On the sixth day of their travels upon quitting Mount Tamalpais, a militia took a pair of women right off the streets in broad daylight, forced them into the back of a van and drove away. Zaley watched through a third-story window of an abandoned business center while Corbin slept within a cubicle. Nothing identified the van as militia, but only a militia had fuel. She was frantic to call the cops, give a description of the women and the van, flip on a television for updates, cross her fingers for a rescue . . . but she could only watch in horror, a witness without a voice, and turn away in agitation and helplessness.
Then she opened a desk drawer for a distraction and stared with incomprehension at the files. The words on the tabs were written in English, but they looked foreign. The computers and phones in the cubicles were dusty. This business had become a room full of artifacts. Once it must have bustled with people and beeping machinery; now it was a museum of pre-breakdown American life.
She and Corbin had canvassed the place carefully for ferals, but as she explored to take her mind off the abduction, she did it on alert in case one had been missed. You could never, ever, be one hundred percent sure that you were alone. In the break room, she held her breath from the stench of the rotting food in the refrigerator. She still searched through it for edibles and found nothing. If there had once been something there, then someone else already cleaned it out. The two of them had run out of food swiftly, having only what happened to be in Corbin’s backpack when their camp was destroyed. Since then, their meals were made up of what they unearthed in break rooms and cabinets. Zaley had acquired another backpack, but there wasn’t anything in it that she could eat.
The glass on the two vending machines was smashed and the shelves liberated of every last calorie. Hungry and frustrated, she started to open all of the desk drawers in the rows of cubicles, praying for a stick of gum or a breath mint. Instead of just glancing in, she searched the contents thoroughly. It turned out to be the most brilliant idea of her seventeen years upon the planet and she spent hours going through the whole floor.
When Corbin awakened, she presented him with a Thanksgiving feast. People had kept extras in the drawers and now it was theirs. Not only packs of gum and tins of breath mints, there were granola bars, a package of cookies, microwave soups, a bowl of candy, a full bag of walnuts, and six bottles of water. Almost everything had been shoved back behind pens and pencils and pads of papers, squashed behind hanging files, beneath the desks and hidden by the trashcans . . . They would have done anything for food when they first arrived in this building and all the while, they hadn’t known there was food all around them.
She also had tissues, over-the-counter pain pills, pads and tampons, hair ties and cosmetics and first aid supplies. There was even a rolled bandage for her ankle, a real bandage that could replace the strips of cloth. Corbin was so excited about the food that he bowled her over and kissed her just about everywhere. Her mind flashed back to those screaming women and she felt sick.
After they gobbled up as much as they could hold, unable to control themselves, they slipped down to the second story and besieged the cubicles there as well. It became a daily ritual from then on to search the places where food wasn’t expected to be found, and thus hadn’t been taken. What appeared to be only a dry sea of cubicles in truth held riches. Some buildings had more than others, but never did they find absolutely nothing. Even a handful of hard candies or a can of soda was a win. That bit of sugar kept them going as they walked and hid, kept watch and stepped over bodies.
Although Shepherds had gotten the nation into this condition, ironically they were the least of its current problems. Zaley and Corbin came across the remnants of a brace on a downtown street one night, four corpses in vests on the ground with wire embedded in their throats. It had happened a long time ago, judging from what was left of the bodies. By day, Zaley didn’t see too many people dressed in Shepherd garb out the windows. They had bellies like everyone else did, and couldn’t throw their weight around when they were losing it from starvation. The infrequent ones she spied upon looked a little lost at their posts on quiet street corners. One swept up broken glass from a sidewalk outside a looted organic food store. All of the rah-rah and Patron Saint saluting and paces had boiled down to this, a Shepherd cleaning up the mess of the country he destroyed in the fantasy that he was saving it.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still deadly dangerous to her. They didn’t know if Zaley was infected with Sombra C. After a week passed from the feral’s nip to her leg, she swallowed another Zyllevir pill and endured the mild nausea. It never grew bad enough to make her vomit, just a sporadic roiling of her stomach like she was on a boat. Starting the morning after she took a pill, it lasted through the day and subsided by night. After that, she felt fine. Corbin had whispered a thousand questions to her since the bite, pretending it was conversation but in truth testing her memory. She understood his unspoken motive and loved him for it. Zaley was testing herself. Everything was always there in her mind when she checked, even the things she wished she could forget.
Only once did she suspect she might have a problem, a miserable mood settling upon her without warning. Then her period began. It was just a hormonal flux, nothing more or less, not Sombra C eating away at her ability to manage her emotions. It was also confirmation that she wasn’t pregnant, which was a very good thing. It was too hard for four of them to take care of one baby in Mars. She hoped beyond hope to come across them one night on the road, or by day in a hideout. Micah and Austin and the baby, all headed for Arquin, too. The world was determined to strip away everyone that Zaley loved, and she was terrified that Corbin would vanish into the ether next. She hadn’t gotten them back from the confinement point just to lose everyone piece by piece again.
