Going to HomeBase, he bounced Sally from his friends list. No, he wasn’t going to join her party if she ever sent a fresh request. She was so stupidly proud of how people didn’t bounce her. It would drive her crazy seeing her friend count go down by a number, and trying to figure out who it was.
Having no clue what to write back to Zaley, he wrote exactly that. Her message came quickly. I have no idea either. So I’m just sitting here in my bed with a candle for you.
Oh, Zaley. Just read your unicorn porn stories.
No, they’ll wait. This is all I can do. Let me do it.
He was sorry that he had made that crack about her arm. That was mean as hell, and still she was with him in this waiting room. He remembered the second message. It was from Austin, inviting the Li family over to Micah’s for dinner this evening. Corbin thought no instantly, but then he reconsidered. He wanted to be with Austin and Micah, to not be the only stamped person in the room. There was no mention of a New Year’s Eve party, which he wouldn’t want to go to anyway since there was nothing to celebrate.
“Li, Corbin,” the receptionist called.
When he didn’t move, one of the guards said, “Come on, kid.”
But he couldn’t. Corbin couldn’t be a party to flushing his own life down the toilet. No P.E. No restaurants. No girls. Nothing. He stayed in the chair, feeling too heavy to move. Both of the guards came for him, and he was dragged through the red doors struggling in their grip and screaming.
Elania
Paolo D’Cruz was the star of Miwan Elementary School’s first grade. He had a variety of custom-made team shirts that read D’CRUZ over his number, a one of course since he was number one. In P.E. he kicked the ball farther than anyone, to the moon practically, and he once scored three goals in a soccer match. He was in the best reading group, the blue group, whereas Percy and Conor were in green and Cormac in the lowly yellow. There was a popular series of books called Magic Marley and Paolo had read five of them even though the books were for ages eight and up. He did not even turn seven until January, and his upcoming party was going to be at Pirate Quest down in San Criata. Elania had been hearing all about Paolo since school started.
The absolute best thing about Paolo was that he could fart on cue, really fart, not fake fart, making him the undisputed champion of the ongoing recess war in which the entire population of Miwan’s first and second grades ran around the playground farting on each other. Modest points were awarded for blowing raspberries, more for ripping one on your arm (better yet on your victim’s arm), serious points for the rare few who had mastered the art of armpit farts, but the real gold lay in those actually delivered from the rear end. And here Paolo’s true genius was revealed. While others claimed SBDs or grimaced and strained after weak putters and grumbles and toots, Paolo effortlessly unloaded blasters and squawkers and screamers. It earned him the nickname of King Fart. Once he had handed in his spelling test with King Fart in place of his name, and the teacher docked five minutes from his recess time as a punishment. Elania’s brothers were outraged on his behalf, all three of them boasting fervent boy crushes on a kid who’d stood on a bench and farted directly in their faces.
The party at Pirate Quest had been the talk of the first grade since November, and with three brothers, Elania knew all about it, too. The place looked like nothing on the outside, as boring as a bank, but inside was a real ship beached on sand where you could climb to the lookout or go on a barrel ride, learn how to sword-fight, be shackled in the hold and search for the key to escape. Treasure boxes full of goodies were hidden all around the sandy area, and the kids were given maps and shovels to dig them up. Cormac was positive that this place outdid every other place in the world, including his future wedding, and the more romantic Percy decided that he was going to get married there to combine both of his favorite things in the same place. He and the lucky bride could exchange rings upon the deck and then race in the barrel ride to seal their vows.
Both first grade classes had received invitations over winter vacation, telling the landlubbers to come in costume and get ready to have the best time of their young lives. The boys checked the mail every day for their invitation, but several days into the New Year, it still had not come. Mom called Mrs. D’Cruz, sure that it had gotten lost in the mail, and Mrs. D’Cruz said that she wasn’t comfortable with having the triplets there since they had a sister with Sombra C. You understand.
