New arrivals had a similar look. Their hair was washed and combed. Clothes were clean and unwrinkled. The men were shaven, or had facial hair well groomed; the women often wore cosmetics. Eyes were wide and terrified, moving back and forth rapidly. The smell of the hill rendered everyone green around the gills, and some grimaced when swallowing from throwing up. Kids were led by the hand. If they were remotely of a carrying size, then they were being carried. Clutched. Younger ones were crying and older ones were on the verge of it.
The forty new people were all different races and ages, and split evenly between the sexes. Most were in jeans or shorts, a few women were in skirts and two guys were in khakis and polo shirts. Another guy was in a bathrobe that was too small. Holding it shut with both hands, he stared at a body and stumbled in his flip-flops.
They walked closely together. The only one speaking was the loud guy. Finely dressed, he had a giant, low-hanging brow like a throwback to an earlier species of human. Incensed, he demanded the old-timers escorting the new party just who he spoke to around here. “I don’t have Sombra C! Neither do a few of the others!”
“That’s a lot of new people,” Austin mumbled. He and Micah were standing at the entrance to the lodge.
“This is going to be a problem,” Micah said.
Austin didn’t want a new problem. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
She was right. How did Micah know these things in advance? When she began to give the rules of the hill, the new people interrupted her incessantly. Was there a bathroom? A phone? Some were too freaked out to pay attention; others looked around her to see who was really in charge. A lot of eyes settled on Austin. Then they stared at the poles, which were dark on the ends where they’d been pushed through people.
The angry Neanderthal was Shawn Racitano, and he was the worst instigator of the interruptions. Micah wasn’t saying anything worth his time. Riding bossily over her voice, he explained that he had been running a harbor in the basement of his father’s defunct magazine company for the last three months. They’d been busted. He demanded to know who to speak with in order to leave. The raiders had just called those who didn’t have Sombra C zombie lovers and pushed them into the vans with everyone else. It was a punishment for being in a harbor and fighting when the place was taken down. But that wasn’t okay. He was a regular citizen, and he had rights. This was America.
He went on and on, having the curious expectation that someone was going to do something about it. Yeah, they’d get right on that, Austin thought sarcastically. Double time. Micah waited for him to finish complaining. That only encouraged him to keep going, convinced he had a captivated audience.
Then the other new people exploded at Neanderthal Shawn, a stamped guy pushing forward and shouting above all of them, “You guaranteed safety and security! That’s what I paid for and now we’re here! My wife and I are in a confinement point! What the fuck kind of security did you shell out for? A doorbell?”
“You were safe!” Shawn yelled. “Do you know how much it cost me a month for those guards? They didn’t come free-” A woman held the stamped man back when he came at Shawn with a fist, pleading for them not to fight here. Nervously, Elania edged closer to Corbin, who put his arm around her waist.
Five of them were having trouble in the sunlight. Two were women, one old and one young. Both had their hands crooked over their foreheads to block out the worst of the rays. Their stamps each read 31%. They looked panicked to be on the hill. Neither had come over to the lodge with a lurch, but Austin didn’t expect one at that number.
He checked out the other three. One was a blond guy in his late teens who was tall and muscular. His stamp read 33%. He blinked and bared his teeth, twisting the hem of his red team shirt with one hand. His mother was holding his other hand. She had the same face, just with longer blonde hair to frame it.
Austin squinted to confirm the boy’s number. That wasn’t the behavior of someone at 33%, but that was indeed the number printed there. The guy had missed pills or they weren’t working for him. People in their viral early thirties didn’t show teeth. A leg could be a little stiff, a word or two missing in their vocabulary, very bright light bugging them to some degree, but in most ways they were still all there. Many didn’t have the stiffness or slight language loss, and light didn’t bother them one bit. Austin could gauge a rough percent by now, and this guy was way beyond 33%. When the teeth got bared again, his mother noticed and squeezed his arm. “Stop it, Chris!” she scolded.
