No one was inside and the back was piled with bicycles. Creeping over to the driver’s seat, she stared out the window to a celebration. The only light was coming from the fire on the other side of the circle, and from flashlights, lanterns, and glow necklaces. A couple let themselves into another camper and everyone turned to hoot at them. Micah opened the door and climbed out to the party as people flocked to the other camper and banged on the sides, yelling, “Get it on!”
This was stupid. They could be Shepherds, militia, anybody under the sun, and here she was, letting herself in to see if something would happen. Begging for it. Please let something happen. She was frightened and thrilled to walk into the center of the campers, surrounded by a hundred strangers. A bullet, a blade, at any second she could be overpowered and brought down.
Pinching a mauve glow necklace from the ground, she put it on and crossed the circle to the fire and the drums. No feral cries could be heard over the merriment. There was a keg beside the four drummers with a little crowd around it. Three of the drummers were bare-chested guys, and the lone girl was in a skimpy tank top with a broken strap that exposed her bra. One boy bent back, shouting that he needed to use the pisser, and someone left the keg to replace him on the drum. The pisser turned out to be a curtain behind which was a trench.
“Hey, who are you? I totally didn’t see you on the bike over!” a guy shouted, dancing around the fire with his eyes on Micah. His hair was tousled, looking at night how Mars’ hair had looked in the morning. His jeans were far too large on him, the pockets packed and the waist riding low.
“I’m Daisy! I was with Ashley,” Micah said brightly. There had to be an Ashley or two in the crowd of a hundred plus teens. That was a common name. “Hey, aren’t you friends with Hannah?”
“Sure! Like one of the million she had on HomeBase. I’m Dyson. You a senior, too? But you must be from a high school in Sonoma or in college, or else I would have seen you around.” A little alcohol was on his breath. He took her hands and weaved the two of them together.
“Yeah, I’m a senior,” Micah said agreeably. “Or I was.”
“So, what was your dream back then?”
She hedged to cover up her ignorance. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“Accepted to UCLA. I’ve been packed to go since freshman year.” He laughed, so Micah echoed it. “I got a lot of older sisters. I was going to study marine biology as a cover for what I really want to do, which is hunt sunken treasure. Much more exciting.” When he smiled mischievously, so did she.
“I wasn’t expecting that answer,” Micah said, appearing impressed. People liked to think they were unusual.
This boy was no different. Pleased, he said, “Too many pirate movies as a kid. Some guy in Florida hauled up a million dollars’ worth of gold coins and chains from a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck. Silver, too. That was just four or five years ago. But my parents won’t pay for me to hunt wrecks. Can’t blame them. Marine biology it is then! So now you know my respectable dream and dorky motive. What was your dream?”
Micah had had many things, but a dream wasn’t one of them. “Totally undecided. I was planning to figure it out when I got there. But something exciting, definitely.”
“Can I get you a drink, Daisy?”
“Actually, I’d really like to take a turn on a drum if one opens up.”
“I can do that for you. Hey, Macey! Macey! You want to take five and let the lady have a turn?” Macey agreed, yelling that he’d take ten, and visited the keg as Dyson got Micah situated. As she started to beat, he motioned to her with a bottle of water and set it down at her side.
He was sweet. It made her want to kill him. That was the wrong reaction. Liking him meant that her mind should have traveled over to the dark guts of those campers for a game of grab-ass and kissy-face. But her brain went instead to shooting him. Then he would die sweet (never having said I hunt zombies or back when I was doing paces) and she could continue liking him.
She took off her shirt to cheers and pumped fists. Occasionally the drummers found a rhythm together and the rest of the time they just banged at whatever tempo took their fancy. People stopped harassing the couple having sex in the camper to dance at the fire or stand around and chat.
Names of high schools and colleges slipped in between the drumbeats. The older people were from two local colleges and one junior college, and the younger ones from public and private high schools in Napa, Sonoma, and Petaluma. Micah drummed and let the voices run together. This beer tastes like ass! He brewed it in a tub. Fuckin’ Shepherds, fuckin’ Bitchy Pitchy, did you hear we’re getting phones back soon? No way. That’s just a rumor! It’s going to be years. How many cell towers have gotten knocked over? It’s not like there’s a Cell Tower Factory two blocks away to replace them. Where is that shit even made? Where was THIS shit made? A tub! For real? Ew!
