Speaking of sex, two people were almost doing it against one of the campers. Locked together, they had their tongues down each other’s throats. Her leg was around his waist and he was groping her breast. People hooted and a girl turned away angrily. She had broken up with him just last week and now that ho Angie was all over him!
This was Micah’s last party with the kids. She was too damn old for this, longing too much for the magic that they still believed in. She danced and drank and laughed when Dyson asked for her digits. Then he caught on to what he had said unthinkingly and promised he did far better on his SATs than she would suspect. Yells broke out at a couple exiting the camper and the exhibitionists just carried on where they were, the girl’s pants sagging so low that everyone was treated to an ample supply of her ass crack. The guy kneaded her breast like it was bread dough.
Dyson planted a lingering kiss on Micah. Flasks were pressed on them, interrupting it, and Micah took a long swallow before excusing herself to visit the curtain. She cut through the dancers and eased over to the unlocked camper. Passing through it, she let herself out of the party and was curious to know what had happened to Good Man Shube and his fifth of vodka. There wasn’t anyone around, human or feral, and the other campers were locked. Amused, she walked around the party twice before she found him fast asleep beneath a camper. The planks hid him from view, but his snoring betrayed him. He roused when she moved the plank aside and shined her flashlight in his face. The bottle was beside him with a large amount missing from it, and the rifle was farther away. “Hey . . . uh . . . you shouldn’t be out here,” the guy said. “Go back to the party. It isn’t safe.”
Micah helped herself to the vodka and filled the flask that she had taken from the party. He rubbed his face, rolled out from under the camper, and struggled to make sense of the world. Then she rubbed off her foundation and showed him what was underneath. Wrapping her fingers around his neck before he could scream at the exposed stamp, she said pleasantly, “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting these kids from zombies, Shube?”
This was the dude left in charge. These fools had the luck of the gods. Shube was a short, scrawny guy, seventeen or eighteen without a muscle to call his own, and far too inebriated to fight her very well. As he kicked out feebly and tugged at her arm, she banged his head into the camper and dropped him. The guy scrabbled underneath for his rifle as she crossed the street and disappeared into the trees. The hypocrisy of scolding him for not keeping watch when she wasn’t keeping it herself didn’t elude her.
As he crawled out and stood there, shaking from fear and swiveling the rifle from side to side, she put her shirt back on and enjoyed his fright. He paced around in panic. Five steps to the right, five steps to the left, he rubbed his aching head and debated what to do . . .
Crawling through the camper, he returned with five armed partygoers. All of them took point around the circle. That was better. Micah hadn’t protected the holiday party, but she had protected this one. Across the divide rang Shube’s voice as he staggered into position. “She knew my name! How in shit did a zombie girl know my name? That’s crazy!” The noise from within the circle reduced from pounding to mutters, and the drums ceased altogether. Micah saved the party and ruined it at the same time.
Her return trip to the museum was quick and unimpeded by ferals. She climbed the tree and let herself into the office. Everyone was still tuckered out in the beds on the floor below. Nothing had gone wrong so she hadn’t done anything wrong. Relieved, she searched the museum to make sure that nothing sneaked in during her absence. If they had all died while she was gone . . . but they hadn’t.
It was long past time to rotate watchers. She poked Zaley in the side and flopped into the bed where she slept until morning. Her dreams evanesced the second she opened her eyes. Leaning over her, Austin curled a finger under the glow necklace she had forgotten to take off and said, “Where the hell did you get this?”
“I found it upstairs in a desk,” Micah lied. Reaching under the bed, she felt for the jar. “Oh, and this as well. It looks fresh, I guess. Must have been meant for someone’s toast before the breakdown.”
Austin turned over the jar of jam in bewilderment. “But it’s dated the end of July. And this didn’t come from a store. It’s homemade. Why . . .” He unsealed the lid and held the jar under his nose. Then he moaned lustily. Micah hadn’t seen the date on the label last night. Dipping his finger into the jam, he stuck a smear of it into his mouth and moaned a second time. “Corbin! Zaley! Oh God, come in here and bring a spoon!”
They crowded around the bed in wonder and shared the jar until it was licked clean. The jam was delicious. Corbin supposed that someone else had broken into this museum for a night and forgotten it. It was incredible that a person in this day and age could forget food. Austin examined Micah for several seconds and then the suspicion went out of him when Zaley passed over the lid so he could scrape off the last bit smeared there. Micah could tell him the truth and he wouldn’t believe a word of it. The world is falling down and you want me to believe a bunch of people rode their bikes out to nowhere and had a party in the dark? Are you fucking kidding me? With ferals around? And you crashed it to steal jam? Liar, liar, pants on fire, Jubilee Eclipse. Then he’d catch on that she had had to go somewhere for it, and be mad that she left them asleep and undefended for hours. That was small potatoes to something else she had done, something she couldn’t even whisper to him.
She would give her gun to those shattered children and kneel before them for judgment. Whether they forgave her or shot her through the head, she accepted their decision. Either way, she wasn’t worthy of it.
The jar was rinsed out and they filled it with water to have a little more on the road. Zaley went upstairs to search the offices for anything else left behind, but all she came up with was a single stick of sugar-free gum that had been hidden under papers.
