The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  All of them had run, and all of them had done so knowing that they were going to lose. No matter how outmatched, they ran with hope in their arms. They ran until the lava or water tumbled them from their feet and swallowed them up, and in their final seconds, they were still trying to push their child higher as they were taken down. They ran until the bullets or blades slammed through them, and even then, their last gesture was to curl around the one smaller than themselves.

  Micah was going to lose.

  She burst into the trees and spied a dirt trail close by. The ground off the trail was nearly impassable, blocked by tall, thick shrubs and stunted firs. Some trees had fallen and been overtaken by other plants, holding death at their centers. The canopy was equally choked, and what light penetrated it was greenish. Branches arched over the trail, so low that she had to duck repeatedly to pass underneath them. The grade was going downhill gently, although a few times it made brief ascents.

  She darted over a bridge and looked regretfully down to a creek. It curved along to stay with the trail, ran away from it and flowed back. Its presence taunted her. Finally, she went to it and drank. Then she dipped her sleeve into the water and pressed it into the baby’s mouth. He sucked at it and made a face. Dipping the sleeve in again, she gave it to him. Looking up to her with his big blue eyes, he accepted it.

  He knew. Oh God and Goddess, neither of who existed, he knew. The sense of danger had passed through her skin to him. They were being run down and though he didn’t understand the nuances of what and why and how and where and when, he wasn’t oblivious. He accepted the water because somehow he recognized that that was the single thing she had to give him. A lock of her long hair was in his hand, not for inspection but as his comfort object. She had his trust.

  That was going to be broken forever when the men caught up and spilled her. When she was still on the ground and didn’t respond to his babbles and touches and cries for her attention and care.

  Then he’d be alone. He would stay with her body. He wasn’t big enough to do anything else. The men would laugh and leave him there to starve at her side. No one would ever hear him cry out here. Except a feral perhaps, driven mad by the noise and who would come to shut him up in the worst possible way. Or a mountain lion could follow those wails and quell its hunger with a free meal. When Micah was gone, Mars had nothing.

  Stopping for water made her aware of just how much she hurt, and how long she’d been running on fumes. She couldn’t go much farther. Her body was shaking from overexertion and her head throbbed. The lightning bolts of the throbs stretched down her neck and into her back. And she had to pee, a stinging of a stupid trickle in her groin. She set down the baby by the water when he was done drinking and yanked down her clothes to take care of that. The baby had also peed in his diaper. She’d smelled that now for hours. There wasn’t anything to change him into, and she couldn’t dunk his diaper in the water to clean it and then pin it back on him soaked.

  She lifted Mars and returned to the trail. The afternoon had turned to evening, but the fading light wasn’t giving rise to feral sounds. There were no ferals around here, unless they were quiet ones, nor did she see animals. The only animals were the two men in pursuit.

  The creek swung away from the trail and didn’t return. It was going to be night before long, and she was coming to the end. Soon Mars would be crying alone in the wild. In the dark. She could do no more.

  Reluctantly, she looked for a place to conceal them. The water was flowing loudly from farther away on her left side. It stank. Through the trees, she caught glimpses of it. Algae grew on the surface, growing more and more clotted until it was all green. On her right side was a slope too steep to scale. At its crest were tall firs and redwoods. She forced herself to maintain a jog and sought a more gradual grade to climb.

  She found one. Scrambling up, she pressed the baby to her chest and shoved herself through the foliage implacably for a place to hide them. Faint voices came down the trail.

  “Did you see that bitch?”

  “I can’t wait to get this over with. I’m so hungry.”

  Micah and Mars were just the breathing dead. They had been that way all day long, but now she accepted it. It would be better if she killed Mars, rather than let him suffer out here alone. Breaking his neck would be a fast death for him. A woman had done that to her daughter in the confinement point. It wasn’t like Mars would be the first child that Micah had killed.

  She put her hand to his soft blond head. It would be the first child that belonged to her. Her hand fell away and she was reminded of how weak she truly was. There was nothing in her to crouch down, prop him between her knees, and murder him. Just choking off his air briefly had been too much for her.

  Mars was fussing. Building up to another bout of crying and she couldn’t stop it. She felt it in the growing stiffness of his body, the snuffles and whuffles and hitches. He was going to scream and lead them right over . . .

  Then let him lead them.

  She climbed up a short slope, pushed through a thicket of foliage, and looked around to the pocket of a clearing in which they had arrived. The sky was a deep blue overhead. Laying Mars down in the crook of a tree, she whispered, “You’re going to do this with Mama, okay?” He didn’t want to release her hair and wailed when she unwrapped it from his dirty hand.

  “You hear that?”

  “Yeah, off the trail.”

  She wasn’t going to take a bullet in her back. She was going to give them her blade in theirs. Just like she had done on the bridge within the fence, walking up behind that sick man while his attention was on Elania, to stab the blade into his kidney. Mars cried, playing his part perfectly as she slipped out of the clearing and slunk behind bushes to locate the hunters.

