The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  A year ago in July, Dad had been stacking up his toilet paper hoard in the laundry room and watching the news on television obsessively. If anyone had told Zaley where she would be today, picking through a field of cow carcasses, she wouldn’t have believed it. Now that house seemed unbelievable.

  They reached the trees and waited there. The blaring came in and out as the vehicle drove around the hills. “What the hell is that idiot doing?” Zaley whispered.

  “Who knows?” Corbin asked as a pick-up shot by. It was too dark to see the person behind the wheel. He or she drove on into town with the horn still going. Zaley scratched her leg. Her hand came away wet. She’d brushed against a carcass. Disgusted, she wiped it off on the scratchy grass.

  Back on the road, they walked for miles until they reached the dull black surface of a lake surrounded by reeds. It had to be Laguna Lake, although again, there were no helpful signs around to confirm it. They searched for proof of a military base and came up short. The world was so big, and it was so easy to hide something upon it. Zaley was nearly in tears as they walked down to the water. Corbin said thoughtfully, “They didn’t say around Laguna Lake. Close to it.”

  “But we’re close to it and we don’t see anything.”

  “It’ll be easier to do this by day. What about those hills there? If we climbed to the top, we could see out to a wider range.”

  Ferals came to the water to drink and stopped them from going any farther. Taking shelter in the reeds, Zaley looked up to the sky. Corbin picked up a fallen sign and read it out loud. “Don’t . . . bother the swans.” Putting it down, he flicked off the flashlight to wait for the ferals to move off. “I could eat a swan. But that probably qualifies as bothering them.”

  By the end of the night, they were climbing up a hill on a dirt path. Fog was rolling in heavily. The vista at the top was simply a sea of white in the early morning light. Zaley took it in and just said, “Fuck you.”

  “It’ll burn off,” Corbin said. “We haven’t seen as many ferals around. Not like in Novato and along the freeway. I’ve counted ten or so instead of fifty plus.”

  If Zaley could have melted fog with her temper, it would be gone. Yet everything else had been difficult. This was no better or worse than before. Then her heart stuttered. “I’m mad, Corbin.”

  “You’re frustrated.”

  “No, I’m mad. Isn’t emotional volatility a symptom of Sombra C?” If she had Sombra C and the pills weren’t working for her . . . oh God. They’d worked for Elania for several months before pooping out. For some people, they never worked at all. A couple of weeks since the initial infection was enough time for the virus to have damaged her brain.

  Corbin tilted her head to his and shined the flashlight directly into her eyes. She yanked away and said, “Corbin! That would hurt anyone!”

  “Are you stiff anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Forgetting things?”

  “How would I know if I’d forgotten?”

  “Tell me everything. Everything you remember about us from the day we first met.” They sat against a tree and covered themselves in a towel for warmth. She detailed the mutual idiocy of their coming together years ago and went on from there to this cold spot upon a hill five or six miles outside of Petaluma.

  The fog was still thick when she finished, having remembered more than Corbin did. Reassured that her brain was working fine, her anger at another inconvenience had passed. Using her stick, she recreated what she recalled of the map going west from the city. There were only so many roads that passed close to the lake, but she still didn’t have time to wander around all of them. As Corbin drew trucks along the roads with a twig, Zaley said, “They don’t disappear. They go to the base. We just have to watch the roads and wait for one to pass by.”

  “North or south of the lake first?” Corbin said.

  She couldn’t believe that she was going to suggest this. “I’ll watch the south and you watch the north. If we go together one way and we’re wrong, we’ve wasted an entire day.”

  Corbin stared at her in disbelief. “You want to split up?”

  That was the last thing she wanted to do. “If there is no base, we have to get to Sonoma. Time isn’t on our side, so we need to speed this up. We can meet up here at this tree, or down at the lake. The lake is better.” There wasn’t anything in particular about this tree that stood out. The lake was easy to find and impossible to mix up with anything else.

