The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

  THE LIES – Zombie Ocean 8

  7 billion zombies. 1 truth.

  The zombie apocalypse killed almost everyone on Earth. Only 700 out of 7 billion people survived.

  It began with love, and loss, and lies.

  It will end in blood.

  The end is coming.

  ZOMBIE OCEAN SERIES

  The Last (Book 1)

  The Lost (Book 2)

  The Least (Book 3)

  Box Set (Books 1-3)

  The Loss (Book 4)

  The List (Book 5)

  The Laws (Book 6)

  Box Set (Books 4-6)

  The Lash (Book 7)

  The Lies (Book 8)

  Buy Michael John Grist's books via links here.

  For Su

  CONTENTS

  AMO

  1. LIGHT

  2. ALPHA STATION

  INTERLUDE 1

  3. FREAK SHOW

  ANNA

  4. COMMAND

  INTERLUDE 2

  5. INCHCOMBE

  INTERLUDE 3

  6. POWER

  INTERLUDE 4

  LARA

  7. JANINE

  8. ANNULMENT

  9. KISSES

  HUNT

  10. CAIRN

  INTERLUDE 5

  11. READ ME

  INTERLUDE 6

  12. SLAPS

  INTERLUDE 7

  13. MONTCLIFFE

  INTERLUDE 8

  14. SUFFER

  INTERLUDE 9

  15. BEECHCRAFT

  INTERLUDE 10

  16. WHITE RABBIT

  17. LITTLE SISTER

  18. CLICK

  EAST

  19. A NORMAL LIFE

  20. FORTY YEARS

  21. WHY

  Author's Note

  Mr. Ruin (Excerpt)

  AMO

  1. LIGHT

  Snow falls around me like motes of decay in a dying world, as though the sky itself is sighing off infected skin. It comes silent and cold, deadening my every step and smoothing away the shape of the earth under my feet. I can't help but wonder that I'm finally reaching the end.

  I walk.

  Tears freeze on my cheeks, and I imagine the ashes of New LA mingling with the concrete-colored clouds overhead. Strange winds carry such strange fruit. I heard once that radioactive material from the Hiroshima bomb rained in Australia for years, rained in Papua New Guinea, rained on the Galapagos Isles, caught in swirling atmospheric currents ten miles high. So it's the same here, and each fat, drifting flake becomes a Deepcraft world I've built and abandoned, or a person lost, or a friend I've betrayed. So many dead already, from the noisy beginning of this apocalypse right up to the frozen, silent end.

  I walk through the dark, twisted stretches of ice-chipped pine forests. I cycle past frostbitten Siberian villages, submerged to the pale tips of their rooftops and lampposts. At times I drive over the endless expanse of this barren white land. Days pass, maybe weeks, and I see no other survivors, speak to no one; I only think of the end to come, and the ends I've left behind.

  I think of New LA.

  The Chinese Theater is dust in the air, now. Venice Beach is dust. Lara's new coffee shop, the John Harrison, is dust. Chino Hills, Disneyland, the malls and the hills and the roads we cleared and cairns we placed, our home and the room where my children slept, the knitted goods made by Keeshom's knitting circle, all of my legacy is turned to dust.

  I push falling flakes to the side like I'm caressing lost friends. Here a piece of Cerulean remains, gazing back at me. Here falls a memory of Anna on the beach, shouting at me, angry at something we've both probably forgotten.

  Anna. Cerulean. Lara.

  Words and memories scroll on a repeating reel through my mind, because I've lost so much, and failed so many, and made so many mistakes.

  I'm following a road, like a river white with snow, though I can't see the blacktop beneath. I tried digging down to it once, but it must be ten feet deep. Instead I slalom through the frozen wastes alone, and I imagine cars trapped beneath my feet, like mammoths locked in the permafrost. Maybe they'll last there for millennia, perfectly preserved, to one day be dug up by a new race and resurrected. Future peoples will puzzle over Russian pop cassettes and the true purpose of cup-holders.

