The teacher wouldn’t let it go until Brennan gave some answer, so he said, “Yes, I guess.”
“You guess? You have no opinion? Some people seem to think that they aren’t a part of this world, that these issues don’t affect them, so why should they care? But we’re all in this together and-” the teacher lectured. Brennan skimmed the handout on his desk. Prop 40 was about freeing Sombra C sufferers carrying up to 50% viral loads from California confinement points.
When the teacher paused, waiting for more, Brennan said, “Then no.”
The class laughed and the teacher pressed on with more enthusiastic participants. Brennan circled his votes randomly when it was time and stuffed it into the ballot box. It was Tuesday so there was no Welcome Mat and robotics, and the library had been closed for some unstated reason. He didn’t know where the other boys were, nor did he have a cell phone to reach them. So he ate by himself in the hallway, reading the book that Stephen wanted him to try, and then he walked around.
He heard a shocked call between students of a car bomb. Alarmed, Brennan looked to the parking lot. He had missed a riot the first day of school, arriving once everyone was in the auditorium and the fires extinguished. A golf cart was being pushed back onto its tires. Late on the first day! He had set his alarm wrong, putting it to P.M. rather than A.M.
The car bomb had happened in Florida at a polling precinct. Brennan joined a group of strangers as a video played on a girl’s laptop. The screen was showing an overhead view of a blasted building crawling with emergency personnel. A reporter was saying, “-at one. Lines were out the door at the Hollingsway Civic Center with an estimated four hundred people waiting their turn to vote. A white van pulled up to the curb and exploded. Thirty-seven people are confirmed dead and area hospitals are overloaded with wounded-”
“Holy shit! What country is this?” someone said.
“The killer, described only as male, is presumed to have died in the explosion and the motive remains unknown. This is one of countless incidences of violence today around the United States, and by far the most deadly. In review: the first reported was early this morning as polls opened in Wellsprings, New Hampshire, when forty-four-year-old Kelvin Marr shot and killed twenty-year-old Franklin Smith for line-cutting. It was followed by riots at two New York precincts when poll workers refused to set up separate booths for Sombra C sufferers.”
The screen cut away to show pictures of the men in New Hampshire, and then a scene outside a precinct in New York. People were screaming behind a line of police, their faces red from fury. The sound muted for the reporter. “Gunfire broke out in both instances between Shepherds, Sombra C sufferers, and members of the public resulting in three dead and seven wounded. One-year-old Kenneth Schmidt was killed in his stroller, a bullet piercing through the window of a bakery and striking him in the head. Police have yet to apprehend all of the suspects-” The screen changed to a picture of a chubby-faced baby with a red ball in his hands, and to caution tape around a building.
“It was chaos in Los Angeles, California, when a stamped man threw a bucket of bodily fluids on Shepherds who had turned him away from his polling precinct earlier that day. Four have been hospitalized and the perpetrator taken into custody, where it is expected that he will be charged with assault. Turning our attention back to Florida . . . nearly forty people were killed when a car bomb-”
The bell rang, making Brennan jump. He had forgotten to pick up his math book, and climbed hurriedly up the slope to his locker. Over his head, a guy called, “I’m praying for you, Micah!” A girl turned with a smile so radiant that Brennan slowed. He had never seen such pure, unadulterated joy, like she had been given the most incredible gift and wanted to share it with the world. Light brown hair streaked with pink hung over her shoulder. It was pretty yet fake, unlike Yanni’s natural streaks from the sun.
“I’m praying for you, Dale,” the girl called back. They must have been part of the Christian Club that met after school. And with a smile like that on her lips wiping out her fake hair, Brennan thought he might join, too. Then he recognized her from Welcome Mat, the girl always seated by the window and hard to see in the sunlight streaming through the glass. He couldn’t sit over there, not when he had friends wanting his presence in the other half of the room, or when the sick kids were on this girl’s side. She might catch it from them, and he didn’t want to think of this pretty Christian girl with dirty blood.
