Then she blocked off her bedroom door with a chair, as she did regularly now to keep everyone out. This was how close she was to the limit, she realized solemnly. She turned around in her room and thought about where to hide the gun. Under the mattress wasn’t safe since Mom changed her sheets; in the desk was a laugh when the drawers were cubbies. The doll’s cradle was tempting but risky, and the only place left was the closet under a pile of old clothes.
The doorknob turned and caught. “Zaley? Baby, your door!”
“I’m busy,” Zaley snapped.
“Okay, but I brought in some bricks from the garage to prop up your desk a little!”
With the gun right here, Zaley did not have to get angry. It was in her control now. The rage dissipated and that was a lovely feeling. Her friends were texting each other about declarations of war and stupid errors on finals, makeup exams for those who had missed on Friday, and she joined in like nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong. Her answer was only five feet away. She thought of those furious, wonderful moments at breakfast in which she had wanted to live, but could not recreate the feeling. Popping open the cap of the pain pills, she swallowed one. If she were smart, the next time she was in the kitchen, she’d fill a glass with water and keep it in here.
Tell me what it’s like to have a job, she wrote while waiting for the medication to kick in.
Your boss steals your pay, Austin answered.
It’s nice if it’s the right job. I loved the animals, Elania wrote.
Corbin’s message was private. I wish I could take you away from there.
Tears stung in Zaley’s eyes at how he’d seen through her text. She wrote back to him. What are you guys up to today?
Nothing. Honestly, I’m afraid to go outside. Did you look at Sombra C News? Harbors are filling up faster than walls can go up. The new Inigo is at capacity; Mirror Lake is overflowing; Haven in Virginia is under heavy fire and there are STILL people trying to reach it. A bunch of Catholic zombies have reclaimed a closed-down church back east somewhere and they’re fortifying it.
I’d be afraid to go out, too. Something rustled in the hallway, followed by clinks. Crouching down, Zaley looked out the crack beneath her door to newspaper. Mom was stacking bricks upon it. Returning to her phone, she wrote: My mother has solved the problem of my desk. Bricks! I’m going to be the most messed-up adult on the planet.
No. The most messed-up adults don’t realize they’re messed up, like Mr. Dayze. They think they’re great.
Then Dad was home, yelling about his sore back and the bricks in the hallway. Zaley moved them into her room with her mother leaping in to help. Mom beamed once the desk was two and a quarter inches higher, and Zaley looked past her to the closet. It was all right. It was all right even though when Mom left to get Dad some pills for pain, she took the chair with her. The chair could be brought back, the gun was in the closet, and all would be well. All would be well! The pain pill was working. Zaley closed her door and read the afternoon away. She didn’t care what she read, silly romances, epic fantasies, vampire dramas, erotica, or robot science fiction. Every world was a world that wasn’t here.
The pills made Dad too sleepy to think of going anywhere for the night, so Zaley did not have to be a statue in forty-degree weather. If only that had happened during finals! Trig she worried about most. The exam period flew by so fast that she still had five unanswered questions when the bell rang. She’d filled in C for all of them, figuring at least one was likely to be right. She and Elania should get Micah a card or a small gift at graduation, in thanks for years of free tutoring.
Dad’s back was no better on Sunday, and he shouted with frustration in the afternoon, “Why aren’t you over at Rattler’s? They’re setting up for a party for you kids going on tomorrow afternoon and everyone is helping out.”
Because I’m not allowed to drive? Zaley thought. The last thing she wanted to do was go to Rattler’s. Dad told her to call one of her friends like Panther or Pony to come over and pick her up. Sure that she was going to be assaulted if she got into Panther’s car alone, Zaley faked a headache. Swallowing two pills, she went to bed. God, she hated weekends. The world numbed, or she numbed to the world, and she read until she drifted away. Much later, she downed another two pills. Or maybe it was three.
When she woke up on Monday, she was still feeling the effects of the medication. Dopily she dressed and ate breakfast. Then the pain struck in her abdomen, a horrifying twist of the intestines that indicated emergency. Rushing to the bathroom, she sat on the toilet with furious diarrhea. Usually the medication made her constipated, but there was only so long it could plug up her system before the crash. The pain was excruciating. Breaking out in a cold sweat, she twisted on the toilet and dug her nails into her knees to keep from screaming. It grew so bad that she leaned over and vomited into the sink. Mom knocked and knocked to check on her, Zaley thankful for the little lock every time.
School started without her. It was nine o’clock when she dragged herself, aching and weary, out of the bathroom and into bed. At ten another strike hit and ended her hopes of getting to school for a few classes. She was more upset about missing Welcome Mat. It was sad to think that their club was going to die with them at graduation. The only younger member they had was Brennan, everyone else fleeing for non-infected company at lunch and the infected students wanting nothing to do with a club they associated with their infections and that horrible party. Well, it had been horrible for them. Zaley remembered very little but the good parts.
Mom visited every few minutes, opening the door that Zaley closed, making Zaley get up after Mom left to close it. Then it reopened with a glass of water, a damp washcloth, just to chat, and was left open yet again when Mom walked out. Zaley closed it and closed it and closed it until she dragged the chair back to her room and blocked the door to stop this game and win her privacy.
