He grimaced and rubbed his head like that blow was still fresh and stinging. “I’ve probably got dents back here by now.”
“It’s happened a lot.”
“She belongs to this anonymous gentle parenting forum online. I ran across it one day on her laptop and read all of her posts going back years about how she and my dad deal with discipline and it’s just lies. Or delusion. She’d post about family incidents that I can remember totally clearly, but she remembers it wrong. I showed it to Laurie and she just laughed and laughed at how hard Mom would spin it, like two grains of reality and then a whole loaf of fantasy. But everyone loved Mom on that forum. Laurie and I made a throwaway account and wrote back that we know for a fact she smacks all four of her kids and screams at them at the top of her lungs, and so does her husband. Everyone piled on and called us trolls, but it felt so good to call her out. Fuck you and your loving talks!
“So after I got smacked for ending the world, Dad rationed out the food and we each had a tiny dinner. I couldn’t make myself eat it. Not with the screaming. I knew people were dying out there. The screams, the gunshots, the booms of cars crashing into things . . . I didn’t have to see it to know. Then when the screaming got closer, Mom blew out the candles and had us hide in the closets. Tank needed to pee and kept whining at me in there, so I came out and bunched up a towel, told him it was okay. He wanted to hold it until he could go outside. Finally he let loose and then his tail went between his legs like he’d been a bad dog.
“Then I unrolled my sleeping bag and stretched it out on the floor. I don’t know why I didn’t sleep in my bed. The floor just felt safer. He and I rested there, breathing in vomit and pee, hearing the screams, shaking side by side. And when I woke up, he was gone.”
“Tank?”
“It’s just a dog, right? You had three kids. You were married. I shouldn’t be so upset about a dog.”
“This isn’t a competition of who lost more.”
Voices came to the door, Malachi tensing, but then the people headed away. Quickly, he picked up the thread of his story. “I woke up and he wasn’t there. I thought he must have gone downstairs to wait by the door to the backyard. But he couldn’t go out now. I got up to get him, and I heard the back door slam.”
His fists clenched in his blanket, knuckles turning white. “I bolted downstairs with my baseball bat. I thought those zombies were breaking in. But that wasn’t it. Elliot had unlocked the door and let the dog out. I slugged him for it. Dad wouldn’t let me outside to call Tank back in. I ran from window to window to see where he was. But he wasn’t in the back. The gate had blown open in the wind. I looked out the windows at the front of the house, but he wasn’t anywhere. It was like he’d run into some other dimension.
“And there were zombies in the road again. They were different from the day before. No one was wearing backpacks or purses anymore, and their clothes were ripped and filthy. Most didn’t even have shoes on. And they were brown, dyed brown, all over their faces and down their arms and chests, on their shirts if they wore them. It was blood. Dried blood. Even their hair was brown, brown and messed up. And there was a skeleton in a driveway across the street, so far to the right that it was hard for me to see. They had eaten someone down to the bone. A bit of fabric was caught in the ribcage. I got my binoculars and watched it waving in the wind. Bones and fabric and a pool of brown underneath.
“I was so mad at Elliot for letting Tank out. Dad was mad at him for unlocking the door. He had told us not to open up anything and Elliot did it anyway. Mom decided the four of us should sit at the dining room table and do our homework, or go ahead in our lessons if everything was done. There was a dead person in the neighbor’s driveway and she wanted me to study my trig.”
He took a long breath and sipped his water, but didn’t ask her to continue with her story. There wasn’t much more for her to tell about the day after, or the days after that. She had fought for every northward inch, traveling only in the sunlight since the danger was even worse at night.
She had shot zombie men. Women. Children. She had even shot a survivor, a man who pinned her against a wall in a hallway and said they needed to do their best to repopulate humanity. He hadn’t seen the gun in her hand, but he certainly felt the bullet as it punched through his abdomen. She crept north on a river of blood, stolen food and stolen cars and stolen guns and stolen clothes, until she stood in the home daycare’s doorway.
JoJo?
“It was deranged,” Malachi said abruptly. “She was even making up spelling tests for us, and grading them. I sat there and did my trig for days, page after page until I was a full chapter ahead of where we were in class. There was nothing else to do. At night I’d lay in my sleeping bag alone, hoping I wouldn’t hear any screaming or barking and my stomach growling. The food was running out. Dad was planning to go next door and raid the kitchen, but every time he geared up to leave, zombies would be wandering around.”
Malachi pulled up his knees and stretched his arms over them. “Well, to make a long story short, Tank turned up three days after he’d gone missing. I always checked through the curtains for him every few hours, and he was just there all of a sudden, limping through the grass in the backyard and lying down about fifty feet from the door. We had a big backyard. Mom and Dad were upstairs. Laurie was with me. We were afraid that he would run off again, so we sneaked to the back door and opened it very quietly. He wagged his tail to see us but didn’t come. He was hurt and hungry and tired, I think. So I crept outside. And just as I got to him, Laurie screamed.
