The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  The Pewter website had not been updated to show the college closing, even though San Diego was struggling to quell its outbreak. There was nothing new on their prospective students page. Dad said the only solution was for Elania to call or email the admissions department and ask for advice. Hi, I know you guys might be dying down there, but can I still send in my application? There had to be a polite, respectful way of handling it.

  She worried that whoever got her message might think she was callous to even be thinking about college while the world was battling this horrible virus. That person might put her name on a blacklist. (Why did it have to be called a blacklist?) Then she’d never have a chance. It might be better to call and leave no physical evidence in case the person who answered was offended by her question. Hi, I was just wondering if I should still send in an application if my school is closed for Sombra C? No name. Then she was just some inconsiderate asshole on the phone, not an inconsiderate asshole with a name wanting admission to next year’s freshman class.

  Two days after Dad’s advice, she was still mustering up the courage to contact the school. Once her phone rang as she was holding it and Elania jumped, thinking irrationally that Pewter was calling her. It was Doctor Ghol asking that she come over around six to take care of the boarded animals. Her back was giving her a bad time and she had left at noon for home. Three cats needed food and water and pats, the dog should get a quick walk around the lot and a hug with his dinner, and it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes but Elania would be paid for the full hour.

  Elania could ask Mom to call Pewter. That was distasteful though. Pewter was for young adults, not kids who still had mommy take care of their problems. For good or bad, Elania had to handle this herself. On the website, it read: Bernice Plummer, prospective student contact, click here for phone number and further information.

  While her brothers yelled in the hallway outside her room (you’re a boogar no YOU’RE a boogar no you’re a BIG boogar HERE’S a boogar) Elania clicked on further information even though she knew what it said. Office hours from nine to five, and it was closed for lunch between twelve and one. And there was the phone number. It was four-thirty now. (OOOOHHH! I’m telling I’m telling Mom you wiped a boogar on Lani’s door! MOOOOOOOOM!)

  Elania could not make this phone call with her brothers yelling in the background. Then Mom was yelling and the door rattled as Cormac was made to clean it (NOT FAIR! I didn’t do it Conor did it I don’t CARE who did it CLEAN IT) and Elania took a deep breath. She wanted to yank open her door and scream at all of them to go away, but that was childish. Putting her cell phone by her crappy old laptop with the number on the screen, she calmly walked to the door and turned the knob. They were all there, Cormac furious and Percy smiling, Conor guilty and Mom aggravated.

  “I have a really important phone call to make to a college,” Elania said pleasantly to the triplets. “Would you guys please go to your playroom? I won’t be able to hear with you outside my door.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO-” two of the boys chorused, and Mom said, “Stop! Lani asked you very nicely to leave her be!” and herded them away. Then they were climbing the old flagpole and yelling in the backyard (you wear diapers no YOU wear diapers no YOU’RE a diaper MOM HE CALLED ME A DIAPER) but the noise was muted considerably.

  She was doing this. She was calling. She wasn’t going to sit around being nervous any longer. Elania picked up her phone and dialed, and the other phone was picked up on the first ring. Her stomach plummeted. A woman said, “You’ve reached the admissions office of Pewter College. This is Sue Grainger. How may I help you?”

  “Oh, excuse me!” Elania said. “I must have dialed incorrectly. I was trying to reach Bernice Plummer.”

  “She’s out sick and I’m taking her calls,” the woman said.

  “Well, you see . . . I was . . .” Elania shook herself. She was a good candidate for this school, and she wanted them to want her. Outside there was a ruckus (you wet the bed no you wet the bed MOOOOM he said CORMAC STOP IT) and with more confidence in her voice as she moved away from the window, Elania said, “I was interested in applying for your school next year and I was curious-”

  The woman interrupted. “Oh yes, we’re still open. You’re the fifth call I’ve gotten today. Send in your application before the January fifteenth deadline.”

  The back door slammed hard as Elania said, “That’s the problem. My school has been closed for the time being. I have my SATs done, but I don’t know what to do about senior year.”

