“We have to find the tree,” Austin whispered.
“We can’t in the dark,” Corbin answered. From the North Bridge at dawn, he would be able to retrace their steps without problem. Not at night.
None of the trees around them were good for scaling, and he couldn’t see out too far. They kept on climbing the steps. Something brushed on his leg and he looked down, fully expecting to see Bleu Cheese there. It was only a rock, and the memory of his dog being shot hit him with all the same rawness as when it was new. His dog! One of the Shepherds had just taken aim and fired . . . She had been such a good dog to go along with all of this. He hoped the Shepherd who pulled the trigger went home tonight to dead pet dogs, pet cats, pet fish or whatever, and that whenever the guy got new ones, they died, too. Even his plants, so he was surrounded by death.
“I want to be anywhere else, literally anywhere,” Austin whispered as they lurched along.
Corbin would have taken Zaley to Hawaii. He’d gone with his family. After harvest was done, her semester at school, he put the plane tickets in her lap and made her jaw drop. All she had seen in her life was fifty flavors of crazy, and he would show her something beautiful. Lava running down to the ocean and making it steam, giant turtles and amazing fish, a nice hotel with room service and one of those spa tubs . . .
She backed through the water into him, warm and wet. He moved a reddish-blonde lock of her hair and kissed her neck.
She was cold on a floor.
A rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire sounded. Why were there no climbing trees anywhere? A wild howl succeeded the gunfire, coming from somewhere so close that Corbin got off the trail in reflex. He and Austin crouched down behind trees. In a minute, figures rushed down the steps. One was making a laughing scream. This was the pack that had chased them away from the tree and the girls. Their breathing was loud and excited. Likely they had hurt or killed someone, maybe that woman screaming earlier.
After the boys resumed climbing, they came across a body. A baby was dead on the ground, swaddled in a blanket and staring. Far too young to walk, it had to have been brought to the confinement point with a parent who was killed or went feral and abandoned it. Corbin and Austin looked at the pathetic sight and pressed on.
The stairs ended in a trail through an open field. Corbin smelled smoke. “The lodge? It smells like a fire.”
“Through those trees,” Austin said. Much farther away, a dark shape rose on the other side of pines. It was a building, with lights shining from windows high in the air. Animal cries came from that direction, so they got off the trail and went east. Corbin wanted to run, God, how he wanted to run, but he forced himself to keep his movements to a lurch.
A sharp drop-off forced them farther north. They kept the lodge always in sight, not wanting to get closer. The drop-off wasn’t giving them much choice. They couldn’t climb down it. Now and then, Corbin spotted figures below running or standing around.
Austin had just suggested that they try west when an oak presented itself. Corbin’s grip was not as sure with his weak fingers, so he moved carefully while Austin waited for him to catch up. The tree groaned and creaked, shaking from their shifting weight and the rancid breeze.
When they were high, they looked down to the meadow. A figure scuttled over the path, crying, “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!”
More of the lodge was visible from here. It was made up of two parts, the trail leading into a single-story foyer with broken windows. No one was in there. A light flickered inside, illuminating a garbage-strewn floor. The foyer led to a bigger room, the one with the light in the highest windows. The lower ones appeared to be boarded. A figure was lurching around and banging on them. “Let me . . . in! Let . . . please . . .” He couldn’t find the words, and screamed in rage.
The girls didn’t need both of them. Austin was much more physically imposing than Corbin. People would be more scared of him. So Corbin could just tongue the Zyllevir pill and spit it out when no one was looking. Let himself sink into madness and quit this world. Yet he might be the one making a woman scream then, in those days that he was dangerous. He could attack one of his own friends, or the kids that had been ahead of them in line. Then he was ashamed to think of ushering that time about faster. He just had no strength for this. At his core, he was a wimp.
