The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  "Why do you keep talking about Drake? He's dead."

  "Not really. He's with me, still." She touched her heart, then her head. "In here."

  Lara racked her mind for something meaningful to say, something to crack through this façade of seeming madness before the deal was struck and history moved on, following Witzgenstein's direction.

  In the end it was Janine who broke the silence.

  "I thought he was the prophet," she said. She didn't look at Lara, but away now, out through the White House windows over the dark South Lawn. "When he came to us first in the Willamette Valley, I was sure it meant something. He didn't go to you, or to Amo, but to us, bringing his host of angels." She smiled, and looked briefly at Lara. "His children. I didn't know about the bombs then. He talked using scripture. He could hold forth for hours, and we were all besotted. I was his from the moment he arrived until the moment he died. I gave him everything."

  Lara could feel the moment starting to sour. Anger was coming back into Witzgenstein's presence on the line, tinged with the dark burr of shame.

  "He made such promises. He quoted prophets past, writing us into those legends along with him. I suppose it's how cults begin. A powerful, charismatic figure, a conman, and we wanted to believe. We wanted to be special, and he made us that way."

  She lapsed again. Now there were tears in her eyes. Lara reached out, taking Janine's hand in her own. Perhaps this was the moment. Janine squeezed it, smiled, then let go.

  "The first time was beautiful. He gave me everything, all of his attention. Just the two of us beneath the holy tabernacle, moving with the spirit. Would you believe it was my first time, Lara? I'd never done it before, and to do it with such a man as he?" She leaned back, ashamed even in the pleasure of the memory. "It made me special. You can understand that, of course. From Amo's loins came your immunity to this world. Like Eve from Adam's rib, so was I re-made too. I began to feel my own power even then. I began to see his power, and the trails Amo had left upon us all. The devil's work."

  She sighed.

  "What happened?" Lara asked. It felt like her future, her life, was teetering on the knife-edge of Witzgenstein's madness. She just had to tip it in the right direction to return the world to sanity.

  Janine patted her hand, amused and regretful at once. "So hungry. You wouldn't be, if you knew what I've done. You'd tear out my eyes right here, if you could see. But for now, let's have this moment. I can't tell anyone else, not ever again, so why not to you? Lara, he changed."

  She shuddered. It went on for seconds, like an earthquake beneath her skin, as she remembered whatever horrors lurked in the past.

  "He changed me. I thought I'd found my Amo." Another shy smile. "In truth I found a cruel master. Twelve years, Lara, can you imagine that? Twelve years of absolute power he'd held, over his people. Owning their minds, their wombs, their bodies, and the children they produced." The tears grew stronger. "So he owned me. Gently at first. Roughly later. He brought his wives in."

  Lara blinked. Wives? She could imagine, but didn't want to. She'd never seen it, but she'd felt Drake's power, and their blank-eyed devotion. "He forced you?"

  "I wanted to," Witzgenstein answered fiercely. "My body betrayed me in ways I never could have believed, as it has betrayed me with you. I lay with him and his women, night after night in a sham of holiness, worshipping not God but him, the idea of him. A false idol. No prophet should ask for that, Lara, and believe me, I will not ask for it. Still, I gave my worship easily, because I loved him, and his gaze wrapped me up in a shadow of love returned. So his fate merged with ours, and my people merged with his, until I had known them all."

  Lara's mouth was dry. Was she really hearing what she thought she was? "All the women?"

  Witzgenstein turned to her. She wiped her cheeks, her tears dried up, and the chill was back.

  "All the men," she said, her tone utterly cold. "All the women. Orgies, Lara. Despicable, base, but I reveled in them. And when he became cruel, I indulged him. I broke my people against his will, and I only loved him more, as if transgression was the holy order, a means to mortify the flesh. I subverted all God's natural laws, for him, and throughout I believed I did it for God. 'This is my will,' he would say to me, 'and so the will of your God'. I swallowed what he gave me to swallow, child, and forced the same decision onto others. So you see, I am no stranger to such things. I have been his rapist. I will not do it again."

