"Ha ha," Amo typed. A few moments passed. "It helps me."
Robert didn't reply.
"What shall I call you?" Amo typed. "You don't have a name."
He wasn't ready to tell who he really was. He didn't want to be Googled and have his life laid bare. "Call me Cerulean. It sounds good."
"OK. Cerulean's a deep blue, pretty close to azure, in case you didn't know. It comes from the Latin 'caeruleum', which means 'sky' or 'heaven'. It's a good name to have."
Robert frowned. "Did you just search that on the internet?"
"Ha, no, I'm an artist. Or I was. I know colors pretty well."
Robert didn't reply for a while. Thinking about all that blue, which was the color of deep water, was putting him on the verge of a panic attack. But at the same time Amo was right: blue was the color of the sky, and you couldn't get much further from water than a clear blue sky.
That helped. He went into his profile box and typed in the name
Cerulean.
"Cool," Amo typed via personal message as the name refreshed on the system. "My name's from Latin as well, you know. 'Amo' means 'I love."
"Ha," Robert typed. "Are you coming on to me?"
"Are you a super hot lady?" Amo typed back. "Maybe."
"Afraid not."
"Then I guess we had just better work."
"Agreed."
So they worked. They passed each other in the dark of the aisles, ferrying bits and bytes of meaningless stuff to a conveyor belt that led to nowhere. They worked for hours, falling into a comfortable pattern of crossing every thirty minutes or so, like Pac-Man ghosts chomping through their arcade maze.
For Robert every crossing was huge. Every turn of the corner opened up his mind, scratching out a straight line from his past to now, meaning he was still the same person. In Deepcraft he had legs, after all. So every time he rounded a corner and saw Amo, the maker of that odd space, he felt a thrill of excitement.
The night after they first worked together, he slept better than any time since the accident. Always there had been dreams of drowning, but that night the dreams didn't come. Instead he was in flight through deep cerulean skies, spinning and somersaulting, turning pikes and twists and rolls.
He never hit the ground. He never broke his back and drowned. He just flew and flew and flew.
* * *
"You said it helped," he wrote the next day while he was running the center with Amo. They were in different sections talking over personal message, and Amo didn't reply for a time.
"We can sync the diviners, you know," he finally answered. "So we can run together and work together. What do you think?"
Robert frowned as he read this text. The game controller grew slick in his hands. Run together? He dropped his hands to the keyboard and typed in:
Are you sure you're not coming onto me?
But he didn't send it. To make that joke once was enough. Yet the invitation made him feel vulnerable, as though he was putting something valuable at risk. Still, he was here to push forward, and being vulnerable was part of that.
He erased the message and typed, "Sure," instead.
A box popped up on his screen.
Sync diviners? Yes/No.
He clicked yes. The item on his diviner switched from a rubber tea set to an inflatable bicycle. He followed it and soon joined Amo on the long central passageway, walking side by side.
"I had a coma," Amo typed abruptly. "Before all this." He typed more too but Robert couldn't move his eyes beyond the first line.
A coma? He stopped walking and his hands went slack on the controller. Sweat sprang up on his face.
Was it some kind of horrible joke? Was Green-O behind it?
He booted out at once. He put the game pad down and stared at the Deepcraft exit screen with his pulse pounding and the demon rising up.
Anger and fear rose up in his throat. His temple throbbed. He was nothing now, so weak and helpless, he was Carrie at the prom with the pail of pig blood teetering overhead, and there was nothing he could do.
He threw the keypad as hard as he could. It didn't even reach the wall; he'd gotten so weak. Tears rolled unbidden down his cheeks. He looked around the sad basement room as if he might see Amo's avatar there, laughing at him. Only the mildewed faces of boy band members looked back at him.
The demon rose up hard, and anger was no protection. He pulled the covers over his head and tried to stave it off, but it pulled him down into the water again.
* * *
For a week he explored other worlds. There were Hollywood mansions and parking lots and even a Kroger's. He tried shopping in it, pretending he was holding a diviner, but it didn't do anything for him.
His mother noticed.
"You don't go in that warehouse any more," she said, as she was getting ready to head up to bed, after leaning in to kiss his cheek.
"I got tired of it."
"I thought you made a friend."
He looked at her. She was trying, he knew that. She paid for him, cared for him, fed him and washed him, but that didn't stop her voice and her touch bringing on the demon. In her every move he saw her disappointment, and biting back his own frustration was a constant battle. "I think he was pretending. He wasn't really my friend."
She put her hand on his shoulder. "Bobby, you spent days playing with him. What was pretend?"
Her touch stung. "He said he was in a coma."
His mother raised an eyebrow. "Maybe he was. It makes sense. He plays that game like you, which honestly no normal person would play. Am I right?"
He had to admit that she was. It wasn't an especially fun game.
"Maybe he knows what you went through. It's a lot of effort to go through just to trick you."
"I don't-"
"You should go back. You said the nightmares were getting better? It's people you need, Bobby, not loneliness."
He shifted in bed, using his hands to adjust his weight. He did that regularly to prevent bedsores, though now he just wanted her burning touch off his shoulder. "What if it sets me back?"
