Xan felt a ghostly defensiveness. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No, it wasn’t. Remember that last December? How I caught that miserable cold and could hardly get out of bed? Mom found out later and asked why I hadn’t called her for help. I said that you’d come over and done everything. It was the truth. You did. I’d sneezed myself to the bathroom and was hacking my way back once and I looked in. A pot of soup was warming up on the stove; Katie . . . Katie was doing a puzzle and watching a Christmas cartoon. The living room was clean, the tree was decorated, the trashcans were at the curb, and there you were installing anti-virus software on my laptop while you two sang along with a song on the show. Everything was fine. Everything was perfect. I could just go back to bed. And Mom said . . . it sounded like she had to pry it out of her throat . . . that I had picked a good man. My dad never did shit around the house when she was sick or healthy. It was the one and only compliment she ever paid you. Or me.” Colette smiled wistfully in a rectangle of light coming out of the foyer to their building. “I miss my mom. She was so damn frustrating, but I still miss her.”
Xan remembered that December and that cold, if not to the same level of specificity. Colette swept her hands over her cheeks and went inside. So did Xan, but what he wanted to do was pass through the doorway and back into that house set up for Christmas. When he went in, he was still in Newgreen.
His stomach tightened. It was all he could do to keep himself following after Colette to the stairs. He wanted to go back outside and rip the metal cages from the soil, tomatoes bursting under his feet to ooze their blood into the road. All that wasted seed, the wasted effort . . . he just wanted to destroy something. He stuffed it down and stepped into the apartment, did the normal things a household needed, noted again that they had to go shopping. Before he went to the hospital tomorrow, that had to get done. He dumped out the pens and ribbons in the coffee mug to set aside some tokens.
Colette took a shower and collapsed into bed. He stayed in the living room, needing something to do yet not having anything. He’d read the books, both those from the Collection Agency and those that had been here when they moved in. After flipping through one, he set it down and looked around. Nothing in the kitchen needed cleaning. Use of the communal laundry machines was restricted to certain days and this was not one of them. He turned on the television, lowered the volume, and watched a movie as his agitation swelled. The sky grew darker and darker outside, and then it was full night. A second movie started.
There was a mall on the screen. Those didn’t exist anymore. Then there was a restaurant, and those didn’t exist anymore either. The hospital cafeteria was the closest they had, and at most it sported two items on the chalkboard menu. Then the screen showed a school, a crowd of children with backpacks pushing up the steps to enter the building as a principal beckoned them in, and Xan turned it off. He picked up another book, set it down, picked up the next in the pile, rifled the pages and dropped it.
He could not stay inside. He couldn’t breathe in here.
Pocketing his keys, he opened the door in a swift, silent movement and slipped into the hallway. The door locked behind him. He strode away on the worn carpet, wanting to run. The apartments were silent, at most a mutter of conversation going on behind the closed doors. The guys at 311 were the noisiest, laughing in harsh barks at a television turned up too loud. They had once lived next to Xan but moved after Lucca was born. They couldn’t stand how he cried at night, and thumped brooms on the wall. Xan had finally gone over there and asked them to stop, and they’d retorted that they would stop when he got his kid to shut the hell up. Xan hadn’t yelled. He’d just replied tiredly that when he found Lucca’s off switch, he’d flick it. Then they looked at him stupidly as they put it together that he couldn’t do anything, and applied for a transfer. The best that could be done was four doors down. But that was enough to make everyone happy. Jay-Jay was still a snot, but Brewer nodded companionably when he and Xan happened to be in the hallway or doing laundry at the same time.
Xan clattered down the steps to the foyer, hit the door and passed outside. It smelled richly of the garden. Frank had gone home to his apartment in another building long ago, yet Xan still heard the drone of his voice over the tattered pages of his magazines.
