Zombie Ocean (Book 4): The Loss

by Michael John Grist

"What?" he demanded.

  "Nothing," Salle said, but it wasn't nothing and both of them knew it. He'd given up. "First positions then. I'll get it started."

  He looked away, toward the blue sky through the TV, and a dream of what remained above.

  * * *

  She made the announcements. She sent out the messages. First positions, and the security zones walls were shrinking down for purposes of a new experiment within 24 hours. Supplies of alcohol and other luxury products would be secured and rationed in the future.

  She clicked send on her email program. So simple, really, to drive the axe in like that. To kill the dream. Nothing changed at once, there was no hue and outcry in the corridor, just a gradual hunkering down inside the minds of all three thousand people they were seeking to manage. A withdrawal to first positions, as once-laughing, joyful, playful and hedonistic scientists and researchers looked inside themselves and saw naked, ugly fear looking back.

  No choice, Salle thought. They were leaving them with no choice.

  The riots began on the first floor within five hours, and spread quickly after that. They were silly and fun at first, more like parties spiraled out of control, but as they went on, and the lack of control became apparent to everyone involved, they grew darker. The first murder came within a day, though nobody knew about it until much later, when the body count had spiked much higher.

  People fought for resources like chocolate and liquor, for land and zones like the forest and soy farms, driven by a maddening fear that the outside world really was gone. To them it seemed that the security zones coming down was the first step in isolating unnecessary sectors, after which they would be purged. Three thousand people split along mob lines, cliques bunching together and taking all the food, water and other resources they could, that they felt they needed. They forced their way to the upper decks, closer to the lifts that would surely now open to release them. They holed up and fought off anyone who tried to push them back.

  It was crazy. It was a pressure cooker that had been turned on for four years with no escape valve for the steam to get out, and getting drunk or high and having sex was just not going to cut it anymore.

  Salle and Mecklarin first tried to reason with several strands of the mob, but were ignored, mocked, and one attacked with canes. They barely managed to escape, taking shelter in a room on the second floor, while outside mobs closed in on Salle's private quarters on the third floor, holding table-leg clubs and looking for blood. It was hard to believe, watching on the video screens as peaceful botanists and engineers prowled the corridors smashing art and TVs, knocking back vodka in one last frenzied blowout before the big lifts opened, out of their minds on years of doubt and fear.

  By that point Mecklarin was drunk and ranting. Salle clung to him still, and he patted her back.

  "They're coming," he said. "The doors will open any minute and a peacekeeping force will flood in. It's a failure, but we'll learn from it. We'll do better next time, five thousand people and fifteen years. The algorithms can compensate for this. We must've got something wrong from the start. Any minute now that door will open and we'll be saved, and the world will still fete us. It's an ugly side of the human spirit, but it's good we expose it here, where it's safe, and not up on Mars. Salle, don't you think?"

  He looked at her hungrily. The easy confidence was gone, replaced by fear. His conception of who he was had been lost. He wasn't the great Lars Mecklarin anymore, mental magician with all the answers, but something else, something broken. He would never be OK again.

  "I think so, Lars," she told him, stroking his hair. "I really do." She still loved him, after all. Things like that didn't change because of failure. He'd burned so bright and now he was a guttering wick, but nobody got to choose the point at which their stamina failed.

  They huddled tight as the lights flickered, as the mob began stripping out wiring and using it to weave belts for themselves; crafting to the end. They hugged and waited, dreaming of the moment they'd be rescued, and all the violence outside would be revealed to be just a rowdy end-of-term party, not a brutal Lord of the Flies-like descent into carnage.

  "Any minute," Lars whispered in her ear, "the police will flood in. The army. They're all on standby and I sent out the signal. They know we need them. Any moment."

  They waited, and waited, until finally the door did crash open, and men in black with black helmets and black rifles did burst in, and seized them up and dragged them away.

  But they weren't the police or the army, because all the police and army had died four years ago in the zombie apocalypse. These were something else entirely.

