They waited for the sun to lower further, each taking a draught of the last water bottle. It wasn’t enough to quench their thirst, not even close, and the dog whimpered when she lapped up the last of her share from Corbin’s hands. Austin made the same kind of whimper at the bottle gone dry.
“Is the reservoir even fresh water?” Elania asked.
“It’s drinking water,” Zaley said. “But it’s closed to the public as a result, so we’re going to have to climb a fence. There’s a note on that map that rangers watch for illegal swimmers and fishers. People are only supposed to be on the trails or the road over there on the west side of the reservoir.”
Micah wanted to eat fish. How to catch one without a pole was beyond her. If the reservoir had some nub of water by the shore that could be blocked off with rocks or logs stacked up . . . take away the top log and let fish swim in, then put it back and trap them there.
“If it gets any darker, we’ll have to use the flashlight,” Austin said. Micah looked up to the sky and saw the truth of it. Very few people were using this freeway, a lone pick-up going north.
They ran through the scrub, Micah hunting for the emptiest stretches of ground and the others following in her footsteps. She smelled the water, although it was still too far away for that. That was just her body’s lust for it. She’d drink until she could hold no more, submerge herself in the cold and scrub off the sweat and grime of the last week. Since it was people’s drinking water, and a lot of people were Shepherds or else sitting idly by and watching Me, Myself, & I while Shepherds did their thing, she was going to pee in it for good measure.
A short, rocky slope led up to the freeway. She scrabbled up it and surveyed the lanes. No one was approaching in either direction, and fading taillights from the pick-up winked out. At her side, Elania said, “I’ve never run over a freeway before.”
“Zombies Crossing,” Micah said. They sprinted for the far side. White headlights glowed in the distance, headed southbound. The minivan didn’t pass until they were safely in the scrub on the opposite end. Austin turned on his flashlight and they rushed through the chaparral behind the beam. The sky was darkening quickly.
“What would you do, if you saw people running around over here? Call the cops?” Austin fretted through pants of breath.
“I’d assume they were broken down somewhere or just homeless,” Micah said. People didn’t usually want to get involved. No, the woman driving that minivan was thinking of getting home from work, putting up her feet and flipping on the television. Whoever those people were off the freeway weren’t stopping her from achieving those goals, so why bother with them?
As to the occasional cars going by now, what did they see but dark shapes rushing away and a small patch of light? Kids messing around, no cause for alarm. Micah wasn’t worried the closer they got to the trees, and not because they needed the cover any longer. The darkness was providing it. The others stopped for a breather and she went on with the flashlight to get a gander at the fence blocking them from the reservoir.
It was a chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. On the other side was tall scrub. This fence would be nothing to get over if they were standing in the back of a pick-up. She trailed the beam over the wires. With a rope, they could wrap it around the barbed wire and draw the rungs of it together with a tie. That would make them pull together in a V. If they had pliers, she could bend the points away. But they didn’t have those things. They did have a blanket, and plenty of T-shirts. Those could be used to muffle the points.
The rungs of it were attached to poles. Climb up by a pole and it could be utilized as a handhold at the top to swing a leg over. Oh, this was going to be fun with Zaley, Corbin, and Bleu Cheese. Micah scuffed at the dirt. It was too hard to burrow through to the other side.
Reaching up, she tested the tensile strength of the barbed wire. Not tight. Not loose, but not as tight as she had expected. None of the trees had branches that extended over the fence to the other side. They couldn’t go under in this packed earth, nor could they go over on a tree branch, and they didn’t have the tools to go through. So they had to walk around until an easier place to penetrate presented itself, or else climb over the fence.
She doubled back and brought the others to this place. Tuning out the bitching and plodding problem solving on their parts, she wound the blanket thickly around the barbed wire by the bracket to which it was tied. Around and around and around she went until she ran out of fabric. Then she chucked her backpack over the fence (Wait, are we going in here? Micah, maybe we should-) and started to climb. Austin trained the beam, their voices dying, and they watched as she let go of the chain links at the top to grasp the bracket.
