With a mean twist to her lips, Micah said, “Why are you crying? I thought you’d be happy.”
Zaley had no idea what she was talking about. “Happy about what?”
As she unbuttoned her jeans, Micah said, “That’s he gone.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Zaley exploded. “No, I’m not happy that he was killed!”
“You hated Mars. We could see it all over your face, how much you loathed any time you had to spend with him. Admit it. You’re okay he’s dead. Problem solved.”
In disbelief that Micah was saying these things, and stung at the baldly spoken truth in how she hadn’t liked to spend time with him all that much, Zaley said, “Fuck you! So what if I didn’t want a baby with us? Have you noticed how we’ve lived since Cloudy Valley? I never wanted him to die! Don’t you see any difference there?”
“Are you going to hit me?”
In her anger, Zaley had balled her hands into fists. She forced them loose and said tightly, “No. It looks like plenty of people have been hitting you already.”
“Yeah. But those people came out worse in the fight.” Micah stripped off her filthy clothes and climbed into the tub.
Zaley scooped up the clothes to wash them in the sink, but Micah pointed to the trash. Stiff with rage, Zaley dumped them in and went to the doorway. Micah could take care of her injuries or fucking drown herself for all Zaley cared. She hadn’t hated the baby and Micah was a bitch to say that. As she stepped into the hallway, she threw grumbled questions over her shoulder. “Why did you get their life stories before you killed them? What difference did it make who they were?”
“I just wanted to know,” Micah said.
“It didn’t matter.”
“I didn’t ask them because it mattered. I was curious what drove them to do it, because I wouldn’t have done the same. I didn’t kill Clarissa because I wanted to hurt her. I did it so she wouldn’t be hurt. But why do people do what they do? How do people like that think?”
Maybe Zaley didn’t care as much because she knew how her father thought. There was good and evil and nothing in between. That was easy. He thought like a cartoon. The guys to kill Mars had just been even more mentally ill variants of Dad, seeing cartoon fun in place of people. “All I hope is that it hurt when they died.” That little hand reached out in her memory. All she did was give the food to Austin, squeeze it, and walk off with the baby gone from her mind. Mars, I am so, so sorry.
“It did hurt,” Micah said. “I stole their guns, shot them in the legs so they couldn’t run away, and kept them alive for almost a day.”
She was leaning against the back of the tub with her eyes closed. Zaley said greedily, “Tell me.”
“How they screamed for me to stop?”
“Yes.” That was what Zaley had to know, that they suffered for making a baby suffer, for making Micah and all the rest of them suffer for his loss.
Micah’s voice lowered and Zaley went back into the bathroom, her anger ebbing in the need to have vengeance. “They screamed. First they screamed when I shot them. I tied them up. Then they screamed as I beat them. I kicked them, Zaley. Everywhere. I kicked them until they pissed themselves and passed out. Then I waited for them to wake up, asked them questions, and I beat them again. I was red from their blood. Every time I kicked, more sprayed out. Is that going to give you nightmares?”
“Did they die then?”
“No. I wanted them to hurt more than that. So I let them plead their cases. They promised me a million bucks each to let them go. Anything I wanted of theirs could be mine. Cars, vacation homes, a safe trip to the Sonoma harbor or Canada, just name the price. So I named it. I wanted them to have Sombra C, and I gave mine to them. I dripped my blood down their mouths and up their nostrils, into their eyes and their bullet wounds as they screamed and screamed and screamed.”
“Good,” Zaley hissed. That was what should happen to people who killed children.
“Sonny had a wicked hunting knife, hand-forged, a Finnish belt knife called a puukko in a leather sheath. It cost him over two hundred bucks. Freshly sharpened. I used it to cut off their trigger fingers. That made them scream, too. I unzipped their pants and checked out their dicks, told them how small they were. How they had never satisfied a woman ever with those shitty little things. Bet they just got their rocks off and told the woman how great it was while she lay there waiting for her turn that never came. I offered to give Sonny a circumcision to match his buddy, and that made him scream and beg. Please don’t. Oh God! Please don’t. Oh, they were so worried I was going to do something to their precious dicks.” Micah trailed off and Zaley thought did you? She warred between wanting to know and wanting to never know, and wanting Micah to have done something yet wanting her to have done nothing. Scaring was enough.
