He pulled her on. Some of the faster members of the flood folded back around them, closing off her view. Soon the road swerved and they walked off it again, down another low hill and into a dark forest.
"Stop!" she shouted, but he didn't stop. There was no use arguing. He pulled her into the dark brambly undergrowth and she stumbled through behind, while thorny bits of scrub tore at her jeans. She tried a new thing; clutching to his leg with her whole body, letting him do most of the walking for her. It worked for a while, but she kept slipping down.
None of this was right. She knew that, could think it clearly even if nothing else was clear. None of it should be happening, but there was nothing she could do. It was just like the hurt. Not even her Daddy understood; it just had to be done.
"Let's stop, Daddy," she gasped for the dozenth time. "I'm tired."
He walked on.
"I can't go much further. Just for a little while."
They walked on. She pulled out his phone; it said 3:53. She could read numbers enough to tell the time.
"I'm serious, Daddy. I'm really serious."
He was too.
The forest got darker as they got deeper. Was it night already? She wasn't sure. Her room had always been dark all day. She began to think about the night. Of course it scared her. Scarier though was the creeping hunger in her belly, and the feeling that at any minute her shuddering arms and legs would give out.
She wouldn't be able to catch up to him again if she was left behind. She felt that with every step, as her fingers weakened on his arm and her feet stumbled. If she let go of his hand now, that would be it it.
That thought was scariest of all: being left alone like Alice in the woods. She didn't know if she could be as brave as Alice, in the night in such a horrible and spooky place.
There had to be another way.
"Think of it this way," she said aloud, trying to make herself braver. Her voice sounded breathy and weak. "A little girl is traveling with a group of snails." The idea for snails came right out of her imagination. "But they never stop. How can she keep up?"
It was like one of her Daddy's impossible challenges. She imagined the girl and her snails drawn on a piece of paper. The answer was simple; build a saddle and ride the snails.
"And if she's tired?" she asked herself aloud. "If she needs to sleep?"
A very nice saddle, that was obvious. She thought about it. A saddle on a snail was easy. But on her Daddy?
She looked up at him. His back was upright. He could easily carry her if he just extended his arms, but she knew now he wouldn't do that. Something was wrong with him, like a sickness, and she had to steer him to a hospital. First though she had to ride.
She imagined sketching the saddle. It looked familiar, and she racked her brain while stumbling over slippery roots. There had been a sick woman earlier, carrying her sick baby with no hands in a sling. Something like that?
Anna looked around. There were no slings here, but there were plenty of jackets, and maybe they could be the same?
It wasn't easy.
"I'm coming back," she said to her Daddy, then let go of his hand and stumbled over to a lady in a black suit. Stripping off her jacket required a few feeble leaps, falling more than jumping off little ledges to get the sleeve off her shoulder, but once one sleeve was clear the other came easily.
She balled it up so it wouldn't drag in the stinking moldy leaves. Her Daddy hadn't gone far, and she stumbled and slipped back to him.
"Here," she said. She tried jumping onto him and looping it around his head, but she could hardly jump and she couldn't hold on at all. She reversed the process in her head, and tried tying the jacket at the arms first, then lassoing it over his head.
It hung loose around his neck like a cape.
"Hold on," she said, and tried to climb up. It was much harder than she'd expected. First she took hold of one side of the loop, but it just spun around him, so she tried again with both sides. It held firm, but there was no way her feeble arms could lift her up.
She tried climbing up his legs. Twice she missed and fell into the swampy muck as her hands slipped off the loop. The third time she managed to kick off his knee and get her butt up high enough to slip into the saddle/sling.
She slipped right out. She hit a patch of bushes hard and rolled.
Tears brimmed to her eyes. She dashed them away and got up and tried again. It was this or nothing, and it had to work. Two hands on the loop, a kick in his knee, and she vaulted higher than ever before. It was just long enough to spread the jacket beneath her, like a hammock, so when she fell it grabbed her.
"Ha!"
She laughed as it caught her and cradled her in close to his chest. Her Daddy bowed a little as he took her weight, then straightened again. It wasn't comfortable and it didn't feel very secure, but she was riding him like a horse. Her aching feet breathed relief. It put her closer to his face, and the horrible clumps of dried Hatter in his beard, but that hardly mattered.
They stumbled on together.
5. FLOOD
She woke hungry and cold to dim pre-dawn light.
Peeling back a duffle coat cover, snatched from another person who stumbled near in the cold night, she looked out on a muddy brown field, dark beneath silty rain clouds. The world jostled up and down like a pulse with her father's footfalls, and it took her a long time to remember where she was.
The flood or people were walking across the field in a long single line, like ants. Their footsteps turfed up a trail of brown mud. In the distance Anna saw the low scrub of greenery, trees probably, and in the midst of it a house.
She was famished.
She shuffled in the sling. Her Daddy's face was grayer than ever, still dark with the Hatter's blood. She kicked one leg out of the cover, then the other.
"Wait for me here," she said, then slid out of the sling.
She hit the muddy field and slipped at once. Mud got all over her knees and thighs. This was just another thing to cry about, but she resisted. Her father continuing to walk was another, but she resisted that too.
