In the future when everything had calmed down, authorities would explore this trail and discover what was left of their bodies. Then it was going to come down to DNA and missing reports, reconstructing their faces from their skulls. Feeling a little sick, Elania clucked to the dog for sniffing at rocks. Bleu Cheese gave her a look of umbrage, like only Corbin was allowed to discipline her. But she stopped.
Down in a ravine was a crumpled form over a boulder, the woman’s fixed eyes staring straight into the ground. She was recently dead. There wasn’t a smell yet. Her skin was drawn tightly over her bare ribcage and the bottoms of her feet were dirty. They kept walking. Enough bodies and it would become rote, just the new normal of the landscape when every body was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.
That blinded, wailing man in the suit on the hillside last night . . . Elania had had to restrain herself from climbing down and offering help. There had even been a child out here, who came halfway up the hill and then went north. It was a boy no bigger than the triplets, dressed in a reflective sports T-shirt and shorts. Someone had dumped him off in this place, actually opened the car door and made him get out. Probably in broad daylight, so he would naturally aim for the shade of the trees. It was just so sick! To think of one of her brothers out here, roving the hills insensibly and wailing made her feel terrible. No matter how feral they got, they were still human. She couldn’t dump them out here to die.
They came around another bend of the path and stopped short. A man was standing upon it not twenty feet away. There was something off about his posture, one shoulder hitched higher than the other. The hem of his shirt was loose, and his shorts were ragged and dirty. He was staring at nothing, his gaze going up into the trees. The sound of their footsteps hadn’t attracted his attention, nor did the growl rising from the dog. Corbin tapped her butt with his shoe meaningfully and the growl cut off.
There was no way around the man on the right side of the trail. A giant boulder was there. Green with moss, it rose ten feet into the air and had to be thirty feet wide. On the left was a ravine.
At no provocation, the man turned and looked at them. He was a pleasant looking guy, a firm chin and heavy brow, and he had wavy brown hair. The muscles in his legs were sculpted and rock hard, a biker’s legs. A stamp shined on his neck, and the front of his rumpled T-shirt bore a message. PLEASE leave me alone. Zyllevir makes me SICK.
His mouth worked. No words came out. Nor did any animal sounds. Zaley whispered what the shirt said to Corbin. The man motioned, a lurch of his arm down the ravine. An orange tent was there. The zipper was undone, showing a cooler and an air mattress inside. The message on his shirt was repeated on the side of the tent. He had come out here to die.
“His stamp says six percent,” Micah whispered. Far beyond that now without Zyllevir, his feet were black with gangrene.
“Should we go back?” Austin whispered.
“I guess we could walk closer and see his reaction first,” Elania said. They took a cautious step forward and examined the man. His mouth worked again. Very, very slowly, his fingers curled into a fist. Freezing, they stood there and stared at him. Micah’s finger slid to the trigger of the gun. His fist didn’t fully form, as the index finger remained extended. He pivoted his arm and pressed his fist clumsily to the message on his shirt.
“He wants us to understand,” Elania whispered. She nodded to him. It was a slow movement to not alarm him, and a long one to give him time to interpret. He watched her do this, and then his gaze floated back to the trees. His hitched shoulder never came down to match the other one. Elania pressed herself to the edge of the trail by the mossy boulder and walked closer. The leash was short in her hand, forcing the dog to walk right at her side. When Bleu Cheese started to growl, Elania tapped her butt hard. The dog quieted.
The others formed a single file line to do the same. Elania held her breath as the distance narrowed between herself and the man. She checked the ground for twigs or leaves, anything that might make unnecessary noise, but there was only the path. He was focused on the canopy. Stepping lightly, she moved past him. Corbin nearly trod on her heels from being so close behind her.
When all of them had reached the end of the boulder, a sound pierced the air. “Peeee . . . peeeee . . .”
It had the quality of a bird cry. The man was looking at them. His fist was still at his shirt. He thumped it, trying to read the message out loud. All he could manage was the first letter for please. Elania nodded with exaggeration and backed away.
