“Scent brought you and your friends together, but what brought you here? To this settlement?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could have gone any other way, all of you, but you came here. There are thousands upon thousands of zombies around this settlement even though they can’t figure out how to get in. The scientists tagged some of them to monitor their movements. They go off in packs to hunt, walking up to a hundred miles away if that’s what it takes to find steady meals for a while, but eventually they return. Why do they return? Why do they keep coming back here to touch base, here where food is scarce for them? It’s the strangest thing, the way they act.”
“I guess . . . I guess it smelled right,” Malachi said. “Smell is so much different when you’re a zombie. Keen. But here . . . this was where I was supposed to be, so this was where I came back over and over.”
“Could you have been smelling your family? Even though you couldn’t see them beyond the tarps? Are they what drew you here?”
His face soured.
“You said yourself that you aren’t thinking in those terms when you’re out there,” Ryla said. “You had no memories, either good or bad, no feelings. Perhaps you only followed a familiar scent. That’s why . . .” That was why she had seen her daughters out there. They had followed one another’s scent until they were together, and then followed Ryla’s scent to the settlement.
Contemptuously, Malachi said, “Are you trying to convince me that we matter to each other after all?”
“No,” Ryla snapped. “Talk to me like the man that you are, not some smart-ass kid dodging the enemy therapist.”
That took him aback. Then a smile flitted across his lips. “I wouldn’t have picked you for a therapist anyway. I would have rather seen a guy, if I wanted to see anyone. Does that hurt your feelings?”
“Not at all. Some people prefer to have a therapist of the same sex.”
“But you aren’t so bad.”
She laughed. “Thank you.”
“Maybe it was my sisters I smelled all those years. We get along pretty well, me and Mandy and Laurie. Laurie especially. Mandy is so quiet she’s almost invisible. It’s always been us against our parents. So I would have followed their scent. Not Elliot, though. It’s impossible to get along with him. But I like my sisters. Was I trying to be close to them?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
His hand went to his hair, and his slightly lighter mood evaporated. “Today is the final fitting of the suit. Tomorrow it’s show time, unless I go to the fence. Aren’t you going to tell me not to?”
“I hope you don’t. But I don’t control your actions, Malachi.”
“Really? Seems like everybody else does. I’d rather go to the fence than have to sit at the family table and hear my parents ask yet again why I left the house that day.”
“The day it began?”
“No. A few days after that.”
“May I ask why you left the house?”
“I’ll only tell you my story if you tell me yours.” With profound indignation, he said, “Like we’re friends, not that we would have been friends before. Two friends having a conversation.”
“Deal.”
Someone was going down the hallway. He looked past her to the closed door and waited for the footsteps to go by. Only then did he speak. “We were all at home the day everything changed. Elliot had gotten some puke virus from school, and he gave it to all of us. My parents, my sisters, and me. It was miserable. Every time I’d throw up, my dog Tank would lean on me like he was trying to make it better. The whole house reeked and it was so windy that we couldn’t have the windows open except for a crack. Every time I opened one more than that, the wind would rip inside and knock shit over. Was it windy where you were?”
“Not as extreme as you had it, or maybe I’m just not remembering it.”
“It’s funny . . . to you, it happened five years ago. So details like that slip. To me, it’s like a month or so ago, so it’s fresh. It was practically a windstorm where we were. I was upstairs feeling like crap when my mom yelled for Dad to come downstairs and watch the news. I went down to see it, too. Mom seemed so intense, more than how she usually is. The reporters were in a panic about rabies and biological weapons, nobody knew what it was. And they still don’t know for sure, the nurses say.”
“It’s hard to study things like that now. We don’t have the equipment; we don’t have the scientists.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said. They have some good theories, but nothing definitive. Anyway, the reporters were saying to get inside and lock the doors, and showing these insane videos from overhead. Thousands of people in cities were running and screaming and driving like madmen to get away, cars wrapping around poles and these white-eyed creatures shambling after them . . .
“They were people. But they looked crazy. And they were making more of themselves, biting who they caught and infecting them, everything getting wilder and wilder by the second. I thought Mom was mistaking some movie for the news, so I looked at the news on my cell phone. There it was again, everywhere I went. It was actually happening. Then we ran around our house to lock all of the doors and windows, pull the curtains, and all the while I thought that it had to be a joke. Some big media prank, someone hacking in to the networks, something like that, anything. And then the TV went dead. My cell phone wouldn’t connect anymore. Everything was quiet. I was in a house full of people but I’d never felt so alone.”
He lifted a cup of water from the side table and took a sip. “What were you doing that day?”
She unlocked that mental door, braced herself, and went in. “It was just a regular day at first, the usual craziness of Matt and I getting the kids ready. Kelsey needed something signed at the last minute like always, Cadence couldn’t find the shoes she wanted, the baby was making a mess of breakfast in his high chair and he threw a little food on Kelsey’s red dress. She went to the sink to wipe it off, debating if she should change and we had no time for that. Matt got JoJo cleaned up and then he left for the clinic.”
