The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “Who were those people?” Zaley asked. “I was still asleep when they went by.”

  “Some militia with a stolen Value Eats truck,” Corbin guessed. “Maybe they stole it for the food . . . ugh.” Out in the valley, vultures were huddled over still forms.

  It was gross that Austin still wanted to have breakfast. The bodies were far off and the smell didn’t carry. One, two, three, four, five . . . there were six groups of vultures surrounding their meals.

  After gaining more distance from the road, they sat down on the trail to eat. Micah cheated so hard on the formula that Austin was hard-pressed not to say anything. Squashing up pieces of cereal and wetting them, he dipped the rubber-tipped spoon into the mash and pushed it into the baby’s mouth. On his lower gums, the slightest bit of white was edging out. It looked like the blade of a shovel. The gums were raised around the emerging tooth. That had to hurt, a tiny blade slicing up through his inflamed skin. Mars had had a good night of sleep anyway, but it explained the fussiness and excessive drooling. And the uncustomary crankiness.

  “Are we there yet?” Austin asked Zaley when she opened a map. They weren’t anywhere close.

  “Almost. Just over the next hill,” Zaley teased. She had winced a little when she sat down. Sleeping in a car was nice, but it still wasn’t a proper bed.

  The baby was being a fuss monster, eating half-heartedly and drinking half-heartedly when they tried the bottle, crying and stopping and rubbing at his face. When nothing helped to soothe him, Micah supplied another dose of the medication and Austin let the kid chew on his fingers. Dada was made of nom, as Micah said, because Mars enjoyed that. Then he took a nap.

  They walked and walked for hours. The trail switched this way and that when a straight line would have taken so much less time. At a split, Zaley went west instead of north. North led into a city, according to the map.

  It was early afternoon when they got to a highway. More abandoned cars were here, some with notes. Austin tried a door and it opened. Falling into the back, he said, “Thank you, Jesus.”

  “We can’t stop here,” Micah said.

  “What? We’ve been walking forever! The baby needs to rest, too.”

  “We don’t have enough formula to last the trip if we only do half-days. The water for ourselves isn’t going to last that long either. So we need to bang out a few more miles.”

  Arquin. Austin got up with a grumble. If they had had a fueled-up car and no braces to worry about, they’d be in Petaluma by now. They would have been there long ago. He got the maps from Zaley as they went on. The distance between them and Petaluma lengthened before his eyes. “How the hell are we going to go so far?”

  “This is the easy part,” Zaley said. “It gets really mountainous ahead, and the trails and roads are so messed up that I’m having a hard time finding a route through.”

  “Don’t tell him that!” Corbin said. “Now he’ll be in a worse mood.”

  Austin hadn’t known that he was in that bad of a mood. “I’m okay.”

  “Every time we’re going any way but north, you practically set fire to the trail with your eyes,” Corbin said. “And the trails are going to do that the whole way there.”

  Austin tried to cheer himself up. It was just so boring. There wasn’t much to look at but trees and grass, occasional bodies, and the baby was in a bad mood. It was hard for him to sleep when he was being carried along, the sun shining down and interesting noises and sights to inspect. He was passed around between them like a hot potato until he really started bawling. Micah wanted to save the medicine for night to ensure he slept. Inconsolable, he wailed on Austin’s shoulder. “Fuck teeth,” Austin said to him, in outrage that his baby had to be in pain. “Fuck ‘em hard, am I right, Mars? Fuck those nasty teeth.”

  “I give up,” Corbin said about the swearing. “Fuck ‘em, Mars. I hate them, too. We should just survive off blended soups and smoothies.”

  “We should write a song,” Austin said. “The Fuck Teeth song.” They worked on it together.

  When the baby dozed, Micah whispered about where to stop for the night. Austin thought mutinously that the cars on the highway had been a fine idea. However, there was no way he was doubling back. The trail ended in a road that wound through the woods. Zaley and Corbin went one way to look for abandoned cars or structures, Micah and Austin went the other way, and they rejoined with nothing to show for it twenty minutes later.

