A cell phone buzzed and Tarley squirmed to take it from her pocket. She smiled to read the text message. “Guy I met last night at a club.” She texted back, turned up the television, and took her empty plate into the kitchen.
“Who’s a big girl that feeds herself?” Micah cooed to Zaley as applause burst out from the screen. “And gets it all over her chin?”
Loving Micah for being so goddamned awful, and loving the boys even more for telling her to shut the fuck up, Zaley said, “You’ve got something smeared all over your own chin, asshole.”
“The shit you spew returns to you,” Austin cooed back to Micah. “It is all over your chin and what’s your excuse?”
“Aw, fuck,” said Micah. She and Zaley got up, the former fleeing with a laugh and calling dibs on the bathroom, and the latter going to the kitchen to wipe off at the sink. Standing at the refrigerator, Tarley stared aimlessly at the contents. There wasn’t much in there to stare at, condiments and vodka, bottles of water, a foil-wrapped package and a limp salad in a plastic container. The pills were kicking in, making a simple decision take more time than normal.
Dampening a paper towel, Zaley wiped off her face. Her fingers were stained with sauce so she washed those off, too. Then she turned off the water and said, “Tarley, where is the trash-”
The door flew open.
It happened all at once, or so fast that it seemed to be all at once. Shepherds in riot gear stormed inside, Tarley shouted that Elania was in the bedroom, a gun blasted and blood flew in the living room. The shot was so loud that it deafened Zaley, who stood frozen at the sink. More Shepherds ran in. Tarley was still shouting, but Zaley could no longer hear what she was saying. Corbin’s mouth was open in a scream of horror. He had thrown himself over a bleeding blue form on the carpet. Austin writhed and shouted in the grip of two big men.
Zaley was turned and her arms were pinned painfully behind her. Fingers dug into her cheeks and forced her mouth open. A swab was jabbed inside, going so deeply that she almost threw up. She thrashed as it was withdrawn, screaming in rage at the man behind the clear visor who dipped it into solution. The sound of her own screaming was muted to dimness, although she felt it leaving her throat in torrents. Around the Shepherd testing her saliva, she saw Elania forced out from the hallway, backpack on, and her hands in cuffs behind her. A gun was pointed at the back of her head.
“ . . . she tried to go out the window . . .”
Hooting laughter. That Zaley heard clearly.
The boys had been dragged outside. The ampoule was held to the light. Elania screamed for Zaley to call her family, tell them that she loved them, and then she was gone. Zaley made out those words, her hearing coming back to full with a hard thumping in the hallway. The talk show was still going, the audience clapping and cheering.
Tarley had closed the refrigerator. All she’d done this whole time was watch and laugh to one Shepherd about Elania’s attempt at an escape, and Zaley knew that they’d been sold out. The ampoule was tossed into the sink, where it broke. “She’s clean. Let’s arrest her for-”
A commotion broke out among those outside, who shouted for backup. The guys in the kitchen released Zaley so suddenly that she rocked back and caught herself on the wall. The Shepherds ran to the stairs, all except one who threw a wad of one hundred dollar bills onto the counter with the ticket stubs.
“ . . . he’s getting away . . . he’s getting away . . .”
More thumps came from the hallway. The guy smiled to Tarley. “Not bad for nine in the morning. You coming by tonight?”
“With a fresh batch of pills for you insomniac goons,” Tarley said flirtatiously, slipping the wad into the front pocket of her jeans. The action was done with no grace or speed, the pills having taken away both.
Zaley had nothing, no gun, not even a knife. Those were in a holder by the other two. The Shepherd called down the hallway, “You okay, Gull?”
“Aw, one barricaded herself in here. It’ll just take a minute. There’s no window for her to fit through.”
“I’ll check on the others,” the first one said. He went outside.
Chest heaving, Zaley stood there. “Why?” she spat at Tarley.
“Three hundred a head, too bad about you.” Yawning, Tarley patted her pocket and hooted lazily with laughter.
