“No,” Corbin said, and sucked down another mouthful. She and Austin exchanged a look at how he was drinking. He just wanted to be away from himself. To stop thinking about Mars; to stop feeling guilty. When Zaley touched his arm, her eyes filled with the silent question of what was wrong, he drank even more of the rotten wine and set the bottle down hard on the counter. Then he reconsidered, and picked up the bottle to sit between his legs on the floor.
This was dumb. He was going to get buzzed and ferals could show up. They had excellent timing that way and a fat lot of good Corbin would be in the fight.
Within minutes, his body began to hum pleasantly and he didn’t care so much. If ferals showed up at the winery, he’d give them a big old hug. Pass around his Zyllevir and the winery’s T-shirts and run around the vineyards with them, a pack of monster friends baying to the moon and wetting their pants. That made him laugh. Austin asked what was funny and Corbin couldn’t explain. No, he wouldn’t explain. “I’m not telling you,” he said childishly.
Austin snagged Corbin’s bottle and drank from it. “Oh Jesus, yours is worse than ours. Don’t drink this rank shit.”
“It’s my rank shit to drink,” Corbin said. He got the bottle back and returned to business. His stomach was empty, so it was hitting him fast.
The wine was almost gone when he raised his bottle. “I’d like to make a toast. Fuck you, Micah. Fuck you, Austin. Fuck you, Zaley. And fuck me.”
“Fuck you back, drunk boy,” Micah said.
Her casualness pissed him off when he had delivered his toast from the bottom of his heart. And he wasn’t drunk, just buzzed. “Fuck you most of all. For the party and for Mars and for everything. We should have given him back, but you had your heart set on playing mommy. That was fucking sick.”
“I don’t know what else we would have done with him,” Austin said. “There wasn’t a foster care system anymore. We had to keep him.”
No, they hadn’t. Austin had been so mad initially about the baby that he’d stomped off to go to Arquin on his own. Corbin giggled about how everything changed. Austin was such a sentimental sap. “But we didn’t know that for sure, Austin. We didn’t try to return him and fail, and only keep him because no one else would take him. We just kept him, and he died. So fuck us all, from Mars in heaven and his parents on earth.”
“Fuck you,” Austin said, and that was heartfelt. “We did the best we could. We just couldn’t . . . we just couldn’t pull him through this mess.” His head bowed. Corbin had made him cry. It should have made him feel bad. But he just felt vicious. All of them should be crying for such a shitty decision.
Micah was watching calmly and Zaley looked torn. She liked to get along with everyone, and it wasn’t possible to get along with both sides of this divide. She wasn’t going to just side with him on this like she should as his girlfriend. But if she agreed just because of whom he was to her . . . that would also make him mad. So he excused her from responsibility for anything. It was too confusing, and she was too pretty to be mad at.
He glared at Micah, who was taking a long swig from her wine glass. When she set it down, she met his eyes and said, “Get it all off your chest. I can take it.”
“Austin shouldn’t have saved you from that Mr. Foods truck,” Corbin said. Zaley and Austin gasped. If they had been on the Golden Gate Bridge without Micah, Mars would have been left behind to become someone else’s problem.
“Please stop,” Zaley said as Corbin helped himself to her nearly untouched glass. He chugged it and sat there sourly.
“No, he shouldn’t have saved me,” Micah agreed. “But he did. And you’ve got a gun, Corbie-eee-eee. Man up and use it if you hate me that much.”
“Stop!” Zaley burst as Corbin took out his handgun to consider it. He only did so in play, his finger off the trigger, but Zaley was taking him seriously. Snatching the gun away, she put it up on the counter. Then she got the bottle and reached for the glass. There was still a little at the bottom. He held onto the stem as she tugged just to see the growing anger in her face. When she was wholly herself, she was the most beautiful girl in the world.
He released the glass to her, distracted by the lovely colors of her hair. Getting up, she dumped the last of the wine out into the sink. Her shoulders were stiff and that turned him on. The second time, the second time they had been together, in the bed at the hospital, he made her moan and clutch him tighter.
