The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  "What are you doing?" he asks.

  I say nothing. I could tell him about the tower, but it's gone now so there's no point. I don't remember coming here. Events drift on a tide of rotten kelp. I look around but Drake is gone, in the sky Lara and the kids are gone too.

  "Amo," Feargal says, and I look back at him.

  "I killed a lot of people here," I say, the first thing that comes into my head.

  "Zombies," he corrects. "Not people."

  Does it make any difference? I feel a dark heat evaporating off me like morning dew. Words jumble in my mouth and head, coming out all wrong.

  "Is he dead?" I ask.

  Feargal frowns. "Is who dead?"

  I struggle for an answer to that. The kelp is tangled, and there's panic threaded into its knotty weave. It seems important to answer his question, but I can't see through to the truth. Faintly I remember that night on the road, with the feel of my belt in my hand, but I can't quite-

  "Arnst," I say, spitting out his name like it was blocking my windpipe. "Is he?"

  Feargal's frown deepens into his eyes, where it frolics with the edge of fear. "Amo. Shit. You can't ask me that."

  The dark heat radiates harder. I know how I sound, how I must look out here, climbing in the empty air and talking to no one, but I can't-

  I don't know-

  I start away.

  Feargal says something, then follows. He doesn't lay a hand on me; he wouldn't dare.

  The RV tracks us from behind. I weave and stutter, picking a path through the matted bodies. I stumble into cars; like rusty shells on a giant beach. If I were a hermit crab I would crawl into one of these and make it my own home, dragging it along with me until-

  The bodies ebb away and I make better time, walking as the sun rises. I reach 34th Street and see The Empire State Building ahead, marked with its huge blue 'f'. I follow it, disturbing a flock of deer grazing in front of Macy's, which makes me laugh. I'm drunk but not drunk, and I'm pretty sure there's no sobering up from this. Whatever has happened, it's stuck, and this is how it will be for me now.

  I find 2nd Avenue and head south.

  I remember where I'm going when I reach 23rd Street, and see the Greyhound buses parked across the intersection. There are more leathery bodies here, and I kick a path through. Each is a kind of gray skin sack, containing bones which shuffle and bounce noisily as I pass, angered by my arrival.

  Clic-cloc, they say. Clic-cloc. I keep on and soon the whole road of them are bouncing like Mexican jumping beans, clic-cloccing in a chorus that tells the sad, long story of their pointless deaths.

  They bounce and I kick them out of the air, sending bone bits spraying like buckshot. I climb up a Greyhound and stand on top with the metal roof flexing under my weight. Feargal stands amongst the bouncing bone bags with some inscrutable sadness on his weathered red face. He wants to say something to me, I know. He wants me to heal.

  "Say it, if you've got something to say," I bark at him. "Let's hear it. We're all dying to have the benefit of your wisdom."

  He just shakes his head, like I'm a disappointment, and I find that hilarious. It keeps me chuckling inside.

  "They can't understand," says Drake, waiting for me as I descend down the other side of the bus. "What the weight of leadership is really like."

  I grunt agreement, then slither over the blackened windows and onto the asphalt I once spent a few weeks scrubbing. I look at the shops and buildings to either side, where once I'd burnt the ocean then cleaned up the mess. It seems ridiculous now that I actually tried to scrub away that atrocity. I only need to blink and images come back, of me standing atop a ladder and brushing down a greasy wall with bleach, trying to wash out the stain.

  It makes me laugh. I'd like to go over and kick out the ladder's legs so that Amo falls in the bubbly black off-wash, a hurt look on his face, asking 'Why?'.

  "No reason," I'd tell him. "Just because."

  "They don't see the big picture," Drake says, leading me down the street. "That's our responsibility. We make the hard decisions so the race can continue."

  In death his shoulders seem to have grown even more massive, bulging in his jacket. He is more like the cartoon Bluto than ever. I walk in his broad footsteps and think about my fingers in his brain.

  "And you'll note that I kept my promise," he says. "I said I'd be punished for what I did, and I was."

