The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  If he went out protesting on the sidewalk in front of Janie’s house, Zaley was going to curl up and die. Janie had sobbed at her first Welcome Mat meeting because her best friends from kindergarten were avoiding her in the hallways. A long-time member of the Games Club, she’d been kicked out unceremoniously. She would not let anyone touch her in comfort, afraid that her own tears were going to infect the rest of them. Only Micah insisted, and rubbed her shoulders. Janie had caught the virus at a piercing party over in Velgen. The guy doing them wasn’t licensed, his equipment not sterilized even though he said it was, and he left in his wake twelve new Sombra C infections. Having someone touch her anyway calmed her tears, Micah braiding her very long red hair through the lunch period.

  Zaley did not write down Janie’s name on the paper, but it didn’t matter since he already knew there were three kids with the virus at her school. The expulsion of the local Sombra C second grader was thrilling him. The kid spat at students for teasing him about being a zombie and was thrown out for assault with a deadly weapon. Also thrilling Dad was the start of a group for younger Shepherds in Penger. They were the boots on the ground, out in the community at skateboard parks and at school to collect zombie rumors from other kids, to be passed along to senior Shepherds. He punched his heart twice and flicked a peace sign over the third punch to indicate the signal that they were of the Cloudy Valley Shepherds. It wasn’t a peace sign but a two, since Cloudy Valley was the second oldest city in the county. Zaley performed it dully when bidden. Now she was a Shepherd, he said. His eye caught on the television screen, and he booed to see a culler being arrested for murder.

  She was a Shepherd. For once Mom’s over-protectiveness was a boon: when Dad suggested Zaley go out on a night’s pace, Mom shrieked. Zaley was a baby! She still wrote letters to Santa, for God’s sake! Zaley listened to the angry back and forth from where she hid in the hallway. She had made a list upon request of the presents she wanted for Christmas; it was only Mom who called it a letter to Santa.

  The gun on the encyclopedias was cold. It was indifferent to the temperature in the house, and the barrel was seductively smooth. She touched it when no one was looking. Dad had chucked the letter from the city beside it, reporting a complaint about the eyesore their house was with the boarded windows. That enraged him. Until every last zombie was dead, those boards were staying up for their protection! Goddamn liberal bleeding heart hippies.

  She’d begun to think that she should pick a day to use the gun. Impose her own limit. She chose the twelfth of December for her deathday, since that would look neat and tidy on her tombstone with the twelfth of October as her birthday. Yet the twelfth came and went because of Davey, who Zaley came across as he stood forlornly outside of Mr. Tran’s room at lunch with his beanbag. There was no club on Tuesdays but he didn’t get it, and she alerted the teacher in the special ed room to help him. He had been absent on Monday, and figured since he was back at school now, that therefore it must be Monday. They looked at a calendar in the special ed room until he pieced the information together. Tuesday was the day he stayed in that room for lunch, and he retreated to the corner with his sandwich, beanbag, and a fifty-piece jigsaw puzzle of a spaceship.

  “Thank you for finding him,” Mrs. White called as Zaley left, and that night she could not pick up the gun. If she hadn’t happened to go by, Davey would have waited for forty minutes at the door without an answer. That was sad. That kept her alive another day.

  The party was on the twenty-first, a Thursday evening. When not in a gray waste of depression, she was in agony about how to get there. Every year had been difficult, pretending to have a last-minute study group for a project or some such nonsense, but as the party fell on the last day of school, that excuse wouldn’t work. What was she to do? Honesty was out of the question. Mom would want to volunteer or else she’d sit outside in the car, come in to check every quarter of an hour, sit with Zaley at the table. She could not be unobtrusive and they had parent volunteers already. And Zaley just didn’t want Mom in her space.

