Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (23 page)

A seagull landed on one of her outriggers and watched her, tilting its head.

"Did you know her?" she asked it numbly. It hurt her jaw to speak. "Were you her pet?”

It flew off.

The green line of Hawaii grew on the horizon. This was Hawai'i Island, easternmost of the archipelago. It was circled with striking green mountains, rippled in sharp ravines like god had drawn a zigzag on the Earth then raised that jagged line to a ridge. There were rocky slab beaches, gorgeous sandy beaches, jungle-crowded beaches filled with mangroves, and amidst them lay clutches of old fishing villages on piers sprouting from clefts like weeds.

Somewhere here was the woman's farm and home. Somewhere here she'd found her little boy, fated to die on the beaches of Japan. The whole place seemed like death.

She followed the coast of Hawai'i island north into the dusk. That first night moored half a mile offshore a throng of mosquitoes descended, waking her with a hundred stings and the whine of their tiny wings in the air. She took shelter in one of the back cabins, curling up on her blankets on a raised bed of sloshing water jugs.

With dawn of the next day she pulled away from the coast. She felt sickly and weak, covered in scratchy welts, with a stuffy ache in her nose and hand. A fair wind carried her on, and Hawai'i Island faded behind her on the GPS. Myriad tiny islands popped up on her right like verdant green molehills before vanishing again. She wondered vaguely if they would remain as uninhabited, island paradises forever.

On one she saw coconuts growing. She moored off it, unnamed on any map she had; no more than a spit of land stubbled with a few palm trees, bushes and a ramshackle jetty leading to a weary slat board hut. She left the yacht at anchor in the shallows and swam ashore. Standing on the beach she felt the world sway and shift and dropped to her knees.

Her land-legs were gone. The world turned as her middle ear adjusted to a floor that stayed put. The sand was bright yellow and warm. A pair of nesting birds startled out the bushes as she lurched by. They looked like parrots, with bright red, green and blue plumage.

They were no one's pets. She knew the population of all Hawaii had been one point four million. In America there had been three hundred and twenty million, and since then they'd gathered only thirty-six survivors. Including Sophia who'd killed herself, plus Julio and Don who Amo and Lara had killed, that made thirty-nine. It was a survival rate of around one in ten million.

Even a single survivor in all of Hawaii was unlikely. Perhaps Jimmy had been it.   

She climbed onto the pier. The boards were bleached gray and cracked. They groaned musically as she walked along them. On the hut's wind-scoured slat wall hung a faded sign, painted with green letters she could just make out.

Snorkel masks - $5

The door creaked open and she looked inside. There was a low desk with yellowed papers in a clipboard, a few water barrels at the back which turned out to be empty, scattered white and black guano on the floor and along one wall a row of ten nails, from which hung ten sets of snorkeling gear.

Everything was a grave. The aquamarine plastic masks were like flowers at a wake. Nobody was coming here ever again.

She scooped up a coconut from where it had fallen by the shack. She hacked off the husk with practiced blows, chopped off the top like she was decapitating a boiled egg, and drank down the warm sweet milk inside.

She began to cry.

It wasn't deeply felt or disturbing. It was more like cleaning out a wound and seeing the pale, puckered flesh beneath the bandage.

She'd killed a woman. She didn't feel any regret about that. It was what it was, and she'd do it again if she had to. The woman was better off dead. Everyone had to make their own choice. 

She sailed on.

Maui and Moloka'i islands passed her by the next day.

Her face turned black and yellow as the bruising from the storm spread and faded. Her nose steadily cleared. She ate and drank and at night she cast anchor and slept for a few hours, thankfully too deeply for dreams.

Time passed in a fog, largely devoid of thought. She tracked her progress on the navigation laptop with GPS, operating like a machine. Distance was all that mattered. Pulling herself across the ocean by her hands. Progress was slower than before, averaging some two hundred miles a day, with fourteen hour days maxing at fifteen knots. It would take longer but that was OK, because she would be alive.

