Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Read online

  "That was a good one," Zane managed between gasps. "Oh, Lord save me, that was a good one, Bobby."

  "A goddamn case full of beer," Green-O bitched as tears welled in his eyes and the welt mark of Bobby's hand rose on his cheek. "Beer and shots and a bandage, you bastard."

  "I'll go get the beer then," Bobby said.

  * * *

  He roused with a head full of methadone fog. Dreams still trailed at the edges of his vision and a phantom Green-O danced round the room.

  "The beer's this way," Green-O sang, and started up a set of silvery stairs.

  Robert rubbed his eyes and took in the dark space. It didn't look like the 7-11.

  "Wait for me," he said in a dry croak.

  Green-O didn't wait and neither did Zane or any of the others, instead they filed up the stairs in a neat, single line, silent but for a raspy, synchronized breathing. There was something odd about the way they moved, an uneven gait like they were halfway drunk, and their eyes seemed to be glowing like flashlights, illuminating the dark basement.

  Reality punctured through, and Robert blinked as the scene before him resolved. Dark bodies lumbered up from their positions on the floor around him and started up the stairs. There were dozens of them lying everywhere, filling his floor from wall to wall, curled around his trophy shelf, lying everywhere like a human carpet.

  Zombies. Zombies in his room.

  Panic hit, but hit softly through the fog. It looked like they were leaving. He tried to pick out his mother's form but couldn't. It was too dark, with only faint light filtering in from above, and they all looked the same; shuffling in the darkness.

  He tried to piece together what must have happened. They'd battered their way in, charged over to him, then laid down on the floor. It didn't make sense.

  Quietly he stretched for the clock on one of his nightstands: 9:42pm. He'd been out for over twelve hours, mercifully short given how much methadone he'd taken. That was twelve hours during which they could have feasted on him, and hadn't.

  Instead they were leaving, and he watched them go wordlessly. Soon the last of them trudged up the stairs and along the hall overhead, leaving a total silence behind: no hum of the air-con running, no low buzz of the computer's fan, no drone of traffic in the street above; just silence.

  It was surreal.

  He let out a shaky breath and pulled the covers back to study his body.

  His guts weren't hanging out in a ropey waterfall. His legs hadn't been bitten off at the knee. There wasn't a spot of blood anywhere; they hadn't even touched him. The demon was gone and the zombies were gone.

  "Mom?" he tried, but she was gone, too.

  He leaned over and looked for his cell phone on the cement floor. It was underneath the bed, skittered out of reach, leaving him one choice.

  Get out of bed.

  He peeled the covers all the way back and surveyed his legs, dressed in their sad little cartoon socks. Seeing them didn't hurt like it did before, but still it hurt. They were thin, pale and weak.

  He guided them nervelessly off the bed, gripped the bed-frame, took a deep breath and slithered off the edge. For a moment his grip faltered and he almost fell, his weak muscles trembling with the weight, but he managed to guide his weight into an untidy slump. Sweat popped up on his forehead. He was on the floor.

  It was cold, that was the main thing. Cold cement, and hard.

  He gathered his phone: the battery was down but the bright screen was a welcome comfort. He clicked through to the last calls on Skype and tried to raise Amo, but it didn't ring. He tried to get the Internet but that was gone too. The only way to reach Amo now would be to actually reach him.

  The wheelchair his mother had brought from the hospital still sat in a dusty corner, tucked behind a row of plastic bags containing shoes. He looked over at the stairs and shuddered. If one descent off the bed had left him short of breath and trembling, how would he manage an ascent like that?

  First the wheelchair. He crawled over to it on his elbows, dragging his legs behind. It was exhausting and hurt his elbows and his shoulders, but at least there was no demon. At the chair he pushed the bags away to study it; a worn gray bucket seat with tarnished silvery poles and gray plastic wheels with old dirt set in the treads.

  He tried to climb into it, but getting his butt up into the seat was much harder than he expected.

  "How do you…," he mumbled, trying to figure it out. He tried one hand on the floor and one elbow in the seat, but that just ended with his head and one shoulder in the seat-bucket. He dropped back then tried turning round and climbing in backwards, but that put too much pressure on his shoulders and he was sweating and shaking in seconds.

