The List (Zombie Ocean Book 5) (34 page)

In two days, the next demon came. They lured it underground with the signal of their own bodies, all standing as bait behind a corridor mined with the ocean. There they trapped it, locked in position by some five hundred. Peters said the next one was three days away, and they went straight back to work.

Anna worked by his side, as the nerve damage to her back healed. They hobbled together about the corridors crowded with gray bodies, as once she'd walked with Amo in his home, and talked about genomic patterns and hydrogen line triggers, about potential base pairs that might build up to a cure. He outlined the full scope of his research and theories to her, delving into ever-increasing depth on mitochondrial building clocks and telomerase reset counts, genetic strand drift and bacteriophagic regeneration, and she swallowed up even the most challenging ideas.

She was a sponge for new knowledge. At times it took him by surprise, when he found himself looking into her eyes, that she was only sixteen. She shouldn't even have finished high school, yet here she was conversing meaningfully about PhD-level genetics that would have confounded even many of his peers back at Carnegie-Mellon.

At times he thought about what she'd been through, from such a young age until now, and it always left him reeling. It was a wonder the stress of so much loss, coupled with so much guilt, hadn't broken her mind apart. Rather, it had made her into this a wonderful, bright young woman with so much potential ahead.

Five days after the bunker fell, they found one of his people.

It was Catherine, a botanist from deck two-minus, who he'd first met ten years ago in their first rotation through Lars Mecklarin's shuffling program of zones and working teams. They'd drunk together in a bar and she'd actually propositioned him to go back to her room, and he'd almost gone.

Back then he'd always been uncertain. He hadn't known what he was, and he'd learnt to hide it so well that even that genius Mecklarin hadn't dug it out. But now he knew. Ten years in a contained environment with three thousand others showed him a truth he hadn't been able to ignore.

He was what he was. It was a lesson everyone faced at some point, and once he'd faced it it gave him strength; strength that allowed him to fight back against Salle Coram. Under her laws on future reproduction he was just a wasted resource, due for execution, so he had sought to change those laws, by bending reality to a kinder, more generous shape. That Farsan had joined his movement, and become his closest friend and confidant in the doing, became both his greatest delight and greatest torment.

But he did not find Farsan, he found Catherine.

Looking into her lost white eyes, which looked back through him as if he was not there, he felt all the old emotion well up. He missed Farsan. If only he could hear his soft voice again, or feel his kind, supportive touch on his elbow. Such small things were all he dreamed of.

But he was not there, and Catherine was, so he embraced her, and promised her he would bring her back. Now it was Anna's touch on his back that brought support, and her voice in his ear that offered quiet reassurance. So things changed.

Together they rounded up fresh laboratory equipment, and they took samples, and so commenced the long, slow process of elimination that his research would entail. Catherine's cells were different in very slight, subtly altered ways. The T4 was there, but expressed in a muted fashion, tickling its cell walls in minor deviations from the cells of other subjects.

It was a starting point. He had his notes, salvaged from Maine, that detailed precisely what cocktail of serums he had given to Catherine over the years, until she'd stopped participating five iterations earlier. They recreated the full range of serums until that point and began tests on other subjects, administering different combinations of serums in different orders. In some cases they caused a similar 'muting' in the T4, in others nothing. They gathered more data and scheduled more experimental variations.

There were endless variables. Perhaps the cure required certain environmental factors in place, like the precise harmonics of the Maine shield in the four-minus bar he'd taken it in. Perhaps it required the full range of all fifteen experimental serums he'd taken himself, injected in the precise order he'd taken them, with the precise same delays he'd allowed. Perhaps it was about something he'd eaten that day. Perhaps it was a reaction with a vaccination he'd taken as a child, leaving tiny strains of mumps, rubella, polio in his system that had somehow conjoined with the serum to defeat the T4. Perhaps it was something in his genetics, or something in the air, or somehow connected to what he'd been thinking as the serum went in.

