Corbin should have taken the baby out of Micah’s arms in those hills behind Redfern and marched him straight into that police station. He railed at himself for not pushing through those doors and going to the front desk. Here. Please take him. He was abandoned in a blue van on the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday.
The people in those vans couldn’t have gone too far without noticing they were missing a baby of all things. The girl who had been trying fruitlessly to release the jammed buckle on his car seat would tell an adult; a frantic mom and dad would search through the crying little children for their infant son. They would have doubled back to the Golden Gate Bridge to search for him, found the van empty, and then gone to the police stations and hospitals in San Francisco, Redfern, Sausalito, Marin City, everywhere in that area. The cop behind that front desk could have had a report right there at his fingertips about a missing baby of seven months, blond hair, blue eyes, dressed in a shirt with a flower and trousers. His name is Marcien. The kid could have been back in his family’s arms by that evening, his mother kissing the top of his head and his father standing there in quiet relief.
But Corbin hadn’t taken the baby from Micah. So now they were here in Petaluma, and without him. Austin was so crushed that he just wanted to die, and Corbin worried that he might actually kill himself. With the arsenal they had at their disposal, Austin had his pick of weapons.
They had had a chance to make it right for Mars, and all four of them failed. But Micah failed most of all. The first time she went out kayaking, Corbin should have gone into Sausalito and turned him in somewhere. That was going to weigh on him. You didn’t keep someone else’s baby just because you happened to find him and thought he was cute.
He swallowed it down and looked around. A park had been fenced off and turned into a grazing area. Cows and sheep wandered around among the trees, their necks dipping to the grass and one sheep standing its front feet upon another’s back to strip leaves from a low-lying branch. The playground was empty. Shepherds, true shepherds, were sitting on the benches and the tables in the shade, guarding the animals and with guns at their sides. Two chatted about which park or property to drive the animals to next when they grazed this one down to nothing.
Beyond the park was a trashed neighborhood as bad as the worst parts of Marin. No one appeared to be living there. Then it returned to regular homes and big gardens, people keeping an eye on what they had and dogs barking behind fences. Chickens were a common sight, either running loose around yards and being shooed away from the plants by bored children flapping towels, or penned in big metal cages that could be slid along the grass. Some chickens roamed free, walking in flocks across roads and going up porches to see what was there.
The kids always watched the four of them going by on the sidewalk for something to do. Corbin watched them for the same reason. One boy tossed cell phones through a toddler’s basketball hoop just a couple feet off the ground. The screens had shattered. He threw one too far and it went over the fence, landing at Zaley’s feet and skittering over to Corbin’s. The kid called, “Sorry!” Picking it up, Corbin aimed and made the basket. Two yards down from that one was a cell phone sculpture. The phones were fixed up into a giant robot that loomed over the tomato beds like a scarecrow. That was all a cell phone was good for lately. Artwork.
Two guys were fighting on either side of a fence, one wearing an official-looking uniform and insisting that dogs had to be contained or were assumed to be lost, and the second guy in a tank top yelling that his dogs could go wherever they damn well pleased. The official one said that they’d end up shot doing that, and then the tank top man got even angrier at the prospect and yelled, “Trade you for that gun!” Micah shook her head, her hands closed around her semi-automatic, and Corbin inwardly seethed. It hadn’t even crossed his mind to sneak the baby away while she was out raiding houses or fishing. That was what he should have done. And when she came back and got upset about it, he would have held strong. The baby didn’t belong to her, and he didn’t belong with them! It was for the better and she should suck it up. Corbin was so ashamed to have just gone along with it. In the former world, he would have been charged as an accomplice to kidnapping. Jailed and put on trial, sent to prison for a few years and his family so embarrassed that they didn’t bring up his name at holiday gatherings. He writhed to picture his parents’ faces and he heard his father’s astonished exclamation. You did what? What was your thought process there, Corbin?
