The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (14 page)

Lars sagged lower in his captors' arms. Salle looked defiantly at the bald man. "It's bullshit, movie special effects."

"On the contrary," the man said. "It's quite real. I'd take longer to explain it, but it's rather old news to the people here. I assure you, there's no one left alive up there. The apocalypse happened four years ago, the night you came down in fact, Ms. Coram. You squeaked in under the deadline."

She stared at him, then at the screen.

"This is my passion project," the man said, spreading his arms. "You, him." He pointed at Lars. "Your three thousand. I'm invested in our race surviving, and right now it's falling apart. The trouble is, we are confined here in earnest. We can't go above until all the zombies are gone, until the infection blows over, and that will be some time, as they take a long time to die, as long as another six years. Ms. Coram, are you with me? Mr. Mecklarin, can you focus on the matter in hand? You have a bunker filled with rage and we need to calm it in the smoothest, least destructive manner. We need your help, and we need it now."

Mecklarin raised his head. Now his eyes were burning with vision again. Something about it scared Salle, just as he'd once pulled her in.

"You lied to me. You made me lie to all of them."

"All for the good," the man said. "Would you rather be roaming the wilds above, arms outstretched, staggering blindly in search of brains?"

Salle almost laughed. Mecklarin didn't. What he did was straighten up and shove one of the men holding him with surprising force, hard enough to send him reeling sideways over a desk and crunching to the floor. Lars had always been an athletic man, and now he used that speed and strength to pivot sharply and send an elbow into the helmet of the one guard left standing, cracking his visor and dropping him like a sack of soil.

How he came up with the handgun, Salle never remembered, but he pointed it at the man in the aisle while holding one open palm out to the guards holding Salle. They stopped in the middle of pointing their rifles at him, looking to the bald man for guidance.

"You lied to me," Mecklarin said again.

The bald man smiled. "Brave, resourceful, ever ready. Lars Mecklarin, all-American hero. Did we lie to you? Yes we did. We saved your life in the process, for which you should be grateful. Please, don't be a child. You see the situation. I'm asking for your help for the good of everyone here. We-"

Lars shot him.

The gun retorted and the bald man's brains blew out the back of his head, some splattering up onto the screen.

"Ugh," somebody at their desk uttered.

Lars turned, and now the fire in his eyes had turned to madness.

"Forgive me, Salle," he said, "and think kindly of me." Then he turned the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

BANG

The shot echoed and a terrible silence descended. Somebody whimpered. Lars fell to the floor where his blood and brains poured out of the hole in his head onto the dark cement floor.

It was like something from the videos above. The chaos had followed them here, inside Lars. Her eyes blurred with tears. She was entering shock.

The man with his visor up snapped his fingers in front of Salle's face.

"Princess. It's your show now. If you want those people to survive," he pointed to the screen, "and by extension, you want us to survive, you need to tell me who to capture, now."

Her legs trembled wildly. Lars was on the floor and his legs were trembling too, caught in death throes. The bald man was down and flat, and on the screen the scenes of zombie apocalypse were gone, replaced by images from the Habitat. In the swamp the men were swapping over with Kathy.

Kathy was her friend, of sorts. In first positions before her access zones had opened up they'd often drunk together, sharing stories about men and fantasizing about making it with Lars Mecklarin. Now Lars was dead and Kathy was getting raped. It wasn't a hard leap.

"Those three in the swamp," she said, pointing, her voice coming out harsh and cold. "One of them in the bar should be enough, probably Rudolph." She pointed. "He's the big one with brown hair."

The man stared back at her. Perhaps even he was in shock too. Salle looked around the room. Everyone in there seemed to be in shock, and it struck her then that for all of them, this was the first time too. They may have seen images of the zombie apocalypse, if it really was real, but they hadn't seen this. None of them had been in this precise situation before, and none of them knew what to do.

But she did. It came naturally and she fell into it. There was a job to be done and she had the skills and knowledge to do it well.

"Soldier, I gave you orders," she snapped.

He nodded, then pulled up a shoulder mic and started barking commands into it.

