The Last
Author: Michael John Grist
Date: 2015-04-28 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Post Apocalyptic; Science Fiction; Apocalyptic; Fiction; Dystopia; Dark Fantasy; Collections
Description: 7 billion zombies. 1 man. When the zombie apocalypse hits America, not a soul is left alive. Except Amo. He's a comic book artist. He's a video game world builder. He's just a regular guy living in New York city, with only his wits, creativity and basic decency to guide him. He's alone against 7 billion zombies. Will he survive? 'Robinson Crusoe' meets the zombie apocalypse like you've never seen it before, packed with adventure, gore and a mind-blowing twist.
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

ZOMBIE OCEAN

The Last (Book 1)

The Lost (Book 2)

The Least (Book 3)

Buy Michael John Grist's books via Amazon links here.

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For SY, as always.

CONTENTS

TAKE-OFF

1. GREEN-O

2.
FRAYSER

3.
THE DIVE

4. DEMON

5. DEEPCRAFT

FLIGHT

6. APOCALYPSE

7. AMO

8. WHEELS

9. NEW YORK

10. TIMES SQUARE

LANDING

11. MATTHEW

12. RV

13. MASAKO

14. SURVIVORS

15. CAIRNS

16. WEST

17. SETTLING IN

18. JULIO

TAKEN

19. TEN YEARS LATER

INTERLUDE 1

20. VAN

INTERLUDE 2

21. MAINE

INTERLUDE 3

22. CHAINS

EAST

23. FREEFALL

24. FLIGHT

Acknowledgements

About the Author

EXTRAS

Mr. Ruins (excerpt)

TAKE-OFF

1. GREEN-O

One day before the dive that would change his life forever, Olympic hopeful Robert 'Cerulean' stood at the edge of the 33-foot dive platform in the University of Memphis swim hall, trying to focus on the dive ahead. It was an arm-stand triple pike flip with twist, a dive he'd mastered a year ago, so the technical elements were not the problem.

The real problem was focus.

He took a deep breath and looked out over the hall. He'd only been training here for six months, after Coach Willings had gotten him membership in advance of the final Olympic trials. It was a cavernous space, like an airport hangar, with windows that ran floor to ceiling and offered a gorgeous view out over the university's green campus. Below lay the deep blue dive pool, with all its lane marker buoys removed and bundled off to the side, its surface rippling under the lights. On the two remaining walls stood tall bleachers, which tomorrow would be filled with hundreds of dive fans, the judges and his Olympic agent.

Everything was as it should be, except for Green-O.

Goddamn Green-O. He was standing by the locker room entrance like a fat toad in his red parka, glaring up. Robert hadn't seen him for precisely a year. That was shitty timing.

"Brother, are you gonna be all day?"

Robert blinked and turned. A guy was waiting at the platform ladder-top behind him. Really he shouldn't have even climbed until Robert had dived.

"Would you drop out of sight, please?" Robert asked, keeping his temper. "I'm doing an arm-stand."

The guy sucked his teeth. That sort of thing would get him shot in Frayser. But no, Green-O was not here for him.

Focus.

The guy dropped down and Robert set his feet at the edge of the platform with his back to the pool. Behind him the fall stretched out and down, 33 feet and an aching two seconds of 'flight' to the water. Take-off, flight, landing: every part of the dive was judged, from difficulty and execution to height gained and smoothness of entry into the water. Even the tiniest mistakes could lead to a loss of control, a loss of points, a loss of his Olympic dream…

Focus! The grooved tile at the edge of the platform was rough and solid underfoot, grounding him. He'd been training non-stop for this for seven years, almost aging out of the full training package and this time he had to make it, or…

He bent down and set his palms firmly on the tile. This had always impressed the girls in his teens, letting him show off his strength. Smoothly he shifted his weight to his arms, finding balance. This was the most precarious moment, when nerves could flavor the judges' impression and ruin a performance. Carefully he raised his legs until they were arrow-straight up into the air, and for a long moment held the handstand at the edge.

Focus came.

This was the reason he dived; for that moment when he lost himself in the dance between his body and his mind, in pure focus where nothing else mattered. It blocked out the blood in his past, the swamp that was Frayser, Green-O, the shitty duplex he shared with his mom, everything.

He took a breath, tucked his head straight, and allowed his body to tip outward over the pool. For an instant he was falling, then he bent his legs at the knee and kicked his heels in a sharp jack-knife. The jolt pulled him bodily off the platform and into the air at a dizzying spin. He clasped his knees in a perfect pike and spun backwards one, two, three rapid turns, followed by a flick of his elbows for a full twist, then smacked into the water.

His clasped palms punched a deep hole in the surface, drawing the splash down after him, and his body curled round as his rotary momentum died out.

Hell yes. It was good and it felt good.

He kicked and surfaced, rubbing water out of his eyes. Green-O was doing a slow clap. Green-O didn't have a goddamned clue. Robert swam over to the edge where Coach Willings was grinning, and Green-O ducked out, headed for the locker room.

"That was damn good," Coach Willings said, as Robert climbed out of the water to stand dripping on the side. The Coach was 63, on the verge of retirement, but had the diver's frame of a much younger man; legacy of being a top level national dive competitor well into his forties. He'd been the one to discover Robert nine years ago when he was just 14, pulling off neat quadruple somersaults from a 16-foot board in the Frayser Rec pool, and stuck with him despite all his many setbacks. "Robert, I really think you've got it this time."

Robert grinned and nodded. "It felt right."

"It looked amazing. I'll never get over the height you get on the kick. You're like Michael Jordan up there."

Robert laughed. The Coach slapped him on the shoulder. "Get home and rest up. You'll need your A-game tomorrow."

"Thanks Coach."

Robert toweled off at the bottom of the bleachers, then headed for the locker room. The knot of anticipation, dispelled so briefly by the dive, was coming back.

Green-O would be waiting for him inside.

He pushed through the door and there he was, lolling extravagantly on one of the wooden benches running down the middle of the long locker room. Two guys were getting changed at the far end by the sinks and mirrors, but Green-O wouldn't care.

"Tight swim pants, those," he said, through his chubby, frog-like mouth. There were two black teardrop tattoos inked by the corner of his left eye. They hadn't been there before. "Like a superhero would wear. Are they called pants or panties?"

Robert frowned. "Speedos. You know it's not panties."

"Speedos," Green-O considered. "Sure. You're too black to be a superhero."

Robert snorted. Green-O was always like this now. He'd been like it before too, but it had been funny then. Now it was just a trial.

"You're here about the memorial," Robert said.

Green-O nodded. "Of course I am. You know I remember this shit. I live it. I'm the one who goes by the cemetery every week. When did you last go?"

"A year ago."

Green-O sucked his teeth. "No shame, that's your problem. You should at least pretend."

Robert shook his head. It was old, old news. "Zane died nine years ago, Germaine. I'm not coming this time. You can all go without me. I've got my final Olympic trial tomorrow."

A slab of fat lifted above one of Green-O's eyes, putting a single wrinkle in his glossy forehead. "You haven't got time to stand by a grave?"

"Stand? Last time you took us through Binghamton in a convoy and we shot up three houses. That was on the way to the service."

Green-O laughed. "You bitched like a damn coyote about that."

Robert shook his head. "You're lucky you didn't kill anyone. There could've been kids in those houses."

One of the guys getting changed at the far end of the room looked up. He nudged his friend and they started packing their gear faster. Green-O followed Robert's gaze, saw the muscular young men hurrying, and laughed.

"There weren't any kids," he called after them, then turned back. "I'm not an amateur, son. And kill people, well, that was kind of the point. You're coming."

Robert looked down at his old friend. He had almost the same face as goofy Green-O from the block, but Zane dying had changed them all. Robert had buried himself in his diving, while Green-O only had the Sons of the Harp.

Robert set his feet. "Are you going to make me?"

Green-O laughed. "You look like a superhero standing like that. Put your hands on your hips for me, would you?" When Robert didn't he laughed louder. "It's always like this with you, trying to make me into the villain. You're so dramatic. I come here once a year and we go, that's all I ask."

"To go shoot people. And what do I ask from you, Green-O? What have I ever asked from you?"

Green-O rolled to his feet. He was taller than Robert and much heavier, though most of the weight was round his belly. His red parka inflated his girth even more. He stepped oppressively close but Robert didn't take a step back.

"You don't need to ask. That's what friends are for, looking out for each other right? You won't know it but I'm a sergeant now in the Sons. I protect you, Bobby. No one's tried to bust in your place have they? You don't have any drugs or whores on your street do you? That's me."

Robert stared right back. "That's bullshit."

"Not bullshit, I protect you and your mom. She's looking well, by the way. I like her new weave. It'd be a pity if some gangbanger busted in and knocked it off her head, wouldn't it? Mussed her up a bit or flipped her over, you know?"

Robert blinked. Flipped her over? This was new. "You're threatening my mother? Are you serious?"

Green-O prodded Robert in the chest. "You think you know me, son. Truth is you don't know shit. You see these?" he pointed to his teardrop tattoos. "You know what they mean."

"They mean you're a goddamned idiot."

Green-O slapped him.

It came fast and hard and Robert didn't see it coming. It was a solid smack like they used to do when they were kids with too much time to kill, and it echoed sharply in the narrow locker room. Robert's cheek stung, his face swung to the side, and the smart of it raised tears in his eyes.

"Like I say," Green-O said calmly, "you don't know me at all. You think we're still friends, so OK, let's be friends. You ride with me, front seat for respect because we used to roll together. One day a year and that's all."

Robert reached up to touch his cheek. Emotions curdled inside him, anger mixing with shock and disbelief.

"The hell you just did?"

"Slap back if you can," Green-O said. "Raise your hand. I won't draw down. We'll just go, you and me here. You were always strong, I'd like to try that. You may even win, but how many fingers are you going to break on the way through? Your ribs, sprain an ankle, bust your ACL, you know?"

A churn of emotions sank in Robert's gut like a bag of cold milk. He wouldn't be able to dive. Colorado Springs would be gone. It knocked the wind out of him more than the slap.

Green-O nodded. "What I thought. Shit, I've got the internet too, Bobby; I keep track of you and your diving. We're all real proud, but you've got to do it right, you know? We're proud if you're one of us. If you're not one of us, then what is any of this but a big F-you, to me in particular?"

"It's got nothing to do with you."

Green-O laughed. "That's a lie and you know it. This is reality, Bobby, where the shit you do is remembered and matters. Every year this time I start taking flak about you and it looks like I'm the bitch. I can't allow that. Are we clear?"

Anger stung at Robert's pride, urging him to knock this fat punk down once and for all, like he should have done years ago. He was a professional-level athlete and Green-O was a fat slob used to relying on a gun. But...

"I see the rage," Green-O said. "The same as that night, ready to pop. You think I've not faced this shit down before? You're just a civilian to me. Go ahead and lay me out, give me an excuse to burn you to the ground. I've been waiting since Zane."

"I've been waiting since Zane too," Robert said through gritted teeth.

Green-O took a step closer, pressing his parka against Robert's chest. "You always thought you were so special. What are you now? Pissing your superhero panties."

"I would knock you flat out."

Green-O's grin widened. "But you won't."

The tension drew out.

"Will you?"

Robert trembled. He longed to lash out, but he'd lose everything.

"You come by mine tomorrow after five," he said through gritted teeth. "When the dive's over. Pick me up then. And I'm not shooting anyone."

Green-O laughed. "I'm not a idiot. We're coming at dawn, before you dive. We better find you there. Or else, well, you've given me an excuse."

A wave of heat flushed through Robert's face. This wasn't remotely his friend anymore. This was another piece of gangbanger shit, acting like supremacy in Frayser was the whole of the goddamn world.

"I like it," Green-O said. "Smoldering eyes; you're making me hard. Dawn tomorrow, Bobby, or you're done."

* * *

Focus came on the bus ride home.

He sat at the back of the number 9; a forty-minute ride across the city to Frayser, then a ten-minute walk to his mother's crappy duplex through the leafy suburban ganglands.

He looked out of the bus window without seeing anything. His cheek still burned and the bag of milk hung heavy on his belly, quickly going stale. Outside another bus went by, a park, the high-rises of downtown Memphis.

He didn't remember leaving the sports hall. He felt drunk.

Zane came into his thoughts, forever trapped in the body of a fifteen-year old. He'd been their leader in so many things; the handsome one, the charming one, the best with the girls. He'd touched tits before grade school even began; by twelve he'd scored a home run with an older girl on his block; by thirteen he was pimping out his exes to Green-O and Robert if they'd wanted a kiss or to cop a feel; and at fourteen he was actually making money from it. The crazy thing was that the girls seemed happy to do it, because Zane was special.

Being around him made people feel lifted. He was strong and smart, played football JV at fourteen. He was the youngest on the team but the fastest at tailback, forcing rushing plays that found gaps through the defensive line that nobody else could see.

"You just got to feel it," he told Robert once, who'd always been a strong athlete too, but didn't have Zane's skill with the ball. "You focus and the world opens up to you."

Until diving he'd never felt that way. It was the one thing in his life he'd ever done better than Zane.

Then Zane got shot.

It was simple and stupid. They'd been out in a gang, ten or so girls and guys of fifteen and up with a crate of Colt 45s, high on a weekend after a big game, headed for the park behind Denver Elementary.

There they stumbled on an execution. They were all already half-drunk and groping on each other, and none of them spotted the warning signs of the headlights glowing through the scrubby trees until they were upon them. The first Robert knew was Zane's steadying hand on his shoulder.

Robert turned from the girl he was canoodling and saw a clearing lit by the roof-lights of a yellow Humvee. Two guys were kneeling and three guys were standing over them holding guns.

A gangland execution.

He'd recognized the men on their knees at once; one of them was Green-O's father, the other was Tolerance Big, one of the Sons of the Harp generals. Their red caps, bandannas and jackets had been stripped and lay on the dirt before them. Their faces were bloody and bruised.

Somewhere at the back of the group Green-O was laughing loudly. He hadn't seen yet. His father winced visibly.

"We get the hell out of here," Robert said quietly to Zane.

Zane squeezed his shoulder. "That's Green-O's pops."

"What's all this?" one of the gunmen asked. He wore a yellow do-rag hovering atop a tall afro, with bright yellow high-top shoes. "I don't recall inviting the Brady bunch."

A second man laughed, wearing a yellow cap and yellow belt over a tucked in black T-shirt. Yellow meant the Memphis chapter of the Orandelles, one of the biggest gangs in the state.

Just then Green-O burst through the middle of the group, emerged into the light, and saw his father.

"Shit!" he shouted. A second passed, then he fumbled drunkenly for the revolver in his paunchy waistband.

The third Orandelle fired. It hit Green-O in the gut and dropped him to the floor. At the same time Zane squeezed Robert's shoulder and called out the play.

"Eleven twenty-two."

Without waiting he sprinted to the side, cutting an evasive line that took him round the cover of a tree. Robert charged too, without thinking, directly toward the middle guy with the high-tops. Shots fired and a bullet zinged off his ribs, then he leaped over a bush and hit. The guy went down hard across tree roots and Robert fell with him, smacking the dirt and rolling.

"Keep driving!" Zane shouted from behind, and as Robert found his feet he glimpsed Green-O's pops and Furious rising up. Zane was straddling his guy and thumping his face, while the girls behind them were screaming and hurling bottles.

The third Orandelle was leveling his gun on Robert when a bottle struck his wrist and knocked it loose, a second before Green-O's dad thumped into him. Robert dived for the weapon as his first guy was getting up and drawing a second pistol from a calf holster. Robert snatched up the fallen gun and fired, hitting the second guy in the belly. He fell back with surprise on his face and blood welling out through his yellow jacket, like a burst ketchup bottle.

Robert swiveled to fire again but the gun was cracked out of his hand by the third Orandelle's boot. Green-O's pops was down, two of the Orandelles were down, and now the third was about to stab a knife into Robert's chest.

Zane, bloody and pale-faced, rose up and took the knife through the throat. Blood gushed out, and he wore a faint look of surprise on his face as he fell into the brown dirt. The Orandelle lurched for the gun but Robert snatched it up first, holding it in the Orandelle's face.

The man sneered. "Goddamn-"

Robert fired. The bullet blew through his face and out the back of his head.

He dropped. Robert dropped too, to his knees. His shoulder was throbbing and Zane was dead. He turned him over and looked into his still and staring eyes.

"I think Green-O's dead!" somebody shouted.

He peered through the thin mist of gun smoke, lit strangely by the headlights of two yellow Humvees parked amongst the trees. Green-O was lying in the dirt with his hands on his belly. He looked dead. There was blood all over him. Robert turned. The others had run off, and bloody bodies lay everywhere. A minute, maybe less, and everyone was dead.

What had he just done?

He dropped to his knees by Zane's side and tried to staunch the wound in his neck and another in his belly, but Zane was already dead. Feeling numb, Robert moved to the next body. Green-O's father and Furious were dead too, the Orandelles were dead, everyone was dead.

He dialed 911, called in the police and an ambulance, then checked Green-O. He was unconscious, but a whisper of breath leaked from his mouth. Robert lifted him to his shoulder and ran through the woods to the road in front of Denver Elementary to meet the ambulance.

Hero, they'd called him. He hadn't felt like a hero.

On the bus Robert rubbed his temples. As a rule he tried not to think of any of that. Killing people wasn't heroic, and Zane's loss had been crushing. But every year Green-O made him go to the memorial, tying it to new attempts at killing, hoping some of Zane's glow would rub off on him. Every year he'd increased his role at the graveside to something nearing master of ceremonies. When Green-O retold the story now he elevated both his and his father's roles. The Orandelles were still their enemy, and every year they took another shot at revenge.

There would be blood tomorrow. If Green-O had his way, Robert would pull the trigger like a good little soldier.

He rubbed his tired, chlorine-reddened eyes. If it was only about pride he'd do it, he'd swallow it as the price of getting out. But it was more than that. It was people's lives, and his life and his mother's life.

It left only one decision. They were leaving Frayser tonight.

2. FRAYSER

He hurried through the lamp-lit streets of suburban Frayser, passing like a thief in and out of pools of shadow. Down the alley behind Walgreens there were scattered soda cans, beer crates and a single fly-tipped washing machine. On the corner of Frayser and North Watkins he turned left and made for the row of houses on Riney Street.

They were mean and largely ill kept. Many had overgrown front yards, some with rusted cars raised up on blocks with all the wheels missing, though a few had green lawns. Each one carried memories from his youth. Once Green-O had dared him and Zane to hump every bit of grass on the street and shout out, "Damn she's fine!" when they were done. They'd done it, racing each other along with tears of laughter in their eyes and lights flicking on in windows behind them.

At the end Green-O had solemnly awarded them a scrap of paper each which read:

Hand job

"Where do we cash this in?" Zane had asked.

Green-O just winked, looked between them, and nodded.

He turned to run but Zane caught him in seconds, dropped him on the floor, then he and Robert took turns humping him sideways, yelling, "Damn she's fine!" They'd laughed about that for years.

The streets were cool with the wind blowing down off the Mississippi river. This was his home, but it hadn't felt like home since Zane.

His mom's duplex sat near the corner of Riney and Frayser School drive. It looked nice enough, small but with some new aluminum siding he'd put up himself, a neat patch of grass with a cement walk-up, though that was all a façade. Inside the plumbing was haphazard, the air con was busted, the windowless basement was his bedroom, illegally, and there were rats. They'd never had the money to do it up or get out, what with his dive trips and training, his grandmother's cancer which had churned on for six long years, his two sisters both going through rehab with one of them now serving in Syria and the other in jail, and the landlord forever raising the rent.

He checked the street but there was no sign of Green-O's red Cadillac.

He slotted in the key and opened the door.

"Hey, Bobby," his mom called from the kitchen. She sounded fatigued, another double shift at the hospital. It was taking it out of her, had been sucking her dry for years, but a job was a job. It was just one of many factors that kept them both in a strange twilight state, between partners, between dreams, between lives really, just existing.

He squeezed down the narrow beige hall and into the pokey kitchen, where orange cracked tiles lined the floor and the white kitchen cabinets seemed more ingrained food stain than actual wood, despite long bouts of scrubbing. The small back window was cracked and beside it the air con ticked over halfheartedly, puffing gusts of cool through the swampy southern humidity.

On the table was a huge weight of spaghetti bolognese, with his mom sat in a plastic bucket next to it, weary like a smoked-down cigarette butt, but smiling still through the straight lines of her new brown weave.

He couldn't help but smile. She was the best thing in his life; she'd always pushed him to pursue his diving though it meant ultimately he couldn't go to college, as holding down a job at the Yangtze fulfillment center and diving had taken all his time, but she'd had faith.

He sat down. The spaghetti looked amazing, and sitting there with her weary smile glowing on him, it felt like the concerns of Green-O and his gang were figments from a different world.

But they weren't.

"I screwed up, mom," he said.

Her eyes woke up. Though he was twenty-three she wasn't above giving him a whupping.

"So tell me," she said.

* * *

They packed fast and light. His mom knew Green-O and what kind of man he'd turned into. She knew the law and that it would never protect them in advance, not on the strength of such a vague threat. One of them would have to die first, or get arrested. Then the cops might listen.

After he'd finished talking she made a show of studying his cheek, even moved to the medicine cabinet to get out antiseptic alcohol.

"Am I supposed to drink that now?" he asked. "It wasn't a cut."

She applied it to his cheek anyway.

The plan was fuzzy, but they'd been saving for years to leave, getting seven thousand dollars together. Most of it was in the bank, but they had enough cash to stay in a Big Eastern motel or something while he dived tomorrow, then catch the Greyhound west afterward, hopefully bound for Colorado Springs.

"I like the idea of Seattle," his mom said. "I mean, for a holiday. Of course we're going to Colorado."

Robert laughed while he polished off his spaghetti. "Seattle, because of that movie?"

"Sure because of the movie. Tom Hanks is my kind of man."

"He's as white as you can get! He's the white man's white man."

"He's white and all right," his mom answered. "White like sweet sugar."

Robert frowned. "Ugh."

"Put some white sugar in this black coffee."

"God, I get it, mom!"

She laughed and they packed, with Robert down in his basement bedroom and her upstairs.

"I always said that Green-O was a little shit," she shouted down to him after half an hour. "Greedy face, pug eyes, like a spiteful little teacup pig."

When they were all packed, three bags each of essentials and mementoes, he called the taxi, then stood for a final time in the basement that had been his room all his life. Beneath the raft of many posters, half of them of old female rappers put there by his sisters back when they'd all shared this space, the wall was bare concrete. He could smell the damp underneath, as he'd smelled it for years.

Here was his cot, with his one extravagance the games console; five years old but it still worked. By the TV was a rickety cabinet holding all his remaining dive trophies. He'd had to start culling them when they grew too numerous, getting a few dollars for each at the pawnshop, leaving only the biggest, brightest and most impressive. He wouldn't take any of them; too bulky to pack into a Greyhound. If Green-O didn't burn the place to the ground he could send for them.

He climbed the steep stairs to where his mother was waiting. She pulled him into a hug.

"Lots of memories," she said. "I know, sugar."

He cleared his throat. "We need to go."

"You're a good boy, Bobby. Good to all the least of your brothers and sisters."

He smiled. It was one of her favorite sayings, from the Bible somewhere.

He led the way down the narrow hall, pulling behind him two overstuffed suitcases and three plastic bags stuffed full of clothes, and opened the door.

Green-O was standing there. He had his gun held low in one hand, the other raised up to knock. Shock registered briefly on his face, then he peered past Robert to the bags in the hall.

"You idiot," he said, and raised the gun.

* * *

Robert dived.

It wasn't much of a dive, with only time enough to push with his ankles and get an inch or two of height, but it carried him into the air and over the threshold to hit Green-O with all the force of a wet kitchen towel.

He deflated across him, pushing the gun barrel down with his thigh, where it discharged with a BANG and crunched a bullet into the concrete path. Robert kicked his other foot off the wall of the house and drove Green-O backward hard. He staggered and fell, his back thumped on the cement walk, his head cracked off it loudly, and the gun fired with another brittle bang.

Robert grabbed at the weapon. Green-O's grip was limp and sloppy and his fingers opened easily. Robert took the gun and sprang back to his feet. Green-O was out cold and bleeding. He turned to survey the street.

The red Cadillac was there, parked three houses down. A skinny white guy in Sons of the Harp red was leaning against its side with an expression of stunned surprise on his face.

Robert raised the gun and pointed it at him. The guy's hands went up at once.

"Robert, wait," his mother called from behind. He ignored her and strode forward, filled with a sudden high tide of rage. He'd kept his head down, he'd paid his respects, he'd done everything they'd asked, and in return he'd just asked to be left alone.

He stopped in the guy's face with the gun barrel pressed against his clammy forehead, next to a zit.

"Robert!" came his mother's voice.

"Give me your gun," Robert said through gritted teeth. The guy reached gingerly into his waistband and fished it out, holding it between finger and thumb like a dainty tissue. Robert took it.

"Now run."

The guy looked at him bewildered. There was the glaze of dope in his eyes. "What, man?"

"Run away. Go."

He inched sideways out from under the gun muzzle, then started to lope hesitatingly away, looking back a lot. Robert kept the gun trained on him until he disappeared round the bend of Riney Street.

Then he sagged. His mother was there to steady him.

"We have to go," he said.

They went.

They left Green-O unconscious on the path. They met the taxi halfway down the street after dumping both guns in a neighbor's abandoned fishpond.

In the cab Robert gritted his teeth through the shock reaction. His mom kept talking about nothings; that was her way to deal with it. The taxi drove on and he glared out of the window. They passed south out of Frayser, through the high-rises of downtown Memphis, pulling onto I-40 to roll over the Mississippi river on the Hernando de Soto bridge.

The first step west of many.

His mom pinched his arm gently. "Colorado Springs," she said. He nodded.

They pulled into a Big Eastern in Clarkdale thirty minutes later, and ate bacon and maple pancakes in silence in the motel's all-night restaurant, with their bags piled up around them. There wasn't much else to say.

Frayser had said its goodbyes.

3. THE DIVE

The next day dawned gray, dreary and intensely humid. Robert lay in the narrow, too-short Big Eastern bed with the too-thin covers that couldn't ward off the air con's drying chill and looked up at the stained cream ceiling. All of this was crazy, fleeing a city with your mother. Most people his age still dreamed of becoming rap stars or gangsters like Green-O, or they'd gone to college and were now starting careers in a far-off city.

Not Robert.

His first shot at serious diving had come at 16, only one or two years behind the most advanced in his state. He'd been selected for the national training camp, then his eldest sister Bethy had had a mental breakdown and he had to work doubles at the Yangtze fulfillment center in south Memphis to help pay the medical bills.

Something like that happened every year after. He worked hard on his diving technique, Coach Willings encouraged him, then another disaster would strike. His other sister got arrested. His mom lost her job in layoffs and was unemployed for a year. Throughout most of it his grandmother's cancer just went on and on like a dog barking through the night, until they were all so sick of her croaky, desperate pleas for water that any one of them was likely to end it with a pillow.

"Mom," he said softly, across the quiet room.

"Yes, son," she answered sleepily.

"If I get shot today, promise you'll go to Seattle. Find yourself a nice guy like Tom Hanks."

She didn't say anything cruel like, 'That won't happen,' or 'You're going to make it!', which he was grateful for. They were both adults and knew enough disappointment to be honest. Instead she said, "I promise."

In the restaurant they ate, sitting on sticky red leather seats and looking out over I-55, where semis whipped by in a fog of rain and spray. It was 6am and the meet started at 11, with his dives listed from 1. He didn't eat much, just a few egg whites and a small portion of waffles.

He got in a taxi alone and his mom waved him off.

"Good luck, sugar," she said, "focus and faith."

The taxi pulled away and he ran over his dive list, as they blustered down the highway in a flurry of rain. Ten dives, all of them easy except for the final dive: an inward arm-stand. Nobody ever did that dive because it was considered to be physically impossible. It meant spinning inward toward the platform, which was impossible on a falling, flicking arm-stand because arms couldn't 'jump' away from the platform edge like legs could. They weren't strong enough.

People broke toes attempting it. One guy had broken a leg, someone else had cracked his skull open.

Robert was different. Perhaps it was a freak of his physiology, gifting him with great upper body strength despite a lack of obvious, heavy bulk, or maybe it was technique. The first time he tried it, he'd skinned his forehead on the platform edge and Coach Willings told him never to try it again.

The next time he broke two toes, and the time after he half-knocked himself out with a solid impact. But the time after that he got it, and every time since, slipping by the platform edge by a whisker's margin. But a whisker was enough. If he could just pull it off today he'd be on the Olympic team for sure. They'd leave Frayser and Memphis behind forever.

* * *

Outside the University swim hall the parking lot was buzzing with the mood of a festival, despite the sodden gray rain. There was a dive meet and a swim meet that day, and bustling beneath banners announcing the Olympic assessment were clustered families, parents, girlfriends, boyfriends and small children clamoring for popcorn.

The taxi dropped Robert off in the thick of them and he overpaid to avoid waiting for change, rolling out smoothly with a hoodie drawn tight over his head and his gear bag on his back.

"It's not a movie, honey, there's no popcorn," he heard as he joined the throng; a parent patiently explaining to his daughter.

There was the smell of hot dogs on the air though, and greasy fried chicken from a tailgate party in the lot, sheltered beneath one of the big sycamores. For some this was all just good fun, with a friend's or a child's medal and position on the podium at stake. For others it was a moment where everything could change.

For Robert it was life or death.

He shuffled along in the thick of the crowd, sneaking glances to either side, but there was no sign of Green-O. It wouldn't stay that way, he was sure. He'd knocked a general of the Sons of the Harp out cold, pulled a gun on another, for which there would be no forgiveness.

He let the crowd guide him through the sports center's airy lobby, beneath more festival bunting announcing the names of the Olympic hopefuls, his included. There actually was popcorn on a stand off to his right, filling the air with its rich salt and butter smell, making an odd combination with the ever-present fog of chlorine.

He reached the sign-in desk and joined the line, keeping his head tucked low. Ahead there was a group of young, tall swimmers and he pressed up amongst them.

"Hey Robert," one of them said, and he mumbled a reply. They talked to him but he looked straight down until they tailed off. Green-O might be anywhere, looking out with a knife in his hand ready to shank him and move on.

The line progressed and he dripped with sweat inside his hoodie, almost at the front now.

"Robert!" came a cheerful cry.

It was Coach Willings. Robert looked up and saw him passing easily through the line as his many protégés parted like water. He patted Robert on the shoulder and peered into the depths of his hood.

"What have you got that thing on for, it's sweltering in here?" He flipped the hood off, and droplets of sweat flicked out. The Coach frowned. "God, Robert, you look half-dead. What's going on?"

The hood was off and anybody could see him now. His knees trembled. "Nerves, I guess."

The Coach frowned. "You never get nerves. Look, get on the lower boards and run through your early list. Once you hit the water it'll all become clear."

He nodded. "Thanks Coach."

"You've got this," the Coach said, and gave him a meaningful look, a squeeze on the shoulder, then headed off.

Robert dared a look around. Still there was no Green-O.

Someone spoke to him.

"Robert, hi, let's get you signed up!"

He was at the front of the line. The girl in front of him was a volunteer, a cute blonde college girl; he'd spoken to her a few times on the bus going home, her with her books and him with his gear.

He signed in, mumbling through her bright small talk, then let his legs carry him away. It felt like rolling on jelly. He passed through the crowds and up some stairs toward the upper gallery, heading for the disabled toilet; hopefully a spot Green-O and the Sons wouldn't be looking for him.

He ducked backward into the toilet and locked the door, then changed into his swimming kit and wrapped a towel around his waist. He stood on the toilet hand railing to stow his clothes in the ceiling, after shifting one of the plasterboard panels to the side, then dropped back down to survey the job.

At least his pants were safe.

Back in the hallway a few people noticed him striding purposefully along, bare-chested with a towel. Somebody wolf-whistled. He came into the dive hall down the bleachers, another unexpected route, and at the bottom looked out over the water. The tall blue platform stood before him, like a great statue of the gods.

A shiver ran down his back. He turned back to sweep the bleachers. There were twenty rows and already hundreds of people camping out to watch the warm-ups, but he couldn't pick out Green-O.

Something whacked against his back and he jerked away impulsively, almost toppling into the water.

"Jeez, Robert, what's got into you?"

It was Thomson, one of the swimmers up for a medal. They'd been friends for a while, before work at the Yangtze center had started taking up all his time.

"Nothing," Robert said, "I'm fine."

Thomson raised an eyebrow. "Big day today, I know that. I'm pulling for you, OK?"

Robert nodded and mumbled thanks. His head wasn't working properly, and it felt like he was living two lives at once; one his regular life and the other a crime thriller overlaid across the top.

"Alright then," Thomson said awkwardly and started away.

Focus.

He shook himself and turned to the dive scoreboards. This was what he was here for. If Green-O wanted to shoot him from the gallery, flinching away wouldn't do a damn thing. This was the only thing he could control.

He strode along the poolside toward the platform, hit the ladder for the medium board and climbed. The agent would be in the stands now, watching how his potentials responded to the pre-dive jitters. He'd gotten off to a rocky start, but screw that; this was his house.

He reached the top and took to the board. Good flex, nice spring. He took a second to compose himself, letting the crowd fade into rustling pink and black smudges. Below was the water. Ahead was the flight, those precious instants of magic when the air took him. It wasn't falling, it was flight. The world centered and focus came.

He took one step, one jump, then launched spinning into the air, doing one, two, three, four somersaults in a tight ball before straightening and punching into the water.

When he curled back up to the surface there were no cheers, not yet, but of course he didn't expect any. This was where he wanted to be, after years of disaster had kept him away, finally in control of his own destiny in a place where Green-O couldn't do a damn thing.

He made for the platform.

* * *

Two hours in and the air fizzed like a shaken soda can. His dives were about to start and the audience were settling in, with the odd klaxon firing to get the divers into line. The judges were at their desks.

Someone ran over to his seat on the divers' row, pressed a printed paper into his damp hands, then scurried to the next diver in line. He looked down at it.

It was his dive list; ten dives culminating in the inward arm-stand. He felt strong and limber, ready to perform, and there was a buzz growing from his middle where the bag of cold milk had been. He was ready to dive into it.

He passed the list on, approved. He knew it by heart. Now Coach Willings was coming over. The big clock on the wall was drawing them inevitably closer on.

"You look better," the Coach said. "Robert, I'm rooting for you. Make me proud."

Robert nodded. The Coach moved on. He was the closest Robert had ever had to a father figure, and earning his pride, while repaying his faith over the long years of failure, was important.

A speech happened over the announcement. People clapped and cheered. The Olympic agent was mentioned to more patriotic cheers, then somebody sang the anthem. Finally they called his name.

His was the opening dive. His body moved without him telling it to, like in a dream, toward the medium board ladder. The announcer's voice read out the dive he'd be performing, a triple backflip with double twist. It was easy stuff, fodder for marks to pad up his score and build confidence in himself, in the judges, in the audience, and get some momentum rolling.

He reached the top of the ladder and walked out along the board. The crowd sucked in a breath and held it. The dive filled his mind, preparing his body to rotate through flight, always aspiring to perfection.

At the halfway point along the board he ran. Three steps on he took a small jump, landed at the edge and sank low with the spring-loaded board's flex, then launched up and out. The air grabbed him and spun him tight and furious, the second or so of flight stretched out as he soared, then he hit the water.

This time he surfaced to rapturous applause. Grins met him at the water's edge. Coach Willings punched the air. Back at his starting line beside the other divers, he waited for the scores to come up on the boards.

7

7.5

8

7.5

8

He couldn't stop the grin spreading onto his face too. Those were close to perfect scores for a dive of such simplicity. Of course state-level judges were not the same as the Olympic agent, but they'd all be marking harder with the agent there.

The other divers' names were called and they rolled past him like items on a conveyor belt. Some were excellent, most were solid, all starting with their most competent, confident dives, leading in to their lists like the intro track on a greatest hits album, displaying their personality, skill and determination.

Soon his next dive was called up; a backflip off the middle board chased by a double pike and single tight somersault. He climbed, jumped and took to the air, executing it with clockwork perfection that ended in a slim and tight landing. Plunging through the surface felt like he was coming home.

More great scores followed and he topped the chart. More dives were called and he knocked them all down: a running flip off the platform, an inward off the middle, a simple rolling arm-stand. Two o'clock came and went, then three, until the crowd was buzzing at a feverish pitch of excitement.

The final round came. Leaving the hardest dive to last was normal, bringing the competition to a tight climax. His scores led the boards, but it all came down to this. Dives one to nine were his entry ticket only. Now he had to give up the goods.

The announcer called his name and he went to the platform ladder. The rungs were slick and cool, the edges biting into the wrinkled flesh of his palms. At the top it seemed colder and he shivered. He looked over the crowd and strode confidently to the edge. He turned his back and bent over to adopt his last arm-stand on this platform, ever.

Abruptly someone's head appeared over the top of the ladder behind him and he paused. A call came out over the PA.

"It appears there may be a last-minute correction to the dive list."

In that instant, Robert understood. The young man on the ladder was not anyone he knew from the University or the pool, though he was wearing the purple sweats of swim hall staff. His face was pale and there was a large zit right in the middle of his forehead.

Green-O's soldier.

In an instant he saw it all. Green-O must have bribed the judges, or the pool staff, or someone. Robert straightened, spun and looked over the crowd, eliciting a, "Whoa" as he wavered on the edge. It was impossible to pick out detail though, not at this distance. There were plenty of reds on the bleachers but were any of them Green-O?

"Hey," the guy on the ladder said, "get over here, genius."

He had to play this out, and walked over. "Where's Green-O?" he asked. Over the PA system they were discussing the protocol for last-minute dive list corrections.

"With your mom," the guy said. He looked ridiculous with only his head and shoulders above the ladder top, like some kind of freakishly white ladder mole.

"Bullshit," Robert said softly. "He hasn't got a clue. This is just a psyche out."

"She's in Clarkdale," the guy said. "A Big Eastern, and Green-O's with her."

The heavy bag of milk burst in Robert's belly. For a moment his vision went foggy and his balance wavered. He just caught himself on the railing, to the excited, "Oooh" of the crowd.

"Tracked your taxi back," the zit-head went on. "It was so simple, man, I thought you'd have looked out."

The taxi. It was so simple, this punk was right. It was a massive screw up, but then he'd been so preoccupied with what he'd already lost, and what he stood to gain.

The focus faded. His sense of purpose drained away.

"He wants me to come down."

The guy shook his head. "Nah, man. He wants you to dive. He wants you to dive so bad they'll never even let you near a pool again. Do that and he doesn't give a shit about the rest. Go to the memorial or not, ride with us or not, whatever."

The words washed over Robert in a vague, water-swirling-in-the-bottom-of-the-bathtub way. He couldn't quite grasp them. He was leading the pack of the meet by a dozen clear points. One more dive with something the agent had never seen before would send him to Colorado.

"And if I don't?" his own voice sounded drunk.

"Then say goodbye to your mom. I don't know exactly what we'll do with her, but there are costs, you know? Maybe she'll whore for us, or be a drug mule, or we'll sell her on south. She's got a good figure still. Fact is, you won't see her again. And you'll never know."

Robert's left leg buckled. There was suddenly a sharp and throbbing pain in his right eye.

"I…"

"Decide, man. You already made this bed. Lie in it."

Robert rolled backward, off-balance though he'd only been standing straight. Again he caught himself on the railing. The announcer called something in alarm but it didn't register. His right leg buckled too, and the pain spread to his right eye. The cold milk was rising up. Something was wrong.

"Don't pull this shit," the guy hissed. "You dive bad or the deal's off. There's no fainting."

Robert tried to nod. His focus was gone and so was his control. The arm-stand jump was out of reach. His jaw lolled lazily open. It felt like he was coming apart.

He turned from the zit-face and lurched to the edge. Was he diving? He didn't know. Something had to happen. Something important. Triple pike, inward, roll. Was that even the right order? He bent over at the edge sloppily and more cries rang out. Now there was genuine alarm out there. He didn't have a choice. He had to dive. For his mother, for himself, and there was no time to sit down and think. His pride had caught him up and this was the price.

He tried to kick his legs up into an arm-stand, but his arms wouldn't hold him and he thunked down solidly on his head, rolling clumsily away from the edge. Gasps sucked up from below but what did that matter now? His head was full of beer and popcorn. Green-O was out there with his mother. His mother was alone with Green-O and that was the end. Either way he'd screwed up. He'd pulled her in and ruined her, just like his sisters and his father and Frayser itself.

He tried again to get to his feet. The pain was now a hard gray fog bearing down, and even moving his muscles an inch brought burning sweat out on his skin.

"Quit kidding around," somebody called. "You think this is a joke? Do the damn dive!"

He had to dive now. There was something wrong with his head and he had to get it done fast.

He turned and ran, working the angles with each slow step. It would be a great dive but not the one on the list. He'd give them something beautiful and they'd mark him zero for it. They'd say he'd broken down and panicked, that the stress had gotten to him, but no one could say he didn't know how to dive. He'd wash out of the program but he'd keep some of his pride, and Green-O would still get what he wanted.

He hit the edge and jumped.

It wasn't the front edge of the platform though. The fog in his eyes and mind had blinded him. It was the side, and as he took off high his knees caught on the railing, sending him into an out of control and reeling flight.

Somebody screamed. One long second of chaotic, desperate flight passed, two, then

CRUNCH

He hit the edge of the pool hard across his side, snapping his spine with a sickening impact that cut him in half. The pain flooded in with the sickness and bound itself up with the dizziness behind his eyes. He was screaming on the edge of a deep black well, unable to move, unable to stop his body as it slid face-first into the water.

The water was cold and everywhere around him, but it wasn't the same water that he'd loved, that had rescued him from the Sons of the Harp, that had won him girls and friends and success. This was a different animal, dark and full of hate, swirling down his throat and eyes and pounding on his burning chest.

He sucked in a breath and water flooded his lungs; fresh pain burst through him in gray bubbles, filling his head with panic and agony. He was drowning. Another sickening gulp of water poured into his lungs and the pain grew unspeakable. His broken body convulsed and sank, panic flushed conscious thought a long way distant, until finally burning red arms gathered him in to the dark.

4. DEMON

He was in the forest again, loping along beside Zane.

Poor Zane.

"Focus, Robert," Zane said. "Focus and the world opens up."

The air in the forest smelled of pine sap, cheap liquor and possibility. There was a girl Robert liked who'd handed him a note during the game:

Tonight.

He was ready to focus on that. He was looking forward to it. Then Zane stopped, laid his hand on Robert's shoulder, and the world erupted in gunfire and violence.

Blood flew through the air like snow, in slow, slow motion. Bottles revolved and bullets soared. In the balletic midst of it Green-O was shot, a bullet that changed his path and his life forever. Zane was shot too, burying him in the dirt, because that was the reward that heroes got.

Robert was left in the middle with blood on his hands and sirens wailing closer.

Then it started again.

They were in the forest. "Focus," Robert said. Bullets flew and bodies dropped, but now it was not Green-O's father and Tolerance Bigs dying, but his mother and some man who might have been his father, his sisters and his grandmother, even Coach Willings, all riddled with bullets and sloshing their blood everywhere, settling like frozen snow over the dirt.

Robert walked between their ruined bodies with guns in both hands, barrels smoking wondering aloud, "Did I do this? Was this my work?"

It started again. He was entering the forest, and the girl at his side was fogging his mind with her musky scent and anticipation of what was to come.

This time when the bullets began he didn't care, he just turned into the forest with the girl and made love while the others were dying nearby. Zane called his name but he ignored it, because he had a vision for his life.

When they were finished, panting and sweaty, he rose and wandered away, passing naked through the scene of battle. There were dozens of bodies in the clearing now, perhaps hundreds, stretching for as far as he could see, and in the middle of them stood Green-O, holding his guts in his hands and grinning. There was red all over him, red pasting down the hair on his head, red sticking his clothes to his skin, red around him in a puddle, red for the Sons of the Harp.

"You see what hope brings, don't you?" Green-O asked. His mouth was a dark hole. "You see what I am, now?"

His head was red. He looked like a demon. He reached out and water welled up in Robert's throat, filling his lungs so he was drowning again.

* * *

For a long, long time the dreams came, and in all of them he ended up drowning.

His arms and legs were bound to his sides, hands covered his mouth, and he hung there in the hot dark going crazy with the need to breathe, a panic that went on and on until finally…

He surfaced, gasping. His head was full of crushing pain. Lights danced behind his eyes in the shape of something evil, the thing that had done this to him.

A bloody red demon at the ladder top, in the forest, in the water, wearing Green-O's hateful face. It patrolled the darkness around him like a jailer.

He screamed and his mother came. Lights came on and made the pain worse. Her touch and her voice made it worse, making the demon with its empty black mouth grin, and fill his throat up with water again.

* * *

A later time, he woke. It was dark but for a small nightlight glowing from across the room, plugged into the rotten sideboard.

The demon was there still, dressed in gangland red; he felt its pressure on his throat, chest and temple. He opened his mouth to call out and it jabbed at him, filling his throat.

He gagged and spluttered until the panic ebbed and the pain calmed, then through cracked eyelids he surveyed his basement room in darkness. Here were his medals on their crooked stand. Here were the posters stuck up by his long-gone sisters, barely holding the damp walls together.

