There were the faintest sounds of traffic from the other side of the slope, like big trucks going by. That must be Caravel. Did he skirt along the fence back to Mountain? He gauged the fence and decided to climb it instead. Wedging his sneakers into the links, he scaled it, moved gingerly over the single strand of barbed wire at the top, and dropped onto the other side.
He was so close!
Brennan rushed up the slope in dogged determination not to slow for his aching thighs. They might be coming up behind him any second and he was not going in their van to this confinement point! Let them collect that woman, accept a hundred dollars for her, and let her enjoy that place. He pushed on despite the pain, letting the beautiful greens of spring along this slope quicken his steps.
At the crest was a boulder in full light of the sun. He came to it and looked down to towering trees and tall buildings of the city far away, to a channel in the dirt that he could coast down to the pinch of Caravel Road visible below. The channel was steep, so steep as to be scary, but he trained his eyes on the road and the shag of trees beyond. The trees obscured the Nature Path. There he was going to be safe.
The weight of his foot in the channel collapsed the dirt, and he slid down several feet in terror before stronger earth bore him. They were not going to catch him! Nor would they catch Nevara, and he rejoiced as he stepped once more upon collapsing dirt. Pebbles rained down to that road far below. Catching himself on a rock, he waited and then let go to slide down farther.
He rejected the idea of being someone’s prize and he wanted to shout this so loudly that God heard. The channel spilled and saved him, spilled and saved him again. It grew less and less sharp the more he descended, until he could stand and run down the last part. Dirt and pebbles stormed about him, branches slapped against his cheeks and the trees laughed with wind. So loud their laughter for the passage of this wild son and as he ran into the road, he was free-
Micah
She wondered at what exact moment of time his spirit fled, when he cracked against the windshield, as he soared spinning over the roof, when he struck the pavement and rolled. Or was it after that, in those first still seconds of his body splayed across the yellow line. Half on one side, half on the other, his backpack torn off and thrown all the way to the rest area before the Nature Path extension. He had been knocked right out of his shoes.
Brakes squealed while Brennan was still in flight over the roof. He had not heard the oncoming car and Micah barely heard the thin whine of it herself. It had whipped around the curve just as Brennan exploded into the road, and then he was in flight. Hopefully that was when his soul left, launched away from the flying body, and that was better. Better than being trapped, albeit briefly, inside that broken form over the line.
Shouting, two young men got out of the car and ran to the body. Their faces engraved themselves in her eyes. A thin face, a fat face, both men had the same bushy eyebrows and thick lips. Maybe they were brothers or cousins, one inflated and the other deflated. Almost the same height and dressed in similar clothes, they wore identical expressions of horror.
Brennan stared unseeing to the extension where Micah was hidden by a bush. His neck was arched like a swan, his scarf yanked down, and the men cried out to see the stamp. They jumped away from the spreading blood and ran back to the car with the cracked windshield.
She had left the others at the benches around the bend in the path, all of them staring at another bleached-out map. Rapid footsteps were coming down the extension now, the pealing scream of the brakes having shattered the quiet. The car rushed away, rushed even though they had just struck someone by rushing. Micah stared at Brennan, who stared back with the same incomprehension.
The others screamed and pulled him from the road to the rest area, checked for his pulse and came in time to accept what Micah had known from the first conjunction of metal to flesh. Or maybe she hadn’t known until the pavement. She didn’t know what she knew, except that he was gone.
At the sound of motorcycles, they scurried back to the nature path. Micah darted forward, throwing off Austin’s hand out to stop her, and grabbed the strap of the black backpack. Then she sprinted after them up the slope and out of sight of the road. Her ankle turned out and she pressed on despite the pain. This was not the day to have worn clogs.
She should have taken Brennan’s sneakers. He had no need of them anymore. That was a mistake, to crouch there in shock pondering his soul when she should have canvassed for resources. A dead body had no use for material goods, and his soul would not begrudge them to her. This was the stuff of her world, and his was now made of different matters. She should have taken his sneakers! But the opportunity had slipped by, leaving her to run in the clogs she’d slipped on this morning when the world was a different place. Clogs and a light sweater since she was going to spend her day inside a heated school, and she hadn’t expected the dentist’s office to have its air-conditioning on. Outside now, the weak warmth of the sun was blown away by the wind. She should have stripped the body of the jacket and socks as well. What she had on was nothing, a paper-thin blue Camise sweater over a white tank, ankle socks, the heat of her body whicked away by the breeze and better clothing would have trapped it.
Micah was not supposed to think of these things. She should have charged out into the road and helped to drag him, sworn at her phone for having no reception in this dead spot on Caravel. She should have cried or prayed. But those things belonged to the world of this morning where she shrugged into the Camise with no thought to the cold. That it was disrespectful to disrobe the dead and check its pockets for money was part of that morning world, too, and she had to center herself in this one of the afternoon. It was not wrong for Micah to claim what Brennan did not need. The backpack was now hers, along with whatever was inside. Grief was a luxury, one they couldn’t afford in this strange new place. Yet she was not taking his things with disrespect.
