In another garage, she discovered an emergency supplies cache in a trashcan. It was a lame attempt at alleviating a disaster. The car seat gained a flashlight and a package of batteries, a first aid kit, a bottle of vitamins specifically designed for post-menopausal women, and an old jar of peanut butter. One pathetic bottle of water had been placed in there, too. Good job, lady. You’re ready for anything.
It was hard not to go through all of the boxes for fun, to learn people’s secrets. Twice she stumbled over porn paraphernalia, naughty panties and scented lotions, a golden-colored dildo that made her long for Dale’s locker, leatherwear and a swing with padded supports and a torque bar. But she had to keep her eye on the sun, and on her goal of edibles. She wished for one of those value-size containers of formula that contained a princely thirty-five ounces or a four-pack of smaller ones. She searched even though the odds were miniscule that she was going to find those things.
She returned to the campsite day after day with the little she’d found, stretched the formula again, and thought a new apology to Mars. The others tried on their new wardrobes and were pleased. The peanut butter joined the food graveyard outside their tents, Austin slavering at the jar and begging to taste some first. She had no trouble saying no to him. Instead, she offered one of the post-menopausal vitamins and he smacked her ass. Then he took it, as it had a few calories. “Is this going to give me boobs?” he asked.
“No,” Corbin said.
“Yes,” Micah said. “Moobs. Big ones. Guys will be all over you.” Austin checked down his shirt hopefully.
His hand came down hard on her ass a second time when he discovered the old catalogue for men’s underwear hidden on his side of the bedding. Micah claimed that she’d gotten it so he could read the articles. Then they giggled and looked at it by flashlight while Mars slept in a ring of stuffed animals. There weren’t any articles. Just fifty pages of cute young men in high-end undies.
“He looks nice,” Austin said wistfully about one guy. Dressed only in tighty-whiteys and inexplicably placed on a narrow, cobblestone street for the picture, he had dark eyes, longish brown hair, a sweet smile, and a leather jacket thrown casually over his shoulder.
“I’ll turn my back and you can bang off to him,” Micah offered.
“Micah.” Austin’s face was full of reproach in the dim periphery of the flashlight’s glow.
“He does look nice,” she said to placate. “Let’s pretend he’s bi and we can share him. We should give him a name though.” The fancy Italian brand of underwear was Pallazheo, and Zheo became his name. He went along with Micah the next afternoon to sort through garages, not the picture but her mental recollection of him.
She had to decide what to do about the kayak. If she left it there among the trees, someone would take it in no time. And if they came back to Sausalito, she was going to need it again. Burying it in the ground wouldn’t be possible, considering the size of the hole they’d have to dig. It had been almost too hard to bury the food in the packed earth. The kayak and the fishing poles, the hoop net and bucket had to be hidden somewhere.
Nothing stirred from a house as Micah fought to open another garage door. There weren’t as many squatters as there had been when they first came to the city. People had quit Sausalito for greener pastures elsewhere. A lot of them wanted to be closer to the train station where the disaster relief organization worked. Micah had hung out with some of them and joined the discussion about it at a circle of campsites one day. No one saw through her foundation to the stamp, but after a few minutes, she excused herself. Mars needed her to come back to him alive more than she needed to risk getting captured or shot for her Sombra C.
The garage door was jammed, but she pried it open enough to slip inside. What she saw was disappointing. There were boxes of holiday decorations. Saws. A broken-down car that looked like it had been sitting there longer than Micah had walked this earth. Toys for a child much older than Mars. A fancy stand full of ancient umbrellas, all of them with snapped ribs, torn fabric, or screwed up handsprings. Jigsaw puzzles by the hundreds, from twenty-five pieces for kids up to three thousand pieces for bored adults who wanted something even more boring to do. Dozens of dolls, all sitting and standing on a long dining table. Loads upon loads of junk surrounded Micah and Zheo, who she had left in his underwear so she could admire his muscles as he stretched up to the top shelves in her mental picture.
