The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (19 page)

Here was Rocky, 28, a prodigy in psychographic profiling, but weak on the inside as it turned out, and prone to abusing whatever power was given to him. He'd abused three women before they'd had him sterilized. There was Amelia, 53, an expert botanist, whose knowledge about kick starting an agricultural boom would be absolutely essential, but whose spirit had been broken for years, and bore the slit marks of suicidal self-harm on her wrists.

They lived on because Salle made their bodies survive, like slaves, but their souls were already gone. Salle saw it all the time, she felt it, she caused it, but it was the only way. This was what happened when you took any meaningful carrot away, but more than that, this was what happened when you took away the possibility of being a real human. It was a great finding for Mecklarin to put in one of his books.

PEOPLE NEED PEOPLE. MAN CANNOT LIVE ON FOOD ALONE.

There was one carrot still, though. These volunteers were going to get it now, and for that she envied them. If this plan worked everyone in the Habitat would share it soon.

To see the sky.

The drones had no cameras pointing up. After Julio had blown up their tower they'd had no eyes above ground left, so they hadn't seen the sky for five years.

In such ways she justified everything. Make this sacrifice now and escape in six years time, in five, in four. It was either that or simply devolve into mad, murdering chaos. Everything was a trade-off in the name of survival.

Joseph opened the elevator door, admitting two alongside him. The doors closed and up they went. Salle felt the great shield in the earth above her revolve as Command opened it, trembling the whole Habitat and opening the single pinhole slot to the ladder. At once the whining spiked in her head.

This was the signal struggling to get through. They knew all about it now, a frequency beyond radio waves and down on an atomic level, called the 'Hydrogen Line'. It was a kind of quantum wavelength that went through everything, except the shield Lars' sponsors had built around the MARS3000 project at immense expense.

Lars had never known about it. The amount of things he hadn't known about turned out to be many, to his credit. He'd truly believed they'd funded his vision only to prep for Mars.

Now a tiny sliver in the shield had opened, and even though Julio's prisoners and her primary had to already be hundreds of miles away, the signal still crept through. She refused to acquiesce and hold her hands to her head though, like the two guards in the room with her were doing, though the pain dug at her thoughts horribly.

Moments later the elevator doors opened and she sent the next two through herself.

"I hope you rot," one of them said through the helmet, her voice sounding flat through the radio.

"I will," Salle replied, "have no doubt of that."

That was a good pep talk.

One more elevator ride and all six were up. It seemed to take forever for them to climb the ladder and emerge out into the world above, but at last the shield began to grind and revolve, coming back into position. When it finally blocked out the signal the relief was huge. One of the guards dropped to his knees. She marked his name.

Joseph came down in the elevator, emerging into an ugly mirror of her arrival in this place, the orange summer room, ten years ago. Every time she passed through it she remembered that first time, with Lars so confident and relaxed, his shirt slightly off his shoulder showing a chink of his chest, so very young.

It was a bad memory, now, because the hall was not what it had once been. The bright yellow ceiling was stained with damp and the cheery orange walls were scoured with greasy black soot and cement-colored pockmarks from explosions and gunfire during the revolution. Most of the TV windows were cracked and the one with the fan had been torn off completely so some angry soul could mangle the workings behind it.

There was no smell of flowers. The power supply was carefully controlled now, so even the few surviving screens were not switched on. A lot had changed in the revolution, as people tore up a Habitat they'd come to hate and believed they were soon leaving forever. They broke transformers, tore out wiring and damaged things that couldn't be fixed. The nuclear plant powering everything still hummed on, like a nuclear submarine, but their access to it had been forever limited.

"Go back to Command and watch them," she told Joseph. "You know the drill. Ding them if they step out of line. Call me if anything happens. I'm going to take a walk."

He saluted, as ever, and as ever she wondered if it was passive aggression. She didn't have files on the command staff like she did on those in the Habitat. Their experience of life underground had been very different from the scientists; forced to watch as three thousand people only thirty yards away had the time of their lives in a delightful environment stacked with abundance, while they lived off hard-tack biscuits, space food and huddled in damp, cold concrete boxes.

It was odd thinking that led to that. Whoever funded the whole affair, who'd purchased the primary and built a hydrogen line shield from whoever manufactured such things, had decided the command staff of thirty didn't need luxury.

Maybe they'd been right. Telling them the truth from the off made a huge difference. Either that or they'd just selected the most fatalistic, disconnected people available. They didn't need them for their great skills or genetics, only to run out the clock and keep an eye on the people who mattered.

Joseph went back up in the lift. Salle left the orange hall by the door into the Habitat.

In the red corridor outside some efforts had been made at repair and decorations. She still encouraged crafting and taking pride in the environment, but of course it was different now. The pieces of art on the walls weren't flights of silly whimsy but brutalist works of propaganda touting her regime. The people she passed kept their heads down, well aware she could have them executed or tossed into solitary on a whim.

It was the kind of power she hated having, the opposite of everything Lars had taught, but it was necessary. Talk softly and carry a big stick. It was the only thing that worked.

The bar at the end had been converted into the lab where they made the suits. It was extraordinarily complex science, reverse-engineering the shield. It helped that they had some of the greatest minds of particle physics, engineering and mathematics locked up together.

She gave them treats of good food and alcohol when they worked well. She shunted power to their TV screens to display the sky, or movies, or whatever they wanted. She ran them like gears in a clock, and they followed the rules, because there was no other choice.

Gideon was in the 'clean' fabrication lab, a white space of shiny plastic with suction fans cleaning out the tiniest particles of dust. He was tidying up the work benches, and looked down as she approached. He was a short man, wearing glasses bound together with duct tape and a sad little cowlick down his forehead. Two girlfriends his whole life, that's what she knew about him, plus an interest in breeding mice.

