The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (15 page)

"A demon is coming," I tell them flatly. "Perhaps two if we include Cerulean, sent by a bunker in Maine that has access to drones and missiles." I pause a moment to let this sink in. "I doubt conventional weapons can hurt them. Anna, you shot the one in Mongolia didn't you?"

She nods, adapting to the briefing style. "Bullets barely slowed it down. I'm confident the RPG didn't kill it either."

I remember her story of shooting the demon while it was inside a great pyramid of fossilized zombie bodies. The pyramid collapsed on itself and the demon was halted.

"Because of the cold feeling?"

She nods. "It continued even after I blew it up. It didn't go away until I was miles to the west."

I look at Peters. "Cerulean killed a few of them, you said. He couldn't kill the original?"

He gives a little shake of his head. "He tried. He broke its arms but he couldn't pull its head off."

"And you felt the cold all the way back here?"

"Yes, chasing after us. I feel it even now."

Alarm washes through the group in widened eyes, shuffling bodies and a gasp from Jake.

"Not near," Peters adds. "Not so near, but getting closer. I feel him on my skin. I feel you too. It's how Julio hunted us all down."

I nod. Interesting. "Can you explain?"

"It's a kind of radar," he says. "After I was in the hallway with the demon I started to feel him, like a piece of ice touching my skin. I can feel you too, you're warm dots, and the zombies are warm too, but different. I don't know why it works, but I'm sure Julio had it too. It's how he hunted so many survivors down."

"That's our early warning system," I say, "it should give us some lead time."

Peters nods. I go on. "Though I don't think we can feasibly outrun them. Not in the long-term, not with every leftover zombie or survivor they find as fodder. I estimate we have a day, maybe two before they arrive. Peters?" He nods. "We should aim to be completely gone from here by this time tomorrow, all of us together, but where we go and what we do when we arrive, I haven't decided. There's just one thing I know."

I stop and look around this small gathering, into each person's eyes as if defying them to challenge me. They look back, probably waiting to hear my genius plan, whatever it is I went off alone to formulate. Wouldn't they laugh if they knew I went to a cupboard to play video games, reminisce and cry.

"After we deal with the demons, we go to the bunker. We do what I should have done ten years ago."

I don't say it explicitly, either because I don't believe it or I just can't face it, but they know. Kill them all.

A silence descends and I wade into it. "Now we have two hours to figure out how." I pick up a red whiteboard marker and unclip the lid. "Thoughts?"

* * *

Within thirty minutes the board is a mass of brainstormed ideas. In one corner is the 'nuclear bomb' suggestion, now thoroughly crossed out after Sulman suggested it and Feargal shot it down, because we don't have a hope of putting that kind of weaponry together in our lifetimes, let alone in the next 24 hours.

Beneath it is the 'escape' contingent, as brought up by Jake; ready an ocean liner and circle the world endlessly until the demon winds down, if it ever does.

"It was there for ten years," Peters argues quietly, pale but persistent. "No food, no water, nothing, and it never changed. I think it could outlast us all."

Anna seconds him. "Mine was buried in a pile of zombies for ten years, but as soon as I dug him halfway out he came for me. He didn't look weak."

"Plus where can we get a functional liner together at such short notice?" Witzgenstein asks. "The engines will be shot."

Witzgenstein has proven herself time and again to be a steady head on a solid pair of shoulders. She's slight, wispy almost, but her brain is incredibly thorough with detail. She was the one who sorted out our plumbing mess, with the simple solution of erecting our own water tower to provide water pressure, and plumbing the existing pipes into it. Her days as county clerk, dealing with policy at the practical level, have really helped us out.

We don't get on. She doesn't like the broad sweep of my ideas, doesn't like that we're all gathered here so closely together, doesn't like my politics or my general lack of religion, but she's smart and I'm glad to have her in the room.

I cross a line through the ocean liner idea.

"What if we drive round in circles forever?" Jake suggests. "We become itinerant, like the Native Americans were. Peters said it, he can detect where they are at all times, so we can evade them. We can have homes in multiple cities and move between them."

