I showed her my painting of zombies. That's what she's talking about. But then, Jesus, what is happening?
The phone rings. I pick it up and see it's an incoming Skype call from Cerulean. There's a history of thirty-three missed calls, and I remember his message from earlier, that I thought had to be him just keen to get the lowdown on my big night.
Are you even alive? Call me!!
I've had his number for the last eight months, but we've never actually spoken. Neither of us wanted the novelty of our voices to bring on a twinge in the other.
Now I slap answer and hold the phone to my ear.
3. DEEPCRAFT
I met Cerulean six months in to my convalescence after the coma, while I was hiding out in my parents' dark Iowa basement. I met him in a virtual world I built myself, inside a video game called Deepcraft, where we both pretended to have the most boring job imaginable.
Those were slow, depressing days. My friends came to visit, but stopped as their presence made me twinge. My girlfriend in New York had already given up on me after I'd died in my coma for the third time.
I was pretty much alone.
"You'll be with us again soon," my mother would often say, when she brought down my lukewarm milkshakes or diet mayo tuna sandwiches. "Coming back to the land of the living."
I appreciated everything she did, but it pissed me off. I'd been through this terrible thing, a coma that literally killed me multiple times, and here now it was continuing. My brain was weak, my body too, I could hardly stand to be around other people and TV made my brain twinge like crazy, but I wasn't some feeble dying goat incapable of doing anything for myself.
"Baby steps," the doctor said at discharge, by way of advice. "Think of it like mental rehab. Your brain has to get re-accustomed to stimulation step gradually. Especially your art. Have you any idea how many parts of the brain fire when you're doing creative work. I'd stay away from it."
"Stay away from art?"
"It looks like you may be allergic." He looked a little embarrassed to be saying it. "I know that sounds strange, but trust me, Amo. Boredom is your bandage."
I'd frowned. How could I give up my art? "What if I don't do that? If I just dive back in?"
He smiled gently. We both knew that wasn't possible. I'd twinged already that morning when they served me a pot of strawberry jam with my breakfast, just because the color was too vivid. "Then there'll be complications."
"Like what, I might die?"
"Or worse."
"Or worse? What could be worse than dying?"
The doctor shrugged. "Some would say a never-ending coma is worse. I've never been in a coma so I wouldn't know. I imagine if you never wake up though, then you may as well be dead. It's just a horrible, powerless delay."
"I woke up this time," I said, more confidently than I felt.
"You did," he agreed. "Who can say, really?"
"Who can say?" I repeated, then slumped back on the pillows, with the jam-twinge ramping up to migraine proportions.
But those days were months ago. Boredom had been my bandage long enough for me to get sick of reading old books, watching old black and white movies, and looking forward to the taste sensation of a dinnertime tuna sandwich. I had to do something real, had to take meaningful steps on the road to recovery.
So I got a job.
I researched the least mentally demanding work out there, in the dullest, darkest environment, and came up with picker at a Yangtze online shopping fulfillment center. They're the people who collect the stuff we order on the website, who labor all day in vast windowless warehouses that cover about a square mile each.
I applied and they took me on. Two days later I turned up and nodded through a twinge-inducing but mercifully brief induction. The supervisor gave me a simple gizmo called a 'diviner', which I was to follow as it flashed left-right directions through the warehouse. I picked up the stuff it highlighted then put it on conveyor belts for the packing department, ad infinitum, like a rat in a maze.
I loved it. All day I walked down dark climate-controlled shelving corridors, making no decisions for myself, just following the diviner to pick up limited edition basketballs, sets of tea knives, greetings cards, self-published books from the cranky print-on-demand machines, talking teddies, butt-shaped pillows and so on. Whatever the diviner demanded, I collected.
It was a lovely monotony. I got back into some kind of physical shape, and built up my stimulation endurance. If any order was too weird, I'd count backwards from one hundred to distract myself. I got good enough that the twinges mostly went away and my thinking cleared up.
