Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost

by Michael John Grist

  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 through the gap left behind by her finger.

  "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 zombies, trying to read into the depths. Late into the night she opened the other files in the USB. 'Zombies of America' was a version of his original comic, stretching out to cover all of new LA. One part dealt with Julio's banishment, including conversations she'd never known before. Julio had pleaded for clemency, but Amo and Lara had been steadfast. There was an image of Masako watching. There was a page devoted to the night that Julio returned with guns, when Lara had shot him herself.

  No forgiveness for him.

  The comic continued up to and beyond the T4 discovery. Anna imagined Amo rushing to finish these panels before she could leave. The final shot of the comic was her sailing off into the distance. He'd scripted even that.

  "Didn't know about the crazy woman though, did you?" she murmured.

  In the final file was Amo's Deepcraft fulfilment center, converted to an open-roofed library. She wandered through looking at shelves. It was all prepper material about surviving the apocalypse in style: rigging 'modern' luxuries out of the ruins of the old, building social structures that would reward cooperation, even information on a human breeding program.

  She shut it down. It was all too hopeful. If she had heart enough, she'd dump all his USBs into the ocean.

  Oahu Island dawned off her bow early the morning after. Honolulu looked much like LA, but for more tall towers and the green backdrop of mountains.

  Gliding by on a smooth ocean she thought about what Amo might do. A cairn on one of the taller buildings here would act like a lighthouse for anyone coming east from Japan. But she'd already left her cairn floating behind; a grave ship on the ocean, with a rotting corpse wedged inside. That was her truth.

  Soon enough the stench would be gone. The salt air would wither the woman's skin and bones, storms would wash away her tomato plants and punch holes in her hulls, and her yacht would sink. So she'd fall to the ocean floor, and rest amongst the gray people as they strode along the sand, so deep down and dark where nothing could survive.

  There she would remain, preserved forever.

  That was Anna's legacy, her cairn. It was the truth, and the truth was all she could leave behind.

  Honolulu went by and faded behind her. Anna faced the setting sun. This way lay her father, with nothing but water ahead for around seven thousand miles. After that lay Japan, China and finally Mongolia, and the only fulfilment she'd ever sought.

  INTERLUDE 2

  The cold grew sharper and never stopped hurting. It burned across his skin like a blast furnace, spreading fast and cutting deep. In the darkness he dreamed of it reaching past him, back to the warmth of the girl on the beach who meant so much.

  He could not allow that. He would not.

  He swam without rest. So did they all. His body thinned but he ate at times, from other predators that seized upon his pack. There were more sharks, giant squid and manta rays, jellyfish and swirling schools of tuna. They tasted like life as he ate them alive. Their blood and flesh propelled him. The cold was only growing.

  In time he hit the seafloor again, rising up out of the deep water beneath. He opened his eyes. He started walking. His legs barely remembered how to hold his body up, they'd been swimming for so long, but they learned. The land here was muddy, here was rocky, here was littered with deep and black crevasses. He walked and he swam. His feet tore on the sharp stones but he didn't feel the pain. He walked until the water ran out, and the land began.

  He emerged from the water on a dark brown beach under white overcast skies. It was hot and humid, and before him a thousand dirty-gray sand cockroaches scattered, their tiny feet scampering into a stinking field of rotten kelp. He walked on by.

  Giant bollards of smooth concrete lay before him, each multi-faceted like a star. He thought of stars and clouds pasted to a ceiling, glowing in the night. He hit the concrete edge of them in his chest and bounced backward. So did all of his fellows, but months of swimming had changed them and taught them new things.

  They used their arms and climbed.

  On a winding road above, he walked past a vivid red temple building framed by a tall red wooden arch. A tree spattered with pink blossoms stood beside it like a welcome sign, sending petals like confetti fluttering through the heavy air.

  It was hot and he walked on toward the cold. It hurt his eyes and his skin and his heart despite the heat. He walked through a city of tall buildings and narrow streets that never seemed to end, clogged with vehicles. He climbed over a heap of broken wreckage on the outskirts of a vast muddy green plain.

  There were mountains ahead, and with his flock he climbed. The cold he felt at the mountain peaks, when walking down their sharp and sheer valleys, while trudging through muddy bogs in a cedar forest, was nothing compared to the cold that pulled him on.

  After the mountains lay another city, and after the city was a beach and an ocean where he walked back into the water. The cold was so close now he could taste it. It sang in his dreams and tugged and cut him at once. He swam on until he hit land once more, and there were more beaches and roads and cities beneath a whistling yellow sky. He walked through them all, through endless water-paddies and twisted forests and steep toothy mountains, until he hit the desert; a dry tundra that ascended through screes of shale rock. The sky here was pale blue and the air grew thin. The cold was everywhere, impregnating everything. The very land was polluted with it, and the air was thick with its taste.

  Now there were no more trees and cities. There was sand and heat and ice cold in his chest. There were clouds and hardy grass and scorpions he chewed on, ignoring their stings. He walked on and froze as he grew ever closer.

  When he was close enough he began to run.

