Julio grinned but it didn't reach his brows. Probably he thought Cerulean was about to die, leaving him with Masako and Cynthia. But Cynthia was standing by the RV door with her rifle by her side. She nodded and he nodded, then he hit the shale by the tracks, rolled on and soon hit the edge of the zombie horde.
He hit the dust cloud first, then fibrous gray bodies surrounded him, like a dry forest of silver birch on the march, ignoring him completely. They didn't even touch him. Their bodies flowed either side of him, and there was no sense of threat, just a strange surreal calm, like he'd fallen in with a herd of wandering buffalo.
He laughed. He rolled back with them, emerging from their leading edge like a surfer cresting a wave. Julio stared grimly.
"Now let's go," Cerulean called, pushing the wheels hard to get ahead. "Or we'll be stuck in this flow for hours."
They sat in the camp beside a children's playground and Julio eyed him fiercely, challenging still. Over his left shoulder there was a children's swing, and over his right there was a merry-go-round. It made his intense gaze laughable.
"Fine, we check Chicago," Cerulean agreed.
Chicago was utterly empty. It took them three days to all agree to that, though. Most of the time they went driving in convoy through downtown with music playing loud from Julio's Mustang.
"At least he could play something classical," Masako complained multiple times. "I'm sick to death of Bruce Springsteen."
The streets were devoid of people but littered with vehicles, just like New York. At times they got out and prowled around buildings, but they were all empty too except for the occasional mob of gray faces pressed to the doors or windows of a bar. Julio would stalk ahead with his gun in his hand, occasionally spinning round corners or kicking in doors like a SWAT member, while Cerulean would go along behind letting the zombies out.
"He was a traffic warden, I wager," Cynthia said as the three of them trundled along behind. "So rageful."
"Ice cream man," Masako answered.
Games like that kept them amused.
"He's just clearing the whole city," Cerulean said. "One building at a time. Checking there's no-one on our six when we go west."
They laughed.
After three days and no more survivors found, they rolled on. "We're not doing that again," Cerulean said, and this time the others agreed.
* * *
In Iowa, in the middle of a corn field a hundred miles west of Des Moines, they found Amo's third cairn. It was a stripe of black and white across a nondescript road in the midst of fields of ripe corn, with two cars parked either side like pillars flanking a finish line.
By the wayside was a young man boiling corn in a silver tub. He saw them and came running over.
"Put your damn gun down," Cerulean said to Julio over the walkie-talkies they'd picked up from a Radio Shack. "Right now."
He did. The young man, tall and gangly with feathery black hair, reached the Mustang's side.
"Lord above, am I glad to see some people. Oh man, I thought I was alone."
"That's great kid," Julio said. "Don't scratch the paintwork."
The kid frowned and turned to Cerulean, who was already out and rolling over, one hand extended. The young man looked overjoyed but there was a slightly queasy expression on Julio's face, like the odds had just shifted out of his favor.
"You're in a wheelchair," the young man said, shaking his hand. "Sorry, I mean, I'm Jake. I've got corn. Listen, do you know that the zombies won't hurt you? I just read the most excellent comic book." He pulled at his inner jacket pocket, Julio's hand went to his pistol, but Jake came out with an actual comic book.
Cerulean stared at it. On the front cover, heaped up and rising from Times Square in a great zombie pile-on, was the final piece of art Amo had showed him before the apocalypse.
ZOMBIES OF AMERICA
It was printed and professional looking, bound properly like he'd had it done at a publisher's.
Cerulean laughed.
"I know, it's amazing right?" Jake gushed on. "This guy Amo, he's like the Pied Piper leaving a trail for us to follow. The things he's done, damn, it's amazing."
He stopped for a second, taking in Cynthia and Masako. "Are you guys following him? Amo, I mean?"
Cerulean smiled, and said yes, then introduced himself and explained, with Julio's dark brows scowling throughout.
