“This turkey came out lovely!” Uma bleated at the foot of the table.
“I think it’s terrible to even say that, Tyson!” Surprisingly, the speaker was Gramma Eleanor. “We just held a benefit at the Cultural Center for struggling Sombra C families. These are times to show compassion.”
“Of course!” Uncle Tyson hastened to say. “I’m not saying to wall them in and let them go feral and die without their medication. But it’s high time we get back to some normal living, going about our business without worry that an infection lies just around the corner. I’m so sick of having to wipe down my cart handle every time I stop at the store!” In his mind, wiping down a cart handle was every bit as life upending as being forcibly relocated to Idaho. “And it’s been so hard on the pocketbook. You should see how home values tumble as soon as a Sombra C person is in the neighborhood. Forget trying to sell a Sombra C’s home! Do you know how many properties we can’t move due to that? And now with this new expanded Natural Hazards disclosure, there it is, front and center and buyers snap up their offers and walk. Not that you get many, having to display a stamp there at the open house. People won’t even come inside for a look-see, despite every assurance it has been treated from rafters to basement-”
When he looks in the mirror, does he see an asshole staring back? Micah wrote to her sister.
It is a genuine problem, to be fair, answered Shalom, since she’d only play so far. Tuma gave them hard looks, knowing why they were focused on their laps instead of their uncle. One flushed; one wondered what it was like to be embarrassed. Uncle Tyson moved from residential to commercial troubles, having lost a property on the brink of sale to the government for a confinement point.
Micah ate and nodded when appropriate, slyly gauging how stiff Uma could get without cracking. All of that work making every inch of the house beautiful, and here the family was gathered in harmony over a delicious meal and talking about zombies. Micah’s uncle and grandfather had had too much wine to pay such acute attention to social cues, Gramma Eleanor was arguing in her polite way that the economy did not trump humanism, and Gramma Cherry was trying to redirect to plans for the winter holidays. They were flying to Boston to watch Amanda perform two days before Christmas.
Kill me, Micah wrote to Austin as the conversation wavered between zombies and her brilliant, talented cousin. Why couldn’t they have had a class together this semester? They rarely shared anything, since she was in the hardest sections and he took regular.
You’re too evil to die, Austin responded. If only he was straight! They’d never make it for the long haul but flame out in a glorious blaze. She wanted that, the volcanic eruption that would be the failure of their relationship. She thought it might be even more explosive than the initial coming together. Thinking of flying stemware and accusations of infidelity turned her on. She didn’t actually care if he cheated. She just wanted the excuse to hurl something and yell.
“From now on, it’s mail-in ballots for us!” Grampa Hugh said. “All the crazies making Election Day their stand. Do you remember Harvey Grantham, Terra?” Tuma shook her head. “That was his great-niece’s friend who died at the bombing in Florida, waiting to cast her vote. A tragedy.”
“Let’s clear the table, Micah, Shalom!” Tuma said with forced brightness. The girls scooped up the plates and serving dishes to ferry to the kitchen, and then reset the table for dessert. The zombie conversation paused so that everyone could exclaim about how full they were, how good the pies looked and perhaps room in packed bellies could still be found. The pause ended with Uncle Tyson talking about the gun he had purchased for home protection. Target practice, aiming for the head, the friendly Shepherd who ran the firing range, a murder a mile from his home, the incident in Squay . . . Grampa Hugh joined in with tales of their Hawaiian vacation, in which they had not been able to view the volcanoes due to the area being closed for a rumor of a zombie sighting.
“Oh, it was so disappointing,” said Gramma Cherry. “The trails aren’t safe any longer and Kauai has closed off to tourists completely! It’s decimated their economy, but what can they do? Overrun with Sombra C.”
“Or the neck,” Grampa Hugh was saying to Uncle Tyson. “They can’t keep moving if they can’t keep breathing-”
The voice was thin but strident from the foot of the table, Uma setting down the cherry pie with a porcelain clank of finality. “Let’s have a nice dessert, shall we? This talk does little for the appetite.”
