The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  She found a nice-looking red-roofed house, and broke her way in. She had the lepers set Peters down on a sofa, then packed them into the garage, settling them down with the door closed. They liked to be in the dark. While he slept she went to the kitchen, where she found a few edible things: what looked like tinned anchovies in bitter-tasting olive oil, crackers that crumbled to dust but were at least calories, some dried lasagna sheets and a jar of tomato sauce.

  She cooked the lasagna sheets on a camping gas fire rummaged out of a closet, served with sparkling bottled water that still had a hint of fizz. She woke Peters to a feast and they ate by candlelight.

  "Ravi was a good man," Peters said.

  Anna smiled. It was about time for this, a proper wake. So they talked about Ravi, and grief. Peters shared stories about Abigail that he'd never told her before. Not only their best moments, but their worst too. The fights they had, the moments he'd thought she might leave one day and he'd never see her again. One time Peters had thought to surprise her with a bed full of roses, a wonderfully romantic gesture, and as soon as she'd seen it she just laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing. Afterward she'd never been able to explain why it struck her so, but she did call him a 'Dear man' and after they'd cleared the bed of roses and thorns, they put it to good use.

  Anna blushed. Peters chuckled. "Why? You are a grown woman now. Soon to be a mother."

  She blushed more.

  She shared the things about Ravi that had always annoyed her; what a pushover he was, his lack of ambition, the annoying way he always had of just getting calmer when she got worked up in a fight, and was surprised to find herself crying halfway through.

  "It's good," Peters said. "To make you clean."

  They ate crumbled biscuits and sucked a few hard candies she found in a rusted tin. Still good.

  Three days passed like that, during which they did nothing but eat, and talk, and recover while taking slow walks around the house, looking at the distant mountains. It was easy enough to forget the lepers in the garage, and with them contained, it didn't feel like there was any rush. There was no place they had to be right then, and nothing urgent they could do to help Lucas with his various challenges. It was nice to play at this act of domesticity; the ritual of bidding each other good night, as they each retired to their rooms; to bid each other good morning and sit to breakfast together like being a family, having a real life, like being back in New LA.

  After the three days were up, Peters showed her the radio.

  It had been built from spare parts scavenged from nearby houses.

  "Where did this come from?" Anna asked.

  Peters gave a kind smile. "I made it. It is time, Anna."

  That unbalanced the careful equilibrium they'd built. "What do you mean? Time for what?"

  "Time to go home. The real home."

  She looked at the radio, and understood, even though she didn't like it. There was a resistance there, a kind of dream that maybe they could just stay here and live like this forever, but of course that was only a pleasant fiction. They had to go.

  "You built this at night," she said, not a question. "While I was asleep."

  He nodded. "I do not need much sleep, Anna. You know this about me. Yet you do. You have lost a lot. You have a baby coming. This rest has healed you very much. But it is time."

  She sighed. It was funny to imagine him sneaking out at night, smuggling these materials in by flashlight, assembling them piece by piece. It was a kind of betrayal, but not really. In truth it was a kindness.

  "We have to go back," she said.

  He just smiled. They both knew it was true. Three days was long enough.

  He turned the radio on. It took a little while, tuning to the frequency for Istanbul, boosting the gain enough to get over the mountains, but at last they got through. The person on the other end came through crackling, but clear enough to hear. They fetched Helen.

  The news Helen told them changed everything.

  The remaining eight bunkers had been bombed.

  Every shield had been taken out, leaving the people there trapped and helpless on the line, just like Gap and Brezno. A bomb had also fallen on Istanbul two days ago, a large-scale cluster bomb that completely destroyed the airfield and wiped out almost everyone who'd been above ground. Some seven hundred people.

  And more bombs were falling.

  Peters and Anna listened in stunned silence.

  They'd left the bunker behind, organizing a rag-tag evacuation to Istanbul; an enormous refugee train of the sick, injured, and mad, only able to travel within the confines of the crater on the line.

  Peters looked at Anna, and she looked back at him, as Helen went on listing losses. There was a choice there to feel guilt, that maybe they should have returned faster, done something earlier, but there was no point in that now. Nothing they could have done would have changed this, but still, it soured the three days they'd spent indulging a fantasy.

  It also raised a new threat, one only hinted at on the line and in all the literature she'd heard about the days of the apocalypse. A shadow SEAL that brought the apocalypse about in the beginning. Someone that even now was trying to eradicate not only her own people, but every other survivor in the world, the bunkers included.

  "We have to go," Peters said. "Now."

  Anna was already pulling the lepers out of the garage.

  20. FORTY YEARS

  Lara made her people move.

  The pyre still burned before her. It would burn through the night and into the next day, a new symbol for the country and its people. She stood and watched the flames while her people prepared.

  The net she'd cast over them hummed with her anger, controlling them just as Witzgenstein's lusts, petty grievances and bigotry had controlled them before. Now their minds had changed. She didn't care what stories they told themselves, about why they were doing these things. Perhaps they'd just changed their minds. An epiphany had struck them all.

