Wow, Corbin wrote. Okay. I guess we have to. We might lose some people.
We should WANT to let them in, and those people can get lost, Zaley wrote, surprising Elania with her fierceness. It made her feel more confident about the decision. Sometimes the mouse had a little lion in her.
Yes, captain! Corbin answered with a smiley face.
Welcome Mat is for everyone, Elania confirmed. Well, except for Dale Summit.
Good, Zaley wrote, and that was that.
Brennan
He worried that the knocking at the door was Papa. The sound came in shapes as he woke from a nap on the sofa. Thud thud thud and he listened for the color. Red squares were angry knocks; friendly yellow taps were neighborhood children selling cookies. The pizza deliveryman was the only one who ever used the knocker, a rattling blue lance that pierced twice through the house. This trio of brisk thuds was the same disinterested beige as the door. They traveled to him in circles, the rap of knuckles radiating out where the red square was made by the side of a fist. Whoever was at the door was impatient but not angry.
Papa had followed Mama from work last Friday to figure out where they now lived. She spotted his old car in the rearview mirror as she drove across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was purely chance that she looked back, intending to check on the new television latched into the back seat and spying him. A coworker had sold her the television for dirt cheap, since he bought a bigger one.
She made a wrong turn on purpose and drove all around San Francisco with the new television until the rearview mirror no longer showed Papa’s car. He had also called her work to wheedle for information, but Mama was smarter and warned her boss not to give anything out. Yet Brennan worried, since Mama said ruefully after their television was set up and playing that even so, she missed Papa now and then.
Brennan did not miss him at all and hoped that Mama held more tightly to her recent memories of the bad times than the better ones from the distant past. Maybe it had just been an idle remark, born of seeing a man and woman dance beautifully together on the screen. Papa knew how to dance, how to open a door for a woman, how to say nice things in front of other men about her cooking. But Papa also knew how to shush a woman for speaking, how to say terrible things about her son, how to strike her in the face. Mama had to remember that, to turn a deaf ear to his platitudes and a hearing one to his insults.
Brennan worried that Papa would come to her office and make trouble, but a zombie was causing the biggest trouble today. At lunchtime, the police suddenly descended on the block where Mama worked and shut it down, telling everyone to lock their doors. A zombie was loose in the area! A man’s Zyllevir had stopped working weeks ago, but his family did not want him to go to a confinement point so they doubled and then tripled his dose to treat the sickness at home. Mama and the other workers raced about the building in terror, even locking the windows on the third floor.
Some men sneaked out to their cars and left a door ajar. Mama discovered this on a second sweep through the building and screamed as she ran to close and lock it. The boss was so angry that she made a list of those men’s names to remember not to call them back for pruning in January. Mama called Brennan over and over to give him updates. They had planned to go to Tic-Tac-Taco for a dinner treat, since the store had a Monday is Funday Special. Now she was trapped in Napa, so she had him tell her over the phone how his second week of school was starting up. He made dinner on his own, although he was not hungry for it. Zombies! It had not seemed totally real until now, and the news was showing him just how real it was.
He watched the new but old television until his mother called to say the zombie had been shot two blocks away so she was on her way home. The feral man had ripped his wife apart and savaged his son, so berserk from Sombra C that he bit the hands that fed him. Luckily, he did not manage to infect anyone outside in his rampage. People knew to run away when this wild, rotting creature exploded into the streets. They fled to stores and homes, climbed trees and grabbed children walking home from school to hide in backyards. The zombie wheeled around the roads, crazed and bloody as he pounded on windows and smashed himself against locked doors. Retired soldiers who heard the police scanner and came to help found him hiding behind a dumpster in the dimmer light.
Relieved that Mama was heading home, Brennan turned off the television and lay down on the sofa to rest his eyes. He wished the zombie had come across Papa going to Mama’s work to bother her. He imagined Papa running down the road in fear, having come to make someone afraid and now he was afraid instead! His shouts and insults could not bully a zombie, which left him with nothing but his two legs to flee. To see him made small sparked a flame that burned in Brennan’s chest. At the market over the weekend, he had seen a new poster on the wall of soldiers in crisp uniforms standing by the flag. They were tall and strong with stern posture, their expressions stoic and NEVER BROKEN written overhead in the cloudless sky. He wanted to be like that.
