The online video had a rainbow cast of Pewter students discussing their experiences. This was not a party school. Yeah, they had parties, but few people were getting hammered every weekend. This was not a homogenous group. If you had an issue with Muslims or transsexuals or anyone who was in some way not a reflection of yourself, you didn’t belong at Pewter. They had a club for liberals and one for conservatives and one for other, and they engaged in civil monthly debates of current issues. The entire student body turned out for the funeral of a local soldier who had died in Afghanistan, to stand between the mourners and picketers. It did not matter your position on the war. It did not matter what political message the picketers thought was so important, and whether or not you agreed with it. The dead soldier, his family, and his friends were due respect for their loss. Politics and mourning were two separate arenas. Students, professors, and the president of the school stood in a red-and-black wave on green grass, holding up huge cardboard lions so that the grieving family couldn’t see the picketers.
Respect for oneself, for fellow students, and for the community was what Pewter founded its pride upon. College was not a four-year vacation from the real world, a last gasp of reckless adolescence. Pewter was for young adults, their first step into a professional community. It was a private school and the price tag made Elania flinch. Forty grand a year.
It had only seven hundred students. It had an active Jewish community. It had a top-notch English department and small class sizes. It had monthly seminars for women in the workplace. She was guaranteed a double room, not a triple like some colleges, and a single by junior year. And she wasn’t going to have the only black face on campus. That had been important to her, not being the ambassador for black affairs in a white sea, or the Jewish one in a Christian bastion. Until her family moved to Cloudy Valley, California, she lived in Kebbeport, Maine as the lone ethnic dash who walked out of her public school classroom after her third-grade teacher asked if she had been saved.
No. She had not been saved. She was Jewish. Maybe that was what she’d write about for her college essay, how she struggled with a teacher who wanted her to sing Christmas songs like everyone else because she was missing out on all the fun. Elania’s parents put a stop to that fast, and then Mrs. Staver wanted Elania to teach everyone about Judaism. She did it because someone had to do it. Mrs. Staver wasn’t up to the task (nor was she up to withholding her praise Jesus compliments from eight to three) and Mom helped with a little presentation about Hanukkah. Mom was very patient with Mrs. Staver, who mixed up Jewish with Amish and asked if they ever used electricity. Yes, they did. Even on the Sabbath. Nor did they keep kosher, or drive a horse and buggy.
Elania didn’t want to do that again, have it be her job to explain what it was like being Jewish or black since she was the only one there. There was a Korean student at her elementary school one year, and the other students called him Ching-Chong Chet. The only person Elania knew in California who said anything like that was Zaley’s father. But California had the distinction of an elderly member at her Reform Temple who said in surprise, “Oh, I didn’t know black people could be Jewish!” That was Mrs. Birnbaum, who randomly gave Elania a hundred dollars one day for her college savings. She hadn’t meant anything badly by her comment; there was just no filter between her brain and her mouth. The Douglas family had the only black faces in the temple, and the number at the high school was vanishingly small. It was like Maine with better weather.
Whatever she wrote about, it had to be 750 words of perfection. Deep and personal and resonant, and perhaps she’d skip race and religion altogether to write about regulating the fertility industry. Elania was sick to death of her six-year-old triplet brothers. She could include a picture of their trashed playroom and all three of them yelling and shooting each other with aerosol string, or yelling and wiping boogars on each other. And she’d draw labeled arrows so the admissions reader could get a visual on Conor, Cormac, and Percy. They came out of the womb yelling.
When the letter arrived cancelling school, Mom moaned and thumped her head on the kitchen cupboard. Echoing thumps came from upstairs. “I’m going to give them away.”
“We could put them in a box with a FREE sign outside of Mr. Foods,” Dad suggested. He shouted, “Boys! Stop doing whatever it is you’re doing!”
