But Grace wouldn’t care. If Leopard didn’t want it, she could swallow fewer pills. Zaley couldn’t care. Her priority was her friends, who weren’t choosing to be here. Leopard roused to complain to the guy feeling her up about her rotation in the kitchen. She was stuck with the morning shift of microwaving huge stacks of meals, loading them onto a cart, and rolling it down to the bucket room to feed the zombies. It was the job that no one wanted to do, and anyone with that assignment made a big show of showering afterwards.
“Holy shit!” a guy exclaimed at the television. The news was showing a video of thousands of people, who lurched through a barren spread of ground in the early evening.
“What the fuck is that?” Zaley asked.
“That’s the border of California and Mexico! Their zombie hordes are headed our way! Legions of them!” The ticker tape read that Mexico’s zombie rate of infection (other channels were more polite and called it Sombra C) was a stunning 70% and still growing. The screen showed military aircraft swooping by. The ground exploded under the feet of the feral Sombra Cs and everything was lost to dust.
An arm slipped around her shoulders, the hand coming closer to her breast than she liked. “Hey-hey, what happened to our little Spitfire? I missed you at the party!”
“Bad drink, man,” said Zaley to the very drunk Meerkat. “I yakked it in back after almost yakking on the dance floor. Ugh.”
“Let me get you a glass of wine.”
“Naw, I’m good.”
“Aww, you visit the Easter Bunny?” He laughed and his hand crept lower. The girl in question was not in the room, but her pill basket was. “Maybe I should make a visit, too. You come by my room tonight and we’ll find out if you’re a Spitfire or a Swallowfire. I got my money riding on-”
“Can’t do it,” Zaley said with a giggle. “I told you. I got a bad boy of my own already.”
“He’ll never know. I promise.”
“Oh, he’ll know. He always knows.” She was very aware that she had the gun in her holster, and that it would not be the first time she’d pulled the trigger. If he tried to assault her, she was going to fucking shoot him. She wouldn’t hesitate.
He staggered over to the pill basket and she slipped from the rec room. After a quick visit to the toilet, she checked out the door to make sure it was safe before going on to her room. Then she locked the door, tightened the window latch, peeked under the bed, turned off the light, and sat on the floor to think.
In time, the doorknob was tried. Meerkat called, “Hey, Spitfire! I got us some pill-zies! Hey, baby, open up!”
Baby. She pointed the gun at the door in a temper, not because she was in danger with it locked but because for the moment, she was wholly Zaley. Only Corbin was allowed to call her that. Meerkat knocked for a while and she didn’t answer. Brushing her teeth wasn’t going to happen tonight; it didn’t feel safe to leave the room. The gun should be at her side at all times, even when she was in the rec room or going for a shower.
Tomorrow she would pick up the package from the church. She could hide it inside the mattress. Then she somehow had to get those pills to her friends, if they were still breathing in there. Were she a watchtower guard, she could drop it to them. But that wasn’t a job she could do. Throwing it over the fence when she was assigned to path guard . . . but she had no way to alert them that the pills were coming over. Janitorial had nothing to do with the hill. The only point of contact was through one position in the kitchen.
“Spitfire! Aw, come on! You sleeping in there? I could keep you waaaa-aaarrrrmm!”
“Dude, shut up! She’s probably passed out,” a girl shouted in the hallway.
I’m coming for you, Zaley thought to her friends, and prayed that they could hear.
Austin
Austin didn’t know anything about the bird species at Golden Gate Park, except that all of them had one thing in common: the ability to fly over the fence. He wished he could do that, too.
By day he sat high in the trees for hours and watched them skimming through the air this way and that, the little dust-colored ones with orange bellies, the black-capped green ones with yellow bellies and faces. Others had the same black caps but were white with black spots and stripes. His favorites were the bright brown chickadees with grayish-white underparts and the sleek blue nuthatches. Those names he had learned from Micah. She thought the other ones were called warblers, although she couldn’t say for sure.
