The guy must have discovered his looted house by now and called the cops. Insurance could cut him a check to replace his things. And he still had his laptop. Austin thought about the guy posting on HomeBase about an asshole breaking into his house to jack his socks and cream of mushroom. Friends typed in a stream of condolences, offers to help out, they disparaged the robber and the guy didn’t feel so upset and alone. That had helped with Dale Summit, knowing that everyone was as upset as Austin. Quinn went to the same church as Dale, and she didn’t know what sermons he was listening to every Sunday. They certainly weren’t the ones being given about how to be a good Christian and love thy neighbor as thyself.
Time went on and on with crackles and canine snores. Their eyelids grew heavy and Corbin came to the fire to lie down. “They would have just taken her home, I think. If Zaley got caught. That’s the worst that could have happened.” He paused. “That’s still pretty bad for her.”
“And for us,” Austin yawned. He tossed the other side of the blanket over Corbin, and they slept.
Some time later, Austin woke to the dog lifting her head. Corbin was totally out, but something had gotten the dog’s attention. Or else she had to pee. Bleu Cheese rose and went to the door with Austin following along. He rolled it open and she ran outside into the cold.
Stars shined high overhead in an unfriendly night sky. He descended the deck and went around the house after the dog, staying in the deepest shadow of the overhang in case of trouble.
It was Zaley at long last. The dog pranced about her feet as she trudged up the driveway, her left arm holding up her right. Relieved, Austin called and ran over to take her backpack.
Zaley smiled wearily at him and said, “Are you both here?”
“We’re okay,” Austin said. “What happened to you?”
“Salmon Park happened. Braces on the roads, guys walking around and demanding everyone show bare necks and ID. It’s crazy. I can’t show ID. I’ve been reported missing in the local news. But I made it to the library and got maps of the trails.”
When they walked inside, Corbin woke and exclaimed, “Zaley!”
“Hey.” She sank down and set her arm carefully in her lap. Austin put the backpack at her side and she fumbled at the zipper with her left hand. The backpack fell over. Wincing, she righted it.
“Let me help,” Corbin said when she picked at the zipper again.
Zaley gave up on doing it herself. “Would you mind getting my sling out? I look too conspicuous with it on.”
“All you had to do was ask,” Corbin said. A faint edge of frustration was in his voice.
Austin went down the hallway to get some dinner for Zaley. He shined the flashlight over the food filling the box and picked out a burger and yogurt. The bananas were gross. It wouldn’t have been a bad idea to take the dude’s spoons, but Austin hadn’t thought about that at the time. He came back and pressed the yogurt on her. When she picked at the foil with her left hand, the right in its sling, he took the yogurt back and peeled it off. The littlest things were made so hard by her injury, things he didn’t even realize until he saw her fighting with them like he had at her locker with textbooks.
Zaley drank the yogurt greedily, pink staining the edges of her lips. After it was gone, she ate the burger in big bites as Corbin opened one of the Super Robo-Man water bottles for her to drink. Motioning to the backpack, Austin said, “Can I see what you got?” Zaley nodded.
Folded within pamphlets of nature trails were maps. He inspected them by the fire. The distance to Charbot was nothing if you had a car and the freeway, but walking there on winding paths was going to take considerable time. Along the top of a map of Charbot, Zaley had written in unwieldy letters STILL GREEN. Another map was of San Francisco. It was specifically designed for Sombra Cs. Neighborhoods were stained red, yellow, or green all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. There weren’t too many green patches, and most were in the north. A trail of yellow ran down the coast, but the rest was blood red.
“There are forty now,” Zaley was saying to Corbin.
Austin looked up. “Forty what?”
“Harbors. Forty walled communities for Sombra Cs. Can you believe that? We’re still closest to the one in Sonoma. They’re spread out all over the country and more are going up every day. Shepherds are demanding that they be destroyed, but the government is sending relief supplies to them instead. Well, what government is left. This is getting really, really bad. Two senators in support of Sombra C rights were killed yesterday, in Oklahoma and New Hampshire.”
