Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost

by Michael John Grist

  She tied a rappelling harness round her waist, affixed the cable to the central aisle, then approached the hole. The edge was warm but solid. With the blowtorch she cut away the last three railing bars. The view out to ocean they revealed was not beautiful, too hazy and white under skies that washed out the ocean's blue, but it had a certain earned charm.

  Next was the bus, sitting a little way back along the bridge. It was big, white and probably weighed around thirty-five tons. She found the gas cap, popped it, and poured some fuel in. She found the battery and replaced it, carefully twining the leads together. In the driving seat she found some zombie had conveniently left her the keys.

  A little white cat bobble-head thing sat on the dashboard, probably for luck. She patted it, its paw waggled, and she turned the key.

  The engine coughed, revved, spluttered and took. She put the stick in gear and drove fifty yards along, bullying cars out of the way, stopping near the hole. There she got out and counted three lengths of one hundred foot cable. At one end she affixed them securely to different parts of the bus chassis with U-bolt cable clamps, then did the same for the Lexus.

  Finally, using the bus as a bulldozer, she shoved the Lexus through the hole and off the bridge. The cables snapped taut with a musical:

  CLANG

  Then it was mostly done. The bus jerked a little as the cables bit, but it was far too heavy to be pulled over. She drove it forward slowly and parked broadside across the hole like a locked anchor. Leaning out through the open door and down, she saw the Lexus swaying on its cables a hundred yards below. The arrows she'd painted on it were starkly clear, pointing up.

  Almost done.

  She painted the floor around a nearby BMW white and stocked it up with Amo's USBs.

  She wasn't doing the work for anyone. She wasn't trying to convince them. She was just offering the choice.

  Back on the yacht she sailed into the bay. Looking back, there was her swaying Lexus beside the mound of bodies, white all over with red arrows pointing up on the roof, sides and chassis. It was a silent answer to a silent question. This is possible, it said. It's a choice.

  It would be visible from both the water and the land. Hopefully it would hang there for years like a lighthouse.

  "Farewell Japan," she said.

  A fair wind blew her out of the bay and soaring back to sea. Her father and her fate were waiting.

  WEST

  20. CHINA, MONGOLIA

  She circled Japan in a few days. At times the wind pushed her close enough to the coast to see gray mounds. Every one steeled her resolve. She sailed and she slept and soon enough she was crossing the open gulf of the East China Sea.

  She passed by rocky Jeju Island fifty miles off the coast of South Korea and bore northwest, passing two days later round the Shandong peninsula into Bohai Bay. China dawned off her port with cities and green forests and intermittent mounds of gray just like Japan. Anna didn't care; she'd stopped trying to keep track of all the dead bodies turned to stone. It was a lot, it was all of humanity, it was the T4 incarnate and it wasn't going to stop her now.

  Tianjin docks looked much like the northern industrial dockyards of LA. Tall horse-like yellow cranes stood on discolored concrete quays, ready to load and unload container ships that would never come. A huge tanker lilted drunkenly on its side, slowly rusting. Beyond them lay the city skyline, replete with a beautiful white Ferris wheel trellised out above a graceful white bridge. A space needle and a cluster of skyscrapers packed as tightly as those in New York stood beyond.

  Anna pulled in and took to the concrete dock. The air smelt like hot asphalt, like the air in any city anywhere.

  "I'm in China," she told the hissing satellite phone. "I'm almost there."

  She unloaded the yacht with brisk economy. There was water and food and fuel and weapons and batteries and cables and wires and USBs and laptops and tools and everything, but so much of it she could get anywhere. Soon she stood on the dock with all her gear stacked around her. The yacht looked smaller in the water; like a raft she could hardly believe she'd drifted across the ocean on.

  "Thanks," she told it, "you hang out here, OK?"

  It didn't say anything.

  She went off to find a vehicle. She had to leave the docks and wander down streets signed with symbols she couldn't understand, toward the thick of the city, before she found the kind of RV she was looking for, in good enough condition, in a covered parking lot beside what had to be an actual Chinese theater.

