Undead Ultra Box Set | Books 1-4

by Picott, Camille

  Hell, I’m even grateful my son has someone special in his life. I’m grateful ultrarunning has given me the strength to come all this way and share it with him.

  You can’t run an ultramarathon and not learn something about yourself. Throw in zombies, dehydration, crippling hunger, perverted thugs, a murdered dog, masochistic drug dealers, and a dead best friend . . . the learning doesn’t stop, no matter how much I wish it would.

  I’m a finisher. This is the singular most important thing running has taught me.

  I am flawed. I am as imperfect as they come. But I have grit inside me. I have the capacity to slog through the deepest, nastiest shit, on the trail and in life.

  This is what Frederico was trying to tell me right before he died. I might not be pretty when I arrive at the finish line, but I do arrive. Though it’s rarely easy, I find a way out of hard times. This is my strength, my inner beauty.

  I’ve finished what I set out to do. For Kyle, for Carter, and for Frederico, I have finished.

  I don’t know what the future holds for our small group. But for the first time in my life, I know I have the strength to face it head on.

  Acknowledgements

  IT IS WITH MUCH GRATITUDE that I thank my writing partners and beta readers: M.G. Alves Jr., who’s read more drafts than I can count; Arlene Ang, whose grammar and spelling expertise leave me humbled; Dinesh Pulandram, who isn’t afraid to tell me when something sucks; Lan Chan, whose candidness helps me weave a better story; Chris Picott, who, despite being my husband, is possibly my harshest critic; and Mike Albee, who helps me understand my audience and the book world. All of your advice and feedback is invaluable and eternally appreciated.

  I also want to thank the ultrarunners kind enough to share their stories with me: Lori Barekman, my running coach and physical therapist extraordinaire, who really did have to shave scar tissue off the bottom of her foot after running the Fat Dog 120; Karen Hanke, who really did survive the Bear 100 in a ten-hour snowstorm in nothing more than a pink running skirt; Skip Brand, who really did have his shoes duct-taped to his feet when he ran the Leadville 50; and Ted Neal, who shared the finer details of bonking. Without all of you, this story would be devoid of the gritty details that make ultrarunning so fascinating.

  I extend much gratitude and love to my running sisters: Lise Asimont, who talked me into running my very first race, a 10K around a mountain that scared the pants off me; and Jordan Costello, who gets up at the butt crack of dawn to run with me and endures countless texts and emails about ultrarunning and races.

  To those of you in AA who shared your experiences with me: thanks. You know who you are.

  Dorm Life

  Undead Ultra

  Book 2

  By

  Camille Picott

  www.camillepicott.com

  Copyright 2019 Camille Picott

  Prologue

  Outbreak

  JENNA

  “Friday pop quiz,” I announce to my boyfriend. “What should we do tonight? We’ve spent all our money on the van, so the movies are out. The CDC goons have a blockade on the north end of town, which means the beach is out. And there’s martial law curfew in effect, which means spray painting the back wall of Safeway is out.”

  Carter sprawls on a sofa in the dorm common room with a tablet, reading reviews of the latest craft beer releases. He sits up as I speak, pushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes.

  “Babe, has anyone ever told you you’re a buzzkill?”

  “My sisters.” I plop down in his lap. “And my mom.”

  “They’re idiots.” He kisses my neck, his bushy beard tickling my skin.

  “Let’s see, the last time I talked with Rachel and Lisa, they brought up the time I left Stephanie Ryzer’s party early and embarrassed the family. My mom—”

  “Forget them.” Carter silences me with a quick kiss on the lips. “I heard Beta Sigma Epsilon is throwing a blockade party.”

  “You mean, there’s a CDC blockade and the frat boys needed an excuse to throw a party.”

  “Pretty much. Wanna go?”

  “I never thought I’d hear you propose an outing to a frat party, but okay.” There aren’t many fraternities at Humboldt State University; the general populace frowns on anything resembling traditional establishment.

  “I may have overheard my lab partner saying one of his frat brothers spent last weekend driving to a bunch of different microbreweries getting kegs,” Carter says sheepishly.

