The others were behind her, all three of them brandishing the broken poles from the bridge and more people doing the same around them. The man scrambled up and ran for the stairs, ungainly from pain or his infection.
She had won. Austin’s arms went around her shoulders as she fed her laughter to the sky. He didn’t laugh with her. None of the three did. Wiping at her cheeks, Micah said, “I can’t remember my class schedule.”
“I think you have French for first-” Elania replied.
“No,” Micah interrupted. “I don’t want to remember.” That wasn’t her world any longer, classes and bells and red lights. It hadn’t been her world for a while now.
The weasel had had enough of a head start. She pulled away from Austin. A girl called, “Who are you?”
Micah listened for the chiding honey and heard nothing.
“I’m God,” she said, and started up the stairs to deliver Her message.
END OF VOLUME THREE
THE ZOMBIES: VOLUME FOUR
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Set Ten
Zaley
It had taken her two days to track down the Golden Gate Shepherds. They were hungry for new people, so hungry that even a girl as short and slight and crippled as Zaley Mattazollo looked good. Within an hour of walking into headquarters, she was welcomed to the club.
She introduced herself as Grace Leigh, the first being her middle name and the second to remind her of Corbin. Fearing that a Caucasian girl with the last name Li would draw ire from the racists in the bunch, she had chosen a different spelling to avoid the problem. Above all, she had to be accepted. But half of them didn’t know her name anyway. They skipped the usual animal names to call her Spitfire, loving it when she said over a handshake, “Grace Leigh and no, my middle name isn’t fucking Full!”
She had borrowed a little of Micah’s look for her Shepherd persona, dyeing her hair brown and striping it blue with a streak spray. Striding into the Head day by day, she exuded the confidence of one who knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she belonged there. Their mission was her mission. Their blood was her blood. She used their lingo, gave the Golden Gate signal, and saluted the ancient Patron Saint with fervor. She was one of them. And she thanked God that they didn’t haze like the Shepherd youths in Penger had. Most of the Shepherds at the Head were older, a rainbow coalition of color, sex, religion, political views, and sexual orientation. All of them squabbled almost to the point of blows about affirmative action and abortion and overseas aid, but their hearts beat as one in their hatred of zombies. As long as you had that in common, you could bridge the gap of everything else to be friends.
The money she had stolen off Tarley Ferguson’s body went to food, a Shepherd vest, a holster for her gun, and a box of ammunition. She had to be tight with the rest of it. When that money was gone, there was nothing to replace it. At least she never had to pay for lunch. She just stormed into the break room of the Head and said loudly to no one in particular, “Doughnuts are part of a fucking healthy breakfast!” There were always leftover doughnuts on the counter. Sometimes people laughed; other times they stared at her. When it was the latter reaction, she hollered, “Well, I’m up, so if you want a refill of your coffee, speak now or forever hold your fucking peace.” Mugs lifted all around.
After a few days, someone always yelled in appreciation, “SPITFIRE!” and she turned around to yell back, “Why don’t these fucking doughnuts come in bacon-flavored?”
She swore more than she had ever sworn in her life. It helped her to fit in. Even when apologizing for swearing, she added a swear word. When she forgot to swear over her first days as a Golden Gate Shepherd, she thought of her mother standing outside the restroom stall at a myriad of restaurants to ask if Zaley needed help. Then she exploded.
It was like pulling on a costume at the start of every day, this brash girl named Grace Leigh who loved Shepherds and loathed zombies, drove a piece of shit car and pretended that she’d just gotten kicked out of her folks’ home for being a Shepherd so she was sleeping in it, too. Praise Jesus for that car. She was just so thrilled to be at the Head and she wanted to do whatever they needed done. So put her to work!
