“Who’s been doing this up for you, baby?” he asked about the hooks.
“I’ve been doing it myself since I’m a big girl,” Zaley said sarcastically. She brought his face to hers and pressed her lips to his. He stayed close-mouthed. His hands slid over the material to the back and undid the hooks.
It was warm in the room from the shower and his hands were scalding when they came to her bare breasts. She choked back a moan at the shock of sensation. Her head tipped back helplessly as he touched her. Now he was kissing her collarbone and it was making her crazy that she couldn’t kiss him open-mouthed. They could, the chance of her catching Sombra C was slim, but he wasn’t going to let her. She gave in to what they could have, and that was his lips trailing to her breast and her fingers in his hair to press him in.
There were three people on the other side of the thin wall. Wishing she didn’t have to be so restrained, that they were altogether alone, she stroked his shoulders as he gathered her up into a tight embrace. The heat and smoothness of his bare chest on hers made a fresh moan catch in her throat. She wanted to lay down in that big bed with him.
“I can’t move,” Corbin whispered into her hair.
“Why not?” Zaley asked in concern.
“I will lose my towel.”
They giggled and she said, “Lose it.”
He lost his towel. She got him to kiss her with his lips slightly parted and that she had to settle for. In time, her ass began to hurt from the hard counter. When she slid off, he turned her and kissed all over her back. His hands came to the zipper of her jeans, her heart picking up to a furious tempo, but then he said, “You should shower.”
“I showered already.”
“You have to. Please. I’ll just obsess if you don’t.”
She acquiesced and let him lower her jeans and underwear. He broke away and pulled open the shower curtain to turn on the faucets. That skill had returned to him. Trailing his fingers in the spray, he said, “Ready for you.”
Zaley wasn’t always going to take a shower just because he feared that he’d covered her in germs. Brennan had gone so overboard and she hated to see Corbin doing it, too. For now, she humored him. Pressing them together fully naked, she kissed him one last time and shivered to feel his erection against her. She liked that she made him that excited. Then she stepped in. “Stay in here and talk to me?”
“Sure, I’ll hide my stamp,” Corbin said. A container squeaked. “This is the rattiest hotel and I’m sorry to leave it.”
“Me, too.” It had been an oasis. “I want you guys to have the gun on the walk, okay?” Lowering her voice, she added, “But keep it away from Micah.”
“She will have a fit to not be the one with the gun,” Corbin said. “Are you sure that you shouldn’t have it?”
“This is only going to be a short drive for me. Then I’ll just lock myself into the car while I wait if things look unsafe. You guys have to walk and God knows what you’ll come across.”
“Lock yourself in whether it looks unsafe or not, especially if you end up sleeping there. Is there any chance that the Shepherds in the Veterans brace will recognize you?”
Zaley squirted shampoo into her palm, washing her hair by reflex. Oh well, it would get more of the dye out. “I doubt it. I don’t know who works over there. They didn’t come to the confinement point.” It was more likely that a guard at the Golden Gate Bridge would recognize her, one of the guys who had gotten skimmed off. That was something to worry about. They’d have to pick a lane carefully if the brace times had changed.
“What about the ones from before the confinement point?” Corbin asked. “At the Head. Did they work-”
“No,” Zaley said. “Those guys were mostly doing paces. They weren’t going up to Veterans for braces when I was there.”
“The bridge,” Corbin said, more to himself than to her. “We’ll go through in the morning to skip the brace. Then we’ve got to drive slowly and carefully up to Sonoma or we’ll get snagged in another one. I wish that we had the Internet to tell us where!”
“Me, too.”
“Whoever is in the front passenger seat should be on guard. The driver is busy driving and those in the back seat can’t see as well. Someone always has to be looking ahead for slowed traffic or cones in the road. We can cover up the stamps but we can’t fake saliva tests. We need a coyote.”
Zaley rinsed the shampoo from her hair. “What? Why?”
