“What went through it?” Corbin asked.
“All of the time I spent worrying about tests at school . . . why did I do that? Why were those tests so important? They were a little important, but it was the end of the world to me back then. I let that fear get so big. But this was truly big. It made everything else so small.” She sighed. “He broke my bracelet.”
“I’ll make you another one sometime, just the same as the first.”
“Haaaoooo. Haaaooooo.” Wood creaked at the base of the stairs.
They stayed very still. A feral went halfway up the staircase and down again to wander off. Soon after that, a team of hunters called from above. Wood creaked and snapped from the top of the staircase, but no one ever came down. Then Corbin fell asleep.
He awoke just before dawn. Zaley’s face was crinkled up and her fingers flexing in her dream. Pressing his hand to her forehead, he tried to guess her temperature. Her skin was a little warm. Was it fever warm? Corbin did the same to his forehead. He didn’t feel quite that warm, but the difference was tiny. Essentially, it told him nothing. Healthy people weren’t all exactly the same temperature. It was a cold morning and she was dressed more warmly than he was anyway.
His touch had roused her. They refreshed the cosmetics over his stamp and checked over her ankle, which was grossly swollen. Not broken, judging from how she could rotate it, but a nasty sprain. Traveling all day long was out of the question, let alone running from ferals or hunters. He elevated it on the backpack and left her there to check at the campsite for the others.
There was just enough light to see without a flashlight. Every step he took was cautious, his bow at the ready. He wanted to find Micah, Austin, and Mars back at the tents, packing everything up and preparing to move on.
At the waterfall were the bodies. Wildlife would be on them in time. The guy that had bitten Zaley was a muscular man in shredded clothing. His face was purplish from lividity, as he had ended up facedown and the blood was pooling there. The back of his head was a dark, wet, and nauseating mess. Corbin crossed the stream and hefted himself up the drop to return to the trail.
Within minutes of retracing his steps, he spotted the body of a woman off the trail. Her legs were hiked up on a boulder. He went over against his better judgment. She looked Korean, and her hair was in a ponytail. Her feet were bare and covered in small abrasions. It appeared that she’d tripped over the boulder in the darkness and landed on her face. Her neck was turned out at a strange angle and in her flesh was a stamp reading 18%.
In her back pocket was the bulge of a wallet. He took it out and opened it. Inside were five dollars and a driver’s license issued to Dora Kim. She was required to wear corrective lenses when behind the wheel. She wasn’t wearing glasses now, nor were they around the corpse. Leaving the money in the wallet, he tucked it back into her pocket. There was nothing on the body for him to use.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the dead woman, and left her there. He couldn’t pray for her when God had let this happen. But he could apologize for the shitty world that had done it to her. The feral he had shot in the throat wasn’t anywhere. It had crawled off somewhere else to die.
When Corbin got close to their campsite, he heard voices. Relief filled him, and just as quickly, it was swept away. Those voices didn’t belong to Micah and Austin. They couldn’t belong to ferals either. He boosted himself up the drop and peered through the bushes.
Three men were standing at the tents. A camping lantern burned between them. One man was dumping out Micah’s backpack. He bent down to pick up the bottle of Zyllevir. “It was a zombie campsite.”
The second man was searching through Corbin’s collapsed tent as the third checked out the bodies of the ferals. Nudging one with his foot, he said, “The campsite can’t belong to these zombies. They’re too far gone. There must be fresher ones out there.”
“None showed up at the lake so they probably ran back up the trail,” the first one said. “We’ll have the morning squads grid out the area and track ’em down today. I’m guessing there are three or four of them, and at least one is female.”
“Two are female, I think,” the second man said. He had quit the collapsed tent to peek into the other one. “They have a baby with them. I’ve got a bottle of milk here.” Laughter. “Zombie baby.” One imitated a wail that trailed off into a growl.
