“Should Austin and I get the food?” Corbin asked.
Elania had a primitive fear of being seen without the boys around her. “No, we’ll go together.” Never in her life had she felt so threatened than by how some of the men in line were openly checking out Micah and Elania. This was a meat market and they were fresh to the sample tray. She wanted her father to be here.
This wasn’t how Elania thought of herself, a young woman who clung to a guy for safety. Yet here there was nothing else to think. The fear of rape was violent inside her.
They joined the back of the line. A middle-aged woman was standing ahead of them with three children clustered around her. Two were girls in their preteens or early teens, and the boy was younger, the age of the triplets. The woman turned around when they walked onto the bridge and said in a friendly voice, “New? I don’t recall your faces. I’m Ruthie.”
Elania nodded. “How long have you been here?”
“A week.” Her stamp read 1%. A man splashed down into the water and ripped the plastic from his meal. The river was much more shallow on this side. Halfway across when he stopped, the water only came to his thighs. Seeing how they watched him, Ruthie said, “Eat your food immediately, or it will get taken from you. We have some hungry fellows in this place! Don’t go wandering around with it, or try to save some for later.”
“Too bad her face is all roughed up. Bet she’s a looker. Hey there, honey! Want to come up here and stand with me?” A very tall man was unabashedly staring back through the line to Micah’s chest. Austin stepped in front of her and stared at the man.
The woman laughed. Her blue skirt and gray blouse weren’t too dirty or torn, not like the clothes on a lot of the other people in line. Yet she smelled strongly of body odor, and her outfit was wrinkled. Her pantyhose had lots of runs, and her brown hair was lank and greasy. “Oh, that’s just Jamie. He’s a nice man, isn’t he, girls? You like spending time with him.” Ruthie nudged the girls at her sides, neither of who responded. Both stared sullenly down to the planks. Elania felt sick. The line moved and they stepped with it.
“Do you have a phone?” Colin asked. He was shivering from his damp pajama bottoms. Pools of water were forming under him and Micah.
“I’m sorry, honey, I don’t have one,” Ruthie said. “Someone else might in the lodge.”
“Where’s the lodge? I want to call my mom. She’ll come and get me.”
The woman pointed to a staircase going straight up the hill. “It’s at the very top up there. I can show all of you after dinner.”
“No, thank you,” Elania said. They were finding a tree to climb for the night.
“I want you to show me!” the boy cried. He broke away from Micah to go to Ruthie.
“You don’t want to be out in the open at night,” Ruthie said with warning to Elania. “It’s very dangerous outside when the feral ones roam. Someone dies every night to an attack. The lodge is safe. It has restrooms, water fountains, electricity, and high windows that the ferals can’t get through. The lower windows are blocked off.”
“I like that new Asian boy, too,” yelled a woman in the water. It was the same one from the shore earlier who had been talking about the size of Austin’s penis. She had horrifically snarled hair. Corbin blanched to see her finger pointed to him.
“And how safe is it inside the lodge?” Elania asked Ruthie pointedly.
“Oh, they get a little rowdy, the kings of the hill, but you’ll get some sleep. I slept great last night.” Ruthie stroked Colin’s head and smiled to him. The girls continued to gaze at the planks, and the boy stared down to the water. Checked out. Ruthie said, “And you, poor guy, you’ll be cold without a shirt! We’ll see if we can’t find one for you.”
“No, Colin,” Elania said automatically. But he didn’t turn back, and now he was talking to Ruthie about his name and where he was from. Elania mouthed trees to Corbin. She didn’t care if it was covered in poison oak and ants. There was no way on this earth she was going to trade sex for shelter. In fact, she was willing to skip food altogether and find a tree now.
One of the guys on the grass had grabbed away a woman’s food, and was making her lift her shirt and jump up and down to get it back. Elania heard a hiss behind her. It had issued from Micah, who was watching with revulsion. Most of the people on the bridge just looked away. The woman lowered her shirt when the man allowed it, and then he threw her food into the water. She dove after it.
