“Oooooon-uuuhhhh, toooo-uhhhhh,” Isaac groaned in imitation of Holly. “Great little conversationalist you have there.”
“Aw, she’s fine, or she will be,” Corey said, still hearing the moans in his head. Weird how Mason and Marquis could just hear those and have their brains fall apart. If they split at the first or second moan, they were fine. If they were still there by the third or fourth, there was going to be a problem. That had never happened to Corey, no more than it had affected him before H1Z1 to watch a zombie movie at the theater. “Actually, it almost sounds like something she says now and then. One-one-two-one-slash-two-cobb.”
“What does that mean?” Isaac asked.
“I have no fucking clue,” Corey said. “Lots of vocabulary, that kid. Mama-Daddy-Brown-Bear. Be quiet be quiet BE QUIET. One-one-two-one-slash-two-cobb. Her teachers can’t get anything else out of her, and usually she’s just silent.” That made her sound unpleasant. The boys were unpleasant at times, not Holly. “She’s nice and all. Friendly. Just quiet.”
“Sounds like an address,” Mia said, turning a page. “The last part.”
“How do you know?” Isaac asked.
She threw him a withering look. “I don’t know. I’m guessing. 112 ½ Cobb. The half could mean an upstairs apartment or a granny unit.” Even when she was guessing, she spoke with sarcastic authority.
Corey hadn’t ever thought of that bit of nonsense as meaningful. The world had imploded when Holly was about five, and it was plausible that a five-year-old could know her home address. She hadn’t ever said a state, but Corey at five hadn’t known he lived in Iowa either.
“I remember the news report about her,” Mia said. “Found in Kansas, wasn’t she? Wandering in a street and crying as a truck full of rovers swept through. They’d been cleaning out warehouses for packaged food. No one could ever figure out how she didn’t get eaten, or die of starvation in a whole year. She was too young to take care of herself, but no one was with her.”
“Someone had to be taking care of her,” Isaac said. “A five-year-old? No five-year-old could do that. Think about it. If you had been five when everyone and everything changed, what would you have done?”
Corey knew what he would have done at five years old. If his parents had gone wild, moaning and kicking and chomping at him, he would have run out the door and fled to his neighbors’ house. And if they had gone wild, he would have run the two blocks to his kindergarten and banged on the door shouting for his teacher. Even on a Saturday or late at night, he would have gone to his school. School was safe. His teacher would know what to do. That made sense when you were five. He’d believed his teachers lived there, sleeping on the pillows in the reading area. And if that plan of his didn’t pan out, his instincts would have been to find an adult, any sane adult, who could take care of him. It wouldn’t have been long before 3s made a meal out of little Corey Halloran. And Holly wasn’t nearly as bright as Corey had been, so her story wasn’t very logical.
Isaac’s fingers were skimming over his phone. Corey said, “What are you doing?”
“Looking up the address in Kansas. That had to have been where she lived, you’d think. It wasn’t like she could get in a car from Kentucky or Oregon and drive there. So she’s a Kansas girl. Wasn’t there a cartoon called Brown Bear?”
“No,” Mia said. “That was Bear Blue.”
Isaac waved his phone around. The reception sucked out here. “Oh. I’m not up on kids’ cartoons.”
“I’m not up on them either. My little sister used to watch it.” No one asked what had happened to her little sister. She wasn’t in Lincoln, and that was all the answer they needed.
“Bingo!” Isaac said as Corey stretched his legs, happy to be out here rather than at his suffocating home. “I’ve got three addresses in Kansas for Cobb Street. One is in Wichita, one is in Topeka, and the last is in Abanoxie.”
“She couldn’t have come from Wichita,” Corey said, beating Mia to the punch. Wichita had been reclaimed. If they’d come across an orphan in their streets, they would have placed her in one of the many foster homes already there.
“If she’s from Kansas, why didn’t they just take her to Wichita?” Isaac asked.
“They were rovers from here, if I remember the report right,” Mia said, and Corey trusted that she remembered it right. “Rovers go all over the place. So they brought her along since they were on the road to come back here anyway. Wichita wasn’t going to mind one less mouth to feed.”
