“Sometimes being alive feels like death,” Malachi blurted.
“How?”
He finally threw his paper ball, which was crumpled almost to oblivion. “Every part of you that’s you has to get whittled off. My parents don’t want kids; they want four family mascots. So our hair goes this way and our clothes go that way and our grades have to be high and our smiles have to be wide and we all have to like lasagna because Dad likes it and we all have to go to church because Mom does. Any time one of us sticks something out, that part has to get whittled off. You want to play soccer? Too bad, son, we’re a football family. You signed up for wood shop? You can’t; you’re a girl. You have questions about Jesus? Shut up and pray.” He patted the dog and said down to her, “You want to be a vet? No, you’re going to be a real doctor instead.”
“Why do you think they’re like that? What are they afraid of?”
Malachi drew back the can, dumped out the paper at their feet, and pushed the can away. Scooping up balls into his lap, he tossed them one by one. “They’re cowards. They’re cowards and they need things to be very simple so they can understand. And they don’t really see other people as people, you know?”
“Tell me about that.”
“Like fully functioning people. I don’t know how to explain. It’s only how those people relate to them, and they don’t exist otherwise. The next-door neighbors wouldn’t care that Laurie built the birdhouse in the backyard instead of me. The neighbors go on cruises all the time and are barely ever home! But in my parents’ heads, they’re absolutely obsessed with what we do and how we look. Everyone is, even total strangers.”
He gave her some of the paper balls to toss, saying, “So they whittle it off us, anything we do or want to do that they can’t understand with their simple little minds. We have to hollow ourselves out and let them fill us up. We have to become puppets and read other people’s words. We have to die to be alive.”
“I think that’s a hard part of growing up that almost everyone experiences,” Ryla said while they threw. “What do you let go of? What do you hold onto, even as people are trying to take it away?”
“You just want to be, and have that be all right. You want to stop suffocating. I was suffocating. And then I was out there, and I could breathe.” He checked the clock and grimaced. “I’ve got Makeup next. Like this is a TV show and I’m the star.”
“Never dreamed of being famous?”
“No. God, no! I can’t even stand up in class and give a speech without feeling like I’m going to piss myself. I don’t like all those eyes on me. Waiting for me to screw up.”
“Can you describe it to me? If it isn’t walking death out there, then what is it?”
“Peace.” He watched carefully for her reaction before going on. “Everything is quiet within you. Everything is quiet within everybody. Everything around you looks . . . bright. Bright like the way the world is right after it rains. Then it starts to dull, and you don’t know why, but you see brightness somewhere else and go to it. There’s no time, no idea of time passing. There is only dark and light and dark and light. There’s just you, and the people you’re supposed to be with, and the colors. You see dead meat walking out there, something grotesque, don’t you?”
“Grotesque. Pitiable.”
“That’s not how they’re experiencing it, though. They’re not in pain or upset or know what they’re missing. They’re perfectly okay.”
“But they aren’t healthy, Malachi.”
“They don’t know they’re sick. They don’t know anything. They’re at peace.”
“I’m glad they aren’t in pain, but they are sick people who need to be made well.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .”
She found that she had nothing to say. Because the world needed to go back to the way it was before. Because she wanted her family back, her home and her job and her life. Because this was wrong, all wrong, and she hated it.
Bongo’s tail thumped on the floor.
“They die in those experiments,” Malachi said. “How many die before one lives? Who gets to say that it’s okay to experiment on people who never consented? What gives the Phoenix Project that right? I was at peace. But now I’ve been dragged in here and they think they’ve made me alive when I’m suffocating again. They want to control my hair. They can’t wait to take me to their church in the settlement.”
“As you pointed out earlier, you are twenty-two,” Ryla said in irritation, reminding herself that she was speaking to a man who was emotionally still a teenager. “Your hair is your choice, and so is church attendance. You are now past the age where these things can be forced on you.”
“I pissed you off.”
“It’s hard for me to accept your point of view. My babies are out there, shuffling around with their skin rotting off, their clothes in rags, not a thought in their heads. To hear you say that it’s better for my daughters to be like that is hard for me to swallow.”
“It is better for them. It’s not better for you.”
“So you believe that we shouldn’t try? We should just abandon our families out there to their illness? To wander around; to decay; to hunt us?”
“We have to eat.”
“We? Or they?”
“They, I mean.”
“Do you have any idea how many patients I’ve treated who have lost the people they love in the most horrible ways? I don’t even know what’s worse, truthfully, to be the one eaten alive or the one who got away but has to live with it. Day in and day out, they live with it, and it’s killing them. They’re scarred. They’re scarred so deeply that I can’t help them very much. The terror, the loneliness, the nightmares . . . We’ve got people here with missing feet and fingers, feet and fingers that were literally chewed off them, but they were saved before they lost their lives as well.”
“They have to eat,” Malachi insisted. “They’re not doing it because they’re trying to terrorize you or want to give you PTSD. They don’t understand it on that level. You see dead meat walking; they see fresh meat walking. Either way, we’re all meat.”
“How do you feel,” she said, arching her eyebrow to indicate she knew she was breaking his terms, “about the people you’ve killed?”
