He looked down into the dark water. It terrified and fascinated him. The demon that used to hold him under was long gone, but there were new demons now, red beasts that stalked Mongolia and turned people into monsters just like them.
The demon from his past was a kind of antique, an artifact he brought out sometimes and studied like a scientist examining a fossil, looking for the origin of things, though he knew where things really changed.
Matthew. His death had cut out the last threads tying him to his engine, after Amo, leaving a hole inside that was sheer and smooth and full of water.
Sometimes he imagined himself falling inside it; water would pour into his lungs cold and solid, followed by the panic wracking him like electric shocks. The light from above would fade as he sank deeper down, until the hole finally became full.
He smiled. It was a strange fantasy. He'd died so many times already, and not one of them had filled in the hole. Instead he'd boarded over it, so he could look down into its depths without any real fear of falling.
It was true that he didn't want to die any more. Maybe that was what healing was. He wanted to see Anna, and know what kind of woman she would become. He wanted to see her children, he wanted to be Grandpa Cerulean and roll down the beach with them tucked on his lap, laughing crazily.
All of that was ahead. He laid his hands on the chair's wheels and started rolling back down the pier, thinking about the future and all the good people in New LA, completely unaware that he would never see any of them again.
* * *
The figure stepped in front of him on the Speedway running parallel to Venice beach. It was all shadow back there, a dark and narrow road between hollow-mouthed condominiums, and the figure was a man holding a gun, dressed in denims with cowboy boots. The moonlight sparkled on the spurs at his heels. His shoulders were uneven, the left lifted unnaturally high like a hump. His gun was thick and round-barreled, extended towards Cerulean's belly.
The chair stopped. The pit opened up beneath Cerulean and filled up with rising and hungry tides.
It was Julio.
It was the same dark face with the same heavy brows and the same dead-eyed glare, but older, and scarred with peppery blotches across his left cheek.
Thoughts raced in his mind; words pealing up from the depths and receding, accusations and statements of disbelief, but none of them fit the bill. None of them said what he wanted to say.
What he wanted to say was far simpler than all that, and he said it.
"I'm going to kill you."
The gun spoke for Julio, three times. BANG, it said, BANG BANG, shots fired direct into Cerulean's gut.
His body thumped back against the seat, and down into the dark.
INTERLUDE 1
Julio didn't die.
Five years earlier, after shooting out Indira's throat and escaping New LA in a flurry of bullets and blood, he survived.
His Mustang served him well through the dark streets of LA and out into the empty desert, before he fainted from blood loss at the wheel, steering wildly off the road and crashing into a stand of cacti at the foot of a blocky mesa.
It saved his life. The patrols from New LA didn't find him that night or the next.
It also cemented his disfigurement.
He roused to heat, thirst and pain. His entire left side was alight. In the cracked rear view mirror he saw speckles of blood tarnishing his left cheek like furious zits.
Cynthia's buckshot.
He tried to open the door but his left arm was agony. He unbuttoned and peeled back his bloodied shirt, creeping the denim across the swollen bowl of his shoulder.
It was excruciating. He probed the inflamed skin and knocked himself out with the pain. There were two bullet holes at least, entry wounds but no exits he could detect. His bones might be smashed to powder inside the skin, with the bullets lodged in amidst them.
The Mustang's engine was dead, so he fought his way out and stood swaying in the mid-day heat. The sun crushed him like a bug. He didn't have a hat or any sunscreen. His left arm swung at his side, painful with every grudging step he took.
In the boot he dredged up his go kit, containing guns, painkillers, medical supplies, maps, a GPS, more guns, a range of knives, water, rations, and a backpack to hold it all; everything he'd prepared for.
He hung a sling round his neck with great care, swallowed painkillers and antibiotics, tipped alcohol over his shrapnel-stung face and the two holes in his shoulder, fixed sticking bandages over the entry wounds, drained two bottles of water, then slung what he could manage of the pack over his right shoulder and started north.
