Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (18 page)

They were an army, and they would press on until every last shred of the cold was gone.

ODYSSEY

14. RAGNAROK IV

The spinnaker sail unfurled like a hot-air balloon off the bow, catching the wind and tugging the catamaran jerkily forward. The rainbow-printed fabric rippled unevenly as the wind spilled and billowed, then settled in a swollen half-globe projecting out in front, a hundred and fifteen meters square of thrust pulling the yacht forward like a massive bulbous kite.

"Like a giant boob," Anna muttered to herself, jibing the lines to pull it taut to the mast. It was very round and globular, missing only the nipple. "A giant gay boob." She started to laugh. "Suck on that."

She was exhausted, giddy, and knew it. She hadn't slept properly since two nights earlier, and even that hadn't been a good sleep, with the electron microscope so close to coming online. She'd been in the lab alongside Jake and Salman until late, theorizing and tinkering and preparing to shift out vital components.

Now she was here.

She slumped at the edge of the fixed foamcore bridge between the two twin catamaran hulls. Each of them were hollow and large enough to contain two cabins, one at the front and one at the back making four in all, plus storage space and a toilet with shower. Now they were fitted out with all her gear: food, water, weapons, fuel for the little engines and spares of every moving part on board. 

Inside the bridge below her was a large lounge, fitted with a captain's bridgedeck cabin at the narrow front window. Behind that was a sofa fixed to the wall with a central table, a kitchen unit and a map wall, all decked out in luxurious brown wood. In the old world it would have cost millions of dollars. Now it was just another mushroom to be plucked, one of millions sprung up during the long night. 

Her feet chilled in the cool sea-spray from below, and she laid back and looked up the rise of the main mast. Everything was white and simple except the spinnaker sail, which roared in glorious rainbow color. Above it hung the blue sky and the hot yellow hole punch of the sun. Sweat rolled down her face and wicked away under the full blast of the wind. Waves crashed under the twin hulls and scaled her skin with a thin film of salt.

She'd give herself this moment. She let her arms flop to either side, resting awkwardly on the solar panels fitted to the bridge's fore. The black glass was warm to the touch, already charging up all her toys and utensils underfoot.

This would be her world for the next several months. She'd tried it out before, overnighting on the ocean with the sails heaved-to, trying to get a purchase on the voyage she'd been contemplating for so long. It had always felt hollow then, but not any more. Her mission lay ahead like a red line bisecting the world.

She elbowed the left solar panel and the vibration bonged through the hull. With a crew of seven this catamaran could complete a round-the-world race in a month or two. With a crew of one it could cross the Pacific in about the same.

She closed her eyes and ran through the route across the globe. In a month she'd be at Japan. She'd circle below it and pull up through the South China Sea, hitting the industrial coastal town of Tianjin just southeast of Beijing. From there she'd choose a road, find a vehicle and drive. After three hundred miles she'd hit Inner Mongolia, then cross the border to Mongolia. Another five hundred miles, passing Ulaan Baatar on her right, she'd reach the point the Hatter's RF chip had last linked in to her Father's phone, before the signal went down.

47.601879, 101.212063

The numbers circled in her head like gulls.

She opened her eyes. In all directions there was nothing but water. She could still feel the heat of Ravi against her skin. Amo standing at the dock echoed brightly in her thoughts. She was exhausted and worn-out and excited.

She was coming for her father.

She was hungover and needed some serious water to drink.

She locked the autopilot and padded back down the bridge. The foamcore structure flexed comfortably under her feet, squeaking when she dropped down to the shallow balcony at the tail that led inside. In the shade of the lounge she drained a liter of water. It made her belly roll and slalom like there was a rambunctious baby in there.

"Steady on child," she said absently, patting her stomach. She went to drink more but had already drunk both the hand-bottles she'd prepared.

Both the hulls held water in the rear cabins, seventy gallons each in big clear jugs. She remembered Amo had said he'd left something in one of them.

