“I try not to think about it at all,” Austin said. “And when I do, I think about smashing it apart if they were ever to put Mars in there.”
The next road was above the world, giving a view of their former home by the bridge, a tiny red line dividing the water and the curls of the land to the side. The fog had lifted enough to make out the faint angles of San Francisco, and pools of mist had settled in the lower points of the hills all around. Micah paced ahead to give them a warning if anyone was coming. While Austin went to the bathroom behind a tree and they waited for him, Corbin said in a hate-filled voice, “If they ever put our kids in a confinement point, I’ll shoot every one of those stupid fucking guards and rip down the fence.” Zaley almost wanted a child then, so she could see how violently Corbin would protect it. If the condom had broken, if she was pregnant right now and just didn’t know . . . it would be all right. She wasn’t jazzed, but she wasn’t appalled either. She’d cope. They’d cope. And definitely get better birth control later on.
At an abandoned inn not far from that view, they went inside to investigate what was there. Inn was a word for a hotel, but this was just a place for hikers to stop and rest, and have a bite to eat. It was mid-afternoon and time for them to scout out a place to sleep, but the windows were broken in the dozen French doors. This wasn’t a good candidate for weathering the night. Austin tortured all of them by reading the menu of egg scrambles and hot roast beef sandwiches.
Not only wasn’t it a place to take shelter, it also didn’t look promising in way of food. People had been through here before. They went into the kitchen anyway to inspect. A nasty smell was coming from the line of refrigerators and freezers along the wall. Zaley opened one and quickly closed it. Micah did the others as Corbin lifted the window to air out the room.
The electricity was out, but water was still running in the sinks. After filling up the bottles, they took quick, cold sponge baths and cleaned off Mars, who wasn’t as excited about bath time as the rest of them were. Then Austin swung him through the air after drying him off, shouting all the while, “Naked baby! Naked baby! Unidentified flying naked baby!” as Mars clutched his stuffed mutant bird and screeched happily. Soaring over to Micah, he was dressed in clean clothes and deposited into the carrier on Austin’s chest.
As everyone packed up to go, Austin rolled aside a cart and opened the doors to a pantry. The room was trashed and smelled like shit. Zaley put on her backpack and peered inside with him to the mess. Shelves had been pulled off the walls. Crumbs of food and spilled sugar were mixed among the torn packaging on the floor. From a top shelf that was still attached to the wall, Austin lifted down a small box. He was just opening the lid when a heap of gray rags on the floor unfolded into a feral.
They had been in this room for a good half hour, in partial states of dress and not modulating their voices. The dead silence of the inn had been deceptive. That whole time, a feral had been less than thirty feet away from the kitchen sinks. The man was wearing only a tablecloth loosely tucked around his waist. Shoving the box at Zaley, Austin crossed his arms over the baby and they backed out fast.
The man was standing on the precipice of sane and insane, baring his teeth and holding up his hands in peace, floating away in his head and returning with a look of confusion at his surroundings. Then he smiled at the baby and waggled his fingers, saying, “Bay . . . bay . . . hi, bay . . . by . . .” He followed them out the door and squinted in the sunlight. Telling everyone to go ahead when the man persisted in following down the trail, Micah remained behind. The blast of the gun broke the quiet.
Then they moved swiftly in case the sound was attracting aggressive ferals to the area, or Shepherds. Zaley guessed that was what they were, these men and women storming through the wilderness now and then dressed up as commandos. She hadn’t seen patches on their clothing. Usually they hid from those people, and it wasted almost as much time as the maps did. Once there had been no time to hide from a man who came around a curve suddenly and silently. He didn’t spy the cosmetics over the stamps and gave them an exasperated warning. Mount Tamalpais was too dangerous to hike at the present. His eyes on the baby had been appalled and full of judgment, and he told them to go back.
It wasn’t until they were much farther away from the inn and the dead feral that Zaley remembered the box in her hand. It was half-full of salted crackers in plastic packages. They exclaimed at the treat and Corbin moaned, “I want a bowl of split pea soup to sprinkle these on!”