“Of course, of course,” conceded Gramma Cherry. It looked like she delivered a dig of the elbow to her husband, who removed his hand from his windpipe and exclaimed with too much enthusiasm about the pies once more. Silence fell over the table, everyone in search of something to say. Micah had no such compunction, and enjoyed the strain.
Polite murmurs began, Gramma Eleanor complimenting the flowers in the centerpiece, and the high wore from Micah as everything returned to dull. She couldn’t leave to have time for herself until Sunday. It was addictive, those nights, the race on the freeway today. The craving in her body wasn’t for pie but excitement. She wanted another hit, to not have to cycle back to this still space. The emptiness in Ms. Velman’s living room, the emptiness at this table, both were dwarfed by the emptiness inside Micah herself.
If they could not talk about Sombra C, what could they talk about? The question hung over the slices of pie being passed around the table. Amanda. Orchids. Amanda. Sports. Amanda. The dry weather. Things untouched by the tentacles of the virus (yet they had been, the sports teams with lost members, the difficulty of importing certain orchids) and if their family could not integrate how the world had changed, then they went still while the planet turned without them.
Gramma Cherry was trading ladylike bites, a sliver from the cherry pie, a sliver of the pumpkin. It was she who found the topic, daubing the whipped cream from her lips and beaming between the candles to Micah. “Where do you think you’ll be applying to college?”
Safe. Micah knew the answers. Oh, she knew them so well. No downcast eyes and shrug of dunno at the Camborne table, no suggestion of a third tier party school whose name was associated with body shots and loutish fraternities. Micah should have an answer, Yale or Harvard or Kingsman, highly respectable back-up schools like Senner or Pewter. And her answer could not be just a school but also what she wanted to study there, classics or English or business . . . She should know facts about the department in which she wished to study, express nerves about writing the best essay ever and about tight admissions. Her family looked up expectantly for the first inklings of the strand she was going to weave into the glowing Camborne tapestry. Straight-A Micah, reliable Micah, shoot-for-the-stars Micah, the streaked hair would go back to respectable at Yale/Kingsman/Princeton/Pewter . . .
“I don’t think I’m going to go,” Micah answered, unable to resist another high, and the shocked expressions from every seat at the table were absolutely intoxicating.
Austin
Most dating websites were blocked on the school computers, but MeetFriends was not. That was because it was ninety percent meeting friends and only ten percent dating if he clicked MaybeDatey under the search function. The site was clean as a whistle, no posting pictures of boobies or underwear regions, no listing 420 or lingerie under hobbies. Complaints were responded to promptly, and the avatar or comment in question taken down more often than not. Nobody with any respect hung out on MeetFriends, but Austin couldn’t risk his mother finding anything disagreeable on his cell phone or laptop at home. Putting in male searching male, age eighteen to twenty-four, within five miles of Cloudy Valley, and clicking MaybeDatey, the site coughed out nineteen profiles in response.
Checking around the room to make sure no one was looking, Austin returned to the screen. He eliminated the first guy for answering Libra to ethnicity, swallowing a joyous laugh. Oh God, that was adorable. The guy was a hot mess, a nineteen-year-old junior college student with mussed hair and a darling smile, a rumpled shirt, and he
had taken his picture with a cell phone using his reflection in a public restroom. There were feet visible beneath the stall door behind him, some poor dude taking a dump and an unwitting participant in the ethnic Libran’s personal ad. Someone needed to take that boy in hand for a lesson about first impressions.
The second dude was cute in a Santa hat, but lost since he had a girlfriend and they wanted a guy, preferably a black one, on the side for group rolls in the hay. It was stated so obliquely that it took Austin three times through to figure out what it meant. Of course, he wasn’t actually intending to answer any of these ads. He just wanted to look, see what was out there and make the world a little smaller.
