"I like it better here. Take a seat."
Anna sat on a plastic chair. The rifle stayed pointed at her chest throughout. The urge to flinch away from it was there, but only faint. She looked around the dim interior. It looked just as shitty from the inside.
"I love what you've done with the place," she said. "Real homely."
"I went to Japan eight years ago," the woman said abruptly. "I haven't slept well a single night since. Now I'm guarding it. You don't want to go there."
Anna cocked her head. "I do. I want to go past it. I'm going to Mongolia because that's where my father went."
The woman gave a toothy smile. Her teeth were a startling white. "I had a son. Can you imagine that? I was only a little older than you, back then. He wasn't really my son, but I adopted him. He must have been three years old when the shift came. When I landed on Hawaii he was five. He'd spent the first two years of the end times completely alone. I don't know what he'd been eating or drinking. He was sickly, he couldn't speak, and I called him Jimmy. He was a good boy."
"He sounds just great," Anna said. The woman ignored her.
"Jimmy liked the dead ones, though. He thought they were his friends, even though they always left him. I wanted him to be happy, so we decided to follow them. I found this yacht and learned how to sail. He was so happy on the trip, so hopeful he'd see all his old friends. Sometimes he used to laugh and point at the sun. At the sun! Then we hit the coast of Japan and he stopped laughing. Have you ever seen something so terrible it just broke you, Anna? Something you thought you could never recover from?"
Anna thought of the T4, wriggling away inside her and her father and every remaining living human cell. "Yes."
"I see. That's why you're here, isn't it? Why my rifle doesn't scare you. Well, Jimmy was old enough to understand what he was seeing, and it broke him. He gave up, Anna. Have you ever seen despair in a five-year-old? It's utter ashes. When I saw that, I gave up too. We gave up together on that blasted shore. He just screamed when I tried to talk to him about it. He screamed and stared and screamed for hours, until finally I did what he wanted and I shot him in the neck. He went quiet then. He let me hug him. It was a mercy. I buried him in the sand. But now, I'm not even sure if any of that happened. That's the worst part. Was there ever a boy called Jimmy, and did he die in Japan, or did I somehow make that up? Nobody else saw it. I don't remember."
Anna looked into the woman's bright white eyes. She was crying now. "You're asking me if you killed a child?"
"Yes. I think I tried to kill myself after that, but I couldn't do it. That's the worst thing, maybe. Maybe I've killed a lot of other people too, but I don't remember. Is that my duty? Should I be protecting them like lambs, should I be ushering them to your Amo in his Eden, or should I lead them all to the truth so their hope can burn up and end their pain sooner? Life is so hard, don't you think, Anna? It hurts so much, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Should I be punished for my crimes, or am I bound to do this righteous work that was left to me, offering the only mercy I can?"
Anna stared. This was just sad. This was Julio all over again. A different kind, a different type, but still the same old shit.
"You're mad," she said. "You've already shot me once, and now you're asking for my permission to kill me. You do realize that, don't you?"
The woman's eyes narrowed, and her tone shifted at once. "You make a good point. Am I asking permission? I don't know. Maybe it would be a mercy. It was a mercy then. But can killing be a mercy, and what becomes of the killer's soul? I think about that often. I think about all the people left out there. Wouldn't we all be better off dead? Maybe that's why I'm still alive. My soul's already condemned, and I need to be strong and do my duty. Would it be a relief for you to die?"
She pressed her cheek to the rifle's stock.
Anna smiled. This was sudden, but so what? If she died, what would it matter? She'd come out here knowing she might die. For the last week all her ties to New LA had fallen away. She'd felt like Amo racing across the country, certain that he'd either find something meaningful at the end of his journey, or he'd swing from the Chinese theater's eves alone. Either way was an answer.
That thought made her cry too. She hadn't really faced it until now, but finally it came through, and she couldn't push it away any longer. She was going west to be with her father. She was going to find him, and tie herself close to his sunken chest like a snail shell, and perhaps there she was going to die.