  6. TRUST

  "We don't know," Julio said. "Not me and not you."

  We sat in the RV, arguing heatedly over a cup of green tea for me and a coffee for him. "We just don't know a damn thing about them," he went on, "what they want or what they're capable of."

  I sipped and kept calm. I was very good at keeping calm, back then, and thought it was a strength.

  "Mecklarin seems to be a peaceful guy," I said. "He was all about maximizing human potential."

  Julio snorted. "That's a line. Now he's king down there, what do you think he's doing?"

  I looked at him, unwilling to take the bait. "Probably managing people a lot smoother than we've been doing."

  That shut him up for a second. He sipped his coffee. My bitter green tea brought back memories of the road, sitting on the Wave in Coyote Buttes, Utah, watching the stars circle overhead and eating s'mores alone. Depression aside, everything was much simpler then.

  "Let's break it down," Julio said.

  I shrugged.

  "That," he pointed at the road, beyond which lay the gun turret, "is a clear sign to me. You can't misinterpret it. If we go near it, it'll shoot us. Agreed?"

  I nodded. There was no point arguing.

  "That's not there for a Mars experiment. That's here for the zombies and the people like Matthew, only existing to protect the survivors in their bunker."

  "Agreed."

  Julio nodded and put his coffee down. Engaged like that, developing a theory, he didn't seem so bad. "So picture this. Your guy Mecklarin, he knows the apocalypse is coming, and he makes up this Mars cover story to lure three thousand people down. Now they're down there, somehow they survived the infection. Answer me this, are they immune?"

  I frowned. "No. Not all of them."

  "Any of them?"

  I wriggled on the hook. I'd seen only a handful of people since the apocalypse, out of America's original population of some three hundred million. "Not likely."

  "So what are they doing down there? Are they just hanging on, thinking the infection might blow over?"

  "Probably," I said. "Infections do. We know the zombies are flushing themselves into the ocean. Maybe in a few months all of the USA will be clear. They can come out. I'd welcome three thousand people."

  Julio shook his head. "You're not thinking clearly, Amo. That's what you're hoping for, not a fact. Think about how the infection started. It was you, wasn't it?"

  More uncomfortable wriggling. He's talking about me and Lara having sex, which somehow brought on the apocalypse. "Perhaps. It could be a coincidence"

  "It wasn't normal. You broadcasted a signal out, or something. How do you know you're not still broadcasting?"

  "I-"

  "And Matthew, the one they shot? Why would they do that if they were coming out in a few months? What if he was broadcasting too, and they knew that? What if we all are, all the time, and the only way they come out is with all of us flushed down the toilet just like the zombies?"

  I stared at him then, partly in shock at the leaps of logic he was taking and partly stunned to hear him say so much all at once. It was more than I'd ever heard him say before. Again, I wish I'd listened. He nailed it in one.

  "None of those are facts, either," I protested weakly. "You don't know any of that. Maybe they're down there working on a cure. Maybe I'm not infectious anymore."
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  Julio grinned. It spread big across his face, revealing painfully white teeth against a dark, wiry stubble. Perhaps he was growing a beard, or he'd just forgotten to shave. His green eyes lit with the upper hand. "Maybe. But listen to yourself. You don't want machine gun nests on the Chinese Theater roof, you don't want to tear down your cairns, I understand, but this? You can't 'maybe' and 'perhaps' your way out of this."

  "All you've got is maybe too," I spat back. "Theories only. It's not enough to do, what, what are suggesting here? Try and kill them all?"

  Julio looked at me, the gears working behind his dark brown eyes. "So tell me something, Amo. I'm curious. Why did you kill Don, in Las Vegas?"

  That was below the belt. I'd thought about it of course, in the weeks since, and had my answer prepared in case a grand jury descended. Whether it was the true reason or not I didn't know, but it was a reason all the same. I flash back to the hot battletank bus, with him leaning in over me.

  "He was an imminent threat," I say.

  "No he wasn't. He asked to see your gun. What is that but maybe?"

