LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (4 page)

“See anything?” Kate asked, sitting on the bathroom counter between the two Italian marble sinks and calling over the shower curtain as I turned the nozzles.
 

“No, nothing. Thought I caught a hint of wood smoke, but didn’t check it out. Could have been that house a few miles back, but we were out of time.”

“Any sign of people?”

“Nothing. No cars, no tracks, no noise.”
 

Jesus, it’s amazing the difference a hot shower can make. I felt my muscles release the stress of the last week, and I breathed a little deeper.
 

“You figure out how to work that radio downstairs?” I asked, letting the hot water run over my face, noting the lengthening whiskers and not caring about the growth of beard. We had found an old HAM radio in the shelter, but it was beyond our ken to simply turn it on. Another way life differed from the movies. If this had been scripted, I would have had an innate knowledge of the intricate workings of the HAM radio and we’d already be conversing with someone in Vancouver about the traffic conditions.
 

“No, no luck. It’s fairly complicated. But I’m not overly hopeful of finding anything useful on the radio waves. Either way, we’re plugging forward and northward—not much could keep me from it.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.
 

I heard the door close softly, and stood in relative bliss, letting the warm water wash away the last week.

Dinner was a main course of SPAM fried on a gas stove with expensive cookware, with a side of beans and canned peas. Desert was the ever-delicious canned peaches, a seventh or eighth helping from the same case of canned fruit we’d been working on for a week. I continually reminded myself that we were lucky to have the food—come winter, which was fast-approaching—it was going to get much, much tougher to live off of what was left behind.

It was a funny realization after being in the film industry for so long. We made so many films about the lives of people in the post-apocalypse, but we never took the time to think about what that would look like. Not just how it would appear, for set and costume purposes, but what it would look like, really.
 

The abandoned roads, the toppled buildings, the scorched earth—these were easily pictures, and quite accurate. But we never imagined the untouched houses. The picturesque mockery of normal life that you found in a home that, but for the overgrown lawn, could have been left just that morning.
 

The smell of food rotting in refrigerators while people starved on the street.
 

The daily grind of finding small stashes of sustenance and clean water.
 

The clogged roads. The lack of electricity. The lack of bathing opportunities. Toilet paper. Vitamin C. Shaving.
 

Everything was different than you imagined. In the fictional world, the apocalypse was a great emptying out—a new beginning in many ways. You, your gun, and your friends against the world.

But this reality was more than that. It was heavier, and more real, and far more dangerous.
 

So I ate the peaches, and I enjoyed them. I ate the SPAM and enjoyed the fact that I had food at a time when I knew others were starving.
 

We ate in quiet conversation, and at the end of the meal we unfolded the already travel-worn map we had pilfered from a roadside stand nearly a week ago. Our route was well known, and we took pleasure in mapping our progress each morning before we went to sleep. We were nearly parallel to Burlington, Washington, and had a river to cross before continuing on northward on state Highway 9, which paralleled the interstate corridor until we reached an area north of Bellingham.
 

Once clear of the major population zones, we would jog over closer to I-5 and zig-zag our way north, across the border on a small state road and meet up with the Trans-Canada Highway east of Vancouver. From there, it was touch and go. It all depended on the undead density in any given area of the city or the suburbs.

We had already seen and experienced that the zeds were grouping together, and that they were moving. What we still didn’t have a precise bead on was how they decided to move. And without that, we had no way to predict whether there was a high likelihood that they’d be between us and where we needed to go.
 

“So tonight, we try for here,” I said, putting my finger down on a small town just south of the border named Everson. “I don’t want to hit the border until we’re fresh. I know it’s unlikely that there’s a herd there waiting for us, but just imagine the scene—it’s likely to be a charnel house with random creatures wandering about, confined by fences and cars. No, I want to stage ourselves carefully before we get there.”

“Agreed,” said Kate, staring at the map and chewing on a strand of hair that had become alluringly long in the last few months. “So that means we have less than 50 miles to cover tonight, right?”
 

I nodded. It was a decent span. We had been averaging forty, but I knew we could handle it, as long as we didn’t see any complications.

In a blessing brought on by our new world, we never did dishes. We always stacked them carefully next to the sink, but the effort of washing and drying was not only wasted, but felt hollow and empty. Like we were wishing for something that wasn’t going to come, a return to normalcy.
 

Once the dishes were stacked, we returned to our beds, Ky staking out the leather couch with Romeo while Kate and I returning to the large master bedroom. The soft sheets felt almost uncomfortable after our varied accommodations of the last few months, and I ended up throwing them off and staring at the ceiling as Kate flopped down next to me.
 

The sunlight still peeked through the gaps between the curtains and the ceiling, and while it didn’t hurt, it still kept me from falling asleep quickly. I stared and thought as I felt her breathing slow beside me. She muttered once in her sleep as I considered the simple question: how were we going to find one young girl in a city of millions?

I know it was Canada, but zombies were just rude—no matter where they were from. Unless her daughter was holed up in the same apartment that she had shared with her father, and had somehow managed to squirrel away months’ worth of food and water while avoiding the herds of creatures and marauding humans, I didn’t see how it was possible that she survived.
 

I never let Kate know I had my doubts, of course, but I knew she wasn’t stupid. She knew that this was a long-shot. That the odds were not good. Mathematically dim, actually.
 

She sighed once, and her hands twitched at her sides. I stroked the hair away from her face and watched as she seemed to speak in her sleep, warding off demons that only she could see.

