The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Check this guy over for contamination and give him to the cops!”

  “In the cabinet, you have to get Zaley from the cabinet. She’s been shot in the arm,” Austin said in panic to the woman. Micah needed tissues to wipe off her face, water to flush her eyes (it was too late, he knew that yet he could not stand to know), alcohol wipes for her cut hand. No longer screaming or vomiting, she was clutching her stomach and blinking hard at the white-suited figures. The cell phone was still clenched in the doctor’s hand, the screen glowing red. Her head had been ripped apart by the bullet, opening like a flower to spread its petals.

  Austin thought to open the cabinet and show them Zaley, but his hands would transfer the blood (sweet Jesus, he was covered in droplets of Sombra C blood! Though not nearly as much as Micah) and two of the guns were trained on him. Into an earpiece, the woman said, “Heavy contamination, repeat, heavy contamination. Withdrawing two contaminated students. Send a stretcher for a third.”

  Then Austin was walking down the hallway among them, Micah two steps ahead with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her hair dripped blood down her back. She was going to have a stamp and he wanted to wail for her perfect form to be marred this way. For her life to be ever defined by it, men’s eyes alighting on her and dropping away because of that angry red splash of ink staining her neck. And it scared him to think of what his wild Micah would do in response. Sombra C.

  He had held her body close to his and now . . . now he had to be afraid of her. Everyone would have to be afraid and he thought of Santa hat man and his girlfriend from MeetFriends wanting a third for their bed, no STDs or Sombra C. That disgusting couple and people like them would judge her as disgusting for what the culler had done. His Micah was going to be alone, forever alone . . . tears stung in his eyes. He hated being alone.

  The pieces of the chair were kicked all over the floor. The doors had been propped open and the curtain was torn from some of its rings. Within the party room, the overhead lights were on. Everything was destroyed, all but the disco ball still turning above. The Christmas tree was trampled. Ornaments and lights were crushed around it. The garland torn from the railing, tables and chairs overturned, there were purses and cell phones stomped to smithereens, shoes and sweaters scattered from wall to wall. Blood was pooled and sprayed on the floor, splashed on the walls and windows and doors, even up on the ceiling. The dead were under sheets and he did not count, he would not allow himself to do so. Three, four, five . . .

  Somehow it had become day. There was the V-6 in the parking lot under a gray sky, the sun shining on the midnight blue hood. More dead were on the grass. Eight, nine, ten . . . The white of the sheets and red of the bloodstains captured in the fibers were brilliant in the light. He was guided out to the path, which was littered with crushed candy cane lights and spotted with blood. People shouted, phones rang, engines revved, and he saw that it was not day at all. Still night, this impossible night, and high overhead were floodlights.

  There was sobbing in the distance. A stretcher raced past for Zaley, three people covered from head to toe in white flanking it. Micah tripped going from the grass to the sidewalk and he reached out instinctively. His arm was knocked away. The woman with the dark hair commanded, “Don’t touch anything!”

  The V-6 could not have been driven away with the squad cars trapping it in. Black vans were parked helter-skelter around the lot. A wide path had been made of white plastic sheeting, dotted with long trails of blood and dirty wheel tracks. He was guided to walk upon it. Covered figures lay among the cars and vans. Some of the sheets had red X’s spray-painted on them. Eleven . . . twelve . . . A hand protruded from one, covered in a black glove. There were bullet holes in the windows and hoods of the vehicles.

  The sound of sobbing increased. It was coming from the far end of the lot where the cars were thinner. To the left was the source of most of the distress, the students from the party sitting on the curb and milling around within a large square roped off by caution tape and guarded by cops. Students wept in each other’s arms and cried into their cell phones, some pleading with the cops to be let out. No one was covered in blood or shot in there. A boy was screaming, “My dad is coming! You can’t keep me here against my will, it’s unconstitutional!”

  “It’s cordoned off, my mom can’t get through,” shouted a girl.

