The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  He'd seen the eruptions on the coast near Bordeaux, though they'd tried to mask it like all the rest. It meant Amo had arrived, and pushed through. The repercussions on the line had been immense, rippling out for a thousand miles and even impacting the shielding on the Gap bunker. Whatever Amo was doing, he was getting stronger.

  The screen flickered to life. It was bright and took a moment to resolve, showing General Marshall's face. Behind him was the octahedral cage of the Dome; their first portable shield. Lucas had already figured out a dozen ways to improve its efficiency, and a dozen ways to booby-trap each of them.

  Marshall looked like shit.

  His usually perfect dark gray hair was pasted to his skull with sweat. The gravelly lines in his face seemed deeper. His piercing gray eyes were a polluted red at the edges, but no less sharp for that.

  "Report," Marshall said. Even his voice sounded weaker. This confirmed how badly he'd lost his engagement with Amo, which meant Lucas still had a good chance. He just had to get the bomb sent out.

  "We're ready to send the generation 6 software update," he said. "It looks like your shielding has taken it out of you. This will reduce the burn rate substantially, and expand the kill-zone."

  Marshall just looked at him. Lucas felt a tremor in his chest. The old paranoia reared its head; what he'd felt for years under Salle Coram, watching others executed for crimes less than his own.

  "Tell me," said Marshall.

  He could feel it slipping. "Sulman found a keystone in the T4's under-architecture. The Central Seal confirmed it, and we've got it synced tightly. It'll let the line, and these aberrations on the line, pass through without causing harm. It's not a rote block any more, more like a filter. It'll double your exposure time, like you wanted."

  Marshall just gazed at him. Like he was sad. "Do you know how many people there are in Istanbul, son?"

  It was the first time he'd called him son. "Yes. No. Roughly."

  "I know. Two thousand, four hundred and twenty-six. An even twenty now, since we lost six last night."

  Lucas didn't know what to say. He'd seen the obscured craters in the line that could account for those deaths, though he wasn't supposed to know about them. But the way Marshall was talking…

  "Six, from the shielding? It can't be failing that badly, but I can-"

  "Cut the shit, son," Marshall said, more tired than angry, and Lucas felt himself getting desperate. Did this bastard know?

  "Look, you asked me for double, this is double!" he said, trying frustrated anger. "I can't help more if you won't tell me what I need to know. Get the update out now, maybe you can bring them back."

  Marshall snorted. "Bring them back. Four got cut down and sunk with their helicopter. The other two got trapped in the Mayor's territory in their helmets, and we're not going back for them soon."

  The Mayor? Lucas' heart did a double-beat. He wasn't supposed to know about that, and if-

  "What are you talking about, is that some kind of code? I'm telling you, I can deliver your double rate that you wanted, just load it out-"

  "Can it!" Marshall snapped. "Boy, you need to listen. You think we're such amateurs that we'd fire your bomb off in every one of our own heads? I've been watching your fumblings toward terrorism for days now, and it's time they stopped. You need to wake up. You should have realized this is not going to end well for you, or your people. I know what you've seen, and I can confirm it. Your Mayor, Amo, is alive. He beached in France sixteen hours ago, killing six of my men and taking out a helicopter with some kind of pulse on the line. Something our helmets do nothing against. I need you to fix that."

  Lucas' jaw dropped. So that was everything. Fear and joy warred inside him. If Amo was definitely alive, that meant the New LA bomb footage was fake, which meant perhaps Anna was alive too, even Jake?

  Marshall saw his expression change, and gave a bitter laugh. "That's it. Hope. He is coming for you, and we don't know how to stop him, that much is true. I've already abandoned Gap to him, and he'll kill them if he can. You know that, don't you? Two thousand, eight hundred and forty souls, gone. Brezno will be next, because I can't defend them either. Another three thousand and seventy-nine. Dead. But you feel hope."

