The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  The obituary picture of Carsen was from last year, a school shot in which he was full of joy. Carsen’s death wouldn’t mean anything to Mamma, and neither would Austin’s. He didn’t know it was possible to hurt this badly. He could fake a girlfriend to keep Mamma loving him, but he could not fake being free of Sombra C.

  This just wasn’t a day he could deal with class. Micah went off to school without him, and her mothers drove away to work. The laptop played the latest news, the burn pile in Ohio made of Sombra C corpses, panicked people in Miller, Indiana escaping Shepherds, an illegal confinement point disbanded in upstate New York. Austin burned in the pile and ran frantically for a car, he stepped out of that building and blinked in the sun. Every story seared itself in his mind’s eye. The new president’s voice rang out in an address, ordering people to lay down their guns and build this country back up rather than tear it apart. Bills were going through Congress to cease stamping, to halt the sales of guns and ammunition, and a protestor screamed second Amendment during the speech.

  The reporters played an interview from the police station at the now fully walled town of Mirror Lake. Armed to the hilt, the stamped cop said, “Let them come. Let them try. We’re waiting. You hear that, motherfuckers? We’re waiting. This is our harbor, and you’re not going to take it away.”

  Anticipating Shepherd attempts to block off supplies, they had stockpiled enough water and food and medication to last a long time. Solar power and seeds and farm animals, too! Their old dance hall had been converted into a barn for chickens and pigs to be raised, even some cattle. Mirror Lake meant business. It was like they’d given up hope of things ever returning to normal.

  Austin missed normal more than he could express. This time a year ago, he had kissed his mamma goodbye and gone off to school. He handed in his homework, more or less done, more or less correct, messed around with his friends, and scooped ice cream at work. Nothing of special importance was going on in the news, certainly nothing that shoved itself in his face and refused to leave. He wanted that freedom back, to go about his life relatively untroubled. He hadn’t known what he had until it was gone.

  The world that appeared so solid was actually made of glass. He would feel so much safer at home with Mamma quiet as her coffee brewed, the rattle in the pipes from the sink. How could she think he had done this on purpose? Where was her rage against the culler? She only saw the dirtiness of Sombra C. Not wanting to lay in bed with it, Austin got up.

  His sadness shifted to anger over a bowl of cereal. The party had been the worst night of his life, the worst night of all of their lives, and he should have been able to go home to his mother, to the comfort of his bedroom. He wondered about the fight that sundered his aunt and grandmother from his life long ago. No one survived his mother’s wrath, not even her own son.

  But he’d send her a present, even so. It was her birthday. If he didn’t acknowledge it, she would think he didn’t care. He cared so much that he’d spend every last dollar in his bank account. If she knew how much she was loved, she wouldn’t want him put down like a rabid animal. He was so proud of his mother. She’d made bad choices, dropping out of school, drinking and drugging and sleeping around, and one night in a jail cell while strung-out and pregnant she had a vision of Jesus crying for her. He held out a hand and she took it. Together they patched her back together from the ground floor up. Earned her GED, dried out and cleaned up, got good jobs and treated her body like the temple it was. She taught her fatherless son to say please and thank you, patched up his scrapes and slapped him for being sassy, got teary on his sixteenth birthday that she couldn’t buy him a car. That made her feel like a failure. But Mamma was a success, living proof that you weren’t ever so far down a bad path that you couldn’t do a U-turn and head back.

  Leaving the news on in one window of the laptop, Austin opened another and surfed rush deliveries of bouquets from the local florist. Some came with boxes of chocolate or fancy vases, necklaces, teddy bears with personalized messages on their T-shirts. Two came with wine. He wouldn’t get those. Or maybe he could get a basket. There was a fruit and cracker basket for ninety dollars, and a slightly less expensive exotic orchid garden. A spa basket with lotions and brushes and bath oil beads; a basket packed with cookies and chocolate-dipped strawberries; a combination bouquet of roses, basket of goodies, a cake and an elegant card. This was going to take him all day, going through the choices on the screen. Except that it couldn’t. He wanted it to arrive by tomorrow, meaning his order had to be in by noon so he couldn’t waffle on this. Forwarding the page to Micah, he asked which one she would want for a present. Her response was a picture of her extended middle finger with HAPPY B-DAY written in ink down it, which he could forward for free to his mother.

