The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (32 page)

The troubles of my life make no difference to them. If I was a red demon now, running east to swim the Atlantic in search of others, nothing would change for them. If I was dead with my family in our Jonestown picnic in Pittsburgh, all this would still be here.

It's beautiful, and I take a snapshot with my brain. The great heap of bodies, like cream piled atop a white chocolate éclair, will be here forever I expect. Anna said the bodies in Mongolia turned to stone, so then will this too; a new Mount Rushmore for a new world, where we were saved by our forbears.

Tens of thousands of them. I'll walk over later and thank them.

Down the convoy there's some noise and one of the doors opens up. Out comes Anna from Ravi's RV, bundled in a heavy red parka. She stands out starkly against the white snow, with black braids and those sharp brown eyes. She looks in my direction, sees me atop the RV, and smiles.

That's nice. She raises one hand in a wave and I wave back. Her other arm is in a sling. She starts toward me, her feet crunching audibly through the snow. That's a nice sound. A lot better than the sound of her dying in the Cessna.

"It's quite a view, huh?" she says, only two RVs away. She doesn't shout, doesn't need to, because there's no other sound around here.

"It's amazing," I say. "Come on up, there's a chair down there."

She comes over and finds the chair leaning against the side where I left it. "This for me?"

"You or Lars Mecklarin, whoever turns up first."

She snorts, and hooks the chair over her good shoulder then climbs up. It goes next to me and she sits down. It's strange to think that she's the next generation. I'm 37, young still, but with eight years maximum left of mayorhood. When I look at Anna I expect I'm looking at New LA's next leader, who'll take them forward through all the painful adolescent stages of growth, into a population boom.

We sit together for a time, because everything that needs to be said has been said, really. It's just nice to be here with each other.

"I'm going to miss Cerulean," she says.

That almost gets me going, coming from her. It probably would any other time, but I'm drained from the long day and night by Lara's side, holding my kids, praying for a miracle.

"Me too."

"I treated him so badly. I always thought there'd be time."

I smile. There's no BS between us anymore. "Honey, you went off with no intention of coming back. When would there be time?"

She sighs, and lets out a long, "Yeah. But still."

"But still," I repeat, "and he knew. Cerulean, your father, was a smart guy."

I look over. This almost gets her. Close to crying, but not quite. I figure I can probably push her all the way.

"You know what he said to me, the night he was taken?"

"What?"

"It was about Ravi, and whether he was good enough for you or not. He said, 'That boy thinks with his ass.'"

She laughs, and a tear jogs loose.

"He didn't."

I shrug. "You knew him. You think, I expect, that all the cruel things you said, all the times you stormed out, even the way you left New LA really hurt him, right?"

She nods. I'm not going to lie. The truth's better, anyway.

"It did. But Anna, sweetheart, you were his daughter. Those things just happen. Teenagers, you know? He knew it. He always saw the young woman I'm talking to now, anyway. That was his creation. Don't get me wrong, you made yourself, but would you have made this version without him? He's in you, as surely as your biological father and the T4 too. He loved you, he lived for you, and I bet at the end he fought for you too. Probably his last image was of you hanging overhead, waving him goodbye. That's a good thing, a beautiful thing."

Now she's crying. Ah, such is healing.

"I was such a bitch," she says.

I laugh. "Yeah. We had a laugh, him and me, you know? We groused about you plenty. He was big enough. He had room. The rest doesn't matter. You were his Anna. You've proved it here, a thousand times over. You're the little Anna who first ran up and hugged him, who walked across the country in a zombie convoy, you've got your head screwed on right. He loved you, and he never doubted this was who you were."

Anna cries. I cry a little too. She reaches out her good hand and I take it and we sit there on the rooftop watching the convoy, crying together. At one point Feargal pops out and gives us a wave and a muted, "Halloo," before toddling off to gather more firewood, wearing only a pair of denim dungarees. The cold doesn't seem to bother him, or maybe he likes it. It's bracing.

"How's Ravi?" I ask, after a time.

"He's fine," she says, rubbing her eyes. "He wants to give his seat on the council to me."

