They made it to the northeast quadrant of modules. There was a small playground here, and it swarmed with children pumping their legs on swings, waiting for the slides, and digging in a sandbox. Most people with young children had modules closer to the park and schoolhouse, the schoolhouse being nothing more than a refurbished module where kids went for story time in the afternoons. A dog strained on a leash tied to a bench beside the playground, wanting to play.
“I saw a cat in a window yesterday,” Austin said. “It’s the only cat in the whole harbor, and the woman has open petting hours for visitors. I almost went in.”
“Don’t the dogs chase it?” Corbin asked. Half a dozen dogs lived in the harbor too, and a ferret had escaped its module and was living wild.
“It’s an inside cat,” Austin said. “It just sits in the window and taunts them with its furry butt.”
Many of the modules over on this side had fences, and signs reprimanding visitors to keep the gate closed and toddlers trapped. The Douglases’ home was on the last lane. When they turned onto it, three heads were visible here and there as boys ran among vegetable beds at the farthest house down. Elania’s triplet brothers were yelling. A dog barked as a ball flew over huge tomato plants. The garden was larger than the other ones on the lane since they had more room to expand.
When Zaley got to the fence around the yard, she called out, “Hi, guys.”
Engaged in a game, the tumble of boys and dog continued to play unaware. The triplets were the same as they were the last time Zaley saw them months ago. Percy was running more slowly behind his taller brothers. Conor focused on throwing the ball away from the vegetable beds and Cormac threw it wildly in any direction. The dog was an adorable dashing streak of lanky legs and black ears.
A book was wedged into Cormac’s pocket. He shoved it in as he ran around, the activity repeatedly jostling it loose. It was Percy who finally noticed that they had an audience, having given up on getting the ball while everyone else raced away in pursuit. He stared at Zaley and the boys, his chest heaving as he caught his breath.
Zaley thought that so much time had passed to make them over into strangers. Thinking the same, Austin said, “Hi, Percy. Do you remember me?” Percy didn’t answer. “I came over to your house sometimes and we played water guns in your backyard last year.”
Percy’s brow crinkled. He did recognize them, and he wasn’t happy about it. “I don’t want to see you! Ever!” He ran away, Conor and Cormac turning to see what he was shouting about. As Percy vanished into the module and slammed the door, his brothers came over to the fence. The dog trotted between them with the ball in her mouth.
“This is going well,” Corbin mumbled.
Zaley floundered for what to say. Cormac shoved the book into his pocket again and said to her, “You were with Lani that day she left. The day we found the dead Shepherd in our backyard. There was blood on him.”
“Yeah. I was with her,” Zaley said. “He came to hurt Elania. We ran away to hide.”
“I’m Corbin,” Corbin said. “You might not remember me. I didn’t come over to your place quite so much.”
“I remember you,” Conor said. “You did your homework listening to headphones in our living room. You’re dys-lex-ic, and your eyes are mixed up.” He said dyslexic slowly, syllable by syllable, but correctly. “I saw your mom and dad.”
“They told me.”
“They came to sit Shivah with us, but you were in quarantine then so you couldn’t come. Mom and Dad didn’t go to work for seven days. Other people did it for them.”
“Is your mom home?” Austin asked. “Or your dad? We have to talk to them.”
“Dad’s at work in the dining hall. Mom is helping out in the community garden. That’s behind our house. We’re waiting for Stella. She trains the dogs.” He looked so much like Elania, and his voice had her quiet, thoughtful cadence in it. “I’ll tell Mom to come back to the house.” He was gone in a blur of legs, shouting, “Come on, Stormy!” The half-grown puppy bounded after him through the garden, still clutching the ball. Barely visible through the green was a gate in the backyard. Conor let himself and the dog out and they disappeared into stalks of corn.
Nervously, Cormac took out his book. It was a paperback for kids. His finger slipped over the pages, rifling them. Zaley said, “What are you reading?”
“Magic Marley.”
“Is it good?”
