Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Babies aren’t very interesting,” he confessed guiltily after watching Katie while Colette took a shower and a nap.

  He expected indignant maternal protestations, or dewy stories about how watching a baby eat, sleep, and poop was the most fascinating activity on the planet. Colette shrugged wearily and said, “They get interesting later. You just have to wait this part out.”

  Slowly, the anger ebbed. He visited every week and then twice a week, bringing over something for dinner and taking out the trash. As promised, Colette never asked him for anything. It was he who noticed the rummage-sale baby clothes and hand-me-down stroller, the second notice on Colette’s electric bill when he brought in the mail. One day, it hit him like a hammer blow. It wasn’t hormones. Or maybe it was. Katie didn’t really feel like his child, but she was and why was he treating her like a poor relation? She was just as good as any other baby girl he’d encountered, and actually she was quite a bit better. She was cute and squashy and had a placid temperament, and sometimes it was more fun to hang out with Colette and Katie in the evening than it was to hit the bar after another soccer game and listen to Jenner and Koby go on and on about the chicks they’d banged and the chicks they were banging and the chicks they would like to bang. That had gotten old even before Katie came along, but that was what they had always done together, so Xan had continued to do it for no other reason than familiarity. He pared down his activities and in embarrassment offered Colette a check one day. She said he didn’t have to give it, but he wanted to. His daughter, their daughter, should have everything.

  He just didn’t know how to be a parent. Xan’s own father was months shy of sixty years old by the time Xan was born, and a heart attack not long after that reduced him to a shadow in the home. Xan’s mother had tried to get pregnant for twelve years before having Xan at forty-five. And for all that money she dished out on reproductive assistance drugs and care, all the effort she’d expended on seeing those two blue lines on the pee stick, she had gotten less and less interested in her son as he grew up. She had done it for a baby, and he didn’t stay that way for long. He didn’t have sordid stories of abuse to relate to a therapist, just benign neglect. Then she died when Xan was in fifth grade, fell asleep behind the wheel coming back from a girls’ night with her friends and propelled herself into a tree. All Xan had after that was his old man, his very old man that people mistook for his grandfather, and his dad didn’t have the energy to do much more than ferry himself to doctor appointments and swallow pills, let alone attend Parent-Teacher Nights or host birthday parties. Again, it was benign neglect. Xan had food and shelter and clothing. There were presents under the tree, all of it ordered online and set up by the once-a-week maid. His father didn’t drink or beat him or hate him. He meant well, but he didn’t have much to give emotionally or physically. Then he died of a second heart attack when Xan was eighteen. So when it came to his own child, he was making this up as he went along.

  And slowly, Katie got interesting. She was funny and sweet and smart. Not brilliant, but there was a good little brain chugging away in there. She had a quality that Xan prized far more than sky-high intelligence, and that was kindness. Even as a two-year-old, she would break her cookies and crackers into clumsy halves. One for her and one for Daddy. After she learned how to swim, she paddled about the whole pool to rescue ladybugs bobbing helplessly on the surface of the water. Her first grade teacher adored her, and as the small tasks of picking up the milk cartons, wiping down the boards, and changing the date on the calendar rotated between students, Katie held a permanent position as Classroom Friend. She had had a graceful soul.

  God had needed to filter a little less intelligence and a little more kindness into Olyvyr Gravine. But He hadn’t. Another prickle of water appeared under Xan’s tongue. He had dim, very dim memories after his infection. He wanted them to stay dim. For three days he had been a resident of hell, and then someone had shot him with the antidote. He’d come back to himself and been driven to Newgreen with a handful of others. Impossibly, Colette was there. He had literally screamed when he ran into her a week later, and they had fallen into each other’s arms and not let go since. Most people had no one. To have one familiar face among a sea of strangers was priceless. On rare occasions, someone recognized a name of a friend or family member on the updated lists from other settlements. That was the only time a regular person was allowed a trip through hell on a truck convoy. Those were restricted to specialized medical teams and commerce.