“Stop ruining our horror flick by demanding zombies are people,” Corbin mumbled.
“And Jonathan Penner was murdered,” Zaley said.
“No!” Corbin cried.
“His body was found floating in the Hudson River. There’s a video online of these masked goons killing him. I didn’t watch.”
“He was a retired ethics professor, for God’s sake!”
“Who wrote a scathing piece about Prime and published it online. It spread like wildfire and is being called the academic evisceration of the century. Prime is targeting people who criticize. His home was revealed to be a catch.”
Austin set aside the maps to see what else was in the backpack. He lifted out a small titanium pot. “What’s this for?” It weighed only a few ounces.
“I made it to Goody-Goody, but that one is being closed down and there wasn’t much left. So I got the pot and two jackets. They’re a little beat-up. Both were in the Big Discount bin, a dollar each. And under those-”
Austin had reached into the backpack again. “Food!” He liked this food a lot more than what he had stolen, and what came out of the elementary school trash.
“Goody-Goody is by a Value Eats. Tuna, chicken chunks in water, corned beef, dry soups, I got anything on sale. I didn’t know what everyone else was going to find, if anything,” she said apologetically. “I picked up sample packs of dog food. But then I couldn’t leave the store. Shepherds were outside checking IDs, so I hid in the restroom for hours. They finally went away.” Closing her eyes, Zaley said, “We don’t have too much more money. Just a few dollars.”
“That’s okay,” Corbin said. “We just have to get out of this net and up to Charbot. I can call my aunt and uncle to come and get us there. They live over in Jamison City.”
Austin searched for Jamison City on the map. “Red.”
“My grandparents are in Dooley.”
“Red.”
“Fuck,” Corbin swore.
“Red,” Austin replied. He looked into the fire, feeling like they were burning in the flames.
Elania
The boys had run out the door while Elania was making her lunch on that last morning, a chorus of BYE, LANI ringing through the kitchen at top volume. She glanced over to the bobbing back of some small head and called goodbye. That was the last she’d seen of her brothers, the back of a head and she couldn’t be sure if it belonged to Cormac or Conor. That bugged her.
She and Micah were moving as fast as the terrain allowed, which wasn’t fast at all, going the long way to Mr. Foods to avoid notice. Trees, trees, and more trees were ever on their horizon north, and when they reached the edge of town and faced east, it was to trees, trees and more trees. And now hills. Elania was breathing hard. She wasn’t out of shape, but she wasn’t in shape either. She didn’t suggest a rest, however. Their enemy was dusk, and it was coming.
They also had enemies in the many trails extending out from parks for walkers and bicyclists. Every time they came across another park, they had to go deeper into the woods and bend around those trails. That had wasted a lot of their time and energy. But the woods around Salmon Park were still welcome, even if it slowed them with slopes to climb and descend, sporadic fences, and slippery patches of leaves and mud. The dense foliage provided a shield. Had they been trying to get around a city plopped in the middle of cow pastures, they’d be seen in no time.
Micah had tied rags around her feet to keep
the clogs from irritating her skin further. The only time she quit moving was to retie them, her ankles ripped up and weeping clear fluid underneath. Elania was quiet in those breaks. All it took was one off-trail person to overhear a voice and look around for the source. Because she couldn’t speak, she thought, and what her brain circled on was which brother it was whose head she saw. She felt awful for not knowing. Mixed with the hardness of the last few days, she just felt bad all around.
Hunted. They were being hunted. That was keeping her going through these endless trees, the feeling that someone was at her back and taking aim. People didn’t actually dive out of the path of bullets, which moved too quickly, and by the time she heard the boom, she’d be dead. No one was going to drag Elania to a confinement point when they thought she’d killed a Shepherd. They would spill her on the spot, so she pressed on despite the exhaustion.