“They had come in through the open gate, run-shambling my way and cutting me off from the house. I scooped up Tank and fled. But they caught up at the fence when I was trying to climb over it. And then . . . then there was nothing. Time stopped passing in the same way. Then I was here in the hospital. The first time Dad came in to see me, he went on a rip. He’s still mad five years later. Why didn’t you listen to me about not going outside? Do you understand what you put us through? Did you ever stop to think about us instead of yourself? It was just a dumb dog. Over and over. He couldn’t let it go. Good to see you too, Dad! Didn’t miss you once. And Mom was crying and clinging to me, but I just wanted to shove her away. I don’t like when they touch me. It’s not me they want; it’s this Golden Son who doesn’t exist.”
Malachi was rushing now, tripping over words in his effort to get it all out before they were interrupted. “It’s so difficult to be around them. I’m always on edge. I dropped out of sports since Dad would not stop criticizing every last thing I did in games on the ride home. I cheated on tests because Mom hassles me so hard for anything less than an A. They make me feel like the biggest loser ever to walk this planet. Other than seeing my friends, the only thing that got me through the last two years was telling myself I’d be going to college pretty soon. That was all that pulled me out of bed in the morning. Before the change. All I wanted to do was sleep. And I worry.”
“About what?”
“I feel like I’m soaked in gasoline and they keep poking me with lit matches. Telling me that I’m not allowed to burst into flames. One day I’m going to burst. One day they’re going to push me too far. They’ll hit me and I’ll hit them back. But I might not be able to stop. I worry that I’m going to go crazy. I worry that I’ll kill them, just so they leave me alone.”
He rested his chin on his outstretched arms and cut her off when she attempted to reply. “Do you think your baby son is out there?” he asked. “Is that why you asked me about little kids?”
“I don’t know if he is,” Ryla said. “I went to the fence a few times, long ago. I saw my daughters once. And . . .” She had not permitted herself to believe it. “There was a man standing in the trees at quite a distance, and for just a split second, I saw a flash of blond hair at his side, what looked like a very small boy going behind a trunk. It looked like JoJo’s hair, white-blond, and the man could have been Matt. But I couldn’t say anything for sure. It was only
the girls I saw clearly.”
Had Matt headed for the daycare too when it began? Had he gotten there in time to pick up JoJo, and then gotten changed with him?
She shook her head. “It could have been anyone.”
“It also could have been them. They could have all followed your scent here.” Malachi glanced around the room critically. “They shouldn’t do this project. They would have been closed down before for running an experiment that kills almost everybody. It’s not right.”
“Malachi, we’re desperate.”
“Would that be okay with you? Your family getting rounded up and treated here? At best, at the very best, you might get one back. Are you willing to take that risk? Which one would you pick?”
“That question is impossible to answer.”
“They’re out there. Not living in a way that you understand, but living all the same. Just because you don’t find worth in it doesn’t mean there is none.”
“I want my family back the way it was.”
“Well, they’ve become something different now. Maybe you should go to them.” His white eyes moved past her to the chocolate bar.
“Do you want that?” Ryla said.
“If I eat it, they’ve won. If I leave it there, Mom will eat it and tell them I loved it because that’s polite. They’ve won again. What I’d like to do is throw it out the window, but that’s what a kid does.”
Now there was a cluster of muffled, anxious voices at the door, then a tentative knock and arguing. Ryla and Malachi glanced at the clock. They had gone way over their scheduled appointment, so far over that it was time for him to return to his treatments.
“What does a man do?” Ryla asked.
Malachi leaned back in the bed and said pensively, “I’d like you to have it.”
Surprised, she said, “You do?”
“It doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s just chocolate. Not a control game. Please take it with you when you leave. And you should go now. I’ll be out of it once my treatment starts.”
She stood up and took the chocolate bar, felt the lightness of the gift in her palm. “I’ll enjoy it. Thank you.”
“That makes it a stalemate for them. This whole place should be called Stalemate 3.”
Stalemate 3. Something sounded very right about that to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be the one up on stage.” Malachi sighed in resignation. “Shitting in a suit.”
Chapter Five
He could not go home. He absolutely could not go home. That night she composed a lengthy report for Aulish, recommending that Malachi Harris be given lodging separate from his family after his release from the hospital. For a young man with such a disturbed relationship to his parents, living in close quarters with them had the potential to be explosive.
Though articulate and friendly, expressive and charming, Malachi was also very angry and depressed. Putting him in the care of an emotionally and physically abusive mother and father was unwise. A room in one of the dormitories with other young adults and an older resident advisor would serve him better than the family home. Though he had been a minor at the time of the change, and was in many ways still that same boy from years ago, he was technically a man now.
Both the government and Phoenix Project had to work with him, she stressed in her last paragraphs. Or they were going to spark a conflagration when he had had enough. He had already threatened to climb over the fence and return to his zombie kin. His attachment to his life out there remained strong, and squelching him so thoroughly in here was only going to make that former life of his more and more attractive all the time.
