Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  "Don't follow us," I answer, too fast, too easy. "Take side roads. Don't ever stop."

  Then Keeshom is there. A tall young man, a man who likes to knit to give his restless energy something to do.

  "I want to come too," he says, uncertainly. His voice is strangled, like he's fighting for control. "I'm not a doctor yet, but… You can use me."

  I look at him. I catch Lydia's arm. "You really have a doctor?"

  She rubs her eyes and nods.

  "Witzgenstein didn't take her, you're sure?"

  She shakes her head. Speech is too much for her now.

  Good. I nod at Keeshom. I nod at Lara. Her hand jerks up but doesn't reach as far as my cheek, then falls.

  I board the RV. I push through heaps of stuffed toys, each packed with plastic explosives. Feargal is there already, belting in a batch of rifles and ammunition, the metal making a series of satisfying, ratcheting clanks as they load. I almost miss a step in my fatigue and he moves to catch me, but I shove his hand away.

  Halfway down the RV I collapse into a booth. I can't keep my eyes open. I'm so deeply and completely tired.

  "Go," I call, as reality liquefies into darkness and the RV's engine rises like a sleepy summer's dust. "Go now."

  2. DARKNESS

  I'm in the Darkness with Cerulean by my side, and we're walking. Tall shelves on either side form a labyrinth of products that guide our path. The air smells of acetate plastic wrap and freshly pressed cardboard. Our synced diviners chime to direct us, and whatever it is, wherever it's stored, we get it.

  Bespoke waffle irons. Basin wrenches for amateur plumbers. A bundle of parachute ripcords. Three thousand Bit-coins on a gold-coin-shaped USB.

  Cerulean waddles along, a blue parrot with a pirate on his shoulder, and I am the me of twelve years ago, dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a long-sleeve white T-shirt, just like it always was. It's peaceful, so simple. Around us the sprites of my old colleagues roam; tall lanky Hank, round blue-haired Blucy, North Korean Bobby, traveling Linda. They trace back and forth over their old tracks like blind ghosts in a game of Pac-man, endlessly circulating.

  "You're worried about the end," Cerulean says. The white speech bubble hangs starkly over his head as we walk. "You don't know what's coming."

  "I'm worried about the beginning," I reply, though I don't know what I mean. The beginning of what, in this place that never changes?

  We walk on, fetching a large red RokShox power kite, a twin-pack of rare black Estonian truffles, a dozen pink power ties rolled into a tube.

  At the packing conveyor belt we deposit our pickings, and Cerulean turns to face me. Beside us the belt rolls on like a sad plastic stream, carrying our items on to Distribution at the far end of the fulfillment center.

  "We're the beginning, Amo," he says. He points at the diviners, at us. "It starts here. We get the order and we fetch it. We lay it here. There's nothing to worry about with us."

  I shrug. I feel the beginning of a distant unease, like something is becoming wrong in the world. A box rolls by and I catch an unpleasant tang off it; that empty kind of freshness like you get walking into a butcher's shop, the taste of cleaved bones and raw meat.

  The box's corners have damp rings circling them, and a furry patina of white mold has sprung up around them, like hair follicles sprouting on a recently shaved head.

  "What?" I ask, the word hovering in a speech bubble above me. I'm not listening, only watching the box receding on the belt. The damp patches look old and sour, like concentric rings of scum in one of LA's empty swimming pools, left to rot and mildew after all the water evaporated away.

  I blink, and already the smell is fading. The box is far off now along with all our pickings, and I can't help but feel glad.

  "I'm talking about the end," Cerulean says, and points one bird wing down the conveyor belt. I look into the depths of the dim warehouse, to the dangling plastic strips that hang from the ceiling like a flapping portcullis between the Picking and Distribution wings, beyond which I never went, which I never bothered to code.

  "There's no end," I tell him. "The center ends here. This is all I made."

  Cerulean smiles, and the sense of unease comes back. I never coded the Distribution space. "There's always an end," Cerulean says, his bird's beak somehow grinning, the yellow keratin warping like an image in Photoshop being skewed, and I flinch. "You just have to see it through. Come on."

