The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (10 page)

I woke in early afternoon somewhere in Nebraska.

"Nearly Iowa," Julio called back. "Site of your great zombie revelation."

I chuckled. How long had he been planning to say that, I wondered.

"Swap?" I asked.

"I'm good."

We listened to Mecklarin a little through Iowa's golden fields, one of his earliest books called, 'The Human Machine'. It outlined in broad strokes his theory that humans were ultimately knowable, the same theme from 'Life on Mars'. If you had perfect information in a completely contained world, with control over every event and knowledge of every surrounding human's 'programming', then you could predict with perfect accuracy what they would do. It amounted to 'free will was an illusion'.

Julio snorted at a particularly enthusiastic recitation of this statement.

"You don't rate this?" I asked.

"It's bullshit," he said solemnly.

"Care to unpack that a little?"

He considered briefly. A small horde of zombies whipped by on the right, clustered round a Dairy Queen.

"People just do stuff," he came up with. "There's no knowing that. Things just happen."

I considered this piece of wisdom. Mocking him would be easy, but I held back. Perhaps this was an apology for Anna?

"Yeah," I said.

I took over and at last he went to sleep in the back. Even with him snoring, my back kept itching all through Iowa that he would creep up and plant a knife in me. I checked the rear view mirror every few minutes, but he remained asleep.

We went past the site of my 'revelation', where I'd knelt down expecting the zombies to eat my brains, and all they'd done was gather in for hugs through the night. Recharging. I'd left my first comic book cairn there, cars and coffee, which looked good still, though I didn't stop to investigate. I took us through Iowa and Illinois to Chicago, where Julio took over and we turned off the I-80 to head north-easterly on the 94, bound along the top of Lakes Erie and Ontario, toward Quebec and through to Maine. I slept and he took us over the border into Canada, past Toronto in the night where we planned to drop a cairn on the way back, and into New England.

I'd never been before, and the slight cold nip in the air was a welcome break after the summer heat of California. Late on the third day I led us carefully off the main road and into the mountains of Maine. They were beautiful granite beasts, blue and silver spikes thrust up through forests of aspen, oak, Balsam fir and spruce. The air smelled of warm sap and fresh grass.

"Careful now," Julio said every now and then, as we approached the area we expected the gun turret to be in.

"Cerulean said they didn't shoot him on the road," I said, remembering the story of how Matthew had exited his RV and charged across the grass toward the gun turret, only to be cut down with a bullet through the throat. Still, I slowed down and kept my eyes open.

The best research I'd come up with before leaving suggested a bunker site near the southern foot of Mt. Abraham, potentially in a Cold War fallout shelter for the government. There weren't many roads in that vicinity, so even taking them all at a crawl, constantly peeking ahead with binoculars, it didn't take us long to find it. The flow of gray-faced, white-eyed zombies was a dead giveaway, as they trooped south on a straight line through the mountains toward it.

Then we were there. We broached a rise in the road and saw it, a pole in a sloping field surrounded by zombie bodies, and I backed the RV up rapidly, muttering, "Shit shit shit."

The guns didn't fire. I stopped the van and looked at Julio. His eyes seemed to be alight with excitement. I nodded, feeling the excitement too. Together we got out, carefully and quietly, as if someone might be watching us, and dropped down on our bellies on the road. The asphalt was freezing. The notion that I might get run over by passing traffic, lying there in the middle of the road, came comically.

Then Julio shuffled forward and I joined him. At the lip of the rise we brought up our binoculars and studied the gun turret, about five hundred yards away. In the middle of a sloping field well-stocked with both dead and not-yet-fully-dead zombies, it stood on a silver pole like a clover stalk, growing out of a big concrete 'planter' box and capped with four silver 'leaves'.

"Those are not machine guns," Julio said. "They look like autocannons, probably Bushmasters; often they're mounted to vehicles. I expect there's a chain feed system up the pole, and who knows how many rounds they've got down there. They can fire anywhere up to two thousand five hundred times a minute."

