The gun wasn’t good for anything now. Austin let it go. The white was growing greater as the door slid open.
He was going to live. Goddammit it all to hell, he was going to make it in there and live. They were almost to the blaze of white that was safety. Dust burst down over them. The guard who knew Corbin’s name was screaming hurry hurry hurry over the deadly chuckles of guns. Another guard cried out and that one stopped encouraging them to look wildly to the end of the corridor.
A man launched a hand grenade into the air, and then bullets obliterated him. The small gray object arced up high over the corridor and started to come down. The guards weren’t yelling because the blast would hurt the wall. It was only going to hurt the three passing through it. The grenade plummeted as they sprinted the last few meters. Above, the guards were screaming, “Close the door! Get down! Close the door!”
Austin wasn’t going to get left out here. They hurled themselves through the entrance as the door began to close, and obeyed the frantic orders to drop. In a second, they were all on their bellies upon a white stone floor and huddled together with their hands over their heads. As the door slammed shut, the explosion rocked the earth.
He was ready for pain, but nothing pierced through him. Footsteps thumped everywhere; something was clashing; guns fired. When he looked up, a pair of black boots stepped right to his face. Micah. He jerked around to see if she had slipped in behind them, but she couldn’t have. Those men had cut her off.
Shaking, he picked himself up off the ground. The white blaze through the doorway was another wall like the first, although shorter. Harbor guards were running up stairs to the taller wall and aiming their guns down to the corridor and grass. One shouted about a second grenade and guns fired simultaneously in the same direction.
Other guards joined the one who was standing beside Corbin and Zaley and Austin. When their eyes lingered on Zaley’s pale, unmarked skin, Corbin put his arm around her protectively and said, “She’s infected. Give her a test. They just gave her one at Arquin and she’s low but still has it.”
Two male and two female guards were standing around them now. One motioned for Austin to take off his backpack. He hurried to comply and handed it over, but she gestured for him to throw it over to the second wall. He chucked it there obediently. Zaley offered her gun to them, explaining that it was empty, and the puukko.
Doing the same with his bow and quiver, Corbin was still explaining about Zaley. “She got Sombra C after they stopped giving stamps but she has it and you can give her one if you have the equipment-”
“We take stamps off here,” a guard said, and Austin stared at their necks. None of them had stamps, and none of the guards going up the stairs to the top of the wall had stamps either.
One man around them was the guy who had shouted to Corbin. Austin put together how he knew Corbin’s name. The Douglas family was within this harbor, and they’d told the guards that their daughter and friends were coming. They could even have had pictures to show them. So the guards saw Corbin in the woods, about to get trapped, and shot to save a boy they recognized.
Now they were here within the wall, and Elania wasn’t among them. Neither was Micah, and Austin said, “Our friend! Our friend is still out there. She was giving us cover fire. Her name is Micah and she’s-”
“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it,” said a guard coming down the steps.
He heard the words, but they didn’t register. Micah would steal a gun and blast her way in when she got a chance, and the door had to open for her, too. Zaley stared speechlessly at the guard who had spoken, and Corbin said, “What? What do you mean she didn’t make it?”
“They shot her. She’s dead.”
Then Austin understood, but he didn’t believe it. Screaming her name, he ran to the stairs. His foot smacked hard into the first one and sent him down to all fours. Scrambling up them, he got to the top and looked over to the corridor. Micah wasn’t there. The bodies of three men were at the far end, and a teenaged boy was spilled onto his side in the grass. Austin ran along the wall to the destroyed tent camp, passing two guards and climbing through the watchtower. As he descended the steps on the other side, he saw her body in a circle of corpses upon the grass.
Micah Camborne was no longer in this world.
“Micah! Micah!” He screamed at her body to make it rise. Flat on her back, her head was turned to the side. It wasn’t whole anymore. Blood was all over the grass and on her chest. Corbin and Zaley pressed up to his sides and gasped. At a guard coming down from the watchtower, Austin shouted, “Why didn’t you shoot them? Why didn’t you shoot them and save her?”
