The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Do you sleep here? How many people live outside the harbor all the time?” Zaley asked innocently.

  “Yeah, I got a tent, but I just came up yesterday to do some business this morning, and I’m going to head back home now. Should have left a while ago, but it’s nice to see people. I’m one of the only ones left on my street.” His lasciviousness faded with the lack of an appreciative audience. Now he was just looking at her like a regular guy. “A bunch of them stay here all day and all night. Not me though. I’m busy collecting scrap lead.”

  “What for?”

  “My friend and I cast bullets. California banned lead wheel weights years ago, so that’s too bad for us. Those wouldn’t be so hard to find. So I look for old racecars, go to hospitals and dentist offices, roof jacks, lead head nails, water department has old lead goosenecks-”

  He wanted to impress her. “Careful. I’m going to steal your business.”

  Earnestly, he said, “You tell me if you got racecars around your block no one’s driving and I’ll cut you in on the profit. I got chased away from a car last week. I thought it was abandoned but apparently it wasn’t.”

  “How do you make bullets out of all that stuff?”

  “Melt it down, scrape off the impurities, pour in a mold, and then there’s our trade secrets. Anyway . . . do you need some? We make really good ones.” He patted a sagging fanny pack at his waist. “We trade for food, pills, whatever you got.”

  She didn’t have food or pills, and she wasn’t going to have sex with him for bullets. Unless he knew a secret passage into the harbor . . . that was a sick thought to consider. “No thanks. I have enough.”

  “Word of advice: don’t let anyone else ever hear you say that.” He gestured to her gun, and also the puukko knife in its sheath at her waist. “If you’ve got bullets or you don’t want that knife, you can barter. The bullets will be worth more than the knife.”

  “So instead of selling myself to you, you can sell yourself to me?” Zaley laughed and he gave her a charming smile. He had just been playing pervert for his friends. “I got to head home. Nice talking to you.”

  She cut through the trees to the potholed road that would guide her back to the market, and looked away from the break that led to the ravine. Most everyone had given off the search and returned to whichever side of the harbor they called home. Passing the bushes where the woman on the bike had spied the rustling, she wondered if Corbin was still hidden behind them. There wasn’t any way to look. A guy farther down on the road was staring her way.

  He held up his hand when she got to him, asked her identity and stared at her neck. Someone shouted she’s local, it’s cool and his entire demeanor changed in an instant. He got out of her way with a smile. A few hands lifted to wave at Zaley, who said thanks when they wished her luck with her obsessive feral. A man hollered don’t worry, he’ll be dead soon and voices carried around the tents with her description of the zombie. The crazy old woman’s stamina was unstoppable; she was still waving her signs in the air and marching on the shell of the egg she had cracked earlier.

  When Zaley got to the driveway where she needed to turn, she couldn’t do so. Another guy was standing in the lanes. He called, “Oh, are you that girl? Better jog fast. It’ll be evening soon.” She agreed and jogged away. Going around the curve, she searched for a way to get up to that house. The driveways she passed were on the wrong side of the hill. Eventually, she just picked the most gradual part of a slope to climb up into the trees.

  Then she heard voices. They were familiar, belonging to some of the people who had helped out with the search. Zaley slipped down the slope to the road. She jogged back to the guy who was blocking her from the driveway. “You know, it’s going to get dark before I can get home. Is it okay if I sleep here in one of those abandoned tents and go home in the morning?”

  She was instructed to take one and drag it beside the others, since the abandoned ones were checked for ferals after darkness fell. Dutifully, she selected a fairly unmarked tent that was easy to move and pulled it across the road. Once the coast was clear, if a moment of that sort presented itself, she’d slip away in the night . . . except she didn’t have a flashlight, so she wasn’t going anywhere. She also didn’t have her Zyllevir, and this was the night that she was supposed to take it.

  The tents on the north side didn’t have the orange fencing. They just sat in clusters in the trees. Zaley cleared the ground of debris and set up her tent several feet away from a cluster. Ten guys talked in the road about taking shifts during the night. Teen boys standing at the edge of the circle nodded when they were told to take first rove.

