The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  I killed so many of them. I burned them, I trapped them, I taunted and slaughtered them, I laughed while they died, and I never once waited to see what they wanted. I never even tried.

  Waves of shame pulse through me. Waves of joy chase them, tsunamis that cleanse all my sins away, because they are here now, with me. They are around me still, my brothers and sisters, my children all, and all they want is the very thing I have wanted for so long, and fought for, and killed for.

  Belonging. Acceptance. Forgiveness.

  More memories slot into place, that I never saw them kill a single person, that though I fought them many times, and their bodies clashed with mine and their mouths grazed against my chest, they never once bit down. They never tried to infect me.

  Because I had already infected them.

  "Oh god," I whisper, the sound escaping me like it has been torn free.

  I was the first. My body began this evolution or devolution or whatever it is, and in doing so rewrote them all. I incubated them, I made them, and then I killed them.

  I rise to my knees. There are so many it's like Times Square again, only then I couldn't see it. I should have. I look over the expanse and silently give thanks. I have done such terrible things.

  Now I will do better. I will help them in any way I can, and I will bring all those left alive with me.

  "Thank you," I tell them. They are asleep and dreaming whatever strange dreams zombies see, but I hope they can hear, as I heard every word uttered by my bedside in the days of my coma. They are in the wilderness, and maybe I can help guide them home.

  I walk, and like sleepwalkers in the midst if a shared dream, they rise and walk with me. They buoy me on. At some point I wander through a barn, and fish out a keg of fuel. I carry it until I reach the convoy. Returning to it is like seeing a long-lost friend.

  "I'm sorry," I say to it. I pat the JCB's flank. I pour the gas in.

  I drive the convoy slowly with the dawn, and they part before me, following behind. I leave the music on endlessly. Stimulation hurt me, it made my brain twinge, but I got better. No baby wants to be slapped to breathe. Life is cold and hard, but there are such joys too. It is worth it.

  I drive the convoy with the JCB door open. It has become a sunny day and the road is clear ahead for miles. I take selfie photos of the endless swarm in the road. I can't stop grinning. At times I get out of the cab and walk amongst them, reveling in the touch of something alive that doesn't want to kill me.

  I film my passage, to show this is real.

  "Here I am," I tell some future audience, touching the ocean's shoulders and backs as I pass. "They're harmless. They don't want to hurt us. Look at this!"

  I hold my phone's lens up to take in the panorama. It records them reaching their withered arms across my chest, pressing their heads to my arms, like affectionate cats. I smile and they breathe as one. I laugh.

  "Hey, not there!" I crow, as one of them pokes me in the nuts. He backs up. A child takes his place and pats at my hand.

  "What do you want, buddy?" I ask.

  He doesn't want anything. He wants to pat at my hand, so I let him. I let them groom my hair and stroke my skin. I look into their wizened peanut faces and see not killers, but lost, sleepwalking souls. They may be in there still.

  "You can hear me, can't you?" I ask a pucker-faced old man. "You're in there still."

  His eyes glow. His mouth is a rictus grin, the skin pulled so tightly back. I touch his cheek, the tenderest expression I can think of.

  Before I would have blown him to dust.

  "What do you think of this?" I ask the phone's lens. I show my posse, many thousand strong, with me in the picture. "Can you believe this? Could you have ever imagined this? Would you like an entourage like this too?"

  I wink playfully. I nudge them and they nudge me back. I pour water on their heads and they lap at it wildly, like those memes of cats drinking from the faucet by dipping their heads under.

  We drive slowly through the day, moving to be moving. They circulate amongst themselves, so the ones closest to me are always new. They gather near, suck in their fill of my presence, like blood cells oxygenating, then radiate away. The ocean is breathing in whatever signal my brain is transmitting.

