Alerted by the squealing brakes, Corbin turned and whispered, “Zaley? Are you okay?”
“Who’s out there?” the woman called. “Boys, are you checking the tents?”
“Stay quiet!” Zaley whispered to Corbin, righting herself and sloughing her backpack. There was Zyllevir in it.
The woman turned and shouted, “Dove! Do you have a squad working over here?” A male voice shouted no.
“Zaley!” Corbin exclaimed as she thrust through the bushes and revealed herself to the woman. Ignoring his frantic whispers to come back, Zaley straightened her clothing, pulled out her gun, and stalked over to the road.
The woman’s eyes widened. Zaley burst in an exasperated voice, “Did you see him? Where did he go?”
“See what?” the woman asked nervously.
“The feral! Did you see him?” She stepped onto the road. Three guys began to run over from the market area, one with a gun and two with blades.
Be Grace, a variant of Grace. It was all she had to protect herself. Zaley waved over the men impatiently. She couldn’t be defensive. Lowering her gun to show she didn’t have a problem with them, she shouted, “Did you see a guy go this way? Tall, messy brown hair?”
“Are you a Shepherd?” the woman asked, her eyes brushing over Zaley’s neck.
“No! I’m chasing off a feral so he stays the hell away from my house!” Jerking down her collar in an exaggerated move to show off her clear skin, Zaley said, “He’s wearing work clothes and there’s no rot on him yet. No stamp either. All he does is shriek and repeat hi, how are you? Hi, how are you?” The feral with a modicum of speech outside the vineyard garage had spooked her. She stared suspiciously into the trees far from where Corbin was hiding. Then she stalked away to search them.
The men caught up, surrounding her and their angry voices running together in demands for her identity. She turned it around to demand theirs. When they persisted, a hand clamping down on her shoulder, she wrenched away like a bratty teenager. “Who the hell are you? Have you seen him or not?”
“We haven’t seen any-”
“Well, that’s great,” said Zaley sarcastically. “But he’s ripping up my garden to eat shit that’s not even ripe and pounding on my door every night. He’s obsessed with my house and scaring the piss out of my gramma. Are you going to get out of my way or what?” Go back, Corbin, go back to Micah and Austin.
They were all middle-aged men, one suspicious and the other two at a cross between concerned about the feral and annoyed at her abrasive attitude. The suspicious one said, “Where do you live?”
“Why? Am I inviting you over?” Zaley asked.
“I asked-”
She sighed noisily. “I live just down this hill, and we’ve had the same feral waking us up every night for three nights straight now. Last midnight, I waved my gun in his face and he ran off. Then he started up again at dawn so I chased him away.” She wedged herself through bushes to inspect the woods and put more space between her and Corbin. “Are you going to help or just stand there looking stupid?”
The suspicious one became pissy and authoritative. “Miss, you can’t just come up here and-”
At least he believed her story. That was the most important thing. “What, do you think I’m a zombie? Give me a spit test and let me shoot this dick before he takes another shit on my porch! Do you have any idea what I’ve been putting up with?” That was the right thing to say, challenging them to the spit test. She had no fear, so she wasn’t a zombie.
“I could get some of the guys,” one man said. “Where was he headed when you last saw him?”
“This way,” Zaley said. “He’s pressing east through the trees and this was just about the last place I saw him. Light doesn’t bother him at all.”
The Bread and Butter Lady pedaled away, staring out to the trees and staying in the exact middle of the road. After a quick consultation, one man returned to the north entrance and another one jogged over to the east to warn the people there. Zaley was disappointed to learn there were people over there. The last guy was the one who had hassled her the most. “What school did you go to before the breakdown?” he asked.
He was testing the veracity of her identity. “None of them. We moved here last year from south of San Francisco and my mother homeschools me,” Zaley said.
“Where’s your mom? Is she helping you hunt? We need to know so we don’t shoot her by accident.”
“No, she’s not here. She and my dad got stranded in Pennsylvania on the day the planes went down and they haven’t come back. Any more questions?”