* * *
The comic detailed Amo's battles in New York. Cerulean sat in the darkness after the others had gone to sleep, camping at the cairn in the corn, turning the pages by flashlight.
He'd fought them to reach his coffee shop, where he'd hoped to find Lara. He'd burned them and shot them, and then he'd shot himself in the head in Times Square.
That part didn't make much sense, but it was the honesty that struck Cerulean hardest. Amo didn't hide from a bit of it. He drew the dead just as bloody and gross as Cerulean had seen them, owning his actions completely and trying to pay the price.
But he hadn't died. There was a hole in his head with nothing inside, and he was still Amo. So he'd gotten down to work. He'd stopped killing the ocean, as he called them, and made the big 'f'. He'd cleared the streets and revised the prepper Bible, then he'd set off in a convoy with an RV and a school bus reinforced as a battle-tank pulled by a big yellow JCB. He found Sophia hanging from her noose, which broke him, and so he let the zombies finally catch up to him in the corn. They didn't kill him, so he made a comic.
It all made a weird kind of sense. It changed his feelings about Matthew a little, though he didn't really know how.
Jake seemed a nice kid. He was so eager, and friendly, and had kept pressing boiled corn on them until they were stuffed.
"I know, I keep saying it, but man is it good to see other people. Oh God, have I been bored."
He'd spent most of the last three months in his parents' house, watching movies and playing games, a lot like Masako. When it got quieter outside he'd taken up golf. He told them all this in big info-dump flurries, peppered with more thanks and more statements about how great it was to meet other people.
Cerulean laid the comic down and looked up at the sky, so full of stars. Between them he figured Jake, Cynthia and Masako could handle Julio. They didn't need him, really, and though he liked them, and even enjoyed being around them, it didn't make a difference to how he felt inside.
Too much had happened for him to turn back. He owed it to Matthew, if no one else. That thought didn't make quite as much sense as it had before, but it still felt true. The comfort and warmth of the others was nice, but it wasn't really real.
After Las Vegas he would still dive.
* * *
Then they found Anna.
It was two days later and they were an hour's drive west of Denver, Colorado, in the middle of a great empty orange-dirt plain. That morning they'd stopped briefly at Amo's most ambitious cairn since New York: a giant yellow Pac-man head painted on all four faces of the Wells Fargo building in central Denver. In the lobby on the name board, there had been three names:
Amo
Lara
Anna
They'd all been excited about that. Jake in particular was cheery, sitting in the RV while Cerulean drove, dreaming up the kind of girl he hoped it would be. Masako encouraged him with visions of supermodels, then teased him that they'd never go for him anyway. He had a strange, enthusiastic-Labrador kind of confidence that let him bull through anything she said and have both of them come away laughing.
Julio didn't like him, always sneering and turning away and driving off in his Mustang. It probably would have annoyed him even more if he knew how little Jake even noticed his scorn.
Then there was Anna, a little black girl in a dirty blue and white dress standing at the side of the dusty road, looking for all the world like Alice in Wonderland after she'd tumbled down the rabbit-hole.
"Oh my God," Cerulean said.
They all turned to look. Everybody went quiet.
The RV
stopped, and the little girl just looked back at them, waiting. She couldn't be more than six years old. She waved.
That broke the spell, and Cerulean hurried out of the back so fast he almost fell. He raced over to her, thankful Julio was bringing up the rear in his Mustang for once, and when she saw him she started to cry. As he drew up she jumped into his lap, wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and sobbed against his neck.
Everything changed.
At once he knew that he wasn't going to dive. He wasn't going to leave these people behind, he wasn't going back to New York, not any more. This was his responsibility now and he'd carry it for as long as he was able.
He hugged the little girl and whispered to her that everything was going to be all right. She was frail and slight, but wiry, and she clung to him like a barnacle. The tears broke down his cheeks and he patted her thin back. She stank but he didn't care.
She filled the hole inside right to the brim.