“Topeka or Abanoxie. Never even heard of that last one,” Isaac said. He passed the phone over to Corey. The screen was showing a map of Kansas, the route laid out along the lines from Lincoln to those Cobb Street destinations. Abanoxie was a tiny town outside of windy Dodge City.
Jokingly, Corey said, “Yeah, we could check those places out in no time.”
“You can’t be serious!” Mia exclaimed, forgetting her textbook in her umbrage. “It isn’t safe out there. And what exactly are you hoping to find?”
Isaac was getting excited. “We could take my dad’s grungy old camper! He keeps it fueled up in the garage. It’s got extra fuel, food and water, he’s put all sorts of shit in there in case 3s take over Lincoln and we have to split.”
“Hey, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,” Corey said lazily. Sometimes he felt like his butt was growing into those hard chairs from sitting in them so long while their junk drawer teachers lectured. Some of them hadn’t been teachers before the change, and were just filling in the gap.
Corey had been shooting the shit, but Isaac snatched the phone from his hand to examine the map more closely. “My father stays up late, but once he’s out, he’s out for good. You could scream in his ear and he’d just roll over. He’ll never hear the camper going down the driveway. Want to come along, Mia?”
“Sure, I’ll pack up my death wish and some undies and meet you at ten,” she said with fake enthusiasm as Isaac typed. Scooping up her book and backpack, she moved farther away to study.
“It would have been something to do,” Corey said ruefully.
Isaac looked up. His brown eyes were alight. “What do you mean would have been? We’re going! Man, maybe the kid’s parents are there. A lot of 1s and 2s in the first year didn’t know about the reclaimed cities. They hid out in their homes and foraged from places nearby. But she was just a little kid. If she slipped out of the house one day to play . . . her parents could still be living at this address and waiting for her to come home.” He waved his phone around again for reception. “I can’t find any more information about who lives or lived at those Cobb Streets.”
This was just silly, but it was fun to picture for a few minutes. To avoid the truth that they were going to be sitting in class tomorrow, listening to one drone after another until lunchtime, and then two more hours’ worth of drones before the bell rang to go home. Still playing along, although he was growing more and more tempted by the idea, Corey said, “But we can’t take Holly-”
“Of course we’re not taking the kid! Are you nuts? It’s too dangerous for her. We’re just going to go and check these addresses out. Don’t worry; my father has guns in the camper, too. It’s stocked and there are bars over the windows. It’s only one hundred and sixty-five miles to Topeka, and then we can swing out and do Abanoxie on the way back. That’s a day trip, man. You don’t like Mondays anyway.”
“Man, no one likes Mondays except for teachers,” Corey said. They got all giddy about Mondays, even if they didn’t really sleep there.
“So stay home. But I’ve got to do something. I’m going nuts. Oh, come on, how can you not come?” Isaac wheedled. “This is the new coming-of-age experience. Remember those movies?” His voice deepened and grew louder like the narration to a preview. “Two boys. One camper. A zombie apocalypse. A summer they’d never forget.”
“You know what I think?” Mia called, and answered her own question even though neither had solicited her opinion. “I didn’t think it was possible for t
he world’s collective intelligence to drop any further, due to all the 3s, but proof that it can is right here by the river.”
As much to irritate Mia as it was to not go back home, Corey said, “I’ll go.”
****
The camper was a blocky piece of shit. Its glory days had come and gone long ago, and now it was in a resentful old age. The racing stripes on the sides were taupe and black swirls on a dirty white background, with GOOD TIMES written in fancy script. The hood had dents and the front bumper was banged up. Dirt was clotted in the wheel wells and hubcaps.
Corey let himself in. Inside was no better. The interior designer had picked the poor combination of brown and orange for the colors. Black and orange would have given it a spooky Halloween feel, but brown and orange was institutional. Even clean, everything looked dirty.
