Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  Feargal goes to ready another, but I hold out a hand. I feel something changing on the wind, something on my skin. I didn't feel it earlier, but there's something out there that reminds me of Salle Coram in her suit, standing over the Maine bunker and explaining the responsibility she was leaving to me.

  It's a hollow shape on the line, like noise-canceling headphones, like white noise pouring out into the radio spectrum, but it's there and I feel it.

  It has to be helmets. The boat THOCKs closer over the waves and the signals resolve more clearly, a string of empty pockets in the air, like the strange tingle of passing down into the bubble of the Maine shield. The harder I focus the more clearly I can feel them, shifting across my skull in shades of white static.

  There are ten, and one of them is the man with the shark eyes. I feel him as surely as I felt him in every drawing I made in my furious nest. He is quieter than the rest, motionless in motion and spewing out his own bubble of silent control that helps shield his men from me.

  "They're coming," I say, then-

  There's a singing WHEEEE whine for half second, a slim line splash like a diver perfectly entering the water, then the ocean bursts nearby with an angry wet FRUMSSH bark that tosses us sideways. The boat slams down hard on its side and almost capsizes, but we both hold tight and lean hard against the roll, which sends us slapping back to level with a soaking splash. The shock wave subsides and the ripples fade and I listen. Now it's artillery, and they'll be range-finding for the next few shots, and then there'll be-

  WHEEEE splash FRUMSSH

  It comes on the other side this time, harder and closer and so bright that the glow of it shines up through the water like a star being born, then we're storming forward again, the boat's hull beating THOCK THOCK THOCK over the waves on a direct line for the beach. Feargal fires a second flare by hand, shedding a fresh rain of red light over the dark beach head, and now we can see figures moving, and behind them rises the ghostly specter of something massive, which can only be a helicopter.

  I laugh madly.

  The THUMP THUMP of its blades carries out to us, then there are more WHEEEs of falling artillery that splash and make water-cratering FRUMSSH blasts in our wake, and I zigzag us on. Feargal tosses a second drone up into the wind and sends it high as I pull us away at a sharp angle, now veering hard north away from the helicopter. We can't bull through that. It gives chase, shooting out a bright white beam that spotlights the bloody red water, followed by a thunderous roll of automatic gunfire.

  RATATATATATATAT

  THUMP THUMP

  It picks up our trail with its two massive rotors churning the air, and I race us away, spinning the boat while Feargal works his controls. Freezing spume sprays across our faces and I feel wild, like the whole world is coming down around us. I holler out my madness at the helicopter as it strafes after us, ripping the ocean with its sewing-machine fusillade.

  RATATATATATATAT

  I feel them on the line as they come into range, and that revelation tips the world again. For three thousand miles across the Atlantic it was a theory. Drake trained me on Feargal and the others, honing the art of my control, but there was no way to know if it would work on soldiers in helmets until we faced them, until we leaped into the lion's mouth.

  But I feel them. Even through the helmets, I feel the faint heat of their signatures on the line, leaking through the imperfect seal of their shields as they peel away from the steel of the shark-eyed man, just as I'd hoped. A little something of who they are creeps out and carries to me like blood in the water.

  They may control the air, but I'm the shark on the line. This is my world and they're just tourists in it.

  I yank the speedboat round to face them as they pull in, stoking my madness like a furnace, fuelled by the light of the white eye in my memory, and dig deep and work my mental brushes and roar the black light out at them.

  It soars like a rocket and bursts in a cloud around them, smothering them in black. We race on and the RATATATATATAT cuts out as they freeze, and the helicopter's ripping THUMP THUMP advance halts.

  "Now," I shout, as our boat tears through their helicopter's search beam and beyond, and at my side Feargal steers a final course on his tablet, and as we strafe by I turn back to see-

  BANG

  His drone crumples in a brief bite atop the huge helicopter's rear rotors, sucked in by the downdraft. The orange flame is gone in a second, and for a second seems to have no effect, until the helicopter begins to twist. I let go of my grip on the four minds in the air and sink panting onto the speedboat's deck, as the fist of my own rage rushes back to hammer into my skull: one, two, three, four huge blows that leave me reeling and twingeing so bad I want to cry.

