“I’m not sticking my dick out the window!”
“Then I guess you’re holding it.”
“Would you rub my arm again, Corbin?” Zaley asked. “Please? I slept on it wrong last night.” Digging his fingers into her skin, he worked at the sore muscles underneath. They came to a dead stop temporarily and she closed her eyes as the pain was kneaded away. “Thank you. You don’t have to keep going. It can’t be a comfortable position.”
“I want to,” Corbin replied. It wasn’t the most comfortable position but she was asking something of him, trusting him for that rather than keeping it to herself to suffer in silence. If she had killed herself last December, he would have spent all of his life wondering why. They weren’t going to fuck up their relationship this time around. They’d just been too young and dumb the first time.
There could be another Shepherd brace at the far end. That had to be why traffic was going so slowly, another random selection and check of necks and trunks. Corbin shouldn’t be so happy right now, but he couldn’t see ahead to that point, and for this moment in time, they were here and here was perfect. He and Zaley, Micah and Austin, the nuns and the clown and the swimsuit dude, the shot-up minivan with Dickhead Dan inside and the special needs people on the rope, the boy clutching the violin case, all of them were moving forward. There was nothing better than to be moving at long last.
I’m alive, he thought in elation. He didn’t hold out much hope that the postcard he’d sent home was going to make it there. But if there was a God, let Him carry the message to his parents that Corbin was alive and in one piece, finally headed north to the harbor. And maybe his postcard would make it after all. One day, though it could be years in the future, he’d see them again.
The harbor in Sonoma wasn’t that far away. If there weren’t braces, they could reach it today, get behind the Sanya Smart Shield and be safe. That possibility made him feel radiant, even though traffic was puttering along so slowly that the walkers were often outpacing the cars. He was high as a kite to be here, creeping north but going north all the same.
“In a few years,” Corbin said in deliriousness to Zaley, “I’m going to ask you to marry me.” They would make this work, keep themselves safe with sex, have kids by IVF, whatever it took. They were alive, and they were going to be happy. Micah started to say something and Austin smacked her arm to shut her up.
Sense overcame Corbin then, and he flushed to have delivered a proposal out of nowhere. He was still a teenager, for God’s sake. But Zaley gave him a beautiful smile and said, “In a few years, I’m going to say yes.”
Micah
She had come across people cooking a dog on a spit the other day. Rover was only a pet until humans got hungry enough to notice the meat under the hair, and she supposed that was true of cannibalism as well. She hadn’t seen that yet, a Tom, Dick, or Hannah roasting over an open fire. It was only a matter of time. Mr. Foods semis and no less than twelve RELIEF trucks had hummed past in the southbound lanes, but for it to be so bad out there that that level of relief was necessary told her everything.
She thought about having baked fingers on her plate, her teeth nibbling the meat from the bone as she would a chicken wing. A cut of calf, a slice of rich belly or ass fat, the tough, stringy meat of an older woman who’d spent her life in a tanning bed . . . Checking out the people on the walkway, she was idly curious what they tasted like.
Micah didn’t truly want the answer. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about it. One day, she could be so desperate that a human being became dinner. She wouldn’t eat Austin though. That would just make her sad, having pieces of Austin Bell moving through her gastrointestinal tract and then shitting him out into a pile somewhere. He was looking out the window, his happiness about making it through the brace switching back and forth with annoyance at the traffic. Micah said, “Would you eat me if you were starving?”
“Don’t you dare,” Austin said to the guys pushing the car that was out of gas. But they’d decided to abandon it. The driver popped the back and they all got out backpacks. Then they scaled the barrier and joined the throngs on the walkway, leaving the dead car to block northbound traffic in the slow lane halfway over the Golden Gate Bridge. The cars behind it turned on their blinkers, but traffic was already going so slowly in the next lane over that no one wanted to let them in even for the short amount of time it would take just to go around the car.
“Assholes,” Austin said, even though they were in the fast lane and it didn’t affect them.
