The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  Anna tried to wipe her stringy lips on her collar, but of course she couldn't move. The vomit lay on her neck and chin and chest. As she watched, the little gray thing twitched, and she felt the slightest kick in her spine, almost vomiting again.

  It was as terrifying as anything she'd felt earlier. It was worse. It was inside her.

  "What do I-" she began, gasping, "how do I 'extract' it?"

  "Yes," he said. Looking at his pink, purple face was almost a relief after seeing the sick thing in her belly. Attached to her. "I'll be dead by then. I won't be able to finish the work, but there is one person I know who might. Whose natural intellect could stand alongside those other giants I mentioned. Price, Romirez, Al-Abra. You know him already."

  She gasped. "Lucas?"

  "Lucas Fallow. Yes. He found his own cure through innovative brilliance, and brought on his own case of Lyell's. His time will be limited too, just as mine is. So the Prometheus' of this world are punished. So we are treated for trying to bring fire."

  Anna stared. Lucas. The dead shred of meat in her middle. "I can't-"

  "'I can't' is exactly what I said," he interrupted her. "Every day of my life for the last twelve years, ever since I was cast from the garden and chained to this mountainside, I said it as I tortured your people to death, looking for understanding, I said that I could not. I said it to myself a hundred times, in the mirror as my skin shed, to the air when I could no longer stomach my own reflection, but still I did it, what had to be done. Again and again, and you will too. Lucas will. Take my life's work to him, and pray that he understands what to do."

  He shuffled closer. His hands raised to one of the cables feeding into the clear ball in her belly, and he worked a dial.

  "What are you doing?" she asked, but already she felt it. The return of the drugs.

  "Knocking you out. You would not want to be awake for the extraction of this." He tapped the glass dome. "You would be-"

  His voice faded out, and she sank, until she was back with Ravi in the darkness, and he held his hands out to her and opened them slowly, revealing a tiny white egg in the cupped bowl of his palms, slowly cracking open.

  "It's a hummingbird egg," he said, so sweetly, so gentle. "It'll be a beautiful thing, Anna, don't you think?"

  In the dark she wept, and took his hands, and sheltered the egg while the tiny creature pushed its beak into the light.

  INTERLUDE 6

  The Western Seal was in chaos.

  General Marshall spoke to Control in bursts as he drove, willing the weight in his head back, but only caught pieces of the panic burning through the three bunkers that had signed the Sailor's treaty.

  Gap, Brezno and Istanbul.

  The Mayor had broken his defensive line at Bordeaux with an ease that was terrifying. He'd reached inside Marshall's own head, through the generation 5 helmet that was supposed to keep him safe, and implanted a terrible paralysis.

  It was hard to remember now what that had felt like. The three worst-affected of his soldiers were now in the Dome, whistling behind in convoy, bloody and dead to the world. The three behind him in the Humvee spoke in tepid bursts, trying to reassure each other, trying to fit the pieces together, but they added up to no known effect of the line. This was something new, and the Seal had their best people on it, all except Lucas Fallow, who was making phenomenal strides in his own area.

  But there wasn't time. He hadn't anticipated this.

  The Mayor's force had crushed his own before they'd even engaged. He'd prepared a defensive barricade that should have held off a battalion; drones, autocannons, sniper and high-powered rifle-fire from cover, artillery shells and the Black Hawk itself, firing twin M60D machine guns on the move. With the Dome in back as their nexus they'd spent a week clearing roads and setting up advantageous defensive screens, allowing them to cover a range of beach a hundred kilometers in length with a fast response time of minutes.

  It should have been unbreachable. For the last two days they'd run the simulations again and again of the Mayor's landing; where he would hit, when he would hit, how the battle would go. They'd seen his high-spec yacht was towing eight speedboats behind it and considered the possibility that he would split his forces, and accordingly set fast-response units in lower-grade generation 4 helmets to cover that eventuality.

