The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (36 page)

"I should be able to rig this," he says, the first words I've heard in hours.

I hug him. He seems a little surprised, then hugs back. I'm glad Jake's alive. Jake is pure in a way I will never be.

"Work on it," I tell him, rubbing my eyes. "We need to get these people out. They deserve to see the light."

I roam. I ebb and flow like a tide on the ocean, like a piece of clockwork compelled from within and without. Would Lars Mecklarin have been able to predict all my random movements, if he'd known me well enough?

It doesn't matter, because he's dead.

I take the elevator back, then ride its twin down. Beyond lies the 'Command' zone, a very different space with only a few narrow, cold hallways and a handful of bunk bed rooms. I walk along corridors where Salle once lived and worked, where her discipline had crushed these people into obedience. There are rusty black blood trails in one stretch, leading at one end to a refrigerated cold storage room, where Salle's twenty-three Command colleagues are dead and tumbled atop each other.

I say a prayer and move on. We'll pull these bodies out too and bury them. At the other end of the blood trail there's a semi-circular hall like a flight control room, with rows of computers on desks facing a large screen showing a very dull movie; seven solid blue dots on a wireframe map of America.

I sit and watch it for a long time, thinking about nothing really. This is what despair looks like.

I wander. I find Peters sitting in a side office, the only other room that isn't a bedroom, a bathroom or the kitchens. It must be the commander's office, as pinned to the walls are maps, charts, lists of names, instructions, timelines, decision trees and numbered contingencies; almost everything we could ever want to know about the bunker and its plan. On the desk is a neatly hand-written guide to it all, leading us through what we need to know. It's addressed:

Last Mayor of America

She prepared. Perhaps she knew this would be my choice.

"It's all bullshit," Peters says dismissively, waving a hand.

I'm inclined to disagree, but I've no heart to argue with him. I've no desire even to see this stuff yet. If other demons are coming, if other bunkers are plotting against us, we have time.

We have time.

I climb back to the surface. It's dark out and I'm the first up. We spent the whole day down there, buried with the dead. I take a deep breath of the frigid New England air. Ten years underground seems unbelievably long.

I go to the other bunker, Julio's hole, and start setting up the winch. I'm not going to sleep tonight anyway, I know that, and there's a lot of work yet to do.

21. HOME

We get the half-formed demon bodies up in the night, as the others come along and help out. In the end the winch can't lift Cerulean's huge frame, so we rig a wire from an RV and haul him out that way. His head comes up separately and rests beside him, under a blue tarpaulin weighed down with stones.

I sleep a little, then radio back to the settlement in Pittsburgh around dawn to talk to Witzgenstein.

"Lara shows no change," she says, the first thing after a greeting, which I appreciate. "Your kids are good. They went on a field trip into the woods to look for pinecones."

I smile. After the horrors I've done in the last twenty-four hours, hunting for pinecones sounds like a wonderful thing. I fill her in on our side of things and tell her to bring the RVs up when they can. This is something we all need to see.

We flood Julio's bunker with gas poured directly off a tanker, found a little way down McKnight. The driver is still in the cab, caught sleeping when the apocalypse struck. Apart from his withered gray skin and puckered peanut face he looks like a regular person, with clothes as bright and clean as the day he went to sleep in them. He was in a prison for ten years too.

He hangs around while we drive his tanker up to the field and over the sloping snow. The hose sloshes out a dense sludge, more like petroleum jelly than regular gasoline. This is what ten years of sitting in the heat and cold will do; the water vapor breathes away through the tiniest of gaps in the tanker's joints, leaving raw rocket fuel behind.

Normally we dilute it ten to one with water, but not today. The jelly pumps in, acrid and brown, and Peters tosses in the lighter. The resultant fire is so fierce that flames lick out through the manhole mouth.

We stand around for a few hours, bearing witness. When it's done the interior is a bare black hole with everything gone; the generators and the heaters, the chains and the bodies, all reduced to dust and ash.