“My sister got us these for a present. They were in our playhouse all wrapped up with our names. And we got art stuff.” His lip pushed out stubbornly and he stared at them with a little dislike. “We sat Shivah for her. Dad said I had to. I didn’t want to. I want her to be here.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring her with us,” Austin said hoarsely.
“She was sick. She died in April and we didn’t even know. We came here to wait for her. Why didn’t you get sick?” It was spoken in accusation, but his lip was trembling.
“I don’t know,” Austin said. “But she was so brave. She was like a superhero.”
“No. They’re on TV. You should have brought Lani here.”
“We couldn’t,” Zaley said. “We’re so sorry, Cormac. We wanted to bring her to you. She was just too sick to come. Her medication didn’t work.”
“It did work! I saw it work!” Cormac said indignantly.
“It stopped working,” Zaley amended.
Cormac began to cry. “Then you should have taken her to the doctor! There’s a doctor here. She didn’t have to shoot herself. She wasn’t going to be a zombie. She was Lani. She was nicer than anyone else in the whole world.”
Zaley let herself through the gate, the boys coming in behind her. Kneeling before Cormac, she said, “You’re right. She was nicer than anyone. We miss her so much.”
Cormac wiped his hand across his eyes and held his book tighter. Calming down, he said, “Mom told us you’d come here sooner or later to tell us what happened, and we could listen or not listen. It’s our choice.”
“What did you choose?”
“Percy’s not going to listen. Conor is. I’m going to sit in the hallway and listen, and go to our room if I don’t want to hear anymore.” He lifted his chin, preemptively defiant that they were going to disagree.
“That sounds like a good plan,” Corbin said. “And if you don’t want to listen, we live here in the harbor now. You and Percy can ask us later when you’re ready to hear. Any time.”
Elania’s mother emerged from the corn and let herself through the gate in the backyard. Conor and the dog were with her. His eyes going to the frame, Cormac said, “What is that? Did you bring us a present?”
Austin turned it around to show him. “Elania was applying to colleges. She got a letter saying that she could go to the very best one.”
“She can’t go anywhere. She’s dead,” Cormac gasped, his eyes filling up with fresh tears. He fled for the door and slammed it shut behind him. Footsteps thumped through the module and another door slammed. Mrs. Douglas and Conor weaved through vegetable beds and came to the front yard.
“Conor, run and get Dad from the kitchen,” Mrs. Douglas said. “He should be almost done in there. And drop off the dog with Stella. There she is down the street.”
The gate opened and clashed shut as Conor and the dog zoomed away. Austin thrust out the frame to Mrs. Douglas. Gruffly, he said, “Here. I want you to have this. She was so proud of it.”
A tear slipped down Mrs. Douglas’ cheek as she read the letter. Touching the plastic wrap, she said, “Oh God. My baby.” Her chest hitched and she pressed the frame to her breasts, hugging that since she didn’t have Elania. Then she hugged all of them.
“Dad’s coming! Dad’s already coming!” Conor hollered.
“Well, come on in then,” said Mrs. Douglas. “I want to know what happened to her, and to Micah, and to all of you.”
“It’s hard to talk about,” Austin said.
“It was hard to live through,” Mrs. Douglas said. “T
alking about it won’t be as hard as living through it.”
They walked through the garden to the house, Zaley unsure of where to start. With Elania’s silence after the confinement point that all of them misread, with that horrible morning the raiders burst into what was supposed to be a safe house on the way to Sable Heights, or the afternoon her father chortled in his recliner about the local Shepherds rounding up all of the Sombra Cs in the community to ferry them to death. Her story started even earlier than that, the party that she had planned to be her last, the boards going up over her window, the hoard growing higher and higher in the laundry room . . .
They sat on the sofa together, Corbin at her side and Conor sitting at her feet. A door opened elsewhere in the module and a small shadow settled in the hallway. She could only start at the very beginning to understand how all of this had happened, and the others would start at their beginnings. Because the only way this world of theirs could go forward was to first go back.
END OF VOLUME SIX
Free Sample:
THE SIGILS: VOLUME ONE
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Chapter One
Cadi did not know who to kill that night, and she was running out of time.
