Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (24 page)

Trash lay on all sides for as far as she could see, congesting the flat seas with a plastic stew of footballs, kayaks, frisbees, lunchboxes, toilets, Lego blocks and plastic bags.

For three days she endured the drone of the docking engines as they propelled the yacht forward at the miserly pace of half a knot. It was nothing, but to run the propellers harder would risk them clogging with chopped plastic, and she had limited spares.

She could swim faster than this. The floating garbage patch stretched for miles. Leaning over the yacht's edge she sometimes poked at items in the jumble, digging for a sight of the water beneath, but there was only more trash. This was the tip of the iceberg. She felt like a tiny ant on the back of a trash vanilla pudding, cutting a trail that quickly melted behind her.

No wonder the apocalypse came to these people, she thought. The world was half dead already.

She made her peace with the satellite phone, leaving it tuned in and on all the time, a low hiss in the lounge. She made no reports to it, and nothing came through in return, but still it helped.

For something to do, she opened all the water jugs and gathered the USBs in one super pack, ready for the day she decided to throw them overboard. She dug through her cache of weapons and made a few hours amusement taking potshots at the trash. Raking the water with assault rifle fire helped with the frustration. The rocket launcher made bright eruptions of plastic.

She crossed off days on the lounge wall like a prisoner. She thought about the woman in her yacht, and Jimmy, and all the other lost survivors who might be out there still, taking their own slow paths to extinction.

Then she saw another mound.

She was still some three hundred miles off the coast of Japan and there wasn't supposed to be any land at all. She steered over and it soon became clear this was not a rock or a half-sunken ship or the torn foundation of an oil rig, but something else entirely.

It was a pile of solidified bodies.

She stood at the hull edge with the sail furled and anchor down, staring at the mound. It was an island of zombie bodies, motionless and heaped up about five feet through the water like a gray mound of jelly. It was maybe fifteen around. It was a wonder she'd seen it at all.

The bodies were sinewy and withered; gray skin shriveled down against the bone, with screwed-up peanut faces she couldn't make out. Their eyes were tightly closed with no hint of white light spilling from within. They were skeletons held to each other in a weird kind of lattice, rife with hollow gaps like the atomic structure of a complex carbohydrate.

They looked like really boring gray coral. Bits of hair remained in places, scraps of clothing long-faded of color. All of them were facing inward to the center of the heap, with their arms and legs spread out and interwoven with others.

She imagined a fanciful party game, where all the people piled onto each other in a giant heap. Leaning over the outrigger edge, she strained to touch one of them.

"Holy shit," she whispered when she did. It was as solid and unyielding as marble. She leaned closer and laid her palm on the sharply ribbed back of an emaciated figure still wearing the shreds of a jacket and belt. She ran her fingers along the indentations where its skin had sunken in to the valleys between ribs, but there was no give at all, no spongy or leathery sensation. She leaned further and shoved.

It was rock solid.

Without thinking too much about it she slipped into the water. Touching the bodies felt strange at first, holding to them like she would a dock, but their solidity quickly removed any sense of unease. They were truly dead now.

Her feet found purchase underwater, a smooth shelf of shoulders and backs. She ducked her head and looked beneath the surface; the water was cloudy but she could see far enough to confirm the obvious.

The mound continued outward and down, made up of hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies. It continued past the point where the water grew too murky to see, an irregular slope of arms, legs, backs and heads descending into darkness.

Above water she ran quick calculations that rapidly sprawled into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The Pacific averaged at about two and a half miles deep, and if this mound was anchored at the bottom, the number would be astronomical. Her mind spun. Even if the mound went down as a perfectly straight pole for two and a half miles, with say twenty bodies to every five feet, then that made…   

Around forty thousand.

Her jaw lolled open. Forty thousand bodies if it was only a pole straight down, and she already knew it wasn't; it was a spreading pyramid. She looked at the skeletal gray arm she was holding like it was a handrail. Were there millions here?