  That's true. As we near the place I need to see, I remember his promise to pay for his crimes. I remember my own too; almost twelve years ago, it was here that I first envisaged my long road to California, and here that I imagined how it would end, with me strung by the neck from the Chinese Theater's eves, looking out to the Pacific Ocean.

  That is a promise I have so far failed to keep.

  "It takes conviction," Drake says. "You've been too much of a little bitch."

  I snort, and stop in front of Sir Clowdesley.

  It all began here. But even Sir Clowdesley died for the new world to be born.

  The cafe looks much like it always did, though grayed by an accumulation of dust, so the name of that ancient admiral stands in dull golden relief across the dusty blue sign. The letters of LARA's name are on the sidewalk, the chalk long-erased from the blackboard. Even most of the black has been washed off, revealing pressed chipboard beneath.

  So it goes.

  "Hope is a cancer," Drake says, and I repeat his words like a mantra. "We all have a terminal case. There's no glory in it, no righteousness, just that insidious voice that says 'live'. That voice is a coward. That voice is full of shit."

  I repeat and advance. Nobody ever actually opened the front door to Sir Clowdesley, so I'm left with climbing through the same broken window I always used. It's gloomy inside and smells like a burnt-out library. Bright paperback covers are scattered across the floor amongst blackened pages like strange crocuses. Lee Child. Stephen King. Theirs is a different world, a mirror I can look into but never pass through.

  I walk over to the bar and run my hand along the polished chrome railing. Inside the glass display case for cakes are little piles of rodent droppings. Maybe if I listen I can hear the squeaking of the rats who now rule New York. Behind the bar all the utensils of the baristas remain, neatly laid out and ready to open shop on that fateful day twelve years back when the world changed.

  "Stop crying," Drake says. "Be a man."

  I'm not crying. I rub my eyes. Of course he is right.

  Together we walk up the stairs into the back section, and I stand over the leather sofa where I first spoke to Lara. I was making art. She was passing the time. I'd just become mayor. I conjure up the feelings of that moment, because that was when all this began.

  It doesn't move me.

  "Why should it?" asks Drake.

  I laugh. The apocalypse began here, and ever since then this café felt like a kind of holy site, as if something sacred had occurred here, but that's just bullshit, and there's no deeper layer in the air. I was a wounded animal then and this is what I did. I'm a wounded animal now, and this is what I'll do.

  "Yes," urges Drake. "Crazy like a fox."

  Thanks to Drake, I'm starting to see. In Screen 2 the journey began, and this is where it leads. I can stick the knife in now and watch the life drain away and not feel a thing. It feels like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes.

  "Finally," says Drake.

  I kick some more bones and laugh. This place doesn't have a hold on me anymore.

  There's a lighter behind the bar. I splash sludgy gasoline from my old supply around the walls and sofas, then I open up the fire door in the back to get a through-draft going. The liquid whuffs to life when I drop the spark, and I stand outside with Feargal a decent distance apart, watching this genesis point go up in flames.

  I'm not anyone, now. I'm not Amo. Drake beat Amo into the ground, and I'm burning the last of him to dust. My legacy will not be in the history books. When this is done the world will be clean and bright, and nobody will eve
r say my name again.

  INTERLUDE 4

  Lucas was led into his new lab.

  He'd been transported the short distance into the bunker hooded and shackled. That was ridiculous, because everyone on his team knew where the Istanbul bunker mouth was, but clearly this process was meant to intimidate him further.

  It wasn't necessary. He was already afraid.

  Marshall took off his hood, and Lucas blinked in the harsh white light. A large lab lay before him, lined with workbenches, power and gas outlets, an electron microscope stood like a small rocket, various iterations of the line-shielding helmets hung on the wall, along with the same laptops, clipboards of data, fridges full of samples, and experimental equipment Lucas had left behind in Istanbul.

  He had no fight left, but seeing his own gear here knocked him even lower. "This was your plan," he managed, looking at Marshall. It was strange to see him without the helmet on, always buzzing. His hair was a close-cropped gray, his eyes were gray, and his face was sharp like a piece of freshly chipped flint. "You took our research. You took us. Now you want us to work."