He had not asked to be a celebrity, nor was it sitting particularly well with him. The more they held him up in triumph, the more they exerted control over his life, the more resentful she predicted he would become. His requests were neither large nor unreasonable, and she thought the best avenue for success lay in integrating him into Settlement 3’s society as an adult capable of making his own choices. And if they would not grant him a different home, then he needed to be in therapy for support. It didn’t matter if it was with her or another therapist, but continuing care was critical. For him at the bare minimum, but ideally his entire family.
It had been a long time since she’d written a report for a patient. The words did not come with ease despite how strongly she felt about the issue. She suspected that his parents would protest strenuously if Malachi were given a room in a dormitory. But her utmost concern was his mental health, not a mother and father so cold, obsessive, and controlling that they couldn’t even cede the management of their twenty-two-year-old son’s hair.
When she had a final draft, she copied it over by hand. One letter for Aulish, one for Satter, one for the head of the hospital, and one for the doctor who had recommended a therapist in the first place. Just to up the odds that someone would take this seriously, since she did not expect Aulish would.
In the morning she sent them off with a courier, and in a windswept afternoon, she joined the throngs to watch the ceremony. Every seat had been taken so she stood in the back as whispers filtered through the audience. Word that the Phoenix Project had had a success had gotten around, though many didn’t believe it. Those who did, however, were thoroughly nonplussed, seeing how underwhelming the other reclaimed zombies had been.
Ryla didn’t say anything. She just waited.
The wind shook the trees so hard that the furious rustling of the leaves blotted out much of the first speeches. But it did not drown out the collective gasp that went up when Malachi Harris was introduced. A confident stride brought him to the stage, drone cameras circling in to catch him from every angle.
One of his younger sisters screamed and ran for him, the other one did not scream but was close on her heels. Aulish was up there too, standing to the side and watching with a fond, grandfatherly smile. A burst of applause rang out at the enthusiastic sibling embrace, Elliot and their parents surrounding them to join the hug.
A whole family. For five years they had dwelled in fragments, most of them without a single soul to cling to for solace. The sheer, joyous bounty of what was on stage riveted the audience: mom, dad, and four, four children, all healthy and together again. It was no less than a miracle.
Then Malachi took the microphone and paused to let the applause die. “I am so happy to be here with all of you today,” he said with rich sincerity, or an approximation so acute that Ryla could allow herself to be fooled. The applause started again, building and building until people were screaming and shouting and sobbing and waving in a frenzy of excitement. Malachi paused again and let the roar of noise wash over him. He could not have been heard over it.
One day it could be Kelsey or Cadence. Giving Ryla a reason to fight off this grayness that enveloped her, giving her a stake to plant in this soil. A peal tore out from her throat and joined the maddened chorus.
They did not stop, could not stop. If Malachi was surprised or dismayed at the ferocity of it, the feast that they were making of him, he did not let on. People ran from the first rows to the stage and put up their hands in wonder; Malachi left the podium and went to the edge, pushing aside Aulish as the vice-president tried bodily to dissuade him. He reached down to take their hands, squeezing them in comfort. The crowds fell even more in love with him for it, raging their adoration to the sky.
There had never been any enemy. Only illness. And they could be healed, given back to their loved ones, so life could go on.
When they were hoarse at long last, they quieted. Malachi returned to the microphone. A hand went up in the audience, two hands, twelve hands, a hundred hands, then a thousand hands and two thousand and more, like they were a lost flock beneath their minister, and Malachi was, if not God, a highly favored intermediary.
The wind resumed its clamor through the trees, washing away much of Malachi’s speech to those like Ryla in the back. It did not matter. Everyone was fixated upon that slim form at the microphone. A drone c
amera dipped too close and Malachi ducked, laughing. They laughed along as he straightened, and shook their fists playfully with him to the rogue camera.
This world would come back together somehow. They felt it as an ironclad truth. Evidence of it was dressed in a suit, his beaming family to the side.
Then he was shaking hands with President Satter and Vice President Aulish, his father clapping him on the back, his mother counting her brood of chicks and smiling when her finger touched Malachi and she hit four. He offered his arms gallantly to his sisters and they accepted. The three of them went down the stairs as one. Then he passed out of Ryla’s view, but she knew Conlon would have those strapping young men appear to greet him, the pretty blonde to embrace him, the presents thrust out in congratulations and welcome.
The wind roared. Mouths gaped in laughter and dry hands slapped together as the Harris family came down the main aisle. Ryla caught a glimpse of Malachi between two burly shoulders when he passed through the back. He happened to be turning his head just at that moment, and he saw her there. Then he smiled to her with genuine joy, and she smiled back.
Happy. He was going to be all right. There would be some hard bumps in the road as his parents learned to let him go, but these were bumps that he could overcome. Everyone weathered hard knocks growing up. And while he might dislike being at the center of such focus, the Phoenix Project would surely have more successes in time. His celebrity would recede.
He would make friends and work and date, do what he pleased with his hair and go to church or not, meet that special someone and start his own family in the years ahead. The world had changed, but it had not ended. The future was waiting for him.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 67
