She’d go deep in the woods to make it too late by the time they found her for the mortician’s beauty parlor. The cops might decide to leave her there, let the wildlife finish its work. Who wanted to touch Sombra C infected remains? Jennifer and Mark would sob to their therapists about the mother they never understood, who insisted on setting off on the next leg of this journey without her hands being held. Maybe they’d figure it out, one or the other of them by his or her deathbed. Maybe not. Squares could only stretch so far, some becoming rectangles but never circles.
Whatever came after this place, only the person dying was going to find out. A hand didn’t make it better. Actually, a hand made it worse. A hand was a reminder that it wasn’t okay to be more interested in moving on than sticking around to see more of the same.
Austin’s hand was still in a bite around Micah’s arm, but she felt better. Now she had Jennifer and Mark to keep her adrenaline up for a while, even if they only existed in her head for the time being. Austin was their godfather, so they could whine to him about their feelings. He’d be a cute old man, complaining about a pain in his back and forgetting it as soon as a grandchild toddled to him with a book to share. Once the book was finished and the grandchild toddled away, he’d be complaining again. His husband would have to be smart enough to give him the heating pad and not take the bitching to heart. Go on with the day and let it run dry, or find a distraction.
“I’m bored. And I smell,” Micah said. She swiped a hand under her arm and held it up to Austin’s nose.
He batted her off. “It kept me up last night, how bad you reek. That and laying on the ground and trying to digest old food, and thinking that today I’d be drinking water out of plastic bottles that had ants in them.”
“You’ll have to give my eulogy.” Her squares of children would be crying too hard. “Make sure you mention how I drove over the lawns to escape those Shepherds. And the dildos.”
“You want Austin to talk about dildos at your funeral?” Zaley asked. “Why?”
“So that her vengeance on Dale lives in our minds and hearts forever,” Austin said.
“That was you?” Zaley gasped.
Elania laughed. “She told me it was you, Zaley.”
“Oh my God! Micah! I’d never even seen one until you started doing that!”
“A dick for a dick,” Micah said. “So make sure you say it, Aussie.”
“Why are you planning your eulogy?” Austin said, his brows dipping down and fresh storms gathering.
“Because one day I’ll die, and I’m going to have stupid children who want to talk about how loving and wonderful and kind I was,” Micah said. Tired of sweating under her scarf, she unwrapped it. “I need you to stand up there and tell the truth.”
“I will,” Austin promised, the clouds receding. “Dildos, warts, and all.”
The path curved to reveal another incline. The shade parting to sunshine over their heads, Elania groaned as they trailed up. An answering groan came from the wind through the trees. The dog’s rump hit the dirt, followed by her belly. Micah clucked to her and got no reaction. “Corbin! Your dog!”
“Come here, Cheesie Cheesie!” Corbin called sweetly, but she only looked at him. So it was break time. Micah had to find a place to go to the bathroom out here. While the others shared water and food, she slid down a short ravine with her eyes on a massive redwood stump left out here from old logging days. It was hollowed out, the light shining through in great gaps in the wood.
She wanted to have seen this tree come down, heard the colossal crash, and she looked for signs of which direction it had gone. Those were long concealed by time, and all that remained was a thin logging road below. It had caused further erosion in the hill, years of rainfall filling it and breaking through.
Circling the stump, she checked the hollow. Nothing was there and she squatted down to take care of business. A thwack-thwack-thwack sound echoed in the distance. The canopy was too thick for her to see the helicopter. So airspace was reopened.
She’d taken a pack of tissues from the woman in addition to her cash. Those were her toilet paper. Just as she was zipping up her pants and getting herself back in order, she realized what the helicopter could be. Dashing around the stump, she looked up to her companions still sitting on the trail in plain view.
“Get the fuck out of sight!” she shouted. They stared until she gestured to the sky. Then Elania said something and all of them bolted down the ravine. Running over bent almost double, they rushed to the stump.
