Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least (7 page)

"You think this place matters?" he typed. "You think you matter to me? It's meaningless. I'm stuck here and I can't do a damn thing, and who are you? You're nobody either."

Another long pause passed.

"I'm not nobody," the Amo avatar said. "I hope you're not either. This place does matter to me. It helps me. I thought it helped you too. We both come here, you know? I know it's not really real, but it's a good place. What changed?"

Robert imagined his face behind the avatar. Was he smirking? Was he sincere?

"I want you here," Amo went on. "You don't know how much progress I've made since we met. It's helped so much, and I want to help you too. I told you I was in a coma- but I never really recovered. It hurts me still. I can't do much, not like normal people. This place helps, it's why I built it, but it didn't really work until you came. I want you to know that."

Robert stared at the long speech bubble, scrolling into the darkness. It sounded like his story. It could be a trick, but his mother was right. Who would do that?

"What did I say?" Amo pressed.

He had to let it go. It was too much to keep fighting, trying to do it on his own. Amo's name meant love, after all, so if he was lying then let him lie, and the pig blood rain down. The wounds from that would be better than this sick fear poisoning him from within.

So he let it go. He jumped into flight. "I was in a coma too," he typed. "I was going to the Olympics, and I lost everything."

A long pause.

"Tell me," Amo typed.

So Robert did, from the beginning to the end. In the past it had hurt too much to even think about what had happened, plunging him into a deep and drowning panic, but not this time. He kept on until it was done, and when it was done the two avatars stood there in silence.

"So I'm talking to an Olympic athlete?" Amo finally typed. "An Olympic parrot?"

Robert snorted. "I'm a paraplegic now. I can't think clearly. I can't do anything, really."

"Neither can I," Amo typed. "Maybe we had the same coma? I didn't break my back, but that was the fall wasn't it? It happened to me while I was filling in some panels for a zombie comic. That's what I used to do, draw comics. I was an editor, there was a lot of pressure, then one night things went all fuzzy and two weeks later I woke up in hospital. The headaches never went away. I call them twinges, and stimulation only made them worse. The doctor said I can't have sex until it clears up, and when I masturbate I should do it clinically."

Robert sprayed water mid-swig, across his bed spread. "I don't want to hear about that."

"Just be sure and do it clinically yourself," Amo went on flatly. "I mean masturbation. Nothing puts a downer on being horny worse than the devil's fat ass crashing down on your head."

Robert laughed aloud, then clapped a hand over his mouth. His mother was asleep upstairs.

"How do you masturbate clinically?" he typed.

"Keep your eyes and look at an apple. Or an orange, that works too. It makes eating them later a bit weird, but…"

Robert laughed.

They talked on into the night. They walked and talked and worked. It was demanding; working the controls and following the diviner while also talking to Amo, but it didn't hurt too much and he loved it. He learned that Amo lived in New York alone, after moving out of his parents' basement.

"I live in my mom's basement now," Robert typed.

"Best place for you. Breakfast in bed and a turn down service for free, you'll not get that anywhere else."

He laughed. It felt good to laugh about being trapped. "She has to lift me up with a winch to turn the sheets down. But it's true, I get breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed."

"And shit in bed I guess too?" Amo typed. "Not manly."

"I don't know," Robert fired back. "Some of these shits are pretty big."

"Ha ha ha."

"Cripples eat a lot."

"Ah, we're both cripples here buddy. You've got it worse than me, but we're in this together."

Afterward Robert remembered that line in particular. We're in this together. It was the best thing anyone could say to him.

Amo understood.

For four months they ran the darkness of the Yangtze every day.

Robert got better and stronger. He still couldn't get in a wheelchair or watch much TV, but he could talk to his mother and the doctor more, he could surf the internet for short periods without too much pain, and he could even start thinking about diving again, following the results of the national dive meets in the news, though it was too much to actually watch the dives or look at the water.

