Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (10 page)

Anna studied the comic and chewed on a pen. She liked these people. They were tough and brave, like her. Already it felt like she'd been traveling with them for months, and they'd been together since the beginning. In the tradition of Amo, and making impossible things real, she decided to do it herself. With the pen she added to the comic, drawing herself into the panels wherever there was space: a little dark girl in a blue and white dress. She wrote

ANNA

over her head. It wasn't neat but she could read it. She was here too. She was just like them.

She wrote her name in chalk on the billboard as well. She had to do it three times before it was up to her satisfaction. She didn't know what to write for a date so she drew a smiley pie-face there instead. She picked up one of the shiny capsules and put it in her pack with her Daddy's phone, because it was pretty.

Then she set out. The map in the comic wasn't so clear to her, but she knew which way the ocean was, and that was the way it seemed to be pointing, down a road called I-70. Outside on the street she could read the letters for I-70 on the blue street signs hanging over the road. Amo had left a large arrow painted on the asphalt too, which made it easy.

Amo. He had traveled all the way across the country, just like her. He had been hurt and alone and lost, just like her. They would be such good friends.

She walked harder now, because she had some purpose. It would be wonderful if she could catch Amo up on the road, so they could walk together, and when she talked to him he could actually talk back.

She made up cheerful hiking songs all day long. These had always been about Alice or Abramov Lincoln before, but now she followed Amo's style and told her own story: riding her Daddy and saying goodbye, fighting the mommy dog and losing the puppies, helping the gray people find their way to the sea. The more she sang, especially the hard bits, the prouder she became of everything she'd done.

She ate red strings and drank bottled water and walked on, until one day in the middle of a sandy orange plain in the middle of the day, she heard a sound coming up from behind.

It was a car. At least it was a kind of car, tall and blue just like the ones Amo had stocked up in his comic. She laughed.

"Amo!" she shouted.

In the middle of the road she waved her arms. The tall car slowed down and stopped a little way away, then someone got out. It wasn't Amo or Lara, but it was still a person, and she was smiling.

Others followed and came over. They were saying things but Anna could hardly hear them, she was crying so hard. They came upon her like a storm, making her eyes so blurry she hardly saw the dark man from the comics, Amo's friend who had died, as he wheeled over toward her, smiling too, holding out his hands.

She threw herself at him. He was warm. His eyes didn't glow. For the first time in months one of the people she hugged hugged her back. 

She couldn't speak. They surrounded her and her voice went away. Their bodies pressed in like the ocean, and they reached down to her and all of them were crying too, but it was hard to tell through her own tears.

"I'm Robert," the man in the wheelchair said. She sat in his lap and clung to his dark hand, nodding happily. He pointed to each of the others in turn: an old lady, two men, a woman. "That's Cynthia and Jake, and Masako and Julio. What's your name?"

She tried to say but her throat didn't work, so she rustled in her pack and pulled out the comic. She pointed to the pictures and her name scrawled above them, and Robert's eyes widened.

"So you're Anna? We saw your name up on the wall in Denver, with the Pac-Man. Did you really walk all this way?"

She nodded happily.

"That is amazing. It's over a hundred miles! Anna you are so brave. Have you been out here all alone since it happened?"

She wanted to explain more but her throat still didn't work, so she just smiled and nodded.

"I think that's really amazing," Robert said again. "Well done." He even sounded like her Daddy. It made her cry more so she buried her face in his shoulder.

"I think this calls for a party," one of the men said.

Robert talked to her and patted her back while the others set to work unpacking things from the van: a long plastic table they assembled in bits, a black grill they snapped the legs onto and poured black rocks on, cans of hot dogs, beans, and buns in plastic packaging which they put on the table, then paper plates and plastic cutlery which Cynthia laid out in six places, with six white plastic chairs.

She winked. Anna blushed and looked away.

"Do you like hot dogs?" Robert asked. She nodded.

