A base with Zyllevir. Corbin was desperate for that to be real. A bottle clinking in his palm and no deadline on his life coming up fast . . . he wanted to pack up their own things and get underway at once. Chase this chance so he wouldn’t have to write those goodbye letters.
Forgetting to check for bait, he returned to the campsite in a daze. The baby had bypassed all of his toys to bang a stick on the ground. Austin had already told Micah, because she looked up from tying the kayak and said, “Someone looks like he swallowed the canary. Was it worth the soup?”
“Oh, sweet Jesus, is it real?” Austin said.
“I don’t know. Is Zaley back?” Corbin asked.
“Not yet.”
He wanted to talk to Zaley first. This was a huge decision, leaving a place that had supplied them with relatively easy food and water, and a degree of safety from ferals. It meant giving up the kayak or finding some place to hide it on the chance they had to return. These weren’t decisions that affected Corbin, Austin, and Micah as much as they did Zaley. Should the base not pan out, she was the only one who was going to keep on living.
The pier held few people, most having caught their meals by now and gone away. Zaley was pulling her hoop net over the side of the bars, her right arm moving almost as gracefully as her left. She was winning it back, piece by piece. Corbin almost tripped over his own feet from paying more attention to the rhythmic movement of her body than where he was stepping. She was so lovely.
A crab was in the net. Zaley reached in and transferred it to the bucket. She glanced up to him. “Hey, sorry to take so long.”
“Are they coming up slow?” There were more crabs in the bucket than they needed for one meal. “Why did you get so many?”
“Everyone is saying it’s going to rain tonight and tomorrow. If it’s comes down too hard, I can’t be out here crabbing. We’ll boil these ones tonight and save a couple for tomorrow. The rest are for Bob. He was feeling so shitty that he went home with only one tiny crab that I would have thrown back. I’ll run these up to his house now so he and his wife have dinner tonight, and something for tomorrow if it really does rain.”
The old guy had cancer of an unnamed kind, probably prostate, and Corbin hated to think of what it was doing in his body without treatment. If he died, then his wife was going to die of starvation. She was too weak to leave the house. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“He didn’t have to teach me or eighty other people how to crab. He just did that because it was the right thing to do.”
“I’ll walk you up there.”
Zaley killed the crabs on the rock one by one and returned them to the bucket, which Corbin insisted on carrying since she had the hoop net. She was quiet as he told her of the Sombra Cs in the grove, and blanched when he added that he had traded three of his Zyllevir for information.
They were walking very quickly to beat the setting of the sun. The last words left his lips as they got to the Shints’ house. Swapping the bucket for the hoop net, he waited on the sidewalk as she jogged up the walkway and knocked on their door. “Hello? It’s Zaley!” Corbin counted the seconds and willed the old people to answer it faster. He wanted to know what Zaley thought of Arquin.
It didn’t go quickly, the old couple hugging her and inviting her in for the meal. Bob was feeling so poorly that when his frail wife said she’d do the cooking, he didn’t argue. But they understood that Zaley had to get back to the baby, so at last they waved and let her go.
When she returned to him on the sidewalk, he blurted, “You could live with them while we’re gone.”
“I don’t want to be separated from all of you,” Zaley said.
“It’d be safer than-”
They walked very quickly again. Her words came in short bursts around her breaths. “Look, they’re nice. They’re like grandparents. I’ve never had grandparents. But I’m not going to stay behind. You need my neck in case you lose your foundation. I can go where you can’t. And if there is no Arquin, what are you going to do?”
“Come back.”
“Not try for the harbor? Petaluma isn’t that far from the harbor in Sonoma. Your choices then would be to come down here and die, or try to break in there and live if they can get their Zyllevir deliveries. Meanwhile, I’ll have no idea what’s going on! You can’t call me, or write to me, or anything! You guys are just going to vanish.”
Corbin had to argue for her to stay, even if he wanted her to come along. “It’s really dangerous out there.”
