The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  Now Sovoy's face went red. His eyes welled with frustrated tears. There was satisfaction in that. Perhaps once they'd been friends, and now they were enemies, and that was good too, because at least it was better than dismissive silence.

  "Get out," Sovoy said coldly. "I never want to see you again."

  Joran nodded gamely. "You don't want to shout at me? Tell me how inhuman I am? How I'm going to pay?"

  "Just leave."

  He left.

  It was good.

  The day after that, Piers Sandbrooke was gone. It was a strange kind of miracle. The nightmares were finally over.

  * * *

  A year with only the ghost of Olan Harrison for company had certainly made James While crazy. That was something to reflect on. Sometimes he had dreams that were like Disney movies, but the villain always won. The Little Mermaid lost her voice and became a miserable weed in the Sea Witch's cavern. Beauty starved in her cage in the Beast's tower, while his heart hardened until the last rose petal fell.

  Sad, sad failure.

  Because he couldn't find them.

  Monitoring the coma-survivors hadn't led to anything. He'd scanned the world a dozen times via satellite, stolen every drop of computing power there was to track suspect global movements, raked through the financial data of every company and government on Earth, built entire new networks of optic fiber in case whoever did this had corrupted Olan's, and found nothing.

  Rachel Heron was out there somewhere laughing at him, he knew it. Standing behind a veil of information and watching his plane circle the world, getting nowhere, throwing out his feeble fresh tendrils of wiring and surveillance, like a child helpless in the dark.

  The old plates still spun around him, but now keeping the nations of the world in the dark about what was coming felt like a horrible echo; him doing to them exactly what was being done to him. It was so easy; that was the most humiliating thing. What they were doing to him was simple. The SEAL had built the maze of the worlds telecom networks, and no matter how he tried to see beyond its walls, he was still a rat running within it.

  He hadn't gotten off his plane for months. It only landed once a week, just long enough to check the engine, fuel up, take on fresh supplies and a new crew, though he didn't think there'd be another changeover now. The line was ready to burst. When it did he and his crew would be triggered by the coming blast, and down they'd fall with the world. A fiery death was better than whatever fate awaited the seven billion at the T4's mercy.

  Yet Joran Helkegarde was making progress.

  He'd stood up his shields across all twelve Arks, with one for Bordeaux too. They all functioned just as he'd planned, the coverage neat and complete. He'd even found a cure of sorts, good for a short time at least, and had tried to persuade James himself to take it, but there had been no point. They'd argued back and forth, but he didn't want his skin to peel off.

  Lyell's Syndrome, Joran called it.

  "It's manageable," he'd insisted. "With the right conditions and treatment, we can live with it for years. We can keep this fight going."

  James While didn't care about the fight. He'd seen the signals down below ramping up. The artist in New York, the boxer in London. It was days away.

  "Bring your plane down," Joran Helkegarde had told him, in their last communication. "Or I will bring it down for you."

  It was strange, to be spoken to that way. Once he'd run the SEAL and Joran had been the lost man, choppered out of Alpha Array. But Helkegarde didn't have any clue about what they were really up against. The enemy were everywhere, and nowhere. They couldn't be stopped.

  He'd told Joran no, and gone back to watching the flood rising below.

  Then his jet bucked.

  The dive knocked him off his feet and sent him rolling against the wall. The holographic ghost of Olan Harrison watched him silently.

  "Sir, we're under incoming fire," came the pilot's voice on the intercom, "three F15s on our tail, another salvo incoming, brace for maneuvers."

  The jet peeled into a hard bank that sent James While rolling against the other wall, knocking the wind out of his lungs.

  "They're steering us, Sir," came the pilot's voice. "Not aiming to hit, but they easily could. We're not equipped to fight back. Sir-" his voice cut out for a moment. "They're sending a message. He says, 'Take your medicine.'"

  James While laughed. Joran?

  "Ignore them," While replied, picking himself up. "They won't shoot us down."

