“Out! Get out!”
When they were gone, Ryla claimed one of the vacated chairs. “Hello, Malachi.”
He turned away, glancing at the clock, the floor, the gray sky out the window, anywhere but at her. “I don’t have anything to say to you. I just wanted them to leave.”
“All right.”
“Nobody asked me if I wanted to talk to a therapist.” He turned back to her in accusation. “I’ve already got them all over my body, poking and prodding and asking ten thousand questions. How’s your leg feeling today? Does this hurt on your ass when I press in? Are you taking a whiz like normal? What color was it? How’s that spot on your dick? Can you roll this ball? Throw it?”
He was so angry that he was jittering. “What color was your piss this time? Did you go number two as well? What color was that? And now they want to invade my mind on top of everything else. How do you feel? How do you feel? How do you feel? I feel like I want you to sit there for half an hour with your mouth fucking shut, so I can have some fucking peace.”
Ryla nodded.
“But you won’t. You should ask yourself this: why should I bare my soul to someone I don’t even know? Who the hell are you?”
“Ask me.”
“But you won’t answer. I’ve been to a counselor before. My mom made me go when I was a freshman. All you’ll say is why do you want to know? Why is that important to you? Who do you think I am? You’ll hold up a mirror and turn it back on me, so I’m naked while you’re a blank slate. You’re nothing but a therapist hologram. Do you even exist? You must, but I’ll never know. Why don’t therapists ever talk about themselves?”
“Generally, people come to me because something is troubling them. They want to be heard. They don’t want to hear my troubles in return but to sort out their own.”
“I didn’t come to you. You came to me.”
“Fair enough,” Ryla said, jolted into awareness once more by this boy.
His anger was a vibrant creature in the room. “And I know why you’re really here. Nobody gives a shit about how I’m feeling just so long as I give that speech over there on the table. They’ll play the heavies; you’ll play the nice guy; whatever works to get what all of you want from me. Now this is your line: that seems to make you very angry, Malachi. Should we give this over to Jesus and ask for his help?”
She looked directly into the simmering milk of his eyes and spoke bluntly. “I don’t give a shit about your speech, Malachi, and I’m not a Christian counselor. Yes, that’s one reason why I’m here, but my life doesn’t revolve around a guy on a stage for five minutes. Whether or not you stand up there doesn’t impact me much one way or another. But it does impact you.”
“Who are you?” Malachi spat. “Who are you really? I don’t talk to holograms.”
“Ask me something then.” She did not have the sense that this was simply a struggle for control, but a genuine request for her to give something of herself. Malachi was not going to open to her in the guise of a therapist.
“Where were you born? Are holograms born?”
“I was born in Texas, though my family didn’t live there long. We bounced all over the United States with the communications company my parents worked for.”
“Who was your second grade teacher? Do you remember?” he asked in challenge.
From the depths of her cobwebbed memory came the name, surprising her. Sunny Day Elementary. Madison, Wisconsin. Her family had only been in the state for a year, and then they’d moved on yet again. She had become so very used to the rawness of being the new kid, of holding back from making some new set of transient friends. “Ms. Yoale.”
“Was she nice?”
Ryla remembered that now, too. “Not really. More of a yeller.”
Malachi was still angry, but the energy in the room was no longer snapping. “So was mine, always losing her shit over stupid stuff. Be real again.”
“What do you want to know about me?”
His brow crumpled in thought. “What were your parents like when you were a kid?”
“Loving but tense.”
“Why? Why were they tense?”
“I didn’t understand why. I was too young. They’d argue in their bedroom so I wouldn’t hear. Then they divorced and my father just faded away. The money showed up month to month, but he usually didn’t.”
“Did that hurt your feelings?” Malachi laughed humorlessly. “Listen to me, asking a hologram if it has feelings.”
“It did, and it didn’t,” Ryla said evenly.
“Explain that. That’s interesting.”
“It didn’t hurt because he hadn’t paid that much attention to me before he left, so I wasn’t exactly losing a close relationship afterwards. It hurt because I still wanted a dad. My mom said it wasn’t me, it was just how he was, but it was hard not to take it personally.”
Even now, she was baffled by her earliest memories. Her parents had always been strangers to her, even when they all lived in the same home. They were three individual planets whose orbits rarely overlapped.
Malachi cocked his head quizzically. “I didn’t think you’d answer any of that.”
“I can’t be your therapist if you don’t feel like you need a therapist.”
“People make their kids go to therapists all the time.”
“You’re not a kid,” Ryla pointed out.
The last of the anger left him like the tide pulling away from shore. He rested in his pillow with the white of his eyes trained upon her. “How old were you when it happened?”
“Forty-one.”
“So you’re forty-six now. Where did you live?”
“In Delorio Heights.”
“That’s just half an hour from where I grew up. Big money.”
“My husband was a pediatrician.”
“Kids? Do you have kids?”
“We had three children, two girls and a boy.”
“Had,” Malachi repeated. He turned to the window and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
So was she.
His tone anxious, he said, “What were their names? Is it okay to ask?”