  I walk, and it's so cold my gums bleed. I have all the thermal gear I can wear, and still my toes blacken. At night I take shelter in dugouts in the snow like a hibernating bear, huddling close to a pitiful jumble of smoking sticks as though heat on my skin has any chance to warm up the ice I feel within.

  How many have I killed?

  The words beat like a drumbeat in my mind, day after slogging day. Even when the humming in the air that draws me North is strong, when the signal reaches out like a hot purple beam across the sky and I dream of the vengeance I'm going to have, I hear the drumbeat of guilt play out.

  How many have I killed, and for what?

  Sometimes it's guilt for the people I mowed down under my tires at Istanbul, or left for dead in the bunkers of Gap and Brezno. I think of the little boy's face on the floor of the shield room, and it's his face that drives me on.

  Then the guilt flips, and I see the effects of my mercy. Because I didn't kill more, because I couldn't kill them all, that means my own people will die. My weakness has doomed my family, right when Lara needs me most, my children need me, but I couldn't do what I promised. I have turned away from them in order to save people I do not even know.

  I've been kind. I've been cruel. I've killed and I've killed, and all I've done is ensure the conflict will grind on and on and on…

  I wake up in one of my burrowed snow tunnels and there's a fox standing at the entrance, vermilion and gold in the bleak morning light, more beautiful than I have any right to see. Against the white he shines like a bead of blood, and I reach out to touch him, because perhaps his purity can heal me, perhaps his certainty can make me see, but…

  He drops to the tunnel floor, instantly dead.

  I didn't know. I didn't mean it. This power of mine flails out in my sleep. I wake from it bleary. Birds fall with the snow, sometimes. Once I saw a great elk collapse. I tried to eat it, to butcher it, but even in this frigid waste the flies descended before I could set to drying strips of its meat over a fire. The whole thing became a putrid carrion pile in hours.

  I'm a cancer, is what it means. I'm better off up here. Pulled up here, like a rotten tooth out of a rotten jaw. Snap, more animals die.

  I emerge past the fox and see them; hundreds of them splayed like the ocean that time in Times Square, after I'd shot myself dead. Not only foxes lie before me but butterflies too, God bless them, and rabbits, and deer, and a family of beavers huddled together, and matted gray wolves. Their bodies steam as their heat fades.

  They came close to me, and this is what they get. I can't control my dreams, and even in my dreams I kill. Maybe I should bury all these poor bastards, set up a huge cairn of snow and boulders and scrawl some meaningless shit in the snow that will only be covered over in moments, taking credit for the murder I've done.

  I'm like Midas, but every thing I touch turns to cold.

  I walk north.

  A sign for Пинега passes me by. I can't read it. I don't know where I am, but I'm getting closer. A sign says Совполье. The feeling on the line gets stronger, leaking power like the black and white zombies of Istanbul. What were they, I wonder? My mind simmers slowly on the possibilities. I see Anna in the Istanbul bunker again, wearing her helmet and beating me with a bat, and think that I'm glad. Good for her. Maybe she'll get it right.

  One night I see the Northern Lights.

  I'm standing on the cusp of a
frozen wave; snow drifted by the winds over a leaning thatch of brambles. Several creepers emerge furtively from the white, reaching toward a sunlight that won't come again for months. Instead there are the Lights.

  They are not like in the photographs I've seen; augmented and zoomed and colorized, vivid and glorious, but they are all the more impressive for it. They knock me on my ass, barely able to breathe, so for long moments I just stand and stare, until my feet grow numb and my cheeks sting with fresh trails of ice. They are alive in a wholly alien way.

  The way they feel on the line is indescribable. The ripples, the tones, the beauty. I wonder if any other soul alive has felt what I'm feeling now, and doubt it. There's nothing up here for us survivors; only emptiness and solitude.

  The Lights speak to me, and as I listen, things begin to shift. I see that all of my past to this point was one chapter; my LMA days, my New LA, my Lara and my kids, and that chapter is now over. I'm not the same Amo as before. The Lights are a doorway opening for me, showing I can still go forward, because there is no way back home anyway.

