It was hell trying to pry her out of the shower curtain appendage by appendage. Janice cut her free at the legs first and cuffed her ankles. A foot clipped her chin and she shoved it back to the mattress. Then she worked her way up until she was at Holly’s waist. Sick of smelling piss, she cut off the girl’s clothing and dumped them in the hallway to be thrown out later.
“We’ll go to the zoo,” Janice said in a choked singsong as she placed an oversized diaper on the girl, and clean socks on her feet. “We’ll see the animals, sweetie. We’ll go to the library and pick out books. We’ll go to the park and you can swing. You can swing so high, Holly, high as a bird in the sky, and I’ll be watching.” Because she loved this girl, her secret favorite of the five, the snuggly one who adored princess dresses as much as Janice’s daughter had adored them, and Janice herself long ago. In a house full of yelling, thumping boys, keep-to-herself-Judy, little Holly was the only one that gave Janice a shadow of that warm feeling from her own lost family. This was her baby now, her darling one, and her baby was gone into this savage creature.
“Uhhhhhhh.”
She freed Holly’s left arm and got it in a cuff, fingers twisting in an attempt to scratch her. “We’ll go on a drive and stop at Hawk’s for burgers and a balloon. A big purple balloon for Holly. We’ll go to Princess Teas.” There had been only one, a darling little tea party place for children, and that was in New York. It was gone now. “Would you like that, sweetie? A tea party for you and your friends from school? Little cakes and treats and all of you in your princess gowns for your birthday . . .” They didn’t know Holly’s true birthday. Celebrating birthdays hadn’t been much of a priority in the last few years. The pediatrician had just picked January first, as he did for all young orphans brought to Lincoln.
Holly would have loved Princess Teas for her birthday. And Janice would have loved going shopping with her for a purple gown to wear to it, filling out the invitations and giving them to Holly to push into the mailbox, beaming from her seat at the adult table at the perfect picture her pretty daughter made. They had no genetics in common but this was her heart child. There wasn’t ever going to be a report card coming home with a sparkling line of straight A’s, a little voice bubbling over with stories of the day, but that was okay. Janice had a trusting hand slipping into hers even when there were no cars in the road, a big smile when chocolate chip cookies came out of the oven, a girl who had nightmares and preferred Janice to Daniel. Holly made this life just a little bit better.
But this wasn’t Holly on the bed. “Uhhhhh. Uhhhhh-nuhhhhh.”
She fought even harder when Janice cut her right arm free. The girl couldn’t see her through the plastic over her head, but fought desperately for her freedom. For her food. Janice got the cuff on as the girl shrieked. Her back arched and the restraints held her fast.
“We’ll go anywhere,” Janice whispered when she removed the last of the decimated shower curtain from the bed. It fell to the floor atop Daniel’s belts. “Anywhere at all, Holly. Just tell me where and we’ll go.”
“Uhhhhh.”
Holly didn’t want to go anywhere. She was lost to the world. Her face was covered in blush, and it was in her hair, too. Tears had made streaks and clots in it. The girl was crying, and Janice couldn’t comfort her. Holly didn’t want comfort. She just wanted meat, and the tears had no more meaning than getting the blush out of her eyes. This afternoon when Judy came home, Janice would give her some money and send her out to the deli for roast beef slices. She just couldn’t bring herself to poke raw hamburger meat into Holly’s mouth.
When she tried to clean off the blush, the girl snapped her teeth and growled. So the strap came down over her forehead, and it was tightened until Holly couldn’t move an inch. Then Janice wiped her off, careful to avoid her mouth, and all too aware that some foster parents were using muzzles.
At last Holly was clean, or an approximation of it. It was all Janice could do. In a thick voice, she said, “You call for me, baby. Call me the second you’re back to yourself, okay? I’ll take these off and we’ll go do something fun.” But Holly wouldn’t call when her brain was back in her head. She would lay there, mute and sad and all alone, so Janice would have to check on her regularly.