  "We wanted you, specifically," Marshall corrected. The faint Texan twang was clearer now too, no longer coming at one remove through the helmet. "The rest, whether it's your findings to date or your team, can be replicated. But time is a factor, as you know. You don't have years, Lucas, and neither do we."

  Lucas looked over the space, and felt like a traitor. Yes, he'd watched the videos showing the extermination of Amo's people again and again; he'd seen the data and understood the reality that there was nothing left to fight for. Yes, it was true that he'd switched sides once already, and switching back now just made him a pragmatist living in the real world, but still he felt like he was committing a grave betrayal. It was hard to believe Anna, Amo and Lara were all really dead.

  "You'll feel better," Marshall said. "When you see the kind of people we are."

  "I know exactly what kind of people you are," Lucas said, but even to him the words sounded childish and aimlessly bitter. It had been a war, and whining now about his loss would serve no one.

  "If you judge us from the acts you've seen to date, I can understand that," Marshall said kindly, like a parent explaining to a child that life is not fair. "But you've overcome that before. You know it was Amo who killed Maine, yet you worked with him. You can do the same here."

  Do the same. Now his skin itched all the time, and he wasn't sure if it had been like that for weeks and he was just noticing, or it was a new and sudden onset of Lyell's syndrome.

  "I'll need the others," he said grimly, knowing what it would mean. Knowing the terrible fate he would damn them to, toxic epidermal necrolysis.

  "We've already applied the cure," Marshall said.

  A spark of anger flared and Lucas looked up at him sharply. "You did what? You didn't even consult me?"

  General Marshall's expression didn't register any change. "Lucas. Come now. Why would we?"

  He'd already lost, that much was plain, but he couldn't cede the ground so easily. "That was foolish. You said it yourself, that my cure is longer-lasting than yours. I could've made it in days, especially with access to your work so far. They would have had years before Lyell's began to manifest."

  Marshall spoke in the same gentle, patient tone. "Lucas, there are thirty thousand of my people trapped below ground. Many hundreds have died of Lyell's already, and hundreds more are worsening every day. Do you think I can afford to care about a few months lost from a meager handful? Do you have any idea how many of my people succumb to despair and commit suicide every week?"

  Lucas managed to keep staring, though his weak resolve was already weakening. All of this was doubtless true; he'd seen enough suicides in Maine. "Not enough," he said.

  Marshall's face remained impassive. "I shall pretend you did not say that. You're upset, which I fully understand, but this is the reality I face every day. What I have faced every day for years, watching good men and women sicken, waste and die. But now my good men and women are your people too. Your team have months ahead of them yet, symptomless. In that time your research will speak for itself. Answers will come."

  Lucas inclined his head. Yes. Every minute would count. "So you'll allow me to work on the cure?"

  "I am not Salle Coram," Marshall said. "You will have allotments. As you render improvements to our shield technology, so you will be given time to work on remedying Lyell's. In this I weigh the needs of the many and the needs of the few, and strike a balance. The Seal is not a totalitarian state."

  Lucas looked down at his feet. He had done this once before, swallowed this kind of deal, only then it had been on a worktop in the Maine airport with Anna holding a blade to his throat. There was no blade now, but the threat was still very real, lodged in his genes, and he would adapt accordingly because there was no other choice.

  Jake was dead, Amo was dead, but Sulman and the others were alive. He could do something for them.

  "I trust all of this is monitored," he said waving at the equipment. "You'll be watching."

  "We have cameras with line of sight to everything," Marshall said. "Microphones to hear everything. Yes, you will be eagerly watched by the eyes of thousands of researchers across the Seal, each replicating your every step, constructing new paradigms and experiments based around your work. They are an army you can call on at will. If you require assistants in the lab with you we will provide them, until such time as your own assistants have overcome the side effects of the cure. For the weeks to come you will be like a general to my people, Lucas, able to issue commands with instant obedience. Their hopes rest on you."

