The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  Hours later, I'm ready to try a sample run. I've got everything in the right position, probably; ink in the trays, paper in the loading bay, glue topped up, toner roll inserted, and power running into the machine through a triple-decker transformer tangle of cables and plug combinations.

  The machine operates off pdf files, and there are several in the RAM already, one of them being Blucy's latest masterwork, 'Werewolves in the Pliocene'. The cover is shockingly bad, not one of mine.

  I press print. The machine starts to kick and flash like it's bottling a storm, rocking itself back and forth. Ah, the book machines. I settle back on the sofa like we used to all those months ago, almost a year now. It's so strange to have Blucy right here beside me, in withered body if not in spirit. Hank too, and some other new ones I don't know. It makes me sad that they're probably dead, but happy that they're here still, to keep me company for this.

  "Sit down," I tell them. I pat the seat by my side. None of them sit though. They either stand nearby or lie on the floor watching me, while I watch the machine.

  After five minutes the bucking and fizzing stops, and out spits a book onto the conveyor belt. I pick it up and study it. It is fine work. It is digital bits, words and numbers and a little bit of art which until now were floating in electromagnetic storage cells in a steadily decaying hard drive, now converted to a real, tangible thing.

  Brilliant.

  I shut the machine down. I flick off the lamps and power, then cart another generator with me back to the outer offices, to the canteen, where there's a window and a desk, and a fridge I can maybe get to work. It's hot as hell though, so I open all the doors and set them with jams, from the outside through to the darkness. I even open up one of the loading bay doors in the warehouse, by jumping the circuit from one of my generators.

  Light floods in, and a delicious cool breeze blows by, clearing out the dry and stale air. I smell grass seeds and undergrowth, and they are sublime. Now I just need a corn dog and some Bud to watch the big game.

  Back in my new office I feed coins pilfered from petty cash in the supervisor's room into the vending machine until it spits out 7UP cans, which I then put in the little fridge, plugged in to the generator. It tastes great going down cold. Sophia had the right idea with her little luxuries.

  The heat clears out and the breeze keeps on coming. The staff wander around their transformed world, seeing portions of the darkness in light for the first time. At times they come to stand by me while I get to work.

  I rig my workspace with a top of the line iMac, stylus and graphical pad, hooked up through Photoshop. They watch and listen with interest as the machine boots up. I feel like a conductor with them as the orchestra, so I tap the pad with the stylus like I'm signaling for attention. I start music playing through my phone. I open a new pane, the right size for the maximum pdf the machine's take, and put my pen to the tablet.

  I begin.

  It takes five days. I take breaks but they are light, because I'm that focused. I love it, throwing myself into the work again with renewed vigor. Every panel I complete feels like a new kind of victory, more than the big 'f' in New York, more than I can really describe.

  I tell my story. I tell it from my coma all the way to now, about brave Cerulean and Lara, about my massacres and forgiveness, about Sophia on the way and the big 'f' and my empty family home, all with as much honesty as I can. I put myself into comic book art lying down in the road to die, and waking up alive.

  It is a hell of a story. I draw over a hundred panels, full color, high resolution. I outline and colorize, I add in text and narration. I try to resist the urge to give myself cooler reaction lines, and fail. I am the mayor, after all.

  Of course I sleep, and eat and drink soda, and take breaks when my back or my wrist hurt. Somewhere along the way, on one of my walks to and from the convoy or around the silent, peaceful center, my audience leaves. They don't say goodbye, they just melt away into the world, gone wherever the others have gone, with their quota of Amo-time filled.

  I salute them, standing at the door, as the last of them traipse off into the woods. We're all moving on.

  I sleep on the roof of the battle-tank, except when it rains and I sleep inside surrounded by my cairn-supplies, listening to the steady thump of raindrops on the metal roof. I dream of Lara bounding through fields to meet me, like Hank, but she's properly alive. I wake feeling good, that I'm doing something worthwhile and maybe even saving lives.

