The smashed drone lay ahead. Already it felt like he'd been walking for hours and he could scarcely feel his numb feet touching the floor. His lips throbbed under the wind, but he pressed on. He'd come across a continent for this. He'd fought off missiles from the sky for this. He pushed on into the frozen darkness, and the sound of zombies banging on hollow metal grew louder again. His breath steamed in the air. The flashlight wavered and his legs shook, barely supporting his weight. The wind was a gale he had to lean into, though not a breath of dust moved around him.
Then he saw it.
It was a man. It was a giant red man, standing in the darkness and sparkling with a sheen of ice or glass before him.
Julio's breath stopped again. The giant towered over the three zombies beating at his thighs, his head almost touching the ceiling. His eyes were closed but there was something utterly present about him. He was naked and a bloody red color, solid with thick and sinewy muscle round his chest, his thighs, his calves.
Julio dropped to his knees, struck dumb. Tears welled in his eyes and he reached toward the giant's sleeping face, so peaceful in repose. The cold was a blast furnace now, scouring his skin and leaving him pure.
"Oh God," he whispered. The cold gathered him in and hugged him close. It seemed as though at any moment the red giant would awake.
Then a voice rang through the still, mortuary air, like a fugue called out on a single trumpet.
"Welcome, Julio," it said.
* * *
The voice talked and he listened. Hours passed as knowledge poured into his mind, delivered from above. It was a woman's voice, the clearest, brightest voice he'd ever heard. She loved him, he knew that now. Everything that had happened, every step along the path to reach here, was written with her loving forgiveness.
"It was a test," she told him. "All the bombs and gunfire, it was a test to see if you were worthy of reaching this place."
He couldn't speak. The icy blast from that great peaceful red face held him silent and prone, quivering long past the point that his knees started to ache on the cement, through pain into a barren plain of snow.
"You passed our test. You gained access to this inner sanctum. Do you know what you're looking upon?"
He managed to give the faintest shake of his head.
"He is an angel. We call him Gabriel. He watches over us and keeps us safe. He's one of the chosen ones, a warrior. We know you're a warrior too, Julio. We've watched you for years, from above. You are a warrior, aren't you?"
He nodded. All he wanted was for her to love him. All he wanted was to kneel in the face of this magnificent angel until the breath froze in his lungs.
"You fought for your community. I know that's why you came to us, because you love too much. You care too well. We have a place for warriors like that here. You might stand beside Gabriel one day."
Sick longing filled him. There was nothing he'd like more. To be so vast, so powerful, so fully alive as this awesome specimen, it would be better than anything he'd ever imagined. All the respect he'd ever hoped for would be right there. It would be everything he'd dreamed of, casting off this sick, wasted body with its petty urges and needs.
He would be clean and pure, a holy warrior of God.
At some point he fell asleep on the cement.
It was very dark when he woke, the flashlight was dead, and there was a heavy silence in the air. The cold wind was gone, but it had left its mark within him, like the tide recedes and leaves the sand forever altered.
The contours of his insides were new. The hole he'd felt for so long, left by a lifetime of being the outsider in his own life, which he'd tried to fill with women, guns, violence, sex and finally rape and murder, was full.
He wept as this new self inside him sucked in a breath. The air, which before smelled musty and tinny and had hurt to breathe, was now the most wonderful thing. The words of the woman echoed down to him, all the kindnesses she'd showered upon him, and all the promises.
He was chosen. He was select, and he would rise up. He would ride at their bloody tideline when the time came to cleanse the planet. Everything would be washed away.
He was a holy angel of death.
"Where are you?" he'd asked toward the end, trembling in a trancelike state. "I want to find you."
"We are nowhere," she'd replied. "You will never find us. But we are always watching."
"I want to see you. I want to know you."
"Then do your work," she'd answered. "A holy crusade lies ahead, and the date of revelation is known to you. Prepare the ground for our coming. Do what must be done, and cleanse the land as you can. Keep this holy sanctum safe from all who would trespass upon it."
He had bowed low, then, and kissed the floor. "I will."
"Begin with these others," she'd commanded.
He'd killed them, stumbling to the three zombies still pounding at the glass, and cut their heads off. Dust had poured from their veins. After the first was dead, its dry head in his hands, the others had come for him.
Their teeth had snapped at his arms, breaking his skin. Their spidery fingers clutched at his belly and tore where they could. He stabbed the second in the back of the neck and it dropped. The third he boxed until its head lolled to the side like his own, and his twisted right shoulder burned and his knuckles bled. Then he knocked its emaciated body down and stamped on its head.
"Good," the woman's voice had said. "Now you are our agent, sent to end the plague upon this great and bountiful land. Go forth in light, Julio."
In the darkness, blind, he staggered to his feet. The red giant was there before him, cloaked in darkness like an unbreakable sentinel. The three zombie corpses were there too, silent and still. With each movement of his body he felt his link to them shifting. They were a faint warmth on his skin, buzzing like a magnet.
He didn't need light to see. He closed his eyes.
The giant was there on his skin too, like a shadow cast across him, a pleasing coolness that had nothing to do with warmth or cold. It felt like home.