The orders had come by text just an hour ago. It had to be a boy between the ages of thirteen and twenty. He needed to be fit and light of complexion, delivered to the parking lot behind the library by midnight, and preferably unmarked. She’d planned to kick back and watch television while Torvi stewed unguents in the kitchen and made the apartment stink, but instead she was out here. Hunting.
As the game ended with a whistle and a round of boos, Cadi glanced at the scoreboard from beneath the bleachers. Pikestown High beat Murphy 33-0, having wiped every blade of grass on the field with them. Six games into the season and Murphy had yet to score a touchdown, continuing the losing streak from the year before. Their quarterback Oscar McAllister had lousy aim, until the whistle when he spiked his helmet in a temper and it hit the water cart dead on.
He sat next to her in second period biology, copying Cadi’s work on one side and picking on his lab partner to the other side. A smart-as-a-whip freshman placed in junior year science, Shawna was a mousy thing, shy and tiny, and Oscar kept asking when she was going to get some tits. He was awful to everyone on campus. If girls turned him down, they must be lesbians; if they accepted his lewd advances, they were sluts. Imitating the marionette walk of the boy with cerebral palsy, shoving the drama kids, slapping the asses of the cheerleaders, shunning the lone girl on the football team, Cadi wanted to choose Oscar if she had to choose anyone, but his skin was too dark.
Patrick Quence met the Nychos’ criteria, but Cadi couldn’t bring herself to consider it. The school paper had run a piece on him the month before, the son of immigrants to America who arrived with fifty-eight cents and zero English between them. Now they owned the Gas Whiz downtown, where Cadi filled up her tank. Mr. Quence always admired her Pantheon when she went into the minimart for a bag of chips. That happened a lot, as it was a four hundred thousand dollar car. Over the summer and on the weekends Patrick himself worked at the Gas Whiz, bent over his books behind the counter between customers. He wanted to go to medical school and had won the science fair twice in the chemistry division. Besides that, he was just a nice guy as far as humans went, and Cadi didn’t want to hand him over to the Nychos. She was even more jaded the second time through high school than she had been the first, and still that article about Patrick and his parents in the Murphy High Express caught her attention. Patrick was their only child.
Her second time through high school, and her last time. Torvi begged when she graduated from Alary High and she’d said no. Once was bad enough. But she aged a little more slowly, and it struck her watching the online recording of the graduation that she looked like a freshman accepting her diploma from the principal under a cool northern California sun. Appearing only fourteen, fifteen at most, the top of her head came to the shoulders of the other seniors. High schools were rich ground for Torvi’s procurements: teachers both male and female from their twenties to their seventies, kids from twelve to nineteen, the infant and young child program for the offspring of students who were already parents. It was ridiculously easy for Cadi to get someone alone to glamour and procure.
Their inheritance had run out and they had lost the store in a fire a month before graduation. Torvi needed time and loads of procurements to build up his stock again, and it wasn’t like Cadi planned on college anyway. She had the Alary Junior College catalogue in her possession but was indifferent; when you hadn’t enjoyed school very much since kindergarten but were condemned to go, it was hard to think about voluntarily signing up for more. Cadi didn’t have a career goal in mind, just a summer of sleeping in and nothing beyond that. She couldn’t become a lifeguard at Slide Racer with the emblems of the sigil on her shoulders, and adults shafted by the economy were filling up all the other positions to which she might have applied. Her friends were heading off to colleges or joining the Army, but Cadi didn’t have dreams of becoming a lawyer and boot camp sounded like hell. She liked shopping, dressing up and going to nice restaurants, seeing movies and reading trashy romance novels. Her idea of hard exercise was miniature golf and air hockey, or carrying a lot of bags from the mall to the car.
But after a month of debating it, and putting together that she couldn’t shop if they didn’t have an income from a store, she struck a deal with Torvi. She would start as a sophomore, not a freshman, and he had to buy her a Pantheon racecar for junior year. Hand-assembled in England, it went from zero to sixty in just under three seconds. A Pantheon made up for going through high school again. Almost. She also wanted to be paid for procurements, any hours she worked in the new store would be at a steep salary, and she had no intention of doing homework again. It was his problem.
