The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4)
Read The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) Online
Authors: Michael John Grist
THE LOSS (ZOMBIE OCEAN 4)
Ten years after the zombie apocalypse destroyed civilization, 'Last Mayor of America' Amo faces the
loss
of everything he's built.
He wants to be a good man. He wants to save his people. But what is good, and who are his people any more?
He will save or break the world.
'The Stand' meets the zombie apocalypse, packed with gore, twists and severe moral hazard.
ZOMBIE OCEAN SERIES
The Loss (Book 4)
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For SY.
CONTENTS
PRESENT
2.
PETERS
3.
CERULEAN
PAST
5.
MAINE
6.
TRUST
FUTURE
8.
PREP
FLIGHT
9.
RACE
10.
DRIVE
11.
HIT
12.
FORGIVENESS
13.
VOTE
14.
FIRST MAYOR
15.
OUR LAND
EAST
16.
THE OCEAN
17.
LARA
18.
BUNKER
19.
SALLE
20.
COMMAND
21.
HOME
PRESENT
INTERLUDE 1
Salle Coram woke at 5am to the shrill blare of her alarm. The room was pitch black but for the small green light of her walkie charging on the side table. No light came from under the door, because all the corridors were dark these days. No light crept in through the window, because of course there were no windows in an underground bunker.
She hit the snooze button; happy they still had those, and lay motionless, luxuriating in this moment. This was about all she had, these days. A few minutes between 5am and whenever they called over with the crossover request, and her next 18-hour shift could begin.
5:05? 5:06?
She closed her eyes and tried not to think of what lay ahead. She wouldn't have slept at all, except this was going to be a long, long day, the most important day yet, and she needed to be on top form for it all.
D-day.
Her walkie rang. It too was a shrill blare, befitting her shrill life and the shrill persona she showed to everyone. She didn't need to hear the voice to know who it was, as she had all the night watches memorized. She knew at just about any moment the whereabouts of every soul under her care, wherever they were in the Habitat or Command, moving in perfect, clockwork synchrony.
This was Joseph, her second in command. Before the infection he'd been a mid-level clerk on the Judge Advocate General's legal team, bringing down corrupt officers and generals. He had no family to speak of, no addictions, no genetic disease, and his psych profile showed a strong tendency toward authoritarianism. Of course they'd selected for all of that, as a means of survival in the Command bunker. When you were locked in a featureless tin can underground for ten years, a little respect for authority went a long way.
"Joseph," she said, answering the phone with the shrillest version of her once Valley girl-ish Texan accent. "Report."
"Yes, sir," he answered sharply, like he was saluting down the line. "There's been little movement. The primary shows no signs of waking early and our agent's been asleep since around 11. The hallway are quiet, and the new one's still unconscious from whatever drug the agent put in him."
Salle breathed a quiet sigh of relief. The primary was her major concern, and its genetics were set with a perfect nuclear clock. The readout on her walkie had the countdown, as set over ten years ago, when Lars Mecklarin and his brilliant dream saw them all stowed down below.
Lars was dead now, of course. Lots of people died when the revolution rose from the Habitat.
"Good," she told Joseph, "I'll be there in five."
"Yes, sir." The salute was there in his tone again. Had she slept with Joseph? She couldn't remember, though the rest of his personnel file came back to her with crystal precision. The days after the revolution though, as she overthrew one flawed dictatorship for another, were an orgy of blood, liquor and sex.
She rolled off her single mattress onto the cold cement floor, poured 11 years ago, and hit the switch on the wall with a practiced motion. A flickering white light filled the boxy room, leaving no sad little detail alone: a few old photographs tacked to a shelf with three old fantasy books on it, a compass her father had given her, a Swiss Army penknife. Beneath the shelf a schedule was pinned to the wall, seven years old and pre-dating her occupancy, which she hadn't had the heart to remove. All of this was only temporary, after all.
The room was dirty white and empty other than these few mementos, carried with her in a tiny rucksack from the helicopter and into the Habitat ten years past. They'd been stricter than any airline regarding carry-on luggage, and back then such things had seemed important.
She brushed her teeth at the sterile sink and pulled on her smartly pressed navy blue uniform, boasting military stripes of rank on her left breast. She slipped on a pair of low black heels and looked at herself in the mirror.
37-year-old Salle Coram, the same age as Amo, Last Mayor of America. What different worlds they'd come to manage. She looked at her face; beautiful still, though it was a hollow and pale beauty now, more like a zombie than a flesh and blood Texan girl. Her curly blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and her cheekbones jutted out proudly like chins. Her once deep blue eyes had gone watery with all the harsh white light; even these bulbs with their ultraviolet rays couldn't do much to replace the sun.
She was ready for the world to begin again.
The control room was next to her quarters; ten steps down a freezing cement corridor with a few lights trying to blink to life as she passed, then she was through the unimpressive door and striding down the center aisle.
"Commander on deck!" Joseph shouted, and the space instantly spiked with salutes. Her 'deck' was a smaller, sadder version of a NASA flight control room, dimly lit with black walls and a low black ceiling designed to improve focus. A big display, torn in the corner, dominated the far wall like a movie screen, with three rows of desks and chairs arrayed before it, stocked with half of her analysts.
"At ease," she said, and the room relaxed a little, though there was no denying the low buzz of excitement. Quiet voices returned to quiet conversation, fingers danced over keyboards. If it went well today, everything was finally going to change.
"Show me the hallway," she said.
"Yes, sir," Joseph barked and brought it up. Twin images resolved in a familiar split screen, and Salle took up position at her standing desk before it.
The image to the left came from a pinhead camera positioned in the ceiling above the primary's head, one of ten in a parallel array. It showed a familiar misery: emaciated bodies chained to filthy walls, hanging by their wrists, some of them sporting nasal tubes for forced feeding. The empty stretch of wall near to the camera, which their agent had been keeping free since the beginning, was filled now with the black paraplegic.
Cerulean, Amo's people called him. He'd been an Olympic diver once. The agent had insisted on collecting him and she hadn't argued, though it saddened her to see this proud, beautiful man chained up like a slave.
The others were there as ever; 24 survivors of the apocalypse, gathered over the years, imprisoned and kept alive for today. At first it had made her sick to watch the agent prod and poke them when he was bored, just to hear them cry out. He didn't rape them too often, but that was only because they quickly grew so repellent; their limbs thinning and their spirits breaking under the constant flow of the primary's influence.
Now it just made her sad.
The image on the right showed the primary in all its glory; the demon that put the D into D-day. It was bright red, powerfully muscled and massive, standing within a glass enclosure at the head of the corridor like the star attraction at a waxworks. It had no ears or nose to speak of, only holes cut into the smooth red oval of its head. Its mouth hung open in sleep, a black and terrifying hole. No sexual organs lay between its legs, only smooth red flesh.