The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  If Mom were under the bleachers with Cadi right now, she would have said to get out of Murphy since the Nychos were here. But that was not an option. Out on the field, Oscar was arguing with the coach. Cadi didn’t know enough about football to understand his complaint, but as he kept gesturing to the girl on the team, it looked like he was blaming her for the loss. He’d been pushy with Cadi the first week of school, trying to figure out if she was a lesbian or a slut since that was all that existed in his cosmology of the female. The story of her college boyfriend was a lie, and it was also a lie that the diamond ring she wore of Mom’s was a purity ring. But it got him off her back, and he restrained himself to asking how long she thought she could hold out, and observing that religious girls turned out to be the kinkiest. Cadi loathed him.

  Although the game had ended, both teams were still out there next to the field. Murphy had a policy of the Friendship Shake after competitions, and they couldn’t start until Coach Jenkins shook the hand of the Pikestown coach and Jenkins couldn’t do that until Oscar shut up. The bleachers creaked as people filtered down the steps in twos and threes to leave. Not too many people had come to watch, and no one saw Cadi in the shadows as they took the walkway to the parking lot. Wishing Oscar were lighter of skin, she resumed her canvass of the other players.

  Peter Stanley had turned sixteen this week, his proud mother putting him on the bus for his birthday wearing a sweatshirt that announced it. Though he ripped it off the second the bus turned the corner, the story was around the school by the end of first period. Mrs. Stanley put other helicopter parents to shame, walking right into his morning classes with his lunch when he forgot it, arguing with his teachers over A minuses, sending a rose and telegram on Valentine’s Day. Cadi had had French with Peter the year before when the cupids arrived to deliver love tokens; he crumpled his telegram quickly and shoved it in his backpack. Everyone knew it was from his mom, who must have been in that line of students at lunch waiting to pay their dollar to send a rose and telegram. The catcalls started and blood was rushing to Peter’s face when Cadi touched a finger to her glamour emblem on her left shoulder. Then she glowed, the attention magically drawn to her, and she said flirtatiously, “Thanks for helping me with my tire, Peter.”

  Of course he hadn’t helped her with anything, but the wheels in his mind slowly turned to the realization of a rescue. “No problem, Cadi!”

  “He totally deserves a rose. I had a flat yesterday,” she said to the girl who sat in front of her.

  “Oh my god, I hate those!” the girl agreed. The glamour wore off quickly with so many people draining it. But that was all right, since the teacher called for attention, and no one remembered Peter’s love note from his mom. He tried to talk to Cadi after class but she brushed him off; she did it out of pity and nothing more. Pale of complexion and nothing but muscle, Peter was waiting among the other players for the argument to finish. His mother was in the bleachers, waving a flag with her son’s number.

  No, Cadi couldn’t take Peter. He’d be reported missing to the cops two seconds after Cadi got him into her Pantheon, the Amber Alert blanketing the whole state two seconds after that, and she’d never make the library. The thought of someone always circling overhead with a spotlight trained on Cadi made her wince. Torvi gave her the distance she wanted. She came to him with problems when she was ready for help, not because he had badgered them out of her. No sooner would Cadi come through the door of the shop after school than he practically vomited his day on her feet, but that was not how she worked, and he respected it.

  Nicholas Hobart also fit the bill in age, fitness, and complexion. Searching her memory, Cadi came up with nothing, not even what grade he was in. Good. This was easier if she didn’t know. She could catch him after the players changed, turn on her glamour and lure him away. If he didn’t come out in a group of them, of course, in which case she needed to have a Plan B. Follow Nicholas home and get him before he walked inside, or else lure him through his window to her car. To the library, to the Nychos, and then . . . she did not want to think about and then.

