Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least

by Michael John Grist

  Robert stared at the fresh red blood on his chest and hands, mixed with gray and tiny fragments of white, then realization hit and sucked all the air out of his lungs.

  Amo had just killed himself. He'd shot himself in the head.

  He screamed. He stared at his fingers and screamed until his breath was stolen away and he couldn't scream or breathe and he didn't even want to breathe. He was diving off the edge of the platform again toward concrete, plummeting down; he was in the water and drowning again, unable to pull himself out. Amo was lying dead overhead despite everything he'd done, and there wasn't a single thing he could do.

  LANDING

  11. MATTHEW

  He came to cold in a ditch, looking up at a murky gray sky.

  Clouds made shapes like kidneys and livers overhead. The sun was an eyeball and all the sky was blood; a delightful buffet for cannibals.

  From nearby he heard the indicator light of the fire engine still clicking. It hurt to turn his head but he turned and looked and laughed. The engine was tilted into the ditch at a crazy angle with its big red ass up in the air. The left indicator was still blinking, which seemed funny because the engine had actually come off the road to the right.

  Ha ha ha.

  The door hung open where he'd slithered out, like a long rope of purple intestine. The trail he'd made back along the highway verge was greasy with bodily fluids, like a slug.

  Crawling around the RV in Times Square was a distant memory. He'd tried to climb it again, driven by some pointless desire to at least see Amo, maybe to bury him, but he hadn't been strong enough. There weren't enough grips. He legs were too weak. He couldn't even do that much.

  Instead he crawled away, back through the bloody wasteland with the flies, back into his fire engine to drive away.

  He surveyed his body lying beside him, like a foreign land. His belly was open to the air where he'd pulled up his shirt and smeared brackish ditch water all over himself, trying to wipe away the blood. Now he smelled like blood, piss and mold. He could feel the crunchiness of dried matter beneath his waistline and gagged, but there was nothing left to throw up.

  He only remembered the hours after New York faintly: the sensation as blood dried down his thighs; road signs, clouds, wandering gray bodies. He'd driven for as long as he could amongst them, until the engine ran out of gas and the siren dwindled down and he was left with just the click of the indicator.

  He looked back to the sky and laughed. The demon was up there somewhere.

  "This is what you wanted all along, isn't it?" he asked the clouds, his voice sounding croaky and drowned. "You want me here, down in the shit. Well I'm here. What now?"

  No answer came. His head reeled and his throat was drier than ever, but he didn't want to drink. He didn't want to eat. He just wanted to get away, from New York, from himself, from his useless legs and his bloody belly and the stink of piss of it all.

  "It's a good joke," he called up. "A really good joke on me. So what's the next line?"

  No answer came.

  * * *

  He crawled.

  The wheelchair was another world that he didn't want, and cars weren't for him either. Instead he just crawled into the night, bloodying his fingertips and elbows as he reached and dragged, reached and dragged. Once he looked down at his legs and saw his knees were sharply lacerated where the asphalt had worn through his jeans.

  He laughed. Everything was falling apart.

  He crawled on. He woke to dusty summer rain falling off him in splashes. He crawled into that too.

  "You want to ride?" he called out to zombies that crossed his path, always treading east to west, east to west. "I'm a good workhorse, get on board. I'll dive for you."

  They wandered by and Robert crawled on, snipping north across their westbound trails like scissors through a finishing line. He came to laughing atop a small hill set back from the road, looking over the wreck of a passenger jet in the field nearby. A cow was standing by one of the huge engines chewing the cud, while another cow lay on its side with its belly torn open and three zombies hip deep inside it, chowing down on its intestines.

  "Draw that, Amo," he called. "That's the apocalypse for you."

  He laughed and crawled, and Amo crawled on beside him.

  "How many did I get?" Amo asked. "Was it a lot?"

  "Millions," Robert whispered in reply. "All put down."

  "Billions?" Amo asked hopefully.