He jogged down the sidewalk, heading for the road that was still a road. It was well past curfew but he didn’t care. Patrol was strict at the periphery of Newgreen and more lackadaisical within it. As long as Xan didn’t run too far in any one direction or make a lot of noise and announce his presence, there shouldn’t be a problem. If Patrol caught him anyway, he’d say that he had dropped his keys on the road during the day, and he had just found them and was going home now. Good night.
Following the clear roads through Newgreen, he passed garden after garden at his sides, all of them gone dark and quiet with night. Some glowed with solar orbs brought in from hell. The green and gold and white orbs seemed to hover in mid-air. Katie would have been entranced by them.
Daddy, can we get one?
Sure. Pick a color.
She would have gone back and forth and back and forth, lifted one and set it down for another, chosen and fingered through her beaded coin purse to see what she had, and what she had to save up, to buy a second and third. Colette had raised her beautifully, and Xan supposed that he had had a hand in it, too. Katie hadn’t whined or pouted when she wanted things. She was the kid who would set up a lemonade stand on the corner, a cup for fifty cents, a cookie for twenty-five cents, and sit there all Saturday afternoon instead of playing.
He ran harder to escape the memories of what had never happened. That was one of the cruelest parts of losing a child.
In time, he passed twin heaps of rubble. The city destined to become Newgreen had been long overdue for road maintenance, and that had made the task of pulling out the roads for gardens easier. They were already falling apart. Behind the twin heaps was Chicken Crossing. The coops were strung with holiday lights, which showed dim avenues between the blocky wood and metal structures. For once, it was quiet here. Not all of the kitchen scraps went to the creation of compost. Some were routed here to feed the chickens.
The avenues were blocked off with cones and chains. A handwritten sign glowing with red and green lights warned DON’T STEAL EGGS OR CHICKENS. In a nearby window, a woman stared suspiciously down at Xan. She was keeping watch over the coops. A couple living by Pumpkin Place had stolen a chicken a year ago and gotten caught. Their punishment was reduced tokens for a month, and a warning that a second infraction would lose their tokens altogether for two months.
At the hospital, a truck was pulled up at the emergency entrance. It was probably there to collect bodies. There was no room in Newgreen for burial, no coffins or crematorium. Bodies were driven out and dumped, left for vultures and zombies and maggots. It was disgusting, it was disrespectful, and it was the only option. But Lucca was so small . . . if it went that way, Xan was going to steal the body if he could and bury his son at the park nearest Tomato. To think of Lucca chucked out of a truck to the side of the road in hell was unbearable.
A bright light shined up ahead. Xan slowed, needing to catch his breath, and went to see what it was.
He was getting close to the northwestern side of Newgreen, but was still too far away to hear the water. It lapped gently in the moat, almost too gentle a sound for the human ear unless a person was right beside it. He remembered when the moat had just been a giant trench that they were digging in panic by shovel and heavy equipment as gun blasts rent the air. People had died in diverting the river to fill the moat.
Such a simple thing kept the zombies out. Colette in her free time often walked over to the moat, to sit on the wall by the water and get away from people, but Xan never did. He was too afraid that while he was sitting there or walking along it, he’d look over to the other side and see his daughter. His vacant, bloodstained, zombie daughter. Standing in the grass looking over the water to him as a mea
l out of reach, roaming aimlessly into a red X in the earth that marked a land mine. Meatfarm had the most land mines of any settlement, but Newgreen also had them. Whenever a convoy brought those, volunteers received extra tokens for going out there to place them. Xan didn’t want extra tokens that badly, which was how most people felt about it. To load onto a raft carrying land mines and shovels and slip over the moat all for an extra chicken dinner . . . thanks but no thanks.
The bright light was coming from a warehouse. People were sorting through the contents of boxes and pallets, and shifting the goods onto trolleys to be disseminated into Newgreen. Clothes for the clothing stores, where a token could buy a whole outfit . . . edibles for the Big Bags . . . There was an entire pallet of split pea and chicken noodle soup wrapped up in plastic that had come from some warehouse out in hell. Hundreds of cans were there, and a second pallet was behind the first.
