“Shit,” Corbin whispered. He held out his hands to stop them. Daughter was coming around the end of the building, her eyes on her old music player. The narrow trees were spaced here just far enough apart that she’d be able to see them. All she had to do was look over.
The rifle was still against her shoulder. It was a little gun, short and lightweight, made for kids. It couldn’t have weighed five pounds. Pressing a button on the music player, the girl rested on the wall of the building and rocked her head to the song.
Micah slipped from the trees. She was taking control of this situation. Oblivious to her presence, the girl just chilled to the music. Then she sighed and turned around.
“Don’t scream,” Micah warned. Only two feet away, she had the gun pointed at the girl’s face. Two blue eyes widened in terror. The music was still pounding from the one earphone in her ear, and coming out from the other one dangling at her chest.
“Please don’t,” the girl whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh God, please don’t kill me. I’m only sixteen.”
“Yeah? You sound like a fucking four-year-old. Set your rifle down on the ground. Slowly,” Micah ordered. The girl did it. “What’s your name?”
“Candy. C-Candice.”
“Well, Candy-Candice, how many came with you up here?”
“Just my father. He . . . please . . . we live down the road and our house has been broken into twice. He got beaten up the last time and he’s just trying to keep it from happening again-”
“Do I look like I care?” Micah asked. “Where is he now?”
“Checking out the buildings on the other side of the road. Making sure you guys aren’t trying to set up tents around here. People keep trying.” Her eyes darted around frantically and Micah caught her attention with the gun.
“I’m going to tell you what to do, if you want to come away from this alive,” Micah said in an imitation of the baby’s voice. “You’re going to jog into those trees, and you’ll go for the next twenty minutes. No yelling, no screaming, no chatting on the walkie-talkie, not even looking over your shoulder. If you come across anyone and they ask what you’re doing, you’re just taking a walk. Then you’re going to go home. Got me?” The girl nodded vigorously and Micah’s voice returned to normal. “If you don’t do these things, do you know what’s going to happen to you?”
“No,” the girl said in a trembling voice.
“I’m going to tell my friends at our camp all about you, Candy-Candice. They like pretty girls. And I got a lot of friends. I’ll tell them where you live, down the road over there, so you can have some friends, too. Do you see where I’m going with this?” Micah smiled with a sick tinge of flirtation and let her eyes slide down to the girl’s tiny breasts.
“Yes,” the girl whispered in horror. It was what Micah had killed the kings for, but the difference was that she had no intention of telling anybody about Candy-Candice or where she lived.
Micah motioned to the trees and the girl jogged over the pavement obediently. A man shouted Candy. The lie was working better than expected. The girl didn’t take a break in stride to hear her father calling her name. That was how much she wanted to protect herself. Picking up the rifle, Micah beckoned for the boys to come out of the trees.
They just had one to worry about now. She gave the kid’s rifle to Austin and edged to the corner. Daddy was coming over, but he was still in the road that ran between the buildings. His voice filled with irritation, he shouted for his daughter. Candy-Candice was jogging fast between the trees. It wouldn’t be long before she was gone.
“Go back,” Micah whispered. They retreated around the building, going about it clockwise in a game of cat-and-mouse. Repeated shouts for Candy echoed from the other side. The guy was getting angrier and angrier at the lack of response.
At the corner of the archives by the road, they turned and slunk along the building past a door that had been padlocked and chained shut. Now the man was over where Micah had confronted the girl. Hopefully she’d jogged far enough away that her father didn’t see her. Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea if he did. He’d give chase and let them go on unmolested.
Parked at the end of the building across the street was a car that likely belonged to Daddy and his family. It was covered in honor student bumper stickers. The man came into view as Micah checked around the corner. Shooting his gun into the air, he bellowed, “Candy! Where the hell are you?” He broke into a jog and passed between the buildings.
“Zaley could be up there on the other side!” Corbin whispered in fright. Sprinting across the divide, he made the second line of buildings with Austin and Micah on his heels.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” the man shouted. “Get out! Does this look like some kind of damn driveway to you? Does this look like your home?”
Today had sucked from the moment Micah woke up to the blast that took Elania away, and it just continued to suck. Corbin hit the corner first. Spinning around, he shouted, “Get the fuck away from her!”
Micah and Austin whipped around the corner. The guy had Zaley against the wall of the building halfway down, pointing his gun to her chest as she cringed. Micah fired into the air before he got a chance to swing the rifle around. He dove for shelter behind their car.
If he’d been smart, he would have grabbed Zaley for a hostage. They closed in on the car fast, Micah firing a second and third time so he didn’t have a chance to peer through the windows and take a shot at them. A bit of his hair was visible through the back window. Rolling over the hood, she landed in a crouch on the gravel. His rifle was pointed at her, and her gun was pointed at him. Both of them had their fingers on the trigger.
Sweat beading his forehead, the man said, “You think I haven’t done this before?”
“I’m sure you have,” Micah said. “But just so you know, so have I.”
Austin and Corbin trained the rifle and bow at the guy. The kiddie rifle got his attention and his anger vanished to aghast. “How’d you get my daughter’s rifle? What did you do to my daughter?”
