The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  I come to sprawled at the bottom against the bushes, what can only be seconds later. The shotgun is gone and I don't know where my handguns are, torn away in the fall. I look up the steep bank and see the one who was crawling for me is now rolling down, only about ten yards away, joined by two others. One of them is slithering down through the grass like a gray snake, while the other two get to their feet either side of me, pulling clear of the bushes and getting ready to dive.

  Oh shit.

  17 – SOPHIA

  I bolt to my feet and hurl myself backward over the scraggy brown bushes, with no time to see where I'm going. My jeans catch on a tough stalk going over and I come down awkwardly, cracking my left shoulder with a sharp knock on a hard root. My body pile-drives awkwardly after it, pain and a sharp nausea grip me, then the ocean surges bodily over the bushes to land snapping at my side.

  I lash out, punching the nearest thing wildly in its knurled gray peanut head, then two more flop over belly first, like damn salmon skipping upstream.

  I scamper backwards on my butt like they do in horror movies, utterly ineffectual. Cold wet clay shuffles down my belt line and into the seat of my pants. Already one of them is on his feet, the one with most of his neck gone is getting up, and I'm in the shit. I roll off my right side and up into a desperate run. My left arm whelps in pain as it swings but I can't do a damn thing about that now.

  It's a rooty, scrubby brown clearance area, and I sprint madly over it. It looks like they've been digging here, maybe preparing to build another damn fast food outlet, but it's early days and the ground is still lumpy with a creek-bed and twisted gnarls of root, so my legs tire out fast running in and out of dips and craters.

  I chance a look back and cry out, because the no-neck guy is right on me. He is literally inches away from snagging my hoodie, breathing down my neck, and revenge burns brightly in his cue ball-white eyes.

  On a dime I stop dead and drop to all fours. His calf kicks into my butt hard, his falling knee thumps into my back, and then he's flying past me to roll hard in the dirt.

  The next races on and it's all I can do to kick a leg up to meet him, catching him in the balls. It doesn't do a thing to make him cry out, his balls must be more withered than the peanut of his face, but it holds him off.

  Only now he's holding onto my leg and leering his yellow teeth closer. The no-neck guy is getting to his feet and the third is loping round from the side now, pincering me like goddamn raptors. What am I supposed to do? Think Amo, think you bastard.

  I lurch up, hopping backward on one foot as the guy holding my leg drives closer. No-neck is behind me and I manage to grab him by the mangled few shreds of throat with my right hand. The purple-gray skin of his inner windpipe feels as cold, stiff and dry as sun-cracked leather. His jaws smack and he paws at my hand, but he can't break my grip that easily.

  We hop backward over the scrub together, a strange kind of lurching train, me sandwiched by the other two. The third is circling freely and getting ready to dive in for my belly. I don't have enough legs to hold him off and my left arm has gone shivery and unresponsive.

  Three hops, four, five. I wriggle my fingers deeper into No-neck's torn throat, striving for something I can snap. I close on a springy tendon at the back, surrounded by chunks of shrunken, rock-hard bone. These are spinal discs, I think absently, as I give the tendon a sharp twist of the wrist.

  He spasms, his head lurches to the side, and his legs go out from under him.

  I follow him down. I hit him bodily in the chest, cracking his ribs, and the one holding my leg comes after, piling on. I manage to roll away so the two of them smack chests. I spy a rock nearby, grab it, and bring it down on the second one's head just as he's getting his arms under him again and coming for me. His shrunken skull cracks, my arm reverberates, and I hit him again, then the third is on me.

  I drop the rock and fall to my back, barely able to hold him off with a palm flat on his sunken chest. The second grabs my leg again and I twist to get my other foot in his face, holding him off. No-neck paws feebly at my chest, and now I am truly screwed, with all my legs locked and my one good arm engaged. Their loose jaws snap and they lunge in toward my belly. I'm tiring fast and they're not. Any second I'll be dead.

  My feeble left hand snags into my pocket. I manage to get my numb thumb to double-click the button, and I shout.

  "Io play the Beatles!"

