Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost

by Michael John Grist

  It was a party, and at that she finally remembered her manners.

  She hopped up off Robert's lap and ran over to the table. From her pack she rustled out two Snickers bars, a handful of grimy red strings and two packs of trail mix nuts. She laid them out on a clean white plate.

  "Is that what you've been eating?" the boy at the grill asked.

  Anna nodded.

  "Then thank you for sharing it," he said. His smile was lovely. It brought her voice right back, slotting neatly into position.

  "I'm Anna," she said.

  His brow wrinkled in surprise. He looked at Robert then back to her. "Nice to meet you, Anna. I'm Jake."

  She held out her hand. His brow wrinkled deeper, then he smiled and shook it.

  "Where have you come from, Jake?"

  He laughed. "I'm from Chicago, Anna. Cerulean picked me up on the cairn-trail in Illinois. I'm the most recent addition, I guess apart from you."

  She nodded curtly. That's the kind of thing Alice would do, even if she didn't understand what somebody had just said. She had asked, so it was correct to listen and nod.

  The others were gathering around now. Jake licked his lips. "What about you, where have you come from?"

  She thought about that for a minute. "I don't know. A city, but I don't know the name. I walked to the ocean with my Daddy for lots of weeks, then I walked back here. I saw Amo's comic in the city with the smiley cake-face. Denver, Robert said? Then I came this way. I want to find him. Amo I mean."

  Jake's jaw dropped. "You walked here from the ocean?"

  She nodded. The others were all there and looking wrinkly and surprised too. It was like being back with the ocean. She hoped she hadn't broken these people. At least none of their eyes were glowing yet.

  Robert wheeled up beside her. "You say you walked with your Daddy, Anna? Where is he now?"

  "He walked into the ocean," she said. "He wasn't like you and me. His eyes were white and his skin was gray."

  "Another damn zombie," somebody muttered.

  "And you walked with him all the way to the ocean?" Robert asked.

  "Uh-uh, he carried me most of the way. I made a sling."

  Feathery-haired Jake laughed, then stopped himself. Anna frowned at him and he muttered, "Sorry."

  "Can I ask Anna, what happened to your father at the ocean?" Robert went on. "Why isn't he with you now?"

  Anna looked at him. It was nice he sat in a chair all the time, so she didn't have to crane her neck up. "He walked into the ocean. Him and all the gray people. That's where they go." She looked round their empty faces. "Don't you know that?"

  Jake laughed again, then covered his mouth. "Really sorry," he said, muffling the sound.

  Anna looked up at him exasperated. Was he that broken?

  "We didn't know about that, no," Robert said, pulling her attention back, "but thank you for telling us. I'm sorry about your father."

  Anna shrugged. He was still out there somewhere. There was nothing to be sorry for. "It's all right. It's what he wanted."

  A silence fell.

  "You're burning those hot dogs," she said to Jake. She had to point to get him to understand. He'd not been attending to them very well for minutes. "Those ones, yes."

  He turned them over.

  "And you walked here from the ocean." Robert pointed off to the side of the road. "The Pacific Ocean, that way?"

  "Yes. It took lots of weeks." She pointed off to the side and a little up, correcting him. "That way and that way a bit."

  He amended his angle. "That's over a thousand miles, Anna. It'll take us days in the van. You walked the whole way alone?"

  Anna shrugged. "I went back and forth a few times with different groups of people, so I'm not sure if I was alone for all of it, but mostly yes."

  She eyed Jake as she finished, daring him to laugh again. He didn't. Cynthia the old lady gave a whistle between her teeth and said something Anna couldn't decipher. Her accent was strong.

  "Can I ask a question now?" Anna asked.

  "Of course, go ahead."

  "Where are Amo and Lara? I'm looking for them."

  Robert nodded. "That is the question, I agree. We think they're both up ahead, headed for Los Angeles. They may already be there, they may be together. You might have passed them by while you were walking."

  She thought about that. "Why are they going that way? Are they following the ocean?"