But if there was a heaven, he wanted to step into it and meet Zaley without shame. She had suffered along at their sides and she didn’t even have Sombra C; she could have found a shelter for abused teens rather than traveling with them. He didn’t think that she had even considered it. Her arm was trashed for life and she’d plugged along indefatigably to win back whatever she could. He was proud of that, and he’d want her to be proud of him. So he’d swallow the pill and keep their friends safe for as long as they lasted here. Then he could walk through those pearly gates the way he had walked out of Mr. Dayze’s class last December. That was what a man did. The boy spat out the pill. People here would kill each other over that bottle of Zyllevir.
He wanted to be the boy. The world wasn’t giving him anything, and he shouldn’t give anything back.
The man gave back anyway. Like his dad, who didn’t just walk out the door for a new chick when Mom got cancer since taking care of her was hard. Some guys did that. Like Jonathan Penner, who published that essay condemning Prime and died for it. He had to have known that he was risking a serious fall-out for what he wrote, and he accepted what was coming.
Corbin wanted to be a man like that. The man looked at a confinement point in which he was held captive and did what little he could. He protected the girls who were in so much danger, and himself. He didn’t sit in a tree forming plans to waste a Zyllevir pill and hasten his own demise.
The right thing to do, the mature choice to make, was just so hard. He had to live when he wanted nothing more than to die.
He wished that he could hear Elania praying. He had never had much to say to God himself. Church was just a place his family went to for the holidays, and God was someone he talked to usually in the context of please, God, let me beat this stoplight.
“Is it okay to be mad at God, you think?” Corbin asked.
“Elania would know,” Austin said.
Corbin imagined what she would say, cobbled together with his scattered history of religious lessons. “I think that she’d say God is strong enough to take it, and to remember that God didn’t build this confinement point. People did that. So go ahead and unload on God all you want, but keep that in mind. I’ll unload. I hate God for putting me here, for creating people who would put me here. I’m a good person. So was Zaley. Bleu Cheese was innocent. This isn’t fair.”
“First you make me gay. Then you give me Sombra C,” Austin muttered. “This isn’t what I wanted to be given in life.”
Corbin thought about what he’d wanted to be given of this life. “I would have had a good job. I don’t want a sales job like my father has. He has to be on the road so much. I’d still make pretty good money with vineyard work. We would have had a house, a nice one. Zaley could have gone to school. We’d have had some kids. One or two. It would have been beautiful.” That wasn’t what he would ever have from this world, so he had to let it go. It stayed in his mind and taunted him. “What about you?”
“A home far away from this place, a big one that I don’t ever have to leave,” Austin said. “A good guy. I wish that one day I could introduce him to my mother, and that she’d see it was all right. We could be a family.”
“And we’d read Elania’s articles in the online paper over our morning coffee,” Corbin said. “What would Micah have done?”
“Something weird. Something insane. She should be in the cockpit of one of those experimental fighter jets that practically go the speed of light, or on the first colony of Mars.”
And Corbin’s dog, his beloved dog should have lived to a ripe old age, still licking the sofa and farting around in happiness and posing for pictures. People could have paged back through The Daily Cheese twelve o
r thirteen years, watching that grizzled old lady dog return to the goofy-looking puppy she had once been.
The man gave back to the world because he wasn’t the only one in pain. So Corbin was going to swallow that bitter pill. As soon as dawn cracked the horizon, he and Austin needed to climb down and get back to the girls. Corbin had one more responsibility to see to in his friends.
The feral man thumped hard on the wall of the lodge. “Let me . . . in!”
“Trust me, man, you don’t want to go in there,” Austin said.
Corbin had a snapshot in his mind of a big, beautiful house. He was standing in front of it with Zaley, their hands on the shoulders of a little girl, his parents at their sides. The snapshot swelled to Austin and his guy, Elania and hers, the triplets making faces and Bleu Cheese looking off the wrong way. A fighter jet raced overhead while they smiled to the camera.
