On the fourth day of Austin’s work in the chow hall, he met another dick on the base. That one was the bull-shaped Sergeant Wilson, who had neither a stamp nor a red necklace and was the first and only uninfected person Austin ever saw in the Sombra C chow hall. Storming in through the doors, the man laser-locked his beady blue eyes on Austin himself. Austin was just standing at the serving counter to dish out food when the guy blew up at him. Such a worthless, shitty excuse for a soldier in the United States Army! Dammit, he was sick of Austin’s stupid fucking face and his stupid fucking tardiness and his stupid fucking dirty boots! Where was his pride? Those things should shine like a diamond up Austin’s ass, not look like they’d walked the road to hell and back. Wipe that look off his face and don’t be late again! Stop acting like a pretty little bitch making her grand entrance at her duties. Is that what Austin was doing? He was a fucking debutante at the ball of the base and perhaps they should slap him into a dress and give him a fan.
The berating went on and on until Austin was about to cry. Then Betsy interceded with the explanation that Austin just worked in the kitchen as a civilian, and those were donated clothes he was wearing. The man yelled at Betsy for having the audacity to correct him and stormed out just as furiously as he had come in. They never found out why he had been there in the first place. He had to have gotten Austin mixed up with another black guy who had Sombra C on the base. There were several.
Manzer made a crack about roid rage and Betsy said not to sweat it. But it was hard not to sweat when a Titanic-sized dude was screaming in your face about how much you fucking sucked and that he wanted to give your mother a retroactive abortion. The world would be a better place for it. Austin cleaned his boots that night. His sneakers were pretty tired, and these boots were scruffy but whole. He never, ever wanted to join the Army. He knew in his soul that he wouldn’t last a day of boot camp. It wasn’t his body that would wash out. He was strong. It was his mind. That wasn’t. Micah would stand there dispassionately for hours while that man screamed horrible things to her face, take none of it to heart, and offer him a throat lozenge when he ran out of steam. Then she’d turn the base over in search of a dildo, earn herself a dishonorable discharge when she glued it to his belongings, and not care one whit.
When Austin got comfortable with the kitchen routine and didn’t have to apply his whole mind to it, he asked Betsy and Manzer about the lingo he heard from the soldiers over their meals. Popped a fof. Routing out the Mexies. Austin never quite understood what they were saying. As they prepared a meal, the two explained it to him. The soldiers were dealing with problems from four major sources. The first was Shepherds. They weren’t being led by Prime, or anything but cowboy leadership now. Shepherds were the least problematic of the four. They set spike strips on the roads to stop the convoys and take what they wanted. Usually, they got mowed down with bullets and no one was left alive to walk away with anything.
Around the base, they were called FOFs. It stood for Fat Old Fucks and that made Austin laugh. FOFs were hungry. Ferals were going nuts in their hometowns. A lot of them were running out of their individual supplies of ammunition and either didn’t have the right connections or couldn’t shell out anything for the black market sources, or both. It wasn’t so much about zombies anymore. It was about resources. Some clung to a crazy fantasy that the harbor was a paradise with government-supplied turkey dinners and all the trimmings on the tables every night. They wanted in to shoot the zombies and take that food! And yeah, there was food in that harbor. But no, it wasn’t a Thanksgiving feast by any stretch.
So some FOFs hung out around the harbor, tantalized by their fantasies and wanting to goad the guards into a firefight that would waste their ammunition. Other FOFs hung out around roads that convoys traveled. One squad of Shepherds had stopped a convoy a month ago to claim its Zyllevir. Not to destroy it, but to seize it for themselves. They were infected with Sombra C and trying to keep it a secret from those in their community. One soldier went down in that battle, but fifteen Shepherds went down, too.
