Austin smoothed her hair and Micah said hoarsely, “What do you mean, you fell asleep? Was she on watch?”
In a choked voice, he said, “No. I was going to stay up all night and let you guys rest. But I fell asleep. And she took the gun . . .”
“You couldn’t know that she was going to do this,” Corbin said.
Austin pushed up onto one arm and wiped off his cheeks. “I should have known! She just told me last night that it stopped working!”
“It?” Micah asked. “What’s it?”
“The Zyllevir.”
The Zyllevir. Corbin’s mind pieced that together.
“She snarled when I put the flashlight in her face accidentally,” Austin whispered. For all its quietness, it had the quality of a shriek. “She couldn’t remember where we were, or why.” He had lain in her blood, a line of which was soaked into his shirt. That line transfixed Corbin. If the Zyllevir had stopped working . . .
“Oh God!” Corbin exclaimed. “That’s why she’s so silent! The virus is-” She was.
“She was getting brain damage.” Austin rested upon the stream of blood and put his hand to Elania’s cheek, whispering more apologies. Her eyes were a quarter of the way open. When he tried to shut the lids, they refused to stay down. A hint of red was at Austin’s neck. His stamp was showing.
Corbin checked over their surroundings. They were out of sight of Ph.D. and he didn’t hear anyone coming after them. No one had settled with tents or sleeping bags in this area. The sounds of traffic were distant. For now, they were alone.
“You found out that she was getting sick and you didn’t wake us up to say anything?” Micah asked.
“She asked me not to tell for the night,” Austin said in misery. “I didn’t know this was why.”
“Of course it was why,” Micah said.
“Micah, don’t criticize!” Corbin snapped, in a rage at her and her stupid blue-streaked hair. He was sick of her being critical, thinking that she could do everything better since she was smarter than all of them.
“I’m not criticizing,” Micah said calmly. “I’m just saying it’s what I would have done if the medication had stopped working for me.”
Elania had died out here alone. The damage had been limiting her thought processes and decisions. She just wandered off with the gun and pulled the trigger in a nowhere place on the golf course . . . what were they going to tell her family?
He wanted a bunch of EMTs to bend over her and try something, anything, and everything to bring her back to life. Watching them work would give him hope. She had fallen prey to her virus and Corbin hadn’t even noticed. Helplessly, he said, “What should we do with her?”
No one answered him. The sun was rising and the longer they stayed, the more they risked someone coming this way and asking questions that they couldn’t answer. They couldn’t bury her in the sand. And her blood . . . her blood was still alive with the virus and her body a biohazard. Anyone who touched it with an open wound could contract her Sombra C. Whoever moved her body wouldn’t be able to see her stamp. The way her head was turned, it was covered up.
He had nothing left in him to care if someone got sick. He just felt defeated.
“We have to leave her here,” Micah answered at last.
“No,” Austin said.
“Aussie, she’s gone. We can’t lug her body around.”
“Don’t talk about her like that! She’s not a body!”
But she was. Life was composition and death was decomposition, and the latter was all that was left to her. First she was going to discolor. Her heart was no longer pumping blood through her veins, so the blood would be drawn by gravity into the lowest parts of her body. Her cells were losing their structural integrity. In a few hours, she would stiffen. Then she was going to bloat and attract insects, her skin rupture and be consumed. The air smelled of nothing now, but that wouldn’t be true later.
Corbin had seen those things many times in the horrific live laboratory of the confinement point. He had seen Brennan’s freshly dead form in Cloudy Valley. None of it was the same as seeing it in Elania. He hated that all of this was going to happen to her. He hated how it reduced her to meat.
“We have to go,” Micah said quietly. The cosmetics were wearing off her stamp and making her look sunburned in one spot.
“We can’t just leave her,” Austin said. “Fuck you for wanting to leave her!” Getting up, he scanned around them and stalked to an island of trees. Then he swept something from the ground. Flowers. He was picking flowers.
