The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Nine miles? I can’t even believe you made it to Charbot!”

  “I don’t see how else we can do this,” Elania said. “Could you or Mom transfer some money into my bank account? I don’t know how long it will take for us to get there with those braces . . . are they monitoring our bank accounts? Is that even private to us?”

  “They’re not monitoring that, although they tried to intimidate us into giving them that information. I’ll have Mom do that now . . . Aviva, put five or six hundred dollars in Elania’s account, will you? But honey, you can’t go into town to get it out . . .”

  “Zaley can,” Elania reminded him. A keyboard chattered in the background as Mom transferred funds. “I’ll give her my number and she can withdraw what we need.”

  “If Sable Heights goes red, you have to get off the peninsula altogether,” Dad said. “Get yourself to the nearest green community or a walled one. Some of Sonoma County is still green and they have that harbor in the city of Sonoma itself. It’s a huge one and very safe. We’ll come up and meet you there.”

  There was so much she wanted to say about the last week, but she had to think about priorities. A priority was conserving the battery left in her cell phone. “Okay, I have to talk to the others. If I don’t call back, assume that we’re going up to Sable Heights. We’ll figure out a safe route to get there.”

  It was difficult for both of them to hang up, and she finally pressed the button after letting one more BYELANI from her brothers come through. She stood there, needing a moment apart from everyone else. Sable Heights. She was so relieved to have spoken to her family, so devastated that what lay before her and her friends was another long walk, so overwhelmed by everything that she did not know how to get started.

  She glanced online at Sombra C News. The map of California was blood-soaked. Tiny patches of yellow and even tinier patches of green were speckled throughout. If this was California, she didn’t want to look at the rest of the country.

  The phone battery. She turned around and opened her mouth to speak, but Micah cut her off. “I heard all of that and I’m working on it.”

  “This is some other world we’ve fallen into,” Austin said.

  Wanting to kick and scream, have a tantrum like one of her little brothers, Elania said in resignation, “It’s ours.”

  Corbin

  She was alive.

  He had thought all along that she had to be dead. After all, she’d beaten the odds on her cancer, and now that bill on these extra years of life was coming due. One slug to the head please, payment in blood.

  During her cancer treatment, Corbin had tried not to cry. A real guy toughed it out, got mad instead of sad, and that was what he did until he saw his father crying. If Dad was crying, Mom was dying. Then it would be just the two of them in the house, missing the piece that glued everything together. Dad had a lot of business trips to make for his job and Corbin would be alone. He thought of studying and playing video games without the sounds of his mother in the house and cried.

  Corbin liked to go on with his day with those sounds of cabinets opening, the television playing, the click-clack sounds of Mom at her craft table. As a little boy, he loved to run his hands through the smooth quartzite in every color, the chunky amethyst, the wood beads and nuggets. There were always works in progress laid out, Corbin putting green sticky tabs by the pretty ones and red tabs by the ones he didn’t like while his mom was doing something else around the house. And while he was elsewhere in the house, he heard her completing the projects he had voted green. She thought he had a good eye for color. For there to be nothing but silence . . . he wouldn’t know what to do with it, how to fit into it.

  Yet she pulled through, so he hadn’t had to face that silent house. Luck and good medicine bought their family more time, but the last grains of sand had fallen through the hourglass for the Lis. Now there were just going to be memories of better times as he stumbled around in a harsh present.

  And then he called her number, expecting it to ring endlessly as he held his breath and fought to accept the coming silence, and she picked up. His throat closed so fast that he barely eked out her name. She was alive. She was alive! He couldn’t stop himself from crying, and she was crying too to know that he was alive.

  The Shepherds had pushed her down so roughly that they’d broken her ankle, but the bullet was intended for Corbin. It slammed through a window on the other side of the street. And Dad was in jail. He had driven across the country and stormed into the Cloudy Valley police station, demanding they arrest Shepherds and help find his son. They clapped him in a cell when he refused to leave and gave him a saliva test to boot to make sure he hadn’t contracted Sombra C from living in the same house as Corbin. Mom had gone in three times on crutches to try and get Dad out to no avail. The third time, the cops threatened to put her in jail with him. He’d be released when they felt like it, and they weren’t feeling like it. Civil rights be damned. In the cell across from Dad was a father who shot three Shepherds to death in order to get his daughter out of the net. They weren’t letting him out until he confessed to where his daughter had gone, and he wasn’t telling. The Cloudy Valley police station had one more cell, which held two women who had had the audacity to request the confinement point be located, broken up, and their sons released. One of the boys was only six years old.

  A Shepherd searched the house every day for Corbin and gave Mom a saliva test, and Mom stood outside in the front yard for the whole process. She didn’t feel safe being alone in the house with a strange Shepherd. Cousin Zoe came over in the late afternoons to help Mom make dinner, and to do the things she couldn’t with her busted ankle. Zoe thought that she was being tailed when she drove around town. She and Mom were going to see another lawyer today about springing Dad free. The first lawyer had refused to take the case, too frightened of attracting unwelcome attention from the cops and Shepherds to fight them in court.