“No, I don’t understand,” said Mom tightly. All her powers of persuasion failed to convince the woman to change her mind. The Douglas triplets were not welcome.
The boys were devastated. Why couldn’t they go? Why did Elania have to get Sombra C? Cormac was the worst, screaming when Elania told him to get his feet off the dinner table that she was an ugly stamped zombie and he didn’t have to listen to her. Dad hauled him to his room. Tears dripped down Conor’s cheeks as he ate in silent misery and Percy announced that now Elania was broken like he was. She hadn’t known that he thought of himself that way, since his CP was so mild. His muscles were broken and her blood was broken, he explained.
She had to leave the table, too upset to stay, and sobbed in the shower. Her thigh twinged where the bullet had grazed her. It was not a serious injury, but the bullet went through one of Murdoch’s Sombra C patients first. She couldn’t even look in the mirror. Out in public, she felt like the stamp was shining through the layers of fabric she wrapped around her neck. The Pewter website had a new addition to their prospective student page for those infected with Sombra C. Students had to be three percent or under to be considered for admission. The old house on campus formerly lived in by their college presidents had been converted into a Sombra C dormitory. Due to very limited space and priority given to already enrolled students with the illness, they only had two open places left for applicants. Two. The school received ten thousand applications every year.
Two. Elania wasn’t even a straight-A student. She didn’t jump horses or climb mountains, hadn’t published a book or mastered an instrument. The B’s in math came by the skin of her teeth, but she damned herself for not working harder at it the last three years. She had been nervously excited for months about the Pewter tour in January, and now it was January and she was just distressed. Two.
That was also the number on her neck. The doctor who tested her blood after the party was shocked and horrified at the warp speed with which the infection was spreading through her system. A minute number of people had an extremely high acceleration rate with this virus, possibly for genetic reasons, and Elania was one of them. By the time the Zyllevir arrested it, she was almost at two percent. Mom and Dad had been terrified Zyllevir would not stop the progression, but it had. She wasn’t turning into a zombie.
An ugly stamped zombie. Cormac was made to apologize, but she didn’t want a forced sorry from his gritted teeth and clenched fists. She thought she’d been more important to him than King Fart’s birthday party. Only six, he was only six, she reminded herself frantically while her hand itched to slap him. She had lost her job and her volunteer position, maybe college, doors were closing right and left to her and a child couldn’t grasp that. Her hand stayed at her side. Right now his world was Pirate Quest and the fart genius Paolo D’Cruz, and all of that was lost to him.
“Why did you have to get shot?” Cormac asked, still bitter, still defiant.
“Because some bad men came to my party,” Elania said, like she had a hundred times. “They were chasing people with Sombra C to kill them, and I got hit by a bullet that had the virus on it when I tried to run away.”
“Could you have run faster?”
Run faster. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself weaving desperately through the cars in the parking lot, the figures in black and tan in chaos all around her. She hadn’t even felt the bullet as she sprinted across the street to hide in the trees. In shock, she called her father instead of the cops and wondered why he answered. He said at the hospital that that was the worst moment of his li
fe, to get a call from his nearly adult daughter, screaming Daddy! Daddy, help me, they’re shooting!
Elania hadn’t been able to hear herself speak over the gunfire, nor could she remember calling her father Daddy. She hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. To Cormac, she said, “It doesn’t matter how fast you run. A bullet goes faster.”
“I could do it.”
“Cormac, go away,” she said, hating him for being a self-absorbed six-year-old and not trusting herself in his presence.
Micah’s family was pressuring her to apply to Pewter and that made Elania want to throw in the towel altogether, even with her application already in the mail. She’d never beat Micah for one of those two spots. Not Micah with her uncanny ability to remember whatever a teacher said in class and parrot it back for papers and exams, Micah who had no trouble with math and landed almost perfect scores on her boards. She wouldn’t even need much financial aid. Elania brought up other schools when the two talked on the phone, making it seem innocent and hoping to interest her in somewhere else. That had been a shitty thing to do. Micah cottoned on to her true motives right away and confronted her on it. Then Elania compounded her disingenuousness by lying (of course she wanted Micah to apply! They could both get in and it’d be so great to have a friend there!) and Micah said that she dished out enough bullshit to recognize it from others. Then she hung up. She ignored Elania’s calls and texts to apologize. Austin could have been a go-between, but Elania was ashamed to ask. He had more problems in his life than mediating a girl fight.
