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 34
th
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?