"He can't drive," Feargal says at last. His voice is thick and nasal thanks to his nose. Keeshom frowns when he sees that. Fear. "We'll crash."
"So we crash," I say.
The engine starts with a rheumatic, frenzied coughing, like an old cancerous man hacking up his rotten lungs. This is the thick, sludgy fuel we've salvaged from beneath the gas station, all the volatile vapors boiled off. Any second, it seems to be saying, any second I might blow, though after a minute or two it settles down to a throaty chug. I lean back against the side window and close my eyes. Here at least I can relax, and put out of my mind the horror on Vie and Talia's faces.
"Tell me about your children, Arnst," I say. The sun on my cheeks is a delicious, burning balm. "Tell me their names. Tell me what they like to do."
We pull out, and Arnst's voice starts up again. "I have eight children," he says, sounding exhausted, sounding defeated. "The eldest is…"
I tune out the specifics, just enjoy the drone.
We drive.
* * *
Nine hours on and coming up on dusk, Arnst is speaking in a whisper. I know everything about him now. I know he loves his daughter Grimelda most, though he does his best to share his affections evenly. I know his favorite wife is Serbian Irinda, because of the sweet dimples in her cheeks when she smiles. I know all the efforts and extents he used to make to earn just one of those smiles.
I should stop him now, but I can't, because it's still not enough. I don't know when it will be. I have to go on until he fails, have to ride the horse into the ground, lash it on the dust, make it pay.
Dusk is falling and he sags over the wheel. The RV slows and I let it. He battles with his eyelids, blinking long and slow, straining toward the road. I watch and suck my pleasures out of it.
"That's right," Drake whispers in my ear. He runs a finger up and down my skull, tracing words I can almost catch. "Victory."
When Arnst finally passes out, it's a simple matter to reach over and take the wheel. I kick his foot off the gas, and the RV comes to a slow halt. I sit there for a long time looking at his big dumb face. This same face pressed close to my ear while choking me in Screen 2, whispering all the ways he was going to break my world, the things he was going to do to my wife, my children, to me.
They beat my body. They burned my comics. They stole my people. They devastated my dream long before the bunkers dropped their bomb, and now he gets his respite, but where's mine? He's lost nothing; he never had a home, never had a dream, while I have lost everything. I'll never sleep well again, for seeing his face, and what have I done so far but make him drive?
It's not enough and I don't know how it ever will be.
"He needs more," Drake whispers in my ear, caressing my head. So strange, I cracked his skull open and he strokes mine, but it feels good, like a twinge, like the only thing I need to do right now is recover. Those old days were always so clear, back when getting better from the coma was my only goal. Every day I bent all my efforts to it, pushing forward until I couldn't go another inch, until the twinges took hold and crushed me under their stifling weight. It was awful, but at least it was simple.
Arnst falls asleep at the wheel after breaking my world, and there's no more punishment for him. He tortures and he enslaves, he's a party to murder and rape, and what does he pay? The first flickers of a new rage bubble to the surface.
"Yes," coos Drake, "you're right, it isn't fair," but I don't need him now because I'm seeing it for myself.
I take Arnst by the scruff of his shirt and pull him off the seat. His huge body thumps onto the floor and shakes the RV. He only groans. I see Feargal and Keeshom watching me with alarm, Lydia and Hatya peering fearfully round the door of their bedroom, and bark an order.
"Get his legs." Feargal shudders, then moves. He's whipped now, an obedient dog. Keeshom takes longer, but he follows.
I take Arnst by the arms, and together we manhandle his massive bulk out of the RV. I don't do it gently, letting him crack off the frame, bumping his back off the stairs, until we get him out on the dusty road. I stand at his head and look back into the dying embers of the setting sun.
The RV is a streaky silver box on a dark river of road, this barren stretch of I-44 an hour or so east of St. Louis. Four lanes of asphalt flanked by dark green oak and pine forest, surfaced with dark clay dust, and me.
