Lost Coast

by Camille Picott

  “We think she’s defending her property,” Gary says. “She thinks another alpha is trying to take her pack out from under her.”

  “Notice how neither Gary nor I could replicate this same reaction when we mimicked the sounds,” Johnny says.

  “Man, I’m telling you, that’s not it,” Gary argues. “Did you know that in Mandarin, the same word has multiple meanings depending on voice inflection? We must be missing something. We’re not making the sounds the right way.”

  “No, man.” Johnny shakes his head. “We’re replicating exactly what we hear. There’s something else at play. I’m telling you, it could be infrasound. We need some sort of machine to help us detect undetectable sounds.” He taps the end of his pen against his temple, grimacing. “Think we can find something like that in one of labs on campus?”

  Gary snorts. “Even if we could, none of us would know how to use it.”

  “You guys are missing the most important discovery.” I frown at them quizzically. “Did either of you realize this series of sounds drove the regular zombies away?” I point to the two creatures that continue to scratch and dig at the far wall of their prison. “Do you realize what we might be able to do with this?”

  They look at me as if I’ve just hit them both over the head with a frying pan.

  “Woah.” Johnny goggles at me. “Dude, Kate, I’m sorry for being an idiot.”

  “We missed the forest through the trees. We’re fucking idiots, man.” Gary elbows Johnny in the ribs.

  “You’re the idiot,” Johnny shoots back with an easy smile. “You’re the one who keeps going on and on about Mandarin inflections.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Guys, shut up for a second.” My mind snaps into overdrive as an idea rushes in. “We need to test this out. We need a megaphone to see if we can use the recording to repel zombies from Creekside.” The idea makes my insides tingle. This could be the very thing we need to protect our home from alphas.

  “Megaphones. Yeah, good idea.” Johnny nods. “We should get the ones at the track.”

  Gary makes a face. “Dude, those are, like, fifty feet up in the air. How do you propose getting them down?”

  38

  Security System

  KATE

  “I think you’re violating every OSHA law ever written.” Ben comes to stand next to me. He shades his eyes as he looks up.

  Reed currently hangs from a metal beam in the covered section of the university bleachers, held in place by a rope harness crafted by Todd and Caleb. In his hands are a screwdriver and wire clipper. He works to remove the megaphone mounted to the top of a ceiling support while Todd and Caleb hold him up by the rope.

  “What’s OSHA?” I ask.

  “Occupational Safety Health Administration. A bureaucracy dedicated to keeping people from dying or getting maimed on the job. I think the entire administration would be apoplectic if they had to keep track of you.”

  I frown in surprise. “Did you just ... make another joke?”

  He continues to shade his eyes and watch Reed’s operation. “Maybe.”

  “That’s two jokes in the six months I’ve known you.”

  “Yep.”

  “Keep that up and you might be funny four times in an entire year.”

  “Yep.”

  I can’t help it. A laugh bubbles up. Ben gives me his eye-crinkle smile.

  My stomach flutters. Other than our mission to retrieve the alpha zom, we haven’t spent much time together. I haven’t forgotten our shared moment the morning of my hangover. Or that moment in his bedroom when I thought I might end up in the bottom bunk with him.

  “How many of those things do you plan to retrieve today?” Ben asks. “The kid might really break his head open, you know.”

  This comment is followed by shouting between Reed, Caleb, and Todd.

  “Dudes!” Reed calls down. “Hold still, will you?”

  “We are holding still,” Todd shoots back. “You keep swinging around.”

  “There’s wind up here. Not my fault.”

  “Just hurry up and get the damn megaphone,” Caleb shouts. “Your ass is heavy.”

  “We’ll start with one megaphone,” I say to Ben. “No reason to risk Reed’s head if my idea doesn’t work.”

  Several hours later, everyone except Gary is gathered on the rooftop of Creekside. Johnny holds the megaphone in one hand. With a pair of trimmed headphone wires and a soldering gun, he connected the megaphone to the boom box with the alpha recording.

