“It wasn’t their fault, but they have to live with the same hands, she said.” Selena’s voice was growing faint, and her eyes heavy-lidded. “I get tired fast.”
“You sleep then. I’ll keep an eye on everything.”
“Okay. Good night-in-the-morning, Mr. Spencer.”
“You can call me Xan. It’s short for Alexander.”
A smile touched her lips and flitted away. “No, that’s weird. You’re a teacher. I can’t call a teacher by his first name.” Shifting against the slide, she lowered herself to the mat and curled up into a desiccated ball of flesh with her hands tucked into the jacket pockets. Her legs were goose-pimpled.
He opened up the backpack and made a breakfast out of candy and soda. Then he walked around to check the doors for the dappling. No one was at the back. When he went to inspect the front, where the door still had dappling, he paused to look at the prize counter. Taking out a compact from the tipped beauty products basket, he prized free the mirror. The back was sticky. He opened a hair clip and pressed one side to the sticky part. Then he flattened the end of a jumbo-sized silly straw and slipped the other end of the hair clip into it. When he closed the clip, the mirror held.
Lying down on his stomach, he edged the straw to the crack. Millions of feet had squashed the carpet flat. The mirror passed under the door and he pressed his head down to the floor to see what reflected.
It worked a lot better in detective shows. He caught a glimpse of ragged jeans. Then the straw was tugged out of his fingers and he realized his mistake. The mirror and straw weren’t edible, but they had been pushed under the door by someone who was. The zombie might understand that much. Xan heard heavy breathing, and then the door trembled as the zombie hit himself against it.
Still, there was only one zombie around now. That was an improvement.
He spent some time trying to pick the lock of the office, gave up and hit it with his shoulder. Nothing worked. The cash box and computer had to be in there, so the door was no flimsy thing like those at the restrooms. He thought about kicking it, but the zombie would hear.
Xan retreated and closed the door to the arcade. Partially concealed by a collapsed bouncy house was a strip of shag rug for shoes. It was attached to the floor with Velcro. He ripped it up and put it shag-side down over Selena, who didn’t react. Her breath was coming out deep and even, but she looked dead. That one-month prediction appeared overly optimistic. Yet people drifted away in their last days, from what he knew, responded less and less to what was going on around them. She wasn’t in that stage. She was well within her head and fully aware of their terrifying present.
The convoy had to have gone through by now. If Zeke had gotten taken down, the truck wouldn’t be joining up at the back to push on to the depot. Another pair of bait men would have to be found.
Xan had shot someone today. More than one. That was new, and it was odd how little it concerned him. A zombie didn’t count as life, God forgive him for thinking that way when Katie was out there, and Buddy wasn’t much of a loss to humanity.
He could shoot Selena in her sleep. She would never know what hit her, and she was dying anyway. He stood over the girl with the rifle and took aim at her head, but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. The rifle lowered and he felt sick for even considering it. She counted as a life still.
Right about now perhaps, Selena’s doctor was coming into work and finding her young charge gone. Right about now perhaps, Colette was getting to the hospital and wondering what the hell had happened to Xan. Right about now perhaps, Lucca was waking up . . . if, if, if . . . to his mother’s face but not his father’s.
Daaaaa. Lucca had mastered a clipped Mama, but he always drawled Daaaaa into infinity. And cracked himself up at the end of it a lot of the time. Daaaaa was the biggest and most inexplicable joke in the world to him.
There was nothing else to do but wait. Xan sat down on the blue mat, the handful of miles separating him from Newgreen feeling as impossible to cross as the sea.
Chapter Six
Sometime in the afternoon, he did another round of the doors. No one was at the back; a zombie was scratching by on the sidewalk at the front.
He wandered around to look for windows. The tiny, south-facing window in the break room was so darkly tinted that he couldn’t make out much more than shadows. There was also no west-facing window to view behind the building, or east-facing for the front of it.
Then he found a strip of windows in the boys’ restroom. Just beneath the ceiling, they were covered in sheets of red felt. He stood on a toilet and peeled a corner of it away to look outside. It was a slow process, not because the felt was hard to remove but he didn’t want to jerk it free and alert anyone outside that fresh meat was close at hand.
The toilet creaking under his feet, he settled the felt to the side. There was the parking lot with the two cars and the aquatic store, the street and the soccer field. The window faced north, which wasn’t the direction Xan needed to go. But at least he had a view of the world, and what he saw within it was a hell of a lot of zombies.
Blood was fresh on their chins and chests, and some were still making chewing motions. Disgustingly, one was carrying part of an arm. The dead woman’s, Buddy’s, Zeke’s, Xan couldn’t tell at the distance. But it was definitely an arm, dripping and stripped of its skin and muscle in places. There was only one finger left. Zombies registered the arm, if not the carrier. Most noted its presence but did not try to take it, their hunger temporarily quenched. Others snapped for it and the zombie owner clutched it to his chest. Then he vanished around the far side of the aquatic store to protect his meat. Two bloody figures followed him.
