Zombie Ocean (Book 4): The Loss

by Michael John Grist

  I take a deep breath. It's good. It'll give us maybe a day's lead time to find the zombie horde and bring the demons home. With Anna in the air it'd be easy, but we've got plenty of survivors here, like tuning forks. We should be able to do it.

  "Do they know all of that?" I ask, gesturing at the RVs ahead.

  "They do."

  I spin the dial to the universal channel and push to transmit.

  "New LA, this is Amo," I say.

  I don't expect the chorus of cheers that follows, and it takes me so by surprise I can't speak for another thirty seconds. My throat chokes up and my eyes fill again. Lara smiles and her eyes fill up too, as I pick up individual voices calling out my name, cheering that I'm still alive. There's Ravi and Macy, Feargal and Sulman, Cynthia and my kids, all people I love.

  Oh god. Shivers run up my back and stiffen my resolve. Everything that just happened will make great panels in the comic book, no doubt, and god knows we need a win right now, but that's not what I'm on the radio for. It's time to tell the truth.

  "I'm not a priest," I begin, haltingly at first, "and I don't know the right words to say for the people we've lost. Nor have I even told you the full count of loss, yet."

  I pause to let this settle in. Now isn't be the time for cheering, and I'm glad that nobody does, especially Ravi. He would never forgive himself.

  "I've kept the full cost to myself. The truth is, I believe Anna, Jake and the survivor Peters are dead." I pause to let this sink in. "You know I sent them to fetch a plane, and scout ahead for the demons and the zombie horde. Twelve hours ago the plane's engine faltered and they fell shortly after takeoff. The last I heard was a crash and the radio died. It's why they weren't in the air to warn us about the demons."

  A long pause follows. I hate it but it has to be done.

  "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner," I plow on. "I didn't want to hurt morale before we dealt with the demons. I'm sorry for that, and for all these deaths. The loss we face is hard to imagine. It's devastating, and we're all the poorer for it."

  Another silence.

  "I want to say-" I begin, but am cut off by a familiar voice ringing over the universal channel.

  "You never should have sent them!"

  It is as unexpected as the cheering, particularly in whose voice it is. I'd never have expected her to speak up in this way, at this time.

  Masako.

  No one else speaks. I don't know what to say.

  "Anna too?" she goes on, the accusation sharp and painful. "When will you be satisfied, Amo, how many more people have to die? This is your fault, your choices, your fantasies, and you alone should pay for it."

  I stare at the radio, utterly confused. I can't get over that this is quiet, demure Masako, but it is. She's attacking me, and I don't have any defense, particularly not against her. She loved Cerulean, perhaps more than any of us, even after he left her behind. She was a kind of mother to Anna for the longest time. She has every right to be angry, but like this?

  "Masako," I begin, but she won't let me speak.

  "You think charging at the demons and surviving makes you a hero?" she demands, her pale voice growing stronger. "Do you even know what Cerulean did out there? Before you sent Peters and Lucy and so many others to die, did you hear how he died? He saved people, Amo, while all you do is get us killed. He saved them all, cleaning up your mistakes, only for you to bury his only daughter too? My daughter? Anna's dead, Amo, and now you want us to forgive you? I hate you! You're Mayor in name only, and we'd all be better off if you'd died in that blast."

  I rock back and gaze out of the window. I hadn't expected this, but now it's here. After forgiveness, blame. It makes me lighter and heavier at once, for all the things I did and didn't do. Let it ride.

  "Aren't you going to say something?" she charges on. "Or are you too much a coward? We've watched you swagger around our lives for ten long years, and it's time someone finally stepped up and crushed you like the bug you are. He shot himself in the head, people! He gave up, what makes you think he hasn't given up again? He murdered people, and let the murderers and rapists live on! Just what kind of man do you think we have leading us now, straight to the demons, straight to the zombies? He's insane, he brought all this down, and you cheer him? We should leave him for the demons."

