Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (29 page)

It was enough, just enough, and she bolted upright. Her body moved stiffly but it moved, and she cast about amongst the pile of stuff unloaded from the RV, coming up with an assault rifle. She clicked the safety, bolted a round into the chamber, and turned on the gray mound.

It was at the entrance now, its eyes burning red and its mouth gaping blackly. The cold stole at her legs and held her tight, becalmed her thoughts and almost stopped her flat, but she'd spent her childhood fighting against the hurt and she wouldn't give in now, not with her father right there and watching.

"Eat this," she whispered, and pulled the trigger.

Bullets raked across the mound with a deafening clatter. The recoil kicked in her shoulder and roused her. A single impact splashed off the red giant's face and punched it back.

The cold faded and she advanced, firing all the while.

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said the rifle. She strode over the limp body of her father, driving a hail of bullets into the giant's face and torso as it backed away. They ricocheted with bright sparks off the wide tunnel walls, crunching stony limbs and fogging the tunnel with body-powder.

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The rifle clicked on empty and Anna blinked, coming back to herself. Sweat poured down her face and mingled with tears. It was still inside and shifting, the cold was reaching out once more, and she understood.

Bullets and bombs wouldn't kill it. Nothing she could do would kill it, because if there had been some other way then the apocalypse need never have happened. The zombie ocean was the world's antidote to this most terrible threat, and all she could do now was follow their lead.

The correct response leaped up and she embraced it. The rocket launcher lay there and she swept it up. On her shoulder it felt solid and right, primed like a vorpal sword.

"This is for my father," she said, and pulled the trigger.

The rocket shot out on a string of smoke, hit the tunnel a few feet deep of the entrance, and erupted in flame. Bodies fragmented and powder shot out and the whole mound lifted for a second.

Then fell. The crunch was almighty. Dust huffed out from all sides like a gasp as thousands of stone bodies settled to a new balance. The cold sank away, fading as the red giant within was once again buried alive.

The launcher sagged to the dust and Anna dropped to her knees by her father's side. The light was nearly gone from his shriveled eyes. 

"Daddy," she whispered. She took his slack hand as he'd once held hers, holding tight while the light in his eyes flickered and died. 

23. CAIRNS

Her father was lighter than the others.

She considered the possible explanations for why, as she climbed up the newly settled mound with his stiff corpse tied across her back, but she only considered them gently. To question them too deeply now seemed inappropriate. To ignore them altogether seemed less than he deserved.

"You never turned to stone, did you," she said to him as she climbed. "You waited and used yourself up like a battery. The others became stone a lot earlier; they leveraged what charge they had for weight and containment. You knew I was coming, so you waited. Is that about right?"

Strapping him to her back had not been hard. Now she wore him like a backpack. It probably looked obscene, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like a return to the days when he wore her around his neck like a baby, carrying her everywhere he went whether she was awake or asleep. It felt right.

She climbed.

The bodies under her hands and feet had set firmly against each other again. They made for strange hiking material. Still she could feel the whispers of the red creature's chill reaching up through the rocky pile, like anemone feelers tickling at the air, but not strong enough to compel her. Bullets, a rocket-launcher and a thousand tons of stone bodies on the head would do it.

The rest she would think about later.

Their hands and feet helped her up. She fancied Alice climbing a pyramid of bodies, and the odd things she might comment upon.

"Well excuse me, sir, but you must know that your little toe is wedged in that other man's nose, now how can that be comfortable? Do you not feel the tiniest bit of shame for the shabby way you're treating him? If only you might unplug it and then both the poor chap would breathe easier and you too would regain freedom of the foot, don't you agree?"

She snorted. Alice again.

She'd thought about burying him; digging a deep hole in the dirt and setting up a grave, but it didn't seem fitting. Cremation was possible, since he wasn't stone like the others. She even scanned the horizon for trees to provide firewood, so she could tip his ashes into a can and carry him around forever, but he'd had long enough travels already. It was time for him to rest.

