All the Pretty Little Horses Read online

  “My God, the view,” he breathed.

  Stacy didn’t answer. He turned to see her heading toward the bedroom, her shoulders beginning to slump again. Michael sighed. He knew how this ended: with her crawling into the bed, her clothes still on, and returning to the fugue state that seemed to consume most of her time these days. It hurt to see her like that, in ways he could never have imagined before everything had become so complicated.

  But he’d seen a way out. He’d seen her break that shell and come back to the world of the living, even if it wasn’t quite as the woman she’d been before. He loved her with all his heart, no matter who she had to be in order to live with herself, and he more than half suspected that the original Stacy—the Stacy who’d danced with him on the college quad the night he asked her to marry him, the Stacy who’d been a mother to Phillip and a member of two local book clubs—was gone forever, another casualty of the Rising. He could live with that.

  They lived in a world where the dead could walk, after all.

  3.

  True to his suspicions, Stacy had gone to bed without even removing her shoes. He had done that for her several hours later, when he finished making his phone calls and calling in his favors. The equipment was delivered to their room at seven the next morning.

  “Stacy.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, putting a hand on her shoulder and shaking lightly. “Sweetheart, I know you need your rest, but I need you to wake up, please.”

  “What?” Stacy opened her eyes. For a moment—just a moment—she looked like the woman she’d always been, and he felt his heart swell with love for her. Then she blinked, and the blankness came back, and the moment passed. “Michael, go away. Let me sleep.”

  “I wish I could, but if you go back to sleep, we’ll miss the truck.”

  Stacy frowned, waking up a little more as she peered at him. “What truck? Michael, what are you talking about?”

  “I spoke to some friends of mine last night. The CDC is going to be cleaning out the Oakland Zoo today, and I thought it would be good to go along with them. Take some pictures, document the process of reclaiming our city—and do it in a place where most of the damage will have been to nonhuman subjects.”

  For a moment, Stacy was silent, and Michael was afraid that he had misread the situation. Maybe the answer was keeping her far away from the zombie menace, insulating her until she could pretend that the world hadn’t changed…but if the world hadn’t changed, then she was a murderess, a mother who had killed her own son. He didn’t think she could live with herself, in that world. No, she needed to be part of a world where what she had done was justified and right, and the only choice she could possibly have made. She needed to be part of this world, even if he had to drag her into it.

  Then, slowly, Stacy nodded. “All right,” she said. “Did you pack my camera?”

  Michael smiled.

  An hour later, when the CDC van pulled up at the Claremont Hotel gates, Michael and Stacy Mason were waiting outside. He had an MP3 recorder and a portable charging station, in case he wound up needing more juice. She had a camera slung around her neck, like a photojournalist getting ready to venture out into the jungle for the first time. The van’s driver looked them up and down before saying something to his passenger, who nodded and opened his door, hopping out.

  “Morning, folks,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Collins. Under the circumstances, and as you’re outside the chain of command, you can call me ‘Bernie.’ I’d prefer that. It tells me that the screaming is coming from someone whose death I wouldn’t have to explain to the brass. Do you understand what it is we’re doing today?”

  “The CDC is cleaning out the Oakland Zoo,” said Michael. “We’re coming with you as observers, and to document the process. The Rising is going to be our generation’s defining event. We need to get as many pictures and firsthand accounts as we can.”

  “You need to not get your asses chewed off by a zombie bear because somebody over my head thinks you’re cute,” said Bernie. “If one of my people says jump, you say ‘how high?’ If one of my people says freeze, you stop where you are, and you do not move. If you are bitten, we will shoot you. If you are scratched, we will shoot you. If you touch a bloodstain and then touch your mouth, nose, or eyes, we will shoot you. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” said Stacy, and there was a crisp alertness in her voice that made Michael’s heart sing. “Do you have Kevlar that we can borrow, or were you just planning to let us flush out the zombies with our soft, delicious bodies? We can roll with either option, but the latter gets you a slightly less positive report.”

  Lieutenant Collins frowned at her. Stacy smiled genially back. Finally, he looked away.

  “Kevlar’s in back, along with the rebreathers we’ll be using in enclosed areas.”

  “Why?” asked Michael. “Kellis-Amberlee isn’t airborne in its negative state.”

  “Breathing the air in a monkey house that’s been closed up for three years may not kill you, but you’ll sure as shit wish it had,” said the lieutenant grimly. “Now all aboard that’s coming aboard. We have a lot of work to do before the sun goes down.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Stacy. She opened the van’s side door, revealing three surprised-looking CDC operatives, and climbed in. Michael was close behind her. Lieutenant Collins shut the door behind them. They heard his door shut a few seconds later. The van started, and they were off.

  The main body of the van had no windows, making it impossible to see how close they were to the zoo. Michael watched Stacy instead. She chatted and politely flirted with the operatives, asking them questions they probably shouldn’t answer and then charming responses out of them. It was like traveling back in time to the days when she’d done similar things at his faculty parties, only now the targets of her attention had guns instead of gradebooks. Yes. He had made the right decision. This was where she belonged now, in a setting so patently divorced from who she’d been before that she could be herself again.