“Did you hear what I said?” Micah asked.
“I heard you.” And he was ignoring her question. Flipping through his magazine to the article on how to smash your stress (Tea! Laughter! Massage! Reconnect with your inner stillness!), he snapped it shut and put it away.
“If I ate you, would I get any better at math?” Zaley asked. To the others, this was a joke. To Micah, seeing the world as it was becoming, it was a serious point of consideration. Was she prepared to eat her friends, if it ever came to that, in order to survive?
“You’d get my math skills and my Sombra C,” Micah said, to play along while she contemplated this as a reality.
“I don’t know if she would,” Corbin said, since he was Captain Science. “The virus can’t survive being cooked, can it?”
“If I ate a beer belly, would I get drunk?” Micah said.
“This conversation is nasty,” Austin grumbled.
Micah would eat Zaley if there were no other option. That was sort of sickening, so she readied herself for it now. Then it wouldn’t be that bad when it happened. The boys would stand around, grossed out and shocked and feeling defensive of the body, and Micah had done that part in advance so she could get on with sharpening the knives. Zaley wouldn’t spoil on the ground as Micah had emotional issues about making a meal of her. It would still be easier to eat a stranger though. In all the time that they had spent together through four years of high school, it had never once crossed Micah’s mind that one day she’d be consuming Zaley. Or anyone.
Austin shot a look over the back seat, suspecting there was more than a joke behind Micah’s question. She hadn’t told him about the dog on the spit, or the way the people had glared at her for stumbling on the scene. They didn’t want to eat the dog, nor did they want to share it. She’d just walked away, passing the skin and guts and collar of the creature piled in a heap on the grass. Like when she had roved around Cloudy Valley and the surrounding communities at night, she didn’t need to brag to her friends later on about what she’d done and seen. It belonged to her, and it would have just bothered Austin to know about the dog. Micah was okay as long as it wasn’t Harbo.
Since no one was letting in the people trapped in the slow lane, space was opening up in front of the abandoned car. Some in the next lane changed over to take advantage of the emptiness. Hanging out the window and first in line of the trapped, the driver yelled, “Come on!” Someone took pity and waved him over. The next trapped car forced his way in on its bumper.
“You see this, Micah?” Austin said, trailing his left index finger in a straight line from his chest to the back of Zaley’s seat. “This is how the human mind is supposed to go, straight line down the freeway. And this,” he added his right index finger to the side of the left and started once more at his chest, “is yours.” The right finger zoomed over to an off-ramp and drove out into nothingness. Then it swung back, traveled along the left index, and zoomed away a second time. “Stop thinking about eating people!”
She adored him. “What should I think about then?”
“Gas. Food. Dildos. Think about dildos. Those make you happy.”
“My moms have a dildo. They keep it under their bed in a shoebox.” Everyone yelled at her. She burst into laughter and Austin smacked her leg. It was his fault for bringing up dildos. She hadn’t been thinking about those until he said it. In her head, she heard her parents’ horrified gasps at being exposed. Honey! That’s private!
&n
bsp; “Why were you going under your parents’ bed?” Zaley asked. “I never went poking around under my parents’ bed.”
“Yeah, I didn’t either,” said Corbin. “The less I know, the better.”
“I was vacuuming,” Micah explained. “Tuma told me to make sure I got under the beds. I accidentally pushed their Fun Box of Lesbo Sexy Times out the other side and dumped it. They had the green banana model that vibrates. It retails for-”
“Please stop,” Corbin pleaded.
“Think about something other than dildos and cannibals!” Austin roared.
She plumbed her mind for another topic. The car inched forward. “Zaley, you can’t take Corbin’s last name when you get married. It makes you Zaley Li. That sounds awful. So you have to keep the Mattazollo.”
“I don’t want to keep the Mattazollo,” Zaley protested.
“He could be Corbin Mattazollo.”
“No! I’d rather be Zaley Li than married to Corbin Mattazollo. My last name takes forever to write out and I don’t want anything of my father’s.”