“You were so easy,” Mom said to Elania. “So calm. I gave you breakfast; you ate breakfast. I said homework time and you sat down. I thought I’d be getting two boy versions of you.” Percy had been a surprise until late in the pregnancy, hiding in the back somewhere and blocked out by his bigger brothers. Even at six, Percy was the smallest, and slowest, not in his head but in his body. He had mild cerebral palsy.
Both Mom and Dad taught at Cloudy Valley schools, so they weren’t going back either. They came up with a schedule to preserve everyone’s sanity, rotating trips to the park and movies and free ice cream from Micah at the Cool Spoon. Elania also had her weekend job at the vet’s office for a break. Not giving injections or anything, and it wasn’t more than three hours of work either day. But it was peaceful. She gave the animals being boarded food and water, petted and fussed over them, and did a basic cleaning of the office. Doctor Yvette Ghol, pronounced ghoul and unfortunate for a person in the medical profession, had a bad back and paid Elania eleven dollars an hour to sweep the floors and scour the sinks, file documents and take out the trash, tidy up the place so it looked good on Monday. Elania loved her job. She was the only one there, and save a few forlorn barks or meows, it was quiet. Now and then she took one of her brothers along to help. They weren’t so bad when separated, and puffed up with importance about feeding the animals and keeping them company. Usually she took Percy, sometimes Conor. Cormac was more of a struggle.
But together, dear sweet Jesus that her family didn’t worship, when they were together it was madness. Even when they were getting along, they were horrifically loud. Every day they had a Pee Party, in which all three of them clustered around the toilet to take a simultaneous piss while they sang pirate chanteys at the top of their lungs. Pewter was five hundred miles south. It was so much easier to like her brothers when they were far away. They got food poisoning in early August after a friend’s birthday party, and there had been barf all over the house. Elania stayed overnight at Micah’s for relief. They sounded like the old family cat Sprinkles when they threw up, huh-huh-huh-HACK. Except the HACK was followed by a wail of MOMDADLANIBARF! After Sprinkles died, Dad said no more pets, not until the triplets were older and stopped sprinkling themselves.
The day the letter came, Mom said, “If we were good parents, Mark, we’d come up with a home schooling schedule for them. We’d tackle this problem head-on and make every moment a learning experience.”
“If we were good parents, Aviva,” Dad said. “I’ll choose some movies.”
Shocked that September was starting without school, Elania sat at the counter and texted her friends in a state of disbelief. I miss school.
That is an understatement, Zaley wrote.
You guys are nuts, Austin responded. The correct response to school cancellation is YAAAAAAAY! I’ll just keep on making bank at work.
It’s cancelled? When did that happen? Micah wrote.
We all got a letter. You didn’t? Elania answered.
Fuck our mailman. We’re on a training route.
Sombra C, not to be disrespectful to those who were suffering, was messing up Elania’s college plans. What if school was cancelled for the whole semester? Did she still apply to college? She had her SAT scores and they were good, solid numbers. Her grades were mostly A’s. She ran a club, had a job, and since sophomore year, she had written the weekly movie critic column for the Cloudy Valley High News, as well as a few other articles. What she didn’t have was a senior year.
Every day since the fifth of September, she’d checked the district’s website to see if closed until further notice due to Sombra C had been changed to starting next Monday. Now it was
Rosh Hashanah, the boys throwing apples at each other and blowing the shofar into each other’s ears. Their family wasn’t very active at temple, but Mom was planning to go to services for the singular reason of childcare. The longer school was cancelled, the more religious she was going to become.
If this went on to Yom Kippur, Elania would be atoning for the murder of the Douglas triplets. Or she’d be living with Micah, or else building a fortress out of the Mattazollo toilet paper hoard and squatting in their backyard. President Ching-Chong, Zaley’s father said that once in the background while Elania and Zaley talked on the phone, and then a door snapped shut. Elania didn’t mention it, and Zaley didn’t say anything. But that was how he referred to the first Asian president of the United States, President Ching-Chong instead of Wu. What he called the first female vice president, Elania didn’t know. Probably Bitch, since it rhymed with her surname Pitch. A forceful and passionate debater in the last election season, Elania was dismayed to see the woman reduced in the press to the adjectives strident and shrill, with occasional references to PMS and columns dedicated to her hair and clothing.
