Elania climbed into the bed at the headboard and promptly fell asleep. Micah dozed in her underwear upon the armchair. Just as Corbin thought about showering, Austin got up to take one. But that was all right. Everything was all right. The shower wasn’t going anywhere, and neither were they.
Eating a bread roll with none of the intensity that they had shown the contents of the bag, Zaley repacked the leftovers. She smiled at him and said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Corbin said. “I thought you were dead until you appeared at the glass. That Micah shot you on accident.”
“No. She shot Tarley in the face, and Tarley knocked me over when she fell. The Shepherds assumed I was dead and left in the vans. I stole Tarley’s car and followed. Are you . . . never mind.”
“Am I what?”
“I want to ask if you’re okay. That’s stupid. I could hear what was going on from the other side of the fence when I was guarding. It was awful. I’d listen to everybody laugh in the canteen and barracks about shooting zombies. I had to play along and laugh with them.”
“We’re out,” Corbin said. He had to look forward, not backwards, or it would drive him insane. “So, does Sonoma still have a harbor?”
“As far as I know. It’s going to take some footwork to get over the bridge. Let’s talk about that tomorrow. You should rest.”
“I can’t get into bed like this.” A bed. It was something for princes and princesses, a once ordinary, everyday part of his life that now had a mythical quality. He wanted to hold her hand, but he’d cleaned Micah’s wound. Returning to the sink to wash off, he realized that he had to pee. With a knock on the door and an explanation, he let himself into the bathroom.
Austin was invisible behind the shower curtain. Reeking clothes were in the trashcan under the sink. The air was heavy with mist, so Corbin turned on the fan. Austin said in surprise, “It didn’t occur to me to do that. I forgot all about fans.”
“I forgot about toilet paper.” Corbin had forgotten about towels and bars of soap, shower caps and tissues and tiled floors. For a crummy motel, the bathroom was nice and big. Plenty of washcloths and towels were stacked up over the toilet. Zaley had gotten them toothbrushes and toothpaste, all of it lined up on the counter. There was a bottle full of Zyllevir, shaving cream for the boys and packages of pads and tampons for the girls. She had arranged everything with care. That was strange and uncomfortable when he’d been treated for weeks like he was worth nothing.
He peed and washed his hands thoroughly. Now he could hold Zaley’s hand. In the other room, she was kneeling by the armchair and smoothing the oily hair from Micah’s face. They were speaking quietly. When Micah apologized, Zaley said, “I’m not mad. Micah! You didn’t have any way of knowing.”
“I’m still sorry,” Micah whispered. “Your arm’s so fucked up.”
“It’s getting better all the time,” Zaley soothed.
Corbin sat down by the wall and marveled at the room. His eyes lighting on the phone, he said, “My mom! I want to call my mom!”
“You can’t, unless you have a landline,” Zaley said. He sank back in disappointment. “There’s no cell service, no Internet, nothing. The only thing you can do is to send a letter, but mail service is getting sporadic. I heard it on the news today.” She sat by him. At the thumping upstairs, she cast an aggravated look upwards.
It was a measure of how much Corbin had changed, and how much Zaley hadn’t. The footsteps weren’t bothering him at all. That was good. He didn’t want her to have changed the way he had. She was how he used to be, and he wanted to get back to it. Elania rolled over and cried in sleepy alarm, “The doors!”
“It’s nothing, Elania. We’re at a motel,” Micah said, closing her eyes to rest.
“They’d come at night,” Corbin blurted to Zaley. “Some of the feral ones. They’d pound on the doors to the great room of the lodge and the outside restroom, trying to break in. Last night, they succeeded. They tore people up.” He wasn’t going to give her any more details than that. She took his hand in hers and they just listened to the rattle of the air conditioner, the faucets squeaking as the shower was turned off, the thump of footsteps and the honking of a horn outside. Corbin’s mind struggled to process these foreign yet familiar sounds.
