When Micah went out to the body, the rest of them stayed on the trail. A zipper rattled down and she returned with two granola bars and a plastic bag of beef jerky. Taking a bite of the jerky, she grimaced. “Homemade. That’s disgusting.” She offered them the granola bars, but everyone declined. Zaley would say yes to those later, when she had more distance from where they had come from. Micah tucked the rest of the beef jerky into her pocket.
The trail went mostly downhill, and steeply. It narrowed so much that they had to walk single-file. Also overgrown and washed out in places, they slowed and stepped with care. “Arquin will be at the base of the mountain, right?” Austin asked.
“Yes, at the base of the mountain plus another few miles,” Zaley said. It was more than a few. He just needed some encouragement to keep going. So did she. And it was better not to contemplate how much faster they could have done this in a car on the freeway.
Finally, there was a wood post that labeled the trail and a road beyond it. They had gone the right way and paused to check the maps for what came next. This spot on the trail was getting close to the bottom of the mountain, and soon they should be seeing a lake. That was where they’d crash for the night. There was a parking lot down there, designated by shaded lines on the map, and maybe it would have an abandoned car. If not, they’d claim a hidden nook. In the morning, the road would take them around the lake and join up to another road going north. Farther to the east was a city named Kentfield. There was still a lot of space between them and Petaluma, but it wasn’t nearly as huge a gap.
Brush rustled across the road. Even though it was daylight, a feral appeared on the pavement. The four of them retreated a little higher on the trail as the man stood there to take stock of his surroundings. The late afternoon sun was making him squint and blink. One of his knees was frozen, and big black splotches were on the back of his hand and across his belly. He was wearing only underwear and a belt hanging loosely over his waist. His feet were torn up and bleeding. The guy was standing on hot concrete with no reaction. Diarrhea had run down the backs of his legs and stained his underwear.
Zaley wasn’t too alarmed. The man wasn’t looking their way. If Corbin ever turned into this, she would have to shoot him. She loved him too much to let him run around a mountain without his sanity, dressed in shitty underwear and a belt. Death was kinder.
The gun blast and rustling of brush happened almost simultaneously. Zaley thought that Micah had shot at the man and was shocked that she’d pull the trigger right by the baby’s head. But Micah wasn’t holding the gun. It had come from somewhere else. Startled by the loud noise, the baby jerked and began to cry.
The feral in the road yelled wordlessly at the boom. A second feral came out of the brush. Several others followed her. A man out of sight shouted, “Rout them out! Rout them out of there!” The brush trembled and a woman emerged, a young child pressed to her chest. She was shading the kid’s eyes and blinking hard herself.
A gun chattered. Corbin pulled at Zaley’s arm and they rushed off the trail and into the trees to hide. The ferals were shouting incoherently; one still had some language skills and screamed, “Run!”
The trees broke to reveal the road for just a moment as Zaley fled after Corbin. Even more ferals were pushing through the brush and one was falling. Those who had come out first had split up, some fleeing for the trail and others down the road. One had a menacing expression and changed course to run back at the noise.
“Got a big pack of them here!” a man bellowed.
Micah shushed the baby and shoved through bushes, where she came up short so abruptly that Austin almost walked into her. The rocky drop went down only four feet, but there were more rocks at the bottom. They climbed down and huddled there.
“Shhhh, I know. That was scary,” Micah whispered to Mars. He changed from crying to gulping, which was still too noisy for comfort. Guns chattered so close by. A man shouted you got ‘em, Danny? You got ‘em? No one answered and he repeated himself.
A feral burst out of the bushes above and cried out as he dropped. It was the man in his underwear, who crashed down on the rocks. Zaley took aim with her gun and Corbin with his bow, but the guy only scrambled up and dashed away. Expecting a hunter to come out any second, Zaley said, “Let’s keep going!”
“We can’t until he stops crying, or he gives us away,” Micah said.