  Tilting her signs up against a trunk, the crazy woman came over to the cluster. A day of marching had shaken her bun loose. She looked even crazier than she had in the morning, wisps of white straggling all over her sweaty face and shoulders. Zaley moved her tent a little to the left when a low-hanging branch kept scraping against the top with the breeze.

  “I hope you aren’t going to go to the bathroom in there,” the woman said when she got to Zaley’s tiny campsite.

  “Excuse me?” Zaley asked, assuming she had heard wrong.

  The woman was standing too close for comfort. Her hands worked furiously against the sideways skirt, opening and closing on the bleached-out fabric. Strings hung down from the torn, frayed hem and brushed against her feet. “You do your business in a bucket and dump it over there by those bushes. You don’t do it in the tent.”

  “Okay,” Zaley said.

  “Do you have a bucket?”

  “No. I’m just here for the night. It’s too late for me to go home.”

  “Then you have to hold it,” the woman said imperiously, and walked away. Just Zaley’s luck, the second closest tent to her own belonged to someone off her rocker.

  Her stomach rumbled in misery, and she was also thirsty. And she had to pee. It was going to be dawn before she could sneak away, and if the others weren’t in the places she knew to look, she was screwed. Having only six bullets in her gun, she palmed two of them and smiled to a woman at another tent. “Can I trade these bullets for food and water from anyone here?”

  The woman eyed Zaley’s gun. “Real bullets or those shitty homemade ones the boys peddle?”

  “Real.”

  For the price of two bullets, Zaley received an apple, a hardboiled egg, and water poured into a small paper cup. She should have just offered one. Taking her meager meal into her tent, she silently cursed at her situation. Outside, the crazy woman was saying, “I told her. I told her not to go to the bathroom in her tent.”

  “That’s good,” someone said.

  “Because she shouldn’t go in there. It makes everything smell.”

  No to the north entrance and no to the east entrance, so they had to push on. Zaley drank her water and inwardly cringed when the Mother Hen of the protestors stopped by to say hello. Coming out of the tent, she shook his hand and apologized for not leaving in time to get home. He was very understanding. A boy ran over and pleaded with Zaley to trade for just one more bullet. He was far more generous than the woman had been, supplying two eggs, a package of crackers, a cucumber, and an overripe tomato. The bullet wasn’t the right kind for his gun, but he could trade it for one that was. A friend of his came over wanting a bullet of his own, but Zaley had to keep a few for herself.

  Then she just sat in her tent and ate, listening as the blue of the sky deepened through a tiny rip in the fabric. Two people talked about the day’s rovers not finding anyone, nor had they found anyone yesterday. Most of the conversations weren’t even about ferals, or the harbor only twenty feet away. It was nothing but mundane, everyday chat about pets and kids, bad jobs and good ones, an old car accident downtown that wiped out a store when a minivan ploughed through the window. They wished someone named Roger a happy birthday. The crazy woman obsessed about the new girl and the bathroom to anyone who would listen. Someone asked if she was making a new sign, which sidetracked her to a new
topic. Muttering to herself, she turned on a flashlight and bent over her posters.

  Uncomfortable to not have her pills, when Zaley found her friends in the morning, she’d take her Zyllevir before she did anything else. But she wasn’t going to go feral by being late a few hours. The others had been overdue by days with their Zyllevir, and they were okay. Elania hadn’t been, but it wasn’t the lateness to have done it. Corbin didn’t think those two things were related, but maybe, just maybe, the catalyst to Elania’s viral takeover had been that measly handful of days Zyllevir wasn’t in her system.

  Before she kissed Corbin hello or asked how everyone was doing, Zaley would take her medication. It didn’t matter if she had to pee so badly that she was going to wet her pants, that pill was going down her throat first.

