The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (6 page)

I feel just as translucent, like I've been pumped full of helium. I'm a big balloon and above me hang a dozen razor sharp knives waiting to drop.

I walk. It's hot in the sun but the sea breeze helps take the edge off. Somewhere to the east, God knows how far, there's a red demon running my way.

The walkie at my side buzzes. It's fair enough, if I were Lara or Anna or any of them I'd be buzzing me too. But I'm not them, I'm me, and ultimately it falls on my head. I bring the insistent device up and press the master button to broadcast to them all.

"We're meeting at noon in the Theater, folks. Feargal and Chantelle, bring your teams down for now, there's no immediate threat. Everyone hydrate, get some food, and I'll see you in screen five." After that I switch the walkie off.

It probably isn't chaos in the lobby. The community is orderly and organized, and nobody but Lara, Anna and I heard Peters' story. Perhaps some others caught it too, or heard snippets from some of the other survivors, but not many.

They'll talk, though. I would.

I walk while the knives loom menacingly overhead, juggling in slow circles. Until now the demons were a bizarre story from Mongolia. Cerulean's loss was awful but manageable. Julio was dead and gone.

What a joke.

I find myself standing in front of an old surf bar. The front wooden shutters were once painted black, with bright reggae figures dancing atop them like the silhouettes from the Apple iPod ads. I reach out and touch the faded, brittle wood, and wonder who I might be in that world now.

A famous comic artist, perhaps. An editor. Maybe I would have graduated to storyboarding for TV shows.

I sigh and look at the walkie by my side. I should call Lara, my wife. She'll have ideas and suggestions, she'll offer support, she'll do what she can. But it won't help with this. I know it instinctively.

I keep walking. At this point it's really a choice about how much misery I can take before I break. I could call Anna and she might understand, but that wouldn't be fair. The things I've done, I need to face on my own.

My apartment building is only one block over from the Theater, so I sneak in via the back entrance, past the dried-up pool and through a garden of moderately well-kept Matilija poppies that look like overcooked eggs, husky purple Lemonade berry and dying vermilion California fuchsia set over a bed of yellow parched grass. Every now and then Lara gets a hunger for gardening and she'll plant up some lovely designs, only to remember that LA is basically a drought-zone these days, and we just don't have the water to spare, leaving them all to die.

The apartment building is a freshly repaired white stucco block one street back from the beach, where the worst of the ocean spray doesn't reach. It probably cost a thousand dollars a week to rent, back in the day. Every year now we have to redo the exterior plaster or cracks develop and the whole façade would peel off the brick and timber frame.

I should go see my kids instead of this, I know, but I'd be useless to them now, floating like a crack addict through the ruins of a life. Reality feels paper-thin around me, like if I reached out with a finger I could poke big wet holes in it. I almost expect a twinge to settle across my brain and lay me up in bed, taking me back to the beginning in my Mott Haven tenement in New York, with the first zombies breathing loudly outside and me standing there while they hammer at the door below, not knowing what to do.

Cerulean saved me then, so I do as he once told me: I hole up. I creep in and up the stairs, into our bedroom where I hunker down, ridiculously, in the closet.

With the doors shut it's stiflingly hot, sitting on carpet with Lara's dresses hanging down and tickling my head, but it's no worse than the survivors of Maine have been through, so I can manage. I sit up against a beanbag in the dark, slide my laptop onto my lap, and lower the immersion goggles onto my head.

The Deepcraft boot screen comes up, familiar still though I haven't been here much in the last few years, and I select the Yangtze darkness. It unfolds around me; a warehouse full of digital goods I built myself, based on the real fulfillment center I worked at in Iowa shortly after my coma. Rows and rows of plain metal shelving stretch into the darkness like a very boring maze, stacked with endless supplies of pixelated consumer products.

I fumble the headphones into my ears, blocking out any ambient California sound and replacing it with the cool and quiet of an Iowa nightshift. Already I feel myself calming down as this place works the magic it always had. It saved me a hundred times before, back when the post-coma twinges were triggered by any sudden movement, any bright color, anything too strange and new. Also it saved Cerulean.

