The Last (Zombie Ocean 1)

by Michael John Grist

  I brace my shoulders against the emergency door and kick out at his legs. I catch one of his shins sharply with the ball of my foot, so hard it twinges my ankle and something clicks. It drives another bellow of rage from him as the leg flips back and he falls hard onto the seat back, his ruined right hand no longer enough to hold up his weight.

  His cheek cracks off the metal rail, and if the gap between the seat and wall were wider he'd fall right on top of me, but it's too narrow for his thick chest. Instead for a second he's left lying suspended above me, blood dripping down from his head and a new gash in his cheek, gazing at me numbly.

  His left hand pats at my chest weakly. "Why?" he mumbles.

  I grab for the pistol at his waist and slide it out. He stares in horror and snatches down at it.

  "Back off," I rasp, pointing it at his belly.

  "No," he mumbles, and tries to grab the gun.

  I put two slugs through his belly. He jerks and more hot blood splashes out, then his hand closes on the barrel and pulls it easily from my grip. He slides backward to slump in the tight aisle on his knees before me, turning the gun in his blood-slick hands, searching for the trigger.

  I kick him in the face, there's a stiff crack and he jerks back, then I scrabble desperately behind me for the emergency exit lever. My hand finds it, yanks down, and the side wall opens outward, spilling me out several feet into the bright sunlight.

  I hit the sandy asphalt with a crunch on my shoulder and neck, then tip ungainly backward across my face. I come to rest flat on my belly with a great view of Don in the shadow getting the gun in position. I roll to the side as he shoots, one, two, three shots, a fourth, and one of them catches me in the foot like a whipping snakebite. I look down to see blood spreading across the toe of my left boot.

  "Come on, Ammo," he calls from inside. "Let's talk. You wanted to talk."

  I lurch to my feet and start hobbling back along the side of the bus. From the delivery truck the sound of Counting Crows singing Mr. Jones peels out, the soundtrack of this ragged escape. I reach the JCB just as there's a crunch and he hits the road behind me, holding the pistol and pulling the trigger, but all it does is click.

  He gets to his feet as I climb up to the cab, my left foot bloody and my right twingeing with every step. I can barely even hold my own weight going up. I make two rungs on the ladder then my leg gives out and I fall back, barely stopping myself from a full fall with my hand on the railing.

  There's no time. He pulls the shotgun from its sheath on his back. I roll around the front of the cab just as the first blast roars out. It tears shreds of metal out of the side and draws fracture patterns on the glass. I hobble ahead, keeping the JCB between me and him, cornering and working my way back down the battle-tank.

  "I just wanted to be friends," he shouts, his voice a pained gurgle. "Why did you have to be such a dick?"

  I don't say anything. Another blast tears across the air beside me and I feel the breath of the shrapnel passing inches over my shoulder. I risk a glance back and see him rounding the cab. He looks like shit, pale-faced as a zombie, with blood and maybe his entrails hanging out of his blasted belly. If I can just keep ahead of him I'll be all right. He'll die of these injuries, I'm sure.

  "We could have shared them," he shouts. "One cheerleader for me, one for you. It didn't have to be like this."

  "You don't get it," I shoot hoarsely back. "How could I trust you with anyone else?"

  I hobble on, one foot sprained and one shot through. I pass the end of the battle-tank and am closing on the ocean at the back of the delivery truck when he shoots again.

  This time I feel it more than I hear it. My legs go out from under me, peppered by spray, and I hit the road hard with my face, cracking my nose and my lips sharply, too abruptly to get my hands up in front of me.

  "I'm a good person," he slurs. "I am."

  Ah god. I roll over and feel the acid sting of buckshot burn hotly in the meat of my legs. I'm twingeing again, it's rising to cloud my vision with gray, and I can't think clearly. Lara, I think, Cerulean, I'm sorry. I twist back to see my thighs and calves lying limply like torn fins behind me, and beyond that there's Don, humping wheezily closer, slotting fresh shells into the shotgun's breech.

  "Should have listened to me," he says. He's moving by sheer will too. He's barely alive, there's so much blood pouring out of him. "We could have been pals."

  I look forward and start to crawl. The asphalt burns hot against my palms and cheek, and I know I'm not going to make it. Like Sophia I'll be found broken and beaten, and this will be my legacy, our two bodies left entwined with no explanation or reason why. I don't want to die.

  I'm sorry Lara. I'm sorry Cerulean. I'm sorry Sophia too, I've let you all down.

  My vision clouds and I look up to see the ocean lapping near. They come over from the back of the truck, all withered faces and gangly limbs, half-dressed and gray, as eager as over-friendly dogs. I think of Hank in the darkness, barreling out to be close to me, and how happy he seemed to have me near. I think of all the horrible crimes I did against them.

  "Please," I whisper to them. "Help me."

  I roll onto my back. Don's over me now, leveling the shotgun, and the music is too loud for them to hear him, to even notice him.

  "Please," I say again. He points the barrel right at my chest, and I know this is the end.

  "Bleeding heart," he says, "bleed for me."

  Then gray flesh flies over me and at him. He pulls up the shotgun and blows it to powder, but another follows in an instant, leaping over my ruined legs and taking another spray of buckshot that blows it to pieces.

  My head falls back and I watch as more of them come, leaping over me like sheep over a fence, and I'm drifting. Four, five, six. I hear Don begin to scream, I hear the sound of rending and tearing, and when I look up briefly, I see the ocean for the first time as they feed on a fellow human.

  They're eating Don. His arm lifts up from the midst of them, covered in his own blood, and one of the ocean bites into it, tearing a chunk of quivering meat free.

  He screams throughout. They rear back with his intestines dangling like strands of spaghetti from their mouths, his bright red blood everywhere, splashing like a geyser. They're eating him. They're really eating him alive.

  It could be me next.

  I lie back and look up at the sky, where wisps of cloud twist and turn. One of them looks a little like Lara, or it may, because I can hardly even remember what she looks like. I never took a photo and it's already been so long. In my mind she merges with Sophia, another soul lost to the vast emptiness of this great country.

  Don's screams fade, replaced by the gristly snap and crunch of the feast. My vision goes dark. If this is the end then so be it. Let my bones be a warning to those that come after me, a cairn itself, helping them forward and making them strong.

  I'm not sad, I'm happy. I've done a good thing. Let the ocean join the ocean in freedom, and there swim for as long as they like.

  INTERLUDE 3

  The videos changed everything.

  Lara watched them again and again, shots of Amo walking amongst the throngs of the dead, laughing and smiling. He touched them and they touched him, amidst the same Iowa cornfields she stood within, surrounded by gold.

  She broke down many times. She'd killed her own mother and father because she'd thought she was putting them out of their misery, when she could have had this. They could have come with her on this journey across the country. They could have been together, or at least had a farewell. They didn't have to die.

  She wept until she ran out of tears, then stopped.

  "Enough," she said, and it was enough. She'd killed her parents, but Amo had killed thousands. He had that on his conscience and they'd forgiven him. Being amongst them had changed him. She could see it in the childlike wonder on his face in the video.

  Now there was the comic. She held it in her hands like an artifact from a long
-gone age, birthed through the apparatus of the old world, into the new.

  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 st
riking 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.