Zombie Ocean (Book 7): The Lash

by Michael John Grist

  I'm sick.

  I feel Istanbul coming. There are things on the line ahead that I don't understand, filling it up with a kind of rippling static. I can't get any kind of read on what they are, but neither can I stop. I caution Feargal, and he twitches in the seat beside me. I tell the others via radio, but no response comes back except a giddy cheer from Arnst.

  I've stopped trying to reach Keeshom, Hatya and Lydia now, because they're useless, serving only to stare in horror. The shock has eaten deeply into them, and the kindest thing I could probably do is kill them too. The wounds in their heads will never heal.

  Keeshom was a good man. Maybe Hatya was a good woman.

  The static swells ahead, fizzing over the line like spilled Coke. I don't know what the shark-eyed man is doing, but it's changing the fabric of the air.

  Feargal feels it too. He gets woozy. He holds his head. I'm not laughing anymore or checking tourist guides. It takes all we have to keep pressing forward. There are more mosques now, fewer churches, persimmon trees by the roadside. Edirne on the border of Turkey is particularly glorious, but everything feels jagged. Sometimes I just stare.

  Clouds leer down. I almost catch a glimpse of Drake on top of a creamy yellow minaret, waving down with a sniper rifle trained on me, but then he's gone. Cerulean moves behind walls secretly, following me and leaping room to room, never seen.

  "What do you want?" I whisper to him. "What would you have me do?"

  He doesn't answer but keeps tracking me, never showing his face.

  I feel strange things out there on the line, burning wildly like pulsar stars. Their random waves hit me in the head and that gets the twinges started. I can't make a screen of madness strong enough to keep them out, so as we drive they keep impacting off my thoughts like meteors, leaving craters behind.

  At times I forget where we're going. I'll look at Feargal and in his eyes see a hatred that makes no sense to me, and I'll almost start crying before I remember; I put that hate there. Something is happening, but we can't stop now. We turn up the speed. We forget to launch drones and just advance. Nobody looks at the radar anymore, and my sense for what lies ahead cannot be trusted.

  The road leads through Ahmetbey. The countryside is a barren, featureless brown. My eyes stop working and I try to blink my vision back. Evergreen ferns loom like the legs of giants, and I beg them not to take my head.

  "I need it," I tell them.

  "Need what?" Feargal asks.

  We race down E80, getting closer. The air starts to smell of the salty breeze from the Sea of Marmara, then we hit the coast and blue shimmers away for a hundred miles. We pass Çorlu and Gilivri and Büyükçekmece, and they each look like perfect backdrops for the zombie apocalypse; empty highways leading to derelict gray tower blocks.

  Coming in to the built-up core of Istanbul I begin to sink. I sag with my head against the glove box. The muscles in my body go weak and flop like wet pasta. Nausea comes from my insides and shuts me down. I break out in a cold sweat and reach out to the others for strength, laying a hold on Arnst in the vehicle behind to draw off him, though it barely keeps me afloat. A good dog, still. I'm just about to tell Feargal to send a drone ahead when-

  BOOM

  The rear vehicle in our convoy, Keeshom and Hatya, jumps up in the air. There's some fire, and it flips. I lean over to watch in the side mirror as it tumbles, then lands, and another-

  BOOM rings out, and this time it's Arnst and Lydia that take the brunt of the blast, sending their Jeep rolling sideways into a rusted Mercedes and careening off to crash through a shop window.

  The third BOOM comes for us, and almost flips us too, but Feargal's too canny for that. He swerves wildly across the road, taking us into the shadow of buildings I barely noticed were there. I suppose they're shooting at us, but now I don't really care. I'm like that girl in Gap, phasing in and out, no longer part of what's happening around her. Anything will be a relief now.

  The fourth BOOM doesn't get us, nor the fifth, though the sixth clips our tail and sends us shattering off a brick corner and spinning into an alley. We come to rest with the hood embedded in a large blue plastic dumpster. I note that the bricks here were once plastered with handbills advocating political regime change, but the print has long since been reduced to blurry smears on a white wattling.