One day about a year after the accident, Amo finished his first comic since the coma, and showed it to him. It had an image of zombies piling up on top of each other in Times Square at the end of the world, all of them straining for some hidden meaning in the clouds above. It matched perfectly with how Robert had felt for so long, crushed by a dream he would never reach.

Seeing it, he realized he'd finally hit acceptance.

His loss still hurt, and perhaps that was never going to change. He would never dive or walk again, he might never even have a normal life again, but now he had a friend who understood. Looking at that hopeless comic and all those hopeless zombies straining for something that nobody understood, he wept for his own lost dream, and said his first true goodbye to the man he'd once planned to be.

It was progress.

The next day Amo pushed forward even further, taking a beautiful girl called Lara on a date. Robert cheered for him via text message. They were both pushing out the boundaries in the face of pain and fear. It was late that evening, while Amo was on his date and Robert ran the Yangtze darkness alone collecting purple shovels, toy plastic tools and garden fencing, that the zombie apocalypse struck and killed just about everyone in the world.

FLIGHT

6. APOCALYPSE

There was no announcement echoing through the Yangtze Deepcraft, no Paul Revere figure galloping through the shadowy shelves calling out the warning:

"The zombies are coming, the zombies are coming!"

Instead Robert's warning was a server failure which kicked him out of the mod completely.

For a few moments he watched as the screen reverted back to the boot page. It happened sometimes, so he wasn't alarmed. He'd lose his streak of 76 delivered items, but it wasn't the score that counted, rather the process.

He clicked through, and while the list of available mods loaded he looked at his cell phone. Most recent was the message from Amo, sent hours ago while he was hunkered down in the toilet of some fancy New York restaurant in the middle of his date, getting crushed by the post-coma pain.

Robert, or Cerulean as he often thought of himself now, had replied with the most motivational message he could think of.

I'm in the darkness, running. I just stood with Blucy for twenty minutes, doing nothing. The air is cool and the corridors are long. You're here with me, Amo. We're running this thing together. Our diviners are firing off like crazy, and we're getting it all. Potato dolls, plastic mop handles, Leatherman wrenches, whatever it calls for, we get it.

We can't be stopped. We're in this together. Breathe clear and get it done Amo. This thing is not going to take us both down with it. You out there and me in here, we have this.

It was ridiculous for running in the virtual darkness to matter or count for anything, but it did. It was a kind of unity between the two of them, a statement that they were in it together.

Amo's reply had been:

Sorely needed that. Thank you. Slumped in the toilet freaking out. I'm going back in!!

In his bed, in his basement in Memphis, Tennessee, Cerulean smiled. You kept pushing. He was about to log back into the Deepcraft server when his phone abruptly rang with a piercing klaxon whine.

He lifted it to switch the alarm off, but there were no icons on the screen. Instead the whole display was flashing red, and a few seconds later a message in large white flashing letters filled the screen.

SEEK QUARANTINE!

He blinked. What? It flashed three times then was replaced with another message.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

"I know that," he muttered, tapping at the screen and power buttons to over-ride the klaxon, "it's a virus."

THIS IS NOT A VIRUS OR A MALFUNCTION.

The phone went on, though the klaxon finally stopped. 

THIS IS THE UNITED STATES EARLY WARNING SYSTEM, BUILT INTO ALL PHONES IN THE COUNTRY.

Cerulean stopped tapping. He read the message again. "Whaaat?" he breathed.

WE ARE UNDER ATTACK. AN INFECTION HAS TAKEN HOLD ON THE EAST COAST. SEEK QUARANTINE AT ONCE.

He held the phone away from him and squinted. Even though the klaxon had stopped the red background was sharp and bright and bound to bring on the demon. He kept tapping to clear the message and finally it did.

But his phone didn't go back to normal. The icons that should have been underneath had been replaced by a news feed from CNC news, showing what seemed to be a scene from a zombie movie. People were running down a street being chased by other people whose eyes appeared to be glowing.