  I was serious, Austin chided.

  So was I, Micah wrote. Why are you doing this?

  It’s her birthday. I want her to be happy.

  Buy her all of them, Austin. Buy her a fucking palace. It won’t make a difference. And if my moms had kicked me out for getting Sombra C, I’d never have anything to do with them again. I wouldn’t even think about them. We’d be done.

  There was a commotion going on in the other window, which he brought back to the forefront. An evacuation was underway in Tanner, Nevada, and the reporter held up a makeshift ticker tape warning people not to go east to the green town of Colfax since Shepherds were blocking the road.

  A call came in from an old man, saying querulously that he’d lived in Tanner for seventy-five years and wasn’t turning tail now. He had locked his doors and kept a dog for protection. It wasn’t like he could drive off anyway, being legally blind. So he’d informed the cops and one was knocking on the door right now. That was fast! The reporter almost screamed at him to check out the window first. He blew her off and the thumps of his feet traveled through the line. Austin watched, feeling frantic, as a deadbolt was undone and a dog yapped. Then there was a boom, Austin jumping in his chair at the table, and silence.

  “It’s impossible,” one reporter said quietly as the other severed the call. “Just impossible to catch all of these Shepherds. Police tell me these are the hardest cases. The perpetrators are often strangers. They can shoot from a distance and be gone seconds after the victim falls. They leave little to no evidence. They adhere to a code of silence. Many of them have no criminal records. For every one caught, there are ten more roaming free and new ones popping up. We are descending into lawlessness.”

  That old man whose voice Austin had just heard was dead. His brain could not accept that. As he sat here, a body was going cold. What was going to happen to the dog? The next caller was a woman from New Mexico. “I just wanted to know if you think I should send my kids to school. We’re green, but we’ve got a yellow to our east and a red only twenty miles to the south. Do you guys have kids? What do you do?”

  The female reporter shook her head, not having children, and the male answered reluctantly, “I withdrew my kids from school weeks ago. We’re yellow, and just barely that. But I don’t want to take the chance. Yellows go red everyday. Greens go red. It may seem like an overreaction. Maybe it is. My wife thinks so. My parents think I’m crazy. I withdrew them both even though only one is infected. The non-infected one was getting bullied simply for having us as family. A healthy kid getting death threats, that’s how overboard it’s gone. You have to decide for yourself what risk is acceptable.”

  “And you, Cindy?” the caller asked the female reporter.

  With the same reluctance, Cindy said, “If I had kids, I’d be in my car driving for Mirror Lake, or any of the other harbors going up throughout the nation.”

  The man hastened to add, “We don’t want to incite panic, yet the level of violence we’re seeing has surpassed extreme. There obviously isn’t enough room within the walled towns, and many people don’t have the resources to go. So be smart. If no one knows you’re infected, cover up that stamp with cosmetics despite what anyone says. If they do know, be care
ful. Consider homeschooling. Don’t assume the cops are on your side. Keep food and water to last a few days in your house, and your gas tank should always, always be full. Keep a bag packed, too. I’ve got one at home and one in my car each with some water, granola bars, cash, a flashlight, extra clothes, matches, things like that. Have an emergency plan for your family. Know every road leading out of your city. Contact family or friends in other cities and find out if they’ll let you stay in a crisis.”

  Know every road. Austin thought about that. Ketterman was the main road running from east to west the length of Cloudy Valley. It pierced through the exact middle of the city, connecting it to upper Penger on the west and lower Blue Hill on the east. Caravel was the road going north from Ketterman and up through the woods to Salmon Park. Going south, one drove on Rayne and connected to the freeway. Those were the big roads. Smaller ones wound through the neighborhoods to east and west. And the Gray King Nature Path, Austin knew that from a field trip. Popular with bicyclists and runners, it went north out of Cloudy Valley. The peninsula had a lot of wild space, redwood forests and oak woodlands and more. Trails weaved all through them like snakes, leading west out to coastal communities, some just going in big circles, one heading north to Charbot. Austin had had to label some of them for the field trip assignment.