A zombie child fought in the restraints, her arms and legs jerking in senseless rage. It was the only reply.
“Call me. I’ll be here right away. I promise.” A clear drop of fluid struck the sheets. Janice was crying, too.
Chapter Four
It was afternoon when GOOD TIMES made it to Abanoxie. No one had reclaimed any part of it. The city was trashed. Trees had fallen upon cars and homes, crushing them, and some were blocking streets. Entire buildings had been disemboweled, the roofs collapsed and the innards of the rooms sprayed out into the lawns and roads.
In only three years, everything had come apart in this sneeze of a place. It didn’t look like it had been anything grand to start with either. The still standing homes were humble and the stores had signs relaying that they were out of business or everything was half-off. None of the abandoned cars were new, or even in their middle age. Abanoxie had been a poor community once. The H1Z1 virus had just ushered it along faster down its already assured trajectory to self-destruction.
The boys drove through it with difficulty, Isaac looking ahead and Corey to his phone to route around blocked areas. The little downtown had been leveled by fire for the most part, and the roads were impassable. As they backed up to go around, Corey thought he saw a face through a broken window for a split second. Then sunlight struck the glass and washed it out. It had just been a trick of the light.
“It’s the graveyard of civilization,” Isaac said. There was no other way to describe Abanoxie but as a grave. The destruction was final. The state wasn’t ever going to come this way and clean it up, rebuild the downtown and the homes, plant roses in the yards. There were other cities, bigger and better and less damaged ones, ones closer to rivers or having good farm ground, to reclaim. Abanoxie had ended forever with the change. It was going to sit here and decay until it was gone. That was sobering to Corey. Everything could be upended in a moment, and it had been.
They traveled down a road called Mazer and discovered there was no way to drive directly onto Cobb Street. Several trees both large and small had fallen onto it, and a car was overturned among them. Trashcans were knocked down everywhere in the roads and on the sidewalks. That was just as sobering. It had been trash day when everyone here got sick, the turned-over cans giving him a peek into the very last moments of their regular lives. They passed Cobb and turned around to go back when there wasn’t another way onto the road. Isaac drove past Cobb a second time as Corey protested that the map showed it being a dead-end. The sign, if there ever had been one, was gone. Turning around again, Isaac pulled to the curb on Mazer Street and parked. They’d have to walk to the address.
The houses on these two blocks were still standing, all but one that had met its maker in a fallen tree. The windows were filthy when they weren’t broken, and the yards were out of control with weeds and grass. “Let’s take guns,” Corey said.
“We don’t need anything. No one’s home,” Isaac said. But Corey insisted, that flash of a face in the window still fresh in his mind. Abanoxie spooked him. He would feel better with a handgun even if the threats were only in his head. Isaac humored him and both boys acquired weapons before stepping out of the camper.
Corey was doubly spooked after they closed the doors, the thud-thud of them loud in the quiet. He looked all around at the shabby-and-growing-shabbier houses. The street from his childhood home would look like this, too. No one was going to reclaim his nothing-special city. It was going to sit there until it caved in on itself. Then green would grow over it. One day in the far off future, some team of archaeologists would dig up Corey’s community and wonder about the people who had lived there, and what happened to them. They’d never know that Corey Halloran had ended up in Lincoln and then Abanoxie
, picking his way through junk after Isaac.
They crossed Mazer. The first houses on Cobb rose like tombstones into the air. Corey watched for faces in the windows, but all of them remained blank. Some of the addresses were missing. Pointing whenever they spied one, Corey and Isaac weaved around debris to the far end of the road.
The address they wanted was somewhere within ugly lines of squat buildings that ran down a long driveway. These were small apartments, part of a development that hadn’t been designed for looks. There were houses along the driveway and another line of houses behind them. Everything was yellow and tan. Isaac said, “What an eyesore.”
It made Corey’s foster home look like a palace. The line of apartments broke for a tiny pool surrounded by a fence. The water was mostly evaporated, and what little was in there had turned green and murky. A lawn chair was wedged between the bars of the fence, and two more were down at the bottom of the pool. Then the apartments resumed beyond it.