  The pilot didn't reply for a long moment, as the plane leveled. This one has been flying him for only two weeks. They'd barely even met.

  "That's a negative, Sir," the pilot said. "I'm taking us down. They've sent coordinates for an airstrip. Strap in."

  So the jet began its descent.

  James While took the only seat in the cabin, with Olan Harrison watching. That was always a weakness in any plan; human fragility. His crew didn't want to die.

  "Well played, Joran," he said softly.

  * * *

  They met in a room, on an airstrip somewhere in the middle of Africa. Joran Helkegarde and James While. The irony of their role reversal was not lost on either of them. Joran seemed a little embarrassed by it, standing awkwardly by a table in the middle of a plain white room, atop which sat a small metallic case.

  That was it.

  Nobody else.

  "Bordeaux says we're reaching fever pitch," Joran said. His words in the silence were a declaration, really. A statement of allegiance in a battle James While had largely cut himself out of.

  "It doesn't matter," said While. "However many you save, they'll have a plan for it. They know more than us."

  Joran just stared. He kept staring. There was disappointment there, certainly. He was hard now. Before he'd been all soft ragged edges, hungry for approval and respect, to be taken seriously as a great, visionary scientist. Now he was a fighter. He'd been carved in the fire and found true. James While couldn't say the same for himself. If anything the opposite had happened. The coming apocalypse had filled him with self-doubt.

  "You turned me around," Joran said, into a long, empty silence. "You threatened my eye, my arm, but that wasn't what made the change. Perhaps the threat to my reputation helped get me moving, but it didn't play the larger role. Do you know what really made me sit up and work?"

  James While didn't care. It didn't matter. "Self-preservation?"

  Joran smiled. "Yes, that took me quite far. Then I got past that and saw the reality underneath; my life doesn't matter."

  He went quiet. James didn't want to fill the silence, but Joran's gaze dug into him like a drill, demanding it.

  "You wanted to win."

  Joran shook his head. "Not that either. Winning's too far off. You have to remember that we came into this game already years behind. The things these people have done could never be undone in a year. Maybe not even in ten. No win condition was possible for us here."

  James While snorted, because that was bullshit. He'd always won. Every test, he'd passed. Every pattern, he'd found. He'd always believed he was up to any challenge, so there was no way not to see this as his failure.

  "You don’t believe me," Joran said, reading it in his face. "I understand. I’d rather not have to give you a pep talk, it's humiliating for us both, but here we both are." He spread his arms. "If you give up, it won’t matter if I find a real cure. They’ll block it."

  They sat quietly for a time. Both of them knew this was true.

  "So what do you want?" James While asked. "If you're not trying to win?"

  "I am trying to win," Joran said, and smiled. "Just not yet."

  James While found that annoying. "You'll have to explain that a little more."

  "I started seeing things differently after my Array blew. A bigger scope, perhaps. Victory in one year was impossible, so I started looking at two years, ten, even beyond my lifetime. I imagined our struggle as a kind of generational goal, a movement. Call it a secret society, if you like,
because that way we get to be knights." He grinned. "Something like the shadow SEAL Olan Harrison built for himself. A conspiracy."

  James While frowned. "I've seen the readouts. We have days left, only, then the Arks are underground for ten years. What generation is coming after us?"

  Joran didn't say anything. Instead he tapped the case on the table. James could guess what was in it; the cure. Joran had suggested it might buy them ten years; a potent combination of drugs and genetic therapies, extremely expensive, each dose worth something like a billion dollars.

  "Who's the next generation?" While asked again. "Who carries the torch on after we die?"

  Joran shrugged. "I can't predict that. Someone from the bunkers, perhaps. Maybe one of the coma survivors out there."

  "We're killing the coma-survivors off. You wrote that part of the plan yourself."

  "Maybe," said Joran. "But we don't know what will happen. Perhaps this Amo in New York will turn out to be a great leader. Maybe Drake will be a genius who sees things on the line that I can't. It could be anyone. We need to be ready for that possibility, we need to prepare the tools for them to carry our fight across the finish line. That's our goal now. Not so we're going to win, but so the next person to come along might."

