The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Read online

  THE ZOMBIES: VOLUMES ONE TO SIX

  by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Copyright 2013, 2014 Macaulay C. Hunter

  Cover image courtesy of Hali & Canstockphoto

  Cover by Joleene Naylor

  Table of Contents

  Set One

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Two

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Three

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Four

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Five

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Six

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Elania

  Brennan

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Seven

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Eight

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Nine

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Ten

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Eleven

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Twelve

  Zaley

  Austin

  Elania

  Corbin

  Micah

  Set Thirteen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Fourteen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Fifteen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Sixteen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Seventeen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Set Eighteen

  Zaley

  Corbin

  Micah

  Austin

  Epilogue

  Zaley

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Macaulay C. Hunter

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  THE SIGILS: VOLUME ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  THE ZOMBIES: VOLUME ONE

  by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Set One

  Zaley

  On the first of September, Dad boarded the windows.

  Zaley woke up to a gash of shadow on the carpet. She stared without comprehension at the long stripe going all the way to the doll’s cradle, hearing the pounding outside and Dad swearing at Mom to hold it straight. Then she remembered. He bought the boards the day before.

  The news had played twenty-four hours a day since the third of July in their dark living room, Dad a massive, sullen splotch on his recliner as he watched. It was always dark in their home, because the furniture was a deep walnut. The curtains were burgundy, and Dad didn’t like to have them open. He raided stores for emergency provisions in the ensuing weeks. Their laundry room was so packed that Zaley could only reach the washing machine by moving a lot of the boxes into the hallway. Dad was angry at the way she dropped them out there one time, her impatience carrying in the thumps and slides. He blocked her into the laundry room, in the tiny space she carved out to do a load. “Don’t you tell your friends about how much we got, you hear? You think they’re friends now, but they’ll turn on you in a second when it gets bad.”

  It frightened her, the intensity in his voice, the heat in his eyes, the anger and excitement in his rigid posture. And he usually never addressed her over the course of a day, except to get him a beer. He was enjoying this on some crazy level, a lurid break from the mediocrity of their lives to press a cart through the aisles of Mr. Foods deciding what they needed to stock. Zaley went with him on the next trip, hoping to inject a little rationality with her presence. Once they arrived, she knew that it would not help. Other men were here at Mr. Foods, pushing carts piled high with toilet paper and granola bars, cans of soup and liters of soda and bottled water, bags of rice and beef jerky and pet kibble. They had the same look as Dad. Hunted, hopeful, considering every item on the shelves with great deliberation. Most of them had gray streaking their hair and T-shirts clinging to aprons of fat about their bellies. Dad stopped to speak with one man (Dad! Dad! He didn’t speak to anyone except family!) about emergency generators. Zaley stood silently by the cart towering with canned goods, wondering where on earth her father made this friend. The two of them spoke in hushed, grimly enthusiastic tones until Dad reeled back in surprise at the man’s whisper that he was having his family stock clothes.

  When they got back to the car, Dad loaded it with cartoon swiftness like he expected a zombie attack right there in the Mr. Foods parking lot. Then he got in and locked the doors, mumbling clothes we gotta get clothes and they roared off into the summer evening with his fists tight on the steering wheel.

  It was the first time in their marriage that Mom hadn’t had to do the grocery shopping, because apocalyptic shopping was exciting to Dad whereas the weekly trip for the usual old things was not. But Mom and Zaley still had to find room for everything and put it all away while he retreated to the news for updates. There were three people in the house and ninety-five percent of the conversation came from the television. Zaley preferred the canned chatter to the voices of the actual people, since the five percent left of what was said within their walls was generally insane.

  She texted Corbin and Elania that night, to tell them that she was not allowed to tell them that the Mattazollo family had a stunning sixty-eight twelve-packs of toilet paper in the laundry room. Typing toilet paper embarrassed her, let alone her father’s zeal for Sombra C preparedness, but they were the only ones that Zaley would ever dare to tell. It was foolish to do this when Mom always tried to sneak peeks at her texts, but Zaley would be extra careful to keep her phone out of temptation’s reach. Half the time she didn’t text at all, too worried she might forget that her phone was not above scrutiny should she leave it on her nightstand or desk. But not texting left her so cut off from her friends that the silence got to her.

  She shouldn’t have written to Corbin since they weren’t dating any longer and he had a new girlfriend. Yet the three of them still ran a club together, and she added to his text a brief question about how they wanted to start Welcome Mat in the fall semester to give her message a business-like appearance. It had been ages since she saw Corbin in person, the last day of school in fact, and except for these sporadic communiqués, she had not spoken to him either. The five months they dated were the happiest months of her life, the only happy time, and they’d raced by in a snap.

