* * *
She walked harder now, because she had some purpose. It would be wonderful if she could catch Amo up on the road, so they could walk together, and when she talked to him he could actually talk back.
She made up cheerful hiking songs all day long. These had always been about Alice or Abramov Lincoln before, but now she followed Amo's style and told her own story; riding her Daddy and saying goodbye, fighting the chef and losing the puppies, helping the gray people find their way to the sea. The more she sang, especially the hard bits, the prouder she became of everything she'd done.
She ate red strings and drank bottled water and walked on, until one day in the middle of a sandy orange plain, she heard a sound coming up from behind.
It was a car. At least it was a kind of car, tall and white just like the ones Amo had stocked up in his comic. She laughed.
"Amo!" she shouted.
In the middle of the road she waved her arms. The tall car slowed down and stopped a little way away, then someone got out. It wasn't Amo or Lara, but it was still a person, and she was smiling.
Others followed and came over. They were saying things but Anna could hardly hear them, she was crying so hard. They came upon her like a storm, making her eyes so blurry she hardly saw the dark man from the comics, Amo's friend who had died, as he wheeled over toward her, smiling too, holding out his hands.
She threw herself at him. He was warm. His eyes didn't glow. For the first time in months one of the people she hugged hugged her back.
She couldn't speak. They surrounded her and her voice went away. Their bodies pressed in like the ocean, and they reached down to her and all of them were crying too, but it was hard to tell through her own tears.
"I'm Robert," the man in the wheelchair said. She sat in his lap and clung to his dark hand, nodding happily. He pointed to each of the others in turn: an old lady, two men, a woman. "That's Cynthia and Jake, and Julio and Masako. What's your name?"
She tried to say but her throat didn't work, so she rustled in her pack and pulled out the comic. She pointed to the pictures and her name scrawled above them, and Robert's eyes widened.
"So you're Anna? We saw your name up on the wall in Denver, with the Pac-Man. Did you really walk all this way?"
She nodded happily.
"That's amazing. It's over a hundred miles! Anna, you're so brave. Have you been out here all alone since it happened?"
She wanted to explain more but her throat still didn't work, so she just smiled and nodded.
"I think that's really amazing," Robert said again. "Well done." He even sounded like her Daddy. It made her cry more so she buried her face in his shoulder.
"I think this calls for a party," one of the men said.
Robert talked to her and patted her back while the others set to work unpacking things from the van; a long plastic table they assembled in bits, a black grill they snapped the legs onto and poured black rocks on, cans of hot dogs, beans, and buns in plastic packaging which they put on the table, then paper plates and plastic cutlery which Cynthia laid out in six places, with six white plastic chairs.
She winked. Anna blushed and looked away.
"Do you like hot dogs?" Robert asked. She nodded.
Some music started up. She didn't recognize it, but it was happy and fast and the first music she'd listened to in over a year. Robert was saying more things to her, but there was really too much going on to properly pay attention to him. One of the other men, the young one with feathery dark hair, was standing at the black grill with flames licking up, roasting sizzling hot dogs.
It was a party, and at that she finally remembered her manners.
She hopped up off Robert's lap and ran over to the table. From her pack she rustled out two Snickers bars, a handful of grimy red strings and two packs of trail mix nuts. She laid them out on a clean white plate.
"Is that what you've been eating?" the boy at the grill asked.
Anna nodded.
"Then thank you for sharing it," he said. His smile was lovely. It brought her voice right back, slotting neatly into position.
"I'm Anna," she said.
His brow wrinkled in surprise. He looked at Robert then back to her. "Nice to meet you, Anna. I'm Jake."
She held out her hand. His brow wrinkled deeper, then he smiled and shook it.
"Where have you come from, Jake?"
He laughed. "I'm from Chicago, Anna. Cerulean picked me up on the cairn-trail in Iowa. I'm the most recent addition, I guess apart from you."