  He drops the RokShox kite onto the belt, and the truffles and the business ties, and then he follows as they are carried away.

  "Come on," he says again. "We can't stay in one place for too long, remember?"

  I try to follow but now I can't, frozen by the illogic of a dream. My legs are paralyzed, my body won't move, and I realize I can't breathe. The unease ripens to full panic, then I'm no longer standing beside the conveyor belt but lying flat upon it, like just another package for delivery. I can't move, can't roll off, can't do a thing.

  "You'll see," calls Cerulean from up ahead. "Nothing to worry about, really."

  His speech bubble turns a sickly, mottled green, and the font turns a veiny red. The bad scent rises again, as brown cardboard walls fold up to my left and right. The same white mold furs them, spreading like radiation sickness, though now it wriggles, each little hair a living thing.

  Maggots drop down. The smell becomes a stink. I glimpse the gateway of plastic flaps nearing. "We'll be there soon," Cerulean says, folding the top flaps over and taping them shut, just as the soft meat of the maggots rises around me like an incoming tide.

  * * *

  I jerk awake, and for a delirious moment don't remember any of it. I am that old Amo again, the one whose biggest problems were talking to girls and watching movies and migraines that came in crippling twinges. Then reality returns, and those old miseries recede beneath a much fresher batch.

  I'm in Drake's RV and it's dark. The engine drones on and the booth stirs slightly, vibrating with the thump of the ten-cylinder engine. It's quiet apart from that, and the stirring burr of the road passing by below. A few red lights wink from appliances. Someone nearby takes a breath; I roll to see and my sides throb. I lift my arm and it rustles. I can feel the stiffness of fresh gauze wrapped around my fingers, which means they've tended to me. I must be covered in bandages. I touch my wrists; at least the chains are gone.

  In the aisle below, Keeshom lies on a makeshift bed of blankets. On the L-shaped chaise longue opposite lies a figure beside an A-frame of cut-black rifles. Feargal. I crane my neck. No voices come from the front, but the large shoulder of a tall, heavyset man is just visible around the seat back.

  No sign of Hatya or Lydia. They must be at the back end, together in the master suite.

  It's better not to think.

  It's better not to remember the things I did, the things that were done to me, but they come anyway, and I hear Drake's voice and feel Arnst's fists and the constant, belittling violence. Even when they weren't hitting me, they were hurting me. They were stealing my world away bit by bit; sucking down the belief of my people, squandering the reserves of faith I'd spent a year rebuilding, all for nothing.

  I blink and force logical thought to overwrite the pain; about dates and trajectories of Drake's arrival in the USA, about their journey across the country. They must have watched us for a long time, working with Witzgenstein throughout, but even as they were watching the bunkers were watching too. Even as Gap, Brezno and Istanbul were signing our treaties and delivering their research results to Anna and Lucas, they were planning for this.

  A nuclear bomb, dropped on all the world's survivors at once. I wonder at how many people the bunkers had to send out in suits before they laid hands on an intercontinental nuclear missile that was salvageable after twelve years of neglect.

  I shift in position in the bed. I don't have any anger to answer this betrayal now, just a sickness inside, like they opened me up and took something vital out. Nothing is mine anymore, not even my own body, and this is
the new way. Every inch I need to claw back.

  I sit up. It hurts. Keeshom at my feet mutters in his sleep. There's an eerie feeling of anticipation in the air, like the night before Christmas with all breaths held and everyone waiting for Santa, and I know what it is. They've been waiting for me.

  I roll to my feet.

  More bandages crinkle and creak; on my thighs, on my face. I'm unsteady but I pick a path round Keeshom and walk. Low blue running lights mark the route to the front, as if I might get lost. Arnst is at the wheel, and watches me silently in the rearview mirror. I hold his eyes for a moment only, then stop a foot behind him and look out the front windshield.

  There is grass on the road verge, dipped into by the headlights like a spoon scooping mint ice cream. We're not in the desert anymore, through New Mexico at least and heading into the Southern farm belt. Soon it'll be old plantation land as far as the eye can see.

