Once the eggs cooled, aided by dousing in cold water, Austin shelled his and bit in hesitantly. “It tastes good. Normal.” He took a second bite and moaned. “I’ve missed eggs.”
They all had one, sprinkling the white with pink grains of Himalayan salt. The yolk tasted like dessert. Zaley wrapped up the others in folds of clothes and packed them away into a backpack. Then it was time to clean up. The ferals weren’t that far off, and their fire was a radiant glow in the dark. Micah brought the baby into the tent and dressed him warmly for the night. He squirmed about in her hands. For a while she’d let him play, and after that was bottle and bedtime.
The camera. She’d forgotten all about the Polaroid camera. Tomorrow was picture day. As he chewed on a Pocket Animal, she gave herself a rapid sponge bath. It grew even faster when a manic hooting started up. She didn’t want to shoot ferals. There wasn’t any joy in that when they didn’t know what they were doing. She felt more pleasure when thinking of that guy who thought he and his cohorts were going to give her a hard time. He had to be dead by now. Bang.
The relief truck might show up tomorrow, so Micah had to deal with the kayak. She would drag it back to the house where she’d gotten it from, the house no one dared to go in due to the big red C on the front. It had been in the garage on a long, wide shelf hanging from the rafters. After she shoved it up there, she’d hide the ladder that was also in the garage. If Arquin was shit, the harbor impenetrable, and they returned to Sausalito, she’d march straight over to that house and get her kayak back.
It wasn’t necessary for her to hold Mars during his nightly bottle, but she did in apology for diluting it and sang to him. They were fruity lullabies that her mothers had once sung to her, about starlight and the Goddess and how much the earth loved them. The earth didn’t give a shit. She’d correct that misinformation later on, tacking on another I’m sorry for giving it to him at all.
Clarissa was looking over Micah’s shoulder to Mars. No matter the time that passed, she couldn’t shake the girl that had gone to the darkness by Micah’s hand. Clarissa should be among them in their campsite, alive and whole because Micah had rescued her from the confinement point. Drawing pictures in the dirt and taking the Zyllevir she loathed, giggling at the nightly knock-knock joke . . . but she wasn’t. She could only watch what Micah gave to Mars.
Kissing the baby’s forehead, Micah whispered, “Mama killed a man today.” He drank, unperturbed, and held her hair in his tiny fist. One day, he’d pound that fist down on the world. Not as a stupid militia thug or a Shepherd, but as a free agent. Every time his fist struck for good, the vibration would carry back to Micah as well.
Austin came in to drape wrung-out diapers around. Mars broke away from his bottle to look at the figure in the shadows. Softly, he said, “Aaaahhh.”
Ridding himself of the last one, Austin sat down. His cross-legged knees touched Micah’s in the same position. When he patted the baby’s head, Mars’ eyelids drifted down and he drank more. Sleep usually came with relative ease to him. Micah said, “We’ll work out joint custody, so you and your guy can have him half the time and I get him the other half.”
Unhappily, Austin said, “I don’t want to think about it. That isn’t going to happen for me.”
“It will.” Micah knew it. “You’ll push Marsie in a stroller through a park, and this cute guy will think it’s the sweetest thing he ever saw. We’ll go for the full knockout punch and pair you with a puppy, too. No one can resist that.” When he didn’t answer, she said, “You aren’t still going to try to get me to ditch him with someone else?”
“First off, it wasn’t ditching.” Austin’s voice was low but angry, and that made her hear him more than if he’d been calm. “It wasn’t ever ditching. It was finding him a good place to be. A safe place. So don’t call it that to me. And second, no. How can I give him to someone else now? He thinks I’m his dada. I never had a father. I don’t even know who the man is. How could I walk out on Mars? I’m all he has.”
They were going to be an oddball family cobbled together, Mars with his mom and two gay dads, and none of whom were actually related to him. If Micah met her Zheo in real life, then he was going to have three fathers. He’d have his aunts in Zaley and Shalom, his Uncle Corbin, and his hippie grandmothers. Micah wasn’t going to tell Tuma that his pants had read Marcien. It was just Mars, Mars and Micah, not Marcien and Jubilee.