Micah withdrew weapons from her clothing and set them aside as Austin called them both ridiculous. She was carrying a lot of weapons that Corbin hadn’t known about, a switchblade almost identical to the one lost in the confinement point, two throwing stars, and a set of throwing knives. As the little pile of weapons mounted, Corbin said in derision, “What the fuck? Are you a ninja now? Do you have nun-chucks, too?”
“No nun-chucks. It’s just the shit those hunters on the mountain brought along with them for some good, old-fashioned zombie killing fun,” Micah said. Nodding to the stars, she added, “Those I picked up from a hunter after I left it. He had them in his backpack and still in the original packaging.”
She lined up her weapons between them, along with her handgun and semi-automatic. “So pick one, Corbin, and kill me. If you can still aim with that little bit of wine in your bloodstream that you can’t handle. I won’t put up a fight. Kill me, or do your gold-star best.” She gave him a taunting thumb’s up. “And if you’re too chicken-shit to do it, then shut the fuck up.”
“Oh my God!” Zaley said. The weapons were gone in a swoop of bodies, Zaley and Austin stealing them and looking around for somewhere in the office to hide everything.
“You’re a bitch,” Corbin said to Micah.
“You’re an immature know-it-all who ironically can barely read,” Micah said.
“I can mature and learn from audio-books, but you’ll still be forever a bitch.” He wasn’t feeling vicious now. He didn’t know what he was feeling. Something about this was silly, the stolen ninja weapons, the standoff, and the insults. “I liked you well enough when we were in school, but we weren’t ever close, Micah. You’re weird. You need therapy to work it out.”
“I had therapy after I got infected with Sombra C,” Micah said. “My moms sent me. The counselor said I needed to connect with nature and have a spirit animal. It would show me the way.”
“Yeah, that’s not real therapy.”
“Well, I defer to your superior judgment of what is and isn’t therapy. I’m sure you’ve had a lot over your life.”
She was almost smiling and Corbin was almost smiling. Then Austin dove down between them, and he most definitely wasn’t smiling. “How can you talk to one another like this? You’re friends. We’re all friends. We’re family after all that’s happened to us. We love each other.”
Micah shook her head at Corbin to indicate that she didn’t love him. He returned the gesture. He loved Zaley as his girlfriend and Austin as his best friend, but he tolerated Micah and she tolerated him. They were the kind of people who were situational friends because they shared the same space in high school and then never saw each other again after graduation. Wished one another well and just didn’t care. Having to voice it one more time, Corbin said, “It’s killing me. We should have left him at the police station. We had the solution right there.” He smacked the floor twice to make his point.
“But we didn’t,” Micah said.
But they didn’t. And this world had destroyed him. It was doing that to all of them.
Zaley was forcing the bow on top of a cabinet. She was too short and it kept falling off. When Austin went over to help her, Corbin looked around mildly. All of the weapons had vanished. Tomorrow, it was going to be an Easter egg hunt to get them back. Micah took advantage of their inattention to steal the second wine bottle. She drank from it and passed it over to Corbin, who had just gotten it to his lips and pulled in a sip when Austin yelled. The bottle vanished from his fingers like magic.
“I was reading him a book,
” Corbin said as Micah lunged for the wine but missed. “It was right before we left Sausalito. That lame little book you got for him that was called Bunny Tall, Bunny Small. He was riveted. Bunny soft. Bunny hop. Bunny ears. Bunny tail.” He imitated flicking pages with a dazed expression.
“About your speed,” Micah said.
It was hard to find his third finger to flip her off, but he managed it in time. “He was sitting up in front of me while I read. Then I had to get up for some reason and left him on the blanket, and when I came back, the book was gone. He was still there, now flopped over on his belly, but the book was nowhere to be seen. I searched all over for it. He and I were the only ones there, so where did it go?”
“Where did it go?” Micah echoed fondly as the others poured out the wine in the sink and muttered about dividing up into two groups for the night. There was an office downstairs with a push button lock. Overhearing them, Micah yelled, “We’re fine! We’ll kill each other tomorrow.”
Tipping over to stare at the ceiling, Corbin said, “I thought maybe I’d taken it along and put it down somewhere, but why would I have done that? I think I’d just gone to pee.”
