The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  I look at my photos. There's my work on the giant 'f', happy deluded selfies, like what I was doing was actually worth a shit, like posting on the side of the Empire State was anything like posting on a digital wall for all my friends and family in the world to see.

  No one will see it. If they're anything like Sophia they'll already be dead. I see her loss eating into me, I can feel it crushing my spirit, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I don't have the resources anymore to buoy myself along. I need outside intervention, but there is none. It's a real boulder crushing me down, and I just can't fight it alone.

  I double-click my phone just to hear Io's voice.

  "I'm messed up," I tell her.

  "You sound sad, Amo," she says.

  I almost sob to hear her say my name. "I'm fading, Io. This is just-" I cut off, bitter with frustration. "Why am I doing this?"

  "Why does anyone do anything?" she counters after a moment. "We do things for love or money. We do things to impress a mate. We do things to make our parents proud. There are so many reasons, Amo."

  I laugh, but it's bitter. Io has been programmed to say these things, of course I know. Some geeks in a lab came up with questions that might be asked, every possible permutation and phrasing, and they shoot out these funny responses, these bites of canned philosophy, to get their 'intelligent' program into the news for free publicity. They don't know me or what I've been through. Io can't see the things I've done.

  Shit bits, Cerulean would say. It's all shit bits, one step away from glitching through a shelf.

  I put the phone away because it's a fantasy. I turn the music off because it's too much of a goddamn fantasy. I'm kidding myself. I've been kidding myself since the massacres. That was the reality. There is only kill to live now, kill the ocean every day to live, and I don't know if that's enough for me.

  I rub my eyes. My head aches from thinking these same things. Sophia has done a real number on me.

  I drive on. Rain comes at me over a hill, a drumming wall of gray passing across the land, and I plunge into it. I bull through the wreckage of a bus torn in half. Torn bits of the ocean reach out to me, from the twists of melted slag and rubber.

  I pass through towns, and they're all empty bar the ocean. The old guilt surfaces now and then, that I did this. If I'd just kept my dick in my pants Jeo would still be a real thing. I would see Lara every day in Sir Clowdesley, from afar but at least she'd still be alive, then I remember how shitty that felt too, for how long.

  I was already coping with the loss of my whole world, and it hadn't even gone. I think now that running the darkness with Cerulean was my preparation for this, an empty world, but at least then I had him. We were together.

  This is too much. I feel the whole weight of the country pressing down on me. Three thousand miles is such a long, long way, and what's even waiting for me at the end? What if I can't even find the movie I'm looking for?

  I remember as a kid I'd wake up to hear the night freight train pass by on the tracks a few miles distant, past Meller Creek. There was something so lonely about lying awake in the small hours listening to that long high whistle, calling out its passage.

  It spoke of vast distances, of the emptiness of barren interstitial spaces between cities, but also of possibility. All day and all night, that train would see such amazing sights; great rolling vistas of desert lit by starlight, bustling night cities filled with a whole other world of people, glorious sweeps of forest and desert and ocean and canyon lit by the burning sun.

  Now I'm the last train, roaming the barren world and playing my music like the train whistle for nobody to hear. I'm so hungry for contact; I'm just as bad as Sophia. I'm leaving my sad little cairns with such miserable hope it makes me sick.

  They'll find me dead too, and they'll see my pathetic record of events, photos of what I did, my cairn, my zombie comic, my vainglorious strain for a connection, and it'll only make this feeling worse. I can't win.

  I am too alone. I am going crazy with it. Shit. Shit shit shit, I can't take it away. I can't do anything.

  I drive on.

  Hazleton, Danville, Lewisburg. I pass through and I don't stop. There are corpses upright and staggering about everywhere. There are baby carriages left standing idly on street corners, spatters of dry bone strewn across the gutters, cars lying like strange colorful mushrooms, sprouting round with veiny ivy. The ocean get thinner and grayer, but still they rumble on.

  More of them are naked now; their clothes have slid or worn right off their skinny frames. They are walking skeletons, rasping at the air.

