“…ARE REQUESTED TO VOLUNTARILY EVACUATE DUE TO MULTIPLE CIVIL EMERGENCY INCIDENTS. EVACUATION CENTER HAS BEEN SET UP ON CAL EXPO FAIRGROUNDS. RESIDENTS SHOULD TAKE PRECAUTIONS AGAINST LOOTERS. RESIDENTS OF SURROUNDING AREAS ARE REQUESTED TO REMAIN INDOORS. PREVENT OUTDOOR ACCESS TO YOUR RESIDENCE AND COVER ALL WINDOWS. BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED. CIVIL EMERGENCY MESSAGE. THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE IS TRANSMITTED AT THE REQUEST OF THE CALIFORNIA EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY. RESIDENTS OF SACRAMENTO CITY…”
Before my gardening job I’d been a seasonal employee for the fairgrounds. They often assigned me to events near the horse track. I had sneaked onto the river bike trail that ran along it many a time while on a smoke break with coworkers when that had still seemed cool. The fairgrounds were a place for entertainment, for overpriced food, for horseracing, but I realized its concrete acres and tall, chain-link fencing could easily be put to other uses.
“Try another station,” Dylan said.
Jane obliged. The next station sent out the same Emergency Alert message.
“That can’t be all of it?” I asked.
“The government is probably doing this on purpose,” Maibe said. “They don’t want any stations to get on the air and say what’s really going on. That always happens in the zombie movies.”
“Girl,” Stan said, this odd twist to his voice, like the word came from the back of his throat at the last second instead of a different, harsher word.
“Maybe she’s right,” Jane said.
“Stop it, Jane,” I said.
“Do you have a better idea?” Jane turned an accusing stare at me. “They’re monsters, or they might as well be, so you tell me, Corrina—what’s going on here?”
“It’s not zombies,” I said. “I would buy some sort of sickness, a version of rabies or maybe a poison.” I refused to flinch under her stare. If that’s where it needed to go, I could give it as good as she could dish it.
A banging on the back froze Jane’s features into panic mode. Maibe yelped. A cold determination swept through me. My life had been filled with people banging on doors, ushering themselves in, invited or not. I had learned I could deal with whatever waited on the other side, though, admittedly, this situation was a little different than what I'd experienced in the past.
“Luna is only parked,” Stan said.
“Help us.” A muffled male voice.
“Go. Just go,” Jane whispered. She placed the bat across her lap and squeezed it until her knuckles turned as white as her face.
Stan’s hand hovered over the shifter and I wondered if we were really going to repeat this whole scene again. “We have to at least see if…” If what? If they slobbered? If they walked like cripples? If they wanted to kill us? Did I really want to open that door and check?
But then the squeal of the door sounded anyways. I whirled around. Maibe.
Faces peered into the crack of light.
“Wait.” I raised my hand in a stopping motion, forgetting it held the knife. The blade clattered onto the floor.
“It’s a family,” Maibe said. She threw the door wide. “Come on. Get inside.” She waved her hands as if to make them hurry.
I retrieved the knife. Three adults and two children pushed into the space.
“You’re the one who’s talking about zombies,” I said to Maibe, “and you let these people in like it’s no big deal?”
“I…” Maibe looked away. “The bad ones can’t talk. That’s how you know the difference. They can’t say words anymore, just noises.”
“Thank you,” the older man said. He looked to be in his early fifties. His hair was longer than I’d usually seen people in their fifties wear it. More an unkempt style that fell just past the top of his ears, like a hipster. His pants were torn at the knee and streaked with dirt. His hazel eyes examined each of us in turn. His dark eyebrows accentuated his stare. There was something odd about his skin, a weird webbing of lines and an ashy cast to his color.
“I’m Christopher.” He waved toward the two women. “This is Gracelyn and Mai. The kids are Samara and Joseph. We’re not family, but we are all neighbors. Sort of. I was visiting my sister when they came through our houses this morning. We’ve been hiding until we saw you drive by the first time. When you came back around, we took our chance.”
