Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least (24 page)

"Show-off."

Amo shrugged. "You've got a broken back and a broken mind, but you're the best thing that ever happened to that girl. Have I told you that before?"

"You have."

"Good. You did a good job with her. She's on her voyage pushing out our boundaries, like we'd always hoped. We need that hope, Robert. I know you see that, even if you don't feel it."

He sighed. "It isn't safe out there."

"What's safe anywhere? Sitting still and going crazy with soul-crushing depression isn't safe either."

"Hmm."

They sat in silence for a time after that, watching while the melted candy sun was swallowed up into the black of the ocean. There were probably zombies down there still, swimming through kelp forests, crawling along the sandy seabed, deep in the dark but still going on, chasing some internal drive only they could feel.

They were like him, really. Like them all. Everyone had an engine inside, driving them on in a particular direction. And engines could break.

"You ever think about Julio?" he asked.

Amo snorted. "Not if I can help it."

"No. I do, though."

"And you want to talk about him now?"

Cerulean shrugged. "I wonder, sometimes, what he was living for. I think for each of us, we can put a name to the reason. For you, it was Lara. For Anna it was her father. For me it was Anna. But Julio?"

Amo stretched on his bench. "Who knows? He wanted respect, I remember that. Nobody ever respected him enough. He got it from Indira for a while, but when you and Masako split…"

Cerulean nodded. "I know."

It had been a painful time. Cerulean had lived with Masako for four years, until Anna's ninth birthday, because it was easy. At times he'd felt rich, like a true family man, but they never had been. The wounds that had made them were always pulling in different directions, and no matter how they tried to sew themselves together, the stitches wouldn't hold.

He hadn't loved her enough, probably. He hadn't needed her the way she'd needed him, and then Anna started to change. She spent longer looking out to sea or tracking her father's position on her phone app. Sometimes she'd rail against Cerulean whenever he asked her to do something, saying cruel words that lingered between them long after.

He hadn't had the energy to keep the lie going after that. Anna's withdrawal sucked the life out of him, like a slowly deflating balloon, and there was never enough left over for Masako. He took to staring out over the water too, not dreaming of a lost family member, but of his own demon.

He spent hours imagining what the zombies felt like, under the water. Drowning. The dreams haunted him.

They'd split up amicably, or at least he'd tried to make it amicable. She'd cried a lot at the end. "How can you do this to me?" she'd asked, over and over again, like he was the one who'd brought the apocalypse down on them both. "How can you do it, after everything?"

He'd had no answer. He didn't know. He just didn't love her enough and was drained from pretending. In the year or so previous she'd seen his withdrawal and grown desperate, clinging to him like a child and only demanding more of his energy. That had only sped up the end.

"You'll find someone," he'd told her. "I promise."

She found Julio. One night she went to him, for comfort or succor or to make Cerulean jealous, or something, nobody knew, and he raped her. The evidence was clear-cut. Perhaps it had started in a better way, with her looking for something in him that she couldn't find any other way, but the bruises on her face, the marks around her wrists, the scratches covering Julio's head and chest spoke the truth.

He hadn't denied it, when they came for him. He'd been waiting, sitting with Indira by his side like she was supportive of what he'd done. It was a bad memory, but one he couldn't help but return to often.

He'd smiled at Cerulean and Amo as they came in his house with guns drawn. "You were waiting for this," he said. "Any excuse. You should know she was asking for it."

Then he drew his own gun and shot Indira in the neck. Her blood sprayed out and she lurched into Cerulean's lap.

One of Amo's shots took Julio in the shoulder as he fled, almost knocking him over. He hit the street where Cynthia was waiting near his Mustang, and she shot him twice through the window as he climbed in and revved the engine, spraying his face and arm with buckshot from her shotgun.

After that he drove away, leaving no trail, and they never saw him again.

Masako was never the same. She'd found a new man, Arlo from Kentucky, but he was a simpleton. She seemed happy enough, but who amongst them was really happy, anyway?

He only had to look at Amo to find the answer to that. Amo either had never suffered enough to truly break him, or he just had an inner wellspring of strength that others didn't.

