“The president isn’t fucking magical!” Corbin almost yelled, still in the present tense where it was safe, where this wasn’t real. “Easy for us to second guess. That takes money and time and infrastructure that he didn’t have-”
He trailed off and they followed his eyes to the screen. Shepherds somewhere were in jubilation. Their mouths were open in shouts, and they gave each other high-fives. Two waved a hastily made sign on a white sheet, the black paint wet and still running. Ding-dong, the Ching-Chong’s dead! Those in the Cool Spoon choked in astonishment at the baldness of the cruel glee on that sign, in those faces.
“This is my country, too,” Stephen hissed to the television.
The ticker tape read that the vice-president was now president, and Tom said sulkily, “Not so bad for you girls. Got yourself a woman for president now.”
“Shut the hell up!” Shelly spat.
“This wasn’t how I wanted to get it,” Elania said quietly and calmly to his outrageous remark. Corbin stormed out the door to the parking lot. With a wail of Corbie-eee-eee, Sally chased after him.
No customers came in and few cars traveled the road. Mr. Yates called with orders to put up the Half-Off Surprise Day sign in the window as a lure, since he was a dick wanting to capitalize on this tragedy. Austin was going to remember that, too. The ethnic Libran, teachers watching Rudy get pounded, Mr. Yates hoping to score some extra bucks from people looking to sugar for comfort on the worst day in their shared history.
Taking an ice cream sandwich from the freezer in back, Austin slipped a dollar in the register, dutifully put up the sign, and reclaimed his seat by Zaley. Her cell was in her hand, an endless river of texts going down the screen from her mother begging and then demanding to know where she was and when she would be home. Even as he peeked surreptitiously, the phone trembled in her fingers as another message came in. She sagged against Austin and read the new threat. Grounded! For a whole week, young lady! Abruptly she pulled away with an embarrassed glance to Elania, though it had only been the comfort of someone else in shock, nothing sexual.
Half-Off Surprise Day! No one responded to the sign. The flag at the store across the street was lowered to half-mast. Candles were lit in governments around the world in tribute to the fallen president, and the screen filled with flickering lights. Then a police car chugged down the road, a stentorian voice over a loudspeaker saying, “Lock all doors. Lock all doors. Turn off lights. Gunfire reported nearby.”
They flew around the building, Janie and Zaley and Brennan dashing to lower the blinds, Micah and Shelly darting to the back and Austin to the front for the doors, the others scattering to check the restroom windows and flick off the lights. The walls in the front room were glass, so they pulled chairs to the back where it was cinderblock and looked to the television and their phones nervously. Yanni wanted to run to her car and go home, but they stopped her from leaving.
Austin wasn’t part of this world; there had been some mistake. As Yanni pouted, he noticed Micah was gone. Of course she was gone, out to find the source of the gunfire, and Austin wanted to scream at her. His text was furious and her response placid: all clear. A fight had broken out at Cornie’s Bar, drunken idiots squabbling about politics and one drawing a weapon. Someone had come out in a body bag; more had been taken away in ambulances at top speed. Police were also arresting a pair of goons for smashing the windows of the television store across the street from Cornie’s with intentions to loot. Other people with the same idea had run away at the sirens. The road was blocked off with every squad car Cloudy Valley possessed.
Want a 42-inch or a 50-inch? Micah wrote.
I want to beat your stupid ass, Austin answered. Get in your fucking car, lock the doors, and go home.
“Calm down, she’s like not even your girlfriend. You barely talk to Elania!” Yanni said, reading over his shoulder. Austin snapped his phone away and hated her for thinking Micah couldn’t just be his best friend. Yanni was happy to have the all clear and accepted Brennan’s offer to be walked to her car. Austin barely knew the boy, but he looked like he was in a daze at the girl’s hand around his arm. He almost barked at Austin when the door would not come undone, the lock stuck where it always got stuck, and Austin gave him a long, hard look until he flushed and turned away. A few others left with them in a tight clutch.
