“But you tried,” Corbin said. He slipped his jacket over the back of the chair and looked out to the dance floor. Elania followed his gaze to Zaley, who was laughing and bouncing around enthusiastically to the music when usually she was more of a wallflower. Corbin looked back with a silent question to Elania, who shrugged.
The doll was having another feed, someone yelling gross and Austin shouting that lactation was beautiful and natural, and then offering his other nipple to any thirsty dancers. Corbin ordered everyone at the table to join the dance, but the three with Sombra C declined. Elania went with him.
Three weeks of vacation lay ahead! The third week was so everyone in the district could be tested for Sombra C. Elania was happy for the extra time. While she danced, she thought about how she would look for scholarships, find something fun to read in her breaks, or kick back and watch television. The boys were agitating for a dog after watching an episode of Tame Me, Mom and Dad holding firm on the no pets rule, so maybe she’d take them along to Doctor Ghol’s and let them walk the dogs boarding there. She had a couple of extra credit assignments, although sadly none for math, and two shifts sorting donations. Otherwise the time was unmarked by plans. She was sure it was going to be perfect, the way every vacation was perfect at its inception.
The mood was so high that when a slow song began, everyone booed and Quinn dashed over to return the music to bouncy. The disco ball spun above, sending lights over the sea of happy faces. It was almost nine when Elania took a break and poured herself some soda. There was a heavy thump at the doors and a wave of cold air washed over her. She wondered who was leaving, but it was an arrival. The parent volunteers had long ago stopped checking IDs, and were scattered throughout the room eating cookies and talking.
The newcomer was a woman. Her thin, oily hair was cut badly, an uneven chop that left one side touching her shoulder and the other above it. The doors swung shut behind her with red splashed on the glass, red that had come from her hands, the institutional-like garb she was wearing, from gashes on her face. Elania was poised to go to the door (maybe this was someone’s mother who tripped in the parking lot, a stranger who had a car accident on the road, she needed an ambulance with those injuries), but the woman let loose a low, eerie chuckle, not of merriment but like that of a creature calling in the woods. The sound stopped Elania cold in her tracks.
The woman’s head turned and that was animal-like, too, an arch to the ceiling as another chuckle resounded from her throat. The chuckle turned to an agitated moan as her eyes roved crazily over the room. Disco ball light flashed upon her bloody, rent face. Elania stared at her dumbly, one of the very few to have noticed her come in.
A gun blasted outside.
People jerked in reflex at the tables and out on the dance floor, turning almost as one to look at the windows. It was pitch black out there, everywhere but for the little light shining on the grass from the room and that from the path lights. Even as Elania looked wildly from the woman to the windows, candy canes were tipping over and extinguishing. White lights burst in the dark of the parking lot like stars dipping low from the sky. They were falling to the building.
The doors opened. As countless figures closed in from the darkness, more came in.
Brennan
They were dreams walking through the door into the South Haven pavilion, like princesses in jewels and finery. Some had their hair loose and others put it up; some held to the arms of boys and others entered with female friends. The windows in the pavilion were large and plentiful. Within was a wonderland of lights and crystal and elegance. Their conversations did not carry outside to the car in which Brennan and Stephen sat, but they were full of laughter.
Every time the security guard patrolled the lot, the boys ducked down. They had only come so that Stephen could drop off his sister, swathed in iridescent chiffon and gabbing on her phone through the drive. She got out of the car with an excited goodbye, her tote bag swinging on her shoulder since she was staying overnight with a friend, and then the boys remained to watch. Brennan was staying at Stephen’s for the night, along with Corbin, the three of them going over there after the Welcome Mat party clean-up and planning to play video games until dawn. To be invited for an overnight was a new experience and Brennan was excited to go. The boys always remembered to speak up with him, even more than they needed to for him to hear.
Twenty minutes turned into forty minutes, forty to an hour, and still those girls arrived in ones and twos and threes to fill the room with beauty. In the back seat of the car were frosted cookies purchased for the Welcome Mat party. Stephen took one and Brennan took one, and then they took second helpings and third. The box was half-empty before they realized how much they had had.
