On the road northwest to Novosibirsk she raced through overripe fields that were surely once farmland for sunflowers, rapeseed and wheat, but now were studded with new growth walnut and Mongolian lime trees, strangled in places by thick Japanese knotweed. Geese honked overhead and vermilion foxes watched from the rushes of lakes that stretched on into ice.
The number of gray mounds ebbed gradually until there were none. The red giants hadn't reached this far. She wasn't sorry to see them go. In their place the Altai mountains rose up, wearing a brittle cap of snow. She kept the map open in the passenger seat beside her, weighted down with the hissing satellite phone: her two constant companions.
The chill in the air deepened. She stopped at a parka store in a low valley and took three of the fluffiest coats they had, along with woolen underwear, thick leather boots, wool socks, gloves, mufflers, whole sheepskin blankets and a heavy furred hats. She left payment in the form of USBs lying neatly like orange pips on the counter.
A few hundred miles later she stopped at a Yangtze fulfillment center, laughing her way down the dark hallways where all the signs were written in stark Russian script. She stocked up on everything she would need for her cairns, then drove on through the Siberian pine-coated hills with old Madonna tracks lilting from her roof-mounted speakers. No zombies came to follow her; those days were gone, but the bright clashing music made her happy and served to warn any other humans she was passing through.
In Novosibirsk she cruised through the suburbs and downtown, past a grand lilac-colored train station as ornate with bright arches as a child's fancy toy box, hunting down the tallest building. Gorskiy City Hotel was a blocky black glass affair with bright stripes of color running around alternating floors, about twenty-five floors tall.
From the rooftop she rappelled down with her gear. It was a giddy high, swaying in the freezing wind fifteen to twenty floors above ground, kind of like leaning into the draft of a catamaran. She spent the day painting a simple symbol, the same all round world that she'd she seen so far.
A STOP sign. It was a red octagon with large white letters in the middle, reading:
LA 36
LA for their location, and 36 for their numbers. Underneath it was a white arrow pointing to the lobby, where she'd left laptops, teabags, cups and kettles with generators and fuel to run them, plus directions drawn out on maps, Amo's USB seeds, and a big whiteboard snatched from one of the conference center floors.
ANNA 7/2028
She surveyed it from a vantage point on the verdant floodplains of the Ob river, just as the sun came down beyond Gorskiy City. It offered a choice.
From Novosibirsk it was a day's hop to Omsk along narrow road-channels carved through dense ancient woods. Beyond that she dropped small, Amo-style car-cairns in lots of minor cities along the way: Ishim and Kurgan, Cheylabinsk and Ufa, Kazan and Cheboksary and Vladimi. She fine-tuned the process down to around two hours: two cars pushed into position, a white and black striped line drawn between them like a checkered flag, then one car branded with her stop sign and stocked with goodies.
In Moscow she made a larger effort. She chewed on a ballpoint pen while studying her tourist map and overlooking the view from the Moscow State University Building, tucked in a loop of the broad Moskva River, trying to choose the best spot for the cairn. There were many tall skyscrapers, plus the Kremlin, a huge tower, the brightly-domed Saint Basil's Cathedral, and countless others.
At last she settled on Red Square itself, fronting Saint Basil's. The space was massive and empty, an absolute joy to drive and do donuts in. There was no sign of habitation. In all of Moscow there'd been twenty million people or thereabouts, probably resulting in about two survivors total.
Where were they? Even if they were here, there was so little chance she'd find them. Most likely they'd moved to warmer climes, where life was easier, but perhaps they'd come here one day, on a pilgrimage to their old capital.
She painted her red stop sign on the floor of Red Square directly, by tipping out cans of red paint and spreading them around with a brush. It took thirty cans to fill up the circle she'd marked out, and four cans to do the lettering in white
On the bar of the L of LA she placed a single red Ferrari, scouted from a dealership and towed over with the RV. It stood out beautifully against the white, which stood out starkly against the red, which stood out sharply against the white. In the Ferrari she put all her cairn staples.
It was good work. She drove on down into Europe. The chilly Russian valleys gradually gave way to the thick old growth pine and birch forests covering Belarus. Winding through long shadowy roads overcast with tangled ancient trees, she thought of Alice stumbling around lost in a forest.
Occasional sudden bursts of motion interrupted her silent passage: a stag emerging from the undergrowth to eye her cynically, a hawk erupting from the shrubs with a caw. Towns blipped up and blipped out in much the same way, each heralded by grimy old Stalinist statues, many of which had been halfway torn down or fenced with rusting metal walls. All were coated in ivy, with saplings growing up around them. Soon all this would be lost in the woods.
She left her symbol in Minsk, painted on the columns of the grand old KGB headquarters. Poland was next, with medieval castles on hills and gray concrete cities. Time whipped by in a blur of driving, painting cairns and dreaming of the days ahead. She was impatient and ready to be home. It had been months already. She looked out for people along the road and any signs of habitation, but saw none.
