Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (20 page)

Another wave hit and bucked the yacht again, driving her face hard against the hull with a horrible crunch. The catamaran rocked forward on its tiptoes near vertical this time, and with her body pressed tight to the hull Anna felt the tension approach full pitchpole. She could barely breathe through her busted nose but the reality snapped hard in her mind. Another good hit timed to a gust in the spinnaker and the yacht would flip bodily, forcing her underwater where she would die tomorrow or die today, as there was no way on Earth to right a flipped twin-hull alone.

The frame huffed back down with a jolt, dunking her for a moment in the water. She grasped the tether cable but it was too thin and slick to climb and her wet hands pulled on it helplessly. She tried to kick off against the hull and get within reach of the handholds above, but the bucking of the yacht was too strong to get a grip.

She dangled and smacked back and forth in the gulley between the outrigger and the hull at the whim of the ocean and the winds, knowing that at any second the whole thing would blow over.

She forced herself to be calm. She stopped scrabbling and racked her mind for an answer. Another wave hit and she ducked her head in between her elbows, thumping against the hull. She couldn't climb out. She couldn't clip out of the tether with her full weight on the carabiner. She snatched for the knife at her yacht-belt but it must have torn loose. The answer came to her last: the only way out was the same way she'd come in.

She pressed one hand against the hull, held one overhead toward the outrigger beam, and waited. The ocean rolled and the wind bucked and she waited, feeling for the perfect confluence between the two; a wind strong enough to sink the front, a wave at the right angle and strength to make the catamaran jackknife again.

When it came and she was ready. The yacht kicked like a donkey, flipping near vertical again and hurling her up through the gap. Her upraised hand just barely kept the outrigger from braining her, the tether spun her in a tight arc while the yacht reared up on its front, and she slammed down across the hull.

Her hip cracked, her belly folded across the hull like a trussed damsel across a horse's saddle, and she began to slip back into the gap, but on the way down she grabbed on to the outrigger rail. The yacht teetered then fell again as the spinnaker skimmed the water and some of the wind spilled out of it. The rear smacked the waves, water sprayed into Anna's mouth and eyes, and she rolled coughing and retching to her knees on the hull walkway.

This time she got the carabiner on the first go, pushing the metal jaw back and feeding the cable through. She almost tumbled backward into the boiling water as another wave hit, but grasped hold of the upper outrigger beam in time. She noticed that one of the fingers on her right hand was twisted backward and bleeding, then she was moving.

In time with the wind and the waves she strode across the gap to the bridge, where she dropped into the spinnaker reel well. She punched a bolted-on emergency compartment open, pulled the knife out of it, and cut the spinnaker lower cable just as a fresh wind sprang up.

The yacht nose-dived slightly then kicked up as the lower half of the spinnaker shot free, lifting the bulbous sail high and crazily spilling wind. It climbed sharply, lifting the whole front of the yacht up now and threatening to pitchpole backward. Cables at its sides and top still tied it to the catamaran, so she sliced those too.

The next thing she knew she was in the water bodily. It felt strangely warm, enveloping her on all sides like cozy warm sheets. She opened her eyes and saw multicolored fabric flowing around her. Hands pressed to her back and raised her up. She spun in the sheets and saw figures rising from below, gray bodies that pressed and lifted.

The ocean.

They raised her higher but the spinnaker hung overhead like a heavy tent ceiling, impenetrable. She scratched at it but there was way through.

"Go back!" she tried to shout, but no sound came and bubbles burst from her mouth. Freezing seawater ran down her throat.

This time the calm came by itself. She could already feel the convulsions to breathe gathering at the base of her throat, the onset of hypoxia. She needed to breathe. She looked down again at the gray-limbed bodies, expecting glowing white eyes and expressionless faces driving her stupidly to her death, but that wasn't what she saw.

They were dolphins.

They had blunt noses and heads, bright and lively eyes, and they were trying to save her. She wrapped her arm around one and it nestled close to her chest. She got her other arm around it and it dived. In seconds her ears popped and it went dark and cold as they descended rapidly. Nearby was the flurry of other muscular gray bodies in the water. Her face touched the creature's smooth side, lost in this moment of grace.