“We’ll just buy another pack on the way,” Stephen said. Guilt expunged, Brennan lifted the box to the center console hungrily. He had had no dinner, since Mama brought a man home for a friendly meal and Brennan stormed out with a slammed door in his otherwise silent fulmination. He was sure that this man hid Papa somewhere inside his person, soon to look at Brennan without any respect. What Mama said over the last weeks when coming home from her schooling . . . Carlo is such a nice man; what a smart mind Carlo has; the teacher said only one person earned an A on that test in our whole class and I knew it was Carlo . . . filled Brennan with dread. He didn’t want to meet this Carlo, not until Brennan was big enough to fill the doorway.
The man had parked his car outside their house, knocked and stood expectantly on the stoop. A tall man, a reedy one, dressed not in jeans and a T-shirt for a friendly meal but clean, pressed trousers and a buttoned shirt. He had black-framed glasses and a pointed face. The weight of his head rested upon the slim wedge of his chin and slightly bulged out the flesh of his neck. In his hand was a bouquet, and one did not bring a bouquet for a friendly meal! Brennan was engulfed in the shadow cast by this man in the setting sun and was enraged to cast none of his own.
Now his temper faded at these girls going to their party, even the plain ones made beautiful by their garments. Stephen mentioned names when he knew them: that girl in blue was Kelly Dare, as dumb as a brick, so dumb that she didn’t understand time zones; that one was Wendy Nudenmyer and you could see her ass on her HomeBase page. They made Stephen angry, all of the girls over there, since Sabrina Bhatan had turned down his invitation to go and then his mom told him to take his little sister. Who took their own sister as a date? It was so clueless as to be an outrage. So he watched and denigrated the girls while Brennan watched and despaired for himself. Yanni was there and he did not allow himself to look for long, since Stephen might follow his gaze and be rude.
The boys at this party held open the doors and walked in with such careless ease, smart suits and combed hair, polished shoes and the air of people who belonged. Girls turned to greet them, and Brennan wondered what it would be like to have a girl smile merely because he walked into a room. In reflex, he smoothed down his hair. Why did it always have to stick up?
“They should notice us, you know that, don’t you?” Stephen asked, after the guard went by again. “We’re going to be the ones who have the good jobs, the good cars. Not the guys like Amin Gest over there. Football doesn’t last. Brains do. They’ll be all over the smart guys at our reunions and Amin will still be slinging pizzas and bragging about some ancient touchdown he scored. Hey, Amin! Gimme two pizzas!”
“Pump my gas,” Brennan said, liking the taste of it on his tongue.
“Change my tire,” Stephen said, intense in his excitement. “No more four-eyes, no more shove over, geek. It’ll be yes, Mr. Chang, and no problem, Mr. Chang. Right away, Mr. Chang. So we can let them enjoy these days. They don’t last. This world of theirs ends with graduation. It blows away like leaves.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Brennan pointed to one of the guys.
“Drinks his weight in beer and has a dead-end job mopping floors, grows a gut and rents a shithole until the day he dies. You and I are going to ha
ve mansions. Pools and tennis courts and gardeners, and he can’t get his landlord to fix the clog in his sink.”
Someone else could have Mr. Jenkins peering through the windows, obsessing about cats and dogs soiling his property. Brennan pointed to a bigger guy. “And that one?”
“Tony? He’s in my math class. Yeah, have fun tonight, Tony! Sent three times to the principal’s office for being a clown this year and let’s see how long that lasts at his first job. His boss isn’t going to laugh when he lifts a cheek and farts at the customers. Teachers have to put up with it by law, but the boss? Get the fuck out of my store and don’t come back, you piece of shit! The boss has a bottom line, and it’s not the one Tony’s farting from. And his date? That bitch Melanie at his side? She’s going to pork out his three kids and have a double-wide ass by age twenty-four, chain-smoking and spending her whole day on HomeBase posting lies about how great her life is.” Stephen waved his hand impatiently when Brennan pointed to a third boy. “Let’s go. Leave these assholes to the pedestal they’re standing on for the last time.”