  He opened a third window to inspect Cloudy Valley closely. Blue Hill and Cloudy Valley butted up together at American and San Simeon. One smaller street could be used to reach Penger. That was Geneva, located in a residential neighborhood. Elania lived over there, with Zaley not far away. The Camborne home were closest to Caravel.

  It didn’t seem like enough roads. He had never looked at a map of his city this way, for escape routes. Sombra C News caught his attention once more, an attack in Montana that ended up in a shoot-out between cullers and cops. Following it was a story about a person with untreated Sombra C going on a rampage in Virginia and still at-large.

  His phone buzzed. Elania had sent out a mass text reporting that she’d received a call from Pewter’s dean of students the evening before. Her visit had caused a campus-wide tizzy in its wake and the dean wanted Elania to resubmit her application. Austin sent back a stream of thumbs-ups. He loved that calm, collected Elania had told them off.

  Keeping packed bags for emergencies, that was an idea. Micah’s mothers had old backpacks in their garage and he could ask for one . . . The arrival of the mail startled him, the clatter-clack of the lid going down, followed by a thump. Not Shepherds. His heart pounded regardless and the yap of that old man’s little dog echoed in his ears. It was just the mail. Pushing back his chair quietly, he slunk along the hallway to the front door. The window along the side was stained glass, but one of the sections was clear enough to look outside and see hazy images.

  No one was there. He turned the knob and cracked the door to confirm it, thinking this house wasn’t safe. All someone had to do was break the glass and reach in to the lock, like Micah had done to get inside the office in Blue Hill. Scarves on the coat hooks, he pulled one down and wrapped it around his neck. Stepping swiftly onto the porch, he withdrew the mail from the box, picked up the package below, and brought it all inside. The street was silent.

  He locked the door and returned to the kitchen. Even now, a red light could be trained on his forehead like in the movies. Setting the scarf on the table, he drew the curtains shut and picked through the stack of letters and catalogues. To not be able to look over the lawn in the backyard was depressing. It was also depressing to eat lunch in the filing room two days a week, but the principal emphasized it was for their own safety. Or else they could eat in their cars. Austin should do that, head out to the V-6 with Micah and Elania, and whoever else wanted to jam inside.

  Three of the letters belonged to the neighbors, which happened at least twice a week. It was like the new postal hires looked at the street name and nothing more, not the house numbers or the names. Terra or Faye would have to take them over. He certainly wasn’t going to do it. The box was for Micah from some place called Dirty Kisses. He typed a message into his cell phone. What’s Dirty Kisses?

  Gourmet chocolate covered pretzels and other candy. Have some.

  That sounded good. After slitting the tape and opening the lid to a dildo, he replied: Asshole. Now she owed him some real chocolate covered pretzels. What did the company make of Micah’s frequent orders for dildos? They must think she had some kind of sex addiction.

  He returned to investigating the mail. Wedged between the fruity catalogue with crystal pyramids and peacock feathers on the cover and the clothing catalogue beneath it was a sight that made his heart stop beating. It was the letter he had sent to Mamma three days ago, with the pink rose card. He had taken pains to write her name and address neatly, not in his usual scrawl. In his mother’s handwriting and with the ink of her favorite blue pen, she’d written ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN.

  Numbly, he snapped a picture of the envelope and sent it to Micah. This was like having his roots severed, leaving him with no steady ground beneath his feet. Anything could tip him over: a stray wind, a push, and nothing would pull him back up to the sky. He pressed ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN to his forehead, to touch something that Mamma had touched.

  Put down. He should be put down. No one wanted him.