Around the next curve was a sight to gladden her heart. Far ahead, the trees ended. They sped up while watching the sides of the path for ferals. A sign had been posted out there in the sunlight, which reflected off the glass cover blindingly and rendered it indecipherable.
When something or someone screamed among the trees, all of them broke into a run. Elania wanted that sunlight on her face like a starving woman wanted food sliding down her throat. She burst out of the canopy, Zaley sprinting beside her with her bad arm held up by her good.
They stopped at the sign, a short distance from the shadows and a huge hill before them. Under the glass, the ink on the papers was faded to obscurity. Beyond that post was a splintered wooden sign between a split in the trail to the hill, and it read LEFT TO CHARBOT 3 MILES.
Three miles. A yell burst uncontrolled from Elania’s throat at the finish line promised by that sign. Even the grade heading up to the hill didn’t dilute her joy. They started for it, Elania forcing herself to keep pace with the others. Soon Zaley was flagging as well from the steepness, so Elania was able to slow. The others charged ahead as the two girls and the dog ambled. Bleu Cheese whimpered for Corbin and Elania said, “You’re fine.” It was like her brothers whining for the ice cream truck.
Apologetically, Zaley said, “I’m thinking that I should go with one of the others when parents show up. You guys are busy enough with the triplets. But thank you for the offer. That means a lot to me.”
Elania understood. Between puffs of breath, she said, “The offer stays open, just so you know. Always. You got me away from those Shepherds.” Hopefully, that confinement point had been broken up by now. “I still can’t believe this happened. How many people that we know from school got dragged away in those vans?”
Zaley’s voice was small. “I’m so embarrassed that my father had anything to do with it. People I sat with in class, at Welcome Mat, passed in the hallways every day . . . shoved in an illegal confinement point. And my father is responsible. One of the people responsible.”
“It was his choice, not yours. Your choice was to come and warn me. You can’t take on his mistakes.” Elania didn’t consider herself responsible for her parents’ mistakes, nor did she consider them responsible for hers. They were separate beings. Not walking out of Mr. Dayze’s class when he put on a zombie movie was Elania’s own cowardice and had nothing to do with her family.
Her forehead beaded with sweat, Zaley said, “But I’ve got his blood.”
“Isn’t that completely abrogating personal responsibility? You’re not a carbon copy just because you’re his child.”
“I wish I weren’t his anything.” That was sad to Elania, who couldn’t imagine not claiming her parents. They weren’t perfect people, but neither was she. Their family wasn’t perfect either, but it was hers. Being with them was a safe place. A safe and very noisy place.
After a moment of quiet, Zaley said, “Do you ever think about the children of world tyrants? The ones who don’t blindly follow along with whatever their parents are doing? There have to be some who are just so ashamed to be related, to share a last name.”
“Didn’t Hitler have an illegitimate son?” Elania tried to recall an online article from a few years before. “There was some thought he did. The son fought against his father in the war. Later, he tortured himself with working all the time, never having any fun in his life, even if nothing Hitler did was the son’s fault. I don’t know if any of that is true. But how
sad that he took on that burden. Denying himself everything in the world didn’t make up for what happened, and it wasn’t his to make up for in the first place.”
The others were waiting for them at a fence around the curve. On the other side of it, the path opened to a viewpoint of the meadows all around. The fence was laden with old warning signs for hikers to go no further on the closed trail. A more recent sign had been added, a warning about zombies with a cartoon zombie pictured under the words. Arms out, mouth slack, pants tattered, with spots of rotting flesh on its face and arms, three stick people fled the zombie in terror as it took a stiff-legged step after them. Disgruntled, Elania said, “There isn’t any need for that.”
“It’s for people who can’t read,” Micah said. “It certainly gets its point across.”
“It’s still not okay.”
“Hey, maybe the next generation will get to deal with a vampire virus. I want to see that.”
“No!” Austin protested. “This is bad enough.”
This path was made of dirt, and better maintained. It was also empty and going downhill. Sunlight glinted off buildings in the distance and Elania said, “That has to be Charbot!”