  But I can't cry, and lift my leaden head to watch as the rear rotor barks roughly, sparking like an angle-grinder cutting steel, then ruptures. There is the smallest of secondary explosions as the rotors' great arms jam and tear from their reinforced hub, then the rear end drops.

  It hits the water hard and sinks harder, taking on water through the open gun bays. Gunfire rips out again desperately, as if that could keep it afloat now, a RATATATATAT stream that skims across the waves and dives into the ocean. Then the back end is under and the body angles up sharply like a diver making a smooth entrance, yanking the search light on the front to paint the sky like the bat signal. The front blades lash furiously at the ocean, spinning the dying craft in tight circles, and I catch the muffled sound of men yelling as they seek to abandon ship.

  In a sickly confluence of light and angles as I circle back to the wreck, I watch one of the black-helmeted figures leap from the open front cab and into the water, making four strokes before the blades whirl round and slash him into bloody sushi on the water top.

  Seconds later the whole craft is gone, swallowed without trace by the waves.

  We're so close to shore, but now the twinge is shutting down my thoughts and blurring my vision. It falls to Feargal to take over the boat, and in the light of a freshly fired red flare from above, he picks off two flapping survivors with his AR-15.

  Smack smack smack say the rounds as they hit the water. Smack smack smack.

  I sag back in the boat, and bright colors rinse over my vision, pulling me down into the worst migraine I've had in over a decade. I moan and cover my head with my hands, while Feargal drops the AR-15 and propels us toward the beach.

  INTERLUDE 5

  The helicopter went down.

  General Marshall watched in disbelief from the waterline on the Bordeaux beach as it dropped onto the water and sank. There was no fire, no smoke, just four more lives lost in the darkness, and he didn't know why. One moment he'd held all the cards; a stronger force, better weaponry, eyes in the sky looking down, and now this.

  Dozens had died to bring that helicopter online, working for months. It represented a sickening loss.

  "Report, what just happened," he called to Specialist Myers back in the Humvee, hoping for something on radar or thermal imaging or some kind of reason why the Black Hawk had let a drone get close enough to blow, but no answer came. His mind raced in the stillness, staring into the black as if an answer might emerge from there, but the only one that came was the sound of the boat's engine drawing closer over the waves.

  SLAP SLAP SLAP

  He switched his visor back to infrared and magnified, tracking the hot rectangle of the boat's engine block bouncing through the cold dark. One of the figures aboard it was standing, one lying on the floor. This was definitely a live boat, now that the other two in its chain had blown.

  Smart tactics, to outfox their drones. It was smart to split into three chains with the decoy boats, smart to come at night, but those maneuvers alone would not have been enough to bring down a Black Hawk.

  So what had happened? Their tiny commercial drone couldn't have even got near the helo if it hadn't stopped dead, but it had, and there'd been a tweak of something then, a cold feeling in the air that made his thoughts loose like
scree on a steep mountainside but-

  SLAP SLAP SLAP

  They were closing.

  "Rub them out," he said to O'Reilly at the artillery on his left, tucked behind their forward defensive wall, a maneuverable metal screen. He leveled his rifle through the slit in the screen and addressed the rest. "Fire at will."

  It took a moment to realize that none of his soldiers moved.

  He looked at the men and women either side of him, and found them silent and still like plastic models in a battle diorama. Here was Park, on one knee with an M40 on her shoulder pointed out to sea, and here was O'Reilly with the mobile artillery on the ground, paused in the act of dropping a mortar into the chute, and there were Saunders and Karak with their rifles up and their mouths open inside their helmets, but none of them were moving.

  "Park," Marshall barked, but she didn't turn. He tried to reach over and smack her helmet, but his hand didn't move.