The other three major problems were Iron Fists, Sweet Song, and De Sangre Fria. Sweet Song was largely defensive, keeping order over a small cluster of cities to the south. They didn’t have any larger purpose than food to survive and ammunition to protect themselves. That didn’t mean that they wouldn’t fight down and dirty to get it. Their ammunition was coming south by sea, and they’d lost no less than two laden ships to the Army. After the second, they approached the base itself, promising to stop attacking convoys in the depot area if they were given a share of the goods and allowed to bring in their weaponry unimpeded. The answer was no. The base was moving on anyway. To the soldiers, Sweet Song was sarcastically called the gentlemen’s club. A militia made by rich people.
Iron Fists and De Sangre Fria had grown out of well-established gangs long in northern California. Both were scary business. They strong-armed farmers and dairies to supply them with food, kidnapped people who had connections or supplies and held them for ransom, and were also funneling drugs from what small-time operations were still functional in Mexico and elsewhere in the world. They fought with each other; they fought the Army; they fought farmers who banded together to protect their animals and crops. Austin wasn’t laughing to hear about these people.
Both had feral fights. That started with Sangre and spread to Iron Fists. It was the new version of cock fighting, or gladiator games. Trappers rounded up Sombra Cs and brought them to buyers, who selected the best of the bunch and presented them to managers. The managers picked champions and signed them up for a fight to the death. Since the virus in its latter stages removed the awareness of pain, the fights could get very bloody and brutal. If someone proved to be a really good fighter, he was given a Zyllevir pill to prolong his life. The big money was in men, but there were novelty fights with feral women or children. This had been going on for a good six months, hidden when the country was doing better and much more in the open now.
If the ferals were totally nuts, they let them go at it with bare hands. If they still had a little sanity left, they were given machetes. The worst was when they captured people who had recently been infected with Sombra C, and made them fight for the prize of a single Zyllevir pill. It was whispered that Iron Fists was not above kidnapping healthy people and infecting them on purpose.
As soon as the Army tossed a makeshift stadium around the North Bay, another one popped up somewhere else. Then they busted up that one and arrested the people there. It was common for the militias to handle business at those locations while the fights were going on, which was really what the Army wanted to stop. Saving the captive Sombra Cs was the afterthought.
Dozens of captive Sombra Cs were discovered in a basement beneath a busted stadium, which had been a theater just three months ago. All were locked in cages meant for big dogs. The ones too wild to be helped by Zyllevir were shot on site and the bodies burned. The rest were brought to the base to be treated for their injuries and were then taken to the harbor. Only ten out of those dozens were in good enough condition to be saved. The youngest of them was an eleven-year-old boy, and another was a soldier. He had been captured in southern California and transported north for the express purpose of fighting.
That was why no one ever scribbled out the question mark by Jake Mornie’s picture in the chapel. These were the craziest things Austin had ever heard, and it was just an everyday part of the soldiers’ lives. For a moment he thought Betsy and Manzer might be pulling his leg, but they weren’t. This shit was going on out there, and it wasn’t so crazy after all. Underground fight clubs had existed long before Sombra C. The difference was that those people chose to fight.
“Had one j-just the other day,” Manzer said. “A solo feral.”
That was the shooting in the truck that Austin watched out the window. The guy seemed still within the range of mentally normal in the tiny fighting ring that he had been rescued from, but he’d freaked out on the drive to Arquin. Pound
ing on the inside of the truck, screaming his head off, the soldiers in the cab didn’t know what had triggered him in the dark back there. But he was too crazy to even be brought to the Sombra C wing of the hospital, let alone given Zyllevir and set loose outside the base. The Sonoma harbor wouldn’t accept people that far gone in the head. The harbor in Humboldt would since they had a big ward behind their wall for out-of-control people like him, but the order from above was to shoot the guy. Let him die with dignity. He had only had a 25% infection when Iron Fists caught him, and they’d let him degenerate to that razor-thin edge of sanity and madness to make him fight hard.
