The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  They stopped writhing in mid-air. They stopped striving. Their bodies thudded down, chased like a rain of fire by the helicopter's ruptured carcass, torn apart at the middle, searing down to the corn with a deep whine of metal and whispering gust of fuel that made it strike with an instantaneous-

  BOOM

  The explosion rose up higher than the stairs van, and Anna kept walking until the heat from the blazing inferno of slag became too intense. The corn and grass nearby caught fire and peeled away in cinders, so Anna walked a steady circuit around it. Two figures she found on the ground, broken-legged and armed, one with his helmet broken open to show a bloody face beneath, trying to escape by crawling through the corn.

  BANG BANG

  She executed them both.

  She walked the corn until she was certain all the figures were still. Then she stood by the fire and watched the thing burn, guns tumbled at her side. A wave of tiredness came over her, and she saw blood pooling on the ashy soil before her, running down her body from a wound she couldn't even see. Her back, perhaps. She laughed, and sank down into darkness.

  INTERLUDE 2

  General Gerald Marshall barely made it out of the cubic cell.

  Through the outer door he stumbled and dropped to his knees on the cracked runway asphalt. The weight of the line bearing down was greater than he'd imagined possible; a migraine of behemothic proportions that crushed him like a cigarette butt underfoot. The pain was bad but the weight was the thing, buckling his legs and rubbing out his mind.

  He hadn't planned it. He'd never meant to remove his helmet, not in such proximity to the others, not in front of Lucas Fallow, not at all. The line was bad enough with the helmet on for fifteen hours plus, but with the helmet off he had perhaps a minute left to live.

  "The line's become erratic," Control had told him, more as a warning that they should limit their exposure even further, spending more time in the Dome under the full shield. "Like a random radioactive decay interval, it can't be predicted. Currently it's so low out there we could probably remove our helmets and survive, though in an hour it could shift completely, becoming strong enough to bore through the Dome."

  That had spurred him on. If even the Dome wasn't safe, there was no time to wait. The line had to be stabilized at any cost, and he'd seen in Lucas Fallow's eyes both the knowledge to end this war faster, and the will to refuse to do it. Only the scorched earth of complete subjugation had any hope of changing his mind.

  As it had with the death of Maine.

  Marshall gritted his teeth and rose again to his feet. The world was very far away, but there was the Dome like a glinting safe haven up ahead, and he'd never been a weak-willed man. A core of iron made him who he was, and he wasn't about to surrender to an unbearable weight. Crippling blows rained down, growing stronger by the second, but he made himself walk on.

  He had no family and no friends, but he found strength in his belief; not in a flag or a nation but a dream of the future. There were too many good people to die. The end of the world had angered him deeply, and the refusal of Amo to cede his world to an overwhelming majority only enraged him further.

  He took a step and another step.

  Injustice drove him. A sense of what was right and fair. His people deserved a chance, they had the right to breathe this same air, to walk these old ways, to live above ground and bring their children into the light.

  Step, step, step.

  The line crushed him down but he didn't stop, though his back stooped and his neck creaked under each strike. The look of absolute shock on Lucas Fallow's face drove him on, because it was the first crack in the façade. It opened the path for him to hammer through, and he would hammer right through, making Fallow his own beast before the day was up.

  Things were going to change. Justice would prevail.

  Step step step.

  The Dome was near when the line finally crushed him to his knees. He grimaced and strained with all his prodigious focus to stand again, but he could not. All he could do was throw back his head and cry out. To die here would erase the effect he'd hoped for on Lucas Fallow. It would set them back to the beginning, back to burying his men in the walls when the weight grew too much for them, back to the merciless dominion of despair, and that he could not allow.

  He got one foot underneath him, then another. There was no way to think it, only a way to do, and he pushed forward. Step, shuddering step. His whole body shook. The Dome grew closer and the air smelled so fresh, fresher than anything he'd experienced in so many years.