  He argued, and she was almost hoping that he’d argue her out of it. But she ended up going south alone with her heart in her throat. Once she got to a place that overlooked the road, she would hide herself well. She had a water bottle and food, her dog-beating stick and the dull blade, and when life boiled down to essentials, there wasn’t much more that anyone needed than that.

  At the moment, her body was so on alert that she felt like she could stay awake for the rest of the year. Yet she wouldn’t even be able to stay awake all day long. Her sleep would have to be light, as much as she could control that, so the sounds of a truck would wake her up.

  The fog burned off little by little. She hiked along the crest of the hills, slipping down slopes and climbing again. The only feral she came across was dead. Naked, bloated, and seething with insects, she gave the body a wide berth. She also left a lot of space between herself and a rocky overhang that was very dark underneath.

  When she arrived at the hill overlooking the road, she considered her options. The hill was bare bones, a swath of grass that ran down from the crest to the base. She was far too visible up here and there were trees on the other side of the road where she could take cover. As afternoon wore to evening, the road would lead her straight back to the lake.

  She got to the bottom of the slope without keeling over and crossed the road. Cautiously, she entered the shade and breathed in a bad smell. At first she believed a body was around, but the stench was coming from her own shirts. The new T-shirt was fine; her old one and her sweatshirt reeked. She had them all on for warmth. Washing it in a sink with hand soap now and then wasn’t getting rid of the smell.

  It took a long time to find a suitable tree, one that gave her a view of the road, had easy branches to climb, and ones low enough for her to grab. She worked herself upwards until she was well off the ground and had a snippet of the lanes visible between the leaves. It occurred to her if a truck went by, she couldn’t descend fast to follow. But it was too late now. Her right arm ached and she massaged it. Seven months after the gunshot, her arm was functional enough to climb a tree. Her physical therapist would have been pleased. She hadn’t wanted to perform professional jumping jacks anyway.

  Backing into a nook of the trunk, she leaned against it and closed her eyes to listen to the sounds of the day. Birds and breeze, her own breath, it was otherwise a still world. She wanted a cell phone to call or text Corbin, to tell him where she was and ask if he had seen anything. The ticking of her internal clock was making her desperate. Corbin didn’t have time to waste. She might not have time to waste either.

  Through the hours, she saw nothing but birds sweeping along in the sky. A hawk dove after starlings. She dozed lightly after wedging her body farther into the nook to keep from falling out.

  A shout woke her. A man was wandering down the road with his hand over his eyes. Although he didn’t have a limp, the light was bugging him and the shout had been wordless and nonsensical. Seeking shade, he came to the trees thirty feet away from her and stood by a trunk. Then he farted and diarrhea rained out the legs of his shorts. Bizarrely, he took off his shirt while doing it. His brain still grasped that a piece of clothing had to come off for bathroom needs, but not which piece.

  This could be Zaley one day. She felt fine, but Corbin felt fine, too.

  The guy dropped his shirt into the shit and stood there with a blank expression. Zaley watched him nervously until he walked away. The breeze picked up the smell of his rancid diarrhea and carried it to her. The guy looped through
the trees, gradually moving farther and farther away. Then he shouted again. It almost sounded like a call for help, but one that was coming out wrong.

  The afternoon passed with no vehicle ever coming down the road. Nor did any more ferals appear, or anyone at all. She passed in and out of sleep, dreaming of nothing when unconscious and thinking of little when awake. There was only Zaley and the tree and the road, a bad smell and the sounds of birds.

  When it was time to leave, she climbed down with excessive care. Her arm didn’t like the activity, but handled it all the same. When she got to the ground, she stepped on her healing ankle rather than favoring it, and it held up without a twinge. A chicken pecked around by the bushes and she thought about clubbing it dead for food. Like it could read her mind, it dashed away and disappeared. Food and water, shelter and medication, the heat of Corbin’s hands on her skin . . . with the fall of the country, her life had been pared down to the absolute necessities. Nothing else mattered.

  Annoyed and upset, she slipped through the trees to the empty road. They were going to find the base, they had to find it, but it wasn’t going to happen today. And even now, Corbin could be antsy as he waited at the lake, wanting to tell her something good.