They looked up the directions to the Welcome Mat party on Stephen’s cell phone. On the way, they stopped at Mr. Foods for another box of cookies, each paying half. Then they decided to go into the Pizza Whippers. Brennan got an individual plain cheese since it was the cheapest. He was in a bad mood by the time the car rolled out of the lot, wanting to be one of those guys in the restaurant ordering the regular-size, the supreme, those guys who plunked fat leather wallets on their tables when the check came. Stephen just assumed that Brennan was getting all A’s and headed for a great university after graduation; the truth was Brennan pulled a monotonous stream of B’s and would one day go to junior college for lack of funds.
But it was quintessentially Stephen to assume, just like how he assumed that Brennan would love the robot book, and that Brennan and Henry wanted to do what robotics project Stephen selected. Since he was paying for them, how could they argue? Henry still did. It was more important to Brennan to have friends. He could choose the less interesting project and get to do it, or insist on the more interesting one and get nothing. Where was Brennan going to get the money for those murderously expensive kits? Only Stephen had the dough. Right now they had the frame of a bug on a CD spindle in Mr. Tran’s classroom, just waiting to be wired, its controllers connected and program downloaded, its legs and antennae calibrated. Their next project was battle bots, waiting on the counter.
That monotony of B’s might be broken up a little with some B pluses this semester, an A- in math. Two lunches a week in the library were giving Brennan’s grades a modest improvement, Stephen coaching him in science and Henry in English. The librarian never checked the table far in the back. To keep it that way, they spoke only in whispers with the boys aiming for Brennan’s better ear, and dumped out bags of chips and pretzels rather than crinkle them.
Houses and businesses were strewn with holiday lights, and a church marquee read PEACE TO ALL. Brennan couldn’t take it to heart. There was so much he wanted yet so little he had. This was Papa’s fault, sending him away with knots. His real father would not have done this. He had died of a heart attack two months before Brennan was born. Mama said this at Thanksgiving in answer to a question never given voice. His real father wasn’t even old enough for a heart attack. It came upon him while riding his bicycle home from work as a tractor driver. He had been excited about his baby boy on the way, so excited that he sang while repainting the room blue with white trim. He made Mama sit on the couch while he cooked their meals and bought more baby clothes than Brennan could ever wear. This hat! Look at this hat! These socks! Tiny for his tiny feet!
Not a hit-and-run by some drunkard driving from winery to winery for tastings, to pop him from the bicycle like a cork from a champagne bottle. Not an accidental drowning in a reservoir clearing out weeds, blame lying at the feet of the boss. Death came from an internal weakness and that upset Brennan. A heart attack! Only that! He wanted his father to be a soldier.
Disgruntled, Brennan continued to stare out the window. Blue Hill was neither blue nor a hill, just a community of dark slopes in the night. He said, “I’ve never been here before.”
“You haven’t missed anything,” Stephen said. “Except for the eastern side, it’s a junked-up old place. I’ve been here for decathlons.”
“Junked-up,” Brennan repeated at a sullen encampment of trailer homes.
“So it’s cheaper to rent a place here for a party than Cloudy Valley.” Stephen turned north and then east, gesturing to a store. “See that? Who still goes to video stores instead of just streaming at home? People move out of Blue Hill so fast that they had to close two of their elementary schools. Hey! Fuck you, Gas-O Cheap-O! Eight bucks a gallon isn’t cheap!”
“Cheaper than Royal,” Brennan said, as the one he walked by on the way to school was almost twenty cents higher.
It was very dark, and little traffic was on the roads. Brennan widened the map on the phone and followed the purple arrows to Melmer. It was coming up fast. The street with the community center was on the north end of the city, which was not the uneven rectangle of Cloudy Valley but a squarish block with two protuberances at the top like a cat’s ears. Pinched between them were open space and one razor-straight residential road named Odalman that branched into side streets like the barbs of a feather.
