Do your chores. Don’t whine. Listen to Mom and Dad. Remember that mistakes are learning opportunities. Be kind to yourself. Respect others. None of these was right. Nothing conveyed anything about her, and her specific experiences. Those were just the bland statements given to everyone.
It was going to be a warm day. She closed her eyes to soak in the sunlight. In weeks they would be dead, Elania and Micah, Corbin and Austin, and she hoped their souls in whatever form they were came back together. She walked through a celestial Welcome Mat to their table, in a giant, glowing auditorium with tables for everyone. Except for Dale Summit, and that awful, uncharitable thought hung out in her mind and made her smile a little. Dale and Sally could be in that Welcome Mat, but sit somewhere else. At her table were Shelly and Trevor, Zaley and Austin and Corbin and Brennan all sitting around with pizza boxes between them. There was an empty chair waiting for Elania, and she’d sit with her eye on the plain cheese. Then Micah would come up to growl, “Well, that sucked!” and they’d laugh. Yeah, it had really sucked. Now it was over, and everything was okay. Have a slice.
People were sitting down in the grass in preparation for services, and more gathered in the shade of the trees. What would Elania say to the image of her brother, still waiting silently at her side for wisdom? She wasn’t wise, a Cloudy Valley High senior who hadn’t done much other than go to school.
She would take Cormac’s hands in hers, his little, chubby hands. She would make one of his hands shake hers and form the other into a fist. See these different ways you can use your hands? You can hurt someone with them. You can befriend someone with them. That’s your choice, how you use these hands. People will remember what you did with them. The world is full of such beautiful things, and so many come from these. She would say that part as she opened his one hand that was closed. This earth needed his open hands so much more than his fists! That was what Elania had learned. Cormac might not be able to understand her words, but he’d remember his hands being opened and closed.
Micah was coming through the seated people. Her arm was through Casper’s. When they reached Elania, both of them sat in the grass. Elania looked down to him in curiosity. They traded off on prayers, one morning Elania going first and the next morning Casper going first, and they always stood while the other spoke. This morning it was his turn to begin.
He raised his tattooed arm and she clasped his hand. His voice was calm and steady, but he blinked hard in the direct sunlight. “Elania, will you give my prayers for me?”
Oh God.
“Yes,” Elania said, her voice strong but her stomach churning. He had come to the confinement point with his hands and heart wide open, put aside all of the terrible things that he was feeling for her and everyone else. His congregation outside of the fence had been lucky to have him, and it stung her too that he’d never get to be a father.
People whispered in the uneven rows. Some reached over to pat Casper’s back. Then everyone looked to Elania, a hundred and forty pairs of eyes from the grass, and twenty more pairs from the trees. Clarissa was among those in the shade. She waved jerkily to Elania, who smiled and waved back. Elania would give the Christian prayers and then the Jewish ones, and then she would ask if there was anyone of another faith who wished to lead a prayer. After that was the exercise of what they wished to say to the person in their life who needed them most. Then she’d go to the trees to embrace and shake hands. Those people could not be forgotten. They were still part of the community.
Overcome with nervousness, she reminded herself that this wasn’t a recital or an exam. They hadn’t come to judge. They just needed her to lead the words for God. If she messed up, they would help. Then they could envision God as they individually needed Him: a superhero on His way, for truth and justice to win this battle, or as memories to sustain them at the end of life. Weren’t all of those coming from the same place? What they wanted was to feel the presence of something bigger in this vanishingly small place within the fence. For someone to see them when all other eyes had turned away. Their lives had been reduced, but their souls had not. They were not their lives. Those were only something they bore for a short while, and their souls were eternal.
It was not for God that Elania stood here.
It was for them. Putting out her arms in welcome, she lowered her head and began to recite for the Christians. A rumble of voices joined hers.
And in that moment, she was serene.
Corbin
One day, people would look back at this event in history and be ashamed.