They discovered a book of matches and claimed it, along with a four-pack of toilet paper. Then she spotted a bow in the mess of the garage, a real bow for a hunter. The person who had lived in the attached house had been into archery, or else just collected random things. The garage had that kind of look to it. Micah took the bow down from the wall to check on its condition. Arrows with yellow fletching were on the workbench below. They weren’t in the quiver, although one was there. Instructions were underneath it. The quiver attached to a belt loop, making it easy for the wearer to snatch out an arrow and bring it to the bow. All of it was in good shape. But for the dust, it looked brand new. Micah liked weapons. They kept her alive.
This was Corbin’s early Christmas present tonight. She glanced over the dolls on Zaley’s behalf and quelled the temptation. The only doll that would have tempted Micah beyond control was a Chloe Goes Pee-Pee, and there wasn’t one.
It was almost evening. On the last street she inspected for the day, a house had been spray-painted with a warning not to go inside. That intrigued her, and it was irresistible. The smell of human rot hit her nose when she went to the back. A window was broken, so she climbed through it into a bedroom and breathed through her mouth.
Bodies were strewn through the house, a woman under blankets on the bed, two tiny children in equally tiny bedrooms, and a man in the living room. She only knew by the clothes whether the bodies were male or female. Insects buzzed around the bodies, and there were pools of liquid underneath them. It was a gruesome scene all around, especially when juxtaposed to the domestic bliss of the house. Family pictures smiled from the walls in every room, four faces in an animated cluster. The children’s bedroom doors were pieces of art, painted exquisitely to show a train winding through mountains and cities on the boy’s, and unicorns frolicking up a rainbow on the girl’s. A shirt hanging from the doorknob on the boy’s room said I’M #1!
Micah wasn’t ever going to let Mars think he was number one. The world chewed up number one and shat it out the other end. That T-shirt hadn’t saved the kid from ending up crumpled and still on the carpet. The confinement point had been full of real number ones, scientists and CEOs and singers, educated and experienced to the hilt. It hadn’t stopped them from being shoved in there to die.
She went into the bathroom and searched the medicine cabinet. Mostly empty, but a wrapped condom had fallen behind an empty box of allergy medication. Going into the kitchen, the smell of human rot warred with the smells of rotting meat from the freezer. Fluid had leaked down to the linoleum. Electricity was a shaky deal in Sausalito. Currently functional, it hadn’t stayed on consistently enough to save the food in the freezer compartment.
Someone had taken most of what was in the cupboards and pantry, or the family had eaten it themselves before they died. However it was that their deaths had come about was impossible to say. Micah took what was left of the food and opened the fridge. Water in one of those filtered pitchers, a festering block of cheddar cheese, a carrot gone soft in the crisper. She took the carrot. That could be added to one of their crab soups. The dozen eggs in the carton looked fine, but those would be hard to transport. To the linen closet she went for material to wrap around the carton. Nothing had been touched in that closet, or in the hall closet where expensive, bulky coats sat on hangers. Everything would air out, and they’d chuck what didn’t.
On a shelf in the living room was an old Polaroid camera. She helped herself to it. If there happened to be any film, she’d take a picture of Mars. Checking it over, as she had never held a Polaroid camera before, she trippe
d over the man’s legs and caught herself from falling into the pool of his fluids. Her jostling of the body revealed a handgun. A flap of shirt had covered it.
That explained it. The guy had killed his family and then himself. They could have been recently infected with Sombra C, all or only some of them, or it had nothing to do with personal infections and everything to do with what Sombra C had done to the world. He had no job, no money, and no way to provide. So he’d gone from room to room and provided the only thing he had left in his possession. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Micah picked up the gun and shook off the insects clinging to it. She ferried it over to the curtains and rubbed off the ooze. The barrel length was about four inches long. The magazine released to show no bullets inside. Nor was there one in the chamber. She searched the house, trying to think as this man had thought. With two little kids, he probably had owned a gun safe. It would be hidden in the garage or a closet. A closet seemed more likely. If a thief or feral broke in, the man didn’t have time to flee for his garage. Just hold on there!