“It’s dangerous here! It’s dangerous everywhere. The relief trucks could stop any day. The ferals could come further into Sausalito. We’re safer together than apart. God forbid you’re captured again and put into another confinement point after leaving here and I don’t even know!”
Corbin’s mind had slipped beneath the sofa when the ferals had broken into the lodge. Elania squashed against him and shaking, his legs threaded into Austin and Micah’s . . . the screaming and the pounding . . . he tried to shake it off, but those were memories that couldn’t be shaken. Zaley slid her weak hand into his. She was his eyes when he couldn’t read; he was her arm when she couldn’t lift. This wasn’t a fight that he could put any strength behind. Whatever lay ahead was something they’d meet together.
“I found a pamphlet on the shore when I was hunting for bait this afternoon,” Corbin said. “It was for engagement rings sold at a jewelry store in Marin. I didn’t bring it back, but it was so bizarre. An artifact from an alien world practically.”
“Are you changing the subject?”
“I didn’t think there was anything else to say on the subject, other than when we want to leave. But that should be a conversation we have with Austin and Micah, too.”
Zaley acquiesced. “There was a new man fishing at the pier today. A big guy dressed in a suit of all things, and he had two young daughters with him. He was talking about the diner he used to own in San Francisco around Golden Gate Park. It was called The Excellent Chicken. He walked off with his catch and called it The Excellent Fish. His daughters were so embarrassed.”
The fire was going when they made it to their camp. The crabs went into the boiling water. Rock music was pulsing through the air from a campsite that had a stereo. Micah danced with Mars to it, dipping him to make him laugh. She kissed his head and said, “I still love you, little ghost, even if you love Austin more.”
“He still loves you,” Austin said generously. “You’ve got the hair.”
Corbin wanted to skip dinner and go straight into the tent to fold Zaley up in his arms. They slept so closely at night for warmth that he didn’t know where his body left off and hers began. But it was his turn to feed the baby, who made a mess of them both. That was okay though. Corbin liked the happy little guy, who had no clue about what was going on in the world and just wanted his next spoonful of mushy gook. Dada. Wow, did they have a crisis taking root here in the high chair of his lap.
They talked about Arquin over their food, their voices soft to keep anything from trailing to other camps. Austin was treating the news like Christmas and Micah with more reserve. When she asked what precisely he had traded, Corbin didn’t lie. Micah had no reaction on the surface. She just scraped up the last of her food.
Drops of rain began to fall from the dark gray sky, sizzling on the flames and cutting short their discussion of what to do. Zaley and Micah rushed through the dishes and laundry as Austin put things away. Corbin wiped off Mars and took him into the second tent. “No bath tonight, lucky boy.” The baby took the news in good spirits, more interested in his treacherous rattle that was barely visible in the poor light. He crawled over to it, staggered on a fold of blanket and went down, and rolled across the rest of the bedding to get himself there. The kid was clever. He had a problem-solving mind. Putting the beak of a stuffed animal in his mouth, he turned over the rattle in his hands.
In the distance came a wild animal cry. The stereo was turned off at once. The fire was doused, the others
calling about the last little tasks that had to be done. The tent shook over Corbin’s head from one of them checking on the kayak. Then Austin and Micah came in and Corbin went out.
He peed behind a tree, fat drops of rain plopping in his hair and running down his neck. Going into his tent, he stripped off his damp clothes and crawled under the blanket. Zaley pulled him down to her.
“I’m afraid to leave this place,” she whispered in his ear. “It’s been lovely. Hard yet peaceful. Don’t say anything. I’m not staying and we have to go. I’m just afraid.”
He didn’t say anything, both because she’d asked, and also because he was afraid, too.
Micah
They couldn’t go to Arquin, at least not right away. No longer were there stores for Micah and Zaley to rob at gunpoint; no longer did dumpsters hold anything edible to scavenge. Gone and gone. Once they moved away from the sea and the relief trucks, they lost their most reliable suppliers of food. So it wasn’t as easy as it had been when they left Cloudy Valley in March, food less accessible yet far from invisible. No longer were there cars full of fuel around to thieve either.
