The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Now she had no balance. All of those men and women on the mountain had their balances. They were here before Micah as their parents hunted, a boy shouting ready-set-go, a flurry of long legs shooting by and shorter, chubbier ones chugging along in their wake. The littlest was a girl with nothing on but a saggy diaper. At the end of each race, she came in last and raised her fists in the air like she’d won. A mutt joined in the fun, barking happily at the excitement.

  There were tons of tents past the fires. Nothing signified which one contained the fuel. She wanted to make that dragon roar over the camp, to strike panic into the hearts of the hunters with it. To send them flying down the slopes, screaming and shouting for the girl in the diaper, the ready-set-go boy, the dozen more lining up for a new race. Their babies, oh God, their babies, oh God, oh please, anything but that . . . don’t take away our babies even though we take away other people’s babies . . .

  No dragons. She gave off her dream of fire reluctantly as a gunshot rang out on the mountain. Micah stared out to the darkness where someone with Sombra C was likely falling, or running away in fear for his or her life. Perhaps with a child in arms.

  So blithely had they destroyed Micah. So blithely would they have done the same to Esme. And for nothing.

  An adult voice from those doing the dishes rang out with a ten-minute warning. Then it was time for the littlest ones to be washed up and put to bed. The pack of children barely acknowledged the warning, all except for a barefoot, mathematically-challenged boy who yelled defiantly that he wasn’t going to bed for five minutes, not ten. The adults laughed. Sure, kiddo. Five then.

  Micah’s hand moved to the automatic. So blithely could she destroy them. She could wait until the hunters returned and were seated at those tables to eat dinner. Then she’d spray the campsite with bullets and turn their home into carnage just as that stupid holiday party had been turned into one for her. Nobody would see her out here in this unlit area. Wedged into bushes, she was invisible. But her bullets would kill them, so the lesson they learned wasn’t one that they’d hold for long.

  There was something even worse she could do.

  No. Wrong, wrong, that was so very wrong.

  Why was it wrong? Why exactly?

  A bullet in her flesh wouldn’t hurt half as much as the bullet in Mars’ little body. She rested the automatic on the top of the fence and took the measure of the children there. Fourteen of them, eight boys and six girls, a tumble of arms and legs and black holes of mouths sucking in air. They came to the end of their latest race and the toddler clapped for herself.

  They could run in the darkness of the afterlife, Mars crowing on a blanket as he watched. She was going to send him playmates. Her finger slipped to the trigger and she hesitated. For some reason, her mind alighted on Zaley. Mousy Zaley, who always surprised Micah on the occasions she showed she was in possession of a pair after all. There was only so far you could push a mouse before it bit. Fuck you to the high school student body that harassed her for hanging out with Sombra Cs; fuck you to her father and mother; fuck you to the Shepherds for taking Micah and Elania, Corbin and Austin away into the confinement point. Zaley lived, or had lived, a very quiet and understated fuck you life.

  The memory of Zaley was making her hesitate. The kids at the water’s edge hadn’t done anything to Micah. There could be a Zaley among them. But she had been one non-asshole out of a million assholes, and the odds weren’t great that these kids were going to be anything more than their parents. And today . . . today they weren’t anything more. Today was all that existed, and there was just a slim and unrealized potential.

  Wrong. Austin pressed up close in her mind and tilted the gun up and away. They’re just babies. Babies, Micah.

  A gun blasted on the mountain again. Cold stole through her body, taking away everything but the slight pressure of her hair in an inquisitive grip. What the hunters had taken away from her, she would take away from them. They came to the mountain to tame it, and they would leave tamed instead. They would know that they had never had all of the power here.

  She aimed at the children. They were standing in a big group by a fire now, all of them eating a treat. The mutt snuffled at the ground for dropped goodies. Their mouths worked and their throats bulged in swallows. One showed another a stained tongue and their laughter pealed. “It’s blue! It’s blue! What color is mine?” “You’re green like boogars! Yuck!” Meanwhile, Mars was decomposing.

  Wrong.

