The second feral man was still making futile attempts to climb the tree. The crash registered in his brain five seconds later. He looked at the body and up to the tree. Elania froze, hissing at Micah to do the same. Blood dripped from the point of the stick.
The body was twitching below. The feral man lurched off the branch and stepped heavily over to the twitching one. Then he kicked him stiff-legged in the head. The wetness of the sound made Elania’s stomach heave. She choked back the vomit in her throat as the kicking went on and on. Don’t look down. She closed her eyes.
Her name was Rachel Elania Douglas. She was a senior at Cloudy Valley High School, and soon to be eighteen years old. She lived with her parents and brothers, and they had just gotten a dog. Her worst subject was math, her best subject was English, and she loved to write.
It was an anthem she spoke in her mind during the relentless kicking. Animal cries rippled from the top of the hillside to the bottom, from the dried waterfall to the bushes where the boys had vanished. Her name was Rachel Elania Douglas. She was about to go to college. Her friends would scatter to different schools and that was the sad part of growing up, how you lost touch with people that once held such prominent positions in your life. The world carried you away from one another, and sometimes carried you back by chance or at reunions. Elania would go to her reunions. She wanted to see her friends, going bald and pudgy, and remember the world they once shared.
The thumping had ended. Footsteps trailed away. Foliage shook above and Micah took the pole from Elania’s fists. She helped Elania find a comfortable nook in the gnarled trunk to sit.
“We’re so far behind in school,” Elania whispered. “You can’t quit during the last semester and just fail everything.”
“They’ll let us make it up,” Micah said, humoring her. They weren’t going back. They were here to die.
Corbin
He had wanted to stop running and let them tear him apart. The only reason he was still alive was that Austin yanked Corbin along every time he slowed. Austin was here in the confinement point, feeling the desperate urgency of the feral Sombra Cs bearing down on their heels, wanting to live through this sundown and still be living at sunrise. And Corbin? Corbin was still at the house from this morning, with his dog. With his girl.
They were dead, so why was Corbin trying to stay alive? He had lost everything, his home, his school, his pet, his girlfriend. The only options that remained to him in this life were which way he wanted to die. He could run at the fence to climb it and be shot by a guard. He could pull away from Austin and charge the ferals charging him. Those were the fast ways to go. The slow way would be to fight to stay alive only to fall to his Sombra C. Then he’d be the one chasing people around this hill and finally decay to the point of immobility. It was only a matter of time.
The boys had been chased to the base of the hill, where the guard’s gun fired. Not at them though, but at a dark figure on the fence. The person fell and was still upon the ground. Corbin decided to do the same, swim through the water and charge that strip of grass to the fence, but Austin wouldn’t let him. They ran and ran, the ferals dogging them.
Now the boys were hiding at the twin of the artificial waterfall, this one on the western side of the hill. They had jumped the stepping-stones in the water and taken shelter against the dry rock on the little rim of stone there. It really wasn’t any shelter. They sat quietly and watched across the pool for movement. The feral pack had gotten lost somewhere, although another single feral went by. He was every bit a real zombie, the ones Corbin had seen in horror movies and cartoons. Possessing the full lurch and half of his face decayed to bone, the zombie stared at them. Corbin and Austin were frozen on the rock ledge until the creature lost interest and lurched away.
The sun had set. Lights were turned on around the fence, the glow shining through the trees below the pool. All Corbin needed to do was go for that fence and this was over. Final curtains for Corbin Li. “You should have let me go.”
“No,” Austin whispered.
“Zaley is dead.”
“We don’t know that.”
Corbin knew it. Either Micah had shot her, or a Shepherd had. Was he mad at Micah, if she was the one to have done it? He didn’t know. He was feeling everything, and the pieces of everything canceled each other out so he was going numb. The presence of everything created an absence.
