Ravi sipped his tea and at once his eyes turned white. He dropped his cup and it broke on the table.
"Everybody drink," Lara cried happily, raising her arms, and all the guests at the table did, swigging back the steaming liquid from an assortment of mismatching cups. Anna shouted for them to stop but they didn't listen. In seconds they all turned gray. Their eyes glared white and their teacups dropped clattering from their hands.
"Bottoms up, my dear," said Lara cheerfully, "say hello to the Jabberwock for me, won't you?" She raised the teapot head and swigged direct from its nose. At once her eyes turned white, her skin turned gray and the teapot head fell and cracked like pottery on the table.
A cold wind blew and Anna shivered. The floaters sat still at the table and stared straight ahead. A rustling sound came from amongst the crockery, where the head had cracked open, like something inside it was moving.
Anna crept around the table to see what strange beast had disgorged from within. The head-pot had cracked quite like an egg, spewing a yolk that was red and unfolding. Six red limbs unpeeled from a skeletal red carapace like clockwork figures, revealing an ant-like trunk with a red nugget octagon-shaped head.
"Jabberwock!" the seahorse cried, but its cry was cut off as the T4-thing sprang suddenly toward it. It cut off the seahorse's head with one blow of its mandibles, then vomited up a red mulch which it forced inside the dead seahorse's neck.
Anna went to swat it with a plate, but as she leaned over everything shifted and she shrank in mid-swipe. A second later she was falling amidst a canyon of poorly stacked crockery, to land face-first on a custard sponge cake.
It bounced her off and she tumbled to her feet on the red and white checked tablecloth, in a valley of outsized kettles. Ahead the burning T4-thing loomed monstrously, five times her height with eyes that clicked as they blinked. Blood dripped from its six feet and blood dripped from its mandible mouth and blood wicked from its fractal eyes as they rounded on her.
"Jabberwock," Anna whispered. It knew its name and nodded slightly. So this was where their destinies met. She drew her vorpal sword and charged, but the T4 cut through her neck with one clean stroke of its jaws.
Her head fell in a pile of crumbs but kept working like a camera, recording as the great virus vomited mulch down her neck. Her body, wearing the old blue and white Alice dress, convulsed as it filled up like a dirty old bag.
"Daddy," she whispered, then her eyes stopped working.
* * *
She woke with a start that cracked her knee off the table leg. Her mouth was thick and it hurt to cry out. Her hand throbbed. It was night and the world was rocking.
She scrabbled out from between the sofa and table and got to her feet. The catamaran lounge was still wet and tacky with saltwater. At the wall she slapped on the light and it flickered up, illuminating a deck splattered with seaweed and fish.
Her right hand was bloodied. She touched her jaw which was tender, then her nose which almost made her pass out.
Outside with a high-beam flashlight she surveyed the damage. The spinnaker was long gone. The aft starboard hull looked to have been twisted but not perforated. The yacht would have sunk if it had cracked. The main sail and jib were there and furrowed, their lines intact. A red light was flashing on the top of her mast; an automatic SOS alert triggered by the violence of the storm.
Beyond it the sky was a deep dark purple, covered with a million lights like Pointillist art. Cerulean had tried to make her appreciate that too. On all sides lay the ocean. She shuddered as a trail of the dream came back.
In the lounge she dug out the first aid kit and inspected her right hand. The middle finger was broken to the side. It must have happened when the yacht bucked while she was trying to unclip the carabiner. Looking at it made her nauseous.
"We'll all be floaters soon," she muttered.
She took it in her left fist, gritted her teeth, and twisted.
She came to on the floor. Her right hand was shaking, but the finger seemed in a better position. She nudged it slightly, and the pain as the bones rustled against each other beneath the skin almost blacked her out again. It took her three tries to set an effective splint from her medical supply. Each time the pain grew worse. When it was done she wrapped it snugly in bandaging, sandwiched between the two fingers either side like a mitten.
