Brennan wasn’t dead, Micah thought wildly. The car just stunned him, and now he wanted his backpack returned.
She checked below to the road. It was invisible through the trees, and a car could be heard wending its way around the curves. Feet scuffled closer on the path and she hunkered down. The dog whimpered and Corbin said, “Shh-shh, shh-shh.”
If Bleu Cheese was going to be a liability like the book and stag, rather than a resource like the T-shirt and Zyllevir and Zaley’s neck, they were going to have to cut her loose. Micah wasn’t going to be penned into a confinement point because Corbin liked his pet. Harbo would have been quiet. Thank God she’d gotten him groomed yesterday! He had almost strutted out the door of Pet-Pet, knowing he looked fine.
Then Zaley exclaimed, “Christ, Elania, I almost shot you!”
Micah lifted her head. Elania wasn’t out of breath like Shepherds were chasing her, and the fear in her teary eyes diminished to see them climb back to the path. In relief, she cried, “I thought maybe you’d taken some other path and I’d never find you!”
“Did the Shepherds spot the car?” Austin asked, looking back down the path.
“No, I didn’t even leave the lot. I just needed time to think more-”
You have lost that luxury, Micah thought.
“-and I realized there isn’t anywhere to hide, and I don’t want to be alone! They think I’m the one who killed the Shepherd, so if they get hold of me, I’m going to be spilled on the spot.” She searched them and gasped, “Was it Brennan down there?”
“How did you know?” Corbin asked.
“There was a commotion at the end of the extension, people shouting about a body and their cell phones being out of service-”
“We need to go,” Micah said impatiently. This was all irrelevant information that could be passed on some other time. Any second, some Shepherd could construe from Brennan’s location that he had been running to the Gray King Nature Path, and decide to search it for others. Micah started walking. Evening was coming; she felt it in a chill along the back of her neck. It was going to be in the low forties tonight, so she’d have to pull out the braid for the warmth her long hair could provide. And draw her arms inside the T-shirt, and damn herself for not taking the socks and sneakers and jacket.
They came along in her wake, whispering to one another like they were afraid to piss her off. Yet she wasn’t angry; she was watching, listening, and planning. At the end of the copse where the path bowed into the road, the thinning trees exposed them. A very woolly copse lay beyond, and past it the path wound around the hill and out of view. They should cross fast to the copse to minimize the time they could be seen by anyone driving by.
She paused to listen for the whine of a motor, but only heard the whine of the wind. Even though she’d lived in Cloudy Valley for many years, she’d barely ever gone this far north on Caravel. Salmon Park wasn’t generally a place one wanted to go, lots of trailer parks and cheap chain stores, people with mouths full of summer teeth. You know, sum ‘er here and sum ‘er there, and Uma thought that a very rude joke.
Micah sprinted for the overgrown copse with the others on her heels. It was a ripe area for a spark, shag and dry underbrush waiting to bloom into flames. A decrepit wooden fence had partially collapsed down the slope. She looked at it and thought firewood. The fence on the other side still stood, although sediment had washed down to form strata against the posts.
There was a placard here. It was not as bleached-out since the sun wasn’t hitting it directly. The information was only about the particular botanical sights in this area and that the trail was named for a gray-banded kingsnake spotted here over a hundred years ago. That was disregarded as a myth since those snakes were endemic to Texas and Mexico, not northern California. The name Gray King, however, had stuck.
Irrelevant. She walked on.
The narrowing path tilted upward as it twisted around the hill. The grassy slope exchanged for a rock wall. The fence along the copse regained itself, splintered but still standing, and the trees on the other side sank deeply to let her look over them. In the distance was a Woodsman Diner sign pushing up through the green.
Austin was checking his phone. “Still no service.”
“We’re only going to know by going there,” Micah said. Her ankles were beginning to sting with the formation of blisters, so she kicked off the clogs and pinched them in her fingers. The socks would give her slight protection, and blisters were going to hobble her. There were no words to express the desperation she felt to be out of this net, and she was willing to destroy the socks to do it.