She knew how fast bullets moved. One had torn from Zaley’s gun and into the Shepherd without Elania seeing a thing. That was how fast. He hadn’t had a chance to dive anywhere. Alive and dead in less time than it took to count to one. Whenever Micah sang that stupid song about Zaley shooting the Shepherd, Elania wanted to yell at her. It hadn’t been funny; it hadn’t been a game.
Nothing about this was funny. A cold wind blew through the trees as they went up a slope and made Elania shiver.
The donation bins were emptied on Mondays. That was the day they had fled Cloudy Valley, so there should be a build-up by now inside. But she hadn’t been allowed to work at Sombra C Relief after contracting Sombra C herself, so she didn’t know if the schedule had changed. That was all too easy to imagine. It was also easy to imagine that there wasn’t much in it. The amount of donations moved like tides. The holiday season was high tide. Now they were in the bowels of a winter sputtering into spring, and that was low tide.
The cold was what got to her the most. Austin had bitched and bitched and bitched under the bridge about his hunger, and even when he was quiet, she could still hear him bitching in her head. The hunger she could cope with; it was the cold that brought her low. Her toes had gotten so numb that she wondered if it was frostbite setting in. Just to sit there for hours had reduced her to a silently whining ball of misery. But saying it even once out loud would start a cascade of complaints, and they were complaints that couldn’t be rectified. If she started complaining, she suspected that she would never, ever stop. The sight of that abandoned house yesterday afternoon had nearly made her cry. The fire had, just a little. Warmth.
Then her period started. It was the worst possible timing. She carried three pads in her backpack, but after those were gone, she had to come up with something else. If there were a lot of clothes in the bin, she’d tear them and fold the material into rags. No way could they spend money on pads or tampons. Above all, they needed food. The hot dog for breakfast had been so long ago. Elania thought of the little they had with lust. That was for tonight, and whatever was in the dumpster. She wasn’t going to let Micah risk a roach coach, even if a packed burrito or tacos sounded excellent to Elania’s empty stomach. She’d eat a pound of gefilte fish if a plate of it landed in front of her, and she hated gefilte fish.
She couldn’t wait to get to Charbot and be able to call for help. If Shepherds were monitoring her family, which they very well might be, she’d call Aunt Tawnie. Sable Heights was on the north side of San Francisco. Save braces, it wouldn’t take that long for her aunt to come and get them.
That was a happy thought. She had to hold on to those.
At the crest of the slope, they looked down to a dead-end road. Micah drew up sharply behind a tree and Elania did the same. Below was a pick-up truck with a couple in it. Smoke wafted from the cracked windows. A wooden fence outlined the dead end. Beyond it, a creek ran.
“What should we do?” Elania whispered.
Micah motioned to backtrack. There were two poor choices: finding their way through by the creek, where the couple in the truck would see them, or passing behind the truck. That meant taking the sidewalk on the cross street to the dead end. In a whispered conversation, they decided to risk the sidewalk.
Hiking up their scarves, Elania and Micah climbed down to it and strolled along. There were houses on the other side of the street. No one was in the driveways or on the lawns. A side door opened at one house and Elania tensed. The man who came out went straight to his backyard with a broom in his hand. Once past the dead end, the truck invisible around a crook, the girls returned to the safety of the trees.
It was early evening when they reached the Salmon Park Mr. Foods. Elania had been worried that they’d miss it, and thus be forced to wait for the light of dawn to keep searching. Crouching down behind bushes, which ran along an enormous parking lot, they took the measure of this place. Cars filled three-quarters of the spaces, and more were turning in the drive past a giant wooden salmon sculpture. The sliding doors of the store hissed open and shut for shoppers, and carts rattled along the pavement. The green Waste Less donation bin was on the other side of the lot. The cans for Sombra C Relief were in front of the store.
It was still too light, and the store far too busy, for them to creep over to the donation bin. A high wall ran around the back of the property. Elania didn’t like that they’d have to cross this lot openly to get over there. Sinking back onto her butt, she rested and wished her cramps would go away. She’d been ignoring them for hours. And she really had to pee, but first her body demanded that she not move for a little while.