  Zaley was drained so dry that her insides were hollow. Only school cheered her a little, but the lift never lasted. Not when the days came to an end and she had to leave. Her sixth period Home Ec with Ms. Anderson was a godsend. There was no project Zaley did not love wholeheartedly: how to make little pizzas, sewing and budgeting, shopping for deals, avoiding identity theft and spotting scammers, a visit to auto shop for a section on changing tires and checking oil with Mr. Goddart. She drank in every tidbit, even the throwaway comment about a magazine article Ms. Anderson had read recommending that people with persistent halitosis brush their tongue in addition to their teeth. It was so hard to walk out of that room when the bell rang, to tuck away everything she’d learned for some amorphous future that wasn’t truly on the horizon. She couldn’t leave home, not really. Not when Mom would fall apart without her. Zaley wasn’t allowed to grow up, and through each lesson (She had made a pizza by herself! She had changed a tire!) ran a thin but ever present vein of guilt.

  It was the twentieth when Mom asked at dinner what she wanted to do for fun to celebrate Thursday night, and what came out of her mouth was the truth. There was nothing left in her to lie. She was going to a party.

  “Oh, how fun! Where is it?” Mom said with a bright smile. They were at the table. Dad was eating in the living room so he could watch the television.

  Zaley shrugged. “It’s just a party. I’ll be home by eleven.”

  The smile sank to a frown, and soon steadied to a horizontal line. “Is it the Winter Gala at South Haven? You didn’t tell me that a boy asked you to go! Who is he? What are you going to wear? We can go shopping fast tomorrow afternoon for a gown-”

  “No, not the Winter Gala. A club at school is having a party. I don’t need to shop. Dress is casual.”

  It degenerated from there, Zaley sulky and reticent to supply details, Mom shrill and insistent that she had to know where the party was, Dad yelling at them to tone it down and a phone ringing. Zaley sought inside for a limit and found it. She was going to this party and it was none of Mom’s business. All of the pleading and threatening and tears would not pry those hours of freedom and celebration from her fingers. Running her hands over this internal wall, Zaley was reassured at its cold, sleek impenetrability. After the party, she might have the fortitude to pick up the gun. It was going to take greater fortitude than she had to get through winter vacation in this house.

  Mom forbade her to go, and was infuriated that Zaley would not agree to this. What was Mom going to do, give her a time-out? Restrain her? Lock her in her room? Take away her presents and tell her that Santa wasn’t real? Mom still wouldn’t cop to that, and it made Zaley crazy. Still bidden to put out cookies and milk for Santa and this wasn’t going to stop, it wasn’t ever going to stop, not unless she stopped it. Dad’s beloved world of anarchy and Mom’s beloved world of fantasy . . . there was no room for the actual world, the one that Zaley lived in. She thought of these worlds contracting even further to the bunker, and was tempted to pick up the gun and shoot herself at once.

  But the party was hers, a last gift to herself, and she was going. Dad yelled that he was on the phone, Mom yelled back about this mysterious party, and Zaley went to her room. The heaviness pulled at her, making the bed inviting, but desperation curdled underneath. Mom was demanding that she return to the living room to discuss this, her voice cracking down the hallway. Heavy feet followed, but they bypassed Zaley’s room in a rush. Dad roared that he had more important things to deal with in errands and getting over at Falcon’s. The Shepherds had renamed themselves after birds of prey, wild cats, bears, and other animals. Dad was oddly named Mother Hen, and more oddly, he liked it. Mom’s retort that nothing was more important than their daughter was met with a bellow that the Shepherds were having a Christmas party tomorrow evening and Mom should bake cookies for him to take.

  “So everyone’s having a party but me!” Mom screamed.

  Gettin
g out her cell phone, Zaley pressed on Micah’s name to call. “Will you come and get me?” Her voice was thick and broken with tears. She had not known that she was crying. One day, two days, three days, whatever the Cambornes could stand of her, she just needed out.