“Your stamp is showing, Micah,” Corbin said.
“So is yours.” They covered them up and checked each other’s necks.
Micah knelt down by Elania and straightened out her body. Corbin went to the island. Austin gave him a hateful look, expecting to be told that it was time to go. In his hand was a bedraggled, pathetic little bouquet.
“You have to cover up your stamp,” Corbin said.
“I don’t care,” Austin retorted.
“You can pick flowers, but you can’t do it with your neck showing. Anyone could come over here.”
Acquiescing, Austin took out the cosmetics and let Corbin cover his neck. Then they searched the ground for flowers together, picking the best of the scrawny selection. Glancing at the hill, Austin said in disgust, “She’s probably going through Elania’s pockets.”
“Micah’s just different that way,” Corbin said, remembering Brennan’s backpack after the car accident. Her loyalty was only to the living, and as reprehensible as that was, Corbin was living so she was on his side. “Actually, I think she’s just fixing Elania up. Her clothes and stuff.” Micah had dribbled water onto one of the washcloths and was washing Elania’s face.
They found a patch of flowers and Austin said, “I never said thank you to her, for pretending to be my girlfriend. It kept my mother off my back. I didn’t think about how weird that was for Elania to have a fake boyfriend. I just thought about how she was saving my ass. What if she wanted to date some other guy at Cloudy Valley High? And she couldn’t because she was faking it with me? I never asked. That was so selfish. It sucks that I did that to her.” A tear dripped off his nose to the flower he was picking.
When they returned to the mound over the sand pit, Micah had smoothed out the wrinkles from Elania’s shirt and blue jeans. Her socks had been pulled up, the laces redone on her shoes, and her arms folded over her chest. Her head was still to the side and her eyelids slightly open.
The boys stripped their bouquets of leaves and twigs, threw away the poorer flowers, and combined the rest into a larger bouquet. A car honked on the road, a staccato TAT-TAT-TAT that was the only sound. Micah searched through the backpacks one at a time, coolly methodical. Austin’s eyes were dark and full of reproach upon her. “Aussie, I’m looking for Zaley’s tea light. It didn’t go with her and I’m sure she’d like us to leave it with Elania. It gives barely any light anyway but she wanted us to have it as a last resort in the night.”
“Oh,” Austin said abashedly, and returned to the flowers.
Once they had a nice bouquet, Corbin lifted Elania’s hands. There was still warmth in them. He teared up. He wanted to have said goodbye while she was alive, not wake up to her dead and gone. Austin slipped the flowers onto her stomach and Corbin laid her hands down to pin them there.
People were going to scream when they realized that they were moving a zombie body. This was the last time Elania was going to be treated with respect. The flowers had to be there to prove she wasn’t a monster, despite her blood. Corbin picked out a leaf and fixed a flower that was getting bent by the others. Then he just wept for her.
The tea light had been all the way at the bottom of a backpack. Micah set it aside and refilled the bag with clothes and rolled-up towels. Austin turned the tea light over and flipped the switch. “How new is the battery?”
“I don’t know,” Micah said. “My moms hardly used these when they were ours, but Zaley could have run
it down more. It’ll work for now.” Austin set the flickering tea light on the back of Elania’s hand. When it slipped, he caught it.
“Put it above the flowers,” Corbin said. Austin moved it there. All three of them got to their feet. There wasn’t anything left to do. Corbin was desperate for there to be more.
“We should say something before we go,” Micah said. “That’s what people do.”
Corbin couldn’t give Elania’s prayers. He stared at the body and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you. I feel so bad that I didn’t see what was going on. I wish I could have helped.” His voice broke. He took a deep breath and fought off a fresh load of tears in order to keep speaking. “Thank you for being such a good friend to me. We never would have started Welcome Mat without you. It was just a fun idea that Zaley and I tossed around, but you made it happen. I hope you’re with your God now.” It was a dumb eulogy. Could she hear him, wherever she was? Was she looking down at them?