Cement follows a day later. We keep working for hours to load the bags and mix the contents, keeping a steady flow of gray slurry flowing into the hole. Filling it to the brim takes a day and a night, a real commitment of our time and effort, but there's something transformative about doing it this way, something healing, like scattering dirt onto a coffin.

Afterward Jake works in the Habitat, setting the hydraulics to their original task, while I peruse the files Salle left for me in the commander's office. There's nothing really about the cause of the infection, except as it relates to this bunker. Of particular interest is the inbuilt receiver their 'primary' demon had, connected through something called the 'Hydrogen line', baked in at a genetic level. This genetic switch would pass on to any 'secondaries' it infected, essentially providing a button Salle could press to deactivate them all, when the time was right.

Though there is little on how they got their primary, it's clear that this switch won't deactivate primaries from other bunkers, and won't defend us against the hundreds that may be coming. Still, I find the button and push it; a protocol buried deep in the computer system, guarded by four banks of passwords and security identification, kindly left behind by Salle.

Anna and I do it together; so simple. On the screen in the control room the seven blue lights wink out. We get a call from Lars moments later, confirming what we'd already briefed him on.

"They're climbing down," he says. "They're picking themselves up and heading off! It's amazing."

"Where are they going?"

"East!" he cheers. "They're all going east."

I look at Anna. We're both thinking the same thing. This will be another line of defense for us, and also an assault. We'll put trackers into as many of them as we can, and follow. We'll take the other bunkers one by one and flip all the underlying switches, each time releasing our army to press on again.

"We're going to be OK," Anna says.

I think so.

"We're coming tomorrow," Witzgenstein says. "And I have some other wonderful news. Lara seems to be showing signs of improvement, Amo."

My eyes quickly well with tears, sitting there in Salle's control room. Hope, in such an awful place, comes so strangely.

"Here," she says, and then there's Vie and Talia on the other end of the line, shouting out about the things they built with their pinecones, and how they're going to start a forest back in New LA, and how mommy maybe smiled at them earlier, and maybe she moved her hand, and isn't it strange that she might be waking up just at the same time as all the zombies wake up?

I cry and laugh and go along with them, approving their ideas to build snowmen out of pinecones and reed grass, agreeing it's strange mommy's waking up right now, though she's definitely not a zombie, don't worry about that, and I'll see them soon, and we'll have snowball fights together of course, and so on for thirty minutes until I can barely stop myself from blubbering and hand them off to Anna.

She's beaming at me. She beams and cries a little too.

Lara's waking up, with the zombies. That's a kind of beautiful thing, no doubt. My wife is coming back. I sit and listen to Anna try to get a word in edgewise while I watch the map of America, with not a single blue dot anywhere to be seen.

* * *
 

We each find our own work.

Feargal heads outward, roaming the nearby mountains until he finds the bunker's drone base, dug into a natural alcove in Mount Abraham's northern side. It's an empty hangar now, with bays for four Predator X-class drones. Presumably they dropped out of the sky somewhere to the west when they were chasing Peters and the other survivors across the country.

"The automation here is amazing," Feargal tells me on the walkie. "Automatic docking, charging, reloading of munitions. It's like clockwork, and it's still working. If I had a drone now…"

"Who would you bomb?" I ask. "The IRS?"

He laughs.

I let him loose on the stacks of military information in Command, and on the fourth day he comes up with an explanation for why Cerulean wasn't shot by the gun turret. 

"It was automated too," he explains, sitting behind the Command desk and plainly enjoying it. I sit before him like an underling and indulge him in this. "A kind of AI program designed to recognize anything that looked like a zombie by its profile, posture, way of walking. Zombies were the threat, so your man Matthew running was a viable target, but Cerulean crawling across the field? The turret couldn't waste ammo on every deer or fox that came near, so it was set to ignore them. Cerulean must've looked enough like one of them, crawling along, to earn a pass."

