“I want to see your manager!”
He called to an office. A woman peered out the doorway and said, “Open the box and the gifts or we can’t ship it. That’s final.”
“I’ll take my business elsewhere,” the customer said stiffly. Scooping up her box, she pushed by Zaley and hit the doors. The line moved up, a man going to the counter with his box already open for inspection.
“Just books,” he said. The clerk pulled them out, rifled through the pages and set them back neatly. Then he taped up the box and weighed it.
The guy in front of Zaley was wearing a black armband that read GO T-BACS. They moved up twice more before she whispered, “I like your armband.”
He edged it higher up his arm to give it greater prominence. “Fuck ’em, you know? Fuck those Shepherds. I had this whole life going just fine until they got in the way. I had to hitchhike home from school.”
“Are you in college?”
“I was. Oberlin. It closed a few weeks ago. Had to close, things were too crazy with the fighting there. You in college, too?”
“Last year of high school. I was, I mean.”
“We’ll get back to it,” he said in a gust of heat, and the employee motioned for him to come up to the counter.
When it was Zaley’s turn, she passed over the postcard. “This is it. Are mail deliveries still going on okay?”
“We’re doing our best, miss,” the man said tiredly. “It won’t be timely, so don’t expect that. Cross your fingers and it’ll show up there in a week or so.” Skimming the address, he added, “Maybe less. This one doesn’t have far to go.”
They spent time in the parking lot and moved on to a Tic-Tac-Taco, which had a menu far more impacted than Shor-Bee’s. “We weren’t gone that long!” Austin protested. “How did everything fall apart so much in that short of a time? Look at that! One kind of burrito. Fries. Two kinds of soda. Chips and salsa. That’s it!”
“The trucks,” Elania breathed.
“Fuel prices,” Corbin said when she didn’t elucidate. “These places truck in food from other states. It’s too expensive, and some of the freeways to get here are battlegrounds . . . and how much of our food comes from Mexico? A lot.”
Now it was after five. Zaley drove around where the brace was set up and scored a parking spot across the wide street. It was an extensive brace, checking the north and southbound traffic on Park Presidio as well as the east and west traffic on Lake. They watched the cars being stopped, the inhabitants tested and trunks popped, the piling up of vehicles in all four directions.
The clock approached six and Zaley was getting antsy. The Shepherds had made no movements toward taking down the brace. At six they were still there, and at half past, she said, “What the hell? Is it manned twenty-four hours a day now?”
“There’s no other way around?” Micah asked.
“No. They expect people to search for the other way around, so they spread out their braces to make sure there isn’t one.” She didn’t want to return to the motel for another night. There had to be a way off the peninsula.
It wasn’t until after seven that two black vans pulled over to the curbs. The Shepherds loaded up their belongings and then themselves. The traffic eased going from east to west. North and south were still a disaster.
“Sundown is at a quarter to eight,” Austin said anxiously. “We have to go now!”
The car emptied in seconds. Corbin came around the hood and kissed Zaley’s cheek, saying, “See you on the other side. Be careful.”
“You be careful,” Zaley said. Waving to Micah and Austin, she called goodbye to Elania. Elania traded places with Corbin at the window.
“Forgive me,” Elania said.
“For what?” Zaley asked.
“Just . . . forgive me.”
She was blaming herself for being depressed. “There isn’t anything to forgive, Elania. Don’t worry about it. You’ll feel better at the harbor.”
Austin called and Elania went over to the sidewalk, where she bent to rub her knee. As Zaley rolled up the windows, Austin said, “Sore from the car? Me, too.” He put his arms over his head and Micah pressed the button for the crosswalk.
Zaley pulled into the turn lane and started north. She glanced in the mirror for one last view of them, Micah stepping out into the lane without the walk signal and Austin saying something to her. He had his hand on Elania’s arm. The quiver over his shoulder, Corbin was watching the car and getting a better grip on his bow. Then they were out of view.
