Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least (18 page)

"I reckon you've let the devil in by the front door with him," she said. "He's madder than me. You'll see."

"Sit down," Cerulean said, a little more harshly than he meant to, and put the RV into gear.

15. CAIRNS

Julio wanted to scour Chicago for survivors.

They argued about it their first evening together, sitting round a fire in a campsite north of South Bend, Indiana, after they'd eaten their ration of canned beans, dried rice and turnips Cynthia dug out of a garden.

"You said it's about survivors only," Julio said, staring through the flickering yellow flames at Cerulean sat in his wheelchair. "Your friend Amo's made a trail, that's great. Let's help him and gather who we can."

It was a fair point. Masako, sitting close by his side as if for warmth, though it was sweltering already and the fire just made it worse, plainly agreed. Even Cynthia did, with a dull grunt.

He didn't want to tell them why they should hurry: that Amo had tried to kill himself once already, that he might try again, and if there was no Amo then he'd be stuck in charge of them and would never be free.

"I don't want the trail to go cold," was all he could say.

Cynthia harrumphed. "Trail's written in traffic paint, son, it ain't going anywhere."

Julio eyed him. They'd hardly spoken all day, with him always 'scouting' ahead in his Mustang. After that first burst of speed, racing out of sight, he'd dropped back and kept fairly close. Perhaps he was worried they'd turn off and leave him.

At one point Julio had stopped at a railway crossing on the Ohio Turnpike just after Toledo, and Cerulean pulled the RV up behind. Julio had gotten out and stood on the tracks with his pistol drawn, pointing.

There was a dust cloud in the distance, stretching back in a long diagonal along the rail tracks toward the horizon.

"Now's your chance," Julio said. "Prove they're safe."

"God, how many?" Masako whispered, craning for a better view.

"Half a million," Cynthia said. "Lot of tramping feet. Protest march, maybe."

Cerulean grimaced, then climbed out of the RV and into his chair. They waited for a while, until the first of the horde came into view round the corner of a long stand of Douglas fir. They were gray, ragged, and presented a front as solid as a wave.

Cerulean started rolling toward them, feeling like a magician being forced to perform at a kid's party. "Just don't shoot," he said as he went by Julio. "You'll get us all killed."

Julio grinned but it didn't reach his brows. Probably he thought Cerulean was about to die, leaving him with Masako and Cynthia. But Cynthia was standing by the RV door with her rifle by her side. She nodded and he nodded, then he hit the shale by the tracks, rolled on and soon hit the edge of the zombie horde.

He hit the dust cloud first, then fibrous gray bodies surrounded him, like a dry forest of silver birch on the march, ignoring him completely. They didn't even touch him. Their bodies flowed either side of him, and there was no sense of threat, just a strange surreal calm, like he'd fallen in with a herd of wandering buffalo.

He laughed. He rolled back with them, emerging from their leading edge like a surfer cresting a wave. Julio stared grimly.

"Now let's go," Cerulean called, pushing the wheels hard to get ahead. "Or we'll be stuck in this flow for hours."

They sat in the camp beside a children's playground and Julio eyed him fiercely, challenging still. Over his left shoulder there was a children's swing, and over his right there was a merry-go-round. It made his intense gaze laughable.

"Fine, we check Chicago," Cerulean agreed.

Chicago was utterly empty. It took them three days to all agree to that, though. Most of the time they went driving in convoy through downtown with music playing loud from Julio's Mustang.

"At least he could play something classical," Masako complained multiple times. "I'm sick to death of Bruce Springsteen."

The streets were devoid of people but littered with vehicles, just like New York. At times they got out and prowled around buildings, but they were all empty too except for the occasional mob of gray faces pressed to the doors or windows of a bar. Julio would stalk ahead with his gun in his hand, occasionally spinning round corners or kicking in doors like a SWAT member, while Cerulean would go along behind letting the zombies out.

"He was a traffic warden, I wager," Cynthia said as the three of them trundled along behind. "So rageful."

"Ice cream man," Masako answered.

Games like that kept them amused.

