Way ahead of them was the minivan. Corbin said, “Hey, there’s Dan!”
“Asshole,” Zaley muttered. “Hope he runs out of gas.”
“Don’t hope that. Then we’ll be sitting here even longer,” Micah said.
“The next time,” Austin said in sudden anger, “the next time some asshole is shooting at you, Micah, duck down for fuck’s sake! Don’t just keep walking to him.”
“Do you know how hard it is to hit someone with a handgun at that distance?” Micah said nonchalantly. “Without any professional training, which I doubt he has? He wasn’t going to hit me. I’m lucky I hit him.”
“Was the kid as awful as her uncle?” Corbin asked.
“No,” Zaley said. “She was nice. They’re trying to get to Washington where her grandparents live. They’re from some place called Barstow in southern California, she and her mother. Someone stole their car on the way up here, so her uncle stole that one. He’s from L.A. The girl didn’t seem to like him that much.”
“I wonder why,” Austin said.
The traffic was so congested that people were walking around the lanes, tapping or banging on windows of vehicles and asking for rides out of San Francisco. Their voices could hardly be heard over the horns. Some had guns, and were tapping on the windows with those. Everyone checked the locks and Corbin said, “Austin, pass me the rifle? We should have one weapon in view just in case here.”
“I have money!” a woman pleaded with the driver of a car in the other lane. She was holding a straggly-haired girl. The driver said something and the woman dove into her pocket to bring out a fistful of bills. The back door opened and she was allowed to get inside.
“You got food?” A guy slapped a wet rag on the windshield of their car and rubbed at a stain. Corbin waved him off with the rifle. The guy spat on the glass before leaving and Zaley flipped on the windshield wipers. A motorcycle went past, having to go slowly due to the people milling around.
Someone opened the trunk in another car after accepting money. A Hispanic man cried, “Thank you! Thank you!” and helped his wife and son inside to sit. Then he crowded in afterwards, his legs hanging over the side to give his family more room.
This was the breakdown of a society, laid out right before Corbin’s eyes. Taking advantage of the plodding traffic, three guys grabbed onto a ladder on the side of a truck and climbed up to sit on the roof. Two people were already up there. A breeze blew past and shook the tatters of ancient gray plastic tied to the chain-link fence running along the freeway.
The haze was burning off. The vehicles inched forward and more people appeared on the lanes to beg or bargain for rides. With four in their little car, those searching usually bypassed them. Couples, singles, families, people holding onto cats and dogs, there was even a man walking around with a live pig, and another holding an aquarium. Lizards were inside. Austin said, “Is that a monkey?” It was, a monkey riding on a guy’s shoulder. Corbin wanted to have Bleu Cheese crushing his lap, or sitting in back between Micah and Austin.
A guy had climbed up on the divider and was holding a Bible overhead. He was preaching that this was divine retribution for a country that lived in sin. A sign around his neck said REPENT FOR ABORTION HOLOCAUST and another propped against his legs was covered in Bible verses.
“Fuck you, I’m not knocking up chicks,” Austin muttered to the preacher, who was now blaming abortion on gay people. Someone else was yelling an insult out of a car window. It only made the dude louder.
“Nostradamus predicted Sombra C?” Micah asked. She was reading a third sign placed along the divider. “What kind of crazy are you, man?”
Traffic picked up from a creep to a crawl, Corbin struggling to contain his impatience. It stopped again once they had moved up three or four car lengths. The man sitting in the trunk shifted uncomfortably. His wife tried to make room for him to bring a leg in.
Dropping her right arm from the steering wheel, Zaley rested it on her lap. Corbin hiked up her shirtsleeve to rub her injury. The flesh was puckered where the bullet had gone in and out and there was a scar from her surgery. Had the gunshot wound happened a hundred years ago, she would have had her arm amputated, or died. She looked down, apology in her expression at the damaged flesh. She was ridiculous sometimes. A few scars weren’t anything to be insecure over. Her arm still being attached was a triumph of medical science, and that she had gotten it to work so well in less than five months was a triumph of her own.