  Then he'd chained and camouflaged his ships in the night, making drone and artillery strikes highly unreliable, getting close enough to send the devastating paralysis through the air, and the battle was lost. Two men in generation 4 helmets had died on the road before Marshall swung by to pick them up. One of the generation 5 helmets had overloaded and scrambled the soldier wearing it so badly that Marshall had no choice but to put a bullet through his head.

  Now his force was in full retreat. He had soldiers in back who needed the Dome, but it was at capacity. Instead they lay on the seats and groaned with the weight of whatever the Mayor had done, already deep into their respective kill-zones, well beyond twenty hours of exposure. Worse still, tracked every inch of the way by the Seal's satellites, came the Mayor on their tail.

  He'd placed shallow rings of defenses around all three bunkers, but now his faith in those measures was shaken. The Mayor had killed an autocannon and an attack helicopter in less than a minute, and rendered drones, artillery and superior soldier numbers useless. What chance did any of them have?

  "Sir?" said Park from in back.

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror. The Dome sat large in the back window beyond her, glinting in the mid-day light. She looked sick in her helmet. The blood from her eyes had dried in crusty stripes down her cheeks, like war paint, but she couldn't take off her helmet to rub them away.

  "You need to use the Dome," he said. His voice came across harsher than he'd meant it to. It wasn't weakness to succumb to this; to need to escape from the pummeling the line had given them all. He'd had exposure and built up his tolerance, so he'd never felt it like they had. His eyes had never bled.

  "I need you to use the Dome, Sir," she answered, anger in her voice too. "You were unshielded for over ten minutes."

  Her tone brought him back into check. Of course, she was a good soldier. They were all good soldiers. He needed to get back in control. He slowed the truck down, stopped, and turned to survey his men. The Mayor was far enough behind for this.

  Park was in the best condition, but still she looked like an early stage Lyell's patient. Miller was prone on his side, inner visor so splashed with blood Marshall couldn't even see his face, moaning without end. Gerrault rocked his head against the window repeatedly, a steady click click click, while Zo was slumped with her head in her hands, shoulders convulsing silently. How long had that been going on for?

  He looked at the dashboard clock. Past one in the afternoon, and the beach assault had happened hours before the dawn. He'd been driving for as long as eight hours.

  "Rotate the Dome," he said coolly. "They've been in long enough. Get Miller and Zo in there."

  "Sir, no," Park protested, but he had no time for that now. None of them could be trusted to drive in their condition, and if they lost the convoy now, lost the suits and helmets they all wore, the Seal would have no chance. Keeping hold of that equipment had to be the priority. That he might die within days was not an obstruction to that plan. Let the line strip decades off him; he didn't have any plan for that time anyway.

  "Yes. We're back on half-rec rotation. Four hours each shift. I'll trade out when you've had yours, Park."

  "That's in another eight hours, Sir."

  "In eight hours we'll be at Brezno. We'll drop the worst of these off and recruit fresh soldiers for Istanbul. We need to prepare."

  Park looked at him drunkenly for a moment. One of her eyes was almost black with blood on the inside. Perhaps she would lose it.

  "Prepare what, Sir?"

  He gave a cold smile. Probably it looked terrifying coming through his helmet. "Everything we can muster. Now rotate the Dome."

  He
pulled the convoy to a halt, and Park rallied Gerrault to help, so together they carried Zo and Miller to the Dome. Marshall closed his eyes tight and fought for the calm he was famous for. His temple throbbed. The pain wasn't clearing like it had before. Rather there was something steely on the inside, and it seemed to be growing. The Mayor had put it there, and it was killing him.

  But he'd almost died before. Lots of things were killing him. The cigarettes he'd smoked until his daughter passed had left their mark in his lungs and his cells. The sun had been irradiating him with cancer-causing ultraviolet light all his life, minus the last twelve years. This was nothing different.