  The woman’s voice was business-like, but still friendly. “What’s your name?”

  Oh no. “Elania Douglas.”

  Then Cormac was outside her door. “LANI! EVERYONE IS BEING MEAN TO ME! LANILANILANI-” Elania was going to slaughter him. She couldn’t open the door to tell him off and it was rude to put this woman on hold.

  “Well, Ms. Douglas, you’re not the only one with a closed school. These are extreme, emergency circumstances we’re going through currently. Pewter will still consider your application for admission. I encourage you, in the weeks or months you are disengaged from school, to find some way to contribute to your community-” the woman paused, doubtlessly hearing the persistent yells of LANILANILANI.

  “I am so sorry,” Elania said in despair. “I have three little brothers and their only decibel level is top volume. They were supposed to be outside so I could call you in peace and quiet.”

  She laughed. “How old?”

  “All six. They’re triplets.”

  “Goodness! Are you caring for them?”

  “Yes, sometimes. Their school has been closed, too.”

  Cormac wandered away and the woman said, “As I was saying, find a way to engage the world in your unexpected free time. How can you help with this struggle? One of our prospectives, for example, is volunteering her home in Colorado for Never Said Farewell get-togethers. Now, does that answer your questions?”

  “It does. Thank you so much,” Elania said, and they hung up. Not one second later, Cormac was back yelling LANILANILANI.

  Elania yanked open her door. “WHAT? Didn’t you hear me say that I had a very important phone call to make?”

  Wiping his nose on his arm and his brown eyes bright with tears and indignation, Cormac said, “I didn’t wipe the boogar on your door! Conor did but he lied and I had to clean it-”

  “Cormac, did you or did you NOT hear me say that I had a phone call?”

  He paused, wiping his nose again, and answered in a tiny voice, “I heard you.”

  Elania flopped onto her bed, exhilarated at the mostly successful phone call. She had to find a way to contribute to the community until school reopened. That would be something to think about tonight. She certainly couldn’t volunteer her time in a confinement point and she sure as hell wasn’t joining either of the Cloudy Valley Shepherd squads. There had been not one but two ads in the local paper, for the north side of the city and the south side, requesting recruits willing to patrol the streets.

  Did people get to send letters to their loved ones in confinement? When whole families were wiped out, what happened to their pets? Elania should research tonight, when she was finished at Doctor Ghol’s. Maybe there was an NSF support group nearby.

  Still in her doorway, Cormac said quietly, “Sometimes it is really hard to be part of this family.”

  She looked over. “You’re telling me.”

  “I wake up and there are brothers. I go outside and there are brothers. I watch TV and there are brothers. There are brothers everywhere. I want to get on my air shark and ride away.”

  “Your what?”

  “My air shark, like the lady at the Cool Spoon has. She’s got green hair because she sleeps on a pillow made of seaweed, and it stains. Her mansion has an octopus for a butler and she rides her air shark to work. It’s pretend, I think. But I still want an air shark, so I can go someplace without brothers all the time. I drew him. Want to see?” Cormac ran away without waiting for
an answer.

  She might actually get into Pewter, without a senior year. Elania wanted to scream to her ceiling. Once she found a way to contribute, she had to seriously start researching scholarships. Their family didn’t have forty grand a year to throw around, and Dad said graduating from college tens of thousands of dollars in debt to loans was a rough way to start adult life. She had to list every scholarship she could find, and to write essays or do whatever was required, whether the dollar amount was one hundred or one thousand. Elania needed every cent she won, and to save every cent she earned from the vet’s office. This time was free from school, but not free from work.

  Cormac returned and thrust a paper full of gray scribbles in her face. “That’s Tobey my air shark.”

  “Is he dangerous? Does he bite cats and dogs?” Elania asked.

  “No!” Cormac protested. “He’s a nice shark!”

  It was almost five. She sat up. “I have to go to Doctor Ghol’s in an hour to take care of the animals. Want to come along? We can stop at the Cool Spoon on the way and get cones.” Why not? It wasn’t like Micah made her pay for them.

