The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  Zombies of America

  It chewed everything that had happened and somehow made it real, sucking the nutrition out of the cold reality and making it wholesome and palatable. It was better than an oral tradition. It was the beginning of a new history.

  She leafed through the parts with her again. She was presented almost angelically, which made her laugh. She wasn't an angel. By some lights she was a failure, washing out at the legal bar, losing her way, becoming a coffee monkey and calling herself a barista to snatch back some modicum of credibility. Then for months after the event she'd hidden in her parent's house, while Amo was out there dealing with the world and thinking about others.

  She'd never once considered doing something on the scale of greatness he'd opened up. She wouldn't have thought herself capable. But maybe now.

  She looked again at the date he'd written on the blackboard in the car. It was cute that he'd taken it from a coffee shop, sort of keeping it within a strange kind of family. It was only a week ahead of her, August 14th. Making the comic must have slowed him down, bringing them closer together.

  Her heart trilled. If he was truly driving in his JCB, clearing the road mile by mile, then perhaps she could catch him before he reached the coast.

  Suddenly it seemed essential that she do that. She had to find him before he hit LA. If she pulled up to the Chinese theater and found him hanging there like he found Sophia, it would kill her too. She'd just string herself up right by his side, and that would be the ultimate message and lesson of this whole trip, for them and for any who came after; all of them hanging like mannequins in a long line, together at last. This was the future of the entire surviving race.

  She ran back to the RV and jumped in. She tossed the comic in the passenger seat and tore off into the night.

  She cleared Iowa into Nebraska in the early hours and slept a few hours in the back seat, no longer so concerned about nesting in somewhere safe. She woke before the dawn, to see a gray face at her window pressing close, lit by its white eyes and the light reflecting off the dash controls.

  It terrified and thrilled her. Slowly, fighting against her every instinct, she wound down the window. The wrinkly screwed-up face leaned in, like a cat nestling closer to be stroked.

  She touched its hair. There was no terrible scent, and it did not rear back to snap at her hand. Others pressed close.

  Lara took hold of her new convictions, and opened the door. She stepped out amongst them, dizzy from lack of sleep, and walked in their midst.

  It was just as Amo had promised. They pressed against her. They tapped at her shoulder and hands. They were a flood, and this was all they wanted.

  She broke into tears, and hugged them. She wandered with them until the sun came up, then she filmed herself with them too. She took selfies against the dawn with wrinkled gray faces that were once people, now shabby gray creatures of dust that craved her attention.

  When the sun rose fully, they left, traipsing due west across the plains, away from the road.

  In the RV she loaded her videos and photos onto the laptop she'd gotten from Amo, and edited them using a simple app into a continuous video, five minutes long. She added it to one of the USBs he'd left.

  She raced on.

  At the cairn in Omaha, surrounded by glassy tall buildings and standing on the checkered line he'd daubed across the asphalt, she plucked out every USB he'd left behind, fifty of them in total, and loaded her video into them too.

  It was more evidence. It was proof for all that followed this way.

  She checked his date, signed on another blackboard, and saw she was gaining. A day had been trimmed off their distance already.

  She sped on. She passed through Nebraska and on to Colorado, stopping only to switch out his USBs at cairns and catch a few hours of sleep here and there. She didn't need to eat and drink much; the hungriest thing was the RV, which she fuelled up with gas from the barrels he'd left in the back.

  Outside Denver she saw his giant Pac-Man figure on the tallest widest building and laughed out loud.

  "You crazy bastard," she whispered to herself. It was strange to hear the sound of her own voice.

  She sped along the scrubby plains and into the city, standing like an oasis of glass and steel in the wilderness. In the cairn in the lobby of Wells Fargo she found his board and counted the dates. She was only two days behind him now.

  She leapt back in the RV and raced on, from Colorado to Utah through the night without stopping, through the corner of Arizona to Nevada and rocketing down to Las Vegas. There in the middle of the Strip, surrounded by a throng of gray bodies milling like an ocean, she saw his convoy, and lying beside it in a shallow clearing of the dead, covered in blood and barely breathing, she found Amo himself.

