The chill comes back.
I see the demon, standing in the middle of the vehicle's torn side wall, a huge red thing rummaging in the RV's guts like a coyote digging for the antelope's heart. We're racing by him and he looks up as we draw near. In his hand he's got someone, jerking faintly, I think it must be…
Ozark.
My lungs feel like they're collapsing. No more, I want to shout, but the demon won't listen.
"Olly get to the gun slot," I slur, as loud and as clear as I can. Blood drips down my face and slaps off the front seat on Jasmine's shoulder.
I turn and see Olly standing there, transfixed. I sure as hell can't do it.
"Now!" I shout, "get to the slot."
He moves. Lara loads the next rocket for him. His arms are trembling but that's OK, it's a big target this time.
"Pull us broadside," I tell Jasmine, like a pirate captain in the age of sail, and she does. We have a window of seconds only. Perhaps I see Ozark's eyes widen as the demon hunches over and forces his jaws open. Poor, poor bastard. I have to believe he sees us, and knows we wouldn't leave him like this. We can't save him now, but we can-
"Fire!" I shout.
The rocket whizzes out on a string of smoke, hits the RV right in the wreckage hole, and the resultant explosion catches the gas stores and becomes huge.
BOOM BOOOOOOOM
Fire balls upward, the demon is set alight, and Ozark and any of his patients left behind are blown to bits.
Dead. We shake and rattle by.
I sag against Jasmine. I track the blazing wreck through the side window and round until it appears in the back window as we turn, then look beyond it to the great bonfire further out in the desert, a Burning Man-like inferno dug into a crater in the sand.
All our explosives are gone, leaving a hollow pit in my head. I don't have any plans left. Worst of all, I can feel them out there still, great bodies full of freezing need, picking themselves up, unhurt and ready to follow us to the end of the Earth. Maybe I can see the first of them peel out of the flames, its body blackened and undamaged, then my knees give out and Lara catches me, guides me back to one of the booths, where I lie down, vomit, and start to shake uncontrollably.
Lara is there throughout. She tears strips of bitter-smelling bandaging apart and slaps them on my shoulder and chest, she injects a needle into my arm, she binds my head with tight white fabric.
"Concussed," she says to someone, her voice a blur, "caught fragments, he's covered in them here and here, losing blood fast."
They tend to me, and I'm just waiting for the feel underneath the tires when the surface changes. When it comes, the rumble of the ruffled desert giving way to the smooth flat of the highway, I let go.
"Anna," I whisper, and Lara draws near.
"What is it, Amo?"
I blink and whisper through my tears, seconds away from blacking out, perhaps seeking forgiveness now at this darkest hour. "Anna's dead."
12. FORGIVENESS
I'm standing in an orange hall, surrounded by windows through which I can see a gorgeous array of flowers in boundless meadows. There's a faint breeze and the hint of honeysuckle on the air.
"Nice, isn't it?" comes a voice.
It's Lars Mecklarin. He's sitting at a table in the middle of the hall, smiling just like on his book covers, dressed in lab-coat white. His teeth glint as brightly as zombies' eyes, and I pull up a seat opposite him.
It feels right. For now, in this place, all the misery of so much loss can't hurt me.
"Not here," says Mecklarin, as if reading my thoughts. "But it will. There's no way to hide from it really. The weight piles up and up, doesn't it? If it's not one man's suffering it's another's. Women too, of course, not to be sexist. We all face our losses, and we react in our own ways."
He smiles, and places his fingers to his head in an approximation of a gun. He pulls the trigger and says, "Bang."
"I shot myself," I say. "It's true. I deserved it."
He leans back in his chair, really making himself comfortable. It's a nice place he has, after all, this bunker, comfortable and cozy. I'm impressed with the windows, which are quite a feat underground.
"We all deserve something," he says. "People who strived for greatness and fell short. Inspirational leadership is so oversold, don't you think? The thrill of it is far outweighed by the crushing weight of responsibility."
I smile. We know each of those extremes, I suppose, he and I.