  With tentative excitement, Cormac said, “Just you and me?”

  “Just you and me. No other brothers. But you can’t yell at Doctor Ghol’s. We can only speak in soft voices or it will frighten the cats and dog. Can you speak quietly and gently to them? And help me fill their food bowls?”

  “I CAN!” Cormac yelled, and then he whispered, “I can.”

  Brennan

  The first day Papa raised his hand to Mama was the last day. Mama picked up Brennan’s baseball bat and said, “Hit me again! You hit me again, little man! And then I will crush your brains from your ears like the guts from those grapes! Brennan, pack your bag!”

  Papa said, “You will not take the boy!” and Mama yelled, “Not one drop of blood in his veins is your dirty blood that hits a woman!”

  Brennan had not known that Papa was not actually his father.

  They were always in tangles, Brennan and Papa, like wet sheets at the bottom of a laundry machine. The first knot was his name, a white boy’s name slung over a Mexican boy. Mama had been driving at night when she was eight months pregnant. She took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost. A stag suddenly leaped out of the darkness and she swerved. The car went off the road in the middle of nowhere, hitting a tree, and she woke in a contraction. Then, just like the deer leaped into the headlights, so did a man. Old! So old. His teeth! Where were his teeth? He and his wife had heard the crash from the bed in their cabin and gone out in search, leaving his teeth in the cup on the nightstand.

  Mama had taken a wrong turn out of cell service. The deer had taken a wrong turn across the road. Brennan was taking a wrong turn out of her womb. Emergency services took a wrong turn out of the county. Then the weather took a wrong turn and sent down rain. It was that kind of night, full of wrong turns for everyone and everything except Albert and Dorothy Brennan. Albert got Mama out of the car; Dorothy brought a tent and blanket and spirits. By the time the ambulance arrived, the three of them in the tent were four: a toothless man, a woman in a nightgown, a tired mama, and four-pound Brennan with a full head of black hair and already half an hour old. Mama planned to name him Alejandro Paciano after his long-dead grandfathers, but now he was Brennan Ciervo Ortega. Because if a deer had had to jump out of the darkness and scare Mama off the road that night, at least it did the deed near the lone cabin in the wilderness.

  Papa did not like the name. He thought that Mama should have named the baby Alberto if she was so badly compelled to commemorate the event, but Mama said that left out the assistance of Dorothy. Old! So old this woman was, but she was putting a pillow under Mama’s head, she was catching the baby, she was climbing the ravine to flag down the ambulance. Alberto did not give her actions gratitude, nor did Dorotea give gratitude to his had the baby been a girl. Brennan did both. Papa thought Mama was being disrespectful of her heritage, of her culture, of men. Dorothy did not need to be included in this name. She was of her husband, not herself. Papa did not like this white boy’s name, and this was a big knot upon which to begin a relationship.

  “You were three months old when Papa came,” Mama said on the drive from Napa with her work truck packed to the hilt. She spoke loudly and clearly, since Brennan had hearing loss from terrible ear infections in babyhood. His right side was worse than his left. “He wished me never to tell you the truth, or else you would not respect him. Are you angry with Mama that this man is not your papa?”

  On the contrary, Brennan was relieved.

  Papa thought Brennan took wrong turns in his brain in everything from work to school to life, since Brennan’s thoughts moved like geometrical proofs instead of Papa’s way of make-do math. In Papa’s brain, if one did not know the answer to a calculation, one used a calculator. If one still could not figure out the answer or did not have a calculator with which to try, one looked at another’s paper. If the paper of the other person was blank, you had a friend. Then the two of you proceeded to a third person’s paper and either made another friend or got an answer. And if you got an answer, you shuffled your desk closer to that person and copied from then on since life was a communal process. It was not important that everyone know how to get the answer, just that someone did and you were positioned closely. And if they got it wrong and you copied, it was their fault, not yours. You shuffled your desk away and started the process anew.