He remembered his mission to pick up the textbook, which turned out to not be required when his teacher put on the television so they could watch the news. There were those faces of the line-cutting squabble again, the baby with the ball, the people screaming at the police. That blackened building swarmed with cops and medical technicians, followed by interviews with survivors. A breaking news update reported yet another incident in Detroit. Two Sombra C sufferers had been shot with a sniper rifle as they voted in their special booths. A culler was arrested, the local Shepherd squad disavowing knowledge of him.
“An ugly day for democracy,” a reporter intoned. Brennan was antsy for the bell to ring. It was necessary for him to call Mama. Digging change from his pocket, he used the sole pay phone on campus. She didn’t pick up so he left a message demanding that she not vote today, just in case she changed her mind. No vote was worth dying for.
At home he fretted to find no reassuring message on the answering machine. Every channel was playing those same pictures and now there was a new case somewhere in Oregon. Not a car bomb but another shooting between cullers and Sombra Cs, a shot of a cordoned-off street with fluid on the pavement. Two dead, maybe three, upped to five as the afternoon dragged on. Fresh stories of voter intimidation, threats of lawsuits . . . the car bomb was mentioned over and over, but with the turn of every segment, its dominance was thinned by other atrocities. Brennan looked at the mayhem on the screen and to the simple sights outside the window: the numbers painted on the curb across the street, the trees waving in the breeze. He saw faces in the shifting leaves, a bulbous nose over fat lips, shaken into nothingness and reforming to a forehead over gaping eyes. It was so calm, yet somewhere else these things on the news were actually happening.
The phone rang. He yanked it up. “Mama!”
She had not voted and he calmed to know that she was safe and almost home. The news stayed on through the evening. Votes were being counted in those blasted places and unblasted alike, and maps of the country showed growing red stains. Celebrations broke out for Zeller-Shane in the headquarters of those states, effigies of zombies being burned in trees and people cheering savagely to see their flesh blacken and split. Then other states flushed blue. Brennan thought blue had lost. Those blue stains were so tiny compared to that giant red swathe growing and growing.
Mama made burgers and said if they wanted her vote, they could fix up immigration policy. It was so hard getting workers for the vineyards with the borders tightened, and no one else turned up for the jobs. And while they were at it with immigration, it would also be nice if they could lower fuel prices. Six dollars a gallon! If Mama were not allowed to drive a work truck filled with biodiesel supplied by her company, she would have to move them back to Napa or find a new job.
The news was depressing so they watched a movie until late, Brennan doing his homework as it played. Then he went to bed. It was midnight when he woke to blasts. He sat up straight, lights flickering overhead in sharp reflections on his ceiling. Still partially in a dream, he believed for a moment that his torpedo bomber had come alive and was firing. But the light was flickering over it as well. Strange blares changed in intensity, some long and undying, others staccato.
NEVER BROKEN, he thought in panic. One hand went to his baseball bat as he got out of bed and went to the window. He left off the light. That would give away his position. Lifting the edge of the curtain, he reeled back to see the explosions in the sky. There was a slight reverberation in the air and ground.
Fireworks. The lights were only fireworks being
shot off in the roads, and the blaring was car horns. People shouted and brakes squealed far away. Sirens wailed, a gun cracked, the world was in chaos beyond the trim yard in the dark. The television muttered in the living room, adding trumpets and cheers.
Mama looked into his room. “It is just a party. And riots.”
“I thought it was an explosion. Who won?”
“Those who are rude behind your back.” Light splashed over her face, red and white and red again, like blood from cuts washed away and seeping once more. “It was very close.”
The horns blared on. The walls trembled as Brennan went to the living room to watch the celebrations on the television. Men and women pumped their fists and clapped as balloons rained down. They were dressed in fancy clothes, most of them older people but a few with children clustered at their sides. Zeller Concedes was written on the ticker tape under those throngs. Champagne glasses were raised over mouths open in happy yells. Then the edges of their lips slipped down and their eyes widened from crinkles to fear. The cheers were screams as heads swiveled, the guns began to chatter, and the screen went black.