Halfway across the bridge, they could see a body crumpled at the foot of the fence farther off. Colin said, “Ruthie, did she get shot?”
“The guards shoot anyone who tries to climb the fence,” Ruthie answered, including the four behind her in the conversation. “She tried yesterday when we were standing here for breakfast.”
A man who had gotten his meal pushed back through the line rather than eat on the grass. Heavily tattooed and with a shaved head, he wore a bloody white T-shirt and ripped jean shorts. There was something vicious about his face. The woman pulled the children to the side to let him pass.
He stopped when he got to them. “Hey, Ruthie. Looks like we got ourselves a fresh blackberry here! I like blackberries. What’s your name, juicy girl?”
Elania didn’t need the chill in the breeze to feel freezing cold. The man stroked his fingers down the front of his jean shorts, his eyes crawling over her. Corbin moved closer and Austin said in a growl, “Move along.”
When the man reached out to touch Elania’s hair, Austin swiped his hand aside and said more loudly, “Move along.”
“You gonna make me?” the man taunted. Elania closed her fingers into fists. They should not have come for food.
Wood cracked and Micah held up a broken pole from the railing. The end of it was splintered to a point. “You want me to stick this through your face first, asshole, or through your dick? I got a real clean shot at the latter.”
Seconds passed in tenseness. A hook-nosed elderly man in line called back, “Shame on you, all of you people! Acting like animals. You leave the girls alone.” He moved up, clinging to the railing.
“Oh, shut up, grandpa,” said the snarly-haired woman.
The man in the bloody shirt whispered to Elania in an intimate voice, “See you at the lodge tonight, sweetheart,” and forced his way down the bridge. Not too many people were behind them, and the last man was lurching along with delayed reactions every time they moved up.
Those who had finished their meals were climbing out of the water to the hillside. Many of them went up the stairs in big groups; a few drifted away on the trails.
Elania had clenched her fists so tightly that she’d left nail impressions in her palms. About the broken pole in Micah’s hands, Elania said in a voice rising with hysteria, “I want one of those.”
Micah gave it to her and kicked out another one to carry. Ruthie looked back at the kicking sounds and said, “Don’t be so worried. There are some really nice people here. You’ll see.”
Nice? Elania had never felt so endangered. She had the suspicion that this woman brought new people to the lodge and pimped them out in place of herself. Happily chattering at the younger boy about a cartoon, Colin was standing on the other side of Ruthie and the girls. When Elania called to him, the woman shifted to cut off their view of one another.
They got to the front of the line. Through the glass partition was a Shepherd. The girl could only have been seventeen or eighteen. Down a corridor was a snippet of kitchen, with two equally young people hunched over a counter. Real food was being made back there, lettuce heaped in a colander, plates in a stack, yet what was being given out here were TV dinners. It was delivered through a metal bucket. The girl opened the door on her side to drop the dinner and water bottle into the bucket; she pushed at the door to close it and the bucket came over to Elania’s side. Then Elania took out her meal. This way there was no risk of her giving the girl Sombra C. Their bodies never shared the same space. Even so, her hands were gloved and she wore a mask over
her nose and lips.
Corbin was waiting for Elania on the strip of grass. She climbed through a gap in the poles and stepped down to him. Farther away, Ruthie was encouraging the four children to eat fast. Colin laughed at how the other three gobbled and said, “Like pigs!” Ruthie agreed. Like pigs, so he did the same with giggling snorts.
Micah landed in the grass and Austin seconds later. They did as everyone else had done: peeled off the plastic layer on the lukewarm dinner and ate with their fingers. The water bottles were tucked into their armpits, and so were the girls’ wooden poles.
It was disgusting food, half of the tray holding a cheap Salisbury steak and the other half macaroni and cheese. Elania ate every rubbery piece of pasta and clot of cheese; she tore at the meat with her teeth. The smell was still hitting her, and Ruthie acting motherly with the kids was hitting her, too.