He didn’t know the dimensions of heaven, or if there were any. Maybe there was a place past this one for him to go on. Or maybe he just scattered to the wind with his death, in the same nothingness after his life that he had been in before he existed at all. It hadn’t hurt back then. He hadn’t known that he was missing out on anything.
But this hurt now. He settled back into the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes. The thumping didn’t cease, nor the pleas, nor the animal cries and gunfire. To lose his consciousness forever, to retreat into nothing seemed like hell. He was here and he’d been real. Yet this . . . this was truly hell. Consciousness wasn’t worth any price.
“When the girls are gone, Austin, when you’re gone, if I’m the last one standing here, I’m going to run for the fence,” Corbin said. That was where he drew the line.
Fresh screaming broke out in the darkness. Reaching down from his higher perch, Austin squeezed his shoulder reassuringly and said, “Corbin, if the girls go first, I’ll run for the fence with you.”
Micah
She had swum over to the boy when they first arrived. The water was shallow enough when she reached him to stand, and she said to the runty figure wedged into the crooks of the railing, “Are you as scared as I am?”
Yes, Colin was scared. He had been asleep in bed when the Shepherds got him. It was all his fault! The rules were that he wasn’t to look out the window in the loft where he hid. But he had heard kids playing in the street yesterday evening, and like a siren’s call, it made him lift the curtain. They waved and he waved back, loving to see their game of street hockey when he had been alone except for his gramma for days and days and days. And someone told. The Shepherds came in the darkness and knew right where to go. They had taken him to the cage and now to this island where people were yelling and it smelled really nasty. He’d heard Micah screaming a lot of bad words.
Yes, Micah agreed. She had screamed a lot of bad words. The people on the shore were saying terrible things, so she said terrible things back. She didn’t let herself be bullied, not at school, not in a confinement point. Did he have bullies at his school? Of course he did. Micah could tell that the kid was retarded. Borderline retarded. Not the word as a slur but as a reality of his mental sharpness and lack thereof. He wasn’t so reduced in IQ that he couldn’t talk or do basic things; he was just not all there as most kids of his age would be.
But the important thing, she told him, was that she didn’t let her friends be bullied either. They had been in the cage together, so that made them friends. Her name was Micah. He came down into her arms, scared of the water since he didn’t have his floaties or his mom watching, scared even more to walk on that bridge with the guard yelling. Scared that he was going to be in trouble at home for looking out the window and scared of those other people who said the bad words. The f word. He was reassured by the fact that they could be scared together, rather than alone.
It wasn’t entirely true that she was as scared as the boy. Rather like when one was hungry and thirsty, one of the two won out. She couldn’t stuff her face with food and drink at the same time. One had to become an undercurrent. Her fear was an undercurrent, extremely present yet forced under by her anger. In a way it was fueling the anger. She didn’t like to be made afraid.
When Austin gave her eulogy, he was going to add that she had shot a woman in the face for betraying them. And he was going to deliver the apology that she’d lived with until the moment she died: it was her fault for trusting that person. She should have been watching out the window, expecting a betrayal. Not in the bathroom scrubbing a smear of tomato sauce off her chin. While Micah was messing around, they’d gotten caught. She was sorry. The lesson was to never trust anyone except your friends.
She had still gotten back her pound of flesh from Tarley Ferguson. If Zaley had been shot too, then Micah would find her in heaven, if there was one, and say next life, if there was one, Zaley got to shoot Micah. That made it equal between them. Zaley wouldn’t do it, she’d be horrified at the very idea, but what made it equal was the offer. Micah would stand still for the bullet, proving that it was an accident that she regretted with all of her heart. She was supposed to be the hero, not the villain.
She’d also shot that Shepherd in the face, the one pounding on the door. It was just a lucky shot. Micah had incorrectly estimated the location of his torso from where his fist was striking the door, and pulled the trigger flush to the wood.
