"That's a great idea."
I pull off the highway and into a Wal-Mart in the scrubby forests near Grand Junction. Of course the ice cream is rotten sludge in its tubs, but that's not what I'm looking for. By flashlight down the aisles, with a crowd of withered staff helping direct me, I find the astronaut's ice cream. It's dehydrated in wafer-form, sealed in brick-like silver packages. I can't find coconut, but there are vanilla, strawberry, and Rocky Road. I grab a handful, and on the way out pick up some cans of bolognese and a box of green tea.
It's a feast that night, on the border between Colorado and Utah, camped out in my battle-tank with the bitter tang of the green tea's tannins in the air. I get nostalgic, and while chewing down bolognese I fire up the darkness in Deepcraft, slipping my goggles over my eyes.
Cerulean is there waiting for me. I turn on my diviner and he starts off down the aisles. I go with him, toddling along through the bicycles and the exercise equipment, circling around past the book machines and down narrow passages filled with large cardboard boxes containing all kinds of Barbie dolls.
Hank passes me but he's mute now, with his Internet feeds cut off. The real Hank is out there somewhere, wandering with his darkness herd. The real Cerulean is out there too.
In the morning I drive on into Utah. I replenish my gas barrels at a Shell station because there's a tanker sitting on the forecourt, and that's a lot easier to siphon than the underground tanks. I fill them up. I get a pack of Big Red and some lukewarm grape soda and sip and chew my way into the desert.
The land turns brown and burnt red, in this our long approach through Mormon country to Las Vegas. To either side great sandstone buttes rise like the mittens in Monument Valley. It is a gorgeous, wasted land, as pure as driven sand, dotted with hardy green cacti and mountainous termite mounds. Scrappy shoots of dune grass crop up everywhere, and sand has begun to reclaim the road.
I pass through various National Forests, fed on water stopped up behind Bryce canyon to the north, and am enveloped in verdant Douglas fir and Bristlecone pine. I spot squirrels and turkey in the branches and the undergrowth, starting as I rumble by. I drink water from a fresh tributary stream, damn it is cold and fresh. I get on my knees and smell the sweet resin of the pine needle carpet. Just beautiful.
I drop more cairns, in Richmond and Beaver, in Cedar City and St. George. Of course I'm saving something special for Vegas itself. It's got to be grand, surely, for a place like that. I ask myself, what would Banksy do with all the world as his canvas? What would JR do? How far does fighting back against the man take you, being defiant against the new world order, when there's not a shred of that order remaining?
I'm not them, though, and I'm not in their world. I'm me, Amo, and I'll do what I've got in my head.
After Zion National Park I hang a left off the main track, and drive a few hours east for the first time since backtracking to the darkness. I've always wanted to see 'The Wave', a part of Coyote Buttes that has the most gorgeous sandstone escarpments, like the eye of Jupiter made flesh on planet Earth.
The terrain gets redder and harsher around me, Arapaho land, and I get misty-eyed and awed with it. Of course I've seen the Grand Canyon before, but there's something more intimate about this. Soon I pass through the car park and by the visitor's center. There I unhook the battle-tank from the JCB, loading the cab with a gas burner and some tea and bolognese, a blanket and an inflatable pool lilo, a pack of marshmallows, Graham crackers and Hershey slabs. With all that I take the JCB up the ranger trail.
It's already straining toward dusk as I ascend up into the wave. It is a perfect half-pipe of red and cream deliciousness, like freshly scooped raspberry ripple, so smooth and perfect I want to reach out and bite it. That all this was formed by water and wind just blows my mind. It feels as alien as Mars, and I am the last man alive to see it.
I park the JCB at the trailhead and climb one of the buttes by dusk light. The sandstone is slippery and a fine rain of sand shivers off at my touch. There are stairs cut into the rock and a rail bolted in, and I climb to a viewing platform atop a twisty crag, left behind when the softer sedimentary layers around it were worn away. So says the sign.