The bathroom door opened and Austin came out in a fresh pair of underwear from the backpacks. Clean-shaven, he crawled into the big bed and moaned. “I forgot about beds and blankets and sheets. Your turn, Corbin.”
Corbin had forgotten how to turn a shower on. He got up and stood there uncertainly, wondering if he should wake Micah to shower so that he could think about this some more. It made no sense in his mind, and here it was all tumbling out of his mouth to make no sense to anyone else. Then Zaley was beside him, saying, “Come on. I’ll start it up for you.”
They went in together and she turned the faucets. Clothes. He had to take off his clothes to shower. She tested the water with her fingers and said, “It’s warm. Just turn the faucets when you’re done, or call me and I’ll do it.”
She skirted around him and closed the door. Corbin opened it. Closing the door would lure the ferals, so the door had to stay open while he washed. “Will you sit in the doorway?”
“Yes,” Zaley said. If she was there and the door was open, then the ferals wouldn’t come and pound. That made sense to Corbin, and would allow him to be naked and vulnerable in a shower. Half of him knew that this was irrational, absolutely insane in fact, and the other half couldn’t shake it. Zaley and the open door were his lucky charms.
Stripping off his nasty clothes, he added them to the pile in the trash and stepped into the shower. The filth that had come off Austin and Elania was there in splatters of brown and gray on the porcelain. The hot water drilled on his back, one stream coming out cock-eyed from the showerhead and hitting his neck. “Tell me where I am, Zaley?”
“You’re in a cheap-ass motel in San Francisco. It’s the third one I tried. The first one said I was too young; the second one wanted to see ID and a credit card. Then I came here. The guy who works the counter is almost blind. I don’t think he could tell how old I was. He had to hold the bills two inches from his eyes to see the numbers when I paid.” The ceiling thumped and she added, “They’re like elephants. Shut up and go to bed, people.”
Corbin looked at the shampoo and conditioner and soap as she spoke, having no idea where to start. His hair? His legs? Under his arms? There had once been an order to this, and now there was nothing. Closing his eyes, he reached out to begin with whatever his hand came across first.
Micah
And these are the ways we break.
She picked relentlessly at her brain for where she had run across that line, in an assigned poem for school, or in a book she’d read for fun. It didn’t come. How could it not come when things always came easily to her? Micah wasn’t accustomed to forgetting academic trivia. There had been a reason she was a brick away from being the valedictorian of Cloudy Valley High. Her mind was a steel trap for shit it didn’t need, shit that had done nothing for her since the day she was chased out of her hometown. School had spent twelve years preparing her for a trip to Massachusetts while the airplane was secretly being diverted to Madagascar. Everything she needed to know, she’d had to teach herself.
Maybe it was a lyric from a song. The words had new meaning now. They played in her mind when she looked at the others, around and around and around like thread unraveling. When the last of the thread passed through their fingers, there wouldn’t be anything left of them but bare black spools. There were so many ways for a person to break.
Elania did it politely, which was how she lived her life when whole. How did a polite person process a confinement point, where everything was rude and crude and base and animal? A polite person didn’t know what to do with that, and coped politely. And then she fell apart politely afterwards. Elania redrew the fence of the confinement point around the motel’s big bed and trapped herself within it. She watched the t
elevision from the brace of the headboard, hugged a pillow to her chest, said please and thank you for food and water, and did little else. Every day, she did a little less than that. She only granted herself furloughs to the bathroom and she held onto the bottle of Zyllevir like a teddy bear. It had come from her parents, a touchstone back to her former life. Even if her parents hadn’t actually touched it, they had gotten this bottle to her. Their rabbi was sympathetic to Sombra Cs and served as part of a hidden network through the country. Like-minded leaders of synagogues and churches, mosques and covens, agnostic and atheist societies were all trying to help.
