It would never stop. It would grow and grow until the boundaries were all broken and there was nothing left to eat in the whole of the world, until even the oceans were drained of their plankton shreds of life, and then it would lie down and die.
"Anna!" he cried.
The giant's elbow struck him in the face and flung him back through air. He somersaulted wildly, catching glimpses of the broader battlefield; everywhere the gray army was circling and assaulting red giants, turning in a frenzied dance. For some reason he remembered eating the first dog, and seeing his little girl's face as she watched.
This was not for her. This could not be for her.
He hit dust beyond the wall of bodies, half-broken. His arms no longer worked and a deep score down his middle flopped his dry guts out in the sand, but he forced himself up and on. In the rampaging crowd he circled, aiming for the center, then along with a dozen others charged up and leapt…
A single blow swept his legs away at the knee. Half the others were swatted down, but those remaining seized him mid-air and flung him ahead. He twisted his torso as much as he could, shifting his trajectory by tiny degrees, hoping it would be enough.
His chest thudded against the giant's face. His thighs squeezed tight around its neck and he pressed his ravaged belly close, slotting its head inside the empty cavity like his rib cage was a crown.
The enemy roared and the sound echoed and vibrated through his trembling flesh. It bit at his spine from within, tearing a hole in his back, but it was too late; the seconds of blindness were enough and his gray army washed over it like a tidal wave. They flew off the wall high and low, snaking round its legs and locking them tight, grasping at its arms and weighing them down with their bodies.
It roared and chewed helplessly while his fellows formed into a tomb over it, surging like waves up its waist and midriff, rising high to lock tight around its head and shoulders. In the brief moments before their bodies sealed over its head and covered him up too, he glimpsed the same event playing out everywhere across the battlefield.
Mounds were rising up with twitching red giants at their cores; the wider army flew and clambered and sacrificed their bodies to tie the enemy down.
Then bodies sealed over his head and the vision was stolen away. Darkness reigned, and there was only the rumble of his fellows climbing like far off thunder, adding layer upon heavy layer to the prison. The giant still worked its great jaw at his back but that was all it could do. Every other muscle in its body was immobilized.
In time the rumbling stopped, and the waves of cold began to recede. Silence and stillness fell across the battlefield. One by one he felt his brothers and sisters drop away, allowing their bodies to stiffen in the cold rigor of death. He felt their joy in success, and was glad of it. They were heroes all, and because of all they'd done his little girl would be safe.
His little girl would be safe.
21. JABBERWOCK
Anna looked at her chosen spot on the mound, much like every other spot, and considered. The hammer weighed heavily in her hand.
"It's not smashing people," she muttered to herself, "don't think of it as smashing people. They're more like snails. Or actually just snail shells."
Before her a single hand stuck out from the mass with the fingers spread. It looked like it was beckoning her in. An invitation was definitely the way to think of it, not defiling the dead. This was why she had come, after all. Destruction didn't have to be destructive.
She brought the hammer down.
It hit the hand and the hand cracked away at the wrist, falling to hit the dirt with a thump. Anna's arm tingled with the impact, and she leaned in to study the fracture line.
It was perfectly clean, like it had been cut with a laser, and inside the wrist was hollow. Where the bone should have been ran a long thin cavity, making the arm a stone tube. She raised her finger and inserted it into the space where the bone should have been.
It was dry and smooth, not gross at all. She pulled her finger out and studied it, but there was no residue or dust.
"Maybe the calcium in the bones broke down," she said to the hissing satellite phone, resting on a jut of knee. "Somehow it bled into the flesh and turned it to a kind of limestone. Like petrified wood."
She wasn't really convinced, but it seemed distantly possible.
"What for though?" she asked the phone. "I'd be guessing, but maybe some weird form of art? Aliens painting with human bodies?"
Neither of those connected with the theories she'd developed so far. There'd been a lot of time on the yacht to think about the wriggling T4. There'd been a lot of time all her life to consider all the evidence they had.
The zombies all flipped at once, and they all wanted to go west, except for some of them who wanted to stay with survivors for a time first. She'd come to think of this as their 'charging up' phase, like snakes in the sun. They charged up then they went, and it had been clear they didn't die just offshore for a long time, after they'd dived to check. So they were able to breathe underwater, or perhaps they didn't need to breathe.
"Maybe they're circling," Amo had theorized in the first year. "Like birds, it's a magnetic thing. They'll go round and round the Earth endlessly."
But they never came back. After a certain time there were fewer and fewer coming by, until there were hardly any left at all. At the same time, Jake figured out how to hack her phone and lift the coordinates out of the Hatter app. They knew then that her father had gone to Mongolia, but they didn't know why.
Everyone had a theory. Some were put forth sincerely, others in jest, like a military experiment gone wrong, an infection brought by some alien comet, a hidden nesting instinct brought on by the very specific sex that 'switched them on', or perhaps an addiction to the sun or an evolution sideways through the tree of life. It had been a game around the LA campus throughout her childhood, making up wilder and crazier theories.
It was one way to deal with the loss. They'd all lost so much. Gradually though they'd stopped joking when the flow of them dried up. They were truly gone.
