4. OCEAN
She woke hungry and cold to dim pre-dawn light.
Peeling back the dufflecoat cover, she looked out on a muddy brown field, dark beneath silty rain clouds. The world jostled up and down like a pulse, and it took her a long time to remember where she was.
The ocean were walking across the field in a long single line, like ants. Their footsteps turfed up a trail of brown mud. In the distance Anna saw the low scrub of greenery, trees probably, and in the midst of it a house.
She was famished.
She shuffled in the sling. Her Daddy's face was grayer than ever, still dark with the Hatter's blood. She kicked one leg out of the covers, then the other.
"Wait for me here," she said, then slid out of the sling.
She hit the muddy field and slipped at once. Mud got all over her knees and thighs. This was just another thing to cry about, but she resisted. Her father continuing to walk was another, but she resisted that too.
"I said wait!" she shouted at his back.
He trudged on.
Anger rushed through her. It was unfamiliar but it felt strong, rushing into her legs, and she picked herself up and ran round to face her father.
"You stop now!" she shouted at him. He brushed into her and knocked her to the mud again. This time it went up her jacket and touched her belly, so cold and slimy and-
"Arrgh!" she shouted.
She raced round again and stalked backward her father. "I told you to stop! You can't hit me like that! You can't eat my puppy, and leave me behind, and knock me in the mud as well! Daddy!"
He was as impassive as a block of stone.
Anna punched him in the belly. It hurt her hand but she didn't care. The anger was really building now.
"You didn't make me banana milkshake," she shouted and punched him again, this time in the hip. "You didn't kiss me goodnight," punch, "you didn't tell me a story," punch, "you left me behind just like Mommy!"
He walked by. Punching was not enough.
She ran and dived at his legs. His pace was slow and easy to predict, and she caught his legs as they passed in mid-stride, wrapping her arms around them and holding on tight.
He tried to keep on walking but couldn't, and fell. He hit the mud with a mighty splat, then started to crawl.
Dragged behind him, Anna laughed manically.
"Where are you going? Daddy-snail, where are you going now? I can't imagine you'll keep up with the others like this."
He slithered. She slithered behind him. Mud was getting on everything and rucking up around her shoulders like a scarf.
"No you don't!" she snapped, and wriggled out of her orange jacket. The air was cold and smelled of sap but she was covered in mud already. She wrapped it around his legs twice then tied it as hard as she could.
She let go. She laughed.
He kept slithering forward, swimming with his hands.
Anna laughed and cried.
"You're supposed to look after me! You're not supposed to leave me. Where are you going?"
She thought about kicking him. She thought about sitting on his back and riding him like a slow mud-cowboy.
She didn't. It was still her Daddy, and the sling was filling with mud. That was her bed. She stopped crying and twisted the sling onto his back. He really looked like a snail like that.
"I'm going to get food," Anna said, "you just keep on crawling if that's what you want."
She turned and stamped away across the field.
The door to the house hung open. It was a nice dark wood building, with a broad cedar-smelling deck and a patio swing. Anna walked in and saw a dark smear in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by tufts of black fur.
Probably another dog had died here. Maybe a cat? She shrugged it off.
The countertop in this kitchen was stone. She scanned it for bananas, but better than that she found cereal. The box was bright red with rays of light bursting from a treasure chest, carrying colorful marshmallow cereal pieces like shooting stars.
She fetched a chair, dug out a bowl and spoon from the cupboards and drawers, and poured the cereal tinkling in. It was so bright and colorful and smelled amazing. She found the white fridge and took out a milk pitcher. It wasn't too cold but it didn't smell bad.
She poured it on the cereal, sloshing messily, but who cared about a little milk when there was a dead dog mess in the middle of the room? She took it out to the porch and sat on the swing and rocked gently, crunching cereal and watching her Daddy-snail crawl across the mud.
She was angry still.
He had no right to be doing this. He was her father and he had responsibilities. Let him crawl.
She ate two more bowls, then fetched up a bowl of water and a cloth from the sink. She carried it out to her father and stood over him. The mud was all over him now. He looked like a swamp monster. It almost made her giggle.
But she was angry. She threw the water on him, then the cloth.
"Clean up the Hatter!" she shouted. "Clean him up at least."
He crawled and the cloth was left behind.
Anna turned her back and walked ahead. Her arms and legs felt stronger already. She brought up his phone to check the flashing yellow blip was still there. It was.
"I'll find it!" she shouted at her Daddy. "Whatever you're looking for, whatever's so important you can't even look at me, I'll find it first!"
She strode off in a huff, striding along the long thin line of the ocean ahead.
They didn't stop.
She walked for hours, still fuming inside. The sun rose weakly, hard to see through the overcast clouds. It rained a little, and she scraped the mud off herself as she walked. She barely noticed as she clumped through puddles and over roads, in and out of cool streams, through torn hedgerows and past the occasional house. She overtook bits of the ocean, more like a stream now, sometimes kicking them in the shins as she passed.
