She pecked at keys with her left hand. I’m okay.
An instant message came from Micah. You’re alive?
I’m alive.
Congratulations are in order. You’re a minority in the club now. You could do a piece on that, or an Offensive Question Friday.
Mom was coming down the hallway. Zaley fought the impulse to shut the lid and hide the laptop under the blankets. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was okay for an intelligent young woman to have friends outside of her mother. What do you mean?
Opening the door, Mom set down a glass of water and the bottle of pain medication on the nightstand. Then she smiled like they hadn’t just fought and walked out. The door was left wide open. The childproof lid of the bottle was still on. It was a game to make Zaley ask for help.
No. She’d get it off herself or be in pain. Micah? How am I a minority? Since no answer arrived, Zaley opened an email at random. It was from Elania, a quick note to say that she and Austin were no longer together.
Zaley was pecking out a message of sympathy when a long message came from Micah. It was broken up into chunks on the screen. I never thought about it from your perspective. Here’s a club that essentially caters to people that get left out of the mainstream. We’re the ones who can’t fit in for whatever reason, or just don’t want to bother faking it to try. Yet you’re from the ideal standard home of two married, heterosexual parents. You’re white. You’re Christian. You’re straight. You’re not fat or autistic or poor or ugly or fill-in-the-blank. But the face of Welcome Mat changed with the party, and now you’re the only one without a stamp. Well, almost the only one. So that makes you the minority in the room for the very first time. Welcome to the other side, Zaley Mattazollo. Don’t worry. We won’t bite.
Her blood ran cold. Micah? Who else has Sombra C?
A better question is who doesn’t have it. Stephen Chang doesn’t.
Elania? Corbin? Austin?
Bingo. Bingo. Bingo.
Zaley slammed shut the lid of her laptop, feeling like she was going to throw up. Her arm ached badly and the lid on the medication bottle sat there like a mockery. She pressed it hard to the wall and turned, gasping from the pain. That didn’t work to open it. Shifting in the bed, she overturned the bottle and pressed it hard to the nightstand. It worked no better. Finally she gripped the lid between her teeth, sliding off and scraping the inside of her lip, and putting it back resolutely to try again. It took several attempts before the lid loosened. Swallowing three pills instead of two, she lay back and waited for the pain to be nibbled away. The laptop slipped to her side and she slept with her left hand atop it protectively.
It was late at night when she awoke. Her stomach rumbled, nausea from the pills or hunger, she couldn’t tell which. The house was quiet, except for the dull mutter of the television. Dad must have fallen asleep in his recliner with it on.
Easing from bed and feeling dizzy, she went to the bathroom slowly. Her reflection revealed a slovenly sight, greasy hair sticking up everywhere, oily skin with a yellowish cast. Brushing her hair awkwardly with her left hand, it looked even greasier when she was done. Tomorrow she’d figure out the shower, a plastic bag over her arm, and how to roll deodorant on her left side when she couldn’t use her right hand. In a few days, she’d sneak money from the coin jar and buy a cheap coloring book and crayons at Dabey’s. It wasn’t that far to walk. And soon she would be back in school to see this impossibility of all of her friends with stamps.
Deciding it was both hunger and nausea, she crept down the hallway to the kitchen. The mutter wasn’t coming from the television but her father. She peeked around the corner, her vision blurred at the edges. He was sitting on the recliner and speaking into his cell phone in a soft, gentle voice to someone named Jag. It was the voice of a father reading a bedtime story in the cool press of night. But there was no book in his hands, no child named Jag in a bed, no stars out the boarded window. The television was on mute, angry colors slashing through the dark of the room as two people on a split screen news program argued.
“When one is cut, we all bleed,” Dad was saying. “That is what it means to be a family. Standing together, standing strong. You haven’t known that feeling until now, what it is to be protected, for others to need your protection, to live and breathe for one another.”
The tearful voice of a man answered through speakerphone. “No. You know. My parents, they just checked out on my brothers and sister and me. They were supposed to hold us up, you know? Supposed to give us a home. My older brother killed himself last winter. My baby brother, my sister, they’re messed up. Won’t even talk to me. They’re lost souls. I got no one.”
