Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  The morning was growing bright. The zombie stopped attempting to get in through the back door and wandered around the backyard. Since the platform was only eight or nine feet off the ground, Xan didn’t prepare to try out the zip line. The zombie was a man who was very tall; he could reach over the side of that platform and grab their ankles or haul himself up.

  It was an hour before he went away, and no others replaced him. Xan tested the cable a second time. Inexplicably, he trusted it. This person had known what he or she was doing. Perhaps the ladders and zip lines extended all the way down the block, or at least until the ladders and cables had run out.

  Getting Selena out of bed took time, just as it had in the car. Her back bent under the weight of the backpack, and when her arms went around his neck, the hold was weaker than ever. He fashioned a sling out of a bed sheet that was tied firmly around his chest. It wouldn’t hold her for long, but if she let go, he would have moments to grab her.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I’m a burden.”

  “You’re not.” His children were not a burden to him, and Selena was, for the time being, his child.

  The window was big enough for him to stand in at a crouch. The rifle he tucked into his pants, the barrel running down his leg. He got a firm grip on the pulley and stepped off into space. They flew over the backyard to the tree, gaining speed at an alarming pace. The line ended at the trunk. He let go once the platform was beneath them and crashed down on one knee. The wooden planks of the platform squeaked horrifically. But they held.

  The rifle had shifted in his pants. He pushed it back into place and pulled the next pulley from its docking station in the tree. With a step off the platform, they were flying again. He pulled up his legs as they passed over the fence separating the yards. He looked around for zombies fast as they flew above a garden of vegetable beds. Everything was growing out of control and there were several parts of the yard almost engulfed by greenery. At first glance, the population of this property was two.

  They hit the deck and he released the pulley. Beside the back door was a mailbox. It had to have been put there by this mysterious person, because there was no reason for a mailbox to be installed behind a house. Xan opened it up. A string was taped to the underside of the lid, and it was attached to a key at the bottom. Just long enough to reach the door, Xan inserted the key into the lock and turned it.

  Willow. That had been the simplest part of this since he’d gotten thrown into the bait truck. Grateful and triumphant, he locked the door behind them. “Next stop. We did it, Selena.”

  “It was Building H,” Selena said peacefully. “Might as well have been the moon.”

  He put her on the sofa in the living room. Every window in the house was layered in sheets or cardboard from cereal boxes, and there were baseball bats and tire irons in the corners. A clipboard was on the coffee table with handwritten diagrams and scrawled words. The lettering was messy, most likely a man’s. Xan flipped through the pages, which showed homes with X’s on them and some without. They were houses the guy had searched for supplies. When there was more than he could carry, he made notations of what he’d left behind. Also labeled on the diagrams were places where zombies had fallen from his bullets. Willow had two, and a third was in an alley that ran from Willow to Walnut.

  Sadly, there wasn’t a zip line going across the street. The house was only one story, and those across the street were two and on a higher place upon the hill.

  No zombies were in the road for now. He balanced that against Selena, who was drifting into sleep upon the couch. He had said that they would take breaks, but he couldn’t hold to that promise. They had to make use of this moment. Apologizing to her under his breath, he went to wake her up.

  Chapter Eight

  It took two days to reach Cordale, which was just one block away from Wicker Place at the top. With each leap up the hill, the homes around them had gotten grander. Each block represented a one hundred thousand dollar jump in home prices, going from places Xan and Colette could have afforded if they had saved up every cent for a decade to places they never could have afforded unless they won the lottery or took to robbing banks. This was the rich part of Delanto. The lots were bigger, the homes were both bigger and fancier, and many of the backyards had pools and spas. Two years of sitting there had evaporated some of the water, and turned what was left a murky color choked with leaves and trash.

  He had shot three zombies on the way from Willow to Cordale, and they had had to spend one full day in the house on Pleasant. The number of zombies far outdid his ammunition, and he wasn’t going to make every shot. They were moving in a loose-knit pack. On some level, they had to be aware of one another. It didn’t show in the bumping shoulders, and the tripping over one another’s feet. But the way they all moved together, undulating like a wave on the ocean up and down Pleasant Lane, proved they did.

  Each day, Selena faded a little more. She’d rally for an hour or two, talking like normal and interested in the homes they hid within, but never did her rally last longer than the day before. She was going down, leveling out at a plateau at times, but otherwise only down.

  While they did their time at Pleasant, Xan and Selena had found a series of diaries in a room that once belonged to a young woman in college. They were diaries fashioned after the school year, starting in August instead of January, and sold by the Delanto public school system. Xan didn’t think too many kids kept consistent diaries these days, or if they did, they did it digitally. The fuzzy ones in the prize counter at the Sinkhole probably hadn’t gotten chosen too often by kids clutching fistfuls of tickets. But here were paper diaries, starting when the girl was in seventh grade and continuing on to her senior year. Little was written in the two diaries for junior high, but the girl’s interest had picked up in recording her activities in high school.