“We can’t go much farther. Look how late it’s getting!” Austin whispered. They were going to lose the light not long from now. The feral man vanished into the trees and bushes beyond the rocky area and cried out identically to the first time. He had fallen down another drop over there.
“Get up the trail!” a man yelled.
“Shoot! Shoot!” shouted another man. Gunfire rattled. Beneath it ran the whispers of the lullaby that Micah sang to Mars at night. He gulped and quieted, tucking his head into her neck and her hair in his fist.
Brush rustled and a twig cracked. The four of them pressed closer to the rock, Corbin still with the arrow in his bow. Shockingly nearby, a man said, “Did it go this way?”
“No, it went north along the creek!” a woman called.
When the rustling was fainter, Zaley whispered, “We can’t go anywhere with them out there!”
The passing minutes were the longest of her life, and that was speaking as someone who had grown up in the Mattazollo home. The rustling at last faded away to nothing, but constant blasts resounded. They were stuck here.
Corbin picked up rocks and moved them away to make a campsite. The feral had left bloody tracks on the ground, which Zaley dumped leaves and dirt over. The baby was given a dose of his medication since it made him tired, and Micah treated him to mashed banana. After he ate, only wanting a few spoonfuls before he turned his head away, he fingered his toys. The medication kicked in once the tents were set up, and Austin carried a yawning Mars inside.
Zaley made a basic meal, crackers and halves of granola bars, two cans of soup to share, and passed them around. When she poked her head into the tent to deliver Austin’s, he was cradling Mars in his arms and whispering happy things as the baby drank from his bottle. Mars stretched out his hand sleepily to Zaley, who still had to give a plate to Micah. Squeezing his hand, she whispered good night.
“Good night, Auntie Zaley,” Austin whispered for Mars.
Every time the silence stretched out encouragingly, something broke it: a shout or gunshot, thumping feet or a whistle. The shadows grew longer and longer. Zaley went behind the foliage to pee and peeked through the bushes. Their camp was on a little plateau. The long drop on the north side led to another long drop, and beyond that was the road. Trees hid most of it, and darkness did the rest.
Micah crept around to get a better idea of what was going on. When she came back, she put her head in Zaley and Corbin’s tent and whispered, “The hunt has moved to the west, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of people lower down on the trail we want to take to the lake.”
“How are we going to get past them if they’re still there tomorrow?” Corbin asked in frustration.
Zaley flipped on the flashlight. “I’ll find another route.”
“Don’t use the light on the maps tonight,” Micah said. “It’s too dangerous. We’ll find a way through tomorrow morning.”
They said good night and she went to the other tent. Austin and Micah would be first on watch, but that just meant watching out from the tent flap. Being outside seemed too dangerous here. Only once did her voice carry as she spoke to Austin, and that was because he’d given the baby a bottle full of formula and not diluted it very much. She was pissed, and Zaley was pissed on her behalf. They had so little and they were traveling so slowly. Austin needed to think ahead, not just about their immediate situation.
Fully clothed, Corbin and Zaley cuddled up together. His hand was on her flank. She listened to the night noises and smiled as fingers traveled under her clothes. “Bad boy.”
“So bad,” Corbin whispered. “So
soft. We’re going to make the best porn videos together, Zaley Mattazollo. People will stop us in the streets to plead for our autographs.”
She muffled her laughter in the bedding. Did she want to have sex again, had they a condom? Yes and no and maybe all at once. She was still getting a handle on the first time, choosing what she wanted on her mental shelf rather than what her parents had tried to store there. But she wanted nothing more than to strip naked and press up to him, take his heat into her body.
He kissed her shoulder and back, tucking himself against her so tightly that nothing could have fit between them. Then he worked his fingers into her arm. It was feeling fine, but she didn’t dissuade him. She hardly ever had to wear the scarf sling for pain now. Over six months had passed from the bullet. Her arm didn’t have the ease of movement that it had had before, and the outside of her right hand was still numb. Sometimes she felt a ghost of pressure when she touched it. But a little numbness didn’t prevent her from doing anything. Like the doctor in the hospital had hoped, she was regaining functionality.