Great vistas of power opened before her. So this was what Lars had felt like every day. The reality of a zombie apocalypse could set in another time. There was too much to take care of inside, too many new laws to formulate, too complex a balance to strike, with the carrot of the outside world now removed.

They wouldn't be able to leave. They wouldn't be going to Mars. In fact all of their in-depth research into the human condition would be useless, except for how it applied to this moment and all the moments to come, getting the three thousand back under control.

She looked around the room again, but there was no one else like the bald man, standing up and ready to take charge. Was he really alone? Was it such a tight hierarchy? Perhaps.

She looked back at the soldier as she caught fully up with events. Capture, he'd said. He was saying it into the mic even now, and instinctively she knew that it was wrong. There could be no forgiveness of crimes like these, no way to go on and live in peace, and capturing wouldn't be enough to lance the boil of frustration and rage down there. It would just enflame it. It was a hard decision but it had to be made.

She laid a hand on his shoulder. "Nobody gets captured," she said. "Nobody gets wounded. The names I give you, you kill. You leave the bodies where they fall."

He nodded sharply and relayed this.

Salle turned to the room at large. "Bring up more screens," she ordered. "Give me the forest, the first floor bar and the red corridor on the sixth."

She'd always had this power, or something like it. She'd had a staff in the last few years, an office and access to all personnel files and footage. It wasn't a change at all, but for her immediate surroundings.

The video feeds popped up in seconds. She pointed again, named more names, and the man at her left transferred them over. In moments figures in black were moving across the screens, like SWAT forces moving on bank robbers. Bullets were fired and bodies fell. It was like watching an action movie, as untrained scientists fell.

Then one of the SWAT got engulfed in flame, as a Molotov cocktail smashed at his feet. He screamed, his colleagues tried to help him, and they were mobbed by scientists who bashed at them and beat in their helmets, stealing their rifles and shooting them back into the flames.

"Shit," the lead guy whispered, and turned to her.

It was strange. She didn't feel much for the loss of these soldiers; she knew nothing about them, had never seen their files and didn't know their names. Watching them struggle and die in the fire while people she did know strapped on their weaponry felt like losing a level in a video game. It was all so distant.  

She turned to the man with the visor down.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Joseph," he said. "Ma'am."

"Joseph, do your men have infrared vision?"

"We do, ma'am."

"Then start killing the lights in a rolling pattern. I want all the people we can muster flushed down to the forest, the swamp, the Arctic zone, away from the stores, the bars and accommodation. Can you control temperature?"

Joseph was staring past her to the screen, where more bodies were falling.

"Joseph!"

"Yes, ma'am. Climate control deck, bottom right."

A hand went up amidst the rows of desk.

Salle swiveled. "Turn the heat down everywhere but the three areas I listed. I don't care if the Arctic melts, just pack them in there. Can you lower oxygen content?"

"Marginally, ma'am," someone piped up. "The system has flues that connect every space, but we can alter the access each has to the scrubbers. That'll load the areas slightly with carbon dioxide."

"Do it. We need to steer these people to a place we can better control them. Now bring me up more images."

The lights in the Habitat went out. All the screens turned dark, then a few glinted back to life as sparks were struck, emergency exit lighting came on, and people used their phones as flashlights.

The screens that were black turned to a monotone green for infrared, and more images followed. Salle drew on her memory of the Habitat's three thousand, gleaned from Mecklarin's exacting files, and made strategic decisions. First they had to set an ambush for the four scientists armed with weapons, then they had to pacify the populace. Here a gravitational engineer with a background of parental abuse was terrorizing three women with a broken table leg. He had to die. Here a doctor with a suspiciously clean record and perfect bill of mental health was warming up to a rape.

She named him too.

On the screen lights flickered and people began to surge from their hiding places as the air grew thin. She knew the map backwards and sent the commands to guide them on like rats in a laboratory maze.

Lars was dead on the floor. Somewhere to the side through stone, soil and poured concrete his Habitat was collapsing in chaos. But at least they had a chance.