“Not the animal. I saw it on the news. Some Shepherd squads hate what’s going on so much that they’re helping non-feral Sombra Cs get to harbors. On the surface they look like all the other squads, wearing the vests and everything, but they’re sneaking Sombra Cs past braces. Some charge huge amounts of money and they’re just exploiting the situation; others do it for free. The guy interviewed was genuine. They blacked out his face to hide his identity. He didn’t charge people a dime. He was one of the original Shepherds in Colorado and it sickens him how everything they were doing got perverted. Shepherds who do what he does are called coyotes. The name is borrowed from the guys who smuggle people over the border to America.”
His voice had gotten louder. Zaley turned around. His head was poking cheerfully around the curtain to watch her shower. “You’re pretty.”
“Thank you.” She flicked water in his face to make him go away.
Retreating, he said, “Can I ask you a question? It’s been bugging me a lot. I’m not sure I want to know the answer.”
“If it’s about Meerkat, the answer is no. And gross, Corbin.”
“No. It’s The Cheese . . . they didn’t . . . those raiders didn’t kick her, or do anything to her? After that one guy shot her, I mean. Do you know? They had me out of there so quickly . . .”
“I didn’t see them do anything to her. After Micah shot Tarley to death, they wanted to be out of there fast. I went over to check on Cheesie before I stole the car. She was already gone.”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
He sighed unhappily. “She saved me from that Shepherd in Cloudy Valley. No brain in her blue head but she still knew I was in danger. Everything we went through and all she got was a bullet through the chest.”
“Corbin, she had such a happy life,” Zaley said. “Just because the last tiny bit of it wasn’t that great doesn’t overshadow the good years.” Did it? She wanted to believe what she was saying. But Bleu Cheese had had a wonderful life until the end.
“Even on the road, she wasn’t having that bad of a time,” Corbin said. “Swimming. Walking. Eating lots of people food. Seeing her first pony. She was the goofiest looking puppy. Do you remember how squat she was? With those stubby little legs?”
“Yeah. She was fat then, too.”
“She was the fattest one of the bunch, like she’d eaten one of her littermates in utero. The other four in the cage were squirming and playing with one another. She waddled over when I stooped down, wanting to play with me instead. She thought I was the greatest toy ever. I want to get another dog some day, but it won’t be her.”
“It’ll be special in a different way,” Zaley said.
“I won’t name it Bleu Cheese the Reboot, or Bleu Cheese 2.0. There was only one, and there will only ever be one Cheesie Li.”
Knocking on the door, Austin said, “Would you guys stop having sex so the rest of us can brush our teeth?”
Blood drained from Zaley’s cheeks. Had the others been able to hear them making out? Corbin laughed and opened the door to pass out the toothbrushes and toothpaste. “Sex-free zone here.”
“And I am disappointed,” Austin said, calling out to the other room, “No sex, guys!” Micah laughed; Elania didn’t. When they got to the harbor, Zaley was sure that Elania would smile to have the triplets and the new puppy bouncing all around her.
Corbin had a towel waiting when Zaley moved the curtain aside. He began at her face and worked his way down. “What gave you the idea to drug the guard?”
“Only about a
thousand cartoons and movies where someone did that. I figured I’d mash up the pills and mix the powder in coffee. When I checked the schedule and it was Wildebeest on shift at that tower, it was even easier. She and her sister Little Bear always brought in so much Pizoom. It tastes so nasty that I thought it would mask the powder.”
The towel slipped lower and lower on her abdomen. “I watched those two drink it for weeks. It was sick.”
“They were addicted to the caffeine. So I opened up the two bottles and dumped in the powder. Wildebeest came in for her shift and I claimed to have stopped some of the guys from drinking them. Quick, have them before they go flat! I probably toasted her liver.”
He was getting every droplet on her skin. “What were they like? Those two? All of them were such enigmas when we were on the hill.”
