"What threat was Matthew?"
"As much as me. Able-bodied and full of life, not like you, and weren't they right, Robert? Consider your life. What have you done but extend the misery of a few in LA, selling them a future you never had a claim on. Amo's dream is seeds on barren rock. This here is a sacrifice for the good of thousands." He pointed at the mountain. "They're in there, the best and brightest of mankind. Do something of value with your life, and help me usher them in."
Cerulean felt himself crumpling. His head felt frenzied, like a wasp's nest full of plans, and what was the point?
A single bullet. That's what it came down to. The bullet Julio had thrown lay on the frosty grass beside him, a gleam of bright copper. Saving a bullet, and Matthew would have died anyway. For that one act of unwitting mercy he had come to know Anna, had watched her grow up and loved her, all for the cost of a bullet.
It was nonsense. It was perfect, and tipped him over the edge.
He started to laugh.
Julio's face soured.
He laughed louder and louder, reigniting the fire and washing away all doubt. He'd said earlier he was going to kill Julio, and now he knew for a fact that it was true. It was the only truth that mattered.
The disappointment spread wider across Julio's face, turning his blotchy grin south.
"Not what I expected," he admitted.
"Thank you," Cerulean said through his laughter. "Do you know how much that one bullet haunted me? You've just set me free."
Julio frowned, his eyebrows working hard, then nodded. "I suppose so."
He raised the gun and shot Cerulean in the chest.
INTERLUDE 3
He came upon the woman at Amo's big cairn, after seven nonstop hours driving south. He watched her approach from the fourth floor of the Empire State Building, coming up West 34th Street.
She was a young woman, blonde hair, a little slim for his taste but sassy looking. She wore two guns in hip holsters and bright red lipstick on her lips. Sometimes she stopped to write messages on car windows in lipstick, and he liked that.
Later, from the corridor to the stairs he watched her up close. Six years she'd been alone, by then. He read the confidence in her motion; the easy amble, the steadfast gaze ahead, unconcerned that anyone might be watching. She was such beautiful prey.
He came up on her easily, friendly. She was looking at Amo's desks of garbage; his coffee cups and comics and computer memory sticks that stretched from here across the continent like a trail of pebbly shits. She was handling the radio equipment they'd left behind on a previous cairn-maintenance run.
At about twenty feet away she heard him and turned, then jumped a clear foot in the air.
"Jesus!" she cried, too flustered to pull a gun. "What the-"
"Sorry," he said, raising his hands and playing into the delusion. "I didn't think you were real. I've been seeing people, I mean, visions of people, for so long. I thought…"
She rested her hand on her chest, just above her breast, and breathed heavy gasps. "God damn," she said. "God Jesus dammit, are you real?"
"Are you?" he'd asked back.
They talked a little. They shared coffee. She kept her hand near her gun throughout, but that didn't concern him. She couldn't possibly see what he was.
"I love your lipstick," he said, after chatting about Amo and his comics, sharing their notions about how wonderful it all was and what great hope he offered. "It's so red, like blood."
"Thanks," she said. How long since she'd spoken to anyone, he wondered. How many times had she told herself the story that she was a survivor? He wondered what other false images she had, rattling inside her mind, that time would peel back like shucking free a pearl. "Designer prices are no obstacle any more."
He grinned. "I think you should put a little more on. Would you oblige?"
That confounded her. Of course it did. "More? Why?"
"I think it would look great."
Her hand closed round the grip of her pistol. It looked like Smith and Wesson, '79. A solid make. He knew them all. Just looking at it, he felt like he could jam the mechanism with his thoughts alone.
"It's in my car," she said. "I haven't got it with me."
He knew that was a lie; he'd seen her drawing on windows. "Let's go there then. We can do hair, make-up, the works."
The lovely tension broke.
"Who are you with?" she asked, eyes darting side to side. "How many?"
He grinned, showing his missing teeth from the time Cerulean beat him. He took a step closer, his usual odd shuffle, necessitated by the deformation in his shoulder. "I'm alone. I'm just a cripple on the road."