* * *
Everything that followed felt floaty and fresh. They had a feast of hotdogs and beans and other bits from the RV's stores, and Anna hung on to him throughout. Julio and Matthew and the dive receded far into the darkness. At first she didn't talk but then she did, abruptly and at length, explaining herself and her story.
Anna had climbed aboard her zombie father when he got infected, after he'd eaten their pet puppy right in front of her eyes, then she'd ridden him to the West Coast, where he'd walked into the sea and left her behind. After that she'd spent a month guiding other floaters to the water.
"Wait, they went to the water?" Jake asked. "To what, take a swim?"
Anna frowned seriously at him, which was about the cutest thing Cerulean had ever seen. "No, of course not. Why would they swim?"
"Why indeed?" Jake echoed. "You are of course quite right, what a silly idea."
"They walk in, and they keep walking," Anna corrected. "They're going somewhere, whatever's past the ocean, but of course they don't swim."
Cerulean considered that, while she sat on his lap and slurped up hotdogs and the others quizzed her more. West of the Pacific lay Asia, which meant Japan, China, Malaysia and so on. But if all the zombies were going west, then what was happening in Maine?
He didn't mention it.
"And you led them in?" Jake was confirming. "Into the water, like a tour guide?"
Anna beamed, pleased he was finally getting it. "Yes, exactly!"
She was sweet, and kind and precocious as hell. She offered him grimy red licorice strings that had surely been in her pack for weeks, and he took one and mimed eating it, which delighted her.
"You didn't eat it!" she jeered. "Eat it properly."
He mimed it better, and she looked pleased, though quickly she was getting sleepy.
"You're safe with us, Anna," he told her as she sagged against him.
"Of course," she answered. "My Daddy said so. You look like him."
He stroked her hair, and over the fire Masako watched with a look like she was about to cry. Even Cynthia seemed to melt a little, while Jake was plainly besotted, and kept trying to engage her in mock arguments that she would win in imperious tones, leaving him looking totally bereft.
She laughed. They had fun.
"We're at the same height," she told him later, as it got dark and he was wheeling her to the RV to tuck in along the back seat. She was sleepy and looked up at him with fuzzy eyes. "Daddy, I missed you," she said.
For a long moment after that he felt like he couldn't even breathe. Just her existence was putting a seed in his heart, and the roots growing out changed who he was. He felt it like he felt the ice shatter when Matthew died. This was the opposite.
"I missed you too, honey," he told her, and kissed her hot forehead and tucked her into the covers. Everybody was inside now, drowsy and warm together except for Julio, who was still out in his Mustang. Cerulean rolled back down the center of the RV, past Jake siting hunched in his booth.
"She really likes you," he said.
Cerulean smiled. "I remind her of her father."
"I'm envious," Jake said. "I wanted a supermodel."
"You'll get that next."
Jake pointed at him. "I'll hold you to that."
Cynthia muttered something cutting from her upper deck bunk, but it was easy to ignore. It was even easy, when he rolled over to his booth opposite Masako's, to take her hand in his own, and look into her eyes and actually feel that, perhaps, he loved her, because really she was beautiful and strong, and she'd survived this long, and that made it all right.
She didn't wait for him, pressing herself close and folding into his lap: hot and sweet, as the soft side of her belly pressed against his chest, sending shivers up and down his back.
Like that, they kissed. It felt right, or as right as anything. Her lips were soft but searching, hungry but tender, and her tears were warm on his cheeks.
"That was beautiful," she said. "All of it, every bit, the whole day."
"All right," Jake chimed in. "Beautiful, good, but kissing is in one of the tents, OK. Out there with Julio."
Cynthia cackled. Cynthia and Jake seemed to actually be getting along. She could dish out the insults all day long, and he could soak them up like they were nothing, which might've explained it, or also she was racist and he was white, so it could be that.
Masako kissed him again. "Come on," she whispered in his ear. "I picked a good place."
"I can't," he stumbled, "I don't have the…"
She stopped him with a look. "We'll make do."
For the first time he felt a stirring from down below. To his wonderment, something was beginning to move. It felt like a miracle.
