The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  In time, the Sombra C Relief cans were taken into the store. Elania assumed that indicated it was near closing. There were only three cars belonging to customers in the lot, and the strip along the back for employees was gap-toothed. An intercom muttered from the store, but they were too far away to hear. Carts were gathered up from the corrals in the parking lot. Fifteen minutes after that, an employee ushered the owner of the last customer car in the lot out the sliding doors and locked them. The front lights dimmed.

  “We should have asked Corbin how late the evening shift runs,” Micah said.

  “I think he once told me that it went to eleven,” Elania said. “I’m not sure he was allowed to work that late as a minor.”

  Inside, employees counted money at registers and swept the floor. An employee door opened beside the cart corral and a man hauled out trash bags for the dumpster. Elania’s eyes kept traveling back to the green bin, and she wished that she could see inside. Sweatpants, jackets, socks, sneakers for Micah, gloves . . .

  Perhaps an hour after the store closed, two people left the side door and got into cars. Now there were five left in the employee line. Elania thought that they should wait until everyone was gone, but Micah stood. “Come on. It’s perfectly legal for anyone to be in this lot looking at that bin.”

  They cut across the lot. The employees were done at the registers, and the person sweeping was not in view. With every step, Elania begged please don’t look out, please don’t look out, until they were at the bin. It was right under a light. Undoing the latch, Micah swung the door open. There was a small pile of clothes at the bottom.

  A metallic snap rang out. The laughter of a man and woman came into the lot. Elania closed the door and moved with Micah to the back of the bin. The man said, “It was so disgusting!”

  “What exactly happened? I didn’t get the whole story,” the woman replied.

  “Some girl was eating out of the olive bar. Like, she was nibbling on the different kinds and dropping what she didn’t like half-eaten back into the tubs.”

  “No!”

  “So Krista went over to stop her and the chick copped this total attitude-”

  “Goddammit, you know that was Zaley,” Micah whispered. Brisk footsteps carried through the lot. Elania hoped that these employees weren’t dropping more bags off in the dumpster. It was hard not to peek around the side, but she resisted. Under the bright light, her face wouldn’t be hard to miss.

  Now the woman was speaking. “-you could hear him bitching from every point in Produce! Where are the apples? Why don’t you have apples? What kind of a store doesn’t have apples? Come on, go in back and get me some apples! The wife is making a pie.”

  “The crazies were out in force today.”

  The voices were growing fainter. Car doors opened and voices cheerily called, “Bye, Dave!” “Bye, Gina!” An engine sputtered and caught, followed by a second. Elania looked around moments later. The cars turned past the giant salmon and onto the road.

  “This is really making me nervous,” Elania whispered.

  “I’ll grab whatever’s in the dumpster, and you collect the clothes in there,” Micah said. “It was just an armload. The lights in the lot will probably be on a little while longer, so we can pick through this in the bushes where we were before.”

  Elania missed that lovely fire back at the house. Her abdomen tweaked. Willing it to calm down, she rounded the bin and opened the door. Micah high-tailed it over to the dumpster.

  Under the clothes was a crumpled paper bag. Within were children’s shoes. Elania stuffed the clothes into the bag and swung the door shut. Listening for sounds from the store, she heard nothing but Micah at the dumpster. The stamp was burning in Elania’s neck. She walked past the store with her eyes steady on the bushes. The shoes in the bag had been jumbled, but the ones on top were far too small for Micah.

  Elania was no one, nothing of interest, nothing to see. No one was visible in the store, nor was anyone coming out of the employee door. She stepped up onto the curb and slid into the bushes. A shaft of light pierced through a meter away, which was what she could use to sort the clothes. Looking back to the parking lot, she spotted Micah crossing the empty spaces with two bags over her shoulder.

  When Micah made it to the curb, Elania dumped out the bag. There were five children’s T-shirts. Those they didn’t need . . . she shook herself. That was what she’d use for pads. These were good. What they didn’t have a use for were the three battered pairs of sneakers meant for toddlers, but among them was a pair of women’s sneakers. They were heavily stained and completely flat, thin-soled and their laces frayed. Garbage shoes, not donation shoes.

