The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “They don’t want him,” Micah said. Zaley put the foundation back in Micah’s pocket and checked over the boys’ necks. “They think he’s the zombie’s kid now.”

  “Fuuuuuuck,” Austin drawled. Voices echoed from lower on the road. All of them got up and pressed on.

  “Aaaaaaaah,” the kid said on Micah’s hip. Then he broke into babble. “Boooo. Baaa-baaaa-baaaa.”

  “Sheep,” Micah said. “Which you are not. Try again, genius.”

  The road stretched on and there weren’t any signs to guide them. At one point it split, one avenue going south and the other west. They chose west. Cars had been abandoned along this road in the hills. Almost all of them had been vandalized.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. It sounded like popcorn. Disappointingly, the road looped to a parking lot, the freeway visible beyond it. People were all over the lanes and some in the lot. Corbin spied a trail that led off the road. They had to get the hell away from anyone who could have seen Micah’s exposed neck.

  The trail did the job. Sporadic signs showed it to be a trail for hikers, but they didn’t come across any. No ferals, no braces, there was no one around save the four of them. Five of them. They walked until they were exhausted, and walked on despite it.

  It was late afternoon when the baby started to fuss. The smell from the diaper was getting stronger. They had to find somewhere to stop for the night. Nowhere looked amenable and the abandoned cars had petered out. The ground was more scrub than trees, and the trees that grew here were short. After contemplation, Micah wondered if that was a good sign. There wasn’t much shade to be appealing to zombies by day, and she hadn’t seen any signs of them. If the ground was the only option, they might be okay.

  “Holy shit,” Zaley blurted when they came to a tiny viewpoint that allowed visitors to overlook the Golden Gate Bridge. It was still standing, but sported a blackened crater where the dump truck had exploded. Cars crowded the northbound lanes, theirs among it but too small to be seen. The viewpoint had no restroom structure to hide out in for the night. It was just a splotch of dirt and a fence.

  There wasn’t any shelter to be had, so they pulled off the path soon afterwards and dropped their things to the ground. Tonight, one of them would have to be on watch. The fussy sounds from the baby were graduating into a cry. Pulling over the diaper bag, Micah unloaded it piece by piece. Austin gasped at the sandwich and bag of chips, both of which he snapped up. “Look at that! That’s a ham and cheese sandwich. Tomato and lettuce and mayo . . . I didn’t know that was in there!” His fingers dug into the plastic wrap.

  Disposable diapers, five of them. Micah stacked them up and pulled out a container of wipes. Beneath those was a white towel, and rolled to the side of the bag were two bottles. One was full, and the other halfway empty. There was also a wallet. It was slim, and contained little more than a driver’s license for a woman named Wanda Melbun. Micah said, “This isn’t your diaper bag, baby boy Shepherd.”

  “Why not?” Austin said, his fingers sinking deeply into a sandwich half to break it into two. The baby cried more loudly. Micah held up the license to show off the picture of a black woman. Austin inspected the blond and blue-eyed kid. “He’s adopted?”

  “No, the diaper bag was for some other baby in the van.” There was a picture behind the license. It showed the woman holding an infant who was also black. The date printed behind it was only two months ago.

  Micah searched the corners of the bag and found only crumpled tissues. No toys, no clothes, no diaper rash cream. The kid finally had had it and broke into a heartrending wail. She leaned him back in her arm and popped the nipple of the halfway empty bottle into his mouth. He fussed and jerked his head away. “Hey, dumbass, I’m trying to feed you,” Micah castigated. If he wasn’t going to eat, she’d have her sandwich.

  “Don’t call the baby dumbass,” Corbin said. He and Zaley were sharing their portion of the sandwich, each taking a bite and passing it to the other.

  Micah pressed the oozing nipple to his lips and got it in. The wailing cut off abruptly and he sucked on it hard. “His name could be Dumbass. If I got Jubilee Eclipse, parents will name their kids literally anything.”

  “It’s not Dumbass,” Corbin said. “I guarantee it.”

  While the baby drank, he got another handful of Micah’s hair and held it in contentment. Austin said, “Aren’t you going to eat? Oh.” Her hands were engaged in feeding Dumbass, who was too dumb to even hold the bottle by himself. Austin held a portion of the sandwich to Micah’s lips.

