The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  We walk together, him or her and me. Its body is so shrunken I can't tell the gender anymore; any hint of genitalia has shriveled up into the body. I start to cry, and now it is a release. Tears flood down my face. I'll walk until I run out of strength, then I'll turn this body over to the flood. That at least is honest. It's facing death down and accepting it with open arms, hiding no more, man not mouse.

  I reach out and stroke the ears of corn, fat and yellow. I pluck one and eat it as I walk. The natural sugars are ripe and rich, sweeter down my throat than any of the processed, canned shit I've been on for months. The air is so clean. I look back to make sure my friend is still coming.

  He's been joined by another. They both hobble along, neither of them running. I don't know why this is, he doesn't look injured, but I'm grateful. They will run me down, but with respect. I will give myself up in the same way. I duck them a low bow and we walk on.

  I toss the corn back into the field. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. It was a grand dream, really. I no longer feel bad about my New York cairn. Perhaps others will come, in time, and it will help them. They'll take strength in what I've left for them, and they may even make it to the West coast alive. It won't matter that I'm not there when they arrive, if they've already made it that far. They can build their own destination. I just made a starting point.

  I'm smiling as I walk. Joy rises up in me like a flood, withheld for so long. Now I feel proud again, and it doesn't matter that no one will witness my death, because I'm here. I don't need the others for this moment, I don't need to apologize or to be witnessed, because which one of us goes into death with others by our side?

  We all go alone. Cerulean went alone, Aaron went alone, my parents went alone, but we all go the same way. We come into the world and we go out of it the same, so perhaps we are never truly alone. This is a path so well trodden it is worn into stone, and finally, I feel the company of all these ghosts in the air around me.

  I'll run with Cerulean and my parents, with Aaron and Lara and them all.

  I walk through the day, until there is a crowd of dozens behind me. Not a one of them runs, and with each one added to the slow trudge my heart fills a little more. This is my audience. They will leap upon me and tear out my guts, and we're going to do it together. I am giving them my body for their sustenance, and in turn they are making me one with them.

  Who ever said birth was pain-free? Life is hard and it hurts. The first thing a baby feels is a slap to make it breathe, and the indignities just keep on coming. Lost love, lost friends, broken bones, all of it part of the tapestry of life. I am part of it too. I started this thing and finally it's caught up to me.

  The cornfields don't end. At some point nearing dusk, when my feet are growing weary and my vision blurs with the heat and exhaustion, so tired I can barely take another step, I stop and I turn. There are hundreds of them now, all my brothers and sisters, and now I am sorry.

  I'm sorry for the family I locked within their home in Mott Haven, and for the mall cops I killed with monitors above Sir Clowdesley, and for the thousands I burned and the thousands I mowed down with bullets and the tens of thousands I locked into the stadium. I would take them all back if I could. Why should I have any more right to the world than them? Why should I be the one to go on, clinging to a past that is no longer real?

  I spread my arms to them. The gray tide draws in, folds around me, and I am encompassed. Their limbs and their skins find mine, tenderness reigns, and we are all rolled into one in the blackness together.

  INTERLUDE 2

  Lara saw the giant 'f' on the Empire State Building, and at once she understood.

  Amo. It had to be Amo.

  The streets of the city were near deserted. She drove through Manhattan with a sense of burgeoning hope in her chest. He was alive. He was alive and he'd done all this. Somehow the city was clear; somehow he'd put up a sign she could recognize at once.

  He was alive.

  She raced to the lobby of that great building, and in. She found within a cairn that surpassed any of her expectations. There was a plan, and supplies. There was a wall laid out like a bulletin board, and upon it at the top was his name.

  Amo – Last Mayor of America

  She laughed and cried. She took up the spray can and filled in her name beneath his, through her tears.

  Lara – Last Barista in America

  She read his log and his comic. She fired up his generators and drank his Nespresso. She reveled in the map, cutting a path west across the country, to Los Angeles where the Chinese theater awaited.

  It was beautiful. It was proud, and it filled her up in a way she couldn't express. She loved him for it. She loved his will for doing it. It was a good thing, with no doubt in her mind.

  She wasn't alone any more. Amo who she knew, who had been through the worst of it just as badly as her, who had been through even worse things, was alive. He was out there. He could be found and known, and she would not be alone anymore.

  She gathered up one of his laptops and a USB with his map, she picked up one of the RV keys and ran down the stairs like an excited child at Christmas, to find the vehicle stocked and ready. The gas tank was full.

  She revved it to life, set the map on the passenger seat before her, and pulled out onto the first stretch of the route he'd marked out in blue felt pen, leading from the basement of the Empire State and through the Lincoln Tunnel, all the way across the country.

