“That’s it, man!” Austin encouraged the little king, putting up a fist in solidarity as a tabby plunged to the bottom. The fluffy tan kitten crept up the side of the tree and swatted the black’s rear end. By the time he leaped around to spot his new challenger, the tan was gone. It slunk around to the other side and spanked the black one again.
“We are unseen, yet always here,” Corbin said in a spooky voice about the tan.
“Viva, Mexi-cat,” Brennan added.
They fell apart at that, half because it was funny and half because it was so unexpected from that particular source. A cold wind reminded them of the errands and they went on to the game store. Corbin put on gloves resentfully and followed his friends to the wall where the new games were put up. There was only one copy of Deadlock Five on the shelf, which they snagged fast.
Then they looked around. Janie poked through the discount bin and picked up Zinc. Having never played it, Corbin said, “Is that one any good?”
“If you enjoy just how many glitches you can fit into one game.” Janie tossed her hair aside to inspect the back. “Zinc is infamous. Random holes that appear in solid ground, walls you can pass through to other levels, occasionally you walk on one leg for no reason. Code is crossed in places with character switching and there aren’t patches for any of the issues. The only thing this game doesn’t do is erase the memory card.” She was talking to him, but her eyes were on an aisle across from the bin. There was a slight crease in her brow. Turning to let her hair fall back and shield her face, Janie said in a low and urgent voice, “We should go. We’re being watched.”
Corbin looked to the aisle, where a quartet of heads was bobbing around. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. They came in right after we did and they’ve been staring this whole time.”
Split between wanting to leave yet claim his right to be here, Corbin walked slowly by the aisle on the way to the register to get a better look. Two guys and two girls were in the section for little kids’ educational programs. They were in their late teens or early twenties, and not one had a game in hand. One girl looked at him slyly, her brown hair bushy around stretched-out earlobes. The other girl was blonde and underfed, her purple tank top tight over the bumps of her ribcage and a sweater tied around her waist even though it was cold outside. The guys were tall and thick, the first with a shaved head and ratty jeans, and the second in chinos. That one turned to look directly at Corbin, his lip curling as he chewed on a toothpick, and his hand going to the inside pocket of his battered blue jacket like he was armed. Alarmed, Corbin pushed on to the counter.
“You should get one of those credit bracelets,” the cashier said, oblivious to the tension when Corbin gave over the game. He reeked of pot. Corbin bent open the edges of the envelope so the cashier could withdraw the money. “You see those? Then you just flash your wrist and your info comes up on the screen.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen those,” Corbin said. “It just seems so easy to misplace it or have it stolen.”
“Hey, Devvie, how’s it going?” The guy in the battered jacket was suddenly next to Corbin, slipping a pack of gum on top of a dollar across the counter. He smelled faintly of alcohol. Corbin thought that he must know the cashier, but it said Devvie on the nametag.
“Just fine,” the cashier said while ringing up Corbin’s purchase. “You see those credit bracelets? Be great, no worries.”
“Be great if they just shopped in their own special stores,” the guy said, smiling keenly at the cashier and the toothpick still in his mouth. “Smear their zombie juice around everywhere in those places and no one cares, ‘cause they all got it themselves. Keep the change.” He snapped up the gum and slid it into the back pocket of his pants.
“Maybe I seen them doing it on some of those games,” offered the bushy-haired girl. She gestured to Janie and mimicked licking Zinc. Standing closely to the boys, Janie said nothing.
“That’s sickening!” cried the blonde girl with great drama. “They really did that?”
“Aw now, can’t be doing that,” the cashier said mildly while counting out the change for Deadlock Five. “Sombra C is contagious, you know that?”
