The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) (27 page)

Anna frowned. "What's that Jake? Please repeat."

"The mountain!" he called back, the words coming through with a brief clarity. "Th-…, did you … al…?"

He sounded panicked, or perhaps that was cheering behind him, it was hard to tell.

Anna started back the way they'd come.

"Jake, I can't hear you, say again," she said into her shoulder mic as she left the radar room and went out into the dark, guttering corridor beyond.

"The mountain!" he shouted. "It's…-zing, … you … the button? Why didn't you …?"

The urgency in his voice was plain. Anna began to run.

"Jake, what's happening with the mountain," she shouted, "repeat, what's happening with the mountain?"

She breached the end of the corridor and dashed to the stairs leading up, her feet clanging loudly off the metal gantry, while a creeping dread stole into her heart.

"They're … down, … of them … we won!"

She sped through the open bunker door and into the elevator shaft beyond, where a cool breeze wafted down and there was an almost straight shot up.

"Jake," she panted into the walkie, "say again, what is happening up there?"

A long moment passed. She took hold of the rope ladder and started up, as Feargal and Peters clanged up the stairs behind her, then Jake's voice rang through clear and bright.

"Repeat, did you push the button, Anna? The ocean are coming down! They're all coming down from the mountain, we've won!"

Now she heard the cheering in the background, but it wasn't right. They hadn't punched the button, they hadn't done a thing, and the zombies shouldn't be moving, unless…

Her heart leapt and didn't land.

They'd prepared for everything, the people who'd made the bunkers, with the radar, drones and demons, with shields and suits and the hydrogen line. Was it really possible they hadn't made a preparation for her?

Her mouth went dry. On the other end of the walkie they were hooting and laughing aloud. "It's so beautiful, Anna! I never saw it the first time, but God, is it gorgeous. They're just unpeeling and running this way."

Anna tried to fathom it. If they knew what had happened in Maine, if they knew she was coming and bringing an army with her, what could they have done? What wouldn't they have tried, to stop her dead at the first bunker?

She raced up the rope ladder rungs. He'd said they were running, but why were they running, with the nearest demon still hours away? It was too much to contemplate the alternative, too massive a betrayal, but what else could it be? The T4 had never been hers. The zombies had never been hers. She remembered her dream of the ocean rising. She remembered Peters pointing out how the mountain was in the wrong place. She remembered what Lucas had said about new signals on the hydrogen line triggering different expressions of the T4, and in that moment she understood what was coming their way.

"Jake, you have to run!" she shouted into the walkie, racing up as fast as her weak left arm would allow. "We didn't push the button, we didn't do anything. The ocean has turned!"

"What?"

"Goddammit, Jake, run! The signal must have shifted, I don't know how, but why else are they running? There are no demons nearby! They're running at you."

"What? That's impossible, Anna, they're…" A rush of movement and thumping crackled through the walkie like a thunderstorm, followed by a pounding that had to be hundreds of feet stampeding, then there was shouting and gunfire.

"Jake," she shouted as she crested the top of the elevator shaft and dodged into the concrete pod, glaring up at the bright circle of sky above. As she put her hands to the rungs there was a BANG through the walkie followed a fainter BANG clanging down the chute, then Jake was back and gasping. "Ollie! Shit, they got Ollie, Anna, and they're… Oh my God! It's.. They're tearing him to bits, Anna, we have to…"

"Run, goddammit!"

She started up the rungs, but at the same moment a figure overhead blocked out the sky, casting shadows down the concrete walls. Anna realized what it was at the last moment, and threw herself backwards just in time.

A zombie soared down the chute and hit the cement floor before her with a loud, shattering CRACK as dozens of its bones broke at once. Dust spat out from it and Anna stared as its sagging arm reached out, and its cracked-open head angled up with one white eye blazing. Its jaw lolled wide, smashed at the hinge, showing bright white teeth in withered pink gums.

Then it was crushed as another fell on top of it.

CRUNCH

Bones broke again, dust huffed out, but already this one was rising on one good leg as she shuffled madly back toward the shaft. More fell like meteors and crushed the ones below.

