The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Guilt overcame her later on that night, tucked into her sleeping bag but awake. Somewhere her mother was falling apart, and Zaley was deliberately letting that happen. The thought of calling to alleviate it . . . her life, herself, being whittled back to the ghost in the house . . . she looked at the gun between her bag and Micah’s, the metal shining from a slice of moonlight coming through a broken place in the blinds, and reached out to take it. Sitting up, she held it in her lap.

  That was her body’s response, its solution to the thought of returning home even only through a cell phone call. Death. That house, that family was annihilating her, so she had made a better life for herself. This one was worth being in danger. When she was with her friends, her mind didn’t revolve around suicide. She felt dark at times, yet not pushed over the edge. She wanted to see what tomorrow held.

  It was simple. She ran away to survive. Setting down the gun a little closer to Micah, she lay back down. This was where she was supposed to be, not in a room of toddler furniture playing with dolls and not on a street corner playing Shepherd. When did her feelings count for something? Zaley wasn’t ever going back. She had grown past that home the second she kicked out the boards. Killed a man and robbed a store, seen things of which she couldn’t even conceive less than two weeks ago. No longer was she a person who fit into the Mattazollo residence. Her anger wouldn’t allow her to stay contained within it even if her father let her stay, and now she knew the world beyond. Every experience was a fence post driven deeply into the soil between her and her family, a further demarcation of their differences.

  The Chapmans had been kind and helpful, so she thanked them anyway. Judith just couldn’t understand. Her family probably wasn’t crazy. It had turned her into an always-make-nice person, but always making nice was killing Zaley piece by piece. It had to be okay to not always make nice.

  At the landing to the green house, Elania took down a note from the door and read, “Will be here around eight or nine this morning. Make yourselves at home!”

  “Fuck this shit,” Micah said. “We’re fucking three miles away from Sable Heights. Let’s just walk there. It’s still dark.”

  “We have to do this carefully,” Corbin chided. They walked inside a foyer lit by a nightlight. Micah snapped on the overhead lights. The living room was smothered in pictures of an elderly couple, pudgy and beaming in a variety of vacation locales. Beaches and mountains, cathedrals and ski slopes, carnivals and amusement parks and playhouses, framed photos were everywhere. Two were even wedged onto the tiny table in the foyer, one of a Halloween party with the couple costumed as a dog and cat, and the second on a cruise ship.

  Only a counter separated the kitchen from the living room. More pictures covered its upper shelf, along with a miniature camper and figurines of horses and sailboats. Artfully scattered under a glass cover on that shelf were ticket stubs.

  Micah peeked into a closet by the hallway that led to the rest of the house. They gathered around her to look in. Nothing interesting was inside, only neatly hung jackets and sweaters, and a suitcase holder beneath them. Corbin said, “We shouldn’t go through their things.”

  “If there was anything important in here, it would have been locked,” Micah said. Closing the door, she touched the stained blue glass lamp on an end table. “These people are loaded. My grandparents have a lamp like this one.” She kicked at the long doily hanging over the sides of the table.

  “What are they doing out at four in the morning?” Zaley wondered. Maybe they were coming back from a vacation. Judging from the pictures, that was all they did. She sat on the sofa in the living room and put her head on the pillow there.

  The coffee table bore a soda cup from Tic-Tac-Taco. It had made a small pool on the surface, not placed on a coaster even though coasters were there. Wrappers from burritos were balled up on the rug. Picking up one of two remotes, Zaley flipped on the television. She sat straight up in alarm as the speakers blared with moans and pants. On the screen, many naked figures writhed in a hotel lobby under strobe lighting. The walls were decorated for a party with streamers and balloons.

  “Zaley, stop watching porn!” Micah exclaimed in mock scandal. Everyone looked over to the television with expressions ranging from shock to appall.

  “I wasn’t!” Zaley cried in genuine horror, unable to flip it off fast enough. She’d expected the news, not the Skin-to-Skin channel. Staring warily at the pictures of the old couple up everywhere, she lay back down and said, “What the hell?”

