I stretch myself until I'm a mile tall and just touching Don's chin.
"Too late, Ammo," he says, "too late and too damn short."
A hand clamps around my foot and yanks me down. Now I'm in the midst of them, thousands of them, massive red beasts that are bigger than me, stronger than me and smarter than me. My jaw is forced open and a black round mouth hole descends.
The flow begins. The red ocean is everywhere. My children are already gone.
* * *
Thumping palpitations in my chest drive me awake. My first thought is I'm having a heart attack, then perhaps a stroke. I lurch out of the booth and into the central aisle, steadying myself on the plastic crates.
It's light outside, and the black road stretches ahead through an orange desert. My mouth tastes like sand.
"I was about to wake you," Chantelle says over her shoulder. "There's been some confusion from the survivors."
"What?" I ask, trying to shake the dreamy fog out of my head. "What confusion?"
"Ask her." Chantelle points at Lucy, lying in her booth still.
I drop to a squat, my heart still pounding madly, and rest a hand on Lucy's shoulder, but she jerks back like I've given her an electric shock.
"What is it?" I ask her. "The radar, do you feel something?"
"Not something," she answers. The whites of her eyes are huge. "Somethings."
"What do you mean?"
She closes her eyes and curls up tightly into a ball.
"What the hell? Chantelle?"
"That's happening up and down the convoy. Nobody understands."
I barge up and grab the radio. "This is Amo, all stations report, what the hell are the survivors saying?"
Lara's voice comes through crisp and clear. "It's the signal, Amo," she says. "It's making them crazy. Nobody can get much sense out of them, but it seems powerful, more than they expected."
I try to understand this for a second, as my heart continues to throb. "They lived for years, some of them, next to this guy. At most Cerulean might be with him, making two. How could that have this effect?"
"It's more than that, they say. I don't know, it's like they're possessed. Ravi had to restrain the survivor on his RV, James, because he was trying to climb out of the gun slot. They're terrified. We're getting very close."
I blink. "Where are we?"
"You don't know where we are?" It comes almost as an accusation. I rub my eyes and try to stay calm.
"I was sleeping, Lara," I say, "can you tell me where we are, how close are we to the crossing point?"
"Miles away. A hundred miles easily, still west of Albuquerque. But it was always an estimate, I don't-"
A shriek comes from behind, then something hits me in the back. It's Lucy, and I'm knocked to my knees with a painful jolt. Lucy pushes by toward Chantelle, perhaps toward the open window, nudging the wheel violently to the side.
The RV lurches and Chantelle drags it back while hunching against Lucy's scrabbling body. "Get her off me, Amo!"
She shouts.
I grab Lucy's shoulders and yank her back. She's so light that she flies away easily, but in the air she whirls and sends one hand raking down my cheek. Then I catch her, wrap my arms firmly around her chest with both hands tucked in, and try to contain her. She's almost naked but for her hospital shift, scrawny and weak, but she kicks, struggles and hisses like a feral cat.
"There are zip ties in the cupboard," Chantelle calls back at me. "Restrain her for her own good, before she hurts herself."
"What's happening?" Lara calls over the radio.
I lift Lucy and take big steps to the booth, but getting her in proves impossible as she spreads her legs and catches on the edges, lashing out so hard I'm worried she might break her own legs.
"She'll hurt herself, Amo!" Chantelle calls, watching me in the rear view mirror. "Be firm, press her against one of the stacks, use your weight."
I scrabble at the cupboard, knocking it open and sending loose plastic zip ties sprawling across the floor, then drop Lucy to the floor. Dropping on top of her, using my weight to subdue, feels like how I imagine a rape would as she squirms and yells meaningless words. The thought sickens me, especially so close after dreaming of Don. I hate to do this to Lucy after she's been restrained for so long, and to do it in such a fleshy, grunting way, but there's no choice.