  “Ah. Now the proposal makes more sense. Count me in, babe.”

  An hour and a half later, the two of us are snuggled up on a grungy sofa watching a Ping-Pong drinking contest. We each have a red plastic pint glass in hand. Beta Sigma Epsilon does not disappoint in its beer choices.

  “You look gorgeous, babe.” Carter smiles at me over the rim of his plastic cup.

  A normal girl would appreciate her boyfriend’s compliment. Not me. I can’t find a way to break the old habit of blowing off compliments, even if Carter is unlike any boy I’ve ever dated. To be precise, he’s a thousand times better than any boyfriend I’ve ever had, but even that isn’t enough to remake me.

  I ignore the comment and say, “Let me have another sip of that.” I take the pilsner out of Carter’s hand, downing a long draught. I close my eyes and savor the golden liquid, blocking out the disappointed crease between Carter’s eyes and wondering if I overdid it with the low-cut top. I wouldn’t have even bought it if I didn’t like the flowery pattern of the fabric so much.

  “Oh my God,” I say, lowering the cup. “Babe, we have to try and make something like this.” I give him a quick kiss, hoping he’ll see how into him I am.

  “I was thinking the same thing.” Carter’s frown disappears. He snugs his arm around me. “Let’s call it the Elite.”

  “Elite, as in, elite runner?”

  He nods with a grin. “Exactly. You’re picking up on ultrarunning jargon fast.”

  I pull out a small sketchpad, my pencil running in delicate lines across the blank page.

  Carter leans in, one arm around my shoulder as he watches me draw. I’ve never let anyone watch me draw before. My mom and sisters give me crap for wanting to study art, so I made it a point of keeping it private most of the time. With Carter, instead of feeling self-conscious, I enjoy sharing the process with him.

  I draw a medal with the word “elite” on a graduated diagonal across it. Around the medal, I draw beams that shoot out from all sides. Except they aren’t beams of light; they’re roads, complete with dotted yellow lines down the middle, but disguised to look like sunbeams.

  “That’s awesome, babe.”

  I smile in thanks, both pleased and embarrassed. “You’re just saying that because you’re drinking good beer.”

  “I’m saying it because my girlfriend is a kick-ass artist and I can’t wait to have her labels on our beer.”

  I snuggle deeper into the crook of his arm, the sketchbook balanced on my knee where we can both see it.

  “I might play around with the letters of ‘elite.’ I’m not sure I like the corners.” I take a sip from my beer. “You have to try this. It’s that lime IPA from Eureka.”

  “I didn’t see that one.” Carter takes the cup and drinks. “Damn, that’s good. I don’t love our IPA recipe. We need to tweak it.”

  “We did tweak it,” I say with a laugh. “We just haven’t had a chance to try it yet.”

  “I’m telling you, we should see about getting some lees from one of the wineries by my house back home. It will give us a richer flavor, plus it will be totally unique.”

  “We’re targeting ultrarunners,” I say. “Do you think they want beer made with wine lees?” Lees are the leftover sediment usually filtered out of wine before it’s bottled.

  Carter shrugs. “If it tastes good, why not?”

  “Okay, then we should try it. Do you have any winery contacts who can hook us up?”

  “Yeah. My friend Todd works in a tasting room.
His brother’s girlfriend works in the winemaking lab. I’m sure one of them can help us get lees.”

  “Nice. Find out when they can get us lees and we’ll take a road trip to pick it up.” I look at him out of the corner of my eye. “Maybe I can meet your mom if we’re down that way?”

  Carter hesitates before smiling at me through his beard. “Sure. She’d love that.”

  “You don’t want me to meet your mom,” I say flatly. His recalcitrance hurts. I don’t think his mom even knows about us.

  He shakes his head. “It’s not that, babe. You’re awesome. I know my mom will love you once she gets to know you. It’s just ... I think on some level she’ll feel like she’s losing me. Like she lost Dad.”

  “Having a girlfriend isn’t the same thing as your dad passing away.” I can’t believe he’d compare us to his father’s death.

