Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (27 page)

The battalion ahead broke away to the right, and a view opened up over the plain. Through the clouds of drifting dust and between the charging bodies, he looked upon his enemy.

It was a bloody and terrible giant. It had burning red skin and burning white eyes and a round black hole where its mouth should be. The battalion ahead encircled it in a swirling rush, throwing themselves bodily at it. It swiped its long bloody arms from right to left like scythes, beheading them like so many flowers. Their bodies dropped and their heads rolled and the cold increased a little for every one that fell.

He ran on, unable to help, bound for his own fate, though he watched as his dead brothers and sisters mounded around it four and five deep. Their headless corpses formed a tide wall that the others climbed and dived from with their arms outspread. The red giant cut them to pieces in the air, while more came and more, until at last there was a break in the charge and the giant had a moment of reprieve.

Without hesitation it scooped one of the headless corpses from the ground by its feet, and held the raw gray neck to its round mouth. There was a ripple in the cold, like a shark in the water, then its back heaved and a gush of black and red liquid vomited from its mouth.

The corpse jerked and the giant cast it aside and scooped another, then filled it too, then another. The gap in the charge closed and the battalion began diving again, but now the giant was not alone but circled by three others; bloody giants that emerged from their gray-skin shells like butterflies.

Together they cut through the fresh rush of tumbling bodies. 

The storm of sand stole the image away. He sped on, closing on his own target at last, summoned by this terrible cold from so far away. Ecstasy dumped into his mind as a final parting gift. He looked at his fellows either side and saw that they felt it too. 

For Anna, he thought.

Then he hit another wall of the dead, climbed and threw himself into the air.

Dust and sand spun, red limbs whirled, and the three bodies ahead of him had their heads sliced off in a single blow. They tumbled down while he flew on, falling into the giant's backswing. For an instant he stared into his enemy's face, and saw the stamp of perpetual hunger in its blind red eyes, the burning need to spread itself far and wide through the world, then he hit. 

His chest crashed against its horny shoulder and he locked his arms around its thick neck, slowing the sweep of its bladed right arm. One of his fellows made it too and hit beside him, grappling for purchase. The giant roared and slashed her to pieces, though that distraction opened a breach that three more flew into, grabbing to the enemy's chest and leg.

He tried to bite into its shoulder but the skin was as tough as rock. It swept its forearm at the others, slicing two in tumbling halves, and for a moment its burning eyes looked directly into his, and he understood.

It would never stop. It would grow and grow until the boundaries were all broken and there was nothing left to eat in the whole of the world, until even the oceans were drained of their plankton shreds of life, and then it would lie down and die.

"Anna!" he cried.

The giant's elbow struck him in the face and flung him back through air. He somersaulted wildly, catching glimpses of the broader battlefield; everywhere the gray army was circling and assaulting red giants, turning in a frenzied dance. For some reason he remembered eating the first dog, and seeing his little girl's face as she watched.

This was not for her. This could not be for her.

He hit dust beyond the wall of bodies, half-broken. His arms no longer worked and a deep score down his middle flopped his dry guts out in the sand, but he forced himself up and on. In the rampaging crowd he circled, aiming for the center, then along with a dozen others charged up and leapt…  

A single blow swept his legs away at the knee. Half the others were swatted down, but those remaining seized him mid-air and flung him ahead. He twisted his torso as much as he could, shifting his trajectory by tiny degrees, hoping it would be enough.

His chest thudded against the giant's face. His thighs squeezed tight around its neck and he pressed his ravaged belly close, slotting its head inside the empty cavity like his rib cage was a crown.

The enemy roared and the sound echoed and vibrated through his trembling flesh. It bit at his spine from within, tearing a hole in his back, but it was too late; the seconds of blindness were enough and his gray army washed over it like a tidal wave. They flew off the wall high and low, snaking round its legs and locking them tight, grasping at its arms and weighing them down with their bodies.

