Lucas snorted. "Then why the raid? We're closer to the cure than ever. Put me back in my lab, with my team, and I'll have you out of the bunkers in a week."
Marshall gave a tight smile. "Our scientists have been working on your algorithms. As I said, enormous progress has been made, but it was judged the date for a safe, certain cure remained up to another decade away. I'm afraid we don't have that kind of time."
"Not a decade," Lucas protested. "Let me explain my work to your scientists; there was a breakthrough on the hydrogen line just moments before you raided us. Something was happening."
Marshall's smile widened slightly. "Something still is. The line has become unstable. I suspect you are feeling this, a pain in your head perhaps, or a lowering of affect."
Lucas did feel it. There was a sharp ache building behind his left eye, but he was not about to admit that. There were a dozen other things it could be caused by other than a change in the line.
"I'm fine."
General Marshall lifted a few fingers from their flat position on the table in an approximation of a shrug. "Is that so? No matter, then. Suffice it to say, work on the cure has been abandoned. It will not be taken up again."
Lucas tried to puzzle this out. Was this part of the strategy? "That doesn't make sense. I just told you, look at my data. I'm within days of formulating a cure. It's not genetic, or at least not hereditary, and not only that either. It's in the T4, a special breed with a unique sensitivity to the hydrogen line. It's so simple. All this time I've been trying to force the lock, when I should've been looking to change the key. I haven't thought about the line. It needs to be cured too."
The General watched him impassively. "Really, Lucas, we'd do well to move on from this subject. As I've said, the project has been canceled. The new mission is infinitely simpler."
Lucas stared. He'd been thinking about it for the last hours anyway. They'd already tried it once with the demons. Salle had tried it too.
"Wipe us out."
Marshall inclined his head slightly. "Not you."
Lucas laughed involuntarily. It was part panic, part mockery, and wild. So this was the play, but the purpose was still unclear. "Not me. But why save me? I'm useless for the cure, you've said it yourself, and I'm no good for anything else."
"I think we both know that's not true," said the General. "Don't we?"
He stared. Lucas stared back, feeling lost. Perhaps he'd guessed wrong. There may be no reversing this dynamic. There was only the hard choice left.
"You want me to help you with what, our radio codes? 'Military secrets'? I know precious little, but I'll die before I tell you any of it."
The General gave a sad smile. "Like you died to gain revenge on your MARS3000 colleagues? No, Lucas, I know what your promises are worth. You value your life too highly. You'll help because you want to, when you see what our new world has to offer."
Lucas snorted. It was time to push back. "A new world of genocide. Do you really think you can kill them all? Every one of them, even Amo, even Anna? You can barely even get to France in your helmets without dying."
Marshall lifted his hands from the table, not a fast or violent movement, but still it gave Lucas pause. It suggested violence. It implied the threat.
"You want to talk about genocide. Lucas, I seriously question the wisdom of your loyalty to the people who killed three thousand of your own. You're an intelligent scientific man; I cannot see how you have reasoned out this position. Amo's group number scarcely one hundred people, yet he has murdered far more, and you stand by him. Why? What makes this man so attractive? What allows him to commit mass murder and still retain your faith?"
Lucas shook his head. Marshall wouldn't listen that he followed Amo because he believed in the cure, because he wanted to save the bunkers in spite of everything they'd done. He wasn't here to listen, but to persuade, and Lucas wouldn't help him in that. Arguing would achieve nothing.
"You've got a file on me," he said, nodding at the clipboard. "Good. None of it is up to date. I know that the last time MARS3000 talked to you was before Salle took over, and that's eight years ago now. You think you can manipulate me, but you don't know a damn thing about who I am."
"People don't change."
Lucas laughed again, this time under control. "I changed at the genetic level. I was trapped like you. I lived in a bubble. Now I'm free."
"And you're so confident I'm not free," said Marshall. "So confident that your cure is the only way." His smile widened, then his hands lifted slowly to his helmet. His fingers found clasps recessed in slight dimples in the glossy material and flicked them; three on each side.