  Was it commerce when there was no exchange of money? The closest they had was tokens. Everyone was just trying to survive.

  Xan and Colette had never shared a home until now. It was only an apartment, but they were lucky, so lucky to have a working, private bathroom. That wasn’t something that Xan had ever appreciated before, and some settlements didn’t have that luxury. Running water was a miracle. Clean water was a miracle, too. And the moat that encircled Newgreen was holy. Zombies wouldn’t cross over bodies of water. He had been one of them once, but he didn’t remember the reason for that aversion. He was just glad afterwards that it existed. Many of the settlements had moats, or were strategically positioned between rivers. Meatfarm had neither, but was so out of the way that zombies rarely wandered in that direction. Still, the community was heavily guarded at its periphery, with several lines of barbed wire fences, land mines seeded in the earth, and attack dogs. The scent of blood drew zombies like a magnet, and Meatfarm was a slaughterhouse.

  Lots of things drew zombies. Blood. Movement. Sound. That was a dim memory of Xan’s, seeing a vehicle passing him and shambling after it. Motion was life. Life was meat. Meat was good.

  The other couple in the waiting room discussed in low tones that it was going to be a while before they had any news, and then they left for the cafeteria. Xan turned the television back on. The sound of Olyvyr’s resentful voice came with it. “-said no. They always said no. They’d pant after every dumb jock in the school, shake their asses and drop their panties, but not for me. They just saw a kid. They’d wear those slutty little skirts and low tops, make me want them and then say no. Stupid. They were stupid and thought they were smart. I thought they should know how stupid they were.”

  He sat back in his squeaking chair with a sulky look at the high school girls who had spurned him, and Xan recalled beautiful Melody Branger in his sophomore year. He’d gathered up his courage and asked her out in the passing period one day, only to have her scoff at him and walk away to giggle about it with her friends. Xan went home to lick his wounds, and tried again later on with another girl. It hadn’t occurred to him to take a gun to school to avenge himself, or to design a crippling disease to use as a weapon that would get back at all women, and all men who were taking attention away from glorious him. He wasn’t a sociopath with a one-eighty-two IQ.

  He had lost Katie to this man, and he might lose Lucca. Birth defects had risen in the last two years, although the evidence was anecdotal. No one knew if it was due in some way to Olyvyr Gravine’s gift to the world, yet what other cause could there be?

  On the screen, the detectives nodded and nodded like bobblehead dolls to keep the guy going. Poor Olyvyr, denied friends in elementary school and girls in high school, consumed by his mother’s adulation and his father’s rejection. Poor Olyvyr, who wasn’t any more popular in the college classes he audited at night, and who was never chosen for an article in Incredible Kids magazine. Xan used to keep copies of that in his classroom for students who finished a test early and had nothing else to do. He didn’t know anything about how the editorial staff of Incredible Kids had selected their featured subjects, but none of those youthful physicists and artists and musicians had ever come across as quite so full of themselves as Olyvyr. They didn’t drop their IQ into conversation every chance they got, and all of them were doing something with their intellectual gifts. Olyvyr had a science lab in the guest bedroom at home, but he hadn’t accomplished anything worthy of an article about it. Chemica
ls and equipment, all of that cost more money than his family had, and his father took a perverse pleasure in giving him sports-related paraphernalia as gifts and sabotaging his scientific work. Turning on lights over experiments that had to be kept in darkness. Turning off timers that Olyvyr had set for a reason. Filling up his Christmas stocking with season tickets to basketball. Cast aside over and over again for a son that existed only in his father’s imagination, Olyvyr felt the sting keenly.

  “Xan, please mute it,” Colette whispered as Olyvyr tapped and squeaked and continued his barrage of silly grievances to the fathers of children that he had killed. They weren’t silly to him. They were deadly insults.

  Xan turned off the sound and read. So then I decided to get back.

 

  Out there somewhere, if she wasn’t dead, Katie was roaming. His baby girl. If the antidote wasn’t given within days of the infection, the alterations to the brain became permanent. It had been two years. Whether she was dead or a zombie, she was gone.

