22. IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
The others slept and steadily their bodies turned to stone. He felt them stiffen and sharpen, lodging him ever more firmly into place. In time the enemy in his middle stopped biting and slept too, wrapped in the embrace of his flesh. The cold grew so faint he could barely feel it, dying day by day just like them all. But there was too much heat inside him still for him to die.
Instead he dreamed of his daughter and his wife, both so long lost. He dreamed and in the world outside days and weeks went by. The tug to sleep forever pulled at him but he resisted, for reasons that his long slow thoughts hurt too much to draw out.
He walked with his wife along a warm beach and they kissed by moonlight. They carried their new baby girl home for the first time. She played with dolls and asked for pointy blue hair. She crawled like a bee along the parched grass in the park, sampling the flowers and buzzing contentedly. She sat warm and heavy in his lap as he read her bedtime stories, and when she slept the cuddling hot weight of her filled him with joy.
Then the coma came. It blanched her and made her eyes strange, made her walk and murmur and hurt herself in her sleep until they pinned her down. He thought he and his wife were enduring it together, but soon it became clear he was the only one enduring.
"I can't do this," she told him one night, after a fight and tears that had become their standard pattern. "I can't live like this."
"We have to," was all he could say, "we have no choice."
She gripped her knees and rocked. The next day she left and he never saw her again.
After that the memories grew simpler and more intense, bounded within the walls of a single room but spiked by every painful push toward creativity and freedom. His adventures with Anna illuminated his life, with her every effort inspiring him. She was stronger than anyone he knew, and he rose to the challenge by staying strong for her. When he missed his wife he just looked down at her sleeping face and saw the reason why he kept on living.
He roused from this long, slow dream to feel the cold rising again. The mound was solid around him; the warmth of every one of his brothers and sisters was long gone, leaving only him.
And the cold was rising, along with the warmth. There came a crashing and crunching beneath him, something terribly urgent nagged in the hollows of his mind, then his enemy moved and broke free.
It tore out of the embrace of his fellows, pulling him out with it. It plucked him away like a rag and threw him to the floor. Lying one a bed of stone bodies, he saw the source of the warmth clearly, standing at the edge of the mound with the blue sky beyond her. It was a girl and he saw only her back, with her head framed with wild frizzy hair, but pride still washed through him. She was so courageous and beautiful, grown into a woman. She'd come so far to see him, and this was what she would find.
His Anna.
The cold swelled out to meet her, as it had taken thousands before her, turning them all to its cause. She turned and the fear in her eyes made him sick. His head slumped on the uneven floor as she started toward them.
Too weak. His arms were broken and his feet were gone, so all he could do was shuffle. He pushed his cold thighs to drive him on, pressing against the red enemy's left foot. He could feel Anna's fragile warmth as she drew closer, walking herself into the enemy's grasp, pressing her face to its mouth. It would take her and remake her, changing everything about her that was beautiful into a killer like it.
He reared up on his stumps and bit into the sinew at the back of the enemy's knee. It was far too tough to bite through but the enemy felt it.
It grunted and looked down, breaking the cold. In a second it sank its bladed left hand into his back, slipping smoothly through his thin chest and pinning him to the ground. His vision blurred, but he could just make out that Anna was running.
Good girl.
The enemy whipped its left hand forward, scooping him and flinging him violently down the corridor, bouncing and tearing off the sharp walls. His feeble bones broke, his skin tore then his ragged body hit Anna as she leapt out of the mound, knocking her head over heels. He came to rest on his back looking up at the blue sky. That was all. His spine was severed and he wasn't long for the world.
His head sagged and there beside him lay his beautiful Anna, all grown up. Her eyes were closed and already the cold was rising up. It couldn't be for nothing, but there was nothing now he could do.
Birdmen and birdwomen flew through the rainbow sky. Her father was sitting beside her reading stories in his cozy brown voice; always there, always and forever.
"Still she haunts me, phantomwise," he read, "Alice moving under skies never seen by waking eyes. Children yet the tale to hear, eager eye and willing ear, lovingly shall nestle near.
"In a Wonderland they lie, dreaming as the days go by, dreaming as the summers die: ever drifting down the stream- lingering in the golden gleam- life, what is it but a dream?"
It was lovely.
"Daddy," she whispered, tucked deeply within the covers. "It's beautiful. Read it again."
"Not now honey. Now it's time to wake up, there's painting to do and the Hatter's waiting."
"I'm so sleepy," she said. "Can't you see I'm like a little kitten, like Dinah, and what kitties really need is to purr and sleep and dream."
"Honey," her father said, "look at me."
She opened her eyes. Her father lay before her, but he wasn't the handsome and scraggly-faced man he'd once been, but a withered gray peanut with fading white eyes lying on orange dust.
"You look so different, Daddy," she whispered.
His lips moved wordlessly.
"Hold me," she said, "please, I want you back. I wish you'd never gone."
His body twitched. Numbly she looked down and saw his legs were gone at the knees. His arms were twisted with broken bones. His stomach had been cut open and lay hollow.
Tears welled in her eyes. "What have they done to you, Daddy?"
