The Last: A Zombie Novel (27 page)

In Denver I ricochet through streets clogged with emergency vehicles, careful to nudge my way through the crowds of milling floaters. There are police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks everywhere. I hazard a guess, that out here they had longer to react to the infection as it spread. People had time to call for help.

It didn't help. I don't see a single living soul, or any sign that anyone survived.

I bulldoze a path gently. I walk amongst thousands of gray bodies, people I would once have burned. They follow me like I'm the second coming.

I smash my way into the Wells Fargo Center, fifty floors tall and laid out like a gridiron of perfect square windows with a wavy curve for a rooftop haircut. I rig my pulley in the massive stairwell to haul my gear up. It's a lot of gear; drums full of bright yellow street paint, rollers, rope, generators, gas, food. Hiking fifty floors is an insane workout. Once I've set up at the top, I have to go back down to affix the load.

Then I haul.

I wander through bank offices around the fortieth floor. The view is epic, of course. Here I pass amongst desks and chairs, along static-rustling gray carpet looking into cubicles and offices. Nothing has changed since the world flipped on its axis, bar the people and the power. It wouldn't look any different from now. At one point a security guard comes pelting for me, and I brace myself.

I sidestep at the last moment, so his momentum fades of its own accord, then I step up close so he can't charge me again. I pat him on the burly shoulder. "There we go."

He puts his wrinkly hand on my shoulder too. No problem. We conga that way back to the stairs.  

The roof of Wells Fargo is a weird wavy pompadour, so I can't go down in a window-cleaner's basket. Instead I hook into the rappel points and hack my generator into the in-coil system. It all works fine, and after working on the Empire State for so long, I have no problem with heights.

From the slippery glass top I look out over the Colorado countryside. There are other skyscrapers nearby, then low suburbs, then an endless flat plain of scrubby brown and green fields in every direction. This is Middle America, the plains, and when you're in it, it seems to go on forever. This latest banner ad of mine will be visible for miles, so I better make it a good one.

I rappel down and work fast, running myself left to right along the windows like a swaying pendulum, slapping the paint in place hastily but with deft familiarity. I do this rather than in-coil back to the top after I complete each vertical line, like a dot matrix printer, where I would have to reset my hooks on a different position, and work another vertical strip.

Plus it's more fun to sway back and forth. To that end, I don't work from sketches painted in the interior this time, because I'm not too worried about accuracy. A splash that looks jagged up close will look like a razor-straight line from down in the street below. Distance forgives a lot.

I splash on paint, zigzagging left to right. I get high on the sway of it. I wonder if I'm cutting through my rope at the top, sawing it on the building's edge, but who cares, really? The drop below is awesome, and the end would be sudden. I can't ask for any more than that. It's what all my zombies got.

I spend most of the first day on the east-facing side, swaying around between floors 48 and 40. I have to leave a little room for bleed on the edges, but otherwise I cover the whole building façade in yellow.  

I wonder absently how much of a crime this would be, back in the real world.

When it's done, I set myself up to stay in the dizzy heights of the top floor, along with my pal the security guard, hunkered down in an executive suite where probably the CEO stayed when he was pulling an all-nighter. The TV in there is a hundred inches wide. There is champagne in the fridge and thirty-year-old brandy in the liquor cupboard. Sadly the ice machine in the corner doesn't work, and I can't be bothered to figure out how to hack it with the generator cables.

I lie on the massive bed in the massive silence of this stilted mausoleum to high finance, and laugh, with lukewarm brandy in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. I wasn't a big drinker before, and I'm certainly not now. I sip at both, then I watch a movie on my laptop. It's the first Ragnarok movie, picked up on DVD from a carousel in a gas station somewhere. In it our mythological superheroes are climbing all over buildings in Shanghai, fighting off aliens.

I'm not a huge fan, but it is good fun. It feels good to watch it after so long, and not twinge at all. The noise and light fills the room for a little while, and I can forget where I've been, and what I've done.

The next day I do two more sides, alone. I wonder if the security guard has found his way down the stairs and out through the hole I smashed, or if maybe he's glitching round the top floor still, banging into walls. I look for him but there's no sign.