She reached the top, held to a slippery bald head by the ears, and slid her father carefully round from her back. His broken arms flopped creakily, and he slumped quite comfortably in a slight depression by the apex.

Anna smiled. So this was his island, and he the giant sat atop it. All these bodies were his throne. It was all right.

Beyond that, it was too much to really process that her father had just died. It was too big, after believing he'd been dead and gone for so long. This was his broken, battered body. This had held her when she went to sleep, had carried her across the world, and come all this way only to die for her again.

She leaned away. When she took her hands off him, they shook. She thought about the last time she'd touched him, back when she was a little girl in the water, clinging desperately to his head as he strode away down the continental shelf.

This was really it. She didn't know what to say. She leaned in and kissed his gray forehead. It made her cry.

"Bye bye, Daddy," she said.

From her pocket she pulled the little Alice figure, made by her over ten years ago and given then as a gift. It had been in his backpack throughout, largely undamaged though a little faded by months in the water. She kissed it too then rested it in the crook of his arm. 

A giant and his daughter.

She sat on the RV roof in the pale midday sunlight, looking at her father's backpack. The items from inside lay spread out in a neat row like soldiers on parade: his wallet, their house keys, a blue crayon with its paper casing stripped away, assorted coins, a dark lump of something in faded plastic packaging that had to be red strings, the book of Alice in Wonderland with the cover washed away though the words inside remained, a piece of red rock from a canyon they'd walked up that she thought had been a fossil, a bottle of water with the seal unbroken, and a dry seed-case from a walnut tree.

She touched each item solemnly with her fingertip, as if anointing them. Memories of them drifted up: picking these up from the nightstand in her home, collecting these along the way. She laid her father's phone alongside them, completing the set.

She'd arrived and fought a Jabberwock. Now this was her treasure. She activated the phone's Hatter app and it flashed with the blue and the yellow dots almost atop each other.

"Good doggy," she said.

The sun was sinking already and it was getting cold. High on the Mongolian steppes it was always cold without the sun. She studied her body, counting the blisters and bruises her body mining and battles had raised up. Her arms were spattered with them, probably from tumbling or from bits of shrapnel blown out by the explosion. There was a huge purple oval on her hip and another on her shoulder. Her neck hurt and so did all her muscles, particularly her shoulders.

The row of items waited for her.

She picked up the wallet and opened it. Her hands trembled as she picked through the cards inside. The top bits of them were faded to white where they'd been exposed to water, but the hidden lower halves were as bright as the day they were printed: a bank card, a credit card, a travel card, and finally a driving license.

It had a picture of her father. It wasn't his peanut face or the face from her memories or dreams, but the actual man. He wore a half-smile revealing white teeth. He still had his scraggly beard but his hair was longer than she remembered. His eyes were brown and warm.

This was her father in his prime. She checked the card's date of issue; it had to be at least a year before she was born. Her vision grew fuzzy and she imagined her father sitting in the photo booth and thinking of the future that lay ahead. Her mother was probably there too, waiting outside the photo booth ready to laugh with him at how the picture turned out. A young couple, young and in love, before Anna had even been conceived.

She wiped her eyes and read her father's name for the first time. She'd never known what it was. She sounded it out to herself quietly; it seemed to fit. It was a good name, a strong name. Their address was printed there too, in a city she bore no memories of.

She made a cairn as the sun went down. It was simple and unmarked, not for anyone but her. She laid the backpack and its items on the sand before the mound, then piled rocks atop them, like a doll's house version of the zombie cairn. She didn't paint the pile or leave any other sign she'd been there.

Afterward she slept, and for the first time since she was a little girl there was no tug of guilt pulling at her thoughts as she slipped away, nothing at all. She was free.

Dawn came bright and cold with a biting wind whipping off the desert. Anna unfurled her world map like a spinnaker sail in the refuge of the RV, set a button down on her spot in Mongolia, and surveyed the whole. 