Dad’s voice had the cadence of a lullaby. “We’re your brothers. We’re your sisters. We’re your fathers. We’re your mothers. We will hold you up, and you will hold us up. Nothing can break us, nothing in this world, and you will always have a home to bring your problems. We’re here for you, like we know you’re here for us.”
Zaley was frozen in the dark as the man wept. They were the sobs of a little child. “It was awful. All that screaming. I can’t hear nothing except that screaming. Those were people, even so. People. Women, a lot of them. That was hard, doing those women. One was just this pretty little thing, so scared. She begged me to let her go. I didn’t want to do it.”
“I know. I know, Jag,” Dad soothed. “It was a bad time. But you pushed through it. You pushed through it. You’re the man that your father never was. Did he push through? No. But you do. You meet your responsibilities to this world. You show up for the hard work where so many don’t. I hope you’re as proud of us as we’re proud of you. You’ve got so much of my respect, and I don’t give my respect to just anyone.”
“It’s not that easy. It’s not that easy! I don’t know what to do.” Jag sniffled.
“You were a man the other night, Jaguar, taking care of others. Now it’s time to lay down that burden, let us take care of you. Crack yourself a beer for now. Put on the TV, something nice. There’s a meet-up at Spider’s tomorrow, and you’re going to be there. And I’ll tell you a secret: our Patron Saint is coming. We’ll talk. Shoot some pool. Work this out together. We’re lucky, you know that? Some of our brothers don’t have anyone to talk to right now, but we do. So we’ll lay it all out. You like pizza? I’ll make sure we get some pizzas delivered to Spider’s. What do you like for toppings?”
“I’m a straight pepperoni guy.”
Dad laughed indulgently. “Pepperoni it is! So now you’ve got a plan. As soon as you hang up, get yourself that beer. Pick a show on your TV. You got cable? Put on Yebbe, that channel’s nothing but girls and beaches. That’s where you’re going tonight, hearing waves, seeing bikinis. Tomorrow, soon as work’s done, you report to Spider’s and let this go. You got it?”
“I got it, Mother Hen. Thanks.”
“If it gets bad tonight, you remember this. I love you, son. We all love you. And we’ll see you there tomorrow, to tell you in person.”
Unsure of what she’d overheard, Zaley drifted back to bed, no longer hungry, no longer anything. Bingo.
Corbin
He wanted to wake from this dream. To have it fade, the sensation of those fingers being ripped from his, the pealing screams in his ears, the terror in those eyes mirrored in his own. Every morning in the hospital and then at home, he woke with the exact impression of those fingers still leaving his. He felt it in the afternoon, in the evening, at night when he returned reluctantly to bed. He felt it when he grasped his fork to eat, and when he sobbed in his mother’s lap. The boy had been pulled right out of Corbin’s grasp, screaming as he slid helplessly from under the table and across the floor to his death.
Noise and light aggravated them but there was no way, no way on this earth to stand silently in a dark room with people so riddled with Sombra C that they had gone mad. Attacking everyone they came across and that boy, that boy with the glass-shattering scream and sequined jacket . . . Corbin had
seen him on the dance floor before it all began, a squirty little clown who moved like no one’s business. A girl threw over her jacket and he put it on to shine under the lights and make people hoot and holler.
He wanted it to fade, the impression of the cold floor under his hands and knees as he crawled under tables with other desperate students. There had been grit in the floor and those impressions were still invisibly in his flesh. He felt them, even if the dents had healed. The kid in the shiny jacket was beside him and Corbin lunged in instinct when a torn hand reached under the table and yanked.
His name was Gage.
And Corbin felt the cell phone in his hand while Gage was murdered, saw the swimming of the numbers, pressed 911 and screamed wordlessly into the receiver as the table was torn away. Ravaged by the virus, the man standing over them had loose flesh hanging from his face in a bloody pulp. Corbin stopped screaming, stopped moving, stopped breathing, but the girls around him screamed and thrashed, and the disco ball moved light over his face.