I nod. "I thought he might. They voted for him really because there was no Cerulean and no you, and he's smart enough to see that."

"I don't want it."

I turn and look at her. "But you'll take it."

It's not an order. I don't have that kind of power. It's more a statement of fact, because it's where she belongs. She's a leader like I'm a leader; getting it just because she's there.

We don't talk about the one thing left, lying below us in the RV. Lara. Everybody knows, it was on the radio all day and night; one update amongst many.

"I'll go down," she says, and squeezes my hand. I smile and let her go.

Life's funny.

She climbs down, rests her folded chair quietly against the RV's side, then enters. Her muted voice carries up through the thin metal to me, talking to Macy, to Adonis, to the kids, and of course to Lara.

I cry a bit more and try not to think about the future. Things are all changing. I think back to that conversation with Cerulean by the beach a month earlier, when we talked about the holes in people and how they fill them.

For him it was Anna. When he found her outside Denver she stopped him from diving off the Empire State Building. For Masako it was Cerulean, but he left her, carving a hole so big not even her own son could fill it. For Julio it was a level of respect and admiration he could never get in real life, only in a torture chamber in a bunker in Maine.

For me, it was always Lara. I left a trail of cairns across America for her. I killed zombies and people alike just to have a chance to be with her. She was my dream, the vision I would see in the sky after I joined the zombie masses clambering onto the heap.

Now she's lying below. She's comfortable. She's warm. Nearly all her ribs are cracked, her skull is fractured, her pelvis is broken in two places, and her right arm is shattered, but she's comfortable.  

She's in a coma.

We don't have any serious gear here. They're going out to get it now, though none of them, not Cynthia, Macy or Adonis is a doctor, nor have they done a brain scan before. We all know a little about comas, though this coma is not like the ones we went through a year before the apocalypse. We don't know what will happen with this, or what the right thing to do is.

We don't move her. We repaired her body as best we could, and now we keep her comfortable. I hold her hand and talk to her. There's an Electro-Cardio Gram coming, perhaps some kind of rudimentary brain-scanner device, all sticky pads and wires like the emergency defibrillator I used on Abigail, but will we know how to use it, or how interpret the findings?

They'll bring books for that. We'll camp here, in the shadow of the mound, until we have some better idea. It strikes me that we'll need to teach ourselves a lot, now our only doctor is gone. Jake is recovering from his own head trauma, but we should have him transfer all his engineering knowledge to at least one other person.

It makes me think, it's time to get serious about the future. We need to preserve what we know.

I go back down. I've had a break for long enough. I sit with Anna by Lara's side and hold her hand. She looks so beautiful, despite the bandage round the patch in her head where they shaved her lovely hair and stitched her scalp. She looks like she's just sleeping. We take it in turns to talk quietly, telling her everything that happened since she went under, and all that we're going to do.

I don't want her to be afraid. If she can hear me, I want her to know that she's safe. If she can come back, or if she needs to let go, I want her to know that both are OK. She's loved and supported so well, and while we want her back, I know she'll do what's right for her. There are no mistakes in this life. It's all a tapestry.

* * *

A week later we go north.

Anna and Ravi, Feargal, Peters, Jake and me.

We've got guns and supplies. We've got explosives Sulman found in a wreckers' yard. We take an RV and a set of radios and leave the makeshift camp on McKnight behind. It's expanded now, with marquee tents and heating systems, a soup kitchen that cooks venison and fox that Cynthia hunted in the woods, a crèche for the kids, foraging groups that dig up truffles, wild potatoes and onions, and there are regular meetings of the Council to debate governance, like an upscale refugee camp. 

The council voted Anna in. Ravi was relieved. He spends all his days and from what I understand, all his nights hanging on at her side. I get it. It's cute, it's love, and it's what makes the world go round. I have it for Lara.

She breathes for herself. Her heart runs. For food we had to intubate her. There's a catheter and a rotating duty for keeping her clean. She's been healing. All the books say 'wait'. I've read all the ones we could find, from cover to cover, brought from book shops and hospitals and doctor's offices. You can't do anything, is the final advice. The skull has to heal itself. The extraordinary trauma has to heal itself. The brain, the spine and the mind all have to heal by themselves.