When Zaley changed the television from the news to the animal channel, in which a home video was playing of three chickens running for the same piece of bread from three different points in the yard, to knock headlong at the prize and flap away in distress, Elania didn’t laugh. The confinement point had replaced her humor and prayer with invisible boundaries that she was unable to bring herself to trespass. But as the essence of her soul was a polite one, she never troubled anybody with the crumbling dimensions of it. She held onto the Zyllevir and was silent.
Austin was a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and spinning. For weeks he had drawn Micah close to sleep and now he shoved her away. She existed in his emotional kaleidoscope as the red clots of his rage, encompassing all the horrible things that had happened to him since the party. He turned to Zaley, who was the white feathers of angel wings, and Elania, the smooth gray circles without any edges to snag. The vacuum in Micah’s brain at losing valedictorian was what she wanted to find here at his stiffened spine, and she did not. It hurt. When he cried, when he angered, when he whimpered in nightmares, she was forbidden to touch him. And when Micah got lost in staring at nothing, the hands to come to her shoulders were never his. They usually belonged to the suicidal infant Zaley, the only one of the five that hadn’t experienced the turmoil of life on the hill.
Suicidal infant. That was amusing, although Micah didn’t laugh over it any more than Elania did about the head-banging hens. The epithet had to remain unspoken forever. The suicidal infant from that child’s room of dolls and star rugs had gotten them out of confinement.
Austin was too full to be contained by a motel, yet here they had to stay until it was safe to move another step closer to the harbor in Sonoma. Five days, according to a stolen paper with information about braces. He paced back and forth from the locked door to the shaded window, flipped disconsolately between the channels, and checked the time. It was more his style to bury awful things, but the details were too hideous to stay quiescent beneath his surface. They burst out to Zaley in choked spurts, the run to the fence, the bratty people from the busted harbor, the old Japanese woman’s death, Clarissa . . . Micah wondered if Zaley would stop giving her comfort after that, and then she remembered. Zaley had killed, too. Nothing changed between them.
Just as thorough his upset, so was Austin’s joy to wake up every morning in the room, at the bags of food, and at the stupid, frightened chickens on the television. Then the kaleidoscope turned and he changed. Once he got mad that someone had used his towel and had a snit fit about it until Elania said in quiet devastation, “I’m sorry. I . . . I must have mixed them up.” Her shoulders began to shake. Austin fell apart since she was falling apart, they were just dumb towels and he was an asshole, and he strove to cheer her up but nothing worked.
She was polite in her pieces, he could be inconsiderate in his tumbling, and Corbin broke into the gaping mouths of needy baby birds in a nest. He watched the news to gather everything of what they had missed; he waited in terror at the door when Zaley went out for supplies. This wasn’t a nice motel, nor was it the nicest neighborhood, and Zaley only had one good arm and what if . . . what if . . . what if . . .
He made sure all five of them ate well; he cleaned up and straightened the blanket; he massaged Zaley’s damaged arm, observed her exercises and did his own; he bothered Micah about disinfecting her thigh wound. “Do you want it to get infected?”
She didn’t care if her leg rotted off and went out with the trash. When she told him that much, he spluttered out the beginnings of six different responses. His eyes moved to Austin as a solution to deal with her, and then to Elania, and lastly to Zaley. The next time Micah went to the bathroom, Zaley knocked. The injury was healing fine and Micah let herself be tended. One shouldn’t say no to an infant.
Corbin organized their backpacks and crowed. The Shepherds had taken Elania’s backpack, but they still had her Pewter acceptance letter. It had been mixed into someone else’s bag when the raiders caught them. Elania unfolded the letter and stared at it for a long time. Then she refolded it and handed it back.
On their second night at the motel, a man pounded on a door upstairs and called to be let in. Half asleep, Corbin slipped from the bed and moved the armchair and footstool to the door. He slept there, blocking it from ferals. The motel was quiet the night after that, but he returned to the door to do it again. Irrationally protecting them, he slept in a slouch on the chair with his bow and arrows close at hand.