“There wasn’t anything I could do.” His voice was plaintive and shocked. “She ran right at them to keep them from making the corridor-” He cut himself off and turned swiftly to aim at the trees. Sternly, he said, “Kids, get off the wall.” Austin caught a glimpse of the underside of the sunglasses as the three of them obeyed frantic beckons from guards. The guy wasn’t seeing the world below in the same way. Humans showed up through those glasses as bright figures, and trees shot past to show another spot of brightness deep in the shadows where no one could see with the normal eye.
They couldn’t leave her body there in the grass, but there wasn’t any way to retrieve it. People were down there, enraged that zombies had gotten into the harbor. A man shouted fuck fuck fuck and then fuck you to the guards. Fuck you for letting that dead feral zombie woman over there slaughter everyone! Dead feral zombie. Micah had been reduced to that when she wasn’t feral or a zombie. But she was dead.
Only three of them had made the harbor. It should have been four. It should have been the six of them from Cloudy Valley, with the baby and the dog. It shouldn’t have been any of them, because none of this should ever have happened. A hand fastened around Austin’s arm and pulled at him inexorably. Guards escorted them between the walls. One overhead called out in warning about a new figure at the periphery of his senses.
They weren’t taken into the harbor itself but led along until they reached a door. It was to a room set aside for quarantine. Austin dumbly did what he was told. He stepped into the room encased in plastic sheets like a big shower, removed his clothing, and put it in a laundry chute. Then he put on a hospital gown and sat on a bed for a doctor in a haz-mat suit to administer a Sombra C test. The harbor had to confirm his infection was real, and that it wasn’t a fake stamp on his neck.
He could only see Micah’s bleeding body in the grass as the doctor spoke to him. The head that wasn’t shaped how it had been twenty minutes ago. She was the closest thing he had had to a sister, and she’d laid down her life for his. He didn’t know what to do without her loose screw at his side. They had come all this way for her to die sheer inches away from safety.
It wasn’t real. He had seen wrong.
“They’ll move her,” the doctor said, Austin barely aware that he’d asked a question. “They don’t leave bodies lying around. There’s a mass grave on the northeast side. She’ll be taken there.” Zaley choked and sobbed. She had seen that grave, people tossed in there like garbage to rot together. The doctor did Corbin’s test next. The man was dressed in a haz-mat suit not because of their Sombra C but because of regular germs.
When he finished his tests, he asked Zaley if she wanted to go to a different containment room for girls and women. She shook her head and the man left. They sat in their hospital gowns on their beds and were silent.
After a long time, Corbin said, “We talked last night about what we wanted for our lives. She couldn’t think of anything. She couldn’t think of one single reason for her to stay. To stick around. Maybe . . .”
“What?” Austin said when Corbin didn’t finish his sentence.
“Maybe it’s better for her this way?” Corbin asked, and cried.
It wasn’t better.
They were sealed into the plastic room, air coming in through a vent in the attached bathroom and meals brought three times a day by a h
arbor guard who never stayed to talk. A table in the corner had old magazines, books, and a deck of cards, which they sporadically employed to break up the tedium. Most of the time, Austin just lay in his bed. He couldn’t play a game to the end, or finish an article. His brain just lost interest in the middle of it. He wanted that body in the grass to be a joke. Just a mean joke that he could get mad about when Micah showed up. But every time the door opened, it wasn’t her. He forbade Corbin and Zaley to talk about her, so they did it in whispers. If he turned to them, the whispers cut off and there was a pause before they spoke about something else. They needed to talk about her, and he just couldn’t.