  In a smaller square beside it, both moaning and still figures were laid out on their backs with ambulance workers bent over them working hard. Ambulances were lined up on the road behind that square, empty stretchers coming from some and loaded stretchers pushed to others. One figure no one was working upon, and the sheet had been drawn over the head. Beyond the ambulances was a van marked C, and somehow Austin knew that this was a special van for Sombra C corpses, for those lying beneath the sheets with red X’s. A team of white-clad people was gathered at the hood listening to instructions from a walkie-talkie.

  “Are these ones okay?” an EMT shouted out the window of an ambulance just arriving on the road.

  “Fine!” yelled one working over an unconscious boy.

  On the other end of the lot was a giant tent with pinned flaps, and it was to that tent the white sheet path led. They were almost to it when Micah bolted away, so quickly and unexpectedly that the people walking with them missed when they dove to stop her. Austin squinted in the floodlights to see the handcuffed figure being loaded into a squad car. Micah’s scream rent the air as she reached him. “Fuck you! Fuck you, she was a fucking doctor, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Micah!” Austin shouted. Two of the white-clad workers ran to retrieve her. One was armed and he was frightened that the man might shoot, but the firearm remained strapped to his waist.

  The cops backed away in panic from the bloody girl bearing down, one reaching for his weapon and then fleeing upon reconsideration. The culler no longer had his helmet, the pale crag of his face clearly recognizable. He tried to use his foot to close the door and protect himself, but he wasn’t fast enough. Her fist glanced off his cheek and she yanked open the door. He jerked away in terror, releasing a high-pitched squeal of fright and moving rapidly over the seat to the far door.

  Crawling into the squad car after him, Micah screamed and attacked. “She was fucking calling her family! You shot a woman calling her husband and kids, you sick commando-playing shit!”

  “Don’t shoot!” Austin begged the cops, who were creeping back to the car with their guns trained on the fracas in the back seat. The culler could do little to fight with his hands cuffed behind his back, nothing but scream and kick while he was struck and clawed.

  One of the workers caught Micah’s arm and yanked her out of the car, the culler falling back with a hard kick to his chin. Micah was pulled to the path, still screaming at the culler in rage. “What’s that worth in your game? Huh? Ten points? Fifteen? A hundred? Some little virtual trophy for valor? What the fuck do you earn for killing a goddamned woman calling home?”

  “Paint an X on that car and pull that man to quarantine!”

  “Cover this stretch of concrete in sheets! Ten feet across!”

  “Baby, stop, baby, stop,” Austin said, shoving away the woman’s block and taking Micah’s head into his hands. Her hair was a mixture of damp and dry against his fingers. (He had no paper cuts or open sores; it had to be okay to touch her, didn’t it? She had to be touched, braced to calm down.) In the squad car, the man was screaming and wiping his face in desperation on the backs of the seats.

  “Get those kids into quarantine!”

  “Help! Help me, get the blood off me!”

  “She’s dead,” Micah cried, clapping her hands over his and writhing in his grip. She looked at him through teary, bloodstained eyes. “I’ve got it, Austin, I’ve got her Sombra C and I’m glad! I’m glad! I’d rather have it than be one of them. I’d rather be a fucking zombie out of my mind biting everyone than some fucking human in my mind who kills one!”

  “You don’t have it, you can�
�t have it,” Austin whispered. He could not let it be true, men’s eyes falling away from her forever. To keep her centered, he let go of her head and took her hand, crushing her slender fingers in his.

  They were close enough to see into the tent. Within were hysterical girls and boys, some on stretchers and others naked and being sprayed down by hoses. Adults ran back and forth, calling for bandages and hazardous material bags. One girl being hosed down was screaming, “Kill me! Just kill me! I’d rather be dead than have Sombra C!”

  An animal roared, a zombie being held in there, and Austin wanted to go anywhere but inside. Oh God, did he not want to go into that tent! That was where lives ended, not in death but in every other way. Every way that mattered. Three new ambulances screeched to a halt on the road, two of them with C on the sides.