People who had been unsuccessful in scoring a ride were just walking along with the cars, determined to get out of San Francisco even if it had to be by their own two feet. Others were riding by on bicycles and skateboards. A guy wearing two backpacks rolled past on a little girl’s Princess Glam bike, his knees sticking out to the sides to keep from hitting the handlebars while he pedaled. The pink tassels waved in the wind.
An hour passed. People got out of their cars to pee, women squatting down and doing it there by the open door, men filling up water bottles in their cars and hurling them out the windows. The horns blared and blared, but for all the noise, they didn’t ever move much faster.
Halfway through another hour, Corbin was in disbelief when the Golden Gate Bridge finally appeared. It was impossible to see the Shepherds up there or what they were doing. The traffic blocked everything. But the bridge was in view now. Its red arches towered overhead.
“Jesus help us,” Austin said. People on foot were aiming for the right-side walkway along the bridge. The one on the left was cordoned off, blackened and damaged beyond the tape. Kids wailed in their parents’ arms and in strollers, and elderly tottered along with walkers. Other old or infirm people were being pushed along to the open walkway in wheelchairs, and incredibly, one in a stretcher. The woman upon it lifted her liver-spotted arm and brushed her wispy white hair away from her face. She looked like she was a hundred years old. Three younger people took turns guiding the stretcher along. One clasped her hand and spoke. Corbin couldn’t hear his voice through the window, but the words were clear. It’s okay, Gramma.
“This shames me,” Zaley said. It was shaming, how their country had done this to itself. It hadn’t been an attack by aliens or some other country, a natural disaster, just a virus and themselves. That was all it had taken to end their world.
Corbin searched reflexively for his parents in the exodus going to the walkway. It had been two months, more than two months, since he had seen them. Of course his mom and dad weren’t out there, but he saw a dog almost exactly like Bleu Cheese. His mother was going to be so upset about her. The dog had been her best buddy during the day when Corbin was off at school.
People were walking bikes along, others rolling suitcases and laden with bags like asteroid rings around their persons. One woman had a basket on her head. It was unusual to see someone who didn’t have at least a backpack on. From newborns to foot-in-the-grave, there were thousands of them pushing on to the bridge. Some held up hastily made signs at the cars, offering money for rides. A lot of the signs listed their destinations, Portland, Cheyenne, Eureka, or just north. One sign said anywhere. A woman raised her skirt to her upper thighs, showing what she’d give to get to Eugene. Corbin looked away as men hollered at her. After the confinement point, he didn’t want to see or hear shit like that ever again. If those assholes hadn’t been so revolting on the shore the first day the four of them were put in there, they would have gone to the lodge that evening and . . .
He wasn’t going to think about that, or how Elania had been so terrified that she’d clutched his arm until it hurt. He turned himself resolutely to the window. The woman who’d trade sex for a ride was climbing into a car.
Corbin breathed deeply to steady himself. Nothing had happened then, and nothing was happening to him now. They had fought and won, all four of them. If a guy ever approached Zaley like that, mouthing off or trying to touch her, Corbin would beat the shit out of him. The way she had hit Dickhead Dan’s stomach, she’d put up a good fight he
rself. She had changed in such a short time. “How’d you think to do that? Elbow his stomach?” Corbin asked.
“I thought to myself: what would Micah do?” Zaley said. “Then I did it.”
“The world would be so much better if people asked themselves what I would do before they did anything,” Micah said. Austin snorted and Corbin couldn’t agree. Everyone would get hit in the head with a brick.
Focusing on signs, he read them slowly. Many were HAVE YOU SEEN ME posters, listing details below pictures of the missing. Black faces, white faces, old faces, young faces, and one sign held the picture of an entire family of six. THE MESSINGERS. They had vanished from their home on the second of April.
This was a breakdown. It was incredible in all the wrong ways.