She had died. Even though she’d believed she couldn’t die, she was dead. Gawkers would stare at her body in the river, Shepherds cross above it on logs, and animals would gnaw on her flesh. He couldn’t stand it, despite hearing her indifferent reply. So what, Aussie? I’m meat. We’re all meat, and almost valedictorian meat is the tastiest kind. One night he dreamed of her leaning over him and saying I’m fine. I’m always fine. Knock it off. She felt in halves what he felt too vividly, and they kept stretching to one another to find a happy medium they’d never achieved. The Micah of his dream kissed his cheek and disappeared. He retraced his steps from the harbor to the base to the mountain to Sausalito, to San Francisco and the confinement point and the catches and the reservoir . . . searching for where he’d lost her, he went all the way back to her home in Cloudy Valley and when he opened the door to her bedroom, confident that she was in there, it was empty. A bunch of bananas sat on her desk.
She was with the baby. If Austin thought about it that way, he didn’t hurt quite so much. Mars was too little to be on his own, even in heaven. The picture of those two was in his backpack, and he was going to keep it until he died. Then it would be buried with him, placed under his hands so he carried it into heaven. That picture was his treasure. It captured a brief moment of perfection, and that was all life had to offer. Moments.
A guard stood sentinel outside the frosted glass window, all day and all night. A nurse came in every morning for a temperature check and to ask how they were feeling. None of them were coming down with anything, their temperatures always normal and no one getting a sore throat, the sniffles, or a stomach bug. She reassured Austin that his backpack would be returned. Everything was inspected for weapons, and the weapons they had come into the harbor with would be placed in the armories under their names. The contents of his backpack had been checked over and everything was just sitting in a locker for the time he was in quarantine. He asked if Elania’s parents had been informed of her death and she said yes. Corbin had already told them about Elania as Austin was in another world on his bed.
During one endless day of quarantine, the boys were given sedatives. They lay on their beds as a laser was wheeled in on a cart to remove their stamps. Zaley sat on a chair in a corner of the shower room and watched. When they came back to their senses, she was sitting between the beds and holding their hands. Their stamps had paled. The microscopic capsules were breaking down as Austin looked at Corbin’s, and as Corbin looked at his. Austin wanted a mirror, but there wasn’t one in the bathroom.
The next day, the stamps were paler still. Corbin’s stamp just looked like a blush. When Austin peed, he expected his urine to be red. It wasn’t, just regular pee. By the ninth day of quarantine, the stamps were light pink and the letters couldn’t be read. He stayed very still as Zaley squinted at it.
“Micah should have had her stamp taken off,” Austin said, the words flying out of his mouth unchecked by his brain.
Corbin and Zaley looked at one another, and then Corbin said, “She wouldn’t have wanted it taken off. She didn’t even wear a scarf or a turtleneck over it unless she had to. I asked her why in the hospital after the party and she said something like because fuck you, that’s why. She was so weird.”
“She wasn’t weird,” Austin said defensively. A hole was opening up in his stomach to speak of her. “She was just . . .” Who was he kidding? They had known her too, and Micah Camborne had been weird as hell. Normal family, normal home, normal upbringing, and there was no good explanation for how she came to be. A giggle squirted out of his lips and he clamped them down hard to keep more from following.
“Anyone who wonders what kind of porn her donor was watching during his sperm collection is weird,” Zaley said. “And that’s why we loved her, and always will.” Then they were giggling about the dildos glued to Dale’s locker time after time, the neighbors’ dog she stole at night for a walk, the ice cream bowling at the Cool Spoon, and all the random things that Micah had done to entertain herself.
If he laughed, if he talked about her, she was really gone. But if he cried, if he was silent in his grief, she was still really gone. He had a family of angels in her and Mars, but God, he wanted them here with him.
On the tenth day, Austin woke up and yelled at Corbin’s neck. The stamp was almost nothing, the faintest stain of pink. He turned his head and Corbin said, “Yours is destroyed. I don’t see anything.”
They were due to be released from quarantine that day. Breakfast came with clothing, not theirs but sweatpants and T-shirts, socks and underwear and sneakers for them to try on. Nothing was new, but it was all in good condition. His backpack was there too, and everything was inside as promised.