  A ripped pair of children’s jeans. Four T-shirts with stains in the armpits and straggling hems, two others that were still in good condition. Seven socks. There was an absolutely hideous jacket, a loud red-and-white print of some stiff material and with wooden buttons. Elania poked in curiosity at a blackened twist. It was a banana peel.

  Micah was pawing through the bags. “Smells like dinner.”

  “Shoes,” Elania said, passing over the sneakers. “Size eight. They’re pretty trashed though. What size do you wear?”

  “Eight-and-a-half.” Micah kicked off the clogs and loosened the laces of the sneakers to try them on. “They can’t be as bad as these clogs. Fine for walking around school between classes; not fine for anything else.”

  The employee door opened. They quieted until the car was out of the lot. Micah stood up and inspected the shoes on her feet. “Yikes, these have barely any soles at all.”

  “How do they feel otherwise?”

  “A little tight, but they’ve been stretched out some. I don’t think they’ll give me blisters. Oh well, getting to Charbot is going to be hell no matter what I’m wearing.”

  Turning over the kids’ T-shirts and debating how to make them into pads, Elania asked, “What did you see in the dumpster?”

  Micah wriggled her feet around. “There wasn’t much, but it was what Corbin said. Produce, that’s one bag, so we can eat like rabbits.”

  Elania just wanted to eat. The chips and breakfast bars hadn’t filled her for long. They sorted through the bags to make a meal, held still for the last employees leaving for home, and ate chicken and makeshift salads in the moonlight filtering through the trees. The lights in the parking lot were off, all except for the one above the Waste Less donation bin. The temperature was dropping. Elania put on the ugly jacket and buttoned it up.

  “We’re styling,” Micah said, swathed in more T-shirts.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Elania asked as Micah hummed the Zaley shot a Shepherd song. “I don’t mean it rudely, but are you enjoying this on some level?”

  Micah hesitated. “No. But I’m not hating it either.”

  “Are you worried about your family?”

  Silence stretched out between them. It was a dumb question. Then Micah said, “Not really? They don’t have any cause to harass my moms, once they figure out my moms don’t know where I am. Their beef is with my stamp and me.”

  Elania wished that she could set aside concern like that. “I’m freaking out about what they’re saying to my parents and my brothers, threatening them, frightening them. My family had to have panicked to find a dead man in the backyard, my clothes and the food gone, schoolbooks all over the foyer.”

  “They’ll know that you escaped. If Shepherds are harassing your family, it’s because they don’t have you in their confinement point. That tells your parents that you’re alive. So does your name in the paper.”

  They made uncomfortable beds on the ground and Elania tore up the most ragged shirt. These wouldn’t be very nice pads and they definitely weren’t sanitary. Whoever donated these clothes hadn’t washed them first.

  She dreamed about a confinement point that night, fences reaching up to the stars, people wild with Sombra C growling in the darkness behind her. They had fangs and claws. She jerked when a hand closed over her sho
ulder, but it was only Micah in the dim light of early morning. It was time to start back for the house, and the more ground they covered this early, the fewer people would be around to observe them.

  They retraced their steps from yesterday up and down the slopes. The new sneakers were nearly as bad as the clogs. Within an hour, Micah stopped to sit on a boulder and rub her legs. “I can’t. I’m going to give myself plantar fasciitis or pull a muscle going up and down hills and ravines in these. I need flat ground.”

  “That is one thing we don’t have,” Elania said.

  “The west side is a little flatter, but this is going to cripple me before we’re anywhere near it, and there are too many twigs and rocks for me to do it in socks.” Micah looked ahead to the next slope. “I’m going to cut through the city.”

  “We can’t.”

  “You don’t have to, but I do. I can’t walk on like this. If we cut through the northwest corner of town and come out in the woods on the other side-”

  “We’re in a net, Micah!”

  “Then they can fucking shoot me.” Micah got up with a wince and crept gingerly down the slope to the road. Against her better judgment, Elania followed. It was still so early, and she told herself that had to make it safer.