  When Corbin said that they were going to try for Sable Heights, Mom replied that they should reach a harbor instead. But the nearest one was fifty miles or more away from Charbot, blocked by infinitely more braces than Sable Heights, and Sable Heights was bad enough.

  “I must get off the phone,” Mom said hurriedly all of a sudden. “The Shepherd is coming to do his inspection, so I have to go outside. I don’t like how this man looks at me.” A jolt of rage shook Corbin in the parking lot, thinking of a Shepherd assaulting Mom while he was in Charbot and Dad in jail. He looked at a mental image of his mother as a woman and not his mom. She was small and attractive and wounded, an easy target. It wasn’t like the cops were going to do anything about it either. His fingers dug into the leg of his jeans from fury.

  “I love you, Corbin. Be safe,” Mom said. “Get out of this area. As soon as I get Dad out of jail, we’re coming for you and going to a harbor if you’re not already there. I will talk to you soon.”

  “I love you, Mom, and take a knife with you,” Corbin said, and she was gone. He hadn’t thought much about what happened after they reached Charbot; his mind just circled on calling his mother. She was alive and God, he hated that he was not there shoving that asshole Shepherd off their property! Who the fuck did these people think they were? He hoped Mom took him seriously about the knife. If that guy made a move, Mom should stab him in the gut.

  He wanted to scream from being so helpless. Punch someone, throw something, carjack a vehicle and roar south to his home. Blow through every brace at a hundred miles per hour, leave a growing Shepherd body count in his wake. He was so angry that he heard the thud of his pulse in his ears. And he didn’t know what to do with it, he had no way to direct his rage, no target, no focus, nothing!

  When Zaley touched his back, he almost exploded at her. But he shoved it down, remembering the amethyst bracelet on the rock at the water. She had been so stupid to break up with him over her father. All of those nights afterwards when Corbin wondered what was wrong with him to get rejected like that . . . Then Sally sat i
n his lap and he was wanted again. How could he say no even if he didn’t like her that much?

  He was being an asshole, the way he was looking down to Zaley. A word hadn’t passed between them, but they may as well have. Closing his eyes, he tempered himself. Zaley had nothing to do with what was going on there. Right now that Shepherd could be attacking his mother and there wasn’t anything he could do.

  “Why aren’t you talking?” he hissed, still with his eyes closed. All of the others were talking, making plans and choosing routes, watching Sombra C News.

  “She’s alive, but you’re pissed about something,” Zaley said. “It didn’t seem polite for me to play a guessing game about what.”

  “Has a guy ever looked at you weird?” Corbin asked. “Made you feel uncomfortable?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “There was a youth Shepherd. He was . . . pushy.”

  Corbin opened his eyes and looked at her darkly. Her long blonde hair had come out of its braid to wisp over her forehead and shoulders. “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing like that. He’d . . . the worst he did was feel up my leg when we were in a car going somewhere.”

  “Did you slug him?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  She looked away. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Tell me!” Corbin demanded.

  “I let him!” Zaley shouted, the others looking up in surprise from the phones. “What the fuck was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, nail him in the nuts? Scream? Throw yourself out of the car?” He was enraged that she hadn’t done anything to protect herself from a creep.

  “I didn’t know what to do!” Zaley exclaimed. “I tried to stay away from him, but that one time I couldn’t. So I just gritted my teeth and waited it out until we arrived to where we were going, and then I got the hell out of the car!”

  “You should have done something more than grit your teeth while some asshole touches you! I can’t see Micah-”

  Zaley shoved him away from her and exploded in a scream, which startled him in its wildness. “Yeah? Well, I’m not Micah, and who the fuck are you to blame me? It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t want what he was doing, I always tried to avoid him, and I was scared half to death. Maybe one day you’ll be trapped in a car with some huge dude feeling up your leg, and you won’t know what the fuck to do either, you fucking self-centered sexist son-of-a-bitch!”

  It hadn’t been his intention to upset her like this. He also hadn’t been blaming her, and he really didn’t want to imagine getting felt up by a guy. But it happened, if rarely. He wasn’t so ignorant of the world that he didn’t know that. Still, he wouldn’t sit there passively and let it happen! “Zaley-”

  “No! You don’t get to ask what happened and then criticize how I handled it! How the fuck would you feel if I asked how you got Sombra C and then told you that if you’d just fought harder like a real man, you wouldn’t have been bitten? And I didn’t ask for your opinion in the first place. Who the fuck did I have to turn to about him? My father? You think he’d give a shit about what that guy could have done? Was I supposed to come to you? What the fuck were you going to do for me?” She slapped her neck to indicate where his stamp was. “I handled it the only way I knew how and I’m sorry if it wasn’t the Corbin Li approved way of going about it. I didn’t realize that I had to solicit your advice about how I ran my life. Fuck you!” Stiff-backed and red-cheeked, she returned to their friends. He was embarrassed at how they looked at him, but more embarrassed that Zaley thought he was blaming her for the actions of a jackass youth Shepherd.

  Uncomfortably, Elania said, “We’re talking about what to do now.”

  He joined their group on the other side to give Zaley distance. She was staring stonily at the phones. Bleu Cheese, delighted that they were all in a manageable pack, trotted around them off-leash. Corbin glanced at the phone in Micah’s hand. It was showing a lot of script, so he looked away. “What’s the plan?”