And he’d have Clarissa, although he wouldn’t know it, always watching over him to make sure Micah did this right. The bottle emptied halfway and Mars no longer sucking at it, she laid him down to sleep. She and Austin moved around quietly to keep from waking him up. The feral sounds weren’t stopping, so they doused their flashlight as soon as they were ready for bed. The darkness and quiet shielded them to a degree, as did the distance, but the protection was nowhere near absolute. She rested beside the baby and breathed in his milky breath.
In the morning, they got to work. The picture was first and thankfully it was a good one, as the Polaroid had one shot in it. Austin was excited to flap the blank picture, having only seen that in commercials and old movies. The image took shape, Micah smiling to the camera and Mars in her arms. He had kicked out as Austin snapped, one bare foot peeking out from his nightdress. She’d left his hair in its sweet night tousles. His mouth was open in a yell of happiness. Well-timed, because after that, he got fussy and just wanted to be held. Every time she put him down to help with breakfast, he rubbed his face and fussed until she picked him up. Gathering her hair in his hand, he mewled at it sadly.
Zaley wasn’t amused at the prospect of taking a fussy baby into Sausalito to check on the arrival of the relief truck. She didn’t say anything, but her face was covered in an oh, shit look. Corbin walked them over, and the wails piercing back to the campsite made Micah sad. She’d check his gums for bulges when they returned. That was all she knew to do about teething, having seen a mother at The Circle do it with her little one. It hadn’t been interesting to Micah at the time, and now she wanted to sit beside that woman and learn.
Corbin returned only long enough to report the truck had come. Then he rushed away, intending to brave the line that wasn’t for people with kids and pick up an extra bag of food for the Shints. Micah thought that was an unnecessary risk, but it was his life to throw away. She supposed it was a nice gesture, since Mars had things belonging to that old couple, she had had those antibiotics and the cancer-ridden dude had taught Zaley to crab.
She and Austin broke down the tents and tied them to the backpacks. The emergency food was dug up and packed away. Every bag was filled to the top. They couldn’t carry everything to the Sombra C house to return the kayak, nor could they leave it there untended. Micah left Austin to guard their belongings and lifted the kayak. It wasn’t that heavy to handle on her own. She carried it to the water on a daily basis.
Since the others were so desperate to go today, then Micah should return it now. She hefted it up to her shoulder and started off, Austin sitting among their backpacks to read. The books weren’t going along with them, nor were the magazine and underwear catalogue. Zheo in his tighty-whiteys had to stay in Sausalito. He could play with all of the toys, which were also getting ditched. Only the star was coming along, weighing next to nothing and taking up little room in their belongings. When she’d told Austin that they had to leave the toys behind, he’d been almost as horrified as he had been about cutting the formula. But toys were toys. She could find those anywhere.
She carried the kayak until she needed a break at the edge of town. There she stopped to rest. All of this fuss and bother going on in their lives and Mars wouldn’t even remember it. Nothing had happened in Micah’s life before her memories picked up more or less at the age of three. Then again, nothing worth remembering had happened after that until she was seventeen.
Sausalito wasn’t a ghost town, but it had ghost areas. This was one of them. Abandoned cars, houses, lives, everything around her was silent. When she had
her strength back, she picked up the kayak and kept going. For a few blocks, it appeared that a woman was trailing her. Then the stranger cut onto a lawn and climbed through a window. She was just a squatter. Micah should have suspected that from the relief truck bag in the woman’s hand.
At the Sombra C house, she struggled to get the kayak up to the shelf in the garage. Just as it crested the edge, she brought it down to remove the fishing rods from inside. If someone stole the kayak after all, she wasn’t going to hand the fishing rods to that person as well.
Sweat beaded her forehead by the time she got the kayak up there. Then she ditched the ladder over the backyard fence and ambled through the house. Canvassing it for a hiding place, she ended up in the pantry. In the ceiling was a big square outlined in a wooden curb. She carried in a rickety wooden chair and pushed on the square. It led to the attic, which was little more than a crawlspace. The fishing rods went up there.