While waiting for the Wisquin family to go to bed and Isaac to emerge from the house, Corey opened one of the boxes shoved under the brown table between orange seats and inspected the goods. It held gallons of water. Another box had granola bars in neat lines and divided by flavors. More boxes were shoved behind those, all of them packed to the brim with food. He and Isaac were going to feast like kings on their day trip. Then Isaac would have his ass whooped, and Corey would receive the Talking-To Special of Daniel’s for taking the minivan and missing a day of school. A talking-to was usually just Daniel reminiscing about the trouble he’d gotten into as a boy, and how it was amazing that he’d lived to be a man, and please, Corey, go easy on the little woman. She doesn’t know what it’s like to rage with testosterone.
If Daniel had an ounce of testosterone in his body, Corey would be seriously surprised. He wasn’t a bad guy, or a weenie by any means, but there wasn’t any toughness to him. Corey’s tall, muscled dad had only had to say Corey in a certain tone of voice to make him straighten out and fly right. For God’s sake, Corey’s mother had had more testosterone than Daniel. She didn’t even have to say Corey. She just gave him a look that promised imminent death and destruction if he didn’t stop doing whatever it was that he was doing. And he stopped. No one challenged his mother’s look, not his father, and least of all Corey.
Janice had called once more in the evening, but he hadn’t answered. No, he wasn’t going to talk to Holly to cheer her up, or come home and let her batter at him and trash his room. Judy shouldn’t have to live in the laundry room for two or three days with Snuggle Butt. It was ten at night now, so Janice was probably tucking Holly into bed for the zillionth time since Holly was too whacked out to understand that she was supposed to stay there and sleep. She wouldn’t have eaten much of her dinner either, if any of it. In episodes, all someone wanted was meat. Janice was a vegetarian who served a lot of fake meats at meals, and fake meat wouldn’t cut it. Would she send Corey out to the store for ground beef or pork? No. She’d spend two hours at the table pushing broccoli on a zombie child, pleading and scolding and cajoling and singing and playing the airplane game as Holly groaned and tried to get up to bite her. Janice was made of meat. Very stupid meat.
The day Corey turned eighteen, he was gone.
Time dragged on to half past eleven. There were still thumps and shouting coming from within the house. Isaac hadn’t been kidding about his father being a night owl. Corey made himself comfortable on the bed, having taken a fistful of granola bars for company. The pillows and blankets had a musty smell. There was only this one bed in the camper, and though it was big, Isaac’s whole family wasn’t going to fit on it if Lincoln turned into a 3s paradise one day. Two of the kids could sleep on the long seats around the table, or maybe there was a pullout bed.
He was going to miss school tomorrow. That made him happy. Corey was allowed three unexcused absences before his grades were docked, but that didn’t mean anything now. All he had to do was tell the school secretary that he’d been feeling under the weather, and she’d chalk it up to an episode and write him off as excused. The last thing anyone wanted was someone having an episode at school. That had happened several times, the most memorable occasion in his junior year P.E. when Taylor’s gaze got glassier than usual. No one paid it any heed because they weren’t friends with her. She always looked checked out from swallowing so many pills, shuffling around the hallways from class to class and only speaking in mutters. But then she smacked Coach Raze across the face when he told her to get her lazy butt moving on the field. He yelled, thinking that she was just being a shithead, and she attacked the old man viciously. They fell to the ground, Taylor batting him around like a cat toy. When people tried to pull her off, she attacked them. Many students in the class had been 1s and 2s like Marquis and Mason, very susceptible to chain reactions. Some of them had been even worse. It was a sick stroke of bad luck that they’d all shared that period together. The fight triggered almost half the class. Those who were 1s fell over or stood there blankly as they were clobbered. Those who were 2s went on a rampage. And those who weren’t affected by chain reactions, Corey among them, had fled shouting for the office with zombie classmates slavering on their heels. Since then, the administration was a lot more careful about which kids were in which class at the same time. They had had to be. Three people died in that incident, Coach Raze included.
It wasn’t before any more. You couldn’t throw students willy-nilly into a class. You had to read their medical files first, and then do a careful dance of periods.