  While watched him.

  He hadn't thought about that. It was a timescale and a worldview he hadn't considered. It required a kind of blind faith that was the opposite of all the work he'd done as COO. Still, he turned the concept in his head. Not to win, but to ready the ground.

  It was alluring. For years he'd run the SEAL and considered himself just one part of a bigger idea, an ideal; to improve people's lives. He'd known that he wouldn't achieve perfection within his lifetime. Perhaps this was the same, a different kind of legacy.

  That moved the end zone. It said that this wasn't the end, but the beginning.

  He put his hand on the case. Nothing more needed to be said.

  "Give it to me," he said. "Cure me."

  Joran pulled out a series of syringes. One by one, he gave James While the injections he required.

  Three days later the apocalypse finally came.

  15. BEECHCRAFT

  The Beechcraft King Air 350i purred through the air above the snowy mountains of Romania, circling the herd of twelve lepers far below.

  They were too far ahead.

  In the eight days that had passed since Anna and Helen Tailor had assumed control over the Istanbul bunker, the lepers had traveled an incredible eight hundred miles. Three times further than expected, halfway to the Brezno bunker already.

  They'd thought they had more time.

  In those eight days of control, they'd done a great deal. Survivors were put into teams and set to the various necessary jobs: shifting and burning the corpse piles, getting power back up to parts of the bunker, clearing Command of smoke, shifting the injured down into proper wards with air conditioning and running water and supplies, training new nursing squads to tend to those injured mentally by what Amo had done.

  All that was done, but the challenges that remained were overwhelming. The shield was irretrievably fried. Comms with other bunkers either were non-functional or were being ignored, just like comms with New LA. And more people were getting sick every day.

  "It's because of the line," Lucas had explained, when the first of them came in three days after the blast, complaining of headaches, dizziness and exhaustion.

  "But the line's gone," Anna had said. "The leper in Istanbul blew it away."

  Lucas was exhausted too. They all were. They all had headaches and dizziness to some degree. He had barely slept since the handover, wracked with the pressure to help Jake and the other Lyell's sufferers, to come up with a cure for the bunker survivors using readings from the baby in Anna's belly, figure out a way to halt the advance of the lepers on Brezno, and deal with this crater on the line.

  His face was blotchy and his words slurred. He shook his head.

  "That's the problem. We need the line. It's like oxygen."

  Anna frowned.

  "You know this," he went on. "We've seen it. The line's fine for us, because we're adapted to it. Most people it turns into zombies. But even a bad signal on the line can impact us. The demons, the lepers. Whatever it is that you've been doing with your 'thought bullets'." He waved a hand. Few of them were comfortable talking about Anna's new powers. "It's a medium, like the air. People need oxygen in the air to breathe. This emptiness in the line, it's like low oxygen because there's no air. They don't get infected, but they also can't breathe properly."

  Anna grimaced.

  "How long?"

  He gulped down a breath. "Twenty-three already sick, three dead, and not from anything Amo did. They were fine after his attack. Their symptoms started after, and they match. It's the lack of the line. It's killing them as surely as asphyxiation. I can only guess at the timescale, but assuming normal disease vectors, maybe two months before they're all in comas."

  "Shit."

  He nodded.

  "If the bunkers don't bomb us first."

  "Or the lepers don't come back," he added.

  He looked at her. He was angry as well as weary. Angry at her. Angry at the universe. Angry at what had been done to Jake. Anna was too.

  "Sleep," she said. "That's an order. You're no good to anyone like this."

  He snorted. "When did you last sleep?"

  She hadn't. Not really. They'd set up an office for her in Hangar 7, with Helen and Peters, and she'd even spent some time organizing papers and thinking about instituting a filing system, but she'd fallen asleep at her desk, only to wake hours later with a blanket across her shoulders, and Peters looking down at her warmly.

  She'd been angry then too.

