The practical question popped into Austin’s mind. “Did he have a gun we can take?”
Zaley started to giggle. Even Micah had a wry smile as she took it out of her pocket and handed it over. The guy had had a lady’s gun. It had a tiny barrel and pink-winged angels engraved on the ivory grips. Having room for two rounds, only one was in it. Austin turned over the tiny, lightweight thing with a snicker and tried to give it back. Micah said, “You take it, Zaley.”
“I don’t want it. It looks like a toy. You take it.”
“Austin should keep it. He’s gay. So he likes pink shit.”
“Shut up. Then your semi-automatic makes you a dyke,” Austin retorted. This gun was a joke, unless it was pressed to your head. “We’ll give it to Corbin. He dressed up as Princess Glam last Halloween.”
When Corbin returned, having found a place for the night, he was presented with the gun. The story of the guy’s friends was worrying, so they didn’t stay at the trees. Austin got the guy’s feet and Corbin the shoulders, and they walked up to the reservoir with Micah wheeling the bike behind them. It was tempting to keep the bike, but one bike for four people wasn’t helpful, and there was a chance that someone could recognize it as the man’s. The bike and body both went into the water with small splashes. Ripples ran out, and after they ebbed, all signs of anything having happened here were gone.
Giving wary glances north and south for the guy’s buddies, they rushed across the road and into vineyards. Corbin led them to a big garage that housed a tractor and lots of empty, towering shelves. It smelled like chemicals, although the place had been robbed and there was little left. The window in the side door was broken, but the lock worked. Pieces of wood were tilted in a corner. They had a hammer and nails from the work truck, so they covered up the window. Two huge corrugated doors were locked tight, creaking when Austin tugged at them but not budging.
The heat had been building up all day inside and there weren’t any other windows. They sat on overturned buckets and stayed by the boarded window to feel the air coming in through the cracks. Austin longed for an on/off switch in his brain so he could shut himself down to sleep and wake up at dawn. Sleep wasn’t going to happen when it was one hundred and ten degrees outside and ninety-something inside. Too bored to sit around, Micah let herself out and promised to be back before night. Ten seconds after she walked away, Austin ran out after her. “What are you looking for?”
“I want to know who lives around here,” Micah said. “And to see if that guy really does have friends nearby.”
She wanted to spot trouble before it spotted them, and so did he. They crept around for hours to get a gander at the area. A pot-holed street leading off the main road terminated in three blocks of homes, most of which were inhabited. A crude fence was erected at the end of each lane to slow down anyone coming out of the trees. Children kicked a ball listlessly in the heat and adults sat on porches fanning themselves. A woman watered a garden with a watering can and a second woman stood on the porch to that house and told her it was better to do it in the early morning or late evening so the water didn’t evaporate. No one saw Micah or Austin, who moved like shadows from tree to tree.
“There were people at a castle winery,” Austin said. They went over there and hid behind a small mountain of ripped-out trellises and dead vines. Two families had moved onto the property. The bumper stickers on a minivan labeled one family as residents of Los Angeles. There was a mom and dad, both with light brown hair, and four blond kids from teens down to kindergarten age. A white-haired grandmother sat on a lawn chair in the shade with a gun on her lap, keeping an eye on the kids as they played. The second family lived in the caves that went into the hill. The caves looked cooler than the castle. No one was up to anything nefarious, just striving to stay cool and yelling at the kids to stop yelling. There was no sign of where the dead guy came from.
They climbed up the hill and used the trees for cover as they pushed south. Decomposing bodies of ferals were here and there. A second winery farther down the way had been lost to fire. Two homes stood almost at the top of the hills above the blackened rubble, but Austin wasn’t about to climb up there and Micah didn’t believe the guy rode his bike all that way. When she yawned, Austin said, “Don’t take so much watch tonight.”
“I just lost track of time.” She chucked a throwing star at a tree. “These things only penetrate a few centimeters. And that hunter thought he was going to kill zombies with them? Unless a feral is holding still and you nail it directly in the throat, what good is a star?”