On top I set up my burner and sit on my lilo, and toast marshmallows on the open fire. They crackle and catch fire, quickly going black, melting the lovely inner layer to sugary goodness. I love this bit. I sandwich it with chocolate and crackers, watch the white distend and bulge through cracks in the black outer skin, and take that first luscious bite.
Oh my lord above, that is sweet.
The intensity brings back so many memories; hay rides with Aaron and my parents, my dad driving us in the little hay-trailer attached to his John Deere round the three acre wilderness farm he bought so we could play there and build proper tree-houses. We'd wade in the creek and catch crawfish, barbeque venison and have burgers, and tell stories by firelight while watching the fire crackle, munching on s'mores.
After a while we'd take the ride to the hilltop crest and lie back to watch the sky. There were always shooting stars, and we'd give them names and shout out when we saw them, sometimes pretending we'd seen one when none had come, just to tease along the others. My mom was the best at calling us out on that game, while my dad just nodded along and claimed to see them all.
I sigh and lie back. The tea and bolognese can be breakfast. I look up at the sky. Of course it's the same sky. These are the same stars, though the shooting ones aren't.
"They're not really stars," my dad told us once. "They're just little bites of interstellar dust, or the screws and nuts that come off falling satellites, burning up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere."
This awed us even more. That there was a layer of sky up there so hot that it burned, that interstellar dust was reaching out to our little planet across the gulf of space, then falling down upon us all like a fine rain, like fairy dust.
In the morning I head out, wordlessly, after the breakfast I promised myself. I hook the JCB back up and rev off, back to I-15, for the road through Las Vegas and out to the coast. It's the final leg now, and I'm excited about what I'll find.
Will anybody be there already? Will I find a copy of Ragnarok III tucked away in a producer's office, ready for distribution nationwide? Will it all be what I hoped, or am I going to end up swinging like dear Sophia within a week?
Whatever. I'm not worried. I feel good regardless of the outcome. I'll have done what I set out to do, and if it just leads to me dying there alone, then that's fine too.
I pull through the desert corner of Arizona and then into Nevada at the fastest clip yet, down largely empty roads. Soon Las Vegas dawns like an abandoned theme park from the wastes, and I blow into the strip hard, roaring between outsized casino-hotels with my music pounding, bound for the UFO, a massive silver saucer sticking edge-into the ground, surrounded by faux-rubble, like it crashed there.
They only finished building it a few months before the zombies; one of the largest hotel-casinos yet, surrounded by giant green alien sculptures. I saw it on the news, distantly, back when I could barely handle TV. It's where my next-to-last major cairn will go. I heard they screened movie-launches across its massive circular façade.
Everything is still and silent but for me, and sand blows down the streets in cute twisty zephyrs. I see the UFO dawn like a dark sun over the faux-city.
Before that though, I see the man in the road.
Two floaters trail behind him, on leashes tied about their necks. For a second I think I must be dreaming, I blink but that doesn't change the reality. He's there. He's real, and he turns and waves as I roll near.
I pull the JCB to a stop and race out to meet him.
23 – DON
I run over and he runs to me with his pet zombies dropped behind, and we stop an awkward distance apart, sizing each other up.
"Jesus," he says. His eyes are wide and watery. His face is thin and he's tall, he's got almost a foot on me. Across his thick chest he wears bandoliers
of bullets just like I used to. There's a sword in a sheath at his waist and a handgun, and a shotgun in a sleeve down his back like Ash in the Evil Dead. "I thought everyone was dead."
I laugh. "Me too. Damn, it is good to see another living person."
He holds out his hand. I spread my arms. We pull into a braced, manly hug. He stinks of old sweat and the sour saltpeter tang of expended gunpowder, but then I probably do too.
We pull away and we laugh in the awkward gap between us.
"Don," he says, holding out his hand. He has a southern drawl. We're both grinning like idiots. "I'm from Texas, I've been roaming all the highways for months, looking."
I take his hand and give it a firm pump. "Amo, from Iowa, though I've just come from New York."
He raises his eyebrows. "New York, in that rig? It must've taken a month."
I shrug. "Yeah. I was looking out too, for others."
