“Elania, are you hearing me?”
“Elania?”
All four of them had their hands. She counted.
People were going over the bridge and up the steps, speaking of nails and logs. It was time to move on or the guard would yell to move away from the fence. Sometimes one popped off a shot to be encouraging, and not necessarily into the air. Elania clambered to her feet when her friends did and ducked under the railing to the bridge. She looked into the empty room and corridor. The others pulled her away when she pressed herself to the glass, Micah whispering, “Not now!”
Not now. The bell hadn’t rung but it had rung and she was late for first . . .
She wanted to see Zaley. They sucked so much at math. Algebra or geometry or trigonometry, both of them just blew at it. There was comfort in that. Whatever Elania was stuck on, there was a ninety percent chance that Zaley was stuck on it, too. They fiddled their way through a problem together a second and third time, and gave up to call Micah. How many times over the years had they done that? Did you get number four? No. Did you get it? No. After a pause, one said I bet Micah got it. Out came a phone. Although Micah was ahead in math, she knew how to do the problem and where they had gone wrong. She’d even remembered when the book was wrong, typos in the answers on two occasions. Elania and Zaley had been doing the problems right all along.
Through the glass was school.
No, she just wanted it to be.
The four of them went to the oak and she climbed high. If only the tree went up and up like the giant’s beanstalk in the fairy tale . . . Corbin called that she was getting too high and she stopped. Her mind strained for that other world above. He came up behind her and sat.
On the ground, Micah and Austin were arguing. Then Micah walked away and Austin heaved himself up into the tree. Snapping back into herself, Elania rubbed at her sore back and said, “Where is she going?”
Austin glared at Micah’s retreating form. Shaking his head, Corbin said, “She wants to look for Matt’s body to get her switchblade.”
Austin settled against the trunk in disgruntlement. “I don’t know what to do. Should I go after her?”
“Your choice, man,” Corbin said. “I’m not going after her.”
The note was nowhere to be seen. The note . . . the note that had come through the bucket from Zaley . . . Elania cried, “What was in the note?”
“Christ, haven’t you heard anything we’ve been saying?” Austin asked.
“She’s in shock,” Corbin said. “We’re supposed to go to the North Bridge at midnight. That’s all it said. She’s getting us out of here.”
“Great!” Austin said sourly. “We’ll just walk over to the bridge at midnight, easy as pie. No, there won’t be a bunch of ferals between us and there!”
“We could stay instead,” Corbin said.
“I’m not joking!”
“I don’t care if I die. I’d rather die trying to escape than live on here.”
The bridge . . . there wasn’t any way out on that bridge. The South Bridge was the one with the gate. Then the thought was gone. “How will we get over there?” Elania asked.
“We all want to know,” Austin muttered. “How the hell are we supposed to know when it’s midnight anyway? Does she think there are clocks in here? Or that we have our cell phones on us?”
“Austin, do you want to leave or not?” Elania shouted. She had no idea where that anger came from. It didn’t exist within her until it had erupted outwards into the world. Startled, the boys looked up to her branch. Elania didn’t lose her temper. But she was mad about last night. She was furious. She was raging . . . and it faded. Last night was over. Most of those junior high minds riding around in adult bodies were gone.
“Yes, I want to leave,” Austin said in the ensuing quiet. “But I don’t want to die getting out.”
“What are you doing?” Corbin asked when Elania climbed down. “I thought you wanted to stay in the tree.”
Had she said that? “We need to see if there’s a place closer to the North Bridge for us to hide once darkness falls. Come on.”
Corbin got down and Austin stayed in the tree. They walked along the path to the North Bridge and inspected the whole of the hillside. Swathes of it were covered in plants that grew low to the ground, well trampled and useless for their purposes. There were sporadic boulders, but none big enough to conceal four people. None of the trees were good to climb. Corbin said, “Do you think we could get to the bridge through the water? Slip in where they can’t see us and swim over?”
Elania didn’t want to get into that river choked with bodies. “Maybe.”