The thwacking grew louder. Micah couldn’t stop herself from peering upwards, even though nothing showed through the trees. Her body was ready for guns to start chattering, or zip lines to plunge down throttled by jackasses dressed in black.
Thwack-thwack-thwack-
The sound was deafening. The canopy shivered and broke not far from where she was. They had to move in the other direction, where the dark was deeper. Plunging down another drop with her hand on the slope to steady herself, Micah crashed through brush to a stone overhang that darkened a crook of the old logging road. The shag of a tree growing sideways also loomed over this spot.
The trees were swaying hard overhead when she jumped down and leaped for the dark. Austin grabbed her shoulder. Pulling her back, he said, “Wait, we need to make sure there aren’t any zombies in here!”
“We’re zombies!” Micah burst. There wasn’t time to inspect this dark groove, and she yanked away to enter it.
Light blinded her when she turned back to call to the others, who were still crashing and crunching down to the logging road. Austin was shining his flashlight over the contours of the space. It was devoid of any life form higher than arachnid. Zaley and Corbin pushed in with Elania on their heels. The dog sat at Corbin’s feet. Everyone waited.
“It’s moving away,” Micah said as the thwacking pulled south.
Down on her knees, Elania dumped water over her hands and scrubbed furiously. They had come straight through poison oak. Micah didn’t know if it was better to save the water and deal with the itch, or wash off the oil and waste the water. The necessity of not being distracted by that itch won out, and she washed her hands with the rest of them. If she couldn’t stand the burning in her eyes from oily skin, poison oak was going to drive her bonkers. Zaley and Elania changed into their extra jeans and rearranged the backpacks to have one just for contaminated clothing.
Thwack-thwack-thwack-
The noise was coming back. The helicopter was circling. Everyone stilled to listen until it pulled away. Taking the map and flashlight, Micah inspected it. They were very close to the end of Skytop, a quarter of a mile at most. The freeway coming down from San Francisco split into two just north of them, one leg pushing east to circle around Salmon Park and then go south to Blue Hill. The other leg, the one they had to cross, cut south on a raised road above the scrub. Eventually it twisted west to the coastal cities like Half Moon Bay and joined the north-south freeway there.
Thwack-thwack-thwack-
“Cross the freeway and get to this Shovolen Wildlife Preserve above the reservoir,” Micah said to herself. The preserve had a trail going north.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Corbin said. “There’s no city in the area, but there’s a symbol for a gas station and a store up by that preserve. If we can’t last until Charbot . . .”
Thwack-thwack-thwack-
“It’s moving off,” Elania whispered. “Do you think it’s for us?”
“Zombies have been sighted here before, so it might not be entirely specific to us,” Micah said. Now she was fully engaged, her adrenaline moving at a race through her body. Let these searchers come. She’d blast them away and bite when she ran out of bullets.
They drank soup to spare the little water that was left. Food went so quickly with six hungry stomachs. When the thwacking of the helicopter grew more distant and stayed that way, Micah crept cautiously out of their hiding place to look back up the hill. The trail was invisible fr
om the logging road.
Telling them to stay, she started up the hill to see what was going on. This time she moved carefully to avoid the poison oak. Through a break in the trees, she glimpsed the helicopter in the southeast. A police helicopter, so there was a slim chance this had nothing to do with zombies but an escaped criminal.
Her foot slipped. Micah jerked away from poison oak, almost having put her hand on it to steady herself. Once at the reservoir, she needed to dunk herself in the water to get the oil off her clothes. They had been smart not to make a fire last night for that reason as well. The smoke of any poison oak inadvertently put in the flames wasn’t healthy. And no one should pet Bleu Cheese until she’d gotten a bath.
She was almost to the trail when she heard a rhythmic clopping of hooves. Spinning on her heels, she rushed back down. The logging road was too far away and left her exposed to the trail for too long. Micah veered for the hollow stump and dove into its protection as a horse and rider rounded the curve to the incline.
