Undead Ultra Box Set | Books 1-4

by Picott, Camille

  “It issued orders,” Ben states.

  The back of my spine prickles. It’s bad enough that we’re outnumbered by the undead. But up until two minutes ago, we had the advantage of organization. Of skilled counterattacks.

  “They acted as a unit,” I say at last. “Like a hunting pack.”

  “A fluke,” Reed says. “We’ve never seen them organize before. That’s not how they work.”

  “That’s not how they’ve worked up until now,” Johnny counters. “We may be witnessing an evolution.”

  “Evolution?” Eric asks. “Fuck that. This was a fluke.”

  “Maybe,” Johnny says. “But let’s take a brief walk through the history of man. We started as apes. Over the years, we learned how to hunt, talk, and organize. Who’s to say zombies won’t undergo a similar evolution?”

  “The explanation might be even simpler than that,” Jenna says. “Maybe the virus mutated differently in a small percentage of those who have turned. Maybe there’s a small percentage who are intelligent.”

  “St. Roch looked after us.” Jesus fishes the saint out of his shirt and plants a kiss on it. “He kept us safe.”

  “We need to get on the ham,” Ben says. “Find out if this is an isolated problem or if other people are seeing the same thing. We’re in serious fucking shit if this is happening in other places.”

  “I don’t buy any of that,” Reed says. “I’m not freaking out over one incident.”

  “No one is freaking out.” I wipe my bat clean on the shirt of one of the dead zombies. “We’ll have Johnny reach out to his contacts on the ham. In the meantime, we need to be vigilant. This may or may not be a fluke. We need to be prepared for anything.”

  “Amen to that,” Ben says.

  4

  Practice

  BEN

  Ben finds comfort in psst-psst of the handguns as they spit bullets on the zombies below. To him, it’s the sound of self-preservation. Of survival.

  College Creek dorm, for all the bad memories it holds, has proven to be a perfect place for target practice. The long balcony across the second floor, connecting three dorm suites, is perfectly positioned above the athletic field. There are plenty of zoms to shoot without fear of being bitten or swarmed in the process.

  “You’re leaning backwards. Your shots are punching holes in the clouds,” Ben tells Kate. “Bend forward at the waist and lower your arms. Better. Try again.”

  “I suck at this shit.” Kate heaves a sigh. The dark circles under her eyes are more pronounced than usual today. He hadn’t noticed them in the smudged light of dawn this morning. She could have used a bigger thermos of coffee.

  “Like this.” He takes her by the shoulders and adjusts her stance. He does his best not to notice her warmth beneath his hands. “Try again.”

  Brow furrowed in concentration, she once again raises the Sig and takes aim. This time, she hits a zom right between the eyes. Granted, it’s only twenty yards away, but this is a vast improvement over a few weeks ago when all she could hit was dirt.

  “Good work, Kate. Keep it up.”

  She responds with a small, tired smile. A sense of contentment fills him. He likes knowing she won’t be defenseless if she ever gets caught in a bad place. With the way she plunges head first into things, that’s likely to happen sooner or later.

  He continues down the row, critiquing people as needed as they fire down into the athletic field.

  “Your thumb is too low on the grip,” he tells Reed. “It should be parallel to the ground.”

  “Two hands,” he tells Carter. “That shit you see in the movies with cops shooting one-handed is just that: shit. If you want to kill zombies, hold your gun with two hands.”

  “Feet shoulder-width apart,” he reminds Johnny. “You look like a frog.”

  The kids don’t argue. They take his instruction, do their best to make corrections, and keep practicing.

  Shooting practice is the only time they aren’t all flapping their jaws. Couple the lack of chatter with the silencers on the guns, and it’s bliss out here for Ben. No wonder he looks forward to practice sessions.

  The silencers were a score. Ben managed to scavenge several dozen sound suppressors when he first raided the army’s weapon’s cache. It was a good thing, too. Without those silencers, Kate would never have agreed to their weekly practice sessions.