Her eyes narrowed and she backed up awkwardly against Amo's table. Odd to think that his hands had set these in place, so long ago. They made a perfect U-shaped corral.
"You're acting weird," she said, "stop it."
"All right," he said, then drew his gun and shot her in the thigh. She screamed and went down.
After that it was easy. It wasn't really torture, because he wasn't exactly a sadist. It was more a mission, the un-shucking that had to be done to get to the pearls. You didn't apologize to the meat you had to eat, nor did you torment it needlessly.
He found a chain and padlock in a maintenance room behind the lifts, and a set of cuffs and key from a dead cop lying in the lobby of a nearby building; reduced to bones and some fluffs of hair. He fetched one of the basement RVs and rigged it with the chain. He smiled, wondering what Amo would think of how he was using his supplies.
He dragged her into the RV, shouting and resisting, and chained her to the table leg, then drove north.
After Kelly were more. He gathered them all, these lost survivors, men and women, boys and girls, aged and infirm, all hot blips against his skin. He traveled the country far and wide to hunt them down.
* * *
Standing now above Cerulean's unconscious body, Julio felt the heat welling up. He'd waited for this moment for so long, and it was everything he'd hoped for.
Fulfillment.
His hatred for the man had changed over the long years since the apocalypse. Once it was a thing that seethed in his belly all day and all night like a cold sore, keeping him awake and making him sick, bringing him out in hot, frenzied sweats that only Indira could soothe away. She'd tried to scoop the fear out of him and replace it with her love, but what was her love but another insidious kind of need?
All symptoms of a disease.
He'd acted like a surgeon and cut her out, maiming himself in the process, but all that left was another hole. Digging out the bunker had filled the hole for a time, then the red angel had filled it the rest of the way, blasting the doubt out like a cleared mountaintop, gone forever.
After that the hatred was changed, becoming a thing he cherished, like a lover held close in the night, like a furnace in his heart that kept him warm above all things, brighter than the heat of New LA burning on his skin.
He kicked Cerulean in the gut three times, and his breathing went spluttery, like he was choking on something. He took him by one leg and dragged him onto a low pallet cart lying nearby. Getting his heavy torso over the cart's lip was difficult, but by contrast his skinny legs were a dream, like bird's wings, so thin and weak. He looked down on that handsome black face and smiled.
Hate was close to love, they said. They would be comrades soon. That was the real goal, not petty hatreds. He smoothed down Cerulean's shirt where his kicks had ruffled it. That was a kind of apology. He wasn't a sadist, not really, he just had a mission to complete.
He took the cart's metal handle and pulled it around to face the path of level ground he'd laid toward the bunker hole. It was knobbly and a difficult pull, but he'd dragged heavier before.
He looked at his watch. Two days, thirteen hours left. Long enough to get him all set up, then do a final round of the surrounding countryside for gray floaters. He could feel a few fresh ones tickling faintly across his left ear, coming from the coast.
Deal with them, come back and let the world end a second time.
The cart reached the bunker hole. Long ago he'd sealed it up with a manhole cover, fitting a ladder for himself, a pulley and winch for his guests. He rolled Cerulean off the cart, fastened him with a harness, then opened it up.
The stench that rose up was vile and he recoiled. There was that work to do too, of course. He could hardly sit there waiting to become an angel with that sewage stink billowing around him.
He wrapped a handkerchief round his mouth and nose and steeled himself against the stink, then carefully guided Cerulean's skinny legs into the hole. The cable on the pulley grew taut as his hips slid through, and it was an easy thing to guide his muscular upper body the rest of the way. He pushed the button for the winch and it hummed and lowered Cerulean down.
Julio looked up and around a final time, at the mountains, the fields, the blue sky. Probably they were watching now, as all his efforts came to a final head. He would bring a flood like Amo had never seen before.
He started down the ladder into the dark.
