Sometimes I just sketch until Drake comes by to talk to me. Sometimes I glimpse others round the edges of my vision, fleeting sightings of Hank and Blucy in the Darkness, even Cerulean stalking silently by, but they don't come to see me any more. Sometimes I stand on top of my yacht and it's like being back on the Iowa Yangtze center, when first I was drawing my comics, surrounded by an ocean of corn. My old colleagues left me then too, a mad captain on a mad comic book ship, and things haven't changed so much.
"You've matured in your madness," Drake says. "This is a rare vintage."
I drink whiskey and roam the yacht, letting my madness swell out like a cloud of black light. Once I read a book about a man who was followed everywhere by a pillar of night, and this feels like that.
"This is the real weapon," Drake says, reclining on my bed. Now his head is split open again and leaking gray onto the sheets. "You know that, don't you? None of this drone bullshit."
"Come on, we talked about this." I point at his brain juice on the sheets, trying to be reasonable. "How am I supposed to sleep there now?" I hustle over and start stripping the bed.
"Amo."
I stop, because that's Feargal's voice. I turn and see him there behind me, sneaking up again, and looking at the walls where my sketches hang. His eyes look, and I can understand how it seems. It is a lot of sketching. It probably doesn't help that the floor is also coated in thousands of screwed up rejects.
I drop the bed sheets.
"Feargal."
"What is this?" he asks. "What are you doing up here?"
I look back at him. "Making plans."
His expression doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe this is disbelief becoming terror. Maybe Drake was right. "This is your plan?" He waves a hand. He kicks at a drift of crinkled paper. "This grade-school shit?"
I clear my throat. "It's actually quite complex," I begin, "if you'll just let me-" but he cuts me off.
"I followed you out here. I thought you had a plan, but this? It's-" he's lost for words. Is this hope failing? God knows what he thought I was doing up here other than sharpening my madness.
"I know it doesn't look like much-" I begin, but he cuts me off with a mocking laugh.
"It's nothing! Amo, we're going to get killed. I thought you had a plan! We did all those things because I thought it was necessary, but…"
He tails off. What things, I want to ask, but then he picks back up.
"This is just crazy. It's not even a PowerPoint. Shit."
So the last bits of hope drain out of him.
"I think he needs another dose," Drake says. He nods in the general direction of Feargal. "Come on."
I have no idea what he's talking about. Dose? "You mean, hit him again?"
I say it out loud, and Feargal sees, and it makes him crumple more.
"Of course not hit him again," Drake says. "Dammit, Amo, do I have to do everything myself?"
I'm not so sure what's happening as Drake approaches Feargal. His feet don't rustle in the autumnal blanket of papers, but the air shimmers with black light and Feargal wavers on his feet.
What?
"Amo," he says, as Drake walks behind him. "If this is really it, then we need to go back. We can get Lara, Crow, some of the others. We won't take a single bunker like this, not when they're ready to fight, when they've obviously got access to nuclear weapons."
Drake takes up position behind him.
"It's OK, Feargal," I say, half-heartedly. "I know it looks bad, but it's to a purpose."
Drake lays his big hands on Feargal's shoulders.
"What purpose, Amo?" Feargal asks.
"I-"
"What purpose?" Now there's anger spiking through the misery. "You're not the man I thought you were. Shit. What's left?"
He turns to go.
"Enough of this," says Drake, and pushes down on Feargal's shoulders. Feargal goes right down to his knees, but doesn't say anything. I frown because I'm not at all clear how Drake can do that, especially with me standing here, since Drake is really me after all, but Feargal doesn't respond. He just kneels.
"Watch," says Drake, and leans over Feargal, and it takes a second before I realize what is happening. It looks like Klimt's The Kiss, with Drake holding Feargal's head in his hands, folding it back so his neck is open and exposed, popping his mouth open so-
"No," I say, a second before it happens.
Drake places his lips around Feargal's, his back and shoulders convulse, then he vomits. The seal round their lips is tight but still I see it. The stuff that passes between them is black. Drake's back huffs and Feargal beneath him inflates, then it's over.