North back to LA.
It took three days and three nights, hiking in a daze. Simple thoughts drove him on. Revenge was high on the list, starting with Masako.
She had come to him. He'd been happy with Indira, or at least a civilized semblance of happy. She did as she was told, she served him well enough in the bedroom, and she denied him nothing thanks to her hunger. She'd wanted him to be special, her reason to go on living, so it was easy to take advantage, but in truth she'd been pathetic, barely a real person. Screwing her for so long was hardly better than screwing a zombie, she was so grateful.
Masako was far more real. And she'd come to him, that was important to remember. He couldn't be held accountable for what had followed next.
Still they came, wrapped in fake righteousness. Killing Indira first had never been part of his plan, it just happened. Better she go than get to stand in judgment of him, though now it seemed clear he should have shot that black bastard Cerulean first. Then Amo, then a bullet for the old crone Cynthia, and he could have saved one for Indira at the end, if he'd really felt it.
Counting the bullets kept him going, one for every step forward.
He reached Las Vegas and found a hospital, but it was too late to do anything about his whole left side. Fits of paralysis and pain washed over him like waves. It was too hard to sleep, so he didn't sleep. He tried to dig in his skin for the bullets but couldn't keep conscious no matter how many anesthetics he injected. Digging in his own back hurt all up and down his spine.
Instead he sewed up the holes. He made a cast and wore it. His face scabbed and began to heal.
He drove east.
At first he had no goal, only to run. New LA would be there for him when he was ready. He backtracked along Amo's line of cairns, at each stop contemplating tearing them apart.
He didn't, though. He couldn't say why.
In New York the true extent of his future became clear to him. Standing alone in the golden lobby, looking up at the name board, he saw his reflection in the glossy elevator doors. He favored his right side so much that his whole left shoulder was sticking up, like a hunchback.
He tried to press it down but the broken bones had set in position. It didn't hurt too much, after two slow weeks on the road, and at least he could use his left arm a little. This was him now; a cripple of sorts, like Cerulean.
A month passed in which he did very little. He ran through Amo's Deepcraft simulation, and read copies of the comic he'd brought with him. It wasn't too bad a time, really. It was quiet. It was lonely.
Perhaps he'd start his own commune. In Boston maybe, or Washington. He could move into the White House. Of course then he'd be competing with Amo for recruits, so he'd have to make his own cairns and develop his own story, earning a cult-like following of his own.
He tried sketching a few comics, but couldn't come up with a narrative to fit his life that would inspire others, plus he wasn't much of an artist. Stick figures in MS Paint weren't going to cut it. The story was all just misery anyway, from the apocalypse to now, five years of playing second fiddle, being beaten, talked down to and disrespected.
In that time he changed.
He turned the spur of the moment murder of Indira, for which he'd felt some residual guilt, into a point of pride. She'd betrayed him for years, really, by being so weak. If she'd truly respected him, she would have stood up for h
erself more. He changed the rape of Masako into a punishment on Cerulean they'd both had coming for a long time. She'd come to him after all. She'd asked for him, and how was he to know that she would change her mind about it afterwards?
He toured New York, going to the scene of Amo's genocides, Times Square where he'd shot thousands and blown his brains onto Cerulean, and 34th Street where he'd burned thousands more alive.
There was little of their bodies left, anywhere. Dried up husks of skin, like threadbare leather on the asphalt. Teeth and bones scattered like remnants from a dragon's feast.
He laughed, when he found a plaque Amo had left outside his favorite coffee shop, Sir Clowdesley.
RIP
Here I committed a genocide of some thousand of the ocean (zombies).
I burned them alive with gas and lighter fluid.
I will not do it again.
Come find me at the Empire State building.
It was pathetic, really, an infant's attempt to atone for a most heinous crime. I will not do it again? It disgusted him. This was their hero, Amo the mass murderer? He himself, Julio, had killed only a handful of zombies by comparison. He was not the monster, Amo was. Amo had crushed him for years.