  You’d think anyone who found herself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse would welcome guns and the chance to learn how to use them. Not Kate. Nope, she was happy with her knives and screwdrivers. And now, he supposes, her aluminum baseball bat. He wouldn’t put it past her to pick running shoes as a preferred form of defense over a firearm.

  But he’d won her over. Eventually. With lots of pestering that earned him frowns. In the end, he’d gotten his way. Sort of. She’d consented to target practice two days a week.

  “Our two-hour runs are scheduled on Wednesday and Friday,” Kate told him. “We can add target practice to those days.”

  Of course, she wouldn’t dream of cutting a running workout. He would have to make do. Consistent practice two days a week was better than nothing.

  Kate almost put the kibosh on the whole thing as soon as she figured out silencers don’t really make guns silent. Like most people, she’d been misled by the movies. Silencers drop the overall decibel of a weapon, but guns still make a healthy amount of noise. Enough that they attracted new zoms to the wrought iron fence around the field every practice session. It wasn’t until Ben convinced her the newcomers were good for long-range target practice that she reluctantly agreed to allow the lessons to continue.

  It was paying off, as evidenced by the fact that Jenna and Carter, who never held a gun before the apocalypse, were hitting their targets eighty-five percent of the time. Only half of those are headshots, but he doesn’t expect miracles.

  Ben stops beside Jenna as she fires at a senior citizen zombie on the athletic field below. “You’re flinching right before you pull the trigger. It’s messing with your aim. Don’t flinch.”

  She wrinkles her nose, raising the Berretta as she again takes aim at the senior zombie. This time, when she fires, her bullet sinks into the shoulder of the creature.

  “Nice work. Bend your knees a little. You’re too tense.” He takes her by the shoulders and adjusts her forward a few degrees. “You want a slight tilt at the waist. Try again. This time aim for the head.”

  Jenna nods, her body locked in place, and fires. Her shot brains a zom and drops it.

  “Nice. Keep it up.” Ben continues down the line.

  Jesus is a good shot. The man is open about his pre-apocalypse days as a drug dealer, which no doubt plays into his proficiency with firearms. Caleb and Ash are more than proficient, of course. They both had professional training.

  Then there’s Eric. Ben stops beside the young man. More than two dozen zombies lie dead on Eric’s end of the field, the result of the young man’s handiwork.

  Not bad for two fifteen-round mags.

  “Nice work.” Ben gives him an approving nod. “I have something new for you to try.”

  Up until now, he’s kept their practice sessions to handguns. He wanted them to feel comfortable with smaller weapons before pulling out the rifles.

  Ben unslings the AR-15 from around his neck.

  “No way,” Caleb protests. “You’re letting the rookie fire the AR-15 before me and Ash?”

  Ben scowls at him. He’d prefer not to give Caleb any firearm and let the asshole test his luck.

  “Want to test yourself against the rookie?” Ben jerks a thumb at the tactical bag he carried here. “Knock yourself out.” Maybe he’ll get lucky and the shithead will shoot off his own foot.

  Caleb gives him a dirty look and resumes shooting with his Berretta.

  Ben spends the next fifteen minutes with Eric, showing him the ins and outs of the rifle. When the young man raises it to his shoulder and takes the first shot, the recoil rocks him backward. He adjusts
his stance and tries again.

  “Keep practicing,” Ben says. “Try not to fall on your ass.”

  He continues his patrol up and down the second-floor balcony, eyes flicking out to survey the zoms in the field below.

  He tries not to recall why there are so many trapped there, but the memory shoves its way forward. Sometime in the early days of the outbreak, some genius had come up with the idea to lead a bunch of zombies into the field, which was surrounded by a wrought iron fence. Ben had watched the idiot First Sergeant do it. Right before he’d gotten himself swarmed and bitten.

  Ben feels the claws of a flashback creeping up on him. He forces himself to look away, to break from the memory

  His eyes land on Kate. Her incredible legs are enough to make him forget all about the overturned jeep and his long-lost First Sergeant. For a good ten seconds, he allows himself to absorb the sight of her.

  The way her brow wrinkles in concentration. The tight tank top. The damned tan line on her legs.

