Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost

by Michael John Grist

  That was kid stuff. Lara skidded the buggy over the sand-strewn sidewalk and onto the Pacific highway, turning north to race up the coast. Anna bit her tongue and looked out the side-window at buildings sailing by. These bits were getting pretty shabby these days.

  The area around the Chinese theater still looked smart and polished because they kept it that way; they pruned the grounds and cleaned the windows and repainted the decking with weatherproof paint.

  By contrast the condos and shops of leftover Los Angeles were looking decidedly run-down. Many of the windows were perished, foggy with condensation, and wind-blown sand heaped up over the once-green forecourts of apartment blocks. Now only palm trees, dune grass and cacti survived, climbing up and flowering out to block doorways and swimming pools. The building façades were steadily peeling away without maintenance, scoured by the salty, sandy Pacific winds, exposing the inner wood frames at corners and round the edges of windows.

  She used to get a big kick out of exploring these places. For a long time she'd done it alone, then when Ravi came after a Southern States cairn-run they'd gone together. Smashing glass had been fun for a while, and experimenting with graffiti cans scrawling on people's old living rooms and bedrooms, until one day Amo had caught them at it.

  The disappointment in his face in that moment stung more than anything Lara ever said or did. Cerulean's disapproval was sweet like red strings by comparison. Amo though got really angry, and she felt it like a heat in the air.

  "What are you doing, Anna?" he'd asked, standing at the edge of a blue-tiled pool filled with swampy bulrushes, while she and Ravi chopped up doors with a fire-axe and sprayed silver spray-paint onto the foggy windows in obscene designs. "What is any of this for?"

  "Did you follow us?" She snapped back. "It's none of your business what I do in my own time."

  "It's all my business. Tell me what you think you're doing."

  "Why don't you ask him too?" she pointed at Ravi. "He's doing it too."

  "I'm asking you, because you should know better. Do you think this is without cost, do you think what you're doing here is just good fun? It takes a cost on you, Anna. It takes a cost on the people who come here and see this. It's not OK to be like this. Everyone else is working to build, and you're out here doing this? It's bullshit."

  Just that brought her close to tears. She turned the tears to anger.

  "You can't talk! How many places did you wreck, how many people did you kill?"

  "That's different. You know it is."

  A sullen silence fell. Ravi set his axe down on the cement pool-side with a metallic clunk.

  "So what then?" Anna challenged. "How big a crime is this for you? Are you going to ask me to leave, like you sent away Julio?"

  His eyes went wide at that. She'd aimed for it. He'd sent Julio away two years earlier and she'd never forgotten. Go away and never come back, he'd said. Come back and there'll be bullets waiting.

  Julio had assaulted Masako. It didn't get far but it was enough, especially with his record.

  Amo opened his mouth to reply. Maybe he was going to say something about her father, about how he would be ashamed if he saw her doing this. She waited for it, hungry for it even, but it didn't come. Instead Amo just shook his head and walked away, and that's what made it sting the most.

  He'd given up. They hardly talked after that.

  She blinked and rubbed her eyes.

  "Sand," she said to Lara.

  Lara grunted. She was Anna's only through-line to Amo now. He'd been proud of her last year when she 'graduated' from the course they'd put together, focused on fire-arms, engineering, plumbing and other essential prepper survival skills, but he hadn't said as much to her directly. A nod was all. Lara had told her.

  "He worries," Lara had said, one evening when they weren't fighting and they just sat on the theater's roof looking out to sea, each drinking a beer. "He worries about you, and me and Cerulean and all the people still out there. I don't think any of us can really understand how much he worries."

  "I worry too," Anna had said.

  Lara had patted her shoulder. "I know you do, sweetie. I know."

  Things since then had only gotten worse.

  The sand buggy lurched right off the Vista Del Mar, up Culver Boulevard to the 1 then racing past the Marina Del Ray. Lara couldn't resist getting in another dig as the forest of bobbing masts went by.

  "You could have just pulled in here. I would've picked you up."