  They were climbing up from the trail in the same place she had. The day had wiped them out, too. Both had sweat on their brows and the shorter one was limping a little. The taller man pulled out a flashlight from his belt, pausing to click it on and click it off, click it on in an obsessive-compulsive way.

  Micah crept along, slowly curving so that she could come out of the bushes behind them. Their backpacks had to have food and water. Once these assholes were dead, she would share their contents with Mars, shelter here for the night, and continue on to the coast in the morning.

  She took out the steak knife. Whatever the short one had in the leather sheath was probably better, so that was going to be hers. The baby’s cries were jarring in the quiet. She’d hurt him; she’d starved him; he wanted her regardless. I’m coming back, Marsie. I will always come back to you.

  It was time to close in. She stepped and almost fell flat on her face from her foot catching on the lip of a big rock. The knife was jarred out of her hand. It flipped away and landed out of sight.

  “She’s hiding up there,” one man said in a voice little greater than a whisper.

  “We should just pepper it,” the other man said, in a tone that was tired yet excited, and above all, matter-of-fact. Micah scrabbled through the dense brush to find the knife.

  Then the world was shattered by gunfire. The blasts rang through the air as she spun around in shock, expecting bullets to strike her. But they couldn’t have seen her behind these bushes! Neither had even glanced this way, both trained on the hidden clearing up the slope . . .

  Oh no. Please no.

  She looked through the bushes to the men. They were standing at the foot of the slope, which only ran up about four feet to the wall of foliage there. Bits of leaves and bark drifted down around them. The shots hadn’t been fired at her. Nor had they gotten to the pocket where the baby was hidden. They had just fired (or one had fired, their arms were down and she couldn’t tell who had shot) into the foliage blindly.

  Utter silence had fallen over the woods. Micah’s heart beat painfully. He was swelling up for a huge scream now, full of his rage and fear and hunger, his dislike of loud sounds, his fury at Micah for taking her hair away. The scream was coming from
so deep inside him that it was taking its time to reach the surface. Then it was going to deafen the universe.

  It was silent. The men climbed up the slope and vanished behind the green. She watched them go dumbly.

  She didn’t hear what they said. She was waiting for the baby to scream.

  One minute. Two minutes. Then the men left the pocket. They went north. She followed, moving softly over the earth and stopping to watch when they paused at the end of the woods to talk. Then they went out to a grassy expanse of land and quit for the day.

  Their tents were small, barely big enough to hold one person. Once they had been erected, the men sat down to share a feast from the tall man’s backpack. Sodas and soup, granola bars and candy, sandwiches and packets of nuts and dried fruit, several days’ worth of food had been riding around on his back. The short man was impressed by how much was there. Oh! He never got over being impressed no matter how many times he saw it! The tall one looked over his loot proudly and said, “I was ready. You hear everyone whining about how they didn’t see it coming? Yeah. I saw.”

  “Oh, come on,” the short man retorted. They ate and laughed and stretched out their sore muscles. A flashlight went on and the tall man studied a map of the mountain. His finger traced paths going west. They complained about headlamps with cheap, oversensitive switches that turned on in backpacks and burned out the lithium batteries. Falling back into the grass, the short one sighed. “Poor Benji. He missed out yet again.” Then he made a mocking series of sneezes as if he had allergies.

  Mars had screamed silently and gone to sleep. It had been a warm day but it was cool now, and he needed her body heat for the night. Micah had to go back for him.

  They had played these games too, the other parents around her. This was how they kept their children alive, and themselves, for a little longer. Somewhere out there, Elania’s parents were playing it. They didn’t know for sure that she was dead. There was no evidence. Suspicions weren’t proof.

  He had just gone to sleep.

  The men chattered and chugged two shots each of vodka. They took pisses in the grass and clinked a third shot together. They were no fearsome beasts, these two that had chased her relentlessly through the day. They were just men. The short one had trouble unscrewing the cap of his plastic soda bottle and whined about a repetitive stress injury from a factory job he used to have. The tall one said in just a couple of years, the short one would own the fucking factory.

  Fourth shots, mixed into the soda. Bedtime.

  She committed them to memory and waited for them to retire before she slipped away. Neither of them was standing watch for ferals, because they were tired and they were fools. The tall man was so tall that his feet protruded from the flaps of his tent.

  When she reached the clearing, she knelt down to Mars.

  Her fingers trembled and paused on their path to touch him, and then she forced them onward. He was cool. Picking him up, she cradled him to her. Her tears soaked into his hair as his blood soaked into her heart. Clarissa was watching. Then she disappeared. There was nothing else in Micah for her to see. She had made her judgment from the still form.

  Standing up, Micah pushed through the foliage and went down the slope behind the beam of the flashlight. From there she returned to the trail and crossed it. Slipping and sliding down to the water, she bypassed the algae-choked part to where it had run clear and sweet.

  She found a place with soft earth and dug into it with the fingers of her right hand. Every time she thought about setting Mars down to use both hands, she clung to him more tightly. She couldn’t set him down. Not yet. Not ever.

