She wanted that puukko. To take something of those murderers for her own. At her side, Corbin whispered, “If they don’t leave, how are we going to get out of here?”
“Cosmetics, pretend we were squatting, pray they let us go,” Zaley said.
They didn’t sleep much after that. Each took a short watch, but it was hard to relax with voices so close by. The doors to the hospital were checked and figures moved around to inspect the windows. “Clear! Clear! Hey, you check in back!” Periodic blasts rang out.
It was past dawn when the four of them put on their backpacks and grasped their weapons. The pick-up was still there, a handful of guys standing around it and bodies of ferals everywhere. Micah didn’t protest the harbor (which was good, because Zaley would have slaughtered her for fussing about it now) and passed out the extra weapons she took from hunters. Zaley inspected their necks and made Corbin put his foundation on more thickly. Then they walked downstairs and let themselves out the side door.
The only way out was down the drive and past the arm at the tollbooth. The guys straightened when they appeared around the corner of the hospital, guns coming up all around. Micah was the only one with a semi-automatic. She had had an automatic once, but lost it on her way from the mountain when a feral came out of the dark and ripped it away.
No one shot and a man said, “What are you doing here?”
“Just slept here for the night,” Corbin said. “You?”
Eyes touched upon their necks and slipped off. The one who had spoken nodded to the bodies and said, “Well, don’t come back.” He flicked his gun to the driveway. Zaley walked to it and worried that he was going to shoot them in the back. Apparently thinking the same thing, Micah walked backwards to keep her gun trained on them. But they had returned to their conversation, some turning away entirely. Then they climbed into the pick-up and drove it around to park it with the abandoned vehicles.
A man was standing in the tollbooth. He blinked to see them and got out to point his gun. “Who the hell are you?”
“Passing through. We hid here from the ferals last night,” Zaley said as Corbin tripped over the loose sole of his shoe, the tape coming free again.
The man’s eyes passed over their necks one at a time. Zaley did the same to him. Sniffing, the guy said, “Sure you didn’t come here looking for Zyllevir?”
Zaley forced an expression of surprise. “No.”
“You real sure?”
“Yeah. Can we go?” A little of her insouciant Grace Leigh persona came into her voice and demeanor. “Day’s fucking wasting!” she said brightly, irritated that she had forgotten to leave the applesauce in the hospital room.
He just stood there. Then he looked over their heads and shouted into the base, “Hey, Dale?”
Of course someone here was named Dale. It must have been one of the guys by the pick-up, who were the only ones in hearing range, or had been up until a minute ago. Zaley was suddenly fearful that it was actually Dale Summit, who knew damn well that Austin, Micah, and Corbin were infected with Sombra C. No one answered the man’s call, and then Micah thrust herself forward to walk past him. He opened his mouth and she said, “Fuck you. We’re going.”
He moved to block the rest of them from following her. “You’re going when I say you’re goddamned g-”
Micah swept a gun from her belt and shot him in the side of the head. A suppressor had been attached to the gun. It didn’t reduce the shot to nothing or a movie’s dull thunk. The crack was reduced, but not by much. He tumbled to the ground, his blood spraying over and into the tollbooth, and they ran. Turning right at the road, they sprinted past the base and crossed the street to a fence. All four heaved themselves over it and dashed for the trees at the far end of a pasture, Corbin panting to watch for zombie traps. But they didn’t have a prayer of seeing those in time when they were sprinting through the grass.
Only when they were to the trees did they stop to catch their breath. Zaley peered back to the road. No shouts had broken out in their wake, no engines revved, so they were safe for now. “Why didn’t anyone come running at the shot?”
“They probably couldn’t tell exactly where it came from,” Corbin said. “The fence and the buildings would distort the sound. And they’re just thinking someone found another feral on the grounds.” He wiped his brow. “We can’t walk on the roads. They’ll find him sooner or later.”
