The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5)

by Michael John Grist

  It didn't help. Panic set in. He turned, studying the wall screen, the desks, the computers, even the chairs and tables, but there was nothing, nothing except-

  He dropped to the floor and ran over to a desk in the back, favoring his right leg. He wrenched the chair out of the way and fell to his knees before the green glow. It was coming from a large black block like an old computer tower, with one defining feature; a radar-like screen on the face, which displayed a dancing green line.

  His breath stopped. He recognized it; a waveform from his calculations, back when he'd been working with Jake on possible permutations of the hydrogen line to match receptor strands in the T4's genomic code.

  He laughed. This was it, proof that his theories were correct. The shield in the Maine bunker had been solid-state and un-hackable, but here? He spun the box. It was incredibly heavy, like trying to slide a washing machine over a carpeted floor, but he managed to edge it out, to find a thick splice of red cabling leading out and up into the computer above.

  Could it really be that simple? He had to take the chance. He gripped the red cable at the point it fed into the black box, and pulled.

  Click.

  It snapped out. At once the green line on the readout died. He dropped the cable and looked around, but nothing had changed. How would he know?

  He ran to the blast door, pushed the press plate, and this time it opened, leading him back onto the flickering stairwell gantry. The ocean below were churning in the pit below, more were following in a regular through the stairs above, but that didn't mean anything. The demon was here now.

  He circled the gantry, shoved open the swing doors and ran limping down the shadowy corridor in the midst of a stream of zombies, all wending the same path up and down stairs, left and right through the maze of hallways until they reached their destination.

  There was a knotted wall of gray bodies blocking the corridor, bulging from floor to ceiling with a single red leg thrust out from the middle. It looked obscene and Lucas could only stare as more of the ocean piled on, smothering the red beast with their weight, crunching in tightly in the confined space of the corridor, until their bodies covered the red limb completely.

  He hobbled back the way he'd come, ducked into some kind of storeroom, pushed through another door in the far wall, and emerged on the other side of the zombie knot. He jogged unevenly to the right, round a corner and there lay Anna, right where he'd left her, alongside Feargal and Peters, all splashed liberally with blood. One of the demon's great hands was near her foot, even now grasping, but the crush of gray bodies was grinding it to a halt.

  "The tide's coming in," Anna said in a daze, looking at her own foot, then up to him. "We should leave."

  He laughed. Any moment now this whole corridor would be clogged.

  "Come on," he said, and bent over to help her up.

  EAST

  20. COMMAND

  Anna roused in a white canvas tent, with the bright summer sun shining through the thin weave. The air smelled of pollen and freshly turned earth and a warm breeze fluttered over her skin through the rippling tent flaps. At the same time her brain felt battered, like it had been baked inside her skull. That was what the tail end of a migraine felt like, unfamiliar for so long but never forgotten.

  What had happened?

  She turned, taking in the tent- tall enough to stand up in, wide enough to encompass three makeshift beds made out of reinforced portable tables. To her right lay Feargal and to her left lay Peters, both stripped to the waist and plastered with white bandaging, lying on dark mattresses from the dormitory. She craned over and saw a mud floor below, coated with a large sheet of translucent plastic. She leaned further and felt a sharp twinge in the small of her back.

  "Shit," she murmured and lay flat again. That was what falling down an elevator shaft did to you. She pushed back the covers as far as she could, looking at her thighs in their cotton pajama pants. She tried to move them but they didn't respond, which was terrifying in a distant kind of way.

  She shuffled up in the bed, out of the snug covers, and tried again. This time the big toe on her left foot moved. She focused hard on the right, and now the little toe moved. That was worth a brief cry.

  "I thought you'd never wake up," said Peters.

  Anna turned. His face was purple and bruised and his eyes were almost swollen shut, but his accent, though hoarse, was as lyrical as ever.

  She smiled. "I'm here."

  "Of course. It takes more than a zombie ocean to kill my Anna."

