Without knowing what kind of conditions they’d find in Salmon Park, Zaley was going in alone to buy food when there. She was the only one with a clear neck. As long as the news wasn’t flooded with stories screaming about her kidnapping, she could pass without notice. But thinking of being alone like that made her nervous. If Shepherds were still bracing Salmon Park, some knew her face. A lot of them did, due to those stupid youth meetings that her father forced her to attend, and her paces. If a genie ever granted Zaley one wish, it was for every Shepherd in the world to drop dead. She didn’t exclude her father from that wish.
Salmon Park was an unknown entity to them. It just wasn’t a place that anyone ever went. Once or twice the Douglas family drove up there to visit a home of another family with multiples. That hadn’t given Elania much knowledge of the area. Salmon Park was a place you bypassed on the freeway to get to San Francisco, which was what Zaley had always done. It didn’t have anything worth seeing, at least not from the world before. Right now, Zaley would be exhilarated beyond belief at the most rundown Gas-O Cheap-O minimart in creation.
What she really wanted, besides food and dry clothes, was a newspaper or an hour with a television set. Not being able to look at a cell phone for the news was difficult. If the brace was still tight in Salmon Park, they had to head northwest to Charbot. If loose, they could cut through the city to Meridian. Zaley didn’t know what they were going to do after that, but the important issue currently was escaping this net.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Corbin whispered. He was pressed to her side, his hands tucked into his armpits for warmth.
“No,” Zaley said. In truth, she had no idea if Corbin’s mom was dead. A Shepherd could have shot his mother in revenge for her screaming at him to run. Just like they’d broken into Murdoch to shoot Sombra Cs who weren’t bothering anyone, and ended up spreading the infection through the community when some escaped. And now they were rounding those people up, those with infections that they had created, and congratulating themselves as heroes. It made her brain twist, the convolutions in their thought processes. To create an enemy and then take joy in hunting it down . . . she was sorry at whatever genetic mutations occurred to create Sombra C in the first place. It brought the country’s loons all together in a psychopathic harmony the way nothing else could.
After more blasts of thunder, the Shepherd falling again in her mind’s eye, Zaley said, “Most likely, they were shooting at you, Corbin.”
“Most likely,” Corbin echoed, with so much pain in that most. “I hope they die. All of them.”
“I was thinking something similar.”
“I wasn’t bugging anyone. I was walking my dog, not biting people or peeing in their banana smoothies.” Corbin spoke so bitterly that she wound her hand about his arm. He jerked away. “Don’t. I wiped my nose on my sleeve.”
She didn’t care if she got Sombra C. It just made her one of the club, and then she’d be able to touch them without everyone freaking out. Sinking back against her, Corbin said, “I might have a job at a winery up in Napa for harvest. If we can get out of this.”
“That’s fantastic. What would you be doing?”
“Picking grapes for juice samples, helping out in the lab. Not much reading. They pay really well. I thought . . . there’s a club up in that area for Sombra Cs. For people our age. Girls who won’t think I’m revolting.”
I don’t think you’re revolting. Zaley couldn’t ever think that of him. “Let’s get you up to Napa.”
Leaping the water, Elania passed them Fruit Slicks, a granola bar, and the last of the cheese gone soft. “It’s lunchtime, near as I can guess.”
“This is the most disgusting thing I have ever put in my mouth,” Austin called sullenly about his Fruit Slick.
“You want to sit with him?” Elania muttered before turning around to go back. Zaley didn’t offer to trade places. His soundtrack didn’t evanesce on the way to her side of the bridge. He was hungry. He couldn’t sleep. He was wet. Dear sweet Jesus, he was so hungry. Every time he opened his mouth, another complaint came forth.
Corbin broke the cheese into three tiny amounts. The dog had sat up hopefully at Elania’s approach, and now her crossed eyes were fixed on the cheese. A pathetic whimper came from her throat when Corbin gave a piece to Zaley first.