  My head's bleeding. I look at my hands and see my one finger bent comically backward, the same one Drake broke a month back, and give a little, sickly laugh. How the hell did that happen, again? I grab it and twist it straight, almost fainting from the pain. Probably I shouldn't have done that.

  There is gunfire close by. Probably they're polishing off the others. Soon they'll come for us, but that's OK. I deserve this; I suppose in one way this is just what I was coming for anyway. Kill or be killed, and isn't it better if I'm killed? I don't want to kill thirty thousand people just to save my children. I love them, but there's only two of them. Are they really any better than that little girl on the floor in Gap, someone who Arnst would have crushed underfoot just to feel good? I don't want to do this at all.

  I weep in the front seat as Feargal jerks awake, bleeding from his temple. He looks at me crying and he's so shocked it flips me over to laughing.

  RATATATATATAT

  Gunfire gets nearer.

  POP POP POP

  At the end of the alley a dumpster explodes. OK, so that is how this will be. Feargal fights with his seatbelt, tries to kick his door open but can't get it done because the dumpster has warped and sent a metal strut out blocking him in. Also funny. He glances daggers at me then climbs over my lap, taking no pains to not knee me in the gut. Add it to the collection of things making me nauseous. He punches the glass out of the frame then tumbles his body through.

  I try to open the door, and it swings open. More comedy. Feargal stares with hate, is about to run off alone, then thinks better of it and yanks at my seatbelt. We both fight with it for awkward, intimate seconds, until it clicks and I clamber out onto wobbling legs.

  PIT PIT PIT

  Rifle fire scores the brickwork above our heads, dusting us with a light helping of old clay. Some asshole has been doing parkour across the rooftops overhead just to draw a bead on us, and that does make me a little angry, but nowhere near enough to cut through the fizzing fog in my head.

  Feargal runs and drags me after him, pistol in his hand. I lumber like a chained bear, trying to keep my overfull brain from spilling out the top of my head. Balance is damn tricky on these cobbles. If only the walls would stop flexing.

  PIT PIT PIT

  Feargal leaps over a beaten-down, rusted-to-shit car's trunk, and I roll pathetically after him. The sound of rifle fire grows stronger. Is Arnst putting up a fight back there? Feargal spins as a-

  POP

  Takes him in the shoulder, and there's the bright flash of blood in the dust. I watch in interest as bullets bounce off the dusty paving stones in front of me, while Feargal returns fire.

  BANG BANG BANG

  My hearing goes out in a whine. I wheel around, taking in sandstone walls and washing lines with a few sun-bleached items still hanging from them several stories up, and the blink of glass from a rifle sight and then-

  Reality crumples.

  I'm looking into a black hole.

  Down the street and flickering nearer in impossible jerks comes some kind of black and white nightmare. Coal-black ribbons of muscle gleam beneath a mummy-like wrapping of tasseled white skin, strands of which extend outward like hair spiking from electrostatic force. The thing jerks through time toward us. I don't see it move, can't see it move, but still it comes, leaping closer with every blink of my eyes like a badly cut movie.

  Not possible, I think, but still it comes. Its head frazzles like a speck of garlic in a broiling wok, its black mouth gapes, its eyes pulse and flicker like stop-motion animation, and it comes, bringing with it a rupturing dislocation of the line which smashes my thoughts to bits.

  Nothing is what it should be
. Up is down and my senses interrupt each other, jammed like fingers smashed into a basketball, jumbling smell and taste and sound on their way into my head. I smell the PITs of bullets raking nearby cars. I taste the impact of Feargal shoving me away as a sudden blast rains down with a rattling-

  TASTE OF STRAWBERRIES

  I roll like an avocado and stand like a paper cup, wilting hard, until another blast comes at the alley's mouth with a wrenching-

  MEMORY OF STANDING IN THE CORN THINKING OF MY BROTHER

  Blooms bust freely, badgering out of the basement, and I blah bluh. I blah buh Arrgh.

  OWLS

  FRZZZZ

  I drop and ….

  I fall and …

  Cerulean leans over me, at the bottom of this tinny wet well, and his face is so sad, because I've let him down again. In so many ways, so many times and now the bill has come due.

