Undead Ultra Box Set | Books 1-4

by Picott, Camille

  “It’s working,” Susan cries. “The zoms are retreating!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Johnny says grandly, “what we have here is a bona fide zombie apocalypse security system. Hold your applause. Just leave a tip in the jar and we’ll call it good.”

  This sets off a string of eye rolls and groans.

  “It was Kate’s idea,” Margie, the former kindergarten teacher, says. “She’s the one who should get the tip.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” Ash says. “The radio runs on batteries. We’re going to need to scavenge a ton of them to keep this thing operational.”

  “Nah, I just need to figure out how to wire the radio to the solar panels.” Satisfied with the zombie retreat, Johnny sets down the megaphone.

  “Guess this means I have to let these idiots dangle me from a rope again.” Reed jerks a thumb at Todd and Caleb.

  In response, the other two young men deliver simultaneous middle fingers. Reed doubles over laughing.

  “What we need,” I say, breaking up the revelry, “is an extensive library of alpha commands. Gary and Johnny, you’ve done good work. Now you just need to do more.” My mind spins with the possibilities. If I have anything to say about this, we’re going to have a full dictionary of alpha zom words at our disposal.

  39

  Recipes

  KATE

  “I can’t wait to get these pieces moved downstairs. I want to get the seeds planted within the week.”

  I glance up from where I lie on the floor, twirling a tiny Allen wrench between my fingers as I disassemble a bed leg. On the opposite side of the bed, Leo and his nephew, Todd, dismantle the other legs.

  Leo has drawn up plans to convert several floors of the Laurel dorm building into an indoor garden. Right now we’re dismantling dorm room furniture to convert into growing beds.

  “Marge wants to go on a scavenging mission back into downtown Arcata to hit up the hardware store for canning supplies,” I say.

  “We don’t have to rush. We won’t have any food to can for eight to twelve weeks,” Leo replies.

  “Marge just likes canning,” Todd adds. “She wants to start teaching the kids how to do it.”

  Not for the first time, I find myself grateful for the new additions to Creekside. “You know, the indoor garden was only a vague idea before you guys stepped up to spearhead the project.”

  “It’s the least we could do. You took me and my people in when we had nothing. After losing so many back at the condo complex, you gave us a fresh start.” Leo glances at me from beneath the mattress. “Was there a Mr. Kate? Before the apocalypse, I mean?”

  I sigh. “Yes. But he died a few years before the apocalypse.”

  “I had a fiancé. A step-son.” Leo doesn’t look at me as he finishes his side of the bed. “I tried to get to them. When I heard reports of what was going on, I rushed home from work. By the time I got there ... You know the story. It’s not unique.”

  “Doesn’t mean it hurts any less.” I recall the day I arrived home to find my husband dead.

  “I just mean I’m not special or unique in my pain. We’ve all lost people.”

  “I lost both my parents,” Todd puts in. “My sister was off at college in Washington. If she is alive, I’ll never see her again.”

  I think of my College Creek kids, all of them stranded in Arcata with their families lost and scattered. “We have to make new families. It’s the way of things.”

  “That’s what Christian says. It’s a good way to look at things now,” Todd says.

  “Hey, guys.” Eric strolls in. “Kate, I need you to come look at something.”

  A distant part of my brain wonders what he’s doing here. Eric is on scavenging duty with Caleb and Ash. The three of them are supposed to be looking for seeds we can plant in the garden.

  “You need me right now?” It’s pretty obvious I’m in the middle of something.

  “Yeah, now.” Eric shoves his hands into his pockets.

  The young man hasn’t asked anything of me since Lila died. Miraculously, he doesn’t even seem to harbor any ill will toward me. He does, unfortunately, smoke more pot than ever before.

  “I found something,” he tells me.

  I glance over at Leo and Todd with an apologetic shrug.

  Leo waves me off. “The furniture will be waiting for you when you get back.” Then, oddly, he winks at Eric.

  I’m not sure what that’s all about. Eric is already slinking out of the room, hands in his pockets. I sigh and pad after him. Time is valuable, especially as the days are getting shorter as we head into fall.