I pin her hips under my knee, yank her arms together as gently as I can then get the ties on. They slide tight and I move to her ankles, zipping two ties together and wrapping them round. She whimpers and I slot her into the booth, bundle her feet in the blankets and zip-tie them snug so she won't break her toes flailing around, then tie her wrists to a hook attachment in the walls.
"Jesus," I mutter. "Stay there, Lucy."
She thrashes but there's little else she can do. My cheek stings and I feel blood roll down my neck from her sharp fingernails. I grab a strip of gauze and press it tight then hurry back to the front and sit beside Chantelle.
"See," she says, "crazy as hell."
I lift the radio. "Lara, everyone, restrain your survivors with zip ties if you haven't already. I know they're weak but it's for their own good. Mine just assaulted me then tried to jump out of the window. Confirm please."
Confirmations echo back. Just in the time that I was attacked, two others tried to make a break for it. One of Ozark's patients was on a blood bag and tore it loose, spraying gore everywhere.
"It's contained?" I asked.
"Contained," he said, "but this level of extreme stress, some of them can't take it, Amo. They'll just wink out."
I feel it myself. In my chest the cold is brewing already, like the opposite of heartburn, and my heart keeps pounding and pounding around it.
I switch frequencies. "Macy, how are the children?"
"They're fine," Macy comes back to me, though her voice sounds harried and stretched. "We're having an adventure in here, aren't we kids? You wouldn't believe how much fun hide and seek is in an RV going at ninety."
"Thanks Macy. Kids, I love you, hang in there." I twist the dial.
"Lara, everyone, we're going to bull through. They shouldn't be here yet. We're just on the edge of the storm, we'll squeak by."
Outside the red scrubland of New Mexico whips by, bounded by random sandstone buttes and well-stocked with wild pampas grass and gatherings of hazel-brown cacti. The sky is a beautiful cerulean blue. I'm about to suggest swapping over with Chantelle, when Lucy starts to scream.
I turn and see her leaning out from her booth as far as she can, pulling her arms taut behind her on the hook. Her mouth is so wide open I can see her tonsils shaking like mad leaves in a wind. She's staring past me and out of the front windshield and really screaming at full capacity, so loud it hurts.
"Amo," Chantelle calls over the cry, "holy shit, look at that."
She points left. We've just crested a low rise in the desert, unveiling more red stretching wilderness; a few scattered boulders, a tiny shack that was probably once the outhouse for a ranch, and an emaciated Joshua tree.
"There," Chantelle says over Lucy's cry, "look, dammit!"
And I see. There are giant red figures in the distance, arms pumping, sprinting down on us from the north like meteors falling. A cloud of red dust rises behind them. I try to count them. Not one, not even two, but three, five, perhaps seven.
"Oh my God," I whisper.
They'll be on us before we can get past. They're massive. They'll block the road and tear us to bits.
Seven demons. The chill opens over my heart and swallows it down.
We're done.
INTERLUDE 5
Two days earlier Salle stood before them, six brave souls in the summery hall.
They were three men and three women, all equal and proper. Had they volunteered, or were they forced? It didn't matter. They were in the suits now and there was no going back. Joseph got it done, like he always did.
"Thank you for your sacrifice," she told them, "we'll nev
er forget this."
Some of them had dead eyes that looked right through her. There was nothing unusual about that, though. Probably they thought of this as just a way to escape, after she'd made suicide illegal and punishable with long-term isolation.
Isolation made them scream and go mad. Better for the others to hear the screaming and be broken than for them to die by their own hands. She needed them all for something.
The suits were not handsome, like the black SWAT gear her rescuers had worn so long ago, back when she'd still believed the Habitat was an experiment for Mars and Lars Mecklarin had been alive. Rather they were a jury-rigged orange fabric, making their wearers look like festive Borg androids, festooned with complex magnetic arrays, bits of wiring everywhere like veins, some kind of capacitor, a heavy battery and oxygen tank on the back. The orange fabric was undercoated with a high-tech silvery material, which still showed through at the seams. Tubes ran down the arms and fed into the wrists through permanent catheters. These would inject drugs, blood, antibodies; all the resistance tech they'd come up with in ten years of research.
