As the night wore on, they worked themselves into better positions to sleep. All four had to be on their sides. He peeked out the crack when Micah’s breathing changed to a steady rhythm. What little he could see was saturated in blood. Two ferals were lurching around a floor littered with still forms. The door to the restroom had been punched through and snapped in two. A body was laying over it. A third feral walked along the wall and swiped at the switch there. The room plunged into darkness, except for the glow of the fire. It hadn’t been tended and was getting low.
Austin dozed, his legs threaded into Elania’s. His sleep was never very deep. Every scuffle and fresh chattering woke him. So did the screams from outside, and further gunshots. He wanted to live, but he was too weary to press on. The switchblade was gone and he mourned it.
“Eh-eh-eh? Eh-eh-eh?”
He closed his eyes and thought of the prayer circle where they had imagined someone standing behind them for support. One woman had had a guardian angel. That was what Austin wanted. Forcing himself away from the hill, he envisioned the angel not behind him but in front, his hands extended out to Austin. His wings were white and beautiful, his skin dark and glowing. They were outside in a grassy field aglow with flowers. Nothing bad had ever happened in this field. Nothing bad was allowed to happen. It was God’s domain, a world apart from the world, and sacrosanct.
“Eh-eh-eh?”
“Hold on,” the angel said sweetly, and Austin did. It was all he had.
Elania
When they pulled away the doors in the morning so Micah could get her blade out of Matt’s chest, it was to find only Chris dead on his side underneath. Corbin retrieved his arrow from the boy’s back. He had a crude quiver to hold them, made of the long sleeve of a shirt left abandoned in the grass. It was Elania’s idea after the third one he was constructing from greenery fell apart in his hands.
She watched from across the great room beside the overturned sofa. The arrow came out with a squelch and was returned to the quiver. The blond boy stared. Elania looked down to the reddish-brown sea at her feet and felt nothing but an ache in her back. The air smelled of shit.
Sunlight was streaming through the windows from high above, illuminating the frozen ripples of bodies and broken furniture going out in a tide from the fireplace to the empty maw of the doorway. She blinked and the wave did not go out or come in. It stayed there. She stayed there. Mouths were open. These were the throats to have issued those screams that had blasted the sense from her mind and now they were quiet, so quiet, and she wished to still hear their screaming. When the screaming died, hope died with it.
Their stories had ended. A story was good if it tied up the loose ends, bringing every character to a finish consistent with his or her or its story arc. But this wasn’t a story. Life was defined by its loose ends. Whatever arcs these people had been traveling upon, this was a gruesome conclusion. The sheer pointlessness of it all revolved in her mind.
Maria and little Sergio were by the fire, both on their stomachs and her arm thrown over his back protectively. There was a shared pool of blood between them. What had their story arcs been? What was resolved by these deaths? Nothing. Nothing, because that wasn’t life. Elania preferred stories. She had sore places on her arms from the boy’s smacks and Maria’s voice was still crystal clear in her ears. Their parents had wanted a boy so badly but kept getting girls. Maria. Fabiana. Valeria. Camila. Noa. At last, they had a son. Sergio had never been told no in all of his brief life. Even though Maria had whispered in shame at dinner about how much she disliked her baby brother, how jealous she was of the family prince who could do no wrong, she had still put her arm over his back in a vain attempt to shield him. Their necks were broken and their faces bruised.
Adelfo was sprawled partially over Tamera. Both had lost control of their bowels in death. A hand attached to no one was by their tangled feet. Elania stared at that, trying to make an arm appear. The skin was ragged along the edges, cut with teeth. She hoped the person was dead when it happened.
Yesterday Gregory had stepped up at prayer circle to lead the Wiccans in a song about spring, and today he was crumpled on the floor of the great room, a glistening cap of blood on his bald head. Yesterday his throat had pulsed with music, and now his throat was gone. In its place was a mottled red hole. He was just one more body among dozens. Heads had been bashed into walls, necks snapped, chunks of flesh torn away . . . the hand . . .
