Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Plantation had running water from a gravity fed irrigation system, that beautiful wall, cows and pigs and a lamb and a huge supply of chickens. The residents were treated to tons of eggs and that was yet another thing Dustin didn’t like, eggs instead of steaks. The cows and lamb were let out to graze in the field behind the property for the safe hours, and under strict guard and control at all times. A squad had recently found the lamb near death out in some random field in Kryton, bringing it back to see if anything could be done. Fisher nursed it back to health, her daily tasks including the mixing up of lamb milk replacer and bottle-feeding the tiny black thing. She had even slept in the barn for a few nights to keep it company. The little ewe had lost her baaaa somewhere, being the quietest animal on the whole of the farm. The noise of the chickens drove Scarlett nuts.

  Elena was reading books on slaughtering practices, turning one page after another by candlelight in the dining room at night once she put Doug down to sleep. They would have beef and pork this winter, and she selected out the noisiest chickens to wring their necks and spare Scarlett’s sanity. No one dared to suggest slaughtering the lamb, not when she could usually be found gamboling among the children within the wall and trailing after the cows like they were her mothers. The girls clipped bows to the top of her head and picked foxtails out of her wool.

  The gate opened while Scarlett was filling up the cans again. It was just Anna and Morris, who had been taking care of the fruit trees. There were even grape vines, tied to tall stakes to make them grow like curious trees. Morris was carrying a basket full of them. Anna closed and locked the gate, the hose they used out there coiled over her shoulder.

  “Want some of these in the bus?” Morris called to Scarlett. It was a joke. She had filled one of the bottom compartments of the bus with cereal and granola bars, sacks of rice and jugs of water, extra fuel and more. California was prone to fires and there weren’t cute firefighters to put them out. If they had to make a hasty getaway, Scarlett wanted to ensure some food went with them. The fuel in the vehicles was always kept full for that same reason. They had the bus and three minivans. Two with the one Dustin had stolen.

  Maybe he wasn’t coming back. He’d just stolen the car and hightailed out of here to try his luck somewhere else. Scarlett considered it worth a minivan to get rid of him. She’d put that on the list for winter, acquiring another car if it appeared they needed one.

  Eamon had been a cute firefighter. Her mind turned back to him without her permission, searching for some topic to kill the time. Eamon had owned the most adorable house in all of Bakersfield. It was like a cottage from a fairytale and he spent all of his free time filling the garden with flowers. They had only been dating since the New Year’s Eve party where they met, but things got serious fast. He had a wicked sense of humor and treated her like a jewel. It was the start of something sweet and that made Scarlett giddy, thinking of what it’d be like to be his wife, to live in that darling house, but he hadn’t come out the other side of March 24th.

  Or he had, but not in a form that Scarlett wanted to continue dating. After days of doing everything to tend him in the bed, his body twisting and writhing as he jabbered at hallucinations and kept throwing off the blanket from the fever, she saw him rise as a deadhead. His eyes had turned a queer grayish color and were intense on her in a strange yet vacant way. Without warning he attacked, scratching and mauling at her when she had only ever known the gentlest touch from his big, rough hands. First she tried to reason with him. Then she armed herself.

  Sometimes, she dreamed of standing over his body. It had taken a knife in his throat to get him off her. She had almost decapitated him. When she called 911, no one picked up. Her shocked walk to the station nearly got her killed by another deadhead. Outrunning him to the elementary school, she locked herself into the principal’s office while he searched the hallways.

  He found someone else.

  No. She wasn’t going to think about that. When the gardening was completed, she coiled the hose. A whistle from the house sent the guards to the towers, Fisher and Jacklyn, Dave and the guy they called Silent Steve. Scarlett couldn’t remember him saying anything but hi, I’m Steve. He worked himself to exhaustion but rarely said a word. The other guy named Steve was a talker.