She nodded curtly. That's the kind of thing Alice would do, even if she didn't understand what somebody had just said. She had asked, so it was correct to listen and nod.
The others were gathering around now. Jake licked his lips. "What about you, where have you come from?"
She thought about that for a minute. "I don't know. A city, but I don't know the name. I walked to the ocean with my Daddy for lots of weeks, then I walked back here. I saw Amo's comic in the city with the smiley cake-face. Denver, Robert said? Then I came this way. I want to find him. Amo, I mean."
Jake's jaw dropped. "You walked here from the ocean?"
She nodded. The others were all there and looking wrinkly and surprised too. It was like being back with the ocean. She hoped she hadn't broken these people. At least none of their eyes were glowing yet.
Robert wheeled up beside her. "You say you walked with your Daddy, Anna? Where is he now?"
"He walked into the ocean," she said. "He wasn't like you and me. His eyes were white and his skin was gray."
"Another damn zombie," somebody muttered.
"And you walked with him all the way to the ocean?" Robert asked.
"Uh-uh, he carried me most of the way. I made a sling."
Feathery-haired Jake laughed, then stopped himself. Anna frowned at him and he muttered, "Sorry."
"Can I ask, Anna, what happened to your father at the ocean?" Robert went on. "Why isn't he with you now?"
Anna looked at him. It was nice he sat in a chair all the time, so she didn't have to crane her neck up. "He walked into the ocean. Him and all the gray people. That's where they go." She looked around their empty faces. "Don't you know that?"
Jake laughed again, then covered his mouth. "Really sorry," he said, muffling the sound.
Anna looked up at him exasperated. Was he that broken?
"We didn't know about that, no," Robert said, pulling her attention back, "but thank you for telling us. I'm sorry about your father."
Anna shrugged. He was still out there somewhere. There was nothing to be sorry for. "It's all right. It's what he wanted."
A silence fell.
"You're burning those hot dogs," she said to Jake. She had to point to get him to understand. He'd not been attending to them very well for minutes. "Those ones, yes."
He turned them over.
"And you walked here from the ocean." Robert pointed off to the side of the road. "The Pacific Ocean, that way?"
"Yes. It took lots of weeks." She pointed off to the side and a little up, correcting him. "That way and that way a bit."
He amended his angle. "That's over a thousand miles, Anna. It'll take us days in the van. You walked the whole way alone?"
Anna shrugged. "I went back and forth a few times with different groups of people, so I'm not sure if I was alone for all of it, but mostly yes."
She eyed Jake as she finished, daring him to laugh again. He didn't. Cynthia the old lady gave a whistle between her teeth and said something Anna couldn't decipher. Her accent was strong.
"Can I ask a question now?" Anna asked.
"Of course, go ahead."
"Where are Amo and Lara? I'm looking for them."
Robert nodded. "That is the question, I agree. We think they're both up ahead, headed for Los Angeles. They may already be there, they may be together. You might have passed them by while you were walking."
She thought about that. "Why are they going that way? Are they follow
ing the ocean?"
"No," Robert said, and smiled. "They're going to watch a movie."
Anna frowned. She'd seen lots of movies before the coma, and while many were fun, she couldn't imagine any were worth crossing a whole country for. "That's silly."
He laughed. "Yes, I suppose it is. Now, let's get hot dogs and settle in."
They got hot dogs, Robert helped her do hers with ketchup, then they sat around in a circle of colorful folding chairs on the orange dust by the road. Anna had a chair to herself, sitting between Robert and Jake. She kept an eye on him for smirking. Across from her sat Cynthia, Julio and Masako.
The hot dog was fantastic. She hadn't even been very hungry, but the taste was amazing and she gulped it down. It wasn't sweet but the way it popped in her mouth, and the rich juices lapped over her tongue and soaked into the bread, was like heaven.
"… and all the puppies died," she finished, telling them the story of the chef and the waitress. She was quite the expert now, after sharing it so many times with the ocean. "The rest after that was just walking."