For Mars? Scaring wasn’t anything. Slicing was something.
Rubbing dried blood from her shoulder, Micah said, “Their hands and feet went numb from how tightly I had tied them. Isn’t that sad? They wanted me to be sad about it like they were. Funny . . . I wasn’t sad. I was sad about the baby. They blamed one another for the bullet that took Mars. Threw each other under the bus a hundred times. Friends all the way back to high school, like we are, and that’s what they did in their final hours. Would we do that to save ourselves, Zaley?”
“No.”
“Maybe we would, if push came to shove. If we both believed that one of us would live should the other die. I’m sure they didn’t ever think that they would give each other up like that. But they did. He did it. No, he did it. I tried to tell him that we should stop chasing you. Then they played up their pity stories. Shane had learning disabilities and mild Asperger’s. Depression, too. All he had was his CGI job and the breakdown took it away. Sonny talked about his alcoholic daddy and how no one ever loved him. How hard it was to live up to all the pressure to be the perfect son in the perfect family. His big sisters just had to touch something for it to turn into gold, straight A’s, athletes in school, and nothing ever worked out for their poor little brother. Women didn’t look at him twice when he was so short. They looked over his head to the taller guys standing behind him. Pretty girls like me, he said, can have the pick of the litter, and no girl wants the runt. All I heard was waaaaaaah.”
The high-pitched, mocking whine echoed in the bathroom. “Sonny taught me that if you’re short and your daddy is a drunk and you don’t have confidence in yourself, that those things put together make you shoot a baby. It was regrettable yet understandable. One and one and one make three. Shane’s bitchy ex-wife plus his mild Asperger’s equaled the same thing. So poor Mars, oh, they were sorry for Mars, but oh, they were so very sorry for themselves. How they tried to make me understand that they were victims of this cruel world, too. But the only victim that night, Rosalie Grace Mattazollo, the only victim was already in the ground, wrapped up in my sweatshirt and with a hole blasted through his tiny chest.”
“Then what?” Zaley asked, hypnotized by the calm, steady rhythm of Micah’s voice as she described such a horrific encounter.
“And when I got tired of listening to them whine and cry about their lives, about how much they hurt, when I got tired of torturing them, I killed them. I asked how they wanted to die, told them I was feeling merciful. Their sad, sad stories made me feel just a smidgen of sympathy, so this was how I was going to reward them. They asked for bullets, begged for bullets, so I gave them the blade.” She looked at Zaley with a sweetness that was psychotic for its incongruence. “Just so I could hurt them again with the lie. I pushed it in slow. Sonny first while Shane screamed, knowing he was next and wriggling through the grass to get away. After Sonny died, I stalked after Shane like he stalked Mars and me, inching along as he inched along, and when I caught up, I did him even slower as he thrashed around like a fish. Then the two of them were just meat on the grass. It was pathetic. They were pathetic. Have you learned that about the world, little itty-bitty Baby Zaley? We have a new tutorial for
our old project in making you over into a big girl.”
Her eyes glittered, something nasty in them laying in wait for Zaley’s reaction to being called baby. Zaley didn’t give it to her, sensing what Micah wanted was to provoke. When she didn’t get a response, she went on. “A murderer, a rapist, a child abuser, the truth about them is that they’re made up of such tiny, stupid, petty things. If you could only see their souls, how twisted and sick and small they are . . . you would never be frightened of them again. You would tower over them in scorn. So I made them look at themselves, those two hunters and all of them on the mountain. I made them look at their insignificance. I must have killed two dozen plus, and after that, I set fire to their camp. Then I walked away. What do you think about that?”
“I think they got what they deserved,” Zaley said, breathless that Micah had done these things, and glad in a way that she had.
“I did worse. Do you want to know that, too?”
“Should I?”