  "No," Robert said, and smiled. "They're going to watch a movie."

  Anna frowned. She'd seen lots of movies before the coma, and while many were fun, she couldn't imagine any were worth crossing a whole country for. "That's silly."

  He laughed. "Yes, I suppose it is. Now, let's get hot dogs and settle in."

  They got hot dogs, Robert helped her do hers with ketchup, then they sat around in a circle of colorful folding chairs on the orange dust by the road. Anna had a chair to herself, sitting between Robert and Jake. She kept an eye on him for smirking. Across from her sat Cynthia, Julio and Masako.

  The hot dog was fantastic. She hadn't even been very hungry, but the taste was amazing and she gulped it down. It wasn't sweet but the way it popped in her mouth, and the rich juices lapped over her tongue and soaked into the bread, was like heaven.

  "… and all the puppies died," she finished, telling them the story of the chef and waitress. She was quite the expert now, after sharing it so many times with the ocean. "The rest after that was just walking."

  The old lady clicked her mouth and said something like, "Child's gotta figure (mumble mumble) super (mumble)."

  Anna smiled politely. Cynthia's accent was just impossible.

  "How about you, Robert?" she asked. "How did you get here?"

  "There's a lot of twists in that tale," he said. He put his hot dog down. "I had a close pass with Amo, actually, but we didn't really meet. After that I went up and down the East Coast for months, looking for people. In the end, it was back in New York at Amo's first cairn where I met Masako."

  "He was my knight in shining armor," Masako said. Her accent was a little strange too, but better than Cynthia's. Her face looked different, not in a bad way, but a different kind of color to the white of Alice and black of her Daddy.

  Robert smiled. "You were mine, more like it. I couldn't even go up and down the stairs into the Empire State without your help."

  "They really should install ramps," Jake said. "I'll have a word with the mayor."

  The others laughed. Anna didn't get the joke.

  "After that we took an RV and set out on Amo's trail, just like you. We had the van so it didn't take us too long. That was about two weeks ago. We met Cynthia hunting a fox in Pennsylvania, Julio at the big cairn in Cleveland, then Jake on the road in Illinois."

  "So you all just met?" Anna asked.

  "We did," said Jake, "but we're good friends now, like the last people alive should be."

  Cynthia shushed him.

  "What are you all going to do when you reach the ocean?"

  "Eat popcorn," Jake said. "Watch movies. Restart civilization."

  Anna nodded. They all had their own plans.

  She took another bite of her hot dog. They went on talking but it wasn't all that interesting now. Talking people were definitely better than the non-talking people she'd gotten used to, but they weren't so different really. The hot dogs were good and it was nice to share stories, but red strings were good too, and she had always shared stories with the gray people by just making up their parts of the conversation.

  None of them filled the hole she still felt inside. They didn't know anything about where her Daddy was, or why he had left her. She put her hand in her dress pocket and touched her Daddy's cold phone.

  That was what she wanted. More than anything in the world, she wanted her Daddy back, and being with these people now just made her realize it more. It felt wrong to eat the hot dog and not share it with him, to tell her story and not have him here to hear it, to sit and talk and know he was
so far away, walking in the cold water, going to his impossible battle all alone.

  Quietly she began to cry.

  9. LINT & COBBLES

  She woke in the RV, lying on a sofa at the back with a thin blanket over her, sometime in the afternoon. She didn't remember going to sleep. The seat rumbled gently underneath her. Through the front windshield she saw the bright sun and the black road and the orange sand, rolling by.

  Always she was traveling by the sun. She went toward it or away from it.

  She sat up. Her belly felt too full of hot dogs.

  The RV was a simple open can lined with hutch-alcove things in which beds lay. Cynthia was asleep in one, the quiet man Julio in another. Up ahead Jake was doing something with needles and yarn at a little table, and beyond that she could see the shoulders of Robert in the driving seat, with Masako beside him.

  They were holding hands. Through the glass ahead of them lay the road and the desert.