Thousands of miles to the east, back across an ocean and round the other side of the world, lay Los Angeles. Thousands of miles to the west it was much the same.

She'd come here to die. Now that didn't seem so important. She wanted to see Amo again. She wanted to hold Cerulean's hand. She wanted to see Ravi.

The RV needed only a little fresh oil and some tuning to its brakes. Not one wheel had blown out yet, and she had the gear to manage when it did. She had more than enough fuel to get to the next major city.

She laughed. She'd never researched any of this, but that was what made it fun.

"I'm going through the looking glass," she said into the hissing satellite phone, atop the RV. The wind snapped at her clothes and hair so loud she could barely hear herself. If they were answering she'd never hear it. "The long way round, leaving cairns all the way. Tell Cerulean I miss him, Amo. I even miss you. Tell Ravi I miss him as well. I'm coming home, and I'm bringing the world with me."

The road had no name that she could see, but the sand lying in shallow drifts over the surface was no worse than before. The GPS unit blinked happily on the dashboard, directing her toward Paris, France.

She peeled out.

It took four weeks, driving nine-hour days and stopping in major cities to drop cairns. She was out of Mongolia on the Murun-Bulgan highway and into Russia as summer came to its end. On the M52 she bore north and west, up through the wooded fir valleys of Biysk and past blocky communist-era statues and French-colonial municipal buildings. There were tatty old lemon-yellow Ladas everywhere, long coffin-like cars alongside great gray heaps of the dead.

On the road northwest to Novosibirsk she raced through overripe fields that were surely once farmland for sunflowers, rapeseed and wheat, but now were studded with new growth walnut and Mongolian lime trees, strangled in places by thick Japanese knotweed. Geese honked overhead and vermilion foxes watched from the rushes of lakes that stretched on into ice.

The number of gray mounds ebbed gradually until there were none. The red giants hadn't reached this far. She wasn't sorry to see them go. In their place the Altai mountains rose up, wearing a brittle cap of snow. She kept the map open in the passenger seat beside her, weighted down with the hissing satellite phone: her two constant companions.

The chill in the air deepened. She stopped at a parka store in a low valley and took three of the fluffiest coats they had, along with woolen underwear, thick leather boots, wool socks, gloves, mufflers, whole sheepskin blankets and a heavy furred hats. She left payment in the form of USBs lying neatly like orange pips on the counter.

A few hundred miles later she stopped at a Yangtze fulfillment center, laughing her way down the dark hallways where all the signs were written in stark Russian script. She stocked up on everything she would need for her cairns, then drove on through the Siberian pine-coated hills with old Madonna tracks lilting from her roof-mounted speakers. No zombies came to follow her; those days were gone, but the bright clashing music made her happy and served to warn any other humans she was passing through. 

In Novosibirsk she cruised through the suburbs and downtown, past a grand lilac-colored train station as ornate with bright arches as a child's fancy toy box, hunting down the tallest building. Gorskiy City Hotel was a blocky black glass affair with bright stripes of color running around alternating floors, about twenty-five floors tall.

From the rooftop she rappelled down with her gear. It was a giddy high, swaying in the freezing wind fifteen to twenty floors above ground, kind of like leaning into the draft of a catamaran. She spent the day painting a simple symbol, the same all round world that she'd she seen so far.

A STOP sign. It was a red octagon with large white letters in the middle, reading:

LA 36

LA for their location, and 36 for their numbers. Underneath it was a white arrow pointing to the lobby, where she'd left laptops, teabags, cups and kettles with generators and fuel to run them, plus directions drawn out on maps, Amo's USB seeds, and a big whiteboard snatched from one of the conference center floors.

ANNA 7/2028

She surveyed it from a vantage point on the verdant floodplains of the Ob river, just as the sun came down beyond Gorskiy City. It offered a choice.