  I slide into the passenger seat slowly, unwilling to tear any stitches Keeshom may have put into me. The leather is supple and cool through these cotton hospital-like pajamas they've dressed me in. Arnst is massive and fully dressed beside me, but I don't feel any kind of threat.

  He had his pleasure in Screen 2, when they couldn't break me until Lara did it for them, and now I'm going to have mine. I need to, because I need to be cruel. I need all the cruelty I can take.

  "How long?" I ask, my voice a dry croak.

  "A night and day," he says, giving away his Belgian descent with his lilting, unnatural English. He looks at the dash. "Twenty-eight hours."

  I look out. I work the distances. This is probably still Oklahoma.

  I turn in the seat to face Arnst directly. He looks at me, then back at the road. I just stare, looking at his face and his skin, every pore. I'd dreamed of punching it bloody, back when he was beating me to a pulp. Even now my face feels bloated and there are loose teeth in my gums. I won't be a looker anymore, if I ever was.

  He watches the road. He watches me. His eyes go back and forth. Eventually he stops checking and accepts me staring. He drives. Is this the first step in breaking a man, I wonder? Is this what it feels like in the beginning? I can taste it, the stirring excitement, the feeling of something important happening, something permanent. I can see how Drake could confuse this for a mission and a cause, how he could call it a religious experience and label himself Father to his holy Laws.

  I can see how the cruelty began.

  "Talk to me," I say.

  Arnst looks at me, looks away. He doesn't know. He isn't sure. He's been brave, he stood up at the rear of the convoy, but he's also been waiting all this time for me to wake. Looking over. Seeing my fists in Drake's hollow head again, smearing gray brain matter around like it was Play-Doh. Maybe he thinks I might beat him too, but I'm not so simple as that. That's no path to the good stuff.

  "What about?" he asks.

  I lean back, let my head touch the cool of the passenger-side window. I watch him. I close my eyes for a long minute and let him sweat. He won't ask again. He'll wait. I stand in that waiting. I pull it up around me like a nice new pair of pants, so I don't need to think about the other things; all the horrors we've left behind, all the horrors still to come.

  "Tell me about your children," I say. "Tell me about Drake. Tell me everything."

  He looks, looks away. He's nervous. He doesn't want to talk. He wants to be big and strong, sitting in the driving seat. He wants to be punched and take it like a man. He wants to refuse to answer unreasonable questions, he wants to show his resilience in the face of pain, just like me.

  But this is not unreasonable. This is the slow, quiet path to domination, and he can't resist, because he knows he needs me. If he wants to save his children, to keep them safe from the next nuclear bomb, he needs me. He wouldn't even know where to begin without me. This is why he's here at all. This is what he already knows.

  This is why he's afraid.

  "Tell me," I say, with the slightest edge in my voice, and he gives a little start, and he starts talking.

  I don't let him stop until the dawn.

  * * *

  We break at a gas station by a diner somewhere in rural Oklahoma, and I step out into the light, leaving Arnst pale and drained at the wheel. His voice was hoarse by the end, but he kept talking, telling me about his children and his wives, about Drake's laws and his little tricks to keep control, all the places they went and the dreams they'd built.

  The sun is baking hot and the dusty blacktop steams with evaporating dew. On all sides are tangled fields where thick, rusty wheat sheaves do battle with twelve years of rising sumac, straggly white cotton fluffs and drifts of disheveled yellow hay.

  The gas station itself is small, not much more than a white-painted shack with a rusted blue tin roof and two old-style fuel pumps out front. Beside one of the fuel pumps there's a red Ford pickup with a broken window, and a gray body lying on the concrete apron beside it, surrounded by dusty cubes of shattered glass.

  I've seen tableaux like it a thousand times.

  I lean against one of the pumps and take a breath of raw Oklahoma air, luxuriating in the sun's touch on my face. I haven't been out in the light for days. In back the women set up a line to pump fuel up from the tanks below. We didn't have time to stock up before New LA blew.

  "We need to talk," comes a voice.

  Feargal's standing behind me with an AR15 cradled across his chest.

  I look past him. Arnst is still at the wheel of the RV, staring vacantly ahead. I know how much he loves his children, now. It's funny, you'd think a man who could torture and take pleasure in breaking others couldn't love anyone but himself, but Arnst does. He's afraid he'll never see them again, and that fear defines what he's prepared to accept.

