Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least

by Michael John Grist

  This time he would win.

  * * *

  The next day revealed an obliterated landscape. The forest south of the bunker remained in only small stands, while the rest was scooped out in great spherical craters of dirt and rock. Trees lay everywhere like pick-up sticks, splintered in bits with their yellow innards gleaming sappily with frost.

  A light dusting of snow coated the uneven landscape like icing sugar. The cement oblong in the midst of all that devastation looked like a vast foreign body waiting to be extracted from the peeled-back earth, like the bullets buried in his shoulder. Today, he felt sure, he would break through.

  He sent a drone over, activated the camera, and aimed it into the hole he'd blasted. The bottom was dark. He steered it down. A gust of wind from below caught it and it bashed a rotor noisily off the inner walls of the blast-hole, sparked and fell. It crashed against a surface at an upside-down diagonal, the video feed fizzed with distortion, then the image settled.

  It wasn't the bottom of the hole. It was the chamber below.

  20. VAN

  Cerulean woke in the rattling back of a windowless panel van, spread-eagled to a mattress with the demon pressing down like an octopus squeezing his skull.

  Sploosh, he thought. Brains in the face.

  Then he thought, Julio.

  He shuffled quietly on the mattress, and handcuffs clinked at his wrists, attached to a chain that looped around a metal pole welded to the floor and ceiling. He reached out and pressed against it, testing the strength, but it didn't budge.

  A prisoner. He'd been shot.

  It was dark.

  Slowly, moving deliberately, he turned and looked down at his belly. He still wore his buttoned blue shirt, and in the dim light cast through a semi-opaque screen separating him from the front of the van, he could see there was no blood.

  Three shots, but no blood. He shuffled higher, until he could pluck at the shirt and reveal his familiar six-pack, marred by three scabbed dots.

  His head throbbed. Not bullets. Not Taser darts, the skin would be burned and he'd have felt that differently.

  Needles, then. That explained the pain in his head.

  He craned his neck back to peer through the forward screen, but all he could make out was the rectangle of light through the front windshield, and two blobs that were the front seats. In one was Julio.

  "Julio!" he called. It hurt his belly and his head to shout.

  The van braked and stopped. The front door opened and slammed closed, footsteps paced round the side, then the back doors opened.

  Light blinded him, and in climbed Julio. He pulled a stool from the side of the van, unfolded it, and sat looking down at Cerulean.

  For a long moment they stared at each other. It was definitely Julio, though he'd changed. One of his shoulders rode up higher than the other, like a hunchback, twisting his body painfully to the right. It made him look old and frail, though the expression on his face was anything but.

  He looked at peace. His eyes were calm and content. His brows were settled and smooth.

  "Hello, Robert," he said.

  Cerulean looked past him. Through the van's doors lay a sweeping expanse of orange desert, speckled with sagebrush and brown cacti, cut to the side by the sandy black road. Perhaps they were a few states over, if Julio had driven through the night. Utah or New Mexico, depending on where they were going.

  He was glad they were out of New LA, safely away from the others.

  "You're calculating now, I imagine," Julio said. "Where we are, how far from the others, if they're safe. Thinking how you might knock me down again."

  "I'm going to kill you," Cerulean said, his voice hoarse.

  Julio gazed down at him impassively. "So you said. I don't feel it, I have to say. I used to, a constant low ebb of anxiety while I padded carefully around New LA, worried I might offend you, but not anymore. That doesn't mean there wasn't a crime though, or that you shouldn't pay for what you did to me now."

  Cerulean laughed. Julio was serious. He was mad. "For all the injustices we heaped on you, right? The lack of respect. You're just setting the world to rights."

  Julio gave a cold smile. "I'm more realistic now. It's hard to believe I ever asked you for respect. Now I know, you have to take it. So you're right to laugh, it is funny."

  Cerulean stopped laughing. "You killed Indira, Julio. You raped Masako. I don't think those things are funny."