“Matt. He was my husband.” She took a deep breath and looked out the window as well. “Kelsey and Cadence, those were my daughters. My son was Josiah. We called him Joey, or JoJo. He was still a baby when it happened, only a year old.”
“There’s a guy named Josiah at my high school. Joze Tanner.” Malachi shook his head. “There was. I can’t get used to that. It was right there.” He opened and closed his hand on air.
“Your school?”
“PHS, all of us students and teachers, the office people, the music in the hallways between classes and the signs for the dance up on the walls. The field. I was just there, walking around with my backpack. But nobody’s gone to school there for years now. I wonder if the signs are still up on the walls. They must be. Just hanging, and drifting down one by one as the tape lets go.”
“I think that’s what the whole world looks like now.”
“Yeah. It’s so weird. I feel like I might just blink and be there, heading off to my government class or waiting for the lunch bell to ring. But I’m here. I’m here.” His shoulders rose and fell in bewilderment.
His mother’s voice pierced into the room from a distant point in the hallway. “We’ve got to get his hair done!”
“You should be seeing them instead,” Malachi said sagely. “My parents. They can’t play fetch.”
“How do you mean?” Ryla asked.
“Ever play fetch with a dog that won’t give the ball back? Mom and Dad can’t figure out how to relax their jaws. The game only ever goes one way.”
A tumble of feet headed for the doorway. Sinking further into the bed, he said, “You don’t need to come back. I don’t have anything to talk about.”
They had just spent several minutes talking. “I will come back, but if you don’t wish to talk, I won’t press,” Ryla said. “You may not have a choice about these appointments, but
speaking to me is entirely your decision.”
He looked at her warily. “You really don’t make people talk?”
Seventeen, a young and unworldly seventeen, she thought. “I can’t make people do anything.”
He smiled teasingly. “You must not be a very good therapist.”
She smiled, too. Not the polite smile she gave her patients but a real one. It made her cheeks sting.
The footsteps had stopped for a hissed and furious argument. Malachi folded in on himself, crooking his legs and wrapping his arms around them. The somewhat fetal posture made him look even younger. “I won’t want to talk, so bring a book or crossword or something. Or just don’t show and pretend you did, I won’t tell. No need for both of us to be here.”
“Where would you rather be?”
He turned back to the window.
“Are you sorry that you were captured and brought into Settlement 3 for treatment?” Though her voice was steady, she suddenly felt winded.
“I am so happy to be here with all of you today,” Malachi said warmly, but with an ever-so-faint sarcastic lilt. “Saved from a nightmare to stand again in the light.”
The window faced north. If she were to stand and walk over to look out, she would see blocks of rooftops and beyond them the fence. Past it was a sea of pine green spikes that trembled and cut at the sky.
A chill ran through her. The sickening, milky white eyes, the dead meat of his arm and above his brow . . . he would rather be out there, beyond the fence. Among the zombies, shambling and rotting as one of them, tearing apart anyone that tried to reach the safety of the settlement.
The prize of the Phoenix Project had not wanted to be saved. They were returning him physically to the young man he was, but in his mind he could still be . . .
She had been speaking to one of them. She was sitting beside one of them! How had that slipped her mind for even a moment? How many had Malachi killed and fed from to stay alive out there for years? How many cows and dogs and human beings had come apart in his teeth? How much earth had churned through his fingers as he dug up coffins of the recently deceased?
She knew what they did. She knew how they fed. Feeling like she was going to be sick, she said, “You want to go home.” Six feet of professional earth buried her judgment and revulsion. Her features were arranged so carefully that she could feel every muscle taut with strain.
Malachi picked at the healing skin of his arm, and answered in a quiet, almost hypnotic voice. “It isn’t home. There is no home. Or home is everywhere. Everywhere is home when they are with you.”
Pick. Pick. Pick.
Her stomach overturned.
The footsteps in the hallway resumed. “If he doesn’t want it done-”
“He can’t go up there with his hair all a mess! It looks trashy; it makes us look trashy! He needs to have it cut!”
Pick. Pick. Pick.
A tiny slice of healing skin peeled away from his arm. Ryla watched, aghast and speechless, as Malachi lifted it to his lips and put it in his mouth. His throat bulged with his swallow.
Then everyone piled into the room, his parents and the barber and a nurse, a new rack of clothes braced by assistants. Ryla got up from her chair. She had to get to the restroom fast, because she was going to throw up.
She only made it as far as the biohazard can.
Chapter Three
She could not take on this patient. Another therapist would have to juggle his or her afternoon appointments to fit in Malachi Harris for the next two days. Ryla wasn’t sure that she could go back to the hospital any time soon. Her revulsion to that white-eyed kid eating his own flesh was too strong.
Smelling of vomit, she walked back to the bridge and hovered over the railing to watch the water dash against the rocks. No new corpse fishers were traveling past far below, and a suicide watcher in a bright red vest gave her a curious look. She nodded pleasantly to convince him that she was not here to throw herself over.