He was back in his basement room. He was buried here in Frayser, a long long way from Colorado Springs.

The demon prodded him, switching back and forth between Green-O and something far worse: a face with only slits for a nose and a round dark hole for a mouth.

"What did you expect?" it asked. "Truly now, what did you expect for one such as you?"

He closed his eyes and tried not to listen.

"It's your lot in life," the demon whispered, its voice a breathy gargle. "I'm showing the truth to you. Don't you see now, what you are? The least of all my creations, the most wonderful. Breathe, Robert."

He tried to breathe and sucked in water. The drowning never ended; the panic never ended.

"Breathe for me."

He tried to get up. He plucked weakly at the sheets binding him to the little bed, pushing through the gulps that racked his throat and the pain that beat down on his head. He tried to lift his legs from the mattress but they wouldn't move. He lifted them with his hands but it made no difference.

The demon laughed. The stink of chlorine washed off him and Robert's throat convulsed. He vomited and gagged. In the moments before he suffocated for the thousandth time, he glimpsed the bright yellow cartoon characters on his socks.

Put there by his mother, like he was a child. They didn't move, no matter how much he strained to twitch them.

"Your legs are lost now," the demon grinned at him. "Like a foreign land. Suffer for me, child of the water. Show me what you are."

* * *

His mother came. A doctor came. For short periods he could emerge, gasping up through the water that fogged his vision and his hearing, long enough to hear snatches of their conversations.

They spoke to him and about them. He caught words like 'coma,' 'brain damage' and 'broken spine'. He tried to reach up and answer but every time the red demon poured piss and chlorine down his throat, pulling him back into the sweating dark.

Time passed like that, days or weeks or both, and the demon was always there, punishing him whenever he tried to speak or move. He drowned for days, lost in helpless panic, punished by the pain. There was no way out.

"There is one way," the demon whispered, hissing at him through the dark in the middle of the night. "I know a way."

He resisted, but the pain and panic never relented.

"Finish what you started. Jump for me."

"I didn't-" he tried to say, but the demon stuffed his throat.

"You did. You jumped. You dived. Surely you knew."

"I didn't."

"You dived into concrete, child. You ran toward me. Come all the way, now, let's finish this together."

He wept in the dark. He had nothing left to fight with. In the day when his mother stood by his side, a dark shadow like the moon, her presence hurt. When she spoke to him the words buzzed like piranha round his face, snapping at his eyes. When she stroked his shoulder or held his hand the pain radiated out from her touch.

"It will never be better," the demon whispered. "It will always be like this, hurt by all the things you love. It's the love that makes it worse, you know? You'd be better off if you'd just died in that pool. Your mother would be too."

He'd seen it in a movie, and one night he did it. It was no addition to the pain at all, no worse than the drowning he felt every moment of every day. He bit down on his tongue until blood welled down his throat and drowned him.

* * *

In the red darkness beyond he saw Zane again, but he was a man now, no longer a 15-year old boy. He still wore the same clothes though, with bullet holes where the Orandelles had shot him.

He took Robert's hand and they walked for a time, until they left the carnage in the forest behind and emerged alongside the Mississippi riverside, a beautiful and empty spot where they use to practice hucking footballs.

"You can't die now," Zane said.

Robert looked up at the face of his friend, grown and strong though he was pale from loss of blood.

"You won't be like me. You have work to do."

"It's good to see you, Zane," he said.

Zane smiled, flashing white teeth spotted with blood. "It's good to see you too, Robert. But I'm not ready to welcome you in yet. I saved your life that day. Do you think it was for nothing?"

"I didn't-"

"There's things you have to do still. Obligations."

He hung his head. "My mother, I know."

"Not your mother. There's a storm coming and you'll be at the heart. You remember the demon? You're going to save the world, little brother, not in spite of what you've become but because of it."

He gestured and Robert looked down. Now he was sitting in a wheelchair, with legs as thin as sticks. Zane too looked weaker now, frail and pale, like a freshly dug-up corpse. He was standing and Robert was sitting and their fingers barely touched.

"How can I save the world?" he asked. "What can I do, like this?"

"You'll be amazed," Zane said, smiling, "what a little faith can achieve."

"I can't even breathe," Robert said. He looked down at his lap. His hands were thin too, like kindling against his bare black thighs.

"Neither can I," said Zane. Now the top of his skull was missing. There were maggots rooting in the gray flesh of his brain. Both of his eyes were gone; dark holes into rotten meat. Still his mouth moved and his swollen tongue wagged between bloated purple lips. "I can't see and I can't hear, I can't speak, but I'm here aren't I? We don't get to make excuses, you and I, two gangbangers from Frayser. Who expected a thing from us? Who thought you would make the Olympic team? I see you now, Bobby, diving for gold. You're standing on the podium for us all, and I'm so proud."

He was crying now, in his wheelchair. Zane was dead. Zane had been dead for years.

"I can't even breathe," he said again. "I'm nothing. I'm the least of us all."

Zane grinned. A piece of his nose fell off. His teeth were still bright and white, though his gums had turned to slushy black and there was blood bubbling on his tongue. "That's not true. You're the most. You're my brother. Never forget that."

The grip between their hands broke. Zane tottered away over the marshy river bank until he collapsed into the water, and Robert was left alone.

* * *

Things were different when he woke next. The red demon was still there, but the veil of water fogging his eyes, ears and mind had lifted. He saw his mother sitting by his side in a puddle of warm lamplight, occasionally tapping her phone gently.

He tried to speak. Only a mumble came out but she heard it, and dropped her phone on the floor.

"Robert?"

He gave the faintest of nods. The demon was coming around already. She came over and hugged him, which put him back under for a time.

But he got better. Over days the demon receded further, allowing him the space to think, hear, see and even speak.

He had staggered, drawn-out conversations with his mother. He couldn't say much, with long breaks needed between every exchange, but they were conversations still. He asked her to turn the lights down. She did. He asked if he'd ever walk again.

She said no, with the same honest bluntness they'd always shared. The doctors had severed his spine after he almost drowned on his own blood, hoping it would stop the endless epilepsy-like assault on his mind.

"I was in a coma," he managed. She nodded, and described how he'd turned so deathly pale and tried to get up at times, with a strange white light burning in his eyes.

He didn't understand, and wanted to ask questions but the weight was descending and he closed his eyes.

Days later she was there with a wheelchair, rolling it round the narrow basement. "We'll get an elevator fitted here," she said, pointing at the stairs. "You can come and go as you please. The state will cover most of it. You can go to college now, they've got funds for the disabled."

He tried to smile for her. He even tried to get into the wheelchair with her helping him, but the weight in his head quickly grew too much. Seeing his legs flopped across the bed like dead tentacles brought the demon on hard.

"It'll come," his mother said. "Piece by piece we'll push back the boundaries."

He tried to push them back, for her. He tried reading and watching TV. He tried to listen to her everyday stories from work as part of his rehabilitation, but exhaustion always set in quickly and persistence only brought on gasping panic attacks. He tried to push through but they grew so bad that even the anticipation of approaching his boundaries would set them off, starting a spiral into thumping pain that sometimes took days to fade away.

He stopped trying to get out of bed. Their conversations remained in bite-sized chunks.

A doctor came at times. They talked briefly in clipped sentences to avoid the pain. He'd broken his spine and was lucky his brain worked at all. There had been substantial brain damage when they fished him half-drowned out of the pool, and no one had expected him to be the same. The second round of operations changed something, but nobody knew how.

It was a miracle he was alive. The migraines were part of the cost of that. When he tried to explain that the pain and weight had set in before he jumped, his mother got a sad look in her eye.

"You think I tried to commit suicide," he said to her once.

"I don't think that. You were confused. You fell."

"I jumped. But I wasn't trying to die."

"I know that."

She said so but she didn't know it. That stung. That drove him to recover more than anything.

He made lists.

On the first list were the five stages of grief, from denial, anger, bargaining, depression to acceptance. Every day he looked at it and tried to chart his mood. The goal was acceptance and moving on, but how could he do that when the pain and panic were always there? Most days he swung between anger, denial and bargaining.

Anger came with the frustration of lying in bed. Anger came at Green-O for trapping him here in this shitty Frayser basement with no way out. Anger came that he would never dive again, never walk again, never swim again.

Denial came when he caught glimpses of his pathetic legs. He felt sick. He wept when his mother wasn't there to see, and cursed the God she believed in. He bargained with the room, with the boy bands on the walls, with the trophies in their cabinet.

Just give me one day. One hour. One minute. One step.

The depression muffled everything.

Still he tried, for his mother if not for him. To prove he wasn't going to abandon her and never had. The panic attacks crushed him and still he tried.

His second list was all the things he could think of to drive the demon back. TV was on it, radio too, books, comics, people, and he kept pushing his way along it, deeper into a life of sweat, pain and recovery, though there was hardly any progress to show for his effort and nothing to look forward to but years more of the same.

He cried when he was lost in pain, anger and depression. He gave up a hundred times then rededicated himself. At last, at the bottom of his second list, he came to Deepcraft, a world-building game he'd played for years.

And it was Deepcraft that changed his life.

5. DEEPCRAFT

It was the last step before the list ended, left until the end because it was the one thing he most wanted to keep. If he lost Deepcraft too then he was truly trapped in this basement, staring at these walls forever. It was his last bit of hope.

But there was nothing else left. He lay slackly with the game controller in his hands while his mother set the system up. Just directing her how to do it exhausted him. She looked exhausted too. He knew the constant failures were grinding her down just as much as him.

She turned the lights off, then left him alone as the Deepcraft boot screen loaded up and logged into the Internet. His avatar name hung there above his head, as always:

Deep Dive

He erased it before it triggered a panic attack, leaving the name slot blank.

The menu page was a simple and clean green. He scrolled through a list of the worlds he'd explored before: one a landscape of giant revolving question marks. He logged in. His avatar, a pale blue parrot with a pirate on its shoulder, the hangover of an old, old joke Zane once made, rode a train around a green plateau endlessly. He looked out of the windows and watched the huge question marks go by.

It was OK, but then it was familiar, and familiar things didn't hurt much.

He logged out and tried other worlds. Anything with water started him on a panic spiral downward, so he avoided oceans, rivers, fountains and rain, bridges, piers, swimming pools, sometimes even bathrooms and kitchens. Getting attacked by the in-game zombies brought on the pain too so he turned them off. Forests were bad too, so he spent his time in cities and underground bunkers and abandoned military complexes.

After that first day of several hours in the system, he was left sweating and gulping. It was hard to say if it helped at all.

The next day he returned, and tried to make a game of it by taking screenshots of the new places he visited and storing them, like new medals on a virtual shelf. That way his progress was clear, and each dive into Deepcraft was a step further out.

In a few days he explored all of his old mods, then logged into Deep-pedia to find something new. All the worlds were recorded there in long dizzying lists. He filtered out any reference to water as best he could with search terms, then picked one that caught his eye.

New York as Destroyed in the Movies

It helped. There was something familiar about roaming iconic locations like Times Square and Coney Island, destroyed in some places by aliens, in others by demons, in others by ice. He could roam the city all day, acclimatizing to each slightly shifted reality. He made progress but it was lonely.

The only other person who visited the world was its maker, who came and went in silence, adding features to his creation. Robert tried to talk to him but he either didn't speak English or wasn't interested.

He logged out and searched Deep-pedia, until a new mod came up through his search filters.

Yangtze Fulfillment Center.

It piqued his interest after years spent working in a Yangtze center, and he logged in. It was a large dim warehouse stocked with goods on floor-to-ceiling shelving, just as you would expect, but soothingly dark and calm. At once he felt comfortable, and wandered the shadowy aisles for a time, looking at the various boxes of produce on the shelves. They were all beautifully crafted, with intricate graphics drawn down to the smallest details on product labels, with price tags and scuff marks on boxes.

Non-player characters wandered the aisles with him, obviously meant to be pickers collecting goods for delivery, ordered off the Internet. Sometimes they tried to engage him in conversation. A skinny guy was very persistent in talking about pick-up lines. A chubby girl called Blucy with bright blue hair kept trying to sell him copies of her book about Amish vampires, printed on the Yangtze's own print-on-demand machines, which chuckled away to themselves in a corner of the warehouse.

There was no outside; no doors and no windows. It was just the warehouse, and it was good, but there wasn't much to do and he couldn't pretend it was pushing the boundaries to stay. He was preparing to leave when a pop-up box asked him:

Would you like a diviner?

He clicked yes. Diviners were the modified tablets that Yangtze used to direct its pickers round the warehouse, collecting goods to be packed. One popped into his parrot-hand and he studied it. The screen said:

3-foot diameter trampoline

An arrow blinked forward. He followed it forward, as he'd done many times in south Memphis. Soon it blinked left and he followed it left. On the way down that aisle he passed another player, a normal-looking male avatar wearing shorts and a T-shirt, carrying a diviner too. They didn't speak. Robert flipped the visuals to display more data and saw the 'maker' tag hanging over the guy's head, along with his name:

Amo

It wasn't a normal name but it didn't hurt his head. It intrigued him that anyone would make a mod so simple, but the calm dark seemed to keep that interest within the boundaries he could manage.

He continued on toward his trampoline. There was a certain satisfaction in collecting it. Next was a sanding belt.

He played for hours, moving digital bits around in the dark. He couldn't explain why he enjoyed it, but the simplicity of the mechanism, with no points, no winning and losing, and very small bursts of very mild excitement when he made a collection, all interspersed by long sections of following directions in the dark, somehow kept him engaged.

Over the next several weeks he came back every day. He made a note of the times Amo was there and timed his visits so they could run the shelves together. They never spoke but it felt good, a kind of companionship.

Then they spoke.

"Hello, Cerulean," Amo said, as they were walking down an aisle toward each other. The words popped up in a speech bubble over his character's head.

At first Robert didn't think Amo was talking to him. His name wasn't Cerulean; he didn't even know what it meant. He walked on. An hour or so passed then they crossed paths again.

"You don't have a name," Amo typed. "I could call you parrot, but I prefer Cerulean. It's the color of your feathers. Unless you'd rather not talk."

Robert blinked in the real world. This 'Amo' was talking to him. It felt bizarre, as if an inanimate object like a toaster had suddenly started to whistle.

The demon stirred but he typed an answer anyway

"Hello, Amo," his parrot said on their next crossing.

It set his heart racing and his mind pounding, which he didn't understand. He'd spoken to other people in Deepcraft before, but not like this. This seemed to matter more, like there was something important riding on what he said and did next. He logged out, dreading their next crossing.

It happened the day after.

"You're here," Amo typed shortly after Robert logged in. It was sent as a private message without waiting for them to cross paths.

The same excitement and dread rose up, and this time he pushed into it. "It's a good maze."

"Thanks. It's a fulfillment center. I used to work in one."

The diviner popped up and Robert followed its directions automatically. "Me too. I never thought I'd want to come back, though. And to work for free."

"Ha ha," Amo typed. A few moments passed. "It helps me."

Robert didn't reply.

"What shall I call you?" Amo typed. "You don't have a name."

He wasn't ready to tell who he really was. He didn't want to be Googled and have his life laid bare. "Call me Cerulean. It sounds good."

"OK. Cerulean's a deep blue, pretty close to azure, in case you didn't know. It comes from the Latin 'caeruleum', which means 'sky' or 'heaven'. It's a good name to have."

Robert frowned. "Did you just search that on the internet?"

"Ha, no, I'm an artist. Or I was. I know colors pretty well."

Robert didn't reply for a while. Thinking about all that blue, which was the color of deep water, was putting him on the verge of a panic attack. But at the same time Amo was right: blue was the color of the sky, and you couldn't get much further from water than a clear blue sky.

That helped. He went into his profile box and typed in the name

Cerulean.

"Cool," Amo typed via personal message as the name refreshed on the system. "My name's from Latin as well, you know. 'Amo' means 'I love."

"Ha," Robert typed. "Are you coming on to me?"

"Are you a super hot lady?" Amo typed back. "Maybe."

"Afraid not."

"Then I guess we had just better work."

"Agreed."

So they worked. They passed each other in the dark of the aisles, ferrying bits and bytes of meaningless stuff to a conveyor belt that led to nowhere. They worked for hours, falling into a comfortable pattern of crossing every thirty minutes or so, like Pac-Man ghosts chomping through their arcade maze.

For Robert every crossing was huge. Every turn of the corner opened up his mind, scratching out a straight line from his past to now, meaning he was still the same person. In Deepcraft he had legs, after all. So every time he rounded a corner and saw Amo, the maker of that odd space, he felt a thrill of excitement.

The night after they first worked together, he slept better than any time since the accident. Always there had been dreams of drowning, but that night the dreams didn't come. Instead he was in flight through deep cerulean skies, spinning and somersaulting, turning pikes and twists and rolls.

He never hit the ground. He never broke his back and drowned. He just flew and flew and flew.

* * *

"You said it helped," he wrote the next day while he was running the center with Amo. They were in different sections talking over personal message, and Amo didn't reply for a time.

"We can sync the diviners, you know," he finally answered. "So we can run together and work together. What do you think?"

Robert frowned as he read this text. The game controller grew slick in his hands. Run together? He dropped his hands to the keyboard and typed in:

Are you sure you're not coming onto me?

But he didn't send it. To make that joke once was enough. Yet the invitation made him feel vulnerable, as though he was putting something valuable at risk. Still, he was here to push forward, and being vulnerable was part of that.

He erased the message and typed, "Sure," instead.

A box popped up on his screen.

Sync diviners? Yes/No.

He clicked yes. The item on his diviner switched from a rubber tea set to an inflatable bicycle. He followed it and soon joined Amo on the long central passageway, walking side by side.

"I had a coma," Amo typed abruptly. "Before all this." He typed more too but Robert couldn't move his eyes beyond the first line.

A coma? He stopped walking and his hands went slack on the controller. Sweat sprang up on his face.

Was it some kind of horrible joke? Was Green-O behind it?

He booted out at once. He put the game pad down and stared at the Deepcraft exit screen with his pulse pounding and the demon rising up.

Anger and fear rose up in his throat. His temple throbbed. He was nothing now, so weak and helpless, he was Carrie at the prom with the pail of pig blood teetering overhead, and there was nothing he could do.

He threw the keypad as hard as he could. It didn't even reach the wall; he'd gotten so weak. Tears rolled unbidden down his cheeks. He looked around the sad basement room as if he might see Amo's avatar there, laughing at him. Only the mildewed faces of boy band members looked back at him.

The demon rose up hard, and anger was no protection. He pulled the covers over his head and tried to stave it off, but it pulled him down into the water again.

* * *

For a week he explored other worlds. There were Hollywood mansions and parking lots and even a Kroger's. He tried shopping in it, pretending he was holding a diviner, but it didn't do anything for him.

His mother noticed.

"You don't go in that warehouse any more," she said, as she was getting ready to head up to bed, after leaning in to kiss his cheek.

"I got tired of it."

"I thought you made a friend."

He looked at her. She was trying, he knew that. She paid for him, cared for him, fed him and washed him, but that didn't stop her voice and her touch bringing on the demon. In her every move he saw her disappointment, and biting back his own frustration was a constant battle. "I think he was pretending. He wasn't really my friend."

She put her hand on his shoulder. "Bobby, you spent days playing with him. What was pretend?"

Her touch stung. "He said he was in a coma."

His mother raised an eyebrow. "Maybe he was. It makes sense. He plays that game like you, which honestly no normal person would play. Am I right?"

He had to admit that she was. It wasn't an especially fun game.

"Maybe he knows what you went through. It's a lot of effort to go through just to trick you."

"I don't-"

"You should go back. You said the nightmares were getting better? It's people you need, Bobby, not loneliness."

He shifted in bed, using his hands to adjust his weight. He did that regularly to prevent bedsores, though now he just wanted her burning touch off his shoulder. "What if it sets me back?"

She shrugged. "You'll learn from it. You can't break your back twice. Nothing can be as bad as that again."

She didn't know how bad it was now.

Until late that night he lay there staring at his lists. He'd made no progress in the stages of grief. Anger still swung through him wildly, along with depression, denial, bargaining. What had happened to him wasn't fair. He hadn't deserved any of it. He'd been good.

On the other list it was even worse. He'd run around in the darkness for weeks, achieving nothing. Tears squeezed out and he winced them back in. The demon was rising. He couldn't win, to go or not go, both ways were terrifying and held so little hope.

But he wasn't a coward. He couldn't be afraid, when he had nothing else, so late in the night he went back to the Yangtze center.

The shelves inside were all the same. It was dark and the non-player characters wandered, but Amo wasn't there. He ran a few routes, testing himself. It felt empty and sad. He'd been kidding himself there was anything here to be afraid of, or anything here at all. It wasn't any better or worse than the cell of his basement. He put his finger on the key to boot out.

Then the system pinged and Amo's name popped up. His avatar materialized in front of him, with words popping over his head at once.

"Where've you been?"

The fear and anger swelled at once, gulping up his throat. There was no expression on the Amo's avatar's face and he wanted to punch it.

"That's not your business," he typed.

The Amo avatar stared at him for a long moment, then spoke. "Did I say something to upset you? Make you angry?"

Robert's head thumped, the first signal of a descending panic attack. He couldn't explain it; it was such a tenuous thread holding them together, but plainly it mattered. It mattered to him and it mattered to Amo and that made him angrier still, bringing the water swirling up into his mouth and stopping up his breath.

"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.

#outbreak Seek refuge in your cellar.

The @surgeongeneral advises you tape down windows and doors, wear a breathing mask, cover your eyes, stay calm and wait it out. #outbreak

He stared but they just kept coming, message after message, many contradictory, each panicked, reporting a disease wave-front moving like a storm across the country, eating up people and towns and states in minutes.

#outbreak Colorado is infected! I heard on KR653 radio and the DJ just got it and everybody started screaming.

#outbreak Augusta is infected.

#outbreak Macon is infected.

It's terrorists. It's a dirty bomb and we need to strike those bastards hard with nukes, now! #outbreak

#outbreak I-75 is backlogged with traffic after a plane came down outside Tallahassee. People are getting out of their cars and running.

Hiding in your basement won't do a damn thing- I just watched a family live-casting from their New Jersey bunker turn white on air. We can't escape! #outbreak

#outbreak He tore him apart! He just tore him apart, and there's so much blood, oh my God, what do I do?

"Mom get down here!" he cried. There was an answering thump from upstairs.

Then the video on his phone re-buffered and kicked in again. The same news anchor was sitting at the desk with paper all around her. Monitors in back showed a mixture of white static and dark, empty streets.

"Hello America," she said, staring right at the camera. "If you're watching this then you know we're in the midst of an extinction-level event. The tide is lapping at our doorstep and I expect we'll be washed away within the hour. We're showing now footage of widespread infection in Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas. My team and I are determined to stay on air until that moment comes. The studio doors have been barricaded. I want to tell you, hold your loved ones close. Barry, if you're watching this, I love you. I'm sorry I can't be there. Jemma and Albi, I love you both. We'll see each other soon, OK? I'll be right there. To anyone else still watching this, I want you to know this is for real. This is really happening. It-"

She stopped talking abruptly. There was a crash off camera but she didn't react. Her head inclined slightly and she closed her eyes. A long, silent moment passed, then she opened her eyes, and they were a bright and glowing white.

Cerulean jerked in bed.

A second later she stalked away out of the camera's field of view. There was clattering and crashing, something like a scream, then the scene was silent.

He watched the empty news desk like that for almost a minute, peering at the tiny images on screens behind the desk, until there was a loud scampering sound from somewhere behind the camera, a strangled moaning scream, then a thump, heavy instruments being knocked over, a crunch, and then the grinding, lip-smacking sound of something being chewed and swallowed.

Long moments passed and Cerulean couldn't look away. The wet sucking and tearing went on and on, until it stopped and the news anchor came back into shot with her back to the camera. Each step was a wet slap, her gait was strange, and there was red running down her bare arms.

Something mewled behind the camera, there was a scratching sound, and she turned back to it. Cerulean gasped. All around her mouth was a mass of blood and pink and bits of purplish meat, spreading down her throat and open-cut dress to flow between her breasts and down her legs

Cerulean gagged.

Her white eyes focused on something and she ran at it. There was more thumping and clattering and another strange scream, then the signal cut out back to the signal card.

Cerulean stared. The emergency warning message continued to scroll across the bottom of the screen. The image was down but the sound continued, as the anchor killed and ate somebody else. Numbly he switched it to mute.

Zombies?

"Mom!!" he cried.

He clicked off the video and fumbled through the phone's icons to get to his mom's cell number. He dialed and it rang, and rang, and finally was answered.

"Robert?" came his mom's voice. "What's all that racket? Is that the alarm?"

He almost wept to hear her crotchety, middle-of-the-night voice.

"Mom you've got to get down here, there's some kind of infection, get down here in the cellar right now!"

She didn't answer.

"Mom!" he shouted.

She didn't speak again. The alarm siren he'd triggered with the red button was still going off overhead. He looked across the dark basement to the stairs and the door leading up. She'd be out of bed by now. She'd be coming down the hall. Perhaps she'd dropped the phone. It might have cut out, that was entirely possible, as how many people were overloading the lines right now making desperate last-minute calls?

She'd be in front of the basement door. She'd be reaching for the handle.

THUMP

The impact came right on time and shook him like an icy finger down the spine.

"It's open, Mom!" he called.

THUMP THUMP

He stared as the door trembled. It wasn't a strong door. His Mom was a big, strong nurse. If she had rabies or some disease like it?

He steeled himself and closed his eyes. It was going to hit him any second. He pushed aside the thumping sound with the skill of someone who'd been pushing aside the pain and panic of the demon for a full year.

In the darkness he found focus. He thought clearly.

He didn't have it yet. He still didn't have it.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. They were his hands still. He looked at his legs, which usually brought on the demon, but in that moment he realized demon was gone.

His jaw dropped and he sat there reeling as the truth of it flowed over him. For perhaps twenty minutes already he'd been watching shocking TV, surfing shocking websites and shouting his head off, but still the demon hadn't hit.

He laughed. Of all the times. He was healed! Praise Jesus and Hallelujah, in the midst of this?

It was some kind of bad dream, but he wasn't waking up.

THUMP

He had to act. He had to do something.

"I'm coming, mom," he called.

He tried 911 and got a busy signal. He dialed for the University reception desk, where a security guard at least should have answered, but no one did. He called Coach Willings. He called old school friends, the pizza delivery line, his eighth-grade teacher Mrs. Fent whose number had gotten into his phone back around the time of Zane, but nobody answered. Not one.

Panic thumped down alongside his mother's fists, but it was nothing next to the old sensation of drowning, and he was a master at managing that. He pressed on. He brought up the Internet again, the Box front page with its twitter feed, and saw the stream was slowing down.

He fired a message out, hash-tagged to get through.

#outbreak I'm in Memphis Tennessee and I think the infection just rolled through. I'm uninfected, in my basement, but nobody else is. Get underground!

Dozens of responses poured in @DeepDiveMemphis, demanding to know how he'd sealed off his air, what kind of tape he'd used, what air filters he had, how deep his bunker was, how thick his blast doors were.

He tried to keep up with the replies.

#outbreak It's just a residential duplex basement- I didn't seal it up, I'm just down here. It's cement-lined.

He looked around the walls hungrily for detail. Anything might be important and explain why he was still uninfected.

#outbreak There's newspaper and magazine cuttings all over the walls. Maybe there's something in the ink. There's mold in the air, maybe that's making a barrier.

People answered, begging for more detail. There had to be something he'd done. What could they do? Their families were down there with them. Their children. What could they do?

He tried to help them. He answered as many replies as he could, but one by one they faded away, until by 3:30 in the morning the tweet stream dried up and the only person left updating the site was him.

#outbreak Is anybody out there?

He typed the words into the void and nobody replied.

#outbreak Is anybody out there?

#outbreak Is anybody out there?

#outbreak Is anybody out there?

#outbreak Is anybody out there?

No answer came.

The siren far above died. The thumping continued. The door scraped on its hinges.

He flicked through the channels on the TV but nothing was happening. A few untended live streams on YouTube showed top-down views of city streets and interiors of studios devoid of people. In some of them hordes of white-eyed zombies were roaming freely.

He hopped through websites. He tried the BBC but their tweet stream was dead too. He searched for Russian sites and Japanese sites but the ones he found were all silent. He brought up the Twitter main page and posted his call there, but not a soul responded.

Nobody moved. Nothing happened.

Lying in bed he stared at the screen.

THUMP
came the sound of his mother from above. It felt like someone knocking on the door to his soul.

THUMP

THUMP

THUMP

He was alone. The whole world had died and his mind was all right, and that was more than he could take in.

He laughed again. It was ridiculous. It was unseemly. Zane had said he would save the world, but now there was nothing left to save.

Except maybe…

Amo.

His brain lit up, making connections the demon had prevented it from for a year. Amo had had the same coma and the same pain, triggered by a moment of high stress at the exact same time. Hadn't they said his symptoms had been turning pale, glowing eyes, a desire to wander?

Like a zombie…

Revelation after revelation tumbled through him. If he was really immune to whatever this was, and it hit at that moment at the top of the platform, then perhaps that meant Amo was immune too. That meant Amo might still be alive.

Amo had been on a date with a girl in New York, against all advice of his doctors, in the epicenter of where the disease first struck. New York.

The epiphany that hit then was overwhelming. Could all this somehow, possibly have started with Amo?

He brought up Amo's address via the Skype app and rang it but no answer came. He'd be asleep now with his phone off, and Cerulean didn't have any other numbers for him. Still he had to do something, and fast. He didn't know how long the door would hold against his mother, and he didn't want to think about what followed next.

THUMP THUMP

Focus.

He focused like he was standing on the platform about to dive. The obvious truth was staring him in the face. If the world was truly overrun with the infected, and if the infected were anything like the one he'd seen on CNC, then he wasn't going to survive. He just wasn't. His mother would come down and take him out of the world just like she'd brought him in, and that was that.

He laughed again, this time loud and long. Screw the demon right in the ass. It wasn't his first time to face death.

"You think I give a shit?" he asked the silent basement. "You think you can scare me with this? Next to diving into concrete this is some weak-ass shit."

The basement didn't answer. Screw the basement. He knew what to do, what Zane had told him to, what his mother had always taught him: do what he could to protect the least amongst his brothers and sisters. That meant helping Amo.

What would Amo need? What would any survivor need?

He started searching online with a furious focus, darting between sites like a picker in the Yangtze darkness. He collected page after page of images, video and text from prepper and survivalist sites, gigabyte after gigabyte of data stacking up: how to light fires and purify water; how to know if canned food is safe to eat; how to find, clean, load and use all manner of weaponry.

When that was done he started on a Yangtze message, to be delivered to Amo by his parrot avatar. He did it with a smile on his face throughout. This was his fate and he accepted it. Amo would need something to laugh about too, dealing with all this. His mother thumped at the door. It sounded now like she'd been joined by a bunch of friends, all of them thumping, scraping and scratching at the door and maybe even the floor. He smiled and typed. This was for Amo who'd helped him so much.

When it was done he sent it all to Amo's email, then settled in to call until he answered.

7. AMO

The early morning passed in fits of drowsiness and hilarious anger, broken by the calls he made to Amo every few minutes. This was truly a shitty lot in life to be dealt, but it was his lot.

At 7:23 Amo answered.

"Cerulean," his voice said, scratchy through the Internet connection. He sounded out of breath and panting. "Holy shit, Cerulean you're alive."

A moment passed while Cerulean lay there with his jaw open. Despite all his efforts he hadn't really expected Amo to reply, but here was Amo. Amo was really alive. He almost started to cry. If Amo was alive and he was alive then surely it was the coma that joined them, and maybe there really were others too.

"Amo?"

"It's me, I'm here, shit I saw your message earlier, I thought you were talking about the date then I went outside and damn, it's been crazy, the girl's gone, the whole city's been turned to zombies, what the hell is going on?"

"Amo," Cerulean repeated, getting control back. There wasn't time to be overawed or worry about the path of the infection. "I'd just about given up, I've been calling and texting you for hours. You say you went outside?"

On the other end of the line Amo took a deep breath, then started to cry. It made Cerulean want to cry even more.

"The twinges are gone," Amo said. "I went out to get coffee and the world's gone crazy. They're everywhere. They chased me up and down Mott Haven. Planes were falling from the sky, New York is burning. What's going on?"

Cerulean shifted up onto his elbows. This was where he could help. This was what he'd been preparing for.

"Calm down," he said. "Amo, I know. I've been watching it all night, it started around midnight and it spread across the country in hours. They were calling it a disease vector carried on the gulfstream, until it got them too and most of the news outlets went out. Twitter went down while they were trying to evacuate, but most people were at home asleep in their beds. The whole country's gone down, I'm surprised the internet is even up still, phone service and texts went down hours ago. I thought I'd call you until my uplink went dead, and then…"

Amo's voice sounded far-off. "The whole country's gone down?"

"They're all zombies, Amo. This thing is instantly virulent, one breath and you're infected. You've seen them so you know. I saw them on the news; there were videos up on YouTube before that went down too. A few websites are still working, so I Googled everything I could find and downloaded it to our shared drive on your computer. You'll need to know this stuff, I've got reams on the prepper lifestyle, survival tactics and strategies, how to make weapons and how to find weapons, how to rig a generator and hotwire a car, siphoning fuel from a station, all that kind of stuff. It's good I did because Wikipedia has just gone down, I guess they didn't get enough donations."

Cerulean gave a scrappy laugh.

"What are you talking about?" Amo asked, plainly overwhelmed. "Cerulean?"

He steadied himself, because there was lots more to come. This was the first of the big revelations. "Amo, I'm cured too." He paused a moment to let that sink in. "The twinges are gone and I'm thinking clearly. I'm not a zombie, but everyone else is. You said everyone you saw in New York is a zombie? They're all zombies, as far as I can tell. Now you need to survive."

"Sure, but-" Amo began then trailed off. His low panting filled the line. "What about you?"

Cerulean laughed. "My brain got better but I'm still a cripple, buddy. Where do you think I'm going to go? I'm busting for a piss but is my mom going to come down and take me to the toilet? More likely she'll come down and tear out my throat. She's banging on the basement door even now, she's been at it all night, her and a few dozen others. It sounds like they're pulling up the floor overhead, actually."

"What the-" Amo started. "She's a zombie?"

Cerulean smiled. Amo was such a kind, unassuming guy. He saw the best in people. Any minute he was going to offer to come save him. That genius, hopeful, decent bastard. Cerulean had to bull through the catch of emotion in his throat. "Of course she is, and it's not to bring me a batch of midnight cookies."

The line rustled as Amo moved, probably getting to his feet en route to Tennessee. "Where are you? I have your address here somewhere. I'll come get you. I'll get you out."

Cerulean laughed softly. He had never seen Amo, but imagined him now standing in his New York apartment with maybe a small soul-patch goatee on his chin and a deep and soulful look in his eyes, a sweet-souled hipster in skinny jeans looking around for something to do and crying because it wasn't there.

"Don't be silly, Amo," he said. "You'll never get here in time. The basement door's been iffy for years; it won't take much longer for them to get down here. They'll come through the floor in a day or two anyway. Don't worry about me, I've got a syringe here and I know what to do with it."

"What do you mean, you've got a syringe?"

Cerulean looked at the side table. For a long time his mother had only left him a few pills at a time, in case he tried to kill himself again. But recently things had changed. He didn't want to die and she'd seen that. So she'd left the syringe, trusting him to self-administer his methadone when the pain got to be too much.

Maybe also it had been an offer. If he really needed to die, she wasn't going to stand in his way any more. He'd loved her all the more for that.

"It's all right," he said, clearing the emotion with a cough. Other things were more important now. "Sit down. Are you somewhere safe, Amo? Are you in your room, are you barricaded in?"

"I don't-" Amo began. "I'm in the tenement. I blocked up the front door, but there's probably hundreds of them out there now. I don't-"

"Block up your room," Cerulean said. "Do it now. Wedge the bed against the door, wedge something against that if you can. They're not smart but they're persistent, and you're in no state to take to the streets again. You need to lie low and get your head straight, Amo, if you're going to get through this. Do you hear me?"

"I-"

"Deadbolt the door and wedge it in. Use everything you've got. Do it right now. I'll still be here. Put the phone on speaker and do it now. I want to hear it happening."

A long moment passed with no answer and no movement.

"Amo!"

The line clicked then went even tinnier, and Cerulean guessed it was on speaker. The distant sound of New York zombies thumping came through the fuzz, falling into a strange synchrony with his mother and her friends up above. He looked at the door. It was battered and bent with one of the hinges torn off. The other wouldn't take long.

Then there was the sound of scraping and movement as Amo made himself safe, and Cerulean felt the relief.

"I've done the bed," came a shout. "I'm getting the desk."

"Good. Don't damage your computer, you're going to need that."

More rustling and movement. Cerulean looked up the stairs. In the dim light cast by the basement's halogen bulb he could see an arm pushing through the gap at the bottom of the door. It looked like a dead tentacle snaking through. They'd be on him soon.

"I've done it," Amo's voice came, clear again as the speaker clicked off. He sounded wavery and weak.

Cerulean looked away from the door. "Good, good. Now you need to relax. We can talk about something that really matters." He grinned beside himself. "How did your date with the Tomb Raider girl go?"

Amo laughed.

"It went fine. It went great. She came back here, but she's gone now. The note she left, Cerulean, it's mad."

Cerulean smiled. It was good to help Amo in these final moments, doing it together. It brought purpose and re-made him as something that mattered. But who was he, now? The answer came easily. He was whatever he wanted to be. He was his mother's son, Zane's best friend, an Olympic diver, a paraplegic man about to die. The choice was his. "Call me Robert," he said. "That's my name."

The sound of Amo crying grew louder. "I know. OK, Robert."

"Are you crying? Come on old buddy. Pull yourself together. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of most of it. You said she's gone?"

Amo laughed. "I don't know. I think so, yes she's gone. She left a note, it said 'Good luck with the zombies'. She was talking about the comic, but Christ, look at this shit Cerulean. I mean Robert. Where the hell is she now?"

Robert laughed too. "Probably running halfway down Manhattan, if she's not already infected. Calm your ass down, Amo. What are you going to do for her now? She'll either get safe or she won't, on her own. You're lucky you're alive. You know how many people out there who're immune? Do you have any idea?"

"No idea. I didn't see any. Maybe her?"

"Maybe her. On top of that there's me and there's you. I've not seen any others, Amo, not any at all. Every live video feed I saw got corrupted in seconds, because the people filming it were infected. It's the most virulent thing ever. It's like that cat in the box, the second you open the box to see if it's alive or not, it drags you in so you're inside the box too. There's no time to report out."

Amo laughed through his tears. "Schrodinger's cat. I don't think that's how it works."

"Whatever. Listen Amo, it can't be a coincidence that it's me and you, and maybe her. Did she have the same condition as us, did she have a coma then recover like us?"

"She said she burned out. I don't think she was twingeing though. I don't think so."

"Well maybe you'll find out," Robert said, running the possibilities through his head. "Perhaps proximity to you conferred immunity. I'm pretty sure we're immune, Amo, because whatever is hitting them now hit us a year ago. Do you follow? Some lesser strain hit us, but it acted like a vaccine, so now we're safe. We went blank, we died multiple times, but they brought us back. Maybe if we hadn't been brought back, we'd be like these others out on the streets now. We got saved."

He could feel Amo trying to swallow this, in the silence.

"You're alive," he said.

Robert laughed. It felt good, in these final moments. "I am."

They sat in silence for a while. The thumping of his mother above seemed to fade away, though she and her friends were very nearly through. Surely the door was only held together by a screw or two now. When that popped they'd pour through like holy hellfire.

"I can come for you," Amo said softly. "I'll get a nice car and make it there in a day. I'll drive all night."

Robert smiled. "That's a lyric from a song isn't it?"

"Stop it! Tell me your address and I'll come."

This was denial. Maybe bargaining. Neither one would do Amo any good in the days to come. He had to get through, and for that he needed the fast track to acceptance. "No you won't. Why in hell would you come here Amo, to see my bitten-out corpse laid up in a bloody cradle stinking of methadone and shit? I'll not have that. I won't be alive by then, Amo. Understand that. Accept that, and we can move on. I've downloaded everything I can think of to your computer, plus a few extras I've had the time to come up with. The fulfillment center will be a bit different. I think it's going to be pretty important to you, going forward, or for a while at least. There are some new routines. You'll figure it out. Until then we can talk."

Amo answered in a small voice. "I want to come."

"I want you to come too. Don't you think I'd love that, if you could come charging in now and rescue me from this mess? But you can't. It's not going to happen, so let's move on. We've never even spoken before, have we? Hi, Amo, I'm Robert. I'm a freak just like you. We might be the last two people alive in the world."

Amo laughed. "Hi Robert, I'm Amo. It's good to meet you. I don't want you to die."

"So tell me about the date," Robert said. "Tell me everything."

Amo did. It started off jerky and unclear, but soon he was rolling. Robert laughed as he pulled off a pick-up move lifted straight from the pick-up guy in the Yangtze, reading her palm with colors. He listened attentively when he brought the girl, Lara, back to his place. He recoiled while Amo described accidentally pulling a zombie apart on the street outside, believing he was a survivor trapped in a burning car.

It was unbelievable. But then he'd already seen it all on the news. The key was to focus on the good stuff, the things to live for.

"It's a good memory, on the whole," he said, thinking of Lara. "You'll need to hang on to that, Amo. You will, won't you? She might be alive out there. You might be able to find her. Hold on to that. You'll put out some flags and let her now where you are. You'll figure this thing out and make it right. I know you will. You've always been resourceful, and smart, and so damn charming."

Amo laughed.

"It's good you can laugh. Don't forget that Amo. Don't you dare feel guilty. I want it to be you, not me. You're a good man. You're the best friend I've ever had. I want you to get good things out of this and become better for it. There's always room to grow. When I lost my legs and I knew I could never dive anymore, I just about gave up. Then I found this weird guy who'd built a weird mod on Deepcraft, and he welcomed me in. He loaned me a diviner and we fulfilled stupid orders together. I saw the world through him, and I'm still seeing the world through him now. Amo, you're going to be OK."

Amo gulped back tears on the other end. Robert kept pushing, because this was important. It had to be intense for Amo to accept it, and he had to accept it to make himself strong.

"Get yourself solid. Research the stuff I sent. Find a safer place than your apartment, a bank or something downtown, something this girl Lara can find, and start clearing the streets around. Make a base and she'll be drawn to you, Amo, if you're offering safety and something worth having. That way you'll find the others too, the ones like us who are lost somewhere across the country and don't have each other like we've had each other. I know you will. You'll make good things out of this."

Amo wept harder. All the while Robert kept his gaze on the door at the top of the steps, where his mother was wriggling head and shoulders through the gap at the bottom. She looked different with zombified white eyes, like a kind of rare fish. The thumping of the others was so loud.

The methadone syringe was already in his hand.

"She's almost through the door isn't she?" Amo asked.

"She is. It's all right. I've got the syringe loaded with my methadone, enough of a dose to knock me right out. I won't feel a thing. It's better this way Amo. I wouldn't stand a chance on the road. I was never good in a wheelchair."

She was almost through. Her hips were out and now she was crawling down the stairs. This was his mother and he loved her. He tried to smile for her. Soon she'd be by his side and digging in.

He plugged the syringe needle into the tappet plugged into his forearm and opened the valve. One deep breath, then he pushed the syringe plunger home. The liquid rushed into his bloodstream and hit him with numbness in seconds.

"How long?" Amo asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from very far away.

"I don't know," Robert mumbled. "A minute, maybe five? I've already injected it." He felt himself start to drift away. He wasn't sure anymore who he was talking to. Was it Zane? "You'll stay on the line won't you? You'll wait with me."

"Of course I will. Robert, I'm sorry."

He remembered briefly where he was. "Don't be sorry. You're here with me. We're in the fulfillment center, running it together. I've got legs again, Amo. We're keeping up with the orders. We're one step ahead."

Tears flowed freely down his cheeks. His mother was so close, clawing her way down the steps. Others were following and the door was bulging inward. He laughed without sound.

"Goodbye, Amo," he said fuzzily. Then the door burst open with a crash and the flood of them poured bodily down the stairs.

"Robert," Amo called urgently, so distant now. "Robert."

"She's coming," he said, watching as they rushed down the stairs like the edge of the pool rising up to meet him, with his mother at the front. She looked so young. "I won't feel a thing. The darkness is so close. I'm going to turn the phone off now Amo. I don't want you to hear this. Goodbye."

He clicked the Skype call off then let the phone drop from his hand. His eyes were so heavy. He was diving again and this time he wasn't scared. Everybody was watching, and at last it was his big chance to reach the Olympics.

"I'm coming, Zane," he whispered, as his mother drew near.

8. WHEELS

In the darkness Green-O was dancing.

The three of them were standing at the edge of the 7-11 parking lot off Denver Road Park; Zane, Green-O and Bobby, moments before the forest behind Denver Elementary that would bring so many changes. They were all fifteen and giddy with the night to come.

The parking lot lay like an alien landscape before them, flat and mostly empty with only a few lonely cars resting like forgotten UFOs. Sterile white light beamed down in conical haloes from the security lamps, like half-opened umbrellas against the dark. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and potential.