  I shoot one with the sniper rifle, then get down and saw off its skull top. The inside is hollow but for the fibrous nerve-bands Sophia described, just like a cored coconut. I could cut it in half and use it like maracas, clacking my way through town like goddamn Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

  I cut out the squarish block of matter in the center, the transmitter/receiver. It is shrunk and as hard as a Brazil nut. I wonder that there must be one of these in my head too. If I shake my head, can I hear it rattle off the coconut walls?

  I pass from Pennsylvania to Ohio, watching the landscape change. I see a few Boston Markets interspersed amongst the rest of the fast food offerings. There are more Kroger's, for some reason. I find myself wandering through a J. C. Penny, I don't know why. I blast the dust out of floaters that lap near. I pick out a new pair of jeans and put them on. No rips, they feel good.

  There are signs for Pittsburgh, signs for Akron. Somewhere in the distance Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago pass me by. I'm through Ohio to Indiana, bound for Illinois.

  I'm in a daze. I follow the road like a train track, my music off now. I don't leave any of the cairns I'd planned to. I just can't, it seems so pointless. Nobody will see. Still I look at times at photos of the giant 'f' I left in New York, trying to decide if this is a good thing or if it just puts me in the same category as poor wilted Sophia.

  I keep her student ID to torture myself with. She is pinned to the JCB cab. I start to masturbate to her image at night, lying in my battle-tank and staring into her eyes and dreaming of her touch, her voice, of teasing her about her kiddie's cereal while she moans for me, for me.

  Each time I come I feel pathetic. I am pathetic. I push her picture far away, like I've sinned against her and myself. I go to sleep mired in guilt, and when I wake I have to climb through it just to breathe.

  I see my failure everywhere. Every billboard along the way is a reminder of the work I should be doing, but am not. It would be the matter of fifteen minutes to climb one of them every fifty or so miles, and put an arrow, another 'f', some other symbol to let those coming up behind me know they are on the right track. But I can't do that. What am I leading them toward? I have nothing to offer.

  I get out my RPG and fire it. I start to blow things up, billboard at first, but then bright red and yellow fast food restaurants. They crunch and explode, so shrapnel bits of trash, bin doors, deep fat fryers and bright plastic chairs fly out in a beautiful spray. There are no secondary explosions, no fuel tanks hit, just a crumbling and hardly any fire.

  This can be a trail of sorts. Let it read like Braille across the country in frustration and loss. I can only be honest. I shoot until my rocket launcher clicks empty, and I toss it to the side. I look at Sophia's picture in the cab, and when I talk to Io I imagine it's her.

  I make slow progress, so much it feels like a crawl. I am constantly nudging other vehicles out of the way, stopping to shoot floaters or clear the backlog behind the delivery truck. I stop too much. I can only drive at the speed of the convoy. Once I come upon a herd of the ocean near South Bend, tramping across the landscape from north to south like a river, and I wonder where they're going. Then I rev the earthmover and drive through them.

  I kill hundreds, probably. They are like a bad storm raging around me, hammering at every inch of my convoy, beating for a way in. I turn the music up to make them go crazy. I consider getting to the top of
the battle-tank and letting rip into their ranks with the howitzer, but I'm beyond that now. I'm not in this to get revenge or cause pain.

  I just need to get through. I won't give up like Sophia, but I can't promise what I'll do when I reach the West coast. Maybe I'll swing there too, last mayor of America taking in the view.

  I rumble over bridges and down a hundred Main Streets, through little towns cored by the move to big-box stores in the country. As I swing through Indiana, I remember why my country is so religious. The vast empty expanses of flat overgrown cornfields spread to either side like endless yellow skies, and the loneliness here is palpable.

  Maybe I too can sense god, in these fields and this growth. In the emptiness I need to feel him or her reaching down to touch me, because without that what is there? I would truly be alone.