Pulling a fast one gave Micah a momentary spark of pleasure. She was sorry when it faded. They were about two days away from the harbor, as long as they didn’t run into a new fire. So this had been her last rove, her last party, her last secret, and she got up to face the day in a blankness that she could no longer stand.
Austin
He was trying to see the world for its beauty rather than its failings. That was so he didn’t drown.
His mother had kicked him out, but Micah’s mothers took him in. Shepherds had put him into a confinement point, but Zaley broke him out. Mars had died, but there wasn’t a second of their short time together that Austin would change. A bullet had gone through Austin’s side, but it hadn’t hit anything so crucial that he had to shit in a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. The wound barely even hurt anymore. He would just have a little scar on his front and a scar on his back. And a story to go with them, even if he didn’t want to tell it.
They weren’t at the harbor yet, but almost. He was rigid with anticipation. If they got in . . . they wouldn’t get in, something would go wrong, something always went wrong . . . when they got in, he would offer himself up. Elania had done that in the confinement point, looked around to what people needed most and given herself over to it. Micah shrank into the hill’s leader; Corbin was sullen and silent; Austin sat in a tree for hours upon hours and fantasized about someone coming to rescue them. But Elania took that ugly place and transformed a little piece of it into beautiful with her prayer circle. Yes, the world was overrun by demons, but she would not be separated from God and she did not allow them to be separated.
That was why Elania hadn’t drowned behind that fence. She made a raft and invited everybody to climb on. A prayer circle was not a very big thing. But it had been big to them when everything else in their lives was lost. She hadn’t done it for attention (the obnoxious junior college student Lulu-Laura-Lorna came to mind) and she hadn’t done it for the ego trip. She did it for others, and she gave it with no expectation of return. It was the quiet act of an angel.
Austin would look arou
nd the harbor (if they got in, when they got in) and see what it needed. He would do that for Mars, so Austin’s sweet baby son hadn’t lived for nothing. If they needed someone to rock sick babies in their hospital or spoon-feed old people who could no longer do it for themselves, he would sign up. He’d tutor or work in the kitchen or offer to give prayers. Then something beautiful was made from the memory of his little boy. Sitting in a tree or being mad about Mamma and Sombra C didn’t do anything for anyone. He had to be better than that, or else he was going to get stuck in it forever. Sit in a tree and dream about rescue when he had been rescued in his life, over and over again.
If the harbor had a baby that no one wanted, he would take it. He knew how to care for a baby now and he wanted to experience that love again. It wasn’t to replace Mars. Nothing would ever replace him. But Austin wanted to have that family feeling that Mars had given after Mamma took it away.
At the harbor, he could grow, rather than just survive. But first, he had to get there. The world wasn’t too sure it wanted him to grow, because it tossed so many obstacles in his way. He climbed over them one at a time, taking the long way to get around those fires, killing ferals, accepting that they would have to stop walking one afternoon when the weather danced past a hundred degrees and soared ever upwards. He sipped his water and instantly sweated it out.
It was a ring of hell even in the shade of trees between two vineyards. The earth was baking in August heat. Plants had shriveled in on themselves and the grapes were wizened. Panting, he rolled up the cuffs of his jeans to get air on his legs. Although there were one thousand complaints in his mind, he bypassed them to think about the harbor. Everything would be okay in there, and what wasn’t okay he would work to change. If Elania could do that for a confinement point where everyone was against her, then Austin could do it for a harbor where everyone was on his side.
“I can tell you one good thing,” Corbin said as the girls took a bathroom break in the rows of vines.
“What’s that?” Austin asked.
“It’s hotter in a city. All that concrete everywhere. So if this is one hundred ten out here in the vineyards and pastures and woods, they’re at one hundred twenty plus.”
The concept of hotter was unreal. Austin wouldn’t bitch about the heat when it could be worse, or he’d only bitch a little on the inside. “We need a zombie catapult. We could just load into it here and have it heave us over the wall and into the harbor onto a mountain of pillows.” Austin’s hand flew through the air and landed on that soft, imaginary mountain. He still had the taste of strawberry jam in his mouth from breakfast, so he crossed off bitching about food, too. That had been an astonishing find, and so very random.
“Or a teleportation device like in sci-fi movies,” Corbin said. “They could just beam us in.”
“Maybe one day those will be made.”
“It’ll be a long time before we have that kind of technology, if we ever do. The human body is too complex. If a single molecule came out in the wrong place on the other end . . .” Corbin made his hands into fists and then opened them, spreading his fingers like two people had splattered all over the ground into puddles of ooze. The catapult was a better idea.
The girls came back and took seats under another tree. Austin didn’t have to pee. His body was sweating out its liquids so fast that nothing made it to his bladder. Micah rested on the trunk and dozed. She had been off since coming to the base. Challenging Corbin to kill her, freaking out on an idiot with an empty gun, she paddled around a shallow emotional pool and was out of her element when it deepened. And this was an abyss. She was working up to an explosion. Austin had seen it before. It was better that vehicular traffic was so rare, or he’d worry that she’d rush over to stand in it.