CRUNCH

CRACK

THUMP

Each time they began to rise faster, with each fall padded more. The ocean had turned. The walkie fritzed at her shoulder. Jake was on his own.

"Back!" she shouted down the elevator shaft. There was no time, not for her or for them. She took hold of the rope ladder and flung herself into the hole just as one of the ocean lurched for her. She barely caught her own weight as it fell past her, tumbling off the walls to CRUNCH at the bottom.

"Oh shit," she panted, descending as fast as her wounded left arm would allow, as more CRUNCHes hit above and more bodies came toppling down past her, their hands whipping off her back.

One, two, three lashed out as they plummeted by, raking her hair and shoulders with their nails, their legs ricocheting off her arms, until one snagged her sling and dragged it out of position with a horrible click in her collar, pulling her away from the ladder. She held on, but in the second it took for her to pull herself back in, a fifth hit her full in the chest.

Her hand was torn from the rope. Her body was sent into a crazy somersault. She fell for a terrifying, aching few seconds with the zombie on her chest before CRUNCH they hit together against the concrete floor below.

INTERLUDE 5

"You don't have to leave," Jake had said.

Lucas, Jake and Peters had sat in a boulangerie in the dark, two hours after the demon almost caught Anna in the first bunker. Feargal and Ollie were pacing restlessly in the street outside, while Macy and Wanda were watching over Anna in the house across the street, still unconscious from the sedative.

Bordeaux.

Lucas sighed and looked out to the silent street, barely visible through the reflection of lamplight in the dark window. He'd been here once, many years ago, before he got his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon. Back then he'd been a punk, sporting a purple Mohawk and listening to rock music. Punk was in a resurgence and in Europe, out of the stifling constraints of his hometown, he felt authentic in ways he never had when hanging around the malls and parking lots of Derby, Kansas.

It was impossible not to think of those days now, sitting in this little restaurant that still, somehow, smelled of baking bread and butter. He only had to close his eyes to remember his first kiss, first proper kiss, stolen on the Garonne river with a fey-eyed canal boy.

"Lucas," Peters said firmly, bringing him back to the moment. The moment was truly miserable. Perhaps it was his fault. Perhaps he was wrong to have thought he could save the world.

"She will kill me if I stay," he said.

"She won't," Jake protested. "She's a sweet girl, really, you just have to-"

Peters laid his hand over Jake's. "She is not a sweet girl, Jake. Maybe once, but not now. Maybe never."

"She won't kill him."

Peters sighed and looked at Lucas. Lucas liked him. He carried himself like an old man, full of the worries of the world, though he wasn't much older than Lucas. It could come across as false, but it didn't. There was a deep understanding in those twinkling eyes.

"Where will you go?" Peters asked.

There was only one answer to that. "With the ocean. I'll keep looking for my friends. With your permission I'll take the electron microscope and other equipment. I still need to find the cure."

"Still," said Peters.

Lucas shrugged. He dreamt of Farsan most nights now, though never in a pleasant way. They were kissing, as they never had in real life, but it wasn't really Farsan, it was a gray-skinned, white-eyed version of him with blood splashed around his lips.

That was guilt, or something. Fear.

"There's nothing else for me. I'll follow them and do my research."

"We're following them too. She'll see you."

"She won't. Salle Coram never did."

Peters shook his head. "That was in a bunker. Not on roads in a foreign land."

He shrugged. There wasn't much more to say. Jake chewed on his lip.

"We could give you gas. Food, too."

"I have food. I can get gas."

In the last month in Maine, when he hadn't been working to narrow down his best possible pathways toward a cure, isolating likely gene strands and ranges of treatment components, he'd focused on learning how to siphon fuel and fit a battery, how to jumpstart a car and replace the tires, how to get a generator going and so on, in case of something like this.

Now it had happened.

"So you'll want one of the Humvees."

"I can find another vehicle. But yes, a Humvee would be good. To carry the equipment."