  Robert laughed. His throat was dry. How long was it since he'd drunk anything? Most of his pants had torn off, his shirt too. His fingers and elbows and knees were a mess of scratches, bruising and blood. The hunger was gone, leaving only the cold milk sense of drowning deep inside.

  In moments of lucidity he knew he was dying, and dived deeper.

  "How much further?" Amo asked by his side.

  Robert just laughed. "Thirty-three feet," he said, "two seconds of flight down to concrete."

  Amo blurred with Zane by his side. They talked about girls; long rambling conversations that he didn't really follow but that just kept on going.

  In the exploded wreck of a police van he collapsed, lying spread across a burnt backseat. All the pieces of the van were there, laid out like a fastidious owner had taken them apart for cleaning and inspection: steering wheel, tires, chassis, roof, bits of glass, decapitated body of the driver, his head, guns, handcuffs, doors and so on.

  How many days had passed since New York? He tried to count them on one hand. Three, or four?

  "Three weeks four days," Amo piped up and Robert laughed. "Five weeks eleven months. Three years and two seconds."

  A zombie wandered through the wreckage toward him, its booted feet crunching on shattered glass.

  "Hey," he called. "Hey, where are you going?"

  It was following the same road as him. Amo walked beside it with his arm around it and his other hand held out with the fingers crossed.

  "I'm just pretending to be his friend," Amo said, winking. "I'll take him up the road then blow his head off when he isn't looking."

  "Where's he going?" Robert asked. He blinked his dry eyes and looked back down the twisty highway. That was south, this was north, and the zombie was headed north. Was that normal?

  It walked by and Robert reached out to grab its leg. It was cold, dry and firm, and by holding it he tripped the zombie flat on its face.

  Amo laughed. "Good one. Now stave in his head."

  Robert just held on. The zombie started to crawl, pushing with its legs and pulling with its arms. Robert held on, and to his surprise the whole backseat scraped along the ground.

  Amo laughed and Robert laughed too.

  "Chariot of fire!" Amo crooned. "You're just like Ben Hur. Take it round the corner and win the giant golden eggs!"

  Robert held on for three more scratchy pulls before the zombie's chill calf pulled free. It had felt good, good to move, good to not be so completely alone.

  "You can't be serious," Amo said, aghast. "Instead of me?"

  "You're a mass-killer," Robert mumbled. "I can't-"

  He scanned the wreckage. There was a spool of black rope spilled from the police van. It seemed like a sign from above.

  "Seriously?" Amo asked again.

  He didn't have a lot of energy. Crawling to the rope took fourteen days and twenty-three seconds. Or twelve hours and five weeks, he wasn't sure. Crawling back to his chair took one hundred and one nights.

  "No man left behind," Zane said, popping up briefly at his shoulder then repeating himself many times. "We leave no man behind, Robert."

  At the same time Amo kept repeating, "Seriously?"

  He tied himself lying on the backseat like Odysseus to his mast. His weary arms wove round his body and the seat again and again, wrapping him like a fly in a spider's web. Then he waited.

  He waited a year and a day, then another year and three more days, until finally more northbound zombies came. It was around dawn and six of them came at once, so close they could
hold hands, like a gang of great friends.

  "I'll be here for you," Zane sang in his ear, "when the rain starts to fall."

  It was raining. Thick drops fell on his body like heavy metal from a cauldron.

  Robert swirled his rope and lassoed at the zombies. Getting the rope high enough to slip over their heads was hard, but he roped two round the necks before the group was out of range. The ropes caught as they walked on, pulling them both over backwards. They got up and leaned forward and the lines tightened, the backseat jerked, scraped, and began to move.

  Robert laughed. After that they fell smoothly enough to their role as chariot-pullers, bent over and heading north. Robert lay back and watched the clouds drifting by, while the rain fell down and washed away the blood.

  Amo was left behind, calling out, "Seriously?"

  * * *

  He slept a lot on his chariot, being pulled along the countryside. Other zombies went by and at times he tried to lasso them too. The world was a blur of roads, bushes and little towns.

  In the distance snowy mountains rose up. He saw a sign for Maine, the Pine Tree State, and chuckled. Pine trees.

