"Any trauma?" he asks, curt and business-like.
"None that I saw," I answer. "She just ran off into the corn, out of nothing. I found her kneeling in front of the combine."
He looks up at me briefly, the shock of that statement bouncing off his professional demeanor, then goes back to his examination. He probes her skull carefully then runs his palms down her ribs, round her pelvis and along each of her limbs like he's patting her down at an airport. He opens one of her eyes and leans in to study the white. He opens her mouth and looks at her tongue, then looks up at me.
"I don't see anything except mild dehydration. You said she wandered off?"
"It wasn't a wander," I say. "It was purposeful, like she had some destination in mind."
"The combine."
We look at each other, a thought too horrible to express, then back down at Lara.
"Extreme dehydration, sunstroke, could feasibly cause something like that," he says. "Hallucination. But she's not nearly that far along." He looks up at me. "She wasn't running from something?"
I look at him. "To go kneel in front of a combine? Why would she?"
"Suicidal thoughts," he says, studying me. "She's not on any medication, is she?"
"What? No, of course not. Nothing like that."
"And no head trauma." He leaves that hanging for a moment. "We need to get her back, Amo. Get some fluids in her. When she regains consciousness we can try a brain scan."
I nod. I'd anticipated something like this. I don't think about the insinuation that he's offering, holding out like an olive branch, that maybe I'd done something. Did you hit her, Amo? Where's the trauma site you made, Amo? These people trust me, I think, but only so far.
I rise and bring my walkie up, ringing through on a specific channel.
"What's new, Amo?" Feargal answers.
Hearing his voice is a comfort. He's deputy head on the Council now, battle-tested and completely reliable, especially after his travails in France.
"Lara's sick," I say, "Keeshom thinks maybe sunstroke, so I'm taking her back to the Theater. I need you to run the harvest while we're gone. And please send someone to tell Vie and Talia I'll be there late. Don't worry them."
He takes this in and answers swiftly. He'll know it's more than sunstroke; I wouldn't call for only that. "Understood. Anything else I can do?"
Thank God for Feargal. "That's plenty, thanks Feargal. It's in your hands."
"I'll go tell your kids myself. Take care of Lara."
He rings off. He's been in urgent situations, he knows how every second can count and shouldn't be wasted, and it makes him invaluable. I respect that.
I look up at Keeshom, kneeling by Lara's legs. Lying on the path she looks so fragile.
"Take her under the arms," he says. "As gentle as you can. People break ribs doing this. You made the right choice to not sling her over your shoulder."
I nod and drop, scoop my arms under Lara's, and together we lift. It's easier than before but not by much, and now I'm walking backwards. Sweat slicks down my face and we stop three times to dry our hands and fix our grip. Down the slope to the Discovery Center lot we go slow, then I lead us over to my RV. We get her in, Keeshom starts setting up a simple saline drip, and I get in the driving seat.
It's an hour back to our little village, clustered by the Chinese Theater.
"Is she set?" I ask Keeshom.
"Set," he answers. "Taking fluids."
I press the gas gently and drive us away.
* * *
I don't think of much but her eyes.
It was before her coma, when the demon crushed her chest right by my side on McKnight Road just north of Pittsburgh, and her eyes were wild and failing as she struggled to breathe.
Those eyes have haunted me for nearly two years now, an undercurrent beneath all the other shit filling up my head, and now they're back. In her fluttering eyes as she lay there in the muck, staring up past me at some unseen face in the clouds, I saw the touch of the demon, and my own inability to protect her.
I don't say as much to Keeshom. I don't even know how to say it, because all the demons are dead. Anna confirmed it, Lucas verified it, we got them all.
So what was this, an echo, like an LSD flashback? She ran out into a field and knelt before a combine. It's no kind of echo I recognize. It's more like madness, and that terrifies me. She could have died.
