The Last (Zombie Ocean 1) by Michael John Grist
I pass from Pennsylvania to Ohio, watching the landscape change. I see a few Boston Markets interspersed amongst the Burger Kings and McDonalds. There are more Kroger's, for some reason. I find myself wandering through a J. C. Penny, I don't know why. I blast the dust out of floaters that lap near. I pick out a new pair of jeans and put them on. No rips, they feel good.
There are signs for Pittsburgh, signs for Akron. Somewhere in the distance Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago pass me by. I'm through Ohio to Indiana, bound for Illinois.
I'm in a daze. I follow the road like a train track, my music off now. I don't leave any of the cairns I'd planned to. I just can't, it seems so pointless. Nobody will see. At times at photos of the giant 'f' I left in New York, trying to decide if this is a good thing or if it just puts me in the same category as poor wilted Sophia.
I keep her student ID to torture myself with. She is pinned to the JCB cab. I start to masturbate to her image at night, lying in my battle-tank and staring into her eyes and dreaming of her touch, her voice, of teasing her about her kiddie's cereal while she moans for me, for me.
Each time I finish I feel pathetic. I am pathetic. I push her picture far away, like I've sinned against her and myself. I go to sleep mired in guilt, and when I wake I have to climb through it just to breathe. I see my failure everywhere.
I get out my M320 and start to blow things up; billboards at first, then chain restaurants. They crunch and explode, sending bin doors, deep fat fryers and bright plastic chairs flying out in beautiful sprays. These can be my cairns. Let them read like Braille across the country, a story of loneliness and loss. I can only be honest.
I make slow progress, so much it feels like a crawl. I am constantly nudging other vehicles out of the way, stopping to shoot floaters or clear the backlog behind the delivery truck. I stop too much. I can only drive at the speed of the convoy. Once I come upon a herd of the ocean near South Bend, tramping across the landscape from north to south like a river, and I wonder where they're going. Then I rev the earthmover and drive through them.
I kill hundreds, probably. They are like a bad storm raging around me, hammering at every inch of my convoy, beating for a way in. I turn the music up to make them go crazy. I consider getting to the top of the battle-tank and letting rip into their ranks with my M240s, but I'm beyond that now. I'm not in this to get revenge or cause pain.
I just need to get through. I won't give up like Sophia, but I can't promise what I'll do when I reach the West Coast. Maybe I'll swing there too, last mayor of America taking in the view.
I rumble over bridges and down a hundred Main Streets, through little towns cored by the move to Yangtze same-day delivery drones. As I swing through Indiana, I remember why my country is so religious. The vast empty expanses of flat overgrown cornfields spread to either side like endless yellow skies, and the loneliness here is palpable. Maybe I too can sense god, in these fields and this growth.
I enter Iowa on a Thursday, at 9:56 in the morning. I keep my phone charged with batteries and solar rechargers. Without it I would have no idea of the date, but Io remembers. This is my land, my home state. The mega-church thirty miles past the border is still there, sprawling like a holiday resort; the mass capitalization of faith and loneliness. I consider going in and alternately praying or shooting up the place.
I do neither. I'm like flat soda left out in the sun. I eat sugary cereal and don't taste it. I drive. After Des Moines I pull off I-80, bound for the little town I come from, where my parents may be even now; Creston. I pull in a day later, wondering if this experience will defeat me, like Sophia.
The neighborhood is unchanged, bar nature growing out of control. I pull up to the house, typical Americana; a swing on the sheltered porch, mosquito nets on the doors and windows, woodwork painted pale lime and white. My folks don't actually have a white picket fence, but the neighbor Mr. Connors does.
The grass is out of control in the front lawn. Dad loved his John Deere and would never have abided that. Just seeing this makes me start to cry. Of course I know they're both dead already, but seeing this damn grass makes it real. Maybe coming here was a mistake.