She found it under a sheet in a corner of the bedroom, almost invisible in the poor light coming through the windows. It was unlocked and the box inside had rounds. She loaded the gun, pressing down each bullet on the top of the magazine to make room for a new one. The gun held seventeen altogether, and that was exactly what she had. Behind her, the woman slept in death. From the position of her body on the bed, she’d been shot in her sleep. That was a horrible way to die. Not even knowing that you were about to be killed! Her husband had to have killed her first so she couldn’t attempt to save the children.
Climbing out the window, Micah returned to the road to go home. A figure scuttled between houses, a silent male feral on the move. She walked calmly and quietly down the sidewalk, the gun along her flank and a sack of goodies over her back. If she made little noise and shined no light, appeared to be no threat, she had a greater chance of being left alone. Food and nice jackets were in the sack, a handful of other things, but the bow and the gun were the biggest accomplishments of the day. She’d forgotten about Zheo, leaving him in his underwear at some other house. He jogged around a corner to join her.
She had wanted to find formula, and Zheo was saddened with her. They watched for ferals through the streets and debated where to conceal the kayak. Here? There? In a garage? Behind one of the homes? Micah forgot about him again when two men and a woman came out of a house, their eyes to her and the sack. There was something similar about their faces, the arch of their brows and the dimples in their chins. Siblings or cousins, six brown eyes locked on their target.
People felt fear in this situation, at the calls of hey, lady and what you got there and where you going so fast? Micah’s new gun retorted through the quiet street and they ran away, the two she hadn’t struck. The third was on the ground, calling her a bitch as she walked off. People felt sad when they were called mean names. Micah didn’t feel anything. She’d won the fight, and the hole in his thigh was her prize. The second prize was that he had no medicine, no access to medical care, and that hole was likely to kill him. Mercy would have been putting a second bullet through his head, but she wasn’t feeling merciful. He wasn’t even worth a fuck you.
At the campsite, she had fun giving out the loot. She did it with the baby on her hip, blue-haired Mother Solstice and her infant elf. Corbin was astounded at the bow. It was far more complicated than the one of his construction. Zaley read the instructions out loud and he listened intently before taking practice shots at a tree. It worked beautifully. Zaley said loyally, “I still like the one you made.”
“Zaley, this is a real weapon!” Corbin said in awe. “What someone uses for hunting. Mine isn’t good for much of anything.”
Micah showed off the new gun and let the baby touch it, which naturally engendered protests from everyone. She wasn’t going to raise Mars to be afraid of the big bad boogeyman Gun like her parents had raised her. It wasn’t an enemy, nor was it a toy. Gun was a friend, a friend that he had to treat with respect because Gun could hurt people. And sometimes it was okay to hurt people, but most of the time it was not. Today it had been okay. In her head, she knelt by five-year-old Mars Camborne and taught him to shoot. He’d ask if he did a good job, and she’d say if he lived, then he’d done a good job. This wasn’t about praise and I’m #1!
Her mothers were going to be horrified at their grandson holding a gun. Micah fantasized about taking a picture of the moment, sticking it in a flowery Blessed Be frame from The Circle, and presenting it to them for Solstice as a gift. That would be funny, the looks of horror they would have and the fumbling to be supportive. They’d give him lots of toys and cooperative games to make up for his mother giving him a gun. Tuma was going to call him Marcien too, despite the fact that he was Mars through and through. Mars, Micah’s child of war. When he asked how he was born, she’d tell him of their escape from the bridge. That would be a ritual of theirs once a year on his birthday at Halloween, him running from imaginary fire and guns into her arms. Then they’d run the rest of the way together, ducking from bullets and winning their lives.
An atheist could still have rituals. Her altar was going to be a hodge-podge of things, a stuffed cocker spaniel to honor the gay men who had sheltered her in their catch, and a Christian cross for the Chapmans for doing the same. An American flag pin to represent that Shepherd mole who faked their saliva tests at a brace, a tiny doll as a joke for Zaley, and flowers for Casper Santana. She had seen him picking them on the hill. Austin wasn’t ever going to find Brennan’s mom to return the stag carving, so Micah would put that on her altar since it was his pills that had bought them time. All of these pieces had brought Micah to Mars, and she’d explain them one by one to him.
