She wags the scoop at me. I love how befuddled she's become. "Park this. Right here."
She hands me the scoop and I take it, while she heads off for the stairs. I listen as she ascends behind the blackboard wall, and faintly hear her shuffling them along politely upstairs while I stand at the quiet, warm bar. The milk frother hisses slightly, and I turn the handle to silence it. The fridge hums. Her papers are spread out along the back worktop; final timetables and logistics for the harvest and the move to come, scattered with fragrant crumbs of roasted coffee. I leaf through, savoring the sensation of raspy paper against my fingers. Here I am, and I feel every little sound and taste every little smell as if it's heightened, as if it's for the last time.
Shortly the knitters come down, hustled past with a grin and a few waves.
"Great-looking cardigan," I say to Keeshom, our tall young trainee doctor, as he goes by. He's been working on it for a month; he says it helps with the manual dexterity. All but one sleeve is finished, and the pattern's only out of sync in a few places. He grins shyly, throws a, "Thank you," over his shoulder then ducks out. The doorbell rings into silence.
Then there's Lara, standing in the doorway to the function room stairs. She's let her tumble of tightly curled black and brown hair down, which she knows makes me crazy. She cocks her hip slightly and licks her lower lip.
"Twenty-seven minutes," she says breathily, "until Floyd will get pissed and turf the kids out onto the street."
I laugh. It's like a dream now, after so long apart. I can almost not believe it's happening, but it is. "We'll only need twenty-six," I say, and close in on her.
We kiss and fumble steamily up the stairs.
1. OCEAN
Lara woke in the night with the faint trails of the same dream tugging at her memory. Just like always there was a great white eye blinking in the sky above, and fire in the streets of LA below, and just like always the details were already fading into the shadows.
Her heart raced and a chill line of sweat dried down her back.
She shuddered and snuggled closer to Amo, trying to put the dream aside. Memories of their vigorous twenty-seven minutes in the coffee shop came back and warmed her. That was a good thing, something to hold onto tightly. They hadn't done anything like that for a long time; a welcome change after a long, hard year of recovery for them both.
She ran a hand idly through his dark, feathery hair, releasing the faintest clinging scent of wood smoke. He'd been out earlier that day burning his files from Maine in a brazier on the back balcony. So much had changed since then.
"There's no point carrying them with me," he'd said, when she came over to stand beside him in the pre-dawn light. "Extra weight."
Lara had surveyed the fifteen large crates packed with personnel folders spread around the brazier. They could easily have made space for them in one of the moving trailers, but she was glad he hadn't tried. He'd been obsessed with these people for long enough.
"It's all up here though, isn't it?" she'd asked, pointing at his head. She hadn't meant to be cruel with that, had meant to meet him halfway, appreciative he was finally moving on, but the edge came through all the same.
He'd smiled his trademark, sad smile. "I know you don't like it, honey."
She'd sighed, beaten again by her own impatience. "You're right, I don't, but I know what it means to you. You don't have to burn them."
His smile became more genuine. "Yes, I do." He put his arm round her and kissed her forehead, then they stood there for a little while, looking out to sea, until Talia came stumbling out bleary-eyed in her PJs and asked, looking at the brazier.
"Are we having a BBQ? For breakfast?"
"Sure, honey," Amo had said. "Go get some eggs."
Talia rolled sleepily back into the kitchen and went rustling in the fridge.
"There's no eggs in there," Lara had said.
"I know." Amo gave a half-smile and kissed her again.
Now Lara shifted comfortably against him in bed, looking at the silvery outline of his face. The details were lost in shadow, but she knew them all. Him she would keep, but everything else, this room, this apartment, this life, it was a lot to leave behind, both good and bad. She'd been processing it for months, ever since Amo had suggested the move after Anna came back from the Willamette Valley, telling tall tales about everything Witzgenstein had achieved. The notion had breathed a new surge of life into him, a second wind after the promise of Lucas, and she'd welcomed it, but only now was it starting to feel real.
A second shudder snuck up over her, and she shifted as an extra detail from the dream resurged, like a body rising up from the depths. It was the view of Los Angeles from a plane, flying high above with Anna, while far below the city was burning.
"What happened here?" she asked in the dream, turning to Anna at the plane's controls, but it wasn't Anna anymore; instead it was Cerulean. He looked well, with his broad hands comfortable on the control wheel and yoke, younger than she remembered, though his expression was serious and concerned.
"They're coming, Lara," he'd replied. "I need you to be strong."
The image faded away, and lying in the warm bed with Amo by her side, Lara faced the same question that always came after one of these dreams. What did it mean? After the apocalypse everyone had had dreams, and many of them had meant something. Amo had seen the zombies hungering for human affection long before the apocalypse hit, and immortalized it in his art. Anna had seen the demon in her dreams, coming as the Jabberwock from Alice in Wonderland, before any one of them even knew the demons existed. Cerulean had seen his long, endless dive, the final one that finished off the demon inside him. There were dozens of other stories from throughout the community.
But not Lara. She'd never had vivid dreams like that, not until her own coma. Then there was rarely a night that went by that they didn't come.