"Ok, Amo," she muttered, and started to the left.

Down two steep steps she dropped into the starboard hull, paneled in molded cream plastic. It was narrow and hot like a greenhouse, with every inch of extra space in use. Shelves inset into the bulkhead were filled with provisions: pot noodles, freeze-dried mash, sun-dried raisins and nuts, canned beans, meats and fruits. It was everything the body needed. 

She headed back toward the rear cabin, trailing her fingers along the wall. It was still hot from lying in the marina. Soon the wind and surf-spray would cool it down. She entered the rear cabin, slightly wider than the corridor and large enough to accommodate a rack-bed, though she'd stripped the furnishings months back. Now it was filled floor to ceiling with two-gallon water jugs, stacked in neat rectangular cardboard boxes like a bricked-in wall.

"Where is it then?" she asked.

She studied the roof and the walls but there was nothing apparent. Perhaps it was sealed in behind the ranks of water jugs. That might be something Amo would do, like treasure buried in Deepcraft, forcing her to dig through to reach it. She couldn't help herself from smiling.

She lifted the nearest cardboard box from the top of the pile and peeled the tape from the joins, opened the flaps and reached in for the plastic handle. The jug came out smoothly, then clanked in mid-air.

Anna looked down. The jug seemed normal, but normal jugs didn't clank. She lifted it up and peered through the plastic. There was a bundle floating inside, wrapped up in bubble-wrap with a white strip of laminated paper round the outside. There were words written on it, and Anna turned the jug to follow them round.

Good luck with the zombies.

She laughed. Everyone knew what that meant. The first cairn of the new world had been left as a message from Lara to Amo, aimed not at the zombie apocalypse but at the comic he'd been working on at the time, which was about zombies.

Amo was a little kid at heart.

She hurried into the light of the lounge, where she set the jug down and hacked off the top with a rigging knife from her yacht-belt like it was a tough-skinned Humpty-Dumpty. She fished out the package and tore it open, spreading the message neatly at her feet and splaying the contents across the wooden floor.

About thirty metallic USB memory sticks clattered out like dice.

Anna laughed again. She'd made cairns by Amo's side, and even recognized the model. He'd picked them up in a discount store in Tennessee, about five thousand in total.

"You crafty bastard, Amo," she said to herself. Wasn't it just like him to sneak one of his cairns aboard her yacht. She plucked one of them up and studied it; a slim key of plain silver stamped with the indentation:

1TB

That was ample storage space. She turned the key and on the other side was a tiny word written in black marker pen, in Amo's comic book capitals:

SEED

They were all the same, glinting where they trespassed in beams of light cast through the yacht's outrigger cables. For a moment she had the impossible image of them taking root in the boards, then springing up in miniature little Amos, who would stalk up and down the hull looking stern while being boyishly silly.

Impossible things before breakfast.

She got to her feet and went to the captain's desk where her navigation laptop was waiting. She booted it and plugged one of the USB keys in. The contents popped up in the SEED drive, showing only three files:

Ragnarok IV

Zombies of America

Deepcraft Encyclopedia

Anna laughed. Ragnarok IV was ridiculous. Ragnarok III was the last movie Hollywood ever made, so what was Ragnarok IV?

She double-clicked and it opened across the screen; a black backdrop with icons of flags arrayed in a circle. Near the top was the red and gold of China, then the complex yin-yang of South Korea, the red sun of Japan, along with others Anna didn't recognize. Beneath each of them were words written in each language. Somewhere at the bottom was the US flag, with

ENGLISH

beneath it. A language menu page.

"Interesting," Anna murmured, and clicked the Stars and Stripes. The circle of flags faded but the black background held, while music began drifting up from the laptop's speakers tinnily, something classical and haunting over the dark. Then the film started.

Anna gripped the edge of the table.

