“Why would you want to go anywhere?” Isaac said in an imitation of his father’s voice. “You want to go clothes shopping? No need to go to Hollywood. We got stores right here in Lincoln. Just order it off the Internet if they don’t have what you want. You want to see a play? Why go to Broadway for that? We got a playhouse downtown and they put on great performances, and cheaper, too. He’s not agoraphobic. He’ll leave the house. But it’s like he’s state-o-phobic. Everything you need is in Nebraska, so why leave? Our family has lived here for over a century and it suited them fine. So what’s your problem? Too big for your britches? They knew their place and we should know ours. He takes wanting to go somewhere as a personal criticism, and disrespectful to our ancestors. And then everything changed, and it bolstered his opinions. It made him get even narrower, shrinking from Nebraska to just Lincoln. Mindy is planning to apply to every college out of state she can find next year. She’s been saving up in secret for the airfare for ages. If she doesn’t get accepted, she intends to catch the next commercial flight to anywhere and never return. He’ll shit his pants when she goes, and twice as hard since I will have chosen the cows over working the family farm I should be dreaming of inheriting in a few decades. We aren’t supposed to leave home.”
“So all of that was true, what you said about him?”
“All true. And it’s getting worse all the time.”
“What did he think was out there that was so scary? Before the change?”
“The wrong kind of people, Corey,” Isaac said dramatically. “Lesbians. Drug dealers. Illegal immigrants. Hippies. People on food stamps. People who don’t honor democracy by voting. People who do IVF and thwart the natural process. Like we didn’t have those things in Nebraska. Every year, he just gets a little bit crazier about it. Maybe he has a slow-growing brain tumor or something, because he’s not just a little off like a lot of people are. He’s a lot off. You know what I mean? The kind of off that almost belongs in an institution. He expects all of us are going to live at home forever and work the farm, and that when he and my mom die, that the three of us will keep on living there together until we die.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” Corey asked.
“Honest truth.”
“But . . .”
“That’s what I’m saying. What if we want to get married? People usually do. Have kids? Most people do that, too. He did both of those things himself. But somehow, it doesn’t apply to us. He just sees a future wife or husband of his kid as our family being infiltrated by outsiders. He was fucking awful when Mindy had a boyfriend last year, forbidding her to ever bring him home to meet the folks, refusing to let her go out on dates. Whenever she talked to the guy on the phone, Dad would make her get off and do some chores. All we need is the five of us, and he doesn’t even like us.”
Crazy came in all different flavors: from Mr. Wisquin to Keefer to Marquis and Mason’s weird mother with her rainbow coalition kid collection. Isaac eased down on the brakes as a man waved in the middle of the road. “Is Topeka reclaimed?”
“I didn’t think it was,” Corey said. And he would know, considering his foster father was in the government and always talking about reclaimed cities.
Isaac rolled down the window. “Can I help you?”
“You carrying any 3s in there?” the man asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you carrying any 3s?” he said impatiently, but more slowly like they were too stupid to understand. “We won’t have you dump them off here. We’re trying to live.”
“We don’t have any 3s,” Isaac said.
“Let me in to check.”
“No. We’ll open the curtains and you can look inside, but you aren’t setting foot in here,” Isaac said as Corey, alarmed, took the handgun out of the glove compartment.
The man glanced at the gun, at how huge a guy Isaac was, and considered the offer enough. “Fine. Move on.”
And that was crazy, too. When they were away from him, Corey said, “What the hell was that about?”
“Who the fuck would lug 3s around and dump them off in another city?” Isaac said. “Lame cover story. He just wanted to get inside to see if we had anything good to steal. But all he had at his belt was a knife.”
They passed through Topeka more soberly after that, watching keenly for 3s and regular people. The few they saw of the latter variety all turned to stare at the camper going by. Corey checked and rechecked the lock on his door between reading the street names and turns off his cell phone. One man was on the grass of a front yard, twitching and staring directly at the sun. He was a 1 having an episode, or an epileptic in the midst of a seizure. If any 3s or chain reaction 2s happened along, he was going to be an easy meal to catch.