Her hand went to her cheek, where he had kissed her goodbye. She sat there, momentarily frozen in her husband’s shadow. Her mind had been on a million things when Matt gave her that kiss, the cereal on the floor and tray of the high chair, the permission slip that needed to get from the counter to Kelsey’s backpack, Cadence yelling that she’d found the shoes, if anything was defrosting in the fridge for dinner.
She wished she had paid more attention to that kiss. She hadn’t known it was the last one. She wondered if she had told Matt that she loved him, or if she just asked him to pick up a pizza on the way home since the ground beef was still a solid brick in the freezer.
Then she forced her hand to drop, aware that Malachi was watching. “Not long after that, we left. I dropped off Kelsey at the high school, Cadence at the junior high, JoJo at his home daycare, and I went to work.”
“Just like normal,” Malachi said.
“Just like normal,” Ryla echoed. “I saw my morning appointments, had lunch, and called in my first afternoon appointment. Halfway through that hour, someone pounded on the door. Then pounded again. I got up to answer it.”
“What did you think it was?”
“My first thought was the building had caught fire, but why hadn’t the alarms gone off? Then I thought someone had gotten turned around in the maze of hallways and stopped at the wrong office. So that was how it started for me. Then we were all standing together in the break room, patients and therapists and receptionists, even the janitor, staring at a laptop as it played the news. The reporter was saying to lock ourselves in . . . but all of us had families. I called Matt but he didn’t answer; I called the babysitter but she didn’t pick up. Everyone else was calling their kids or their kids’ schools, their spouses and parents, and almost nobody was getting through. Then we bolted en masse for the doors to the parking lot.”
She remembered that frantic run among two dozen people,
her keys in one hand and her cell phone in another, her mind revolving on plans to do the pick-up in reverse so Jo-Jo first, then Cadence, then Kelsey and then she’d get them home and lock up and hopefully Matt would appear . . . “I thought it might be a joke, too. It wasn’t real in those moments.”
“But you still left work,” Malachi said.
“I had to. When you have kids, you don’t wait to see if it’s a joke. You can’t take the chance. I had to get to the baby.”
“He was the favorite?” Malachi asked with offhand sarcasm.
“No,” she said, her voice an eruption of temper in the room. “Kelsey and Cadence could run. JoJo could barely walk. It wasn’t a matter of favorites.”
Contrite, he said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
That old panic was reawakening in her. She breathed in and out meditatively. “Maybe you should take a turn now.”
Malachi nodded, looking apologetic for his careless crack. “Not much happened for me in the next few hours, since we were already at home and locked in. I was still feeling crappy, so I just rested in my bed and convinced myself it was a movie set or something we’d been watching. Tank took a nap on the floor. I kept picking up my cell phone and trying to call and text Kelton, Lorenzo, my other friends at school. Nothing. If I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have climbed out my window and run the mile to the high school to see what was going on over there. Then I heard a sound outside, and I went to my window to peek out. And it was them.”
The book slipped off her lap and hit the floor with a slap. They both jumped.
“They scared the piss out of me,” Malachi said. “The white eyes, the weird way they walked, like hunchbacks without humps. I didn’t know then to not be scared. They were wandering up and down the street, some of them with backpacks or computer bags over their shoulders. There was even a cop in full uniform among them, and another guy was stark naked. That was when I knew it wasn’t a movie. Not because there weren’t any cameras around, but because they wouldn’t show a full-on naked dude. Isn’t that stupid?”
“You were in shock. We were all trying to make sense of it any way we could.”
“Did you think it was a movie? What happened next for you?”
“All I could think about was getting to the daycare and schools as fast as I could,” Ryla said. “I got in my car and jerked out of the lot to the street. Then I hit traffic just before the freeway. Finally I was able to get on it and had only gone a mile or so north when everything came to a dead halt. I looked ahead . . . I was on the far end of a curve, so I had a good view of what was coming up. They were there, doing this run-shamble down the lanes, jerking people out of open windows and biting them. It was exponential how fast they were multiplying. They were taking down motorcyclists, catching people as they ran away on foot, pounding on windows and pushing through the doors of a bus. I didn’t know what I was seeing. But I didn’t want them to catch me. I couldn’t turn my car around, so I got out, locked the car just out of reflex, and ran.”
“Back to where you worked?”
“There was no way to reach it. I could see them coming up, boiling up, from the other direction on the freeway, both on the northbound and southbound sides. I jumped a ditch and ran into the trees. Chewed up my leg getting over a fence and made it to a fast food restaurant where I stole a car. Someone had left it in line at the drive-thru, so I just hopped in and drove it over the curb. But I didn’t make it much farther north than I had on the freeway. It was pandemonium, and it just got worse because it was more populated the way I needed to go. No matter what I did, I kept hitting a figurative wall.”
“How did you not get caught?”
“Dumb luck. That was it, honestly.”
“Like being home with the stomach flu when I hadn’t missed a day of school in two years. Just dumb luck.”