“Of course she’s with God,” Austin said. “She was the best person I’ve ever known. The best one out of all of us. When she was leading morning services, I thought that she should be a rabbi, not a writer. I don’t know if there are women rabbis. They still should have wanted her to be one. She would have been a good leader, just like she was behind the fence. Not like how Micah was doing it. Elania was leading in a different way.”
“Women can be rabbis,” Micah said. “That’s a change in modern times. As long as they’re not Orthodox, and she wasn’t.”
“I don’t know if they would let her though,” Austin said somberly. “She had a different view of God than most people. A really complicated one. People like easy things. She wouldn’t just stand there and say everything is going to be okay, even if that’s what people want to hear.” He quieted and waited for Micah to speak.
“I’ll miss you calling me for help in math,” Micah said. Corbin’s temper flared and died just as quickly. She wasn’t being disrespectful. If that was the only way Micah was going to miss Elania, then it was the only way. At least it was some way.
“Anything else?” Austin said testily.
“We had fun at our sleepovers. Your pieces were always interesting in Welcome Mat. Hair is hair to me, but to a black woman it has freight. It can be a battle. I didn’t know that. You just wanted to wear it whichever way you liked. For your hair to be hair, like mine is. I have no idea how you survived triplet brothers. And you were too hard on yourself.”
“When was she too hard on herself?” Corbin asked.
“With Mr. Dayze last year. She felt shitty for not walking out of that stupid zombie movie he put on. But it was just a movie. She tried so hard to do the most ethical thing, and this isn’t an ethical world. It’s a losing battle.” The breeze tossed a lock of blue hair in Micah’s face. She brushed it away.
“That’s what made her the best,” Austin said. “When everyone else was being an asshole, she didn’t join in. That made me want to be better than what I am, and being a good person came to her naturally.”
Goodbye, Corbin thought. Her parents and brothers and Zaley couldn’t be here, so the goodbye was from them, too. His voice came out quavering when he said, “She should have gone to Pewter.” He hated that that had been taken away from her.
“Do we still have her acceptance letter?” Austin asked.
“We’ve got it,” Micah said.
“Give it to me, so I can carry it with Brennan’s stag carving. I want to give that to her family. They can get it framed. That should be a memento of her that they pass down through their generations.” Micah searched through the backpacks for the letter.
How they would scream when they moved her body and saw the stamp. Drop her and run away to get haz-mat suits. Bitch about having to clean up the mess. Get the zombie into a body bag and drive fast to a crematorium, where Elania Douglas would go up in smoke. Having Sombra C meant you were trash.
Corbin got down on his knees and kissed her forehead. Elania couldn’t care what happened to her body now, but he did. Even as they screamed and ran and bitched, they’d know someone had cared enough to leave flowers and a candle, fix her clothes and tidy her up. She had been a human being before her virus, and she was still a human being after it. That reminded him of the man in the shuttle on that long-ago day when Corbin had received his stamp. The guy wore a business suit to make those about to take his life away recognize that he was somebody. Those people had heard Corbin screaming for himself in the waiting room, too.
“It’s funny,” Micah said.
“Nothing is funny,” Austin groused while putting the letter in his backpack.
“Not hah-hah funny. It’s funny that Zaley’s middle name is Grace. That should have been Elania’s name. She was a graceful person.” All of the anger in Austin’s face vanished at her words. That had been the right sentiment.
The sun was rising. Corbin picked up his bow and slung the quiver over his shoulder. He worried that they wouldn’t be able to convince Austin to leave the body, but Austin kissed her forehead and walked after them, looking over his shoulder every few steps to check on her. When they reached an island of trees, he stopped to do so one more time. Once they passed through, she wouldn’t be visible any longer. Corbin did the same. There she was, asleep forever. The small tremors of the fake candle flame couldn’t be made out at the distance. It burned steadily upon her body. Goodbye.
“I can’t believe I fell asleep and let this happen,” Austin said.