“Or we could zombie lurch onto the bridge. The ferals must do that all the time at night. They go everywhere else and we don’t normally find bodies on the bridge at breakfast.” Corbin considered the glass wall, which was shining like a scream in the sunlight.
Shining like a scream . . . shock was making garbage of her brain. Those words didn’t fit together.
“That glass can’t be climbed,” Corbin was saying. “It’s the fence they have to watch, not the end of the bridge.”
“They shot people on the bridge last night.”
“Everything was going crazy. They don’t do that regularly.”
“What about those bushes there? They’re really thick. If we crouched in them as night fell, no one will see us there. But there might be bodies.”
Corbin searched through the ring of bushes. “No bodies. Then we lurch over . . . I don’t know where on the bridge we’re even supposed to be.” His voice held a stirring of excitement.
Micah came around the path. Spying them, she cut over to the bushes. “Have you seen him?”
“Who?” Elania asked. “Austin? He’s in the oak tree.”
“No, Matt. I can’t find him anywhere.”
“You stabbed him deep in the chest,” Corbin said. “The internal hemorrhaging and the doors falling on him . . . he couldn’t have gotten too far from the lodge.”
Then Elania was going up the stairs after them. She hadn’t wanted to return to the top of the hill earlier, and she didn’t remember changing her mind or mounting those first steps. A whole conversation about it had to have happened with Elania unaware.
She had to pull herself together. These weren’t surroundings where she could be off guard. Micah didn’t rule the confinement point any more.
The crest of the hill was abuzz. Bodies were being dragged out of the lodge and put in a heap in the shade at a distance. Men and women were clustered at the broken doors to discuss what to do. Others were carrying in fallen logs and large rocks. The pretzel of a human was gone.
Colin’s body came out in a man’s arms. They had come here with him, that boy in pajama bottoms and one slipper. He was someone’s son, someone’s grandson, someone’s friend, someone’s student . . . thrown on the pile by indifferent arms when his body should have been met with wails.
A party of five spoke on the grass where prayer circle should have been taking place. They were planning to spend the day hunting ferals on the hill, killing them now rather than wait for an attack at night. As Micah picked through the bodies in the heap for Matt’s, a man asked to borrow the bow. Corbin said no. Angry at the refusal, the man said, “You want to go through that again in the lodge tonight?”
“Forget it, we’ll get some poles from the bridge!” another man shouted.
“I won’t be going through it again because I won’t be there,” Corbin said to the first man. “Those doors won’t hold.”
“So you’re going to sleep on the hill somewhere? That’s safe. Just give me the damn bow and you can have it back tonight!”
Nowhere on the hill was safe. Micah lifted her pole in warning and Corbin drew an arrow from the quiver. The man backed off, unwilling to fight for it. The other man from the hunting party asked in a friendlier voice if Corbin wanted to join them in the hunt. He declined a second time.
Matt’s body wasn’t in the he
ap, so the three of them walked south. Elania said, “Is your bow not strong enough to hunt? It looks good.”
“It’s a decent bow,” Corbin said as Micah inspected the bodies in the grass. “Tons better than my first one. But it’s still a rudimentary weapon, and the problem with ferals is their imperviousness to pain. Just because I nail one through the torso, which is the easiest place to strike, doesn’t mean they’ll go down. And by the time I’ve aimed the second arrow . . .”
“They’ll have gotten to you, if they’re charging your way,” Elania finished.
“Yeah. This is basically a last-resort, emergency weapon. Nothing more.”
They wandered around the multitude of paths. Once the hunting party charged past them, intent on the shadowy, southwestern gulch. Screaming followed. Eager to get away from it, Elania, Corbin, and Micah went east along the path at the base of the hill. It wasn’t a feral doing the screaming.
As they came to the South Bridge, the gate was opening. The guards shoved three stamped men inside. Elania stiffened . . . the kings . . . but these new people were far more frightened of Elania than she was of them. One was a very tall boy in his early teens; a second was very old. All of them had similar features and frames. They were likely family, grandfather, father, and son.