There was nothing Corbin could say. His thought process? If someone had found Corbin alone as a baby and didn’t turn him in, his parents would have been devastated. If someone found Corbin’s own baby and just kept him, Corbin would punch the idiot until blood ran. That was his kid. It wasn’t a penny to drop from his pocket. It wasn’t his lunch. Yet Corbin had done that to someone else’s son.
Smoke rose through the trees, coming from a cemetery. They passed by the long fence of it as two men carried a stretcher up the driveway. A dead body was on it, a heavy one that strained their muscles with the weight. The fire was from burning bodies. They were collected and brought here. A double red line was painted on the driveway, and Zaley read a sign posted on the fence. “Corpse delivery, all kinds.” The red line was to warn people that they could be exposed to Sombra C here and to take precautions. A woman crossed the street to the cemetery, a wheelbarrow rolling in front of her. Its contents were covered.
“He should have had a grave,” Austin whispered. “A plaque like those people out there on the lawn. A place where we could visit him.”
“Yeah,” Corbin said. A little coffin, someone saying prayers, everyone gathered around to grieve. Not an unmarked hole in the dirt by a mountain, all alone forever, or dug up by an animal and consumed. Mars should have been laid to rest as these people had been. A long time had gone by since the grass was mowed. Weeds engulfed some of the plaques.
Every day they hadn’t taken him to the cops, they became more attached. The cut would have been clean had they turned him in immediately. Now their wounds were ragged. Corbin had no longer looked at Mars and seen someone else’s baby. He looked at Mars and saw their little dude who hated the airplane game and bossed them around as a rude, racist English lord from some other century.
Corbin hadn’t made huge mistakes in his life. Little, stupid ones all the time, but not massive ones. He hadn’t realized at the time the true depth of this error, how mammoth-sized it was. He’d known it was wrong but not just how wrong, and then he got distracted by collecting bait and preparing food, snuggling up to Zaley at night and washing the endless rounds of laundry that a baby created. On warm days when Corbin was in charge, he just stripped the kid down to his diaper and let him loose. Then there wasn’t so much to wash in the evening.
That hadn’t been Corbin’s decision to make, and it shouldn’t have been his arms to comfort Mars after the battle with the rattle. To have made a mistake of this magnitude and have no way to rectify it ate at him relentlessly from minute to minute. I’m sorry. I kept your missing baby and then he died. Oops! My bad. If only that stupid woman in the window of the last van hadn’t seen Micah’s stamp and freaked out. If only the baby hadn’t scratched Micah on the bridge and exposed it. If only Corbin weren’t a little afraid of Micah’s weirdness and turned in the kid when she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
If only. If only. If only.
Austin stopped walking to read the plaque closest to the fence. The girls went on, unaware that he had paused, and Corbin doubled back for him. A charm necklace of plastic animals outlined the plaque, which was engraved with the name LILIANA JENKINS and dates underneath. She died last autumn at five years old.
“Do you think she had Sombra C?” Austin asked, and then he answered his own question. “No, they would have burned her body and put the ashes somewhere. These are graves.”
“Maybe it was a car accident,” Corbin said. “Or she had an illness. A brain tumor or leukemia or something.”
“You know w
hat sucks the worst about life?” Austin said. “The people that hurt the most, they’re the ones who’ve done the least wrong. The good get punished and the bad just go on their merry way.”
“That’s not true, Austin.”
“You can’t say that. They shot your dog, put us in a confinement point. They kept Elania from dying with her family at her side. They killed the baby. We hadn’t done anything to anyone. We were just trying to find a safe place.”
“Yeah, they did those things to us. But those bad people are hurting, too. Prime was only ever a flash in the pan. They’re going to lose. They’re losing right now as we stand here. Winning battles but losing the war, that’s all they got. We’re going to wait this out in the harbor while they die off.” Corbin had to believe it. “Or we’ll go down fighting on the way there, giving them as much hell as they’ve given us.”
