ZOMBIE TALES
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Copyright 2018 by Macaulay C. Hunter
Cover image courtesy DepositPhotos
Cover by Devorah Mast
Table of Contents
Plantation
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Zombie Child
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Bait
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Blood Games
Chapter One: The Shooting
Chapter Two: The Search
Chapter Three: The Games
Chapter Four: Battle of the Zombies
Chapter Five: The Children’s Melee
Chapter Six: The First Match
Chapter Seven: The Second Match
Chapter Eight: The Brawl
Chapter Nine: The Post-Party
Meat
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PLANTATION
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Prologue
He wasn’t supposed to be out here.
No one went out of the gate without permission, and no one went out alone since those were the rules. Dustin didn’t like rules. He hadn’t liked them before Z-Day, and he hadn’t liked them after it. Z-Day was a clever name for what had happened. He’d invented it on his own.
Good at putting things together, that was Dustin. It was why he was out here by himself, driving around from empty city to empty city in the red soccer mom minivan he’d taken from the garage. Before that, he’d lifted the keys from old man Bridger, whatever kind of name that was. Doctor Bridger Tolaman. And before the keys, he’d gotten his big fat NO from Scarlett and the triumvirate about driving up and down the freeway to find a Perfect Homes.
Dustin didn’t know what triumvirate meant, other than three people who said NO a lot to his ideas. Not a lot. They always said NO. But they needed these things on the list in his head! He’d seen that out in the garden, before the NO and the keys and minivan. They were watering a massive garden by hand with watering cans and hoses. Some of the hoses were older than Bridger. Cracked like him too, big wrinkles on the tubing, bleached white like his skin. And two had leaks. When hoses got that old, you either used them as soaker hoses or tossed them. But the garden was too big for these hoses to cover as soakers, and one had a leak so bad that all of their attempts to patch it met watery fates. There weren’t enough faucets through the garden and that left him to filling cans over and over, carrying them back and forth to the farthest edges of the property until he wanted to yell from the boredom. He’d come into Plantation for some square meals and protection, not to be made into a field slave.
So he’d come up with his list. Poly drip tubing. Compression fittings. Goof plugs. Tubing stakes. A cutter. This was his area of expertise, gained from a job he’d had for a while after getting out on parole. Scarlett was big on that, everyone having something to contribute no matter how old or young or dumb or crippled they were. She was a pretty bitch, one of those people where you couldn’t tell if they were white or black or Mexican or something else, because all of those things were blended into them like a racial smoothie. Before Z-Day, when they’d filled out forms that asked about their race, she must have had to check every box. He’d just done two, Caucasian and Other, with the Other because his adoptive mother was Cherokee back in the 1800s. Every time he passed a casino before Z-Day, he felt proud at his people making good. He didn’t have enough of their blood to get a cut of the dough, but he did keep a dreamcatcher on his rearview mirror to show his affiliation.
Dustin liked to think about Scarlett when he took baths, those big lips stretching wide to say YES in her bed when in real life they pinched together in NO within the conference room. He’d never actually seen her bed. She had a room upstairs since she was the first to Plantation after Z-Day, bringing little Fisher with her. Dustin had a sleeping bag on a cot in the library, a room he shared with seven other men and a zillion books the squads brought back from raids. They weren’t even good books.
Names were funny. Fisher was a girl. He’d laughed and slapped his leg when he learned her name. She hid behind Scarlett like the girl was four and not twelve. She was scared of men, all but Bridger. Maybe she was a little lesbian in training. That was sort of sad and sort of hot at the same time. The sad part was because it meant she’d be like Scarlett in a few years, another pretty bitch saying NO to Dustin.
No, Scarlett wasn’t going to let a squad drive around the area in the hopes of coming across a Perfect Homes box store. No, what they had in the garden wasn’t ideal, but this wasn’t the time to mess with the system. No, Dustin couldn’t take a vehicle and go alone. Only at high noon could anyone travel safely. The deadheads went to sleep then, the little bit of sleep they needed. Even the ringers slept at that time, or so it was said. Dustin hadn’t ever seen a ringer. It was only safe for a period of three hours tops. So no. No, Dustin! Bridger and Elena also had words for Dustin. NO and NO.
He might have gotten some support among the little people like himself, Wesley and Dakota and Shirley mainly, but Dustin wasn’t going to spend his time doing that. That was his big fat NO. No, he wasn’t wasting any more time plodding around the garden when it was his turn on the hoses. He was going to make this happen and watch the Big Three eat their words. That would feel good when he drove up with a trunk packed with everything they could ever want. Just because those guys had been at Plantation longest didn’t mean they called all of the shots.
There were always Perfect Homes stores around, one per city and sometimes more if the city was big enough. California was drowning in them. They were like Staties for grocery stores or Yum-Yum Waffles for restaurants. Scarlett worked at a Yum-Yum Waffles until Z-Day. Dustin had been one day away from his court date for a DUI when everything fell apart. That was good. Z-Day hadn’t been so bad for him in that regard.
