The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  This breaks through the shell of disaffection surrounding me. This is something true, and not the thing I'd expected.

  "The cure isn't real?"

  "Not real. Made by whoever made the infection." He shifts position slightly and a reservoir of blood rolls out of a fold in his suit, pooling by his thigh. "There is no cure. I wish there was. Killing you was our only chance."

  This hits me three times. Each time I rock. No cure.

  It salts my resolve.

  "I understand." I say.

  He looks at me. His shark-gray eyes are already flagging. He'll die soon, I expect. He understands too. I can't imagine what things he's seen.

  "You've already killed six thousand of my people," he says.

  "Nine thousand," I correct, "including Maine." Already I feel some of my earlier steel coming back. This man is my enemy. Never mind that he speaks well, and seems good, and I like him. I have to kill him.

  "Nine thousand," he says. "For your one hundred. Though that's far fewer now." He pauses for a wet breath. "You haven't kept in contact with your wife, have you?"

  My eyes widen. I left almost one hundred people behind. Another lie?

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're dying. Less than a quarter of those who remain are with your wife." He sucks in a tight breath. "Your people are broken, Amo. There's no unity left."

  I stare. Broken? I left Lara with everyone, except Witzgenstein. "What are you talking about?"

  He shakes his head. He's so gray now, but I can't let him die. I need to hear this even if it is a lie. "The center can't hold, son. You left your wife with fifty children. You left the preacher too. But children are the only resource that matters, now." He rears briefly, piercing me with those sharp gray eyes. "Really, what did you think was going to happen?"

  I shuffle closer. I don't know, but I'm starting to see pictures. My voice goes tight too. I imagine a hundred horrors. "What did Witzgenstein do?"

  He looks at me, and now there's the mysterious smile I was looking for. "Go home," he whispers. "Find out."

  Then he slumps and says no more. I lean in and shake him, I make his lips move, blow breath into his crushed throat, but he's already dead.

  I roll into the dust and chipped masonry and blood beside him, utterly bereft.

  There it comes back. It comes slow, trickling like bile, but the rage and the madness are welcome friends. There's nothing else to fill gaps like that. I can't help Lara, whatever trouble she's facing. I can't go home and just wait for the next missile to come. There's only one thing I can do.

  My body doesn't work, but I make it work. The bile drives me on. There's murder to do, so many murders, until the whole world burns.

  I stumble off like a drunk. The shark-eyed man has his eyes open behind me. Feargal's a limp body, silently recriminating in the dust. Arnst is a bright flow of blood. Somewhere there are guns, and bombs, and more bodies, and I know how to find what I need. I know what I need to do, and nothing can stop me.

  I stagger up the street. I feel nothing on the line, apart from the horde of twelve strange, shifting signals somewhere to the west, but they're growing fainter. Soon the line is empty, and all I can hear is my own rage, swelling to fill the space left behind like a great black eye overhead.

  19. ISTANBUL

  When Anna woke, the bindings were gone. The white lights were on and there was a sucking, smacking breath in the air still, but no voice. No footfalls pacing around her. The hall was empty, but for the living corpse of Ravi lying on the bed beside her.

  He was as gray as the ocean. His eyes shone white and stared blindly upward.

  Ravi.

  Once losing him would have broken her. When he came close to getting snatched by the demon in Bordeaux, she'd lost control, leading an army of the ocean for revenge, right into a trap.

  But not now.

  She moved for the first time in weeks. Her head was no longer strapped to the frame, nor were her arms, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. Vertebrae in her back cracked like breaking sticks, and the cold pain in her stomach pulsed deeper. She looked down at the flat black skin of her belly, bare in the warm air, which once had been wedged open with a glass bowl forced inside.

  There were no bandages now, and the stitches were invisible. She sketched a finger down the seam. There was no swelling bump yet, but she couldn't forget that little gray clump of cells, dividing. Alive but dead, he'd said. It throbbed, but at least it was a piece of Ravi.

