The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  They'd given him a bedroll on the floor. They'd provided a portable toilet in the corner, and given him hot food; a platter of beef teriyaki that tasted just like the Meal Ready to Eat field rations they'd had thousands of in Maine. There'd been huge sections of them in the storage rooms, lining the walls ten deep and fifty high, like bricks.

  He ate. He sat on his bedroll, while two of them in black suits and black helmets moved him over and fastened his chains to another small loop embedded in the metal floor. He asked them questions but they didn't say a word, and left him alone with the helmet on the table.

  He couldn't not look at it. It helped steel his resolve, and it terrified him. He would make them listen to him. They'd already ignored him.

  He didn't mean to sleep, but it had been days already, and there was nothing else to do. Even the fire of his own determination waned as time passed by. With no clock or indication of light or dark from outside, he had no idea how much time had passed by the time he woke. A day, two?

  General Marshall was standing over him, looking down. He was wearing his helmet again, and the expression behind the visor was severe.

  "You've put it back on, I see," Lucas said.

  The General didn't show any response, merely indicated for one of his soldiers, another man in a suit, to transfer Lucas back to the table. He unlocked Lucas' chains, lifted him gently, and guided him to the chair. Never mind that he needed to take a piss. He'd have to wait now, or just let it go. He wasn't going to ask for permission to use the toilet unless he really had to.

  "That's an impressive trick," Lucas said, as the chains were padlocked again to the loop in the table, next to a laptop computer. "But the line's still there, isn't it? You can go without for a few minutes, perhaps? You don't need to confirm it, I can see as much. It means you still need me. General," here he paused, emphasizing his use of the title, showing respect, showing they could still be on the same side. "General, I swear to you, I can cure all of you within twenty-four hours. I know what I need to do. I know exactly."

  The General watched him with a steely flatness. "You believe that. Mr. Fallow, I know that you do. But there are realities you are not aware of. Have you heard of Lyell's syndrome?"

  That was out of left field, and he inclined his head in curiosity. As a geneticist, of course he had. It was a horrific condition that killed most of those afflicted with it before they were even one year old, causing large portions of skin to slough off through necrolysis. Horror babies, they'd been informally called. Those who survived into adolescence had it even worse, as the bodily changes and emergence of new hormones made their suffering even worse. The oldest recorded case was a twenty-five year old man who'd required round-the-clock care, and begged his mother every day to kill him.

  "Yes. What does that have to do with anything?"

  "It's where your cure will lead. We've known this for seven years, ever since one of our own found the same cure that you did. It's a trap designed into the virus, and it will not save the world. On the contrary, it will cause you to begin exhibiting Lyell's syndrome yourself. Perhaps you have noticed it already; the shifting sensation within your own skin? That is the gradual separation of the epidermal layers from each other. Soon they will slide as smoothly as if they were oiled. That is the fate that awaits you."

  Lucas gazed at him. This was a strange tactic, and one he didn't really understand.

  "You're not listening," he persisted. "I've found the cure. It was hidden in the line, in the way the line talks to the T4. I can-"

  The General held up a hand. "We can simplify this process, if you'll indulge me. You believe you've found a cure. You feel it in your own body. Allow me."

  He opened the laptop and it powered up, bathing the black suit in white light that reflected off the visor. Marshall tapped several keys, the suit gloves making a neat clacking sound. Then he spun the laptop sideways so Lucas could see it too.

  On the screen was a radial graph, just like the ones from Bordeaux, though it featured readings he hadn't seen before. Beneath it lay a line graph showing a complex wave form representation of the hydrogen line.

  "Here," said Marshall, tapping the screen. "This is what your research has led you to, correct?"

  Lucas blinked and studied the graph. It was different, it didn't represent any living survivor like he'd seen before, but there was something about it that sparked his imagination. He tried to put the pieces together, until in a flash of inspiration he saw it.

  It was his cure.

  "Yes," said Marshall. "We've had it for years."

