The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (28 page)

"Sit with him," she told Peters. "I'm coming back. Jake, sit down."

He sat down.

She didn't have time to be scared or worried. There was only time to act.

She ran. Her whole body hurt at first, resisting with a tightness in her muscles which soon devolved into a warming throb that signaled deep bruises spreading under the skin. She'd wrecked her yachts and been tossed bodily into the waves enough times to recognize that pain, and knew that it was only going to get worse.

The runway thumped against her feet, and every time her right arm moved even the slightest amount, merciless spikes of pain shot up into her shoulder and neck. She held it close to her chest and adopted a loping sideways gait, bounding through the lukewarm puddles and knee-high weeds of the neglected runway, all while sorting through the challenges ahead as best she could.

Peters had broken legs. She had a broken arm. Jake had sustained a serious head injury. They all needed intensive care, the kind only Ozark could provide, but Ozark wasn't here and she was, and all she had was the emergency go-bag stowed in the Jeep.

She hit the open hangar and loped to the Jeep. The key was in the ignition, the engine started like a dream, and she was back on the runway beside them in a minute. In the trunk she rifled through the pack for bottles of water, dropping one by each of them, giving thanks she'd decided not to bring the go-bag on board the plane. She fished out a roll of antibiotic pills packaged in plastic and silver foil, popped two and washed them down with a healthy glug of water.

"Here," she said, popping two into Peters' hand. "For any infection." He swallowed them. She had to guide Jake to take his, as he couldn't get his own hand to his mouth. They were all at risk of blood poisoning at the least, considering the amount of damage they'd sustained.

Painkillers followed. She dosed both herself and Peters but not Jake, as she didn't want to do anything that tampered with his brain. Next she set to work cleaning and bandaging what she could. The split in Jake's temple was deep, his skull was probably cracked, but she didn't know what to do about that except bind it securely and try to keep him awake.

The gash in her broken arm wasn't wide, so she wrapped it tightly with a plastic butterfly stitch, then smashed the Jeep's pneumatic trunk extenders with a mallet and used one as a splint, binding it tightly to her arm then hanging it in a sling.

"I'm going to straighten your legs," she told Peters, holding his hand tightly. "If I don't do it now you won't be able to move for the pain. Don't die on me, all right?"

He gave a watery grin. "I'm used to," he said, then stopped to breathe, "pain."

"Bite on this." She handed him a strip of thick gauze, then dropped down at his feet. She peeled back his pants and surveyed the damage. This one a tug and twist to the left, this a twist to the right. That was a guess, but she only had her own judgment now.  

She did both in quick succession, bracing her feet mercilessly against his crotch and holding his legs between her left arm and chest. He shouted but didn't pass out. She used the trunk extender to splint his broken calf and a smashed bit of plastic from a storage crate to cup his shattered ankle.

"Good as new," he breathed.

Anna grinned. "That's the spirit. Now we have to move."

She went to Jake and took his hand. "It's going to be OK," she said. He nodded at her though the panic was there again, hidden behind a veil of fog in his eyes. "Trust me. I need your help."

He wobbled up to his feet. She pinched his jacket tightly behind the shoulder blades with her one good arm, enough to slow his descent if he fell.

"Can you lift Peters into the trunk? Carefully, his legs are broken."

He managed it, curling Peters onto a blanket and depositing him surprisingly gently into the trunk, then without being asked he got into the trunk with him.

"Keep him awake," she said to Peters. "Don't let him sleep." Then she shut the trunk, got into the front seat and tore the Jeep away.

* * *

Back at the Chinese Theater she collected medical supplies, food, gas, a generator, lamp and two of the radios Amo had left behind, moving with urgent, clipped efficiency. Within ten minutes she was back in the Jeep and driving north through Los Angeles, trying to raise Amo on the radio, but with her one good hand on the wheel never was able to dial in for a clear signal.

She couldn't spare the seconds to stop. The convoy had left at night around twelve hours ago, which probably put them somewhere near Albuquerque now, where they'd expected to cross the demons. She wasn't going to be able to help with that, but with the zombies?

They were driving blind now toward the horde, hoping it was the right direction.

