The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  I strip.

  In the steaming cold I look at my pale, shivering body. At the wounds, the scars. I run my badly healed fingers over them, cataloging the ones I remember, whether they are wounds I can be proud of or ashamed of. A round divot on my left shoulder marks the beginning, when an indicator lever from an exploding car in New York knocked me down.

  There are so many others; the pale, hairless patch on the side of my head, where I blew a bullet through my own skull. The dense, interwoven lacerations on the backs of my thighs and calves, where Don shot me in Las Vegas. An injury taken in Chino Hills, handling one of the pneumatic plows. Flecks from forgotten, ricocheted explosions. A burn where I mis-cooked an egg. My lumpish shoulder. My broken fingers.

  My hand shakes, but I can't stop tracing this unforgiving landscape.

  There are new wounds I didn't know about, sustained perhaps in the chaos of Istanbul, in my fight with Anna; a weal down my back, a chip in the bone on my forearm. Across my chest and thighs I count the marks of Drake's torture: cuts, cigarette burns, little fractures, patches of skin missing. From the plunge into Alpha Array I have two bullet furrows in my thigh, never stitched.

  My body is a map of what I've done. On balance, I'm ashamed of more than I'm proud. It's a sad tally, but at least it isn't a lie. It's good to be honest. It's necessary.

  My chest is turning blue, and the shudders make it hard to stand. I go into the store, where I make a fire and scrub myself down with raw snow. I scour my wounds so hard some of them bleed. I apply what pressure I can to my shoulder, but it will require another break to correct, and I don't have the time or expertise. Maybe, if there's a future.

  I shave my beard. I cut my hair. I look at myself in the mirror, and see a different man. Not the same man as before. Not a man Lara would hold close, and kiss, but a stronger man than I've been of late.

  What else can I be? If I must do what I've done already, perhaps now I can do it better. Perhaps I can be like Joran Helkegarde, strong enough to give sympathy to the ones I have to kill. That would be a dream. I don't think I can kill any more with rage and cruelty in my heart; it will kill me.

  But I can still kill. Even the people who did this, I will kill them when I understand, and when I understand and they're dead, perhaps then I will be able to forgive. Maybe then, if I forgive them, there will be a path toward forgiveness for me.

  I make myself cry again, too full of self-pity.

  I drive, and some of the signs are in English now.

  Yekaterinburg

  Omsk

  Novosibirsk.

  At last I reach it, looming on the line like a mountain: Joran Helkegarde's Prime Array. The feel of his one thousand steers me in from a thousand miles away. I couldn't miss this if I drove deaf and blind. It is a blot on the line as big as Istanbul.

  The exterior stands out on a barren steppe, looking like a half-built sporting arena, with oval, massive metal support struts and a lot of glass. There are signs with enough English on them to show that this was its cover identity. Under construction, I gather. A new ice hockey stadium, judging by the faded picture. What an ice hockey stadium was doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, I don't suppose anyone cared to ask.

  I can't feel him inside, obscured by the churn of the thousand, but I know he's here. James While.

  I'm almost there.

  * * *

  I blow open an ice-glazed window with a small mining charge, picked up along the way. The blast echoes emptily inside, through the soup of signals fired off by the thousand. I can pick through them now, labeling type one, two, three, all the way to thirty-six. I know all about what they are, the tricks they can do.

  Here they're held by a primitive shield. It's weak but it's enough.

  I pass through with the black eye fitted to me like armor, framed to my body. What they did to me at Alpha Array they can't do anymore. I head toward the main office at the back, because that is where he lives. The best views, like Istanbul. I expect it will be completely empty but for him; no desks, no chairs, just a pacing man in a room, although I doubt he can pace any more.

  I've seen the effects of Lyell's. I've seen the pictures Joran kept of them both, that James While cross-filed. I know what to expect; a bloody worm of a man encased in moist white fabric, huddled into a specially-fitted motorized wheelchair, barely able to lift his head, barely able to move. I can look past all that, though, because it's his mind that I need, it's what he knows.

