The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (23 page)

Lying in my booth, I sigh. Having Cerulean at my left hand and Lara at my right has insulated me against some of this. Such things never seemed very pressing to me, back when I was engaged with my grander vision.

I had in mind our ultimate survival as a race. I was always working on the cairn packs, tweaking them as best I could to better spell salvation to any undecided survivors out there. I was absorbed with planning and implementing our rollout of cairns into cities in South America and Canada. I worked on the movie Ragnarok IV for years, aiming for a more universal recruitment tool in multiple languages, no longer so America-centric, which we would spread in cities around the world. I worked endlessly to make it as inspirational and welcoming as I could.

In tandem with that I had my plan for Anna to circle the world, and the wider series of cairns that would follow, and restarting a rudimentary global internet using the existing deep-sea cables. I delegated a lot onto many people's shoulders, but I did the work too, going out on the front lines as much as I could, heading on cairn trips to new cities and old. I threw grand parties for every survivor who arrived. I tried to celebrate life as well as I knew how.

But I never really thought of the mayorship as a concrete, tangible thing, separate from myself. There was nothing there to vote for. I was New LA.

But ten years is a long time to be in power. The President of the United States was limited to two four-year terms. Ten years is more like a dictatorship in some tin pot backwater country, where control passes down dynastic lines, like North Korea.

Am I Kim Jong-Un?

It's laughable, but the things Masako said are not. They are threats to our unity, precisely because I have come to symbolize that unity, but this is not a cult of personality. It's a new nation.

I rub my eyes.

Who will I be if I am no longer Mayor? Amo the artist, I suppose. He draws our cairns for us, he's great on a rope hanging off a tall building, drawing funny video game characters and social media logos. Once he was Mayor, sure, but that was a long time ago.

It's all right. I'm no Washington and I never thought I was. I'm just a guy.  

Lara is driving, up ahead. I should go talk to her, pride be damned. I owe her everything, really; my life, my happiness, my children and my reason to live.

Pride is a little thing, really, next to all that.

So I go.

I get up, though every bit of me aches. I go stand beside her, looking at the rear of two RVs ahead of us, and put my arm round her shoulder. She looks up and leans into me.

From the front RV to the back. I kiss her rich, wiry hair. She has the radio tuned low, but on it I can hear familiar voices deep in argument. Here's Witzgenstein pitching herself for mayor. Here's Masako in support. Here's Ravi and Sulman speaking up for me.

"Have you been joining in?" I ask.

Lara snorts. "They make some good points. Willful. Arrogant. Rides roughshod over everyone."

I nod. "Masako is a bitch, I agree."

She laughs in spite of herself. "Dammit, Amo. What if they vote you out?"

I pretend to consider this possibility deeply. Screwing my face up thoughtfully hurts though, with all these bruises and bandages. "More church," I offer up. Everyone knows Witzgenstein is devoutly born again. "Fewer dances, probably. Christian rock, ugh."

Lara looks at me with that half-angry, half-puzzled face that I love. "Are you serious? They'll split off. The convoy will break and New LA will be decimated."

I nod slowly. "Yeah. But that might have happened anyway."

She frowns. "You don't know- I mean, ugh. You're crazy. You're just, ugh!" She breaks off, despairing of me. It's cute, and I kiss her hair again.

"I should talk to you about these things, before I do them. I know. I'm far from perfect."

"And they know it too," she says. "However this comes out, it won't be the way it was before."

"It can't be," I say, "and it shouldn't be."

She drives on. Outside there's just the sharp cone of light from our headlamps, illuminating the RVs ahead. It's a cloudy night, no stars and only fleeting glimpses of a sickle moon.

"How's your head?"

I squint. If I squint I can read the digital clock on the dashboard through my blurry vision. 3:21, it says, meaning another nine hours spent in the dark.

"Fine," I say, ignoring the dull thumping growing in my head. I ignored headaches for a year after my coma, and look where it got me. "Clear as a bell."

"You've got new scars. There's a nasty one on your cheek; we slowed the convoy down to let Macy come tend to it."

I finger my right cheek. Yes, I can feel the stubble of stitches under the bandage. That might have been Lucy, or maybe flying debris.