In the narrow hull bathroom she studied her face. Two teeth were loose, her lips were hideously puffed up like big purple slugs, her eyes were black and worst of all her nose was crumpled to the side.
She took a swig of the medicinal alcohol. It burned but she swallowed. She'd seen this done once before, after Ravi fell through a rotten car roof and smashed his face on the frame. With her left hand she took her nose and almost fainted. She had another swig, poured a glug over her nose, and while it was distracted with the biting pain of that she took hold and pulled it back to approximately the correct position.
Gristle crunched in her face, the sound made her sick, and she barely got the toilet lid up before dark bile spewed out of her. When it was done she drank a liter of water and staggered back to her bed in the lounge. The covers were tight. She stripped off all her clinging wet clothes and slipped in.
24. TRIMARAN
Things were different when she woke.
The sense in the catamaran had changed. It was light, probably around midday, and the bridge rocked gently on the waves, but the quality of light was altered somehow. The sound of the wind whistling through her outriggers was familiar but shifted, like a song heard in the wrong key.
They were anchored. She could detect as much from the tug through the floor. That was part of it, but not all. Had she set the anchor? She couldn't remember.
She pushed back the covers and rolled her legs out of bed. Her hand throbbed, but the mitten of bandaging looked intact. Her head ached, and she needed water. Through the open porthole at the front she saw guy lines that she didn't recognize.
It took a long moment for her to realize that they weren't wreckage from the storm. She rubbed her eyes and worked on that thought like a hard gumball, until finally it came.
They were the lines of another ship.
Excitement leapt up and fought with caution. Another survivor? Perhaps many survivors?
"Hello?" she called tentatively. Her voice was a croak. She was dehydrated and weak. Nobody replied.
She got on her feet and walked slowly to the open hatch leading out. She didn't remember leaving it open. She leaned out into a cool breeze, beneath a brilliant sky of stark blue sky and white clouds, to see another yacht moored alongside her own.
It was a trimaran, with three hulls each painted a different shade of brown, and three green masts rising up. Green and brown sails were furled roughly around them like teepees, and even the outrigger lines seemed to have been painted brown. The decks and main bridge looked weirdly organic. Where her catamaran was all sleek and efficient industrial design, the trimaran looked like a giant clod of earth. In fact earth was everywhere atop it. There were piles of it on the hulls and scattered across the bridge. Growing in neat rows were what looked to be tomato plants, with cheery red button-sized tomatoes glimmering out from bright foliage.
There was a strong smell rising off the deck. Her nose didn't work well, too stuffed up with blood or cartilage, but she could taste it in her mouth. It tasted like fertilizer, like the Chino Hills farms in New LA after a fresh spreading of human manure. The ammonia in the air made her eyes water.
It was some kind of weird boat-farm.
"Hello?" she called. "Anybody home?"
No response came. Anna stood in her lounge doorway, calculating possible outcomes. Obviously this yacht represented another survivor, or perhaps several. They had organization of a kind. If they'd wanted to hurt her, they could easily have done so while she was asleep.
Atop the bridge she surveyed the trimaran from stem to stern, waiting for someone to emerge through one of its grotto-like deck hatches. They were round ho
les like hobbit homes, as though they'd been plastered to look more organic.
She padded to the starboard hull to inspect the line tethering the yachts together. It was a simple cross-hitch, one she could slice through in a few seconds with her knife. She touched her hip. Of course the knife was gone, battered away in the storm.
"Shit," she muttered. The words came stifled by her stuffed-up nose. She was in no condition for anything, certainly not a fight if it came to that. Maybe the best course was just to cut loose and get on. That's what she was in this for anyway, not to find crazy survivors on shit-boat farms.
But...
Curiosity got the better of her. In the lounge she tooled up, trying to ignore the tweaks in her ribs and hips and the hurt in her face and hand. She slotted two fresh knives into her waist belt and slipped a Colt 45 into the back, angled for her left hand to draw. She was a passable shot with her left hand; Cerulean had encouraged her to become ambidextrous.