  24 – SAVIOR

  I look up and see Lara's face again, hovering under the clouds like the shadow of a dark mother ship.

  "Hi," I whisper feebly. I reach up and pat at her face, like creamy coffee.

  "Jesus Amo, what happened?" she asks.

  I smile, high on dying, blessed with this final angelic vision. I try to frame an answer but my lips don't work well.

  All night I slept fitfully, too weak to move, too surrounded by the dead to care. They pressed close, breathing their hot bloody breath against his skin, stinking of shit and raw guts.

  My legs were done.

  I watched the stars and waited for the end. I tried to crawl with just my arms, like the snail man back in Mott Haven, but the pain blacked me out. I didn't make an inch.

  I look down the side of the battle-tank, through the shifting gray legs of the ocean. All that remains of Don are his bones. His skull lies like a fat white pebble beside the barrel tube of his ribs.

  Lara is here, saying something. I smile up at her.

  "Water, please," I mumble.

  Her face is wobbly, like ripples on the surface of a lake after a stone's been thrown. I try to say something more but I can't really make a sound. It is good to see Lara after so long, even like this.

  "This skeleton, what the hell is this?" she asks. "God, look at your legs Amo, what happened?"

  I don't really feel my legs anymore. They are long and far off.

  "There was an indicator," I manage to whisper. She leans in close to hear. "It hit my shoulder."

  She frowns, the movement of her brows barely visible, then she starts tugging at my shirt.

  "Left," I whisper. She pulls at the shirt there, running her fingers over the little dimple the indicator had made. That has healed too, so fast and so long ago I barely remember it.

  "This is ancient," she says. "Amo, I'm going to have to move you. I need to do something about all this mess."

  "They killed Don," I croak. "He's right there. We need to clean him up."

  Lara turns her head then spun back. "The skeleton? Wait, you mean the ocean killed him? You said they're not hurting us."

  "Help him," I mumble.

  "I think he's a bit past helping."

  She fumbles in her pack and produces a bottle of water. She unscrews the cap and holds it to my lips, and I drink.

  Oh, angelic horde, the taste of manna from heaven. I suck it in and it fills me like a river. I look up and then she's gone again. Of course. I try to sing a song, a tune in my head but I don't even know the name. The ocean bumble nearby, filling the space she'd taken. I read the label on the water bottle absently.

  Fresh Spring Water Direct from the Alps!

  It sounds delicious, so cool and clean. I close my eyes for a time, and when I come back she's come back too. That's good.

  "This is going to hurt," she says. There's some kind of low trolley beside her, a long shiny metal thing with a cream-cake coating of white sheets atop it, low to the ground, grumbling on wheels.

  A stretcher? I look past it and see the blurry white flank of an ambulance, with a striking red cross on the side. What? Something of logic creeps in past the dying daze in my mind, and I look again at Lara.

>   "Lara?" I whisper.

  She nods grimly, then does something to my legs which just about kills me, and just as I realize that Lara is really here, Lara has come out of nothing and is really, actually here, a black wave of pain reaches up like a dark ocean and gobbles me down.

  Getting him on the stretcher was the first of the hardest things she'd ever done. He was so damn heavy, even lifting his torso half on to the edge exhausted her. Getting his hips on nearly busted out her back. She tipped his legs as gently as she could after, though she was afraid of touching them.

  He cried out then went unconscious. That was a blessing, but not if he died. Already fresh trickles of blood were seeping from the deep and crusted wounds in the backs of his legs. They looked like spray from a shotgun blast; similar to patterns she'd etched into zombies to date.

  "Hang in there, Amo," she said, then belted him in and lifted the stretcher to waist-height. The spring inside aided her, and she rumbled him over to the waiting ambulance in seconds.

  She'd found it after fifteen minutes of mad driving in circles, hunting beyond the Strip for a hospital. The first ambulance she tried wouldn't even start, but the second did. The doors opened and pulling out the stretcher was easy, as the legs kicked down to the ground.