“All right,” Isaac said when the camper coasted to a stop in front of a two-story white house with bleached blue trim. “112 Cobb Street, Topeka. The half must be in back.”
It was dead on this block of homes. Most had had their windows smashed in, and 112 was no different. All of the first story windows were broken on the side facing the street. They got out and locked up the camper so nothing, whether human or zombie, boarded in their absence. Each boy took a handgun along and Corey still had the flashlight in his pocket. Going down the driveway, they discovered a side door that had a mailbox reading 112 ½. Isaac tried the knob and it opened to a tall flight of stairs with another door at the top.
They looked at one another and Corey said, “I did the casino.” So Isaac went in first, each step creaking under his feet. Corey whispered for him to move over and walk on the side of the steps. Both of them went up that way, but it didn’t reduce the sound that much. At the landing, Isaac motioned to the door. It was cracked.
Nervous yet excited, Isaac called, “Hello? Is anyone home?”
No one answered. No one groaned. That was promising. He pushed at the door, which creaked as badly as the stairs, and they peered inside. A hallway led into a living room and a kitchen, and they were trashed. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and everything knocked off the shelves in the living room. The refrigerator had fallen forward in the little kitchen, and the freezer compartment was resting upon the cracked counter on the opposite side.
They split up, Isaac opening the pantry and Corey penetrating deeper into the apartment. A beanbag had been ripped apart on the floor of the living room, and its contents were all over the carpet. He squeaked over them to a second hallway. It led to a bathroom and bedroom. Both had also been trashed, the shelves under the sink pulled out and overturned in the bathroom, and the bedroom a sea of clothes thrown everywhere and the mattress pushed off the box springs.
“Wow, good housekeeping,” Isaac said. Startled, Corey jumped. They entered the bedroom, walking over the men’s clothes on the floor. The closet door was wide open, and the bar held only a lone hanger. Beneath it was a suitcase covered in travel stickers.
Two framed photos were on the floor. Corey picked them up. They showed the same family in each one, two generations of adults and a pair of teenaged boys, all of them Asian. Isaac found a third photo. There was just a single person in it grinning over a cotton candy at a fair, and that was one of the older men in the group shots. Corey said, “This can’t be Holly’s place. He’s too old to have adopted her and there’s nothing around for a little girl. Not even a second bed.” Mama-Daddy-Brown-Bear. It wasn’t just Daddy-Brown-Bear. Corey picked up a fourth picture. The glass was cracked over the shot of that man alone on a beach. He hadn’t had a wife, from the looks of it, or she was deceased.
“But maybe . . .” Isaac paused. “No. It’s got to be the Cobb Street in Abanoxie.”
They searched the entire apartment to convince themselves that they were right. There wasn’t a single toy or kiddie book anywhere, and the sofa didn’t pull out into a second bed. It looked like the guy had become a 3 and torn up his place, then wandered out and never returned. The wind had probably closed the door at the bottom of the stairs. Since there was still food in th
e pantry, although not Sugar Boogars, it proved no one normal had hidden out in here since then.
Eventually they gave up, helped themselves to what was still good on the pantry shelves, and went down the noisy flight of stairs to the camper. Isaac said, “Too bad. This is half over now.”
“It would have been all over if this had been the right place,” Corey pointed out.
After they got in, Isaac started the engine. “You know what it is? I don’t want this to end. This is fun. I don’t have any fun in Lincoln. It’s just work, school, yelling. Work, school, yelling. Then it’s going to be work, work, work after I graduate. And yelling when my dad calls, pissed that I’m not coming back, and more yelling when I visit home to see my mom. When does life get fun, Corey? Do you ever wonder that? Is it ever any fun? People talk about how this is our golden time, but this isn’t gold. It isn’t silver or bronze either. It’s cheap, rusty tin ware.”