“Are you coming?” Micah called. The girls had moved off the sidewalk to allow a man pushing a wheelbarrow to pass. The smell of the crumpled form inside was appalling. Austin and Corbin stepped off the curb and caught up.
Past the cemetery was an intersection. They crossed it and cut through an empty We Got Gas station with a raided minimart to a field of tall yellow grass. Then they walked along weedy railroad tracks rather than walk through a housing community on the other side. Zaley guided them through a burnt field and over the freeway, where a squad of people in protective clothing loaded a body onto a stretcher. Corbin received no more than a glance. All that interested those people were the dead.
They backtracked several times for roads that were blocked off. Some of the blocks were whole but under protection by the people living there. Others were reduced to rubble. A bomb had gone off in one place. A lily-white sign stood in the midst of the destruction, reading Shepherd Headquarters. At another blocked-off series of streets with homeowners standing guard, Micah asked permission to cut through. Her request was politely but firmly denied.
Although they saw a lot of people, no one bothered them beyond refusing to let them walk down certain streets. At midday, they stopped to eat upon the athletic field of a closed school. It had been grazed down and was covered in heaps of manure. Then they climbed over the fence to walk through a wooded area behind the school, through condos and twisted streets with missing signs that got them lost. The development had only four styles and four colors, so everything looked the same.
They got through it at last and left the city behind. Now there were trees and occasional, ramshackle buildings abandoned long before Sombra C began, scorched fields and ones tall with grass that animals were feeding upon. People guarding the animals studied Corbin, Zaley, Micah, and Austin intensely, even those who gave friendly waves. It was more than studying out of boredom. They were ready to react to a problem.
At a badly damaged electrical area, men and women stood guard behind a fence. The place was nonfunctional. Corbin guessed that they were hired to keep it from getting more damaged than it already was. Replacement parts were made overseas, and those countries were just as affected by Sombra C as America. It was going to be a long time before they could be manufactured and brought over.
Just across the street, an organic farm had been raided. Not so much as a carrot was left in the overturned ground. A fist was spray-painted on the wall of the barn. Having been lulled into a false sense of security by the calm in Petaluma, Corbin searched the premises for any sign that a militia was still here. Zaley said, “It’s the end of July. Stuff wasn’t even ripe when they came through.” A squashed pumpkin was on the ground, its rind still green.
When you were hungry, you took what you could get. If the crops were mostly ripe or not ripe, you ate them anyway. Whoever had lived or worked here put up a fight from the looks of it. There were bullet holes in the barn. Pens for pigs were empty, and so were stalls for larger animals.
The highway that would take them to the one that hit Sonoma ran alongside the farm. Corbin cast it a wistful look and headed for the vineyards that embraced the hillside like a pleated green skirt. They were growing wildly, the trellises lost in the huge, bushy plants. Lack of watering had wilted them, but they were still big. Clusters of puckered grapes hung down. He helped himself to one as they walked through the row. The grapes were gross.
Trellises had collapsed in the curve of flat land to hill. They crossed under the wires to walk in a row that still stood. The slope was steep, but Corbin was so used to climbing that it didn’t slow him down much. It was almost time to start looking for a place to hide out for the night. Crossing Petaluma had taken a lot longer than he’d expected, but then again, everything took forever when one was walking through a zombie apocalypse.
One vineyard turned into another, the sun beating down hard and a hint of ash being swept along in the wind. A skeleton was lying in a tree-filled patch beyond the last vineyard. Those folks with wheelbarrows and stretchers didn’t come all the way up here to hunt bodies. Cresting the hill, they spied a road running east through a ritzy neighborhood that had seen better days. The boards over the windows detracted from the look.
No one braced the road. No one was even around except for dead bodies. The lawns weren’t planted with fruits and vegetables and there weren’t any cars. Everyone was gone, so they could have their pick of mansions for the night. Austin crossed a lawn to peek in a window that had its boards taken down. He came back to the road at a quick clip, his eyes wide as saucers. “Full of dead ferals. Literally full. I couldn’t even see the carpet.”