  I climb an elevator shaft. I walk on a gantry round the massive open arena with the thousand in the Prime Array striving below, just like Alpha but ten times the size. My people. They flow with the gravity well of my passage. I climb another shaft, and kick through a door, until the final corridor stretches ahead.

  My heart hammers, as answers lie ahead. I stamp down the gray corridor to the door, every step beating a path to the future, bringing the butterfly's wings thumping into synchrony with my pulse.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  Empty offices pass either side as I walk back in time, back to an era when the apocalypse could be forestalled and the power of the SEAL could solve world hunger, end war, and rewrite the carnal cruelty buried in the human genome. Shudders ripple up my back and make my knees weak beneath me.

  Thump

  Thump

  This moment has been coming for so long. This man at least can understand. This man knows what I've done, and why, because he's done far worse. He watched billions die and couldn't stop it, so if there's anyone who can look into my eyes with understanding, it is him.

  Thump

  I need it. My whole body yearns for it as I lay a hand on the handle. He surely knows I'm coming. This will change my world, I know it.

  I open the door, and see the man inside.

  At first I can't be sure of what I'm seeing.

  In his chair, in the middle of his empty office, he is white bandaging and blood and raw purple skin. I pick out his face, his gleaming white eyes, bright teeth, two dark holes for nostrils, and then I realize what is wrong.

  His ribs have been spread-eagled.

  It drops me to my knees.

  I'm looking into his chest cavity. It's hard to tell because everything about him is red, inside and out. His skinless face is a rictus snarl of white tufts and cheek muscle. I feel pain. I see his dead heart, his entrails heaped in his bloody lap. He sits in a puddle of red, head thrown back, frustrated at the last.

  There are no words for this. It's as if my own chest has been spread-eagled, as if someone has reached into my chest and ripped out my heart.

  They got here before me.

  Suddenly it is too hard. This man waited for me, and I'm too late again.

  I drop my thumping head into my hands, and I hurl the black eye after them.

  FAR EAST

  19. A NORMAL LIFE

  After the battle, Anna stood atop the mountain with her new troops arrayed around her. It was like a video game. Ravi would have loved it.

  "You can teleport?"

  She imagined him standing beside her, laughing, nudging her elbow and needling her like it wasn't really real.

  "How far? Bet you can't reach that mountain."

  "I can blow that mountain up," she whispered, to no one, to herself. Her hands rested unconsciously on her belly. Where the last piece of Ravi lived, now.

  "Istanbul, then. Can you teleport to Istanbul?"

  She smiled. The lepers flickered around her like dogs twitching in their sleep. How much had she lost, in the battle for control? That was a night land, and perhaps she'd never know. Energy fired in the dark spaces of the mind, hard to remember now, but leaving her buzzing like a live wire.

  At first they had knelt, as if in worship of a god, but she swiftly corrected that. Now they stood like soldiers. She was all too aware of the people they had been. Those parts of themselves, like the flickers of light in her father's eyes as he hurled her to safety in Mongolia, still remained. It was
in bringing them to the fore, and giving them some measure of control over their chaotic skins, that she had earned their obedience.

  So they stood to attention. She had saved them, after all, from the hell of themselves.

  "Goddess number one," Ravi whispered. "Super primo ultimate lady."

  She snickered. That was one of his things, maybe from geek video game culture, maybe just something he'd made up.

  "All your base are belong to us," she whispered back, a video game reference from a time before she was born. He used to wear a T-shirt with that printed on the front, proudly a geek long after being a geek wasn't even a thing. It had kept him alive, though, while everyone else was dead.

  "Spiderman had it right," he said, the ghost of him, though he wasn't really there, she knew that. "With great power."

  "Comes great respiration, yes, I know."

  He chuckled. Another thing. "Great perspiration."

  "Great aspiration."

