Micah watched Zaley’s eyes move over the words written in blood. GET US OUT.
They had to get out. It was borrowed time they were living on. A racist guard would take a potshot at Austin. A feral could kill Corbin while he was making another bow. A new arrival might target Elania. Even now, malcontents could be plotting above their meals to overthrow Micah, steal her switchblade and return to the time of the kings. Every day that passed for them without disaster was bringing them closer to the day that held one.
Please, Micah mouthed. She wasn’t truly mad at Zaley. She was just afraid to be consigned here forever to a precipice. Please get us out.
And Zaley nodded. I will.
Set Eleven
Zaley
The question was how, and it was making her crazy. The confinement point had been expertly designed. It was like trying to maneuver one’s way out of a trick maze with no exits, only an entrance. She chewed over the problem through days and nights, at work and in free time, all of it to no avail.
They were filthy and ragged and losing weight. Corbin and Austin had scruffs of facial hair. Elania was red-eyed from exhaustion or tears, and Micah looked dazed and glassy. But they were alive, thank God, they were alive! Zaley wanted to call the Douglases, the Lis, and the Cambornes to tell them, but there was no longer such a thing as cell phones or Internet. In an effort to regain control of the country, the government had suspended service. It was a complex network to shut down, but they’d done it.
America was off the grid.
If her friends’ families were in possession of landlines, Zaley was unaware. Most people didn’t have those any more, or rarely used them if they did. She could have called the harbor in Sonoma to reach Elania’s family, but she needed a number to call. Information didn’t give it out; she couldn’t search online; it wasn’t going to be printed in the paper phone books at the library. Although there was no chance of it being in there, she decided to walk over to the library and search anyway.
Kitten, Sloth, and Fawn wanted to escape the clutches of work-doling Wasp and go along on an adventure away from the confinement point, but once they heard the destination, they rapidly found something else to do. A library was a sanctuary to Zaley; it was the equivalent of an STD clinic to them. Speaking of STD clinics, all three of those girls needed to go to one. The barracks were a swing party. Kitten was Zaley’s next door neighbor. Several times Zaley had heard her through the wall having sex. Fawn was worse, sleeping her way through the barracks with dicks and chicks both, but Zaley didn’t have to listen to it. Both long-time confinement point workers, she had befriended them in the rationale that knowledge was power. Unfortunately, the girls barely had a coherent thought between them. Their brain cells were being picked off one by one with what they drank, smoked, swallowed, and huffed.
Zaley bypassed the paths to walk in the trees and make sure Wasp didn’t catch her for extra work. They didn’t have enough hands at the confinement point. A pair of AWOLs, a death, bridgers had recently swept in needing more people to guard the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the raiders picked off a handful of others to help out with busting up an unofficial harbor. It was underground a few miles away and planned as a three-day operation. The watchtower guards were off-limits due to their special skills, but everyone else was up for grabs.
Wasp had been pissed to lose people. He already had the dregs for workers and now he had even fewer of them? Was the work supposed to do itself? He needed this many in the kitchen and this many walking the path and this many on janitorial and this many on deliveries! A full third of who was left behind was so non-functional on pain pills or booze that they made more work than they performed! The Head sent more, but not enough to replace what was gone.
She eluded capture and got to the sidewalk, where she jogged the blocks to the library. A sign posted on the doors read defiantly NO SHEPHERDS. Zaley hadn’t been expecting that, and was glad that she’d dressed in street clothes. Beneath it was another sign displaying grossly reduced hours. Volunteers staffed the library only three afternoons a week. Without the Internet-based service the library relied upon, no materials could be checked out. A woman was noisily complaining about it at the front desk as Zaley went in. There wasn’t anything to be done for it, the volunteer explained. The system had changed over from stamping cards and card catalogs to computers almost thirty years ago. Changing it back would take ages, and there wasn’t the money for that kind of undertaking. The woman huffed and puffed and slapped her stack of books on the counter, furious and asking why she paid taxes then.