Part of him was German. His family on that side had been long ensconced in America by the time World War II came around. If they hadn’t been, and he had gone through a great-grandparent’s belongings and found Nazi regalia, Corbin would have been ashamed beyond description. No, he hadn’t done those things. He wasn’t even born. Still, it was his blood to have done them!
But German culture was more than just World War II. It was far richer than that, its definitions longer than persecution and concentration camps and extermination. Germans had done so much more than just unload the Nazis on the world. Literature and philosophy, music and art and technological advances . . . Corbin had reasons to be proud of his heritage, to go along with the guilt and the slight wariness of it.
One day there might be such a thing as Shepherd guilt, a kid far in the future going through a great-grandparent’s belongings and finding their regalia. A patch with a musket and a crook crossed, or two muskets crossed, the gold and silver threads signifying mysterious things. What’s this, Mom? Oh, honey . . . well, you see, Great-Grandpa was a Shepherd when he was young. The kid would be horrified. There was no larger Shepherd culture. The definitions of Shepherd were exceedingly small: persecution and concentration camps and extermination. And idiots.
Corbin woke up on his third day minus Zyllevir with a mission. He was going to build a bow.
Six watchtowers surrounded the hill. Six guards per shift and three shifts made eighteen guards, faces passing away on occasion and fresh ones replacing them. Corbin recognized most of the faces by now, and thought of them in as diminishing of terms as they thought of him. There was the fat one he named Piggie, who always leaned against the taller poles. Standing on a tower doing nothing for eight hours wore him out. Poor fella. Some days he brought a stool up there, upon which he adjusted and readjusted uncomfortably through his shift. Other times he just knelt and peeked over, so all Corbin saw was the guy’s head spiked on a shorter pole. He also shot randomly to freak people out. That was his exercise for the day.
Limp Dick forever had his massive rifle trained on Sombra Cs who walked the path, obviously compensating for something. He didn’t shoot it, just liked to show it off. There were three women who all had similar shades of brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, so Corbin named them Bitch 1, Bitch 2, and Bitch 3. Their only distinction was the latter two had a bottle of Pizoom on a post. Some days, they had two of them. When they drank, they guzzled down half a bottle at a time. It was gross to watch.
Mr. 1% wore a flashy pair of sunglasses; Sasquatch was tall and hairy; Baby Face had the body of a man with a big old baby’s head affixed to the neck. Black-haired, chubby Psycho popped off now and then and shot people, usually selecting kids as his targets. Albino constantly swiped sunscreen over her nose and adjusted the brim of her hat. Then there were Midget and Hook Nose, Zit Box and Earrings, Yawner and Ugly. Dumbass often looked over the park instead of into the confinement point, unable to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Narcolepsy was a woman who appeared to have mastered sleeping while standing up. She leaned on a pole and didn’t budge for hours. Corbin had watched. Not a muscle moved.
He wanted to take them down.
For weeks, he had been so lost that he barely thought. He looked around to the time of day or night and just did what everyone else was doing. But not today. After breakfast and prayer circle, he checked in with Elania to make sure she would stay with Austin or a bunch of wome
n. She nodded and told him to be careful on his walk. That was stupid when he was dying. Be careful of what? Boldly, he strode into the shade, his eyes on the ground. He knew what to look for from watching movies.
A slim, slightly flexible piece of oak of one meter in length would do. It had to be hardwood, and dry yet not gray. There shouldn’t be protuberances or twists. Cutting through the trees, he inspected one of the few oaks on the hill. It was the one that the boys had been chased away from on their first night in the confinement point.
There was nothing on the ground good to use. People collected wood to keep the fire going in the lodge, so anything easy to get was long gone. He could break off one of the little branches, but that was green wood. Green wasn’t going to make as strong of a bow.
He’d shoot an arrow through the back of Dumbass, or one of the lenses of the ritzy sunglasses that Mr. 1% wore. As blood ran, Corbin could feel some satisfaction. They were taking away his life, so he was taking away theirs. But everything to shed from this tree had gone up in smoke.