Corbin crept away, going over the drop and down the trail, past the body and following the noise of the waterfall. When he got to the staircase, his mind was made up. They were going east to the cities to find an abandoned house, squat there for a day or two to give Zaley’s ankle a chance to mend, and pressing on north through the neighborhoods along the freeway to Petaluma. It couldn’t be any worse there than it was here. He whispered all of this to Zaley, who said in upset, “What about Austin and Micah?”
Also upset, he whipped off his ripped up T-shirt and cut at it with his steak knife. The bloody parts he discarded. With the rest, he made a crude bandage to wrap around her ankle. They didn’t have cell phones to get in contact with the others, nor had they discussed a meetup point if they got separated. Their goal had only been Arquin.
Micah’s backpack had been there at the campsite, meaning she hadn’t come back. If she and the baby and Austin had gone down to the lake . . . one of the men had said no one showed up at the lake. There had to be a brace there, or some other kind of trap. Micah and Austin could be anywhere on the mountain, or finding another way north. Seeking them out was impossible.
Corbin tied her ankle and fixed the end beneath another layer to pin it. “How does it feel?”
“Stiff.” She tried to flex it.
“And how are you feeling?” He was on edge to match her response to his mental list of symptoms. Feverish. Lethargic. Decreased appetite. In some people, the fever was extremely high. They could fall unconscious for seventy-two hours. That was why Brennan hadn’t been found for so long after the party. He had been one of the newly infected who fell asleep. It was the difference between a 1% percent stamp and a 5%, those days he slept in the woods. But other people never did feel under the weather with the initial infection. They went on about their days feeling fine.
Rotating her foot in the other direction, Zaley shrugged casually at his question and said, “Okay, I guess.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I was up half the night and I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. My knees and my ankle hurt so much. I really want to sleep more, but you’re right. We should get out of here and the lake isn’t a place to go.” She eased on her sock and sneaker.
Lethargic. But he was also tired from their bad night. She wasn’t so tired that it was preventing her from getting up. Making a face, she pressed her hands to her stomach. “Ugh. I’m on a boat.”
“It has to be the Zyllevir,” Corbin said as she closed her eyes and stood there. He didn’t want her to be sick from the medication. It made some people so ill from the side effects that they gave up on life and no one could blame them. Peeeeeee. He had forgotten that man on Klaman Trail.
Once at Arquin, if it really seemed like the military was accepting of Sombra Cs, he could ask for her to be tested should they have the supplies. Until they got there, he was going to be watching her like a hawk, in fear that anything she forgot or a snappish remark was indicative of a far greater problem than absent-mindedness or a transient mood. Every time she stepped into the light, he would be waiting in dread for unusual blinking and a flinch.
Please don’t take her away. If he didn’t believe in God, then to whom was he addressing his plea? To chance or fate, to the particular genetic combination that made up Zaley Mattazollo and determined if she responded to Zyllevir? He’d pray to all of it, any of it, whatever had the power to keep her here. God or Goddess, Satan or Zyllevir, he’d bow down before anything for her life.
Zaley breathed in and out meditatively. Her hands fell away from her stomach and she said, “It’s subsiding. Let’s
go.”
They walked away from the ancient staircase, taking it slow and easy over the uneven ground. His backpack felt so light on his shoulders. They didn’t have maps. There was only a little food and one bottle of water. Zaley didn’t have her gun. That was in the collapsed tent with her other possessions. They had gone from having little to having little more than nothing. Corbin steeled himself to check every body that they came across. For food and water, weapons and Zyllevir, a backpack for Zaley, no matter how rotted and stinking the corpse had become. He would hold his breath, avert his eyes, and take what he needed. As he had done in the confinement point for the watch. It was just what they had to do to survive.
“Maybe we’ll run into them,” Zaley whispered. Corbin didn’t say anything to dissuade her hope. Anything was possible, and he wanted to run into them, too.
In the distance was gunfire.
