“I want to get to the harbor. To walk in there and have some guy say you made it! I want him to be happy to see me.” Austin looked down at his feet in embarrassment. “Then we’ll adopt a bunch of kids, six or seven, or get a surrogate if we can afford it, so there’s always someone happy to see me. That’s so fucking pathetic. No one is ever going to be happy to see me coming.”
“That’s not true.”
“It feels true.”
Zaley would meet a guy that she could be with, really be with, and leave Corbin in the dust. He couldn’t be mad about that. He’d just go with her as far as she would let him, and then have to let her go. If she was still alive. If he was. Nothing was guaranteed.
They had to get to her. She was all alone out there.
The end of the golf course came up on them fast. Red roofs and white walls of duplexes were visible around the trees. All of the first floor windows were boarded up. They passed through a strip of grass to the road. Across it was a burned shell of a building that exuded a singed scent. A tree beside the charred place had also gotten fried. The side closest to the house was black and withered; the side farthest from it still had leaves.
None of the lawns had been tended, nor had the trash been picked up. It reeked in overflowing cans along the curb. Graffiti was scrawled on the walls of most of the duplexes and some of the second story windows were broken. One place was even more trashed. Old cars were parked on the grass around it, one directly on top of a fallen FOR SALE sign.
It was a cold morning but the walking was keeping Corbin warm. No one was driving around on the road. The duplexes didn’t have driveways and garages, and farther down the street was a parking lot. Junked cars were parked haphazardly over the lines. One had thin boards over the windows. It was someone’s home.
The parking lot gave way to tall trees and the road went north. Corbin checked in reflex for ferals. It smacked him hard that one of them could have been Elania, had she not shot herself. Snarling at Austin . . . she’d been close to losing it. She’d been strangely quiet in the motel and had chosen to go into the restroom yesterday. The sun was too bright. All of the hints had been there and he hadn’t seen. It was so easy to ascribe her issues to other things. The quiet was depression. The light had blinded everyone. But the snarl . . .
He breathed in the rot of the confinement point. The smell wasn’t all encompassing, but it was still present here. Among the trees were sporadic tents pushed back from the twisting road. None had flags or blue tarps over the top; these were in camouflage colors. No people were in view, although a dead one was around somewhere to cause the stench.
He was so busy looking for more tents that when Micah stopped short, he almost walked into her. The intake of Austin’s breath made Corbin jerk around. The road split, their path continuing on in a northeasterly direction and the other one going east. Barricades blocked off the second road. A man at the barricades was pointing a rifle at them. They’d walked right into a brace.
The guy looked absolutely pissed to see them. His receding hairline made a wide beach of a forehead. He didn’t have a vest with a Shepherd patch, and was dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt. The rifle traveling between the three of them, he said, “Turn around and get the hell back to your homeless camp!”
“We can’t turn around. We’re going this way,” Micah said, gesturing to the unblocked road.
“Then you find another way to get there! I’m sick of you people coming through here, stealing and trashing our land, setting fires. So get the hell out or I’m going to fucking shoot you!”
“Let’s go back,” Corbin muttered in exasperation. He didn’t want to deal with it. They could cut through the trees to get north and pull back onto the road once they were past this asshole. At least he wasn’t giving out spit checks.
Austin blew up at the man. “Fuck you! We’re not here to junk your shit. We’re just going to catch our ride. You don’t fucking own the road!”
“This here says I do,” the guy said, and fired his gun into the air. He came around the barricades menacingly and lowered the gun to take aim at them.
They bolted down the road. At a second blast, all three of them veered off it and darted into the trees. Micah whipped the gun out of her jeans and ran with it in her hand as they crashed through the foliage. The guy was following. His livid voice cracked through the air. “I said to get back to your camp! Get the fuck out of here!” He stepped off the road and stopped to shake something from his shoe. The rot smell was getting stronger.
“Micah, we can’t be seen by the braces on Veterans!” Corbin panted. A third gunshot blasted and they ducked. Skirting north, they slipped and slid down a short slope. Sunlight reflected off windshields on Veterans, which wasn’t very far away.
