He was fully awake now. With excruciating slowness, he scanned their campsite for intruders. The dog and his friends were close to invisible, moonlight striking one of the stumps and little of it sloughing off onto them. No one else was there.
They had put away the food, although the burger wrappers were in the trashcan. That was something Corbin hadn’t thought about, how the smell could possibly attract trouble. From now on, they disposed of things like that farther away from wherever they camped. Much farther.
A second figure stalked out of the dark, so close to the fence that Corbin almost peed himself. It was a bald old man with black rot over part of his head. All he wore was pajama bottoms. His feet on the rocks as he lurched to the woman left glistening trails of blood. Corbin’s heart thumped painfully, even though the man was moving away without so much as a glance up. The woman hooted three times to see him coming. Had Corbin not watched the woman tilt her head back to make the cry, he would have believed it came from a genuine owl. He’d tell everyone in the group tomorrow not to trust that what sounded like an animal actually was.
Their executive functioning was destroyed and Broca’s area for speech impaired, yet the zombies moved together with some level of understanding. What sounded like gibberish to Corbin appeared to have meaning to the two of them. No one could know for sure. They had lost the ability to speak in human tongues and explain.
Had they known each other before? They stood facing one another, the moonlight soft enough to not bother them. Then they lurched away together into the trees. Corbin was torn. Was it smarter to dump out what was in the trash and carry it away, or leave it where it was? It was too hard to see to take it very far unless he threw it over into the gully. Just getting it out of the can would make noise, and the beam of the flashlight he’d need to do all of this could upset the feral Sombra Cs and attract searchers, if any were out here.
The two figures merged back into the darkness. Guessing that it had been an hour since his watch began, Corbin expected this adrenaline rush to keep him awake for the whole night. But in half an hour, it was dying. No one else had appeared, and the woods were silent. Soon it was going to be Zaley’s turn, which gave him pause.
He trusted her to stay awake, but . . . she looked so delicate to him. It was her smallness, her one arm, and her natural tentativeness. A strong wind could have blown her over.
Yet she’d shot a Shepherd. That tiny form hid a lot of strength. To live in a family like that and still retain so much of herself was something he respected. Getting everything easily like Sally did hadn’t made her a strong person, or a caring and thoughtful one. When push came to shove, Zaley rose to the challenge. So Corbin was going to turn watch over to her and sleep in trust. They had to trust one another, because they were all each other had.
When he judged it time, he put his hand to Zaley’s left shoulder. She was up in one swift movement. Taking her to the fence, Corbin whispered of what he had seen and passed over the gun. “Wake me for anything, okay? Even if you’re not sure and think it might just be a deer.”
“I will,” Zaley whispered, turning to watch below, and he crawled under the blanket thinking that she was beautiful.
Micah
If civilization ended tomorrow, everyone was fucked as soon as the shoes ran out. Thinking of how much brighter her life had become with a good pair of sneakers, Micah hiked the trail in cheerful dislike of everything and everyone, including herself. Her blisters were still bitching up a storm, but no longer were they being aggravated by the rub of her clogs. The rest of her body was aching from a crappy night of sleep on a crappy forest floor, followed by a crappy breakfast and now this crappy walk uphill. However, this was better than in the hands of Shepherds, so she was enjoying the crappiness. Speaking of crap, eventually she was going to have to take one, pop a squat over all the goddamned poison oak everywhere and let loose while the leaves tickled her ass.
She wished that she’d gotten to see the old zombie couple in the moonlight. That would have been interesting. It also would have been interesting to wake up to gunshots and darkness, but her life just wasn’t made of interesting things. Her mothers should have taken her to a shooting range when she was little, not rituals. Aiming for the head was a good skill to have, far superior to calling in a corner. But no one had anticipated zombies stepping from horror novels and movie screens to everyday life.