The white in his eyes faltered. He was crying too.
"Daddy, please."
She closed her eyes and he was there again, leaning over her in her bed. He was always there and would always keep her safe.
"You have to wake up now honey," he said. "I can't do this for you, Anna. Wake up!"
Her eyes opened and she remembered. The cold was already creeping near. She looked over the body of her father to the mound, where the scratching sound of the red giant lurching itself near was growing louder. Every second it came closer and the cold grew harder, binding around her thoughts like the hurt.
Impossible things would protect her. She drew them about her thoughts like a wall, envisaging birdmen and women flapping back the cold with their bright wings, caterpillar people smoking out warmth like a foggy moat, dog-people and cat-people and the Hatter and all the little puppies rising up and building themselves into a barrier to keep her safe.
It was enough, just enough, and she bolted upright. Her body moved stiffly but it moved, and she cast about amongst the pile of stuff unloaded from the RV, coming up with an assault rifle. She clicked the safety, bolted a round into the chamber, and turned on the gray mound.
It was at the entrance now, its eyes burning red and its mouth gaping blackly. The cold stole at her legs and held her tight, becalmed her thoughts and almost stopped her flat, but she'd spent her childhood fighting against the hurt and she wouldn't give in now, not with her father right there and watching.
"Eat this," she whispered, and pulled the trigger.
Bullets raked across the mound with a deafening clatter. The recoil kicked in her shoulder and roused her. A single impact splashed off the red giant's face and punched it back.
The cold faded and she advanced, firing all the while.
Rat at at at
said the rifle. She strode over the limp body of her father, driving a hail of bullets into the giant's face and torso as it backed away. They ricocheted with bright sparks off the wide tunnel walls, crunching stony limbs and fogging the tunnel wi
th body-powder.
Rat at at at Rat at at at
Rat at at at
The rifle clicked on empty and Anna blinked, coming back to herself. Sweat poured down her face and mingled with tears. It was still inside and shifting, the cold was reaching out once more, and she understood.
Bullets and bombs wouldn't kill it. Nothing she could do would kill it, because if there had been some other way then the apocalypse need never have happened. The zombie ocean was the world's antidote to this most terrible threat, and all she could do now was follow their lead.
The correct response leaped up and she embraced it. The rocket launcher lay there and she swept it up. On her shoulder it felt solid and right, primed like a vorpal sword.
"This is for my father," she said, and pulled the trigger.
The rocket shot out on a string of smoke, hit the tunnel a few feet deep of the entrance, and erupted in flame. Bodies fragmented and powder shot out and the whole mound lifted for a second.
Then fell. The crunch was almighty. Dust huffed out from all sides like a gasp as thousands of stone bodies settled to a new balance. The cold sank away, fading as the red giant within was once again buried alive.
The launcher sagged to the dust and Anna dropped to her knees by her father's side. The light was nearly gone from his shriveled eyes.
"Daddy," she whispered. She took his slack hand as he'd once held hers, holding tight while the light in his eyes flickered and died.
23. CAIRNS
Her father was lighter than the others.
She considered the possible explanations for why, as she climbed up the newly settled mound with his stiff corpse tied across her back, but she only considered them gently. To question them too deeply now seemed inappropriate. To ignore them altogether seemed less than he deserved.
"You never turned to stone, did you," she said to him as she climbed. "You waited and used yourself up like a battery. The others became stone a lot earlier; they leveraged what charge they had for weight and containment. You knew I was coming, so you waited. Is that about right?"
Strapping him to her back had not been hard. Now she wore him like a backpack. It probably looked obscene, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like a return to the days when he wore her around his neck like a baby, carrying her everywhere he went whether she was awake or asleep. It felt right.
She climbed.
The bodies under her hands and feet had set firmly against each other again. They made for strange hiking material. Still she could feel the whispers of the red creature's chill reaching up through the rocky pile, like anemone feelers tickling at the air, but not strong enough to compel her. Bullets, a rocket-launcher and a thousand tons of stone bodies on the head would do it.
The rest she would think about later.
Their hands and feet helped her up. She fancied Alice climbing a pyramid of bodies, and the odd things she might comment upon.
"Well excuse me, sir, but you must know that your little toe is wedged in that other man's nose, now how can that be comfortable? Do you not feel the tiniest bit of shame for the shabby way you're treating him? If only you might unplug it and then both the poor chap would breathe easier and you too would regain freedom of the foot, don't you agree?"
She snorted. Alice again.
She'd thought about burying him; digging a deep hole in the dirt and setting up a grave, but it didn't seem fitting. Cremation was possible, since he wasn't stone like the others. She even scanned the horizon for trees to provide firewood, so she could tip his ashes into a can and carry him around forever, but he'd had long enough travels already. It was time for him to rest.
She reached the top, held to a slippery bald head by the ears, and slid her father carefully round from her back. His broken arms flopped creakily, and he slumped quite comfortably in a slight depression by the apex.
Anna smiled. So this was his island, and he the giant sat atop it. All these bodies were his throne. It was all right.