He stood very still and studied the many sensations dappling his body, like reflections on waves. There were warm spots on his back and across his shoulders, spread like glowing dots on a radar screen. He felt the map of the land above slotting into place with the sensations in his body.
There were zombies, trapped in a 7-11 three miles down the road, burning in the small of his back. He'd driven past them weeks ago, and now he could feel them, like a splinter touching his spine. They had to be excised.
There was another in a home five miles away, atop a hill. A mansion. He'd seen it in his earlier explorations: grand rolling lawns now thick with young spruce, winding stone-slab walkways leading to monastic cloisters, a palatial home with two dozen rooms. It was trapped in a panic room, hammering its fists against a metal enclosure of its own making.
There was such a thing as too much security.
He felt the gun in his hand, familiar and heavy. That was good. That was right, because there were others out there too; not only the dead, but the living. The heat they gave off was like the pinhole light shining down from the stars, far away but sharp and precise. One was a woman, he guessed in New Hampshire now, heading south.
A smile stole across his face.
Heading toward New York. Toward Amo's first cairn.
As he padded down the corridor, already the exact meanings of the woman's voice were fading. He'd never really believed anything, beyond the Catholic sense of heaven, hell and guilt. He didn't believe the red creature before him was an angel, nor that the woman was the voice of God.
He didn't know who or what they were, and neither did he care. Because of them he felt better than he ever had in his life. That required a payment, and he was happy to give it.
He climbed from the underground sanctum into the cool light of a bluish wintry day. Fresh snow lay on the scattered wreckage of his exploded drones, drifted in places over the craters in the torn land, making it fresh and clea
n.
The car woke at his touch. The sense of the woman to the south was keener now, sharpening across his skin. This was the first of his gifts, his payment for being the holy mercenary of some hidden God.
"You will never find us," she'd said. "If you seek us we will crush you."
He grinned. He could feel them already on his skin, thousands of them, their bodies clustered like a burning beehive beneath the mountains. So many, and all of them bustling, moving and working.
He saluted the mountains. Perhaps they were watching him even now, from a drone far above. It seemed clear they needed him. Bursting open their vault had exposed them, and their unholy red giant. That suited him. He would be their security, and they would be his purpose.
A deal.
He got in his panel van, checked the weapons bag in the passenger seat, and drove out into the white.
21. MAINE
When Cerulean woke from a fitful sleep, they were driving. Julio called out the states as they passed through: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. They stopped for the night in Cincinnati.
"One more day and we'll be there," he said, sitting on his chair in the back of the van, looking down at Cerulean. "The true end of the world. It will end not with a bang, but a whimper."
"Shut up," Cerulean answered. "Just shut up with your crazy bullshit, Julio. You want to have a conversation, unlock this chain. I'll have something to say after that. Until then, why don't you just shut your mouth?"
Julio looked at him. In the harsh lights of the van the left side of his face looked leprous, pockmarked with the scars of Cynthia's buckshot. "I should warn you, I hear a lot worse than that. The last man I took, he just screamed. I wasn't hurting him but he kept screaming as if I was, like the pain would protect him. I tried cutting out his tongue, but he still honked, like a goose. After that I turned to duct tape."
Cerulean felt his face turn pale. He'd known it. Torture. His throat went dry and he swallowed hard. Julio studied him with interest.
"You understand me. I think the duct tape killed him. Not being able to scream broke him. I stole his control. I'll take yours too."
Cerulean's legs began to shake involuntarily. That was new. Perhaps, if he wasn't careful, he would piss himself. His stomach became tremulous. He tried to imagine Julio standing over him in his torture gear, plastics splattered with blood, and almost gagged.
He pushed through it. It took all his focus to force out words.
"You've been killing people?" His voice sounded strangely conversational.
"Not killing," Julio replied. "It's not fair to say that."
"Torturing, then?"
"I can't explain. You have to see it to know. The world's been turned upside down for so long, you've come to think this is the rightful shape." He gestured around him. "It took me a lot of dead people to truly get over that. Think about Amo. He told a nice story and you all believed it, but what did he really offer, Robert? Hope which he had no right to give. The real world is nothing like you think it is."
"Then what is it?"
Julio leaned forward, hands on his knees, his hunched body tilted to the right. "We should be dead. All of us. One in twenty million survived the infection, through luck. It's nothing we did, we weren't prepared, and we aren't the best this world to offer. We're dregs only."
"We're all that's left."
Julio shook his head. "No, we're not. We're just in the way, and soon we'll be gone. It's written in stone, chiseled long before the apocalypse."
Cerulean stared at Julio. Julio stared back. There was nothing more to say. He climbed out and slammed the doors.
* * *
Julio called out the states like a countdown. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, ticking down to some unknowable bomb.
Nightmares haunted Cerulean throughout the day, ghosts of the long cold night before: a red demon on his chest tugging at his tongue. Another at his back pouring blood down his throat. He gagged and choked all night.
Anna loomed foremost in his mind. He saw her again and again, as she turned to greet them on the road ten years earlier. So young, so small, so fragile.