They were speaking to her. The words had gotten lost on the way across the room. Austin splashed through that dazzling sea of light and drying blood, the smell of shit and the waves of bodies to the sofa. “Elania? Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Her feet refused to walk into that brilliant picture. Frozen, she stood there.
This she could never write about. It was beyond words. She closed her eyes. Her arms were taken and the boys forced her to march through it blindly. They twisted back and forth around the waves. The boys had her arms locked in their strong hands . . . panic flared up and died. Austin was gay, Corbin wasn’t sick in the head, and Elania wasn’t in danger from them. They lifted her into the air to cross a wave and set her down on the other side.
Home. She was home. This was just the worst, most vivid nightmare of her life. Soon she would wake up and set it aside to get to school. The boys were yelling in the playroom. Cormac had shut himself into their fort and the others were pounding on the windows and door to break in . . . no. They were yelling in the backyard, leaping the dead Shepherd’s body and running away from Percy who was lurching along . . . no.
There was nowhere to go in her mind that was not reminiscent of this place.
“Elania?” Someone touched her cheek.
She opened her eyes to Micah. They were now in the foyer. More bodies were here, one draped over the fallen log. The outside restroom no longer had a door, and the people were crumpled and still inside. Last night, the ferals had won and won big. They’d busted down everything.
It had been hard to watch Micah walk away with those four people who asked to be killed. Elania wanted to stop it, especially in Clarissa’s case. Now she was thankful for the four who chose death by blade, for the many who chose death by fence. Those people hadn’t created this carnage in the dark hours. So easily it could have been Clarissa punching Sergio in the face rather than asking him to play, Casper chewing off a hand that once he’d shaken. The reverend had loved them so much that he chose the fence and death over beating down the doors and life.
The hill was going to be a horror in the morning light. Many of them had run out of the lodge to a hill crawling with zombies. They had run out screaming, and that drove the ferals crazy. Elania would have gone silently to the trees, the good ones for climbing. There weren’t many around. The newcomers wouldn’t have had a clue where to go or what to do, and lots of the old ones wouldn’t either.
They never should have started Welcome Mat.
They stood in the entryway to the foyer and checked for problems. Her pole. It was in her hand and she hadn’t felt it there this whole time. She thrust it out at Micah and said, “I don’t know how to use this.” Elania literally didn’t remember how to use it. Micah would know. She had known how to take walks and kill people.
Micah took the pole away and Corbin’s voice rumbled quietly. He was saying something about shock. Elania was in shock. If she had had her cell phone, she would have searched the term to read the symptoms. When a person was said to be in shock on television, someone slapped him or threw a cup of water in his face. No, water was for people who had fainted. Water and smelling salts under the nostrils. When a person was in shock, someone loaded him onto the hitch of an ambulance and put a blanket over his shoulders.
But if a medical professional said she’s going into shock, it was a bad thing. So there were two kinds of shock, emotional and physical. It wasn’t something she had thought about much. Until the party, her life didn’t truck in shock.
She was bleeding other peopl
e’s blood from her feet. It was the sea following along through the foyer, licking at her on the shore of the entryway and wanting to pull her back. She wouldn’t go back to that sea and she couldn’t go forward into the blaze of sun on leaves and sun on grass and sun on bodies strewn around like dolls. One was where she stood in prayer circle, twisted into a pretzel shape so Elania was looking at the front and back when she should only see one . . .
The hill was beyond the reach of God in any way that anyone conceived of God, and she was trapped within it. No longer could she pray, and there were few to pray for. The four of them could be the only ones left alive in the confinement point.
The bell rang for breakfast. Corbin had an arrow loaded in his bow. Austin and Micah held the railing poles up in preparation to club as the four went to the stairs. Birds sang, but otherwise it was still.