In minutes, Corbin had a better view of the situation laying in wait. Shepherds were standing in the northbound lanes and on the walkway. There wasn’t any order to which cars they checked. Two got waved through and the third stopped; one waved through and the next two having its occupants and trunk checked. Traffic was too thick for Zaley to lane dive. Beyond the Shepherds . . . Corbin’s heart jumped at those lanes going north and away from this nightmare. Traffic wasn’t going too quickly on them either. The Shepherds could be checking on the other side as well. So Corbin shouldn’t relax and expect to be home free if they made it through here.
A moving truck was stopped and the driver told to get out. He walked around and lifted the back, the Shepherd following along. Rather than furniture, the van was packed with dozens of people. They blinked in the sudden light and looked out warily to the Shepherd, who raised his gun and yelled at them to come forward and show their necks one at a time.
“Nuns,” Micah said. Nuns were caught at the Shepherd check on the walkway. “I’ve never seen nuns wearing backpacks over their habits before. Then again, I haven’t seen many nuns.”
“That’s not right,” Austin said in offense. “You don’t make a nun show you her neck.”
“Why?” Micah asked. “You’re not even Catholic. Is there something special about their necks?”
“No, I’m not Catholic. But it’s just wrong! They’ve taken holy vows to chastity and poverty and dedicated their lives to Christ. You respect that.”
“To play the devil’s advocate, Aussie, if the Shepherds let nuns through without checking them out, we’d all be dressed like nuns.”
Corbin would dress up like a nun for a guarantee of getting through a brace. Other people waiting at the walkway were in agreement with Austin, and were yelling at the Shepherd to leave the nuns alone. One guy was so offended that he got in the Shepherd’s face to express his opinion about it. Micah said, “Bet he was a choir boy or went to a private Catholic school forty years ago.”
The Shepherd pointed his gun to the man’s forehead. The nuns cried out to stop him from shooting, one putting her hand on their defender’s shoulder soothingly. They showed their necks and were allowed to pass. The man walked with them, throwing dirty looks back to the Shepherd now accosting someone else. The nuns began to sing a hymn and Corbin startled to hear it, reminded of going down the hill behind Casper Santana. He disliked how his mind returned there at the slightest provocation. Some people gravitated through the crowds on the walkway to be closer to the nuns, singing along and even reaching out to touch their habits.
After several more minutes had gone by, the Shepherd waved the moving van on. The driver pulled down the door on all of the people inside and climbed into the cab. The line inched up, Corbin memorizing the details of the three cars that now separated them from the Shepherd. First there was a blue sedan. The trunk was packed and tied shut with rope since it couldn’t be closed. The Shepherd glanced at the person driving and went to look at the trunk.
Behind the sedan was a filthy green Clizz, splattered with bird shit over its length and two heads barely visible through the window. The trunk was dented on one side and the plates were from Oregon. Corbin’s eyes were drawn away from it to another lane where the guard there let three cars go through without examining any of them. If only they’d been over there! The lucky cars drove through the tollbooths and joined the slow streams going over the bridge. Southbound traffic was still moving along a little faster, Shepherds stopping only every fifth or sixth vehicle for quick neck checks. A second Mr. Foods semi was among them in the curb lane, followed by a smaller white truck with RELIEF painted on the side in red.
In line after the Clizz was an ancient tan car huffing exhaust. Passengers were cram-packed inside. Bumper stickers covered the trunk. Peace signs, Darwin fish, old NO WAR WITH IRAQ admonitions, some were covered in part by others laid over them. There were political stickers for elections dating back two decades. Corbin counted the heads inside and gave up at ten. The car was riding low from the weight. The driver had been on the horn through the whole moving van inspection and was still blaring it.
The Shepherd working in this lane was a squat black guy. Corbin said, “Do you know him?”
“No, and I don’t recognize any of the others either,” Zaley said. The guard moved away from the sedan and waved it on. Then he beckoned to the Clizz, scanned the occupants, and pointed it ahead. The loaded car lurched forward, windows opening on the driver’s side and the horn cutting off so one of the occupants could bellow at the Shepherd about what a waste of gas this had been. The Shepherd demanded that they show their necks and open the trunk for inspection.