Dylan motioned for everyone to sit down. Gracelyn tucked Joseph, who looked to be about five, into her lap. Samara was maybe eight years old and pressed herself into Mai. “How did you know we wouldn’t be like…whoever’s done this?” Dylan asked.
“They’re like animals,” Christopher said. His eyes lost their focus, as if he were reliving a terrible moment. “They aren’t capable of doing something like driving an RV.” Christopher tilted his head. “How’d you know we would be all right?”
“We didn’t,” Dylan said, “but Maibe here didn’t give us much of a choice.”
“All right…listen up,” Stan yelled across the RV. “This is my place.” He swiveled his chair around. “Everybody better watch where he or she sits. I want Luna kept as clean as when you all walked in. You better watch those kids, too. You’ll have to pay for anything that gets broken.”
I felt a small hand reach for mine. I looked down as Maibe’s pink arm intertwined itself with mine. “I’m sorry. I promise they’re not zombies,” she said. “I’ve watched all the movies. I know the signs. They’re still okay.”
This kid was alone when she had watched her uncle brutally murdered. I pulled her close for a moment and caught Dylan’s eye.
“Everything okay?” He asked.
“No,” I said, smiling through the tears welling up in my eyes.
“Okay. Now that everyone knows Luna’s rules, we have a problem. Luna’s been in storage. We need gas if we’re going to make it to Cal Expo,” Stan said.
“May we use the bathroom?” Mai asked, Samara still pressed into her side.
“Absolutely not,” Stan said. “I haven’t had the septic tank checked in awhile. You can wait to go once we stop for gas.”
I was about to protest, but when Mai returned her focus to the top of Samara’s head without argument, I let the matter drop for the moment.
The group looked cold, exhausted, shell-shocked. I'm sure we didn't look much differently to them. No one else bothered to speak up, except for Joseph who complained about his hiccups. His cheeks were streaked with dirt and his eyes watered. Gracelyn held him in her lap and crooned into his hair.
“Do you have any water?” Christopher asked. Even though it was cold inside the RV, sweat beaded on his forehead.
I went into the bathroom, poured a cup of water and handed it over.
Christopher took a sip and then passed the rest to Joseph. He cleared his throat. “I know a gas station where we could see anyone coming at us for miles. Along the railroad tracks from here.”
We all waited to see what Stan would do.
“Give me directions,” Stan said.
We drove out of the neighborhood and followed the railroad tracks away from downtown.
Everything had become eerily still, as if the city had gone comatose after a violent seizure. The different alarms filled the air, making it impossible to hear anything else except for the person right next to you. There was plenty of broken glass, car accidents, blood, a bicycle twisted into the front end of a truck, a spilled bag of groceries, milk dribbling into the gutter, streaks of blood showing where something was dragged away. Odd-shaped lumps lay unmoving in doorways, bullet casings lay in a small pile next to a car with its windshield busted, but there were very few bodies out in the open and no one moving around.
I hoped that meant the worst was over, but I feared it was just a lull.
On the other side of the railroad tracks from the gas station were open fields full of starthistle, foxtails, goathead—weeds for as far as the eye could see. Flat, open fields on one side, and except for a few buildings and the station’s convenience store, flat, cracked pavement on the other.
Luna sputtered to a halt as Stan downshifted, and I searched for anything that moved outside. It looked quiet, abandoned, safe, for the moment.
We decided that Jane, Stan, and I would get the gas. Dylan would go with the gun, Mai, Gracelyn, and the kids to find a bathroom. Christopher would stay and guard Luna.
“Maybe we shouldn’t split up,” I said to Dylan, even though I was the one who had argued the gun should go with the bathroomers.
Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Do you trust Stan not to do something stupid?”
Everything in me wanted to keep together in a large group, as if we were in elementary school playing bunch-ball soccer. Luna was the soccer ball and we should all be hovering around her, not leaving her sight. “Jane could go alone and help him.” But I knew that wasn’t fair to her. “Never mind,” I said. “Just be quick and be safe.”