This was not the reaction these four wanted, but the cashier was far too stoned to be perturbed about the prospects of infected saliva on the products in the store. He passed over the change and put the game in a plastic bag. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” Corbin said. The guy backed up just as Corbin tried to go around, getting in his way. Pulling back sharply, Corbin managed not to touch him. The desire for a fight was strong in these people, like they were all waiting for the barest breath of an opportunity. Corbin hadn’t known that that was a physical sensation, but it was there in the back of his neck, buried in his brain in some primitive place. He wanted to say fuck off and leave us alone but that was exactly what they wanted him to do. The guy waited there, still blocking him, and Corbin waited. Going around was a provocation, too.
Finally the guy moved on to his friends. Corbin returned to his group, which was closer to the door, and they exited rapidly. The door banged shut behind them. They did not strip the gloves from their hands to drop in the waste bucket, or stop to look at the antics of the kittens still at war in the Pet-Pet display. The door to Game Tix banged shut again, Corbin wishing they could have just gotten into the minivan but still having to pick up dessert at Mr. Foods.
The missiles. How could he have forgotten that even for a moment? Shepherds were calling for the right to shoot anyone with Sombra C, and Corbin was out in public with his stamp covered but the gloves giving him away. He heard their footsteps, as did his friends, and they picked up the pace. Cutting through the lot, they exchanged gloves hastily, picked up a basket, and went inside.
The deli was to the left, with soda and chips close by. Brennan picked out the latter two as Corbin looked through the glass to the cakes. Charla was behind the counter, glancing at his neck but still smiling. “What can I get for you, Corbin?”
“That little chocolate cake,” Corbin said. There were tons to choose from, all sorts of flavors, some with flowers or cool designs, but not now. He didn’t even read what was inside this one.
“They’re here,” whispered Janie. “The girls.”
“Could I just pay here?” Corbin asked. Charla nodded amiably and rang up his purchase, Corbin snagging the soda and chips from Brennan and turning them to find the scan code.
“I can take them to the line over there,” Brennan said in surprise.
But those girls were watching, and the primitive place in Corbin could read their minds. They wanted a scene and could easily make one, claim Brennan sneezed on the apples over in produce, that Janie coughed on the boxes in the cereal aisle. It was imperative that the four stay together and in direct view of the employees and cameras. Charla rattled a bag and slid the cake inside. The chips and soda went into another one. She wished them a good afternoon and the four walked straight to the sliding doors.
Outside, the guy with the toothpick was cutting off their way to the minivan. “Hey now, what’s the rush? I think we should have a little chat.”
“I don’t think so,” Austin said firmly. He started to go around. A switchblade whickered out from the battered jacket, the blade bursting forth from the handle and the guy holding it out in warning. The sliding doors opened and the girls exited. They laughed harshly to see Austin jump back.
“Run!” Janie cried, and the three boys ran after her to the parking lot’s other exit. The bag with the cake smacked against Corbin’s side. As they neared the exit, the second guy appeared to block it.
Brennan wheeled left in panic, the others following and Corbin crying, “No, not that way!” The loading dock for incoming goods was a dead end. Empty of trucks and employees, all it had were dumpsters pressed to the wall of the store, and high walls impossible to climb to the side and back. Corbin knew the door was locked, so they couldn’t get back into the store.
“Just wanted t
o have a chat!” called the guy with the toothpick jokingly. He and his friends blocked them in. Janie tried the door and then pounded on it.
“Throw over your wallets,” the second guy said. “Do it or she’ll start screaming.”
“Oh, help, help!” cried the blonde. “Those zombies over there spat on me!”
Corbin did not know what to do. Most of his money was still in his backpack, safe in the minivan, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it was his, dammit! He stared at the knife as a wallet hit the ground between them. It was Brennan’s.
“Get it, Kace,” the guy with the toothpick ordered.
The bushy brown-haired girl made a face. “I don’t want to touch it.”
“Get out the money!”
“Help! Help!” wailed the blonde. Three more wallets pattered down fast, Corbin almost flinging his in hatred.
Motioning aside Austin to get a better look at Janie, the toothpick guy said, “Don’t be calling anyone now. Throw over the phone.”
“I called them two minutes ago, and dispatch has been recording this whole time,” Janie said.