They found a place for the night. Over a rocky stream and partway up a steep slope thickly peppered with rocks and foliage, they tucked their tents into such an inaccessible area that there was little to no chance anyone was going to stumble over them. The trade-off was that it wasn’t flat ground and they had to roll away rocks first. Then they drank cool soup out of cans, broken pieces of crackers liberally applied to the surface. Micah fed the baby with a disquieted expression in the fading light. She was knocking herself for not checking out the whole inn before they took baths.
“It was so quiet in there. You had no way to know,” Zaley said. The feral in the pantry had been a complete shock. Even if Micah had looked in there, he had appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rags on the junked floor.
“Nothing happened,” Corbin said. “He wasn’t totally off yet.”
The reassurances didn’t make Micah feel better. “Like when we were with Tarley. I should have been watching out the window.”
“That isn’t fair!” Austin said. “You can’t feel bad about that. None of us was watching. Uncle Brad and Aunt Jeanie, the Chapmans, those were good people. We didn’t have any reason to suspect Tarley Ferguson was playing for a different team.”
“I had reason,” Micah said, pointing to her stamp. No one could be trusted if you had that on your neck. “And I had reason today.” She gestured to Mars, who she felt like she hadn’t protected. Then she didn’t want to talk about it any more.
After dark fell down on the wilderness and they were in their tents, Zaley whispered, “Did killing that man today bother her?”
Corbin rubbed her back and whispered, “That didn’t bother her, Zale.”
Now her nickname had a nickname of its own. It didn’t bother Zaley any longer to have killed that Shepherd in Elania’s backyard. Entire weeks went by without her even thinking about it. When it came down to Zaley or a Shepherd, she was picking herself and that was fine. Corbin’s hand had slowed and she sensed that he was still considering her question. Then he said, “Maybe it does bother her. I don’t know. It really bothered her to kill those people who asked for death in the confinement point. But she had no hesitation about walking onto that bridge and killing the kings. She just strolled onto the planks and started stabbing. Then she laughed like it was the funniest thing ever. It was weird, really, really weird. She scared me at that moment, almost as much as that terrible place itself. It wasn’t wrong what she did. It made the confinement point safer. Awful things would have happened to us if she hadn’t done that. But the laughing about it, I’ll never forget that. Later I realized it had to be shock, just an unusual reaction to shock.”
That didn’t sound like an unusual reaction to Zaley, who had gotten shot at the party and said all sorts of strange things afterwards. Micah hadn’t been laughing this time. The guy at the inn was too compromised to join their group and they couldn’t spare the Zyllevir. So she had done the only thing that could be done, and was beating herself up only over the baby. That man was dangerous to them, both in and of himself, because of whom he might attract.
The woods were heavy in traffic that night. It was difficult to sleep in all of the activity going on outside. Zaley peeked through the slit in the tent and out to the trail repeatedly whenever hunters with headlamps or flashlights were going by. Three separate times that happened over the dark hours. The first group was a cluster of teenagers, the girls giggling and the boys doing a fake march. There were seven of them altogether in a bubble of light. One
of the boys was carrying a cooler on his shoulder and the rest had guns in holsters and sleeping bags under their arms. As they passed around the curve, a girl in a knee-length skirt and high heel boots shouted, “Come on! You didn’t say it was going to be this far to the inn! My feet hurt. Let’s go back.”
“We’re too far away now to go back!” one boy said in derision as another called, “Are you chicken?”
“Are they trying to attract ferals?” Corbin whispered.
More power to them, Zaley thought. “Off to play fort at the inn.” They were going to find the body of the feral man first, and hopefully that would convince them that this wasn’t a big game. Crazed ferals were going to be drawn to that bright light, if any were around, and those kids wouldn’t be giggling and marching any more.
The second group of hunters woke her up not long after that. They were a professional operation, four men dressed all in black and carrying guns, the bulbs on their lights exuding a dimmer glow. They communicated in hand gestures and whispers. Zaley watched as they bent their heads together for a conversation that didn’t carry. This party made her far more anxious than the brats.
