The fight didn’t last long after Zaley shoved the muzzle of her gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. So that was three deaths before the sun had risen above the treetops. Micah just retrieved her energy bar and stuck it in her mouth while she checked over the ferals’ clothes for anything interesting. Only shit in the pants and the woman had a key in her pocket. When she looked up, the others were staring at her. Their hearts were still pounding, their blood racing, and it would be a few minutes before they could resume their quiet chatting and eating. Micah was as calm as she had been before the ferals appeared. Her heart rate would measure at something like sixty over ho-hum.
Drop the energy bar. Swing the gun around. Open fire. The steps were neatly laid out in her mind, no more arousing to the senses than use a sharpened #2 pencil. Fill in the bubble completely. Do not select more than one answer.
Boring. They were completely different sets of circumstances, yet equally boring.
Hours after the ferals’ attack, someone shot at them from a tiny stone house when they were cutting across a field. Micah instantaneously unloaded a spray of bullets through the window. When no one shot again, she went over to the house, kicked open the flimsy door with its hook latch, and stood over an old man dead on the floor.
She wanted to be standing over an orphaned, bawling baby in a cradle, its arms outstretched to her. An abused dog on a chain, straining for a pat and kind voice. But only the man was there, blood in his grizzled beard from the hole in his cheek. The house was packed with years’ worth of newspapers. Melted candles rested in thin holders upon each stack. It was a fire waiting to happen.
She was so mad that there wasn’t a baby or dog, a squirming passel of newborn kittens or anything, that she wanted to ignite the fire.
The scraps of food in his pantry became theirs, as did the rest of his ammunition. The gun was a piece of shit, so the dead man got to keep it. Micah slaughtered the two scrawny chickens in the back, relieved them of their feathers and internal organs, and made an inelegant meal of them within the oven. Even though they weren’t going to be in the house long enough for the body to smell, the boys wrapped it up in the rug and dragged it outside.
When the chickens were roasted, Micah sat at the dead man’s table to feast. Everyone followed her example, the meat so tantalizing that they overcame their feelings of weirdness about eating in his home. The chickens were tough but edible, and soon nothing remained of them but two heaps of bones picked clean. Stunned and sated by the profusion of protein and fat in their bellies, they sat there as Austin read the most recent newspaper, dated the second of May. It was a quarter of the size it should have been. Producing a newspaper without benefit of cell phones and the Internet had severely curtailed reporting.
So that was four deaths. In the early afternoon, they came across a man going north through the woods. He had a preschool-age girl riding on his back and an older boy walking at his side. The boy was dragging a red wagon that was covered in a sheet. A rip in the sheet showed that the wagon held their food. Panicked to see them, the man raised a blade and looked at their guns hopelessly. Micah shrugged at him. Picking up the pace, the man snapped at the boy to come along faster.
They passed one another. Then two men came stalking through the trees, their eyes on the ground to track the ruts of the wagon’s wheels. Each had a gun. Before either could raise one, Micah shot them and yelled to stop chasing children. One man died right away, and the other was winged in the side. Shouting that the guy with the kids had stolen their wagon, he ran off.
Micah couldn’t take back the bullet and return the food. The sounds had disturbed a feral, who ran into the dappled light under the canopy. She shot it. Two more ran away from the disturbance.
Six deaths (not including the chickens) and one injured. But Austin lived too acutely, so this was a much bigger deal to him than to Micah. She said, “We don’t have other solutions here.”
“It’s not that,” Austin said. “I just want it to be like it was long ago, when we went day to day without killing anyone. It didn’t cross our minds. We sat in school and bitched about Mr. Yates thieving our tips.”
She had lost touch with that world entirely. This was what it was, and this was how she coped. Waiting for a rush to lift her above it. There wasn’t any joy in fighting ferals; there wasn’t any joy in killing people who thought to bother them. There was just Micah, blank and untouched. Just like in school, she was pulling straight A’s without trying or caring. A for fighting. A for killing. A for comportment. A for resources. She had this mastered. Micah didn’t have to worry about winning admission to Zombie Yale. She was an asset to the class.
F for opening fire on the kids at the campsite.
Nothing troubled her about what she had done on the mountain but that, and that wouldn’t leave her alone when she wasn’t distracted by something else. Those children hadn’t chosen to be there. Mars hadn’t chosen to be on the Golden Gate Bridge. Micah had chosen to shoot, and then she’d been too much of a coward to see if she struck them. If she hadn’t been able to own that decision, then she shouldn’t have made it. She and those kids hadn’t had any quarrel between them, and pulling the trigger made her just as bad as their shitty parents. She made herself the boogieman in the darkness for all of their lives.
Don’t pull . . . but she pulled. Pulled it in memory of someone dead, and a memory didn’t care.
That night, she had a vivid dream of her belly swelling in pregnancy. Suddenly it deflated, and Mars’ dead body was in her arms. The hole in his chest closed, the blood evanesced, and his eyes opened to stare up to her. Then his lips spread into a smile and his hands waved for her hair, which grew back in a glowing ocean blue that reached the ground and rolled away in waves. Fish leaped them. She burst into tears and held him close to run from the mountain, her legs lengthening until she could swallow a mile at a stretch. He was also growing, from a baby to a toddler to a young boy to a big boy too heavy to carry. They made it to Sonoma side-by-side, Mars so tall as a man that he towered over her. When they burst through the Sanya Smart Shield and into the harbor, she was being carried in his arms as the child.