Micah
“This just isn’t up to your usual standards,” Ms. Velman said, the English paper in her hand. Micah had been watching her for weeks now, even visiting the woman’s condo at night. She was fascinating for how fascinating she wasn’t. An unattractive thirty-year-old, she lived alone save for a cat. Even the cat was boring, white and pudgy with dull blue eyes. It sat on the windowsill and only looked over when Micah tapped on the glass.
The mail in the box was junk and bills and teaching magazines. The square vase on the porch held faux birds-of-paradise and rocks. The windows revealed a fleshless scene. There was furniture, yet not enough for the size of the living room. A loveseat instead of a sofa, an anorexic floor lamp rather than a squat lamp with a fat shade for the side table. The small pictures were swallowed up by the vast whiteness of the walls. The colors matched and the furniture was quality, but she did not know what to do with space except let it inhabit her home like a second occupant. Maybe that was what it was to Ms. Velman, space reserved for the belongings of a lover yet to show. Perhaps upstairs half of the closet was empty, half of the medicine cabinet, waiting for someone to fill it.
How could anyone be so boring? Micah went back at all hours to uncover this woman’s secrets, learning her brand of cereal, the blue sweatpants she always wore, that she drank one glass of merlot from a box of wine every night while watching A Date with History and grading papers. At eleven on the dot, she went upstairs and presumably to bed. Micah tried to get through an episode of A Date with History when she got home and wanted to stab herself in the eye with a fork after the first ten minutes. That would have been an interesting explanation to the emergency room doctor.
The problem with the English paper was that it had earned a B minus. Micah had had Ms. Velman for one semester of junior English and dazzled her from assignment to pop quiz to exam. Now it was senior English and acquiring all A’s was getting boring. Micah had invented a new game to break up the tedium. It was easy in math and science to score perfect 80s on everything: Micah just calculated how many to miss and got the rest right. Her other classes were trickier. She struggled to hit that sweet spot, either shooting a little too low or a little too high. Mr. Dayze gave out A’s like candy, so government was a true challenge. That was how he must have stayed out of trouble with his politically incorrect boundary pushing: students weren’t as likely to report him for denying the Holocaust ever happened if they were getting A’s just for sitting there quietly and maintaining a pulse.
Her notebook was filled with calculations, averages of scores and weights of different assignments. It was more work than doing it the right way. Uma and Tuma didn’t know, trusting that she was getting all A’s like she always had. Tuma talked colleges, Uma talked about a summer tour of Europe, and Micah found both avenues as dull as the eyes of Ms. Velman’s cat. Classes for a major, monuments and bed-and-breakfasts, both of them were white, uninhabited spaces to fill. Micah read Shalom’s emails about Yale, she could visit anywhere she wanted in the world on the Internet, so why should she do either of these things for real?
“I’m just wondering if anything is upsetting you,” Ms. Velman said.
Should she shrug sullenly? Confess to sloth? Micah lowered her eyes. “It’s just been hard. Everything is so different now.”
That was a lousy, rotten thing to do, use Sombra C to explain the bad grades she earned deliberately for fun. For all she knew, this woman had lost her entire family to the virus; a former lover could have filled those empty parts of her condo. She could be sick herself and paid her life savings for a black market removal of the stamp. Perhaps she greased the palm of the doctor as a bribe to leave it off in the first place. That was interesting.
But Sombra C shouldn’t be used for Micah’s entertainment, not when people were dying every day. To look at the news, the country had gone straight to hell. Yet Micah was using it anyway and getting a thrill. It overrode the vague guilt. They talked about how strange the world was becoming and then the teacher gave her a hug. Micah wanted to ask the name of the cat, that dull, boring cat in the window. Instead she smiled at Ms. Velman like the hug had rejuvenated her fallen spirits, widening her lips and eyes a tad too large to make her expression unnerving, and wished her a happy Thanksgiving.