She's in there, doing her best to come out. I can't rush that.

We've chopped down some trees for firewood, though honestly I think we did that just because Feargal wanted something physical to do. He's been wanting to make this trip for a week, I know, to tie up the last loose end, but he was too kind to press his case.

The Council voted we'd send a single RV. There's other work to do at the camp; all of Julio's survivors need constant care and attention, as a few are still in comas of their own, brought on by the last brush with the demons. The kids need some stability. There was Masako's funeral a few days ago, after the funeral for Chantelle, Ozark, Lucy and the others we lost.

The Council postponed a trial about my involvement in Masako's death. Everyone knows what I did. Alan has already told the truth to everyone that'll listen, the poor guy. He can't stop himself. Masako abandoned him just as Cerulean abandoned her, but much worse really. She quit not only him, but their son and all of us. I didn't say anything at the funeral, I was torn if I should even attend, but Alan asked me too. I was sorry. I always liked Masako.

The tally stands at forty-nine, now. We lost a lot of good people along the way.

Driving up to Maine takes less than a day. We don't talk much, as the terrain grows slightly more mountainous, the roads a little more twisty, cutting through dynamite-blasted hills and thick snowy forests. I drive the whole way because I can't handle being in the back with the rest of them.

I bring them down. I was inspirational before and I will be again, but I can't do it now. Not with Lara on the edge like this.

"Ravi's asked me to marry him," Anna hisses to me some time in the afternoon, as we pass close to New York.

"That's brilliant," I say, then lower my voice, because Ravi's dozing in back. We're all on a strange napping schedule now, after having shared night shifts for the past week to help with all the sick survivors. "What did you say?"

"That I'd think about it."

I chuckle. "Weigh up your options, is that it?"

"A girl can't be rushed into these things."

I nod thoughtfully. "Smart, I suppose. if you're willing to wait, Lin will be of age in about, I don't know, ten years? He's a nice boy."

Anna snorts.

"Or maybe you go older? There's a few more choices there. Sulman. Smart, a provider. Or Feargal, that's a strapping man."

She frowns. "Feargal?"

"You saw him in his dungarees. The man's carved out of wood."

She gives this some reflection. "That's true. Muscles are really what I'm looking for in a man, after all."

"Good genes," I agree, "beautiful red hair."

She laughs. You can't out-do me on this sort of thing, really, even when I'm down.

"So what do you think we'll find?" Anna asks, sobering. "When we get there?"

I contemplate that. "A hole in the ground. A lot of bodies. And a bunker."

"Do you think he'll be there?"

She's talking about Cerulean. Perhaps he was one of the seven demons, buried under the mound. He could have been the one that put Lara in her coma. Or perhaps he's still in Maine, waiting for us to come bury him. We may never know.

"I hope so."

I drive on. It takes about twelve hours, and I take hardly any breaks. For a time I put on some music; bits of pop that remind me of the past. Some Kanye, some Taylor Swift, a little Simon and Garfunkel. I've always been a sucker for 'Old Friends', but now I think of Cerulean and it hits me doubly. Then I think of Lara and I need to just focus on the road.

The route is obscure but not too hard to find. I remember it, as we get into the Town of Madrid in the dark. Feargal suggests stopping over and going the rest of the way in the morning, out of some misguided sympathy for me, I think, but I don't want to do that. I need to be there now.

So I drive up into the mountains, in first gear and crunching over thick, crusted snow and ice, winding up to the base of Mount Abraham in the dark. Its outline is barely visible against a muffled sky of clouds.

The warning cairns I placed here ten years back are mostly gone. The cars have been shoved off the road and the checkered finish line marking them has been painted over with bitumen. Julio's work, I expect. Just after them we stop and get out.

I walk up to the rise with the others behind me. I'm the only one who's been here before, and the weight of memory is stifling. Here I made choices that set us all on a path. Nearly two weeks ago now I swallowed the consequences of those choices like knives, and this is the new Amo that resulted.