The search party was trickling in by twos and threes, all of them going to the card game to chat. The dim beams of their lanterns swam around in the air like the glows of melancholy fireflies. A very bright light went on in a tent, the one that belonged to the man with the booming voice. His head ducked out and he yelled for the search party to shut up, put those lights back, and let people sleep.
“Even at night, we can’t get in through here,” Corbin said in dismay. “They sit right in front of the fucking doors. Tell me about the east side.”
“It’s pretty much like this,” Zaley said. “Just about the same number of people. You can’t get to the doors without everyone seeing you. What about the south path?”
“About thirteen guys are down there. They were eating soup and hanging out near the corridor that goes to the door in.”
“Humboldt? I don’t know what else we can do here.”
“Austin says we should just unload our weapons on them and dash for it. We can’t do anything against the numbers on this side, or on the east, but there aren’t so many people at the south. And a guard . . .” Corbin was astounded at that. “A harbor guard stationed up on a watchtower shot a trapper who was coming after me. Killed him.”
“I want to be in there,” Zaley said fervently. So did Corbin.
Most of the search party went into tents in time; the last few hung out to talk and eventually made motions to leave on another search. This one trailed along the side of the wall to the west, so it was for the better that Corbin and Zaley weren’t over there right now.
They waited for the searchers to come back. Time dragged with little to see. Occasionally, people left their tents for the bushes. The guys got bored with card games and talked, and then they just watched the night in silence together. A third man paced up and down the road.
Corbin guessed that it was in the vicinity of two in the morning when the searchers returned. Nudging Zaley, who had dozed off, he slid back, adjusted the tape on his shoe, and got up. This was their golden period, should the next search not happen until just before dawn like the night before. A gunshot rang out and those awake at the doors turned, but it was far away.
The two of them walked through the trees, Corbin shining his light and keeping Zaley’s hand in his so she walked where he did. The ground was loose and pebbly in so many places. They passed the body of the dead trapper and Corbin looked up to the watchtower. It was so dark that he couldn’t tell if the same man was up there, or anyone at all. He trusted someone was, and that they knew damn well two people were walking by.
They stopped for a feral, a woman who was staggering around and saying hah with every step. Hah could be what was left of harbor in her head. She paused in the moonlight to stare at it every so often. As she moved south along it, so did they. There wasn’t a way to pass her. But Corbin’s cautiousness turned out to be unfounded. When she finally observed that people were behind her, she turned tail and lurched away fast. She was one of the frightened ones who just wanted to be left alone.
At the end of the wall, Corbin looked around it for signs of the south side blockade. A lot of trees stood in the way between them and the corridor; he couldn’t see their camp from here. No lights were moving around, and as they crept along over the path and into the trees, he didn’t see any lights whatsoever. Had they all gone to bed? If they had, then he was waking up Austin and Micah and they were running for it.
He and Zaley kept going. Snores came from tents lost in the darkness as they neared the south entrance. A glow emanated from the corridor, and Corbin gave up on his idea of running through the sleeping men to get at that door. A lantern was placed in the corridor itself, and a bunch of guys were sitting behind it.
They weren’t going to get into the harbor. Corbin was pissed as they got to their rocky hiding place. Austin was fast asleep, and Micah was on watch. Perched cross-legged on a boulder, her back was ramrod straight as if she was meditating. That seemed like the sort of fruity thing her therapist would have suggested for handling the stress induced from the holiday party and being infected with Sombra C. Commune with your spirit animal and meditate on its guidance. Be at peace with the universe and please fill out the check to Doctor Loony Fruitballs. See you next week.
Micah hadn’t been on watch that long, so Corbin made a bed and rested beside Zaley. He didn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t so much due to the soft calling of a feral as the cold, hard reality of those men lollygagging in the corridor. That was how much they hated Corbin, who they didn’t even know.
His eyes burned and his body screamed from exhaustion, but he still couldn’t fall asleep. He got up and leaned on the boulder beside Micah. “It’s quiet over here.”
Micah was still in her pose. “Yeah. This isn’t a high traffic area for the harbor. Most people don’t know about the back door.”
But the Shepherds did. Maybe in a few weeks they would drift away, or maybe more of them would come. Corbin couldn’t live in the woods month after month, praying for boredom to drive them away. “Do you want me to take watch?” She shook her head and muffled a yawn. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Dreams. What do you dream, Corbin?”
He didn’t understand. “What do you mean? At night?”
“No. What do you dream for your life? Fame? Fortune? Sailing the high seas?”
That was an odd thing to be thinking about now, but then again, he and Austin had had a similar conversation in the confinement point when they felt like they were at the end of their lives. Being blocked from the harbor was almost as great a disappointment. “I don’t really want to be famous. There’s nothing special about me anyway. I can’t sing or dance or act. Money would be nice. I want a job. A good job where people take me seriously.”
“Because they don’t with your dyslexia?”