Two gunshots rang out in the hallway.
Zaley screamed, believing the Shepherd had shot through the bathroom door to kill Micah. She shoved past Tarley to look. Micah burst out of the bathroom as the Shepherd staggered back, his visor red with blood and shielding his face. Footsteps and surprised voices rang from the stairs at the sound of the shots.
“You bitch! You bitch!” Coming down the hallway with a howl of fury, Micah lifted the gun and shot Tarley in the face.
Shepherds reentered the house. Tarley twisted and knocked into Zaley, the gun blasting a second time. The two of them tumbled to the floor, where Zaley banged her head on a cabinet. Too stunned from pain to move, she lay there. Tarley had collapsed over her, blood forming a rapid pool on the linoleum.
The Shepherds surrounded Micah. They knocked the gun away and clubbed her on the head. She fell and was dragged out the front door. Two more Shepherds dashed into the hallway and returned with the wounded one named Gull. His helmet was off, and he was screaming and gagging on blood. One looked down at Tarley and Zaley and cried, “Oh shit!”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” the other one yelled. They thought Zaley had been shot, too. She didn’t move. Her only defense was playing dead.
When the door slammed shut, she shoved Tarley’s body off and got up. One of those pretty hazel eyes was now just a hole, and there was another one through her temple. Her blood had leaked over Zaley’s right shoulder, staining her shirt and warming her skin.
They were a bag operation. If they were a spill, they would have shot her friends where they stood. And since they were a bag, there was an illegal confinement point somewhere around here. Zaley jammed her hand into the woman’s pockets, searching for keys. As she pulled out the money and jammed it into her own pocket, she remembered the keys were on the table by the door.
Coming around the counter, she saw the dog. Bleu Cheese was still on the carpet, her eyes wide open and her tongue lolling out. Zaley whispered, “No, no,” and bent down to touch her. The bullet had torn through her stocky chest and exited her back. Tears burned in Zaley’s eyes. Patting the dog one last time, she straightened to go to the window.
Austin thrashed in the road by a van, clubs beating down on him. He was screaming for Micah. The van was black and plain, the one that they were trying to take him to, and a second van parked in front of it was also black but had silver muskets on the back doors. The bloody Shepherd was being loaded into the back of the silver one. The doors closed behind him, more Shepherds piled into the front, and that van pulled away from the curb. Tarley’s Seeker was across the street. It was a filthy blue four-door.
Austin was shoved into the back of the plain van and the doors were closed. The three Shepherds who had done it walked to the front of the van. Zaley let the blind fall and looked around the room. Three of their backpacks were on the floor.
Ripping off her wet shirt, she tossed it on an armchair. She yanked out the ugly Waste Less jacket from Austin’s backpack, threw that onto the bloody shirt, and pulled on the T-shirt beneath it. Three backpacks were too much to carry, so she jammed hers into his almost empty one. Zipping it up, she slung it over her back. Something caught her eye by the closet with the jackets. It was the gun, partially under the long doily that hung from the table.
She picked up the last backpack and slid it over her left shoulder on top of the first one’s strap. The van was starting up outside. Dashing across the living room, she snatched up the gun and slipped it down the back of her jeans. She spun on her heel and hurried to the foyer, where she cracked the door.
The van was pulling out. Jerking open the door all the way as it drove off, Zaley ran d
own the stairs and hit the sidewalk just in time to see it turning north on the cross street. She sprinted over the road and hit the key fob on the chain. The lights on the Seeker blinked.
Throwing the backpacks into a pile of trash on the passenger seat, Zaley examined the three keys on the ring. Only one was for a car. She shoved it into the ignition and turned. The engine caught with a rattle. Laying her hand on the horn to alert a car tootling in her direction, Zaley wheeled around the road and raced after the van. The light was yellow going red when she approached it, someone already creeping through to get a head start on going south. Zaley hit the gas instead of the brakes and crossed the lines two seconds after the light flicked to red.