There was a body of a girl on the steps. They walked around her. It was so very still, the world upon the hill. The barest breeze lifted a few brown hairs upon the girl’s head and made them undulate. Her blood had sunk into the earth and her hair was over her face. No one checked her pulse. It was all too obvious that she was gone.
Elania hated to hear the thumping of their feet on the steps. It was far too loud. But it was day, and ferals rarely bothered anyone when the sun was out. Most of them clung to the shade, slept under rocky overhangs or gulches, and attacked only if someone traipsed into their territory. Never had Elania been bothered on her walk to the bridge for breakfast. Too many shafts of light pierced through the canopy, dappling the ground in puddles and pools. The ground aside the stairs was steep and full of prickly plants. She scanned them for ferals and saw none.
She flexed her hands. They were both there. It was someone else’s hand in the great room. Tonight she had to climb to the roof of the lodge and sleep at a slant under the stars. But she couldn’t figure out how to get up there.
“The trees,” Austin said. Elania had asked that out loud without hearing herself speak. “Just like the first night. After dinner, the four of us will climb that big oak. There isn’t a way to get up to the roof.”
Keeping his voice low and glancing behind them, Corbin said, “Those stupid fucking people! There’s no toilet paper! The sink’s not working! Do you have a cell phone? I want Pizoom!”
“It wasn’t all of them,” Austin said.
“It was enough of them,” Corbin said. “Where did they think they were? Camp?”
“They’re dead,” Elania said. Everything else was irrelevant.
At the base of the stairs was a second body, a man with one eye wide open and one eyelid drooping down. He had been the one taunting Micah yesterday, pretending he had breasts and mincing around. That had frightened Elania. He had issues with a female in charge. Women couldn’t know shit. Women belonged on their backs. He was a man who wanted to be a king.
He didn’t have issues now. Near him was the body of a feral in shreds of clothes. He had been speared through the stomach with a railing pole. The two had fought, both winning and losing. Floating by in the river was poor Victor in his bathrobe. Only hours ago, he had been alive and speaking, fighting with the too-small bathrobe to keep it closed. The Shepherds had stormed the basement harbor just as he was getting out of the shower. Someone else’s robe was all he had had time to put on. Now the robe was wide open, displaying his nudity to the sky. Elania stared at his shriveled penis and thicket of pubic hair, the bullet wound in his face and his big, pale belly that bore another one. Jewish on his mother’s side and Christian on his father’s, he’d wanted to attend morning services. He loved any excuse for a holiday and celebrated all of them, Hanukkah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, and everything else. His wife just rolled her eyes and let him go nuts. Those words had come from his open mouth, now open and silent.
Elania shouldn’t be seeing his nakedness. He hadn’t wanted her to see it. This would have embarrassed him so much.
Splash.
At the other end of the bridge, Zaley was standing behind the glass. Micah, Corbin, and Austin were dumping bodies off it through the broken part of the railing. Elania and Zaley just watched from opposite ends. Splash. Splash. One body got stuck between poles and hung there, half on the bridge and half in the air. Micah bent down to dislodge it.
Splash. Water flew into Victor’s open eyes. He didn’t react.
People crept out of the trees, one here, two there, one more. They came to the bridge as water flew up to embrace the last body. Others had survived the night. But there were going to be a lot of leftover breakfasts today.
“What the fuck?” one man shouted. A bloody stick was in his fists. “Why the fuck did you guys stop blocking the doors?” His eyes landed on Elania.
Why didn’t you lock the door? A girl from the holiday party had shouted that at Elania last December. Now it was so easy to know that zombies and cullers were coming, but not then. Something could be coming right now and she had no idea. She would only know later when it was too late. Then it would be obvious.
Her friends pushed past her, the bow going up and the poles rising higher, all of them demanding that the man get away from Elania. He was one of the new ones, baptized in blood. As they shouted at one another, Elania drifted around the darkening puddles on the bridge to the window. Very gently, Zaley set a microwave bowl of spaghetti and a bottle of water into the bucket. She pressed it over and mouthed I’m sorry. Then she looked meaningfully at the bucket.