"No good," I say. "That demon will multiply every time he finds another survivor, and at some point early warning won't matter. They'll come at us from all sides."

I cross it out.

There are more suggestions to attack, with Feargal describing an assault of the biggest munitions we've stocked, perhaps using the tank Julio fetched years ago, but none of us is trained in using distance artillery, and none of us really believes that'll do it.

"Bombs fell from above," Peters says. "when we were running. All around us, sent by the woman's drones. They may have hit him already but it didn't stop him. He's stronger than that."

I cross it out.

We discuss erecting walls for a short time, but come down on the conclusion that given his size and strength and the fact he might have friends by then, they'd eventually knock them down. Sulman theorizes about a virus he might be able to design to take out the T4, perhaps even some kind of radiation, but that is about as far away from reality as going nuclear.

"If it could be done, wouldn't they have done it already?" Anna counters. "Whoever's in that bunker, they surely have more expertise than us."

I cross it out.

"Jets," Feargal offers enthusiastically. "Our own drones. We bomb this demon back to the stone age."

Anna frowns at him. "You have a Yangtze delivery drone. How long did that take to get ready?"

He shrugs. "Over a day to assemble and wire. It could drop books on its head."

Nobody laughs.

Jake suggests an avalanche. If we could lure the demon up into the mountains then trigger a massive flood of snow, maybe we could trap him in it. Other ideas flurry forward quickly after that, all variations on the avalanche; like filling a swimming pool with quick-drying cement and luring it into that, or a lake of oil which we set on fire, or a crater filled with TNT which we blow.

"And the back-up is?" I ask for each one. "If it doesn't work, or we can't trap him sufficiently, or he's just too smart to fall for it?"

It always comes down to running. Run again, go in circles, try another plan. How do you kill an unkillable thing? You can't.

At last Lara speaks up. She's been quiet the whole time, listening. "I don't think the zombie piles work like that," she says, and we all turn to her. "Like an avalanche or any of these other ideas. It's not just the mass of their bodies that holds the demons still, it's something else. Peters, you said you felt the zombies as hot blips, people as hotter blips, and the demon as cold."

"I do. I feel you all now."

She looks at me. "I think it's the signal. Think back to the first infection, you and me in New York. It spread in hours around the world, but how was that possible? No germ can spread that fast."

I consider. We'd talked about this endlessly in the early days, more again recently with Anna's demon and the discovery of the T4 cell within us all. "I'm with you so far."

"Peters can feel that signal still, like radar on his skin. It's why the people in the bunker want to kill us, because with us up here they can never come out."

I don't know if this is new to the others. Many nod.

"They need to get rid of us," Lara explains, "because they're not immune and we're constantly transmitting. To them we're the zombies, and just being near us is enough to be infected. It means we're all still giving off a signal that we can't stop. If we could mask the signal somehow it would help, but even the people in that bunker couldn't figure that out."

I frown. "I don't follow."

She stands up, goes to the whiteboard and plucks up a blue pen. I stand aside. Quickly she sketches the gun turret and concrete box from Maine, familiar to me but perhaps not to the others.

"They built this thing in Maine to kill zombies. If they had the means to repel them, or even to mask their own signal, why wouldn't they do that instead of use bullets?"

"They would," Feargal chimes in. "Camouflage is always better than conflict. With the gun there's all kinds of risks, including mechanical failure, misfires. Camouflage is passive, and it wouldn't draw others in."

Lara points at him. "So they don't have that technology. We certainly can't get it by tomorrow. So we have to use a means we all understand, one we've lived with for years. We have to go old school."

We all look at her blankly. She smiles. "We use the zombies."

8. PREP

Lara's explanation takes more diagrams and a lot more discussion.

"The zombies are hot," she starts off. "The demons are cold. It makes sense they'd cross each other out, like magnets. I believe that's what makes them stop, not the weight of bodies but the huge amount of counteracting signal."