"You're crying," the woman said. "Are you afraid to die?"
Anna rubbed her eyes. "No. I'm too eager for it. But I can't let you kill me."
"Why not? One death's as good as another."
"You're wrong. My father's out there. Wherever the ocean go, I'm going to find him. I'm going to be by his side, because that's important. If you rob that from me, it'll be worse than anything else you've done."
The woman rubbed her eyes too.
"It's all so hard, isn't it? I try to do what's best. I just don't know if I can believe you. Anna, help me understand. You called me here. I was happy circling Hawaii; I just go round and round. I wait to die, you know? I wait to decide if I'm going to come to your New LA and kill all your people in the night. I've been listening to your broadcasts on the radio for years. I even know you. Your father's Cerulean, isn't he? He lists all the survivors, most nights, like advertising. Sometimes I think I should go join them. I try to decide what my real duty is, but I don't know. After what I've done, how can I go back?"
Anna shook her head. Two broken women. That's what it came down to. In all likelihood she was going to die here, if she didn't do something to change the script.
"Do you know what caused the end of the world?" she asked abruptly. "What brought us down, and why I'm out here now?"
The woman shrugged. "The flu? I don't care."
"A unique virus called a T4. It was in the movie, if you watched it to the end. It's a special kind of virus, and only a very special few survived it. It may make us live forever, we don't know yet. It's in the floaters and it's in us too, every soul living and dead. It gets inside you and changes everything. And do you know what it wants?"
"No."
"It wants to go west. And you know what's out west."
"I do."
"So you tell me that. If you're going to kill me too, for bullshit reasons you can't even figure out yourself, then you tell me what it is before I die. You tell me what that kid was screaming about, and why you had to blow his brains out, or you are nothing but a goddamn coward, with nothing righteous about you at all."
The woman flinched. The safety clicked again. She pressed her cheek back to the stock. "You keep insulting me. Now you want me to tell you about Japan. Anna, do you think I'll remember any of this in the future? Do you think I'll remember you, or you'll haunt me in nights to come? I don't know, I really don't. If I shoot you now, will I forget? Will I ask the next person I see if I really killed this girl, or maybe it was a dream? I might be very old by then. I can imagine it. Maybe I'll be in your New LA with your friends, Amo and Lara and the rest. Will he believe me do you think, when I say I met a girl on the water heading west, and when I tell him I helped her on her way?"
Anna didn't take her eyes off the woman's face. The vorpal sword was right here before her again. "Tell him I was five when the apocalypse happened, like your boy," she said. "Tell him I walked across the country strapped to my father's chest. There'll be no doubt then."
The woman licked her lips. "I should write this down. Five like my boy. Where do you think you'll go when you die, Anna? Your soul, I mean. Where do you think they go in all their millions?"
"Billions," Anna said, studying the rifle. It was really the actor here, she was realizing, not the mad woman. The rifle was the thing she had to convince, not its owner. She tried to imagine it killing her; a bullet from it passing through her heart. It would hurt for a second only, then it would be over. It had happened to plenty of other people the world o
ver, since the beginning of history. It had happened to a little boy called Jimmy, and if he'd been through it then so could she. In a way it meant lending her strength to him, to join him in death. "Now tell me what's out there or give me the damned gun."
The woman looked up from the sight. "Give it to you? Why should I? It's mine. Give me one good reason why I should."
"So I can kill you with it," Anna said, feeling cold and wise at the same time. "I'll punish you for what you've done. What you've done is wrong. You can't kill a child because he screamed. When did you ever think that was OK, in what way was that lessening his pain? It was only lessening yours. You don't get to make the choice for any of us, how we deal with our pain. It belongs to us, like my father belongs to me. Like going to Japan belongs to me, that's my duty. Steal that and you're a thief. Give me the rifle though and I'll give you what you want. I'll take away your pain and send you on."
Tears rolled down the woman's dirty cheeks and over the rifle stock. She nodded slightly, and the barrel bobbed. "That does sound nice, Anna. Thank you. It's such a sweet gesture. But I can't give you the rifle. I just can't do that."
