The Last (Zombie Ocean 1) by Michael John Grist
That would help.
I pull up about eight more cars to block 23rd to the east where it meets 3rd Avenue. These will serve as ballast for when I get another bus, backing it up. I notice I've left my patrol car inside the barricade, but it doesn't matter now. My lime green moped is still there too, though it's not green anymore, and it's been knocked on its side and crushed by countless feet. There are thick mucusy strands of something glistening around it, like organic padlock chains. Entrails?
This whole charnel pit stinks of barbeque and offal. This was a mistake.
I climb out of the cesspit over my barricade of cars, boost another car with its key in the ignition, and drive off looking for a bus. I see floating lost zombies and swerve to hit them. Doing this disgusts me, but I can't stop myself. They rattle up the hood, into the glass and over the roof. When the windscreen cracks so badly that I can't see, I get another car. I find a bus somewhere around 37th, and drive it back, crunching the crawlers beneath its ten-ton frame. All of these are mistakes but I can't stop making them. It's like I'm not myself, and all I can do is kill.
I pull the bus up flush along to the cars and handbrake it.
It's still not enough. Perhaps they can push them back. Perhaps they can climb over. I need more buses. I know where to find them.
* * *
The Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown feels like a dungeon, dark and dingy once I'm through the glass vestibule with its pop-red modern art. I use one of my stolen flashlights to illuminate my way. No floaters come for me, as it's empty inside. I walk through the massive dark interior, bigger even than the darkness, with only my footsteps as company. Right about now I'd talk to Io, if she still worked. What would I say?
Forgive me father for I have sinned.
I smash into a bus at stop C22, where I once took a trip up to summer camp in Boston. I was a camp counselor back then, working with at-risk kids from the inner city. I met a friend from Iowa State University by chance, sitting on a railing waiting for his Greyhound going west. It was bizarre. We talked about how easy it was to get lost in the bus terminal's dark nether halls, and what we both missed about college. We agreed to catch up online, but we never bothered. His bus came and we went our separate ways.
A different world, now.
There is no key in the bus. Of course not, that would be too easy. There are a few sleepy floaters though, rousing like this is finally their stop.
I leave them. I get out. I wander around the maze of buses for a while, feeling lost. Is this the nightmare, I wonder, or the reality? One of the ocean pops up around the edge of the bus alley I'm walking in, and I jab him hard in the throat with the sharp end of the iron. He falls to the ground. I notice as I step over him, he's wearing the gray uniform of a bus driver.
There must be a room where they keep all the keys. It would be an office for the drivers, probably protected by a pass card, some kind of electronic lock that would be fixed solid now, forever. I'll never find it before nightfall for sure.
I follow the buses to the exit. Light floods around me, shaping the mouth of this concrete nether-hall with black diesel smoke accretions. I feel sick at myself. I'm already tired of smashing my way into things.
I smash into a Greyhound bus sitting in the exit, which must've stopped on its way out. The keys are in it. I rev it up and drive. It bullies its way roughly down 8th Avenue, plowing other road users aside. On 23rd I turn left and pull it up across the gap where I slotted the car in. I work it back and forth until the flank grinds hard against the brick face of a Lush soap shop, knocking over a lamp-post and striking sparks off the other bus and car. This is my mortar. I get out and look up at my new wall.
It is impregnable. At first I'm not even sure how I'm going to climb it. Then I remember. I smash a few windows, clear the glass, and climb up them. Atop the bus I look back. My area is clear of floaters still, and grossly filthy still. A few more buses will do it.
I do the run to Port Authority on 41st and 8th three more times, swapping a stolen car nearby for a bus each time for the trip back. On the last trip back I stop off at the tech store on 44th street and pick twenty laptop batteries off the dark shelves, plus headphones and immersion goggles. I stop at a clothes store and pick up some clothes. I stop at a bed store and pick up sheets and a few duvets.
I don't have a gun. I don't want one now.