"It'll give me character."

She smiles.

"I want to see the kids," I say, struck by a sudden yearning. "I miss them."

"Me too. We're stopping in an hour, the whole convoy. We have enough of a lead to stretch our legs for ten minutes. We can swap with Cynthia, ride out the debate in the kid's car."

I grin. Nothing sounds so wonderful as that. I kiss her again, and she pulls my hand down and kisses my palm.

"No more surprises," she says.

"No more surprises," I agree.

* * *

The trade-over takes nine minutes total, including emptying a few toilet septic tanks, supplies being traded and people switching vehicles. It is a smooth and perfectly oiled maneuver, all the parts interchanging with clockwork precision, and I feel proud.

On the way up to the kids' car I let myself be seen, hobbling along on Lara's arm.

It's good to let the people see me, alive and moderately well. The ones who like me will be cheered. The ones who want a new Mayor will see I'm present but not interfering with the process. At one point I see Masako, as we go past her RV toward the kid's car.

"That was brave," I tell her. "I know it wasn't easy."

She watches me with disdain, standing with her husband Alan holding her arm like he's restraining her. I know it must sound patronizing for me to say that, but I mean it, and I want her to know I'm not angry. Still, it's strange to see so much anger fuming off her, when I never really saw it before.

"She hates you a lot," Lara whispers in my ear. "That or she's just really constipated."

I snort.

"I wouldn't blame her," Lara goes on, "it's hard to shit in a moving RV. Plus the demons are terrible for digestion."

Ravi runs down to us from the lead RVs. When he sees us his eyes swim with tears. He stops and takes my hand with both of his, like I'm the Pope.

Ravi is such a good boy. In school he'd no doubt be the sweet, dumb jock who doesn't even realize there's a clique system going on. He pursued Anna for years, and was too bull-headed to ever take her cruelty, sarcasm and disdain as a definitive no. He adored her like a puppy loves its master.

"I don't blame you," he says, getting right to it. "For Anna, I mean. She went because she wanted to, I know it. She never did anything she didn't want to."

I don't know what to say to that. It means a lot. My throat gets tight and my eyes get watery. He sees it and watches me like a little kid, like Vie or Talia when they've fallen and hurt their knee and are lost in that moment, trying to decide how much they need to cry.

"Thanks," I say, and pull him into a hug. He's strong and pulls Lara in with us. I guess we were surrogate parents for him too. He came to us at fourteen after being alone for six years, playing video games and eating chocolate in Louisiana. He was fat then but quickly burned it off, becoming a powerful young man. I pat his back, getting misty-eyed. "We'll talk when this is over. We'll have proper funerals for them, and services and everything, I promise."

He nods, plainly not trusting himself to speak, then walks quickly away rubbing at his eyes.

Outside the kids' car Feargal comes over, a solidly built athletic guy a head taller than me, with a shiny bald head kind of like an Irish 'The Rock'. He holds out his big hand and I shake it.

"You're doing the right thing with this," he says. "Better late than never."

I smile. I've always liked Feargal, even though he's been a pain over the years. I never wanted yes-men, though, and he's a good guy. "Thanks."

"And out there?" he points behind us. "Amazing. That explosion was better than any stump speech I've ever seen. I don't think you can lose."

"I didn't plan it. I thought I was going to die."

He smiles back. "That's why you'll win. What Masako said about the mistakes, we don't all agree with that. I wouldn't have done it any differently. For me it's not personal, it's more about the democratic process."

"It's a good process," I say. "We had it for centuries."

He nods seriously, shakes Lara's hand too, then walks back toward the front.

I look around but I don't see Witzgenstein.

"She'll be glad-handing," Lara says, reading my thoughts. "Door-stepping, leafleting, kissing babies."

"Too busy to pay a call on us."

"I don't want to see her anyway."

We get in the RV.

The floor is a riot of kids' toys in bright plasticky colors; soft teddies and Lego bricks and My Little Ponies, wooden blocks and iPads and rollable piano floor sheets. On the walls are all manner of palm-print paintings and origami crafts, featuring a madcap array of explosions and demons and zombies.