Austin swept over the land below and jerked when he realized he’d just passed over a guy on a bicycle. “Micah, look.” He gave her the binoculars.
“He’s turning into the driveway to an old restaurant,” Micah said. “A guy is coming out the side door to talk to him.” She handed him the binoculars and took a flask from her pocket. After sipping, she offered it to him.
He expected water and got a mouthful of vodka. Choking it down, he said, “Where did you get that?”
“Same place as the jam and glow necklace.”
That museum had been filled with weird shit. The guys talked, and then the second one rolled a dirty bicycle out of the restaurant. The two wheeled down the driveway and came north. Pedaling on either side of the road, they stared into the vineyards. “Do you think they’re looking for him?” Austin asked.
Micah put the flask away. Her eyes were on the fog bunching up like a rumpled blanket at the horizon. “Yeah. It’s getting late. Smart.”
“What’s smart?”
“Their position. They live right by the road and get first crack at shaking down anyone going into Sonoma, or leaving it.”
These last steps to safety were just as dangerous as every one they had taken since being run out of Cloudy Valley. The closer they got to the harbor, the more obvious it would become to observers where they were going. “We could walk at night.”
“Our lights will give us away, to ferals and thieves like these,” Micah said. “We’ll go in slow and cautious, see what’s there at the harbor before we dive for it. Or try for Humboldt.”
“Fuck no!” The Sonoma harbor was a lousy handful of miles away now, and he was getting inside if it was the last thing he did. This stopped. Austin’s mind had made over the disaster housing into quaint cottages with roses growing among the beans and cucumbers. It wouldn’t look like that, but still, he was almost to it. If the country’s unrest went on for the length of his life, he would stay in that harbor and make it beautiful for everyone he loved who hadn’t made it, everyone who had, and for himself.
The two bicyclists passed out of view. Austin and Micah doubled back and stayed still behind trees when the bikers returned. They were poking along, peering into the vineyards and their mouths opening in short shouts that didn’t carry to Austin’s ears. Calling for their friend perhaps.
Then it was a mad dash to beat the setting sun to the garage where Corbin and Zaley were waiting. Once inside, Austin locked the door and checked it twice. He also checked the corrugated doors.
It was still hot, although not as bad as earlier. Feral noise doubled in volume every quarter of an hour, and when it reached a freakishly loud chorus, someone rattled the doorknob. A soft hooting came through the cracks in the boards. They relocated from the buckets to the giant shelving units. Austin hauled himself up to the shelf that was five feet off the ground, helped everyone up after him, and then hauled himself up to the highest shelf. One by one, he pulled them up. The ceiling was so high that he could almost stand.
The shelves creaked at their shifting weight, but had been securely fastened to the wall. Austin made up a bed and sweated into it. All of them stripped down to underwear to cope with the heat, which was a tad worse up here than on the floor. Corbin almost knocked his new gun over the side by accident as he pulled off his pants. Catching it just in time, he said, “For the sensitive killer. Are you sure this is a real gun? It looks like a movie prop from some
dumb old Western about lady cowboys.”
Ferals hooted and hollered, screamed and screeched, turned the doorknob and scratched at the boards. Eerily, one feral retained a measure of human speech. Going around and around the garage, he shouted repeatedly, “Honey, are you in there? Honey, are you in there? Hey, change the channel!” There wasn’t any sense behind the words. It was just his equivalent of monkey shrieks or owl hoots.
The boards held through sporadic blows, but Austin woke in the darkness to one clattering to the floor. He leaned over the edge to see a fist framed in the moonlight. It withdrew and a rhythmic thud hit another board until it fell, too. Zaley was on watch, the semi-automatic beside her. Deep in the vineyards, the other feral was still shouting at his honey about the television.