It's interesting information. Once I was so desperate to know the answer, but this is so banal and obvious that it doesn't satisfy. There was no human choice involved in sparing him, only a simple machine intelligence. Cerulean would have gotten a kick out of it.

Ravi and Anna spend their time working in the farm halls to harvest the widest range of crops and seeds they can. Ravi takes to it with gusto, constantly smeared with dirt and happy to be at Anna's side, while I think Anna enjoys the quiet time, involved with nurturing things to life.

"They've got strains here I've never heard of before," Ravi explains to me excitedly. "GM sorghum that reseeds year on year, with yields like you wouldn't believe. Rice that's drought-proof, corn with more calories per kernel than anything in all of Iowa. It's high-tech, gene-spliced stuff."

"We'll take it," I say. "Load it up. Cynthia will want to marry you."

He grins. Anna frowns at me. Has she said yes to him yet? Cerulean's not around to tease them anymore, so I suppose that job falls to me. I'm recovering some of my old self.

Peters mostly wanders, rolling quietly in his chair, looking at this place that he was tortured for. I catch sightings of him round the Habitat and Command, soaking it in. I know he's weighing all of this. That's good.

In a week Jake has the system figured, and he hands me the plunger.

"This'll do it?" I ask.

He nods. It's a plunger like you'd see attached to TNT in a Road Runner cartoon.

"Does it have to be so dramatic?"

"It's like the cement," he says. His voice is back to normal and the wound in his skull is healing nicely, the gory gash from before fading to a tight pink line with scabbing round the stitch holes. It makes me very happy to see him heal. "You have to really mean it."

"And it'll start explosives?"

"It starts a process which begins with twenty explosives they planted, and moves on to the hydraulics."

"Good work."

We wait for the others to come. Seven more RVs join us in two days time, lined up neatly along the winding mountain road to get the best view.

One by one we bring everyone down into the MARS3000 bunker and show them around. I show it to my kids. The zombies have long since lost interest in us, having fully charged, but Talia finds them fascinating. She's never seen this many together before, except for the battle with the demons. Now she walks between them holding their hands, like an enthusiastic, very friendly dog. They tolerate her. Vie is more interested in the layout of the Habitat and all the various controls in Command.

I get Witzgenstein and the other Council members down too, and they vote on some things: order of ceremonies, the words to use, who gets to speak when and what comes next.

In the end, it's me who pushes the plunger and blows the cap off the bunker. It's not something I'm hungry to do, as it symbolizes the death of all these people, but for that same reason I don't want anyone else to bear the weight of it. It's on me already.

It's not so dramatic as I'd expected. The explosions are disappointing, with all of them taking place underground. The earth shakes, some snow jumps up in the air on a section as big across as a volleyball court, then for a long time there's nothing. We all sit on our RVs watching the smooth slopes, like the ranks of scientists, soldiers and government people who watched the early atomic explosions.

"These explosives are more like fracking," Jake whispers to Anna, respectful of the somber mood. "The charges fracture the earth above; they're not designed to blow it all out. The elevators will do the rest."

In a few minutes they do, with a grinding bass vibration that shakes the earth. Gradually the volleyball court's worth of snow begins to lift up and roll to the side, as a dark gap yaws open like a big metal jaw. A moment later the first flush of a hundred zombies steps out into the light, lifted a hundred feet up a pre-built shaft by an industrial grade elevator.

They hobble out. The snow and the cold don't bother them. They start as one toward the east.

"Next demon," Anna says, below her breath.

"Next demon," I repeat.

In the RV below I sit with my kids and hold Lara's hand, looking into her eyes and explaining everything to come.

She's weak still, but she's awake. She can't speak well at the moment, still recovering from the battering the demon gave her, with a bruised throat and healing ribs, but I understand every croaky whisper she attempts.

She loves our children. She loves me. She's glad to be alive.

I hold her hand and press it close to my lips.

"Honey," I say, so glad that she's here with me again. "We've both been in comas now."