  It was time to set up the tents then. The trees weren’t good for climbing, so their best defense was just to stay quiet and still. No fires either. The place they picked had a lot of bushes around it, which helped to hide them somewhat.

  Corbin and Zaley took dinner into their tent and Austin did the same. When Micah began to make the night bottle, Austin took it away and put in the right amount of formula. The baby shouldn’t cry out here from hunger. A feral could go nuts from the noise and be on them in a heartbeat.

  “I’m not doing this to be cruel to him,” Micah whispered. There was so little formula. Tomorrow they’d get more miles in than today. She held the baby for the bottle.

  “Militias,” Austin said at length. “That’s so weird.” It was as weird as the Shepherds had been last summer and autumn, random people picking up guns and making themselves over into a force.

  “In the absence of power, someone will become the power,” Micah said. He turned on the flashlight for one last inspection of the maps. “Aussie, don’t waste the batteries.”

  “I’ll be quick.” He kept the light low to the ground. Zaley’s route was marked in red pen. They’d barely covered any ground, still quite close to Sausalito, and Mount Tamalpais was an enormous park to cross. He folded up the map and turned off the flashlight. The only sounds in the tent were the baby drinking from the bottle, a good bottle that was going to fill him up. With that and his medicine, it would put him to sleep.

  “If Arquin had nothing and you knew someone out there in Petaluma had Zyllevir, would you steal it?” Austin whispered. “Even from a mom with kids?”

  “Yes,” Micah whispered.

  “That’s the wrong thing to do.”

  “For us, yes. For Mars, we have to. It’s complicated. And if we had Zyllevir, the two of us with a baby, and that mother had none, she’d try to take it from us. Not because she hates us or we hate her, but because we need it for something bigger than ourselves.”

  Mars was smaller than them, but his need made him bigger. Until there was plenty, they had to take. Austin had to prepare for Arquin to be nothing, and for the last weeks of his sanity to be spent doing anything for his drugs. Mars would ask one day how they got through it and Austin had to hold back his shame. It was just what had to be done, and what a father did for his son. He wished his mother had done something like that for him.

  “I brought one of his toys and I don’t care what you say,” Austin blurted.

  “It’s your back to throw out,” Micah said indifferently.

  She had been such an asshole about it in Sausalito! “You’re supposed to be mad!”

  “We couldn’t carry everything. If I had told you to pick only his favorite things, you would have spent days going back and forth on what were his favorites, choosing way too much and making everybody nuts about it. So I said to take nothing and you stole one. Who cares about one?”

  “Goddammit, Micah!” He hated being so easily manipulated, and hoped the guy she married one day was able to read her like a book. He took out the Pocket Animal and put it at Mars’ side. It was too dark for him to notice it now, but it would be the first thing he saw when he woke up. The stuffed animal and the badge made two toys. Austin would replace all of the stuffed animals one day so Mars always had his friends around.

  “Did you mean what you said? Mars really won’t care that I’m gay?” Austin asked. “His family isn’t normal.”

  “What’s normal?” Micah asked. “I grew up with two moms and it was normal to me. You grew up with one mom and it was normal to you.
Zaley and Corbin have a mom and dad and that’s their normal. The kids at Cloudy Valley High had two dads or single moms, single dads or grandparents . . .”

  “Some were adopted,” Austin said. “Adoptive parents or foster parents-”

  “Exactly. A lot of people had divorced parents, stepparents from remarriages. A guy in my English class lived with his older sister. She was his legal guardian. Their parents had drug problems and lost custody. He wrote about it in an essay. None of us at school went home to exactly the same family situation. Mars Camborne-Bell will know his situation as normal, and he’ll kick the shit out of any kid who tells him differently. Or put a dildo on the asshole’s locker. I’ll buy him the glue.”

