Expired antibiotics had to be better than none. They walked to his bright yellow home halfway down the block, Bob saying to the baby, “And maybe we’ll find you a toy in the garage. Oh, we’ve got some baby things in there still. What do you think about that, young man?” Mars babbled in reply.
Trees shook in the wind and birds sang among them. Garbage was piled up and reeking at the curbs between cars without fuel to move. Yards had gone wild with flowers and grass, some of which had been cleared for fire pits and gardens. It was beautiful and ugly, familiar yet not, old and new together in its disharmony.
A very old woman looked out from a recliner by the window. Bob held up the cans of soup to show her, but a smile was creasing her wrinkled face at Mars. She tapped on the glass and beckoned eagerly to invite them in.
Corbin
He knew in general. Specifics were too hard. Every week, they swallowed three more of those pills. Every week, they had three pills fewer. Sometime in late August or early September, they were going to run out of Zyllevir. Then the end was inevitable.
It was so strange to consider the end when he felt fine, just as fine as he had felt before he was infected with Sombra C. But his health was an illusion. He wouldn’t be fine for long if the pills ran out.
Corbin planned to do as Elania had done, a shot to the head when he started slipping down that one-way stream to feral. But first, while his mind was still whole, he had to write Zaley a note. Please be happy. She should do all of the things that he wished he could have done. He wanted her to have a good life despite the hurt at losing all of them. He didn’t know how to bring it up in conversation, or if he should. There was time, so he let it go.
Not a lot of time. Late August or early September. It was the end of June, giving him two months at most to live in safety from his virus. Anything could happen in two months. The world could straighten itself out or Shepherds give off attacking the harbor. But so far, the progress was going in the wrong direction. The relief trucks came every four days now, not three, and once it didn’t come at all due to being hijacked on its way. People had panicked when the truck failed to show. Some went from campsite to campsite, offering rolls of bills for food like anything could be done with them. A teenaged boy was shot to death for sneaking into someone’s backyard to steal a chicken. Micah shot at another man, who crept up to their campsite one night to relieve them of the kayak. The bike locks she used to connect the kayak to their tents made them shake when he tried to slide the boat away. People flooded out of Sausalito in those days to walk up to Marin, where it was said there was more to be had. The fewer hooks and nets going into the water were fine with Corbin. He wished he could see through the surface for the reassurance that crabs and fish were plentiful.
He’d write a note to Zaley and another one to his parents, in case it was ever possible for her to deliver it. He wanted his parents to know how hard he had tried to live, and how much he was going to miss them. In one of the backpacks were pencils and pens. For paper, he’d have to find something or use the pages of the robot book from the Cloudy Valley High School library. The dedication page had a lot of empty space on it. Still, he kept his eye out for abandoned notebooks or computer paper. With his handwriting and spelling issues, he was going to need several attempts at his letters. Nobody cared but him, yet he wanted his last words to read well. Corbin had been lucky in his family, so lucky indeed when he compared it to Zaley’s and Austin’s. His girlfriend and his parents should have good letters. They’d be short, but heartfelt.
Last night, Micah, Austin, and Corbin hadn’t spoken while taking their Zyllevir. Three swallows, three pills gone, and Corbin returned to his tent to gather Zaley close. In the morning, he walked her into Sausalito to wait for the relief truck. Then he lurked around the trees, looking out at the long lines of white boats bobbing on the water. The sky was gray and the atmosphere felt petulant. Makeshift weathermen on the pier the day before had spoken of an out-of-season storm on the way.
They had passed the one-year anniversary of Ford Looper’s infection. The girlfriend, the roommate, the prostitute, the clients . . . the circles had rippled out wider and wider until they collected Corbin Li in the turbulence, sweeping him away from Cloudy Valley and depositing him here in Sausalito. In one lousy year, his life and his world had become utterly unrecognizable.
