Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (28 page)

Its skin burned a bright and bloody red, but it was just as hard and cold as the rest of them. She tapped on it but couldn't tell if it was hollow too.

She hadn't found her father yet, or didn't think she had. Now there was this. She leaned against the wall of bodies and looked up at the naked red giant.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

It looked part sun god and part devil. All it needed was a nice red pitchfork to complete the look.

"Did you summon my father? Did you call all the zombies here?"

It didn't say anything because its head was stuck in the ceiling. Anna looked up and sighed. Of course she wanted to see its face too, though it was probably just a peanut like the others, but it would take another few hours to clear it; either by cutting directly up or unpeeling a wider swathe from the outside.

Her hands were blistered. She sat down on a shelf of shoulder.

This was pretty far from the sense of closure she'd hoped for. Really it was ridiculous, that all these millions had come this far to what, worship at this thing's altar? Carve it then hug it to death?

She looked back out of the cavern. It widened like a funnel, giving her an excellent view of desert sand, her RV and at least three other mounds.

"Are they all like this?" she asked the red giant. "What's the point? Father, I'm here!"

She rubbed her eyes with her palms then laughed. She felt giddy. That was what working through the night did to you. A cool breeze lapped at her feet. Perhaps she would make something up when she reported back to Cerulean, something a little more impressive and meaningful than this.

She was too weary to theorize now though. It felt like an anticlimax, and she wasn't sure finding her father, if she even could pick him out like a needle from this vast haystack, would be any better.

She looked back to the giant and addressed its bright red chest. "What do you think, should I cut my way through you too? You're just a fancy pillar, let's be honest."

It said nothing, again because its head was stuck in the ceiling. She laughed. What kind of a life was it, walking around with a pyramid of zombies clinging to your head?

"It's a hat!" she shouted back down the tunnel, to Cerulean and Amo on the other end of the satellite phone. She couldn't hear the hiss and they probably couldn't hear her either, but who cared?

"The zombies became zombies and traveled all around the world to become giant lampshades for tall red lamp poles!"

So this was the ultimate goal of the T4 virus. It figured, probably. Crazy viruses did all kinds of crazy things to further their own goals, and sometimes for no reason at all, if their code went amok. Ebola could make your eyes change color, syphilis made peoples' brains eat themselves, and sufferers of rabies became both furious and morbidly afraid of water. 

At that thought she stopped laughing. If it was an infection she was dealing with, she probably shouldn't get close to this thing. It could still be infectious, and just because she was immune to the gray zombies, that didn't mean she was immune to this giant red one.

She started quickly back down the funnel-cavern. It was strange she hadn't considered this possibility before, not once. Now she looked at her hands where they'd touched the giant. She'd already touched her face countless times. Was a virus in her now?

She sped up along the root-like tunnel. Perhaps all of this had been a mistake. The cool wind around her ankles grew stronger. The RV was just there, almost in reach. She'd shower in raw gasoline and alcohol. She'd get up protective gear and then bring the bodies back and rebury this red thing without touching it, hide it back where it belonged. She'd leave a note on the mound advising people to stay away. Police tape.

Lint and cobbles.

What?

She stopped at the edge of the mound, momentarily confused. She didn't know what she was doing or what she'd been thinking. She was standing still at the outer wall of the mound facing outward, but surely she intended to go in? She turned herself to look back into the dark.

Something moved inside.

It was dark and she could hardly see. The cold around her ankles was so strong now it hurt, and she tried to rub her bare arms but she couldn't move. A distant kind of panic welled in her. It was so cold, like being sucked into the bottom of the ocean.

She gulped. She tried to lick her lips but couldn't.

Something was moving in the darkness. The satellite phone hissed behind her but couldn't help her. The heat of the sun faded along with the RV and the world. There was only the tunnel now, and at the end of the tunnel there was the red giant, and it was moving.