When he closed his eyes, he saw Zaley sleeping on the couch. Her brow was furrowed. Even in rest, she was concentrating. At the time, he’d thought about the apartment they could have in Napa when the world tipped right side up. The job in the vineyard was early-morning work, so she would still be asleep when he left. Concentrating on her dreams. Her alarm was set for later. She was smart; she’d be taking classes at the junior college there and doing well. He’d leave the coffee maker set up so she’d have that smell to breathe in when her alarm went off.
At the Fergusons’ when he’d stopped patting her legs, caught up in something on the television, the furrow deepened and she moaned. Demanding that he continue, and she didn’t even know she was doing that. He rubbed her skin again. Her demands were so sparse, and he liked to be needed for something.
“What are you thinking about?” Austin asked.
“Zaley,” Corbin breathed. Deep in the vineyards was where he would be by the time she was drinking that coffee and getting ready for school. She’d be able to hook her own bra by then, which was good for her yet sad for him. They’d drag home about the same time. He’d be filthy. Harvest was dirty, sticky, sweaty work. He would get into the shower to wash it all off and she’d climb in with him. Tease him to think about Mr. Dayze and he wouldn’t have to any longer. The first time they’d made out in junior year, she pulled away guiltily and said she shouldn’t do that. But then there was the second time, the third time, the fourth time . . . she loved to be touched even more than she feared the guilt.
In the shower with him, that guilt didn’t exist. His Sombra C didn’t exist. He turned her around, her back to his front, and kissed the soft, clear skin on the right side of her neck. She whispered his name and pulled his head closer instead of pushing him away. He slipped his hands down to her slick, soapy breasts. And she wasn’t thinking of how many truffles he’d put in the box, or planning to laugh at his sex drive with Elania and Micah later.
They finished their shower and ended up in bed. But his Sombra C kept intruding on the picture of it, no matter how he tried to keep it at an arm’s length. Every single thing they did with each other had to be done with it in mind. His Sombra C existed.
Zaley didn’t.
He looked out to the dark water, which lapped lightly at the rim of the pool with the breeze. “She was right for me. It just wasn’t the right time when we were together. I didn’t know that was possible.”
“I liked you guys together,” Austin said.
“We never had sex,” Corbin said. Since they were going to die, he had no secrets left. “I’ve never had sex, not like all the way. Not even with Sally.”
“Oh, I knew that.”
“How did you know?”
“Cripes, Corbin, you would have had fang marks in your neck if you had,” Austin said hatefully. “Sally was a fucking vampire who ate guys’ souls. I was starting to think that we should plan an intervention with you.”
Liking Austin for how much he so utterly and thoroughly detested Sally Wang, Corbin snickered. There were tears in it. Wiping his nose, he said, “I thought if I was just nice enough, I could make her happy. It made her less nice. So I’d try even harder. She was mad about the blog.”
“Your blog was great. You should have taken a photography class. Some of those set-ups were classic, like Cheesie kicking back in a deck chair on vacation, tongue out and sun visor on, with an empty wine bottle tucked under her leg. She looked totally smashed.”
“I think Sally wanted it to be The Daily Sally, not The Daily Cheese. Or The Hourly Sally.”
“The Minute-by-M
inute Sally, more like.” They quieted as another figure went by. This one was a child in ragged clothes. Every few steps, she spun around like she was trying to figure out where she was. Once the spin led her to the pool. She stepped into the water and paused, her eyes glazed as she looked to her leg and the closest stepping-stone. Then she pulled out, spun, and lurched away. Her lower jaw was gaping open the whole time.
When it was safe to speak, Corbin said, “I wish I could have had sex with Zaley. That makes me sound like an asshole.”
“No,” Austin said. “It isn’t just about getting your rocks off.”
Corbin had so many regrets, now that he was in the evening of his life. He hadn’t always been happy to see his dog. He’d turned himself inside out for a girl who wasn’t worth a minute of his time. He’d never gotten to graduate from high school and work that job, a real job, not stocking shelves at Mr. Foods. And he’d never gotten to show Zaley how much she made his heart pound. She could have had any guy on campus, as pretty as she was.