  She snorted. It hurt. "You did it. You fought them off."

  He shrugged and said nothing more.

  "Is Feargal OK?"

  "He is OK. He lost a lot of blood; one bit him in the stairwell very badly. It tried to eat his breast, is this the right word," he tapped his own chest, "breast?"

  Anna shuddered. "Chest. Ugh."

  "Chest. He is sleeping. You have been sleeping for a day."

  Anna lay back. A day. "And you?"

  "I don't sleep, you know this."

  She laughed. "Have you been counting ammunition?"

  "Lucas will not let me. I asked. He advised me to count dimples in the tent weave."

  Anna looked at him, not sure if he was kidding.

  "It is very dull," Peters said.

  She laughed, and though it hurt it flushed away a load of the stale weight in her head, like an incoming tide steadily washing away sandcastles on the beach.

  "What happened? There was a demon. I don't remember anything after that."

  "Lucas saved us. Though you should ask him yourself."

  There was a brief kerfuffle outside, then suddenly the tent flap flung open and in bounded Jake, wide-eyed and mouth open.

  "Anna, thank God!"

  He rushed over and pulled her into an embrace, squeezing so tight it hurt, but she welcomed it. She patted his back, with Peters smiling at her over Jake's shoulder.

  "He has already hugged me," he mouthed. Anna laughed.

  At last Jake let her go, and she wasn't surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  "Oh, you," she said.

  "I should have gone with you," Jake said. "I knew it."

  She shook her head. "I'm glad you weren't. We're lucky we're all whole. What happened up here, is everyone OK?"

  Jake's smile fell and he went somber. "We lost Ollie."

  The good feeling faded.

  "The ocean took him. I didn't see it, exactly what happened, but there was blood and we can't find the body now. He's gone."

  "Oh," Anna said, and left a moment for that to settle in. Ollie who'd saved Amo with his RPG, Ollie who'd always made Amo's kids Talia and Vie laugh with his impressions of different kinds of zombie animals, Ollie who'd been a good, solid guy and one of Ravi's closest friends.

  "And the others?"

  "They're well. Wanda's on patrol and Macy's resting. She was working on you three all night."

  Anna lay there and looked up at him, suddenly feeling very tired. This was Jake, one of her favorites, with his dark floppy hair and the half-moon scar on the side of his head. She reached up and took his hand and fresh tears swelled up in his eyes. It was hard, always hard, but for people like Jake it was worth it.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "We got your warning." He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. "They got Ollie, but it was enough for the rest of us to get in the Humvee and go. We kept going for maybe an hour, until the horde chasing us stopped and turned back. Lucas came through on the radio shortly after. We helped lift you all out, and Macy fixed you up."

  Anna nodded. He was probably feeling guilty that he had run away. If she knew Jake, that would hang over him for years now.

  "You did the right thing," she said firmly. "There was nothing you could've done, and I could not handle it if you'd died pointlessly trying to save me."

  He laughed through his tears. "You said the same thing to Ravi."

  She smiled. "I guess that means I love you, then? We're family."r />
  He squeezed her arm. "I love you too, Anna. Holy hell, if you died?"

  "I barely survived."

  "But things are changing now. The things you discovered…" He trailed off.

  She frowned. "What things?"

  "Of course, you don't know yet." He turned to Peters, who nodded. "I won't spoil it, it's for Lucas to say."

  "Say what?"

  "I'll get him." He let go and backed away. "It's great to see you awake, Anna, really."

  "It's great to see you too. I'm sorry for what I said in Bordeaux."

  His smile widened to a grin. "That wasn't you. Not the real you. It's fine."

  He slipped out. With him gone the tent was silent and muffling again, ruffled only by the breeze. She turned to Peters.

  "What's he talking about?"

  "Good news," Peters said.

  "Is it the cure?"

  "You will see. I can't tell you."