On both sides of the stretch of road were trees, sudden and shocking after the endless lines of buildings. Turning on the radio, she passed into a tunnel at a creeping pace and at long last returned to the road and trees. Hidden beyond them was the golf course.
The trunks weren’t being opened in the brace ahead. Swiftly, she was corrected: only some were being opened. It didn’t appear that they were doing the full spit check either, only a neck check for a stamp. Again she was corrected when the tests came out. It was being done at random, every car getting the neck check, and then the luck of the draw whether a cursory inspection of the trunk or a saliva test was given. She turned off the radio. A moderate station wasn’t what should be playing in her car when the Shepherds came over. Inspecting the guys working the brace, she recognized none of them.
Cars were separated in the lanes, some motioned to the fast and others to the slow. Cones were laid out between them. A woman two cars ahead of Zaley was pulled out of her vehicle and forced against it. The Shepherd yanked down her turtleneck and another one came over with an alcohol wipe, which he smeared over the right side of her neck. They didn’t find a stamp. The first one shouted, “Next time, you let me have a look!”
“Screw you!” the woman screamed. She got back into her car and slammed the door. A third Shepherd motioned her into the slow lane.
When it was Zaley’s turn, an old man approached the window and said, “Evening, miss.”
Turning to show her neck, Zaley said in a tone of friendly respect, “How’s it going?”
“Not bad. Pop the trunk for me.”
She popped it. He scanned the few contents and shut it. Gestures passed between him and the third Shepherd, who motioned Zaley to stay in the fast lane. Travel was three times faster there than the slow. All of those cars were in line to be inspected a second time, the drivers staring ahead in aggravation and some honking. The cones went all the way down the road to keep anyone from changing lanes.
Passing by the second brace, Zaley turned off the freeway and east onto Canzana. There was no traffic. Rapidly she came to their meeting point and parked in the long line of empty spaces alongside a building. She and Austin had done the best they could without satellite maps. The others knew to look for her in the vicinity of these park maintenance and archives buildings. Cobwebs were all over the windows. No one was around.
Shadows were growing long. She turned off the headlights and made sure the windows were up fully and the doors locked. It was too early to expect them, but she couldn’t restrain herself from looking around frequently. She wasn’t going to relax until all of them were in the car, safe and sound and off to deal with crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
The harbor worried her. They had let in Elania’s family and none of them had Sombra C, but Elania was their blood relative and she did. When everyone caught up, Zaley would suggest that they pretend she was Micah’s uninfected sister. Micah was tall and Zaley short; they could say Zaley was younger by a year though in truth Micah was the younger one. They didn’t look related, but Zaley doubted the harbor was going to administer DNA tests. A friend of theirs, Corbin’s girlfriend, neither of those sounded as binding as Micah saying she’s my little sister. Zaley Camborne. Her brain resisted the necessity of being switched to the younger of the two. Micah just looked older, and nothing could be done for it.
Zaley made a bed for herself on the back seat and formed plans. The future had been so obscure and impossible when she lived at home; now it was
a real and tangible thing. The country was going to set itself upright. She and Corbin would get jobs and find an apartment that didn’t care about his Sombra C. Zaley would get her GED and take an English class at a junior college. No matter what happened, on the twelfth of October, she was free. Nobody could force her to go home.
On that day, she’d call her mother if cell service had returned to say that she was alive. A short call. Her mother deserved that much. Zaley wasn’t coming back to be her eternal baby, but she was still breathing out in the world. If Mom chose the tears and guilt trip route, Zaley was hanging up. And should Mom want to try . . . then there were rules. No more baby, no more intrusions. No gifts of toys for a young woman. Zaley’s life was going in only one direction. Forward.
The world was waiting for her.
Climbing into the nest of towels and clothes to rest, she felt strangely at peace about laying down the laws. You are you, I am me, and we are not the same.
To that lullaby, she fell asleep.
Austin
A city made of tents was going gray in the growing evening. Yellow points of fire waved within it. Making a ring around the lake and extending out to infinity, a cross-section of humanity had settled on the golf course to live. The four of them penetrated the outermost line of tents and started to walk through. A man said, “No room here. You kids move along.”