He kissed me, a deep, sorry-I-gotta-go-but-I’ll-make-up-for-it-later kiss. And I wished for time later to make up for this rushed kiss, and for the last few months.
Dylan opened Luna’s back door. “All right, come on out.” He motioned with his free hand for everyone to step onto the pavement.
My knee still ached, but Christopher had checked it, saying he was a paramedic. He concluded it was only badly bruised.
I held the kitchen knife more like a security blanket than a real weapon, and yet I felt stronger for holding it and for being given a reason to not look at the pathetic group of people exiting Luna as if she were some spaceship landing on a harsh alien planet.
Maibe came out last, her pink hood up and her hands drawn into her sleeves. Christopher poked his head out of the door and gave an all-clear thumbs up before closing it.
Stan closed Luna's door with a soft click. We tried the hose. The pump was shut off.
We would need to go inside the store and see about switching it on before heading back to safety. That’s how I thought of Luna now, as safe. As if we were playing baseball and as long as we made it back to base before the other team tagged us, we were safe. I didn’t know who this other team was yet, but I forced those questions away for when there was more time to think.
Dylan and his ragtag group walked alongside the railroad tracks, around the back of the store to look for an unlocked bathroom or the privacy of a wall.
They went out of sight and suddenly I couldn’t breathe for fear I would never see Dylan again.
I forced myself to follow Stan and Jane instead of running after Dylan. The store was pretty much gutted inside except for what one man might need to operate the pumps. A countertop, a cash register, and somewhere, a pump switch. On racks by the register hung a few trinkets and what looked like empty Slim Jim’s wrappers. The place was little more than a shack to protect the owner from the weather. Stan pulled open the doors without any problems.
Something grabbed my hand. I yelled and jerked away.
Maibe.
The bat in Jane’s hand shook from the vibrations of her body. Stan had his flare gun pointed at Maibe, and then grimaced and lowered it. I tried to calm the trembling of my own body. Her surprise entrance had made blood rush to my ears, which blocked out sound and balance. Not a good reaction. I shook my head and took a deep breath. “Come on,” I kept hold of Maibe’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
“What were you thinking?” Jane yelled. “Running around by yourself? Are you stupid?”
“Let’s just get this done,” I said.
Stan pointed the flare gun into the store like he actually knew how to use the thing. He led the way. It would be easy to follow him, the oldest adult, and pretend that had any meaning.
Yes, there were people in the world capable of doing horrible acts, but just because they all seemed loose in our area didn’t mean that someone wouldn’t get things under control. The police, or the National Guard, or whoever. All we had to do was not die before that happened.
I laughed quietly to myself. Easy. Just don’t die, Corrina, then everything will be fine.
“Found it.” Stan bent behind the cash register counter. Something clicked and then there was a whirring sound, like liquid running through a pipe. Stan stood up and brushed dust off his hands.
Jane stood by a door at the back of the store. “I think this is a food closet.”
“This whole thing is a closet,” I said.
“The owner had to have a little sink area or something,” she said. “A microwave, a little pantry.”
In spite of everything that had happened, or maybe because of it, my stomach rumbled. I wondered if we’d find enough food for everyone and how we would go about splitting it if there wasn’t.
“Don’t open that door,” Maibe said with all the conviction a thirteen year old could muster.
“Shut up, kid,” Stan said.
Maibe looked first at Jane and then back to me. “This is exactly like in the movies. You don’t go opening closed doors, ever. That’s one of the first things you learn after a zombie apocalypse. There’s always something bad hiding behind a closed door. All the movies are like that. You just know the movie plans to kill someone as soon as you see them thinking about opening a closed door. That’s how it—”
“I told you to shut your mouth,” Stan said.
“Calm down, Stan,” I said. “She’s been through a lot. We all have.”
Jane remained silent, as if she were also considering what may or may not be waiting on the other side.