"I said wait!" she shouted at his back.
He trudged on.
Anger rushed through her. It was unfamiliar but it felt strong, rushing into her thin legs, and she picked herself up and ran around to face him.
"You stop now!" she shouted at him. He brushed into her and knocked her to the mud again. This time it went up her jacket and touched her belly, so cold and slimy and-
"Arrgh!" she shouted.
She raced around once more and stalked backward ahead of her father. "I told you to stop! You can't hit me like that! You can't eat my puppy, and leave me behind, and knock me in the mud as well! Daddy!"
He was as impassive as a block of stone.
Anna punched him in the belly. It hurt her hand but she didn't care. The anger was really building now.
"You didn't make me dinner," she shouted and punched him again, this time in the hip. "You didn't kiss me goodnight," punch, "you didn't tell me a story," punch, "you left me behind just like Mommy!"
He walked by. Punching was not enough.
She ran and dived at his legs. His pace was slow and easy to predict, and she caught his legs as they passed in mid-stride, wrapping her arms around them and holding on tight.
He tried to keep on walking but couldn't, and fell. He hit the mud with a mighty splat, then started to crawl.
Dragged behind him, Anna laughed manically.
"Where are you going? Daddy-snail, where are you going now? I can't imagine you'll keep up with the others like this."
He slithered. She slithered behind him. Mud was getting on everything and rucking up around her shoulders like a scarf.
"No you don't!" she snapped, and wriggled out of her orange jacket. The air was cold and smelled of dirt but she was covered in mud already. She wrapped the jacket around his legs twice then tied it as hard as she could.
She let go. She laughed.
He kept slitherin
g forward, swimming with his hands.
Anna laughed and cried.
"You're supposed to look after me! You're not supposed to leave me. Where are you going?"
She thought about kicking him. She thought about sitting on his back and riding him like a slow mud-cowboy.
She didn't. It was still her Daddy, and the sling on his chest was filling with mud. That was her bed. She stopped crying and twisted the sling onto his back. He really looked like a snail like that.
"I'm going to get food," Anna said, "you just keep on crawling if that's what you want."
She turned and stamped away across the field.
* * *
The door to the house hung open. It was a nice dark wood building, with a broad cedar-smelling deck and a patio swing. Anna walked in and saw a dark smear in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by tufts of black hair.
Probably another pet had died here. Or maybe a person? She shrugged it off.
The countertop was stone. She scanned it for cereal, and found some. The box was not like hers; bright red with rays of light bursting from a treasure chest, carrying colorful marshmallow cereal pieces like shooting stars.
She fetched a chair, dug out a bowl and spoon from the cupboards and drawers, and poured the cereal tinkling in. It was so bright and colorful and smelled amazing. She found the white fridge and took out a milk pitcher. It wasn't too cold but it didn't smell bad.
She poured it on the cereal, sloshing messily, but who cared about a little milk when there was mud all over her? She took it out to the porch and sat on the swing and rocked gently, crunching cereal and watching her Daddy-snail crawl across the mud.
She was angry still.
He had no right to be doing this. He was her father and he had responsibilities. Let him crawl.
She ate two more bowls, then fetched up a bowl of water and a cloth from the sink. She carried it out to her father and stood over him. The mud was all over him now. He looked like a swamp monster. It almost made her giggle.
But she was angry. She threw the water on him, then the cloth.
"Clean up the Hatter!" she shouted. "Clean him up at least."
He crawled and the cloth was left behind.
Anna turned her back and walked ahead. Her arms and legs felt stronger already. She looked ahead, then back.
"I'll find it!" she shouted at her Daddy. "Whatever you're looking for, whatever's so important you can't even talk to me, I'll find it first!"
She strode off in a huff, striding along the long thin line of the ocean ahead.
* * *
They didn't stop.
She walked for hours, still fuming inside. Her legs hurt and quivered at times, but she was too angry and stubborn to care. The sun rose, but was hard to see through the overcast clouds. It rained a little, and she rubbed the mud off herself as she walked. She barely noticed as she clumped through puddles and over roads, in and out of cool streams, through torn hedgerows and past the occasional house. She overtook bits of the flood, more like a stream now, sometimes kicking them in the shins as she passed.
She felt a little better. The cereal had filled her up with shooting stars, and it kept her shooting through lunch without being hungry again. Mostly she thought about her Daddy and how he was avoiding his responsibility. She took out his phone as she walked, trying to figure out who to call. He'd shown it to her before, letting her play some simple games before the hurt came down. He'd even promised she'd have her own phone in a year or two, and would be able to make calls or track the Hatter for herself.
After tinkering for a time, she made it ring. On the other end somebody spoke. In the middle of a field she shouted.
"Hello, my name is Anna! My Daddy's turned into a snail, and I want to see the police. Help."
Nobody spoke again, so she stopped. She sat down by a tree and made conversation with the flood of people as they went by.
"That's a lovely shade of mud on you," she told a big woman. "Wherever did you buy it?"
