It was what she wanted to ask of the men who formed the Shepherd Prime cabinet, yet Austin was asking it of her. In a fit, he said, “You know when you get the choice back to die? When we say so.” He pointed at the others and himself. “Until then, you have to live. Or else you’re just like my mother, loving me when it’s easy for you, and fuck me when it’s not. Do you understand that? How we’re tied together? Or is it one of the first things that goes when you’re almost a sociopath? You think you’re an island and you aren’t. You’re part of us and we’re part of you, so you don’t get the right to die.”
She had smiled and lied to a child about pain. “But I suck, Aussie.”
“Everybody sucks!” Austin said sourly. “But we’re used to you.”
They stayed on the beach for a while. The stamps were hidden and no one was around. Zaley slid down the rock and walked along the surf with Corbin; Elania found a shady patch in the overhang of the rocks and watched the waves roll in. Then she took a nap. Micah sat on the sand between Austin’s legs and leaned on him. He didn’t stop her from burying his legs. She had started it to annoy him, but when he wasn’t annoyed, she just continued it for something to do. “When are you going to grow a straight twin of yourself for me?”
“I wouldn’t wish you on my twin,” Austin said. “I can’t think of any guy I’d wish you on.”
“But I’m hot. Guys like hot.”
“You’re a freak is what you are. Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“My family.” Micah didn’t think about them often. It wasn’t from anger but an extension of that numbness, an extension that went back as far as she could remember. “It’s easy to feel like an island when you don’t have anything in common.”
“They’re nice people.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t. But we’re from different solar systems. Shalom fits in and I don’t. She’ll focus on the positive like Uma, but is more practical like Tuma. She blends them, and those two complement each other, so it all works in harmony. And then there’s me. They do everything to attach and I just feel so detached. It bleeds out, Aussie. I didn’t care about losing valedictorian. I had nothing tied up in that. I didn’t care about catching Sombra C. I still don’t.”
“You care about me.”
He hadn’t come to her needing things that she couldn’t give. Her parents needed her to prove to themselves that they were living the right way, to prove to the world that they could do it. Micah was as much their daughter as she was their presentation. It was why Tuma took it so to heart when Micah dyed her hair silly colors and questioned their family’s faith. Uma took it to heart in a different way, that everything Micah did was fine and dandy. There was nothing genuine about how Uma ceded control to Micah. The insistence that she should be completely herself and at the same time present only the greatest success to vindicate her parents . . . it was an impossible conundrum. Just like the one in the confinement point.
She patted sand around Austin’s legs until he had vanished from mid-thigh to feet. His shoes formed a mountain range. “There. You’re gone.”
“Do you want me to be gone?” Austin asked.
“Yes. Then the truck can hit me. It’s what I deserve. It makes it equal between me and them.”
“Equal? I talked to Daffodil a few times. She was a nice lady. Chatty. She wouldn’t be smiling to see you get run over for doing something she asked you to do. Clarissa wouldn’t want that. Don’t you remember her? She was sweet. Gentle. She was so scared. You couldn’t send her out there to the night, alone in the dark with zombies. You showed her mercy, Micah.”
“I was a goddess of death.”
“Of mercy,” Austin insisted. “You know in the Bible where-”
“Not Christian.”
“Okay. Well, everyone knows the part about how God created the world in seven days. Every morning, He waved His holy wand and poof! Something new appeared.”
“Your God has a wand? If he hadn’t invented trees and knives yet, how did he carve it?”
“That isn’t important. Maybe it wasn’t a wand. It doesn’t go into detail. Maybe it was like those models the guys built in Welcome Mat, God all hunched over His desk and swearing at the shitty instructions, wood glue drying on His fingers.” Caught up in the image, Austin laughed at himself.
Micah dragged her arm beneath the sand to bring more over and proceed with his total burial. “Where are you going with this?”
