The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  She was Kali in the earliest incarnation of the goddess, the one who annihilated the forces of evil. She was Lilith, who rejected subservience to meet the world as its equal. She was Hekate the dark mother, and her guns were her torches. She was Persephone who destroyed the light. She walked with the dark goddesses not as deities to be worshipped but as names for her darkness, and she spread it over the mountain so that even the sun fell muted upon the green, and mortals drove away in fear.

  Hidden in the large, hollow trunk of a tree were an arsenal, a pantry, a library, a closet, a gas station, and a sleeping bag. No one could approach her home without her being alerted. She had strung wire between the trees to trip anyone who came. No one did. It was an out-of-the-way spot, a nook near the water and far from the trails. She had stumbled upon it by accident. Everything was yellow and pale green, crisp and hard-packed and desperate for rain. A dying kingdom for a dark queen. She tended her injuries with great care so she could continue her work.

  It wasn’t hard to find a hunter roving alone. Many preferred to work in squads and travel within defined grids. She had their maps and knew their ranges and schedules. To target them was suicide. But others weren’t team players and wanted to go farther from the trails. That made it easy, and gave her privacy to do as she would with them.

  When they were bleeding and tied up, she asked why they were here, what it was that brought them to the mountain. Half were thrill seekers. They were here because the zombies were here, and it was fun to hunt them. Adrenaline rush. She laughed at that. She understood. But did they know, did they truly know that these zombies were actually people just like them? Moms and dads, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors and coworkers? That it was only a drop of blood that kept the hunters from being zombies themselves? One tiny drop was all it would take to change the game entirely, for them to become someone else’s fun.

  They hadn’t thought about that, or had but it just wasn’t real until she made it real.

  They were her fun. She donated her blood generously to show them the other side of the coin. Drops into their eyes and mouths and open wounds as they screamed and wriggled about to get away. So they lusted after an adrenaline rush? Here was the biggest rush of all. Now the whole world was against them.

  She asked about their tattoos and traced around them with a blade; she admired the piercings in their noses and navels, ears and brows and nipples, and ripped them out. She let some think that their apologies and wheedling had been so powerful as to make her consider letting them go. Then she bent to loosen their ropes, and as they thanked her profusely, she smiled and ended them.

  M.

  One had had a bottle of headache medication in his backpack, which she took to her tree once she was done with him. That night, she learned the bottle had a trick bottom. Within it was Zyllevir. Although the man (man, he was hardly a man, his driver’s license proved him to be eleven months older than Micah) was knowingly infected with Sombra C, he had come to the mountain to hunt others with it. That made her want to go back through the woods and stab him some more, piss on his face and drag him to a clearing for the vultures to find faster. He had betrayed his own.

  So a good half of the hunters had come only for shits and giggles. There was food; there was fun. They’d heard it was a party on the mountain, set up their tents for a weekend in the campgrounds by the lake and accepted a map of the range they were allowed to hunt on in order to not interfere with more organized operations. Some obeyed that rule; others didn’t. One fellow had had a two-gallon container of gasoline with him. His plan was to capture a zombie and burn it alive. It. Not him, not her, but the sexless it of a monster. The idiot would have set fire to the whole mountain had Micah not caught him in time. The rain last winter had been paltry and everything was dry.

  The second half of the hunters had come with purpose. No less than three teenaged boys arrived at the mountain as an initiation rite to a gang. Make your zombie blood and come back as men. Older ones dreamed that they were keeping their homes in the nearby communities safe. That their presence here in this dangerous place was a sacrifice they had to make for the greater good.

  Have zombies been bothering your family at home?

  No, but-

  Are you helping people with Sombra C in your community get Zyllevir?