  At the corners of the walls were mock towers. Through the dangerous hours, someone was posted on each one. They had enough people for that now, three-hour shifts peeking through a parapet to the world rather than standing up there. It was better that zombies didn’t see them. Humans piqued their interest like nothing else. Tucker, Tanya, and Serena talked enviously about when they’d be old enough for guard duty. Scarlett had made it twelve-and-up. She didn’t trust elementary school kids to not get distracted. To be fair, she didn’t trust Shirley either.

  She dropped the hose. It was going to be hot in the house, but she wanted to be out of the direct sunlight. Loosening the string of her straw hat, she let it fall over her shoulders once she made the porch. A distant voice called out, “Car!”

  Dustin.

  Instantly in a rage, Scarlett strode off the porch and down the sidewalk to the long driveway, her eyes set to the tower by the gate. Fisher was waving with the gun she carried. Scarlett didn’t know what had happened to the girl in the days before they met. Nothing good. That gun Bridger gave her was almost her stuffed animal. When the guys were getting rowdy at dinner or messing around outside, Fisher’s hand went to it in subconscious reflex. The little boys didn’t bug her, but grown men did. Only with Bridger did her hand stay where it was. He had taught Fisher to shoot and that made him safe to her.

  Cutting through the vegetable beds and trees, Scarlett restrained the urge to jog. She wanted this over with. Fisher was doing as she’d been told, staying out of sight and not just opening the gate even if it was for someone she knew. Maybe it was paranoid, but Scarlett wanted to be there every time the gate opened. Bridger poked his head out of the shed to see what was going on and started down the drive.

  “I saw it coming through the trees way back down the lane,” Fisher called down the ladder when Scarlett got to the base of the tower. “Then it turned into our driveway.”

  “It isn’t Dustin?” Scarlett asked.

  Shaking her head, Fisher said, “It’s a blue station wagon with tinted windows. I can’t see who’s inside.” She checked out the parapet, keeping herself low. “It’s coming along at a creep.”

  Scarlett heard the engine now. No one else knew they were out here. This could be someone canvassing the streets to look for anyone. But it was a dangerous time in the day to be doing that. “Come on down, Fisher. I want to have a look.”

  They traded places. Now that was a shit car easing down the driveway. Twenty years old at the very least, it had peeling blue paint and racing flame stickers on the hood. Dustin had either run out of gas or swapped cars for fun, finding the stickers snazzy. He’d bitched to Bridger about the lame vehicles they had. Scarlett decided to cut him loose without the backpack of food. In its place, she’d deliver a get the fuck out.

  “Is it Dustin?” Bridger called up quietly. Scarlett shrugged.

  Stopping fifteen feet from the gate, the car idled there. The door opened. Fisher had wedged herself up the ladder at Scarlett’s side to take a look. In surprise, the girl said, “It’s just a kid!”

  The boy was ten or eleven, with a sweet face and hair getting too long from months uncut. His clothes were pretty clean, jeans and a T-shirt with a sports logo on it. He looked nervously up to the tower and called, “Hello? Hello, is anyone in there?” He reached back into the car and honked the horn twice. “Hello?”

  “We should let him in,” Fisher said, her eyes wide with anxiety. “The time.”

  “What’s your name?” Scarlett called down.

  The boy jumped at her voice. “Hi. I’m Baylen.”

  “How did you find this place?”

  He wiped at his nose, a gesture that made him look so very young. “Did I find something? I
’ve just been driving around looking for anyone. My mom . . . she died.”

  Scarlett felt like a bitch, but she didn’t trust anyone. She couldn’t, not even a boy. She’d seen and heard too much weird shit since serving those gluten-free pancakes to the annoying tourists. “Where are you from?”

  “I was born in Oakland. We moved to Pemos when I was seven. Where are you from?”

  It was a rude question if he’d been an adult, but this kid didn’t mean it badly. “Bakersfield.”

  “Do you have any food?”

  “He’s just a boy,” Fisher whispered. Her eyes slid to the sun.

  “What grade are you in?” Scarlett asked.

  “Fifth.”

  This was ridiculous. She was letting him in, giving him a meal, and checking with Elena if they had an extra cot around. As she turned to go down the ladder and unlock it, Bridger hissed, “Ask him what school in Pemos.”