Micah
She had a knife that had once cut some Sausalito yuppie’s steak. She had a gun without bullets. She had one plastic baggie holding a couple of Zyllevir pills, and another with homemade beef jerky. She had the clothes on her back. She had the toy badge and a flashlight so small that it was practically a toy. And she had the baby.
That was all.
In the night as she was chased away from the camp, she had pinched his nose and mouth shut to make him stop crying. Then she let him breathe, and before he could resume wailing, she pinched his nose and mouth shut again. They had taken shelter in a tall, hollowed out stump of a giant tree and he stopped crying so she would stop smothering him.
Only one feral had been persistent enough to follow them there. She choked it to death outside while Mars made sniveling sounds in his hiding place. Then she crept back to find him almost out of the stump. He had been crawling out to find her, wanting his mother even after she had been cruel to him. That made her feel like the lowest form of life on the planet.
She carried him into the stump and sang in whispers until the snivels stopped and he went to sleep in her arms. Then she just whispered tearfully I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and rocked him from side to side. It was cold and she put her arm across his bare legs to warm them. If she could only set him down and wrap him up in her sweatshirt . . . but she was afraid the movements would wake him up. Afraid that she would have to smother him if he cried.
It had taken such a long time for his snivels to die away, for sleep to sweep him off. She had feared that they would be discovered long before the baby calmed down. By either ferals or hunters, both come to kill.
As he slept against her shoulder, she spotted flashlights moving between the trees. Ferals wouldn’t be using flashlights. All she could do was wedge the two of them into the most concealed nook of the stump and stay quiet. When a beam touched the place where she had just been sitting, she closed her eyes and waited in dread to be discovered. Take him. He doesn’t have Sombra C. Shoot me but take him. From Shepherds he had come, and to Shepherds he would return. It was his fate. She had only ever been an interlude in his life. Her arms would relinquish him to the Shepherd outside the tree.
The beam was moving back and forth when she opened her eyes. She breathed in the sweet smell of the baby, wanting to have that one last time before she died. No. She’d wait until the Shepherd was trying to balance the baby and his gun, kick his weapon away and steal Mars back. Bite the dickhead and take his gun, blast her way out of this mountain and get to Arquin.
The beam withdrew. The hunter walked away.
Now it was day, and she didn’t know where they were. Somewhere in the green and gray and brown and yellow of the mountain, and her efforts to find the campsite had failed. She only had the crudest locational information in the position of the sun to discern east from west, and the angle of the land to tell her north from south. South went up the mountain. North went to the lake. By mid-morning she was going west, having no choice but to do so. She wasn’t the only one on the mountain. At times she came across trails, but she never followed them for long. They left her open.
She used the chatter of gunfire to tell her where the hunters were. It was coming from every direction save west. And they had the cries of the baby to tell them where she was, before her hand cut off his air supply. For hours she dropped down ravines and scaled rocky protuberances one-handed. She mashed the nasty homemade teriyaki beef jerky in her teeth until it was a gummy mess and spat it into the baby’s mouth. He pushed it out with his tongue and cried, hungry for his bananas and his bottles of milk. At a stream she drank deeply and tried to cup water in her hands to have him drink. Some went in, and then he choked on it and threw up. There wasn’t time to try again. Far away were voices.
She should have dipped her shirt in the water and had him suck from it. She should have combined the Zyllevir with the beef jerky and filled the empty baggie with water to carry along. Neither thought occurred to her until it was too late.
It was late afternoon now. Go far enough to the west and she’d run into coastal communities and the ocean. The next time she came across a trail appearing to lead that way, she’d run there if it had good tree cover. There would be a police station or a relief truck, someone to whom she could give Mars. Hand him over to welcoming arms and get away from him, draw the hunters after her alone. Elude them until they gave up, and go back for the baby when it was safer.
Since the sun had been directly overhead, the voices were always the same at her back. They belonged to two men. No matter where she went, they came after her. She climbed down and up a pair of slopes and took shelter in the trees, hushing the baby and looking behind them to see how much distance they had.