What was the difference between a crow and a raven? Austin had lost the right to know. He had never had any interest in birds when it was a province to which he was welcome; now he was banned and it enthralled him. He wanted to be a bird, to beat his wings and lift over the fence, to soar over the piece of the San Francisco street that teased between the trees.
He could see it. That was how close he was. Two-story buildings pinched together on both sides of the street, and cars laced themselves through the lanes between them. Changing lanes to go faster was silly from his perspective, people obsessed with saving a few seconds when all of them always got where they were going. Pedestrians were tiny, moving blots on the sidewalks. He saw them, yet they could not see him. Did they feel his eyes? Did they look back down the road and through the park to the trees? One with eagle eyes might spy him. He was waiting for that person, which was why he sat in the trees hour after hour. He thought about searching the hill for white rocks, to spell out HELP or SOS like in the cartoons when someone was marooned on a desert island. A pilot would look down and read it, land and pick them up.
“No one is coming,” Micah said in the afternoons when he climbed down in frustration. “No one cares.”
Someone cared. Someone in the entire world out there would be upset that a bunch of college-bound, relatively healthy teenagers had been put into a confinement point to die. There were seven billion people on this earth, and one of them had to care. Austin certainly cared.
If he caught a bird, he could tie a rolled-up message to its leg and set it free to carry his plea for rescue, over the fence and to that street, to land in the hands of someone who could help. But Austin had no paper, no pencil, no rubber bands, and no way to trap the birds. If he fashioned a net, or lured a bird to him with crumbs . . . These were quick fantasies that played out in his head while the birds flickered by and cars changed lanes. He wanted to teleport himself to that road, open a rift in space and step through it. To be there on the sidewalk by those stores, walking along to anywhere he wanted . . .
At night, he dreamed of soldiers shooting the watchtower guards and ripping down the fence to free them. He crossed to the other side where there were tables of food and sodas and Zyllevir, and the soldiers said how sorry they were that they couldn’t rescue everyone sooner. They’d been held up. Austin didn’t care. He was out. They loaded into trucks to be taken home. The trucks dropped them off at school, and their group of friends broke apart to hurry to class. Backpacks appeared over their shoulders even if their clothes were still dirty and bloody, the bell was ringing and locker doors were slamming and he was filled with joy . . .
Then he woke up. Still here. The hardest part of being in a confinement point was the one in which he opened his eyes. The dream had not been real; the guards were whole on the watchtowers; he still had Sombra C.
The slamming of the locker doors in his dreams was inevitably someone outside pounding to be let into the lodge. Someone going feral, someone already there, or someone of whole mind who had been cast out for other reasons. No one was allowed in after dusk. After dinner, Austin, Elania, Corbin, and others blocked the doors to the great room with Micah judging who could come inside. One little girl always said anxiously, “I’m still good! I’m still good!” She was petrified of being out in the darkness with the zombies. Her name was Clarissa, and she was eight years old.
She was developing the slightest lurch.
The night that they would have to turn her away from the great room was one Austin dreaded. It was coming. It was coming for al
l of them. The front room of the lodge was trashed and unsafe, but there was a small restroom attached to it. Those who could no longer be trusted in the great room went there. Then the doors closed and were blocked, and the night began.
There were one hundred fifty to one hundred sixty people in the great room on any night. Micah had claimed the best sofa for herself as ruler of the hill, and people let her. If a new person sat there by mistake, someone hissed, “No! That’s Micah’s!”
Austin shared the sofa with her. People assumed that they were a couple, and they did nothing to dissuade anyone from thinking that. It was safer for him to be seen as straight, for her to appear claimed.