It wasn’t the end of the world if she didn’t get accepted to Pewter, and she’d get a spot in one of the state schools she had as safeties. If she didn’t get in anywhere, then it was junior college and a transfer. But that wasn’t the dream, hopscotching from school to school, building up a community only to tear it down and build a new one somewhere else. She wanted the full experience from those first days of navigating the campus as a freshman to the last as a confident senior about to set sail into the world.
Elania and her mother were going to drive five hundred miles for Pewter to say no. The morning they left for San Diego, Dad put his hands on her shoulders and said, “They haven’t said no yet. And if they don’t want you because of an illness, then you don’t want them.” But she did. If they wanted her even with Sombra C, then maybe there was a way past this. It wouldn’t permeate every facet of her existence.
She wrapped a scarf around her neck even though they’d just be in the car for hours. Her brothers surrounded her for hugs once the car was packed, Cormac yelling that Dad was taking them to Pirate Quest while they were gone. So he was happy again. Conor and Percy had drawn clumsy pictures of flowers for good luck, and she made a bigger fuss over how pretty they were rather than express much excitement for Cormac about Pirate Quest.
“Little boys are mean,” Elania said on the drive. “I didn’t go through that.”
Mom laughed as they pulled onto the freeway. “Little girls can be mean, too, honey. The fits you threw when I decided to see what my hair looked like natural! I was getting it from everywhere, from Gramma and my sisters all the way down to my daughter about why I wasn’t making my hair pretty any more. That was hard, especially the day I got my big cut and you said that I wasn’t your mommy unless I looked nice. Then you hit high school and decided to do the same thing.”
“I like my hair.”
“I don’t miss relaxers, not one bit. And neither does my hair,” Mom said. “I just got so tired of battling it, and the breakage.”
Pulling down the mirror, Elania checked to see if the stamp was fully covered. Someone might spot it from another car and take a potshot. Setting up this trip had been a nightmare. The original plan was to go by car, one long day of driving to the hotel with the tour the next day. Then a leisurely day of sightseeing historic San Diego and shopping, and a long drive back the day after that. But that was before the party. Now Elania took to heart every story in the news about illegal checkpoints, detained citizens and kidnappings and murders. It could have been her. It could be her. She pored over websites listing Shepherd/culler (the terms were used interchangeably) hotbeds in the cities and counties they would be passing through. Hanstown just north of the grapevine was marked with a flashing red light for dangerous. There were two disappearances of Sombra C drivers in December, both unsolved. So the Douglas women were not going to be stopping for gas in Hanstown. Or in Reveille. Or about a half dozen other places, worrying Mom and Dad so much that they looked into flying to San Diego.
That offered up even more problems, people with Sombra C allotted only certain red-eye flights on small, specific planes. Seats were twice as expensive as a regular flight. That was due to the extensive cleaning the plane was given after each run, and the special handling for the baggage. Mom would not be allowed to fly with Elania, who couldn’t even use the regular entrance to the airport but one to the side. Nor would they be able to rent a car once in San Diego, every agency with NO STAMPED on the homepage of their websites. Public transport was out of the question, considering an average of fifty buses were detained every single day in this country and its riders saliva-tested and searched for stamps. The stamped were forced out. A fed-up man in Nevada had created a Sombra C-only bus in response, ferrying those in his community free of charge, at least until it disappeared with twenty people in it.