  The grave was small. When it was finished, she sat there at its edge to hold the baby and listen to the water. A long time passed before she could break her grip and set him down on the ground. He was still wearing the piss-soaked diaper. She unpinned it and took off his bloody truck T-shirt. Cupping water from the creek, she poured it over his body to clean it.

  He just stared. The cold water on his skin should have made him shriek.

  Removing her sweatshirt, she worked it over his head and body. Then she wrapped the arms behind his back and brought them to his front to tie them. It was stupid. But it didn’t seem right to bury him in his wrecked T-shirt and piss. She had treasured this little body. He would go into the darkness wearing something of hers, something she needed more than he did, to show how sorry she was. She would suffer willingly for not protecting him well enough. Her sweatshirt had become his shroud.

  When she picked him up, his head flopped back. She put him down hastily and staggered away to retch at how his head had moved. Then she returned and picked him up with one hand bracing his head so it didn’t move that way again. Like he was broken.

  He needed one more kiss good night, a dozen kisses, a hundred. She gave them to him and sang his lullaby. Then she set his body in the hole. Another long time passed before she could put a handful of dirt on him. She did it very gently, starting at his feet and moving up his body handful by handful. She didn’t want to put dirt on his lips, block that scream that could still be building to blow. The gunshots had been so very loud.

  Grains of dirt began to appear on his chin and cheeks when she reached his chest. It was with a sob that she shoveled the rest of the dirt over his face. She smoothed it down and sat there for hours. Listening for his scream.

  He never made a sound.

  He had stepped from the void only last year and now he had returned to it. If only she could feel what the others did, some certainty that one day they’d all be reunited in a paradise, but she felt in her bones that what came next was absence. There was no holy roll call in which Mars’ name had just appeared, no angels coming forth to give him wings and take him home. He was gone from everything. Eradicated except for the shell of his body, and what of his life lived in her mind.

  She was his home. But he didn’t need a home any more. Smoothing the dirt of the grave, she wrote his name into it with her finger. MARS CAMBORNE. She couldn’t leave the dates when she didn’t know if Halloween was his true birthday, nor did she know what the date was today.

  It took her four attempts to make a dove, the rough drafts wiped clean with a pass of her hand until a good one took shape. Then she withdrew her steak knife and sawed through her hair. Why had she been carrying this weight around for so long? It was a pain to keep clean and wasted her time. All it did was make her look young and female and attractive, none of which worked in her favor.

  The strands broke roughly at the sawing of the knife. It was a sharp, hard sound in the quiet. This hair belonged to Mars, the hair he had loved to hold. At first she dropped the strands willy-nilly, but then she collected them into one spot. Every time she tugged at another lock to rid herself of it, she felt Mars’ hand tugging in her memory.

  Someone watching would think she had gone crazy. That someone had never put a child in the earth.

  Her hair was just above her shoulders when she finished. It was ragged at the ends. She pressed all of the bluish and brown strands together and tied each end with a tendril of grass. The long swathe of hair was placed under his name.

  “Mama loves you,” she whispered. Mama loved him so much. There would be no child from her body or outside it in this life. Everything of hers had belonged to him, and he was gone. She would only ever look at another child with emptiness. All she had to offer Mars now was her loyalty.

  No. There was one other thing she had to give him.

  They were just men, and they were drunk and sleeping. She would give them to him, make them tell Mars why they had done what they did. They would introduce themselves to her ghostly son at the point of her knife. They would tell him about their lives while she whittled away their fingers and toes, bit them and passed on her infection. They would apologize before she spilled their steaming innards in search of their hearts. Bullets were too good for them. Bullets were a kindness and she wanted to cause them pain.

  The bullets were for her, for l
ater.

  Once they were dead, she would leave them in the grass to feed the wildlife so that something good could come of them. And then she would turn back to the mountain, armed with her knife that had once cut some Sausalito yuppie’s steak, her gun with no bullets, a pair of loaded handguns, a blade in a leather sheath, and a semi-automatic with plenty of ammo. She had her baggie of foul teriyaki beef jerky and now two backpacks stuffed with supplies. She had a couple of Zyllevir pills and the clothes on her back, a flashlight to trade out with her newer, better ones that would come from those men. Click on. Click off. Click on.

  That was all. That was enough.

  But she also had the badge, Mars’ blue badge that he’d chewed on every day. That was unnecessary weight, just like her long hair. There was no reason for it to ride along with her.

  As she walked in the direction of the men’s campsite to claim her goods, she slipped the star from her pocket. Keeping it served no purpose. Mars didn’t need it, and Micah had no use for it. She ran her fingers over it one last time and flicked it away into the shrubbery.

  It didn’t hurt any more than losing valedictorian had hurt. The star existed within another empty pocket in her brain. Its only meaning had been in the hands to hold it, the gums to gnaw on it. With those gone, the star wasn’t anything but a star. It was just junk that Austin had discovered under a back seat of a car in San Francisco. Only in Mars’ hands had it transformed.

  She was going to spend the rest of her life waiting for him to scream. That was what it meant to be the parent of a dead child. Her body would be ever poised to respond to him until the moment death took her. Micah hoped it came soon. Waiting for him to scream, knowing he never would, hurt too much to be borne.