Elania was sorry, too. She emptied the bucket of her breakfast and the folded up piece of paper that had come along for the ride. Going under the railing, she sat in the grass and ate. Red sauce slicked down her fingers and mixed with the green of the grass.
“Why the fuck didn’t you-”
“Why the fuck didn’t you?” It was Micah, who unloaded on him in an expletive-laden tirade. Why the fuck hadn’t he pulled the two feral boys away? Why the fuck hadn’t he helped to block the doors? She took the responsibility that he was trying to dump on her and dumped it directly back on him. Did she look like his fucking mommy? No? Then why the fuck hadn’t he done something more than watch? Why had these people from the harbor owner on down come to a confinement point with the belief that someone was going to take care of them? He gestured to the bodies and shouted about how many had died; she gestured to the living and shouted they were all going to die. It was just a question of when.
It had been hard living with them in the harbor. Victor had whispered that to Elania. You had the nice, normal ones, regular Joes and Janes, and then there were the others. Always quarreling, complaining, gossiping . . . he had been tempted to go home and take his chances there rather than keep on being in their tiresome company twenty-four hours a day. He’d survived junior high once, and he was living through it again.
Elania blinked. Her friends were seated with her when they had just been all the way over on the other side of the bridge. No one was yelling any longer and the bridge held several dozen people. The accusatory man was scarfing down his food twenty feet away. A lot of the survivors were soaking wet. They had fled from the lodge to the river and taken shelter within it, hiding under fronds that hung off the shore and bodies bumping into them with the current. All night they stood there awake.
She hadn’t heard anyone say that, but she was aware of what they had done.
This was shock. Her spaghetti was gone. She didn’t have a memory of finishing it, or of how the argument wrapped up. Somehow her friends had gotten their meals. All of these things had happened while Elania traveled a strange sea in her mind.
Fresh bodies were farther down the strip. The smarter ones had hidden in the water; the panicked ones had splashed through it and run for the fence. Without the sofa, Elania would have gone to the fence to get away from the ferals and died to a guard’s bullet. She counted the people at breakfast. Twenty and thirty, forty and fifty and sixty and seventy . . . that was all.
No one asked for prayers, or to speak about last night. No one had confessi
ons. That was for the better. Elania had no words. There wasn’t going to be prayer circle anyway today. Someone was in her spot.
She had run out of words. She was a writer who traded in words. Lifting her water bottle, she unscrewed the cap and drank. Micah said, “What’s that?” and snagged the paper. It had been underneath the bottle. A ring of water was soaked into it. “Where did you get this?”
Elania tried to focus on it. “Zaley passed it through.”
“And you didn’t say anything?”
Shock.
The note was unfolded and Corbin whispered, “What does it say?”
The voices of the other captives burbled over plans to drag the bodies out of the lodge and fix the doors. They’d see when they went up there how that was impossible. The plank that went in the brackets was snapped. The hinges were off; the frame damaged; one of the brackets had been hanging loosely. What was torn asunder could never be repaired with the little they had. The doors would have to be pinned with fallen logs carried in from around the hill. If that didn’t work, there was the inside restroom with the smashed door. Blocked off by a sofa set on end . . . that restroom wasn’t nearly as big a space as the great room. Everyone couldn’t cram in there. Twenty people. Thirty at most. They would have to choose which thirty and they’d do what they had hated Micah for doing. Sort. Or they could do what the kings had done, and only let in people willing to give them something in tribute.
After breakfast, Elania was going to that big oak tree and climbing up for the day. She wasn’t returning to the lodge. From now on, she lived in the tree and only came down for meals. For the weeks or months or years that she was here . . .
I am not strong enough for this. She put her hands in her pockets for strength, and drew them out filled with nothing.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 103