Then they looked into trains, but many of the same issues cropped up. Yes, there was a Sombra C car, painted red so no one else mistakenly climbed into it. Still Mom could not travel with Elania and the cost was prohibitive. Also, it was booked, and didn’t even come with the guarantee of a seat. Elania couldn’t stand on her wounded leg the whole way to San Diego. No food or water service was provided, and violence between passengers was common. Dad read a report of the latest incidents in California, refused to speak of their particulars, and forbid his baby girl to travel alone in a Sombra C railcar. So that led back to driving with sky-high gas prices. Driving and doing it smart, which meant having a list of green towns to stop for gas, and traveling fast past the yellows and reds. It was also wise to keep Elania’s neck covered.
She’d ordered seven new scarves online, not wanting to go to Dabey’s or the mall and have to put on gloves to touch things. If she didn’t and an employee saw that she was trying to conceal her stamp, she’d be thrown out of the store. Online shopping took care of the problem. Stamps were constricting, and then she self-constricted on top of it. But why worry about gloves and cullers and stares at the store when she could just do it online? It made her sad though, since she had always enjoyed shopping for clothes in person. That leisurely day they planned in San Diego was removed from the schedule, since historic San Diego had a rabid Shepherd/culler force determined to weed out stamps and keep tourism high.
“It draws more attention,” Mom said quietly as Elania adjusted her scarf. Elania snapped her hands away and flipped the mirror back up. People were being shot and killed by crazy cullers every week for wearing scarves, and many didn’t even have Sombra C. She shouldn’t feel like she was running past a firing line to get to San Diego for a college tour!
Maybe this was selfish, putting Mom in danger over a college. But Elania wasn’t ready to just give up on everything she had worked for due to a minor infection. Her doctor at the hospital had a teenaged daughter also at 2% and laid it out point by point. Kissing the triplets on the head was not going to sicken them. Elania should check her hands carefully for any cuts before preparing food, or just wear gloves. It was unlikely that she could pass it on through sex, the risk of which skyrocketed at five percent and up. But it was possible, so the doctor counseled condoms and no wet kissing. At this point, studies were showing that pregnant Sombra C women did not pass on the illness to the fetus unless it was born vaginally. A C-section, very carefully performed, and formula feeding prevented that. This was not the end of the world. Elania repeated that to herself when the hospital released her. She still hesitated when touching he
r brothers.
Mom’s phone rang. It was Dad wanting to know where the form was about the boys’ saliva-testing date for school. While she walked him through the mess on her desk where it was buried, Elania checked HomeBase on her cell. She’d posted about going to Pewter for a tour, one of her first posts since the party. The first comment was from Micah, kick their ivory tower asses, and Elania was relieved.
The next was from Austin, wishing her luck with a roaring lion video attached. It had been heartbreaking in the hospital, his mother having brought his belongings to the front desk and leaving them there. Hearing his sobs of Mamma, please into the phone was going to haunt Elania forever. She had cried with him to see so much pain. Even Micah cried a little, pressing his head to her stomach and whispering that he would live with her. Her mothers hadn’t batted an eye over it, just as scandalized as everyone else about a boy left with no one.
“How’s Austin holding up?” Mom asked when both put down their phones. She knew about the bearding now, Elania unloading everything from her conscience while they were still waiting to see if Zyllevir worked for her.
“Okay and not okay. How could his mom do that?” Elania asked.
“For some people, love is very conditional.”
“Only if he’s healthy.”
“That’s going to mark him all the rest of his life, how his mamma loved him only when it was convenient. But that’s not love.” Mom stiffened to see a black van shooting by in the fast lane, a giant Shepherd symbol painted on the side. Her hand going in reflex to tighten the scarf, Elania pulled away.
“Driving while stamped,” Elania muttered. Somebody had called it that in an article, the danger of driving with a giant stamp on one’s neck. Mom turned on the radio. A song was being interrupted for a breaking update of shots reported in the Oregon community Inigo.
“I feel like I’m watching civilization end in slow motion,” Mom said in exasperation. “Do they have nothing better to do than hunt people with Sombra C?”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 34