She felt strong. The cereal had filled her up with shooting stars, and it kept her shooting through lunch without being hungry again. Mostly she thought about her Daddy and how he was avoiding his responsibility. She tried his phone again, calling more numbers, but there were no more voices or beeps now, just endless ringing.
In the middle of a field she shouted.
"Hello, my name is Anna! My Daddy's turned into a snail, and I want to see the police. Help."
Nobody answered, so she stopped. She sat down by a tree and made conversation with the ocean as they went by.
"That's a lovely shade of mud on you," she told a big woman. "Wherever did you buy it?"
She threw mud-balls at trees. She tried piggybacking on a strange red-haired man who smelled of lavender. She kicked at the legs of people as they went by and tipped them over in the mud, splash.
"Should have looked where you were going," she said each time, "oops."
It was fun but not really, since they didn't even know it was a game.
She forged on ahead. In the early afternoon she crested a rise and looked out over an endless landscape of mud and grass and little green shoots. It went on and on. The stream of people wound ahead across it as far as she could see, like a snake in the dull gray daylight. Clouds brewed overhead like the hurt.
She sat down on a fence and kicked at a scrubby stand of tall grass, perhaps Tiger Lilies out of season, counting the people go by. There was something very wrong with them. They couldn't hear or speak. They just wanted to go in this one direction.
She started to cry again. It surprised her, because the anger had been so hot. But it was gone now and the tears took over. They filled her up like a waterfall and poured out so she could barely see.
Loneliness came where the anger had been. It was cold now, and getting dark again. She was alone and she'd done such terrible things. She'd punched her own Daddy. She'd punched him and made him snuffle through the mud all day, when all he'd ever done before this was protect her.
It wasn't fair. If he was weak now, if he was broken, it was her job to p
rotect him, just like he'd done for her.
She started walking raggedly back the way she'd come. There were so many faces now, but none of them were her Daddy. She saw the woman she'd tripped up, and the man she'd kicked, and it made her feel worse. The mud was all down their fronts and on their faces.
Alice would have done none of it. She would have tried to help them.
Her head thumped and her tears became sobs. She passed by dozens of people. Where was her father?
"Daddy?" she called.
When at last she found him, face down and snuffling through the mud, her crying redoubled. She'd done this to him. He truly looked like a snail, not the strong and smiling man she'd always known.
"I'm sorry Daddy!" she said. She knelt and threw her arms round him, not caring that she got muddy again. She wiped the mud from his face, and it pulled slickly from his cheeks and neck, scraping the dead Hatter blood with it. Underneath it his skin looked gray and clean. She held his face as she struggled on by and kissed it.
"I'm sorry."
She wiped him down as best she could. She scraped the mud out of the sling and untied the orange jacket round his legs, then helped him up.
"I'll help you now," she said. "I promise, Daddy, I'll look after you."
He walked on. She climbed up into the cold and crusty sling and buried her face against his cold chest.
She napped for a time and dreamed of days before the coma when her father and mother were together, and things were better.
She woke to dark. She wasn't hungry. Her father was walking down a hill road lit by silvery moonlight, surrounded by others. Anna stared out at them, spreading for miles ahead, rolling over the land like a vast cloud.
There had to be thousands. Their eyes glowed and their skins shone, they breathed in raspy tandem, and in their slow movement there was a beauty she had never seen before.
"So many people," she breathed into her father's neck.
She climbed down and walked with them.
The next day she tethered her father carefully, as the ocean flowed past a giant shopping mall. She tied his legs first, dropping him on a grass verge of the huge parking lot, then let him crawl up to a stop sign where she tied his arms one at a time to the metal post. He strained but couldn't crawl any further.
She couldn't afford let him get away from her anymore, as the phone battery had died some time in the night. She stroked his cold head.
"I'll be back soon."
The doors to the huge mall stood open, and she walked in. Daylight poured in far enough for her to navigate the aisles. It was silent inside. In the entranceway bright flowers greeted her. She collected a cart and went shopping. Soon it was piled up with new clothes for both her and her father, a tough canvas backpack for him and a smaller one for her, bottles of banana milkshake and water, packs of cereal, red strings candy, potato chips, magazines, an actual child-sling, and a cap to keep off the sun.
She carried them out, then changed her and her father's muddy, bloody clothes in the sun while the ocean passed by. She tipped the contents of her filthy jeans pockets into one of the big backpack's inner compartments: her father's wallet, coins, keys and the little statuette of Alice. She filled the rest with the food and magazines then strapped it tightly to her Daddy's back, clicking lots of buckles and ties.
Into the smaller pack she put water, chips and the dead phone, then strapped it to her back.
"Houses for a couple of snails," she said.
He didn't laugh. He kept on struggling to escape. She fitted the new sling to his front then untied him.
He walked, and Anna followed.
That day they walked along a straight road through a deep green forest, and their numbers grew. People emerged from amongst the trees and pressed in closer at their sides.
Anna walked and daydreamed of their destination. It had to be something big and special. She chewed on candy red strings and sipped warm banana milkshake. She investigated the people nearby. Some of them had wallets so she could check their names. Her reading wasn't great, but picking out names was easy enough.