Emptying trashcans. Filing papers. Sweeping the floor. Making coffee. Walking the streets. Running errands. Attending Fun Nights. These activities filled up her days from eleven in the morning until ten at night or later. She blamed her damaged arm on getting caught in a turf war between gangs long ago when she lived in Los Angeles. Woses, all of them down there! Sucking off the government teat and were they even grateful for the milk given in kindness? If you got a free handout from the world, you said thank you. And you looked for a way to stop living on handouts since that had no respect. But instead of saying thank you and deciding not to be a drain on society, these people ran around fighting over who ruled some shit street and shot up a fourteen-year-old twat named Grace Leigh on a field trip to a damn museum. Her school wanted its students to be multicultural and shit, she’d gotten enough multiculturalism with that bullet to last a fucking lifetime.
This was the only idea she could come up with to get herself access to the confinement point. Although she had learned its exact position, which was talked about frankly in the break room, she couldn’t get any closer without running into Shepherds guarding it. So she did her best to make herself into one. People mentioned that the confinement point frequently ran short on guards. They usually had to shout it. Televisions played on top volume in every room of headquarters, revolving between one openly pro-Shepherd channel and two that were sympathetic to the cause.
The reporters on each of the three agreed daily that it was time for the government to come to the table with Shepherd Prime. The country could only go forward by working together, and one reporter had the audacity to compare the Shepherds’ fight against the government to the Revolution’s blue coats against the red. Shepherds were hardcore patriots. When they derailed trains and ambushed food trucks, they were doing it for freedom. Everyone at the Head cheered when it was reported that the IRS building had just been bombed. Prime was taking the credit, yet one of the reporters blamed the government. He joked that that was one way to lower taxes. Among the claps and hoots, Grace yelled, “Praise Jesus!”
At night she slept in Tarley’s car and used a public restroom to pee and clean up. Dark brown and bright blue stains still marked one of the sinks from where she had dyed her hair. There was only a very slim chance that anyone up here had heard of the missing Cloudy Valley teenager Rosalie Grace Mattazollo, but she had dyed it to be safe. On the free library computers, she checked in on the news back home and never saw any mention of herself. Her mother was undoubtedly hysterical, yet her hysterics weren’t buying her time in the media. A runaway seventeen-year-old wasn’t a compelling story, even without Sombra C going on. It was a measure of how much Zaley had changed in just a few short weeks that she didn’t consider calling home. Mom could go as childishly nuts as she pleased; Zaley had things, adult things, to do.
She had to win access to that confinement point. Zaley only let herself think of them in pieces: Micah’s streaked hair, Austin’s upcoming eighteenth birthday, doing homework with Elania, the sweet treasure boxes that Corbin had passed through the bedroom window. God, please let them be alive. Let me get in.
A man named Bat was one of the higher-ups that she had to impress. In charge of day-to-day operations, he sat at a desk covered in maps and schedules, and blinked twice every time she bellowed, “Give me a pace and don’t make me a fucking statue! Respectfully said, sir!” He always needed volunteers for paces. In truth, she hated them. To walk by one closed store after another was depressing. It was also alarming. Everything was not well at all in the USA, despite what the reporters said in the Head.
Some of the stores had been looted of every last thing inside, cleaned out to bare shelves and broken glass. Rarely did anything get cleaned up, so she walked by the same scenes over and over again. She was horrified that someone might
approach her with an alert that a zombie was on the loose, expecting her to track down that poor soul and shoot. Thankfully, no one ever did.
For every person who complimented her on keeping the streets safe, there was another one who threw a filthy look or disparaging comment that she was a bitch or should go back to kindergarten. A homeless man had shouted furiously across the street, “I didn’t fight for this country just for shitheads like you to tear it apart!” Other Shepherds got roughed up or hit by cars, one of them shot and killed. If there had been enough people at the Head, Bat would have assigned double duty so a Shepherd was never out there alone.
An armed group calling itself T-BACS (which stood for Take Back, meaning to take the country back from Shepherds) fought constantly with the Shepherd unit stationed to the Golden Gate Bridge for control of it. The healthiest young Shepherd specimens worked the bridge, and sometimes died there. Zaley couldn’t do that with her busted arm, so she did pace after pace up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco and went back to the Head talking eagerly about more. Bat always told her to go home and she corrected him. “Go car.” He blinked.