Struggling to climb a steep hill, they came to a trail with old piles of horse manure on it. It led them up and around through the thick trees, which made Zaley nervous about ferals although exposure to the road would make her equally nervous about those men. At least ferals weren’t armed. Austin slapped a hand over his pocket in alarm and then dropped his backpack to the ground to disembowel it. The tension went out of him at the Pocket Animal. Micah said, “He doesn’t need it anymore.”
“I need it,” Austin said in a forbidding tone.
The trail ended in a collapsed bridge over a ravine. They slid down to the bottom and fought to climb up the other side. After two failed attempts, Zaley waited for Corbin to reach the top. Then he crouched down and extended his bow. She grasped it and he pulled her up.
The trail dumped them out at a horse ranch. No one was home, nor were there horses in the stalls or pasture. The windows on the first floor of the house were broken. A long driveway led out to the road. Garbage cans were empty and overturned in the open barn, which was where they stopped to have breakfast. They spoke very little over their meals. A dirty white cat wandered in and weaved around their legs, uninterested in their food but very interested in being petted. It was living well off rodents. Zaley scratched its back and was rewarded with a rattling purr.
She wanted to show the cat to Mars, but she couldn’t show him anything ever again. How she wished that that strangely dressed group of people hadn’t left him in the blue van on the bridge, trapped under the recalcitrant buckle of his car seat. Then Zaley wouldn’t be hurting right now.
When they were about to leave the barn, tires scratched on the dirt and gravel driveway. It was the pick-up, carrying two guys in the cab and two more in back. Zaley squashed into a corner of the barn with the others and watched it go by through a crack. Circling the driveway in front of the house at a snail’s pace, it stopped once and a guy in back called, “Want me to go in and have a look?”
“No,” said the driver, craning his neck at the paddocks and the barn. Four heads turned this way and that, and then the pick-up carried them down the driveway and to the road. Waiting in the barn for a few minutes to pass, Zaley crept out cautiously after Micah.
It was six to seven miles from Arquin to the city of Petaluma. Six miles on that hilly road was the work of a few hours at an easy pace, but having to go through the hills more than quadrupled the time over that day. Once they came across a trap, a wicked thing with jaws poised to snap. Corbin hunted around for a stick and depressed the lever in the middle with it. The jaws clamped shut and broke the stick. Shocked for a moment out of his depression, Austin said, “You stepped in one of those?”
“Yeah. I know the guy was just protecting himself and his neighbors, I can’t blame him for that, but fuck,” Corbin said. “I’m going to have scars.”
Almost all of the homes in the hills they came to were abandoned. Of ferals there were few, and none were bothersome. At one point they had a view of the road, which was quiet under the sunlight. Those guys couldn’t possibly have the fuel for a sustained search. They were going to drive around the roads and give up, or that was what Zaley told herself.
They made it to town in mid-afternoon, descending a slope to the road and crossing the street to the apartments. The lot was empty. It was a place to stay the night if the place was clear, so they broke into groups of two to round the three one-story buildings. A garden had wilted in the heat behind the one Zaley and Corbin checked out. Skinning a mostly dead plant of its overripe cherry tomatoes, they ate them and pressed on with the search.
There
wasn’t a soul here, and all of the apartments had been raided. They selected the only one with whole windows and a functioning deadbolt, and had a home for the night. The place was a pigsty. Garbage was all over the floor and the walls were stained. The bathroom had no toilet, and the only object within the lone bedroom besides trash was a twin mattress with a yellowing sheet and no blanket. Three of them could squash onto it to sleep while the fourth stood watch.
Then there wasn’t anything to do but be still, the last thing Zaley wanted. If they had had the baby, there would be a thousand things that had to get done: the mashing of food, the feeding and bathing, changing and playtime, lullaby and bottle and bed. A baby did nothing if not fill up a day with a routine. Zaley just took care of herself, lonely for a ghostly cry of boo, and went to bed.
She woke up in the early morning needing to pee. Micah was on watch in the living room, where she tapped the puukko against the back of her hand as she sat against the wall. Snagging the container of applesauce, Zaley let herself outside.