He slid his arms around her waist and made her let go of the sand dune coming his way. “Maybe it hurt. Maybe it hurt God on each of those days. When women have babies, it hurts. We’re made in His image after all. So it might have hurt God, because creating things is just that way. You created a world for us in that confinement point, the best world that could be made out of it, and it hurt you. You didn’t run around stabbing people at random. The Shepherds were the gods and goddesses of death there. But you always had a reason when you pulled out that blade, and it was for mercy whether you were killing kings or little girls afraid of the dark.”
“I told her it wouldn’t hurt.”
“If you’d told her it hurt, would she have gone along with it?”
“No.”
“Her brain was giving out, little by little. We all saw it coming. She could have been one of those people that wandered into the shade one day and never came back. But they weren’t totally gone in the head yet. They just couldn’t remember how to get back, or only remembered after the doors were closed. That could have been Clarissa, that poor baby girl scared and alone with ferals all around. They would have beaten her to death. It could have been her out there at the doors, pleading for you to let her in. You had to tell her that lie.” His voice was thick. “At least with you, it was quick. It was done in love. Now she’s in heaven.”
“To your perspective.”
“She is. She’s an angel, your angel. You watched over her on earth, so she’ll watch over you from heaven. All of them will.”
“Even the kings?”
He pinched her side. “Don’t be a twat. The kings went to hell where they belong. God doesn’t allow rapists into heaven.” Austin wriggled his feet and the mountain caps of sand broke off. She covered up his feet again, to punish him childishly for tying her to them. She’d bury all four of them and walk away free, except she had no idea where to go.
People were gathering farther down the beach. Corbin and Zaley jogged back. He nodded to the car to indicate it was time to leave. Having woken, Elania stood up in her shady spot and stretched. Micah didn’t want to return to the motel room, and sat there to eke out a few more seconds of sun and water.
“It’s so weird to be on a beach,” Austin said, also disinclined to go. “It’s so weird to be on the other side of the fence.”
Crouching by the buried lump of his leg, Zaley said, “They’re setting up for a big birthday party. We should get out of here.”
Austin made a rumbling sound and shook the sand from his legs. Sighing, Micah said, “I wish you’d been just a few seconds later.” A few seconds and it would have been too late. Her cheek hurt from the smack. He hadn’t restrained himself too much there.
“No,” Zaley said. “Come on, Micah. Who else is going to propel me to maturity?”
“I miss your bunny shirt,” Micah said, falling back into their comfortable antagonism. “It was so cute and you never let me borrow it.”
“Fuck you. I hated that shirt.”
“Let’s get a move on,” Corbin said.
“Micah has something that she wants me to say for her, since she’s too shy to do it herself,” Austin announced as sand sifted from his jeans. Micah didn’t remember any such part of their conversation, nor was she shy. Not remembering that line of poetry or song either . . . was her mind ever going to hold onto things the way it had? Or was that gone for good?
The others waited. Smiling brilliantly, Austin said, “Her real name is Jubilee Eclipse Camborne. She changed it to Micah in third grade becau
se she found it so embarrassing.”
Asshole. She couldn’t believe that he had betrayed her secret! And it wasn’t out of embarrassment that she had changed her name. Jubilee Eclipse was stupid and made her stick out.
They stared at her. Corbin said, “Is that true? It’s not Micah?” Austin giggled.
“Jubilee?” Elania repeated, just as Zaley asked in disbelief, “Eclipse?”
Two could play this game. Smiling with just as much wattage, Micah said, “Austin likes dick.”
Set Twelve
Zaley
Part of Zaley expected them to be the same, but the four people she had known in their last fated catch, laughing about the porn on the old couple’s television, weren’t the four here now with her at the motel. They looked the same, spoke in the same voices and bore the same mannerisms, yet they were not the same at all.