The man was getting closer. Corbin pointed to a thicket of bushes, of which there were few when the heavy tree canopy blocked out most of the sunlight. They crouched down just in time. The man appeared at the top of the slope.
“What kind of crazy person is this?” Austin whispered in fright.
“It’s not crazy at all,” Micah whispered. “People are protecting what they have. You shouldn’t have shouted at him. He was going to let us walk away.”
“Shhhh,” Corbin hissed. The guy scanned everything beneath him and then began down the slope. Pebbles and crumbs of dirt went out from his feet. Micah lifted the gun and squinted through the leaves to aim at him. Corbin couldn’t do shit with his arrows at this range.
None of them might make the car.
At the base, the man stopped and scanned around again. Then he cocked his gun to the trees and fired, trying to learn their position by startling them with the sound. Flush them out. A bird swooped down from a tree, the guy’s eyes tracking it east. A breeze carried more of the rotting scent.
He lowered the gun and paced east after the bird. The slope was much more gradual that way, so he climbed without loosing soil. At its modest crest, he turned around. They hadn’t moved an inch. His glance was perfunctory and he strolled away. Austin got up and Corbin said, “Give him a little time to get back to his brace.”
They could wait for night. The guy couldn’t stand there twenty-four hours a day. But Corbin was aching for the car, to climb inside and be whisked off. He didn’t want to camp out here, smelling human decay and Zaley waiting for them. They weren’t that far away from the car!
The gun fired from farther away. “Someone’s got a lot of bullets if he’s blasting them off at nothing,” Micah said.
After ten minutes of quiet, they pressed on to the north. Corbin watched the ground to the east, Micah took ahead and Austin to the west and behind. The paltry amount of bushes and somewhat thin trees were problematic. If the guy popped up, there wasn’t anywhere good to hide. The only factor in their favor was the proliferation of trees; he wouldn’t get an easy shot at them. God almighty, Corbin refused to die a lousy mile from the car. He pulled an arrow from the quiver and wished for a semi-automatic.
“Tell me the map, Austin, you looked at it for ages,” Micah said.
“The road comes up close to Veterans and then bows out away from it,” Austin said. “Then it bows in to Veterans again. We can’t miss hitting that road if we keep going north. From then on, we should keep it in sight. There are a few other roads winding through around here and we don’t want to take one by mistake.” He gagged. The smell was intensifying. There wasn’t anything to do but walk toward it.
The gun blasted, a wickedly loud crack. He was still out here hunting. They spread out and pressed against trees. The next sounds were even more dismaying than the gun. The guy was calling out to someone else, and a girlish voice replied. Corbin couldn’t make out the words, but she wasn’t far away.
They abandoned their trees and ran. Another slope was coming up. In the lead, Micah reached the top of it and stopped to stare. The boys caught up and looked down. In a space between the trees were three tents, two of which had collapsed. This was where the smell was co
ming from. One man’s body was spilled over a blackened fire pit; another man had crushed a tent by falling on it. The third person was just a pair of legs coming out of the second collapsed tent. Judging from the dirty pink sneakers, the body belonged to a woman.
After the confinement point, dead bodies couldn’t be what had stopped Micah. Corbin whispered for her to move and she shook her head. Past the camp and up the slope on the other side was a moving reflection, coming off a watch or something else. The person was lost in the shade, all except for the flashes of that light.
“Veterans,” Austin whispered, but that was braced.
“Yeah, Dad!” The girl’s voice bent around the trees from behind them.
Elania, please help us, Corbin prayed, as if there was anything she could do but watch.
Micah
She should have been holding the gun. Popped a bullet through that asshole’s forehead and gone on up the road to the car. The gun hadn’t done them any good stowed down the back of her jeans. She’d put it there to keep Austin from chucking it away in a fit of grief. Like it was the gun’s fault that it had been stolen, pressed to Elania’s head, and had its trigger pulled. So the gun went on time-out by her ass and now they were here. On a slope over a campsite full of bodies, and being hunted.