  Once his chariot got stuck on a garden fence, through a strip of forest with the highway long behind. His chariot-pullers strained with all their effort but it couldn't get loose. He tried to untie himself but the ropes were too tight. Instead he spent half a month sawing through the rope with a set of Yale keys he found in the pocket of his lead zombie, after reeling it in like a fish.

  He unraveled the rope and rolled off the seat. The cold was hitting him a little. He saw bedsores on the backs of his thighs where he hadn't moved for days. Hunger and thirst were like the distant cry of the demon, so deep inside.

  Shouldn't he be dead yet?

  He pulled on the seat until it was free of the tangle, then clambered back on as his horses pulled away, terrified to be left behind. Where was he now? He looked around and saw pine trees everywhere. Zane was walking alongside, grimly silent.

  "Where's Green-O?" Robert asked, "that fat shit?"

  "I cut his head off and hung it on a washing line," Zane answered without looking. "Best place for it."

  This made good sense. The slalom continued.

  Over hills and dales they went, over roads and under tunnels, and each day that passed Robert became a little weaker. His body thinned right out, his skin tone shifted from a rich black to coffee with heaps of milk. Perhaps his eyes were glowing.

  "Where are you going?" he shouted at his sled-pullers. His shout was a croaky whisper. His teeth were loose in his gums and his tongue felt obscenely dry, like a squirrel's tail that flicked around of its own accord.

  Finally they arrived.

  * * *

  It was a mountain. Looking up along his body Robert saw the great white peak above, like a meringue baseball cap on the world. Of course, this was the stairway to heaven. He hummed a few bars before he forgot the tune.

  He let his wiry neck twist to take in the surrounding foothills. There was a road nearby but they weren't on it. They had just emerged from more forest and were scraping through a tilted field of tall grasses and sweet purple wildflowers. Other zombies were nearby, converging.

  With a phenomenal effort he hoisted himself to his elbows to look ahead. The foothills rose steeply out of the forest in leaps and bounds, rising toward the stately sweep of the mountain's solid rock ridges. Way up ahead, at least three meadows and a scree-slide distant, there was a strange concrete block as big as a house standing in the middle of a grassy field, like a bizarre piece of modern art. Around it milled hundreds of zombies.

  He blinked; dry lids rasping down then up.

  Not hundreds; thousands. They looked like an ocean of gray buoying up some weird futuristic ship. The block was tall, maybe two stories, and featureless with no windows or doors he could see; no markings beside a black ladder running up one side and a black antenna rising from its roof.

  The zombies were hammering at its walls, and the sound of their flesh and bone smacking against solid stone jolted him to a measure of wakefulness. He could feel the thrum of their assault through the ground even this far away, and it took him back to New York.

  His back gave out and he sagged onto the seat again. Perhaps this was the tower Amo had drawn in his comic. Perhaps this was what it all came down to.

  The sledge drove on. He drifted in and out of consciousness, watching as faster zombies overtook them and slower ones fell behind. There were old women and young women, black folks and white folks and Asians, all turned gray and white-eyed.

  They crossed the three meadows and the scree. They pulled over the dirt track, rutted with deep tire tracks, and the throng of zombies folded around him.

  Over there he saw a dead one. His sledge pulled right past it, lying in the tall grass half-decomposed, with its features collapsing inwards. It had yellow hair and there was grass growing into its mottled gray ear. It was a lady, maybe. Her sagging pale breasts pressed toward the dirt, like pouches of custard. Her throat was a bloody tear, like a chasm in space-time.

  The sledge went on by, then slowed and started to bump and thump off more dead bodies. Some of them got caught on the front and dragged along the sides.

  "Get your own chariot," Robert mumbled at them, "this is mine."

  One of them brushed his arm, and he looked at the stain of fresh blood there like it was something magical. He sniffed it. Not jam. He looked up but he could barely see the sky anymore, there were so many bodies; dead bodies that were dead and dead bodies that kept moving.

  Bullet holes.