It was the night of the big game. The Tigers had just won and the whole school was out celebrating and now they needed beer. The girls were waiting, one for each of them, even one for Green-O, probably several for Zane, and Sandra Rey for Bobby. She was the cute Latino who was quiet in class. Everyone said she was celibate as a nun, but not according to the note she'd passed him at the game, with a shy but knowing smile.

Tonight.

He'd almost blasted right through his pants when he read that. Who wrote notes like that? He'd folded it and given her a nod, trying to play it cool. Even now she was waiting behind the elementary school with the others for the beer run to come back.

And now Green-O was dancing.

"You go," Green-O said, nudging into Zane in the middle of his bobbling dance. "It's your turn."

Zane laughed and sucked on a cigarette. "You go, you little bitch. I went last time."

"And I went the time before," Bobby heard himself say. "Everyone's waiting."

"They know me in there," Green-O moaned. "You go and I'll pay you in dance. I'll dance for my supper and my beer."

"Nobody told you to dance," Zane said. "Stop being an idiot."

"He's drunk already," Bobby said, "or high."

"Dad's gone out, back room third drawer down on the left, whiskey," Green-O panted, still hopping and jigging. "Swig, replace with barley water and medicinal alcohol, repeat."

Zane snorted. "He'll whup the dancing out of you, I'll say that."

"Whup some of the fat might help too," Bobby muttered.

Green-O bumped into him accidentally-on-purpose, mid-dance. "You should be filming this shit," he said. "I'm going for the record."

"Record for being the biggest dick in Frayser?"

"I have the biggest dick," Green-O grinned. "Care to see?"

Zane looked at Bobby and Bobby nodded, and that was all the communication they needed. They stepped in together and tackled Green-O, crunching their shoulders into his hips and lifting him up.

Green-O squealed as he rose into the air. "What the-? I'm dancing here."

"Dance on, sugar plum fairy," Zane grunted. Green-O really was a fat little bastard. "Dance all the way down the beer aisle to the cash register."

They lurched out across the asphalt lot with him squashed between them, still dancing. To make matters worse he started to sing too: the Supremes' Stop! In the Name of Love. He played their backs as drums and hit his falsetto so hard they had to put him down in the middle of the dark lot and stop to laugh.

"You fat little bastard," Zane laughed.

"I'm in no shape to go in there," Green-O mewled. "Bobby, you go Bobby, please Bobby."

Bobby looked at this ridiculous, hilarious version of Green-O. He couldn't know then that in just an hour's time Green-O would be shot in the gut, Zane would be dead and Bobby would be left panting in the midst of bloody Orandelles with his future falling apart.

All he knew was that these were his friends. Green-O squashed his face up for another falsetto, looking a little like an aged Diana Ross. Such a tempting target. Bobby pulled his hand back then slapped Green-O's face so hard it sounded like a pistol shot. Zane erupted in laughter. Green-O yelled, "Son of a bitch!"

"Do you want beer or not?"

"You shit, of course I want beer!" Green-O stopped his song and dance to rub his cheek, then looked at his hand as if there might be blood there. Zane laughed harder.

"That was a good one," Zane managed between gasps. "Oh, Lord save me, that was a good one, Bobby."

"A goddamn case full of beer," Green-O bitched as tears welled in his eyes and the welt mark of Bobby's hand rose on his cheek. "Beer and shots and a bandage, you bastard."

"I'll go get the beer then," Bobby said.

* * *

He roused with a head full of methadone fog. Dreams still trailed at the edges of his vision and a phantom Green-O danced round the room.

"The beer's this way," Green-O sang, and started up a set of silvery stairs.

Robert rubbed his eyes and took in the dark space. It didn't look like the 7-11.

"Wait for me," he said in a dry croak.

Green-O didn't wait and neither did Zane or any of the others, instead they filed up the stairs in a neat, single line, silent but for a raspy, synchronized breathing. There was something odd about the way they moved, an uneven gait like they were halfway drunk, and their eyes seemed to be glowing like flashlights, illuminating the dark basement.

Reality punctured through, and Robert blinked as the scene before him resolved. Dark bodies lumbered up from their positions on the floor around him and started up the stairs. There were dozens of them lying everywhere, filling his floor from wall to wall, curled around his trophy shelf, lying everywhere like a human carpet.

Zombies. Zombies in his room.

Panic hit, but hit softly through the fog. It looked like they were leaving. He tried to pick out his mother's form but couldn't. It was too dark, with only faint light filtering in from above, and they all looked the same; shuffling in the darkness.

He tried to piece together what must have happened. They'd battered their way in, charged over to him, then laid down on the floor. It didn't make sense.

Quietly he stretched for the clock on one of his nightstands: 9:42pm. He'd been out for over twelve hours, mercifully short given how much methadone he'd taken. That was twelve hours during which they could have feasted on him, and hadn't.

Instead they were leaving, and he watched them go wordlessly. Soon the last of them trudged up the stairs and along the hall overhead, leaving a total silence behind: no hum of the air-con running, no low buzz of the computer's fan, no drone of traffic in the street above; just silence.

It was surreal.

He let out a shaky breath and pulled the covers back to study his body.

His guts weren't hanging out in a ropey waterfall. His legs hadn't been bitten off at the knee. There wasn't a spot of blood anywhere; they hadn't even touched him. The demon was gone and the zombies were gone.

"Mom?" he tried, but she was gone, too.

He leaned over and looked for his cell phone on the cement floor. It was underneath the bed, skittered out of reach, leaving him one choice.

Get out of bed.

He peeled the covers all the way back and surveyed his legs, dressed in their sad little cartoon socks. Seeing them didn't hurt like it did before, but still it hurt. They were thin, pale and weak.

He guided them nervelessly off the bed, gripped the bed-frame, took a deep breath and slithered off the edge. For a moment his grip faltered and he almost fell, his weak muscles trembling with the weight, but he managed to guide his weight into an untidy slump. Sweat popped up on his forehead. He was on the floor.

It was cold, that was the main thing. Cold cement, and hard.

He gathered his phone: the battery was down but the bright screen was a welcome comfort. He clicked through to the last calls on Skype and tried to raise Amo, but it didn't ring. He tried to get the Internet but that was gone too. The only way to reach Amo now would be to actually reach him.

The wheelchair his mother had brought from the hospital still sat in a dusty corner, tucked behind a row of plastic bags containing shoes. He looked over at the stairs and shuddered. If one descent off the bed had left him short of breath and trembling, how would he manage an ascent like that?

First the wheelchair. He crawled over to it on his elbows, dragging his legs behind. It was exhausting and hurt his elbows and his shoulders, but at least there was no demon. At the chair he pushed the bags away to study it; a worn gray bucket seat with tarnished silvery poles and gray plastic wheels with old dirt set in the treads.

He tried to climb into it, but getting his butt up into the seat was much harder than he expected.

"How do you…," he mumbled, trying to figure it out. He tried one hand on the floor and one elbow in the seat, but that just ended with his head and one shoulder in the seat-bucket. He dropped back then tried turning round and climbing in backwards, but that put too much pressure on his shoulders and he was sweating and shaking in seconds.

He wasn't strong enough. There wasn't time. He'd deal with it later.

From his cupboard he pulled down clothes, falling on him in an undignified heap. He pulled on jeans, socks and sneakers, a fresh T-shirt and hoodie, gathered some more clothes and stuffed them in an old gym bag, then crawled over to the stairs pushing the chair in front.

There was a length of twine sticking off a nail in the wall, and he unraveled, attaching one half to the chair and the other to his belt. He set himself before the stairs, spun so his back was facing them, then put his palms on the bottom step and lifted.

It wasn't dignified, but he scraped onto the first step. He rubbed sweat off his brow. It was like an arm-stand, sort of, though not nearly as impressive. He did it again, now panting, gaining a better view of the basement. The bed that had been his world for so long looked small and sad. That propelled him on.

By the top he was gasping, trembling all over and drenched in sweat. He peeled off the hoodie and lay back in the hall, looking out through the front door to the empty street. It was dark out and a light wind blew the trees across the road. A pale figure loped by at a jog, lighting its way with his eyes.

Robert laughed. It was quite ridiculous.

The wheelchair came up easily enough, reeled in step by bouncing step, until it sat in the hall beside him. He pushed it into the kitchen, where he used the table to pull himself up onto the chair's gray leather seat.

It felt a little like the moment when he'd fetch something in the fulfillment center, and the diviner would chime cheerfully.

Ta-daa!

He set his feet on the stirrup rests, tried the wheels and they rolled smoothly. It felt amazing to move with such ease. Turning circles in the narrow space, he tried not to look at his mother's seat by the kitchen table.

He couldn't help her now.

From the lower cabinets he found a can of frank and beans. The gas oven still worked, so he heated it up and ate. After that he filled two tall Diet Coke bottles with water before the faucet pressure sputtered out. In the kitchen cupboard he found a set of his old football gloves and pulled them on, fished out a flashlight then looked around the kitchen a final time.

It was strange, but there was no reason to stay.

He rolled to the doorway and looked out over the street. The first few leaves of fall lay dappled across the asphalt, like splotches of blood on dark waters. The duplexes opposite were still as sentinels, watching over him. He hadn't been above ground for a year.

He dropped off the step and the slanted path rolled him fast down to the sidewalk, where he raced halfway across the street before he could get the chair under control. That was exhilarating, and he found himself excited despite everything.

He practiced controlling the chair in the middle of the street, pushing one wheel and pulling the other. It was strange to be able to move so easily, after giving up on his body for so long, and he loved it.

He started north along Riney Avenue without looking back. Three streets over he pulled onto Frayser Boulevard, where the road shone like a silver river in the moonlight, stopping his breath. Tall sycamore trees lined its banks, swaying in the gentle wind, featureless but for their outlines against the star-studded sky. A warm breeze carried scents of city dust, green tree sap and the comforting hot-tar smell of cooling asphalt.

To the east lay Walgreens, the Hi-Lo, the Second Tennessee Bank and the Minimart Express, looming like the faces of non-player characters in the Yangtze. To the west the road stretched into darkness and the Mississippi River.

Crickets chirped from the undergrowth. He felt small and big all at once, sitting in his chair.

"Hello Mississippi!" he called experimentally, for no particular reason. The night swallowed up his voice. "Hello Tennessee!"

It felt like he'd stumbled out of his basement and into an empty Deepcraft world. He couldn't help but feel happy, despite the loss of his mother. She was dead, but in truth he'd lost her and all the world a long time ago.

Now he had to find Amo. He pushed the wheels east without looking back, passing cars parked at diagonals across the street, many with their doors hanging open like spread-eagled cicadas gone crusty in the sun. He weaved between, pumping the wheels in spite of the pain in his palms.

At the Minimart Express he went shopping, picking up candy bars and dried meat sticks, batteries, more flashlights, some sandwiches and bags of chips, several rolls of duct tape, bottles of water, a penknife, a state map and a bag to put them all in, two canisters of gas and two whiffle-ball sets, then left and rolled on.

Two blocks further he came across a silver automatic BMW resting across the dark asphalt and stopped. The driver's side door was open and the keys were in the ignition. He looked around the street but nobody was there, of course. He felt a pang of guilt but rubbed it away. The rules were different now.

The keys turned, lighting up the dash for a second before spluttering as the engine died. He rolled to the back, located the gas tank and filled it from the canisters, turned the key again and now the engine purred to life. The front beams winked on and bathed the leaf-strewn street in sterile white light; a bright island in the road's dark river.

He took firm hold of the handle above the door and hoisted himself off the wheelchair and in. His weak grip failed halfway through, dropping him painfully onto the car's metal doorframe, but he caught himself on the steering wheel and climbed the rest of the way.

Now he was sitting in the car.

It was hot and fiddly work attaching the two plastic whiffle ball bats to the gas and brake pedals with duct-tape, but he got it done. He tested them and they worked, revving the engine sweetly as he pushed down. A quick study of the steering wheel showed it had cruise control, which would help. Cool air blew on his face from the air con vents and he turned it up, basking for a moment.

He got the wheelchair in with difficulty. He closed the door and looked in the rear view mirror, but could only see a few yards of road illuminated by his red brake lights. That was all that remained of Frayser, now, perhaps all that anyone would ever know. But he didn't feel sad, instead he was growing more excited. He was a grown man finally leaving his mother's basement behind, and Amo was waiting.

He pushed the gearstick to drive, pressed down on the whiffle for gas and the BMW pulled away.

9. NEW YORK

It took him two days solid driving to reach New York.

For six hours that first night he drove in silence, with all the windows rolled down and the high beams on, plunging alone into the dark. There wasn't a single electric light on anywhere, not in any of the tenement buildings in the little towns he rolled through, not on the I-40 toll booths or in roadside burger shacks, motels or bars.

All he saw was the tiny slice of the world his headlights illuminated: shuttered shop fronts and the washed-out entrances to malls; dark alleys passing by like dry veins; parking lots that stretched away as endless silver-tinged deserts, their contours just discernible by the light of the moon; and between each town the long dark walls of forest, marking the outer edge of a darkness that went on forever into the night.

The road was full of motionless cars, dropped like heavy metal hailstones from heaven. In places they had crashed into each other, forcing him to weave between them, telling a story of sudden, hard infection. Cubes of shattered glass lay sprayed like diamonds across the road. Some cars had flipped onto their roofs after head-on collisions, the trajectories of which Robert would work through backwards as he passed by.

CRASH

BANG

BURN

Some were smoking still, reduced to skeletons of corroded black bones full of white and black char. He breathed in the smell of ash and the chemical stink of burnt plastic seats.

He drove on.

There were zombies everywhere, wan pale figures emerging from the darkness and quickly receding behind. Most ignored him, rolling by as impersonal as a weather front, though some turned to follow, running in his wake like glowing white meteors. On clear sections he sped away, and their pale figures soon faded in the rear-view mirror.

He drove down pitch-black roads until he hit the edge of Nashville around 5am. He didn't feel hungry, though he was tired; a deep, bone-weary kind of exhaustion. For a year he'd barely moved, and now this.

The odometer said he'd covered 212 miles. He rolled into a Big Eastern motel and switched the BMW off, dropping him into near complete darkness but for a few tiny lights on the dash. The engine ticked steadily as it began to cool.

He tilted the seat and crawled over it to the back, where he laid down with a water bottle for a pillow. He chewed on a single sandwich before giving it up as a lost cause; he wasn't even hungry. He drank a few gulps of water and closed his eyes.

* * *

When he woke it was steamy and hot in the car, and pale zombie faces pressed against the glass like Halloween wallpaper. The white glow from their eyes lit the interior, and their synchronized breathing rocked the vehicle from left to right, like a lullaby.

He rubbed his face, damp with sweat. His shoulders ached deeply, his whole body throbbed and he barely felt rested at all, but Amo was waiting.

He crawled back into the driver's seat and the zombies' eyes tracked him, like paintings in a haunted house. They were all races, genders and ages, bleached back to the color of pale milk. This was what the end of the world looked like.

He had to pee.

He put the car in reverse and backed up slowly. The bodies in back shuffled awkwardly but gradually split to the sides, so he flipped to drive and steered the car through the bumping bodies by memory, dipping down a verge, bobbing back up, bound for the highway. In a few minutes the bodies thinned and bright midday sun slashed in.

Ahead lay a largely clear highway, stretching through a meager services stop penned on all sides by thick bristlecone pine forest.

Beautiful. He looked behind him and saw a zombie horde sprawling across the parking lot and four-lane highway, probably thousands strong, running at him like a surging wave. He pushed the gas and drove away at sixty miles an hour, rolling the window down and sucked in deep lungfuls of hot, pollen-scented air, clearing out the fog of the night before.

The world was strange now.

To either side the dark, wild expanses of the night were replaced by the suburbs of Nashville; malls, parking lots, gas stations and off-ramps. Soon he was rolling through downtown flanked by upmarket skyscrapers, genteel old law offices and saloon-like designer cafes, edging carefully through herds of milling zombies. At times he wound down the window and called out, "Hello!", but no responses came. Zombies running at him out of dark buildings and side-alleys became commonplace.

He passed out of Nashville twenty minutes later, catching a glimpse of the Cumberland River off to the left. On a barren stretch of I-40 overlooking the long empty runway of Nashville airport, he stopped at a Barky's gas station and refilled the tank direct from the pump.

A plane wreck south of Lebanon slowed him briefly, spread across I-40 like a vast swatted fly, and he pushed through charred rows of seats and odd bits of twisted metal like a snow plow. In Buffalo Valley he stopped for a Fat Boy donut, then drove on, pushing the BMW and himself hard until he was almost asleep at the wheel, lulled by the silence and drowsy warm monotony.

When it was past midnight he stopped in the middle of the road and slept in the driver's seat, waking chilly and confused sometime in the early morning, with more zombies around him, like ghosts in the ruins of a world.

He made good time that second day, reaching Knoxsville by mid-afternoon and crossing over into Virginia by nightfall. Once his BMW burst a tire on shattered glass and he climbed out and swapped to a nearby Audi. The ache in his shoulders began to fade a and he was feeling stronger already.

The air was hot and humid in the run toward Roanoke. He reached Maryland by lunchtime. The zombies seemed more numerous now, and he imagined all the East Coast cities emptying out and wandering the countryside. He finished the last stretch to New York in a kind of fugue, half-asleep at the wheel as dusk set in. He came in on I-78 through a warren of neighborhoods and tiny little towns, following signs for Manhattan.

A bridge carried him over Newark Bay to Jersey City, where he zagged north and pulled over to the waterfront before the last vestige of light faded from the sky. There he sat staring out at the towering skyline of New York, all dark silhouettes against pink clouds.

It was on fire.

A thick plume of greasy smoke rose up from somewhere behind the Empire State Building, illuminated by a swathe of orange flames in the streets below. It set a deep cold fear burning in his belly, reminding him of 9/11, when he'd been only 5 years old and barely understood what had happened.

He understood this. New York was burning, and somehow Amo was in the thick of it.

* * *

Holland Tunnel was blocked a few hundred feet in and he couldn't get through. His headlights illuminated a butter-churn of vehicles all cramped and pressed together.

"Shit," he cursed.

If he'd had his legs he could climb through easily. Perhaps even now he could try, but it would be madness to crawl over so much jagged metal and glass in the pitch black. He'd cut his unfeeling legs to ribbons and bleed out without even knowing it.

He reversed back out, halting at the water's edge. The Hudson flowed by uncaring, dark and fast. Already the pink was fading from the sky, though the flames still burned high on Manhattan Island, their light reflecting off the plumes of smoke and ash.

He dug around in the mass of papers and trash in the passenger foot well, coming up with a map for New York. The George Washington Bridge seemed the closest, fifteen miles to the north. Chances were good it was just as clogged as the Holland Tunnel, but he didn't have a choice.

It took five hours.

The built-up city roads were at most one or two lanes wide, with narrow curbs and buildings stacked right up to the sidewalk, offering no space to bypass all the cars, buses, semis and motorbikes lying around.

He tried to plow through but the Audi wasn't powerful enough to shove other vehicles out of the way, so he had to constantly backtrack, kept company by a growing swarm of zombie bodies. They pressed up to his glass whenever he stopped, growing thicker as the night went by, until at last at four in the morning they were so tightly pressed around him, wedged into an intersection somewhere in Union City, he could no longer move at all.

Pushing the gas just spun his tires, filling the car with the stink of burning rubber. He tried to pry a way free, jolting between reverse and drive with the pedal pushed down hard, but there were too many. He heard their bones cracking and stopped.

He was trapped.

* * *

He dreamed of Amo burning atop a pyre of bodies, just like the image in his comic. Green-O stood nearby with a Zippo lighter in his hand, grinning like a demon.

Around noon they started to clear, and he eased the Audi through, rolling along streets bathed in warm mid-summer light. In 45 minutes he sat on the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge, but it was just as crowded as Lincoln Tunnel.

He needed a bigger vehicle.

At the New Jersey Fire Department station he switched into a fire engine out in the yard. It was a high haul to get into the seat, and pulling his chair up after him was tough, but he made it. The key was in the ignition and sparked at his first try.

On the approach to the bridge he sped up. The huge machine responded slowly but surely, charging up like a dynamo. He steered it up the ramp to the bridge, pushed the gas-bat hard to the floor, and launched into traffic like a battering ram.

CRUNCH

The truck plowed through for about fifty feet before its momentum died out, with vehicles shifted to either side like logs in a beaver dam. The jolt of the seat belt across his chest felt good. He reversed and charged again, sending vehicles shearing against the bridge railings.

He forced his way over George Washington Bridge in a little over an hour, making landfall on Manhattan Island giddy with adrenaline. His chest ached where the seat belt had slapped him again and again.

Zombies were waiting for him, and he rolled on through, battering his way east along 174th street, punching a white Porsche to bits over the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, tearing a yellow Ford almost in half on his way into Tremont.

At an open intersection with 3rd Avenue on the corner of Tremont Park he looked south, but the smoke and ash were long gone. The fire had been somewhere near the Empire State Building, on 5th Avenue and 34th Street, so he turned right onto 3rd Avenue and raced down toward it.

What he found disgusted him.

The first body was near the corner of 3rd and East 112th street, deep in Harlem, lying in the middle of the road. It wasn't gray and the lights in its eyes had gone out, rather its skin was a mottled black with patches of purple and pink, and flesh hung off it like pulled pork at a barbeque.

He gagged. Moments later when the smell wafted through the open window, like burnt sausages, he vomited out of the window.

This was a person burned alive. Its face was gone, its hair was gone, its clothes were gone. He killed the engine and in the following silence heard the low drone of flies.

Around the body there was a wet and glossy smear, like translucent candlewax. A southerly breeze came and the smell hit him harder. He pinched his nose and looked away, momentarily startled by how normal the world looked to either side. There was a parked taxi, a yellow fire hydrant, a row of brightly colored newspaper boxes. The display window of a clothes shop called Hartegan's featured a Daniel Boone-like figure wearing a top hat. Then there was this.

Was this Amo's body? Was this a zombie?

Stretching south behind it was a trail of footsteps marked in glossy oil. Probably a zombie, lit up like a firecracker somewhere south, then it kept walking this way.

Robert looked toward East 111th a block south, expecting to see a burnt-out wreck that might have caused this, a fallen plane or a rubbled building, but everything looked normal. He drove on.

Half a block further down he found three bodies lying like a belt across the street, half-melted, their fats and juices running down into the asphalt and staining it a shiny yellow. They too had left footsteps behind them, written in glossy oil.

"Oh God," Robert mumbled. The roasted, greasy smell of cooked humans was worse here. He tied a kerchief around his mouth and wound the windows up, stopping up the vents.

It only grew worse.

Near East 110th street there was a silvery trail of seven or eight bodies, melted like slugs lying on salt. Halfway to East 109th the trail picked up again and didn't stop, beginning as a tapered point of a few bodies tumbled together with flaps of purple meat hanging loose, then expanding backwards to fill out the road.

After a time he couldn't drive any further, as bodies covered every bit of the asphalt, though they were hardly recognizable as bodies any more. They were a pink, purple and black soup of burnt flesh and bones, like bacteria beds in Yellowstone Park, ropey with veins of wriggling yellow that had to be curdled human fat.

There were peaks where bodies had heaped up and valleys between them where blood, offal and fat had coagulated in cracked platelets, like a dried-up desert.

The stench was thick in the fire engine cab. The flies beat at the windows like a droning black sandstorm, fogging the air in every direction.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered, again and again as though invoking the name could take the horror away. It was like an image of a mass grave in some third-world country, where victims of ethnic cleansing lined shallow pits, but this was New York, the greatest city in the world.

He felt it scarring him inside. It was so much worse than watching the zombies on TV that first night, because this had to be deliberate. No gas mains would have broken and sparked five days after the apocalypse, no more planes were falling, no open fires were left. Instead someone had lit this fire, and led this burning train of bodies north.

It had to be Amo.

His stomach wrung itself tight. Amo was kind and gentle, but then he hadn't seen another living soul since Memphis. No one else was even left.

He came round from a faint, leaning against the driver-side window. Flies spat at the glass by his elbow like black popcorn, and the stink was a solid taste in his mouth, like chewing rotten meat.

He saw his face in the rear view mirror, the skin pale. Shock was eating into him. Maybe he was turning into a zombie, to be burnt like the rest. Amo would do it with a grin on his face and a lighter in his hand.

He'd expected to find Amo much as he had been, cheerful and ready with a quip, but he'd been wrong. This was a hellscape.

A booming sound rang out, and Robert twisted toward it but the street hadn't changed. Another came, then another, and though he didn't know for sure, each one sounded like Amo's name hammered onto the air.

BOOM

BOOM

BOOM

Feeling woolly and thick-tongued, Robert pulled the fire engine back. He turned it on 110th and drove over to 7th Avenue, rolling down the windows in a fog to clear the foul taste of death from the cab. As he started south he heard the ratatatatat of distant gunfire. Far ahead down the canyon of skyscrapers he saw a tiny fireball plume up.

"Jesus, Amo," he whispered, less a prayer than a surrender, and drove the fire engine on.

10. TIMES SQUARE

He found Amo on the edge of Times Square, standing atop a long white RV facing south and spraying bullets from a machine gun into the ranks of a charging horde of zombies.

Robert stopped the fire engine at the intersection with West 48th Street a full block away and stared. The sound of the gun pummeled the air like a drill, mowing down line after line of stumbling bodies.

ratatatatatatat

He was killing them. It was Amo. He had his back turned but it was undeniably Amo; a hipsterish figure in khaki pants and a polo shirt just like his Yangtze avatar, surrounded by the banality of Times Square's blank video screens. Now he was killing people in their hundreds.

Zombies rushed up at his RV like a tide, drawn by the sound, the light, the movement, and Amo killed them. His RV rooftop was walled with red ammo crates stacked two high, like sandbags in a machine gun nest, and he constantly ducked in and out of them to gather fresh munitions.

Bullet-ruptured bodies were everywhere, forming a landscape of torn gray flesh and purple guts that coated the road like a carpet all the way up to West 48th where Robert sat watching. In places there were sooty clearings where grenades or rockets must have exploded, cratering the asphalt and blasting bodies into bits. Blood ran over the yellow parking lines at the curbs and dripped silently down into drains.

His mouth went dry. He couldn't drive any further without rolling the engine over the dead. It was worse than the fire, because it was still happening, and Robert couldn't take his eyes off Amo at the center. He couldn't hear anything but the ratatatatat of the gun, dropping more and more. He couldn't smell anything but the metallic stench of blood, infesting his lungs like water rising up.

"Amo!" he shouted, but his voice was pummeled back by the thunder of automatic gunfire. Another explosion came, blooming like a tiny flower and biting bodies out of the tide over a block away.

He slammed down on the horn.

HOOOOOOOONK

It rang out but wasn't enough. Amo was too far away, and the sound up on the RV with the bullets, zombies and adrenaline had to be overwhelming.

He leaned his head out of the window and shouted at the top of his lungs. He leaned on the horn with all his weight, as if that would make a difference, but Amo didn't turn.

So he gunned the engine forward. Bodies flattened and gushed out their innards under its thick tires, skulls popped like watermelons, and the seat jostled and jerked like a 4x4 going off-road. He leaned on the horn throughout, so he wouldn't have to hear the slosh as internal organs were forced out of gaping mouths by the fire engine's massive weight.

HOOOOOOONK

Amo kept firing without break, unloading clip after clip into the gray mass before him, and soon the engine hit a density of fallen bodies halfway down the block that it couldn't climb over or bull through. There were just too many.

Robert tried charging like on the George Washington Bridge, but it was impossible to get any momentum on the slippery, organ-strewn asphalt. He charged forward all the same but his front wheels just dug into the bellies of dead people on the wall's lowest tier, tearing them open like piñata and spilling more slick purple ropes across the road.

"Amo!" he screamed, but he barely even heard his own voice over the onslaught. He shot and shot and shot, and Robert could feel the vibration rising up through the ground.

There was nothing else to do. He unlatched his seatbelt, opened the door, and lowered his useless legs down to the street.

His arms were stronger now but his stomach wasn't, and as he lowered himself to lie on his side in the slick of freshly burst blood and guts by the front wheel, he vomited again.

His hip was in it, his fingers were in it, it was slimy and cold against his skin and it stank like rotten meat gone fetid in the trash, pus and sweat mingling with the slit pork-stink of the butcher's. His eyes stung with the bitter tang of ammonia and shivers wracked down his broken spine.

He began to crawl.

On his elbows he edged round the blockade of bodies, squirming through a narrow valley between sprawling arms and legs. His belly and hips scraped through puddles of cold guts, his legs trailed through it behind him, and liquid seeped down his waistband and into his pants.

He gagged and tears fogged his vision. Merciful streams of snot blocked his nose and he made no effort to clear them. In moments he rounded the heap and faced a saddle of bodies three deep.

Just like ladder rungs, he told himself, climbing to the platform. Focus.

He reached for a sturdy looking arm at the top, hairy and pale, gripped it round the wrist and pulled. It creaked then tore loose, dropping him roughly back to the road and showering his face with fresh gore as the stump smacked down off the top of his head. The asphalt punched his hip and elbow sharply, freezing him momentarily in pain.

"Come on!" he cried.

Amo's onslaught went on, a deep bass thrum that vibrated through his sodden pants. He rubbed tears from his eyes with an arm covered in blood and tried again, taking hold of a leg in blue jeans and tugging on it experimentally.

It held. He pulled himself up.

The bodies were firm but yielding, and he slipped and rolled over them. They turned under his weight, arms and legs shifting position, broken hips twisting and torsos wheezing like bellows, wounds tearing open and disgorging rotten purple innards, like some disgusting, hellish orgy.

From the top he gained no vantage or fresh view; the landscape extended like a mass grave. He slithered ungainly to the bottom of the small heap, where he came face to face with a young woman who was still alive. Her jaw gaped at his face, gray tongue waggling. Her broken arms twitched where they lay trapped underneath other bodies. Her chest was blown apart from the third rib down, with her lungs and heart poking their heads out like shiny friends come out to play. The heart pulsed and the lungs expanded and contracted.

He vomited, looked away and crawled on. He slithered like a snail round a thick encampment of bodies drifted up against a yellow school bus, over a mercifully clear rocket crater where the road beneath his belly was still warm, and circled a jagged wall of ribs and leg bones like a stack of chopped wood, all the time drawing closer.

The sound of gunfire grew louder with every slap of his palms on cold and wriggling bodies. He was alive and they were alive and they were all alive together, waving like the dying waves. His were arms slathered in a thick coating of viscera, like the glaze on a cake.

He dry-heaved and went on and it took forever. The block went on and on, the gouged, ruptured, torn bodies went on and on, until at last the RV was there. He could smell the burn of gunpowder and welcomed it as something different to raw and rotten meat. The RV was white or cream, it was hard to tell with so much blood in his eyes. He crawled up to it and laughed.

ratatatatatatatat, said Amo's guns.

BOOM, said Amo's rocket launcher.

Robert laughed madly and pounded at the RV's side. He could barely reach up above the wheels to the metal skin. His shoulders trembled and threatened to drop him chin-down to the asphalt.

bang bang, his palm said on the metal, barely an ant nipping at Amo's heels.

ratatatatatatat

BOOM
ratatatatatatat
bang bang

He slithered round the back of the RV looking for a way to climb up; halfway up there was a ladder but he couldn't reach it. He slithered round toward the front.

"Amo!" he shouted up, lying to the RV's side and fighting to be heard above the oppressive roar of the gun. "Amo!"

He pushed away from the RV's shadow and looked up at Amo's face in profile, bobbing above the ammo crate fort. His dark hair was swept back from a face grim with dark lines of smoke, sweat and gunpowder. He looked like a grizzled war veteran with a thousand yard stare, focused on a horizon point beyond the ocean of charging bodies, trying to shoot his way through them all. He looked like the last man alive after the apocalypse, giving up.

"Amo!" he screamed.

But Amo didn't hear. Robert tried grabbing up bits of organs and throwing them but he couldn't even reach the roof of the RV. They splatted against the side ineffectually.

"Amo!"

He wanted to help him. More than anything lying there in the blood and shit, he wanted to reach up and take the weapons out of Amo's hands and tell him, "You don't need to do this! You don't need to do any of this!"

But he couldn't. He was a cripple lying in the shit and he couldn't do anything. He couldn't climb or make himself heard, he couldn't stop his only friend in the world from perpetuating a massacre the likes of which he'd never recover from. He couldn't do a damn thing except bury his bloody face against his bloody elbow and sob.

* * *

Some time later the shooting stopped.

It took Robert a moment to recognize the emptiness in the air, like a vacuum sucking at his ears after the constant assault of gunfire. He heard his own breath and his own heart banging hard in the silence.

The zombies were gone. The groan and crush of them, the stampede of their feet up 7th Avenue, was halted. He looked out over an endless wasteland of the dead. Their bodies were everywhere, fogged with a low and bloody haze, scattered around crashed vehicles and piled up near lampposts and newspaper boxes. Thousands or tens of thousands; an entire herd, the entire population of New York, and every last one of them ripped and dead.

Finally the shooting had stopped.

He felt like he could breathe again. He rolled and looked up. There was Amo standing just as before, though the grim expression of defeat was gone from his face. Now he looked faintly amused.

This was the Amo he remembered, who'd saved him in the darkness and who he'd saved in turn on the phone, who any minute would climb down and help him up and together they'd plan a way to move forward.

Robert sucked in a breath to shout and this time be heard. It wasn't too late.

"Amo!"

At the same time there was one final BANG.

Fluid splashed on Robert's face and across his chest, fallen from the sky. There was a thump from the RV as Amo's body settled on the roof.

Robert stared at the fresh red blood on his chest and hands, mixed with gray and tiny fragments of white, then realization hit and sucked all the air out of his lungs.

Amo had just killed himself. He'd shot himself in the head.

He screamed. He stared at his fingers and screamed until his breath was stolen away and he couldn't scream or breathe and he didn't even want to breathe. He was diving off the edge of the platform again toward concrete, plummeting down; he was in the water and drowning again, unable to pull himself out. Amo was lying dead overhead despite everything he'd done, and there wasn't a single thing he could do.

LANDING

11. MATTHEW

He came to cold in a ditch, looking up at a murky gray sky.

Clouds made shapes like kidneys and livers overhead. The sun was an eyeball and all the sky was blood; a delightful buffet for cannibals.

From nearby he heard the indicator light of the fire engine still clicking. It hurt to turn his head but he turned and looked and laughed. The engine was tilted into the ditch at a crazy angle with its big red ass up in the air. The left indicator was still blinking, which seemed funny because the engine had actually come off the road to the right.

Ha ha ha.

The door hung open where he'd slithered out, like a long rope of purple intestine. The trail he'd made back along the highway verge was greasy with bodily fluids, like a slug.

Crawling around the RV in Times Square was a distant memory. He'd tried to climb it again, driven by some pointless desire to at least see Amo, maybe to bury him, but he hadn't been strong enough. There weren't enough grips. He legs were too weak. He couldn't even do that much.

Instead he crawled away, back through the bloody wasteland with the flies, back into his fire engine to drive away.

He surveyed his body lying beside him, like a foreign land. His belly was open to the air where he'd pulled up his shirt and smeared brackish ditch water all over himself, trying to wipe away the blood. Now he smelled like blood, piss and mold. He could feel the crunchiness of dried matter beneath his waistline and gagged, but there was nothing left to throw up.

He only remembered the hours after New York faintly: the sensation as blood dried down his thighs; road signs, clouds, wandering gray bodies. He'd driven for as long as he could amongst them, until the engine ran out of gas and the siren dwindled down and he was left with just the click of the indicator.

He looked back to the sky and laughed. The demon was up there somewhere.

"This is what you wanted all along, isn't it?" he asked the clouds, his voice sounding croaky and drowned. "You want me here, down in the shit. Well I'm here. What now?"

No answer came. His head reeled and his throat was drier than ever, but he didn't want to drink. He didn't want to eat. He just wanted to get away, from New York, from himself, from his useless legs and his bloody belly and the stink of piss of it all.

"It's a good joke," he called up. "A really good joke on me. So what's the next line?"

No answer came.

* * *

He crawled.

The wheelchair was another world that he didn't want, and cars weren't for him either. Instead he just crawled into the night, bloodying his fingertips and elbows as he reached and dragged, reached and dragged. Once he looked down at his legs and saw his knees were sharply lacerated where the asphalt had worn through his jeans.

He laughed. Everything was falling apart.

He crawled on. He woke to dusty summer rain falling off him in splashes. He crawled into that too.

"You want to ride?" he called out to zombies that crossed his path, always treading east to west, east to west. "I'm a good workhorse, get on board. I'll dive for you."

They wandered by and Robert crawled on, snipping north across their westbound trails like scissors through a finishing line. He came to laughing atop a small hill set back from the road, looking over the wreck of a passenger jet in the field nearby. A cow was standing by one of the huge engines chewing the cud, while another cow lay on its side with its belly torn open and three zombies hip deep inside it, chowing down on its intestines.

"Draw that, Amo," he called. "That's the apocalypse for you."

He laughed and crawled, and Amo crawled on beside him.

"How many did I get?" Amo asked. "Was it a lot?"

"Millions," Robert whispered in reply. "All put down."

"Billions?" Amo asked hopefully.

Robert laughed. His throat was dry. How long was it since he'd drunk anything? Most of his pants had torn off, his shirt too. His fingers and elbows and knees were a mess of scratches, bruising and blood. The hunger was gone, leaving only the cold milk sense of drowning deep inside.

In moments of lucidity he knew he was dying, and dived deeper.

"How much further?" Amo asked by his side.

Robert just laughed. "Thirty-three feet," he said, "two seconds of flight down to concrete."

Amo blurred with Zane by his side. They talked about girls; long rambling conversations that he didn't really follow but that just kept on going.

In the exploded wreck of a police van he collapsed, lying spread across a burnt backseat. All the pieces of the van were there, laid out like a fastidious owner had taken them apart for cleaning and inspection: steering wheel, tires, chassis, roof, bits of glass, decapitated body of the driver, his head, guns, handcuffs, doors and so on.

How many days had passed since New York? He tried to count them on one hand. Three, or four?

"Three weeks four days," Amo piped up and Robert laughed. "Five weeks eleven months. Three years and two seconds."

A zombie wandered through the wreckage toward him, its booted feet crunching on shattered glass.

"Hey," he called. "Hey, where are you going?"

It was following the same road as him. Amo walked beside it with his arm around it and his other hand held out with the fingers crossed.

"I'm just pretending to be his friend," Amo said, winking. "I'll take him up the road then blow his head off when he isn't looking."

"Where's he going?" Robert asked. He blinked his dry eyes and looked back down the twisty highway. That was south, this was north, and the zombie was headed north. Was that normal?

It walked by and Robert reached out to grab its leg. It was cold, dry and firm, and by holding it he tripped the zombie flat on its face.

Amo laughed. "Good one. Now stave in his head."

Robert just held on. The zombie started to crawl, pushing with its legs and pulling with its arms. Robert held on, and to his surprise the whole backseat scraped along the ground.

Amo laughed and Robert laughed too.

"Chariot of fire!" Amo crooned. "You're just like Ben Hur. Take it round the corner and win the giant golden eggs!"

Robert held on for three more scratchy pulls before the zombie's chill calf pulled free. It had felt good, good to move, good to not be so completely alone.

"You can't be serious," Amo said, aghast. "Instead of me?"

"You're a mass-killer," Robert mumbled. "I can't-"

He scanned the wreckage. There was a spool of black rope spilled from the police van. It seemed like a sign from above.

"Seriously?" Amo asked again.

He didn't have a lot of energy. Crawling to the rope took fourteen days and twenty-three seconds. Or twelve hours and five weeks, he wasn't sure. Crawling back to his chair took one hundred and one nights.

"No man left behind," Zane said, popping up briefly at his shoulder then repeating himself many times. "We leave no man behind, Robert."

At the same time Amo kept repeating, "Seriously?"

He tied himself lying on the backseat like Odysseus to his mast. His weary arms wove round his body and the seat again and again, wrapping him like a fly in a spider's web. Then he waited.

He waited a year and a day, then another year and three more days, until finally more northbound zombies came. It was around dawn and six of them came at once, so close they could hold hands, like a gang of great friends.

"I'll be here for you," Zane sang in his ear, "when the rain starts to fall."

It was raining. Thick drops fell on his body like heavy metal from a cauldron.

Robert swirled his rope and lassoed at the zombies. Getting the rope high enough to slip over their heads was hard, but he roped two round the necks before the group was out of range. The ropes caught as they walked on, pulling them both over backwards. They got up and leaned forward and the lines tightened, the backseat jerked, scraped, and began to move.

Robert laughed. After that they fell smoothly enough to their role as chariot-pullers, bent over and heading north. Robert lay back and watched the clouds drifting by, while the rain fell down and washed away the blood.

Amo was left behind, calling out, "Seriously?"

* * *

He slept a lot on his chariot, being pulled along the countryside. Other zombies went by and at times he tried to lasso them too. The world was a blur of roads, bushes and little towns.

In the distance snowy mountains rose up. He saw a sign for Maine, the Pine Tree State, and chuckled. Pine trees.

Once his chariot got stuck on a garden fence, through a strip of forest with the highway long behind. His chariot-pullers strained with all their effort but it couldn't get loose. He tried to untie himself but the ropes were too tight. Instead he spent half a month sawing through the rope with a set of Yale keys he found in the pocket of his lead zombie, after reeling it in like a fish.

He unraveled the rope and rolled off the seat. The cold was hitting him a little. He saw bedsores on the backs of his thighs where he hadn't moved for days. Hunger and thirst were like the distant cry of the demon, so deep inside.

Shouldn't he be dead yet?

He pulled on the seat until it was free of the tangle, then clambered back on as his horses pulled away, terrified to be left behind. Where was he now? He looked around and saw pine trees everywhere. Zane was walking alongside, grimly silent.

"Where's Green-O?" Robert asked, "that fat shit?"

"I cut his head off and hung it on a washing line," Zane answered without looking. "Best place for it."

This made good sense. The slalom continued.

Over hills and dales they went, over roads and under tunnels, and each day that passed Robert became a little weaker. His body thinned right out, his skin tone shifted from a rich black to coffee with heaps of milk. Perhaps his eyes were glowing.

"Where are you going?" he shouted at his sled-pullers. His shout was a croaky whisper. His teeth were loose in his gums and his tongue felt obscenely dry, like a squirrel's tail that flicked around of its own accord.

Finally they arrived.

* * *

It was a mountain. Looking up along his body Robert saw the great white peak above, like a meringue baseball cap on the world. Of course, this was the stairway to heaven. He hummed a few bars before he forgot the tune.

He let his wiry neck twist to take in the surrounding foothills. There was a road nearby but they weren't on it. They had just emerged from more forest and were scraping through a tilted field of tall grasses and sweet purple wildflowers. Other zombies were nearby, converging.

With a phenomenal effort he hoisted himself to his elbows to look ahead. The foothills rose steeply out of the forest in leaps and bounds, rising toward the stately sweep of the mountain's solid rock ridges. Way up ahead, at least three meadows and a scree-slide distant, there was a strange concrete block as big as a house standing in the middle of a grassy field, like a bizarre piece of modern art. Around it milled hundreds of zombies.

He blinked; dry lids rasping down then up.

Not hundreds; thousands. They looked like an ocean of gray buoying up some weird futuristic ship. The block was tall, maybe two stories, and featureless with no windows or doors he could see; no markings beside a black ladder running up one side and a black antenna rising from its roof.

The zombies were hammering at its walls, and the sound of their flesh and bone smacking against solid stone jolted him to a measure of wakefulness. He could feel the thrum of their assault through the ground even this far away, and it took him back to New York.

His back gave out and he sagged onto the seat again. Perhaps this was the tower Amo had drawn in his comic. Perhaps this was what it all came down to.

The sledge drove on. He drifted in and out of consciousness, watching as faster zombies overtook them and slower ones fell behind. There were old women and young women, black folks and white folks and Asians, all turned gray and white-eyed.

They crossed the three meadows and the scree. They pulled over the dirt track, rutted with deep tire tracks, and the throng of zombies folded around him.

Over there he saw a dead one. His sledge pulled right past it, lying in the tall grass half-decomposed, with its features collapsing inwards. It had yellow hair and there was grass growing into its mottled gray ear. It was a lady, maybe. Her sagging pale breasts pressed toward the dirt, like pouches of custard. Her throat was a bloody tear, like a chasm in space-time.

The sledge went on by, then slowed and started to bump and thump off more dead bodies. Some of them got caught on the front and dragged along the sides.

"Get your own chariot," Robert mumbled at them, "this is mine."

One of them brushed his arm, and he looked at the stain of fresh blood there like it was something magical. He sniffed it. Not jam. He looked up but he could barely see the sky anymore, there were so many bodies; dead bodies that were dead and dead bodies that kept moving.

Bullet holes.

There was no stench from these zombies, only a crispy dry smell of sap, like a broken twig. This was the smell from their bones, he realized, when they cracked. It was getting darker and his sledge was pulling in closer.

He studied another corpse and saw the bullet holes in its face and throat clearly. Its skull was the eye of a needle through which hot metal slugs had passed, leaving a hollow, like a holy eye. Its throat had another eye torn out.