  "But that's-" Lucas began, then spluttered off. This was a cure he hadn't even made yet. It had been there in the back of his mind, steadily forming after all the changes in the line, not as fully formed as the graph before him, but…

  But he hadn't written it anywhere. He hadn't thought to represent it this way. It was different, some of the harmonics came in places he hadn't expected, hinting at genetic mark-ups he hadn’t anticipated, but it was the same. It was the cure.

  "So, you have it," he said, confused as to whether he should be celebrating. "This is what I used on myself. I didn't realize it, but look, yes, I'm here! You can treat all your people with this, just like me. There doesn't need to be a war."

  General Marshall just stared at him, and in that cold gaze Lucas remembered what he'd already said about Lyell's. He peered again at the graph and tried to puzzle that out. If they had the cure they would surely use it, there was no reason to do anything other. They wanted more than anything to come above ground, he knew that. But then…

  Then that meant…

  "Have you felt it?" General Marshall asked. Lucas knew exactly what he meant. It was a fate worse than death, hanging in the air between them. "The symptoms begin with a ticklish sensation. It can last for days or weeks, before the first section slides away. After that I'm afraid it's a free for all. There are special ointments you can use, padding, but within several weeks typically there is a loss of all lasting cohesion. Fingernails, toenails, hair, and ears are the first to go. Genitals, nose, nipples and lips follow. Within a month or two, with even the best care, you will not be able to recognize yourself in the mirror. Most die within two years, defeated by the pain and the despair."

  Lucas looked at the readout and struggled to think. His cure? It couldn't be, but then if it really was a cure, why wouldn't they use it?

  "Here," said the General, and tapped the keyboard, bringing up a set of ten photographs that showed the progressive ravages of Lyell's necrolysis. Lucas winced. It began with a strong young man, standing naked against a pure white background, arms out to the sides, with a lead card at the bottom stating:

  Subject M284573

  Formula x9th3

  Oral ingestion 3/24/2019

  Day 0

  From there the photographs progressively deteriorated. It was the same young man in every picture, though he steadily shrank and sickened. Patches of his skin came away, like fallow fields absent any crop, showing raw red underneath. Just as General Marshall had said, first went hair and ears, next went genitals, nose, nipples, lips. By the final image, marked Day 154, he was bent almost double and so much of his body was red that it was hard to believe he was still alive.

  It was repugnant. To see such wounds viscerally shocked Lucas, made the gorge rise into his throat.

  "His name was Henry Wakefield," General Marshall said. "He was a volunteer, knowing what fate he would undergo. I have been through this cycle so many times, Mr. Fallow, that I can recognize the symptoms in you already. The way you favor your left side, even as you sit. The way you leave your forearms hovering in the air above the table, rather than resting them on the surface. I have seen it. I grant you, it may be that your cure has a longer lead time than we have accomplished, and for that you are to be commended. You have lived with this 'cure' for over 552 days, by my count, and still do not show any outward 'slippage'. But you will. The syndrome will emerge, and this is how you will be left." />
  He tapped the screen with a solid thunk.

  "But-" Lucas began, then stopped. "That doesn't make sense. Lyell's syndrome, it's a million miles away from the T4. There's no connection, no reasonable way for one to go to the other. I banished the T4 from my system completely, and there is no such thing as late-onset Lyell's. There is simply no way these two disease factors could correlate naturally. It can't happen."

  General Marshall gave a tight, unhappy smile. "You're right. It took our scientists seven months to corroborate that. By which time we'd already run over a hundred through the cure. This is the fate that awaited them all, sooner or later. And it is not natural, but then, surely you've come to the same conclusion about the T4 already."

  Lucas's thoughts raced. Too many revelations were heaping up now. "I don't- I mean, of course I know the T4 was made. It's too complex, too tied into the hydrogen line, to be the result of a single natural mutation. There was design, but are you saying the T4 was manufactured to do this? In the event of, what? A cure?"