  The morning was cold and heavy with mist, which choked visibility and reduced someone walking a dog across one residential street into a dim blob. This was the weather to walk hunched into a jacket, with hands shoved into pockets from the chill. Elania didn’t worry so much about braces in these quiet rows of homes. Hopefully all of the Shepherds were still in bed, or bleary-eyed over coffee and newspapers. Not looking out the window in suspicion to two girls going by. Micah hobbled along, the sneakers better suited to sidewalks but her muscles still aggravated.

  Criss-crossing south and west on the roads should eventually return them to the woods. They hiked through a park of looming trees shrouded in white, the scene striking Elania as funereal. Beyond the park were blobs and voices. It was two men at a delivery van parked in the road by a restaurant. One man was apologizing for not making it the afternoon before, and the other was saying, “No, no! You made it, that’s all I care about. Let’s get these boxes to the freezer.” They pulled a rattling ramp down to the concrete. Neither took notice of the girls.

  The only stores open in this commercial area were those serving coffee, and gas stations. Empty parking lots and empty roads, swathes of mist making fuzzy the glow of stoplights, Elania watched everything around them. They crossed a street. Past plants and decorative rocks on a tiny lawn was a toy store, an arts-and-crafts store, a furniture store, and she sighed in frustration to see a shoe store. A display of sneakers was there in the window. “If only.”

  “Benders,” Micah said. They paused to look in at what was so close yet so unattainable. “Shalom loves those for work-outs.”

  “And Sidewinders.” Elania was wearing a pair of those. They were solid, well-made sneakers.

  As Elania turned to push on, Micah said, “Walk to the end of this block and go west for two more, will you? Wait for me somewhere safe.” She picked up a big rock and grunted at the weight.

  “Micah, you’re not going to-”

  “If I don’t get better shoes, they won’t have to shoot me because I’m going to do it first with Zaley’s gun. I’m getting in, going to the back, and picking out sneakers for myself. Go. I’ll wait until you’re out of view.”

  Oh God. Elania walked away. The sidewalk bent down to a driveway, which led to a lot full of empty spaces for shoppers, and dipped back up for another row of closed stores. She tried to modify her pace to one that was rapid but not suspiciously so. What pace was that anyway? Like never before, she was acutely aware of being black and in the vicinity of a crime.

  It wasn’t possible that this was happening. She was a college-bound senior with her heart set on a career in journalism, but her name was in the local paper for all the wrong reasons. The stores ended and she jammed her finger into the button to cross the street. Praying for Micah to wait a little longer, she debated jaywalking but the light changed. Once on the opposite sidewalk, she turned west past a grungy hotel. Beyond was an equally grungy apartment complex, paint peeling off the walls to show a gray underbelly.

  Elania shrank into her ugly jacket and crossed two separate entrances to the apartment complex. A faint crash resounded in the distance. She wanted to go home, which felt safe even if it wasn’t. Her room stood out starkly in her mind, the duvet pulled up to the pillow, the lamp crooked over her desk. The boys’ room was a disaster area, but her room was her sanctuary and she kept it tidy. If they came in and left a mess on her floor, they got in trouble. Just as clear as her room in her mind’s eye was the voice of her mother in her ears, shouting, “No, boys! If you want to play in a nice room, then clean your playroom! Any toy you leave in Lani’s room becomes her property.” They hadn’t liked that one bit after losing their portable toy garage to a big sister who didn’t even do the cars the dignity of playing with them.

  She was going too fast. Elania slowed and thought of the bullet to her thigh that had changed her life. That was why she was here rather than in her room at home. Just a little to the side and she would have been untouched. Of course, just a little to the other side would have split her femoral artery and caused her to bleed to death there in the community center parking lot.

  Sirens. She crossed the street to more residences, modest homes with lights on inside. A huge black dog barked furiously at her, banging itself on a fence and gate in a driveway. Her pace picked up as the gate clanged.