  "Playing the Beatles," comes her muffled voice from my pocket. The signal goes out by Bluetooth, boosted by the battle-tank transmitter, and just as the third guy is nudging round my arm and his head is about to plunge into my soft belly, out comes the roar of the speakers from the rear of the delivery truck, back on the road, fittingly the first line of "Help!"

  His dive stops, and I play dead in the hands of the ocean. They look up and tune into the sound. The third one considers for a moment, looking at me lying there perfectly still, then up at the road. I can only hope their AI really sucks.

  He goes with it. He gets up and runs away. The second lets go of my leg finally, and runs off. Even No-neck tries to follow them, but he's gone all weird now, jerking like he's having a fit.

  I lie there and listen to the Beatles save my life, while No-neck thrashes about. Dammit, I do need somebody.

  "Good job, Io," I whisper.

  "My pleasure, Amo."

  I laugh. No-neck reaches for me again and I high-five him. Then I get up, put one foot on his shriveled chest, and using both hands get a firm grip under his chin. My left hand is weak and shaky still, but it can do this.

  I strain back and pull his head off. It comes with a snap, as the tendon of his brain-stem ruptures. The light goes out of his eyes. It feels like holding a Terminator skull, but only as heavy as a coconut husk. Alas poor Yorick. I drop it beside his motionless body.

  Screw these zombies. I hobble back to the bushes and climb over. There's a cut on my leg where it caught on a thorny branch going over, torn through my pants, and blood is dribbling down. I feel sick and wobbly in my shoulder. I barely make it on hands and knees up the embankment, pulling at clumps of grass and digging my toes into tufts.

  Over the fender, onto the road I go. There's no sign of my shotgun. Screw it, I've got others. I squeeze back down past the semi's grill. The ocean are congregating at the rear of my convoy, enchanted by the sound of the Beatles. They pay no attention to me. I climb up the cab, pull another shotgun from the rack, and ascend to the roof of the battle-tank, then walk the roofs to the delivery truck.

  At the edge I brace myself and shoot down. One, two, three, to eleven, I dissolve them in powdery puffs of gray, like Tinkerbell's magic dust. It's better now they're so dry, less grotesque. It doesn't feel quite so much like murder, though I don't like it. I made a promise.

  I double-click. The Beatles are thunderous back here. "Turn the music off Io."

  "Turning off."

  It cuts out over her last syllable. I'm left in noisy panting silence, cursing myself.

  I thought I was ready, but here I got lucky. I would probably go into debilitating shock now, if I didn't already know enough about how to deal with that. I drop into the battle-tank and pour two bottles of cool water over my head. It chills my brain and gives me something else to think on, something emphatically not fight or flight.

  Stupid.

  In the silence afterward I pour medicinal alcohol over the ragged cut in my thigh, dabbing away the crunchy bits of thorn. I put a bandage over the top then reload my shotgun. My shoulder throbs but it doesn't seem to be broken. I just need to be more careful. Io as a wingman is also pretty handy.

  I put the music back on. That can be my standard operating procedure now. It pulls the floaters safely away from me. So, to the twerking majesty of Nicki Minaj, I pad back round the semi's grille. I walk down its side, past the powdered body of the first one I shot, and take a wide berth around the hanging open rear door, to peer into the interior.

  It's not a good sight. It's a girl, hanging.
For a moment I think she's about to open her eyes and talk, but she's too pale for that, and her feet are not even touching the floor, and she doesn't have any eyes at all.

  I feel myself begin to come apart. Electrical cable has been worked around the metal light fixture of the storage cab's interior, dangling tautly down to bite into her throat. Her head is at a sharp angle, bloated and starting to rot, with the eyes already pecked away and long trails of bloody tears down her cheeks.

  The smell is strong. She smells like the dead, before they became the dry and crusty things they are now.

  "No," I say. I envision myself running forward and grabbing hold of her legs, trying to lift her up to take off the pressure while crying out frantically, 'Somebody cut her loose, somebody call an ambulance!'

  I don't do it. I take a step back. The fight goes out of me and tears come to my eyes. She's a survivor, not one of the ocean, and she did this to herself. She broke her own neck to make it permanent.