"You're only hurting yourself with this," he said, looking at Cerulean. "It pains me to see. You're not still thinking about diving, are you?"

Cerulean smiled. That was a confession from the past; his desire to perform the greatest dive in history off the Empire State Building. Was it still there? It seemed so hotheaded now, something a young man would say. But then he was only 33 now, still young. There were many years left. 

"No," he answered, and surprised himself with the truth of it. "I don't want that. I'm kind of happy, like this."

"In this misery?"

He shrugged. "It's comfortable. Surrounded by memories, I suppose. You and me, me and Anna. We've had lots of good times."

"We have that. And many more to come. Anna's on her way home! You've got all her growing up still to do. I'm sure she'll be a different person when she gets back. She settled her pain. I only wish you could do the same."

Cerulean snorted. "Settled my pain. Isn't there a pill for that? Drop it in water and it fizzes nicely."

"I wish. I'd have dosed you years ago."

"Yeah," Cerulean said slowly, drawing out the sound.

"Anyway," Amo said. "You shouldn't sit out here alone. You know the rule."

He did. Everyone did. Nobody was supposed to be out alone, at any time. It was a hangover from Julio's many security procedures, but one they'd kept. With all those cairns out around the world, you never knew who was going to come, or what they'd want.

"I'm almost done moping, I promise."

"Good," Amo said, changing his tone to something more upbeat. "Lara's cooking up a hot pot, and they're all asking for you. The girls are waiting and Ravi will want to sit next to you again, of course. Father of his prospective bride. I heard he's working on a ring."

Cerulean shrugged. Amo and Lara's daughters were lovely, of course, but that just reminded him of how sweet Anna had once been. Ravi was a sweet boy too, two years older than Anna but way too ditzy for her, all looks and no brain. "It's not for me to give him permission."

"Now that's just wallowing," Amo chided. "She's a new person now, she found what she was looking for. New vistas, Robert, a whole new world of possibility."

Enough of that. He changed the topic.

"You think we'll be getting some fresh citizens?"

Amo raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering if he should accept this topic change. "You want to talk about the future now?"

"Sure."

"Sure," Amo echoed doubtfully. "All right then." He leaned back on his bench, considering. "Yes, I think we will. There were billions of people out west; in China, Malaysia, India. They can't all have been crushed by the infection. There must be some left."

"And they'll come here."

"Where else? We've got thirty-seven now. With maybe a hundred more we'll have a sustainable gene pool. The human race starts here, you know? We get to be founding fathers to the whole world."

"Just like we destroyed it."

Amo sighed. "There you go again. You can't help yourself, can you? That was me and Lara anyway, not you. I'm the one that killed billions. You just got in on the ground floor."

"I know," said Cerulean. "Sorry. I just get this way, sometimes."

"Especially now." Amo looked at the glowing display on his watch. "Look, old buddy, they're expecting me back. They're expecting you too. Come for hot pot. It'll make the kids squeal, and Ravi will be over the moon. He treats you like a father-in-law already."

"The boy thinks with his ass."

Amo laughed. "That's more like it. You should tell him that."

"I'll come," Cerulean relented. "Give me a little longer and I'll come."

"Great," said Amo and got up, though for a moment he remained, looking down. "Hang in there, brother, OK? You mean a lot to all of us. You know that."

"I know. Thanks."

Amo nodded then strode away down the pier, his sandals slapping off the wood. Cerulean listened as the tone changed when he hit the sandy asphalt of Ocean Front Walk. A few moments later came the sound of Amo's Porsche door opening and closing, barely audible over the lapping of the Pacific against the pier's weary wooden struts. The engine was a faint growl which faded into the distance.

Cerulean was left alone with the ocean, and the hole inside.

Amo was a bandage too, like Anna. New LA was a bandage he'd wrapped himself up in, all these people with their light and noise and laughter, but none of them really filled the hole with a new engine.

Anna had shown the way. She had found her father and filled herself up, and now she could be whole and happy. She wouldn't need him any more, not the way she once had, so he couldn't cling to her any more.