“What’s wrong with your shoes?” Elania asked.
“They’re for walking around a high school, not hiking, and they’re killing me,” Micah said. “I’ve got to find some new sneakers in Salmon Park. Maybe we’ll see a garage sale sign.”
“There’s a Waste Less donation bin for clothes in their Mr. Foods parking lot,” Elania said. “You might find something there.”
“Or you could just double-back and strip Brennan,” Austin sniped.
Micah turned on him. “If I could, I would! Do you know how cold it’s going to be in a few hours? We’re hardly dressed for this!”
“I’ve got extra,” Zaley offered. “Except they won’t be your size.”
They had to stop wasting time! Micah walked down the decline of the path, which sank from the tops of the trees to the bases. The road was visible in snatches, at a distance of thirty feet or more. She should have known this path and if it passed in sight of the diner! Ages of living here and she might as well have moved to Cloudy Valley yesterday. Her family usually went to the coast when they desired a little nature, but familiarity with that turf was of no help. Her life was made up of very foolish things.
They stopped for Elania to pull on a sweater. They stopped for Corbin to go behind a tree and pee. They stopped for Austin to get a pebble out of his shoe. They stopped for everyone to have some water. Micah urged them on, furious to know what lay ahead. She did not expect to see any hikers or bikers coming their way, not at this time of day and so far out from the city. The path rose and fell under her socks, rose once more but not high enough to see the sign over the diner.
It concerned her how the distance was diminishing between the path and the road. That was not a promising sign. In her head she tossed about the idea of scaling the grassy slope and rocks to pass right over the top of this hill, but she had no clue what was on the other side, or who might see them.
When Austin’s phone rang, they jumped. He looked at the screen in surprise and passed it to Micah. She tapped to answer. The connection was weak. “Tuma?”
“Joob!” Tuma cried. Her voice was thick, like she had caught a cold. “Honey, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She was fine, even though she shouldn’t be. Everyone else looked very stressed and she was just irritated to be called Joob. “Shepherds are rounding up Sombra Cs for a confinement point, but they haven’t caught me.”
“Honey, where are you? I thought you were doing errands in San Criata?”
Something stirred in warning within her mind. Tuma wasn’t a crier, and she sounded like she was trying to hold back. The comment about San Criata . . . they had not spoken of errands down there. It was a warning. Someone was with her, forcing her to make this call. “No, the dentist went late and I decided to do those tomorrow. We’re in Penger. I’m driving to The Circle. They won’t look for me and Austin out there behind the spiral garden.”
Could this phone be tracked? It was pinging off whatever cell tower they were near. Micah said, “I have to go!” and hung up. Let them hunt for her all around The Circle! The gardens and gazebo, the ritual rooms and offices, the woods behind the property, that was going to waste their time and put StarTruth in a fit. Micah turned off the phone and told Elania to do the same.
Giving her a strange look, Elania pressed the button. “Why did you lie?”
“The Shepherds forced her t
o call and find out where I am,” Micah said.
That caused the others to stop lollygagging with pit stops. They hustled on in silence, pausing only to check the road when the path was open to it. The sun slid behind the hill and the sky began to deepen in color. Thorns and pointed pebbles stabbed through the socks despite the care Micah took in where to step. The boots in her closet at home taunted her, as did all of the warm clothes in the dresser and on the rack.
The path climbed upwards as the road dipped down. There wasn’t enough space between them for comfort. Even in the cool, Micah was sweating to scale the path. She trained her eyes to the woolly growth at the top and forced her aching feet onward. Then she pulled up short.
The sudden, everyday sounds of life were startling her, a car door slamming, voices and scraping. It had started to feel like they were alone in the world, but they were not. More slowly, she went on. When the path leveled, she looked out and crouched down at once. The others followed suit. The Woodsman Diner sign was across the road, and visible also was the roof. The road was straight down the bushy embankment. The path itself split ahead, one leg going down to the diner at the right, and the other leg continuing on straight. Creeping forward on her hand and knees, Micah sought some break in the foliage for a better look.