Micah wasn’t breaking with them. Most of the time she felt little, numbness braced by painful twinges when Austin turned away. The days were bottomless pits without the rituals of school or getting north or the confinement point to get through it. Once she idly found herself wishing to return to the confinement point. She understood what she was supposed to do there. When they pressed on in a few days, she’d have something to do once more. But for the moment, she could only sit and watch them crumble.
They had evanesced when she got into the car, Grandpa Cloud and Aunt Daffy, her lover Justin and little sister Clarissa. All of the rest to run for the fence had gone along with them. They left her without the figments of her imagination. There was only Micah here and that was the only one who ever had been. It was lonely. They had ended and she went on.
If she wasn’t soothing Austin, testing the web for its threads, being with the spirits of those she’d killed, what was she to do? She stared at the seething mess of the world on the television and wondered what she was supposed to be feeling. There was no reaction in her mind. People did terrible, horrible, sickening things to one another. The evidence was on every channel. She watched it numbly, one program after another and all about predation.
She didn’t feel anything because she wasn’t breaking. She was just the strongest, always the strongest, so they fell apart as she held it together. They’d all been raised to expect Massachusetts but gotten Madagascar. She coped best in changed surroundings. As they argued at the ticket counter to book a flight back, she looked through the windows and gleaned what they needed to do to survive.
Over and over at night, Clarissa came to her in dreams of sidewalk mazes and asked to be stabbed. Someone shouted, “STOP!” too late. A horrified crowd encircled Micah and the body at her feet, the blade dripping blood to the concrete. She tried to explain, but her voice never rose above a whisper. The crowd held Clarissa’s parents and Mrs. Sink the teacher and the families of the three others, Micah’s mothers and older sister, teachers from Cloudy Valley High and Dale Summit all aghast. Murderer! Overhead on giant televisions descending from the clouds played scenes from her life, stealing from Rubenz and racing down the freeway in her V-6, every lie she had ever told. The crowd craned upwards as a jury to watch all of the actions that were going to work against her defense. She had just graduated from small crimes to big crimes, and now a child was dead. The hazel eyes stared.
The thought occurred to her every morning that were a little girl to come up on the street and ask to be knifed, it would be very wrong for Micah to grant the wish. She had to remember that after living in a place where it was different. It was like learning to drive on the opposite side of the road in another country, a queer adjustment to be made. For now, this would have to be a conscious thought, rather than an automatic one. Don’t kill the girl.
There wasn’t a ritual for this. There should have been one to re
turn her to the world outside the fence. In her head, she beat on drums to work through it, but failed to find a rhythm even in her own fantasy. It was something that could not be let go of. It was going to walk with her forever.
If a girl asked to be killed, Micah had to look around first for a fence. To check herself. There wasn’t one in the motel room, so the answer was no.
Zaley was bringing in the most bizarre food, dependent on what shipments made it through to stores. Everything was very expensive. When Micah said, “That’s weird,” at the latest strange display, Austin exploded, “Don’t criticize! She’s doing the best she can!”
It hadn’t been a criticism. It was just a comment on the odd assortment of canned baked beans and miniature sausages, chips and baguettes. He had forbidden her to speak to him, so she swallowed her explanation. Zaley passed around cosmetics and said, “For your stamps. I have to get the car through some braces. You guys will walk and join me on the other side. Scarves and turtlenecks will draw too much attention. All of you have to find or mix a shade to match your skin, so I got every kind.”
This was what they should have been doing earlier. If Zaley had stolen cosmetics, they could have walked to Sable Heights. Well, no, not with the braces and saliva checks. But it still would have been a good idea to cover up their stamps. Finding a shade was going to be a challenge. The four of them had such different shades of skin from pale to dark.
“Sable Heights,” Micah said. It hadn’t crossed her mind in a long time. “We were going there. Is it yellow? Red now?”
“I have no idea,” Zaley said. “Without the Internet, it’s not anything.”
“With what’s going on, it’s now better to try for the harbor in Sonoma,” Corbin said. “Harbors are getting relief supplies. If things get much more scarce out here, it’s going to be mayhem.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 107