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

Mercy was a mistake. She'd fallen foul of it earlier, when he'd been choking and so weak, but not now. Mercy was a liability, just like Maine, just like Witzgenstein, just like Julio.

But Ravi was looking at her with a soft pleading in his eyes. Ah, Ravi. Ravi who liked to plait her hair and kiss her neck and who sometimes mumbled the strangest things in his sleep. If he knew what she and Amo had done, if he really knew what she was planning to do now, would he look at her the same way?

She managed a smile.

"All right. Macy, can you check on him? Check he's comfortable."

"I can," she replied sharply. She was different too, after Dr. Ozark died. She used to be such a nurturing type, always cooking and seeking to make other people happy, but so much loss had beaten that out of her.

"Then you go first. Feargal and Peters, you'll flank her. I'll be out here. Check him, feed him something if you can, and I'll follow afterward. Don't talk at all."

"Good cop, bad cop," said Feargal. "Done."

They left. Anna lay back and took a moment to breathe.

Outside the tall airport window, there was a jumbo jet; marked with the Virgin Atlantic insignia. That was just another bit of branding from the past. It leaned slightly to the side now, with one of its wheels more deflated than the other. The top slopes of the fuselage were scaled with gray dust, baked dry in the sun, while the underbelly dripped with green moss and lichen. At the tips the wings were starting to bow under their own weight, and all the windows had perished, fogged on the inside with condensation.

She took her breath, trying to find her calm center, but the jet didn't help. It was ten years since anyone had opened the hatch and depressurized the hull. Ten years of sitting there while the innards broiled in the sun and cooled in the winters; ten years in a can, just like Salle Coram and all those Mars colonists fated to die.

"I'm still here," Ravi said, by her side, pulling her back to the moment. She looked at him, then took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. That was all she could do right now, the most commitment she could make when she didn't know what they were up against.

Killing one person should be easy. After all of the other deaths they'd caused she should barely even notice it, but she did. She only had to look at Amo to see how deeply killing the bunker had broken him. It had hurt her too, with the dreams coming every night now. She never slept enough and could never outrun the weight.

You'd think so much death would numb you to killing, but in truth it made it worse. Every death added to the load. Eleven more bunkers lay ahead, with who knew how many thousands of people to die. She would do it, she knew that, but she was afraid of who she would be at the end.

It started here.

"I know, honey," she answered Ravi.

For three months they'd had a kind of holiday, waiting for the trans-Atlantic crossing, but now the question was here before her again. The zombie horde was almost to Europe, and this intruder in their midst meant they still weren't safe, and Anna wasn't going to be first to blink.

"I know."

* * *

If anything he looked weaker.

The feeding had taken it out of him. Nobody liked having a hose pushed down their throat.

Anna lifted herself onto her workbench, after Feargal dragged it closer. She'd wanted to stand, but that wasn't possible. Ravi had wanted to be there too, but she couldn't let him. She didn't want him to see her like this. She didn't want any witness.

They were alone. The man looked up at her. She looked down at him.

"You know Amo's name," she said to him. "Perhaps you know mine. I'm Anna. I'm guessing you've read the comics from our cairns, so you know something about us."

He gazed back. He was calm now, resolved perhaps. Perhaps he expected torture and was putting on a brave face. She owed as much to him.

"If so, you know who Julio is." She watched for a reaction, but he gave none. "He started off like you, in a way. Unwilling to join, unwilling to work together for the good of our community. You'll know how that ended."

He frowned.

"This is your last chance." She laid a hand gently on his throat. His eyes widened. "And I hope you don't believe I'm bluffing. You'll tell me who you are and why you're here, or I'll push. They won't know. I'll say you struggled, and by then it will be too late. You're going to talk to me."

He stared back. With her free hand, she placed the pen and clipboard on his chest. "Talk."

He glared at her. He was so angry, and that fired her up. So scream, so rage, but in the end buckle your head down. He stared, then reached for the pen and paper. Without breaking eye contact he wrote, three simple letters that filled up the paper.