  In that moment, she didn’t care. I love you, baby boy.

  She aimed at the heart of the pack, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.

  Her eyes were still clenched shut as she weaved the automatic around in her mental image of where they were standing. The noise of it deafened her. When the gun ran out of bullets, she chucked it around to her back and didn’t look over the fence. She just couldn’t. It was done and she couldn’t take it back, so there was no need to look. Dimly through the ringing in her ears, she heard screaming.

  If she had done that much, she might as well do more. She was going to let loose the dragon, burn down the world for burning down hers. Everyone would pay for what she’d lost; everyone would be punished; everyone would cry. Uncapping the gas can, she poured the two gallons of fuel swiftly over the dry grass in a sloppy M shape, the tips of the letter touching the fence. Then she stepped back, lit a match, and flicked it over.

  Fuck you.

  She walked away as flame ripped into the air. It was time to finish that journey to Arquin, the one that they had made for life but the one that ended in death. If there were nothing to see, nothing but grass and trees where a base should be, then she’d make every last day of hers count. Find this Sweet Song in Marin and show them how their safety was purchased with Mars’ life. They would bleed for him. Then she would embrace the dark when the virus nibbled too much away, just like how she’d been embracing it since she stood over those sleeping hunters who killed her child.

  The fire moved fast, but the breeze guided it away from her. When she had enough distance, and was standing upon the crest of a small hill, she looked to the camp through her binoculars. The baby dragon had grown to a fearsome monster in hardly any time, bellowing forks of flame into the early night. Dark figures ran around hysterically in the camp, and cars were peeling out on the road. No longer was anyone firing on the mountain.

  She had avenged him. But she still had empty arms. It was Pyrrhic. If Arquin turned out to be nothing, and after Sweet Song had bled, she would go to his grave. There she would dig a grave beside his, descend into the cool earth, and bury herself to the chest. She’d shoot herself with her one arm left free and fall back to rest with him.

  She would cede to that bullet. More than cede. She welcomed it.

  Two cars collided in the road. A third car didn’t brake in time and rammed into the bumper of the second, which propelled it forward to knock into the first again. A fourth car swung off the road and cut through the brush to go around. People piled out of the totaled second car and ran for it. One held a child prostrate in his arms. The nearest city was a good distance away, and the night held ferals along the route. Instead of eating a nice dinner and bunking down for the night, she’d sent them fleeing into hell.

  Good. That was where they sent her.

  She trained the binoculars on the dragon, which opened its mouth wide to eat the world. She hadn’t had enough formula for her baby, but the dry ground itself was food for this child of hers. This one could banquet to its heart’s content. What it needed to survive was everywhere.

  If the wind changed, it would catch Micah and eat her alive. And as its mother, the one who should go before, she would let herself be consumed.

  On her lips was a hint of a smile, but her eyes were filled with tears.

  Austin

  On the base was a tiny chapel. It was really just a corner out of the way where people stuck pictures to the wall and burned candles on a shelf beneath. The roof was a tarp that rippled
and flapped in the breeze. The pictures of the dead had one side of the wall, the presumed dead had the other side, and the we-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-happened-to-them outlined everything. Austin found the chapel after days spent recovering in the base hospital. The glow of the candles in the night led him there. There was something holy to him in how that light had beckoned to a lost soul and drawn him close. God wanted him to find this place.

  Tanya Johnson had died on the third of June, struck by Shepherd fire outside the Sonoma harbor. That was a certain death, her name and the dates of her life written on a scrap of paper beside her picture. She had been a month past her twenty-second birthday. Jake Mornie and his guys had gotten hijacked on the road. Every body was found in a pile except for his. That was a presumed death, but there was a hopeful question mark after the date. Perhaps the militia responsible took him captive and planned to demand a ransom for his return. As time went on and the demand never surfaced, that seemed less and less likely. But no one ever scribbled over the question mark and moved his picture to the known dead where all of his compatriots were smiling. Then there were Karl Wang and Jesus Sanchez, and their pictures were part of the outline of mysteries. They had gone on some mission that had to do with ferals, and simply evanesced. Austin never got the full story from the man who was praying to those pictures one night.