I got so good at the job I could anticipate turns even before the diviner told me where to go. With all that extra brain-space, I started to notice the other pickers. They were all weirdos. Hank for example was a bitter redneck who got 'stranded' in Iowa after his community college kicked him out for selling weed, and he washed up on the fulfillment center's shore to make ends meet. In lieu of completing his studies he'd signed up for an online 'sexual mastery class,' and often would try out conversational gambits on me when our paths intersected through the warehouse, like lonely little ants at a scent-trail crossing.
"So when she says her name, you say, 'You should speak a little louder, you must be the shy one in the group'," he told me once.
"It's embarrassing her," I said.
"Right, it's putting her on the spot, meaning you control the spotlight. It's cool stuff man, neuro-linguistic programming from the top artists in the game."
"Does it work?"
"I haven't tried it yet."
Bobby was six foot seven and really into North Korea. Sometimes he wore the red star of North Korea on a T-shirt he'd clearly printed himself, as if daring our overlords to kick him out. I don't think the supervisor ever noticed, he probably thought it was a basketball shoe logo.
Linda from Arkansas was working her way around all the Yangtze fulfillment centers in the US, for a travel memoir she was writing.
"It's like the travel book by the guy who hitch-hiked round Ireland with a fridge," she told me once. "You've got to have a gimmick. This is my gimmick."
I loved it. Here were weird people, all with their own strange aspirations just like me, and I was handling it. When I needed time apart, I'd turn at a crossing when it looked as if we were going to intersect. A simple shrug of the shoulders and a point to the diviner would explain all.
The gods are re-routing me, that shrug said. It's just my fate.
It was Lucy on the print-on-demand machines, that clattery industrial corner of the center where books were baked in great X-ray like kilns, who put me onto Deepcraft.
I liked to stay near the printers for as long as I could before the sound made my brain twinge, watching pages slip in and out of the runners, forming up gradually into newly birthed books, their binding still tacky. These were dreams being made, just like my brain was rebuilding itself.
"I print my own here," Lucy told me once. She was a chubby girl with poorly dyed blue hair. We all called her Blucy. "I write romance with Amish vampires in the post-apocalypse. It's a big niche. They let me print them at cost."
I nodded. She showed me one of her books. The cover was awful, just clip-art of something representative of each of those genres horribly overlaid.
I made her one much better that night, stretching my brain's limits to the max. I had twinges for the following week, but she went wild for it. She invited me to play Deepcraft with her.
"It's just like digital Lego, Amo, you can turn down the danger and everything so there's no random events like falling into lava, no roaming zombies, nothing to make you scared or set off stress alarms, just a sandbox to build in. I make weird ruined worlds for my characters to live in. I think you'd get a kick out of it."
We went in together at her place, viewing one of her post-apocalyptic worlds through split-screen. It was funny to see the broken elevated roadways and tattered skyscrapers she'd envisaged built in chunky 3D blo
cks. Her ruins were fun and bright, like her writing. The game itself was intuitive and repetitive, involving grinding out ores by digging, then crafting them into tools and materials to create buildings.
It was fun. At home I built a miniature version of the fulfillment center; lovingly stacking up the long clean corridors, fitting it with low lights, stocking the shelves with whatever weird products I could craft, even hand-coding a diviner.
At the same time I started making covers for all Blucy's books. She never paid me, but she put me onto her writer friends who wanted covers, and they did pay. The work ran me down, but then I'd go in Deepcraft and grind out ores for hours, add to my fulfillment center, and wander it in a trance. In God mode I added non-player characters modeled on my co-workers in real life, who wandered its corridors endlessly online, forever doomed to think of little nuggets of information they wanted to pass on.
It was wonderfully soothing, and it sped up my recovery so much that I was able to make more covers. I had enough cash and energy after six months to quit the picking job and go full time with the covers.