His eyes narrow eagerly. "Did you find any? Are there others?"
I consider telling him about Lara and Cerulean, but despite the natural ebullience of meeting a survivor, I hold back. I don't know this guy at all. "No. Well, yes, but she was dead. A girl. She committed suicide before I reached her."
This casts a pall over our jubilant meeting. He runs a hand through his thick blonde hair. He looks to come from Scandinavian stock.
"And you?"
He shakes his head. "You're the first, man. Damn, it is good to see someone."
I nod. It is.
"And you said your name was ammo? Like, bullets?"
I hold in a laugh. Shall I tell this huge man that my name actually means love, and my parents were hippies? Maybe later.
"Sure," I say.
"That's cool. I guess I should've come up with something better than Don." He laughs sheepishly. Then he draws his sword. It looks like a medieval replica, maybe from a fantasy movie or something, with an ornate pommel and what look like runes carved into the shaft.
"Sword, maybe? It could be a good name. Here, you want to have a go?"
He swivels the blade smoothly, doubtless a practiced motion, and holds it out to me.
"I got the idea from that zombie TV show, you know, that black girl?" He jerks his thumb to the two floaters milling aimlessly where he left them, their leashes trailing. "Them too."
I notice they're both female. They're dressed as cheerleaders, in bright miniskirts and tight sweater tops that haven't faded with exposure to the sun. I think-
"Here," he says, pressing the sword closer. "The balance is perfect. Most of these things are made of zinc, and the tang, that's the bit of the blade that goes down into the handle here, is nothing more than a thin pin, so when you hit something, snap, the whole thing comes apart." He hawks and spits to the side. "This baby is real though, cold-rolled steel sharp as a straight-razor."
I take the sword by the handle. There are spots of dried blood on the blade, but the balance is fantastic. I give it a few experimental swishes.
"It does feel good," I say. "Where did you get it?"
His grin widens with pride. "I found it in some rich asshole's pad in LA. He had a whole wall full of them, like he was some kind of crusader knight."
"You've been to LA?"
"Sure. I go back and forth, you know, patrolling the desert. Scouting."
I swing the sword a few more times, then hold it out to him pommel first. For an instant I feel vulnerable, with the handle toward him and the blade pointing toward me. All he'd have to do is push and I'd be impaled.
The moment passes though and he takes the sword.
"Just hot shit," he says abruptly, while sheathing it again. "Just color me damn surprised to meet you. Ammo, what a name, and what a rig."
"And you walk?" I ask. "You just, kind of roam?"
He laughs. "Yeah, sometimes. Me and the girls."
We look at his floaters. They toe the ground and strain at the edge of their taut leashes. I notice he's tethered them to a nearby car. I guess he did that while I was getting out of the cab.
"So, you know they don't want to kill us right," I say.
"Sure, of course. I woke up when the plague hit and some nurse was leaning over me all attentively, you know? I was in a hospital, then. For a minute I thought she wanted to screw me, you know, but then I figured it out. TV down, lights down, the white eyes?" He points to his eyes to help me get the point. "I figured it. I gave her what she wanted."
He grins. I smile back. What did he just say?
"So, Ammo. You say you're going to LA?"
I nod, then wish I could take it back. I'm not ready to tell him about the others yet. I ad-lib. "Yeah, I've got family there." I cast around for a part of LA I know. "Down near Muscle Beach. You know it?"
He laughs. "It's full of posers still! I guess they were having a full-moon party or something, there's a stage set up, the band's gear all up there, and all these idiots wandering around with only their bikinis and shit on like there's no better place to be than the beach."
I nod, absorbing this. I look back at his cheerleader zombies on their leashes. It's clear they're straining to get away, to go wherever the rest of them go.
"So what's with them?" I point. "It's not like the TV show, you don't need them to fend off the others."
He shrugs. "Company. I like to have them around."
"Where did you get them? They must've come out of some midnight show in a casino, perhaps, with clothes still bright like that?"