Over an hour had passed before Zaley came back, giving over Mars and shifting the bag of food to her hip. It was full of random things, like someone had gone blindly through Mr. Foods and dumped food into a basket by feel. The baby was fussy, needing to go down for his morning nap, so Corbin turned him around in the carrier and patted his back. Mars nestled against him. If they ran out of Zyllevir, if Corbin had to write those notes, he should address one to Mars. Mars was all Zaley was going to have, and Corbin wanted him to grow up and take care of her.
As hungry for information as he was for food, Corbin said, “Tell me everything. How are the weird women?”
“Weird as always. The guys handing out food today said that they don’t know how long it will keep coming,” Zaley said. “They lost one of their workers at the stop before Sausalito. Some guys from a militia drove up and opened fire, trying to seize control of the truck. The workers mowed them down, but Adam took a bullet to the chest. His body was in the back. The truck is riddled with bullet holes.”
“I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
“I didn’t see much. They put a towel over his chest. It was only his second time working on a relief team. He had light brown hair in a ponytail and the cross on his necklace was stained with blood. The others said if it gets too dangerous for them to deliver food, their organization would have no choice but to pull back. The military is trying to get control of the militias, but it’s been hard. These people even have grenades, illegal fragmentation grenades.”
Militias. Sausalito hadn’t seen that problem yet, to Corbin’s knowledge. “Did they say anything else about these militias?”
“Some. The depot was attacked last week. Some militia wanted to claim the trains for themselves. Military personnel have been stationed there to make sure that doesn’t happen. But the fight lasted for a few days. I can’t tell you the name of the militia. A man told us, but it was in Spanish, so I don’t remember it. That one has been a huge problem in Marin lately, and so have Iron Fists. That one extends up farther north. They’re commandeering ranches and farms, claiming warehouses and businesses, selling some of what’s inside and keeping the rest for themselves-”
“Selling for what exactly?”
“Sex. Drugs. Weapons. Loyalty. Information. What people are getting from relief isn’t enough. They’ll do or give anything for more.” The bag crinkled in her arms. “If it weren’t for fishing, we’d be a lot hungrier. A lot of people live in places where they don’t have fishing as an option. But the militia didn’t win the depot. They did hijack a truck last week. The bodies of the relief team were found on the side of a road. The truck was dumped miles away after getting cleaned out of food and fuel. And there’s a fire out of control somewhere in the northeast. The response time is so slow and it took out a whole city. There have been smaller fires all over Marin. The workers told us to be very careful with our cook fires.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence. Corbin wanted to leave the United States. Whatever this country was turning into, he didn’t need to be a part of it. Canada had to be better, but it wasn’t taking any more immigrants.
As they approached the tents, Mars thrust his hand at Corbin’s mouth and snaked a finger between his lips. Corbin wiped the trace of wetness off Mars’ finger, knowing that finger would soon be in Mars’ own mouth. The baby pulled away and whined. Then he tried to reinsert his fingers in Corbin’s mouth and wailed when Corbin turned his head to avoid them.
Austin looked up from a book, happy to have them back. Along with the tattered women’s magazine, they had a little library. Zaley had gotten old, ragged paperbacks out of a box left
at a curb for trash. Mysteries, romance, high fantasy, the others picked through them all even though the fantasy was the third in a series and made little sense without the first two for context. Corbin had just looked at the covers and read the blurbs on the back of them. None was interesting enough to make him read.
He handed over the baby, who yowled and flailed. “It’s naptime. He’s grumpy.” Even with four people, the amount of work it took to get one infant through the day was incredible. Zaley put the food in the tent and tried to tell Austin about the militia, but he didn’t want to hear about it or the relief worker who had died.
Fussing, Mars bumped Austin’s chest with his forehead. Austin grunted from pain and said, “Dude, you have a hard head.”
“Dada,” Mars whimpered.
They stared in astonishment at the little blond head, Zaley’s fingers pausing over the box of cereal that she had been opening. “Did he-” she began to ask.
“Did you just call me Dada?” Austin asked Mars in disbelief.