“You don’t have to do that,” Austin said once the door was relocked. Zaley was cleaning up the colossal mess they had made from their ice cream earlier.
“I don’t want to go home,” Zaley said baldly, and continued to stack bowls. Austin let her. Once she was home, she was grounded, so why hurry to go home? The tables and counters had to be wiped, the bowls and utensils run through the dishwasher, the floor mopped, the ice creams covered, machines cleaned, straws restocked, the trash taken out and more. There was plenty to do and plenty of hands, two more when Micah returned. She put her hand to his back, sorry that she had scared him, not sorry that she had gone out, and did the mopping since he hated that task most of all. It was too early to close but Austin did not care. If people were running around the Cloudy Valley downtown, starting fights and waving guns, he wasn’t going to make it easy by leaving the door unlocked.
“Do you think we should cancel the party?” Elania asked, having taken up the task of loading the dishwasher in the back. He did speak to her, no matter what Yanni said. They were friends, not really close ones but good, and he didn’t have to worry about her, not like Micah. Elania wasn’t missing a piece.
Mad to be thinking about the party at this time, Austin said, “We don’t have anything to celebrate. It doesn’t even seem like we should be talking about it!”
“But we aren’t meaning to be disrespectful,” Elania said, like he was one of her little brothers having a fit. “This is something we should talk about soon, since the party is coming up fast. We either cancel it and get our deposit back, or incorporate what has happened into the party.”
That was impossible. “Like how?”
“I don’t know. A moment of silence? We could put up a picture of him, candles, a place in the room where people could go to pay their respects.”
He could not see his way to both of those things, the music and dancing, the tree and menorah and Solstice displays juxtaposed to a somber corner for a dead president. That was worse than ignoring it. A moment of silence? Standing at tables covered in candy and ribbons, the bounce of the music in abeyance but still resonant in the air, no, that would not do.
Zaley brought back more bowls to scrape and talked with Elania about taking down the signs at school, how best to move the news through the grapevine that the party was canceled. Micah swish-swished the mop behind the ice cream counter as Austin tidied the restrooms, dumping the trash into one big bag and tying it off to be set by the back door. Life was moving on when it should freeze. Somewhere three fatherless sons were being given dinner, a widow was disembarking a plane to a waiting armored car. The vice president was preparing to speak to the nation at eight and they were accepting this, that a boy barely out of babyhood had been laden with explosives and told to hug the president.
The white man had his turn on the seat of power and we respected it. The black man had his turn and we respected it. But the Chinese man! No, we can’t have the Chinese man! America would rather blow him up than have a Chinese man sit on that seat. --- L. Shen. It was scrolled along the ticker tape on the television in the front room, taken from someone’s bitter email to the news station. Following it was a vituperative message about America blowing itself up in short order once the new president got on the rag. The screen showed a picture of the president and his wife, of their sons arranged in a shrinking line. Nineteen, fourteen, ten.
“We’re not cancelling it,” Micah said in the back room, where she was mopping between the counter and the freezer. Austin brought back another filled trash bag.
“It’s just not right,” Elania said. “A memorial and a party don’t go together, and we can�
��t overlook what has happened.”
“Who says we’re overlooking it?” Micah asked, her long hair swinging as she straightened from her stoop. “How does canceling the party change what’s happened? How is it paying him respect to ignore our lives? Do you know how the president and his wife met? It was at a party, a holiday party at their law firm. They were having a white elephant gift exchange, and he got the silly gift she’d brought. Let’s have one of our own in a nod to that. I don’t see what’s disrespectful there. I think it would make him smile.”
“But we’re making something happy about something that’s sad,” Zaley said, rushing ahead to placate, “I’m not saying that doesn’t sound like fun-”
“If you died, would you want everyone sitting around moping? Or doing something that was once one of your favorite memories?” Micah argued. “I vote yes, even though I’m not in the triumvirate and I don’t get a vote.”
“Hey, hey, you still have a voice,” Elania protested. Her phone buzzed with a text from her parents. “I’ve got to go. Austin, do you feel any particular way?”
