The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4)

by Michael John Grist

  "With that," Salle says, "I bid you adieu."

  Abruptly she pulls a clasp on her chest. Gas hisses out of a ruptured valve and the heavy bronze helmet blows back off her head.

  Underneath is her face. For a second I'm looking right into her eyes as they flash-freeze to white, and for that second I feel her looking back into me. Blue eyes, honest eyes, in a pale and haggard face.

  Salle Coram.

  Then the woman is gone. The last shred of color in her cheeks fades to gray and her eyes burn white like any other zombie.

  BANG

  Her gray skull blows out, spraying brains over the snow behind her. Another shot comes and her throat blows through in a fan of blood.

  She drops.

  I turn and see Peters has the gun, smoking in the cold.

  It's fair.

  I nod, but he's not looking at me. There are more important things.

  20. COMMAND

  I stand frozen in the snow.

  Salle Coram's blood drains into the white. Everywhere there's white, spreading over the fields and the forests, the mountains and the road, a perfect screen for the corruption below. But now there's this stain, like the first blush of the infection creeping through. The geyser to follow will tarnish the world.

  I've faced this choice before.

  I imagine Lars Mecklarin in that moment of understanding, as the crushing weight of responsibility for all those people fell down. I know how he felt as he pressed the gun to his head.

  BANG

  An end to guilt; an end to pain, to fear and to suffering. I've been there, done that and bought the T-shirt.

  But he left Salle. Now Salle's dead too.

  The gun's in my hand still. I look at it as if the answer may lie within. The inner barrels of these things are swirled, you know, to make the bullet spin in the air. That's a piece of knowledge we all got from Julio.

  Ah, Julio, what a stupid, awful, pointless waste. I'd kill him a thousand times over and never regret it. But would I kill him then? If I could go back in time and kill him before any of this happened, would I do it?

  That's the only question that matters, because there has to be a line and I need to draw it somewhere. This is my responsibility, built on the choices I've already made.

  I smile at the white mountain. Salle Coram's just as bad as Julio. I'd shoot her myself for handing me this. But then, what I just saw in her eyes as she died was sincere. I don't think she was evil. She was just weary. She had shouldered the burden for long enough, and now she wanted to pass it on.

  I can sympathize with that too.

  I turn to the others. There's Anna, holding the binder and looking at me with a terrible light in her eyes. She knows, or she suspects. There's Peters with his gun, tears rolling down his cheeks. Down off the RV, Feargal is a small figure running over the snow toward us. Ravi and Jake are staring at the dead body.

  Seconds have passed only.

  They fall to me, and I wonder what is right or wrong anymore. Am I the Last Mayor or the last executioner, and isn't there a scale for things like that? Shouldn't there be a calculation made on a set of balances, weighed by some unbiased and blind judge, who would tally the score in pain and suffering on both sides and come to a final decision?

  But I don't have those scales or that judge. There is no easy or logical decision. I have only myself and my people, forty-nine against three thousand, and it isn't fair. There's no way to fathom it, though the facts are right there.

  It would be the right thing to do. The numbers are plain, and we could even have a few happy years before the demons from the other bunkers reached us, my children growing and playing, Anna and Ravi deepening their love, the survivors finding peace in New LA, so that when the other demons hit it would be over in seconds, with no time to be afraid.

  Would that be better? Would that tip the scales into balance?

  I think of that, and I squeeze the grip of my gun, and I look at Anna. We could return to the RVs and go back to New LA to live out our days. The three thousand would have a chance, and our community would end with little pain or fanfare. They could tear down my cairns and start again.

  But Anna sees that too. I see it in her, and I know she won't go quietly. I'd have to shoot her right now, then Ravi too, Jake, all of them. In Pittsburgh I'd have to kill all my people, as they'd never believe any explanation I could give. There'd be no peace, only a great and deep betrayal blown into the dream I've built. I'd have to kill Cynthia and Sulman and Witzgenstein. I'd have to kill Lara on her hospital bed. I'd have to see the fear on my children's' faces as I stalked up to them with a smoking gun.