  Corbin fed the dog some kibble that he had taken with permission from the first catch. Blood was still pounding in Zaley’s cheeks when he settled down beside her. He stroked her ankle and said, “Was it good for you, too?”

  She kicked his leg. “Who knows that people are coming over and leaves their television set to the porn channel?”

  “Apparently these geezers do,” Corbin said with a snicker.

  Elania sank into the armchair. “Well, I would watch the news if we could mute this fast enough for me to figure out the remotes. Gross.”

  They inspected the remotes together and determined that one connected to a game console. Zaley returned that one to the table as Elania winced and pressed the power button with the thumb of her right hand. The screen flipped on and she pressed mute with her other thumb, the speakers getting out only one breathy cry of God. Then they were trapped with the writhing figures, now in a new configuration at the party in the hotel lobby, because the channel finder button didn’t do anything.

  “They’re watching porn again, Micah!” Austin tattled. “On mute this time.”

  “They’re animals! Cover Zaley’s eyes, would you?” Micah called from some other room in the house. Paper rattled. “These are the Fergusons, Mel and Laverne, according to their mail.”

  “Please, please do something,” Zaley begged Elania, who shook her head in bafflement at the remote and tried another button. Corbin just laughed.

  Austin took in the scene on the television and said dramatically, “An intimate night for you, your lover, and your thirty closest friends.”

  “That’s not helping, Austin,” Elania snapped. She passed the remote to Zaley and said, “Okay, I’m not seeing anything to change this!”

  “One Plus One Equals Three Dozen,” Austin dubbed the show. “Or just Multiple Madness.”

  “Me, Myself, & Everyone,” Corbin giggled. He covered the dog’s eyes as both boys were overcome with laughter. The girls inspected the remotes desperately as Micah came in and plopped down on the rug in front of the screen. She and Austin passed a candy bar back and forth while critiquing positions.

  Pointing to a button that they hadn’t tried, Zaley said, “Whatever this one is has been rubbed off, but I think that’s an M there.”

  “Please be menu,” Elania said. Zaley jabbed it and the image changed to a list of channels, shows, and times on the lower two-thirds of the screen. Within a box on the upper third, the party continued. Micah and Austin booed.

  Ten channels below Skin-to-Skin, Zaley was still finding porn. Austin read the channel names out loud: Hard ‘n Soft, Ooh Aah, and a variety of acronyms that Zaley didn’t understand although the list of shows made it clear what they concerned. Elania smacked Austin’s head with a pillow at every channel and show title he read. How many subscriptions to porn channels did one couple need to be satisfied? These old people were revolting.

  “Let’s watch the underwear channel here,” Micah suggested. “Five o’clock: Blacks in Whites. The sequel is on after it: Whites in Blacks.”

  “I had my heart set on Full Frontal Asian,” Austin argued. Elania smacked both of them.

  Zaley arrived at home shopping channels, and after that was a news station. She pressed enter and got rid of the hotel lobby of horniness altogether. If she’d been alone, she would have watched a little, but with all of her best friends and a dog in the same room? A room belonging to elderly strangers at that? No way. The news station was on a commercial break.
r />   “What we had between us was special and magic,” Austin said sweetly to Micah. He turned to Elania and said in the exact same tone, “What we had between us was special and magic.” Zaley cracked up as Elania smacked him with the pillow. He turned to Corbin undaunted. “What we had between us-”

  Corbin was wiping tears from his cheeks. “Oh God, I love you guys.”

  “You promised I was the only one,” Zaley said when Austin turned once more to give her the line.

  He reached over the table and clasped her hand. His dark eyes were wide with sincerity. “Oh honey, you were! You were the only one at the time.”

  They watched the news and cheered quietly to hear that a Shepherd compound in Ohio had been taken down. Although not the source of Prime, it trafficked a lot of weaponry and was a hard blow to the large organization in that area. Lines of Shepherds were led out at gunpoint by the Armed Forces, forced into buses and driven away to a secure facility at a military base. An enraged woman was interviewed. Her husband was among those Shepherds. He was a good person doing good things. Crates of weapons were being loaded up beyond the fence behind her.