  “Good thing I grabbed those electrical wiring books before Mama Bear blew up the library,” Johnny says.

  “I hope you guys grabbed an Anarchist’s Cookbook,” Todd says. “We might need one of those someday.”

  “Shhh.” I wave a hand at the guys to shut them up. “Everyone, pay attention.”

  On the ground below, Carter and Jenn stand on the western side of the compound. They each hold a metal pot and spoon.

  “This feels counterintuitive,” Susan says. “Since when do we call zombies to us?”

  “It’s gonna be okay, babe,” Gary calls up from the hallway below. He might not be able to get up the ladder, but he still wants to be close to the action. “Don’t worry. This is going to work.”

  “I’m just saying,” Susan mutters.

  She isn’t wrong. We’ve gone to great lengths to secure our home and keep zombies out of our living space. Banging on metal pots to draw some toward us is counterintuitive. Not to mention dangerous if my plan doesn’t work.

  I peer over the edge of the building at Carter and Jenna and wave my arms over my head. At my signal, the two of them beat on the pots with their spoons. Everyone on the rooftop cringes at the noise.

  It doesn’t take long for the zombies to arrive. A dozen make their way toward Creekside, shuffling along with their arms outstretched.

  I let Jenna and Carter pound away for another sixty seconds. Then I wave my arms again, signaling them to stop.

  We wait for the zombies to bump up against our barrier. Then I turn to Johnny.

  “You’re on,” I tell him.

  Johnny positions himself at the corner of the rooftop, aims the megaphone in the direction of the zoms, and hits play on the boom box.

  The recorded sequence of clicks and keens bounds through the quiet. A shiver runs across my skin at the unearthly sound.

  The reaction of the zoms below is instantaneous. With a collective moan, they fall back from our perimeter. On the ground below, Carter flashes me a thumbs-up.

  “Is it working?” Gary calls. “Is it driving them away? Somebody tell me what’s happening!”

  “It’s working,” Susan cries. “The zoms are retreating!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Johnny says grandly, “what we have here is a bona fide zombie apocalypse security system. Hold your applause. Just leave a tip in the jar and we’ll call it good.”

  This sets off a string of eye rolls and groans.

  “It was Kate’s idea,” Margie, the former kindergarten teacher, says. “She’s the one who should get the tip.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” Ash says. “The radio runs on batteries. We’re going to need to scavenge a ton of them to keep this thing operational.”

  “Nah, I just need to figure out how to wire the radio to the solar panels.” Satisfied with the zombie retreat, Johnny sets down the megaphone.

  “Guess this means I have to let these idiots dangle me from a rope again.” Reed jerks a thumb at Todd and Caleb.

  In response, the other two young men deliver simultaneous middle fingers. Reed doubles over laughing.

  “What we need,” I say, breaking up the revelry, “is an extensive library of alpha commands. Gary and Johnny, you’ve done good work. Now you just need to do more.” My mind spins with the possibilities. If I have anything to say about this, we’re going to have a full dictionary of alpha zom words at our disposal.

  39

  Recipes

 
; KATE

  “I can’t wait to get these pieces moved downstairs. I want to get the seeds planted within the week.”

  I glance up from where I lie on the floor, twirling a tiny Allen wrench between my fingers as I disassemble a bed leg. On the opposite side of the bed, Leo and his nephew, Todd, dismantle the other legs.

  Leo has drawn up plans to convert several floors of the Laurel dorm building into an indoor garden. Right now we’re dismantling dorm room furniture to convert into growing beds.

  “Marge wants to go on a scavenging mission back into downtown Arcata to hit up the hardware store for canning supplies,” I say.

  “We don’t have to rush. We won’t have any food to can for eight to twelve weeks,” Leo replies.

  “Marge just likes canning,” Todd adds. “She wants to start teaching the kids how to do it.”

  Not for the first time, I find myself grateful for the new additions to Creekside. “You know, the indoor garden was only a vague idea before you guys stepped up to spearhead the project.”