  "Amo," he says, "you've really fucked this up."

  I laugh, but laughing is vomiting, and vomiting is pissing in my pants, and pissing in my pants is Feargal's head spraying blood right in front of me, and-

  CRACKLE SIZZLE HUSH

  The thing is there and cracking open above me. Its whole chest breaks apart to reveal a universe inside. I'll be at home in there, surely. I reach up and into the clouds, because after all I did this for Lara. I did this for my children, and who knows anymore if-

  The jaws snap shut, and my left hand is gone.

  Ha ha ha.

  PIT PIT PIT come bullets like gumdrops raining from heaven. I open my mouth to take the vomit, and the frizzing, flickering black and white thing leans in to give me what I deserve.

  17. DISTRIBUTION

  Cerulean's waiting for me in the dark of Distribution, but there is no time. No time for one of our friendly chats, no time for him to impart otherworldly wisdom, no time for us to stroll the Darkness and talk about girls, no more time for gestures or words, except for maybe one, or two, perhaps four.

  "Get in the box," he says.

  Four.

  There are thousands of boxes around us, every delivery we ever made, dumped off the end of the conveyor belt in this empty, un-rendered place. The pixilation on the ocean waves underfoot is shit, made up of old gray body parts the programmer must have had lying around. The waves don't even move. Who'd want to be mayor of this?

  "Get in the box," he says again, as the towers of cardboard begin to lift away into the sky like poorly insulated rockets, like someone's shifted the Deepcraft gravity and all the blocks are getting sucked up into the sky. I feel the suck on me too, pulling at my hair, while the stink of rot and maggots rises from the open box at my feet.

  I look down and see them in there, shuffling like organic packing material, burrowing and weaseling blindly. They stink. The box is foul, ripe like the fermented sweat of the long-term homeless, and I don't want to-

  "Amo!" Cerulean barks, and I look at him. Behind him there's a great black eye growing across the sky. It judders and scratches bigger and smaller like the oscillating waveform of an explosion, all desperate peaks and troughs across the line. It is raw and chaotic, biting and furious, and it is coming for us all.

  Cerulean is a parrot and he looks at me with those dumb parrot eyes that have always understood me so well, that have always been saving me, and he points at the box. It's stupid, but I got in a box for him before. In my garret apartment in Mott Haven while the ocean first stacked up against the door, his voice on the phone kept me alive.

  "Get in the box," he says again.

  "That's a stupid idea!" I shout back over the biting silence of the black eye, which cuts into my speech like an editor splicing in fresh ribbons of empty tape. "It won't do anything. We have to fight."

  I get maybe two of all those words through, and now the boxes around me are disintegrating as the black eye vacuums them up. Cardboard shreds wetly and up fly the products kept inside; hand-held sunlamps and a full set of junior boxing gloves and a board game called Agricola. They break apart and spin like the debris of New York sucking into the villain's skybeam at the end of Ragnarok III. Even Cerulean's blue feathers start plucking and sucking away, up into the sky. The world crumbles and the tightly-knit ocean of bodies itself starts to crack, sending gray bodies shooting up like capsules in a bank's drive-through vacuum tube, feeding into the spasming black eye.

  Soon the Darkness will be gone, I understand that. Soon all my memories will be gone, and I will be gone; not vomited into, but absorbed and rewritten. I'll become another jagged monster like the one I saw on the street, a black and white aberration glitching through space and time, catching the crests of the line and riding each for seconds only before striving desperately for another, always seeking something I can never find.

  Only this foul box remains, and Cerulean's words from that long-ago phone call echo back to me through the years. I'm in my Mott Haven apartment and I'm terrified again, and he knows he's going to die, but still he's talking calmly about what I can do to survive.

  "It's like that cat in the box," he says now, and I hear him as clear as I did that day, so young, "the second you open the box to see if it's alive or not, it drags you in so you're inside the box too. There's no time to report out."

  I laughed through my tears. "Schrodinger's cat," I said. "I don't think that's how it works."