  There hadn’t been enough time to make the antidote for everyone. Olyvyr had made a stock of it, imagining that he was going to load it into tranquilizer darts and shoot only beautiful women to keep in a haven with him. One man. Two hundred women. Paradise. Frantic efforts by those who hadn’t been infected created more of the antidote. It was by chance that Xan had been shot and cured.

  It took me ten years, said the words on the screen.

  That’s a long time, Olyvyr, exclaimed an impressed detective. I couldn’t have put ten years into a science project!

  Few people can. But it was easy in a way. Nature had done the hard work for me. I just had to put the pieces together. What’s highly contagious? What affects brain function? How do you connect them? How do you disperse it? I looked at science for the clues. Like the brain function part: there’s a tropical fungus that overrides the behavioral patterns of an ant to benefit itself; the Toxoplasma gondii parasite that renders a mouse unafraid of cats . . . isn’t that interesting? Even when the parasite is eliminated from the mouse’s system, the mouse is still unafraid. The brain is rewired permanently, genes getting switched on. I tried all sorts of things, the parasitoid wasp Glyptapanteles for example, Dicrocoelium dendriticum, that one uses an ant as a host, controlling its mind and making it climb to the top of a blade of grass every evening until a grazing animal like a sheep eats it. That’s where it wants to be, inside the sheep. Bird tapeworms that redirect fish to warmer waters away from their schools, Zatypota percontatoria are wasps that use spiders to serve their needs by spinning their webs a different way for wasp cocoons. Want to hear a real crazy one? Pseudacteon litoralis is a parasitic fly. Its larva in an ant eats the ant’s brain. A brainless ant keeps on living and acting like normal as the larva matures inside it!

  Nature made this whole smorgasbord for me to work with, and previous scientific work added more to the pot. Did you ever hear about the mosquitoes that were genetically modified to resist the malaria parasite? Inserting an enzyme that cuts up the X chromosome? The female mosquito infects a human, not the male, so a male mosquito that sends on far more Y chromosome sperm than X . . . you see? Mostly sons, and they’ll have mostly sons, and you’ve ended malaria. Anyway, I won’t get too technical on you. You won’t understand a tenth of it and it’ll bore you. I needed something to induce a starvation state in the body and . . . oh, I’m getting going again. A fascinating fact about my zombies is that they have trouble digesting anything but meat. The enzymes we have to break down carbohydrates are disrupted in them. Less salivary amylase in the mouth, less pancreatic amylase secreted from the pancreas, obviously, less maltase in the lining of the small intestine, less sucrase, you get the idea. They think they’re starving, and what sates them briefly is meat. Human meat. They’ll eat Fluffy or Rover, Bessie or Tweety if there’s no choice, but human is what they want most. That’s their drive.

  I’ll let you in on one thing I couldn’t pull off. Immortality. You like zombie movies? How they stay in a state of stasis, never aging, never dying unless someone blows their heads off? Well, keep it to yourselves, hah hah, but I couldn’t do that part. That was really disappointing. Maybe if I wanted to spend another ten years in my warehouse, but there weren’t any guarantees that I could ever pull it off. I didn’t want to be eighty, ninety years old and still tinkering on that one detail.

  They’ll age; they’ll die. They probably won’t reproduce, and a fair number of them won’t live to be old, at least they didn’t in my rat studies. Their hearts just gave out, and when I dissected them, the kidneys showed signs of atrophy and there were cysts in the brain. I wasn’t working in the guest bedroom anymore, thank God. I couldn’t get through anything without my dad whining at the door for me to take out the trash, my mom asking if I wanted cookies.

  Everyone hated me at college, made it hard for me to work in the lab on my ideas, so I did all of my research and testing at a warehouse my mother rented for me. It wasn’t really a warehouse; it just looked that way from the outside so that was what I called it. It was a lab that no one was using, the business it was for had closed, and the building was owned by this crazy old guy who didn’t care what I did so long as he got his money on the first of each month. Anyone else would have freaked out about the liability, insurance requirements, but he didn’t give a shit. He was cool. If anything catches on fire, he said, for God’s sake, don’t call the fire department. Just run out and drive off, let the building burn down, and insurance will take care of it. When I say that he didn’t care, trust me, I mean it. I saw him twice in ten years.