Zaley checked the phone books for what wasn’t there and put them away. The library was packed with people. Every armchair, every seat upon a sofa, every chair at the tables was taken, heads bent over books and magazines. The long, dark bank of computers stood vacant. More people stood in the rows of books to read there. Snagging a newspaper with jumbled sections, she leaned in a corner to skim it. Even the pages within the sections were jumbled, classifieds and world and state all pieced together at random.
Fuel was low. Crime was up. Schools were closed. Sombra C infections were increasing at a highly alarming rate. Soup kitchens and food banks had far more visitors than they could feed. People were panicking. The government had won two battles over here; Shepherd Prime had won one battle over there. Canadian social services were overwhelmed with Americans fleeing the country, and they were closing their borders.
The news from overseas was tumultuous, Europe calming down as the Middle East flared up; South America and Asia were a patchwork of chaos and peace. Travel to Africa was prohibited. A journalist stationed there wrote in an article that one billion people had lived in Africa before Sombra C, and she would be surprised if one million people lived there after it. Confinement points in Africa were most often for the healthy, what few existed.
In science news, a person in Denmark had proven to be genetically resistant to contracting Sombra C. Scientists were very excited, although Zaley didn’t see what good it did anyone else. What were they going to do, give everyone a gene transplant? That technology was so far out of reach that it was in the realm of science fiction.
San Diego was gone, overrun by zombies. The Armed Forces stationed down there were fighting ferals on one side and Shepherds on the other. The soldiers were being beaten back. Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were also under siege. In some places it was even crazier, the zombies attacked by the Armed Forces who were attacked by the Shepherds who were attacked by the T-BACS.
A blurb in local news read that the battles over the Bay Area bridges were intensifying. That was a common conversation for Zaley to overhear in the canteen and rec room. Shepherds held permanent braces upon them in order to do saliva swabs; T-BACS broke up the braces and let everyone through. A three-way firefight between Shepherds, T-BACS, and cops on one bridge had ended badly for no less than ten people just trying to drive over it. A second blurb reported that a brace in San Rafael had been attacked by T-BACS, who shot dead all six Shepherds manning it and police weren’t investigating. Their pay had been sliced in half with no word when it would increase back to its normal levels.
She turned the page. The nation’s firefighters were in disarray, some stations hijacked by Shepherds, others having trouble getting fuel and paying their employees, so fires often raged out of control. What made it worse was the lag time: when a fire started, no one could use a cell phone to report it. Fire season was going to be a disaster, and one was currently raging over tens of thousands of acres in southern California. There wasn’t the manpower or resources to do anything about it. People were evacuating in droves. Those who stayed behind died when the unchecked walls of flame closed in.
The world had lost its collective mind, and Zaley’s father no doubt was sitting in his recliner with a self-satisfied smirk on his stupid fat face. He’d been so right to put in his bunker! Look at this mess. I told you so.
She didn’t want to read any more. Returning outside, she began to walk back to
the park. There were other NO SHEPHERDS signs in windows of businesses and homes, but they were a tiny fraction compared to the NO STAMPED signs. She was still happy to see each one, as well as the signs reading GO T-BACS.
A lot of windows had no signs, their glass spread into pieces over the sidewalks. Guards stood by the stores that were still open and whole, checking for thieves and troublemakers. The worst of the fighting between Prime and the government was in the Midwest and stretched east from there. The west coast was considered calm. Walking past streets of closed stores, broken glass, empty shelves, and fearful faces, Zaley hated to picture everywhere else.
Passing a Mr. Foods, she doubled back to get a snack. That depressed her so much that she nearly lost her appetite. Entire swathes of shelves in the store were empty, and what little was there was being sold at double or triple the regular price. Placards sat in certain sections to warn customers that there was a limit to how much they could buy. No more than two boxes of cereal (down from the usual hundred brands to a dozen), one half-dozen eggs per person (at eight dollars a carton), and produce was a desolate scene. The deli and coffee bar were closed. Anything imported from Mexico was gone. Zaley got a candy bar, concerned that those wouldn’t be available much longer either. Mr. Foods was just about the only grocery store to remain open. Specialty stores offering Asian or European food had closed altogether. The Mexican restaurant next door to Bonko’s served no food but held support groups for people struggling to cope with the loss of their Internet access. Zaley didn’t miss having a cell phone. Being enslaved to her mother’s million daily texts had put her off them permanently. But people still walked around staring at them in disbelief, knocking into other pedestrians and vainly trying to connect.
