An apple flew through the air and struck the girl with Sombra C in the face. Police whirled around to seek the perpetrator among the hordes. People cried out in triumph and backpacks were unzipped furiously for weaponry. The girl did not react beyond a flinch, and the apple rolled away between the cops. Students dodged it.
Then a drop of blood slipped from the girl’s nose, and instead of launching more projectiles, they screamed in terror and ran away.
Corbin
The roommate slept with a prostitute.
That was the point to catch Corbin again and again, probably because it had to do with sex. He had seen prostitutes once, standing on a street corner deep in San Francisco in front of a hotel with a neon sign offering rooms by the hour. They didn’t look like their television counterparts, clean and hot and youthful, hanging out of second floor windows to ladle witty spoonfuls of ribaldry over the heads of passerby on the sidewalk below. They had fallen into this work by poor fortune, but they were seeking true love.
The real prostitutes had torn tights and loud skirts, their jagged laughter wheeling up wildly into the sky as Corbin’s family drove past. Their faces were hard, and the smoke from their cigarettes curled along the chipped bricks of the wall. If they were wistful for love he could not imagine, but he did not see longing in their eyes. One looked strung out, bones in a skin suit with a coating of lipstick and purple eyeshadow, and her dyed banana-blonde hair fell raggedly to her waist.
He thought of them taking one man after another into those rooms for an hour, and what they did in there. Next. Next. Next. It was annoying how his body reacted positively even as his mind thought ugh. He wanted to be one of those men, and he didn’t since it was gross. The television version of prostitutes was better. Once he dreamed it was Sally standing there, furious that he hadn’t bought her a bigger bouquet and looking for a richer man. Corbin had far too vivid dreams. Sally, zombies, hookers, Ford Looper . . .
He’d wondered one morning while blinking away dreams how Sombra C would have gone differently otherwise, if Ford Looper had denied his shiftless friend’s plea to crash on his couch. The names had been released (thirty-two-year-old Justin Calhoun was the sleazy roommate; twenty-seven-year-old Sheila Gail the unlucky girlfriend) as well as every fact no matter how miniscule about their personal lives. Ford liked animals. As a teenager, Sheila once saved a drowning sibling in a pool. Justin was a douche with aspirations of being an author, a string of DUIs and work terminations, a daughter he wasn’t supporting nor had seen in months, and a penchant for his friends’ cash and pharmaceuticals. He was a loser, but a loser with a charming wheedle that won him admission to one couch after another for the last three years of his life.
“He was always on the verge of a breakthrough with his Great American Novel that would make him famous,” said a friend in an interview. Justin had written a few chapters and sent them out to agents, one writing back that novels needed to be finished first for consideration. That infuriated Justin, who was already spending the expected six-figure advance in his head. Famous after death, his partially written novel was posted online. Psychologists dissected the forty pages to ascertain more about his person, bandying about terms like narcissism and delusional and bipolar. Corbin had a diagnosis. Douche. That said it all.
Even under intense scrutiny, no one could figure out exactly how Ford Looper was infected with Sombra C. His bank records were picked over with a fine-tooth comb; his friends and family and neighbors and coworkers interviewed; his Internet history plumbed for information. There had been a kindergarten field trip to a petting zoo around the time he was infected, Ford subbing for a teacher out sick. Had he caught it from the teacher? Maybe she had left some infected fluids on her desk or somewhere else in the classroom. But no, the teacher was alive and well months later. It was just a cold. From the zoo? Had Ford come in contact with an infected animal? A pig died days after his visit, but the body had been cremated and there were no blood or skin samples since it had not seen a vet. The pig was old and pneumonia assumed to be the cause of death. The origins of the pig were being traced, but it was a traveling zoo with a history of violations and its records were shoddy.
Even the death date wasn’t certain. Three of the employees said it was after Ford’s visit, and two were positive that it had happened before. They had three pigs that looked exactly alike and they couldn’t even agree on which one had died. The old one picked up from a humane society in Nebraska, or one of the two from a farm in Utah? None of the workers lasted long in what was a pretty shitty job; none had worked for the traveling zoo when the pigs were acquired, so little could be gleaned from them. They drove from place to place. They fed and watered the animals. They did the spiel when kids came. All three of the pigs were named Bessie to forestall having to change the spiel. A second one had died in mid-June, having never seen a vet, and was buried off some lonely stretch of highway. No one remembered where. The government had taken the one surviving pig and every other animal in the zoo for testing. Public opinion was that the owner was a reprehensible, animal-abusing person, and her other traveling zoo in the Midwest was also taken away for testing.
Though no one could figure out how Ford Looper contracted the virus, the minor mystery of where Justin got the money for Betty Bareback was solved. He had been spotted on a bank camera cashing a check for five hundred dollars written out to Ford from his grandmother. It was intended for airline fare for a trip in August. Ford didn’t have the money to fly to Florida so she sent it to him. Instead, it went to Betty Bareback, who was willing to do pretty much anything her clients desired, from long BDSM sessions to foot worship to quickies. Her real name was Candace Walters. She was thirty-one (but billed herself as twenty-four) possessed a lengthy array of STDs and extensive history of drug use (but billed herself as clean on both fronts) and failed out of junior college (but billed herself as having a bachelor’s in communication).