  She turned, while they bustled in and out of the White House. It wasn't what it once had been; not sacred, not glorious, not inspirational. Witzgenstein's death in the flames had wiped that out. There was no foundation stone here to build a new civilization upon. There was nothing. There was shame, and a new collective guilt, bigger than the guilt of manifest destiny.

  Had Crow been the last of his people?

  The wicked work was done. So let America rest.

  She watched her people work. They knew where the stores were; everything Witzgenstein had stolen from the Strategic Reserves before she'd put them to the torch. Trailers full of food, good gasoline, clothes, clean water, everything they would need for the months to come.

  And the months would come. Years.

  After a time, Lara moved. It hurt to walk, on burned soles, with burned skin pulling tight. She went into the White House, where nothing really remained. No clothes for her, no memories but misery. She walked the halls, looking into sad staterooms that passed by in a blur of elegant decoration and lost dreams.

  The shining city on a hill.

  She brought a doctor to her, and she tended to her burns. The pain was there, but at one remove, filtered through the line. Her legs and feet had it worst. Her scalp in places, her face, her back, her arms. She looked at the raw wounds as they were doused with cold water, then cleansed with burning antiseptics, wrapped carefully with thin gauze.

  Tonight would mark her for the rest of her life.

  She had them put her in a wheelchair. She almost wept, when at last her thoughts turned to her children, and what she'd made them witness.

  No better than Amo as he killed Drake. The things they'd seen. It wasn't fair, and she wanted nothing more than to go to them, but she couldn't. Her emotions would be too volatile, and she couldn't let her control slip, not for a second, not after what she'd done to Witzgenstein, and to Frances.

  They'd all seen it, her naked show of power on the line. Some of them might recognize it. Some of them might have
learned, and be waiting for their chance to walk her back into the flames.

  Seeing her children would make her weak, and she couldn't afford that now.

  She looked at her face in a mirror. She wouldn't be the same. No longer beautiful. Mottled, now. Handsome, perhaps. Fearful. The patches singed out of her hair wouldn't regrow. Her neck would always be raw. She would wear these wounds with the shame they merited.

  Witzgenstein's screams would never be enough. They would always be too much.

  She looked round the Oval Office one last time. There was no cairn to leave behind. No one would ever come this way again. No one would sit in that chair. The power of the old world, along with all of its symbols, was now thoroughly broken.

  The convoy stretched down to the gates; thirty-one vehicles loaded with supplies, people, and failure. Thirty-one pairs of hands let off the parking brakes at once, and thirty-one feet pressed on the gas pedals, and every one of them was Lara. She lay in the back of the tabernacle, Drake's silver airstream, her eyes closed while the convoy rumbled to life, working the net deeper into her people. She would sleep soon, and she couldn't let them rise up while she was unconscious. She knit her net deep around their hearts, a bridle so far in they would mistake it for their own hopes and dreams, a lie for the ages.

  So she made them like Drake's hollow-eyed children; flat and obedient, not trusted with their own free will.

  She didn't pause to think it was impossible. She only acted. Crow had died, and in death some remnant piece of him on the line had physically hurled her from the fire. If that was real, what couldn't be?

  What wouldn't be?

  She pinched off all her threads, and in the midst of the pain in her body, she fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  The bombs didn't fall that night, or the next day.

  Lara lived out fever dreams, while her dressings were checked and changed, and they pumped antibiotics into her system, and long discussions went back and forth about skin grafts.

  She cut them all short, swimming up from the depths of the line to exert control. She didn't speak, didn't open her eyes, because she was in another conversation now.

  She was speaking with Crow, deep in the line. There was some of him there still, exchanging dreamy explanations and inspirations. What next? What now?

  He wanted her to trust. To let the people go again, and forgive. He said the fever had broken with the death of Witzgenstein, and they could now be trusted to do the right thing. Lara only had counterarguments. Everything she'd lived argued against that. They had cheered for her death by fire, and that had come from within them, and she couldn't find it in her anywhere to forgive them.

  What forgiveness could there be? What foundation stone would remain?

  They would keep going, just as Amo had told them. They would wander for forty years in the desert, if that was what it took. She thought back to his days after Maine, when the guilt of what he'd done held him deep in its embrace, and she'd done everything she could to snap him out of it.

  Now all she had was the ghost of Crow, and he couldn't snap her out of it, because he wasn't even real.

  'You're dead,' she told him. 'You aren't real.'

  He couldn't argue. He argued, but she didn't listen. His arguments had no weight.

  Forty years of wandering had a ring to it. Her generation would be done. The next generation could start afresh. Let all memory of the past be erased in an endless stream of disheveled gas stations, crumbling cities and rusting cars. Let it all be erased.

  'And if Amo needs you?' Crow asked. 'If the real world calls?'

  'Let them call. We are nothing now. A genetic remainder, left from an equation we couldn't balance.'

  Crow just shook his head. 'People have lost more.'

  'I don't think so,' said Lara, and stopped listening to him. Part of her knew, even in the depths of the line, in her sleep, that he would be gone soon. Nothing would be left. He'd used up his purple spark in saving her, and she couldn't offer anything in return.