He wanted it to fade, please fade, the sensation of heaviness that was the man’s body on top of his, of teeth sinking into his neck and left hand as he tried to push the guy off. It was only someone tripping over them that rolled the man away, and he lunged after another person while Corbin scrambled into the throng of students in the corner. The booms of the guns rattled his teeth and that he still felt, too. It was madness, and it had marked itself on his brain, in his flesh, and in his blood indelibly.
He had Sombra C.
The mirror showed the same face as always, and more than once he reeled back when he remembered that he was not the same on the inside. He saw the slim red bottle of Zyllevir on the counter and wondered to whom it belonged. When he cried in his mother’s lap, a cold fear overtook him and he jerked away fast to not infect her. That had made his neck hurt, the bite still healing there, and he’d knocked his plastic splint against his leg. The zombie’s bite had been so vicious that it lacerated tendons, Corbin’s ring and little finger drooping downwards while the fully shielded doctor inspected it. Surgery put it back together, and he was flooded with antibiotics to deal with the infection. If the bite to his neck had been as bad as the bite to his hand, he’d be dead.
He might be dead anyway. They had been dosed with Zyllevir at the hospital, the fevers setting in but the virus swiftly arrested. No matter how the specialist called it a miracle drug, there was no guarantee that Zyllevir was actually going to work for him, for anyone, no guarantee at all. Some patients never responded to the miracle, each test showing a further infiltration of the virus into their systems. Others responded well for a while, weeks to months, and then regressed. And the rest of them? The rest of them were stuck with this miracle for the duration of their lives.
The rest of them were stuck going through special red doors at hospitals, doors which led to special hallways marked with a streak of red tile, special elevators with red doors that carried them to special Sombra C floors. They were stuck with pamphlets entitled Sombra C and You, where a cartoon cell in a long blonde wig and pink skirt quailed from a menacing protein strand dressed in dark armor. An army of pills waving swords saved the day. They were stuck with a Sombra C specialist who, when asked what stage of viral replication Zyllevir interrupted, said aren’t you smart! and didn’t answer. They were stuck with nicking themselves accidentally while cutting some cheese for a snack, and having to ask their parents to sterilize the counter and knife.
Corbin hated that red door, the bottle of sword-waving pills, the appointment card on the refrigerator for the San Francisco Processing Center. December 31st, ten o’clock. Everyone else had been carted off for stamps, but Corbin had to report to surgery for his damaged hand and let his neck heal first. They wrote back and forth on their cell phones, from their waiting room at the Processing Center to his hospital bed. The center was specifically designed for Sombra C patients and Sombra C patients alone, yet still the doors and tiles were red. The receptionist was in a glassed cage with a blue door so they knew not to go through it, and two armed guards were posted there and dressed in full haz-mat suits. Cloudy Valley High students filled the waiting room, some angry, others fearful, and most crying. When Jemini Baez was called, a trembling freshman stood and screamed at Elania for not locking the doors to the party. Why hadn’t she locked the doors? This was all her fault!
Her fault. Not the fault of the cullers, breaking into a medical facility and releasing zombies into a suburban community, but Elania’s for not foreseeing the tragedy and locking the doors to the party. After Jemini passed through the red doors to receive her stamp, Micah texted that Corbin might want to check HomeBase.
He clicked over in bewilderment. Sally had posted that her boyfriend had Sombra C. Sympathetic comments were coming in even as he read slowly and in horror, Sally responding to all of them individually and writing that she pleaded with Corbin not to go to the Welcome Mat party. And look what happened! She had just known something was going to go wrong, like a premonition. Yanni wrote that Sally must be a little bit psychic.
There had been no time for Corbin to process this privately before five hundred people read his diagnosis in their feed. He forced himself to read every last word, torn between screaming and crying at how Sally could have been so callous. Calling her up, he exploded that they were through. She was vile and disgusting and a bitch to have told people that without consulting him first, to use him as an attention ploy, and they were done. Sally laughed incredulously that of course they were done. She couldn’t have a zombie boyfriend of all things!
