The Lash (Zombie Ocean Book 7)

by Michael John Grist

  Now he had a research team larger and more accomplished than anything he'd ever dreamed of. The truth was waiting.

  "You'll get your results," he said. "Don't worry. You'll see what kind of man I am."

  * * *

  The strike team tore west out of the Black Sea Region of Turkey, through roads overrun by fragrant fronds of tea blown in from the coastal Pontus plantations. Sitting in the hum of his geodesic Dome as it shook along, arranging logistics for their defenses with Control on the radio, General Marshall smelt the sweet, rich scent on the filtered air and looked up.

  The world around them was an ocean of green leaves and bright white blossoms, spread over hills and valleys as far as he could see. The sight pulled on his heart. This was what they were fighting for.

  "There's still no trace of the Sailor," Control said, O'Flanerhy again, running down the latest intelligence scavenged from dying satellites and their global network of hydrogen line outposts. "The Mayor's reached New York, we're assuming he'll take Drake's ship. Records show he's cached supplies and munitions nearby."

  "And his signal?"

  Control took a moment. His signal was the wildcard, and they'd been monitoring it ever since the blast. "His impact on the hydrogen line is becoming more erratic. The signal he's producing has expanded off the chart, sending ripples for hundreds of miles. Three bunkers in the Eastern Seal are running correlation matrixes with the lepers; looking for a key. There's no telling what kind of chaos it'll play with the helmets."

  Marshall sucked a tight breath through gritted teeth. The changes in the Mayor's signal were something none of them could have anticipated, and presented perhaps his greatest threat. They had another Black Hawk, they had drones, they had no shortage of munitions, but if they couldn't get close enough to the Mayor to use them, what good would they do? Weaponry could be automated, but it was never as effective.

  "Best guesses, what threat does he present?"

  "Unknown," Control answered. "Seal governance is pushing for another missile launch, but they want to hear the situation on the ground."

  Marshall took a breath, looking out to the white tea flowers flowing by the Dome. It was easy to talk about deploying another missile, but in reality it would be an either/or choice. The loss of the Black Hawk and its crew was still echoing through their supply chain, limiting their manpower and options. It had taken months and dozens of lives to find the first ICBM, then transport it, work on it, get it fit for launch.

  They had the Dome now, but they'd lost eight helmets on the Bordeaux raid. To rig another missile in the time left would leave them utterly exposed if, for whatever reason, a missile strike failed a second time. They still had no clue as to how New LA had known to flee the first. It was one of the questions he'd wanted to ask Lucas, but to do so he'd have to admit that Amo wasn't dead, and he couldn't risk losing that leverage. He needed Lucas properly motivated, believing the helmets and the cure were the only way forward, to get him focused on preparing generation 6 before the Mayor arrived.

  The choice was binary. Do it with a missile, or do it in person, and 8 Lives had always believed in looking into the whites of their eyes.

  "We'll take them when they land," he told Control firmly. "Please transfer to the Eastern Seal my extreme aversion to wasting resources on another missile. The manpower required, and the risks involved, do not justify the odds. We need to invest our best minds in shield technology, behind Lucas Fallow."

  Control confirmed receipt of the message and went on down the list of updates. The assembly line on deck minus-5 had produced another helmet; they were almost ready to crew the remaining Black Hawk for the journey to Bordeaux. Marshall listened and grimaced, making a note on his paper. It took the number of functioning generation 5 helmets they had to seven. Five of those were with him now. There could be as many as six still in functioning condition at the Black Hawk crash site, or as few as zero.

  "How many prior generations remain?" he asked, and on the other end Control shuffled papers, asked the question to an analyst on his team, then came back. "Seven. Many of them were cannibalized for generation 5, as you know."

  Of course he knew. He'd given the orders. Stable portable hydrogen line shields were rarer than plutonium, and incredibly difficult to make. Though they'd been refining the technology for over a decade, they still lost irretrievably half of the ones they tried to build, and along with each effort they lost the team working on it, the hydrogen-line sealed compartment it was built in, and all the trace minerals required in the construction.