On the yacht she collected her scuba gear. Two suits hung in the starboard rear hull, behind the water jug blocks. She laid one out with tanks, tubes, breathing apparatus, mask and flippers, tested the air pressure and flow, checked the mask and suit for cracks, then put it on.

Off the outrigger rail she pulled the mask down and tipped over the edge.

The water closed around her and down she went. In a second she hit the pyramid's slope and took hold of it to pull herself deeper, using rocky limbs like rungs in a swimming pool. The water quickly grew dark and she hit her shoulder-mounted lamps, which lit up the ocean with countless floating motes like stars in the sky. 

She went down: thirty feet, fifty feet, where the slope of the mound steepened until she was descending almost vertically. She'd never been much deeper than fifty feet but now she blew right past that limit, and began to feel the pressure of the water. A warning light blipped in her mask as she hit seventy.

Then she saw movement. She stopped descending as a bright flash of color slunk back into the hollow, root-like structure of intertwined bodies. Her pulse hammered against her ribs and she crept the next few feet with all her nerves tingling.

More flickers of color darted inside the zombie tower. She peered in through a gap between diagonal thigh pillars, aligning her shoulder lamps to cast light through the woven bodies. It wasn't hollow inside; there were more bodies within like a second layer to the onion, and in the gap between the layers new life had sprung up.

She laughed as a school of orange clownfish scurried away from her lights and took refuge in a bright pink ribbon of coral. Coral and anemone were everywhere in bright shades of blue, yellow and red, climbing inside the zombie tower like ivy. More bright fish darted in and out to eye her, inspecting this strange black monster briefly before fleeing home.

If there was coral then that meant…

She angled her lamps back down and pulled herself five feet more, reaching the dusty sea floor. It was awash with a carpet of drifting life. Countless tiny eyes and hermit crab legs and fish no bigger than her thumbnail ducked back into their crevices as she swept her lamps across them.

She was barely eighty foot deep and this couldn't be the ocean floor. She swam a short distance, careful to mark her bearings as she went, and soon found the land tapered down sharply.

This was a seamount, a mountain rising underwater, probably an old volcano. Here at this peak the zombies had built a tower out of bodies. A mountain on a mountain.

At the base of the tower she tried to peer deeper through the scaffold of limbs, but all she could see was the second skin of bodies within.

A bizarre notion came to her, that perhaps there would be a door somewhere. She would knock and a witch would open up.

"Excuse me, I'm looking for my father?" she'd ask.

The witch would stuff her in an oven and make her into seafood muffins.

She flippered around the tower. It was not as massive as she'd first suspected, perhaps a hundred feet in circumference, but there were no doors, arches or windows. Once she tried knocking on a broad stretch of withered back, but nobody answered.

It was simply a heap of solid dead bodies, like a sculpture. She flashed back to Amo's first comic rendering of zombies in New York: a tower stretching up to the sky, reaching for images of loved ones in the sky. Was this the same? It was the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there was nothing that could possibly hold any meaning for the lost souls of fallen America.

There were only fish.

On the surface, Anna climbed to the top of the mound. It seemed more disrespectful somehow than pulling on their limbs underwater, but it also seemed important.

At the top there was a single head, shiny and hard. She knocked on it too. She considered setting a single USB key atop his head, but it would wash away with the first strong wave. She tried to prize open its eyes, but even the eyelids were set like stone. She rustled through the jeans pockets on a zombie nearby, but they were ragged and empty.

What now?

On the yacht she took photos, feeling some responsibility to document this, even if she ultimately only threw the USBs away. She took out her father's phone and studied the Hatter app. There was no yellow flash marking his position, but then his last coordinates were still a thousand miles away.

Was her father heaped in a tower too?

She took out the satellite phone and tuned it to hiss. There was no shame in telling them this.

"They're in a tower," she said into it. "Thousands of them, just like Amo drew in his comic. In the ocean. They've gone solid. I don't know why, but I'm going to find out."

She set the phone back down. She tossed all the scuba stuff on the floor of the lounge, then raised the sails and the spare spinnaker. Fresh energy poured through her.