The junk drawer administration. Corey’s counselor kept calling him Torey. This was a junk drawer life all around. Isaac had been absent that day to work in the fields, and confessed to Corey, and only to Corey, that he was sorry to have missed it. Not because he was happy that anyone had died, but because the world had gone to shit and Isaac had never gotten to see pretty much any of it except on television. Most of his friends from before were gone, and so were his teachers, but Lincoln’s still sane inhabitants had cleared its 3s fast and the only one to ever set foot on the Wisquin property had gotten shot by Isaac’s father. Mr. Wisquin had made his kids stay home through the whole ordeal. Then Isaac returned to school with new teachers and new students, and all of them had stories about running and hiding from 3s, suffering from chain reactions or fleeing family members having them, making it by the skin of their teeth to reclaimed space. Some were permanently disabled from the experience, missing limbs or eyes, a couple of them in wheelchairs now. Everyone was screwed up, jumping at loud sounds, crying on lost parents’ or siblings’ birthdays. And what did Isaac have to share in return? Not a damn thing. I worked on my dad’s farm all through the zombie apocalypse. Anyone but Corey would have misunderstood. The world had changed under their feet, but Isaac had stayed pretty much the same. Corey never betrayed the secret. Isaac was right. No one, absolutely no one, would understand. They would just snap at Isaac to be grateful that he still had his body, his family, his school, his home, and write him off as the biggest jackass alive.
It was one in the morning when Isaac slipped into the camper and woke him up. Blearily, Corey rolled over on crackling wrappers and said, “Did he go to sleep?”
“Finally. I was starting to think he’d be up all night. He was all fired up because Mindy checked her cell phone at the dinner table.” Isaac’s voice boomed in the dark camper. “It’s family time, dammit!” It returned to normal. “Family time? Okay. I guess that’s what you call it when everyone except him is dead silent, and he’s just ranting about the horrible new batch of hired labor to hear himself talk. Then she started yelling when he took the phone away, so he broke it to make his point. It was great fun to watch. Mom just stared at her plate like she always does. I love family time so much. Mindy’s like his Mini-Me, just with boobs and long hair.” Dropping a backpack onto the floor, Isaac stretched and yawned. “I should pound some soda before we go. I’m wiped out.”
“Don’t you care that he’s going to beat your ass when we get back?” Corey asked.
“Naw. The way I see it, it’s his last gasp of authority. My acceptance for work came in the ma
il today. As soon as I graduate, I’m being bussed out to work cattle.” He held up his hand for a high five and Corey smacked it. “He’ll shit himself, so the beating is my pity gift to him. Did yours come?”
“How would I know, stupid? I’ve been in here.”
“You could have called home to find out, stupid.”
Yeah, Corey could have done that. The Job Board should have just sent out an email confirmation since everyone had email, but they were old and regressive. The paper letter would wait until Monday night or Tuesday, whenever they got back. Corey was pretty sure what it would say, and that was yes. After all, who the hell wanted to farm or guard? They always needed people, so they should have read his application and given it a fat old rubber stamp. He was young, he was healthy, he was willing, and he was a 1 who wouldn’t spaz out if someone around him had an episode. Corey Halloran was hot shit. Everything was in his favor.
They were just cracking open sodas when a noise in the house alerted them to trouble. Isaac and Corey slipped outside and peeked through the windows into the living room. It was Mindy, who stole into the kitchen and came back out with a knife. Alarmed, Corey said, “Oh, shit! She’s having an episode!”
But she wasn’t. There was such purpose in her movements, and she wasn’t groaning. Cutting through the living room, she stopped in the foyer. The boys moved along the windows to watch. She bent down to the boots there and brought the knife down once. Then she took it back to the kitchen, and went up the stairs to her bedroom. Isaac laughed quietly. “So she’s the one slitting Dad’s boot lace. Nice. He thinks he keeps getting factory seconds the way they split when he tries to tie them.”
They looked up to the second floor. One light was on upstairs, but even as they watched, it was extinguished. The boys returned to the garage and climbed into the front of the camper. Over the next half hour, they pounded soda and listened for further noises. The caffeine wasn’t helping to pep up Corey much, and Isaac said, “Don’t worry about it. We just have to make it to Nebraska City tonight and we can crash there. It’s only fifty miles away.” Nebraska City wasn’t officially claimed. No organized group kept it free of 3s, or had a voice in the government. But it wasn’t totally wild either.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 12