The baby’s eyes were big on the gun for several moments, and then he lost interest. That would come in time. Now they had the bow and new gun, the kid’s rifle and Zaley’s gun, one decider of life or death for everyone. The kid’s rifle was the most useless of the four, only having a little ammo. They also had steak knives that she’d lifted from abandoned homes.
If they ever landed in a harbor, a good one that supplied food and Zyllevir, she’d have to stay there for Mars. Perhaps whoever was in charge would let her guard the wall from Shepherds, or do whatever they did to ensure shipments made it through. Then she’d get her rush, and go home to the baby so he could hold her hair while he drank from his bottle. His full bottle that she hadn’t cheated him on by diluting it.
“Some of this smells a bit,” Austin said about the clothes.
“It’ll wear off. The fridges in those homes are full of rotting food.” Micah knew better than to tell him about the bodies. He’d look at the clothes after that as belonging to those people instead of himself. And he couldn’t. The man’s jacket from that home was high quality, in excellent condition, and very warm. He’d been tall like Austin was tall. There were sleek gloves in the pockets, the interior lined with rabbit fur. The days were mostly warm to hot, but the nights ranged from warm to cold. The jacket and gloves would be good to sleep in, and they could leave a little of their bedding behind rather than lug it up to Arquin.
The woman’s jacket was just as good, and she’d been small like Zaley was small. Giving it to her, Micah said, “There was a huge doll display at one place, but it’s time for you to stop playing with those. Come on, Zaley. Grow up.”
Zaley kissed her cheek and whispered, “You are such an asshole and I love you.”
“And happy fucking.” Micah presented her with the condom.
“I knew you were going to do that,” Zaley moaned. The boys asked what Micah had slipped over and Zaley exclaimed in embarrassment, “Nothing!” If she’d really been mad about it, she would have thrown the condom in the fire rather than squirrel it away in her pocket.
The baby yelled and Micah said, “I didn’t forget you.” He received a pacifier, and a new soft book to gnaw on. He already had one about bunnies, and this one was about colors. T
hey were very dull reading.
The one dusty can of soup she’d taken off a top shelf was for kids, pasta alphabet letters in tomato sauce. That was going to be dinner as a treat for him, a ten-ounce deal that wasn’t worth taking along on the road and had expired five years ago. She mashed it up, the baby playing with his toys and everyone discussing the matter of the dozen eggs. The cardboard container they were in stank to high heaven, something having leaked on it, and was disposed off as a result and at a distance. If the eggs were still good was a long debate. How did you know if an egg was off? They didn’t smell weird and the color was normal, just regular big brown eggs.
In time, the eggs went into the pot to boil, Corbin and Austin talking about how long was long enough when Corbin’s parents had left them on for twenty-five minutes at high heat and Austin’s mom had left them on for a scant fifteen. Zaley had no idea how many minutes her mother had chosen, and Micah thought her mothers had done it for twenty. Then Corbin segued back into pondering how long eggs lasted with on-and-off refrigeration. It was better to boil them longer in case some nasty little buggies needed to be killed, but boiling them forever wouldn’t save them if they had gone bad.
The baby loved the mash and gobbled it up, Micah happy that he was enjoying it and sorry that he was gobbling from hunger. She’d gotten back late and he’d had his sponge bath, but she had to give him a partial one after the mash was gone. In his hair, around his face, on his hands and up his arms, she wondered how he kept sprouting new streaks of sauce when he wasn’t eating it any more. It turned out they were hailing from her own sleeve. Mama needed a bath, too. But even dirty, she felt clean when caring for him.
They had to find this Arquin or she couldn’t take care of him. The relief trucks were on an unsteady schedule, every three to four days now, so they weren’t sure exactly which day they’d be leaving. The best time of day to leave was also unknown, and Corbin stopped obsessing about eggs to obsess about that instead. Zaley came back anywhere from mid-morning to early afternoon on relief days, depending on when the truck arrived, where she was in line, and how fast the line moved. Micah thought it was smarter to wait until the next day and go at dawn; the boys wanted to leave as soon as Zaley had the bag. Zaley voted with Corbin, so Micah was overruled.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 134