"You lose a few limbs, and you get awful concerned about the use of the others," he'd said more than once.
Back up top, she moved cautiously along the bridge to the hull. Taking the step from her yacht to this alien island made her heart skip a beat. This person had surely watched her sleep. This person had been waiting for her to wake up.
The trimaran bridge took her weight. Something in the soil crunched underfoot. She looked down and saw eggshells mixed in.
Eggshells? That meant chickens, maybe a proper farm. Perhaps Amo had been right. Perhaps this crazy boat was good news for New LA.
Five steps in, padding through soil and approaching one of the round hobbit holes from the side, she heard the low fuzz of screaming. For a moment it startled her, but the sounds were far too small to be actual people screaming anywhere nearby. She imagined a horde of miniature people trapped beneath the decks; some weird side effect of the T4 infection. Then the screaming stopped and the news reports began, and she realized what it was.
Amo's video.
Near the hole she called out again. "Hello there?"
Still no response came. Maybe this was the trap? She'd walk in and be stuck in a torture lair. She eased the Colt free and edged closer. She pulled a knife, angled it carefully, then held it out across the opening like she'd seen done in movies, to get a reflection.
Nope. All the steel blade reflected was a dark interior with a square of fizzing light in the middle; a computer screen running. It was too small to see anything else.
"I'm coming in," she called, and slid around the opening's edge.
Inside was worse than outside. It was full of junk, and the stink that had been fresh and windswept before was now acrid and stale. The lounge was dark, dingy and crammed with garbage; at her feet was a stack of lobster or crab cages, tangled with frayed red and plastic rope and interspersed with dull plastic toys; muscular hero dolls and transforming cars and a large red and blue yard slide. Beyond that were masses of bleached driftwood, some suspended from hooks in the ceiling by blue fishing net, plus jumbles of old wooden furniture, a metal fire hydrant and a grandfather clock with the face missing and the clockwork brains spilling out. Car license plates decorated the walls haphazardly like family portraits, outsized top hats hung from hooks, and everywhere there was rigging of Christmas fairy lights, some of them glowing dimly.
"Oh man," Anna breathed, and tightened her grip on the pistol. This was worse than any of the hoarders she'd glimpsed in awful old-world DVDs. This was real crazy.
The computer screen was a small oblong of light in the middle, like a pearl in an oyster. The video was through the apocalypse montage now, up to Amo partying with his ocean flock.
"This bit gets me the most," came a voice from somewhere in the dim garbage. Anna flinched. It was reedy and hoarse, like an old engine turning over after many years lying fallow. It was a woman's voice. "All the hope. I piss myself when I see his face like that."
Anna frowned. Piss myself? "Uh, yeah," she said awkwardly, "that bit gets me too. I'm Anna. What's your name?"
"He thinks he's had a revelation," the voice went on, "when all he's really done is look the other way. But maybe that's better than to look on the truth. If only we could all stay in Eden."
Anna knew all about Eden, as in The Garden of. It was the old-style religion, a God and a heaven and a set of rules to follow. A few of their survivors in New LA had held to such beliefs in spite of the dead rising up and walking into the ocean. Some of them explained it as a second flood, with New LA a second Ark and Amo as their Noah.
Anna had never bought into it. If anything, the apocalypse had been the rapture, summoning the faithful to heaven while the rest of them were doomed to endless purgatory. It was a nice thing to think about for her father, but it was all most likely a fantasy.
"Um, yeah," Anna said, peering into the dark, trying to resolve the woman's frame. "Eden, you might be right about that. Amo's a nice enough guy, but a bit trusting really."
No reply came.
"I'm Anna," she said again. "I'm from a community based in LA. New LA. I'm supposed to be telling all survivors to go there. You'd be welcome."