That was how they landed in Murphy, a suburb baking under the sun in southern California. The high school was of monstrous size, with three thousand students flooding its hallways and classrooms. Cadi’s geometry class didn’t have enough desks for the kids enrolled; some crowded around the teacher’s worktable and others had only chairs. Not one of her classes numbered under thirty-five students, and her geometry teacher Ms. Gleneden looked on helplessly as a forty-first strolled through the door late on the first day of school that year. It didn’t matter to Cadi, who was surrounded by every skin tone, hair color, eye color, talent, personality, disability, family background, and blood type imaginable. For a joke that only could be told to Torvi, she joined the Diversity Club. He laughed until he cried, Cadi sitting there on random Wednesday lunches to show how accepting she was of diversity for procurements.
There was even a set of quadruplets at this school, three of whom were identical, but Torvi had no spells requiring anything above twins. He played her father on the phone when the school called, claiming to be quadriplegic to excuse why he could not come in person when she got in trouble for ditching a Spirit Rally. He looked much too young to be her father. The trouble hadn’t lasted long. Her glamour emblem was out of juice from taking procurements by the time the proctor caught her, but eventually it recharged. She pressed it and shined her way out of the principal’s office with his partially filled out suspension form to dump in the trash.
Torvi had a harder time hiding his emblems than Cadi, as he had so many more of them being a full sigil when Cadi was only half. During the day, he worked the shop wearing a low-brimmed hat, a long-sleeved shirt and gloves, claiming to be a burn victim. Just in case, he also slathered his forehead with cosmetics. Cadi could still see those three dark circles of his emblems underneath the foundation on his forehead without the hat, the insignia of their spells shifting within. She saw it because she knew to look; other people might think his skin was oddly smudged or in shadow.
Their mother had been covered from head to navel in emblems. Cadi had a picture on the side of her bed of Mom’s white hair spilling down over Cadi’s brown as they sm
iled for the camera. Emblems crossed her forehead and spotted her cheeks; they ran down her neck into her shirt. That picture was Cadi’s most treasured possession, that and the letter tucked behind it that Mom wrote before she’d gone into the night. She thought that she would have twenty more years of life but she could feel the night calling, and leaving Cadi so soon was her greatest regret. In all of Mom’s one hundred and sixty years she had seen much of the world, but her favorite memories were of the three of them snuggled up in bed eating beef jerky and watching cartoons. Torvi kept Mom’s most stylish clothes for Cadi, but her favorite was just an old pair of gray sweatpants. She had no memories of Mom herself, but she had a flicker in her mind of those sweatpants flashing by as Mom hurried somewhere.
Torvi did not have as many emblems as their mother; his father had had far fewer and Torvi split the difference. Down his chest ran a deep double V of emblems, appearing when he was ten and the empty circles filling with insignia of spells as he grew. It was a horror in his adolescence that more would break out on his face, but other than his forehead, he was clear by his twenties and the danger had passed. Mom had had to be so careful with her cosmetics. Something about sigil magic ate away at it no matter how much foundation was applied. Her watch went off at regular intervals when she was out and about to remind her to slather on more. Much of the time, it was just easier to stay home and not worry about it. That was all right; she had been a little more like Cadi, happy to watch television, catalogue shop, and read, although her tastes in literature were much more refined.
But Torvi didn’t want to spend his life marked in ninety-minute beeps and a frantic search for a restroom, nor did he want to stay home. He loved the jingles of the bell in his shop; he knew the name of every employee in the stores on their block and more students at Murphy High than Cadi did. She didn’t need people quite as much as Torvi. They were hair clippings and blood types mostly to her, and only through chinks in the wall of her disinterest came people like Patrick Quence, or pathetic, hand-me-down Shawna thinking that boys teased because they secretly harbored crushes on her. At Alary High Cadi had friends, but she just couldn’t start over again with kids years younger than she was. What seemed so desperately important to them were issues that had passed for her, or never existed in the first place.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 175