So Corey wasn’t the only one who felt like his life had been turned into a junk drawer. That surprised him, hearing it come from happy-go-lucky Isaac, whose life hadn’t changed all that much in comparison. “Yeah.”
They doubled back through Topeka by a different route to avoid that weird dude who asked if they were lugging around Type 3s. Fences stretched around several blocks and fields where crops were growing. People had claimed a portion of the area. There was a desperate quality to the claiming. The fence was made out of wires or planks or bricks depending on the section. The homes within were ramshackle. No one had time for lawns or prize flowers. They were growing food and panicking about winter.
“Why do you think they don’t move to reclaimed cities?” Corey asked.
“They’re like my dad,” Isaac said. Backs were bent in the fields, little kids and old people straining beside the able-bodied adults. All of them looked up to watch the camper go by. “Not as crazy, maybe. But they lived here when the change happened, I guess, and they want to stay here afterwards. It’s home.”
That was like how some people clutched to the past when the present was something totally different. But their clutching wasn’t doing them any good. Instead of going with the flow, they stood still and let it roll over them. The world wasn’t coming back the way it had been before, not ever, and trying to explain to Corey what he had lost wouldn’t help. This was how it was. The people behind that shit fence would do better to move to Wichita or Lincoln, stop breaking their backs and spread the work around to a larger community.
“Did you like your dad?” Isaac asked abruptly. “I’m not talking about love. Did you like him? As a man? As a person?”
“Yeah,” Corey said.
“What did you like about him specifically? What did you two do together?”
It hurt to remember, which was why Corey usually blocked it out as much as possible. “Friday nights he’d come home from work and yell it was time to put on our weekend pants. That meant no pants. I had my favorite shorts and Dad had his boxers and a T-shirt that was way too big. Before Mom was killed, she had this ratty old nightgown that was almost see-through. We’d hang out and watch movies in our weekend pants, order in a pizza and then watch more movies.”
“That sounds fun.”
“It was fun. Saturdays were the day he wouldn’t do shit, and we weren’t allowed to do shit either. Sunday was for homework and bills, buying groceries, mowing the lawn. But Saturday was ours, unless I had a birthday party to go to or something. I liked him a lot. And he liked me. He was always there if I needed him. For school and stuff.” A bit of heat came to Corey’s cheeks and he looked out the window to hide it. He didn’t talk about that with anyone. For school, for girl problems, for what-the-fuck-is-puberty-doing-to-my-body and general life questions, Dad had been there. They had had a tight relationship when most of his guy friends were falling apart with their fathers, and tighter after Mom died.
“My dad would yell his head off to catch me watching TV in my boxers,” Isaac said. The mood in the camper had lost its jubilance from earlier. Now it was sober, and everything from the ugly orange and brown color scheme down to the boxes tied up in the shower felt like it was listening to them talk. “It’s weird when I look at old pictures of him. We’ve got photo albums that start back when he was in his twenties. He’s got this huge smile on his face in each shot. Standing around with his friends, hoisting a brew, laughing his head off in some of them. And I look at him now and think what happened to you? What the fuck happened to you? When did you go from that happy dude in the pictures to this angry, weird old man in our house that no one likes? Who yells all day long over nothing? Why can’t I know the guy you were before?”
He turned the camper around the corner and they drove past another section of the crappy fence. “He never laughs. Ever. I can’t remember him ever laughing in my whole life. He doesn’t have any friends now. And you can watch my mom’s smiles turn to grins in the pictures, and then just the corners of her lips curled up a little, and now . . . she doesn’t smile at all. She just stares at the camera, looking beat down and blank at the same time. She doesn’t have any friends now either. It wasn’t the change. It happened before the change to both of them. Is that going to happen to me, too? Are my kids going to look at my pictures one day and notice the same thing? I don’t know. So do you know what I do when someone lifts a cell phone to take a picture of me?”
“What?” Corey asked.
“I dodge it,” Isaac said, and they rumbled past the last of that sorry, makeshift reclamation.