“Sometimes people don’t. One teacher in junior high really didn’t. He thought that because one part of me is broken that every part must be.” Everyone was a little broken. No one was good at everything. His broken part was just easier to observe. “I’m not stupid. I can read. Not well, and not fast, but I can. I’ll work around it if someone gives me a chance. So that would be a dream. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. What else?”
“A house. A nice car. A family. A dog. To take vacations every year. I’d love to go back to Hawaii sometime, and Zaley wants to see the world.” He wanted to give it to her, tickets to Hawaii, Ireland, Spain, Italy, China, anywhere that caught their fancy. “I want to be happy. They’re little dreams, but they’re mine. What do you dream?”
“Nothing.”
He was annoyed at how he had exposed some of himself and she wasn’t giving anything in return. “Everybody dreams something.”
“I don’t. I think of the future and I draw a blank. There isn’t anything I want to do. There never has been.”
That wasn’t normal, but she wasn’t a normal person. “That’s depressing.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She didn’t sound depressed about it.
“What’s something that you’ve enjoyed doing? There’s had to be something in seventeen years that you liked.”
“I like pizza.” She looked at him for a moment, her features mostly obscured when the moonlight was so begrudging, and weighed her real answer. Then she stared out into the darkness. “I liked walking around Cloudy Valley at night with a borrowed dog and peeping in people’s windows. Honest truth.”
“Yeah, that’s you. You can build that into a career as a spy. Intrigue. Danger. Ninja weapons. You’ll be happy doing that.”
“I won’t be.” Micah spoke with absolute certainty. “I liked walking around wherever it was I wanted to go. Spies are performing missions under someone else’s orders.”
You could have a child. Corbin didn’t give it voice. Micah had known what to do with Mars and enjoyed doing it, but he sensed the wound was still too raw. For both of them
. The energy bar had looked like something to come out of Mars’ diapers compressed into bar form.
The hah-hah feral was moving around out of view, only her breathy exhalations carrying over to the rock piles. When Micah’s hand slipped to her weapon, Corbin whispered it was fine. If the woman happened this way, she was just going to take off at the sight of them.
“I’ve never had dreams,” Micah said, removing her hand. “Life is just time to fill up with things that don’t matter to me. So why do I stay? I stay because I’m breathing. That’s why a lot of people stay, I think. They’re breathing, so they try to find something to hold onto to fill up the time. I saw that through their windows. The shit they collected, the shit they didn’t collect, that was what they distracted themselves with to avoid the bare fact that they’re just staying because they wake up and their heart is still beating.”
“How do you not collect something?” That made no sense.
“I tracked down Ms. Velman’s home. Did you ever have her for English? She lived in a condo. It was so odd, only half-filled up like she was waiting for a man to move in and fill up the other half. That kept her going, I’ll bet, the fantasy of the knight in shining armor carrying boxes of his belongings through the front door. So she filled up her time by leaving space for him to fill. She wasn’t staying for her job. I never thought she liked teaching that much. She wasn’t staying for family. She didn’t seem to have anyone except her cat. She wasn’t staying for religion. I didn’t see a cross on the wall, or an altar unless it was upstairs. She was staying for hope. That was the only reason.”
The feral woman heard her voice and lurched away, still saying hah on each step. Corbin said, “You’ll find a dream, Micah. Not everybody knows what they want to do right away.” He yawned, his body telling him that it was long past time for sleep and his mind was going to cede to it whether it wanted to or not.
“I don’t think so,” Micah said as he straightened. “I think one day I’ll be fifty years old, eighty years old, one hundred even, taking my last breaths on my deathbed and still wondering when it’s going to come to me.”
He stretched and yawned again. “I’m going to bed. And that’s not going to happen to you. Everybody finds something in time.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. Getting down onto the blanket, he put his arm around Zaley’s waist and closed his eyes. His dreams might not be realized in this life, but he was going to fight for them. Anything else was death, and he didn’t want to be a dead person with a still beating heart. He would bring home a nice paycheck from a job that demanded more of his brain than mopping up a spilled heavy cream carton in the dairy aisle. He would have another good little friend like Bleu Cheese. Years from now, he was going to watch Zaley walk down the aisle to him, and hold their baby in his arms. He would power through the bad parts of life and hang on to the good ones.
Those dreams glowed on a canvas in his mind, which he painted right to the very edges with all of the things he wanted. And it started with the harbor. So tomorrow they would run for that door, guns blazing, and beat it down.
Micah
Micah knew how to get them into the harbor. It wasn’t complicated. All it took was a little lying, a little luck, and a lot of bullets. She was fine with the lying and luck wasn’t under her control. More bullets would be helpful, but there were no more to be had. Yet.
She had looked at that wall for a long time with her throat tightening until it was hard to breathe. Enough of her life had been spent between walls, and she didn’t want to go behind this one. There were some things that people just weren’t into, gay guys not mesmerized by boobs and Tuma’s parents befuddled by Wicca when Christianity was perfectly pleasant, serviceable, and far more accepted by the dominant culture. Micah just wasn’t into the harbor. She’d seen too much, done too much, lived too much, and fucked up too much, to go back to the way things were before, even a rough approximation of them.