Lucas watched with mounting confusion. What was happening?
Marshall brought up his forearm and tapped through various menus on the built-in touchscreen, resulting in a satisfying click coming from within the helmet. His smile didn't change. He reached up and twisted the helmet. It slotted smoothly a few degrees to the left, then with a tinny hiss of gas lifted free.
Lucas stared. Marshall stared back. There was no darkened visor between them now, as Marshall set the helmet on the table between them.
His eyes didn't flare white.
His skin didn't turn gray.
He didn't become a zombie.
"The hydrogen line is changing, Lucas," he said. "You would do well to remember that."
Then he stood up and walked out, leaving the helmet behind.
5. CORN
WHOOSH
The first missile missed the stairs van by inches, left a ghostly trail of propellant smoke beside the passenger side window, and erupted fifty feet away upon impact with the road.
BOOM
The van jumped at the tremendous blast, the shockwave leveled the surrounding corn like a UFO landing site and dust billowed out to envelope them. Anna moved.
"Run!" she shouted, yanking Ravi awake and pulling him out of the van through the cover of dust. Two steps on she lurched off the road and into the dense ranks of wild corn and grass, dragging Ravi stumbling behind her. Five steps further in there was another whoosh and an enormous-
BOOM
That flung her flat to the ground like a whole-body slap, while a storm of shrapnel shredded through the undergrowth all around and the helicopter sailed by THUMP THUMPing overhead. She couldn't breathe for long seconds beneath the tidal wave of pressure and noise, her head spinning and the iron tang of blood on her tongue.
She cried Ravi's name and barely heard her own voice. Dust got in her nose and mouth and came out in hacking coughs. She tried to scrabble up to her feet but there was a dead weight on her legs. Wriggling numbly, she peered back through the curtains of corn as they swayed like waves under the helicopter's thumping onslaught, revealing the stairs frame blown drunkenly off the van and the front cab blasted open and burning.
The heat stung her eyes. Everything was happening too fast, too loud. She looked down at the dead weight on her legs and saw Ravi lying prone across her. His arms and legs were tangled amongst pale grass tubers and corn roots, while his back was torn up like a freshly furrowed field in Chino Hills, raked with lines where the van's shrapnel had struck. Gouges in his flesh filled swiftly with deep wells of blood.
Anna stared uselessly as the helicopter came THUMPing back around. Too fast. They wouldn't survive another missile. She couldn't think.
She dragged weakly at her own numb legs, tugging them free like senseless blocks of wood, then on her knees tugged on Ravi's outstretched arms. He only shifted an inch or two, and from his back spilled the dark reservoirs, rolling thick and slow like syrup. Anna fumbled to her feet and pulled harder, driven by a desperate urge to get him away, until-
RATATATATATATAT
The helicopter swooped overhead through the billowing smoke like a kind of fuzzy black god, thrashing the corn with a flurry of high-fire rate ordnance. Anna tracked its dark shadow until it stopped to hover near the burning wreckage of the stairs van, just visible through crevices in the corn jun
gle.
RATATATATATATAT PING PING PING PING it went as hot metal ricocheted off hot metal.
Anna strained at Ravi's weight, but his body was a deadweight she could barely shift.
"Come on!" she cried, and the helicopter inclined its blades and drifted closer. The overgrown corn flayed back under its thunderous downdraft, stalks snapping in brittle bursts of sap, until finally both she and Ravi were revealed like bugs beneath a rock. She dragged desperately on Ravi's arm to get them back under cover, but it did no good. A figure stood in the open cargo door manning a matte black Minigun, dressed in tactical black with a black-visored helmet, looking right at her and training the barrel in, then-
RATATATATATATAT
An arcing hail of stinging bullets punctured Ravi up the middle, slicing though his innards and burying themselves in the heavy clay soil with deep percussive THUDs, their heat sizzling off in the moist ground like frying eggs, just missing Anna. She fell backward into the corn with Ravi's torn torso tumbling after her, while the scything stream of bullets came swinging rapidly back around.