  Lara was dumbfounded. She thought of the people from Willamette Valley. Cynthia. Greg. Frances. Alan.

  "All of them?"

  "All. Some resisted. None could withstand the firebrand of our wills combined. So my powers developed. Then-"

  She faltered.

  "What?"

  Her eyes blazed again. "Then we came to New LA. He saw you." She said 'you' like it was a foul word, something distasteful in her mouth. "He turned the glow of his love from me, to you. One night, then the next, while he kept you in his tabernacle."

  Lara frowned, casting her mind back. Drake had locked her in his Winnebago Airstream. Was that the tabernacle?

  "We didn't do anything."

  Witzgenstein sneered. "It doesn't matter. He was besotted with you. He turned from me and mine, and his thoughts were on you at all times. His lust was unseemly. His rejection of me, and the one true path I had offered, made him baser than ever. After that there was only one eventuality. If you had not killed him on that stage, I would have done it myself."

  Her rage was back, hot and trembling.

  "So he-" Lara began, trying to slot the pieces into place with her memory, "he sent you to me in the RV? The tabernacle? Before Amo was to die. You were cruel then, and that was just because, I don't know, you were jealous?"

  Janine laughed. "Jealous. Yes. Of a dead woman. But of course, he was going to spare you then. He forbade me from talking to you, but I came anyway, risking his wrath. I poured poison in your ear, to press you to turn on him in public, and force him to make an example of you as well. So it passed."

  Lara buckled under that, feeling like she was drowning off Venice Beach again, already exhausted from the stream of revelations. Each one burst over and changed her.

  "You wanted me to do that? To turn on him?"

  Janine shrugged. "I thought you would die. I couldn't foresee the alchemy of the Antichrist, that you would touch them both and Drake would die. But it only accelerated my plans. He was gone, and in our flight from Los Angeles I hatched my exodus. The rest you know, until the moment you knelt for me. Sweet Lara, that was such a gift."

  She reached out and stroked Lara's cheek. Lara tried to recoil but the bridle stiffened instantly, holding her in place.

  "Are you satisfied now, child? Is there anything else you would like to know?"

  Lara tried to think of something, anything, to prolong the moment and wedge a crack into Janine's thinking, but she was too drained to come up with anything. The things Witzgenstein had done were beyond her understanding. She was not the woman she'd believed her to be, and she didn't know what lever to press any more, what argument to take.

  "Very well then," Witzgenstein went on briskly. "You and I have had our dance, and the moment is over. It is time to put childish things away, and bring about the civilization God always promised. Drake was a false prophet, I see that now, an obstacle sent to test me, just as you have been. But I know what to do with you now. With a witch."

  She almost spat the last word. The bridle tightened around Lara abruptly, shutting her mouth and squeezing her lungs. She tried to speak but nothing came.

  "Perhaps you thought this was my soul's confession," said Witzgenstein, mockingly now, as she rose to her feet. She looked stronger than she ever had, a solid oak of strength reinforced with red anger on the line. "That I'd fall into your lap a changed woman, having seen the wickedness of my ways? But you're wrong. You don't know me at all, Lara. Come, let me show you."

  She walked toward the South Portico arched window, overlooking the Sou
th Lawn. Lara found her own limbs responding from within, outside of her control. It was startling but irresistible, the power of Witzgenstein's blunt mind overriding her own. It forced her to stand, and moved her jerkily to the window, where she hung like a puppet from her master's strings.

  The Lawn was dark beyond, and plentiful stars overhung it. Dim shadows shuffled through the black, then a fire sparked, burning in an iron brazier. Others followed, circled in a ring around a large, dark mass at the center. She saw many people gathered around it now, some ferrying the flames from brazier to brazier, some standing motionless in a ring. All of New LA was there, and all of Drake's people too, waiting in the darkness with pale faces turning upward now, to her.

  The thrill of fear weakened her legs. If it weren't for the spine of Witzgenstein's will holding her up, she would have collapsed. Laid across the darkness, she saw the red trails of the bridle stretching between the people and Witzgenstein. She had laid her control over them all, though that was not the thing driving them now. Whatever they were planning here, it came not only from Janine, but from within them, from a place where they were angry, and afraid, and beaten down.