CRUNCH

Its arm moved. In the dimness she watched with wide and watering eyes as that long serrated limb rose, formed a fist, then punched upward at the rock bodies round its head.

CRUNCH

Dust and bits of stone fell down. Its other arm rose and punched upward too. More dust and stone fell. Its legs sucked out of the nestled bed of bodies from behind, like it was emerging from carbonite. It punched up again and again in the dark and dust and Anna could only watch.

Icy tears welled down her cheeks. She imagined herself getting in the RV and racing away, but she couldn't make herself do it. She could barely breathe, she could only watch.

CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH

Large chunks of stone fell and she gasped, and now the totem pole was dropping. The red giant dropped to its knees, and its great shoulders and head sheared out of the mound above in a cloud of dust and stone debris.

Anna's belly and neck quivered. She felt naked. It was vast. It reached up and pulled a shroud of gray off its head, then turned to her.

It was a monster. Its eyes burned a bright red in the darkness. Its mouth was a deep black hole, round and repellant. She pushed with all her strength against the cold smothering her thoughts, but she couldn't make herself run.

Instead her body took a step forward. She wanted to scream but she couldn't. The red giant knelt there and she took another step toward it, then another. Her whole body began to shake. She kept moving forward, unable to even turn her neck, until the creature opened its hand and she stepped in to meet it.

Its grip closed around her middle. Her arms reached up and helped it guide the black hole of its mouth close to her face, as if coming in for a kiss. Her nerves screamed as she opened her mouth wide. Its sharp round lip quivered. Its shallow breath stank of blood. She leaned in closer, until her face was touching its mouth.

Its jaw opened slowly, and she pressed her face up against its mouth. Its chest began to pulsate. It heaved, and her lips tasted an acid tang. The sharp rim of its lips bit down around her face, and her own blood beaded hot down her face.

She couldn't think and she couldn't breathe. Its chest convulsed and its grip quickened. Something was coming, and this was how she would die. This was what her death would mean. This was the end of her long odyssey around the world. 

22. IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

The others slept and steadily their bodies turned to stone. He felt them stiffen and sharpen, lodging him ever more firmly into place. In time the enemy in his middle stopped biting and slept too, wrapped in the embrace of his flesh. The cold grew so faint he could barely feel it, dying day by day just like them all. But there was too much heat inside him still for him to die.

Instead he dreamed of his daughter and his wife, both so long lost. He dreamed and in the world outside days and weeks went by. The tug to sleep forever pulled at him but he resisted, for reasons that his long slow thoughts hurt too much to draw out.

He walked with his wife along a warm beach and they kissed by moonlight. They carried their new baby girl home for the first time. She played with dolls and asked for pointy blue hair. She crawled like a bee along the parched grass in the park, sampling the flowers and buzzing contentedly. She sat warm and heavy in his lap as he read her bedtime stories, and when she slept the cuddling hot weight of her filled him with joy.

Then the coma came. It blanched her and made her eyes strange, made her walk and murmur and hurt herself in her sleep until they pinned her down. He thought he and his wife were enduring it together, but soon it became clear he was the only one enduring.

"I can't do this," she told him one night, after a fight and tears that had become their standard pattern. "I can't live like this."

"We have to," was all he could say, "we have no choice."

She gripped her knees and rocked. The next day she left and he never saw her again.

After that the memories grew simpler and more intense, bounded within the walls of a single room but spiked by every painful push toward creativity and freedom. His adventures with Anna illuminated his life, with her every effort inspiring him. She was stronger than anyone he knew, and he rose to the challenge by staying strong for her. When he missed his wife he just looked down at her sleeping face and saw the reason why he kept on living.

He roused from this long, slow dream to feel the cold rising again. The mound was solid around him; the warmth of every one of his brothers and sisters was long gone, leaving only him.

And the cold was rising, along with the warmth. There came a crashing and crunching beneath him, something terribly urgent nagged in the hollows of his mind, then his enemy moved and broke free.