  This had been a bad idea, walking directly into the lion’s den. An old car rumbled down a driveway and she slowed for the man to pull out in the street. She kept her face down, hoping the man wasn’t up-to-date on the faces of the zombies loose in the community. The car paused and Elania slowed further. She risked a peek. The man was adjusting the dials of his radio. There was no way to go around in that narrow driveway, so it was either pass in the street or stand there.

  The car pulled out. At the end of the block was a church. Here she was supposed to wait. Checking over her shoulder for Micah anxiously, and distressed that the mist was not as impenetrable as before, she walked into the parking lot. Without cars or dumpsters, the only place to hide was behind the church itself. No, there was a marquee on the lawn, reading: Jesus died for your sins. What have YOU done lately for Him?

  She ducked behind it, visible to anyone looking out a window of the church. The sirens were getting louder. If Micah didn’t appear, how long should Elania wait?

  A brave person would have gone back for a friend, been loyal to the end. Elania was humbled to know that she was not that brave. Cars traveled past on the road, early commuters off to work, and that big dog was barking again and making the gate clang. How much farther could it be to the woods? She guessed that the city was six to eight miles from east end to west end if one went straight across it using the roads. They hadn’t covered much ground this morning in the hills, and only twenty minutes had passed since they entered the city. How far could they have gone in twenty or so minutes? A mile and a half, added to the miniscule amount in the hills. That was nothing.

  It was time to go. She couldn’t stay here.

  Stepping out from behind the marquee, she looked back to a figure fleeing down the sidewalk. Her spirits soared to hear the heavy breathing of a runner, the mist slowly relinquishing Micah’s shape. A shoebox was tucked under her left arm, and her feet were bare.

  “Run,” Micah said, and Elania ran.

  With the backpack heavy on her shoulders, her muscles sore from the walk yesterday and her abdomen muttering darkly, she willed herself to keep going. They jumped into the road and dashed across it. Elania would run until the city spat her out into the woods, and then she’d sink down and die from a body pushed beyond its limits.

  The sirens were ringing through the air. Veering south another block, they spun west and reeled to a stop. A brace was dimly vi
sible at the far end of a commercial block. Shepherds milled around the road, one drinking coffee and bobbing on the balls of his feet to stretch his calves. Micah hissed, “Fuck!”

  “South another block,” Elania whispered. She pressed the button casually. While they waited, Micah dumped partially laced sneakers from the box and put them on. Elania shoved the box down a rain gutter.

  They zigzagged south and west through the city. Traffic was picking up on the roads, as was the foot traffic. Dog walkers, joggers, homeless people, workers unlocking store doors, the world was waking up. Any second now, someone was going to demand ID or recognize their faces, wonder why they were wearing scarves and pull them off . . .

  They walked fast with their arms crooked like they were power walkers. Micah smiled to a man jogging in the other direction and whispered, “We should talk.”

  That looked normal. “What happened in . . . your class?” Elania asked.

  “Mr. Sanchez was talking about booby traps in the Egyptian pyramids.” Glancing around to see if anyone was nearby, Micah said in a lower voice, “I think I tripped a silent alarm that alerted the cops. Stupid to put on their sirens and let me know they were coming. I was lacing these up when I heard the wailing.”

  The sirens had stopped. There were trees in the distance and Elania was happy to see them, but the streets shifted to residential once more and the trees were only part of a new development. The mist was burning off fast.

  When the development ended, a long field of grass stretched out to the next one. A sign said NO TRESPASSING. Many people had, judging from the cigarette butts and beer bottles all over the ground. This field saw so much foot traffic that a narrow path had formed. They followed it west, and pressed on through the grass when the path twisted north.

  “How much farther do you think it is?” Elania asked.

  “Long enough that we might want to think of taking cover to nightfall.”

  It was the last thing Elania wanted to do, be trapped somewhere like she had been on the porch with Zaley in Cloudy Valley. The woods were singing to her like a siren song. Forget the house, she’d settle for that bridge in the rain and cold, with Austin on his complaint marathon. Suddenly, it was charming. She’d stop rising above to bitch along with him, because Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this Jew wanted to be home.