Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (25 page)

"Sorry," she muttered, and continued up.

At the top she sat on a man's back, flat like an altar. From this high she could see over the bridge to the full bay façade. It went on endlessly. She'd always thought of LA as an endless, characterless gray sprawl, but this sprawl was the Pac-Man that would eat LA up like a tiny food pixel. It went on so far she couldn't see the edge, and where much of LA was single floor warehouses and duplexes, this was all high-rise.

Gray mounds were interspersed everywhere; dozens of them, maybe hundreds.

She studied the skyline with her binoculars, looking for any sign of human activity: a giant 'f' perhaps, a Michael Jordan, a smiley face.

There were holes bitten out of buildings in places, and trees growing on top of skyscraper roofs. There were crashed cars and roads filled with moss and a whole section of town sunk beneath a murky swamp, but there was no sign of human habitation at all: no paintings in the windows, no mattresses laid out in the shape of an SOS in the streets, no arrows pointing to cairns, no signs of smoke rising, nothing. There were just endless ranks of abandoned buildings like gravestones in a vast cemetery.

She put the binoculars down and this time the tears got the better of her. Millions dead and nothing to show. The zombies had done this and left nothing but their corpses behind, gathered in neat piles like gigantic cairns, built out of individual stones placed there by a thousand individual hands, and the message they delivered was utterly clear.

Defeat.

Total and utter defeat.

This is what they'd seen, and what had broken them. Surely this is what it had been like for Amo too, when he first stumbled upon Sophia. When he was the first at every step, stumbling on suicide and rape and haunted by massacres and destruction, surely it was this same thing he felt that ultimately drove him to let the zombie ocean swallow him down.

But this was so much worse, because not even the dead could come to her now. Every gesture they'd made was meaningless, because this was what they became. This was what her father had come to do when he'd left her so long ago. This was the shape of the T4 that was inside them all, the parasite at the heart of all their hopes and dreams, making of them a complete and utter folly.

It was too much. She stumbled and rolled and staggered back down the mountain.

Mounds ringed the bay. They seemed to swell up over her like waves, threatening to crush her like a little girl in the water. She ran back to the yacht and crawled into her bed like she was that little girl again. The zombies were outside and her father was hammering at the door and there was nothing she could do but get under the covers and hide.

She dreamed of her giant father on his island again, staring out to the sky with burning white eyes. He spoke in slow low tones.

"What are you doing, Anna?"

She lay on the rock at his feet, but now it was clear the rock island he stood upon was not rock at all, but frozen bodies. The cold had got to them all and turned them to stone. She looked out and saw the whole ocean freezing, all the bodies stopping their tidal lapping and setting hard. They were dying.

"I can't find any lint," she muttered. She pulled at her pockets and scraped at them hungrily, but no lint at all came from within them.

"It isn't always easy," boomed her father. "You walk away or you stay behind, both of them can take everything you have. This is not something you need to see, my daughter. You don't need to feel this way anymore."

"I do need it, Daddy," she said. In the dream she was little Anna again, small and wearing her bright blue and white Alice uniform, looking up at him. "I have to see, and if this is all there is then I'll be with you, by your side. I'll hang like Amo at the end of the world, because what else can I do?"

"I'll be waiting," her father said. "I have always loved you, you know that."

She cried. "I can't find any lint," she mumbled between her tears. "Where is it?"

"It only grows with hope, child. You can't expect strength and memories to grow out of nothing. They come from efforts made and put out into the world. I hope I've left enough for you behind, my child. I only did what I could. I have missed you."

"I miss you."

"Now I must go. If you find a world where the Hatter wears a saddle and you can ride him like a knight, think of me kindly will you? Anna, my dear Anna, see it for what it is and not only what you feel. Now I must truly go."

"Don't go," she said, getting the tears under her control, "I don't want to be alone again."

"What is alone, child? You're never alone in this world. I must go, and where I go you can't follow."