After peeing, she went to the garden. Fresh footsteps were tracked in the earth and the tomato plant was missing its unripe fruit. Someone had been hungry enough to take those overnight, a feral without any sense, a human with nothing else. Setting down the applesauce on a post of the garden, she backed away and just looked at it. There would never be anything else to do for Mars. She would just have to live with the helplessness and the recrimination, the wish that she had held his hand that night. Such a simple thing she could have done for him.
She could have been better, but Mars had loved her anyway for the scraps she had to give. He’d still wanted her company, even if she hadn’t always wanted his. That made her feel like hell.
A sound startled her. It was Micah, who stood at the side of the apartment building and looked inquisitively at the applesauce offering on the post. Zaley said, “It was for Mars. Corbin and I found that on our way to Arquin and were saving it for him as a treat. We were so careful to make sure it didn’t get squashed under our things. I . . . I wanted to feed it to him.”
“It’s a waste of food to leave it there,” Micah said.
“I can’t eat it. I can’t ever eat that.”
“I will.”
As his mother for all intents and purposes, Micah had that right. Zaley retrieved the container and was just extending it when her fingers tightened around the sides. “I’ll trade it for that knife of theirs. Please.”
Indifferently, Micah unhooked the sheath from her belt and they traded. Ripping off the foil and dipping her finger into the sauce, she said, “Why do you want it?”
“Because I want something they can’t have anymore. Something that had a lot of meaning to them,” Zaley said. And what a joke that was. The knife was just a thing, and it didn’t have any meaning. That little hand reaching out to her, to all of them, had. “I want it to be mine instead.”
“As a trophy?” Micah asked. “Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
Zaley flushed in embarrassment, and then she understood it was a joke. “You cut off their trigger fingers with it, Micah Camborne.”
A smile touched her lips and flitted away. “I cut off more than that.”
“Don’t tell me. Please don’t ever tell me.” Zaley ran her finger over the FINLAND and withdrew the blade. That asshole had dropped serious cash on this knife and only to lose it to Zaley. It didn’t pay for Mars, nothing would ever pay for Mars, but that murderer died screaming in Mars’ name. “You were good to him. You were so good to him. I hope I’m as good to my children one day as you were with Mars.”
Micah nodded and ate the applesauce, her eyes trained upon a pair of plump brown birds hopping around in the grass. Zaley went inside with the blade in her fist.
Corbin
As they went out the door to get the day’s walk underway, a rumble alerted them to large vehicles approaching. They ducked back into the apartment and looked out the bedroom window. Trucks appeared on the road and turned onto the lane that ran in the direction of the base.
Over the next half hour, it was practically a parade of trucks, cars, and motorcycles. Some honked horns and others had music pounding out their open windows. All that was missing was an audience and floats. They all turned at the same spot. The last truck halted at the turn-off and men jumped out of the back. One swung an axe at the street sign. There was no need to hack that down except bad reasons.
Corbin was so mad at Micah for not leaving the baby at the police station in Redfern that he could hardly bring himself to look at her. But he held it in abeyance at the sight of that stopped truck and the sounds of the axe. She didn’t like it any more than he did. Letting the blind fall, she said, “I don’t know what they’re doing here, but we need to shove off.” He was in full agreement. It was long past time to be gone from this place. If that was a militia out there, those men could soon be scouting out these apartments for places to stay while they braced the road. If it wasn’t a militia, just some nomadic group, it still didn’t look good.
There was a window over the kitchen sink that would let them out behind the apartment building and shield them from view. But something was wrong with the window, which rose only partway and jammed. They couldn’t fit through that narrow rectangle, not even Zaley. It was smaller than the bucket hole at the confinement point.
Micah sat on the edge of the sink and put all of her weight under it to shove. The window squeaked and didn’t move up more than a millimeter. Then Austin did it. No more impressed with his effort, he let go and said, “Let’s break it.”