None of them had any idea what was normal vocabulary for a kid this age, and they didn’t even know how old Mars was. Dada could be just more babble, or maybe the baby was connecting dada to Austin. “Is Micah calling you that in front of him?” Corbin asked. Micah was calling herself mama.
“When we play in the early morning, she tells him to give toys to Dada Aussie. But she’s only done that a few times. Once it was Dada Shit Churro, but usually Dada Aussie,” Austin said. Mars tilted his head back and Austin touched their foreheads. “Do you want me to be your dada? I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, Marsie. There are better guys out there than me.” He sniffed, made a little teary by dada, and looked with a small measure of pride at Zaley and Corbin. “Know what this means? He likes me better than Micah. I’m his first word.”
“Are you going to rub that in?” Corbin asked. They had to stop swearing around the kid or he was going to end up on the first day of preschool strolling in through the door and saying hey, fuckers, I’m Mars.
“Unbearably,” Austin said. The fussing picked up and he carried Mars into the tent for a nap. The kayak was gone, Micah out fishing and Corbin relieved that he wasn’t doing it today. Every time he was out there, he worried about what was going on at their camp and the pier. If anything went wrong, he wouldn’t have a clue out on the waves.
Once the baby was napping, they had some cereal. Then Zaley picked up her hoop net and their meager supply of stinking fish heads from the day before. Getting the bucket, Corbin walked her to the pier. There they parted and he went to the rocks to hunt for worms and tiny green crabs. They were ugly things just a few inches long. The old man named Bob had told Zaley there were traps for them, but Corbin had to do this by hand.
With people doing the same, he went farther away. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, and his chances were better at finding bait in a place where others weren’t searching. There weren’t so many now. With the missed relief truck, Sausalito had cleared out fast.
Turn over rock. Look. Turn over rock. Look. Turn over rock. Look. Grab. It was brainless work. Trash was sprinkled around on the shore and bobbing on the water. Farther out was a body floating facedown. A seagull was perched on the back, just standing there and gazing around at the world.
The fish and crabs would eat that body, and then Corbin would eat those fish and crabs with human meat in their stomachs. That put human meat in his stomach, which was disgusting. People were eating birds too, when they could catch them. A man at the pier had been planning to swim out to Alcatraz, make it his own personal island and live in the old prison. Zaley had heard him talking all about it with Bob, who had been giving him pointers on crabbing. From taking the tour as a kid, the man remembered there were apple and fig trees growing there, sweet peas and blackberries. The prison held cells with beds in them for visitors to see. It was practically the Garden of Eden. Bob had pointed out to him that it was a long swim through very cold, choppy water, far from an easy pull through a pool. The man hadn’t been dissuaded. He just patted his laden backpacks and said it wasn’t that far away. He was a good swimmer.
Had the guy made it? Perhaps that body the bird was using as a raft was his. It had been a dumb plan. Even if he’d gotten there after all, what was he going to do if there wasn’t running water or if other people had already claimed the island for themselves? Swim back to Sausalito or go down to San Francisco? He should have stolen a boat, built a raft, at the very least worn a life vest to counterbalance the weight of his backpacks.
Corbin stepped on a pamphlet. He picked it up and the words on the cover came to him slowly. LOVE. SAY IT WITH DIAMONDS. In amusement, he opened it up to two pages of beautiful engagement rings. The jewelry store was located in Marin and called Eternity. Had he stayed at the country club’s winter party and with Sally, this could have been his life. Feeling lost among the display cases at Eternity in all the bling, baffled if Sally was going to like the diamonds clustered in a heart shape on white gold more than the diamonds in a square shape on rose gold. Or the pear shape, or framed with sapphires, or the gigantic one that had diamonds going all the way around the band. That alternate universe Corbin would have gone nuts over it, and guessed wrong no matter what he chose.