The fourth in trouble was a black girl of about nine. She blinked hard until her father held a sweatshirt over her head to shield her face. Unresponsive to his voice, she was staring off into space with a telltale vacancy. Her stamp read 39%, which didn’t seem accurate either. Then she stammered, “Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad . . .” Whatever else she wanted to say didn’t come out. It trailed off into an animal whine. Her head jerked at the shouting of the Neanderthal. Although she couldn’t say it, the sound was upsetting her. The father caught on and moved her away. This girl would be one that Micah allowed in the lodge only for a few nights, and then she’d be moved along to the outside restroom to continue her degradation there.
The last of the five was in his early twenties. The guy had the build of a professional football player. He had been the lurching one on the path. His stamp read only 37%, and that was clearly wrong. The doctor at the holiday party had still been cognizant at 49%. Definitely brain damaged, unable to remember a phone number let alone treat patients, but she was sane. This guy had the zombie gait, and lips that stayed parted for no reason. His hair was a mess. A bald patch was over his right ear and his eyes weren’t moving together. They were magnets repelling one another, staying in the far corners like they couldn’t stand each other’s proximity.
The doctor’s eyes had done that. But unlike hers, his eyes weren’t moving back together. There was a pocket of air around him except for his mother, who had a bruised face and no stamp. People were giving her son space. He grunted and his mother said, “It’s okay, Matt.” Her eyes skimmed around in accusation, although no one had been bothering him.
Chris jerked his head at the grunt and the two guys bared their teeth at one another. It lasted only a second for Chris. Matt’s lips returned to their partial state of openness more slowly. He was way too old for the Elemental Team T-shirt that he had on. It was a show for grade school kids. Austin hadn’t known those T-shirts came in adult sizes.
Neither of these guys could be admitted to the great room tonight. Their brain functioning was a thing of the past. Their mothers put more space between them and Chris’ mother made him turn his back to Matt.
Shawn ran himself out at long last and Micah picked up the thread. The peace didn’t last long. A few in the group were annoyed about standing there through a lecture about not touching anyone. “We came from a harbor, not jail!” a man exclaimed. One woman picked up her young daughter and moved her to the back of the group when the girl asked what assault meant.
Another guy laughed, threw out his chest in a mocking posture, and said, “So, are you the law in these here parts, little lady?”
“Yes,” Micah said flatly. The switchblade flicked open in her hand. It was held down along her thigh, but everyone in the front of the group saw it. Some looked frightened; others scoffed. Austin saw Micah through their mocking eyes, a teenaged girl with filthy clothes and ratty, dyed hair playing boss. Her jeans were discolored along the inner thigh from her period, despite being washed in the river. Disgustingly, she had had to cut a shirt off a dead body to make pads. But what else was she going to do? Ask the watchtower guards to please throw down a box of tampons? A lot of women had resorted to the clothes of the dead for that reason. Austin had never been so happy to be a guy.
The bell rang for dinner. Everyone went down the stairs and got in line on the bridge with Micah and Austin trailing after them. Corbin got his food first with another man and both doubled back to guard the l
odge, eating on the way.
There was trouble almost immediately, everyone being pushed around so the woman with Matt could go to the glass for meals first. When someone told her to get back in line, she snapped that her son couldn’t wait. Her voice was so strident that Austin heard it plainly from the last steps. Jesus Christ, these people!
The man with the daughter at 39% decided not to wait either. He tried to force her up in line. The girl broke away from him and ran off the bridge to stand in the shade. Her father told her to stay put and he’d get meals for both of them. Then he continued to cut ahead. The Shepherds didn’t give out more than one meal per person, so it was a waste of energy. Zaley would have done it, but she wasn’t the one dispensing food.
Matt’s mother pushed on a man’s back to go by. He turned around and said angrily, “Do you want to get us shot?” with a gesture to the closest watchtower where the guard had his eye on everything. Matt roared and pounded his hands on the railing. His mother yelled at the man for upsetting her son and dammit, let her through!