  When she woke properly, it was a week later and the bombs had fallen.

  Washington was gone.

  She felt the shift on the line as surely as the burns on her skin. Not nuclear, this time, but a crater blasted into the deep ocean of the line, which the waters of thought wouldn't fill for years.

  Was it the bunkers? Was it someone else? She didn't care. It wasn't her world. Postpone her for forty years and she could care. Her people wouldn't wake up for that long.

  'You can't do that to them,' Crow said, muffled now, already distant.

  'It's been done before. We did it to you. This is our reservation. We need a time out.'

  He protested and she listened, but didn't change.

  They changed her bandages. Her skin cracked and sealed and in places healed raw. States passed by, old lines in imaginary space that didn't matter now. Soon the signs would be gone and no one would know.

  She felt the other bombs fall, in a necklace across the world. She could even feel Amo and Anna, bright lights out there in the wilderness, pushing through the ocean of living and dead minds. They spoke to her like whale song in the depths of the line, telling her their corrupted hopes and dreams.

  It didn't change her mind. Forty years was right, and fair, and necessary.

  But it changed her destination.

  It raised the specter of work left undone, and here was an army of people with no other purpose. If there was work for them to do, then she would take them to do it. It raised a new question, about who was really right, and who was wrong, and couldn't there be something better than this?

  She had to know.

  The convoy straightened up, bound for the Far East. There were already ships in Sacramento, lined up for the day it became their home. From there they could sail beyond the border of the known world, and into the true darkness on the line.

  Into the past, to find a new enemy or new ally in this war for the world, and the line, and meaning.

  Her people came with her. In their hearts, they believed it was the right thing to do. They didn't know why. They followed blindly, just as they'd followed Drake and Witzgenstein before, into death or damnation, because Lara wanted them to. And Lara didn't care.

  She just had to know.

  21. WHY

  The black eye catches nothing.

  I scour the land to the furthest extent I can, but all I find are wispy trails. People came this way, people like me, like the shark-eyed man, like Lucas, but different. Their tracks on the line are unfamiliar, perhaps cleaner somehow, purer, more neatly arranged.

  But they're gone now, far to the East.

  I kneel before James While for hours, a grotesque idol, but I can't turn my gaze away. His echo on the line is still there, a faint buzz of life like the body doesn't quite know it's dead.

  I've never noticed that before.

  The buzz speaks of pain. A lifetime of pain, culminating in a death of extraordinary anguish. They cracked open his ribs while he was alive. Cause of death must have been blood loss. It doesn't smell in here, and part of that's the cold preserving him, but I'm also confident they were only here within the last two or three days.

  I missed James While by two or three days, and that breaks my spirit. If I hadn't spent three days reading his notes, I could have saved him. I might have been here and I could have fought them, whoever they are.

  But even so, I'm starting to get a feeling for them now. The butterfly I felt earlier is right there before me, fluttering in James While's cratered chest. Its wings are dappled red with his blood.

  I remember, this is how he found Olan Harrison.

  I think back to those images in James While's meticulous notes; the old man on his operating bench, ribs cracked open, horror and pain on his face. But was there something else, too? Was there a sense of accomplishment in his eyes? Perhaps if I'd been there, if I could have seen him in the flesh with the line buzzing slightly just like it buzzes around James Wh
ile now, I might have known for sure.

  But that was fourteen years ago, and I was nobody then.

  All I have now are photographs made of digital megabytes, not even real. Still, the butterfly flaps its wings, and somewhere around the world a tornado begins. I picture it growing slowly at first, a zephyr building from local variances in pressure, enough to swirl plastic bags in the air and make the leaves rustle, but steadily getting bigger and stronger until it climbs into visibility.

  Now it's a twister. It scours the land like the raging finger of God, raw nature destroying its own creation, tearing up barns and ripping a path through corn fields, decimating cattle and yanking mosquito blinds off your windows, setting the storm shelter rocking and making the children cry underneath the table, wearing helmets and clutching your hand so tightly, terrified to die.

  I blink, and James While's glistening interior comes back into focus. I can see his spine. His lungs hang slack from their tubes, like cuts of meat in the butcher's window.

  The tornado from a butterfly's wings. I think, from such small things are whole worlds shifted. Probably the tectonic plates begin with a trickle of magma only, a tiny reversal in the Earth's magnetic core, and that makes for earthquakes that can topple cities or knock a species into extinction. Probably the Ice Ages began with only the slightest wobble in the planet's axis, and led to millions of tons of ice raking down from the poles, cutting a swathe through the dinosaurs and the mammoths and our distant human ancestors.

  I see the shape of this world now, in the ribs spread either side of James While's body, like a gory angel watching over me. I see the train of events linking him to me to Olan Harrison and the SEAL, all of us trapped in a confluence of events brought about by one man, by one desire, by one beat of the butterfly's wings.

  And finally, after many hours of communing with this poor dead bastard, I see the things that James While never could see, because I have lived a life he never could. I see why he left me his great work, so that I could reach this moment and know it for what it is.