The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) (26 page)

Anna shone her flashlight in, picking out contours suggesting the hall was perhaps a football field in length and half that in width. Each bed was appointed with a matching black locker, brown bedding, and a single white pillow. Round lights were mounted on the walls, but only one in around twenty were operational, and many of those were guttering or so faded to a burnt sienna that they barely cast any light at all; offering a flickering porthole on a sad, grand tableau.

"A lot of beds means a lot of people," Feargal added, pointing to the door on the right, through which another huge hall lay, seemingly identical.

Anna entered the left-hand hall and walked amongst the bunk beds. There were enough there to cater for thousands. She shone her flashlight on bedheads and over the black lockers, but there were no pictures tacked up anywhere, no mementos of a home left behind, no signs of personality shining through, nothing like Maine. There were many bodies though, collapsed on and off the beds like flurries of wilting fall leaves. In places the pale mattresses were stained with the dark brown and yellow stains of their corrupted, burst bodies.

The air smelled like dust and diesel. The dull drone of fans working somewhere was a little louder, but she had no doubt now. This place had been dead for years, and it didn't make sense. She knelt by a cluster of bodies in a circle of orange light and pulled back their coats, seeking some sign of what had killed them, but there were no bullet holes she could discern, no evidence they'd turned into zombies themselves, nothing.

They were just dead. But what had killed them?

"Anything?" Peters asked.

"No."

"Someone took the doors off here as well," Feargal said, standing in one of the entrances and studying it with his flashlight. "The hinges are there but the doors are gone."

Anna grunted and strode on down the long rows of beds, while Peters reported back to the others up above, using the radio in low, uncertain tones.

The doors were a puzzle. The dead bodies were a puzzle.

At the end of the hall she exited and padded down the dark corridor with Feargal beside her.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think they're all dead."

Five more open doorways loomed ahead, to left and right, and again Anna approached cautiously, readied her gun and peered round.

The hall here was even bigger and even darker, stretching away like the sweep of a moonlit city, littered with bodies. Here there were no beds though, and the walls were lined with an unbroken black desk split into hundreds of small bays, each equipped with a large black computer screen and a black chair, with a label hung above. 38674 read one, lit by a sickly yellow lamp. 873 read another, in no clear order. They stretched round the whole hall's edge, encircling a bizarre glass meridian running down the hall's spine.

Two rows of giant floor-to-ceiling glass panes dominated the hall's central axis, laid out in parallel like a Bordeaux colonnade. Some were lit from the edges with a range of colored lights, glowing strangely in the dark like huge, forgotten TVs tuned to the signal card, in green, pink, orange. She strode over, and saw that their clear surfaces were lightly etched with finely-drawn maps, showing places Anna couldn't recognize, absent any names or coordinates. She walked down the middle aisle between the two rows, trailing her hands to the smooth glass, reading the worlds underneath like Braille. Here she could pick out rivers and major cities, there coastlines and roads, but nothing she recognized.

Each pane had a corresponding number above it, matching one of the numbers on the bays along the walls, and in the center of each was a single red dot with an irregular assortment of red lines radiating out, each of different lengths. In some cases the lines reached to the edges of the glass, while in others they barely stretched beyond the dot itself.

What the hell was any of this? It felt like a mausoleum to some past conspiracy, but it didn't mean or explain anything. It didn't give her revenge for Cerulean. It didn't help her find Lucas. It didn't help her shut down the demon. It was nothing, a great wasted hole in the ground.

"Is this New York?" Peters asked.

That woke her up. She spun but couldn't see him, swallowed up in the darkness. Separating in a place like this was not a good idea; she'd let herself get careless. She followed his voice back along, squeezing through a narrow gap in the panes, and at first mistook him for another body, squatted up close to a glass panel that looked like all the rest. Then Feargal loomed out of the darkness too, moving in smooth silence. Both their faces looked drained of color in the shadows.