She took out her cell phone and turned it on. There was little to no service, a bar flickering in and out on the screen. It vanished altogether for a few minutes of the walk, and then it came back and brought a friend. The friend wavered uncertainly in the doorway, unsure of its invitation to enter. In time, it stayed. Elania’s battery was half-full still. That made her walk even faster to conserve it. Although she wanted to go online and read the news, it was better to wait. She had sixty-eight missed calls from home.
They cheered at the next sign, which read CHARBOT 2 MILES. The landscape passed by fast at their speed, grass and rocks, and then a bridge over a deep ravine with a stream running along the bottom. There were no bodies or ferals anywhere. The bridge ended in another fence. They climbed over it, no hard task at only three feet tall. Again there was the sign with the cartoon zombie, and another saying to proceed at your own risk. The sun beat down on their heads.
They had made it. The others were discussing the phones, who to call or what to look up first. Corbin was going to use Micah’s phone to call his mother’s number; Austin wanted to look up Sombra C News on his. At CHARBOT 1 MILE they applauded. The trees out here were sparse, some clustered but those clusters separated by long grassy distances. This place wouldn’t look alluring to feral Sombra Cs. Twice they crossed over chains on the path warning people to go back due to zombies, and soon they were stepping onto the cement of an empty parking lot. Elania looked at her phone, not daring to hope. Every bar was there. She jammed the phone icon and then the first number to family that came up in recent calls, which was her father’s. She passed the leash to Zaley.
“Charbot has gone yellow,” Austin said tensely, but Elania had no time to process that as the phone was answered with her father’s shout, “Elania? Elania, is that you?”
“Dad!” Elania almost yelled, her eyes filling with tears and her throat thickening. In the background, Mom was screaming and the boys were saying, “What? What’s going on? Is it Lani?”
“It’s Lani! Lani’s alive!” Dad hollered, and then everyone was screaming. “Oh, thank God, where are you?”
“Dad, is it safe for me to say? Are the Shepherds bothering you?” Elania asked in a quavering voice. The boys chanted LANILANILANI and banged on something.
“Lani, what happened?” Dad said. “We got home and your things were everywhere, there was a Shepherd’s body in the backyard-”
“They tried to round me up for their illegal confinement point, but Zaley ran over to our house and warned me that they were coming. Her father is a Shepherd and she heard what they were doing. So we packed up clothes and food and ran out the back just as they got to the house. They gave chase and Zaley shot one who was about to shoot us. She has her father’s gun.”
“Zaley? She’s with you?”
“Yeah, she’s with me. We escaped Cloudy Valley, a group of us. Austin and Micah and Corbin, too. So they aren’t harassing you?”
“They searched the house that evening, the Shepherds and the police. Ripped up every inch of it thinking that you’d come back and were hiding. One of them sits outside in a car keeping watch every day. When we leave, they follow wherever it is we go. Boys! Pipe down!” Dad roared, as they were still chanting LANILANILANI at the top of their lungs. That was the sound of home to Elania. For now, it was beautiful.
“Oh my God,” the others were gasping about something on the screen of Austin’s phone. Standing apart from them, Corbin said tentatively into the other phone, “Mom?”
It seemed safe to say where they were. “Dad, we just got to Charbot. We walked the whole way. What’s going on there?”
Mom was pressed up to the phone. She exclaimed, “They walked to Charbot?”
“Oh, Lani, everything has fallen apart,” Dad said. “It’s insane here. I get stopped and inspected at a brace daily just going to work and back; I’ve been pulled out of class repeatedly for chats with cops about where you are and so has Mom. Some Shepherd has questioned the boys at their school twice about you and forced saliva tests on them. We were just talking about keeping them home. The schools may be closing and-”
“Why?” Elania asked. “Dad, we haven’t had much news access. We have no idea what’s going on.”
“The White House was just bombed. Thank goodness the president wasn’t in it. Shepherds are taking over everything, forming a provisional government. It’s madness! They’ve started to disrupt distribution to Mr. Foods because the company refuses to give out their list of people picking up Zyllevir from the pharmacy. But honey, leave that for later. We have to figure out what to do about you. You’ll be shot on sight the second you return here.”