She got back to the barracks. Everyone shouted her name in the rec room, so she put on a cheery face and went in with a Grace Leigh shout of hello, fuck-faces. The television was blasting a news program about a Shepherd defeat and people were booing the scene. Sloth was bitching, just back from a restaurant where a waiter had refused to serve her for being a Shepherd. No other waiter would take over the table and the manager told her to leave. Half of the patrons applauded when she went out the door. Humiliated, she was planning to return at night and break the windows. Good luck getting those fixed!
Others in the room told her to shut up about the restaurant because the big news was that the sale of guns and ammunition was no longer legal in America. The legislation had just gone through and was to be enacted immediately. People yelled about the government infringing on the right to bear arms. How long until those goons raided houses to claim those guns for themselves? Grace put her hand on her piece and threatened to put a bullet through the fucker who tried to part them. Zaley was curious how anyone could genuinely fear the government was coming to raid the millions of homes around the country for their guns. The reason the zombies were encroaching up southern California so successfully was because there weren’t enough troops to stop them.
Logic. It didn’t apply to her parents, nor did it apply to the people in the rec room. Wildebeest got her drunk ass off the sofa to bellow, “Here’s what I say to that!” and fired her gun through the ceiling. “Fuck you!”
Someone spied Wasp out a window and everyone scattered. Zaley fled for her room and locked herself inside, unenthusiastic about picking up the extra work that Wasp was coming to dole out. There had been two AWOLs and another overdose just evenings ago. It was hard to say if it was suicide or accidental. Hammerhead drank too much in wine and cough syrup, and had had a bad habit of dipping his hand into the Easter Bunny’s basket and swallowing whatever he pulled out. What’s this? Oh, who cares? Gulp. He called it his party pack. People cheered when he did it. One of the guys had found him unconscious on the floor of a restroom, blue from choking on his own vomit and unresponsive to slaps and yelling. He died en route to the hospital, never having regained consciousness. They ditched his body at a bus stop for someone else to deal with.
There wasn’t a note, so everyone chalked it up to accidental. Either way, he was dead and they were short one more pair of hands. The AWOLs had gone out on a Fun Night and never returned. Beaver and Badger were headed for San Diego where the real action was. Confinement point work sucked. Zaley hadn’t known Badger, but she’d had a path guard shift by Beaver and he complained about boredom. When he’d signed up to protect the world from zombies, marching back and forth by a fence wasn’t what he had had in mind.
Wasp was pounding on doors and assigning extra work to anyone who was dumb enough to answer. Due to the shortage, the tasks of janitorial and office work had been combined and assigned to one unlucky person, who spent the morning engaged in cleaning the restrooms in the canteen and barracks, sweeping and vacuuming, picking barf off the pool table in the rec room, and then the afternoon in the office doing whatever Little Hitler and Mrs. Hitler wanted done. That was how Zaley thought of the Commander and his assistant. While eating in the canteen at a table beside Zaley, Mrs. Hitler had whined three times in ten minutes about how much it always smelled. Then she asked Zaley to find another air freshener and drop it off in the office. It reeked with the competing scents of Tall Alpine, Cranberry Delight, Song of Vanilla, and Kiwiberry Fresh.
And rot. Always the rot. No matter how many air fresheners exhaled potent chemical bouquets within the structures of the confinement point, they failed to fully eradicate the scent of death that they had been employed to smother. Zaley tried not to breathe too deeply when she was outside. The smell was sickening.