  Then he takes note of her hunched shoulders. Her posture has gone to shit in the five minutes since he last critiqued her. Irritation and anxiety prick him. She’s the worst shot out here. The idea of her failing to properly defend herself due to his poor training does not sit well with him.

  He steps up behind her, pressing down on both her shoulders with his hands. “You’re too tense. Drop your shoulders. All the way.”

  She gets them in place.

  “You’re leaning over too far—” he begins.

  She fires mid-sentence, her bullet flying to the side and burying itself in the grass. “Dammit,” she snarls.

  Ben swallows back his impatience. “Just wait a sec. Your posture is all wrong.”

  “You said to bend my waist.”

  “I said slight bend.”

  “You never said slight. You said bend.”

  Her obvious annoyance irks him. Words run out of his mouth like a freight train on autopilot. It’s with an effort that he manages not to snap at her.

  “You make us run because you don’t want us to die out there. This is no different. I want you to survive whatever this fucking world throws at us.”

  He means that last part more than she knows. Just to cover his tracks—in case anyone is listening—he turns a glare on the rest of the pack. “I want all you little shitheads to survive, okay? Now get back to practice.”

  Said shitheads keep firing.

  Kate adjusts her body into a semblance of a proper stance. “Is this what you meant?”

  He swallows, doing his best to let go of his anger. “Almost. Straighten up another two degrees. There. That’s good. Try again.”

  This time, when she fires, her bullet hits a zombie in the lower sternum.

  “Nice,” he breathes. “Again.”

  She fires three more shots. The third one goes straight into the head of a zombie and drops it.

  Ben folds his arms in satisfaction. The tension within him eases. “Nice work. Just keep working on your stance. That’s half the battle.”

  Kate nods, giving him another small, tired smile. “Thanks.”

  Her exhaustion is evident. If he wasn’t afraid for her life, he’d tell her to skip practice and take a nap.

  He wants to say this to her, but has no idea how to shape these thoughts into words. So he does the next best thing. He gives her a curt nod and moves on.

  Maybe tomorrow he’ll make her another thermos of coffee and sneak in an extra spoonful of grounds for a caffeine boost.

  5

  Hair

  KATE

  A week later, I stare at myself in the mirror.

  I hardly recognize the face that stares back at me. Lean bordering on gaunt. Brown ponytail with a solid five inches of gray roots. The skin around my eyes shows the beginnings of crow’s feet.

  “God,” I say. “You’d never know I’m turning forty next month. I look fifty.”

  “Your birthday is next month?” Jenna, who stands beside me in the bathroom, frowns at me in the mirror. “Carter didn’t say anything about your birthday.”

  “You may have noticed my son is short on details.”

  Jenna’s mouth twists in an affectionate grimace. “Yes, I’ve picked up on that once or twice.”

  “His father was the same way.”

  “For the record, you don’t look fifty. You look like someone who does CrossFit at the beach.”

  Jenna is being nice. I appreciate her kindness. My son snagged himself a great girlfriend.

  “So, what will it be? Cut or color?” Jenna picks up a pair of scissors with one hand. With the other hand, she hefts a bottle of brown hair dye.

  It turns out brown hair dye isn’t the easiest thing to find on a college campus. Green, yes. Blue, yes. We even found pink and red and purple in one room, but no brown. If the apocalypse had stranded us in an old-folks home, I’m sure there would have been brown hair dye in every other bathroom.

  When I happened across this bottle yesterday while scavenging in a nearby dorm building, I’d been ecstatic. Now that I have the dye, it seems stupid. What’s the point of dying my roots if they’re just going to grow out again? I don’t have time to spend messing with my hair.

  “What do you think Ben would like?” Jenna asks.

  “Why does that matter?”

  Jenna shrugs, giving me a look of wide-eyed innocence. “I don’t know.”

  Without a doubt, I’d look better with dyed hair. I’d look younger. Not haggard. Borderline okay-looking. Not attractive by any sense of the word, but not a she-got-run-over-by-a-truck look, either.