  She bit in. The sandwich was exquisite, the slices of ham and cheese thick, the lettuce and tomato crisp. Mayonnaise and mustard had been thickly smeared on the whole wheat bread. She was so happy that she’d stolen this bag. It had food for all of them. If there hadn’t been a bottle for the baby inside, they would have been fucked.

  When the sandwich was gone, Austin broke open the bag of chips and shared them out. He breathed in while giving some to Micah and said, “You smell, little dude. How do you know it’s a boy?”

  “I don’t,” Micah said. “Change the diaper and find out.”

  “Ew! You change him. Her. It.”

  “Dumbass,” Micah corrected tartly. “Not It. That’s rude.” She cracked herself up and Austin snickered. The baby broke away from the bottle for a moment to make an aaahhhh sound. He was laughing with them. Then he returned to eating, his chin working up and down and a little milk caught in the corners of his lips.

  Corbin had a stick up his butt about it for some reason. “Not Dumbass! You can’t call a kid that. It’s not good for them.”

  “Corbin’s changing you, since he thinks he knows all about what’s good for babies,” Micah said sweetly to the kid.

  “I don’t know how to change a baby! I’m an only child.”

  “I’m an only, and I have a bad arm,” Zaley said, tripping over the words from getting them out so fast. “Not it.”

  “Not it!” Austin said. “I’m an only, as far as I know. That’s a job best left to a professional. You’re the only one with a sibling, Micah.”

  “Yeah, and I’m the younger one!” Micah said. So she was going to have to change the baby. “You assholes.” They needed Elania. She would have known what to do with a kid, and three times over at that. Didn’t babies have to be burped after eating? Micah knew that much from television. Once the bottle was empty, she put the kid over her shoulder and thumped him on the back several times.

  “I think that’s too hard,” Austin said.

  “He’s not crying.”

  “No, but he is eating your hair.”

  “Burp, Dumbass,” Micah commanded.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Corbin said. “Give the poor kid to me.” He took the baby, who stared at him for several long seconds and burst into a wail. Swiftly, he was returned to Micah, where the wailing ceased. Over her shoulder, he grabbed up fistfuls of her hair. She patted his back.

  “We need to find a fire station,” Austin said. “We can leave him outside. Or drop him off at a hospital.” The baby burped. With one hand, Micah stretched out the towel and laid him down to change the diaper. He was mad about having to let go of her hair and waved his arms in disapproval. When the yowling picked up, Austin whipped out a toy badge and offered it. The kid snatched the badge and shoved the end of it in his mouth.

  “He shouldn’t eat that,” Corbin said. “There are chemicals in those.”

  Corbin needed to shut the fuck up. They had already established he didn’t know anything about babies, so Micah wasn’t interested in his thoughts. She wanted Elania, who usually had something worth saying and definitely would have had plenty to say about little kids. To bother Corbin back for bothering her, Micah cooed at the baby, “Nom, nom, nom. Who’s meeting his RDA of healthy phthalates?” He was meeting them and then some. She pulled off the little trousers with the elastic waistband. The reek intensified. Austin gagged and pulled his shirt over his nose. He sneaked a chip under his shirt from the bo
ttom to get it to his mouth.

  “It’s a boy,” Micah confirmed once the diaper was off. “A covered in shit boy. Austin, lob the diaper away.”

  “Ugh. Do I have to?”

  “Or you could change him while I do it.”

  It worked like a charm. Austin picked up the soiled diaper gingerly and walked farther down the trail to throw it into the scrub. When he came back, he said, “There’s a minivan around the curve. It’s unlocked and no one is inside. We should spend the night in there. Anything could be crawling around these hills.”

  The others packed up their things. Micah used the wipes to peel dried shit off the baby and clumsily put a fresh diaper on him. It was getting cold, so she pulled his pants back up over his chubby legs. A tag caught her eye. In the growing evening, she could just barely make out the letters. “Marcien. Is that his name? Or is it a brand of baby clothes?” The tag only said that word, not the size or washing instructions. But it wasn’t handwritten either.