  So I go forward, and leave that old, broken Amo behind.

  I walk. Time sizzles and flows like ice, freezing and refreezing in ways I can't remember. My brain doesn't work properly, though the power of it crackles like a frozen puddle popping underfoot. Miles of cold and white pass by. I must be nearing the northern coast of Russia, bound for the Arctic Circle, and the pulsation on the line gets stronger every day.

  It's a complex, shifting signal that washes over me day and night. There are tones in it that I recognize, some that seem strangely like echoes of my own signal bouncing back, and others that are new. I can taste hints of the chaos of Istanbul's black and white zombies, along with the cold thrill of the demons, the jittering hot spots of the Ocean, and more sensations I don't know how to describe. Through my dreams it spreads like a heartbeat, gushing in my veins and fuelling me onward, until the understanding finally comes.

  This is the heartbeat of the world.

  Of course I've felt it before. Like background radiation, like traffic on a highway ten miles off that never stops, like the air that I breathe, it has always been there. It's a soup I've been living in since the signal started and the world ended, and only now, up here in the isolation, can I really feel it.

  I laugh as I walk, tasting old flavors again. At times I think I catch a glimmer of Lara in the line, or Anna, or maybe a zombie I remember from a long time back. Every step further north makes it stronger, makes the delineations sharper, helps me distinguish the thing that has pulled me this far, the thing that is different.

  I even feel myself. When I'm quiet and walking, when my mind is on the snow and the world is calm, I sense my reflection on the line like a face in a broken mirror. When I'm driving, when I ride, when I get angry or frustrated and the black eye rises up, I see myself reflected in the line like an ugly bruise, and I wonder, is this darkness washing out across the world too? Am I tainting some communal well, sending nightmares and misery out over them all?

  I feel the thing that is different too; slippery like a greasy tide. Maybe there are many, stitched to a necklace across the crown of the world. I can't tell.

  Then it's there.

  One night, I see it.

  In the depths of the frozen dark, there is a light. The land around me is all crevasses; deep fissures in the permafrost that hide underground caverns. I go on skis, pulling a sled behind me laden with supplies, fitted with ice axes so that when I fall through the cracks, they spin and halt my descent.

  Now I'm here, standing on the purple-dark snow with all those stars and the moon and the Northern Lights fizzling like ribbons of energy in the sky, and I see the light in the distance, atop a rising spike that at first seems to be a column of rock.

  I stare.

  A light out here doesn't seem possible without a person to tend it.

  My black eye blooms large overhead, rising involuntarily and burning back at me in the line's reflection. The rage is so cold, built of my old madness, rising off the memory of a man called Amo. He's just a bundle of pain and loss now, left behind but always there. The cold has split us apart, but still his rage towers over all.

  The light on the rock wakes the black eye, and up it climbs, flattening the signal before it, and I have no choice but to listen as it speaks. Justice, it says. Up ahead. Another few steps. Another few miles. Justice waits.

  * * *

  It's not a rock, but a long building of dark glass rising from a pale cement base, with a slim glass tower rising from its southern-edge like a land-locked lighthouse. It looks for all the world like some high-tech office park plucked out of Silicon Valley, except for the mottled layering of blue-ish ice coating it, obscuring any detail.

  Around it lies an empty expanse of flat snow; probably once a parking lot or a security perimeter. There are no signs announcing what it is, or if there are, they've been obscured by years of creeping ice. At the top of the tower the yellow light shines toward me, and with it the signal pours out, and I know what it is now.

  A shield.

  But it's not like any shield I've felt before, nor is it the source of the signal I've been feeling for weeks. It's one thread only.

  I advance slowly over the hard crust of white, my skis scraping loudly in the wind-blown silence. Overhead the Northern Lights ripple like a welcome mat. I approach the crusted snow near the front, where it looks most like a church, but there are no doors apparent. I unclip my skis and toe the ground, but the snow here is packed solid, probably harder than stone. I'll never burrow down even to the topmost door arch, not without a pneumatic drill.