“She wanted to play in the big leagues,” Micah said. “Last I saw, she was bleeding her way home. Hope she makes it.” It was unnerving him how she smiled when she spoke. She was looking happy when she wasn’t truly feeling anything.
“Where’s Elania?” Zaley asked.
“Later,” Corbin said tersely. “Let’s take his rifle.”
“No,” Micah said. The kid’s rifle was dumb but relatively new. His rifle was old and unappealing, the wood scratched up and the barrel rusted. It was a forgotten in the attic for two generations kind of rifle. Something told her not to take it. “Empty out the bullets.”
The guy emptied out the bullets.
“Now let’s take a walk,” Micah said. To the others, she ordered, “Get in the car.”
She kept the guy at gunpoint as they walked around the side of the building. The rifle was down along his side, neutered by the removal of the bullets. Her numbness snapped to rage and she screamed, “Turn around and stand against the wall!”
“Please,” the guy pleaded as he did it. “I got two kids. I wasn’t going to kill you. I promise. I just wanted to scare you off. Everything has gone crazy and I have to protect my family.”
She should kill him. He had gotten in her way and she should make him bleed. But first she was curious. “Did you kill those people in the woods? The ones at the tents? Tell the truth. I’ll know if you don’t.”
“Two of them,” the man said hastily. “I killed two of them. The woman was in a bad way when I got there, so I just let her keep on having it. I’d hurt her earlier but not killed her outright. I shot the men.”
“Why did you kill them?”
“The cops don’t come. Those three were sniffing around my property. They did that to all the houses on our lane, breaking in to take food and pills and things. Hardly two, three days can go by without someone new around, breaking into our car, our house. I’d chased those guys off twice. Then they
pried a board off my window and broke the glass one day. I shot the woman as she was coming in. They ran off and I tracked them to that camp.”
“What about that dead woman on the shoulder?”
“No, I didn’t kill her. Her body just turned up there one day. I’m just trying to keep people away. I don’t want anyone thinking our lane is an easy mark. Please, how bad is my girl hurt?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Micah said.
Was she going to feel anything if she killed him? She was cold, she was hot, she was furious, she was numb, and in the sweep of breeze stained with the smell of rot, she heard a whispered fragment of Elania’s prayers. The ones she gave for the Jewish people in the confinement point were being carried on the wind to circle the world.
Say goodbye to my family. That was essentially what the note had said, but the message was all jumbled up. A few of the words at the bottom of the page were indecipherable. Whatever Elania had tried to express was lost to her Sombra C. The flame from the lighter had eaten up the paper and Micah stamped it out on the green. She wasn’t ever going to speak of it to anybody.
The man was begging. He’d been begging for his life and she hadn’t heard. She hadn’t listened in the sorting either, a few people vying to win the gold medal at the Sad Olympics and avoid the outside restroom. The only relevant part to Micah was how well they were still capable of speaking. Her measures were taken in other ways at the confinement point. She didn’t know which measures to use for this man.
They were gathering behind her.
They hadn’t vanished when she escaped the confinement point. She felt the weight of the presences as she had before, Grandpa Cloud and Daffodil, Justin and Clarissa, frail Mrs. Nakamura and her interpreter, Jerry and the twins along with everyone else to run for the fence. Riddled with holes and his arms thrown out wide, Casper was among them. The kings she had struck low were here in the crowd, hooting Tarley in their midst, the gang members and pervert and schizophrenic she’d put out to die . . .
All of them were watching her. They wanted to see what she was going to do.
Elania stepped forward. There wasn’t any anger in her eyes over the note. Back in her whole mind, she understood.
There wasn’t really anyone there. Micah felt them all the same.
Killing him wasn’t going to give her a rush, or clear up the muddiness that she was feeling. If she pulled the trigger, she just added one more face to the legions. She didn’t want this gun-toting dickhead following her around for the rest of her life. There were enough people behind her already. Let someone else kill him.
“Get out of here, you worthless shit,” Micah said in vituperation. The guy ran. She unloaded a shot to the clouds to make him shriek and go faster.
Austin flew around the corner. His dark eyes searched the ground for a body and Micah said, “I let him go.”
“Okay,” Austin said. He was trying to read her face. She gave him a bright smile, screams bunching up behind her teeth and spilling back down her throat. They roiled in her stomach. Not fooled, he didn’t return the smile. Instead, he hugged her.
“I thought I heard Elania praying for a second,” Micah said into his chest.
“Souls visit their loved ones,” Austin whispered.
She didn’t believe that. It was the equivalent of a muscle memory, an action she had done so many times that it stayed taut in her arms and legs. Hearing Elania’s voice was the same, a chemical misfiring in her neurons that happened because she was so used to hearing that voice. The misfiring would fade in time, and Elania recede with it.
Please don’t recede. But that was going to happen. Micah would recede one day, too. She wanted to recede, to stand among these presences as a fellow spirit and not their leader. “I would have carried her Pewter letter,” Micah said. “They’re going to be at the harbor, and I know how much they’d cherish it.”