  Now she pushed the feet end of the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, onto the sliding rails, and it accepted them. The front legs bent back flush, and Amo slid inward like a smoothly oiled drawer.

  She followed him in, cursing, crouching in the tight space. She'd done basic first aid for Sir Clowdesley, but that hadn't covered shotgun blasts. First she had to see what she was dealing with.

  She raided the many little shelves in the ambulance's back, coming up with rolls of bandaging, surgical tape and a pair of needle-nose scissors. With great care she slit his bloody and tattered jeans down both sides, then peeled them away. Coming free from the blood scabs, they tore and started fresh flows.

  She could wash them later. She tossed the ruined pants out of the back and started wrapping the bleeding crevices, softly at first then tighter as dark red continued to show through. She worked on the left leg then the right, lifting them and slipping the bandage roll underneath, taping it, doing it again until his lower half looked a mummy, stained with blotches of red.

  She applied pressure. For a moment he woke and barked out something, then passed out again.

  "What now?" she muttered, looking at her handiwork.

  She tore through the cupboards again. There was a mini-fridge with bags of dark red blood in, but those had to have gone off now, and she had no idea what his blood type was. She kept looking until in one cupboard she found a rack of yellow-ish clear bags, complete with long tubes. Drip bags?

  She grabbed one and pulled it near. It was written with all kinds of chemicals, but it had to be right, didn't it? They wouldn't keep weird, extremely specific stuff in ambulances would they? She checked it against the other bags there, three in total. They were all the same.

  It had to be the good stuff. She hung one from the hook on a swing-out hanger, then started hunting for a needle. She'd never injected a single person before. Of course she'd seen it on TV, and had her own blood taken at health checks. It looked simple enough. She rustled through more drawers until she came up with a needle that looked like a fit.

  She attached it to the drip end, piercing the inner sack. Fluid began to drip out. She caught some and licked it, yeah, it tasted salty and sweet, probably that was all right? She twisted the little plastic tappet to halt the flow then took hold of his right forearm. It was splashed with road-dust and blood. With an alcohol-swab she wiped it clean, then wiped her hands too, and the needle.

  She searched for something to bring up his veins, and settled on his belt. It slid free from his legless jeans and she wrapped it tightly around his bicep, patted the underside of his forearm, and waited. Veins popped up. Taking her heart in her mouth, she fed the needle into his skin. It seemed good, so she opened the tappet, then a bulge started to form.

  Nope. She pulled it out and picked a different spot, trying again. Again it bulged. Third time, near the crook of his elbow, she got it. No bulge formed. The drip fed down. He was getting fluids and basic nutrition.

  She taped the line in place, belted him again into position, then climbed out, closed the back doors, and got into the driving seat.

  Where the hell was the hospital again?

  She stood over him, lying on the stretcher by the window of a clean and white first floor hospital room. Getting him out of the ambulance and into a room had been horrible with blood and stress. One thing she was grateful for was he’d remained unconscious throughout. Flipping him onto his belly had been easy though. Keeping the drip going, setting up a fan and a light with a generator in the corner, all that was easy.

  Far harder was contemplating his legs. She just didn’t know. Was it better to leave him as he was, or dig the shrapnel bits out and try to sew him up, or sew him up with them inside, or what? He’d lost so much blood, could he stand to lose more?

  She stood by and watched two more drip bags go into him, dithering. She raided supply rooms for the tools she thought she might need: a gallon of swabbing alcohol and a fat pipette to drop it into place, antibacterial soap to scrub up with, surgical gloves, scalpels, towels, bandaging, surgical thread and curved needles, clean blue scrubs and a face mask, a helmet with a large magnifying visor, a surgical light hung over the bed, pounds of cotton wool-type blotting stuff, gauze, a shiny kidney bowl for slugs she extracted, a range of tweezer-like utensils for extracting, powerful and pungent disinfectant in serious brown jars, bottles of antibiotics in pill and liquid form, and a dozen more drip bags with tubes and needles to match.