“How does a lion feel,” he said, arching his eyebrow back at her and silver shining in the necrotic splotch, “when it takes down a gazelle? It’s not morally wrong; it’s not a moral situation. The lion doesn’t think about the gazelle’s feelings or wonder if it has a family. The lion needs to eat.”
“So you don’t feel anything? That’s hard for me to believe.”
“It wasn’t wrong. It would be wrong for me to do that now, but it wasn’t wrong then.”
“What if it had been one of your sisters you were hunting?”
Discomfited, he said, “It still wasn’t wrong. There was only hunger. Hunger and strategy.”
“Was there a strategy when you couldn’t think?”
“You feel the strategy. There aren’t words for this. We had the most success at boxing.” Giving her a worried look, and then one to the biohazard can, he said, “Pretend it’s an elk. Just an elk, having a drink at the stream. It hears a sound and looks up to see me coming through the water on the right. It hears another sound and sees Kelton coming through the water on the left. That spooks the elk, so it turns around and runs into the trees as we chase after it. Over to this rocky place that can’t be climbed, it’s boxed in, and that’s where Lorenzo is waiting to take it down. We couldn’t ever switch up positions on that, or the elk would get away.”
He cast another glance to the clock and shook his head ruefully. “Lorenzo’s always so goddamned slow.”
Chapter Four
JoJo?
She knew it was a dream, and tried to wake herself up as she stood within the gouged frame of the door. It was her visits to the hospital dredging up these dreams that had gone dormant over the last two years. She didn’t want to have this one again
, but could only watch helplessly from both within and without herself as she stared in aghast at the crib.
She had taken too long in reaching him. He had starved to death in there. Or he had been eaten, and all she would find within were red scraps of his clothes.
She just stood there, balanced on the precipice, as darkness fell outside the windows.
He lifted from the crib with white eyes, bloody drool dangling from his lips. Then he snapped at her, hungry for her meat instead of her milk, and she went to feed him in the sudden night. Picking him up, she pressed him to her chest and sucked in her lips as pain lanced through her from her nipple being torn away.
With a jerk, she woke up at her desk. Sleep had been hard to come by the night before, and she’d crashed over her lunch hour.
A nameless, faceless, thoughtless young woman from months after the change jogged through her waking brain. They had worked as water carriers together, toting innumerable loads to various sanitation checkpoints. She parted admonishing lips at Ryla for how she would not just pick a man, any man, at Settlement 3 and try for another child. It has to be now at your age! Don’t wake up fifty and alone!
The casual cruelty of it had taken Ryla’s breath away. She could not cradle another baby with her arms still muscled from JoJo’s sweet weight. He was imprinted so strongly on her flesh, her mind, her soul, on the pivot of her hip, in echoes of wails to reach her ears. But the other woman was in her early twenties, and had had no children yet. They could not be exchanged like playing cards.
Then Ryla’s gaze fell upon the clock, and she leaped from her chair with the dream and memory both thankfully evanescing.
Malachi’s door was closed when she arrived at the top floor. A nurse glanced up from the station, Ryla asking, “Is he still receiving treatment?” She had run all the way, and was only a minute late.
Uncomfortably, the nurse said, “No. He wants to be left alone. They cut off his hair last night.”
“Excuse me?” Ryla blinked at her. “He already got his hair done.”
The nurse’s lips thinned in displeasure. “It was done again. The drugs make him sleep very deeply. They came in here around midnight, propped him up, and just buzzed it all off. He woke up and saw it a little while ago and . . .”
She gestured to the closed door. “Threw his food across the room and kicked everyone out.”
Ryla was dumbfounded. Memories came to her of herself between seventeen and twenty-two, putting her hair back in a ponytail for class, curling it for a date, dyeing it fire-engine red on an impulse one night in college when she and her friends were tired of drinking and partying. Had she woken up to find her hair gone, snipped away by her parents in her sleep, she would have raged at the violation.
A man was standing at the far end of the counter, his back to Ryla as he consulted paperwork. He turned just then and she realized he was Conlon. Quietly but wrathfully, she said, “How was this supposed to encourage him to give that speech?”
The man flinched under her icy stare, Ryla noticing anew how unattractive he was. The pig’s nose, the missing chin, and then she heard the whiny imperiousness of his voice. “I only did what the family wanted.” Unstated but still heard was his belief that it wasn’t his fault, that he bore no responsibility for this decision, and who was she to question him?
“The family isn’t giving the speech. He is.” Ryla pointed to the reproach of the closed door. “If you had any chance of convincing him, you’ve lost it now.”
Conlon looked at her, and down to the paperwork. She grasped that she was putting him in a difficult position: she was neither someone in his employ that he could boss around nor someone to whom he needed to be obsequious. Gathering up the stack of papers in an uneven pile, he strode away without another word.
“I tried to tell Malachi that it wasn’t as bad as he thought,” the nurse said.
That wasn’t the point.
Ryla knocked on the door. “Malachi?” she called.
Silence.
“Malachi, it’s Ryla. May I come in?”
There was no answer.
She opened the door. In a miserable lump on the bed, Malachi had the blanket pulled up to his chin. That glorious riot of curls was gone; everything left was subdued along his scalp. “Please leave,” he whispered. The contacts were not in.