  It's terrible, but is killing three thousand people, or leaving them to kill each other, any less terrible?

  I smile at Anna.

  She has her gun in her hand now and she doesn't smile back. Good. I'm glad. It's an immense weight, and if I couldn't bear it then she would. She's always been strong. Just like Lars Mecklarin, just like Salle Coram, I could pass this decision on down the line. She's strong enough to carry it all.

  But what is strength? I know it's not always strength to survive. There's a line where it's stronger just to say no more, to take your chips out of the game and leave the table for good; just like I did in Times Square, just like I did in Iowa. Killing every day just to live is not enough; it isn't human anymore.

  I don't know what the answer is, so I just look at Anna. She's so certain. I'd have to shoot her right between the eyes, then again through the throat. I couldn't miss. Is that strength, to shoot the ones I love to give our race a better chance? What is the suffering of forty-nine against the mass misery of three thousand?

  The greatest minds of our generation. Visionaries who followed Lars Mecklarin under the earth; people who deserve a chance to thrive just as much as mine.

  I just don't know, and I don't have time to weigh it out. The seconds are stretching on, and Anna's getting itchy. She doesn't have the same doubt as me. I have to decide.

  So I decide.

  I draw the line that Lars and Salle couldn't draw, because in truth I already made this decision ten years past, when I first gave these people a chance.

  I gave them a chance when I stopped Julio and fated us to all this misery. I gave them ten years worth of chances, and they used them only to plan how to kill me faster. I gave Julio the chance to belong and become a good man, but I couldn't make him change.

  I did everything I could, and I won't do it again. I drop the gun. I've already made this mistake once.

  Because I love my wife. I love my children. I loved Cerulean and I love Anna, and all that tips the balance. It puts a thumb on the scale that breaks the machine, because the lines are so stark. I can only take this world in one direction, now, because at some point you have to draw your own line.

  I won't put this decision in the comic book. I won't share it with the Council. Our past country was built on the back of a genocide, but there's no reason this one should be. Let the genocide rest on my back alone.

  Manifest Destiny.

  Anna has her finger on the trigger. Rage still burns in Peters' eyes. Feargal is still so far away. Jake and Ravi stare at the dead woman on the snow, and it's easy for me, really, a matter of only a few words that seal our fate and set our path.

  "They're dead," I tell them. "All three thousand. They're already dead."

  * * *

  We don't talk.

  We find the bunker. Following Salle Coram's footsteps is easy, leading us back through the snow to another manhole in the earth. There's a ladder leading down and I take it first, over Feargal's protestation. Halfway down a strange tingling sensation runs over my skin, like static electricity, then I'm in.

  A small round space awaits at the bottom, well-lit and decked in sheer white plastic with two doors and an elevator call button, which I press. Anna and I get in the car on the left together. There's no space for anyone else. The ride is short. She looks into my eyes throughout. There's nothing to say.
>
  The door opens on a battered yellow hall. Broken TVs line the walls, in places leaving empty alcoves behind. There are black and brown stains of all kinds spattered around the walls: blood and soot, damp and grime. There are also twenty or so people here too, men and women all around thirty and forty, and as the door opens we catch the end of their transformation.

  Their bodies go gray. Their eyes go white. I haven't ever seen the change on a scale like this, except in videos I put into Ragnarok IV. They're all dying right in front of me.

  I feel sick. I take a step forward and stumble. Anna catches me. She takes my hand in hers. Her eyes are full of understanding. Goddamn.

  "Come on," she says, "let's see it through."

  They turn into zombies around us.

  We walk on. There's a red corridor beyond, lined with angular posters supporting Salle Coram's authoritarian regime, filled with more bodies transforming, more people dying.

  Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands.

  It's mass murder. It's genocide.