  Anna shuffled onto her knees and turned to look out of the back window. The road fell away so quickly. There were a few gray people out there and they whizzed right past them. The last time she knelt like this it was in a taxi.

  "It's a lot faster than walking, hey?"

  It was Jake, sitting at the table by the back sofa. She turned and regarded him seriously. Probably he was about eighteen, she thought. He was definitely younger than the others.

  "Why were you laughing at me before?" she asked.

  "I didn't-" he said, looking puzzled, then stopped. "Right yeah, I'm sorry. It's just, you're a little girl. But you talk like you're grown up."

  "And that was funny?"

  He shrugged. "I suppose so. I didn't mean anything by it. You're not upset about that, are you?"

  "No."

  She looked ahead to the windshield, to the flat orange horizon. "When will we see Amo and Lara?"

  "Real soon, I think. Cerulean, that's Robert, sorry, I read the comic too and I can't get his nickname out of my head, he thinks we'll be there this time tomorrow. Not much of a nickname when it takes longer to say than his real name, is it? Anyway, he wants to drive through the night."

  Anna disregarded much of this. "What time is it now?"

  Jake pulled a phone out of his pocket and it blinked to life. "Three thirty. Are you in a rush?"

  "Yes."

  "Can I ask why?"

  "Yes. I don't know. I don't like sitting still."

  He smiled widely. His feathery black hair made him look a little like a crow. "I suppose for someone who's been walking for basically three months, this is a lot of sitting."

  She shrugged.

  "Do you want to play a game?" he asked. "We've got lots on board. Amo stocked them for us."

  "No. Thank you." An idea came to her. "But could you…" she trailed off, looking for her backpack. Panic cut in. Her Daddy's phone was in it. "Where's my pack?"

  "It's OK, it's right here." He leaned back on the chair and slid it out of a storage hutch. "Everything in its right place." He held it out.

  She took it and dug around inside, coming up with her copy of Alice through the Looking Glass. "Can you read this to me?"

  He made his surprised face again. "Well, I, sure."

  "I can't read," she said, by way of explanation. "I just look at the pictures. I want to be able to read it, someday. Maybe you could teach me? It means a lot to me."

  "Sure." He took the book. "I'd be happy to. Now, where shall I start?"

  She laid her head back down on the rumbling leather seat. "Anywhere. I know it all anyway."

  They rode.

  It was very different from riding in her Daddy's sling. The people were there, and they talked, and a few times they ate something together, but they were always distant. Even Robert.

  Listening to Jake read Alice helped. It was like listening to old things after the coma, and keeping off the hurt, though this hurt was very different. It was all inside. Plus it seemed the stories might hold some secrets left behind by her father.

  Jake laughed a lot when he read, which was OK too. The stories were supposed to be fun, and his laugh sounded nice now.

  On the RV they also had a lot of cables to connect phones, and with Jake's help she plugged hers in. It charged up and she spent a long time looking at it, flicking through the screens. There was the phone screen, and the photos she could hardly look at without crying, and some games, and of course the flashing yellow dot that was her father, lost in an ocean of gray.

  She didn't want the others to see that so she huddled up in a corner of the back sofa.

  Some time late in the night, with Cynthia driving and Jake in the front seat beside her, she overheard Robert and Julio whispering in their beds.

  "We could find out where she's from," Julio whispered. His voice was easy to recognize though he didn't speak much. "It'll only take a minute. There must be addresses in there."

  "Why do we need to know where she's from?" Robert answered. "She needs to learn to trust us, Julio, and that won't happen if you take her phone."

  "Don't we need to trust her? Her stories about walking across the country can't be true. She's lying, and she could be leading us into a trap."

  "She's five years old. Don't take her phone off her, OK? Just leave her be."

  She held the phone more tightly. She brought up the gray screen for the Hatter's chip and watched the yellow dot blinking softly, like a pulse, so far away.

  She was the blue arrow. At least now she was going in the same direction as him.