  She laid them all out on silver trays on clean white strips of gauze and tried to decide.

  "What do you think?" she’d asked the few of the ocean gathered nearby, like an audience. They looked like doctors. They held to her elbows. She didn’t have time to be afraid that they might eat her, like they’d plainly eaten the body on the Strip.

  Using portable machines she took his pulse and his blood pressure. They both seemed low, but then she took her own and saw they were low too. She strung up a third drip bag, injected a syringe full of liquid antibiotics into it, and watched it flow into him.

  It began to grow dark outside, but the desert heat was unremitting. He showed no signs of waking up. At last she made the decision, and rolled up her sleeves, drew her mask into place, and pulled the makeshift covers away from his legs.

  They were a torn and meaty mess. There were scour marks where buckshot had grazed through the sides, long furrows where they’d burrowed in, and dark red wounds where they’d gone deep. They looked like a muddy battlefield, crusted with trenches and bomb-divots sprinkled with fragments of denim. She didn’t know where to begin.

  Sweat dripped down her nose and caught in the mask. It was hot under the lights and the fan did little to relieve the dry heat. She stripped off her shirt and bent to work, wearing just a sports bra and her scrubs.

  She began with something easy, cleansing a shallow furrow around his right ankle. If she did it piece-meal, allowing the existing sealed scabs to hold, then perhaps he’d keep most of his blood in him. She began to think of his body as a precious bag, one she had to keep intact so the liquid inside wouldn’t leak.

  Cleansing the interior of the shallow line, like a seed-line plowed into a field, turned her stomach. There didn’t seem to be enough skin left to seal it over again. Scraping away the crust of blood gently with alcohol and a cloth, she saw the raw pink and red of inflamed skin and muscle beneath. Was it infected? She couldn’t tell. Fresh blood began to seep up like water bubbling through porous cloth. She splashed alcohol and disinfectant liberally, which mixed with the blood and ran pink down the sides of his leg, darkening the white stretcher sheets.

  There didn’t seem to be any bits of shrapnel in this gouge. She swallowed back her gorge and took up one of the threa
ded needles. It couldn’t have been further from the needlework she’d done as a kid, but surely the principle was the same. Grabbing the edge of the skin was hard, and piercing it with the needle was tougher than she expected.

  She pushed it through with a little pop. The thread ran through his skin like a shoelace through an eyelet, stopping at the crude knot. She scooped into the other edge of the wound, blotting furiously now with gauze to clear her view, and pulled the thread taut. The wound zippered closed, but in doing so cracked the scabs on other wounds on his leg, which began to leak blood through their caked platelets.

  "Shit," she cursed. She hadn't though of that.

  So it became an awful, bloody race. She needled the rest of that gouge in one long thread, then tightened it up like a corset before tying it off. Half a dozen other wounds, each deeper and more severe, were bleeding now too. She leaned back and saw that his face was white.

  "What the hell," she muttered. It was too hard. She was going to spend all night on this, and lose him still. But what else could she do? She already felt exhausted from driving through the night, emotionally drained, but it had to be done.

  "Stop pussyfooting around," she whispered to herself. She bent back to his leg, and dived into one of the biggest, darkest wounds, trying a new theory. If she could seal those up first, then perhaps there’d be less blood leaking out when she pulled the smaller ones tight.

  It was deep a hole dug squarely into his calf. There was only a shallow crust of blood over the top, and when she broke through it began to well up profusely. She felt sick. She dug into the hole with one of her pliers. She rooted around, grateful the only sound was his smooth breathing, until she hit something hard. Bone or metal? No way to know. She dug deeper until she got a grip then pulled. It shifted, but caught on something. To pull harder would do more damage, potentially tearing ligament or a muscle.

  She pulled out and went at it on a different angle. She clamped it again, and this time it came free with a sucking breath. She held it up, feeling dizzy. It was a bead of metal as big as a nail head. She dropped it with a clank into the kidney bowl, had another root in the well to check it was alone, then sewed up the hole. It took only a few stitches to pout it closed, sealing off the blood flow.