"Oh, what's this?" Masako asked huskily, feeling it move through her thigh. "Why sir."
"I didn't," he said, "I mean I don't-."
"I read a book, while we were traipsing around Chicago," she whispered in his ear. "Just because you're paraplegic doesn't mean this doesn't work." She reached down and stroked his groin, holding his eyes with her own. It felt like a poker stoking a furnace to life. It wasn't how it used to be, because now he felt nothing from below the waist, but he felt something still. "There are nerves that bypass the spine, its autonomic, it runs without your conscious control and you feel it as dopamine in your brain."
He tried to say something but the words and intentions got lost in his throat. She was so warm and so close and he hadn't felt anything like this for years.
She plunged into another kiss.
"Seriously," Jake hissed. "I am not going to listen to this. Should Cynthia and I go outside? Would you prefer we leave you to your privacy?"
Cynthia cackled madly.
"Come on," Masako said, taking his hand. Together they rolled back down the RV to the rear exit, and Jake gave a thumbs up on their way past.
In the darkness outside Masako led him to a tent she'd already prepared. She laid him down on the bedroll and they kissed by the hissing orange light of a camp stove. She peeled off her clothes first, sticky and warm in the summer's heat. Her skin was tan all over, with perfect half-moon breasts hanging like sweet fruit just above his reach.
She kissed him. She peeled off his clothes. She moved atop him, in the darkness, in the night, and he felt every second of it; perfectly capping the best day of his life.
16. WEST
They drove.
Anna slept a lot, spoke with Jake a little, and spent some of her time in the back of the RV looking out of the rear window, or clutching a battered old smart phone to her chest, studying the display.
The rest of the time she was with Cerulean. She crawled up into his lap whether he was driving, not driving, eating or sleeping. Once he woke from a drowsy nap to find her tucked tightly within the arms of his wheelchair, her arms wrapped round his back, fast asleep.
"She just climbed there," Masako said, looking back from the wheel with a smile. "Her eyes were hardly even open."
"She clings tight," Cerulean said. "Like a koala."
Masako reached for his hand and he gave it.
Jake piped up from his booth, behind. "We finished Alice in Wonderland. She wants you to read it to her now, I think."
Cerulean looked down at the curled-up little girl. They'd made her wash and changed her clothes, though she hadn't let them leave her blue and white dress behind. Her tightly knapped hair was wiry against his chin. He kissed her head and she murmured in her sleep.
"I can't imagine what it's like for her," Jake went on. "You remember she said she killed her puppies?"
Cerulean mulled that over. It was an accident, she hadn't known how to feed them milk, but still it had to hurt. She'd ridden her undead father to the West coast, and he couldn't begin to imagine what that would have felt like. He'd never known his father, but his mother had supported him enough for both. If she'd left him as well?
He shuddered at the thought. He'd had diving when Zane died, otherwise he'd have certainly fallen into the gangs like Green-O, seeking some kind of meaning and a way to fill the hole Zane left. Anna had her stories of Alice, and her phone, and those were things to hang onto.
Now she had him too.
She didn't talk much, that was true. She was a little girl with world-weary eyes. None of them talked much now though, as they crossed out of Colorado and into Utah, and the world outside shifted from dirty, dusty scrublands to vivid orange desert with great red buttes rising up like burning glaciers. The sky was blue all the way to the horizon, and any time they stopped at a highway services to pee, the dry heat baked them like eggs frying on the asphalt.
Julio stood by his Mustang and watched everything on these stops, like he was keeping count of how many times everyone used the toilet, a tally he would present to Amo in Los Angeles. He never seemed to go himself. Jake had a theory that he peed into a bottle.
One time, perhaps it was a Thursday, he was standing and watching as usual, as Anna followed Cerulean to the services entrance. She pouted when he went into the men's rooms alone, and when he came back she took his hand again and pulled him back to the RV.
"She's afraid you'll leave her behind," Julio said, as they passed by.
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 14