  Dozens had died making helmets. Everything was a cost-benefit analysis. With each loss, more expertise was gone, more resources, more space, and more needed to be trained.

  "Turn up production," he said. "We have to be ready when the Mayor comes. He will meet a wall. And fill the seven generation 4s." He looked at his watch. "They can be with us in twelve hours. We'll be ready; they can refuel at the convoy, take respite in the Dome, then continue to Bordeaux."

  Control relayed the command, there was a pause, then came back. "If there are no functioning helmets at Bordeaux, that's where they'll stay. They won't survive to make the return journey."

  Marshall knew that. It had happened with their previous ploy, to turn the Bordeaux bunker into a trap for the Sailor and her team. A dedicated group wearing generation 4 helmets had gone to sabotage the inbuilt shield and flip the frequency to turn the Stage Ones and Primaries rabid, knowing there would be no return. The Bordeaux shield was the earliest fixed-locus emitter, and had no hope of sustaining the team. It had never been designed for that.

  "Then they die," he said. It was a worthwhile ploy, to bring the Black Hawk in sooner and provide him with more men to build up their defensive line against the Mayor.

  Control relayed that. Ruthlessness was second nature to them all now. Lives were assets on a page to be shuffled back and forth at will.

  "Out." Marshall closed the line and looked up, taking a breath. Ending the discussion with Control felt like coming up from underground. Even here in the glass Dome, looking up at the blue sky through frosted glass, he felt cloistered. He only had to close his eyes and he was back on deck minus-5 again, sealing up the exterior of another blown helmet lab, watching the deformed humanoids ramble and stutter inside.

  They called them 'lepers', these remnants of each failed build. Dark blood splattered the inner walls as they raked each other's white skin, revealing the iron-like black muscle beneath. He'd watched them with fascination, for as long as was safe, because they were terrifying. They were like radioactive waste that could never be disposed of; could only be contained. The chaotic signals they spewed had forced the Seal to double the shielding on their partitions, to prevent brain lesions and accelerated carcinoma on the nearby decks. They were the real demons, and looking into their black eyes was like looking into madness.

  The Mayor wasn't going to enjoy meeting them, if it ever came to that.

  Marshall looked up at Master Sergeant Park, sitting on the cot opposite him.

  "It's time," he said.

  She gave a slight frown. "It's been less than a day."

  "It's time."

  The last headache hadn't worn away yet, and probably he had trimmed years off his natural lifespan, but that didn't matter. This was necessary. Until Lucas Fallow came up with generation 6 this was all he could do, an experiment being replicated now all across the Seal, that was unaccountably working.

  Go out in the line. Take his helmet off. Endure.

  Each time he lasted longer.

  He stood, and she stood. He wore his suit but made no effort to replace his helmet, even as she slotted hers into position. The world outside looked bright and alive.

  Park opened the inner door.

  The line poured in and dropped him to his knees beneath the weight. The pain was indescribable, the pressure intolerable, but he'd already done this five times. It was no worse than the pain of all the soldiers he'd ordered to their deaths, trialing
generations one to four.

  Park put her gloved hand out and he took it, stepping into the airlock as she opened the outer door.

  His legs barely held him up, his hands grasped the doorframe and sweat streamed down his chest, then he was outside, and it was worth it. The air smelled a hundred times sweeter than in the filtered Dome. He sucked in lungfuls and held himself steady while the line beat down like a lash. The telomerase counts in his cells were shriveling by the second, ticking off the potential days of his life, but this was necessary.

  "Thirty seconds already," Park said, reading off her sleeve display.

  His other soldiers saw too; Myers in the front cab of the drone truck, O'Reilly on top as lookout, but neither of them would report it to Control. He was General 8 Lives Marshall, and this gave them hope too, adding to his legend and spurring them on to stay alive.

  One day they'd all be free like this. They just had to meet the Mayor at the shore, and destroy him. All their many sacrifices would find their return, and the line would finally come down.

