Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “A jacket?” Xan hadn’t seen it. He went back to the break room. There was a black jacket slung over a chair. A backpack sagged from straps over the back. The light under the door was still dappling furiously as zombies milled around and jiggled the door. Swiping the jacket and the backpack, Xan looked around. There was a refrigerator in the corner, rude magnets and food stains stuck to it, and a microwave beside it. The mostly empty shelves above had no doors. Mouse droppings were everywhere.

  He opened the fridge. Food had gone sour in containers and foil wrapping, but there were two unopened bottles of water. Rubber-banded together, a paper was taped to them with a childish drawing of a skull and crossbones. Above the drawing, it said THESE BELONG TO JACKAL.

  Now they belonged to Xan. He took everything back to the tubes, where he passed up the jacket and one of the water bottles. Then he downed half of the second in several huge gulps. He could have polished off the whole thing, but he doubted the water was still running in this building and he had to clean up his head.

  “Do you want me to lift you down?” he asked.

  “I can come down on the slide,” Selena offered. She disappeared and the slide scraped within as she shot down to the thick blue mats on the floor. Landing with a whomp upon them, she pulled down her hospital gown and tried to get some purchase to stand. He held out his hands and she took them. The jacket hung on her.

  “I’m going to the restroom to fix myself up,” Xan said. “Can you make it to the chairs, or should I help?”

  Her eyes had more spark to them from being locked in safely. “I’m . . . I’m not allowed to walk by myself in the . . . hospital. That’s why I had my red socks, so nurses knew I wasn’t . . . wasn’t supposed to walk. I get . . . I get too tired . . . and fall. But I . . . I don’t want to hurt your back anymore. And . . .” Her cheeks gained faint color from a blush. “The gown is factory . . . factory seconds, my nurse said. Open halfway down the front, open in back. I . . . I mooned all those zombies, Mr. Spencer.”

  He took her water bottle to carry. She had only downed a few sips. “They didn’t notice. You hold onto my arm and walk as near to those chairs as you can. I’ll carry you the rest of the way if you get too tired.”

  She walked with small, determined steps, and made it to the chair. The jacket went down to her thighs. She was not a tall girl. He set down the backpack on the table and ferried himself to the boys’ restroom. The burp shirt had blood on it. After mopping up his head, he put the soiled paper towels into the trashcan and knotted shut the top of the plastic bag. Then he took off his shirt and poured water over the blood. Lucca was on his mind. Without a clock, Xan estimated they were thirty-six hours away from the end of the surgeon’s three-day danger period. If Lucca was still alive by then, he had much better chances.

  Would Xan still be alive in thirty-six hours?

  He wrung out the shirt. The blood was out of it now. It was just dirty, and somewhere along the way, he had acquired a tear in the sleeve. Putting it on, the material damp, he looked at his reflection. A stranger stared back at him.

  The contents of the backpack were on the table when he fell into another chair. Selena was sorting through it in interest. “Jack Albert Shimuzu. This is his stuff,” she said.

  Jackal. It was school stuff, a heavy textbook on economics, two notebooks, crumpled receipts to a junior college bookstore, pens and pencils. The receipts were dated over a time period of two years. The guy had just dumped them in and never cleaned out his backpack in all that time. Xan flipped through the notebooks, which had just as many ink drawings as they did class notes on the pages. Selena unzipped the front pocket and dumped out more pencils, a calculator, and used tissues. “Gross.”

  Xan fingered the empty backpack. They needed food, water, clothes for Selena, and weapons to get back to Newgreen. A women’s clothing store was right next to them, but there was no way to get to it now. He wasn’t going to find ammunition in a Sinkhole, and he’d been right that the water wasn’t working. And food . . . what was in the fridge was no longer good, and rodents had helped themselves to the candy on the prize counter.

  He hadn’t looked at what was in the counter. Someone had been in the process of restocking it when the contagion came. “I’m going to check the prize counter for anything we can eat,” Xan said.