  "All right," Anna said.

  The 1 blurred through into Santa Monica, where at the edge of the beach Lara swapped it for Santa Monica Boulevard, long-since cleared of the road-clogging traffic they'd found it full of years ago. One of their earliest jobs, after ensuring basic survival amenities, had been to clear LA's jammed arteries. Most of the cars now rusted in broad parking lots, out of the way.

  Within ten more minutes they took the turn onto Westwood Boulevard, and within three were revving up through the entrance roads to University of California. Lara pulled up with a cough of dust and sand in the disabled parking space at the front entrance to the Stem Cell Research Center. Even the four-story brick and stone walls here were showing their age, with long discolored patches of damp.

  Lara leapt out of the buggy and Anna followed. Up the stairs and in through the open foyer they sped, cleared of gurneys and wheelchairs just like the roads. The rooms either side passed by like flashing postcards, back to the days they'd prepared all this.

  They'd salvaged the electron microscope from a research center three hundred and eighty miles northwest in San Francisco two years ago. It had been covered in soot from an old electrical fire and half the boards were damaged, but they brought it back with them driving at only twenty miles an hour the whole way down.

  Ever since then Jake and his team of self-taught engineers had been working on it, switching out boards from the other models they had when they could spare the time. Time and neglect had caused almost all of the parts they found to perish, so putting together a working whole was like a huge 3D jigsaw. It was a passion project and everyone had one. Alongside the yachting, this was Anna's.

  Sophia's notes, lifted from her grave/cairn back in Pennsylvania, had gotten them started on what equipment to use and what kind of samples to take. There was no shortage of desiccated zombie bodies to experiment with, lining the roads of Chicago and a dozen other cities where they'd dropped fresh cairns.

  With the electron microscope they'd finally be able to peer inside the zombie cell architecture, see inside their minds, and find out what the hell made them all shift, and why the hell they all upped and left in one mass emigration event.

  At the glass wall of their third-floor lab Jake met them, visibly trembling with excitement. His floppy black hair had thinned but he still had the boyish exuberance of ten years earlier, though now he was twenty-nine.

  He held out packaged white overalls and Anna and Lara took them and opened then up.

  "The ultramicrotome is up," Jake said. "The diamond blade is slicing at seventy nm, we can't get much thinner than that, but it's already provided stunning resolutions on clippings from my leather belt and one of Salman's beard follicles."

  Salman's swarthy dark face popped up through the glass and he waved. He was the closest they had to an actual medical engineer, as his job had been tech support for X-ray machines before the apocalypse. He always smelled of pickled onions. Anna waved hastily while shrugging into the overalls.

  Getting the electron microscope up had been just the final one of the challenges they faced in looking deeply inside the zombie brain. There was a vast pyramid of knowledge required that none of them had been trained for, and a mountain of infrastructure that had to be pieced together, with so many of the West Coast research facilities severely damaged by years of compounded earthquake damage.

  "We have some fresh samples on the tray," Jake went on. "Blood, brain, skin, spinal fluid from a careful lumbar puncture," here he nodded his head to A
nna, who had insisted that none of the ocean should 'die' for their experiments, "spun plasma, renal, vitreous humor from the eyes, heart scrape, cheek swab, spinal column fragment, you name it, we've got it, all diced as fine as a turkey roast."

  Anna tugged the sleeves of the overalls on then sprang forward and kissed Jake on the cheek. "So let's do it," she said.

  "Shoes and hair," Jake reminded. Lara was already kicking off her sandy sandals and stepping into white lab moon boots. Anna joined in, pulling the overalls hood up atop her frizzy dark cornrows.

  "Ladies first," said Jake, and opened the hermetic seal to the small glass airlock. Anna entered, and high velocity winds blew and sucked all the tiny particles off her, then a green light flashed and the inner door opened.

  She passed through and bounded over to Salman, who sat at a molded white desk with several screens inset, and a keyboard with a particle-blocking rubber mold covering it. By his side rested the electron microscope, a tall pillar of white metal and plastic that rose five feet off the white desk it was mounted to.