  "Wait," I say feebly. "Wait a second."

  She doesn't answer. Her dead eye sockets, eyeless now and squirming with fat white maggots, stare back at me.

  I am too late. I can't look at her. I run away from the rear of the semi and drop gasping to my knees on the asphalt. Now the shock really hits.

  The knots are too tight, so I use a pair of bolt-cutters to snip the wire. I wear a kerchief for the smell. She falls with a ringing thump to the metal floor of the trailer's interior. It's hot in here, baking in the sun, making her rot faster surely. I wonder how long she's been hanging here.

  I wrap her in her own bed sheet, like a mummy. I can't take her accusing face anymore.

  I lower her to the asphalt, then turn and study the trailer's inner gloom. It is sweltering and buzzing with flies. It is plainly her home. I look around. She's got a sofa at the back, a generator of her own with a few gasoline tanks nearby and an ad hoc chimney to carry the fumes out the back. There are lots of wires and fat blocky transformers plugged into cable extenders, leading to a music system, a huge flat screen TV, a bed, a fridge. I pad inside and open the fridge door. Bottles of clotting milk stare back at me in the dark. I wonder if she actually milked a cow, or this is reconstituted stuff from powder.

  There are about twenty bright red boxes of a sugary kid's cereal stacked by the wall. It's little details that this that hurt the worst. On the rug there are reefer papers. I suppose she'd been lighting up a few spliffs. Why not? I find a stash of her tobacco and dry fine-grain weed in a pouch by the coffee table. I haven't rolled a fat one since college, but I do it anyway. I light it up and smoke it down. It tastes like shit, but it helps with lifting her body onto my good shoulder, while some ridiculous pop jingle plays out from my speakers.

  I have to roll her down the embankment. I follow carefully. In the scrub, I dig her a grave. The dirt here is loose, bar the tangles of slim roots, but the shovel blade cuts through them brightly. It doesn't take long.

  Sophia, her name is. I find it on ID in her pocket. She was a pretty blonde girl, maybe twenty-three. There's a student ID in her purse, and some change, odd pennies and dimes. It feels sour to hold them. What did she think she was going to spend these on? Alive this would have been a funny thing I could have teased her about, and maybe she'd make the point that they might still work in a vending machine, or perhaps they remind her of the past, and our best presidents.

  Like this they feel like unfinished stories, so thin and vulnerable, her whimsy remaining as a pathetic reminder of her failure.

  I drink some whiskey to help the high buzz on.

  Sorry, she wrote on the side of the semi. That's what gets me worst. She said sorry, though she'd seen no one for months, known no one for all that time. She killed herself surely with the ocean at her feet, looking out over them and the glorious view, hanging there with her feet kicking and…

  I throw dirt on her gently, feeling the guilt descend. I didn't do enough. I should have been out here a month ago, two months ago, instead of playing my silly games with the Stadium and the Empire State. Maybe if I'd found her then we could have helped each other, even saved each other, but I didn't do that. I didn't lift a finger to save Cerulean either.

  I haven't done a damn thing.

  I revel in the sorrow, to feel something. I smoke another doobie in her hot home. When the music cuts out, because the generator has run down or the battery's gone out in the Bluetooth booster, I don't care. I sit on her sofa, where she must have sat a thousand times chewing vaguely on food packed by hands long-taken by the ocean, and look at the TV. She's got great choice in DVDs, a lot of Bill Murray. Groundhog Day is one of my all-time favorites.

  I read her journal. It is a litany of hope dashed. She went to her parents but they were dead. She went to her boyfriend but he was dead. He attacked her and she had to kill him with a frying pan and a skewer through the throat. She went to town and everyone was dead. She tried to press on. She even brought her medical books; she was studying to become a doctor, and tried to make some headway. She dissected the dead, studying their brains and brain stems as best she could.

  The brain stems were engorged, thicker than normal, and pressed sharply against the windpipe, which caused their characteristic breathing sound. The brain itself was alien, the normal structures altered with thick nerve fibers running from the eyes, the nose, the ears, the mouth, and a new squarish shape suspended right in the middle. Everything in-between was turning to mush.