However changed, they would continue on together. In the evenings she spread out her maps and the list of braces, working out the best way to go north. Before the confinement point, Elania would have been crouched over beside her, a finger tracing lines and her measured voice debating options. This was no longer a role into which she naturally slid. Austin was beside Zaley, working out the details of what and when and which and how and why. Corbin did his best to help, but this was still such hard work for him. Once it grew too frustrating and he exclaimed, “I’m not dumb!”
“I’ve never thought you were dumb,” Zaley said. Corbin was smarter than she was, for God’s sake. He was just dyslexic.
It was odd to see him without a stamp, all of them without stamps, their necks smooth and unmarked like the party had never happened. Had it not happened, these four would all be in their respective homes in Cloudy Valley, and Zaley in a plot at the cemetery. Her mother would have covered it in stuffed animals and dolls, be sobbing about what a happy little girl Zaley had been and how the gun went off accidentally. Seventeen-year-old baby Zaley had mistaken it for a toy.
The Shepherds had an extremely thick presence between here and the bridge, and a more tentative one on the other side. That last part she knew from an interview on the local news of a woman who had a prosthetic hand and a nose ring with a gold chain leading back to her earlobe. Her name was Yolanda Terris. She was a wounded combat vet from Afghanistan and led the San Francisco T-BACS. They were taking back the bridges. She didn’t have Sombra C or know anybody with it. She was just pissed about the violation of her civil rights every time she drove around, being stopped for spit checks and having her car searched.
Since the police weren’t putting a stop to it, she and a group of others discharged from the military were doing their damnedest to get the Shepherds out of the Bay Area. Twelve hard-faced men and a woman in a wheelchair were clustered behind her. It was easy to see the soldiers in them, even dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Zaley examined every male face there, black and white, round and narrow, young to old, one with mottled skin on his cheek from a burn, and found them to the last man sexy. It was hard to be objective. Even the two women were hot as hell.
“The only reason they have power is that you submit,” Yolanda said, her eyes piercing straight through the television to look at every one of them. “Stop submitting. They stick their guns in the window of your car and demand your saliva? Tell you to pop your trunk? Shove your weapon back in their faces! Tell them to step away from your vehicle.”
Shepherds no longer held the Richmond Bridge and were struggling to hold onto the one in Hayward. It was tempting to drive south to Hayward, cross the bridge, loop back north through Oakland, and cross the Richmond Bridge to San Rafael. Then it was north to Sonoma. The problem with that plan was so much of the territory was red, and there were many other braces standing in their way. Also, driving through Oakland was highly discouraged due to regular hijackings of cars and trucks.
The ownership of the Golden Gate Bridge depended on the day, and the battles were causing structural damage. Half of the tollbooths had been blown up by T-BACS on purpose. That was where traffic naturally throttled for electronic tolls and Shepherds took advantage of it for searches. Some people passed through no less than four braces just trying to get from the city over the bridge. It would have been far worse had things been going on like normal in the country, backing up traffic for miles with commuters going to work or going back home. Even now, it resulted in a slow-moving mess.
But first they had to get to the bridge, and braces were literally everywhere. Zaley grew too depressed to keep counting when she reached thirty in the immediate area. Shepherds made sure that people couldn’t circumvent the braces by alternate routes. When Zaley and Austin went over all of the possible ways to get to the bridge, every one of them looked bad. Their best bet of the awful options was Park Presidio at Lake. It didn’t have complete coverage, so she’d drop them off there and go north in the car by herself. Sadly, the drop-off had to be in the evening. The brace came down at six and went back up at midnight.
As she was going up the stretch of Veterans Boulevard, the other four had to walk through a golf course and then a winding road through the trees. That was going to take them a while. She’d fly through it in minutes and wait on Canzana, a road that dove through the 101 Freeway. It was such a new road that the older paper maps didn’t show it. A brace was always present on Veterans Boulevard when the one on Lake was down. Sometimes they were up simultaneously, so someone finally getting through the brace at Lake just got nailed again along the boulevard.