“What about Sable Heights? Is that still green? I could stay with Aunt Tawnie,” Elania suggested. A phone was thrust into her face, Micah’s finger pointing to a map of the peninsula on Sombra C News. It was a nearly solid wall of red. Elania took the phone and scrolled up to Sable Heights. Surrounded by red, it was yellow. “Dad, Aunt Tawnie is in a yellow zone. Could I go there?”
“Here, I’ll put your mom on and make some calls,” Dad said. The phone was passed over and Mom burst, “Lani, I can’t believe it’s you! Are you okay?”
Oh, she was so not okay after this week. She returned the second phone to Micah and said, “I wish I could come home. It’s been really hard.” Not wanting to cry, she asked, “Did the boys miss me?”
“They’ve been so upset. All they do is ask when you’re coming back and Cormac cries every night.”
“I do not!” Cormac screeched.
“Cormac, do you want to say hi to your sister?” Mom asked.
“LANI!” Cormac exploded a second later, the other boys shouting me, too. “They said you were a bad guy and I said you were not and they said-”
“Hi, Cormac,” Elania said.
“-so I said that I’d beat them up and Dad said I can’t say that and are you going to be here for cake?”
She checked the date on her phone. Oh no, it was their seventh birthday tomorrow. “No, I can’t come there, Cormac, it isn’t safe for me. Can you have Mom put the phone on speaker so I can sing happy birthday to you guys?”
“No!” he yowled. “You sing it to me separate.”
Hoping that she wouldn’t cry, she sang happy birthday to him. It was silent and Percy came on. “Lani! I miss you!”
“I miss you, too, Percy,” Elania said.
“My shoe is untied.”
That made her cry, how he thought that she could fix it from miles away. Wiping her cheeks and pinching the bridge of her nose hard, she said, “Well, I’m trying, but I can’t fit my arms through the phone.”
“I can fit my shoe through the phone,” Percy suggested brightly. He laughed and she sang the birthday song.
Conor came on. She asked if he wanted his song and he said
in a solemn voice, “Lani, did you kill that man in the backyard? He was a bad man.”
“No, Conor, I didn’t kill him. Zaley helped me escape from the bad man.”
“Okay. Know what? Our dog is coming tomorrow. The lady with the puppies has to come this way for an errand, so she’s bringing the dog with her. We don’t know what to name it. It’s a girl dog. I think she should be Storm Blaster.”
“That’s a big name for a puppy,” Elania said with his same seriousness.
“But she’ll grow into a big dog,” Conor said reasonably. “And the name won’t grow any bigger, so she’ll catch up. Storm Blaster is the best girl fighter on the Elemental Team. I like that show. Will you sing my song now? You can sing it on fast forward. Dad wants to talk to you, so I have to go.”
After she sang the birthday song one last time, and not on fast forward, Dad came back on. He sounded agitated. “I don’t know what to do. You’re nine miles from Sable Heights. A lot of those roads are braced. Tawnie is offering to drive down there to get you, but we don’t know how she’ll get back with you. Every car is checked top to bottom at the braces.”
“How bad is the situation in Sable Heights?” Elania asked, her mind flying with ideas of how to get there.
“It’s okay. Not great, but okay. Their community is yellow only by proxy to reds, not because they have too many problems with Shepherds. Most of the people are violently anti-Shepherd as a matter of fact, and there have been shoot-outs with Shepherds trying to infiltrate. But getting you there . . . I can’t get you without them following. Even if I lose them, I can’t get you through all of those braces and I can’t take you any other direction without hitting them either! I should have taken you to a harbor in January!”
She hated to hear her usually calm father so upset. It didn’t seem like there was any other way than to do this on foot and bypass the braces with smaller roads, park trails, or going through backyards. Now that they had Internet access, they could tell where those braces were going to be. It occurred to her that they should write those down physically; if the White House had been bombed, who knew how much longer until the Internet went down? They couldn’t count on anything. “Dad, we’re going to have to walk there. It’s the only way.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 75