I had never had a child. Ky was as close as it came for me. Maria and I, we had never had time. As much as I liked to pretend, I didn’t totally understand the devotion of a mother to a child, or the preternatural dedication to protecting that child that was innate to a parent. I could empathize and imagine. But I didn’t
know
.
 

So here I was. Along for the ride, willing to die for the cause, but with the lingering doubts about the wisdom of the journey that only a parent’s love could suppress. It was a long-shot, yes. But it was our responsibility.

I got that much, very clearly.
 

The sun grew stronger, and I watched the rays creep across the ceiling until I finally drifted away, eyes closing with the sound of a distant peal of thunder.

***

As the doomed submarine released her last gift as she died, unknown and unseen, at the bottom of a trench in the Pacific Ocean, her captain never could have foreseen the consequences of refusing his order to fire his warheads at remaining living population of the nation of Russia.

In point of fact, there’s no true way to measure how much more damage following that order would have done. Dozens of missile strikes had failed to stem the tide of the undead in Russia, and those who survived the large cities had long-since fled to the frozen north or the mountainous regions, seeking silence and solitude in an unforgiving land. Multiple missile strikes—targeted at these same cities—would have added radiation to the atmosphere, but statistically could not have had a fraction of the effect that the ensuing geological and oceanographic phenomena would have on the world.

When the compressed energy of those warheads was released into the precise location of the stricken submarine’s demise, that energy triggered a statistically unlikely seismic chain reaction that was like nothing the world had ever known. Tectonic plates, long stalled in their movement past one another in the dance of eons, began to move, triggering volcanic and seismic activity that was unrivaled. As they shifted, the water above them reacted, sending a tidal wave of cold ocean over the island chains of the Pacific Northwest and onto the coastal plains and valleys of the continent’s western coastline.
 

Before the earthquake began, the first to know of its approach were the animals. As the high-frequency compressional waves emanating from the fault line began to reach the surface, birds took to the air, and deer stopped their foraging to nose the air in curiosity. Dogs barked. Cats howled. 
 

These waves, moving much faster than the large, undulating waves of earth beneath the surface, could only be sensed by members of the animal kingdom. Had Oregon or Washington been in possession of an earthquake early warning system, the alarms would have sounded, signaling an imminent seismic event.

But in addition to having fallen months prior to the ravages of a zombie apocalypse, neither state had ever truly taken seriously the imminent threat of catastrophic seismic activity in the Pacific Northwest. Neither had implemented serious building code requirements, neither had invested in early warning systems, and neither had ever contemplated the simple fact that the Northwest was, by several reliable and thoughtful estimates, considered to be decades overdue for an earthquake that would level entire cities.

The only thing that saved the succession of lawmakers who were warned of this, but did nothing, from being voted out of office was their slow, painful death at the hands and teeth of the undead.

Many voters might, in retrospect, have considered that a fair trade.

As the animals listened in fear, the earth began to move. Slowly at first, but then more urgently. Waves of energy, pushed into the outer edge of the earth’s crust by the shear overwhelming heat produced by two continents forcing themselves past one another, undulated to the surface.
 

In the cities and towns across the region, brick homes crumbled as their mortar failed to resist the primal forces of a moving earth. Wooden homes, flexing with the movement of the ground, fared little better, some of them retaining their structure and frames. Windows across the region shattered into shards of sprinkling glass, the impact of which could not be heard over the sound of exploding gas mains, ruptured by the moving ground and ignited by sparks of shattered metal.

Bridges and suspended highways across the region fell into the waiting waters or deep ravines, concrete and steel no match for the primordial anger of a broken earth that sought to twist steel girders about as if they were twine.

Water mains were severed, pushing loosened dirt into roadways, homes and gullies. Fires began to rage as the cities and towns that relied on natural gas for heating or cooking were consumed by escaping gasses and engulfed in orange destruction.

For seven long minutes—seven minutes that passed as if the clock had been suspended indefinitely—the entire nation felt the angry irritation of the earth’s core. In New York city, zombies roaming a dead land looked askance at the sky, as if wondering at the intrusion of the tremors through the city’s streets. In Miami, a small group of survivors making do in an abandoned Coast Guard Air Station cursed as their fences shook and the long disused airplanes outside rattled softly.
 

Finally, as the dust began to build in the air, and the smoke from fires rose to the sky, the earth ceased its trembling. Buildings continued to slide from their foundations and cement walls continued to crumble.

But mere miles off the coast of Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, a new danger was already gathering to strike. Like the angry back of an awakening dragon lurching from the depths of the sea, the wave rose.

Its peak was nearly seven stories tall, and it drew with it water from the depths of a cold ocean that had been shocked into action by the shifting of the continents beneath its waves.

It rose quickly and silently. There was no rush of water. There were no screams of terror or flashes of light.

The only clue as to its new life was on the shoreline of the coast. From San Francisco to Vancouver, the broken earth had its blanket of seawater pulled away. The tidal surges were suddenly pulled back into the ocean, revealing hundreds of yards of sandy ocean bottom as the water shifted to the sea dramatically in what is known as a drawback.

Had anyone been left alive to watch, this drawback would have been frightening. As if all the water in the ocean were being drained through an unseen and unknown funnel far from the shore. Everything from small fish and crabs and ocean debris to whales and long lost shipwrecks were exposed to the open air of the chilly sunset.

But had anyone been left alive to watch, they would not have had much time to be scared.

Approximately three minutes after the sea was suddenly pulled back, the massive wave of cold seawater came into view.

At first, it appeared to be a trick of the fading light. A rapidly rising horizon beneath a glowing orange and red sun. An inexplicable variation in the landscape that stretched as far as the eye could see from north to south.