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 43
rd
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.