Sleeping through lunch, she woke at two with her stomach defiantly twisting, although not as urgently. After that bout, she took a long shower and went to the kitchen to see if her system could tolerate some water and crackers. Dad yelled about the party and Mom yelled back that Zaley had a stomach bug and couldn’t attend.
If nothing else, she didn’t have to hang out at the stupid party. Zaley tested her stomach with the crackers, found it settled, and had some cheese. The first day of the semester! She wouldn’t take any pills tonight. If this was how her body was going to react, she shouldn’t take them ever again.
“Zaley, get me a beer,” Dad called. She brought the can to the recliner, where he looked at her sourly. “You should be hanging out there and celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?” Zaley asked.
“Celebrating! Spider’s there to make the announcement to all the kids and you’re going to miss it. No more zombies in your schools, no sirree!” He chortled and drank.
Feeling something cold slide from her throat to her stomach, Zaley said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean no zombies! Got wax in your ears?” Dad asked merrily. “No more in schools, in stores, in churches, nowhere! We got a nice home all set up for them, those old campgrounds. The raiders are out and about at their houses picking them up and getting them to the vans now.”
She could not believe what she was hearing. “Is this a joke?”
“You see me laughing?”
In a shrill voice that she did not recognize as her own, Zaley said, “You’re gathering up people right now and taking them off to an illegal confinement point? Are you fucking insane?”
Then her bad arm was in his grip and she was screaming in pain to be dragged down the hallway to her room. He knocked her onto the bed, where she dove under the pillow to get to her phone and call Corbin. Lunging forward, Dad jerked it out of her hand and smashed it into the wall. Blood pounded beat-red in his face, and she was frightened that he was going to strike her. “You aren’t going to warn them! No, you aren’t warning them to run and hide themselves! They’re going home and you s
hould be glad. You should be down on your knees thanking me that you’re going to have a normal life!”
“You’re a goddamned murderer and I’m going to call the police!” Zaley cried. Her arm throbbed.
“The police? The police are helping us!” Yanking her laptop from her backpack, he opened it and smashed the keyboard against her nightstand. He dropped it to the floor and stomped on the screen, and did the same to her digital reader. Then he stalked out of her room and slammed the door. Zaley jumped off the bed and wedged the chair underneath the knob, terrified and gasping for breath.
“Give me your phone and don’t let her out of this house!” Dad screamed at Mom. The recliner squeaked and the television blasted.
No more.
This was the limit.
This was where it stopped.
In a surreal state, Zaley pulled out the gun from her closet. She would not spend one more day, one more night, one more hour, not even ten more lousy minutes in this house. She was done. Her friends were going to die in a confinement point and she had no way to even warn them what was coming.
Oh, baby.
It was not Mom’s daily insult but Corbin’s occasional sweet nickname she heard, meaning only that she was something precious to him. And he had been precious to her, was still precious and always would be, her first love and no guy was ever going to compete with his feet pounding across the school in her direction. Other guys might loom over six feet, but five-ten Corbin was always going to be taller in her heart. Zaley put the gun to her temple. Her finger trembled on the trigger.
He had run for her.
She should run for him.
She should run for all of them, the friends who were her family since her family had failed. What was she thinking to put a bullet through her brain when they needed her? The gun lowered and she placed it on her pillow. Jerking up her backpack, she dumped out the schoolbooks and binder. Jeans, shirts, underwear, socks . . . her jacket was in the hall closet and she wasn’t going out there, so she packed in her thickest sweater. Money! She pushed in her wallet and rummaged through the desk after the change purse, the tampon, too. Then she went back to her closet to retrieve her beautiful amethyst and red bead bracelet.
What else should she take? She spun around on a star rug, snagged the tealight, and concluded there was nothing else. That was it, her life reduced to a backpack of what actually fit. Once the gun was inside, she zipped it up and confronted the problem of the boarded window. Raising the bottom half of the glass, she pressed hard with her left hand on the board. It didn’t budge.
Laying on her back across the bed, she braced her hand on the post to the canopy and kicked with all of her might. The board shot out from the outside wall and sunlight burst over her legs. It wasn’t enough space to climb through. Gripping the post even more tightly, she aimed a practice kick at the higher board and gave it all she had. Two kicks and it broke away, falling to the lawn below. More light burst in and warmed her.
Backpack in hand, she slid out of the window and landed clumsily on one of the boards. No one was around. It wasn’t likely her parents had heard with the television up so loudly.
Elania lived only half a mile away. It made the most sense to go there and borrow her cell phone to alert the others. And then . . . and then didn’t matter. Zaley wasn’t ever coming back to this house. Sleeping in a recycling bin was preferable, on the floor of someone’s closet, in the middle of a busy road, anywhere at all. She fixed the backpack over her shoulders and crossed the lawn, worried that the front door might open. But it didn’t. The cars were in the driveway, the television blaring, and nothing stirred. If Zaley put the boards back, it might be days before they knew that she was gone. But they were too heavy for her to lift one-handed.