  Then the Dome was opening, and Sergeant Park's terrified face was flashing closer in her suit, and her arms were on him and supporting him, helping him forward. Together they got his body up the steps, got him into the Dome's airlock, and the octahedral armature-door shushed closed, and the familiar low drone of the shield closed in around him.

  But the weight didn't lift. It crushed in tighter and he curled into an undignified ball that did nothing to relieve it. Waves pounded him down, and he could do nothing but endure.

  * * *

  Lucas stared at the helmet.

  What he'd just seen was impossible, or at least it always had been. In the early days after the Maine insurrection, when they'd first learned the truth about their imprisonment and the zombies and the line, he'd run experiments constantly and sequentially to find a way out. He'd been in charge of seeking a cure, back when Salle believed that was still a valuable use of their time.

  The line had always been far too strong, though. Early executions had taken place by exposure to the outer world, via trials of their first shielded suits. The condemned were shielded up the ladder rungs by the bunker's core resonant bubble, but once they were above ground they were left alone with the portable shield embedded in their helmets.

  The very first man lasted barely ten seconds, before he dropped to the ground then reanimated as another zombie. They'd affixed a tether to the suit so their vital prototype would not be lost, but they couldn't pull him back after infection. So for weeks that first victim of their infant science had tugged at his cord like a kite pulled by the wind, straining to be free.

  His studies on the existing shield redoubled. Salle put more of their best scientists on the case, back when she could still be reasoned with, before the dictatorship of three thousand people closed her ears forever. They'd almost been friends, for a time, as he reported the findings of his team in this new field of science.

  It had been exciting. Every day it had seemed their emancipation lay within grasp, perhaps only days away. Salle's rule might only be temporary, and the harsh laws she'd already laid down to ration the supplies that hadn't been destroyed in the revolution would only be temporary. She tightened the work on rebuilding sections of the bunker that had been crippled in the revolution, reducing work-hours to replant the farm halls and rewire habitation decks, in order to press ahead with the cure.

  It had been a heady time. It was indeed distasteful that each volunteer to go above was not truly a volunteer, but a 'criminal'. At first Salle would tell him who these men, because they were always men, were. Rapists she'd caught out on camera during the insurrection. Murderers who'd killed for sadistic joy. She'd been proud when she sent them up to their deaths.

  "They're serving their community," she'd say, and in those moments Lucas first really grew to fear her. It began as a seed, but it grew from a root in Salle that was not going to wither. It would only grow stronger with time, and so it did, as she ran out of rapists and murderers, and volunteers with lesser crimes had to be found.

  She stopped discussing those crimes with anyone, least of all Lucas. She stopped speaking to him altogether after a time, and soon his only interaction with her came through Joseph, her first lieutenant, a sharp and unbreakably formal ex-lawyer.

  So they sent more volunteers up. Dozens. At the height of it there were seven of them at once, all zombies pulling at their tethers and trying to escape like ribbons on a Maypole. Only the eighth, who h
ad been promised that he would be allowed back in, if he could strip some of the suits off the zombies and return them.

  He lasted almost ten minutes up there, and in that time managed to de-suit three bodies before he replaced one of them with himself. Of course when he came crawling back to the bunker entrance point, he'd found it sealed up. Soon enough he got to his feet again and stumbled away, to the extent of his leash. Lucas' team wound the now-empty three suits back in, and from the readings they'd captured they learned so much. Based on that they'd redesigned the whole suit program.

  It took years to develop a suit that could keep any one of them alive for an hour. Four years in, after even the time that the agent, Julio, had started making his collection of other survivors in preparation for D-Day, they sent one out for the full hour, then brought him back in. They kept him for observation in a newly segmented functional hydrogen line airlock between the Habitat and Command, watching as he shivered and wept and begged to be readmitted. In the end, to everyone's surprise, he did not become a zombie but simply died.

  He was not contagious. It wasn't the same disease that turned those up above to zombies, but rather a deep and destructive brain damage.