Both militias were heavily armed, and Sangre had even been in possession of shoulder missiles capable of bringing down a commercial airliner. Although the Army located and claimed the warehouse holding them, no one knew what else and how much they had stowed elsewhere. Convoys were attacked with illegal grenades, and a lot of those had been found with the missiles. The loss of the warehouse caused Sangre to retaliate against the base, but they’d been driven away. Some of the weapons coming into the depot were given to volunteer police forces in the cities around Petaluma, so they could fight the militias themselves.
The most dangerous task of all for the Army was just moving shit from here to there. Anything could happen anywhere, shaggies or Mexies or FOFs, and no one would ever be the wiser. It was a mad world. Captured militia members and Shepherds were shipped off to chain gangs in the Midwest. The chain gangs took the criminals away and made them someone else’s problem. They got stuck rebuilding and farming all day on worse food than the Army had.
So when Austin overheard the soldiers talking about the Irish and the Mexies, now he knew to translate that to the Iron Fists and De Sangre Fria. Neither name was accurate. Few of the Iron Fists were Irish and there was no connection to Ireland; Sangre had plenty of Mexicans but half of their population was white and Asian and everything else under the sun. As to Sweet Song, it was led by rich and hired the poor to do its dirty work.
Those were the four biggest problems, but there was a multitude of smaller ones like shaggies. Shaggies was the base term for survivalists who caused problems, ranging from lone troublemakers to the mini-militias like Patriot Nation and Security Alliance and Anarchy. There were hundreds of little lawless groups like that from coast to coast. Shaggies had attempted to break into the one operational nuclear power plant in California and take it down. They hadn’t been successful. The plant was under heavy guard, and would remain that way for the time being.
“Always,” Betsy said. “It will always have to be under guard.” So would the factories making Zyllevir. A person had a better shot at breaking into the Pentagon than he did those places. The drugs were driven out in armored vehicles. Water treatment plants, electrical stations, refineries, fields of crops and factories, security had become a paramount issue on just about everything. Insane people would rip up their own communities, and they were still trying to rip them up today.
Austin’s wound grumbled and he worked through it to make food. If Manzer was still going with his hacked-up body, then Austin would, too. Talking through steam rising from a soup pot, Betsy said, “There was no reason for it to get this bad! Everything went downhill to total lawlessness the second we lost communications. Took out banks, industries, fun stuff, everything. People don’t have anything better to do now than watch ferals fight in a ring or stand around a harbor mad that their tax dollars went to those damned Sombra Cs living in heaven.”
“I’ll t-tell you what made the administration d-do that,” Manzer said in his shaky voice. “It was those flash mob b-battles. I’ve never seen anything so crazy. Shepherds would c-come after us, a hundred maybe, and then there’d suddenly be two hundred. Five hundred. A thousand and more! They’d post on HomeBase or Bitt-Bitt: wanna join the action? Then every fool and freak in d-driving distance would jump in a car and zoom over to be part of the attack. Half of them would just be bored people looking for fun, thinking they were going to p-pop off a few rounds at us and go home. That was happening all over the c-country. Kids with Daddy’s gun; crazies; looky-loos there to cheer it on. Take away the Internet, cell phones: boom. It stopped cold.” Laughing dryly at Austin’s expression, Manzer said, “T-take it you never got one of those posts, kid? It wasn’t going on in California so much. They kept it out of the news as much as possible. That was a nasty t-trend no one wanted to spread.”
“No, I never saw a post like that,” Austin said. That was just as crazy as feral fighting rings. There were a couple of people at Cloudy Valley High that would have responded to a HomeBase post like that. Dale Summit, definitely, Rudy French, the weirder guys and girls . . . Micah would have gone, not to shoot but to see just what the hell was going on. Betsy and Manzer argued about what exactly had led the administration to that decision. Those two enjoyed arguing with each other, but it was always in a friendly way. They were on the same side. They just got there by different routes.