  His body expended its last reserves, and he ran. The wind rushed by and the sand kicked out underneath and he sprinted at the head of his battalion, thousands strong and all come for this same cause.

  He was a predator now. He was an avenger. This was what he'd come for, what he'd come thousands of miles to do, and in a sudden rush of memory dumped into his mind at the very last moment, he remembered who he was and what he was doing this for.

  Anna.

  Anna his daughter was behind and had to be saved. Anna was alone and afraid and had no idea of the destruction that lay ahead. He didn't understand anything deeply, in those brief few moments of startling clarity, but he knew that what he'd come to was more righteous than anything else he could imagine. It was terrible but it had to be done, for Anna.

  He felt this knowledge well out through his army like a gift. He turned and saw gray faces looking back at him, with people inside their white eyes for the first time. They knew too. They knew and they kept running. All the hints and dreams came together, and finally he understood.

  He was her father and this was the role he'd been born to play. The cold was so close and only he could do what had to be done. Every step he'd taken away from her was worth it to keep her alive.

  He sprinted over a stony rise and looked out across a vast plain consumed in battle, where thousands of gray bodies swirled like churning hurricanes around points of terrible cold. They were the ocean beating against their enemy, grinding it down over generations. In that moment he saw the face of the cold for the first time, and it saw him.

  His throat didn't work well anymore, but he called out his daughter's name anyway.

  "Anna!"

  The cold was waiting. It was coming for him, pulling the hordes of his brothers and sisters inward. It had already killed millions of his kind and it would kill millions more, and this was why he had come. It charged and he charged down the slope at he head of his army to meet it.<
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  18. MOUNT

  She thought the first mound of bodies was a crag jutting up through the water and sailed on by.

  Five weeks had passed and she was weary. Every day was the same, an unending litany of tasks, and always the sea was there, haunting and mocking her.

  "Anna where's your father?" it asked her. "Anna where's your mother?"

  In time the numbness had been swallowed boredom. Every day and every night were the same, again and again, a ceaseless race with the sun which she never could win. She'd gotten so sick of the monotony that she'd even turned Amo's satellite phone on, but all it did was fizz, catching no signals.

  The catamaran sailed on. She was too tired to think. She felt blind to the line dividing sea from sky anyway. Weren't they the same? What was the difference if it was all blue? Sometimes she'd find herself lying back off the edge of an outrigger, daydreaming that she was sailing on a bed on an ocean of gray bodies.

  There were no more milestones left to look out for. Since the tiny island of Midway, barren but for a few concrete foundations and weedy runways, there had been nothing.

  She set her anchor at night but still drifted off course. One morning she woke in the midst of a vast garbage patch, becalmed. Not a breath of wind troubled the sails, not even when she took out the spare spinnaker. It wouldn't inflate a bit.

  Trash lay on all sides for as far as she could see, congesting the flat seas with a plastic stew of footballs, kayaks, frisbees, lunchboxes, toilets, Lego blocks and plastic bags.

  For three days she endured the drone of the docking engines as they propelled the yacht forward at the miserly pace of half a knot. It was nothing, but to run the propellers harder would risk them clogging with chopped plastic, and she had limited spares.

  She could swim faster than this. The floating garbage patch stretched for miles. Leaning over the yacht's edge she sometimes poked at items in the jumble, digging for a sight of the water beneath, but there was only more trash. This was the tip of the iceberg. She felt like a tiny ant on the back of a trash vanilla pudding, cutting a trail that quickly melted behind her.

  No wonder the apocalypse came to these people, she thought. The world was half dead already.

  She made her peace with the satellite phone, leaving it tuned in and on all the time, a low hiss in the lounge. She made no reports to it, and nothing came through in return, but still it helped.

  For something to do, she opened all the water jugs and gathered the USBs in one super pack, ready for the day she decided to throw them overboard. She dug through her cache of weapons and made a few hours amusement taking potshots at the trash. Raking the water with assault rifle fire helped with the frustration. The rocket launcher made bright eruptions of plastic.

  She crossed off days on the lounge wall like a prisoner. She thought about the woman in her yacht, and Jimmy, and all the other lost survivors who might be out there still, taking their own slow paths to extinction.

  Then she saw another mound.

  She was still some three hundred miles off the coast of Japan and there wasn't supposed to be any land at all. She steered over and it soon became clear this was not a rock or a half-sunken ship or the torn foundation of an oil rig, but something else entirely.

  It was a pile of solidified bodies.

  She stood at the hull edge with the sail furled and anchor down, staring at the mound. It was an island of zombie bodies, motionless and heaped up about five feet through the water like a gray mound of jelly. It was maybe fifteen around. It was a wonder she'd seen it at all.

  The bodies were sinewy and withered; gray skin shriveled down against the bone, with screwed-up peanut faces she couldn't make out. Their eyes were tightly closed with no hint of white light spilling from within. They were skeletons held to each other in a weird kind of lattice, rife with hollow gaps like the atomic structure of a complex carbohydrate.

  They looked like really boring gray coral. Bits of hair remained in places, scraps of clothing long-faded of color. All of them were facing inward to the center of the heap, with their arms and legs spread out and interwoven with others.