I climb back in over my bus-blockades, each two thick now. I have the whole street now, and it's disgusting. I traipse through the treacle of burnt bodies like an alien landscape, numb and barely in control of my legs. Across the street there's a liquor shop and I pick up a bottle of whiskey. I pick up another one. I carry all my stuff to Sir Clowdesley and look inside.
A few floaters mill in there. It stinks sourly, like old vomit and charcoal that's been pissed on. I see my new bedding has been trailing in the black and I let it drop. I drop all this shit except the batteries in their shopping basket and the whiskeys. I climb in.
The floaters come for me. I hit them in the brains. They must be dizzy, because they're slow. They let me come in, and up in the library I find my nest, and my cache of guns spread around the floor.
I shoot them in the throats. I go back to my shitty sofa and stuff tissue paper up my nose to block out the stink. A breeze carries it in from the street and circulates it.
I boot up my laptop from my pack. I get the spare batteries on standby. I get out the USBs and boot up the darkness. I plug in my goggles, my noise-canceling earphones, and escape.
If they come for me, I don't care. I can't do this anymore. What I've done today is already unforgivable, a kind of genocide. The fulfillment center peels open before me. Here everything is simple, there are shelves to walk like city blocks and there are goods I need to collect like guns and buses.
I laugh. It's all the same. I get a mouthful of the stench of what I've done. I run on through the darkness while tears run down my eyes and hang in the goggle-cups, obscuring the screen. I do what I'm told. I drink some whiskey and I do what I'm told.
11. THE DARKNESS
The fulfillment center is dark and calm. I go round and round in circles for hours, picking up junk and delivering junk, bringing some measure of reality and routine back to my existence. I could even imagine I'll bump into Cerulean soon. We'll run together. I'll go to bed in my Mott Haven flat, and the next day I'll wake up looking forward to my trip to Sir Clowdesley, because the barista called Lara's on shift.
It's a dream that makes me sound like a stalker. I'm in Sir Clowdesley now, waiting for her. It doesn't smell of lovely roasted coffee anymore.
I go to Blucy at the print-on-demand machines. She runs through her set script, talking about her books, selling me on Deepcraft, things like that. I watch as Hank and the others go by, endlessly grinding for loot in the darkness' monster-less dungeon.
Hours pass into the night. At some point I sleep with the goggles still on. When I wake up the laptop battery is dead. The goggles have dug sharp creases into the skin around my eyes. I don't want to take them off, but just for a few moments I must.
Sir Clowdesley's walls, ceiling and floor are streaked with black grime. Light creeps in around the tumbled blackboards and through cracked windows. Chairs and tables have been scattered everywhere. One of the floaters is actually lying dead near my feet. I didn't notice that.
I get up and drag it by the feet to the stairs, where I tip it down. There are four other bodies there, each lying in a dark bloodstain in a pool of hot spring light, smeared with the ashy grease of their fellows.
I go to the toilet in the toilets off the stairwell. The water flushes for what I expect will be the last time. There'll be no water pressure any more to fill the cisterns. I open the door into the inner donut and look out. There's a deep blue sky, and the air here is so fresh it burns my lungs. I feel like a subterranean thing peering for the first time into the light.
It isn't for me.
I go back to my sofa.
USB pack, wrapped in saran plastic, and unfold them. I plug the first in and peruse the files. It's all prepper stuff, but for the file labeled 'Cerulean'.
I take a long fortifying slug of whiskey, then I open the file. Hit me with it all. I find the code for a new non-player character in the mod file, and preview it. Of course it's Cerulean, his image and a coded text file. I find myself blinking back boozy tears. I boot up the center, slip my goggles back into their grooves in my face, and install him into the mod.
There he is, just as always, a green and blue parrot with a pirate on his shoulder. Immediately he starts walking away, down the long halls, and I follow him. I try to raise him with a text interaction, but he's not interested. He's got a program. He's not even looking at his diviner.
Just to see him brings home the reality. I'll never talk to my friend again.