There were more oaks around a shadowy gulch on the southwestern side of the hill. People avoided going over there. It was naturally where zombies tended to cluster during the brightness of the days. Corbin decided that that was where he should search and hey, he was in the process of turning into a zombie himself. These were his people, just in a higher grade. So around the hill he walked. A person crouched beside a tree let out a growl on the way. Corbin put distance between them. It was the crunching of his shoes on the dirt and fallen leaves that had spawned the growl.
My great-grandfather was a Shepherd? Are you serious? What a stupid fuck! Oh, honey, it was a different time. He was actually a nice man. People just didn’t know any better back then.
Corbin had lived through this time and yes, they did. There wasn’t any excuse a Shepherd could give that made a whit of sense; their position was indefensible. Sixty years after World War II ended, still old concentration camp guards had gotten their identities uncovered and their saggy butts dragged to court for their crimes. Even if there couldn’t be much punishment, the world knew their names and what garbage they were. Sixty years from now, wrinkled old Dumbass or Pizoom-swilling Bitch 2 could be discovered hiding out in Argentina and hauled back to America to answer for what they had done. Corbin would be long deceased, but up in heaven, he’d laugh to see them shamed on the news and scorned in the streets.
It took him a long time to find two workable sticks. Then a feral chased him away from the gulch. Corbin fled up the hill and dashed into the sunlight. The zombie only came out a little from the shade and turned around to go back in. It was Mr. Davis, or what was left of him. He had been an adjunct professor at a junior college up in Santa Rosa teaching Speech. That was sick, to go from teaching Speech to speechless in a few weeks.
A bow had to be balanced. It couldn’t be thick at one end and thin on the other. One of his two sticks sported a fairly equal diameter for its full length; the other one was uneven and had several knobs. He chose the first and let the other fall to the grass. Picking over his memories of a certain movie in which the character built a bow, he remembered the girl saying that the middle had to be the strongest part. Both ends needed to be shaved down a bit on the belly side. It gave them greater flexibility. He had to get a knife to do the shaving, and there was only one knife on the hill.
Micah was sitting alone on a crumbling rock wall that ran along part of the northwestern side of the hilltop. She refused to give him the blade. “It has to stay sharp.”
“I just need it for a little while,” Corbin protested.
“No.”
“Micah!” He couldn’t believe that she was refusing him.
“No,” Micah repeated calmly. “Find a pointy rock to shave your stick and play Robin Hood somewhere else. This blade is for other things.”
Corbin hated her for making fun of what he was going to do. When he stood there, refusing to back down, she sighed and snapped the blade open. It was not to give it to him. Pointing it at his heart, she said, “If you go downhill faster than me, you’ll be glad I kept this sharp.”
“You’re going to kill me?” Corbin asked incredulously.
“You’re going to ask me to, you and Austin and Elania. All of you will ask me, rather than have me send you out of the great room to go nuts in the outside toilet or these woods. And I’ll do it. But I can’t do it with a dull blade.”
A rock wasn’t going to do this work as keenly as the blade. “Making one bow won’t dull it that much!” Corbin argued.
“It’s already not as sharp from rasping on ribcages,” Micah said. “It’s going to be duller yet by tonight. I’m saving these last blows for us.”
“Why will it be duller tonight?”
“Clarissa asked me to kill her after dinner.”
Appalled, Corbin said, “You said yes?”
She closed her eyes. “I will always say yes. Her other choice is to be put out in the darkness, and that scares her even more than the blade. So right now she’s drawing pictures in the dirt while Jerry sings her favorite songs and talks about cartoons with her and the twins. At dinner, she wants Elania to pray for her especial, to tell God that she’s coming and to send her old, dead cat named Kitty to meet her. She wants Casper to pray as well. He can’t, so he said that he would hold her hand as Elania prayed. Then she’s going to take a walk with me. She asked if it would hurt.”
“What did you say?”