  Out of the side door comes Lydia, stumbling into the light. Little dark Hatya follows. Keeshom is already out in the grass, peeing into the fields.

  This is my team.

  I start away, striding toward the shuttered diner, and Feargal follows.

  "Let me explain, Amo," he says, and it's plain what this is doing to him; me ignoring him. He hates it. He's choking on guilt inside, and I know why. When Drake brought him in to Screen 2 on the second day, to see me there dribbling and spitting blood in the chair, humiliated and naked, he didn't do a thing. He didn't look at me, didn't speak to me, didn't help me.

  But this is not about a petty revenge. This is about what I need to be.

  I reach the diner door and smash the glass with a rock, put my arm through and turn the handle. The door swings open, and Feargal's right there at my back, saying something about Drake. I already see what's going to happen as if it were painted bright yellow on the faded diner linoleum, but I can't stop it. He won't leave me alone until it's done, and I don't know what else to do.

  "There wasn't any good choice," he says, following me in to the hot shadows and dust. "I thought maybe there'd be a chance down the line, maybe I could work change from the inside, I didn't know-"

  I turn and punch him sharply in the face. My knuckles crunch onto his nose and his head rocks back, forcing him a step away. The butt of his rifle slips loose and clacks loudly on the wooden floor, then his hands rise and vivid blood rolls between his fingers. His eyes widen in disbelief, more shocked than in pain.

  "Amo," he says, calling to some familiarity I don't feel, because I can't get past the things that I've done. I can't stand for him to look at me like I'm still some kind of hero, a great man worthy of his own myth, able to offer hope and succor to all, when I haven't got a thing left to give.

  "Please," he says, and that makes it worse. I step forward and shove him hard in the chest. He topples back awkwardly, hitting the floor on his shoulder, and I almost jump atop him like I did with Drake, grab his hair in my hands and start to hammer his head into the plastic flooring, because I can't stand to see that look in his eyes anymore.

  But I don't.

  "It's an acquired taste," comes Drake's voice, as Feargal shuffles a
t my feet. He whispers in my ear just like he did in Screen 2. "Victory, she's an unruly bitch. Hard to savor."

  I shake my head to clear it, because I don't want to hear Drake anymore, and this is not victory. This is not anything.

  "Amo," Feargal says, his eyes shining as blood rolls down his chin. "I'm sorry."

  On one level, I want him to shut up. I want to stop this farce now because his apology is no good; I don't want it and I can't take it, because it's me who should be apologizing to him, but I can't do that. It won't help with what's to come. Being soft with the bunkers, offering them treaties and trust, only led to this.

  I need to learn. I can't afford to let a single crack through or I'll lose it all. There's just too much ahead to buckle now.

  I stab a finger at him. Somebody cleaned the remains of Drake off my hands, but I feel him still, his thoughts making me cruel. "I told you not to come," I say, flat as a hammer's head. "I told you."

  I step over him and head out of the diner. I put him out of my mind. It doesn't mean a thing.

  3. THE LASH

  I tell Arnst to drive.

  He's sitting in the side booth when I return, clearly out of it, but there's no room for mercy now. His eyes are watery and his skin pale, sweating and weaving, and that's good.

  Keeshom's eyes harden. He's put himself in the driving seat, and I'm telling him to get up. Now perhaps he'll give me something to strike too, and I see the words forming on his lips, but he doesn't say them. He swallows them, which is good, and he moves. Arnst picks himself up; a man mountain, just like Drake. A sociopath born or trained, just like Drake, while he is my training. I feel Drake's voice in my ear, pulling my strings. This is what it feels like to break a man, he says. Push buttons. Pull levers. Make his spirit rip.

  Arnst stumbles over, bumping off a cabinet in the kitchen. Feargal boards the RV, T-shirt pressed to his broken nose, and watches Arnst settle into the driving seat with a kind of numb fascination. The ladies go to their room in back, too miserable to protest. Arnst rubs his eyes with the knuckles of his left hand and fumbles on the ignition with his right.