Wasp rapped on her door. “SPITFIRE!” Staying very still, she didn’t answer. Another door opened and he cried out that Sloth was now a path guard. Those positions had also been reduced, everyone having an area twice the size to pace for eight hours. Deliveries were handled by Wasp himself and one other person, and kitchen remained untouched. There was only so far a staff could be cut and still produce meals three times a day. No one washed hands, few wore hairnets, and several people smoked while cooking. It was ironic that the most hygienically handled meals were what went out to the Sombra Cs. They were pre-made and just warmed up.
“Who else wants to be a path guard?” Wasp yelled, still outside Zaley’s door. She only would have answered had it been kitchen. She pretended to love working in there. That was the heart of a family. Everyone else hated the hot, sticky work, and no one wanted to open the windows and let the smell in. When Zaley did the zombie feedings, she saw bodies festering on the hill and floating in the water. The amount of garbage bobbing on the river was amazing. People switched tasks when Wasp was elsewhere, if they had jobs they particularly hated, and the kitchen was a favorite one to trade away. Zaley wanted to maneuver herself into being the go-to person for kitchen trades, and the go-to person within the kitchen for zombie feedings. It was the only way to see her friends.
Finally, Wasp collared enough people and went away. How was she to get four people out of there? She couldn’t send in a pretend note from a parent about a doctor’s appointment. The place was constructed so no one ever left. There had to be a way to clip a hole in the fence without getting her head blown off. They would have to cross the water and sneak through when she was assigned to path guard at that specific spot. The nearest watchtower guard had to be distracted . . .
But just getting to the fence was impossible! She would blow her whistle, telling the guard that she was checking something out. The watchtowers were manned twenty-four hours a day. Then she’d rustle through the bushes and lift the tarp and start clipping? Hope the person above didn’t hear anything or wonder what she was checking out that was taking so long? The more Zaley picked over that idea, the less sturdy it seemed.
There was the South Bridge entrance. Cleaning Admissions was part of janitorial service. It was once a little museum featuring local flora and fauna and now it was used as a detention center for new arrivals. One of the doors connected to the tarp-covered corridor that led to the bridge, and the fence of the corridor had a locked gate on o
ne side for guards to pass through. If she stole the keys . . .
The raiders would have the keys. There could be a set in the office as well. Little Hitler and Mrs. Hitler went home at night. Zaley needed to check out the office when it was dark.
Half an hour later, Fawn and Kitten pounded on her door for dinner. They joined the crush to the canteen. Kitten moaned, “This sucks! We’re losing all the guys!” Daddy Long Legs and Howler and Millipede had gone off with the bridgers; Meerkat and Sea Monkey were taken away with a few others by the raiders.
“You have me!” Cuckoo yelled. He started slapping butt cheeks. It took him three times longer than it should to fill a dishwasher, but he was ever on the ball when it came to lady ass. Spitfire slapped his ass in return and Finch raised her fist in warning when he approached. He called her a bull dyke and she retorted bull dyke and proud.
Fawn checked out who was left besides Cuckoo, still moaning that Daddy Long Legs had been taken for the bridge. She had yet to hit on Grace Leigh, for which Zaley was thankful. Every evening, the girl drank too much wine and sat on a new lap with her fingers entwined in the person’s hair. After sex, she was devastated when the other person didn’t consider it a relationship. You had sex to keep them, so why wasn’t it keeping them? She wept and wailed on Kitten’s shoulder, and once upon Spitfire’s, worried that everyone considered her a tramp. She just had mental problems, expecting what hadn’t worked with ten bed partners to work with the eleventh.
Everyone was going out for a Fun Night afterwards. They were drunk by the end of dinner and reeling by the time they staggered off down the path. Claiming murderous cramps, Zaley stayed behind in the barracks. The girls protested (they were going to have so much fun! Just grab a pain pill from the Easter Bunny’s basket!) and she begged off since those pills gave her the shits. She encouraged the girls to bring back a hot guy for her. It was a joke. They weren’t allowed to bring people to the confinement point. No, you ladies have a great time! I already got someone in my bed and her name is Aunt Flo. Wish us a sexy time.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 99
