Read Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Online

Authors: Michael John Grist

Tags: #Zombie Apocalypse

Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least (6 page)

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.

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