"He's just clearing the whole city," Cerulean said. "One building at a time. Checking there's no-one on our six when we go west."

They laughed.

After three days and no more survivors found, they rolled on. "We're not doing that again," Cerulean said, and this time the others agreed.

* * *

In Iowa, in the middle of a corn field a hundred miles west of Des Moines, they found Amo's third cairn. It was a stripe of black and white across a nondescript road in the midst of fields of ripe corn, with two cars parked either side like pillars flanking a finish line.

By the wayside was a young man boiling corn in a silver tub. He saw them and came running over.

"Put your damn gun down," Cerulean said to Julio over the walkie-talkies they'd picked up from a Radio Shack. "Right now."

He did. The young man, tall and gangly with feathery black hair, reached the Mustang's side.

"Lord above, am I glad to see some people. Oh man, I thought I was alone."

"That's great kid," Julio said. "Don't scratch the paintwork."

The kid frowned and turned to Cerulean, who was already out and rolling over, one hand extended. The young man looked overjoyed but there was a slightly queasy expression on Julio's face, like the odds had just shifted out of his favor.

"You're in a wheelchair," the young man said, shaking his hand. "Sorry, I mean, I'm Jake. I've got corn. Listen, do you know that the zombies won't hurt you? I just read the most excellent comic book." He pulled at his inner jacket pocket, Julio's hand went to his pistol, but Jake came out with an actual comic book.

Cerulean stared at it. On the front cover, heaped up and rising from Times Square in a great zombie pile-on, was the final piece of art Amo had showed him before the apocalypse.

ZOMBIES OF AMERICA

It was printed and professional looking, bound properly like he'd had it done at a publisher's.

Cerulean laughed.

"I know, it's amazing right?" Jake gushed on. "This guy Amo, he's like the Pied Piper leaving a trail for us to follow. The things he's done, damn, it's amazing."

He stopped for a second, taking in Cynthia and Masako. "Are you guys following him? Amo, I mean?"

Cerulean smiled, and said yes, then introduced himself and explained, with Julio's dark brows scowling throughout. 

* * *

The comic detailed Amo's battles in New York. Cerulean sat in the darkness after the others had gone to sleep, camping at the cairn in the corn, turning the pages by flashlight.

He'd fought them to reach his coffee shop, where he'd hoped to find Lara. He'd burned them and shot them, and then he'd shot himself in the head in Times Square.

That part didn't make much sense, but it was the honesty that struck Cerulean hardest. Amo didn't hide from a bit of it. He drew the dead just as bloody and gross as Cerulean had seen them, owning his actions completely and trying to pay the price.

But he hadn't died. There was a hole in his head with nothing inside, and he was still Amo. So he'd gotten down to work. He'd stopped killing the ocean, as he called them, and made the big 'f'. He'd cleared the streets and revised the prepper Bible, then he'd set off in a convoy with an RV and a school bus reinforced as a battle-tank pulled by a big yellow JCB. He found Sophia hanging from her noose, which broke him, and so he let the zombies finally catch up to him in the corn. They didn't kill him, so he made a comic. 

It all made a weird kind of sense. It changed his feelings about Matthew a little, though he didn't really know how.

Jake seemed a nice kid. He was so eager, and friendly, and had kept pressing boiled corn on them until they were stuffed.

"I know, I keep saying it, but man is it good to see other people. Oh God, have I been bored."

He'd spent most of the last three months in his parents' house, watching movies and playing games, a lot like Masako. When it got quieter outside he'd taken up golf. He told them all this in big info-dump flurries, peppered with more thanks and more statements about how great it was to meet other people.

Cerulean laid the comic down and looked up at the sky, so full of stars. Between them he figured Jake, Cynthia and Masako could handle Julio. They didn't need him, really, and though he liked them, and even enjoyed being around them, it didn't make a difference to how he felt inside.

Too much had happened for him to turn back. He owed it to Matthew, if no one else. That thought didn't make quite as much sense as it had before, but it still felt true. The comfort and warmth of the others was nice, but it wasn't really real.

After Las Vegas he would still dive.

* * *

Then they found Anna.