The boards were all knocked down, and then a feral slithered through the gap. The woman wandered around in the garage and bumped into the tractor. She slapped it and hissed. Then she wandered around some more, going in and out of the moonlight and knocking into the corrugated doors. They squeaked and she moaned, disliking the sound. Eventually, she crawled through the gap of the window and went away. Austin considered going down to put the boards back over the broken window, but the pounding of the hammer would lure aggressive ferals over. If these ferals were used to coming into the garage at night, being blocked explained why some were obsessing about it.
“Eh-eh-eh!”
“Ah-HAAAA!”
“Honey, are you in there?”
Did they hear the calls of ferals in the harbor? The cries couldn’t be so frightening behind the shield. If Shepherds couldn’t break through that wall, no way was a mindless zombie going to do it. As he lay down on his hard bed, Austin inched away from the edge of the shelf, concerned he was going to roll over thoughtlessly in his sleep and plunge to his death. Then he fumbled with his pants. Tying one leg to the post, he knotted the other one around his wrist. Now if he turned, his pants would pull at him and wake him up.
Another feral came in during the night to howl. It never looked up in the times they could see it in the moonlight. Its head was bent down and didn’t even turn from side to side, its neck muscles freezing it that way. Spacing out every few minutes, the feral stood there hunched over. Then it moved around aimlessly, howled and forgot itself, howled and wandered, howled and howled and in time went back outside. Austin heard the crack of a fist and a thump, and that one didn’t howl again.
At dawn, Corbin shook their shoulders and pressed a finger to his lips. A new figure was crouched down in the shadows on the far side of the garage, right beneath the emergency wash pull-cord for chemical exposure.
Their dressing and descent couldn’t be silent when the shelves squeaked. Austin went down first and kept his gun trained on the feral. He didn’t want to shoot the person. So many people had died just from four people trying to get to Sonoma. Outside the broken window, the sky was white. It had gone from too hot to almost chilly, the fog having swept in.
“Whooooooo,” the feral whispered, clumsily putting its hands over its ears at the squeaks. Austin backed away once Zaley slid down into Corbin and Micah’s arms. They walked out of the garage and turned to the hills, planning to bypass the restaurant by climbing right over it.
A balding guy in a stained work outfit was in the vineyard they needed to cross. He was rubbing his hands in an oily rag and inspecting the puckered grapes. Austin expected the man to turn and be angry that people were trespassing on his property, but he was so fixated upon the sorry state of the grapes that he didn’t notice them. They ducked into another row and walked single-file down it, the out-of-control grass growing there muffling their steps.
“Hey, change the channel. Hey, change the channel. Hey, change the channel.”
Jesus Christ! Austin bent over to look under a vine, the others doing the same. The guy was also bent over and looking right at them. No rot on his face, he gave Austin a nice smile instead of a snarl and repeated his wish for the channel to be changed. Sombra C had a million faces, and here was the weirdest one of all. If it weren’t for the echolalia, no one would ever guess the guy was feral. Even folded over to gaze at the four of them, he was rubbing his hands in the rag. They were red and raw, and bleeding at the knuckles. He was going to dribble the virus everywhere.
They crossed the road double time to get away from him and hiked up into the hills. No one was outside the castle winery or the caves at this early hour, nor was anyone visible at the restaurant. A couple of ferals were still out and about in the rows below and one in the road. That one was crawling, black and naked, and leaving a slick trail behind it that glistened in the light.
The hills softened to slopes, and winding through them were roads. They stopped for a quick neck check and breakfast beneath a tree full of twittering birds. To a bird’s perspective, everything in the world was A-OK. Their lives went on like always. Everything important about today for Austin was nothing to them.
If we get in/when we get in.
After eating, they passed between quiet residential streets, crossed over a hill and through acres of vineyards, and returned to civilization once again. Chickens were waking up in coops and atop fences, making disagreeable sounds and flapping their wings. People who had gardens in the front were keeping watch over them behind the windows at some houses. Other sleepy people sat in lawn chairs under big umbrellas, guns or knives or dogs beside them. One man yawned and called, “Watch where you’re going, guys. There’s a feral around these blocks.” One yard over, a woman stretched and waved at the man. The two of them groused about that damn feral who kept swinging by to shriek at two in the morning, three in the morning, four in the morning, and sprinkle shit on the sidewalks and fences.