“Oh, Cheesie, I didn’t forget you.” Corbin offered her the chunk and it was gone in a flash. Zaley nibbled hers slowly to make it last. The Fruit Slicks were raspberry-flavored and lemon. Both were thoroughly unappetizing unless one was starving. She wanted to stuff a slick in her mouth and swallow it whole.
Jerking in alarm, Corbin cried, “You should have broken the cheese yourself!”
“Corbin, stop it! You’re getting as bad as-” Zaley cut herself off. Brennan. His broken, bloody body on the road . . .
Taking the Fruit Slicks from Corbin in frustration, she ripped off the foil from one with her teeth and withdrew the flat rectangle of fruit-like jelly hammered into submission. She couldn’t rip it into three, the fingers of her right hand too weak. Corbin rewrapped the bottom of the slick in the foil and braced it on her leg as she tore with her left.
The cheese had spiked her appetite, making her ravenous and unwilling to nibble and stretch it out. Cramming her share of the lemon slick into her mouth, she chewed rapidly and tore open the foil on the raspberry the second she swallowed. They were truly disgusting, but it was all they had.
She was about to unwrap the granola bar when something scratched up on the bridge. Tensing, she slipped the bar into her sports bra. Dripping, multi-colored hair swung over the side and she relaxed to see Micah, who looked at them upside-down and called, “Hey, bitches. You want to hang out somewhere else?”
“Anywhere else!” Austin pleaded.
“About half a mile away, there’s the most fucked-up foreclosed home and it’s in the middle of nowhere. No running water or electricity, but we can be out of this deluge.”
“How do we get in?” Elania asked.
“A window is broken in the back,” Micah said nonchalantly, shaking out her blue, green, and brown hair. Zaley thought that was lucky, until she saw the others’ faces and put together that Micah broke the window herself. No one said a word to criticize.
Micah ate her portion of the food as she guided them through the trees. Rain sluiced down their necks and drenched whatever parts of their bodies had managed to stay dry under the bridge. Micah’s clogs were so caked with mud that the original color could no longer be told. Mud had reached up her jeans to her knees and was splattered over her backside like she’d fallen or slid.
Zaley worried about staying in the house, afraid that someone was going to catch them, but her ass hurt so much from the concrete that she just kept walking. Her right arm wasn’t so painful with the scarf sling, although the material was cold and wet and unpleasant on her skin. Fucking Shepherds. For some reason Micah had tracked down the Shepherd who caused her Sombra C infection, but Zaley had no interest in knowing from which asshole’s gun came the bullet that shattered her arm to bits. An asshole was an asshole, whether his name was Raul or Steve or Martin. It could even have been an Emma or Jennifer. She didn’t give a shit.
Strange to have so little memory of the party. She remembered getting rid of Chloe Goes Pee-Pee at long last with the white elephant exchange, and feeling like she had graduated into the same age as everyone else around her. She remembered dancing. After that, she didn’t remember much except random images and sensations. Austin and Micah had hidden her in a closet and talked to the woman from Murdoch whose Sombra C they now carried, but as far as Zaley knew, they could have mounted her on a cross and discussed life with aliens.
Something had hit her cheek. Then she was at the hospital. Somewhere in there, she’d also announced to her friends that she was suicidal. Right now, she wasn’t. She just wanted to be out of this rain. Depression was a strange beast, for the moment off tormenting someone else.
Zaley concentrate
d on picking after Elania through the least muddy spots, her body waterlogged and her soul as light as air. This was her family now, the one she’d chosen, and she was the only one who could contribute certain things. They all had something, Austin and his emergency backpack with a flashlight and first aid, Elania with food, Corbin with the dog, and Micah had the biggest pair of brass balls under the sun. Zaley still felt the jolt of the V-6 under her as they tore over lawns to escape the Shepherds on that dead-end road. And Zaley herself had the gun and a neck with no stamp. Hopefully, that made up some for only having one functional arm.