It was two days later and they were an hour's drive west of Denver, Colorado, in the middle of a great empty orange-dirt plain. That morning they'd stopped briefly at Amo's most ambitious cairn since New York: a giant yellow Pac-man head painted on all four faces of the Wells Fargo building in central Denver. In the lobby on the name board, there had been three names:

Amo

Lara

Anna

They'd all been excited about that. Jake in particular was cheery, sitting in the RV while Cerulean drove, dreaming up the kind of girl he hoped it would be. Masako encouraged him with visions of supermodels, then teased him that they'd never go for him anyway. He had a strange, enthusiastic-Labrador kind of confidence that let him bull through anything she said and have both of them come away laughing.

Julio didn't like him, always sneering and turning away and driving off in his Mustang. It probably would have annoyed him even more if he knew how little Jake even noticed his scorn.

Then there was Anna, a little black girl in a dirty blue and white dress standing at the side of the dusty road, looking for all the world like Alice in Wonderland after she'd tumbled down the rabbit-hole.

"Oh my God," Cerulean said.

They all turned to look. Everybody went quiet.

The RV stopped, and the little girl just looked back at them, waiting. She couldn't be more than six years old. She waved.

That broke the spell, and Cerulean hurried out of the back so fast he almost fell. He raced over to her, thankful Julio was bringing up the rear in his Mustang for once, and when she saw him she started to cry. As he drew up she jumped into his lap, wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and sobbed against his neck.

Everything changed.

At once he knew that he wasn't going to dive. He wasn't going to leave these people behind, he wasn't going back to New York, not any more. This was his responsibility now and he'd carry it for as long as he was able.

He hugged the little girl and whispered to her that everything was going to be all right. She was frail and slight, but wiry, and she clung to him like a barnacle. The tears broke down his cheeks and he patted her thin back. She stank but he didn't care.

She filled the hole inside right to the brim.

* * *

Everything that followed felt floaty and fresh. They had a feast of hotdogs and beans and other bits from the RV's stores, and Anna hung on to him throughout. Julio and Matthew and the dive receded far into the darkness. At first she didn't talk but then she did, abruptly and at length, explaining herself and her story.

Anna had climbed aboard her zombie father when he got infected, after he'd eaten their pet puppy right in front of her eyes, then she'd ridden him to the West Coast, where he'd walked into the sea and left her behind. After that she'd spent a month guiding other floaters to the water.

"Wait, they went to the water?" Jake asked. "To what, take a swim?"

Anna frowned seriously at him, which was about the cutest thing Cerulean had ever seen. "No, of course not. Why would they swim?"

"Why indeed?" Jake echoed. "You are of course quite right, what a silly idea."

"They walk in, and they keep walking," Anna corrected. "They're going somewhere, whatever's past the ocean, but of course they don't swim."

Cerulean considered that, while she sat on his lap and slurped up hotdogs and the others quizzed her more. West of the Pacific lay Asia, which meant Japan, China, Malaysia and so on. But if all the zombies were going west, then what was happening in Maine?

He didn't mention it.

"And you led them in?" Jake was confirming. "Into the water, like a tour guide?"

Anna beamed, pleased he was finally getting it. "Yes, exactly!"

She was sweet, and kind and precocious as hell. She offered him grimy red licorice strings that had surely been in her pack for weeks, and he took one and mimed eating it, which delighted her.

"You didn't eat it!" she jeered. "Eat it properly."

He mimed it better, and she looked pleased, though quickly she was getting sleepy.

"You're safe with us, Anna," he told her as she sagged against him.

"Of course," she answered. "My Daddy said so. You look like him."

He stroked her hair, and over the fire Masako watched with a look like she was about to cry. Even Cynthia seemed to melt a little, while Jake was plainly besotted, and kept trying to engage her in mock arguments that she would win in imperious tones, leaving him looking totally bereft.

She laughed. They had fun.

"We're at the same height," she told him later, as it got dark and he was wheeling her to the RV to tuck in along the back seat. She was sleepy and looked up at him with fuzzy eyes. "Daddy, I missed you," she said.