When they all had something to wear, they followed the nurse into the harbor. Rows of modules were laid out and larger buildings held a cafeteria and a doctor’s office. Rooftops bore solar panels and gardens, and more of both were on the ground. Doors opened and closed in the modules; people left the cafeteria in a clutch; a woman carried her baby through the door to the doctor. The bay door was open in another building, and that was a warehouse packed with boxes. Workers were pulling some of them down and making a pile on the floor.
The walls rose up high into the air, barely visible through the tall trees. As the nurse guided them into the rows of modules, she and Zaley spoke about everyone taking turns in the kitchen unless they had another skill the harbor could put to use. They passed an intersection in the rows and down it was a line of locked sheds. Those were the armories, one for every block. If Shepherds broke in, people didn’t have far to dash to retrieve their guns.
The modules were miniature homes in blue and yellow, all the same style with two front windows beside a door. A few had fences. People watched them go by and hands rose to wave at the nurse. No one had a stamp. Austin had been idly searching for them, wondering if anyone here had Sombra C, until he remembered. There was no way to tell who was infected, although most of them had to be. No one could look at him and know now. It was his secret to give or restrain.
“Where are you taking us?” Corbin asked.
“To a certain module where two people are waiting to say hello. We’re almost there,” the nurse said. Oh God. Austin rummaged through the backpack for the Pewter letter, which was still attached to Brennan’s stag carving. He wanted to pull Elania out of his backpack, but all he had was a piece of paper to give her parents. Locating it at the bottom, he squeezed the carving with a curled-up corner of the letter rasping on his palm.
All he could do was say how sorry he was, and watch their eyes move from Austin to Zaley to Corbin, wishing to turn one of them into their lost daughter. He wasn’t ready to see them after all this time of wanting to hand over the letter.
The nurse stopped at a little blue house that was being eaten alive by its out-of-control garden. Sitting in chairs on the tiny porch were Corbin’s mother and father. They were taking a break, both of them sweaty, dirt staining the knees of their pants and Mrs. Li’s hair bristling up from her ponytail.
They stared at one another for two stunned, silent seconds, and then Corbin shouted as his parents stood and came down the step to the garden. The three of them hugged, crying and laughing, and Austin looked away to keep from crying, too. His mother wasn’t here, he hadn’t expected her to be, but it still hurt. Zaley leaned against h
im and he put his arm over her shoulders. Her parents weren’t here either, and never would be. They’d think that she should be put down, too. But Austin celebrated to have her here, and she was celebrating for him.
Then Mrs. Li reached out for them, and they were added to the embrace. The nurse slipped away down the row. Mr. Li patted Austin’s back and Corbin said, “But how did you get here? Are you infected?”
“No, we’re not infected,” said his mother. “We got your postcard in the mail and left that day for the harbor to see if you’d arrived. That was at the end of April.”
“But all the Shepherds out there-”
“There were protestors outside at that time, but a harbor guard saw us in. It was just before the real battles began at the walls. The Douglases vouched that they knew us and we were allowed to stay and wait for you.” Her eyes were watery. “And you made it.”
“Micah’s dead,” Austin said.
Mrs. Li gave him another hug. “I know. It’s terrible.” All of the information had been passed along to her, but she and her husband had had to wait for quarantine to be lifted to see them.
They stood there for a long time, Corbin and his parents talking about what had happened since March, and then Mrs. Li brought them into the module. The living room had a sofa and a little table, and that was all that could fit. There was a bathroom with a narrow shower, and two bedrooms. Austin stopped in the bathroom not to pee but to stare at his neck in the mirror over the sink.
The stamp was gone, his skin going on in a seamless shade from his jaw to his collarbone. He passed his hand over it. His neck was vaguely tender if he pressed in, so he stopped pressing in. Months ago, it had been strange to see himself with a giant splotch of red. Now it was strange to see it gone, to have no more need for cosmetics or scarves. When people looked at him, their eyes weren’t going to trail away to his neck in judgment. He was just Austin Bell, not Austin Bell the zombie.
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