“I smell chicken,” Micah whispered. “Maybe they throw it out at the end of the shift.”
That was fine with Elania. They drank from their water bottle and ate the food they had. The sky grew darker and the parking lot cleared out slowly. Giving in to the needs of her body, Elania slunk behind a tree to pee and change her pad. Burying the used one in the soil, she hoped no one came across it and got infected with Sombra C.
When she came back to the bushes, Micah was gone. Elania assumed that she’d gone off to pee as well. A minivan was turning into the lot, a hybrid was turning out, lights buzzed, doors hissed, and a cart rattled toward the store. Just a little more time and they’d be able to . . . Elania stiffened. It was Micah pushing the cart, her long hair tucked down her shirt. Striding directly and confidently for the store, she nodded in greeting to a person coming out.
Elania watched in dread as Micah pushed the cart all the way to the doors, which hissed open. There she turned left and steered the cart into the corral against the outer wall of the store. It hit with a mighty crash of metal. She walked out of the corral and to the donation cans for Sombra C Relief. Her hand slipped into one, and then she was ambling over the lot with food on her hip. Elania pushed stale air from her lungs, not having realized until then that she was holding her breath.
Another car pulled into the lot. Micah walked and walked, reaching into her pocket like she was searching for keys. In a quick step up the curb, she vanished into the darkness there. Leaves rustled and she pushed over to Elania.
“What was that?” Elania hissed.
“I’m hungry,” Micah said calmly. She had snagged a big bag of chips and a box of blueberry breakfast bars. Passing over the chips, she ripped open the cardboard top of the box.
“But you could have been caught!”
“But I wasn’t.”
“But you . . .” Elania gave up and opened the bag. “You aren’t supposed to donate chips. They get squashed under everything else.”
“Those cans are meant for Sombra C Relief, and we are Sombra Cs in need of relief,” Micah said through a mouthful. “Chill out, Elania, it’s dark enough. People come here with their minds on shopping, not a zombie fugitive returning a cart to the store.”
What could Elania say to that? She was hungry and the chips were good. So were the breakfast bars. It was getting cold, not uncomfortably yet, but that was on its way. Her abdomen ached. Seeing her press into it, Micah asked, “Are you okay?”
“Cramps.”
“I figured we could make pads out of rags, if there are any extra T-shirts in the Waste Less.”
Micah looked out to the bin in question. “You notice that on television? I didn’t until just now. No girl ever hits the rag at times like these.”
“It’s inconvenient to the plot.”
“But it’s true to life. If it’s a completely inconvenient time, like vampires are chasing you or a tsunami is coming, you’ll start. Do people donate a lot to Waste Less bins?”
“I have no idea.”
“I guess women used to do that,” Micah mused. “Use rags. A lot of the women in my family’s coven use environmentally safe sponges. One of them rinsed it out in the restroom sink at the theater. She liked how that bothered everyone.”
That would have bothered Elania. They watched the sporadic traffic going in and out of the lot. The sky was dark now. A man exited the store with a child wailing for candy in his arms. How many times had Elania or her parents dragged one triplet or another from stores? “People always give you funny looks for that, the screaming kid you’re dragging out. I always wanted to say: would you rather we buy him the candy he’s demanding? He’ll be the spoiled jerk cutting you off in traffic in another decade or so, the one loudly talking in the theater, and that’s because we gave in today and let him have the candy or those stuffed Pocket Animals just to keep him happy.”
“Stupid kid,” Micah said. “Don’t scream about it. Don’t even ask. Just slip it up your sleeve.”
“Not how kids think.”
“It’s how I thought. What time do Mr. Foods stores close?”
“Nine.” Elania was so hungry after days of slim rations that her body would not allow her to stop eating. After the breakfast bars were gone, she polished off what was left of the chips when Micah had had her share.
Gathering the trash into the box, Elania tucked it underneath a bush. Micah passed her the water, which she drank reluctantly. She didn’t want to have to pee again so soon.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 63