The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  The plane bounced along the buckled tarmac and lifted off with a hundred yards of runway left. The familiar lurch and wobble felt like coming home. Swiftly they began to climb.

  "Here we are, Anna," Peters said, smiling in the co-pilot's seat. "We are always better in the air."

  They did find them, but not within three or four hours. The lepers were not in Turkey, or anywhere near the border. They weren't in Bulgaria, nor at the border heading north. Rather they were in the mountains of central Romania eight hundred miles away, fully halfway to Brezno already.

  * * *

  It was a terrifying realization. It changed everything, and kept on dawning like a series of hammer blows as the plane circled hard, and the jagged sense of lepers refined on the line below. Anna looked at Peters and he looked at her, and neither of them knew what to say.

  They would hit Brezno in another eight days, or sooner. Lucas was never going to have new shielding technology ready in time. Could they get enough people there in time to load all the bodies into the bunker?

  It didn't seem possible. Not in the Beechcraft alone, and there was no time to prep another plane. That meant Brezno was going to fall, and thousands of people were going to turn.

  From there the dominos would drop. Gap would be next, even as half the leper tide would surely come washing back toward Istanbul. They wouldn't be able to save either of them. They'd have to evacuate, but without a portable shield there was no way to take anyone with them.

  Perhaps they could be locked underground while the lepers prowled above, but they'd surely die down there when the resources ran out, if the infecting signal of the lepers didn't reach down through the earth and get them first.

  "Shit," said Peters.

  It was shit. It hit home with a devastating thump in Anna's belly. A horde of three thousand lepers, of six thousand, would be unstoppable. They would sweep over the world, swallowing Istanbul and the other bunkers like pieces of chewing gum, swallowing the world in just a few months, keeping a sea of infection alive for another decade at least.

  Every second she'd spent working to save Istanbul would have been wasted. Everything she'd been through in the Alps would be for nothing, and all the pain Amo had caused would be pointless.

  She flew the plane and the weight of it thickened, welling up from the rabid creatures below and crackling on the line. These twelve lepers were an Ocean seed, ready to spawn the tsunami. It was happening right now, right here, and she couldn't do a thing.

  Long moments passed.

  "They jump," Peters said. He was studying the imagery from the aerial camera they'd mounted on the Beechcraft's belly. "It explains why they are so fast."

  Anna watched the screen, and grunted agreement. She'd never actually seen the lepers before, only felt the rabid effect of them on the line grow stronger as they'd drawn closer. On the screen they were black and white blips, twelve bodies that zagged and flickered, disobeying basic laws of physics. They didn't really walk, more they crackled and leapfrogged forward in impossible spurts, covering ground far faster than any sprinting demon.

  On the line they tasted of blown gunpowder and chaos, like a streak of electricity through the air. She tried to follow their paths back to the root and felt her own thoughts corrupting; twisting, losing focus, throwing up strange and dark ideas.

  "What are you doing?" Peters asked abruptly, jolting her back to focus. She looked up at him blearily, seeing the concern on his face. "Look."

  He pointed, and she looked at the screen, where three thousand feet below the lepers had stopped moving. Her heart skipped a beat. Their black and white faces were raised to the sky, as if they were looking at her. The strange thought hit that at any moment they would leapfrog up into the Beechcraft.

  "They feel me," Anna said quietly. "Studying them."

  "So stop it, Anna."

  With an effort of will she shifted her attention away from the lepers, sucking up out of the line like a boot out of thick mud. Instead she studied the clouds and looked at the Beechcraft's dials. She listened to the engine revving and counted specks on the windshield, until-

  "They're moving again," said Peters. "Anna, what was that?"

  She didn't know what to say.

  "I was listening to them," she managed. "On the line. They're, I don't know. They're broken, somehow. If I could reach in and straighten them out, maybe-"

  "No," Peters said firmly. "Anna, listen to yourself. Look what Amo did to Istanbul, with just one of them. How would that help us now?"

  She didn't know. Peters went on, talking about the possibilities that he knew were hopeless, trying to convince himself and her that there was some other way. She tried to listen, but ignoring the lepers was getting harder; the sense of them lapped at her thoughts like a riptide, each taste a hanging question, the urgent sense of something left undone, an addiction that led only to-

  "Anna," Peters said, shaking her arm.

  She didn't need to look at the screen to see it; she could feel their eyes gazing up into her just as she was gazing into them. That way led to madness, yes, but she'd been mad before; madness was an old friend and ally, a weapon she could turn at will, and what else was she supposed to do now? There just wasn't enough time. She needed an answer, and the more she tracked them on the line, the more she thought that answer lay with them.

  "We need to go back," Peters said firmly. "Turn the plane around, Anna, we have to go back to Lucas, he can have an idea, but we have to-"

  She didn't have to think.

  She knew Lucas would have no ideas. There weren't any to have; the lepers were a hard wall, inflexible, with no trick ways through.

  There was no need to think now, anyway, not with their buzz rising up on the line. She never had thought on her catamaran, reading the swells of the ocean just to stay alive. How was this any different? These creatures were part of the ocean, and so was Anna. She knew what she had to do.