Ravi's dead face slapped against her chest, his organs strewed back through the buckling corn, and Anna realized that this was it. The black god hovered closer and she saw everything end, the walls came down and the ocean dried up; her body and her blood would fertilize the ground for future generations to till, alongside Ravi and all their dreams. RATATATATAT came the stream, and she closed her eyes to see her father in the darkness beyond.
RATATA-
The geyser of bullets abruptly stopped, leaving a terrible ringing that swelled beneath the THUMP THUMP. Anna opened her eyes, thinking she heard a faint popping sound through the chaos, followed by a tiny voice yelling from far away-
"Run, Anna!"
She opened her eyes and there was Ravi's torn upper body, and beyond it through a valley of cracked and buckled corn stems she saw the fiery chassis of the stairs van. Above it the helicopter rocked on a strange axis, sparking with incoming fire.
"Run," the faint voice shouted again, but she couldn't run, could only lie in the dirt and watch Ravi's blood soak into the ground. His eyes held open and his jaw lolled and it didn't seem possible that he was dead. They'd been planning their next match-up on the open ocean, her RokShox against his PowerBoat, and she'd been confident she'd crush him, because he was never any good at predicting random motion.
That wouldn't happen now, because he was dead.
RATATATATAT
THUMP THUMP
The helicopter stopped its wobbling spin and fired a blur of streaking bullets to the other side. Perhaps someone was shouting still, Peters or Jake, or perhaps they were already dead, but she couldn't hear them, couldn't hear anything over the RATATAT in her ears that seemed to say-
Ravi.
Ravi.
Ravi.
Her eyes fogged, because they'd been planning to make a baby. They'd been best friends since she became a teenager. They'd opened the Willamette Valley together. They'd-
RATATATATAT said the helicopter as it rattled away, and each RA was Ravi's name and each AT was her own, and it didn't-
She understood suddenly, with a fearsome clarity, that she was going to stay and die right here. Her fingers clawed stupidly at the earth, because this was where they both belonged. There was no good in fighting any more; it was over, especially if New LA was down. The helicopter moved away on its pummeling cushion of air that bowed corn and broke grass, running the others down, but that didn't really matter. It all seemed perfectly normal, part of a natural cycle she'd seen many times before.
The THUMP THUMP receded and the RATATAT scream of bullets became sporadic and choppy. Chasing up and down the field, she watched it go. First Peters, then Jake. First Jake, then Peters, then Anna too. Dear Jake, she thought, dear Jake. She didn't want to be the one to tell Lucas he was gone too.
She snorted, because of course Lucas was dead already. Everyone was dead. Warn New LA, he'd said, and she'd done no such thing.
Ratatatatat
Thump thump
She leaned forward and brushed her palm over Ravi's eyes, catching his eyelashes and closing them. That was better. Peaceful. Her clay-clotted fingers left smeary brown marks on his temples, but that was all right too. There was blood everywhere else.
She found she was on her feet, swaying.
She didn't remember standing. Through the black smoke spewing up from the van she watched the helicopter, far away down the field now, roaming randomly like a buzzing fly. Zigzagging. Spinning.
Thump thump
Ratatatatat
Maybe Jake and Peters would get away.
It wasn't a conscious thought, more a kind of instinctive reaction. If she'd thought about it, she would have realized it was impossible. What chance did they have against a helicopter?
But it was flying low. It was right there. It wouldn't see her coming.
She moved without thinking, starting at a brisk walk through the dense crop but climbing to a mad run, thrashing a path through the corn and grass, cutting her arms and hands up on sharp stalks. It was like swimming through the great Pacific garbage patch; always more green shot up before her, chafing and scratching at her passage, thumping at her shoulders with their fat, beetle-infested corn-teeth. Grass lashed her legs, her arms swept in front of her in a breaststroke through the green and gold, like her father had taught her to swim off Venice Beach.
Ha ha, ha.