She was running a red light, not coasting through a yellow-almost-red, but a real red light. Horns blared angrily at her. Thinking sorry with true remorse, she turned left and sought through the traffic for the black van. Her heart sank and then jumped. It was changing lanes ahead. Slamming into the slow lane to go around someone poking along in the fast lane, she yanked back into the fast and plotted how to get up to the van when two more cars were driving side-by-side in her way. What the fuck, were they friends? “Get the hell out of my way!”
She had to know where they were being taken! Pulling behind the car that was going slightly faster than the other, she rode up almost to its bumper. The light changed to yellow up ahead, the van passing through and the cars in front of her slowing down.
She was going to lose them.
No. She was going to keep up. She wasn’t going to shoot herself; she wasn’t going to call home; she wasn’t going to yield to a red light and lose her friends forever. She jerked the wheel and whipped through the gas station on the corner. The car dropped off the curb into the east-west road, brakes screeching as she whizzed over the lanes and turned hard to get back to the one going north. The van was still in sight, caught at the next red light.
Zaley lowered the sun visor and pulled in behind it. There weren’t any windows in the back of the van, so the only way they had to see her was the side view mirror of the driver’s. But they thought she was dead and had no reason to think that anyone was in pursuit. Still, her heart was pounding so fast from nerves that her chest hurt.
Tarley’s car was a pigsty. A mountain of trash was on the floor of the passenger side, ninety percent of it fast food related and the rest plastic wrappers and pill bottles. The back seat was even worse. Everything not covered in garbage was coated in dust. The car smelled.
The light turned green. They moved on, going mile after mile north. A scream caught in her throat when they passed a restaurant reading Sable Heights Eatery and left it behind. The van turned west and Zaley followed for the length of two blocks before the van headed north once more.
They were just crossing into Golden Gate Park when the van went right. Greenery rose along both sides of the road, casting shadows over the cars parked at the curb. A trail wound away through a carpet of untended grass to the trees.
The van passed a post bristling with signs. The topmost warned that there was no parking beyond this point. A few people had ignored it. The sign beneath it read that Brayton Mound was closed, as were the boats and children’s wading shallows, and the third announced that this was not a through road. The fourth and last sign shouted NO TRESPASSING.
Teenagers were getting out of a car just beyond the signs and looking back the way they’d come. One shouted about the trail. A boy hefted a cooler into his arms. Doors slammed as Zaley drove by.
A loop was up ahead. The road was about to end. The van entered the loop and curled around north, where it bumped up the curb and drove over a crude dirt road through the grass. Two Shepherds sat on lawn chairs to the sides of the road, almost invisible in the shadows of the tree cover. They rose together, the woman lifting her gun and going to the van, the man looking to the Seeker slowing in the curve. Zaley stopped and got out, putting a hand over her eyes and looking back the way she had come like she was lost.
“There’s no parking here!” the man bellowed.
“Do you know where I can find it?” Zaley asked, doing her best to sound like an idiot.
“Somewhere else!”
The confinement point was around here. It had to be in the park or else they wouldn’t have gotten off the main road. She climbed into the car and opened the glove compartment, pantomiming a search for a map. Fast food wrappers fell out to heighten the mountain of trash below. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the woman talking to the driver of the van.
If Zaley leaped out of this car and opened fire, first of all, she was going to miss at this distance. And second, they’d mow her down with their semi-automatics. So that wouldn’t do her any good.
There had to be another way. The man stalked over to the car as she flipped through the stack of maps that had been behind the fast food wrappers. None was even of California, and they were falling apart from age. At a thump on the window, she turned with a worried smile and rolled it down. “Just trying to figure out-”
“Can’t you read? The sign down there said no trespassing!”
The woman was backing away from the van. It rumbled into the trees. Zaley said, “Oh, I’m not meaning to hike here, sir. I passed the trail I want back there, but I can’t find a place to p-”
The semiautomatic replaced his furious face in the window. “Move along!”