Down through Yorba Linda residential area, I take us over the dry Santa Ana River and up onto Express 91. Miles flow by under the RV's wheels like water, on this gray river cutting through the arid, barren landscape. I look out and see a city slowly baking. Cracks are everywhere these days, shooting up like spider webs on the strip mall façades and spreading out along the blacktop, cutting through whole districts in jagged lines where the 2026 quake tore the earth.
Shit.
How many times have I driven an RV faced with some godforsaken shit like this? It's never easy. Poor Lara. Shit. I see her eyes again while the Sky Zone trampoline park whizzes by on the right. We took the kids there a year back and they loved it; have been begging to return ever since. We promised to get them a huge trampoline for the yard in our mansion up in Sacramento.
Folsom Lake was beautiful. We went up all together a few months back, shopping for a new home. We picked out a house we could never have afforded in the old world. I rub my eyes. Dammit!
Fullerton on the right, Anaheim on the left. We flow through junctions and past other spiraling, crisscrossing highways. All of these will crumble eventually and LA will be truly empty. Shit. Buena Park passes on the right, Lakewood on the left, Compton on the right.
"How is she?" I call back.
"Unresponsive, but stable," Keeshom says. He sounds sleepy. It's stifling in the RV and I open the windows, letting a hot blast of air rush in.
I think about the steps to come. Back in New LA we still have the satellite gear. One day that too will stop working, but for now I can Skype Macy and get her input. Maybe Lucas will have some ideas. If it's the demons, if it's something inside Lara's head, then…
Gardena, Hawthorne, then I'm pulling onto the 405 and heading for the beachfront, to Torrance Hospital just down from the Theater. I pull off onto the 105 and from there roll down toward the beach with LAX on my right. The ocean spreads out ahead and I take Highland Avenue south on the coast toward Torrance, racing by the Theater, and…
"Holy shit," says Keeshom in back.
Seconds pass, then I hit the brakes. The RV rocks to a halt and the engine quiets and starts ticking down, while a faint ocean wind wisps in. I stare out of the window in disbelief.
There's the Chinese Theater, like it's always been, but something is very different. For a moment I guess that the Sacramento division has come home, or failing that Witzgenstein's people have given up on their experiment in self-government, but neither of those things is true, because I don't recognize any of these people.
There are nine RVs in the forecourt, and I recognize them because they're some of the last batch of RVs I loaded into the Empire State Building in New York. Around them there are literally dozens of people standing out on the forecourt, all now looking this way.
"Holy shit," I breathe.
There's a guy in the middle who steps forward while we stare, frozen here like we're stuck in traffic. I get the awkward twitch that we're going to get rear-ended, but of course there are no cars coming up behind us.
The guy is huge, a giant of a man, easily six foot five and thick-necked like Dwayne Johnson, with a chest as big as a refrigerator, thighs thick as Doric columns. He's got a short crop of black hair and beard on a head like a ham hock, like Bluto off Popeye. He's looking at me, and all around him are people. I make a quick count of nine other adults, while the rest of them are children.
So damn many children. Thirty, perhaps, of all ages from babies in strollers up to around ten years old, all arranged obedient and polite like little soldiers in a row, all looking at me.
The
y look like a throng of the ocean. I can hardly believe they're real.
"Holy shit," Keeshom repeats, the third time between us.
I scan them. I scan the big guy, dressed in blue jeans, a check shirt and dark jacket despite the unrelenting heat. He's got a pistol at his hip and so do the other adults; looks like four men and five women. I don't have a gun on me, I'm not wearing a holster, but there is one in the glove box. My mind races. What the hell, why is this happening now?
I need to focus. I blink hard. No holster, OK. I can't think about Lara. I can't go out with the gun in my hand. That would be no kind of welcome, and right now I'm facing a first contact situation like we've never had before. Shit could get real, fast. Likewise, I'm not going out there unarmed, not with Lara in back.
The answer comes quickly. I can tuck it in my waist band. How many seconds have passed while I just sat here now? What impression am I giving? Time to act. I fish out the gun with swift and practiced hands. I check the magazine, load a round into the chamber, click the safety off, then slide it into my belt.
So this is how I'll roll.