  No, but-

  Sometimes she could coerce a deeper truth from them. It was thrill seeking behind the altruism and nobility. They were bored. All they had to do was sit around and eat what they got from the relief truck, listen to the kids fight and the wife bitch. No phones, no Internet, no library, no malls, no air conditioning, no television . . . but now they knew just how wrong they had been. Micah helped them see the light. Oh God! What were they thinking? They would pack up their zombie dreams and go home, take the kids out for a game of ball, tell the wife how much they loved her. Zombies were people too, and they were so sorry! Please-

  M.

  It was late afternoon one day when she returned to her hollow trunk. Laying down to rest, she heard the crash of someone tripping over a wire of her trap. She snatched up her illegal automatic and went to see the face of the hunter who had fallen in her lap. There would be one more M for the day, but she’d have to drag the body away to keep it from poisoning the air. Micah didn’t want to breathe in the confinement point. Or she could just force the person to march away and do it somewhere else. Downwind.

  It wasn’t a hunter. It was a woman with a stamp on her neck, and she was lovely both for it and despite it. A little girl was gasping from fright at the woman sprawled on the grass. They had the same curly dark hair, and similar faces but different eyes. The girl clapped a hand over her neck when Micah emerged, covering up the stamp imprinted in her flesh. A sweat-dampened scarf was straggling on her shoulders. The woman backed up in fear at Micah and the gun. Scratching her nails down her neck to remove the cosmetics, Micah displayed the red of her own stamp.

  “Please don’t . . . hurt . . . my mama,” the girl begged.

  “Do you need Zyllevir?” Micah asked the woman.

  “Yes?” the woman asked, and her eyes grew teary. “I mean . . . yes.”

  Micah had that. She had food and guns, and knowledge of which trails had less traffic and when. While the two ate ravenously from her stores, she stuffed an extra backpack to the brim with food and water, the jewelry that could be traded, the best of everything she had in the trunk. They were blameless to the dark goddesses that dwelled upon this mountain, and deserved divine spoils.

  When she could stop eating long enough to breathe, the woman said, “Honey, why are you on this mountain? It’s crawling with hunters.”

  “I know,” Micah said. “I hunt them.” The honey should have bothered her, but it didn’t. It hadn’t been to insult her. The woman looked between the stamp and the weaponry, the backpacks aplenty. No question followed if Micah was serious. The answer was all around them, and within their sated stomachs.

  The woman’s name was Esme. She was twenty-six and a single mom. Her daughter Antonia was four. The two of them were from a small community in central California and got infected earlier in the year. Their next-door neighbor had been hiding two infected adult sons in her house, and one climbed out a second-story window in the night and through Antonia’s. He attacked the girl when she screamed to find a strange man growling in her bedroom, and then attacked Esme when she flipped on the lights and ran in shouting to save her daughter. She beat him with a baseball bat, which didn’t affect him, but when she shoved him over the railing to the ground floor, he broke his neck on the tile. Overlooking the terror and illnesses her actions had caused, the neighbor complained to the police that Esme should have just called for her to come over and pick up the boy.

  They weren’t going to Arquin, had never even heard of it, or to the Sonoma harbor, but instead to a cousin’s family on the coast. That family was also infected, and had a big supply of Zyllevir from a relative in the pharmaceutical business, or they had had one
before everything fell apart and Esme lost contact with them. She and Antonia had been walking for days with nothing to eat but unripe berries, and they were overdue for pills. Micah gave them the hunter’s hidden cache, which would last them a full month, as well as cosmetics to cover their stamps. The shade didn’t match their skin tone, but to a cursory view, their necks would be clear.

  A small hand filled Micah’s palm with candy and Antonia said, “May I have . . . that? A . . . piece?”

  “What do you say?” Micah asked.

  “P . . . p-please.”

  “No,” Micah said, but teasingly so the girl wouldn’t look crestfallen. “Not please. These are Halloween candies. What do you say on Halloween?”

  Pause. Then the girl giggled. “Trick . . . trick . . . trick or treat!”

  And she got the candy, every piece. Sombra C hadn’t touched her muscles yet. It didn’t make her sensitive to light, nor did she space out. Her reasoning was sound, her intelligence present, but the virus had sawed through some of the connections between her mind and her speech. Everything was still in her head where it belonged. She just struggled to make it come out. Esme had a lower viral load, and only the light bothered her a little.