She didn’t want to collect any more stories. Casper and the flowers, Maria and the favored Sergio, Victor and his holidays, Colin and the one slipper . . . It was the right thing to do for Elania to introduce herself, make them feel welcome in a hostile world, but the words never reached her throat to get caught there. The boy threw up on his own feet.
The shouting of the watchtower guard propelled the three fellows off the bridge. Corbin pointed them up the stairs to the lodge. The oldest man said fearfully, “But who is that screaming?”
“A feral is attacking someone. Stay on the stairs and the path,” Corbin said.
“Yes, sir,” the youngest one answered.
“Sir?” Elania echoed as the others went up the stairs in a tight group.
“It’s the facial hair,” Corbin said. “I can’t wait to shave it off.”
“I want to shave off the fucking forest under my arms,” Micah said. “I don’t give a shit about my leg hair. It doesn’t bug me one bit. But my armpits? Ugh.”
“Storm Blaster,” Elania blurted. She’d meant to say Elemental Team . . . no, she’d meant to say Matt. His body was in the water, cracked over a rock. His head was half-under the surface. She had recognized him by the red of his kiddie shirt. Micah splashed in and turned him over. The nearest watchtower guard had seen them, but his gun was slack at his side.
The switchblade was no longer in Matt’s chest. Letting go of the body, Micah filled her lungs with air and searched the river bottom. As Elania trailed up the path to look for the blade, Corbin walked up the hill a short ways to do the same. None of them uncovered it.
Micah got out of the water, limping a bit, and Elania said, “Did you twist your ankle?”
“It was sleeping in that weird position under the sofa. Everything hurts,” Micah said. “You’re walking a little off yourself.”
Elania flexed her knees. Her body was also aggravated from last night, especially her back. The ache just didn’t quit. Her legs had been out straight for hours when she needed to bend them, and she couldn’t without hitting Corbin. Somehow she had still slept and dreamed of Casper, that she was magically ten years older and he was ten years younger. A sharp pain in her groin had led to the wailing of a baby. It came out clean and wrapped in a towel, but the arms were loose and waving. Casper cried over their daughter, who had Elania’s dark skin and Casper’s tattoos down her tiny arms. It had been sweet and bizarre.
She forgot the dream as abruptly as she had remembered it. Someone was going to carry that hand out of the lodge and add it to the heap. Someone was going to drag a body minus a hand out of the lodge as well. Mom and Dad had sneaked Zyllevir to Zaley and that meant Mom and Dad were close by . . . Elania shook her head to clear it. She stretched out her muscles until some of the ache dissipated.
They searched for hours but didn’t turn up the blade. Matt could have run all over the hill, thrashed anywhere in the river before landing on that rock. Another captive could have already claimed it. Keeping Corbin in view, Elania poked through plants. She avoided the bodies swarming with insects in a hollow, but just her presence disturbed some of them into rising. The smell heightened and she retreated.
“Is that a watch on his wrist?” Corbin asked. He covered his face with his shirt and plunged down into the hollow. The buzzing was furious. When he came back, he gave a watch to Elania and vomited on the ground.
“I don’t want to die behind the fence,” Elania said.
She blinked and they were back at the tree. Austin was saying self-righteously that he could have told them not to bother looking for the blade. Micah told him to fuck off since they had a watch. It was around Corbin’s wrist. Elania closed her fingers. It had just been in her hand.
Stop it, Elania. Pay attention. She had forgotten everything because part of her had been listening to last night’s cacophony of screams.
They took a bathroom break and sat in the tree to wait for dinner. A dog barked far away and reminded Elania of Bleu Cheese. The hunting party passed under the oak, reduced by a member and covered in blood. The guy was still mad about the bow. Glaring up at Corbin, he called, “That’s your great hiding place? Good luck tonight.”
“Thank you,” Corbin said much more kindly. “Good luck to you, too.”