  She found the gravesite of the suicide girl outside Stroudsburg. Amo had shifted the semi-trailer to the side, but painted his brand across the road in the same thick yellow paint he'd used in New York, along with a message:

  Sophia – RIP

  06 / 11 / 2018

  I should have reached you in time

  LMA

  Lara found the grave he'd dug. She cleared a few roaming zombies with one of the shotguns from Amo's RV, then climbed into Sophia's trailer.

  It was peaceful inside, and cool in the still afternoon. She sat on the sofa and leafed through a journal, which Amo must have read too. He left it there for her to read.

  There was a line of three spliffs lying on the glass coffee table.

  "You idiot," Lara said, and laughed. Emotion flushed up in her. God, it was Amo. He'd been here, how long ago? She brought up her phone. It was July 4th, Independence Day. She hadn't even realized. All that mattered was she was a little over three weeks behind him. The thought stunned her.

  He was really out there. He was out there clearing the way, like some self-appointed janitor for the world, like the mayor of America, clearing a path through the brush and tidying up the dead en route.

  Lara lifted one of the spliffs to her mouth. Her hand was shaking. She hadn't smoked since college, before law school. Her fingers remembered though, and using the Zippo she lit up. Mellow smoke filled her mouth, filled her lungs, filled her up. Amo's hands had rolled this, had prepared this like a party favor at some crazy wedding, where the guests would come one at a time if at all, spread out over the years, to pay their respects at the grave of a dead girl and get high.

  She almost coughed but held it down until her lungs burned, then exhaled. Bluish smoke wreathed out and up, spiraling and twisting like drops of oil in water. A buzz hit her quickly from the tobacco, followed by the cushioning descent of the marijuana. She snuggled back into the sofa, imagining Amo was outside with Sophia, getting some milk or something, and they were all going to get high and party down together.

  She read Sophia's journal. It was miserable and ecstatic by turns, a record of ups as miniscule as spotting three zombies in red jackets in a row, of lows so deep she scrawled in a rabid scratchy hand, repeating the same words over and over again:

  What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?

  Poor Sophia. Lara smoked the spliff down to the quick, then left it there in the ashtray, another signal to others. She rooted out a ball pen from her pack and started writing in answers to Sophia's long-silent entreaties.
/>   You're all right now, Sophia. We're taking care of you. You are an important trailhead on the way out West. Your death was not for nothing. You will not be forgotten. I wish I'd known you, you sound like a lovely girl.

  Thank you.

  She wrote answers in Sophia's journal to her every moment of loss and misery. It did nothing, but it seemed to do something. These words were an unanswered plea that remained, and now they were answered. Sophia would never know, but that didn't make it any less real.

  The others would know.

  Lara signed it, Lara, Last Barista in America. LBA. She added the date.

  Then she started a new entry, on a clean page. She kept it short, but described how seeing Sophia's grave made her feel, and how it excited her, that others could be alive.

  I hope to meet you, at the Chinese theater. You, me and Amo will watch movies together. And whatever else we fancy too. Plant radishes and suchlike. We're going to be OK.

  She put the journal down where she'd found it. She hunted out the spliff papers; there was no more weed but there was some tobacco left. She rolled a fresh cigarette, to replace the one she'd smoked. She laid it up neatly in line with the others. It felt like a kind of offering.

  Poor Sophia. What a sad shrine, but strangely full of hope too. Amo's passage had made it that way. Her passage would make it even more so.

  A waypoint on their pilgrimage.

  She left.

  There were no signs of Amo for a long time after that. She saw evidence of destruction at the roadside, passing through Indiana; a destroyed burger joint, its ragged outer walls blackened and splintered; elevated billboards that were burnt and had chunks missing.

  That couldn't have been him, could it?

  She reached the rolling cornfields of Iowa. In the summer blaze, the golden spread looked like the fields of Elysium, stretching into forever. She drove on over flatlands that went on and on, wondering if she was gaining on Amo, wondering if others were coming up behind her even now.

  Were they in New York, at the first cairn? Were they at Sophia's shrine, the second? What would be the third?

  In the midst of the corn, on a long and lonely road in the middle of nowhere, she found it. It was immense, and it changed everything.

  20 – REBIRTH

  I remember my coma.

  It was terrifying; I was a child again surrounded by colors I couldn't recognize and shapes I couldn't distinguish, shifting constantly like warping reflections on a soap bubble.

  Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

  It was overnight.

  I've never seen the like.

  I 'hear' the words, coming to me through a gust of color like a digital brush-stroke, 130-point font and meaningless.

  His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.

  But what?

  But what.

  I rumble and roll on an ocean of bald heads, so many shades like a million disconnected eggs. These are all heads and their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, conjoining from a flat weave to a tubular extrusion, like intestines curling themselves from to existence, like sausages bulging into life.

  He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.

  It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible?

  Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.

  Are we talking an infection?

  Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.

  His DNA shows no change. We checked that.

  Not at the genetic level, then. Structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's been remapped completely.