  After adding a pair of sunglasses to the backpack, Micah unearthed her first aid supplies for their cuts and scratches. They stared afterwards when she checked over her own various slashes, all acquired from hunters who failed to get away. Fighting in real life was so very different from slow-motion rehearsed stances in a martial arts class. In real fights, everything was on fast-forward. There wasn’t often time for fancy moves, blocking a blade and catching the arm to throw the attacker. You just blocked and tried to get control of the arm holding the blade. Then you closed the space between you, took the person down, and gained enough distance to have time to grab a gun. Almost every time Micah attempted to disarm someone and snatch the blade, she’d gotten a hole poked in her.

  Esme insisted that she be allowed to tend the fresh gash on Micah’s back, and her fingers were the first gentle touch that Micah had felt in a long time. She wasn’t sure what to do with it when the only hands to have come her way since Mars died were to hurt her. Since Mars, the only way Micah had used her own hands was to hurt.

  “How old are you?” Esme asked as Antonia played with two toy unicorns that had been in one hunter’s backpack.

  “Seventeen,” Micah said, made helpless at that touch.

  The fingers moved warmly across her lacerated skin. “Jesus. I thought you were older than me.”

  “They killed my baby,” Micah blurted. When she turned around, Esme was crying for her and Mars. They looked to Antonia, who was entranced by the toys and oblivious to the conversation. The unicorns tipped their necks to an imaginary bucket of apples and nibbled.

  They stayed with Micah that night in the trunk, all of them wedged together to sleep. Periodic shots rang out. There were so many more out there for Micah to hunt. Picking them off one by one wasn’t good enough, although the camp had had fewer people the last time she spied upon it with her adopted binoculars. One hundred fifty approximately, down from almost two hundred. She couldn’t say for sure that that was due to her, although she wanted to think it was. She had to take stronger measures.

  At dawn, she led them west upon an overgrown trail that wasn’t on the maps given to the hunters. The only living person they came across was a feral, who snarled at them and slipped deeper into the trees. When Antonia tired or they had to go fast through the plains, Micah carried her. The weight and warmth of the child on her body reminded her so much of Mars . . .

  She had already cried for him, so there was no point in doing it now. It hadn’t brought him back. He had passed beyond the veil, and the veil was what she had become. That was the only way for them to be close. She would kill these people until they knew that they were no better than her child, no more deserving of life than he had been.

  When they got to the pass that would carry them to the coastal cities, she gave the unicorns to the girl and told her to take good care of them. Antonia had a smile that was Solstice-wide when she accepted the purple and blue toys. “Thank . . . thank you!”

  Esme clasped Micah’s hand and said, “Come with us, sweetie. They’re going to hunt you back in time.”

  Stay with me. Micah wanted to return to them at the tree when she came home at the end of the day, to sweep up Antonia into her arms for a hug and to give a backpack of fresh food and supplies to Esme. To have that warm hand on her flesh. Micah wasn’t gay, yet she wanted Esme beside her desperately as a touchstone. A touchstone to what, she couldn’t say.

  But a dark goddess walked alone. That was what it was to be in darkness. She kissed Esme’s forehead and ran her fingers through Antonia’s hair. Then she turned away to the mountain.

  A day later, she spied a hunting party through her binoculars. There were five of them at the base of a trail, four dudes and a chick clustered around a map. Fresh meat. The trail was one the campsite set aside for people who weren’t permanent residents, and there was nothing remotely professional about this quintet. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, sneakers and sandals, they looked like they were off to a day at a county fair. The only details wrong were the guns and backpacks. One guy was taking aim at nothing, his mouth opened in silent cries of pow.

  She couldn’t take on five at once.

  She could, if she played the game a different way.