But those weren’t the real issues. It wouldn’t kill Micah, Austin, Zaley, and Corbin to walk for days on only a little food, following trails to Petaluma. Austin would bitch about it relentlessly and the other two suffer in silent misery. Micah would be fine. She almost looked forward to seeing how hard she could push herself.
The problem was the baby. If he were older, she could explain about belt-tightening and endurance, and how Mama Micah and Dada Aussie and Aunt Baby and Uncle Science were hunting for a temporary military base with a magical store of medicine that kept three members of his family alive and mentally intact. So that was why they were all eating less. Five years from now, Mars would look up to her out of those big blue eyes and nod solemnly. He’d hug to her side and press on into the wild. When they stopped for meals, he ate his small ration of food slowly to make it last. She had taught him to do that, and he remembered. Marcien had been born to a stupid first name and the blood of stupid people running in his veins, but Mars Camborne wasn’t a stupid boy. He was strong. He stayed in Micah’s shadow and watched for danger, a switchblade tucked into the pocket of his jeans. That was another thing she had taught him, to always have a point. It was something he never would have picked up in kindergarten.
Unfortunately, Micah was dealing with Mars as a child of less than a year old. He couldn’t understand anything more complicated than Micah was a big person, and a big person made food and comfort happen. If he were old enough to understand belt-tightening and Arquin, he wouldn’t still be drinking out of a bottle and messing in a diaper. He couldn’t walk a single step of the distance, although he liked to bounce on her thighs and was figuring out how to stand when she took his little hands in hers. When she held him under his armpits, she propelled him forward and he stepped. His smile when he did that almost cracked his face in two. He loved doing what a big person did.
With Marin so dangerous and food in a realm beyond unsteady, they were waiting for the arrival of the next two relief trucks to build up their banks of supplies before leaving Sausalito. As such, their meals were one hundred percent what they caught from the sea. Fish. Crab. Fish. Crab. Guess what? Tonight the menu sports more fish and crab! The cans of soup, boxes of cereal and packages of cookies, whatever else trundled in on the bullet-riddled trucks had to be saved for the road. The storm had come and gone in anticlimactic fashion, spitting and dying down, raining furiously for minutes and tapering away to barely a drizzle. Micah just kayaked through it.
The only one exempt from complete sea dining was Mars, and his was only a partial exemption. Tapping less formula into the scoop to stretch the powder was the first time Micah grasped an inkling of the emotion called embarrassment. She was embarrassed to feed diluted milk to the baby, to at times give him nothing more than a bottle of water. His heightened appetite shamed her. One evening he didn’t care for the fish and crab mash of the day and refused to have more than a few reluctant bites. Micah almost broke, her body turning involuntarily to the hidden cache of cans. He loved bean mash. He relished the reddish goo she made out of spaghetti and stars. And after an afternoon bottle of water, he needed to eat something. She forced her body to turn back to him, to keep her fingers out of the earth in which the cans were buried. In her peripheral vision, Clarissa stepped out from behind a tree to watch.
Micah couldn’t bring herself to cheat him on formula by quite as much that night. In the morning, the drained bottle was beside his sleeping form as a silent rebuke. He was somewhere in the seven-to-eight month range of age, at their best and wholly uneducated guess, and he needed four to five bottles holding six to eight ounces a day. That had been on a chart printed on one of the formula cans. They were rarely the same brand. He had turned up his nose at a few, but hunger eventually got the better of him.
I’m sorry. Parenting was feeding and changing and apologizing. The kid believed that she could do everything, and it smacked her in the face over and over that she couldn’t. When she thought of Uma saying that all children needed was love, Micah corrected her mother sharply in the memory. Fuck love. They needed food. Mars couldn’t stay alive off I love you and who’s a big boy? Love was what drained down his throat. That was how he knew he was worthy. That was how he learned to trust.