Bottles of wine and flasks of harder alcohol were passed around. Micah scratched at her mosquito bites and took a nip of a flask. Her awareness of the itching would die in inverse proportion to her blood alcohol level rising. The girl who handed it over asked who Micah was. Saying she was Jake’s neighbor (there had to be a Jake or Jacob in the crowd, too) she offered the drum to the girl, who declined and walked away.
Some guy peed openly into the fire. When the yelling died down, the cry of a distant feral pierced the circle. The conversations changed to my dad thinks I’m at Sophia’s house for the week. You’ve got a gun? Good. I’ve only got a knife. Mom would kill me if she knew I was out here! Mine, too! Knives and handguns were brandished and everyone was reassured at how well protected they were. One girl had nothing, but bragged about her black belt in ju-jitsu.
“Just aim for the head!” a guy said authoritatively. It wasn’t as easy as just aiming for the head unless you were extremely close or very well trained. That guy had never shot anything in his life. You shot a feral in the torso as it advanced, and aimed for the head when it was almost to you.
They were just kids. Micah was the same age but felt eons older. Had she not been infected with Sombra C, she would have been like them. Bored at home with no space from her family, never having shot a gun, having nothing to do while everyone waited for the country to come back together, sneaking out for a party. They all would have gone, Micah and Austin, Elania and Corbin, and Zaley if she could loosen the apron strings that tied her to her mommy. Drinking homemade beer, whining about their defunct cell phones and lack of colleges (although the alternate universe Micah would be secretly happy about that part), learning if you went to one relief truck first thing for your bag and then changed your clothes and biked really fast, you could just make the next drop-off and stand in line again for second helpings.
All that had had to happen to reroute them was a holiday party. A party little different from this one, and all it would take to reroute these kids was a feral wriggling through that unlocked camper.
Two girls stopped by the keg and spoke in quiet intensity as Micah slowed to a more contemplative beat. Didn’t you hear? She died giving herself an abortion. No, I’m serious. They couldn’t get condoms so they were just using the rhythm method and she ended up pregnant. Her dad said he’d kick her out if she didn’t take care of it, they can’t feed another mouth, and she tried to get a dose of Milledex to make her miscarry but couldn’t find it anywhere. Doctors, hospitals, no one has stuff like that anymore. So she used a hanger. Her dad found her in her bedroom the next morning, lying there on the carpet in a pool of blood. Jory is so ripped up.
Some of these kids weren’t so young compared to her. The world had changed them, too. Others were talking about a Sangre strike on a relief truck that left them hungry for days. Fuckin’ greedy, greasy wetbacks . . . not you, Pedro, you know the people I’m talking about . . . Another strike ended poorly for a street gang that attempted to hijack a truck in Napa. A bunch of enraged soccer moms who had been waiting in line for their food jumped into a van and ran them off the road. The
y shot the gang members and drove the relief truck back where it belonged.
Macey’s ten minutes turned into twenty and kept on going as he chatted up a chick by the curtain. Micah was fine with it. The couple left the camper and another couple replaced them. Slipping in sneakily, they didn’t cause the same commotion as the previous couple had. Only one person saw them go in, and he laughed about it over his beer. “Why doesn’t anyone use the other campers?” A girl explained that the rest were either trashed on the inside or filled with bicycles.
Dyson swung around to check on Micah’s health and happiness. She’d worked up a mild sweat and took a quick break to down the water. Drunker than before, he watched her bang away and asked twice if she wanted beer because he’d forgotten the answer the first time. When she asked what he’d rather have in his hands, a pair of boobs or a pile of gold coins, he said that she had broken his brain into zillions of ecstatic little pieces.
“You’re dumb,” Micah said. “The answer is gold. Those can buy you plenty more than one pair of boobs.”