  She had to pee that badly now. She slipped out to the designated bushes and squatted down over a reeking trench. The grass around it was disgustingly slick. As she returned to her tent, the description of her feral was being given to the boys going on the first rove. Two said impatiently that they knew it already, everyone knew it, and then all of them walked away down the road. The boy who traded for the bullet was in their company, as was the one who wanted to trade. A man called after them to be on guard.

  People that she hadn’t seen before climbed out of tents and dragged lawn chairs over to the doors of the harbor. They had been sleeping all day, and now it was their turn to form the blockade. The woman who traded for food came to Zaley’s tent to collect her stupid paper cup. Zaley slipped into Grace and thanked her effusively, throwing in a few questions about how long the woman had been here at the harbor and what she did all day long.

  “Since May when a guard shot my son,” the woman said, motioning upwards to a tower. “He wasn’t doing anything to anyone. A good boy. Just came up here to see the sights. Anyway, I got nowhere else to go now. Our house is gone. So I just stay here with him.”

  People went into their tents as night fell. Camping lanterns were set out, both on the ground and up in trees. They glowed dimly. One wouldn’t go on and had its batteries refreshed. A man cried out in welcome as one last bicycle came down the road, his wife disembarking and removing a backpack. They went into their tent and discussed at top volume what she had unearthed in houses that day. Flour and yeast, headache pills, batteries, rubbing alcohol, dog treats, they spoke about each new acquisition with no awareness that everyone could hear. The man tasted a dog treat and said it wasn’t so bad.

  All of the voices silenced over time, and the only sounds were feet scratching on the road from those on watch. Not once had Zaley ever heard a peep from within the harbor. She attributed it to sound dampeners or death. But if everyone were dead in there, the guards wouldn’t bother to stand watch over the grave.

  She peered repeatedly out the flap, wanting to get the hell out of here, but retreated every time. Someone was always in the road, and then it was too dark. At last, she curled up on the hard ground and waited for sleep in the enemy camp, just a few feet on the wrong side of the place built to be her haven.

  Corbin

  He waited until Zaley moved the search far from the foliage and then glided away. No sooner had he gotten to Micah and Austin than a man at the north doors stared curiously to the ridge and lifted his finger to point. They were completely shielded there, but still he was staring. Putting together the problem fast, Micah set down the binoculars. Light was reflecting off the glass.

  It was too late. Several guys were then pointing and chattering about the rocky ridge where the three of them were concealed. Sombra Cs must have done this many times before, the ones still in possession of their minds, staked out the harbor to find the best way in. Slipping back from the ridge, as the men appeared to be talking about coming over to investigate, Corbin noticed their footprints everywhere in the dirt. Micah wrested a thin branch from a tree and threw it at him while she pulled down another one for herself.

  Smoothing the dirt as Austin hissed in panic for them to come along, they kept covering up their prints until they made it to a mat of dead leaves. Then they chucked the branches and the three of them walked away quickly. The rocky terrain either went up or down, never flat as they cut west along the north side of the harbor.

  “We lost Zaley,” Austin said. “I can’t believe we lost her.”

  “We didn’t lose her,” Micah said. “Unless she announces to those people that she has Sombra C and she would really, really like to be let into the harbor, pretty please, they have no way of knowing she’s infected. Trust that she’s smarter than that. And I haven’t seen a single spit test being given.”

  Corbin adjusted the two backpacks on his shoulders and damned the chip bag that had parted him from Zaley, as well as the bread-and-butter bicyclist who came back from the market at precisely the wrong moment. He hadn’t understood what Zaley was doing until she was too far away to stop her from doing it. One bad step. He’d crunched on trash himself. It was impossible to miss all of it in that dumpster of a wooded place.

  “Why are you going that way?” Austin asked Micah after they had turned at the corner of the harbor to go south along it. “Let’s go down, not up.”

  She was climbing up a steep slope that had a stony pinnacle. “I want to see if we can peek into the harbor up there.”