"So we talk about what people deserve," he says. "For some, a bullet in the head, self-administered. For others? Tell me, what do you deserve for these most recent failures, Amo?" He spreads his arms to take in the table, the room, the windows and all their pretty flowers. "Heads sliced off like poppies, all in a row. Your darling Anna and cheerful Jake, now the inestimable Chantelle, good Dr. Ozark and so many others. Survivors of long years of pain. And of course your great friend Cerulean too, let's not forget him. How many more will it take before you stop clinging to hope?"
I look at this Lars Mecklarin, author of The Human Machine and Life on Mars, really look into his bright blue eyes, and try to imagine the zombie lurking within. If I reach out and touch him, won't his eyes burst out with white light, won't his skin shrivel to a sad peanut-gray, and then will he still be Lars Mecklarin, gifted genius and savior of three thousand lives, or will he just but a walking corpse, waiting to die?
He raises an interesting point. A fine point, really.
"Did you know?" I ask him, delving for the depths. "When you gathered all your people in, did you know what they would become? That they would cause this?"
I point out of one of the windows, where now there is the convenient image of the desert and two smoking fires. I point to another window where there is more smoking wreckage, this time of a small jumbled plane lying on an asphalt runway. Through a third window, replacing the fields and flowers, there appears a barren, filthy hallway covered in blood with broken shackles hanging on the walls, where an array of dead bodies lies.
He smiles. "Amo, my dear boy, what difference does it make? If I tell you I shot myself in the head to escape the knowledge of what I'd done, what would you say? Is there some part of you that would feel sympathy, or would you only be glad? We all face our challenges alone, don't you agree? You yours, and I mine. What we are left with is only this: where do we draw the line between our desire to survive and the survival of our desire? Do you follow me? At what point do we cross an un-crossable line, and become animals of the like we would take out behind the barn and shoot in the skull? Where is the difference between striving for something good, and persisting in spite of an irretrievable sickness?"
I look at him and he looks at me, like a battle of wills.
"There's limits," I say. "For some. But limits change. Tolerance shifts. We all grow old and we get tired."
He grins, then raps sharply on the tabletop. "You're right, of course. Now, a wager."
I react like this is the most natural continuation of our dialog, a wager in a dream between two lost souls. "Name it."
"All of yours against seven of mine. We'll meet on the plains and do battle. Whoever stands gains the right to the Earth."
I rap on the table back. "You can't set the terms. You're locked in a cave underground. What do you know about the world now? You haven't lived in it for over a decade. You gave it up, Lars, so it's not yours to wager."
He reclines comfortably in his chair. "So name your terms, Amo, Last Mayor of America. Claim your right, and name the number of casualties you're willing to accept. There are three thousand of us here. You almost died once to give us that chance, and now there are less than fifty of you. Where is the balance in it?"
"It's not about balance."
"Then is it about what is right? No, of course not, you are not so morally immature. What could be right when we come to survival, is there some cosmic scorekeeper keeping tally of all the atrocities we have each committed, who will at some later stage render judgmen
t on whose offences most deserve extinction?"
He grins and goes on. "No, my dear Amo. It is about simple survival, and we are back at our original question. At what cost do we live on? At what point does survival become more of a misery than death? Better an hour lived as a lion than a lifetime as a worm, do you know the expression?"
I stare into his blue eyes. "You're the one living underground. You tell me."
He laughs. Despite myself, I like him. Reading his books ten years ago I liked him, and throughout all those ten years, as I built New LA by welcoming new people and aiming for something better, his wisdom was there in the background, guiding me on.
But this?
"I think we might have been friends, in another life," I say.
He waves a hand. "Don't be ridiculous. I was a genius, darling of the age. Did you know a psychologist could have groupies?" He points at himself with a smirk, then at me. "And you? You drew comics of zombies, Amo. That's it. You don't even have a real name, no heritage, you don't come from anything genuine or authentic. You are a false object, a painting in sand, like all your countrymen in this fantasy of a land."