“What’s your name?”
“Grace. What’s yours?”
He declined to answer and asked for her last name, but she waved him off dismissively and peered around a tree. It was taking everything out of her not to glance to the bushes where Corbin was, or had been. She prayed that he had taken her backpack and stolen away. The guy followed after her for a few paces and then peeked into a tent that had its sides rippling from a light breeze.
Within five minutes, twelve people had joined the search. Insisting that the feral headed east any chance he got, she was relieved when people spread out ahead of her to whack at bushes with sticks and strike tattered tents. Six were adults, and half wore Shepherd vests. Their search was organized, two skirting far ahead quickly and the last four dividing up the terrain and methodically checking every inch. The other six were younger, some of them just teens and none wearing vests. They lingered in the back and rechecked everything a second time, a guy shouting bossily, “Look up into the trees. Remember that climber we had a few weeks ago.” Necks craned.
Zaley stayed in the very back and gave the description of the feral three times to inquiries. A girl smiled in a friendly way after the last repetition and Zaley said, “Hey. I’m Grace.”
“Stephanie,” the girl said. “A feral ripped through my garden a month ago and took out everything. Maybe it’s the same one.” If the girl had identified as a Shepherd, she would have given an animal name. She didn’t know too much about Sombra C if she believed a feral who destroyed her garden a month ago was still alive and doing the same today.
“What school did you go to?” Zaley asked. Although pretending to be homeschooled, it was implausible for Zaley to live in this city and be totally unaware of the local schools’ names. She plumbed Stephanie for details, guiding her to information and then nodding like she knew it all along. A high school junior, the girl swung between chatty and quiet, adjusting and readjusting the backpack on her shoulders. When it started to feel like pulling teeth, Zaley quit asking anything. The others didn’t introduce themselves, excited to be searching and the bossy one reiterating to look up, not just out.
They moved along the strip of woods that ran by the road. A handful of others swept it on the other side by the white wall of the harbor. Bushes and tents shook from blows. A man yelled and exited one tent, saying they’d woken him up, and two of the searchers shouted at him for sleeping out of bounds. The guy took down his tent and dragged it to the north entrance, cursing all the while. In a watchtower, a guard kept an eye on the search and didn’t react when a man yelled hey, bitch.
Zaley’s temper rose to stratospheric heights when the north side of the wall ended. Patches of tents were visible in the trees along the harbor’s east side. An orange plastic safety fence attached to steel bars surrounded each patch. “Do you guys all live up here?” Zaley asked Stephanie. “I’ve never come this way until today.”
“I don’t,” Stephanie said.
“Only when she wants to fuck for food,” a boy volunteered. He looked to be about fifteen years old. Face scored with scars and pimples under shaggy red hair, he imitated sucking on a dick. Okay then. Laughing, he said to Zaley, “You hungry?”
Zaley played along. “What do you got?”
Having grown bored with the search, some of the younger ones came closer to walk with them. A girl called, “Docker doesn’t have shit, so don’t fuck him.”
“I won’t then,” Zaley said.
“You want Terry if you’re hungry. His family has a farm. You scratch his back; he’ll scratch yours. But you missed him. He’s only here between his morning and evening chores. What did you get from him, Steph?” The girl laughed in a catty way that said she didn’t have to give head for food. Stephanie didn’t answer.
“He’s going to fuck himself into a world of hurt if Ceila tells her brother what she’s been doing for fruit and eggs,” Docker said. “He’s got a friend in Sangre. They’ll rip up that farm and stick their dicks in Terry in revenge.”
“His dad will do worse if he finds out Terry’s coming up here to trade away a chunk of the goods,” someone else said as Docker yelled, “I’ll bend Terry over for a chicken.” He humped the air, moaning eggs meat apples walnuts, and everyone chortled. Stephanie just hitched up her backpack. Zaley felt sorry for her. From the conversation, she gathered that Terry had been the guy with all of the baskets tied to the bike. His father hated Shepherds and had supported the harbor going in, so he would be furious to learn his son was swinging over here to trade food for pain pills, alcohol, jewelry, and sex.