The Neanderthal wasn’t even in line. Standing on the path, he was yelling up to the guard, “I don’t have Sombra C! Can you hear me? Give me a spit test and you’ll see!”
A preschooler at the back of the bridge was holding his ears and screeching in his very young mother’s arms. Or she was an older sister. Micah came down the last step at a casual pace. Agitated at the chaos, Austin said, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”
“It won’t make any difference,” Micah said. “We’ve lost.”
“Micah!” This was the world she had put together, as orderly as it could be, and he couldn’t believe that she was going to let it fall apart. Well, he wasn’t. He had killed to change the hill, and he would defend it. He stalked through the water (don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down) and stepped up onto the grass on the other side. Swinging under the railing, he confronted the pushy woman in a rage. “Get back in line!”
Her face was flushed red from rage that the man hadn’t let her skip ahead to the glass. “Can’t you see him? My son can’t wait!” Matt was still banging on the railing.
“If he can’t handle being in line, then you keep him back until everyone else has gone. Everybody waits their turn here!” Austin said. He blocked the woman’s progress with his pole and told the people they had passed to come around. She looked apoplectic and her son growled. He was feral.
An answering growl came from Chris. His mother said, “Chris, stop it! Use your words!”
The bucket went back and forth. A new woman got down to the grass and complained over her meal that she only ate gluten-free or else she got headaches. The reality of the confinement point hadn’t hit her yet. Matt’s mother tried to go around Austin, who stubbornly blocked her. Coming up was the girl’s father, who had shoved his way through people shoving back.
“So I want to talk to your authority!” the Neanderthal screamed. A blast deafened everyone. The man crumpled to the ground, where he twitched and lay still.
The new people screamed in unison, heads turning to the watchtower, and the old-timers looked away. Screeching, the preschooler kicked and thrashed in a tantrum. Chris growled and his mother tugged at him.
When Austin couldn’t take it any longer, he allowed Matt and his mother forward. She called him a thug asshole and passed by. Then the girl’s father got to the glass and rapped on it for a second meal. The Shepherd guy on the other side just stared at him. The man yelled out what he wanted three times, and the watchtower guard fired into the air to make the line move. The father pushed his way back through the people on the bridge to get to his daughter. She was no longer in the shade and he shouted, “Willa? Willa? Willa, where are you?”
Austin got his meal, wishing it had come from Zaley. They tasted better when she was the one putting them in the bucket, even if they were in truth the same old things. She set them in the bucket, too. The other Shepherds just dropped them in carelessly, right side up, upside down, on the side, squashed under the water bottle, however it fell. All of those hours he had looked out to San Francisco from the trees, believing no one cared, and someone had been. She couldn’t do anything more than pass in pills, but just to see a friendly face through the glass was a gift. He wanted to go to a bakery and buy a big old box of frosting flowers, never mind the cake. The two of them could pig out and watch a movie on television. Bakeries should do that, just sell frosting flowers. He and Zaley would be first in line.
They ate on the strip of grass in separate groups. Only Elania went over to welcome the new arrivals to join the morning prayer circle. A man replied snippily that Elania should keep her Jesus to herself. None of them appeared upset about the Neanderthal’s demise past the initial shock of the blast, and the stamped man who had tried to beat him up said that he had paid twenty grand to get into that ratty basement of a harbor and eight hundred a month to stay there. All for nothing! Someone had ratted out the location to the Shepherds.
The preschool boy was having a fit about the food. He wanted chicken nuggets from Shor-Bee’s and this stuff was yucky. And it smelled yucky here! He screamed that in the face of the girl with him, calling her Maria. She just stared at him tiredly. Up closer to Austin now, he didn’t think that she was older than fifteen or sixteen. The boy didn’t want the bottled water either. He wanted cherry-flavored Pizoom. The cries of Pi-ZOOM, Pi-ZOOM beat into Austin’s brain until he was ready to smack the brat.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said to Elania, who was still trying to bridge the divide.
“It’s all right,” Elania said, sitting beside her. “He’s young.”