  The voices distend and balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend in and out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.

  My mother's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere. It stumps up and pats me on the head. It speaks.

  My dear boy. My darling boy.

  Later, much later with time as a food I chew on and excrete, she speaks again.

  Not again, please. Not him too.

  I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of bald heads. There are great canyon-walls all around me made of bodies which are zombies, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.

  Father.

  They say.

  Mother.

  I reach out to them. I want to help them. I scoop their bodies up on my tongue, listen to them etching words across my skin, I see them growing older and changing by the minute. I reach out and feel the barrier between of this maddening reality flex and twist, like an image trying to bend its way out of a television screen.

  Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.

  Like nanobots?

  Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was always waiting in the brain to be turned.

  You said his brain-

  I said his brain looked like an infant in the womb's. It does. Have you compared the stills I showed you? The telomerase counts are all getting reset at a mitochondrial level for brief periods, so for each of those brief periods it lasts, he isn't aging. That's undeniable.

  He's the fountain of youth. Your paper argues-

  I can't publish that paper, not yet. I need more.

  But he's waking up.

  Put him under again! Put him under and we'll see.

  I am pushed back under, lost to the world beneath a layer of forget-me-nots, when all I want is to rise. They put me down again and again, until I'm scrabbling up a tower of a thousand bodies of the dead, fighting for breath.

  It's stopped. Whatever it was, it isn't working any more. If anything it's starting to stunt him in ways that look necrotic. It's eating him alive. If we keep him under any longer he'll die.

  Then let him die. This is research that could change the whole world.

  This is a man whose parents are kicking up a mighty media storm. We can't just keep him. We'll never keep his records to ourselves if anyone suspects. We need these records if we're ever going to-

  So let him wake up. We'll lose the greatest scientific breakthrough in the history of our race.

  I think that's a bit-

  What? Histrionic? Do you not see we're making history here? His brain was resetting itself! He was getting younger before our eyes!

  And now it's stopped. Whatever it was, it was wonderful, but it's over now and it's starting to curdle. We have to let him go.

  So wake him up. Screw you, and wake him up.

  I rise. Everything hurts, from the back of my tongue down to the sound of my own pulse. I am inside out and upside down. I don't know where I'm thinking, what taste I'm seeing, everything is a jumble.

  "It will be hard for a time," a voice said. How long had I been unconscious? There was cotton wool in my mind, fogging me up. "You've been in a coma for two weeks. We have no idea what happened. How do you feel?"

  The first of the twinges got me then, that new and persistent companion. It got me good and hard and it laid me out. I didn't know, but I know now. They used me. Something was happening to me and they broke it. I was a butterfly emerging from my chrysalis, and they kept me in too long.

  My thoughts chuttered and jolted like a faulty boiler, sweating like burnt toast. I reached out against the glare and the movement tore new sinews in my mind.

  My mother was there. My father was there, and I grew calmer. My doctor came and went, a new voice, an Indian with red glasses. I liked him, I trusted him, because the red and brown chimed perfectly together, though they did
look a bit ridiculous.

  "Think of it like diabetes," he said. "Once you've got it you can't go back, and one lapse can lead to serious complications."

  Now I remember my lapse. I remember Lara. I remember reaching out to reality, and what it became, and what I am now, surrounded by the dead.

  I wake surrounded by the dead. They are everywhere, pressed up against me skin to skin, their gray faces in the still repose of sleep, their white eyes closed, lying beside me like family, like lovers, like breakers in some almighty, unknowable weave.

  I am alive. I jolt and start up. I look down on my chest and belly, study my arms and my legs, pat my face and my neck and my shoulders urgently, but there are no bites. There is no blood, there are no wounds at all.

  I am alive.

  The deep wheeze of their breath is everywhere. It is dark but starlight shines over us. I am sitting on the road where I stopped, the corn swaying in a warm wind on either side like walls of water waiting to descend, and all around me are the ocean.

  There must be thousands of them. Their bodies stretch from me into the distance, on the road and into the corn, all lying down, all skin-to-skin, all asleep, and in that moment I understand a truth that changes everything.

  They don't want to kill me. They never even tried.

  Guilt, sickness and joy fall within me like stones plummeting down a deep well, each chasing the other and hammering off my heart on the way down, pulling me in and out of balance. The ocean's breath wheezes like a great placid ocean in time to the clanging bell of my heart, lapping at my sides, ringing in the change.

  They are touching me. They have their arms across my body. They have oriented themselves with their heads closest to me, like a thousand sunflower seeds pointing little dry peanut heads seed-first at me, so I am the center of their mandala, and this is all they ever wanted.

  Tears spring from my dry eyes. The touch of those closest to me is cold but tender. Here I am adrift, but for the first time in days I no longer feel lost. I am finally reaching through to the truth, and seeing it with open eyes.