He rose and strode into the water again. It hurt again, but this time there was something final about it. The solidifying ocean opened to admit him, stone crunching and shearing apart, then closed over his head.

Anna ran after him, over the surface of the ocean as it zipped itself back up, but he was already within, deep below and lost. And it was getting colder. She looked to the horizon where an icy red glow was rising, and understood.

It wasn't the sun, but the Jabberwock, and it was coming round again.

She woke in silence and weak morning light. Her head ached and the sheets were stifling around her. She was still wearing her clothes from the day before.

She kicked out of the sheets, drained a liter bottle of water, then climbed to the bridge.

Warm sea winds washed over her. The sun was already up and hidden behind its mask of white cloud, hidden like her father within the ocean.

The mound was there, wriggling like the T4, though it was completely still. The city was still and the mounds were everywhere, and that was that.

"Lint and cobbles," Anna muttered.

This was what the crazy woman had warned her of. This moment when madness beckoned.

"Everything we ever did, turned to naught," Anna said.

It was a true thing. It was the T4, and it meant her father would be somewhere like this, buried in a meaningless mound, lost for all time.

That thought made her cry quietly. It asked more of her than she thought she could give. For so long she'd believed she'd find him, somehow heal him, and bring him home to be a father again.

Now that would never happen. Even to see him would be a kind of surrender. Perhaps it would take more from her than she was able to give. Perhaps it would break her mind too, and she'd forever roam the oceans, going so mad that she slaughtered little children then forgot if she'd truly done it or not.

The sting of the rifle's recoil still echoed in her palms. She'd killed another human. She held up her hand and looked through the missing space where her finger had been. Everything was a cost. Living was a cost.

And her father was still out there.

She couldn't reconcile the two. He was her father, but his body would be set like stone. What did it mean to go to him now, what did it mean to die by his side, when he'd left her so very long ago?

But he was still her father, and that had to mean something. It meant something to her, even if nobody else cared. She owed it to herself, to the little girl who'd believed, to see this thing through. She had to go stand by his grave, just as he'd always stood by her.

The satellite phone hissed by her side. She barely remembered picking it up and turning it on.

She clicked the button to transmit, and the static fuzz dropped away.

"I get it, Amo," she said, "or I get something."

It was desolation, dust and ashes, the great weight of defeat. He'd seen it all but somehow come through, and to know that felt like stepping out of this creature called Anna, out of everything Anna was and wanted, and into a bigger and higher place from which could see the whole of the world. In that place she wasn't only herself, but a representative of all humanity, come to a site of immeasurable human loss. She wasn't only an angry child on a hopeless mission anymore, but something more.

She was the last person alive in the world, but what she did still mattered.

She remembered Amo's face when he caught her and Ravi smashing things in the ruins of LA. She understood now. There had been millions of windows to smash, millions of walls to deface, but now she knew there was
not a single one that they could spare.
They needed them all intact for the people who came next to see. It wasn't fair to leave hopelessness, surrender and despair for others to find. It wasn't fair to let a five-year-old come and see this, and be destroyed.

She could do better than that. She had to offer the choice, whether she believed in the alternative not. Every soul had to choose for themselves.

In this world you had to build. Amo had said their little group was fragile, always in danger of blowing apart, but she'd never truly understood. Now she saw it clearly. Without the things Amo had built they'd all have been lost.

There was a path before her, still. It opened up like a chrysalis, and the more she thought of it the stronger it got. It was a fantasy, but not only that. It was hope, but not only that, either. It was balance, a way to even out the score, and at its core was bloody-minded defiance, and that she could revel in with ease.

She heaved the first of her munitions crates out of the front hulls and set it on the bridge. She would do this her way. No one said building meant you couldn't also destroy. You just had to do it right.

She'd packed rifles and rockets on a whim. They'd practiced with them on ranges, one of the trainings Amo had lined up for everyone after Julio left. It had always seemed funny to her that Julio had gotten what he wanted only in banishment.