Someone stepped on his sledge beside his head.

"Hey," he mumbled.

He was deep in the thick of them now, and they were swarming. The sledge stopped moving but the ocean didn't; they swayed and gathered and all the while more were piling in from behind.

"Hello!" he called out feebly. "I'm here!"

One of them stepped on his head. For several seconds it pinned him to the sledge, squashing his nose against the hard fabric and setting off blooms of color and pain through his head. Then it was gone, climbing on and over.

Another stepped on his outstretched arm, trapping it against the seat's hard metal edge and teasing out a pain that was sharp and repulsive.

He screamed, then a foot came down on his belly, driving any wind out. Another stepped on his shoulder and another on his chest, and then he was swarmed. His chariot-pullers were still pulling him deeper, and now it was almost solid dark overhead with gray bodies walking over him.

The pain in his belly peaked and it felt like his guts would be driven up out of his mouth, like he'd done to dozens of them with the fire engine. He was too weak to shake them off or fight, too weak to move or wriggle away, too weak to scream.

He was drowning in a gray ocean. His vision silvered and he thrashed pathetically, unable to free any part of himself. More feet fell until he couldn't see the clouds at all. Feet landed on his face and smothered his mouth, crushing his lips; feet landed on his legs and his groin, pressing him like grapes beneath them, squeezing him to mulch.

The demon was back with a vengeance and this time he was going to die.

* * *

ATATATATATATAT

He felt the machine gun fire more than he heard it at first, passing through the mass of bodies above like forks pulling chunks out of jelly. The weight shifted as bodies were cut away by bullets, and he breathed. It was only a tiny suck of air, but it settled his bulging eyes and made him hungry for more. He sucked harder and more air trickled in. A break in the throng of bodies above let gray light stream in, along with the full thunder of the guns.

ATATATATATATAT

Whatever it was it was big, more like a jet engine left running than any gun he'd ever heard before.

ATATATATATATAT.

Bodies peeled back like a banana skin and he clawed at them to be free, emerging up through them and waving his hands like flags.

"I'm here!' he croaked. "I'm alive!"

Blood washed down his face, down his back and made his grip slick, but he swam up through the falling dead until he lay gasping atop a nested thatch of bodies, looking up.

The concrete block had transformed. From its top a huge black pillar had risen, over a meter thick and as tall as the floodlights in Memphis University football stadium, but instead of lights there were four cannons angled outward near the top, swiveling and shooting.

Bullets raked out of them in four directions at once, in a widening circumference of fire. He craned his neck backward to see zombies topple a hundred yards away, their throats ripped out in red.

He raised his feeble arms again and waved. "Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, I'm here!"

The guns kept firing in a methodical, organized sweep, until the number of zombies was fewer and the firing rate dropped to

AT AT AT

Every bullet dropped one of them, going on for minutes more until finally every zombie was dead, and the sloping field was still again.

He waved and called out. He kept on until finally one of the cannons turned to him like a spotlight.

"I'm alive," he croaked up at it, staring up into the black barrel because there had to be a camera up there. "I'm here."

The barrel stared for a long moment, then finally folded back on itself like a drawbridge and slotted neatly back into the long metal cylinder, which slid with a long smooth hiss back into the concrete block.

"I'm here," he said gratefully, as the earth swallowed the whole pillar, and he was left alone with the dead.

He laid his head back on a body and breathed easy. He'd been saved. Even now they'd be coming for him, an ambulance crew to whisk him back to civilization, with doctor and nurses bringing order to the chaos. They'd have a wheelchair. Maybe crutches.

His crushed chest refilled. It felt like half his ribs were broken, but it was alright.

He lay back on the dead and waited.

* * *

All night he lay there, drifting in and out of a chilly sleep, shivering atop the dead. He had hardly any fat or clothes left on him now, and up on the mountain's slope the air was far colder than in the forests below.

But he couldn't leave. There were people here, he knew it. They'd seen him and they were coming.

He burrowed down amongst the zombies' cold bodies for insulation. The coating of blood and gore felt like a second skin now. In time a pale sun rose and he dreamed fitfully of warm sheets and a hot shower, of smiling faces asking how he'd managed to survive for so long, of hot soup, welcoming eyes and comfort.

"They're not coming," Amo said flatly.

He looked and saw Amo and Zane standing there over him. Green-O was with them too, so fat he eclipsed the sun.

"Face it," Amo went on, "they don't want you. I didn't want you. Zane and Green-O didn't."

The other two stood silently, condemning with their gaze. Robert turned away but Amo's voice followed him.

"You think I'm the weak one for what I did, but do you see yourself now? This is pathetic. This is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen, you lying in your zombie bed with zombies for covers, waiting to be saved."

It was true. Robert sobbed into his hand, but even his hand was freezing, like touching the wheelchair rims after a frozen night's sleep in the car. His body was turning to stone. Each sob hurt worse than the last, tearing at his broken ribs, but he couldn't stop them. The hope was too much.

"At least I had the balls to do something," Amo said. "I was on top of Times Square while you were rummaging in the guts. What does that say about us, Cerulean? What does that say about you?"

"I didn't," he tried to answer, "I wasn't-"

"You were weak and you quit. Why not quit all the way now? Have the balls to finish what you started a year ago in your hospital bed. It's never going to get any better than this. Don't you think I would know?"

"He's right," Green-O said. "Zane?"

Zane just looked down at him with hard eyes. That was perhaps the worst of it, and he sobbed so hard it hurt his head and he lost his breath, bringing on a panic like the demon descending.

The sun rose higher.

The air grew a little warmer and the chill faded. A dewy vapor rose up off the fields and all the dead bodies. It looked like their spirits departing.

More gray bodies came. They went past him in his pile, over the dead to the concrete block, where they started hammering again like nothing had happened.

Robert laughed. Maybe Amo was right: what he needed was to finish the job.

By midday he had crawled to the outer ring of dead bodies, through damp grass that chilled and cleaned him. He might die but it wouldn't be by being crushed alive. Already there were several hundred zombies circled round the box, hammering.

Then he heard it. At first he wasn't sure if it was imagination or not, a droning sound attributable perhaps to a big bee or an avalanche or some hidden workings in the earth, but then he saw it too.

A van. It was a bright yellow van coming along the winding dirt track out of the woods, its engine rumbling, heading his way.

They were coming. After all, they were coming.

Tears rolled down his cheeks. He pushed himself as high up on his elbows as he could and waved.

"I'm here!" he croaked. "I'm over here, I'm alive!"

The van slowed then stopped at the edge of the field, and a young man burst out of the front. He looked like a football player, tall with short sandy hair, wearing jeans and a letter jacket. He stared across the gulf of a football field's distance toward Robert, and Robert stared back.

"Did you say hey?" the guy shouted hesitantly. "I mean, are you alive?"

Robert nodded frantically. "I'm here. I'm alive."

The guy grinned and spread his arms. "I'm alive too! Hell yes, I knew the zombies were leading me somewhere!" he started over the grass at a run. "I'm Matthew. Damn am I glad to see-"

Then his throat exploded. A resounding single AT rang out over the still landscape, and the hope in Robert's heart turned to ice, cracked, and shattered.

The guy was blown backward, irretrievably dead, spurting a brief geyser of blood.

ATATATATATATAT

The guns kicked in again. Robert spun to see them hanging overhead and dealing out death to the zombies at the base. They must have periscoped up in silence behind him.

ATATATATATATAT

He looked back at the fallen figure by the yellow van, unable to believe what he was seeing. His jaw dropped wide and the cannons droned on, blasting bodies behind and around him to shreds, turning the field into a war zone and spitting up gouts of meat and grass. Wildflowers rained in the air.

ATATATATATATAT

It was hard to think in that noise. Nothing was real, anyway. Matthew, he'd said. There was his yellow van just ahead, like an oblong rising sun. He was real, wasn't he?

Frantically Robert crawled. Now the most important thing in the world was to reach Matthew and see if he had ever really been alive. His elbows thumped the ground and his waist dragged in the dirt and the guns fired overhead and then he was there.

Matthew. Apart from the great oval hole torn through his neck from front to back, still spitting up dark venal blood, he looked peaceful. Unthinking, numb and dizzy, Robert took Matthew's hand and squeezed it. Tears poured from his eyes.

"Wake up," he urged. He squeezed the young man's fingers so hard one of them cracked. "Wake up please!"

ATATATATATATAT

Matthew had blue eyes and freckly skin. He was thick in the shoulder; he could be a butterfly swimmer, probably. Maybe Robert could have taught him to dive, like Coach Willings, they might have gone to the Olympics together and now he was dead. Robert reached out with trembling hands to touch his face. It was warm.

Something broke inside him, and tears bubbled up like a geyser. The waste was too much, like his dive all over again, spiraling down to the concrete and into the smothering arms of the red beast. It was Zane with the knife in his throat and the surprised look on his face that said it all: I'm not going to see my friends anymore, I'm not going to run plays or get drunk or lay girls anymore, I'm not going to get married or have kids or any of that.

It was a whole life snuffed out for a mistake, like seven billion people lost for nothing at all, and now with Amo gone and Matthew gone he couldn't bear it anymore.

He screamed so hard it hurt, but he couldn't stop now if he tried. The guns screamed back, implacable and unstoppable, spitting out bullet after bullet that tore gray flesh to shreds.

ATATATATATATAT

He bared his chest to it, held up on his arms, wrenched control of the scream and hurled words into the barrage.

"Kill me too! Kill me, you bastards!"

ATATATATATATAT

12. RV

But he didn't die.

In time the cannons retracted, leaving behind an empty Deepcraft world. Even the guns hadn't wanted him. He wasn't worth a bullet. He wasn't anything, not even real at all.

Amo was right. He should have killed himself already. He should have died on the first night, going out as a hero instead of becoming a ghost.

He closed Matthew's eyes. He looked around the field. More zombies were coming already. The bag of milk in his middle was gone and he felt utterly hollow inside, like a non-player character in the Yangtze with the Internet gone.

He had nothing to say and nothing to do, and no hope left.

He climbed into Matthews' van and drove away. The gun tower let him go. He drove and drove then parked by the coast and sat in the driving seat overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, near some town on some road.

Gray waves lapped at a pebbly beach, and he thought about crawling down into the water. It wouldn't be hard to drown. He was weak and wouldn't be able to keep himself afloat. He'd be with the red demon again, with Zane and all the others.

But he was a ghost now, and ghosts couldn't die.

He woke in the back of the van, lying on a mattress Matthew must have put there. There were beautifully bound books in neat little wooden shelving units. Robert ran his fingers over the titles.

Robinson Crusoe

Walden

Crime and Punishment

Classics of isolation, survival and guilt. He considered tipping them all out and burning them. He thought about it until he actually crawled out and did it, like willing the thing into being.

It was a weak bonfire that didn't take well, burning in a yellow metal can beside a rocky beach on a wintry day, spitting up dark gray smoke.

Also in the back of the van there were cans of Coke and hot dogs, and Robert ate them while watching the books burn.

He ate and drove and slept. For days he looked out to sea, driving north up the coast a few hours at a time, until the van's fuel gauge ran dry in a tiny New England town. The hospital there was an historic building, and inside he had his pick of wheelchair. He picked the oldest, heaviest, slowest as a weak penance.

He refueled and drove silently for days, looking out of the window and watching the empty world pass by. That was the role of a ghost, to wander the ruins. Nothing he saw filled the cold emptiness inside. Near the Canada border he watched Niagara Falls for a few hours, unmoved, then turned back south.

He drove down through Vermont and Massachusetts in silence, through Connecticut back to New York, circling in like a fly round a flame, bound for the place it all went wrong.

Amo.

* * *

New York was there.

He rolled south to Times Square with no plan in his mind.

On 43rd the worst of the mess was gone. Sun, rain and the swarms of flies had melted the dead down to bones already. The stink had faded and the streets were dry and clear where bodies had shriveled and receded like melting snow in the spring.

He parked Matthew's yellow van at the intersection of 43rd and 7th Street, then rolled out in the wheelchair. It was a sunny and warm day, with the wind blowing little zephyrs of dust along the curbs, fluttering against chip packets trapped in fleshless ribcages.

He sat before Amo's RV and looked at the dark matter streaking sides, all dry now, like the scar over an old wound. All of Times Square felt that way.

"I'm back," Robert said. His voice was clearer now; weeks of rolling in his chair, of eating and drinking, had brought his strength back.

"I guess you didn't expect me again. Though you never even knew I was here."

Amo atop the RV said nothing, surrounded by his tall ammo crates. He'd be a skeleton now too, a scar instead of an open wound.

"That hurt," Robert said. The catch in his voice surprised him. He thought he'd been through all the emotion he could take. "I wish you'd seen me. I wish you'd just looked."

Amo said nothing.

"You were my only friend, you know. I wish you'd waited."

He didn't have any more to say after that, so he rolled up to the ladder at the back. On the lower rungs there were dark clots of bloody matter from when he'd tried to climb it before. Now he pulled himself up the rungs with ease, rising hand over hand, until he looked down on the RV roof.

Amo wasn't there.

* * *

He sat on the RV's roof and watched the sun scroll by overhead, trying to decide if Amo being alive was worse or better than Amo being dead. It was good, and he was glad, but either way it didn't make him feel any hope.

It just made him feel tired.

He peered over the ammo crate edge, considering a dive. It seemed poetic justice, but from this height he'd almost certainly fail again. Fall, crunch, perhaps he'd lose the use of his left arm, his right, or better yet he'd be blinded.

No. He could do better than that.

* * *

The Empire State Building was only a few blocks away, according to a map he smashed out of a dispenser box, so he rolled toward it down streets lines with broken vehicles. Thoughts of the dive to come inflamed him; the most amazing arm-stand the world had ever seen, 60-odd stories of flight all the way to the street. He'd punch right through the asphalt, all the judges in the world would flash up 10s, and the burning emptiness inside would finally be wiped away.

He turned on 34th Street, weaving through traffic and starting to feel excited. The entrance was just ahead, and he entered through the tall narrow doors.

The lobby was stunning even in the half-light cast from the street, with rich marble floors and gilt golden walls in a vaulted hallway. At the end a glinting image of the Empire State Building hung in gold relief, though atop it somebody had strung up a chalkboard there, with gridlines and two entries at the top.

Amo – Last Mayor of America 06/08/2018

Lara – Last Barista in America 06/30/2018

Robert laughed and laughed so much he cried.

Amo and Lara, Lara and Amo. There was a map painted onto the floor, outlining a path to the West Coast and Los Angeles, and he imagined Amo and Lara chasing each other along it like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Their paths had crossed at the Empire State and now they were forever linked.

It was beautiful, in a way. It made him happy for them, that they could survive and go on to thrive. He wished them all the best wishes in the world.

But it wasn't for him. He needed to dive.

That was the only way to forget Matthew and make himself clean again. He'd crawled through too much blood to go back now, and the emptiness inside had cut too deep. The thought of diving shone like a star before him, offering the chance to return to the Robert he'd once been, so full of potential and hope, before it all went so wrong. He dreamed of flight all the way to the ground, where having no legs wouldn't matter at all.

He rolled forward.

At the head of the lobby Amo had set out several desks beneath the chalkboard, laden with an interesting array of bits: laptop computers and bowls of USB sticks, a bowl of car keys and maps, wires and generators and red gas canisters stacked neatly like the entrance to a prepper Wal-Mart, even ten chrome Nespresso machines, each with a neat stack of shiny, multicolored coffee pods beside it, like zombies in a heap.

He smiled. Amo was funny, even after what he'd done. He'd survived, the bastard, and this was his world now. Good for him.

Robert wheeled into the darkness down a side corridor, looking for the stairs. It would be a long crawl up, but that was part of the excitement. He found them in a broad vertical chamber lit with faint light from far above, stretching up and up in a square spiral, and completely thronged with zombies.

He hadn't expected that.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered.

A heavy barred security gate had been latched across the bottom of the wide stairwell, behind which squirmed and breathed a mass of zombies with skin like pale and moldy milk. He stared at them, stretching up the spiraling stairs as far as he could see, bulging over the edges and breathing as one, filling the column of open space down the spiral with a wheezy, sucking wind.

In the middle of the stairwell floor there were dozens of blue and white paint cans lying dented atop a white tarpaulin, itself spattered with blue and white paint, along with a heap of used paint-brushes and rollers, a tangle of rope and harnesses, two large metal gas drums and two square generators. Boot marks in blue and white spread all round the square space.

"What the hell were you doing in here, Amo?" he whispered.

Some crazy plans. Some crazy art?

First things first. To dive he had to use the stairs, and for that he had to clear the zombies.

They were pressed against the security gate so tightly that the bars had eaten into their skin in places, embedding through gray cordy muscle the same way trees grow around railings. Robert rolled over and studied the padlock barring the gate. The key was right there.

He laughed, and turned the key. It clicked, the gate opened and Robert rolled back while the zombies poured out. They flooded back down the dark hallway toward the lobby, ignoring him, and he grinned as he imagined the dive to come. Soon he would be free.

Then came the scream.

13. MASAKO

It was a woman, high-pitched and terrified, her cry barely carrying over the heavy wheeze of the zombies' breath and the trudging of their many feet, but he heard it and it woke him up.

BANG

A gunshot followed, then another and the mood of the zombies shifted. The random pattering of their footfalls became a purposeful, unified drumbeat, their breathing sharpened, and they moved toward the sound.

Robert didn't like the shift; it felt primal and violent, and he flashed back to the news anchor during the initial infection, when she paced off to tear some living thing apart.

"Stop shooting!" he shouted. He tried to drive his wheelchair forward but the gray bodies were too tightly packed already, with more forcing their way down the stairs every second.

BANG came another shot, then another.

He took a deep breath then shoved off the wheelchair's armrests in a kind of arm-stand, climbing high enough to lift his legs off the stirrups and hit the wall of zombie shoulders on his chest. He grabbed for something to hold onto, latching onto a toothy open jaw with one hand and a dry and withered neck with the other, then pulled himself onto the top of the zombie flood.

More rushed in to fill the gap he'd left behind, pressing in beneath him and buoying him so there wasn't a single crack he could fall down. A knobbly ocean of gray heads, faces and shoulders stretched out before him, pressed tight to the walls and flowing through the doorway toward the lobby like a Yangtze conveyor belt.

He laughed, then started crawling along the top. He was swimming on the ocean!

BANG the gun shouted again. She was going to get herself killed, and Robert swam urgently, each stroke grappling with somebody's nose or chin or hair, pulling himself over the hard waters of collarbones and skulls. He tensed his stomach against their various bony bits, and gave silent thanks that everything from the waist was not feeling the pain of the pummeling it was taking.

The walls of corridors passed by fast, then BANG-

He spilled into the golden lobby, now flooded with the undead; Amo's tables were lost within their bulk, the Nespresso machines buried along with their shiny egg-pods, but there before the high name board, teetering on the top rung of a ladder like a terrified child about to make her first dive, stood a beautiful Asian woman holding a gun.

Robert stared up at her as the tide of bodies carried him on.

She wore jeans and a white vest with a silver pendant round her neck. The gun was black and snub like the ones atop Amo's RV, and she was waving it desperately around the flooded hall. She had black hair in a ponytail and her eyes were wild and frenzied, but in that wildness there was a bright and shining life.

The sight of her punched him hard in the heart. She was his first human in months to not die or turn into a zombie within seconds. He stared and stared.

BANG

She shot a zombie at point blank range as it crawled up the ladder rungs, but others followed and she aimed the gun again.

Robert shook himself out of his daze.

"Stop shooting them!" he shouted. "It's making them angry."

He was somewhere above the laptop desks now, paddling toward her with all his strength. She heard and spun to see him. Her eyes went wider, she raised the gun, and he almost laughed ay her puzzled expression. It must have been quite a sight to see, some guy crawling across the top the dead.

"I'm alive!" he shouted, holding up his arms. This caused his face to drop hard against a shoulder, bloodying his nose, so he hunkered up onto his elbows. "I'm alive," he went on, "just stop shooting them, noise riles them up. Hang still and I'm coming over."

She looked like she was about to faint, almost as pale as the zombies. The gun had gone slack in her hand and she stared as he swam over.

"It's all right," he cooed up at her, "just keep calm."

When he reached the ladder he gently pushed the climbing zombies away, and they let him. The wonder on her face was priceless.

"They don't want to hurt us," he explained, and pulled himself onto one of the rungs, settling himself in position to ward off any more climbing zombies. "Not normally, anyway. I promise you, you don't need that gun."

She made a sound that might have been a word but came out like gargling. Robert pushed another zealous zombie gently on the forehead, guiding it away. It let itself be tipped back into the throng. He pushed a few more, then they stopped trying to climb past him.

The militant sound in their breathing shifted, becoming softer again. The storm of their footsteps dissipated back into the trudging patter of rain on the roof.

"You see?" Robert said, waving an arm soothingly. "Move along folks, nothing to see here."

They moved along. The lobby settled as they went back to flowing by and out onto the street. Robert looked up at the Asian lady. The expression on her pretty, sharp face shifted between confusion and terror. She probably thought he was magic. The zombie whisperer. He reached a hand up toward her.

"Hi, I'm Cerulean."

He hadn't even meant to say that. He hadn't thought of himself as Cerulean for months, but now it came out easily. Cerulean was a strong man, he was brave and he saved people, and that's what this woman needed now.

It was like slipping into his Deepcraft avatar, and he found himself grinning.

"I'm Masako," the woman said, and shook his hand.

* * *

The zombies moved on, while Cerulean explained. He even caught one by the arm and held it out for her to stroke.

"I don't believe it," Masako said, as she gingerly touched its papery skin.

"Believe it. They haven't hurt me yet."

Her eyes were still a little glazed over, but the shock was fading now.

"So you thought they were killers all this time?" he asked.

"I saw them kill," she said, her voice tight but controlled with a light Brooklyn accent, her eyes not on him but still watching them nervously, tracking any that came too close.. "They killed a man in Queens on the first night, right out on the street. He was running and shooting and they ripped him to rags."

Cerulean nodded. "I guess that's a defensive reaction. If you don't attack them they're calm. Friendly even, like dogs."

Now her eyes focused on him. It seemed like she was seeing him for the first time.

"Did you swim in?" She pointed in a zigzag line from the corridor entrance to where they were sitting under the name board. "Did you crawl on their heads?"

He shrugged. "It was the only way."

Her delicate lips quirked into a slight smile. "I felt sure I was dreaming it. I almost shot you."

"I'm glad you didn't."

"I've never seen anything like that. It was amazing. How did you know they wouldn't hurt you?"

He smiled. It was a good question. "I woke with them around me," he said, then went on to tell the rest of it, though he left out the worst bits, like Amo's suicide and the gun tower in Maine. Without those it seemed like just a lot of crawling.

"Then you came back to New York," Masako prompted.

"For Amo. I wanted to bury him." He didn't want to mention his dive.

Masako scratched her face. A few lines of dark hair had pulled out of the knot high on the back of her head and stuck to her narrow tanned face. She was pretty.

"Then you saw the big F and came here."

Cerulean frowned. "What big F?"

She frowned back. "You're kidding, right? The big F painted on the top of this building? That your friend Amo put there?"

It didn't make sense and he looked at her blankly. "F?"

"F for Facebook, you know? He did the symbol on all sides, blue and white. You really didn't see it?"

He smiled as he grasped it. Now all the paint cans in the stairwell made sense. It meant Amo really had gone big, choosing a symbol that anyone would understand, that couldn't possibly have been there before the world ended. He'd put up a flag for the whole world to see.

A blush of pride ran through him.

"I just came for the view," he said. "I didn't see it."

Masako narrowed her eyes at him. "Climb fifty-odd floors for the view?"

He shrugged and looked around. The zombies were starting to dissipate, and he didn't want to pursue this conversation any further.

"I'm going for my wheelchair," he said, "I'll be back in a minute."

He slid down the rungs, slid onto his side on the cool lobby floor, then began to crawl. The marble was cool and it was easy enough to weave between the moving bodies, like dodgem cars.

"You don't have to-" Masako said, then stopped. He turned to look up at her.

"Don't have to what?"

"I mean," she paused awkwardly. "I didn't realize. Your legs, you know. You don't have to crawl."

He looked down at himself. Yes, he was crawling, that was true. He hadn't thought about it really, not since waking up in his basement. It was true though, paraplegics weren't often crawling around in the old world, were they? That was a kind of taboo.

"How would I get my wheelchair then?" he asked.

She came down the rungs of the ladder tentatively, still skittish as the dead went by. "I could get it."

Ah. He hadn't considered that. "You could, but why shouldn't I get it myself?"

She didn't have an answer for that. Obviously she wanted to say it was embarrassing to crawl on your belly like a slug or something similar, but what did that even mean now?

"Walk with me, if you like," he said, and smiled.

She did.

* * *

They ate a meal of warmed-up hotdogs and beans over Masako's gas camping stove; his first hot meal since it began, served on an actual plate. They lay down in the lobby on bedding she found in a storage closet, gradually growing bolder as zombies failed to attack. They lay there and talked about the big F and Amo's California plan and each other.

Masako was from Brooklyn, a teaching assistant at the University there. For the last two months she'd hidden in her apartment, reading books and watching out of her window. She'd only gone out after she ran out of food, then saw the big F and planned her trip over for three days.

Cerulean put his arm around her as it got dark outside, and she nestled in to his side; just two survivors together. She fell asleep easily, but Robert lay in the still dark of the lobby, looking up at the ceiling. By now he would've reached the top and dived.

Nothing had changed.

Masako was sweet, but she didn't scratch the surface of the emptiness inside him. At the same time he couldn't just leave her. That wasn't something he could live with, or die with.

So he would deliver her to Amo. Then he would dive.

14. SURVIVORS

The next day all the zombies were gone.

Together they tidied up Amo's goodies, scattered across the floor by the zombie flood.

"Why the coffee?" Masako asked.

Cerulean looked up. She was handling one of the shiny Nespresso pods.

"Lara was a barista?" he offered. "It's a kind of in-joke, I suppose. Other than that, I think he wants us to feel like the old world is still here, only shifted. We can have luxury if we want."

"I don't even know how to use this thing," Masako said, tapping the coffee machine and giving him a shy smile. He didn't know either, but that was his cue. He went over and figured it out, slotting the pod in and puncturing the seal, running the process with a mug waiting underneath.

"Good thing it runs on powdered milk," he said. "I don't know when we'll have real milk again."

The air filled with the smell of brewing coffee as the machine percolated water and milk powder through its innards. It almost eclipsed the smell of gasoline in the air, though it did nothing to counter the loud buzz of the generator, connected by a long orange power line.

Amo had thought of everything.

They sipped coffee and studied Amo's maps. He'd laid out a route leading west across the northern states, culminating in Los Angeles. Cerulean could feel the excitement growing in Masako, from her excited tone and the way she skipped around and kept touching his shoulders lightly. These tastes of the old world probably felt more natural to her, like a welcome home. She'd never even left her room, let alone the city. She hadn't dragged herself through blood and guts, through mud and falling bodies. She hadn't seen Amo die, or Matthew.

He marked Las Vegas in his mind. That's where he'd leave her. She could go the rest of the way on her own; he didn't owe her any more than that.

Still, he got caught up in the excitement of planning their voyage. You couldn't wear an avatar and be fake the whole time, since Cerulean was him just as much as Robert underneath. Travelling across the country was exciting, that was undeniable.

Amo had parked ten neat blue and white RVs in the Empire State Building's underground car park. He'd even painted the bays with names, and they chose-

Lincoln

The name was also stenciled neatly on the RV's side. That instilled pride. He brushed off the similarity to Matthew's RV. At least this one wasn't bright yellow.

"How do you drive?" Masako asked, as they finished looking over the vehicle. There was nothing to load, not even gas, since Amo had done it all for them.

He held up two mop handles from a broom cupboard. They would serve as his whiffle bats. "I push the pedals with these. Then I drive."

She nodded. "Would you take us out, then? I hate driving in the city."

They both laughed at that. He appreciated it, even if it was slightly patronizing. She was trying to build him up into the heroic male she needed, and for a time at least he could go along.

They rolled up and out of the parking lot into a beautiful, hot summer's day. On 5th Avenue there was a big arrow painted on the asphalt, pointing left.

Cerulean laughed. This was going to be easy.

Another arrow guided them left onto West 34th Street, which lay ahead completely cleared of vehicles. Cars and trucks lined the route like barricades at a ticker tape parade, with gatherings of white-eyed people behind them, waving them on.

"This is amazing," Masako said quietly as they rolled by. "Amo did all this?"

Cerulean pushed the mop-pedal down and New York blurred by. At some point Masako leaned over and turned the stereo on. The sudden blare of music, something by the Beatles, filled up the cab. Here Comes the Sun.

He hadn't listened to music for a year and three months. He bobbed his head and tapped the steering wheel like a real person, while Masako began to sing.

Lincoln tunnel was clear. He couldn't believe it, but there it was. The whole tunnel, so clogged with traffic when he'd come by a month or so earlier, was empty.

Masako was laughing about Amo now.

"He's like some kind of god," she whispered as they rolled through the dark tunnel. "You said he was a comic book artist?"

"Zombie comic books," Cerulean said. "His last project was a tower of them in Times Square."

That delighted her.

They emerged up from the tunnel and followed the arrows laid down on the road, through a broken tollbooth and up a circling onramp to the 495. At a corner looking back over Manhattan Cerulean pulled the RV to a stop and they surveyed the city they'd left behind.

"Wow," Masako said.

The big 'f' was there, painted proud across the top ten floors of the Empire State Building. Robert had to tip his hat to Amo. He'd really remade the world.

* * *

The roads were clear to the I-80, and on it they zoomed through New Jersey. Air rushed in through the open windows hot and sweet and green, as to either side the suburbs faded into forest, fields and creeks. There were yellow wildflowers everywhere; on the highway verge, in the fields, springing up down the central boundary grass.

They passed a large troop of the dead roaming on the right, mute as wildebeest stalking the prairies.

"Where are they going?" Masako asked, watching until they fell out of sight.

Cerulean shrugged. He'd seen them going west, and going north, and heading towards him. It didn't add up to much. "Just walking."

Beatles tracks played on the stereo and little towns flew by, all picket fences and historical old restaurants, windmills painted Shaker white and blue, churches with inspirational messages out front. Here and there lay crunched cars, shoved off to the side.

In two hours they were clear across New Jersey and entering Pennsylvania through a forest of red maples, then as they climbed to cross a low bridge over a wide creek, there was a white line painted in a broad stripe across the road. Cerulean slowed down. Off to the side lay a semi trailer and cab with a single word painted on its side in large letters.

SORRY

Cerulean pulled the RV over. They both got out, Masako helping him with the wheelchair, and went to investigate.

Painted near the thick white stripe there was a message.

Sophia – RIP

06 / 11 / 2018

I should have reached you in time

LMA

They looked at each other and said nothing.

In the back of the semi they found a noose hanging ominously from the roof, and a living space with a bed, sofa, TV and generator. Cerulean hauled himself in and Masako followed.

There was a diary on a coffee table next to three burnt-down spliffs, which detailed the misery of a young trainee doctor called Sophia. Cerulean and Masako sat side-by-side on the sofa like a couple looking at a wedding album, reading about a lonely life that culminated in suicide.

Her entries were a fluctuating mix of fatalism and optimism, at times detailing her theories about the infection. Her goal was to find an electron microscope and study 'living' infected cells, with the dream of curing the world.

Her final entry was:

Sorry,

I wish I could do this. I feel like I'm letting you down. But I can't do it anymore.

"She hung herself," Masako said, her voice thick with emotion. "Poor girl."

Cerulean pointed at a second batch of writing underneath Sophia's last entry, penned in red ink in a different hand.

You're all right now, Sophia. We're taking care of you. You are an important trailhead on the way out West. Your death was not for nothing and you will not be forgotten. I wish I'd known you, you sound like a lovely girl.

Thank you.

"Lara wrote that," Cerulean said, pointing at her signature in block capitals. He flicked back through the diary, pointing at numerous other places where Lara had annotated Sophia's most miserable moments with kind words and support, the kind of things that might have saved her life if she'd heard them in time.

Masako was crying. "It's beautiful," she said. "Don't you think so?"

He wasn't crying. He could see the beauty in it, and the hope, but it didn't affect him like it did her. Sophia was still dead. Matthew was still dead. It was good to chew down all the pain, chomp it into palatable bits in the past, but that wasn't what was real.

What was real was the dive. Diving into the truth and letting it wash all over you, down into your lungs. Hanging there in the semi-trailer's mouth was beautiful. Making that choice was the right thing for Sophia, because this wasn't the world for her.

"It's beautiful," he agreed.

Masako wanted to write something. They discussed it briefly, then she wrote it neatly and clearly on the next page over, like a log book.

We're coming, Lara, and Amo, and Sophia. We're right behind you. We'll see you in Los Angeles.

Masako and Cerulean.

They drove on.

* * *

They saw a woman by the roadside at the edge of Pennsylvania, lurking by a small fire in a dense patch of pine forest just out of Grove City. She was old and weathered, dressed in denim stonewash dungarees with wrinkled skin and a shotgun over her shoulder.

They pulled up and she leveled it at them.

"I can keep driving, if you like," Cerulean called out of the open window. "It's just two of us. I'm in a wheelchair, my name's Cerulean. This is Masako."

The woman hawked and spat. "Wheelchair? Let's see that."

He lifted it out and climbed in. The woman frowned. Her skin looked like old parchment, lined with ground-in dirt.

"How'd you do that?"

"I fell."

She studied him for a time, then spat again. "You know anything about hunting foxes?"

Masako chuckled politely.

"Not a thing," Cerulean said, "but we're willing to learn."

"Willing's good," said the woman, brushing a sliver of silvery hair out of her face. "God willing and all. I ain't seen folks since the big flood rolled out. Sit down." She gestured to the grass around the fire.

Masako climbed out cautiously and started over, Cerulean following.

"Cynthia," the woman said, pointing the shotgun down. "That's me."

They cooked and ate fried spam and beans together from the RV's stores, with wild onions the woman rustled up out of a burlap sack.

"You need these for vitamins," she said, holding one up like it was a diamond to be studied in a fine light. "They'll put the stink on you, but you'll shit perfect for three days."

Masako gasped and laughed. They made other small talk, sharing theories about where everyone had gone, though Cynthia was certain it had to be the rapture.

"There's not a more sinful soul than me," she said, and winked at Masako. "I ain't never said my rosaries right."

Cerulean laughed. It was a good sign that there were other people. It meant they wouldn't need him. Masako explained about Amo's plan, heading to LA to see a superhero movie, and Cynthia thought on it, spat once, then nodded.

"All right."

They drove on, taking it in turns at the wheel and sharing stories.

"I just roamed," Cerulean told them, when it was his turn. "Nothing impressive. Up and down the coast."

They pressed a little, but he couldn't tell them about Matthew. That was for him alone.

That night Cynthia retreated into the woods to sleep, carrying her shotgun and a sleeping roll. "Don't come looking for me, and I'll not come looking for you," she said.

After she was gone Masako laughed and put both her hands on Cerulean's shoulders in his chair, like they were a couple.

He had to go.

* * *

The next day they passed another survivor on the road near Cleveland.

He was in his early thirties, standing in the parking lot of an Ardy's, dressed in denim pants with tall cowboy boots and no shirt. A leather gun-belt was slung round his waist with a pistol holster on his left hip and a long shotgun holster fastened to his right like a sword scabbard. He also wore a black shoulder harness round his tanned bare chest with a dark pistol flush to his side.

He was standing next to a red Mustang muscle car with a yellow sponge in his hand and a red foamy bucket by his feet.

He stared at them and they stared at him as they rolled to a stop.

"I'll be damned," Cynthia said, peering out the open window in the passenger seat. "Boy, are you washing that car?"

The man glared back at her. He had dark features, Hispanic, with a tousle of dark hair over heavy brows. He looked angry, Cerulean thought, to be stumbled upon in such a way.

"Yes ma'am," he said. "Mustang '69. It's a good car."

Cynthia cackled like a crazy old witch.

Cerulean was already opening the back doors and lowering the wheelchair out. Seconds later he was rolling over to the man, who took a step back and put his hand to the gun at his waist.

"Far enough," he said.

Cerulean stopped a few yards away near the back of the car and raised his empty hands, palm out. "I'm sorry about her," he said quietly. "Cynthia. We just met her."

"Can't hear you, boy!" Cynthia called from the RV. "Speak up, this is first contact."

He spoke up. "I'm Cerulean, that's Cynthia, and here's Masako. It's good to see another survivor." He smiled to show he meant it. "We're on Amo's trail headed west, have you seen it?"

The man's brows pressed close together like lumps of suspicious dough in a fox stew. "Julio. And this is I-80," he said, nodding at the highway. "I don't know what trail you're talking about."

Cerulean nodded, studying the man. Three guns he wore, and drove in an overpowered hot rod car. Metal grilles lay on the asphalt nearby, partially clean, partially stained black and red, cut to match the shapes of the windows. All of that told a story. Plus there were two zombies on the gravel behind the car with their heads blown off, leaking blood from the severed neck holes, which pretty much shouted it out.

Julio noticed him looking. "Shotgun," he said. "Clean, takes off the whole head. Only way to kill them I figure."

"I've got news, then," Cerulean said. "You won't believe it, but it's true." He pointed at the pallid gray bodies. "They don't kill us."

Julio's brows nuzzled closer together. "What?"

"It's true. They come close, sure, but they don't kill. So you don't need your guns."

Julio's brows pressed so close they seemed to almost combine into one fuzzy bump. At the same his right hand crept over to the stock of the pistol on his hip, and hovered there. "Are you serious? You want me to put my guns down, now?"

Cerulean licked his lips. The situation was slipping. "I'm not saying that. Look at me, in a wheelchair. You think I could outrun a horde of them? You see me carrying a gun? That's all."

Julio looked over the wheelchair frame. His hand was still on the pistol. "So you're in a chair. I could sit in a chair too, doesn't mean anything."

"Is he a moron?" Cynthia shouted through the window, laughing again. Cerulean winced. "Is that right, boy, you too thick to see it, or you don't want to?"

"Sorry," Cerulean mouthed, "she's-"

"You shut that old bitch up," Julio interrupted, his voice level and firm. "You may be the first people I've seen in months, but that doesn't make me sport. You hear that grandma?"

"Pose for us!" she called back. "Sud yourself good, boy, and give us a muscle show."

Julio's eyebrows throbbed, a calculation turning inside his head, then he drew his gun and pointed it at the RV.

"Slight me one more time, you crazy old bitch. Once more."

The bag of cold milk flumped hard into Cerulean's belly. He hadn't planned it going this way. Cynthia just cackled madly. Julio clicked back the hammer, and Cerulean wondered how hard it would be for this man to kill the three of them, shotguns to the head like they were zombies, then just drive on in his Mustang.

"Cynthia, shut up," shouted Cerulean.

"Why should I? Jumped-up shit like him, he's not for us anyway."

"Who are you to say? He's a survivor like us."

She cackled some more. "You think he's like us? Think again, boy. This one loves what he's found out here, don't you see? Loves it a little too much, so he's ready to draw down on a little provocation. He don't know I've got my hunting rifle, armor-piercing round, pointed at him through this tissue-thin door. Maybe he thinks I don't know how to shoot from the hip. Either way, he's an idiot and we'd be best driving on."

Sweat beaded on the tip of Cerulean's nose. To rub it away now seemed too much movement. The air was suddenly hot and still, chafing against his skin like a sweaty, salty sponge.

"If we all just-" he tried, but Julio cut him off.

"I'll count to three," he said, as cool and calm as Clint Eastwood. Perhaps he was enjoying it. "On three, you drop your rifle out the door and make your apologies to me."

"And if I don't?"

Julio pointed with his free hand toward the bonnet of his car. "You join the choir like everyone else."

Cerulean craned to the side to see what he was pointing at, and the bag of milk shivered and grew in his belly. On the front of the car was a low metal rack, with a few tufts of what looked like white hair sticking up in two places.

Heads?

He gulped. He looked at the headless zombies on the ground, then back again. Cynthia had a clear view of the whole car from her seat, while he'd just seen it.

"Now you get it," Cynthia said.

"One," Julio said.

"Call out three already," Cynthia hollered back.

"Two."

Cerulean looked between them, locked in a stupid battle of wills. This was not what he'd planned. This wasn't any better than Matthew under the gun tower, dying for nothing. Without thinking he pushed hard on the chair's wheels, driving it forward toward Julio, then set his hands on the armrests and dived.

It wasn't a pretty dive, nothing like a true arm-stand with his legs up in the air so gracefully, but it had power and sent him flying through the air at Julio.

Julio spun too late and Cerulean hit him bodily, chest to chest, so together they fell. Julio hit the asphalt hard on his bare back while Cerulean landed on him, thumping the air out of his lungs. Julio tried to throw him off but he wasn't nearly as strong as Cerulean, who'd been crawling, climbing and rolling using only his arms for months.

He snatched Julio's wrists and smacked the right one against the ground until the gun came loose, then he rolled off and easily guided both of Julio's arms tightly behind his back.

Julio cursed and jerked but Cerulean just held him locked, using his arms like they were reins.

"All right, Jesus!" Julio shouted when it was clear he wouldn't escape. "Let me go."

Cynthia trotted over and chuckled down on them. "Neat work, son. Trussed up like a chicken."

Cerulean turned to look up at her, red-faced himself. She was holding her rifle over her shoulder at a coquettish angle with obvious pleasure on her face, and something about that just punched all his buttons at once.

"You never do that again," he snapped up from the ground. "Do you understand me, Cynthia? Play the crazy old woman all you want, but you do not pull a gun on another survivor again. I don't care how many zombie heads they've got on the front of their car, or round their necks like a necklace, you just … goddamn … don't."

Cynthia frowned down at him, her weathered features wrinkling like skin on custard. "You sure look a prize specimen, son, a negro barking orders from the ground. Stand up if you want to put your foot down, boy, else hush up and let the adults deal."

Cerulean stared at her for a second. She stared back. Then he laughed. She really didn't get it.

"You're not thinking," he said. "You think you're in charge here? You think I'll give a shit if we leave you behind? I won't. I'll drive on, with Masako and Julio here if he wants to come, and we'll go to LA to find Amo, because people are all we've got. Get that in your head. So he killed some zombies, I don't care! I will leave you behind, and you'll be alone. If that's what you want, go do it. If not, and I'm pretty sure it's not, Cynthia, then you apologize right now to Julio."

Cynthia snorted. "Exile me, is it? You don't scare me. You ain't got the nuts to do anything like it."

He laughed again. Did these people not know about Matthew? They didn't know who he was at all.

He let go of Julio's arms and snatched up his pistol off the road. Julio let out an almighty gasp and rolled away, coming up with the gun from his chest holster steady in both his hands, leveled on Cynthia. In turn Cynthia had her rifle leveled at his chest.

"Bitch," he said.

"Spic," she said.

"Goddamn," Cerulean roared from the floor. "Spit one more foul piece of racist shit, you stupid honky bitch, and I'll shoot you myself. Are we clear? Now put your goddamn rifle down and tell this man you're sorry."

Cynthia's eyelid twitched. Julio stood red-faced but impassive.

"Say it!" Cerulean shouted. "And you can apologize to me too, while you're at. Hunting foxes, goddamn!"

Cynthia licked her lips, her tongue darting out. "I apologize for insulting you," she said, enunciating each word carefully, and when she was done she gave Cerulean a look a child might give, as if to say, 'Enough?'.

"And me," he said.

She rolled it out again. "I apologize for insulting you."

"Good," huffed Cerulean. "Julio, I'm sorry I jumped you. Cynthia, I'm sorry I called you a honky bitch. I hope you don't mind, but I'm borrowing this gun. I'm driving a hundred yards up the road, and you two are going to make up. One of you shoots the other, Masako and me are gone. Either of you wants to join us, you need only come ask nicely. Else we're gone in," he stopped to look at his wrist, but he hadn't worn a watch there in years. "Real soon."

Julio chanced a glance down at him, sneering. He wouldn't forget being jumped any time soon, that was clear. Cynthia didn't budge.

"Grow up," Cerulean said to them both, then turned his back and crawled to the wheelchair. It was undignified perhaps, to keep on crawling, but what was dignity now? A sham. Democracy too. He reached the chair, hauled himself up, and was unsurprised to see the two of them still pointing their weapons at each other.

"It's my damn van," Cerulean said, "and I say who rides in it."

* * *

He parked up in front of a Boston Market only a few lots over, with a good eye line on Julio and Cynthia, standing like the last two pistoleers in a Mexican standoff. Masako rested her hand on his.

"That was amazing," she said.

He shrugged. "Screw them."

Masako nodded. "She's an angry lady. She may have a point though. He doesn't look quite right."

Cerulean grunted, not looking. "She's dumb. He's crazy with being alone."

A moment later she tapped him playfully on the cheek. He had to fight to keep the irritation off his face. He was glad he did, because she was grinning flirtatiously.

"You seemed pretty confident I'd come with you. You and me in the RV?"

There wasn't much to say to that. The truth, maybe, that he didn't too much care if she came? His obligation would be done with if she didn't. Or should he let her believe her truth, that they were two lone survivors slowly falling in love, only for him to jilt her in Vegas?