  The van pulled to a stop with a jerk. Stacy sat up a little straighter. “Are we here?” she asked. “Why did we stop?”

  The door slid open, revealing the desolate sweep of the parking lot at the Oakland Zoo. “We’re here,” said Lieutenant Collins, unwittingly answering Stacy’s question. “Everyone, move out, find your assigned group. Masons, you’re wherever you want to be. Personally, I’d recommend wanting to be in the van for as long as possible, but as you’re civilians, that’s not my call.”

  “Damn right it’s not,” said Stacy. She stood, as much as the van’s low ceiling allowed, and walked over to where Lieutenant Collins waited, offering him her hand. He took it automatically, and she used his arm to help herself down. Then she smiled at him, as dazzlingly as if he had been the one to offer. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked, and removed the lens cap from her camera.

  Michael followed more slowly, letting the three men from the CDC get out first. He was gathering his thoughts, trying to prepare himself. He was fairly sure that wasn’t possible.

  He was right.

  Three groups of soldiers had assembled in the zoo parking lot, each of them standing near a troop carrier. The three CDC observers had broken up and gone to their respective stations, their yellow biohazard suits standing out among the olive green. Michael raised his recorder.

  “Domestic cleanup crews are in orange, zoo cleanup crew is in yellow. Are there other colors? Do they have a deeper meaning? Can the extent of local infection be ascertained by looking at the cleanup crews? Find out.”

  “Michael!” He lowered his recorder and turned toward the sound of his name. Stacy was waving to him from some fifteen yards away, her camera in her free hand. She looked so natural in her Kevlar vest and hiking boots, like this was who she’d always been intended to be. It made his heart ache a little for her. How could it have taken him so long to see her clearly? “Come see what I found!”

  “Coming,” he called back, and trotted over to her, feeling the disapproving eyes of Lieutenant Collins on the back of his neck as he moved. He’d have to find a way to flatter the man’s ego before the end of the day, or he’d never be able to get himself and Stacy onto another cleanup job. And he already knew that he wanted to get Stacy, at the bare minimum, onto another cleanup job. She was…lighter, in a way that he hadn’t seen for a very long time. It was almost like seeing his wife again.

  Stacy had found a ball of garter snakes, tucked under the back wheels of an abandoned car. There must have been two or three hundred of the striped serpents there, all of them twisted together like an impossible macramé of slithering sides and flickering tongues.

  “I’ve never seen one this big,” said Stacy, and took a picture. “What do you think happened?”

  “Zombies aren’t particular about what they eat, but they tend to go for mammals first; the virus knows it won’t gain any traction with other creatures.” Thank God for that. Michael had spent half the Rising waiting for the first confirmed zombie eagle to swoop in and end what remained of the world. “Bears, coyotes—anything large enough to convert would have done a number on the small dogs and house cats. They removed most of the natural predators for these snakes, and the snakes thanked them by having a population explosion.”

  “The ecosystem is recovering. It’s just changing at the same time.” Stacy snapped a few more pictures before turning to look at the zoo gates. The CDC crews were walking toward that distant entrance, moving slowly, methodically, like they had all the time in the world. “Can we go in?”

  “Yes, if we stay with the cleanup crews and don’t get in the way. That’s what we’re here for.”

  Stacy’s smile was sudden and electric, and took Michael’s breath away. “Then let’s go.”

  Th
ey walked back to the others side by side, catching up with the CDC’s people about five yards outside the entrance. Stacy took pictures of everything: the gates, the bloodstained ticket booth, even a backpack that had somehow remained pressed up against the fence for who knows how long, bleached by the sun and battered by the rain. A piece of paper with the owner’s name written on it had been wedged under a little clear plastic “window” at the top of the bag, and it was still legible, even though Molly was never going to be coming back to collect her things.

  Michael glanced at Stacy anxiously when he saw her photographing the backpack, waiting for the reality of another dead child to send her crashing into a fugue state. It didn’t happen. She moved straight to capturing pictures of the CDC troops as they cut the locks off the zoo gates, and he began, almost unwillingly, to relax.

  The zoo was no longer a slaughterhouse—it had been too long since the initial outbreaks—but the signs remained, scribed in dried blood and bits of bone. Michael had seen enough zombie attacks to be able to read the story written in the stains. It was not a pretty one.

  The three teams separated once inside, heading for different sections of the zoo. Michael hung back, waiting for Stacy to choose a direction, and then followed the group she was with, periodically raising his recorder to capture a few thoughts on the scene around them. It was eerie in its devastated stillness—not as eerie as the deserted streets of Berkeley, perhaps, but worse at the same time, because this was a setting he had never pictured in this manner. The zoo was supposed to be a place of education and joy, preserving animal life for future generations. Instead, it had become the same as everyplace else. It had become a graveyard.

  They passed open-air enclosures meant to house the great herbivores, the antelope and zebras and giraffes. Some of them had been pulled apart on their artificial grasslands, bones scattered and bleaching in the sun. Others told a different story: their bones were intact, pressed up against fences or collapsed at the bottom of protective moats. Somehow, Kellis-Amberlee had gotten to them, turning them into killers of their own kind, until starvation had finally taken over.