  She looked over at him again, and slid her feeble legs off the bed. Her muscles were slow and weak to respond. Wastage had already set in; she could see the thinness in her calves, but they held her.

  She took the step to Ravi, but he didn't see her. He didn't know her. He'd died in Bordeaux, because she'd brought him there. It was on her head, but it was on his too. They weren't children and they never had been, not really. Not since the world ended and left them alone.

  She straightened up. Her body wasn't strong, so she would have to do the work for it, because there were things she had to do. In her belly she carried the hope of the whole world, and for that she had Ravi to thank.

  She leaned into him. He sucked and smacked at the air, but there was no scent. Bodies in the ocean didn't rot and never had, they only grew tougher and wirier as they dried. Ravi was drying nicely, halfway toward becoming a mummy.

  She'd loved him. A tear ran down her cheek, and when she kissed him on his cold cheek, it dripped off and trickled down his.

  "How's the parallax in there?" she asked.

  He didn't look at her.

  He didn't look at her when she came back with the scalpel. It wasn't placed far away, and she could only think it had been left there on purpose. More tears came, but they felt healing. The world was larger than she'd ever guessed, and there were terrible things in it, but there was hope too.

  She pressed the scalpel to the back of his neck gently, and pressed in. He didn't react in any way. With care, she cut through a gap between his vertebrae and into the spinal column. A second, perhaps, and he went still. His breathing stopped, the light went out in his eyes, and that was it.

  Anna rested her head on his shoulder for a time, but not too long. He'd been dead for weeks, perhaps as long as a month. He'd died to save her in amongst the grapes, and his body here was just a headstone now, a marker for where his love had once lived.

  "I'll miss you," she whispered, then turned. She placed the scalpel reverently on a workbench by the door, following a dry blood trail on the floor. She didn't turn around, but flicked the switch by the door, marked with rusty smears of blood, and the light went out. In stillness he would finally rest.

  The door opened, and she left her prison behind.

  The remains of her captor's body lay curled on the floor of a bare bedroom that was spattered with years of sprayed blood, lying in a fetal position in a pile of moist white cladding. He seemed so sad, lying there without any skin, so Anna knelt at his side too, and placed a kiss on his crusty, infected forehead. It would be the first time anyone had touched him with tenderness in over a decade. It hurt just as much as kissing Ravi, if not somehow more so.

  It made it real.

  There was nothing else in his room. It was bare but for the white cladding and the body. He'd lived no kind of life for all that time. He'd worked for his cure, and suffered, and made others suffer, and that was all.

  There were other rooms spread along a plain corridor, though none with windows. In room after room Anna turned off the lights. Here were shelves filled with the white cladding material. She touched it; springier than wool, soft as a memory foam mattress. In one room were more shelves laden with various drugs, vials of genetic building blocks, raw chemical materials. In another lay strange medical apparatus like something from a torture chamber. She recognized the bubble that had been implanted in her stomach.

  She walked on.

  At the end of the corridor she emerged into a kitchen, where a pile of suppli
es lay on a plain metal breakfast bar. Meals Ready to Eat, vitamin and mineral pills, bottled water, and a note.

  It was brief. She read it three times.

  Lucas is in Istanbul. Amo landed in France two days ago, and is heading there, killing bunkers on his way. Gap has already fallen. If Lucas dies, then there is no hope.

  Good luck.

  There was no name.

  She hadn't eaten solid food in all her captivity, so the MREs tasted good. She ate part of a Beef Bologna raw, then cooked a batch of Broccoli Chicken Cream Mash in a pot of boiling water.

  There was dried blood on every surface, like dust; scrapings of it on the oven's knobs, dried smears on the pans, flecks on the cutlery. Her captor had clearly tried to clean up after himself, but how could you clean when every touch leaked more?

  On a workbench were new clothes: jeans, T-shirts, sweaters. She stripped off the loose medical gown and dressed herself. Some of her old strength was coming back. She drained one of the bottles, then opened the door leading out.