She used a fake picture on her website. It was stolen from a modeling agency. The real Betty/Candace shared only the same hair color as the model, and interviews with her embarrassed clients, whose names had leaked from her appointment book, revealed her lackluster performances. I only saw her once was a constant refrain. The one man who wasn’t embarrassed at being exposed added that’s why you use an agency. They vet their girls. She charged two hundred and fifty dollars an hour and there it was in her book, Justin’s first name and a two-hour appointment. Paid in cash. What they did in those two hours was mercifully unknown.
She saw three to five clients a day, most of them married men, and almost all of the sex was unprotected. That was why Sombra C exploded, that and Ford’s attack on the pedestrians and cops. But Ford attacked people who lived locally. Betty/Candace had clients from all around the state, and some from out-of-state doing business in Denver. So it spread and spread and spread with her as the common link. The only men who had not contracted Sombra C from Betty Bareback were clients who happened to visit in the earliest stages of her infection. Her viral load was not high enough to transfer as easily to a new host, although in one instance, it still had. The lone man to escape an encounter with her unscathed in her last days had insisted on using a condom, and did not engage in kissing. The article about it was named: He Had Sex With Death and Survived.
“Hmm,” Dad said about that. He was home for two weeks from business trips selling wine. The night before school started, he looked over the Sombra C project Corbin had worked on and said hmm a second time at that headline in the corner.
“Anything else?” Corbin prompted. It was not a criticism, that hmm. Dad was just putting his thoughts together.
“It reminds me of the AIDS scare when I was a boy.” Dad moved around the three little toy pigs below the display. “People were terrified. They didn’t know how it spread. A hospital turned away a baby who had it, because they feared that she would give it to everyone. Sombra C is like AIDS on speed. Which part of this was most interesting to you?”
“The we
ekly maps of the U.S.,” Corbin said, pointing to them on the project board. The infection grew like blossoming flowers within the states as the infection grew in number. He had other maps for death tolls, a quarter million in Colorado, hundreds of thousands to millions in New York, Minnesota, Texas, and California. It was strange to think of how just one person brought it to each place, and total chaos ensued.
Little towns all over the country were entirely wiped out by Sombra C, like Swate, Nebraska and Kingdom Come, Oklahoma. “I was also interested in how the rate of infection had a direct correlation to the speed at which a local confinement point was created. There’s so much anger at Wu over those points, but the math can’t be argued. We’ve had an estimated five million Sombra C deaths and thirty million living with the infection. Compare it to Mexico, which has had twenty million deaths and seventy million infected. Their population is a third of ours, and their rate of growth today is still moving very fast. Sombra C is spreading in America even now, nothing will ever stop it save a cure, but the rate has slowed drastically.”
“There are a lot of reports coming out of those confinement points about abuse.”
Corbin motioned to the section that Dad was looking over. “One confinement point in Denver was gassing their patients to deal with the overflow. Others mixed their populations of the mad from the still sane, and thousands were murdered. Most of those places were hellholes, and people have a legitimate complaint about human rights violations. But we’re still going, this country is still going, and other economies have collapsed.”
“The end justifies the means, as so many claim?”
“No,” Corbin said thoughtfully. “Isn’t that comment kind of glib on both sides? The left means it sarcastically when they say it and the right means it sincerely. We were presented with a sudden, overwhelming health crisis that threatened the whole country. There was never going to be a perfect solution that respected everyone’s rights. This is the real world, and that wasn’t possible. I listened to Jonathan Penner’s commentaries going back all the way to July. We had to act hard and fast on this, and we can see what happened with governments who did not act hard and fast. Hard and fast meant confinement points and National Guard, shutting down public places in the worst affected areas, and ignoring the right to refuse medical care. It meant stopping the creation of other pharmaceuticals so that all of those companies could create more Zyllevir. It meant stamps, although Penner is thinking these should be removed now, or relocated elsewhere on the body. People don’t walk around with HIV+ stamped on their necks. That’s private. It’s your personal responsibility to have safe sex, not an infected person’s responsibility to broadcast his diagnosis to the world at large.”
“But this is far more dangerous than AIDS.”
“Yes, it is. There are only inelegant solutions here.”
The quiet voice of retired ethics professor Jonathan Penner had filled Corbin’s ears for hours through this project. He was not above saying that he was wrong about issues, nor taking unpopular positions such as the removal or relocation of stamps. The press pilloried him for that. But someone with a two percent infection was not going to infect you by any means save pouring their bodily fluids down your throat. The risk through sex was minimal, and condoms eliminated it. Zyllevir failed here and there, but mandatory testing caught those people.
“Sombra C is a serious danger that is here to stay. But what interests me,” Dad said, “is the unexpected danger Sombra C has created in the rogue Shepherd movement. That’s just as worrisome. It’s being used as a cover for racism. When I was in Tennessee, I was stopped twice on the roads by Shepherds wanting to perform saliva checks. There was no reason in either instance to single me out except that I’m Asian.”
