Sixty-nine hours, thirty-eight minutes, twelve seconds.
Don’t die. Please don’t die tonight. Lucca couldn’t hear; he couldn’t understand if he did. Just like when Xan had stood over that skater dude begging for mercy.
The moon was swollen overhead, shining down on a world ravaged by the most brilliant tantrum thrown since the dawn of humanity. Over the wrecked cities and desolate farmland, over the heads of roaming hordes of zombies who had once been Xan’s students, his friends and neighbors, the actors he’d watched in movies, Colette’s relatives and everyone they had ever known.
Good night, baby girl. Daddy loves you, he thought, and went to bed.
Chapter Two
He woke up alone in the apartment. Colette was gone to the hospital, and probably had left for it the second dawn stretched its first pink glow over Newgreen. She hadn’t woken him up to accompany her. He was hard to wake up, and he bore her no grudge for that. Katie had slept much the same way, through car horns and thunder and even an earthquake. That was how loud those stupid, rebellious college kids had been, to pierce through the deadness of Xan’s sleep.
If Colette had left at dawn and found the baby dead, she would be back by now to tell Xan. That she was still gone gave him the courage to get out of bed. Unless she was sitting there with his dead body cradled in her arms, unable to put him down because to put him down was to accept that she would never pick him up again. She would be crying. Silently. For Lucca, for Katie, for how she and Xan were doomed to outlive every child they brought into this world.
He didn’t have that thought until he was already up and half-dressed. That was good. If he had had it in bed, he never would have gotten up at all.
Things were stirring around him, water running in a pipe from the next apartment, voices calling down in the tomatoes. Xan was slavishly thankful to live at a distance from Chicken Crossing. Between the crowing of the roosters and the yelling of the hens when they laid eggs, he would have lost his mind. Almost everyone who lived in the buildings near the chickens wanted to move out; those that didn’t usually had hearing loss or had grown up on farms and were inured to the noise.
There was little in the kitchen cabinet, so he fixed a strange breakfast out of the scraps and ate it over the sink. They were overdue to shop, their tokens hidden beneath pens and ribbons in a coffee mug. Newgreen tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy in that area. Fruit and vegetables, eggs and other produce were gathered and delivered to stores around the community. Xan and Colette did a small shopping every other day. It was very odd to collect a green Big Bags basket just like before Olyvyr Gravine, but to walk down aisles stripped of most things that any Big Bags in America had once sold. No longer were there twenty kinds of toothpaste, ten choices of milk, or one hundred types of cereal. Trail mix wasn’t stacked ten bags deep on six shelves, sealed in plastic with labels of suns shining over green valleys and promises that everything was non-GMO and gluten-free.
Xan could take whatever he wanted from the Everything aisles, and he presented tokens for the Special aisle. All the residents of Newgreen were given a set, equal amount of tokens at the start of each month, and were left to their own devices if they wanted to save it for meat, splurge on cheese, or drop it on a treat like a package of cookies brought in by the Collection Agency. This month, the tokens were blue. Last month, they had been yellow. They were casino chips without any true value. No one was allowed to hoard them month to month and then clean out the store. Tokens were good at full value for one month, half value the following month, and worthless in the third month. That prevented people from hoarding, and token thieves were punished severely if caught. Two of the most unrepentant had been shipped out of Newgreen on a convoy. It was said that they were forced to join the Collection Agency or Power Rangers, neither of which had a long life expectancy. Newgreen didn’t tolerate its problem people for long.
When Lucca wasn’t in the hospital, Xan and Colette had daily shifts in the tomato gardens. Picking the ripe, shucking the rotten, killing pests and weeding and watering, carrying heavy baskets of tomatoes to the Big Bags stores around the settlement for the workers there to display. The overseer for Tomato was Frank Toll. He was quintessential management: absolutely useless. A puffed-up peacock with a gut that never deflated despite two years of restricted food, he had thinning hair and an obsequious smile that had once shined down on boardrooms at some management agency. His job here was to make sure his charges were hard at work, and to work himself. But he only performed the first task, which taxed him not one bit since none of them needed his encouragement to work. They were desperate for this food. As they labored, he positioned himself in the center of the beds and read articles from a variety of old magazines out loud for their entertainment. That was his idea of contributing to the cause.