  He wasn't strong enough. There wasn't time. He'd deal with it later.

  From his cupboard he pulled down clothes, falling on him in an undignified heap. He pulled on jeans, socks and sneakers, a fresh T-shirt and hoodie, gathered some more clothes and stuffed them in an old gym bag, then crawled over to the stairs pushing the chair in front.

  There was a length of twine sticking off a nail in the wall, and he unraveled, attaching one half to the chair and the other to his belt. He set himself before the stairs, spun so his back was facing them, then put his palms on the bottom step and lifted.

  It wasn't dignified, but he scraped onto the first step. He rubbed sweat off his brow. It was like an arm-stand, sort of, though not nearly as impressive. He did it again, now panting, gaining a better view of the basement. The bed that had been his world for so long looked small and sad. That propelled him on.

  By the top he was gasping, trembling all over and drenched in sweat. He peeled off the hoodie and lay back in the hall, looking out through the front door to the empty street. It was dark out and a light wind blew the trees across the road. A pale figure loped by at a jog, lighting its way with his eyes.

  Robert laughed. It was quite ridiculous.

  The wheelchair came up easily enough, reeled in step by bouncing step, until it sat in the hall beside him. He pushed it into the kitchen, where he used the table to pull himself up onto the chair's gray leather seat.

  It felt a little like the moment when he'd fetch something in the fulfillment center, and the diviner would chime cheerfully.

  Ta-daa!

  He set his feet on the stirrup rests, tried the wheels and they rolled smoothly. It felt amazing to move with such ease. Turning circles in the narrow space, he tried not to look at his mother's seat by the kitchen table.

  He couldn't help her now.

  From the lower cabinets he found a can of frank and beans. The gas oven still worked, so he heated it up and ate. After that he filled two tall Diet Coke bottles with water before the faucet pressure sputtered out. In the kitchen cupboard he found a set of his old football gloves and pulled them on, fished out a flashlight then looked around the kitchen a final time.

  It was strange, but there was no reason to stay.

  He rolled to the doorway and looked out over the street. The first few leaves of fall lay dappled across the asphalt, like splotches of blood on dark waters. The duplexes opposite were still as sentinels, watching over him. He hadn't been above ground for a year.

  He dropped off the step and the slanted path rolled him fast down to the sidewalk, where he raced halfway across the street before he could get the chair under control. That was exhilarating, and he found himself excited despite everything.

  He practiced controlling the chair in the middle of the street, pushing one wheel and pulling the other. It was strange to be able to move so easily, after giving up on his body for so long, and he loved it.

  He started north along Riney Avenue without looking back. Three streets over he pulled onto Frayser Boulevard, where the road shone like a silver river in the moonlight, stopping his breath. Tall sycamore trees lined its banks, swaying in the gentle wind, featureless but for their outlines against the star-studded sky. A warm breeze carried scents of city dust, green tree sap and the comforting hot-tar s
mell of cooling asphalt.

  To the east lay Walgreens, the Hi-Lo, the Second Tennessee Bank and the Minimart Express, looming like the faces of non-player characters in the Yangtze. To the west the road stretched into darkness and the Mississippi River.

  Crickets chirped from the undergrowth. He felt small and big all at once, sitting in his chair.

  "Hello Mississippi!" he called experimentally, for no particular reason. The night swallowed up his voice. "Hello Tennessee!"

  It felt like he'd stumbled out of his basement and into an empty Deepcraft world. He couldn't help but feel happy, despite the loss of his mother. She was dead, but in truth he'd lost her and all the world a long time ago.

  Now he had to find Amo. He pushed the wheels east without looking back, passing cars parked at diagonals across the street, many with their doors hanging open like spread-eagled cicadas gone crusty in the sun. He weaved between, pumping the wheels in spite of the pain in his palms.