Thinking of booze made him thirsty. The squads brought back books of all things, but not some nice cold ones. He’d inquired about that and Elena said some things were a priority and other things were not. She also mentioned that for things to be cold, they required refrigeration and electricity was gone with Z-Day. Dustin knew that! Elena was being a smartass when her English wasn’t even good enough to know what smartass meant.
Once he thought about Elena in the bath. But she was a little ripe for the plucking, in weight and years. He thought when he slipped his dick inside that he might feel the rings of her age like a tree. That wasn’t too sexy of an image. She was more like a mom and Dustin wasn’t into that. He watched MILF porn videos on the Internet, back when there was Internet. No, thank you. He didn’t like used chutes. Too bad, since Shirley didn’t beat around the bush that she was interested in him.
Beat around the bush. He laughed. Shirley wasn’t pretty enough for Dustin. Not with that long horse face of hers and her roots growing out fast so her hair was black and blonde. Some man had still pumped her full of seed a few times, because she’d come down with a case of the babies twice over. Enough beer and anyone was pretty. That was how guys ended up doing cows.
Why was it when he didn’t need
to find a Perfect Homes, they were everywhere he looked? And now he did need to find one, and he was seeing everything but. On the bright side, he hadn’t seen any zombies taking naps either. Just bodies scattered here and there, eaten away to bones. He wondered if the deadheads ate the clothes, too. That was how they got their fiber. What ringers ate, Dustin had no idea.
He had better blood than they did, the deadheads and ringers. When the biological agent hit, Dustin’s blood said NO. So did the blood of everyone living at Plantation. Z-Day had been three days long, people breathing in the agent and their brains getting sick. Then they became deadheads. If they didn’t go crazy, their blood not so weak as to give in totally to the agent but not strong enough to fight it off, they were ringers. But all of them were zombies. Dustin drove into some deadheads before he came to Plantation, just like he’d driven over frogs twenty years ago when he first got his license. Frog-popping. His high school girlfriend had dumped him over that. Those poor little frogs! Tracy had been pretty, the best tail he’d ever had the pleasure to nail. Crying over frogs added pretty dumb to the pretty. And now she was just one of the billions of deadheads, or the millions of ringers, or else the thousands of people with their strong blood running scared. Dustin estimated thousands, although he didn’t know for sure. It just seemed like a good number. Plentiful. His old high school had had three thousand students, minus one when he dropped out halfway through senior year.
He searched the streets of some nameless city, driving past every damn kind of store but a Perfect Homes. It was about eleven in the morning when he stole the minivan and one in the afternoon now. And it would take a bit more time to get back to Plantation. So he needed to find the store! Getting back onto the freeway, he headed for the next exit. If he passed a Staties, he was going to pull in and get some beer. Those with strong blood had raided the stores for months since Z-Day. But if they were like Elena, they wouldn’t think beer was a priority. It would still be there for Dustin to load into the trunk.
Billions to thousands meant the women needed to start breeding. Breeding like rabbits to put those missing billions of people back. He thought about Scarlett again. She said she was twenty-nine, but that meant she was thirty-four. Someone had told Dustin to always add five years to a woman’s age and subtract three inches from a man’s dick. But Scarlett still looked good for her thirties. They could have a kid and name it Dustlett or Scartin. That fit in with a girl named Fisher, for God’s sake.
Making the kid would be the best part. He’d fill the world with Dustletts.
A body was in the road, eaten away to bones and the leftover gristle a black crust on the pavement. He swerved around it. The stores here were nothing good, a Mexican joint with two burritos dancing around a sombrero on the sign, and a Princess Tea Party that catered to little girls and gay boys on their birthdays. Insurance, bail bonds, a bank, a kids’ clothing store, boutiques, a shoe store, a theater . . . He missed movies. And all of that money sitting untouched in the bank! One day, he was going to raid it and come back to Plantation as the richest man among them. Gold, jewels, fat stacks of bills, he would pile them all around his cot and-
Yard Wizards.
Drifting as he looked at it, he almost struck a parked car at the curb. He yanked back into the road. A Yard Wizards was just as good as a Perfect Homes. Even better with its low prices and he liked their commercials with the blonde bimbo wandering around the aisles. She was always confused on her home projects, in need of an employee to explain what a hammer was or the difference between a nail and a screw. The Yard Wizards guys came by the dozens to help, running around aisles and rappelling down from the ceiling, pushing up through a grate on the floor to offer their services. One the guys was actually a lesbian chick.
Excited to find the store and turned on by the memory of the commercials, Dustin zoomed up to the driveway and pulled in with a bang since two of the tires hit the curb. He’d like to show the bimbo the difference between a nail and a screw.
The lot had a few abandoned cars. Carts were packed in the carrels and others stranded in the parking spaces with their front wheels hooked over the islands. He pulled into the best spot, the handicapped space right by the front doors. What did it matter? There weren’t cops any more. Even before Z-Day, Dustin had thought those spaces were a rip-off. No one ever parked in them.
