“Yeah,” Malia sighs, sitting down on the roof next to me. “I know. I feel like maybe we overreacted with this whole Jake threat thing. I mean, it’s been two weeks, and they’re not exactly known for being master strategists.”
“Well maybe it’s just to make us think they aren’t coming.”
“Yeah, but the longer this drags out, the more I think Jake just wanted to scare us.”
“They’re not like that,” I can see what Malia’s doing, treating them like some frat boy pranksters. It’s what I did, back when they started showing up. I thought they were harmless too, that the most danger they posed was to themselves. “They don’t do stuff just scare you—they scare you so you wish you were dead.”
I can feel Malia staring at me, but I don’t look at her. I look over the trees, to the horizon of a road that lies beyond them, the town in the distance that contains the dead and the undead, and everyone who is in between.
“You know, it might help to have you tell me something about what happened while you were there,” Malia says quietly.
I blink, trying to clear the rising memories from my vision. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I’m horrified to realize how watery my voice sounds. “I don’t ever want to tell anyone about it.”
“I think you need to,” Malia uses that same tone of voice, trying to calm me, tell me I’m safe.
And suddenly I’m angry again, it’s lacing through my veins like fire, angrier than I’ve been since the day I almost left.
“What am I supposed to tell you? That my brother would bring home a girl screaming, but by the next day she wouldn’t say a word to anyone ever again? That sometimes when they went on raids I would look at the weapons they left behind and think about killing myself with one of them, because I saw the way one of them looked at me and I was so afraid that I thought I’d rather die than let him come near me?”
Malia shifts toward me, reaching out a hand to grab mine. “I’m so sorry,”
I throw up my hands. “It doesn’t matter that you’re sorry. What matters is that they’re still out there, because of me. I could have slit all their throats while they were asleep; I could have stopped them, and instead I ran like a coward because I cared more about saving my own skin than saving anyone else.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“I am.” I turn to face her. “I’ve been a coward since I was born, always too afraid to confront people and say what I mean, and give them what they deserve. I’m weak and I’m afraid all—all the time.” I bow my head. “I don’t remember what it’s like to not be afraid,” I say into my palms.
“You’re brave.” Malia says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been walking into zombie-infested buildings with me practically since we got here, and you barely bat an eye. Do you know how rare that is?”
I shake my head, but she doesn’t let me interrupt. “Maybe you care about surviving, about keeping yourself safe. But that’s brave too. It’s brave to decide that you want to live, no matter what you have to do to stay alive”
“I— “
“And don’t tell me you don’t care about other people,” Malia continues stubbornly. “That may have been true when you left them, but your brother was a dick, Rogue. That wasn’t you being a selfish coward, that was what anyone would have done. Just because you have the same blood doesn’t mean you’re family. The way I see it, he abandoned you long before you came to us.”
Her words roll over me like ocean waves, calming and strong, sweeping everything away. And I can look ahead and see a future where I believe them, and the burden of guilt eases a little. The fear takes a step back. I raise my head and look for Perce, but he’s gone inside. I think about the day he chased after me in the woods, the day I thought that I wasn’t enough of a person to stay here, to be with these people who I knew would believe things I didn’t and do things I couldn’t imagine ever doing again.
But Perce had made me stay, and I’ve been here for a month now. A month since I’d run through that forest and tried to stop hearing Ben’s laughter in my ears. Two months since I pulled the trigger on Mom. Five months since the first baby went sick and the whole world went to Hell.
Malia, Mason, Perce, Lucia, even Lisa and Jeffrey. I never thought I would be able to care about someone again.
And that scares me, more than anything. Because I know that nothing lasts forever, and I know that there will come a day when they will leave or I will, or a day when I will run again because there is no safe place left.
There is no endgame, where the government rolls in on tanks and we are safe forever.
Even if Jake and the gangs never come, there are the zombies, and one day soon they will make their mark on my life again, erasing and corrupting everything I have here, everything I’ve been able to care about.
I almost fell apart the first time this happened. I don’t know what will happen the next time. I don’t know if I’ll survive it.
“I’m a coward because I care, and that scares me,” I said. “I don’t want to care about anyone.” Malia says nothing, but she doesn’t leave, either.
The sky is lightening to a rosy pink, and we sit and watch the sun come up in silence.
I try not to let panic overtake me. I’ve said out loud the words that have kept me away from everyone for so long, the words responsible for my avoidance of Perce. I don’t want to care, but I’m starting to, and I know that it will only end in blood and destruction, and I’m not sure that I can survive it again.
“When I first came here, I had been walking for two days straight with no food, just the water I could find at convenience stores and in streams. My shoes had fallen off and my feet were bleeding, and I fell into the pool by accident, thinking that I was heading into a building. By that point, the heat had started to make me hallucinate.” She’s not looking at me, still watching the emerging blue of the sky. She takes a swig of wine.
“I was running from the military.”
“The military?” I remember how her gaze detaches when her life before this is mentioned, her adamant refusal to hear about Fort Sam.
Malia has demons chasing her too; she’s just better at fighting them than me.