I start up the music and get out, drawing a few floaters to the truck. I trail the shotgun barrel noisily behind me, scraping a line up the concrete path, then stop at the door. I actually have a key. It feels so strange in my hand, like a piece of magic to access this world, so far away.
It slides into the lock, I turn it, and the door opens.
Inside it smells of slowly baking mahogany and cedar. It's a timber-framed house and they've got dark wood furniture throughout.
"Mom," I call, into the musty corridor. Plenty of light radiates in through the windows. "Dad."
To either side are chests of drawers, one adorned with a few petite Chinese-style vases. Mom loved these, and would often boast of them to friends and neighbors, though they were plainly reproductions probably cast a few miles down the road at the hippy commune near Shenandoah.
I go down the hall, past the neat kitchen, to the den. Nothing is touched or has been changed. Wooden ducks fly across the wall above the TV, still a thick old CRT model. I'd been meaning to buy them a new one before the coma hit. I run my fingers through the dust on the kitchen table. We used to play games of Rook here when I was little, me on my Mom's side, Aaron on Dad's, and it doesn't hurt to remember that, though it feels like ancient history.
I wander through the living room, where the coffee table is still piled neatly with mom's women's magazines. In the back room the piano rests silently. I play a few notes.
"Mom," I call again, but no answer comes.
Up the beige-carpeted stairs, I look in on each of our bedrooms one by one. Theirs is plain and unadorned; large cupboards, a dresser, a full-length mirror, veils on the windows.
The guest room, which used to be Aaron's room, is barren, with nothing of him left here now. My room is empty too, though it still bears many of my teenaged decorations, like a time capsule. I stand in the middle and look at this hollow space in the air, thinking there must be millions of rooms just like it across America, emptied out.
I open my drawers, looking at my collection of old Transformers. I run my fingers over their plastic shells, their holographic stickers, so colorful and bright. Perhaps if I cared about these things now, I'd be like Sophia. They would be my flimsy roots, too easily plucked up and exposed to the air, wriggling weakly. Loss of them might break me, seeing them like this could hurt me, like she brought her movies and her kid's cereal along for the ride.
I don't need them. They don't mean anything to who I am now. I've died so many times between then and now I can hardly remember. This room is a shell I've grown out of.
The basement is the same. It was my prison for a time. I sit on my old bed and look up at the door, imagining Cerulean in a place just like this while his mother hammered her way in. She brought him into the world, and she took him out of it.
I go out into the yard and wander through the long grass. A few thick hotdog reeds have sprung up at the edges, where the rainwater always collects and tries to make a pond. Bulrushes? I can't remember. Io can't tell me.
They're not here. I could go to the back of the delivery truck where the locals are gathering and study shriveled peanut faces looking for them, but even if I found them they still wouldn't be here.
I put Sophia's ID card reverently in my desk, along with my Transformers. That's enough of that, now. All of this is a farewell, and I've felt guilty abusing her poor, lost image for so long. I am a seed of a long-dead plant, caught on a wind and untethered by any trailing, unmet desires, and that's fine.
I get in my cab and drive off, to the west, with my comet trail trudging behind.
19. ENDLESS
In an endless landscape of corn, I run out of gasoline.
The battle-tank is empty of supplies. It's not that I planned it wrong, or I forgot to fill them up. There were countless opportunities to fill up,
But I didn't do any of that. It is a clear-headed and clear-eyed choice. I rumble the convoy on until it stops, the engine gutters, and goes silent.
Hot sun bakes down. I leave my phone behind on the seat. I contemplate taking all my clothes off and going out naked, but there's no need for that. It will happen itself, when time has thinned me down like the rest of them, and the sun has baked and worn them so much they slough off.
I'll wander free like the herds that fill out this land. I'll finally belong again. I want to face it, the same fate that I gave to them all.
I climb out of the cab. I don't need guns or music now. It's all right.
I start walking. The sun is hot and the corn is indescribably beautiful. I've never seen it grow so out of control before. The stalks get thick and tangled, interweaving like unkempt threads in a greater organism.