  “Well, the government’s not protecting us!” the woman shouted to the camera.

  “You’re not in danger!” Austin said in offense.

  That was the best the news had to offer; the rest was disheartening. The air industry was losing billions of dollars each and every day they were out of service; ports were backed up as new battles broke out daily for their control. Pharmaceutical companies fielded bomb threats by the dozens every day. Their executives and lower employees were being harassed and in some cases, abducted or murdered. The bottles that Zyllevir came in were made in China, and they were caught up at the ports. Companies who made similar items in the United States had had their regular workload additionally burdened by order of the government to make bottles for Zyllevir. Now they were getting death threats, too.

  Entire states were out of control, and California was among them. A siege upon a makeshift harbor in Texas had broken through. Shepherds massacred people by the hundreds. Along the bottom of the screen flashed a warning for Sombra Cs. Anyone could build a wall, hire a few security guards, and claim that the patch of ground inside was a harbor, but a wall and a few guards weren’t enough. People paid thousands of dollars to get in and weren’t any safer than they were outside. The warning changed to confirmed harbors with Sanya Smart Shields in each state, and that admission to each one was free to anyone with Sombra C, and also their families.

  “San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Sonoma, Humboldt,” Micah said rapidly when California’s harbors scrolled by.

  “This can’t go on,” a man in a suit was saying on the screen. “It’s destroying the world economy. We’re going to have widespread starvation, unsanitary water supplies, deaths from illnesses we’ve had under control for decades. The rate of Sombra C infections is going to skyrocket! If you make Zyllevir hard to obtain, if people know that just going to pick up their prescription means they risk being killed . . . without this medication, carriers will go wild and inflict incalculable damage-” He was speaking on a split screen. The other half was showing a poll of viewers who had answered the question of who was at fault for the current state of the country. Twenty percent blamed Shepherds only; twenty percent blamed the government only. Fifty-five percent thought both were culpable, and five percent answered undecided/do not understand question.

  After Zaley read the question to Corbin, he commented, “That wasn’t a very hard question to understand.”

  The early morning was getting to Zaley, who eventually closed her eyes just to listen to the program. Elania yawned and yawned until she said that she was claiming the guest bedroom to sleep. The door closed behind her. The others curled up around the living room. Bleu Cheese gnawed on a bone in the kitchen, lapped at her water, and gnawed on the bone some more. Zaley went in and out of a doze, her feet hooked over Corbin’s lap as he rubbed her calves and ankles. She hadn’t shaved her legs in ages. Was that grossing him out? But he wouldn’t keep rubbing if it did.

  Those hours they were squashed together on the basement sofa had been the sweetest night of sleep in her life. She loved to wear the bracelet again, and that he wanted her even if they couldn’t have each other. She wouldn’t think about that too deeply. It was going to hurt like a bitch once the reality sank in. Right now she was just enjoying the return of that familiarity to one another’s bodies, the undercurrent of possessiveness. His hands moved up and down to knead her skin, warm and comforting. She slipped into a deeper sleep and didn’t wake until the front door opened.

  It wasn’t the old couple in the pictures but a gaunt younger woman, with a punkish hairstyle of blonde and pink, a sallow complexion, and earrings going all the way around her ears. She smiled with yellow teeth. Rustling a bag of Tic-Tac-Taco in her hand and tossing a ring of keys to the crowded table in the entryway, the woman said, “Hi, I’m Tarley Ferguson.”

  It had become day, light pushing around the periphery of the blinds. The time on the screen read half past eight, and hosts of a morning show chatted to each other on the television. Micah said, “Is this your grandparents’ place?”

  Tarley closed the door. “Yeah.”

  “Where are they?” Micah asked. Zaley turned down the television to a mutter.