“I had a bad feeling about them,” Malia sounds less like a leader than a child confessing a scary story under the folds of the covers at night.
“Is that why you didn’t go join their fight?”
“No. I was going to join them when they showed up at our house, the day they were clearing everybody in the town out.”
“Why did you leave them?”
“At first, I didn’t. My mom and dad and little sisters would have been safe if I enlisted, and who cares if I did anyway? I’ve been taking martial arts since I could walk, and I knew I could do some damage. Zombie-killing machine, right?”
“So you went to join them.”
“This guy in fatigues shows up at my door. I tell him I want to draft but my family has to be safe. He says that’s fine, that’s what they do anyway. I’ll come to base and train and they can stay there as long as this lasts.”
“As long as this lasts’?”
“Yeah. That’s what he said. Like the zombie apocalypse was just a hurricane or something, a natural disaster we could clean up from and start over again.”
“Why would he say that?”
“I thought it was just to make everyone feel better, at first. You know, positive thinking and all that.”
“But it wasn’t?” I can tell it wasn’t by how scared she sounds, even now, even talking about it. It’s the first time she’s actually looked only nineteen.
“No, see, I confronted him about it.” She tugs on a curl. “I don’t like being messed with, so I asked him straight out, “What do you mean, ‘as long as this lasts?’ This is it.”
I can see it clearly: Malia, chin up, standing in the doorway of her house, head tilted up at a huge, camouflaged man with a bristling mustache, eyes flashing, demanding to be treated as if she knows how
the world really is.
Once the zombies hit, none of us were concerned about being treated like children anymore. There weren’t any real children left anyway.
“So you asked him why he was bullshitting you, and what did he say?”
“I thought he would say he was trying to make us feel better, that we shouldn’t give up hope, blah blah blah. But he didn’t. He said, ‘You’re in for a lot of surprises.’”’
I frown. “What the Hell does that mean?”
Malia sighs. “I don’t know, but I had a bad feeling, like I said. The way he smiled, it just— “she shuddered. “It didn’t make sense. I was getting second thoughts.”
“Did you tell your mom and dad what he said?”
“I was going to,” Malia nods. “But they didn’t give me time. The soldiers all came in, and the next thing I knew I was watching them, my mom and my dad and Alyssa and Grace, being led away, to the canvas-covered trucks they were keeping people in who wanted to go the camps but didn’t have to enlist.”
“Did you at least get to say goodbye?”
Malia swallows, and I see tears glisten in her eyes. “Yes.” She closes her eyes and takes a drink of wine again, then passes the bottle over to me. I haven’t touched alcohol since Ben started drinking, but I take a swig. It tastes awful, burning down my throat, making my eyes water. I’ve always hated wine.
“They got me and I started walking with them back to the recruits, and that’s when I heard them screaming.”
“Your family?”
“Mom, Dad, Alyssa, Grace, all screaming like they were being murdered. Grace, my littlest sister, she’s—she was—only three.”
I start to ask what happened, but she continues, fast now, the words falling out of her like rocks down a hill, rolling and sliding faster and faster.
“I pushed the general away and sprinted toward the truck. They tried to stop me, but I was too fast, and I could get them out of the way if I wanted anyway—they were big and slow and inexperienced. So I got there and they were screaming at this guard who was pointing a gun at them, so I got in front of my family and faced him down.”
I could imagine Malia, launching herself in front of a gun barrel, hands clenched at her sides, daring them to shoot. “I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’ll have to go through me to get to them.’ I didn’t know if it would work but it was all I had at the moment, and then”—she took a deep breath. “Then the general came in, and he said to show me the test,”
“The test?”
“It’s this thing they have to test everyone who comes in. They just run it across your wrist, and it can tell if you’re going zombie or not.”
I frowned. I’d never heard of that happening. Then again, I’d been preoccupied with Ben and the rest of my family when the military had started taking people. I’d been running around trying to avoid them, afraid of what would happen to Mom and Jonathan if I had to leave.
“They were infected?”
“They read as infected,” Malia said. “And I tried to tell them that they weren’t. I mean, there’s no way they could’ve been. We hadn’t left the house since it started.”
“So why did it read as positive?”
“The general started talking about stress, and how it can make us believe things that aren’t true, and he just pulled me away and told me he’d make extra sure that they wouldn’t hurt my family until one of them showed actual symptoms. And— “she stopped.
“And what?”
“And I went with him,” her words sound forced, like it’s physically paining her to get them out. She takes a drink again, and splutters, coughing. Her breath smells entirely like alcohol now, and I take the bottle from her. It’s about half full. I take another swig and put it aside.
“I went with him,” Malia says again. “I just let the nice guy in the uniform take me away from my family. I gave them all hugs and told them everything was going to be fine, and my dad was talking about how great the new place would be, and Mom was holding Grace and singing to her, and Alyssa was too mad at me to say goodbye because she wanted to fight, too.”
“It was all so normal. It was like any other time I’d left to go to college, and I just thought the army was going to fix everything. I just didn’t even think.”