  From the flash in Selena’s eyes, he knew that she wanted to see it. Yet she didn’t say a word. She was thinking of his aching back, and how there were zombies outside, and that a bunch of cheap plastic crap wasn’t important right now. All of her thoughts played out on her face. But she was also on the younger side of her teen years, and what kid that age didn’t like to see a prize counter? The adult in her won out and she held her peace, but he humored the child behind it. “You want to come?”

  “We can fill up the backpack if there’s anything edible,” Selena said, trying hard to be grown-up about it. She stood up and he offered his arm. Halfway there, she wobbled and he picked her up.

  He sat her down atop the counter beside a register, where she could see into the glass and to the shelves behind it. Crowded up on the highest shelf were big stuffed animals, toy cars and planes a level below. Everything was labeled for the amount of tickets it cost to win. Board games, action figures, jump ropes, balls, coin purses, silly straws, makeup kits and jewelry for older kids, prizes were packed to overflowing along the wall display.

  The smaller items that cost fewer tickets were within the glass counter. They bent over it to look in, Xan moving aside the plastic container and detritus the mice had left behind. There was a basket of key rings and another of balloons. A third and fourth basket held little stuffed hedgehogs in blue, purple, and pink. Even in the poor lighting of the arcade, their fur sparkled. Stacked up beside them were boxes of candy. Selena tapped a skeletal finger over it. “There.”

  Xan went behind the counter and knelt down. The glass door was shut but unlocked, and rodents hadn’t gotten inside. Brushing past the stuffed animals, he liberated the candy and brought it up to the top of the counter. Selena’s finger tapped again. Shuffling over on his knees to where she was indicating, Xan moved aside the crinkled plastic shag of pom-poms. A cup holding lollipops was almost invisible underneath them. He tipped over a basket of beauty products as he lifted the cup to the counter. Wrapping her fingers around the lollipops, Selena transferred them into the backpack.

  Something scraped outside. Their heads jerked to the door. The amount of dappling had reduced. Seeing the girl was in terror, Xan whispered, “It’s okay. There are fewer of them out there now.”

  “They’re going to . . . to the others.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stayed very quiet as the light shifted on the worn carpet of the entryway. Then they packed up the rest of the candy. Some wasn’t candy at all, but a stack of fuzzy diaries that had been beneath the boxes. Xan set those aside and searched for anything else. He had gotten it all.

  “Mr. Spencer, this is pretty stupid but . . .” Selena tapped on the glass. “Could I have just one of those? I had a bunch when I was little. I’d squeak them and scare my cat. They were really popular back then.”

  She was pointing to the stuffed hedgehogs. He lifted out a basket and put it on the counter, where she ran her hand in pleasure over the giant puff of soft fur. After a moment of deliberation, she chose a blue one. She slipped it into her jacket pocket and then pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Look at that. I’ve got smokes.” She opened the lid. Only two cigarettes were inside.

  Xan wanted to get to an area with houses. Some of them had to have guns inside, and garages or driveways with hybrid cars. But now was not the time to leave this building. The scent of blood at the drop point would be luring over every zombie in the area, and they were one lousy block away. He had to wait until the meat was gone and they dispersed. Those who had seen him enter this building would head off to feed in time, and wouldn’t remember he was in here if they wandered back. Would he have remembered when he
was like that?

  He noticed a sign that said soda was a dollar each. A small refrigerator was beneath the far end of the prize counter. Opening it up, he pulled out six cans, four regular Nazzies and two Diet Nazzies. He’d prefer water, but he couldn’t be picky. Selena dutifully added them to the backpack and said, “Diet Nasty. That’s what my mom called these.” As he did the zipper and slung the backpack over his shoulder, she squinted through the dimness to the arcade games. “Princess of Space. I used to play that all the way . . . to level sixteen on two quarters. What are you doing to those teddy bears?”

  Xan was stripping them of their T-shirts. “I can wrap these around your feet for socks.” A zombie thumped against the door. He put the T-shirts in his pocket, helped himself to string necklaces filled with charms, and picked up Selena.

  When he carried her back to the play floor, she pointed to the girls’ restroom. He took her into the handicapped stall, set her on the toilet, and held the door closed since she couldn’t reach the latch. “This is really embarrassing,” she called.

