The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (31 page)

"Commander," Joseph said.

She willed the dots to move. Julio had been the worst experience of her life, and she'd done it all for this. Giving him tacit approval for all the sick, depraved things he'd done in his torture hallway was all for this. Before that she'd executed dozens of people in the revolution. After that she'd killed many more, and tortured hundreds with solitary confinement and public canings until they learned their lesson.

Survive. Behave. All for this.

Her mind was blank. So much data in there, three thousand people and all their personal logs, all their psychographic charts, reams and reams of notes taken by her or Lars or any of the monitoring team, and all she could think about was what she'd done to them.

The stick.

She'd wielded the stick like a tyrant. She'd driven people into narrow channels like cows climbing to the slaughter, to accept the totalitarian state she'd created, and the stick had kept them in line, but it was the carrot that kept them alive. Now that carrot was dying on the screen, winking back at her with a slow, sullen pulse.

Seven demons. It had all seemed so possible.

"There'd be more dots, if they were infecting," she said quietly.

"It could take time," Joseph answered. "We don't know."

"It took the ones in suits seconds only."

"So they're fighting. We wait."

They waited.

Minutes passed, stretching on in rustling, breathing, keyboard-tapping silence, and still the dots didn't move.

She thought back to a moment from her childhood, played again and again on the news media so often that she'd come to internalize it. Perhaps it was one of the many prods that had driven her into a career in extreme psychology, looking to understand the font from which all human motivation flowed.

On 9/11 when the Twin Towers fell, George W. Bush was reading a story to kids in a school in Florida. He already knew a plane had hit the Towers, but when they told him a second plane had hit he froze, sitting there like a doe in the headlights for seven long minutes, with the cameras recording, with the kids watching, and in that moment the whole world had seen the man beneath the mask of the presidency.

He was mocked for it. Though he came back stronger, the media never let him forget those seven minutes of sitting while the nation was under attack.

Now Salle Coram understood. In that moment the world he'd known had shifted on its axis, and he no longer knew which way was up. Reassuring the children in that one room, trying to maintain his composure to stop them from being scared, suddenly became the most important thing he could do.

So Salle Coram marked the names of every person in that room who breathed too loudly, or creaked in their chairs, or tapped at their keyboard. She didn't know for what reason or what punishment awaited them, but there was nothing else she could do.

There'd been so much suffering already. The facts couldn't equate in her mind. All of it rested on the crux of the demons because without them there wasn't any hope at all, and without any hope they'd be back in the days of the revolution, but worse. The bunker would consume itself in an orgy of blood.

She'd applied the pressure. She'd wound up the clock. It couldn't be stopped now.

If only the seven dots would move. But they didn't.

She turned to Joseph, and in the instant she gave the order, she realized how much she despised him, because she knew he would carry it out.

"Lock the doors."

He moved quietly. The room was still spellbound by the display. Twenty-three people at their stations but what were any of them doing? Monitoring the Habitat. Always watching. She hadn't needed them and it would be better if they weren't there.

Now they'd seen too much.

She drew her service revolver and, without really thinking, started shooting.

People didn't start screaming until the fourth bullet in the fourth head, by which point Joseph had started shooting too.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

It was just like watching the turret gun they'd once had, before Julio blew it up. BANG BANG, and all these people could do was scrabble like insects, trapped in a cage.

BANG BANG

She stopped to reload, slipping in a fresh clip, while Joseph carried on. It was so simple, really, and she hardly felt a thing. This was mercy compared to some of the things she'd seen and done, compared to what awaited them. This was a good end.

BANG BANG

She stalked down the rows. In her research she'd spent a lot of time studying Columbine; what could possibly have driven two young men to slaughter dozens of their peers. It was such a mystery then, but the answer was so clear now.

Despair. Despair took away your guilt and your reason. It made murder into nothing at all. In despair this act was one of erasing pain and suffering, not creating it. The screams rang out and as Joseph moved down the other flank of the hall she felt a beautiful peace descend over her.