The third day I finish with the north-facing angle, and I set up the cairn in the ground floor lobby, just like in New York but with a whole lovely bench, set up like a booth at comic-con, featuring my books and the digital file and the rest. I sign a few bits and bobs, authentic LMA merchandise, and intersperse these amongst the piles. I should get some T-shirts made.

I drive away. On the outskirts of Denver I look back along I-76 at my handiwork.

It's a giant yellow Pac-Man. I tried to do it like a stop-motion animation, though who will notice that, I don't know. Starting at the east his mouth is mostly open, then clockwise he clamps it closer to shut, until at the north it's just a slim wedge of pie, uncolored in.

His eye is a black dot the size of a double-desk. It looks good. It's a bit of fun.

I rumble on.

I tell jokes to Io and she tells them back to me. I try to think of puns about zombies. Most of them revolve around the similarity of 'brains' to other words, like drains, grains, flames. I theorize aloud about why zombies have always been so interested in brains, and figure out it's probably because they haven't got any of their own.

"Remember, I sawed open that head?" I ask her.

"What head is that, Amo?"

"It was like a coconut husk."

"I like coconut ice cream."

I laugh. "Me too, Io, me too. Good luck getting that now, though."

"You're near a Wal-Mart. I'm sure they have it."

I'm impressed she knows where we are anymore, and that the location of every Wal-Mart in America would be stored in her memory, but I suppose it's all just a few more bits and bytes, so why not?  

"That's a great idea."

I pull off the highway and into a Wal-Mart in the scrubby forests near Grand Junction. Of course the ice cream is rotten sludge in its tubs, but that's not what I'm looking for. By flashlight down the aisles, with a crowd of withered staff helping direct me, I find the astronaut's ice cream. It's dehydrated in wafer-form, sealed in brick-like silver packages. I can't find coconut, but there are vanilla, strawberry, and Rocky Road. I grab a handful, and on the way out pick up some cans of bolognese and a box of green tea. 

It's a feast that night, on the border between Colorado and Utah, camped out in my battle-tank with the bitter tang of the green tea's tannins in the air. I get nostalgic, and while chewing down bolognese I fire up the darkness in Deepcraft, slipping my goggles over my eyes.

Cerulean is there waiting for me. I turn on my diviner and he starts off down the aisles. I go with him, toddling along through the bicycles and the exercise equipment, circling around past the book machines and down narrow passages filled with large cardboard boxes containing all kinds of Barbie dolls.

Hank passes me but he's mute now, with his Internet feeds cut off. The real Hank is out there somewhere, wandering with his darkness herd. The real Cerulean is out there too.

In the morning I drive on into Utah. I replenish my gas barrels at a Shell station because there's a tanker sitting on the forecourt, and that's a lot easier to siphon than the underground tanks. I fill them up. I get a pack of Big Red and some lukewarm grape soda and sip and chew my way into the desert.

The land turns brown and burnt red, in this our long approach through Mormon country to Las Vegas. To either side great sandstone buttes rise like the mittens in Monument Valley. It is a gorgeous, wasted land, as pure as driven sand, dotted with hardy green cacti and mountainous termite mounds. Scrappy shoots of dune grass crop up everywhere, and sand has begun to reclaim the road.

I pass through various National Forests, fed on water stopped up behind Bryce canyon to the north, and am enveloped in verdant Douglas fir and Bristlecone pine. I spot squirrels and turkey in the branches and the undergrowth, starting as I rumble by. I drink water from a fresh tributary stream, damn it is cold and fresh. I get on my knees and smell the sweet resin of the pine needle carpet. Just beautiful.

I drop more cairns, in Richmond and Beaver, in Cedar City and St. George. Of course I'm saving something special for Vegas itself. It's got to be grand, surely, for a place like that. I ask myself, what would Banksy do with all the world as his canvas? What would JR do? How far does fighting back against the man take you, being defiant against the new world order, when there's not a shred of that order remaining?

I'm not them, though, and I'm not in their world. I'm me, Amo, and I'll do what I've got in my head.