So he began to write a new narrative in his mind, of all the mistreatment he'd received for so long. He'd tolerated it beyond all human patience. They'd beaten him and abused him and never truly valued his contributions.
His was the story of a victim. That was what made it so hard to write earlier. He'd believed he was the hero when he was just the slave. Did he want revenge? Was he right to count every bullet with every step, dreaming of the day he'd grind them all into the dust?
Perhaps.
And perhaps there was another life for him, elsewhere. It wasn't forgiveness or fear, it was being the bigger man.
Somewhere in the midst of that, he remembered Cerulean's stories about the gun tower in Maine, and his mind was made up. Those people had rejected Cerulean because they'd seen what he was. They would see what he was too, and judge him to be better. That would be the decider. If he was better off dead, they would see it and know.
* * *
It took him a month to find the tower, after crisscrossing the state and studying all its mountains. It stood in a field paved with dry gray carcasses, as solid and still as a stadium floodlight.
When he saw it, driving out of a snow-laden spruce forest with the view of the white-headed mountains cut clean against a brisk winter sky, he almost swerved off the road. It was up and the guns were pointing outward, like stunted silver branches.
But it wasn't firing.
He parked and climbed out.
Bodies covered the sloping hillside, spread in a hundred yard radius. Dead zombies. Here and there tufts of tall grass shot through them, but mostly they were an unbroken layer of leathery gray skin overlaid with a light dusting of white snow, like a lumpy tablecloth.
The gun tower stood in a square concrete block in the center, like a great cube of gray sugar, just as Cerulean had described it. There were a few zombies standing beside it even now, brittle and thin-boned things, beating their wiry fists against the stone. He hadn't seen live zombies for some time.
He took out binoculars and surveyed the guns. They showed signs of rust. Cerulean had described a mechanism that raised them up and let them down, but that seemed to be dead now. Perhaps they were frozen. He scoured the ranks of the fallen ocean, but few of them seemed to be freshly fallen. All of them wore snow like a mantle.
He headed over, brushing easily past the zombies. Up close the concrete block was smooth and featureless, bar the dents teeth and scratching fingers had cut into it. In one place a section of two-inch rebar was showing, as though the concrete had pulled back its lips in a sneer to reveal bone. He fingered the un-rusted metal.
Someone had gone to a lot of effort to protect something.
The shriveled bodies were mounded thickest at the western edge, like dry kindling, and upon their backs he was able to climb to the top of the block. He touched the gun pole. The metal was a reflective silver, unblemished but for his hunchback image, with no markings of any kind. The top surface of the cube was marred by four regular-looking grooves, perpendicular to each of the four faces.
He knelt and touched one of the grooves, as wide across as the span of his hand and slanted outward, like gutters for rain. There was cement dust in the groove's shallow bowl, which painted his palm like chalk.
Then the block underfoot rumbled. The metal tower began to rush by at his side, his reflection shifting imperceptibly, and it took a moment before he realized it was retracting back into the concrete.
He threw himself off the block a second before the four gun towers cracked into the top of the block, pounding the grooves so hard they would have crushed him to mince. He fell and hit the blanket of bodies on his deformed left shoulder, crunching and something inside. He yelled out, blinking towards unconsciousness, but came back in time to see the gun tower slowly rising up again, like a daisy shooting up to the sky.
He laughed. That was hilarious.
Somebody was inside, still.
* * *
It took him three months more, but he found them.
He blew the concrete block to shards with drill-implanted explosives sourced from a nearby granite quarry; three 20lb bags of ANFO, Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, normally used for mountaintop removal. They poured down the holes he drilled as a stream of tiny pink beads, like candy. He ignited them with a stick of old-fashioned dynamite, and they blew in a bubble of dirt and rock that shook the earth and knocked him off his feet half a mile away.
The big tower flew through the air like a caber and hit the ground flat. That felt like progress.
