The Last: A Zombie Novel (14 page)

"Yes/No," he offers.

"No."

Cerulean flips me the bird. This is one of his jokes, a bird flipping the bird. I can't stop myself laughing again, through my tears.

"Use your head, Amo. Think things through. I'm here lying in my cripple bed, dreaming you're alive. Can you imagine what things will be like if you are? It's beautiful. It means I'm not alone, which means you're not either. I don't feel the twinges anymore. If it wasn't for my mom and her friends banging on the door upstairs, I could go out in the world and I'd be fine. I'm cured! Do you think that's a coincidence, the same day the zombie apocalypse hits the whole world? Yes/No?"

"Shut up, Cerulean," I type.

The parrot waits. His Yes/No dialog clicks up again. He'll have all the patience in the world, now. I wonder how far down the decision tree he planned this interaction, when he was lying in his bed listening to the Skype call to me ring out, with his mother thumping overhead. What did that feel like, to finally be free and know that it could only last for hours?

Now I'm crying again. 

"Yes," I type. It's just a coincidence. 

"Yes? Pull your shit together, Amo. You're being willfully blind. We started this thing, or it started with us, don't you see that? Whatever hit us a year ago primed us and the world. It's obvious, don't you think? We became the proto-zombies, even the incubators for this infection. We went gray, we got white eyes, we wandered. But we were cared for, because there were only a handful of us, and they brought us back. What if that's what's happening out there, now? We seeded this apocalypse. I don't have time to offer a Yes/No now, Amo. You've just got to be with me on this, because the next one is a big one."

He goes quiet.

"What?" I type.

Thirty infuriating seconds pass.

"Are you ready?" he asks.

"For shit's sake, Cerulean!" I shout in Sir Clowdesley. "Tell me."

"Then consider this. Your doctor warned you never to have sex. He said it might cause something worse. Do you remember that? I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that is what happened with you and Lara. You are a charming bastard. You had your date, you took her home, and the earth moved forever. Whatever chemical buttons that act pushed in you, it also triggered the world's zombification. The infection began in New York, Amo, I gathered that much from the first blush of its spread. It went everywhere after that in hours, across the globe faster than any wind vector could carry it. People were primed to a wavelength, it has to have been something like that, because they were all pre-infected, and you were the trigger. You and Lara got down, and you birthed this new race."

He goes quiet. I lie on my filthy grime-smeared sofa and stare at an image on two goggle-vision screens, while the last cold hard chunk of text bobs above his parrot head.

What the?

"Amo," he types. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"

I stare. I caused this, he's saying? I caused this by having sex? It's true the doctor told me to masturbate clinically, to never indulge in romance, and I did exactly as he asked until Lara, and then…

Then I killed the whole shitting world?

"Amo," he types again. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"

I want to punch his stupid bird face. I want to burn myself to the ground.

"No," I type.

"Are you listening, Yes/No?"

"No!"

"Are you listening, Yes/No?"

"Yes, goddammit, yes Cerulean you bastard!"

"Yes, so get over yourself. Get over yourself Amo. You cannot for one second feel guilt over this. You died multiple times in a coma. You spent a miserable year running around in a fake dark cave with a cripple. That it was you who first reached out of your confinement means not a damn thing. If it hadn't been you, it would have been one of the others. There must be others, Amo; it can't only be you and me. The chances of only us finding each other are infinitesimal. There must be hundreds like us, out there somewhere. Perhaps some of them have been in comas this whole time, and now they just woke up. Have you thought about that? Think about that.

"And of those hundreds, any one of them might have recovered sufficiently to have sex, and thus trigger the end. But none of them did, because none of them are as defiant as you. Do you understand that? You were brave, Amo! That's human. You were willing to risk dying just to live a little, you chose man not mouse, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. There is no guilt here; you had no conception of this godforsaken outcome.

"Now, your duty is clear. Your people are out there, all the lost ones who never found each other and have no idea what's going on. They're going to need guidance. They'll need a leader. They'll be lonely and broken, like I was when I found your center. You have to do what you did for me, for all of them. Do you understand? Yes/No?"