  “Kids, move it!” the woman shouted. A rattling stopped behind them, with swathed workers screaming for Austin and Micah to walk into the tent. Unconscious, Zaley was upon the stretcher. His shirt was gone from her injury, which had been redressed in a heavy bandage. Her arm was elevated over her heart and her hair twisted to the side and pinned under her shoulder. There was an ashen quality to her skin, making him think that she was dead, but her chest pushed up and fell back resolutely. The red bulbs of her earrings were still blinking.

  The workers motioned, wanting to push the stretcher into quarantine, and Austin said, “No, get her to an ambulance! She wasn’t struck with anything!”

  “You want to get your friend to an ambulance, then you get the hell into quarantine and let us check her over first!” the woman ordered. Hands closed over Austin’s shoulders, and he was pushed between the flaps of the tent.

  END OF VOLUME ONE

  THE ZOMBIES: VOLUME TWO

  by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Set Four

  Zaley

  When one is cut, we all bleed.

  Her first memory was of masks below a white ceiling. They were masks that swallowed bodies and left only a strip of clear material at the eyes, and a shielded silver covering for a mouth. From behind the shields came garbled voices. Dimly she knew that it was her hearing that was garbled, not their words. Pain swelled and ebbed like the tides at a shore. When it bit too keenly, a masked figure swam into her wavering vision and spoke to her garbled hearing. Then the pain receded.

  She was pulled around in a riptide (no fever lab tests clear thank you nurse transfer to negative floor immediately yes doctor lift restriction on visitors she’s clean) and opened her eyes to a different ceiling and faces without masks. The tide was coming in to another razor sharp crest when a face appeared. She connected the face to the medication, the face meant medication meant relief. The high-pitched chords of pain faded to twinges in a lower octave, and a cool hand touched her forehead. “Oh, Rosalie. You poor thing.”

  Relief was being unaware, or only vaguely so. Zaley was what she had called herself at age two, unable to pronounce her real name. Zaley. When people had corrected her (Ros-a-lie) she corrected them back in childish umbrage with a stern finger to her chest (Zaley!) and would not be persuaded that this other name was her own.

  She looked up to the blue domes of churches. A boy was behind her on the ferry, with his hand riding her hip. The heat of it passed through her thin summer dress to her flesh. She did not want to move, unless it was to hook her arm around the back of his neck so that he could feel her possession the way she felt his in the grip of his fingers. But her arm wouldn’t move, and people were with them on the deck. It seemed too intimate a pose for public. The hand on her hip quivered upon that line, and would pass over it could others feel the heat the way that she could.

  She turned a little to see the face of a handsome stranger, dark hair and white teeth, blue eyes even more heated than the hand. Her mind stuttered on the scene and it began again, even though she wanted to push forward. But Zaley was a babyish nickname and she never thought of herself as Rosalie, so she could not tell him her name and move on. She wanted to sit with him at a taverna overlooking the Aegean Sea and know he was watching as she crossed her legs casually under the green skin of this dress. Beautiful women did that in movies, and handsome men watched them. Her mind pushed away the image and returned her to the ferry and the hand on her hip.

  “She’s lucky to still have her arm, Mrs. Mattazollo.”

  “But it won’t be normal! Oh God, she was a perfect little girl and now-”

  “She’s alive. She’s very lucky to be alive at all, not to mention uninfected. The surgery went well. She’ll recover some of the use of her arm with physical therapy-”

  “But not all of it! How much can we expect, Doctor?”

  “It’s too early to know. It will never be what it was before. But she doesn’t have to pitch for the Yankees, just be able to brush her hair. Drive a car. Lift a bag of groceries. I’m optimistic that she’ll regain functionality.”

  Zaley opened her eyes to her mother’s horrified face, focused across the bed to a man in a white coat standing there. “But she’s a dancer!”

  No, Zaley thought, not having set toe in a ballet class for over twelve years. She did not want to come back to this world. Clawing at the ferry, it pulled away without her. The hand on her hip was just an extra fold of sheet. She had been shot at the party, but the particulars eluded her.

  In her room was a multitude of stuffed animals purchased from the gift shop. A get-better bear with a green bowtie, a frog, a dog, a giraffe, three cats, and stray movements tripped the motion sensor on the monkey holding cymbals. It clashed them together and giggled every time. At least she wasn’t sharing the room with another patient. There was also a batch of smiley-face balloons and yet another stuffed bear hugging a vase of flowers. Cards were mixed in among them, and most were signed MOM.