“She could have done that any old time,” Micah said. “You being awake wouldn’t have stopped it.”
“But I could have talked to her-”
“There wasn’t any hope if Zyllevir quit,” Corbin said. “There was only this.” It was all that was left for any of them, should the virus prove stronger than the anti-virals. His mind recaptured his earlier worry. “What are we going to tell her family?”
“We don’t know if they made it to the harbor,” Micah said. “We don’t know if we’ll make it to the harbor. That isn’t a problem for now.”
“We should know what to say if we do.”
Putting her hair in a ponytail as the breeze picked up, Micah said, “We’ll say that she died a hero. It’s the truth. She knew that she was going to die, and she handled it the most ethical way possible. What she did was brave. Other people should be as strong as that.”
“But her soul,” Austin said in anguish. “People who kill themselves are supposed to go to hell, aren’t they? She can’t be sent there for this. That’s not fair.”
“She was Jewish. They don’t have the same concept of hell as Christians do, or a hell at all. If you believe that God is love, and that love is to care for one another as yourself, then you have to see what she did as godly. She didn’t let herself go wild.”
“Do Wiccans have hell?” Corbin asked.
“Wiccans have candles and fruity names,” Micah said tiredly. “There isn’t a specific dogma to which they all ascribe. Some believe in reincarnation, that right now Elania is resting in Summerland and then she’ll be reassigned to another body to continue her karmic journey to a higher spiritual level. Others think that she’ll stay in Summerland forever, or that her soul will evolve into something else, water or a tree, or fly apart and become part of everything. There are as many views as there are Wiccans. But I’ve never heard anyone speak of an eternal damnation.”
“Which one do you believe?” Austin asked.
“None of the above. I’m an atheist.” Micah turned away from the body. “I think she’s gone.”
Harshly, Austin said, “That’s sick!”
“It’s not sick, but it’s hard.” Micah was walking off and they followed. “Being an atheist is hard. I don’t get the fantasy of a Summerland or a heaven. And I want that for her a lot. She deserves a beautiful place to rest from this shithole of a world, and I’d like to see her again someday. So that makes me an atheist who wants to be proven wrong. I’ll find out eventually. We all will.
”
The next time Corbin looked over his shoulder, Elania was gone.
They walked onto a narrow strip of green between long lines of trees. Corbin’s stomach rumbled. He couldn’t stand to think about eating and ignored it. What he couldn’t ignore was his bladder. Mumbling an explanation, he walked over to the trees to relieve himself. Every step led them farther away from Elania, and that was wrong.
If he just shook her shoulder hard, she’d wake up. They should go back to check. Call 911 and just maybe . . .
He was in denial. Four of them had gone into the confinement point, and four of them had emerged from it. He’d assumed that all four of them would make it to the harbor along with Zaley. The worst part of this had ended when they climbed through the bucket hole and returned to the world.
Zaley might not have made it to the other side of last night either. The Shepherds could have claimed her; an asshole marked her as a target and she didn’t have the gun . . . he loathed to think of them as so fragile, but they were. Nothing was special about them. It was a lesson he should have learned in the confinement point. That Elania was his friend hadn’t boosted her chances of making it to the harbor. Just because he couldn’t imagine the group without her in it didn’t mean the group hadn’t become that way less than an hour ago. They’d lost Brennan and Bleu Cheese and now Elania. God only knew what had happened to Janie and the others in their high school with Sombra C, and God only knew what would happen to Corbin and Micah, Zaley and Austin, too.
He zipped up his pants and stared at the damp streak going down the tree. When Austin came over, Corbin said, “I want my mom.” He and Austin could just be honest with one another, and Corbin wanted his mother. She couldn’t make it better, but she’d hurt with him.
“I wish I could want mine,” Austin said.
That was horrible to have a mother who wasn’t a safe place to land. “I want my dad, too. My dog. My house. All of my friends. I want everything that I had before. What else do you want, since you can’t want your mom?”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 115