Some music started up. She didn't recognize it, but it was happy and fast and the first music she'd listened to in over a year. Robert was saying more things to her, but there was really too much going on to properly pay attention to him. One of the other men, the young one with feathery dark hair, was standing at the black grill with flames licking up, roasting sizzling hot dogs.

It was a party, and at that she finally remembered her manners.

She hopped up off Robert's lap and ran over to the table. From her pack she rustled out two Snickers bars, a handful of grimy red strings and two packs of trail mix nuts. She laid them out on a clean white plate.

"Is that what you've been eating?" the boy at the grill asked.

Anna nodded.

"Then thank you for sharing it," he said. His smile was lovely. It brought her voice right back, slotting neatly into position.

"I'm Anna," she said.

His brow wrinkled in surprise. He looked at Robert then back to her. "Nice to meet you, Anna. I'm Jake."

She held out her hand. His brow wrinkled deeper, then he smiled and shook it.

"Where have you come from, Jake?"

He laughed. "I'm from Chicago, Anna. Cerulean picked me up on the cairn-trail in Illinois. I'm the most recent addition, I guess apart from you."

She nodded curtly. That's the kind of thing Alice would do, even if she didn't understand what somebody had just said. She had asked, so it was correct to listen and nod.

The others were gathering around now. Jake licked his lips. "What about you, where have you come from?"

She thought about that for a minute. "I don't know. A city, but I don't know the name. I walked to the ocean with my Daddy for lots of weeks, then I walked back here. I saw Amo's comic in the city with the smiley cake-face. Denver, Robert said? Then I came this way. I want to find him. Amo I mean."

Jake's jaw dropped. "You walked here from the ocean?"

She nodded. The others were all there and looking wrinkly and surprised too. It was like being back with the ocean. She hoped she hadn't broken these people. At least none of their eyes were glowing yet.

Robert wheeled up beside her. "You say you walked with your Daddy, Anna? Where is he now?"

"He walked into the ocean," she said. "He wasn't like you and me. His eyes were white and his skin was gray."

"Another damn zombie," somebody muttered.

"And you walked with him all the way to the ocean?" Robert asked.

"Uh-uh, he carried me most of the way. I made a sling."

Feathery-haired Jake laughed, then stopped himself. Anna frowned at him and he muttered, "Sorry."

"Can I ask Anna, what happened to your father at the ocean?" Robert went on. "Why isn't he with you now?"

Anna looked at him. It was nice he sat in a chair all the time, so she didn't have to crane her neck up. "He walked into the ocean. Him and all the gray people. That's where they go." She looked round their empty faces. "Don't you know that?"

Jake laughed again, then covered his mouth. "Really sorry," he said, muffling the sound.

Anna looked up at him exasperated. Was he that broken?

"We didn't know about that, no," Robert said, pulling her attention back, "but thank you for telling us. I'm sorry about your father."

Anna shrugged. He was still out there somewhere. There was nothing to be sorry for. "It's all right. It's what he wanted."

A silence fell.

"You're burning those hot dogs," she said to Jake. She had to point to get him to understand. He'd not been attending to them very well for minutes. "Those ones, yes."

He turned them over.

"And you walked here from the ocean." Robert pointed off to the side of the road. "The Pacific Ocean, that way?"

"Yes. It took lots of weeks." She pointed off to the side and a little up, correcting him. "That way and that way a bit."

He amended his angle. "That's over a thousand miles, Anna. It'll take us days in the van. You walked the whole way alone?"

Anna shrugged. "I went back and forth a few times with different groups of people, so I'm not sure if I was alone for all of it, but mostly yes."

She eyed Jake as she finished, daring him to laugh again. He didn't. Cynthia the old lady gave a whistle between her teeth and said something Anna couldn't decipher. Her accent was strong.

"Can I ask a question now?" Anna asked.

"Of course, go ahead."

"Where are Amo and Lara? I'm looking for them."

Robert nodded. "That is the question, I agree. We think they're both up ahead, headed for Los Angeles. They may already be there, they may be together. You might have passed them by while you were walking."

She thought about that. "Why are they going that way? Are they following the ocean?"

