Micah led them high in the mountain, wearing them out with the promise that there were always zombies in a certain region ahead. Fuck her if she was wrong! The truth was that up there, they were guaranteed to be alone.
By the time they reached the vista, the hunters were too exhausted to hunt. They sat on rocks and rubbed their sore feet. One guy wondered if they should be worried about ticks, and another guy said he was too wiped out to care. The girl checked her legs with feminine squeals of protest that she didn’t like bugs. Kane mustered energy at Micah’s surreptitious gesture to the trees. They slipped away, ostensibly to visit the bathroom, and she guided him deep into the woods for privacy. Taking him all the way to a thin branch of the stream, she let him feel her up and give her wet kisses. It felt good. She was rough about it, biting at his lip, and he got rough in return on her breasts, hissing, “You like that, Kali? You like that?”
“I like this,” Micah whispered in a sultry voice, and stabbed him in the stomach with a blade. She knocked him to the ground and shoved his face into a mud puddle beside the stream. Collapsing onto his back, she pinned his head into the muck and stabbed him repeatedly. He bucked and thrashed. The one yell he got out was met with faraway cheers and hoots. The guys in the hunting party thought he was getting laid.
Yeah, she was riding him. But not that way.
When she emerged alone from the trees, Jenson asked if Kane was taking a nap. She laughed and shot him in the face. Reese’s hand went to his gun, but never achieved any more than that. Bullets chopped into his flesh, some passing through him to Harris one rock over. Aubrianna screamed and ran for the trail, abandoning her gun in her panic.
Micah gave her a head start, and then hunted her down over the next half hour. The girl ended up on her stomach, tied at the ankles and wrists, pleading for her life. Bored with everything she found in her mind to do, Micah said, “Do they say anything about me in the camp?”
Oh, did they. A crazy person was out there. At first they had thought it was friendly fire. That happened all the time with everyone thrashing around in the brush, but many of the bodies showed signs of torture. More than just a feral’s wild clobbering. A freak was making sport of hunters, probably a zombie who hadn’t gone feral yet, and people argued if it was an E or an M or a W or a 3 carved into the bodies.
“It’s an M,” Micah said while going through Aubrianna’s backpack. That freaked the girl out even more. She tried to be clever, and refused to give additional information unless Micah let her go unharmed. It was adorable how the captive was attempting to lead the negotiations. No one demanded anything of a goddess. No one bargained with the darkness. They came in respect, or they were taught a lesson. The girl was persuaded to talk without naming a price after a kick to the head. She had no power here, and nothing she said was information that Micah desired for anything other than curiosity.
They thought Micah was a man. That was irritating, but of course they would assume such a thing. Men claimed power; women shied away from it. Trusting that the murdering zombie was going to fall prey to Sombra C sooner or later, lose the ability to stalk and kill so deliberately, they were on alert for unknown dudes but not hunting for him specifically. Well, not yet. Some of them were talking about it.
“Are you going to kill me?” Aubrianna asked as Micah did her nails with the girl’s polish. It was a drab color, just like everything about the girl was drab.
“I haven’t decided,” Micah said.
“Please. Please. I am so sorry. I didn’t really want to come out here. I don’t have anything against zom . . . people with Sombra C.”
“Then why are we here, Aubrianna?” Micah asked very gently.
“Because Kane asked me,” she whispered, and cried.
That was so pathetic. Micah was filled with scorn. She and Mars had been a pathetic, scornful sight to the two hunters that pursued them. But Micah made them pathetic in the end. Made them squirm and beg for forgiveness. She showed them what was beneath their flesh, and learned the sorry contents of their hearts. When she finally walked away, they were unrecognizable.
She let the girl live, but only to extend her pathetic existence. Carving into Aubrianna’s forehead as she screamed and flailed, Micah reopened one of her own wounds and dripped blood into the M. “Now we’re sisters.” Then she cut the umbilical cord of the bonds and set her newborn sibling free upon the mountain without a weapon or a flashlight as evening encroached. Gathering up the five backpacks and leaving her mark on the dead guys, Micah went to her tree and hated that no one was there.