“He’s so spoiled,” the girl said, and her shoulders began to shake. The boy grabbed her long black hair and yanked on it. He screamed louder when Elania worked the girl’s hair free of his fingers and said he was hurting Maria. He wanted to hurt her.
Chris and Matt had been seated far apart, and their mothers were pushing food into their mouths. Another new woman had a 42% infection. She was taking a bite and drifting away for a moment, taking another and going off to a dead place in her mind. Once she forgot to chew and the food fell out of her mouth. She had to have been in the back of the crowd when they came to the lodge and thus escaped Austin’s notice.
“Pi-ZOOM! Pi-ZOOM! I want Mama! Mama gets me Pi-ZOOM!”
The others stopped talking to gawk at a body floating along in the river. A woman glanced over to the body of Shawn Racitano and hissed, “Fuck him! He said no one would ever find us!”
Austin ate and inspected them carefully for what clues had alerted Micah to impending trouble without a single exchange. Half of the forty were silent and watchful, like most new arrivals were. They were checking out the guard in the watchtower and not bitching about the quality of the food. Many wiped away tears, yet did so quietly. On the occasions they spoke, they did it in whispers. The bathrobe man edged closer to Elania, who looked a little freaked out until he asked in a polite voice what time prayer circle was.
This was normal. It was not what had tipped off Micah. We’ve lost.
That chilled him. On the bridge, she was helping someone make it to the bucket. Austin didn’t see her for the dyed hair and youth, the bloodstains on her jeans. She was their leader who had kept the hill together for weeks. But these people hadn’t seen it for themselves. She was young enough to be their daughter in many cases, so they had no respect.
It was this second half of new people that had made her say it. They were just weird. A man was calling over the sea of heads to each of the old-timers if there was a phone handy. That was a normal question, everyone hoping that someone had sneaked in a cell, but being so loud about it wasn’t. In skinny jeans and a tank top, the woman who only ate gluten-free was still grumbling about it to herself when the Shepherds didn’t have to feed them at all. Someone called her Natalie. Austin would have been dead by the time Zaley showed up with the pills if they hadn’t gotten the shit food twice a day. Other confinement points didn’t bo
ther with food or water. In that regard, they were lucky.
“Pi-ZOOM! Pi-ZOOM! I want Mama!”
A woman named Tiffany was wailing over her barely touched meal. “We’re going to die. We’re going to die here!” No one was consoling her. The quiet ones were giving wary looks to the trees at an animal cry; Tiffany sobbed harder and tried to catch their eyes. She wanted comforting from others who needed it just as much.
The guy who had mocked Micah as being the law was Derek. He got on the bridge and kicked out a pole for his own. Austin stiffened. He didn’t think it was being taken solely for zombies. Derek had thought everything Micah said was a big joke. At the lodge, his eyes lingered longer on Austin, sizing him up whereas Micah was instantly dismissed. One of his eyelids had a marked droop. Something about him put Austin in mind of the kings.
A pretty woman ate her food, asked where the trashcan was, and ascertained there wasn’t one. That was why trash was everywhere. She folded up her refuse neatly and walked over to the hillside. The man and his daughter were gone. Shouting, “Jason? Willa?” she cut through the trees to search for them. The normal half of the group whispered nervously as Bettina went out of sight. They were sensing the danger.
The little boy was screaming wordlessly now, battering at Elania since she wasn’t allowing him to batter at his sister. Then he flung himself down and shrieked into the grass, arms and legs pumping.
The last meal was given to Micah, who jerked her head to the lodge. Getting up, Austin whispered to Elania, “Will you be okay here? I have to go with Micah.”
The pole at her side, Elania inspected those around her. The bathrobe man was trying desperately to keep his private area covered as he shifted position. The kid snaked out a hand to pinch his sister’s leg and Elania caught his fingers. She pinned them to the grass, told him no in a no-nonsense voice, and said to Austin, “I’ll be okay. We’ll come up really soon.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 101