She hoped her mother was doing all right, even so. She didn’t care about her father. But Mom wouldn’t be able to cope with this. Zaley was the only interest in her mother’s life. That had always given Zaley an overwhelming sense of weight on her heart. When phones were safe to use, she should call her mother to say that she was alive and not to worry. But Zaley was done with that dark, boarded-up house, her father’s temper, and her ridiculous, toddler-age bedroom that her mother made her keep no matter how tall and old her daughter became. Was it possible for someone to know when she was being messed up? Zaley knew it was messing her up, and she didn’t want to be messed up. The thought of the bedroom piqued her temper into considering not calling at all, although to not call was going to make her mother fall apart.
It was hard to think of herself as a bad daughter, and it wasn’t okay that she was all right when her mother was devastated. But Zaley didn’t know where she left off and her mother began, what was normal and what wasn’t. Until she knew that she was herself, when tears and anger held no sway over her, she didn’t want to talk to her mother.
None of that mattered now. There was a house ahead. A vacation home or a ranger’s home back when the state had a budget, it was a tiny affair and painted brown. A long driveway wound away into the trees. Micah circled around to the back and they climbed the stairs to a deck.
A window was indeed broken, and the sliding glass door unlocked. They walked in and cried out at a fire burning in the fireplace. Zaley paid no attention to the writing all over the walls, other than to note it was there. They pushed forward to sit on the carpet by the metal screen and soak in the warmth.
“How did you do that?” Elania asked Micah.
“There was some wood in a shed out back, and Austin brought matches.” Micah closed the glass door and propped up her backpack on the kitchen counter to block the hole in the window. Glass was all over the sink below.
Zaley relaxed. No one had been to this remote place in a long time, judging from the cobwebs and dust. Definitely no one was going to show up in this weather. The wind would blow away the smoke from the chimney. It was theirs for now.
Flopping onto the carpet, Bleu Cheese scooted along to dry her back. They peeled off layers of wet clothes, wrung them at the kitchen sink, and draped them over the screen to dry. Then they looked at the writing, which extended from ceiling to floor. With the fire, there was just enough light to read some of it. Corbin lay down by Bleu Cheese and covered his eyes with a hand. “It’s like the house of a dyslexic person’s nightmares!”
“Whoever lived here wrote their whole life story,” Elania said, her finger passing under lines of a passage beside the fire. “Bought this place for two hundred and eighty grand fifteen years ago from Shaisse Bank . . . it was going to be the home of our dreams . . . they refinanced twice to spruce up the place . . . and they went underwater when the economy had its downturn . . .”
“It continues down the hallway and in the bathroom,” Micah said from the kitchen, where she was twisting her drenched hair. She’d taken everything off on top but her bra. Zaley kept on her soaked T-shirt, unwilling to go that far with Austin and Corbin there. Both were bare-chested, but they were boys.
“If I had a million dollars, I would trade it for a towel,” Austin moaned at the fire. He skimmed his fingers over his skin to remove drops, some of which struck the flames and sizzled.
The fire was glorious, and it was lovely to turn from back to front since Zaley’s front was too hot. From all around the living room, Elania read the financial problems of the family who once called this place home. She quit rather than take on the hallway, and returned to the fire. Zaley did the honors of inspecting it once her back was hot (how tremendously wonderful to be too hot) and squinted at the thick black writing that wound around the short hallway in undulating waves. “It’s all about their kids. They lived in this tiny place with three kids? All were born on the living room floor-”
“Yah!” Austin shouted.
“In a wading pool, not on the carpet. Here are their names and birthdates and birth weights, first words, how one had a cleft palate . . . and here’s all about his surgery and the nice doctors and nurses . . . and they had pets, lots of pets . . .” Zaley was amazed that someone took the time to write all of this down. It had to have taken days. The walls in the bathroom had more, but with a tree hanging low out the window, she couldn’t make out much. “I think it’s about how they met at a music festival.” Squinting at another line, she added, “And there are lyrics.”
“Nuts,” Corbin said. “They did this as their version of trashing the house, making it a little harder to sell. Absolutely freaking nuts.”
