I might not go home tonight, Micah thought in surprise, and then she rejected it. She wasn’t done living so this casualty list wasn’t going to bear her name. Eyeing the room, her gaze fell upon the curtain. A table had tipped in the bedlam and was pressing the material to the hidden doors. Nobody was over there seeking escape because very few knew that doors were behind the curtain. But someone else was there, a zombie, a man with Sombra C, Micah’s mind flicked back and forth between the terms.
The percent was indiscernible in the limited lighting of the room, but the red of the mark was very visible. As everyone stampeded to escape their attackers, both culler and zombie alike, this one stood between the legs of the table and chattered at the light from the disco ball. Chattered like a bird or a squirrel, a strange sound to emanate from a human throat, but little of him was human any longer save his form. This was a creature, something feral. There were scratches on his face and arms (that blood transfixed Micah, the power it had to change everything) and his clothes were thrashed and covered in dirt. Unwashed hair stuck out all over, and he had not shaven for a long time. His head was cocked at an odd angle, the noise of the room not as agitating to him as the shifting light from that disco ball.
“Oh, fuck!” Austin said as Zaley slipped to the floor.
“We have to get by him to the doors behind the curtain,” Micah said as Austin shook Zaley’s uninjured shoulder. Almost unconscious, she looked at them dully through slitted eyes.
“Micah, you can’t! He’ll get some of his . . . stuff on you!” Austin protested, but she had already picked up an old wooden chair. The purse slung over the back of it fell off. Turning the chair to point the legs out and using the seat as a shield, Micah slunk along the wall. He growled to see her coming. Upper lip raised, teeth bared, it was a menacing sound. She hesitated.
A gun cracked and fresh screaming broke out. The light distracted him once more. He swatted at the ball like a cat, although he was nowhere tall enough or near enough to reach it. The only way out was through those doors, and the only way to the doors was to move that table, and they couldn’t move the table until that freak was no longer there. Micah braced herself (did she? She was afraid but that coldness overrode her once more. Her goal was the doors.) and pressed forward.
Jabbing at him with the legs, the creature responded by striking them with such force that it nearly blew the chair from her hands. Micah whirled with it, unable to lose her shield, and came around in an ungainly circle to strike. It carried the full force of her desperation to get the hell out of this room. He staggered as the chair slammed into his shoulder, Micah closing her eyes in reflex in case he bled or spat. Hitting him a second time while he was still reeling, she drove him away.
Students clustered by the men’s restroom screamed as he came closer. Micah could not worry about them. She had to get out. She and Austin and Zaley had to get out. Glancing through those panicked faces for Elania or Corbin, Janie or DeAngelo or Trevor (not Trevor and she jerked again), anyone she knew more than in passing from the hallways at school, she did not recognize even one.
Shoving the table away, Austin had Zaley in his arms in a split second and kicked aside the curtain. She moaned from pain against his chest. Micah shook the legs of the chair as the hissing creature stalked her. All he had to do was spit, swipe his blood into her mouth or nose, but his mental degradation was so severe that it wouldn’t occur to him to do this purposely to infect her. The number on his neck was sixty percent.
This man could not have told her his name or age, where he worked, if he worked, where he lived. His body was nothing but a cage for this virus, a cradle, a feeding ground, a host, a vehicle to spread. She backed to the curtain, thrusting out suddenly to make him keep some distance. Out of sight, Austin was screaming her name. The swirling of the light agitated the man once more, and in the moment he took to hiss at it, she was through the curtain. Austin slammed the doors shut.
“It’s all a joke,” Zaley said almost happily on the floor. Micah and Austin pressed hard on the doors to keep them closed. The man raged on the other side and pounded upon them. The chair had clattered to the floor. One of the legs was gone. Zaley laughed, blood running freely from her arm. “You don’t know the joke.”
“We have to block these doors with something!” Austin cried, his muscles straining, but there wasn’t anything in the hallway to do so.
Leaving him to press alone, Micah picked up the chair and smashed it into the ground. Slats and legs flew everywhere. The seat bounced on the floor and hit Zaley on the leg. She only reacted with laughter while the doors trembled and the man roared. Micah snatched up the legs and longest slats. She slid them one by one through the handles of the double doors, filling that hole with everything to keep it braced. It wouldn’t last against a concentrated effort, not this soft old wood that had seen some exposure to the elements.