  Elania wrote back first, encouraging Zaley to buy even more packs. Toilet paper would be a hot commodity once
the country fell into her father’s imaginary chaos. People would be wiping their asses with worthless twenties while Zaley still had the comfort of quilted three-ply Soft Day coated with aloe and Vitamin E for a tender touch. On the heels of that text came Corbin’s. He ignored the question about the club to write: oh, baby. Zaley stared at that message, hearing his voice so clearly behind her, and scrolled down to the picture of his pit bull Bleu Cheese licking her favorite spot on the sofa. Bleu Cheese was a sweet but exceedingly dumb dog, and Zaley hadn’t had to say what she was feeling for Corbin to hear. He knew. Oh, baby. She hated being called baby by anyone except Corbin, and he shouldn’t be calling her that at all now. Zaley didn’t need a longer text than that, nor could he write one easily with his dyslexia, and in its place he had hunted down his dog for a goofy picture to cheer her up. Thinking of him with spoiled Sally Wang made her weep at night. Quietly, so her parents didn’t hear. Her mother and father had not known Corbin and Zaley were ever a couple.

  They’d both contracted Sombra B in their junior year, Zaley catching it the week before Thanksgiving break and Corbin the week after it. It was an odd cold, light on the phlegm and heavy on the fever. Had Corbin been allowed in the Mattazollo home, he would have been there every day to look after her. Zaley hadn’t dared to bring him in as a friend, let alone her boyfriend. She hadn’t dared to bring in Elania either, not with Dad the way he was. Corbin came over every night and tapped on Zaley’s window once she texted that Dad went to bed. A cup of hot soup from his mother since her cancer was in remission and she was feeling better, one of his time-capsule treasure boxes for Zaley to inspect, a reminder to check The Daily Cheese, Corbin did not let a night slip by without a visit. She swallowed the soup and giggled at what a five-year-old Corbin had considered treasure: a marble with a green and blue swirl through the center, a party whistle, a wheat penny, and faux diamond earring. She checked his blog to see the latest update on his dog. It was a picture of Bleu Cheese wearing a sign that said GET BETTER, ZALEY! The treasure boxes were her favorite. He and his mom made one every year for his birthday until he was thirteen.

  Then he had gotten sick with the same illness. Zaley was welcome in the Li home, and she went by after school with his homework. She was welcome in the Douglas’ home to visit Elania, she was welcome in Austin’s apartment and Micah’s mansion, but none of them were welcome in the Mattazollo house. That embarrassed her, but it would have embarrassed her more for them to meet her father. His voice would be noticeably strained around polite small talk, his beady eyes hard, and once the door closed, she’d be bracing for the storm. Chinks and niggers, kikes and dykes and wetbacks and towelheads, the four walls of their home were splashed on a weekly basis with the worst of verbal atrocities. It made Dad angry that he had to keep them contained out in the world. When some famous football player got in trouble for calling a referee a fag, Dad had yelled at the television fag fag fag like he could not say it enough. No one had the right to take his words away! Zaley was horrified that Mom might ask Dad to do some household chore in front of her friends, and for Dad to say what he often said. What do I look like, your house nigger? Like being asked politely to unload the dishwasher was slavery.

  No, Zaley did not bring anyone home. Never. But Corbin’s mother welcomed her in and sent her upstairs to drop off homework assignments; she invited Zaley to dinner and asked about college applications. Sombra B had Corbin flattened to his bed. Zaley did not have treasure boxes to share with him, nor a cup of soup or blog. That was okay. What Corbin wanted was for her to read an article from his science magazine out loud. Reading was hard for him, text jumping around the page and the words not connecting to meaning in his mind very quickly. Hearing them was different. The articles mostly went in one ear and out the other for Zaley, but Corbin understood even complicated concepts, and peppered his ceiling with questions that he wanted to ask the author, or the scientist who performed the study. Corbin was smart. They had just started dating at the time they were ill, and something joyful must have slipped through on Zaley’s face when she got home, because Dad asked with nasty suspicion if she’d been with a boy. Like it was sleazy of her, a teenaged girl being interested in teenaged boys, and a gang-bang video posted on HomeBase or out-of-wedlock pregnancy was just around the corner. She lied. What she really wanted to do was explode.

  Sombra B had passed, striking Micah and Austin, skipping Elania, knocking down a full third of the members of Welcome Mat, and then it was over and they forgot about it. But now it was Sombra C sweeping through, the news brushing aside celebrity weddings and child kidnappings and the endless war in Afghanistan to report on this new strain. It began its pulse in Colorado and radiated out to the world from there, leading to Zaley’s father doing the shopping with a severity of purpose and the purchase of a gun on the tenth of August. He had bought a gun and gone to a shooting range to learn. It was in his closet while he waited for the chance to blow the head off someone with Sombra C. Often he marched through their house checking the locks on the doors and windows. He even let himself into Zaley’s room without knocking, without even announcing his intent. Not that she was doing drugs in there, or looking at porn on her laptop and acting out scenes with her Chloe Goes Pee-Pee doll, but it was invasive and she complained to Mom.