  Beyond there was a stunning view. It was day outside, and there lay the Swiss Alps, cutting across the edge of the world like white saw teeth nipping at a swimming-pool blue sky. The air was cold and sharp and carried the smell of earthy pine forests.

  The facility was built into a forested hillside above a gouged green valley, with a small parking lot recessed into the cliff to the right, and a road running by. There she saw three Jeeps, one with barrels of gas stacked beside it. She imagined her captor struggling to get these out with the last of his strength. Stains of him marked a trail on the snow-dappled lot.

  She went over and found the keys in the door. The engine started with ease, purring smoothly. It took her an hour to load it with supplies. It took her another hour with maps to sketch out her route to Istanbul, taking in Brezno in the hope of beating Amo to it.

  Last of all, she looked for the bodies.

  They hadn't been in the facility. They couldn't be far, and it didn't take long. At the edge of the road, the hillside cut away sharply, and down in the leafy crux of the valley far below she saw them. A mound of them, mostly rotted and reduced to bones, though some still wore gray skin, tossed outside after they were used. She imagined her captor wheeling them out on a gurney and tipping them off the cliff, cursing his failures.

  It would be easy to hate him, but where would hate get her? What had happened to him was evil. The infection was evil, that had stolen her father from her at five years old. Her captor had been compromised by that, but did that make him evil too?

  Nothing was simple now.

  She said a few words, not prayers as she'd never learned any, but kind things, hoping for peace for the dead. Their struggles were over. She carried the strange fruit of their deaths in her belly. That had to mean something, and she would die to make it so.

  She got in her Jeep and drove.

  * * *

  From the mountains near Grindelwald, in the shadow of the Mittelhorn, Schreckhorn and Reeti mountains, she circled west then east for the 8 highway that surfed along the southern edge of the Brienzersee reservoir.

  The mountains had snow. The roads were clear. The reservoir was still and perfect and cold. Amo was ahead; she could feel him on her skin. Feargal was with him, and four signals more that she didn't recognize. She sped up, taking hairpin mountain corners at eighty miles an hour, leaning into the wind like she always had on her catamaran, lifting the boat out of the water and racing along on one hull.

  Switzerland passed by. The 8 was clear and she blazed through little mountain towns; Lucerne, Zug, Niederurnen. The 8 became the 3 became the 14 and she flew on with the windows open, veering round dead cars. Amo was so close. He was within reach, and maybe she could reach him in time. She'd spent months working on the treaty with Brezno. She didn't want all those people to die.

  At Bad Ragaz she chicaned north into Liechtenstein and crossed the corner of Austria, up into Germany and speeding for Munich along highways she'd cleared herself. She pushed the Jeep beyond a hundred and hung on. Back across Austria she flew in a blur of pastel buildings and clock towers, Salzburg and Wels and Steyr to Vienna, darting for the border with Slovakia at Bratislava and barely stopping to drink, caught up in the intensity until-

  The wave hit her and she almost crashed. It came invisibly on the line and almost knocked her out. The Jeep spun and she fought half-consciously for control; the rear end fishtailed and cracked off a postbox, the front dinged hard into a Lamborghini, then the driver side door ground along a wall of terraced houses backward before rocking to a stop.

  Anna gasped in the seat. Her neck was whiplashed. Her mind was reeling. Something had hit on the line, like the waves that used to wake her from micro sleeps on her first Atlantic crossing; each coming dangerously close to flipping the yacht.

  She didn't understand, but it was clear something catastrophic had happened on the line. It had to be Brezno, but Brezno was still a hundred miles away.

  In three hours she stood before the decimated bunker.

  She felt sick.

  There were bodies everywhere, crushed and torn. Blood lay in dense, coagulating pools in the deep tire tracks left by the wide wheel base of a Humvee. She gagged. She'd spoken to these people at length, knew them. She'd done everything she could to have them sign the treaty, and now this.