“Aw, shit, man, let’s go!” said the second guy. The girl finished rifling through the wallets and dropped them to the ground. Slipping the slim pickings of money into her pocket, she wiped her hands on her jeans.
“And that game,” the toothpick guy said as the others ran away.
Acting on pure rage, Corbin withdrew it from the bag and spat heartily on the cover. He pushed the glob around, covering every inch of it, spat a second time and did the same to the back. Then he tossed it to the ground. The guy looked down to it and said, “You fucking dick!” He ran off after his friends.
“Did you really call the cops?” Austin whispered.
“No,” Janie said. “I just thought it would make them go away. I saw someone do that on TV once.”
Corbin picked up the game. His knees were shaking. They retrieved their wallets and looked at one another, unsure of what to do. The minivan was clear across the lot. If the four didn’t hear sirens and were hanging out close by . . . the echoes of the blonde’s cries for help rang through his head.
“What should we do? The cops?” Brennan said. All were afraid to move.
“The cops can’t always be trusted,” Austin said. “Some are Shepherds.”
And now Corbin’s saliva had touched the ground, transferring from the game. He could walk away and pretend that everything was fine, no one could possibly be infected from that little bit and who would happen to come upon that one tiny spot on the concrete with an open wound? But a haz-mat crew should clean it, or else that place should be blocked off until the virus died in a few hours.
They didn’t know if they could trust the cops, so they had to have more people around to run interference and protect them. Unstamped people. Corbin pressed a finger to his phone and scrolled down to his mother’s name. Dad would be next, and Corbin could contact the high school and ask for Mr. Tran or Mrs. Ervin. “Call your parents. Austin, call Micah’s. Call Elania’s. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, reverends, siblings, everybody you know who isn’t stamped. Tell them to come over here fast, anyone who can vouch for us. Then we call the cops.”
Elania
It was midnight when she woke with a start, a dream dipping away to nothingness and her room lit only by the glow of a streetlight coming through a crack in the blinds. Elania lay there in hopes that she could sink back into sleep, but it was gone. Her mind agitated over the first stray thoughts to waft into consciousness. The final for trigonometry . . . the alarm she missed Sunday night for her Zyllevir . . . the call from the dean of students . . . the latest on Sombra C News . . .
There was nothing to do about the trig final except study, and it was still weeks away. The Zyllevir she remembered without the alarm right after she climbed into bed that night. Frightened, she set up a back-up alarm. As for the call, Elania couldn’t change it. Dean Marconi said that bigot wasn’t a word anyone at Pewter took lightly, and Elania replied that she was a writer, and hadn’t used it lightly. At the time of the tour, Pewter had already been going through a procedural review as to its handling of Sombra C students. The dean was interested in her opinion. What did Elania want personally?
No different from the lone woman on a board of CEOs, a Jew in a classroom of Christians, a black living in a community of whites. She wanted to be respected as an equal, to not have undue attention drawn to her differences in situations where they weren’t relevant. Yes, she had Sombra C. Yes, that was disturbing to some people. But that they were disturbed wasn’t Elania’s problem. She was stable on her anti-virals (thank God she had not gone to sleep without remembering), responsible with her care, and her illness should not be thrust in her face day in and day out. It wasn’t her only characteristic. She was made up of many pieces, but those pieces both large and small added up to a whole. That was what she wanted, to be seen as whole rather than her fragments. Elania was black and Jewish, female and had Sombra C. These things informed her as a person and each changed the lens through which she saw the world. They changed how the world related to her. But it wasn’t all of who she was, not any one of those things, and she didn’t want to be treated in such a reductionist fashion.
That had been an interesting call, her heart pounding but her voice cool and polite. Her application was at the school. She didn’t care quite so much now about getting in, but if she did, there was going to be a Sombra C Student Union by the end of her first week. That school needed something. The whole world did. She kept hoping that the situation would plateau, but Black Monday dug them down to an entirely new level of rock bottom. Here it had to stop, missiles to transformers in America, and people come to their senses. The riot at Cloudy Valley High was playing out on a greater stage of their own country, the citizenry ripping its own home to bits.