He turns left at Blucy, walks straight by the supervisor who's making marks on his notepad, then stops at an aisle in the shelving. I see some new items there, they look like comics.
"Hey Amo," Cerulean says. The text bubble floats above his head. My hearts turns over in my chest.
"Hey Cerulean," I type back.
"I made this for you," he says. His parrot picks up one of the comics and holds it out. "It's good work. It means something."
I take the comic and bring it up across my screen, then laugh aloud, in the real world. It is a digital version of my own comic, Zombies of New York. It is completely fitting. I leaf through the pages, every single panel and cell I made in the last six months present and correct.
"I hope you don't mind," he says. "I just want you to know I'm proud. If anyone deserves to survive a real zombie apocalypse, it's you. You have the right kind of empathy."
I laugh again, this one more like a sob. Nothing I've done so far has been empathetic. I've only been brutal and cruel, and making excuses for the reason why doesn't mean shit. It is a weakness in me still.
"You might not believe that now," Cerulean says, as if he can hear me scoffing. "But you will. I've seen it, you know? I saw things in my coma too. If you're even alive, and you ever see this message, you'll understand, or you'll come to. Because these zombies are you and me, Amo. Did you know that? Yes/No?"
I recognize this question as the start of a simple decision tree. We programmed them into our non-player characters, to give them some diversity in their scripts. I type, "No."
"You don't? Think about it. Did you see any photos of yourself in your coma? Probably not. Did they tell you any of the weird stuff you did? Probably not. Do you know I went gray for a month, like a dead man? My eyes went white, like I had glaucoma. I was up and sleepwalking, following people. They probably didn't tell you any of that, because it's too damn freaky. My mother told me. It sounds like a zombie though, doesn't it?"
"Yes/No," he offers.
"No."
Cerulean flips me the bird. This is one of his jokes, a bird flipping the bird. I can't stop myself laughing again, through my tears.
"Use your head, Amo. Think things through. I'm here lying in my cripple bed, dreaming you're alive. Can you imagine what things will be like if you are? It's beautiful. It means I'm not alone, which means you're not either. I don't feel the twinges anymore. If it wasn't for my mom and her friends banging on the door upstairs, I could go out in the world and I'd be fine. I'm cured! Do you think that's a coincidence, the same day the zombie apocalypse hits the whole world? Yes/No?"
"Shut up, Cerulean," I type.
The parrot waits. His Yes/No dialog clicks up again. He'll have all the patience in the world, now. I wonder how far down the decision tree he planned this interaction, when he was lying in his bed listening to the Skype call to me ring out, with his mother thumping overhead. What did that feel like, to finally be free and know that it could only last for hours?
Now I'm crying again.
"Yes," I type. It's just a coincidence.
"Yes? Pull your shit together, Amo. You're being willfully blind. We started this thing, or it started with us, don't you see that? Whatever hit us a year ago primed us and the world. It's obvious, don't you think? We became the proto-zombies, even the incubators for this infection. We went gray, we got white eyes, we wandered. But we were cared for, because there were only a handful of us, and they brought us back. What if that's what's happening out there, now? We seeded this apocalypse. I don't have time to offer a Yes/No now, Amo. You've just got to be with me on this, because the next one is a big one."
He goes quiet.
"What?" I type.
Thirty infuriating seconds pass.
"Are you ready?" he asks.
"For shit's sake, Cerulean!" I shout in Sir Clowdesley. "Tell me."
"Then consider this. Your doctor warned you never to have sex. He said it might cause something worse. Do you remember that? I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that is what happened with you and Lara. You are a charming bastard. You had your date, you took her home, and the earth moved forever. Whatever chemical buttons that act pushed in you, it also triggered the world's zombification. The infection began in New York, Amo, I gathered that much from the first blush of its spread. It went everywhere after that in hours, across the globe faster than any wind vector could carry it. People were primed to a wavelength, it has to have been something like that, because they were all pre-infected, and you were the trigger. You and Lara got down, and you birthed this new race."