It was an insurmountable task; a billion points of data, but there was only one way to unravel it, and he had nothing but time on his hands.  

Weeks passed. Demons came and were locked away in the corridor pockets assigned to them like balls on a pool table, but that became a background event. He wasn't needed as bait; his body didn't draw the demons anyway, so he worked throughout. Somewhere far away seven were captured, then ten, then fourteen, with always more coming, gravitating to them like the tides rising to meet the moon.

In time Jake joined them, working alongside Anna to learn what he could, while also teaching what he had learned about the electronic components of the hydrogen line emitters, the control block and the suits. He'd back-engineered several of the suits, investigated the override controller, and his finding brought a vast new array of data that had to be explored, understood and synthesized into the calculations. For days on end Lucas barely looked up from his work, but when he did, it was to see Jake.

Jake was slim and fey, with his floppy hair and that scar on his skull, signaling such a deep, abiding hurt. He'd fallen from the sky and been forever damaged, just another casualty in the wake of this new world, like Peters, like Anna, like him. He was gentle and sometimes made silly quips about what the T4 was thinking or feeling, whether it would like some beer or a haircut. His smile was secret, and soon every time he showed it to Lucas a thrill went through him.

He wasn't Farsan. He wasn't like Farsan, except for his kindness and the obvious loyalty he showed to those he cared for, like Anna. He wasn't Farsan, and despite the guilt Lucas felt from looking at him, and enjoying his voice, he couldn't help himself from starting to feel something new.

He looked up from his work more. They began to eat together, usually sandwiches Jake brought down from above, and together talked about the old world and all the things they missed. Lucas was older by a few years, more highly educated and from a different, academic world, but that didn't matter. The pangs in Lucas' chest grew stronger, until he couldn't work through them anymore.

They kissed first on a long walk through the vineyards, the night after finding a third Maine subject. It was evening and a lush fog from sweet, fermenting grapes rose up around them like a drunken haze. The sky was purple with the North Star just peeking above the horizon, and Jake kissed him.

Lucas pulled away at first, startled, then when he saw the look of hope and yearning on Jake's face he understood.

They were the same; the same kind of men, the same kind of outcasts, the same kind of brave. Jake was not Farsan but that was all right, he was Jake, and that made Lucas happy. Perhaps they too would have a white picket fence some day, and a garden and a dog, and maybe they would care for children or even have their own. He was a geneticist, after all, and finding a surrogate would not be hard.

They kissed and the world turned and a new page in Lucas' life turned over.

* * *

Anna led them to the next bunker over, on the edge of the Alps mountains, just south of the little town of Gap. The air was crisp and biting and all the streets were lined with flint cobbles laid perhaps two hundred years ago.

There was a quaint little post office in town, and a boulangerie, and a tailor's and a cozy bank. They rolled through quietly, on their way to elsewhere, leaving the ghosts of that silent place still asleep, as though at any moment the church bell would ring for service and all the windows and doors would open and a flood of little people would come streaming out, like clockwork figures in a child's wind-up toy.

They climbed into the mountains, winding up narrow roads cracked with neglect, until they came across the gun turret. It stood on its block at the head of a steep and rocky valley, shouldered to either side by bluish-gray mountains ascending to snowy-capped peaks. A carpet of the dead lay before it like a melt water flow; most likely the silent citizens of Gap.

They approached in three triple-reinforced Humvees, and took out the autocannons at a long distance using small rotor drones that delivered explosive packages from above. No missiles or bombs were launched against them, as Feargal had been busy too, analyzing and scouting the hangars where the bunker's drones were housed and deactivating their mechanisms.

They didn't attempt to dig or blow open the chute. Rather they salvaged the cameras from the drones and transmitted their new 'cairn' down below, spread across hundreds of heavily detailed boards, led by the simplest message they had to offer.

We almost have the cure.