  The equipment and chemicals were expensive. I picked up what I could at online surplus stores, but it still added up to more than I could cover. Some equipment companies cut a deal to new labs, but it still wasn’t enough, and a lot of those things aren’t just sold to anyone. I had to go about it a different way. I would pretend to be a prospective student at various universities, canvass the labs on the tours, and then go back later and steal what I needed. I rarely hit the same place twice and never got caught, although there were a few close calls. I knocked out a security guard once.

  As I was saying, it took me a decade to pull this off. There were so many failures! A few years I made no progress whatsoever and it was tempting to just throw in the towel. It was too hard. But I kept trying. I was a man on a mission! When I really hit the wall, I’d contact scientists. So many of them would fall over themselves wanting to help out if I said I was writing for a television show and wanted my techno-babble to sound real. I couldn’t get some of them to shut up. They were really impressed with me for knowing so much. Most didn’t question me too closely about the show. There were half a dozen zombie shows on television in those years and here was just another one coming down the chute. People couldn’t get enough of zombies, zombies, zombies. A mutated cold virus, a fungus, bacteria from space, rogue nanotech, all of these disparate causes ended up in the same place. Zombie apocalypse!

  You can’t get any more stupid than a zombie, can you? They’re the lowest of the low. People say that I turned the human race into zombies. I like to think that I turned them into themselves. It was always there under their skin, and I just made the outer match the inner.

  Xan noticed something in the interview that he hadn’t seen before, that Olyvyr couldn’t see from his side of the table. A detective had flexed his fingers into a fist. His face remained pleasant. The second detective took notes diligently. There would be many more interviews to follow, technical ones with far more scientific minds across the table from Olyvyr than the two detectives, but this one was the most widely disseminated. It was so brutal, and brutally honest, a despicable man laying himself bare and making the monster of himself pathetic. Still wanting to make friends out of people that he considered too stupid to be his friends, and totally disconnected from the reality that one could not make friends out of men after killing their wives and children.

  Unfortunately, some of the survivors weren’t that menta
lly balanced, and Olyvyr had exchanged letters with a loony woman far away in Big Sugar who thought he was misunderstood and wanted to marry him. He’d finally gotten a girl. He’d just had to end the world to do it.

  This was what he had done instead of curing cancer. For ten years, while Xan had been teaching his students, making eyes at that pretty P.E. teacher with the long legs, and raising his cherished daughter, that brilliant idiot had been plotting their demise. He didn’t know them. It wasn’t personal. That was just how it had to be so he could rectify all the blows that he had endured in being the precocious, pampered, entitled child of a middle class family in the United States.

  Having had enough, Xan got up and changed the channel. In his father’s childhood, there had been four channels to choose from. In Xan’s childhood, there had been hundreds. It had come full circle. There were four again. None of the settlements was called Entertainment. One channel had news; the other three broadcast old movies and cartoons. Xan watched them now and then with incomprehension that he had once been a part of that world.

  Lucca.

  In the time that Xan hadn’t thought of him, had he died?

  He took his seat and polished off the last of his meal. Colette was already done with hers. Part of his heart always kept Lucca at bay. He smiled and cooed and cradled him, but emotionally at times it felt like a betrayal to Katie. Intellectually, he understood that that was ridiculous. But the boy was so delicate that he could be lost, and when he smiled, it was Katie’s smile. It made Xan want to hold him close and put him down at the same time.

  Xan kept his son at bay because he was so afraid of what could be coming, what he’d never seen coming with his daughter. He hadn’t gotten to her in time. He’d taught her to watch out for cars when crossing the road and not to pet strange dogs without asking permission, but he hadn’t seen the hulking shape of Olyvyr Gravine in the shadows. No one had.