Bicycles whizzed through a stop sign. The riders were wearing heavy backpacks. Most of the bicycles also had baskets attached to the handlebars and over the back wheel. Blankets and garbage bags shielded the contents. All of it was tied down with belts and cords. Latched into a kid’s seat on one bike, a little girl shouted, “We’re going to Canada!” The guy in front hushed her sternly and pushed on fast.
“Let’s go to Canada,” Micah suggested.
“Let’s not and say we did,” Austin said. “The borders are closed anyway.”
Every road they started down, every house they passed, something could go wrong. Austin breathed a sigh of relief at each one they went by without disaster only to tense at the next. The calm of the neighborhoods was deceptive. It wanted him to relax, to comment on that stupid lady’s pistol and munch on a snack as they walked. Then it would attack. The others felt the same way, because they barely spoke.
At mid-morning, they swung off the road and hid under a bridge to allow Zaley time with the maps. Doing it out there made them look lost and vulnerable. A thin stream ran among parched rocks at the lowest point of the riverbed. A skeleton was splayed over it.
“Are we doing okay?” Austin asked.
“Fine,” Zaley said. “There’s another rabbit warren of roads to go through and we’re in blank space. I assume the space is more vineyards.” He followed her finger along the edge of the hills. “This is the north road leading to the harbor. We’ll take these side roads when we can.”
The space between where they were and where they were going was no space at all. Her fingers were touching as she pointed them out. Then she read out street names for Corbin to memorize, Austin doing his best to remember them too, and she put away the map.
Four armed men stood in the middle of one street, so they selected another one to travel down. That road only had a boy of twelve or thirteen outside to protect a garden. He gave them the evil eye until they were well away. Not far from that, an entire park had been transformed into a fenced garden, and people were hard at work within it. The sign on the fence was modified from Steal and You will Be Prosecuted to the Fullest Extent of the Law to the short but sweet Steal and Die. The rest was crossed out and the die painted in red.
The rabbit warren fell behind their
feet and became a pasture where cows and sheep were grazing. The fence had collapsed in several places. As they crossed over a broken plank, a man rose from the grass and pointed a gun that looked similar to Micah’s semi-automatic. “Passing through or here to steal?” he barked at them.
Like anyone would admit to that! “We’re just passing through,” Austin said.
“Is there a reason you’re not taking the road?”
“Someone tried to steal our things on the road,” Micah said, giving the man a doe-eyed, nervous expression. “We thought we’d be safer traveling here.”
The man shouted, “Passing through!” Another man waved from deeper in the pasture, where he was standing by a broken part of the fence. At a third collapsed place were people fixing it.
They crossed the pasture, eyes on their every move until they climbed over the fence on the far side. From there, they took a two-lane road up into the hills. The city hadn’t done a great job, or any kind of job, in maintaining it. There was no guardrail, potholes were everywhere, and the paint on the line separating the lanes was just a bleached smear that faded away entirely along some stretches.
Their pace slowed from the grade. On and on Austin walked, a sour thought coming to mind that this harbor had been a mass delusion all along and nothing was there. It would just be a patch of trees and a sign saying JUST KIDDING or APRIL FOOL’S even though it was summertime.
Micah ushered them off the road and he forgot about it. They hid in the trees as guys strolled along the road, going in the same direction and all of them with guns. The men chatted about the fog and yesterday’s extreme heat, nothing alarming, but they should have been guarding food. None were carrying baskets or pulling on a cow. So that made them suspicious. One stumbled in a pothole.
It was afternoon now. Zaley whispered, “We’re less than a mile away.”
“Then let’s climb to the top of the hill on the other side of the road and look through the binoculars,” Micah said. That was easier said than done. They thrashed and cursed their way up over the next half hour, and only to step upon a crest with a view shielded on all sides by trees.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 165