  I listen. I imagine Masako's anger and what bravery it took for her, a quiet and calm woman all her life, to stand up in her RV, snatch the radio and start on this tirade. The worst part is she's right. I have done awful things, though they've never been so baldly stated before. I imagine her truth spreading throughout the convoy, causing doubt and dissent. There are others who share her views, I know that, simmering for long years under my mayorhood.

  "And what proof have we got of any of it?" she charges. "He keeps us in the dark. How can we know the demons are really following us all, and not only him? He started this thing! Him and Lara, they started it, and I think he should finish it. If he was truly a hero he'd leave the convoy right now and go face them himself, and leave the rest of us alone. They don't want us, Amo, don't you see that? It's only you. How many more have to die before we can be free?"

  I sigh, hardly able to believe what I'm hearing. Does she really think this? Do others? Are we at risk of RVs leaving the convoy behind because they simply don't believe the demons are really a threat to them? But then they have been safe for years. Perhaps they're forgotten the horrors of the apocalypse, or they've just cracked under the weight of memory.

  It's a fantasy, but I can see the appeal, and the threat is real. So an answer comes to me.

  Perhaps this is what we need, the symbol to bind us together. It's a wound I've left untended for years, and its time is due.

  We need a leader we can all believe in.

  "No!" Lara hisses, glimpsing what I'm about to do.

  I smile at her. Again, always, I'm making a distance between us with my decisions, then afterward asking for forgiveness.

  "You're right, Masako," I say on the universal channel. Lara tries to grab the radio from me but I lean away. "Not with the conspiracy theories, not that the demons are only coming for me or that this is all my evil plan to kill my people off, but everything else. My mistakes are out there for everyone to see. You know what I've done. If ever there was a time for us to be united, it's now. I believe that to split the convoy now, to put anyone out on their own as some kind of sacrificial offering, would only kill us all faster. But I'm not a dictator, and I can't force you to see sense and survive. So as of this moment I'm formally stepping down as mayor, and I'm calling an election."

  13. VOTE

  A long pause. A long silence. Even Masako is stunned, I expect.

  But I was never elected. I took control from the start because I was alone and there was only me to take control of. I built New LA from a dream, but that dream doesn't belong to me any more. I was never in love with the title Last Mayor of America; I made it up as a joke when I thought I truly was the last man alive, and I kept it as a cry of defiance.

  But I've worn it too long. I've done too much to be above the judgment of my peers, and I won't be responsible for us tearing apart now. If even one of the RVs decides to separate from the convoy, it could doom us all. The demons will split, they'll double in number, and there won't be enough zombies left in the world to bury them all.

  "Today we've lost some of our brightest, youngest members," I say, maybe my closing argument. "Deaths that are true and fair to lay at my door. Another leader may not have made those mistakes. Yet I'm certain that this path, in this convoy, remains our only hope for survival. Divided we will all fall.

  "We have two days until we reach Pittsburgh. I ask that in those two days you grieve, reflect, and decide. This is not personal, but what you believe is in the best interests of New LA, and the best future for us all. Thank you."

  Lara stares at me. I hand her the radio, like there's something she's going to do with it. Her jaw drops but she doesn't say anything.

&n
bsp; "You get a vote too," I say, "please respect this."

  "You didn't need to-" she starts, then pauses. "You're hurt. You've been concussed. You need to rest. They'll understand."

  I smile at her. She doesn't like that at all.

  "It's stupid," she says, "right now, in the middle of this? It's selfish! We need you."

  Selfish. I feel like laughing. That's one way to see it. For a second it seemed like the spotlight was about to veer away from me, and I dragged it right back. So maybe I'm the biggest narcissist of them all. I can't get it right no matter what I do.

  Yet I see no other choice. If Masako leads a splinter group, perhaps peeling off Witzgenstein and some others who've been sick of me for years, then nothing else I've done would matter. I'm not prepared to shoot down a splinter RV with an RPG just to keep us safe. I won't kill these people just to keep them alive.

  For now though I'm tired of my own voice.

  "I'm hurt," I say. "I've been concussed. I need to rest."

  She stares at me. There's that gap, opening up again.