But there was no cure.
There could be no cure, not for a disease already so deeply ingrained in the genetic matter of its hosts. Every one of them here was already a walking zombie, they just hadn't had their switch punched to 'on' yet. The suits would delay that switch getting punched at the cost of tearing the body apart themselves.
If they were fast, though?
"Send them," she said.
Joseph lifted the first helmet, a solid bronze globe, and with the help of two others set it into place on the volunteer's shoulders, clicking and belting straps and fasteners into place, forming a perfect seal around the neck. Oxygen hissed inside. It looked like a torture device, a fish bowl-like helmet without any visor, only a tiny blinking camera lens at the fore, with more coiled wires and a strange whipcord antenna rising at the back.
"Can you see me?" Joseph asked, holding up three fingers before the camera.
"Three," the volunteer inside answered, her flat voice transferred through an open channel on Joseph's radio.
"Good. You're ready."
He moved down the line doing the other five. Each one was a death penalty, but then she and Joseph had killed people in much worse ways. That first day of the revolution over twenty had died at her command, some of them horrifically. In the weeks that followed, as she clawed back control and stamped discipline on Lars Mecklarin's hopeless people, another thirty had followed in highly stylized public executions. Their bodies were buried in the forest now, without any graves.
Joseph got the last one done. Six humans with heads like rusted underwater mines stood in a line before her. It helped to dehumanize people like this, made it easier. Still she had to really try not to think of the personal information she knew about each of them, memorized a long time ago from Mecklarin's intensely observed files.
Here was Rocky, 28, a prodigy in psychographic profiling, but weak on the inside as it turned out, and prone to abusing whatever power was given to him. He'd abused three women before they'd had him sterilized. There was Amelia, 53, an expert botanist, whose knowledge about kick starting an agricultural boom would be absolutely essential, but whose spirit had been broken for years, and bore the slit marks of suicidal self-harm on her wrists.
They lived on because Salle made their bodies survive, like slaves, but their souls were already gone. Salle saw it all the time, she felt it, she caused it, but it was the only way. This was what happened when you took any meaningful carrot away, but more than that, this was what happened when you took away the possibility of being a real human. It was a great finding for Mecklarin to put in one of his books.
PEOPLE NEED PEOPLE. MAN CANNOT LIVE ON FOOD ALONE.
There was one carrot still, though. These volunteers were going to get it now, and for that she envied them. If this plan worked everyone in the Habitat would share it soon.
To see the sky.
The drones had no cameras pointing up. After Julio had blown up their tower they'd had no eyes above ground left, so they hadn't seen the sky for five years.
In such ways she justified everything. Make this sacrifice now and escape in six years time, in five, in four. It was either that or simply devolve into mad, murdering chaos. Everything was a trade-off in the name of survival.
Joseph opened the elevator door, admitting two alongside him. The doors closed and up they went. Salle felt the great shield in the earth above her revolve as Command opened it, trembling the whole Habitat and opening the single pinhole slot to the ladder. At once the whining spiked in her head.
This was the signal struggling to get through. They knew all about it now, a frequency beyond radio waves and down on an atomic level, called the 'Hydrogen Line'. It was a kind of quantum wavelength that went through everything, except the shield Lars' sponsors had built around the MARS3000 project at immense expense.
Lars had never known about it. The amount of things he hadn't known about turned out to be many, to his credit. He'd truly believed they'd funded his vision only to prep for Mars.
Now a tiny sliver in the shield had opened, and even though Julio's prisoners and her primary had to already be hundreds of miles away, the signal still crept through. She refused to acquiesce and hold her hands to her head though, like the two guards in the room with her were doing, though the pain dug at her thoughts horribly.
