The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8), Page 2

  Instead I focus on one thing: the rage.

  I'm good at this. I've been doing it for weeks. I focus on the list of deaths, repeating each one like a puff of breath blown into the black eye, expanding a bubble of anger around me. I lash myself with the past, because fear is not a warning, it's a challenge, and haven't I already learned that a dozen times? Drake taught me well, and I think about his cracked-open head, about dead Feargal and traitor Arnst, about poor helpless Keeshom and everyone else I've killed, crying out for a reckoning.

  It helps, but that help wilts when faced with the hole in the side of the building. I feel madness drawing me in, and know that the eye is no match for the chaos pouring off this place. It's like the leper in Istanbul, but stronger still, chopping up my thoughts and pulling out the plug, leaving me like I'm-

  What did I-

  Hope to be?

  Another slap, ringing in my ears.

  Still, I have to go in.

  I duck back to my sled to get some gear, sucking in deep breaths as if that will help, then turn back and climb in.

  It becomes a fall, and I flop down on the leather seating, sending echoes through that desolate space for the first time in God knows how long. The signal wallops me at full strength, like one of the worst twinges from my post-coma days hitting me square between the eyes, throwing me into a past of failure and dull books and slow, stilted conversations with my parents, croaked out in a whisper, so that-

  I pull myself back into the present with a painful jerk, then writhe on the seat for a while, struggling for control. The signal is a cacophony in here and the black eye is barely keeping my head above water.

  Feargal, I think, crushed and abused. The boy in the shield. Keeshom who did nothing but try to help others. Anna in Istanbul, looking up at me with some curdled kind of disappointed rage…

  The black eye sputters outward, and I lurch forward into the space it buys me. There's a flashlight somewhere, in my pocket, and I lift it. A gun too. I sweep them across the dark, dusty space.

  "Hello?" I call.

  The bright light beam picks out more maroon seating, more dead potted plants, and framed posters hung on the walls. One looks like a cell dividing, another like a schematic of the brain. The security gates are unmanned, the bank of elevators lying beyond are shuttered.

  "Anyone?" I mutter, and lurch forward.

  I hit the reception desk hard on my hip. There's a corporate logo on the wall behind it; the letters squirm and dance.

  ALPHA STATION – MULTICAMERAL ARRAY

  My thoughts turn with a glacial slowness. Alpha may mean more stations than this? I make weak guesses at 'Multicameral', drawing on what I know of the mind from Mecklarin's pop psychology books. The mind is bicameral, he said, two parts of the brain that together make…

  Make-

  So, multicameral?

  A shudder trickles down my back.

  I catch myself staggering out into the open space of the lobby. The air is full of dust kicked up by my own passage, then I'm on my knees while the twinge bears me down.

  All a mistake. I start laughing, and lift the gun to my head. I'm not thinking, not doing, but it happens and it's hilarious, and maybe none of this is even real! I draw love hearts in the dust with the tip of the flashlight, humming a tune I don't recognize, while counting down from ten.

  BANG

  BANG

  I shoot the gun but miss my head. It doesn't feel real, and maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm already lying in the snow outside surrounded by dead animals, dreaming this while I freeze to death.

  "Stop it," I mutter to myself, more afraid than I am angry, more amused than I am worried. "Stop it."

  The black eye is flagging. I feel it dropping away from me like pieces of skin unraveling. This is me, my anger, and my rage. Justice is not enough, I suppose. Anger won't cut it. I need…

  I look at my love hearts and giggle. Love!

  I think of Lara, my Lara, but no rush of sanity comes welling up from within, no conquering of the signal by the power of love. It makes me laugh more, and I drool wickedly everywhere.

  BANG

  The gun goes again, this time so close that the recoil smacks me in the cheek.

  What the hell is going on?

  Did I just shout 'What the hell is going on?'?

  "What the hell is going on?"

  I shout it to be sure. I kick my legs, spinning a circle into the dust, like a snow angel, like Homer Simpson walking himself round in circles.