  She smiled.

  It was like Amo's RVs. She serviced and stocked it with tires, gas, water and oil, then drove back to the dock. As it grew dark she filled it with her gear, then lay atop its hot metal roof and looked out over the city.

  There was a gray mound near the Ferris wheel and the tip of one emerging through the water in the bay. Other than that the city was quietly beautiful. She sipped a lemonade and chewed on a red string. Some habits you couldn't break.

  The next morning she drove through downtown Tianjing and out the other side, into Chinese countryside. The road weaved through wild rice paddies, fruit orchards where ripe kumquats and dark blood oranges grew side by side, and fields of tall waving grain, toward the endless blight of Beijing.

  Beijing took the whole day to drive through and seemed to never end. It was like New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo all rolled into one nightmarish concrete sprawl: an endless parade of streets and buildings and cars. She turned the RV's music up, blasting out 50 Cent and Jack Johnson alternately. Mounds were everywhere, with no sign of recent life.

  The next day she raced up the G7 then G6 highways, through the little towns of Changping and Badaling, where she pulled to the side for a while to admire the Great Wall creeping across the land. Huge blocks of orange-gray stone rested one atop each other, topped by the in-out crenellations of battlements and punctuated every mile or so by watch towers.

  It had stood for over two thousand years, built to resist the barbarian hordes clamoring at civilized China's gate. Back then it was the barrier at the edge of the world, beyond which lay only wilderness and the unknown. She understood what that felt like.

  She drove on.

  She raced through Zhangjiakou to Ulanqab in a long afternoon of buildings and fields, then started directly north on the G208 toward Mongolia. The land changed rapidly from the lush green of crops, trees and grass to the orange dust and barren yellow rock of the Inner Mongolia steppes. It got colder and the road ascended sharply, zigzagging up switch-backed roads over bald foothills.

  One hundred miles from the border with Mongolia a chime rang out behind her.

  She was slumped in the driving seat with her head resting on the window and a red lace hanging from her mouth like bloody drool, listening to the rampaging lyrics of Eminem, so she didn't really hear it. She wasn't a big fan of Eminem, but it was listen to her whole playlist on random or endlessly make selections. Both were exhausting but at least this way she could look forward to one song ending and the next beginning.

  The beeping sound came again, rising in a brief furlough in the music. She checked the fuel gauge but none of the lights were lit and nothing felt wrong in the RV's steering. She looked to the satellite phone in the passenger seat beside her, but it was just hissing quietly as usual.

  "Ghost in the rap," she muttered, talking part to herself and part to the phone.

  Then it came again. She frowned and told the digital assistant to switch off the music. She slowed down and listened more carefully, then it came again.

  beep beep

  She pulled over and killed the engine. Her heart began to race. She climbed out of the driving seat and glared back down the middle of the RV, as if defying whatever was beeping to do it again.

  beep beep

  It lit up to boot. For a long moment she couldn't move, too overcome by the weight of this message finally finding its way to her. She'd dreamed of it for so long.

  beep beep

  She lurched down the RV an
d swept her father's phone off its charging mount on the rear table. The screen had activated itself with a notification which was already fading, but meant everything.

  Hatter signal reacquired.

  She opened the phone and clicked through to the app, still a fog of gray where the map should be, but now there wasn't only the blue dot for her at the bottom, there was also a yellow dot at the top, pulsing like a breath drawing in and drawing out.

  Her father.

  Her hands shook and she felt like she might burst with excitement. After ten years of waiting she was almost there.

  Mongolia flew by in a blur of sulfurous canyons, jagged battlement hills and constant rising steppes, broken by an increasing number of tall gray mounds. Once one of them almost blocked the road, but she managed to just squeeze by, scraping the paint off the RV's sides.