“No. You wouldn’t believe me anyway. It was that bad.”
Zaley didn’t know what to say. “Do you want me to stay or go?”
“I could drown you in this tub,” Micah said, her eyes focused on the wall rather than Zaley. Her voice was flat. “I could cut you open. I could shoot you or stab you, break your neck or kick you to death. I could leave you here in a bloody heap for the boys to find, and then jump out of the shadows and kill them. That could be how you three end. Bet none of you ever saw that coming.”
She had gone crazy from losing Mars. “I don’t want you to do those things,” Zaley said, never having been so frightened of Micah. This wasn’t the same person who had traveled from Cloudy Valley with them. “Do you want to do that to us?” If the answer was in the affirmative, Zaley was hightailing it from the bathroom and hauling the boys out of Arquin.
Micah was quiet. The water had grown dingy from the dirt and blood coming off her body. “It’s not a question of wanting or not wanting to do it. When I look at you, what comes to mind is how I can take you apart. What you would look like in a pool of blood. How I could make you scream. That’s all I have in my head.”
“Then put something else in your head. Good God, Micah! I had nothing to do with his death and neither did the boys! We were trying to keep him safe, just like you were.” Zaley’s voice broke. “Weeks, for fucking weeks I’ve been praying that you two were okay. Not just you but both of you. No, I didn’t love him like you did. I don’t like babies and you can guess why. But I liked him, and I cared for him, and I miss him. So I don’t know how killing me is going to make you feel any better about Mars.”
“I don’t know how not to kill people.”
“You can’t tell the fucking difference between a friend and a hunter? I didn’t shoot that Shepherd back home and feel tempted to shoot you. Corbin and Austin have killed people and they aren’t struggling to keep their weapons out of each other. If you’re having that hard of a time, then we’ll leave you behind and go to the harbor. You sit here and think about it until you can fucking figure it out or a feral kills you.”
“Go to the harbor without me,” Micah said. “I’m not sure I really want to go. I don’t have any reason now.”
She did have a reason. The harbor was the only place where any of them were safe. They looked at one another for several long moments. Zaley didn’t feel threatened now; this reminded her of when the others were fresh out of the confinement point. Their adjustment back to the regular world hadn’t been immediate. That only came with time. Micah was still upon the mountain in her mind, seeing enemies all around at the base when none were present.
It was so quiet between them that they heard Austin’s sobs from down the hallway. That snapped something in Micah, who broke the gaze hastily and closed her eyes. She was going to cry. When Zaley bent down to take her hand, Micah shook her head and gestured to the door. She wanted to mourn alone.
Whatever the right thing was to say in this situation, Zaley couldn’t find it. Maybe there wasn’t a right thing to say. Just a million wrong ones. She closed the door behind her and went to their room, debating if she should tell the boys what Micah had said or chalk it up to grief and let it go. Opting to let it go, she sat on a chair beside Corbin and looked out the window. It bothered her to have nothing to do that would mitigate the helplessness. Sitting with it was unbearable.
She had to do something. She would find clean or at least cleaner clothes for Micah, sort through the backpack and tend anything that needed to be tended. Undoing the zipper, Zaley spilled the contents out onto the floor and separated food from water from weapon from clothing.
Jesus. One knife was tucked into a leather sheath, and upon that sheath was sewn the word FINLAND. Micah had taken that murderer’s knife, cut off fingers with it, and kept it for herself. Withdrawing the blade from the sheath, Zaley inspected it. Either Micah had lied about the fingers, or she cleaned off the blade afterwards. Probably cleaned it. The blade was sharp, much sharper than the blade Zaley had from the would-be thief. Putting it down, she picked out bullets strewn everywhere in the food.
“It takes away everything from you,” Austin said, the beak of the Pocket Animal protruding from his fist. He stared at his finger rubbing over the back. “That’s why I didn’t want you to get Sombra C, Zaley. You lose everything to it. Even things you didn’t know you could lose. It strips you until you’re alone with the virus and nothing else. That’s Sombra C.”