Beyond that, it was too much to really process that her father had just died. It was too big, after believing he'd been dead and gone for so long. This was his broken, battered body. This had held her when she went to sleep, had carried her across the world, and come all this way only to die for her again.
She leaned away. When she took her hands off him, they shook. She thought about the last time she'd touched him, back when she was a little girl in the water, clinging desperately to his head as he strode away down the continental shelf.
This was really it. She didn't know what to say. She leaned in and kissed his gray forehead. It made her cry.
"Bye bye, Daddy," she said.
From her pocket she pulled the little Alice figure, made by her over ten years ago and given then as a gift. It had been in his backpack throughout, largely undamaged though a little faded by months in the water. She kissed it too then rested it in the crook of his arm.
A giant and his daughter.
She sat on the RV roof in the pale midday sunlight, looking at her father's backpack. The items from inside lay spread out in a neat row like soldiers on parade: his wallet, their house keys, a blue crayon with its paper casing stripped away, assorted coins, a dark lump of something in faded plastic packaging that had to be red strings, the book of Alice in Wonderland with the cover washed away though the words inside remained, a piece of red rock from a canyon they'd walked up that she thought had been a fossil, a bottle of water with the seal unbroken, and a dry seed-case from a walnut tree.
She touched each item solemnly with her fingertip, as if anointing them. Memories of them drifted up: picking these up from the nightstand in her home, collecting these along the way. She laid her father's phone alongside them, completing the set.
She'd arrived and fought a Jabberwock. Now this was her treasure. She activated the phone's Hatter app and it flashed with the blue and the yellow dots almost atop each other.
"Good doggy," she said.
The sun was sinking already and it was getting cold. High on the Mongolian steppes it was always cold without the sun. She studied her body, counting the blisters and bruises her body mining and battles had raised up. Her arms were spattered with them, probably from tumbling or from bits of shrapnel blown out by the explosion. There was a huge purple oval on her hip and another on her shoulder. Her neck hurt and so did all her muscles, particularly her shoulders.
The row of items waited for her.
She picked up the wallet and opened it. Her hands trembled as she picked through the cards inside. The top bits of them were faded to white where they'd been exposed to water, but the hidden lower halves were as bright as the day they were printed: a bank card, a credit card, a travel card, and finally a driving license.
It had a picture of her father. It wasn't his peanut face or the face from her memories or dreams, but the actual man. He wore a half-smile revealing white teeth. He still had his scraggly beard but his hair was longer than she remembered. His eyes were brown and warm.
This was her father in his prime. She checked the card's date of issue; it had to be at least a year before she was born. Her vision grew fuzzy and she imagined her father sitting in the photo booth and thinking of the future that lay ahead. Her mother was probably there too, waiting outside the photo booth ready to laugh with him at how the picture turned out. A young couple, young and in love, before Anna had even been conceived.
She wiped her eyes and read her father's name for the first time. She'd never known what it was. She sounded it out to herself quietly; it seemed to fit. It was a good name, a strong name. Their address was printed there too, in a city she bore no memories of.
She made a cairn as the sun went down. It was simple and unmarked, not for anyone but her. She laid the backpack and its items on the sand before the mound, then piled rocks atop them, like a doll's house version of the zombie cairn. She didn't paint the pile or leave any other sign she'd been there.
Afterward she slept, and for the first time since she was a littl
e girl there was no tug of guilt pulling at her thoughts as she slipped away, nothing at all. She was free.
Dawn came bright and cold with a biting wind whipping off the desert. Anna unfurled her world map like a spinnaker sail in the refuge of the RV, set a button down on her spot in Mongolia, and surveyed the whole.
Thousands of miles to the east, back across an ocean and round the other side of the world, lay Los Angeles. Thousands of miles to the west it was much the same.
She'd come here to die. Now that didn't seem so important. She wanted to see Amo again. She wanted to hold Cerulean's hand. She wanted to see Ravi.
The RV needed only a little fresh oil and some tuning to its brakes. Not one wheel had blown out yet, and she had the gear to manage when it did. She had more than enough fuel to get to the next major city.
She laughed. She'd never researched any of this, but that was what made it fun.
"I'm going through the looking glass," she said into the hissing satellite phone, atop the RV. The wind snapped at her clothes and hair so loud she could barely hear herself. If they were answering she'd never hear it. "The long way round, leaving cairns all the way. Tell Cerulean I miss him, Amo. I even miss you. Tell Ravi I miss him as well. I'm coming home, and I'm bringing the world with me."
The road had no name that she could see, but the sand lying in shallow drifts over the surface was no worse than before. The GPS unit blinked happily on the dashboard, directing her toward Paris, France.
She peeled out.
It took four weeks, driving nine-hour days and stopping in major cities to drop cairns. She was out of Mongolia on the Murun-Bulgan highway and into Russia as summer came to its end. On the M52 she bore north and west, up through the wooded fir valleys of Biysk and past blocky communist-era statues and French-colonial municipal buildings. There were tatty old lemon-yellow Ladas everywhere, long coffin-like cars alongside great gray heaps of the dead.
Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost Page 22