It was ridiculous to pray for baby formula when she searched through cubicles, but she prayed for it anyway. She and Corbin held off on eating a plastic container of applesauce. It was the last one in a cardboard six-pack that someone had left behind a computer. Mars couldn’t eat walnuts or granola bars, but applesauce was perfect. Zaley wanted to feed that to him, his fingers over hers on the spoon to hold it together. She couldn’t say that she liked babies very much, but that one habit of his was dear to her.
Night after night, she and Corbin plugged on until more than two weeks had passed since ferals and hunters separated them from Micah, Austin, and baby Mars. Petaluma and the temporary military base called Arquin were north of them, and after such a ridiculously plodding travel pace, they were almost there.
After a day spent in a Novato gym, where they slept on a floor among rows of silent treadmills, they took cold showers. There was soap and shampoo in dispensers. Zaley couldn’t recall the last time she had stood in a shower. The cold stopped her from enjoying it. She was in and out of there in less than five minutes, clean but freezing. Corbin had discovered six T-shirts advertising the gym while she bathed. Brand new, there were three blue ones in his size and two yellow ones in hers. On all of them was the slogan Excellence in Exercise, and footprints tracking around the sleeves in spirals. It was lovely to pull on a shirt that didn’t stink at the armpits. The sixth T-shirt was green and in size 3XXL, which they both could have squashed into at the same time. It went into Zaley’s backpack anyway. She’d rather have a huge shirt that she never needed than no shirt at all.
“I haven’t set foot in a real shower since that motel in San Francisco,” Corbin said, and that had been in April after the confinement point. Three months ago. Their underwear had holes and so did their pants, but they never felt confident enough when they passed malls to go inside. Ferals lurking in the dressing rooms, Shepherds or a militia guarding the goods . . . it wasn’t worth the risk.
They swept through the gym’s offices for food, claimed a pair of energy bars, and headed out. Past the pool with two bodies floating in it, the water greenish and murky, past the parking lot where a feral had fallen. An animal scurried away from the body and Zaley gripped her sti
ck. It didn’t come back, whatever it was. She only assumed the man sprawled across the parking space had been feral; there wasn’t much left of the neck where a stamp would have been and he was naked except for a pair of filthy socks. A dog barked and she looked around for it warily. Three crazed pocket dogs had attacked them not long after leaving the mountain, which sounded funnier than it actually was. Down any street could be the full-sized version. If Bleu Cheese had been mean-tempered and hungry, and there were three of her instead of one, Zaley and her stick could kiss the world goodbye.
A full moon was rising this night, trails of clouds passing over its top and making it look like a half-lidded eye. The sky still held some blue from the evening. The day had been much cooler than the previous ones, due to a layer of fog in the morning that brought a welcome bit of chill with it. No fog was on the horizon tonight, which didn’t bode well for tomorrow.
The air smelled like fire. Zaley was used to that smell. People were cooking without benefit of stoves, there were no firefighters to be called should a fire get out of control, and so they rampaged where they would. She’d walked through the blackened shells of entire blocks. The only thing to stop fires these days was when they ran out of things to burn.
The night was quiet as they passed from street to street. The people who’d once lived in this city had scattered. Some had to have gotten into cars and aimed for Canada; they’d walked away to the homes of relatives or friends; they had taken shelter in the abandoned homes of strangers. They went away in search of food, and to escape the legions of ferals. Some were still here, locked up tight for the night in houses and in evidence only by the dim lights from lanterns or candles that came through curtains. Some didn’t lock up so tightly, and their voices carried through open windows.
Zaley trained her flashlight on the ground and moved on with Corbin. A trailer park had been totaled by fire to their side. The dark hulks sat sullenly in clusters. Only a single cluster was still standing at the far end, somehow having eluded the flames. Candlelight burned in the windows of the one closest to the road.
Someone bayed, either a dog, or a feral whose voice was indistinguishable from one. Hooting answered it and Zaley was disappointed. They had hardly covered any ground and might as well return to the gym. Corbin motioned her over to the trailer park. Crouching beside the doublewide with the glowing windows, they doused their flashlights and waited there to listen. A man opened the door and looked out, a candle wavering in his hand.
From inside, a woman called, “Close the door! It’s just chickens or crazies like it always is!” The candle swung around, giving so little light that the man couldn’t see anything except a tiny bubble around the flame. The woman yelled and the light drew back inside. Their crabby voices were audible through the wall, the woman scolding that the light was going to lure the crazies and the man scolding in return that her yelling was going to do it. The barking and hooting increased and the squabbling couple fell silent. They rustled around inside, moving the lights away from the windows. Corbin pressed his hand to Zaley’s back when the feral noise ceased.
They returned to the road, its only occupants. At times it felt like they were the only two people in existence on the whole of the planet. Humanity had sung its last verse and gone silent. Cities would sit empty and buildings fall to ruin, fields lay fallow and the wilderness creep in. The strange feeling of utter isolation never lasted very long. A man shouted or a feral screamed, and Zaley was reminded that there were more people out there. And it was better to be isolated.
