“Now what?” Corbin said.
Outside the bars, Ronnie Y. Vasquez Memorial Garden Museum was painted above a black-and-white picture of an old man standing in a garden. Cases of butterflies and pressed flowers were leaning on the wall under it. Elania squinted to read the small lettering on one of the displays and said, “We’re at Golden Gate Park.”
Austin didn’t care where they were. It was just a place where he didn’t want to be. The room was cold, and the air smelled heavily of pee. It was coming from a bucket by the bench. With the doors closed, the smell was concentrating.
He felt his pulpy ear gingerly. Corbin didn’t look hurt. A thin line of blood was on Elania’s forehead, the Shepherd’s smack to the back of her head having propelled the front into the wall. Elania knelt down to look at his ear and said, “The blood is coming from inside. And you’ve got a gash on your chin.”
“I don’t remember that one,” Austin said.
“They took him down on the road,” Corbin said hoarsely. Austin remembered it more clearly now, the running and the tackle. He hadn’t been able to shield his face with the handcuffs, and the concrete hit his chin with a jolt that didn’t wear off until he was being walked back to the van. Then he’d started fighting, and the clubs came out.
“Hello,” Elania said to the boy, who was watching them again. “What’s your name?” He didn’t answer. “How long have you been in here?”
“I want my mom,” the boy said tremulously, and buried his face in his arms once more.
There was nothing to do but sit in the cage. Austin fought for a comfortable position. Anything that felt okay with his battered body was bad for the Zyllevir in his crotch, and anything that didn’t tweak the bottle upset some bruised part of him. His body heat couldn’t be good for the pills, yet he was afraid to hide them elsewhere and risk the lump of the bottle being seen. He should slide it up his ass, but the heat there would be even worse. Austin was unaccustomed to having things in his ass, and wasn’t keen on breaking that tradition here of all places and with a bottle of Zyllevir.
The cage had no outlet except for two sets of double doors, the ones they had come through and another on the far end of the museum. Both were locked. He wished that they had just shot him. It was better than being locked in here hour after hour. The sun changed position through the windows beyond the metal bars, the leaves on the trees outside and the breeze creating a dappling light on the floor. He watched the shadows shake. Sometimes they made faces, leaves gathering into brows and noses with light for eyes. Twice the shadows made the face of an old man with his mouth open wide in a guffaw. Austin didn’t like that one, the mockery of it. Nature was taking the side of the Shepherds.
Micah stood sporadically to walk over and test the doors, seeming to be in disbelief that they were still locked. The boy got up in time and laid out on the bench with his back to them. The wood squeaked under his negligible weight every time he moved. His bare foot he wedged under his other leg for warmth.
Austin shifted over and over to reduce the pain. Faces made of leaves came together and broke apart, reformed into different faces as the day moved on. Occasionally, vans rumbled by outside. They couldn’t be seen through the windows, only heard.
Micah kicked the doors the next time she tested them. She was going to lose control, Austin could sense it, but he was in too much pain to wrestle her back to peace. The only reason she hadn’t lost it already was the amount of pain she was in herself. In the long spaces between her checks of the doors, her eyes were dazed and present in turn.
A third set of doors in the room was on the other side of the bars. Austin had lost track of time when they opened to admit a blond man in a black uniform and a woman in a short pink skirt and pink blouse. Her skin was also pink with sunburn. She looked like a stick of bubblegum. Both wore Shepherd patches, and were armed with clubs and guns at their belts. Everyone in the cage stared at them dully. Staying several meters from the bars, the man looked them over one by one and said, “Information?”
“The boy was being hidden in a makeshift apartment over his grandmother’s garage in Shelling,” the stick of bubblegum answered. She was reading off her cell phone. “The other four were picked up from a catch.”
“Identification?”
“They match a group of Cloudy Valley teens who escaped the net.”
“How did they get to this catch? From where? Was there one before it?”