The race was on again, and she wasn't going to delay a second longer.

19. JAPAN

The coast of Japan materialized on the horizon two days later. The catamaran raced high in the water, cutting through the waves at a record nineteen knots with the spinnaker bulbous at the fore. Anna leaned far off the outrigger edge, pulling the yacht into balance with the weight of her body.

The coast was green and gray and brown beneath a hazy, hot white sky. As she drew near a thick humidity swelled out to envelop her, raising a sweat that didn't blow away in the breeze. The air smelled so rich with dust and sap it made her dizzy. She whipped the spinnaker line like it was the reins on a horse.

Soon enough she saw.

The coastline was littered with mounds. They stood up off the horizon like ridges on a spine, each a sharp rise of gray reaching up. She'd mistaken them for buildings at first, but they were bigger and wider than that, and the true scale of them didn't become clear until she neared land.

They were massive. There were dozens of them up and down coast. It meant millions of people. She'd had no intention of stopping in Tokyo, but she couldn't ignore this.

In three hours she was soaring down the great open mouth of Tokyo Bay, past long expanses of overgrown green and yellow fields fading into dirty gray factories and docking yards that stretched for miles, all spiked with enormous heaps of the dead.

Soon a huge blue bridge hung before her, arcing easily half a mile across the bay. On the left it ended in a great loop that fed into the city amidst dozens of tall skyscrapers. The majority of them were banal glass or gray constructions, though the odd unusual one rose up from their midst, like nails waiting to be hammered down: at the center a red steel-frame structure that looked like the Eiffel Tower; to the west an elegantly rounded building probably a hundred stories tall; to the east a gigantic space needle shaped like a science-fiction ray gun. Mounds were everywhere.

To her right the bridge descended in an elegant curve to a strip of low rectangular land, probably man-made, giving over to a low shock of malls. There was a Ferris wheel and a funfair, and next to that a six-story silver building with a large architecturally unique ball in the middle, and next to that stood the largest mound yet, half-spilled into the water like a heap of forgotten salt.

It towered higher than the silver building. Anna couldn't take her eyes off it as the land cut the wind out of her spinnaker sail and she drifted in closer. She steered past a tiny hexagonal island with 'No Trespass – Bird Sanctuary' signs written in English and Japanese, up to a slim sliver of golden beach fronting the rectangular stretch. The waves were flat here and she dropped anchor just shy of the sand.

Over the rail and into the water she went, up the beach willing the wobble and sway in her legs away, past a small-scale Statue of Liberty and over a sandy road covered in long-mulched palm leaves, to the base of the mound.

"Oh god," she murmured.

It was all bodies. Lying here like this, with the whole of it in sight at once, it was undeniably plain that tens of thousands of people had died to make it.

She dropped to her knees while the land and sky swirled around her. Here was a body, and another body, and another, this one with dark frizzy hair, this one wearing a fraying backpack, this one sporting the upper part of a smart black shoe round its ankle like a strange bracelet. This was what the woman had seen, and what her son had seen, and the reason for the loss of them both.

Tears threatened to overcome her, but she pushed them back.

She walked around the mound, dizzied by its scale. She drew closer and peered through the limbs, as she'd done before on the water. The bodies were a little plumper here, not as withered as those at sea, so the gaps between them were smaller, but still she could make out a second skin beneath the outer layer, and maybe another layer after that.

"Hey," she said softly, "hey, I'm here."

Their eyes were screwed tightly shut. She touched a shoulder more cautiously than before, but it felt just the same; as hard and smooth as alabaster. There was no scent of rot or decay, only the heat and the dust.

"I'm here!" she shouted across the bay. "I'm right here."

From the yacht she gathered a pair of binoculars and returned to the mound. The limbs were stony and firm, holding her weight easily as she climbed. It was strange at times to take an outstretched hand for a handhold. Halfway up she stopped to pant. The air was thick and oppressive with humidity, far stiller than at sea. Her skin tingled despite the cloudy white skies. She wiped her brow and sweat dripped into the heap.