Breaking apart, they moved their lights over the terrain. If they saw the tents . . . if they started this way, she’d let herself out and meet them directly. Tell them that her kids were sleeping and take the baby along to prove it. They could spit-check both if these guys had testing equipment on them, and just peek for bare necks if not. Have the gun and cop an attitude, make them write her off as a bitch.
Thankfully, the light passed over their concealed campsite and moved on. Two men went south and one went west. The last man paced up and down the portion of the trail, keeping an eye on the water. Zaley didn’t budge from the flap for the next hour, frightened that the baby was going to wake up or that a zombie would come to the water for a drink and get shot, which would also wake up the baby and expose them.
Screaming. It was an inhuman voice. The men came together almost at once from wherever they had gone and charged away in pursuit. Then a feral wandered through. This one was female, and she was quiet. She had no reaction to the ensuing gunfire or another feral hooting out there. Perhaps she was deaf. After lapping from the water like a dog, she disappeared into the trees.
Zaley slept and was wakened again by lights for the third and last time. Two bright headlamps were headed north on the trail. It was hard to tell whether they were strapped to men or women, but she guessed one was a man from the height. He was so tall that a branch knocked against his head. Austin hadn’t had to duck that one, and he was a few inches over six feet. A male voice said, “Shit!”
The second figure ducked, even though he or she wasn’t remotely tall enough to be in threat from the branch. His light turned and shined on the poofy jacket of the first figure. It also shined on the big gun resting upon the short one’s shoulder. Zaley hoped that the feral woman wasn’t coming back for another drink of water. A zombie was just as dangerous as a hunter, but Zaley still rooted for her over the goofing around teens, the professional squad, and the giant-midget duo.
She went in and out of sleep for the rest of the night. Although no more lights woke her, ferals went by at irregular intervals. Some cried out and others were quiet, but all of them splashed in the water. Screams pealed through the air, some loud and alarming, others far away and only tickling at the edge of her hearing. Dawn found her awake for no reason, her sleep having been so broken that she didn’t feel like she’d slept at all. Corbin had gotten a little more, but was still fairly bleary-eyed as he took down the tent.
“It was a fucking party last night,” Austin grumbled. They ate and returned to the trail. Candy wrappers had sprouted there since yesterday evening. The cheery reds and strong blues of the packaging made Zaley’s mouth water. They were Halloween-sized and she remembered dumping out her plastic pumpkin as a child to sort through everything for the good stuff. The cracker discovery of yesterday and the blackberry bushes before that had been no less exciting.
Corbin took her hand as they walked. It was terrible what her father had taught her about boys and sex, that a girl having interest in those things was gross and perverted. Dirty. Since the others were walking ahead and singing the Fuck Teeth song to the baby, she said, “Did you ever get the talk from your parents?” She wanted to know what normal parents taught their kids.
“The sex talk?” Corbin asked. “Yeah. The first one was from my mom when I asked where babies came from at five or six, and the second one from my dad when I was thirteen. It was really embarrassing both times.”
“What did your dad say?”
“Basically wrap it up, son. Always wrap it up. Don’t be a kid having a kid, or have to go to a clinic because you’ve got something weird on your willy. Yeah, that was how he phrased it. I wanted to die. And make sure the girl isn’t drunk or anything. You don’t want regrets the next morning.” Corbin hesitated. “Are you having regrets?”
“No,” Zaley said to his dear, worried face. He had never pushed her too far, and that had let her come to sex at her own pace, and from a safer place. “Next stop: porn video. That’s what my father would think.”
“Of course that’s where we’re going,” Corbin said amiably. “It’s a natural progression. We’ll broadcast our love to the world. Nine ninety-nine to access the feed and we’ll never have to work a day in our lives.”