An alternative route to the bridge was Lincoln up the western coast, but that had a permanent brace. So it was Veterans. The distance they’d be separated was two and a half miles. If zombies were loose in that area, they’d have to climb a tree and wait out the night. They’d also have to be careful of regular people. Zaley had heard conversations in the rec room about the big homeless camp that had gone up over there.
After they rejoined at the car, it was on to the Golden Gate Bridge. The Shepherds checked incoming traffic in the morning and outgoing in the afternoon, so morning it was to get the car through. They also maintained people on the bridge to check at random through the night, which was too bad. Zaley would have rather traveled then. Of course, her information wasn’t necessarily accurate. The filched paper could be out-of-date. This was going to be a nerve-wracking move.
If the T-BACS held the bridge, as they did on occasion, the car would be waved through without delay. Zaley prayed that the news would show control swinging to the T-BACS, but other than a few Shepherds being shot, nothing had dislodged them this week.
The motel room was paid for through tomorrow, and checkout was at noon. She was going over the maps for the millionth time that evening, both to steady her nerves and in the hope that some overlooked route would present itself. Elania was watching television from the bed and the water was running in the shower for Corbin. Micah and Austin sat on the armchair and footstool, smearing cosmetics on his neck and bitching at one another companionably. Whenever she thought it blended with his skin, he thought it didn’t, and it also went in the reverse direction. She smacked his hand when he touched what she was rubbing into his stamp and he said, “You’re such a bitch.”
“You’re such a lame excuse for a gay dude,” Micah retorted. “The rest of them are born knowing everything there is to know about makeup. You’re just bisexual. That explains it.” Zaley laughed. It was disconcerting that they had all known Austin was gay except for her. The relationship with Elania had been faked! That blew her mind. Micah was acting fine but looks could be deceptive, so the gun was buried under clothes in Zaley’s backpack. She never would have pegged Micah for a suicide attempt before the confinement point. But this was the world after it.
The pills rattled in the bottle, which Elania was turning over and over in her lap. It was pretty much the only noise she ever made. What the confinement point had done to her in only a couple of weeks . . . one of the rare times she had spoken, it was to fearfully whisper a request that Zaley mute the television. S
ome reality show was on with guys bragging about how many times they’d gotten laid over spring break, and one gave another a high five when he said proudly that he didn’t even know his conquest’s name.
Before the confinement point, Elania would have just grimaced at the crudeness and muted it herself. After the confinement point, she was upset and disturbed by it. They had to get her to the harbor. Her family was there. That would make Elania happy again.
“Can I get you anything?” Zaley asked. The bottle turned over as Elania looked at her for long moments. Thinking that she hadn’t heard the question, Zaley repeated it.
Understanding dawned in Elania’s eyes. “Could . . . could I have some paper? And a pen?”
That was a good sign, Elania wanting to write. Zaley got her those things and then Corbin called from the bathroom. She left Elania hunched over the pad and writing in block letters rather than cursive. That was odd, just like how Corbin not being able to remember how to turn on a shower was odd. Zaley grasped most what life had been like on the hill by what her friends had lost there.
The door was open to the bathroom. Corbin was in there, a towel around his waist. As Zaley came to the doorway, he caught her wrist and dragged her in. Then she was pressed up against the sink, Corbin kissing her cheeks and nose and forehead. The door had been kicked shut. He didn’t kiss her lips until she insisted, catching his head in her hands and drawing him to her.
“Grace Leigh,” he mumbled with a snicker, pulling away from her lips to kiss her throat.
“And no, my middle name isn’t fucking Full.” She laughed at her idiotic Shepherd persona and was lifted into the air. Corbin settled her onto the counter and she wrapped her legs around his hips. His hands came to her shirt and pulled it up. As her right arm didn’t go over her head without discomfort, he leaned back as she held her arms out straight and dipped her head to have it taken off. Cast away, it hit the doorknob and hung there. Her heart raced as he spread his hands to cup her breasts through the bra.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 109