  “I know that.” He looks away, a clear signal he wants to change the subject. “I’ll send a text to Todd and see if he can hook us up. I—”

  A howl rends the air. I turn in time to see a small girl in a minidress covered with Cheshire Cats body slam a much larger frat boy onto the Ping-Pong table. The people gathered around give a collective shout of surprise and fall back. Beer cups fall to the ground, splashing golden liquid across shoes. The girl in the Cheshire Cat dress leaps onto the pool table and pins the frat boy. Red lipstick is smeared all over her face, her mouth twisted in a snarl of determination. Her eyes are an eerie eggshell white. They roll discordantly in her face.

  “What the hell?” I mutter, tightening my grip on my beer cup as I take a sip. I will not be one of the losers who spills her drink. This beer is way too good to spill.

  “I’d say she’s pissed,” Carter murmurs. “What do you think—?”

  We both stop short as a cry of agony goes up from the boy sprawled on the Ping-Pong table. The crowd scatters, many of them tripping over one another in their haste to get away.

  That’s when I see it.

  The girl in the Cheshire Cat dress crouches on the Ping-Pong table like a predator, her face buried in the boy’s neck. She rears back, letting out a growl of pleasure. Gripped between her teeth are chunks of flesh and sinew. Blood—not lipstick—paints a red rictus around her mouth. Gouts of blood spurt out of the boy as he flounders and convulses.

  “Shit!” I leap to my feet. My beer falls to the ground, my concern for it going out the window in light of the current circumstances. Carter reaches for me and shoves me behind him.

  Several frat boys close in on the scene, each of them grabbing a different limb of the girl and trying to drag her off the boy. She doesn’t resist. Not at all. Instead, as soon as they grab her, she turns on them.

  She lunges straight at the boy who holds her wrist, sinking her teeth into his shoulder. From where I stand, I hear the sound of tearing fabric and flesh being gouged.

  I watched my fair share of horror movies in high school and junior high. I’ve seen countless scenes like this. Although, it’s one thing to see it in a movie and another thing to see it at a frat party. Even though I know what I’m seeing, I can’t form the word in my mind.

  Carter grabs my hand. I squawk in surprise as he swings us into the melee of fleeing students.

  It’s pure panic in all directions. Students yell and scream in fear and confusion. I cling to Carter as he drags us toward safety.

  We’re almost to the door when another girl charges into the crowd. Blood smears the front of her tie-dyed tank top. There’s no question this time if the red around her mouth is lipstick.

  The crowd surges. I’m thrown forward—right into the path of the raging girl. I scream as I’m ripped from Carter’s grasp and thrown to the ground.

  I’m going to die. The thought flashes through my mind as the crazed girl lunges for me. Her eyes are smooth, eggshell white. They roll in different directions in her sockets.

  Carter seizes a wad of the attacking girl’s tank top. He yanks back ruthlessly. I scramble to my feet. Fleeing students split in a stream around us, desperate to get outside.

  Tie-dyed girl swings her attention to Carter. She bares bloody teeth. Carter releases her and kicks out hard. She flies backward, knocking over a few other students in her wake.

  We don’t stop to see where she lands. We don’t try to help the kids she knocks over.

  Carter grabs my hand, and we run.

  1

  One Week Later

  JENNA

  “How long do you think she’ll sleep?” Reed asks, running his hands through his afro and puffing it up.

  “I don’t know,” Carter replies. “She’s never run two hundred miles before. Usually, after a hundred-miler, she spends a day or two in bed.”

  I stand with my roommates in the common area of the dorm suite. All of us cluster around the short loveseat where Carter’s mom sleeps. Every one of us is fixated on her, staring at her like she’s an exotic zoo animal.

  “Dude, that means she might sleep another two days,” Reed says.

  “I wish she’d gone to sleep somewhere else,” Eric grumbles. “It’s kind of hard to play Call of Duty with her on the couch.”

  “Dude, don’t be an asshole.” Lila flips her long black hair over one shoulder. “She just ran two hundred miles to find Carter. She deserves a little sleep.”

