Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (16 page)

"What truth?"

She strode up to his wheelchair and looked down into his sweet dark face. This was the age her father must have been when he left. There were already bits of gray in Cerulean's beard. She couldn't even remember what her father looked like, there wasn't a single photo of him in the phone. 

"That this little community is a fantasy, Robert. It's Amo's fantasy and we all joined in happily, but there's just not enough of us to keep it going. You know it too. Thirty-six is not enough for healthy genetic diversity. We'll get one or two more generations then we'll be gone, or so interbred we may as well be. That's the truth."

He looked up at her. His eyes were so beautiful and strong. "I don't believe that. More people come in all the time. We're still building cairns."

She touched his cheek. "Cairns that nobody sees. There's nobody left out there, Cerulean. Ravi came four years ago and there's been nobody since. We're alone, and if we can't bring the ocean back to life we're finished. It's over, turn out the lights."

He shook his head. "Maybe something will change. They're still going through samples in the lab, studying the connections. You don't know-"

She shook her head. "I do know. I've always known, and now I've had enough of Amo's fantasy. Julio was right in that at least. The rules are different now."

"Julio? He was insane."

She shrugged. "Maybe I am too. We're all mad here, you know?" The words from Wonderland slipped out easily. "My father is a virus and I was his Alice, but I'm tired of the fairytale. I want to live in the real world, and none of this is real, Robert, not even you and me. I'm sorry, but I can't be a part of it anymore."

She reached up and tugged the silver necklace from around her neck. The chain snapped with a sharp little pop. He'd given it to her ten years ago as a symbol of their mutual adoption. He wore one too.

She dropped it in his lap. "Keep it. I'm sorry I can't be a better daughter. I do love you though, and I appreciate everything you've done for me."

Tears came to Cerulean's eyes. He looked down at the necklace. "Where are you going?" 

"You know," she said. Now she was crying again too. "Where I've always belonged, where my father's waiting for me. It's been a true pleasure."

"It was my pleasure," Cerulean said, and scooped up the silver necklace. It twinkled like a fragile telomere strand against his dark hands. "It may be a fantasy, but I'm proud of it still."

"We all have to grow up Robert, sooner or later."

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. He took her hand and squeezed it for a second, then let go. She picked her bag up off the bed, and slid past his wheelchair into the hot night without looking back.

13. RAVI & AMO

Ravi found her on the beach, wandering north with a bottle of whiskey dangling from her hand. She didn't like the taste, but three good glugs down and the wooziness helped to take off the edge.

Leaving everything behind.

He came along on a dirt-bike, calling out her name over the drone of the engine. The bike's single headlamp made him look like a charging cyclops zombie.

She didn't respond at first, just kept on walking until he saw her. He pulled up the bike and killed the engine with the lamp still on.

"Anna," he called.

She smiled and slurred her speech. "Ravi. Come over here."

He ran over and stopped before her, fidgeting awkwardly. His face was hot and flushed. "Cerulean told me you're leaving. Is it true?"

She nodded. "I'm leaving. Here." She held out her hand. "Walk with me."

"You're really going to cross the Pacific?"

She laughed. It sounded crazy spoken aloud. "I suppose so. Take my hand."

He looked down at her hand doubtfully. "You're drunk."

"You can be drunk too. Come on."

"I don't want you to go."

"Then come with me."

He shook his head. "I don't want that either. I don't like the water, Anna. I just want you to stay."

"And the oysters didn't want to be eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter," she slurred. "It happened all the same. I'm going, Ravi. I told you that years ago; now it's happening. Maybe I'll even miss you. You'll miss me too, that's good. Now can you help me drink this whiskey? I don't think I can manage it alone."

He stared at her wide-eyed. "You'll miss me?"

"Maybe," she allowed.

"So miss this," he said, and leaned in and kissed her. It was warm and wet and messy. She kissed him back. It wasn't her first kiss, not their first kiss, but it was the first that might mean something, and it warmed her more than the whiskey.

She pulled away and they both gasped. Ravi looked surprised by what he'd done. Anna wiped her lips and held out the whiskey.