It was cold. She put her other hand on the blanket mound and hauled herself up the rest of the way. Now for the swing . . . she had it, one leg over and resting on the bar that ran behind the chain link part. It was a very uncomfortable position, so they had to be quick. “Give me the dog.”
“Wait . . .” one of them said, and she demanded, “Give me the damn dog!”
“She’s almost sixty pounds!” Corbin said. With grunts and heaving, the dog was pushed up to her. Micah settled the dog on her hip awkwardly. Bleu Cheese didn’t like this and wriggled. Bracing her tightly, Micah got her second leg over the blanket mound. Now she was crouched, only one hand for balance on the bracket and the dog being a bitch. Micah froze for a split second.
“She’s going to fall!”
No, she wasn’t. She was going to get to the ground without spraining her ankles, goddamn this fence and goddamn this dog and goddamn that here she actually did smell the water and goddamn how much she desired it. Micah pushed a foot into the chain links to climb down. The imbalance of weight unsettled her. She rattled down the fence, her fingers slipping through a diamond and grasping in desperation. That arrested her plummet, but it was even more painful to have all of her weight and the dog’s on those fingers. Wedging her feet hard into diamonds, she relieved the pressure. Doing this without two hands was challenging. Every time she moved to another diamond, for a moment nothing attached her to the fence but her feet.
She hit the ground and set down Bleu Cheese, who whined because Corbin was on the other side of the fence and that made her sad. Micah was in, and that made this reservoir hers. Austin and Elania tossed over the other backpacks.
Zaley removed her sling and said, “Let me go now or I’m going to lose my nerve.”
That was dumb. The promise of water was going to return that nerve before long. Austin said, “We’re just all hitting on Zaley today,” and knelt down. “Sit on my shoulders like we’re playing pool wrestling and I’ll boost you up to the top.”
“Pinch hard with your thumb and index,” Corbin said about the bracket. Zaley grasped it and Elania pushed the flashlight through the fence to Micah. She shined it up as the boys helped Zaley to find her footing. Austin scaled up a few feet to get her situated better at the top for swinging over, and Micah guided her down.
Elania came over without a problem. Corbin had more, wobbling at the top with people tense on both sides to catch him. Once down, he sucked at a tiny cut on his palm from grasping a ridge on the bracket too tightly. Austin hauled himself over last and unwound the blanket. The bottom layers were speared with the spikes and time-consuming to pry free, but they all waited. It was their blanket and it was important to them.
Then they turned to the reservoir, the dog bounding ahead through the thick scrub to get to the water. Excited, they went after Bleu Cheese. Elania whipped out a bottle in anticipation. Crouching down beside the dog, Austin scooped up water with his hands.
Micah hung back. There were no lights about the reservoir, only that of the flashlight and the rising moon. The far end of the water was lost to view. Travel by day and they risked being spotted. Travel by night and they risked the flashlight being spotted. Somewhere ahead was a bridge over the reservoir, and they could take that to the other side where the store was
.
Night. Micah tried to think as a ranger. She’d expect people to breach this in the day for fishing and swimming. They should press on rather than set up camp, take advantage of the night. Get to the bridge and hope the fence wasn’t any harder to get out, cross over and hit that store. But everyone was too tired.
What did they have, ten dollars? Thirteen? That wasn’t enough for food. A single store wasn’t likely to have much in its dumpster. Charbot wasn’t all that far away, but they didn’t know the conditions of the trail. There could be a brace on it or near it, costing them time in going around. Micah was willing to gut it out and go hungry and thirsty, but Austin would be a fainting, whining, whimpering drama queen.
Before she did anything, she was bathing. Every inch of her was old sweat coated in more sweat covered with grime and wrapped in a layer of new sweat with a dusting of more grime as a garnish. She didn’t want the water in pieces, first to drink, then to dip body part by body part in to wash. Stripping off her clothes to scrub later, she walked naked past her company and stood on the edge in the moonlight. The breeze was chilly and now she was going to be wet on top of it. But that was a temporary discomfort and one she’d survive.