"Commander," he said.

"Is the seventh suit ready?" she asked.

"Yes. Concealed from Joseph. I have it here."

"Keep it. I'll let you know."

He nodded, starting to sweat now. She had that effect on men.

Salle walked back down the red corridor and took the stairs heading down. People went by carrying bags of soil, fresh potatoes, a sack of powdered milk, a coil of copper wiring. The Habitat was always on the move now just maintaining itself. A lot had been destroyed in the revolution, including large swathes of their seed stock and supplies.

It got darker and damper as she went deeper. Atmospheric controls like sump pumps and dehumidifiers were a power luxury that ranked behind keeping the farm grow lights, irrigation and heating on. Eating took priority over comfort, and now half her genius scientists worked at some menial laboring task just so they could eat.

On the second floor she found her old room. Cameras watched many hallways, as ever, but not here. She'd had them removed. 345C. Inside it was pleasant still, purple walls and velvet curtains, very different from her cell in Command. The TV worked, a luxury she allowed herself on the rare instances she visited, and she turned it on. It showed a view out over the ocean, once no more than a dull but calming screensaver. Now it helped keep her going.

In this room she'd grown to love Lars Mecklarin deeply. Not a day went by that she didn't think of his last moment in the control room, and the last thing he said to her.

"Think kindly of me."

She had never quite figured out how that made her feel. Angry, yes. Pitying. On some level, understanding. He'd been the best amongst them, he'd seen the bright side in humanity and tried to nurture it. His view that all humans were just complex machines wasn't reductive, it was constructive; something to build on. It wasn't his fault they'd lied to him, and sometimes she thought he'd made the right choice in committing suicide.

Lying on the bed, she picked up her copy of Amo's comic. It wasn't printed on the right kind of paper nor was it bound well, because every page was a screenshot taken from the agent's copy, harvested from the long days and nights he'd parade around his shitty little hallway surrounded by his torture victims, holding up Amo's work and scorning it.

God, she'd hated him. Julio. Nothing had made her happier than to see his head torn off by Cerulean, except that it meant all the years of suffering he'd caused were for nothing. For years she'd sat in the control room alone with all her staff sent out, watching him rape, torture and enslave innocent people. It was sick, but surely the ends justified the means.

Surely?

Reading Amo's comic, for a time she could dream. For him suicide wasn't a selfish act, but a selfless one. He died for his sins, so the zombies might live on. She read and reread the pages again and again, as ever hoping something in it might bring resolve to the choice she'd faced for six years.

Kill herself, or not. Kill her people, or not. Either one might be the right thing to do. When did dignity fade away completely and survival become worthless? She hardly knew what were they surviving for now.

Reading the comic was a pleasant fantasy. She looked out her TV window and dreamed she was in Amo's shoes. She tried to imagine him in hers, and how he would fare in this situation. Would he kill himself, like Lars? Would he find a way to raise her people up with hope?

Her radio buzzed.

"They found a vehicle," Joseph said. "It runs. Commander, it's snowing again up there. It's beautiful."

She didn't care. The real world wasn't as real as Amo's world.

"Send them. They drive without rest."

"Yes, sir."

He hung up. Salle lay back and looked up at her ceiling.

Now she had to kill Amo, along with all his bright, happy people. It had been coming for years. It was the strangest thing.

* * *

In a day the six caught up to the primary near Akron, Ohio.

Salle stood at her command post in the control hall, watching it play out in split-screen. On the left was video from their cameras, a road and blue sky and the primary's running body ahead, framed by the windshield of their stolen Jeep as it gave chase. On the right was a GPS map showing the demon's blue dot and their red dots nearly overlapping.

The primary didn't see them or sense them. The suits made them invisible.

For twenty hours they'd been closing in, and already they were losing their minds. The suits' hydrogen line defenses were imperfect, letting just enough of the signal through to slowly turn their minds to jelly.

"You'll be the advance party," she'd told them. "You'll go ahead of the primary and prepare his way."

Lies.

"They're on him," Joseph said. "Now's the time."

She took over the controls. The command was keyed to a red box; one click of the mouse to unlock, one to activate. It was far less than the worst things she'd done. She took a moment to enjoy the view through the windshield of the racing Jeep; trees and clouds and such green grass.

"Pull over," she ordered, and the message relayed directly into their helmets. The Jeep slowed and stopped. The primary ran on. "Step out of the Jeep," she said, and they did, where they wandered aimlessly across the road.

It was time to betray them.

She clicked the mouse twice, and six tiny clasps on all six helmets blew off in six tiny explosions. The helmets tumbled open, air rushed in and the signal transformed the bodies inside in seconds.

Salle watched the change on the live feed from a camera mounted on the Jeep. Their helmets lolled down their backs, clanking off their oxygen tanks and battery packs. Their faces paled in fast succession, like lights blinking on. Their eyes sparked to a glowing white.

Up ahead the primary stopped. It was reading them now.

It came back. It hit the first and lifted him with ease, and Salle looked away. She watched the sky as six jaws broke, as six transformations happened, until seven of them stood on the road, echoed by seven blue dots on the map. One of them looked back at the camera, sending a chill through Salle's chest, then they all ran.

"Was he looking at you or at me?" Joseph asked quietly. A joke.

Salle left the control room without answering. Now they could only wait.

11. HIT

Seven demons are coming and we don't stand a chance.

I scan the land ahead hungrily, hoping for something that isn't there. Distant red rock mountains encircle us, closed within a wide red desert plain of red dust, spartan cacti and spreading Pinyon pines.

It's like a trap. I scan the satellite map but the next turn-off south isn't for fifty miles, and there's no way we can stay ahead of them riding rough in RVs across the desert scrub. We can't use the buildings or any other feature to our advantage, all we can do is crash ahead like a battering ram.