  Micah made some sense of the garbled explanation and was soon rapping on the door with cheery cries of hello! She had redone her hair for Christmas even though her family celebrated Solstice, some of the natural color ending halfway down and changing to red and green streaks. Without a pointed look about the tons of locks on the door, or one about the gun on the encyclopedias, she stuck a textbook under her arm and shook Mom’s hand. Dad had left. “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this! I hope I didn’t interrupt dinner. Zaley’s been so nice to help me with math for the last few weeks, I’m a wreck at it and there’s a huge test tomorrow. It’s sweet of her to offer to help me prepare tonight. Are you ready, Zaley?” She looked over brightly. It was impossible to tell that anything was a lie; Micah was embodying this tall tale.

  “Sure, let me grab my backpack,” Zaley said. Stupid! She should have brought it with her and just fled out the door to the V-6. Mom was flustered by this unannounced visit, and doing her best to be polite for company. She retreated to the kitchen as Zaley hurried down the hallway to get her things. Her backpack was on the bed, filled to bursting with a change of clothes and toiletries along with her school things.

  The door closed. Slinging the bag over her shoulder, Zaley turned to see Micah’s mouth dropping. Her eyes trailed over the room to take it all in, the star rugs, the toy corner, the desk with its cubbies and the pouf, and even though Micah was saving her, Zaley hissed, “Fuck you.” Because it was Micah, the only person that Zaley could talk to without a scintilla of politeness.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God,” Micah said, and her chest heaved with laughter. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Zaley plucked up her digital reader and cast about for anything else she had forgotten. “I tried to get rid of it, okay? I took the toys out to the garage ages ago and Mom brought them back in. What the hell would you have done?”

  “I would have taken the box back outside and set fire to it!” Micah exclaimed.

  “Goddammit, I forgot to buy something for the white elephant gift exchange.” Zaley had meant to do that on the way home from school at the dollar store by Dabey’s.

  “Are you kidding? You live in a white elephant paradise.” Micah snagged an old Princess Glam backpack from the closet and unzipped it. Bending over in the toy corner, she picked up Chloe Goes Pee-Pee on her pink plastic potty and slid them into the pocket. “There. Done. We’ve got loads of gift bags at home. You can wrap it up nice and proper.” Kicking a star rug, she broke out in incredulous giggles.

  They made it down the hallway and almost to the door, Zaley nauseous with tension that something would force her to remain here. Then Mom cried on cue, “Wait!” Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, she stopped behind them as Zaley undid the locks. “Micah, are your parents home?”

  “Of course!” Micah said smoothly. “They just aren’t any good at math, that’s why I always turn to Zaley. You can call if there’s a problem, let me give you a number.”

  Zaley jerked open the door. Cold air rushed in as Micah rattled off numbers comfortably and even leaned on the encyclopedias an inch from the gun. Darkness had fallen, the midnight blue of her car rendering it nearly invisible. Zaley was down the stairs before Micah had even turned around to follow. It was happening, this was actually happening. Tonight she would not be in that house but somewhere else, somewhere sane.

  Once in the car, Micah turned on the ignition. The speakers exploded with rock music, which gushed out her open window into the silent street. Zaley almost screamed at the assault of the decibel level, and she did scream when Micah hit the accelerator so hard that her car screeched. And Mom had still been closing the door, watching diligently for zombies while they got to the car! What if she had seen? There was no way she couldn’t have heard. Micah had done that on purpose and Zaley shouted, “You bitch!”

  Even with the music, she could hear Micah’s wild laughter. At the stop sign she didn’t even slow, jerking hard right and then left through the last beat of a yellow light. Zaley gripped the cushion even though she was belted in. What a joke that she was helping Micah with math! Micah was in A.P. Calculus and Zaley was hanging on for dear life in trigonometry. She glanced at the book that had been dropped in the back. It was their government text.

  A demand to slow down never left her lips since she had her limit coming up sometime after the party. Nothing mattered any longer. They were at Micah’s house in half the time it should have taken. Wreaths were hung on the windows of both floors. Lights ran along the roof and twined down the posts of the porch. White wire reindeer tipped their heads to nibble at the lawn.