Then he shrank into a little boy of four or five, his hand in hers, and they found the Camborne mansion in the disaster housing. Uma and Tuma opened the door to let out Harbo and stared at them in surprise. Jubilee? Is that you? Who is this boy? They were going to add him into the family as a new son, take his charge away from Micah, and she corrected them that this was their grandson. The family reformed to a new constellation. A hand closed over her shoulder and she turned, expecting Shalom, who wanted to meet her nephew. But it was Austin. She had been crying and calling out for Mars in her sleep.
She almost couldn’t get up that morning, too desperate to return to the dream. Everyone was very kind when she wanted to be treated like normal, and she couldn’t be rude when they’d know why she was doing it and fall over themselves to be understanding and forgiving. So she made no mention of the night and pushed herself onwards. Everything was fine. But when a man waved a gun at them threateningly and demanded food at midday, Micah shot him until Austin made her stop.
The man was riddled with holes. She connected the dots to evidence of a rage she hadn’t felt until it overcame her. When you invited a monster in, it never left. It made a home for itself in your shadows. She lifted his gun to take the bullets. There weren’t any in it.
In the harbor, no one was going to wave a gun at her. She wouldn’t be shooting people either. After months of being in business, the administration behind that wall could even have set up some kind of schooling. She twitched at the thought of sitting at a desk and opening up a textbook to page two hundred and eighty-one. The door opening not to a feral but an office attendant with a pass to the counselor . . . a hand waving at the teacher followed by a question about extra credit . . .
She would do as she had always done. Smile and turn the pages, hand in perfect homework and pretend she cared about the subject matte
r. Her blood would still in her veins from the hours in hard seats; her brain would scream at how she just had to memorize the material and spit it back for tests, and only to be handed a fresh ream the next day with which to do the same.
There was no trail in any dimension that led her back to that destination. She was seventeen, eighteen in November, and long past the time when she could legally drop out of school. She’d just say no if someone suggested she enroll in Zombie Harbor High School to complete her last semester. Her mothers weren’t around to expect it of her. In the harbor, she wasn’t the shining star of a Camborne girl. She wasn’t anyone.
She imagined herself pacing around within the harbor. Going out at night and walking through the disaster housing only to run into a wall no matter which way she went. The harbor was a cage.
A confinement point.
The others would scream if she called it that to them. Oh God, they howled in her head. It is a haven, Micah. A safe place. The only safe place for Sombra Cs. We’ll get in there and live! Everyone wants to live. Why don’t you get that?
The determination they had to get there was matched by her regret that they weren’t headed for the one in Humboldt. It would take forever to reach Humboldt, and at the rate they were using their ammunition, they’d run dry long before they were within a hundred and fifty miles of the wall. She might be bored with fighting ferals and thieves, but it kept her occupied.
“What if there are fires blocking off the north side of the harbor?” Austin fretted in the afternoon as they picked through a valley that was black from a previous fire. It had spread quickly, if the destroyed tents were any indication.
“Then we’ll go east,” Corbin said.
“What if there are fires on all four sides of it?” Micah queried.
“I really don’t think that’s likely,” Corbin said.
That was a damn shame. She wanted it to be impenetrable and force them to try for Humboldt. Charred tree stumps stood up all around the burnt valley, and there were lumps near the tents that were likely human. The fire had burned to a road and stopped for the most part. The other side was just as dry and ready to blow, but it was far rockier terrain and the black patches were separated by dirt and rock.
They climbed to a ridge and descended a slope on an unmarked dirt trail that appeared. Mosquitoes ate them alive at a lake reduced to a puddle in the low point of a big, dry pit. Micah couldn’t slap the insects faster than they could bite her. Between her fingers, behind her ears, on her forehead, one wriggled under the backpack strap and bit her there, too.
The puddle of the lake stank. Water had been hard to come by since leaving Arquin. The stone house had had running water, a stroke of luck, but they were drinking it quickly in the hot weather. No one was so bad off yet as to consider battling the mosquitoes to fill up at the bug breeding grounds puddle.
The silver lining on that itchy cloud was the mosquitoes made this place so godforsaken that even the ferals didn’t hang out here. Although it was past time for them to find a hiding place for the night, they had to go on until the mosquito paradise was far behind. The bite squarely in the middle of her forehead itched fiercely.
By evening as animal cries took to the air, they reached the end of the trail. It let out into a parking lot and a museum. They were on the grounds of a historical park. The doors and windows on the first floor of the museum were locked and barred, so Micah scaled an oak beside the porch and broke a window on the second floor. Only the first floor was a museum; the second was made up of several offices. She went downstairs and let everyone in.