It was day now, so the zombies were unlikely to be lurking around this sunlit path. There weren’t any Shepherds or cops either. It had been a pretty boring walk on a grade sloping gently upward past bay trees and madrones. Yesterday was better, with bear spray and phone stomping and running, the gratification of knowing they’d gotten away. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men failed to put zombies in confinement again. She hated to live in reaction to them when what she wanted was for them to live in reaction to her. Being the predator was better than being the prey.
She wanted to turn around and give chase to those fools, take her problem and make it their problem. She’d like to give them all Sombra C. Knock them off their pedestal, sink her teeth into their flesh and show them a richer world. They’d thank her, those smart enough to appreciate the gift she had given. Some guy as handsome as Austin would come to Micah with new light in his eyes. She thought about ripping the Shepherd patch from his clothes, his teeth sinking into her shoulder, the passing of their infection back and forth.
That was gross. It made her laugh. She couldn’t respect a former Shepherd. The virus didn’t increase IQ, and a person had to be miserably stupid to be a Shepherd in the first place. So she’d sleep with him and send him on his way to make more converts. Her infection flowed on and on through this world, until everyone was just a few degrees from Micah Camborne. That made her a goddess. Not that anyone would want to sleep with her at the moment. Her hair was oily and revolting, and her skin tacky. She didn’t want to sleep with herself.
“What’s so funny?” Austin said. He was in a bad mood.
“I’m going to rule the world one day,” Micah said. And that was interesting. She craved interesting, which this path had in short supply. There were trees and more trees and a slope going up followed by a curve that led to another slope going up, everything lathered in poison oak and no zombies crouching in the shadows.
The last few days had left her so overtired that she was desperate for a shot of adrenaline to keep her going. Since there wasn’t any cause around to get her heart pounding, she wanted someone to go after to break up the tedium. Yet none of her choices was satisfying. Elania was at the far back of their group and almost out of earshot. She didn’t provide much for ammunition. Corbin was too far ahead. Zaley always provided Micah with loads, but that was dull to rehash. Austin had a stormy face, and was clearly in enough emotional turmoil without Micah adding to it. She had a shallower approach to the world, and it gave her a shield.
She was shallow, and that was okay. Adrenaline ruled her, not emotions. The only one left to bother was Bleu Cheese, who was off-leash. No one was around to enforce the rule and if it came to a chase, zombies or Shepherds or cops or truancy officers, Corbin didn’t want his dog caught by a leash dragging behind her.
Bored, Micah said, “Bleu Cheese, you’re out of shape.”
The dog looked up to her happily.
“And you’re a weird color.”
The dog wagged her tail.
“And you almost got us caught at the Woodsman brace.”
The dog panted and looked out to the trees.
“Like you’re in such great shape,” Austin groused.
She wasn’t doing too badly after months of spending her nights roving around the local communities. Micah was no athlete, but she was fit. Why hadn’t she gotten more into sports in her pre-zombie days? She knew why. They were boring. Games had rules, and she didn’t like rules. She’d tried a few sports, a season of soccer, a season of basketball, a season of softball, two years of martial arts (which disturbed Uma to no end), a
nd dropped out of each one. For a while she had considered trying out for the high school football team, with polarizing the campus the main allure, but she’d just get bored after a season and drop out of that, too. The boys who wanted to keep her out would think they’d won; the girls who supported her would be crushed at what they thought was a blow to equality. The truth was that Micah had neither been run out nor found it too tough, just dull as everything else was dull, bound by rules and controlled. Even in martial arts, she was only allowed to throw practice strikes.
There weren’t rules here. Someone could explode out from the trees, the path behind or ahead, and act without rules whether zombie or Shepherd. And Micah had no rules governing her response. She had the gun down the back of her jeans, a virus in her body, and no compunction about sticking her nails in eye sockets. If someone didn’t want Micah’s nails in his or her eye sockets, then that someone shouldn’t be coming after her.
A little thrill ran through her about the gun pressed to her skin. Her mothers were hard and fast proponents of gun eradication in the United States. They only existed to hurt people!
Exactly.