It was footage shot from a shaky camera looking down from a rooftop on a broad night street, where a flood of white-eyed bodies was running. Screams rang out faintly. With a sick feeling Anna recognized it as Hollywood Boulevard. There had to be hundreds of people down there, stumbling and charging through halos of light cast by streetlamps. 

"Do you see this shit?" the cameraman shouted from behind the lens. "What the hell's going on?"

A second later he fell off the roof. The camera caught the motion badly, but the angle shifted abruptly, the view spun and circled, then there was thump, the world rolled, a crack spidered up through the lens, and the image continued on its side.

The right half of the screen was filled up with sidewalk, the left half with the body of the cameraman: a shadowy bulk blocking the street. His face was young, pale and bloodied. Moments passed, then he twitched. His eyes opened and they shone bright white.

He got to his feet and joined the running throng.    

The flow continued. More bodies fell and thumped down in the view of the camera from buildings off to the side. They smacked, bounced, then moments later got up. Others punched their way through bar windows and dragged through the broken glass trailing blood. In cars gray people butted and punched against car windshields and side windows. The flow of people went by and by, fed by countless tributary streams sucking up from the city.

"Jesus," Anna whispered.

It was found footage from the real world, on the night the world ended. She'd seen movies that started the same way, with medleys of destruction. This was the real thing.

In line with that, footage from more cities falling followed. Each of these clips lasted thirty seconds or less, depicting the fresh and urgent flow of bodies down night streets before each camera dropped to the ground as its operator was infected. One of them might have been Chicago; Anna recognized the skyline from a cairn-placing trip she'd taken years ago with Jake and Lara. Another was a shot encompassing orange desert, she guessed Nevada from the red stone escarpments, another was amidst a great redwood forest somewhere in California.

One was New York, with the camera pointing up past the Empire State Building as a helicopter spun out of control in the sky. The sound of its guttering blades subsumed the steady tramping of the ocean as they walked. The craft wobbled then veered sharply into a building, shearing its blades before crashing to the street in flames. The flood was crushed beneath it. The camera operator swore then dropped the camera.

A camera mounted on the front of a large ship recorded everything as the vessel cut through a row of smaller boats until it crunched hard against the concrete dock, then began to sink. A black and white CCTV camera mounted above an intersection captured footage of people staggered through flames on a burning street, followed by an explosion as the leaking oil tanker blew up.

Tinny voices rose up above the sounds of chaos, along with swelling, desperate music. There were scraps of frantic news reports on what was happening, voices filled with disbelief and fear. A pressed and smart anchorman sitting at a neat news desk talked urgently about the spread of madness they were seeing, then became a zombie on air. He stopped speaking mid-sentence, stood, and his eyes began to glow white like an old TV screen warming up. There were screams in the studio followed by silence, and the tramp of footsteps. The camera continued to record as the feeds on the monitors behind the desk died out.  

Soon the voices and reports faded, as did the music. They were replaced by the steady thump of the ocean's footfalls, and the great rasping suck of their synchronized breathing. The screen returned to the original camera, lying on its side and watching the flood walk sideways from the bottom of the frame to the top. They went on and on, pumping like blood through the intersections of a city, headed only one way.

thump thump thump
   

Anna's mouth was dry and she stared at the little screen as it faded into black, and silence. She hadn't expected that. She'd never seen the moment the world turned before. She'd only heard about it and seen it in comics but there'd never been footage.

It filled her with emotions she couldn't understand. The sheer number of people lost hit in ways she'd never considered. This was loss on a scale she couldn't comprehend. Her memories of the flood were so faint and distant, tied up with the loss of only one man, her father. This was right here in front of her, this really happened, and the numbers were hard to ignore.

Millions and billions had died.

She looked at the timestamp along the bottom. Only fifteen minutes of the movie had elapsed and there was an hour and a half left.

Gradually the music rose up again. The key changed steadily from the haunting melody to something a little more hopeful. A trumpet serenaded in the distance. Anna leaned in closer, ramped up the volume and full-screened the image. The music got louder, reached a peak, and then color splashed across the black.