“How much of that was just a really good story?” he asked Micah.
“God’s own truth,” Micah said. “It’s right there in his autobiography.”
He was going to look that up tonight to see which part was her bullshit and which was real, and if it was real, he liked it. A gift exchange was okay to do. Maybe some bizarre present of his would land in the hands of a sweet guy at the party, some boy at the school he’d never met. Even if it didn’t, that was all right. It was the carrying-on of the ritual, the chance of what could happen, the memory of what had happened that counted, and Austin could be at peace with the party in this way.
They left in a group once the store was clean, Zaley tempted to take them up on offers to have an overnight, but in the end she caved to the inevitable of what lay in wait at home. Austin walked the mile to his apartment, passing the street with Cornie’s Bar cordoned off in caution tape and squad cars. There was glass on the sidewalk in front of the television store.
Mamma was not yet home so he made himself a bowl of cereal and watched the news on his laptop. Another second grader had died. It was just a rumor that the little boy had said anything about having a present. Now it was believed he hadn’t said a word.
The perpetrators had been named not by federal agents but by some activist organization that tracked them down faster online and posted the information. Aaron Mellor. Gene Smith. Jalene Akamu. All were in their twenties. The boy had been Jalene’s stepson, his father having died in July of Sombra C. They had a room at a hotel close to the school. Agents stormed the place. Thousands of screaming citizens ringed the building, squashing the garden to shreds and refusing to leave, and all to find that Jalene and Gene were long dead by self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Aaron was still alive, though gravely injured. His ambulance never made it to the hospital. Frenzied people stopped the vehicle, held the agents and emergency workers at bay with an arsenal, and finished the job Aaron had started.
“Are they trying to recover the body?” a reporter asked the one on scene.
It was dark around her, although lights moved crazily in the distance. She shook her head. “There’s nothing left to recover, Marty.”
So these people could not even be held accountable for their crimes. Austin quit the news for MeetFriends, trying to get back to where he had been before the hush. He should not do this on his personal laptop. That was dangerous. Erase his browsing history when he was done, clear the cache, and replace it with innocent visits to college sites and The Daily Cheese to cover his tracks. The reverend at their church said homosexuals were not God’s reflection, Mamma nodding hard in agreement, but when Austin looked in the mirror, it was hard to believe that the devil molded him. If God was love, then God should love Austin no matter who and what he was.
A little green light was blinking by that hot mess junior college student with the rumpled hair in the public restroom. He was online, breezing about the site. Austin clicked and wrote in the message box, his heart in his throat and his breath a wheeze around it. You do realize that Libra is not an ethnicity?
Silence. Oh, that had been stupid! What the hell possessed him to do that? He was desperate to take the message back, suck it out of the Internet and press delete, but it was gone now. Innocent, it was an innocent mistake clicking on MaybeDatey, he’d meant to click on GroupFun for an activity like soccer at Penger Park. The cursor had just gone down one too far. Austin clicked on that to convince himself of the truth, noting the times of the games and how many people were coming. He surfed all of their particulars and checked on his to reassure himself that nothing incriminating was there. Not even his full name, just his initials, age, and a list of manly sports and interests. He’d skipped the box for sexual orientation, nor put in a picture.
Mamma called, on the way home with burritos from Tic-Tac-Taco. In her opinion, the president would be alive if he’d just dropped a bomb on Colorado as soon as Sombra C broke out. Then his boys would still have a father. Aghast at that loony solution, Austin cried, “Mamma!” and she said, “He let this get out-of-hand, too busy trying to get himself reelected. Now we’ve got Shepherds and zombies everywhere! They all need to be packed into a spaceship and sent directly to the sun.”
“The zombies don’t mean to have Sombra C,” Austin protested. His mother saw things in such stark colors.
“Don’t they?” Mamma railed. “Stop getting tattoos and doing drugs! Get into church and learn how to be a man to a woman! Sombra C will go away fast enough if people live the way God intended.”