  I enter Iowa on a Thursday, at 9:56 in the morning. I keep my phone charged with batteries and solar rechargers. Without it I would have no idea of the date, but Io remembers. This is my land, my home state. I go past familiar sights, from the times I've made this drive before. The mega-church thirty miles in is still there, sprawling like a shopping resort; the mass capitalization of faith and loneliness. I consider going in and alternately praying or shooting up the place.

  I do neither. I don't think any of that would help. I'm like flat soda, left out in the sun now, just going because I'm going. I eat sugary cereal and don't taste it. I drive. After Des Moines in the heart of my state I pull off I-80, bound for the little town I come from, where my parents may be even now; Creston.

  Pulling into my town a day later, I wonder if this experience will defeat me. At least it will be new. I've saved some of Sophia's weed, and I get high before I pull up to my old home.

  The neighborhood is unchanged, bar nature growing out of control. It's been two weeks since I left New York, and I can't imagine the slog across the whole country. I could go faster, but then I wouldn't have my convoy, and something about that just seems dishonest.

  I need to do it this way. I'm afraid to reach the West coast too quickly. If anything, this is a farewell tour. I want to make it last, no matter how miserable it is. I want to give the body of America a chance to change my mind.

  I pull up. The house is stereotypical, a swing on the sheltered porch, mosquito nets on the doors and windows, woodwork painted pale lime and white, with decorative vase-like flourishes. They don't actually have a white picket fence, but the neighbor Mr. Connors does.

  The grass is out of control in the front lawn. Dad loved his John Deere, and would never have abided that. Just seeing this makes me start to cry. Of course I know they're both dead already, but seeing this damn grass makes it real. Maybe coming here was a mistake. My mother and my father.

  I start up the music and get out. A few floaters gravitate to the truck. I trail the shotgun barrel noisily behind me, scraping a line up the concrete path. I stop at the door and consider. I actually have a key, still. It feels so strange in my hand, like a piece of magic to access this world, so far away.

  It slides into the lock, I turn it, and the door opens.

  Inside it smells of slowly baking mahogany and cedar. It's a timber-framed house, and they've got dark wood furniture throughout.

  "Mom," I call, into the musty corridor. Plenty of light radiates in through the windows. "Dad."

  To either side are chests of drawers, one adorned with a few petite Chinese-style vases. Mom loved these, and would often boast of them to friends and neighbors, though they were plainly reproductions probably cast a few miles down the road, by one of the old hippy communes near Shenandoah.

  I go down the hall, past the neat kitchen, to the den. Nothing is touched or has been changed. Wooden ducks fly across the wall above the TV, still a thick old CRT model. I'd been meaning to buy them a new one before the coma hit. I run my fingers through the dust on the kitchen table. We used to play games of Rook here when I was little, me on my Mom's side, Aaron on Dad's. It doesn't hurt to remember that. It feels like ancient history.

  I wander through the living room, where the coffee table is still piled neatly with mom's women's magazines. In the back room the piano rests silently. I play a few notes.

  "Mom," I call again, but no answer comes.

  Up the beige-carpeted stairs, I look in on each of our bedrooms one by one. Theirs is plain and unadorned, large cupboards, a dresser, a full-length mirror, veils on the windows. I check through to the en-suite, but it's empty.

  The guest room, which used to be Aaron's room, is barren. There's nothing of him left here now. My room is much the same, though it still bears many of my teenaged decorations, like a time capsule. I stand in the middle and look at this hollow space in the air, thinking there must be millions of rooms just like it across America, emptied out. I could go into any one of them and feel nostalgia, indulge in memories of movies shared, posters that were popular at the time, bands and comics and superheroes, but that would be pointless.

  It doesn't work on me, now. I open my drawers, looking at my collection of old Transformers. I tried to get as many of the first generation as I could, the original Dinobots and Constructicons, only stopping when I was about fourteen and they were so long past their original run you couldn't get hold of them anywhere. Later they would pop up on eBay, but that was outside the window when I was bothered.