Vice President Bitch. She was sure Zaley’s father called the woman that. If Sombra C hadn’t gotten in the way, Elania was also sure that this year’s election campaigns would have gone no differently. It was the only reason reporters weren’t obsessing about her hair. The conservatives had put forth a truly frightening candidate in Zeller, who wanted to usher them all back to the 1950s where everyone knew their place: women in the kitchen and blacks shining shoes, Mexicans on their side of the border and homos in the closet where they belonged. Dad said there had once been a day when you could have a good conversation with a conservative, but that day was gone. The party hijacked by extremists over the last few decades, it expelled its moderate and rational members in favor of the loons. He kept replacing their Wu-Pitch sign in the front yard, which had been egged twice and vanished once altogether. It troubled him, that happening in mind-your-own-business Cloudy Valley.
Something was stirring, something ugly. And Sombra C was acting as a catalyst. Without school to keep her busy, Elania watched the news a lot more than usual. Wu had cancelled his appearance for two of the three presidential debates and Pitch the vice-presidential one to tend to more pressing matters. Zeller called him a coward on national TV. But they were in a state of emergency! The vice presidential debate was reinstated, and Wu was called a waffler. Mom thought he should have stuck to his guns, and Elania rolled her eyes at the hysterical screaming that Wu was planning to award himself a second term without benefit of a vote. That was a fantasy straight out of some crazy people’s heads.
People like Zaley’s father, no doubt. In August, Elania saw him at the store stocking for Sombra C, and he had frightened her. She knew then why Zaley was such a mouse. Hulking over a cart, gimlet eyes on the price tags, he looked like a three hundred pound mountain of barely contained rage. It spilled out in his hand when a bag of beef jerky slid over a box of cereal, threatening to drop to the floor. He slammed it down, not caught it but slammed it so hard that the sound rang out throughout the store. The anger in his eyes from that rogue package of beef jerky! It made him look absolutely insane. Elania was curious if he’d forced Zaley to dump Corbin last spring. The one-quarter of Corbin that was German was not what you saw when you looked at him, any more than the part of Elania that was Irish and Polish was what you saw when you looked at her. Micah and Austin agreed (lovingly) that Zaley was a spineless wuss, but they had not seen this man strike a bag of jerky so hard that he dented the cereal box underneath it. They had not seen his eyes.
Mom and Dad were not stocking for Sombra C, although they did freshen the emergency bucket with fresh batteries and granola bars. Some items were missing from the aisles of Mr. Foods, mostly fruit imports from Chile and Mexico, and the apple harvest in Washington State had been lackluster due not to weather or quality but lack of workers. The crackdown on undocumented workers, added to those sickened by Sombra C, created a perfect storm. A reporter called it the Apple Holocaust and Elania winced. A season of unpicked apples was the equivalent of the Holocaust? She hated how words were misappropriated, reduced of their intensity, and had tangled with Dale Summit when he came into Welcome Mat last winter complaining that the cafeteria had raped his wallet. It got under her skin. That was a heavy word, as heavy as Holocaust. You didn’t use it in jest. Dale was the one person they ever told to leave the club (even Zaley standing firm, Elania learning the mouse could only be pushed so far) after the blowout with Austin on one of their movie days.
Micah shouldn’t have thrown the brick through Dale’s windshield, but Elania understood even if she didn’t approve. Dale was a dick. A stupid dick who foolishly took on someone willing to sink to his level, and then go even lower. Elania would have been hysterical to lose her shot at valedictorian, had she been a contender. The B’s in math held her back.
Seeing a half dozen sparse or empty fruit bins was odd when Mr. Foods stores were always overflowing. Once Cormac had plucked an apple from the bottom of the pyramid and they all rumbled to the floor. There was no longer a pyramid for him to destroy. It was also odd the sign put up on the meat counter in mid-July announcing that their beef did not come from Colorado. A rumor had started that Sombra C was a strain of mad cow disease gone wild, and no one would buy it.