People were laid so thickly upon one another that the road alongside the lake was obscured. Sitting on lawn chairs, toasting marshmallows and hot dogs over camp stoves, standing at the fires that burned in trashcans to do the same, the air was rich with scents and voices and music, the wails of small children and the barks of dogs, laughter and arguing and snoring. Garbage crackled on the ground and shored up against the trunks of trees. Discarded soda bottles were filled with pee. The reek of shit was heavy from portable toilets. A guy twisted on a chair had his dick aimed into an empty water bottle, the stream hissing on the inside. He wasn’t trying to be discreet about it.
A woman was shouting, “Zach? Zach? Come here, Zach!” English wasn’t the only language that Austin was hearing. People were speaking French and Spanish, Chinese and French, and even Russian. One man was speaking in a language that he didn’t recognize whatsoever. Vaguely audible was the whoosh of traffic upon the road that Zaley had driven away upon.
“It looks like a fleet of turtles,” Corbin said about the tents. Tarps were clipped around many of them to keep in heat, and cardboard was flattened underneath them for softness. Austin thought the American flags that topped off a few of the tarps were sick. People living in a tent city still believed that this was the greatest country in the world.
Shopping carts were parked between the tents, makeshift driveways for makeshift vehicles beside makeshift homes. The insides of the carts were covered up in plastic bags and strapped down with cords or rope. There was a food truck parked out here, too. People formed a winding line around tents to the service window. Hopefully, Corbin wasn’t going to freeze to see it. That had been odd to Austin. The window with the bucket in the confinement point and the ones in a fast food drive-thru or roach coach were so different that Austin’s mind didn’t form a connection between them.
“Move along!” a woman said when they passed a cook fire. Others took up her words in echoes: move along, move along, there’s land north of here, move along, hey, you got some money?
Fences had been made around some tents with pallets or rotting pieces of wood. One had a theater’s velvet mauve ropes. Austin wanted to point that out to Elania, but she was too freaked out. Back at the intersection, she had taken his hand and placed it on her arm, saying, “Don’t let go of me.” When he asked why, she didn’t answer. It was fear. The motel had been safe, and they weren’t there any longer. So he just held onto her, and in this tent city, held on tighter.
“Do you know where I can get diapers? I’m going to be totally out tomorrow,” asked a tired-looking woman to another one. Both had babies over their shoulders.
“Honey, you’re going to have to use cloth and wash them out in the lake. Ask Tina, she keeps extras around.” The second woman pointed and Austin followed her finger to a laundry line stretched out between trees by the water. Drying cloths and onesies were clipped to it.
They picked around the tents, Micah in the lead and people giving side-eye to the bow and quiver she carried. Since Corbin had the gun, she’d demanded the bow once they’d crossed the street. Austin didn’t expect that she wanted it to kill herself, nor could she do so without a great deal of difficulty, but he didn’t trust her. To find her standing on the road, intending to let a truck mow her down, had shaken him so deeply that he’d feel those reverberations for eternity. He couldn’t be mad at Micah if that was what she was going to do. How could he be mad at people when they’d just kill themselves? And Micah, the least suicidal person in the world . . .
“Got some Ph.D.s here!” a man shouted about the four of them. “Move along, kids, this place is full.”
“What the fuck did you just call me?” Micah asked, more conversationally than in anger. “Do I look like I have a fucking Ph.D. to you?”
“Micah, don’t,” Austin warned. They didn’t need trouble. He thought about having Corbin hold onto Elania so that Austin could keep Micah under control. But Elania had asked Austin to do it. She had spoken so little in the last couple of days that he’d do anything to make her happy.
“Ph.D. means students, college students. They camp north of here,” a woman called. She was drowning in clothes far too big for her frame. The sleeves of her shirts were rolled up to giant lumps above her elbows, and the extra room in her pants was pinched with a clothespin. Her shoes didn’t match, both sneakers but in different colors and styles.