At the top of the slope was that bleached-out map, faint red lines trailing to indiscernible landmarks of smudges and letter fragments. There were four avenues to travel, back the way they had come, two pulling out west in a loop, and one north. That information was all Austin remembered of his field trip here, a gabble of students armed with clipboards and pencils to mark off the botanical specimens they scuffled past in disinterest. The loop was small and framed by a splintering wooden fence, the far end visible from the map and intended for those requiring the easiest hikes. Within the loop were flowerbeds, the slashed state budget rendering them long ignored.
Austin went north and they followed. The path was ten to fifteen feet above the curves of Caravel and visible to the road in places between thin, naked trees stunted in some fire of the recent past. The grassy slope on the left side of the path went sharply upwards and would expose them even further to passing traffic if they climbed it, just like it was exposing a deer right now.
The clogs slid about her feet. Her mind was full of castigation for missing the chance to better prepare for this path. She had just been so shocked at what she’d witnessed. Yet just as grief was an indulgence, so was shock. She had to put it aside. One day she might leave pennies at Brennan’s grave like she did Trevor’s, but this was not that day.
She cast an eye down to the road. They should be running with more care, hiding when vehicles went by. Fresh bicycle tracks were impressed on the dirt path. They shouldn’t be running here at all, not by daylight.
Fuck these clogs. She was tempted to run without them.
He hadn’t heard that car coming and she hadn’t had time to cry out. It was over and done with before her mouth even opened. His backpack, her backpack now, banged against her with every step. Those men hadn’t even reached for a cell phone to call an ambulance, and discovered that they were out of service. They had just driven away.
Until the car hit Brennan, all of this had seemed to Micah like a surreal field trip. The change was too abrupt from the dentist’s office to running for her life. But wanting a graceful
segue was a luxury, too.
The path curved abruptly, bowing inward to the hill as a thicket of tall trees plunged down to the road. Austin stopped in the deep shade. He put his hands to his knees and panted as Zaley sprawled to the dirt in exhaustion. Micah kicked off the clogs and sat upon the path in dappled light, her ears keen to the passage of cars below. A wind blew and she shivered. Pulling off the backpack, she unzipped it in hopes of another layer to put on.
“You are such a ghoul,” Austin said angrily.
“He doesn’t need it.” She dumped everything out onto the dirt. There was a plastic water bottle, which was half-full. No, it was half-empty, that was how she had to think in a situation like this. Also in halves were the loaf of bread and the package of chocolate chip cookies. A comb, a bottle of Zyllevir, sweatpants and a T-shirt . . . when she pulled up the T-shirt, something fell out. It was a circular wooden carving of a stag, which stood on a fallen log. A crown of antlers stretched up to leafy branches overhead.
In the side pocket were pencils and pens beneath a paperback checked out from the Cloudy Valley High School library. War of the Widgets. The marker was at page fifty-three, and the book was due in two weeks. Corbin rubbed Zaley’s back as she cried (grief is a luxury) and Austin kept glaring at Micah like they had time for mourning appropriately. The dog just sat there having no idea of what was going on.
The plain blue T-shirt was short-sleeved. That was too bad. It was still one more layer than she had on now, and she wasn’t in a position to be picky. Pulling it over her head, she dragged out her hair and braided it quickly. The side pocket had a rubber band, which she used to tie off the braid.
“He isn’t even cold,” Corbin said about the way she treated Brennan’s things as her own. It had only been ten minutes or so since the car knocked Brennan from his body, and it felt like his mark was still on his belongings. Zaley just cried with her left hand over her face. Some of Brennan’s blood was on her fingers. Corbin exclaimed in horror to see it and yanked up his water bottle as Austin jerked her hand down. They cleaned her off and inspected her hands for open wounds.
“I don’t care,” Zaley wailed, and Corbin said, “I do!”
Micah continued to work on his backpack. Her backpack. These three were still in the morning world where what she was doing was beneath contempt. But if she fell over dead this instant, she would not begrudge them taking what was on her person. Right and wrong weren’t the absolutes that people thought they were. Their problem was the shock and grief were too fresh, and they had yet to understand that they’d lost the luxury of time and distance. Micah did not think that they’d be able to understand her explanation, so she stayed quiet. Imperative now was sorting what she needed from what she didn’t. She didn’t know how far they were going to be walking, her shoes were already a misery, and extra weight on her back would make it worse.
This was a simple and sturdy backpack, unadorned with reflective stripes along the material. It wasn’t what she would have picked out for herself. It was interesting to have that control taken away. To be forced to work with what she was given. She would have liked this new backpack even if it had big pink teddy bears all over it, because it was hers and all she had. Thinking of herself paging through hundreds of online selections as she had a year ago when her old backpack met its retirement, her bankcard on the desk beside her laptop and the hour she’d spent in search filled her with scorn. She could have made do with any of the backpacks on those pages. She should have pointed and clicked instead of dallying over padded laptop compartments, injection-molded ventilated shoulder straps, and recessed spine channels. That was a luxury she no longer had.
The half-empty water bottle, half-empty loaf of bread, and half-empty package of cookies were returned to the backpack. She popped the cap of the Zyllevir bottle and saw a bunch of pills inside. Then she checked over the sweatpants more closely. They were new, something Brennan must have acquired after the fire. She didn’t have to hold them up to know that they were a size too small, and she wasn’t going to care about that when the evening chill swept in.