"Here," she pressed the warm bottle into his hand. "Start with a small sip or it'll choke you up."

"I know how to drink whiskey," he said raspily. He took it, swigged it, then coughed. She refrained from laughing.

"Walk with me," she said, "until the dawn."

"You can't really be going. It's too far. You might die. You don't know who's out there."

"I'm going." She took his hand. "So I'll find out. You can be my escort."

She walked on and he followed, leaving the bike behind with the lamp still blazing like a lighthouse beam.

Up Hermosa Beach they went, dancing at times in and out of the tide. The moon came out from behind the clouds and lit the long stretch of beach in many shades of pale gray.

"It's like a dream," Anna whispered. "I remember nights like this with my father, riding across the country."

Ravi sipped the bottle. "I used to lie on the roof of our house and look up at the moon," Ravi said. He was wavering side to side. "I dreamed of other people."

"You were alone for a long time."

He shrugged. "It wasn't so bad. I taught myself to drive. I got the TV to work. I figured out DVDs."

Anna laughed. "I bet you ate a lot of candy."

He laughed too. "Yeah." He hiccupped. "Yeah I did, raided all the shops in town. Peanut butter cups were one of my favorites. Those chocolate eggs with toys inside; collecting them really kept me going. You don't see them these days."

"No you don't."

She drank. They ambled on arm in arm.

"I don't think I'll die when you're gone," Ravi said after a time, as they crossed a line of rotten wooden stumps demarking Hermosa from Manhattan beach. "I'll help out with the cairns, try and find new people, the same kind of thing I've always done. And I'll wait for you."

"I don't know if I'm even coming back."

"Then maybe I'll come after you. You don't own the ocean, or the idea of crossing it. I'll learn yachts better and I'll stop being afraid of water and I'll ride across."

She laughed. "You can't even swim. And it's three thousand miles. It's taken me years to get ready. In any event, I'm not worth all that effort."

He hiccupped. "You're beautiful, you know that?"

"So are you," she said.

He kissed her again. It was better this time. She held her arm around him and they walked on.

At the harbor they jumped laughing along the bows of yachts bobbing low in the water. Each leap carried them sailing over a narrow slice of water trapped between two hulls. The risk of falling into the gap them made it terrifying and exciting. It reminded her of days running through the sandy ruins with him, breaking things to capture just a small glimpse of that excitement.

Even then she'd known. She'd been waiting for this moment, and she'd delayed for as long as was possible.

They dropped laughing onto the deck of a luxury schooner berthed next to her catamaran, in basin C of the Marina Del Rey. In the darkness the hull bobbed like a lullaby under their weight. 

"I'll stow away here somewhere," Ravi mumbled, looking around. "In one of the water drums. Under the hull."

"We'll run out of water halfway across the world then," Anna slurred. "And you'll wake up terrified and adrift."

"It'll be fun."

"It'll be fun," she said, and kissed him, losing herself in his embrace. It was good, and unexpected. This was Ravi who she'd practiced kissing on when Amo banned them from vandalism, Ravi who used all the dumb lines he learned from pick-up books to get her to kiss him again, Ravi who skipped after her along the beach and cleaned up her mess when the yacht got damaged, Ravi who followed wherever she went.

But this was a different Ravi too, not a boy anymore. His shoulders were as hard as the deck, honed by months of digging and clearing to build fresh homes around the theater, and she ran her hands over them. His lips were soft and the buzz of new growth stubble on his chin tickled her. She ran her hands down his back then gripped hold of his T-shirt and pulled it up over his head.

They kissed greedily. She ran her fingers over his broad flat chest. He hadn't eaten candy for years and it showed. He fumbled with her shirt and she helped him pull it off. He dropped his head and kissed her breasts. She held him close and led him down into the cabin, where they moved together in the hot dark.

Afterward she lay beside him as he slept, feeling the buzz of two different sensations rush through her fuzzy body. There was the feeling of being with Ravi, and still the need to leave. Even if she stayed, it would be no kind of life, always knowing their children would have only one or two choices of partner, and their grandchildren even fewer. They might yet live to see their great-grandchildren suffer disfiguring mutations from inbreeding.