  The lone girl of the five was drab. Micah tied her shirt into a knot that bared her belly and sliced off the legs of her jeans to create short-shorts. There were more clothes in her tree. Her ass was hanging out by the time she was done. Slicking back her hair and washing her face with her water bottle, she put an extra layer of foundation over her stamp and went to greet them.

  The name she gave was Kali. None of them understood the warning, the hint that they should turn around. The guys were Kane, Jenson, Reese, and Harris, college students in their earlier incarnation and refashioning themselves into zombie hunters in this one. The girl was Aubrianna, a name with plumage for a girl without any. Lank hair, a sallow complexion, a long face, she had a fat ass and no tits to balance it out. Her makeup was plastered on, accentuating her flaws rather than concealing them. Her pale blue eyes ran along Micah’s exposed, voluptuous body in jealousy as the attention of the guys was diverted away.

  Only Jenson had ever been a Shepherd and barely that, doing a pace here and there between classes and giving it up in time because it was boring. He was their connection to the camp through a crazy friend who was obsessed with zombie everything and had once fought at the Sonoma harbor. Those were zombie breeding grounds, he believed, and they were building a zombie army behind that Sanya Smart Shield. Everyone laughed at the level of delusion. Jenson knew his friend was whacked in the head. As long as those people were trapped inside the harbor, so what? The pressing problem was the zombies out here.

  After a good day’s hunt, the five of them were invited back to the lake to partake in barbecue chicken. But not to stay longer than two or three days. The camp population was capped and there was a waiting list to get in. A long one.

  They knew about Arquin, these college kids who shook hands and chatted with Micah. Zombies came over the mountain all the time to get there. Tall, handsome Kane expressed distaste that the United States military fell over backwards to feed and medicate zombies while his own family lived on shit rations and had no electricity. Maybe they should spend a little more time fixing the infrastructure than making zombies happy. “Know what I mean, Kali?”

  Yes, Kali knew what he meant. Fucking zombies!

  He was here to strike back and have some fun, or the other way around. Who cared? They were here and it was going to be awesome. Everyone’s guns and ammunition had come from his father’s collection. It had only ever been employed at a shooting range before today. The fuel was supplied by a guy who worked for Sweet Song, and goddamn they had had to shell out for a few shitty gallons! Those dudes were s
itting on a treasury of wedding rings and jewels and worthless cash, what people gave up for food or a little gas to try to make it north. None of those things were worth shit now, but the guys were banking on it being worth plenty later when the country returned to normal.

  Micah enjoyed hanging out with them, playing the part of a flirty girl, and the guys regaled her with stories of their derring-do. On the way over to the camp, this band of merry men had run over a feral in the road. Kane aimed for him on purpose. Everyone cracked up at the memory of how the feral bounced off the windshield, although chubby Harris was a little pissy since there was now a dent in the hood of his car. Kane caught the look and dug into him. The car was a piece of shit and one dent didn’t change it. Harris couldn’t even identify which dent it was! Micah laughed and hung on Kane’s arm, tossing a wink over to Aubrianna to piss her off. One guy asked about the bruise that was almost healed on Micah’s cheek. She blamed a feral that she hunted down the day before, said she came out here often and knew the trails like the back of her hand. The camp didn’t care since she didn’t depend on it for food. All five became very excited. This girl had seen action. Maybe she could show them some. From the look Kane was giving her, it was clear which kind of action he hoped to get.

  They tromped around the trails together, hunting zombies and bitching about what they missed most about their former world. Reese missed restaurants and Harris really wanted to get back to school. Jenson groaned about movies. Dude! The release date for Blood Wars III had passed just a week ago. Everyone razzed him for his love of Gothic vampire movies and then Kane said that he didn’t know how much longer he could go without the Internet and good pot. As Aubrianna began to answer, Micah cut her off to say what she missed most was porn. Three of the guys followed her through that door. Porn! Oh God, they were reduced to old clothing catalogues and posters, whacking off to pictures of ex-girlfriends and fantasies. Aubrianna laughed furiously at everything they said.