The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (18 page)

I almost burst out in tears at that. It's this kind of thing, the sympathy that I don't deserve, that will break me. There can be no forgiveness for the mistakes I've made, only atonement. I know I should tell her it all, but if just coming this close does this to me, how can I go any further?

"I know," I manage. Of all the charges against me, being too soft is by far the greatest. "Keep checking in. We'll talk soon."

"Sure."

I switch off the private line and turn to Chantelle.

"Can you drive?"

She comes over. I set the cruise control and lock the wheel then slip out of position. Chantelle slides in, not even looking at me. I just need an hour or two to sleep and not think. I've been awake too long already, two days and now driving for over five hours, so all I can see are flashing road lines and Anna falling in flames.

"Wake me in two hours," I say.

I stagger back down the RV, nudging off the stacked crates and into one of the bed booths along the side. I fall into it and come up looking across at Lucy. Though it's dark back here some stray flash of light catches in her open eyes, staring back at me.

"It's coming," she mouths.

I know it. I turn and put my face to the shuddering wall.

* * *

Anna's in my dream, sitting on the wrecked propeller mount of the Cessna and waving a stick about like it's a wand.

"It won't be so bad," she says. She's talking to my kids Vie and Talia, who sit in the sooty black wreckage with smudge marks on their faces like students in a classroom, looking up at her. "It'll be gentle, really. Just open very wide and you'll barely feel a thing."

She opens her mouth, and Vie and Talia copy her.

"Will it taste like ice cream, Anna?" Talia asks. I almost chuckle at that. Talia really loves ice cream. Cynthia just started to make it, after we rounded up enough cows to get a steady supply of milk.

"Like ice cream and chocolate," Anna says. "You just open very very wide, and-"

She opens her mouth so wide that her jaw clicks and breaks open. Still her mouth keeps opening, wider and wider until her whole body unzips pinkly down the sides of her grin, then folds back on itself like a watermelon gumball, spinning in space and shrinking until-

POP

She disappears.

"That's not ice cream," Talia says, disappointed. "I hate gumballs."

"Daddy, look," Vie says, and points out across the water. I look to the horizon, and see thousands of red demons there, marching toward us like breakers on the tide. The skies are full of them too, flying with their arms widespread, and I find myself reaching up to the clouds above for salvation like that lost zombie atop his pile in Times Square, but there's nobody up above to take my hand.

No God. No magic Cerulean come to bail me out. No Lara to save me from myself.

"Please," I shout at the clouds, which morph and change shape, "it's for my family."

"I could have had a family too," says Don. He's up there in the clouds now, his handsome face all bloody and torn from the zombies eating him. "Did you help me?"

I stretch myself until I'm a mile tall and just touching Don's chin.

"Too late, Ammo," he says, "too late and too damn short."

A hand clamps around my foot and yanks me down. Now I'm in the midst of them, thousands of them, massive red beasts that are bigger than me, stronger than me and smarter than me. My jaw is forced open and a black round mouth hole descends.

The flow begins. The red ocean is everywhere. My children are already gone.

* * *

Thumping palpitations in my chest drive me awake. My first thought is I'm having a heart attack, then perhaps a stroke. I lurch out of the booth and into the central aisle, steadying myself on the plastic crates.

It's light outside, and the black road stretches ahead through an orange desert. My mouth tastes like sand.

"I was about to wake you," Chantelle says over her shoulder. "There's been some confusion from the survivors."

"What?" I ask, trying to shake the dreamy fog out of my head. "What confusion?"

"Ask her." Chantelle points at Lucy, lying in her booth still.

I drop to a squat, my heart still pounding madly, and rest a hand on Lucy's shoulder, but she jerks back like I've given her an electric shock.

"What is it?" I ask her. "The radar, do you feel something?"

"Not something," she answers. The whites of her eyes are huge. "Somethings."

"What do you mean?"

She closes her eyes and curls up tightly into a ball.

"What the hell? Chantelle?"

"That's happening up and down the convoy. Nobody understands."

I barge up and grab the radio. "This is Amo, all stations report, what the hell are the survivors saying?"