  Julio shrugged. "What's morality, at the end of the world? Accepting it really is the end, that's the best thing I ever did. You'll see it too, when you tear Anna's head off her fucking shoulders."

  Cerulean flinched. "What?"

  Julio just looked at him. He still had his low, surly stare, but now there was real menace behind it. Cerulean's heart throbbed in his chest. "I would never do that."

  Julio rose off the stool. "There's a lot you don't know, Robert, about this world and this glorious apocalypse. I'm going to show you. And then you're going to join me."

  "I never will."

  Julio looked at him, then turned and dropped down out of the van.

  "Wait!" Cerulean called as he started to shut the doors. "At least tell me where we're going."

  "East," Julio answered, slamming the doors shut. "All the way east."

  * * *

  They drove all that day, and Cerulean lay in the semi-dark, bouncing on the mattress as the van powered along. With his arms shackled he couldn't do anything. He pried at the pole but it wouldn't budge. He inspected his handcuffs but they were cinched tight against his wrists.

  He could only lie and wait. He tried to guess what Julio had in store for him, and thought about what Amo would do when Cerulean didn't come back, but there was nothing they could do. America was vast, and he hadn't swallowed a tracking chip like Anna's father. No one was going to find him now.

  That realization settled slow and heavy, like a thick fall of snow. This was probably it for him. Certainly torture lay ahead. Julio would take his revenge, in long, slow and painful days. It was a miserable prospect, chased by nothingness. He'd be dead. He wouldn't see Anna again, come back from her round the world trip as a new woman. He wouldn't see her married, wouldn't be grandfather to her kids.

  It was a hard thing to face. Shivers of fear ran up and down him, and he recognized the first stage of grief in his response: denial. It couldn't really be happening. Julio was dead, they'd shot him to bits. Even now he wasn't lying in the back of a van driven by a psychopath, it just couldn't happen to him.

  But he'd been through this stage before many times, and knew it couldn't help him now.

  Anger though, the next stage along, could. If there was a chance to fight back he would take it, and tear Julio apart with his bare hands, as he should have done years ago. Anger was a fuel that he could burn inside, keeping him afloat.

  But anger would hurt him too. When the torture began anger would break him all the harder. Bargaining would only make him pathetic. Depression was better, but that too was an emotional state that could be broken. It was no shield.

  What he needed was the emotion at the end of the road, beyond acceptance and even forgiveness, into the realm of soulless nothingness, like he'd felt after Matthew died. He needed it so he could hide his anger beneath it.

  But it was hard.

  He wanted to see Anna one more time. Visions of her kept springing up no matter how hard he focused: as she had been as a sweet little girl alone on the road; as she would be as a grown and righteous woman, eclipsing them all, and every vision of her hurt.

  He couldn't let her go, and feeling nothingness wouldn't help her, so he lay on the mattress racked with horrific visions of her chained on this same mattress, terrified just like him, headed east just like him.

  Soon any attempt at soullessness faded, lost beneath that one all-consuming emotion.

  Fear.

  He could scarcely breathe for it, filling his throat: fear of what Julio might do to them all. Fear surged and was replace
d by bargaining in ways he couldn't control.

  'Do what you want with me, but leave Anna alone, please.'

  It would be music to Julio's ears, but he couldn't stop the words from rolling through his head, almost calling them out. He knew they wouldn't help but he couldn't get beyond them. Nothingness was too far away, with Anna still out there. He could surrender his own body and mind, but not her, never her.

  He wept into the mattress and the van rolled inexorably on.

  * * *

  By dusk some measure of numbness had settled.

  Anna might die. He could take that vision out and look at it now. Amo and Lara might die, all of them might die in just the same way as him, and denying that would only weaken him.

  It wasn't true acceptance, but something like it, a borrowed version of the Cerulean from the past, shrugged on like a shabby old coat. It didn't make him impervious to pain or erase the cold terror in his middle, but it let him think with some clarity and shelter the anger inside.