  Marshall almost seemed sympathetic. "Yes. As I said, it took us seven months to reach that revelation. Imagine a terrorist bomb attack on a school, and the school burns, killing everyone inside. A fire crew comes to put out the fire, and the terrorist kills them all with a second bomb buried in the sidewalk." He paused. "This is the same. The arrival of the fire crew is predictable, just as this route to a cure was predictable. You were guided to this path, following clues left throughout the T4 and the line, and this is what you found."

  Lucas stared at the vile images on the screen with a sick fascination. He couldn't stop. The logic was unassailable. Why wouldn't they cure themselves, if they could? Only because the side-effect of the cure was far worse.

  Marshall went on. "We've been working on it for all this time, Lucas, and we have found no genuine cure. The greatest minds in our world have been hammering at it for twelve years and found no hope. If the leader of your bunker, Salle Coram, had kept the ties to the rest of the Seal intact, she would have known too. She could have saved you your efforts, and allowed you to funnel your brilliance to the only direction that remained. Extermination of the immune."

  Lucas stared.

  Of course.

  It made sense.

  He tapped the screen himself, at the extension of his chains, shifting the display back to the radial graph. He tried to see some fault in their calculations, in the wavelengths or the genetic coding it would imply, but could find none. This was the essence of the cure he would make himself. It was right here.

  And it wouldn't work.

  That fact changed everything. Thoughts of Farsan spiraled into his mind, of all those long pathetic hours spent in their hidden lab tucked away in the darkness where Salle Coram couldn't find them, suffering with his various formulae and dreaming of a better world.

  For nothing.

  Farsan had died believing in a lie. Lucas himself had lived because of a lie, and ahead of him lay the worst, most drawn-out death imaginable. He slumped in his chair, utterly deflated, but noticed even in doing so that he carefully kept his forearms from resting against the arm rests. He'd never consciously thought they were tender, but now he realized it was true.

  He did have an aversion to being touched, one that had come on in the last year. It had amused Jake. Now it seemed it was the T4's revenge.

  "So you see, we have been planning for this eventuality all along," Marshall went on, not unkindly. "Your treaty, your offerings of a cure, we had no choice but to play along, while planning to wipe your people out. There is no other path, I am afraid, no route left by the T4. To that end, I have something more to show you."

  He clicked the laptop several times. An aerial image of a city came up in a video panel, frozen. Lucas barely had the strength to look but again he couldn't draw his eyes away.

  "It's New LA," he said in a slur.

  "It is," said Marshall. "Footage from a satellite taken yesterday, at the same time we raided you. Our timing was dictated by the gathering of all your people in one place, together with a second group that traveled from Europe, led by a man named Matthew Drake. We had been waiting for this moment for months."

  Lucas looked down on New LA. He'd never been. He'd never met Amo in the flesh, or any of them. His only go-between had always been Anna, and he'd been happy with that. The things his people had done to Amo's, and vice versa, were too harsh for him to ever want to be in their midst.

  Still, he recognized the curving line of beaches, the low sprawl of gray. In a way, considering what he'd already seen, he knew what was now coming.

  Marshall pressed play, and it was perhaps a minute before the white circle engulfed the city. A halo of dust spun out around it, then the white began to peel away from the inside, as the smoke of destruction rose up through the middle. He'd never seen one before, but it was easy to know what it was. It stamped on his heart and sank him lower in his chair.

  "Nuclear," he whispered.

  "There were no survivors," Marshall said. "An entire hemisphere wiped out. I'm sorry to tell you this. I don't take joy in their deaths. But I do accept the reality that this is the only way. In this new world, they are the cancer. We cannot fight the T4, but we can cut out the infecting agent. There is hope for the rest of us."

  The people in New LA were mostly just names to Lucas. Amo and Lara and their kids, though he knew Feargal, and he'd spoken to each of the victims of Julio, offering his deepest apologies. Crow's forgiveness had struck him in particular. Most of them were just stories Anna had told him, but their dream had been very real. He'd built that dream himself, in concert with Amo, both of them seeking some kind of forgiveness and way forward after all the crimes they had committed.