  For a second he only stared, half sure that he'd done it and the slapping sound of his palm had already rung out, though all the evidence argued otherwise. His hand was still on his rifle, leaning against the screen, and he hadn't leveled it yet either. He began to sweat in his suit, though the night air was cool.

  Something was happening that he didn't understand and couldn't control. "Myers, have we been hit by chemical ordnance?" he called over the radio, but Myers still didn't reply.

  SLAP SLAP came the boat's engine, perhaps a minute distant now. There was a sense of something he felt in the back of his mind, vaguely familiar, but he couldn't put a name to it. He broke protocol for an active engagement and connected directly to Control.

  "Are there nerve agents in the air?" he called across the thousands of miles back to Istanbul, the only explanation he could hazard.

  "Not chemical," came the harried voice of O'Flanerhy in Control, losing her fabled calm. "The hydrogen line just pulsed with chaos like nothing we've seen, except maybe the lepers. All readouts assess," Control paused as crackling voices broke in. "It could be overloading the helmets and buffering through. Reports coming in-"

  Marshall tuned her out, because yes, of course it was the line. He'd felt it as the invisible blast wave came out from the Mayor's speedboat, a faint tang of floor five-minus in the Istanbul bunker, but he hadn't recognized what it was, too caught up in the aerial assault. Now he felt it clearly, a dampening signal lodged in his helmet as the boats SLAPped closer. He closed his eyes to cast about for it, rummaging in the parts of his mind where it touched, but it was everywhere. It held his thoughts trapped in a static fog, seeping through the generation 5 shield like an anesthetic, filling his thoughts with a drowsy gray paradigm that he didn't understand and didn't know how to fight.

  He couldn't move. He couldn't shoot. He could barely talk with the fog squashing any impulse his mind fired off.

  He had to change the paradigm.

  "Control, deactivate my helmet," he said through gritted teeth.

  "What?" Control came back, "I can't do that, you'll die."

  Of course he hadn't told them about his experiments. That didn't matter now.

  "I'll die if you don't. They killed my helicopter and four of my men. I'd do it myself, but I can't move. Switch it off!"

  No more argument came. The helmet clicked and the shield died, and at once the great weight of the line forced him to his knees, more powerful than ever before, carrying with it an assault of bizarre images. He gasped as black stick figures lanced into the hollows of his mind, battling scrawly demons and zombies in the wilds of America, bringing with them a kind of frolicking madness that almost knocked him unconscious.

  But the pain of the line was far stronger, and familiar, and gave him room to think. In its brutal embrace he could see the numbing black fog for what it was; a kind of weapon, and weapons were a paradigm he understood.

  He told his body to move, and now it moved.

  His helmet clicked and hissed off with ease, and he breathed fresh sea air that spurred him on. The helmet dropped to the sand, and he moved to Master Sergeant Park, hitting the clasps of her helmet, twisting, and pulling the black molded plastic away. She buckled at once, but caught herself on her knees.

  "Wake up the others," he commanded, shoving the helmet against her chest so her arms wrapped involuntarily around it. "Take off their helmets and get to the Dome. Go!"

  She tilted shakily to all fours, hammered by the full force of the line for the first time in her life, but that was all he could do for her, because SLAP SLAP came the boat over the water, only a few hundred yards out now. Marshall caught the M40 launcher off Park's shoulder, twisted over the screen and sighted, then fired.

  WHOOSH

  The rocket missed wide and didn't even explode when it hit the water, but the boat shifted angle. It was seconds away only.

  "Wake them up," he shouted at Park, then hefted his rifle and ran out from the cover of the screen and into the water, firing.

  RATATATATATATAT

  The boat veered wider and answering fire came back, but Marshall didn't flinch. He'd lost too many already to lose a single man or woman more. He waded further into the water and the pain, battling a flurry of jagged black stick monsters and exploding children in his head, and fired.