“I didn’t think I’d ever have this,” Corbin whispered, his hand stroking her stomach and his thumb brushing the underside of her breasts. “When they locked me up, I didn’t think I’d have anything. I was so angry. My life had been taken away.”
The sensation on her skin was diminishing the part of her that would say no to sex. “Do you think if I’d gotten the pills to you sooner that Elania wouldn’t have died?”
“No. She was only late by a few days. Zyllevir just quit on her. It does that to some people.” His hand stilled and he pressed his forehead between her shoulder blades. “I can’t remember what Brennan looked like, not all the way. Isn’t that awful? I just see dark hair. He was on the short side, I remember that much.”
Zaley tried to bring him to mind. She was relieved when he came back to her. “Quiet. And thin. He moved his head around a lot as people talked, kind of like a bird, so he could catch what they were saying. We sat together outside the district office the day they tested our saliva, and we debated if we should write our whole names on the clipboard or just first and last. Then it occurred to us that our names were so unusual that the district office wasn’t going to confuse us with anyone else.”
“What else about him?”
“After the party, he was almost immobilized by his Sombra C. He was so afraid of passing it on that he stopped being rational. He believed God was punishing him. And he thought he was going to give it to me by magic. He wanted me to stay away from him, drop out of Welcome Mat, not breathe the same air.”
“I remember,” Corbin whispered.
They had just stopped, Brennan and Elania. The rest of them were going forward in this world and changing with it the way they should, but those two had come to the end so soon. There should be a third tent here tonight, and God only knew what had happened to Janie and DeAngelo and Quinn.
She prayed for blessings on Brennan and Elania and Bleu Cheese in the next world, and wherever Janie and their other Sombra C infected friends were in this one or that one. Brennan’s mother, who had lost her only child, the Douglases who didn’t know their daughter and sister was gone, all of those students infected at the party and the sophomore who killed himself weeks later . . .
Something was going through the foliage, either a silent feral or one of those people hunting them. She listened tensely until the person drew away. Then she whispered, “Thank God.”
“What if there really is a God, and He doesn’t care what’s going on?” Corbin asked. “I’m serious. What if He looks down on the world that He created and honestly just doesn’t care?”
“Then I should pray for Him, too,” Zaley said, and added Him to her list.
Corbin
He was dead asleep when it fell on him.
His body woke up before his brain, and he fought senselessly with a great, shifting weight on his rib cage and abdomen. It was pitch black. Zaley was crying out in confusion beside him. Something shoved into Corbin’s nose, knocking his head back into the bedding and making his eyes sting with tears. At the same time, something pushed viciously into his groin. He cried out in pain and tried to bring up his knees protectively. The weight crushed his chest and kept him from doing anything. The sky had collapsed on the tent and was pressing him into the earth.
His brain woke up the rest of the way. Something was scrabbling on the fabric. Something alive, be it animal or feral, had come over the edge in the darkness and dropped onto the tent. The creature was struggling to get up. Pulling his arms up to his face, Corbin shoved with all his strength. It fell to the side and he breathed in deeply to fill his starved lungs.
The baby released a brilliant scream and Austin shouted. Flailing in the collapsed tent, Corbin gasped, “Are you okay? Are you okay, Zaley?”
“What the hell . . . was that?” she asked, struggling in the tangle.
Gunfire, three blasts very close. Thump.
His feet had been pointed to the flap of the tent. Corbin rolled over onto his side and crawled through the darkness to where it should be. He found it and forced his head out, bringing his bow and arrows along. Micah was breathing hard and doubled over in the thin moonlight, holding the gun and a flashlight. A disheveled Austin came out of the second tent, the crying baby and his own flashlight in one arm, his open backpack on the other. The rifle was sticking out of the open zipper and he was trying to free it when he didn’t have enough hands to do so.
