The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

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The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 26

by Michael John Grist


  Of her.

  In their eyes she was the devil; flung from the depths of the fire, blazing but somehow alive, naked and burnt black and utterly unforgiving. She couldn't stand; every fiber of her body wanted to lie down, to pant, to vomit, to shudder and weep, but she forced herself onto her knees. Swaying, she searched their blurred faces for the only one that matter.

  Witzgenstein.

  Her eyes marked her out. Staring, white, so perfect, like alarm bells in the night. She couldn't believe what was before her, didn't understand it and felt the same fear as the rest, too stunned to re-build the bridle.

  Lara drew on that fear, sucking it down just as Witzgenstein had sucked the strength out of her, and used it as a crutch to stand. The burnt gown slipped away, leaving her raw and naked before them. The crowd broke at once, crying out in fear. Some staggered back, falling over each other in their panic, while others turned and fled. She was an apparition. She was a demon.

  She reached out on the line and stopped them in their tracks. There could be no escape from this. This had to happen now, and they would get what they wanted.

  At last Witzgenstein reached out with the bridle, seeking to snap it back into place over her people, but Lara was already there. The fingers of her mind wove a net out of pain, fear and horror, and laid it over them all. The stitching was tight and seamless, growing more perfect with every passing second. Witzgenstein lashed out with hammer blows but the net absorbed them, flexing easily and bending back into shape.

  Witzgenstein's eyes flashed in disbelief and she redoubled her assault, but Lara just redoubled her weaving of the net, sewing the bridle directly into it, so her strength pulled not only from the crowd but from Witzgenstein herself.

  Cynthia gave everything she had to it. Frances and Alan and George drove it onward. So Lara's legs became firm beneath her, her gaze cleared and the pain numbed, and she turned with the fire at her back, pointing at each person as they were forced into the net.

  Witzgenstein screamed out her frustration, thrashing against the links growing round her in the net, but Lara just used those screams to wrap her up tighter, spinning silk like a spider around a fly, until the crowd was silent, and the line was still, and the only noise came from the roaring fire.

  Lara stood alone, surveying these people. The words came without thinking.

  On your knees.

  They knelt. Only Witzgenstein remained standing, her face torn with rage and frustration. With one touch on the line, Lara smoothed that expression out. Then she reached into Witzgenstein's mind, into her body, and started her walking forward.

  A slow, stately pace.

  Janine screamed defiance inside her own head, but Lara didn't let a speck of it show. Those who tried to turn their faces away, she forced to look. The men, the women, the children.

  Please, have mercy.

  Witzgenstein called inside, but Lara stitched those words into the net and made them part of her strength.

  The first step into the fire was a raw pain that almost dropped Lara where she stood, but she held on. Witzgenstein howled inside, but outwardly was as silent as a saint. Let this be part of the story, a cornerstone for them all.

  A second step.

  She climbed, and Lara was with her every step.

  How?

  Witzgenstein howled silently, driving that one thought through the agony as the fires burned her alive.

  How, Lara, how?

  She reached the top and stood like a candle, lighting their way forward. Lara felt every second of it, in the thick of the raging flames as Witzgenstein's perfect skin crisped and her beautiful blonde hair blazed, consumed by the pain. When she could take it no more, she pulled away, and Witzgenstein collapsed.

  Lara did not.

  She stood in the midst of her people, naked, unashamed, looking round at their horrified faces. Tears lay on their cheeks. This was not what they'd wanted. This was not the release they'd hoped for.

  She circled the pyre, taking long strides and looking into their eyes, hammering this lesson in. She could light the fire too. She could stand above and wield the lash. She could take their fear as well as their love and use it as a bridle to whip them forever.

  She stopped before Frances.

  The woman was shuddering. She knelt in a muddy patch of her own piss. Lara lifted her chin, forcing their eyes to meet. The question came naturally, as she thought back on the purple flash on the line that had saved her life.

  "Where is Crow?"