  A statue of the Virgin Mary stood among the candles, along with trinkets belonging to the deceased. It wasn’t only soldiers’ pictures on the wall. Family members and friends who had died or gone missing were up there, too. If there weren’t pictures, then the names were tacked up on scraps of paper. There was even a picture of a cat. Austin had lifted bare scraps of paper from under a candleholder and added in his names. Brennan Ortega. Elania Douglas. Bleu Cheese. On that one, he drew a little ink picture of a dog so no one would think he was being a jerk and putting up the name of a salad dressing as a joke. If he’d seen Tuna Salad or Burrito Supreme up there, that was what he would have assumed. A prankster was mourning food in a place meant to mourn family and friends. Dear Diet Cherry Pizoom, I love you and miss you so very, very much.

  It was both a resting place and one of uncertainty, but always memory. He went there every night, got on his knees upon the bar and bent his head to the wall. Once, while he was doing that, a soldier came in. He affixed a new picture and name on the dead side. The date of death was only the day before. Austin just nodded to the guy. People didn’t usually talk much in the chapel. The guy stared at the photo and then he said, “Know who this was?”

  The fellow in the picture was a stranger to Austin. “No. I’m sorry.”

  “He was a good man,” the guy said, and walked out.

  After a week of recovery, being in bed had really begun to grate on Austin. A few new people with Sombra C had come in, but they didn’t keep him company long. Most just wanted Zyllevir and needed a little medical care, and cleared out to go on their way. The badly wounded soldiers were taken to the depot to be transferred by train to a better hospital. So Austin just lay there hour after hour, or sat at the window, alone and bored. There usually wasn’t much going on outside. Soldiers walked here and there, some of them carrying boxes or equipment. Trucks droned by after receiving a thorough check-over at the gate. One stopped while he was watching and three guys ran over to form a line at the back. Their guns were aimed. Someone opened it up and they shot as one. Then a body was brought out, wrapped in plastic and loaded onto another truck, and taken out of the base. The first truck was cleaned out thoroughly.

  Austin grumbled at the nurses for something to do and was swiftly placed in the Sombra C chow hall as a food service worker. They were always short hands in there. Non-infected workers flat-out refused to go inside, and the infected ones had mostly left for the harbor. He hadn’t meant his grumbles to be taken seriously, and learned a lesson about complaining to very tired and overworked people. They weren’t going to sit around and commiserate with him, or dredge up magazines and books to pass the time. They dumped a job in his lap and told him to get out of bed. Well enough to complain meant well enough to work.

  He ended up liking the kitchen. He didn’t get paid, but no one was getting paid. He had a place to sleep at night, three meals a day, Zyllevir and medical treatment, and the safety that came from being surrounded by tons of soldiers. Militia had tried to take the base and failed. They hadn’t tried again.

  A woman named Betsy ruled the chow hall. She was like Austin, a wounded Sombra C who’d come in and hadn’t left. A heavy, middle-aged woman, she was layered with just as much muscle as fat and powered through the day like her blood was made of caffeine. The soldiers were her boys and girls, and some of them called her Mom.

  Every time a delivery of strange food came in, her voice cracked through the air. “What the hell am I going to do with that?” And then she did something with it, and taught Austin and the lone other kitchen worker to do the same. The Sombra C soldiers coming in for a meal knew that it was going to be shit chow, it was the Army after all, but Betsy’s job was to make it edible shit chow. If they had wanted edible food, she said, they should have joined the Navy.

  The second kitchen worker was a badly wounded private named Manzer. Shot and burned, infected and partially blinded, he had a bad limp and two fingers missing from his hands. Kitchen work was all he could do, and that just barely. His voice shook when he spoke. He really should have gone with the transfers to the better hospital, but he had fought to stay. “What am I g-going to do there? Sit in a bed and have doctors poke at me now and then, wait around five decades to die?” he asked Austin. In the kitchen, Manzer had a purpose. He couldn’t do much, but he could do something.