It felt like transcendence, like she was finally drifting free of this bunker that had been her prison for so long. Lars was calling, and they would be together on Mars at last. Her life would not be a waste, a miserable shitty waste of crushed dreams and loneliness, but a thing redeemed.

BANG BANG

Some of them tried to hide under their chairs like worms, which was fitting because they were all worms now, buried in the earth. Some of them raised their hands as if to deflect the bullets, but the hot metal tore right through, breaking fingers back and plowing into faces, into lips and teeth, gouging open cheeks and bursting eyeballs in geysers of gray brain.

Blood sprayed on the gun barrel and on her fingers, on her face and her clothes. The floor underneath ran greasily with blood, like Julio's hallway.

She began to laugh. It was a kind of game, after all. This was what Lars had seen coming so long ago. He'd taken a gun and shot himself to avoid this, because he'd been a good man. He'd understood there was a point beyond survival after which you weren't really human at all, after which you were better off dead. Once the hope was gone, the human was too.

She laughed and laughed and shot them all, until she was standing at the front of the hall in front of the big screen, and Joseph was standing there too.

They were panting. They were both splattered in blood. It was the most wonderful thing in the world.

"We shouldn't have done this," she said, "any of this."

He nodded. He raised his gun but she beat him to it, and her bullet punched him in the chest and off his feet while his shot only put a ding in the cement floor.

Salle stood at the front and laughed. She put the gun to her head but didn't pull the trigger. That was the coward's way out, to be sure, because she still had a duty. The people in the Habitat were hers, as they'd always been hers, and she wouldn't allow them to descend into rape and murder once more. The world she'd created already was bad enough, but at least they had hope, and she wouldn't take that way.

She'd let someone else.

"I understand now, Lars," she said.

Numerous bodies moaned in the dark. She wandered for a time, shooting them until they were silent. When her bullets ran out she took Joseph's gun and finished the work.

BANG

BANG

BANG

All the while the seven blue dots shone above her, as clear as stars in the sky.

The door at the back was slick with blood. Two bodies lay there, where they'd tried to escape. Salle opened it and peered out.

A cold, concrete corridor. No paint here, no niceties. The Command module was tiny compared to Lars' Habitat; just the bare essentials for survival. These people weren't the seeds, only the soil to help the seeds grow. They hadn't needed to be pampered, their deep potential didn't need to be tapped, they only needed to do their work like cogs in a machine.

"Hello!" Salle called, but of course no one answered. They were all dead behind her.

No one was coming to help. No one in the Habitat had access. Nobody knew what she'd done. Nobody in the world was better qualified than her to make this decision.

Except, perhaps, one.

In her room she dug out a spare uniform. The few bits of memento from her previous life seemed so small and pointless now. They were the crayon scribblings of a pathetic, hungering child, a child who would never get a thing that it wanted, who didn't deserve anything, who wasn't fated to ever be happy.

A child.

In the fogged mirror she studied herself. Blood had congealed in her tied back hair, had splattered around her chin and cheeks like an unholy beard, had gotten into her ears and down her throat.

She stripped and studied her naked, nearly thirty six-year-old body in the mirror. So much potential. There was blood on her full breasts and her trim belly. There was blood on her toned thighs and her muscular shoulders. She stared herself in the eyes, daring this other Salle to rebel or show some sign of weakness, but the other Salle held just as fast as her.

How many people had she killed? None. They washed off with ease. She scrubbed them away with a wet towel, rubbing until her pale white skin was scoured clean. She scraped a comb through her hair and tore the clots out, then held her head under the cold tap for long minutes.

Penance? It wasn't penance. It was just something she did.

In her clean, pressed new uniform she felt more like a fraud than ever. Somebody had laundered this for her, and somebody had pressed it with a steam iron, and for what? Not because they wanted to. Not because they were paid to do it. Because she would have punished them if they hadn't.

It was fitting to wear. It was correct.