Austin felt naked without a scarf. But the darkness would just keep growing and help to conceal any hint of the stamp coming through the foundation, unless someone shined a flashlight on him. His hand went to his neck and he jerked it down. To keep it there, he pinched his leg as a reminder.
They came to an uninhabited stretch of the road, the concrete broken into chunks and covered in garbage. Plastic and paper signs were hung on a rusty pole with arrows. They were all jumbled up and hard to decipher in the diminishing light. Ink had drooled on the paper ones. Micah gave the signs a cursory inspection. Austin didn’t know where to begin on everything stuck to the pole. Corbin made a face and ceded it to them to read.
“There are smaller camps making up one big one,” Micah said, walking around the pole to read it from every side. “The one we’re passing through now is called Hard Times. Straight east from here is Crazy Town. North is Little Mexico and Ph.D. The rest of these signs are missing people and pets notices.”
“Let’s not go east,” Corbin said.
“We don’t want east anyway,” Austin said. He wanted to jog the miles to the car, but more tents were coming up on the road and off it. The city of turtles was slowing them down.
None of the trees were suitable for climbing, all pines and eucalyptus. The area couldn’t have any kind of zombie presence, or people wouldn’t be sleeping in tents and outside on bedrolls. No one was looking around in trepidation as evening bled away.
Micah was struggling to find a way through the clusters of tents. A woman yelled at them for cutting through her backyard, which was a scrape of dirt behind her tent. Nothing labeled it as a yard. For a moment, Micah paused to stand there. She looked like she was innocently trying to glean where to go, a hand along her forehead to survey the best route, but it was really to be an asshole. The woman said, “Fuck you! Get the fuck out of here! Move on!”
Micah said, “I think it’s this way,” and inched along to make her point.
“Crazy Town,” Elania whispered. “Do we have the gun?”
“Corbin has it,” Austin said. “We’re not going to Crazy Town, Elania. Wrong way.”
Overhearing him, an elderly man mumbled, “Damn crazies.”
“Yeah, we know, Dad,” a woman an
swered from within a tent.
“In my day, those people went to the loooon-a-tic asylum.” The man drew it out to the closed tent flap. “It was the eighties when they got dumped into the streets to go crazy there, doing drugs and robbing people. They need to be locked up, all of those looon-a-tics.”
To the right were tennis courts, transformed into a land of campers. Clothes and towels dried on the net; hangers with more of the same hung from the chain link fences. The lake was pulling in close on the left. Small boats floated on it, holding steady from anchors and people lying down upon the decks. Bottles bobbed on the surface. A woman filled a plastic bucket from the lake and then dipped a cup in it to drink. Horrified, Austin said, “But they’re washing diapers in that water!”
“Not to mention all the pee bottles,” Corbin said in equal aghast. “Those could be leaking.”
“Any money?” a woman called by a big tent. “Five bucks and you can sleep in here.”
“This is nuts!” Austin said. “What are all of these people doing here?”
“We’re all just one disaster away from homelessness. My dad said that,” Corbin said. “It’s why he put so much in savings after my mom got better from her cancer. Sombra C is a disaster on a large scale . . .” He trailed off. A two-year-old had a tie around his waist that led to a stake in the ground. Only able to move in an eighteen-inch circle around the stake, he was stacking blocks as a woman fixed the tarp over their tent.
The water was forcing them to go east when what they wanted was north. Austin reminded himself of the map to stay calm. They were supposed to go east along the lake. It didn’t go on forever. It wasn’t really that big. It just seemed that way when he was so desperate to not be here, and when progress was so slow. A cat meowed within a tent under a rainbow flag as a man hunched over to go inside. He was holding a burrito from the food truck.
If Austin hadn’t gotten Sombra C and Mamma had lost her job, they would be living in a tent. She hadn’t made that much money. It wouldn’t have taken long before they were down to nothing. There could be a tarp over her head in a Cloudy Valley park tent city as Austin walked through this one.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 111