The door was a flimsy-looking metal sheet. Shoe marks covered the bottom half as if someone routinely kicked it closed. The place smelled like grease, sweat, dust. If there was any food it wasn’t out here with us.
“Look,” I said. “It wouldn’t hurt to be cautious, but what if there’s food? We wouldn’t have to stop again.” A part of me knew that if I gave into Maibe’s superstition I’d never want to open another door for as long as I lived, because wasn’t she right? Hadn’t all the doors today brought nothing but one horrible thing after another?
“Just open the goddamn door,” Stan said. “There’s nothing there, alive anyways. Otherwise we would have heard something.”
“I don’t want to. You do it,” Jane said.
Stan stomped over to her. He leaned his head close to the door. “I don’t hear anything,” Stan said. “There’s nothing there.” Yet he still didn’t pull it open.
“Knock or something,” I said. I immediately felt embarrassed. I waited for Stan to shoot me a withering look, but he seemed thoughtful instead.
Jane shifted from foot to foot.
“Yeah, okay,” Stan said.
Maibe moved away from the rest of us. Closer to outside.
Stan took a small step back, kept the flare gun in his right hand and raised his left. He froze for a moment, and then knocked softly. He stopped, and then knocked harder.
Silence filled the room. The four of us strained to hear something, anything, coming from behind the door. There was noise, but it came from outside, muffled by the closed gas station door—the low whine of alarms, the screech of far-off car brakes, the low rumblings of who knew what. The booms had started up again too, sounding like gunshots, but there was no way to know for sure. I did catch a glimpse of Joseph and Samara straggling back to Luna. They must have finished, and here we were, standing stupid, not yet done with our one task, risking all our lives by not getting the gas and then getting the hell out of there.
“There’s nothing,” I said. “Open it and let’s get back to Luna.”
“Stupid kid,” Stan muttered before jerking the door open.
Maibe squeaked and pulled on my arm hard enough to tweak it.
“Nothing,” Stan said as he walked into the room with Jane on his heels.
“Maibe, ease up,” I said.
Jane poked her head out of the door. “The lights aren’t working, but there is some food. Crackers and some water bottles.”
Maibe buried her head into her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought for sure—that’s always how it works. People never get away this easy.”
“It’s okay.” I tried to take a step, but my knee buckled. I swore and touched the tender spot under my jeans. Not a good time for injuries, even if it was just a bruise with some swelling.
Jane and Stan came back out with a few boxes and a depressingly small stack of water bottles in their arms.
Maibe drew up her hood and pulled the strings tight so that the pink cloth hugged her face, like in one of those photo shoots where they dressed babies in enormous flower costumes. I decided not to mention this to her. I'd yet to meet a teenager who would feel thrilled with knowing they reminded someone of a baby.
“It’s okay, Maibe,” I said. “Remember this is real life, not the movies.”
“You didn’t see them up close like I did. You didn’t see what they did to my uncle.”
I decided not to tell her about Mr. Sidner. Better to just try and forget about it. I would want to do a lot of forgetting once this was all over. But I had gotten pretty good at that skill while living in the group home with other fosters out for blood at any accidental insult.
“They always demand payment.” Maibe bowed her head, and then raised it again as if inspiration had just struck. “Oh. Why didn’t I think…you can’t ever get away with something like this, getting food or gas or something, without a cost, but maybe it’s not supposed to come from us.”
She stared at me as if waiting for a response to her brilliance.
I closed my eyes. “Are we done here?”
“This is all there was,” Jane said.
“It’s enough,” I said. I pushed open the door to the outside.
That’s when we heard the shouting. The gunfire. The roar of an engine.
“Luna!” Stan yelled. “They’re trying to leave without us.” He dropped the boxes and sprinted.
Luna remained exactly where we’d left her. Everything looked okay from our side of things, but it did not sound okay.
“If it’s not us who has to make payment,” Maibe said from behind me. “It’s the people who went to the bathroom.”