  I can barely see as tears pour from my eyes. They become the ocean before us. They die before us because we are the zombies now, come to spread our infection. Worst of all is the aftermath, when they scurry to be near us. They reach out and touch me, taking my hand and pressing close, clinging to my legs and shoulders, straining to touch my face, a cruel mockery of affection, love, forgiveness.

  Anna drives me on. These are my disciples now, and the burden I must carry. These are my victims forever following behind, like heads strapped to a muscle car's grille. Three thousand. I touch their cheeks and can't stop the tears from running down my own.

  We walk all the floors in a blur.

  The bunker is huge. As we walk through its once-colorful hallways, swamped by zombies pressing against us, I begin to sag. I can't do this anymore. I can't see another face change, another body hunch, another soul wink out, but Anna's right there and her strength buoys me on. Her hand is tight around mine, holding me up, and she's right. I owe a duty to these people to see it through.

  The zombies surge around us like a tide. Slap, slap, their bodies say against each other, slap slap. Together they carry us past a riotous jungle of dark oak and acacia, through a farm hangar filled with creeping soy plants in deep brown loam, past a shuttered bar and a bowling alley and a cinema. The floors stretch down and down, deep into the earth. We go by luxurious rooms, spartan rooms, and a wing that had to be a prison.

  We stand in a corridor of solitary confinement cells, in the doorway of one, now painted gray with a reinforced metal door. Prisoners have etched their names, serial numbers, and curses into the walls. There is no light. There's a bucket in the corner.

  Salle, I think. Goddamn it, Salle.

  We walk through a gym and an area that was once a coffee lounge, now decked out with a set of medieval stocks and a bloody whipping post. Now all the ocean we see have already transformed, which is a mercy. Some of them are only half-dressed, summoned from their beds, and on their backs I see whip marks. On their calves I see cane marks. This was the misery of their last six years. I have just killed all three thousand.

  It will be a difficult knife to swallow. It's a bigger knife than any of them, and I'll spend my whole life trying to swallow it. It's so large I can't even feel hurt yet, because it's a part of the world around me. It's a lens through which I now see everything else.

  On the bottom floor, in a park-like space planted with potatoes, Anna and I part ways. We don't say anything because words can't express any of this.

  I wander alone, away from the others, taking my own meteor cloud of zombies with me. I drop in and out of rooms, where the covers lie tossed back, where the paperwork is half-done on desks, where a production line still rolls slowly around a hall, the workers deserted, where a bagel rests half-eaten on a chipped plate.

  I stop crying and keep walking, hunting for something that I only understand when I find it, many hours later.

  Lars Mecklarin. On the deepest level, interred in the wall by the doorway of a large park, lit by a flickering orange light, there's a stone grave marker carved in a very familiar symbol from the old world; a swooping chevron across a circle, with a gleaming star in the middle.

  The Star Trek icon.

  I smile, despite everything. Even in the depths of their despair somebody had a little wit. Maybe this too was Salle. I expect I'll be learning about her and these people for years, now. I need to know them all, to read all their names and about their lives, to understand who they were. Perhaps that's my penance. It's also my duty, because these were my people too, whether they knew it or not.

  Standing in front of Lars Mecklarin's marker, with no words but his name and the dates of his birth and death, I try to think of what I would have done in his place, but no clear answer comes.

  It was an impossible situation, but I wish he hadn't killed himself. Not with so many people depending on him. He left it to Salle, but she was no more prepared than him. Perhaps there was no better way, but I still wish that he'd tried. He was the captain, and it was his duty to go down with the ship, not be the first to leap out into the water.

  I wish, I wish.

  I touch Mecklarin's symbol. I wish he'd just tried. I lead my zombies on.

  Feargal drifts past me in a corridor and we wave silently, caught up in the moment like pickers in the Yangtze darkness. Peters is sitting silently in his chair and looking at the prison wing. Anna is standing at the entrance to a forlorn-looking room, studying a brown stuffed monkey doll resting on the bed. Ravi is nearby reading duty roles, rules and punishments painted on the wall. Jake is on the top floor inspecting the Habitat's large-scale hydraulic engineering.