  I follow Eric out of Fern dorm and back in the direction of Creekside. We pass Margie and the two kids as they return from a trip to the nearby creek to gather water. With them are Reed and Stacy. The adults all lug giant five-gallon buckets. The kids carry gallon jugs, one in each hand. They strain under the weight, but neither of them complains.

  “You’re going to make them do fractions?” Reed asks. “With buckets of water?”

  “Let me guess,” Margie says dryly. “You weren’t much of a math fan when you were in school.”

  “I’m not a math fan out of school.”

  “There’s no better way to teach fractions than with water and various container sizes,” Margie says. “It’s the best way to get kids to visualize the concept. Granted, I used to use measuring cups and water from the tap, but buckets and jugs and creek water will function the same.”

  Eric and I leave them behind and head into Creekside. Once upstairs, Eric leads me to the dorm room he used to share with Lila.

  I pause just inside the door. Lila’s pink-and-yellow flowered blanket has been straightened, the decorator pillows in place.

  Eric makes it a point to make the bed every day. It was something Lila did before she died. Seeing the neat blanket tightens my chest.

  “Look what I found.” Eric lays a hand on a pile of spiral-bound notebooks spread across the bed.

  “What are those?” I move to the foot of the bed, taking in the many monoblocks of color.

  “They’re Lila’s notebooks. All of them. She never threw anything away. Here, sit down.” He drags a desk chair up for me and closes the door.

  I don’t want to sit. I want to get back to dismantling beds with Todd and Leo. I suppress an impatient sigh. If Eric needs my attention, I’ll give it to him. I sit.

  “These are all her recipes for her cannabis salves and tinctures.” He pushes one of the notebooks into my hand. “Take a look.”

  I flip it open. Lila’s neat handwriting marches across page after page.

  Emotion blooms in my chest. I remember seeing Lila with these, bent over the kitchen counter as she meticulously measured, mixed, pounded, and stirred her ingredients. There are notes with all her recipes. Many of them are crossed out and rewritten with slightly different measurements of the various ingredients.

  I miss her. I miss her scared eyes and her acerbic tongue.

  “Lila.” I close the notebook and press it to my chest.

  When I look at Eric, I see the same emotion in his eyes. They’re misty with sadness, though a tender smile pulls at the corners of his mouth.

  “All her work and experiments of the past few years.” Eric picks up another notebook, flipping through it. “We can recreate her medications and salves.”

  Before the world ended, Lila had a dream of starting her own medicinal cannabis company. Everyone liked to poke fun at her, mostly when she, Reed, and Eric quarreled over the dwindling supply of buds.

  “Her muscle salve worked.” I rub absently at the ankle I rolled on my journey to Arcata, thinking about how well her salve had helped me heal.

  “Johnny and Carter have both been using it. Now we can make more.” Eyes brightening, Eric pulls open a drawer and pulls out a Zip Lock with two buds. “Look at this. It’s shitty bud full of seeds.”

  From my time spent with the kids, I’ve gathered that shitty weed has seeds. The more ex
pensive, premium buds don’t have seeds.

  “Now that we have seeds,” Eric says, “Do you think Leo and Todd could get them to grow?”

  My eyes narrow. “You want to use our indoor garden to grow marijuana?”

  “Pharmacies are going to dry up. We’ve looted our fair share, but the supply is going to run out. It’s in our best interest to develop other medicinals.”

  If his face wasn’t so earnest, I’d think this was a ploy to restock his pot supply. Eric spends more time stoned than not, but at the moment, there is no hint of fuzz in his eyes. He’s stone sober and he means every word he says.

  “I have to think on it,” I say. “Let me go over Leo’s plan for the garden and see if there’s a corner we can set aside for a plant or two. Your job is to go through these books and make a compilation of all the final recipes. Make a combined list of all the ingredients. There’s no use to put in a pot plant to make medicinals if we don’t have any of the other components.”

  “Okay.” Eric takes the notebook back from me and returns it to the stack, spending more time than necessary straightening the already neat pile. “You’re really going to consider it?”