The doors were automatic. Those didn’t work now, but they’d frozen partway open. He let himself inside the store and paused to adjust to the dimness. This was a sight for sore eyes. Huge shelving units stretched up high. They were packed with everything on God’s green earth except food. But Dustin was wrong about that. At the register was a mini-fridge with glass doors. Inside were sodas. He helped himself to a cart and packed it with every soda in the fridge. One he cracked open immediately and drank to the last drop. He set the empty bottle on the frozen conveyor belt and imagined paying for it, a woman behind the counter taking his money and asking how his day was going. No one at Plantation ever asked how Dustin’s day was going. They just gave him work to do. Water the garden. Clean the chicken shit. Wash the dishes. Fill the vehicles with fuel. And instead of saying thank you or how’s your day going, they said NO. He wasn’t even allowed into the armory to pick out his own weapon. They were assigned.
It was time to shop. He’d never had so much fun shopping in thirty-six years. Into the cart went coiled black tires of half-inch drip tubing. He chose the most expensive kind. They were durable. The heat wouldn’t bug them and they were resistant to cracking. So much better than the shitty hoses they had now! The shelf had ten of them and he cleaned it out. After that, he moved on to compression fittings, plugs, a cutter, and a puncher. A puncher! That hadn’t been on his mental list. What was the point of drip tubing if he didn’t have a puncher to make the tubing drip? Two of them went into the cart. Then he tossed in tubing stakes. They were forty cents each before Z-Day and free after it. So he took a lot of them.
At the end of another aisle were hoses. These were hoses, a hundred feet long, not like the bleached-out shit snakes half this size that they had at Plantation. He piled some of those in the bottom of the cart and charged through the other aisles to enjoy everything he could take. Hammocks! Nail guns! Fire pits! The world belonged to Dustin Klave.
It was so engrained in his head to go through a checkout line that he did that, even though the store had a population of one. He scanned the impulse purchases and plucked out the gum. Reconsidering, he also added in the magazines. Women liked those. They’d be so excited that they wouldn’t notice the magazines were five months out of date. The model on one cover was hot as hell with her long hair and sultry smile. She had big tits wedged into a skimpy pink workout top. He took a second copy for himself as bath time reading.
One last time, he examined the impulse buys. The kids at Plantation would like the Lemon and Grape Num-Nums. Dustin hadn’t taken them since they were gross, but imagining the handful of Plantation kids crawling all over him for candy made him happy. That was the last of what he put into the cart. The imaginary woman behind the counter asked if he’d had any trouble finding anything.
“No,” Dustin said politely to the empty space. It was time to load up the trunk.
He’d been at the store much longer than intended, goofing off in the aisles. The clock on the dashboard read 3:33. Zombies were waking up, wherever they were, stretching their legs and looking for someone to eat. He didn’t see anybody around, so it was all still good. Three was his lucky number since he was born on the third of December.
Time to go. He pushed the empty cart away from the trunk and watched it rattle away through the empty spaces. When it hit the wall, he climbed into the driver’s seat and ignored the seatbelt like he’d always done. If God wanted to take Dustin that badly, a strap around the chest wasn’t going to save him. Besides, minivans like these always had airbags.
Slipping two pieces of gum into his mouth, he started the engine and pulled out of the handicapped spot. He loathed workin
g in the garden, but now it wasn’t going to be such a royal pain in the ass. Just turn on the water and walk away. Play with the animals, sit in one of the big chairs in the living room, tinkle on the piano and play Chopsticks to entertain little Dougie. But Dustin wasn’t supposed to hang out with Dougie any more, not after he’d taught the kid some bad words. The kid had a speech impediment, so him saying fluck-face wasn’t that bad. You dirty flucker! Elena had been pissed. She knew enough English to translate that.
This time, as Dustin backtracked to the freeway, he drove over the skeleton. Crack! The ribcage was shattered when he checked in the rearview mirror. This car needed a dreamcatcher for luck. Elena would say that wasn’t a priority, and it was a safe bet that Bridger wouldn’t add it to the grocery list for squads going on raids.
It was weird the people who got left behind. Elena didn’t look like she had strong blood, just another fat Mexican woman in her fifties. Bridger was a surprise, too. He was one of those old white dudes who played chess in the park, killing the last of his time on the way to the grave. And Fisher was such a scrap of nothing, a hundred pounds at most and a few of them belonged to the gun at her waist. She was the kid who got the shit kicked out of her in junior high. Wesley and Dakota looked stronger, so they weren’t so surprising, and Tucker was shaped like a small but muscled fireplug. Tucker was a weenie name, but he wasn’t a weenie.
Dammit, Dustin had missed the turn to the freeway somewhere. He looked around for a sign. It was a residential area, with cars in some of the driveways like families were home for dinner. That was nice to picture.
He saw a kid.
Dustin stared at the boy ambling down the sidewalk. Ten years old or a bit older, he had brown hair getting too long and wore an empty backpack over one shoulder. What the hell? He looked like he was just walking home from school, nothing wrong with the world. Jerking over to the curb, Dustin rolled down the window. “Kid, you can’t be out here!”
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