AMO

Anna felt sick. But she'd warned him. Now she couldn't take the risk.

She pushed. His throat beneath the bandaging flexed inward. He struggled against the cable ties holding him down, but it was no use.

"Shhh," she soothed.

"Anna!"

She spun, letting go at once. Ravi was there, standing there with the tablet computer in his hand, staring at her. She hadn't heard him come in. Shit. He blanched white, and so did she.

"What are you doing?"

She pulled away from the man. He gurgled once but otherwise his raspy breathing continued.

"Nothing," Anna said, "what is it?"

He held the tablet out, trembling now.

"It's Amo."

INTERLUDE A

I go to see Jenny Gil.

Her house is nice, on the outskirts of Thousand Oaks close to Camarillo. There's a pool, a scrubby hill in back dotted with strangleweed and struggling redwood pines, a carport and a two-door garage. She lived with her parents, it seems, a middle class life, toward upper for LA. From the look of all the film posters on the walls her folks were in the movie business. I find a few awards downstairs; a silver plaque, a trophy cup on the den mantelpiece over a fake wood fire.

I wonder what her parents thought of her becoming- I check the papers again- a medical tech engineer. Were they upset she was going underground for ten years with Lars Mecklarin, or were they proud?

There are the regulation two pictures in her thick crimson psych folder, one a headshot and one full body. She was an attractive woman. Like all of Mecklarin's 'colonists' she was young on admittance, younger than I was at the time and slender like a young sapling, with very straight dark brown hair and wide, knowing eyes.

Now she's at the bottom of the Atlantic. Her hair is tangled with seaweed and krill. Her eyes are a blind, staring white. She's become a kind of slave, driven by a signal on the hydrogen line to sacrifice herself against the cold of the demons.

Caused by me.

I sigh and put the folder down on the dresser in her bedroom. The walls are a fawn-brown in here, like Lara's skin, with some posters of volleyball teams. Jenny Gil played defensive for her college team, I know that from Mecklarin's copious notes.

I open one of her dresser drawers and find mementoes, nestled together in a cardboard box decorated with glinting sticker hearts: some bracelets, intricately-folded letters that smell of perfume, a tiny little book of black and white photos bought in Europe on some old family holiday. There's also a little, frayed beanbag frog; it's probably mentioned in the file too.

I sit in her dresser chair. Through the window there's a view of the street; a calm black snake winding through this bland residential zone, like a million others just like it across America. Sandy brown dust coats the graying asphalt road top. There are overgrown palm trees lining the sidewalk with thick rushes of cast-off brown fronds about their feet, like someone's pulled all their pants down. There's a rusted lawnmower across the way, sitting in the middle of a patch of dead brown grass like a piece of modern art.

Cars wilt up and down the street on melted rubber wheels like faithful aged dogs; at a limp kind of attention, ever ready to take their lost owners to work, to the store, chase a tennis ball. No one's coming back, though. A sepia layer of dust on the window glass makes everything seem even more hazy and unreal.

I touch it with a finger. I could write anything here; something witty or glib, something reverential or mournful, but nothing comes to mind. Maine and Witzgenstein both hammered some of that out of me, so I spend a lot of time in quiet reflection these days, watching what I do and say. Everything has an impact, and I'm tired of watching the ripple effect of the actions I take, causing pain. These days I can hardly bear to take a step for fear of treading on a bug.

"Jenny," I muse, as I always do at these places. Jenny Gil, medical tech engineer, the twenty-third of twenty-three of Mecklarin's colonists who lived in LA before they entered the Maine bunker. I've been to the other twenty-two already, and Jenny Gil is the last. I want to stretch this last one out, because after this it becomes a little crazy.

There are seventeen addresses in San Francisco. Five in San Diego. Many more scattered across the smaller coastal towns like San Jose, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and that's just in California. I could spend the rest of my life visiting the homes of my three thousand victims, but it'll never change how dead they are.