Malachi resumed his part of the story. “I was staying at my window to watch them in the road. I had the curtains parted just a crack, but they never looked up. I don’t know what the rest of my family was doing by that point. Probably barfing in the bathrooms. The virus hadn’t just gone away with everything going so insane. I knelt there and stared down to the cop and the naked dude, these chicks with college sweatshirts and backpacks, and all the rest. They were milling around like they didn’t know what to do. And then Mrs. Grover came out of her house across the street. She was old, partially blind and pretty deaf. Mr. Grover was dead and she had this helper come in a few times a week to do the cleaning and take her to doctor appointments and stuff. I’d lived by her my whole life and she still thought my name was Michael. She didn’t see them wandering around, just checked her mailbox like it was any old day. Then she tottered with her cane down her steps to turn on the sprinklers. Water began to shoot out and . . . it must have been the hissing sound. All of those zombies suddenly turned their heads to her yard. It’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
At that moment, Malachi was nothing more than a boy in a hospital bed. His kinship with the zombies did not extend to this terrifying point in his life. “They knew what to do when they saw her over there. They broke into that run-shamble all at once just like how their heads had turned simultaneously. She looked up with this vague smile; she couldn’t see much of anything unless it was right up to her nose. It wasn’t until they got to her lawn that she realized something was wrong. Then she went to her porch to get back inside, but they followed her up the steps. I saw her trying to close the door, but they were pressing on it and forced her back. Then they went in.”
Malachi winced. “I had to throw up then. Of all the times. I got sick in my trashcan, Tank leaning on me, and after that I looked out. They were leaving her house, wandering through the sprinklers, crushing the flowers, going back into the road. There was the policeman, the college girls, a kid, the naked guy and another one in a robe, and last of all Mrs. Grover, blood running down her arm and her eyes all white. No cane. She left her front door open and lurched after them down the block. They must have found someone else to chase, because they didn’t ever come back-”
The door opened, and Malachi’s mouth snapped shut. His eyebrows lowered over his erased eyes. Conlon stepped in, holding a suit and a chocolate bar. “Look what I have!”
Their time was up. Malachi balked, his lips setting into a hateful pinch, and Ryla bridled internally for him. He was far too old to be bribed into compliance with candy.
“Get out,” Malachi said, his voice so flat and dead that the innocent smile fell from Conlon’s lips. “If you give me that suit to try on, I will take a shit in it. Get the hell out of here.”
Conlon opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and retreated, though not before setting down the chocolate bar upon the counter. The dark brown wrapper and silver foil blazed in the light from the window.
Malachi turned away from it stoically. “Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.”
“Okay,” Ryla said.
“I watched out the window until night fell. The streetlights didn’t go on, and the dark just got darker. Until it was dark like I’d never seen the dark before, just bottomless. I thought this had to be the weirdest day of my life. But we didn’t know then. We didn’t know the night would be worse.”
Human. Zombie. Human. Zombie. She did not know which one he was, if he embraced them both equally or each in turn.
“Where were you by then?” Malachi asked. “By night?”
“It was evening when I climbed from the top of a car to a fire escape, and all the way up to the roof of a three-story building,” Ryla said. She had been so overwhelmed and exhausted and confused and frightened that she was numb. The light faded from the sky with her looking hopelessly north. “And then the screaming started.”
“Yeah.”
The screaming had startled her out of the numbness. She slipped down to a top floor apartment and let herself through the unlocked sliding glass door on the balcony. No one was inside, so she barricaded herself in guiltil
y. The family of three in the pictures on the walls could be coming home any minute . . .
But they weren’t. After some time spent sitting politely on their sofa, she helped herself to their food and flashlight, armed herself with a kitchen knife, and then the loaded handgun she came upon in the bedroom closet. Their first aid supplies patched up her leg; their spare backpack and clothes became hers. It would have seemed like a dream, if not for the screaming.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke. Then Malachi said, “I’d never heard anything like that, those wild screams out in the night. Mom freaked out and had all of us gather in the living room for a prayer circle. The electricity was out, so she lit candles. Elliot was crying that we were going to starve to death since Mom kept saying she hadn’t done the shopping for the week. She couldn’t see how upset it was making him. And we didn’t try to calm him down, Laurie and Mandy and me. You can’t with Elliot. It’s a waste of breath. He’s like a miniature version of our parents, always right and we’re always wrong. Do anything nice and he throws it back in your face. So he just cried and cried.
“Dad was freaking out, too. He’d gotten out the gun, a piece of shit thing that used to be my grandpa’s. God only knows how old it was. It just sat in its safe. He had tied a bandana around his head and would randomly drop to the floor to do pushups. He told me to do pushups, but Mom was telling me to pray. It was the end times. The four of us kids were on our knees facing each other, and then Mom suddenly slapped me hard on the back of the head.”
“Why?”
“I always fought about going to church. That was why she’d sent me to that joke of a counselor. I had so much homework to do and she wanted me to go to services and be in the bell choir and regular choir and the youth group and confirmation class. It ate up my entire Sundays and she wouldn’t let me drop anything, so I fought everything. She went bananas when I refused to be confirmed. That was why she hit me that day. She hit me and said this is what happens, Malachi! This is what happens. It was my fault, she meant. All of this was happening because I fought with her over church. I wanted to yell at her, but it was just going to make it worse. So I didn’t say anything.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 66