The sun was starting to set. Animal cries broke out from the hill frequently. She had to eat fast and seek a tree to climb. Jamming the last piece of steak into her mouth, she swallowed hard to force it down her throat. Then she set the container on the grass and drank her water. Corbin was also finished, and the other two were finishing.
A body floated by facedown. Elania looked around for Colin. All five of them, the woman and the children, were already across the water and climbing the steps up the hill. Elania cried, “Colin!”
Ruthie put her hand on his shoulder, none of them turning around, and they passed out of sight. Elania said, “Oh my God, we can’t let him go up there!”
“What do you suggest we do about it?” Micah said with sarcasm.
“I don’t know! Go after him! Pull him up into a tree with us.”
Dumping her trash to the grass, Micah said, “I’m not going up that hill to their gang-rape lodge. He made his choice. I’m making mine.”
“He’s nine or ten years old!”
“Then you go up and get him, but I’m not. We have to find a good tree. Let’s get going.”
They climbed back onto the now empty bridge to keep their clothes from getting wet, and in Micah’s case, wetter. The guard watched them go. The hair on the back of Elania’s neck rose at the thought of climbing those steps up the hillside. This was a lawless place. Since everyone here was guaranteed to die in the next month, why stand in line? Why obey any laws? It wasn’t like the police were going to swoop in to do an investigation and place the perpetrators under arrest.
“That kid may be walking to his own molestation,” Elania said.
“Yes,” Corbin said. “And there isn’t anything we can do about it, Elania. The sun is going down. We have to get off the ground.”
The trees closest to the trail around the river weren’t good for climbing, their branches either too high or too weak to hold weight. Pines and cypress wouldn’t do. Shielding her eyes from the sun, Elania looked farther up the hill. There were redwoods, also not helpful. Micah said, “There’s a trail here.”
“We don’t want to go higher!” Austin exclaimed.
“These aren’t trees we can spend the night in,” Micah said. “This is a big hill, Aussie. If we come across the lodge, we’ll back off.”
The trail was braced by logs and ran up through slim trees and heavy vegetation on the ground. The shadows were growing deep. Elania scanned their surroundings with an increasing sense of panic. They passed an artificial pool with wide stepping stones scattered through it. A waterfall had once flowed down the hill to collect here. Brackish and dark, the pool lay still.
“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh,” something or someone cried in the distance.
“Oak,” Micah said. She pointed higher up the hill. Ditching the trail, they went to it in haste. Every second it took to get there was a second the sun dipped lower, a second of crunching leaves or panting breath to be overheard . . .
The tree was massive and old, dark serpents of branches writhing up into the air and down all the way to the ground from a gnarled trunk. Lichen was thick on the tops of the branches. Four of them touched the dirt and lifted to make little arches. Elania followed the thickest of the four back to the trunk. That would deliver her to a higher perch than the others. From that point, she could keep going up until she was thirty or forty feet off the ground.
Straddling that branch and wedging the pole in her armpit, she gripped the sides with her hands and scooted herself a few inches upwards. She did it a second time and moved a few inches more. Walking would have been faster and it was wide enough for her to do so, but she didn’t trust her balance. Austin unzipped his pants to move the bottle of Zyllevir.
“Haa-MAAA!”
That poor boy could be some pervert’s plaything this same second that Elania was battling her way up the tree. And she could only save herself. Austin redid his zipper as the stick fell out of her armpit and hit the dirt. “Fuck!”
“I got it,” Austin said. She scooted higher and he handed it back. How was she to do this without dropping it? Clench it under her neck? It was too wide to hold with her teeth. Sticking it down the back of her shirt, she settled the base in her jeans and used the band of her underwear as an anchor.
Micah was balancing on one of the other low-falling branches, her arms outspread to keep from tumbling off. Doing the same, Corbin leaped back to the ground when the branch beneath his feet made a snapping sound.