  She drove past midnight with the moon hidden behind clouds. She couldn't make out the road beyond her RV's headlights, taking sharp hairpin turns at sixty, propelled onward by the beep of the phone. Only after grazing off her third railing barring the edge of a steep cliff did she slow down and stop.

  She parked the RV against the rock-face, and sleep came as soon as she laid her head down. She woke to a spluttery hissing from the front seat. Fuzzy and freezing in the chilly tin of the RV she didn't recognize it for a long moment, then bolted up to the front.

  The satellite phone was trying to speak.

  She staggered over and clamped the transfer button down. "Cerulean!" she shouted into it.

  A silent second passed then there was a muffled response, words broken by thousands of miles of static and space, but she recognized the intonation.

  It was Cerulean.

  Happiness swelled up and she kicked the RV door open, climbed the ladder to the roof and held the phone up to the pale dawn sky. It fizzled and hissed, but she thought she caught a single word.

  "Anna!"

  "Cerulean," she called back into it. "Can you hear me? I'm in Mongolia, Cerulean! I'm really here, I've almost found my father!"

  The phone whispered and hushed with words that overlaid and rolled like tides. She basked in it, reaching out to both of her fathers in the space of twenty-four hours. It didn't matter that she couldn't hear him clearly or that he couldn't hear her. They had just communicated over half the world.

  Soon the fizzing faded out, leaving her laughing.

  Amazing. So that was their goodbye.

  She drove on.

  There were valleys filled with zombie bodies. In places there were elaborate shrines perched on winding crag-tops above them, with golden and red rooftops glinting in the cold sun, like priests officiating at a mass rite for the dead.

  Her blue dot drew closer to the flashing yellow. In a day she left the valleys behind and entered an endless landscape of flat orange dust. The temperature rose a little in the sun, and she tore down the straight, empty road with Amo's favorites, the Beatles, jangling out through the open windows.

  Everything was OK. She was going to be OK.

  Tiny settlements of a few tin shacks punctuated the empty steppes. A bright white temple capped with a dark pyramid spire passed by on the left, multicolored flags still whipping in the wind. A great herd of camels flooded the road and she honked her way through them. They didn't part easily, and for a time she was becalmed in their midst, shouting at them to move from the RV roof.

  They stank of unwashed hair, piss and dust.

  "You filthy bastards!" Anna catcalled them. "Take a bath. You're no better than plastic."

  They catcalled back with honking brays and spat at her car. It was glorious.

  The mounds here dwarfed the ones in Tokyo, rising hundreds of feet high, growing more frequent as she bore closer.

  In two days she hit Ulaan Baatar and swept on by. At the edge was a huge statue of Genghis Khan. He sat on horseback facing east on a low hill overlooking the city. He would have had an excellent view of the zombie hordes stampeding into his land.

  In the middle of a flat desert salt plain, two days later with sand and dust in her hair and eyes, she stood before a mound a hundred feet high in the middle of a constellation of dozens, with the Hatter app beeping constantly.

  This was it. Her father was right here.

  The blue dot and yellow dot overlapped. She clicked off the beeping numbly. The coordinates on her GPS device matched the one she and Cerulean and Lara had pulled off the app years ago, before the signal weakened.

  This was it. This mound, somewhere, contained her father.

  A few tears leaked from her cheeks. She'd expended so many already, it felt like she hardly had any left. The sky was blue and the mounds were gray and this was the shape of things.

  "Hi Daddy," she said to the mound.

  She circled it, hoping to pick him off on the outside. She remembered the yellow lightning bolt on his pajamas, but probably that had faded by now. He had been wearing a backpack, too.

  She picked out some bodies wearing torn and weathered backpacks on the mound's exterior, spotted with sand and sun tarnish. She studied them, but couldn't tell if they were her father by their wrinkled faces or their withered skin, by the clothes or even any branding written on the packs.

  So she opened up their packs. There had been a tiny figure of Alice in her father's pack, wrapped carefully in plastic wrap, alongside his copy of Alice in Wonderland, his wallet, his house keys, a clutch of red laces and maybe a Coke, plus any other totems she'd wanted to keep. She remembered them so clearly still, as they were the only items she'd taken with her from their house.