She rolled over to look at the glowing red digits of the side table clock.
2:11
Ugh. She'd only gone to bed a few hours ago, and she was getting up again soon. There was a lot to do tomorrow, with the final harvest in Chino Hills State Park to begin. So much could go wrong, but still the blend of images kept coming back to her.
She contemplated waking Amo; perhaps they could run another twenty-seven minute workout, but she held back. They hadn't made love like that since before Maine and she didn't want to jinx it. Slowly he was becoming her Amo again, and though he was sometimes joking again, even sometimes showing his old charm and confidence, it had been a long hard road that wasn't yet done.
She kicked her feet out of the covers with a shush and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Come on," she whispered, but it wasn't any good. Now the dream was taking hold, and just like always there was no way to not think about the demon snatching her in Pittsburgh. She'd tried many strategies to stave the memories off, night after night when these panic attacks descended, anything to distract herself from walking down these same well-trodden mental paths, but few of them really worked. Singing songs in her head just postponed them. Reading a book saw her attention constantly slipping away so the story and the memories got confused. Taking walks outside just spread the contamination further afield, so the next time she was out walking by the sea she'd think of that moment over a year back, when the demon's hand had closed around her and…
She got to her feet and clenched her fists. Come on.
She looked back at Amo, preferring to think about him. She couldn't control these fits, couldn't stop them just like you couldn't stop a migraine, but she had learned to channel them into shallower waters. Thinking about Amo was one such path.
For months after Maine he'd been almost impossible to talk to, and at every step that had made her own recovery harder. They'd grown distant, while he plunged himself into memorializing the MARS3000 victims, dwelling on the smallest details of their lives, while in turn she'd let herself be consumed by the needs of her children on top of essential Council business, all to keep
the dreams at bay.
They'd started in her coma and continued in the months that followed, sometimes even haunting her when she was awake. There was the fire and the white eye, Cerulean in the plane, the sensation of being crushed, and perhaps strangest of all there was the vivid memory of her bedside, with people sitting nearby while she'd laid unconscious, holding her hand.
In some ways it was the most disturbing image of them all, though the panic it brought was more manageable. How could she even have memories of it, when she'd been in a coma? It made her feel like her own mind was unreliable, filled with spotty recollections that couldn't be real memories.
She'd talked to Macy about it, before she left for Europe with Anna, but Macy wasn't even a doctor and far from a psychologist, so she'd started her own research. In silent bookstores and libraries around LA she read the pop psychology of Lars Mecklarin and those like him, before moving down into deeper, more scientific works on the mind. Yet even the best experts doing the deepest science didn't know for sure what happened in a coma or its aftermath.
It was severe brain damage, that's what it came down to. Some people were conscious throughout but unable to respond, while for others it was like they'd just closed their eyes one year and opened them ten years later. The one thing in common was that their brains were forever altered, and in some cases their personality was radically altered too.
She began to pace softly over the carpeted floor while Amo breathed on unaware, as details from the dreams kept rising. Her brain seemed to think it was important for her to keep seeing these distressing images, like there was vital information in them she was supposed to learn, but never quite could. What was the benefit of seeing the white eye and New LA burning? What was the value in seeing Amo sitting by her comatose side, trying to hide his tears?
She hated those fuzzy half-memories of Amo most; they felt so hollow and hopeless. Every time she chose this path through the panic it hurt, but still it was preferable to the others, where she lived again through the demon's terrifying grip round her chest, pouring visions of burning LA into her mind.
The room began to feel confining and she sped her pacing. Perhaps a walk would be the only way now. It didn't matter if the dreams glommed on to the ocean or the beachside or the railings, because she was leaving soon and would never have to come back to this place again.
She looked at Amo, then hustled to the desk and scrawled a quick note.
Couldn't sleep, gone for a walk down Venice Beach.
She set it on the pillow by his side, stroked his hair half hoping he would wake up, then left the room behind. On the way out she looked in on the kids' room, where their silent, small figures lay peacefully in bed. Talia might remember some of this place in the years to come, she thought, but for Vie at five years old, it would all be lost. His life lay entirely ahead of him.
Was that happy or sad? A little of both. Lara blew them each a kiss then closed the door so it rested slightly ajar, with a sliver of orange light from the nightlight in the hall spilling through.
Outside the apartment building the air was warm and still, and a sky heavy with black clouds left Santa Monica Boulevard largely in darkness. For a time she stood there on the cracked sidewalk, beside an old yellow fire pump and three racks of newspaper-vending boxes, letting her eyes adjust and breathing in the scents of salt, summer dust and cooling asphalt.
The waves down on Venice Beach lapped forward and backward like the steady tick of a metronome. She could just pick out the sparkle of foam on breakers, dashing through stray beams of light as the moon peeked out through crevices in the clouds. This was good, and peaceful, and though they'd outgrown it, she would miss this place. In the buildings to either side were their people, survivors all, gathered through twelve years of hard work, tucked up now safely in their beds and surely asleep at this time.