Corey almost exclaimed when he spied the pair of apartments that they wanted. The one labeled 112 faced the driveway, and 112 ½ was in the back. The exclamation caught in his throat, held back by the silence that had swallowed all of Abanoxie. The city was dead. Beyond noise. To speak loudly here felt almost rude, like singing a rock song at a cemetery. All he wanted to do was peek into the apartment and haul ass out of here, leave it to its decomposition. The living shouldn’t be in the same world as the dead.
Corey. It was almost audible, his dead father’s warning encapsulated into his first name. Dad wouldn’t commiserate about being young and making dumb decisions, how rash a young man could be, and never mind it really, no harm, no foul. When Corey had heard his name spoken with that much of a load behind it, his whole body came to attention. Although he had never spoken it, his mental response was a respectful yes, sir.
His dead mother looked at him. He and Isaac shouldn’t be here. Just as Corey was opening his mouth to say they should return to the camper, Isaac said, “There we go! 112.”
They’d gotten here, so they might as well go in. But Corey intended to be fast about it. Abanoxie was making him a lot more uncomfortable than Topeka had. He was intruding here. A ghost in a house was an intruder to the living humans who inhabited it; the boys were now the intruders in a ghostly home. In this ghostly city.
They stepped up onto the curb and passed by 112 on a thin walkway, which they followed to the bend that ran up to 112 ½. Corey had put the handgun down the back of his jeans, but he took it out. He wanted it close. Unfortunately, his bullets would pass right through an apparition, should one appear.
The stoop was just a small concrete slab under a sagging overhang, and the green plaque upon which the address was written had come loose and fallen into a shrub. The upper corner of it had been incorporated into a cobweb. The door to the apartment was closed, but the glass was broken. Isaac stuck his hand through the gap and led them inside. It was just as trashed as the place in Topeka, books and DVDs and clothes all over the floor, cabinets spilled onto their sides and a broken plasma TV in the wreckage. A cat had been using the mess as a litter box, leaving turds in the clothes.
Another exclamation throttled in Corey’s throat when he turned around. Taped beside the door was a drawing of a girl in pigtails holding her finger to her lips, and beneath it in block print was written BE QUIET. There was another one of those drawings in the kitchen, and a third in the hallway that led into gloom.
“What the hell?” Isaac said about the signs. “Was this a retirement community or something? Everyone in bed by five in the evening? Be quiet!”
“No,” Corey said. “Don’t you see? Those must have been put up after the change. People were hiding out in here from 3s.”
“And someone needed a sign to tell them to be quiet about it? Real smart. You’d think being quiet would come naturally.”
It was smart if the person who needed to be reminded of that was a little girl, a very little girl who wasn’t that bright. A five-year-old wouldn’t understand about Type 3s or viruses, or why being quiet was so important. But she would understand a sign showing a girl about her age with her finger to her lips, and a simple message written beneath.
How could Corey tell if Holly had lived here? There were no obvious signs, but everything was tangled up on the floor. He crunched over the mess to the kitchen. There were cups in the sink. The strainer had fallen to the floor and spilled its plates. All of them were broken except for the plastic ones. Isaac opened a cupboard and said, “No Sugar Boogars. But they do have mice.”
“Isaac,” Corey said. “Look at the fridge.”
There was a whiteboard fixed to it. The date was after the change. It was, in fact, dated the month before Holly had been found. Someone had marked off each day with a black X. The X’s went all the way to the twenty-eighth and stopped there. Isaac said, “A five-year-old couldn’t reach all the way up here and make those X’s.”
“Someone was here with her,” Corey said. If this place had indeed been Holly’s home. “She wasn’t alone for a year out in the wild. She would have only been alone for days before she was found.” That was far more plausible than a full year. There weren’t any alphabet magnets on the fridge, school notes or pictures. But the plastic plates on the floor . . . those were for a kid. There weren’t trucks or princesses on them. They were just plain plastic in blue, purple, and green.