“They’ll hear the glass shatter,” Corbin said. The bathroom window was too small and the bedroom window put them directly in the line of view from that parked truck blocking the lane.
That left the front door. Slipping out, they raced around the building and past the dying garden there. Then they ducked between the slats of a fence and sprinted through a pasture. Not until they were all the way across it did they slow down and check behind them. The guys were tiny spots upon the road, and several more were standing among the apartment buildings. Micah watched them through her binoculars as Zaley rifled through her maps.
They had maps again, both from the base and ones that Micah had gotten from the mountain. Two were of the North Bay region, and the third was of the whole of California. In the event they had to try for the harbor in Humboldt, they’d need that one. Corbin had taken quick looks at them, happy to pass off the job to Zaley but wanting an idea of what they faced in getting to Sonoma. They had to stay off the easiest route there, and that was a wobbly line of a highway going east that connected to one leading north. The harbor was nestled in the hills at the far side of the city. The last thing he wanted to do was walk up to Humboldt. It would take ages to get there even if by some miracle they weren’t waylaid. Ages and ages more on top of it, since they would have to stop frequently to find food and water. Humboldt was no more accessible than Mars.
Mars.
“They’re setting up a concrete road block,” Micah said as pain and dislike ran through him. “It’s so heavy that it’s taking eight of them to get the block out of the truck.”
“Maybe they want the base, and those guys were cleaning out the ferals before everyone got there,” Corbin said tightly. “Or they want the farmland.” They could have designs on both. With so many people, they could storm every farm out there and take its cattle and chickens and crops for themselves. Corbin had no way to warn that kind old farmer who helped him out of the trap that trouble might be coming.
Zaley folded up a map and said, “This way.”
Corbin wanted to take the easy route, but he trusted what that soldier told Austin, seeing how the military had taken regular convoys to the harbor. Soldiers knew what was out there. The easy route would blow up in Corbin’s face. They had had so little luck since leaving Cloudy Valley that each moment of grace stood out starkly in his mind. He could count them on one hand. So they would pass through Petaluma and go into the
hills. He had his bow and arrows, and now a handgun from the collection that Micah had brought along. It was fully loaded. At least there weren’t any mountains in the way now.
Mars came to mind as they walked. That fat little tummy and toothless smile, the blue eyes intent on his toys . . . his chubby fist closed over a stick as he drummed it on the ground and shouted boooo . . . a hole punched through his chest . . . Corbin blinked hard. He had seen a dead baby at the confinement point. Yet he hadn’t known that one when alive. He knew Mars.
He retrained himself on his immediate surroundings. After passing by a rural patch with falling down homes surrounded by pastures and gardens, they were now going through a development where each driveway led to four big homes. Each one was fancy, but they were precisely the kind his mother looked at when they drove around and dismissed as being cheaply made. All show, no substance.
After so long traveling by night through Marin, it was strange to be walking around in the daylight outside the base. People even waved to see them on the sidewalks. On some streets, the only signs that anything was wrong rested in the boards over first-story windows and the massive gardens in the yards. When everything had gone downhill, many in this community responded by planting. Tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, the only space in the yards that wasn’t taken over with plants was the walkways going between them. A house had burned down to rubble on one block but left part of the yard unscathed, and that had been converted into a garden, too. No matter how small the yard, something was growing in it. Hanging tomato plants were tied to columns and flowerboxes grew herbs. There was something comforting about all the food right at hand, and something disturbing as well, that it was necessary.
A woman was washing off a baby in a metal tub on her porch, clothes flapping on a line over the driveway. His mind stubbornly returned to Mars. It was something he couldn’t ever say out loud when Micah and Austin were destroyed, but he was ripped up, too. Mars had been his little buddy. They’d hunted bait together so many times, the kid babbling in the carrier about whatever half-formed thoughts went through an infant’s mind. It was goofy how Mars believed that he and Corbin were having a conversation, and funny how he’d smacked himself in the face with a rattle and wailed before promptly wanting to play with it again.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 159