  She pushed the stick forward, and the Beechcraft rocked into a hard dive that threw Peters forward, cutting him off mid-speech. His safety belt caught him sharply. He turned to her with a look of baffled horror.

  "What are you doing?"

  It was simple. She had to do something and this was it. The baby in her belly was no good for anyone if the virus metastasized at Brezno.

  "I'm following the waves," she said, her voice emerging from some deep, automatic place in the back of her head, not under her own control.

  "What waves? Anna, stop listening to them, they are mad! I feel it too. We have to go back."

  They had agreed to go back, Anna knew, but she couldn't. The pivot point was right here, in this moment, and only she was in the position to decide.

  She shoved the stick and steepened the dive.

  Peters let out an involuntary bark and braced himself against the cockpit readouts, but whatever he said was muted by the rush of wind and the sound of the lepers calling up to her, their voices synchronizing in a detuned, white static call.

  Come

  Like sirens. The sound was a storm threatening to tip her tiny catamaran at any second, and only she could hold the tiller. Down below their black and white bodies spun in a jagged, skipping circle, like dark children playing a game of Ring-A-Round the Rosie. The engines roared and the plane body creaked, and she watched the dial on the dash spin below one thousand feet.

  Then Peters was on her, shouting something she couldn't hear. She didn't fight as he stripped her safety belt and yanked her out of the pilot's seat, dropping her hard onto the steeply tilting floor.

  He pulled on the stick and the Beechcraft's nose jerked up, making the engine scream and slamming Anna's head into the metal floor. In that moment of white stars and pain, it happened. Something like lightning lashed out on the line and snaked round her head, snapping her gaze up to see-

  A leper leapfrogged into the plane.

  Anna gasped at its impossible, stop-motion beauty. It struck her dizzy and numb. It looked like something unearthed from
beneath a rock; with black slug-like muscle and ribbons of stripped white skin. In its strength there was a dazzling rightness.

  It lurched toward her, and she felt the terrible power pouring off it like a fever.

  Peters was screaming now at the controls, and the storm was right here, in him and in her, and she luxuriated in it. It was so strong, so incredibly powerful, and it made her wild. She felt Peters wink out beneath it, felt herself shrinking, and understood.

  Come

  Called the lepers, and down the plane went. Was it time yet, was it already time?

  She ran to the leper, and it embraced her, its skin crisping her own. She embraced it back and kept moving. It couldn't stop her, just like the waves couldn't stop a catamaran they were already tossing aloft. She could read the ocean, as she always had. This was her skill.

  They wanted her to come, and she was coming.

  With one smooth movement she yanked the emergency lever on the hull, snapped the door open. It broke off in the slipstream, and the rush of air tugged her and the leper bodily out.

  She flew. It was a dive like Cerulean before her, like everyone who'd died and come back without their mind in place, who'd never had a choice or a chance, this was her chance and her choice. The wind grabbed her and flung her and the leper away from the little plane, tumbling madly on the crackling line.

  An anguished cry from Peters rang after her, as consciousness snatched him back, but already her sense of self was fragmenting into the leper. The wind ripped the life from her lungs and buffeted their bodies as they plummeted to Earth together, offering fleeting glimpses of the creatures spinning below, the reeling sky, and the little plane pulling away.

  INTERLUDE 10

  James While and Joran Helkegarde didn't see each other in the flesh again.

  Joran went to the Alps under cover of night, to where Olan Harrison's facility was waiting, outfitted with his team and everything he would need.

  Together they watched as the radial fuses of Amo in New York and Drake in London raced toward eruption, until finally Amo won the pool, on a date with a barista from his coffee shop.

  The second blast on the line rang out, and ended the world. The transmission spread in a wave; from New York it leapt the Atlantic in hours, cropping Eastern Canada, the Caribbean and the whole of South America before the long silence of the open ocean, chopping Greenland and Iceland almost as afterthoughts, and making landfall in Africa to rush east. Mauritania and Morocco went first, followed by Portugal and Ireland then Spain, France and England as the wave front spread, taking a swathe of African nations, as the hydrogen line convulsed.

  It hit Drake on his Mediterranean cruise. It took Holland and Belgium and washed over Switzerland, engulfing their little oasis in the Alps with a sensation he felt burning in his skin, as the neutered T4 uselessly tried to trigger. Onward it flowed, sweeping across Germany, Scandinavia, flooding through Egypt and down the Nile toward the Middle East, where it swallowed the vast empty swathes of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran and Syria, silencing the conflict of generations around Israel and racing inexorably on, leveling all beneath it.

  Mountains and rivers didn't slow it. It swept across land and water alike and left the emptiness of gray-skinned, white-eyed type ones in its wake, who sniffed at the line and stampeded and formed herds to seek out the coma survivors who'd suffered so much already. Joran's heart went out to them, as the tsunami rolled over their heads. They couldn't have prepared, they couldn't have been saved.

  Already he'd watched Drake kill a dozen helpless type ones, transmitted live from cameras on his cruise liner. Amo still slept in New York. Other survivors around the world were waking to the carnage, each living or dying in their own ways.