The next mansion had its front door hanging ajar. Corbin liked that one for how its windows were so high off the ground. But when he went in, it was to find an old couple dead in the foyer. The lock on the door was busted and a chair was spilled over. The man and woman had tried to brace it and gotten killed when ferals knocked in the door. A grand staircase led up to a second floor past the man’s body. Although they could climb up the stairs and lock themselves into a bedroom or bathroom, Corbin gestured for everyone to go on. “Let’s find another one.” There could be ferals hiding out upstairs, there were millions of flies, and the whole place reeked of rot and shit.
They ended up in a small winery several blocks away, slipping in through a broken French door and barricading it with a heavy cabinet tipped on its side. Micah did a quick run-through of the building, her feet rapping up metal stairs to the second floor after she canvassed the first.
Dust was thick on the tasting bar. Corbin examined the heavy doors and was satisfied that they weren’t going to budge from any amount of ferals’ fists. The windows were high and narrow, so unless the zombies were strolling around on stilts and very slim, they weren’t getting in that way either. Zaley inspected the shelves of items for purchase as Corbin went in back. Tanks towered over him. Feet rapped down the steps and Micah appeared at the corner. “There’s a tiny lab and an office that has a bathroom upstairs. It locks.”
They explored the first floor thoroughly and then retired up there with new winery T-shirts and two bottles of pinot noir that Austin had taken from behind the bar. The labels were messed up. The lab was indeed small, but the lock on the door was a fully operational deadbolt. A shade hung over the window, and the walkway that joined to the metal stairs and ran along the wall to overlook the tanks didn’t pass under it. On the desk was a picture of a black-haired man. A little boy that looked just like him sat on his lap. An older girl stood beside them.
“We’re in trouble if there’s a fire,” Micah said. The only way out was that door, or the window as a last resort. They’d have to drop down to the first floor and that was a long fall. The desk’s swivel chair spun smoothly under Austin, who kicked around in lazy circles.
Corbin didn’t want to listen to Micah’s uninflected voice, so opposite of how she had spoken to the baby. He didn’t want to hear her at all, or see her face and the ragged ends of her chopped hair, or think about her thought process that led to keeping Mars. Going through drawers, he pulled out a corkscrew and swiped one of Austin’s wi
ne bottles. He was a little mad at Austin, too. For dubbing himself the kid’s daddy at one stray dada spoken in a fussy fit. That was all it took to win his heart.
What was your thought process there, Corbin?
There wasn’t one, Dad. There wasn’t anything. I was an idiot. His dad would respond better to the truth than excuses. And what his dad thought didn’t matter. Corbin had fucked up royally and didn’t need to be grounded to appreciate how much. Drawing the cork out of the bottle, he took a sip of the wine. It tasted like rubber bands. He swallowed and took another draught.
“Planning on sharing that?” Austin asked.
“You’ve got another bottle,” Corbin said. He had had wine many times, his father pouring a taste of what he and Mom were drinking since Corbin was eight years old. Then when he was in high school, he’d had alcohol at parties. Never enough to get smashed, but he’d had a pretty good buzz going on. Then he would just sit back and enjoy the sight of everyone else getting hammered, acting crazy and barfing in pools.
This stuff was badly made. It should have felt silky in his mouth. Pinot noir was challenging to do well, the grapes susceptible to rot and temperamental about weather extremes. That was what his father had taught him. After it got picked, it had to be handled delicately when being made into wine. This one could have been no worse had it been created by ferals. The alcohol was fifteen percent, which was too high for pinot noir.
Austin undid the lock and went downstairs. When he came back, he had four wine glasses. Corbin drank straight out of the bottle while the other three opened up the second and poured it out to share. “Is it supposed to taste like that?” Zaley asked, grimacing over hers.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 160