  After five days all the work is done, with my hand aching and blistered from working with the stylus. I format the pages into a single pdf, I trim the edges and manage the bleed on the front and back covers. The front is an image of me borne aloft by the zombie ocean, one living man amongst a sea of thousands of the dead.

  I run it through the machines, all of them hammering and clattering at once, like a barnyard of oinking pigs. I run it and run it, printing copy after copy. When the machines jam I unjam them. When they need paper or ink I feed them. When the generators start to fade I fill them to their gurgling lips.

  I stand on the top of the center in the middle of the run, so high up I can't even hear the machines thumping, and look out at the sky. It's silent and unblemished. The air smells ripe and dusty, like a storm is coming. This is a full-throated Iowa summer. It's so silent, and as the sun goes down it gets beautiful; the sky lights up in burnt sienna and ochre shades, like firing clay.

  I can hear the sound of jackdaws in the forest. The traffic on nearby I-80, my road, is absent. There are no co-workers below, bustling in and out of the office, gossiping while smoking up at the loading bays. There is none of the constant supply of semis coming to unload goods or to pick up goods for delivery.

  It's just me, mayor of everything I survey in this empty and barren land, but it doesn't feel barren. There's life growing everywhere I look; green overtaking the car park, trees rustling in the wind, the birds, the drone of bees going by, the buzz of cicadas in the bushes, living out their short lifespans.

  I'm not alone, and this truly is a beautiful land.

  I cart the stacks of my comics, let's call them graphic novels, to the battle-tank. There are several thousand, filling six plastic cartons. I throw out most of my weaponry to make room, leaving it in a bonfire-like pile in the middle of the car park. There it can rust away to nothing, and that's OK by me.

  I get back into the cab, and look one final time at the Yangtze center. It's empty now, but I imagine Cerulean's digital ghost rolling through its halls, though he never once went there in life. It was his favorite place, still, and where for a long time we both belonged.

  I rev the JCB and pull away. I return to the spot on the road where the revelation first happened, flanked on both sides by corn, a nondescript locale but for the geo-tag I placed in my phone.

  There I build my third cairn out of Blucy's bug and Hank's Cadillac, dragged along at the back of the convoy. I array them either side of the road and draw a thick checkered bar between them in white and black, just like the start and finish line of a race. I tag it LMA, and draw arrows pointing to the two vehicles.

  In the bug I put my books, some two hundred of them. It's ambitious, but I've always been that way. I set up a nice bit of custom shelving inside, so the books are handsomely arrayed. There's even a sign that says:

  The zombies won't hurt you. Pass it on please.

  I want to make it completely plain. In the Cadillac I leave a digital cache, dozens of laptops, batteries, and USBs all with the same stuff I put in the Empire State, but with my video of the friendly zombies foremost in the filing system. It's a short highlight reel showing me walking in their midst, lying beside them, laughing with them, moving freely and unhurt while surrounded by an ocean of the dead.

  "Don't you want an entourage like this?" I've titled it. I've drawn a picture of a zombie modeled on the famous Banksy image of a guy throwing a bunch of flowers, and used that as the cover image. I even draw that onto the hood of the car itself. The zombie
isn't throwing flowers though, he's throwing a nice pink brain.

  You've got to laugh.

  I stand back and look at my work. It's the starting point of a new journey, one that will catapult me and any who follow to the West, and what we might find there. The destination takes on mystical power in my mind. It's a brave new world with such dreams in it.

  I get in my convoy and I rumble over the start line. It's only as I'm falling back into the monotony of the drive, watching the yellow fields slough by on either side, that I realize something vast, and unavoidable.

  Cerulean is alive.

  It hits me like a punch. He had the coma like me. He remained uninfected like me. His mother was hammering at the basement door to get down, but I don't think she wanted to kill him, not if she was anything like these others. She would have knelt at his side until she was ready to go on, leaving him there in his basement, waking from his methadone dose.

  Oh my god. Cerulean is alive.