  "He had me penned in. He had those cheerleaders. Not so unlike you, really, with your heads on the grille of your car."

  His grin went as wide as the Cheshire Cat at that. "So why didn't you kill me? After Anna, too, am I not an imminent threat?"

  I looked at him and he looked at me. Both of us had guns at our hips.

  "Time," I said, finding the right answer in the moment. "I had time with you, not with Don. If he'd not had me penned into the bus, maybe he'd still be alive. But he pressed. You want to keep pressing, go right ahead."

  He laughed at that. "You won't kill me for words. Cerulean, maybe he would. Boy's got some anger."

  "Don't call him boy."

  "He's young, Amo. Hotheaded, despite being in the chair. What are you, twenty-six?"

  "Twenty-seven."

  "Like the one year makes a difference. I'm thirty-eight. You're all kids to me."

  I didn't say much to that. It was getting late and dark out.

  "Tonight we do a sign," I said, retaking the initiative. "Camp down the road from here. I don't want to be close to it."

  "You're the boss."

  We rolled the RV back down the road, and in the last of the light painted three existing road signs a bright traffic paint yellow, with stenciled text in neat spray-paint red.

  STOP & READ OR DIE

  I strung a red-painted glass Coke bottle from each sign on a piece of metal cord, within which was a warning written on paper and a USB.

  "Is that it?" Julio asked.

  I couldn't argue, it looked a little sad. It wasn't much of a warning.

  In the end we worked through the night, setting up a full-blown cairn. We painted a wide checkered black and white streak across the road by the light of the RV's high beams, then rolled back down the hill to the nearest home over where we collected two cars, a Porsche and a Volvo, and drove them into position to block the road. I painted them red and stocked them up with a cairn's worth of material: USBs, comics, Nespresso machine, pods, water, powdered milk and a generator, with directions to New LA and an explanation of what lay over the hump in the road.

  Julio did the work without grumbling. When it was done we spent an hour circling around the forest to come along the road from the other direction, where we did it all again. A new cairn, more paint, more road signs, more bottles. It was around 4am by the time we finished.

  Quarantine.

  "Probably no one will ever come this way again," Julio said.

  "Matthew and Cerulean did."

  He shrugged.

  We parked the RV down the road from the barricade. I called Lara, updated her on our progress, then I went to sleep.

  When I woke, only a few hours later as a cold dawn was creeping through the forest, Julio was gone.

  * * *

  I shouted his name. I looked around. I tried to hail him on the HF radio but eventually, fearing the worst, I crawled up the road to peer over the killing fields, and that's where I saw him.

  "Julio," I shouted.

  He was lying up against the concrete block on his side, easily visible as the one patch of solid, living skin. He gave me a little wave back. The gun turret was down in its block still, and floaters were milling around him striking the concrete.

  "What the hell?" I whispered.

  Using the binoculars I saw he was dragging a large four-gallon red container behind him. I recognized it from the RV as one of my own gas refill tanks. On his back he had a satchel.

  "Julio, what are you doing?" I shouted into the radio. He ignored me, must have had it turned off, so instead I just shouted.

  "What the hell are you doing?"

  That made him pick up the radio. "Keep your voice down," he hissed, "we don't know what might trigger this thing."

  "So tell me what you're doing."

  "What we should have done from the start. Burn this thing up." He patted the gas tank.

  I stared, putting the pieces together. I should have realized it. He was far too compliant the night before, even offering suggestions about where to place the cairns. He was just waiting for me to fall asleep. The bastard probably thought he was doing the right thing.

  "It's concrete, how are you going to burn it down?"

  "Not down, up," he corrected. "I'll climb up and pour this," he tapped the drum, "down the hole. I climbed a tree and got a good angle, there's a gap. Fill it up, drop a flare," he gestured to his satchel, "boom goes the dynamite. The gun won't fire again, we're all safe."

  For a moment I thought it was a good idea. I wish I'd held onto that and let him go ahead. So many problems would've been solved. But I didn't.