She pulled the yacht up a few hundred yards from the sea-facing front of the bridge, dropped anchor and sails, and lifted the rocket-launcher to her shoulder. This would make an impact.

She took aim and fired. The rocket steamed out on a trail of smoke, flew low under the bridge and arced gracefully into the water, where it sank without exploding.

She reloaded, raised the trajectory and fired again. This time hit the side of the bridge with a massive 'crump'. Flames burst out like a wind-whipped spinnaker, then dissipated within a smothering puff-ball of deep black smoke.

Shrapnel peppered the water. A tiny piece of something pinged off one of the hulls.

"Direct hit," Anna muttered. "Gold star please Amo."

Sea winds soon cleared the black smoke, revealing a mangled mess of twisted bridge railings and chewed-up asphalt. A few cars on the bridge had been blown backwards, one on its roof. There were still several sections of strong rebar buttressing the edge, but she didn't need a rocket for those.

She set the weapon down. Part one finished, on with part two.

The catamaran docked again at the beach, and she began transferring the tools and equipment she would need to the beach: two jugs of sloshing gasoline, two cans of red paint and one of white, cables and ropes, two spare car batteries, brushes, and other bits and pieces.

She loaded them onto a flatbed cart and started along the sandy, shady path to the bridge. Either side of her lay narrow strips of trees, carpeted with grass spiked by bright wildflowers. She began to whistle.

It was the music from the Life of Brian; a film Cerulean had insisted she watch. Lara, Amo and Masako had joined them on the first screening, after they found a copy that would run on the Chinese Theater's IMAX screen.

"Always look on the bright side of life."

Brian sang it while he was getting crucified. Now it cheered her on.

The bridge was a bridge, double level with the bottom part for cars and pedestrians, the top for trains. She went along the bottom sidewalk past stationary cars and buses, until at the midpoint she reached the hole. The rocket had blown away the wire mesh and all but three of the steel safety beams that served as railings, as well as taking a jagged bite out of the sidewalk. Through it lay a straight shot down to the water below.

First up was a car. She picked a shiny black Lexus nearby, climbed on the roof tentatively, and started to paint. When that was done she jacked up the car and painted the underside, shuffling around in the smell of old oil. She did the sides next, then fired up her blowtorch.

Everyone in LA had all learned how to use these, for simple engineering and plumbing purposes. Amo had insisted the knowledge was widely diffused. She clicked the dark visor over her eyes and bent to work.

Cutting through the chair mounts was easy. The seatbelt sizzled and melted in a noxious plastic fog. Pulling the chairs out through the doors was a little tricky, and she banged up her knee and elbow, but soon they were all lying on the road like dollhouse pieces. A little lighter, now.

She tied a rappelling harness round her waist, affixed the cable to the central aisle, then approached the hole. The edge was warm but solid. With the blowtorch she cut away the last three railing bars. The view out to ocean they revealed was not beautiful, too hazy and white under skies that washed out the ocean's blue, but it had a certain earned charm.

Next was the bus, sitting a little way back along the bridge. It was big, white and probably weighed around thirty-five tons. She found the gas cap, popped it, and poured some fuel in. She found the battery and replaced it, carefully twining the leads together. In the driving seat she found some zombie had conveniently left her the keys.

A little white cat bobble-head thing sat on the dashboard, probably for luck. She patted it, its paw waggled, and she turned the key.

The engine coughed, revved, spluttered and took. She put the stick in gear and drove fifty yards along, bullying cars out of the way, stopping near the hole. There she got out and counted three lengths of one hundred foot cable. At one end she affixed them securely to different parts of the bus chassis with U-bolt cable clamps, then did the same for the Lexus.

Finally, using the bus as a bulldozer, she shoved the Lexus through the hole and off the bridge. The cables snapped taut with a musical:

CLANG