  "My favorite," he said, and kissed her on the cheek. His touch was cold, just like his cheek had been in the Alps bunker. Cold forever.

  "My White Rabbit," she breathed.

  Then he was gone, or perhaps the moment was gone, or the sense of him in her mind was gone. She knew she was alone again, despite the twelve circled around her. How long had passed? Not long.

  She became aware of a low drone, buzzing in on her from above. She looked up, and saw the Beechcraft up above, buzzing and arcing. Just minutes ago she'd been up there too, but that felt like another lifetime now, so long ago. Up there was Peters, still watching down through his belly-mounted camera.

  That amused her. She gave him a grin, waved, then blew a kiss.

  Ravi's voice surged again in her head, just for this. "Conqueror of Hell," he whispered. "Ishtar, who broke down the doors of damnation and waged the dead against the living."

  She laughed, and then he was gone again.

  In his absence, she reached up, augmented by her circle of twelve. The energy coming off them filled her up like light in a lens. In a second she homed in on Peters, sensing things about him at a level of detail like she'd never felt before.

  She felt the fear he always wore beneath his surface of calm. The love he felt for her, like the daughter he and his Abigail had never had. Pride and worry, mixed into a deep tangle of emotions that even he didn't really understand.

  Then resolution.

  She laughed, as she felt him strap on a pack, and open the plane door again, and jump out. A second later his parachute opened; a billowing white cloud that got caught in the wind and sent reeling.

  She blinked herself over to where he would land. Her lepers blinked with her. She looked up as he came down, and landed in the snow, and looked at her with wonder, awe, and glory in his eyes.

  "Anna. My God."

  "Goddess will do," she said, and smiled.

  He just stared, at her and her twelve disciples, while the parachute skittered over the snow in the stiff wind. "Are you?"

  She shrugged. A moment passed, then he lurched forward, pushing aside her lepers to wrap his arms round her in perhaps the tightest embrace she'd ever had.

  "Never do that again," he said fiercely into her ear. "Or, do it, but warn me first."

  "Sure thing, Dad," she said, laughing, but that had a far bigger impact than she'd expected.

  He began to shake. He held her closer and tried to bury the emotion, as he always had since Abigail died. It opened a door she hadn't ever considered, but that had been there all the time. Dad. And why not, one more on top of the pile after her real father, and Cerulean, and Amo? It was what Peters had always wanted, after all, and she was proud for him to think of her that way. She patted his back while he struggled with his pride enough to pull away under control.

  "Young lady," he said at last, looking into her eyes while the Beechcraft above entered a steep dive that would, in less than a minute, result in a beautiful fireball against a rocky mountain flank. "What have you done?"

  * * *

  It got cold in the mountains.

  "You could have jumped out with some jackets," Anna teased.

  "I followed my hero," Peters replied, returning not to his deadpan delivery, though the twelve lepers still plainly made him uncomfortable. "You leapt with not even a parachute."

  She smiled. That was a strange thing.

  "If you'll let them carry you, we can be out of the mountains in hours."

  Peters frowned hard.

  So they hiked. They weren't wearing the right shoes. Probably they would freeze to death when night came, if it weren't for the heat fuming off her lepers. They had traversed only one mountain slope in hours. Anna could have jumped it in a second, perhaps two, tweaking the power that now seemed to live inside her, as accessible as a faucet, but it was better to walk with Peters.

  They both needed it.

  She'd tried to explain. He'd stopped being frustrated that he couldn't do what she did, and just come to accept this new ability of hers.

  "So you blink?" he asked.

  "I think, a twist," Anna answered, as if that made it any clearer. "Things just line up. I can feel them already, like a fifth limb, like I'm just making my hand into a fist. It's another muscle."

  Peters nodded along. It was a lot to swallow.

  "And these creatures." He gestured to the lepers flanking them like an honor guard. "What are they, really?"