  We walk and we drive and we listen to music. I hand out snacks for them to eat. They drop them from hands that have become useless claws. I imagine shooting out T-shirts from a T-shirt cannon. "And if you look under your seats…"

  "It's a zombie armada," I tell Io that night, after my first full day as just another piece of jetsam on the ocean. It was wondrous. "They're all boats on the waves, not the ocean itself."

  "What waves are those, Amo?" she asks.

  I shrug. I'm lying atop the battle-tank, weary but feeling more alive than ever before. My whole body thrills to the sound of their breath below, and the despair is gone.

  "Waves of thought? I don't know honestly. I don't know if they'll ever come back as people, or if they're too far-gone now, but it isn't pain, is it? They're together with each other. They're roaming together, they're following a pattern that I can't understand, and they might still wake up."

  Io contemplates this for a time. "I hope it makes you happy, Amo."

  I smile, and click her off. It's another misleading response the geeks thought up for her, so she wouldn't have to say something disappointing and banal like, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

  I don't care. It does make me happy. I climb down so I can lie amongst them. I lie down on the still-warm asphalt, and they lie down beside me.

  In the morning they are gone entirely. I stand atop the tank and look out.

  "Hello!" I call. "Where are you all?"

  No reply comes from the tangled corn.

  "Have you all gone for a pee?"

  No reply. I turn and scan every direction but there is truly no sign of them. It is amazing. It touches me in a new way, like when I first saw a flock of sparrows massing and changing direction in the air, driven by the deep imperatives in their tiny sparrow brains, forming something beautiful, chaotic and amorphous, but at once ordered and logical and driven by an invisible calling.

  They've had their fill of me. What I denied them in New York, with barriers and walls and locked doors, they've now gorged on, and are moving on. Will it save them? Will proximity to me, to my mind and my body and the patterns buried in my immune brain, somehow bring them from their long hibernation?

  I hope so. I really hope so.

  It feels empty now with them gone, here on this barren stretch of road, but not lonely. My body remembers their presence, and my hands remember the dry rasp of their skin. They're out there now, wandering the wilds, heading for god only knows what, perhaps the very thing that can save them.

  The sun is coming up on a new day. It's July 7th, 2018, and I know exactly what I need to do. I know what the contents of the next cairn will be, and what I need to put in every cairn after that, because I can't let anyone else kill any more of them, not when contact and time is all they want.

  I know where to go. It isn't even that far from here. I get in my cab and I roll back along the way I came.

  21 – INDIANOLA

  The building is immense, a warehouse without any windows, and I pull the convoy up in the staff car park just outside Indianola, where my mother used to drop me off. I wasn't allowed to drive, back then. She'd hand me my lunch, sandwiches in plastic wrap, and kiss me on the cheek.

  "You're doing so good," she'd say.

  Perhaps there is hope for my mother and father. They could have been in the horde that came to me yesterday. Perhaps I touched them fleetingly as I walked amongst their ranks. I wouldn't know, but I think they would remember. That makes me feel good.

  The JCB engine winds down as I turn the key, and I reach behind me for a shotgun from the rack in the cab, then stop and chuckle. I don't need that now.

  I climb down from the cab without it and look around. There are none of the ocean here; I haven't seen a
ny all day. There are just trees circling the car park, and cars parked in it, already fading in the sun. Their windows have the white hoar of sun-warp in the glass. Weeds have grown up in the dust accumulated against their tire rims.

  There's a pink Cadillac, maybe Hank's. I think he used to work a night shift. And that has to be Blucy's little VW Bug over there. I laugh. When I went to her house to play Deepcraft for the first time, we drove in that.

  I walk over and rub at the rain-dust on the side window, holding my eyes to my cupped hands to look in. The glass is hot to the touch on my nose. In the back bucket seat are two plastic cartons filled with books.

  Vampires of the Amish Plain

  I laugh out loud. "No way."

  It's one of the covers I did for her. There must be two hundred books branded with my image stacked in the crates. That is crazy. They've been sitting here for months, slow-roasting.