  She imagined a fanciful party game, where all the people piled onto each other in a giant heap. Leaning over the outrigger edge, she strained to touch one of them.

  "Holy shit," she whispered when she did. It was as solid and unyielding as marble. She leaned closer and laid her palm on the sharply ribbed back of an emaciated figure still wearing the shreds of a jacket and belt. She ran her fingers along the indentations where its skin had sunken in to the valleys between ribs, but there was no give at all, no spongy or leathery sensation. She leaned further and shoved.

  It was rock solid.

  Without thinking too much about it she slipped into the water. Touching the bodies felt strange at first, holding to them like she would a dock, but their solidity quickly removed any sense of unease. They were truly dead now.

  Her feet found purchase underwater, a smooth shelf of shoulders and backs. She ducked her head and looked beneath the surface; the water was cloudy but she could see far enough to confirm the obvious.

  The mound continued outward and down, made up of hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies. It continued past the point where the water grew too murky to see, an irregular slope of arms, legs, backs and heads descending into darkness.

  Above water she ran quick calculations that rapidly sprawled into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The Pacific averaged at about two and a half miles deep, and if this mound was anchored at the bottom, the number would be astronomical. Her mind spun. Even if the mound went down as a perfectly straight pole for two and a half miles, with say twenty bodies to every five feet, then that made…

  Around forty thousand.

  Her jaw lolled open. Forty thousand bodies if it was only a pole straight down, and she already knew it wasn't; it was a spreading pyramid. She looked at the skeletal gray arm she was holding like it was a handrail. Were there millions here?

  On the yacht she collected her scuba gear. Two suits hung in the starboard rear hull, behind the water jug blocks. She laid one out with tanks, tubes, breathing apparatus, mask and flippers, tested the air pressure and flow, checked the mask and suit for cracks, then put it on.

  Off the outrigger rail she pulled the mask down and tipped over the edge.

  The water closed around her and down she went. In a second she hit the pyramid's slope and took hold of it to pull herself deeper, using rocky limbs like rungs in a swimming pool. The water quickly grew dark and she hit her shoulder-mounted lamps, which lit up the ocean with countless floating motes like stars in the sky.

  She went down: thirty feet, fifty feet, where the slope of the mound steepened until she was descending almost vertically. She'd never been much deeper than fifty feet but now she blew right past that limit, and began to feel the pressure of the water. A warning light blipped in her mask as she hit seventy.

  Then she saw movement. She stopped descending as a bright flash of color slunk back into the hollow, root-like structure of intertwined bodies. Her pulse hammered against her ribs and she crept the next few feet with all her nerves tingling.

  More flickers of color darted inside the zombie tower. She peered in through a gap between diagonal thigh pillars, aligning her shoulder lamps to cast light through the woven bodies. It wasn't hollow inside; there were more bodies within like a second layer to the onion, and in the gap between the layers new life had sprung up.

  She laughed as a school of orange clownfish scurried away from her lights and took refuge in a bright pink ribbon of coral. Coral and anemone were everywhere in bright shades of blue, yellow and red, climbing inside the zombie tower like ivy. More bright fish darted in and out to eye her, inspecting this strange black monster briefly before fleeing home.

  If there was coral then that meant…

  She angled her lamps back down and pulled herself five feet more, reaching the dusty sea floor. It was awash with a carpet of drifting life. Countless tiny
eyes and hermit crab legs and fish no bigger than her thumbnail ducked back into their crevices as she swept her lamps across them.

  She was barely eighty foot deep and this couldn't be the ocean floor. She swam a short distance, careful to mark her bearings as she went, and soon found the land tapered down sharply.

  This was a seamount, a mountain rising underwater, probably an old volcano. Here at this peak the zombies had built a tower out of bodies. A mountain on a mountain.

  At the base of the tower she tried to peer deeper through the scaffold of limbs, but all she could see was the second skin of bodies within.

  A bizarre notion came to her, that perhaps there would be a door somewhere. She would knock and a witch would open up.

  "Excuse me, I'm looking for my father?" she'd ask.

  The witch would stuff her in an oven and make her into seafood muffins.

  She flippered around the tower. It was not as massive as she'd first suspected, perhaps a hundred feet in circumference, but there were no doors, arches or windows. Once she tried knocking on a broad stretch of withered back, but nobody answered.

  It was simply a heap of solid dead bodies, like a sculpture. She flashed back to Amo's first comic rendering of zombies in New York: a tower stretching up to the sky, reaching for images of loved ones in the sky. Was this the same? It was the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there was nothing that could possibly hold any meaning for the lost souls of fallen America.

  There were only fish.

  On the surface, Anna climbed to the top of the mound. It seemed more disrespectful somehow than pulling on their limbs underwater, but it also seemed important.

  At the top there was a single head, shiny and hard. She knocked on it too. She considered setting a single USB key atop his head, but it would wash away with the first strong wave. She tried to prize open its eyes, but even the eyelids were set like stone. She rustled through the jeans pockets on a zombie nearby, but they were ragged and empty.