  Not enough. I wheel through the possibilities, but not revenge, not love, not justice, not righteousness, not madness, not the twinge, not my Lara, not-

  "Get up."

  I roll and giggle and look, and there he is. I give him a big old laugh, standing spectral and serious in the darkness.

  Old Shark-eyes. Geoffrey Marshall. My old nemesis.

  "Shark-eyes," I say.

  He grimaces down at me. I've let him down. I'm a disappointment, and that's only to be expected.

  "I didn't die for this. For you to giggle yourself until you shit and die."

  I giggle at that.

  "Shit and die?"

  "Shoot and die, you idiot. Just shoot yourself in the head and be done with it."

  I put the gun to my head. This is familiar, I've been here before.

  "Shoot," he says. "For Arnst. That bastard wanted it. Imagine what he would have done to your Lara, if you'd let him. Think of that while you snigger."

  I hold for a second. My finger strains on the trigger. Shit, I want to pull it and hit home again. My spine, I guess. I want it. But-

  "What?" I say.

  "Kill Lara," he says. He barks. Maybe he's saluting. It's not a dance. It's a march. He's standing still. The signal is playing havoc with his reception. "Or Drake. Have you any idea what's happening to her, right now?"

  I frown, because what does shark-eyes know about Lara?

  "You tried to kill me."

  "And I failed! Discipline didn't help me, but it can help you. Only discipline about the right things."

  I get angry and point the gun at him. It's so frustrating. I feel like a child, lying in the dust. "What things?"

  "Like what Janine Witzgenstein is doing to your wife. Listen to me, little man, pay attention, open your eyes and remember what you're doing here. What did you kill me for, and all those other innocent people? Don't lose track of that now. It's all that you have."

  His words echo. He sputters and starts to fade.

  "Shark-eyes," I call.

  "Don't be a –" I strain for his last words, but they come slow, so slowly stretched out. I think the last word is 'fool'.

  Then he's gone, but it gets me thinking on a new track, a parallel track that isn't justice or revenge or even love, with all my squiggly dust-hearts erased now, but something different and deeper.

  It's why I did all this. Why I lashed Arnst in the dust, and beat Feargal, and killed hundreds and thousands, not because I'm cruel or want the power or even for justice or revenge but because-

  I strain toward it.

  For the weak people. For my weak people, and my children and my friends and my family.

  To save them.

  It's why I started this whole thing. I giggle and sob. I started off clean, I promise! I wanted to do good things, to help other people, not to kill them, not to break them, but to save them.

  When I get hold of that, and chew it like a bit of rubbery steak, the black eye gets thick. The chaos backs right up.

  And I stand.

  I'm not giggling any more. Shark-eyes is gone. I wipe drool from my chin and look around.

  It's all still there. It's beating at my shell now, hammering picks into my resolve, but I have time. Shark-eyes gave it to me.

  I move fast, thinking clearly again,

  I scan the reception desk; in the shadows lie a keyboard, a mouse, a large monitor and a pen set at perfect gaps apart, as if they've been aligned with a ruler, but the computer has no power and there's
nothing in the drawers. Midway through checking I stop, because this is not important.

  The signal is important. The source, the shield, that's what I'm here for.

  I stride through air as thick as mud to the security gates, which remain closed so I roll smoothly over them. The metal detector doesn't blink as I pass through, though the signal intensifies again, briefly dropping me to my knees.

  Then I'm up and at the elevators. There's no power so I set to work with a crowbar from my pack to lever open the silver doors. Inside the flashlight illuminates mirrored walls and four buttons on the control plate:

  -1

  1

  2

  Tower

  It's near now, I can feel it playing with my sense of perspective. Vertigo strikes and I lurch sideways into the wall. I feel drunk. My mouth goes dry, I'm losing control, but I don't need much to punch out the access hatch in the ceiling. Pulling myself up through it helps; like I'm running along a balance beam rather than edging across step by step. The friction of speed will help me stay upright. The thought of Lara and Witzgenstein spurs me onward.