Sombra C had given Zaley life in a weird way, so she didn’t trust herself to speak. He wasn’t waiting for an answer. Rubbing the back of the animal harder, he gasped, “He was so little,” and cried again.
They didn’t leave that day. Micah eventually got out of the tub and fell on the mattress to sleep. Even though she hadn’t done a damn thing except take a short walk and sort through a backpack, Zaley was exhausted. Yet also frantic to make this better when she couldn’t.
Her stomach didn’t tweak at lunch for food. It already felt full of something sour. The sky was an ugly color to match their moods, a dirty blue-gray that carried the scent of fire. The building grew warm and then warmer until it was uncomfortable with the summer sun beating down. Even as the sun slipped to the horizon, the heat stayed in the building and made her sweat. Only the fog of the morning had prevented it from becoming unbearable. She walked around the hospital to look out the windows from all sides. No fire was closing in, despite the smell.
In the evening, Corbin scouted the building himself to check on all the doors and windows. She went with him. They were on the far end of the building when they heard a thumping and dashed over to see if a feral was breaking in. It was only Austin, who was beating on the desk in the foyer with a shovel. The materials were cheap and it gave more and more under each blow. He didn’t scream or cry, just smashed at the desk until it was splinters on the floor. Then he swung the shovel at the wall to make dents in the long red line up there.
Zaley jumped at a second thumping. A feral man had come to the other side of the glass doors of the entryway and was standing atop the body there. Corbin leaped over to Austin and forced him to stop hitting the wall. They ran upstairs to their room as the feral howled and pounded. Blocking the door with a chair, they quieted to listen. Zaley went to the window at the silence and peered down. A dark figure was moving away from the hospital.
“Is this what it was like at the lodge?” she whispered to Corbin.
He slipped his arm around her waist. “Just a little bit, Zale.” She loved when he called her that.
They went to bed, but Zaley couldn’t fall asleep. There were so many things she understood more viscerally now. The fear of Zyllevir running out or crapping out, the oddness of feeling fine but being sick, the desperate need to be at the harbor. She had only ever needed to get there for her friends’ sake, but now it was her own. Those walls had to be around her just as much.
All that stood between Zaley and madness was a pill so light upon her palm that she didn’t feel it th
ere. She could infect someone with Sombra C. Her fluids had become dangerous. At once she had no value and value, the first to the world in general and the second to anyone wanting a zombie for a fighting ring. Betsy and Manzer had told her about them in the kitchen. Then they had gone back to arguing if the president had been wrong to cut off the Internet, and the hundred other things that should have been handled differently since the advent of Sombra C. Wu fucked up by yanking people away for legal confinement points and not letting them communicate with their families, creating serious and quite justified grudges that ended up in his assassination. Zeller had been a dick who fanned the flames in his futile efforts to get elected. Pitch hadn’t signed on for a war but one got dumped in her ineffective lap anyway, and Congress couldn’t agree on scratching their own butts if they itched, let alone pass legislation. By the time ammunition sales ceased, it was too damn late to be effective. Every day, Zaley had traveled the tired treads of the same arguments from them. Now with those two gone, she could still hear them in her head.
In the morning, they were starting for the harbor and Micah had to come along. She couldn’t let grief for Mars override their goal. Zaley wasn’t going to let her do that. They absolutely could not stay here at Arquin, run out of food and then what? Micah had brought a surprising amount of food with her, testimony to how many she had killed and stolen from, but it wasn’t going to last forever. Then Zaley fell asleep.
Glass shattered in another building just before dawn. She woke up and watched out the window. Ferals were roving around out there in the moonlight. The temperature had slipped down to cool. Just as she was about to leave the window to return to the mattress, a pick-up drove into the base. Figures piled out of the back, each one with a spot of light shooting out at the head. Gunfire woke up everyone else as the ferals were shot. The guys didn’t leave when they were done. Canvassing the unlocked buildings, more ferals were chased out and mowed down with bullets. The blasts made her think of the bullet to cut through Mars and her arms literally hurt to hold him.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 158