Late at night when she could shuck her Grace Leigh character, she listened to a moderate radio station for news before falling asleep in the passenger seat. Serena Penner was interviewed on a program once. She was the daughter of the late ethics professor Jonathan Penner. An author and professor in her own right, she was speaking from an undisclosed location for her own protection. The interviewer asked how this had happened to America, and she summed it up in five words. We reap what we sow.
They talked about it more with Zaley listening in fascination. The majority of Americans were poorly educated, poorly housed, poorly employed, and poorly fed. A full twenty percent of them lived in outright poverty. States like California had an even more dismaying rate of twenty-five percent. Of those in the population doing a little better, their situations were still quite precarious. The American Dream was going to stay forever a dream for most of them. Social mobility was a myth. Hard work wasn’t going to lift them up; their lives would be less prosperous than those of their parents, whose lives in turn were less prosperous than the generation to come before. Nothing that had happened since the outbreak of Sombra C was surprising to Serena Penner, or to her father in the last months of his life.
The people of this nation were angry and depressed and fearful, suspecting even in what should be their idealistic twenties that they were going to fail at the game called life. They were right. Most of them were going to fail. They had been set up to fail by economic policies. But it was very hard to strike back at faceless policies and those who had created them, and many didn’t even recognize the culprits.
They had grown up disconnected and voiceless. Money ruled politics and money was what they didn’t have. No one was concerned with the plights of their lives and that was just how the world worked. You were on your own. Grandpa owned the farm and passed it on to Dad; Dad worked hard but lost it; Junior was one of six thousand people applying for thirty positions at a Tic-Tac-Taco. In three generations, the ladder had only gone down to pauper. Junior was furious and seeking a target. Some of these Juniors could not connect the dots between blowing up a tomato sauce factory and their dry spaghetti. Nor would they connect the dots between the bombed government buildings across the country and their missing unemployment checks.
The professor added that there were many perfectly reasonable and intelligent people in America. John and Susie Smith of Nice Street, Random City, really just wanted to find or keep good jobs, raise little Billy and Chloe, and go on about their lives in peace. There were tons of John and Susie Smiths from coast to coast, some on the right of the political spectrum, some on the left, some in-between, and all of them decent people who had more in common than not. They were passive in their disconnections, not malicious. They were trying to feed their families, take care of an ailing grandparent, and put money aside for Christmas presents and college. But the Johns and Susies of all those Nice Streets had a Shepherd Junior for a neighbor, building a bomb in his basement.
Zaley didn’t understand the heavier economic talk on the program, let alone have enough knowledge of her own to agree or disagree with it. She still forced herself to listen. The channels at the Head made everything so easy over the day; the truth was in the night, where the darkness hid complicated things. She imagined the Penner family sitting at a table in quiet discussion about ethics and economics over dinner. The father had to have loved to watch his little girl grow up into an intellectual equal, the dolls trading out for thick books, the squeal of cartoons muting to deeper thoughts.
When she slept, she had repetitive dreams of the confinement point being moved. No matter where she drove to chase it down, it always stayed one leap ahead. It was shocking to her how open the Shepherds at the Head were about the confinement point. Zombies belonged in containment, so they were contained. The police weren’t trying to break it up; several of the people coming in for paces were fresh off shifts as cops.
A few of the guys were hitting on her a little. It grossed her out that Lightning Bug was old enough to be her father. He didn’t believe in dating girls older than twenty-two, and he was forty. The other guys were much closer to Zaley’s pretend age. They thought she’d turned eighteen last Valentine’s Day and no, she didn’t want to be anyone’s fucking Valentine. She made up an on-again, off-again boyfriend named Chuck, who liked to talk about his feelings. She didn’t want to fucking talk about feelings, and the guys got the subtle message that they shouldn’t bring up their feelings for her either. One year. Grace was giving Chuck one more year of her life and if he couldn’t pull his head out of his ass by that anniversary, then she was replacing him with a man who didn’t want to process so much about his big baby feelings. That gave those interested guys a time in which she might be interested, and they backed off. Only Lightning Bug asked when the anniversary was up. She said next Valentine’s Day. So stick around, boyo, Grace Leigh was hitting the meat market soon.