They're standing there now, wondering what to do. Arnst lies unconscious and they're all wondering.
Things harden inside.
I've always been soft, and I know it. Maine nearly broke me. I could never have done the things that Drake did, and that's why I'll always lose. It's not enough that we got lucky, that Lara's vision somehow bailed us out. I need to change what I am.
A partial quote haunts back to me, heard I don't know where or when, but fitting for this moment. 'Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be repaid by another drawn with the sword.' It sounds Biblical, or maybe something Lincoln said about slavery.
Either way it's perfect, though I don't have a sword. Maybe if Don was here. I almost laugh.
"That's it," Drake whispers, "yes," and I do start to feel it. If I strain hard, if I listen with all my being, I begin to understand. With my enemy at my feet, my people before me cowering and afraid, I do start to feel it.
A wild and fearsome joy.
The pleasure of crushing down. I catch tears in my eyes and turn them to bile. I take this weakness and burn out its eyes, until finally it sees that being Amo will not work. Offering love and hope will not mean a thing if we cannot first survive, which leaves only one way left to go.
My hands move to my belt.
"No!" calls one of them. Hatya, the quiet one. My gaze finds her and she shrinks. I look into her eyes as I undo the buckle and slide the smooth, sheer leather band from its loops. She knows this, I think. She's felt this before.
"You can't be serious, Amo," says Keeshom, staring at me in disgust. Now he sees it too, now he believes that maybe it was me who sent Lara off into that cornfield at Chino Hills. Maybe I'd hit her, maybe I'd put her in the fit from the start. Maybe everything they've said about me for so long is true. Mass murderer. Liar. Manipulator.
I grin.
"Step up," I tell him. The setting sun turns the sky to ash and blood all around, so it feels like we're back in the shadow of the great white eye, washed by the rain of cinders, fogged by that hellish, stifling heat. "Step up and see."
He gawks, and turns to Feargal, but finds no help there. Feargal hangs his head. He was beaten by Drake and now he's beaten by me, and good.
"Good," soothes Drake at my back, giving me strength. "Very good."
I stare at each of them, willing any one to step up and stop me, and with every second passing the anticipation grows, the wild joy thickens, and I'm right here in the thick of it. I should have done this a long time ago, to Witzgenstein and Julio, to Don and the Maine bunker. Hope is nothing next to strength. The lash is all that matters.
I raise my arm over Arnst's still body, holding the lash, and they gasp. Hatya burrows her face in her hands but I can't allow that.
"Open your eyes," I tell her, but she won't. "Open them!"
She doesn't.
I look at Lydia. I look at Keeshom. I settle on Feargal.
"There'll be a chance down the line," I tell him, aping his own excuses. "You'll work change from the inside out, later. But for now, I need you to open her eyes."
He looks at me with pleading, and I meet him with my wild grin. Screw his pleading. Screw it right to the sticking place, and let's have at it, boys, let's get it done. "Now."
He buckles. He moves behind Hatya and pulls her hands away from her face. He forces her eyes open with his fingers. He doesn't say a word but she shrieks, and there I am, triumphant before them with the belt raised. The real man. The great man, and it feels…
Drake presses himself to my skull like a purring cat. "This is nothing," he murmurs, just like he did in Screen 2. "There's far, fa
r worse to come."
He's right. I have to be ready.
It feels amazing.
* * *
I drive through the night.
Nobody talks. The women comfort each other at the back while Keeshom tends to a feverish Arnst. Feargal vomited once, now he sits in the dark with a rifle in his hands, rocking back and forth while the stale stink wafts all around.
I don't know what I've done.
Drake sits in the passenger seat beside me, just like Cerulean once did. His head is broken open and oozing.
"Victory's not for everyone," he says.
I ignore him.
"Only the strong. You've heard that expression. It's not a Brit thing, is it?"
"I think it's in Rocky," I say softly.
Drake laughs, and reaches out a fist for me to bump. I don't bump it, but he doesn't seem upset.