  Betsy gave him the easiest work, assigned the mid-level to Austin, and did the bulk of it herself. She was going with the soldiers up north. They already had a Sombra C staff wherever it was that they were going, so they were just dropping her off in Oregon at a harbor. Oregon was her childhood home. That was why she hadn’t gone to Sonoma. Her son’s name was up on the wall in a what-the-fuck corner, as he was part of a convoy that vanished in the south. He was in the Army like her husband had been, and her father and grandfather, too. Their family was military going back a hundred years plus, so she knew how things worked and how things used to work and how everything would work better if she were in charge. Her grandfather was the only man on God’s green earth who had ever expressed missing C-Rations. The guy was crackers. She bought him a vintage set dating back to the Korean War off an online bidder for a joke one Christmas and dammit if he hadn’t eaten them. Loved those jelly bars.

  Austin’s bullet wound wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t put in a good day’s work, and what he did felt so important that he pushed through the pain. Manzer couldn’t do things; Betsy was doing too much. Everyone came through those doors needing the solace of a meal. Their work was grueling and they’d all lost friends; some were injured and refusing to quit. It had to get done. Austin had to get his work done, too. A little old stabbing in his side could be powered through, and the choice was to power through it or go back to being alone in his hospital bed.

  A pair of soldiers gave him funny looks on his first day serving food in the chow hall and made unfriendly comments to one another about a new queer. They saw right through him in seconds, read his soul as easily as a page of a book. The straight filter. He dusted it off and transformed, keen to the danger he could be in if he failed. Micah was his girlfriend and they’d gotten separated on the way here. She had a baby boy and Austin was going to adopt him when they got married. Here’s the picture! He heard his mother say quiet your hands. He kept them busy at his tasks.

  By the third day of work, he wasn’t sure that he was in that much danger. They were mostly good guys, just a few assholes sprinkled among them. But their presence was enough for him to keep up the charade. Despite the picture and happy heterosexual family story, one guy still persisted in harassing Austin. That was Private Kobe Hooter, whose last name Manzer couldn’t spea
k or hear without giggling. Manzer said Hooter was a neo-Nazi from the backwoods town of Ignoramus, Texas. The Ignoramus part was a joke. No one but Manzer could disrespect Texas, since he came from there. The Army had been in such dire need of troops in Afghanistan that it accepted some gang members and extremists to fill out the ranks, even convicted criminals who were given a moral waiver. Hooter was proof of a lax policy in action. He didn’t have the freedom to walk around yelling his neo-Nazi beliefs, but everyone knew what he was and that he was proud of it. He had major beef with another private, who was black and just as racist going the other way. That one never had a sour word to say to Austin.

  It was only verbal diarrhea spilling from Hooter’s lips as he got his meals time after time, and then he went away. Oh look, fag chili today! Austin pretended to be a straight guy playing gay, a hand on the hip, a flip of his head, and flutter of his fingers. That’s ZOMBIE fag chili to you. People laughed. Of course Austin wasn’t gay. He had a girlfriend and a kid, for Christ’s sake. Austin laughed riotously and loathed himself for having to do it. Gays are funny! All they do is dance around with boas and arrange flowers, stick cocks up their butts and own little dogs. That summed up the whole experience of being gay, put it in a nice, neat nutshell for dumb people to understand. He wished that stupid soldier could live a couple of days in Austin’s not-so-funny gay life. Like the ones in the confinement point. Just hysterical.

  There was some consolation in that a lot of people didn’t like Hooter either. One evening, a newly infected soldier came into the chow hall and burst into tears over his tray when he sat down. Hooter mocked the tears, but almost everyone else was kind. They yelled at Hooter to shove it up his zombie ass and told their stories to the new guy of how Sombra C had caught them out. Sex, feral bites, contaminated equipment, one of the women came up positive on a test and no one ever figured out how she was exposed. She just passed out from fever at her post and they tested her for the virus on a whim. Two days later, she woke up in a hospital bed with a red necklace and a bottle of Zyllevir.