This was her limit, one that she’d never cross back over. If the cops caught Zaley and tried to force her to return, she would just keep escaping until she was too old for them to care and give chase. This part of her life was done, end of chapter, forever. Turn page. From now on, for good or ill, she wrote the chapters rather than have them written for her.
Without a backwards glance, she ran.
Corbin
“I can’t do it,” Mom said the second Corbin got home from school. “I can’t take one more fart from this dog. It smells like a sewer in here. She needs a walk.”
“Mom! I just walked in!” Corbin was annoyed, wanting to run out the strength in his hand on his video game and relax. Tomorrow they were going to the Cambornes for their afternoon get-together, but today everyone had plans. Micah was driving Austin to a dentist’s appointment at the only place in Cloudy Valley that treated Sombra C patients; Elania wanted quiet time at her house without her brothers to work on an article for the paper; Quinn was out of town for a family event and Janie cramming for make-up finals since a cold kept her out of school last week. Brennan’s mother wanted him at the hotel by four so she could pick him up to look at a house for rent. It was his nausea day with Zyllevir anyway. So Corbin was at loose ends and went home.
It did smell like a sewer. The dog must have gotten into something, sneaked food from the trash or dug her way into the compost. Wriggling around his feet, she gave him a cross-eyed look of love and farted hard. Then she jumped around to see who was back there wanting to play.
Mom moaned in the kitchen, where she was browning meat in a pan. Two boxes from California Munchies were on the counter, their contents partially unpacked. “Twice I put her in the backyard and she just stood at the door and howled. Give her a good jog and see if you can’t shake out what dead, rotting thing she has inside.”
Dropping his backpack to the floor, Corbin got the leash and a plastic bag. He really didn’t want to do this, not now after all day at school. The new student teacher for economics had visibly blanched to see Corbin, Janie, and Austin take the handicapped table in first period. She gave the class a pop quiz to test their knowledge of the subject. Anything they got right was extra credit to start the semester off on a good note. But Ms. Schubert wouldn’t even stand behind Corbin to see how many he got right. Asking his score clear across the classroom, she waited with a strained smile over her grade book. Angered, Corbin lied that he’d gotten all of them right. The student teacher looked barely older than the seniors and she was hot, long legs stretching up to a little skirt, black hair held back on one side with a flower clip. He couldn’t even enjoy the visual since he knew that she was stupid. Austin and Janie lied as well (they hadn’t gotten five right added up between all three of them) and watched the teacher suspend disbelief in her desperation to be as far as she could get from their infection.
“Come on,” Corbin said resentfully to his reeking dog. He braced himself and walked outside, mad that he had to brace himself. He was also mad that he had to consider which way was safest, rather than just go. Winding through neighborhoods looked safer on the surface, but all it took was some shithead to pop him on a drive-by and no one would be there to see. Downtown was better: more risk with more people, yet more witnesses if anything went wrong. It was rare for him to be bothered, not when it was still so cold and everyone bundled up, but he was dreading summer.
Bleu Cheese pulled on the leash to reach the sidewalk. Stopping at once, Corbin tugged on the leash lightly and clucked to remind her of who was in charge. Then he waited for the reminder to be slowly processed through her brain, just like how anything he read had to be slowly processed through his. A special dog for special Corbin, and he thought of his old teacher with resentment. Bleu Cheese figured it out and they walked on with her at his side, the leash slack between them.
If not for the airport bombings, Dad would have been home today. And Dad would have walked the dog, happy for exercise since so much of his life was sitting in planes and driving around with wine reps. Stranded in Miami, he didn’t know when he’d be home. It said on the news that air travel might resume on Wednesday, but that all depended on the state of wrangling between Shepherd Prime and the government. The problem
with fighting Prime was that they weren’t centralized. Since anyone could shoot a transformer or blow up a plane and claim it for Prime, the work of sussing out what was Prime and what was copycat wasted a lot of time.
Corbin waited at the road for a break in traffic, and then they jogged across the street. The dog sniffed at a bush and he was hopeful that she might do her business here so they could double back. But she only wanted to sniff. They continued walking in the direction of the downtown, passing houses and apartments. An old man on a porch at the assisted living center cried out, “That’s a fine-looking dog!” as he always did whenever Corbin and Bleu Cheese went by. Heads were clustered around the television in the common room, but he liked watching the world go by from the porch. Corbin said thanks and the man replied, “You get that fine dog a bone, you hear?” and slapped his thigh. Bleu Cheese wagged her tail, probably not understanding bone, but knowing dog and that someone was admiring her stocky blue self.
It didn’t feel real that the country was at war. The hot spots of conflict were mostly centered in Colorado, Texas, and Georgia, and all of them were comfortably far away. What the government had working in their favor was just how pissed millions of people were about the actions of the Shepherds in general over the months, and crucial information was getting passed along as a result. On Sunday, a wife in the Midwest ratted out her husband and a dozen of his buddies, busy stockpiling weapons, building bombs, and intending to bring down their state capitol. Half of them were caught and arrested. The wife and her son were put in protective custody. Infuriated to have their plans exposed, the other half attacked the police station. Cops dead, the bad guys freed, but their faces were plastered all over the news.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 52