  Lucas went back to the drawing board. Salle distanced herself further, perhaps disgusted by the number of volunteers she was committing to the cause, with no sign of a result. Lucas took his research and reasoned there was no way to build a suit that could ever sustain them permanently above ground, so instead began to work on a cure.

  A year after that, Salle cut him off. A cure was a waste of resources, as D-Day was the only real hope for them all. She barred him from his lab and blocked any communication with his old lab-mates. Some of them were sent to the surface as volunteers, which he learned about only by their absence, and rumors. The suit program was continuing without him.

  So he threw himself into his cure. He learned the back alleys and hidden ways of the bunker, spying and infiltrating and risking himself in the walls to find a better way forward.

  Now he sat here, with a helmet on the table before him, and the General Gerald Marshall had just walked out without it.

  It was a dizzying revelation. It changed many things, reorienting the way he saw the world. Amo was one thing, Anna was on one side, and on the other were these people. Obviously he still needed the helmet, but…

  But he didn't.

  Yet they'd raided with the helmets and suits on. None of his captors had taken them off for the duration of his rendition to this place. Marshall had worn his throughout, through the interview, only removing it at the end.

  But he hadn't changed immediately. He'd gotten up and walked out. Perhaps there'd been a slight lurch in his last step out of the door, but what was that but a matter of degree?

  The line had changed. It was a clanging hammer on his plans. Even if suits were still necessary, their duration and safety would only be improved if the line outside had weakened so considerably. The ramifications stretched out ahead of him.

  He'd registered the seismic change on the hydrogen line. Perhaps it also meant a cure was closer. If only he could make Marshall listen to that. The gap between the immune and non-immune had never been narrower. If ever it was possible to bridge that gap, it was now. Perhaps it would take only a day to design a new formulation. One day and they could all be immunized. The thought of all these survivors flowing up from the earth overcame him, and he wept.

  Things could get better. There would be no more war, no more volunteers, and no need for genocide. Finally he would reach the cure that Salle had so long barred him from researching.

  * * *

  Marshall woke in the night, laid on a bed in the Dome. The crippling weight of the line still lay upon him, squeezing his head in a vice, but he'd done hard things before. In the Gulf he'd taken out a sniper nest with a bullet in his chest and a piece of shrapnel the size of a STOP sign embedded in his back.

  Gentle lights from the Dome's many-jointed armature illuminated the Spartan floor space, drawing a glow off the face of Master Sergeant Park. She was watching him with an awed, somewhat cautious expression.

  "Sir?" she said tentatively.

  He could imagine what she was thinking. '8 Lives' had earned his nickname again. Even the line couldn't lay him low. Control had told them the line may be lessened in strength, so he'd taken off his helmet and taken a stroll. It was how he presented himself to them, an indomitable force, using the power of his reputation as a way to beat back despair.

  "Soldier, you're out of uniform," he said, rising to a sitting position. Lightning engulfed his head, but he allowed no outward sign of the pain to show.

  "I, yes sir," Park managed. Her top button was undone, and she refastened it swiftly. "It won't happen again. We thought-"

  "Nothing to think," he said. "Tell me Control haven't interfered."

  "I-" she started, before getting ahold of herself. "No, sir. They ordered us back into the tent, but no one's spoken to him. He's still sitting there, next to your helmet. Sir, if I may ask, why did you-"

  "Expedience," he answered sharply. "It's what he needs to see."

  Park nodded. She had dark eyes, a cloyingly sweet round face, and was highly competent. Her sensitivity made her an excellent Master Sergeant back in the bunkers; out here that empathy made the difference between life and death.

  There was no time to waste. He looked down at his uniform; crumpled and sweat-stained now. They must have stripped the suit off him piece by piece. His body still felt feverish, but there was no time for rest. At once he started to strip. Park was unabashed, didn't turn away, only went to his trunk to fetch a fresh uniform. They'd been through this countless times before, when she'd come upon him still drunk on a morning after a funeral. Covering for him. Perhaps, if he'd been twenty years younger…

  "Report," he commanded.