The thrill wasn’t big enough to keep her energized. How hard would Micah have to bite to sever a nose or ear? It was just cartilage. When she asked, Austin gave her a look and whispered, “Jubilee.”
Fuck her parents. People should have to apply for a license to name their kids so the poor things didn’t get landed with Jubilee Eclipse. “I’m going to give my kids the most boring names in creation. Jennifer and Mark. I’m not going to spell them weird either, like Geniphyr or Marque. Nope. Regular way.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Zaley asked.
Not wanting her given name to be general knowledge, Micah shrugged and said, “People who give their kids stupid names.”
“Mark isn’t stupid, but there was a Mark in my elementary school with the last name Stark,” Elania puffed from the end of their group.
“Mark Stark,” Austin said. The clouds in his face dissipated and he laughed.
“I’ve got one,” said Zaley. “There was a girl in my fourth grade named Scroll. Scroll Friedman. She was just there for a year.”
“Like a roll of papyrus?” Elania asked, walking faster to catch up and participate. “That’s bizarre.”
Micah knew a bunch of weird names through the family coven. The adults all had boring names in the real world and fruity names for ritual, and some gave their children fruity names for the real world to make them stand out. Her mothers had done that. There was no way a Jubilee was going to get lost in the crowd. “I know a Dancer Dawn from The Circle.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Elania said. “Dancer Dawn?”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Micah said. “There’s also Wintersweet Keelin. Imagine going through life with that for a name. Everyone calls her Sweetie. Then there was the baby Mystery Rothsmith. What’s in his diaper? It’s a mystery.” Austin’s laughter rolled up to the heavens.
“You know what’s mean about that?” Corbin called back. “One day he’s going to be applying for jobs, and all anyone will see is his stupid name.”
“Detective Mystery Rothsmith. Paging Doctor Mystery Rothsmith,” Austin said gleefully. “That’s so awful that it’s wonderful.”
“Until it’s your name, then it’s just awful,” Elania said. “My parents went for normal. Rachel Elania. Alexander Cormac. Benjamin Conor. Reuben Percy. And before anyone says it, yes, Elania is uncommon. But it’s not Mystery.”
“Why do you all go by your middle names?” Zaley asked.
“That started when I was a baby. There were two other girls about the same age in the extended family and both were also named Rachel. It was just for clarity. They continued it with the boys.”
“Professor Mystery Rothsmith,” Austin said. He saluted. “General Mystery Rothsmith. A girl could get away with that name.”
“No,” Micah said. “It isn’t any more dignified for a girl than a boy.”
“I didn’t say it was dignified,” Austin argued. The ground leveled under their feet at a meadow. “But girls get away with boys’ names or weird names a little more easily than boys can. Look at Cloudy Valley High. Girls named Brett and Dakota and Sam and River, no one thinks anything of it. Enroll a boy named Susan or Missy? Mystery or Dancer? He’s going to be tortured.”
“So would a girl named Isaac or Matthew.” Micah scanned the flowers growing in the meadow and wondered what was edible. They didn’t need the food now, but the knowledge would be good for the future. There were blackberry bushes, but it was too early in the year for fruit.
“President Mystery Rothsmith,” Austin said with a grin, dropping the argument in favor of the game. “His wife will have to be Solution. What will he name his kids?”
“Clue,” Elania said instantly.
“And her little brother Alibi,” Zaley said.
“The twins Suspect and Witness,” Elania went on.
“The family pet is obvious,” Micah said. “Red Herring, of course.” Tuma undoubtedly hoped that she’d go back to her given name in time and pass on the uniqueness of it to the next generation, Jubilee and her children Laughter and Kisses. Nope, it was Jennifer and Mark, common through and through. When the kids complained that Micah hadn’t made them unique, she’d march them into the courthouse and change their names to Wonder and Embrace, or the most awful things she could think of to give them a taste of what having an unusual name was really like. They’d beg to return to Jennifer and Mark after a week or two, but she’d force them to keep those names for a year to experience them more fully.