He couldn't decide which one was less cruel, so he said nothing. Her hand stayed on his for a long time.

Even from this distance he could see Julio's back was bleeding. He'd hit him hard and he'd skinned himself on the rough asphalt.

They still had their guns up but they were talking at least, and that was good.

He honked the horn and leaned his head out the window to shout. "Cynthia you put your rifle down right now or so help me."

It sounded like the kind of thing an adult would say to a misbehaving child, but it worked, and Cynthia lowered the barrel a few degrees. For a horrible second it seemed like Julio was about to shoot, then he lowered his gun too.

They talked more. It took a while for them to put the weapons away completely. Then Cynthia pointed and Julio took the heads off the front of his car. Next, bizarrely, Cynthia picked up the sponge and started washing the car.

"What on Earth?" Masako whispered.

Cerulean laughed. "Looks like she cut a deal."

Julio walked around the car's perimeter, kicking the window grills to the side. So perhaps he believed them? Soon enough he got in his shiny clean Mustang and drove over slowly, with Cynthia walking alongside.

"We've reached an understanding," she said, as he parked alongside the RV.

"Rush me and steal the van?" Cerulean asked. Nobody laughed.

"Avoid each other. Take a look at your friend Amo. See what he's worth, then decide."

Cerulean nodded, and looked through the two open windows to Julio. Sitting up in the RV he was taller than him.

"Good plan. I'm glad to have you."

"Yeah," Julio said, though something about his expression was off. The brows, perhaps, calculating furiously under the surface. His dark eyes maybe, gazing a second too hard. "I'll scout ahead."

He revved the Mustang's engine and tore off. Masako opened the slide door and Cynthia climbed in.

"I reckon you've let the devil in by the front door with him," she said. "He's madder than me. You'll see."

"Sit down," Cerulean said, a little more harshly than he meant to, and put the RV into gear.

15. CAIRNS

Julio wanted to scour Chicago for survivors.

They argued about it their first evening together, sitting round a fire in a campsite north of South Bend, Indiana, after they'd eaten their ration of canned beans, dried rice and turnips Cynthia dug out of a garden.

"You said it's about survivors only," Julio said, staring through the flickering yellow flames at Cerulean sat in his wheelchair. "Your friend Amo's made a trail, that's great. Let's help him and gather who we can."

It was a fair point. Masako, sitting close by his side as if for warmth, though it was sweltering already and the fire just made it worse, plainly agreed. Even Cynthia did, with a dull grunt.

He didn't want to tell them why they should hurry: that Amo had tried to kill himself once already, that he might try again, and if there was no Amo then he'd be stuck in charge of them and would never be free.

"I don't want the trail to go cold," was all he could say.

Cynthia harrumphed. "Trail's written in traffic paint, son, it ain't going anywhere."

Julio eyed him. They'd hardly spoken all day, with him always 'scouting' ahead in his Mustang. After that first burst of speed, racing out of sight, he'd dropped back and kept fairly close. Perhaps he was worried they'd turn off and leave him.

At one point Julio had stopped at a railway crossing on the Ohio Turnpike just after Toledo, and Cerulean pulled the RV up behind. Julio had gotten out and stood on the tracks with his pistol drawn, pointing.

There was a dust cloud in the distance, stretching back in a long diagonal along the rail tracks toward the horizon.

"Now's your chance," Julio said. "Prove they're safe."

"God, how many?" Masako whispered, craning for a better view.

"Half a million," Cynthia said. "Lot of tramping feet. Protest march, maybe."

Cerulean grimaced, then climbed out of the RV and into his chair. They waited for a while, until the first of the horde came into view round the corner of a long stand of Douglas fir. They were gray, ragged, and presented a front as solid as a wave.

Cerulean started rolling toward them, feeling like a magician being forced to perform at a kid's party. "Just don't shoot," he said as he went by Julio. "You'll get us all killed."

Julio grinned but it didn't reach his brows. Probably he thought Cerulean was about to die, leaving him with Masako and Cynthia. But Cynthia was standing by the RV door with her rifle by her side. She nodded and he nodded, then he hit the shale by the tracks, rolled on and soon hit the edge of the zombie horde.

He hit the dust cloud first, then fibrous gray bodies surrounded him, like a dry forest of silver birch on the march, ignoring him completely. They didn't even touch him. Their bodies flowed either side of him, and there was no sense of threat, just a strange surreal calm, like he'd fallen in with a herd of wandering buffalo.

He laughed. He rolled back with them, emerging from their leading edge like a surfer cresting a wave. Julio stared grimly.

"Now let's go," Cerulean called, pushing the wheels hard to get ahead. "Or we'll be stuck in this flow for hours."

They sat in the camp beside a children's playground and Julio eyed him fiercely, challenging still. Over his left shoulder there was a children's swing, and over his right there was a merry-go-round. It made his intense gaze laughable.

"Fine, we check Chicago," Cerulean agreed.

Chicago was utterly empty. It took them three days to all agree to that, though. Most of the time they went driving in convoy through downtown with music playing loud from Julio's Mustang.

"At least he could play something classical," Masako complained multiple times. "I'm sick to death of Bruce Springsteen."

The streets were devoid of people but littered with vehicles, just like New York. At times they got out and prowled around buildings, but they were all empty too except for the occasional mob of gray faces pressed to the doors or windows of a bar. Julio would stalk ahead with his gun in his hand, occasionally spinning round corners or kicking in doors like a SWAT member, while Cerulean would go along behind letting the zombies out.

"He was a traffic warden, I wager," Cynthia said as the three of them trundled along behind. "So rageful."

"Ice cream man," Masako answered.

Games like that kept them amused.

"He's just clearing the whole city," Cerulean said. "One building at a time. Checking there's no-one on our six when we go west."

They laughed.

After three days and no more survivors found, they rolled on. "We're not doing that again," Cerulean said, and this time the others agreed.

* * *

In Iowa, in the middle of a corn field a hundred miles west of Des Moines, they found Amo's third cairn. It was a stripe of black and white across a nondescript road in the midst of fields of ripe corn, with two cars parked either side like pillars flanking a finish line.

By the wayside was a young man boiling corn in a silver tub. He saw them and came running over.

"Put your damn gun down," Cerulean said to Julio over the walkie-talkies they'd picked up from a Radio Shack. "Right now."

He did. The young man, tall and gangly with feathery black hair, reached the Mustang's side.

"Lord above, am I glad to see some people. Oh man, I thought I was alone."

"That's great kid," Julio said. "Don't scratch the paintwork."

The kid frowned and turned to Cerulean, who was already out and rolling over, one hand extended. The young man looked overjoyed but there was a slightly queasy expression on Julio's face, like the odds had just shifted out of his favor.

"You're in a wheelchair," the young man said, shaking his hand. "Sorry, I mean, I'm Jake. I've got corn. Listen, do you know that the zombies won't hurt you? I just read the most excellent comic book." He pulled at his inner jacket pocket, Julio's hand went to his pistol, but Jake came out with an actual comic book.

Cerulean stared at it. On the front cover, heaped up and rising from Times Square in a great zombie pile-on, was the final piece of art Amo had showed him before the apocalypse.

ZOMBIES OF AMERICA

It was printed and professional looking, bound properly like he'd had it done at a publisher's.

Cerulean laughed.

"I know, it's amazing right?" Jake gushed on. "This guy Amo, he's like the Pied Piper leaving a trail for us to follow. The things he's done, damn, it's amazing."

He stopped for a second, taking in Cynthia and Masako. "Are you guys following him? Amo, I mean?"

Cerulean smiled, and said yes, then introduced himself and explained, with Julio's dark brows scowling throughout.

* * *

The comic detailed Amo's battles in New York. Cerulean sat in the darkness after the others had gone to sleep, camping at the cairn in the corn, turning the pages by flashlight.

He'd fought them to reach his coffee shop, where he'd hoped to find Lara. He'd burned them and shot them, and then he'd shot himself in the head in Times Square.

That part didn't make much sense, but it was the honesty that struck Cerulean hardest. Amo didn't hide from a bit of it. He drew the dead just as bloody and gross as Cerulean had seen them, owning his actions completely and trying to pay the price.

But he hadn't died. There was a hole in his head with nothing inside, and he was still Amo. So he'd gotten down to work. He'd stopped killing the ocean, as he called them, and made the big 'f'. He'd cleared the streets and revised the prepper Bible, then he'd set off in a convoy with an RV and a school bus reinforced as a battle-tank pulled by a big yellow JCB. He found Sophia hanging from her noose, which broke him, and so he let the zombies finally catch up to him in the corn. They didn't kill him, so he made a comic.

It all made a weird kind of sense. It changed his feelings about Matthew a little, though he didn't really know how.

Jake seemed a nice kid. He was so eager, and friendly, and had kept pressing boiled corn on them until they were stuffed.

"I know, I keep saying it, but man is it good to see other people. Oh God, have I been bored."

He'd spent most of the last three months in his parents' house, watching movies and playing games, a lot like Masako. When it got quieter outside he'd taken up golf. He told them all this in big info-dump flurries, peppered with more thanks and more statements about how great it was to meet other people.

Cerulean laid the comic down and looked up at the sky, so full of stars. Between them he figured Jake, Cynthia and Masako could handle Julio. They didn't need him, really, and though he liked them, and even enjoyed being around them, it didn't make a difference to how he felt inside.

Too much had happened for him to turn back. He owed it to Matthew, if no one else. That thought didn't make quite as much sense as it had before, but it still felt true. The comfort and warmth of the others was nice, but it wasn't really real.

After Las Vegas he would still dive.

* * *

Then they found Anna.

It was two days later and they were an hour's drive west of Denver, Colorado, in the middle of a great empty orange-dirt plain. That morning they'd stopped briefly at Amo's most ambitious cairn since New York: a giant yellow Pac-man head painted on all four faces of the Wells Fargo building in central Denver. In the lobby on the name board, there had been three names:

Amo

Lara

Anna

They'd all been excited about that. Jake in particular was cheery, sitting in the RV while Cerulean drove, dreaming up the kind of girl he hoped it would be. Masako encouraged him with visions of supermodels, then teased him that they'd never go for him anyway. He had a strange, enthusiastic-Labrador kind of confidence that let him bull through anything she said and have both of them come away laughing.

Julio didn't like him, always sneering and turning away and driving off in his Mustang. It probably would have annoyed him even more if he knew how little Jake even noticed his scorn.

Then there was Anna, a little black girl in a dirty blue and white dress standing at the side of the dusty road, looking for all the world like Alice in Wonderland after she'd tumbled down the rabbit-hole.

"Oh my God," Cerulean said.

They all turned to look. Everybody went quiet.

The RV stopped, and the little girl just looked back at them, waiting. She couldn't be more than six years old. She waved.

That broke the spell, and Cerulean hurried out of the back so fast he almost fell. He raced over to her, thankful Julio was bringing up the rear in his Mustang for once, and when she saw him she started to cry. As he drew up she jumped into his lap, wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and sobbed against his neck.

Everything changed.

At once he knew that he wasn't going to dive. He wasn't going to leave these people behind, he wasn't going back to New York, not any more. This was his responsibility now and he'd carry it for as long as he was able.

He hugged the little girl and whispered to her that everything was going to be all right. She was frail and slight, but wiry, and she clung to him like a barnacle. The tears broke down his cheeks and he patted her thin back. She stank but he didn't care.

She filled the hole inside right to the brim.

* * *

Everything that followed felt floaty and fresh. They had a feast of hotdogs and beans and other bits from the RV's stores, and Anna hung on to him throughout. Julio and Matthew and the dive receded far into the darkness. At first she didn't talk but then she did, abruptly and at length, explaining herself and her story.

Anna had climbed aboard her zombie father when he got infected, after he'd eaten their pet puppy right in front of her eyes, then she'd ridden him to the West Coast, where he'd walked into the sea and left her behind. After that she'd spent a month guiding other floaters to the water.

"Wait, they went to the water?" Jake asked. "To what, take a swim?"

Anna frowned seriously at him, which was about the cutest thing Cerulean had ever seen. "No, of course not. Why would they swim?"

"Why indeed?" Jake echoed. "You are of course quite right, what a silly idea."

"They walk in, and they keep walking," Anna corrected. "They're going somewhere, whatever's past the ocean, but of course they don't swim."

Cerulean considered that, while she sat on his lap and slurped up hotdogs and the others quizzed her more. West of the Pacific lay Asia, which meant Japan, China, Malaysia and so on. But if all the zombies were going west, then what was happening in Maine?

He didn't mention it.

"And you led them in?" Jake was confirming. "Into the water, like a tour guide?"

Anna beamed, pleased he was finally getting it. "Yes, exactly!"

She was sweet, and kind and precocious as hell. She offered him grimy red licorice strings that had surely been in her pack for weeks, and he took one and mimed eating it, which delighted her.

"You didn't eat it!" she jeered. "Eat it properly."

He mimed it better, and she looked pleased, though quickly she was getting sleepy.

"You're safe with us, Anna," he told her as she sagged against him.

"Of course," she answered. "My Daddy said so. You look like him."

He stroked her hair, and over the fire Masako watched with a look like she was about to cry. Even Cynthia seemed to melt a little, while Jake was plainly besotted, and kept trying to engage her in mock arguments that she would win in imperious tones, leaving him looking totally bereft.

She laughed. They had fun.

"We're at the same height," she told him later, as it got dark and he was wheeling her to the RV to tuck in along the back seat. She was sleepy and looked up at him with fuzzy eyes. "Daddy, I missed you," she said.

For a long moment after that he felt like he couldn't even breathe. Just her existence was putting a seed in his heart, and the roots growing out changed who he was. He felt it like he felt the ice shatter when Matthew died. This was the opposite.

"I missed you too, honey," he told her, and kissed her hot forehead and tucked her into the covers. Everybody was inside now, drowsy and warm together except for Julio, who was still out in his Mustang. Cerulean rolled back down the center of the RV, past Jake siting hunched in his booth.

"She really likes you," he said.

Cerulean smiled. "I remind her of her father."

"I'm envious," Jake said. "I wanted a supermodel."

"You'll get that next."

Jake pointed at him. "I'll hold you to that."

Cynthia muttered something cutting from her upper deck bunk, but it was easy to ignore. It was even easy, when he rolled over to his booth opposite Masako's, to take her hand in his own, and look into her eyes and actually feel that, perhaps, he loved her, because really she was beautiful and strong, and she'd survived this long, and that made it all right.

She didn't wait for him, pressing herself close and folding into his lap: hot and sweet, as the soft side of her belly pressed against his chest, sending shivers up and down his back.

Like that, they kissed. It felt right, or as right as anything. Her lips were soft but searching, hungry but tender, and her tears were warm on his cheeks.

"That was beautiful," she said. "All of it, every bit, the whole day."

"All right," Jake chimed in. "Beautiful, good, but kissing is in one of the tents, OK. Out there with Julio."

Cynthia cackled. Cynthia and Jake seemed to actually be getting along. She could dish out the insults all day long, and he could soak them up like they were nothing, which might've explained it, or also she was racist and he was white, so it could be that.

Masako kissed him again. "Come on," she whispered in his ear. "I picked a good place."

"I can't," he stumbled, "I don't have the…"

She stopped him with a look. "We'll make do."

For the first time he felt a stirring from down below. To his wonderment, something was beginning to move. It felt like a miracle.

"Oh, what's this?" Masako asked huskily, feeling it move through her thigh. "Why sir."

"I didn't," he said, "I mean I don't-."

"I read a book, while we were traipsing around Chicago," she whispered in his ear. "Just because you're paraplegic doesn't mean this doesn't work." She reached down and stroked his groin, holding his eyes with her own. It felt like a poker stoking a furnace to life. It wasn't how it used to be, because now he felt nothing from below the waist, but he felt something still. "There are nerves that bypass the spine, its autonomic, it runs without your conscious control and you feel it as dopamine in your brain."

He tried to say something but the words and intentions got lost in his throat. She was so warm and so close and he hadn't felt anything like this for years.

She plunged into another kiss.

"Seriously," Jake hissed. "I am not going to listen to this. Should Cynthia and I go outside? Would you prefer we leave you to your privacy?"

Cynthia cackled madly.

"Come on," Masako said, taking his hand. Together they rolled back down the RV to the rear exit, and Jake gave a thumbs up on their way past.

In the darkness outside Masako led him to a tent she'd already prepared. She laid him down on the bedroll and they kissed by the hissing orange light of a camp stove. She peeled off her clothes first, sticky and warm in the summer's heat. Her skin was tan all over, with perfect half-moon breasts hanging like sweet fruit just above his reach.

She kissed him. She peeled off his clothes. She moved atop him, in the darkness, in the night, and he felt every second of it; perfectly capping the best day of his life.

16. WEST

They drove.

Anna slept a lot, spoke with Jake a little, and spent some of her time in the back of the RV looking out of the rear window, or clutching a battered old smart phone to her chest, studying the display.

The rest of the time she was with Cerulean. She crawled up into his lap whether he was driving, not driving, eating or sleeping. Once he woke from a drowsy nap to find her tucked tightly within the arms of his wheelchair, her arms wrapped round his back, fast asleep.

"She just climbed there," Masako said, looking back from the wheel with a smile. "Her eyes were hardly even open."

"She clings tight," Cerulean said. "Like a koala."

Masako reached for his hand and he gave it.

Jake piped up from his booth, behind. "We finished Alice in Wonderland. She wants you to read it to her now, I think."

Cerulean looked down at the curled-up little girl. They'd made her wash and changed her clothes, though she hadn't let them leave her blue and white dress behind. Her tightly knapped hair was wiry against his chin. He kissed her head and she murmured in her sleep.

"I can't imagine what it's like for her," Jake went on. "You remember she said she killed her puppies?"

Cerulean mulled that over. It was an accident, she hadn't known how to feed them milk, but still it had to hurt. She'd ridden her undead father to the West coast, and he couldn't begin to imagine what that would have felt like. He'd never known his father, but his mother had supported him enough for both. If she'd left him as well?

He shuddered at the thought. He'd had diving when Zane died, otherwise he'd have certainly fallen into the gangs like Green-O, seeking some kind of meaning and a way to fill the hole Zane left. Anna had her stories of Alice, and her phone, and those were things to hang onto.

Now she had him too.

She didn't talk much, that was true. She was a little girl with world-weary eyes. None of them talked much now though, as they crossed out of Colorado and into Utah, and the world outside shifted from dirty, dusty scrublands to vivid orange desert with great red buttes rising up like burning glaciers. The sky was blue all the way to the horizon, and any time they stopped at a highway services to pee, the dry heat baked them like eggs frying on the asphalt.

Julio stood by his Mustang and watched everything on these stops, like he was keeping count of how many times everyone used the toilet, a tally he would present to Amo in Los Angeles. He never seemed to go himself. Jake had a theory that he peed into a bottle.

One time, perhaps it was a Thursday, he was standing and watching as usual, as Anna followed Cerulean to the services entrance. She pouted when he went into the men's rooms alone, and when he came back she took his hand again and pulled him back to the RV.

"She's afraid you'll leave her behind," Julio said, as they passed by.

Cerulean frowned at him. Everyone knew that, but why say it. "She's right here," he said. "Her name's Anna."

"That's what you're afraid of, isn't it, Anna?" Julio said. Anna ignored him completely. He shrugged.

They drove through that day, stopping for the night near the border with Nevada in a Big Eastern motel lodged at the edge of the Red Cliffs National Conservation area. Bald red hills rose either side of the dusty road, broken by the jutting crags of pitted sandstone, like blocks of the earth's striped muscle rising through the skin. All around were scrubby stands of sagebrush, creosote bush, and the odd towering yucca, flowered with thick white blossoms.

Cerulean read Alice in Wonderland to Anna in the dark of the motel restaurant, lit by a camp light hung from the rafters and buzzing with moths, while the others bedded down in private rooms.

"Luxury," Jake said, popping his head into the restaurant with a towel round his neck and rumpled wet hair. "They even have running water."

"That's the water towers," Julio answered flatly, from somewhere out in the lobby. "It's not hot though."

"Warm, at least," Jake said. "Heated by the sun."

"Luxury," mumbled Cerulean, then Jake was gone. Anna had drifted off some time in his lap, in the midst of the Garden of Live Flowers while the Red Queen was spouting off about how she owned all the ways about here. He looked up at the moths buzzing round the camp light, like zombies endlessly heading west.

They went into the ocean, Anna had said, in their hundreds and thousands. It didn't explain the ones in Maine though, piled up around the gun tower, nor Matthew, nor all the ones that walked to Amo to be slaughtered.

"We need to talk."

He looked down from the light and saw Julio standing there, off to the side, staring down at Cerulean with his brows working like boiling puddings. Cerulean sighed inside, then nodded and wheeled himself to face him.

"Sure. What's up?"

"You don't respect me enough."

Julio said it and let it hang, following up with his dark stare. Cerulean wished he would just go away, but like it or not he'd made himself leader of this little troupe, and Julio wore a pistol at his hip all the time.

"Can you explain that a little?"

"I can," said Julio, ticking off one finger on his hand, like he'd prepared it all in advance. "The first time we met, the racist hag insulted me and you attacked me. You're lucky I didn't shoot both of you then."

Cerulean sighed. "I apologized for that. I explained we'd just met her. And she was racist to me too."

Julio ticked off a second finger. "You left us behind to quibble like we were children. I'm older than you, stronger, faster, and I'm better adapted to survive out here. You should have left her behind and been grateful to find me."

Cerulean nodded. He was starting to get a headache. "OK. Is there anything else?"

Julio ticked off a third finger. "You contradict and correct me in front of the girl." He pointed at Anna. "She doesn't talk to me now. I'm on the outside. I know that little shit Jake is gossiping about me."

"You drive in your Mustang," Cerulean said, exasperated. "I know you like the car, but what do you expect? We're together all day and all night, and you're out there. Have I not invited you in with us lots of times?"

Julio flicked out a fourth finger, nodding. "On that, every time you stop for a break, I stop with you and I come out, but nobody talks to me. Nobody thanks me for scouting the route, for not resting like everybody else does. I should be getting gratitude for all my efforts."

Cerulean shook his head. Jesus, these people. Nobody benefited from Julio not stopping to pee more, and his scouting mostly consisted of driving a few hundred yards ahead of the RV, on roads plainly already scouted by Amo a few weeks ahead. What was he supposed to be grateful for?

But he couldn't say any of that. Julio was a survivor, and he'd laid down the law about that himself: they were all in this together. The headache thickened behind his eyes, like a faint memory of the demon days of old.

"We do appreciate you scouting, Julio. It's an important job."

"And I need my Mustang for it, don't I? I can't scout from inside the RV, can I?"

"No, I suppose not. So we should be more grateful."

"You should. And the girl should talk to me."

Cerulean looked down at sleeping Anna.

"She talks to you," Julio went on, "to Masako, to the old racist, and I know she just loves Jake. It's only me she won't talk to."

Cerulean gave a purposefully feeble shrug. "What do you want me to do? Do you want to be the vegetables on the side of the plate, so we force her to talk to you? She's just a kid, she's scared no matter how tough she acts, and you're scary."

"I'm a serious person," Julio said. "This is work to me, not play. I've got good advice too."

Cerulean tried another track. "You never smile. You're always severe. You just stare. It's creepy. Maybe if you-"

"It's how I am," Julio interrupted.

The two stared at each other. So it was clear, any compromise was going to have to be entirely on Cerulean's side. He'd be damned though before he made Anna dance to his whims.

"I can't make her like you, Julio. I won't. If you make an effort, I'll encourage her to be friendly, but it can't start with her."

Julio stared hard, with his brows rumbling. Then he nodded, and pointed at Cerulean, coming to what seemed a well-rehearsed summary of his grievances. "You stop them gossiping about me. You show me some appreciation for what I do. I'm not going into LA to meet your friend Amo looking like a fool. That's all I'm asking. Do you understand?"

Cerulean nodded, thinking it through. Minus the Anna stuff, was that so unreasonable? No. He had to make allowances. "All right. I promise, no more gossip. And if you could try, you know, to be friendlier?"

Julio sneered. "You should thank your lucky stars every day I didn't shoot you for jumping me in that parking lot. Remember that."

He tapped the gun at his waist then strode out.

Cerulean sighed, looking up at the camp light again, frothing now with bugs.

"Why me?" he whispered to it.

Perhaps Cynthia was right; he'd let the devil in with Julio. He'd need to start wearing a gun, too.

* * *

They drove on with first light, Julio 'scouting' the way ahead as ever, heading into the dark with the sun rising behind them. When they crossed over into Arizona and everyone in the RV gave a whoop. Half an hour later they crossed into Nevada and the whoop was even louder.

All the way southwest toward Las Vegas excitement built, and even Anna gazed out of the front window, rather than burying her face in Cerulean's shoulder or looking at her phone. Everyone knew they were catching up to Amo, and soon they'd be on him. Nobody knew what to expect.

Mesquite, Bunkerville, Riverside; little towns passed by like strange blots on the golden desert. Here there were cacti and scattered palm trees by the roadside. Moapa and Crystal passed by, and then out of the midst of the desert, like an oyster unfolding to reveal a great blighted pearl, was Las Vegas.

"I'm coming home!" Jake shouted, even though he wasn't from Las Vegas. They all cheered. Even Julio up ahead honked his horn. Cerulean answered with an answering honk.

It was Vegas, as seen a hundred times in movies and TV, though of course all the lights were down and it was midday only. Still they could pick out the flash of sunlight reflecting off the bizarre themed hotels along the strip. Jake started nattering to Cynthia about all the things he was going to do.

"Dice, of course some dice, then baccarat, is that dice? and we'll catch a show, and poker, of course slot machines, and roulette! How could I forget roulette!"

Cynthia cackled. Maybe she was sweet on Jake? Cerulean chuckled at that. The boy would have to watch out.

Julio kept honking his horn for a long time. That grew annoying quick, dampening everyone's spirits, but soon they were in the thick of the city and he stopped. They rolled all the windows down and hung out of them gawping while Julio led them at a steady pace up through the city's heart.

Anna gasped and pointed as they reached the strip, and the first of its crazy hotels reared its head, The Mirage. "Look at that," she called, awed

Everybody looked. Next was Caesar's Palace, then the grand Bellagio, then Excalibur, the black pyramid of Luxor, until they hit the northern tip and the tilted oval disc of the UFO, crash-landed at a steep angle into the earth.

Masako laughed and pointed at the alien saucer. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

They all saw it. Drawn across the UFO saucer's silvery surface was the huge figure of a very familiar man: the Nike logo of Michael Jordan, legs spread and in flight, reaching up to the pinnacle of the flying saucer. Underneath the familiar logo had been adapted:

JUST LIVE ON

"I think that's probably copyright infringement," Jake said. Cerulean laughed good and hard, for relief as much as anything. Amo's tag was underneath it.

LMA

It was a vast relief. He hadn't realized how heavily the pressures of dealing with this little troupe had been weighing on him. He'd be more than happy to hand them over to Amo when the chance came. He'd be more than happy to see Amo at all.

He hadn't killed himself yet.

They pulled right up to the saucer's lobby door and bundled out of the RV in a frenzied mob, laughing and hungry like little kids eager to see what goodies Santa Amo had left for them. Even Julio seemed touched by the good cheer.

It was better than any of them had expected. On a big blackboard hanging over the main reception desk were two names written on the same line.

AMO & LARA 07/18/2018

Amo and Lara were together!

Masako came up and took his hand, squeezing tight. There were tears in her eyes. This was hope.

There was all kinds of stuff arrayed on neat tables in the cairn, in addition to the stuff they'd found in previous cairns; sunglasses, swimwear, a map to a clean pool, a pyramid of champagne bottles with crystal glasses nearby. They poured a glass each and everybody clinked glasses and drank some of the hot, bubbly liquid.

"It went up my nose!" Anna charged. Cerulean frowned at Jake, who guiltily took the glass away.

There was a new section of the comic printed out too, detailing Amo's journey west and reunion with Lara, plus a horrible encounter with a zombie-rapist called Don.

Amo killed him and almost died in the process, then Lara nursed him to health. That was only few days ago! They all sat and read through the new pages together, sipping on champagne. Cerulean couldn't help but look up at Julio in the middle of it, while Don was cornering Amo in his battle-tank. Unfortunately Julio looked up and caught his eye at the same time, holding it for a moment.

Cerulean looked away.

They could have stayed there all day, especially after Cynthia reported back that, "The pool's pretty clean, only one dead eagle in it," but now everybody wanted to get on and actually see Amo and Lara in the flesh. So they bundled into the RV and tore off.

Nevada flew by, and Cerulean pushed the RV to 80 miles an hour, so fast the frame rattled and the floor shook, a few times overtaking Julio which he didn't seem too pleased about. By early afternoon they crossed the state line to California, and Masako cued up 'California Dreaming' then played it blasting out at full volume, so loud that Cynthia held her hands to her ears and Anna screamed along to the music and no one could even make out what she was saying.

It was dark as they hit the outskirts of Los Angeles, the sun setting far ahead off the edge of the continent. They slowed through the city's traffic-congested sprawl, all white-cement warehouses and blank condominiums with the stain of humidity and rot blooming at their corners. There were old newspapers blowing everywhere and the smell of salt and old sewage in the air.

They reached the coast in time to catch the last of the sunset off Newport Beach, burning like an orange ember over the waves. Cerulean pulled a hard right and took them tearing north up the Pacific Coast highway, tension burning in the air, leaving Julio trailing behind on the narrow roads.

When they saw the lights of the Chinese Theater up ahead, Amo's longtime destination, they cheered. It was a distant building decked with twinkling fairy lights, and as they wound up the coast and closer still, weaving around a steady tide of gray bodies traipsing down into the water to the left, they could see two figures standing in the Theater's open courtyard.

"Is that them?" Anna asked hungrily. "Is that Amo and Lara?"

Cerulean could hardly answer, his throat was so thick with emotion. He'd never expected to reach this point, had never even wanted it, but now he wanted it more than anything. He wanted to see Amo in the flesh for the first time, and meet his Lara, and hold onto them both.

They were all silent as they pulled up into the flashing Chinese Theater forecourt with Amo and Lara standing there hand in hand. They piled out, Cerulean last out of the back, settling into his wheelchair and readying himself for all the changes that were going to come now.

Then he rolled around the RV's side, and Amo saw him. The look on his face was worth it all, as his jaw dropped and sheer joy shone in his eyes.

"Cerulean!" he shouted, and ran over, dropping to his knees to pull him into a tight embrace. "Goddamn, Cerulean!"

17. SETTLING IN

It was chaos for hours, like a school reunion where nobody really knew anyone though they all shared the same past; the apocalypse had stolen everything from them.

Though they all knew Amo.

He looked much as Cerulean had always imagined, a sensitive hipster wearing the last generation's fashion in baggy cargo shorts and polo shirt, with a scraggy goatee and sandals. The scar on the side of his head where he'd shot himself was prominent, a jagged circle of mottled skin in amongst his dark hair, but he seemed to be the same Amo he'd known in the Yangtze, with warm brown eyes and an easy, confident grin.

To the others he was like an A-list movie star, grinning and laughing at the center of the world.

Cerulean couldn't stop grinning and laughing himself. Anna clung to Amo's pant leg and Cerulean's at the same time, looking up with wild admiration. Jake babbled endlessly like a star-struck fan, about what a stroke of genius the Pac-Man was, about how cool the Nike logo had been. Cynthia asked Amo bluntly what it had felt like to shoot himself in the head, with the respect plain in her rusty old voice. Masako tried to thank him for bringing them hope, but couldn't get the words out for crying.

Of course there was Lara too; shown only briefly in the comics. In real life she was gorgeous, with cream-coffee brown skin, tightly curled black hair in a palm tree-like mass on her head, and a look of deep, relaxed happiness in her swimming blue eyes. She was everything he'd expected and more.

"So you're Cerulean," she said, kneeling before him with a smile and sparkling eyes. "He's talked about little else since we got in."

"Robert, please," he said. "He's been on my mind too. Both of you have been, blazing a trail like Louis and Clark ahead."

She laughed and the sparkle in her eyes became a tear down her cheek, following a well-worn path. She took his hand in both of hers. "I can't believe you're really here," she said. "It's like a dream come true."

He squeezed her hand. "We're really here."

"Come inside!" Amo shouted over the hubbub. "Come on in, we've got a feast ready to throw on."

He stepped to one side, grinning like a madman, and allowed Lara to take the lead.

"This way," she called and started toward the main entrance. Everyone fell into orbit behind her, even Julio, though he'd been loitering round the edges shooting murderous glances at Cerulean throughout the greeting. Even that miserable bastard couldn't ruin this moment.

Amo excused himself from an overzealous Jake and fell in beside Cerulean, speaking in low tones.

"You don't know what this means to me," he said, looking solemnly into Cerulean's eyes. "That you're alive, and you came. After what you did."

Cerulean snorted. "I think I know."

Amo rubbed his eyes. "I suppose you do. I never would have made it this far without all the things you did for me. I would have died in New York without a doubt. I would have killed myself and made it stick." He gestured to the RV and the fairy lights and the Theater. "All this, the cairns, Lara, it all stands on your shoulders."

A chill ran down Cerulean's spine, as far as it could, crunching into the memory of the cold bag of milk left there when Amo shot himself. "I tried to kill myself too," he said, in a quiet and unfamiliar voice. "Almost twice. That I didn't is on your shoulders as well."

Amo grinned down, and squeezed Cerulean's shoulder. "We're stronger together. We always were. I'm so glad you're here."

The bag of cold milk in his belly went away, replaced by something wonderful rising in its place; a happiness and relief like nothing he'd felt before. For a while he couldn't find words, and it seemed Amo couldn't either, because they just looked at each other and walked and rolled.

"I'm glad too!" Anna piped up between them.

Cerulean laughed and patted her head. She came round the side and took both of their hands.

"We're all glad," Amo said. "And I want to hear everything, every bit of your stories, both of you." He pointed at Anna. "I bet you've had some amazing adventures."

She grinned and nodded. "I'll tell you about the puppies!"

Cerulean winced, then they were at the Theater and Lara held the swing doors open. The lobby was a vast, red-carpeted space, festooned with twinkling fairy lights and huge posters for the superhero movie Ragnarok III.

"We've got the movie," Lara announced to them as she headed toward a long row of tables laid out with electric grills, fridges and Nespresso machines, with three generators sitting under them. She grinned widely at the table's edge. "We've got all the movies you could want in brilliant 4K, plus popcorn, beer, food, whatever you need."

Jake cheered. Anna was so excited she was hopping up and down.

They fired up the generators and fell into an easy, dizzy, laughing collaboration to boil up a feast of canned roast beef and fresh asparagus, fry fresh potato slices, grill baby carrots and of course Spam, with onion consommé soup for starters and a melted Hershey bar fountain for dessert. There was beer and champagne on ice and Nespresso and whiskey. Cerulean worked coffees then manned a fry station, while all around people were digging in and contributing like it was 4th of July.

Everyone except Julio. Cerulean caught glimpses of him, in between taking snippets of coffee lessons from Lara and guiding Anna in arranging the plates and napkins. He was standing at the doors with his back to them, looking out of the glass as if at any moment he thought an attack was coming.

Cerulean looked away. Screw him, if he couldn't enjoy the best moment any of them had had in the new world.

* * *

They set up makeshift camp beds for everyone in one of the theaters, laid out along the rows of seats like bunks in a dorm room. Anna was on the same row as Cerulean and Masako, then Jake and Cynthia below, Amo and Lara above, and Julio off at the back on his own.

Cerulean, Masako and Anna retired first, followed by Jake and Cynthia hours later, long after Masako and Anna were deep asleep. They wobbled down the aisle arm in arm, lit by yellow glow-in-the-dark nightlights left lying near the exits, shushing each other, abundantly drunk and giggling at every misstep.

Cerulean waited, lying in his clothes with his wheelchair nearby. Soon enough Jake and Cynthia had shushed each other so much they fell asleep, mercifully in separate beds. Amo and Lara followed, whispering and laughing too. They set what was probably a wine bottle on the floor unevenly and it tipped and spilled across the floor with a clank and shush.

Soon enough they too fell asleep. Still Cerulean waited, until there was a sound at the top of the theater and Julio stalked in. By his footsteps Cerulean could tell he was drunk as well. He fumbled his way to his cot and flumped into it.

When finally he was asleep, and the theater was filled with the soft, ocean-like hiss of breathing, Cerulean slipped carefully from his bed and into his chair. He rolled along the row, using a small flashlight to identify Amo, then reached over and tapped him. His groggy face stirred.

"Come on," Cerulean whispered.

"Oh?" Amo said. "OK."

He creaked out of bed and Cerulean led him out.

They sat in the lobby, watching the door to the bedroom theater, drinking water out of bottles.

"It really is good to see you," Amo said.

Cerulean smiled back at him, genuinely happy. This was the same Amo who'd built the Yangtze darkness, who'd most likely initiated the zombie apocalypse, who'd committed awesome crimes then tried to atone with a trail of hope across the country.

His grin was goofy and wolfish. He was clearly drunk and happy. He was a comic boo artist done very good.

"We have to talk," Cerulean said.

"I figured. Shoot."

Cerulean wondered where to start. First things first. "What do you make of Julio?" he asked.

Amo sobered a little. "The quiet one? Julio, watching the doors, nice Mustang." He rubbed his chin. "He's in there now?"

Cerulean nodded. Amo was tough, after what he'd been through there was no doubt of that, but he was trusting. He'd done terrible things, he'd killed a man, but he hadn't been in Maine when the guns turned on their own.

"He is. He came last. He's sleeping at the back."

Amo frowned. "And you're worried."

"He doesn't fit in. I don't know if it's anything, but he pulled a gun on us when we first met. I knocked him down. We haven't seen eye to eye since."

Amo raised an eyebrow. "Knocked him down? From the wheelchair?"

Cerulean shrugged. "I'm strong."

Amo nodded. "Olympic diver, OK. So we'll watch him. Enough?"

Cerulean shook his head. "There's more."

"Go ahead. I want to hear it. I've been thinking about you and what you must have been doing ever since Iowa, when I realized you had to be alive. Where did you go, what did you do?"

So Cerulean told him. Not all of it, not about finding him in New York, because that seemed too much, but about Maine, the gun tower, and Matthew.

Amo's face was pale when he finished. "They just shot him. Did they think he was one of the ocean? Why else would they do that?"

Cerulean smiled at that: 'one of the ocean' was so much nicer than 'zombie'. "No chance," he said. "They didn't shoot me, and I looked more like one of the ocean than the zombies did. Matthew drove up in a yellow RV, he ran out calling out, and whoever was controlling that gun tower shot him."

Amo considered. "But not you?"

"Not me. I don't know why."

Amo blinked and rubbed his eyes. "Things to think about. To manage. We can talk about it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

Amo nodded. "There's a schedule planned. Meetings. Discussions. Plans and maps, more cairns, restarting civilization, you know how it is. Of course there's a screening time for Ragnarok III too, mandatory for all survivors. It's full of good prepper tips."

"You've got it all planned, huh?"

Amo grinned. "A plan, at least. I've no idea how it'll turn out."

"Good."

They looked at each for a moment. Amo smiled, then tapped Cerulean on the knee. "And now you're a father?"

That surprised him, and he laughed. "I don't, I mean… Yeah. I suppose so."

"And Masako? That's all you, right?"

He laughed again. "Yeah, I guess. After the Iowa cairn."

Amo's eyes widened. "After Iowa? Damn. I never thought that comic was romantic."

Cerulean shrugged. "What about you and Lara?"

"Well yes, Lara and I, yes. Father and mother of the apocalypse, I've heard. It weighs heavy, but I think I bear it well."

"You do. You look good together."

"Thanks, man. You too."

Cerulean smiled. There were things unsaid still, about his suicide in New York, but that could wait for another time. Now he needed Amo happy and proud, ready to lead these people forward into hope.

"We should sleep," he said.

"Agreed," said Amo. "We've got the rest of our lives to do this."

* * *

Hours later he woke to Anna scrambling up by his side. It was just as dark as before.

"Robert," she whispered, "I think I peed on myself."

He rolled over to look at her. The nightlights were very faint now, illuminating no more than the outer curve of her face. Of course. All that trauma, held for so long, and now to just let it go at once?

He pulled her in, embracing her despite the wetness and faint tang of ammonia.

"Let's get you sorted out, sweetie," he said, and rolled with her into his chair.

Heading up the aisle, the air smelt of stale wine and popcorn and piss. On the way past the back row he saw Julio lying there lit by the glow of his cell phone, staring back.

Outside it was morning and hot already, with light flooding in through the floor to ceiling windows in the lobby. The red carpet was a mess, with bottles, cans and greasy paper plates scattered everywhere. In the courtyard the ocean breeze was fresh, and Anna pointed sleepily out to the horizon.

"My Daddy's out there," she said.

"I know, sweetie."

They got spare clothes and washed her up using the shower in the RV. When she came out, after spending five minutes dashing around the RV completely naked, laughing and rebuffing Cerulean's every effort to wrap her in a towel, she got dressed in jean-shorts and a red T-shirt.

"We're going to be OK, aren't we?" she asked him, very sincerely.

He nodded sagely back. He was only 23, but now this fell to him. A week ago he'd been ready to die.

"We're going to be just fine. Like superheroes, all of us."

She gave him a pitying look. "What superhero sits in a wheelchair?"

He laughed. She laughed too, then hopped into his lap.

"A few actually," he said, starting to roll back to the Theater. "Professor X, he's very powerful, and…"

* * *

The day went like clockwork, much like Amo predicted. He had plans, agendas and everything. There was a room for the meeting, a duty for clean up, PowerPoint slides, maps, ideas.

Everyone gathered in the meeting hall in back of the screens, where great natural light through skylight windows floodlit a big conference table, after a breakfast of leftovers and some time spent cleaning up the lobby.

Amo led them through a short PowerPoint presentation he'd put together, outlining his plans for the future. He wanted to build in more ways than Cerulean had even thought about until then. First there were the cairns: he envisioned a network of them spreading across the country, huge images stuck to buildings all pointing toward LA, with maps and RVs, with digital transmission radios and live uplinks to LA, but that was just the beginning.

He wanted to build up LA into a truly sustainable community, with enough people to rebuild the human race. It was grand talk. To that end they'd need not only every survivor from the USA, but Canada, Mexico, all of South America, Europe, the whole world. New LA would have to become a shining beacon for them all.

He also wanted to restart the Internet. He wanted to restart power stations and factories, get planes in the sky, start communicating with satellites again, and in short bring all of it back.

Cerulean sat in the audience of seven, feeling floored. Anna was fussing with her phone in her lap, tugging at his pant leg, but he couldn't turn away from Amo's ambition.

When the last slide was done Amo looked over them and smiled.

"I wanted to tell you this early. I know it's probably not protocol, to welcome survivors in and ask them to start work at once." There was a laugh at that. "And who am I to ask anything? Well, you're all here. You've seen my work." He gestured to Lara. "Our work. Now I'm hoping you'll want to be part of it. Can you imagine how many people are out there still, alone like you were? How many people are still fighting the ocean like an enemy? How many broken people are there, like Don, that we might be able to save?"

He let that stand for a moment. Julio shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, but didn't interrupt.

"I'm for people," Amo said, in closing. "Judging by everything I've seen, you are too. I'm overjoyed you're all here, I'm overjoyed to meet you, and to see you safe and happy. But I want more. More people, more joy, more of us, and less people struggling on alone out there. That's it, the whole pitch. Will you help me?"

A long silence followed. Cerulean would have been stunned, except Anna kept drumming loudly on his knees and whispering, "You don't even feel this? Not this?"

Then Jake stood up and started to clap. Cynthia followed him up, Lara, Masako too, and Cerulean applauded from his chair. Amo's eyes shone.

So followed a long discussion of everything that had to be done. Now Amo mostly sat back and let Lara or one of the others manage the debate.

Cerulean dived in as best he could, with Anna getting increasingly bored on his lap. Of course they needed better places to stay than the Theater, working faucets and running hot water, electricity, supplies.

Amo started throwing up PowerPoint slides as he made them, listing tasks and timelines and duties, each according to their skills, with a calendar for that day and the next, a week later, a month, a year.

"Stretch goals," Jake said, "like Kickstarter."

Amo logged them on the screen.

- Restart the Internet

- Make utopia

- Film Ragnarok IV

- Wrap the world in loving communications arms

They chuckled and went on. Everybody was getting into it, except Julio, who sat back and watched with a smug look on his face, like there was some secret only he knew.

At one point Masako raised the issue of Anna, using code to talk about her as 'Muffet'. She'd have to be schooled, cared for, looked after at all times. Cerulean added that she was tough, she wasn't like normal five-year-olds, and that he would be proud to stand in as her adopted father.

Amo gave him a thumbs up, and that was that.

They were about to break for a late lunch, and Jake was leading them in an impromptu second round of applause, when Julio spoke up.

"What about security?" he called in a loud voice, a moment before the clapping had wound down naturally.

Everyone turned to look at him.

"Security's a part of it," Amo said. "We talked about that."

Julio scoffed. "Do you think? Then who was watching the doors last night, while everyone got drunk and partied? Who stood guard while you all slept?"

Not you, thought Cerulean, you slept like the rest of us, but he thought better of saying it. The others sat themselves again awkwardly.