  She leaned over Salman's shoulder to look at the readout screen. "It's really online?" she asked.

  He laughed softly, then spoke softly, which was all he ever did. "Of course Anna."

  Lara and Jake joined them. It was cold in the lab, kept that way to help preserve the samples and keep the hi-tech gear functioning at peak capacity. Sweat from the rush to get here dried cold on Anna's skin and she shivered. This more than anything was what she'd been aiming at for years.

  Lara squeezed her hand and Anna allowed it. Jake moved forward to slide the first of his samples, a tiny glass tray with an infinitesimal slice of stringy brain cord on it, into the black plastic base of the electron microscope's tall pillar.

  "Like a rocket about to go off," he muttered, and eased the slide into the delivery slot. The mechanism took it in and rolled it the rest of the way, clicking the entry door closed.

  "We have lift-off," Salman muttered, as he dialed up the electron bombardment. Inside the microscope electrons spat out, into, and off the sample in a focused beam. An image began to cohere on the screen.

  "Well holy shit," Anna whispered.

  12. T4

  They'd taken hundreds of samples before and run them through optical microscopes. They'd already seen the vague beads of shrunken nuclei in every cell, the dark smears that had to be mitochondria, the thickened cell walls and the deep loss of plasma, allowing the cells to somehow run almost completely 'dry'. At that low level of resolution the cells looked essentially normal, but withered on the inside, just like the zombies were on the outside.

  There'd been so much for them to learn over the past ten years, and Anna in particular had sucked it all up. She'd studied as many samples as she could in hope of finding a key that could be unturned.

  She hadn't seen this though.

  On the screen the gray scale image presented a vastly exploded view of several brain ganglion cells, spread like ringed planets on a starscape littered with long fibrous hairs. Salman zoomed the image in, focusing on a single cell. It was beautiful and bizarre, if a little blurry.

  "Those are DNA strands, I think," said Jake, pointing to the thin hairs within the cell structure with a pencil. "Should those be there?"

  The image twitched then a second later vanished. Nobody else spoke for a moment.

  "Burned up," Salman said. "I'll bring it back from memory."

  The image came back to life and they all leaned in. Salman tinkered with the resolution and the dark dot of the nucleus came into finer relief. Anna pressed her face so close she almost blocked the screen. The image of the single cell twitched and shifted slightly as the second or two of footage they'd captured recycled.

  "What the hell are those things sticking out of the nucleus?" Jake asked.

  "It's not DNA," Salman said. "No helix."

  They all peered in. Encircling the shrunken central nucleus, there was an odd hexagonal blot. It had a stubby trunk, then six spidery legs that splayed off to the edges of the cell like lines in a spiderweb. At the end of each run on the image, the legs twitched inward.

  "Oh my God," said Salman.

  "They're definitely not DNA strands," Lara said. She was probably the least proficient of them all, had studied the least, but she said it first. "Those are the legs of a T4 bacteriophage."

  Anna stared.

  A T4 virus was a phage, or a bacteria killer. Typically it attached itself to any kind of bacteria with its six legs, bored through the outer layer with its screw trunk plate, then injected its own DNA or RNA in. Those bits of genetic information then mutinied against the bacteria's existing command structure and took it over, rewriting the host cell's code into producing milions of copies of the T4. The host cell would then explode, spitting out the virus' babies to spread out and strike again.

  They didn't attack human cells, Anna was certain of that. They certainly didn't climb inside them and encapsulate their nuclei.

  Jake and Lara muttered to each other. Anna just stared at the twitching image.

  There were no other features of a human cell at all. No ribosomes, no mitochondria, no Golgi or lysosomes, just the squat blunt head of the virus and its spidery legs spreading out. What they'd taken before to be cell features, via blurry optical analysis, now looked more like blotches of waste spat out by the virus as the end result of bacteriophagic consumption.

  It hit her in ways she had not prepared for.