  "There are three thousand people down there," I hissed into the radio. "What if they need that pole?"

  "What if they do?" he countered. "There's two of us up here, and they didn't stop and ask if we didn't mind being shot. They killed Matthew and they'd kill us if we let them. These bastards are asking for it. They're just like Don, an imminent threat."

  "They're protecting themselves," I said weakly. "It's hardly imminent to us, if we stay out of the way. It's just to stop zombies getting in and infecting them all."

  He gave me a look that, despite the distance, I recognized as one of knowing pity. "Grow up, Amo. Don't be a boy about this. Imminent today or in ten years, what's the difference? This is the shape of the world now."

  With that he stood up beside the concrete box, lifted the red tank onto the top, and curled his fingers around the edge to climb.

  I'd like to say I was only enraged by his callous disregard for three thousand people. I'd killed and I was sick of it. If I could avoid killing the zombies I would, and if I could avoid killing three thousand people sheltered underground, I certainly would. But possibly also something about his tone set me off.

  He kicked his feet off the box's side and in a second was rolling onto the top. About fifty zombies were thumping the concrete below him, and more were ambling closer across the field all the time, like incoming waves.

  I didn't really think. There was no calculation, no consideration of cause and consequence, just a deep drive that made me stand up and start sprinting toward him, binoculars clattering on the asphalt. I hit the dew-wet grass with a slip and recovery, careening on until I hit the outer rings of dead zombies and had to start picking my footing carefully.

  Julio was atop the block now with the cap off the tank, staring at me with his jaw open.

  "You crazy bastard, go back!" he shouted, "you'll get us both killed."

  But of course I couldn't go back now. I kept on until my foot struck off a skull and my ankle rolled, dropping me hard and awkwardly into a heap of them. I scrabbled up in time to hear a deep low burring coming from below, vibrating my teeth.

  I looked up and saw Julio pouring gas into the hole. Again the thought came that maybe this was a good move, chased by the other thought that perhaps the pole wasn't just the guns to them. What
if it was also their oxygen inlet or their communications device, or the only detector they had to tell them when the air outside was safe to breathe? I couldn't let him just kill them all.

  THUNK

  With a jarring metallic sound the bud-like tip of the metal pole jerked up through the box. Julio lurched back and away from it, nearly losing his balance off the edge and spraying gasoline everywhere.

  "Get back!" he shouted.

  He went back to pouring, down the side of the rising pole as the autocannons deployed above. I kept dodging forward over the beach of the dead. My ankle twinged and I stumbled and staggered over their bodies, nearly falling several times and barely catching myself. They were two and three thick here, so my every step was off flexing chests and rolling limbs, slipping in spilled guts, staggering and lurching forward.

  The pole reached its full extension and the four autocannons fully unpeeled.

  "Julio!" I shouted.

  He tossed the empty red canister backward. I flung myself at the concrete box and grabbed the edge just as the guns thundered from above.

  RATATATATATATATATATATAT

  The sound closed the world in around me, so loud I could scarcely breathe. I was back on the RV in Times Square again, reveling in shooting the thousands below, watching blood and guts spill out while Cerulean crawled toward me in the muck, and it made me crazy.

  A man by my side, peanut-faced with a single sad glove on his left hand, was hit and erupted like an alien had burst out of his chest. Blood spattered me and the side of the concrete box. His white ribs spread open and his heart and chunks of his lungs shot through and he fell. A flax-haired child behind me, stumbling awkwardly over a fat man's belly, had her head erupted like a hollow piñata. The bone and skin fractured outward in concave chunks. Bullets whizzed and bit down everywhere, perhaps two thousand rounds a minute, slicing through the layers of bodies like a cheese wire, plowing deep into the ground.

  RATATATATATATATATATATAT

  I hauled myself up onto the box. Julio stood by the pole with a burning flare in his hand and a look of utter disbelief on his face. Behind him zombies were dropping, scythed down like rows of corn, and by his side thick bronze spent shell casings tinkled down off the concrete.