Feargal leaned in to look as she approached. "Maybe," he said, tapping the glass. "Lower Manhattan Island, perhaps? It's extreme close-up."

Anna drew up and leaned in too. The map was lit a faintly glowing green, and showed a grid of four or five unlabeled city blocks, like any modern city, though as she studied the intersections and street angles, she began to realize this one was familiar. She'd seen it many, many times before.

"It is New York," she said, as her heart sank. And she knew exactly where. She leaned past Peters and traced a road along the glass, up from what had to be Madison Park to what had to be 23
^rd
Street, then across along Fourth, Third, to Second Avenue, where the red dot sat.

"Twenty-third and Second," she said.

It meant nothing to Peters, but Feargal turned to stare at her. He remembered.

"No way. You can't be serious."

"I am," Anna said, and tapped at the red dot in the center. "That is Sir Clowdesley."

The dot was the same as any of the others like it, though the red lines were not; every one of them stretched to the edge of the glass.

"I know that name," Peters said. "Is it Amo's coffee shop?"

Anna nodded. If it weren't for the cold-cut diamond in her middle this would have shocked her too. Instead she looked through the glass, now, and began to understand. The room, the glass panes, the desks and all the dead bodies.

It did make sense.

"This was their radar," she said. 

"What?"

She looked at Peters and Feargal. They were almost there, but the trees in the way still prevented them from seeing the forest. It just required a large enough leap, a certain callous disregard for what normal people would do in any normal situation. But she wasn't normal now, and she was more callous than any of them.

"This dot is Amo," she said, tapping it again. "These lines are his strength as a hydrogen line emitter. It makes sense that he'd be the biggest, as we know the infection started with him." She gestured at the other glass panes. "It's a radar array with people as the signals." Her mind rushed through the possibilities. "On one of these panes I think we'll find ourselves. You, me and everyone in New LA, maybe everyone who survived the apocalypse, possibly everyone in the world. They could all be here, pinned up as red dots. It means these people were watching us long before the world ended."

It was beautiful, really. Elegant. They didn't have a cure either. They couldn't stop it. But they could track it.

Feargal stared at her blankly. "I don't follow. Why would they do that? How would they?"

"To predict the date of the outbreak," Anna said, running the sequence of events through her head rapidly. "Think about it. We must have been easy to find, people who went into unprecedented comas all around the world, all at once? I expect they covered up for us. Why else were we not all in government research labs, being pored over by the best brain surgeons in the world? Because they didn't want that, they wouldn't want a panic. Imagine the resources they would have expended, to catch and contain us all? This is nothing compared to that. Watching us would be easy, and serve the same essential purpose."

"But what purpose?" Feargal asked, still struggling with the concept. "I mean, predict the apocalypse? How would they know where and when it would start, if it started with Amo and Lara having sex? How could they predict that?"

Anna shrugged. It all seemed suddenly so obvious. "Easily. Now we know the infection spread on the hydrogen line, starting with Amo in New York." She tapped the dot again. "This is Amo. Look at the lines stretching out from him. That has to be a measure of his strength as an emitter. We know we're all emitting still, we're infectious; that's why Salle's people couldn't come up, why the demons are out there, why all the bunkers are trying to kill us. That's all old news. What these maps show us is, we were emitting even before we became infectious, just not at a triggering level."

Peters nodded. He got it. Feargal looked between them plainly lost.

Triggering level?" he repeated weakly.

"Look, these red lines look like the strength of a radio signal, agreed?" Anna ran her finger along a few of them, radiating out from the Amo-dot. "Like a wave form? They have to be a measure of signal strength. I'm guessing that signal strength grew in power over time, starting small after the coma and getting bigger over the year. It syncs up with the idea that Amo was recovering fast, faster than any of us. So was it the sex that started the apocalypse, or just what the sex represented?"

Feargal looked worried. Peters nodded.

