The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  "Good. I'm glad. I can die happily, knowing you're out there doing what you can, in the full light of the truth. You're a good man, Amo, you'll be a great man, and if there's any way to save these infected millions, or to alleviate their suffering, I know you'll find it, just like you did for me. I know you'll die trying if you have to, and no one could ask for more than that."

  I look at his damn bird. It looks glassily at me.

  "Goodbye Amo. Good luck."

  The parrot doesn't disappear or fade, it just stops talking. Its diviner blinks, and it starts walking away. I watch it go.

  Now it's just a non-player character like the others, a true ghost in the darkness. It passed along its message, one it carried across the vast distances between this broken world and the world when it was still on the cusp, and now it's for me to carry onward.

  It bows me. I crumple beneath it.

  I tear off the goggles and drink.

  I rouse in the evening looking out over 4th avenue, sitting atop one of my Greyhound barricades with my legs dangling like a child's over the side. The ocean spreads gray and white before me, its arms reaching up like the fins of fish, its eyes glowing white like the lantern-antennae on those hideous deep-sea fishes that lure other fish in.

  Cannibals.

  I swig the whiskey, which I hate. I pour a little out for the floaters to enjoy, on their faces and heads.

  "I'm not going to burn you," I slur at them. "Don't worry."

  They wave and drift like fronds of seaweed in the water, like groupies holding up their lighters at a stage. Their fingers sometimes plink against my shoes, tickling me gently.

  I drink and think about Cerulean and Lara. I wonder how my parents died. I think about the cosmic sex that sent a signal out that somehow caused this.

  "Did you know?" I ask the bodies below. "Did you feel it? Do you feel it now?"

  They grope and waggle like anemone fronds. I pour the rest of the bottle on the head of an obese man wearing a sodden brown velour training top. As the liquor splashes he lifts his face and I get it in his mouth.

  This makes me laugh hysterically. He blows bubbles with it.

  I get to my feet and throw the bottle as far as I can. It hits the darkening tarmac across the intersection but disappointingly doesn't smash. Rather it chips and skitters away, like a flat rock skimmed over calm waters, receding underneath a resting car.

  I laugh. I look out west along 23rd and north and south on 4th. The sun is going down, a nice burnt sienna, and it's really just me. There's no sign of Lara, and if she was here, would she even want to come within a mile of this disgusting charnel fiefdom?

  I laugh. I have screwed myself, by surviving.

  Down amongst the midst of my crop of floaters there is a cop. His uniform is easy to pick out. I pull one of my guns, strapped like bandoliers now across my chest, and shoot at him.

  His shoulder blows out, and a floater behind him takes the slug and his dark blood in the chest. It's quite hilarious. I shoot again and the top of his head comes off, the face behind him explodes, and still no holy retribution rains down.

  I get these for free. I shoot until the gun clicks out, but he still hasn't gone down. There's blood all over him, his head is in half, there are pockmarks torn into his chest and flesh, but still he sways his glowing eyes at me like lanterns in the depths.

  I throw the gun and it disappears beneath their mumbling feet. I pull all my guns and shoot them blank at him. This is the way to fish. I get about five rounds before all my guns are blank, and I throw them.

  He's still standing. He looks like a stick of pulped meat.

  I drop back inside my blackened block as the sun goes down. I head for the liquor shop, through the darkness as night comes on, with his one burning eye still foremost in my mind.

  12 – RV

  Lara isn't coming.

  I figure that out the next afternoon, looking over the ruin of my domain from the fourth-floor office. She isn't and she won't, because she's surely dead like everybody else.

  I just had to have sex and screw everything up. It's like those horror movies where sex damns the heroes, but my sex has damned the whole world. It's a sick kind of vanity that allows me to feel responsibility for this, to feel guilt for 'what I did', but still I do.

  I need to find other survivors.

  There have to be some. Cerulean promised.

  I go out the embassy back door, still drunk in the clean morning light, with a whiskey bottle in my hand. I hate the taste but it's starting to grow on me. I wander up the street, tapping out silly rhythms on deserted car frames with the bottle and shouting at any floaters that come near. I hit one with the tire iron and fall into an ugly embrace with him.