  "That has to be a mistake," Jake said quickly. "It could be a freak moment mid-injection, or two layers are overlaid; maybe the ultramicrotome didn't slice properly. There has to be differentiation; something like this can't even exist in nature. T4 viruses don't cohabit inside human cells, they can't, they take over bacteria and move on. Anna..."

  "It's a cuckoo," Anna said.

  "We don't know anything yet," Lara said steadily. "That's one brain cell. We already know brain function moved to the spinal column in the year after the comas. We should expect to find something different there."

  Anna already knew. It was a sick feeling in her gut, and she knew.

  "It wasn't mid-consumption or layers," she said. Her voice sounded cold and sick, like she was vomiting up the reality she knew inside. "Didn't you see it twitch?"

  "That was involuntary," Jake said, "on heat-death from the electron burn."

  "Watch the clip," Anna said. "Slow it down please, Salman."

  He did. There were only a few seconds of footage and he slowed them threefold. They watched as the bacteriophage virus clenched its six legs in, pulling the cell walls toward the center.

  "It's protecting its nest," Anna whispered. "Contracting on death like a spider. You see that don't you? If that was standard injection it wouldn't pull in the walls like that. If it was mixed-layers the cell wouldn't react at all. Lara?"

  Lara said nothing. They stared at the screen, showing the frozen image from a millisecond before the layer burned.

  "It's completely new," Jake said. "We expected something new. It doesn't mean anything."

  His reassurance fell flat.

  "Let's see another slide," Anna said. "From the spinal column."

  Jake collected one. A button on the microscope ejected the previous burnt sample and he slotted in the new one.

  "Salman."

  Salman pushed a button. Electrons fired. An image popped up.

  It was the same: a T4 inside a cell where a T4 should never be. The image twitched then fried.

  "It doesn't mean-" Lara began but Anna cut her off.

  "Another one. Have we got slices from different subjects?"

  Jake pulled his gaze from the screen. "Uh, yes."

  "Can we see one please?"

  He snapped out of the daze and collected another slide. Eject, insert.

  "This is a lumbar spinal bone puncture: spinal fluid from another live sample. He's strapped down in the next room."

  The image came up. It was the same. The size of the cell was different, its conne
ctions to its fellows were different, but the T4 still hung there around the nucleus like a louse hidden under a rock, lurking, eating and making all the decisions.

  "Control sample," Anna said. "You've got a control?"

  Jake looked at her blankly.

  "From one of us. Non-infected. Hair, skin, anything."

  He snapped out of it. "Of course. Yes. What shall I…?"

  "Skin," Anna said through a dry mouth. "Load it up please."

  He did, eject, inject, click to lock. "This is from me, a skin cell."

  Salman played it. It was the same. Lara gasped and put her hand to her mouth.

  In the middle of a healthy functioning cell, with normal thickness cell walls and plasma, with all the essential cell features like mitochondria and lysosomes, squatted the T4.

  "Oh my god," Lara whispered.

  "It's in us too," said Anna. "Zoom in."

  They worked for hours, burning through sample after sample, building up a library of video clips and images. They barely spoke but for the surgical precision of requests from Anna to Jake. The only other sound was the shush of the extraction fans and the click of glass slides ejecting in and out of the microscope's hub.

  They zoomed in to the limits of the machine's resolution, they conducted stains and freezes and metallic overlays, teasing out the microscopic secrets of the zombie infection as best they could.

  "The telomeres," Salman said, looking at a cryo-fixed zombie eye cell. "They're capped with a protein chain I've never seen before."

  They all looked.

  "What the hell is that?" Lara whispered.

  "They don't age," Anna said. She was hardly looking anymore. Telemere strands were essentially cellular fuses that determined the lifespan of all living things. The longer the fuse, the more time a given cell could self-replicate. It happened with skin, with brain cells, with every bit of tissue in every creature on earth.

  "Zombies don't heal," Anna went on, dully. "They don't regenerate. At the same time they hardly need to eat. This is the reason. Show us one from a human sample."