You’ve been home for ages and only now mentioned this? Corbin thought. “What did you do?”
“What could I do? Encircled by armed ruffians? I submitted to the test in good humor, thanking them for their vigilance.” Dad trailed off, and Corbin recognized from the flex of Dad’s fingers that he was angry. That was why he had not brought it up. “It was demeaning. Humiliating. Frightening. I am a professional man walking down the street to make an appointment and minding my own business. I am not thinking of danger, just sales. The second time it happened, they asked if I was Vietnamese. I said Chinese and German, and they asked if I sold fortune cookies, if I was related to the President. The wine representative I spoke to in my time there had changed his route to work because of a checkpoint in which he is always stopped for a test. Why? He is gay, and they harass him. They feel that gay men are so promiscuous that he should have daily tests. He felt this humiliation, too.”
“He should move away from Tennessee!”
“It is his home. Why should he cede his home from birth? His family has lived there since before the Civil War. It belongs to him just as much as it belongs to them. But when I read the news, the latest profile and crime of some Shepherd, I think that he should move.” Dad tapped the edge of the project. “I will look at this more later.”
The project had consumed Corbin for weeks, and provided a fantastic control for his interactions with Sally. Nope, he couldn’t answer the long morning text! He had to attend his home schooling. But Corbin had time for The Daily Cheese, she protested, every day a new photo and sentence. His dog got more coverage than his girlfriend! He asked if she wanted to pose with Bleu Cheese, but she said that was silly. When she was sitting in his lap in the back seat of the car kissing him madly, he was so in love that he wanted to shout. Most other times, she bugged the hell out of him.
He did not want to hear about calorie counts and how Remo Wiley wrote a poem for his girlfriend Connie every day (implying that Sally herself was being shirked). Once she got so mad about The Daily Cheese that she broke up with him, and Corbin hung up the phone with a strange sense of grief and relief. No more fun in the back seat, but also no more oh my God, did you hear that Hanna told Lane that Kelly had an abortion over the summer? Oh my God, Frankie told Myla to piss off when they fought and she cried and cried and then she told Kay-Kay that . . . That last bit of gossip about Frankie, Myla, and Kay-Kay had had Corbin bewildered. He asked who they were and she exploded. She had said twice that they were on the new reality show Me, Myself, & I and didn’t Corbin ever listen to her? Oh my God!
It was hard to listen when she wasn’t really saying anything hour after hour. So he was grieved but relieved when she dumped him over the dog, sniping that Bleu Cheese was his real girlfriend. Within minutes, her HomeBase page was changed to a broken heart and single, and flooded with sympathetic comments and questions. Her best friend Saylor called and said, “Why are you so mean to her?”
That embarrassed Corbin, not to mention made him defensive. Then Sally came to Mr. Foods to visit the next day and somehow they were back together again. The broken heart post was removed. He wasn’t sure how it happened, and he was less happy about it than seemed appropriate. This new world since Sombra C had barely infiltrated her consciousness. The strangeness of a saliva test to gain admission to school captivated Corbin, who had never imagined such a thing. When she called that night, he brought it up and she said, “That was so gross! I was in line for two whole hours and then this guy was like let me take your spit and I thought are you like some freaky perv into fluids?”
“I wonder if we’ll have students with Sombra C in our classes,” Corbin said.
“Ugh, that’s so nasty! They should get taught somewhere else. Yanni and I bought water bottles today because we’re not drinking out of the school fountains. I didn’t know which kind to get, purple or pink and Yanni picked this really ugly one but don’t tell her I said that. Mona is taking her brother’s old water bottle, isn’t that disgusting? Like, it’s only ten dollars to buy your own!”
“Did you hear about the cullers?”
“The what? Which show is that?”
“Not a show,” Corbin said in exasperation. “That’s what they’re calling vigilante Shepherds no
w, cullers. I heard it on the news. They cull the infected stock from the clean stock. The Shepherds want nothing to do with them, that’s what they claim anyway, but I wonder if in truth they approve-”
“Oh, Corbie! Why do you always think about such awful stuff? So we were at the store and-”
He thought about how to get off the phone, faking a call from his mother, or the dog needing to go out. The blossoms on his project held his attention, the blooms growing in size week after week, the deepening flush of color as more people were infected. And those infections would only continue forever now, with unprotected sex, with people refusing Zyllevir for whatever reason. Those prostitutes in San Francisco . . . he wondered if any of them had gotten Sombra C from their work.
“Are you even listening to me?” Sally demanded.
“Oh, sorry!” Corbin said rapidly. “I thought I heard my mom calling, but it was just somebody outside. Tell me again?”
“Silly Corbie! What should we do for our Halloween costumes? I think we should match, like Prince Fab and Princess Glam from the cartoon!”
Oh hell no. “I’m too old to dress-up.”
“You’re not too old! I saw the costumes when we were buying water bottles and I bought yours already-”
“Then why did you ask what we should do?” Corbin asked.
“-and the wands light up! So you should wear something in dark blue to school and I’ll bring the sash and crown-”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 14