"We'll need thousands," Anna chimes in. "The piles I saw in Asia were huge, and we've hardly got any zombies left now. The ones out there have all turned to stone, and here we're lucky to see the odd straggler once a month. But I know where we can find them."

I see it now too, putting the pieces together. It's perfect, a kind of karma for my good behavior ten years ago that could pay off now by saving us all.

"The Yankee Stadium horde," Lara explains. "We all remember that from the comic, yes? Amo rounded up as many as he could find around New York and led them into the stadium instead of killing them. We always meant to go release them, but for some reason we didn't. I suppose this reason is it."

For the first time since Cerulean disappeared I feel a ray of hope.

"There were more than thousands," I say. "Tens of thousands, probably. Enough to crush even two demons."

Lara grins. "And Anna set them free. That was maybe ten days ago?"

Anna nods. "I led them across the George Washington Bridge and into Pennsylvania. The line stretched back for half a day, and they just kept on going like a train."

"Good," says Lara. "Now I'm assuming they continued west after that, following the prerogative to charge up on us, probably, like their fellows, then roam into the Pacific. We might expect them to stay reasonably bunched together, in one large horde, moving steadily across the country. Have we got a-?"

Before she can finish the question I've brought up a map of the United States on the PowerPoint. Jake hops up to lower the lights and Lara uncaps a black pen for better contrast.

"They started here," she says, drawing a circle around New York, "and they've been heading due west for about ten days. They walk all day and all night, Anna you're probably the expert on this, how far do you think they could've made?"

Anna coughs to clear her throat. "Well, when I walked with my father's horde, it took I think two months to walk from Minneapolis to LA. I was only alone after that for about a month, then I met Cerulean outside Denver. Minneapolis to LA is about two thousand miles, by 60 days? That averages to something like thirty miles a day, walking day and night."

Lara scribbles notes in the margins of the map. "Ten days means three hundred miles." She looks at the map's key in the corner and makes a rough estimate, then draws out a line extending west from New York. "Right now they're probably somewhere toward the edge of Pennsylvania, just east of Pittsburgh."

We all stare at the map. It's strange to think of the zombie horde somewhere out there like a thing that can be predicted, slowly combing across the country like a weather front or flood line. Lara is already leaping ahead.

"Now the demon, or demons, left from northern Maine how long, three days ago?"

"I think so," says Peters. He's flagging now. "It's a blur."

Lara picks up the blue pen and draws a circle around the top of Maine. "They're moving fast, at a dead run for twenty four hours a day. Plus they're taller than us, correct?"

"Maybe three times as tall," Anna says, and Peters nods.

"So how fast would that be? Professional athletes run a twenty three-mile marathon in how long, about two hours? So if we triple that speed, sixty miles in two hours, we get around thirty miles an hour. Thirty by twenty four hours gives us," she does the quick calculation on the board, showing the wits that nearly saw her through law school, "seven hundred and twenty."

We take a collective gasp. Lara plows on.

"In three days that means they'll have covered two thousand-plus miles. But perhaps they run faster than marathon runners, at a dead sprint, in which case," she throws up her hands. "It's like Amo says, they'll be on us in a day or less."

She draws a line from Maine directly toward New LA, stopping short at around two thousand miles in, right by Denver.

Anna laughs. "Crossing point."

"But not anywhere near the zombies," Jake points out.

Lara nods. "So we go with the avalanche theory. We lead the demon to the zombies and watch the sparks fly."

There's a silence for a while as we all take that in. It seems strange to use the zombies as a weapon. It relies on a lot of factors, like can we successfully lead the demons, and will the zombies be where we think they are, and can they still cancel out a signal after ten years standing in the sun in Yankee Stadium, but it's the only plan with a remote chance of working.

"I like it," I say, "it's mad."

Jake laughs.

"But logistics could be a nightmare. We'll need to confirm the position of the horde while at the same time evading the demons. It's no good trying to lead them to a place the zombies aren't. Also we'll need to confirm the demon's position and send bait out to draw it to meet the zombies. Finally, we need to consider what to do with everyone here."