"Open sourcing," Lucas had told Anna, when he'd realized the simple elegance of such a path. "I can do this, though it will take me years. But with a community of thousands working through the permutations, all of them geniuses stowed against a later day when the Earth would need them? The Earth needs them now. We can reach that point sooner together. We can reach the cure in months, perhaps."

So they put together a new cairn for a new age, composed of hundreds of images and tens of thousands of words of research; from highly complex genetic strings and their hydrogen line 'handshakes' to full research data on the five subjects from the Maine bunker they'd managed to recover, along with complete medical histories from the MARS3000 files, full experimental data on every variation they'd attempted on the fifteen versions of the serum, and anything else they could think of.

Everything they had, they shared. They ran through the boards multiple times using multiple cameras, to be certain the people below saw it all. They listed detailed suggestions for how the research might be further pursued as part of a strategic plan across all the other bunkers, and how together they might achieve a full cure within a year.

They gave it all, then they waited for a response, camped out around the motionless gun turret. They built a campfire with dead wood from nearby rugged cypress trees, and sat around it as it grew cool and evening phased into night. They lay on deckchairs around the crackling flames and talked about the future and the past, reminiscing about New LA, and Ollie, and all the people they missed back home.

Lucas listened, mostly. There wasn't much he missed back there, though Anna plainly longed for Ravi. She was pulling away from their research together a little more every day, spending more time working on her Pilatus, preparing it for a return flight. Wanda longed for her boyfriend Jonathon, a baker, and said as much every time she voiced a desire for fresh croissants. They had video contact, of course, but it wasn't the same. They wanted to be there, back home.

Amo and Lucas had started to speak, soon making it a daily habit. Lucas updated him on his progress along new research paths, while Amo talked about how the Council were sharing out the expanding governmental functions of New LA. They often talked about Lars Mecklarin and Salle Coram, and always Amo ended up asking questions about the people of the MARS3000 Habitat. He knew them all now, from Lars Mecklarin's files, but he wanted more, and Lucas filled out his knowledge with real life anecdotes.

Martine the third-level engineer had often made a pig's grunting sound while she stood in line at the canteen. Lucas had never really spoken to her, but he'd heard her grunting from afar, making her friends laugh and groan by turns. It was a splash of color on a dry resumé. Saeed was a medical doctor from corridor Ohio, and his bedside manner included humming snatches of Bruce Springsteen songs. Lucas had heard him once at karaoke in a three-minus bar crooning a haunting take on 'Streets of Philadelphia'. Farsan was an immigrant, come from Iran as a child, and Lucas' best friend. They had played chess together in their heads, but often lost track of the virtual board and ended up in long discussions where they argued about who might have won, trying to retro-engineer the positions of the pieces.

"It sounds boring, but it was much more than that," Lucas said gently, as they chatted quietly by the crackling fire beneath the disabled gun turret. Somewhere nearby Anna announced they had s'mores.

"You loved him," Amo said.

Amo's face on the video transmission was sincere and honest, as it always was, and Lucas smiled. Lars Mecklarin hadn't noticed it, even Farsan hadn't seen it, but Amo had.

"Yes," Lucas said.

"But you haven't found him."

Lucas didn't trust himself to speak. Instead he shook his head.

"You will," Amo said. "Your cure will one day open up Bordeaux again, I know it. The world is coming together, Lucas, and it's thanks to you. We all owe you so much."

"I owe it to you, for listening."

Amo shook his head. There'd been a silent understanding between the two of them for weeks now, with the true cause of the Maine bunker's death unspoken. Perhaps now was the time. "Anna told you what we did. You don't owe us a thing."

"I forgave her. I forgive you too. You only did what you felt you had to."

Amo smiled sadly. "You can't forgive me for that. I value the offer and the words, Lucas, more than you know, but I don't deserve it, and you can't speak for the dead. I am so sorry, to you and to Farsan and to them all, but for what I did there can be no forgiveness."

Lucas didn't know what to say.

Jake came over and held out a s'more on a plate. The marshmallow was a delicious, crispy black.

"Hello, Jake," Amo said, shifting the mood.