A man opened a moving box labeled HOMES and plucked out utensils and batteries, cans of food and soda, spatulas and pans, things the Collection Agency had cleaned out from silent suburbs and cities to bring here. Lining up ten cans of refried beans, he stopped unloading to drop those into the random items box on each Big Bags trolley. Another man lifted one out and said, “Aww! We can’t sell these! They’re expired!” Everyone laughed wearily. Even if mold had been growing on those cans, someone in Newgreen would eat them. Plenty of someones.
They didn’t see Xan out in the darkness. He leaned on a building and watched them while he rested. They were excited about a pallet loaded with canned fruit and selected a jar to share once the work was done. They debated what to do with the odds-and-ends in the HOMES boxes, and bitched about the stupid shit no one needed, like picture frames and little green vases. They pulled out board games and library books, light bulbs and watering cans, boxes of ammunition and handguns. Those last items were put on a trolley labeled Patrol.
“What the hell do we need this for?” a woman groused about a cuckoo clock that had been wrapped in tissue paper. “Do we still have that WTF can? I got a donation to make.”
“In the corner,” someone yelled, and she carried it over to dump it in as they laughed.
Time. It was less than forty-eight hours now. Xan wanted to go to the hospital, hold the baby’s hand, read the book and whisper to keep fighting, but they wouldn’t let him in until morning.
The people in the warehouse sorted and yawned, and then started to guess at the time. In merriment, the cuckoo clock was brought out of the can. It had stopped at 4:20, which led to pot jokes. Then their overseer called out authoritatively that it was a quarter past three and to stop messing around.
How had it become a quarter past three? Xan had forgotten that he’d sat through a whole movie and then most of a second. Peeling himself off the wall, he jogged away from the sorting. But he didn’t backtrack home. He wasn’t ready yet. He’d push on a few more blocks and then face the inevitable of the apartment and the stillness, this wait that felt like a slow-motion guillotine.
Very few of the lights in the apartments were on now. He made it to a formerly wealthier part of this city where there were condos. The tiny lawns were tangled in watermelon and pumpkin vines.
One more block. He’d go one more block, and start the long walk back.
He still couldn’t hear the lapping of the moat, but a ring of lights was taking shape. Armed guards paced the moat all night long under those lights, around and around Newgreen, even though no zombie had ever tried to swim across.
Something out in the night rumbled.
It stopped just as quickly as it had started. Xan looked behind him, expecting to see a vehicle approaching on the street, but nothing was there. He kept walking, the condos changing into stores. There was yet another Big Bags, a salon, and a bakery where some of the flour and packets of yeast sorted in the warehouse would be sent. Then the smell of bread would filter through the streets, and if any fruit were in season, it would be hastily carted to one of the three In a Jam kitchens to be made into jams and jellies.
Scuffling. Xan’s shoes were making scuffle sounds on the sidewalk, but one had gone overlong. He turned around again. No truck, no person or animal . . . he was alone. A warning bell resounded in his head, yet no one and nothing was behind him.
It was time to go home. It was past time. But that meant he would have to double back, and something felt off back there. It could just be a man or woman doing Patrol, and he was getting close to the moat.
If someone was here, he or she was hidden in the shadows. It couldn’t be a zombie. They weren’t stealthy, and yes, what Xan was sensing was stealth.
He listened for breathing and came up with none but his own. A chicken! Some of the chickens escaped now and then and ran around Newgreen. The sound could just have been one trying to roost on a fence. Or it was a dog. Most of the dogs in the settlement had gotten eaten in that hungry first year and no one kept them as pets because pets needed feeding. However, the moat guards kept some dogs that were trained to attack should a zombie somehow make it over to this side. They trotted along with their handlers at the wall. And if it wasn’t a chicken or dog to be making noise somewhere in the darkness around Xan, then it could be a cat. Cats were an infrequent sight in the streets, but some did live here. They fed off the mice and gophers and birds, usurping the dog as man’s best friend.