  I look at the box before me now. Its flaps whip madly in the rising gale, and only dozens of zombie hands from the ocean are keeping it down, pinching at the damp card, but they're losing their grip now too. One by one they snip away like stray hairs torn out by the roots, and the box starts to rip.

  Get in the box.

  I think of a cat that is both there and not there at once, and I look up at the black eye, and that's what I see. It's there and it's not there. It comes and it goes, so fast that it's both states at once, alive and dead, coming and not coming, some kind of quantum phenomenon.

  I jump in the box. I seal the lids around me and sink into the rotting meat smell and the cushioning bed of white maggots as the ocean below let go and I rise up like Dorothy, up along the conveyor belt and toward the plastic fronds to Distribution, up into the black eye like a quantum missile, and-

  RAT TAT TAT

  I open my eyes on the chaotic street as gunfire spits off brickwork nearby. The black and white thing is right there, its twitching face inches from my own, its black eyes rolling, but something has changed. I can feel the desperate hunger inside it, to tap into something solid and safe. Its scratchy blast on the line burns my skin, and my left hand pressed against its chest is coated in dark blood, sweating out at a cellular level, but it doesn't come any further.

  I hunker back into the wheel rim of a rusted car and wrap the foul, invisible box around me. I huddle down in the maggoty damp and slam down the flaps hard.

  PIT PIT PIT bullets strafe the alley blacktop.

  The black and white thing sniffs on the line, searching for my signal, but I'm in the box now. I'm the quantum cat, I'm Schwarzenegger in the mud in Predator, and I pray that this is enough. I don't want to be ripped apart at the genetic level.

  It jags side to side, its head twitches like a CGI kaleidoscope, and I huddle tighter, pitiful and invisible. It sends out pulses that scald where they touch, but I keep my signal muffled tight, and slowly, painfully slowly, it turns.

  Its black eyes flicker inward through the back of its head, and its legs re-joint themselves to stagger away. I let out a breath, then see where it's headed; to Feargal. He's lying in a heap of rubble, bleeding from the head, and in three steps the thing is nearly on him. Through the haze I feel his signal already sucking into this black and white thing. I peer round the side of my invisible box to see Feargal's face.

  He's breathing. The bullet grazed his temple. Even unconscious he's drawing the thing in like bait, as RATATATAT shells rake the asphalt with little potholes, and I really should run. I have a mission to complete, I've got people to kill, and that'll be my revenge.

  But it's not what Ceru
lean would do.

  Already I'm standing, and I know with perfect clarity what Cerulean would do, and what made him a hero. Time after time he threw himself upon the grenade; at the beginning and at the end, and if there's anyone in this world I want to be more like, it's Cerulean.

  It sputters in closer and Feargal's face starts to sweat blood as the thing gloms on to his signal like a vampire. I've done terrible things to him, to everyone, but nothing like this.

  This is evil.

  And I'm on it.

  I leap up with the box forgotten and shoot my madness at it in a dizzying canvas of all the things I hate the most; my massacres, my failures, my dead lost along the way, poor Cerulean and Sophia and Don, all the way to the moment I smashed Drake's head in my hands and looked up to see my children watching with terror in their eyes.

  It comes out like a spear and cuts a path through the thing's shimmering field of chaos, but only a path, because as soon as my madness touches it, it begins to feed. Its eyes rear wild and its black and white mouth opens and it latches violently on to me.

  Just as I latch onto it.

  The line goes manic around us. Invisible waves of madness and chaos stream out like an EMP, strong enough to level a city. I wrap my arm round its rock hard black throat and blood evaporates out of me like I'm stuck in a microwave on full power; my arm and every place I touch the creature melts at a cellular level, but still I squeeze.

  A world of chaos rips through my head like the mother of all twinges, gobbling greedily at my madness, and in turn I feel the beating heart of chaos trapped inside it, forcing it on. This thing that was once human is now a shattered bomb that keeps exploding and contracting without end.

  All natural laws fail before it. Gravity comes and goes. Elements blend and transform. Living things die and live again as worlds collide and reform, as the universe pulses out then in again, and all is chaos.