“A guy just needs one pair,” Dyson said, oblivious to the lumps of mosquito bites on her forehead and shoulder, her ragged hair, and that her bra wasn’t at its bouncy best. He brought her a cup of the beer. Its reputation as tasting like ass was not wholly unfounded. She sucked it in, accepted a second and then a third, and hit the drum until someone else wanted a turn. Then she danced in the orange-tinted darkness. The museum touched upon her mind and she dismissed it. They were locked in, asleep, and fine. She needed this hedonism around the fire, the wild drums and half-naked bodies, the scent of beer and howling to the moon. It wouldn’t escape her once behind that wall that any party she attended would be within a cage.
Anything could happen here, a feral break in and freak out, Shepherds crash it for neck and spit checks, a hunter’s stray bullet drop from the sky . . . Anything could happen just to her should her stamp be spotted and her identity revealed. She’d fall to bullets and blades and the black belt. Her friends would never know what happened to her. She had just vanished into thin air as they dreamed in those musty beds in the museum. The mystery would haunt them.
The dream returned to her of that pregnant belly, and Mars regenerating through her into the same body he had left behind. A guy rubbed up on her thigh and she turned away to Dyson, who accepted her into his drunken lurch of a dance. Uma and even Tuma would translate that dream as prophetic: Mars’ soul was tied to Micah’s, and he would return in a new form to continue their karmic journey as destiny decreed. All she had to do was take Dyson or some other boy into the love camper for sex and the celestial dance of two entwined souls would be renewed. Life is so very, very beautiful! So very beautiful indeed, isn’t it, Joob?
Micah hated the frantic, clutching denial in that. The magical thinking. What you lose will always come back to you by some means. No. It wouldn’t. What was lost was lost forever. It was putting gift-wrap over a nightmare and insisting that pretty bows and ribbons transformed the hideousness inside to something beautiful. She could fuck Dyson and get knocked up in the camper, and in forty weeks, she’d be looking into the eyes of a small stranger in her arms. A Venus, a Saturn, never her Mars. She could pump out twenty kids before menopause shuttered the reproductive factory and never hold the one she wanted, the one that had made her feel clean after the confinement point dirtied her.
And now she had dirtied herself, had a true choice and chosen wrong. The most corrosive acid on a chemist’s shelf wouldn’t scour her clean.
“The world has gone nuts and all of us are having a party,” Micah said to Dyson. “Does this happen often here?”
“Oh God no!” His hands squeezed her waist. “We’ve never been here until today. We haven’t been anywhere. The last party I went to was the Valentine’s Day dance at my school. You?”
“Last December.”
“Yeah. Crazy, huh?”
“Crazy.”
“My school closed in April and I’ve just been sitting around at home for months. Well, not just sitting. My mom makes me work in the garden all the time, and now she’s doing the canning. Used up all the sugar. She’s panicked about winter. Canning is so hot and awful! We’re back in the frontier.” He focused on her blearily. “Jokes aside, we’ve gone from college-bound seniors to unpaid farmhands.”
“It’s food,” Micah said. Food was his pay.
“Yeah. I just had to get out of there for a night though. Let off some steam. We’ve all lost so much since this began, you know?”
You have no idea what it is to lose, man-child. “Yeah, I know.”
“We’ve lost everything, so why can’t we have one lousy party? But most of my friends refused to come, the few who are still in the area. They said it was too dangerous. And they didn’t want to burn the calories getting here. Relief never brings enough to fill you up.”
His friends were a lot smarter than he was. “You’re awfully confident you won’t attract ferals here. It’s so noisy from the drums and yelling and some of them are awfully aggressive. And what about militias? They aren’t so friendly.”
“Oh, we blocked everything off so ferals can’t get in, and Shube is out there. He’ll let us know if anyone comes,” Dyson slurred confidently. Overhearing, a guy bellowed, “SHUBE! SHUBE! SHUBE!” People took up the chant and Dyson said, “Good man. He’s got a rifle and is marching around the campers. We paid him off with a fifth of vodka, compliments of Denny’s dad’s secret stash.”