  I stand and look around myself. Standing in the building's shadow, the Siberian wind has cut out briefly, and I prize my goggles off my face, tuck the muffler under my chin and slide back my heavy parka hood. It's at least minus thirty degrees here, but without the wind it's not so bad, and I can probably go without my hood for five minutes before my nose starts to freeze.

  I touch the structure's frozen side, and peer in through the thick skin of ice, but it's too dark inside, distorted by the ice. Maybe a hallway, or a lobby, I can't be clear.

  I look up at the tower, to where the light shows now only in the flakes of snow caught in its beam. My nostrils chafe at the freezing air, and I lift the muffler again. In a minute I'll have to cover my eyes too with the goggles, but I want to take this in.

  There's something special here.

  I unhook from my sled, strap a pair of ice crampons onto my boots, and start around the structure. It takes fifteen minutes to circle it, and at no point are there any doors or open windows. Frequently I peer through the ice, but get no more clarity than a poorly sliced fragment of the T4 virus seen through a conventional microscope; just blurs and runny smears that I could paint any kind of meaning onto.

  Back beneath the tower, I rummage in the sled for my pick. With my goggles back in place to protect me from ice chips, and my hood up to seal in the heat, I heft the glinting metal back, then bring it forward.

  CHONK

  The impact rings up my arms and into my crippled shoulder so painfully that I have to drop the pick. For all that, I've barely knocked a chip out of the ice.

  From the sled I get more layers and wrap them round my gloves to deaden the impact, then I take up the pick, heft it over my shoulder, and hit the ice again.

  2. ALPHA STATION

  It takes hours, bashing out a chip of ice at a time. It's not so different from walking over the tundra. I drop into a calm, near-comatose state of focus, driving the pick in and in and in.

  When the metal first breaks through the glass, there's a sigh of gas from within, as though the interior was hermetically sealed. I suppose it has been, by ice. Over a decade of freeze-thaw cycles, beaten by the sun; God knows what kind of toxins are in this air.

  I step back while the wind whistles out, and swing the pick again.

  CHONK

  CRASH

  The pane smashes i
nward, a plate of glass as big as a trash can lid. Air puffs out in a last gulp that is swallowed by the cold winds, and I lean in to see.

  It's a lobby. I cup my eyes to cut the snow's white glare, adjusting to the darkness inside. It's like peering beneath the surface of a lake. The floor is a dusty dark tile perhaps two yards down, where maroon seating runs along the wall, flanked by wiry dead potted plants. The ceiling is high, making a generous, glamorous lobby that stretches some hundred yards to the far wall. Below and to the right there's the main entrance door, a large revolving glass affair, buried beneath the level of the ice, and to the left there's a row of electronic security gates with a large airport-style walkthrough metal detector.

  I almost laugh.

  It's like I'm back in the Valley, wandering the headquarters of various Hollywood studios looking for a decent copy of Ragnarok III. But I only need to pull my head back to return to frozen Russia. Reality goes slick and fluid and I almost fall through the gap. Did I bring my security pass? Have I brought coffee for the team? What floor was my interview on again?

  I cackle, then slap myself in the face. There's no pain with the muffler covering my cheeks, but there's a jolt. I need to pull myself together. I back away from the entrance and try to get a read on what's happening. My thoughts feel slimy, like they've been deep-fried, and I can't catch onto any of them.

  The signal is changing?

  I feel it slipping into my thoughts like a subtle blade, poking here, prodding there, making me crazy. The moment I cracked the glass it started, and now it's threatening to scramble my brains like an egg.

  Was it, what?

  I-

  I turn round for a slippery few minutes, feeling it threaten to pull me down. In the ice I see my own body reflected like distortions in a funhouse mirror. I laugh, and my face splinters. My breath goes ragged and I stop trying to map the contours of what is happening to me. I try not to think of the terror lurking just beneath the surface.