“Bathroom whack-off reading,” Micah said.
“Maybe yours. I ransacked the tents and didn’t find it. I looked under the kayak, even though it made no sense that it would be under there. I looked around the trees as if he could have hurled it away. Just when I thought I was going insane, I wondered why he kept dipping his head down to the blanket. I rolled him over and there was the book, pinned underneath him as he tried to chew on a page.”
“Bunny yum,” Micah said, and they giggled. Corbin closed his eyes, accepting that he was a little drunk. His stomach wasn’t happy about all of the nasty wine he’d dumped inside it. This winery sucked. Faint feral sounds echoed outside. He bayed back to them, although he wasn’t clear if it was only in his head or coming out his mouth.
He didn’t remember getting into a bed of clothes and blankets to sleep, but he woke up in one the next morning. Zaley gave him the evil eye upon her awakening and he kissed her shoulder in apology. Then he whispered, “I miss Mars,” and her anger softened. God. Their little dude was gone. Corbin hated those two men. He wanted them to burn in hell for all of eternity.
Feeling crappy as the girls unearthed the weapons from everywhere, he went downstairs with Austin and flinched at the creaking of the metal stairs. They hadn’t been so loud yesterday. The heavy cabinet blocking the broken French door was exactly as they’d left it. The boys pushed it aside and stepped out into the morning light. The neighborhood was just as much of a ghost town as the day before. Their only companion was a rabbit, which was running under the vines.
While they waited for the girls, they poked around the place and ate grapes. Corbin opened the door of a garage and called, “Hey! A truck!” It was an old work truck, dried mud crusted in the wheel wells and dirt on the windows and sides. The bed was strewn with planks and a shovel. Hay and bird tape were caught in the corners.
“Now that’s a real lady killer of a vehicle,” Austin said. “Mmm-hmm. Oh yeah.”
“What would you know about lady killer anything?” Corbin asked.
“Hey, I didn’t have trouble catching them. I had trouble wanting what I’d caught.”
Rings of keys were on a pegboard. Corbin pulled down the set that matched the truck and opened up the toolboxes. The first one had irrigation supplies, drip emitters, glue, and an old hacksaw. There were also hitches. In the other one was a roll of trash bags, a screwdriver and a hammer, with loose screws and nails scattered among them.
Pulling out the roll of trash bags, he tossed it to Austin. They would have made the reservoir swim a lot easier. He bypassed the hitches to help himself to the tools. Then he closed up the toolboxes and let himself into the driver’s side.
The girls squeezed out of the French door as he started it up. Yelling when the engine turned over, he checked the gas gauge. It was on the low side of red. He rolled down the window and shouted, “Jump in and let’s see how far we can go on ten drops of gas!”
Austin leaped into the passenger seat once Corbin drove it out of the garage. Micah hefted herself into the back and put out a hand to Zaley. They crouched on the boards and held onto the toolboxes as Corbin eased down on the accelerator. The truck rumbled forward obediently and he steered it to the driveway. He loved being in a moving vehicle. Austin pushed an ancient cassette tape into the player and banda music blasted out the speakers. “Oh sweet Jesus!” Austin shouted. “This makes me want Tic-Tac-Taco so bad! They were always playing this music when you went inside.”
“You don’t even like fast food that much,” Corbin hollered.
“I like it better than no food!”
Fair enough. All of them yelled as the truck went on its way. Micah and Zaley banged on the toolboxes encouragingly and Austin chanted, “Go, truck, go! Go, truck, go!” He danced in his seat to the beat.
They made it to the road. They made it to the end of the block. They made it halfway down one more block, and then the truck made a grinding sound, shuddered, and slowed. It coasted to a halt and Corbin slapped the wheel companionably. “Thank you!” He said it in all sincerity. It was several hundred feet that he hadn’t had to walk. Everyone got out and brushed off the detritus that had gotten stuck to their clothes and hair.
“Good find,” Zaley said. “I bet that was almost a fifth of a mile.”
“That might be stretching it,” Austin said, looking back to the winery.