  “It’s okay. It’s just what has to be done,” Xan said.

  “It’s still really embarrassing. You should talk so I can pretend you can’t hear.”

  “We need to give them some time to break up out there, and then we’ll start back for Newgreen,” Xan said over the sound of her urinating. “There will be maps in homes and if we can’t find a car, we’ll have to take this in small movements.” They could jump from house to business to house, whatever was between the Sinkhole and the settlement.

  “I can’t go back to Newgreen,” Selena said. Paper tore. “They can’t do anything more, the doctors said. Even if it was before . . . they might not have been able to help. I’ll just get put on a bait truck again. I don’t want that. Can you take me out of here now?”

  He carried her back out to the play floor and settled her down on the mats where the slides let out. There was nothing for a blanket or pillow. She rested against the lip of a slide and tugged at the giant jacket.

  Taking out the teddy bears’ T-shirts, one pink, one blue, both reading WUV U WOTS, Xan wrapped them around her icy cold feet. Then he dumped the charms from the string necklaces and bound the T-shirts there. “How long do you have?” he asked quietly.

  “About a month, Doctor Hansen said. I don’t remember what day she told me that. A week ago? Less?” Her eyes were accepting. But she had had cancer for quite a while, plenty of time to get used to it, or she was just the sort to keep her more negative feelings to herself. “She’s nice, my doctor. It’s just too strong . . . what I have. As hard and dirty as we fight . . . it fights back harder and dirtier. She visits me even on her days off. I get so sick of always being in the hospital, so she tells Nurse Burt to chuck me . . . in a wheelchair and she’ll take me around to see the gardens. I got to help plant seeds and collect eggs.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen. She wouldn’t have put me on the bait truck! She’s my friend. She’d gone home for the day when Nurse Sue came in to tell me what was going . . . to happen. The nurse was crying about it as she started . . . to give me the drugs. She said it wasn’t right to send me out yet. That’s the last thing I remember. It had to be Doctor Koy who authorized it behind Doctor Hansen’s back. He’s . . . an asshole.” Selena gauged his reaction to her profanity, but Xan thought anyone who would put a living child on a bait truck was indeed an asshole. He just nodded. “Doctor Koy isn’t always in Newgreen. He’s a settlement hospital administrator . . . who rotates with this mean-eyed head nurse. Every time he comes . . . he has a fit about how much the hospital wastes. I can hear him out in the hallway complaining . . . about how much they use, complaining that the Collection Agency doesn’t pick up enough, complaining that . . . Factory makes the wrong things. He’s got a loud voice. All he does is complain . . .”

  She paused to catch her breath. “He’s been taking his turn in Newgreen for a few months now and . . . he doesn’t like me much. He looks at my chart, talks to my chart, talks to Doctor Hansen and the nurses, never looks . . . or talks to me. He did that again just the other day, like I’m blind and deaf and dumb. Why did they . . . try this or that treatment? Why when they knew it . . . wouldn’t work? I don’t think . . . I don’t think he likes female doctors. Because he just talks right over Doctor Hansen when she explains. He’s rude to her. He doesn’t . . . talk over male doctors that way. He’s going to Meatfarm next. Everyone can’t wait for him to go. His head nurse, too.” Flexing her feet, she examined her socks.

  “Too tight?” Xan asked.

  “No, they’re good. Thanks. Do you have kids?”

  “I had a daughter before. She’s . . . out there,” Xan said. “She would be ten now. And I have a son. He’s one. He just had surgery at the hospital because he was born with heart problems.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “The surgeon doesn’t know if he’ll pull through. We should know in a few days which way it’s going to go.” The light dappled on the mat by his side. He looked up to the roof in alarm, expecting to see a zombie looking down hungrily through the glass to them, but it was only a bird that had landed above.

  “But he’s only one,” Selena said. “That’s sad.”

  But you’re only fourteen, Xan thought. That was every bit as sad.

  “You didn’t see her, did you?” Selena asked anxiously. “Out there today? I saw one that was a girl.”