  Scarlett returned to the parapet. “What school?”

  “Koman Elementary.”

  “Don’t let him in,” Bridger said automatically. His rheumy eyes were hard.

  That hadn’t been what Scarlett expected. “What?”

  “Don’t let him in! I lived in Pemos for forty years. My four kids all went to Pemos schools. There isn’t a single elementary school in that area or the cities around it named Koman, not public or private. Fisher, get down here right now.” Fisher climbed down fast.

  “Maybe it’s a new school?” Scarlett asked.

  “No,” Bridger said. He pointed his finger and sent Fisher running back to the house. “Not unless it got built up in the last five months.”

  A ringer. Oh fuck, Scarlett had been about to let a ringer into Plantation. She had only ever seen one ringer before, in those first terrifying days in Bakersfield. That one had been a man in a business suit, looking as healthy as could be. But Scarlett had heard the weird chuckling sound from his throat right before she called out to him. Then she’d seen the zombies rise. They walked down the road together, the ringer and his zombies, and fortunately away from her. Other people in Plantation had similar stories, Elena’s the worst of all since her own son had become one. He spoke to her almost like normal, tried to lure her down an alley, and she fled to her car with a hundred zombies giving chase. To this day, she felt guilty for leaving her son behind. Even if he had been about to feed his mother to zombies.

  “Could I just have a little food?” the boy called. “If you have something to spare? I don’t eat too much. I could help around your place to pay for it.”

  Scarlett peered through the parapet. Nothing about Baylen’s looks would tip anyone off to his true identity. For all intents and purposes, he was who he appeared to be before. But ringers didn’t retain all the memories of who they were as human. Those in long-term storage remained, but the newer information didn’t. That was what had tipped off Elena that something was wrong with her son. It was like the last two to three years hadn’t happened to him, and he mentioned going to college like he was still a student and not a graduate.

  “Shoot him,” Bridger whispered.

  Scarlett took her gun from its holster. To keep him unaware of her purpose, she said, “Just have a few more questions. To make sure you’re okay.”

  “Okay. Shoot,” Baylen said.

  Oh, the irony of him saying that, if that was what irony was. “What were you learning in your math class before everything went crazy?”

  The boy smiled with a measure of wistfulness, like he missed school. “Addition. Subtraction. I’m good at math. Do you like math?”

  “Not really.” Fifth graders did fractions and decimals, division with remainders, that sort of deal. Not ten plus fifteen any longer, unless he was remedial. But then he wouldn’t have said he was good at the subject. Scarlett aimed at his head. A breeze blew through the trees and made the leaves rustle, dipping a branch down and blocking her view of him. To kill time while the wind died, she said, “Who’s the current president?” Well, until March 24th when there had been a government.

  He smiled again with total innocence. “Come on! I’m just a kid.”

  The boy didn’t know. Scarlett had known the name of the president when she was his age. Maybe not at seven years old, but definitely by ten. Her finger was on the trigger. A bullet through the brain and then . . . they couldn’t leave his body there at the gate to attract deadheads. She’d lead the squad herself, loading it into the trunk of that shitty car and dumping it off downtown. They’d screech back to Plantation in one of the minivans and get themselves behind the wall.

  She fired, the wind choosing at that movement to dip the branch into her way. Blood streaked along the side of his head. It was a grazing wound, not a killing one. Realizing the jig was up, the boy hissed up to the tower and threw himself into the station wagon. The door slammed shut. Scarlett took aim at the windshield where his head should be behind the tinted glass and fired a second time. Cries echoed behind her at the gunfire, Elena calling sharply, “Doug! Come to Gramma!”

  The station wagon lurched into reverse and drove fast down the driveway, Scarlett firing at it until she ran out of bullets. She put plenty of holes into the car, but none into the ringer’s head. Once at the street, the kid rolled down the window and shouted, “See you soon!”

  Her cheeks cold, Scarlet scanned the trees for any sign of movement. No deadheads. Nothing but the wind. She climbed down the ladder. Bridger had seen the whole thing from peeking through a gap in the covered gate. They looked at one another and he said, “Okay. We have to make plans.”