It tore out of the embrace of his fellows, pulling him out with it. It plucked him away like a rag and threw him to the floor. Lying one a bed of stone bodies, he saw the source of the warmth clearly, standing at the edge of the mound with the blue sky beyond her. It was a girl and he saw only her back, with her head framed with wild frizzy hair, but pride still washed through him. She was so courageous and beautiful, grown into a woman. She'd come so far to see him, and this was what she would find.

His Anna.

The cold swelled out to meet her, as it had taken thousands before her, turning them all to its cause. She turned and the fear in her eyes made him sick. His head slumped on the uneven floor as she started toward them.

Too weak. His arms were broken and his feet were gone, so all he could do was shuffle. He pushed his cold thighs to drive him on, pressing against the red enemy's left foot. He could feel Anna's fragile warmth as she drew closer, walking herself into the enemy's grasp, pressing her face to its mouth. It would take her and remake her, changing everything about her that was beautiful into a killer like it.

He reared up on his stumps and bit into the sinew at the back of the enemy's knee. It was far too tough to bite through but the enemy felt it.

It grunted and looked down, breaking the cold. In a second it sank its bladed left hand into his back, slipping smoothly through his thin chest and pinning him to the ground. His vision blurred, but he could just make out that Anna was running.

Good girl.

The enemy whipped its left hand forward, scooping him and flinging him violently down the corridor, bouncing and tearing off the sharp walls. His feeble bones broke, his skin tore then his ragged body hit Anna as she leapt out of the mound, knocking her head over heels. He came to rest on his back looking up at the blue sky. That was all. His spine was severed and he wasn't long for the world.

His head sagged and there beside him lay his beautiful Anna, all grown up. Her eyes were closed and already the cold was rising up. It couldn't be for nothing, but there was nothing now he could do.

Birdmen and birdwomen flew through the rainbow sky. Her father was sitting beside her reading stories in his cozy brown voice; always there, always and forever.

"Still she haunts me, phantomwise," he read, "Alice moving under skies never seen by waking eyes. Children yet the tale to hear, eager eye and willing ear, lovingly shall nestle near.

"In a Wonderland they lie, dreaming as the days go by, dreaming as the summers die: ever drifting down the stream- lingering in the golden gleam- life, what is it but a dream?"

It was lovely.

"Daddy," she whispered, tucked deeply within the covers. "It's beautiful. Read it again."

"Not now honey. Now it's time to wake up, there's painting to do and the Hatter's waiting."

"I'm so sleepy," she said. "Can't you see I'm like a little kitten, like Dinah, and what kitties really need is to purr and sleep and dream."

"Honey," her father said, "look at me."

She opened her eyes. Her father lay before her, but he wasn't the handsome and scraggly-faced man he'd once been, but a withered gray peanut with fading white eyes lying on orange dust.

"You look so different, Daddy," she whispered.

His lips moved wordlessly.

"Hold me," she said, "please, I want you back. I wish you'd never gone."

His body twitched. Numbly she looked down and saw his legs were gone at the knees. His arms were twisted with broken bones. His stomach had been cut open and lay hollow.

Tears welled in her eyes. "What have they done to you, Daddy?"

The white in his eyes faltered. He was crying too.

"Daddy, please."

She closed her eyes and he was there again, leaning over her in her bed. He was always there and would always keep her safe.

"You have to wake up now honey," he said. "I can't do this for you, Anna. Wake up!"

Her eyes opened and she remembered. The cold was already creeping near. She looked over the body of her father to the mound, where the scratching sound of the red giant lurching itself near was growing louder. Every second it came closer and the cold grew harder, binding around her thoughts like the hurt.

Impossible things would protect her. She drew them about her thoughts like a wall, envisaging birdmen and women flapping back the cold with their bright wings, caterpillar people smoking out warmth like a foggy moat, dog-people and cat-people and the Hatter and all the little puppies rising up and building themselves into a barrier to keep her safe.