“We don’t know. Sombra C News was alerted of what happened before our operatives could glean more. We called to have the Fergusons picked up in Portland, as they were away from the catch at the time, but the News beat us to it and moved them as well as another relative they were visiting up there.”
He smiled to them in the cage. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell us how you got there?”
Austin had no intention of telling these people about the Chapmans or Uncle Brad and Aunt Jeanie. They’d have to torture it out of him. The man chuckled at their recalcitrant faces. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll just send in some sweet thing with a fake stamp to travel from Cloudy Valley to Sable Heights and see who so kindly offers to hide her.” He nodded to the bubblegum woman. “Let’s send these spatters to camp and clear out the room.”
“Camp? That’s what you call it?” Corbin asked without expression.
The man and woman left the room and closed the doors behind them. Half an hour later, the second set of doors in the cage opened. Six armed Shepherds were there, some from earlier and others new. A new one ordered, “Move.”
It was another hallway of grass, running between high fences draped in yellow tarps. The boy came with them, his steps uneven with one bare foot and one slipper. Austin was almost to the doors when he noticed that Micah wasn’t there. She was doing it again, sitting on the floor and refusing to obey. Austin said, “Micah, come with us.”
“No,” Micah said calmly. “They can drag me to their little illegal confinement point or shoot me dead here. But I’m not helping them.”
“Move!” a Shepherd demanded.
“Don’t push her!” Corbin shouted as Elania staggered, the muzzle of a gun being used to propel her along faster through the hallway.
Austin couldn’t watch Micah be shot on the floor. Bending down with his muscles protesting, he picked her up. She was almost too heavy for him. Placidly, she stayed in his arms. She wouldn’t fight his grip when he was hurting. This wasn’t helping the Shepherds on his part. It was keeping her alive, for as long as he could.
“I said move!”
He couldn’t move any faster when carrying a girl of five-eleven who weighed in the vicinity of one hundred and forty pounds. Grunting, he shifted her body to even out the weight. As the Shepherds gestured impatiently with their guns to the hallway, Austin plodded along at the same pace. The bottle pinched and scratched at his most sensitive areas, which also wasn’t helping his speed.
“We’re coming, you stupid bunch of motherfucking limp dicks!” Micah said to the next shout. Blinding sunlight broke over their faces when Austin stepped outside. He took another step uncertainly, unable to see where he was going. A breeze shook the trees overhead and gave him some shade.
They were screaming for him to go faster or they’d shoot. Then Micah squirmed, forcing Austin to set her down or else drop her. He caught her arm as she hurled herself right for the barrels. “Then fucking shoot me! Go ahead and shoot me!” One Shepherd ordered the others not to spill her here or they’d have to clean it up.
“So you were fucking bluffing!” she shouted, and spat at them.
Austin fought to hold her back. “Come on!”
“Let me go! Let me go!” Micah screamed in high-pitched hysteria, Austin dragging her along with his arm implacable around her waist. She wasn’t screaming at him but for all of them.
Elania
Nothing prepared her for the smell.
She would have recognized the odor even if she had never smelled anything like it before. It was a communi
cation on a visceral level, an instinctual one. Death was here, not of a cat or dog or deer, or of food left out to rot in the heat. This was the decay of human meat, a punch to the nose, to the throat, to the stomach and groin. She forced it from her lungs and helplessly drew in more. Her body rejected it, the rankness and cloying sweetness, and she threw up over the side of the bridge to the water below.
A body was beneath the surface. For a moment, she thought it was Zaley. The girl’s mouth was open in a cry, her eyes bulging and long blonde hair splayed out. But on her dimpled neck was the red stain of a stamp. Then the girl’s face was obscured by the splash of Elania’s vomit into the water.
She couldn’t breathe in that smell again, nor could she deny herself air. Gulping in reflex from the esophageal spasms, the punches of the smell reverberated through her body and caused her to dry heave. A gentle current moved the girl’s body along. It pushed her head under the wooden planks of the bridge and nibbled away at the torso inch by inch.