It played in his mind how it would happen if Papa made the right turns to this house some day. The red squares of his fist to the door and the knob turning before Mama could lock it . . . and there was Papa filling the quiet space of their home. Make me dinner! Where is that stupid boy with the white name? And then Brennan opened his bedroom door, Papa’s head swinging low to find his eyes and having to go up, up, up this tall body with its broad chest and big arms, up to a stoic face. Like with the zombie, Papa was afraid. This was not a little boy any longer. It was the hulking shape of a man that filled the doorway. Brennan should ask for dumbbells for Christmas.
Thud thud thud. One day he would not listen to knocks at the door for the color and shape of the emotions behind them, and he’d open it without fear. NEVER BROKEN. Brennan would finish school and have an unbreakable mind; become a soldier and have an unbreakable body. All of Sunday, he had fashioned missions in misty jungles and when a fellow soldier was hurt, Brennan helped him to the helicopter. Their friendships were unbreakable, too.
Still half-asleep and Mama not home yet, his mind drifted to girls, the one in his magazine, a beautiful girl named Yanni at Cloudy Valley High, another on a movie poster he passed on the way home from school. The girls vanished and were replaced by the wizened face of their landlord. Twice Mr. Jenkins visited on the pretense of checking something outside and looked through their windows to make sure they didn’t have pets.
The trio of beige knocks happened a third time and Brennan woke fully to get the door with the soldiers from the poster behind him for support. It was nothing, yet another campaign worker wanting to talk about the election. Mama usually closed the door in their eager faces. She wasn’t going to vote tomorrow, since it didn’t really matter who was in the White House. The reds were rude to your face, the blues were rude behind your back, and she was tired of rudeness.
The man at the door was tall but so narrow that Brennan could see most of the street around him. All of his presence was in his eyes, which were brown and alight with intensity. He did not seem to notice that Brennan wasn’t old enough to vote, and without preamble, he said, “It’s time for California to go red. Can we count on you to vote tomorrow-”
“Please excuse me,” Brennan said, and closed the door. There was a thump, the purple rectangle of an open hand in frustration striking the wood. Brennan slipped to the window and watched the man walk away. It was not until later when Mama asked about the new addition to the door that the thump took on a new shape. The campaign worker had slapped a Zeller-Shane sticker upon the wood.
If a soldier had answered the knocking, the campaign worker would not have put the sticker on the door. Brennan knew this down to his soul. The uniform, the stature, and the stoicism marked territory in a way the short, slender fifteen-year-old boy in jeans and a T-shirt failed to do. He was hungry to see this man in the mirror looking back at him, so hungry that he made a second dinner and ate it with Mama. Though he did not want to know about his real father, he asked, “Just tell me if my papa was a tall man?
”
“Oh, not so tall,” Mama said, and Brennan was disappointed. So he didn’t ask more, to stop his image from being reduced further. Girls wanted guys to be taller and he was only five-six. Girls wanted guys to be stronger and he needed to build! In P.E. today, he’d pushed hard in the weights room and on the track. There were no sports this semester in school, but he planned to join track and field in the spring. Already he was running to prepare, feeling the stag’s legs in his own. Although the track was a flat oval, in his head he was leaping boulders and fallen logs, cutting through tall grass and weaving among trees.
Cheerleaders only attended football and some basketball games. But they might practice on the field at the same time he did. They would see him flying and wonder who he was, rather than Brennan always wondering who they were. Yanni Bolman was so lovely that heat rose in his body just to look at her. Her hair was a deep brown with bronze streaks from the sunlight and her eyes were gray, true gray. They had no classes together since she was a senior, but his locker was near hers. She was always laughing amidst her friends, and tossing locks of hair over her shoulder with careless flicks of her fingers. The boys around her were tall and muscular with booming laughs.