A cacophony of light blazed from a real estate agency. Even the bushes on the lawn in front had been outlined with lights in the grass, and from every other corner and branch and window of the property were more. The boys stared at the over-the-top decorations as they traveled by. Beside the real estate place was a mortuary with only one light under the sign. Glancing over his shoulder for one last look at the agency, Stephen said, “Hang my lights. Those football muscles still good for anything?” Wind pulled at the car, trying to move it into the other lane, and he tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
From somewhere came the sound of sirens. They looked around for the source but did not see it. A restaurant, lathered from chimney to ground in lights and with X’s over each window, outdid the real estate agency. They spied ahead eagerly, spotting a blaze even more enormous. That one was the best, whatever business it did obscured by the overload of lights and reindeer and glowing candy canes. Santa and his sleigh were on the roof, attached to a train of reindeer lifting up into the air.
Stephen pulled into the turn lane and went north. He was mumbling to himself about rich bitches and assholes while Brennan silently hoped that Carlo was gone from home. He didn’t want to return to find the man on the sofa, drinking from one of their glasses and soaking up their warmth from the heater. Sucking in their air and expelling it in a chuckle, looking to Mama and thinking how beautiful she was and then to Brennan, calculating how many years it would be until he was out of the house. Men displaced each other, Papa coming in to fill the void that Brennan’s real father left, Carlo coming in to fill the void of Papa.
The houses and apartment buildings were lit here, but not so extravagantly. There was an assisted living center with a gate around it, and all it had were white lights around the posts. Stephen cursed as the residences petered out to a park on both sides of the narrowing road. The streetlights were far apart, and their lights were dim. “Where the hell are we? Check the map.”
Brennan sought the arrows on the cell phone. They had gone too far, turning on Odalman instead of Melmer. The car slowed as Stephen searched for a place to turn around, but the road was too slim and braced by sharp dips for rain collection. The map showed the end of the road coming up, and only one more side street. They would have to turn there.
Something caught Brennan’s eye in the park, a figure running through the grass and only made visible for a split second by a motion light that flicked on over a path between trees. The person pulled down into a hunched position when the light went on, and scurried doubled-over off the path and into darkness.
“Did you see that?” Brennan asked.
Swiping his cell phone, Stephen cursed at the map as he drove. “We might have to turn up there; I don’t see any driveways into this p-”
A pale figure hurtled onto the road in front of the car. The boys screamed and Stephen jerked to the right to avoid striking the person. The car shot over the lane and plummeted into the ditch, the front fender hitting the dirt hard and throwing the boys forward. The seatbelts kept them from striking the windshield. Stephen gasped, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”
The figure was gone. The headlights shone on dirt and matted dead leaves, weeds tangled down the slope. It was too steep an angle to back up, and the engine groaned when Stephen put the car in reverse. Getting his breath back, Brennan said, “You have to call someone.”
“I can’t call anyone!” Stephen exploded. “Do you know how much trouble I’ll be in?”
“It was that person who caused it,” Brennan protested.
“My dad won’t care! I could be dead behind the wheel and he’ll just see the car and freak the fuck out. Look at the hood!”
Light burst over them from a van racing south down the road. It slowed and then turned sideways, leaving it diagonally across the road and blocking the lanes. A second van was behind it. That driver slammed on the brakes, the metal scream of them slicing through the night. The door on the side of the first van rattled open and men jumped down to the ground in a great rush. They were dressed in black and wearing helmets with beams coming from them. Clear visors shielded their faces, and many had splatters of red fluid across them. Some leaped the ditch and sprinted into the darkness, one crossing the path and the light turning on. Others ran across the road, leaped the ditch there, and fanned out.
In an instant, the rest of them surrounded Stephen’s car. Light reflected off the barrels of their guns and both boys put up their hands in a shocked reflex. A man screamed, “Get out! Get out of the car or we’ll shoot!”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 26