  Lucas just stared at the screen, trying to catch up with what it all meant. New LA really hadn't been bombed. His adopted people were still alive. It meant-

  "Just how selfish are you people?" Marshall asked, leaning in on the screen. "That's over six thousand people, Fallow. Count the ones here and it's nine, for what? You've got less than a hundred people. In no world does this make sense. We're all humans. Make the right choice."

  A tear brimmed in the corner of Lucas' eye. Everything Marshall said was true, but what did it mean next to the reality that Jake might be alive? What good was living if part of that deal was that Jake and all his people did not? He'd never been happier than with Jake by his side. His love of Farsan had been a fantasy, but Jake had been real. Jake had loved back.

  The tear spilled. Marshall snorted.

  "You were one of us, son. What happened?"

  Lucas stared into the camera lens, remembering the way he'd hidden himself from the very start of Maine. "I was never one of you. You're right, I've bombed your data. It's useless to you if I don't unlock it, but you know that, don't you? If you wanted to keep your people alive, you should have kept your word. We could have found the cure together."

  Marshall shook his head, sad again. "We've been through this. You know it. There is no cure for Lyell's, not within a timeframe that can save us. This was our only choice."

  Now Lucas laughed. He bounded to his feet. "So screw you. Kill me, kill the others I don't care. Amo's coming, and you're going to pay."

  Marshall gave a slight nod. "Don't say I didn't try to reason with you." Then he shifted his gaze, looking at another screen, and spoke again. "Bring them in."

  Lucas turned at a sound from the wall beside him. It was opening, splitting at the middle as two sheer gray bulkheads sliced apart neatly. On the other side was another blank, empty room but for two men on their knees, heads hanging low, dripping blood to the floor. They were held up by soldiers in black suits, two to each, holding them by the elbows.

  The bloody elbows.

  The men were naked and peeling. Their white skin hung off them in gory curls, like a peeled apple, revealing dark red muscle and meat beneath, desperately trying to seal over. One of the men was sobbing, the other just hung there and dripped.

  The man who sobbed had black hair, feathered and light where it hadn't already been scalped by the advanced stage Lyell's. He'd recognize that sob anywhere. That chest, those shoulders.

  Lucas dropped to his knees, unable to breathe. It was too much to gain and to lose in one. It was too much and he couldn't get the word through his mind. The name. His eyes felt they would bug and burst, because this was all his fears in one. This was the greatest horror of his life, and in the throes of it he knew that he had irredeemably, irretrievably lost.

  He had lost.

  All the bravery of his defiance fell away. He wasn't anything now but sorry. He wasn't anything but beaten, and ready to profess himself a slave, bowing at his master's hand.

  "Jake," he whispered.

  The name hissed out like a tendril on the line, so fragile, but it found its target. Across the distance between life and death, it struck home, and Jake lifted his head.

  His beautiful face had been ravaged by the disease. His cheeks were stripped and his forehead was a putrid blue, bursting and ready to peel. His jaw hung open and ropey tendrils of blood and saliva drooled out, but his eyes were the worst, glaring white pearls set into the raw meat of his face, because they saw Lucas. They knew Lucas.

  Lucas began to sob. Jake wailed.

  "We picked them up hiding in Bordeaux a day after Anna blew our Black Hawk," Marshall said from the screen. "She got away, but these two didn't. So, Lucas, you'll do as I say now, won't you? Do that, and we can help. You can work on your cur
e. Only save us first."

  There was no room to think. Jake's head dropped, slumping into unconsciousness, and Lucas nodded hungrily, unable to think.

  "Yes," he whispered feverishly. "Yes, please. Please."

  "Yes," said Marshall. "Then get up. Your work is waiting. Clean that update and send it within the hour. I want it strong enough to withstand the Mayor's new weapon. Full details will be sent to your screen."

  Hands appeared in his armpits, lifting him, and he let them half-carry him out. Moments ago he'd been one man, and now he was another. They'd had Jake all this time? It was hard to fathom. They'd saved him for this. Amo would die, but there was nothing he could do about that. Everybody in New LA would die, and Anna if she was still alive, but that didn't make a difference.

  They put him at his desk, and shoved tissues in his face, wiping away his tears. Sulman stared in concern. They all did.