  Scarlett was on the brink of hysterics. “What do we do?”

  “We stay calm,” Bridger said. It was his psychiatrist voice that he’d no doubt used with hundreds of patients having meltdowns. “We organize, just in case he comes back with deadheads.”

  “Will he do that?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know much about them. So we prepare in case that happens, string up more barbed wire on the wall, get to the armory and give everyone a gun. Or else we run and find somewhere else to live.”

  They could pile into the bus and cars and drive out of here fast. But this was her place, their place, and it had what they needed to survive in this strange new world. Scarlett hadn’t spent months making this property into a haven to cede it to a ringer and the deadheads he managed to scrounge up in the abandoned streets of Kryton. There weren’t many, judging from how none had ever come this way all summer. They’d place their best shooters with their best guns on the towers to pick off whomever the ringer led back. And that would save Plantation. Scarlett wanted to keep on living here.

  The wire. The guns. An adult to replace Fisher on this tower. Getting everyone informed and in position. It was like extreme waitressing, having too many things on her plate that all had to happen at the same time. They hurried back to the house, the driveway seeming to get longer no matter how fast Scarlett went.

  Her favorite detail about Plantation was the wall around the property. Perhaps this place had once belonged to a celebrity, who erected it to prevent paparazzi from snapping a money shot of So-and-So sunbathing in the nude, or doing whatever it was celebrities did with their time that they wanted to keep private. The cost of the wall had to have been astronomical. It was made out of concrete blocks and over eight feet tall. Now it didn’t look high enough.

  Everyone was divided into squads, from eighty-six-year-old Artie to the preschoolers. Four squads reported to the wall immediately with saws, to cut down any branch that hung over it. If the ringer brought back his pack of deadheads, Scarlett wasn’t going to make climbing over the wall easy for them. Three more squads raced to fix more barbed wire around the wall itself. Yet another one put up ladders along each side, to help those in the watchtowers keep an eye out for movement. The ladders were going to stay up, so any deadhead managing to beetle his or her way over the wall got shot in the head.

  There weren’t enough weapons to go around. The armory held four dozen guns altogether
, everything from crappy old BB guns to a beautiful Knight’s SR-25 that was worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. A few people had brought guns to Plantation, but most of what was in the armory had been picked up on raids. There wasn’t tons of ammunition, and they had only two 20-round magazines for the SR-25. A receipt in the bag said each had cost a hundred bucks. There hadn’t been enough ammunition for everyone to train properly over the last months.

  They also had a bow and arrows, and a samurai sword. Scarlett took the sword for herself, along with a pair of handguns. She had ended Eamon with a knife. Carrying a blade felt like what she was supposed to do, something that required examination but there wasn’t the time and she didn’t have the heart.

  The younger kids were given knives. Scarlett felt heartsick at their jealous faces at the guns. This wasn’t a game, and they had both the curse and the mercy of being too young to fully understand their circumstances.

  Through the night, they doubled up on watch. With Wesley bringing more nails and planks as needed, Scarlett and Silent Steve boarded up the first floor windows of the house and twirled the last of the barbed wire around the poles that held up the roof of the porch. In the garage, Elena draped black cloth over the windows of the bus and made some of the seats comfortable in blankets and pillows. If anyone showed, the youngest, oldest, and frailest were going to lock themselves into the garage and stay very quiet within the bus. Alessi was going with them, since she had partial paralysis on her right side from a car accident ten years ago. She selected children’s books out of the library to take along, extra paper and markers to draw, and a few of Doug’s stuffed friends.

  Coming back from her turn on watch, Shirley stopped at the window that Scarlett and Silent Steve were working on to drop hints that her back pain might make her a better candidate for the bus than outside fighting, if it came to that. When Scarlett ignored the message, Shirley moved on to saying her kids were so young! They needed their mommy. Scarlett just said no. The kids were pretty much raising themselves anyway while Shirley sneaked food, flirted with the guys, and whined. Silent Steve didn’t say a word when Shirley went away disappointed, but his face said everything.