  She pulled them all open, but few of them had anything left inside, and those that did had nothing that belonged to her.

  She circled slowly round the mound, kicking through drifts of unpacked clothes and wadded papers. Perhaps these people had been through the Pacific like her father. They might have walked and swum thousands of miles just like him, to come here and build this pointless cairn of bodies in this pointless nothing space for no reason at all.

  The old anger reared its head a little, like an old friend.

  "You're in there, aren't you?" she asked the mound. "You're waiting for me, I know it. You've been waiting for years."

  Her father.

  The mound was a mound. Anger shifted to excitement, and her skin tingled. She'd promised, she'd come this far, and now she was so close.

  She began unloading the RV.

  INTERLUDE 3

  He charged.

  He was one body at the head of a wedge in the midst of an endless herd stampeding over the barren plain. The sound of their foot beats thrummed like the deep ocean crust rupturing as a volcanic plume escaped; a rumbling bass that carried through the water for days. The earth was changing and now his time on it was so short.

  He charged down the rise and into the dust cloud raised by the herd ahead. The cold was in his mouth and his belly now, in his eyes and his mind, seeking a way in. He heard its voice as a whisper summoning him close; to vicious red teeth that would grind him down, to vicious red nails that would rip him apart, to a vicious red throat that would remake what he was. He felt his enemy move in the flows of heat and cold, trying to outflank him, seeking a way to break through.

  The battalion ahead broke away to the right, and a view opened up over the plain. Through the clouds of drifting dust and between the charging bodies, he looked upon his enemy.

  It was a bloody and terrible giant. It had burning red skin and burning white eyes and a round black hole where its mouth should be. The battalion ahead encircled it in a swirling rush, throwing themselves bodily at it. It swiped its long bloody arms from right to left like scythes, beheading them like so many flowers. Their bodies dropped and their heads rolled and the cold increased a little for every one that fell.

  He ran on, unable to help, bound for his own fate, though he watched as his dead brothers and sisters mounded around it four and five deep. Their headless corpses formed a tide wall that the others climbed and dived from
with their arms outspread. The red giant cut them to pieces in the air, while more came and more, until at last there was a break in the charge and the giant had a moment of reprieve.

  Without hesitation it scooped one of the headless corpses from the ground by its feet, and held the raw gray neck to its round mouth. There was a ripple in the cold, like a shark in the water, then its back heaved and a gush of black and red liquid vomited from its mouth.

  The corpse jerked and the giant cast it aside and scooped another, then filled it too, then another. The gap in the charge closed and the battalion began diving again, but now the giant was not alone but circled by three others; bloody giants that emerged from their gray-skin shells like butterflies.

  Together they cut through the fresh rush of tumbling bodies.

  The storm of sand stole the image away. He sped on, closing on his own target at last, summoned by this terrible cold from so far away. Ecstasy dumped into his mind as a final parting gift. He looked at his fellows either side and saw that they felt it too.

  For Anna, he thought.

  Then he hit another wall of the dead, climbed and threw himself into the air.

  Dust and sand spun, red limbs whirled, and the three bodies ahead of him had their heads sliced off in a single blow. They tumbled down while he flew on, falling into the giant's backswing. For an instant he stared into his enemy's face, and saw the stamp of perpetual hunger in its blind red eyes, the burning need to spread itself far and wide through the world, then he hit.

  His chest crashed against its horny shoulder and he locked his arms around its thick neck, slowing the sweep of its bladed right arm. One of his fellows made it too and hit beside him, grappling for purchase. The giant roared and slashed her to pieces, though that distraction opened a breach that three more flew into, grabbing to the enemy's chest and leg.

  He tried to bite into its shoulder but the skin was as tough as rock. It swept its forearm at the others, slicing two in tumbling halves, and for a moment its burning eyes looked directly into his, and he understood.