Missouri passes by in the dark. All these states start to look the same, once you turn out the lights. Endless darkness reaching out to nothing; a dark continent.
I don't remember what happened.
"Ah, mate," Drake says, reading the uncertainty in me. He lolls forward attentively, and an eggshell sliver of bone rocks in the bowl of his skull like a dashboard bobblehead. "Lighten up. Enough with the self-analysis, already. You take everything so seriously. It'll come back to you. You either did, or you didn't beat a defenseless, helpless guy half to death. You may have made a bunch of weak-willed men and women watch. So what?"
He laughs. I can't help but snort a little too. It does sound bad.
"If you did, he'll heal. And he did worse to you. We both did worse to you, and look what I got?" He points at his wrecked head. "I got the short end of the stick on that, right?"
I laugh more freely. He leans back in his seat and sighs. "And if you didn't, no problem. He's just tired. There's a long road ahead."
I mouth the words along with him. A long road. When I next look over, he's not there anymore, but someone else is. Someone I know well. A young black man with short dark hair, just looking at me.
Cerulean.
I don't have anything to say to him, and it seems he has nothing to say to me, either. He just wants to look, and that's fine. Looking is free, just like I looked at Arnst while he watched the road, though it does get uncomfortable. A shudder passes over me, and that sense of something wrong creeps up again, like in the dream. There's even a faint tang of souring meat in the air.
"I don't know, Robert," I say finally. "I don't know what I did. What should I have done?"
He just stares.
"It's not like whipping is a new punishment," I go on. "It used to be common. They put people in stocks, they hung them, they quartered them like Guy Fawkes, and what else could I do? We've tried banishment, but they always come back. I can't imprison people, not before and certainly not now. I could've killed him, but that's a crime too, when I need him. This is wartime."
He just stares. It makes me feel like laughing. There's something very light and airy in my head, like I'm the one with no skull top instead of Drake, like there's nothing but air above me.
"Come on," I say. "Lighten up."
"Don't lie to yourself, Amo," he says, at last favoring me with words. "He's no threat, and that wasn't punishment. That was something else."
I shrug. "All right. There's things I have to do, and he's my training. So what?"
"So don't enjoy it," he says.
I do laugh at that, a raucous bark that makes Keeshom jerk violently in his sleep. "Not enjoy it? Jesus, Robert, when did you become such a bleeding heart? You're the one who thrashed Julio, and you're telling me you didn't enjoy that? I saw the look in your eyes afterward. You were wild."
Robert keeps on watching me. I laugh some more.
"Robert," I say, wheedling like Drake, "old buddy. Come on."
"Not like this, Amo," he says, and I notice that he's speaking without moving his lips, which is a good trick.
I smile. "I don't know any other way."
"You're just afraid," he says. "Of the end. Of what's coming."
The sour smell grows stronger, stinging my eyes. I try to blink it away, but there are flashes of the fulfillment center in the darkness behind my eyelids.
"What are you doing?" I ask, but Robert just watches. I try to keep my eyes open, but like Arnst before me I'm fighting a losing battle with the Darkness closing in, and-
I'm back lying in my sealed cardboard box on the conveyor belt, rumbling along with white spores drifting in the air and maggots worming at my elbows, tumbling toward Distribution. My only connection to the outside is Cerulean's voice, but I can't read it from here, can't see his speech bubbles so I don't know what he's saying.
"I won't be there at the end," I shout into the cardboard, spilling all my plans. "I'll be dead by then, long dead, so what does it matter?"
The box rustles as it passes through the portcullis of hanging plastic flaps, then there's a cold that cuts through the cardboard and into my bones. The white spores flash and grow before my eyes like bacteria reproducing in a drop of water, then the box rocks and tilts.
I cry out as it drops off the end of the belt, but there's no one to catch me, and I fall. I scream and tumble, and down below I know something terrible waits, something worse than all the rest, and all I want in the world is to not see it, to not see that end and to just die before it comes, but-
ANNA
4. BLACK HAWK
Anna, Jake, Ravi and Peters fled north.
