Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Read online

  THE LAWS – Zombie Ocean 6

  7 billion zombies. 1 law.

  Twelve years after the zombie apocalypse, New LA is finally at peace. 3 bunkers have signed the treaty, the demons are gone, and Amo's people think they're finally safe.

  They're wrong.

  Lara falls sick, hit by destructive hallucinations that threaten her life, just as The Laws arrive in New LA, fellow survivors with a very different idea of what survival is, and nothing will be the same again.

  Who will survive?

  'House of Cards' crashes full-throttle into the zombie apocalypse, crammed with gore, twists and political carnage.

  ZOMBIE OCEAN SERIES

  The Last (Book 1)

  The Lost (Book 2)

  The Least (Book 3)

  Box Set (Books 1-3)

  The Loss (Book 4)

  The List (Book 5)

  The Laws (Book 6)

  Buy Michael John Grist's books via links here.

  Join the newsletter and get the free Starter Library of 2 post-apocalypse thriller books here.

  For David Gemmell and John Christopher, both heroes in their own way.

  CONTENTS

  PRESENT

  AMO 1

  1. OCEAN

  2. HELP

  3. LEMONGRASS

  4. HARVEST

  AMO 2

  PAST

  INTERLUDE 1

  5. COMA

  INTERLUDE 2

  6. COMMAND

  INTERLUDE 3

  7. LIMBO

  INTERLUDE 4

  FUTURE

  AMO 3

  AMO 4

  AMO 5

  INFLUX

  ANNA 1

  INTERLUDE 5

  ANNA 2

  8 DEMONS

  ANNA 3

  9. THE FIRST LAW

  10. NOT THE MEEK

  11. SACRAMENTO

  12. ROBERT

  13. WITZGENSTEIN

  ANNA 4

  14. EXECUTION

  EAST

  ANNA 5

  AMO 6

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Mr. Ruins (excerpt)

  PRESENT

  AMO 1

  It's time to say goodbye to New LA.

  I stand beside the HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill, looking through the one 'O' still upright. Most of the other letters are long gone, toppled in the 2025 quake then covered over with rough brown gorse after one good summer's growth. Y O D it says now, with large, gap-toothed spaces in between, like some primal, meaningless cry yelped out by the hill itself. Swap the Y for a G and it'll say GOD. Would that be funny?

  Hmm.

  The walkie burbles at my hip and I tap it silent gently, like I might a baby's head. Someone's calling me, but that's more a protocol on this day than a sincere appeal for directions. They know I'm out here saying my farewells, gazing out to sea and chewing on weighty issues, and they'll go on down the hierarchy line to Lara soon enough.

  I turn away from the YOD and walk on. This trail along the back hills is one of my favorites, where I do some of my deepest thinking. I used to get like this as a kid sometimes; I can remember way back to the days on the old Iowa farm, when my brother was off playing high school football and I was still too young even for JV. This was before he died, before I started stealing, before I got into drawing zombies in comics.

  In those strange, in-between times it would just be me and the endless fields of corn, with perhaps Mom in the kitchen making up a batch of butterscotch for dessert pancakes, and Dad in the garage working on whittling a bookend. Out in the yard there was a magical stillness to the air, with the corn silent all around, not a breath of wind, like an intangible weight was holding everything in position.

  I marked it then, that sense of nothing. My brother's shape in the air was a thing I could feel, like part of me had been snipped off, leaving only this emptiness behind. I'd walk out into the corn and wander while looking up at the blue sky, trying to navigate my way to the opposite side of the field then back again by the clouds alone. Hours could go by and nobody would know where I'd been.

  Through my twenties, as I got started on my career in comics and moved to New York for a life of parties and girlfriends and low art, I would sometimes think about that odd, empty feeling, and very occasionally I would feel it again, like an old friend with a cold, clammy touch. Those moments felt like temporarily glimpsing through the veil into a kind of madness, and I'd pull away quickly, like a car glancing off the highway guardrails, diving into something else just to get away.