He goes quiet. I lie on my filthy grime-smeared sofa and stare at an image on two goggle-vision screens, while the last cold hard chunk of text bobs above his parrot head.
What the?
"Amo," he types. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"
I stare. I caused this, he's saying? I caused this by having sex? It's true the doctor told me to masturbate clinically, to never indulge in romance, and I did exactly as he asked until Lara, and then…
Then I killed the whole shitting world?
"Amo," he types again. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"
I want to punch his stupid bird face. I want to burn myself to the ground.
"No," I type.
"Are you listening, Yes/No?"
"No!"
"Are you listening, Yes/No?"
"Yes, goddammit, yes Cerulean you bastard!"
"Yes, so get over yourself. Get over yourself Amo. You cannot for one second feel guilt over this. You died multiple times in a coma. You spent a miserable year running around in a fake dark cave with a cripple. That it was you who first reached out of your confinement means not a damn thing. If it hadn't been you, it would have been one of the others. There must be others, Amo; it can't only be you and me. The chances of only us finding each other are infinitesimal. There must be hundreds like us, out there somewhere. Perhaps some of them have been in comas this whole time, and now they just woke up. Have you thought about that? Think about that.
"And of those hundreds, any one of them might have recovered sufficiently to have sex, and thus trigger the end. But none of them did, because none of them are as defiant as you. Do you understand that? You were brave, Amo! That's human. You were willing to risk dying just to live a little, you chose man not mouse, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. There is no guilt here; you had no conception of this godforsaken outcome.
"Now, your duty is clear. Your people are out there, all the lost ones who never found each other and have no idea what's going on. They're going to need guidance. They'll need a leader. They'll be lonely and broken, like I was when I found your center. You have to do what you did for me, for all of them. Do you understand? Yes/No?"
I stare at the block of text. The Yes/No tag repeats insistently, refreshing once a minute. Steadily it pushes his speech off the screen. This was Cerulean. He isn't here, but that doesn't change anything. He was my friend, and I won't disrespect that even if I don't believe or agree with him.
"Yes," I type eventually.
"Good. I'm glad. I can die happily, knowing you're out there doing what you can, in the full light of the truth. You're a good man, Amo, you'll be a great man, and if there's any way to save these infected millions, or to alleviate their suffering, I know you'll find it, just like you did for me. I know you'll die trying if you have to, and no one could ask for more than that."
I look at his damn bird. It looks glassily at me.
"Goodbye Amo. Good luck."
The parrot doesn't disappear or fade, it just stops talking. Its diviner blinks, and it starts walking away. I watch it go.
Now it's just a non-player character like the others, a true ghost in the darkness. It passed along its message, one it carried across the vast distances between this broken world and the world when it was still on the cusp, and now it's for me to carry onward.
It bows me. I crumple beneath it.
I tear off the goggles and drink.
* * *
I rouse in the evening looking out over 4th avenue, sitting atop one of my Greyhound barricades with my legs dangling like a child's over the side. The ocean spreads gray and white before me, its arms reaching up like the fins of fish, its eyes glowing white like the lantern-antennae on those hideous deep-sea fishes that lure other fish in.
Cannibals.
I swig the whiskey, which I hate. I pour a little out for the floaters to enjoy, on their faces and heads.
"I'm not going to burn you," I slur at them. "Don't worry."
They wave and drift like fronds of seaweed in the water, like groupies holding up their lighters at a stage. Their fingers sometimes plink against my shoes, tickling me gently.
I drink and think about Cerulean and Lara. I wonder how my parents died. I think about the cosmic sex that sent a signal out that somehow caused this.
"Did you know?" I ask the bodies below. "Did you feel it? Do you feel it now?"
They grope and waggle like anemone fronds. I pour the rest of the bottle on the head of an obese man wearing a sodden brown velour training top. As the liquor splashes he lifts his face and I get it in his mouth.