As they discussed what to do, Austin and Zaley wrote out a huge stack of messages. Instead of using her left hand, she practiced with her right to see what it could bear. A drop of sweat fell off his forehead to stain the paper by the time he was writing out the last one. The day was viciously hot and the temperature still climbing. There really was no good time of night or day to travel, ferals roaming by one and unfriendly people by the other. As Austin gathered up the stack of notes, they decided to leave early tomorrow morning for no other reason than they had to make some decision. But if anyone turned up in the time between now and then, they’d go immediately. And stick to the roads as much as possible through these hills so they didn’t walk into a zombie trap.
They walked all over the base together to scatter the notes, including in the parts that had previously been off-limits. Barracks and offices, a giant place to park, they peeked in every nook and cranny. None of it was very interesting, although they found a map of the area. The water had been left on, but the power was out. That was how the military found it, so that was how they left it.
In one building, there was a sign of the Coast Guard base it had once been in a picture of people standing in an anchor shape on the lawn. Plopping down in an abandoned wheelchair, Corbin rolled around the hallways and passed a magazine called Get to the Point to Zaley for her reading pleasure. It was about the joys of traveling in San Francisco. She skimmed through it, but said she’d seen all she ever wanted to see.
The chapel was broiling in the heat under the tarp. Half of the pictures were still on the wall. Austin taped a note for Micah to a blank space where she couldn’t miss it. He considered burying a little food for her and leaving a map to find it, but anyone could decipher that.
No one showed up at the base as the day wore on. The place was so out of the way. In the early evening, ferals sounded outside the fence. They locked themselves into a second story room in the hospital and ate dinner sitting cross-legged on a mattress. Austin watched out the window as a dark shape came into the base and lurched around.
“Maybe we should have left when they did,” Corbin said. “People with Sombra C could still be trying to get here for Zyllevir.”
There was nothing they could do about it now. They weren’t going outside with the feral there. A second and third came in to wander about, eventually melting into shadows and hooting like owls. Using only the light from forgotten candles, Austin and Corbin organized the backpacks so everyone had food and Zyllevir. Zaley let Austin take one of the knives for himself.
They’d also locked the doors on the first floor of the hospital and didn’t have any trouble with ferals that night. Austin fell asleep to their animal cries and woke up to silence. No one was out there now as dawn got underway. He shook the others awake and they prepared to go.
A feral had fallen right outside the front doors of the hospital and appeared to have died there. Rather than risk it and walk over him, they slipped out a side door and headed for the gate. Fog had rolled in overnight. It wouldn’t be such a hot day.
All was quiet on the road. They walked along the base’s fence until it broke for pasture. A feral was walking through the grass their way, untroubled by the light and having no limp. But the person was still at quite a distance, so there was no need to break into a run.
The harbor was twenty miles to the east. Austin didn’t allow himself to estimate when they would get there. He couldn’t. This wasn’t the old world of cars and safe roads, where he could tack on a few extra minutes of travel time for the inconvenience of traffic and red lights and be one hundred percent guaranteed to get there today. Anything could happen in twenty miles within this new world, and it was a greater distance than that since they couldn’t take main roads to get there.
Abruptly, Corbin stopped walking. Zaley and Austin drew up short and looked around, alert for trouble. Seeing that Corbin was gazing out fixedly to the feral, Austin said, “What? It’s far away.”
“That’s Micah,” Corbin said.
Austin squinted through the haze. “No, it isn’t.”
All three of them stared at the person. Then Zaley gasped. “It is Micah! I didn’t recognize her in those clothes. Where’s her hair?”
“Where’s the baby?” Austin asked, a pit opening up in his stomach at that solitary figure. All she had cradled in her arms was a gun.
Set Seventeen
Zaley
The worst part of life wasn’t death. It wasn’t hatred or greed or fear or any of those things. It was helplessness.
She had thought she understood helplessness from being literally boarded into her bedroom, trapping her in that dark home with her unhappy family. But that wasn’t the lowest depths to which helplessness could sink. There had been an out in kicking out the boards, both in her window and in her mind, and leaving them behind. She had had a measure of power all along, one that she hadn’t recognized, and just had to be brave and desperate enough to seize it. She did that at long last, transferred the power to herself as she slipped from the window and bolted away to escape into her own life.
The bullet to go through Mars’ chest hadn’t given him an out.
That was helplessness. To be trapped with no rescue on the horizon, and the surety that none would ever come . . . that was life at its lowest and most cruel. They were all helpless, caught up in the inexorable march of time and in the chance game of misfortune. You could pretend that nothing would ever happen, but it would. Something always caught up with you. A car crash could happen any day, or a doctor deliver a bad diagnosis, and no one escaped becoming old unless they had the poor luck to die young.
Mars had died young.
She hadn’t liked having him with them. That was a truth she couldn’t deny. It wasn’t a personal dislike of Mars. She didn’t like babies and small children in general. They got on her nerves, the wailing and whining, the lack of reasoning and speaking skills. Give her an older kid to hang out with any day, the Douglas triplets bent studiously over their homework to imitate the big kids, the elementary-school age children in the Sausalito relief line with books in hand. Anything but a drooling, crapping, crying baby.