Micah’s beam fell on a very overweight man in blue jeans and no shirt. His crumpled body was a few feet away from the tents. She had shot him once in the forehead and twice in the chest. Blood was leaking over his skin, getting caught in his heavy brows and chest hair, and spilling over onto a rock. The beam moved to his neck, where a stamp was peeking out from the folds of his flesh. They shouldn’t have set up the tents by a drop. A person was pretty much already falling before he or she noticed it was there. But there really hadn’t been any other good options for a campsite.
Corbin held up the material of the tent so Zaley could crawl out. A flashlight trembled in her hand. Pinning it between her legs, she rubbed at her side and winced. She shook her head when he looked at her, understanding his silent question. It wasn’t a bad injury, just a smack. The guy’s weight had fallen mostly on Corbin. His groin was still aching from the blow he had taken there. He checked his nose. It wasn’t bleeding.
“Did he hurt you?” Corbin asked Micah.
She was rubbing her knee as Austin gave up on the rifle to jiggle the wailing baby. “No. I was just out here to take a piss and tripped on a tree root when I came back to shoot him.”
The dead guy had to be in excess of three hundred pounds, his belly puffing over the tight jeans like an oversized muffin. He was going to be a bitch for them to drag off and dump. None of his skin was decomposing from Sombra C yet. His stamp was at 3%, although his viral load wasn’t necessary still there, but he hadn’t been pissing in his pants or making animal cries. He might not have even been that feral.
“Oh, oh, oh, come here,” Micah was crooning. She had let go of her knee and was reaching out to Austin and unhappy Mars.
“The dude landed on his arm,” Austin said. When Corbin shoved, that was where the man had gone. Feeling guilty, he patted the baby’s back in apology as Micah pressed him to her chest and whispered to him. Her flashlight was a thin one and not good for much, so she’d put it in her pocket.
They should move the tents somewhere else. But that created infinite problems in having their lights or movements noticed, not to mention that nowhere around here was any better. The ground was either rocky, thick with bushes, pushed up by tree roots, and then there were the slopes. All they could do was move the tents to the tree roots and have a bumpy night of sleep.
Mars’ cries turned to the stuttering chokes that signaled he was calming down. Corbin tried to check out the arm to see if anything was broken or bleeding, but the baby had curled it in between him and Micah. He was
shivering a little. It was cold and he only had on his truck T-shirt and a diaper. If the fat dude had broken his arm, they had to make a splint for it.
“Let me see his-” Corbin was saying to Micah when they heard the rustling.
Then they were everywhere.
Ferals spilled out of the bushes and fell down the drop. Gunfire rattled after them. Corbin had just started for Zaley when both of them were tumbled over by the rushing bodies. One came apart in the air, a bullet exploding its head. A rain of blood sprayed out. As more leaped and fell down the drop, Corbin rolled in panic to get out of the way. Micah was firing furiously, the baby wailing in her hold and some of the ferals screaming. A few fell to the ground with mortal injuries. Others just absorbed the bullets into their bodies without reaction. Then the gun clicked, out of bullets, and some of those still standing charged her. Micah turned and bolted through the trees, Mars’ cries leading on the ferals like a siren.
It wasn’t a pack. It was just insanity. Corbin hit a bush and cowered there. He couldn’t see Zaley or Austin among the thrashing bodies trying to regain their feet, caught on the tents they’d landed upon, the corpse of the fat man, and each other. One got up and promptly tripped again over the one who had lost his head. Bark burst off a tree from bullets. Hunters were coming. The flashlight that Austin had been holding was on the ground, and Austin was gone.
Corbin couldn’t worry about the hunters yet. Ferals were only two meters away. Shouting for Zaley, he scrambled to his feet. His voice attracted the attention of a creature that was unable to get up from the plunge. On its stomach, it hissed and crawled in his direction. One of its arms stopped at the elbow, the flesh rotted to a point around exposed bone.
The bow and quiver. He had dropped them nearby, and dove for them. Nocking an arrow, he released it. It struck the feral in its head. For another second it crawled, and then it collapsed.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 140