So she didn’t stay. She cut down the mountain through the shadows, led by the dim light of a lantern, and climbed a tree to give her a view of the camp. They would be her company. For all of those hunters’ efforts, there were still ferals out here. Micah wanted to catch a few and let them loose in that campsite, but she wouldn’t use ferals that way. She had had to shoot a few in her time on the mountain, ones coming after her and another whose body just wouldn’t die. He or she had been totally covered in rot, sagging under the shade of a tree and the eyes always open because the lids were gone. The feet and hands were rotted to stumps. Maggots had moved in. And still the chest was hitching, the soul flat out refusing to vacate this mangled and decaying body. Micah put a bullet between the staring, lidless eyes.
This person was her kin. Refusing to go, to lose control. Living on and on when everything was gone. When that life ended by her hand, she bowed to the body. The brother or sister of her soul rested here. No matter how much that one wanted to live, it ceded to the bullet. That made her accept for the first time, fully accept instead of her usual half-assed acceptance, that she would cede, too.
Music played within the camp. Children darted around between two fires as she watched through her binoculars. Some of the tents were packed with goods, she had learned from her kills. Sweet Song was just north of here. It supplied the camp with food and ammunition, and in return, the camp served as an effective barrier to zombies getting through and wandering around their precious streets. It was a bizarre name for a militia, pried off an exclusive, overpriced haven in the area whose obscenely wealthy residents were making sure their world didn’t fall into chaos like the rest of it had. They paid people to stand in for a police force, guarding their clipped grass and white column community, funneled supplies in from Canada and paid more people to receive them. Payment was in goods. They supplied another camp like this one to keep away ferals coming from the east. Having commandeered the local farms and receiving boatloads of non-perishables from out of the country, they were doing fine.
She learned the most interesting things from hunters. Some of the ferals were captured, not killed. She hadn’t seen that for herself, but one man whispered about it. He’d been looking for big guys with Sombra C and had been carrying a tranquilizer gun along with his regular one. Not too crazy a zombie. Not too wild. Maybe a woman, a strong woman, but men were best. A big, edging-to-feral man would get him a wagon full of food. He died as she asked just what the fuck exactly someone would want with an almost feral dude. When she asked two other hunters for clarification, neither of them knew what in the hell she was talking about. Zombies were for killing.
Hunters were for killing. They were why her arms were empty.
Maybe the camp beneath her was indeed smaller because of what she was doing. Some people cleared out, unwilling to put themselves at risk from someone of whole mind hunting them down. But the camp wasn’t small enough to suit her taste. They had killed Mars, and Micah never found any trace of her friends. Austin had gotten shot right in front of her, but his body wasn’t there when she investigated the place on the slopes where he’d gone over. It was a mystery what happened there, if he staggered away to die somewhere else, if he lived, if he’d been tranquilized and taken away. He was a strong guy, and just what that dead hunter would have been looking for. Corbin and Zaley, had they lived, likely kept on in their attempt to make Arquin. Micah wasn’t sure that she cared to foll
ow. She hoped that they were alive and had made it, but if they hadn’t, it didn’t cut as deeply as Mars. They hadn’t depended on her in the same visceral way.
In San Francisco, Austin had told her that she had to live. They needed her to live, to help them get to the harbor. But walking away from the mountain was walking away from Mars. Mars who was dead, who didn’t need her anymore. It shouldn’t have been so hard, the thought of leaving. Leaving a memory, which wasn’t anything at all. Leaving his grave, which she visited now and then on her longer hikes to search for hunters. He was going to pieces below the earth, and she was going to pieces above it. Once she had dug her fingers into the dirt to pull him up. To check to see if he was really dead when it couldn’t be true since she couldn’t bear for it to be true. She wanted to hold him again. Only with difficulty did she remove her fingers and smooth the rumpled earth back into place.