  I stop at the edge of a steep curve in the hill and look out over the empty land to the north. More hills, and beyond them, receding through the sweet gin-smelling haze rising off wild juniper bushes, more towns. Empty buildings moldering in the sun-rain cycle. Empty lives. A world of ambition brought crumbling down beneath a brilliant blue sky; all of it hollowed out by twelve years of New LA survivors raiding for canned food, water, gas and so forth. We are parasites, really, dug in to the flank of old LA, living off its rotten old meat, though soon that is going to change.

  I walk on.

  I used to think this feeling was about loneliness. In my twenties I worked to keep my life full of people. There was always somewhere I was supposed to be and some person I was meant to meet. But when the apocalypse hit, it wasn't loneliness that brought me down. It did hurt, of course, and at times I went a little crazy, talking to zombies when I wasn't massacring them, but it wasn't the same as that solitary cornfield feeling, of slipping through the cracks while the world spun on around me.

  In the last few years, ever since Maine, I've been feeling that way again. Some days it's there with me from the moment I wake to the moment I lay my head to sleep. I pull away from it most of the time, as I play with my children and spend time with my wife, as I read Council meeting notes and attend to the enormous logistics required for the upcoming move, but I never get that far. When it's on me in full it feels like the world's become a ghostly fog; a place where other people bustle around importantly, working on important things, making a difference.

  Now I understand what that feeling's really about, and it's not loneliness. It's a lack of purpose.

  I kick a stone and it skitters over the dry red loam and off the edge of the trail, lost in the undergrowth. The sea to the left would be pretty if there wasn't such a haze of humidity in the air. Instead it looks murky, like I'm gazing through old glass gritted with a decade of dust. Twelve years is a long time, there's no denying it.

  For most of those twelve years I've had purpose. Every day since the apocalypse hit I was neck deep in the water and swimming like crazy just to keep my head above the waves. At first I was just surviving, then there was Lara and then the others, and after that I barely had a chance to think for all the balls I had to keep juggling in the air.

  Then one day it stopped.

  I killed three thousand people in Maine, and things changed. Lara almost died. Witzgenstein tried me in court for crimes I didn't commit, and for some reason I couldn't muster the energy to fight. After that people didn't look at me in the same way. I think back over that time now with a kind of hazy uncertainty. Was it really me, sitting there in the court dock and bowing my head while she poured on the accusations? Was that Amo, the same man who started New LA with Lara by his side?

  Perhaps I thought I was doing the right thing for the community, taking the blow to allow the healing to begin, but now I don't know. I think rather that I was glad of the censure. It wasn't about the attention, as Witzgenstein charged. I'm not a narcissist. I just wanted to atone in whatever way I could, for all the deaths I had caused. But Anna put a stop to it, and Witzgenstein wa
s banished.

  It left me feeling lost. I was still mayor, but for what? Perhaps my job was just to keep the lights on in New LA until the next person came along to take the reins.

  I floated along like that for months, untouched by reality, spending all my days reading Salle Coram's files and visiting the homes of the dead MARS3000. I was hardly even in the water anymore, no longer struggling for anything. I was up on the surface on a little raft with nothing to do, occasionally dipping my hand into the water and halfheartedly paddling a few strokes. I was like a toy train running round an old, old track, getting ready to skid off the too-smooth rails and lie on my side, wheels still spinning, no more aware that I was going nowhere than the big white ball of the sun knows which way is down.

  Then there was Lucas.

  I start back through the hills, kicking up little puffs of baked red dust underfoot. The grass here is spiky and stern, all yellows and scrunched-up browns. I'll miss this place when I'm gone. I set my sights back on the stretching grid of West Hollywood to the south, bobbing up and down amongst the hills. To the right there's Universal Studios and the Hollywood Reservoir. All these places are full of memories.