I see him now, a little way down from me. His ghostly avatar is a bright blue parrot with a little pirate on its shoulder, wandering toward me with a diviner in its feathery hand.

Emotion wells up in me like a tide, and I start to cry. It hits and I can't fight it, crying until the cups of the immersion goggles fill up and I have to pull them away from my cheeks so the saltwater can run down.

Cerulean walks up to me and stops, blurry through my fogged-up lenses, and I can't do anything but experience this god-awful wave of sadness.

"Hello, Amo," he says, a speech bubble popping up above his head.

"Goddammit, Cerulean," I mutter through my tears, in my closet, "you son of a bitch."

His parrot avatar stands a moment longer, then walks on by, following the click and signal of his diviner, taking him to collect mushrooms that glitch between shelves, robotic cocktail servers, a thirty-foot-long plastic slip-and-slide.

"Goddammit," I whisper.

The knives spiral overhead, promising guilt, pain and a sadness that cuts to the bone. I stop myself crying and glare up at them, because I'm here now and I need to get through. In their reflections I see Julio's bunker in my mind, sketched like panels in a comic strip. There are tortured bodies hanging by the wrists and Cerulean is striding from one to the next on bright red legs, breaking them free. The pages flash by as though someone's riffling through them, conjoining the images into a staccato film. Here he's a hero again, saving them like he saved me before.

"Goddammit," I curse for the third time. More knives twinkle, bringing home the stink and fear of the van as the survivors fled west across the country, not knowing how far the demon was behind them, not trusting what lay ahead. All my fault. In a very real sense I put them there, for all the things I did or didn't do.

I shake off the images and look to the next knife. There's plenty more, dating back the full ten years. At the same time I rub my eyes and get the tears under control. Now I do have a twinge in my head, like a toddler making himself sick with crying.

I couldn't break down like this in the lobby. The community's faith in me is a tool I can't afford to dull through such displays of weakness. We're going to need all the resources we have to survive.

In the darkness Hank walks by. Tall Hank, the lady's man. Above his head a bubble pops up explaining the best way to get red wine out of a carpet. I frown at his serious face. I know I programmed him with pick-up routines a long time ago, but did I accidentally copy-paste this in by mistake?

He goes on.

I get my crying mostly under control and start my avatar walking. In the cool of the Yangtze warehouse I chase Cerulean. When I have him in sight, a bobbing blue parrot, I click the button for tandem work, sending a message that floats above his head.

SYNC DIVINERS?

His avatar accepts and stops while I catch up.

DIVINERS SYNCED

A fresh shopping list of randomly generated purchases pops up at the side of the screen. Years ago, Cerulean and I spent hours doing this together. We'd walk and talk through the twinges, sharing snippets of our lives when we were able. It was thanks to him I had the strength to leave my New York apartment, and thanks to him I got back into drawing zombies, and thanks to him I had the balls to invite Lara for dinner.

"How are you, Amo?" he asks as I draw level, words above his head that are part of a pre-designed script from years ago, that I last read hunkered down in Sir Clowdesley at the time, Lara's old coffee shop on 23
^rd
Street in Manhattan, where I'd hoped to find her. He'd prepared a big info dump for me, about how I had probably caused the zombie apocalypse but I shouldn't feel bad about it.

That script's still in there somewhere. I could call it up but I don't want to. This is the Cerulean I need to see.

"Pretty damn bad, man," I type. "You're dead."

He has basic AI, just like the personal assistant Io in my phone, so he can reply.

"Dead?"

"Yeah. It's my fault."

We walk. The diviner has us heading for a plastic child's ray gun.

"How is it your fault?"

"I let Julio go," I type. "I let the gun turret go. I let you go. I've been screwing up since the start."

We round a corner.

"That sounds tough," he says.

"Yeah it's pretty damn tough. It sucks."

"Life sucks," he answers, "and then you die."