Austin pulled away tentatively. The doors held, jutting open only a little before catching, and on the other side was the curtain bowing in with the impression of fists. Guns were still firing. The walls weren’t thick and neither was the door; a bullet could easily pass through. They had to get away.
When Micah turned to the hallway, there was a pool of blood on the floor. Zaley was just watching it form. Still laughing in a dreamy, distanced way, she said, “I was going to die tonight anyway.”
“No, you’re not, Zaley, we’ll get you to the hospital,” Austin said. He pulled the shirt from the back of his pants and bent to wrap it around her arm.
Micah darted down the hallway. The double doors to freedom were chained and padlocked shut. The hallway extended to the left, but only to another closed door with OFFICE written on the frosted glass of the window. Inside it was dark, although part of the frosted glass had a tiny red reflection.
It was locked. Of course it was locked. Micah doubled back to the others, checking the doorknobs as she went. Unlike the office, the rest of the doors had no windows. They were locked just the same, even the unisex restroom and water heater. The lights running along the ceiling flickered. They were set to dim, a sticker on the wall exhorting everyone to save energy.
The doors back to the party bulged in, and one of the legs broke. The screaming from within had not abated, and Austin tied off the shirt in a rush. As blood soaked through the material, Zaley said, “I was going to shoot myself when I got home. But look, someone did it for me. Someone did it for me, so God can’t cast me out.”
“You can’t do that, baby girl, we love you-” Austin said.
“Zaley, shut the fuck up,” Micah ordered. The laughter was getting on her nerves. So they could not leave this place, nor get through any of the doors to hide. Where did they go? If Austin held her up, could she push aside the vent grate and hide them in the ceiling? It was too small an opening.
“We’re stuck,” Austin said with rising hysteria. A gunshot rang out and they ducked in reflex.
“Pick her up,” Micah said. There was only one place to go. She grabbed the seat from the destroyed chair and fled back to that office. Gripping it tightly, she turned the seat sideways and bashed the glass. A hole would do, just enough to let her hand slip in to unlock the door, but the window shattered. Shards rained down and sliced across her fingers. Blood ran at once (streaks of it through Shelly’s hair, no, deal with it later) and she dropped the seat. Austin carried Zaley around the corner, the sound of a clatter following them. A slat or leg had fallen from the blocked doors. The air rattled from a helicopter passing overhead, so low to the ground that it was painful to hear.
Undoing the deadbolt, Micah let them into the small room and closed the door. It would do nothing to lock the deadbolt with the window gone. Her fingers snapped the latch regardless. The red reflection she had noticed earlier was coming from a large lava lamp on a table being used as a desk. Blobs of colored wax rose and fell within it and glowed upon files scattered on the table. A nightlight shined from an outlet, illuminating the very little that was in the room. A ta
ll metal cabinet was in the corner. Short stacks of boxes brimmed with paper along one wall. Yellowing advertisements and out-of-date calendars covered a bulletin board. There was an old beige phone on the table, so old that it had a cord from the handset to the base.
Micah wondered if anyone had called the cops. Probably everyone hiding in the restrooms with a cell had done that. The phone in this room was not even hooked into a jack, its cord wrapped up and held in loops with tape. More to herself than Austin, Micah said, “Can we move the cabinet to block the door?” The table was a spindly thing without a chair.
“I’m going to put you down, okay? Can you stand?” Austin asked gently.
“Lousy shot,” Zaley giggled while being set down on her feet. Micah slapped her without thinking.
“Micah!” Austin cried.
“I said shut up!” Micah hissed to Zaley, whose laughter had stopped abruptly with the blow. “If you want to die so much, then die. But we’re not fucking going with you! Slash your wrist with some of that glass there and go bleed to death in the hallway!”
Zaley pressed a hand to her cheek. When she didn’t move to the glass, Micah said, “Then you want to live,” and it was a command to be quiet. Her hand stung. She’d slapped someone for the first time in her life and had no remorse. Zaley was going to be silent or get slapped until she was.