His eyes narrow slightly. "Yeah maybe. I found them wandering in the desert nearby, and they came up with all the hugging that they do, you know? Maybe they're sisters, I'm not sure, you can't really tell with the raisin faces. I figured I'd keep them. There's nothing where they want to go but other drifters, you know?"
I process this for a second. I put it to one side, that their clothes would not be so bright if they'd truly been wandering in the Nevada sun for three months, because it leaves a pretty distasteful taste in my mouth. Did he dress them like that?
I focus on the most interesting thing.
"You're saying you've followed them, the floaters? You know where they go?"
He laughs. "Sure I have. I guess you wouldn't have though, would you, not when you're making for your family?" His brow wrinkles. "But let me ask, why the convoy Ammo, pulled by that thing? You could've made it across the country in a few days if you took, like, a Lamborghini or something."
He's catching me in a lie. "Supplies," I blurt. "I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know they weren't dangerous until a week ago."
He stares at me. "Seriously? So you've been fighting the zombie apocalypse, like, all this time? That sucks. I feel that. Of course they're not dangerous, not in that way at least. And you've not got any yourself, chained up inside? It's really all ammo in there?"
He looks concerned. I try to puzzle out the reason.
"Why would I have them chained up inside?"
He laughs again. "I don't know, man. Who can say what people do? Can I take a look inside, anyway?
"What?"
He points. "Inside the school bus, see what kind of gear you're packing. Call it professional curiosity, one survivor to another. I showed you my blade, show me yours. Plus, I've got some whiskey in my pack, we can toast."
I let my answer wait a second too long, maybe. I recover quickly, but still.
"Sure, yeah. I've got tea."
He laughs. "Tea! Brilliant. Yes, let's have some tea. After you."
"OK."
I lead us toward the battle-tank. He catches up and slaps me on the back. The sour stink of him is actually overpowering. "Don't be nervous," he says. "We're all good. I've been waiting for this moment for so long."
I laugh. "Who's nervous? I've been hogging my RPGs since the start, I don't want to go sharing them out now."
"You've got RPGs? Damn, I knew you didn't play about, Ammo. Walking around with no weapon on you, music blaring like you were the ice cream man come to town or something, I knew either you'd gone soft or you h
ad to be packing some major heat. You sure there's no one in there right now, drawing a bead on me?"
"What? No, there's no one in there."
"Good."
We reach the concertina-door, where the glass is reinforced with cut strips of sheet metal. I open a square cover in the tank's side, like the flap on a gas tank, and pull the lever. The door cranks noisily open.
"Love it," Don says. "After you, boss."
I climb in. It's the same as it always is, though my crates of comics are lying right there. For some reason I feel I ought to hide them away. This starts to feel like a mistake. There's hardly even any ammo or weapons in here at all, and I forgot I tossed all the RPGs away weeks ago.
"What the hell is all this?" Don asks, climbing in behind me. His head almost strokes the roof of the tank. In the confined space, the disparity between the size of us becomes far more apparent. He's huge, and his animal stench comes at me in waves, like an assault. "Where are the guns? And what are these, comics?"
He thumbs the copies lying topmost on the crate. "Jesus, they're all the same. 'Zombies of America'? What are you doing with these?" He picks one up and leafs through. "New York," he murmurs, "the road West. Damn, is this you Ammo? Did you, somehow, make these?"
He holds the comic out by the cover, causing its own weight to pull at the binding.
"Yeah," I say. "I printed them out."
He looks at me. "Why? Just for your own pleasure?" He twirls his finger round next to his head. "Gone a bit crazy? That's fine, I understand. I've gone plenty crazy myself. It can be hard, you know, to keep a handle on things."
"I know."
He eyes me hard. "Do you know? From the look of this, and the lack of guns, it seems like you've had it pretty easy."
"I've had plenty."
He puts the comic down. "So where are the guns then? The ammo? I don't see anything. You promised me RPGs."
"I guess I threw them mostly away, after I realized they weren't dangerous. Let me see." I back up to the end of the bus, and rummage in the storage boxes there. I come up with a handgun. I turn back and find he's followed me halfway up the bus, closing in tighter.
The Last: A Zombie Novel Page 21