“You’re welcome,” Corbin said, and the four of them continued on foot.
Micah
Skirting a fire sent them much farther north than they had needed to go. The smoke and falling ash were the first signs of trouble, and then the sirens began. A fire department was still functional and responding. Passing around the binoculars, the four of them watched as firefighters ran around to do what they could. Even from a distance, the hopelessness was evident. The fire was only going to stop when it ran into water or some other change in topography that removed its fuel.
In their efforts to get away from the big fire, they ran into a smaller one within a valley. It roared as loudly as a jet engine as it ate through brush. All that prevented it from growing larger was the lack of wind. The air was absolutely still, the dry valley fringed by green trees, and through those they walked with their shirts over their noses to breathe.
She took perverse pleasure at the inconvenience of fires, every time they traveled along a wrong trail, or had to dive into the wilderness blindly without one. The others grumbled and studied the maps, checked the sky for time and smoke, and fretted over their dwindling food supplies and finding a place for the night. It wouldn’t do for them to suspect that she was happy about their delays, so she concealed it well and they never had a clue.
She didn’t know what to do inside the harbor, but she knew perfectly well what to do outside it. Inside, she would think too much about her finger on the trigger. She didn’t hear her parents’ horrified honey in her ears at what she chose to do at the Sweet Song campsite. She heard nothing, because all voices, including her own, were speechless. Within the harbor, she didn’t expect it to remain silent for long. Sooner or later, there would be a clamor of a thousand voices, and the strongest would be hers.
You fucked up, Micah.
There was no coming back from a fuck-up as gross as that one. There would be no punishment in the afterlife since there was no afterlife. She would live in discomfort and reproach, and then she would die and not be punished. The only punishment would be in the lives of the children she crippled with her bullets (if any, maybe she missed them, she hadn’t been watching when she pulled the trigger), the siblings overlooked while their parents tended a gimpy or brain-damaged brother or sister (they could have all been only children), the dog that might have been hurt and bleeding on the ground, trampled by people stampeding for the parking lot and still alive when the fire engulfed it (she would have kille
d anyone else for doing that to Harbo).
Micah had drawn a bull’s-eye on the wrong targets. That wasn’t the act of a dark goddess, who meted out Her justice only to perpetrators. It was an impulse, the cruelest of impulses, and she let it overcome her. She had guarded the children in the car as their parents got sloshed in the bar back at home; she killed Clarissa out of kindness behind the fence. But what she did in the shadow of the mountain . . . that was the act of a monster. She became what she was exterminating, fell into the darkness and climbed out with it inside her.
In the harbor, shooting at the children was going to haunt her. She didn’t have too much time for it now, and in the scraps of time she did have, it was unbearable.
They were approaching the harbor from the north. The south and west carried them straight through the city of Sonoma. But north meant fires, and even on the roundabout trails (and lack thereof) that they took, they spotted occasional people hanging around to cause trouble. Micah considered anything trouble, even requests for food. Give them an apple and they’d want a granola bar. Give them a granola bar and they’d want some trail mix. Give them some trail mix and they’d want the whole damn backpack that kept producing such magnificent things.
The sun graced the horizon every morning to shine on a new dawn of civilization, one where a third of the people were feral from Sombra C, and another third were uninfected but behaving like ferals all the same. The last third were cowering from them both. Micah had to make snap judgments about which third an unfamiliar person hailed from, and act accordingly.
Austin was quiet in their nook of bushes one night, and when she prodded for a reason, he said, “Do you know how many people we killed today?”
That took her aback. It had just been a regular day to her. There was the pair of ferals at breakfast who charged out from the trees. The woman had a stamp and the boy in his early teens didn’t, but the latter was just as feral as the first. Both were Mexican. Micah dropped her energy bar and opened fire, nailing the boy several times through the chest. He staggered and fell, bits of rotten skin bursting away from him in his blood. Zaley and Corbin backed away frantically, firing at the woman. Then Austin shouted about another feral coming up from behind. Black clouds of birds burst from the trees, screeching and flapping to get away from the noise as the raging man absorbed the bullets from Austin’s gun and launched himself at them.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 161