No one listened. They just worked. And this thirty-something man felt no shame in standing there and flipping the pages of a Coupon Quest or Spooky America while elderly Harold and Winnie wiped sweat from their wrinkled brows, dragged themselves along the rows in walkers, and bent to pinch bugs off the tomatoes. He felt no shame at five-year-old Sage either. She should have been running on a playground, or sitting in a kindergarten circle time, but was huffing and puffing from lugging around her heavy basket as she harvested without a complaint.
If Xan had any room in his heart for loathing, he would loathe feckless Frank Toll.
Finishing his breakfast, Xan went in search of a shirt. Their apartment had belonged to two guys before, and they’d left a wealth of clothing behind. One had been about Xan’s size and he wore that man’s things to work; the other was chubbier and Xan wore that man’s things when hanging around at home. Colette drowned in those big shirts, which she used as nightgowns.
She and Xan both had left most of the décor alone, like their little family was only house-sitting and the true owners would be coming back from vacation soon. John and Roger Cormander-Wilkinson were the names on the mail and tax information. The art was abstract; the furniture was a mixture of college dorm and moving-up. In a photo album on a shelf in the living room were pictures of two tanned guys in their late twenties, and sitting on the desk when Xan and Colette had first come in was a pamphlet for gay couples about finding a surrogate. Xan had moved that into the bottom drawer along with the mail and tax forms. Those guys weren’t coming back, and it just made him sad.
He spent too long waffling between shirts. The black matched his mood, but it was like dressing for a funeral and inviting Lucca to die. The red was too cheerful when Xan might have just lost his second child. At last he went with the big gray burp shirt that he and Colette often stole from one another. It was roomy and comfortable, and a little faded now from frequent washing to remove the barf and drool, breast milk and sweat, food stains and God-only-knew-what-it-was splashes. Lucca had a weird liking for that shirt. It could have been a comfort smell thing. If one of them had it on, he was calmer. And for a baby who turned blue when he cried, calm was everything.
A book. Xan would take a book with him and read it to Lucca, if he was still alive. He went to the pile and pulled out a colorful book with a kitten on the cover.
There was no sign of Colette by the time he left the apartment. Was that good? Bad? Going down the stairs, he nodded to the yawning grocer on his way to the local Big Bags. The guy cut off his yawn and said, “Hey, man! How’s your kid? He’s okay, right? We prayed for him last night.”
“Thank you. I’m going there right now to find out,” Xan said. He wasn’t very religious, but he appreciated anyone’s prayers for his son. The grocer clapped him on the back and Xan went outside. The solar collectors glinted on the roofs under a grayish-blue, uncertain sky.
Still no Colette, only tomato plants bursting out of their cages in vegetable beds everywhere. The population of Newgreen was too great to limit agriculture to its parks, and they also had to grow produce for settlements that couldn’t grow it for themselves. The Collection Agency had brought in m
assive loads of topsoil, and Newgreen also had a team of Mulch Men who went around gathering leaves and dead plants, clippings from lawns, and kitchen waste to create compost.
“Alex!” someone cried as Xan walked past the rows. “Let’s have you in the cherry tomatoes today, shall we? There’s an awful lot getting ripe over there. Take the baskets to Big Bags and help out Winnie when you can. She’s picking for the Fourth Street kitchen. They’re scheduled to make tomato sauce. Yum-yum!”
He turned around to face Frank. It was a strange name for someone born on the southernmost border of Generation X, fussy and out of place. And how typical for him to not even ask about Lucca. Xan didn’t expect anyone but Colette to care about the baby as much as he did, but it would have been polite to inquire of a coworker how his son was doing the day after open-heart surgery. Winnie, Harold, little Sage and her uncle, even the woman who only spoke Italian would ask.