22. CHAINS
Cerulean woke in the darkness with a sharp pain in his arms, shoulders and back, breathing in staccato little pants. Next came the stench, like an open sewer, and after that came the sound of other shallow pants; an orchestra of them spreading around him.
He opened his eyes. A dirty gray wall lay before him, part of a broad and tall corridor of moldy, smoke-stained cement that receded into the candlelit dimness on his left, lined with wasted bodies strung on chains.
He gasped and choked on a wet breath. There were three bodies hanging at full stretch before him and two to his side visible in the flickering gloom, all naked and thin as corpses, their pale flesh streaked with muck. The one in front of him sagged horribly on her chains, her ragged yellow hair pasted to her shoulders and face. Her shoulders seemed to be dislocated, hanging too high out of their sockets with the skin marked by long stretch lines.
He blinked and tried to rub his eyes but couldn't move his hands. He looked up and saw them chained to the wall overhead, hung from a metal pinion by cuffs and a chain. He was sagging from them, pulled down by his own weight, putting pressure on his chest and making it hard to breathe. He shifted and cold stone stung his bare back.
"Julio!" he tried to call, but his throat was constricted and barely any sound came out. He rubbed at his neck with his shoulder and felt a cold metal band clamped around it.
Panic swelled in him. He couldn't move, locked in place like he'd been so long ago in his basement bed. He began to choke and his throat convulsed against the metal collar.
Then he saw the demon.
Away to his right, only glimpsed in snatches as the foul, smoky air blew the candle flames to and fro, stood the outline of a vast figure behind a sheen of glass. It was three times the height of a man, heavily muscled with angry red skin the shade of an infected wound, and no mouth but a haunting black hole.
The panic swelled and he drowned on it, his vision dimming. This was his demon, crushing him in the coma, crushing him in life. Fluid filled his lungs and he coughed, staring at one of Anna's demons come to life.
"Stay calm," somebody whispered.
He jerked and saw a face beside him looking back. It was a boy, a teenager perhaps, with feathery black hair that looked just like Jake's. Every one of his ribs was clearly visible, like a washboard. His stomach was so sunken it hurt to look at, with protrusions where the vertebra of his spine pushed through his deflated innards. His pelvis was a sad sallow bowl with emaciated legs dangling below like pigeons' feet.
He looked like a zombie. His face was a death mask, with sunken and wrinkled eyes, lips pulled back tight from a mouth full of gumless teeth, smiling a death's head grin. "Keep calm," he whispered. "Wait for his touch. All will be well."
Cerulean thrashed against his bonds. The chains rattled and the pressure in his chest throbbed harder. He pulled at the chains, lifting his own weight so the pressure on his throat relented, but in moments his arms began to tremble and he sagged back.
He was weak; he hadn't eaten or drunk anything for days. The panic swelled up so hard it rose over him and carried him down, drowning, toward the concrete edge of the pool.
* * *
When he came to next the light was different, augmented by a hissing white halogen lamp hanging from a cable. The heavy stink in the air had cleared a little, replaced by the stark scent of winter fog.
Julio was standing before him, putting down a syringe. He looked tired, his motions slow and thick, but there was an excitement in them too.
"Welcome back, Robert," he said. "Welcome to the sanctum."
In the harsh white light the dinginess and dirt of the corridor only became clearer. The bodies were all there still, strung off to his left in varying shades of decay. Yellowish drip bags had been added to some of their chains, with tubes coiling down into their sunken noses and mouths. Fluid flowed slowly, inexorably inward. Some of them, those at the furthest reach of the halogen's staticky glow, almost looked human.
"Hey," said Julio, clicking his fingers in front of Cerulean's face and pointing to the right. "You've seen the big guy, right?"
The demon was there like a great red statue, looking strangely real in the bright white light. But it couldn't be real, not in America, not here.
Denial.
"He's the real thing," Julio said, pulling up a stool and sitting down. The floor beneath him was stained with dried stains like splashed black paint. Cerulean noticed a channel carved crudely into the edges of the corridor, where even now a thin slurry of waste was slowly curdling. "An angel, or so I'm told," Julio went on. "I know your Anna called them demons."