Drake straightens up. Feargal sags for a moment, then straightens too. He gets back to his feet and looks at me.
"I'm working on my drones, Amo," he says, as if I'm the one bothering him. His eyes are tinged slightly black and don't seem to see my sketches. He's not angry any more. Instead he turns and walks out, leaving me with a beaming Drake.
I look at him, realizing something important. "You've done that before."
"And you've said that before," Drake answers. "We've had this conversation many times. Will it stick this time?"
I'm not sure, but there is a familiarity there. It must have been two weeks since we left New York, but time is a soup behind me, full of flotsam. Haven't I always been here, working on my sketches? Or have I been somewhere else?
"We need to talk," says Drake. "About this. About lots of things. But most of all, about Arnst."
11. ARNST
Drake leads and I follow, out of the madhouse and down to the deck where Feargal is squatting over a pile of brass shell casings. They look like 5.56mms for his AR-15. A mid-sea breeze washes over him like a puddle on the blacktop.
"Flying guns," he says absently, as if nothing in the room above just happened. "It'll give us the upper hand."
He talks like a robot, not really looking at me.
"Sure," I say. "Over nuclear weapons."
He turns his blank gaze to me. There's something wrong with his eyes.
"You wouldn't look right either, if someone puked black light down your throat," Drake says. "Come on."
I peel myself away and follow Drake. He takes us along the bow of the ship, a 220-foot explorer yacht named 'Wanderer'. Once it was owned by a pro-baseball player, apparently. He kept a helicopter on the deck where Feargal's now stripping shells out of magazines with a satisfying clink clink clink, like peas from their pods.
At the rear hatch we take the stairs down into the fever swamps. An ample living space opens out before me, well-lit via Plexiglas panels in the deck, at least twenty feet across. There's a dipped den area with a square of chic gray sofas, a faux fireplace, a space for a twelve-setting dinner table, and a svelte bar area with bright multicolored stools. I try to imagine Drake's brood of fifty children and ten adults hunkering down in this space at night.
"There are seven bedrooms as well," Drake says. "No need for the First Law program to halt because of a trans-Atlantic journey."
I laugh, then stop when I see his face and realize that, of course, he isn't joking.
"This way."
The air gets thick and noisy as we pass through the living space and down a beautifully appointed corridor past a number of bedrooms. At the back end of the ship we take a tight spiral staircase down, and the air gets thicker still. I know why, because the women are down here. Arnst is down here, and he's a real sticking point in my thinking.
The sound of the engine grows louder. Down here it's the servants' quarters. The rich hotel-like décor is gone, replaced by narrower and darker corridors, with pipes sticking out of walls and tiny hutch-like rooms off to the side. A pantry, a kitchen, a room full of explosives crates, a room full of drone boxes.
I feel like I'm on the conveyor belt again, moving along with no control, trapped in my cardboard box. There are no maggots and mold, there's no blue parrot Cerulean, but the damp tang of rotten meat is still there in the air.
I stop, disgusted.
"Why are you stopping?" Drake asks. As his outer lips move, so the inner lips of the person inside him move too, though slightly out of sync, leaking a reddish juice from the layers between, like pulped tomato.
"You've got a person in you," I say.
He laughs, spraying flecks of red onto me. I brush them away and they hit the floor as wriggling white maggots, which I crush under my boots.
"Come on, Amo," he says. "Heart of darkness time."
"I think I'll go back upstairs," I say. "It's so airy."
His lips curl in a grin, and two sets of teeth blink at me from within, like a shark's. The outer layer is slipping more as whatever's inside him grows larger.
"You've done that three times already. We'll be in France in two days. There's no time for another pass."
"Even so," I say, because it's cold and rotting down here. The longer I stay, the closer I feel to the dream of the Yangtze center, to the Distribution area plastic curtain, and it makes me writhe in my skin. Perhaps there's a hidden person inside me too, waiting to crack my skull and seep out. I'm out of my depth, I don't know what I'm doing. "I'll take my chances with the drone-carried AR-15s."