Baby, baby, wake up. Wake up and need me. Please, baby . . .
It was so hollow to kill the hunters. Under the fun of it, that was how it felt. Nothing returned what she wanted, which was to scoop up her baby boy and walk away. At the end of every bloody day, when she curled up in her tree trunk to sleep, she was still alone. Alone with the sensation of his nose in her fingers as she pinched it shut in her futile attempts to save his life. Clarissa’s last thoughts had been that her friend Micah lied to her about pain, and Mars’ had been that his mama was hurting him. So she lied to the hunters and hurt them, but it didn’t put Mars in her arms.
If she happened to think of her hand on his nose while she was with a hunter, she went wild.
She wished that Esme and Antonia had stayed. So Micah could wreak her revenge under the sun, lost in the hatred and hollowness, and return to the tree to be sweet under the moon. Her heart had gone into the grave with her baby, but it left bloodstains behind. Part of her wished that Esme had just dragged her along to the coast, taken the choice away from Micah. Micah would have let her take control.
For hours, she watched the merry goings-on at the camp and wanted to take it away. They had taken away her happiness, so they shouldn’t have it themselves. A woman was yelling for Alfie. Alfie, Alfie, where are you, Alfie, until finally a dog bounded her way. Micah had believed Alfie was one of the children, and how insane it was that people brought kids here to live. Like setting up a home at the base of an active volcano, assuming they were so special that a river of lava would divert around them and wipe out other people instead.
If Aubrianna made it back to the campsite at the lake, Micah was fascinated about what she was going to do. She couldn’t get to their car in the parking lot without being let in at the gate, and they would see the bloody M on her forehead. An M a zombie made . . . they’d wonder if the girl was infected, plumb her for information, give her a test if they had one around, or just shoot her in the head.
That was if the girl didn’t get ripped up by a feral, or trip over a slope in the darkness and break her neck. If she didn’t get lost and wander around the mountain until she died. If she didn’t try to walk home. Or to Arquin! She came here to prevent people from getting to Arquin for their medication, and now she was in need of that medication herself. Micah had fucked her over well. Welcome to the other side, sister. Hope it hurts.
A night hunter crept alone on the trail, still clinging stubbornly to his individualism in a world where that was a liability. When he passed near her tree, Micah shot him in the face and went home, his bloody backpack swinging over her shoulder. More guns and ammunition, snacks and water, she had a picture of his family in their Easter best and a wallet packed with cards that she went through for her entertainment at bedtime. The one on top was a Cool Spoon’s buy-ten-get-one-free card. It was stamped halfway across.
The scariest people were made up of such mundane things. She learned that lesson anew every time dawn struck the mountain and she left her tree to hunt.
She also had a new sketchpad and pencils that had hardly been used. Hunt zombies and draw pictures on the way. That had come out of one of the boys’ backpacks. She didn’t remember which one. Already they were fading from her memory. The sketchpad was duly added to her library, which was a mixture of thrillers and romance, true crime and wizard fantasies. Like the cosmetics, the toy unicorns, and a handful of trinkets, it was just another example of the witless garbage that people carried about with them while chasing zombies.
She had considered making notches within the trunk for every murder, but she hadn’t been counting, nor was the number a point of pride. The backpacks weren’t trophies; she didn’t relive her kills; revisiting the places where her slaughters had been done held no allure. She doubted she could even locate most of them. One point. She was closer to normal than she was to weird. The books on true crime in her library told her that. Of course, she had had to read them to be sure.
She had to go to Arquin. Her Zyllevir wasn’t going to last forever. If they weren’t there . . . if her friends weren’t there, Micah had no ties. That was good. She didn’t want any. She would return to the mountain to continue this work and let herself go feral. By the time they killed her, the victory would be nothing for them if not Pyrrhic. Even better, she would take out as many of them as she could and then kill herself when she could no longer keep it together. Deny them that win.