Anna thought about snatching for the Colt at her back. She'd dropped the knives, but not the gun. Was there time? Probably not. Maybe they'd both die.
Instead she lifted her left hand slowly, and curled it to a fist, leaving only her index finger extended.
"I met a man named Julio when I was five years old," she said, feeling her way. "You remind me of him. He talked and he talked, and I don't think he ever killed anyone, but you know why he was like you?"
She took a step forwards, extending her finger ahead of her at arm's length. The woman watched, confused and fixated.
"He'd given up. He thought the old rules didn't apply and he could do whatever he wanted. Maybe he thought he was really helping me, making me tough, when he tried to hurt me. What he really did though was make himself feel strong. I think that's how you felt too, when you killed a little boy on a beach. I think that's how you feel now. You're loving this. He was a coward too; he didn't have the moral strength to resist the hole this world became. He was weak and he deserved to die, and so do you. I can do that for you, and the crazy thing is you know that I'm right. You know it's what you deserve."
She took another step forward. The rifle safety clicked off.
"So I put it to you. Stop lying to yourself. Whatever's out there broke you. Do I look like I'm going to break? My father's out there and I love him. I'd never kill a child, because I'm stronger than you. I'm going, and that is my choice to make, not yours. Don't you dare get in my way."
She took one more step and pushed her finger gently into the barrel of the rifle. It fit smoothly in. Inside it really was curled, like a corkscrew. That was strange. The woman's eyes were wide open and now she was shaking.
"So prove what kind of person you are," Anna said. "I'm making it real easy. Shoot and it won't be reducing my suffering. You'll blow off my hand and we'll fight. We may both die. We'll both suffer, and there'll be no mercy for either of us. But be brave for the first time in your life, give me the rifle, and I'll give you what you want. I promise, you will pay for what you've done."
Fresh tears ran down the woman's cheek. She looked from the rifle barrel up to Anna's face. "You'd do that for me?"
"I can feel the swirls inside the barrel," Anna said. "That's what Julio wanted me to know. He called me a liar; he thought I killed all the puppies. So what do you think? Am I the real thing, am I the one you've been waiting for?"
The woman stared, and sobbed, and nodded. "I think you are. Oh God I think you are. Have mercy on my soul."
She let go of the rifle. The stock dropped into her lap with Anna's finger still in the barrel.
"I knew you were coming," she said. She rubbed the streaming tears from her eyes and bared her chest. "I was waiting for you, you're right. You're so beautiful. You're everything I wanted to be."
Anna picked up the rifle, pulled her finger out and pointed the barrel at the woman's chest. "What did you see out west?"
The woman smiled through her tears. "Glories, little sister. Such terrible, awful glories they'll blast your mind from your skull. You have to see them for yourself. Now keep your word, there's a good girl. I'm ready to take the righteous path."
It was nothing. It was easy. Anna pulled the trigger. A blast, a puff of smoke, and the woman's tears stopped coming. Her filthy body slumped and blood pumped out of her chest.
Anna put the rifle down. She didn't really feel anything.
She looked around the dark, narrow space. The video was still playing behind her, at the moment her RV first pulled up in front of the Chinese theater. Her ears rang and the tang of cordite tasted stale in her mouth.
Could there be forgiveness, for someone like this? She didn't care. Perhaps that was a no. It wasn't her job.
"Have fun with her, Julio," she said over the woman's corpse. "Follow your rules together."
26. HAWAII
The day that followed was a blur. Her right hand was weak and not much use for trimming sails, so she avoided raising the spare spinnaker, sticking with the mainsail and jib. Her head was a fog with no room in it for thinking. She focused on leaving the filthy trimaran behind.
Her broken finger began to throb sharply. She didn't want to undo the bandaging and risk unsetting whatever healing had taken place, so she just swallowed two painkillers and went back to work, using only her left hand.
By late afternoon she glimpsed the sliver of land on the horizon. Hawaii. It should have been a joyous moment, completing the first leg of her voyage, but she felt nothing.