I stare at the block of text. The Yes/No tag repeats insistently, refreshing once a minute. Steadily it pushes his speech off the screen. This was Cerulean. He isn't here, but that doesn't change anything. He was my friend, and I won't disrespect that even if I don't believe or agree with him.

"Yes," I type eventually.

"Good. I'm glad. I can die happily, knowing you're out there doing what you can, in the full light of the truth. You're a good man, Amo, you'll be a great man, and if there's any way to save these infected millions, or to alleviate their suffering, I know you'll find it, just like you did for me. I know you'll die trying if you have to, and no one could ask for more than that."

I look at his damn bird. It looks glassily at me.

"Goodbye Amo. Good luck."

The parrot doesn't disappear or fade, it just stops talking. Its diviner blinks, and it starts walking away. I watch it go.

Now it's just a non-player character like the others, a true ghost in the darkness. It passed along its message, one it carried across the vast distances between this broken world and the world when it was still on the cusp, and now it's for me to carry onward.

It bows me. I crumple beneath it.

I tear off the goggles and drink.

I rouse in the evening looking out over 4
^th
avenue, sitting atop one of my Greyhound barricades with my legs dangling like a child's over the side. The ocean spreads gray and white before me, its arms reaching up like the fins of fish, its eyes glowing white like the lantern-antennae on those hideous deep-sea fishes that lure other fish in.

Cannibals.

I swig the whiskey, which I hate. I pour a little out for the floaters to enjoy, on their faces and heads.

"I'm not going to burn you," I slur at them. "Don't worry."

They wave and drift like fronds of seaweed in the water, like groupies holding up their lighters at a stage. Their fingers sometimes plink against my shoes, tickling me gently.

I drink and think about Cerulean and Lara. I wonder how my parents died. I think about the cosmic sex that sent a signal out that somehow caused this.

"Did you know?" I ask the bodies below. "Did you feel it? Do you feel it now?"

They grope and waggle like anemone fronds. I pour the rest of the bottle on the head of an obese man wearing a sodden brown velour training top. As the liquor splashes he lifts his face and I get it in his mouth.

This makes me laugh hysterically. He blows bubbles with it.

I get to my feet and throw the bottle as far as I can. It hits the darkening tarmac across the intersection but disappointingly doesn't smash. Rather it chips and skitters away, like a flat rock skimmed over calm waters, receding underneath a resting car.

I laugh. I look out west along 23
^rd
and north and south on 4
^th
. The sun is going down, a nice burnt sienna, and it's really just me. There's no sign of Lara, and if she was here, would she even want to come within a mile of this disgusting charnel fiefdom?

I laugh. I have screwed myself, by surviving.

Down amongst the midst of my crop of floaters there is a cop. His uniform is easy to pick out. I pull one of my guns, strapped like bandoliers now across my chest, and shoot at him.

His shoulder blows out, and a floater behind him takes the slug and his dark blood in the chest. It's quite hilarious. I shoot again and the top of his head comes off, the face behind him explodes, and still no holy retribution rains down.

I get these for free. I shoot until the gun clicks out, but he still hasn't gone down. There's blood all over him, his head is in half, there are pockmarks torn into his chest and flesh, but still he sways his glowing eyes at me like lanterns in the depths.

I throw the gun and it disappears beneath their mumbling feet. I pull all my guns and shoot them blank at him. This is the way to fish. I get about five rounds before all my guns are blank, and I throw them.

He's still standing. He looks like a stick of pulped meat.

I drop back inside my blackened block as the sun goes down. I head for the liquor shop, through the darkness as night comes on, with his one burning eye still foremost in my mind.

12 – RV

Lara isn't coming.

I figure that out the next afternoon, looking over the ruin of my domain from the fourth-floor office. She isn't and she won't, because she's surely dead like everybody else.