She wasn’t that much of an asshole to throw it away as unneeded weight. The difference between her and normal was one lousy point. The suicide note would only bring pain to Elania’s family, a keen mind eradicated by a tiny virus. But its message she could carry, and say that Elania had told her to relay it. That was a good lie to tell. It affirmed what they knew, that she had loved her parents and brothers. They could hold close the letter from Pewter and never know (they would know, but not really know from the stark evidence of the suicide note) that mere weeks later, Elania was too compromised to attend any kind of college, let alone one of the best ones in the United States. That vicious reality didn’t need to be in their faces.
They wouldn’t be able to throw that terrible note away when it was the last thing Elania had composed. They would keep it forever, and that was how long it would hurt them. The flame had been a mercy. She had done it out of respect for the Douglases, and in memory of Elania as the friend Micah had had for years.
“I can’t die,” Micah said. “I told you that in Cloudy Valley. If I want to live that much, I’ll just keep going.”
“That’s not true,” Austin said.
“I know. And I don’t know. Now I want to die, I’m ready to let go, and you won’t let me die.”
“Why do you want to die so badly?”
“So it’s on my own terms,” Micah blurted. It always boiled down to control with her. Elania’s thoughts in the note had been out of control. Micah didn’t want to be at the mercy of a watchtower guard, a man at a brace, a virus in her bloodstream. If she shot herself in the parking lot of the archives, it was because she wanted to do it. She had chosen the time and place and means. The only casualty of her act was herself, and she wasn’t a casualty when she pulled the trigger of her own accord.
“Elania would take what you want to throw away,” Austin said, and a small, familiar flicker of enjoyment pierced through the numbness at how she had angered him. “She’d take it and be grateful. So would Clarissa and Casper and everyone.”
“That’s like telling me to eat my peas because children in Appalachia are starving,” Micah said. She would gladly donate her health and years to Elania or Clarissa. “That doesn’t make me like them. It’s just supposed to make me feel guilty for wanting something else.” It didn’t work, but that was the intent. One didn’t have anything to do with the other.
“It’s not the same. It’s so much deeper than that. You just can’t see it,” Austin said. He breathed out in a huff and released her. “You won’t ever see it. So you just live because we need you to live. When we’re all dead, you can do whatever you want.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She was the youngest of the four and men had shorter life spans than women. So did abused kids in studies, the childhood trauma shortening their lives. That took care of Zaley. These were such wonderfully awful thoughts that she reveled in them. She didn’t want any of her friends to die. But they would in time and she’d get her control back.
She wished that she had said no to Clarissa, for any alternative to her hand on the blade. That presence was still here so heavily when the others had evanesced. The little girl had given Micah her love and trust, and there was no kingdom of heaven in which Micah could ever explain why she had done what she did. It would remain forever unfinished between them. It was going to cross the Golden Gate Bridge with her, live in the harbor with her, and go to her friends’ funerals with her. That presence would always be there.
A hand came out and she accepted it. Austin said, “Do you want to drive? Corbin just told Zaley and . . .” He didn’t need to finish, and his eyes welled up with tears. Zaley was crying for Elania, and not in any condition to drive.
“I’ll drive,” Micah said. They went to the car. The other two were in the back seat, Zaley’s blonde head tucked under Corbin’s dark one. Austin got into the passenger seat and slid the kiddie rifle underneath it. Putting the gun in the center console, Micah closed the door and slipped on the seatbelt. She couldn’t die yet. When the last of them went and these ties were undone . . . she’d give
herself a great death for an old woman. Barrel down a freeway at midnight in a brand new V-6, heavy metal screaming from the speakers, windows down and no seatbelt on, aim for a tree and end it in a fiery boom. Clarissa would be with her there, too.
But not today.
Elania would have approved of letting that man go. So that one was for her. Micah released the parking brake and eased down on the accelerator, steeling herself as the car moved onto the road for whatever new problem the world was planning to throw their way.
END OF VOLUME FOUR
THE ZOMBIES: VOLUME FIVE
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Set Thirteen
Zaley
Once upon a time, the world had been an easier place.
Not at the Mattazollo home, of course, but outside of it. Children went to school and adults to work. The streets buzzed with vehicles. People paced down sidewalks to shops and automatic doors to banks hissed open. Mail carriers strode from box to box, airplanes glided overhead, and fire trucks wailed by. There was an order to the days and nights, a rhythm to the seasons, a network of adaptive responses people learned to the problems inherent in the system. An accident on the freeway and you called ahead to work to say you’d be late. An empty shelf where your favorite brand of cookie usually sat and you either selected one of seventy kinds of others, went to another store, or ordered it in bulk online. If you were sick, you went to the doctor; if you were really sick, the hospital; if you were dead, the morgue.
You couldn’t conceive of that world not being there.
Zaley hadn’t, not really. Two plus two made four, Mr. Foods was open seven days a week, what was up must come down. Things were crazy in Egypt or Afghanistan, yet you could live in the conceit that those places were very far away and the chaos wouldn’t trespass too far over their borders. Everything close by was doing fine, and would continue to do fine since it always had as far back as you could remember.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 117