It roared and chewed helplessly while his fellows formed into a tomb over it, surging like waves up its waist and midriff, rising high to lock tight around its head and shoulders. In the brief moments before their bodies sealed over its head and covered him up too, he glimpsed the same event playing out everywhere across the battlefield.

Mounds were rising up with twitching red giants at their cores; the wider army flew and clambered and sacrificed their bodies to tie the enemy down.

Then bodies sealed over his head and the vision was stolen away. Darkness reigned, and there was only the rumble of his fellows climbing like far off thunder, adding layer upon heavy layer to the prison. The giant still worked its great jaw at his back but that was all it could do. Every other muscle in its body was immobilized.

In time the rumbling stopped, and the waves of cold began to recede. Silence and stillness fell across the battlefield. One by one he felt his brothers and sisters drop away, allowing their bodies to stiffen in the cold rigor of death. He felt their joy in success, and was glad of it. They were heroes all, and because of all they'd done his little girl would be safe.

His little girl would be safe.

21. JABBERWOCK

Anna looked at her chosen spot on the mound, much like every other spot, and considered. The hammer weighed heavily in her hand.

"It's not smashing people," she muttered to herself, "don't think of it as smashing people. They're more like snails. Or actually just snail shells."

Before her a single hand stuck out from the mass with the fingers spread. It looked like it was beckoning her in. An invitation was definitely the way to think of it, not defiling the dead. This was why she had come, after all. Destruction didn't have to be destructive.

She brought the hammer down.

It hit the hand and the hand cracked away at the wrist, falling to hit the dirt with a thump. Anna's arm tingled with the impact, and she leaned in to study the fracture line.

It was perfectly clean, like it had been cut with a laser, and inside the wrist was hollow. Where the bone should have been ran a long thin cavity, making the arm a stone tube. She raised her finger and inserted it into the space where the bone should have been.

It was dry and smooth, not gross at all. She pulled her finger out and studied it, but there was no residue or dust.

"Maybe the calcium in the bones broke down," she said to the hissing satellite phone, resting on a jut of knee. "Somehow it bled into the flesh and turned it to a kind of limestone. Like petrified wood."

She wasn't really convinced, but it seemed distantly possible.

"What for though?" she asked the phone. "I'd be guessing, but maybe some weird form of art? Aliens painting with human bodies?"

Neither of those connected with the theories she'd developed so far. There'd been a lot of time on the yacht to think about the wriggling T4. There'd been a lot of time all her life to consider all the evidence they had.

The zombies all flipped at once, and they all wanted to go west, except for some of them who wanted to stay with survivors for a time first. She'd come to think of this as their 'charging up' phase, like snakes in the sun. They charged up then they went, and it had been clear they didn't die just offshore for a long time, after they'd dived to check. So they were able to breathe underwater, or perhaps they didn't need to breathe. 

"Maybe they're circling," Amo had theorized in the first year. "Like birds, it's a magnetic thing. They'll go round and round the Earth endlessly."

But they never came back. After a certain time there were fewer and fewer coming by, until there were hardly any left at all. At the same time, Jake figured out how to hack her phone and lift the coordinates out of the Hatter app. They knew then that her father had gone to Mongolia, but they didn't know why.

Everyone had a theory. Some were put forth sincerely, others in jest, like a military experiment gone wrong, an infection brought by some alien comet, a hidden nesting instinct brought on by the very specific sex that 'switched them on', or perhaps an addiction to the sun or an evolution sideways through the tree of life. It had been a game around the LA campus throughout her childhood, making up wilder and crazier theories.

It was one way to deal with the loss. They'd all lost so much. Gradually though they'd stopped joking when the flow of them dried up. They were truly gone.

"Called to heaven," Julio had said to her one day, while she was waiting in line for her curry from the canteen line. A broken zombie was crawling by.

She'd gotten good at ignoring Julio. He'd kept trying to engage her at times, to goad some kind of angry response from her, but if she just ignored him he always went away. She hadn't liked to admit it, but he scared her. If there were no zombies around anymore, how could they protect her?