She stalked down the cold corridor to the elevator. She rode it down, changed over in the capsule space between the bunkers, where the shield hung above her humming softly, protecting and encasing them all, and took the other carriage back down.

The Habitat's orange hall was the same. The TVs were broken. Soot and grimy damp smeared the walls. She walked the red corridor. Life continued as normal, here. People bowed and bobbed as they passed by. Others turned the other way.

She marked all their names. Here Richards, a botanist. Here Shelley, a microbiologist. Cowards and cravens all, because of what she'd done.

She strode on. In the engineering deck she went to the sweaty man Gideon and told him what she wanted. He stacked it on a trolley for her, bowing and sweating, smiling though he wasn't happy.

She wheeled it back herself. The trolley barely fit in the elevator but she managed.

Back in the Command bunker she gathered a gun and fresh ammunition from the stores. She stood in the commander's chamber, a room she'd rarely ever been in, which belonged to the man she'd killed six years earlier. Curiously enough there were spider webs in the corners. She'd not seen any anywhere else.

"So they let spiders on the Ark," she murmured to herself.

On the wall were maps of the world, marked with red dots for all the other bunkers. Next to her bunker in Maine was a number: 9. Beside it was a call sheet of radio frequencies and codes for each bunker, long since unused since Julio took down their main array. There were directions on the correct use of drones, a hierarchy chart of command, and long lists of their full complement, including people, rations, weapons, oxygen and various pieces of replacement equipment.

There was a book of seeds. There was a manual describing the procedure for the first days after emergence. There was a decision tree describing how best the three thousand should be mated. There were books and books of contingency plans and redundancies and 'what ifs'. There was a complicated procedure for disabling the primary and all his secondaries, once the time came.

She collected the most important ones and strung them up on the walls. She took down the one map of the world, with all the Habitats marked out, and put it in a briefcase along with the two-way radio from Gideon and her gun. All this was only fair. She had six years on her conscience, now let another share the load.

In the control room she stood at her desk, in her proper position, where she'd stood for six years and borne things she'd never thought possible. It felt like turning off a light in her mind, just standing there. It was the easiest thing in the world, like a mannequin no longer needed for the task, a doll with its strings hung up.

She stood and waited, gazing up at the seven motionless blue dots.

"Come on, Amo," she said, so softly no one but her could have heard it, if there'd even been anyone left alive to listen. "I'm waiting.

17. LARA

It really is a sight to see.

Standing on the lead RV rooftop in the misty early morning, looking back along our convoy to the great heap of zombie bodies spreading across McKnight and into the postcard-perfect Pennsylvania forest like a great mound of snow, I can't help but feel a kind of inner peace.

The sky is a translucent blue. Smoke rises from the line of RVs like some tranquil vision of a peaceful Swiss mountain village. Any moment Belle is going to come along singing about her provincial town.

It's my first time out of the RV after Lara got crushed, and the cold, fresh air feels good in my foggy, muddled lungs.

Good god, what a world.

The mound is huge, a single pile of bodies crushing seven demons beneath it; at least six stories high, as wide around as a football field, and as white as the snow covering the road, the forest, the RVs. If I didn't know to look for the lines of shadow marking out shrunken peanut heads, arms, bodies and legs, I'd think this was nothing more than a giant melted snow cone.

A half built snowman. A milk flavored Slushy. A vast white Yeti turd.

I set up my deckchair and sit down.

Nobody's moving at this time, just after the dawn. There's heat in the RVs, comfort, and people are lying in. Feargal rigged his with a wood-burner, and the scent of burning pine carries strongly on the air; rich and resiny.

I sip on melted ice water from a blue plastic cup with an 'A' for Amo stenciled on the side. Out in the forests there are birds chirping, maybe some pigeons, the hoot of an owl, the shrub-shuffling burst of a grouse. I expect there'll be vermillion foxes stalking about under the forest canopy and millions of tiny hibernating creatures huddled in their warm dens, continuing on as if nothing is different.