In the early days of the virus, it had been so hard to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. Did getting Sombra B mean you were immune to Sombra C? Elania worried, because she’d never gotten Sombra B. That one was airborne. It passed the Douglas family by, which was amazing since the triplets brought home everything else. Both of Elania’s grandmothers had gotten it in New York, her Aunt Tawnie up in the San Francisco neighborhood of Sable Heights, and all of the other relatives scattered about the country. Scientific evidence finally mounted to show that having Sombra B was no protection from Sombra C. Patient Zero had had both.
The Internet was full of quack cures like mega-dose iodine pills, citrus diets, and aura therapy. Faith healers claimed they cured it with the light of the Lord. A woman had felt the virus growing inside her and read the Bible to stop its replication. People screamed end times and Rapture and conspiracies that Sombra C was lab-created and released on purpose. Some refused to come out of their homes. A man was killed in a San Diego street by a squad of Shepherds, who mistook a schizophrenic for a victim in the last stages of Sombra C.
The Shepherds freaked out Elania nearly as much as the people with Sombra C. The first squad to form back in July was a necessity with Colorado so out of control. They worked with the police force and provided extra eyes on the streets. But since then . . . wow, since then. Squads were all over the country now, armed and lawless and eager for excitement. For every genuine Sombra C victim they shot and killed, they also shot someone innocent. They created random checkpoints on the roads and demanded to search cars for the ill. In Ohio, one car had not stopped at the checkpoint and the Shepherds opened fire. They killed the driver, a woman who didn’t speak English, and two of her three children in the back. None had Sombra C. The police could not deal with Shepherds on top of this illness, and often they went free. There weren’t the resources to stop them.
Also freaking Elania out were the people who hid their infected relatives in back rooms or attics, figuring prayer or vitamins would cure it. Inevitably the person went wild and escaped into the streets to spread the virus around. Elania had a recurring nightmare of a zombie chasing her around the high school while throwing water balloons filled with infected blood. His face was decaying, new faces pushing forth to replace what was gone and then rotting off him one at a time.
Maintenance workers went into the sewers to make repairs armed, since zombies gravitated toward the dark and calm. Families were being so selfish and irresponsible to hide infected relatives and let this happen! Those people had to go to confinement points and their families should stop picketing them like a crime was being committed. She talked a
bout it at dinner one evening and Mom said, “Rachel Elania, think about it from the family’s perspective. If I came home one day and found out that all of you had been carted off to a confinement point, I’d be out there picketing and fighting to get inside, too. No one is even given a chance to say goodbye. They’re just taken away forever. You aren’t mad and dangerous in your first two weeks of infection, and you should be able to get your affairs in order and hug your family one last time. Those Never Said Farewell support groups break my heart. Their worlds ended in an instant, and you can’t just move on from your family.”
The porn industry was refusing to use condoms, as always. Elania got that gem from Micah, who kept up with such things. Privately, Mom gave Elania a lecture that if she was having sex with Austin, she needed to use protection. Elania almost laughed. She was just Austin’s beard. No one else knew save Micah, although Mom asked if they were fighting because Austin didn’t call much, nor did they hang out often. It was a relationship of convenience for appearances at school and his family. There weren’t any boys Elania was interested in at Cloudy Valley High. She liked the college men in the Pewter video, and she wasn’t planning on sex until then. Especially not with Sombra C around! Micah said some asshole in Kansas who knew damn well that he was infected slept with people anyway to pass it around on purpose. It was his last hurrah to the world, that psychopathic asshole.
“If I get Sombra C, I’ll have to stop licking people’s cones,” Micah said regretfully at the Cool Spoon after the Kansas story. She did that, secretly licked the cones of customers who brought an attitude to the counter along with their order. “Or maybe I’ll just continue.” Micah was trying to get fired. She gave away so much free ice cream that it was amazing her boss hadn’t noticed.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 5