But he was dead, and she was overcome with guilt. She hadn’t loved him. She had liked his fingers over hers on the spoon, the way he cried and reached for her when that weird woman in the relief line insisted on holding him and cooed at his distress like it was the most adorable thing in the world. Even in his uninformed babyhood, he understood just as well as Zaley did that there was something majorly wrong with that mother. Had he been able to speak, he would have shouted you’re a crazy person! But he could only express it with a wail and struggles to get back to the safety of Zaley. She’d figured that he would get more interesting when he was older, and if Micah kept him, that one day Zaley could take him to the library and not have to stand directly overhead to make sure he wasn’t chewing on the edge of the ABC rug instead of reading a book.
They returned to the empty base. Micah had been the only one to press for going on, despite being the least capable of doing so. A body in motion wanted to stay in motion, and that was all still driving her on. Every inch of her skin was bruised, scuffed, or lacerated, fresh blood dried over old blood, dirt mixed in with it and the smell of fuel and smoke clinging to her clothes. She had walked all through the night and the day before, most of the night before that as well, just going and going and going through the hills and searching until she found the base. She paused only for ferals and hunters, never to rest and barely to eat.
All of them were crying for Mars save her. Austin tried to hug her, but her arms never went around him in return. He let go and her hands twisted around her gun. When Zaley looked into her eyes, they reminded her of someone dead. Mars hadn’t come from Micah’s body, but something about that baby boy had stolen her heart from the day she rescued him from the Golden Gate Bridge. And something about Micah had stolen Mars’ heart, too. She was gone to a realm of grief where Zaley couldn’t follow, and that was
embarrassing. She should have been equally crushed.
You were supposed to love babies unconditionally, coo and dandle and sing and rock them, always be happy to see them and play endless rounds of peek-a-boo. She was usually just exasperated and thinking grow up, already. But that baby time was all that Mars had been allotted in life, and now it was over. He was over. She wanted to hold him one more time and kiss his blond head, apologize for not being beholden to the charms of youth. If she had known that all he was going to get was less than one lousy year . . . she still would have been annoyed with him. God forgive her for that. Babyhood was something that she just had to endure until graduation to a better stage, but he only graduated to a grave. She felt cheated. She would have been better when he was older, and she hadn’t gotten the chance to show him that.
And there was nothing they could do about it, no bargaining or reasoning or pleading. So much of life was negotiable. She wouldn’t have been able to attend a four-year college like her friends, but she could have gone to a junior college, saved money from work and transferred. Her parents were mired down by a myriad of problems, but she didn’t have to sink into the tar of their sicknesses with them. She could date Corbin or not; be friends with Micah and Austin or find new ones; stay in their circle or strike out on her own. Even if the choices weren’t perfect, she had choices.
But for this . . . Mars was gone and that was it. They were helpless to greater forces, and one had carried a bullet through the air and into Mars’ body as Micah tried in vain to protect him. Mars, who hadn’t had anything to do with this world except to be caught up in it. He’d died before he’d even been fully conscious that he was here. All of the time that Zaley and Corbin were creeping north, and Austin recovering from his injury at the base, their baby had been dead.
They retreated to the hospital from which they had just emerged and went upstairs to the room they’d been sleeping in as Micah spoke. His killers were Shane McKay and Sonny Denesius. Both were thirty-three years old, high school friends who’d grown up in Marin and stayed there after they graduated from college. Shane had worked as a CGI artist before the breakdown. He’d made a ton of money doing so, his portfolio including some of the top movies in the last decade. Zaley was sickened when Micah listed them. Those were movies all of them had seen. A three-car garage packed to the rafters for disaster had tided the guy over well since the breakdown. It was a hobby of his long before Sombra C hit. Once it did, he’d bought even more. Everything was stacked and catalogued. It was enough to last one person for over two years. Food, water, fuel, flashlights, he had it all under lock and key. People were going without in these times and he just laughed. They hadn’t seen ahead like he had. They hadn’t prepared, and he had no sympathy. Despicably, he went to the relief truck every time it came to his part of Marin and collected more. Faked hunger and hung out in line to commiserate. That was nothing less than hilarious to him.
Then there was Sonny. Sonny’s life was on hold until his thirty-fifth birthday when he came into his trust fund. His grandfather could have let him have it at twenty-one, but he’d been an asshole who wanted his family to apply some elbow grease to their lives before being handed an inheritance of millions from the family hotel chain. Fuck him! Sonny’s older sisters had applied that elbow grease, one in the family business and the other starting up her own business in small but increasingly successful high-end clothing shops. Every holiday in the large Denesius clan was a competition for whom was doing the best. It was never the black sheep Sonny, who suffered the indignity of being fired from his own family’s business for constant tardiness and stealing. Nothing big. Extension cords. Just a little money. So what? Nothing worth firing him over. He wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed about what he did. He was angry that he hadn’t been given a second chance. Since then, he bided his time at one minimum-wage job after another, picking up chicks at wine bars with tales of the money to come, and dreaming about the cars he wanted to buy. He smoked a lot of weed and popped pills as he waited out the calendar for the birthday that was going to change his life.