Chapter Three
Janice was dragging through the day, having been up for most of the night. Every time she’d fallen asleep, a thump or groan woke her and she had to get up to see what Holly was getting into now. In the kitchen fumbling at cabinets locked shut, in the bathroom doing the same, bumping into furniture in the living room as she walked mindlessly around, the little girl was a pitiful sight. Yellow slicks of mucus leaked from her nose to crust on her upper lip; more dripped down to her chin. When Janice tried to wipe it all off with a tissue, Holly snapped her teeth. Her stomach rumbled so audibly on one occasion that for a second, Janice thought they had a dog in the house. But it was no dog. Holly was just hungry, having eaten nothing but breakfast on Sunday and a few nibbles at lunch.
The bug going around the elementary school was a mild one, other parents had said. A bit of a sore throat and fever, the usual nasty nose business for two to three days, not much of a cough at the tail end. The episodes triggered by the cold seemed to set in just as the nose exploded with goo, and had totally faded before the cough set in for a brief, light stay. It was so minor of an illness in a few students that it hadn’t triggered an H1Z1 episode to accompany it.
Holly hadn’t complained about a sore throat or a fever, but she rarely spoke even to mention pain. Janice comforted herself in the long night hours that this was going to be short, and soon the girl would be back to herself and running through the house in her purple princess hat and cape, waving her magic wand with the glittery star at the tip. What spells did a mute princess cast? No one knew, but they were performed with gusto. The wand was locked in the girls’ closet, and Janice had been woken up yet again by Holly thumping repeatedly against its door.
At four in the morning, the poor thing finally wore herself out and fell asleep on the floor in her room. Janice was too exhausted by that point to put her in bed, and that was embarrassing. She didn’t want to risk waking her up and left the girl curled into a somewhat cat-like ball on the carpet, her belly turned up to the ceiling. Only in an episode did she sleep in that odd position.
Janice never would have left her own children that way. But they wouldn’t have snapped at her like feral creatures either. Sometimes she just wanted to climb into the minivan and drive away, far from this family and this life, drive until she found her old one waiting for her. The kids eating cereal at the table, Damon pretending the text message coming in was from work and not one of his extracurricular lady friends, an appointment on the fridge’s whitebo
ard for Janice’s massage at one in the afternoon . . . She was so dreary and overtired as she closed the door on the Holly-ball upon the carpet that she irrationally considered getting her keys and driving back to New York. The only thing that stopped her from going at that moment was that Corey had taken the minivan and never returned.
They weren’t waiting for her in their spacious New York home that she had labored to decorate to perfection. She was the only one who had walked away three years ago with her mind intact. She wished that she had just been made over into a Type 3. If zombies maintained any familial ties, then she would still be with her children.
Holly slept until eight and had gotten right back to it, wandering around the house, groaning and thumping her head and hands on the doors and walls. Mucus was everywhere on her and on everything she touched. Janice wiped it down here and wiped it down there, spraying disinfectant and using clean rags each time.
The girl wasn’t interested in a bowl of cereal for breakfast, or peanut butter toast and eggs. She needed fluids to deal with the cold, but the only fluid was coming from her nose and between her legs when she wet her pants in the hallway. Janice shut her up in her bedroom to clean it, down on all fours pressing thin towels into the puddle as Holly groaned in her room. “Uhhhhhhhhhh.”
“It’s okay, honey,” Janice called. This was going to end tomorrow or the next day, and the younger boys had gotten to the neighbors’ in time. Judy was a self-contained young lady, as always, and had taken care of herself in the laundry room until it was time for her to climb out the window and go to school. Janice had a key to let herself in, where she’d dump the dirty laundry in the washing machine, pat Snuggle Butt, and make sure to lock the room up when she left. Foogles. Kids didn’t see the baskets a parent scored. They only saw the missed shots.
She soaked up the puddle, sprayed the carpet, and then scrubbed at it with a second towel. It was a warm day, and in no time it would be dry. Holly thumped harder on the door and the knob jiggled. She’d figure her way out soon and Janice would figure out how to get her out of her pee-soaked clothes.
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