I turned to gawp at him. He enjoyed the moment, no doubt.

"Twenty-five hundred rounds a minute?"

"You didn't know that, huh? Seems you were wise to bring me. This is serious gear. Look closely, tell me what you see."

I studied the guns on their pole. They had very long snout-like barrels, backed with several blocky items that might be scopes, cameras or batteries. A small orange light glowed under the leaf-like metal hood extending over each gun barrel, alongside the wink of reflected light.

"Those orange lights are heaters," Julio said, "to keep the barrels from freezing up. That's smart. Reflection must be a camera lens. The rest of the stuff up there, I would guess, is an anti-jamming mechanism. Somebody really planned this."

I stare. The wink of light seems to shift, and I wonder if it's a camera training in on us.

"Can they shoot us out here?"

"Definitely," Julio responded. "Although we might get some warning, as they find the range. Probably long enough for us to back up."

I resist swallowing loudly, and resist saying something that would betray my lack of knowledge, like, 'Oh shit.' Rather I figured it was good to have Julio with me, just as he said.

I scanned the pole down to the concrete block. Around it there were about fifty zombie bodies standing and smacking at the concrete like a drum. Beneath their feet were perhaps a thousand dead zombies, laid out like a hellish carpet that left barely any sign of the grass below. Most of them still wore clothes, as they hadn't shriveled enough to slough them off, so in truth it looked like a massacre.

It looked like Times Square, where I'd killed thousands. I gagged and this time swallowed back acid reflux. Julio didn't comment.

The sound of the fifty or so beating at the block was a steady, low drum line.

"There has to be people underneath it," I said. "Enough to pull all these over and keep them coming."

"And they knew it would happen," Julio continued, gesturing at the surrounding land. "Look at the location, it's a perfect line of sight for miles. The whole area's a killing ground."

I worked the logistics of this new reality round in my head: autocannons, lines of sight, anti-jamming mechanisms. "They must have thought the zombies could dig down to them. If enough of them massed, maybe it would be possible. Why else have the guns here?"

"Why else?" Julio agreed.

We lay there longer, watching through binoculars, perhaps an unspoken agreement that we wanted to see the big guns fire. It didn't take too long, only a few hours as more stumbling bodies filtered out of the forests to beat at the block, some traipsing up past me along the road.

At last the guns barked, and the suddenness of it made me flinch.

RATATATATATATATATAT

The sound washed over us like an avalanche, and out on the field hot metal found dry flesh and tore it apart.

Zombies fell. It made me sick to my stomach to watch, as bodies who were once mothers and husbands, children and wives fell like mown grass, their corpses piling up like a thicker layer of snow over the ones who'd come before. It was a nightmare, though it only went on for a few minutes before the fire rate slowed, then fell silent. Maine was still again.

"They're watching us," Julio said.

The guns had shifted angle to point directly at us. The reflected light off a lens was there again.

"We should back up," I said."

Julio grunted assent, but neither of us moved, perhaps transfixed by the notion that through that lens and down that periscope pipe, someone down below was looking back.

Three thousand people. It was crazy. Was it Mecklarin himself? The mad fancy of holding one of his audiobooks up, like I might get it signed, ran through my mind. Before I could do it though the guns folded in on themselves into grooves in the pole, fast and smooth, then the pole itself dropped rapidly back into the concrete box.

Abruptly, it was gone. The box remained. A few zombies were already picking their way across the fields of slaughter.

"Shit," I whispered.

"Shit indeed," Julio agreed. "They've seen us now. We have to kill these bastards before they kill us."

God I wish I'd listened to him.

* * *

It takes a lot to admit Julio was right.

Sitting in my hot, pathetic closet while my people back in the Theater wait for me to come lead them to safety, I face the reality that for ten years, I've been wrong. I was wrong about him and I was wrong about Cerulean's gun turret, and it has led us to here. It stings like something I can't understand. It fills me with doubt that I can't overcome.