  “Yeah.” I put an arm around his shoulders and squeeze. “We owe it to Lila, don’t you think?”

  He nods, sniffing once. “Yeah.”

  As I head to the door, Eric says, “Wait—Kate. I—uh, want to talk to you about something else.”

  “What is it, Eric?”

  “I was—uh—thinking about the cemetery.” He shifts, not quite meeting my eye.

  “We don’t have a cemetery.”

  “The rubble where we buried Lila and Jesus,” he amends. “We need to mark it. Set it apart from everything else. Maybe find some fencing to put around it.”

  It’s not a bad idea. The problem is that it would take half our people and at least two days to find fencing and transport it to the site. It’s not the best use of our resources. I don’t say any of this to Eric, though.

  “Just think about it? Please?” Eric asks.

  “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

  “Wait. Kate?”

  Once again, he stops me when I try to leave. “Yes, Eric?”

  “Thanks. For being here. For all of us, I mean. You hold us together.”

  I give his shoulder a last squeeze. Before he can delay me any longer, I push out the door and into the hall—

  —and right into a sitting room decorated with streamers and a big, homemade banner with the words Happy Birthday Kate written in big bubble letters. Every member of Creekside is there, big smiles filling the room.

  “Surprise!”

  40

  Surprise

  KATE

  “Surprise!”

  The word washes over me. I stare, dumbfounded.

  “Happy birthday, Mom!” Carter, arm draped around Jenna’s shoulder, grins at me.

  “My mama is officially old.” Reed emerges from the crowd and crushes me in a bruising hug, lifting my feet off the ground. He twirls me in a half circle and plops me next to the kitchen table.

  In the center of it is a large chocolate cake. A paper plaque sits on top, the words Over the Hill written in black marker. Beneath the words is the number 40.

  “Guess who made the cake?” Jenna jerks a thumb at Reed.

  “Hey.” Reed puts his hands on his hips. “I had to make the cake when Mama Bear was sleeping. I dare any of your asses to make a cake on a barbeque with a headlamp for light.”

  “I was talking about the decoration on the cake,” Jenna replies.

  “Oh.” Reed cocks his head at the paper plaque that looks like it was drawn by a third-grader. “I’m pretty much the next fucking Picasso. Ya’ll better save that. It will be worth millions someday. Do you like it, Mama?”

  “I—” I sputter, trying to find words. “How?”

  “How did we know it was your birthday, or how did we pull off the surprise?” Johnny asks.

  “Both.”

  “It is your birthday, right?” Caleb frowns.

  “Of course, it’s her birthday,” Carter says. “You didn’t think I’d forget, did you, Mom?”

  I shake my head, still in shock over the surprise. I turn on Eric. “You were a distraction.”

  He shoves his hands into his pockets with a grin, not bothering to deny it. “How’d I do?”

  “You’ve officially tipped your hand. I now know you’re a grade-A bullshitter.”

  Everyone chuckles, crowding forward to hug me or clap me on the back. I catch sight of Ben at the back of the gathered crowd. He wears his general gruff expression, arms folded over his chest, but he gives me a wink when our eyes meet.

  “I hope I’m in good shape like you when I’m old,” Evan, the little boy, tells me.

  “Hell, I’m already old,” Margie says. “If Kate doesn’t give me a heart attack during training, I might get in shape one day.”

  “Heart attacks are half the fun,” Johnny tells her.

  “Says the punk who’s on a recovery cycle,” Margie grouses.

  “I’ll be passing you in another week. Just you wait, old lady.”

  “Gary made a special casserole,” Susan tells me. “He’s been working on the recipe for days.”

  “We had to break into the student store to get powdered potato cups,” says Christian.

  Since arriving, the former PE teacher has helped me add new strength training routines to our workouts. He’s shaved off his beard, revealing the face of a man in his early thirties. Christian wasn’t exaggerating when he said he ran the 400 and 800 meter sprints. Reed is still our fastest runner, but Christian chases his heels anytime I make them race.