The old lady clicked her mouth and said something like, "Child's gotta figure (mumble mumble) super (mumble)."
Anna smiled politely. Cynthia's accent was just impossible.
"How about you, Robert?" she asked. "How did you get here?"
"There's a lot of twists in that tale," he said. He put his hot dog down. "I had a close pass with Amo, actually, but we didn't really meet. After that I went up and down the East Coast for months, looking for people. In the end, it was back in New York at Amo's first cairn where I met Masako."
"He was my knight in shining armor," Masako said. Her accent was a little strange too, but better than Cynthia's. Her face looked different, not in a bad way, but a different kind of color to the white of Alice and black of her Daddy.
Robert smiled. "You were mine, more like it. I couldn't even go up and down the stairs into the Empire State without your help."
"They really should install ramps," Jake said. "I'll have a word with the mayor."
The others laughed. Anna didn't get the joke.
"After that we took an RV and set out on Amo's trail, just like you. We had the van so it didn't take us too long. That was about two weeks ago. We met Cynthia hunting a fox in Pennsylvania, Julio just south of Cleveland, then Jake at the big cairn in Iowa."
"So you all just met?" Anna asked.
"We did," said Jake, "but we're good friends now, like the last people alive should be."
Cynthia shushed him.
"What are you all going to do when you reach the ocean?"
"Eat popcorn," Jake said. "Watch movies. Restart civilization."
Anna nodded. They all had their own plans.
She took another bite of her hot dog. They went on talking but it wasn't all that interesting now. Talking people were definitely better than the non-talking people she'd gotten used to, but they weren't so different really. The hot dogs were good and it was nice to share stories, but red strings were good too, and she had always shared stories with the gray people by just making up their parts of the conversation.
None of them filled the hole she still felt inside. They didn't know anything about where her Daddy was, or why he had left her. She put her hand in her dress pocket and touched her Daddy's cold phone.
That was what she wanted. More than anything in the world, she wanted her Daddy back, and being with these people now just made her realize it more. It felt wrong to eat the hot dog and not share it with him, to tell her story and not have him here to hear it, to sit and talk and know he was so far away, walking in the cold water, going to his impossible battle with the Jabberwock all alone.
Quietly she began to cry.
12. APP
She woke in the RV, lying on a sofa at the back with a thin blanket over her, sometime in the afternoon. She didn't remember going to sleep. The seat rumbled gently underneath her. Through the front windshield she saw the bright sun and the black road and the orange sand, rolling by.
Always she was traveling by the sun. She went toward it or away from it.
She sat up. Her belly felt too full of hot dogs.
The RV was a simple open can lined with hutch-alcove things in which beds lay. Cynthia was asleep in one, the quiet man Julio in another. Up ahead Jake was doing something with needles and yarn at a little table, and beyond that she could see the shoulders of Robert in the driver's seat, with Masako beside him.
They were holding hands. Through the glass ahead of them lay the road and the desert.
Anna shuffled onto her knees and turned to look out of the back window. The road fell away so quickly. There were a few gray people out there and they whizzed right past.
"It's a lot faster than walking, hey?"
It was Jake, sitting at the table by the back sofa. She turned and regarded him seriously. Probably he was about eighteen, she thought. He was definitely younger than the others.
"Why were you laughing at me before?" she asked.
"I didn't-" he said, looking puzzled, then stopped. "Right yeah, I'm sorry. It's just, you're a little girl. But you talk like you're grown up."
"And that was funny?"
He shrugged. "I suppose so. I didn't mean anything by it. You're not upset about that, are you?"
"No."
She looked ahead to the windshield, to the flat orange horizon. "When will we see Amo and Lara?"
"Real soon, I think. Cerulean, that's Robert, sorry, I read the comic too and I can't get his nickname out of my head, he thinks we'll be there this time tomorrow. Not much of a nickname when it takes longer to say than his real name, is it? Anyway, he wants to drive through the night."