What if the trail of cairns was the wrong idea? What if sending Anna off was wrong? What if the next choices I make will be wrong too, and lead to the deaths of my wife, my children, my friends at the hand of a vomiting demon? The terror of it paralyzes me. I should go down there and tell them I'm not the man they thought I was. I don't know what to do, because whatever faith I had was based on judgments that were wrong.

But it's not only these. It makes me sick to really, truly face it. Masako too, and Indira, and Cerulean, lay all these at my door. Trust, goddammit. I shouldn't have trusted anyone. I should have killed Julio the first time I saw him, but I didn't because I was weak. I've always been weak, and shit, people just do things. People just do things and you can't plan for that or trust that they won't.

11:00, I'm due to give a PowerPoint in an hour, but maybe I'll just hole up here until the deadline passes. Maybe they truly are better off without me. I just don't know.

INTERLUDE 3

Salle stepped out of the summery hall into a long, bright red corridor with posters and paintings hanging on the walls. People were moving in it, talking purposefully in pairs, going in and out of doors with blinks of their security passes against readers. It seemed more like a corridor in a tech company than an underground bunker they were all sealed in for a decade. It felt utterly banal and bizarre at the same time.

Salle walked amongst them, trying her card on doors as she went, but all the readers dinged red. A hundred yards on was her elevator, which she rode two decks down to the third floor. The corridor here was green and yellow and seemed to twist to the left. Strung along the walls were amateurish paintings, perhaps done by her fellow inhabitants.

She felt as giddy as a freshman on the first day of term. Her room was 345C, and with excitement she touched her card to the reader, it dinged green, and the door opened. Inside her room was painted a shocking violet with a turquoise bedspread. It was a good size, with a private toilet off to the side, a fridge, a desk and a forty-inch TV currently displaying a wintry lake scene.

Ten years lay ahead like a most grand adventure.

The first day she passed in dizzy exploration, on a scavenger hunt to explore the realm allotted to her. She passed through a marine-themed zone, a farming bay where soy plants were budding in layered racks of soil trays under bright grow lights, an open store room laid out like a Kroger's, accommodation corridors with brick-fronts to make them look like tenement buildings, a bar, a gym, and even a swamp. It was like a really great college campus had mated with a theme park, art gallery and national park.

At the tail end of the third floor main corridor she found the forest, where huge fir trees grew to forty foot tall under ultraviolet lamps in a space half a football field in size. A guy in dungarees talked to her.

"They scrub the air," he said, smiling apologetically. "The lungs of the Habitat, really. Sorry, I can see you're new." He nodded at the manual in her hands, and extended his hand. "I'm Terry, bio-engineer."

"Salle," she said, shaking his hand, "psychologist."

"Ah, Mecklarin's wizards? I heard one of your crew got sick."

"I'm the replacement."  

He smiled. "Well, you need any help, just let me know. Looks like we're on a rotation together for the first year or so."

She smiled back. "Thanks, Terry."

He went back to tending freshly planted saplings in the black dirt.

She stopped at the bar for a drink. The walls were festooned with memorabilia, like a TGI Fridays. It was bizarre and terrific. They had chocolate milkshake and it was delicious.

At the end of her tour Salle sat at her desk, looked in the mirror and couldn't stop herself smiling. That morning she'd been in the outside world, going about her business, and now she was here, part of a dream to change the world.

She couldn't wait to get started.

* * *

Life in the Habitat never let up. Work began and she was already behind, constantly racing to catch up; memorizing the staff psych files, meeting with all 400 in her sector of the third floor, making additions and alterations to their files as best she could then feeding that back into Mecklarin's algorithms, taking on his feedback and slowly getting inducted into the research schedule under the floor's lead psychologist, respected Berkeley professor Richard Albright.

In her off hours, staggering around the Habitat with a head foggy and full with 400 people's childhood trauma, sexual preference and practices, genetic disposition and political affiliations, she dived into her sector's social life. Events came and went constantly; huge parties to celebrate each passing week, sports events, art exhibitions, craft beer tastings. Mini cliques formed then reshuffled under her guiding hand.