“Wildebeest was sort of like Grace Leigh for real, but quieter. You were all just zombies to her. She blew a hole in the rec room roof on impulse. Little Bear . . . she truly believed that she was doing a good thing for the world. It was sad that you guys had to be in there, but it was necessary for the greater good. Corbin, I think you’ve gotten all the drops.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, and kept rubbing her everywhere with the towel.
In the morning, they packed up to go. Zaley felt a twinge of guilt for stealing the towels and the blanket under the duvet. But only a twinge. She made a trip out to the car with their backpacks. A woman was loading a suitcase into the trunk of a car across the lot. Otherwise, the motel was quiet.
They had hours to kill before the brace came down and driving around the streets was a waste of gas. The goal was to find a parking spot somewhere to sit and hang out. As the woman shut her trunk and drove away, Zaley nodded to the cracked door of their room.
The others filed out and climbed into the car. The key returned with five minutes left until checkout, Zaley steered them onto the road and fumbled to lower the visor. The sun was beating down. Austin had a hand over his brow and Elania was closing her eyes from the glare. Squinting at stores, Corbin said, “Wow. Closed. Closed. Open with reduced hours. Closed. Open. Closed. Open.” San Francisco smelled from its uncollected garbage. Litter was strewn around the streets.
It didn’t take long to reach the vicinity of the brace. There was hardly any traffic with gas prices so high. They pulled into the lot of a Shor-Bee’s and Austin said hesitantly, “Should we go in?” He shook his head in the rearview mirror. “No, that’s not a good idea.”
“Why don’t we go through the drive-thru and then sit in a parking space to eat?” Zaley asked. No one was in line and most of the lot was empty.
They ordered burgers and fries but not soda to save money. Many items were missing from the triptych menu, no bacon burgers or fish sandwiches, no avocados on anything. Ice cream only came in vanilla. People had stuck pro-Shepherd and pro-TBACS stickers to the frame. The ninety-nine cent menu was now the three-buck menu. Spelled out in an empty swathe of the triptych was a warning that the only acceptable form of payment was cash.
Zaley pulled up to the window and exchanged cash for food. When she extended the bag to Corbin, he stared at it blankly until she said, “Corbin! Please take this from me.” He reached out quickly, the weight too much on her arm and bringing it down to his lap anyway.
Driving around the building to the farthest spot in the little lot, Zaley parked under the shade of a tree. Corbin was staring at the bag. “Is there a problem?” Zaley asked.
“I’m sorry,” Corbin whispered. “It came out of the window.” Austin rubbed his shoulder reassuringly and Zaley took the bag away. She passed everything out. The employee had only put one package of catsup inside for two orders of fries.
“Aren’t you hungry, Elania?” Micah asked.
“Oh,” Elania said. The unwrapped burger was just sitting there in her lap. Picking it up, she nibbled at the bun and set it down.
“I’d like to have the gun for the walk,” Micah said. “We don’t know what’s out there.”
“I agree,” Zaley said. “I gave it to Corbin to carry.”
“Why?”
Zaley was blunt. “Because what you did with the truck makes me really nervous about giving it to you.”
Rather than argue, Micah sank back in her seat and ate. Austin lifted Elania’s hand, whispering for her to have a little more of the burger. After some lackluster bites, she gave it to him to finish.
They sat there for a long time. The Shor-Bee’s had only a handful of customers. A lot of homeless people were on the sidewalk. Corbin gathered up their trash but wavered about leaving the car to dump it, so Zaley did it. When she got back into the car, Micah said, “Zaley, what was the battle at Scolie? I heard about it several times on the television. They never said what it was. A city?”
“It’s an unincorporated area somewhere in the Midwest. I don’t remember which state.” Zaley had been watching the news at the confinement point when it was first reported.
“The Shepherds lost that one,” Corbin said. “They showed a picture of a field covered in bodies.”