There were two old fashioned beds in one of the rooms set up to give visitors a peek into the past. The mattresses were rock hard and the bedding musty. Corbin flopped down on one and a cloud of dust leaped up around him. They shook everything out and remade the beds, sneezing all the while. The water ran brown in the bathroom sink, but it cleared within a minute. Micah washed up and changed into clothes that didn’t smell as strongly of smoke and sweat. Dousing her filthy set, she wrung everything out and slung it up on the posts of the bed.
Austin took first watch and walked about the creaking floor of the museum as Corbin and Zaley breathed deeply and rhythmically in one bed. Micah lay awake in the second, afraid to dream of Mars and wake up with him returned to the grave. She flailed for anything else to think about and alighted on school. Micah, what are your thoughts on the current political state/the poem you read last night/the ethics of genetic testing? Care to share with the class?
Split second pause to look serious and reflective.
When you puncture someone’s lung with a blade or a bullet, air is sucked into the hole when he tries to breathe.
Silence.
That was all she would find in her head in government, English, and science. Math would be calculated in liters of blood. Foreign language was feral tongues; P.E. was Shepherds, militias, and zombies chasing after her around the field. Ethics would only ever concern Micah at the fence, her gun trained on children eating dessert. Even when reading Bunny Tall, Bunny Small to her baby, she’d noticed how fat those bunnies were on every page. Her old world had been saturated by the new one, so saturated it drowned under the weight.
Austin came in when his watch ended, bitching in a whisper that he’d never get to sleep when he had mosquito bites. She rose for her turn. He was asleep by the time she’d gotten her shoes on. The moonlight wriggled through the bars on the windows and made long lines on the floor.
She walked through the museum, dousing the flashlight to travel between the jail bars cast onto the carpet in every room. Then she went up the squeaking stairs to the second floor. The offices were full of papers and calendars and nonsense. Sliding the broken window all the way over to the side, she sat in a chair and leaned out to listen.
Her friends were walking to their salvation. She was walking to her execution. Her brain waffled between harbor/confinement point as a warm breeze passed by and rattled the leaves. She’d adjust in there. Of course she would adjust, because she was highly adaptable. But she didn’t want to adjust, to leave behind the messy, expansive world with Mars in favor of one made of straight lines and right angles with her pinched between them.
Her mind was determined to think of unpleasant things. Next it traveled to memories of rituals when she was in junior high, idiot Flies with Crows and her forever-and-a-day libations where she gave gratitude to everything under the sun. Micah just wanted to get back to beating on a drum, but the old woman was an attention whore who did not relinquish the spotlight easily. StarTruth just shined her on as she took over rituals and baby naming ceremonies and handfasts alike to pour spurts of wine on the ground and talk about herself.
Drums. Micah was hearing a faint beat of drums. She leaned farther out the window, sure she was mistaken. But she wasn’t. She was remembering rituals because there were drums out there past the hooting of a lone feral.
The decision was made in an instant. Slipping on a coat of foundation, she armed herself with a simple handgun and climbed out to the oak. No one would ever know she was gone. A feral wasn’t going to spy the open window through the tree’s canopy and scale the branches to get there, and everyone was fast asleep in a cell of barred windows and locked doors.
Then she was off on a rove. A real rove. What she’d be doing in the harbor/confinement point was a pale imitation to stepping out into a wild kingdom such as this one. It could be Micah’s last chance. The sound of drums was the first thing to have piqued her interest in days.
If she had to shoot a feral this close to the museum, her secret mission would no longer be secret. She turned off her flashlight and hid when the hooting one lurched past. Another feral surprised her only moments after she left her hiding place. Freezing as it came silently through the trees, she stood stock still as it examined her. The sex couldn’t be told in the darkness. Breath puffed on her cheek and a finger trailed down her chest. Micah kept her eyes averted and wrestled with the impulse to scream and ma
ke it attack her. The gun was down the back of her jeans and the feral had the advantage.
It breathed in her ear, its body heat pulsing into her side. Then it lurched away, Micah waiting until it was through the trees. She was disappointed that the drums had stopped during its inspection.
They began again and her heart jumped. As incredible as it was, someone was playing music in the area. The beat was unsteady, giving it a live feel. Her flashlight on, she pursued it through the warm midnight. After she found it, she’d return to the museum and never make mention of her little adventure out in the dark. Or she would tell Austin when they were safe behind the wall to make him angry. Jesus, Micah, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you didn’t want to get here!
The siren call of the drums led her on and on until she was standing upon a narrow road. The music was coming from a ripped-out vineyard, where a huge circle of campers were parked end to end like elephants protecting their young at the center. Invisible people shouted and laughed inside. The campers had been parked there for a long time, many listing upon flat tires and weeds growing high around them. Planks were set up at each one, presumably to block ferals from crawling underneath. There weren’t any cars around, so everyone had to have walked here. Micah skirted the whole circle, fascinated by this strange scene, and eventually crept closer to peek through a window. Dozens of people danced around a fire, ululating and shouting as drums played.
It didn’t have the feel of the Sweet Song camp at the mountain. These were uniformly teenagers and young adults, and they were partying. Micah lifted the door handle. It was locked. She went to the next camper and tried its passenger door. It was also locked. On the fifth camper, the door opened. The lock had only been pushed partway down.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 162