  "I've enjoyed this confession," Witzgenstein said, as Lara's eyes adjusted to the darkness outside. "It has helped me enormously. But now is the time for our new world to begin, and what better way than with a grand symbol to kick us off into the history books? That can be your role, serving me even at the end."

  Lara would have gasped, as she recognized what the dark mass on the South Lawn was, if it weren't for Witzgenstein's tight clasp around her heart. A heaped, pyramidal stack of broken furniture and chopped logs, from which rose a single, jutting stake at the center, tall enough to fit its purpose.

  A pyre.

  Witzgenstein pressed her face close to Lara's, and whispered in her ear. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Lara. And I won't."

  INTERLUDE 9

  While James While tracked down coma-sufferers, Joran Helkegarde killed them.

  Testing to destruction, he called it. Every day, all day, he tested people to death.

  As the weeks passed and they steadily came out of their comas, beginning a slow road to recovery, he performed experiments that stopped that progress dead. He performed live brain vivisections. He overloaded their minds with transmission signals on the line until they burnt out. He tested them with a ravenous hunger, and they died one after another.

  Time slipped between his fingers like the line. Days passed and he was on a plane, then in a facility, then at the Prime Array construction site, then back in Istanbul. The world became fluid, sleeping and awake, so everything was a dream. His work was a mountain toward redemption he had to climb, but that mountain was made of gray type ones, and with each step forward his ex-coma sufferers were dying.

  "You have to do it," James While told him, in the brief moments when they spoke. "This is your calling."

  It was a cruel calling, though their deaths didn't seem to hurt. Instead the nightmares that woke him in the middle of too-short sleeps were of Piers Sandbrooke with the wraith flapping in his head.

  Type seven, one of the least understood of the T4's expressions. It fascinated him even as it disgusted him. He thought about it while he dissected spines, while he ramped up the transmission signal to overload the motor area of the brain, the speech area, the vision area. He thought about it as he mapped brain wave patterns at death to the first few readings he received off the Prime Array, as it gradually came online.

  He thought about Sandbrooke so much that he became real.

  Piers took to following him everywhere he went. Joran knew he was a hallucination, a symptom of too-little sleep and overwhelming stress, but his presence was oddly comforting. It wasn't forgiveness, nothing like that; rather it was a different kind of punishment, and the least of what he deserved.

  Piers didn't speak. Sometimes he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Joran didn't tell anyone. Nobody cared, anyway. He bore it.

  "Don't talk to me," Sovoy said now, whenever he called him. He'd changed, as his work at Bordeaux took him away from Joran's circle of control. The anger was back, the blame. "I don't have anything to say to you. Read the reports."

  Sovoy's data was good, though it wasn't the data Joran wanted. It left him with no one else to talk to, as James While was fiercely engaged in his shadow SEAL hunt, constantly muttering to the ghostly holograph of Olan Harrison in the background. So he started talking to his own ghost: Piers Sandbrooke.

  He explained each new revelation, each brain broken open, each fresh attempt to build a shield by harnessing the frayed ends of a spinal column. Sandbrooke was a mute witness, even when he was screaming. It didn't help. Now Joran woke from nightmares clawing unconsciously at his own throat. In the pale mirror of whatever bunker he was visiting, scratches laced over scratches on his skin. He wore polo necks in the lab and strengthened his resolve to stop sleeping.

  Thirty-three of his hundred were already dead, tested to death.

  His first breakthrough came on a Tuesday, four months after the Event. Using new techniques and new patterns, he built a temporary shield on the line that prevented any signal getting through. It lasted for only twenty-seven seconds, but in that time it screened an area the size of a house.

  He whooped himself hoarse, not really feeling any joy but the beginning of a slow relief.

  "Twenty-seven seconds is a start," James While told him, with the young Harrison puttering at his back. "Get me twenty-seven months. Twenty-seven years."