As they hung up, the new mail symbol flickered on the screen. He clicked on the tiny envelope, feeling a sense of urgency since Mamma was almost home. There was the guy in the restroom snapping his own picture, the disembodied feet in the stall behind him, and he had written: But it got your attention, didn’t it?
And Austin laughed, unable to throttle it.
Set Three
Zaley
The dishwasher was broken, so she had washed the plates in a basin of blood. Her hands beneath the red froth, she picked at the knuckles of utensils. A bowl had fastened itself to the bottom of the basin, and it squelched wetly when she pried it free. That was the way she imagined it sounded when an eye was prized from its socket.
This was how she saw things with the news playing the world’s gruesome happenings twenty-four hours a day. Splashes of gore dripped down the walls of the living room; she vacuumed while envisioning hair and chunks of tissue going up the tube. Once she stepped outside her room, she was drowning in blood and bullets, disembowelments and sundered flesh. Regressive freakouts, bombings, lynchings, cullers, a zombie attacking kids in a dark theater, missing people . . . She looked at her father, eager and shouting for quiet at each breaking development, and was afraid.
Their house was under siege from that screen. It always surprised her to go outside and see that the world was not on fire. Well, some of it was. California was a tinderbox just waiting for a spark from a tossed cigarette butt. Four times now since school started she had left the house so fast that she forgot her lunch, so hungry for freedom, so desperate to be away from death and maiming that the prospect of hunger didn’t register.
His hoard had at last exceeded the capabilities of the house to contain it, and in glee he purchased a shed. The bunker, he called the windowless steel storage unit in the backyard. It was crowded with shelves packed to the roof. Dad had moved every ounce of goods from the house himself, and bought a twin-size airbed in case they had to take shelter in there. Was he thinking that all three would sleep together on that tiny bed? How were they to go to the bathroom? How were they going to breathe? It was kept locked to prevent theft.
Already this house was claustrophobic in size and some horrible day, Zaley might be living in the bunker unable to get more than two steps away from either of her parents. If that happened, she was going to take the gun (one of the new ones, there were six now
scattered around) and end it. That kept her calm, and every time she passed the gun on the bookshelves, she looked at it deliberately.
At night she took out her photo album, kept hidden under the vomitus that seventeen years of life had created in her closet, and paged through it. She was so happy in those pictures, in a crowd of friends, teachers beaming at her side. Her favorite was a beautiful shot of Corbin and herself when they were dating, but she could not recall the feeling that she had had back then. Who was that glowing girl wrapped up in his arms? No one would guess that anything was wrong in her life, not with that smile.
Sometimes she was angry, wanting to take a baseball bat to the television, to the bunker, to smash everything until her father looked up and her mother backed off, and smash it some more. Most of the time, she was numb. Too heavy to get out of bed, to lift her spoon at breakfast, too heavy to protest when Mom said hold still and popped a pimple on her forehead. Her body was not her own; her mind was not her own. Though it still got a rise out of her when Mom asked if Zaley needed help in the toilet stall at Pizza Whippers one evening. Zaley looked darkly at the prong of the coat hanger and thought about striking her head against it so hard that she impaled herself.
She was not going to make it to college. It was too far away, unreal and unattainable. This would go on and on and on until she stopped looking at the gun on the encyclopedias and picked it up. Dad would assume the shot had emanated from the television, and shout for quiet to see if a bullet had lodged itself in the new president. The sun rose daily on fresh horrors but it was never enough for him. He wanted cause to use his bunker.
The Shepherds had had another meeting in their house, although Mom ferried her away fast for girl time. When they returned, Dad thrust out a pad of paper and demanded Zaley write down the names of any new students with Sombra C at Cloudy Valley High, for the future. For the future? She echoed the phrase, not understanding how one thought jumped to another, and he said that Shepherds had short-range sights and long-range sights. She didn’t know what that meant either. Meetings were becoming more and more frequent, three a week, four a week, Dad charged like a firecracker to go.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 21
