We stand there a time longer, sipping bottled beer and thinking our own thoughts while the burnt sienna sunset fades atop the ocean, when a noise comes from down the coastal road. It is unmistakably an engine, drawing near.
Lara turns to me with wide eyes. I smile.
We fire up the front generators that power up fairy lights all round the Chinese theater's façade. We watch the headlights meander up the coast, always growing closer. My heart hammers with hope.
One of my RVs from New York pulls up. A man gets out. He's pale, his hair is close-cropped, and he stands at the door looking up at us with a broad grin on his face.
I spread my arms. "Welcome!" I say.
There are tears in his eyes. "We didn't know if you'd be here," he says. He looks at us in turn. "Amo. Lara. Look at this."
The door to the side of the RV opens, and someone else gets out. It's a little girl, a redhead wearing a sparkly blue princess dress. She's followed by an elderly woman, who is assisted by a dark-haired young man and an Asian woman in camouflage gear. A floater washes past them and not a one of them draws a weapon or shows any sign of fear. I feel such pride.
Then someone else comes. The RV back doors open, they all go over to help, and my heart leaps in my chest.
They lift out a wheelchair. In it is my friend, grinning like a madman, crying like all of us.
Cerulean. Robert.
I run down and hug him.
"Good job, Amo," he says in my ear, thumping my back.
"You too," I answer, barely able to breathe.
He introduces us to the others, each of them a survivor gathered along the way, on the road or in my cairns. We all hug and shake hands, we tell them our names though of course they already know, and we all cry together and laugh together and grin like idiots together.
"Welcome," I say. "We've got movies. We've got popcorn and soda. Welcome home!"
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Thank you again for reading The Last!
Michael John Grist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I'd like to thank all my early reviewers and beta-readers, whose advice and suggestions have proved invaluable in fine-tuning this and my other books, in particular Bethany, Katy, Christina, and Lunara. Matt offered great advice and encouragement as ever, Ray made a number of very helpful suggestions about weaponry, and Elaine spotted an ample handful of missed Britishisms I wasn't aware of, like 'dressing gown' instead of 'bathrobe'. Rob dived in with some excellent saves, in particular the bit where Cerulean's avatar stopped being a parrot with a pirate on its shoulder and became a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder. Thank you all!
Also, as ever, thanks to my wife for her stalwart support of my writing career, as well as to my mom and dad, my brother Joe and sister Alice too, for all their encouragement and interest. Thank you all very much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael John Grist is a British writer and ruins photographer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years, and now lives in London, England.
He writes dark surreal science fiction and fantasy, and explores and photographs abandoned places around the world, such as ruined theme parks, military bases, underground bunkers, and ghost towns. These explores have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.
OTHER WORKS
Ruins Sonata (science fiction)
#1 Mr. Ruins
#2 King Ruin
#3 God of Ruin
Ignifer Cycle (fantasy)
#1 Ignifer's Rise
#2 Ignifer's War
Ignifer Tales - 7 short stories
The Last (zombie)
Short fiction
The Bells of Subsidence - 9 science fiction stories
Bone Diamond - 9 weird fiction stories
Non-fiction
Into The Ruins - Adventures in Abandoned Japan
EXTRAS
If you enjoyed The Last,
look out for battling vampires of the mind
in the sci-fi technothriller
Mr. Ruins.
An EXCERPT follows.
MR. RUINS
Book 1 of the Ruins Sonata
Give the devil his due.
Ritry Goligh is a former Arctic marine living in a tsunami-wrecked future. Scarred by the Arctic war, he leads a directionless life of alcohol, violence, and sex, until the psychopathic Mr. Ruins offers him a devil's bargain: unlimited power, but at a terrible price- the souls of everyone Ritry ever loved.
And Mr. Ruins won't take no for an answer.
MR. RUINS (EXCERPT)
The needle enters her eye socket smoothly, nestling beside her bright white eyeball and passing back into the brain. There I inject the engrams, a bespoke combination of off-the-shelf language packs and vocational skills, encapsulated in a silvery liquid.
The needle comes out and I lean back, giving her a moment to blink away the discomfort.
"How do you feel?" I ask.
"Shivery," she says. As her mouth opens I see the tattoo on her tongue, an abstract DZ pattern I recognize as the brand of Don Zachary. "It's cold, like brain freeze."