"Run away!" he tried to warn her, in his chair at the head of a wave of the dead, but she didn't listen. She needed him too much, and she ran with her arms spread. She couldn't see the suffering following behind him.
He screamed. He woke screaming. Julio was leaning back through the plastic screen.
"I can cut your tongue out too," he said. "It's distracting when I'm trying to drive."
Cerulean buried his face in the mattress. Soon even that would be gone. He'd be in a cold room somewhere, prone on a surgical table while Julio sliced into his skin. He had to be strong, but what did being strong mean now?
His fire of anger was almost out, quenched by hopelessness. How quickly the changes were wrought. Amo shot himself in the head and the world spun on its axis. Matthew fell and every last hope fell with him.
He blew on the ember inside. If it went out then so would he.
"We're here," called Julio.
The van stopped and the engine died. The back doors opened, revealing a view of uneven but lush fields dotted with bright wildflowers. Bluish mountains rose through a frosty haze beyond, and scattered coppices of forest circled the field's edge. A black asphalt road curved across to the right, leading in and out of stands of spruce. Over it all hung a beautiful, cerulean sky.
"Familiar?" Julio asked.
It was.
Tears welled in Cerulean's eyes, both for the beauty of this scene and the memories it brought back: his original sin. The gun tower was gone, the concrete block was missing and the field had been savaged in dune-like troughs and peaks, but it was the same place.
He looked at Julio, for the first time on daylight. The blotches on his face were an angry red and his right eyeball had a musty pink tinge. His left shoulder was crumpled inward and lifted, a stretched reflection of his muscular right. He wore a black shirt over black pants and cowboy boots.
"It took me months to find this place," Julio said. "They tried to kill me at first, but I stopped that with a few hundred pounds of explosives and an earth-mover."
Cerulean surveyed the field, a mess of roughly circular rises and falls, as though craters had been bitten out of the ground.
"What happened here?"
"Drones dropped bombs on me," Julio said. "Protecting their secret. It's the reason they killed Matthew, but spared you. I think you're very interested in that."
"Tell me!"
"I will. First, why don't you come out?" Julio reached into a pocket and dug out a key, which he tossed into the van. It flopped against Cerulean's chest and trickled down to the mattress.
"You're not going to die in that van, I promise you," Julio prompted. "Unlock the chain and come out. There's real wisdom out here."
Cerulean took the key and tried it in the cuffs on his wrists, but that was too much to hope. Next he tried the padlock on the chain, and it turned, freeing him.
Now was his chance.
He shuffled to the edge of the van, eyes fixed on Julio, and Julio watched back.
"No diving," he said, with a faint smile curling the edges of his mouth and an unusual gun tapping against his leg. It was large and round-barreled, big enough to contain tranquilizer darts. "I know what you're capable of."
Cerulean climbed out with a graceless oomph to the grass. After three days in the sunless back of the van it felt like freedom, but he was under no illusions; Julio had him still.
Julio pointed at the mountains. "Out there is a bunker. There are thousands of them under the rock, squirreled away since before the apocalypse. The gun tower here was theirs."
Cerulean frowned.
"To understand their plan," Julio went on, "you have to understand what we are to them. You, me, your friend Matthew, everyone."
"What are we?"
Julio smiled. "We're the zombies."
Cerulean just looked at
him.
"We are all of us infected," Julio went on. "Them included, but out here we've had the infection triggered. We're immune, but we still carry that trigger, constantly transmitting." He paused, eyeing Cerulean closely. "It means we can't be part of their new world, when they emerge. It means they have to wipe us out, because we're infectious. We're the zombies."
Cerulean looked at the mountains. The rest of it could be true or not, but the mountains were definitely there, massive and solid as ever. You couldn't remove the mountains. You couldn't fool them or take advantage of them, they simply were. But perhaps there was a bunker. Perhaps there were drones.
It meant Julio was not alone. He was one agent in a much larger extermination, planned since before the apocalypse. Anna and Amo wouldn't stand a chance against drones. The cold milk rose up in his throat. It even explained the gun tower, to protect them, but then…
"Why did they spare you?" Julio asked, as if reading his mind. "It's common defense. You know the gray ones draw each other." He brought his hands together before him. "They cluster on threats like ants, drawn to violence. It's how they swarmed in Asia, like Anna saw, piles on top of red monsters- the zero infection. The possibility of a cluster right here threatened their plan, so they shot them. The tower must have had thousands of bullets."
"What's here?" Cerulean asked. "Are they down here too?"
Julio shook his head. "You'll see soon. For now, ask yourself why they didn't shoot you."
He did. He had, for ten years. Not a night had gone by that he didn't think of it. Now he began to suspect.
"I wasn't a threat."
It wilted him. Julio nodded, pleased. "You weren't a threat. Your presence wouldn't summon others to swarm. As a cripple, you weren't capable of pulling down their tower. You weren't worth a bullet."
Julio reached into his other pocket and produced a single coppery chunk of metal. A bullet. "Not one," he said, and tossed it at Cerulean. It bounced off his dead legs.
He felt sick. After so long, it seemed a petty, unsatisfying reason.
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 21