  I sit back and laugh. I suppose they have come for our brains.

  'Transmitter?' she has written next to her diagrams of the new structure. To me it looks like a circuit board of flesh. Her notes ramble on in bizarre theorizing, about the purpose of this new organ. She too was aware of how quickly the infection spread, faster than any disease we've ever seen before.

  'Receiver?' it says on another diagram. If I'm reading her ideas correctly, it seems she's suggesting the brain has been completely repurposed as a two-way signal box. Signals go out, signals come in. It could explain some things, I suppose; how they work so closely together, how they know I'm there even when I'm silent and invisible, and how the infection started.

  It came out of my brain. It leapt out like an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, and it fried everybody nearby. Their brains had already been primed, and they transmitted the signal on in seconds.

  I wonder if there are still survivors, up in the Arctic somewhere, living on isolated islands where the signal never reached. They must be really confused about now. Anyone they send to go find out what happened, won't come back.

  I read on. Her journals get darker. She had glimpses of hope, though it doesn't seem she really believed them. She was headed for Lewington, the next big city over, where she thought maybe they would have an electron microscope. She was hoping to study the spinal tissue in more detail, perhaps with some hope that the condition could be reversed, despite the massive changes to the brain. She outfitted the semi truck for survival, just like my convoy.

  But she couldn't kid herself enough. She didn't even make it very far. The looming road defeated her and the loneliness tore her up. All these brains around her were lost, along with personalities and everything that ever made them human. She wasn't going to be able to help them, and watching Bill Murray on the TV screen alone in a nightmarish world of the dead just wasn't enough for her.

  Sorry,

  she wrote in her final journal entry, addressed to other survivors she couldn't know even existed.

  I wish I could do this. I feel like I'm letting you down. But I can't do it anymore.

  She left everything neat. She parked the semi across the road because she couldn't bear to go completely un-noticed, even in death. She craved to be seen to the last, to be witnessed, to be held and remembered.

  I held her dead body. I will remember her for as long as I live, because I know exactly how she feels. I feel I have let her down too. I want to tell her that, tell her I'm sorry too, but I can't. I have come too late, and there is nothing I can do.
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  I fire up her generator and I watch her movies. The part where Bill Murray kills himself again and again hits home hard. I can't stop crying when he finally makes a meaningful connection with Andi McDowell. He's earned it, by this point. For everything he's done and all the changes he's made, he's earned it.

  I lie in her bed in the darkness after, listening to the lapping wheeze of the gathering ocean outside, and think about the comas. She'd survived them too. She'd come so far, and built this semi-life with ingenuity and luxuries I never considered, so resourceful, but at this final stage she fell. Her dream wasn't strong enough, the propellant in her jetpack not potent enough, and she just couldn't push through the emptiness in those empty skulls.

  It is somber and sobering. I go to sleep and dream of Cerulean's phone call, and the seconds after when the line went dead, when I knew I'd never talk to him again.

  Robert. Sophia. Lara. I've left them behind like they were nothing, always moving on. I have no meaningful connections left, and any moves toward that have been kidding myself. Signs left behind mean nothing if there's no one there to see them. The world is empty, it's lonely, and it's going to stay that way for the rest of my life.

  18 – IOWA

  I drive in a daze, only half-watching the road. Miles go by, this JCB has no odometer, and we rumble on. I play my music half-heartedly through forests and over hills, through little towns and past a million strip-malls, running by flag-pole signs for various fast food burger joints, pancake huts, ice cream stands, all of which would have once spun and flashed to catch my attention.

  They look so foolish. They don't mean a damn thing.

  I stop to fill the JCB's tank from my barrels. Floaters run toward me but I have time. I eat a cold hotdog on the battle-tank roof. I could cook it but why bother. It's bland and slippery. I bring up my phone and scroll through past messages; to and from Cerulean, my mom, my other older friends. The record goes back years, all my mail. I eke myself forward with these pathetic memories.