  Frances stammered. She couldn't get the words out, so Lara helped her, reaching in and soothing the fear for a moment.

  "G-Gone," Frances answered, babbling despite Lara's calming touch, too deep in her terror. "Already g-gone."

  Lara let her chin drop, feeling something change. She reached out on the line, looking for Crow, but he wasn't there, or only the tiniest spark could be found, as if he was very far away.

  But he wasn't very far away. Lara saw it now, and felt it. She turned back to the fire. The heat was blistering. The stake at the top was barely visible through the maelstrom. Witzgenstein was gone, melted down into the wood.

  And Crow was there with her.

  "You burned him," she said softly.

  Frances choked on her own tongue. The truth was right there on the top of her mind, but she couldn't get it out.

  They'd put him in the middle of the pyre. Two for one, gagged and bound, reducing the minority load.

  They'd lynched him.

  She turned back to Frances. Her face was livid and blotchy with fear. She tried to beg.

  "Put your face in the mud," Lara said. And Frances did.

  "Deeper," Lara said, and so Frances did. So deep that she couldn't breathe.

  Lara waited. Frances' legs twitched, then went still. It didn't take long.

  After that, Lara gazed into the flames for a long time. Perhaps she'd heard him, now, she thought. As she was screaming, he'd been screaming too. Below her, already halfway there. In the race to die, he'd won, and then-

  She had no answer for what came next.

  He'd broken the bridle. The purple flash of him had come like a lightning strike, hurling her out. She couldn't argue with the truth. Crow was dead. Crow had saved her. Now Crow was dead.

  She gazed into the pyre until it stung her eyes and the heat scalded her face, until she saw Witzgenstein's bright white eyes in the flames, and heard again Witzgenstein's dying plea in the crackle and roar of the fire.

  How, Lara? How?

  18. CLICK

  I click and click and click until my eyes go dry and my head twinges and there's a deep, throbbing crick in my spine, then I click some more.

  James While lays out everything.

  I finally can see the shape of the SEAL, this many-headed hydra that for so long has controlled my life. I understand what the Multicameral Array was for, and the Logchain, and even the Apotheo Net, but I come away from it all with the one most important question remaining, the same question James While searched for in vain.

  Who did this?

  I leaf through pictures of Olan Harrison's spread-eagled corpse in his Alps research lab, the moment the trail was lost, and try to pick it up again, but the trail is cold. The images are gory, hate-filled, worse than anything I've seen before. I've seen death before, but not like this. Salle Coram died swiftly in a spray of blood. Dr. Ozark was eaten by a demon. I shot Masako and left her crawling over the ice for the demons to reach. In Julio's pit they suffered horrors, but none so abhorrent.

  Who hated Olan Harrison this much?

  I click on.

  James While's filing system is beautifully clear, once I've started following along. It displays a bright and highly structured mind, but clarity doesn't help with the unknown. It is a flashlight shone into an impenetrable darkness. In the master timeline of his investigation, with many of the more important documents in the whole file hyperlinked in, I track his lack of progress after the Alps, up to the apocalypse and beyond.
>
  There is no sign of Olan's killers again, the shadow SEAL, not anywhere in the records, not anywhere in the world.

  Days and nights go by as I search. I hunt down threads that lead to nothing. James While has already done it all. I'm left with nothing, again and again.

  I lean back and my spine grates loudly. It's light outside today, maybe three days since I started and cold with the fire died down, but I've long forgotten about the dead chill in my toes and fingers. Now's the time to stand up and stamp some life into my extremities.

  I pace like James While. There are videos of him in the Oval Office, in the UN, with various world leaders where he went under cover in the last days, to ask and to command. The President shook his hand. The EU President shook his hand. James While was a broad-shouldered but wiry man with a hidden energy beneath the surface, like a quietly burning fuse. Just watching him I can feel the spark inching ever closer to explosion.

  Where now, I want to ask him? Where do I go now?