  “It’s the least we could do. You took me and my people in when we had nothing. After losing so many back at the condo complex, you gave us a fresh start.” Leo glances at me from beneath the mattress. “Was there a Mr. Kate? Before the apocalypse, I mean?”

  I sigh. “Yes. But he died a few years before the apocalypse.”

  “I had a fiancé. A step-son.” Leo doesn’t look at me as he finishes his side of the bed. “I tried to get to them. When I heard reports of what was going on, I rushed home from work. By the time I got there ... You know the story. It’s not unique.”

  “Doesn’t mean it hurts any less.” I recall the day I arrived home to find my husband dead.

  “I just mean I’m not special or unique in my pain. We’ve all lost people.”

  “I lost both my parents,” Todd puts in. “My sister was off at college in Washington. If she is alive, I’ll never see her again.”

  I think of my College Creek kids, all of them stranded in Arcata with their families lost and scattered. “We have to make new families. It’s the way of things.”

  “That’s what Christian says. It’s a good way to look at things now,” Todd says.

  “Hey, guys.” Eric strolls in. “Kate, I need you to come look at something.”

  A distant part of my brain wonders what he’s doing here. Eric is on scavenging duty with Caleb and Ash. The three of them are supposed to be looking for seeds we can plant in the garden.

  “You need me right now?” It’s pretty obvious I’m in the middle of something.

  “Yeah, now.” Eric shoves his hands into his pockets.

  The young man hasn’t asked anything of me since Lila died. Miraculously, he doesn’t even seem to harbor any ill will toward me. He does, unfortunately, smoke more pot than ever before.

  “I found something,” he tells me.

  I glance over at Leo and Todd with an apologetic shrug.

  Leo waves me off. “The furniture will be waiting for you when you get back.” Then, oddly, he winks at Eric.

  I’m not sure what that’s all about. Eric is already slinking out of the room, hands in his pockets. I sigh and pad after him. Time is valuable, especially as the days are getting shorter as we head into fall.

  I follow Eric out of Fern dorm and back in the direction of Creekside. We pass Margie and the two kids as they return from a trip to the nearby creek to gather water. With them are Reed and Stacy. The adults all lug giant five-gallon buckets. The kids carry gallon jugs, one in each hand. They strain under the weight, but neither of them complains.

  “You’re going to make them do fractions?” Reed asks. “With buckets of water?”

  “Let me guess,” Margie says dryly. “You weren’t much of a math fan when you were in school.”

  “I’m not a math fan out of school.”

  “There’s no better way to teach fractions than with water and various container sizes,” Margie says. “It’s the best way to get kids to visualize the concept. Granted, I used to use measuring cups and water from the tap, but buckets and jugs and creek water will function the same.”

  Eric and I leave them behind and head into Creekside. Once upstairs, Eric leads me to the dorm room he used to share with Lila.

  I pause just inside the door. Lila’s pink-and-yellow flowered blanket has been straightened, the decorator pillows in place.

  Eric makes it a point to make the bed every day. It was something Lila did before she died. Seeing the neat blanket tightens my chest.

  “Look what I found.” Eric lays a hand on a pile of spiral-bound notebooks spread across the bed.

  “What are those?” I move to the foot of the bed, taking in the many monoblocks of color.

  “They’re Lila’s notebooks. All of them. She never threw anything away. Here, sit down.” He drags a desk chair up for me and closes the door.

  I don’t want to sit. I want to get back to dismantling beds with Todd and Leo. I suppress an impatient sigh. If Eric needs my attention, I’ll give it to him. I sit.

  “These are all her recipes for her cannabis salves and tinctures.” He pushes one of the notebooks into my hand. “Take a look.”

  I flip it open. Lila’s neat handwriting marches across page after page.

  Emotion blooms in my chest. I remember seeing Lila with these, bent over the kitchen counter as she meticulously measured, mixed, pounded, and stirred her ingredients. There are notes with all her recipes. Many of them are crossed out and rewritten with slightly different measurements of the various ingredients.