“I lied,” Micah said, opening her eyes to stare into the canopy of the trees. Her voice grew soft. “It’s like going to sleep. Please go away, Corbin.”
Just break her neck to spare the knife and let me use it. That was the worst thought he had ever had in his life, and he was revolted that his brain produced it. He hunted for a rock. It wasn’t the blade that would kill him; Corbin was dying the way of the fence. Hopefully the bullet would hit him in the head and he’d blank out. Even as his body hit the grass, his soul would be in another place.
He found a rock that had a sharp edge, and he scraped at the stick. His bow. His vengeance. It didn’t go gracefully. Little dents and cuts were all over the ends. It was even harder to cut into the ends and make notches for the bowstring. He didn’t have fishing line or rawhide. There was elastic in sweatpants, but the string wasn’t supposed to be stretchy. He could try vines . . .
Twine. The lodge had twine. It attached a broken leg to a side table. Going inside, he walked through the great room quietly. Mrs. Nakamura and two young children were napping. Elania was in a corner, speaking in a low voice to other girls. Two were crying. Corbin cried at night so no one would see.
He hefted up the table and walked outside. Dismantling the twine from the leg, he reattached it to his bow. It was too long, and he had stupidly chucked the rock into the grass. That careless movement took twenty minutes of searching to rectify.
The twine was old and he was a little afraid to test it. A man who’d arrived last week had had twine through his belt loops. Dressed in many filthy layers of clothes, he was hearing voices that weren’t there. Micah ejected him after the first night. He’d tried to open the doors when ferals pounded, screaming that Jesus was on the other side and here to save them. It had taken Casper, Corbin, Austin, Micah, and Jerry to hold him down. If this twine from the table fell apart, Corbin had to hunt the hill and take the twine belt off that dead man’s body. There was no way he was still alive.
Now it was time for the arrows. Those had to be very straight sticks. They also had to be dry and dead ones. If all he could find were green, then they had to be dried before he could use them. He needed the switchblade, dammit! Arrows had to be whittled smooth; they needed a notch for the bowstring and fletching; they had to have a point. It was ridiculous to do this without a knife.
After that character had formed the point, she’d hardened it using fire. Not set it on fire, just near it. Corbin wished that he could watch that part of the movie again. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time to wa
tch for instructions. Back then, it was just an exciting movie with a hot girl and her friends dumped in the wilderness and trying to survive.
He could cut an arrowhead out of someone’s bone. There were plenty of bodies around to supply it. That was a foul idea. And doing it with a rock . . . his stomach overturned. He searched the ground for the sticks destined to become his arrows.
He would move through the trees unseen, from one watchtower to another, and take them down. Through Dumbass’ back, the lens of Mr. 1%, the gut of Piggie, the fat cheek of Baby Face, the sunscreen slathered Albino, the throat of sleeping Narcolepsy. They tumbled out of sight on the watchtowers. Hours later, their replacements climbed up and Corbin was waiting for them. Goodbye to Bitch 1 and Bitch 2 and Bitch 3; goodbye to Zit Box and Ugly and Sasquatch. He’d shoot down the guards until the Shepherds ran out of people to put up there. He should scout out the best places to stand at each watchtower.
It was good to have a plan. He hadn’t known what to do for so long.
One arrow was for his father, who had been harassed by Shepherds and put in jail. An arrow for his mother, her ankle broken and her house invaded. An arrow for Bleu Cheese, who still appeared in the edges of his vision. He missed the way she’d run into his bedroom in the morning, all excited for hug time like it didn’t happen on a daily basis. She had been such a good sport about posing for pictures in The Daily Cheese. He wished that he’d thought to ask Uncle Brad and Aunt Jeanie to take her. This was no life for a dog, and it had ended up with her losing her life altogether. She could have lived with those gay dudes and their daughter and their ancient cocker spaniel Bonnie, and been happy. Corbin imagined Bleu Cheese with them, going about the simple business of her existence.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 95