Entranced last Wednesday, Brennan had followed Yanni and another girl into a science classroom for a lunch club. They made a beeline for a boy at one of the black tables with gas hookups, wheedling for him to eat with them outside. The boy did not want to go, and they did not want to leave without him.
The girl who had waited with Brennan outside the district office for saliva tests waved to him. Not knowing what to do in this room, Brennan called hi, Rosalie. He was proud that he remembered her name from the clipboard. Rosalie Grace Mattazollo. From another table, someone sitting directly in the glare of sunlight through the window yelled that no one called her that except people who didn’t know any better.
“I’m- I’m sorry,” Brennan stammered, unable to see the yelling girl very well even with his hand over his eyes.
“Zaley. It’s a nickname,” said Rosalie. “Take a seat, or did you come for homework help with DeAngelo and Quinn? It’s over there behind the curtain. There’s a whole other half to this room.”
Embarrassed to have gotten her name wrong, he nodded and shook his head, moved aside hastily for more students coming in. Someone else spoke to him. The words came in dull through his right side and he couldn’t suss out the meaning. A red stamp caught his eye and with urgency, he stepped away from the boy and staggered when his ankle turned out. A girl was stamped, too.
“I didn’t come here to be treated like a leper,” the boy said defensively to Brennan. “I’ll go back to the office.”
“You’re welcome here,” Zaley said, but a commotion broke out among some of the students at the tables. Yanni and her friend looked up in terror to the stamped kids.
This was a disaster to Brennan, getting a name wrong, missing words, almost falling over in front of twenty-five people. His hair was probably sticking up in back, too. More students were coming in so he could not go out; he did not want to be any closer to that stamped boy or girl. Not knowing what to do, he ducked behind the curtain and looked around warily. A boy read comics on a beanbag in the corner and there were two round tables. One was crowded with students, half of them listening to a fat boy’s explanation of a history project, the other half following a girl’s finger as it drew down algebraic properties. Lunches were wedged between textbooks. At the other table, a pair of dark-headed boys studied plastic and metal parts laid out in perfect lines.
Brennan sat on a chair against the wall, feeling lost as to his next move. Since everyone else had lunch, he took his from his backpack and ate quietly. One of the two boys looking at parts noticed him watching, and said with impatience over a creased paper of instructions, “Read this, would you mind? One at a time until we find the pieces.”
“Unless you’re here for homework help?” called a blonde girl from the other table. That must have been Quinn, but he didn’t want to make another mistake. She looked familiar from the line at saliva checks, standing by Rosalie. Zaley. That was a curious nickname.
“No, I’m okay,” Brennan said to Quinn, and joined the boys. The one who had spoken to him was named Stephen Chang. He and Henry Keller were juniors, and the complicated creation laid out on the table was a robotics kit. The finished product was a toy car that changed directions to a new course at a clap, whistle, or shout. Lunch was fantastic then as they checked over the pieces to make sure everything was there. Stephen’s instructions were crisp and angry, not angry with them but a more general, undirected anger. Brennan inched closer to not miss words.
There was a commotion from the other side of the curtain, the door opening and shutting over and over. With his right ear turned out, he could not hear as clearly, but it was about the stamped kids. After minutes of gathering up the courage, he asked the boys, “Is there a problem over there?”
“Just arguing about if we should accept Sombra C students in the club,” Stephen said. “Who cares? As long as they stay over there.”
“Can’t you hear it?” Henry joked.
“Not all of it,” Brennan said. He explained about his hearing and both boys spoke louder as they sorted the pieces. Until the bell rang, the talk was of the circuit board, transistor switching, and how to solder, their sandwiches forgotten to the side. Stephen invited Brennan to come to the library at lunch when the club wasn’t meeting, instead of getting knocked around the hallways by the lugnuts on the football team. So Brennan went to the library on Thursday, having never received an invitation from anyone to hang out until now. The boys studied so he studied, eating in secret with them. Stephen dropped a paperback book about robots in front of Brennan and said that he should read that one and another series later, so Brennan checked it out.