  The shaft is dark and towering, like all elevator shafts before it, but screw this place. I let violence take a hold of me, and snatch onto the recessed ladder rungs set into the wall, climbing like I'm stamping on Ocean skulls. Ten rungs up I think I hear some kind of noise, and react.

  BANG BANG

  The pistol recoil feels damn good, and the sound it makes is deafening. Why did I fire? I don't know. From above there's a metallic PING and a crunch, then I feel one of the bullets whip past me and down to PING off the elevator top below. I squeeze the pistol grip so hard it hurts.

  "Come on!" I shout up into the dark. "Come for me, let's go!"

  It feels great, this defiance. It drives the thick soup of the signal, even now trying to steal back into my ears and between my lips, a little further away.

  BANG BANG

  I shoot at nothing again and there are more PINGs. I jam the gun into its holster and fly up the rungs in a rage. They think they can do this to me? They think scaring me in a goddamned elevator shaft is going to have some kind of effect?

  "You'll have to do better than that!" I yell, driving the black eye up ahead, clearing my way. Another seven rungs and I'm at the next floor, where the metal doors are sealed tightly in the darkness. I jam the crowbar in between them and wrench open a gap.

  Light pours in through the narrow crack, and along with it a staggering punch on the line. I almost lose my grip and fall. Even dreams of protecting my people is nothing before this. I'm back in Screen 2 with Drake leaning over me, whispering mastery in my ear about how he's going to take away my wife and children and remake my world, and how much fun it's going to be, and I know there's nothing I can do. Again I'm standing atop a van in Times Square with a thousand dead bodies around me and the gun to my head, seconds away from pulling the trigger.

  BANG

  The pistol flashes in the darkness, suffusing my face with a salty exhalation of spent gunpowder, cramming the noise of it into my ears and setting up a ringing tinnitus in its wake. I blink and find myself barely hanging from the rungs by one hand, with the gun still pressed close to my head.

  What the-

  The flashlight weaves crazily round the shaft from its place in my breast pocket, though there's plenty of icy blue light pouring in through the narrow gap in the doors now. My head rings and I feel a trickle of what must be blood run down my jawline.

  Did I just shoot myself in the head? Again?

  I rip a glove off with my teeth, too shell-shocked to be much slowed by the line, and run my fingers up over a tight, hot furrow along my right temple. The skin has torn, blood is leaking out, and I laugh.

  I did. Goddamn. But I do feel clearer.

  "It's not that easy!" I yell up into the shaft. I yell it through the gap. "I'm not that easy any more!"

  I tuck the glove into a pocket and press my face to the gap in the doors, but all I can make out beyond is a metal walkway, a railing, and a bright white ceiling that looks to be made out of sky. I force laughter out like barks, setting my body headlong into the stream of confusion spewing out from inside, and jam my left hand into the gap. The crowbar is gone, probably fallen down the shaft when I drew the gun.

  I catch my balance and get both hands into the opening, teetering on the rungs. With a grunt I push outward, and the doors open a few inches. I see more, and more of the line bursts against my chest, but I just curse and push harder, driving the doors open until I can clearly see the insanity on the other side, and step through into-

  INTERLUDE 1

  Fourteen years earlier, Joran Helkegarde stepped onto the second floor gantry walkway encircling the Alpha Station of the Multicameral Array, and let out a breath of awe and admiration.

  It hit him every time.

  Beside him Piers Sandbrooke laughed. He had an easy laugh to match his tousled blond hair and teasing blue eyes. "You're too easily impressed, Joran. Have you seen what they're doing at Gamma Array?"

  Joran didn't have much to say to that. It had taken eleven months to get the Alpha facility built, seven more to staff it and bring on the experimental volunteers, and he'd been over every inch of the plans a dozen times, written and rewritten the theories behind it until he could recite the equations in his sleep, and you'd think he'd be sick of it, but this? To actually see it, to feel it humming through him, to feel it really working? It blew his mind every time. The possibilities were endless. The possibility of today was immense.