"Called to heaven," Julio had said to her one day, while she was waiting in line for her curry from the canteen line. A broken zombie was crawling by.
She'd gotten good at ignoring Julio. He'd kept trying to engage her at times, to goad some kind of angry response from her, but if she just ignored him he always went away. She hadn't liked to admit it, but he scared her. If there were no zombies around anymore, how could they protect her?
She had to rely on the others. She had to trust Cerulean and Amo.
Now Julio was dead, gone a long time back, and his rules for the new world had amounted to nothing. It was the same for the crazy woman on the yacht. She'd pitied them both. There were things they'd both been trying to be that they just weren't, and never would be. Their ideas of reality were fundamentaly flawed.
So many things had changed.
She shook her head, clearing out the musty memories. This was now and she was here, the T4 was in them all and that was that. She was about to find out what all the fuss had been about.
"I'm going to dig to the middle," she told the phone through gritted teeth, "and find out what's in there. Then I'm going to dig outward until I find my father. I'll figure out the rest later. OK?"
The phone hissed.
"OK."
She brought the hammer down again.
After three hours she'd worked up a thorough sweat and made a visible hollow in the mound. At first she'd intended to make a neat and narrow tunnel burrowing straight through to the center, but actually it proved far easier to topple bodies away whole than cut through them.
All she had to do was smash away fingers and feet that were hooked around their fellows, then lever the heavy bodies down. It grew easier the wider she went, taking apart the outer skin of the lattice before moving to the next layer in. Their bodies became a sizable pile behind her, so she used the RV and a length of looped cable to drag them away, making a new mound e
lsewhere.
Her shoulders ached, but really this was just like sailing without a break; a question of will. There was no way she would sleep until it was done.
Through the night she dug. At times the hammer couldn't crack a particularly tightly clenched fist, and she brought out the crowbar, pickaxe, electric drill or blowtorch. With them she sawed, pried, drilled and burned her way into the heart of the mound like a worm in an apple, coring a cavernous tunnel that led eerily through solid bodies, narrowing like a cone the deeper she went. Overhead and to either side their bodies held fast like carved angelic figures in a cathedral, reaching down.
Sometime in the early morning, half-dozing in a kneeling position with the flashlight guttering by her side, she glimpsed a flash of color ahead. At first her sleepy brain thought it was a fish darting back into the coral, but a few moments later she realized that wasn't possible because she wasn't at sea anymore.
She rubbed her eyes awake and trained a flashlight through the porous wall of limbs and trunks ahead. She'd come about fifteen feet already, turning out well over a hundred bodies and making countless runs with the RV to clear them. She was probably almost at the center, standing in a broad arch-like tunnel of stone bodies.
They were like roots, as if she'd fallen down the rabbit hole and was chasing the White Rabbit still.
Then she saw it again.
"Holy shit," she muttered.
Something red. There was something bright red right in the middle of the mound, upright like a totem pole. She pressed her face close to somebody's solid armpit to peek through the gap, while trying to angle the light through another gap upon whatever lay beyond.
It looked like a leg. Like a giant red leg of a giant red standing figure.
She hadn't expected that. She pulled back and rested on her haunches to puzzle it over. Maybe it was a sacred Mongolian tree of some sort? Maybe it was the tent-pole that held the mound up. Maybe it was a pharaoh-figure that had to be buried with all his zombie slaves, in a pyramid made out of his zombie slaves, because…
Ideas failed her. She dug.
By noon, with hot dry winds swirling around her and blowing dust into the mound's inner sanctum, she had cleared through to the naked red giant at the center.
It was a naked red giant.
It was so massive that its head and shoulders disappeared into the roof of bodies, easily three times her height. The white stone zombies clung to it like bandaging on a mummy, and had been incredibly difficult to crack, drill, and prize clear. Their arms and legs had been wrapped around its arms and legs skin-to-skin, packed incredibly tight.
Now it stood before her. Between its legs, where some kind of genitalia should have been, was a blank space. Its thighs were as thick as Colorado redwood trees and its chest was as massive as the air conditioner they used to cool the giant IMAX theater. Its arms lay straight down at its side, giving it the appearance of a pole. Its forearms looked a little like shrunken wings, with a webbing of razor-sharp cartilage sticking out and running all the way down to the little fingers.
Its skin burned a bright and bloody red, but it was just as hard and cold as the rest of them. She tapped on it but couldn't tell if it was hollow too.
She hadn't found her father yet, or didn't think she had. Now there was this. She leaned against the wall of bodies and looked up at the naked red giant.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
It looked part sun god and part devil. All it needed was a nice red pitchfork to complete the look.
"Did you summon my father? Did you call all the zombies here?"
It didn't say anything because its head was stuck in the ceiling. Anna looked up and sighed. Of course she wanted to see its face too, though it was probably just a peanut like the others, but it would take another few hours to clear it; either by cutting directly up or unpeeling a wider swathe from the outside.
Her hands were blistered. She sat down on a shelf of shoulder.