Ninety-five percent of the captives weren’t the problem, and not the reason Austin and Micah pretended. They were kids and kindergarten teachers, pilots and nurses and nice old retired guys who wished for a pack of playing cards to pass the time. There was a stay-at-home dad with his twin son and daughter of ten years old, Willy and Emmeline; a diabetic woman in her twenties without insulin; two bewildered guys who until recently had been local college students. One old lady only spoke Japanese. The day a businessman who spoke some Japanese arrived, Mrs. Nakamura sobbed to have someone who understood. She clutched the guy’s pale white hand and her pleading desperation came through in his halting translation. Please, please, could someone explain to these Shepherds that she had a less than one percent infection? Zyllevir controlled it just fine. She promised to never forget her pills. Could someone call her son?
The twins called it the Mountain of Tears. Everyone cried drop after drop to be cast away upon the hill, Austin included. Mrs. Nakamura held onto his arm for balance when they went down to the bridge for their meals, and every time he guided her to the foot of the line, she said in broken English, “You good boy. You good boy. Your mama proud.” That broke his heart anew. The man who spoke Japanese said she was ninety-two years old, a citizen of Japan who had contracted Sombra C on a vacation to the United States to see her younger son’s family. She was refused admittance to her home country when she tried to return. Since then, she had been living with the younger son and his wife in Alameda. The businessman didn’t last long, his mind falling apart so fast without Zyllevir that they never saw him lurch once.
They also had a reverend. From the day Casper Santana arrived at the confinement point, he’d made friends of everyone. If someone had to unload during dinner or weep at midnight, he went over to listen. He was just there to be kind to everyone, like Jesus had been kind. Tattoos ran up and down his arms, skulls and barbed wire, everything at sharp angles. When people asked about them, Casper said, “When I was a young man, I was not a good man.” So they asked why he hadn’t had them removed, and he replied, “Because when I got older, I realized how not being a good man hurt. So I decided to be a good man, and I keep these so people can see where I’m coming from.” Here is where I came from; here is where I am today. Austin listened to the man’s guidance more deeply for that.
Every morning, Casper and Elania had a group for those who wished to pray. It was very well attended, since all of them were in the slow process of dying. Austin went to that before he climbed the trees. The prayer group was held in the bright sunlight that streamed onto the top of the hill. People with growing infections who were unable to bear the direct exposure any longer hung around in the trees and prayed with them. Their words to God were sloppier, but they were still speaking. The reverend shook hands with them in the shade after services. There were Muslims and Wiccans and Mormons and Buddhists and Catholics, all of them together to address the sky. One Jewish woman sobbed without tears under a tree when she could no longer remember the words to her prayers, and Elania recited them in her stead. These people were not the problems in the confinement point.
Nor were the kings a problem any longer. They were all dead. Some had fallen to Micah’s blade, others to railing poles. Anyone else who had done so much as fondle an unwilling person had gotten turned out of the lodge to get torn to pieces by zombies. A few had pounded on the walls at dusk and screamed they were sorry, please let them in, please just let them in . . . Austin had felt their panic and wanted to soothe them, and then he remembered what they were. No. He’d killed two of the kings himself.
He couldn’t think about it. If he refused to let it imprint on his mind, then it would fall away. There was so much of his life he wanted to fall away that little would be left if it did.
Every new arrival was given a primer on lodge rules. The lone man who still thought to act like a king and felt up a sleeping girl was brought to Micah. She carved an R into his forehead as Austin and other men held him steady. Then she ordered him guarded and decreed him expelled from the lodge for good after that night. More people volunteered for guard duty than were needed. All day long as the man tried to make amends and excuses, everyone looked at the bloody R and turned away. Parents kept their children under close watch and one man slugged him for daring to speak to his wife. The dude was killed an hour into the next sundown as he pleaded to be allowed back inside the lodge. People loved Micah and hated her at the same time. Her word was final on who came in and who stayed out.
But she made the hard decisions during the late afternoon sorting that the rest of them didn’t have the heart to make. She would be the one to turn away Clarissa when it was time. That was not in Austin to do. It scared him that that was in Micah. A college-aged girl challenged her at every damn sorting, complaining that this should be a democracy and not a dictatorship. They should vote on whether more severely affected people could be in the great room for another night. Micah flicked the switchblade and said when no one had a knife, then they could talk about democracy.