Dust sifted into her face and she sneezed. They weren’t ever coming back here. She just wanted to protect her things for the tiny possibility. If Arquin were nothing, they’d have no choice but to find a harbor. The Sonoma harbor was under siege, but another one might not be. There was one in Humboldt. If that didn’t pan out, Micah was pressing on to Oregon. She had to do that for Mars, to get the medicine that kept her alive and one point from sane. Clarissa would be a witness to how far and how hard Micah pushed for Mars. Smashing the chair to bits, she chucked them into a corner of the living room.
Whatever had happened to the family that once lived in this home was sudden. There were plates on the table. But there were no bodies in the house or in the yard. The car parked at the curb could have belonged to them, so they hadn’t driven away. If they hadn’t left on foot, they were driven away in black vans. Micah closed up the house, feeling light as air without the kayak, and checked over the car. It had been trashed.
Cutting down the roads, she ended up on the street where the Shints lived. Her timing was excellent. Corbin motioned to her from where he was waiting by bushes. “You look thrashed,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Micah said. “Is Zaley in the house giving her hugs?”
“Yeah. The bag didn’t have much. Cereal and soup. They can eat that when he feels too shitty to leave the house for food.”
Micah held her peace that they should have taken that food for their own. From the look on Corbin’s face, he knew what she was thinking. But she hadn’t said it, so he didn’t say it either. They liked each other and didn’t, and that was okay. It didn’t keep her up at night, and she doubted it kept him up either.
The bag that Zaley had gotten from the relief truck was at Corbin’s side. Micah searched through it. Soup, cereal, meals intended for a microwave, one piddly container of pureed peas, and a small container of formula. Goddammit. Her baby needed to eat, and it made her feel homicidal. The Sensitive Infant, a new formula that Mars wasn’t going to like until he got too hungry to stand it, and it would make only twenty-six lousy ounces for him to drink. It’d make a lot more than that with how she was going to water it down. Too bad she couldn’t get to a hospital for drugs that would trick her tits into lactation.
“It’s okay,” Corbin said kindly. She had just been staring at the container of formula. It wasn’t okay. The only reason he could say that was because he was old enough to understand the situation. Nothing about this was okay for Mars.
A door closed. Zaley appeared on the sidewalk, giving a final wave to the couple at the window. She’d been crying a little, which made Micah impatient. These weren’t their people or their concern, and Corbin had given away resources they could use. Taken food right out of the baby’s mouth. Mars was hanging from Zaley’s chest, his bad temper from earlier having passed.
They walked down the street together. At the corner, Micah took the baby but not the carrier. She put him on her left hip since her right side was aching from the hike with the kayak. He gabbled at her, thankfully unaware of the meager formula in the bag.
This could be part of a yearly ritual, too. The escape from the bridge, a fast to represent the time of little food, and they’d cap it off with a feast of plenty at a restaurant. The table would be covered end to end with everything on the menu. The big person was providing. She longed for that future when this was only a ritual, no longer a painful and humiliating present.
“We should get directions to Humboldt if this doesn’t pan out,” Micah said.
“God, we can’t walk all the way there!” Corbin said.
Then she’d leave him behind to wallow in what couldn’t be done. He didn’t have a child, and Clarissa wasn’t trailing along after him. It wasn’t Corbin who had taken on all the responsibility upon the hill, and those in the huge blue van had accepted his offering of the little girl after they got off the bridge. So the only weight he carried was his own.
“You should have asked for more formula,” Micah said to Zaley.
“There isn’t any more,” Zaley said. Then Micah thought Zaley should have stolen it from someone else. “The worker said not to expect them back for a whole week. They can’t drive out here until they get a fresh supply of ammunition. A militia called Sweet Song hijacked another truck and some of the workers were killed in defending it. The relief organization won’t send its teams out unarmed or poorly armed, and the military can’t spare soldiers all the time to guard the trucks.”
“Sweet Song?” Corbin asked. “That’s a new one.”
