“Oh, honey, you new?” she said. “That’s your city color, green if it’s safe, red if not, yellow if it’s in-between. Learn the communities around you.”
In the quieter spaces of one song flowing into another, the DJ often had them hug reds and yellows, or ask greens where they lived. Sonoma, Sable Heights, and Vista were the greens most often mentioned. Once he had them raise their hands if they were related to a Shepherd or had lost someone close to them to Sombra C, and people swarmed in for hugs. Micah raised her hand, thinking of the doctor.
In time, she stopped seeing the stamps altogether. Everybody had one and who cared what the number was? They were just here to dance and have a good time. It was after one in the morning when she visited the restroom and checked her phone. Austin had gone to bed in a huff, telling her to do him the favor of not getting herself killed. She remembered the dog with a start. It was cold as hell out there and the mudpack wouldn’t retain heat forever. The butch security guard walked her to the V-6, where Harbo was sleeping under one of the blankets. He looked up blearily and yawned when Micah got in. “Who’s a good boy?”
Oh, Harbo was a good boy. He wagged his tail and enthusiastically accepted another treat. The guard softened to see the dog and Micah rolled down the passenger window so she could pat him. “Smart to travel with a dog these days,” she said, tickling Harbo’s chin and fussing at him.
They traveled back to Cloudy Valley, weariness tugging at her eyelids and her legs aching from the hours of dancing. Now she could deal with tomorrow, return to school and not scream while the world turned to ashes outside. The dog in his yard, her car in its spot, and tomorrow when her mothers were surprised to find her home, she’d say that Elania’s brothers had had screaming nightmares half the night and she came back to sleep. They would be very understanding of this.
When she kissed Austin’s cheek, he roused a little and spoke with his eyes closed. “I don’t want you to die.”
“I’m not going to die,” Micah said. She’d just refuse. “If someone has a strong enough will to live, she’ll live. Mind over matter.”
“That’s your loose screw talking. But you could die, Micah. You can’t go out like this, walking around at night with a stamp. And you can’t drive to other places without checking them out first online. I don’t want to get a call that you’ve been found dead somewhere, or your car’s been found and you’re gone. How can you ask me to get that call?”
“Is Cloudy Valley red, yellow, or green? Do you know?”
“Yellow, because of its proximity to Blue Hill.” He rolled over, turning his back to her in anger mixed with resignation. “You’re tempting fate. One day fate is going to call you on it. You absolutely cannot keep doing this, not now. You think you’re in charge, but you aren’t. Promise me that you’ll be more careful!”
She rested her forehead on his shoulder and crossed her fingers. “I promise.”
“Uncross your fingers.”
“I can’t. They’re stuck,” she said. He lashed out behind him, grabbed her hand, and uncrossed them. “What if I just cross the fingers on my other hand?”
“Give me your other hand, baby girl,” Austin ordered. She gave it over compliantly. “Promise me.”
“I promise. Sort of. Not really,” Micah said. He let go in disgust and curled in on himself. Walking her fingers down his arm, she cupped his hand in hers. “Don’t make me lie. I’ll check the cities before I go, okay? Just don’t put a tether on me. I can’t stand that.”
“It’s not a tether. It’s keeping you alive.”
It felt like a tether to Micah. “I put his porn in his mom’s mailbox. Except for one issue. That’s going to be my personal trophy, a twenty-year-old October issue of Jub-Jubs. I’m keeping it forever and you’re going to bury it with me. The centerfold is a double L-cup and her name is Pebbles. It should be Boulders.”
Silence. Then Austin giggled reluctantly. “In his mom’s mailbox? You’re such a lowdown dirty fucker, Jubilee Eclipse.”
Kissing his cheek a second time, she whispered, “He’s a piece of shit who lives in shit, lovely Aussie. He wakes up in shit and eats shit and goes to sleep in shit. He’s got shit for prospects, shit for looks, shit for brains, and a monitoring bracelet around his ankle that chafes his shitty skin. Now he’s a shit zombie just like us, and Zyllevir makes him puke.”