  “Families shouldn’t have closed doors, baby,” Mom said. She saw the calendar on the wall inside the closet, which Zaley was marking off with red X’s to get her through the summer. It made Mom sad. “It’s like you just can’t wait to get away from your own home.”

  Zaley was guilty at that, since it was the truth. She was so ready to get back to school. Her backpack had been packed since the third day of summer vacation. She still didn’t take down the calendar, nor did she pull the closet door closed to hide it. Mom didn’t say anything to Dad about his new obsessions with stocking supplies and playing action hero. It was easier to let Dad do what he wanted. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear.

  Sombra C was scary. That was true. But it wasn’t airborne. Zaley had couched the brief question to Corbin in a text between school-related matters, wanting his perspective in addition to the one she received from the news. He sent back the link to an article his mother read to him. Sombra C was transmitted through bodily fluids. You got it through unprotected sex or sharing needles, breastfeeding or being attacked by someone in the final stages of the viral infection before they died. Beneath the link, Corbin added two postscripts. The first read: I assume you aren’t still breastfeeding, and the second said: If you see someone freaking out in the road, just run away and call the cops.

  It was the longest text he had ever written to her, and it must have taken him ten minutes since he had trouble with spelling and a streak of perfectionism that would not accept it. Zaley didn’t care if he misspelled, but Corbin liked to put his best foot forward even in something as inconsequential as a text. The first postscript was punctuated with a smiley emoticon and a disgusted one. If Zaley’s mother could still breastfeed Zaley, she’d probably try. That was another reason Zaley didn’t want her friends over, seeing as she had to live with a Chloe Goes Pee-Pee doll in her room.

  This had been a grand toy when she was two, pink-cheeked Chloe and her pink plastic potty, but now Zaley was sixteen. Sixteen, seventeen in October, and her room still looked like it belonged to a very little girl. The desk drove her wild. Low to the ground and with a yellow pouf for a chair, the shelves were fashioned like cubbies. Instead of doors, there were big holes in circles and squares, like she was a preschooler still learning her shapes. Trying to sit at it to do a paper was impossible. The carpet was covered in yellow shag rugs shaped like stars, and worst of all was the toy corner. She tried not to look at the doll’s cradle filled with cheery plastic and porcelain faces, the mountain of stuffed animals. Corbin’s treasure boxes were darling, showing Zaley sweet whispers of the boy he had once been, a boy that was gone into this five-foot-ten young man who loomed over her.

  But there was no place in Zaley’s l
ife to allow for nostalgia; her bedroom stayed in its childish colors and was filled with childish things, and she was still the child who lived in it. Anything she had that made her look older, like an emergency tampon she kept through a square hole shelf on her desk, Mom relocated to the closet out of sight. It was a silent war between them, the address of that stupid tampon. Zaley didn’t leave it hanging from the arched canopy of her bed; you couldn’t even see it unless you bent down to your knees and looked. If she just had a desk with proper drawers! But she didn’t. She moved the tampon back. If the box ran dry in the bathroom and she didn’t notice until too late, it was sensible to have a spare easily accessible. Her closet was a pit of too-small clothes that Mom would not donate or trash, of old projects and toys and books. The tampon would get buried. Since Mom didn’t want to see evidence of adulthood, she should buy Zaley a real desk. Mom had gotten Sombra B herself and still dragged herself in the worst of it to the kitchen since she didn’t want Zaley using the stove without supervision. Any time they went to a restaurant and used the restrooms, Mom finished like a shot and then stood outside Zaley’s stall calling, “Are you okay in there? Zaley? Are you okay, baby? Do you need help?”

  When in her sophomore year of high school Zaley boxed up the toy corner and star rugs and put it in the garage, Mom took it out and brought it back. Zaley came into her room at the end of the school day and found it reconstituted there, the nest of faces in the doll’s cradle, their cheeks polished and clothes spruced up, the rugs artfully scattered, the stuffed animals in a playful tower with the monkey dangling by its tail to the doorknob. Mom must have been in there for hours, wiping down the dolls and balancing the animals, figuring out just how to place the rugs, and she was proud of it.

  “You don’t know how fast life goes. Hold onto these a little longer,” Mom said when Zaley did not respond with joy. Like Zaley in a fit of the good old days was going to sit cross-legged on a star rug and play tea party with Baby Bootie and Chloe Goes Pee-Pee. And now she was a senior, a senior who had sneaked a sip of beer at a party and enjoyed some heavy petting, who had a period and looked at college websites, who read the news and knew how to drive and ran the most popular club on her high school campus. Her room denied all this, froze it out, and left Zaley in a body too big for the furniture.