  "Get a grip," one of the guards whispered in his ear. Lucas saw the name on his chest-plate. Kerrigan. "Fix this shit or boyfriend goes in the accelerator again. I don't think he'll take another round."

  Lucas nodded. Yes. That was clear. There were no choices now. He'd been a fool before and this was the truth now.

  He bent to it.

  15. GAP

  The little town of Gap is beautiful.

  I haven't been out of America since the apocalypse hit, and I'd forgotten how stunning the rest of the world can be. Here are little painted houses and little cobblestone roads and little lives, stretching back for millennia. This place has been densely populated for so long.

  Our convoy stops on crunching gravel in front of the town's church, and we get out. It's a white stucco affair, with a small spire rising one story high topped by a white-painted cross. It has stained glass on its sides showing saints, and a thick column of glossy green and white ivy twined up the left flank.

  Behind me Arnst prepares weapons. Keeshom just stands. Lydia and Hatya toe the ground and hold hands, while Feargal readies his drones. It's easy to forget that he's done all this before. He came here with Anna a year and a half ago, when they first carried the notion of the treaty with them. He disabled all the drones in their hidden launch hangars, he blew up their autocannon and he stood watch as Anna communicated with them below.

  "Ready," he says, and launches. He doesn't wait for my permission. The drone whirrs up and away, rising over the valley sides.

  I can feel them, despite the distance and the depth they are underground. I can feel the wash of their shield like a tide lapping at my skin. I could probably reach out and punch through it even from here, but that time will come.

  I go to the church door while Feargal does his thing. A crunching footstep falls into time with me, and I see that it's Lydia. Hatya now stands alone; no engines to fix, waiting. We stop together at the door and she looks at me; her chubby face thinned by stress and lack of sleep. I'm sure none of them have been sleeping well.

  "Can you really kill three thousand people?" she asks.

  "I already have," I say, and twist the black iron door ring. The heavy wooden door opens inward. It's nice that they left it unlocked. Probably we're the first ones to come in here since the world ended.

  I lead the way in. It's cooler inside; stone flags pave the floor, tombstones carved with illegible names and dates now worn away by the passing of centuries of feet. This is what happens to all of humanity's cairns. The ceiling arches up in clean white plaster, with rich black beams rising like a ribcage to meet at an ornately carved spine. Probably raising that massive piece of dark wood was an awesome engineering feat for the people half a millennia ago. This little church was a wondrous site, where the profane met the sacred and everyday life was invested with a higher meaning.

  I'm a devil here, come to tear them all down.

  "What does a place like this mean to a man like you?" Lydia asks. She's beyond scorn; this is more a residual kind of disgust. I feel her emotions rippling on the line, and there's no answer I can give that will satisfy.

  I walk between the dark pews, footsteps echoing on the gravestones, letting my hands run over the old carved wood. At the front I look up at the big man himself, still hanging on his cross after all these years. He never meant very much to me in life. Still I drop to my knees and pray.

  Not for myself. Not for forgiveness. But for all the lives I'm about to take. I stay there, kneeling while my knees throb on the stone, until Feargal calls the all clear. Then we go to finish it.

  It's a twenty-minute drive, to a hole in the ground disguised as a well, in the midst of a green meadow shouldered by the Alps foothills. There's a lake and a small cabin, but I know these are uninhabited. I feel the people far below, cowering. They have no eyes up here, but they'll be able to read the fluctuations in their own shield, telling them I've arrived.

  There are fresh tire tracks in the grass, and tossed away boxes of ready-to-eat meal packs. There is one cracked black helmet lying by the well, almost as a message. I imagine the shark-eyed man coming here. At a moment like this, faced with no kind of threat, it is tempting to call off the killing to come.

  Arnst comes to stand beside me. I'm at the well top, looking down into the dark. There are dark blast marks up and down the walls, where Feargal blew his drones, taking out any explosive traps they might have left behind.