Shocked at her nudity, they protested (It’s cold! Nearly freezing! How deep is it?) and she ignored them. She’d won this, and so had they. All week they had paid for the gift before them, and this was how she was going to celebrate.
The air was cold, and the dark water below would be far colder. It was going to hit her like a bolt of lightning. Taking a deep breath, she jumped in.
Set Eight
Zaley
It was disconcerting to watch the others swallow their Zyllevir and be overcome with jealousy.
The wrongness of that was so extreme that she didn’t even want to admit it to herself. But it was there, a subterranean rumble of discontent as the pills were passed around to alight in every palm but hers on Sunday evening. She felt left out, and that was awful. Wishing for Sombra C just to be like her friends! To live with the knowledge that Zyllevir could stop working at any time, as it did for a small percentage of people, to risk being one of those unfortunates for whom it worked but made nauseous as a side effect. To know what waited if the pills ran out, brain damage, muscle damage, violent behavior, madness, bodily decay, and death.
You don’t want Sombra C, she told herself sternly. To have a giant red stamp on her neck and be ostracized from society, chased from home and hunted, bagged or spilled . . . Throats swallowed and Zaley swallowed in tandem. No one could read her mind and hear the horrible excuse for a human being she was. That was a mercy.
Voices echoed from the bridge to the north of them. It was being braced on the eastern side, exactly the side that they were on. These weren’t the out-of-shape schlubs of the Woodsman brace but young and fit Shepherds, heavily armed and stopping every car going west to the coastal communities to inspect necks and administer saliva checks. Few cars ever came east, but they were checked too. Stopped right there to wait on the bridge until a Shepherd got to them.
It made her angry. Furious, in fact. This was her family, her brothers and sisters and their dumb but loyal dog. The assholes up there on the bridge would mow them down with bullets and no second thoughts. Zaley couldn’t stand to think of losing them.
The brace looked like a permanent feature of the landscape. A trailer had been erected by the bridge for Shepherds to rest in when off-duty, and there were even potted plants around it. Zaley hadn’t seen it for herself. Austin and Micah had slunk away to check out the situation and report back.
Five Shepherds were working there. One stood in each lane by automated arms to stop traffic, and only their fingers on the controls after a car passed the inspection raised the arm to let it pass. A third Shepherd ferried the saliva tests to a fourth at a little lab station beside the bridge to be processed. Once the fourth delivered a nod to the third, he reported back to the bridge to deliver the results. A fifth Shepherd stood on the bridge’s railing to oversee this activity, a semi-automatic in her hands. The oldest of the bunch was in his late twenties. The males were clean-shaven, the females had their long hair set back in buns, and their uniforms were black and crisp. The one on the railing stood ramrod straight, rather than lean on the chain-link fence behind her. Signs were posted on it, warning that this was not a place to fish and fines were in excess of five thousand dollars.
They couldn’t climb over the fence by the bridge without being seen. Nor could they backtrack around the whole reservoir to climb over and pass by the bridge on the other side. That also put them in a position to be easily noticed, both at the bridge itself and anywhere along the long hike. The option had been seriously discussed and dismissed.
Or they could backtrack partway and swim across under the cover of night to scale the fence on the other side. But the reservoir was far too wide for Zaley to swim. It shrank in at the bridge, a much more manageable distance to cross, although with Shepherds directly overhead. That was what they’d be doing once night fell.
Swimming. Her arm barely went over her head. One of the others had to carry her backpack for this. It embarrassed her to be so needy. All of their belongings were spread about on the ground, being resorted into their four backpacks to distribute the weight more evenly. The perishable food was gone. Some cans of soup were all that was left, and Corbin cracked open the can of moist dog food for Bleu Cheese so they wouldn’t have to lug it around any longer. Her fanny wiggled as he stared at his hands in concentration on the can opener. He was trying to bear more weight with his damaged fingers on the handles.
