Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 11

  His crushed chest refilled. It felt like half his ribs were broken, but it was alright.

  He lay back on the dead and waited.

  * * *

  All night he lay there, drifting in and out of a chilly sleep, shivering atop the dead. He had hardly any fat or clothes left on him now, and up on the mountain's slope the air was far colder than in the forests below.

  But he couldn't leave. There were people here, he knew it. They'd seen him and they were coming.

  He burrowed down amongst the zombies' cold bodies for insulation. The coating of blood and gore felt like a second skin now. In time a pale sun rose and he dreamed fitfully of warm sheets and a hot shower, of smiling faces asking how he'd managed to survive for so long, of hot soup, welcoming eyes and comfort.

  "They're not coming," Amo said flatly.

  He looked and saw Amo and Zane standing there over him. Green-O was with them too, so fat he eclipsed the sun.

  "Face it," Amo went on, "they don't want you. I didn't want you. Zane and Green-O didn't."

  The other two stood silently, condemning with their gaze. Robert turned away but Amo's voice followed him.

  "You think I'm the weak one for what I did, but do you see yourself now? This is pathetic. This is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen, you lying in your zombie bed with zombies for covers, waiting to be saved."

  It was true. Robert sobbed into his hand, but even his hand was freezing, like touching the wheelchair rims after a frozen night's sleep in the car. His body was turning to stone. Each sob hurt worse than the last, tearing at his broken ribs, but he couldn't stop them. The hope was too much.

  "At least I had the balls to do something," Amo said. "I was on top of Times Square while you were rummaging in the guts. What does that say about us, Cerulean? What does that say about you?"

  "I didn't," he tried to answer, "I wasn't-"

  "You were weak and you quit. Why not quit all the way now? Have the balls to finish what you started a year ago in your hospital bed. It's never going to get any better than this. Don't you think I would know?"

  "He's right," Green-O said. "Zane?"

  Zane just looked down at him with hard eyes. That was perhaps the worst of it, and he sobbed so hard it hurt his head and he lost his breath, bringing on a panic like the demon descending.

  The sun rose higher.

  The air grew a little warmer and the chill faded. A dewy vapor rose up off the fields and all the dead bodies. It looked like their spirits departing.

  More gray bodies came. They went past him in his pile, over the dead to the concrete block, where they started hammering again like nothing had happened.

  Robert laughed. Maybe Amo was right: what he needed was to finish the job.

  By midday he had crawled to the outer ring of dead bodies, through damp grass that chilled and cleaned him. He might die but it wouldn't be by being crushed alive. Already there were several hundred zombies circled round the box, hammering.

  Then he heard it. At first he wasn't sure if it was imagination or not, a droning sound attributable perhaps to a big bee or an avalanche or some hidden workings in the earth, but then he saw it too.

  A van. It was a bright yellow van coming along the winding dirt track out of the woods, its engine rumbling, heading his way.

  They were coming. After all, they were coming.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks. He pushed himself as high up on his elbows as he could and waved.

  "I'm here!" he croaked. "I'm over here, I'm alive!"

  The van slowed then stopped at the edge of the field, and a young man burst out of the front. He looked like a football player, tall with short sandy hair, wearing jeans and a letter jacket. He stared across the gulf of a football field's distance toward Robert, and Robert stared back.

  "Did you say hey?" the guy shouted hesitantly. "I mean, are you alive?"

  Robert nodded frantically. "I'm here. I'm alive."

  The guy grinned and spread his arms. "I'm alive too! Hell yes, I knew the zombies were leading me somewhere!" he started over the grass at a run. "I'm Matthew. Damn am I glad to see-"

  Then his throat exploded. A resounding single AT rang out over the still landscape, and the hope in Robert's heart turned to ice, cracked, and shattered.

  The guy was blown backward, irretrievably dead, spurting a brief geyser of blood.

  ATATATATATATAT

  The guns kicked in again. Robert spun to see them hanging overhead and dealing out death to the zombies at the base. They must have periscoped up in silence behind him.