She had to rely on the others. She had to trust Cerulean and Amo.

Now Julio was dead, gone a long time back, and his rules for the new world had amounted to nothing. It was the same for the crazy woman on the yacht. She'd pitied them both. There were things they'd both been trying to be that they just weren't, and never would be. Their ideas of reality were fundamentaly flawed.

So many things had changed.

She shook her head, clearing out the musty memories. This was now and she was here, the T4 was in them all and that was that. She was about to find out what all the fuss had been about.

"I'm going to dig to the middle," she told the phone through gritted teeth, "and find out what's in there. Then I'm going to dig outward until I find my father. I'll figure out the rest later. OK?"

The phone hissed.

"OK."

She brought the hammer down again.

After three hours she'd worked up a thorough sweat and made a visible hollow in the mound. At first she'd intended to make a neat and narrow tunnel burrowing straight through to the center, but actually it proved far easier to topple bodies away whole than cut through them. 

All she had to do was smash away fingers and feet that were hooked around their fellows, then lever the heavy bodies down. It grew easier the wider she went, taking apart the outer skin of the lattice before moving to the next layer in. Their bodies became a sizable pile behind her, so she used the RV and a length of looped cable to drag them away, making a new mound elsewhere. 

Her shoulders ached, but really this was just like sailing without a break; a question of will. There was no way she would sleep until it was done.

Through the night she dug. At times the hammer couldn't crack a particularly tightly clenched fist, and she brought out the crowbar, pickaxe, electric drill or blowtorch. With them she sawed, pried, drilled and burned her way into the heart of the mound like a worm in an apple, coring a cavernous tunnel that led eerily through solid bodies, narrowing like a cone the deeper she went. Overhead and to either side their bodies held fast like carved angelic figures in a cathedral, reaching down.

Sometime in the early morning, half-dozing in a kneeling position with the flashlight guttering by her side, she glimpsed a flash of color ahead. At first her sleepy brain thought it was a fish darting back into the coral, but a few moments later she realized that wasn't possible because she wasn't at sea anymore.

She rubbed her eyes awake and trained a flashlight through the porous wall of limbs and trunks ahead. She'd come about fifteen feet already, turning out well over a hundred bodies and making countless runs with the RV to clear them. She was probably almost at the center, standing in a broad arch-like tunnel of stone bodies.

They were like roots, as if she'd fallen down the rabbit hole and was chasing the White Rabbit still.

Then she saw it again.

"Holy shit," she muttered.

Something red. There was something bright red right in the middle of the mound, upright like a totem pole. She pressed her face close to somebody's solid armpit to peek through the gap, while trying to angle the light through another gap upon whatever lay beyond.

It looked like a leg. Like a giant red leg of a giant red standing figure.

She hadn't expected that. She pulled back and rested on her haunches to puzzle it over. Maybe it was a sacred Mongolian tree of some sort? Maybe it was the tent-pole that held the mound up. Maybe it was a pharaoh-figure that had to be buried with all his zombie slaves, in a pyramid made out of his zombie slaves, because…

Ideas failed her. She dug.

By noon, with hot dry winds swirling around her and blowing dust into the mound's inner sanctum, she had cleared through to the naked red giant at the center.

It was a naked red giant.

It was so massive that its head and shoulders disappeared into the roof of bodies, easily three times her height. The white stone zombies clung to it like bandaging on a mummy, and had been incredibly difficult to crack, drill, and prize clear. Their arms and legs had been wrapped around its arms and legs skin-to-skin, packed incredibly tight.

Now it stood before her. Between its legs, where some kind of genitalia should have been, was a blank space. Its thighs were as thick as Colorado redwood trees and its chest was as massive as the air conditioner they used to cool the giant IMAX theater. Its arms lay straight down at its side, giving it the appearance of a pole. Its forearms looked a little like shrunken wings, with a webbing of razor-sharp cartilage sticking out and running all the way down to the little fingers.