Another one in the hunting party asked for the lighter. Micah said that she’d lost it last night in the chaos. Once they were gone, something rasped and Elania spied a little flame dancing above Micah’s fist. “Why did you lie to them?”
“I don’t know,” Micah said. “I just did. If you knew some of the lies I’ve told, you’d club me to death with the railing poles.”
“There isn’t any lie that would make me do that,” Elania said.
The flame went out and Micah put the lighter away. “I lied about the Welcome Mat party, Elania. Remember how I said that there was just one date we could have the community center in Blue Hill? Only one day that that place was still available for rental?”
“I remember.” Elania just barely remembered that.
“It was a lie. I picked that date on purpose.”
“Why?” Elania asked. Corbin and Austin listened from their branches in equal bewilderment.
“I wanted to see what people picked, the school gala or our dorky club party,” Micah said. “It didn’t have to be that day. There were a bunch of other dates available.”
“So all of us got Sombra C and shot up for no reason?” Austin said heatedly. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kidding. None of that had to happen. None of this had to happen. It’s my fault that we’re here.”
Elania had no idea what to say. Neither did Corbin. Only Austin had the power of speech, and he said hatefully, “Don’t you ever talk to me again, Micah Camborne. Not ever!” Micah nodded and looked up to the sky.
None of them spoke through the rest of the afternoon. Elania closed her eyes and saw the heap of bodies, Colin’s thrown atop it. A year ago today, no one had Sombra C. No one had heard of it. It didn’t exist. Then her thoughts didn’t exist either, and she stared at the changing light on the branches from the leaves shivering in the wind.
When the bell rang for dinner, they climbed down. Austin landed first and strode away with Corbin not far behind. Micah waited for Elania to drop to the ground, and then she was still standing by the trunk when Elania turned around to see why she was alone. “Micah? Are you coming?”
“Go ahead. You don’t have to walk with me.”
“Please come,” Elania said. They walked together to the path. “It was a coincidence that that happened to be the night the cullers attacked Murdoch. That wasn’t your fault.” It wasn’t fair for the boys to be angry with Micah when no one could hav
e predicted the future.
“It was stupid,” Micah said. “I didn’t care which party people picked.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“For something to do.”
“Micah, that’s not a reason.”
“That’s the most honest reason I can give you. I promise. I was bored and it was an impulse. And all of you trusted me. I guess I was waiting for someone to call me on it.”
“Why would I ever think to call you on it?” Elania asked. “You never gave me any reason not to trust you.”
“You should be mad.”
The line was forming on the bridge. People muttered and watched the sky. Dinner was coming on the late side again. The girls stood at the back of the line, Elania saying, “I don’t see what purpose there is in being mad about that. It was just kind of mean to put people in that position. I wasn’t planning on going to the party at South Haven, but others were. Corbin had to split between the two.”
Clasping her hands, Micah gazed down to the bodies in the water. “I’m a mean person.”
“You are not! You’re the only reason I passed math all through high school. And doing what you did for me on the bridge that day . . .” It was as far as Elania could allude to that horror. “That wasn’t you being mean.” Like Zaley, Micah had stepped between Elania and evil. Elania hadn’t known when she made these friends how good they were going to be.
The line moved up in a quick rhythm. Other times it was slow as molasses. The people on the grass had bowls of pea soup. Those were very small meals, starvation rations. Yesterday some of the new people had complained about the smell of the hill and the shitty food; today they were silent and accepting of it.
It wasn’t Zaley behind the glass. Some other girl was there, swathed in a mask and hat and apron. She dumped in a bowl of soup and water, shoving the bucket over and jerking it back so fast that she nearly pinched Elania’s fingers. Elania carried her food out to the grass and drank the soup. It was lukewarm and gross. Chunks of ham were stuck on the bottom. She licked the bowl clean.
The boys sat apart from her and Micah. People chucked their trash into the river and hurried to the stairs. The three new ones were among them. The man from the hunting party called to Corbin, “See you tomorrow!”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 104