  The van stopped and Julio opened the back doors. The air that flowed in was cool, and the sky was dark and flecked with stars, like sea foam. There were a few trees, a parking lot, part of a McDonalds.

  Julio looked in and Cerulean looked out, two different angles on a strange mirror.

  "We're just outside Denver," Julio said. "Eighteen hours driving. Two days more and we'll be on the East Coast."

  "East," Cerulean echoed. His voice sounded dead, like the Cerulean of old.

  Julio climbed up to sit on the tailgate, frowning, his body leaning awkwardly right. "That's disappointing. Are you beaten already? I know it's a crushing thing to be in someone else's power, but so soon?"

  Cerulean only gazed at him.

  "Or are you faking it?" Julio narrowed his eyes. "Trying to mimic control? Remember who you're dealing with, Robert. I felt that same way. For five years I pretended, because of what you did to me."

  "So you're not pretending now?"

  Julio smiled. "No. This is who I am. And do you know what separates me from that other man?"

  "This new one's a bigger dick."

  Julio pointed at Cerulean's wrists. "Chains. I was pathetic before, needy and always hungry, wearing the chains you cast for me. Then I saw my fate and embraced it. You're part of that fate now, Robert. Together we'll rub New LA away."

  Cerulean shuddered. Julio sat still, an angled silhouette against the moonlit asphalt and a field of foamy stars. Any moment the gun might come out, and the torture might begin. Even with the numbness, it was a battle to stop himself from flinching every second. A sledgehammer, perhaps, or a scalpel.

  "You're insane if you think I'll help you."

  Julio shrugged. "I know you will. People change, Robert. I'm hardly the first to reinvent myself. You were Robert, then you became Cerulean. You've made your share of mistakes too."

  "I didn't kill anyone."

  "You killed Matthew. Poor soul. You lured him to his death. But death isn't so bad, not really. It's another change like all the others. Anna will join you soon enough."

  Cerulean gritted his teeth so hard it hurt.

  "You've changed too in the last five years," Julio said. "I thought by now you'd be a barking dog, raving at me. You've matured. Chains become you."

  "They'd become you even more."

  Julio smiled. "They already do. But my chains set me free, old friend."

  Cerulean glared.

  "It really is good to see you," Julio said. "I'm going to enjoy this time together, and perhaps you will too, when you see where we're going. Old mysteries, laid to rest. Now sleep well. We've got a long day's drive tomorrow."

  He climbed down from the tailgate and shut the doors, plunging Cerulean back into the cold and dark.

  INTERLUDE 2

  Julio dug three feeble, palsied zombies out of a nearby Stop'n'Shop, herded them into a panel van, then released them one by one over the bomb-blasted landscape.

  The first tottered over and fell down the hole he'd blown in the cement oblong, appearing seconds later on the drone's video feed, gray legs shuffling past a dark concrete wall. A tunnel? Julio watched with his heart in his mouth. Moments later the fuzzy sound of footfalls stopped, and a deep hollow bonging began.

  A door? The zombie was thumping against something.

  He looked to the sky. Clear blue with wispy white clouds. The air was so cold it stung in his throat. No sign of drones, missiles, or anything.

  He set the next zombie loose, and watched it stumbling across the rutted field. It fell down the hole like the other, this time crunching flat onto the drone. The camera angle shifted, settling pointed down the oblong Another sheer concrete wall stood opposite, forming a wide and featureless corridor receding into inky blackness. Julio gulped. The zombie shuffled away, behind the camera, then added its hollow thumping to the first.

  Julio released the third. On the fall it broke the camera, reducing the image to hissing static, but the audio continued. There was shuffling as it crawled, then a third strand of sound added to the thumping.

  The sky was clear. Julio hefted his pack and strode out into the first crater.

  No havoc fell from the sky. There were no explosions. Birds in the remnants of the forest cheeped gaily. He climbed the crater lip and rounded another one. Now he could hear the thumping from below, deep and even, like fists striking a great hollow water tank.