He tugged at his chains and they rattled weakly. He tried to lift himself on his arms but he could scarcely raise his body an inch.
"Of course you're tired," Julio said. "You've already been hanging there for two days, unconscious. I'd do things differently, with the chains, but there were issues. People were trying to cut each others' throats in the early days, when I let them move around." He frowned, brows working in deep throbs. "This one in particular," he pointed at the shriveled woman across from Cerulean. "She was the first, and she never quit, not even after he spoke to her." He shook his head. "A bad business."
"The demon," Cerulean said. His voice came out a hoarse whisper, forced past the band round his neck. "It's like Anna's. Mongolia."
Julio nodded. "Yes, I overheard that transmission. I've been spying on you for years. Who would have thought she'd almost set one free by accident? Hardly like here, is it, all of this so meticulously planned?"
"You're," Cerulean croaked, "insane."
Julio nodded. "I know it looks that way. It's a matter of perspective. Has he spoken to you yet? You are here at the head, after all, by his side, most honored of all his disciples next to me, a place I reserved for you since the start. Have you felt a cold breeze yet, a vice around your head, images of the glory to come?" He peered at Cerulean, then turned to look down the parade of his other victims.
"Anybody?" he asked. "Have we had a recent visitation?"
They hung broken and silent. Perhaps twenty or thirty, close to the population of New LA, and he'd failed them all.
"What have you done?" Cerulean whispered.
Julio ignored him, nodding as none of his prisoners replied. "He didn't come, then. He does sometimes, I think they're his dreams. He's sleeping, you know. They tamed him that much, and put a timer on his DNA or some such thing."
"Who did?"
Julio sighed. "Haven't we been through this? The people under the mountain. They can hear us speaking now, but they don't often chime in these days. They didn't want me in the beginning, for the same reason they shot your precious Matthew, but once I'd blown the bunker open they needed me. What if enough gray ones came down here and piled in front here, blocking him in? It's what their programmed to do, after all, like white blood cells in the immune system. He's strong but even he h
as limits. So we made a deal."
Cerulean glared.
"A good deal. They wouldn't bomb me, and I would serve their interests, cleaning up any gray ones nearby. I suggested fetching any live people down here to incubate and join the charge, and they liked that. Now you're here at my right hand, a final addition to the brigade, because I want it to be your hands that tear Anna and Amo apart. I want you to see for yourself what lies they sold you, so then you'll understand."
Tears blurred Cerulean's vision. His throat tightened in its metal band. "Understand what?"
Julio shrugged, an odd gesture given his twisted shoulder. "We're the zombies, remember? This world was never for us. These people were prepared and we were not. They put him here, timed to wake up ten years later. Today. Most of the gray ones would have long ago turned to stone in Mongolia, leaving only us and a few grays. Not enough to stop an angel."
He stopped and sighed. "I'm interpreting all this, you understand. They never told it to me so plainly, but this is the essence. I received it with a lot of mysticism mixed in, but the big guy doesn't go in for that. For him it's simple: multiply. He cleans up the last of us, and having us here will just speed things up." He pointed at the demon. "He should be waking up in a few hours. We all become angels and the final work begins."
Cerulean closed his eyes. He couldn't close his ears, but he didn't want to see Julio any more.
"We'll infect the world," Julio went on, "America, Europe, Asia. When it's done, they push a genetic button and we all die. They emerge. It's a good plan."
"It's," Cerulean whispered, but there was nothing to say. It made sense, for them. It was inhuman, but it made sense.
"They're asking for a self-sacrifice," Julio said. "That's your game, right? You've done it before. And it's a good cause, Robert. They'll do better than us. We're all so hungry and lonely inside that we'll just screw it up worse. The people in that bunker though can make things better. You think they want this grotesque shit?" He waved at the corridor. "I know it's sick and they do too. But it's the only way."
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 22