She threw mud-balls at trees. She tried piggybacking on a strange red-haired man who smelled of lavender. She kicked at the legs of people as they went by and tipped them over in the mud, splash.
"Should have looked where you were going," she said each time, "oops."
It was fun but not really, since they didn't even know it was a game.
She forged on ahead. In the early afternoon she crested a rise and looked out over an endless landscape of mud and grass and little green shoots. It went on and on. The stream of people wound ahead as far as she could see, like a snake in the dull gray daylight. Clouds brewed overhead like the hurt.
She sat down on a fence and kicked at a scrubby stand of tall grass, perhaps Tiger Lilies out of season, counting the people go by. There was something very wrong with them. They couldn't hear or speak. They just wanted to go in this one direction.
She started to cry again. It surprised her, because the anger had been so hot earlier on. But it was gone now and the tears took over. They filled her up like a waterfall and poured out so she could barely see.
Loneliness came where the anger had been. It was cold, and getting dark again already. She was alone and tired and she'd done such terrible things. She'd punched her own Daddy. She'd punched him and made him snuffle through the mud all day, when all he'd ever done before this was protect her.
It wasn't fair. If he was weak now, if he was broken, it was her job to protect him, just like he'd done for her before.
She started walking raggedly back the way she'd come. There were so many faces now, but none of them were her Daddy. She saw the woman she'd tripped up, and the man she'd kicked, and it made her feel worse. The mud was all down their fronts and on their faces.
Alice would have done none of it. She would have tried to help them.
Her head thumped and her tears became sobs. She passed by hundreds of people. Where was her father?
"Daddy?" she called.
When at last she found him, face down and snuffling through the mud, her crying redoubled. She'd done this to him. He truly looked like a snail, not the strong and smiling man she'd always known.
"I'm sorry, Daddy!" she said. She knelt and threw her arms around him, not caring that she got muddy again. She wiped the mud from his face, and it pulled slickly from his cheeks and neck, scraping the dead Hatter blood with it. Underneath it his skin looked gray and clean. She held his face as she struggled on by and kissed it.
"I'm sorry."
She wiped him down as best she could. She scraped the mud out of the sling and untied the orange jacket around his legs, then helped him up.
"I'll help you now," she said. "I promise, Daddy, I'll look after you."
He walked on. She climbed up into the cold and crusty sling and buried her face against his cold chest.
6. OCEAN
She napped for a time and dreamed of days before the coma, when her father and mother were together, and things were better.
She woke to dark. She wasn't hungry. Her father was walking down a hill road lit by silvery moonlight, surrounded by others. Anna stared out at them, spreading for miles ahead, rolling over the land like a vast cloud.
There had to be thousands; a number Anna had never really thought about before. Their eyes glowed and their skins shone, they breathed in raspy tandem, and in their slow movement there was a beauty she had never seen before, like a sky full of stars revolving.
"So many people," she breathed into her father's neck.
She climbed down and walked with them.
* * *
The next day she tethered her father carefully, as the ocean flowed past a giant shopping mall. She tied his legs first, dropping him on a grass verge of the huge parking lot, then let him crawl up to a stop sign where she tied his arms one at a time to the metal post. He strained but couldn't crawl any further.
She couldn't afford to let him get away from her anymore, as the phone battery had died some time in the night. She stroked his cold head.
"I'll be back soon."
The doors to the huge mall stood open, and she walked in. She'd been to places like this before, before the hurt, though those memories were very fuzzy. It was silent inside. In the entranceway bright flowers greeted her. She collected a cart and went shopping, with enough daylight pouring for her to navigate the aisles. Soon her cart was piled up with new clothes for both her and her father, a tough canvas backpack for him and a smaller one for her, bottles of banana milkshake and water, packs of cereal, red strings candy, potato chips, magazines, an actual child-sling, and a cap to keep off the sun.
She carried them out, then changed her and her father's muddy, bloody clothes in the sun while the ocean passed by. She tipped the contents of her filthy jeans pockets into one of the big backpack's inner compartments: her father's wallet, coins, keys and the little statuette of Alice. She filled the rest with the food and magazines then strapped it tightly to her Daddy's back, clicking lots of buckles and ties.
Into the smaller pack she put water, chips and the dead phone, then strapped it to her back.
"Houses for a couple of snails," she said.
He didn't laugh. He kept on struggling to escape. She fitted the new sling to his front then untied him.
He walked, and Anna walked with him, hand in hand.
* * *
That day they walked along a straight road through a deep green forest, and their numbers grew. People emerged from amongst the trees and pressed in closer at their sides.
Anna walked and daydreamed of their destination. It had to be something big and special. She chewed on candy red strings and sipped warm banana milkshake. She investigated the people nearby. Some of them had wallets so she could check their names. Her reading wasn't great, but picking out names was easy enough.
A tall guy walking at the same pace as her Daddy was Trevor. A short old Indian lady was Amandeep. Some of them had photos in their wallets too: of family, children stamped with the date of their graduation, prom pictures.
Anna put them back carefully. She watched the trees for some sign of the Cheshire Cat too, or even the Caterpillar, but they never came.
The Last Mayor Box Set 1 Page 25