  Birds picked through the ruined habitats, crows with their casual strut, pigeons with their bobbing heads, and more types of duck than Michael had ever seen in one place. A flash of white flew by, and a heron landed atop the desiccated corpse of a black bear. It preened the feathers of its breast before striking a classic pose, neck bent, one foot drawn up against its body. Michael heard a click as Stacy’s camera went off.

  “We’re going to have to burn the whole place to the ground,” said one of the men in green. “There’s blood everywhere.”

  It wasn’t inaccurate. The blood had dried long since, and some of it had been worn away by the wind and the weather, but the traces still remained, marking the pathways of infection. It was a striking image. Michael captured it with his recorder, describing it in careful detail.

  The day unfolded from there, bitterly predictable and viciously surprising at the same time. There was movement in the monkey house: the spider monkeys had an enclosure that featured plants they had been known to eat and enjoy in the wild, and somehow two dauntless monkeys had managed to turn this into survival. There were tooth marks on the bones that littered the floor. They had eaten each other not out of virus-induced hunger, but simply because they needed to stay alive. The monkeys were skeletons clothed in fur that rushed the glass when they saw the humans, shrieking and pleading with their high-pitched simian voices. The keepers had returned. The days of peace and plenty were sure to follow.

  Michael averted his eyes as the soldiers went around to the back of the enclosure and put the monkeys out of their misery. The click of Stacy’s camera followed on the heels of the gunshots, punctuating the scene.

  There was more motion near the reptile house. Michael watched in awe as the big alligator that had been hiding in its moat surfaced, blinked its reptilian eyes, and opened its mouth in what was either a greeting or a threat display. It was impossible to tell without getting closer, and none of them wanted to do that.

  “How the fuck is that thing still alive, Lieutenant?” asked one of the men, looking shaken. “I signed up for zombies, not crocodiles.”

  “It’s an alligator,” said another man. “They’re everywhere in Florida. We’re pretty sure they could survive a nuclear holocaust. They might glow, but they’d still eat your cat.”

  “Alligators are reptiles; they can’t be infected,” said Michael. The big gator closed its jaws, watching them warily. It knew humans were a source of food, but maybe it also knew that humans were the reason it was here, in this cramped, stinking enclosure, instead of roaming free through the Everglades and ignoring the zombie apocalypse with the rest of its species. “Is there any way we can remove it before the zoo burns?”

  “I’ll put it in my report,” said Lieutenant Collins. “I believe there’s going to be a second team that comes through and removes anything we’ve flagged as salvageable. They may not have a place to keep an alligator.”

  Everyone was briefly quiet, looking at the big reptile wallowing in his moat. The alligator, having decided that he wasn’t going to be fed, sunk back below the surface of the water.

  “We really fucked everything up, didn’t we?” asked Lieutenant Collins. The question didn’t seem to be directed at anyone specific: It was more asked of the open air, and the silence. Michael looked at him thoughtfully, and didn’t say anything.

  The mission moved on.

  There were more signs of life in the reptile house, although not many: Most of the snakes, lizards, and terrapins had long since surrendered to hunger and the elements. But a few had managed to survive, feeding on whatever they could find. The king cobra enclosure was smashed in. There was no dead snake inside. They left the reptile house quickly after that, all of them glancing into corners with the jittery unease of humans who had just been reminded how closely related to monkeys they were—how closely related to prey.

  The last stop of the day was the zoo gift shop, which had been deemed the most likely place for infected to have taken shelter and potentially survived. It was connected to the outside; a broken window would have made it possible to den there while also leaving to hunt.

  Stacy, naturally, was eager to get started. So when Lieutenant Collins barked, “Civilians outside until I give the all clear!” she sulked. Quite literally sulked, folding her arms and leaning against a clean patch of wall as she glared at the men now streaming into the gift shop.

  “We should be in there,” she said, looking at Michael. “They’re going to knock everything over and mess everything up, and we’re not going to be able to get any good pictures.”

  “I think they’ll be more careful than that,” said Michael. “Have you been able to get some good shots today?”

  “Hundreds,” said Stacy. She stroked her camera the way she used to stroke their son’s hair. “It’s amazing. Some of these pictures…I never really wanted to be a journalist, but I think I could have won a Pulitzer if I’d taken pictures like this before everything got weird.”

  Stacy’s pictures were generally amateurish in composition and framing, more family snapshot than striking vista, but Michael nodded all the same. The subject matter transcended the technique. “I was thinking I might write an article about all this. I’ve been taking notes all day, and if we combine them with your pictures…”

  “Who would publish it?” Stacy shook her head. “I don’t think the newspaper is going to be a thing for a long time.”

  “Maybe not ever,” said Michael. “I was thinking I could publish it myself. The Internet is getting more stable by the day, and I know how to put together a decent site. All the old blogging sites are pretty well overrun, so I’d have to do the HTML by hand until I can find a better client, but—”