They made it to a frontage road and walked alongside the freeway. The ground to their right was scorched and black from another fire. It gave way to a marsh area beyond a fence. A figure moved under the freeway overpass and they paused, pressing the beams of their lights to their clothing. The cause turned out to be a deer. Plenty of other times, it had been cats prowling around, or roosting chickens on fences or in bushes, some up in trees. Zaley always wanted to catch one for a meal, just the thought of roast chicken made her mouth water, but they didn’t have time to hunt and making a fire would attract all sorts of attention.
The road curved away from the freeway, so they hiked over to it. Corbin shined his light on a road sign. Zaley waited for him to read, and then he put his mouth close to her ear and said, “I think these are the Novato Narrows. No, it’s not on the sign. It’s just what people called it. The freeway narrows to fewer lanes and everyone got crunched here during rush hour.”
“Why do you sound worried?” Zaley whispered.
“The next city is Petaluma, but that’s miles away. There won’t be too many buildings from here to there, just hills and cow pasture.”
They would be exposed. Pastures and hills would have fences to climb and gopher holes to trip in; walking on the freeway was dangerous in other ways. Conferring in whispers, they chose the freeway for now. There wouldn’t be anywhere good to hide in the morning if they didn’t make it to the city of Petaluma. Both picked up the pace, although they stayed highly aware of everything around them. Zaley scanned the cars parked on the shoulders. Those weren’t good for anything but extremely short-term cover. They couldn’t hide in those during the day. It would be way too hot, and someone only had to stroll by and look in to spot them there.
Twice they hid behind cars for ferals going through; once they ducked in bushes from a dozen men headed south on the northbound lanes. Zaley hid her light none too soon. One in the crowd said loudly that he could have sworn he saw a beam.
They could have been perfectly nice people. But there was also the chance they were assholes, hating Sombra Cs, wanting a woman, in possession of guns when Zaley and Corbin only had knives, a stick, and the bow. Considering the number of men in that group, they didn’t even need guns to have the upper hand in an altercation. Neither Zaley nor Corbin got up until those people were far in the distance. Then they climbed out from behind the bushes and hustled on.
In some places, the light from the moon was so bright that they extinguished their flashlights to spare the batteries and keep the ferals off. Miles fell away under their feet as the freeway weaved through the hills. They climbed over to walk in the southbound lanes when forms with telltale lurches appeared ahead.
It was little better on the south side, more ferals shuffling aimlessly around the lanes, and they quit the freeway altogether when one feral came their way. Rushing down a road to dark buildings, they took shelter in a thrashed structure that had once been used for agriculture. This was a farm, or had been. The feral wandered around outside and made snuffling sounds. Just when Zaley couldn’t hear it any longer, she heard another snuffle. Perhaps this was as far as they were going to get tonight. Having to travel at a crawl was aggravating. She just wanted to get there.
The snuffling stopped at last, but other sounds replaced it. There was no way to leave this destroyed farm yet. She edged open the zipper of the backpack and drank water. Moonlight fell to the floor through gaps in the ceiling and walls, metal siding hanging loosely or ripped away altogether.
“A year ago today,” Corbin whispered, “a year ago today, everything was fine in northern California. Sombra C was out there but our lives went on like normal. If you didn’t watch the news, you’d never know anything was wrong. Everything was still more or less okay in February of this year. And look at it now. It’s the end of civilization by July. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for it to happen so fast.”
“Other places might be okay,” Zaley said.
“They might not be. This could be true of everywhere. Everything is destroyed. Whoever comes out of this alive, whoever goes on, it’s not going to be the same. Not for them or their children. Not for their grandchildren even. What’s been taken apart in months will take hundreds of years to put back together. We aren’t just coming back from this.”
She closed her eyes and thought of Austin and Micah out there in the darkness. Everything was so tenuous that it could be ripped apart in seconds, even the four of the
m who fought so hard to stay together. “Do you think they’re okay?”
“I want them to be okay.” He wouldn’t give her platitudes that of course they were okay. “They could be as little as a mile away.”
A mile ahead or a mile behind, always just out of view. Without phones or the Internet, it might as well have been a thousand miles. Or they could be on the north face of the mountain still, their bodies gone cold and a feast for maggots. Zaley couldn’t allow herself to think about what had happened to Elania’s body. She wanted to picture Elania at school, briskly going about her classes and annoyed that one of her younger brothers had signed his name to her science homework. Though months had passed since her death, it still didn’t feel real. Would it ever feel real? Or would Zaley just get used to the not-real feeling?
At the pace he ate, her father had to be running low on food in his bunker by now. Maybe he was pushing a broom at broken glass on a Cloudy Valley street corner, feeling the faintest inkling of remorse now that his actions had affected himself. That was doubtful. He’d cling to his righteousness, blame everyone else, and Zaley couldn’t figure out exactly how she shared blood with that man.
“What are we going to do if Arquin doesn’t exist?” Zaley asked. All it had ever been was a rumor. “We’re out of Zyllevir. We just have days.”
“Then we’ll try for the harbor,” Corbin said, grunting as he took off his shoe to adjust it. They’d weathered some pretty rough living for months now, and the outer sole on his left shoe had split. Every time they taped it up, it broke free. “The city of Sonoma isn’t that far from Petaluma. We’ll walk to it and do whatever we can to break in.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 147