After Poland there was Germany, where it seemed the cold was following her west from Russia. She left cairns in Potsdam and Hanover, in Dortmund and Cologne. In Belgium she stopped for an afternoon in Liege and ate fine chocolate. In France she breezed through vineyards and fields ripe with pumpkins, stopping off in Amiens to sample the wine and drop a cairn, before speeding on to the coast.
It felt almost like coming home. The salty winds of the Atlantic blowing in over the little marina at Le Havre were a welcome sensation. She was almost there.
24. SLEEPER CELL
The Atlantic was easy. She found a buoyant catamaran in the harbor, spent two days fitting it and stocking it with gear, then she was away.
Long sunny days passed by as the wind ushered her west. She lay on the new bridge and looked up at the sky and thought about the zombie apocalypse.
They had died for her. Ten years ago billions had crossed the world to sacrifice themselves on giant mounds atop red monsters.
Now she was ready to figure out why. She had no further samples, no electron microscope or textbooks or slides of the T4 to study, but that didn't stop her. She had notepads and pens, and using them began to construct a picture of how the world had ended.
A year before the apocalypse the world was infected with a virus. In most people it made no visible changes; it simply bedded down to lurk like a viral sleeper cell. In others, the one in ten million who would survive, it struck differently. They entered a coma that turned them briefly into zombies.
This was inoculation. They recovered, though the recovery was abysmal; they were still infected with something, which caused the hurt.
"Our entire cellular make-up was shifted," she said into the hissing satellite phone one afternoon, reading over her scribbled notes and stacked diagrams of cellular division. "We were like butterflies in a pupal state, protected from the real world while all our senses had to adapt to becoming something entirely new."
She tapped the paper with her pen, thinking.
"At the same time, the sleeper cell spread through the population. Probably it was airborne. It made subtle changes in its hosts, readying them like empty vessels for the change to come. Then Amo and Lara sent the signal, one they could never have expected, the virus activated, and the world turned gray."
She circled the sketch of a T4 she had drawn. For months it had haunted her thoughts and dreams; this three-legged was inside them all, controlling them from within. Now she began to think of it differently,
no longer as a parasitical tripod but as a lighthouse on a great wall, looking out over an endless ocean.
It had saved them all.
"The zombies were an immune reaction to the true infection," she told the phone, "like white blood cells. They threw themselves on the red monsters in Mongolia. I don't know what that thing was, but I couldn't fight it. Some kind of mind control. It would have used me to make more of itself, then we'd all be screwed."
She paused and chewed the pen.
"But the zombies were immune. They sacrificed themselves to stop it."
She sat at the edge of the bridge and gazed out to sea. It was a lot to swallow still. She didn't know how a signal released by sex could pass around the world in mere hours. She didn't know what the red creatures wanted, or where they came from.
"But it's good," she told the phone. "The zombie ocean saved us. Without them we'd have been overrun."
She rubbed her eyes. A few months ago she'd been angry. She'd hated Amo and scorned Cerulean. She'd used Ravi and cared only about her own loss.
Now she was going home.
New York was much as she remembered it. She pulled in up the Hudson River, looking up at Amo's giant 'f' on the Empire State Building and wondering how many people this lighthouse had steered home already.
She signed the blackboard in the Empire State's lobby, then helped herself to the keys to a new RV from the bowl. She had a classy cup of foamy latté from the machines, still good after all these years.
The RV sat on flat tires but she'd had plenty of practice switching them, plus Amo had left all the tools she'd need right there. Already there was gas in drums, water and food.
Before she left New York she drove north to Yankee Stadium. Their group had talked many times about returning here and setting the tens of thousands of zombies inside free, but they'd never done it. There were always other things that were more urgent.
Standing before the Stadium's tall glass façade, blockaded by large Greyhound coaches Amo had used as gates, she wept a little. Through the glass she could see the zombies inside, emaciated, wilted and patting on the smeared glass futilely. They'd locked them away and denied them their purpose, for nothing.
"I'm sorry," Anna said.
She jumpstarted the Greyhound and rolled it clear of the entrance. That was all it took, and at once a trickle of gray bodies tottered out. Anna smiled as they came over and encircled her. They touched her hair and her arms and her belly as though there was nothing at all to forgive.
"It's good to see you," she said, as they gathered around her. "Thank you for your service. I'm sorry you had to wait so long."
They circled her in a swarm, spreading out across the street as hundreds and thousands poured from the mouth of the Stadium. Soon there were so many that the streets couldn't contain them, and she climbed back into her RV. With the windows down she drove west at a snail's pace, reaching out to touch the hands that strained up toward her.
All these people were her family. To them she owed everything.
"Thank you," she said, holding hands and touching their heads. "Thank you for all you've done."
She led them west along 155th street to the Hudson River, then north along its banks past Washington Heights to the George Washington Bridge. Coaxing them en masse onto the I-9 bridge was tricky, but she managed to get a thread of them following her up, and the rest followed.
In the shadow of the bridge's lower deck she paused while they wound up the spiral on-ramp behind her and spread out across the four lanes. Everything about this place was familiar. Looking out over the water to a beautiful cityscape made her think of the bridge in Japan, where all of these people were headed. They pressed close against her.