  The epiphany dizzies me and I have to pull to a stop. If Cerulean is alive then perhaps Lara is too. For whatever reason, she didn't become a zombie in the middle of the night like the rest. She left a sly note behind. Maybe the act of sex immunized her, present at ground zero for the infection's spread.

  The ocean will lap against them both, but it will not kill them. I feel that for certain.

  God damn.

  WEST

  22 – UTAH, ARIZONA, NEVADA

  I press on, feeling the race biting at my heels, like blazing this trail is the most important thing I'll ever do. Day chases night and I chase after them both, always following the sun and the moon over my head and off to the west, always west. Through Colorado the I-80 becomes the I-76, soon to be the I-70 then I-15, which will carry me all the way to the coast.

  At night I dream of Cerulean and Lara, out there somewhere, perhaps together and united by the New York cairn, rolling and walking hand in hand with the ocean. Gray bodies lurch around them like emperor penguins in the Arctic, too damn docile to fight back, because they've never seen humans before and don't know that they should fear us.

  I drive and I sleep and time burns away behind me in dropped cairns. I place them in all the bigger towns I pass through, getting the process down to a fine art. In Nebraska I hit up Omaha and North Platte, each time commandeering two cars and pulling them to either side of the road, where I then paint another thick wodge of black and white paint across the lanes, my own checkered lap marker. In Colorado I drop them in Brighton and Frisco.

  I add arrows in goopy red road paint that'll never fade. I tag each one LMA. In the cars I put my books and my digital footprint, just like the start line in the middle of Iowa. I add large blackboards sourced from nearby coffee shops to each, with chalk, and tag my name at the top along with the date. It feels like keeping it in the family.

  I drive on through the endless waves of corn, alternating at times with the leafy green sprung over rich brown soil of soy plants. On stretches there are hay bales lining the road that have been there for months, steadily mulching down. The high sweet smell of their fermentation carries in the air, along with the cloying scent of sugar-beet plantations in the distance. Water towers mark my progress, and by the names written across their bulbous flanks I chart a path from tiny town to tiny town, like a spider linking a many-stranded web together.

  I walk with the ocean. I ride with them. When I sleep I sleep amongst them and we breathe together. Come the morning they are always gone, receded like the tide. As my journey begins each morning I gather more, like an inhalation, until night comes and they flow away again like dust on the wind. I dream of old friends and old places. I wake to the West.

  In Denver I ricochet through streets clogged with emergency vehicles, careful to nudge my way through the crowds of milling floaters. There are police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks everywhere. I hazard a guess, that out here they had longer to react to the infection as it spread. People had time to call for help.

  It didn't help. I don't see a single living soul, or any sign that anyone survived.

  I bulldoze a path gently. I walk amongst thousands of gray bodies, people I would once have burned. They follow me like I'm the second coming.

  I smash my way into the Wells Fargo Center, fifty floors tall and laid out like a gridiron of perfect square windows with a wavy curve for a rooftop haircut. I rig my pulley in the massive stairwell to haul my gear up. It's a lot of gear; drums full of bright yellow street paint, rollers, rope, generators, gas, food. Hiking fifty floors is an insane workout. Once I've set up at the top, I have to go back down to affix the load.

  Then I haul.

  I wander through bank offices around the fortieth floor. The view is epic, of course. Here I pass amongst desks and chairs, along static-rustling gray carpet looking into cubicles and offices. Nothing has changed since the world flipped on its axis, bar the people and the power. It wouldn't look any different from now. At one point a security guard comes pelting for me, and I brace myself.

  I sidestep at the last moment, so his momentum fades of its own accord, then I step up close so he can't charge me again. I pat him on the burly shoulder. "There we go."

  He puts his wrinkly hand on my shoulder too. No problem. We conga that way back to the stairs.

  The roof of Wells Fargo is a weird wavy pompadour, so I can't go down in a window-cleaner's basket. Instead I hook into the rappel points and hack my generator into the in-coil system. It all works fine, and after working on the Empire State for so long, I have no problem with heights.