  That was infuriating, but she didn't have long to wait. Moments later Lucas strode in. He looked weary and bruised, but there was a brightness in his eyes that buoyed up his whole face. He looked like a man who had seen the light. He smiled at her, and the feeling it raised in her was confusing and wonderful at once.

  Here was a man who she'd beaten and almost killed, who she'd doubted and crushed and vowed to execute, and now here he was and she was so glad to be wrong. He made her feel a new kind of hope.

  "Would you come with me, Anna?" he asked.

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  In a wheelchair he rolled her out of the tent. The sky above was blue with high fluffy clouds and the hot sun felt good on her skin, like California. They rumbled over wooden boards laid down on the drying mud, past two mud-covered Humvees and through the remnants of the barren vineyard to the chute into the ground. It looked puckered and gouged where thousands of feet had pummeled it. Gray bodies lay here and there, crushed and stamped into the mud, but other than that there was no sign of the ocean.

  "Where are they?" she asked. "Did they move on already? What about the other demon, it was due in a few hours?"

  "You'll see," said Lucas, and helped her out of the wheelchair and into a rope sling. He handed the rope over to Jake, standing nearby and grinning widely, who took the strain and belayed her gently into the chute.

  There were bodies heaped at the base, five or six deep. Jake followed after her, helping with the harness and taking Anna's weight, then he let her down the elevator shaft, where another wheelchair was waiting. She sat and Lucas wheeled her through.

  The bunker within was as dark as before, and the dead bodies on the walkway were still there, but the thing that stopped her flat was what lay below. A deep, rolling ocean of gray bodies filled the bunker to the lip of the encircling gantry. There had been four decks stretching down before, and now they were all full.

  "It's a good fit," Lucas said.

  She didn't say anything. It was going to be a helluva job to get them all out again in time for the next demon, but that didn't seem to bother Lucas. Jake appeared behind them, followed now by Macy and Wanda too.

  "The bridge is a little tricky," Lucas said, and rolled her forward over the downward angled walkway, to a makeshift spiderweb bridge of ropes lashed across to the encircling deck. Jake went first, followed by Anna in her sling again, guided by Macy and Lucas.

  From there Lucas led her round to the blast door on the left, which now hung open.

  "Command," he said, and wheeled her through.

  It looked just like Salle Coram's Command hall. Everything was the same, with desks and the wall screen, workstations and chairs, except for the doors stacked on the left, and the row of black-suited bodies lying on mattresses on the right. Her hand went to her waist for a gun.

  "They're dead," Lucas said quickly. "Long dead, over two months now."

  Anna eyed them carefully, six bodies laid down to die on mattresses, so civilized, amongst the tossed-about tools of their saboteurs trade. The things people did to survive.

  "It was a trap," she said, finally. "They knew we would come here."

  "Yes," Lucas said warmly. "May I tell you my theory?"

  Anna nodded. Already the scale of this was beyond anything she'd anticipated.

  "This was the first bunker," Lucas said, "built at least a year before the apocalypse hit. I think you're that far already. They used it to predict when the T4 would be triggered, using the radar boards you saw in the halls. But, and here I'm starting to make informed guesses, it was early in their research into the shield technology. It was imperfect, much like in their suits, and it failed rapidly. So when the infection spread and the shield switched on, all the staff here died."

  Anna grunted. It seemed possible. There was certainly poetic justice in being killed by their own shield, but she stopped herself from taking any pleasure in it. That was the old Anna. The new Anna would have fought for them to survive. That change would take some getting used to.

  "So they died," Anna said, picking up the thread. She looked at the six bodies lined up along the wall. "Then these six came to turn it into a trap. They must have come from another bunker, in some kind of coordinated attempt to trap us."

  Lucas nodded. "Go on."

  Anna looked over to the stacked doors. They looked about the right size. "They took off all the doors so we had nowhere to hide. They even took out the elevator and made the main door lock open, so we couldn't seal the bunker up and hide."