  "I should be able to rig this," he says, the first words I've heard in hours.

  I hug him. He seems a little surprised, then hugs back. I'm glad Jake's alive. Jake is pure in a way I will never be.

  "Work on it," I tell him, rubbing my eyes. "We need to get these people out. They deserve to see the light."

  I roam. I ebb and flow like a tide on the ocean, like a piece of clockwork compelled from within and without. Would Lars Mecklarin have been able to predict all my random movements, if he'd known me well enough?

  It doesn't matter, because he's dead.

  I take the elevator back, then ride its twin down. Beyond lies the 'Command' zone, a very different space with only a few narrow, cold hallways and a handful of bunk bed rooms. I walk along corridors where Salle once lived and worked, where her discipline had crushed these people into obedience. There are rusty black blood trails in one stretch, leading at one end to a refrigerated cold storage room, where Salle's twenty-three Command colleagues are dead and tumbled atop each other.

  I say a prayer and move on. We'll pull these bodies out too and bury them. At the other end of the blood trail there's a semi-circular hall like a flight control room, with rows of computers on desks facing a large screen showing a very dull movie; seven solid blue dots on a wireframe map of America.

  I sit and watch it for a long time, thinking about nothing really. This is what despair looks like.

  I wander. I find Peters sitting in a side office, the only other room that isn't a bedroom, a bathroom or the kitchens. It must be the commander's office, as pinned to the walls are maps, charts, lists of names, instructions, timelines, decision trees and numbered contingencies; almost everything we could ever want to know about the bunker and its plan. On the desk is a neatly hand-written guide to it all, leading us through what we need to know. It's addressed:

  Last Mayor of America

  She prepared. Perhaps she knew this would be my choice.

  "It's all bullshit," Peters says dismissively, waving a hand.

  I'm inclined to disagree, but I've no heart to argue with him. I've no desire even to see this stuff yet. If other demons are coming, if other bunkers are plotting against us, we have time.

  We have time.

  I climb back to the surface. It's dark out and I'm the first up
. We spent the whole day down there, buried with the dead. I take a deep breath of the frigid New England air. Ten years underground seems unbelievably long.

  I go to the other bunker, Julio's hole, and start setting up the winch. I'm not going to sleep tonight anyway, I know that, and there's a lot of work yet to do.

  21. HOME

  We get the half-formed demon bodies up in the night, as the others come along and help out. In the end the winch can't lift Cerulean's huge frame, so we rig a wire from an RV and haul him out that way. His head comes up separately and rests beside him, under a blue tarpaulin weighed down with stones.

  I sleep a little, then radio back to the settlement in Pittsburgh around dawn to talk to Witzgenstein.

  "Lara shows no change," she says, the first thing after a greeting, which I appreciate. "Your kids are good. They went on a field trip into the woods to look for pinecones."

  I smile. After the horrors I've done in the last twenty-four hours, hunting for pinecones sounds like a wonderful thing. I fill her in on our side of things and tell her to bring the RVs up when they can. This is something we all need to see.

  We flood Julio's bunker with gas poured directly off a tanker, found a little way down McKnight. The driver is still in the cab, caught sleeping when the apocalypse struck. Apart from his withered gray skin and puckered peanut face he looks like a regular person, with clothes as bright and clean as the day he went to sleep in them. He was in a prison for ten years too.

  He hangs around while we drive his tanker up to the field and over the sloping snow. The hose sloshes out a dense sludge, more like petroleum jelly than regular gasoline. This is what ten years of sitting in the heat and cold will do; the water vapor breathes away through the tiniest of gaps in the tanker's joints, leaving raw rocket fuel behind.

  Normally we dilute it ten to one with water, but not today. The jelly pumps in, acrid and brown, and Peters tosses in the lighter. The resultant fire is so fierce that flames lick out through the manhole mouth.