  Their time in the sun was coming.

  10. SHIP

  I talk to Drake for hours.

  We sit close together in my captain's quarters at the top of his luxury yacht, where his people once hunkered down and hoped for better things to come. We plan. I sketch out ideas in a rage while we beat a path across the water to the east, filling page after page with all the possible permutations of the bunker's forces arrayed against us, my pencil moving faster than I can think.

  "They must have helicopters," Drake muses admiringly, studying a Flight of the Valkyries-like fleet I've drawn cruising over the grapevines of Bordeaux. He points at one sketch I made of a thin man with shark eyes standing in a long helicopter's side bay. He's not manning a gun, but he's watching the battle like some kind of all-seeing general. "This bastard here, they definitely have him."

  "You like him?" I ask.

  "I love him," Drake says. His bulk looks funny curled over the sketch, sitting on the edge of my disheveled bed. "He thinks he's so righteous, you can see it in his little eyes." He looks up with fire in his own bloody gaze. "Doesn't that just turn you on? I love to crush a righteous man. You've no idea how much fun it was to bring you down, Amo."

  I smile, because I understand that now, and dash off more sketches. The shark man in a submarine. The shark man on a tank. "No," says Drake, screwing up his face like I've offended him. "A tank, why would they? What good would a submarine do?"

  I shrug, and draw him in a Humvee. I draw him under a sky full of soaring Predator drones. I draw him at a line of artillery pieces, flanked by soldiers wearing black suits and black helmets like the ones Anna found in Bordeaux.

  "Yes, exactly," Drake says, stabbing the paper so hard he pokes a hole through it. "The little bastard's mobile like this. He's not bound by the bunkers."

  I don't bother to remind him he didn't even believe the bunkers were real. We're brothers in this thing now, battling forward together. Just me and Drake and nobody else, because Anna and her team are gone.

  "Don't think about Anna," Drake says, but that doesn't work, because she's always there in the background now, especially as I cross an ocean. This is really her domain, but she doesn't answer on any frequency when I call. We found plenty of satellite radios in our days of cashing in old New York caches, foraging for weapons, equipment and supplies, but none of them pick up any signal from her, and she answers no transmission I send.

  Drake takes a silver pencil while I muse and colors in the shark man's eyes until he tears more holes in the paper.

  "This guy," Drake says admiringly. "He's the one we have to break."

  I buckle down and sketch more. I draw the map route from Bordeaux to Istanbul and all the routes beyond. I draw maps of the world with all the bunkers highlighted from memory; twelve at regular intervals around the globe, spread evenly across longitude and latitude, none closer than a thousand miles apart.

  Drake does dot-to-dot with my earlier drafts. "It's like a zigzagging line," he says thoughtfully. "Where's the center?"

  I shrug and dash off a fresh diagram with no geographic markings, just the line of bunkers. It looks like a long, meaningless constellation.

  "I give up," Drake says. "Draw more comics."

  I sketch on. I show us landing off Bordeaux and facing missiles that turn the beaches to glass. I draw arms and legs flying through the air like Saving Private Ryan, more horror and fog than a zombie comic.

  "You're good at this," Drake says. "A real vocation. I can't believe I burned all the others."

  I laugh. "That was propaganda. This is real."

  He shrugs. "Art is art. Draw me some biological weapons. Drawn some autocannons that pop up out of pillboxes on the coast. Draw me drones."

  I draw us landing and facing bad weather, which Drake screws his nose up at. I show us landing to see a thousand people in suits and helmets, just staring like zombies.

  "I am Spartacus," Drake says, and I draw one of the helmeted people putting up their hand. More follow.

  I guess we're becoming friends. He's forgiven me for smashing his head in, which is good.

  Days go by and I barely sleep. I don't eat and I certainly don't wash. Around me I sometimes hear the people on the ship moving, living their lives, preparing for what's to come as best they can, but they don't know. They could try to imagine, but they don't have that skill anymore.