That afternoon, there were five trails before them and nary a sign in sight. The map showed only four trails, so Zaley was baffled as to where the hell the fifth one had come from. Then again, the map was really old. Two of the trails on the map went nowhere helpful, east and west. They wanted one of the last three, and while she was fairly confident that it wasn’t the one to the left, she was clueless on the last two. Micah headed away down one of them to check it out and Austin did the other. As the baby was sick of traveling around in his carrier, Corbin unfolded a blanket and set him down to play at their feet with his star. Trading it out for a stick, Mars banged it on the blanket. He was a budding drummer.
“I hate this,” Zaley muttered to the map.
Corbin took a deep breath and looked over to it with determination. “Can I help?”
Mars tugged at the leg of Zaley’s jeans as they worked. She didn’t look down, believing the baby was either swatting her with the stick or had found a new teething toy in the fabric. As long as he was doing that, she knew where he was. Pointing to one of the lines, she said, “We want this one here. That’s my best guess. I just can’t be one hundred percent sure when the map has four trails and here we have five.”
“Two of them end up on the same path.”
“Yeah. But that one will take us far out of our way.” Zaley wasn’t keen on traveling any unnecessary distance. It was a waste of their energy, and more importantly, their food. Her pants were tugged from a higher point, the baby on a mission to find the tastiest part. She and Corbin consulted the map and the choices before them. If they picked the time waster, it still wasn’t so big of a deal. The real problem was if they picked the one that wasn’t on the map and could lead anywhere.
“Here, I’ll fold it,” Corbin said when Zaley started to close the map. She gave it to him and looked out to the endless trees. Another tug reminded her of Mars, and she glanced down to him standing up.
Zaley gasped. “Corbin!”
The baby had pulled himself up on her jeans and was clinging to them for balance. He turned his head up to her with a big, proud smile, and an answering one came unbidden to her lips. Even the baby didn’t want to be a baby! All the while he acted like he was thinking of nothing more than his badge and his bird and his bottle, he’d been deciding that he wanted to walk and working out how to make his body obey. Mars was so annoying a lot of the time, but seeing him on his feet made her want to hug him. The baby stage was ending and a new one was beginning, carrying him a little further along the road to one day stand at her side rather than drag on her chest.
“Go, Mars!” Gettin
g down to his knees on the blanket, Corbin held out his arms and said, “Can you walk to me?”
Mars wasn’t ready for that. He clung fiercely to Zaley’s leg and laughed. Zaley said with equal, joyous ferocity, “Good boy! Good big boy!” She wanted him to enjoy doing big boy things so he pressed for the next level. Then Austin returned from the trail exploration and yelled at Mars upright. Micah dashed back in the belief that something was wrong.
“Isn’t he too young to stand at eight months?” Corbin asked as everyone clustered around to see this marvel.
“We don’t know how old he is,” Zaley said. “He could be a little older than we think and just be small for his age.”
“He’s just smart!” Austin exclaimed. “Look at you, Marsie! Oh Jesus, I want a picture. The baby boy is standing up.”
Then Mars began to look a little worried and made a fussy sound. Keener to his moods and what they indicated, Micah snorted in amusement and said, “He can’t figure out how to get down.” She took the baby’s hands and guided him to a sitting position. Austin cheered and Mars laughed. His little hand took hold of Zaley’s pants and he got to work on scaling her again. She stayed very still and Austin caught him when he tipped over on a failed attempt.
They let him do his new trick three times before going on to the trail. It was very narrow. Twice they came to empty posts and Zaley wanted to kick the person who had removed the signs. Nails were protruding from one of them. She didn’t want to discover in another mile or two that they were on the wrong path through the redwoods. Beside the trail, water moved in a thin creek that was choked with rocks and fallen branches.
The baby was in the carrier on Austin’s chest. He shielded Mars’ eyes every time they passed by bodies. They couldn’t walk twenty minutes without spying another one, either beside the trail, on the trail, or out in the trees. One was in the water. From the filthy clothes or lack of them altogether, it was clear that most were ferals that had fallen to their virus or more violent causes. One body was different, the man turned on his side away from them, his clothes fully on and fairly clean. A backpack was over his shoulders.
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