On the dashboard there's the walkie, slotted into its charging booth. I snatch it up as Bluto takes another step forward, off the forecourt and onto the sidewalk.
"Feargal," I say into the walkie. "Feargal, it's a Code Violet at the Theater. Forty people, mostly kids, the adults are armed. Code Violet, I need an armed welcome squad here now. Bring Crow."
He comes back swiftly, showing some of the surprise I expected. "Confirm, Amo, was that Code Violet?" He's surprised but taking it in his stride, and damn, am I glad he didn't head back out to Europe with Anna.
"Code Violet confirmed, this is not a drill. Get here as soon as you can with a squad, round the others up and have Jennifer get them to Fallout One, then contact Sacramento and tell them to hunker down."
"Will do," he replies swiftly. "En route in five, Amo. Be safe."
I set the walkie down as Bluto reaches the edge of the sidewalk and stops, watching me. No smile, no wave, just watching. His people stand in back like sheep, open eyes gazing to me, watching for what will happen. The kids are all holding big stuffed toys, which is cute I guess, but who knows? I've got Lara in the back. Shit.
I turn to Keeshom, still sat with Lara's limp hand in his own, peering through the side window. "Stay with her," I tell him, because already I've delayed long enough. They all saw me rustle with the gun and talk on the walkie. They all see this delay, and it looks either weak or aggressive. Perhaps now they're getting antsy, and I can't let it fester. The last thing I want is shots fired.
I open the door then stop and turn back, weighing what I'm going to say, but there's no time to sugarcoat it. "If anything happens to me, or if anyone comes over to the RV, just drive, Keeshom. Get the hell out of here."
He stares at me vacantly, dropping into a kind of shock himself.
"Tell me you understand," I repeat. "I want to hear the words."
His throat makes a funny noise, his jaw slack and open, then words come out. "I understand," he manages. "Be careful, Amo."
"Always," I say, then open the door and stride out to meet this glaring giant of a man.
PAST
INTERLUDE 1
Three days after the zombie apocalypse, Matthew Drake stood in the corridor and leaned his head against the door, breathing hard. This was the worst part, and no mistake. This was where the crunch really hit home, where the men would be separated from the boys.
Was he a man or a boy?
He rubbed his eyes. Thick fingers, scratchy with dried blood, snagged on his eyelids. The contact lens in his left eye jogged sideways and he blinked a few times to right it. He hadn't worn his lenses for a year, had only brought them onto the Summer Wind out of some vague sense of hopefulness.
"Progress has been wonderful," his doctor had said prior to the cruise, and wasn't that great. Five minutes snatched with his General Practitioner, during which they could go over platitudes about how the pain seemed to be easing, and yes migraines certainly were a challenge but they can be managed, followed by him always being ushered out the door by a strange, unnatural quiet when the doctor stopped speaking and stopped looking at him; the signal that it was time to go.
It wasn't fair or natural. Sure there was another patient waiting outside always, thanks to the tight strictures and budget placed on the National Health Service, but shouldn't his doctors at least act like human beings? Shouldn't they look him in the eye, act like they cared?
'Were your other patients in an unexplained coma?' he often wanted to shout, when these moments came. 'Have they been under house arrest for a year, shitting in a pot because the stairs are too hard?'
He never said that though. Jenny wouldn't like it, and he'd long ago come to understand that Jenny knew better than he did about a lot of things. She was the cool reason to his hot emotion, and even when she wasn't there, a certain amount of her clear thinking remained in his head.
"My puppy," she'd say at times after the coma, stroking her fingers through his dark beard, rubbing his closed eyes. "Big, soft puppy."
It had made him cry. It had been good. That was what love was, and not all the asshole doctors on the NHS could take that away. Jenny loved him, she reined him in and helped him get along, and that was good.
He thumped his head against the door hard enough to hurt. A thump came from the other side, answering him. Two thumps, then more. Every now and then it seemed he had to get them restarted. If he didn't restart them, then how could he know if they were still in there?