  “Mars Bell-Camborne. It’s alphabetical.” Austin didn’t care which way it went. It was just nice that Bell was in it somewhere. He thought about Mars not being embarrassed about who Austin was, and how Austin himself was more embarrassed. If Mars turned out to be gay, Austin didn’t want him to be embarrassed about it. That was just who he was, and God chose that for a person. A person didn’t choose that for himself. If it were that easy, Austin would be straight. Whether Mars asked out a boy or a girl to the prom, his dad was going to be standing there with the camera to snap an embarrassing picture before they left. That was all that mattered, not the sex of the date on Mars’ arm.

  Ferals called out in the wilderness. When the baby was asleep, Austin rested on the pillow beside him and envisioned pushing a stroller down a park path in some safe place where his stamp didn’t have to be covered. That was a hard image to hold onto, but he forced his mind to do it. Mars crowing at a flock of birds on the grass, a Bleu Cheese-like puppy tugging at the leash attached to the handle, Austin chiding the dog to slow down and saying bird to the baby, and a guy looking over to the mismatched, perfect picture they made with a smile.

  Set Fifteen

  Zaley

  Whore.

  She turned over the word, felt its weight and sharp contours on her palm and against her fingers, and quietly returned it to the shelf in the back of her mental warehouse where her father lived. That was one of his belongings, crowded in there with his guns and toilet paper hoard, his anger, his fear and hatred of anyone who wasn’t his exact reflection. The daughter who was not the wanted son had spread her legs in the back of an abandoned SUV and wallowed in filth, trailing her shame home to stain him.

  From another shelf in the back, Mom looked out in horror among boxes of toys and crafts, the bunny shirt on a hanger and the dolls agape at Zaley. She was too young and that rapist boy had taken advantage of her! The baby needed to be returned behind the bars of the crib where she was safe and her virginity restored. Zaley’s protests (she was closing in on eighteen fast, she had not been taken advantage of, and she was far too big for a crib) transformed into adorable coos and babbles on the way to her mother’s ears.

  Zaley’s shelves held other things. The guilt she trotted back to her father’s shelf every time it made its way to hers, and the belief in Zaley’s utter incompetence at managing any facet of her own life was squashed into the cradle on her mother’s. Zaley was left with the drumbeats in her skin, a little soreness, happiness and uncertainty. It had been joyful and terrifying, pleasurable and painful, and just when the darker side threatened to overwhelm her, Corbin had whispered that he loved her. The darkness released her or she fought her way out, and she was back with him. Afterwards, he dropped kisses on her forehead, not dollar bills on her belly as payment. She had put her hands to his cheeks in the blackness and he was crying. That made her cry.

  Whore. It was such a strange word. According to her father, Zaley was a whore for making love with a boy that she had known for six years, a boy who she planned to marry and have children with one day. That was the equivalent of being a porn star in his head, where people only existed in extremes.

  In the barracks at the confinement point, the Shepherd named Fawn would be considered a whore. She’d sleep with anyone, male or female, tall or short, sour or sweet. Her only standard for a bed partner was a pulse. But Zaley remembered that desperate girl chasing down everyone in the hopes of landing anyone and couldn’t apply the word whore to her. Mentally disturbed Fawn had been a pathetic sight, doing everything wrong to win love.

  Then there was Micah, who had had sex only for fun. Sex hadn’t meant anything to her. It wasn’t love. People would call her a whore for taking something they considered sacred and treating it like a whirl around a new rollercoaster. Zaley couldn’t have had sex for those reasons, but Micah still wasn’t a whore in her eyes. Her virginity hadn’t been a prize and Austin hadn’t scored anything. Nor had Corbin scored anything from Zaley. The term was so crass, her legs the goalposts and her vagina the winning point to end the game. It diminished both him and her. That wasn’t sex to them.

  She returned one matter after another to her parents’ shelves as she walked through California’s wildest places. The conviction of her mother’s that it had been forced made Zaley the angriest. Rape was what had been going on in the confinement point. It hadn’t been present in the cocoon of clothes and blankets in the SUV, Zaley whispering yes and yes again when Corbin asked if she was sure. There was such a huge difference between those two situations, the billions of miles that stretched from the heat of the sun to the ice of Pluto. To know that her nervous but whole-hearted yes would be twisted into something ugly in her mother’s mind was infuriating.