  “Little kids have their names sewn or written into their clothes for daycare,” Austin said. “I remember that from when I was in nursery school.” He squinted at the tag in the trousers. “That looks like a personal tag.”

  “You have a dumb name,” Micah said to the baby. She knew all about that. He kicked at her half-heartedly. The badge slipped from his fingers as he yawned and she took it away. “Kids are going to call you Martian. They’ll ask where your antennae are. And you’ll say they’re up your ass where you like it and get in trouble with the teacher. Not cool, dude. You’re just defending yourself. You need a better name.”

  “You can’t change his name,” Corbin said.

  He was really irritating her. Micah could do whatever she wanted. The window had slammed shut in the baby’s face. Austin said, “Keep his name but call him Mars for short. Mars, the Roman god of war.”

  “That’s what we’ll call you at home,” Micah said to Mars. It was fitting with the world at war. “At school, you’ll need something different.” Mars was a planet and Marcien was just stupid. Mark was normal. Mark, Mario, Marley, Marshall, there was no need to dive past those for Marcien.

  They moved over to the minivan. Two of the tires were flat and the gas flap was open. It had been parked there so long that weeds were growing into the hubcaps. But the windows were whole and the doors locked up fine, which was all they needed.

  Using the last of the light, Zaley sat in the driver’s seat and squinted at the maps. Micah climbed into the trunk and made a bed out of the blanket and pillow. Then Austin passed the baby over and she settled him down. Back to sleep? Tummy time? She had heard about SIDS, but not what to do to prevent it. She put him on his back. His eyes closed, eyes that had never seen a confinement point. Micah wished she had eyes like that, and a hand that hadn’t brought down a blade to a girl’s chest. Marcien the Martian still lived untouched.

  The kid probably had a daily schedule that had gotten royally fucked by this day, but he was just going with the flow. He was both a dumbass and a champ. Flexibility was how one survived in this world. That and getting used to less food. Micah rolled the last bottle through the fabric of the bag. “Zaley, what cities are around here?”

  “Sausalito,” Zaley said. “That’s a couple of miles to the east. And there’s a little place called Redfern. That’s closer, and on this side of the freeway.”

  Micah hadn’t ever heard of Redfern, but she had been to Sausalito ages ago with her family. It was a wealthy place, under ten thousand residents and attractive to tourists for its small town feel and waterfront views. Red. It had been marked red for Sombra Cs on the most recent map she’d seen. Everything was red now though, in Micah’s mental map. She walked through Sausalito in her memory, remembering restaurants that overlooked the water, jewelry stores and a New Age shop where Shalom had spent her allowance on a tree-of-life poster.

  Sausalito didn’t have a Mr. Foods, at least it hadn’t when Micah was there. That was too common and inexpensive. Then again, she’d only been seven or eight at the time of the visit, so there was likely a lot that she didn’t remember. They needed formula. One bottle wasn’t going to last long. If they couldn’t find a Mr. Foods, she’d stroll in whatever hippie co-op was there, open, and stocked, and shoplift her heart out. One of the others could distract the employee. If they whined about laws, she’d just do it herself.

  Mars opened his eyelids a little at the voices in the minivan, and then they sank shut. His foot kicked. The kid was thoroughly worn out, and so was Micah. She stroked his tummy and he relaxed.

  Austin leaned against the front seats to take a gander at the map. “Maybe Redfern will have a fire station. Zaley can leave Mars there. You can’t get in trouble for that. There’s a safe haven law, isn’t there?”

  “Technically, that law only covers moms who leave their newborns,” Corbin said. “But Zaley’s not his mom. It’s no crime to save a baby off a bridge being bombed. They can’t possibly think she kidnapped him if she’s trying to give him back.”

  “But if there’s a chance they would, then we should just leave him outside . . .”

  Micah lay down beside the dozing god of war and trailed her hair over his open palm. He was too young to grasp that this was the worst day of his life. It was going to live on forever in his subconscious, the scream in his face, the window closing, and the van driving off without him. Someday he’d be in counseling with someone like Micah’s toothy, lizard-loving therapist Cheryl/Merry Meet, trying to figure out why he had so much trouble connecting to women. And he wasn’t ever going to figure it out, because his brain was too immature to retain what Micah was never going to forget. It was wrong that she’d know something so personal about his history when he didn’t. That belonged in a letter to him for when he was an adult, although that was almost as bad to see such ugliness on a piece of paper, like Elania’s suicide note that Micah had destroyed.