She was nearly to the split when she found one. The parking lot of the Woodsman Diner was modest in size but full, and the three parking spaces at the tiny Comanico were also taken. Two squad cars were parked in a red zone. Shepherds were standing in the road, two of them directly in the lanes holding up stop signs, and three on the far side in lawn chairs.
In jocular spirits, they were laughing and drinking beer while the pair in the road chatted amiably. A car pulled up as Micah watched, southbound on Caravel and the brakes squealing in protest. The Shepherd of that lane tapped the window. The sound of it coming down made a whirring sound. “Lower your turtleneck, sir.”
“What’s going on?” the driver asked.
“Hey, Pellie? Pellie, we got a problem here!” the Shepherd called. One of the men in the lawn chairs started to get up, sliding a gun out from underneath the seat.
“Hey, man, no problem! Look, here!”
“Unlock the car so I can check your kid.”
A child promptly started crying, the back seat out of Micah’s vantage point. The driver shushed the child to no avail as the back door opened. It closed a moment later and the Shepherd stepped away from the car to wave it through. Micah gauged the position of the lawn chairs to the split and understood why they had no one standing up here. The path to the road was wide, and the guys were sitting directly across from it. No one could pass by unnoticed.
They were not going to pen her here. They weren’t going to pen her in the back of a van or a confinement point. She looked ahead to the path going straight, so close yet so far, and could do nothing but retreat.
Austin
Redneck Deadneck.
The bumper sticker was on the back window of a banged-up turquoise pickup truck going into the parking lot. He wouldn’t have been able to read it if not for the floodlights the Shepherds were erecting. The pickup rattled to a parking spot, the door opened, and a boy swung down to the ground. In a Shepherd’s vest, he adjusted the baseball cap on his head as two girls squealed and spilled out from the other side. They walked into the restaurant on his arms with the easy posture of people who belonged. On the door was a large sign reading NO STAMPED.
Austin hadn’t wanted to eat there anyway. It was the kind of place that had bitter waitresses named Marge who smelled like cigarette smoke, and laminated menus whose appetizing pictures looked nothing like the sad reality delivered to the tables. The kind of place where Austin would almost expect some tub-gutted guy chewing on the stub of a cigar to lean back on his bar stool and say, “We don’t take kindly to you fellows in these parts.” The patrons of Woodsman Diner didn’t truck with no black gay zombie boys, no sirree!
The smell of burgers and fries wafting over the road was driving Austin crazy. He wanted to slide across a booth and catch a whiff of Marge, eat the burger made up of ground beef from two thousand cows spread out over the country. To ask for a refill of a soda that never came, look over the fifty kinds of pie being advertised on a banner over two of the windows, screw up his forehead figuring out the tip. He wanted what had been gone since the party, and before the party he never would have gone to the Woodsman Diner. It was just the Cloudy Valley High cafeteria having graduated.
He was hungry, and afraid to eat the food they were sharing. Once he ate it, it was gone. The diner was not an option. They had food for a little while but every bite was final. Elania divided the perishables for their dinner, slices of pepperoni and sticks of string cheese, with a portion for Bleu Cheese, too. Pinching one side of the plastic wrapping in her teeth, Zaley stripped her string cheese. Her right arm looked dead in her lap. They were huddled around the curve of the path in case Shepherds walked up the split.
When the wind blew hard, it reconfigured the foliage on the embankment and gave Austin glimpses of below. The road and parking lot were bright from the lights, making it look like day when it was evening. None of the Shepherds monitoring the road looked to the path with interest. They were old and out of shape. One had clutched his back while helping with the lights, swaying back and forth with his beer belly out in front like it contained quadruplets. Gray hair, white hair, bald as an egg, the youngest was in his fifties and that was the one expecting his babies to arrive any day. They must not have been expecting much Sombra C traffic to pass this way, so the Shepherds sent their duds to guard the road. But these duds were armed, and they had two cops in the diner for back up.