But that wasn’t Frank, who couldn’t even remember that Xan was called Xan. Coming down the sidewalk with a magazine tucked under his arm, he gave Xan an oily smile. “We missed you and Colette yesterday.”
They had been missed only because their absence had meant Frank had had to do something besides read. “I have to get to the hospital,” Xan said bluntly.
His pudgy face fell. “Again? I’m sorry to hear that. Well, hopefully you’ll get back in time this afternoon to pull a half-shift.”
You pompous, lazy little asshole. “No, I don’t think I will. My son is very ill.”
“That’s too bad. Maybe I can get a few people from Potato to spot you two. They’ve got more people than they need over there. Always sitting on the stoops without anything to do.”
Xan didn’t care about tomatoes, potatoes, work shifts, or Frank Toll. “I have to go.” He walked away. When he turned the corner onto the road that was still a road, he threw a glance over his shoulder. Frank was cutting through the street to make his way over to Potato Square. The universe further underscored its point about how sub-human the overseer was when the Italian woman named Bianca came out of Big Bags just as Xan was passing it. She set down her basket and cradled her arms at him, her dark eyes filled with worry. The only words he understood were Lucca and bambino. She understood more English than she could speak, and when he said that he was going there now to find out, she hugged him and spoke something that sounded like a prayer. Having lost her own baby boy in the contagion, she always came over to hold Lucca whenever Xan and Colette were tired from working with him strapped on. Then she sat on the curb with him, her eyes glowing as she touched his soft hair, and sang lullabies in Italian. She had a very pretty voice, and Lucca liked her songs almost as much as the burp shirt.
He had such a burbling little laugh, rare and enchanting. Xan would stand on his head to hear it, to get a glimpse of the happy kid so often hidden by a sick body.
As they parted in front of the Big Bags, Bianca called after him in hesitant English, “Strong . . . strong heart. Lucca strong heart now.”
Xan hoped so. He walked and walked through converted roads, people trickling into the gardens to work. Then he went by the nursery. There were some fruit trees in the city and many more had been planted, but it would be a long time before the new ones bore fruit. Lines of young trees were in pots within the former car lot, cheery signs at the ends of the rows reading APPLE and PEACH and PEAR. Another sign posted in the window of the former showroom was for a laborer, and encouraged interested people to transfer. Xan was tempted, if only to get away from Frank. But that would leave Colette with him, and they had the baby to think about. It was far easier to run into their apartment for a diaper blowout or some other infant emergency when they worked in Tomato.
At the Big Bags only a block from the hospital, a man was hanging a sign in the window that read WE HAVE GROUND BEEF. ONE POUND = 5 TOKENS. That would cause excitement once more people were outside to see it. If there were still some in the stores this evening, Xan would buy a pound and make two burgers for their dinner.
He swallowed, nine-tenths of him hankering after that burger, one-tenth of him after something unspeakable. When he had been brought to infant Newgreen, the moat being put in at a furious speed and under heavy guard, he had seen his reflection in the truck’s rearview mirror when they unloaded. There had been blood on his chin and all down his shirt. He understood why, and ripped it off at once. Then he spat on the hem and rubbed at his face. Colette hadn’t had to see him like that, and he never wanted to see himself that way again. He wasn’t going to, as the antidote lasted forever.
He remembered a moment of being a zombie in hell, not so much a firm memory as a ghost of one, in which he jerked his head to tear away a piece of meat. He didn’t remember whose, or from what part of the body.
He made it to the hospital and let himself through the door. Bile rose in his throat from the fear of what he was about to learn. Please, please, please . . .
Colette was wan at Lucca’s bedside, and Lucca was even paler than the night before. He had had a bad night. He’d even flatlined at one point, but the doctors brought him back. A nurse came in and elaborated on what Colette was saying, but Xan couldn’t focus on it. The clock was still ticking down from seventy-two hours and the danger zone was blazing red and it was so unfair. He had only gotten through the last year by envisioning this surgery as a magic cure, and in truth it was only the beginning mile of a new marathon. At twelve months, Katie had been walking and babbling, her hazel eyes wide as she explored this fascinating world all around her. At the same age, Lucca was a phantom of a child who was trying too hard to oxygenate his blood to do much else.