“It’s not. It’s just the first time the relief teams have had a name for them. They’re the hired contractors for the rich communities in Marin. Some tiny enclave is called Sweet Song and they created their own protection in early May since the police force was so slow to respond to ferals and other problems-”
Micah interrupted their conversation, none of which had any relevance. “Will a baby die at this age if he’s moved to regular food, Corbin? Does he need milk that badly?”
“He won’t die if he’s still getting calories from mash,” Corbin said. “The problem is that he needs the fat he gets from the milk. And milk is easier for him to digest than real food. But he’s around eight months old, not a newborn.”
In other words, Corbin didn’t know shit as always. Her hair was collected into a fist and pulled, Micah not stopping Mars even though it hurt. He’d let go soon, and if he didn’t, she could take the pain. I’m sorry. She had to do better, but the obstacles were insurmountable. And because he was little and she was big, she had to surmount them anyway. Finding milk and pills. Keeping him warm and clean and protected. Living behind the walls of a harbor.
He would drain her dry like he drained his bottles, and she would let him. He could take everything of hers. It would save them both.
After their birthday ritual when he was older, she’d put him to bed with a kiss and walk outside in the October night. To take the autumn wind into her lungs and break the backs of fallen leaves under her feet, to think about the year to fall away and the new one to come, a shadow ever following along behind her. Silent and watchful, small and bloody, with Micah’s soul balanced in her golden scales.
Austin
His subconscious mind had wedded Arquin to the Sonoma harbor, giving him nightly dreams of walking into the base to cheers from fellow sufferers of the Sombra C virus. Plates of hot food were pushed into his hands and everyone wore a bottle of Zyllevir as a necklace. He was given a room of his own at a hotel, the bathroom sink was filled with the contents of a fruit basket, and the drawers under the television had extra pills just in case he lost the bottle on his necklace. There was enough Zyllevir in those drawers to last six lifetimes.
A soldier was posted to his room, not outside it but inside, and he stood by the window with a semi-automatic. All of the soldiers in his dream just wore dog tags and combat boots, guns and underwear, and Austin damned Micah for giving him that catalogue. He didn’t want to wake up every morning in a tent beside his best friend and his baby boy, his privates standing at attention from
those handsome and mostly naked guys.
Usually white people adopted black babies, not the other way around. He and Mars had gotten funny looks here and there while hunting bait together or hanging around at the tents. A woman passing by the campsite had said with a frown, “Are you sure that’s your baby?”
Yes. Austin was sure. He was also mad. He didn’t walk around asking people if they were sure the kids with them were theirs. His hands changed Mars’ diapers and dried his tears. His hands washed the clothes and filled the bottles. There was a reason Mars reached out for him. It was so insulting that Austin hadn’t even told his friends. The baby didn’t care that he was white and Austin was black. They were just a big dude and a little dude who belonged to one another. Micah said when Mars got older, he wasn’t going to care that Austin was gay. When you grew up with gay parents, like she had, it wasn’t interesting. Not even a little, so it was really weird to your perspective how other people found it very interesting indeed. To you, it was just your moms or dads, and they were pretty boring people.
Austin wasn’t going to be boring though. He’d coach Mars’ Little League team and go on field trips with his class, all of the things that Austin hadn’t had a father around to do for him. When Mars hit a home run, he’d have a dad cheering for him in the stands. Then they’d go out for ice cream. Austin would be at Parent-Teacher Nights and school performances and the Nativity play at church, up late at night baking cupcakes for Mars’ class on his birthdays, hiding eggs for Easter and wrapping presents at Christmas. Those were things a father did.
And Mars wouldn’t ever have to worry that his dad was going to dump off his belongings somewhere, for getting Sombra C or being transsexual or anything else. When Austin looked at the baby, he understood less and less how his mother could have done that to her own son. She should have felt something more than wanting him to get put down like an old, sick dog. If Shepherds ever put Mars in a confinement point, Austin would suit up in body armor, blow away the guards, and mow down the fence. Seize his boy and run away.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 135