“You could ditch both your last names and create one,” Austin suggested. “Corbin and Zaley Bell.”
“God, those are country club names,” Micah said.
“I like my last name,” Corbin said. “I don’t want to change it.”
“What if you hyphenated?” Austin asked. “Zaley Mattazollo-Li is fine.”
“See previous complaint about how long it takes to write out my last name. I don’t want to make it even longer,” Zaley said. Another relief truck went by.
Zaley and Corbin were going to be the most boring couple alive. And they would love being boring, just like her sister Shalom and whoever she brought home in time were going to be boring and love it. To irritate all of them, Micah said, “Parents have sex too, you know. That’s how we all got here. Except for me. I’m the immaculate conception.”
“Your father had sex with a collection beaker and an issue of Jub-Jubs,” Austin retorted. “That doesn’t make you immaculate.”
“Do they still use magazines? I thought they let guys watch movies now. No dude wants to flick through the sticky pages of a Jub-Jubs that hundreds of other guys have whacked off with,” Micah said with sagacity. “I wonder what my donor was watching when he rubbed out the sperm that became half of me.”
“Goddammit, Micah!” Corbin swore as Zaley shrieked, “Shut the fuck up!”
“Come here, baby girl,” Austin ordered. Micah leaned over to him, a huge smile on her face from wondering what was going to happen. He wrapped his hand around her head and kissed the top of it. Then he crooned into her hair, “Are you happy now, Jubilee? You got the reaction you wanted? You’ve given all of us some emotional scars to carry forever.”
Micah felt like a child with a double dip ice cream cone. “I’m happy, Austin.”
“Good. Now knock it the fuck off.”
She knocked it off and wished that she were on a motorcycle. They were the only ones making decent progress through this disaster. The pedestrians weren’t doing too badly either. Somehow the car and nuns kept passing each other. Ahead were the backs of taller vehicles that concealed the end of the bridge. Turning around in her seat, she looked through the back window. The cars stretched out of sight. “How are we doing on gas?”
“Not good enough for Sonoma unless we pass a station that’s open,” Zaley said.
They weren’t going to pass a station. More to the truth, they would pass dozens upon dozens of stations, but none of which contained gas. The fuel being frittered away on this bridge was the last of the last.
Everything had gone to hell so fast. At the beginning of March, Micah had been sitting in a classroom. Gas was rationed and there wasn’t as much food in the stores, but everything was still more or less okay. By mid-May, she was scrounging for crumbs in abandoned homes and businesses. That was lightning fast, a blink of an eye. More had happened to her in the last two and a half months than in the previous seventeen years added up and multiplied by a thousand.
The four of them would drive the car until the gas ran out, and walk the rest of the way to the harbor. To go behind the Sanya Smart Shield . . . the reaction was violent inside her, a tightening of her chest and clenching of her stomach. She was done with being penned in. So this conflict had better come to a resolution soon. It was going to make her wild to be in a cage again, even a friendly one.
Micah wanted to climb up the steep cables to the tips of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, throw out her arms to embrace the wind and salt and sea. Maybe the wind would be so strong as to lift her away and make her fly. Then she could move with the currents around and around this rotten earth, watching everything but not having to be a part of it. That fantasy pleased her. The world didn’t have anything new to show her, not really. She’d seen bad and worse and worst of all. If there were something left except for roast Zaley Li on a plate, she’d be seriously surprised.
A girl in the mob on the walkway caught her eye. Micah mistook her for Clarissa, the same height, the same hair, the same age. Her heart caught in her chest the way the little girl’s heart had stuttered once the knife was embedded inside. Acid rose into Micah’s throat. Then the girl out there turned to the cars and became someone else.
Forgive me. Clarissa couldn’t forgive anything. She was dead. Her body was being taken apart by nature on the hill. Micah swallowed the acid. It burned down her esophagus and into her belly. Her eyes trailed after that girl on the walkway, who came into view sporadically between adults. The same height but the wrong nose; the same hair but a cleft in the chin. The same narrow chest, but no blade in it.