  Now all that was gone, wiped out in a flash of light. It stole more from him than he had to give. It was hard to breathe. On the screen the white circle was mostly absorbed by the inner yolk of gray. The mushroom cloud.

  "Turn it off," he said, sounding numb, and Marshall did.

  "There's only one more. I'd show you these later, but every minute we wait, another minute passes that you will not regain, Lucas. And make no mistake, we need you. You are a genius, though you reached the cure later then we did. You reached it in your own way, and with modifications that have allowed you a normal life until now. Your work with the shields in both Maine and Bordeaux has offered us innovations not one soul amongst our people has matched. So we need you. We need you to refine our suits and our shields. It's our belief that even after the last of the immune are destroyed, their impact on the hydrogen line will continue to resonate. We will need protection for possibly years to come, and I believe you want the best for your race. You want humanity to survive, and I assure you we are human. We are humane. We don't want this any more than you do."

  Lucas weaved in the chair. He couldn't speak.

  "It may be the hardest to see yet," said Marshall, and brought up another frozen video. This one showed an overgrown cornfield, shot from an elevated position, with a barely discernible dirt road running through the midst. Square in the middle of the frame there sat an outlandish sight; a low white van with a set of stairs climbing the hood, the kind of thing you would see at an airport for boarding passengers.

  Lucas almost laughed, but didn't have the energy. Strapped across the front of the van was a metal grille of metal, and within the cab-

  "I'll zoom in," Marshall said, and the image tightened in on the windshield, through which Lucas could see them, all four of them sitting in a squashed-together row staring wide-eyed up at the camera.

  Anna at the wheel, then Ravi beside her, Peters and Jake. Jake looked so scared, crushed against the door.

  "No," he whispered, and a tear ran down his cheek. He felt himself crumbling inside. First Farsan, now this, to be exterminated like animals.

  "I'm sorry," Marshall said, "I truly am," and zoomed the image out. "This was taken from a Black Hawk helicopter, one of a fleet we have painstakingly restored. It carries a full s
tock of Hellfire missiles, each with a kill-range of one hundred yards, and that is what you're about to see."

  More tears ran down Lucas' face. All hint of defiance in him was gone. He leaned in closer to see Jake's face. In Jake he'd found a kind of warmth and peace he hadn't known since the promise of Farsan, but better than anything Farsan had been able to offer, because Jake truly loved him back.

  They'd protected each other against the harshness of the world.

  Marshall ran the video. The first missile shot out on a string of smoke and erupted near the van, sending a cloud of smoke that obscured the shot. Moments later there was a second explosion, even larger, and gouts of flame rose up through the dust.

  Lucas sobbed.

  "I'm sorry, Lucas," said Marshall, slow and measured, using his first name for the first time. All a trick, but a trick that would work. "There were no survivors. The only immunes left are here, sitting in cubicle tents nearby, and for them I have one more solution."

  He lifted a pistol from its holster at its side, placed it on the tabletop, and Lucas sank the final few feet down inside himself. "No," he muttered, desperate now, willing to do anything. "Please." He reached out to Marshall, but the chain on his wrist prevented him, and the pain of it chafing was new and terrifying. Lyell's was coming.

  "I'm sorry," Marshall said again, "but this has to happen."

  He rose to his feet, and Lucas felt his face cave in. He wailed like an animal. "Please!"

  "You'll see," said Marshall calmly. "You'll see this is not done with any hate or cruelty, but with a terrible regret. I am not a murderer. I am a surgeon cutting out the cancer to save the body. If I could do the same for your people, Lucas, I would. But I can't."

  Marshall moved toward the door. He laid his fingers on the handle while Lucas tried to frame words through his sobbing. And there, for a moment, he paused.

  And turned back.

  "Unless…" he said.

  Lucas leapt upon the chance. He babbled incoherently and begged, eyes streaming. If any of them could be saved, he would do it. No matter what they asked of him, he would do it, if there was just a chance.