A chair squeaked and Austin looked up sharply. No one was coming his way in the back. If he was caught looking . . . he didn’t know which would be worse, school or home. He might just run away. Morosely, he inspected the second guy wanting a stud to liven his straight relationship. His user name was coalinmystocking. That was gross, if it was meant the way Austin thought it was.
A hush fell over the room a split second before the intercom buzzed. He would always remember that, the hush that eerily preceded the buzz. The keyboards stopped their rapid gunfire, even though everyone was in a rush to get through a wickedly long assignment due on the fifth. Austin loved December, the music and lights and merriment and cartoons, even the push to finish schoolwork, but right now he didn’t love anything. In the strange hush between clicks and clacks, he looked at that guy in the Santa hat. There were other pictures, the guy with his girl at a fancy party, the two tanned and attractive on a boat, a picture of their snazzy car, and now they wanted to acquire a young man for their bed. Under dealbreakers, the guy had written no STDs or Sombra C.
The buzz rattled through the room. Austin looked up to the intercom with everyone else, and the buzz changed to the open line. The principal cleared her throat once, then twice, and in the interim a girl in the class gasped and pointed at her computer. “Is that true?”
Austin tried to see her screen, but it was at an angle. His hand was still on the keyboard, and he clicked away from MeetFriends to the homepage. Splashed across it was broad black print reading ASSASSINATED, and below it was a picture of the president.
Someone cheered.
The ethnic Libran, the Santa hat, the hush, the buzz, the headline, the cheer . . . Austin never would remember what the principal said. He heard the clearing of her throat, the impression of a thickened voice, and nothingness. Then he was outside. It was ten minutes to the end of the school day, but the student body had flooded the hallways. Teachers were among them. Many were crying. Someone cheered again and people screamed at him, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
Phones were everywhere, eyes scanning a variety of news sites. Austin did not see familiar faces about him, nor did he walk down the hallway in search. Here against the lockers he gathered the snippets from the articles being read and discussed. The colors of the hallway were so bright and out-of-place, yellow rain slickers, a burnt orange T-shirt, the red of the lockers. In the classroom closest to him, the teacher was yelling at his class that they were not dismissed until the bell regardless of what had happened. Students yelled back at him.
These things did not happen here. They did not. People did not strap explosives to a four-year-old boy (a four-year-old!) and send him dashing past the Secret Service. The president was visiting an elementary school in Hawaii, as a special favor to his wife who once attended it, as had two of their three children for several years long ago. The school had been vetted and inspected, the students checked over against the enrollment. The election was over, his second term secured, he was on a vacation and this was not an advertised affair. In the auditorium with the second-grade classes, he was sitting on a stool and answering the questions raised by little hands on the floor.
The boy was someone’s baby brother, maybe an escapee from the nursery class down the hall, or a wily runaway from the parents standing proudly outside. Agents tried to block the giggling child in jean shorts, whose bare brown feet slapped on the floor. He was wearing a light jacket with a message about autism and there was a cartoon character bandage on his scuffed knee. The president laughed to see him duck and dodge security (it was only a little boy, a very little boy with carefully combed black hair). Maybe the president was reminded of one of his sons when they were younger. Nothing was in the boy’s hands, no guns or knives, he was young and naughty, possibly had special needs, and full of joy. The boy ran forward, his arms thrown out for a hug, and survivors said that he shouted, “I have a pwesent for the pwesident!”
And he exploded.
This was not Austin’s world. None of this was Austin’s world, not since the day he first heard the words Sombra C. He had been born seventeen years ago in Los Angeles to a woman who could not name which of her guy friends knocked her up; he had crawled and walked and run from the blanket on the living room floor to the front door and on from the yard to school. Running north in time to Cloudy Valley where he kept running from grade to grade in the track of a life that everyone was running or ran long ago or would run in the future. He ate pizza and got colds and played video games; he blew out the candles on his birthday cakes and worried that he’d never have a date and procrastinated on his homework. This was who he was and he had been created by this world, but now the world had changed and stranded him. Austin didn’t have a clue how to change with it, that normal had mutated to this violent, frightening form.