Santa Barbara airfield was an hour up the coast, and she smashed right through the barricades to the runways and sped from hangar to hangar as the rain cleared up and the sun came out, searching for another Cessna 400TTx.

"Is he awake?" she called back at times to Peters.

"He's got very active eyes," Peters replied.

There were no propeller Cessnas there though, only jets, and she didn't know the first thing about how a jet engine worked.

She paused and rigged up a drip for each of them, left them some rice-ball sandwiches and dosed everyone again with antibiotics.

"Sepsis is a bitch," she said, by way of explanation. Peters grunted.

"Julio fed us these all the time," he said. "I'm a connoisseur."

She tried Amo again but had no success; they had to be out of range already, or perhaps stuck in bad weather. She put the radio aside and drove north, headed toward San Francisco and another airfield she remembered passing on a cairn trip this way two years back.

Hours passed with the Pacific on her left, a warm wind blowing through, in a blur of pain and exhaustion. The deep bruises were starting to push themselves up through her skin, turning her already dark skin a far blacker shade. The pain in her arm surged with even the slightest motion, as the ends of her bones grated against each other.

Paso Robles airfield was big, and searching all the hangars took far longer than she expected. It was coming into late afternoon by the time she found another Cessna, not a TTx but an older 420, cherry red and outfitted for a singular rich pilot, perhaps a Hollywood star who liked to see the world from ten thousand feet.

She located the kerosene pump and primed that first, checking there was some juice left, and filled the Cessna's tanks. It didn't matter now if the engine failed, because there was no time to find another. Soon enough the convoy would cross the country's mid-point and she'd never be able to catch up in time.

"Is he awake?" she called back to the Jeep at times.

"Just barely," Peters replied, his voice stuffy through his clogged broken nose. She dropped down and knelt before him. Both his eyes were ringed with shiny black bruises like a panda, and his nose itself was a crumpled purple mess.

"I'm going to set this," she said. "It'll help you breathe."

He gritted his teeth. "Yeah."

She'd seen it done before. Ozark had done it for her once after she'd taken the wind too sharply on a racing yacht and the boom had swung over and belted her square across the face.

It had been gristly, sharp and horrible.

She pressed her fingers firmly either side of his nose, into deeply bruised flesh, and he gasped. It was more of a scoop after that, kneading the structure of his nose back up into position the same way you'd pop a zit.

"Jesus!" Peters shouted, then sneezed, spraying blood and black clots all over Anna's waist. "Did you have to-" Another sneeze struck and he fell unconscious for a second. Blood trickled from his nose and Anna sat there in shock, until with a sharp gasp he came to.

Breath wheezed in and out of his nose.

"Oh God, don't do that again," he mumbled.

"I need your help."

Peters helped. He couldn't move, but by the light of the generator, with a fresh IV-bag dripping nutrients into his battered system and him propped up in the Jeep's trunk, he instructed her on what to do.

They'd done it once already; strip the propeller hood, open up the casing, get into the pistons and check for rust. Oil everything. Strip and replace faulty-looking wires, clean, replace, filter and re-hose.

She ran tests they hadn't run before, going step-by-step through the same drills Peters had taught himself a long time ago, back when it had been him and Abigail soaring through the skies over America, before Julio came and ruined everything.

Some time long past midnight Jake cried out and she dropped from her work and went to him. 

His eyes were terrified. His forehead was burning with his feathery black hair plastered to his pale skull. His eyes were pleading. "Much," he tried to say.

"Hang in there," she told him, squeezing his hand. "Hang in there, Jake."

She took off his bandage to reveal the skin around the wound was an angry, inflamed red. The skin either side was turning a blackish purple. She cleaned it delicately, rewrapped a fresh bandage, and shot another dose of liquid amoxicillin direct into his IV, then helped him sip down a whole bottle of water. After that she sat and simply held his hand for a time, looking into his eyes and sporadically nodding. She ate a rice ball and drank water herself. She popped more pills for the pain and dosed Peters too.

She'd done everything she could.

"They say the first twenty-four hours," Peters wheezed. "For head trauma, the not sleeping? It'll be twenty-four soon."