  RATATATATATATAT

  He fired until the magazine clicked empty and the sound of the boat's SLAPs grew further apart as they fled, then he let the weapon drop and almost collapsed in the water. His record in the open had been three minutes and twenty-three seconds, and how much of that had he used already?

  He turned to see Master Sergeant Park staggering up the beach supporting two others, each of them stripped of their helmets. Two more lay on the sand with their helmets off, convulsing, and he went to them first. Perhaps he could carry one, not two, but still he seized them both by their collars and pulled.

  In his head visions of a black space filled with cardboard boxes popped up, and he pulled so hard it felt the tendons of his forearms would rip, but they moved. First an inch, then another, and his legs burned to match the throb in his head, but they slid and he gained momentum even as the numbness began to disentangle from his thoughts.

  He dragged their bodies up the beach, plowing furrows into the sand until he reached Park at the dunes. She lay collapsed across the bodies she'd rescued, and in the flickering light from the cracked autocannon turret he saw blood trickling evenly from her eyes.

  Too slow.

  He looked back to the two he'd dragged and saw their faces: blank, empty, screwed up and flowing blood smoothly.

  He dropped to his knees. The line pummeled him like never before, longer than ever before, getting into his head and ripping at his resolve.

  DIE DIE DIE it thumped in his head.

  DIE DIE DIE

  It beat him like a nail and his head pounded down into the sand, into the darkness where he saw something lurking, an image of a man in a labyrinth of boxes that receded into infinity. In every box was a thumping human heart, and in every heart was a life struggling to be set free, etched in black ink across plain white skin, endlessly fated to fade, and there was nothing he could do but watch and fade himself.

  DIE DIE DIE hammered the line.

  The boat was coming back.

  He was by his daughter's side again, twenty-four years earlier, and thinking that if perhaps she'd been just a few days older then she might have survived. But she was so small, two months premature and her little heart was just not strong enough to keep the blood moving.

  8 Lives they called him, and he would have given any number to let her live. He would have given any number to keep his wife by his side, instead of letting her sink into the depression that ultimately claimed her a year later, when he found her clutching a razor in the bath, washed by blood, and lifted her body himself.

  He buried her in the same grave as their daughter, because there was nothing else he could do. He'd stood over the grave and promised to join them when the date came, until the date came, and perhaps that t
ime was now, though there was no peace in that thought. There would be no hope for anyone if he fell now, and that was too much a betrayal of his tiny, premature daughter to let it stand. To give in to that meant spitting on her grave, saying she never should have been born, and he could never do that, because in the brief moments when she'd looked up into his face with recognition in her tiny eyes, he'd known.

  His life belonged to her. His life still belonged to her.

  He burst up through the crust of consciousness with a gasp. How long had passed? The slapping of the boat was out there and so was the line, crumpling him still, with the dark undercurrent of something else digging away below. He looked up; in the dark Park was still bleeding, perhaps she was still breathing.

  He pulled her helmet from under her belly and sealed her back in. He did the same for the others. If they were alive, they might survive. If not, their bodies would be needed for research and their suits would be needed for others to fill.

  He left them and ran raggedly over the dunes to the Dome and the Humvee, where Myers lay slumped against the wheel, frozen solid. Marshall climbed in, pushed him to the side and powered the vehicle on, driving it back to the bodies with the Dome tumbling along haphazardly behind. Lifting them in took the last of his strength, feeding deadweight bodies in limb by limb, but he couldn't stop.

  Halfway to the tide the line felled him, and for a time he crawled. Beside three ranks of artillery he rolled his helmet back on, just as the SLAP of the speedboat started growing louder again. They thought their work was done.

  Click, hiss.

  The shield was still off. He slapped at the buttons on his wrist numbly, struggling for the correct combination, until by blind chance he hit it and the stunting weight of the line faded, replaced by an echo of the numbing blackness, though now it was fainter. He got to his feet and looked out to where the boat skipped over the waves, drawing in.