  There was only one condom, so it had only happened once. In the following two nights, they had to stay clothed and be absolutely quiet in the storm of ferals and gunshots out in the darkness. It was a nerve-wracking situation in which to try to fall asleep. When the infrequent cry or booo emanated from the other tent, Zaley begged internally for Mars to shut up. And when her mother nattered in her thoughts about childish things while sleep danced out of reach, Zaley thrust out an image of Mars and roared HE’S a baby! Not Zaley, and she hadn’t been one for a very long time. Having an infant as a daily presence in her life made grotesquely stark the canyon between them. She was a breath away from adulthood and Mars couldn’t even toddle yet. Anyone sane could see the difference.

  She and Corbin hadn’t talked about what happened in the SUV. By day they had company in their friends, and by night they had company in their enemies. But he had cried. A guy didn’t do that and hit on another girl the next day. His hand slipped up her shirt to rub her back at night as ferals chattered and guns blasted, and those tiny booos threatened to give away their location.

  They walked on trails and fire roads, regular roads and over bridges above small waterfalls. Past signs with crossed out dogs and bicycles that had no more meaning in the gloom of tall redwoods and the grasslands full of coyote brush. Big trees had toppled in the woodier areas, yanking their shallow roots from the soil and blocking the paths. Some trails were almost invisible from overgrowth. They climbed up and down, took curves and followed straight lines, avoided dead bodies and huddled in hiding places from live ones. During one of those times, they spied a thicket of blackberry bushes. After the pack of ferals had moved on, they went over. Most of the berries weren’t ripe yet, but they cleaned out every last one that was and all of those that were almost ripe. The baby’s mouth puckered at a taste of berry mash and he made a face at the tartness.

  At crests they looked over the world made silent and beautiful by distance. There were frequently postcard shots, the majestic views and the quiet places upon the trails, oaks wrapped in green jackets of moss with branches stretching overhead. Running below them in many places was a rushing white torrent of a creek.

  Less charming were the maps, which gave her a hellish time. Trying to match them to the trails and roads they needed ranged from difficult to impossible. Some of the actual trails weren’t labeled, and her eyes narrowed whenever they came to broken posts that had to have once sported signs. The guesswork was horrible. A trail that looked like it went north could easily curve east in a half-mile, and eventually loop them bac
k to where they had started. That had wasted a lot of time.

  At every unmarked split, she stopped and studied and guessed. She wished for Elania to be beside her, a dark finger following a trail of ink and Zaley’s light one following another, their heads crooking up one by one to gauge the map and the real world. Instead, Zaley worked with impatient Micah and anxious Austin. It wasn’t as easy as just going north when the terrain off the path was often impassable. They had to pick a trail and cross their fingers that it was the right one.

  On the third day, Corbin paused at one trail that had log steps going up a hill. They were halfway up when they realized he was still there at the foot. He stared at the steps helplessly, and looked like he was going to vomit. Zaley rushed back down, not knowing what was wrong. Micah and Austin did. The log steps had reminded Corbin of the stairs to the lodge at the confinement point the way fast food drive-thru windows were too reminiscent of the bucket that delivered his meals. He was panicking, and whispered in shame, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as Zaley soothed that it wasn’t the same.

  She let him take a minute to get himself together. When the minute passed and Corbin still hesitated to climb, Austin came down the steps with Mars and said, “You hold him.” Then Corbin crept up the stairs, the baby held tightly in his arms, and apologized again in a whisper. He had to keep taking things back to the mental shelf where the confinement point lived.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Zaley said. Had she been in the confinement point, she wouldn’t have emerged exactly the same either.

  “I don’t know how to fight it when that happens,” Corbin said. “It just hits me, and then I’m back there. What do you do with it, Austin?”