We are all like this. I take step after step and feel lighter with every one. I am walking into my freedom. If Sophia had been brave enough she would have done this too. Yes there will be pain, but then it will be over. Like my parents there'll be nothing left to find because I'll be gone.
I leave no message, no 'Sorry' scrawled hastily over the battle-tank's side, because I am not sorry. This is reality and I'm not ashamed. I am not willing to kill a single floater more to survive, for this. My life is not worth it. I'd rather run with the herd, hunting down buffalo in the wild and bringing them down, feeling the hot blood gush down my neck and chest, swallowing, swaying together like kelp on the tides.
I get misty-eyed thinking of it. It seems like a beautiful life, and I am proud that I finally see that. Life is nothing lived alone. I don't want to be in my basement anymore, I don't want to hide away in my cab afraid and clinging to the past. My eyes are open.
A member of the ocean peels out of the corn. Just one, and I wonder at his long and winding pilgrimage, a bit of jetsam tossed upon the golden waves, like me.
His leg is twisted and he can't run. So much the better. We can dance together one last time. I walk and he walks behind me. We walk together, and I slow my pace to let him keep up. It can even be beautiful, a harmony of kinds. I turn once at a rise and see my convoy so far behind, so small.
We are all so small. Like Aaron always taught me, the key lies in seeing that smallness and knowing it. You have to see the reality or you are lying to yourself, and I can't be Sophia. I want to be like my parents, absorbed by the flow, to go forward unafraid and as boldly as I can.
We walk together, him or her and me. Its body is so shrunken I can't tell the gender anymore; any hint of genitalia has shriveled up into the body. I start to cry, and now it is a release. Tears flood down my face. I'll walk until I run out of strength, then I'll turn this body over to the flood. That at least is honest. It's facing death down and accepting it with open arms, hiding no more, man not mouse.
I reach out and stroke the ears of corn, fat and yellow. I pluck one and eat it as I walk. The natural sugars are ripe and rich, sweeter down my throat than any of the processed, canned shit I've been on for months. The air is so clean. I look back to make sure my friend is still coming.
He's been joined by another. They both hobble along, neither of them running. I don't know why this is, he doesn't look injured, but I'm grateful. They will run me down, but with respect. I will give myself up in the same way. I duck them a low bow and we walk on.
I toss the corn back into the field. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. It was a grand dream, really. I no longer feel bad about my New York cairn. Perhaps others will come, in time, and it will help them. They'll take strength in what I've left for them, and they may even make it to the West Coast alive. It won't matter that I'm not there when they arrive, if they've already made it that far. They can build their own destination. I just made a starting point.
I'm smiling as I walk. Joy rises up in me like a flood, withheld for so long. Now I feel proud again, and it doesn't matter that no one will witness my death, because I'm here. I don't need the others for this moment, I don't need to apologize or to be witnessed, because which one of us goes into death with others by our side?
We all go alone. Cerulean went alone, Aaron went alone, my parents went alone, but we all go the same way. We come into the world and we go out of it the same, so perhaps we are never truly alone. This is a path so well trodden it is worn into stone, and finally, I feel the company of all these ghosts in the air around me.
I'll run with Cerulean and my parents, with Aaron and Lara and them all.
I walk through the day, until there is a crowd of dozens behind me. Not a one of them runs, and with each one added to the slow trudge my heart fills a little more. This is my audience. They will leap upon me and tear out my guts, and we're going to do it together. I am giving them my body for their sustenance, and in turn they are making me one with them.
Who ever said birth was pain-free? Life is hard and it hurts. The first thing a baby feels is a slap to make it breathe, and the indignities just keep on coming. Lost love, lost friends, broken bones, all of it part of the tapestry of life. I am part of it too. I started this thing and finally it's caught up to me.
The cornfields don't end. At some point nearing dusk, when my feet are growing weary and my vision blurs with the heat and exhaustion, so tired I can barely take another step, I stop and I turn. There are hundreds of them now, all my brothers and sisters, and now I am sorry.