"No," Robert said, and smiled. "They're going to watch a movie."

Anna frowned. She'd seen lots of movies before the coma, and while many were fun, she couldn't imagine any were worth crossing a whole country for. "That's silly."

He laughed. "Yes, I suppose it is. Now, let's get hot dogs and settle in."

They got hot dogs, Robert helped her do hers with ketchup, then they sat around in a circle of colorful folding chairs on the orange dust by the road. Anna had a chair to herself, sitting between Robert and Jake. She kept an eye on him for smirking. Across from her sat Cynthia, Julio and Masako.

The hot dog was fantastic. She hadn't even been very hungry, but the taste was amazing and she gulped it down. It wasn't sweet but the way it popped in her mouth, and the rich juices lapped over her tongue and soaked into the bread, was like heaven.

"… and all the puppies died," she finished, telling them the story of the chef and waitress. She was quite the expert now, after sharing it so many times with the ocean. "The rest after that was just walking."

The old lady clicked her mouth and said something like, "Child's gotta figure (mumble mumble) super (mumble)."

Anna smiled politely. Cynthia's accent was just impossible.

"How about you, Robert?" she asked. "How did you get here?"

"There's a lot of twists in that tale," he said. He put his hot dog down. "I had a close pass with Amo, actually, but we didn't really meet. After that I went up and down the East Coast for months, looking for people. In the end, it was back in New York at Amo's first cairn where I met Masako."

"He was my knight in shining armor," Masako said. Her accent was a little strange too, but better than Cynthia's. Her face looked different, not in a bad way, but a different kind of color to the white of Alice and black of her Daddy.

Robert smiled. "You were mine, more like it. I couldn't even go up and down the stairs into the Empire State without your help."

"They really should install ramps," Jake said. "I'll have a word with the mayor."

The others laughed. Anna didn't get the joke.

"After that we took an RV and set out on Amo's trail, just like you. We had the van so it didn't take us too long. That was about two weeks ago. We met Cynthia hunting a fox in Pennsylvania, Julio at the big cairn in Cleveland, then Jake on the road in Illinois."

"So you all just met?" Anna asked.

"We did," said Jake, "but we're good friends now, like the last people alive should be."

Cynthia shushed him.

"What are you all going to do when you reach the ocean?" 

"Eat popcorn," Jake said. "Watch movies. Restart civilization."

Anna nodded. They all had their own plans. 

She took another bite of her hot dog. They went on talking but it wasn't all that interesting now. Talking people were definitely better than the non-talking people she'd gotten used to, but they weren't so different really. The hot dogs were good and it was nice to share stories, but red strings were good too, and she had always shared stories with the gray people by just making up their parts of the conversation.

None of them filled the hole she still felt inside. They didn't know anything about where her Daddy was, or why he had left her. She put her hand in her dress pocket and touched her Daddy's cold phone.

That was what she wanted. More than anything in the world, she wanted her Daddy back, and being with these people now just made her realize it more. It felt wrong to eat the hot dog and not share it with him, to tell her story and not have him here to hear it, to sit and talk and know he was so far away, walking in the cold water, going to his impossible battle all alone.

Quietly she began to cry.

9. LINT & COBBLES

She woke in the RV, lying on a sofa at the back with a thin blanket over her, sometime in the afternoon. She didn't remember going to sleep. The seat rumbled gently underneath her. Through the front windshield she saw the bright sun and the black road and the orange sand, rolling by.

Always she was traveling by the sun. She went toward it or away from it.

She sat up. Her belly felt too full of hot dogs.

The RV was a simple open can lined with hutch-alcove things in which beds lay. Cynthia was asleep in one, the quiet man Julio in another. Up ahead Jake was doing something with needles and yarn at a little table, and beyond that she could see the shoulders of Robert in the driving seat, with Masako beside him.

They were holding hands. Through the glass ahead of them lay the road and the desert.

Anna shuffled onto her knees and turned to look out of the back window. The road fell away so quickly. There were a few gray people out there and they whizzed right past them. The last time she knelt like this it was in a taxi.