  He reached the edge of the concrete oblong and dropped onto it, hurried over to the hole blasted through the middle, and peered down. Perhaps thirty feet down lay his busted drone in a pile of crumbled cement, atop a sheer cement floor.

  He unpacked a rope ladder and tied it securely to two thick prongs of twisted rebar, then started down. Cold air rose up around him, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia. He descended rung by rung through the jagged cement hole, twisting to avoid spikes of ruptured metal, his left shoulder burning with the effort.

  He came down in a tightly defined halo of light cast from above. Cement dust stirred up by the last few falling bodies swirled around him, getting into his nose and making his eyes run.

  He drew a gun and a flashlight.

  "Hello," he called, peering into the darkness. The corridor was big, easily four times his height and maybe ten feet wide. It had the air of a tomb, untouched for generations. The thumping of the zombies was cacophonous here, bonging like a stampede of kettledrums. He rubbed his eyes and blinked into the darkness.

  "Hello!"

  Nobody answered.

  He turned, toeing his ruined drone out of the way, and ran the flashlight along the ceiling, where the sheer walls curved up into a smooth arch. There was something strange that took him a moment to put his finger on.

  No lights.

  The cold sent a shudder through him. It was freezing in here, colder than above in the open air, and it felt like an icy breeze was blowing straight over his skin, despite his thick winter parka. The dust wasn't moving though; there wasn't a single breath of wind, but still he felt it.

  He ran the flashlight further around. There were no lights anywhere, on the walls or on the ceiling; no switches, no outlets, no pipes or cables of any kind, nothing you would expect of a habitable bunker. He shuddered again, his legs shaking now, and shone the light down the length of the corridor.

  The hollow thumping cacophony seemed to be coming from both directions. He turned, shining the flashlight down each direction, but its light only soaked into the deep dark. He chose a direction and started along it, taking careful steps with his gun held up, though his knuckles burned with the cold.

  The corridor receded away, and with each step the banging grew louder. Ten paces he went, fifteen, then the beam of light caught a glint of metal.

  His finger twitched and the gun barked a rough blast. The bullet sparked off something, ricocheted four of five times in a mad tympanic fury, before falling silent again. Echoes hammered him, coming like peaks in the wave of hollow thumping.

  He took a deep breath, trying to calm
himself, but the air was so cold it burned his lungs and stopped his throat, starting a panicky throb deep in his chest. A moment of silent panic passed as he strained to breathe.

  A horrible moment passed before breath came back, and he took it in shallow gulps, like a man drowning on the surface of a rough ocean, each one a raw wind on his aching throat.

  Enough. He stepped forward, running the light over the space ahead. It was an outsized metal door, fitted perfectly to the dimensions of the corridor, hung on three fat hinges each as thick as his fist. The door had no markings on it, no handle either, and no zombies standing in front of it, though the banging was louder now than ever.

  Spiraling panic twisted his insides as the thumping went on. Where had the zombies gone, and if it wasn't them what on Earth was banging?

  He took a step backward, terrified. Was it the denizens of the bunker, fighting to get out? Was it some hellish beast straining to break through and shred his body? What the hell had happened to the zombies he'd dropped down?

  Then he realized, and breathed a sigh of relief. He'd got turned around coming down the rope ladder, and walked back toward the exploded gun chute. This door surely led into the hollow tube beyond, down which he'd dropped several zombies a week ago.

  They were still hammering now.

  He leaned against the cold cement wall and gave a few ragged, freezing laughs. His legs shuddered and almost gave way beneath him, turning to liquid now the terror was past.

  But it wasn't past. He turned and faced back along the corridor, the way he'd come. That's where his latest zombies had gone, back into darkness.

  The cold was overwhelming now, the breeze becoming a harsh wind that seemed to clamp around his head and interfere with his thinking.

  He walked into it, and every step forward the invisible wind grew colder and stronger. Holding up the gun became too difficult so he let it dangle uselessly by his side, then fall to the floor. It clanked on the cement and he trudged on, holding the flashlight hip-high with both hands.