  It could have been his mother to snap shut the window. He was only hers until a zombie touched him. Then she was done with him, her spigot of affection turned off just like that. Parents did that to gay kids all the time. Austin’s mother had done that to a zombie son. Oh, you’re not who I thought you were? Then you’re not mine. Goodbye.

  The baby’s fingers closed on the lock of blue hair in his palm. He held onto it in his sleep while Zaley, Corbin, and Austin debated the best way to get rid of him. A fire station. A doorstep. A church or synagogue. A grocery store or an adoption agency. A call on a pay phone to 911. A man or woman with young children. Someone who looked kind.

  Austin looked over the back to get Micah’s opinion. She was the one who solved their problems, pulling them out of Cloudy Valley and through the confinement point. She was good at getting rid of things. It horrified them when it was Brennan’s stag carving and library book, things that didn’t matter one bit. It relieved them when it was a baby boy, something that did.

  She was good at striking the blows they couldn’t. At lying to children about pain, her eyes wide with sincerity, honey-flavored lies about the afterlife slipping from her tongue. Tomorrow she would be setting Mars down, sacrificing him to the altar of others’ kindness and mercy at a police station or a hospital. And she would walk away, just as she had set Clarissa’s dead body upon the leaves and walked away alone. Micah was always alone, the odd one out in her family, the good student playing a part in school as everyone else played it for real, the ruler of the confinement point.

  “Micah?” Austin said.

  She pretended to be asleep, to spare the kid one final betrayal on the day he had unknowingly broken forever. Her hair had gone dark in the night, but he was still holding onto it. It was a lifeline to him, since she had gotten him from the van on the bridge.

  Although it put her in a weird position, she didn’t free herself from his fist to find a better way to sleep. His touch made her feel cleaner, the fingers on her hair washing away some of the blood to stain her from the hill. She’d killed Clarissa and that was wrong yet right.
She’d saved Mars and that was right all the way through. Only one of those two acts gave her pride and returned her hands to how they’d once been.

  This afternoon, his community had shut a window in his face. Tomorrow, the four of them would be dumping him off and she’d be dirty again. But for tonight, someone in this huge, horrible world wanted him. Even if he never knew. If a feral or a Shepherd or some crazy idiot attacked the minivan in the darkness, Micah would throw herself out with her gun blazing to keep him safe. That was also unequivocally right.

  The dragon of fire was still burning in her eyes. She took his other hand into hers and fell asleep.

  Austin

  “Hah-HAH! Hoo-HAH! HAAAAAA!”

  God help them, there were ferals out here in the night. He wasn’t going to call them zonchos and he didn’t even like to call them zombies. The same virus moved in his bloodstream. These were people with Sombra C gone feral, just like he was at risk of doing.

  He remembered Elania snarling at him and shivered. She couldn’t have held out much longer, a few days at most. Then she would have been roaming around mindlessly and aimlessly, the girl who had once been in possession of a really good brain and definite direction. The person currently hooting outside the minivan could be an Ivy League graduate and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.

  Everyone was asleep except for him. He looked warily out the window for movement. The calls weren’t close, yet they were close enough to hear. It was pitch black out there. He wasn’t going to see squat unless the feral pressed its rotting, crazy face to the window. That would scare the piss out of him.

  Austin felt along the door to make sure it was locked. Ringing in his ears was that man’s voice from an Internet video long ago. I am still a human being! Just because he had Sombra C, it didn’t make him less than who he had been before. But the ferals were less. Austin tried to work it out in his head so they weren’t. When did a human being stop being a human being? What particularly human essence did they have to lose first? No one was going to argue that a severely crippled or brain-damaged person had lost the claim to humanity. That was offensive. Of course that person was still human. A person in a coma was a person in a coma. People would argue that a serial killer wasn’t human. He was just an animal. But animals didn’t grow up to be serial killers, so that wasn’t fair to animals, not to mention that Sombra C and sociopathy were very different worlds.