  I pace and think of him in the videos, a young man in his prime, with short dark hair like me. He is taller but thinner, perhaps better looking, and no doubt he is smarter, though his mannerisms and the way he walks make it clear he is on the Autistic spectrum. I know little about that, but in the way he staggers his pacing, so he always lands carefully on his right foot at this point in a circuit, his left foot at this point, or the way he turns at a precise ninety degrees at corners, I see the unusual workings of his mind.

  It is plain enough that he is a genius.

  I pace and let my mind spin, randomly revisiting standout pieces of While's records. My name is mentioned many times, as are my people. His Bordeaux facility tracked me through the Event, even in the moment that my readings spiked in a restaurant in New York with Lara, and the hours after when the final stage of their apocalypse came about.

  I think about him out there in the world, trying to bring order and justice while I was out there alone; both of us building, surviving, trying to make something for the future. But we were building different things. As I pace, I see that while I was building for a new world, for coming generations I would never even know, he was building for just one person, one successor, to come and continue his work.

  For me.

  His cairns mirror my own. His path through our world's twisted history touches on mine constantly. He watched me, it seems. It feels like every step of the way he was preparing for me, waiting for me, and now he's out there somewhere, just waiting for me to put the final piece into the puzzle.

  And there is something there. I feel something fluttering in the back of my mind, but I can't put words to it. It's a feeling only, slipping in and out of my sight like a butterfly I dare not trap, for fear of forever smudging its wings. I have to wait for it to come to me.

  In the meantime, I prepare to go.

  The trail is here. He has left it for me to find. Perhaps at the end, when I look into his eyes and know the man behind the mission, the butterfly will become clear. The missing piece will appear, and I'll know the real way forward. I'll know who it is I'm supposed to kill.

  I move faster once the intention is there, gathering what few things I need. I prepare a vehicle, and food, and fuel. The fuel is shit, thick and foul, but it will take me far enough to a place where I can collect another vehicle, then another, leapfrogging across Russia until I find this man who survived the apocalypse alongside me, like a distant unknown twin.

  Maybe then I'll know why billions had to die. I'll know why thousands had to die at my own hands. I'll finally know the truth, and I need to know. I need something to explain this pain, I need to make sense of it, or I'll never be myself again.

  I set out into the howling winds of a Siberian storm, but it is nothing. I don't feel the cold. With every mile I'm closer, so close I can taste it. Not redemption, or salvation, but revelation.

  My stolen truck's tires bite the ice and propel me into the blizzard.

  * * *

  I drive on roads invisible beneath the snow. I see signs for the city of Arkhangelsk, heavily corroded and bitten by frost, one of the few written in English. There are tiny settlements and towns in between; clusters of white buildings with red and blue fronts, golden onion domes on tiny provincial palaces, lakes of ice, brutalist concrete communist monuments, forests of wiry spruce and fir, ice in the sky and in the air and all around.

  I've done this kind of thing so many times before, I'm an expert at it. In the end it's just driving through people; the ruins they leave, the diggings they dug, the dwellings they raised up atop the earth.

  I drive and make mental notes so I don't need to think. The mayor lived there. The priest here. That's a church though it doesn't look like it. In this house there lived a woman having an affair. In that house was the man she was having the affair with. Here they had five children. There they were barren. This woman dreamed of international journalism. This man wanted to be a masked vigilante.

  More signs pass in Russian, more towns.

  Холмогоры

  Брин-Наволок

  Заболотье

  I cross a frozen river, then another. The bridge is out on the first, so I cross it on foot. The ice creaks. The second reminds me of Pittsburgh; it's hard to say what, the bend in the river, the two bridges at right angles crossing, the city on either side then the sudden open sweep that takes my breath away.

  I think of Lara, like a sucker punch in the gut.

  Back then we rode together, she by my side, only moments before the demon crushed her ribs. On this long, slow ride, I think of how much I miss her. Her touch, her look, the strength she brought me just by being there. I think of the John Harrison and our last day, before everything went to shit.

  It could have been so good.