There hadn’t been much in his garage at the breakdown, nothing like what Shane had, but his family could afford to have necessities sent to them. Even though no one had any respect for Sonny, they kept him well supplied since he was a Denesius. That was what you did for family, whether you liked them or not. His house was paid for with his parents’ money, and so was his car. He was a spoiled kid grown up, Micah said, and had Short Man Syndrome going on there, too. There were lifts in his shoes.
These were the men who killed a baby. They had been the greater force on the mountain. Coming to it with a third friend who stayed behind in the camp from an allergy attack, they stalked a young woman with a child in the conviction they were saving the planet from Sombra C. Zombies didn’t deserve Zyllevir, which prolonged their lives and allowed them to pass on their illness.
Micah had asked why they hated people with Sombra C so much, and their answers were nothing if not dumb. A former work acquaintance of Sonny’s had fucked a chick who gave him Sombra C and he killed himself from shame. Micah had Sombra C, and so he was going to avenge his acquaintance in a convoluted line of reasoning that made no sense whatsoever.
Shane’s response had nothing to do with Sombra C at all. He just didn’t like women after his ex-wife took him for a ride at their divorce two years back. Got half of his money, custody of his young son, moved halfway across the state for a job and told him that he could commute for visitation. Cunt. Every time he called, she said the kid was busy doing something and couldn’t talk. The last time he’d made that long commute, it was only to watch his son throw his arms around his mother’s new boyfriend and call him Daddy Bert. His best daddy!
Micah was female. That was why Shane targeted her, and to a smaller extent, Sonny as well. But that wasn’t how they framed it at first in response to her questions. They were knights going after the dragon. Sombra C was spreading faster than wildfire and it had to be gotten under control. Yet saving the human race from annihilation was only the half of it. It was also fun. They were bored, and here was something to do that had a side benefit of ridding the world of more carriers of the virus.
Micah learned so much about them before ending their lives. She had a peculiar fascination with people. It was weird to Zaley, who remembered how Micah had wanted to know more about the guy who caused her to get Sombra C at the party. Had Micah been the one to take the bullet in her arm, she would have dedicated herself to finding out which culler shot it. Zaley was indifferent in that regard, but she couldn’t stop herself from listening to every detail about the men who killed Mars. Because she didn’t understand how they could have killed him. Logically she understood that they thought he was a zombie baby and thus had to die, but emotionally she was out of her depths at their reasoning. He was a baby. Even if he had been infected and nightmarishly feral, what conceivable risk did he pose to them? Were they worried he was going to crawl over to them lightning fast and bite their ankles?
The reason was there was no reason. There was no reason for any of it.
It was eerie how Micah’s face changed when she repeated what they told her. Her voice took on a different inflection. Theirs. Sonny had had a gravelly voice; Shane’s was smoother but he spoke in rapid-fire bursts like each thought came to him in an individual packet. Once he opened it, he read the words off fast and then had to wait for the next one to descend. So I stand in line with all these dumb bitches complaining they’re hungry. Long pause. Who couldn’t see what was coming? I saw it plain as day. Shorter pause, followed by a smile that came out more of a grimace.
Austin wept broken-heartedly in a corner of the hospital room, crushing his head in his hands, and Corbin sat in a chair with his head bowed and tears dropping to his arms. Zaley was tending Micah’s dozens of injuries, but they were crusted in blood and filth, bits of grass. She excused herself to run a bath when Micah paused to drink water. There was a tub down the hallway. Afterwards, it would
be easier to inspect the extent of the wounds.
He was gone. Jesus Christ, he’d never had a chance. All of that work to get him through the days was for nothing.
He had just learned to stand.
Water had almost overflowed the tub by the time Zaley remembered what she was doing. She shut it off and drained it down so it wouldn’t spill over the side when Micah stepped in. Mars had just learned to stand, using Zaley’s leg for support. She had been so proud of him at that moment. Later in the tent, how it stung that he reached out for her as Austin fed him a bottle. Instead of sitting with him and holding his hand, Zaley squeezed it and went on with her tasks about the campsite.
The chores could have waited. He’d wanted her. She wished she had taken him into her arms and cradled him for that last bottle. Everything else had seemed so important at the time and she didn’t want to stop for the sweet but relatively boring task of watching a kid eat. Now she would take him and memorize every feature of his hair and face, the soft chub on his arms and legs, his smell. It was his last meal. She had been mad at Austin for not cutting the formula more, and now she was thankful that he treated the baby to a rich bottle.
Those horrible men had killed him. They hadn’t known he wasn’t infected, and they hadn’t cared. These were men with siblings, nieces and nephews, younger cousins, friends with children. Yet all they saw was Sombra C in place of a girl running away with a baby in her arms, and a cunt in place of the female.
No, Zaley hadn’t loved him. But she was used to him being part of the group. She accepted him and was genuinely happy to find the applesauce that he would like. Now they could eat it. That made her ill. She wasn’t ever going to be able to take a bite of what had been a gift to him from her. They would ditch that at the base when they left.
Micah came to the doorway. Wiping her eyes, Zaley backed away from the tub. “It’s ready for you.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 157