The woman laughed. It sounded raucous and unpleasant, like cats fighting in an alley. Anna scanned the darkness for movement. Perhaps that was her, lying prone before the screen, or her head at least. It looked like a head.
"Is that why you called me here?" the woman asked. "To preach his word? Are you his missionary?"
Called her? Anna frowned for a moment, before realizing what she meant. "Ha, no. I got caught in a storm. The signal you heard must've been the automatic SOS. You've seen the damage to my yacht. I'm not trying to convert anyone."
"So you say," said the woman. "I've been hunted before. Why don't you come in, Anna? I have tea."
Tea! It just got better and better.
"How would I even come in? You have this place pretty well crammed up."
The woman laughed again. "There's a path. Or just shove things out of the way. It's what I do. We have so much to talk about."
That sounded reasonable. Still, it was weird. Anna thought back to Amo and Don, getting up close and personal in the battle tank. She thought about Julio in the theater, and how things had gone for him. Trust had to be earned.
"I don't think I will, actually. Thanks. Why don't you come chat out here?"
More cackling laughter followed, this time really witch-like. Anna started to back away. So she'd met a mad survivor, well, she wouldn't be the first. Cerulean had come across one in Wichita and the guy had been drunk or high or both, dressed in rags with gray make-up on, and he'd just barked. They'd tried to catch him, to help him, but he'd bounded off like a March Hare.
If this hole-dweller wanted to stay in her hole, let her.
"I know where you're going," the woman called after her. "I've read the comic book too. I've been there. I can help you."
Anna stopped. That gave her pause. "You've been to Mongolia?"
"I've been to Japan. It amounts to the same thing."
"So what did you see?"
"Come in."
Anna weighed it again. Crazies were always crazy, lurking in their lairs. She didn't need the candy. Japan was just out there a ways, and she'd be there in a month. This calculation hadn't changed.
She took another step away, and
BANG
The blast shot harshly out of the interior, along with the bullet, which whizzed by her head, whipping at her hair.
"You really want me to come in, hey?" Anna asked.
"I do. The next shot will go through your heart. I've been polite. Now leave whatever guns and knives you have outside and come on in."
Anna looked at her yacht. She looked at the sky. This was ridiculous.
She did as the woman asked.
25. 5 YEARS OLD
Pushing inside was a stumbling, awkward battle with heaps of flotsam trash. Here were packing crates full of puffy packing balls, here was a solid bench with a glinting saw blade rising through the middle,
here were heaps of costumes from a kid's theme park. It was like a maze.
At the center was the monitor, with the woman nearby. She was sitting on a simple chair in a small open clearing, wearing loose-fitting khaki yoga pants and a jacket that was several layers at once, or several layered scarves. Her face was a filthy oval framed by a dark hood, with glimpses of red hair. Perhaps she was attractive underneath all that muck. Maybe she wasn't even that old. She held a rifle pointed at Anna's chest.
It didn't scare her. She was too annoyed, too impatient and in too much pain already to be scared. Instead she stood by the computer screen as Amo's video played out. Had he anticipated this too?
"So what do you want?" Anna asked.
The rifle discharged once, twice, three times, thunderously loud in the lounge. The final bullet nicked her thigh. Smoke puffed in her face and swirled around. A line of blood trickled down her leg.
She coughed. She rubbed her eyes. Her ears rang.
"A little respect to begin with," the woman said. "I've seen things that would burn out your eyes."
Anna sneered. "Your eyes look fine. And if you want to shoot me, do it. You think I care? I wouldn't be out here on the water alone if I cared."
The rifle clicked.
"That was the safety going on," the woman said. The rifle clicked again. "That was it going off."
Anna laughed. "Is that why you brought me in, to show me that? You've been alone too long. It's really not that impressive."
"I want to talk."
"So talk. There's no need for the rifle. We could've talked back on the catamaran."
"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."
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 37