Ratatat
Thump thump
She hit a wooden fence on her hip and rolled over it, tumbling onto her shoulder and into a heap. There she rolled to her knees and found her guns, still holstered at her waist; twin Glock 17s. The cool haft of each pistol felt reassuring in her palms. She knelt and waited, watching the sky through the swaying corn fronds while the black god circled, strafing with its fire, and as she waited her tears dried and the madness receded.
Anger took its place.
THUMP THUMP
RATATAT RATATAT
The god came closer, rocking sideways in tight backwash, spinning and spraying, and she waited. Stray bullets split the fence nearby into fragrant cedar kindling, and she waited. It went further, it came back, and she waited for the perfect moment, until it swung a fast arc overhead and hovered over the field corner post, facing back toward the column of smoke rising from the stairs van.
The THUMPing was beyond intense; it charged into Anna's head, so deep it felt like her past was impregnated with the noise of it, as if she would never escape this moment because it was the whole of her life. And she rode it. All her life she'd been at home on the ocean, rolling with the waves of the water and the apocalypse that followed, taking the reality that came her way and finding a way to blaze her trail through it.
This was no different.
She put one foot on the fence and straddled it, putting her head above the waves of corn, swaying in the strong downdraft, and leveled her Glocks.
The helicopter was so low and close now, hovering low above the tops of the wild crop scarcely twenty feet away, sending shimmering ripples across the surface like Cynthia skimming butter off churned milk. It was side on to her, in profile an immense and muscular beast, but she'd taken down bigger beasts before. Dozens of demons had come for her and she'd buried them all. Thousands had died at her feet.
The figure at the cargo door saw her. His Minigun coughed to life, slashing over to face her, but by that time Anna was already emptying the magazines in both her guns. The sound was nothing compared to the RATATATAT, but the recoil in her palms felt right.
BANG BANG BANG
She loosed seven rounds in a second, striking sparks off the lower bodywork and runners as the blade's powerful wind shunted her shots down. RATATATAT came the Minigun, and she adjusted and loosed another rapid eight rounds that glanced off the already-pitted Plexiglas cockpit, cracked through, sparked a suit chest-plate inside, then finally burst through the helmet of the pilot. He sagged over the controls, sending the streak of R
ATATATAT over Anna's head as the machine lurched away.
THUMP THUMP THUMP
The helicopter jacked upward as if caught in a skyhook, spinning and yawing drunkenly to the side, tightening into a mad and rising pirouette as RATATATAT ordnance sprayed out like celebratory fireworks. The THUMP THUMP grew louder, matched by a dreadful straining whine as the machine went mad, spinning in spirals so tight it almost rolled in mid-air onto its side. Smoke spat out from the top rotors as the whine became a grinding shriek.
Anna hopped down from the fence and advanced through the corn like a shark, both guns raised. She didn't shoot, as the helicopter fought with itself, as the body of the dead pilot was tossed back and forth on his controls and suited bodies leapt or were flung out of the cargo doors like black ballast, each flailing in the air before THUDding down to earth.
BANG
She plucked one through the chest as he fell. The others she let rain down as she closed in, unafraid of the black god's dying throes, feeling like an avenging angel. A last ditch effort at control sent the machine rising again but a crunching grind in its THUMP THUMP rotors failed, and it spat down more smoke in a dry rain.
Calmly, coolly Anna stalked it. Her own pain was forgotten now. Nothing mattered but that, and she was the huntress in the forest, she was Odysseus at the doors of hell, hammering for them to let her in, hammering to bring back the dead. The black god reached an outlandish height, like a whale beaching itself to die, where it sputtered and yawed wildly, this time unable to pull out of the roll. The blades chopped a staccato THU- THUMP -UMP THU- out of sync as the great beast twisted.
Anna didn't skip a step. The god hung high in the air a second longer, then one blade catapulted outward while another crumpled, and the top of the machine tore open like an old tin can as it rolled in mid-air and fell. Flames broke out and Anna fired as more bodies tried to leap clear.
Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash Page 5