  He grabs for my brains, and I get on top, where I can press the tire iron in through his eye. Of course that does nothing. I have to pull it out again, fascinated and grossed out by the black blood welling up from the ruined socket, and press it into his throat. Getting it through the skin is hard, but with enough weight it punctures.

  He doesn't die until I sever his spine. So I learned something.

  I wander on. Somewhere around 26th and 5th I see a horde gathering in the distance. What are they so interested in? I wander over. There are hundreds grouping near Times Square. I round a corner stacked high with blank digital screens and see.

  It's a dog, standing somehow atop a city bus in the middle of the road. I laugh. He's skinny and barking, some kind of brown/white terrier breed, and he's probably a few hours from dying. He keeps on barking like somebody's going to come save him.

  Poor little guy. He's meat for the ocean, now.

  Some of the horde peel off and come for me. I move like I'm in a dream, climbing into a nearby SUV. The keys are there in the ignition and I rev the engine. More of them flow toward the sound. I put my seatbelt on, press the pedal down and drive right at them.

  I hit the first with a thump, the second with a thwack, then it's a barrage of thwack, thump, crack for a hundred yards, running over bodies and sending them flinging to the side like Moses parting the Red Sea, until the windshield is fractured so badly I can barely see and my forward momentum is halted by their sheer mass.

  A breaking wave of gray and white faces stares at me through the white-webbed glass less than two yards away. Dryness has pulled their lips back from their bloody teeth in a series of rictus grins, shriveling their cheeks into dark hollows. Death is really changing them.

  The dog is still somewhere ahead, barking frantically. He sees me, he knows I'm one of the good guys.

  "Just a second," I call, and twist to look through the rear window. I shift the stick to reverse and rev backward.

  Thump, bang, crack, smack. Bodies impact and go smearing across the asphalt, bodies crush beneath my wheels. I rev back until my tire marks run dry of blood and I've dinged off a dozen cars, clearing something of a path.

  They're charging again. I slam the horn down and charge right back.

  It's like ten-pin bowling for people. They go flying in all crazy directions; off to the side, over the top, bouncing back into the crowd. Bits of them start to get tangled up in the windshield's fractured web, here a scrap of tongue, an earlobe, a gobbet of dry gray skin.

  "Come on!" I yell into the fury of the stampeding storm. I hit the solid depths again and rev backward. The poor dog won't shut up. I ram backward and forward like a steam piston. When the windshield breaks inward it takes me totally by surprise, showering me with crystal glass and zombie bits. Hands grope inward from bodies suspended on the hood.

  I race back and friction pulls them off. I stop an intersection down, spy out a better machine, an RV, and get in. The keys are in the dash, it revs up nicely, and I bring it to bear like a battering ram.

  The dog barks. I crush dozens of them. I splatter dozens. I probably grind hundreds under my wheels. In all, it doesn't do a damn thing. I can't get closer. Hot tears splash off my hands. One damn dog! I couldn't save Cerulean but maybe I can do this
.

  "I'm coming!" I shout to him. "Buddy, I'm coming." I hammer at the ocean but the ocean is an ocean and it swells to encompass me. Rather than getting closer, each time I get driven further away, carried on the surging tide. I can't think for the dog's crazed barking.

  "Hold on, I'm coming."

  Then the barking stops. I don't see the moment he gets pulled down. It's a wholly unremarked death, like every other death in this new age, and it makes me seethe. I beat the crap out of the steering wheel with my fists. Ramming them with an RV is not enough for this. Burning them won't cut it. I need something more.

  The RV punches through the glass entrance hall of the Police Academy with ease. I drive it on into the lobby until it cracks to a halt against the elevator shaft.

  HOOOONK.

  I ply the horn, drawing the floodwaters out. The lobby is low and wide; more of a space to line up and wait, like the DMV, than a place to be awed and impressed by.

  HOOOONK.

