Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost (5 page)

"Here," she said. She tried jumping onto him and looping it round 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 round 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 round 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.

It 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. It wasn't comfortable and it didn't feel very secure, but she was riding him like a horse. Her aching feet breathed relief. Her Daddy bowed a little as he took her weight, then he straightened again. 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.

Anna shuffled side to side, trying to make herself comfortable. When they came close to a burly man wearing a brown sweater, it was easy enough to lean over, reel him in like a fish, and peel his sweater like a banana skin.

"Excuse me," she murmured as she looped the arms beneath her and tied them round her Daddy's head. It spread her weight and made the ride more comfortable.

She did it once more with another man and his grey duffle coat. The arms were thick and hard to tie, but when it was done she was much warmer, tucked tightly like the snug covers back home.

She rested her head against her father's cold and raspy chest. She was so tired. Her eyes closed, and carried along by the waves of snails she fell asleep.

4. OCEAN

She woke hungry and cold to dim pre-dawn light.

Peeling back the dufflecoat cover, she looked out on a muddy brown field, dark beneath silty rain clouds. The world jostled up and down like a pulse, and it took her a long time to remember where she was.

The ocean 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 covers, 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 legs, and she picked herself up and ran round to face her father.

"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 round again and stalked backward 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 banana milkshake," 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 sap but she was covered in mud already. She wrapped it around his legs twice then tied it as hard as she could.

She let go. She laughed.

He kept slithering 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 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 fur.

Probably another dog had died here. Maybe a cat? She shrugged it off.

The countertop in this kitchen was stone. She scanned it for bananas, but better than that she found cereal. The box was 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 a dead dog mess in the middle of the room? 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 brought up his phone to check the flashing yellow blip was still there. It was.

"I'll find it!" she shouted at her Daddy. "Whatever you're looking for, whatever's so important you can't even look at 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. The sun rose weakly, hard to see through the overcast clouds. It rained a little, and she scraped 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 ocean, more like a stream now, sometimes kicking them in the shins as she passed.

She felt strong. 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 tried his phone again, calling more numbers, but there were no more voices or beeps now, just endless ringing.

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 answered, so she stopped. She sat down by a tree and made conversation with the ocean 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 across it 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. 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 now, and getting dark again. She was alone 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.

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 dozens 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 round 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 round 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.

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. 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.

"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 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. Daylight poured in far enough for her to navigate the aisles. It was silent inside. In the entranceway bright flowers greeted her. She collected a cart and went shopping. Soon it 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 followed.