  They came into Las Vegas in the early morning. The name meant nothing to Anna but the others were all excited. They had the windows open and laughed and joked loudly. Robert had her brought up to the front to see, and they played the game of looking out for Amo's next cairn.

  "He said there was going to be one here," Robert said, grinning at her. "A big one, I think. First one to find it gets a red string."

  He dangled one just in front of her. She laughed and grabbed for it. Warm sandy air rushed in through the window and through her hair. They'd made her take a wash the day before, and Masako had pulled a comb through her matted hair. Now it was all frizzy again.

  They'd examined her tooth-marks too. Masako and Cynthia had done a full check on her whole body for any kinds of sickness or injury, but they found nothing except the holes in her head.

  "You're like Amo," Masako said and smiled. "Holy." Cynthia shushed her.

  "I know," Anna said, "it's OK. He shot himself. I read the comic."

  Masako patted her shoulder.

  "You're a strong girl, Anna."

  She already knew that.

  Now she studied the strange buildings either side of the road with glee. They were like something out of Wonderland, too big or too small, built in the shape of things that shouldn't be buildings. Robert called them 'casinos'. They were places for people to make bets and have fun, apparently. There was a big black pyramid, and a huge white one that looked very fancy, and one that looked like a tall red tower, and finally one that was a big white circle like an egg, with a picture drawn on it.

  Robert hit the steering wheel and laughed. "The UFO! Of course. Amo you crazy bastard!"

  Anna didn't understand, but soon the others were up at the front pointing and laughing. There was a picture of a giant man jumping on the UFO-egg, which apparently had to be Amo's work.

  "Subversive," Jake said, "twisting the man against the man."

  None of it made much sense, so Anna was right at home. Impossible things were her specialty.

  They pulled up in front of the UFO, parked, and then all got out and headed in an excited rush to the hotel lobby. Anna hurried along by Robert's side, caught up in the excitement. Another cairn from Amo! Maybe he was still here…

  The lobby was vast, and in places giant green monster statues stood, with impossibly long legs and great eyeballs for heads. Amo wasn't there, but it was definitely his cairn and he'd left lots of things gathered neatly for them to find.

  There
was a new edition of the comic, and more of the shiny colorful cups which Julio turned into a disgusting drink, and best of all there was a billboard with Amo's name on it, and right underneath Amo's name was Lara's, and next to both of their names was the same date.

  Amo and Lara at the same date!

  They all enjoyed that, because it meant they must have met up in this very place, and left the cairn together. It made Anna feel warm and tingly inside.

  For a while she tried on sunglasses from the dozen racks, imagining she was Lara trying them on. She leafed through an updated version of the comic, reading about how Lara saved Amo and how Amo killed Don. When Masako showed her how, she watched videos of Amo and Lara goofing around by the swimming pool.

  So this was Amo! This was Lara! They were beautiful and happy, and seeing that happiness went some way toward filling up the emptiness in Anna's middle. Watching them jog and film each other, listening to their voices, made her almost feel at home.

  They added their names to the listing on the wall. Robert checked his maps. They all took one last look then got back in the RV and pulled out.

  "By dusk!" Robert shouted from the front. "We'll be there soon."

  Anna could barely contain herself. She'd only seen Amo's Pac-Man sign a few weeks ago, but already he meant more to her than she could explain. He was like a real life Alice trotting across the world, figuring out all these strange things and helping the rest of them see the way forward.

  She sat in the front next to Robert in Masako's lap until she fell asleep.

  When she woke they were there. Everyone was hooting and hollering, even Julio. It was so dark outside and the RV was blasting along an empty stretch of road, with the moon off to the left.

  "There," Jake said, pointing out of the side window. There was an orange light in the distance, bobbing on an ocean of black. "That's Amo and Lara."

  It felt like the opposite of the hurt. She wanted to see them so badly. She wanted to hold them and know that they were real, that hope and dreams could come true no matter how grand or impossible. It mattered much more than anything else.