I just had to have sex and screw everything up. It's like those horror movies where sex damns the heroes, but my sex has damned the whole world. It's a sick kind of vanity that allows me to feel responsibility for this, to feel guilt for 'what I did', but still I do. 

I need to find other survivors.

There have to be some. Cerulean promised.

I go out the embassy back door, still drunk in the clean morning light, with a whiskey bottle in my hand. I hate the taste but it's starting to grow on me. I wander up the street, tapping out silly rhythms on deserted car frames with the bottle and shouting at any floaters that come near. I hit one with the tire iron and fall into an ugly embrace with him.

He grabs for my brains, and I get on top, where I can press the tire iron in through his eye. Of course that does nothing. I have to pull it out again, fascinated and grossed out by the black blood welling up from the ruined socket, and press it into his throat. Getting it through the skin is hard, but with enough weight it punctures.

He doesn't die until I sever his spine. So I learned something.

I wander on. Somewhere around 26
^th
and 5
^th
I see a horde gathering in the distance. What are they so interested in? I wander over. There are hundreds grouping near Times Square. I round a corner stacked high with blank digital screens and see.

It's a dog, standing somehow atop a city bus in the middle of the road. I laugh. He's skinny and barking, some kind of brown/white terrier breed, and he's probably a few hours from dying. He keeps on barking like somebody's going to come save him.

Poor little guy. He's meat for the ocean, now.

Some of the horde peel off and come for me. I move like I'm in a dream, climbing into a nearby SUV. The keys are there in the ignition and I rev the engine. More of them flow toward the sound. I put my seatbelt on, press the pedal down and drive right at them.

I hit the first with a thump, the second with a thwack, then it's a barrage of thwack, thump, crack for a hundred yards, running over bodies and sending them flinging to the side like Moses parting the Red Sea, until the windshield is fractured so badly I can barely see and my forward momentum is halted by their sheer mass.

A breaking wave of gray and white faces stares at me through the white-webbed glass less than two yards away. Dryness has pulled their lips back from their bloody teeth in a series of rictus grins, shriveling their cheeks into dark hollows. Death is really changing them.

The dog is still somewhere ahead, barking frantically. He sees me, he knows I'm one of the good guys.

"Just a second," I call, and twist to look through the rear window. I shift the stick to reverse and rev backward.

Thump, bang, crack, smack. Bodies impact and go smearing across the asphalt, bodies crush beneath my wheels. I rev back until my tire marks run dry of blood and I've dinged off a dozen cars, clearing something of a path.

They're charging again. I slam the horn down and charge right back.

It's like ten-pin bowling for people. They go flying in all crazy directions; off to the side, over the top, bouncing back into the crowd. Bits of them start to get tangled up in the windshield's fractured web, here a scrap of tongue, an earlobe, a gobbet of dry gray skin.

"Come on!" I yell into the fury of the stampeding storm. I hit the solid depths again and rev backward. The poor dog won't shut up. I ram backward and forward like a steam piston. When the windshield breaks inward it takes me totally by surprise, showering me with crystal glass and zombie bits. Hands grope inward from bodies suspended on the hood.

I race back and friction pulls them off. I stop an intersection down, spy out a better machine, an RV, and get in. The keys are in the dash, it revs up nicely, and I bring it to bear like a battering ram.

The dog barks. I crush dozens of them. I splatter dozens. I probably grind hundreds under my wheels. In all, it doesn't do a damn thing. I can't get closer. Hot tears splash off my hands. One damn dog! I couldn't save Cerulean but maybe I can do this.

"I'm coming!" I shout to him. "Buddy, I'm coming." I hammer at the ocean but the ocean is an ocean and it swells to encompass me. Rather than getting closer, each time I get driven further away, carried on the surging tide. I can't think for the dog's crazed barking.

"Hold on, I'm coming."

Then the barking stops. I don't see the moment he gets pulled down. It's a wholly unremarked death, like every other death in this new age, and it makes me seethe. I beat the crap out of the steering wheel with my fists. Ramming them with an RV is not enough for this. Burning them won't cut it. I need something more.