  ATATATATATATAT

  He looked back at the fallen figure by the yellow van, unable to believe what he was seeing. His jaw dropped wide and the cannons droned on, blasting bodies behind and around him to shreds, turning the field into a war zone and spitting up gouts of meat and grass. Wildflowers rained in the air.

  ATATATATATATAT

  It was hard to think in that noise. Nothing was real, anyway. Matthew, he'd said. There was his yellow van just ahead, like an oblong rising sun. He was real, wasn't he?

  Frantically Robert crawled. Now the most important thing in the world was to reach Matthew and see if he had ever really been alive. His elbows thumped the ground and his waist dragged in the dirt and the guns fired overhead and then he was there.

  Matthew. Apart from the great oval hole torn through his neck from front to back, still spitting up dark venal blood, he looked peaceful. Unthinking, numb and dizzy, Robert took Matthew's hand and squeezed it. Tears poured from his eyes.

  "Wake up," he urged. He squeezed the young man's fingers so hard one of them cracked. "Wake up please!"

  ATATATATATATAT

  Matthew had blue eyes and freckly skin. He was thick in the shoulder; he could be a butterfly swimmer, probably. Maybe Robert could have taught him to dive, like Coach Willings, they might have gone to the Olympics together and now he was dead. Robert reached out with trembling hands to touch his face. It was warm.

  Something broke inside him, and tears bubbled up like a geyser. The waste was too much, like his dive all over again, spiraling down to the concrete and into the smothering arms of the red beast. It was Zane with the knife in his throat and the surprised look on his face that said it all: I'm not going to see my friends anymore, I'm not going to run plays or get drunk or lay girls anymore, I'm not going to get married or have kids or any of that.

  It was a whole life snuffed out for a mistake, like seven billion people lost for nothing at all, and now with Amo gone and Matthew gone he couldn't bear it anymore.

  He screamed so hard it hurt, but he couldn't stop now if he tried. The guns screamed back, implacable and unstoppable, spitting out bullet after bullet that tore gray flesh to shreds.

  ATATATATATATAT

  He bared his chest to it, held up on his arms, wrenched control of the scream and hurled words into the barrage.

  "Kill me too! Kill me, you bastards!"

  ATATATATATATAT

  12. RV

  But he didn't die.

  In time the cannons retracted, leaving behind an empty Deepcraft world. Even the guns hadn't wanted him. He wasn't worth a bullet. He wasn't anything, not even real at all.

  Amo was right. He should have killed himself already. He should have died on the first night, going out as a hero instead of becoming a ghost.

  He closed Matthew's eyes. He looked around the field. More zombies were coming already. The bag of milk in his middle was gone and he felt utterly hollow inside, like a non-player character in the Yangtze with the Internet gone.

  He had nothing to say and nothing to do, and no hope left.

  He climbed into Matthews' van and drove away. The gun tower let him go. He drove and drove then parked by the coast and sat in the driving seat overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, near some town on some road.

  Gray waves lapped at a pebbly beach, and he thought about crawling down into the water. It wouldn't be hard to drown. He was weak and wouldn't be able to keep himself afloat. He'd b
e with the red demon again, with Zane and all the others.

  But he was a ghost now, and ghosts couldn't die.

  He woke in the back of the van, lying on a mattress Matthew must have put there. There were beautifully bound books in neat little wooden shelving units. Robert ran his fingers over the titles.

  Robinson Crusoe

  Walden

  Crime and Punishment

  Classics of isolation, survival and guilt. He considered tipping them all out and burning them. He thought about it until he actually crawled out and did it, like willing the thing into being.

  It was a weak bonfire that didn't take well, burning in a yellow metal can beside a rocky beach on a wintry day, spitting up dark gray smoke.

  Also in the back of the van there were cans of Coke and hot dogs, and Robert ate them while watching the books burn.

  He ate and drove and slept. For days he looked out to sea, driving north up the coast a few hours at a time, until the van's fuel gauge ran dry in a tiny New England town. The hospital there was an historic building, and inside he had his pick of wheelchair. He picked the oldest, heaviest, slowest as a weak penance.