Or she could take him with her. If she asked again then perhaps he'd come, but what could she offer him out there, alone on the water? The world was empty and dead, and at the end of the voyage would be the wandering corpse of her father. What was she even going to do when she found him?

Ravi needed Amo's fantasy more than she did, and she couldn't bear to watch that hope be lost.

She had to go alone. 

Through a porthole she watched the beach beyond the marina's wall, where the ocean lapped with the sparkle of moonlit surf. It was beautiful and sad. She traced lines down Ravi's chest. She knew he loved her. Perhaps she could love him too, if only that were enough. She tugged lightly on one of the dark curls hanging over his eyes. He shifted and mumbled in his sleep.

But this was no place for her. She would always be looking out to the ocean, waiting and wondering. The T4 was in her. It was in Ravi and them all, and she had to know why.

She fumbled for her shorts, strewn on the floor, and pulled them closer, then rifled through the pockets. Her father's phone was still in there, wrapped in its plastic bag. It didn't hold a charge well but that was OK, there was a charger in the catamaran. She brought the phone to life and scrolled through the icons to the one for the Hatter's chip.

She clicked it, and a gray field emerged with a single blue dot at the bottom. The yellow dot for her father had faded over time. Probably the battery for the chip in his belly was worn out, or the satellites carrying his signal had gone down, but she knew he was out there still, driven by the T4 in his core. Whatever he was, whatever he'd become, he was there, and she had a promise to keep. 

She set the phone down and laid her head beside Ravi's for a time, looking out at the steady lapping gray of the water. Always it came, endlessly. It didn't matter if she was dead or alive, if she was here to see it or not, it would still lap on.

After a time a sallow, emaciated figure staggered down the beach. It entered the water and disappeared in mere moments. Anna's heart quickened. A zombie like a shooting star. It had a kind of fleeting beauty.

There were so few of them now, those who'd been released from whatever had trapped them for so long: perhaps an earthquake breaking down a wall, perhaps a door finally giving in, perhaps a man come along to cut the leashes around their necks.

She kissed Ravi on the cheek a final time, then gathered her clothes and left him alone on the yacht.

Amo came just before the dawn.

He stood on the basin wall, watching while she checked her supplies and tested her ropes. He looked just as strangely powerful as he had ten years ago at the entrance to the Chinese Theater, as he had three years ago across a swimming pool in the ruins of a crappy condominium block, despite being only slightly taller than her.

He was wearing his trademark uniform: khaki cargo shorts with stuffed pockets and a plain white polo shirt. His hair was short and swept back, his dark eyes watching her like haunting ghosts.

"You've got it all, then," he said.

"Yes," she said sullenly.

"And Ravi's here?"

She nodded at the nearby yacht. "Sleeping in there. I didn't have the heart to wake him."

Amo stood silently. She wasn't going to be the one to break the silence. If he wanted to leave it like that, then she was OK with that too. He was the one who'd gone silent on her. Let him stew.

She tested the sail winders again, inserting the metal crank into the narrow slot and turning it to ratchet the lines in and out. Everything was smooth.

"He'll be hurt for a time," Amo said when the ratcheting was done, "but he'll recover."

"Good."

"What about you?"

She frowned. "What about me?"

"Will you recover? You've just lost your father, or you think you have."

"I lost him ten years ago."

Amo smiled and shook his head. "I don't think so, Anna. You lost him yesterday when you were looking into the microscope. You saw the bug in there and you think that's him."

"It is him. It's a virus, Amo, not a bug."

He laughed. "I know it's a virus. It took him over; I know that too, it took them all over. But that same virus also saved me more than once. It saved you too. Don't be so quick to say there's nothing human left in there."

She snorted. "What do you know about cellular biology, Amo? I never saw you in the lab once."

"I don't need cellular biology to know what I saw, Anna. The ocean forgave me, despite all the terrible things I'd done. The ocean saved me when Don was trying to kill me. That means something to me. It should mean something to you."