Austin inhaled sharply. Four feet off the ground, Elania followed his gaze up the hill. Figures were emerging from the trees. Ferals. They were alarmingly close by. A cry resounded from the other direction, where two more had appeared by the defunct waterfall. Elania gripped with her hands and swung her pelvis forward, gripped and swung over and over. They were coming fast, the ones from above, gravity speeding their staggers down the hillside.
She wasn’t so high that one couldn’t grab her ankle. Swinging her legs up behind her, Elania tilted forward, grasped the branch with every ounce of strength she had, and crawled for the trunk. Micah had already gotten to it, but the boys were barely off the ground.
“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!”
“Oh, shit!” Austin screamed. Swinging off the branch that he was scooting along, he said, “Corbin!”
Embracing the trunk, Elania looked down. The boys were scrambling off their lower perches and wheeling around. The two ferals from the waterfall were lurching along, still about twenty feet away. The ones from above had reached the tree. Two shied away, their attention on something else. The others inspected the girls in the tree and the boys rushing to the trunk. One of them let loose a cackle that turned into a scream, and bled into a cackle at its end.
“There isn’t time!” Corbin shouted when Austin tried to boost him straight up. Leaves crackled as the feral man who had screamed pushed through the branches to the trunk. Elania clutched a branch that grew a little higher than her own and climbed up to it. Micah was scrabbling down through the branches to offer a hand to Corbin, yet she wasn’t going fast enough. The man screamed even louder and the boys ran away from the tree. He gave pursuit, the scream fading to a cackle, and with a flick of his arm to the other ferals, some of them followed him.
Pack mentality. Elania remembered that from a news segment they had watched in Welcome Mat ages ago. The remaining ferals looked at the tree.
“Corbin, come on!” Austin was yelling.
“Climb higher!” Micah exclaimed, now moving up. Elania moved unsteadily to another branch, laying her stomach across it and swinging up her legs. If she fell, they would rip her apart. Three of them were down there, the two from the waterfall having caught up and one who had not gone with the pack after the boys. Two were men and one was a woman, in varying stages of decay.
“Aba? Aba?” It was coming from somewhere else, in the shrill soprano of a child.
The woman’s face contorted in a grimace, that particular sound painful to her. “Aba? Aba?” With a moan of distress, she slapped her hands to her ears and lurched down the hill to get away from it.
The men were climbing the tree.
Elania though
t that she and Micah should be still, on the chance that it was the movement attracting the feral Sombra Cs. Her body wouldn’t allow her to stop, demanding that she gain more distance and overriding her logic. She could not sit still on a branch and hope they stopped coming.
One of the two was having trouble with climbing. The paralysis caused by the virus had seized up his knee joints, and kept him from making much progress up the tree. The second was climbing quickly. His eyes crazed, he stared up to Elania and swiped out for her though almost two meters separated them. She screamed and pushed up to a higher branch.
“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!”
The man chattered back to the growing dark. Bushes rustled and Elania thought in horror that he was calling more ferals here. She hugged the trunk and edged over to another branch, the man climbing up further and swiping out for her.
This was why people went to the lodge.
No. No! Pulling the stick from the back of her clothing, she pinched the branch with her legs. The man gained another foot. While his arms were engaged in gripping the branch to swing over, she struck him on the head with the stick. The cracking sound was accompanied by a wet one, a soft spot in his skull caving in. She struck him again, this time across the back of the neck.
It wasn’t hurting him. It wasn’t even slowing him down. He stared up to her, now only three feet away, and made that chattering call.
I can’t believe I am about to do this. She righted the stick and stabbed him with the point. It barely pierced his chest. He swung out to knock the stick away and she retracted it in the nick of time.
“Elania, move!” Micah screamed from above.
He lunged. Elania stabbed him in the face.
The point sank through a skull gone spongy. Their eyes met, the man’s still insane and intent on her as blood leaked down his cheek. His grip slackened from the tree and she kicked him in the chest. The point slid from his skull. He fell, crashing into branches on the way down and hitting the ground with a thump.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 85