“They lost it big time. The Armed Forces had set up a base of operations there after Prime destroyed their other one. They’d infiltrated and taken it down. Thousands of Shepherds showed up to blast the new base to shreds and ended up getting blasted instead. Most of them don’t have any real military training and their leaders barely have any themselves. They do their best at guerilla attacks, not direct assaults. So they got hammered. A lot of soldiers died, too. Shot in the back by a Shepherd mole. He was executed. There wasn’t a trial.”
“Who is Mother Marian?” Micah asked. “That name came up in the same segment and they showed a picture of a woman kneeling and crying.”
“Marian Colt. She lost all four of her kids in the battle. They were our age and a little older, three boys and a girl, and fought for the Shepherd side. They had just joined the Shepherds because all of their friends were doing it. The soldiers should have arrested them, not shot them to death. That’s what their mother said. They were kids. Like with bullets flying around, the soldiers were going to stop to check IDs. She’s becoming a Shepherd martyr for losing her whole family.”
The shade of the tree moved and it grew too warm to stay there. Zaley drove around the blocks and pulled in at a Comanico gas station. She topped off the tank and moved the car over to a parking spot. Then she went into the minimart and wandered the aisles while the others took turns in the outside restrooms. She was surprised when the door opened and Corbin came in. Her eyes went immediately to his neck. It appeared bare.
The clerk was reading a paperback behind the counter. His eyes skirting around the aisles and his expression overwhelmed, Corbin said, “The car’s uncomfortable. The sun is giving Elania a headache, so she’s staying in the restroom for now. And I . . . I thought I would come into a store.”
This was terrifying him. “It’s okay.”
He almost yanked the basket away from her. “I can hold that for you.”
“Do you want anything?”
They walked down an aisle. “There are so many kinds of things. How did I used to do this?”
“There’s actually not so much,” Zaley said. Half of the shelves had dust for sale, and a lot of what goods were there weren’t edible.
He paused at a postcard rack and lifted one down of the San Francisco lights at night. “I want to send something to my parents. Let them know where we’re headed.” Returning the postcard to the rack, he pulled out a cheaper one and added it to the basket on top of the scattered energy bars that Zaley had chosen for them to take on their walk. When she paid and asked the clerk for the location of the nearest postal office, Corbin hung back shyly.
In the car, he hesitated over the postcard and then handed it and the motel pen to Zaley. “Would you? I’ll tell you what to say.”
“Sure,” Zaley said. Elania was still in the restroom; Micah and Austin were stretching their legs outside by the hood. Every time someone walked by the gas
station, Austin looked nervous.
Moving his elbow off the center console to let her use it for a firm surface, Corbin said, “I’m worried that Shepherds are reading their mail, so it can’t be too obvious. Write ‘Hi, guys! Long time, no see.’” He waited as she wrote. “‘Sorry to have missed you when we passed through last. We’re on our way up to the wine region. Hope something is still open! Love, Froggie.’”
“Froggie?” Zaley repeated when she signed the name.
“I told you about that awful shirt I used to wear all the time when I was a kid, didn’t I? It had a frog with its tongue sticking out. My mom called me Froggie for a joke. I thought it was hysterical.” He checked over the postcard. “Good. We don’t know if the Cloudy Valley Shepherds were told that I was put into a confinement point, so they might still be keeping an eye on my house. If they’re checking for letters from me, this won’t be suspicious.”
“Your parents will figure out what you mean?”
“Yeah. Mom will. Who else would sign something Froggie but me?” He leaned out the window. “Let’s hit the post office; it’s just a few blocks away.” Micah went into the women’s restroom to retrieve Elania, and Austin motioned to the men’s and mimicked washing his hands from the filth on the car hood. It was after three.
At the post office, Zaley left them in a shady spot and crossed the lot. Panhandlers were everywhere and she shook her head to five different solicitations for money. Inside, the stamp machine was busted. She joined a short line to the one open service window. The woman at the counter was arguing with the employee there. He was insisting that she had to open the box and let him examine the contents, and she didn’t want to do it. The items inside were wrapped gifts. Nonplussed at her anger, the guy said, “Then you’ll have to unwrap those, too.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 110