"I did," said Julio. His eyes were burning now, with the same put-upon, neglected rage of before. Already these people were not respecting him enough. "I watched. How many people in here are armed? Just me? We're going to be soft meat when they come."

Amo cocked his head. Cerulean winced, hoping he'd handle it well.

"When who comes?"

"Whoever! Cannibals, rapists, the lot. You said your Don, he was raping the zombies? I know there are men like him out there. I've seen them. I killed one too."

This caused a silence.

"You killed a person?" Amo asked.

Cerulean noticed Lara inching a gun out of her waistband. Julio was too fixed on Amo to notice.

"Damn right I did. We've all got a history here, but nobody asked me about mine."

Cerulean knew for a fact that wasn't true. He'd asked several times, as had Jake, Lara, even Amo himself. Perhaps he hadn't asked with enough respect.

"He came at me in the night, in Cleveland, and tried to steal my radio. I was listening to music, I was asleep, and he came at me. It was only days after the apocalypse, when none of us knew what was happening."

Here Julio hawked and spat, right on the floor. "Goddamn looters. I fought, of course. I didn't have a gun then, so I had to club in his brains. Do you know what that feels like, to get brains on your fists?"

He was getting heated. His face was flushed. Cerulean wanted to say, "Do you know what it feels like on your face?" or, "So that's why you had us running round Cleveland for three days?" or even, "What human would want to steal your radio? It sounds like a zombie to me."

He didn't say any of it though. Instead he listened as the conversation devolved into Julio demanding more attention be given to building a silo of weapons, more effort diverted to building defenses and keeping watch like a military camp, more manpower assigned to running patrols.

And once he got running the truth came out. By and large, his vision was the opposite of Amo's. He wanted to retrench and tear the cairns down, or at worst send other survivors to some neutral screening area, like a refugee camp. "We shouldn't be giving out our home location," he hissed. "Have you any idea how lucky we are to be here, and not one psycho amongst us?"

Lara exchanged a meaningful glance with Cerulean.

That was enough. Anna was frowning in his lap, listening to Julio's anger with a frown.

"Come on, you," he said, and rolled out of the conference room.

18. JULIO

They went along the Walk of Fame, Anna scuffing her feet off each of the shiny gold stars and putting her hands in some of the handprints of long-dead actors. Cerulean tried to explain the conference but she wasn't too interested, so instead they talked about Alice and told each other nonsense riddles.

On the walk back he told her they'd decided he would be her parent, if that was OK with her. She was curious but accepted it with a smile.

When they came back to the theater things were moving. Amo and Lara had clipboards, while Jake, Masako, Cynthia and even Julio were setting about various tasks.

"He's going to gather munitions and set up a war room," Amo said to Cerulean through gritted teeth, pulling him to one side. "And see if he can find a tank."

Cerulean raised an eyebrow, not sure if he should laugh or be worried. "A tank?"

Amo nodded. "He's a prize, that one. What are we going to do with a tank?"

"Stage a coup d'état? Damn. So he'll have all the guns?"

"Not by a long shot. Lara and I are armed. You are?" Cerulean shook his head. "You should be. Look, take this."

Amo reached into one of his cargo pockets and palmed a black pistol into Cerulean's lap. "Tuck it down the side or something."

"What am I going to do with this?"

"Shoot him, if you have to," Amo said. "I've told the others too. But I'm sure it won't come to that."

Then Amo was away, coordinating an effort to fetch and bring a gas tanker round so they'd save time on the run for fuel. Lara strode over as Cerulean tucked the black gun down beside his withered thigh. Anna was still standing by his side, holding to the armrest.

"Hey Anna," Lara said. "Are you game for some coloring in?"

Anna beamed. "Yes Lara I'd love that," she said, like a good little girl, with none of her customary cheekiness. Cerulean snorted. She still had Amo and Lara up on a pedestal.

"Why don't we do that, so Cerulean can get on with gathering supplies."

"You should call him Daddy, he's my Daddy now."

Cerulean winced, but Lara took it in her stride, winking at him and mouthing. "Give you a break."

"Thanks," he mouthed back. Anna waved as she was led away.

* * *

For two days they worked. Cerulean was tasked with finding a good hotel nearby that had ground-floor apartments where they could set up running hot water and power. There were lots to choose from, but he narrowed it down fast, working with Lara.

The rest of the time he looked after Anna, and they played games, or strolled along the hot beach and talked, or raced along crowded avenues. Whenever they came across members of the ocean Anna ran over and stopped to offer them advice.

"Right that way," she'd say and point to the water. "My Daddy's out there, waiting for you. You can't go wrong."

Then she'd skip back and take hold of the armrest and on they'd go.

They erected a water tower, which didn't work, so they erected another which did, using a crane Amo found to set it in position atop the Chinese Theater's roof. They sourced more air-conditioners and wired them to generators, set up fridges in one of the theaters to serve as a communal mess hall, gathered a wide range of canned food while Cynthia drove up to the nearest green space, a golf course off Federation Drive, and started tilling it with Amo's JCB, rigged with a makeshift tiller.

"Potatoes," she said afterwards, covered in smeary dirt and sweat, staggering with Masako's help back into the Theater lobby as dusk fell. "Two hundred of the little bastards, root and eye, best calorie source there is in nature."

Cerulean had just got back from an arduous day re-fuelling and driving cars and trucks and semis off the roads they planned to use, lining them up in barricades to steer the ocean away.

"We're not short of calories," he said, weary himself. "All of Los Angeles' bounty is at our fingertips."

"Fresh food," Cynthia sneered, though there was no vitriol in it. Probably she was too tired. "Vitamins and minerals. Tomorrow I'm planting salads."

One day later they moved into apartments in the Wellville hotel, his choice, with nice wide corridors for his chair, ramps everywhere, and a great central courtyard with pool. He took a duplex with a granny flat built in, for Anna. It was only noon and everyone was out somewhere, but he was exhausted. He had kept up the same pace as everyone else, shifting bricks for reinforcements, gathering paints and other equipment on Amo's shopping list for future cairns, but it was wearing on him hard.

The chair gave him limits. He used his arms for everything, to move and to lift and to drive and now they were shooting with sharp pains.

"This is yours," he told Anna, showing her into her room. It was all pink, scrubbed for the personal effects of the previous little girl who'd lived there.

She looked it over, gave no reaction, then looked up at him. "You should rest," she told him. "You look like a floater."

He couldn't argue.

"Don't go anywhere, OK," he said. Seconds later his head hit the pillow and he was out.

* * *

When he woke Anna was gone.

He was hot, bleary and sticky, and the ache in his arms and shoulders had become a painful crick in his neck. To boot, it felt like he was getting sick. He went to check on Anna, but she wasn't in her room. He opened the outer door and called her name, but no answer came. She wasn't by the pool or out on the Walk or anywhere.

He tamped down the rising panic and brought up his walkie-talkie, one of which they all carried now, scavenged from the Long Beach Police Department, and opened a frequency.

"Amo, have you seen Anna?"

It took a few seconds for Amo to reply, seconds in which worry plummeted into Cerulean's belly like a bag of cold milk.

"She's here with Lara. It's all right, she's fine, but you better come over. We're in the conference room."

He was there in minutes, sweating from the exertion of rolling at full speed down the street and over the courtyard. Amo met him at the conference room door.

"Where's Anna?"

Amo pointed. At the conference table Lara and Anna were playing fruit-chopping games on a tablet computer.

"She's OK?"

Amo nodded. "I think so. But you won't like what I'm going to tell you. Promise you won't do anything rash."

Cerulean stared. "I promise. Just tell me."

Amo lowered his voice. "Julio threatened Anna." He raised his hands, palms out and soothing. "But calm down Cerulean, it's not like that. It was a joke, or possibly a joke, you know he's got no sense of humor. We need to talk to him."

He was seeing red already. "Talk to him?"

"Things are too delicate for anything else. Yes, he may have said some possibly sexual things, but he didn't actually do anything, and how certain can we be of any of it?"

"Possibly sexual?"

Amo winced. "Apparently he told her there was only one rule now, you do what you want? The weak and the strong, all that. And he told her to put her finger inside the rifle barrel… I know, yes, it doesn't sound good. And it's true he made her cry, and yes, he did scare her, but-"

Cerulean's jaw was tight. Rage bubbled up inside. "I warned him," he said through gritted teeth. "That shit. I warned him plenty."

Amo touched Cerulean's shoulder tentatively. "You promised, Cerulean, remember? Nothing rash. I'm handling it."

He broke the promise at once.

* * *

He charged into theater 3 like a stampeding bull.

Theater 3 was Julio's workshop, where he'd set up drills, files, a lathe, a table saw and other tools on a few scavenged desks at the front of the theater, in the open space between the seats and the screen. All manner of shotguns, rifles, pistols and rocket launchers lay around him, resting on ammo crates and held up on sawhorse frames. Here he was attaching a scope, here he was sawing off a shotgun barrel. The air smelled of sawdust, grease and gunpowder.

Julio stood behind his workbench, scattered over with bits of tubing, trigger guards, emptied clips and many gauges of bullet. He smiled at Cerulean, showing gleaming white teeth.

"I wondered when you'd pay me a visit," he said.

Cerulean didn't reply, too furious for words, and raced down the sloping theater floor. Julio put a large Beretta on the desk in front of him, with a heavy clank and a warning look, but Cerulean didn't care. He rounded the banks of seats and propelled himself at the work desk, to Julio's amusement.

That shit-eating smile would soon be gone. A yard ahead of the desk Cerulean clicked the chair's brakes on, punched his hands off the armrests like he was doing the arm-stand dive of his life, and took off.

The air caught him and pulled him on: one second, two seconds of flight passed as he soared up and over the desk. A thunk and a slight change in his angle told him his trailing legs had smacked off the desk edge, but it didn't slow him enough. Julio's face changed as he flew right at him, downshifting from arrogance to fear, and Cerulean wanted to shout at him, "You idiot, we've been through this before!"

But still Julio wasn't ready and Cerulean hit him like a 200lb linebacker wiping out the quarterback. He was bigger, he was stronger, and now Julio would know it.

Time sped up and his fists rose and fell, hammering Julio in his face, with one hand on the floor to support himself and the other to punch. The meaty crunch of knuckles on bone and flesh rang out, the crunch of Julio's nose breaking, his teeth coming dislodged, while he struggled and yelped.

Then Cerulean's supporting hand slipped in blood on the slick vinyl floor and he missed, punching Julio's shoulder and flopping onto his side beside him, gasping too. There was blood everywhere and Julio's features were torn and swollen. How many times had he hit him now?

"You remember this, you bastard," Cerulean snarled at him, grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt. "You don't forget it."

Then there were stamping feet nearby, and Amo and Jake were on him. They gasped as they pulled him away, seeing what he'd done. He let it happen and the fight went out of him, as Julio's bloody face receded.

"Shit, oh shit," Jake muttered.

"Robert, get the hell out of here," Amo said.

He helped as they lifted him back into his wheelchair, then sat mutely as Jake rolled him away.

* * *

They sat on a pier, far away from the others. Jake was gone now, it was just him and Amo watching the sea, with the sun only a few finger widths away from falling into the water.

What he'd done back in the Theater seemed very far away. His hands hurt a lot. He turned them over in his lap, crusted with blood and spit, some of it his own, no doubt about that. He'd need stitches too.

Amo stood at the railing looking out over the water. Thinking, probably, what to say to his best friend. How to make this play. Cerulean just sat and waited, like a kid outside the principal's office, looking down at his bloody arms. Evidence everywhere.

It was a warm and humid California evening, three days after their arrival.

Eventually Amo spoke. "I wouldn't have told you if I'd known you'd react like that," he said.

Cerulean grunted. He didn't feel like himself. "You should've done it yourself."

Amo shuffled, plainly uncomfortable. "Beaten him half to death? You can't do that kind of thing, Robert. You'd go to jail for that. It sends a shitty signal."

Cerulean looked up, defiant now. "It sends a signal. I don't know that it's bad. And he'd go to jail for what he said, or be put on some kind of register."

Amo sighed and threw up his hands.

"He threatened Anna, Amo!" Cerulean went on. "What did he say? 'This is how the world is now, you do what you have to to survive?' What's that supposed to mean, when you say it to a little girl? Then getting her to come over and put her finger in a gun tube? It's perverted. Do you honestly think, if it was just him and her without any of us around, he'd have any qualms about doing whatever he wanted to her?"

"All right," Amo said. "I see that, of course I do, but let's keep some perspective shall we? They were all just words. And we are all here, aren't we? He's not going to get the chance to do anything."

Cerulean shook his head, holding eye contact. "Not good enough. He's shown his character, and that's it for me. He's a shit and we can't watch him all the time. I should never have let him come."

"He's lost," Amo countered. "You see that, I know it. He's put himself outside the loop, yes, and he's feeling it now. None of us has made a big effort to bring him in, have we? So he makes threats to a little girl to feel big. It's pathetic, deplorable I agree, but I don't know that it's the same as actually committing the abuse."

Cerulean looked him in the eye. "Who knows where it might have gone, if she hadn't told you. What if she hadn't?"

"But she did," Amo snapped, "and I was handling it until you bulled on in. What am I supposed to do with him now? What do I tell the others? Don't make Cerulean lose his temper, he'll almost goddamn kill you?"

"They know me."

Amo smacked the railing hard. "Bullshit! I know you better than any of them and I didn't see that coming. Dammit, Julio is pitiable! He wasn't worth this."

Cerulean laughed, and something shifted inside him, letting him press on and say the first words that came into his mind. "Why not, does child abuse not exist in your brave new world, Amo? Don't you want to put this event in your comics?"

Amo's eyes narrowed and he leaned away. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Cerulean let his temper carry him on. "It means you're letting your damn vision get in the way of reality! You need bodies to spread the cairns, I get that, which means you need people like Julio, but at what cost Amo? How many sacrifices for that goal?"

Amo frowned. "Where is this coming from, suddenly? What are you even talking about?"

"I'm talking about I saw you!" Cerulean barked, letting the worst of it vomit out of him. "In Times Square. You were on your RV and I was down below, crawling in the shit of all those innocent bodies you'd wasted, shouting up at you, and you were too damn lost in some vision or other that you didn't see me!"

The anger fell out of Amo at once, and his face went pale. "What?"

Cerulean laughed. Anger was making him cruel and he was glad; they needed some reality here, cutting through the happy-dappy bullshit. "I saw you, you dumb bastard! I came to New York, after I woke up and my mom didn't kill me. Are you surprised to hear that? Where do you think I went, when I woke up in the basement still alive? I went straight to see my good old pal, Amo."

Amo took a step back. His eyes were widening as the realizations hit. "You couldn't have been…"

"I was there. I saw you burn them from across the Harlem River. I came on the trail and found you slaughtering them. I crawled through the blood and guts to shout up at you, but you didn't see me. You didn't even look! Then you blew your brains out and they hit me in the goddamn face."

Amo's hand went to his mouth and he sagged against the railing. "No."

"Yes. You couldn't have waited for me? You couldn't have waited one more day for me to arrive? I drove as fast as I could."

"I thought you were dead," Amo whispered, barely making a sound. "I didn't-"

"I was as good as dead, after that! I crawled, and I've been crawling ever since, Amo, like a worm in shit, to Matthew and back, to your RV where I finally decided enough was enough." He laughed madly. "Can you believe it, I was going to climb the Empire State Building then dive off the top? Best dive in history, enough to make you all proud, gold medal, everything, that damn crazy."

Amo just stared at him, pale as a floater.

"Then there was Anna!" Cerulean stormed on. "Do you see what I'm saying? She's the only reason I'm here, do you get it? If it wasn't for her I'd be jumping right now, so don't give me that shit about being reasonable. If anyone hurt her I'd kill them, that's a fact. You think I give a shit what message it sends? Julio's lucky he's alive."

Amo slipped down the railing to slump awkwardly on the second bar down.

"Oh, brother," he said, a sad little wheeze.

"Damn right," Cerulean said, though the second blush of anger was fading already. He was panting lightly. The two looked at each other in the quiet, broken by the lapping of the waves.

"You were really there," Amo said quietly. "You saw me do that? God, I thought finding Sophia was bad. But to see that?"

Now there were tears in Cerulean's eyes. This day was crazy. Plus his nose was stuffed up and he was getting sick, so he could hardly breathe. His face was just leaking everywhere.

"And my brains, they hit you?" Amo asked, his voice very weak. He looked up, half-sickened, half-curious. "In the face?"

"Right in the face," Cerulean said. He mimed the splash with his hand. "Sploosh. It was disgusting."

Amo shook his head. "God damn. Brains in the face. That's a new one."

At that the tone changed.

"Don't laugh," Cerulean said.

Unbelievably, Amo had started laughing. "Ah, I'm sorry Robert, really. Oh God, brains in the face, it's so horrible. Right on you? I can hardly believe it."

"Stop saying it!"

"I don't think I can." His color was coming back now, and his slump was growing less feeble. He was definitely laughing harder.

"It's not funny."

"Then why are you laughing too?"

He wasn't laughing, but perhaps he was smiling? He tried to straighten his lips but couldn't.

"It's funny," Amo sighed, "oh, it's sick. That's black humor. What a shot! But how could I know? Ah, I'm sorry. Sploosh."

Now they were both laughing. Probably it was more relief than humor, some ridiculous reaction to shock and violence and horrible truths, but it took hold of him and wouldn't let go.

"Oh God, to see that," Amo said between gasps. "What a mess, you lying there with brains on your face in the middle of all that carnage, you poor bastard!"

"I couldn't even climb up the ladder to see you. I wanted to bury you."

"Bury me!" Amo hooted, gasping for breath. "Ah, Robert, I'm sorry, that's so awful. I had no idea."

They laughed a while longer, until they stopped and a slow silence fell between them. The sun was closing its long descent to the sea, leading the zombies into the water.

It was good to laugh.

It was good but it didn't change the fact that he'd beaten Julio to a pulp, or that his blood-smeared arms were shuddering in his lap now despite the summer heat. The more he looked at them the stranger they seemed, as foreign as his legs when he'd first seen them under the covers, wearing their cartoon character socks.

What did that make him now?

"You'll have to punish me," he said, looking up. His head felt cleared out and free.

Amo watched him.

"You're right that it's the wrong signal, and even worse because it's from me. You can't be seen to play favorites. There have to be rules, and they have to bind all of us equally."

Amo nodded. "Julio too. Unless we go back and kill him now, we have to deal with him. We can't crush him, you know, not completely. Obviously we keep him away from Anna; you just can't talk to a child like that. But in other ways, he is useful. We should be more cautious, he's got a point. Don was real. Your gun tower was real, and we'll have to deal with those things at some point. Not everyone out there is friendly."

Cerulean sighed. He couldn't believe he was walking himself into this, but it did have to be done, and he'd never shied from doing hard work.

"So what punishment? It has to bite."

Moments passed as they considered. To the left a group of gray floaters ambled down the sand, their dull footfalls crunching on brittle shells. Cerulean watched them walk together into the water.

"Banishment," he suggested, at last.

Amo met his eyes.

"It's the only thing. We can't start corporal punishment, and imprisonment is just a waste. You send me away and I go, something public for everyone to see. I don't know how long. I can't leave Anna behind, though, not with him here."

"You could take her."

"If she'll come. We'll go make a cairn together."

Amo nodded. "Somewhere nearby," he mused. "San Francisco? It had a high population, so there may be people. Those are risks too."

"It's all risks."

Amo sighed. "True. You could go and be back in a week."

Cerulean shook his head. "Better make it a month. We need systems for things like this. You can work on them, and you can work on bringing Julio into the group while I'm away, if you think it's possible."

"It's not ideal," said Amo, "and I hate to lose you so soon, but you're right. It's all we've got."

* * *

They left the next day. The other five were standing nearby, watching as he packed the RV. Julio was in hospital, unconscious still. Masako had asked to come, but he'd said no.

"Why can't I come?" she'd demanded.

He'd held her hands gently and looked into her eyes. "Because it's supposed to be a punishment. If you come, then…" He trailed off, letting her fill in the gaps. He knew he didn't feel what she felt, but he had no desire to hurt her.

It worked. She smiled. She kissed him. "I'll be waiting," she said.

"Why is it just you and me?" Anna asked as he packed a few final bits: a charger for her phone, some candies, stock for the next cairn.

Cerulean smiled at her. His hands were both bandaged heavily, limiting what he could do. He'd broken one knuckle and slit the skin badly in three places, requiring stitches. They ached, now that the last of the anesthetic's effects were wearing off. He hadn't got them sewn up until past midnight, after Cynthia had finished work on Julio's face.

She'd talked little throughout the operation, in one of the back rooms which they'd rigged with running hot water. Julio's blood was splattered on the seat.

"You want this?" she'd asked at the start, holding up a syringe. "I'd like to do it without, so you feel every stitch, but Amo told me to offer."

He gave a wan smile. "I'll take it, thanks."

She injected him then got to sewing, not making any effort to be gentle.

"You wish I'd killed him?" Cerulean asked. "Is that why you're angry?"

She grunted. "You still will. Or him you. One of you's going to die."

The certainty in her voice had haunted his dreams that night. He'd woken up with water in the back of his throat, terrified he was drowning. He felt pale and shaky, like the world was coming apart again.

Anna was looking at him now, standing by the RV. The air was hot and close, the armrests of his chair slick with sweat. Perhaps it was truly this simple. He smiled. If there was no Anna, would he stay?

The answer came easily. No.

But she didn't owe him a thing. His life shouldn't be balanced on her presence. She was wearing her Alice uniform. That's how he'd remember her.

"Robert, why is it just you and me?" she repeated.

He cleared his throat. He owed her the truth, even if it drove her away.

"It's a punishment, honey," he said. "For me, not for you. You remember the things Julio said to you?"

She frowned. Cerulean went on. "He shouldn't have said them- it wasn't fair. Amo told me, and I got angry. I hurt Julio a lot." He held up his bandaged hands. "I hurt myself too. But now I have to go, because we can't do that kind of thing here. It's not all right. So I'm getting punished, and I have to go away. You can come with me, but you don't have to. You can stay here, if you like."

She stared at him, unreadable for a long moment. He felt a wave of emotion rise up in him. "It won't be for long," he lied. "If you want to stay, it's OK. I'll be back soon."

She stared a moment longer, then her face seemed to collapse in on itself in misery. Her eyes screwed up began to cry, deep rolling sobs that wrenched her from within.

"I'm sorry," she said, barely audible over her gasping. She hugged her hands around her middle. "I told Amo not to tell you. I didn't mean it, Robert. I'm sorry, please don't leave me."

Tears welled in his eyes as soon as she started. He hadn't expected this, and it punched a sickening hollow into his gut. He'd done this, and now he was now hurting this damaged little girl even more.

He rolled over and wrapped his arms tightly around her little convulsing body, trying to smooth away the pain with his touch. He pressed her sobbing face against his shoulder, stroked her tangled hair as she wept and gulped for air, and whispered furiously in her ear.

"I'm sorry, Anna. I'll never leave you again, I promise. I promise."

He kept his promise.

Ten years later, Anna left him.

TAKEN

19. TEN YEARS LATER

Ten years after the zombie apocalypse destroyed humanity, Cerulean sat at the edge of the pier off Muscle Beach in his stripped-back Murderball wheelchair, looking out over the lapping Pacific Ocean as the winter sun set, thinking about Anna.

She'd been gone for four months now, headed off alone in a catamaran to the west, punching a massive hole in his life. For so long he'd done everything for her; she'd been his adopted daughter for ten long, hard and wonderful years as they rebuilt the world together. His every decision had been dictated by her needs and what it would take to keep her safe.

Now she was out there somewhere, alone, and with her gone nothing was clear.

He picked at a fleck of dried paint on the pier railing with his thumb. The sun was already halfway sunk over the waves, smearing the horizon with pink and orange like a sticky, melting candy, and he wondered if she was looking up at this sky too, perhaps waiting for this receding sun to dawn over her.

He sighed.

Two months earlier she'd set sail in search of her father, following clues a decade old: an ID chip in her father's belly, swallowed when he ate their pet puppy, linked to a tracking app in his phone. She'd kept that phone ever since, clutching it like a talisman at times, dreaming of the day she would go hunt him down.

Now she'd found him. She'd crossed the Pacific, circled Hawaii and Japan, driven up through China and ultimately found him in Mongolia.

"They were piled up like cairns," she'd said over the long-wave radio connection three days ago, the last communication they'd received. Despite the many thousands of miles separating them, the sense of excitement in her shaky voice had been palpable.

"Tens of thousands of zombies in these great pyramids," she'd gone on, her voice coming through scratchy, "and at the heart of every pile there's a giant red one, like a demon. They're the real killers. The zombies piled up their bodies then turned to stone, locking them in."

Here she'd paused, perhaps because she was crying. They'd tried talking back to her but the signal was too weak and she didn't seem to hear. He'd been crying too, just to hear her voice. He'd hardly left the radio room for months since she'd left, just waiting to hear she was OK.

"The zombies sacrificed themselves to save us," she'd said. "And Cerulean, I found my father! He was alive still, not frozen like the others. He was waiting for me, I think. And he saved me from the red demon. He sacrificed himself all over again."

On the pier, Cerulean turned a fleck of paint over in his fingers, like a poker chip. Finally she'd found her father, who was a gray-skinned, white-eyed zombie, and that brought up a welter of emotions. He was glad that her months-long solo voyage around the world had not been in vain. He rejoiced that she was alive and had finally found some of the closure she so badly needed.

At the same it was a knife in his heart. She was nearly sixteen and every day for the last four years she'd spent pulling away, drawn toward the memory of her father, the zombie. It had hurt more with every snub and snide comment, piling up inside, as she answered all his kindnesses with growing cruelty.

That was the apocalypse, perhaps. That was people. That was a great gaping wound trying to seal itself over, using other people as bandages and stitches and tossing them away when they were done.

He sighed again. Regret was infectious, like self-pity.

Still, it was hard. He missed her, and sometimes now he dreamed of the demon from his past, pouring fluid down his throat. He'd wake terrified he'd lost everything, and there was nothing left but an endless crawl through the rotting ruins of the dead.

It was hard, at those times, to remember why he was still alive. Only Anna's voice on the radio, come at random, broken moments over the last few months, reminded him of the man he'd become as her father.

He sighed a third, self-indulgent time.

"Reminiscing about Krispy Kreme donuts?" came a voice from behind him. "Or maybe a fresh can of Bud Lite?"

Cerulean turned to see Amo standing there, the Last Mayor of America, looking the same as always; a hipster without a cause. He wore light brown sandals, baggy khaki cargo shorts and a loose white shirt, despite being 37 now. His dark hair was pulled back in a loose knot, and his warm brown eyes were light and free as ever, dancing in the sunset.

"You walk too quietly, Amo," Cerulean said. "I could have shot you."

Amo laughed. "You're not even holding a gun. When's the last time you carried one?"

Cerulean shrugged. The answer was simple enough; the day they shot and killed Julio, but what point was there in bringing up that?

Amo sat on the weathered bench nearby. They were the oldest friends left alive in the world, pre-dating the apocalypse by six months, and Amo could read him like an open book.

"You're moping," Amo said.

Cerulean couldn't stop the smile from inching across his face.

"I know what this is," Amo went on. "The usual survivor's guilt, beating yourself up for outliving the world, feelings of unworthiness, not feeling real, and now you've got that empty nest syndrome too."

Amo could be a real pain sometimes. "I shouldn't have told you any of that stuff."

Amo frowned. "Come on, Robert. It's a real thing, and I'm forever glad you told me. I'm just thankful I don't have it too."

"Show-off."

Amo shrugged. "You've got a broken back and a broken mind, but you're the best thing that ever happened to that girl. Have I told you that before?"

"You have."

"Good. You did a good job with her. She's on her voyage pushing out our boundaries, like we'd always hoped. We need that hope, Robert. I know you see that, even if you don't feel it."

He sighed. "It isn't safe out there."

"What's safe anywhere? Sitting still and going crazy with soul-crushing depression isn't safe either."

"Hmm."

They sat in silence for a time after that, watching while the melted candy sun was swallowed up into the black of the ocean. There were probably zombies down there still, swimming through kelp forests, crawling along the sandy seabed, deep in the dark but still going on, chasing some internal drive only they could feel.

They were like him, really. Like them all. Everyone had an engine inside, driving them on in a particular direction. And engines could break.

"You ever think about Julio?" he asked.

Amo snorted. "Not if I can help it."

"No. I do, though."

"And you want to talk about him now?"

Cerulean shrugged. "I wonder, sometimes, what he was living for. I think for each of us, we can put a name to the reason. For you, it was Lara. For Anna it was her father. For me it was Anna. But Julio?"

Amo stretched on his bench. "Who knows? He wanted respect, I remember that. Nobody ever respected him enough. He got it from Indira for a while, but when you and Masako split…"

Cerulean nodded. "I know."

It had been a painful time. Cerulean had lived with Masako for four years, until Anna's ninth birthday, because it was easy. At times he'd felt rich, like a true family man, but they never had been. The wounds that had made them were always pulling in different directions, and no matter how they tried to sew themselves together, the stitches wouldn't hold.

He hadn't loved her enough, probably. He hadn't needed her the way she'd needed him, and then Anna started to change. She spent longer looking out to sea or tracking her father's position on her phone app. Sometimes she'd rail against Cerulean whenever he asked her to do something, saying cruel words that lingered between them long after.

He hadn't had the energy to keep the lie going after that. Anna's withdrawal sucked the life out of him, like a slowly deflating balloon, and there was never enough left over for Masako. He took to staring out over the water too, not dreaming of a lost family member, but of his own demon.

He spent hours imagining what the zombies felt like, under the water. Drowning. The dreams haunted him.

They'd split up amicably, or at least he'd tried to make it amicable. She'd cried a lot at the end. "How can you do this to me?" she'd asked, over and over again, like he was the one who'd brought the apocalypse down on them both. "How can you do it, after everything?"

He'd had no answer. He didn't know. He just didn't love her enough and was drained from pretending. In the year or so previous she'd seen his withdrawal and grown desperate, clinging to him like a child and only demanding more of his energy. That had only sped up the end.

"You'll find someone," he'd told her. "I promise."

She found Julio. One night she went to him, for comfort or succor or to make Cerulean jealous, or something, nobody knew, and he raped her. The evidence was clear-cut. Perhaps it had started in a better way, with her looking for something in him that she couldn't find any other way, but the bruises on her face, the marks around her wrists, the scratches covering Julio's head and chest spoke the truth.

He hadn't denied it, when they came for him. He'd been waiting, sitting with Indira by his side like she was supportive of what he'd done. It was a bad memory, but one he couldn't help but return to often.

He'd smiled at Cerulean and Amo as they came in his house with guns drawn. "You were waiting for this," he said. "Any excuse. You should know she was asking for it."

Then he drew his own gun and shot Indira in the neck. Her blood sprayed out and she lurched into Cerulean's lap.

One of Amo's shots took Julio in the shoulder as he fled, almost knocking him over. He hit the street where Cynthia was waiting near his Mustang, and she shot him twice through the window as he climbed in and revved the engine, spraying his face and arm with buckshot from her shotgun.

After that he drove away, leaving no trail, and they never saw him again.

Masako was never the same. She'd found a new man, Arlo from Kentucky, but he was a simpleton. She seemed happy enough, but who amongst them was really happy, anyway?

He only had to look at Amo to find the answer to that. Amo either had never suffered enough to truly break him, or he just had an inner wellspring of strength that others didn't.

"You're only hurting yourself with this," he said, looking at Cerulean. "It pains me to see. You're not still thinking about diving, are you?"

Cerulean smiled. That was a confession from the past; his desire to perform the greatest dive in history off the Empire State Building. Was it still there? It seemed so hotheaded now, something a young man would say. But then he was only 33 now, still young. There were many years left.

"No," he answered, and surprised himself with the truth of it. "I don't want that. I'm kind of happy, like this."

"In this misery?"

He shrugged. "It's comfortable. Surrounded by memories, I suppose. You and me, me and Anna. We've had lots of good times."

"We have that. And many more to come. Anna's on her way home! You've got all her growing up still to do. I'm sure she'll be a different person when she gets back. She settled her pain. I only wish you could do the same."

Cerulean snorted. "Settled my pain. Isn't there a pill for that? Drop it in water and it fizzes nicely."

"I wish. I'd have dosed you years ago."

"Yeah," Cerulean said slowly, drawing out the sound.

"Anyway," Amo said. "You shouldn't sit out here alone. You know the rule."

He did. Everyone did. Nobody was supposed to be out alone, at any time. It was a hangover from Julio's many security procedures, but one they'd kept. With all those cairns out around the world, you never knew who was going to come, or what they'd want.

"I'm almost done moping, I promise."

"Good," Amo said, changing his tone to something more upbeat. "Lara's cooking up a hot pot, and they're all asking for you. The girls are waiting and Ravi will want to sit next to you again, of course. Father of his prospective bride. I heard he's working on a ring."

Cerulean shrugged. Amo and Lara's daughters were lovely, of course, but that just reminded him of how sweet Anna had once been. Ravi was a sweet boy too, two years older than Anna but way too ditzy for her, all looks and no brain. "It's not for me to give him permission."

"Now that's just wallowing," Amo chided. "She's a new person now, she found what she was looking for. New vistas, Robert, a whole new world of possibility."

Enough of that. He changed the topic.

"You think we'll be getting some fresh citizens?"

Amo raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering if he should accept this topic change. "You want to talk about the future now?"

"Sure."

"Sure," Amo echoed doubtfully. "All right then." He leaned back on his bench, considering. "Yes, I think we will. There were billions of people out west; in China, Malaysia, India. They can't all have been crushed by the infection. There must be some left."

"And they'll come here."

"Where else? We've got thirty-seven now. With maybe a hundred more we'll have a sustainable gene pool. The human race starts here, you know? We get to be founding fathers to the whole world."

"Just like we destroyed it."

Amo sighed. "There you go again. You can't help yourself, can you? That was me and Lara anyway, not you. I'm the one that killed billions. You just got in on the ground floor."

"I know," said Cerulean. "Sorry. I just get this way, sometimes."

"Especially now." Amo looked at the glowing display on his watch. "Look, old buddy, they're expecting me back. They're expecting you too. Come for hot pot. It'll make the kids squeal, and Ravi will be over the moon. He treats you like a father-in-law already."

"The boy thinks with his ass."

Amo laughed. "That's more like it. You should tell him that."

"I'll come," Cerulean relented. "Give me a little longer and I'll come."

"Great," said Amo and got up, though for a moment he remained, looking down. "Hang in there, brother, OK? You mean a lot to all of us. You know that."

"I know. Thanks."

Amo nodded then strode away down the pier, his sandals slapping off the wood. Cerulean listened as the tone changed when he hit the sandy asphalt of Ocean Front Walk. A few moments later came the sound of Amo's Porsche door opening and closing, barely audible over the lapping of the Pacific against the pier's weary wooden struts. The engine was a faint growl which faded into the distance.

Cerulean was left alone with the ocean, and the hole inside.

Amo was a bandage too, like Anna. New LA was a bandage he'd wrapped himself up in, all these people with their light and noise and laughter, but none of them really filled the hole with a new engine.

Anna had shown the way. She had found her father and filled herself up, and now she could be whole and happy. She wouldn't need him any more, not the way she once had, so he couldn't cling to her any more.

What did that leave?

He looked down into the dark water. It terrified and fascinated him. The demon that used to hold him under was long gone, but there were new demons now, red beasts that stalked Mongolia and turned people into monsters just like them.

The demon from his past was a kind of antique, an artifact he brought out sometimes and studied like a scientist examining a fossil, looking for the origin of things, though he knew where things really changed.

Matthew. His death had cut out the last threads tying him to his engine, after Amo, leaving a hole inside that was sheer and smooth and full of water.

Sometimes he imagined himself falling inside it; water would pour into his lungs cold and solid, followed by the panic wracking him like electric shocks. The light from above would fade as he sank deeper down, until the hole finally became full.

He smiled. It was a strange fantasy. He'd died so many times already, and not one of them had filled in the hole. Instead he'd boarded over it, so he could look down into its depths without any real fear of falling.

It was true that he didn't want to die any more. Maybe that was what healing was. He wanted to see Anna, and know what kind of woman she would become. He wanted to see her children, he wanted to be Grandpa Cerulean and roll down the beach with them tucked on his lap, laughing crazily.

All of that was ahead. He laid his hands on the chair's wheels and started rolling back down the pier, thinking about the future and all the good people in New LA, completely unaware that he would never see any of them again.

* * *

The figure stepped in front of him on the Speedway running parallel to Venice beach. It was all shadow back there, a dark and narrow road between hollow-mouthed condominiums, and the figure was a man holding a gun, dressed in denims with cowboy boots. The moonlight sparkled on the spurs at his heels. His shoulders were uneven, the left lifted unnaturally high like a hump. His gun was thick and round-barreled, extended towards Cerulean's belly.

The chair stopped. The pit opened up beneath Cerulean and filled up with rising and hungry tides.

It was Julio.

It was the same dark face with the same heavy brows and the same dead-eyed glare, but older, and scarred with peppery blotches across his left cheek.

Thoughts raced in his mind; words pealing up from the depths and receding, accusations and statements of disbelief, but none of them fit the bill. None of them said what he wanted to say.

What he wanted to say was far simpler than all that, and he said it.

"I'm going to kill you."

The gun spoke for Julio, three times. BANG, it said, BANG BANG, shots fired direct into Cerulean's gut.

His body thumped back against the seat, and down into the dark.

INTERLUDE 1

Julio didn't die.

Five years earlier, after shooting out Indira's throat and escaping New LA in a flurry of bullets and blood, he survived.

His Mustang served him well through the dark streets of LA and out into the empty desert, before he fainted from blood loss at the wheel, steering wildly off the road and crashing into a stand of cacti at the foot of a blocky mesa.

It saved his life. The patrols from New LA didn't find him that night or the next.

It also cemented his disfigurement.

He roused to heat, thirst and pain. His entire left side was alight. In the cracked rear view mirror he saw speckles of blood tarnishing his left cheek like furious zits.

Cynthia's buckshot.

He tried to open the door but his left arm was agony. He unbuttoned and peeled back his bloodied shirt, creeping the denim across the swollen bowl of his shoulder.

It was excruciating. He probed the inflamed skin and knocked himself out with the pain. There were two bullet holes at least, entry wounds but no exits he could detect. His bones might be smashed to powder inside the skin, with the bullets lodged in amidst them.

The Mustang's engine was dead, so he fought his way out and stood swaying in the mid-day heat. The sun crushed him like a bug. He didn't have a hat or any sunscreen. His left arm swung at his side, painful with every grudging step he took.

In the boot he dredged up his go kit, containing guns, painkillers, medical supplies, maps, a GPS, more guns, a range of knives, water, rations, and a backpack to hold it all; everything he'd prepared for.

He hung a sling round his neck with great care, swallowed painkillers and antibiotics, tipped alcohol over his shrapnel-stung face and the two holes in his shoulder, fixed sticking bandages over the entry wounds, drained two bottles of water, then slung what he could manage of the pack over his right shoulder and started north.

North back to LA.

It took three days and three nights, hiking in a daze. Simple thoughts drove him on. Revenge was high on the list, starting with Masako.

She had come to him. He'd been happy with Indira, or at least a civilized semblance of happy. She did as she was told, she served him well enough in the bedroom, and she denied him nothing thanks to her hunger. She'd wanted him to be special, her reason to go on living, so it was easy to take advantage, but in truth she'd been pathetic, barely a real person. Screwing her for so long was hardly better than screwing a zombie, she was so grateful.

Masako was far more real. And she'd come to him, that was important to remember. He couldn't be held accountable for what had followed next.

Still they came, wrapped in fake righteousness. Killing Indira first had never been part of his plan, it just happened. Better she go than get to stand in judgment of him, though now it seemed clear he should have shot that black bastard Cerulean first. Then Amo, then a bullet for the old crone Cynthia, and he could have saved one for Indira at the end, if he'd really felt it.

Counting the bullets kept him going, one for every step forward.

He reached Las Vegas and found a hospital, but it was too late to do anything about his whole left side. Fits of paralysis and pain washed over him like waves. It was too hard to sleep, so he didn't sleep. He tried to dig in his skin for the bullets but couldn't keep conscious no matter how many anesthetics he injected. Digging in his own back hurt all up and down his spine.

Instead he sewed up the holes. He made a cast and wore it. His face scabbed and began to heal.

He drove east.

At first he had no goal, only to run. New LA would be there for him when he was ready. He backtracked along Amo's line of cairns, at each stop contemplating tearing them apart.

He didn't, though. He couldn't say why.

In New York the true extent of his future became clear to him. Standing alone in the golden lobby, looking up at the name board, he saw his reflection in the glossy elevator doors. He favored his right side so much that his whole left shoulder was sticking up, like a hunchback.

He tried to press it down but the broken bones had set in position. It didn't hurt too much, after two slow weeks on the road, and at least he could use his left arm a little. This was him now; a cripple of sorts, like Cerulean.

A month passed in which he did very little. He ran through Amo's Deepcraft simulation, and read copies of the comic he'd brought with him. It wasn't too bad a time, really. It was quiet. It was lonely.

Perhaps he'd start his own commune. In Boston maybe, or Washington. He could move into the White House. Of course then he'd be competing with Amo for recruits, so he'd have to make his own cairns and develop his own story, earning a cult-like following of his own.

He tried sketching a few comics, but couldn't come up with a narrative to fit his life that would inspire others, plus he wasn't much of an artist. Stick figures in MS Paint weren't going to cut it. The story was all just misery anyway, from the apocalypse to now, five years of playing second fiddle, being beaten, talked down to and disrespected.

In that time he changed.

He turned the spur of the moment murder of Indira, for which he'd felt some residual guilt, into a point of pride. She'd betrayed him for years, really, by being so weak. If she'd truly respected him, she would have stood up for herself more. He changed the rape of Masako into a punishment on Cerulean they'd both had coming for a long time. She'd come to him after all. She'd asked for him, and how was he to know that she would change her mind about it afterwards?

He toured New York, going to the scene of Amo's genocides, Times Square where he'd shot thousands and blown his brains onto Cerulean, and 34th Street where he'd burned thousands more alive.

There was little of their bodies left, anywhere. Dried up husks of skin, like threadbare leather on the asphalt. Teeth and bones scattered like remnants from a dragon's feast.

He laughed, when he found a plaque Amo had left outside his favorite coffee shop, Sir Clowdesley.

RIP

Here I committed a genocide of some thousand of the ocean (zombies).

I burned them alive with gas and lighter fluid.

I will not do it again.

Come find me at the Empire State building.

It was pathetic, really, an infant's attempt to atone for a most heinous crime. I will not do it again? It disgusted him. This was their hero, Amo the mass murderer? He himself, Julio, had killed only a handful of zombies by comparison. He was not the monster, Amo was. Amo had crushed him for years.

So he began to write a new narrative in his mind, of all the mistreatment he'd received for so long. He'd tolerated it beyond all human patience. They'd beaten him and abused him and never truly valued his contributions.

His was the story of a victim. That was what made it so hard to write earlier. He'd believed he was the hero when he was just the slave. Did he want revenge? Was he right to count every bullet with every step, dreaming of the day he'd grind them all into the dust?

Perhaps.

And perhaps there was another life for him, elsewhere. It wasn't forgiveness or fear, it was being the bigger man.

Somewhere in the midst of that, he remembered Cerulean's stories about the gun tower in Maine, and his mind was made up. Those people had rejected Cerulean because they'd seen what he was. They would see what he was too, and judge him to be better. That would be the decider. If he was better off dead, they would see it and know.

* * *

It took him a month to find the tower, after crisscrossing the state and studying all its mountains. It stood in a field paved with dry gray carcasses, as solid and still as a stadium floodlight.

When he saw it, driving out of a snow-laden spruce forest with the view of the white-headed mountains cut clean against a brisk winter sky, he almost swerved off the road. It was up and the guns were pointing outward, like stunted silver branches.

But it wasn't firing.

He parked and climbed out.

Bodies covered the sloping hillside, spread in a hundred yard radius. Dead zombies. Here and there tufts of tall grass shot through them, but mostly they were an unbroken layer of leathery gray skin overlaid with a light dusting of white snow, like a lumpy tablecloth.

The gun tower stood in a square concrete block in the center, like a great cube of gray sugar, just as Cerulean had described it. There were a few zombies standing beside it even now, brittle and thin-boned things, beating their wiry fists against the stone. He hadn't seen live zombies for some time.

He took out binoculars and surveyed the guns. They showed signs of rust. Cerulean had described a mechanism that raised them up and let them down, but that seemed to be dead now. Perhaps they were frozen. He scoured the ranks of the fallen ocean, but few of them seemed to be freshly fallen. All of them wore snow like a mantle.

He headed over, brushing easily past the zombies. Up close the concrete block was smooth and featureless, bar the dents teeth and scratching fingers had cut into it. In one place a section of two-inch rebar was showing, as though the concrete had pulled back its lips in a sneer to reveal bone. He fingered the un-rusted metal.

Someone had gone to a lot of effort to protect something.