“Fresh meat!” someone was shouting from the far end of the bridge, and people took up the cry in mocking calls. Through bleary, stinging eyes, Elania tried to see them. A smear of green and brown and moving figures was on the shore of a hill, and that same voice yelled that he liked himself some dark meat. The man was referring to her. Corbin moved closer to her side.
“Get off the bridge or I’ll fucking shoot you!” That voice was coming from up high. Elania didn’t track it, the smell striking her with the same force as it had in her first breath. A hand moved under her arm to pull her away from the railing of the bridge.
“Corbin?” she whispered.
He was holding her arm so tightly that it hurt. “You’re my girlfriend. Do you hear me? In this place, you belong to me.”
She understood that she was in danger from that blurry man on the shore, from the other figures around him. Corbin was claiming her as his own girl. If she didn’t have a claim laid on her, it meant she was available. Fear resonated deep in the marrow of her bones. She held onto Corbin just as hard as he was holding to her.
Her eyes were still too teary to see much. The planks creaked and groaned under their feet. Again she had to stop to retch over the railing. Corbin put his hand to her back in comfort and possession. The catcalling was only increasing. Dark meat, white meat, break me off a piece of that, got something for you over here, perky tits, tight ass, pretty hair and look at those colors! They were talking about Micah, too. Most of the voices were masculine, but a woman was shouting among them and causing the men to laugh. She was yelling about Austin, asking what size shoe he wore and if it was true that black guys had big dicks. Once you have black, you never go back!
“Don’t let go of her,” Corbin whispered to Austin. Micah was out of control, screaming fuck you and hurling comments just as crude back to those on the shore. Although Elania was still heaving, her stomach with nothing left to expel yet the contractions shaking her painfully, the shouting from above made Corbin pull her away from the railing a second time to move down the bridge.
A gun blasted. The catcalling stopped and the figures moved away from the end of the bridge. It continued from the shadows beneath a tree. She blinked hard to clear her eyes. Half a dozen adults were there. The hill rose up behind them, encircled at its base by the slow-moving river. Behind Elania, the gate they had passed through was closed. Tall fences draped in tarps encircled the river. A watchtower stood overhead. A Shepherd was upon it, a man whose features were blotted out by the sun.
No one had fallen to the bullet. Terrified, Elania clung to Corbin even more strongly as they got to the end of the bridge. The ache in her head from having it smacked into the wall was nothing to the dread in her gut. It was so overpowering, so animal, that it reduced her to desperate repetitions of oh God.
The woman yelled, “Hey, you guys come on up to the lodge tonight, all right? Don’t want to be outside around here in the dark.” She made a spooky woooo sound and fluttered her fingers.
“Damn, that one is pretty!” a man said. “Yeah, you come up to the lodge. We’ll take care of you.”
Whatever the lodge was, Elania wasn’t going to it. And if anyone but her friends touched her, she was going to scream and kick and fight. It wouldn’t be worth anything when she was this outnumbered. She’d do it anyway, the way a deer kept trying to escape even when the wolf was on its back. That was a picture in a book from childhood, the title lost to memory. That image had stayed with her, the bulging eyes of the deer as it struggled for nothing.
A bell rang and drowned out the voices. When the echoes of it died, the group of hecklers started to walk around the hill to the left. Elania remembered the boy with one slipper who had come with them. He was nowhere to be seen. “The boy?”
Everyone looked down. The kid was still on the bridge and barely visible. He had wedged himself into a tight ball between the criss-crossed wooden bars of the railing. Only the fluffy part of his slipper was sticking out. Micah, who had been yelling fuck you repeatedly, headed back for him. The guard on the watchtower raised his gun. “Get the fuck off the bridge!”
“Micah, leave it! There isn’t anything we can do,” Austin said. She hopped over the side and went into the water to go back for the boy. The water that had the girl’s body in it . . . Elania’s stomach overturned. Her home, her family, school and friends and college, all of that belonged not to some other place on this planet but to some other dimension.