School was clearing out and papers were strewn over the hallways. They had only been back for a little over three weeks and the excitement that vacation caused was as palpable as in a regular school year. Micah had gabbled among them about her house being full of relatives, although that wasn’t entirely the truth. Why did she lie about something that didn’t matter? She didn’t know. She just did. It wasn’t a total lie since Shalom was back, and Uncle Tyson and Gramma Eleanor were staying over. But Grampa Hugh and Gramma Cherry had gotten a hotel room, as they always did even though Uncle Tyson was happy on the big sofa in the basement rec room and Gramma Eleanor took the sofa bed in the study, which left the nice spare bedroom free upstairs. Uncle Tyson’s daughter Amanda wasn’t coming but would still be there, since she was all Grampa Hugh ever talked about. Amanda did this and Amanda did that and Amanda said and like I told Amanda . . . Micah wanted to yell we got it, Grampa, we’re not your real granddaughters like Amanda. It would be so very easy to hate favored Cousin Amanda, Shalom said, if she wasn’t a really nice person.
Lies. Micah didn’t even have a shift at the Cool Spoon this afternoon but was pretending that she did. Uma had gone insane decorating the house over the last week, coming home every day with a new bag of knick-knacks from Dabey’s and other stores. Pumpkin place card holders for the table, glittery pinecones, oak leaf napkin rings, autumn-colored votive holders, a little village of teepees and log cabins with pilgrim and feathered native figurines to stand around a table with a tiny turkey atop it. This was in addition to the decorations they had had for years. Their house had never gotten such lavish treatment. The windowsills sported gourds and baskets spilling over in a harvest bounty imported from China and made of plastic foam. Micah had hung red-and-gold wreaths of leaves and rearranged the figurines as bidden, since she’d placed them squaring off around the table and Uma wanted them mixed in a friendlier way.
“Isn’t this nice? Isn’t this nice? It’s going to be a perfect holiday!” It was spoken constantly, anxiously, and Micah had no interest in going home to listen to the rustle of a bag, the refrain of how nice this or that was. She didn’t want to hang the newest acquisitions and coo over how precious they were, how unique, like Dabey’s didn’t have a hundred more on the shelves for nineteen ninety-nine. Shalom could do it, and mean it.
Thanksgiving was going to be boring. Crumpling up the English paper, Micah got into her car and hit the road. No plan, no particular direction, just a drive to look for . . . she didn’t know what she was looking for. Something different. Something exciting. Once she had hydroplaned on the road after a hard rain, and to lo
se control of the car made her scream. That was what it was like to feel her heart beating! Not the controlled thrill of a rollercoaster, safe on a track, safe under the bar, but actual danger.
Pulling onto the freeway, she gunned south, zipping around cars going too slow for her liking and activating her phone app that alerted her to speed traps ahead. This morning had been briefly interesting while parking her car in the school lot. The back door opened suddenly and Zaley popped in. Telling Micah in a threatening way not to say a word, Zaley whipped off a T-shirt with bunnies on it, sat there in a bra and pulled out one of Micah’s old T-shirts from her backpack, and yanked that one over her head. Micah didn’t say anything, since this was so unexpected and she was curious where it was going. The first shirt was stuffed into the backpack and Zaley got out, yelling thanks and see you in second period. Zaley was weird.
Micah’s family had the same conversations around the Thanksgiving table every year . . . the same stories, the same jokes, the same laughter, the same pussyfooting around topics because Uma and Gramma Eleanor were frail in spirit. Needless to say, what Micah did with the brick and windshield would not be up for discussion. People in their family did not behave like that. They were wealthy through inheritance or business, attended benefits for charities, donated to political parties and rubbed elbows with those same politicians at fancy dinners costing two thousand dollars a plate. They did not discuss politics except in the most oblique of terms at holidays, since Tuma’s side voted conservative and Uma’s side voted liberal.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 18