I smile. I study her. Her name is Mei-An, a sweet-looking meta-Asiat with black face-framing bangs and rigid determination in every move she makes. Soon her brain will be in my hands. She came in to my graysmithy building an hour ago asking for the inject, for what purpose I have no idea, though it's plain she's running from something. I didn't question her. I'm Ritry Goligh, a graysmith for the gray matter of the mind, and it isn't my job to ask questions.
A silvery tear beads from her eye and I dab it away with a surgical cloth.
"Let them settle for a few moments," I say, "then we'll dive."
She nods. "He may come looking for me, afterward. I want to be honest. You'll see it in me anyway."
I shrug. Of course I know. Don Zachary is the boss of proto-Calico, and by all accounts he's a bastard. "Just try to be calm."
I leave her, exiting the spartan, gray-walled dive room to stand in the polished steel corridor with my assistant Carrolla. He's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I think he must have had marine training, but he never fought in the skirmishes. Working here in the dog-end of the skulks is his skirmish.
He raises one eyebrow, and I know what he's thinking.
"She wants a dive," I say.
"I heard the Don crucified the last guy who crossed him," Carrolla says. "He nailed him to the fucking tsunami wall. Does that sound like fun to you, Rit?"
I chuckle. There are no shortage of legends about the Don. "Not really, but I'm not turning her away."
"Don fucking Zachary," he mutters under his breath.
We stand quietly for a moment, each in our thoughts. In Mei-An's brain the inject will be spreading, beginning to swamp her neurons. I speak. "I need you tight on me for this. It's a bigger inject than usual."
Carrolla nods sharply, like a marine. He's not though, I'm not anymore, the skirmishes have been over for ten long years but still we're both here, acting like it's a war. It's not a fucking war.
We go back into the dive room together. Mei-An is still sitting there, perched like a doll on the input tray of the Electro Magnetic Resonance machine; a blocky off-white oblong of hollow plastic and metal, retro-fitted and bolted to the floor. It's an ancient piece of kit the graysmith before me must have lifted off one of the commodium barges, tossed up in the last
big wave;
Her thin legs dangle down its scarred and discolored side like a child's, though she must be at least twenty-eight. I have no doubt she's seen some awful shit. You have to be strong to make it in the skulks, and Don Zachary is not known as a charitable man.
I sit on the stool and look into her artificially widened eyes. "You know this is dangerous," I say. "Permanent brain damage is possible, and it gets more likely with the size of the inject. I'm good, but there's always a risk. Are you sure?"
She nods. "I'm sure. I have to do this now." I can feel the fear underlying her calm demeanour.
"Lie down on your side," I tell her.
She does. I walk around the EMR, past Carrolla at the control panel, then climb onto the tray and lie down beside her so we're face to face.
"It'll be OK," I say.
The EMR begins to thump as Carrolla fires it up. Inside electromagnets are whirring, phasing with the transponders implanted deep in my cerebellum. I can feel the tide rising. The input tray jerks into motion, and together we slide into the machine's hollow middle. Electromagnetic waves wash over us, beginning the synchronization of our thought patterns. Dimly I start to sense the outline of her mind, a hazy sphere of heat barely glimpsed through murky waters, transposed atop her face. I focus closer, striving for a resonant bridge across which I'll be able to pass into the outer reaches of her mind, then-
"Shit!"
It's Carrolla. I hear his shout tinnily through the waves, followed by a red flash splashing across my field of view, like blood in the water. Fuck. Her mental immunity is kicking in already, the Lag, reaching out to take a bite. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her mind away just to get me and the inject out.
"Her neurons and starting to crisp!" Carrolla calls faintly. "Get out of there Rit."
I'm aleady too deep to pull out though, not with the inject still lying there like bloody chum to the Lag. I have to go deeper.
"All levels are up," Carrolla calls, barely audible over the thump of the EMR. "If you're not coming out then get it calmed!"
I gaze through the layers of thought into Mei-An's eyes, big dark staring spheres, and will her to calm down. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, and it never gets any easier, or safer, but I've always survived.
The Lag snaps up at me from within her head.
"Look at me Mei-An," I say as I tune my core transponders tighter, driving for stronger resonance. "Look at my eyes, Mei-An, that's it."
She tries to nod but now she's glitching on motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky. She's terrified. I kick a leg at Carrolla to increase the cooling Cerebro-Spinal Fluid flow bathing her brain, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull those neurons really will begin to cook.
"It's OK," I tell her softly. "Mei-An, I need you to relax, can you do that?"