And he had to know, because Jenny had made him who he was; ever since college she'd help make him. When he'd dislocated his shoulder playing rugby 11s for the Worcester university team, she'd been there by his side to soothe him. She'd skipped her best friend Tracy's hen night, a big party out in Liverpool, to sit by his bedside and laugh at how weak he was now at thumb-war.
He had a temper but she corralled him. Hadn't he almost beaten that guy to death, who groped her in the club then slapped her for calling him out? On the nightclub floor, on foul wood scummed with tiny bits of broken glass and chewing gum and tacky with spilt beer, he'd punched that guy's face until it was lumpy and shredded.
It was easy. Drake was a big guy after all. Hadn't he broken another boy's leg in rugby when he was just fourteen, and did his team ever let him forget it? The Beast, they'd called him. So he'd let the Beast loose, and it had been easy.
THUMP THUMP THUMP
He'd felt nothing but the reverberations jolting up his arms, like he was a little man inside a wrecking machine, swinging the ball and feeling the thump, but no more personal than that. Punching was just another job to be done.
It wasn't the bouncers that dragged him off, not in the end, it was Jenny. It was when she'd tried to put her face in the way of his fists, and he'd actually hit her once, a glancing blow off her cheek, before he realized what was going on and stopped.
Whenever he thought back on beating the guy into hospital, he never felt any guilt. It was a good thing. But that one accidental strike against Jenny haunted him to this day.
"You did it for me," she'd said, over and over again as she rushed him out of the club, away from the main roads where the police might check, kicking through rushes of litter in Alexandra Park on the edge of Worcester town center. When they'd got to her student digs, a crappy back room with a rotten window frame and a too-short single bed, the sex had been amazing. His and her bruises the next day, his knuckles and her cheek, had felt like a kind of shared badge of honor.
He'd done the right thing to beat the guy. She'd done the right thing to stop him.
He butted the door again, to get them going. They hit the door back.
Man or boy? It was hard to say. He'd been killing them for three days now. That was the right thing, all the movies said so, and in a way it was easy too. Now there was this, and it wasn't easy at all.
It all began with corn soup.
* * *
They'd been two days out of Southampton, bound for the Mediterranean. A cruise for two weeks, the Mediterranean Explorer package it was called, something Jenny had been dreaming of since she was a little girl.
Drake's health insurance had paid out well enough. Work in the City, London's financial center, had left them with no shortage of cash and a hell of a termination package, offered in lieu of long-term sick pay. Their troubles were not about the money. Their troubles were him, and the migraines, and the fact he could barely even open his eyes after the coma first hit.
So he'd worked at it. At first sleeping all day in the downstairs bedroom in their St. Alban's cottage, with the blackout blinds drawn and the house around him on a quiet lockdown, had been torture. The tiniest things had set him off. He'd cried, Jenny had cried, their daughter Lucy had cried, and it had been pure misery.
But he was the Beast. The boys from back then and the boys from work came by, but he couldn't admit them. But knowing they'd come? He kept on.
He got out of bed when he could. He walked around the dark room. See, he had something to live for. That made him strong. In time he opened the blinds a crack. Sometimes he could let Jenny sleep alongside him. He was able to talk to Lucy for brief conversations, then sit her on his lap, then he could even sit out in the living room, as long as the TV was off and the curtains closed and nobody shouted.
He shouted, at times. He shouted at Lucy once when she got up and started dancing, 'moved by the spirit', his mother would have said, but it almost ruined everything. He yelled himself into a migraine, and Jenny was mad at him for days. So he fixed his behavior. Every Beast needed chains of some sort, and he welcomed his. She was his Beauty, and she never ran away. Like she'd bathed his knuckles after the nightclub, now she helped clean up his mind.
They took walks, in the early morning and late at night, around their little village. He hadn't noticed when he'd been at work just how beautiful St. Albans was. The medieval church and priory, all ancient stone and crenellated spire-top, like a battlement. The graveyard filled with tilting gravestones, lumpy with ancient bodies underneath. The woods, the air, the brook that bubbled down through their garden.
Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Page 6