  “I think he likes you,” Jenna says.

  “No.” I shake my head. “He barely talks to me.” Which is technically true. Ben doesn’t talk much to anyone.

  “He spends more time with you on the firing range than anyone else.”

  Target practice. I wish she hadn’t brought that up. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to get worse at something with practice, but over the past week my already nonexistent shooting skills have declined.

  Ben is so different when he’s patrolling the balcony and critiquing us. Yeah, he’s still gruff and curt. I don’t think anything will ever change that. But he’s a good teacher. No, scratch that. He’s a great teacher. Give the man a gun and he’s completely in his element.

  I like seeing that side of him, but it’s distracting. It’s even worse when he starts prodding me to stand correctly. I pretend not to be hyper aware of his small touches as he corrects my stance. He has no idea how hard it is to get everything right when he’s standing two feet away scrutinizing me. I hate looking like an inept idiot in front of him.

  “The only reason he spends extra time with me on the shooting range is because I’m a terrible shot,” I tell Jenna.

  Jenna just looks at me and says, “Uh-huh.”

  I decide not to tell her about the thermos of coffee left just outside my bedroom door every morning for the past week. Ben has never said anything to me, but I have no doubt he’s my coffee fairy. Seeing the Yeti thermos there every morning warms me more than the coffee.

  But my hairstyle is not about Ben. His theoretical opinion doesn’t have any bearing on my decision.

  “Cut it all off,” I say. That’s the practical thing to do.

  Jenna’s bottom lip sags open. She snaps it back shut. “Are you sure?”

  I nod. “I can’t be worried about my hair.” Or about Ben’s opinion. “There are too many other things to worry about.”

  Such as the evolution of zombies. Johnny spent the last week on the ham talking to every person he could find. Three reported seeing organization among the zombies. It’s a small percentage, but it’s enough to make me think our post-apocalyptic world might be on the brink of a major shake up. Practical hair is the only way to go.

  “Are you sure, Kate? You want to cut it all off?” Jenna’s discomfort is not making this any easier.

  “Yes.” To emphasize my decision, I plop down on the lid of th
e toilet seat. “Chop it all off.”

  Jenna picks up the scissors. “You should know I’ve never cut hair before. I’m an experienced dyer, not a cutter.”

  “How much talent does it take to hack off someone’s hair?” I position myself so that my back is to the mirror. So I won’t have to watch my transformation. I yank out the rubber band holding my hair in place. “Go for it.”

  Licking her lips, Jenna picks up a strand of my hair. It hangs well past my shoulders.

  I force myself to stare at the shower curtain. The cheery cloth with pink, yellow, and orange flowers is now tarnished with gray splotches of mold.

  I feel like that shower curtain.

  Snip.

  The first chunk of hair falls to the floor. I see it out of my periphery and make it a point not to look at it directly.

  Snip. Snip.

  My vision blurs. The shower curtain flowers swirl before my eyes.

  Twenty minutes later, Jenna steps back. “That’s it. It’s all gone.”

  The smile she gives me eases the tension gripping my chest. I hate the fact that cutting hair produces anxiety. In a world where stepping outside can result in death, I shouldn’t give a shit about my hair.

  “I like it,” Jenna says. “You have nice cheekbones.”

  More like gaunt cheekbones, but I don’t say that. Jenna was nice to help me. I shouldn’t ruin it by complaining.

  “Turn around,” she urges.

  I turn.

  I hardly recognize the women in the mirror. If not for the sports bra, I could almost imagine myself as a no-nonsense businesswoman. The pixie cut lends youthfulness to my face and eases the weight of my impending fortieth birthday.

  “I was worried.” Jenna grins at me in the mirror. “But love it.”

  I can’t help but grin back at her. “Me, too.”

  “Maybe I should cut mine.” She pulls back her long tresses, studying her face in the mirror. “One less thing for zombies to grab.”

  “If you, me, and Carter all cut our hair, people are going to think it’s a conspiracy,” I say, referring to the time a few months ago when my son abandoned his lumberjack look by shaving off his beard and hacking his hair short.