  The wind tossed locks of her hair into her face and she swiped them aside. Her eyes skirting around for danger and her posture crouched in case she had to run, Zaley wondered what her former self would say to the strange picture she made now. A silent, stealthy figure with shaggy hair, ragged clothes, and a weapon in hand, she was no test-dreading suburban schoolgirl anymore. Just a wild sight to match this wild world.

  Corbin

  Every time he reached the top of a hill, he spied a better one and scaled it. At last he got to a modestly glorious vista, in which lesser hills and valleys full of pastures spilled out before him to the north and west. The roads and driveways were gray curves and angles throughout it. He could almost imagine the world was fine. There were no bodies either human or animal around here, broken glass or scorched ground or crumpled cars. Everything was at peace. But the traffic that had to happen occasionally along these roads was missing. Also, he could smell a body faintly, even if he couldn’t see it.

  His eyes crawled over the land piece by piece, seeking anything that looked big enough to be a base. The largest structures were only barns, and smaller ones were houses. So he was left to watching the roads, which he couldn’t do from this peak if he was sitting down. And he had to sit down. He’d been awake all through the night and now the morning. Wishing they hadn’t separated and that he had Bleu Cheese for company and protection, he settled down by a tree and warned himself not to sleep too deeply. If he missed a truck full of soldiers, he’d kick himself. But he wouldn’t know if he slept through it.

  Though he was tired, it was hard to fall asleep with the world so bright and awake around him. He thought pleasantly of sex and drifted on the memory. It had felt so good to him, if awkward, and he was sorry that it hurt Zaley a little. Not screaming pain but uncomfortable at times. Her body was so soft and curvy, pink and warm . . . the sense of softness continued in his dreams, and he woke up in a stiff state of appreciation that had to be ignored. Someone was honking a horn. It wasn’t the weirdo from last night who brayed it unceasingly, just a polite tap-tap-tap.

  Leaping up, he looked down the hill to the vehicle on the nearest road. It was a farm truck, battered and dirty, the driver honking at a loose cow that had stopped in the road. Placidly, it stood there and chewed its cud while contemplating the presence of the truck. Then it moved on to step over a drainage ditch, and from there it passed through a broken fence to a reservoir. The water was low. The truck eased on down the road. The back was covered in paintings of tiny white and brown objects. Eggs in nests. Words were written above and below the nests, but they were too small for Corbin to read.

  Pulling into the next driveway, the truck weaved up it and parked between a house and a barn. An obese old man climbed out and unloaded baskets from the trunk, which he carried into the barn stack by stack. Two big brown dogs had also gotten out of the cab and were following him in and out. Neither bothered the chickens, which were everywhere. Corbin looked back to the road. No one else was going by.

  Used to getting four to five hours of sleep by now, which was what he gauged that he had had, he searched the land again. Close to Laguna Lake. Close would be within a few miles. They had to do this logically if a military vehicle didn’t pass through the area. That meant walking these roads one by one, making a grid with the lake in the center. He’d insist that they walk them together.

  For now, he had to get to the lake. It was going to be a long walk and the sun was past the apex of the sky. He waited another few minutes for a truck, but the only action was the cow wandering off from its drink at the reservoir to scratch its back against a tree, and the fat guy going into the house while his dogs rested in the shade of the barn.

  The way that Corbin had come to the crest was on the steep side, so he cast about for another way down. Pushing through the trees and thickets of brush going straight west would eventually dump him out into a grassy stretch at a more gradual angle, and then he’d cross over one more line of hills to the lake. Zaley was going to argue about his method of locating the base (God, he loved when she forgot herself and argued with him), but Corbin would prevail. He didn’t want to sit around and hope for trucks. In only a few days, he would be overdue for Zyllevir, and perhaps she would be as well. They were going to spend those days actively searching. That would be difficult when there weren’t good places to hide along the roads in case of trouble, but working in their favor was that he’d only seen one damn vehicle the whole day.