It had to be some kind of elaborate hoax. It was 1:16 in the morning.

He clicked up the volume.

"…reports of the infection decimating the populations of New York, Washington D.C. and Boston," said a female voice over the images. "Reports of the infection spreading through into Pennsylvania, the latest says New England has gone completely dark, with reports…"

The jolting video feed of people running switched to a harried-looking news anchor sitting at a desk leafing through papers frantically.

"She's not even looking at the camera," Cerulean muttered.

Her face and voice were panicked. "… best estimates suggest it's travelling via the air at speeds of over a thousand miles an hour, on a-" she paused to scan a piece of paper, "-disease vector of rabid contagion across 100% of those exposed."

There was a clatter from somewhere in the studio and the anchor looked up. Across the bottom of the screen a warning flashed brightly, scrolling yellow against red.

INFECTION ATTACKS USA – SEEK QUARANTINE – SEEK SHELTER

"The cameraman just fell," the anchor shouted, half to the camera and half to the studio behind the camera, pointing haplessly. She turned to the side and pressed her fingers to the bud in her ear. "Brett, did you see that? Shit, did you see that?"

"He's OK!" someone shouted from off-camera. "He's just pale."

"Oh my god, it's in here with us," the reporter muttered, perhaps unaware that the mic pinned to her dress lapel picked up every word and beamed them right to Cerulean. 

A title card popped up for a second stating CNC in large letters, followed by a few seconds of an ad for Dub Lite beer, then the image scrolled back to the footage of more bodies sprinting down city streets.

Was it a hoax, still?

"Mom!" Cerulean yelled at the stairs while hurriedly tapping at the computer screen. "Mom you have to see this!"

He cleared out of Deepcraft and brought up a search bar, typing in the address of another news site, Box. It took a long time to load and when it did all there was across the whole front page was a single headline, eclipsing the masthead and the adverts in the sidebar.

GET AWAY!

He scrolled down as the rest of the article loaded.

"Mom!"

The video on his phone spurted out tinny clips of sound as the transfer rate slowed right down. How many thousands, how many millions of people across the world were doing just what he was doing right now?

The article loaded and he raced through it.

A seemingly fatal wind-borne virus has struck the Eastern seaboard of the United States with unparalleled ferocity, infecting an estimated twenty million in its first hour.

"I urge all Americans, all peoples, to seek out shelter at once," the President said shortly after midnight, while standing on the steps of Air Force One before Secret Service agents pressed her into the body of the plane. 

This agency has since lost contact with its reporters on the ground in Washington, with bureaus equally going dark across New England and south down the East Coast through to Florida.

Infection appears to be a mass event originating from New York, or carried inland by the cross-Atlantic Gulfstream. Reports suggest entire populations become infected at once then begin a frenzied rampage, slaughtering anything in their paths with their hands and teeth.

"It could be a temporary strain of madness, like a super-flu," said expert Mathias Goren from MIT Infectious Diseases, "or even a fatal rabies-like virus, we just don't know. They're turning into what look and act like zombies. Shelter in buildings or in remote areas doesn't seem to prevent the spread. I'm afraid I can't offer any advice, only luck. There is nothing we can do but pray."

  Update us with the hashtag #outbreak. All reports will show here. May God have mercy on our
souls.

"MOM!" Cerulean shouted. He remembered the red panic button by his side and punched it. Up above a siren rang.

The Box front page refreshed itself with a flurry of tweets coming in from reporters on the ground, government bodies, FEMA and various emergency services.

#outbreak The lights all across Baltimore just went out!
 

I see a horde of them coming. Help me! #outbreak

Jackie Rosen in Albany isn't answering, does anyone have eyes on? #outbreak

The whole #outbreak is a goddamn fakeout, cool your shit, Ameritards…

#outbreak #FEMA Satellite imagery shows a flood of infected humans rampaging northwest along I26 from Columbia.

#outbreak #gov DO NOT attempt to intervene with an infected. Find higher ground.