  Arnst doesn't speak much these days. I give him the nod and he goes over the edge. No farewell, no concern, just in. Nobody says anything to him, not even Lydia, because nobody here cares about him. They don't care about me. They accept we are just a human hammer, come to do a job.

  No traps are triggered. I'm not surprised, though, as Feargal knows his work.

  I send a pulse of black light downward, made up of zombie comics and sketches of Times Square. Working those same old pathways that used to light up in pain is easy, now. The people deep down there freeze, and I start over the well wall, but Feargal seizes my wrist.

  "Not yet," he says, and I allow it. It's good for his pride. It's certainly not out of respect for me; just a knowledge that I'm needed. Without my influence on the line we'd all be dead in the water off Bordeaux.

  He descends ahead of me. Still no explosion comes. I follow.

  I've been here before. Down the ladder, into the shaft where the elevators are waiting. They don't run, the doors don't open, but Feargal fixes that with a few small explosive charges. The first blows the door, the second blows the carriage cable, and the elevator plummets to the bottom of the shaft with a distant crash. We climb down the rungs in the wall, slip through the carriage's roof access hatch, and pry open the doors on the other side.

  On the other side, it is like Maine.

  There is a grand hall painted a bright, startling yellow. There are screens on the walls that look like windows, showing a scene of fields where flowers ripple beneath an azure blue sky. There is a warm breeze that carries the scent of fresh sap and carnations. It startles me, because this is Lars Mecklarin's vision come to authentic life. It was never like that in Salle Coram's bunker. That place was sick; marred by their own revolution, with no working screens left, only wires jutting out haphazardly, and walls marked with bullet holes and black mold where damp had penetrated over long years, stinking of old piss and crumbling plaster.

  Maine was sick. Killing it had been like putting a dying animal out of its misery. I can see straight away that Gap will not be so easy.

  There are people writhing on the floor. Their eyes flash white static like television screens glitching on a signal. Their skin tinges gray then normal then gray, and they squirm like bugs trying to reach for something, driven still by some unseen imperative.

  It's interesting that they are not turning to zombies, even though I have brought the line down here with me. Or perhaps they are, but not one of them completes the transformation; trapped in a kind of midway limbo.

  "Shit," Feargal whispers.

  "What does this mean?" Lydia whispers respectfully beside me, as if this is a holy place, no
t some grunting, half-mad sweaty orgy of people soon to die. It is not what I expected, and I can't answer her. I pulse harder with my madness, gushing it over them, and Arnst freezes beside me, as does Feargal and Lydia in the elevator shaft, but it has no further effect on the people on the floor. None of them complete the transition to ocean; they merely twitch and phase on the doorstep.

  I stop sending my signal. There's no point. This will be far harder than I thought.

  "It means we have to kill them." I look up at Arnst. "Actually kill them, every one."

  * * *

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Feargal and Arnst begin. They move through the hall, putting bullets in brains. Keeshom stares in horror, which is his default state now. He looks at me and out at the slaughter. He knows I'm not making them do this, it's not like whipping Arnst.

  They're doing this for themselves.

  Hatya appears through the blown entrance, once the final protective doorway for these people, and shrieks something. She starts to run, doubtless aiming to stop the slaughter with her own body, but Lydia catches and holds her.

  Yes.

  We all have to see this. It's better if we're all complicit.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  The gunshots reverberate like clattering pinballs in the bright, hopeful hall, and I don't feel anything. I watch real people die and it doesn't move me. I've done everything I needed to reach this point, and here I am.

  Victory is a bitch. Hard to savor.

  "Stop," I say.

  They don't hear me at first. Keeshom's eyes go wide with hope. He's still retained his humanity, at least. He'll pay for that, in the long term. I should never have let him come. Hatya yelps for them to listen.

  "STOP!" Keeshom shouts, and they do.

  Bang.

  One more shot rings out from Arnst, then he turns, looking at me with a fierce determination on his face. Defiant. Already his face is splattered with blood; here he is in his element, the role he was born to play. Behind him lies a trail of lapping blood, flowing from the pierced bags that are these bodies. I count fourteen in his wake. Nine for Feargal.