  Joran took heart, but it was a hollow kind of heart. People kept dying and every death made the scratches on his neck worse. The blip signals off the coma survivors around the world grew stronger, each one a fuse on the coming apocalypse. He began tracking them with a morbid fascination, digging into all the data Sovoy passed along and requesting more. They became his only entertainment and only connection to the world, like a real-life soap opera. In a world of unlimited resources, it wasn't hard to dig up good gossip.

  He learned about Amo in New York, and Drake in St. Albans, and the others who were leading the pack.

  "So a hipster artist shall lead the survivors," he said to Piers Sandbrooke, and Piers Sandbrooke said nothing.

  On their infrequent calls James While grew even more distant, speaking like he was talking to the air. He'd grown thin and mad, even more so than Joran.

  "Focus on the shields," he would mutter, repeating himself.

  "I am," Joran said.

  "On the shields, on the Arks."

  His Prime Array reached completion. Standing at the head of its great glass-ceilinged hall, as big as a football stadium hunkered in the Siberian permafrost, Joran surveyed the thousand young men and felt the weight of what he was doing catch up to him.

  One thousand more sacrifices to the line. He could never climb fast enough.

  The new Array worked beautifully. It sucked down the hydrogen line like a lung, and taught him such terrible secrets. He learned about triggers and blips and the future to come.

  It was a Wednesday a few months later, after a Christmas spent picking the scabs on his throat, when he made another breakthrough.

  Stabilization.

  He told it to James While. James While listened and ordered it done.

  The signal went up through the Prime Array in silence, carried over the world on the hydrogen line like a smart phone firmware update, unseen and unheard. It rewrote brains and the T4, switching fragments of code so that instead of thirty-six types expressing on a given signal, there would only be one or two.

  "It's not a cure," Sovoy told him, when he went to Bordeaux on New Year's Eve and begged to talk.

  Sovoy was looking better. Divorced from the worst parts of their joint mission, focused on his role as the savior of Bordeaux's seven hundred, he had gone back to despising Joran. Now he looked at him with contempt.

  "It's no cure at all," Sovoy repeated, enjoying the difference between them, his own moral purity.
"Now you trap seven billion innocents as type one rather than spread across thirty-six types. What good does that do?"

  Joran nodded hungrily, enjoying the censure. He almost pulled his polo neck down to show Sovoy his scarred neck. There was worse to say yet, and to be judged for his crimes by another living person, not just Sandbrooke's silent stare, was delicious.

  "It stops them killing each other. It gives us control. It affords us ten years," Joran said.

  Sovoy sneered, full of high-minded contempt. He hadn't kept up to date with their plans. "Ten years for what?"

  Joran bathed in his disgust. "To find a cure. If no cure comes in ten years, then it'll be much easier to wipe them out, if they're all of one type."

  Sovoy blanched. He hadn't seen that coming. Joran felt light-headed with pleasure.

  "What?"

  Joran cackled beside himself, like an old crone. That was the beauty of stabilization.

  "Kill all seven billion," he said. "We have type twos expressed and waiting to sweep them away. It's very neat."

  Sovoy just stared. Seven billion was a large number. Perhaps he'd been sustaining himself with dreams of saving them all. Sovoy the savior. Joran cackled more. He was here to tear those dreams down and drop Sovoy into the same sea of shit he'd been swimming in for months.

  "What about my survivors?" Sovoy asked.

  Joran had to stop himself from laughing madly. It was hard. Sovoy, the fool. Didn't he know Joran had already killed seventy-eight of them, one after another tested to destruction? What were seven hundred more?

  "They'll die," he said. "The type twos will cleanse the world for the Arks. A second flood."

  Sovoy blinked.

  Something inside him cracked.

  "You're planning to kill them, still? After all that I've done?"

  Joran cackled more. He didn't mean to. A year alone had made him crazy, and he knew that. He knew this was cruel, even, but how could he stop himself any more?

  "We have to save the Arks," he said, echoing something James While had told him many times, that he'd insulated Sovoy from. "Your seven hundred are incidental."