  Some of the ocean come, trickling out of their hidey-holes. There's a few regular cops amongst them, plus some more civilians. They bang against the RV's sheet-metal sides. I feel like a turkey in tinfoil packing, waiting for the heat to turn on.

  HOOOONK.

  Maybe there are fifteen. Many have blood on them, masked around their lipless mouths like gory lipstick. I pull the RV back and ram them.

  It works well for this many. It breaks necks and crushes limbs. It only takes one more go before they're all down. I get out and run over the glass-sprayed, blood-smeared lobby floor, to one of the cops. He's burst like a bloody piñata. I crunch the tire iron through his neck and pluck out his gun.

  I have some familiarity with this now. I flick the slide to check the clip, full. I toggle the safety off. I stride the remnants of this horror show and put them out of their misery.

  Looking back at my RV is disgusting. It is not white any more, but a maroon-brown the color of guts and shit. It looks like a hairball made of blood and sinew, with hundreds of scraggly tufts of skin and meat caught on tears in the metal and cracks in the glass.

  I collect three more guns and put them in my pockets. I collect two flashlights from utility belts. I look for the stairs. There's bound to be a shooting range in the basement. Near to that there's bound to be a munitions cabinet, and a key.

  I rummage in the darkness, deep into the building. I shoot a few. I find pitch-black stairs and descend. In the mad, cold dark I advance, until I hit a long alley leading through swing double doors and onto a deep low-ceilinged range.

  HANDGUNS ONLY

  The sign is very helpful. It tells me this is not the shooting range for me. I keep on going until I find another one, with a mixture of long and short-range targets. My flashlight can't pick out the furthest ones.

  I scavenge around. I shoot bits of kelp that come jogging out of the shadows, leaving them gurgling. I find a room with long metal roll-cupboards, and I shoot at the locks until it becomes clear that won't open them. I search in nearby desks and ranks of keys hung on hooks on a wall in an office somewhere until finally I find the one I need.

  The cupboards roll open and they are not bare. They are full of sleek black shotguns, AK-47-like rifles, and what look like sniper rifles.

  Beneath them are banks of ammo in nice bright cardboard boxes, orange and green and purple. I find a gear-bag and stuff it with boxes, then throw in two of each gun type on top.

  I make five trips or thereabouts to the surface, filling up the RV with munitions. I go back to Times Square. I stop a block away from the throng, where the marks of my passage are clear in blood and broken bodies.

  I bolt the RV's door closed. I pop the skylight and push my gear bags through to the roof. Already they're coming for me. I settle on top with one of the sniper rifles. I work the new slide, line my eye up to the scope, and shoot.

  The kick punches the scope back into my head, and blood springs out of my face. I gawp in shock at the fountain spurting out from above my eyes.

  "Shit!"

  I slap a hand over the wound and drop the rifle. I drop back into the RV and rummage through the cupboard until I find sticky bandages and a mirror. The wound is a half-moon just above my right eye, cut by the scope's sharp edge. I laugh and plaster it up. Blood seeps through but not much, and the first wave hits the RV hood.

  I climb back up, fetch a shotgun, and shoot down into them.

  The butt slams up into my armpit painfully, but three of them evaporate in gray mist. Brilliant.

  More are coming. I get down on one knee above the windshield, take aim vaguely, and let rip.

  It takes hours. Stragglers still come, drawn on strange tides.

  I've killed them all. My trigger finger burns with blisters. Shooting the AK-47s was the most godlike. I sprayed wave after wave and they went down. I got better at shooting them in the throats at a distance, like scything down a row of corn.

  SPAT SPAT SPAT DROP DROP DROP

  Reload. They came on and I shotgunned them to brain-shells and dust. At one point they cleared far enough back that I popped out the sniper rifle again and set to work.

  SMACK SMACK SMACK

  They went down. They went down all day long.

  Now I'm standing surrounded by the strange coral creations of their bodies, a landscape of the heaped-up dead like a full-color image of the holocaust, and it's too much. I can't take this, I don't want to kill them anymore, so I take the path I ought to, which is really the only decent thing to do, having come this far.