  But Brennan solved problems by geometry rather than Papa’s sideways, with the logical progression of thought to thought. If Brennan could not solve a problem, he reread the instructions and tried again. And if he got it wrong, he checked every step and tried once more. Then it was time to ask the teacher, not a friend. Brennan didn’t have friends anyway, not really. Just acquaintances. He was the boy that nobody noticed.

  The knot that was school was not as big as the knot of his name, but the knot of work dwarfed both. When Brennan was fourteen, Papa took him to help at his job in the vineyards. Papa said to sweep out the back of a truck that had just made a delivery of chemicals, and Brennan jumped down from the hitch to find a broom.

  “Where are you going?” Papa shouted in high temper.

  “You want me to sweep the truck and I need a broom,” Brennan explained. “But I can’t find one in the truck, so I cannot sweep, and I am going to look in the shop.”

  Papa’s large hand reached down and jerked him back by the collar, and then there was a knife going switch switch switch at the tree by the truck. Here was a broom, a broom of branches in the tree, and Brennan had not seen it there. It was like those hidden objects in pictures that he loved when he was little. He had poised over them with a pencil, his eyes breaking apart the struts of the banister to see the lines that made a chair with the stair below, the berry in the bush that was truly a button. Brennan was good at those, yet he had not seen the broom in the tree.

  “All B’s and not smart,” Papa castigated. “Better all F’s and smart.”

  It made Papa angry that Brennan did not see the hidden broom. A good Mexican boy would have noticed that shape. If one did not have a broom but had to sweep, one used something else to get the job done. Looking for what might not exist was a waste of time. All of Brennan’s hard work that day, running and fetching and lifting, everything had been swept away by his mistake.

  That was not fair, but fair was something that belonged in school, not life. Fairness was yet another knot between them, a wrong turn that Brennan took. To Papa, one worked. One survived. One smiled at the braying jerk of a boss through six days a week, and on the seventh drank beer to scour the braying jerk of a boss out of one’s mind. The boss didn’t care about fair. He cared about money. Tractors didn’t care about fair. They just backed over you if you were stupid enough to stand in the way.

  And Papa did not care about fair. When Brennan was small and Papa said, “Let’s race!” Brennan always lost since Papa ran for real. Papa was stronger and faster and better, and when B
rennan pointed it out, that the race wasn’t fair, Papa agreed. The little rooster would never catch up! That was what he called Brennan when his hair was sticking up straight in back, as it was wont to do.

  “Are you going to ask me about your real father?” Mama asked while they waited to go south on the Golden Gate Bridge. Brennan could not answer right away, because the arm at the tollbooth did not lift until an officer looked in their truck to check on their health and take their temperatures. One booth over, a woman was yelling, “He has allergies, not Sombra C. Allergies can cause a fever!” But they did not let her through, and the officer at her car put up a red flag. Then Brennan and Mama had to wait for that woman’s car to be directed to the side, a pale face of a boy looking out the back window in fright. Brennan waited and waited, looking at the placard that ran along the arm beyond the tollbooth. The banner was in ten languages, and it said Zyllevir Is Free. Available at Mr. Foods, hospitals, and police stations. Do not miss a do-. Brennan assumed the missing letters made the word dose, but someone had stuck a Vote Zeller-Shane political sticker over it.

  Their temperatures were fine, the arm went up, and they drove on. Brennan had gone this way before, but this was the first time he had had his temperature checked just to drive into San Francisco. Sombra C hadn’t affected him, and consequently, he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He didn’t read the newspapers. Their family did not have a computer with Internet connection, and now they would not have a television either. The one in Napa was bought with Papa’s money, so it stayed with him.

  Mama was getting Brennan a cell phone for Christmas, and they would pick out a big TV for a present to themselves. But first she had to save. The stories he’d heard of Sombra C were sparse and seemed over-inflated for shock value. Sometimes he heard the neighbors’ radio, if he put his better ear to the window, and it was just dull, dry political issues.