  From the slippery glass top I look out over the Colorado countryside. There are other skyscrapers nearby, then low suburbs, then an endless flat plain of scrubby brown and green fields in every direction. This is Middle America, the plains, and when you're in it, it seems to go on forever. This latest banner ad of mine will be visible for miles, so I better make it a good one.

  I rappel down and work fast, running myself left to right along the windows like a swaying pendulum, slapping the paint in place hastily but with deft familiarity. I do this rather than in-coil back to the top after I complete each vertical line, like a dot matrix printer, where I would have to reset my hooks on a different position, and work another vertical strip.

  Plus it's more fun to sway back and forth. To that end, I don't work from sketches painted in the interior this time, because I'm not too worried about accuracy. A splash that looks jagged up close will look like a razor-straight line from down in the street below. Distance forgives a lot.

  I splash on paint, zigzagging left to right. I get high on the sway of it. I wonder if I'm cutting through my rope at the top, sawing it on the building's edge, but who cares, really? The drop below is awesome, and the end would be sudden. I can't ask for any more than that. It's what all my zombies got.

  I spend most of the first day on the east-facing side, swaying around between floors 48 and 40. I have to leave a little room for bleed on the edges, but otherwise I cover the whole building façade in yellow.

  I wonder absently how much of a crime this would be, back in the real world.

  When it's done, I set myself up to stay in the dizzy heights of the top floor, along with my pal the security guard, hunkered down in an executive suite where probably the CEO stayed when he was pulling an all-nighter. The TV in there is a hundred inches wide. There is champagne in the fridge and thirty-year-old brandy in the liquor cupboard. Sadly the ice machine in the corner doesn't work, and I can't be bothered to figure out how to hack it with the generator cables.

  I lie on the massive bed in the massive silence of this stilted mausoleum to high finance, and laugh, with lukewarm brandy in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. I wasn't a big drinker before, and I'm certainly not now. I sip at both, then I watch a movie on my laptop. It's the first Ragnarok movie, picked up on DVD from a carousel in a gas station somewhere. In it our mythological superheroes are climbing all over buildings in Shanghai, fighting off aliens.

  I'm no
t a huge fan, but it is good fun. It feels good to watch it after so long, and not twinge at all. The noise and light fills the room for a little while, and I can forget where I've been, and what I've done.

  The next day I do two more sides, alone. I wonder if the security guard has found his way down the stairs and out through the hole I smashed, or if maybe he's glitching round the top floor still, banging into walls. I look for him but there's no sign.

  The third day I finish with the north-facing angle, and I set up the cairn in the ground floor lobby, just like in New York but with a whole lovely bench, set up like a booth at comic-con, featuring my books and the digital file and the rest. I sign a few bits and bobs, authentic LMA merchandise, and intersperse these amongst the piles. I should get some T-shirts made.

  I drive away. On the outskirts of Denver I look back along I-76 at my handiwork.

  It's a giant yellow Pac-Man. I tried to do it like a stop-motion animation, though who will notice that, I don't know. Starting at the east his mouth is mostly open, then clockwise he clamps it closer to shut, until at the north it's just a slim wedge of pie, uncolored in.

  His eye is a black dot the size of a double-desk. It looks good. It's a bit of fun.

  I rumble on.

  I tell jokes to Io and she tells them back to me. I try to think of puns about zombies. Most of them revolve around the similarity of 'brains' to other words, like drains, grains, flames. I theorize aloud about why zombies have always been so interested in brains, and figure out it's probably because they haven't got any of their own.

  "Remember, I sawed open that head?" I ask her.

  "What head is that, Amo?"

  "It was like a coconut husk."

  "I like coconut ice cream."

  I laugh. "Me too, Io, me too. Good luck getting that now, though."

  "You're near a Wal-Mart. I'm sure they have it."

  I'm impressed she knows where we are anymore, and that the location of every Wal-Mart in America would be stored in her memory, but I suppose it's all just a few more bits and bytes, so why not?