  “This is nine miles through almost solid red territory,” Micah said. “There are several permanent braces set up between here and Sable Heights along the most direct route, and dozens of others that rotate around the side roads depending on the day. We’re waiting on an email from the news station.”

  “Why are they emailing us?”

  “Underground railroad,” Austin answered. “We sent them our situation and they said that they wanted pictures of us and our stamps to confirm our identities. Once they’ve checked us out to see if we’re legit, they’ll help us.”

  Even from here, Corbin felt the heat coming off Zaley. She so rarely got mad, but when she did, he was always blown away at the depths of it. Now she was going to think that he was a caveman blaming girls for being assaulted. And he should have told his mother to text him after the Shepherd left, so he’d know that she was okay.

  He shouldn’t have taken that out on Zaley. He just didn’t understand why she hadn’t done anything more proactive than sit and take it. It was helplessness at the situation, he thought, and then he was mad again.

  “How’s your mom?” Elania asked.

  “Alive,” Corbin said tightly. “Broken ankle, house being searched daily. My father is in jail for trying to get the cops involved. Did you call home, Micah?”

  “Not yet,” Micah said. “I’ll deal with that once we have a plan in place-”

  “Email,” Austin interrupted. He read out loud, “Hi! Traffic is a bummer but we should catch you there within half an hour. Just sit tight and can’t wait to see you! Hope you all fit into Big Old Blue. Love, Uncle Brad and Aunt Jeanie.”

  The weird message had to be code, in case their phone was intercepted and the texts perused. Catch translated to a safe house; Big Old Blue likely referred to the color of the car on its way. “Can this be trusted?” Corbin asked.

  “No,” Micah said.

  “I don’t know what other choice we have,” Elania said. “Once we leave Charbot, we’re in a lot of danger. How far are we going to get without someone noticing our scarves? Reports indicate that even at night, these areas are crawling with Shepherds.”

  Corbin sighed. “My mom wants us to go to a harbor.”

  Micah laughed incredulously. “What, up in Sonoma? That’s fifty miles through pretty much all red, and Shepherds hold the bridges.”

  “Let’s deal with Sable Heights first and reevaluate,” Elania said. “The government and Prime are fighting for control of the country, and if the government gets it back, things will get easier for us-”

  Austin said, “Car.”

  It hadn’t been two minutes, let alone half an hour. They were exposed on the edge of the parking lot. Running past the trailhead, they sheltered behind a closed restroom building. Corbin looked around the corner and spied a red hybrid. This couldn’t be their ride. He shook his head to the others, who leaned on the wall silently.

  “No, we were supposed to go right on Fifth,” a woman was saying in the passenger seat. Her bare feet hung out the window.

  “Just give me a minute,” said the driver in frustration. He rolled to a stop over three parking spaces and stared at his phone. Five minutes passed with the woman complaining and the man telling her to wait, and then he concluded that they should have gone right and pulled the car around to leave the lot. On the back bumper was a Shepherd sticker, and SUPPORT OUR TROOPS written beside it.

  They remained behind the building. Corbin prayed that his mother was okay. If this was how she was going to be treated, it was safer for her to stay with Zoe, his aunt and uncle, or his grandparents. Even a hotel room would be safer.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Zaley, but she didn’t answer him. That wasn’t good. He had really, truly offended her.

  The next vehicle to come into the parking space was a police car. It rounded the lot slowly, Corbin fearful that their position had been turned over to the cops. When it pulled out, he was still afraid since it had been there at all. Micah
held a rapid call with her parents with Corbin listening in. Shalom wasn’t yet back to Cloudy Valley. Her flight had landed in Ohio and she’d driven to Nebraska in a rented car, but there was a fight between forces happening there and the freeway she’d been taking was closed. Micah had to talk her mothers out of coming to Charbot to pick them up, her voice growing less and less patient with each reiteration. “Uma! You can’t pick me up, do you understand? There is absolutely nowhere you can take us without hitting a brace! I’m looking at the map right now!”

  “But we have to try to get you to Sonoma-” her mother was protesting. Micah pushed the phone to Austin. It went on like that even as he was saying goodbye.

  Ten minutes later, an old blue van turned into the lot. Fish and underwater plant life had been painted on the side and a shark was on the hood. Two guys were sitting in the front. The van pulled up to the space closest to the trailhead and the doors opened.

  “That has to be it,” Micah whispered. Corbin didn’t move, chilled to see the guns in holsters at their waists. The guy who had been driving was tall and muscular with a head of silver hair. There was a peace sign on his T-shirt. Handcuffs and a brown sack were hanging from his pocket. The second guy was shorter and rounder, a mix of Asian and Caucasian. He was a little younger, and his hair was still thick and black. Also in jeans, he wore a checkered shirt. The two of them looked around the lot.

  Micah strode out from behind the restroom. Their guns came out, and she held up Zaley’s. The men’s eyes moved over the scarf around her neck, and they lowered their guns. The younger one said, “Micah? Are you Micah? That’s the only name the News gave us.”