The holes in the bark gave her a view. A woman was astride the horse, which was walking on the trail. Another head appeared, a second woman on horseback behind the first. The horses moved slowly up the ascent. Both women were holding whips. They looked down the slope and the second woman called, “What is it, Lucille?”
“Must have been a deer,” Lucille answered. “Look at that huge stump!” She stopped the horse.
Micah pulled back from the hole as the women chattered and snapped pictures of the stump. They complained about the helicopter spooking their horses and discussed how much farther the trail went. When the last picture was taken, the clopping began again. Micah waited for them to vanish around the next curve. She stood to go and promptly had to duck. There were hikers, too. She counted seven through the hole, and one was armed with a handgun in a holster.
They didn’t have Shepherd patches, just hiking clothes and fanny packs, water bottles hanging from belts and a woman bitching about how she burned despite sunscreen. A geezer at the back held onto a walking stick. These were innocent hikers taking precautions by traveling in a big group and with a gun. How long were people intending to cling to these rituals that the world was going on like normal? That was the vanity allowed those without stamps. It was the only reason they were walking on the trail and Micah was crouched behind a stump. They could go on pretending everything was fine when she couldn’t.
After the group of seven was gone, even more hikers appeared. A full hour had passed by the time she returned to their hiding place. The others were engaged in a serious discussion about going out to search when she came in and interrupted. “We’re going to have to wait until evening. The trail has gotten really busy.”
The thwacking was gone. They sat around with plenty of time to kill. Zaley read a chapter from the library book that had been in Brennan’s backpack. She did it out loud, and since there was nothing better to do, they listened. Micah fell asleep with her head on Austin’s lap, breathing in his reek. She should be watching around their area for signs of trouble, but she was flat out of energy. In her dream, she searched all of Cloudy Valley High for a restroom purported to have a shower. Then Mr. Yates appeared, saying that she could use the one at the Cool Spoon. But when she walked into the store, he added that she had to work the counter first. The place was packed with people waving coupons. Done with this aggravation, Micah stripped down in front of them to widespread horror, a shower without a door appearing at a table. Mr. Yates said that she was fired and she flipped him off.
“He was such an asshole,” she yawned when they woke her.
“Who?” Austin said.
“Mr. Yates. Remember how he used to filch money from the tip jar? Take out a five meant for us and go to Tic-Tac-Taco.”
“Hey, I put money in there,” Corbin protested. Backpacks went on and everyone headed out into the late afternoon.
They needed enough light to see by, but also needed enough light to be gone for the trail to have cleared out. If there was some magic moment in which that occurred, it was probably now. Already Micah was having a hard time spotting the poison oak as they climbed.
“I loved my job,” Elania whispered. There was no reason not to talk when the crunching of their shoes on the ground revealed their position. “It was so nice and quiet there. I thought Doctor Ghol was great, and she thought I was great, at least until the party.”
Micah hid the lot of them at the stump and went up the rest of the way to the trail. She heard nothing from the curve, no voices or footfalls or clopping. Going up the incline a little, she paused and listened. Nothing. The others came at a wave of her hand. Up the incline they went, moving rapidly to use every last iota of the light.
When the path leveled a quarter of an hour later, she didn’t need the sign to know that this was the skytop of Skytop. The world lay beneath them on all four sides. The path was straight and level for the length of a meadow, which ended in a fenced circle with a plaque congratulating them for getting there.
Part of the freeway was in view to the west below, and far beyond it, the setting sun glinted on the water of the reservoir. Micah ducked under the fence and looked over the edge. It was a steep drop, but a manageable one. Cars traveled back and forth on the freeway. The traffic wasn’t heavy. Most people took the split going in the direction of Salmon Park and Castlebar.