This was pretty far from the sense of closure she'd hoped for. Really it was ridiculous, that all these millions had come this far to what, worship at this thing's altar? Carve it then hug it to death?
She looked back out of the cavern. It widened like a funnel, giving her an excellent view of desert sand, her RV and at least three other mounds.
"Are they all like this?" she asked the red giant. "What's the point? Father, I'm here!"
She rubbed her eyes with her palms then laughed. She felt giddy. That was what working through the night did to you. A cool breeze lapped at her feet. Perhaps she would make something up when she reported back to Cerulean, something a little more impressive and meaningful than this.
She was too weary to theorize now though. It felt like an anticlimax, and she wasn't sure finding her father, if she even could pick him out like a needle from this vast haystack, would be any better.
She looked back to the giant and addressed its bright red chest. "What do you think, should I cut my way through you too? You're just a fancy pillar, let's be honest."
It said nothing, again because its head was stuck in the ceiling. She laughed. What kind of a life was it, walking around with a pyramid of zombies clinging to your head?
"It's a hat!" she shouted back down the tunnel, to Cerulean and Amo on the other end of the satellite phone. She couldn't hear the hiss and they probably couldn't hear her either, but who cared?
"The zombies became zombies and traveled all around the world to become giant lampshades for tall red lamp poles!"
So this was the ultimate goal of the T4 virus. It figured, probably. Crazy viruses did all kinds of crazy things to further their own goals, and sometimes for no reason at all, if their code went amok. Ebola could make your eyes change color, syphilis made peoples' brains eat themselves, and sufferers of rabies became both furious and morbidly afraid of water.
At that thought she stopped laughing. If it was an infection she was dealing with, she probably shouldn't get close to this thing. It could still be infectious, and just because she was immune to the gray zombies, that didn't mean she was immune to this giant red one.
She started quickly back down the funnel-cavern. It was strange she hadn't considered this possibility before, not once. Now she looked at her hands where they'd touched the giant. She'd already touched her face countless times. Was a virus in her now?
She sped up along the root-like tunnel. Perhaps all of this had been a mistake. The cool wind around her ankles grew stronger. The RV was just there, almost in reach. She'd shower in raw gasoline and alcohol. She'd get up protective gear and then bring the bodies back and rebury this red thing without touching it, hide it back where it belonged. She'd leave a note on the mound advising people to stay away. Police tape.
Lint and cobbles.
What?
She stopped at the edge of the mound, momentarily confused. She didn't know what she was doing or what she'd been thinking. She was standing still at the outer wall of the mound facing outward, but surely she intended to go in? She turned herself to look back into the dark.
Something moved inside.
It was dark and she could hardly see. The cold around her ankles was so strong now it hurt, and she tried to rub her bare arms but she couldn't move. A distant kind of panic welled in her. It was so cold, like being sucked into the bottom of the ocean.
She gulped. She tried to lick her lips but couldn't.
Something was moving in the darkness. The satellite phone hissed behind her but couldn't help her. The heat of the sun faded along with the RV and the world. There was only the tunnel now, and at the end of the tunnel there was the red giant, and it was moving.
CRUNCH
Its arm moved. In the dimness she watched with wide and watering eyes as that long serrated limb rose, formed a fist, then punched upward at the rock bodies round its head.
CRUNCH
Dust and bits of stone fell down. Its other arm rose and punched upward too. More dust and stone fell. Its legs sucked out of the
nestled bed of bodies from behind, like it was emerging from carbonite. It punched up again and again in the dark and dust and Anna could only watch.
Icy tears welled down her cheeks. She imagined herself getting in the RV and racing away, but she couldn't make herself do it. She could barely breathe, she could only watch.
CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH
Large chunks of stone fell and she gasped, and now the totem pole was dropping. The red giant dropped to its knees, and its great shoulders and head sheared out of the mound above in a cloud of dust and stone debris.
Anna's belly and neck quivered. She felt naked. It was vast. It reached up and pulled a shroud of gray off its head, then turned to her.
It was a monster. Its eyes burned a bright red in the darkness. Its mouth was a deep black hole, round and repellant. She pushed with all her strength against the cold smothering her thoughts, but she couldn't make herself run.
Instead her body took a step forward. She wanted to scream but she couldn't. The red giant knelt there and she took another step toward it, then another. Her whole body began to shake. She kept moving forward, unable to even turn her neck, until the creature opened its hand and she stepped in to meet it.
Its grip closed around her middle. Her arms reached up and helped it guide the black hole of its mouth close to her face, as if coming in for a kiss. Her nerves screamed as she opened her mouth wide. Its sharp round lip quivered. Its shallow breath stank of blood. She leaned in closer, until her face was touching its mouth.
Its jaw opened slowly, and she pressed her face up against its mouth. Its chest began to pulsate. It heaved, and her lips tasted an acid tang. The sharp rim of its lips bit down around her face, and her own blood beaded hot down her face.
She couldn't think and she couldn't breathe. Its chest convulsed and its grip quickened. Something was coming, and this was how she would die. This was what her death would mean. This was the end of her long odyssey around the world.
Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost Page 21