  Tears roll down my cold cheeks as I drive at ten miles an hour through choppy refreezing slush. Sacramento was going to be the making of us. I would step down from a leadership position, ceding it to Anna or Keeshom or whoever wanted to stand in the election. Maybe I'd play the elder statesman for a time, and I might be sad, but I'd be glad it was behind me, that the eyes of these people were no longer on me.

  I remember that Keeshom is dead.

  It's a strange thing to remember. I hadn't ever thought of it, I never even saw it, but I know it's true. I do remember Feargal's sad corpse lying in the rubble, just inches away from the shark-eyed man, and I cry for them both. I led him into that. I did that to him, as surely as anything.

  The things I did to Feargal shame me, but they only make me remember other things, all the other things I did on the road to this point. At some point I have to stop my trundling vehicle, now a creaking old green fire engine, and vomit into the snow. It's bitter and it's more than I deserve.

  I don't remember, but I do. I know who I was, I knew what I was doing, though everything from these past few months feels like a blur. I remember standing over Arnst and holding my belt in my hand while reality went slick around me, lowering the boundaries and making it easy. I remember what I said to them, how I treated them, how I left them all dead in the end.

  I remember Drake.

  He's a fog in my head. I remember Cerulean in a realm full of boxes, trying to guide me through, but what else is there?

  I don't feel Cerulean in my dreams anymore. I don't remember his face. The things I've done can never be forgiven.

  Gap comes back to me, and Brezno. I left thousands of people shivering without their shield, trapped on the broken line. I killed them like insects. I ground them beneath my tires. In Istanbul I mowed them down while they tried to flee.

  I almost killed Anna.

  I can't see for tears. I drive on, because if I die like this it'll be fitting. I deserve it. The things I did, the cruelties I stretched to, make me sick to the depths of my soul.

  It hurts. For days it hurts. Drake haunts me as a memory, his giddy voice in my head, his brains on my hands. Feargal haunts me as a face in the snow, bloodied from the time
I punched him for nothing. I think of him kneeling before me in the rushes of my mad sketches, waiting to be told what to do.

  I humiliated him then, and in that humiliation I also debased myself, but the worst thing, creeping through this noxious self-indulgence, is the fear.

  What if I have to do it again?

  There are no good choices. I know now that I will. Wielding this power, this great black eye, I can crush on a whim whoever strikes at me. I could so easily fall back into that bleak, black place again, and who will dig me out again? Who will forgive me, give me absolution, make me whole?

  I don't deserve it. There can be no atonement, and insanity is no excuse. I am going back into the world with my eyes open, knowing what I've done and what I might do, and that is the most terrifying thing of all.

  I see Lara and my children out there in the snow. I see Anna and Jake and the rest. Shark-eyes was right.

  What wouldn't I do, for them?

  I stop thinking and I drive.

  Верхняя Тойма

  Красноборск

  Визиндор

  There are flickers on the line at times, coming from the south. It feels like Anna, like she has some of the same skill as me. I don't know what she's doing, but it grows stronger with time. One night I dream of Lara, standing at a window and looking out over a huddled crowd of people clustered around a huge heap of wood, waiting for the spark to light it up.

  The butterfly dances around me. James While's enormous weight of research seeps steadily into my brain, like a well-squeezed cheese in muslin cloth, and new ideas mingle with the old. There is something there still, but I can't name it. A tickle in the depths of my past, shadows painted on the pavement by rainfall, never lasting long enough for me to sketch them with chalk.

  There's something.

  Сейва

  Кудымкар

  Кунгур

  I look at myself in the dark, mirror-like glass of a little town's department store, and see a crazed stranger looking back; a man who belongs behind the dumpsters in Times Square, drooling for spare change. My left shoulder rides slightly higher than my right, after the break that Anna gave me. My hair is long and my beard thick and unkempt, scored with clinging lines of frozen snot, tears and vomit. My clothes are bulky and filthy with old blood, my boots are filled with water.

 

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