“We need to get down this hill,” Micah said. “Get to the edge of the tree line down there and wait for evening to cross the scrub to the freeway. Then we can run across it and to the tree line over there at the reservoir.”
“It looks so far,” Austin said.
Standing there wasn’t going to make it approach any faster. The light was dying incrementally with every breath Micah took. She turned sideways and stepped down the hillside. If any curious eyes were looking out from passing cars, they were only going to see trees.
At times they had to slide on their asses. Bleu Cheese skidded along with her legs locked in front of her. Zaley moved very carefully, planning each step and slide at length with Corbin offering his hand at the base of the slides to help her up. Poison oak wasn’t as thick here. They called out in warning when they spied it.
In the lead, Micah came to a drop-off that went down seven or eight feet. There was no way around it, so she sloughed her backpack and dropped it down. Then she sat on the edge and launched herself after it. The shock of landing sent a jolt from her feet to her crown, and she almost fell on her face from the uneven ground. Austin looked over and said, “Oh, shit.”
“Drop your backpacks to me,” Micah said. Those came one by one over the side. Austin followed them, staggering when he landed.
Corbin coaxed Bleu Cheese to jump to Austin, but she balked. “I’m sorry,” Corbin said, and pushed her. With a bark of distress, the dog went over. It wasn’t far to fall with Austin’s hands right there. He grunted at the weight and brought her down heavily.
“Your dog is a liability,” Micah commented.
“My dog,” Corbin said, landing in a whoosh and falling on his ass, “attacked a Shepherd to protect me.”
“Here goes nothing,” Elania said. She dropped from the edge, Micah and Austin grabbing on as she touched ground to steady her. Dirt and rocks tumbled down the slope.
Zaley swung her legs over the side and dropped her scarf sling. Catching it, Micah said to her nervous expression, “Light’s fading, baby doll.”
“We’re all going to help break your fall,” Corbin said.
“Fuck,” Zaley whispered, and pushed off. Hands enveloped her, their bodies absorbing the blow of her body and the dirt shifting under their feet from the impact.
“I promise it wasn’t a come-on,” Micah said, having snagged Zaley’s shirt at the breast.
“You wish,” Zaley retorted. “But you are so not my type, if I were gay.”
Intrigued, Micah said, “Why not? I’m everybody’s type, or I should be.”
“Because you wouldn’t be a comforting relationship,”
Zaley said. They put their backpacks back on and kept going. It was no longer as steep of a descent, and soon they heard the sporadic hum of the freeway.
“Who wants comfort in a relationship?” Micah pondered.
“Everyone but you,” Austin said.
That was interesting, how people signed on happily to be bored. Her mothers were happy in their complacency and Shalom was going to be just like a straight version of them. Well, if Shalom ever got back from Ohio. Throwing a Shepherd from a window made Micah respect her more. One day Shalom would have a dull, complacent husband and make a casserole for dinner while Micah visited, and Micah would look at Shalom and remember that once she’d felt the rush. Not in the act of murder, but reclaiming her space and school from intruders.
If a Shepherd wanted to live, he or she should have better sense than to come after a Camborne girl. Micah relived blowing past the Shepherds in her V-6 on that dead-end road. If only she had had the gun then to fire back! Like she’d just quietly accept being carted off to a confinement point to die? Fuck you would ride on every bullet to scream out of her gun. But only the one-armed wuss had gotten to shoot one.
Micah was jealous of that. It wasn’t something she could tell anyone, hearing her mothers’ horrified honey in her head. (Honey, poor Zaley will have to live with that all of her life. Honey, you can’t treat life so casually! Honey, a gun is the last resort, not the first!)
Micah would live with it and life was casual and bang. Fuck you.
Beyond the tree line was an expanse of scrub to the freeway. No underpasses were visible. The sun was below the hills far in the distance, but the sky still hadn’t deepened quite enough to get through the scrub. From the speed the cars were traveling, it was clear that there wasn’t a brace anywhere nearby.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 68