She closed the door behind her and stepped over a dismembered sandwich. “I can’t. I have to stay for my time. But we don’t have to talk.” Taking a seat, she lifted what remained of the kids’ horror book that had been dropped or knocked to the floor.
Five minutes passed as she read. Occasionally his eyes touched upon her, but she did not initiate a conversation. Then he rolled over, away from her, and said, “I wish they hadn’t brought me back.”
She closed the remnants of the book and set it on her lap. “I understand.”
“No,” Malachi said heatedly. “I’ll talk. You don’t talk. Maybe some of those people before me in the trials, maybe some of them wanted this. But they died, and I got it instead. And I don’t want it. You say I’m twenty-two and I have choices, but you’re wrong. You are so wrong! I don’t have any.”
She was quiet, appalled to see a forgotten tuft of hair on the floor beneath his bed. Were they trying to sabotage this ceremony on purpose? Her gut said no. Malachi had just been reduced to an extension of his parents, a science experiment, and a mascot. He was not off base in his assessment of how he was a tool to be manipulated for everyone’s benefit but his.
Malachi huffed in the silence. “I told Nathan that I won’t even think of giving that shitty speech after what he let them do to me last night, and he panicked. He said that he’d give me anything. So I said that I would give the speech on the condition that afterwards they send me to another settlement. I don’t want to see my father again for a very long time, or my mother. They had no right to do this. No right! But it’s just hair. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
That hadn’t been what Ryla was thinking, but she did not contradict him.
“I can’t draw a line without them walking over it. I can’t have an opinion without them telling me I’m wrong. Do you know how exhausting that is? Do you? No, you don’t. They have never once admitted they were wrong about anything. They have never once said they were sorry to anybody. It’s always someone else who’s wrong, someone else who has to say sorry. Even if you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are wrong, they just double down. I’m not dealing with that anymore. So I told Nathan that those were my terms. I’ll give that speech if they send me away to another settlement. I need space.”
Nathan had to be the first name of the communications director. Malachi took a moment to breathe.
“And he said no, Ryla. No! There is no way Settlement 3 is going to release me. I’m too important to medical science. Pick something else, Nathan begged. I said fine, in exchange for the speech, I want to live somewhere else in this settlement than the same house with my family. And he still said no!” Malachi smacked his bed and spoke mockingly. “People need to see the Harris family being whole and happy! So I have to live with them to make everybody else feel good. I have no way out. I have no way out! I’m always boxed into a corner!”
His voice was now frantic, and he looked over his shoulder to her. “Nathan said six months from now, we can talk about other arrangements. If I give the speech, then in six months he might see about finding me some other place. Might. Like he’d be doing me a huge favor. Can you believe that? Basically, I give you people everything, I stand up there and smile and speak and lie, and you give me nothing in return. So fuck you. You need me to stand up there and put the heart into people. But I don’t need to stand there. I didn’t ask for any of this. It would serve all of you right if I sneaked back outside the fence and let them change me again, if they can. And you’re probably bursting with all sorts of therapist platitudes, but I don’t want to hear them. No, you know what? I do. Tell me so I can have a laugh. Well?”
&n
bsp; “I think what they did to you last night is tremendously unfair,” Ryla said.
He sat up sharply. “But it’s just hair. It’s not the end of the world. It will grow back. You’re expressing a lot of anger, Malachi.”
She didn’t rise to the bait.
“Maybe I will go to the fence. It would serve them right. There’s a fantastic end to your experiment! Out there is better than being in here, so stick that up your ass. You think you’re better than we are? You live in a cage. You fucking live in a cage of tears because the world has changed and you can’t accept it. You can’t change with it. But I was free. Free of everything. It was like being a ghost. How are you going to stop me from going back? Are you going to have a bunch of guards around me at all times? Will they stand outside the doors and windows at my parents’ house to make sure I stay in? Will the doctors sew my lips up to my cheeks so I’m always smiling? You’ve turned me from a zombie to a clown. Well? What wisdom do you have to share with me today?”
“How aware are you of other zombies when you’re one?” Ryla asked.
“What?” Malachi spat.
“When you were out there . . . you found your friends, but did you notice all the other changed people around you?”
“Yes, but why do you care?”
“Were some of them very young children? Babies? Toddlers?” In the weeks before she had come to the settlement, she hadn’t seen any infant zombies except for those unfortunate souls changed in their car seats and trapped there to perish. But her study of zombies had been far from extensive. She traveled slowly and cautiously to avoid them as much as possible.
Malachi rolled back to her. Even without eyes, his gaze looked distant. “I remember them. Just a few. I didn’t have anything to do with them since their scents didn’t interest me. But they were there.”
“How do they get around, the littlest ones?”
“They’re carried, of course,” Malachi replied.
“Zombies know to do that?”
“The stupidest animal in the world knows how to care for its young. It’s instinctual. I saw zombies carrying little kids now and then. Chewing up meat and spitting it into their mouths. But after a while, they grew up, I suppose. There weren’t babies in arms anymore. Or the rot got to them faster and they died.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 65