With all of the cat shit mixed into the stuff on the living room floor, Corey didn’t want to search through it. Strangely excited, he went down the hallway. The first room was a bathroom. The door had been smashed to splinters. Brown stains were on the walls and floor and mirror, and there were bones. Human bones, some in the shower, others on the bathmat, more around the toilet and within it.
As Isaac went in to look, Corey pushed on to a bedroom. A BE QUIET sign was torn in half on the floor. The queen-sized bed was heavily stained, and a second set of remains was on the floor by the closet. A huge fight had happened in the room. Nothing was unbroken. A framed picture had fallen partially behind the bedside table. Careful not to step on the bones, he crossed the room and pulled it out. The glass had cracked.
Holly. It was Holly in a blue dress, all of two years old in the picture. She was holding a stuffed brown bear in her arms. It was nearly as big as she was. Holly sat in the lap of a woman who looked a lot like her, and a guy was sitting behind the woman. He was bald, but he had eyes the same color as Holly did. The three of them were at a park, and caught at the side of the shot was a picnic basket.
Mama-Daddy-Brown-Bear.
Corey had found her home. Type 3s had broken in and killed her folks. That was plain to see. But she’d escaped. Rovers had found her soon after that, brought her to Lincoln and to foster care. The miracle wasn’t that she’d survived on her own for longer than was humanly possible, but that rovers had happened upon this nowhere city in time to save her. He called out, “It’s Holly’s home!” and Isaac cheered.
Too loud. They were being too loud. Corey didn’t cheer with him.
There was another room beyond the master bedroom. He carried the picture with him as he went over to peek in. It was Holly’s bedroom. The wallpaper was pink and purple, and on the wall were the wooden letters of her name. The O had fallen, so it read HLLY. Below it was yet another BE QUIET sign.
They must have hidden here in terror for that year, 3s going around the apartments to look for meat. And to do it with a little kid who wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t yell, or go outside to play . . . be quiet. That command had gotten stuck in Holly’s head from all the times she had to have heard it over those long months. Years later, she was still being quiet.
Her bedroom was in no better condition than the rest of the house. It was a disaster of broken toys, ripped up books, and the blankets had been torn from the bed. They were on the floor now, and a lump was underneath them. Although it was still, its presence made Corey nervous. Like it was Holly’s remains under there, her skeleton picked clean of mea
t, her lower jaw hanging open in one last scream of agony. But she was safe and sound in Lincoln, having an episode to go along with her cold.
A heavy sheet had fallen beneath the window. Nails protruded through the fabric at the corners. There were matching holes in the window frame. It had been nailed up there and then yanked down. Now there was just a flimsy lace curtain.
The lump on the floor didn’t move. He didn’t know why he expected it to move. Nothing had moved in the apartment for a long time, excluding the cat and mice. Corey glanced around at the room Holly had once inhabited, his eyes never straying far from the lump. Moving the framed picture to his armpit and transferring the gun to his left hand, he picked up an umbrella. Poking the end of it into the lump, he jerked back. But nothing had reacted to the poke.
He poked it again. Isaac came in just as Corey withdrew the umbrella and said, “What are you doing? Is there a 3 sleeping under there?”
If there was, it was really stupid of Corey to be poking it with an umbrella. “I don’t know.” The lump had the shape of a small body, curled up on itself in a fetal ball.
Holly was in Lincoln. That was beyond dispute. He hadn’t been living for years with her ghost.
“Let’s see,” Isaac said, creeping up and pinching the hem of the blanket in his fingers. Both boys had their handguns trained on the motionless lump. Mouthing one-two-three, Isaac jerked the blanket away. Something brown scuttled fast across the floor to Isaac’s feet. Freaked out, Corey pulled the trigger.
The noise was deafening in the tiny room. Then his arm dropped when he realized what he had just shot. It was Holly’s stuffed brown bear, which wore a jaunty bow in a different shade of brown around its neck.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 17