  I go lie down in my booth and fall straight back to sleep.

  * * *

  No dreams come.

  When I wake I lie silently in the night while the RV rumbles on, thinking about my life and what I've done.

  There've been stirrings of discontent for years. I never saw it so deeply in Masako, but then I've never really looked. Seven years ago Feargal wanted to militarize more, joining with Julio, so we bent that way a little, adding weapons caches and running personal safety courses, and he seemed content.

  Witzgenstein used to talk a lot about staffing the cairns. Six years ago, in 2021, she suggested manned cairns in Las Vegas, New York and Seattle, with two or three people in each place on rotation, like lighthouses, to serve as better beacons for incoming survivors. We discussed it at length. There were positives and negatives, and she had several supporters who wanted to get out from under the tyranny of my New LA rule.

  It was an excuse, I knew it then, a way to break off and start a new community vying for survivors, without completely writing off the support of New LA. Call them mini-colonies, which in time would stage their own wars of independence.

  But it never happened. Julio's rape and murder happened instead, and fear gripped New LA, squashing talk of splitting our numbers for a time. Disagreements came down to the level of where to site new accommodations, which cairn to set up next and what the best balance between defense and openness was.

  Two years after Julio, in 2024 Witzgenstein suggested her colony idea again, this time limited to only one group in one location; far more an actual alternative settlement than a series of lighthouses. She had seven people who wanted to join her, including Masako, Feargal and Cynthia. They offered a break with the loose liberal principles I'd run New LA on, promising a more God-fearing, conservative and homogenous community, perhaps based in Iowa or some other strong agricultural state.

  They never spoke poorly of me, at least in public. They never attacked New LA, only spoke of a desire to pursue their own self-determination. They theorized about splitting all the cairns down the middle to offer incoming survivors a choice, and arranging 'partner-swaps' between the two societies to ensure genetic variability. It didn't matter to them that even at the then-population of 28 we didn't have nearly enough genetic variability to birth our way out of a paper bag.

  In the end it was Cerulean who put that mini revolution down. At a general meeting in the back conference room he went after the idea with a burning passion, speaking of the dwindling lives the children like Anna would face, increasingly isolated as fewer babies were born. He pointed at Ozark as our sole doctor, Sulman as our sole bacteriologist, Jake as our sole professional mechanic, and questioned the value of pure independence over practicality.

  The movement fell apart. I remember now that Masako seemed particularly disappointed in this, but I never thought much of it. She still harbored anger for Cerulean, I figured, after he broke it off between them, and that was all it was.

  Lying in my booth, I sigh. Having Cerulean at my left hand and Lara at my right has insulated me against some of this. Such things never seemed very pressing to me, back when I was engaged with my grander vision.

  I had in mind our ultimate survival as a race. I was always working on the cairn packs, tweaking them as best I could to better spell salvation to any undecided survivors out there. I was absorbed with planning and implementing our rollout of cairns into cities in South America and Canada. I worked on the movie Ragnarok IV for years, aiming for a more universal recruitment tool in multiple languages, no longer so America-centric, which we would spread in cities around the world. I worked endlessly to make it as inspirational and welcoming as I could.

  In tandem with that I had my plan for Anna to circle the world, and the wider series of cairns that would follow, and restarting a rudimentary global internet using the existing deep-sea cables. I delegated a lot onto many people's shoulders, but I did the work too, going out on the front lines as much as I could, heading on cairn trips to new cities and old. I threw grand parties for every survivor who arrived. I tried to celebrate life as well as I knew how.

  But I never really thought of the mayorship as a concrete, tangible thing, separate from myself. There was nothing there to vote for. I was New LA.

  But ten years is a long time to be in power. The President of the United States was limited to two four-year terms. Ten years is more like a dictatorship in some tin pot backwater country, where control passes down dynastic lines, like North Korea.

  Am I Kim Jong-Un?

  It's laughable, but the things Masako said are not. They are threats to our unity, precisely because I have come to symbolize that unity, but this is not a cult of personality. It's a new nation.

  I rub my eyes.