  Selena had taken out the diaries for the girl’s freshman and sophomore years and read them from beginning to end. She felt guilty for breaching someone’s privacy; Xan thought she was giving herself the high school experience she never had. Nervousness about getting lost on the first day there, a teacher who was mean, friend problems, a boy who never noticed a pair of admiring eyes staring his way, the girl had written down everything and Selena lapped it up whole.

  Then they’d started jumping houses again. The house at Cordale was two stories of gigantic windows with sheer curtains. It was a place to ditch quickly, but Xan was wiped out. He wasn’t going to make the next jump just yet.

  Selena stayed upstairs in a bed, and when Xan moved around, he did it at a crawl. He only stood in one certain bathroom when the door was closed, because there were no windows. Blocking the sink, he filled the basin with the contents of a water bottle and took a bath with a washcloth. He smelled. Reeked even, and he couldn’t stand to breathe himself. The puncture on his finger had closed over; the wound on his head had a scab. He’d acquired a baseball cap to wear when they were on Walnut.

  “Would you . . . would you wash my face?” Selena called as he dried off. He crawled to the bed and washed her face and hands. The washcloth was cool and she shivered. He patted her dry with a towel and opened the backpack. Looking over the side of the bed as he rummaged around, she said, “What do you have?”

  It had been foolish of him to lug around utterly unnecessary items, but looking at Selena made them feel more necessary. He hadn’t had a chance to show them to her yet, but now he presented her with the diaries from that girl’s junior and senior year. She hadn’t asked down on Pleasant, but that was why he had found himself slipping them into the already overloaded backpack. It was such a little thing to make her happy, a little thing that she wouldn’t ask for.

  Her eyes brightened. But she was too tired to read more than a few entries on her own, and then she handed the diary back to him. “Would you? Please? She didn’t write so much for this year. I just can’t get through it.”

  He s
at by the bed and read it to her. Advanced placement classes that dumped loads of homework onto the girl’s head, a fight with her mom about going to a concert, sneaking out for a party expressly to see the boy that still hadn’t noticed her since freshman year . . . Selena closed her eyes, but was awake and listening. She smiled at the sole entry for January, in which the girl had dropped her brand new cell phone into a toilet. February also sported a single entry on Valentine’s Day, the girl going out on her first date with a guy in her school. It wasn’t the object of her infatuation but a friend from her history class. In March, she had gotten caught cheating on her science midterm. A few devastated entries recorded the incident and aftermath. Then there was nothing until April, a rash of entries through May, and radio silence on the rest of the pages. The girl was just too busy this year with school and friends, the fallout from her cheating, to write very much. They would leave the junior year diary at Cordale.

  He crawled to the windows to see how it was going out there. The wave of zombies had not followed them from Pleasant Lane. There were only loners here. A curve of a driveway connected the house to the road, where one was roaming. The front yard bled into the neighbor’s front yard without demarcation, and a second was roaming between them.

  Crawling to the back of the house, he looked out that way. The backyard was filled with flowerbeds and outlined by a decorative wall that wasn’t more than three feet high. He had to go that way to the trees, which would quickly let out to Wicker Place. A roof showed above the treetops.

  She was too weak to ride around on his back now. She would have to be secured there with heavier duty means than the sheet, or strapped to a rolling chair. There was one downstairs in the home office. But that would be hard to push through the grass beyond the wall. So that left on his back, or thrown over his shoulder, or cradled in his arms and put down hastily if he had to shoot.

  He worried at it like a dog with a bone, and surrendered the problem to fate. The day was wearing on, and his fright was growing at the thought of that tsunami of zombies happening to head their way. This house was nothing but windows and French doors, and several panes in the living room were cracked.

  This time, the backpack went on his shoulders. He picked her up from the bed and she didn’t rouse until they had gone downstairs and were almost to the back door. Her eyelids fluttered then and he whispered, “Shhh.” The rifle had had to go in the backpack, as much of it that fit, but he had a handgun in the holster on his belt.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She apologized every time they moved and she could help so little. “I’m . . . I’m sorry . . . I can’t . . .”

  “It’s all right.” That was what he said every time in reply. “Shhhh.”

  The backyard had once been someone’s pride and joy. He glided over the walkway through the rioting flowers in the beds. A human skull was tipped over beneath a fruit tree. Selena’s eyes were still closed as they passed it, and the ribcage near another tree. It could have been wild dogs, coyotes, but it wasn’t.

  At the wall, he paused to look around. Then he stepped over it to thick grass. There was Wicker Place, a twist of road, and a driveway. He jogged all the way to the driveway, his head jerking from side to side in fear, and then up the grade. Around a curve was a tall black gate, braced by brick walls that held back little hills of shrubbery. Fuck.

  He went up the bricks with exceeding care, branches rasping against his leg and threatening to push him off. At the top, he made an ungainly slide down the slope to the driveway. Selena shifted in his arms and whispered, “Pretty.”

  It was indeed a pretty property. The driveway was cut stone and centered around a fountain. The house was a sprawling two stories, and when he put his hand to the handle on the front door, it opened just like that.