"His recovery. He was getting better, getting rid of the migraines, and being with Lara cemented it. It didn't happen overnight though it looked that way. It was a long, slow build since the coma, like a finger slowly squeezing a trigger. You don't have to add sudden pressure to make it fire, you just add one tiny bit more and it blows. That was Lara. So, put all that together, it means these people knew the end would begin in New York, because look at Amo's signal. It's massive compared to the rest. He was the most advanced."

Feargal's face screwed up in thought. "So they knew in advance that Amo would start it?"

Anna shook her head. "Not at first. They had no idea. Look around, they were monitoring all of us. This whole hall, look at these section numbers, they each relate to a map. How many halls like this are there here? How many staff to monitor them all? Maybe they even coordinated the cover-up from here, tracking each of us, shutting down media attention, turning away scientists and researchers. Hushing it all up. The resources involved would have been enormous, but it's all right here. They mapped us and followed us all."

"But a cover-up of that size," Feargal murmured, "it's…"

"It's a weapon," Peters interrupted. Anna turned to him. Yes, of course. "One we can use too," he went on. "If every survivor is listed here, it means we can find them, or at least where they started from. Perhaps they left a sign where they were going, like Amo. We can hunt them down and bring them to New LA one by one."

It was possible. Peters' eyes were bright. It opened up a new world of possibilities. They didn't need the cairns left scattershot in capital cities, waiting like honey-traps. They could go out and find them.

"But how did they monitor us?" Feargal asked, pointing at the red lines. "I went to the hospital only once. They thought it was a car accident, concussion. I was at home in a week, out in the woods. I don't know-"

"Helicopters flying over," Anna offered. "Maybe they dropped a scanner near your home. Perhaps it was even the kind of thing they could do from a satellite. Maybe they still can. Perhaps they've been watching us for ten years."

That reality sank cold in her belly. Was it possible?

"But-"

"Salle said something about the day she joined the bunker," Anna said, speaking as she worked it out, "in one of her diaries. She'd been rejected by Lars when she first applied, but one day he called her in at the last minute, months earlier than the MARS3000 deadline. Why would he speed up the deadline like that?" She pointed at the red dot. "Because of this. Because of Amo. The moment he invited Lara on a date he pushed his progression right up to the edge. He only had to take one more step, and…"

She tailed off. The pieces fit. She studied the little red dot with the long red lines. This was really Amo. It was overwhelming to contemplate; him sitting there in Sir Clowdesley ten years ago, drawing zombie comic books and flirting with Lara, completely unaware he was about to blow up the whole world, while these dead people in this bunker in France watched it happen. "They watched him do it."

She stepped back. She felt strange, like a magician after the trick has been given away. It didn't help blunt the sharp clarity inside her; the imperative to kill anyone involved in Cerulean's death, but it shifted something.

Who was the target, now? Not the people here, who'd spied on them and reported to their masters, because they were all long dead. Was it Lucas, had he known about this? Salle hadn't so how could he? Did she hate Salle, who'd only done her best to keep her people alive?

"So this whole bunker," Peters said, taking it to the next step. "Is it supposed to be dead, was that part of the plan?"

"I don't know," Anna answered. "Maybe. Or it was a mistake, or they didn't care. It looks like they've been dead a long time. They served their purpose, they predicted the end, and when they died they weren't replaced, because they weren't needed any more."

"But the defenses? The gun turret, the drones."

"Automated."

"Then why is there even power?"

Anna shrugged. "It's probably a nuclear plant, like Maine. It didn't need any maintenance. Nobody was going to come here and shut it down."

They fell silent for a moment, all lost in thought. There were a lot of possible conclusions to draw, a lot of directions to take their theories in, but how much did it really matter? Whoever had built this bunker and prepared this radar, they knew who the survivors were going to be, and they knew who the trigger was at the end, but they did nothing to stop it. They didn't even try to keep their own radar operators alive.

They just let it happen.

Abruptly the walkie on her shoulder crackled, and Jake's voice came through, intermittent and broken by static, damaged by the distance and depth.

"… you do something? The m-…. all coming…"