“You like taller girls,” Corbin said. That was why Austin had never hit on her. Micah was taller than Corbin even, and Elania had a good four to five inches on Zaley. That made sense, because Austin was really tall. He was over a foot taller than Zaley. They would have made a funny-looking couple.
“I’m gay,” Austin blurted.
The words hung there in the darkness, Corbin unclear from the delivery if it was a joke. “Are you sure?” Austin couldn’t be gay. He had had loads of girls fawning over him at school since the first day of ninth grade, a girlfriend in Elania for many months and a fling with Micah. He was the stud that every other guy wanted to be.
“I’m sure,” Austin said.
“But Elania-”
“We faked it. It was all a lie so my mother would stop bugging me about having a girlfriend. We never did anything. After the holiday party, Elania got tired of pretending, so we pretended to break up.”
Upon reflection, it had been a very dispassionate break-up. “What about Micah? I thought that you two-”
“Once. Only once. I thought if I just tried . . . she has everything a guy could want. She’s good-looking and smart and funny . . . it should have been there, you know? But it wasn’t, not for me.” Austin sighed. “I hate telling people. A lot of the time, I hate that I’m gay. It means you have to tell people so they stop asking about girlfriends and stuff, or else you have to keep on lying.”
“You didn’t have to lie to me,” Corbin said, struggling to work in this new information with who he had thought Austin was.
“But you feel naked, saying that about yourself. Everything changes. And then you hate that you have to be grateful when someone is okay with it. You don’t want to be grateful, almost like you’re being forgiven. You don’t want to feel relieved. You feel like their equal, you are their equal until you say the words. You want to keep being equal afterwards. I don’t know how to explain it. But it sucks.”
“Do you . . .” Corbin didn’t know if asking was polite. “Do you have a boyfriend then?” He picked through his mental roster of the guys at school. Kader? Austin had hung out with Kader a lot.
“No,” Austin said. “There was this guy I talked to online that I liked, but once I got Sombra C, he stopped writing.”
“Asshole.” That was just like Sally, announcing Corbin’s diagnosis to the world to gain sympathy points for herself and then dumping him. “I never had any idea.”
“I didn’t want you to have any idea. You’d think I was hitting on you or checking you out or something. I’m not.”
“My cousin Zoe is gay. She doesn’t hit on every girl that goes by.” Zoe had had two lackluster relationships with guys before she figured it out at age nineteen. “Have you known a long time?”
“Yeah. It’s like you look at a guy in some class at Cloudy Valley High. He’s smart and funny and nice and you think that he might be an interesting dude to have for a friend. That’s all you think. Then you look at the girl sitting next to him. She’s smart and funny and nice, and you want to know her better too, but there’s something extra. You see how pretty she is. The guy is just going to be your friend; the girl . . . you want her to be more. But for me, it’s the reverse. I look at the girl and all I think is that she’d be interesting to have for a friend. My body, my mind, they don’t react past that. I get the extra with the guy.” The words were coming from him rapidly, although he still kept his voice low. “I wish I did like girls that way. It would make everything easier. I guess it doesn’t matter now. Not here.”
Not here. This was their graveyard. The night was alive with animal cries, more gunshots, and screaming. Corbin stiffened and prayed that it wasn’t one of the girls. It was a female voice. They couldn’t get back to the tree. He didn’t know if they could even find it in the dark, let alone with ferals everywhere.
Wild peals of terror and pain lanced over the hill. Bushes rustled beyond the dry spill of the waterfall, something responding to those distant cries. Corbin wanted her to die, for whatever was happening to her to stop.
“Please, Jesus,” Austin was whispering.
The choices were the lodge or out here. Maybe they wouldn’t do anything to Corbin and Austin as guys. But that weird woman had been yelling about how hot Corbin was at the bridge for dinner. He didn’t want her touching him. She’d walked by to the shore with some guy who agreed that he liked Asian dudes too . . . that guy had also been part of the group when Corbin first came into the confinement point, yelling awful things to the girls. Apparently, he was interested in whomever he could get.