The shriveled bodies were mounded thickest at the western edge, like dry kindling, and upon their backs he was able to climb to the top of the block. He touched the gun pole. The metal was a reflective silver, unblemished but for his hunchback image, with no markings of any kind. The top surface of the cube was marred by four regular-looking grooves, perpendicular to each of the four faces.

He knelt and touched one of the grooves, as wide across as the span of his hand and slanted outward, like gutters for rain. There was cement dust in the groove's shallow bowl, which painted his palm like chalk.

Then the block underfoot rumbled. The metal tower began to rush by at his side, his reflection shifting imperceptibly, and it took a moment before he realized it was retracting back into the concrete.

He threw himself off the block a second before the four gun towers cracked into the top of the block, pounding the grooves so hard they would have crushed him to mince. He fell and hit the blanket of bodies on his deformed left shoulder, crunching and something inside. He yelled out, blinking towards unconsciousness, but came back in time to see the gun tower slowly rising up again, like a daisy shooting up to the sky.

He laughed. That was hilarious.

Somebody was inside, still.

* * *

It took him three months more, but he found them.

He blew the concrete block to shards with drill-implanted explosives sourced from a nearby granite quarry; three 20lb bags of ANFO, Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, normally used for mountaintop removal. They poured down the holes he drilled as a stream of tiny pink beads, like candy. He ignited them with a stick of old-fashioned dynamite, and they blew in a bubble of dirt and rock that shook the earth and knocked him off his feet half a mile away.

The big tower flew through the air like a caber and hit the ground flat. That felt like progress.

Where it had been was a huge crater, and in the middle of that crater, like a plughole leading down to the drains, was the lower half of the chute the pole had run in and out of, as wide around as a Jacuzzi. Within its blasted, ragged lip lay a set of powerful engine-driven wheels that ran and stopped and ran and stopped fitfully as he watched.

"It's gone, you idiots," he told the hole. "Your big hammer's gone."

He dropped a camera on a wire down the chute, but it was just a chute with no doors leading anywhere, and soon enough it filled up with zombies dropping down from above. They hit the bottom then started hammering at the western inner face of the chute, like miners tapping a seam of gold.

"Gotcha," Julio said.

He sprayed a marker line across the field cutting to the west, then came back with a JCB. The first trench he dug was a yard deep, and he found nothing. He cut three more, until it was wide enough for the JCB to fit in, then dug another yard down and hit smooth cement.

He cleared it in two weeks, like an archaeologist steadily brushing great clods of clay and dirt away from the surface, using jackhammer drills, a pickaxe and a shovel. It was an unbroken oblong structure leading away from the gun chute, approximately a hundred yards long and ten wide.

He tapped on the cement with his crowbar.

"Hey," he shouted. "You in there. Open up."

They didn't answer. Of course they didn't. This was their bunker.

He set back to drilling holes and pouring pink ANFO beads in. Before he could blow the first though, the world above him erupted. There was a cacophonous explosion that crammed the air hard into his ears and showered him with a thick wave of jagged winter dirt.

He rolled down the curve of the dome until he was wedged hard against the edge of the pit he'd dug, and dirt was rolling down over him, and the next explosion came.

The earth throbbed and his body was entombed. He laughed into the cold clay, assuming the only possibility was true.

They were bombing themselves, to get at him.

He lay there for a few hours, long after the last strike hit. It had been four or five blasts total he thought, though he couldn't be sure because for a time one of the impacts had knocked him out cold, slamming his whole body into the cement with enough force to crack a few ribs and put a nasty crick into his jaw.

When he finally crawled out, burrowing through the loosely packed soil slow as a worm, he saw a dusk landscape pocked with great blast craters. His makeshift home, a premium silver RV with the coal fire left burning at all hours, was now just a few ruptured shreds of torn silver, like an exploded soda can. His JCB was yellow rubble, like a dissolved transformer. His heaped bags of ANFO explosives had been replaced by a hole bigger than any of the others.

He laughed, looking up at the sky. Drones? Missiles from a second bunker somewhere? It didn't matter.

"You'll regret that," he said.

* * *

He came back with a drone.

It was a high-spec quad copter, a thousand dollars fresh from its shelf in a nearby Yangtze center, good for remote control from a mile away and able to ferry loads of up to ten pounds.

He loaded it with a ten-pound bag of ANFO beads, flew it to the bombsite and brought it down on top of the midpoint to the half-obscured cement oblong.

BOOM.

The drone was gone, the explosives were gone, and a lovely gout of shrapnel and dirt flew up into the air. He waited, but no bombing run began from above.

He loaded up the second drone, drove through the forest a few degrees, then sent it out. As it hovered into position, he used the onboard camera to line it up with the shallow blast mark the previous one had made.

BOOM.

He did it all day. Twenty drones he sent to their deaths, until the hole was five feet deep through solid cement and rebar, and he had to start using smaller drones to fit them in. Each explosion after that was smaller but more focused, sending great thick cracks radiating out through the oblong's smooth cement surface.

That night more bombs fell. The first two woke him, as the forest somewhere to his right erupted, where he'd last stopped to send his drone from. Whole trees flung up into the moonlight then thumped to the earth, like giants tossing javelins.

He waited it out. He couldn't see if the missiles were arcing in from land or were falling down from a drone orbiting too far above to see, but he didn't care. The people below were fenced in; they didn't have access to the resources that he did. He had all of America, while they had only the stores they'd built up before the apocalypse hit.

This time he would win.

* * *

The next day revealed an obliterated landscape. The forest south of the bunker remained in only small stands, while the rest was scooped out in great spherical craters of dirt and rock. Trees lay everywhere like pick-up sticks, splintered in bits with their yellow innards gleaming sappily with frost.

A light dusting of snow coated the uneven landscape like icing sugar. The cement oblong in the midst of all that devastation looked like a vast foreign body waiting to be extracted from the peeled-back earth, like the bullets buried in his shoulder. Today, he felt sure, he would break through.

He sent a drone over, activated the camera, and aimed it into the hole he'd blasted. The bottom was dark. He steered it down. A gust of wind from below caught it and it bashed a rotor noisily off the inner walls of the blast-hole, sparked and fell. It crashed against a surface at an upside-down diagonal, the video feed fizzed with distortion, then the image settled.

It wasn't the bottom of the hole. It was the chamber below.

20. VAN

Cerulean woke in the rattling back of a windowless panel van, spread-eagled to a mattress with the demon pressing down like an octopus squeezing his skull.

Sploosh, he thought. Brains in the face.

Then he thought, Julio.

He shuffled quietly on the mattress, and handcuffs clinked at his wrists, attached to a chain that looped around a metal pole welded to the floor and ceiling. He reached out and pressed against it, testing the strength, but it didn't budge.

A prisoner. He'd been shot.

It was dark.

Slowly, moving deliberately, he turned and looked down at his belly. He still wore his buttoned blue shirt, and in the dim light cast through a semi-opaque screen separating him from the front of the van, he could see there was no blood.

Three shots, but no blood. He shuffled higher, until he could pluck at the shirt and reveal his familiar six-pack, marred by three scabbed dots.

His head throbbed. Not bullets. Not Taser darts, the skin would be burned and he'd have felt that differently.

Needles, then. That explained the pain in his head.

He craned his neck back to peer through the forward screen, but all he could make out was the rectangle of light through the front windshield, and two blobs that were the front seats. In one was Julio.

"Julio!" he called. It hurt his belly and his head to shout.

The van braked and stopped. The front door opened and slammed closed, footsteps paced round the side, then the back doors opened.

Light blinded him, and in climbed Julio. He pulled a stool from the side of the van, unfolded it, and sat looking down at Cerulean.

For a long moment they stared at each other. It was definitely Julio, though he'd changed. One of his shoulders rode up higher than the other, like a hunchback, twisting his body painfully to the right. It made him look old and frail, though the expression on his face was anything but.

He looked at peace. His eyes were calm and content. His brows were settled and smooth.

"Hello, Robert," he said.

Cerulean looked past him. Through the van's doors lay a sweeping expanse of orange desert, speckled with sagebrush and brown cacti, cut to the side by the sandy black road. Perhaps they were a few states over, if Julio had driven through the night. Utah or New Mexico, depending on where they were going.

He was glad they were out of New LA, safely away from the others.

"You're calculating now, I imagine," Julio said. "Where we are, how far from the others, if they're safe. Thinking how you might knock me down again."

"I'm going to kill you," Cerulean said, his voice hoarse.

Julio gazed down at him impassively. "So you said. I don't feel it, I have to say. I used to, a constant low ebb of anxiety while I padded carefully around New LA, worried I might offend you, but not anymore. That doesn't mean there wasn't a crime though, or that you shouldn't pay for what you did to me now."

Cerulean laughed. Julio was serious. He was mad. "For all the injustices we heaped on you, right? The lack of respect. You're just setting the world to rights."

Julio gave a cold smile. "I'm more realistic now. It's hard to believe I ever asked you for respect. Now I know, you have to take it. So you're right to laugh, it is funny."

Cerulean stopped laughing. "You killed Indira, Julio. You raped Masako. I don't think those things are funny."

Julio shrugged. "What's morality, at the end of the world? Accepting it really is the end, that's the best thing I ever did. You'll see it too, when you tear Anna's head off her fucking shoulders."

Cerulean flinched. "What?"

Julio just looked at him. He still had his low, surly stare, but now there was real menace behind it. Cerulean's heart throbbed in his chest. "I would never do that."

Julio rose off the stool. "There's a lot you don't know, Robert, about this world and this glorious apocalypse. I'm going to show you. And then you're going to join me."

"I never will."

Julio looked at him, then turned and dropped down out of the van.

"Wait!" Cerulean called as he started to shut the doors. "At least tell me where we're going."

"East," Julio answered, slamming the doors shut. "All the way east."

* * *

They drove all that day, and Cerulean lay in the semi-dark, bouncing on the mattress as the van powered along. With his arms shackled he couldn't do anything. He pried at the pole but it wouldn't budge. He inspected his handcuffs but they were cinched tight against his wrists.

He could only lie and wait. He tried to guess what Julio had in store for him, and thought about what Amo would do when Cerulean didn't come back, but there was nothing they could do. America was vast, and he hadn't swallowed a tracking chip like Anna's father. No one was going to find him now.

That realization settled slow and heavy, like a thick fall of snow. This was probably it for him. Certainly torture lay ahead. Julio would take his revenge, in long, slow and painful days. It was a miserable prospect, chased by nothingness. He'd be dead. He wouldn't see Anna again, come back from her round the world trip as a new woman. He wouldn't see her married, wouldn't be grandfather to her kids.

It was a hard thing to face. Shivers of fear ran up and down him, and he recognized the first stage of grief in his response: denial. It couldn't really be happening. Julio was dead, they'd shot him to bits. Even now he wasn't lying in the back of a van driven by a psychopath, it just couldn't happen to him.

But he'd been through this stage before many times, and knew it couldn't help him now.

Anger though, the next stage along, could. If there was a chance to fight back he would take it, and tear Julio apart with his bare hands, as he should have done years ago. Anger was a fuel that he could burn inside, keeping him afloat.

But anger would hurt him too. When the torture began anger would break him all the harder. Bargaining would only make him pathetic. Depression was better, but that too was an emotional state that could be broken. It was no shield.

What he needed was the emotion at the end of the road, beyond acceptance and even forgiveness, into the realm of soulless nothingness, like he'd felt after Matthew died. He needed it so he could hide his anger beneath it.

But it was hard.

He wanted to see Anna one more time. Visions of her kept springing up no matter how hard he focused: as she had been as a sweet little girl alone on the road; as she would be as a grown and righteous woman, eclipsing them all, and every vision of her hurt.

He couldn't let her go, and feeling nothingness wouldn't help her, so he lay on the mattress racked with horrific visions of her chained on this same mattress, terrified just like him, headed east just like him.

Soon any attempt at soullessness faded, lost beneath that one all-consuming emotion.

Fear.

He could scarcely breathe for it, filling his throat: fear of what Julio might do to them all. Fear surged and was replaced by bargaining in ways he couldn't control.

'Do what you want with me, but leave Anna alone, please.'

It would be music to Julio's ears, but he couldn't stop the words from rolling through his head, almost calling them out. He knew they wouldn't help but he couldn't get beyond them. Nothingness was too far away, with Anna still out there. He could surrender his own body and mind, but not her, never her.

He wept into the mattress and the van rolled inexorably on.

* * *

By dusk some measure of numbness had settled.

Anna might die. He could take that vision out and look at it now. Amo and Lara might die, all of them might die in just the same way as him, and denying that would only weaken him.

It wasn't true acceptance, but something like it, a borrowed version of the Cerulean from the past, shrugged on like a shabby old coat. It didn't make him impervious to pain or erase the cold terror in his middle, but it let him think with some clarity and shelter the anger inside.

The van stopped and Julio opened the back doors. The air that flowed in was cool, and the sky was dark and flecked with stars, like sea foam. There were a few trees, a parking lot, part of a McDonalds.

Julio looked in and Cerulean looked out, two different angles on a strange mirror.

"We're just outside Denver," Julio said. "Eighteen hours driving. Two days more and we'll be on the East Coast."

"East," Cerulean echoed. His voice sounded dead, like the Cerulean of old.

Julio climbed up to sit on the tailgate, frowning, his body leaning awkwardly right. "That's disappointing. Are you beaten already? I know it's a crushing thing to be in someone else's power, but so soon?"

Cerulean only gazed at him.

"Or are you faking it?" Julio narrowed his eyes. "Trying to mimic control? Remember who you're dealing with, Robert. I felt that same way. For five years I pretended, because of what you did to me."

"So you're not pretending now?"

Julio smiled. "No. This is who I am. And do you know what separates me from that other man?"

"This new one's a bigger dick."

Julio pointed at Cerulean's wrists. "Chains. I was pathetic before, needy and always hungry, wearing the chains you cast for me. Then I saw my fate and embraced it. You're part of that fate now, Robert. Together we'll rub New LA away."

Cerulean shuddered. Julio sat still, an angled silhouette against the moonlit asphalt and a field of foamy stars. Any moment the gun might come out, and the torture might begin. Even with the numbness, it was a battle to stop himself from flinching every second. A sledgehammer, perhaps, or a scalpel.

"You're insane if you think I'll help you."

Julio shrugged. "I know you will. People change, Robert. I'm hardly the first to reinvent myself. You were Robert, then you became Cerulean. You've made your share of mistakes too."

"I didn't kill anyone."

"You killed Matthew. Poor soul. You lured him to his death. But death isn't so bad, not really. It's another change like all the others. Anna will join you soon enough."

Cerulean gritted his teeth so hard it hurt.

"You've changed too in the last five years," Julio said. "I thought by now you'd be a barking dog, raving at me. You've matured. Chains become you."

"They'd become you even more."

Julio smiled. "They already do. But my chains set me free, old friend."

Cerulean glared.

"It really is good to see you," Julio said. "I'm going to enjoy this time together, and perhaps you will too, when you see where we're going. Old mysteries, laid to rest. Now sleep well. We've got a long day's drive tomorrow."

He climbed down from the tailgate and shut the doors, plunging Cerulean back into the cold and dark.

INTERLUDE 2

Julio dug three feeble, palsied zombies out of a nearby Stop'n'Shop, herded them into a panel van, then released them one by one over the bomb-blasted landscape.

The first tottered over and fell down the hole he'd blown in the cement oblong, appearing seconds later on the drone's video feed, gray legs shuffling past a dark concrete wall. A tunnel? Julio watched with his heart in his mouth. Moments later the fuzzy sound of footfalls stopped, and a deep hollow bonging began.

A door? The zombie was thumping against something.

He looked to the sky. Clear blue with wispy white clouds. The air was so cold it stung in his throat. No sign of drones, missiles, or anything.

He set the next zombie loose, and watched it stumbling across the rutted field. It fell down the hole like the other, this time crunching flat onto the drone. The camera angle shifted, settling pointed down the oblong Another sheer concrete wall stood opposite, forming a wide and featureless corridor receding into inky blackness. Julio gulped. The zombie shuffled away, behind the camera, then added its hollow thumping to the first.

Julio released the third. On the fall it broke the camera, reducing the image to hissing static, but the audio continued. There was shuffling as it crawled, then a third strand of sound added to the thumping.

The sky was clear. Julio hefted his pack and strode out into the first crater.

No havoc fell from the sky. There were no explosions. Birds in the remnants of the forest cheeped gaily. He climbed the crater lip and rounded another one. Now he could hear the thumping from below, deep and even, like fists striking a great hollow water tank.

He reached the edge of the concrete oblong and dropped onto it, hurried over to the hole blasted through the middle, and peered down. Perhaps thirty feet down lay his busted drone in a pile of crumbled cement, atop a sheer cement floor.

He unpacked a rope ladder and tied it securely to two thick prongs of twisted rebar, then started down. Cold air rose up around him, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia. He descended rung by rung through the jagged cement hole, twisting to avoid spikes of ruptured metal, his left shoulder burning with the effort.

He came down in a tightly defined halo of light cast from above. Cement dust stirred up by the last few falling bodies swirled around him, getting into his nose and making his eyes run.

He drew a gun and a flashlight.

"Hello," he called, peering into the darkness. The corridor was big, easily four times his height and maybe ten feet wide. It had the air of a tomb, untouched for generations. The thumping of the zombies was cacophonous here, bonging like a stampede of kettledrums. He rubbed his eyes and blinked into the darkness.

"Hello!"

Nobody answered.

He turned, toeing his ruined drone out of the way, and ran the flashlight along the ceiling, where the sheer walls curved up into a smooth arch. There was something strange that took him a moment to put his finger on.

No lights.

The cold sent a shudder through him. It was freezing in here, colder than above in the open air, and it felt like an icy breeze was blowing straight over his skin, despite his thick winter parka. The dust wasn't moving though; there wasn't a single breath of wind, but still he felt it.

He ran the flashlight further around. There were no lights anywhere, on the walls or on the ceiling; no switches, no outlets, no pipes or cables of any kind, nothing you would expect of a habitable bunker. He shuddered again, his legs shaking now, and shone the light down the length of the corridor.

The hollow thumping cacophony seemed to be coming from both directions. He turned, shining the flashlight down each direction, but its light only soaked into the deep dark. He chose a direction and started along it, taking careful steps with his gun held up, though his knuckles burned with the cold.

The corridor receded away, and with each step the banging grew louder. Ten paces he went, fifteen, then the beam of light caught a glint of metal.

His finger twitched and the gun barked a rough blast. The bullet sparked off something, ricocheted four of five times in a mad tympanic fury, before falling silent again. Echoes hammered him, coming like peaks in the wave of hollow thumping.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, but the air was so cold it burned his lungs and stopped his throat, starting a panicky throb deep in his chest. A moment of silent panic passed as he strained to breathe.

A horrible moment passed before breath came back, and he took it in shallow gulps, like a man drowning on the surface of a rough ocean, each one a raw wind on his aching throat.

Enough. He stepped forward, running the light over the space ahead. It was an outsized metal door, fitted perfectly to the dimensions of the corridor, hung on three fat hinges each as thick as his fist. The door had no markings on it, no handle either, and no zombies standing in front of it, though the banging was louder now than ever.

Spiraling panic twisted his insides as the thumping went on. Where had the zombies gone, and if it wasn't them what on Earth was banging?

He took a step backward, terrified. Was it the denizens of the bunker, fighting to get out? Was it some hellish beast straining to break through and shred his body? What the hell had happened to the zombies he'd dropped down?

Then he realized, and breathed a sigh of relief. He'd got turned around coming down the rope ladder, and walked back toward the exploded gun chute. This door surely led into the hollow tube beyond, down which he'd dropped several zombies a week ago.

They were still hammering now.

He leaned against the cold cement wall and gave a few ragged, freezing laughs. His legs shuddered and almost gave way beneath him, turning to liquid now the terror was past.

But it wasn't past. He turned and faced back along the corridor, the way he'd come. That's where his latest zombies had gone, back into darkness.

The cold was overwhelming now, the breeze becoming a harsh wind that seemed to clamp around his head and interfere with his thinking.

He walked into it, and every step forward the invisible wind grew colder and stronger. Holding up the gun became too difficult so he let it dangle uselessly by his side, then fall to the floor. It clanked on the cement and he trudged on, holding the flashlight hip-high with both hands.

The smashed drone lay ahead. Already it felt like he'd been walking for hours and he could scarcely feel his numb feet touching the floor. His lips throbbed under the wind, but he pressed on. He'd come across a continent for this. He'd fought off missiles from the sky for this. He pushed on into the frozen darkness, and the sound of zombies banging on hollow metal grew louder again. His breath steamed in the air. The flashlight wavered and his legs shook, barely supporting his weight. The wind was a gale he had to lean into, though not a breath of dust moved around him.

Then he saw it.

It was a man. It was a giant red man, standing in the darkness and sparkling with a sheen of ice or glass before him.

Julio's breath stopped again. The giant towered over the three zombies beating at his thighs, his head almost touching the ceiling. His eyes were closed but there was something utterly present about him. He was naked and a bloody red color, solid with thick and sinewy muscle round his chest, his thighs, his calves.

Julio dropped to his knees, struck dumb. Tears welled in his eyes and he reached toward the giant's sleeping face, so peaceful in repose. The cold was a blast furnace now, scouring his skin and leaving him pure.

"Oh God," he whispered. The cold gathered him in and hugged him close. It seemed as though at any moment the red giant would awake.

Then a voice rang through the still, mortuary air, like a fugue called out on a single trumpet.

"Welcome, Julio," it said.

* * *

The voice talked and he listened. Hours passed as knowledge poured into his mind, delivered from above. It was a woman's voice, the clearest, brightest voice he'd ever heard. She loved him, he knew that now. Everything that had happened, every step along the path to reach here, was written with her loving forgiveness.

"It was a test," she told him. "All the bombs and gunfire, it was a test to see if you were worthy of reaching this place."

He couldn't speak. The icy blast from that great peaceful red face held him silent and prone, quivering long past the point that his knees started to ache on the cement, through pain into a barren plain of snow.

"You passed our test. You gained access to this inner sanctum. Do you know what you're looking upon?"

He managed to give the faintest shake of his head.

"He is an angel. We call him Gabriel. He watches over us and keeps us safe. He's one of the chosen ones, a warrior. We know you're a warrior too, Julio. We've watched you for years, from above. You are a warrior, aren't you?"

He nodded. All he wanted was for her to love him. All he wanted was to kneel in the face of this magnificent angel until the breath froze in his lungs.

"You fought for your community. I know that's why you came to us, because you love too much. You care too well. We have a place for warriors like that here. You might stand beside Gabriel one day."

Sick longing filled him. There was nothing he'd like more. To be so vast, so powerful, so fully alive as this awesome specimen, it would be better than anything he'd ever imagined. All the respect he'd ever hoped for would be right there. It would be everything he'd dreamed of, casting off this sick, wasted body with its petty urges and needs.

He would be clean and pure, a holy warrior of God.

At some point he fell asleep on the cement.

It was very dark when he woke, the flashlight was dead, and there was a heavy silence in the air. The cold wind was gone, but it had left its mark within him, like the tide recedes and leaves the sand forever altered.

The contours of his insides were new. The hole he'd felt for so long, left by a lifetime of being the outsider in his own life, which he'd tried to fill with women, guns, violence, sex and finally rape and murder, was full.

He wept as this new self inside him sucked in a breath. The air, which before smelled musty and tinny and had hurt to breathe, was now the most wonderful thing. The words of the woman echoed down to him, all the kindnesses she'd showered upon him, and all the promises.

He was chosen. He was select, and he would rise up. He would ride at their bloody tideline when the time came to cleanse the planet. Everything would be washed away.

He was a holy angel of death.

"Where are you?" he'd asked toward the end, trembling in a trancelike state. "I want to find you."

"We are nowhere," she'd replied. "You will never find us. But we are always watching."

"I want to see you. I want to know you."

"Then do your work," she'd answered. "A holy crusade lies ahead, and the date of revelation is known to you. Prepare the ground for our coming. Do what must be done, and cleanse the land as you can. Keep this holy sanctum safe from all who would trespass upon it."

He had bowed low, then, and kissed the floor. "I will."

"Begin with these others," she'd commanded.

He'd killed them, stumbling to the three zombies still pounding at the glass, and cut their heads off. Dust had poured from their veins. After the first was dead, its dry head in his hands, the others had come for him.

Their teeth had snapped at his arms, breaking his skin. Their spidery fingers clutched at his belly and tore where they could. He stabbed the second in the back of the neck and it dropped. The third he boxed until its head lolled to the side like his own, and his twisted right shoulder burned and his knuckles bled. Then he knocked its emaciated body down and stamped on its head.

"Good," the woman's voice had said. "Now you are our agent, sent to end the plague upon this great and bountiful land. Go forth in light, Julio."

In the darkness, blind, he staggered to his feet. The red giant was there before him, cloaked in darkness like an unbreakable sentinel. The three zombie corpses were there too, silent and still. With each movement of his body he felt his link to them shifting. They were a faint warmth on his skin, buzzing like a magnet.

He didn't need light to see. He closed his eyes.

The giant was there on his skin too, like a shadow cast across him, a pleasing coolness that had nothing to do with warmth or cold. It felt like home.

He stood very still and studied the many sensations dappling his body, like reflections on waves. There were warm spots on his back and across his shoulders, spread like glowing dots on a radar screen. He felt the map of the land above slotting into place with the sensations in his body.

There were zombies, trapped in a 7-11 three miles down the road, burning in the small of his back. He'd driven past them weeks ago, and now he could feel them, like a splinter touching his spine. They had to be excised.

There was another in a home five miles away, atop a hill. A mansion. He'd seen it in his earlier explorations: grand rolling lawns now thick with young spruce, winding stone-slab walkways leading to monastic cloisters, a palatial home with two dozen rooms. It was trapped in a panic room, hammering its fists against a metal enclosure of its own making.

There was such a thing as too much security.

He felt the gun in his hand, familiar and heavy. That was good. That was right, because there were others out there too; not only the dead, but the living. The heat they gave off was like the pinhole light shining down from the stars, far away but sharp and precise. One was a woman, he guessed in New Hampshire now, heading south.

A smile stole across his face.

Heading toward New York. Toward Amo's first cairn.

As he padded down the corridor, already the exact meanings of the woman's voice were fading. He'd never really believed anything, beyond the Catholic sense of heaven, hell and guilt. He didn't believe the red creature before him was an angel, nor that the woman was the voice of God.

He didn't know who or what they were, and neither did he care. Because of them he felt better than he ever had in his life. That required a payment, and he was happy to give it.

He climbed from the underground sanctum into the cool light of a bluish wintry day. Fresh snow lay on the scattered wreckage of his exploded drones, drifted in places over the craters in the torn land, making it fresh and clean.

The car woke at his touch. The sense of the woman to the south was keener now, sharpening across his skin. This was the first of his gifts, his payment for being the holy mercenary of some hidden God.

"You will never find us," she'd said. "If you seek us we will crush you."

He grinned. He could feel them already on his skin, thousands of them, their bodies clustered like a burning beehive beneath the mountains. So many, and all of them bustling, moving and working.

He saluted the mountains. Perhaps they were watching him even now, from a drone far above. It seemed clear they needed him. Bursting open their vault had exposed them, and their unholy red giant. That suited him. He would be their security, and they would be his purpose.

A deal.

He got in his panel van, checked the weapons bag in the passenger seat, and drove out into the white.

21. MAINE

When Cerulean woke from a fitful sleep, they were driving. Julio called out the states as they passed through: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. They stopped for the night in Cincinnati.

"One more day and we'll be there," he said, sitting on his chair in the back of the van, looking down at Cerulean. "The true end of the world. It will end not with a bang, but a whimper."

"Shut up," Cerulean answered. "Just shut up with your crazy bullshit, Julio. You want to have a conversation, unlock this chain. I'll have something to say after that. Until then, why don't you just shut your mouth?"

Julio looked at him. In the harsh lights of the van the left side of his face looked leprous, pockmarked with the scars of Cynthia's buckshot. "I should warn you, I hear a lot worse than that. The last man I took, he just screamed. I wasn't hurting him but he kept screaming as if I was, like the pain would protect him. I tried cutting out his tongue, but he still honked, like a goose. After that I turned to duct tape."

Cerulean felt his face turn pale. He'd known it. Torture. His throat went dry and he swallowed hard. Julio studied him with interest.

"You understand me. I think the duct tape killed him. Not being able to scream broke him. I stole his control. I'll take yours too."

Cerulean's legs began to shake involuntarily. That was new. Perhaps, if he wasn't careful, he would piss himself. His stomach became tremulous. He tried to imagine Julio standing over him in his torture gear, plastics splattered with blood, and almost gagged.

He pushed through it. It took all his focus to force out words.

"You've been killing people?" His voice sounded strangely conversational.

"Not killing," Julio replied. "It's not fair to say that."

"Torturing, then?"

"I can't explain. You have to see it to know. The world's been turned upside down for so long, you've come to think this is the rightful shape." He gestured around him. "It took me a lot of dead people to truly get over that. Think about Amo. He told a nice story and you all believed it, but what did he really offer, Robert? Hope which he had no right to give. The real world is nothing like you think it is."

"Then what is it?"

Julio leaned forward, hands on his knees, his hunched body tilted to the right. "We should be dead. All of us. One in twenty million survived the infection, through luck. It's nothing we did, we weren't prepared, and we aren't the best this world to offer. We're dregs only."

"We're all that's left."

Julio shook his head. "No, we're not. We're just in the way, and soon we'll be gone. It's written in stone, chiseled long before the apocalypse."

Cerulean stared at Julio. Julio stared back. There was nothing more to say. He climbed out and slammed the doors.

* * *

Julio called out the states like a countdown. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, ticking down to some unknowable bomb.

Nightmares haunted Cerulean throughout the day, ghosts of the long cold night before: a red demon on his chest tugging at his tongue. Another at his back pouring blood down his throat. He gagged and choked all night.

Anna loomed foremost in his mind. He saw her again and again, as she turned to greet them on the road ten years earlier. So young, so small, so fragile.

"Run away!" he tried to warn her, in his chair at the head of a wave of the dead, but she didn't listen. She needed him too much, and she ran with her arms spread. She couldn't see the suffering following behind him.

He screamed. He woke screaming. Julio was leaning back through the plastic screen.

"I can cut your tongue out too," he said. "It's distracting when I'm trying to drive."

Cerulean buried his face in the mattress. Soon even that would be gone. He'd be in a cold room somewhere, prone on a surgical table while Julio sliced into his skin. He had to be strong, but what did being strong mean now?

His fire of anger was almost out, quenched by hopelessness. How quickly the changes were wrought. Amo shot himself in the head and the world spun on its axis. Matthew fell and every last hope fell with him.

He blew on the ember inside. If it went out then so would he.

"We're here," called Julio.

The van stopped and the engine died. The back doors opened, revealing a view of uneven but lush fields dotted with bright wildflowers. Bluish mountains rose through a frosty haze beyond, and scattered coppices of forest circled the field's edge. A black asphalt road curved across to the right, leading in and out of stands of spruce. Over it all hung a beautiful, cerulean sky.

"Familiar?" Julio asked.

It was.

Tears welled in Cerulean's eyes, both for the beauty of this scene and the memories it brought back: his original sin. The gun tower was gone, the concrete block was missing and the field had been savaged in dune-like troughs and peaks, but it was the same place.

He looked at Julio, for the first time on daylight. The blotches on his face were an angry red and his right eyeball had a musty pink tinge. His left shoulder was crumpled inward and lifted, a stretched reflection of his muscular right. He wore a black shirt over black pants and cowboy boots.

"It took me months to find this place," Julio said. "They tried to kill me at first, but I stopped that with a few hundred pounds of explosives and an earth-mover."

Cerulean surveyed the field, a mess of roughly circular rises and falls, as though craters had been bitten out of the ground.

"What happened here?"

"Drones dropped bombs on me," Julio said. "Protecting their secret. It's the reason they killed Matthew, but spared you. I think you're very interested in that."

"Tell me!"

"I will. First, why don't you come out?" Julio reached into a pocket and dug out a key, which he tossed into the van. It flopped against Cerulean's chest and trickled down to the mattress.

"You're not going to die in that van, I promise you," Julio prompted. "Unlock the chain and come out. There's real wisdom out here."

Cerulean took the key and tried it in the cuffs on his wrists, but that was too much to hope. Next he tried the padlock on the chain, and it turned, freeing him.

Now was his chance.

He shuffled to the edge of the van, eyes fixed on Julio, and Julio watched back.

"No diving," he said, with a faint smile curling the edges of his mouth and an unusual gun tapping against his leg. It was large and round-barreled, big enough to contain tranquilizer darts. "I know what you're capable of."

Cerulean climbed out with a graceless oomph to the grass. After three days in the sunless back of the van it felt like freedom, but he was under no illusions; Julio had him still.

Julio pointed at the mountains. "Out there is a bunker. There are thousands of them under the rock, squirreled away since before the apocalypse. The gun tower here was theirs."

Cerulean frowned.

"To understand their plan," Julio went on, "you have to understand what we are to them. You, me, your friend Matthew, everyone."

"What are we?"

Julio smiled. "We're the zombies."

Cerulean just looked at him.

"We are all of us infected," Julio went on. "Them included, but out here we've had the infection triggered. We're immune, but we still carry that trigger, constantly transmitting." He paused, eyeing Cerulean closely. "It means we can't be part of their new world, when they emerge. It means they have to wipe us out, because we're infectious. We're the zombies."

Cerulean looked at the mountains. The rest of it could be true or not, but the mountains were definitely there, massive and solid as ever. You couldn't remove the mountains. You couldn't fool them or take advantage of them, they simply were. But perhaps there was a bunker. Perhaps there were drones.

It meant Julio was not alone. He was one agent in a much larger extermination, planned since before the apocalypse. Anna and Amo wouldn't stand a chance against drones. The cold milk rose up in his throat. It even explained the gun tower, to protect them, but then…

"Why did they spare you?" Julio asked, as if reading his mind. "It's common defense. You know the gray ones draw each other." He brought his hands together before him. "They cluster on threats like ants, drawn to violence. It's how they swarmed in Asia, like Anna saw, piles on top of red monsters- the zero infection. The possibility of a cluster right here threatened their plan, so they shot them. The tower must have had thousands of bullets."

"What's here?" Cerulean asked. "Are they down here too?"

Julio shook his head. "You'll see soon. For now, ask yourself why they didn't shoot you."

He did. He had, for ten years. Not a night had gone by that he didn't think of it. Now he began to suspect.

"I wasn't a threat."

It wilted him. Julio nodded, pleased. "You weren't a threat. Your presence wouldn't summon others to swarm. As a cripple, you weren't capable of pulling down their tower. You weren't worth a bullet."

Julio reached into his other pocket and produced a single coppery chunk of metal. A bullet. "Not one," he said, and tossed it at Cerulean. It bounced off his dead legs.

He felt sick. After so long, it seemed a petty, unsatisfying reason.

"What threat was Matthew?"

"As much as me. Able-bodied and full of life, not like you, and weren't they right, Robert? Consider your life. What have you done but extend the misery of a few in LA, selling them a future you never had a claim on. Amo's dream is seeds on barren rock. This here is a sacrifice for the good of thousands." He pointed at the mountain. "They're in there, the best and brightest of mankind. Do something of value with your life, and help me usher them in."

Cerulean felt himself crumpling. His head felt frenzied, like a wasp's nest full of plans, and what was the point?

A single bullet. That's what it came down to. The bullet Julio had thrown lay on the frosty grass beside him, a gleam of bright copper. Saving a bullet, and Matthew would have died anyway. For that one act of unwitting mercy he had come to know Anna, had watched her grow up and loved her, all for the cost of a bullet.

It was nonsense. It was perfect, and tipped him over the edge.

He started to laugh.

Julio's face soured.

He laughed louder and louder, reigniting the fire and washing away all doubt. He'd said earlier he was going to kill Julio, and now he knew for a fact that it was true. It was the only truth that mattered.

The disappointment spread wider across Julio's face, turning his blotchy grin south.

"Not what I expected," he admitted.

"Thank you," Cerulean said through his laughter. "Do you know how much that one bullet haunted me? You've just set me free."

Julio frowned, his eyebrows working hard, then nodded. "I suppose so."

He raised the gun and shot Cerulean in the chest.

INTERLUDE 3

He came upon the woman at Amo's big cairn, after seven nonstop hours driving south. He watched her approach from the fourth floor of the Empire State Building, coming up West 34th Street.

She was a young woman, blonde hair, a little slim for his taste but sassy looking. She wore two guns in hip holsters and bright red lipstick on her lips. Sometimes she stopped to write messages on car windows in lipstick, and he liked that.

Later, from the corridor to the stairs he watched her up close. Six years she'd been alone, by then. He read the confidence in her motion; the easy amble, the steadfast gaze ahead, unconcerned that anyone might be watching. She was such beautiful prey.

He came up on her easily, friendly. She was looking at Amo's desks of garbage; his coffee cups and comics and computer memory sticks that stretched from here across the continent like a trail of pebbly shits. She was handling the radio equipment they'd left behind on a previous cairn-maintenance run.

At about twenty feet away she heard him and turned, then jumped a clear foot in the air.

"Jesus!" she cried, too flustered to pull a gun. "What the-"

"Sorry," he said, raising his hands and playing into the delusion. "I didn't think you were real. I've been seeing people, I mean, visions of people, for so long. I thought…"

She rested her hand on her chest, just above her breast, and breathed heavy gasps. "God damn," she said. "God Jesus dammit, are you real?"

"Are you?" he'd asked back.

They talked a little. They shared coffee. She kept her hand near her gun throughout, but that didn't concern him. She couldn't possibly see what he was.

"I love your lipstick," he said, after chatting about Amo and his comics, sharing their notions about how wonderful it all was and what great hope he offered. "It's so red, like blood."

"Thanks," she said. How long since she'd spoken to anyone, he wondered. How many times had she told herself the story that she was a survivor? He wondered what other false images she had, rattling inside her mind, that time would peel back like shucking free a pearl. "Designer prices are no obstacle any more."

He grinned. "I think you should put a little more on. Would you oblige?"

That confounded her. Of course it did. "More? Why?"

"I think it would look great."

Her hand closed round the grip of her pistol. It looked like Smith and Wesson, '79. A solid make. He knew them all. Just looking at it, he felt like he could jam the mechanism with his thoughts alone.

"It's in my car," she said. "I haven't got it with me."

He knew that was a lie; he'd seen her drawing on windows. "Let's go there then. We can do hair, make-up, the works."

The lovely tension broke.

"Who are you with?" she asked, eyes darting side to side. "How many?"

He grinned, showing his missing teeth from the time Cerulean beat him. He took a step closer, his usual odd shuffle, necessitated by the deformation in his shoulder. "I'm alone. I'm just a cripple on the road."

Her eyes narrowed and she backed up awkwardly against Amo's table. Odd to think that his hands had set these in place, so long ago. They made a perfect U-shaped corral.

"You're acting weird," she said, "stop it."

"All right," he said, then drew his gun and shot her in the thigh. She screamed and went down.

After that it was easy. It wasn't really torture, because he wasn't exactly a sadist. It was more a mission, the un-shucking that had to be done to get to the pearls. You didn't apologize to the meat you had to eat, nor did you torment it needlessly.

He found a chain and padlock in a maintenance room behind the lifts, and a set of cuffs and key from a dead cop lying in the lobby of a nearby building; reduced to bones and some fluffs of hair. He fetched one of the basement RVs and rigged it with the chain. He smiled, wondering what Amo would think of how he was using his supplies.

He dragged her into the RV, shouting and resisting, and chained her to the table leg, then drove north.

After Kelly were more. He gathered them all, these lost survivors, men and women, boys and girls, aged and infirm, all hot blips against his skin. He traveled the country far and wide to hunt them down.

* * *

Standing now above Cerulean's unconscious body, Julio felt the heat welling up. He'd waited for this moment for so long, and it was everything he'd hoped for.

Fulfillment.

His hatred for the man had changed over the long years since the apocalypse. Once it was a thing that seethed in his belly all day and all night like a cold sore, keeping him awake and making him sick, bringing him out in hot, frenzied sweats that only Indira could soothe away. She'd tried to scoop the fear out of him and replace it with her love, but what was her love but another insidious kind of need?

All symptoms of a disease.

He'd acted like a surgeon and cut her out, maiming himself in the process, but all that left was another hole. Digging out the bunker had filled the hole for a time, then the red angel had filled it the rest of the way, blasting the doubt out like a cleared mountaintop, gone forever.

After that the hatred was changed, becoming a thing he cherished, like a lover held close in the night, like a furnace in his heart that kept him warm above all things, brighter than the heat of New LA burning on his skin.

He kicked Cerulean in the gut three times, and his breathing went spluttery, like he was choking on something. He took him by one leg and dragged him onto a low pallet cart lying nearby. Getting his heavy torso over the cart's lip was difficult, but by contrast his skinny legs were a dream, like bird's wings, so thin and weak. He looked down on that handsome black face and smiled.

Hate was close to love, they said. They would be comrades soon. That was the real goal, not petty hatreds. He smoothed down Cerulean's shirt where his kicks had ruffled it. That was a kind of apology. He wasn't a sadist, not really, he just had a mission to complete.

He took the cart's metal handle and pulled it around to face the path of level ground he'd laid toward the bunker hole. It was knobbly and a difficult pull, but he'd dragged heavier before.

He looked at his watch. Two days, thirteen hours left. Long enough to get him all set up, then do a final round of the surrounding countryside for gray floaters. He could feel a few fresh ones tickling faintly across his left ear, coming from the coast. Deal with them, come back and let the world end a second time.

The cart reached the bunker hole. Long ago he'd sealed it up with a manhole cover, fitting a ladder for himself, a pulley and winch for his guests. He rolled Cerulean off the cart, fastened him with a harness, then opened it up.

The stench that rose up was vile and he recoiled. There was that work to do too, of course. He could hardly sit there waiting to become an angel with that sewage stink billowing around him.

He wrapped a handkerchief round his mouth and nose and steeled himself against the stink, then carefully guided Cerulean's skinny legs into the hole. The cable on the pulley grew taut as his hips slid through, and it was an easy thing to guide his muscular upper body the rest of the way. He pushed the button for the winch and it hummed and lowered Cerulean down.

Julio looked up and around a final time, at the mountains, the fields, the blue sky. Probably they were watching now, as all his efforts came to a final head. He would bring a flood like Amo had never seen before.

He started down the ladder into the dark.

22. CHAINS

Cerulean woke in the darkness with a sharp pain in his arms, shoulders and back, breathing in staccato little pants. Next came the stench, like an open sewer, and after that came the sound of other shallow pants; an orchestra of them spreading around him.

He opened his eyes. A dirty gray wall lay before him, part of a broad and tall corridor of moldy, smoke-stained cement that receded into the candlelit dimness on his left, lined with wasted bodies strung on chains.

He gasped and choked on a wet breath. There were three bodies hanging at full stretch before him and two to his side visible in the flickering gloom, all naked and thin as corpses, their pale flesh streaked with muck. The one in front of him sagged horribly on her chains, her ragged yellow hair pasted to her shoulders and face. Her shoulders seemed to be dislocated, hanging too high out of their sockets with the skin marked by long stretch lines.

He blinked and tried to rub his eyes but couldn't move his hands. He looked up and saw them chained to the wall overhead, hung from a metal pinion by cuffs and a chain. He was sagging from them, pulled down by his own weight, putting pressure on his chest and making it hard to breathe. He shifted and cold stone stung his bare back.

"Julio!" he tried to call, but his throat was constricted and barely any sound came out. He rubbed at his neck with his shoulder and felt a cold metal band clamped around it.

Panic swelled in him. He couldn't move, locked in place like he'd been so long ago in his basement bed. He began to choke and his throat convulsed against the metal collar.

Then he saw the demon.

Away to his right, only glimpsed in snatches as the foul, smoky air blew the candle flames to and fro, stood the outline of a vast figure behind a sheen of glass. It was three times the height of a man, heavily muscled with angry red skin the shade of an infected wound, and no mouth but a haunting black hole.

The panic swelled and he drowned on it, his vision dimming. This was his demon, crushing him in the coma, crushing him in life. Fluid filled his lungs and he coughed, staring at one of Anna's demons come to life.

"Stay calm," somebody whispered.

He jerked and saw a face beside him looking back. It was a boy, a teenager perhaps, with feathery black hair that looked just like Jake's. Every one of his ribs was clearly visible, like a washboard. His stomach was so sunken it hurt to look at, with protrusions where the vertebra of his spine pushed through his deflated innards. His pelvis was a sad sallow bowl with emaciated legs dangling below like pigeons' feet.

He looked like a zombie. His face was a death mask, with sunken and wrinkled eyes, lips pulled back tight from a mouth full of gumless teeth, smiling a death's head grin. "Keep calm," he whispered. "Wait for his touch. All will be well."

Cerulean thrashed against his bonds. The chains rattled and the pressure in his chest throbbed harder. He pulled at the chains, lifting his own weight so the pressure on his throat relented, but in moments his arms began to tremble and he sagged back.

He was weak; he hadn't eaten or drunk anything for days. The panic swelled up so hard it rose over him and carried him down, drowning, toward the concrete edge of the pool.