She couldn’t get back to Corbin. Searchers were coming up from behind now, although searchers was a nice word for two guys who were more interested in talking about a tricky level in a videogame called Deadlock Five. She remembered that name from somewhere, and had to puzzle on it for a minute before the memory came to her in full. Corbin had bought that game and nearly had it stolen just outside the store. Good times. It was a little of Grace’s sassiness taking over Zaley’s brain.
They approached a quartet of tents that didn’t have orange fencing and one of the Deadlock Five guys said, “Zombie catchers, these old tents. That’s why we leave them up.” Only two were upright. He lifted the flap of one and peeked in as his friend did the second. No one was inside.
“How often do you catch zombies in them?” Zaley asked.
“Just now and then. We’ve got three regulars out here every night right now and a few that go in and out of the area-”
The other Deadlock Five guy interrupted to say, “The regular three are named Eh-eh-eh, Owww-aaaahhh, and Hah-Hah.” He held up his hand and said, “How,” like ferals were a new branch of a Plains Indians tribe.
“Those are the sounds they make. We didn’t hear Hah-Hah last night, but the other two are still around. Owww-aaaahhh comes real close to the camps. He’s always up here on the north and east sides. Eh-eh-eh goes all over the place, but usually we don’t hear her until almost dawn. Anyone heard from Zoop lately? Maybe that one died.”
“You think they talk to each other?” someone asked. “Hi, Eh-eh-eh, my name is Owwww-aaaahhh.” His jaw gaped and he scratched his crotch as he offered his hand for a shake. People just groaned and snorted like it was a joke they’d heard before.
Zaley breathed in the rot smell of the confinement point, but she didn’t see any bodies. The road that went along the harbor split. One branch went down to join a road on the eastern side, and the second branch swung into the hills in a northeasterly direction. The search moved along that second branch, people standing on the curb to peer down into a ravine and a person shouting from out of sight that he wasn’t seeing anything.
Zaley froze at the sight in the ravine. It was full of bodies, hundreds of them, in a long, narrow pool of human puzzle pieces. Dirt had been shoveled over the mass grave in places, but it was too large to cover by hand. The bodies were decaying and mutilated and all tangled up together, someone’s head tucked between another’s legs, an arm sticking up from a body trapped under the top layer, glassy eyes staring at the sky, at each other, and at Zaley herself. Fallen logs had been placed over the ravine so people could cross it. A guy balanced upon one and leaped off onto the grassy slope on the far side.
Bile rose into her throat and she swallowed hard. She was going to throw up. She couldn’t help it. Staggering out of the clutch of searchers, she vomited beside a bush. There wasn’t much in her stomach, so not too much came up. As she straightened and wiped her mouth, Docker said awkwardly, “Yeah, it’s bad. We call it the river. Just walk on the logs if you have to cross it for some reason.” Several of the searchers stepped onto the logs to go over there.
Zaley had already fallen into a smaller grave, and there was no way on heaven or earth that she was going to walk across this one. The Sombra Cs that Corbin had met in Sausalito told him about all of the bodies, and he’d told her. It was very different to actually see it. These were Shepherds killed by military and harbor guards, military and harbor guards killed by Shepherds, TBACS, Sombra Cs, and the relief teams that came to deliver supplies to the harbor. A massacre had taken place in these hills. There was even road kill tossed in there, very little left of a deer obliterated along its midsection, and garbage. Walking over a log, a searcher added a wad of his spit to it.
Those who didn’t want to cross the river broke away to search the trees along the east side of the harbor. Zaley went with them to calculate how strong the blockade was on this side, and to get away from the mass grave before she was sick again. No one looked at her too oddly as she walked by orange-ringed campsites. The story of the feral had spread, and she was with people that they all knew and trusted. As they went along, Stephanie said, “Shouldn’t you get back home?”