“Nuts,” Austin said. “I want nuts. Trail mix with little chocolates mixed in.”
Something or someone had dinged the wall above the bathroom sink. The ding was circled in black ink, and above it was written OOPS! Zaley went on to the bedroom, of which there was only one. It didn’t have writing on the walls. How had a family of five slept in here? There was barely the room for a queen-sized bed!
This was a home for one person, or at most, a couple. Two dogs and three cats had also been jammed into this place, as well as an aquarium. And now there were five people in this house again, Zaley and Corbin, Elania and Austin and Micah, plus a dog. They were fitting in here just fine. There was no choice.
Hail rattled on the roof. It covered the ground in a thick sheet within a minute while she watched from the window. Thanking God for the miracle of this house, she rolled open the closet door and discovered a single line of script. Corbin entered the room just as she exclaimed, “Yuck!”
“What is it?”
“The backyard is a pet cemetery,” Zaley read. She rolled the closet door closed. Her bra crackled and she remembered the granola bar. Pulling it out, she handed it to Corbin in reflex. Then she blushed, blood beating furiously in her cheeks. “Sorry.”
“Sorry for having food?”
“Sorry for whipping it out from between my boobs in front of you.”
He laughed as she pressed her hands to her cheeks, willing the blood to go down. “Zaley, there are worse things in this world to a starving guy than being offered food from between a girl’s boobs.” She laughed because she couldn’t listen to him laughing and not join in.
Corbin brushed a lock of damp hair from her face. It was a sweet and intimate gesture, and reminiscent of the way he had touched her when they were together. Zaley leaned into him and rested her forehead to his bare chest. He tensed and she begged, “Corbin, don’t do this. You’re not going to give it to me through a hug. You know the science, and better than I do.”
Tentatively, his hand pressed on the back of her head. Zaley closed her eyes, rising and sinking with the rhythm of his breath. It was cold in the room, too far from the fire for the warmth to penetrate, but she wanted to stay here with him. The others were chattering in the living room. Her forehead dipped down with his exhalation, and he whispered, “Why did you break up with me?”
She rose with him and spoke part of the truth. The trials of the last few days gave her no other recourse. Her soul was almost bare from hunger and exhaustion. “My father was going to hate you for being part-Chinese.”
“That was why? You should have let him.”
And one day I might turn into my parents. She couldn’t give voice to her greatest fear, to soil the walls of this bizarre bu
t safe sanctuary with it. God, she wished her teacher had never said that! Stripping Zaley of all control with the knowledge that no matter how hard she tried to differentiate, she was going to end up the same. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, she’d read and heard that a thousand times. If she could, she’d scoop up her apple self and lob it through the orchard.
“Did I embarrass you?” Corbin asked.
“No. No!” Zaley said. “They embarrass me. I don’t know how my father can live in this day and age and be so backwards.”
“That was a stupid reason to break up. I don’t care that your father would have hated me as your boyfriend. I’m not that weak.”
From the other part of the house, Micah sang, “Zaley shot the Shepherd! But she did not shoot the deputy!” Austin yelled at her to shut up, and Elania said that that was really insensitive. Micah just laughed.
“Was it true what Micah said in Welcome Mat about when we were dating?” Zaley whispered. “That you didn’t like how I did whatever you wanted?”
Corbin breathed in and out, pulling her with him. “Remember when we went to the movies? I asked if you wanted to see whatever the drama was and you said yes. Then I asked if you wanted to see the comedy and you said sure, whatever I wanted. Zaley, what did you want to see? You had a vote, too. It was like that all the time. Every time I tested, it was the same.”
“You tested me?” Angrily, Zaley raised her head. She didn’t like to think that he was playing games with her.
“You see?” Corbin said. “When we’re not together, you’re you. You get mad at me when I’m being an asshole about my stamp. You demand that we admit Sombra Cs to our club. But when we’re together, you’re me. What did you want to see that night?”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 60