I lost our baby. She had whispered that at Arquin, expecting him to be mad at her. Forgive me. I lost our baby. Then he’d been ashamed for wondering if there was anything else that she could have done to stop it. Anything that would take back what happened, give it a different outcome.
She killed the killers in revenge, and that made Austin dark with gladness. If he had only been there . . . but he’d been shot and fallen down the slopes, Micah ran off with ferals on her heels, and there was nothing they could have done to change what followed. God had given and taken away for reasons too great for Austin to understand. Maybe Mars had come into Austin’s life to make Austin understand that he had things to give, too. And there were people who needed what he had to give.
“What do you think there is to do at the harbor?” Austin asked.
“I bet they have everyone helping out with growing food,” Corbin said. “You can’t count on relief trucks to make it through, so it’s imperative to grow as much as possible, be self-sufficient. They must do maintenance on the shield, or on the power system and septic system if they have one. I don’t know what they do for water. If someone stops responding to Zyllevir, they’ll need closed quarters and people to watch over them . . . why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Austin said. “I just don’t want to sit around in there.”
What if they’re full? What if they don’t let us in? What if the only choice is Humboldt? Oliver would have said if the Sonoma harbor wasn’t taking people, and there wasn’t any reason to say no to the four of them. Austin swallowed the taste of strawberry and took out the map to estimate the distance. Tomorrow afternoon, if nothing got in their way, they’d be coming up on that harbor. There were a few communities to cut through first, but nothing like the heavy population there would have been if they had approached from the south.
Micah just slept and slept. She hadn’t woken Zaley up for her turn at watch until way too late, and by the time Zaley woke Corbin, it was pretty much time to get up anyway. Taking the binoculars, Austin climbed up the vineyard to look for habitation to last the night. Corbin went down it to cross the street and search past the vineyards on the other side. Zaley stayed at the trees to guard Micah and their belongings.
Hiking up to the ridge, Austin stood over a stagnant reservoir. There wasn’t anywhere out here to hide in the sea of green vines, but there was a single building far off. He peered through the binoculars as the sun simmered on the top of his head. It was a winery shaped to look like a small castle, and people were walking around it. So that was out.
As he turned to go back, he heard the crack of a gunshot. He sprinted through the vines, which were so tall and bushy that he couldn’t see over them to where he’d left the girls. They weren’t screaming. When the noise of the shot was gone, there wasn’t a sound. He came to the end of a row and dashed in panic to the trees.
Unharmed, Micah and Zaley were standing beside the body of a man who had fallen on his face. His hair was matted and wet at the back, and blood leaked out from it into the dirt. His clothes were ragged yet fairly clean, and he didn’t have a stamp. Austin exclaimed, “What happened? Was he feral?”
Micah had a throwing star in her palm. “No. He came by on that piece of shit bike down there and spotted us, then swung up here to have a chat.” The guy’s pockets were turned out. She had already gone through them.
“And you shot him for that?” Austin asked, fooled for a split second by her show of indifference. “Did he try to do something to you?” A guy had to be really stupid to approach two armed girls and attempt to molest them.
“He was just weird, Austin,” Zaley said as Micah threw the star. It nailed the trunk of a tree and jutted out. “He came over with a big smile like we had been best friends for years. He wanted to know what we were doing out here, were we alone, and how it wasn’t safe for girls to be alone. His eyes kept going to our backpacks, our guns, everything.”
“He was going to steal our stuff,” Austin said in irritation.
“Never gave him the chance,” Micah said.
“We told him to go away and he just got pushier,” Zaley said as Austin looked down to the body in distaste. “Practically demanded to know where we were going, Glen Ellen, Sonoma, Na
pa, up in the hills. He didn’t say the harbor, but it was implied. He said that he’d be our guide. I said we had a bunch of guys with us and we knew exactly where we were going and we didn’t need him.”
“That didn’t scare him off?” Austin asked.
“No. If we truly had guys with us, he said, why had they left us alone? He wouldn’t leave girls alone. And we have too much for two girls to carry. So he called it our lucky day because he and his friends were going to help us carry stuff and get wherever we were going.” When Austin scanned around in alarm for friends, Zaley said, “They’re just a little farther down the road, he told us. Micah yelled at him-”
“I didn’t yell,” Micah said.
“Micah told him very loudly and clearly to get lost if he wanted to live,” Zaley said. “And he still wouldn’t go. He just laughed like she was hysterically funny and reached for a backpack. So she asked if those were his friends and pointed off into the distance, and she shot him.”
The trees were barely visible from the road. The only way that guy could have seen the girls was if he had been biking very slowly and searching for travelers down every row of vines. Jerking the star out of the tree, Micah took aim at the body. The star cut through the air and hit the guy on the ass. It pierced a little through his jeans and fell over.
“How did he know that we were going to the harbor?” Austin asked. It wasn’t like they were wearing T-shirts with their destination printed on them.
“He didn’t know shit about us,” Micah said. “He was guessing. There’s a fair chance people coming down to Sonoma are going to be Sombra Cs headed for the harbor. But he just wanted to jack our stuff. Butter us up, lead us away, have his friends jump us.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 164