  He set her down in the foyer and armed her with her squirt gun. It was slack in her hand. Then he paced every room of the house to search for zombies, lock doors, and pull curtains. Not a single door in this fancy place was locked. In the master bedroom on the second floor, he glanced out the window and froze with the curtain in his fingers.

  Newgreen. Water was sparkling in the moat and the tallest buildings rose high into the sky. Home.

  He pushed the curtain back to the side. The house had been built at an edge of the hill, or it had eroded to become that way. No one could stand below and look into this room. The same was true of the window in the bathroom, which was so low that a person could sit in the spa tub and look out to the trees below and a couple of miles of pasture and woody patches beneath the hill. The view was beautiful.

  The bathroom was coated in dust and the medicine cabinet was ajar. Within were bottles of pills. Most were narcotics, and several different names were printed on the labels. Ella Sanders. Amanda Rodriguez. Jennifer Copman. He opened a bottle that had no name. A jumble of different pills was inside. Someone had had a considerable problem.

  He carried Selena upstairs and put her on the huge bed in the master bedroom. It would let her look out upon the world and show her how close they were to Newgreen. If only he had another hybrid! The only time he had seen one in the last few days was on Pleasant Lane, it had had a flat tire, and there was no way to get to it. Wash, wash, the zombies had washed from one end of the road to the other, hour after hour after hour. Keeping him from that black Korus sitting in a driveway and painted with bird droppings. Even when Xan and Selena were leaving, he didn’t go to it. The binoculars had showed him that the zombies were doing their waves on Gardner now, and he couldn’t drive through them.

  “Oooh,” Selena sighed about the window, and the big bed with a lovely duvet. “This is like a palace.”

  Then she was quiet, watching him as he ate, motioning once when she wanted the bathroom. He held her up on the toilet and then she smiled apologetically when nothing happened. “Could you give me a minute alone?”

  “Don’t fall.”

  “I won’t fall.”

  She didn’t fall, but called for help minutes later. The toilet held a small amount of tea-colored urine, and she had stepped to the sink by habit to wash her hands. The water wasn’t working, and her energy had quit on her there. Collapsed half over it and terribly out of breath, she said, “I . . . didn’t . . . fall.”

  He carried her back. Once in bed, she turned onto her side and curled up, facing him. “I can’t . . . go farther.”

  He leaned down and rested his head on the second pillow. “We are so close to home, Selena. So close that we can see it from this window. We’re going to make it.”

  “You’re going . . . to make it. You’ll make it if you’re not . . . dragging me along. I want . . . to stay here.”

  “Don’t you want to see your doctor?” He wished he had something more compelling than that to tempt her with.

  She smiled at him patiently. “That would mean . . . I’d be in the hospital again. I’m done. I’m done . . . with hospitals. I’m done . . . being sick. I’m done . . . with everything. Let me . . . be done.”

  “Selena-”

  “Would you . . . would you read to me? The last diary? I know you brought it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because you’re nice, Mr. Spencer. Read it? I . . . want to hear what . . . happened in her senior year. She . . . she wouldn’t be mad at us . . . do you think?”

  That was a big concern of hers. She brought it up repeatedly like she didn’t remember just talking about it with him. “No,” Xan said firmly. “She wouldn’t mind. We’re not going to tell anyone what we read, are we?”

  She shook her head, and he opened the last diary. The author had been much more attentive to her senior year than her junior. His voice pattered on as the sky darkened and Newgreen faded. He read even when he thought she was asleep. Time felt short. He stopped with the entry for the last of December. It was early night, and he had gone hoarse. She was totally still beneath the blanket.

  But breathing. Still breathing.

  The bed was king-sized. Rolling onto
his back with his head propped up on the pillow, he drank from a bottle of water and counted the stars. Tomorrow he would match this twist of road to the map and determine how best to get to Rockwin.

  I’m coming, Colette.

  She would be quiet in her relief, a sharp gasp at most, but he would see it in her eyes, and feel it in the tightness of her arms. That was how it had been when they came upon one another by sheer accident after he was brought to Newgreen. He had screamed; she had pulled him into a death lock.

  He wanted to be home in their apartment that wasn’t really theirs, but had become that way over time. Watch her go by with her hair slung back in a ponytail, the stolen burp shirt swaying over her frame. Feel her beside him in the bed, his only constant from the old world to new. Lucca wouldn’t ever grasp the depths of the change but Colette understood every painful inch and mourned their vanished lives along with Xan. Their missing daughter most of all, beautiful and kindhearted and forever lost to the world. He had searched for her in the Pleasant Lane tsunami, although she had been changed nowhere near Delanto.

  It had been strange all these nights to fall asleep without Lucca in his crib box, snuffling and gurgling and rumbling and farting, making querulous sounds of infant dissatisfaction. Once Xan was out, he was out, but he’d listened to his son’s small racket until then. Tonight, he had the occasional sigh or groan from Selena. She turned onto her side and something made a ticking sound. It was probably candy in her jacket pocket. She hadn’t smoked the cigarettes, but their presence amused her every time she rediscovered them.