Xan counted them. He couldn’t get an exact number when they were wandering in and out of the trees and around the buildings, but it was over thirty. And these were just the ones that had roamed this way after feasting. If there happened to be an equal amount on each side of the Sinkhole, then the number was well over one hundred in the immediate vicinity.
They bumped into each other. Tripped over the curbs. Stared mindlessly into the sun. Shuffled this way and that, looked into the glass front of the aquatic store, shuffled away and knocked into the pole of a streetlamp. If he and Selena made a break for it tomorrow and got surrounded, Xan would shoot her first and then himself. He wouldn’t hesitate in those circumstances. Better that than being eaten alive.
He should know how much ammunition was in the rifle. Thoroughly ignorant of guns past taking aim and pulling the trigger, he would have to figure it out before night fell. For now he just watched the zombies, wanting their numbers to decrease and dismayed when they only multiplied. This city was crawling with them, and some were literally crawling. Infection or paralysis had relieved them of the use of their legs.
The youngest ones roaming around were seven or eight years old, and there were very few of them. It made a grisly sense. The littlest ones to get infected wouldn’t have been able to toddle fast enough to food before it was gone; those a few years older would be knocked aside by the teenagers and adults. They couldn’t compete, and they had died off already. Perhaps Katie was among them.
He hoped she had. He hoped she hadn’t. If she came down the road, he did not know if he could restrain himself from going out there to grab her. Tie her up and cart her back to Newgreen, give her to the doctors and plead do something, do anything, this is my daughter please please please . . . Before he had had children, he dismissed parents who fought with hospitals to keep their brain-dead children alive on ventilators. They had to let it go sometime! Oh, how well he remembered sitting around a table at a restaurant with Koby and Jenner, thoughtlessly shooting the shit about cases like that in the news.
Now he was on the other side, and he understood. He would never look at Katie’s zombie form and believe that she wasn’t still in there somewhere, screaming and beating her fists on the parasites that had her trapped. He would be at the hospital every day, bent over her vacant-eyed form and
singing her name as she struggled to break free from her restraints and consume him.
He had been so close at the elementary school. So unforgivably close.
The youngest of humanity had been wiped out in the last two years, and so had the eldest. No one out there was older than seventy-something, and there were as few of them as there were of the seven-year-olds. Survival favored the middle crowd. The ratio of men to women was equal: the average male zombie might be able to out-compete the average female zombie in speed and brute strength over food, but the average female had more fat stores on her body than the average male. She could survive lean times longer than he could.
Katie wasn’t out there, but a woman who looked like Melody Branger was. It was only a similarity in face and hair, yet Xan’s heart quickened from horror. He wanted these zombies to all be strangers to him. Not his former students or his old drinking pals, his college professors or his coworkers. That high school shame of his had lost its sting. This was what had happened to that beautiful queen bee in the end, and to all of her giggling friends. It wasn’t vengeance he felt. It was sorrow.
They just kept roaming as he watched from the window. Only one ever looked his way. Xan froze upon the toilet seat. It was motion that was going to give him away, let the guy know that Xan was more than a partial, cardboard cut-out of a face. Air hissed through his parted lips as he stared and waited for the zombie to shuffle on. Eventually, a crawler bumped into the guy and knocked him off-balance. When he looked back to see Xan still in the same position, he blinked dully and turned away to walk down the street. Xan retreated from the window.
The building had gotten very warm as the day progressed, especially with the glass roof over the play floor. He sat down at a table with the rifle. Selena was still asleep, the little blue hedgehog beside her. She could have asked for a hedgehog of each color, or the dozens in the baskets since no one else was ever going to claim them. But she had just taken that one. That was likely the adult winning out in her again, thinking of the worth of toys versus food, and unnecessary weight on his back. Getting to Newgreen was going to be devilishly difficult to do on his own; getting there with a girl who couldn’t even walk unassisted would be even harder.
She was a good kid. Despite her worries, the chances weren’t high that she would be placed alive on a bait truck again. She had less than a month, and the next convoy wasn’t going to come through in that time. But her reluctance to return was understandable. If her hunch about the hospital administrator signing her off for the bait truck was correct, he wasn’t going to be pleased at the return of a patient he’d dismissed as worthless. And she was only going to get more needy and vulnerable as her life came to its close. To be helpless in the company of a man who had callously sent her out alive to feed zombies . . . that would scare any teenager. It scared Xan to think of what the man could do if he came across Lucca’s file.
Xan picked up the rifle. It was every bit the gun that he would expect a guy like Buddy to own. Battered and dirty and scratched up, the bait man had been lucky it hadn’t jammed on him out in hell. Zeke’s rifle had been in much better shape, but the driver’s gun wasn’t the one that Xan had.
Something thumped on the front door. Xan paused over his inspection of the magazine. No worrying sounds followed the first thump, leading him to believe that it had just been a mindless stumble. Then he returned to his task, and soon he was nudging out rounds with his thumb. The magazine had a thirty round capacity, but Buddy and Xan had shot it half dry.
There had to have been more ammunition in the truck to see them through to the depot, under the seats or in the glove compartment. Xan reloaded the rounds, knocking the last one off the table by accident, and the sound of it striking the floor woke Selena.