  At the Minimart Express he went shopping, picking up candy bars and dried meat sticks, batteries, more flashlights, some sandwiches and bags of chips, several rolls of duct tape, bottles of water, a penknife, a state map and a bag to put them all in, two canisters of gas and two whiffle-ball sets, then left and rolled on.

  Two blocks further he came across a silver automatic BMW resting across the dark asphalt and stopped. The driver's side door was open and the keys were in the ignition. He looked around the street but nobody was there, of course. He felt a pang of guilt but rubbed it away. The rules were different now.

  The keys turned, lighting up the dash for a second before spluttering as the engine died. He rolled to the back, located the gas tank and filled it from the canisters, turned the key again and now the engine purred to life. The front beams winked on and bathed the leaf-strewn street in sterile white light; a bright island in the road's dark river.

  He took firm hold of the handle above the door and hoisted himself off the wheelchair and in. His weak grip failed halfway through, dropping him painfully onto the car's metal doorframe, but he caught himself on the steering wheel and climbed the rest of the way.

  Now he was sitting in the car.

  It was hot and fiddly work attaching the two plastic whiffle ball bats to the gas and brake pedals with duct-tape, but he got it done. He tested them and they worked, revving the engine sweetly as he pushed down. A quick study of the steering wheel showed it had cruise control, which would help. Cool air blew on his face from the air con vents and he turned it up, basking for a moment.

  He got the wheelchair in with difficulty. He closed the door and looked in the rear view mirror, but could only see a few yards of road illuminated by his red brake lights. That was all that remained of Frayser, now, perhaps all that anyone would ever know. But he didn't feel sad, instead he was growing more excited. He was a grown man finally leaving his mother's basement behind, and Amo was waiting.

  He pushed the gearstick to drive, pressed down on the whiffle for gas and the BMW pulled away.

  9. NEW YORK

  It took him two days solid driving to reach New York.

  For six hours that first night he drove in silence, with all the windows rolled down and the high beams on, plunging alone into the dark. There wasn't a single electric light on anywhere, not in any of the tenement buildings in the little towns he rolled through, not on the I-40 toll booths or in roadside burger shacks, motels or bars.

  All he saw was the tiny slice of the world his headlights illuminated: shuttered shop fronts and the washed-out entrances to malls; dark alleys passing by like dry veins; parking lots that stretched away as endless silver-tinged deserts, their contours just discernible by the light of the moon; and between each town the long dark walls of forest, marking the outer edge of a darkness that went on forever into the night.

  The road was full of motionless cars, dropped like heavy metal hailstones from heaven. In places they had crashed into each other, forcing him to weave between them, telling a story of sudden, hard infection. Cubes of shattered glass lay sprayed like diamonds across the road. Some cars had flipped onto their roofs after head-on collisions, the trajectories of which Robert would work through backwards as he passed by.

  CRASH

  BANG

  BURN

  Some were smoking still, reduced to skeletons of corroded black bones full of white and black char. He breathed in the smell of ash and the chemical stink of burnt plastic seats.

  He drove on.

  There were zombies everywhere, wan pale figures emerging from the darkness and quickly receding behind. Most ignored him, rolling by as impersonal as a weather front, though some turned to follow, running in his wake like glowing white meteors. On clear sections he sped away, and their pale figures soon faded in the rear-view mirror.

  He drove down pitch-black roads until he hit the edge of Nashville around 5am. He didn't feel hungry, though he was tired; a deep, bone-weary kind of exhaustion. For a year he'd barely moved, and now this.

  The odometer said he'd covered 212 miles. He rolled into a Big Eastern motel and switched the BMW off, dropping him into near complete darkness but for a few tiny lights on the dash. The engine ticked steadily as it began to cool.

  He tilted the seat and crawled over it to the back, where he laid down with a water bottle for a pillow. He chewed on a single sandwich before giving it up as a lost cause; he wasn't even hungry. He drank a few gulps of water and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  When he woke it was steamy and hot in the car, and pale zombie faces pressed against the glass like Halloween wallpaper. The white glow from their eyes lit the interior, and their synchronized breathing rocked the vehicle from left to right, like a lullaby.