A seagull landed on one of her outriggers and watched her, tilting its head.
"Did you know her?" she asked it numbly. It hurt her jaw to speak.
It flew off.
Hawaii grew larger, until she could pick out its striking green mountains, rippled in sharp ravines like god had drawn a zigzag on the Earth then raised that jagged line to a ridge. There were rocky slab beaches, gorgeous sandy beaches, jungle-crowded beaches filled with mangroves, and amidst them lay clutches of old fishing villages on piers sprouting from clefts like weeds.
Somewhere here the woman had found her little boy, fated to die on the beaches of Japan. The whole place seemed like death.
She followed the coast of Hawaii north into the dusk. That first night moored half a mile offshore a throng of mosquitoes descended, waking her with a hundred stings and the whine of their tiny wings in the air. She took shelter in one of the back cabins, curling up on her blankets on a raised bed of sloshing water jugs.
With dawn of the next day she pulled away from the coast. She felt sickly and weak, covered in scratchy welts, with a stuffy ache in her nose and hand. A fair wind carried her on, and Hawaii's first island faded behind her on the GPS. Myriad tiny islands popped up on her right like verdant green molehills before vanishing again. She wondered vaguely if they would remain as uninhabited, island paradises forever.
On one she saw coconuts growing. She moored off it, unnamed on any map she had; no more than a spit of land stubbled with a few palm trees, bushes and a ramshackle jetty leading to a weary slat board hut. She left the yacht at anchor in the shallows and swam ashore.
The sand was bright yellow and warm. A pair of nesting birds startled out the bushes as she lurched by, wobbling on her land legs down the pier. The boards were bleached gray and groaned musically as she walked along them. On the hut's wind-scoured slats hung a sign painted with faded green letters.
Snorkel masks - $5
Inside there was a low desk with yellowed papers in a clipboard, a few empty water barrels at the back, scattered white and black guano on the floor and a row of ten nails sticking out of the wall, from which hung ten sets of snorkeling gear.
Everything was a grave. The aquamarine plastic masks were like flowers at a wake. Nobody was coming here ever again.
She scooped up a coconut from where it had fallen by the shack. S
he hacked off the husk with practiced blows, chopped off the top like she was decapitating a boiled egg, and drank down the warm sweet milk inside.
She began to cry.
It wasn't deeply felt or disturbing. It was more like cleaning out a wound and seeing the pale, puckered flesh beneath the bandage.
She'd killed a woman. She didn't feel any regret about that. It was what it was, and she'd do it again if she had to. The woman was better off dead. Everyone had to make their own choice.
She sailed on.
* * *
Maui and Moloka'i islands passed her by the next day.
Her face turned black and yellow as the bruising from the storm spread and faded. Her nose steadily cleared. She ate and drank and at night she cast anchor and slept for a few hours, thankfully too deeply for dreams.
Time passed in a fog, largely devoid of thought. She tracked her progress on the navigation laptop with GPS, operating like a machine. Distance was all that mattered. Pulling herself across the ocean by her hands. Progress was slower than before, averaging some two hundred miles a day, with fourteen hour days maxing at fifteen knots. It would take longer but that was OK, because she would be alive.
She sat on the bridge for lunch on her third day since the crash, munching on beans and meat she'd canned a year earlier, looking out over the water. She held up her right hand and looked at the fat mitten of bandaging.
"A sacrifice," she murmured, "lint and cobbles."
Before she slept that night she watched Amo's film again. She paused on his wild face, surrounded by the ocean, trying to read into the depths. Later on she opened the other files on the USB. 'Zombies of America' was a version of his original comic, stretching out to cover all of New LA. One part dealt with the time she and Cerulean were banished, during which Amo took Julio on a road trip to Maine, to investigate some kind of gun tower Robert had found. It was all new to her. There was also a section on Julio's assault on Masako, including conversations she'd never known before, followed by Amo and Cynthia shooting him and driving him off into the night, where he surely died.
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