"Don't be a coward," Drake says, reaching back to seize my hand. Even his forearm is splitting, revealing a red arm inside. "Man up."
I chuckle nervously. I feel sick. "We're going to see the girls," I say, like I'm persuading myself that's all this is. "I can do that."
"Sure," Drake says. "The girls."
We walk on and the back of his head slits open down the back of his neck and under his shirt. I gag. "You're not looking so good," I manage.
"That always happens," he answers. "Come on."
We reach a door, which Drake opens, and the heat and noise of the engine room slaps out. I peer in to a grimy, dark space engulfed with pipes, lit by a few dirty portholes and a halogen lamp in the corner, with the two baking metal engines blocks. Two hammocks hang on the walls, but there is no sign of Lydia and Hatya in them.
I look around. "Where are they?"
"Must have gone up for a spell," Drake says casually, which sends another shiver down my spine. We just came down by the only route, and looked in every room.
"Not every room. Plenty of toilets we didn't look in. Maybe they were hiding among the drone boxes."
A cold flush shivers over my skin, and I look down to see my own hands are starting to split, along seams that mirror the bones within.
"Shit," I mutter, though it doesn't hurt. I bring my left hand up and study the slit, like a fault line through my palm. The skin that lies beneath looks black.
"Keep moving," Drake says, and shoves me from behind. "This way."
I clatter down the bare metal steps, through the heat and fog from the engines, though I'm trembling with cold. I stagger on while my forearms split and even my chest begins to peel. "What the hell is happening?" I whisper.
"Transformations don't come easy," Drake says, and prods me forward, circling round the throbbing engines. I see dark palm marks on the walls, as if left by black-ink zombies hammering to get out. Perhaps they were. "Come on. Arnst is along here."
I keep on, as beneath my clothing my thighs and back start to split. Dark trails of black liquid soak through my jeans, leaking out around my shoes and leaving oily flowers on the metal floor.
"Where? There's nothing here."
"There." Drake points at a curtain of hanging plastic strips across the back wall, where the drive shafts lead through the hull and out to the propellers. I stop dead, because I know they shouldn't be there, not in this place.
"It's the way to the med bay," says Drake, grinning a twin grin. He takes my hand and pulls, and away comes the skin like a paper glove, revealing vivid black tendons and muscle beneath. My heart hammers hard.
"What is this?" I ask.
"What you are inside," says Drake. "Just how enormously special you are."
I pull back my shirt sleeves and peel tentatively at my forearm, where the skin tears away easily, revealing a fresh black limb beneath. I gag.
"Oh God."
"Not yet," Drake says, "through the curtain, first."
He kicks me from behind and I stumble forward. The sour stink of maggots and rot fills the air, damp stains flash up on the walls, then I'm tumbling into the Distribution curtain, black arms outstretched, and-
I fold through.
The plastic strips trickle over my body like jellyfish fronds, and I don't hit the hull, or chew into the propellers on the other side, instead I land and roll on an uneven gray surface that stretches on in every direction, that shifts slightly as I come to a halt and look down to see that-
It's bodies. Thousands of gray bodies.
My knee rests on the surface of a squashed face. My hands rest on curled limbs and liverworted backs. I jerk away and back, wheeling around to take this new place in, and I see that it's an ocean of the dead. They are everywhere, in their thousands, in their millions, all frozen with their limbs and bodies interwoven, shaped into the rutted peaks and troughs of static waves.
I lurch to my feet, as if the extra few feet distance from this mass burial event will save me, even as Drake advances from behind. His head is fully split now, and his outer skin unravels down his sides like a too-big set of clothes. Underneath he is all red, like a demon.
I backstep rapidly, my ankles rolling on the uneven surface, until I stumble on a box.
I turn and catch myself on it, a large cardboard box out in the middle of the ocean, packed with familiar duct tape showing the company's logo.
A Yangtze box.