She liked shooting assholes in the face. That should have been her major in college. It would stop every conversation in its tracks when people asked her at nice parties or holiday events what she studied. I’m studying how to shoot assholes in the face.
Silence.
Big smile. And what do YOU do?
She swam awkwardly back to shore with the boy holding onto her. He should not have looked out the curtain. She should have looked out the curtain. They were made mirror twins by these events, Micah and Colin, even if seven years and a hundred IQ points separated them. Then they were separated in line, by that woman and by this place, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it except watch him go.
She should have left him on the bridge.
When there were no laws, the society to develop was hinged on the strongest members of the community. Those people set the laws, usually ones to serve them rather than a higher ideal to help everyone. Micah didn’t like the laws here, people expecting her to spread her legs for what limited safety the lodge had to offer. The kings of the hill demanded this in tribute for protection. They were all going to die in weeks; what did it matter if they abused a bunch of helpless people in the meantime? Who was going to make them stop? The Shepherds who had put them all here? The kings could do whatever they wanted, and they were going to do as much of it as they wanted. It would all be over soon anyway, so let’s orgy unto death.
Austin wasn’t the only one with an object in an uncomfortable place. They had gotten the gun away from Micah (fuck them, she loved her gun even if it was really Zaley’s. And it wasn’t truly Zaley’s but stolen from her father) but not her switchblade. When the Shepherds burst into the house and she ascertained that escape out the bathroom window was not possible, she searched the little space to see what it contained. The old couple had a drawer packed to the brim with things from hotels, samples of shampoos and conditioners, body lotions and shower caps in white cardboard envelopes. She covered the blade in three shower caps and yanked down her clothing as the door reverberated and her friends screamed. It was the most awful tampon imaginable.
In the night it had really started to wear thin, so she pulled it out and dropped the outermost shower cap onto the body of the zombie that Elania sent down to earth. The other shower caps she put into her back pocket, in case they ever had to keep something waterproof. Now she knew not to be wasteful. The blade went into her front pocket after she flicked it for the comfort of the snap. She wanted to carve her initials into the tree, to prove to the absolute no one who would ever see it up here that she’d been in this place. Carving her own headstone. But the blade was sharp as hell and digging it into tree bark
would dull it. She had other business for this blade.
Honey, that’s not nice! Honey, you have to think about others’ feelings! Honey-
Micah was strong. She didn’t recognize the laws of the confinement point. The lodge should belong to everyone until the virus made them a monster, and giving up your body wasn’t the entrance fee. She’d been born into this body and she determined what happened to it. That should be true for everyone, not just the few at the top of the food chain. Sex with Austin had been wholly her choice; sex would always be wholly her choice. This was her law. If someone took that choice away, attempted to or even threatened to, that person had a lesson to learn about the law.
Laws had to be enforced or people didn’t believe in their power.
Was she strong enough to enforce her laws?
Yes.
The kings may not have expected the girls to come to the lodge last night. People likely held out, tried to find a hiding place the first night and realized the only shelter on the hill was the sole structure standing upon it. They gave up control of their bodies to spare their lives for a lousy few weeks. But Micah wasn’t going to give up hers, nor was Elania, and the boys weren’t either. Dickheads who infringed on other people’s control deserved to die. Whether they were locking you in a cage or leering at your tits, they were declaring war over who was in control of your body, your freedom, your soul, and your right to existence.
Honey! Don’t hit Shalom; ask for your toy back! Use your words!
Please stop talking about my tits. It hurts my feelings. Please don’t lock me in a cage. It makes me sad. Please don’t molest children. That’s not nice.
She had not left the boy on the bridge when she should have, nor was she going to be assaulted in the lodge in an attempt to save him. But now she had an obligation to Colin. That obligation extended to everyone here who couldn’t fight back. They had grown up on honey use your words and taken it to heart. Or they were too young to do anything, too old, too sick, too weak, too dumb, or too frightened. In the war between angry and fearful, the latter overrode the former in them.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 87