  Calm didn't come though, blocked by the sliver of the Mayor in his head. But something came in its place; cold, clinical rage. This too he was famous for. It had been General 8 Lives Marshall who'd brought down the entire Third Legion for war crimes after the Gulf. They'd pleaded with him; hardened Marines on their knees begging for him to consider their conditions. Two of their own squad members had died over the course of three days, tortured to death by the enemy in dense street-to-street fighting in Raqqa. When they'd found the men who'd done it, loyalists to the Republican Guard, the Third Legion tortured them in turn.

  Seeing the details of their exploits had sickened Marshall, then a Master Gunnery Sergeant. He'd been one of the first on the scene, and seen the black blood splashed around that pitiful, miserable clay basement. The looks on his men's faces though was the thing that stayed with him the most. Pride.

  They'd filmed the beatings they'd given. They'd believed in the justice of what they were doing. They'd expected Marshall to applaud their work and perhaps ask to take a blow at one of the dead, hanging bodies himself.

  Instead he'd walked out and filed reports until he was finally listened to. He'd forced his way into Congressional hearings, endangering his own chance of earning a commission, risking charges of treason and his own dishonorable discharge.

  In the end he'd won. It had been a hollow victory, standing over those men as they pleaded with him to stop, to not bear witness against them, in the final hours of their arraignment, when the Special Counsel called him to the holding cells for a final debrief. They'd hoped until the last that he'd have mercy on their souls.

  He hadn't. And he wouldn't now.

  After that his promotion to commissioned officer had come more as a means of getting him off his then-commander's rolls and into the charge of somebody else. It had also built his reputation as an ironclad bastard. 8 Lives, for the eight men he'd sent down for life in prison. It had earned him hate and respect in turn. Making General after that had been a twenty-year odyssey of similar decisions, bringing justice with a steely-eyed persistence.

  Now he wouldn't compromise either.

  He raised Control on the radio. This shift on the command deck of Istanbul, head bunker in the Western Seal of three, it was Kerrigan, a brutal admin who'd once been Marshall's aide-de-camp, in another war in another world. Marshall had deposed O'Flanerhy when she'd failed to unlock his helmet fast enough.

  "Sir?" Kerrigan said.

  "Where are they on generation 6?" Marshall said sharply.

  "Fallow's still sowing his false trail, Sir, but we're watching it. Data bomb. The rest of his work is clean, but days off completion."

  Marshall almost laughed. Of course the schedule was off. It took time to hide terrorism, and until now Marshall had allowed it, because the urgency of getting generation 6 had been less, and the risk of losing Fallow wasn't worth the measures it would take to properly motivate him.

  He'd always known Fallow would uncover the truth about the Mayor. The man was intuitively smarter than any asset in the Seal, and it had only been a matter of time before he attempted to subvert command and throw off his shackles. Marshall had only outmaneuvered him so far by having had so long to prepare. For seven months they'd sat on the nuclear warhead, waiting for Drake's people to reach Los Angeles and round them all up, as they knew he would.

  They'd waited and planned for every stage, knowing that a man with the pattern detection intelligence of Lucas would see through their shallow screens of fake data in less than a week. They couldn't fake the data any more deeply, as it would render any contribution Fallow made atop it irrelevant. They'd had to give him the full feeds, altered slightly to hide the ripples sent out by their twelve shields, like pillars rising up through the tide of the hydrogen line. Their rudimentary efforts to shield Amo's explosive path across the Atlantic were even more transparent, and Marshall had been surprised how long it had taken Fallow to find them.

  Now he had. Now he was wasting time precisely when they didn't have it, when the Mayor was only three days away from Istanbul.

  "Tell Gap they're on their own," he said.

  There was a moment of silence from Kerrigan in control. Then a tentative, "Sir?"

  "There's nothing we can do for them. The Mayor will be on them in hours. Wish them well."

  More silence. This had always been a possibility, because these were the odds. They'd had fallback plans prepared for this eventuality, but no one had believed it would actually come to that. How could a nuclear bomb fail? How could a Black Hawk fail?

  But the bomb had failed. His Black Hawks had failed twice. The line was making things possible that he'd never planned for.