“Good,” Austin whispered fiercely into the pitch black of the night, and she crept downstairs to her room.
Austin
He had not seen it coming, and it left him blasted.
When he was ten years old and realized what he was, he had tried to hang himself. That day Rudy French had enlightened him on the playground as to the particular characteristics of homosexual men. Boys who liked boys had to wear girl clothes. They put on makeup and danced ballet. They cried like sissies at the drop of a hat.
At the time, Austin had been madly in love with a boy in the sixth grade who didn’t know Austin was even alive. Dalton McDermott. His birthday was Christmas Day. Dark hair, brown eyes, a big laugh and crooked smile . . . Austin could have looked at him all day, but had to settle for watching the boy charge back and forth on the soccer field during recess. One of Austin’s classmates was a girl who knew all about astrology, and Austin had asked without naming names if Aries was compatible with Capricorn. She said no, and he was devastated.
Dalton liked to brag that he had never spent more than two years in any school since his father’s work kept the family on the move, and to think of him scooped away was equally devastating. Whenever they had assemblies, Austin tried to position himself somewhere where he could look to his heart’s content. That was hard to do since his grade naturally sat in front of the older kids.
All of this made him a boy who liked boys, and it meant he was supposed to wear girl clothes, put on makeup, and learn how to dance ballet. He would be a joke, some screaming queen like he saw on television flapping a wrist and saying things like oh, you and talking with a lisp.
He knew what happened to those people. Mamma said they were going to burn in hell. That wasn’t God’s way, men acting like women, women acting like men. Their parents must be so ashamed to have sons and daughters like that! When the news showed gay parades in June, she made a face and changed the channel. Disgusting.
Austin’s uncles had called him a sissy for crying when a football hit him in the face at six; they’d mocked him as a girl for cooing over an adorable red kitten. He thought the parades on the news looked like fun, everyone cheering for floats and waving rainbow flags. So he was already pretty far down the road to gay, except that he didn’t dance ballet or wear girl clothes or put on makeup, or want to do any of these things either. Rudy French didn’t make it seem like homosexual men had a choice.
Once home from school that day, he looked at the clothes in Mamma’s closet. The blouses, the floral sweaters, the skirts that buttoned around her thick trunk of a waist . . . Austin didn’t want to walk around in clothes like that! Hearing laughter at a boy pretending to be a girl. The boys in his class thought the girls were stupid, tattling to the teacher for every little thing, coloring unicorns during art, some of them sighing over Princess Glam’s fancy dresses when the class watched cartoons through rainy recesses. Austin liked hanging out with the girls, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be a girl. Yet that was what being gay meant!
With tears running down his cheeks, he looped a belt over the bar in the closet and had choked himself nearly unconscious by the time Mamma found him. She pulled him out and screamed, “What the hell are you doing?”
He screamed back, “I’m gay, Mamma!” and could not stop screaming it. “I’m gay! I’m gay! I’m gay!”
She slapped him so hard that his neck cracked. “You are not! You are a normal little boy!” They had never spoken of it again, except for her comment later that day, “If you tell your uncles, they’ll beat the shit out of you.” Unspoken was and I’ll let them.
But it was Sombra C that expel
led him from her heart. He hadn’t expected that. When he sobbed into the phone that his test was positive, she said that he should be put down. Then she hung up. Just like that, she was no longer his mother. Put down. Euthanized. The claim of blood had nothing on the claim of the virus, and the virus was his mother now.
He walked around with what she had said heavy on his shoulders. His mother had decided to bring him into this world, and now she had decided it was time for him to leave it. The specialist said mildly that he’d seen that reaction before in other families. Austin wanted to die, if it would make her happy. He looked at the bottles of pills at the pharmacy while picking up his Zyllevir and wondered how much it took; he tried to discern if his weight would be too much on a bar or light fixture if he hung himself.