The gaggle of five kids and two babies are being watched over carefully by Cynthia's beady eye. She doesn't look any older than the day I first saw her, a crusty, hillbilly granny.

"Daddy!" Vie calls, suddenly overjoyed.

"Mommy!" Talia matches him. They run up and grab us, and it helps me get my priorities straight again.

This is what it's for. These kids, these people, this group. My family.

"I'm sick of all the shitting," Cynthia says, in her classic redneck accent. "Fifty diapers a day, in a contained space? I'm done."

With that pronouncement she gets out and Macy gets in, swapped from another RV. Lara takes the wheel and moments later we pull away, leaving me concussed in the back and getting trounced by all the kids; Masako's four-year-old boy Lin, Feargal's five-year-old Siobhan, Vie, Talia and Rose, Martha and Tom's daughter.

They babble at me in tongues, pulling me by a finger each to show me what they won in the last game they played, the painting they did last night, the cubbyhole they slept in, the new half forward roll they mastered.

Lara and Macy crack up at the front while volunteer nannies Jorge, Maris and Janine slump at the sides on beanbags and sigh with relief.

"What happened to your face, Daddy?" Talia asks, pulling me down to kneel before her in the middle of a game of Blind Man's Bluff, with that intense seriousness children sometimes get. She points at my cheek. "There."

"I was bitten by a manticore," I say, ad-libbing wildly. "Have you ever seen a manticore? It has the head of a lion and the body of a goat and the tail of a snake."

I mime a manticore with some hissing and scary shaking of hands, which terrifies Vie and the others, though Talia is probably too old for it.

"Daddy, stop being silly. Vie, he's being silly."

"It came out of the desert and tried to bite my head off, but I bit its head off instead." I bare my razor sharp teeth and pat my belly. "It's in here now. I bet you can't draw me a picture of that dinner scene. Best one gets a ride round the RV on the back of a manticore-killer."

They probably only half-understand what I'm saying, but it gets them all scribbling on paper furiously; an assortment of lion, goat and snake bits, with a few hippopotami and eagle bits thrown in for good measure, and me sitting at the head of a big table waiting to eat.

"Praise the Lord," says Janine from her beanbag, clearly enjoying the respite, "you have my vote." The world wavers a little as my concussion knocks me silly, but I get my balance back and play it off with a cheerful grin.

"Go tell it on the mountain," I tell her and wink, making her blush.

"Daddy, pay attention," Talia says, tugging me back down to her level. "I know it wasn't a manticore, it was the big explosion. I want to know, are you really all right? They talked about you on the radio a lot."

I give her a big hug, the biggest yet of the day. "Sweetheart, I'm going to be just fine. We all are. I promise."

I look up and Lara catches my eye. Making promises I don't know if I can keep.

14. FIRST MAYOR

It's a wonderful day.

I put aside all the death, the politics and the demons and I play with my kids. I'm not mayor anymore and the weight of responsibility coming off is a huge release.

We play hide-and-seek up and down the RV, until the simple, obvious fact of hiding in the booths, amongst the supply crates and under the same blankets becomes ridiculously funny in itself. We play Monopoly for very short bursts, fighting over the shoe and the iron, until one of the younger kids grabs the money and starts throwing it around and we all play the grabbing money game instead. We make crafts, and I judge the manticore competition and give the promised manticore-slayer ride, despite my head throbbing and the wound in my cheek pulling tight every time I smile.

Lara swaps out of driving for Jorge, and comes back to help me lead story time, where we read one story for the older kids, The Hunger Games, and one for the littler kids, Three Little Pigs. We have a nap and I snooze with Lara lying next to me and Vie and Talia cuddle up close like kittens.

The convoy rumbles on. Up ahead they have the radio on low and a curtain up so the carers can go join in the political discussions without alarming the kids, or, perhaps, alarming me.

I don't care. My head spins and ribs ache and this is just perfect.

"Mr. Amo," Masako's boy mumbles at me, Lin, waking me from a daydream about Anna.

"Just Amo," I tell him. "What is it?"

"Is my mommy mad at you?"

I consider. Lin is just four, between Talia and Vie, and it's funny to think of all the things he doesn't know. So much happened before he was born, and how could I ever catch him up on all of it?