  I peel back and look up at the fulfillment center. There is only the smallest of signs to let me know it is Yangtze. This is not a customer-facing location. It is an immense cairn, filled with all the stuff we humans ever needed to survive, and the staff who used to man it.

  It is a supply depot for me, now. It holds resources I can mine and craft into something better, if I can just get through the zombies alive.

  I start across the car park. The staff door is metal and red, and the knob is hot in the mid-day heat. Summer has come, and it's a scorcher.

  It opens. Of course, these places never close. They serviced our needs 24/7.

  Inside is the corridor through the admin offices; a kind of smaller intestine, snaking with a little canteen, toilets, changing room, staff room, meeting room, supervisor's room, and center manager's office. All of us passed through this system the same way, before passing beyond into the greater intestine that is the darkness itself.

  It's dim and hot in the corridor. I fire up my head-mounted flashlight. It feels strange to not have a shotgun and bandoliers of ammo across my chest, or the familiar weight of my handgun at my hip, but I couldn't bring any of them. I'm too afraid that, in the rush of a zombie charge, I'll use them.

  In my pack I have my laptop and my USBs. That's the only heat I'm packing.

  The air smells of linoleum and plastic-wrap. The center was only built a few years back, another of the changes sweeping our country. The supervisor told me all about it in the induction, but I was too busy staving off the twinges.

  I advance. I peer in to the staff room, centered round a circular table where we used to sit, and the others would laugh and tease each other. I'd always try to get in and out fast. There's a soda machine in the corner, I never noticed that before, and a good-sized window onto a square plot of parched yellow grass.

  I go by the offices and the changing rooms.

  "Anybody here?" I call softly as I go. "Blucy, Hank?"

  They don't answer, and nobody comes out to meet me. Perhaps they all found their way out. I hope that, but I expect it's not true. They couldn't open that metal door, and I've seen no broken windows yet.

  They're still inside.

  I advance to the entrance to the darkness; a single swing-door watched overhead by a very obvious CCTV camera. I give the non-functioning lens a thumbs-up, then push the door open.

  Inside the heat dissipates at once, swallowed up in the cavern that is the warehouse, and a cool breeze meets me that smells of dust and packing material. My headlamp illuminates the nearest shelves, flanking the central aisle, but does nothing for the depths. Beyond the faint halo of light lies pitch black.

  Something is moving out there, a rustle that becomes a slapping footfall. I flinch as months of defensive habits kick in. My heart begins to race and a cold sweat breaks on my forehead. I'm still clutching the door, and I want nothing more right now than to put myself back through it and run for the convoy.

  Instead I close it behind me. I step out into the center aisle, 'Main Street' we used to call it, and wait.

  "I'm here," I say, more loudly than I meant to. "It's Amo." I pause while the slapping of footsteps gets louder, then add slackly. "I'm back."

  I catch a glimpse of the figure running, briefly visible as he goes by a slit of reflected light cast off a silvery edge halfway down the warehouse, then he's in the dark again. It was Hank, tall and skinnier than ever, his footfalls slapping more loudly each second. Others join him, a stampede of bodies running in the darkness, maybe Blucy, North Korean Bobby, travelling Linda. I stand there waiting for them, with plenty of time to question everything I've seen and think I've learned.

  Are they really friendly?

  Hank pops into view again, no more than twenty yards off and charging like an emaciated hipster bull. I take an involuntary step back, because he'll be on me in seconds flat. My fists are itching to fight or run or hold a gun, my nerves are firing like an AK-47, and it takes everything I have to take a step forward.

  His eyes glow like halogen lamps, his feet slap the floor, and I manage a hasty, "Easy big guy," before he hits. His body crashes wholly into mine and we go down hard, rolling and slapping, until his face is against my head, and his hands claw at my back and his shoulder punches my chest, and I think that at any minute the first bite will come that will finally make me part of the in-crowd.

  It doesn't come. We roll and tussle and I manage to push him off me, though he clings close, and he doesn't bite.