Life was a Pyrrhic victory. If you lived to be old, no matter the pinnacles you crested, you lost your abilities and regressed to infancy. If you died young, you never achieved any pinnacle. So nothing meant anything. All you did was lose no matter how well you ran the race.
Days passed with Micah still unable to leave Mars. One hunter got away from her, an unknown partner to one she’d just killed. Her shot to injure did more damage than she intended, and by the time she got over to him, he was almost gone. Then she’d heard the shout at her back. Her bullets hit dirt and trees, everything but the partner she was aiming for. Now they would have her description, which was both unfortunate and pleasing. (A girl? It’s just a girl out there? Are you kidding me? We can take a girl!) She didn’t want them to think only a man could wield power. But it was time for her to choose the mountain or Arquin.
If she were gone for a time to Arquin, they’d relax and feel safe. That she died at last of her virus, and all was well. The mountain could be a zombie amusement park again. Then she’d return, and they would be relieved of their assurance along with their lives.
She could set fire to their camp on her way out as a parting shot.
Oh, they were very careful about fire in that camp, threatening to kick out anyone who made a fire of his or her own. It was only allowed in designated areas where the dead grass had been cleared and the pits were ringed in stones. On very windy days, they didn’t light their fires at all.
There was fuel within one of the tents. The explosion would be incredible if Micah set fire to it. An orange dragon would roar above the camp in the blue-black of night, swallowing the screams, and no fire trucks would ever come to put it out. But ferals lived upon this mountain too; infected Sombra Cs passed over it every day. A fire could not be contained by that sorry excuse for a fence around the campsite. The fire she set could rage across the world, out of her control.
In a deep recess of her soul, that felt all right.
Austin scolded in her head that she needed to pack up her stupid, shiftless ass and get north, so she packed one day to humor him. The best had gone with Esme and Antonia, and the second-best would go with Micah. Her backpack was laden in food, water, and ammunition, extra handguns, and a semi-automatic. At her waist were two black leather holsters holding more handguns, and she had a nylon tactical sling for her automatic. At least she thought it was called a tactical sling. It had been hard to tell through the screaming.
The hunters were out in force that day, and from their shouts, she understood that some of them were searching for her. Sweeping far east to circle them, the sun had just crept below the horizon when she made it to the north side of the fence around their camp. They were s
till out there hunting. Only a few people were inside, preparing food around a fire and two washing dishes from the children’s meals. A pack of kids played at the shore of the lake. Ranging in age from diapers to training bras, they yelled and ran in races. A guard paced along the south side of the camp. Another one was sitting upon a table and looking around casually. No one saw Micah in the darkness.
A breeze blew past and she felt a gentle pressure at the side of her head. Mars had taken hold of a blue handful for comfort and inspection. He would have grown out of that in time; he would have wondered when he got older why Micah dyed her hair such stupid colors. Mama, you have a carnival on your head! It’s so embarrassing! Why? Caught between him and her mother Tuma, who wanted to know the answer to the same question. Honey, he’s right! You’re getting too old for this! Why do you keep doing it?
She did it because she did it. Because she wanted to do it. So there. The breeze came again and blew away the conversation slash argument that would never happen with the three of them together. One small bullet had ended everything and left her with an ache that never went away.
They didn’t know, these people on the mountain. They didn’t know what it was like to lose someone, or they would not be doing this. They hadn’t felt that pain. She had given pain to many of them now, but then she’d killed them. So they hadn’t been masters of the lesson long, nor could they teach it to others.
They had taken her baby, the deepest reason she had to keep going after the confinement point. He was why she would walk behind the loathsome wall of a harbor and willingly pen herself in. The one who would temper her a little, because he needed her to be steady more than she needed to chase a rush. She would have found a balance for him. She would have tried to respect a few boundaries.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 153
