was entering shock.
The man with his visor up snapped his fingers in front of Salle's face.
"Princess. It's your show now. If you want those people to survive," he pointed to the screen, "and by extension, you want us to survive, you need to tell me who to capture, now."
Her legs trembled wildly. Lars was on the floor and his legs were trembling too, caught in death throes. The bald man was down and flat, and on the screen the scenes of zombie apocalypse were gone, replaced by images from the Habitat. In the swamp the men were swapping over with Kathy.
Kathy was her friend, of sorts. In first positions before her access zones had opened up they'd often drunk together, sharing stories about men and fantasizing about making it with Lars Mecklarin. Now Lars was dead and Kathy was getting raped. It wasn't a hard leap.
"Those three in the swamp," she said, pointing, her voice coming out harsh and cold. "One of them in the bar should be enough, probably Rudolph." She pointed. "He's the big one with brown hair."
The man stared back at her. Perhaps even he was in shock too. Salle looked around the room. Everyone in there seemed to be in shock, and it struck her then that for all of them, this was the first time too. They may have seen images of the zombie apocalypse, if it really was real, but they hadn't seen this. None of them had been in this precise situation before, and none of them knew what to do.
But she did. It came naturally and she fell into it. There was a job to be done and she had the skills and knowledge to do it well.
"Soldier, I gave you orders," she snapped.
He nodded, then pulled up a shoulder mic and started barking commands into it.
Zombie Ocean (Book 4): The Loss Page 10