"Charging up," she said softly. They were. Perhaps this was an essential stage in their programming. They sampled what a living, immune human felt like, then they went off to fight its opposite. Perhaps this sense drove them on. Perhaps in the end they even recovered some memories of who they had been before, so they could understand what their sacrifice was for.
She smiled and cried a little. It would be nice to think that; that her father had known what he was doing at the last, that it wasn't just a T4 virus forcing him into it
She didn't wait for them all to catch up. The bridge wasn't big enough to contain them. Instead she drove on, cranking up the music like the Pied Piper and leading her people home.
Through the day and into the night they followed her, just like old times. Together they left the city behind and crawled like a long caterpillar through the fields and forests of New Jersey, headed for Pennsylvania. Then as dawn broke and the road swerved gently to the right, they split away and continued on a straight line to the west. They tumbled down the road embankment and into the weeds of an old construction site, then picked themselves up and walked on.
Anna stood at the side and said goodbye to them as they passed. They were going to die, but it was all right. She'd seen where they were going and what they were going to do, and it wasn't that scary. It was a kind of beautiful.
"Best of luck," she said to them. "Safe journey. I know you'll do fine."
By evening her voice was a croak. At some point she'd curled up on the grass verge and napped, but still they were flowing by. She got up and back to thanking them, until finally they were all gone.
The sound of them rustling through the evening dark faded like a distant freight train, honking its call through the lonely night beyond her bedroom window. She was a little girl again, leading her people back to LA and into the water, telling them not to be scared. It was part of who she was.
"I might see you again," she called after them. "In LA."
For three days she drove. She didn't play music, just enjoyed the peace and silence of the natural world. Little towns and big states passed her by. For a little while she followed the route Amo took. She passed by Sophia's cairn and way-marker, and added fresh USB seeds.
In Chicago, just after passing by the tip of Lake Michigan's long blue finger, she turned right, and for a time drove north then northwest. The chill cut in but she dressed in some of her Siberian furs and pressed on. Snow soon lined the ground around her.
Up I-94 she went to Milwaukee, across to Madison then over and up on I-90 through Wisconsin Dells and Mauston, to Minneapolis.
There the circuit was complete.
She pulled up to her old house in the suburb of Minnetonka, west Minneapolis. It looked like a nice area, if you didn't count the weeds everywhere and the cracks in the tarmac, or the ivy creeping up the walls and the brown knotweed strangling cars beneath a mass of brown.
It was a street and there were tall brownstone houses arrayed long it. They had short front yards overgrown with trees and hedges. The cool air smelled like elderberries and winter.
She looked down at the address written on a piece of paper, copied from her father's driving license. Almost there. Her hand shook as she let the RV roll slowly down the street. Flashes of memory came back to her, of where she'd run after him, where she'd fought her way out of the flow and into a taxi.
It all looked smaller.
She stopped at number forty-seven, her heart beating hard. She killed the engine and climbed out. She took out the house keys and held the familiar metal so tightly her fingers hurt. She didn't need them, as the door still hung open. Still she held onto the keys. They felt good in her hand, like a magic totem of belonging.
She walked in.
The hallway was carpeted with rushes of crinkling brown leaves. In the warm autumn light she studied photographs on the walls. Here was her father. Here was a picture of her as a baby. Here was her mother. She was a pretty white lady with dark hair. Here was a picture of all three of them together, posing over a big blue cake with a picture of Alice on the side.
There were many others pictures. In all of them they looked happy. There was no hint of the misery to come. Anna peered closely at her mother, trying to understand who she was behind those smiling eyes.
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br /> It didn't really matter. They were both dead now.
In the kitchen she found an empty carton of milk sitting in the middle of the room and laughed. Up the stairs, her old room was full of light. The bed lay in the middle, so small. She'd spent a year in it, just a little girl with her father by her side. She imagined him standing outside the room, spending silent moments preparing to enter, putting on his smile and pushing through another day.
He had done so much for her, both in life and in death.
Around the room, her pictures were still tacked to the walls, their bright colors were preserved by the dark; images of birdmen and birdwomen, rainbow warriors and horses with slug legs, monsters and heroes and Alice too, weaving her way amongst them with grace and wit and childlike ease.
A line from Alice came to mind and she spoke it aloud.
"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then."
It was true.
She went to collect the pictures, then thought better of it. They belonged where they were, where they had been for ten years. She stood at the window for a time, looking out, gathering her strength before the final room.
The Hatter was a dark circle on the floor. She ran her fingers through her father's clothes in the cupboard. It was amazing to think he'd walked from here to Mongolia. It made her miss him more, for all the things she would never know. Perhaps he would have met another woman and she might have had a second mother. Perhaps they would have had another child, a little brother or sister for Anna to look after.
She went back down the stairs. From the wall she selected one picture, of her and her father together, just the two of them. Seeing her mother had been nice, but she could remain here in this eternal mausoleum, a past too distant to keep near. She only wanted her father with her for the days and years to come.
Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost Page 23