  He refueled and drove silently for days, looking out of the window and watching the empty world pass by. That was the role of a ghost, to wander the ruins. Nothing he saw filled the cold emptiness inside. Near the Canada border he watched Niagara Falls for a few hours, unmoved, then turned back south.

  He drove down through Vermont and Massachusetts in silence, through Connecticut back to New York, circling in like a fly round a flame, bound for the place it all went wrong.

  Amo.

  * * *

  New York was there.

  He rolled south to Times Square with no plan in his mind.

  On 43rd the worst of the mess was gone. Sun, rain and the swarms of flies had melted the dead down to bones already. The stink had faded and the streets were dry and clear where bodies had shriveled and receded like melting snow in the spring.

  He parked Matthew's yellow van at the intersection of 43rd and 7th Street, then rolled out in the wheelchair. It was a sunny and warm day, with the wind blowing little zephyrs of dust along the curbs, fluttering against chip packets trapped in fleshless ribcages.

  He sat before Amo's RV and looked at the dark matter streaking sides, all dry now, like the scar over an old wound. All of Times Square felt that way.

  "I'm back," Robert said. His voice was clearer now; weeks of rolling in his chair, of eating and drinking, had brought his strength back.

  "I guess you didn't expect me again. Though you never even knew I was here."

  Amo atop the RV said nothing, surrounded by his tall ammo crates. He'd be a skeleton now too, a scar instead of an open wound.

  "That hurt," Robert said. The catch in his voice surprised him. He thought he'd been through all the emotion he could take. "I wish you'd seen me. I wish you'd just looked."

  Amo said nothing.

  "You were my only friend, you know. I wish you'd waited."

  He didn't have any more to say after that, so he rolled up to the ladder at the back. On the lower rungs there were dark clots of bloody matter from when he'd tried to climb it before. Now he pulled himself up the rungs with ease, rising hand over hand, until he looked down on the RV roof.

  Amo wasn't there.

  * * *

  He sat on the RV's roof and watched the sun scroll by overhead, trying to decide if Amo being alive was worse or better than Amo being dead. It was good, and he was glad, but either way it didn't make him feel any hope.

  It just made him feel tired.

  He peered over the ammo crate edge, considering a dive. It seemed poetic justice, but from this height he'd almost certainly fail again. Fall, crunch, perhaps he'd lose the use of his left arm, his right, or better yet he'd be blinded.

  No. He could do better than that.

  * * *

  The Empire State Building was only a few blocks away, according to a map he smashed out of a dispenser box, so he rolled toward it down streets lines with broken vehicles. Thoughts of the dive to come inflamed him; the most amazing arm-stand the world had ever seen, 60-odd stories of flight all the way to the street. He'd punch right through the asphalt, all the judges in the world would flash up 10s, and the burning emptiness inside would finally be wiped away.

  He turned on 34th Street, weaving through traffic and starting to feel excited. The entrance was just ahead, and he entered through the tall narrow doors.

  The lobby was stunning even in the half-light cast from the street, with rich marble floors and gilt golden walls in a vaulted hallway. At the end a glinting image of the Empire State Building hung in gold relief, though atop it somebody had strung up a chalkboard there, with gridlines and two entries at the top.

  Amo – Last Mayor of America 06/08/2018

  Lara – Last Barista in America 06/30/2018

  Robert laughed and laughed so much he cried.

  Amo and Lara, Lara and Amo. There was a map painted onto the floor, outlining a path to the West Coast and Los Angeles, and he imagined Amo and Lara chasing each other along it like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Their paths had crossed at the Empire State and now they were forever linked.

  It was beautiful, in a way. It made him happy for them, that they could survive and go on to thrive. He wished them all the best wishes in the world.

  But it wasn't for him. He needed to dive.