Peters sighed. He leaned back and signaled Feargal over.

Within an hour he was checking the load. No guns, no bombs, only scientific equipment. In the street a few pale stragglers from the ocean were drifting by, lighting their paths with their eyes. He studied each of them, standing by the oversized Humvee.

Any one of these could be Farsan. The chances of it were infinitesimal, but still he looked and saw Farsan's face everywhere. Finding any of his people was a highly unlikely dream; fourteen needles in a haystack of well over one hundred thousand. Still he had to try.

"You should go," Peters said. "She will wake soon. Good luck."

They shook hands. He nodded. So this was the end. He slipped into the driver's seat and drove away.

* * *

He took a looping, circuitous route through the western ranks of the ocean. The demon was still out there somewhere and he didn't want to take any chances.

Bordeaux faded away, and for a time he took a highway leading north along the Garonne river, allowing himself to drift, cruising at a stately thirty miles per hour where it was clear. Tree branches jutted out into the road. Pale bodies nudged up against the fender as he slowed through traffic-clogged sections.

He pulled over at a rise in the landscape and watched the Garonne flow by for a time, rolling round a shallow bend marked with boulders and a small muddy beach. The zombies staggered down the incline to the side, traipsed through the dark mud, and walked directly into the river, leaving thin footprints behind. Moonlight frittered away on the waves.

He drove on, pulling east steadily. It felt strange to be alone and on the outside again. Spying. For three months after his bitterly cold bicycle ride to the Maine airport, he'd spied on them. He'd found an outbuilding near the edge of the airfield, crawled in through a broken window, and begun.

Everything that followed was a blur of loneliness and purpose. He was hungry a lot of the time, often forgetting to eat though he'd brought a bulging knapsack of rations from the Habitat. He spent his days asleep or lying on his low rooftop, watching them run their bunker assault drills through binoculars and listening to them talk on the radio. At nights he ran his generator and worked on the cure with what weak equipment he had.

He took to stalking their encampment, growing bolder night by night. They ran patrols, but rarely did they come out as far as his little signalman's shack. One night he dared himself to enter Anna's laboratory in the quarantine bay of the airport, far better equipped than his own, and decided on a careless, defiant whim to use it.

It was a risk, but he didn't have half the equipment available in the ward, and no other way he could access it. It was far better gear than he'd had in the bunker even, because it was all built for purpose; a real centrifuge, a flash-freezer, an impressive range of dyes and stains, even some genetic building block liquids he could mix and match.

He found a gun in a security room and stripped the bullets. He knew he wouldn't use it, not even to save himself, but it was good to have. He accepted that at some point he would have to talk to these people. The ocean was gone, taking with them Farsan and his other test-subjects, and he had to follow, but he couldn't cross the Atlantic without their help.

Yet he waited. He watched them, enjoying this small sense of fleeting power he held over the people who'd brought on the destruction of his world. He studied them and worked on his cure, so that when he took his case to them in the broad light of day, they could not say no. He wanted to be sure.

Loneliness became a problem. As the weeks passed he grew careless. Perhaps he went a little bit mad, in the run-up to Anna breaking his throat.

Now he was here. 

He tapped the wheel and drove on. That she hated him was clear. What he felt for her was confused. It wasn't hate, perhaps, but it was strong. Admiration was part of it. Fear was another. She was so like Salle Coram it was sometimes hard to breathe around her. There was also, weirdly, a kind of pride. He'd never felt that before; pride for someone he didn't know, whose life he'd had no role in, who felt so negatively towards him.

But still, she was human and so was he, and her achievements were impressive. A child in the outbreak, she had grown up strong. She was exactly the kind of person her people needed, which made him think again about Salle Coram, and the things she'd done to survive.

He drove east, and gradually the ranks of the ocean grew thicker. He stopped for a time beneath a hickory tree on the edge of a field of wild rye grass and watched their bodies flow by. Some time around four they began to run, and he followed along in the Humvee, going off-road with a sense of raw excitement as they began to sprint. He rolled the windows down and cheered them on.