  It took him a moment to understand the question. “No, Katie wasn’t out there today.”

  “Good. My mom is like that. I don’t want to see her that way. I don’t know what happened . . . to my dad. He was at work at the airport when it happened. Mom and I . . . were going to the hospital. It was like the one time in my life . . . I wasn’t going there for me. My friend had to get her appendix out and we were off to visit. We stopped to get brunch at a restaurant on the way . . . and then everything went crazy.”

  There was nothing of high school jadedness about this girl, the almost automatic distrust and dislike of an adult that a lot of them had. Then again, she hadn’t been old enough to go to high school at the time of the contagion. She reminded him of his seventh graders. “How did you get away?”

  “The waitress saw what was going on. She got me and two more people and we locked ourselves into the employees’ restroom. Then we were there for days . . . drinking water from the sink . . . until a truck went by with a bullhorn. They were shooting zombies with antidote and gathering up survivors. How did you get away?”

  “I didn’t. I got infected. But I was lucky and shot with the antidote.”

  Her eyes widened. “You were one of them?”

  “For a few days.” The muscles in his neck twitched. “I don’t remember it very well.”

  In that second, he did. Being out in hell was doing that to him. The sun had been hot on the back of his neck in that stinking alley, and then the overhang of the building had flushed him with coolness. He hadn’t had those words, hot or cool or overhang or alley, just the sensation of shifting temperature, the reek from the dumpster unconnected to the word garbage. The skater had been crushed up against the fence, too scared or too injured to scale it.

  Injured. Xan had smelled blood. The guy had had baggy pants on and they made him trip over himself. He’d scuffed his arm on the sidewalk, pinpricks of blood shining like tiny rubies against the alabaster background of his skin. The smell had driven Xan insane with need. It was stronger than any hunger he had ever felt in his life, for food or water or sex. Blood was meat, and shrinking against the chain-link fence was a banquet.

  He didn’t have that word, of course. He had simply understood that he could quell the need here.

  The skater could have broken his arm in that fall, or bashed up his leg. That was why he wasn’t climbing. Or there were zombies on the other side of the fence, zombies that didn’t register in Xan’s mind, and there was nowhere else for the guy to go. The parasites in Xan weren’t directing him to bite and infe
ct the guy as a new host, but to devour.

  Then something had struck Xan’s chest. The guy had thrown a fistful of cash at him in a vain bargain for his life. No, it had been more than bills. True rubies had gleamed on the broken, splotchy concrete, rubies on necklaces and bracelets, and other jewels. The guy had been looting, but helping himself to stupid shit. Not fuel to drive away. Not food or bottles of water. Not guns and ammunition. He’d swiped jewels from a display case at a store, money from wallets or cash registers. And he’d been careless about where he’d done it, because Xan had seen him.

  The skin on his arm flushed cold in five ovals of fingerprints. Selena said, “All of you get that look.”

  Now it was Xan’s turn to be embarrassed. The girl patted his arm and withdrew to her uncomfortable recline on the slide’s lip. “What look is that?” Xan asked. “Have you met many people like me?”

  “Some. Most of you guys just have flash-memories. That’s what Doctor Hansen said. But when you have them, you look a little checked out and freaked out at the same time. She called it . . . dissociated or something. And it was for the better. You shouldn’t have to remember a time when you did horrible things . . . and couldn’t control yourself. But a few people do remember that time.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true. Just a few, and a lot of them go crazy because of it. A nice, regular person can’t walk around knowing . . . that he or she hurt people. Killed people. Ate people. There’s a small ward in the hospital . . . for people who remember. It’s by the cancer ward where I was. A lot of those patients tried to kill themselves. One man screamed all the time because . . . he remembered infecting his son and then murdering his wife. He did kill himself later on . . . right there at the hospital. He hung himself on the bar in his closet. He left a note for the doctors and nurses saying that . . . he was sorry. He just couldn’t be helped.”

  “Sometimes the flashes are stronger than others,” Xan said in a winded voice. He could point to the exact spot on his chest where the bills and jewels had struck him. “But usually they’re not so bad.”