  She handed him a crisp white shirt. She knew better than to question the pointlessness of wearing a smartly pressed dress uniform to see the prisoner, when none of it would be visible beneath the shield suit. It was just the General's way.

  "Sir, suggest you sit to hear the news from Manning."

  That stopped 8 Lives' blood cold. He pulled on the shirt and focused on her. It could be only one thing. "He's dead." A silence passed for confirmation. "How?"

  He wavered with the pain, and Officer Park stepped forward as if to catch him, but his acid glare saw her off sharply.

  "They reported eyes-on the Sailor and her team shortly after you walked through the line, sir, then moved to engage. Rockets deployed, they buzzed a corn field with Minigun-fire, then as best as I can detect from watching the cockpit feeds, the girl shot them down with a pair of handguns."

  8 Lives stared. "Handguns?"

  Park winced slightly, as if she were responsible. "Yes, sir. I would guess she shot Davies; they were flying low. The helo went down with no sign of survivors."

  Marshall restrained a grimace. This was bad news. This made his straitjacketed heart pump harder, but it also made it easier to push back at the electric cloud currently fragging his brain. This required an overwhelming response.

  "I'll need a handgun," he said, shrugging on his fresh jacket, sparkling with medals, brass buttons and gold stars. "Two, in fact. And that footage."

  "Yes, sir," answered Park, and started climbing into her own suit.

  6. THE CURE

  Anna swam up from the same old dream.

  She was racing on her catamaran toward a giant figure sitting on an island on the horizon. His face wasn't visible, but she knew it wasn't the weighed-down bulk of her father anymore, as it had always been before. Now it was Ravi, waiting to say goodbye, but he wouldn't look in her direction. No matter how fast she raced round to face him, he kept turning, so all she ever saw was his back.

  She woke to smoke.

  It wafted across the blue sky like parallax scroll in an old 16-bit video game. Ravi used to wax lyrical for hours about all his old platform-scrolling favorites; the games he'd l
oved most in his five years spent alone, before leaving his parents' home in Tennessee and discovering the cairn trail to New LA.

  "Call of Duty is all very well," he'd hold forth, while snacking on ancient Cheetos and pointing at Ken and Ryu fighting in a Chinese village, while the varying background layers smoothly scrolled left and right, simulating a depth that Anna never quite understood the appeal of. "Tell me that is not a work of art. This whole game should be in museums."

  Anna would laugh and roll over and go back to plotting her strategy to outrace him on the water.

  Now she lay on her back and tears trickled down into her hair, slipping like the arms of sunglasses above her ears. The smoke kept drifting, and the clouds kept scrolling, simulating depth. Two layers, like two pieces of Ravi, torn apart by gunfire.

  Her left arm didn't work well.

  She got to her feet.

  On her feet the world was a hazy gray corn maze, and smelled of burnt plastic and popcorn. The helicopter body lay on its side nearby, surrounded by a dark crater-like blot of smoldering vegetation and cinders. The cabin was rolled on its side and blown open at the rear, where the fuel must have caught and made the BOOM. One blade still hung from the ruptured main rotor, sticking up in the air like a raised middle finger, offering an obscene final salute.

  No bodies, not here. There was no movement. The glass was all gone in the cab. The black sides were marked with sweaty streaks of soot. The sound of something clicking inside carried through the smoke, and she wondered what it was. A plastic dashboard pelican, perhaps, slowly pecking itself down a pole. A Geiger counter clicking off the changes in the hydrogen line. A body tapping to be free.

  "Peters!" she called.

  Her voice was weak. She felt weak. Each step was more of a stumble. The ash underfoot spat up in little puffs of black and glowing red. She felt the heat through her feet. The corn nearby was smoldering upright.

  "Jake!"

  Her throat was dry. She needed water. She looked down and saw herself airbrushed with gray powder. A dark line of dried blood ran down her left leg, and she tried to track it back. Her left arm swung weakly. She craned her head to look for the wound, and clunked against something hard and metallic over her shoulder, like a backpack with a shovel strapped across the top.