Embrace Camborne. That reminded her of braces. But it was only the five of them plus the dog in this sunny morning. It had to be about eleven. The trees at the sides of the meadow dipped down the hills, giving them a view of the world from the peak.
The end of this trail was near the freeway, which had to be crossed at night if they couldn’t find a discreet underpass or a wildlife corridor. Even then, crossing in the dark made more sense for both traffic and visibility reasons. Micah checked behind them. The trail was still empty behind Elania. Everyone saw Micah looking back and did the same nervously.
“I thought there might be hikers by now,” Micah commented.
“If people are scared of zombies on the trails, they might skip Skytop,” Corbin said. “This one goes the farthest out. Something bad happens and it isn’t like anyone can come to help very quickly.”
Micah wanted to teleport home for a heavy eight-hour sleep in her bed, a full meal, and to teleport back here. It beat class. What she coveted most of all was a shower. Peel the oil from her hair, the crust out of her ass, and the odorous build-up in her armpits that made her wince to smell it. She had never been so filthy in seventeen years, and washing her face in the fountain by the parking lot was a fantastic sensation. Her skin had grown so oily that it seeped into her eyes at night and made them burn. No matter how she wiped at her eyelids, she couldn’t get rid of all of it.
Forbidden a shower. It was the first time her life had moved entirely beyond her control, and that she was prevented from going home to do something as simple as showering made her want to hunt Shepherds even more. Sighing at a lost opportunity, she said, “I should have bitten that guy yesterday.”
“No,” Elania said. “Those were just scared people.”
“With faces full of bear spray.” Micah growled at the flower-filled meadow.
A hand wrapped around her upper arm and squeezed. His voice low, Austin said, “You’re looking for trouble.”
She was looking for anything. The path dipped down into redwoods and she peered into the shadowy places for trouble. An old pair of zombies running around in the woods! Maybe they had been a retired married couple with Sombra C, too religious for Zyllevir and degenerating together percent by percent . . . they didn’t attack one another, their minds decomposing at identical rates so that both flinched at light and fell silent simultaneously, their t
hroats giving rise to a new animal tongue and connecting them once more. There was something romantic about that. Bob and Mitzy Smith or Jack and Betty Rogers had run away from their civilized world of backyard barbeques and television watching to live in the woods in their new forms. These lives wouldn’t last long with the infection out of control in their bodies, but this brief, wild existence in moonlight and forest was better than the slow decay of a natural life. They wouldn’t wither away between doctor’s visits, swallowing loads of pills and bouncing back and forth from home to hospital. No tidy cosmetics and preservatives done by a mortician, no moisture-sealed coffins beneath a carved headstone with doves . . . no, it was a better death out here. Their flesh would fall away to become new flesh in the wild, a part of the cycle rather than forever separate from it in the coffins.
Micah was going to do that when she was old. She’d know when it was time to go to the woods. Death was to be alone, and dying didn’t need to happen in a group of weeping family members. A note on the table for Wonder and Embrace would do (they wouldn’t be as sad then, this Jennifer and Mark, just pissed that their last message was addressed to their youthful hippie punishment names) and they’d find an empty bed in the sterile room for sickness. Their gray-haired mother was out among the green and brown on one last rove. She couldn’t pick her place of birth but death belonged to her.
If she lay down to die in a crook of a redwood, ants were going to be on her immediately. That was where it should be done, the quiet disassembly of her form just as its assembly had been quiet in the womb. No services. Her children would be total squares and want them, and already she heard their querulous voices explaining that services were for the living.
But she was the one who was dead, the cause of their whining for services, so it was her decision. They should respect the way she wanted to say goodbye. That meant no search parties. There would be search parties anyway from children like that, since that was how it went. Squares turned out wild ones like Micah, and wild ones turned out squares. As a wild one, she chose the crook of the tree, the ants starting the first foray into her hair even as she lifted the gun to her forehead. (Honey! Guns are terrible!)
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 67