I'm sorry for the family I locked within their home in Mott Haven, and for the mall cops I killed with monitors above Sir Clowdesley, and for the thousands I burned and the thousands I mowed down with bullets and the tens of thousands I locked into the stadium. I would take them all back if I could. Why should I have any more right to the world than them? Why should I be the one to go on, clinging to a past that is no longer real?
I spread my arms to them. The gray tide draws in, folds around me, and I am encompassed. Their limbs and their skins find mine, tenderness reigns, and we are all rolled into one in the blackness together.
INTERLUDE 2
Lara saw the giant 'f' on the Empire State Building, and at once she understood.
Amo. It had to be Amo.
The streets of the city were near deserted. She drove through Manhattan with a sense of burgeoning hope in her chest. He was alive. He was alive and he'd done all this. Somehow the city was clear; somehow he'd put up a sign she could recognize at once.
He was alive.
She raced to the lobby of that great building, and in. She found within a cairn that surpassed any of her expectations. There was a plan, and supplies. There was a wall laid out with a bulletin board, and upon it at the top was his name and a date.
Amo – Last Mayor of America 06/08/2018
She laughed and cried. She took up the spray can and filled in her name beneath his, through her tears.
Lara – Last Barista in America 06/30/2018
She read his log and his comic. She fired up his generators and drank his Nespresso. She reveled in the map, cutting a path west across the country, to Los Angeles where the Chinese theater awaited.
It was beautiful. It was proud, and it filled her up in a way she couldn't express. She loved him for it. She loved his will for doing it. It was a good thing, with no doubt in her mind.
She wasn't alone any more. Amo who she knew, who had been through the worst of it just as badly as her, who had been through even worse things, was alive. He was out there. He could be found and known, and she would not be alone anymore.
She gathered up one of his laptops and a USB with his map, she picked up one of the RV keys and ran down the stairs like an excited child at Christmas, to find the vehicle stocked and ready. The gas tank was full.
She revved it to life, set the map on the passenger seat before her, and pulled out onto the first stretch of the route h
* * *
She found the gravesite of the suicide girl outside Stroudsburg. Amo had shifted the semi-trailer to the side, but painted his brand across the road in the same thick yellow paint he'd used in New York, along with a message:
Sophia – RIP
06 / 11 / 2018
I should have reached you in time
LMA
Lara found the grave he'd dug. She cleared a few roaming zombies with one of the shotguns from Amo's RV, then climbed into Sophia's trailer.
It was peaceful inside, and cool in the still afternoon. She sat on the sofa and leafed through a journal, which Amo must have read too. He left it there for her to read.
There was a line of three spliffs lying on the glass coffee table.
"You idiot," Lara said, and laughed. Emotion flushed up in her. God, it was Amo. He'd been here, how long ago? She brought up her phone. It was July 4th, Independence Day. She hadn't even realized. All that mattered was she was a little over three weeks behind him. The thought stunned her.
He was really out there. He was out there clearing the way, like some self-appointed janitor for the world, like the mayor of America, clearing a path through the brush and tidying up the dead en route.
Lara lifted one of the spliffs to her mouth. Her hand was shaking. She hadn't smoked since college, before law school. Her fingers remembered though, and using the Zippo she lit up. Mellow smoke filled her mouth, filled her lungs, filled her up. Amo's hands had rolled this, had prepared this like a party favor at some crazy wedding, where the guests would come one at a time if at all, spread out over the years, to pay their respects at the grave of a dead girl and get high.
She almost coughed but held it down until her lungs burned, then exhaled. Bluish smoke wreathed out and up, spiraling and twisting like drops of oil in water. A buzz hit her quickly from the tobacco, followed by the cushioning descent of the marijuana. She snuggled back into the sofa, imagining Amo was outside with Sophia, getting some milk or something, and they were all going to get high and party down together.