“It’s too deep to hold the backpacks over our heads,” Elania was saying.
“Then they’ll get wet,” Micah said. “Everything will dry.”
The pills. “The Zyllevir,” Zaley said. “I know the bottle will likely keep water out, but do we have anything to wrap it in as a further precaution?”
It was the most precious item they had besides each other, and the cell phones. Those pills had to stay dry when they didn’t know how long it would be to get a refill. The bottle was narrow, yet still too big to slip down the narrow necks of their water bottles, even the slightly wider Super Robo-Man ones. Corbin washed out the can of moist food and offered it, suggesting they tamp down the empty spaces with clothes and put the can at the very top of one of the backpacks. Rustling through the supplies, Elania brought out an old hamburger wrapper. She doubled it over and covered the top of the can with it, tying it down with a sock.
“Corbin will have the dog, so he shouldn’t have a backpack, too,” Austin said. Three heads bent over their belongings to discuss this, Corbin looking on in consternation and then down to his dog eating the last of what had been in the can.
“Okay?” Zaley whispered.
“I’m not a great swimmer,” Corbin said.
All of the heads lifted and Micah said, “Oh, fuck. Okay, anyone else not know how to swim?”
“I know how to swim!” Corbin said defensively. “Just not well.”
“You don’t need to know the butterfly for this,” Micah said, and the heads bent back down.
Zaley had had swim classes over the summer when she was in elementary school, her mother hovering at a deck chair and never taking her eyes away from the water. (Don’t go too deep! Don’t pull off your floaties! The diving board is too high, baby!) She hadn’t done much swimming since then, but hadn’t forgotten how. “Did you learn the breaststroke, Corbin?” That was the quietest stroke.
“No,” Corbin muttered. “Basically, we just learned treading water and how not to drown. And freestyle. I was little.”
“What about the frog kick?” Zaley asked.
He hesitated. “Which kick was that?”
“Up, out, together.” Awkwardly, she demonstrated on her back. It looked far too sexual for her comfort. He caught the look on her face and a hint of a smile pulled at his lips. Then she smiled, because it was only Corbin, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t had her legs
wrapped around him before. And that was something she shouldn’t be thinking about now. Her body prickled. Dammit, she wished that she hadn’t been so freaked out back then about him touching her. She’d been far too wound up in wondering if it made her a whore to like it. At this point, she no longer thought it did, and didn’t really care either way. She was that hungry to be touched.
“Show me again,” Corbin teased. The current between them was electric, and a shout from the bridge broke it. Micah glanced around their hiding place to ensure they were concealed. It was just a man angry about having his car searched, and the response from the guards was that he could like it or be arrested. He chose to like it.
The backpacks were stuffed, Micah’s bag folded into Austin’s since there wasn’t much in it anyway. Elania carried the Zyllevir in hers. The cell phones caused the most discussion, and at last they decided to slit open the biggest plastic water bottle. Micah gouged at the plastic with the can opener to make a crack wide enough to allow the phones inside. While she did that, Elania carefully tore the empty plastic bag that once contained the bread from Brennan’s backpack. She handed each strip to Austin, who wrapped it around a phone and suited it in a sock to hold it steady.
“I think we’ll need everyone’s socks,” Elania said. Zaley and Corbin removed theirs and put their shoes back on. The wrapped phones were slipped one by one through the crack in the bottle. Zaley felt hopeless at this makeshift attempt at waterproofing. If she’d known earlier that swimming was going to be a part of this, she’d have picked up every empty chip bag they’d come across in trashcans. Sandwich bags, candy wrappers, anything and everything to keep the water out.
“What’s this?” Micah asked Elania, who was offering a tightly folded paper.
“My acceptance letter to Pewter,” Elania said. “Please just put it in with the phones, okay?” Micah slipped it in.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 69