It was just one more thing that her coven didn’t have a ritual for. However, Micah could say with certainty that she was the only person ever at The Circle to have the distinction of killing an eight-year-old. Eight-and-a-half. Beating on a drum wasn’t going to work this one out. She wanted to bleed on the altar. Rage through the world and carry the girl’s decaying body in her arms, forcing people to see it. This is what you did when you let the inmates run the asylum. This is what happened while you looked away.
Something popped.
She assumed it was a tire on someone else’s car (oh fuck, how much longer were they going to be stuck in this hideous traffic?) and it was followed by a screech and crash. The accident had to be on the southbound lanes then, since they were moving at a faster clip than one-mile-an-hour northbound. Gray smoke swept over the lanes in front of them. Traffic came to a halt, Zaley pressing on the brake as red lights flared.
Rolling down her window, Micah forced the upper half of her body through it to see the accident. The smoke was thick, and piercing through it were faint screams. The pedestrians had stopped with the northbound vehicles, craning their necks warily in the same direction as Micah.
Corbin rolled down his window and called out, “What is it? Do you see anything?”
Micah scrambled up onto the roof of the car and stood there, shielding her eyes and searching through the smoke. A massive boom rocked the bridge and almost threw her off the car.
Pop. Pop-pop-pop. It was gunfire.
BOOM.
The bridge rocked a second time and Corbin opened his door hesitantly. A few other people were doing the same, looking north and to each other and to the pedestrians. No one was sure what to do, nor could they see what was happening. And what could they do? They were on a goddamned bridge. There were only three ways to go: north, south, or over the side. Or else they grew wings and flew up.
A truck filled with armed men and women shot past in the southbound lanes, their rifles sticking up into the air like the spines of a porcupine. It was followed by a dump truck. A handful of other vehicles came after them, and then there were no more.
The wind blew away some of the smoke to reveal an overturned semi blocking the lanes. A body was on the ground far away, tiny and still. Micah jumped off the car and said, “Get your backpacks!”
They were already climbing out.
In the distance, pedestrians were bursting out of the smoke to run to San Francisco. Micah wasn’t going back there for anything. She strapped on her backpack and took the gun. Corbin stripped the plastic free of his bow and quiver as Austin lifted the kid’s rifle and looked around in fear.
BOOM.
That one resounded from behind them. A cable snapped and whipped around. The pedestrians screamed and staggered on the walkway, Micah grabbing onto the car for balance. More people began to run south, creating gridlock with those wanting to go north. Gunfire rattled through the air.
“What are you doing?” Austin shouted when Micah started north.
“We go back there and we’re dead!” Micah said. There was nothing but death for them in San Francisco.
“Are they T-BACS?” Zaley asked.
It wasn’t relevant who they were, T-BACS or anarchists or rogue Sunday school teachers. Micah broke into a run and they ran after her. Gunfire picked up behind them. Her friends passed her by as she turned around to see if anything was coming.
The vehicle full of armed people was racing away and almost to the tollbooths. The dump truck had stopped dead in the lane, the driver’s side door wide open and a man fleeing from it.
Then it exploded.
The fireball was gargantuan, a yellowish-orange blast that wasn’t ball-shaped but an off-kilter U that widened. For a fraction of time, it formed into a vaguely dragon-like shape in the air. Blowing dark gray smoke, it was strange and beautiful. The sight transfixed her. Her skin prickled like she was burning within it, and she wanted to be burning in that radiant light. Then the dragon grew thicker and thicker, losing its boundaries and joining to a singular spot of fire that blotted out the smoke.
The sound was incredible in its force, overriding the blaring horns and the screams, the gunfire and the wind. It was the beat of a god upon a drum. Pieces of metal sprayed out in every direction. The hail of debris smashed into cars and flew over the side to the water. The bridge disappeared from view.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 123