  Now Lucas is out there doing vital work on the cure. Anna is out there offering the treaty to more bunkers, bringing them over one by one to our side. It spells hope, and I do what I can to fan that flickering flame. Still a few people trickle in every now and then from the cairn trail, but it's clear now that the cairns will not be our salvation.

  There just aren't enough people left alive. Lucas diagnosed it correctly; with any less than a hundred genetically viable humans, there isn't the variance for sustained population growth. Asia was wiped clean twelve years ago by the vast flow of demons. Much of Europe was erased in the three months after Maine, when the demons from eleven other bunkers roamed free, before Anna and the ocean arrived to take them out. We can't expect fifty more people to come now, not after so long.

  But I accept that hard truth gladly. The cairns will no longer be the only hope for humanity. My histories and my comics may too have had their day, because what person of the thirty-odd thousand out there in bunkers would find much meaning in my story? Not even Witzgenstein did, who lived through it.

  But that's OK. I smile as I walk, because the world is changing for the better, and I can change with it. If they don't want my comics or my Ragnarok film or even my new, united world flag, it's all right. I'm not too old to adapt, and the big adaptation is on us now.

  Because LA can no longer meet our needs. Water. Food. Power. A place of our own. It means leaving this desert of empty white concrete behind, and for the first time truly setting out on our own. Farewell to the old world, twelve years gone, and perhaps the first real time I'll say goodbye since the apocalypse. I've clung to my movies and my cairn trail for so long, but the maps are different now, the past is gone and reality has shifted under me.

  Now I'm getting excited for the future, and what it holds for my children. There are so many possibilities ahead, and the hole in my heart from Maine is no longer so empty. Time heals, and we will be on our own again soon, following in the footsteps of our distant forbears to settle in a new land. I'm ready.

  So farewell, Los Angeles. Farewell my friends Cerulean, Indira, Abigail, Ollie, Chantelle, Dr. Ozark, Sophie, and all the other souls lost here and along the way. It's time to move forward. Looking up to the blue sky, I feel as though I am finally finding my way out of the endless fields of corn, and my brother is coming home.

  I take the left turn that'll steer me back toward the Chinese Theater, and pick up the pace over the broken-backed hills as my mind races ahead to the days and weeks to come.

  * * *

  Lara's in her coffee shop on Montlake, the 'John Harrison'. She's got specials up in the windows on chalkboards, reminiscent of how they used to do it at Sir Clowdesley all those years ago. There's a wide variety in the special blends she stocks now, since she moved off the pre-packaged pods I've been filling cairns with for over a decade.

  She is, after all, a trained barista, the Last Barista of America (LBA), and she's sourced hundreds of beans over the years; from other shops, from warehouses, from wholesalers, and now she even mixes and matches her own combinations.

  We're running out of lots of things now, like usable gasoline and canned food, but foil-packed coffee beans will probably never run dry.

  Vivada

  -reads the board on the left, marked up in her elegant scrolling hand. In purple and green chalk she's taken the time to draw blooms of lavender and ivy wreathing the board.

  A delicate, soothing blend of smooth vanilla beans from Paraguay, with a hint of English cottage garden lavender.

  Her description sets my mouth watering. These specials may seem a frivolous thing to do, but most people in New LA drop through her shop at least once a week, with the coffee either as the main reason or an excuse to get a word in with Lara herself, the Council head.

  Pellegrino

  -reads the board on the right, and this one is festooned with red chilis, flames and a rambling zombie.

  Wash your mouth out with espresso heat from darkest Gambia, only for the hardest core survivor.

  She's got artistic skills, and I'm pleased by that. Her coffee shop is really the hub of New LA now, more than the Chinese Theatre. If there's to be a community-wide meeting we gather in the function room upstairs.

  The Council meet here three times a week. There's a knitting club with four members, one of them a man; Keeshom. A cycle group uses her shop as their start and end point, and after Cynthia left with Witzgenstein the crèche was moved here too.