That evening at dinner, a soldier on the other side of the serving counter blurted, “You know what I like about you?” Austin was caught by surprise, his hand closed over the ladle and his forehead beaded with sweat from the steaming kitchen. Looking incredibly embarrassed, the soldier said, “It doesn’t matter what kind of shit day we’ve had out there. We come back and you’ve got a smile.” He grabbed up his tray, forgetting to take the bowl of soup that he had come for, and hunkered down at the farthest table like he wanted to sink into the floor.
He was gay. Austin knew that as strongly as if the guy had come in wearing a rainbow flag. And here was Austin, making fun of gays to keep himself safe. It hadn’t crossed his mind that there was another gay person in the chow hall. Carrying a bowl of soup over to the table once the line ran out, Austin said, “We worked really hard to make this. Opening all those cans, I mean. You should try it.”
“Thanks,” the guy said, red as a beet. He was a thin white guy. Not handsome, but his soft brown eyes were beautiful. Since he looked so uncomfortable to be speaking with Austin, and as a fresh load of people had come in to be served, Austin fumbled for something else to say and then left.
After that, he watched that soldier when he came in for meals. In a room full of loud, laughing guys, and three equally loud, laughing women, Oliver’s quiet stuck out. It wasn’t an unpleasant, unfriendly quiet, borne of not liking his fellow soldiers. He smiled at the stories and antics going on about him. He just didn’t join in too much. They called him Quality, or Qual for short, and the noisiest dude was Quantity, or Quan.
But Austin didn’t watch Oliver too much. Someone could be drawing a line between them, and there was too much work that needed Austin’s attention anyway. It wore him out. The workers who managed the chow hall for the non-infected had enough numbers to divide into shifts. Christ! And here Betsy and Manzer had been doing everything, the first with a hundred extra pounds making her knees hurt and the second who worked with only one eye open because the other saw nothing but a fuzzy pinpoint. Even with Austin helping, it was overwhelming. At least the base had power to run the dishwashers so they didn’t have to wash everything by hand.
Every night, Austin dragged his weary self to the chapel to pray for his friends before he crashed into sleep. The number of pictures only grew, and he always noticed the newest ones to have appeared from one day to the next. They weren’t all murders. One recent addition was a suicide. At another picture, a woman said in agony how did he know? How did he know? A soldier had put up his own picture on the wall of the dead the day before he was killed. He had just had a feeling that he wasn’t coming back. That spooked Austin, who wondered if he himself would have a feeling like that one day. Something would whisper in his soul that it was his time to leave, and he’d scribble his name on a scrap of paper and stick it to the wall. Austin Bell.
People flowed in and out to pray, to add pictures or names, or just to look. One night, Oliver and another soldier came in while Austin was there. The two had gotten sent to
clean up the puddles of wax from the candles and tidy up in general. The tarp was loose and snapping from the wind in one corner, so the second guy went off for a ladder.
Austin’s hand was frozen over a scrap of paper, where he was trying to force himself to write down Corbin, Zaley, Micah, and Mars for the what-the-fuck columns on the wall. It was an agonizing decision, like the simple fact of writing their names was a jinx that they weren’t ever coming. Under his other hand was Mars’ bird toy, and in his pocket was the picture of Micah and the baby. He couldn’t leave those on the shelf with the trinkets either.
“I can’t make myself write the names,” Austin said to Oliver.
Oliver scraped up wax. “The wall will still be here tomorrow.”
He was right. If Austin wasn’t ready to do it today, the wall wasn’t going anywhere. He had come here to plead with God to intercede for his loved ones, not to waffle over a piece of paper. He pushed it aside and lit a candle. Feeling like a dork but also full of pride, he took out the picture and said, “That’s Mars. He’s mine.” Oliver might not know about the adoption story, and Austin would look like the reverse of one of those sorry talk-show dads, the white ones who insisted that their equally white wives had been faithful and the black child in the blown-up pictures behind them was their blood. “He was abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge. Micah and I are raising him. She’s . . . just a friend, really. My best friend.” That felt so dangerous to say. But the second soldier hadn’t returned with the ladder yet, and they were alone. It was the first time Austin had come out to a gay guy.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 155