The stairs van rattled and groaned, running low on gas, but there was no time to halt and resupply. There was only the endless rush of their tires on the uneven grassy road, the occasional rough swerve it took to swing around a zombie body lying motionless in the weeds, and the white static hiss of the radio reciting the emptiness from Istanbul.
Anna stared and drove and stared, because there was nothing to say. The ocean had collapsed at a terrible, shocking signal through the hydrogen line. Something enormous had changed, and at the same time Istanbul had fallen, and surely New LA was next.
If the attack hadn't already come.
She shifted gears and her wrist smacked into Ravi's knee for the dozenth time, crammed in beside her, but he didn't seem to notice. He was reading a map; the paper folded out and spread over the dashboard. Nobody knew what was coming. Not even Jake knew for certain if their signals could still be read, if the bunkers could track them, but-
"Here," Ravi said, tapping the map. "There's a weapons silo in an Air Force base. We scouted it when we resupplied a year ago. Guns, mortars, the works. We could strap artillery to the stairs and charge at them. Stairway to heaven."
Anna looked at him and he grinned guiltily, which was strange, because it wasn't the time for making jokes. Yet he was almost giggling at the outlandish suggestion, and even Anna felt a little like laughing too. She imagined the first few bars of Stairway to Heaven, crooned out by Ravi as he stood atop the charging van, letting rip with an artillery fusillade, and…
She caught herself drifting with a slight twitch to the wheel, setting them back on course. Ravi let out a little chuckle, as if crashing the stairs van would just be another good joke.
That wasn't right. Anna blinked and focused, though concentration was hard and her mind seemed to slip and slide around the question. Of course they were exhausted, they'd been up for days without any real rest, spiraling the ocean and the demons in, watching them waterfall down into the Bordeaux bunker, but she'd been exhausted before, and this was different. It was something else, something new.
"Jake," she barked. "What's going on with the line?"
He roused slowly from a fugue by the door, crushed in next to Peters and lost to staring out of the grille-window. Probably he was thinking about Lucas, about where he was now and if he was even still alive.
"I- what, Anna?"
"The line, what's going on? You said it was some kind of blast?"
"Yes," Peters answered for him. "I am certain. It was very powerf
ul."
Anna nodded, trying to maintain control of her own thoughts, but her head felt strangely airy, like there was too much room in her skull and her brain was bouncing off the walls like a Ping-Pong ball.
"What do you feel now?"
"I have been thinking this too," Peters answered. "There is a not usual feeling. Like drunk, perhaps. Like I am drugged."
Anna had been drunk plenty of times before, especially in the last few years with Ravi. It was mostly good, but there was also that swirling sense of disconnection, the little taste of vertigo when you lay down and tried to go to sleep. This feeling was a little like that, like a warping lens between her mind and the world. "I feel the same. It's hard to concentrate. Ravi? Jake?"
"Like things don't matter so much," Jake said. He was back looking out of the window already, speaking in a far-away voice. "Like things aren't real."
Ravi patted Anna's hand supportively. "We'll figure it out. We always do."
She frowned. That wasn't the question. "But do you feel it?"
"Oh," he said. "Yes. I feel something. Sleepy, mostly." He grinned.
"Jake, can you explain any of this?"
He turned and looked at her for a long moment, while the van rushed through a gently thwapping stretch of tall grasses, and Anna thought she may have to explain again, but slowly he focused on her.
"Yes. I think we're looking at some kind of global shift in the hydrogen line."
"Global? What are you talking about?"
He took a moment, as if winding himself up for a big speech, then only let out a heavy breath and looked at Peters.
Peters nodded, as if it was only natural for him to pick up on matters of hydrogen line physics. "I felt it from the west, Anna. Like a gale, it blew through me, but familiar. It was like Amo, like Lara, like they were standing near to me but not, because there was another."
Anna grimaced. "Matthew Drake."
"Perhaps it was. It was a corruption. The line is not what it once was."
Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash Page 3