  I miss her. I miss her scared eyes and her acerbic tongue.

  “Lila.” I close the notebook and press it to my chest.

  When I look at Eric, I see the same emotion in his eyes. They’re misty with sadness, though a tender smile pulls at the corners of his mouth.

  “All her work and experiments of the past few years.” Eric picks up another notebook, flipping through it. “We can recreate her medications and salves.”

  Before the world ended, Lila had a dream of starting her own medicinal cannabis company. Everyone liked to poke fun at her, mostly when she, Reed, and Eric quarreled over the dwindling supply of buds.

  “Her muscle salve worked.” I rub absently at the ankle I rolled on my journey to Arcata, thinking about how well her salve had helped me heal.

  “Johnny and Carter have both been using it. Now we can make more.” Eyes brightening, Eric pulls open a drawer and pulls out a Zip Lock with two buds. “Look at this. It’s shitty bud full of seeds.”

  From my time spent with the kids, I’ve gathered that shitty weed has seeds. The more expensive, premium buds don’t have seeds.

  “Now that we have seeds,” Eric says, “Do you think Leo and Todd could get them to grow?”

  My eyes narrow. “You want to use our indoor garden to grow marijuana?”

  “Pharmacies are going to dry up. We’ve looted our fair share, but the supply is going to run out. It’s in our best interest to develop other medicinals.”

  If his face wasn’t so earnest, I’d think this was a ploy to restock his pot supply. Eric spends more time stoned than not, but at the moment, there is no hint of fuzz in his eyes. He’s stone sober and he means every word he says.

  “I have to think on it,” I say. “Let me go over Leo’s plan for the garden and see if there’s a corner we can set aside for a plant or two. Your job is to go through these books and make a compilation of all the final recipes. Make a combined list of all the ingredients. There’s no use to put in a pot plant to make medicinals if we don’t have any of the other components.”

  “Okay.” Eric takes the notebook back from me and returns it to the stack, spending more time than necessary straightening the already neat pile. “You’re really going to consider it?”

  “Yeah.” I put an arm around his shoulders and squeeze. “We owe it to Lila, don’t you think?”

  He nods, sniffing once. “Yeah.”

  As I head to the d
oor, Eric says, “Wait—Kate. I—uh, want to talk to you about something else.”

  “What is it, Eric?”

  “I was—uh—thinking about the cemetery.” He shifts, not quite meeting my eye.

  “We don’t have a cemetery.”

  “The rubble where we buried Lila and Jesus,” he amends. “We need to mark it. Set it apart from everything else. Maybe find some fencing to put around it.”

  It’s not a bad idea. The problem is that it would take half our people and at least two days to find fencing and transport it to the site. It’s not the best use of our resources. I don’t say any of this to Eric, though.

  “Just think about it? Please?” Eric asks.

  “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

  “Wait. Kate?”

  Once again, he stops me when I try to leave. “Yes, Eric?”

  “Thanks. For being here. For all of us, I mean. You hold us together.”

  I give his shoulder a last squeeze. Before he can delay me any longer, I push out the door and into the hall—

  —and right into a sitting room decorated with streamers and a big, homemade banner with the words Happy Birthday Kate written in big bubble letters. Every member of Creekside is there, big smiles filling the room.

  “Surprise!”

  40

  Surprise

  KATE

  “Surprise!”

  The word washes over me. I stare, dumbfounded.

  “Happy birthday, Mom!” Carter, arm draped around Jenna’s shoulder, grins at me.

  “My mama is officially old.” Reed emerges from the crowd and crushes me in a bruising hug, lifting my feet off the ground. He twirls me in a half circle and plops me next to the kitchen table.

  In the center of it is a large chocolate cake. A paper plaque sits on top, the words Over the Hill written in black marker. Beneath the words is the number 40.

  “Guess who made the cake?” Jenna jerks a thumb at Reed.