Grunting to move the cabinet, Austin gave up and turned on the flashlight on his cell phone to see it better. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s bolted into the wall. We’ll never move it.”
He opened the cabinet doors, which creaked and grated loudly. Micah looked in with him. A vertical barrier divided the inside into two portions. On the left side were many narrow shelves marked with peeling stickers. They were crammed with files. The right side was empty except for a bar across it to hang a coat.
There was a soft thump behind them. Zaley was unconscious on the floor.
“Goddammit,” Micah said. Gunfire popped and rattled back at the party. Picking up Zaley, Austin placed her in the empty side of the cabinet and shut the doors. They creaked so noisily that Austin and Micah flinched.
With nowhere to go and nothing to use for protection, they sank down to their asses and leaned against the cabinet doors. The screaming was lessened at the distance, but only for that reason. The pounding of the zombie at the doors had not ceased, and more of the wood of the blockade was clattering down. Austin shrank into the corner. “This can’t be happening. It’s crazy. Do you know that? Crazy.”
“It’s happening,” said Micah, uninterested in whether it was crazy or not.
“I was talking to this guy online-”
“What guy online?”
“Just a guy. He said that he keeps waiting for the planet to return to its regular orbit, the one we’ve been on for all of our lives. And sometimes it does travel part of the same track, with papers due in your classes, waiting in line to see a movie, but other times . . . other times we’re on some new orbit altogether. Like tonight. I don’t know what to do.”
“You go with it-” A rattle and clatter was followed by a tremendous bang. The doors to the party had just been forced open. The noise quadrupled and then muted as the doors swung shut.
Someone sniffed in the hallway. It was a normal sound, not the animal ululations of that creature. Austin nudged Micah with his cell phone. “If we make it really bright in here, will it force them to go away? If that’s a zombie?”
“They gravitate to darkness,” Micah whispered. “But if they get cornered in here with a lot of light, they’ll probably attack us. And some hate the light but get drawn to it from what I’ve read, trying to put it out.”
“I hate that sitting in the dark makes us just a little bit safer.” He doused the flashlight on his phone and turned off the nightlight. The cord to the lava lamp was on the far side of the table, vanishing into the cluster of boxes to some outlet hidden on the wall there. Getting to it would make too much noise, and the light it cast was poor. Shivering at her side, Austin whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
“We are not going to die here,” Micah said with utmost assurance. She was going to be pissed to get her obituary written up in the local news with gobs of glowing shit. If she didn’t write her own definitions, then they weren’t getting written at all. The thought of the funeral was irritating, everybody crying about how smart and beautiful and kind she was, bemoaning the loss to humanity and dropping flowers onto her casket. If any of them knew the real Micah Camborne, they’d drop a brick or a dildo, something shoplifted from Rubenz in her honor. And Tuma would undoubtedly call her Joob in the eulogy.
The sniff had no further sound. Maybe the person saw the padlock on the double doors to outside and was just sitting out there in the hallway since there was nowhere else to go. Austin took her bleeding hand, for his comfort, not hers. But she liked the warmth of it, and the press of his muscled arm into her own. She whispered, “Who’s the guy?”
He sighed at her persistence. “Just a guy from MeetFriends. It’s nothing.”
It was something, or he would have mentioned it before. “Give me his name and I’ll tell you my real name again. Come on, I’ll be the surrogate mother for your kids. You’ll need one and I’m cheap.”
“Blayre. You should go by Jubilee. It’s cute.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah, you’d like that.”
“I just want to see if you’ve improved. Opening night is always the weakest performance.”
“Jubilee,” Austin repeated, drawing it out.
They froze at a scuffle of feet, the furtive click-click of a doorknob being tried. His hand tightened on hers, making it hurt with the scratches from the glass shards. Micah listened also for sounds from within the cabinet. It was so quiet that she thought Zaley might have died in there.
Scuffle. Click-click. Scuffle.
Silence.