  Before him lay the enormous, light-filled hall of Alpha Array. The ceiling stood twenty feet high, formed from an unprecedented single pour of glass. The clarity through it was astounding, like the polished steel reflecting mirror on the Hubble telescope; revealing the swirling white Siberian storm above in minute, high-resolution detail. Getting that made had cost nearly a hundred million in itself, but it was worth it.

  "They're still running their Array in a null chamber," Sandbrooke went on happily, ever ready to gossip. "In Delta, I mean. Nothing in or out, of course, but they've tried varying materials; like the floor, they've gone for rubber, not cement. Apparently there's some refraction, an echo, but that actually increases signal absorption? Preliminary figures are coming, I talked to Yeary, but …"

  Joran tuned him out, not caring about what the other stations in the Array were doing. He'd ceded a certain degree of experimental control from the outset, as long as his core vision remained intact. That had been the one condition he'd laid down when the SEAL came knocking, after his research proposal had been roundly rejected by every established scientific organization on the planet.

  Shows them, he thought idly. Shows Sandbrooke. His rise had been meteoric. If today went well, he was about to launch through the stratosphere.

  But for this moment, he admired the central asset in his Array. One story down from the metal gantry lay the Array floor, subdivided into a hundred ten-foot square allotments by means of slim dark lines grooved into the gray plastic floor. Within each square lay one of his crack, hand-selected team of one hundred sensitives, each bedded down like a perfectly planted potato. They lay on low plastic gurneys aligned North-South like compass-needle soldiers primed for battle, shaven-headed and wearing simple white hospital gowns. All were males between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four, all lay with their eyes closed, and all of them wore the plastic neural caps with assorted pads suckered to their bald skulls, with thick bundles of cables running away like secondary spines.

  "..the walls, which are ten feet thick," went on Sandbrooke obliviously. "That's Gamma, from what I hear. As much of their signaling as they can reduce, so they say, though naturally all their habitation's in a shielded cage, like the Faraday rig you set up here, but not quite the same…"

  Joran let him fade again to a background drone. The scale of the plan was tremendous, representing billions in investment capital, all to make his pseudoscientific dream into a functioning reality. The breakthrou
ghs they were making every day were going to rewrite human understanding of their place in the universe for generations to come, though of course those discoveries had slowed to a crawl of late. Today was the pivot point that would change all that, right up there with the moment the idea had first come to him, sitting in a Princeton doctoral lecture on the varied signals produced by a normal, bicameral brain talking to itself across its left and right hemispheres.

  "Consider the medium, not the message," the professor was saying, in explaining the speed limits to thought. In the brain, or so he explained, the 'medium' was the hard lines of brain matter; organic 'wires' that electrical impulses could transmit along. No matter how powerful or important the message, it could travel no faster than the wiring would allow.

  The idea had set Joran off in another direction entirely. The medium, not the message.

  In that moment it had seemed that the old professor had simply never fully put the pieces together, while in Joran's head the potential clicked into place. His face had flushed and he'd looked around at his fellow PhD students, each of them a competitor for research money and university positions and ultimately scientific glory, and felt certain that every one of them had just glimpsed the same gaping hole in existing science that he had.

  But none of them had shown any sign of it.

  The medium was the essential question.

  Joran had left the lecture that second and raced to his room, where he'd stayed up all night working out the mathematical landscape of his theory. He'd known he wasn't the first to theorize a kind of 'medium' through which all thoughts passed, different from the 'hard' wiring of the brain, but he would certainly be the first to approach it in this way. All the evidence thus far was anecdotal.

  He dug into research, and found out that twins were perhaps the largest area of evidence to date, with various casual studies conducted that had come up with numerous findings that were either not replicated, or not explained via any meaningful theory. Sometimes these theories were about twins who'd never met each other, who could essentially read each other's minds. Others were about twins who could say where their twin was at any time, or twins who knew when their twin had just died or fallen sick or suffered an injury. Very little of the surrounding literature had a experimental basis, but the sheer amount of it still set Joran's mind alight.