He forced himself to read every word of the pamphlet. As a punishment or a lesson, he wasn’t sure which. It was so apropos to his life that it seemed like it had been placed here on purpose. He should have known from the moment he’d told her that he didn’t like being called Corbie and she kept on doing it that they weren’t headed anywhere but down. He debated taking the pamphlet to the campsite to show the others, but returned it to the ground where he’d found it. They needed bait far more than interesting trash. And there was a lot of trash around. He’d stepped on tons of it.
The search resumed. He turned over a rock and caught a crab. There wasn’t much today, even here where no one else was looking. Soon he’d have to get back, relieve Austin, and watch Mars play with his toys. It was fascinating to watch the kid problem-solve. If Mars was here, and Toy was there, how did he get to it? Determined attempts at crawling followed, and then he had eventual success. Corbin could have given him the toy, but then Mars wouldn’t learn how to crawl. Crawling didn’t just happen. They had gotten a small collection of toys from Micah’s raids of abandoned homes and also from the Shints: rainbow stacking cups, a dozen stuffed animals, a rattle, and a book that Mars liked to chew on. Yesterday he’d accidentally smacked himself in the eye with the rattle and cried into Corbin’s shoulder at the indignity. Then he wanted to play with it again, their previous altercation gone from his mind.
Dada. Christ, if that had fallen from his lips on purpose, then the kid was getting seriously attached to them. That wasn’t something to celebrate when they lived like this. He was identifying them as his parents and they couldn’t be. They had to move him along, and quickly. It wasn’t good for a kid’s forming psyche to get passed around from family to family. He wasn’t a piece of furniture or a pet fish in a bowl. At some point, that became deleterious. Micah should have left him at the police station in Redfern. The kid needed to see a pediatrician, get his vaccines, be weighed and measured . . . he was eating all sorts of things that he might be too young to digest or allergic to and not one of the four of them had a younger sibling, much experience in babysitting, or any idea what they were doing. The baby needed his own family, or some family that wasn’t four clueless high school seniors and most of whom were on the run with Sombra C. Failing that, then Corbin wanted a book about the first year of life, so they didn’t do something wrong and hurt their little dude inadvertently.
Turn over rock. Look. Turn over rock. Look. Grab. Corbin made his way to a tiny grove of trees that ran all the way to the water.
Then he was looking down the barrel of a rifle, and a woman’s angry, acne-scarred face behind it. Her long, dirty blonde hair was in a braid. He dropped the bucket, spilling the bait. All of it scuttled away. On the alabaster skin of her neck was
a stamp reading 3%.
After everything he had been through in these last months, Corbin had thoughtlessly walked right into a shaded area on a bright day. He wasn’t even armed. The handgun was with Zaley at the pier, and Austin had the kid’s rifle at the campsite. The bow and arrows Corbin had left in his tent. The bucket at his feet was all he had.
“Please don’t shoot,” he whispered in terror. The fact of the rifle and the tended hair suddenly gave him pause. She wasn’t feral. Her jeans and T-shirt were wrinkled but mostly clean, and she didn’t smell from not bathing.
“Don’t shoot,” she said in imitation. “So you can tell others where we are?”
“No!” Corbin raised a hand, intending to scrape off the cosmetics over his own stamp. She butted his chest with the rifle to make him stop and he begged, “I’m not going to tell. I have Sombra C, too.”
“Don’t you lie to me.”
“I have it, I swear. I’ve just covered up my stamp.”
The rifle lifted and he closed his eyes. He loved his parents and Zaley, his friends and his life, and they were what he’d carry with him into whatever came next. Cold metal touched his neck and trailed down. She was selecting the perfect place to shoot him.
No. She was scraping off the cosmetics to see if he had been telling the truth. He opened his eyes. The rifle lowered and the woman said less heatedly, “What the hell are you doing over here?”
“I was hunting for bait,” Corbin said. “That’s it. That’s all. I’ll go away and I won’t tell anyone you’re here.”
“’Course you won’t, we’ll just point our fingers right back at you,” said a man stepping out from behind a tree. “Sure that’s real, Kelly?”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 131