He’d cried, oh God, how he had cried in bed, in the bathroom, next to Terra in her study and wrapped in Faye’s arms in the kitchen. Faye said that he had to believe with all of his heart that his mother could change, and that he should keep trying with her. If she wouldn’t pick up her phone, leave a message. Send texts. Write cards. Let her see that he was the same person he had always been, just with a bit of a virus. He went online and agonized over boxed sets of cards, deciding on very beautiful ones of watercolor flowers. Mamma would like those, the swirl of petals on the pink rose, the orchids at the crown of the slender stem, the clutches of rhododendrons. He had money from his time at the Cool Spoon, and Micah’s mothers paid him to help around the house.
What was he to write in the cards? Not everything in his heart of love and betrayal, since that would turn her away further. He censored himself viciously and wrote about New Year’s and school, how cold it was, and that he hoped she had wonderful plans for her birthday on the first of February.
Nothing about his illness, or about how it took an act of courage daily just to walk out the door and go to school. He didn’t mention the suicide of one of the students infected at the party, a sophomore boy in Brennan’s science class. He didn’t say anything about the man walking around the Cloudy Valley High campus, asking students to point out the stamped kids. The guy got away before the police came. Every school in the district was put on lockdown in response, Elania’s father so frightened that he called in a substitute teacher and pulled all four of the Douglas children out of class for two days. The boys were being harassed for having a zombie sister, and many children refused to play with them. It wasn’t far for an unhinged mind to leap, thinking that the triplets might be harboring infection and how wise it would be to take them out, too. Because nearly the entire population of Welcome Mat was infected with Sombra C (and it went without saying the spring bake sale was canceled), Mr. Tran waited until they came in for the club and then locked the door. When anyone knocked, the tiny teacher was out of his office like a shot to check through the drawn shades. The guy was a twig, but a little protection was better than none. No, Austin could tell Mamma none of that!
They didn’t do pieces any more in their club, just watched the news on a laptop. An undercover journalist took video of a Shepherd training camp in Tennessee, hundreds of armed men and women, young and old, black and white wearing uniforms and marching in strict lines. Militarized. The only good zombie is a dead zombie, an eager new recruit said unwittingly into the hidden camera. They break us down, ‘cause some of those zombies are little kids, grammas. But you gotta be able to pull that trigger, even on babies, even on your own family. We practice on dummies. That’s the only way humanity is going to survive, man! It’s the apocalypse! And the recruit cheered, throwing her head back and laughing to the heavens. The undercover journalist asked her age, and she said eighteen.
Mamma was turning thirty-seven on her birthday. He did not know what to get her for a present. Micah didn’t think he should send anything, and she thought it was dumb to try to weasel his way back into his mother’s heart with those cards. Even if Mamma forgave the Sombra C, she was just going to hate him anew when she could no longer avoid the fact that he was gay. He couldn’t pretend forever that a boyfriend was his roommate, who just happened to take vacations with him every year and never seemed to have a girlfriend either. Micah viewed this as a clean break. To Austin, it was anything but clean.
Once he mentioned his Sombra C to Blayre, the cheery communiqué between them ceased. Austin wasn’t fit to even be someone’s online friend now. Put down. Like a dog or cat with a terminal disease. He even cried in Welcome Mat, but half of them were crying as well. The world was falling apart, not just his family. There on the screen were hundreds of people training to kill everyone in this room except for Mr. Tran and Zaley, and they wouldn’t particularly care if either was caught in the crossfire. Zaley already had been.
It was wrenching to watch her and Corbin struggle with their injuries, the two of them working out a system where she pinned down a can of soda in her good hand and he opened it with his good hand. They did the same with their sandwiches, each taking a lip of the sealed plastic bags and pulling. Both laughed about it, but Brennan looked on with tight lips and Austin didn’t see the joke. Zaley’s locker was near his, and trading books one-handed was a bitch of a task. Austin helped when he was there at the same time and barked at two guys shoving each other not to jostle her arm. One said, “Ooh, don’t make the zombie mad!”
“All we have to do is tell a teacher you spat at us, and you’re expelled,” said the other boy in nasty glee. They were scrawny freshmen a foot shorter than Austin but had no fear of him. His stamp gave them a trump card.
“And I’ll tell them you lied!” Zaley retorted in a temper, and they could say nothing with her neck as white as snow. It always surprised Austin, those rare occasions when Zaley spoke up.