FUTURE

7. DECISIONS

My phone reads 11:30.

The meeting starts in 30 minutes and perhaps I'm through the worst of it. There are no more knives spinning overhead; they're all buried in me somewhere. I feel light and insubstantial. The solid foundations I've built my life on are gone, and there's a process to that. I remember Cerulean talking about the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining and so on.

Perhaps I'm at acceptance already. I don't have time to not be. I'm not even angry, because that kind of anger is no different from self-pity when I'm the one to blame. There is only one thing to do now to correct my mistakes, and that is to kill them all.

I turn that thought in my mind.

Kill them all.

11:35 already. I rub my face and shake my head. The twinge is there, hovering like Cerulean's demon. There isn't much time.

I stand up and push my way out of the hot dark closet. Taking steps into the light helps, space and fresh air help. The path is chosen now and I can't stop until it's done.

I walkie Lara first, then Anna and Sulman, followed by Ozark, Feargal and Witzgenstein, with Jake thrown in for good measure, then I go on the master channel to tell everyone the meeting is delayed until 2.

Two hours to save New LA.

Composure comes back in the sea breeze across the Chinese Theater courtyard. Confidence returns as I stride into the lobby, smiling and waving at the people tending to the survivors in this new hospital ward; Betty by the boilers preparing some orange juice, Karim working on the blood samples, Macy and Samuel moving through the forest of drip stands and checking readouts.

They nod and wave back. As I'd hoped, there is no panic here. The people don't know yet, at least not about the worst of it.

"Two o'clock," I tell them, one by one, with a gentle touch on their arm or shoulder, reinforcing the walkie message. This is reassurance, recharging them from my own personal supply. Ozark is standing in the hall waiting and nods in my direction. I nod back, feeling like I'm high.

I drop by Peters. He's lying on his back in his bedding, gazing up at the ceiling vacantly. Ozark said earlier he was most likely in a state of delirium, caused by extreme lack of sleep, intensity of emotions and the chemical effect of months of his fat cells slowly breaking down into sugars.

"Hey," I say softly. He's so wasted, with tight withered skin. His big head, on too thin a neck, wobbles over toward me.

"Amo," he says, "you left."

"Had to think," I say. "I've done that now. Peters, I know you must be exhausted, but can I ask you to join another meeting? Answer some questions."

He looks up at me and I see the death in his eyes. If only he knew. "You think we have a chance?" he asks.

I don't grin for him, or try to reassure with a soft touch. He's seen things I never have and I don't want to be a liar. "We have a shot."

He pushes himself to a seated position. I take his arm, gesture Ozark over, and between us we help Peters hobble down the hall toward the back office. He's sweating and trembling by screen 4.

"Is this a cinema?" he asks abruptly, perhaps noticing for the first time.

"Best in LA," I answer.

Down the hall we enter the back office, where Lara, Anna, Sulman, Feargal, Witzgenstein and Jake are sitting around the conference table in a flood of light cast down through the glass ceiling. They have a whiteboard and marker pens at the ready, and are in the midst of a heated discussion which halts abruptly as I walk in.

"Thanks for coming," I tell them, as I lower Peters into an ergonomic office chair.

"Where've you been?" Anna asks. The accusation is there but finds no purchase in my calm, polished exterior.

"Thinking," I answer easily. "Have you shared what Peters told us?"

"Yes."

"Good." I check my watch; two hours and ten minutes left. Lara's glaring at me, with anger and concern mixing, and I can only hope she understands.

I take my place at the table and survey the faces looking back. Sulman, our resident expert on the T4 virus' biology, looks curious beneath his thick black beard. Anna is ready to fight someone, poised and holding to the table with white knuckles. Feargal, a fighting Irish fan, infantryman and ex-boxer who's now in charge of our security, watches me with his usual calm demeanor. Witzgenstein, once a Wisconsin county clerk, sits with her legs crossed and her long Goldilocks braids twisted between her fists. Jake is affable and breezy as ever, as if all of this was just another wonderful jaunt.