Was there still going to be Christmas? He didn’t know. This wasn’t the same world any longer. He stood at the lockers, unsure of where to step. A fight broke out between boys, one cheering, one crying, and when the cheering one went down, teachers looked on and said nothing. Austin had seen teachers fling themselves into fights for years to haul the opponents apart but today, today they did not intercede. Nor had any of the students been chanting fight fight fight in glee, pumping their fists and howling at blood. Like the teachers, they watched. Blinking, Austin recognized the boy moaning on the ground as Rudy French. How had he watched the fight and not recognized dumb old Rudy?
“Does this make Zeller president then? By default?” someone asked.
“No, it makes Pitch president,” came a response.
“Was it Shepherds?”
“It can’t be Shepherds! Maybe cullers.”
“Cullers are Shepherds, but the president didn’t have Sombra C!”
“Cullers aren’t Shepherds!”
“They’re still trying to identify the boy.”
“The bitch is president? Dude, like we have a lady president?”
If Austin went home, would home still be there? The world beyond the lockers seemed that precarious, the ice of the concrete cracked and poised to spill him under to drown. Right now the president’s three sons must be huddled together in a guarded room in Hawaii, his wife flying from a conference to join them, the vice president in hiding while this act was investigated . . . she was President now. This was not their world either, and Austin stood in community with them, frozen at this juncture where they could not step back but did not know how to step forward.
He had a shift at the Cool Spoon. By rote he began to walk. Halfway across the street, he remembered his bicycle. His feet did not turn back for it; the bike would be locked in the cage overnight, and who said it was still there anyway? He didn’t want to know if it had been stolen, not yet, and that strange logic propelled him past one dead lawn after another to work.
Micah was there, Elania and Corbin and Zaley, too, and he almost wept to see their faces. Even Sally’s, tear-streaked as Corbin held her hand. Ditzy Yanni, querulous Tom Jooner . . . quiet Brennan Ortega and Stephen Chang were at another table, and Shelly was there at a third table with a scarf around her neck and Janie without one. Mr. Yates must not be here today or he would have kicked them out. Benji Turner, Lara Sanchez, Quinn Dutch, DeAngelo Rosenberg. . . Micah was behind the counter making a long line of banana splits, heaping dollops of hot fu
dge over scoops of ice cream and drowning them in nuts and rainbow sprinkles and whipped cream. Doris was in the back when Austin checked, staring solemnly at the news on the television.
“I’m goin’ home,” she said, not really to him or anyone, and left through the back door. Her Cool Spoon apron was still on, a dash of mint on the strap.
Micah hadn’t even put on an apron, but she wasn’t working today. The counter was smothered in creations, which she placed on a serving tray and delivered to the tables without charging anyone. The television in the main room was playing the same channel, although it was on mute. Two ticker tapes were at the bottom, the top flashing AMERICAN PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED and the second revolving with details. Sixteen children, three agents, two teachers, one president, all dead, many more wounded, and a radical branch of the NSF was claiming responsibility. The NSF itself disavowed knowledge.
Austin exploded. “Who the fuck is the NSF? Is that some kind of organization for cullers?” He took an empty seat in the booth by Zaley.
“Not cullers. It’s N-never-” Elania whispered with red-rimmed eyes.
“Never Said Farewell,” Tom overrode authoritatively. Even here and now, he had a tone of voice that indicated Austin should know. “It was a support group started up over the summer for people who lost their families and friends to confinement points. A lot of them blame Wu for never getting a chance to say goodbye.”
“He didn’t have a choice!” Corbin said defensively. “There was no Zyllevir back then and the infection was spreading like crazy.”
“It wouldn’t have hurt to let them say goodbye through a glass barrier with phones on each side, like they do in prisons,” Tom argued. “Then this might not have happened.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 20