  I stand outside and watch a few people amble along the sunbaked road. I wave and they wave back. It's a new center now, away from the false, multiscreen cinema I chose for New LA's heart. That place served its purpose, but now there's this, and soon this too will move, and I'm glad. We are a village, and this feels better. We don't get overawed by the sheer scale of a building we could never in our lifetimes replicate or even hope to maintain. We forsake that temple of the past for this small, cozy community center.

  I push through the wooden door and a bell in the frame rings. Lara looks up from behind the counter; still gorgeous after all these years, with her big frizzy hair and lips. She's framed by the bar's dark teak boards in front and two large chalkboards in back, touting the full range of coffee and cake offerings. The walls are painted with solid blocks of deep red and yellow that could easily overwhelm, though in the muted lighting they seem rich and comforting.

  Will this be my last time, I wonder, emerging into the fragrant air of rich coffee and steamed milk in this place? Everything now is a last.

  Lara's face lights up when she sees me. This I can rely on, and it makes my heart beat harder.

  "Honey," she says happily. "How were the hills?"

  I smile and pull up to the bar. Here we are husband and wife, but also mayor and lead Councilwoman, and I enjoy the hint back to the moment we first met, just two people crossing paths at a coffee shop.

  "The 'Y' looks like it's going to fall next," I say.

  "So it'll be O D," she muses. "I expect they'll all be down the next time we pass through here. What can I get you?"

  "Pellegrino," I say. "I'm hardcore."

  She laughs. "You are soft through and through."

  I smile back, and she busies herself with the paraphernalia of coffee. She talks about the kids and her day while I grunt short answers and watch, enjoying the fluid rhythms of her movement. Her curly hair springs as she works the milk frother. I admire the curve of her back as it tightens against her white shirt. I look at her warm face, and I listen to her talk about Vie and Talia, and my eyes prickle with the threat of tears. It's so much to lose, but so much to reclaim.

  She sets the coffee down in front of me gently, looks into my eyes, and takes my hand in hers.

  "Hey," she says. "Come on. It's going to be fine."

  I smile back, but I barely trust myself t
o speak. There's a weight of emotion there; so many pent-up feelings clamoring to let go. I come round the open bar instead, brush past the fridge without looking, and wrap my arms around her. She is soft and warm and folds me in.

  "We're going to be fine," she says in my ear, though I can hear the telltale fizz of tears in the back of her throat too. None of us have escaped the last two years without pain and suffering of our own. Too many times we've been cold, and only now do I feel the thaw, as we're getting ready to start again.

  "I know," I say back. "I'm sorry. I haven't been there."

  Maybe she chokes up at that. Maybe I do. Warmth swells up from where our bodies touch, and I feel the tingle of it hot in my belly, like I'm back on that first date again, in the restaurant in New York with this beautiful woman and so many possibilities ahead.

  I kiss her neck and she lets out a heavy breath. It's been so long. She guides my face round, her hand on my cheek, and we kiss in silent, hungry heat for a moment, tasting the salty tears as they trickle down to our lips.

  Then she pulls back, and we're both breathing heavily, and it's as if the world has transformed. We haven't kissed like that in years, and suddenly I want more, and I can see the same thing in her eyes; like there's nothing more to feel guilty about, no more reasons to hold back. There's just us.

  We look at each other.

  "We've got to pick the kids up in half an hour," she says in a husky voice, then laughs, because it is ridiculous. She starts to say more, but I silence her with another greedy kiss. I run my hands down her back and her hip moves against my thigh. It gets hot until she pushes away again, slightly breathless, slightly flustered. She's still holding the coffee scoop in her right hand.

  "They're having a-" she takes a breath, "knitting circular upstairs. Let me just kick them out."

  I laugh low. It feels like the world has closed around us so that we're all that matters, and I've missed that feeling. For the longest time I thought I'd never feel it again. "Kick out those damn knitters," I say, my voice tight.