Anna disregarded much of this. "What time is it now?"
Jake pulled a phone out of his pocket and it blinked to life. "Three thirty. Are you in a rush?"
"Yes."
"Can I ask why?"
"Yes. I don't know. I don't like sitting still."
He smiled widely. His feathery black hair made him look a little like a crow. "I suppose for someone who's been walking for basically three months, this is a lot of sitting."
She shrugged.
"Do you want to play a game?" he asked. "We have lots on board. Amo stocked them for us."
"No. Thank you." An idea came to her. "But could you…" she trailed off, looking for her backpack. Panic cut in. Her Daddy's phone was in it. "Where's my pack?"
"It's OK, it's right here." He leaned back on the chair and slid it out of a storage hutch. "Everything in its right place." He held it out.
She took it and dug around inside, coming up with her copy of Alice through the Looking Glass. "Can you read this to me?"
He made his surprised face again. "Well, I, sure."
"I can't read," she said, by way of explanation. "I just look at the pictures. I want to be able to read it, someday. Maybe you could teach me? It means a lot to me."
"Sure." He took the book. "I'd be happy to. Now, where shall I start?"
She laid her head back down on the rumbling leather seat. "Anywhere. I know it all anyway."
* * *
They rode.
It was very different from riding in her Daddy's sling. The people were there, and they talked, and a few times they ate something together, but they were always distant. Even Robert.
Listening to Jake read Alice helped. It was like listening to old things after the coma, and keeping off the hurt, though this hurt was very different. It was all inside. Plus it seemed the stories might hold some secrets left behind by her father.
Jake laughed a lot when he read, which was OK too. The stories were supposed to be fun, and his laugh sounded nice now.
On the RV they also had a lot of cables to connect phones, and with Jake's help she plugged her father's in. It charged up and she spent a long time looking at it, flicking through the screens. There was the phone screen, and the photos she could hardly look at without crying, and some games, and another app that her fathe
r had showed her, with a picture of a dog's face.
She clicked it, and up came a screen of gray fuzz. There was a blue arrow in the middle, and a flashing yellow dot in the corner. She tapped the gray, then the dots, but nothing did anything. She was about to click out of the app, when the arrow shifted.
That was odd. She peered at it, and tapped some more, but nothing changed. Again she was about to click out, but now the yellow dot shifted. It was a tiny shift, but it definitely moved, then the arrow turned again.
She watched the screen for a long time after that. Was this some kind of clue? It wasn't until some time in the middle of the night that she realized the arrow was turning to match the turns the RV was making.
The road swerved to the left, and the arrow turned to the left. The RV went right and the arrow turned right. Then the yellow dot shifted a tiny bit. It was very mysterious. She thought about asking Jake, but it seemed like her mystery, her secret, so she huddled up in a corner of the back sofa and held the screen close.
Some time late in the night, with the van parked and everyone asleep in their booths, she woke and overheard Robert and Julio talking outside.
She climbed up the backseat and peered through the side glass. They were standing outside on the dark road, lit by starlight.
"We could find out where she's from," Julio said. His voice was easy to recognize though he didn't speak much. "It'll only take a minute. There must be addresses in there. Even the dial codes would tell us the area."
"Why do we need to know where she's from?" Robert answered. "She needs to learn to trust us, Julio, and that won't happen if you take her phone."
"Don't we need to trust her? Her stories about walking across the country can't be true. She's lying, and she could be leading us into a trap."
"She's five years old," said Robert. "Don't take her phone off her, OK? Just leave her be."
She held the phone more tightly, now. She brought up the gray screen and watched the yellow dot blinking softly, like a pulse, so far away.
13. LINT & COBBLES
They came into Las Vegas in the early morning. The name meant nothing to Anna but the others were all excited. They had the windows open and laughed and joked loudly. Robert brought her up to the front to see, and they played the game of looking out for Amo's next cairn.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 29