Heads bobbed around behind the windows, some showing their necks and others appearing to refuse. The Shepherd stuck his gun into the window to encourage them. Then heads bobbed around some more. The Shepherd went to the other side of the car to look through those windows. After that, he walked to the trunk. He rapped on the top sharply to make the driver open it.
Food. Soda. Water. Backpacks. It was tightly packed. Corbin’s mouth watered at the food. The Shepherd helped himself to a diet Pizoom and a travel package of cookies. After he closed the trunk, he waved them on. The driver shouted, “Fuck you!”
“Move up,” Micah said.
“I can’t,” Zaley said. “He hasn’t waved to me.”
Sliding the cookies into his pocket, the Shepherd cracked open the soda and took a long swallow. Then he waved up Zaley impatiently. Corbin had a dubious relationship with God, but the plea still came to his mind. Please, God, let him just pass us on.
The man motioned for them to stop. Zaley hit the brakes a little too hard and brought the car to a jolting halt. The guy beckoned for her to roll down the window. She nodded and complied. After another swallow of the soda, he said, “Pop the back.”
“Okay.” Zaley pulled the lever. Corbin thought frantically of what they had in there, the gas cans and tubes, the bottle boogie boards, nothing interesting. The car rocked from the Shepherd closing the trunk. His boots scratched over the lane as he came back to Zaley’s window, Corbin so anxious that he thought he was going to vomit. The person behind them laid on the horn.
Two brown eyes moved over them cursorily. The guard’s mouth opened (oh God, he was going to ask them to step out, Micah would shoot him and then what the hell were they supposed to do?) and he said, “Move on.”
Nodding again, Zaley eased onto the gas. No one said a word until her window was up and then all four broke out in screams of joy. Austin’s arms came around the headrest to hug Corbin, who stomped his feet on the floor and smacked his knee with his own bow in its plastic wrapping. The arms fell away and went to Zaley, who protested, “Austin, I’m driving!” But her voice was thrilled and he was laughing. They were through, they were through, and the bridge was theirs.
Stuffing the sweatshirt into her backpack, Micah shouted, “I had my finger on the trigger!” Not far ahead of them was the bumper sticker car and she exclaimed to it, “Thank you!”
“Why are you thanking them?” Zaley asked.
“For being assholes. That was exactly what needed to happen, us being behind the squeaky wheel. They gave him shit and we didn’t, so thei
r squeaky wheel got the grease and we coasted on. Thank you, shitheads!”
Passing by the tollbooths, they joined the creeping lines of cars beyond. Someone had run out of gas in the slow lane, so every time traffic moved, three guys popped out of the car and pushed it. Corbin looked ahead eagerly and cracked open his window. The walkway was swarming with people, the nuns still singing in the distance. No one was posing for pictures or stopping to admire the view over the side. Everyone was just going north, the faces grim yet happy to be leaving San Francisco. The haze was gone and the day was bright, even brighter now that they were through the brace. Waves rippled below and Corbin yelled to not be swimming in them.
“Do not let go of the rope!” a woman was yelling among the passerby. Ten special needs adults were hanging onto a rope, the end in her palm. She was guiding them on through the crush. Her other hand was resting on the back of a motorized wheelchair in the lead. Ninety-five percent of the people in there were going north, but a few hugged close to the barrier and were forcing their way south.
Children sat on their parents’ shoulders, a little girl waving to the top of the bridge. Dogs barked and people chattered, the voices of the nuns sweeping along in the breeze. Others were singing too, a woman with a big opera voice riding above all the rest. Some weirdo was in a clown costume, including the fake red nose and makeup. Another dude was almost naked, dressed in a tiny blue swimsuit snuggled around his groin. His belly flopped over the top of it, and the only other thing he had on were sandals. A boy hugging a violin case to his chest stared at the guy’s lack of apparel and nudged his mother, who just told him to stay close. Wind blew over the bridge, tossing around hair and hands clapping down on hats.
“I have to pee,” Austin complained.
“Stick your dick out the window or hold it,” Micah said. “There isn’t anywhere to pull over and I’m not giving you one of our water bottles for that.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 122