  Passing a dead feral between thickets, he didn’t bother to note anything about it. He saw bodies everyday, ranging from freshly dead to skeletal. It was just part of the American landscape now. He kept on thinking about breasts, which had featured prominently in his dream, and remembered how a guy at school once said fake ones felt hard. They looked huge and sexy, but they lost some of the softness. Corbin liked the softness better. Zaley’s breasts blew his mind and he didn’t want a girlfriend with massive porn star boobs, totally disproportionate to her frame. A girl came with breasts. Breasts didn’t come with a girl. Unless he was watching porn. That had been a long time ago.

  Guys never looked awkward when they were having sex on-screen. They knew exactly what to do. Corbin wished that he knew exactly what to do with sex. He wanted it to be good for both of them, not just him. They’d taken to naming the porn videos they were going to shoot in the future as a joke. Passion of the Zombie. Sombra Sexy. Big Bouncing Ferals IV.

  Stamp Me Hard. Oh, that was a good one. He was going to tell her that tonight and make her shake in their bedding from keeping her laughter down. The sequel would be Stamp Me Harder.

  As he pushed through shrubs, he heard a strange whistle. It was followed by a shock of pain. Crumpling down into scrubby grass, he dropped his bow and stared at his right leg. Metal jaws had snapped over his calf and were grinding into his flesh.

  It was a leg hold trap. The pain was excruciating. He fumbled at the jaws to pry them apart. All of his strength did nothing to loosen the metal clamped around him, and piercing into him. Blood stained his jeans. The trap was rusty and underneath where it had been was a dead patch of grass from how long it had been out here.

  A chain led away from the trap and attached to a loop that was wound around the narrow middle of a fallen log. Dragging himself over to it, Corbin yanked at the rusted links fruitlessly. They didn’t snap. His foot was going numb, and his last pull was so desperate that the log itself moved. But the chain didn’t do a damn thing.

  If he could step on either side of the trap, force the jaws to release . . . but one of his legs was in the trap. No, the springs! It had springs. He was so frantic to get it off that he wasn’t thinking straight. He pressed down hard on the springs.

  Nothing. This piece of shit on his leg didn’t have a brand en
graved on it anywhere. It looked homemade. There weren’t safety catches or anything. The log was too thick on its ends to slide off the metal noose. It moved again when he pulled, creeping millimeters over the grass in his direction.

  Animals chewed their own legs off when they got stuck in traps like these. They didn’t feel the pain of it, the circulation cut off and the leg going bad. Corbin cringed at the thought of sawing his leg off with the knife he had. He could yell for help, but Zaley wouldn’t ever hear him at this distance. The only people he’d attract were the kinds that weren’t going to be any help whatsoever.

  He had to drag the log to the lake.

  Corbin stared out at all of the space that separated him from the bottom of the hill, let alone the field past it. Then there was the climb up the next hill and another descent to reach the lake. All of it he’d have to do on his ass, dragging a log for the ride and moving only a tiny bit each time. If Zaley couldn’t get it off, then what the hell were they going to do? He couldn’t drag the log all the way back into town. It was going to take him days just to get to the lake! His leg would be rotting off by the time he got to her, or he’d never get to her because ferals had torn him apart. The only other person around was the guy with the egg truck.

  The lake wasn’t doable. The egg man was. The house and the barn weren’t more than half a mile away, if that. If the man refused to help . . . if he saw the stamp . . . Corbin wouldn’t be any worse off than he was at present.

  Swearing and bleeding, he tossed his backpack and bow through the crack in the shrubs. Then he leaned back and pulled on the log. It came along reluctantly from a groove in the earth. The chain slackened and Corbin scooted back on his butt. He pulled the log a second time, hating himself for not looking down as he had walked. The log was roughly seven feet long, a foot in diameter, and heavy as hell. When it caught between the shrubs, Corbin fought to turn it and then inched it through. It took him a terribly long time to travel the short distance to the crest where he’d been standing.