  Lucas sighed. Hopes came and went. They changed. So he had to change too. He took a deep breath and looked up again, at the lab and the equipment and the helmets, but now with an appraising eye. He'd been thinking about the line and the cure constantly anyway, after the enormous disruptions before the raid had offered so many insights at once. While sitting at the table in his cubic interrogation tent, he'd been desperate to get his hands on equipment and start running confirmation tests, probing the dozen theories churning through his mind. He already had a dozen experimental programs planned for the cure, and these could easily be twisted to target the helmets. His own research could continue under cover of working for the greater good.

  "I need my people," he said, looking ahead and mentally sketching out the stations they would occupy and the work they would do. "You want time saved, get them here. When will they recover?"

  "Within twenty-four hours. Macy is near recovered. Within another day all of their residual signals on the line will have abated, and we will move them here into the Istanbul bunker."

  Lucas swallowed. It was strange to finally be back in a bunker. The walls were familiar; perhaps even the layout of this space was one he knew from Maine. He'd thought about coming down many times, long before Istanbul turned the tables on them, since he'd never been infectious. He'd discussed it at length with Anna, but she hadn't wanted him to take the risk. They could have kidnapped him and used him as collateral, she'd said, and now he knew she'd been right.

  Now he was here. But here wasn't good enough.

  He didn't look at Marshall, just kept his gaze on the facilities. "I'll need full technical specifications on all the iterations of helmets. I know something about how the shields function, but I'll need full details on those too, how they interact with the line, dating back to their inception before the apocalypse. Get your top designers on a call; if you have the originator of the first shield here, I need to talk to them too. I'll need to be thoroughly briefed, and I'll have questions."

  "They're all waiting to hear from you," Marshall answered smoothly. "Trust me when I say, Lucas, that the whole of the Seal is eager to help you. You may be the best hope we've had in years."

  Hope. He restrained a snort and turned to look into Marshall's eyes. He seemed decent. A murderer, but honest. The hope was real. This truly was to save his people.

&
nbsp; "I also need to know how all this started. The apocalypse, the zombies. I need to talk to the people who began it, whether it was a containment failure, military program run amok, accidentally irradiated wombat, whatever. I need to know."

  The flicker in Marshall's composure was barely perceptible, the slightest twitch of an eyelid that most people would not have caught, but Lucas was not most people. He'd lived a doubly outlawed life for years under Salle Coram's rule, conducting research she'd banned and hiding a love she'd forbidden, trusting his life every day to his ability to discern intent from the faces and words of people around him. This was truth.

  "You're not authorized for that," Marshall said smoothly, offering no break from his earlier tone. "Everything else you will have. Don't ask again; the answer will be no."

  The words said one thing, but that flicker said another, something that not even iron-faced Marshall could hide. It was a crack opening up that promised untold possibilities.

  "You don't know," he said softly. "Do you?"

  No flicker came this time, as Marshall exerted more control, but Lucas knew what he'd seen.

  "The current survival time in our latest iteration of helmets runs to an average of seventeen hours," Marshall said. "The kill-zone starts at the fifteen-hour mark, with everything after that causing permanent brain damage. Ideally we'd like to double those numbers. I expect you to begin work at once."

  Lucas ignored all of this. It wasn't important. "You don't know," he said again, louder this time. He pointed to the lab where all the cameras and microphones were. "Are they aware you don't even know what started this thing?"

  Marshall's eyes bored into him, betraying nothing. Somehow that gave Lucas strength. "Double," he repeated. "The Seal demands results."

  Lucas felt the new strength glow inside him. It didn't mean much, because he wasn't any closer to knowing what caused the apocalypse either, or leveraging that knowledge to help him in some way, but it was a lever he could pull, and the experimental data was there. The trap in his genes that had triggered Lyell's was waiting to be torn into, and if there was anyone skilled at reverse-engineering genetic traits, it was Lucas. He'd cured himself alone, tucked into a broken, badly lit dungeon of the Maine bunker, sweating out horrible side effects on a sweaty mattress with only one assistant to ensure he didn't choke on his own vomit.