A tall white guy walking at the same pace as her Daddy was Trevor. A short old Indian lady was Amandeep. Some of them had photos in their wallets too: of family, children stamped with the date of their graduation, prom pictures.
Anna put them back carefully. She watched the trees for some sign of the Cheshire Cat too, or even the Caterpillar, but they never came.
Two days later she changed clothes again, outside a Target. In the window she'd seen a perfect blue and white outfit that looked just like Alice's dress. She tried it on and admired herself in the mirror.
She looked different already. Her stick-thin arms and legs were filling up with new muscle. She smiled. Muscle made out of bananas and cereal, which meant she was filled with shooting stars.
When she was tired she hung from the sling on her Daddy's chest. At night she slept and his walking rocked her through the night. When she was thirsty she reached to the pack on his back and drank. When she was bored she looked at pictures in magazines or daydreamed impossible situations, often imagining what kind of place they were going to. When she was lonely she talked to her father, or sang, or looked at Trevor and Amandeep's photos again. She took to tethering them along with her father, so they could all walk on together, like a family.
Soon enough they came out of the forests and walked across great baking expanses of low vegetables, laid out in neat rows, some low and some tall. For a time she could lean from the sling and pluck fresh ripe tomatoes from the vine. They were warm and juicy and seeds spurted out as she bit.
There were orchards of apples and lemons, then fields of low grass, and here was a school with its football field, and in the distance a city with high towers.
"Who do you think lives there?" she asked her father.
Days went by. They passed through a vacant small town. Anna looked into hollow windows of the houses lining the street. The ocean of people flowed everywhere, ignoring roads and fences and rivers, always heading straight away from or straight toward the sun, depending on whether it was morning or evening. Anna hung on to her father's shoulders tightly as he waded deeper across one wide river.
She recorded time with lines in her magazine. Ten days passed, and she looked at herself in the mirror of a house somewhere on a hot and steamy day. The room was a little girl's, with pink wallpaper and dolls arrayed in cubbyholes all around.
She was dark and vibrant. Her teeth shone against her gums. She twirled in her Alice dress. She imagined a photo of herself as she was now, hanging in their home so far behind. This was the little girl she had always wanted to be, not the sickly child from before.
They went on. They crossed great sandy plains where the air smelled of salt, pushed through a barbed wire fence and passed over an expanse rucked by craters and exploded dirt, on until they reached a bright orange desert that went on and on.
She found caps for both of them in a roadside motel, to keep off the sun. She pulled her own tightly on her head, and changed her shoes for better-fitting boots. They didn't match her dress, but that was OK. Alice never had to walk this far.
Two weeks passed, then three then four. She became expert at foraging for milkshake and water in shops and houses that they passed. She had names for two-dozen of the people always walking nearby, those who walked a little more slowly than her Daddy, so they were always overtaking her when she stopped for food, then her Daddy overtook them again later.
She told them silly jokes she thought of, about their families and where they were going: it was a recall from the machine-people factory, or a big assembly at the world school, where the principal was going to tell them all off for coming to school looking so shabby.
After six weeks she smelled the sea. She didn't know what it was, having never seen it before, but the tangy smell in the air felt like a destination. Soon they were stumbling down a rocky cliff-side, with Anna leading her father past the dangerous areas where the oth
ers fell down, always keeping him safe.
It was near to sundown, and the beach spread out like a beautiful golden road to either side. The ocean was vast and went on forever, and now Anna understood: her ocean of people wanted the ocean.
She laughed and ran down to the water, peeling off her shoes. Her father stumbled on behind her. The sand underfoot was soft and hot, cushioning her toes. A warm breeze rubbed across her skin.
"Isn't this wonderful?" she asked the people around her, as they all slid into the water together. Anna laughed and joined them, splashing and kicking at the water. Perhaps this was what they'd all come for then, to have a great big bath together.
Amandeep bobbed past her.
"Can you swim?" Anna asked. "It'll hardly be much of a bath if you can't even swim."
Amandeep answered by dropping beneath the low waves. Anna chewed her lip and waited for the dry brown head to re-emerge, but it didn't. She stopped splashing and watched the water.
Amandeep still didn't pop up.
A coldness clamped in her chest and she stopped laughing. She spun. Here was tall Trevor and he was going under too. She watched the surface where he'd sank, but he didn't come back up either.
This was bad.
"Daddy!" Anna shouted. She splashed and turned, hunting for his familiar snail-backed shape, but she couldn't see him. She ran out of the water onto the beach and looked again, shouting and pushing the others out of the way.
At last she glimpsed him a little along the sand, already treading into the water. She called and ran to him.
"Wait Daddy, just wait!"
He kept walking, already waist-deep into the water. It was up to Anna's shoulders and she dived to tackle his legs, but in the cloudy water she couldn't get a good grip and it was hard to see what she was doing.
She breached the surface panting hard and clutched at her Daddy's shoulders. She shouted but he kept going on, carrying her with him. She kicked at the water to slow him down but her feet only made feeble splashes, far from enough to make him stop.
Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost Page 4