Where it had been was a huge crater, and in the middle of that crater, like a plughole leading down to the drains, was the lower half of the chute the pole had run in and out of, as wide around as a Jacuzzi. Within its blasted, ragged lip lay a set of powerful engine-driven wheels that ran and stopped and ran and stopped fitfully as he watched.
"It's gone, you idiots," he told the hole. "Your big hammer's gone."
He dropped a camera on a wire down the chute, but it was just a chute with no doors leading anywhere, and soon enough it filled up with zombies dropping down from above. They hit the bottom then started hammering at the western inner face of the chute, like miners tapping a seam of gold.
"Gotcha," Julio said.
He sprayed a marker line across the field cutting to the west, then came back with a JCB. The first trench he dug was a yard deep, and he found nothing. He cut three more, until it was wide enough for the JCB to fit in, then dug another yard down and hit smooth cement.
He cleared it in two weeks, like an archaeologist steadily brushing great clods of clay and dirt away from the surface, using jackhammer drills, a pickaxe and a shovel. It was an unbroken oblong structure leading away from the gun chute, approximately a hundred yards long and ten wide.
He tapped on the cement with his crowbar.
"Hey," he shouted. "You in there. Open up."
They didn't answer. Of course they didn't. This was their bunker.
He set back to drilling holes and pouring pink ANFO beads in. Before he could blow the first though, the world above him erupted. There was a cacophonous explosion that crammed the air hard into his ears and showered him with a thick wave of jagged winter dirt.
He rolled down the curve of the dome until he was wedged hard against the edge of the pit he'd dug, and dirt was rolling down over him, and the next explosion came.
The earth throbbed and his body was entombed. He laughed into the cold clay, assuming the only possibility was true.
They were bombing themselves, to get at him.
He lay there for a few hours, long after the last strike hit. It had been four or five blasts total he thought, though he couldn't be sure because for a time one of the impacts had knocked him out cold, slamming his whole body into the cement with enough f
orce to crack a few ribs and put a nasty crick into his jaw.
When he finally crawled out, burrowing through the loosely packed soil slow as a worm, he saw a dusk landscape pocked with great blast craters. His makeshift home, a premium silver RV with the coal fire left burning at all hours, was now just a few ruptured shreds of torn silver, like an exploded soda can. His JCB was yellow rubble, like a dissolved transformer. His heaped bags of ANFO explosives had been replaced by a hole bigger than any of the others.
He laughed, looking up at the sky. Drones? Missiles from a second bunker somewhere? It didn't matter.
"You'll regret that," he said.
* * *
He came back with a drone.
It was a high-spec quad copter, a thousand dollars fresh from its shelf in a nearby Yangtze center, good for remote control from a mile away and able to ferry loads of up to ten pounds.
He loaded it with a ten-pound bag of ANFO beads, flew it to the bombsite and brought it down on top of the midpoint to the half-obscured cement oblong.
BOOM.
The drone was gone, the explosives were gone, and a lovely gout of shrapnel and dirt flew up into the air. He waited, but no bombing run began from above.
He loaded up the second drone, drove through the forest a few degrees, then sent it out. As it hovered into position, he used the onboard camera to line it up with the shallow blast mark the previous one had made.
BOOM.
He did it all day. Twenty drones he sent to their deaths, until the hole was five feet deep through solid cement and rebar, and he had to start using smaller drones to fit them in. Each explosion after that was smaller but more focused, sending great thick cracks radiating out through the oblong's smooth cement surface.
That night more bombs fell. The first two woke him, as the forest somewhere to his right erupted, where he'd last stopped to send his drone from. Whole trees flung up into the moonlight then thumped to the earth, like giants tossing javelins.
He waited it out. He couldn't see if the missiles were arcing in from land or were falling down from a drone orbiting too far above to see, but he didn't care. The people below were fenced in; they didn't have access to the resources that he did. He had all of America, while they had only the stores they'd built up before the apocalypse hit.
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 19