Evening. It was late afternoon, and they had to plan for the coming night. Micah rolled up the sweatpants and put them in the bag. The T-shirt was helping to retain some of the heat from her body. How was this ghoulish when she was grateful for one more barrier to the cold? It might not be so ghoulish to the others when night rolled over them. They just couldn’t see ahead the way that she could. Bleu Cheese whined and Corbin gave her some of his water, drops falling to the dirt and wasted.
The pencils and pens Micah kept, since the weight was negligible. They might come in handy at some point. She set aside the stag and paperback to zip up the backpack. The food and water were enough for the time being, and night was their most pressing problem. The diner and its brace weren’t that far away, so did they stay here and try to pass in the morning or do it now? Should they attempt to cross at night? They had flashlights on their cell phones.
She should turn off her cell phone! Conserve the battery. It wasn’t like she could use it for anything anyway, except to check the time. Depressing the power button, she shut hers down to spare the half of the charge that remained.
Zaley touched the paperback and said, “I guess we could mail this back to the school.”
“I’ve got a stamp,” Micah said, and chucked it over her shoulder to the slope. Austin hissed, “Micah!” and retrieved it.
“It isn’t right to just . . . paw through his stuff like this,” Corbin said with the stag in his hand. “I remember seeing this on his desk when we went over there. This was obviously important to him if he packed it.”
“He’s gone and it’s not important to me,” Micah said. That sounded callous, like her comment to Flies with Crows about Hitler, the side of her that her mothers didn’t like. But Micah didn’t care for the ins and outs of respecting her elders and being sensitive to history; Flies with Crows deserved to be called on her idiocy. As to Brennan and his backpack, if they were reversed, Micah wouldn’t expect someone to find value in her personal trinkets. So she wasn’t being ghoulish or callous to not have need of the wooden carving or paperback.
The others disagreed, which she read in their posture as they inspected the rejected belongings. Zaley opened her backpack and placed the book inside with gentle care; Austin did the same with the stag. He had not brought his school backpack but another he’d been keeping in the back of the V-6 for a month. Micah saw the food in it and that returned her attention to the time of day. They needed more clothes to weather nights out here, for however long it took them to get somewhere safe. But even that was not the biggest issue at hand. If they tried to cross at night and the brace was still active, the Shepherds might see the light from the cell phones. “Does this path run close to the road the whole way to Salmon Park?”
“The map was pretty bleached out,” Zaley said apologetically, and Micah didn’t know why she was apologetic when she didn’t control the sun or the state budget. “It travels by the road for a while and then goes west before curving back to the city. It might split with another part going straight north but the lines were gone.”
“There were a lot of faint pink dashes in that western part,” Corbin said. “Maybe we’ll pass a map that’s not so thrashed.”
“Or just get cell service,” Austin said over his phone.
“You should turn that off and spare the battery,” Micah said. He wasn’t going to listen to her though, because of the backpack. He would take the time to be mad about it first and time was what they didn’t have! “We don’t know how close the path comes to the brace, or if the path itself is being braced. We can’t be that far from it now. I think we should go forward carefully and try to clear it before nightfall. Then we’ll have to pick a place to bunk down.”
“I’ll just call my grandparents to come and get us,” Corbin said. Then he shook his head. “Never mind. I forgot Salmon Park is braced, too. And Delmar, that’s huge! They’ll never get us out.”
“But this goes on for miles,” Austin said, gesturing to the woods. “I know that there’s a path somewhere that goes up to Charbot.”
Green, Micah thought. That was why he was thinking about Charbot. It was a green city, or it had been at last notice. The food and water wouldn’t last to Charbot. They would have to go to Salmon Park first and stock up. And on warmer clothes, sneakers or boots . . . if the Shepherds were that intent on collecting them, if their reach was that far and powerful, they could monitor her credit card transactions. She had twenty bucks in cash in her wallet, a few coins in the change pocket, and that was all. If Salmon Park had garage sales or a Goody-Goody charity store, they should go there. Or send Zaley, since she was the only one of them free to move without attracting attention. That bare neck was a resource. But these were matters for after the brace, not now.
Someone sneezed on the path from behind. All of them scurried for their things and dove for the steep copse of trees leading down to the road. The gun was in Zaley’s hand, making Micah believe for the first time that that nebbish of a girl had really shot a Shepherd. Who would have expected it of the ghost who could barely say boo? But when people were cornered in this afternoon world, which Zaley’s body resided within if not her mind, they acted for survival. She might still be thinking of returning books to the library, but she was also thinking of escape by any means possible.
The person was walking at a quick pace, and then a slow one. Micah should have gauged the distance from that sneeze and done a better job of covering their tracks. The dirt was disturbed all around where they had just been, and her clogs left tracks into the copse. Her feet were stinging to have them on. Listening hard to the odd way the person was moving, she thought it might be someone just hiking along and stopping to admire the greenery. The pace picked up once more, grit cracking under shoes, and that was followed by a rattling sniff.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 57