  That's my skill.

  On the broad luxury deck Feargal is always out polishing his array of weapons. From him comes the steady clank clank of finely honed metal clicking into place. There's a real satisfaction in watching a perfectly bored 80mm round slot into one of his artillery pieces, as the chamber closes, as he triggers the firing pin and-

  BANG

  BANGs ring out day and night as he trains, homing in on orange flotation jackets that he strings behind us on a long strand of blue rope. Water splashes up as he finds his range. He's in his own war, a one-man killing machine, trying to pull the others in as much as he can, though the others are little better than zombies.

  Keeshom doesn't come up above decks much. He spends his time in a festering sick room with Arnst, suffering though the fog together. Lydia and Hatya hide out near the engines and the comms room, fine-tuning mechanisms that don't need to be fine-tuned, coming to terms with the things done to us, the things we've done.

  Sometimes I walk down to stand near Feargal and we talk about the munitions he brought on board. We have hundreds of drones and battery packs to drive them, and sometimes I work with him to attach little bags of ANFO explosives to their bases. It takes a while to get the weight right, to set them to trigger reliably, to wire one handset into a tablet computer so he can control multiple units at once.

  I'm impressed. I watch as he lays out a dozen drones on the deck, then fires them up en masse, launching them together. It actually takes my breath away, because there's something beautiful about it. These drones are a team in a way we will never be. The atomic blast in our stories will forever prevent that.

  "Useless toys," Drake says, but I ignore him. He knows not to talk to me in front of other people. I have to maintain at least that much semblance of sanity.

  Feargal buzzes them up, left, right. Each carries a tight little bag of ANFO at its belly like a venom sac. He practices his maneuvers and the sound diminishes as he takes them to the furthest limit of their range, over a mile away in this open air, then detonates them.

  The fireballs blossom briefly then fade, leaving stale puffs of black smoke like asterisks in the ocean air, quickly dispersed. Feargal brushes past me, saying nothing. I wonder briefly what he thinks. He goes on to his anti-drone radar and missile locks, trialing their auto-fire functions with drones sent five thousand feet high.

  Back in New York he spent days loading all this onto Drake's yacht with a forklift truck. I wonder what his next plan is, as he sets an AR-15 down on the deck. If he slaves enough drones together, can they carry that into the air?
Can they aim it?

  He's ambitious.

  "He's an idiot," Drake says. "A distraction at best."

  I laugh, then retreat as Feargal glares back at me, taking it as mockery of him.

  "Good work, Feargal," I say as I go back up my stairs. "Really solid."

  He's angry. I guess nobody talks to him now. Lydia and Hatya are from a different world and I'm sure he hates them. Keeshom never leaves Arnst, and Feargal won't go down there. I was his leader once, a man he respected, but I'm not anymore. There's some fear and some disgust and who knows, maybe a desire to toss me overboard.

  "He needs watching," Drake says as we climb back to my top deck 'castle', once a Russian oligarch's presidential suite. My rooms have a four-poster bed and windows all the way around, a large hot tub and a one-hundred-inch TV screen, plus a small elevator in the corner for sending up food and champagne from below decks.

  Now I notice that the walls are covered in my tacked-up sketches. The number of them I've done is surprising even to me, because they do look mad. I thought I'd been working better than this, but what I'd taken before for neatly done comic panels are actually a whole lot of jagged stick figures rendered in a disturbing black scrawl. They parade around the room, and everywhere there's the shark man with his scribbled-through eyes.

  "Did you do this?" I ask Drake.

  He grins and sits down with a chunk of graphite. Ha. I thought I was using a pen, but I guess not. He starts to scrawl a new picture, and I'm fairly sure that's actually my hand scrawling.

  "You're getting madder," Drake says absently.

  I can't argue with him. It comes and goes in waves, with towers of the dead one moment, then giant hands made out of the dead rising from the ocean, then the next I'm back here in this sweaty room with just myself and my sketches.