I rise to my feet. I suppose he wants to badmouth America now.
"Survival," I say, "is just one kind of dream. It'll drive us to grand things, but it's weak compared to what I'm feeling now. In survival there's room for doubt. What I'm feeling would crush it underfoot. There's simply no room."
Mecklarin rises to his feet, grinning. I'd never noticed the blood dripping down from his temple before, but now it's undeniably there. "Better," he says. "Let's get to the root. We're in opposition, you and I. What room is there for compromise? There's only the one drive."
"I'm going to kill you," I say, and it comes out far calmer than I feel. "I'm going to take this world and make it safe for my people. If that means every one of your three thousand must die, so be it."
He nods. The blood's pouring down his cheek now, along with a thick flow of oozing gray brains. On the opposite temple there's an entry wound, bubbling with bright red liquid like the hole itself is breathing. "Rage," he says. "Pure, undiluted rage. You'll burn yourself up."
"You'll burn with me."
We stare for a long moment, then he raps the table again and sits down, back to smiling, as if the previous exchange never happened. "A fresh wager then. Gather for me, say, three lilies from the fields you see all around. Only three, and my underground realm will be yours. I'll hand over the keys and the security pass. Just fetch me three."
He holds out his hand. I reach across the table and shake it. This is a wager I can easily win. The windows are right there, and the flowers are countless. I can bring him armfuls in a minute only.
I stride over to the open window and reach to open the clasp, but it doesn't budge. I tug on it but it won't open no matter how hard I pull. I swing an elbow to crack the glass but rather than breaking outward into fresh air, the image of fields warps and tints purple, with rainbow hues spreading around a jagged black crack in the glass.
Lars laughs wildly, though half of his head has now fallen away like a wet Squeegee, revealing the red emptiness inside his head. His face is a moving doll's mask on the front of a hollow shell, drizzled with blood spray. "How will you kill us when you can't even find us? You don't have time, Amo. You just don't have time."
I smash the television screen with my elbow until my skin tears and blood smears the screen and all the fields and flowers are gone, leaving only flickering black pixels and jagged cracks in the glass. Still I keep beating it, like the sound of waves slapping against the beach, constantly rolling in though not changing a thing.
Slap, slap, slap.
* * *
I rouse to the slow slap, slap, slap of a drip tube against the booth's wall.
The RV is moving fast, I can feel it in the thrum coming up through the chassis. The aisle is full of light and it takes a second to realize this is not my RV anymore. No plastic crates, no Lucy, no Chantelle.
My RV blew up.
There are low voices talking. I shuffle to better hear them, though a fresh twinge lances in my head. Witzgenstein and Lara are up ahead in the driver and passenger seat talking. Someone's lying in the booth opposite me, it looks like Olly. Down at the back of the RV, past crates of food, water, gas tanks and munitions, Sammy and Lulwa are staring hard at a map.
I wave at them. Lulwa sees me and nudges Sammy, and they both wave back awkwardly.
"You guys OK?" I ask.
Sammy nods.
"Lara," Lulwa calls.
I turn just as Lara drops to kneel beside me, wrap her arms round my back and hug me hard.
"Ah," I mutter, as the tube flowing into my forearm pulls tight and pinches, my ribs creak and my head throbs, but I hug back weakly. This is good, and just what I need.
"Gods, I thought you were mad," Lara says quietly as she pulls back. "The size of that explosion."
I cough and clear my throat. "A gift, for you. Most girls only get flowers."
Her face falls. "We lost Chantelle and Lucy, Amo. They ran back into the fire. Ozark and everyone on his RV are gone too, that's Rosalita and Terrence plus five of the survivors from Maine, the worst cases. We lost two across the convoy just from being near those red bastards, their hearts gave out just like Ozark said. That's ten in all."
Her voice starts trembling. She sits in the booth next to me, takes my hand in hers and picks idly at one of my bandages. She looks exhausted, with eyes red from lack of sleep.