The men were picking down the slope at the very top of it, following the footprints she had left. The tall guy was dressed all in black. He was a cartoon caricature of height and thinness. The short, chubby one wore camouflage. He was a klutz, twice stumbling on rocks in the seconds that Micah took his measure. Each had a gun. The little one had a sheath at his belt for a knife, a semi-automatic in his arms, and the big one sported a pair of handguns in the holsters on his belt. They also had stuffed backpacks, and folding tents clipped to them. So they weren’t going to turn back at nightfall and write her off. They were just going to keep coming until they ran her down.
I am going to make you sorry.
She wasn’t going to make them sorry. She didn’t have any means to do that. She was going to run and they were going to chase and the baby was going to cry and then she was going to die . . .
There wasn’t anywhere to hide where the baby wouldn’t give them away if he started up. She dodged through a forest of redwood and fir trees, sliding on her ass down to a trail and breaking away from it when the path led to an area of chaparral. Micah pushed deep into the trees and found that it came to the same area of chaparral that stretched out and exposed anyone upon it. In the distance were trees.
So that was where they had to go. For the moment, the baby was quiet. She shifted him to her other hip and broke into a run. Her clothes were soaked with sweat from the exertions of the day. The satiation from the water hadn’t lasted long. But there were cities out there by the ocean, houses with gardens and gardens with hoses and hopefully water still ran through them if she didn’t come across a creek or lake.
“Daaa,” the baby said in a tiny voice.
“Dada is dead,” Micah wheezed. Then she could speak no more from exhaustion. Her lungs burned with every breath. When the bullets had come flying into their campsite, Austin had staggered and fallen over the side of the steep drop through the brush. That was the last she had seen before fleeing, ferals on her heels. What had happened to Corbin and Zaley, she didn’t know. In the pandemonium and dark, she hadn’t been able to see much of anything except Austin vanishing down the plunge.
They had killed Austin. She was going to make all of them sorry. But she wasn’t. She had no power. They were going to make her sorry.
Shouts. The two men had seen her. Gunfire from the semi-automatic chuckled. Micah weaved
frantically and swung the baby in front of her body rather than keeping him at her side, where he was exposed. Dirt shot up from the ground to her right where a bullet had kicked up the soil.
The short man was loaded with ammunition to be firing so indiscriminately. She had nothing and he had everything. If she had that gun for herself, she would tie the two of them to trees and make a bullet outline around their bodies. They’d be riddled with holes from stray shots in seconds and that was what they deserved for chasing her and Mars through this no man’s land. For chasing all of the ferals in the wilderness. There were no communities close by that these people were bothering. The hunters were here for sport. She was sport.
She was furious.
She didn’t fall to a bullet. The gun stopped firing and she threw a glance back. All the way at the uneven tree line, the men were stepping out to walk through the chaparral. The short one checked the sky. The tall one’s eyes were fixed on her.
Where you goin’, girlie? Why you running away so fast? They didn’t have to speak for her to hear their thoughts. But they couldn’t hear her thoughts or feel her rage. They couldn’t know that she’d make bullet outlines that left them bloodless, that she’d gather up the limbs she had sawn from their bodies and offer them to mountain lions. They were fucking with the wrong person. To them, she was just a scared zombie woman with a baby.
She was scared.
She was terrified. Mars was eight months old, not eight years old. If she didn’t do something for him, it wouldn’t be done. That was how reliant he was. He couldn’t propel himself forward in the chase, and her arms were growing weak from carrying him. Her steak knife was nothing against guns. She was nothing. She was exactly what they saw, a scared zombie woman with a baby and nothing more.
They were running with her, but not her usual followers of Clarissa and Elania, and the dead from the confinement point. Women and men ran through the chaparral, clutching small children in fruitless flights from streams of lava, raging fires and racing water, executioners. Now it was Micah’s turn to run, filled with a primal fear that made her stomach drop out. This act felt ancient to her. How it ended felt ancient to her, too.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 142