“Probably. It’s a long walk.” Zaley couldn’t seem too eager to leave, but she was in a quandary. Assuming that they would meet up at the ridge where she spent the morning, or the nook where they’d slept last night, she had to walk straight past the people at the north entrance. The driveway she wanted wasn’t too far from it, and if anyone was on that part of the road hunting her imaginary feral, she couldn’t go up to the house and slip behind it.
Or she could go all the way around the harbor itself and approach from the back way, but that was hardly feasible with the uneven terrain. Not to mention that time was working against her. It was well into the afternoon. Mulling over what course of action to take and never coming to a satisfactory conclusion, she stayed with the search as it came to the east entrance of the harbor.
The road here was wider, and far more maintained than the one going to the north entrance. It looked almost new. Perhaps it was, the same age as the harbor itself. Cutting straight through the trees, it led to a huge, arched entrance in the wall. The closed doors had no knobs, or obvious way to get in. Did people have to wave at the guard for them to be opened? They must. There wasn’t any way for those doors to open.
If Zaley waved at the guard and shouted up to be let in, she’d be long dead by the time the doors cracked for her. Although the road was clear of tents, many were in the trees along it. This side was almost as well occupied as the north. Still pacing along nearby, Stephanie said abruptly, “There used to be battles here. That’s why they put the bodies in the ravine.”
“I never imagined.” It was a struggle to play a part when the horror of the ravine was still so starkly in her mind. “I’m pretty new to Sonoma and I never came this way until now.”
“A lot of people didn’t want the harbor to go in. Put it somewhere out of the way, not right here in a community. But the government just grabbed up the land and built it. No talks, nothing. Even kicked a guy out of his home to tear it down and put that up in its place. They can’t get through the VA backlog for shit, they just shined my dad on and made him wait forever for appointments, but they had this place built in weeks. Were you around for the marches?”
“No, I missed those. My mom didn’t let me out much.” Zaley shrugged ruefully.
“People marched up here to protest it, and they got in fights with people marching up here to protect it. Those weren’t battles usually. Just yelling, and there were fistfights. I ditched, came up here once to see it. I didn’t care about the harbor then. I just wanted to get out of school. I didn’t know anyone with Sombra C except for a guy in my friend’s English class. It was crazy, cars parked everywhere and people screaming t
heir heads off.”
“You had a Sombra C guy at your school?”
“There were two people with it at my high school. Him and a freshman girl.”
“That must have been scary.”
“No. I barely ever saw them. But they put in the harbor and it attracted tons of Sombra Cs here. Some of them are crazy by the time they make it to Sonoma. That’s why you got that guy at your house, and mine, too. He was aiming for the harbor to get Zyllevir and his brain went to pieces first.”
“It’s definitely in pieces,” Zaley confirmed.
“So now he runs around our city, our homes, causing trouble. All of those people yelling about how great it was to have the harbor here didn’t stop to think about that until it was too late. The rate of infection in a city with a harbor is much higher than in cities without one. Zombies flood in and go feral.”
When she stopped talking, Zaley prompted her. “Did you see any of the battles?”
“No, are you serious? I didn’t come up here for that. My brother did a few times. There are five hundred, six hundred bodies in that ravine. Maybe a thousand. My brother moved some of them afterwards. The soldiers just mowed everyone down.” She slipped out of the trees to the road and Zaley followed. Surprised, Stephanie said, “You live down this way, too?”
“Oh, no.” Zaley had thought they were still talking, and the girl was walking home. “See you around?”
“No, I don’t come up here too much.”
“Hey, wait up!” The catty girl dashed after Stephanie to walk with her.
“She’ll be back the next time her tummy is empty, like she always is,” Docker said. Zaley’s stomach was empty, and her backpack was either in the bushes or off with Corbin. She despaired that they were going to be walking to Humboldt. Although a few people were trickling away down the road, plenty were left behind to stay the night.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 167