  Gary and Susan bring out his casserole, which turns out to be the apocalypse version of shepherd’s pie. The top is covered with the powdered mashed potatoes. The bottom is a gooey mixture that bears a loose resemblance to cream of mushroom soup with caramelized onions and peas. I may have turned my nose up at it prior to the zombie apocalypse, but tonight, on my birthday, it’s the best thing I ever tasted.

  It turns out Gary has a sense for seasoning. He’s made some pretty interesting and delicious canned food casseroles on the barbeque. In comparison to Lila, he’s practically a gourmet chef, though I would never disrespect Lila’s memory by saying that aloud.

  After dinner, Reed prepares to cut the cake. “Someone get a candle or something,” he yells. “Anything flammable. Oh, and make sure there’s forty of them for our Mama Bear.”

  Jenna produces a potpourri candle with three wicks. “This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  “Peppermint scent?” Reed makes a face.

  Jenna shrugs, lighting the candle with a book of matches.

  “One more person wants to sing you happy birthday.” Johnny holds up the ham radio. “Foot Soldier, are you there? Over.”

  “Wandering Writer, this is Foot Soldier, over. Where’s Mama Bear?”

  “She’s right here, Foot Soldier,” Johnny replies. “Get ready to bust out the birthday melody!”

  “On three,” Carter calls, plunking the peppermint the candle in front of me. “One-two-three—”

  The entire room bursts into song. My gaze passes over each and every one of my companions. Carter. Jenna. Reed. Johnny. Eric. Ben. Caleb. Ash. Susan. Gary. Leo. Christian. Todd. Margie. Stacy. Little Evan and Kristy. And Alvarez, two hundred miles away. Everyone here, for me. My heart swells with love.

  I blow out the candle, sending a silent wish out in the world. Protect my people. Keep them safe.

  After everyone has cake, Carter taps a spoon against a glass. “Alright, everyone, time for Mom’s birthday present.”

  “Presents?” I ask. “On top of food and cake?”

  “One more,” Carter says. “This one took a lot of planning. Jenna and I may have gone on a super-secret mission with Ben back to a certain brewery.”

  My mouth falls open. “You what?”

  “Don’t worry.” Ben holds up his hands in self-de
fense. “I took enough grenades to take down a large village in China. They were perfectly safe.”

  I narrow my eyes in mock scowl. “No more super-secret missions.”

  “Don’t say that until you see what we have.” The crowd parts as Carter lugs a box in his arms. Glass clinks inside.

  He plunks the box in front of me. It’s wrapped in Hannakuh paper.

  “I found that!” Kristy jumps up and down, beaming. “I was playing hide-and-seek with Evan and found it under a bed!”

  “It is the most beautiful paper ever,” I tell her, tearing into the gift.

  The lid to a cardboard box pops open as the wrapping paper falls away. Brown bottles with beer caps fill the interior. I lift one out, my body going still as I take it in.

  On the front of the bottle is a hand-drawn label in the shape of a half-ellipsoid. A green mountain fills the upper curve, bisected by what is clearly a trail. On the trail is the silhouette of a runner. Over the top of the mountain are the words Over the Hill.

  Carter can’t contain himself any longer. “Jenna designed a beer label for you!” He beams at his girlfriend.

  “And Carter made a special brew for you,” Jenna says. “It’s a lager.”

  I pop the top of the bottle. The glass is cool in my hands. Not ice cold like the good old days when we had refrigerators, but cool like it’s been stored in a dark closet.

  The first sip washes over my tongue. I close my eyes, letting the taste carry me back to a different time. To a time when Kyle and Frederico were still alive. To a time when my free time was spent training for ultramarathons and researching races to see where my next adventure would take me. To a time when running wasn’t something I did for self-preservation.

  To a time when the world wasn’t overrun with the dead.

  “It tastes like a finish line.” My voice is rough with emotion.

  Carter and Jenna gather me in for a hug. I squeeze the two of them, holding them close. My love for them threatens to explode out of my chest.

  This is, by far, the best birthday I’ve ever had.