They stood on the edge of the shore, Corbin and Elania looking out to the hill in fright as Austin watched Micah wade and then swim to the other side of the bridge. This had been a place for hikers once. Trails ran along the water. Dirt steps braced with logs climbed the side of the hill. The staircase crooked into tree cover and vanished into shade. They shouldn’t go into a shady place in a confinement point. A distant cry of animal chatter confirmed that the people here weren’t being supplied with Zyllevir.
The boy unfolded himself and slipped down to Micah, where he clung to her side like a monkey as she crossed to the shore. She was saying, “Don’t look down. Don’t look down, Colin,” but his blue eyes were as wide as saucers upon what was beneath the surface.
“Get to the North Bridge if you want your eats,” shouted a new guard on the watchtower. The man who had shot his gun was descending a ladder and disappearing behind the tarp over the fence.
“This is Colin,” Micah said when the two of them reached the shore. His slipper leaked onto the dirt and thatches of grass.
“How do you think we get to the North Bridge?” Austin said.
“We just walk around the shore,” Elania said, her voice raspy from her sore throat. She had spent all of those hours in the cage reading from the displays outside the bars. It kept her sane to see evidence of the world she once knew, the world she had lived in until Zaley ran up the road screaming while Elania waved her Pewter acceptance letter. Flower descriptions, butterfly pictures, maps of different parts of the park and one of them had had a circle of water around a mound of earth. That was this place. A line of dots had represented the steps, and they’d wound all over the hill.
A little food trash was strewn through the foliage. Empty water bottles, plastic wrap, and there were black containers from microwave meals. More water bottles were floating in the river. Colin whispered, “I’m hungry.”
Breakfast had been their only meal of the day many hours ago, but Elania was far more thirsty than hungry. Holding onto Corbin’s arm, she started down the right-side trail that went along the shore. Austin and Micah walked three paces behind them, and the boy held onto Micah’s hand.
An old man was leaning against a tree, his head stooped over his chest like he was asleep. But he was dead, and naked. Only a stripe of white hair was left on his head at the sides. The smell hit Elania, nose to throat to stomach to groin. It didn’t seem possible that for a few seconds, the smell hadn’t been the most prominent feature in her mind.
Sometimes people emerged from the trees to the trail, som
e looking back to the five silently and then pressing on. Bodies were splayed in bushes and under trees; they were floating and sunken in the water. A living woman stood under one tree. She was like the man in the T-shirt on Klaman Trail, her brain and body being eaten alive by the virus, yet still she was trying to hold on. With a jerky gesture to the trail, she said, “Foo. Foooooo-oooooo.” But she didn’t come with them for food. She knew where it was, yet was unable to command her body to go there.
After a walk of less than ten minutes, they heard voices ahead. Elania was afraid to go closer, but Corbin was walking so she did the same. The trail kept curving and curving around the hill. A body was sprawled before them, the bottom half on the trail and the top half face first in the water. They stepped over the legs.
Flies lifted and resettled. Austin and the boy vomited; Elania’s body heaved in response. Corbin and Micah pulled them along.
“The bridge,” Corbin whispered when they came around the next curve. People were crowded upon it in line. At the far end of the bridge, which extended over the river, was a heavy glass partition where meals were being doled out. Those who had received their meals were not walking back through the people on the bridge but eating hurriedly along the small strip of grass beside the fence. Some had waded into the water to do it there. Another watchtower rose into the air here. Standing upon it was a Shepherd. Wearing sunglasses, her gaze appeared to be trained to the line.
Much more food trash was spread about on this side of the hill. There were roughly two hundred people altogether on and around the bridge. Men, women, children, every color and age, and most had stamps on their necks. Some didn’t want to wait for their food and pushed to the front of the line. The ones they shoved past remained silent for the most part, pressed and knocked to the railings to let the cheaters through. Below the handrails was a tight line of wooden poles to keep people from falling into the water, although some of them were broken or gone.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 84