  Her father came to visit daily, the chair creaking in warning under his weight. After he said hi and she said hi, there was nothing left to say. Mom jumped up every time Zaley so much as turned her head (Do you want some water, baby? Are you hungry? Do you need the bathroom? Should I get the nurse?) and hours dribbled by with Zaley going in and out, wishing with all of her heart to spend more time in out.

  The news was on when her father was there. The words registered and unregistered in her drugged-up brain. “What’s interesting about Sombra Cs when they go feral is that some develop a pack mentality. Like dogs . . .”

  When she drifted back to in, the sky was purple with evening. Dad’s chair was empty, and a policeman was there to interview her. In the hallway Mom was arguing nervously that Zaley was far too fragile. The cop insisted. Then Mom came in to take Zaley’s left hand into hers and say with a weird intensity, “Your father loves you. He loves you so much, Zaley!” There was a message in the pinch of her fingers, one that pierced through the grogginess.

  The first questions were about the party, of which Zaley remembered little. Setting up, the gift exchange, and . . . and then a flash of Austin’s worried face. No, Zaley did not remember anyone there with Sombra C, except for the three students who already had it. Mom was shocked and horrified that Zaley had gone to a party with the Sombra C students of her school. Her hand went to her throat and her lips parted in a gasp.

  No, Zaley did not remember anyone there with guns, even though a bullet had blasted apart the meat of her arm. Austin had been there. He was concerned about her injury, even as he teased that he wanted his shirt back. She remembered her arm hurting, and how she thought it was a burn. Interrupting the cop’s next question, she said, “How is Austin? Elania? Do you know? All of . . . all of my friends were at the party-”

  “Later,” Mom said sharply to the cop.

  Zaley was too spacey to protest. “Who had guns? Who was shooting?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” the cop said. He was a slab of a man. “Do you know where your father was the night of the party?” Mom’s fingers crushed hers in a silent cue.

  “He said . . . they were having a Christmas party. The Shepherds. He w
anted Mom to bake him cookies to take. Why?” Zaley asked dreamily, and Mom ended the interview.

  She had no phone. Everything on her person at the party had been destroyed in case of contamination. Mom watched the home shopping channels and kept the remote out of Zaley’s reach. The monkey clashed its cymbals and giggled, clashed and giggled, clashed and giggled . . .

  A roommate. She woke to a roommate, who was watching the television beyond the curtain and had the captions on. Mom was reading a magazine in the chair. Zaley edged aside the curtain just enough to read the words. Pretending to sleep, she kept one eye cracked open through a soap opera and a sitcom, and then the local news. She prayed the roommate would not change the channel. Her arm twinged, wanting to be in a different position, but she refused to move.

  -names have been released of the Blue Hill tragedy. Dead are Gage Ashman, 14, Shelly Cray, 18, Abby Hook, 17, Darius Johnson, 15, Trevor Long, 16, Mina Martin, 17-

  She could not cry or moan. She could not even turn her head, or it would give her away to her mother. Still missing: Sofie Yu, 16, Freddy Vander, 14, and Brennan Ortega, 15. Many students remain hospitalized for broken bones, gunshot wounds, concussions . . . Two reporters were speaking in mute, their captions tumbling over one another, and Zaley slowly pieced the story together.

  Murdoch Rehabilitation had been set to become an official confinement point, its numbers due to swell by fifty Sombra C victims on Christmas Eve as points were consolidated to make them easier to manage. Local cullers were furious that this unwanted confinement point in their community was not being closed down but growing even greater. They didn’t torch it like other cullers did around the country, worried that the fire would grow out of control in California’s parched, windy weather. So they broke into the facility to slaughter every patient there. A nurse was shot and killed for trying to call the police; the rest of the employees were rounded up and locked in a van. One hundred and twenty Sombra C patients were murdered within minutes. About forty escaped into a wooded area and the community, some of them dangerous and others not.