  I look at him and he looks at me. We're lying there on the cold floor like he's just done a really good football tackle, and we're about to start laughing. My butt and side hurt where he took me down, but that is all the pain I feel. He didn't attack. More than anything he reminds of a really over-eager dog. I half expect him to start panting and wagging his tail.

  "Good to see you Hank," I manage. "You're looking well, considering."

  He stares at me. I nod to inspire confidence.

  "I know, yeah, this is weird. Hang in there. Where are the others?"

  A second later one of them hits us, connecting like a ground tackle in the small of my back.

  "Shit!" I cry out, and turn, recognizing the cannonball behind me by her eponymous blue hair.

  "Jesus Blucy, you could have killed me!"

  She cozies up. Hank cozies up on the other side, so I'm like a human sandwich. The next three or four that come pelting out of the darkness hit into them and not me directly, so that's better because I don't think broken ribs will bother them the way they would me.

  "It's good to see you guys," I say, as we all lie there in an orgiastic heap. I feel warm and ridiculous though their bodies are cold. "I never thought we'd all be lying like this in the middle of Main Street. But yeah, it's good."

  My wit is lost on them. I pat at them, trying my best not to be condescending. I stop short of saying, 'Good Blucy, there's a good girl.' Instead we just lie silently for a while, breathing together. It's amazing, and despite myself I start to cry. These are the first people I've seen that I actually know since the world ended.

  They look bad.

  "You look good," I say to Hank's wrinkled peanut head. "It's a good look on you."

  Somehow he's managed to get his scarf, an affectation he used to use to 'attract the ladies', since it has little silly kittens on it and was a good talking point, caught in his hair like a turban. I untangle it. He watches me with unblinking eyes.

  "OK, cool."

  After a while of that I get up. They get up with me. They follow me down the aisles, as I head for the place I've really come for. I explain to them a little what my plans are, and what I've been through. I tell Hank the play I used to 'reel' Lara in, color reading her palm. I tell Blucy how my book cover career was going, and about the big 'f' on the Empire State Building.

  She is suitably impressed. I take her hand as we walk. It is a wrinkled bony thing, like a witch's, but it reacts, curling around my fingers like a baby's grip. We walk hand in hand toward the print-on-demand book machines.

  This is my plan. Listen closely children, because I'm go
ing to drop some art. It's called-

  Zombies of America

  And I'm uniquely placed to make it. First though I need power, and light, and paper and ink, and to understand the book machines, and to make the art and the words, but all that will come. This is a fulfillment center after all, where all your dreams come true.

  The layout comes back to me quickly, and I prowl the aisles of the darkness following the invisible diviner in my head. I find the generators in no time, a whole section devoted to them, and my group follows on behind, touching my arms and back when they can. I pick up the first generator, a C-540 model, at least 80 pounds, and think 'Damn that is heavy'. I offer it to Hank.

  "You want to help?"

  Did he shake his head? I can't tell. He doesn't take it though. It's too heavy to be carrying. I go find a trolley and collect five generators. I drop them at the book machines then take the trolley out to the convoy and gather a drum of gas from the battle-tank.

  The staff of the center look strange in the outdoor light, trickling along behind me like a line of baby ducks. I suppose this is the first time they've been outside in nearly four months. Their skin is still a light gray, but their clothes are oddly bright, like new. They wait patiently while I roll the gas drum out and get it on the trolley, then they walk alongside me like little kids gone shopping with their mom, holding on to the drum's sides.

  I patrol the darkness looking for gear. I get cables and transformers and lamps and socket extenders. I get paper and card and glue and ink and toner, mustn't forget toner, and everything else I think I might need. I start the first generator burning beside the book machines and plug in the lamps.

  Let there be light. It warms the place right up, and the generator's thrum gives the darkness a pulse. I pull up the old sofa Blucy installed back here, take a comfortable seat with my peeps lying down around me, and dig into the book machine operating manual.