  Anna shrugged. She didn't really know any more than him. "Just people. Accidents. Like the Ocean, like the demons, just different. I can see bits of them peeking through at times, but they're such a jumble. This one thinks about a movie he saw once, but the image is so degraded, then the memory flips to this other one, like they're sharing it, or eating it, and it goes down then something else comes up to replace it. They're feeding on themselves somehow, eating each other, but the fuel doesn't run out. It feels like, when they get done they just start up again."

  Peters nodded. His breath steamed in the air. Already the sky was darkening, and they'd have to hunker down to rest some time soon. Anna didn't relish the thought of cuddling up to the lepers for warmth, but if they weren't going to jump their way out…

  "Like perpetual motion machines," Peters said. "I have an interest in these."

  Anna looked over at him. "You do?"

  "Yes. I have many interests, Anna. I am an old man, after all."

  "You're not even forty-five."

  He snorted. "Well, I feel old. I used to build them, really as a hobby. My Abigail laughed at me. 'Water will not flow uphill', she would tell me, while she was laughing, and I kept building anyway. 'It is friction that is our problem' she said. And I would laugh then, and ask her about the Ocean. Where do they obtain their energy from? They go and go, and they do not eat, but still they continue. The same is true of us. We eat little, but last a long time. I once went a month without eating, and I could have continued longer. My experiments."

  Anna smiled. Peters rarely spoke this much, certainly not about his time with Abigail.

  "She was a good match for you, I think. You kept each other sane for ten years."

  He chuckled. "Yes, I think so. She did not want children, and every day that broke my heart, but she was a good woman. She did not deserve the end she received."

  "She died in your arms. She died free."

  He nodded.

  Anna let a long moment pass.

  "Cynthia is single, last I heard."

  The look on his face made her laugh out loud. "You are not serious. I do not think you are suggesting I, and Cynthia, become a couple?"

  Anna laughed again. It felt good, even if they were in the mountains humping through snow, with her feet soaked through and the wind picking up. "She's a handsome woman. She knows how to sow a field."

  His expression became distraught. "She is twenty years my senior. Thirty, perhaps, Anna!"

  "Perpetual motion helps with a lot. Less friction."

  He jawed the air emptily, so offended he couldn't think
of a sufficient reply, ultimately settling on, "You are a terrible matchmaker."

  She laughed.

  "I do not think it is funny," he grumbled. "It is my life."

  "Maybe, but you shouldn't be alone any more," she said, then stopped, because that made her think about Ravi. Peters sensed the change in tone at once. He was good at that.

  "Neither will you be," he said. "We will both be well. I feel this."

  That was nice.

  They trudged on in silence for a time. One of the lepers slipped and that was good for a half-hearted laugh.

  We will both be well, Anna repeated under her breath. We will both be well.

  * * *

  After a cold night curled up together amongst the lepers, and half of another day trudging through the cold and snow, Peters relented.

  "Let your servants carry me. This is unacceptable."

  Anna rounded them up and had them lift him carefully. She had them lift her too, because they were better at jumping than her. Then she had them begin.

  "Oh God," Peters exclaimed, as the first jump flung them fifty feet forward, then the second came fast on its heels, and the third. "I will be sick."

  "Sorry," said Anna, and slowed the pace.

  He sighed in relief.

  They jumped, had a pause of a second, and jumped again.

  "Actually, better to go fast," Peters said. "I will close my eyes."

  Anna grinned, and revved the lepers up to full speed. Control of them came naturally now, like turning a dial on the wall, like leaning out to pull a catamaran into the wind. The world flickered by in a blur; up and down, the skyline jumping, the white snow changing angles.

  In a few hours, perhaps, the mountains were behind them. Peters was actually asleep, like a babe in arms. She slowed her little army, and returned to walking along a road, carrying the sleeping Peters like a king on a chaise longue.

  This was Romania, she supposed. She'd never been here before. There were patchwork fields full of pink wildflowers, and lots of panoramic hills.