  He rubbed his face, damp with sweat. His shoulders ached deeply, his whole body throbbed and he barely felt rested at all, but Amo was waiting.

  He crawled back into the driver's seat and the zombies' eyes tracked him, like paintings in a haunted house. They were all races, genders and ages, bleached back to the color of pale milk. This was what the end of the world looked like.

  He had to pee.

  He put the car in reverse and backed up slowly. The bodies in back shuffled awkwardly but gradually split to the sides, so he flipped to drive and steered the car through the bumping bodies by memory, dipping down a verge, bobbing back up, bound for the highway. In a few minutes the bodies thinned and bright midday sun slashed in.

  Ahead lay a largely clear highway, stretching through a meager services stop penned on all sides by thick bristlecone pine forest.

  Beautiful. He looked behind him and saw a zombie horde sprawling across the parking lot and four-lane highway, probably thousands strong, running at him like a surging wave. He pushed the gas and drove away at sixty miles an hour, rolling the window down and sucked in deep lungfuls of hot, pollen-scented air, clearing out the fog of the night before.

  The world was strange now.

  To either side the dark, wild expanses of the night were replaced by the suburbs of Nashville; malls, parking lots, gas stations and off-ramps. Soon he was rolling through downtown flanked by upmarket skyscrapers, genteel old law offices and saloon-like designer cafes, edging carefully through herds of milling zombies. At times he wound down the window and called out, "Hello!", but no responses came. Zombies running at him out of dark buildings and side-alleys became commonplace.

  He passed out of Nashville twenty minutes later, catching a glimpse of the Cumberland River off to the left. On a barren stretch of I-40 overlooking the long empty runway of Nashville airport, he stopped at a Barky's gas station and refilled the tank direct from the pump.

  A plane wreck south of Lebanon slowed him briefly, spread across I-40 like a vast swatted fly, and he pushed through charred rows of seats and odd bits of twisted metal like a snow plow. In Buffalo Valley he stopped for a Fat Boy donut, then drove on, pushing the BMW and himself hard until he was almost asleep at the wheel, lulled by the silence and drowsy warm monotony.
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br />   When it was past midnight he stopped in the middle of the road and slept in the driver's seat, waking chilly and confused sometime in the early morning, with more zombies around him, like ghosts in the ruins of a world.

  He made good time that second day, reaching Knoxsville by mid-afternoon and crossing over into Virginia by nightfall. Once his BMW burst a tire on shattered glass and he climbed out and swapped to a nearby Audi. The ache in his shoulders began to fade a and he was feeling stronger already.

  The air was hot and humid in the run toward Roanoke. He reached Maryland by lunchtime. The zombies seemed more numerous now, and he imagined all the East Coast cities emptying out and wandering the countryside. He finished the last stretch to New York in a kind of fugue, half-asleep at the wheel as dusk set in. He came in on I-78 through a warren of neighborhoods and tiny little towns, following signs for Manhattan.

  A bridge carried him over Newark Bay to Jersey City, where he zagged north and pulled over to the waterfront before the last vestige of light faded from the sky. There he sat staring out at the towering skyline of New York, all dark silhouettes against pink clouds.

  It was on fire.

  A thick plume of greasy smoke rose up from somewhere behind the Empire State Building, illuminated by a swathe of orange flames in the streets below. It set a deep cold fear burning in his belly, reminding him of 9/11, when he'd been only 5 years old and barely understood what had happened.

  He understood this. New York was burning, and somehow Amo was in the thick of it.

  * * *

  Holland Tunnel was blocked a few hundred feet in and he couldn't get through. His headlights illuminated a butter-churn of vehicles all cramped and pressed together.

  "Shit," he cursed.

  If he'd had his legs he could climb through easily. Perhaps even now he could try, but it would be madness to crawl over so much jagged metal and glass in the pitch black. He'd cut his unfeeling legs to ribbons and bleed out without even knowing it.

  He reversed back out, halting at the water's edge. The Hudson flowed by uncaring, dark and fast. Already the pink was fading from the sky, though the flames still burned high on Manhattan Island, their light reflecting off the plumes of smoke and ash.