  Corbin wanted to see that, too. They fought up the slope after her, dirt sliding under their feet, and climbed over rocks. Skeletal remains were broken upon them. Lifting a backpack out of a dark crevice, Corbin kept an unsteady balance on two rocks as he opened it up. An energy bar, a notebook and pen, and a pair of broken binoculars were inside. The notebook had poor sketches of the harbor. Why would someone who wanted in take the time to sketch it? He glanced over to the bones and realized they belonged to someone without Sombra C, who wanted to sketch it in order to make plans on how best to attack it. There was a hole in the skull where a bullet had gone through.

  “What’s in that backpack?” Austin called.

  Corbin held up the energy bar. “A snack for us.” It was morbid to eat a snack that once belonged to the person reduced to bones at his feet, but here was food.

  Micah was still going to the pinnacle, but Austin scrabbled over and took the energy bar to see the label. “Look at that! Nut free, gluten free, soy free, corn free, GMO free . . . what’s left? It’s made of organic air.”

  “Let’s try it,” Corbin said. The flavor was raspberry-lemon. Austin tore open the wrapping and they grimaced at the energy bar, which looked like a dark brown turd full of seeds.

  It tasted weird, too. They gobbled up their shares despite the bar’s lack of flavor and aesthetics and wrapped up the last third of it for Micah, who was nearly to the top. She waited once there for them to climb up and join her. Just as their heads crested the highest rock, the harbor guard on the watchtower below turned to them. They ducked. There was no way he could have seen them climbing through the trees, so something was feeding him information though no sensors were around the pinnacle. Austin whispered, “We need that catapult!”

  They peeked over again. He was still staring, or seemed to be when he was wearing sunglasses, but the gun wasn’t pointed their way. Corbin looked behind the man to the harbor. Its only particulars were green. On the other side of the wall were tons of very tall trees. No one could sit up here and shoot at Sombra Cs. You couldn’t see shit. But the guard could see you. “Should we wave to him? Let him know we’re out here?” Corbin asked.

  “There’s nothing he can do about it,” Micah said over her third of the energy bar. “We have to let a guard by the doors see us and our stamps, but we can’t do that without everyone else seeing, too.”

  “We should find out how bad it is at the south path,” Austin said.

  “I don’t want to go so far from Zaley,” Corbin said, although he didn’t know where she was. She’d been going east down the road the last he’d seen of her. But whenever she got free, she would look for them at the trees where they’d slept, the house or
the ridge.

  He couldn’t be over there now, so he wobbled down from the pinnacle after Micah. The jumble of rocks shifted under Austin behind him, who gasped as his ankle twisted. Corbin said, “Is it okay?”

  “It has to be,” Austin said, glaring at his foot. He walked on it pretty well as they went along the western wall, so it wasn’t that bad. The slope changed to coast down. There weren’t any high points in the topography that would allow anyone to peek over the wall, unless they were scaling trees. Corbin was sure the guards would see that, too.

  One turned to look down as they passed by another watchtower. “If they could only drop a rope and haul us over,” Corbin said. “No one’s around on this side.”

  “They know we’re here,” Austin said sadly. “And we know they’re there. They should have built an underground tunnel to get inside. But those people would just be blocking that, too.”

  “We’ll go to Humboldt,” Micah said.

  “Micah, we’ll die going to Humboldt,” Austin said, the three of them walking sideways as the slope was going down at a sharp angle. “It’s taken from March to August to go from Cloudy Valley to Sonoma. That’s insane. We used to drive that in two hours. I’m going to shoot as many of those idiots as I’ve got bullets for and run for the doors.”

  They reached the end of the western wall and peeked around it to get a look at the southern face of the harbor. A paved trail was below the slope. Crossing the trail, they traveled in the trees. Now the harbor was slightly uphill, and just as impenetrable as before.

  The path ran parallel to the harbor, passing through trees and grass, and eventually turned to it. The wall bent inwards to form a long corridor, and at the far end of it was a door. A small group of people was camped out in the field by the entrance to the corridor. There was a baker’s dozen on that grassy spot, all men and most in Shepherd vests. Clustered around a cauldron suspended over a campfire, one was ladling soup into waiting cups. A watchtower was above the corridor itself and another was farther off with a view of the grass.