“And then I heard the gunshots. The general was telling me about how there might possibly be an airborne strain, and I was screaming that it was all bullshit, and he kept saying, ‘we’ve got to get rid of all the infected before we can start over so they won’t hurt anyone else.’ Grace was three. She wasn’t going to hurt anyone!” Tears stream down her face, and she swipes at them furiously with a hand.
“They killed them, just like that?” Levi rises to my mind again, pleading with me to not let anything happen to him.
Malia’s sobbing now, head bent against her knees, and I lean over and rub her back the way my mom used to when I was a kid.
I’m trying not to let her see my face, the way I’m holding back tears. I’m trying to block out the screams Levi made, the way he talked like a child and pleaded, then flipped like a switch, from begging to hissing, from reaching for a hand up, to clawing at my throat.
Could Malia’s family have been like that? About to flip a switch, and then become monsters? Could they all have been like Levi, like the guy Perce and Mason saw? It doesn’t make any sense; none of this does. The military and the idea that this is all temporary and zombies that switch back and forth. We’re surviving day to day but we don’t know why; we don’t know where this is going or if it’s going anywhere. We don’t even know how this all started.
And if they can switch back and forth, what does it mean when we kill them? Can we even call them zombies? And what does it make us, that we’ve made a game out of it?
The weight of the deaths I’ve caused, living and dead, will push me down into the ground if I’m not careful. It will crush all of us.
Malia and I sit there for a while, watching the sun rise in the sky. By the time it’s starting to beat down on us, Malia has finished crying. She lies back and stares at the clouds scudding across the sky, tear tracks still marring her face, her curls spread around her like a fan. We don’t say anything, and the wine bottle stays where I put it, but Malia squeezes my hand now and then, as though to thank me for being there.
I’m starting to get thirsty when I hear a thump on the stairs. Someone walks over to us, but I’m feeling too relaxed and tired to turn and see who they are. Malia rises up on an elbow and looks at them. When she sees who it is, she bends down quickly and smears the tear tracks, which only serves to draw more attention to their presence in the first place.
“What are you girls doing?” It’s Lisa, it must be. She’s the only one who can get away with talking to Malia like that.
Malia plops down on her back and says, her voice slightly hoarse. “Talking about boys.”
Lisa doesn’t comment on the tears still visible on Malia’s face. “My favorite subject,” Lisa purrs. “But I feel like this isn’t the proper venue. And you’re leaving the rest of us out.”
“What are you talking about?” Malia snaps, obviously a little annoyed. She loves leading everyone, but I imagine it must be hard, always obligated to someone, constantly needing to make people feel like you value their company. I don’t think Malia can ever say that she wants to be alone.
“Today is official Girls’ Day,” Lisa announces.
“Girls’ Day,” Malia says slowly, and I can practically see the wheels turning in her head, about the negative effects of gender segregation and stereotyping. She sits up entirely and turns completely toward Lisa, taking a curl and wrapping it around her finger. Acting as though her hair curling task is the most important thing in the world, Malia raises an eyebrow and says, “And what exactly are we doing on Girls Day?” Her voice is getting low again, the way it does before she explodes into action or anger.
I expect Lisa to take a step back, or at least look intimidated, but she j
ust rolls her eyes. “Quit being such a drama queen. And be in the Room 4B, in 30 minutes. Bring yourselves and any of those beauty products you’ve been hoarding.”
“What about training? What about patrols?” I can’t deny that I’m with Malia on the ridiculousness of this one. To do something like this, when literally any second could spell the end of our time here, seems ridiculous. And for what? Pretty hair and pillow fights?
“Mason took care of it,” Lisa’s still smiling, even though Malia’s looking at her the way she looks at food before she eats it.
Malia blinks and leans back, surprised by the thoroughness of the idea. “How long have you been planning this?” She asks suspiciously.
“Since it got dark last night. It was my idea, and Lucia executed it to perfection. No one can refuse middle school girls anything. They just said the words ‘hormones’ and ‘advice about bodily changes’ and I thought Mikey was going to hurl on the floor.”
Malia laughs, and the tension is broken. Lisa pulls us to our feet. “Come on. I even got Mason to make us cookies.”
“Cookies?” I squeak. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite thing in the world, one of the things I miss the most about normal life. Even when everything was going to Hell with my family, I’d still spend a few nights a week making cookies from scratch.
The last time I had chocolate chip cookies, I was still working at my job at the deli and worrying about saving up money for college.
Lisa gives a little jump. “Cookies.” She confirms.
Then I’m pulling Malia to her feet and sprinting towards the door. Malia stumbles beside me, and I lose my balance for a second, too. I’d forgotten about the wine we drunk.
“Slow down, room is spinning,” Malia giggles in a way I’ve never heard before. We climb down and sprint into the bedroom at the end of the hall, the same one I stayed in on my first night.
Someone screams, and I understand why. We’ve come in like a thousand zombies are chasing us. “Are we being attacked?” someone asks.
“COOKIES. NOW.” I yell, and a girl by the door, who can’t be more than 14, hands me a chocolate chip cookie with a shaking hand. I bite into it and I feel the chocolate coat my tongue, the notes of brown sugar sing into my soul. I close my eyes.
Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Page 14