Watching the screen full of training Shepherds had drained the blood from her face, and she was speechless when Austin asked if they should worry about the Cloudy Valley Shepherds. He knew her father was one. Everyone at the table stared as she clutched after words. “I . . . I don’t know. They haven’t had a meeting at my house in ages. Dad goes off for his meetings and paces.”
“Think he was one of those cullers the cops can’t identify in the camera feed?” Micah asked.
Zaley blanched even more. “He’s over three hundred pounds, Micah. He wouldn’t be hard to identify. I saw a picture of him at a party that night with other Shepherds.”
“What did they talk about in the meetings you did hear?” Austin asked.
“Politics mostly. Paces. They mentioned Murdoch in October sometime, but not about attacking it! One of the guys had his wife picketing. Writing letters to the local paper, I think. They’re mostly a bunch of middle-aged fat dudes and a few chicks who swill beer and yell a lot. There was none of this in our living room!” Zaley made a wild gesture to the screen, where recruits were giving war cries as they ran over a snowy field to stab dummies with bayonets. The reporter gave an update that this training camp had been disbanded, but with the resigned look of a person who knew it would just continue somewhere else.
On the last day of January when Inigo was destroyed, Austin did not get out of bed. A defiant voice issued from his laptop. Inigo will rise from these ashes. A network of bombs brought it down by a quartet of residents with fake stamps on their necks. The infuriated businessman who created it promised that the community was coming back with a Sanya Smart Shield, the absolute best in technology.
Austin buried his face in the pillow, imagining that the sounds of this house were the sounds of his apartment. It didn’t work, Micah’s moms chatting and laughing when his mom was quiet until she had her coffee. The water in the pipes swished rather than rattled. Even the birds made different cries out the window, and the mattress beneath him had a different firmness and smell.
Mamma wasn’t answering any of his letters or calls. He hadn’t contacted his uncles either, who he saw only sporadically anyway. They didn’t like driving up to northern California and Mamma didn’t like driving down to southern California, so more often than not no one drove and they
talked on the phone. Lately she’d been mad at Uncle Jimmy for dating a woman who didn’t care that she had two daughters and no son, and didn’t want any more children. This was offensive to Mamma, who wanted Uncle Jimmy to have a son of his own. Any woman could have girls, but a woman didn’t become a mother until she had a son. That was a miracle, to give life to difference rather than sameness. Until her brother dumped this woman, or the woman came to her senses, there was no reason for him to call Mamma.
On the inside, Austin had laughed at the time to hear such a quirky belief system. When people asked Mamma if she planned to have more children, she said why? She did it right the first time. People who only had daughters were to be pitied, and Micah’s family was an abomination of unchecked estrogen and devilry.
Mamma was also mad at Uncle Markus for sending wine as her last birthday gift when he knew that she got her spirit from the Bible, not a bottle. He compounded his offense when he told her to loosen up, so Mamma hadn’t spoken more than ten words to him in almost a year. When her phone rang with his name popping up, she ignored it. The messages were deleted unheard.
She had done that to Austin now, cut him off exactly like her mother and sister, like she was doing to Uncle Markus. Mamma didn’t even bring up their names. It was like they never existed, excised from her memory, and she did not seem to care or miss them. Put down. If Austin put himself down, would she love him again? Or had he already been sanded away, so his death would be no more meaningful than a stranger’s? Like Carsen Rhodes’ death, just some boy she didn’t know. Gossip filtered through the school about how he’d begged his parents to homeschool him and they refused. He’d hung himself in the garage. Now his parents wanted to sue the school for the bullying Carsen had endured, and the administration was saying it hadn’t received any complaints so how was it to know there had been a problem? Austin was sorry that he hadn’t reached out to the boy in their Tuesday and Thursday lunches in the filing room. But the kid had obviously wanted to be left alone. A lot of the newly infected students came in with music blasting through earphones, spread out in the room to eat, and ignored one another. No one wanted to break bread with zombies, not even other zombies. The forcefields were invisible but impenetrable.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 39