She attempts another nod, and for an instant I see my face reflected in the liquid sheen of her eyes. This is Ritry Goligh, only thirty seven and already my face is forming up in lines like calving Arctic ice. Fuck.
"It's going to be OK," I say, then slide my transponders' wavelength all the way down to fully match with hers.
A rush of thought-data pummels me, hard bubbles rising through the water. These are the inputs and outputs of billions of her individual brain-cells and their action potential states. I swim through them, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode. If I had a better EMR I could fix her through that, but this is proto-Calico, a floating slum built of old wreckage and flotation barrels, and I don't.
So I dive.
A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Allatanc ocean in tsunami: chemical stress levels spiking, the neuron firing rate shooting up, even the inject area for speech flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.
"Damn it Rit she's slipping," I hear Carrolla faintly from above, the voice of a ghost.
I dive through the flood and deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by neurons like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away, beyond the confines of the machine and through the ocean's crust and into the realm where my mind truly meets hers.
The Molten Core.
Lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am an invader. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.
Nearby I can see the silvery inject being attacked by the Lag, in a powerful engrammic immune reaction. The Lag here is a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through the blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows. I am the only thing that can save a good chunk of sweet Mei-An's mind.
Everything is to play for now.
My sublavic ship coalesces around me, a submarine built for diving magma in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with six layers of heat-proof, ablative brick cladding. Within its belly the crew members fire into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln. I send them to their posts throughout the ship, manning the periscope at the conning tower, setting a course for the womb-like frequencies sounding out from Mei-An's Solid Core.
The Solid Core is the utmost center of the mind. I've never entered the Solid Core of another living soul; it would be madness. I've only ever dabbled around the edges. The risks inside are far too massive, where the Lag is infinitely stronger, and the pathways are an unquantifiably complex maze. I'm not even sure I could get in if I tried.
But I don't need to. I only need to get close.
The engine-screw churns the ship inward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava ahead, popping over the sublavic ship's prow, leaving behind frazzled hints of who this girl is and was. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum-piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don.
The Lag snaps up at me with ravenous meat-jaws from the magma, and I launch a few sacrificial memories as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the blue-tarp park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me- Arclo-berry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a worm, ever hungry.
My sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I sight the radiant outer edge of what I'm looking for through the sonar, embodied as liquid sound. It is waves pulsing through the magma with a steady
thump thump, thump thump
that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture: her mother's pulse.
The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in a baby's brain. Though all other sound is also heard dimly across the mother's belly wall, muted and simplified, it's the pulse that sounds the loudest for that forming seed in its budding sac.
thump thump
The pulse is goddess, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like it was soft clay, shaping it in its own image and instilling it with a unique engrammic immunity. It is the foundation all minds are built upon, locked away in the Solid Core at the heart of the mind, and I can use it, but I don't need to break into Mei-An's Solid Core to get it. I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg.
Tuning forks winch out of the sublavic ship's sides, punching through the brick cladding, to store this invaluable pattern. The forks melt in moments, but the pattern is captured. I turn the ship around and unleash the sound outward through the ocean of lava-thought, amplifying it massively. The Lag is soothed at once by this gentle lullaby memory of the womb. I drag the sound away from the Solid Core with me, causing Mei-An's mind to bathe itself with the right kind of Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, tinged with harmonics too complex to fake.
It works.
I feel her chemical stress levels calming through the flow of lava. Her brain-rate is settling down, so I pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my sublavic's bridge. More thoughts bubble up across the periscope; glimpses of her latter days in the company of the Don's son, an abusive shit who beats the will out of her, but calmer now, as the panic spike of her immune rejection stills beneath the smoothing pulse.
thump thump, thump thump
The Lag has been quieted, but it's still out there tracking me sleepily through the lava. The job is not over. If I don't do something, it will still eventually scrub the language engram-inject completely, so I head to zone where Carrolla first injected the Afri-Jarvanese engram, in the crevice between the tail end of the optic nerve and the auditory zone. There I massage the pulse around the engram's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells lining the language dump and pets the Lag on its head like a trusty old dog.
I metaphorically sigh with relief.
"Can I have my Arcloberry back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the Cerebro-Spinal Fluid. I remember the memory because I only gave the content not the frame, so I remember that it happened and that it's now missing, but not any detail or emotional connection. The Lag is mute on its refund policy.
"My walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."
It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?
The Last: A Zombie Novel Page 26