Elania rolled over in bed and heard a sound from the living room. Fear leaped within her. Shepherds. In her house, hunting for the one with the stamp and she remembered the interview on the news that day of a sobbing college-aged girl whose family was shot in their house during the night. They lived in the country. No one locked anything. Her mother and father had had Sombra C. Her fifteen-year-old brother had not, but died defending their parents from Shepherds.
It was dangerous for Elania to live here in her own home, making the whole family a target. Another sound came from the living room, but it was only paper being crumpled. Why would someone break into a house to crumple paper? She slipped out of bed, pulled on her robe, and went to look. Not Shepherds or some brother being naughty, it was her father. He was still fully dressed from the day and crouched before the fireplace, light gleaming on his bald head. The laptop was on the recliner facing him, and pages of newspaper were bunched up on the carpet. One roll of paper was smoking aside the grate. He was intent on the screen until Elania came in. Looking abashed, he said, “Sorry, sweetie, did I wake you?”
“I just woke up for no reason,” Elania said. “What are you doing?”
He sighed and separated the pages on the floor, pushing the glossy advertisements away. “Feeling like a fool.”
“You’re not a fool, Dad,” she said in surprise. He had a master’s degree and Mom called him the most common-sense man in the world.
Sitting on the sofa, she looked over to the laptop. On the screen was a how-to list with seventeen steps on building a fire in a fireplace. Bookmarked along the top were several more pages with similar themes. Their central air was working fine, heat blowing from the vent overhead. In all the years they lived in this house, they had never used the fireplace. The house in Maine had had an automatic electric one. Awake but not fully up to speed, she stared at the new logs in the grate and asked, “Does this have something to do with the missiles?”
“They died,” Dad said, sitting back heavily to rub his shins. “I heard that on the news this morning, how many people have died in Boston and Denver the last few nights. Carbon monoxide poisoning mostly, since they didn’t
know not to bring their camp stoves into the house for warmth. They didn’t know, and I started thinking of how many things I don’t know. Like making a fire. Best I’ve done is a barbeque.”
She pulled the computer into her lap. The two tabs not related to fire were a survivalist list of goods and another on dog breeds. It reminded her of Zaley’s father smacking the beef jerky in his loaded cart at Mr. Foods. “You’re really worried. Dad, this is crazy stuff.”
His brown eyes met hers soberly. “It’s not so crazy anymore. This country may really be on the verge of falling apart, and I don’t know how to make a fire. We don’t have more than four days’ worth of food in this house, and less than that of water. If something happens here, we’re in trouble, Rachel Elania. Serious trouble.”
Elania opened up a shopping list that he was making. Standby was crossed out, and portable circled next to generator. Gallons of water, toilet paper, a hand-cranked radio, solar torches, matches, canned goods, books for the boys . . . it went on for two pages, and at the bottom was dog or gun. “Wow. A dog or a gun?”
“I don’t want either. But that’s a reaction from this world, where I don’t need either. If everything goes to pieces, I’m thinking that we should have one or both. And it can go to pieces in a snap, just like on Monday. Shepherd Prime is seeing to that.”
Prime. At least the Tea Party had had a historical reference with their name. Elania couldn’t wait for these fools to be caught and imprisoned. Dad said, “If people are looting and killing each other over generators not six hours after the power goes out, I hate to think of what they’re doing six days later when it hasn’t gone back on.” He nudged the glossy paper farther away. “Don’t use glossy for a fire. I read that just as you came in.”
“Dad, you’re frightening me.”
“What I see in the news frightens me. Teachers at work complain about having to remember the last digit of their license plates to know if it’s a day they can buy gas, but that we have to ration is frightening! This country is built on cheap fuel. I . . . oh, don’t get me started, honey. Go to bed. I’ll keep it down in here.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 44