  What did you do with something that had no worth? You threw it out and bought another. She could have another son to replace him, a better one. After all, she was only thirty-seven tomorrow. It wasn’t too late for Mamma to birth an improvement. The new kid would be straight and healthy and everything she wanted. Mom would go from room to room in the apartment to yank out evidence of her other, lesser son. Pictures from albums, art projects he’d made as a child, everything into a trash bag and the trash bag to the dumpster and gone to the landfill to be buried with the rest of the junk.

  Fuck her, Austin, Micah wrote. When he did not respond, a second text came in. I’ll come home at lunchtime.

  There was no floor beneath him. He was gone, like his grandmother and aunt, like the guys Mamma fell in love with and dropped like hot potatoes for one reason or another. But he was her son, and he did not accept this. Sliding the laptop closer, he reopened the page of bouquets and gift baskets. Some caught his eye more than others, the merry fireworks explosion of blue iris and Stargazer lilies, the chaotic joy of the seven dozen alstroemeria stems, the bush of daisies pressed tightly together. He filtered the ones he liked most to a separate page for closer examination.

  I’m coming home now, Micah wrote. He loved her yet wished it were Blayre hurrying over in worry. Austin wasn’t good enough for that cheerful slob, for the man in the Santa hat, for his own mother.

  The Sombra C was so low in his blood that it was barely detectable. The stamp read 1%, but the reality was a tiny fraction of that. No one should be afraid of him. The specialist could have told Mamma that herself, had she stayed on the phone long enough to listen. But it was an imperfection, and she couldn’t abide those. A homosexual son had also been taken as her personal imperfection, so she had slapped him, obliquely threatened them with his uncles, and pushed girls on him ever since. A son with Sombra C was just as bad, people wondering how he got it (Gay sex? Drugs? A tattoo?) and thinking badly of her as his mother.

  Even if he won her over with this bouquet, Micah was right that he’d lose her again with his homosexuality in time. If she took him back, it had to be for all of him. And he’d keep trying until she got tired of saying no. Scrolling down the page of his favorites, he clicked on the small image of two dozen roses in five colors. Beside it was a lovable brown teddy bear. On its blue T-shirt, it read HAPPY BIRTHDAY and on the line beneath YOUR MESSAGE HERE.

  Why do you like me? He wrote to Micah while thinking of what to say on the teddy bear’s T-shirt. Why does anyone?

  Because you’re passionate. You hold onto me when I don’t deserve it. You hold onto yourself when someone like Dale attacks. You could have hidden in that cabinet and saved yourself, but you put Zaley in t
here instead. I’ll pick up some burgers.

  The bouquet and bear cost fifty dollars. He plucked his card from his wallet and filled out the form. Every birthday, every Mother’s Day, every Christmas, he was going to make sure that she could not eliminate him from her mind and her life. Even if she didn’t answer, he was sending something. So she knew that he was still here, an imperfect son but a loving one, reaching out as his whole self yet not groveling for her to reach back. She was loved, and she should know.

  He filled out his mother’s work address at the temp agency and selected between twelve and one as the best time. It would be her lunch break, the flowers and bear set up on her desk for those in the waiting room to see until she returned. With equal parts love and nastiness, he filled in the message to be printed on the bear’s T-shirt. Happy Birthday! From your gay zombie son. He pressed send.

  Set Five

  Zaley

  Fifteen minutes into her first appointment on Monday afternoon, she was madly in love with the physical therapist. Daniel Pacheco was in his late twenties, slim and dark-haired and new to the work, not attractive so much as charismatic. When Mom kept talking over Zaley during the initial examination in the tiny office, Daniel reiterated each time with a smile, “Thank you! Now let me get Zaley’s perspective.”

  That majorly pissed off her mother, being treated like a separate being. What pissed her off even more was Zaley demanding to go to the PT’s gym alone. An intelligent young woman she was going to be, dammit, and an intelligent young woman was an independent one. Mom protested, wanting to help with the exercises at home so she should see them now in the gym. Daniel said that he was confident Zaley could handle them without assistance. Tight-lipped, Mom retreated to the waiting room. In triumph and guilt, Zaley followed Daniel to the gym, adoring to be treated like she was capable of managing her own life.