  "You needed it," he said. "Your baby needs it."

  "The baby's already dead," she'd answered, then strode out without saying any more. She didn't sit at the desk again.

  "Sleep or you'll make a mistake," she told Lucas. "And we can't afford that."

  "If I sleep I'll never make a cure. There isn't time."

  The trouble was, he was right. There wasn't time. People fell sick too fast. They started putting the worst of them into sedative comas, using up the bunker's supplies just to reduce the time required to care for them. Jake was one of the first to go under, along with the other advanced Lyell's sufferers.

  Anna had spoke to him briefly, before he went under. He couldn't talk much anyway, for the pain and the pain meds already warring in his system. Wrapped up in white, he barely looked like a person.

  She held her hand near his, unable to even touch him, and wept for them both, and promised him things would get better soon. He'd wept a little too, and the tears came out tinged pink.

  They put him down. His pain ended and he slept.

  Anna turned her attention to the lepers. The technology they'd need to stop them didn't exist yet.

  "I'm working on it," was all Lucas could say. He had numerous teams working on all aspects of the line at the same time in the bunker's labs; a crazy flurry of activity. "They had containment cells here, but those were loops split off the main shield, and the main shield is down. I don't know how to make another."

  There weren't any good answers. "I'm expecting the lepers to hit Brezno in two months," Anna said. "That's how fast the Ocean went. But the lepers may go faster. If I don't stop them before they hit, they'll be an unstoppable flood by the time they come back. Thousands of them."

  Lucas sighed. He knew it. "There are too many unknowns, Anna. Too much to do. I can't give you a date. I'm doing everything I can."

  So was she. So were they all.

  She went looking, and found the Beechcraft King Air in Hangar 7 on the south side of the airport. It was a large turboprop with four engines, boasting a cruise range of over three thousand kilometers. It could take them all the way to Brezno, and she had a distant, hopeful plan for that. Perhaps, if she could shift all the bodies at Brezno into the bunker, and seal it off co
mpletely, then the lepers might not be able to convert them. And even if the signal could reach down through the unshielded earth and convert them, at least they would be trapped inside the bunker, and perhaps they couldn't get out.

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

  She ran scenarios through her mind while she labored on the Beechcraft with a team of expert engineers, Peters at her side. To try it, they'd just have to go. They'd have to see. In snatched hours of sleep she dreamed of three thousand people choking in a vacuum of the line. They choked and choked, and kept choking.

  "All right," Peters said, when she woke in the dark or light of the Hangar, the clanking sounds of engine checks in the background. "All right, Anna."

  She'd get back to work.

  At times they talked about the baby, or the Alps, or her powers. She'd tried to teach him, tried to teach the others too, but it seemed nobody else could do what she could. When they pushed, when they reached down to twist, Anna felt something fizzle in them, but the spark didn't light. They couldn't send out a cold demon fog, or shoot thought bullets, and it annoyed no one more than Peters.

  He worked on replacement panels for the rusted wings, filtered and purified the fuel, and stewed on it. He wanted to be useful, she could see that. He didn't want to be helpless again.

  "Maybe it was Amo," she tried. "Whatever Amo did to me. It changed me, and now I can do this. Maybe if you keep practicing-"

  He only grunted, as she trailed off. She'd seen him practicing, achieving nothing more than the fizzle. Maybe it just wasn't there. Still, he tried.

  Days passed by, each one another length of fuse burned down. The Beechcraft reached readiness.

  "We are seeking information only," Peters explained to Helen. "We fly above the lepers, and measure their pace. We will then know how many people to take to Brezno, to shift the bodies."

  Helen OK-ed the mission. It was only supposed to take a round-trip of three to four hours. If the lepers were where they expected them, they would barely be past the border of Turkey.

  Only a few people from the bunker came out to see them off, those who weren't buried in their own work, but they didn't cheer or show much enthusiasm. The absence of the line was having a dimming effect on them all, even if the headaches and confusion hadn't yet begun.