  Still the wave swept east, engulfing Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, biting deep into Russia and encircling Nepal and the great subcontinent of India, swallowing millions per second, gathering billions into its bosom, until at last it met itself somewhere in the middle of China, where the eastern tide hit the western tide and sealed a dome of infection over the world.

  A ridgeline of type twos rose briefly along the front where the two waves clashed, down through China and Mongolia, but he'd always expected something like that might happen. The type ones acted exactly as he'd expected; piling themselves up on the twos to end the threat, like white blood cells overwhelming an infection.

  Then it was over.

  His shields stood up. The cure endured. The whole process took a little less than twelve hours.

  Nobody moved for a long time, after that. There was a lot of processing required. Then one by one they trickled outside, as if by unspoken agreement, into the wan afternoon light where they looked at the sky, some cried, some stood alone, and made peace with this new world they lived within.

  Years only remained, for all of them. The timer had been set.

  Soon enough, they went back to work.

  It was early the next morning that the call came in from Bordeaux.

  Sovoy stood before them on the video screen, holding a gun in his hand, with blood trickling down his jaw. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes crazed.

  "I've turned the shield up," he said. "Any moment we'll go under. This isn't natural, Joran. I can't live like this and I won't."

  The Alps team watched helplessly on internal cameras as he ran onto the top gantry of Bordeaux, shooting at anyone who came near. He was not the same man he'd once been. They approached him with an armed security team, and soon enough they brought him down, but the damage had been done. Post-analysis showed he'd spun the shield into overdrive, and the result came within minutes.

  Thousands of scientists all throughout Bordeaux, every member of Sovoy's team, dropped. They didn't phase into type ones, like those beneath the flood above. Instead they were trapped in a diminished cycle of the shield, unable to move, unable to speak, but still there, blinking at times.

  In five days the last of them were dead. Joran watched throughout. Three thousand people lost for nothing.

  It was the only shield that failed.

  * * *

  James While watched the world end from the Prime Array, tucked into the Siberian wilderness between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, two hundred miles southeast of Novosibirsk. The bellows of Joran's one thousand Prime Array subjects let him know when the wave had passed over.

  His people; a handful of those most trusted, most dedicated, most loyal, looked to him for leadership.

  He didn't have any words, because he'd never been that kind of leader. Rather he led them to the Array, where they stood on the circling gantry and looked over the mass of one thousand howling beasts. All the thirty-six types were there in all their gore, expressed into reality. They lashed each other and strained to be free. James While saw in them a metaphor for the past year of his life.

  But the tide was turning now.

  He led his people down.

  Together they walked a gauntlet through the ranks of creatures. Gray ones and red ones, blue ones and yellow ones, wraiths and beasts and monsters. He could almost feel the line burning off them.

  They couldn't see him. The cure hid him and his people completely. This was the new reality, and he stood amongst the thousand for a long time, letting the chaos wash over him.

  He didn't need to give a speech, after that. Everyone knew their roles. They were caretakers only, tending to the world until a new generation could come and pick up the pieces. So they began the long work of laying all the groundwork they could.

  * * *

  In the aftermath, Joran stole people.

  The first was an old man in Belgium, eight days after the end. It was their earliest foray into the post-apocalyptic world, and it went smoothly. Wrecks on the road were easy to move. Throngs of type ones ignored them and flowed past like tides.

  His name was Maxime Willem, sixty-three years old, a postman in his past life. They found him in his back yard, huddled by a low wood fire in a too-new barbeque set. He had a table set out on his porch la
id with various meats that were already going off. He had beer and wine enough for thirty people. He'd even put up bunting.

  "He's going to kill himself," said Kaley, one of the youngest on Joran's team, as they spied on Maxime with a drone. "That's what this is for."

  Joran went in alone.

  There was no way to do it without lies. Still, he tried to steel himself for the moment when the hope fell out of the old man's eyes. He wanted to shout out the truth before he even saw him.

  He stepped around the wooden gate into Maxime Willem's back yard, amongst all that sad regalia and forlorn hope, and held out his fake badge, dressed in his fake uniform. He didn't speak Belgian, but Maxime spoke English.

  "I'm from the United Nations," he said. "I've come to help."

  Maxime stared. He didn't believe what he was seeing. Perhaps he thought he was dreaming. When he spoke it was roughly, remembering the parts of his brain he'd already started to forget. He asked questions. He wanted to know about his family, his grandchildren in other countries. He embraced Joran. He wept. He offered him a hamburger, though the BBQ fire was now guttering in a drizzly rain.

  He got in the vehicle and met the team. They smiled as if it was real, as if they were really going to help him. The journey back took a day and a night, and throughout Joran answered Maxime's questions, offering him hope. It was the least he could do.

  They gave Maxime one day of happiness in the bunker; good food, good people, the chance of a future, before Joran broke it to him in the experimental room.

  "What would you do, if you could save your grandchildren?"

  "Anything," Maxime said swiftly. "Of course, anything I could."

  "Would you die?"

  "In a moment. What good is my life? Why, when you found me-"

  Joran held up a hand. He let a silence develop. There was no kind way. There was only the quieter way.