  I run my fingers over their plastic shells, their holographic stickers, so colorful and bright. Perhaps if I cared about these things now, I'd be like Sophia. They would be my flimsy roots, too easily plucked up and exposed to the air, wriggling weakly. Loss of them might break me, seeing them like this could hurt me, like she brought her movies and her kid's cereal along for the ride.

  I don't need them. They don't mean anything to who I am now. I've died so many times between then and now I can hardly remember. This room is a shell I've grown far beyond.

  The basement is the same. It was my prison for a time. I sit on my old bed and look up at the door, imagining Cerulean in a place just like this while his mother hammered her way in. She brought him into the world, and she took him out of it.

  I go out into the garden and wander through the long grass. A few thick hotdog reeds have sprung up at the edges, where the rainwater always collects and tries to make a pond. Bulrushes? I can't remember. Io can't tell me.

  They're not here. I could go to the back of the delivery truck where the locals are gathering even now, and study shriveled peanut face after face, but why would I do that? They were here before and they're not here now. That's all I need.

  I put Sophia's ID card reverently in my desk, along with my Transformers. That's enough of that, now. All of this is a farewell, and I've felt guilty abusing her poor, lost image for so long. I am a seed of a long-dead plant, caught on a wind above a killing ocean, untethered by any trailing, unmet desires, and that's fine.

  I get in my cab and drive off, to the west, with my comet trail trudging behind.

  19 – ENDLESS

  In an endless landscape of corn, I run out of gasoline.

  The battle-tank is empty of supplies. It's not that I planned it wrong, or I forgot to fill them up. There were countless opportunities to fill up, I could have siphoned any of the tankers I've passed, I could even have rigged a pump to bring it up from the depths beneath a gas station. I have those kinds of skills now.

  But I didn't do any of that. It is a clear-headed and clear-eyed choice. I rumble the convoy on until it stops, the engine gutters, and goes silent.

  Hot sun bakes down. I leave my phone behind on the seat. I contemplate taking all my clothes off and going out naked, but there's no need for that. It will happen itself, when time has thinned me down like the rest of them, and the sun has baked and worn them so much they slough off.

  I'll wander free like the herds that fill out this land. I'll finally belong again. I want to face it, the same fate that I gave to them all.

  I climb out of the cab. I don't need guns or music now. It's all right.

&
nbsp; I start walking. The sun is hot and the corn is indescribably beautiful. I've never seen it grow so out of control before. The stalks get thick and tangled, interweaving like unkempt threads in a greater organism.

  We are all like this. I take step after step and feel lighter with every one. I am walking into my freedom. If Sophia had been brave enough she would have done this too. Yes there will be pain, but then it will be over. Like my parents there'll be nothing left to find because I'll be gone.

  I leave no message, no 'Sorry' scrawled hastily over the battle-tank's side, because I am not sorry. This is reality and I'm not ashamed. I am not willing to kill a single floater more to survive, for this. My life is not worth it. I'd rather run with the herd, hunting down buffalo in the wild and bringing them down, feeling the hot blood gush down my neck and chest, swallowing, swaying together like kelp on the tides.

  I get misty-eyed thinking of it. It seems like a beautiful life, and I am proud that I finally see that. Life is nothing lived alone. I don't want to be in my basement anymore, I don't want to hide away in my cab afraid and clinging to the past. My eyes are open.

  A member of the ocean peels out of the corn. Just one, and I wonder at his long and winding pilgrimage, a bit of jetsam tossed upon the golden waves, like me.

  His leg is twisted and he can't run. So much the better. We can dance together one last time. I walk and he walks behind me. We walk together, and I slow my pace to let him keep up. It can even be beautiful, a harmony of kinds. I turn once at a rise and see my convoy so far behind, so small.

  We are all so small. Like Aaron always taught me, the key lies in seeing that smallness and knowing it. You have to see the reality or you are lying to yourself, and I can't be Sophia. I want to be like my parents, absorbed by the flow, to go forward unafraid and as boldly as I can.