I ran across the parking lot in spite of the jelly my legs seemed to be turning into. I ran, but it felt so slow, it felt so late.
Stan reached Luna and shook the driver’s side door, screaming for someone to let him in.
I rounded Luna's back side and saw the doors to a box van that hadn't been there before. They closed shut on a glimpse of Dylan’s jacket. Before I could raise a shout, it sped off in a whine of engine noise.
If Dylan stood beside me, then whatever happened next, it would be manageable, it would not be the end because we would get through it together. Wasn’t that what this morning had proved, that we would get through whatever life threw at us—together?
I ran after Dylan as if my life depended on it. I ran like I used to run for my father when Bettina’s gang of girlfriends chased after me in elementary school.
The van turned a corner and then another corner. I gasped for breath and wished for longer, faster legs, the same wish I’d had when I was nine. My nightmare come to life—home base just out of reach and I ran and I ran and I ran, and home base moved further away.
My knee flared and I lost my balance. Asphalt grated my cheek, made my face burn, matched with the pain flaring in my knee, but it could not match the pain inside. It could not stop the despair welling up in me like a black hole, its gravity sucking me down and about to break me apart. I screamed.
A wild thought jolted me back—maybe Dylan had let one of the others borrow his jacket. Maybe he was safe. Maybe he was hiding somewhere, and I would find him in the weeds by the railroad tracks.
I forced myself to rise from the pavement and return to the gas station at a fast limp. I walked past the first dead body, that little hiccuping boy, Joseph. As soon as I realized he was too small to be Dylan I did not look closer.
Joseph's body was the only one on the pavement, so I moved to the field. My mind was fuzzed out, as if nothing existed beyond waiting for Dylan to sit up from the middle of a bunch of starthistle and say, “I’m okay.”
I do not know what Jane and Maibe and Stan were doing while I conducted my search. I did catch the shadow of a figure out of the corner of my eye. I think it was Maibe and I think she may have said something like, “They might come back,” but I can’t be sure and besides, I hadn’t found Dylan and I knew he was waiting for me.
The world would not be so cruel as to have allowed us to see we were still worth saving, and then not allow us to save ourselves. A voice whispered in my head that, yes, the world was definitely cruel enough to do that. It had taken both my parents from me and dumped me in a group home, hadn't it? I kept searching anyways.
I found five bodies of people who looked sick like the man at our patio door, now dead from what must have been bullet wounds. I did not find Dylan, and suddenly I was glad, because no one I had found was still alive.
Jane’s voice cut through my search. “Look at this.” She held up something small. Dylan's gun.
“There’s blood on it,” she said.
That’s when I grew calm. I walked to Jane as if I were passing through a swarm of paper wasps. Let them get a good look at me. They could recognize faces. They knew whether you belonged in their section of garden or not. I took stately, relaxed steps across the field, over another body. I examined Jane’s hands as if I could tell whether it were Dylan’s blood. On the ground was a flattened goathead plant and boot prints. Not Dylan’s shoes. He’d worn sneakers like me.
There was blood. Little enough that I could breathe again.
The barrel of Dylan's gun looked twisted in on itself, as if hit by something small with great force. It must have been shot out of his hand.
Jane let the broken gun drop into the weeds.
“They took him then,” I said, hope rising in me. “He’s still alive.”
He was alive, but for how long? As if this thought woke me up, I noticed Stan sobbing. He had dropped to his knees next to the wreck that used to be Luna. Her tires were flat, blood streaked the purple swirls on the side. Bullets had punched holes in the front hood, making something inside smoke.
“Luna! My God, what have they done to you?” Stan looked around at us and then pointed at Maibe. “I saw them. Those criminals who shot up Luna. All dark-eyed foreigners.”
I lost all my calm.
I walked over to Stan and punched him.
He babied his jaw in his hands. He narrowed his eyes so that his cheeks seemed to swallow his face.
I turned and began to limp away.
“You can’t leave. You need me.”