I didn't see it a second earlier. Now it's here, and as I watch more come, up from within the ocean like square brown bubbles, forcing the bodies to fold and shift to make room.
I stare.
They come in all shapes and sizes, burping up with the rustling of old cardboard on dry flesh, building into heaps; little boxes for DVDs and books, medium ones for protein bars and hand drills, big ones for handheld leaf blowers and backyard trampolines. They rise higher as I gawk, climbing until they loom overhead like the canyon streets of New York, like a maze that blanks out the ocean.
Drake advances through the weave of them easily.
"Every delivery you ever made," he says, his head now entirely that of a demon. He is huger than ever, and redder. "Dropped into nothing and left there amongst the dead. Welcome to Distribution."
"I don't-" I say, trying to understand. Everywhere there are boxes now, and do I remember any of these? With Cerulean I packaged thousands of items, whatever the diviners told us to fetch, and in the years that followed the apocalypse I went back to the Darkness many times, seeking calm, seeking a quiet place to think for a time. I packaged blenders and skipping ropes, devil Halloween costumes and little headphone packets, and maybe they're all here.
A city of my unreal deliveries. I tilt my head back and look up to the sky, but there's only darkness. So this is what Distribution looks like.
"Yes," the Drake-demon says, "Distribution, a place where the empties go. If we look hard enough, we can probably see some real people amongst all these zombies." He scans the frozen waves. "There, I think I see …"
He points and bounds over on his too-long legs. I just stand, taking it in, thinking that I'm really going mad.
"Gone mad," Drake corrects without turning. "We're well past 'going'. Take a look at this."
Despite myself I take a step forward, and my ankle twists on someone's ear. I mutter a quiet apology and stumble sideways onto a shoulder.
Drake laughs at me. "You think she cares? Maybe when you killed her she did. Now she's just blacktop. Paving stones for us to walk on. Come see this. I found Dr. Ozark."
Dr. Ozark? I remember him.
"He died on the r
oad out of New LA," I say faintly. "When the demons were coming."
"There's always demons coming," Drake says. "Look at his giant red head." He holds it up, like a big red apple, but I don't look. I study the boxes, trying to find balance in that.
"Balance?" Drake sneers. "Is that why you think I brought you here? Wake up and smell the genocide, Amo. This is real."
"So where's Arnst?" I ask, pushing back. "Where's Keeshom? You said they were down here."
The Drake-demon laughs. "You haven't got a clue, have you, Amo? Ah, you're so innocent still." He takes a step out of the Drake skin, which stretches like rubber to the floor in a slapping, wet pile. "Let's do something about that."
He kicks a box in the nearest wall of brown, and it flies backward as if on rails, receding into a black tunnel with a light at the end. "You first," he says, then kicks me forward, and I duck just in time to fall on my face into the tunnel. At once the bodies underfoot grab me and propel me forward, like the conveyor belt in the fulfillment center, but made out hands and feet. The Drake-demon slots in behind me and kicks me again so I tumble faster, rolling on the rolling ocean, boxes flying by either side in growing darkness, until I emerge onto-
A road, in a desert, in the night.
Headlights illuminate a body by my feet. Arnst.
I'm there too. I see myself, standing over him with a belt in my hand. The others stand opposite; Feargal holding little Hatya in position, forcing her to watch. Keeshom bites his lip and blood rolls down his chin. Lydia's eyes are wide with fear.
"It's quite a tableau," the demon says.
I'm back. I've blanked this out, but now I'm here.
"I don't know what happened," I say.
Drake stands over me. "Stop whining. You're about to find out. Watch."
I look up, and the figure of Amo strikes a terrifying figure. There's Drake's blood on him still, making him cragged and cruel, whitewashed in the headlights, with a kind of crackling nimbus of black energy swirling around him.
Then the tableau spools to life. Amo pants and I hear his breathing. The belt wavers, the buckle sparkling in the white light. Hatya struggles and Feargal grunts as he holds her. Keeshom hums with tension.
Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash Page 13