He went back to Welcome Mat on Friday and then Monday to work on the car some more with his new friends, giving a wary eye to the two stamped students. They stayed on the other side of the curtain, so he did not worry overly much. Still, he checked for an exit. If one of them freaked out and became a zombie, there were no doors to outside on this half of the room. But the big windows would be easy to climb through. He kept one open on pretense of keeping the air clear from the smell of the soldering. These zombie fears were not voiced to the other boys, whose conversation was of the current project and past projects. Very little of a personal nature was ever said, with the exception of hot girls on television shows and Stephen’s castigations against the football team. This suited Brennan, having such strict definitions while the other side of the club was freewheeling.
Today a boy named Corbin had visited to say hello, calling himself the project manager and shaking hands in a joking way. Then he grimaced at the instructions and said it looked like they had everything under control. Stephen said, “Speak up, he’s hard of hearing,” and Corbin clapped Brennan on the back and replied, “No problem, I’m hard of reading.”
Stephen showed a receipt on his cell phone and said, “I’ve pre-ordered Horizon II, Corbin, release date mid-December and see if your girl can’t release the choke chain for a night.”
“What’s Horizon II?” Brennan asked. The boys were appalled.
“How can you not know Horizon?” Corbin cried. “It’s a video game, going undercover in an alien nest world. You’ll have to come over and play. There’s another game coming out next February that I want to try, called Deadlock Five. The preview was great.” When he left, Stephen said that Corbin couldn’t read any better than a little kid and his girlfriend was the biggest bitch in the school.
Brennan had dared to say hello in the hallways between fifth and sixth that afternoon when they passed, Henry returning it and Stephen grunting, Zaley smiling sweetly and Corbin shooting a bright hey, Brennan back at him. It was incredible when he had always been a ghost at his other schools. And everyone else in the hallway liked Corbin especially, yelling his name and waving, so Brennan knew a popular student. He di
d not know what else to say and did not plan to try with any other familiar faces from the club. He’d just screw it up, miss words, not know how to joke, and it was enough to be seen. Almost enough.
To sit over there on the other side of Welcome Mat where Corbin and most of the girls were tempted him, but he did not want to touch a table that the stamped were touching. In their classrooms, they had the special seats for handicapped students in the front by the whiteboard. He often imagined a zombie freaking out and chasing girls about the hallways, and how Brennan would grab their hands and pull them into a classroom to safety.
Cursing about the campaign worker’s presumption, Mama peeled the Zeller-Shane sticker from the door and threw it away. They had a hang-up call after dinner on the landline, Brennan putting down the receiver nervously and thinking that Papa found out the new number somehow. It was too soon; Brennan was nothing impressive yet. He did push-ups and sit-ups at bedtime, as many as he could manage, and dragged himself under the covers with his stomach muscles screaming in dismay. Would he be allowed to be a soldier with his hearing trouble? He worried about this. Dear God, he did not want Papa back! Their lives were as they should be, Brennan and Mama in their quiet little home without knots, where he didn’t always have to worry about the shapes he was missing. He would never forgive Papa for hitting his mother, making blood leak from her nose and staining her cheek red. Papa would not have dared to do this in front of Mama’s soldier son!
That thump of the sticker goaded Brennan into the night and the next morning. Wherever he looked on the way to school were stickers, Wu-Pitch or Zeller-Shane, vote on this proposition or that. Each one was a reminder that Brennan was of no consequence to this world. Some of the oldest students were wearing stickers announcing that they had voted, and many of the teachers and administration wore them as well. English class was a discussion of the issues, leading up to a fake election with ballots. The teacher asked for Brennan’s opinion on Prop 40. He sank deeper into his chair, not wanting to answer either way because it would lead to a debate with someone else. What did it matter anyway? He wasn’t old enough to vote and it wasn’t a real proposition but one proposed too late to count for this election.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 17