So she wasn’t going in there. That was the answer that came to her in the darkness when she memorized the shapes of the night.
They would kill her if they had the power to read her mind. That was why she needed to lie. A lie was only an adjusted truth, and she was good at adjustments. The truth was that she was just dropping them off here, and then she was taking off. She had a lot of Zyllevir pills in her backpack and she’d clear out, go up to Humboldt and see if she felt like going behind the wall there. And if not, she’d go up to Oregon and try again.
Or she’d go somewhere else entirely. Spin around in a circle once the others had submitted joyfully to their pen and go in whatever direction she stopped when she grew dizzy. Leave it up to chance whether she went west to the ocean or east to flyover country, or south where she’d give a wave to Cloudy Valley and wander on through central California and down into the hell of the Los Angeles basin. Eventually, if she went that way, she’d end up in Mexico and just have herself for company. Blunder about the wasteland in a car that still had fuel, hit Guatemala and the Honduras and see what there was to see. Keep going to Chile and then steer a ship through those choppy waters around Cape Horn.
Except she knew what there was to see. There would be ferals. There would be hunters. There would be survivors grasping after food and clean water and safety. There would be death and destruction and fires and pain in her stomach when she couldn’t find a meal. There wasn’t going to be anything that she hadn’t already seen, unless she went all the way to Antarctica to waddle after the penguins. But she had seen those in zoos, so that wasn’t really new either. Cute, but done. It was still better than the harbor, the pounding of her untidy shape into a square hole.
She didn’t want to be behind those walls. She didn’t deserve to be behind them. But she didn’t want to be behind them anyway, so staying outside wasn’t exactly a punishment.
Going inside was a punishment. She pushed that thought away.
The reason she stayed was because people stayed. That was what they did when they found themselves in this world, stayed and made the best of it. Micah was tired of that. She’d track down patches of survivors and ask them what the hell they were sticking around for now. Their answers would be an amalgam of the ones she’d get out of her friends. They stayed for love, for friendship, for memory, for hope or certainty that things would get better. Had to get better! They stayed because their hearts kept beating.
Those answers weren’t satisfactory, and since Micah already knew what they would say, why bother tracking them down to ask? They stayed. The end. She would be doing it for the same reason that she once tried to score perfect eighties in all of her classes. It was something to do.
It was exhausting to always be looking for something to do. She wanted to live in a rush, but those were temporary whirls. Still, she was going to chase them rather than settle into somnolence, feeling her finger on the trigger and nothing to pull her attention aside.
Having stayed awake from two to dawn to keep watch, she shifted on the rock to ease her aching ass. Everyone was asleep, cuddled together for warmth with Zaley in the middle. Micah had taken off everything on top but her T-shirt to soak in the cold. Her skin was ice to the touch. It would be a hot day in a matter of hours, and turn her to fire.
Those three would live in there for months or years or their lifetimes, however long it took for everything to calm down and the country to lurch forward instead of regressing. She could see the day they emerged from the harbor, blinking like very young kittens new to the light. In their twenties, fifties, seventies in a circle of adult children and grandchildren who had never been outside the wall . . . No, they wouldn’t be old and gray when they stepped outside the harbor. This insurrection had reached its sixteenth minute of fame. Order would return sooner rather than later. They would be so nervous that the regular lives they wished to lead would once again be thwarted, yet joyous at the chance to come back to the world. The interlude was over, and they were returning to the main theme.
But not for Micah. There had
n’t ever been much of a theme for her.
She breathed deeply to memorize the air the way she had memorized the night. There were threads of smoke and rot within the smell of green. Riding along with those scents was her personal smell, and without deodorant, it was a feral odor. She had been born to a world where one was judged by cleanliness, faces wiped and clothes unstained, hair trimmed and combed and parted. So much effort was put toward those things. If her mothers could see her now, they’d fall all over themselves in getting her into a bath. Shalom would take the filthy clothes out to the trash and dump them inside.
Micah hoped her sister had made it home. Their parents needed one of their daughters so Uma could stay in her magical wonderland life. To lose both children to the world would bring her into a harsh reality that she had spent far too much time dodging to adjust to it now. Shalom was the good daughter, the secretly preferred one, and Micah didn’t begrudge her older sister the honor. Being the preferred child boxed a person in, but Shalom hadn’t resented the box. Micah would have.
The sky was turning gray. She’d memorized every shade from the time Austin woke her up for watch until now. Every one of them was beautiful, from the fathomless blacks to the wasted grays. Now slivers of light edged through the trees. The sun was rising.
She left her friends to their dreams and slipped up the slope to watch the watchers before the wall. They were bored, as bored as she was, sitting in the corridor and one standing to take a leak against the wall. Making their point. Making their damn point that they shouldn’t have to share a country with sick people! Two more were stretching at the tents. Thirteen had been here around the cauldron at dinner; ten were here at dawn as the sun tentatively touched the earth to gauge its welcome. The numbers varied through the day and night, but there were always some around. The point had to be made and they were making their point.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 170