After Zion National Park I hang a left off the main track, and drive a few hours east for the first time since backtracking to the darkness. I've always wanted to see 'The Wave', a part of Coyote Buttes that has the most gorgeous sandstone escarpments, like the eye of Jupiter made flesh on planet Earth.

The terrain gets redder and harsher around me, Arapaho land, and I get misty-eyed and awed with it. Of course I've seen the Grand Canyon before, but there's something more intimate about this. Soon I pass through the car park and by the visitor's center. There I unhook the battle-tank from the JCB, loading the cab with a gas burner and some tea and bolognese, a blanket and an inflatable pool lilo, a pack of marshmallows, Graham crackers and Hershey slabs. With all that I take the JCB up the ranger trail.

It's already straining toward dusk as I ascend up into the wave. It is a perfect half-pipe of red and cream deliciousness, like freshly scooped raspberry ripple, so smooth and perfect I want to reach out and bite it. That all this was formed by water and wind just blows my mind. It feels as alien as Mars, and I am the last man alive to see it.

I park the JCB at the trailhead and climb one of the buttes by dusk light. The sandstone is slippery and a fine rain of sand shivers off at my touch. There are stairs cut into the rock and a rail bolted in, and I climb to a viewing platform atop a twisty crag, left behind when the softer sedimentary layers around it were worn away. So says the sign.

On top I set up my burner and sit on my lilo, and toast marshmallows on the open fire. They crackle and catch fire, quickly going black, melting the lovely inner layer to sugary goodness. I love this bit. I sandwich it with chocolate and crackers, watch the white distend and bulge through cracks in the black outer skin, and take that first luscious bite.

Oh my lord above, that is sweet.

The intensity brings back so many memories; hay rides with Aaron and my parents, my dad driving us in the little hay-trailer attached to his John Deere round the three acre wilderness farm he bought so we could play there and build proper tree-houses. We'd wade in the creek and catch crawfish, barbeque venison and have burgers, and tell stories by firelight while watching the fire crackle, munching on s'mores.  

After a while we'd take the ride to the hilltop crest and lie back to watch the sky. There were always shooting stars, and we'd give them names and shout out when we saw them, sometimes pretending we'd seen one when none had come, just to tease along the others. My mom was the best at calling us out on that game, while my dad just nodded along and claimed to see them all.

I sigh and lie back. The tea and bolognese can be breakfast. I look up at the sky. Of course it's the same sky. These are the same stars, though the shooting ones aren't.

"They're not really stars," my dad told us once. "They're just little bites of interstellar dust, or the screws and nuts that come off falling satellites, burning up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere."

This awed us even more. That there was a layer of sky up there so hot that it burned, that interstellar dust was reaching out to our little planet across the gulf of space, then falling down upon us all like a fine rain, like fairy dust.

In the morning I head out, wordlessly, after the breakfast I promised myself. I hook the JCB back up and rev off, back to I-15, for the road through Las Vegas and out to the coast. It's the final leg now, and I'm excited about what I'll find.

Will anybody be there already? Will I find a copy of Ragnarok III tucked away in a producer's office, ready for distribution nationwide? Will it all be what I hoped, or am I going to end up swinging like dear Sophia within a week?

Whatever. I'm not worried. I feel good regardless of the outcome. I'll have done what I set out to do, and if it just leads to me dying there alone, then that's fine too.

I pull through the desert corner of Arizona and then into Nevada at the fastest clip yet, down largely empty roads. Soon Las Vegas dawns like an abandoned theme park from the wastes, and I blow into the strip hard, roaring between outsized casino-hotels with my music pounding, bound for the UFO, a massive silver saucer sticking edge-into the ground, surrounded by faux-rubble, like it crashed there.

They only finished building it a few months before the zombies; one of the largest hotel-casinos yet, surrounded by giant green alien sculptures. I saw it on the news, distantly, back when I could barely handle TV. It's where my next-to-last major cairn will go. I heard they screened movie-launches across its massive circular façade.

Everything is still and silent but for me, and sand blows down the streets in cute twisty zephyrs. I see the UFO dawn like a dark sun over the faux-city.