That meant something. She chuckled, thinking of how Ravi and Anna had acted in the week before they flew off together to rejoin Lucas and Feargal in Europe. Their late night carousing and occasional drag-race down the front promenade in noisy, spluttering sports cars had woken her angry and cursing several times, but now with them gone New LA seemed almost too silent. Nobody was out drinking, dancing, baying at the moon, as they once would have, twelve years ago. Now it was a quiet, nurturing place fit for the very young and the middle-aged, with nothing much in between.
She smiled sadly and strode out onto the dark road. Anna had called them earlier on the satellite phone, with a report on progress at bunker 5 in Istanbul. It all seemed to be going well, though there had been some delays. There was no hard schedule now though, with the demons gone and the bunkers pacified.
The world was safe.
She reached the edge of the beach and stepped down onto the soft sand, still warm through her thin plastic sandals. To the left lay a bench with the wood rotten through, now just another lump in the shadow. Amo had been talking about fixing it up with a few fresh two by fours for years, but now it was plain that was never going to happen.
The bench would rot to nothing. The metal frame would corrode. The salt air and sand would swallow it slowly down.
Images from the dream rose up again, and she sped her pace to escape them. For perhaps thirty minutes she walked, finding a pleasant balance between breathing and laying her feet down in the moist sand with a slight, hissing crunch. It became trance-like, so when a distant sound rang over the beach it barely registered, more of a mosquito buzz nearby as sleep beckoned than anything to truly be concerned about.
Then it came a second time, and this time Lara stopped. With her disciplined rhythm broken, the world filtered rudely back in; the tick-tock lap of the tide, the smell of driftwood and plastic flotsam tangled with rotting seaweed, the rub of humidity in the air. It was like taking off headphones and surfacing into traffic, as the sound called out a third time.
"Lara."
It was faint, barely recognizable as a voice, but it was there and Lara spun, scanning the darkness of the road and the deep inky blots between low apartment buildings, uncertain if she'd really heard anything or if she was imagining it. Nothing there was moving. Cars and SUVs squatted on the sidewalk as silent and dark as felled ogres.
"Lara."
It came again and a chill washed through her, as for a moment she thought she recognized the man's voice. She turned this time out to sea, surveying the endless march of waves, and thought perhaps she picked out the slightest blip against the dark, perhaps even the sound of frantic splashing.
Was that a person?
The tide lapped by her feet, and she realized she'd approached up to the tide's edge. The shudder came over her again, but she took another step forward into the warm and foamy water before stopping herself. This was crazy. There couldn't be anyone in the water now, it wasn't possible. This had to be another imagining.
"Hello," she called. "Is anybody out there?"
No answer came. A faint wind rustled over her skin, dragging like soft claws over the goose bumps on her arms.
"Hello?" she called again, squinting and craning to hear any reply, while the water washed up over her feet. She took another step into the water, so the dirty foam rose to her ankles.
"If you can hear me, say something!"
She waited, but still no answer came. The splashing sound faded, if it had ever been there at all, and she was left feeling cold and uncertain, though the dragging breeze was still warm. Suddenly the sea seemed very large, a vast and inhospitable expanse, no place to stand by at night, no place to swim out into seeking lost souls.
"Get a grip," she muttered to herself, though her voice carried little conviction. It was silly to feel afraid of nothing, a noise going bump in the night, just a trick of the senses. Still she peered out over the water. Was there a buoy out there? She couldn't remember. Once perhaps there'd been a sea wall, and that little blot could be a sole standing pillar, yet to rot away. That was all it was, surely; the tides splashing unevenly against a chunk of old, obstinat
e wood.
The wind breathed and she took two steps back, out of the water. Her heart was racing sharply in her ribs, so she took slow, deep breaths to counter it. She let her gaze wander away from the ocean, back to encompass the beach, the dark silhouettes of buildings and sunken vehicles. But all the time while she was looking away, she felt a prickling on the back of her neck, like she was being watched.
Yet the ocean was just the same when she turned, just lapping on the sand. She let out a shaky half-laugh and started walking back the way she'd come. This was not what she'd come out for. Amo would laugh at her if she told him any of this, starting to jump at her own shadow.
She made it seven steps before the voice came back.
"Lara!"
She froze. This time it was louder and she couldn't deny it was familiar, though she couldn't name it. What felt like ice water ran down her spine, making her shudder so hard her arms jerked. She had to turn but didn't want to.
The splashing sounds started up again, unmistakable now, loud and clear. That couldn't be the tide off a piece of rotten wood, it had to be a person. Her heart thumped painfully hard, reminding her of those awful seconds outside Pittsburgh as the demon squeezed and her chest popped inward one bone at a time and…
She spun.
Far out in the water was a speck of a flailing figure, beyond even the point she'd thought it had been before. A person in the water. Perhaps they hadn't heard her calls; perhaps they'd been under the surface and hadn't been able to reply. They were there now though, undeniably, and she was the only person on the beach who could help.
She kicked off her sandals and ran out into the tide.
The warm water splashed up her thighs and made the loose cotton yoga pants she used as pajamas cling to her skin. Three more steps and she dived, plunging herself bodily into the frothy ocean with an icy slap.
Zombie Ocean (Book 6): The Laws Page 2