She shrugged. "You'll learn from it. You can't break your back twice. Nothing can be as bad as that again."
She didn't know how bad it was now.
Until late that night he lay there staring at his lists. He'd made no progress in the stages of grief. Anger still swung through him wildly, along with depression, denial, bargaining. What had happened to him wasn't fair. He hadn't deserved any of it. He'd been good.
On the other list it was even worse. He'd run around in the darkness for weeks, achieving nothing. Tears squeezed out and he winced them back in. The demon was rising. He couldn't win, to go or not go, both ways were terrifying and held so little hope.
But he wasn't a coward. He couldn't be afraid, when he had nothing else, so late in the night he went back to the Yangtze center.
The shelves inside were all the same. It was dark and the non-player characters wandered, but Amo wasn't there. He ran a few routes, testing himself. It felt empty and sad. He'd been kidding himself there was anything here to be afraid of, or anything here at all. It wasn't any better or worse than the cell of his basement. He put his finger on the key to boot out.
Then the system pinged and Amo's name popped up. His avatar materialized in front of him, with words popping over his head at once.
"Where've you been?"
The fear and anger swelled at once, gulping up his throat. There was no expression on the Amo's avatar's face and he wanted to punch it.
"That's not your business," he typed.
The Amo avatar stared at him for a long moment, then spoke. "Did I say something to upset you? Make you angry?"
Robert's head thumped, the first signal of a descending panic attack. He couldn't explain it; it was such a tenuous thread holding them together, but plainly it mattered. It mattered to him and it mattered to Amo and that made him angrier still, bringing the water swirling up into his mouth and stopping up his breath.
; "You think this place matters?" he typed. "You think you matter to me? It's meaningless. I'm stuck here and I can't do a damn thing, and who are you? You're nobody either."
Another long pause passed.
"I'm not nobody," the Amo avatar said. "I hope you're not either. This place does matter to me. It helps me. I thought it helped you too. We both come here, you know? I know it's not really real, but it's a good place. What changed?"
Robert imagined his face behind the avatar. Was he smirking? Was he sincere?
"I want you here," Amo went on. "You don't know how much progress I've made since we met. It's helped so much, and I want to help you too. I told you I was in a coma- but I never really recovered. It hurts me still. I can't do much, not like normal people. This place helps, it's why I built it, but it didn't really work until you came. I want you to know that."
Robert stared at the long speech bubble, scrolling into the darkness. It sounded like his story. It could be a trick, but his mother was right. Who would do that?
"What did I say?" Amo pressed.
He had to let it go. It was too much to keep fighting, trying to do it on his own. Amo's name meant love, after all, so if he was lying then let him lie, and the pig blood rain down. The wounds from that would be better than this sick fear poisoning him from within.
So he let it go. He jumped into flight. "I was in a coma too," he typed. "I was going to the Olympics, and I lost everything."
A long pause.
"Tell me," Amo typed.
So Robert did, from the beginning to the end. In the past it had hurt too much to even think about what had happened, plunging him into a deep and drowning panic, but not this time. He kept on until it was done, and when it was done the two avatars stood there in silence.
"So I'm talking to an Olympic athlete?" Amo finally typed. "An Olympic parrot?"
Robert snorted. "I'm a paraplegic now. I can't think clearly. I can't do anything, really."
"Neither can I," Amo typed. "Maybe we had the same coma? I didn't break my back, but that was the fall wasn't it? It happened to me while I was filling in some panels for a zombie comic. That's what I used to do, draw comics. I was an editor, there was a lot of pressure, then one night things went all fuzzy and two weeks later I woke up in hospital. The headaches never went away. I call them twinges, and stimulation only made them worse. The doctor said I can't have sex until it clears up, and when I masturbate I should do it clinically."
Robert sprayed water mid-swig, across his bed spread. "I don't want to hear about that."
"Just be sure and do it clinically yourself," Amo went on flatly. "I mean masturbation. Nothing puts a downer on being horny worse than the devil's fat ass crashing down on your head."
Robert laughed aloud, then clapped a hand over his mouth. His mother was asleep upstairs.
"How do you masturbate clinically?" he typed.
"Keep your eyes and look at an apple. Or an orange, that works too. It makes eating them later a bit weird, but…"
Robert laughed.
They talked on into the night. They walked and talked and worked. It was demanding; working the controls and following the diviner while also talking to Amo, but it didn't hurt too much and he loved it. He learned that Amo lived in New York alone, after moving out of his parents' basement.
"I live in my mom's basement now," Robert typed.
"Best place for you. Breakfast in bed and a turn down service for free, you'll not get that anywhere else."
He laughed. It felt good to laugh about being trapped. "She has to lift me up with a winch to turn the sheets down. But it's true, I get breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed."
"And shit in bed I guess too?" Amo typed. "Not manly."
"I don't know," Robert fired back. "Some of these shits are pretty big."
"Ha ha ha."
"Cripples eat a lot."
"Ah, we're both cripples here buddy. You've got it worse than me, but we're in this together."
Afterward Robert remembered that line in particular. We're in this together. It was the best thing anyone could say to him.