Lara's voice comes through crisp and clear. "It's the signal, Amo," she says. "It's making them crazy. Nobody can get much sense out of them, but it seems powerful, more than they expected."

I try to understand this for a second, as my heart continues to throb. "They lived for years, some of them, next to this guy. At most Cerulean might be with him, making two. How could that have this effect?"

"It's more than that, they say. I don't know, it's like they're possessed. Ravi had to restrain the survivor on his RV, James, because he was trying to climb out of the gun slot. They're terrified. We're getting very close."

I blink. "Where are we?"

"You don't know where we are?" It comes almost as an accusation. I rub my eyes and try to stay calm.

"I was sleeping, Lara," I say, "can you tell me where we are, how close are we to the crossing point?"

"Miles away. A hundred miles easily, still west of Albuquerque. But it was always an estimate, I don't-"

A shriek comes from behind, then something hits me in the back. It's Lucy, and I'm knocked to my knees with a painful jolt. Lucy pushes by toward Chantelle, perhaps toward the open window, nudging the wheel violently to the side.

The RV lurches and Chantelle drags it back while hunching against Lucy's scrabbling body. "Get her off me, Amo!"

She shouts.

I grab Lucy's shoulders and yank her back. She's so light that she flies away easily, but in the air she whirls and sends one hand raking down my cheek. Then I catch her, wrap my arms firmly around her chest with both hands tucked in, and try to contain her. She's almost naked but for her hospital shift, scrawny and weak, but she kicks, struggles and hisses like a feral cat.

"There are zip ties in the cupboard," Chantelle calls back at me. "Restrain her for her own good, before she hurts herself."

"What's happening?" Lara calls over the radio.

I lift Lucy and take big steps to the booth, but getting her in proves impossible as she spreads her legs and catches on the edges, lashing out so hard I'm worried she might break her own legs.

"She'll hurt herself, Amo!" Chantelle calls, watching me in the rear view mirror. "Be firm, press her against one of the stacks, use your weight."

I scrabble at the cupboard, knocking it open and sending loose plastic zip ties sprawling across the floor, then drop Lucy to the floor. Dropping on top of her, using my weight to subdue, feels like how I imagine a rape would as she squirms and yells meaningless words. The thought sickens me, especially so close after dreaming of Don. I hate to do this to Lucy after she's been restrained for so long, and to do it in such a fleshy, grunting way, but there's no choice.

I pin her hips under my knee, yank her arms together as gently as I can then get the ties on. They slide tight and I move to her ankles, zipping two ties together and wrapping them round. She whimpers and I slot her into the booth, bundle her feet in the blankets and zip-tie them snug so she won't break her toes flailing around, then tie her wrists to a hook attachment in the walls.

"Jesus," I mutter. "Stay there, Lucy."

She thrashes but there's little else she can do. My cheek stings and I feel blood roll down my neck from her sharp fingernails. I grab a strip of gauze and press it tight then hurry back to the front and sit beside Chantelle.

"See," she says, "crazy as hell."

I lift the radio. "Lara, everyone, restrain your survivors with zip ties if you haven't already. I know they're weak but it's for their own good. Mine just assaulted me then tried to jump out of the window. Confirm please."

Confirmations echo back. Just in the time that I was attacked, two others tried to make a break for it. One of Ozark's patients was on a blood bag and tore it loose, spraying gore everywhere.

"It's contained?" I asked.

"Contained," he said, "but this level of extreme stress, some of them can't take it, Amo. They'll just wink out."

I feel it myself. In my chest the cold is brewing already, like the opposite of heartburn, and my heart keeps pounding and pounding around it. 

I switch frequencies. "Macy, how are the children?"

"They're fine," Macy comes back to me, though her voice sounds harried and stretched. "We're having an adventure in here, aren't we kids? You wouldn't believe how much fun hide and seek is in an RV going at ninety."

"Thanks Macy. Kids, I love you, hang in there." I twist the dial. 

"Lara, everyone, we're going to bull through. They shouldn't be here yet. We're just on the edge of the storm, we'll squeak by."