  "Tell them to mine their entrance. Tell them to kill the Mayor if they can, and if they can't, then we will mourn them as heroes. Make sure they understand. Then cut off ties."

  Kerrigan didn't speak. He would run it through bunker Governance, certainly. He would pass it through the Central and Eastern Seal, running it all the way up to Seal Core in the ice of Kamchatka, but Marshall knew none of them would dispute the necessity of this. They knew him as he knew them, and they would accept the necessity of this. You cut off an arm to save the body every time.

  "I need confirmation on that," Marshall said.

  "Confirmed," Kerrigan barked. He was brutal, even sociopathic at times, torturing colleagues he took to be weak, but he was a highly efficient cog in the hierarchy. "They'll get the message."

  Of course they would. The Mayor was a great communicator if nothing else, and this was his message: destruction. But Marshall still had strategies in reserve.

  "Kerrigan."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Ready the Raven. I want him exposed and irradiated. The Swede too. Ramp them up to seven months."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then I want a shielded path leading from the stockade, level 5-minus."

  A long moment passed, as Kerrigan worked through the ramifications of that. The tremor came through in his voice.

  "For the lepers, sir?"

  "Affirmative."

  Another pause. "Leading to where?"

  Marshall stifled an exasperated sigh. Even with Kerrigan it was the same; he hoped half-measures would be enough, just like many in Seal governance. When he'd recommended the nuclear bomb they'd second-guessed him for weeks. None of them wanted to destroy the capacity that Los Angeles represented to the North American continent. The logistical apparatus that remained there was going to be key to their eventual resettlement of the United States.

  But even the bomb hadn't been enough.

  "Leading outside. I want them all outside, up in the air."

  Kerrigan paused again. "But, sir, there's currently no means of pacification for the lepers. This isn't like the primaries, sir. There'll be no off button."

  "Make it so, soldier," 8 Lives barked. The pain and this prevarication were wearing him down. Things had to happen now, and he wasn't in the habit of explaining his orders.

  "Yes, sir," Kerrigan said.

  "Call me with Fallow on the line when you have the two in position. Do you understand?"

  "Understood, sir!" Kerrigan shouted smartly.

  Marshall rang off and lifted his heavy head. Out through the windshield he saw the foothills and dark, ancient pine trees of the Black Forest flanking them in this deep valley, somewhere on the edge o
f Stuttgart. Gap was already behind, and some seven hundred miles ahead lay Brezno, in Slovakia. They'd be there in a day, racing against the Mayor. He'd rest in the Dome then. They'd take as many men as they had helmets, and leave the rest behind to die when the Mayor passed through.

  He laughed again, losing control. It made a travesty of him trying to save them so far. He may as well kick them out of the Dome now. But he would never do that. There was a difference between killing your own men and the enemy killing them. Let every one of them be on the Mayor's conscience.

  Besides, he had work to do.

  Sergeant Park was coming back around. She looked broken. He would keep her, at least. There wasn't time to break in a new Master Sergeant.

  "Ready," she said, climbing in wearily. Marshal revved the engine and the convoy started away. He thought of the hours ahead, and the things he'd say to Lucas Fallow when his preparations were complete. They weren't happy words. But they had to be said.

  * * *

  The call came, and Lucas took it.

  His data bomb was ready, set to go out in the next over-the-air update to the helmets' operating systems. He didn't know exactly what it would do, as the line was proving far more unpredictable than he'd seen before, but it almost certainly would end this bunker. Perhaps it would end them all.

  He should have just done this earlier.

  In the middle of finalizing some minor covering details for the update, two of his handlers collected him and took him to a separate room in their suite of labs, away from the others. He didn't ask questions any more, just let them move him, sit him down before a blank screen. They left without words, and he sat there waiting.

  Most likely it was a call from Marshall. There'd been several, because Marshall wasn't in Istanbul himself, Lucas had known that for a week. He was away putting together his welcoming party for Amo. Everything Lucas wanted to know about their respective movements was right there on the line.