  In the foyer was a lovely oak table strewn with evergreen and a Santa figurine with a sun behind his head. A red clock puddled about his feet, and the curl of the hard material was filled with gold and silver and blue chocolate balls. Micah took a handful of them. Zaley memorized all of this, the way she memorized her teachers’ words and style of dress. Even with the limit approaching, she could not help herself from doing it as a reflex. This was what normal people did, and she had to learn it.

  Dinner was a light and pleasant affair of spaghetti around the table, both parents scolding over the chocolate balls and Micah adding them to her helping of peas with an insouciant grin. A blue one rolled over the table to Zaley so that she could do the same, but she laughed and set it aside to not upset Terra and Faye. It was always awkward to call them by their first names as they insisted. What they had been told of the situation at home she did not know, nor did they make mention of it. Maybe they thought she was here to tutor after all, however improbable that was.

  It was really hard to not be jealous of Micah, both of who she was and where she came from. No blood and guts were splashed on the walls of this house, no chunks of tissue on the floor. The television was on, but only to play orchestral music. The talk was about colleges (without either mother crying at the prospect!) and Zaley was shocked to learn that Micah was struggling with going to college at all. “But you’re nearly valedictorian of the school! You could go anywhere!”

  “I don’t see a relationship between being nearly valedictorian and going to college,” Micah mused.

  “What else are you going to do?”

  Micah shrugged. Her mothers rushed to fill the silence with programs in Europe for traveling teens and young adults wanting to backpack or engage in community service. Zaley pressed for details, soon falling in love with the idea of two weeks in Greece to view monuments and museums in Athens, to look up from the ferry to the blue-domed churches of Santorini, to wander the little streets of Mykonos. There were longer tours of Europe, hopping from England to France to Spain to Monaco, then Italy and Austria and more. It was incredible to think of them letting their daughter go off on her own to do that, but Zaley was pretty sure they’d stopped passing the child’s menu over to Micah at restaurants ages ago.

  “You have to do something!” Terra said during their dessert of ice cream in darling little red and green goblets.

  “Maybe that language school in Italy,” Micah said with vague interest, and her parents looked relieved.

  After the meal, Zaley helped to load the dishwasher and then swept the floor even though Faye said it wasn’t necessary. Zaley did not want to be an imposition. And the room she was given to stay in upstairs! It was everything she wished her room was at home, a relaxing place with adult-sized furniture in which to crash. She’d vacuum and dust it before she left, take the sheets down to the laundry machine and offer to wash them.

  Although homework was due the next day, first she wrapped up Chloe Goes Pee-Pee from the bin in the den of holiday gift-wrap. White, red, and green tissue paper fluffed from the glittery Santa Claus gift bag, concealing what was inside. Zaley tied shut the handles with rib
bons in those same colors and curled them with scissors. It was a grand looking gift, implying that something equally grand was inside. And it was grand, at least to Zaley, expunging this part of her childhood. Her torment could be someone’s joke tomorrow night, and she’d never have to look at that stupid doll again. Mom would notice straightaway, she might already have noticed the absent face in the throng of toys while moving the tampon from the desk to the closet once more.

  Then she spread out on Micah’s bedroom floor to organize her tasks. Checking her phone, she saw missed texts. They were nothing worth a response (missing you, making cookies, when are you coming back, chocolate or vanilla icing, your friend was nice, this house is so quiet without you and Dad!) and Zaley kept her phone on silent, unable to cope even with the vibration. Micah had a beautiful black desk, no functional plywood construct but a real professional desk with a top that tilted like a drafting table for an architect. It was quiet as they worked, Micah swiveling between her books and her laptop, and Zaley turning the pages of her science text to glean the answers for a worksheet on equilibrium and extinction and deleterious alleles. Terra stopped in to ask if they wanted mugs of hot chocolate, and Zaley waited for Micah to say yes before she said yes, too. Then it was okay since Terra was making one for Micah.

  “What’s in the box?” Zaley inquired once the drinks were dropped off, since it was a natural pause in their work.

  Micah glanced at the big box in the corner of her room. “Uma is getting rid of a lot of our old holiday decorations. She said we could have this for decorating the center for the party. You can pick through it; I don’t care.”