“Wow,” Micah said.
“Everyone was hoarding food before the stores closed and his dad was hoarding alcohol and cigarettes. I thought it was stupid. You know what? He was a goddamned genius. Every smoker and alcoholic in a ten-mile radius from Denny’s house will trade a portion of their relief supplies, what they grow in their gardens, chickens or even pigs to get at that stash. He doesn’t have to do a damn thing. They just come to him. And Shube! Shube will do anything for booze.”
Micah almost laughed at the stupidity of placing his trust in some dude named Shube. There hadn’t been anyone outside when she approached. Shube had gotten killed or wandered off to take a dump, slipped into the party, or passed out in a camper. These people were putting their faith in Shube, locked doors, and planks to stay safe. That was so adorably naïve, so childish, just the way that she was at the holiday party when they didn’t lock the doors and bar the windows. But there hadn’t been as much danger then.
“What are you thinking?” Dyson asked. “Don’t say you’re worrying about militias.”
“It’s hard not to worry about militias.”
“I can’t stand calling them that! They’re just fucking gangs. Don’t worry! We talked a long time about them when we were setting up the party. What are the odds that Sangre or Fists would happen to go by tonight of all nights? This is the middle of nowhere. Besides, we don’t have anything they’d want. We were more worried that someone’s little brother or sister would rat us out to a parent.”
“I was actually thinking about an old woman I once knew who believed she cured her cancer with chemo and positive thoughts,” Micah said. Flies with Crows would tell Micah at the burial, had there been one, that Mars was such an old soul he had only needed to be here a short amount of time to learn his karmic lessons. Fuck you, Flies with Crows. Fuck you so hard for that. Micah wouldn’t hold that back, or her fist.
Or a bullet. Then Micah could give a libation and dribble wine on the woman’s corpse, talk forever about what a pain in the ass she had been and how no one was going to miss her.
“I believe in the power of positive thoughts,” Dyson said, taking her hips and pressing them to his. There was something very hard in his pants, and it was too low to be his dick. If it was his dick, he belonged in porn. “But I also change the oil in my car and look both ways before crossing the street.” Even drunk, he had a functioning bullshit meter. Too bad it didn’t extend to his personal safety. She liked him regardless, his tousled hair and silly treasure dreams, his deep thoug
hts about what he had lost in his life, his confidence that nothing bad would ever happen to him at a party of all places. If there were any chance that Mars could reincarnate through her, she’d haul the treasure hunter into the camper and fuck his lights out.
But magic didn’t exist in the real world. Not unless you belonged to a fairly wealthy family who had the luxury of believing in magic when times were good, or such a desperately poor family that magic was the only resource you had. Micah wanted to reach for Uma’s magic, but her feet were too firmly rooted in the world as it was. Sex with Dyson could only be for the sake of sex, and the thought of getting pregnant with a stranger was repugnant. She didn’t want to bottle-feed a Mercury or Jupiter, or wipe the shit off Uranus.
If the world had been in possession of magic, good spells to reward kind acts, bad spells to punish evil ones, she would only have been the recipient of the latter. Her finger uncurled over the trigger in her mind, and the children at the campsite ate their treats unaware of the gun trained upon them. Micah would never have been given the spell to resurrect Mars after that. What you put out into the world is returned to you threefold.
The hard thing bumped into her leg. She slipped her hand into Dyson’s pocket and drew out a sealed glass jar. “I thought guys used rolled socks to enhance their size.”
“Oh, you want that? Take it! I swiped half a dozen of my mom’s strawberry jam jars to pass around. I was going to give that last one to Muriel, but she didn’t show. She loves strawberry anything.”
Pushing on his chest, she said, “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend!”
“No, we were just lab partners two years running. I tried to get her to come to the party, but she doesn’t want to be outside after dark.” His eyes bored into hers. “I promise. She’s not my type. No sex ever happened between us. Just tons of shop-talk about mitosis, meiosis, and stamens.” Micah accepted the jam. It would be entertaining to explain its presence tomorrow at the museum.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 163