“Aussie, eat,” whispered Micah. She lifted the string cheese and pressed it to his lips, which opened by rote. The pangs in his stomach won out and he gobbled everything in his hands. When it was gone, he was not full. That was another reason he hadn’t wanted to eat, because it wouldn’t fill him up. His emergency backpack had granola bars and beef jerky, and those wouldn’t fill him up either. He wanted a meal, just like the one Mr. Redneck Deadneck and his ladies were enjoying. When the wind blew, he spied them through the window in the corner.
He wondered if Mamma would be happy to know that Shepherds put him down. Austin blurted, “That’s what she said when she found out I had Sombra C. My mother said I should be put down.”
Those words had never left his lips until now. Elania said, “That’s horrible.”
“Dead is better than Sombra C. That was how she felt. You get it from doing something wrong, and it makes your family look bad. Like how people once thought about mental illness or disabilities, like the person with it should be hidden in an attic or an asylum. Pretend they never exist and go on with life.” It must have been hard to be the one relegated to the attic, hearing the sounds of family on the floors underneath, watching out the window as they piled into the car to go somewhere. To know that you weren’t good enough to be among them, the secret upstairs that made them ashamed. Looking to the road, Austin said bitterly, “They all think I did this on purpose.”
“No, not all,” said Corbin as Micah crept away to her better sightseeing spot on the path. They kept their voices low. “They’re down there for as many reasons as there are Shepherds. Some think it’s a moral failing. Others are so freaked out about getting it that they lose touch with the reality of the risks.”
Picking up her right elbow, Zaley propped up her arm on her knee and closed her eyes. “They’re crazy, a lot of them. Not shouting at trees crazy, but the kind of crazy that lets them have lives that look normal on the surface.”
“You think your dad is crazy?” Austin asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Crazy and bored. He had nothing until Sombra C. He doesn’t have hobbies or friends, not even a job. His parents are gone, he doesn’t talk much to my mom, and he wanted a boy instead of me. It’s like he finally has a cause. Something that gives him a community; something to believe in; some
thing that’s easy.”
“Easy,” Austin disagreed. “It’d be easier for them to stay home and watch TV!” Elania hissed to keep his voice down.
“It’s not easier,” Zaley argued thinly.
“What’s wrong? Is your arm hurting?” Corbin demanded. She nodded and breathed deeply.
While Corbin and Elania fashioned a sling out of scarves, Zaley opened her eyes and looked to Austin. “I thought about this on my paces, why my father and all of those Shepherds showed up to walk around in the cold and dark. I had nothing else to do but think about it. If your days were that empty, if you thought everyone else was getting ahead and leaving you in the dust, you’d get angry. You’d want a target. My father’s target is Sombra C. You’re incidental. All you do is give him purpose. Now he has friends and a role and a nickname. If the world starts accepting Sombra C, he loses everything. If the real zombies stay locked up, and the rest of you go on about your lives like normal, what use is there for him? What use is there for Shepherds? So you’re the enemy even with a very minor infection. They’re trying to kill you, but you’re the only thing keeping them alive.”
“I didn’t sign on to be target practice,” Austin said.
“As I said, you’re incidental. You’re the boogeyman and they’re the knights. That’s why they call you zombies and not people with Sombra C.”
As Corbin held her hair out the way, Elania fixed the sling about Zaley’s neck and said, “That’s childish. These people want everything to come apart, even though they pretend that they’re trying to patch the world back together. How can you blow up transformers and cause all of those deaths and still envision yourself as the hero? That’s the craziness in this.”
Austin peeked through the foliage parting in the wind to the road. The Shepherds were milling around. He said, “You know what I think? They saw a chance to step into the movie, from the audience to the screen. So now they get to play the action stars, instead of being the dumb old fucks they really are.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 58