  “I wonder if she’ll let me write her story.” Johnny, never without a pen, chews on the plastic end.

  “We were just about the get the Scorpion Key!” Eric barely manages to tamp his shout down to a whisper-yell. His shirt has come untucked around his burgeoning potbelly.

  “Your dumb solar panels won’t last long enough for you to get the Scorpion Key,” Lila snaps.

  “Did you guys see her feet?” Johnny asks. “I could write an entire novel about her feet.”

  “Dude, why are you even looking at her feet?” Reed frowns in disgust.

  “They look like they’ve been run over by a lawn mower. There’s a story there.”

  I tune out the whispered conversation, taking in the near-catastrophe that is my boyfriend’s mom.

  Two pillows are shoved under her calves, effectively elevating her legs. Her shoulder-length brown hair is washed but uncombed; she’d been too tired to comb it after she staggered out of her bucket shower last night. Gray roots show close to her scalp. Her exposed arms are covered with cuts, scratches, bruises, and poison oak.

  There’s also a bullet wound. The stitches look like they were administered by a blind person, the threading uneven and crooked.

  Carter has been fretting about the wound since he found out about it. He hovers near her arm, staring down at the dirty, puckered red skin and scabs encrusting the black thread. He wants to dump disinfectant all over it, but we don’t have any.

  Her feet, the current topic of conversation, are bare. There are more blisters than I can count. Some have been lanced and sealed with Super Glue. Others are big lumps of clear fluid, others dark disks of blood. A few of her toenails are missing. The soles of her feet are cracked and scabbed. At some point during her two-hundred-mile trek, she rolled an ankle. It’s swollen to twice its normal size.

  All in all, my boyfriend’s mom looks like hell.

  I’ve heard so much about this woman, but I don’t know what to make of her. It was obvious to me early in our relationship that Carter and his mom are close, even if she sounds a bit weird. I can’t fathom getting along or even liking a parental figure, but I want her to like me.

  “She’s lost weight since I saw her last,” Carter says in a low voice while Eric and Lila argue about the merits of the solar panels stolen off the university campus streetlights to power the Xbox.

  “She just traveled two hundred miles on foot in three and a half days,” I remind him. That’s a crash diet for sure. If the world hadn’t turned upside down, Carter’s mom could slap a fancy name on it and market it as the new weight loss fad. Hell, my mom and older sister would be the first to sign up. Half of Southern California follows diet craz
es the way beagles follow the scent of dead animals.

  I try not to think about my family in Los Angeles. It’s been a few days since cell phone service went out. I imagine them safe in our family cabin at Big Bear Lake. The last I spoke to them, that’s where they’d been headed.

  “I have to raid some of the other dorm rooms and find first aid supplies.”

  I must not be hearing well with all the whispered arguing around me. I turn to Carter with a frown. “What?”

  “I have to raid some of the other dorm rooms and find first aid supplies for her. My mom needs calamine lotion. And some disinfectant for her blisters and cuts and the bullet wound. An Ace bandage for her ankle would be good, too.”

  Okay, maybe I did hear him correctly. “We don’t know which of the rooms are empty,” I say, returning the argument I’ve heard every time I pitch the idea of raiding other rooms for supplies. None of my companions, not even Carter, has felt a compelling need to secure the rest of our building or organize supplies.

  “We’ll have to use the attack and stack method to draw them out,” Carter replies. “Like we did in this room.”

  “Sure, okay.” I guess if Carter’s mom is what it takes to get him and everyone else mobilized, I can’t complain.

  “Cannabis oil can help with the poison oak,” Lila pipes up from the far side of the couch. Her dark eyes brighten at the challenge of creating yet another marijuana recipe for healing. “I’ll see if I can make a salve.”

  Eric snorts. “You think pot cures everything.”

  “Mom, my dick won’t go down,” Reed says in a high-pitched voice. “Can I have some marijuana lube?”

  Lila plants her hands on her hips, almond eyes narrowing at Reed and Eric. “Laugh now, assholes. When I’m living in a mansion, you losers will still be drooling over Call of Duty and working deadbeat jobs at the local mini-mart.”