* * *

When he came to next the light was different, augmented by a hissing white halogen lamp hanging from a cable. The heavy stink in the air had cleared a little, replaced by the stark scent of winter fog.

Julio was standing before him, putting down a syringe. He looked tired, his motions slow and thick, but there was an excitement in them too.

"Welcome back, Robert," he said. "Welcome to the sanctum."

In the harsh white light the dinginess and dirt of the corridor only became clearer. The bodies were all there still, strung off to his left in varying shades of decay. Yellowish drip bags had been added to some of their chains, with tubes coiling down into their sunken noses and mouths. Fluid flowed slowly, inexorably inward. Some of them, those at the furthest reach of the halogen's staticky glow, almost looked human.

"Hey," said Julio, clicking his fingers in front of Cerulean's face and pointing to the right. "You've seen the big guy, right?"

The demon was there like a great red statue, looking strangely real in the bright white light. But it couldn't be real, not in America, not here.

Denial.

"He's the real thing," Julio said, pulling up a stool and sitting down. The floor beneath him was stained with dried stains like splashed black paint. Cerulean noticed a channel carved crudely into the edges of the corridor, where even now a thin slurry of waste was slowly curdling. "An angel, or so I'm told," Julio went on. "I know your Anna called them demons."

He tugged at his chains and they rattled weakly. He tried to lift himself on his arms but he could scarcely raise his body an inch.

"Of course you're tired," Julio said. "You've already been hanging there for two days, unconscious. I'd do things differently, with the chains, but there were issues. People were trying to cut each others' throats in the early days, when I let them move around." He frowned, brows working in deep throbs. "This one in particular," he pointed at the shriveled woman across from Cerulean. "She was the first, and she never quit, not even after he spoke to her." He shook his head. "A bad business."

"The demon," Cerulean said. His voice came out a hoarse whisper, forced past the band round his neck. "It's like Anna's. Mongolia."

Julio nodded. "Yes, I overheard that transmission. I've been spying on you for years. Who would have thought she'd almost set one free by accident? Hardly like here, is it, all of this so meticulously planned?"

"You're," Cerulean croaked, "insane."

Julio nodded. "I know it looks that way. It's a matter of perspective. Has he spoken to you yet? You are here at the head, after all, by his side, most honored of all his disciples next to me, a place I reserved for you since the start. Have you felt a cold breeze yet, a vice around your head, images of the glory to come?" He peered at Cerulean, then turned to look down the parade of his other victims.

"Anybody?" he asked. "Have we had a recent visitation?"

They hung broken and silent. Perhaps twenty or thirty, close to the population of New LA, and he'd failed them all.

"What have you done?" Cerulean whispered.

Julio ignored him, nodding as none of his prisoners replied. "He didn't come, then. He does sometimes, I think they're his dreams. He's sleeping, you know. They tamed him that much, and put a timer on his DNA or some such thing."

"Who did?"

Julio sighed. "Haven't we been through this? The people under the mountain. They can hear us speaking now, but they don't often chime in these days. They didn't want me in the beginning, for the same reason they shot your precious Matthew, but once I'd blown the bunker open they needed me. What if enough gray ones came down here and piled in front here, blocking him in? It's what their programmed to do, after all, like white blood cells in the immune system. He's strong but even he has limits. So we made a deal."

Cerulean glared.

"A good deal. They wouldn't bomb me, and I would serve their interests, cleaning up any gray ones nearby. I suggested fetching any live people down here to incubate and join the charge, and they liked that. Now you're here at my right hand, a final addition to the brigade, because I want it to be your hands that tear Anna and Amo apart. I want you to see for yourself what lies they sold you, so then you'll understand."

Tears blurred Cerulean's vision. His throat tightened in its metal band. "Understand what?"

Julio shrugged, an odd gesture given his twisted shoulder. "We're the zombies, remember? This world was never for us. These people were prepared and we were not. They put him here, timed to wake up ten years later. Today. Most of the gray ones would have long ago turned to stone in Mongolia, leaving only us and a few grays. Not enough to stop an angel."

He stopped and sighed. "I'm interpreting all this, you understand. They never told it to me so plainly, but this is the essence. I received it with a lot of mysticism mixed in, but the big guy doesn't go in for that. For him it's simple: multiply. He cleans up the last of us, and having us here will just speed things up." He pointed at the demon. "He should be waking up in a few hours. We all become angels and the final work begins."

Cerulean closed his eyes. He couldn't close his ears, but he didn't want to see Julio any more.

"We'll infect the world," Julio went on, "America, Europe, Asia. When it's done, they push a genetic button and we all die. They emerge. It's a good plan."

"It's," Cerulean whispered, but there was nothing to say. It made sense, for them. It was inhuman, but it made sense.

"They're asking for a self-sacrifice," Julio said. "That's your game, right? You've done it before. And it's a good cause, Robert. They'll do better than us. We're all so hungry and lonely inside that we'll just screw it up worse. The people in that bunker though can make things better. You think they want this grotesque shit?" He waved at the corridor. "I know it's sick and they do too. But it's the only way."

"Not the only way," Cerulean whispered.

Julio shrugged. "We're beyond debate. The show's starting soon, and the big guy's very persuasive. Time to get comfy for your rebirth."

He walked toward the demon and knelt just before him, his head craned back.

"Shit," Cerulean whispered.

He tried his chains. He shifted his neck. There wasn't a thing he could do.

He looked at the others to his left. They were gazing towards the demon, convinced already. The infection had taken root in all but body.

This was it.

All his threats and anger evaporated like warm summer rain. They didn't matter. He wouldn't kill Julio. He wouldn't protect Anna; he would kill her himself. Amo's dream would wash away and New LA would be gone, flattened like a sandcastle under the tide. Everything they'd done would be forgotten.

So he slipped into acceptance, and his defiance winked out. There was nothing left to sustain it, no hope remaining in the world. His legs hung uselessly beneath him, his arms hung chained above him, because it was over.

* * *

Hours later, the demon's touch came as a faint lapping of cold against his bare skin, like the touch of the demon of old, speaking through his dreams.

"Do you remember me, Robert?" it whispered. "I came for you once. You dove for me. Will you dive again?"

To his right, the demon's eyes flicked open, burning a dark red. Julio let out a gasp. The breeze stiffened to a wind against his bare skin.

"You see what hope brings, don't you?" the voice whispered. "You see what I bring?"

The cold wind became a gale beating at his skin, forcing liquid up into his throat. He was drowning and falling, he was breaking his back and dying, lying in bed with his mother's touch a burning curse and everything lost.

He would never dive in the Olympics. He would never love a woman or raise a child. He was the least of them all.

"You are with me now, Robert," whispered the voice. "Breathe for me, child of the water."

The glass wall before the demon clanked three deep, loud times as ancient locks released, then began to grind open like a door. The demon's body shifted forward slowly, like a creature coming out of hibernation. Julio tilted his head and raised his arms as though receiving his saviour. The red demon forced the glass door aside and stood in the dim corridor before Julio, surveying its victims.

Not a scrap of hair covered its great, muscular frame. Its skull was smooth red skin like molded putty, with features that were slight notches only: inset red eyes, a slight hill and twin slits for a nose, dark dimples for ears and that gaping round mouth like a black valve to nothing.

It knelt to take Julio's head in its great red hands, opening its black mouth wide and pressing it down across Julio's face. The freezing gale became a hurricane, which plucked Cerulean up and hurled him far, far away.

EAST

23. FREEFALL

He was standing by the Mississippi riverside, looking out over that broad body of muddy, swirling water. Thick bulrushes tickled at his elbows, while bees and other bugs hummed and buzzed nearby. A gray-skinned, white-eyed version of his old friend Zane was at his side.

"I told you," Zane said. He didn't look so handsome as he once had, with rags of skin hanging from his chin, and ears that didn't look to be on right, like a twisted mask. "The choice would come around, and you'd save the world."

Cerulean looked down. He was standing at the water's edge in mud that rose up over his bright white sneakers, sneaking icy cold water in between his toes.

"What choice is it?" he asked.

Zane smiled, unveiling a hole through the back of his throat through which Cerulean saw daylight. "The same one as always. You survived before, even when they broke your back and shoved your head under the water. That's a choice, Robert, to keep on. That has to be worth something."

He shrugged. "It's just being stubborn."

"Stubborn is a choice. We find our will where we can. Look at this."

He pointed, his dry zombie arm extended like a weathered wooden signpost, toward a red lump protruding from the water. The cold was round his ankles now. He looked down and saw dead frogs piling at his feet in tiny green pyramids. The cold was spreading into his calves now, taking away the sensation. His thighs were trembling.

Zane grinned, but now he wasn't Zane anymore, but Amo. There was a hole in the side of his head where he'd blown his brains out. His tongue waggled and his eyes were shriveled white blobs in their sockets, like old tea bags.

"You loved Anna," Amo said. "That was a choice. You protected her. As you do unto the least of these, you do also unto me."

Cerulean found he was weeping. The water was up to his knees now, and the frogs were mounding, and the red bump had risen through the water into the shape of a head. His legs trembled a final time and gave way, splashing him down into the thick mud on his knees.

"It's always hard," said Amo, but now it wasn't Amo anymore but Anna, a little five-year-old zombie standing at his side in her bright Alice in Wonderland dress. The dirty water came up to her waist. "When you can't stand you kneel, and if you can't kneel you get on your elbows and crawl. You've always understood this, Robert, what is there that's different now?"

"I can't do it," he muttered, as the river lapped over him. Control of his legs faded and he slumped from his knees to his side, held up on his arms barely above the surface. "I can't move, I can't fight. I'm not strong like Amo, I don't have any hope left to share. I'm sorry."

Her dead face twisted quizzically. "It's not about hope. Whoever told you that? Hope is easy, Robert. What kind of hope is it that dives? What kind of dive is it, that requires hope to make it work?"

He looked into her face. There were worms crawling inside her brain, through the open doors of her eyes. She gave him a pretty, corpse-gray smile.

"Then what?" he asked. "I don't have anything else to give."

She touched his cheek tenderly. "You have faith, father. Faith is blind, don't you know that by now? Every dive is an act of faith, and you wonder where Amo gets his strength from? He dived twice, and it was faith that brought him back both times."

He hung his head. The demon was almost upon him. "I don't have it now."

Anna took his chin and lifted it firmly. "You do. When you wrote the bible for Amo, did you hope he would ever read it? When you charged into the fight against three Orandelles, did you hope you would survive? No. You had faith; once in Amo, once in Zane, and now you need to have faith in yourself. There's nobody else, Robert, you're alone here, at a pivot point in our history, with all that you need. Have faith in yourself, and do what must be done."

He looked into the dark holes where her eyes should be, and let out a sob.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"You never need to apologize to me," she answered. "Not ever again, for all you're about to do. Thank you."

The icy water rose over his head and the demon reached down.

* * *

He blinked back to himself in the sweaty corridor, gasping.

Before him Julio and the demon were clutched close like lovers, conjoined at the lips with the demon hunched over Julio, holding his head like an infant's in its huge red hands. Its shoulders heaved and there was a wet roaring noise, and tiny jets of red liquid spurted out from between their lips.

Julio's body thrashed. His eyes bulged and his stomach swelled, his legs kicked and his arms flailed at the giant's huge hands, but the demon didn't budge.

Cerulean realized what it was doing.

Vomiting into Julio's throat, like a mother bird feeding its children. He gagged as the demon's shoulders hunched and the wet roar came again, making Julio's legs scrape and beat on the floor.

Then it stopped. The demon rose up, trailing mucusy red spit from its round mouth. Julio gasped and burped and sagged to the side. His eyes rolled back in his head and bloody fluid frothed down his cheek.

The demon turned toward Cerulean. Its great red hands cradled his head like a child's and he was helpless before it. Its round black mouth loomed over him and its bright red eyes glinted with a pure, burning intensity, drawing closer like a planetary body moving into eclipse.

Just past its side he glimpsed Julio shaking on the concrete. A button on his shirt burst and clicked off the wall, then one of his pant leg's ripped as his body swelled; his arms thickened with muscle, his thighs bloomed like fat eggplants, his twisted shoulder unkinked and his skin shaded a subtle red.

Then the demon was all he could see, pressed close and stinking of bile. Its fingers squeezed and forced his mouth open, breaking his jaw with a sharp and crumpling pain. Its black mouth descended and closed over his lips, clamping into his cheeks in a cutting ring.

It heaved and the regurgitation began; hot liquid filled his mouth and throat, puffing out his cheeks and swallowing madly down, more than he could take.

His body convulsed and his eyes blazed wide, his throat gagged but the flow was too strong to push back, filling his belly and lungs. More and more came until he was just a bag filling to the seams, too drunk, too full, hurting beyond the point he could endure and further still, a wet rag of flesh shuddering in the wind.

Then it stopped. The demon's wet mouth sucked away and he sagged on his chains. Dizziness struck and he burped, tasting the acrid tang of bile. He tried to gag but couldn't, spitting up phlegmy foam instead.

The thing that was Julio laughed and gurgled on the floor, dressed in torn rags and almost doubled in size, pointing a meaty red arm at him.

Bitter cold filled his head. He tried to resist, as his withered legs filled out like water balloons and his arms thickened against the metal cuffs, but the cold was too strong. Every effort he pressed against it brought the cold down harder, squashing him into the back of his own mind, watching through a dim and small window as a burning new consciousness rose from the bag of sick in his middle.

Bright feverish spots flashed across his stretching skin, sensations that this new consciousness recognized; cold dots like blips on a radar for Julio and the demon, a hot red cluster for the bodies to his left, a horde of warm bodies to the south, and far, far away to the west, a raging bonfire urging him on.

On. His shackles burst and he dropped to his knees. To his left the demon, his brother, turned another one of the hot pulses cold, and he felt a deep satisfaction. This was his purpose now. To his right another brother was rising to his feet.

Julio.

He strode by, head halfway to the ceiling already. He was a brother, but the thin sliver of Cerulean still remembered he was Julio too, who'd raped the woman he'd once loved, who'd vowed to murder his daughter, who he should have killed on the very first day they met.

That thought gave him strength, even as the new consciousness thickened inside him like concrete. Faith, Anna had said, his daughter, and he remembered her voice through a drowning fog. Faith and flight, because every dive led into the unknown.

The mind inside him swelled, and the sliver that was Cerulean climbed a ladder; past the bag of bile, above the cold concrete, all the way to the platform at the top where at the edge he slowly lowered himself into arm-stand position.

Focus came.

This was why he dived, for these moments when he lost himself in the dance between his body and his mind, in pure focus where nothing else mattered. It blocked out the blood in his past, the graveyard that was New York, Julio, the lonely hotel room he'd once shared with Anna, everything.

He bent his arms then sprung upward, flinging himself into the air; an inward arm-stand dive like no one had ever done before in the history of competitive diving, because they didn't have faith.

The cold air caught him and spun him in searing somersaults, like a bullet spiraling down a barrel to exit velocity, that shot through Amo's mind and into Matthew's heart, that made a clear and blazing line of all his suffering and love, all for this.

He straightened at the last moment, his palms crunched into the side of the pool and burst a perfect ten-point hole in the concrete which he passed clean through, tearing through the cold and back out to himself.

He jerked to consciousness in the smoky, stinking, bloody corridor, swaying on feet he hadn't used for a decade. Everything was different and a fog filled his head. The cold was still lodged in his middle, grasping to pull him back down even as it laid thick bands of muscle on his limbs.

But it was still his body, at least for now.

He saw the thick red back just ahead. Julio. He looked down to see thick, powerful thighs holding him up. He almost wept to see them. His legs were back, and he remembered how to use them.

Three strides and he seized Julio by the head, then yanked as hard as he could. His back locked in place like a perfect pivot, and Julio rose over and upward like a wet towel in an arcing judo throw, so high his legs smacked off the ceiling, then-

CRUNCH

He struck the concrete floor bodily.

A second passed, then he looked up and got back to his feet, unhurt.

"What was that?" A woman's voice rang out from above. "What the hell was that, somebody explain to me what just happened!"

Julio's eyes burned red. His mouth was halfway towards becoming a toothless black hole as his cheeks and bones sucked inward. His skin was a ruddy pink and only the faint blotches of buckshot scars on his right cheek identified him.

"I know you're in there," Cerulean growled. His voice came out muffled, altered by his shifting body and throat, but something in Julio recognized it. His brows worked thunderously.

"Cerulean?" came his voice, a thin and sibilant hiss.

Cerulean dived.

His shoulder crunched into Julio's midriff and drove him backward against the great glass door, forcing out a whuff of air. He wrapped his arms around Julio's back, hoisted him onto his shoulder, then leapt, spun and body-slammed him into the ground.

"Ugh," grunted Julio.

Blood and black bile spewed from his mouth. Cerulean rolled on top and punched him in his shifting head; once, twice, three times, great thumps of his blooming knucklebones against Julio's thick skull.

But the shrinking bones of his face didn't break. His skin didn't tear, and there was no screaming except the cries of the woman overhead. He was wasting time, and the gasp of rising panic beat at him, scarcely able to breathe as the changes backed up within him.

He roared, drowning out everything, then shifted to wrap his arms in a tight chokehold around Julio's head. He wrapped his massive legs tight around Julio's chest. He set his back and he pull.

New muscles screamed and he drove them to their limits, squeezing with his legs and straining with his arms and back. Julio patted feebly at his arms as his neck stretched.

"He's not supposed to be doing that!" the woman shouted over the sound of tearing flesh. "That's not supposed to happen."

"Aaaarggggh!"

He screamed, wrenched on Julio's sweaty jaw a final trembling time, and with a sick tearing sound ripped his head clean off. His body flopped and the neck-hole disgorged like a shaken soda can, spraying out pressurized blood and guts that coated him from head to foot in gore.

Torn apart with his bare hands, as he'd always promised.

"Oh my God," the woman said. "Can't you stop it? Stop this thing before he kills them all!"

Julio's body sagged, fluid poured from the head cradled in Cerulean's arms, and he let it drop, thumping like a bowling ball on the floor. He rose back to his feet, holding off the weight of the new consciousness for a few moments longer. There was more yet to do.

The demon had infected others; the next was still kneeling where it had dropped from its chains, smaller than him. He dropped a meaty elbow into its back and it fell flat, following with a vicious stamp on its neck that produced a massive, flattening crunch. He braced one foot on its shoulder, bent to grip its head round the jaw and face, and pulled.

The shattered neck creaked, groaned and tore free. Hot fluids blew out like a wet firecracker, splattering Cerulean's red legs and hands. It was bloody work, but he was no stranger to crawling through the mire.

He began to laugh, a strange gasping bark through his round mouth.

"Somebody please," the woman was calling, "put him down!"

The big demon was ahead still, seemingly unaware that he was killing its children. Cerulean moved to the next, kicked it in the swollen gut and locked its bowing head under his arm, squeezed until the throat popped, and wrenched.

A fountain of guts, bile and blood came out. The next was easier, and the one after that, and then he was standing alongside the red demon itself. It didn't look so tall now. It moved away from its last victim, and Cerulean swung one fist the size of a trash can lid to punch it, crushing the whole head like a swatted mosquito against the wall.

"Nooooo!" the woman shouted.

The red demon moved to the next. Cerulean darted round to block its path and shoved it in the chest. It staggered backwards over one of its burst victims, then straightened in the middle of the bloody hall.

Its burning eyes set on Cerulean, finally, and he looked into the hollow eyes of this ancient enemy. For so long he'd fought this demon. It had stolen his body, his mind, and killed everyone he ever knew.

Now it was here, made real in ways he'd never believed possible, and the anger tore through him, giving him the strength to stave off the cold a little longer. It still towered chest, shoulders and head over him, and he knew he couldn't hope to tear its head away; but then it wasn't hope he was fuelled by now, nor defiance, nor acceptance or any of those.

It was raw, rage-filled faith.

He dropped his shoulder and charged.

24. FLIGHT

It was like hitting a Humvee.

Their bodies crunched together with a ringing smack, and the red demon buckled slightly at the middle and took three steps back, but three was all. Cerulean bent far over and drove hard like a linebacker plowing through the defensive wall, but already he was slipping backward as the red demon pushed back.

One step, two, and it was just stronger than him. He screamed into the air, even as he heard the woman's voice from above.

"Yes, squash that little bastard."

Three steps, four, but that wasn't all he had to offer. After all, his strength had never been in his legs.

He skipped to the side and grasped the demon's left wrist. It ignored him, heading toward the next prisoner hanging from his chains, and Cerulean let it take one more step, pulling his arms extended fully, then with a single rowing stroke yanked it backward.

It lifted bodily into the air. For a second it flew, then hit the ground so hard the corridor shuddered.

The woman screamed. Focus filled Cerulean. This was what he should have done so long ago, to Green-O, to Julio, to any of the threats that faced him. Forgiveness was not for the weak, it was for the strong, and he'd never been strong enough to let them go.

He stamped on its head, then knelt to elbow it once in its hissing, evil face, then he seized the other arm and heaved it again, scraping down the corridor on its back. It kicked like a dog to get its feet under it, batted with its free arm, but it couldn't stop him.

There was a sound of raging applause. Cerulean couldn't be sure if it was the prisoners cheering or the crowd round the pool or the swelling of fresh cold concrete from the bile in his middle, but it spurred him on.

He kneed the demon in the face as it tried to rise, dropped a punch square between its eyes, then jerked it backward again. This was Green-O, Julio, and the demon that put him in his bed all together, plus the fear and panic that kept him there. This was all his enemies and mistakes at once.

It tugged to free its arm, pulling back, but Cerulean was stronger and merciless. He forced its arm to lock out straight, then punched one massive trash can lid fist through the elbow, breaking the joint backwards with a grisly CRUNCH.

Its black mouth opened and screamed. The woman screamed from above. Chains rattled and Cerulean yanked it again by its flopping broken arm, screaming and kicking along the blood-smeared cement. It spun and tried to swipe at him with its one good arm but Cerulean caught it, forced it to extend and lock, then punched it through the elbow too.

That scream stopped up Cerulean's hearing and almost dropped him to his knees. The cold thing inside him clawed harder and almost smothered him, but he beat it back one last time, yanked the red demon a few more yards, then stuffed it into its big glass cupboard.

It screamed, broken arms flailing and clicking as the bones realigned themselves under the skin, but it could do little other than headbutt the glass ineffectually as Cerulean bent his weight and drove the door closed. It slammed shut with a satisfying clank and for a second Cerulean leaned against it, staring at the demon inside, back in its box and butting so hard cracks shot through the glass.

No time.

"Scramble the drones!" The woman's voice was shouting from very far away. The cold bile was in his neck and rising. "Bomb the shit out of him."

He turned and ran down the corridor, and it felt like he was running into the past, back toward Zane and Green-O, to his mother and Matthew and all those billions of souls he never could have saved. This was his repayment.

The chains of the first of them, a skinny Asian with hollow cheekbones and a terrified grin, broke in his fists like a cornhusk. The man dropped and Cerulean moved to the next, breaking chains one after another. As he moved down the line the bodies grew fuller and plumper, less desiccated, more muscular. A man dropped and caught himself on his feet, wobbling unsteadily.

"Get them out!" Cerulean barked at him. It barely sounded like words to him, but the man nodded and started back toward the others. The next one, a redhead woman, caught her balance too and went to join him.

Seven more chains snapped and then he was done. He stood and swayed, looking back along the corridor as this slender rivulet of tiny people hobbled and helped each other to the ladder. The winch was running and a cluster of three rose up beside him like a yoyo.

So few. Scarcely enough to make one good wave.

The glass door at the end was grinding open, revealing something red inside, but it didn't mean much to him now. Instead he was back by the Mississippi with his best friend Zane on a wintry day, the ground covered in snow, tossing a football back and forth.

"Great spiral," Zane encouraged him, "good job."

"Go west!" Cerulean thundered at the survivors, a roar they probably couldn't understand. They quaked and wobbled and perhaps one of them said thank you. Many of them were moaning, many had to be carried as their shrunken legs no longer worked. "Warn Amo!" he shouted.

"Great catch!" Zane called again, and he grinned in the corridor, replaced by the demon running toward him now. Its arms looked healed and its great legs drove it on. Any second now.

He looked up at the little people climbing through the high hole in the ceiling. He felt them as hot, angry welts on his skin, like pinpricks of boiling oil. He waved at the last of them, a little black girl dressed in blue and white, and she waved down at him.

"Good bye, Anna," he said.

The red demon shouldered by him roughly and started to climb the ladder. He had barely the strength to hold onto its leg, but he clung there for long seconds while it kicked him in the face, slowing it down. He didn't even know why anymore, only that he had to, clinging until the cold inside broke his grip.

The demon pulled free and was gone. There were not many sounds left after that, only the fast pulse of his breath coming in and going out. He was hanging by his fingertips in a very high place, a man on the edge of the platform, a man lying on his back looking up.

The circle of sky through the round opening above was a searing, halogen white. Something fell through the gap, like dust, and landed on his face. He touched his thick red fingers to his face and felt the round mouth hole there, the slit of a nose. He brought his hand away with a speck of melting white on his bloody fingertip.

Snow.

The corridor was empty now and he was alone. A chill wind gusted over him to match the creeping ice inside, steadily taking him over. He felt the cold dot of the red demon moving away over his skin, following behind the hot burning cluster of prisoners as they sped across his chest. Perhaps they had the panel van. Perhaps they would reach Amo and warn him in time. Perhaps they would all survive, and Anna too, and all would be well.

He had faith.

There was just one thing left.

His hands found the rungs of the ladder and climbed. His legs trailed uselessly below him, already claimed by the demon inside.

He emerged above ground to a beautiful scene of white; snow was thick in the air, fogging the distant mountains and coating the churned earth with a cozy white mantle. He laughed, as the distant sound of the van's engine echoed back, followed by the crumping thud of bombs exploding.

Drones. Through the white curtains he caught glimpses of fire, but the hot cluster on his skin kept moving. They had a chance. The snow might save them. He held his hands out and let it gather starkly against the red of his palms, lying on his side in the snow, wanting to say only one thing.

"Anna, shall we build a snowman?"

She laughed and ran up to him. It was a time he'd loved, one of a thousand memories he'd cherished all through the dark times, as she grew up hurting inside and turning that hurt onto him.

"Silly," she'd said, "you can't make a snowman out of sand."

"This is not sand," he'd said, miming forming the slipping golden stuff on Muscle Beach into a ball. "It's snow, honey. Didn't you know the beaches in California are made of dried-up snow?"

She'd tilted her head to one side, so her tight braids flapped wildly, studying him through screwed-up eyes. "Dried-up snow?"

"Of course," he'd said, meeting her screwed-up eyes with his raised eyebrow, "don't you know that? When it snows in LA it melts very high up, then comes down as just the dried out grains in the middle, like seeds." He picked up a shell. "This too, it's just the hollow bone of an old snow bat that fell while he was flying to the Arctic. And look at this, here's a bit of a dried-up, frozen pterodactyl, left over from an ice age I expect."

She'd looked at him for a long moment full of doubt, and looked, and then her face split in a wide beam. She'd dropped to her knees and scooped up a big ball of dried snow and dunked it on his head.

He'd laughed. She'd laughed. It was such a happy time.

He looked down the hole into the corridor below; the gap was narrow but he could do it. It wasn't what he'd always dreamed of, it was no Empire State Building, but it would do.

He pressed a sharp edge of manacle to his neck and pressed until it broke the skin. He wasn't a demon yet, still human enough for this. He worked the metal deeper, through muscle and fiber down to bone, then wrenched it to the side, cutting his own throat. The cold leaped up sharper to refill the gaps, but he pressed on, cutting a furrow round the side of his neck, to the back and down the other side.

Blood covered his hands, but there was no pain. The twisted chain in his hands looked like an alien thing. He noosed it tight round his neck, digging into the channel he'd worn, and knotted it there, preventing the meat from growing back.

Lifting himself to arm-stand took all the focus he had left. His arms shook and heat and cold battled inside and out. He'd done this once before, when all he'd dreamed of was that Amo might survive, but now the stakes were higher. He had so much more to lose, and so much more to gain.

Ravi as a son-in-law and Anna happy with children of her own, all the people from below brought out into the light, New LA left with a fighting chance and a warning that could save the world. It was more than he could have ever asked for, filling the hole up in ways he'd never imagined possible.

He jumped.

There was no blazing somersault this time, no pike or twist, only an arrow-straight form through the hole with his arms at his sides, a suicide dive down to the ground. This was his reward, to be a hero twice over, and the concrete rushed up to meet him like it had so long ago, only now he had chosen it, and that made it all the better.

CRUNCH

He hit and his spine broke a second time, the bones shearing inside without the surrounding meat to support them, and his head pulled away from his body.

The cold couldn't reach him now. The demon couldn't hurt him any more, here at the end. All was black but for the ghostly burning blip of the survivors racing over his shoulder, with the single cold dot of the red demon following behind.

He'd won.

Anna lay down beside him. She nestled herself warm against his headless body and whispered, "Goodnight, Daddy."

Then he was gone.

* * *

In the corridor the woman's voice continued over the speakers, perhaps forgotten, perhaps no longer caring who heard what she had to say.

"I don't care how much of the reserve you have to scramble! I don't care how many missiles or drones we exhaust in the effort, that van does not get to Los Angeles to warn them, am I clear? Am I clear?"

Moments later the line crackled and went dead.

Snow fell down through the hole into the bunker, down across the giant red body of a man called Robert, heaping over him in a white pyramid that almost looked like tiny bodies interweaving, climbing one atop the other.

Snow flurried further on in thick drifts, coating the grimy floor with a pristine carpet of white and cleaning out the fog of rot, waste and suffering with fresh winter air, draining the stink like pus from an open wound. Now the splinter under the skin was gone, the pain was over and the land could heal.

Seven miles west along a winding road through a dense forest of Douglas fir, a white panel van veered over the icy, snow-capped road. Two thin men and a woman sat cramped and shivering in the front seats, peering intently into the white fog ahead as if they could somehow divine their future from it, working the steering wheel as best they could on the slippery asphalt, while broken chains clanked at their wrists and all around rang the distant, terrifying sound of explosions, echoing like avalanches through the thick rain of white. These were the woman's bombs falling from twenty thousand feet overhead; unstoppable, unpredictable, against which they were utterly defenseless.

Behind them lay a payload of groaning, moaning bodies in the back of the van, many of whom hadn't used their atrophied limbs in years, some of whom would likely die from the shock of disruption, others of whom would be crippled, and all of whom would remember the things they had endured for the rest of their lives.

Including the giant who had saved them, and the last orders he'd given.

Go west. Warn Amo.

Further back still, miles behind but running tirelessly in a perfectly straight line through the falling snow regardless of road, forest or river, its naked red skin burning and its red eyes alight, came the demon that had dreamed for eleven years of murder, thirsting only to spread its own kind across the Earth.

And the snow fell over them all, thick and white and even, on both the living and undead.

Thank you for reading The Least!

If you enjoyed it, I sincerely hope you'll consider leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Thank you!

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Newsletter

Thank you again for reading The Least, and read on for chapter one of Mr. Ruins, Book 1 in the Ruins War!

Michael John Grist.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my wife Suyoung for her constant support, my Dad Tony for encouragement, and to PJ Lea for reading the book in just two days to offer great feedback.

- Michael

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael John Grist is a British writer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years, and now lives in London, England.

He writes dark surreal science fiction and fantasy, and used to explore and photograph abandoned places in Japan, such as ruined theme parks, military bases and underground bunkers. These explores have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.

OTHER WORKS

Zombie Ocean (zombie apocalypse)

#1 The Last

#2 The Lost

#3 The Least

Ruins War (science fiction)

#1 Mr. Ruins

#2 King Ruin

#3 God of Ruin

Ignifer Cycle (fantasy)

#1 Ignifer's Rise

#2 Ignifer's War

Short fiction

The Bells of Subsidence - 9 science fiction stories

Bone Diamond - 9 weird fiction stories

Non-fiction

Into The Ruins - Adventures in Abandoned Japan

EXTRAS

Want more books by MJG?

If you enjoyed The Least,

look out for battles with the devil

in the sci-fi technothriller

Mr. Ruins.

An EXCERPT follows.

Mr. Ruins

Book 1 of the Ruins War

These vampires drink souls.

Ex-marine Ritry Goligh lost everything in the Arctic resource war- his love, his life and most of his mind. Now he leads a meaningless life of alcohol, violence and sex on the floating slums of proto-Calico.

Then he meets Mr. Ruins, a shadowy figure with an excellent hat, who offers a terrible devil's bargain: godlike power, in exchange for the souls of everyone he ever loved. Now Ritry must choose.

And the fate of all humanity hangs in the balance.

MR. RUINS (EXCERPT)

The needle enters Mei-An's eye socket smoothly, nestling beside her bright white eyeball and passing back into the brain. There I inject the engrams, a tailored combination of off-the-shelf language packs and vocational skills encapsulated in a silvery liquid.

The needle comes out and I lean back, giving her a moment to blink away the discomfort.

"How do you feel?" I ask.

"Shivery," she says. As her mouth opens I see the tattoo on her tongue, an abstract DZ pattern I recognize as the brand of Don Zachary. "It's cold, like brain freeze."

I smile. I study her. Her name is Mei-An, a sweet-looking meta-Asiat with steely resolve and black face-framing bangs to die for. Soon her brain will be in my hands. She came in to my graysmithy building an hour ago asking for the inject, for what purpose I have no idea, though it's plain she's running from something. I didn't question her. I'm Ritry Goligh, a graysmith for the gray matter of the mind, and it isn't my job to ask questions.

A silvery tear beads from her eye and I dab it away with a surgical cloth.

"Let them settle for a few moments," I say, "then we'll dive."

She nods. "He may come looking for me, afterward. I want to be honest. You'll see it in me anyway."

I shrug. Of course I know. Don Zachary is the boss of proto-Calico, and by all accounts he's a bastard. "Just try to be calm."

"I'm calm."

I leave her, exiting the spartan, gray-walled dive room to stand in the polished steel corridor with my assistant Carrolla.

Carrolla's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I think he must have had marine training, but he never fought in the skirmishes. Working here in the lawless dog-end of the skulks is his skirmish. He raises one eyebrow, and I know what he's thinking.

"She wants a dive," I say by way of explanation.

He snorts. "I heard the Don crucified the last guy who crossed him, Rit. He nailed him to the fucking tsunami wall. Does that sound like fun to you?"

I chuckle. There are no shortage of legends about the Don. "Not really, but I'm not turning her away."

"Don fucking Zachary," he mutters under his breath. "Could you not have at least charged her more?"

"It's a set rate," I say, "and a big enough haul already. It's a big dive."

He grunts, and we stand quietly for a moment, each in our thoughts. In Mei-An's brain the inject will be spreading, beginning to swamp her neurons. I speak. "I need you tight on me for this. It's a bigger inject than usual."

Carrolla nods sharply, like a marine. He's not though, I'm not anymore, the skirmishes have been over for ten long years but still we're both here, acting like it's a war. It's not a fucking war.

We go back into the dive room together. Mei-An is still sitting there, perched like a doll on the input tray of the Electro Magnetic Resonance machine; a blocky off-white oblong of hollow plastic and metal, retro-fitted and bolted to the floor. It's an ancient piece of kit the graysmith before me must have lifted off one of the commodium barges, tossed up in the last big wave;

Her thin legs dangle down its scarred and discolored side like a child's, though she must be at least twenty-eight. I have no doubt she's seen some awful shit. You have to be strong to make it in the skulks, and Don Zachary is not known as a charitable man.

I sit on the stool and look into her artificially widened eyes. "You know this is dangerous," I say. "Permanent brain damage is possible, and it gets more likely with the size of the inject. I'm good, but there's always a risk. Are you sure?"

She nods. "I'm sure. I have to do this now." I can feel the fear underlying her calm demeanor.

"Lie down on your side," I tell her.

She does. I walk around the EMR, past Carrolla at the control panel, then climb onto the tray and lie down beside her so we're face to face.

"It'll be OK," I say.

The EMR begins to thump as Carrolla fires it up. Inside electromagnets are whirring, phasing with the transponders implanted deep in my cerebellum. I can feel the tide rising. The input tray jerks into motion, and together we slide into the machine's hollow middle. Electromagnetic waves wash over us, beginning the synchronization of our thought patterns. Dimly I start to sense the outline of her mind, a hazy sphere of heat barely glimpsed through murky waters, transposed atop her face. I focus closer, striving for a resonant bridge across which I'll be able to pass into the outer reaches of her mind, then-

"Shit!"

It's Carrolla. I hear his shout tinnily through the waves, followed by a red flash splashing across my field of view, like blood in the water. Fuck. Her mental immunity is kicking in already, the Lag, reaching out to take a bite. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her mind away just to get me and the inject out.

"Her neurons and starting to crisp!" Carrolla calls faintly. "Get out of there Rit."

I'm aleady too deep to pull out though, not with the inject still lying there like bloody chum to the Lag. I have to go deeper.

"All levels are up," Carrolla calls, barely audible over the thump of the EMR. "If you're not coming out then get it calmed!"

I gaze through the layers of thought into Mei-An's eyes, big dark staring spheres, and will her to calm down. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, and it never gets any easier, or safer, but I've always survived.

The Lag snaps up at me from within her head.

"Look at me Mei-An," I say as I tune my core transponders tighter, driving for stronger resonance. "Look at my eyes, Mei-An, that's it."

She tries to nod but now she's glitching on motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky. She's terrified. I kick a leg at Carrolla to increase the cooling Cerebro-Spinal Fluid flow bathing her brain, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull those neurons really will begin to cook.

"It's OK," I tell her softly. "Mei-An, I need you to relax, can you do that?"

She attempts another nod, and for an instant I see my face reflected in the liquid sheen of her eyes. This is Ritry Goligh, only thirty seven and already my face is forming up in lines like calving Arctic ice. Fuck.

"It's going to be OK," I say, then slide my transponders' wavelength all the way down to fully match with hers.

A rush of thought-data pummels me, hard bubbles rising through the water. These are the inputs and outputs of billions of her individual brain-cells and their action potential states. I swim through them, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode. If I had a better EMR I could fix her through that, but this is proto-Calico, a floating slum built of old wreckage and flotation barrels, and I don't.

So I dive.

A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Allatanc ocean in tsunami: chemical stress levels spiking, the neuron firing rate shooting up, even the inject area for speech flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.

"Damn it Rit she's slipping," I hear Carrolla faintly from above, the voice of a ghost.

I dive through the flood and deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by neurons like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away, beyond the confines of the machine and through the ocean's crust and into the realm where my mind truly meets hers.

The Molten Core.

Lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am an invader. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.

Nearby I can see the silvery inject being attacked by the Lag, in a powerful engrammic immune reaction. The Lag here is a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through the blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows. I am the only thing that can save a good chunk of sweet Mei-An's mind.

Everything is to play for now.

My sublavic ship coalesces around me, a submarine built for diving magma in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with six layers of heat-proof, ablative brick cladding. Within its belly the crew members fire into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln. I send them to their posts throughout the ship, manning the periscope at the conning tower, setting a course for the womb-like frequencies sounding out from Mei-An's Solid Core.

The Solid Core is the utmost center of the mind. I've never entered the Solid Core of another living soul; it would be madness. I've only ever dabbled around the edges. The risks inside are far too massive, where the Lag is infinitely stronger, and the pathways are an unquantifiably complex maze. I'm not even sure I could get in if I tried.

But I don't need to. I only need to get close.

The engine-screw churns the ship inward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava ahead, popping over the sublavic ship's prow, leaving behind frazzled hints of who this girl is and was. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum-piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don.

The Lag snaps up at me with ravenous meat-jaws from the magma, and I launch a few sacrificial memories as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the blue-tarp park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me- Arclo-berry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a worm, ever hungry.

My sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I sight the radiant outer edge of what I'm looking for through the sonar, embodied as liquid sound. It is waves pulsing through the magma with a steady
thump thump, thump thump
that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture: her mother's pulse.

The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in a baby's brain. Though all other sound is also heard dimly across the mother's belly wall, muted and simplified, it's the pulse that sounds the loudest for that forming seed in its budding sac.

thump thump

The pulse is goddess, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like it was soft clay, shaping it in its own image and instilling it with a unique engrammic immunity. It is the foundation all minds are built upon, locked away in the Solid Core at the heart of the mind, and I can use it, but I don't need to break into Mei-An's Solid Core to get it. I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg.

Tuning forks winch out of the sublavic ship's sides, punching through the brick cladding, to store this invaluable pattern. The forks melt in moments, but the pattern is captured. I turn the ship around and unleash the sound outward through the ocean of lava-thought, amplifying it massively. The Lag is soothed at once by this gentle lullaby memory of the womb. I drag the sound away from the Solid Core with me, causing Mei-An's mind to bathe itself with the right kind of Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, tinged with harmonics too complex to fake.

It works. I feel her chemical stress levels calming through the flow of lava. Her brain-rate is settling down, so I pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my sublavic's bridge. More thoughts bubble up across the periscope; glimpses of her latter days in the company of the Don's son, an abusive shit who beats the will out of her, but calmer now, as the panic spike of her immune rejection stills beneath the smoothing pulse.

thump thump, thump thump

The Lag has been quieted, but it's still out there tracking me sleepily through the lava. The job is not over. If I don't do something, it will still eventually scrub the language engram-inject completely, so I head to zone where Carrolla first injected the Afri-Jarvanese engram, in the crevice between the tail end of the optic nerve and the auditory zone. There I massage the pulse around the engram's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells lining the language dump and pets the Lag on its head like a trusty old dog.

I metaphorically sigh with relief.

"Can I have my Arcloberry back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the Cerebro-Spinal Fluid. I remember the memory because I only gave the content not the frame, so I remember that it happened and that it's now missing, but not any detail or emotional connection. The Lag is mute on its refund policy.

"My walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."

It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?

Dammit. I pull outward, and my body and the sublavic ship merge back into one as my thoughts suck free of Mei-An's mind. I rush up the tunnel of data and figures as my consciousness disengages, then I'm out again and panting hard in the decelerating thump thump of the EMR machine, back in the graysmithy room.

I'm leaning over her now, looking down on her dark eyes staring back at me. I notice I've drooled on her face. Oh man, that looks bad. I hastily rub it off, my arm a bit jerky as the gears of my brain slot back into sync. She doesn't notice, she's totally out. Then the tray engages, and we're sliding out of the quieting machine together, into the filtered gray light of the dive-room. It's gray for just this moment, to not provide any disconcerting stimulus to a disoriented brain.

"Strong work Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.

It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this, and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.

I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.

"Fine work, really excellent," he's still saying, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"

I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray, to sit up with my back away from the girl. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.

"Not bad," I say. My tongue feels thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me hold it up while I take a sip. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"

He frowns. "What, you gave up the juice? Hell no, Rit, that didn't come cheap. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"

I shrug. "It came to mind."

He laughs. "Well shit. Still, I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the skulk-end, some new seed-blend. Sound good? Yes sir. Let's get you to recovery."

"I'm fine."

"Of course, I'm fine also, now move it."

Carrolla is always effervescent, even when he's blackout drunk. Perhaps this is part of why I find him cheering, though most people want to punch him after a few minutes. He can get very loud. Either punch him or sleep with him, actually, he gets his share of both.

Together we hoist my body up off the bench, and I can mostly walk on my own, so he mostly lets me, assisting only when I sway. We trudge like that together out of the gray dive-bay, and he's saying something about the girl, Mei-An, and Don Zachary. A warning maybe. I barely listen. Down the polished steel-floored corridor we go, to the end of the smithy building, and the glass-walled outlook space. Here there's a massage chair with a Cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Allatanc waves, off the edge of our floating barge, skulk 47.

I let him settle me down in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Allatanc spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice and life. There's nothing left now, not since we blew it all up in our hunt for hydrate resources deep underwater, in the Arctic skirmishes. This is the world we've made for ourselves.

"Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, as he guides my head into the bath-spot. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "Settle in and you'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."

"Arcloberry," I mumble, in place of what I meant to say which was perhaps some kind of joke.

He nods and repeats the word but I don't hear it, as the world fades back and the sonic bath takes hold with a medley of music I've reacted well to in the past. Underneath the beat it attempts to mimic the sound of a mother's pulse, automatically reverting the body back to the same womb-like state of recovery and growth I put Mei-An into.

It's a poor facsimile for most, and works even less for me, since I never had a mother, and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an external machine womb, but still, I like the music. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the mental re-jigging a graysmith provides, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. She was pretty, and real.

I drift off thinking of Mei-An and the blunt-nosed face of Don Zachary, completely unaware of how goddamn awful he's going to make my life, any moment now.

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Copyright © 2015 by Michael John Grist

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Cover art by Francisco Ruiz Nunez.

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Table of Contents

GREEN-O

FRAYSER

THE DIVE

DEMON

DEEPCRAFT

APOCALYPSE

AMO

WHEELS

NEW YORK

TIMES SQUARE

MATTHEW

RV

MASAKO

SURVIVORS

CAIRNS

WEST

SETTLING IN

JULIO

TEN YEARS LATER

INTERLUDE 1

VAN

INTERLUDE 2

MAINE

INTERLUDE 3

CHAINS

FREEFALL

FLIGHT

Acknowledgements

About the Author

EXTRAS

Mr. Ruins (excerpt)