The red blobs moved in the lava lamp, lifting from the bulb and sinking back. Right now those language schools in Venice and Florence weren’t looking so bad. She picked up knowledge fast, which left her with a lot of free time. While everyone else studied flashcards and verb sheets after morning classes, she’d immerse herself in the streets all afternoon and look through windows when darkness fell. It beat being on the floor of an office in a crappy community center in Blue Hill, California, trapped in a building full of zombies and cullers and death. If she had known Zaley was going to die in the cabinet, she would not have slapped her.
A helicopter passed overhead. The vibration from the cabinet passed through Micah’s skull. A weak sniff came from the hallway. Austin folded in on himself and looked sick with tension in the red glow. Trying to discern the identity of the person from the sounds, Micah thought that a police officer would have announced his or her arrival, and a zombie like the one who blocked the curtain would not be moving so tentatively. The sniffing really did seem like a normal human sound, someone crying or fighting a cold. It could be an injured student, or one of the parent volunteers. It couldn’t be a culler. A culler would have moved more briskly to check the doors, not scuffled, unless he or she was hurt. If it was indeed a culler, Micah hoped that person was hurting badly.
Good that her mothers weren’t the parent volunteers for the party. Micah wouldn’t have wanted to see Uma above all in this mess, not when Uma couldn’t even stand to watch the news. Uma’s HomeBase page was nothing but silly yoga cartoons, poems about flowers, and pictures of kittens. What had happened in that room was beyond her mother’s kenning, her resources to cope. The coldness with which Micah extricated herself and her friends from the party came from Tuma’s more rational example, or else her sperm donor’s genetics, or both.
Taking his hand away, Austin typed a quick message in his phone and pressed send. Looking over at the screen, Micah read: I love you, Mamma, love, Aus. So he was preparing to die. She wasn’t.
Chains rattled, the person having gotten to the end of the hallway with the padlock. It was weird how these
movements were always followed by silence, like the person (Zombie? Culler? Student? Cop? Who knew?) was in disbelief at each blocked door.
The scuffling started anew. When the shards of glass crunched on the other side of the wall, Austin bent his head to pray. The crunch was followed by a sudden intake of breath, a rasp in a throat, and a slight but alarming keening. Micah canvassed the room for a weapon, unable to stop herself even knowing the futility. Boxes of paper. A lava lamp. Files. The table was a lightweight metal, and it would be a lot harder to break off the legs. There wasn’t so much as a pencil with which to defend them, just thumbtacks on the bulletin board.
Shards skittered over the floor. Click-click.
She hoped to hear the scuffling move off, but another silence followed. The person was just standing out there. A staccato of shots echoed from far away. Austin put his hand to Micah’s knee and traced one line straight down, the halves of a heart, and a U.
Micah returned the marks on the palm of his hand. If only. If only he was straight. She wanted the charge of being caught in his emotional tempests, to break free of them and be caught again like a mouse batted about at the cat’s will. He lived such a raw life when hers was so callused.
Click-click.
She did not dare to look around the cabinet to the door, to that shaking knob. Her heart pounded in her chest, throbbed like a creature trapped behind the bars of her ribcage. The lava lamp could be broken over a head, its contents splashed into eyes. The phone could be hurled or used as a club. The table could be flipped to its side and driven forward, more clumsily than the chair but there was no chair and that was that. The boxes of paper would be devilishly heavy to lift, but one thrown at short range would be manageable, and would hurt like hell whoever it landed on. And her nails, failing all else, she had manicured nails to scratch, legs to kick, arms to pound, teeth to bite, and somehow she was going to survive this night.
Snap.
It was the deadbolt being undone.
The doorknob turned and the door opened slowly. Micah counted to five, all the way to five before the scuffling started. She heard a whimper from the cabinet (since Zaley wasn’t dead, she needed to shut the fuck up) and looked up to a figure entering the room. Wax blobs lazed in the lava lamp, which put light to clothes that were not black but some lighter color. No shoes, only socks with ridges of tread on them, bunched around the top of the foot where they did no good. Micah trailed up the rips in the trousers to the shirt, loose and askew over breasts. A woman. There was nothing on her neck, but Micah could only see the left side, not the right where the stamps were always located. The glow of the lamp didn’t extend to her face, not until she scuffled farther into the room. Her gait had a precursor to that telltale lurch, part of her musculature sinking into the deep freeze of the infection.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 28