Then it turned and they were kicking upward, toward the ocean surface as seen from beneath. The play of pale storm-light off the toothy waves was beautiful, like the impressionist paintings Cerulean had always tried to interest her in, all choppy stucco lines of raised color spreading and intersecting. It was a second sky and she was lost beneath it, a seed in its belly waiting to be born.

More dolphins swam to either side. She almost lost her grip but one of them pushed her from behind. They rose up the side of the sinking spinnaker together. It was a giant rainbow jellyfish hovering in the water. They drove her up through the surface and…

Noise and chaos returned. She gasped and struck out, thumping her elbow on the metal bridge ladder-rail. She was between the front hulls and the dolphins were gone. She grabbed hold of the ladder and took shelter as another wave struck, then pulled herself up.

Her right hand didn't work so well but it was enough. On top again she ran along the hull then leaped across the gap to the mast well. Another knife was gone so she slotted out the winder from its hatch and cranked the sail down. At once the thrust went out of the yacht and the sail began to thump with a deep pulse as the wind caught then spilled, caught then spilled. 

She wound faster, regardless of the blood dropping on her hands from her broken face or the blood welling up from her broken finger.

The sail came down and she worked the jib next, until finally the yacht's riotous race through the storm halted and she dropped anchor.

Afterward, she rolled down into the lounge, nauseous and faint. It was wet and suds of ocean foam slipped from side to side on the floor as waves hit. She could barely think for breathing. A blackness was drawing down, and she barely got safely wedged between the sofa and the bolted-down table, head to the hard wood, before it plummeted over her like an eclipse.

There were guests in party suits sitting around a long wooden tea table stacked heavily with various kettles, pots, teacups, silver dining sets and cake trays, situated in a clearing in the middle of a wood. All the guests wore faces she knew: one was Cerulean, one was Amo, Ravi was there too as were Lara and Jake and others, all of them holding cups of steaming tea.

Anna stood at the edge watching.

"Well you must drink tea my dear," called Lara cheerfully, as though continuing a conversation. Her head was too big for her shoulders, and a strange heart shape was painted across the middle of her lips. She was holding out a teapot in the shape of Anna's father's head. "Everybody must have tea."

"Tea for everybody!" squeaked a little purple seahorse that bobbed in a cup that had already been poured. "And everybody for tea."

"Now who's for tea?" Lara asked.

Ravi held out his cup toward the head-pot. Lara frowned and snatched the cup off him. "From the left now dear," she advised sternly, "never the right, you ought know that by now."

Ravi looked down at his lap ashamedly. Lara tipped the gray teapot-head and a thin stream of brownish-gray liquid poured from its nose, steaming gently up to the cup's very brim. She handed the cup back to Ravi.

"Now don't spill a drop," she cautioned, "it's all very sclerotic, don't you know."

Anna noticed the head had no handle, Lara was simply holding it by the back of its scraggly gray hair. It began to look more like a severed head being used for tea than a teapot shaped like a head.

"That's my father's head," she said.

"Tea for you, what's that?" Lara shouted in reply. "Well where's your cup then child? There can't be tea without a cup, or cup without a tea, don't you know? What's a vessel without an ocean, riddle me that if you please."

Anna looked at the table before her; there were cups everywhere, but none for her. She pushed her chair back and stepped away from the table. She didn't even remember sitting down.

"I'm in no mood for tea," she said. "Not from a head."

"Tsk tsk," Lara responded, "lint and cobbles child, how else do you expect to receive your tea if not in a cup? Some complex arrangement of tubes and lead piping, perhaps?"

"I don't want tea!"

Lara's face drew back, her heart-painted mouth opening in surprise. "No tea? Don't you want to see the Jabberwock?"

"The Jabberwock doesn't even exist. It's a myth."

Lara's big face fell. The teapot-head sagged in her hand, spilling brain-tea over the crockery-clad table. She looked at Amo who sat across from her, abruptly wearing a frightfully gaudy yellow sombrero. "Doesn't exist? Amo, have you ever?"

"I've never," Amo replied smoothly.