I only have to close my eyes and I'm back in Salle Coram's bunker with Anna at my side, watching as person after person turns gray. Perhaps these visits are my new addiction. Once upon a time I used to drink, back when I thought I truly was the last man alive. I drank to get through the terrible things I'd done, then I did penance with all the admissions I left across the country as cairns.

I sigh. My absolution is in every comic book I printed, but I can't make this home a spot on the cairn trail. I can't tell the truth to New LA, not after Witzgenstein, because this is not the kind of weight that gets lighter with sharing. This is the weight that tears communities apart; a wound around which the skin can never knit, and New LA can't bear another wrench like that. So I'll bear it alone, along with the knowledge that I'm sending Anna east to do it all over again, eleven more times.

I can't bear to think about that at all.

In the distance a car's coming. Good.

I hear its engine for a time before I see it; a rough barking that many of our vehicles make now that they're burning the reclaimed, rehydrated fuel we scavenge from the old world. This one has a guttural cough, a signature I recognize. Soon there's a trail of black exhaust smoke rising up from nearby, like a Wild West steam train approaching the station.

It pulls up the dusty street; a Jeep Wrangler in cherry red with the windshield pushed down across the hood. I smile. At the wheel there's Crow, long black hair gleaming in the sun, wearing a solemn pair of shades that make him seem incredibly wise, like Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse from legend. He spots me in the window easily, through all the wind-blown grime of years, and raises a hand.

I smile. I like Crow.

He's strong, with that seamy face and that calm way about him. I like that he wears flowers in his hair sometimes, that when he touches the grass he says a prayer, that he looks at the sky with a kind of wonder in his eyes. He was buried with Julio and the demon for almost a year, and now he looks at everything with a glorious appreciation. I want to be like that.

I find the clasp and open the window.

"Crow," I call as he gets out and comes over. He stands for a moment looking up at me, like a statue. He'll have followed the copies in my study, where Salle Coram's files of the three thousand are spread everywhere; pinned to walls, organized in geographical batches, lying in stacks. He's spent more time in there with me than anyone else.

"It's enough for one day," he calls up to me. He sees this for what it is, an addiction, and that's an honesty I appreciate. "You're needed."

I nod. Of course.

* * *

He gives the overview on the road back, and it wakes me up like a punch in the nose. Halfway there I get on the walkie to Lara.

"He asked to speak only to me?" I ask.

"He wrote it down," she answers. "He can't speak since Anna broke his throat." There's definitely a note of pride in her voice, which worries me a little. Once she found violence so distasteful, but now I think she quite likes it. After the demon crushed her ribs she acquired a new edge. It's one reason she won't go in my study and look at Salle's files; she doesn't want to dilute her hatred for them with sympathy.

"But only me," I puzzle, rubbing at my temple as the Jeep catches air for a second, going eighty miles per hour over a slight rise on the 405, down through Santa Monica. "How would he even know who I am?"

"Everyone knows who you are, Amo from the cairns, though Sulman says he could've been listening in to our walkie frequencies too, for who knows how long. We don't use encryption, it's all just up there in the air."

I curse beneath my breath. The cairns, of course, but radio too? I thought with Julio gone we wouldn't need to worry about that again. "So he knew about Anna's lab. He could've known their guard rotation. He could even know about our plans and what we're aiming to do in Europe."

"He could," Lara confirms, "but why would he want to interfere with that? That's what we can't figure out here; his motivation. He's out in the air, a survivor like the rest of us, so it's in his interests for all the demons to be crushed. What's his game?"

"It's got to be something else," I say, as Crow revs us into a sharp right turn onto 187, bypassing the section of 405 that collapsed in the 2026 quake. "He could've just walked up if he wanted to join us."

I remember words I said a lifetime ago to Anna, that we might not be alone above the ground. There could be others, groups less welcoming than us, with very different ideas of what survival was. There's already one out there.

Witzgenstein. Could she have sent him?

I change my tone. "Lara, tell me we've pulled everyone back from the farms and the university. We need a tight cordon, gunners on the roof, guards on every entrance to the Theater, and the radar scanning the streets."