“Okay! Okay!” Throwing the maps to the passenger seat, she put her hands on the wheel in pretend fright and pressed the accelerator. Not all of the fright was pretend. She drove out of the loop and back down the road, hating the distance increasing between her and the van, and having no clue what she was supposed to do now.
Austin
“Is he awake?”
“Austin?”
He opened his eyes. Elania’s face was nearly obscured by the darkness around them. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and every part of him hurt. The van stopped and started, rocking them gently into one another.
The only light came from a dim bulb beyond the glass door of the cage in the back of the van. Austin thrashed around to sit up, leaning on the glass and squinting to see the others. Huddled against the opposite wall was Corbin. His eyes were swollen from crying. The dog had been shot right between them. There hadn’t been a chance to do anything. She just rocked back and fell, her spirit flying away with the bullet, and the Shepherds were on them.
Moving around carefully on her knees, Elania went to the form sliding on the floor of the van like seaweed caught in the tides. Micah. Austin had seen how they dragged her body downstairs and shoved her limp form through the glass door. She hit the floor without raising a hand to protect her face, and that was because she was dead. He’d almost pissed himself. They had been inseparable since they met, their individual fuck-ups coming together in an almost perfect cohesion. Now her soul had flitted away and left him without his wild little sister, only the shell she came in. He’d screamed so loudly that it cracked open the heavens to let her in. Then something had hit him in the head. “They killed her!”
“She’s breathing,” Elania said.
He didn’t believe it, not after the gunshots in the house and the dead thump of her feet going down the stairs. Thump. Thump. Thump. They hadn’t bothered to cuff Micah. That could only be because there was no reason. Slipping down to his side, he rolled over and put his head by hers to see if her breath struck his skin. Her long hair was splayed out everywhere, including locks over her face. The van stopped again and Micah rocked with it, braced by Elania and Austin around her.
“Micah?” Austin whispered. There was no response and he looked up to Elania in betrayal. “How do you know she’s alive?”
“I backed up so I could take her pulse with my hands cuffed behind me, before you woke up. I did that with both of you.”
“Why isn’t she waking up?”
“Because she was probably hit hard on the head, like you were.”
He’d run for it as they tried to get him i
nto the van, kicked out the leg of the Shepherd to his right, wrenched away from the one on the left. Before they recovered, he kicked the one in the back who was dragging Corbin along and shouted to run. Austin had bolted down the street, slowed by his cuffed hands but still sprinting. The back of the van was death. One Shepherd yelled that he was going to shoot if Austin didn’t stop running, but how was he to stop? Stop and turn around and give up his life? He could have no sooner grown wings to fly than he could have stopped running.
People had seen him at the cross street, a pair of businessmen, a clutch of shoppers. Austin screamed for help and they only stared. The Shepherds caught him and those people just watched. It wasn’t their fight. He hated them for doing nothing more than witnessing.
Sweet Jesus, did his shoulders and back hurt. His stomach hurt too, and his left ear was filled with fluid. That blow he didn’t remember. It must have been the one to wipe away his consciousness for a while.
Maybe he had just fallen asleep on the porn-loving old couple’s living room rug. He had slept there for an hour, and this could be a shitty dream. But it was real pain in his body and the dog . . . that hadn’t been a dream, the falling back of her body and the spray of blood. One of those assholes had shot and killed their dog, who hadn’t been doing anything more frightening than sitting on the rug and having her doggy thoughts.
He searched the dimness and said with agitation, “What happened to Zaley? Where’s Zaley? Did they shoot her?”
“We don’t know,” Elania said. “They may have. For helping us hide. She was still alive when I was taken out of the house.”
Zaley. Austin couldn’t even fathom that she was dead when she had been alive a few minutes ago and having breakfast with them. She was supposed to get his birthday cake, and he was supposed to get hers, so she couldn’t be dead. Corbin was crying for her, not only the dog. In a helpless voice, he said, “We just got back together.”
“Oh, Corbin,” Elania said.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 82