  She couldn't comprehend what she was seeing. Had Amo done this? She got out and picked a path amongst the dead, but it was hard to keep her feet clean. Everywhere were shreds of people; heads crushed and exploded like gray meat fireworks through the brain pan, guts burst like vomit, limbs tangled and twisted.

  They weren't gray ocean bodies. They weren't dried and withered. They were real people, massacred.

  She entered the bunker's Habitat in a dreamlike state, following the trail of blood and body parts. Someone had let loose here with gory abandon. Here a head sat posed on a table, looking at its body on the floor. Here two bodies were laid naked atop each other in a crude simulacrum of sex.

  The destruction was joyous. At every step, at every body, Anna said to herself that this couldn't be Amo. It couldn't be Feargal. They wouldn't do something like this.

  But they had.

  It was a new kind of cairn.

  Further on there were some who had not been physically damaged, but writhed as if in pain. Blotches of gray passed over their skin, and their eyes flashed white like guttering flashlights. There were children amongst them, twisting like with the rest. Their shield was gone, but they weren't becoming zombies, were somehow trapped in-between.

  Amo had done this.

  She smelled the bitter smoke from the elevator before it reached Command. Inside there was thick smoke, rich with the stench of burnt-out batteries. She held her sweater to her mouth and advanced deeper, coughing along a trail of gore until she reached the shield room.

  She'd seen its equivalent in Maine. A wall of readouts that led inward to the huge machine, though here the outer frame was buckled outward. Metal panels were warped and many of the inbuilt displays had blown, leaving blackened rectangular holes in the metal, trailing wires.

  So three thousand people had died.

  On the floor lay a little girl with red hair, coated in black soot with a metal panel half-severing her at the middle. Anna leaned in and wiped the black dust from her cheeks. There was no hope for her. Even if the shield came back up, she would not survive, not with an injury severing her like that.

  Anna pressed a knife into the back of the girl's neck, just as she had done for Ravi, until finally she went still.

  Amo had done this, and it was wrong.

  She rose with the anger burgeoning brightly. This was unnecessary, and wrong, and it should never have happened. She had to do something to help them.

  "I'm coming back," she said in that acrid room, quietly at first but then more loudly as she went. Striding out of Command, back in the elevator, she said it with more confidence at every step she took.

  "I'm com
ing back," she promised, and meant it. "I'm coming back for you."

  * * *

  She didn't rest or eat, because this was a race now and she'd never lost a race in her life. There wasn't any need to navigate; she knew the route by heart, and the flash of Amo's signal on her skin pulsed like her father's dot on the smartphone screen, pulling her on

  Hours flew by and she took every turn at full speed, through Hungary and Serbia, through Bulgaria to Turkey, gaining on them every second. Amo's signal resolved on her skin, revealing erratic patterns that swelled and ebbed like she hadn't felt before.

  She was within twenty miles of Istanbul when the second wave struck and blacked her out.

  She woke at the wheel with the Jeep lying on its side, hanging across the gearstick, held by her seatbelt. Her neck throbbed, and the airbag had deployed in her face, perhaps breaking her nose. It took long moments for her to regain orientation, and even after that the world kept spinning. The air felt strangely empty, insubstantial somehow, and it wasn't until she unclicked herself from the belt and fell to the window, crawling out through the broken windshield, that she realized what it was.

  The line was gone.

  For years she'd felt it all around her, like the kiss of the wind on her skin as she sailed, but now it was gone. It felt like she shouldn't be able to breathe. Sounds came muted, even gravity felt weaker, or the ground less substantial. She walked away from the Jeep as it caught fire and burned, dizzy and clutching her stomach.

  The seam had opened slightly, and blood leaked down in a razor-sharp line, soaking into her pants. What could she do?

  She lay down on the dry yellow grass on the highway's verge, gazing up at the blue sky, holding pressure on the slit. If it opened all the way she would die.

  It had been another wave, but on a different scale to the first, causing lasting damage.

  Still, there were things to do.