Stupid to not have the gun out when they were walking! After the armed guards stationed all around Little Mexico, some dude who had woken her up shouting patrol and stomping through Ph.D., this was a place full of people who expected trouble. Austin wasn’t allowed to hate the gun and make Micah keep it out of sight. He also wasn’t allowed to have a temper tantrum at a powder keg with a short fuse. Mr. Road Authority would have let them leave without a problem, just so long as it was done respectfully. But Austin had challenged him, so now they had a new mess on top of the fresh mess that was Elania.
She would cry for Elania later, when she was alone. Right now they had to get through these goddamned woods.
There were two of them. Daddy was north of Camp Death and Daughter was southeast. Who the fuck invited their daughter along for a little homeless hunting and bonding time? The girl had the high-pitched voice of a young child, the age for pigtails and dreams of ponies. It carried through the trees and annoyed Micah half to death.
Austin was panicking, his breath coming over her shoulder in ragged ribbons. Corbin had his eyes trained for more flashes of the watch, although those had stopped. They couldn’t escape by going down to Veterans; they couldn’t go north or east or south . . .
A twig snapped. It was unmistakably under a shoe, and obviously close if they could hear it. A second snap came seconds later. That one was even closer. Micah checked out to where the flashes had been and thought she saw one more, a wink so minute that it could have been anything.
They were in view on this slope. She ran down it into the trashed camp. One tent was still upright, and that was the only decent cover available. The tarp pinned over it was a dull brownish-purple, stretched out over the yellow tent itself. The zipper had been torn loose. Hanging from the tattered parts of the entry were hair clips. She ushered them inside.
More twigs snapped. Little was inside the tent besides a tangled sleeping bag and trash. And needles. Austin hissed in pain and yanked his hand away from one. They lay flat on their bellies with Micah in the middle. The sleeping bag was lumpy under their bodies.
Traffic whined softly over on Veterans; a harsher buzz came from the bodies outside. Birds and bees and footsteps . . . She did one of the clips on the fabric. It still parted above and below the clip, but there wasn’t time to fix it. The footsteps were too close, tracking at the top of the slope. The girl came into view through the lower part. Speaking into a walkie-talkie and staring out to Veterans, she said, “I’m here, Dad! Jeeze! It stinks.” She was in her late teens but had a voice an octave too high. Her long blonde hair swung in a ponytail. A white cord was partially tangled in it from earphones. Only one was in her ear.
Over her shoulder was a rifle. Appearing bored and nauseous, she slipped the walkie-talkie into her belt loop and lifted her shirt to cover her nose. Then she started to walk down the slope at an angle.
It had been impossible to discern from the bodies what brought about their deaths. All were degraded to the point that only a medical examiner would be able to tell. Austin pinched shut his nose and breathed through his mouth. She hoped that he wasn’t planning on barfing. They had gotten soft since leaving the confinement point.
The girl made a gagging sound and her shadow fell over the tent. The second Micah suspected that this chick was taking aim, she’d beat the bitch to the punch. Pointing the gun to the shadow, Micah thought in cold anger that the three of them were getting to the goddamned car and taking it to the goddamned bridge and making it to the goddamned harbor. There they would be safe behind a Smart Shield. She turned over that thought in dislike. The harbor was a cage, albeit a nicer one. She could only think of it as something that gave her boundaries.
This was a cage, being trapped between hunters.
As the shadow moved along the wall of the tent, so did Micah’s hand. The pace was casual. The girl had no idea that they were inside. Micah could kill the girl without her ever seeing where the bullet had come from.
A walkie-talkie crackled and the shadow halted. The words from the walkie-talkie were incoherent. The girl’s aggravated response was clear. She was so close that Micah heard the rock music coming through her earphones. “No, I’m not seeing anyone. Dad, they probably just ran to the road. They’re gone. Can I go home? One of us should be watching the house.” She paused for a garbled response and sighed noisily. Then she gagged again. “No, I don’t want to walk all the way up there to look for them! I’m sick of chasing people around all the time. This is stupid.”