Amo understood.
For four months they ran the darkness of the Yangtze every day.
Robert got better and stronger. He still couldn't get in a wheelchair or watch much TV, but he could talk to his mother and the doctor more, he could surf the internet for short periods without too much pain, and he could even start thinking about diving again, following the results of the national dive meets in the news, though it was too much to actually watch the dives or look at the water.
One day about a year after the accident, Amo finished his first comic since the coma, and showed it to him. It had an image of zombies piling up on top of each other in Times Square at the end of the world, all of them straining for some hidden meaning in the clouds above. It matched perfectly with how Robert had felt for so long, crushed by a dream he would never reach.
Seeing it, he realized he'd finally hit acceptance.
His loss still hurt, and perhaps that was never going to change. He would never dive or walk again, he might never even have a normal life again, but now he had a friend who understood. Looking at that hopeless comic and all those hopeless zombies straining for something that nobody understood, he wept for his own lost dream, and said his first true goodbye to the man he'd once planned to be.
It was progress.
The next day Amo pushed forward even further, taking a beautiful girl called Lara on a date. Robert cheered for him via text message. They were both pushing out the boundaries in the face of pain and fear. It was late that evening, while Amo was on his date and Robert ran the Yangtze darkness alone collecting purple shovels, toy plastic tools and garden fencing, that the zombie apocalypse struck and killed just about everyone in the world.
FLIGHT
6. APOCALYPSE
There was no announcement echoing through the Yangtze Deepcraft, no Paul Revere figure galloping through the shadowy shelves calling out the warning:
"The zombies are coming, the zombies are coming!"
Instead Robert's warning was a server failure which kicked him out of the mod completely.
For a few moments he watched as the screen reverted back to the boot page. It happened sometimes, so he wasn't alarmed. He'd lose his streak of 76 delivered items, but it wasn't the score that counted, rather the process.
He clicked through, and while the list of available mods loaded he looked at his cell phone. Most recent was the message from Amo, sent hours ago while he was hunkered down in the toilet of some fancy New York restaurant in the middle of his date, getting crushed by the post-coma pain.
Robert, or Cerulean as he often thought of himself now, had replied with the most motivational message he could think of.
I'm in the darkness, running. I just stood with Blucy for twenty minutes, doing nothing. The air is cool and the corridors are long. You're here with me, Amo. We're running this thing together. Our diviners are firing off like crazy, and we're getting it all. Potato dolls, plastic mop handles, Leatherman wrenches, whatever it calls for, we get it.
We can't be stopped. We're in this together. Breathe clear and get it done Amo. This thing is not going to take us both down with it. You out there and me in here, we have this.
It was ridiculous for running in the virtual darkness to matter or count for anything, but it did. It was a kind of unity between the two of them, a statement that they were in it together.
Amo's reply had been:
Sorely needed that. Thank you. Slumped in the toilet freaking out. I'm going back in!!
In his bed, in his basement in Memphis, Tennessee, Cerulean smiled. You kept pushing. He was about to log back into the Deepcraft server when his phone abruptly rang with a piercing klaxon whine.
He lifted it to switch the alarm off, but there were no icons on the screen. Instead the whole display was flashing red, and a few seconds later a message in large white flashing letters filled the screen.
SEEK QU
ARANTINE!
He blinked. What? It flashed three times then was replaced with another message.
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
"I know that," he muttered, tapping at the screen and power buttons to over-ride the klaxon, "it's a virus."
THIS IS NOT A VIRUS OR A MALFUNCTION.
The phone went on, though the klaxon finally stopped.
THIS IS THE UNITED STATES EARLY WARNING SYSTEM, BUILT INTO ALL PHONES IN THE COUNTRY.
Cerulean stopped tapping. He read the message again. "Whaaat?" he breathed.
WE ARE UNDER ATTACK. AN INFECTION HAS TAKEN HOLD ON THE EAST COAST. SEEK QUARANTINE AT ONCE.
He held the phone away from him and squinted. Even though the klaxon had stopped the red background was sharp and bright and bound to bring on the demon. He kept tapping to clear the message and finally it did.
But his phone didn't go back to normal. The icons that should have been underneath had been replaced by a news feed from CNC news, showing what seemed to be a scene from a zombie movie. People were running down a street being chased by other people whose eyes appeared to be glowing.
It had to be some kind of elaborate hoax. It was 1:16 in the morning.
He clicked up the volume.
"…reports of the infection decimating the populations of New York, Washington D.C. and Boston," said a female voice over the images. "Reports of the infection spreading through into Pennsylvania, the latest says New England has gone completely dark, with reports…"
The jolting video feed of people running switched to a harried-looking news anchor sitting at a desk leafing through papers frantically.
"She's not even looking at the camera," Cerulean muttered.
Her face and voice were panicked. "… best estimates suggest it's travelling via the air at speeds of over a thousand miles an hour, on a-" she paused to scan a piece of paper, "-disease vector of rabid contagion across 100% of those exposed."
There was a clatter from somewhere in the studio and the anchor looked up. Across the bottom of the screen a warning flashed brightly, scrolling yellow against red.
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 5