A couple of the girls had offered their couches for the night, but she claimed to prefer her independence. Thank you, you have a beautiful heart, but she wasn’t going to suck off it. Someday soon she’d get a job and afford a hotel or room for rent. Until then, she had her car and her self-respect. Playing a Shepherd all night long in someone’s home would be too much. She needed that time to remember who she was, the polar opposite of Grace Leigh.
The only time she let people help was when they insisted that she come to Fun Nights. No more were they weekly occurrences: Fun Nights happened three times a week. Then she’d let Lightning Bug or Penguin buy her a meal or a ticket to a movie, and she always gave big hugs of gratitude. She couldn’t pay it back when she didn’t have a pot to piss in, but she was going to pay it forward. That was how Jesus had lived, dying on the cross for sins committed by people who hadn’t even been born yet. That was awesome. Praise Jesus for that. Sometimes she had doubted in God, especially after people started turning into zombies. Why would God allow that to happen? How did that bring glory to His name? Then she realized it was Shepherds bringing Him glory, and that Sombra C came from Satan. The Shepherds were God’s Holy Army, going after Satan’s zombie hordes in these End Times. As the garrulous simpleton Grace Leigh rattled on over dinners during Fun Nights to her new friends, Zaley listened to herself, cringed inwardly, and just kept going. It wasn’t that hard to come up with Grace’s lines. Zaley used her father for inspiration and all kinds of idiocy burst forth. He’d been good for something after all. Often she quoted him verbatim.
The men and women who managed the Golden Gate branch of the Shepherd operation spoke highly of people who gave money. Bless them! They adored a very old man who came in every day to give the five dollars of his lunch money to the donation jar. The guy apologized for it not being millions, and the Shepherds called him Grandpa George and gave him hugs. If only everyone was like Grandpa George, the Shepherds would have a treasury.
Zaley watched this keenly for days and then brought in donations of her own. So sorry that it couldn’t be more! Once she lied and said that a man had given her fifty bucks while she was doing her paces. He’d told her to give it to the big guys at headquarters. The big guys thought well of Zaley for that. She could have pocketed that fifty for herself and no one ever the wiser. Other Shepherds did it all the time. That was pretty righteous for a girl so poor that she slept in a car.
On the tenth day of being a Shepherd, she was out doing paces and missed a visit from the Patron Saint. That was Jules Crover, a bald, hunchbacked businessman who funded them. Everyone was sorry that Spitfire had missed it, so she pretended to be very disappointed in the break room. She wanted to kick out Chuck and his baby feelings for Jules Crover, were he sixty years younger. He had his priorities straight. Penguin yelled that someone ought to make him president, kick out President Bitch and get a dude on the seat who had some balls when it came to zombies.
When Penguin looked over for her opinion, Grace agreed. Because what the fuck really? If a virus came around tomorrow that changed people into vampires, well, she couldn’t wait to see the liberals slice open their veins and offer them to suck. She ducked a doughnut hole lobbed her way in retaliation for that, Gopher telling her to shut the fuck up. Lightning Bug egged Grace Leigh on, so she gave Gopher a hug and obliged. Don’t even get her started on werewolves, and San Francisco already had a fairy virus. No disrespect to gay Shepherds. She prayed for them to change, and God wouldn’t cast a gay Shepherd out of heaven. The dead dude would just get assigned to therapy with the angels and those pearly gates open to welcome him in. Being queer wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was caused by pollutants. And Hollywood. A doughnut hole bounced off the top of her head.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 89