  I hold a handgun to my head and pull the trigger.

  13 – AARON

  When I was younger I had a brother. His name was Aaron and he was four years older than me, and he specialized in riding his Schwinn bike, playing WWF wrestling games, and calling out the endings to movies we watched as a family.

  "Stop spoiling it!" I'd complain. "Mom, tell him."

  "I haven't even seen it," he'd laugh, spreading his hands. "How's it a spoiler if I'm just guessing?"

  We used to ride our Schwinn bikes up and down the street outside our house, jousting with fallen corn stalks picked from the fields. The stalks usually bent on impact, but they hit hard enough to hurt. That was part of the excitement though. The harder the hit the more we'd laugh.

  Afterward we'd compare welts and bruises on our chests and shoulders, and guess at how mom would shout down the house if she ever saw them.

  "For that one she'd shit a house," I'd say, pointing at a good bloomer I'd landed across Aaron's sternum.

  "She'd shit a whole farm," he'd answer. "Even the barn!"

  When I was fourteen Aaron died. It was a hit and run, he was in a rented Oldsmobile with his date for the prom, and whoever did it totaled them. We never found the guy. Just out of the darkness, my brother was stolen away.

  I stole my first zombie comic a month after the wake. In the mall, it was easy to do. I lingered for ages, fingering all the copies, leafing through them, hoping I'd become invisible to the clerk on duty down at the checkouts.

  I knocked the comics over. I picked them up. I straightened them out. I luxuriated in the raspy touch of them, the wrapping paper feel of them, the vibrant colors; all that blood and gore.

  I asked myself, is this what Aaron looked like when he shot through the front windshield and they found bits of him spread all across the corn? I thought knowing might help. I hated the zombies because they were like the guy who killed Aaron, but at the same time you had to forgive them, because they didn't know did they?

  We don't hate tigers or sharks or bears, though they kill and eat people sometimes. We don't hate cows or buffalo in the fields, but they can trample people to death. A horse can kick the jaw clean off a man's face. A camel can bite off your nose. Maybe some people hated camels, I wasn't sure.

  The point was, I couldn't really hate the zombies. They fascinated me too much.

  I started stealing a copy a day. I'd slide it up my shirt or down my pants. Always I did it a different way, like each time it w
as a different crime and they could only get me for one, because there was never a pattern. On the way home I'd always do something good, like help an old lady carry some bags, even just a little way. They thought I was such a little saint. I'd help a little kid find his lost bit of green glass. I'd smile at a baby in a pram instead of scowling, while all along the comic would be burning its secret message into my skin, trapped against my belly or round my back.

  Hot, sweet shame. It was something to feel, something to be.

  I'd never been into art before that. I was a sports junkie like Aaron, but every time I took to the field after the crash, all I could see was his burst-out eyeballs on the road, his guts piling out while he panted a few last hot breaths, wondering why nobody was coming to help him.

  I got good at art by studying the comics. I started doing them myself. It wasn't always zombies, but it was always monsters of some kind; strong monsters that made everything seem hopeless, who could wring every bit of life out of heroes and leave them desiccated and weak. It had to be that way, so I could make myself stronger. Shit happened in reality, and true strength lay in knowing and accepting that, so you wouldn't be surprised when it hit you in the face like a clothesline out of the black on a weaving county road.

  You saw it coming, like Aaron and the end of the movies. It didn't surprise you so it couldn't hurt you, not more than physically. You were the one left smiling, no matter how badly bruised, no matter how physically broken, because you'd seen it coming and kept on driving, kept on riding, kept on stealing anyway.

  It was your decision. It meant something that way.

  One day my dad caught me reading the comics up in the tree Aaron and I had once shared. He played it cool. Six months had gone by, and I had a stash of hundreds tucked away wrapped in plastic beneath a loose board on the porch. Maybe he'd known about it for a while.

  "Sport, what have you got there?"

  I told him. I admitted I'd stolen it. He climbed up the tree and put his arm round me and we sat like that for a while.