The first relief truck came with its usual collection of scattershot supplies, dutifully transferred to their hidden pit of goodies. The formula was a smaller can, holding only thirteen ounces rather than the more typical twenty-three. Micah stretched it and fed Mars as much in way of solids as he’d take. The bag from the truck had held only two containers of baby food. One was a double load of pureed carrots and the other one was bananas. She felt helpless at that, sacrificing the carrots to his belly and burying the bananas. When the carrots were gone in time and Mars yelled for more, Micah had the crumbles of dirt in her hand when she caught herself and stopped.
“Maybe we could-” Austin started.
“No,” Micah said shortly. Austin thought she was being too hard, but he couldn’t hear her shamed I’m sorry to Mars. No one but her saw Clarissa upon a branch of the tree above the tents. Even Micah didn’t see her. She just felt the presence. Clarissa was going to see how Micah did with Mars, and determine what kind of person she was from that. It was hard to judge from the extremes of a confinement point. The girl had allowed Micah that much.
Nonsense. But real. Elania was there too in moments. That was whom Micah wanted to talk to most about the baby, the only person in their group who would have known what to do with this ghostly little boy. With three younger brothers, she would have seen pretty much everything a kid could lob at her. She helped Micah pat the dirt back over the hidden cans as Austin argued.
Mars wasn’t going to die from a little less food. How many commercials had they seen over their lives of starving refugee children with distended bellies? Kids kept on living for quite a while on the apologetic scraps given to them. The baby wasn’t going to keel over dead from not eating as much.
But it ate at Micah. She was the big person. If only he were older for this walk to Arquin, she could explain their problems. Then she wouldn’t be so embarrassed. He’d understand. He was hungry for his bottle; she was hungry for him to be old enough to accept hardship rather than wail at it.
There had to be more food somewhere. Once the fishing was done in those days between the first and second relief truck deliveries, she canvassed Sausalito. There was nothing. Just nothing. She searched through raided homes and stores that had been picked clean. People had swept through here and moved on, those who weren’t willing to fish or couldn’t. Micah stood in what had gotten left behind. Shelves of books and photographs, cat toys and cans of paint, things that people had paid good money for but were truly worthless.
I’m trying, she thought to Clarissa. The hazel-eyed girl just watched from the aisles of the empty stores and the hallways of the homes. To a bab
y, trying meant nothing. They were creatures of sensation, not reason. Mars only grasped results. And in results, Micah was failing him.
One house was still decked out from last Christmas, lights along the wall of a living room, stockings at a fireplace and a brown tree smothered in ornaments in the corner. The carpet was covered in needles. The house had been broken into many times, muddy footprints tracked thickly upon one another. The cupboards and pantry were bare, as were the shelves of the refrigerator. A purse was disemboweled on the dining room floor. The beds had been relieved of their sheets and blankets, and the linen closet contained zilch. Four impressions in the carpet of the master bedroom held evidence that a chair had once stood by the closet.
But the holiday scene was untouched. The needles fallen from the tree hadn’t been tracked around the house. Many people had stood where Micah was standing, observing it and leaving it alone as testimony to the past. The stockings were too thin for warmth, fashionably tattered and with names sewn along the top. Mom. Dad. Darcy. Baker. Aran. The smallest one read Woofie. She left it alone like everyone else had. They had done it for nostalgia; she did it since nothing was worth anything. Her family hadn’t celebrated Christmas. She didn’t expect that a Solstice scene would have swayed her much either.
A lot of the garages were still intact, more or less. People hadn’t taken the time to search them thoroughly, especially the hoarded ones that were full of junk. One had an old car seat, which Micah took down from atop a filing cabinet. The tax forms sitting in the seat she dumped into the wind. In their place, she piled a little wealth of things that weren’t as important as food: clothes and shoes for all of them to try on, Pocket Animals for Mars, a thermal blanket. She unearthed a real camping backpack and beat off the dust.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 133