It was just an animal, chicken or dog or cat, and none was scary. Xan turned to go home and watched for whatever had needlessly spooked him. A long tail of a cat on a night’s prowl vanishing around a corner . . . a dog bounding over with a naughty twinkle in its eyes from sloughing its handler to run around . . . a feathery lump of a chicken shifting on a perch . . . There wasn’t enough light to see which it was, but it was nothing to be concerned about. It also could have been a person, a defiant teenager proving a point that he could so stay out late, or an adult drunk on bathtub brew and staggering around. Both could have mistaken Xan for Patrol and gone into hiding.
All was fine. All was well.
He couldn’t shake his nervousness.
He passed the bakery. Even closed, it exuded a faint and intoxicating smell of bread. The salon had the faint and less intoxicating smell of hairspray. Then he hit the Big Bags and looked in. Someone could have broken in to take a little extra food. Not what could be stripped from the gardens everywhere in Newgreen, but things from the Special aisle. Xan walked very slowly past the big plate glass windows. They hadn’t been broken, nor were there flashlights bobbing and weaving around in there.
He got to the door. It was closed. Hesitantly, he reached out for the handle. This wasn’t any of his business and he didn’t want to involve himself. But something about trying the door was less frightening than walking on.
Locked. He stared through the glass. Nobody could be stealing from the front of the store. It was too dark inside. They could have broken in through the back and gone hunting about for goodies in storage. Xan couldn’t see that from this vantage point.
He didn’t want to see anything. Dropping his hand from the handle, he backed away from the door. A Big Bags robbery would be big news in Newgreen tomorrow. Everyone would scream and howl about fairness, and security would be rerouted to guard the stores at night. Xan would hear the storm of it in gossip as he worked in the tomatoes.
He never should have left his apartment. The night belonged to other things than Xan, and it had been dumb of him to stay up so late. He would be wiped out tomorrow.
The morning seemed very far away. So did his apartment. He kept walking, his eyes on the road for a cat to shoot away and allay his anxiety, his ears attuned for a youthful or drunken giggle. No one was visible through the other windows of the Big Bags beyond the door. A tower of baskets pressed against the glass, and that was as much as Xan could make out.
Beyond the store was the road, and on the far side of it were the condos. His fingers clenched into fists as he approached the intersection. His mind threw out the fanciful possibility of Olyvyr Gravine�
�s ghost lurking around the settlement, relegated to eternal scratches and scuffling as the light to heaven never appeared and the gates to hell refused to open. Some crimes were too great to be forgiven, and likewise too great to be punished. He’d be forever in limbo, still shut out of the human community he was so desperate to join.
Xan was holding his breath by the time he came to the sidewalk. The noise had troubled him; the silence was troubling him even more. It felt expectant. The condos and the rows of apartments beyond them were deafeningly still, like all one hundred thousand residents of Newgreen had quietly expired in their beds as he walked the streets. One last biological weapon of some kind had wiped them out, leaving Xan as the sole survivor.
He was spooking himself like a five-year-old child. He stepped off the sidewalk to the intersection, and then the scuffling sound happened right behind him. He whirled around, raising his fists, and something struck the left side of his head hard enough to knock him to the ground. There was a shape above him and a swish-swish sound made by the legs of jeans rubbing together.
It wasn’t a hungry zombie, who would have dropped on Xan without delay. It wasn’t a guard from Patrol, who certainly would have announced his or her presence and demanded to know what Xan was doing out here. And it definitely wasn’t Olyvyr Gravine, who could no longer do anything. It was just a man, his features invisible in the night.
Dazed, Xan made out an arm swinging back. Light glinted off something metal that the man was holding. Xan lifted his arm defensively, too winded and shocked to shout. He was almost blinded by the pain in his head.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 25