Anna looked at her watch. It was 5am and the sun was rising outside. She'd worked through the night and the wreck was already a day ago. Amo and the convoy had departed a day and a half earlier. They'd be halfway across the country by now, into Kansas or Missouri, with the demons behind them and heading into the unknown. 

"We can't help them like this," Peters said, "you need to sleep if you're going to fly."

She nodded and smiled. Of course, she was going to fly now. That made perfect sense. Fatigue hadn't caught up to her yet, but she was airy and light-headed. It felt like she was back on her catamaran again steaming west to Asia, leaning over the edge of the hull and pulling the craft into the wind, daydreaming for hours on end about taking a twenty-minute nap. The wind never stopped, the waves never stopped, and so she could never stop either.

But that had led to the storm which almost killed her.

"Sleep," Peters said, rousing her from the reverie.

"I will," she said, "in a minute."

She walked out of the hangar, leaving the two men curled around each other in the Jeep's trunk. On the cement walkway outside it was shaping up to be a beautiful, clear day. The rising sun was warm on her skin.

She began to cry. It was exhaustion or grief or pain or all three rolled into one. This was it, really. It all came down to this. Cerulean had died to send them Peters, and now Peters was back there, inexpertly patched up, Jake might have serious brain damage, and they were about to get back into a model of plane that had done it to them.

It could happen again. They'd all die, then perhaps everyone in the convoy would die too.

"Welcome home," Amo had said, when she'd walked back into the Chinese Theater and into their lives, after finishing her circuit of the world. That was less than a week ago still. Two weeks ago she'd just got back to New York and let the zombies out of Yankee Stadium. She'd gone to her father's house in Minneapolis, and seen her mother's face for the first time. Two weeks ago but it felt like a lifetime.

She rubbed at her eyes. In the days that followed Ravi had been so sweet. He'd wanted to do everything for her, bring her whatever she wanted, drive for her, hold her hand, gaze into her eyes. Once that had infuriated her, but she'd changed, and she now found him sweet. He had become a good and caring man while she wasn't looking, no longer the silly boy she'd dismissed for years. If anything he had become more like Cerulean, solid and dependable no matter how badly she treated him.

The tears flowed freely and she let them come.

For the three days she'd been back, she hadn't been able to accept Cerulean was gone. She'd gone to the lab with Sulman and Jake, as if working furiously on the T4 could bring back another father she'd lost. Ravi had come along, supporting her though he didn't understand any of it. When she broke down in tears on the fourth day, just hours before the survivors had arrived, he was there to catch her.

That meant something. That kind of thing didn't come easily, and was worth more than she knew how to repay.

Now, standing alone looking out over the blue sky, he was all that she wanted in the world. Cerulean was dead, and she wanted Ravi's kind arms around her, with hers around his. She wanted him being annoyingly sincere and looking into her eyes, telling her he loved her, just like he'd done on the yacht in the harbor three months ago, before her crazy round-the-world voyage began. She wanted to kiss his lips and press herself against him and learn all about what love was.

She didn't deserve it, she knew that, after her cruelty for so long. She'd done nothing to earn it, not his love or his attention, but now she wanted to. She wanted to be worthy of his love, she wanted to make him happy, as he'd tried so hard to make her happy for so many years. She'd failed Cerulean, but that was in the past now, and there was nothing she could do to take it back.

There was only the future, and that meant Ravi, and Amo and Lara, and saving the community she'd only a few months ago wanted so desperately to leave.

She wanted to live. She wanted them all to live.

* * *

She slept until noon.

Jake was asleep, but his breathing was more regular and the heat in his forehead was fading. Peters snored soundly.

She made the last few adjustments to the engine then snapped the casement back on. She took out the radio and tried to raise Amo, but they were definitely too far away now. She got out a map and sketched a route. Following a familiar road seemed the best path. The Cessna had a top speed of around two hundred and seventy miles an hour and a range of around one thousand three hundred miles. That would put them around Denver by the time they had to refuel, so she marked a few airfields on the map within a two hundred mile radius of the city, where she could refuel.