The nurse went away and Xan remembered the book. He had put it under his arm in the apartment and completely forgotten about it until now. Setting it down on the bedside table, he took the second chair and waited with his girlfriend for their son to die.
He made it to noon. He made it to three. He made it to six. His chest stubbornly rose and fell with tiny breaths and when he was awake, he let them know that he was not at all amused with the prongs up his nose. Xan let himself imagine that Lucca’s color was getting stronger as the day progressed, a pink flush replacing some of the shock white. But then the surgeon stopped in for a visit a little before Xan and Colette had to leave, and blew the hope out of the water. It wasn’t that the man had a particularly poor bedside manner; it was that he was devastatingly honest when that was requested of him. Xan asked for Lucca’s chances based on the other cases the surgeon had seen in the last two years, and the doctor said, “I would have said fifty-fifty before last night. After the trouble he had . . . well, I’d say he has a twenty-five percent chance now.”
Forty-eight hours flat. Xan had never hated time quite so much.
Half an hour before curfew, he and Colette stood to go back. Leaving the hospital was hard. It reminded Xan of how little his presence mattered. This battle was one that Lucca had to fight on his own, and he had so little to fight with.
The roads were quiet. Both of the Big Bags were closed. One had sold out of its ground beef; the other still had a sign up. People were making burgers in the apartments overhead, the scent wafting out open windows and down to Xan. He wasn’t distressed to have missed out on getting some for himself; the hospital cafeteria had made giant meatballs in pools of pasta sauce for lunch, and didn’t charge tokens for them.
Above in one building, a woman exclaimed in exasperation, “Mom!”
“She was always mad at me,” Colette said quietly as they turned onto their own block. “My brother, my sister, my father, too. She wasn’t happy unless she was making herself unhappy about something. When I was a child, she’d get herself worked up over my shirt not being tucked in the right way, my shoelaces tied just a little off center. When I was a teenager, she’d get worked up over even more. What’s that B doing on your report card? Why did you park so close to the hedges? Why do you hang out with that girl Marcy? She has such ratty hair. Then in college it was my major, my boyfriend . . .”
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Dead and gone. All of those people were dead and gone, and there was no heat in her voice in her remembrances of her mother. “You must have fought a lot,” Xan said.
“We didn’t. I wouldn’t fight with her. I saw how the rest of my family fought and how it just worked her up more. I was quiet and she’d leave off faster, move onto something else that would give her excitement. After I graduated, she went after my job. A P.E. teacher? She asked if I was a lesbian, and why had I worked so hard in school just to get a job kicking around a ball with kids? Then when I was pregnant with . . . the first time.”
“What did she say?”
“She wanted you to propose. But you didn’t, and I wouldn’t have said yes if you had. Not then. We were friends with a fantastic benefits package, nothing more.” Her hand slipped into his, and they walked very slowly past the tomatoes. “Since we weren’t getting married, she wanted me to haul you into court and shake you down. Those were exactly the words she used. She was furious that I wouldn’t. I told her that it was my fuck-up. My choice. And I didn’t want you to resent us. I didn’t want to pay for things with money that someone had begrudged me. I’d rather do it on my own. Later on when you were giving money because you wanted to, she’d still throw out these snide remarks that it should be more, that I should get a lawyer and file for your financial information. That was the first time in my life I really dug in and fought with her.”
“You never told me.” Colette’s mother had always been saccharine sweet to his face. He had known there had to be something more behind it.
“I didn’t want to dump that on you. And by that time, you were giving me money every month. I know . . . I know that we didn’t do things the normal way. But it worked for us. She couldn’t see how it was working; she could only see how it might go wrong. She was freaked out that you’d meet another woman, have another child and lose interest in ours, and never give me another cent. She worried that Katie and I would move back in with her and Dad; she worried that we would have a snit about something and you’d file for full custody in retaliation. She said we needed papers or everything would fall apart, and that we were coasting on borrowed time. Sooner or later, I’d be paying the piper.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 24