  That was the only way to forget Matthew and make himself clean again. He'd crawled through too much blood to go back now, and the emptiness inside had cut too deep. The thought of diving shone like a star before him, offering the chance to return to the Robert he'd once been, so full of potential and hope, before it all went so wrong. He dreamed of flight all the way to the ground, where having no legs wouldn't matter at all.

  He rolled forward.

  At the head of the lobby Amo had set out several desks beneath the chalkboard, laden with an interesting array of bits: laptop computers and bowls of USB sticks, a bowl of car keys and maps, wires and generators and red gas canisters stacked neatly like the entrance to a prepper Wal-Mart, even ten chrome Nespresso machines, each with a neat stack of shiny, multicolored coffee pods beside it, like zombies in a heap.

  He smiled. Amo was funny, even after what he'd done. He'd survived, the bastard, and this was his world now. Good for him.

  Robert wheeled into the darkness down a side corridor, looking for the stairs. It would be a long crawl up, but that was part of the excitement. He found them in a broad vertical chamber lit with faint light from far above, stretching up and up in a square spiral, and completely thronged with zombies.

  He hadn't expected that.

  "Jesus Christ," he whispered.

  A heavy barred security gate had been latched across the bottom of the wide stairwell, behind which squirmed and breathed a mass of zombies with skin like pale and moldy milk. He stared at them, stretching up the spiraling stairs as far as he could see, bulging over the edges and breathing as one, filling the column of open space down the spiral with a wheezy, sucking wind.

  In the middle of the stairwell floor there were dozens of blue and white paint cans lying dented atop a white tarpaulin, itself spattered with blue and white paint, along with a heap of used paint-brushes and rollers, a tangle of rope and harnesses, two large metal gas drums and two square generators. Boot marks in blue and white spread all round the square space.

  "What the hell were you doing in here, Amo?" he whispered.

  Some crazy plans. Some crazy art?

  First things first. To dive he had to use the stairs, and for that he had to clear the zombies.

  They were pressed against the security gate so tightly that the bars had eaten into their skin in places, embedding through gray cordy muscle the same way trees grow around railings. Robert rolled over and studied the padlock barring the gate. The key was right there.

  He laughed, and turned the key. It clicked, the gate opened and
Robert rolled back while the zombies poured out. They flooded back down the dark hallway toward the lobby, ignoring him, and he grinned as he imagined the dive to come. Soon he would be free.

  Then came the scream.

  13. MASAKO

  It was a woman, high-pitched and terrified, her cry barely carrying over the heavy wheeze of the zombies' breath and the trudging of their many feet, but he heard it and it woke him up.

  BANG

  A gunshot followed, then another and the mood of the zombies shifted. The random pattering of their footfalls became a purposeful, unified drumbeat, their breathing sharpened, and they moved toward the sound.

  Robert didn't like the shift; it felt primal and violent, and he flashed back to the news anchor during the initial infection, when she paced off to tear some living thing apart.

  "Stop shooting!" he shouted. He tried to drive his wheelchair forward but the gray bodies were too tightly packed already, with more forcing their way down the stairs every second.

  BANG came another shot, then another.

  He took a deep breath then shoved off the wheelchair's armrests in a kind of arm-stand, climbing high enough to lift his legs off the stirrups and hit the wall of zombie shoulders on his chest. He grabbed for something to hold onto, latching onto a toothy open jaw with one hand and a dry and withered neck with the other, then pulled himself onto the top of the zombie flood.

  More rushed in to fill the gap he'd left behind, pressing in beneath him and buoying him so there wasn't a single crack he could fall down. A knobbly ocean of gray heads, faces and shoulders stretched out before him, pressed tight to the walls and flowing through the doorway toward the lobby like a Yangtze conveyor belt.

  He laughed, then started crawling along the top. He was swimming on the ocean!

  BANG the gun shouted again. She was going to get herself killed, and Robert swam urgently, each stroke grappling with somebody's nose or chin or hair, pulling himself over the hard waters of collarbones and skulls. He tensed his stomach against their various bony bits, and gave silent thanks that everything from the waist was not feeling the pain of the pummeling it was taking.