"It's a lot," I say. I can't think of much else right now. Like before in the Theater's lobby when Abigail fell, it isn't time to grieve. I squeeze her hand.
"It's a lot," she says, "and Anna."
Now that hits. I remember telling her, and it almost washes away my firm resolve.
"Her plane went down just after take off," I say, getting the words out before I lose this moment and its sudden rush of confidence. "The engine died. I told her we loved her and thanked her as she fell, then the signal was gone."
Tears well in my Lara's eyes.
"You're sure?" she asks. "They couldn't have glided down? A crash landing, maybe."
I'm crying. "Maybe. I hope so. It didn't sound that way, though. It sounded like an explosion. Whatever happens, they're too far away to help us now, and we can't help them. We have to keep going."
Lara nods and rubs the tears away. She points through the front windshield, and I lean forward to see the beige of an RV just ahead of us. "We caught up with the convoy. Everyone's in shock, Macy's despondent, and I haven't told Ravi what you said yet."
"Don't," I say quickly. "Let me. I kept it back, now I need to make that right."
She strokes the line of my jaw. There's a crinkle of plastic there, must be another bandage. "You kept it from me. Like a lot of things."
I nod. I'm guilty, shutting her out since this whole thing began, but even that's not really true. I've been pushing her away since Cerulean disappeared two weeks ago, falling into my own pit of internal despair. There's no excuse for it, and I deserve whatever sting I'm going to get.
"I understand," she says instead. She presses her face close to mine and whispers into my cheek. "I know you take on things that are hard for you. I know that you're doing your best. It isn't your fault that any of them died, it's whoever did this to us. Things just happen. You keep doing what you're doing."
I start to cry quietly, then. I did this, I want to say, but I know it isn't true. I saved Julio and the bunker, but only for the best reasons I could think of. I tried to do the right thing, and if I failed it wasn't because I was evil or even a fool. Things just happen, and you try to be good when you can afford it.
With that, and Lara's hand resting gently around my back, the weight I've been laboring under falls away. It feels like acceptance, as the last knife wedges in and becomes a part now of what I am, spiky like a porcupine.
"I should have told you," I whisper back. "Right from the start, but I couldn't handle it. Cerulean dead and
so many victims from Julio. It was too much, but I should have told you."
She kisses me, wet with tears, a tender brush of the lips.
"No more," she says, just as I said in the lobby. "We're all doing our best. I know that about you, don't I? I've read your comic. I'm just glad you didn't shoot yourself in the head again."
I laugh involuntarily, too caught up even to joke that this time I held the gun to my throat. She presses her forehead against my cheek and I revel in the warmth.
"Oh, that would've been such a mess. Blood everywhere, sewing up the hole. I don't even know how to sew through bone."
"It's a challenge," I mumble nonsensically, just glad to have Lara in my arms again. "Strong needle."
She strokes my head. "And now you've got all these new scars. I thought you'd never survive the blast, when I saw all that fire. I think you've been hit by every bit of the RV."
I laugh. I remember years back when the apocalypse was young, and a car exploded in Mott Haven right before me. I took an indicator lever in the shoulder. It healed but the scar still twinges in the winter.
"I'll survive. We all will."
"All of us that are left," she says.
"Yeah."
We hug. It's good, but it can't last forever.
"I need to talk to them," I say, after a few minutes. I'm getting the measure of myself again. I've fallen and now I'm back up. Lara nods and helps me stand. My old radio is gone so we fish a spare from the cupboard, and sit me in the aisle looking out through the windshield. There's two RVs in front, which means we're traveling in a diamond formation. Circling the wagons. To either side the scenery has turned from ochre red to sienna orange.
"It's six o'clock," Lara says. "You've been out for nine hours. We're through New Mexico and into Texas now. We should hit Oklahoma some time in the night."
"And the demons?"
"All behind us. We've got reports confirmed across multiple survivors, they think there are still seven and they're all chasing us, but they're falling behind. They can't go as fast as us on the roads."
Zombie Ocean (Book 4): The Loss Page 16