Corbin wasn’t going to risk getting raped by those people at the lodge, nor did he want to be in a place where that was happening to others. That was sick. Just their eyes on him earlier had made him feel like he was surrendering some part of his body. Being looked at that way was bad enough. The thought of hands fumbling eagerly at his pants was disgusting. It was better that Zaley had been shot back at the house than brought here. Thinking about those men on the shore brutalizing her made him want to vomit.
His mind revolved on those sickening images as the woman screamed and screamed. But Zaley wouldn’t have been here anyway. Micah and Elania were, and he hoped to God that they were still safely up in the tree. He hoped his mother was safe, too.
The screaming stopped.
“Why are we trying to live?” Corbin whispered in despair.
“Because dying is going to hurt,” Austin replied. “And the girls need us in this place.”
Corbin knew that. He’d known that from the moment on the bridge when those men started talking to Elania and Micah like he had never heard men speak to any woman before, not even in the raunchiest shows on television, or in the locker room at high school. They were discussing dibs, dibs on who went first like the girls were just inflatable sex dolls and not actual people. One older man had had his dick out, this ugly grayish-pink limp thing, and was asking who wanted to suck first. Everyone on the hill got a chance. Micah had shrieked that she’d bite it off if ever she found that thing in her face.
Austin and Corbin had to outlive the girls here, or at least keep their minds about them until the girls went feral. Then, only then, could Corbin run for the fence. If he still had enough mind of his own to do so. He had one purpose left, and then he was through.
Something crashed onto the stepping-stones, landing partly in the water and throwing a splash of it over him. A person had fallen off the ridge of rock that the waterfall once plunged down. That was a fall of ten feet, and still the head rose. A growl rattled from its half-rotted throat and a hand lifted from the water. Corbin and Austin were up on their feet in less than a second and edging along the rim away from it. Male or female, that was gone. The smell of death was sucked down into Corbin’s lungs even though this creature was still living. At the end of the rim, he leaped onto a stepping-stone. Water splashed behind him.
The stepping-stones had been placed in two winding trails through the pool. The boys quickly fo
llowed one to the end and got out to the hillside beyond. Corbin’s heart stopped to see all of the lurching figures in the dimness from the lighting on the fence. Their swift strides had attracted interest from two. Corbin slowed and whispered, “Lurch.”
“What?” Austin asked in terror. His body was primed to run.
“Lurch!” Corbin took a lurching step, pretending his knee was stiff from paralysis. Ahead was a stream of those dirt steps braced with wood. He went to them only because he could see them, and aimed to go up. Going down led them right to the ferals who were watching.
One of the two looked away. Farther down the hill, most of the ferals were keeping distance between them. Some weren’t too light sensitive yet; they were wandering into the glow from the fence to drink from the river going around the hill. Not into the brightest parts, but the periphery.
Someone else was coming down the steps. Corbin swung out wide to walk through the vegetation on the steep slope. A feral man came down with heavy thumps of one leg and drags of the other. Leaves crackled under Corbin’s foot and the feral hissed. The boys halted and waited to see what it would do. Long seconds plodded by with the feral staring in their general direction. The boys stared at the ground.
Dominance. Corbin was reminded of all of those episodes of Tame Me he’d watched. Did zombies do that sort of like dogs, determining dominance among those who had the pack mentality? Or was it just the slow process of threat determination? There was nothing threatening about Corbin or Austin at the moment. Their stance was submissive. Abandoning the steps had been a gesture of respect. Corbin kept his head turned down.
At the river, wordless screeching broke out. The feral jerked away to look. Then he thumped to the far edge of the step, his other leg dragging behind him, and thumped again into the vegetation on the other side. Corbin waited until they had more distance before returning to the steps. The feral man was heading for the water, going directly to the screeching people and crying out angrily to them.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 86