"Don't go," my mother said, when I told her I was heading back to New York. "That place broke you. I couldn't bear for it to happen again."
My dad patted me on the shoulder and stood by.
I came back to New York on a Greyhound, quietly defiant. I worked on art that would've bored me to tears before. I went to the coffee shop Sir Clowdesley's as mental therapy to build up my tolerance. I crafted goods to sit on my Deepcraft warehouse shelves, even opening it up for others to run online and critique.
On one of those runs I met Cerulean, who loved nothing better than to run through the fulfilment center picking up randomly generated orders, just like me. He was always there for me. I was always there for him. We were the only people in the world, as far as we knew, who'd been through the same coma and come out with the same mind-crushing migraines.
"Cerulean," I say into the receiver now, curled up against my bed and hardly believing this is happening, "holy shit, Cerulean you're alive?"
A moment passes and he says nothing, during which time I feel like I'm falling, then his voice comes through, weak and high.
"Amo?"
4. CERULEAN
"It's me," I whisper frantically, "I'm here, shit, I saw your message earlier, I thought you were talking about the date, then I went outside and damn, it's been crazy, the girl's gone, the whole city's gone crazy, what the hell is going on?"
"Amo," he says again, his voice getting clearer now, a light Southern drawl. "I'd just about given up, I've been calling and texting you for hours. You say you went outside?"
I take a deep breath. Abruptly tears start coursing down my face. Shit, this is Cerulean, and it's our first time to talk.
"The twinges are gone. I went out to get coffee and the world's gone mad. They're everywhere. They chased me up and down the Bronx. Planes were falling from the sky, New York is burning. What's going on?"
"Calm down. Amo, I know." He takes a breath, then plows ahead. "I've been watching it all night. It started around midnight and it spread across the country in hours. They were calling it a disease vector carried on the gulfstream, until it got them too and most of the news outlets went out. Twitter went down while they were trying to evacuate, but most people were at home asleep in their beds. The whole country's gone down, I'm surprised the internet is even up still, phone service and texts went down hours ago. I thought I'd call you until my uplink went dead, and then…" he trails off.
I stifle my tears and stare wide-eyed out the window.
"The whole country's gone down?"
"They've all turned, Amo. This thing is instantly virulent, one breath and you're infected. You've seen them so you know. I watched it happen on the news; there were videos up on YouTube before that went down too. A few websites are still working, so I Googled everything I could find and downloaded it to the shared drive on your computer. You'll need to know this stuff, I've got reams on the prepper lifestyle, survival tactics and strategies, how to make weapons and how to find weapons, how to rig a generator and hotwire a car, siphoning fuel from a station, all that kind of stuff. It's good I did because Wikipedia has just gone down; I guess they didn't get enough donations."
He gives a scrappy laugh. I'm struggling to catch up with everything he's saying. My heart's still pounding from the run.
"What are you talking about? Cerulean?"
He takes a deep breath. "Amo, I'm cured too. The twinges are gone and I'm thinking clearly. I've not turned, but everyone else is. You said everyone you saw in New York has gone gray? They're all that way, as far as I can tell. Now you need to survive."
"Sure, but-" I begin then trail off. There's something missing. "What about you?"
He laughs. "My brain got better but I'm still a cripple, buddy."
I hadn't thought of that. I wince as the repercussions come down. Of course his spine is still broken. Ever since the coma hit while he stood atop the highest dive board in his Olympic pre-trials, ready to dive, he's been confined to his bed. He fell, hit the pool's concrete edge, and it was game over for his Olympic hopes. Ever since then, his twinges have been worse than mine. He can't leave his mother's basement. It's why 'the Darkness', our shared nickname for the virtual Yangtze fulfillment center, came to mean so much to him. It was his only way out.
Shit.
"Where do you think I'm going to go?" he goes on. "I'm busting for a piss but is my mom going to come down and take me to the toilet? More likely she'll come down and tear out my throat. She's banging on the basement door even now, she's been at it all night, her and a few dozen others. It sounds like they're pulling up the floor overhead, actually."