The shadow moved and a grubby white boot kicked through the bottom part of the opening in the flaps. Austin covered his mouth to restrain a yell. The boot swung out and the fabric settled. The girl circled the fire pit and headed north. Her baby voice burst out in one last complaint to the walkie-talkie. “All right. I’m coming. Then I’m going home!”
“Jesus,” Austin whispered. “That was too close.”
Micah undid the clip and inched forward to peek out. The only activity was insects. Some wild animal had chewed on the body sprawled upon the fire pit, helping itself to a foot. They got out of the tent and stood there. The smell propelled them onward. Even Micah couldn’t stand to breathe in the rot when she knew cleaner air was within reach.
Austin aimed them at a gradual northeast angle, taking it slow and quiet to a gray stretch of road. They darted across to the grass on the other side. The trees were set back from the road and they ran for the shade. Micah swore internally at the zombie bite on her leg, which had had a week to heal and still stung.
A gun blasted. It was followed by the girl’s voice raised in a shout. Micah whirled around. Daughter was stepping out from behind a tree on the other side of the road. Lowering the rifle, she pressed the walkie-talkie to her lips and yelled, “Dad! They’re here at-” Micah raised the gun and fired. The girl ducked into the trees with a cry of fear. She hadn’t expected them to have a gun. Austin shouted and Micah ran after the boys.
Get rid of it. She loved Austin, but really? He existed in a state of such emotional immediacy that it wiped out his common sense when he was upset. It had made sense to get rid of Elania’s suicide note, not the gun. The letter Micah had discovered in the backpack was a stunning mess of awkward letters and misspellings, repetitions of words. This from one of the best writers at the whole high school! The note was ash now.
They sprinted under the trees, which were far enough apart to allow them to see at a distance. Of course, someone else would also be able to see them. Their strength was their weakness. With their position made, the only thing left to do was run. Her hair was flopping out of its ponytail. She brushed it off her neck and felt the foundation smear.
They burst out of the trees to another loop
of the road. Here it broke apart and ran in several directions. Austin selected the one going straight north and dashed over the intersection to run in the middle of the lane. In the distance, the trees broke for buildings. That was where Zaley had planned to be.
“We should run in the trees,” Corbin said between pants of breath.
“But we’re almost there!” Austin protested. Micah watched a blossom of red bloom on the back of his shirt from a bullet settling into his flesh, and blinked to shake the image off. She caught his arm and yanked him to the side. He needed to think cold rather than hot.
A body was on the shoulder. They dodged into the trees to go around it. Buried in the withered, blackening neck of the woman was the red of a stamp. Her face was frozen in a feral expression, or it just looked that way with her upper lip gone. She was wearing a ripped tracksuit with stains down the legs. Rot and shit and piss . . . the body had laid out here in the open for days and no one had come to clean it up.
At the sound of squealing brakes, they dashed for a clutch of trees and scruff of short bushes. Micah didn’t dare to spy out to the passing vehicle with her shield of twigs and leaves so scanty. When it was gone, Corbin whispered, “Was it them?” A second car shot by without warning as they were getting up. It was a hybrid with a quiet engine. The woman behind the wheel took no notice of them in the woods. Her mouth was open in a yell at two kids bouncing around in the back.
Then there were no more cars. They cut through the trees for another minute and reached the break, where they scanned for Zaley and their car in the parking spaces along the buildings on either side of the road. These were the archives. Another row of buildings was behind them.
“She didn’t make it,” Austin said hopelessly. All of the spaces were empty.
“She could be somewhere else here,” Corbin said reasonably. “I see more spaces ahead.”
They used the trees for a measure of cover and crept east around the buildings. Micah investigated the archives and concluded that they were either not open today, not open just yet, or else had been abandoned. It had been a while since maintenance had come by. Trash was in the grass, and the grass was long and scruffy.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 116