The last person to make it to Settlement 3, except those who arrived by aircraft, had been a man named Saul some years ago. He’d sat on the sagging loveseat in Ryla’s office and sobbed. Of sixty family members and friends who had abandoned their makeshift settlement to drive for this one, he was the only soul still alive. Their caravan had been swarmed in the night less than a mile from the fence, armies of zombies blocking the roadway and smashing the windows of the vehicles to get to the terrified occupants. Saul survived only by shimmying out a sunroof and leaping for the branch of a tree. As he clung to it, he heard the screams of everyone he loved being run down.
He hadn’t thought the screaming would ever stop, but it did in time. Then it was replaced by something even worse to him than the screams: hundreds upon hundreds of mouths tearing and chewing in a feast that went on until dawn.
It consumed him, the sound of it. It intruded on his every waking moment, and at night he dreamed of it as well. Nothing Ryla or anyone else could say had the power to mitigate the horror of his experience. After six sessions and a lengthy stay in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, he hung himself with an extension cord to make the sound stop.
They didn’t need zombies to break through the fence and kill everyone. They were doing it to themselves. The suicide rate was sky-high, so high that firearms were restricted to those who worked the fence. But there were still knives and poison and ropes and rooftops. Some had starved themselves to death; others had filled their pockets with rocks and drowned in the river. Then there was the Neck Breaker, a rumor of a former military man who would put anyone out of misery with a quick jerk. But that could have been a shadow of imagination. No one knew for sure.
Ryla had had no tears left to drop one for Saul. She had no tears for anything. There was only the day ahead, even if that day was spent exploring the past through her patients. Her own past was locked away as tightly in her heart as she could manage, and she stuffed it back in mercilessly when it escaped.
In the first year, there had been no Therapy Center. It wasn’t essential like food and clean water. But after the umpteenth suicide, those in charge realized that there was no point in the production of meals for people who weren’t there to eat them. The call went out for anyone with qualifications, and Ryla straightened in the back-break of water carrying to respond.
Sometimes, though, she wished that she had left the yoke of heavy buckets on her shoulders. Because who was she to nudge people into the belief that it was worth it to stay? Who was she to talk them out of a premature exit? They didn’t want to be here, she didn’t want to be here, so why was she trying to shackle them with hints of a future that no longer existed? They were husbands without wives and wives without husbands, parents without children and children without parents; their worlds had been shattered so thoroughly that each one of them stood alone within a massive circle of loss. Of their once gargantuan family trees, they were solitary surviving twigs. Uprooted, unnourished, and alone.
They did not cling to each other, those they had met within the settlement. It was now too real how swiftly and horribly they could be sundered from all those they knew once more. So they did not connect, except in the most superficial of ways, and coming in a close second to the suicide rate was the one for newborn abandonment at the hospital. Someone to love was someone to lose, and Ryla’s office had seen dozens upon dozens of mothers whispering in guilt that they would have died for the children they had had before, but they looked at their newest now and felt nothing. Just an urge to get away from those tiny, clasping hands.
And Ryla tried to mitigate these disordered attachments when she herself had not tried for one last gasp from her ovaries. She had not tried because she knew she had nothing to give a new child, and here she was trying to guide other women into giving what they did not have either.
She could not turn away from these thoughts when they occurred, just like Saul could not turn away from that sound. But she had a respite when the fog returned to claim her, scouring away everything but the
tidy hours in which her life was ordered.
From her vantage point on the bridge, she could not see the fence. Then again, there was nothing to see. It was covered in tarps from top to bottom, and guards were stationed at frequent intervals all the way around it to ensure nothing was coming through. This was done more to check on the welfare of the fence itself; the zombies were so mentally compromised that they did not think to climb it, nor burrow underneath. Without the tarps, they just walked into it repeatedly. The force of so many bodies would break through in time, but once the view was covered, all of them simply drifted away into the trees.
The tarps were also there so the survivors within Settlement 3 didn’t have to see them.
Former friends. Former coworkers. Former families. Ryla had seen Kelsey and Cadence years ago amongst the masses of zombies outside the fence. The settlement was miles, many miles away from their hometown, but the flood of people fleeing for safety had drawn the zombies along behind.
It had broken something within her to see them. She hadn’t broken in those horrible days after the change when she fought her way from work to JoJo’s home daycare. There was no way that he could still be alive but she had to know, to see . . . She arrived there at long last and stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand, temporarily frozen at the sight of the crib with the elephant mobile across the living room.
JoJo?
His diaper bag had still been on the floor in the exact same place where she dropped it weeks before. The crib was empty, as was the entire house. Then she went to the junior high to search for Cadence, the high school for Kelsey, both void of living people but random zombies that Ryla shot while going from room to room. She prayed the occasional heaps of bones she came across did not belong to her daughters; she found Cadence’s backpack beneath a desk in a math class but nothing else.
She still didn’t break while holding a folder of homework with her daughter’s name written upon each page in that familiar, happy scrawl. Kelsey was a rainfall, sometimes a sweet patter, sometimes a furious torrent, but Cadence was ever the sunlight breaking through the clouds afterwards. It had always been a joyous bafflement to Ryla how well the two got along when they had nothing in common, but maybe it was because they had nothing in common there was no reason to compete.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 63