"What the-" I start. "She's turned too?"
I can hear him smiling. God I love Cerulean. That fit, handsome, paraplegic bastard. His mom's upstairs coming for him and he's been calling me all this time, trying to save me. "Of course she is, and it's not to bring me a batch of midnight cookies."
I get to my feet, deciding instantly. I look around the room taking stock of what I'll need. "Where are you? I have your address here somewhere. I'll come get you. I'll get you out."
He laughs softly. I picture the only Cerulean I've ever seen images of on Google, the dark young man on the dive platform or the medal stand, full of confidence and in his prime, ready to take on the Olympics and the world and make them his own. "Don't be silly, Amo. You'll never get here in time. The basement door's been iffy for years; it won't take much longer for them to get down here. They'll come through the floor in a day or two anyway. Don't worry about me, I've got a syringe here and I know what to do with it."
The blood drains from my head and I go dizzy. I'm still looking round my room urgently, like there might be an answer here when there cannot be.
"What do you mean, you've got a syringe?"
"It's all right," he says. "Sit down. Are you somewhere safe, Amo? Are you in your room, are you barricaded in?"
"I don't-" I begin, then look at the door. I can hear them thumping faintly from downstairs. "I'm in my building. I blocked up the front door, but there's probably hundreds of them out there now. I don't-"
"Block up your room," he says. "Do it now. Wedge the bed against the door, wedge something against that if you can. They're not smart but they're persistent, and you're in no state to take to the streets again. You need to lie low and get your head straight, Amo, if you're going to get through this. Do you hear me?"
"I-"
"Deadbolt the door and wedge it in. Use everything you've got. Do it right now. I'll still be here. Put the phone on speaker and do it now. I want to hear it happening."
I take the phone from my head and stare at it blankly for a moment. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
"Amo!"
I remember and click the button for speaker. I hear the distant sound of Cerulean's home somewhere in the South filter into my New York apartment. There is his breathing and the sound of a dehumidifier, suc
king damp out of the cement basement that's been his prison cell since he fell.
I shake myself and look to the bed, then the door, and start moving to bring them together. The bed drags noisily out of the recessed wall. I push its headboard flush against the door. The headboard has metal slats that reach three quarters up the height of the door, so even if one of the zombies get in the house and successfully punch a hole through the door, they'll still have to get over the slats.
"I've done the bed," I call to Cerulean. "I'm getting the desk."
"Good. Don't damage your computer, you're going to need that."
I lift my monitor carefully off, then drag the desk to the tail of the bed. Laid end on, it fits almost perfectly between the bed and the wall, wedged into place. It's going nowhere. They'd have to bend the bed's metal frame or push it through the wall to get in, and I don't see either of those happening. That's more force than human bodies can muster.
I drop to the floor by the side of the bed and start to shake.
"I've done it," I say to the phone, turning it off speaker mode and holding it back to my ear.
"Good, good. Now you need to relax. We can talk about something that really matters. How did your date with the Tomb Raider girl go?"
I laugh beside myself. I scratch at the wooden floor with a fingernail.
"It went fine. It went great. She liked the final panel in my comic book. You remember?"
Of course he remembers. I showed it to him first, two days earlier, and it sent him into a monumental twinge, but still he stayed on the line to tell me how beautiful he thought it was.
That's the kind of friend he is. When all my other friends left, or just drifted away, because staying in touch with someone in 'my condition' was just too damn hard, or too slow, Cerulean showed what true friendship is.
He was there last night, texting me when I collapsed in the restroom, overcome by all the stimulation on my date with Lara. I'd thought for sure I was going to die at the table, face-first in my grey poupon soup. He'd sent me a text that made it all seem different, that gave me the strength to pick myself up, push back the twinge, and get back in their and enjoy my date.
The Rot's War (Ignifer Cycle Book 2) Page 47