  Who will I be if I am no longer Mayor? Amo the artist, I suppose. He draws our cairns for us, he's great on a rope hanging off a tall building, drawing funny video game characters and social media logos. Once he was Mayor, sure, but that was a long time ago.

  It's all right. I'm no Washington and I never thought I was. I'm just a guy.

  Lara is driving, up ahead. I should go talk to her, pride be damned. I owe her everything, really; my life, my happiness, my children and my reason to live.

  Pride is a little thing, really, next to all that.

  So I go.

  I get up, though every bit of me aches. I go stand beside her, looking at the rear of two RVs ahead of us, and put my arm round her shoulder. She looks up and leans into me.

  From the front RV to the back. I kiss her rich, wiry hair. She has the radio tuned low, but on it I can hear familiar voices deep in argument. Here's Witzgenstein pitching herself for mayor. Here's Masako in support. Here's Ravi and Sulman speaking up for me.

  "Have you been joining in?" I ask.

  Lara snorts. "They make some good points. Willful. Arrogant. Rides roughshod over everyone."

  I nod. "Masako is a bitch, I agree."

  She laughs in spite of herself. "Dammit, Amo. What if they vote you out?"

  I pretend to consider this possibility deeply. Screwing my face up thoughtfully hurts though, with all these bruises and bandages. "More church," I offer up. Everyone knows Witzgenstein is devoutly born again. "Fewer dances, probably. Christian rock, ugh."

  Lara looks at me with that half-angry, half-puzzled face that I love. "Are you serious? They'll split off. The convoy will break and New LA will be decimated."

  I nod slowly. "Yeah. But that might have happened anyway."

  She frowns. "You don't know- I mean, ugh. You're crazy. You're just, ugh!" She breaks off, despairing of me. It's cute, and I kiss her hair again.

  "I should talk to you about these things, before I do them. I know. I'm far from perfect."

  "And they know it too," she says. "However this comes out, it won't be the way it was before."

  "It can't be," I say, "and it shouldn't be."

  She drives
on. Outside there's just the sharp cone of light from our headlamps, illuminating the RVs ahead. It's a cloudy night, no stars and only fleeting glimpses of a sickle moon.

  "How's your head?"

  I squint. If I squint I can read the digital clock on the dashboard through my blurry vision. 3:21, it says, meaning another nine hours spent in the dark.

  "Fine," I say, ignoring the dull thumping growing in my head. I ignored headaches for a year after my coma, and look where it got me. "Clear as a bell."

  "You've got new scars. There's a nasty one on your cheek; we slowed the convoy down to let Macy come tend to it."

  I finger my right cheek. Yes, I can feel the stubble of stitches under the bandage. That might have been Lucy, or maybe flying debris.

  "It'll give me character."

  She smiles.

  "I want to see the kids," I say, struck by a sudden yearning. "I miss them."

  "Me too. We're stopping in an hour, the whole convoy. We have enough of a lead to stretch our legs for ten minutes. We can swap with Cynthia, ride out the debate in the kid's car."

  I grin. Nothing sounds so wonderful as that. I kiss her again, and she pulls my hand down and kisses my palm.

  "No more surprises," she says.

  "No more surprises," I agree.

  * * *

  The trade-over takes nine minutes total, including emptying a few toilet septic tanks, supplies being traded and people switching vehicles. It is a smooth and perfectly oiled maneuver, all the parts interchanging with clockwork precision, and I feel proud.

  On the way up to the kids' car I let myself be seen, hobbling along on Lara's arm.

  It's good to let the people see me, alive and moderately well. The ones who like me will be cheered. The ones who want a new Mayor will see I'm present but not interfering with the process. At one point I see Masako, as we go past her RV toward the kid's car.

  "That was brave," I tell her. "I know it wasn't easy."

  She watches me with disdain, standing with her husband Alan holding her arm like he's restraining her. I know it must sound patronizing for me to say that, but I mean it, and I want her to know I'm not angry. Still, it's strange to see so much anger fuming off her, when I never really saw it before.