Moments later the elevator doors opened and she sent the next two through herself.
"I hope you rot," one of them said through the helmet, her voice sounding flat through the radio.
"I will," Salle replied, "have no doubt of that."
That was a good pep talk.
One more elevator ride and all six were up. It seemed to take forever for them to climb the ladder and emerge out into the world above, but at last the shield began to grind and revolve, coming back into position. When it finally blocked out the signal the relief was huge. One of the guards dropped to his knees. She marked his name.
Joseph came down in the elevator, emerging into an ugly mirror of her arrival in this place, the orange summer room, ten years ago. Every time she passed through it she remembered that first time, with Lars so confident and relaxed, his shirt slightly off his shoulder showing a chink of his chest, so very young.
It was a bad memory, now, because the hall was not what it had once been. The bright yellow ceiling was stained with damp and the cheery orange walls were scoured with greasy black soot and cement-colored pockmarks from explosions and gunfire during the revolution. Most of the TV windows were cracked and the one with the fan had been torn off completely so some angry soul could mangle the workings behind it.
There was no smell of flowers. The power supply was carefully controlled now, so even the few surviving screens were not switched on. A lot had changed in the revolution, as people tore up a Habitat they'd come to hate and believed they were soon leaving forever. They broke transformers, tore out wiring and damaged things that couldn't be fixed. The nuclear plant powering everything still hummed on, like a nuclear submarine, but their access to it had been forever limited.
"Go back to Command and watch them," she told Joseph. "You know the drill. Ding them if they step out of line. Call me if anything happens. I'm going to take a walk."
He saluted, as ever, and as ever she wondered if it was passive aggression. She didn't have files on the command staff like she did on those in the Habitat. Their experience of life underground had been very different from the scientists; forced to watch as three thousand people only thirty yards away had the time of their lives in a delightful environment stacked with abundance, while they lived off hard-tack biscuits, space food and huddled in damp, cold concrete boxes.
It was odd thinking that led to that. Whoever funded the whole affair, who'd purchased the primary and built a hydrogen line shield from whoever manufactured such things, had decided the command staff of thirty didn't need luxury.
Maybe they'
d been right. Telling them the truth from the off made a huge difference. Either that or they'd just selected the most fatalistic, disconnected people available. They didn't need them for their great skills or genetics, only to run out the clock and keep an eye on the people who mattered.
Joseph went back up in the lift. Salle left the orange hall by the door into the Habitat.
In the red corridor outside some efforts had been made at repair and decorations. She still encouraged crafting and taking pride in the environment, but of course it was different now. The pieces of art on the walls weren't flights of silly whimsy but brutalist works of propaganda touting her regime. The people she passed kept their heads down, well aware she could have them executed or tossed into solitary on a whim.
It was the kind of power she hated having, the opposite of everything Lars had taught, but it was necessary. Talk softly and carry a big stick. It was the only thing that worked.
The bar at the end had been converted into the lab where they made the suits. It was extraordinarily complex science, reverse-engineering the shield. It helped that they had some of the greatest minds of particle physics, engineering and mathematics locked up together.
She gave them treats of good food and alcohol when they worked well. She shunted power to their TV screens to display the sky, or movies, or whatever they wanted. She ran them like gears in a clock, and they followed the rules, because there was no other choice.
Gideon was in the 'clean' fabrication lab, a white space of shiny plastic with suction fans cleaning out the tiniest particles of dust. He was tidying up the work benches, and looked down as she approached. He was a short man, wearing glasses bound together with duct tape and a sad little cowlick down his forehead. Two girlfriends his whole life, that's what she knew about him, plus an interest in breeding mice.
"Commander," he said.
"Is the seventh suit ready?" she asked.
"Yes. Concealed from Joseph. I have it here."
"Keep it. I'll let you know."
He nodded, starting to sweat now. She had that effect on men.
The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) Page 14