What did that leave?

He looked down into the dark water. It terrified and fascinated him. The demon that used to hold him under was long gone, but there were new demons now, red beasts that stalked Mongolia and turned people into monsters just like them.

The demon from his past was a kind of antique, an artifact he brought out sometimes and studied like a scientist examining a fossil, looking for the origin of things, though he knew where things really changed.

Matthew. His death had cut out the last threads tying him to his engine, after Amo, leaving a hole inside that was sheer and smooth and full of water.

Sometimes he imagined himself falling inside it; water would pour into his lungs cold and solid, followed by the panic wracking him like electric shocks. The light from above would fade as he sank deeper down, until the hole finally became full.

He smiled. It was a strange fantasy. He'd died so many times already, and not one of them had filled in the hole. Instead he'd boarded over it, so he could look down into its depths without any real fear of falling.

It was true that he didn't want to die any more. Maybe that was what healing was. He wanted to see Anna, and know what kind of woman she would become. He wanted to see her children, he wanted to be Grandpa Cerulean and roll down the beach with them tucked on his lap, laughing crazily.

All of that was ahead. He laid his hands on the chair's wheels and started rolling back down the pier, thinking about the future and all the good people in New LA, completely unaware that he would never see any of them again.

* * *

The figure stepped in front of him on the Speedway running parallel to Venice beach. It was all shadow back there, a dark and narrow road between hollow-mouthed condominiums, and the figure was a man holding a gun, dressed in denims with cowboy boots. The moonlight sparkled on the spurs at his heels. His shoulders were uneven, the left lifted unnaturally high like a hump. His gun was thick and round-barreled, extended towards Cerulean's belly.

The chair stopped. The pit opened up beneath Cerulean and filled up with rising and hungry tides.

It was Julio.

It was the same dark face with the same heavy brows and the same dead-eyed glare, but older, and scarred with peppery blotches across his left cheek.

Thoughts raced in his mind; words pealing up from the depths and receding, accusations and statements of disbelief, but none of them fit the bill. None of them said what he wanted to say.

What he wanted to say was far simpler than all that, and he said it.

"I'm going to kill you."

The gun spoke for Julio, three times. BANG, it said, BANG BANG, shots fired direct into Cerulean's gut.

His body thumped back against the seat, and down into the dark.

INTERLUDE 1

Julio didn't die.

Five years earlier, after shooting out Indira's throat and escaping New LA in a flurry of bullets and blood, he survived.

His Mustang served him well through the dark streets of LA and out into the empty desert, before he fainted from blood loss at the wheel, steering wildly off the road and crashing into a stand of cacti at the foot of a blocky mesa.

It saved his life. The patrols from New LA didn't find him that night or the next.

It also cemented his disfigurement.

He roused to heat, thirst and pain. His entire left side was alight. In the cracked rear view mirror he saw speckles of blood tarnishing his left cheek like furious zits.

Cynthia's buckshot.

He tried to open the door but his left arm was agony. He unbuttoned and peeled back his bloodied shirt, creeping the denim across the swollen bowl of his shoulder.

It was excruciating. He probed the inflamed skin and knocked himself out with the pain. There were two bullet holes at least, entry wounds but no exits he could detect. His bones might be smashed to powder inside the skin, with the bullets lodged in amidst them.

The Mustang's engine was dead, so he fought his way out and stood swaying in the mid-day heat. The sun crushed him like a bug. He didn't have a hat or any sunscreen. His left arm swung at his side, painful with every grudging step he took.

In the boot he dredged up his go kit, containing guns, painkillers, medical supplies, maps, a GPS, more guns, a range of knives, water, rations, and a backpack to hold it all; everything he'd prepared for.

He hung a sling round his neck with great care, swallowed painkillers and antibiotics, tipped alcohol over his shrapnel-stung face and the two holes in his shoulder, fixed sticking bandages over the entry wounds, drained two bottles of water, then slung what he could manage of the pack over his right shoulder and started north.