  “Portland. My great-gramma is ninety-nine years young and just broke her hip at her assisted living place. They drove up to check on her. I had no idea they were a catch until they called a few days ago, told me to come over and keep the house running. Nice place, isn’t it?” Tarley laughed. It was a strange, hooting sound, and vaguely off-putting for its weirdness. “Better than my shithole apartment! I love crashing here.”

  “How long until we can make our move?” Corbin asked as the woman went to the kitchen. Taking a plate from the cupboard, she removed a package of fries from the bag and dumped them out.

  She bit the edge of a catsup package and spat a plastic scrap into the sink. “Later. We’ve got a straight shot all the way there, but only between five-thirty and six. Traffic will be bad, so we’ll get our butts in my Seeker at five on the dot to make it. It’ll be a tight fit. Is this all of you?”

  Elania was still asleep in the bedroom. “One more back there,” Corbin said. Tarley sat in the armchair, having added a burrito to the top of the fries.

  Glancing at Zaley’s neck, she asked, “They forget to put a stamp on you?”

  “No, I don’t have Sombra C,” Zaley said.

  “Oh!” Her eyes narrowed in confusion. Zaley prepared herself to be sent to the garage or the laundry room, but Tarley just ate fries. Then she reached into her pocket and took out a pair of white pills, which she popped into her mouth and swallowed without water. They looked like Zaley’s pain medication. Her body responded inadvertently, craving a pill of its own. But she was done with those. They made her stupid and gave her the shits. She watched with alarm when Tarley got out a third pill and swallowed that one, too. Sinking back into the chair, the woman said, “So, what are we watching?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Corbin said. It was a little uncomfortable, Tarley mowing down her food without acknowledgement to the rest of them. Motioning for a backpack from Micah, Corbin unzipped it. “Would you mind if we used the microwave to make our breakfast?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” said Tarley indifferently. Close up, her hair was dry and dreadful. It was a cheap dye job and her roots were coming in black. She brushed her hair forward and sprayed it out flat like a surfboard. The pink was mixed into the banana blonde. Her eyes were a pretty hazel, but thick eyeliner detracted from them. She smelled like beer and cigarette smoke.

  But Zaley wasn’t here to pick her apart, and the woman was being kind to keep her grandparents’ catch open. The porn channels could belong to her, and the trash definitely did. Corbin held out two microwave meals, spaghetti and meatballs and a chicken dish. “Which one do you want, Zaley?”

  “The spaghetti,
please,” Zaley said. Even though she had had that last night for dinner, she’d rather have it again than the strangely spiced chicken. Corbin and Austin took a stack of microwave meals into the kitchen. Sniffing at Tarley, Bleu Cheese made a sound halfway between a sneeze and a wheeze. Zaley apologized and sent the dog away. Three of those pills would have knocked her out in short order. She hated that she craved them, not for pain so much as escape.

  The hot cup of spaghetti was brought to her swathed in paper towels. She set it in her lap and Corbin placed a glass of water on a coaster for her. Austin dumped forks on the table and Zaley got to work. Pinch the cup between her thighs, pinch it harder with her thumb and index protected by the towels, twirl the fork with her left hand and lift.

  The others sat down around the coffee table to eat. The television continued at a mutter, no one bothering to turn it up. The co-hosts were gabbing about the fashions on a catwalk at a fashion show in Paris. It was odd to see something that had nothing to do with Sombra C. Austin sneaked the dog a meatball from his cup.

  Zaley’s arm was feeling all right. Once she had had a few bites, she speared the fork into the cup and felt along the outside of her right hand. Still numb. She pressed her thumb to her fourth finger. It had more strength, not a lot, but a little. Physical therapy was slow to award its prizes. Deciding to practice, she pinched the cup with her left hand and used the fork in her right. The cup cooled as she concentrated, the talk show playing on and on unnoticed.

  “If I worked half as hard as you do, I’d be a lot farther with mine,” Corbin commented.

  “I want my arm back,” Zaley said resolutely.

  “You’ll get it back, if willpower has anything to do with it.”