  "It also explains why the demon hadn't been released yet," Lucas added, "but why Peters and Wanda felt that it had. They were channeling a new frequency in, which blocked the demon's signal. That same frequency too kept it nearby, when it was released. They needed it near, to draw the ocean in for when the main signal shift went out."

  Anna ran all the moving pieces through her head. It was complex, but really came down to one thing. "They did all that on the hydrogen line. They changed the frequency and the signal. But I thought you said you couldn't do that."

  "I couldn't," he answered. "Not with the solid state shield we had in Maine. But in this older bunker, along with a special piece of equipment they brought with them?" He pointed at a black box on one of the desks. "They had it all pre-programmed. Perhaps they've been working on it as a backup for ten years. They're all geniuses."

  Anna slumped back in the wheelchair. With this news, the whole landscape was changed. Before it hadn't been possible to change the shield frequency or send behavioral instructions on the hydrogen line. Now it was. What possibilities did that unearth? There was so much they hadn't known, and perhaps they really had been lucky to survive this far.

  But still, Lucas looked happy.

  "Why aren't you more worried?" she asked. "If they can turn the ocean against us, how can we ever get close enough to the bunkers to kill them? We can't even talk to them."

  "We don't need to."

  This only made her more tired. Weeks and months of this pressure were weighing her down. Always the need to kill. "Just tell me."

  "The answer's outside."

  * * *

  He wheeled her out to the gantry round the stairwell, then round to the corridor on the other side and back down the path he'd led her on a day earlier, up and down stairs, through a maze of turns, until the corridor ended in a solid wall of frozen gray bodies.

  She looked at the bottleneck, crammed in from floor to ceiling.

  "I've seen the bunker's plans," Lucas said. "Above this there's twenty feet of solid concrete with a rebar steel mesh running through it, and above that another hundred-odd feet of earth. Beneath us are the other decks, where there are more of the ocean, pressing up to the ceiling to lock the demon in."

  Anna peered at the gray. She didn't feel any hint of cold emanating out. "It's in there."

  "It's in there, partially contained by the natural structure of the bunker, partially by the ocean. How many zombies do you think it has taken to contain it?"

  His point hit home, then. She counted the bodies o
n display then ran a quick calculation, guessing at the length of corridor before it turned at the corner, where she'd last seen the demon.

  "A thousand? A few thousand, maybe."

  "Much less than a thousand," Lucas said. "Even with conservative math. More like five hundred."

  Anna stared. It changed everything. It made so many things possible. When she looked again at Lucas, it was with tears rising unbidden to her eyes.

  "Five hundred?" Her voice cracked.

  His smile widened and his eyes sparkled too. "Yes, Anna. I believe we can contain them all here. We can use their trap against them. We don't need to kill the bunkers or hit the off switches. This is all we need."

  She laughed despite her tears. Goddamn. It was too good to be true, but if she really didn't have to kill ten more bunkers, possibly thirty thousand more people, that was a mercy sent from heaven. It was the best news she'd ever heard.

  And it left one thing to do. Looking into his eyes, just as happy as her own, the one lie she'd carried for too long already bubbled close to the surface. She didn't want it any more, didn't want to be that person or do those things. The T4 had taught her a valuable lesson, so long in the learning.

  It was her true enemy. Wherever it 'expressed' in her or in the demons or the ocean, it was the enemy, and everything else, everybody else, was just a victim. And like Amo before her, she had slaughtered her share of victims.

  "It was us," she said abruptly. Lucas's eyes narrowed. She took a breath and got the rest of it out. "Not Salle Coram. Amo and I, we made the decision to kill your bunker together. All your people died, because of us."

  Lucas looked at her. She didn't know what to expect. If he wanted to hate her now, then he should. If he wanted revenge that was all right too, she was too tired to fight back.

  Instead he smiled, a gentle, sad smile. "I know," he said. "I always knew. The people ran to you, Anna. Not to me. I've always known, even if I didn't let myself see it. But thank you for telling me."