He put the rifle back together and encouraged her to eat something. Although her eyes were bright at the box of Sugar Snaps, she ate only a few pieces. Then when he asked if she wouldn’t like to try another kind of candy, she gave him a very gentle look and said, “You don’t get so hungry when you’re dying, Mr. Spencer. You just don’t.”
“One more Sugar Snap and I won’t say another word.”
She humored him and had the piece just like he had humored her with the prize counter. Downing a little more of her water, she said, “Were there any books out there?”
He went to look. There were games if not books, and he brought back a flat box containing Marble War, a deck of picture cards for memory games, and a magic trick kit for her to amuse herself. Then he returned to the window in the restroom. They were still out there. None showed any overt interest in the Sinkhole, telling him that the scent from his head injury wasn’t carrying.
They had just eaten. If he and Selena left now to find a block of homes, they might not be pursued with the same intensity. He hesitated to think it over. What had he done after killing and feeding?
He didn’t have a clear memory, only an impression. It was of a dim gnawing in his gut. The hunger ebbed but was never vanquished in full. The chemical signals of satiation were partially disrupted by the parasites. He would have still been on the prowl despite a belly packed with meat. Searching for his next kill, even if his body couldn’t hold one more bite.
His stomach twisted around the candy, his muscles in revulsion along with his mind. Katie might have fed from some dying or dead person with him, both of them ripping and chewing and ignorant of their shared blood and history and love. Had Colette not run so fast, she could have been the one providing the feast.
He had to stop thinking about this or he was going to vomit.
The first touches of evening were settling over the block, and while there were still a lot of zombies around, the number was not as great as earlier. But there were many more zombies than he had rounds in the rifle. A dull thump got his attention and he looked toward the back of the parking lot. A zombie had staggered into the trunk of a car. He was trying to go around it, but his depth perception was off. Bumping into it again, he hit it several more times before finally going around. Xan wanted to know if there were paper maps in the glove compartment. By the time of the contagion, most people just used their phones to get around.
He needed paper maps. Going out blindly into the city with his fingers crossed to run into homes was freaking him out. He counted the zombies that he had in view again. The population below the window had dwindled to fifteen. Two of the fifteen were crawlers, both grown men with rotting feet and flies buzzing around them.
A zombie wandered up the road and didn’t return. A pair of them wandered down it, one weaving about the lanes and the second on the sidewalk, and vanished. A new one appeared, blinked at the setting sun, and turned to the park where Xan could just make out stripes of tree shadows. A crawler had disappeared by the time Xan looked back.
The lowest number out the window over the next hour was eight. That just wasn’t low enough for him to risk going to the cars for maps. And the exhaustion was hitting him hard, his adrenaline going down and his fatigue going up from being awake for so long.
He got off the toilet and went out to the play floor. Selena was tiredly turning over animal cards to make pairs. Seeing him, she said, “You were so quiet in there that I thought . . . maybe you’d gone. But you hadn’t taken the backpack, so I figured you were still here.”
“I’m not going to leave you here,” Xan said.
“I would understand . . . if you did. No, really. No hard feelings.” Her eyes were earnest, and it was heartbreaking how she accepted that her life was deemed worthless in settlement terms. You couldn’t wake up in the back of a bait truck and escape its judgment.
“You’re coming along with me, and that’s the end of it,” Xan said. He sat down and turned over two of the cards at random. One had a cat on the underside, and the other had a bird. He flipped them back down. She snapped over his cat card and did the same to a card farther down in the same line. It was the match and she added them to her pile of pairs.
“Were you a good tea
cher?” Selena asked.
“I hope so.”
“You don’t know?”
“No teacher is the right person for every kid, but I want to think that I was fair to all of them.”
“Did you have favorites?”
Of course not, I loved all of my kids exactly the same . . . He opened his mouth for an artful dodge, and the truth squeaked out in its place. “Most teachers do.”
She grinned at his breach of protocol. “You aren’t supposed to say that.”
“I know. You have favorites, but you try not to let on. I felt bad in my first year about it, how I liked some of the kids more than the others, but the senior teacher who was mentoring me said that we don’t expect all of the kids to be friends with each other. We don’t expect ourselves to get along with everyone we meet. You’ll click with some and clash with others. But you have to be fair as a teacher, no matter how you feel. You can’t go easier on the kids you click with and harder on the kids you clash with. That was Mrs. Steubens.” Mrs. Lulu Steubens had been a weathered old battle-axe of a woman encased in flowery knit sweaters and orthopedic shoes. She had worked at the junior high since the day it opened its doors four decades ago. No one called her by her first name. Even the principal didn’t use it. Xan didn’t think anyone dared.
“Did you give a lot of homework?”
“I gave some. Not over the top. I wanted my kids to find connections to the stories we read. It’s not just about spewing out answers for a test. And they had lives outside of school just like I did. Giving out endless dittoes . . . it doesn’t really help anyone’s comprehension. It’s just more stuff to get through when you’re tired and would rather go to bed.”
“And it’s more for you to grade.”
He smiled. She was slyly poking fun at him behind that innocent face. “Yes, it is.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 33