But the obnoxious girl was still part of the ninety-five percent, a regular person who had been locked into a confinement point. The last five percent weren’t kings but troublemakers. They came to the hill with an attitude, wanting to hunt zombies and start fights. Some belonged to opposing gangs and brought those battles to the hill. Austin thought that was stupid. What was there to fight over here? He gave me a look. He threw his signal. He pushed ahead in line. His gang killed my friend. And the fists flew. They were almost always guys in their late teens and twenties, a few older and bearing prison tattoos.
Some of the five percent were coming down off drugs or years of alcoholism; others were infected Shepherds stunned to find themselves on the wrong side of the fence. A jittering skinhead called Elania the Antichrist nigger cunt during morning services, and that evening Micah refused to let him into the great room. His pounding on the doors and cries rang out for a long time. You bitch you cunt you fucking bitch. It attracted ferals, who chased him off and killed him.
Two gang members had tried to take over the lodge, claim it as their space and not allow two guys from another gang in. One expected Austin to support this, to get the blade off his girl and lend it to the guys to settle some business. Austin shook his head. The four guys scuffled in the foyer during the sorting. Elania hurried in the last stragglers and they closed those doors up tight. Then all four of them were pounding and screaming on the other side, united by terror, and only one was alive the next morning. He wasn’t around the morning after that.
One day, Austin would not be around. They were out of Zyllevir.
That had kept them healthy as the virus multiplied in everyone around them. But now it was gone, their smuggled, precious cache, and the virus was multiplying in them as well. They were one day overdue for their pills. As he sat in the tree, his virus was peeking its head out from wherever it hid in his body, whispering to the others, is it safe? Is it safe? Yes, it was safe. Zyllevir was no longer there to freeze it. How the virus rejoiced, and set about making more of itself.
All along, the pills had given him a small degree of hope. If soldiers busted through at any point in those weeks, he was still at less than 1%. He was the same guy going out as he had been going in. Brennan’s bottle supplied a luxury of time that no one else here had. Now the p
ills were history, and Austin was just like everyone else dumped on the hill. The hope was dead. He was about to become history.
He had to make peace with it, or not, just like everyone else was doing. Now all of them were the same. Tomorrow, if Casper had a moment after morning services, Austin wanted to speak to him. To talk about how the pills had set Austin apart, kept him from feeling this as fully, put off the harshness. Was he to cry or rage? Be silent with despair or stoic in acceptance? All of these reactions he had seen in the changing faces around him, and some did all of these in turn.
If the soldiers burst in this very minute, Austin could not walk out of the confinement point unmarked. The hill had changed his blood chemistry and it would change the number on his stamp. He couldn’t force his mind to believe it had not happened. The evidence would be there, indelibly on his skin and in his blood.
Perhaps he had once known the names of these birds. The virus could have eaten a hole through that part of his brain and left him with blankness. But he could recite his class schedule for all four years of high school, and Sombra C wouldn’t have left that so wholly untouched. He listed everyone who had ever belonged to Welcome Mat. He did his multiplication tables and scratched elemental symbols in the air. He still remembered to pull his pants and underwear down when he took a shit. Everything was still in his mind, as far as he knew. Would he know when it was gone? The doctor at the Welcome Mat holiday party had known she was missing pieces.
So Austin’s infection was growing, but it wasn’t yet that high. It couldn’t be that high when he was only one day overdue. He was so afraid to be without Zyllevir in his body, and last night he’d swallowed fifty imaginary pills in his dreams. It had actually been one dream on repeat, a dozen variations of finding Zyllevir on the hill, or pills raining from the sky, another bottle appearing in his underpants, the water changing into a flowing river of pills . . . He plucked one up, he caught one from the rain, he pulled one from his clothing, and he swallowed. On nothing.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 91