"If there was no Jabberwock then why ought we be gathered like this, drinking ten T4 teas or five tea for twos? There are ten of us here, are there not, and all blessed with the appetite for ten cups of tea?"

She made a quick count, nodded sharply, then rounded back on Anna. "Of course there is a Jabberwock, little lady, and of course there are ten. Do you not think all of this adds up to something?"

"I'm not a little lady," Anna said, growing angry, "I'm a woman and that's my father's head. Put it down."

Lara grinned. "This old thing? I must have brewed a thousand good teas in this head. Of course the best tea is right in here." She tapped Amo's head. "Drink up, my dear."

Amo lifted his tea and drained it in one. When he lowered the cup he was transformed, with eyes turned glowing white and a face that was wholly gray.

Anna took a step back. A moment ago Amo had been Amo and now he was a zombie. 

"Don't be afraid," said Lara, "it comes for us all in the end. Drink your tea, Ravi dear."

Ravi sipped his tea and at once his eyes turned white. He dropped his cup and it broke on the table.

"Everybody drink," Lara cried happily, raising her arms, and all the guests at the table did, swigging back the steaming liquid from an assortment of mismatching cups. Anna shouted for them to stop but they didn't listen. In seconds they all turned gray. Their eyes glared white and their teacups dropped clattering from their hands.

"Bottoms up, my dear," said Lara cheerfully, "say hello to the Jabberwock for me, won't you?" She raised the teapot head and swigged direct from its nose. At once her eyes turned white, her skin turned gray and the teapot head fell and cracked like pottery on the table.

A cold wind blew and Anna shivered. The zombies sat still at the table and stared straight ahead. A rustling sound came from amongst the crockery, where the head had cracked open, like something was moving.

Anna crept round the table to see what strange beast had disgorged from within. The head-pot had cracked quite like an egg, spewing a yolk that was red and unfolding. Six red limbs unpeeled from a skeletal red carapace like clockwork figures, revealing an ant-like trunk with a red nugget octagon-shaped head.

"Jabberwock!" the seahorse cried, but its cry was cut off as the ant-thing sprang suddenly toward it. It cut off the seahorse's head with one blow of its mandibles, then vomited up a red mulch which it forced inside the dead seahorse's neck.

Anna went to swat it with a plate, but as she leaned over everything shifted and she shrank in mid-swipe. A second later she was falling amidst a canyon of poorly stacked crockery, to land face-first on a custard sponge cake.

It bounced her off and she tumbled to her feet on the red and white checked tablecloth, in a valley of outsized kettles. Ahead the burning ant-thing loomed monstrously, five times her height with eyes that clicked as they blinked. Blood dripped from its six feet and blood dripped from its mandible mouth and blood wicked from its fractal eyes as they rounded on her.

"Jabberwock," Anna whispered. It knew its name and nodded slightly. So this was where their destinies met. She drew her vorpal sword and charged, but the ant cut through her neck with one clean stroke of its jaws.

Her head fell in a pile of crumbs but kept working like a camera, recording as the great ant vomited mulch down her neck. Her body, wearing the old blue and white Alice dress, convulsed as it filled up like a dirty old bag

"Daddy," she whispered, then her eyes stopped working. 

She woke with a start that cracked her knee off the bolted-down table leg. Her mouth was thick and it hurt to cry out. Her hand throbbed. It was night and the world was rocking.

She scrabbled out from between the sofa and table and got to her feet. The catamaran lounge was still wet and tacky with saltwater. At the wall she slapped on the light and it flickered up, illuminating a deck splattered with seaweed and fish.

Her right hand was bloodied. She touched her jaw which was tender, then her nose which almost made her pass out.

Outside with a high-beam flashlight she surveyed the damage. The spinnaker was long gone. The aft starboard hull looked to have been twisted but not perforated. The yacht would have sunk if it had cracked. The main sail and jib were there and furrowed, their lines intact. A red light was flashing on the top of her mast; an automatic SOS alert triggered by the violence of the storm.

Beyond it the sky was a deep dark purple, covered with a million lights like Pointillist art. Cerulean had tried to make her appreciate that too. On all sides lay the ocean. She shuddered as a trail of the dream came back.