He returned to his texts in a fury. At the Processing Center, the waiting room was emptying one by one. Elania passed through those red doors stoically, having cried herself to acceptance. Quinn was on pain pills for an injured ankle and hobbled through in a daze. DeAngelo threw up from nerves and was wheeled through them. Micah went in proudly and silently, and Austin sobbed.
And Corbin? Corbin didn’t plan to go through them at all, but he had no choice in the matter. It was insane, it was insane to have a stamp on his neck! All of them had the most minor infections, Zyllevir stopping those dark armored protein strands at miniscule amounts. Corbin was far less than one percent, beneath a tenth of one percent, the barest breath of contamination in his blood, but the specialist made the appointment anyway and the stamps didn’t reflect anything other than whole numbers.
One percent. He was so low that he could theoretically have unprotected sex and not pass it on to anyone, the specialist mused. Corbin thought the man was a psychopath the way he almost enjoyed his work, even joking about the percents and virally caused behavior. Never trust anyone over thirty. Hah-hah!
His friends came back from the Processing Center to visit in twos and threes, and he wanted to cry at how they were humbled. Elania and Austin were wearing scarves. DeAngelo and Quinn had on turtlenecks, the former speaking only in whispers and planning to drop out of school. Only Micah came in with a bare neck, and Corbin’s eyes fixed upon the lurid red stamp on the right side. It was massive. When he asked why she wasn’t covering it, she said because fuck you.
The stamps were made of dye pigments suspended in microscopic capsules coated in biodegradable plastic. They were permanent but removable by a laser treatment, the wavelength combusting a tiny pellet in each capsule. The capsules then burst, releasing the fragments of dye and the body expelling them. The design was clever to keep people from having them removed unlawfully, the pellets containing nanotech that blocked any beam save those from the lasers in authorized processing centers. Corbin did not want this big blotch of a stamp on his neck.
He was too old to cry on his mother’s lap, but he had done that in the hospital, and at home. She cried, too. Dad wanted to drag those three cullers out of the safety of the local jail and string them up from trees. The death penalty was too good for them. When a reporter mentioned their names on the television, Dad spat into the sink as he washed the dishes. Corbin had rarely seen his father lose control
of his temper, and never spit. Scrubbing hard at a bowl, Dad said, “Who raised these animals?”
The cullers had shot anyone with a stamp, no matter the number. Shelly hadn’t even had a chance to get up from her table before the bullet went through her skull. The three cullers in custody were being charged with over a hundred counts of murder for what they did at the rehabilitation center, in the surrounding woods and park, and at the party. Not to mention the charges for attempted murder, and assault and battery. The dead cullers had ties to the Shepherd community, although several of their families said they’d dropped out weeks to months ago. The police were interviewing Shepherds in Blue Hill, Cloudy Valley, Penger, and several other cities going all the way up to Napa. Only one of the three captured cullers even hailed from the area.
Both of his parents were horrified that Austin had been kicked out of his home and Mom said, “If he needs a place to live, Corbin, you bring him here. Dad and I will clean out his office.”
“Then you’ll have two zombies living in your home,” Corbin muttered.
Rarely had he seen his mother lose her temper either. She shouted, “Never call yourself that! You are my son, and this is your home. My loving, handsome, hardworking son with Sombra C, and Austin will be my son, too! What kind of mother throws out her son like trash for an illness he cannot control? Shame on her, a good, honest boy like Austin! You bring him here if Micah’s parents can’t let him stay.”
Corbin could not conceive of himself as sick, not when he felt absolutely fine. The touch of fever had lasted less than a day. The Zyllevir pill went down the hatch with no side effects. He was not sick, yet he was. One missed pill and the virus would start to replicate, and taking the dose late or twice as much would not reduce what grew in the interim. The specialist said that most of his patients set the alarms on their cell phones for every Sunday night. No problem! It was a miracle how the effects lasted a full week, letting Corbin go on about his days without worry.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 32