She sat on the bridge for lunch on her third day since the crash, munching on beans and meat she'd canned a year earlier, looking out over the water. She held up her right hand and looked through the gap left behind by her finger. 

"A sacrifice," she murmured, "lint and cobbles."

Before she slept that night she watched Amo's film again. She paused on his wild face, surrounded by zombies, trying to read into the depths. Late into the night she opened the other files in the USB. 'Zombies of America' was a version of his original comic, stretching out to cover all of new LA. One part dealt with Julio's banishment, including conversations she'd never known before. Julio had pleaded for clemency, but Amo and Lara had been steadfast. There was an image of Masako watching. There was a page devoted to the night that Julio returned with guns, when Lara had shot him herself.

No forgiveness for him.

The comic continued up to and beyond the T4 discovery. Anna imagined Amo rushing to finish these panels before she could leave. The final shot of the comic was her sailing off into the distance. He'd scripted even that.

"Didn't know about the crazy woman though, did you?" she murmured.

In the final file was Amo's Deepcraft fulfilment center, converted to an open-roofed library. She wandered through looking at shelves. It was all prepper material about surviving the apocalypse in style: rigging 'modern' luxuries out of the ruins of the old, building social structures that would reward cooperation, even information on a human breeding program.

She shut it down. It was all too hopeful. If she had heart enough, she'd dump all his USBs into the ocean.

Oahu Island dawned off her bow early the morning after. Honolulu looked much like LA, but for more tall towers and the green backdrop of mountains.

Gliding by on a smooth ocean she thought about what Amo might do. A cairn on one of the taller buildings here would act like a lighthouse for anyone coming east from Japan. But she'd already left her cairn floating behind; a grave ship on the ocean, with a rotting corpse wedged inside. That was her truth.

Soon enough the stench would be gone. The salt air would wither the woman's skin and bones, storms would wash away her tomato plants and punch holes in her hulls, and her yacht would sink. So she'd fall to the ocean floor, and rest amongst the gray people as they strode along the sand, so deep down and dark where nothing could survive.

There she would remain, preserved forever.

That was Anna's legacy, her cairn. It was the truth, and the truth was all she could leave behind.

Honolulu went by and faded behind her. Anna faced the setting sun. This way lay her father, with nothing but water ahead for around seven thousand miles. After that lay Japan, China and finally Mongolia, and the only fulfilment she'd ever sought.

INTERLUDE 2

The cold grew sharper and never stopped hurting. It burned across his skin like a blast furnace, spreading fast and cutting deep. In the darkness he dreamed of it reaching past him, back to the warmth of the girl on the beach who meant so much.

He could not allow that. He would not.

He swam without rest. So did they all. His body thinned but he ate at times, from other predators that seized upon his pack. There were more sharks, giant squid and manta rays, jellyfish and swirling schools of tuna. They tasted like life as he ate them alive. Their blood and flesh propelled him. The cold was only growing.

In time he hit the seafloor again, rising up out of the deep water beneath. He opened his eyes. He started walking. His legs barely remembered how to hold his body up, they'd been swimming for so long, but they learned. The land here was muddy, here was rocky, here was littered with deep and black crevasses. He walked and he swam. His feet tore on the sharp stones but he didn't feel the pain. He walked until the water ran out, and the land began. 

He emerged from the water on a dark brown beach under white overcast skies. It was hot and humid, and before him a thousand dirty-gray sand cockroaches scattered, their tiny feet scampering into a stinking field of rotten kelp. He walked on by.

Giant bollards of smooth concrete lay before him, each multi-faceted like a star. He thought of stars and clouds pasted to a ceiling, glowing in the night. He hit the concrete edge of them in his chest and bounced backward. So did all of his fellows, but months of swimming had changed them and taught them new things.

They used their arms and climbed.

On a winding road above, he walked past a vivid red temple building framed by a tall red wooden arch. A tree spattered with pink blossoms stood beside it like a welcome sign, sending petals like confetti fluttering through the heavy air.