Outside the red scrubland of New Mexico whips by, bounded by random sandstone buttes and well-stocked with wild pampas grass and gatherings of hazel-brown cacti. The sky is a beautiful cerulean blue. I'm about to suggest swapping over with Chantelle, when Lucy starts to scream.

I turn and see her leaning out from her booth as far as she can, pulling her arms taut behind her on the hook. Her mouth is so wide open I can see her tonsils shaking like mad leaves in a wind. She's staring past me and out of the front windshield and really screaming at full capacity, so loud it hurts.

"Amo," Chantelle calls over the cry, "holy shit, look at that."

She points left. We've just crested a low rise in the desert, unveiling more red stretching wilderness; a few scattered boulders, a tiny shack that was probably once the outhouse for a ranch, and an emaciated Joshua tree.

"There," Chantelle says over Lucy's cry, "look, dammit!"

And I see. There are giant red figures in the distance, arms pumping, sprinting down on us from the north like meteors falling. A cloud of red dust rises behind them. I try to count them. Not one, not even two, but three, five, perhaps seven.

"Oh my God," I whisper.

They'll be on us before we can get past. They're massive. They'll block the road and tear us to bits.

Seven demons. The chill opens over my heart and swallows it down.

We're done.

INTERLUDE 5

Two days earlier Salle stood before them, six brave souls in the summery hall.

They were three men and three women, all equal and proper. Had they volunteered, or were they forced? It didn't matter. They were in the suits now and there was no going back. Joseph got it done, like he always did.

"Thank you for your sacrifice," she told them, "we'll never forget this."

Some of them had dead eyes that looked right through her. There was nothing unusual about that, though. Probably they thought of this as just a way to escape, after she'd made suicide illegal and punishable with long-term isolation.

Isolation made them scream and go mad. Better for the others to hear the screaming and be broken than for them to die by their own hands. She needed them all for something.

The suits were not handsome, like the black SWAT gear her rescuers had worn so long ago, back when she'd still believed the Habitat was an experiment for Mars and Lars Mecklarin had been alive. Rather they were a jury-rigged orange fabric, making their wearers look like festive Borg androids, festooned with complex magnetic arrays, bits of wiring everywhere like veins, some kind of capacitor, a heavy battery and oxygen tank on the back. The orange fabric was undercoated with a high-tech silvery material, which still showed through at the seams. Tubes ran down the arms and fed into the wrists through permanent catheters. These would inject drugs, blood, antibodies; all the resistance tech they'd come up with in ten years of research.

But there was no cure.

There could be no cure, not for a disease already so deeply ingrained in the genetic matter of its hosts. Every one of them here was already a walking zombie, they just hadn't had their switch punched to 'on' yet. The suits would delay that switch getting punched at the cost of tearing the body apart themselves.

If they were fast, though?

"Send them," she said.

Joseph lifted the first helmet, a solid bronze globe, and with the help of two others set it into place on the volunteer's shoulders, clicking and belting straps and fasteners into place, forming a perfect seal around the neck. Oxygen hissed inside. It looked like a torture device, a fish bowl-like helmet without any visor, only a tiny blinking camera lens at the fore, with more coiled wires and a strange whipcord antenna rising at the back.

"Can you see me?" Joseph asked, holding up three fingers before the camera.

"Three," the volunteer inside answered, her flat voice transferred through an open channel on Joseph's radio.

"Good. You're ready."

He moved down the line doing the other five. Each one was a death penalty, but then she and Joseph had killed people in much worse ways. That first day of the revolution over twenty had died at her command, some of them horrifically. In the weeks that followed, as she clawed back control and stamped discipline on Lars Mecklarin's hopeless people, another thirty had followed in highly stylized public executions. Their bodies were buried in the forest now, without any graves.

Joseph got the last one done. Six humans with heads like rusted underwater mines stood in a line before her. It helped to dehumanize people like this, made it easier. Still she had to really try not to think of the personal information she knew about each of them, memorized a long time ago from Mecklarin's intensely observed files.