  There was no stench from these zombies, only a crispy dry smell of sap, like a broken twig. This was the smell from their bones, he realized, when they cracked. It was getting darker and his sledge was pulling in closer.

  He studied another corpse and saw the bullet holes in its face and throat clearly. Its skull was the eye of a needle through which hot metal slugs had passed, leaving a hollow, like a holy eye. Its throat had another eye torn out.

  Someone stepped on his sledge beside his head.

  "Hey," he mumbled.

  He was deep in the thick of them now, and they were swarming. The sledge stopped moving but the ocean didn't; they swayed and gathered and all the while more were piling in from behind.

  "Hello!" he called out feebly. "I'm here!"

  One of them stepped on his head. For several seconds it pinned him to the sledge, squashing his nose against the hard fabric and setting off blooms of color and pain through his head. Then it was gone, climbing on and over.

  Another stepped on his outstretched arm, trapping it against the seat's hard metal edge and teasing out a pain that was sharp and repulsive.

  He screamed, then a foot came down on his belly, driving any wind out. Another stepped on his shoulder and another on his chest, and then he was swarmed. His chariot-pullers were still pulling him deeper, and now it was almost solid dark overhead with gray bodies walking over him.

  The pain in his belly peaked and it felt like his guts would be driven up out of his mouth, like he'd done to dozens of them with the fire engine. He was too weak to shake them off or fight, too weak to move or wriggle away, too weak to scream.

  He was drowning in a gray ocean. His vision silvered and he thrashed pathetically, unable to free any part of himself. More feet fell until he couldn't see the clouds at all. Feet landed on his face and smothered his mouth, crushing his lips; feet landed on his legs and his groin, pressing him like grapes beneath them, squeezing him to mulch.

  The demon was back with a vengeance and this time he was going to die.

  * * *

  ATATATATATATAT

  He felt the machine gun fire more than he heard it at first, passing through the mass of bodies above like forks pulling chunks out of jelly. The weight shifted as bodies were cut away by bullets, and he breathed. It was only a tiny suck of air, but it settled his bulging eyes and made him hungry for more. He sucked harder and more air trickled in
. A break in the throng of bodies above let gray light stream in, along with the full thunder of the guns.

  ATATATATATATAT

  Whatever it was it was big, more like a jet engine left running than any gun he'd ever heard before.

  ATATATATATATAT.

  Bodies peeled back like a banana skin and he clawed at them to be free, emerging up through them and waving his hands like flags.

  "I'm here!' he croaked. "I'm alive!"

  Blood washed down his face, down his back and made his grip slick, but he swam up through the falling dead until he lay gasping atop a nested thatch of bodies, looking up.

  The concrete block had transformed. From its top a huge black pillar had risen, over a meter thick and as tall as the floodlights in Memphis University football stadium, but instead of lights there were four cannons angled outward near the top, swiveling and shooting.

  Bullets raked out of them in four directions at once, in a widening circumference of fire. He craned his neck backward to see zombies topple a hundred yards away, their throats ripped out in red.

  He raised his feeble arms again and waved. "Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, I'm here!"

  The guns kept firing in a methodical, organized sweep, until the number of zombies was fewer and the firing rate dropped to

  AT AT AT

  Every bullet dropped one of them, going on for minutes more until finally every zombie was dead, and the sloping field was still again.

  He waved and called out. He kept on until finally one of the cannons turned to him like a spotlight.

  "I'm alive," he croaked up at it, staring up into the black barrel because there had to be a camera up there. "I'm here."

  The barrel stared for a long moment, then finally folded back on itself like a drawbridge and slotted neatly back into the long metal cylinder, which slid with a long smooth hiss back into the concrete block.

  "I'm here," he said gratefully, as the earth swallowed the whole pillar, and he was left alone with the dead.

  He laid his head back on a body and breathed easy. He'd been saved. Even now they'd be coming for him, an ambulance crew to whisk him back to civilization, with doctor and nurses bringing order to the chaos. They'd have a wheelchair. Maybe crutches.