It was hot and he walked on toward the cold. It hurt his eyes and his skin and his heart despite the heat. He walked through a city of tall buildings and narrow streets that never seemed to end, clogged with vehicles. He climbed over a heap of broken wreckage on the outskirts of a vast muddy green plain.

There were mountains ahead, and with his flock he climbed. The cold he felt at the mountain peaks, when walking down their sharp and sheer valleys, while trudging through muddy bogs in a cedar forest, was nothing compared to the cold that pulled him on.

After the mountains lay another city, and after the city was a beach and an ocean where he walked back into the water. The cold was so close now he could taste it. It sang in his dreams and tugged and cut him at once. He swam on until he hit land once more, and there were more beaches and roads and cities beneath a whistling yellow sky. He walked through them all, through endless water-paddies and twisted forests and steep toothy mountains, until he hit the desert; a dry tundra that ascended through screes of shale rock. The sky here was pale blue and the air grew thin. The cold was everywhere, impregnating everything. The very land was polluted with it, and the air was thick with its taste.

Now there were no more trees and cities. There was sand and heat and ice cold in his chest. There were clouds and hardy grass and scorpions he chewed on, ignoring their stings. He walked on and froze as he grew ever closer.

When he was close enough he began to run.

His body expended its last reserves, and he ran. The wind rushed by and the sand kicked out underneath and he sprinted at the head of his battalion, thousands strong and all come for this same cause.

He was a predator now. He was an avenger. This was what he'd come for, what he'd come thousands of miles to do, and in a sudden rush of memory dumped into his mind at the very last moment, he remembered who he was and what he was doing this for.

Anna.

Anna his daughter was behind and had to be saved. Anna was alone and afraid and had no idea of the destruction that lay ahead. He didn't understand anything deeply, in those brief few moments of startling clarity, but he knew that what he'd come to was more righteous than anything else he could imagine. It was terrible but it had to be done, for Anna.

He felt this knowledge well out through his army like a gift. He turned and saw gray faces looking back at him, with people inside their white eyes for the first time. They knew too. They knew and they kept running. All the hints and dreams came together, and finally he understood.

He was her father and this was the role he'd been born to play. The cold was so close and only he could do what had to be done. Every step he'd taken away from her was worth it to keep her alive.

He sprinted over a stony rise and looked out across a vast plain consumed in battle, where thousands of gray bodies swirled like churning hurricanes around points of terrible cold. They were the ocean beating against their enemy, grinding it down over generations. In that moment he saw the face of the cold for the first time, and it saw him.

His throat didn't work well anymore, but he called out his daughter's name anyway.

"Anna!"

The cold was waiting. It was coming for him, pulling the hordes of his brothers and sisters inward. It had already killed millions of his kind and it would kill millions more, and this was why he had come. It charged and he charged down the slope at he head of his army to meet it.

18. MOUNT

She thought the first mound of bodies was a crag jutting up through the water and sailed on by.

Five weeks had passed and she was weary. Every day was the same, an unending litany of tasks, and always the sea was there, haunting and mocking her.

"Anna where's your father?" it asked her. "Anna where's your mother?"

In time the numbness had been swallowed boredom. Every day and every night were the same, again and again, a ceaseless race with the sun which she never could win. She'd gotten so sick of the monotony that she'd even turned Amo's satellite phone on, but all it did was fizz, catching no signals.

The catamaran sailed on. She was too tired to think. She felt blind to the line dividing sea from sky anyway. Weren't they the same? What was the difference if it was all blue? Sometimes she'd find herself lying back off the edge of an outrigger, daydreaming that she was sailing on a bed on an ocean of gray bodies.

There were no more milestones left to look out for. Since the tiny island of Midway, barren but for a few concrete foundations and weedy runways, there had been nothing.

She set her anchor at night but still drifted off course. One morning she woke in the midst of a vast garbage patch, becalmed. Not a breath of wind troubled the sails, not even when she took out the spare spinnaker. It wouldn't inflate a bit.