We come down the side of the warehouse past the print-on-demand machines, where the sound of them milling paper becomes a steady grumble. Blucy's there, her bright mop of blue hair glowing under the work lamps, and she waves as we go by.

"Hi, Amo," say the words in her bubble.

Cerulean and I collect the ray gun together. A single point rolls up on the side of my screen like a cashier's dial. Next up is a set of model train tracks.

"You suffered," I type, which gets me crying again. "I couldn't protect you."

"I don't need protection," the parrot says. "I'm safe here. All the zombies are turned off."

I chuckle through my tears. It's true; I turned all the Deepcraft threats off as part of my twinge-avoidance. No thrills, no spills, no zombie kills.

"Well they're turned on out here. There's a demon running across America toward us. There's a bunker full of people who want us dead. What can I do about that?"

"It's safe here, Amo," he insists. "The threats are off."

This is the limitation of talking to an AI. It doesn't really respond, not to anything more than key words and basic structures, and it never will again because in truth, the real Cerulean is dead.

"I love you, man," I type, and the words pop up over my head in a comical bubble. My eyes mist over. "I'm sorry for what happened. I'm really, really sorry."

I click to unsync diviners before he can say anything else, dropping the tether between us and stopping my avatar. The parrot keeps on walking.

"Bye, Amo," he says over his shoulder. "Come visit us again soon."

I boot out and come up gasping for air in the hot cupboard. The computer is baking on my lap and I slide it to the side, pulling off the goggles and ear buds. My best friend is dead and it's my fault. I killed Cerulean as surely as if I'd pulled the trigger myself.

Now I'm supposed to give a PowerPoint presentation to my people in less than an hour.

Dammit. I grind my knuckles into my weepy eyes. I need to get a grip, though I don't know what to get a grip on. The knives are still spiraling overhead, of death and betrayal and the full weight of all my mistakes. I always thought I was building a civilized world, but perhaps I've just fated everyone I love to death. I can't trust my own judgment at all.

I should call Lara, but no love and support can cut through this. She hasn't done the things I've done; she never walked right up to the edge and threw herself over like I did, like Cerulean did, like Anna did too. But I can't put this on Anna, I can't put this anywhere, I just have to try and suck it down to get through.

I look up at the knives and steel myself. I won't be any use to anyone until I figure this out, so let the bastards fall.

PAST

4. 10 YEARS EARLIER

Without Google searching was hard.

I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to it ten years back, what with a new world to build and a country's worth of isolated survivors to unite. First up on the docket was more cairns, essentially dropping big signposts for New LA in America's major cities, but I couldn't get to that until either Cerulean and Anna came back from their month-long exile in San Francisco, or I found a way to trust Julio. I'd been putting off tackling Julio for a week, while he recuperated from the beating Cerulean administered.

Julio, ah, what a dick. What kind of man threatens little girls?

"Perverts," Lara said one night, lying on the Chinese Theater rooftop awning and looking out over the ocean, about a week after Cerulean left on his exile. White blobs on the waves were either breakers coming in or zombie heads marching out into the deep. "Maybe you should have let Cerulean beat him to death."

I frowned at her as she took another pull on her Bud. "That's not what you said at the time. You were horrified at all the blood, if I remember rightly."

She sighed. "That was before playing nursemaid and prison guard to him all the time. The guy is an ass. This silent warrior shtick he has, acting like he's so threatening, staring at me while he's sucking down baby food through a straw, it's BS."

I leaned back and sucked in the hot, salty air. It was true, Julio presented a problem. Every day Cynthia went off to plow her golf course fields off Federation Drive, Masako and Jake sometimes went with her and sometimes did plumbing or painted arrows on the Chinese Theater road approach, and Lara and I were left to take turns watching over Julio.

We couldn't chain him up because that would just fuel any resentments he held. We had to rehabilitate him, which was infinitely harder.

"He's about ready to pop," Lara said, crunching on potato chips between sips. "Get up, go get himself a gun."