  The hair rose on the back of her neck. She looked into the shadows and saw Kalanthe approaching. Dressed as always in black yoga pants and a black tank top, olive skin between the streaks of her emblems, she was rendered nearly invisible. All of her color was in the rosewood of her hair, which was loose and hanging to her waist. Emblems covered the exposed skin of the beautiful Nychos girl, jagged black streaks, lines, and curved claws wrapping around her arms and shoulders. It was hard to tell where one left off and another began, and impossible to know what spell each contained. Cadi didn’t want to ask. One emblem was concealed by her hair and evident only in stripes that broke through her hairline and cut down to her temple.

  The emblems upon her left arm had a dark, living sheen, as did the stripe extending to her left cheek. Her other side, however, was a mess. Some caustic substance had splashed there, scorching and bubbling the skin and turning parts of those living sheens dull. Her right eyelid drooped at half-mast, although that was better than a month ago. She was regaining muscle strength on that side as well where once she’d moved at more of a shuffle than a stride. At a distance now, she might look like an attractive girl in her late teens.

  Those dull emblems Torvi noticed the night the Nychos visited the shop; all three had been splashed. Kalanthe received the least of it. Of the two Nychos males, the bubbling had obliterated Delyth’s facial features to nothingness and the emblem on his shaved head was as lifeless as a regular tattoo. Although he seemed young, Cadi could not be sure what age he was. Short and with a stocky but muscular build, his chest was mostly unmarked. Emblems were visible through his thin T-shirt. One of his arms was in terrible shape. The skin was warped and crackled around his spells, leaving no sheen anywhere. From the way Delyth hitched when he walked, and winced at the rasp of his jeans on his skin, it was obvious his legs had been splashed, too.

  The second male could not even stand without leaning on the wall or counter, and he was burned in a solid sheet from lips down. Above his lips, Vastax had the features of a handsome boy about seventeen, tall but with a little baby fat still on his cheeks. His clothes were the ultimate in preppy, a smart Melmont vest, khaki chinos that needed ironing, his shirt rolled up at the cuffs, but this was matched with a punk hairstyle. With hair as black as his emblems, Vastax had put three red streaks into it running from forehead to nape.

  Both of the Nychos males struggled to speak, their slices of phrases braced by wheezes and their eyes angry at the struggle. Torvi believed it might have been the work of a sacrili trying to kill them. A shame the sacrili had not succeeded, but perhaps he or she was successful in killing the others, as Nychos usually traveled in packs of four or more. But sacrili played the game until it ended, not let three of a pack escape and figure it was good enough. He thought these three Nychos, two of whom were quite wounded, should have been easy for sacrili to track and take down. Maybe the Nychos had killed the sacrili in the fight, or maybe it had been joyriders instead.

  Cadi had never met a sacrili, but Torvi had long before she was born. Hunters like sacrili did not kill Ceilidh, or Shang or Chwi for that matter, since Ceilidh sigils like Torvi and Cadi took non-essentials and Shang took nothing at all from humans. Chwi were a type of sigil so rare that Cadi didn’t know much of anything about them. For one night the man stayed with Torvi and their mother, hot on the track of a bleeding Aposha who had been killing heavily. An Araja killing once a year to feed, the man said, and he left it alone. That was how they stayed alive, and the apex predator of the jungle called the shots. Finding that Araja could take twenty years of a concentrated hunt, and it was likely to wipe out several sacrili and a square mile of innocent bystanders before they took it down. That feast of one human a year was sad, but trying to stop it would create a far greater tragedy.

  But this Araja had refused to die at the end of its life and thus diminished to Aposha, killing twice a month now to stay alive
instead of once a year. The length of time between kills was decreasing and no less than fifteen sacrili were on its tail. It had been winged with a bullet dipped in hound blood in San Francisco, and he was part of a team stalking the Aposha as it bled its way north. The bullet wasn’t slowing it down, nothing normal like bullets or fire slowed diminishments for long, but the poison of that blood was. They were trying to herd it into a less sparsely populated area to finish it off for good. The operation moved slowly and carefully out of necessity, and that hotheaded joyrider’s careless bullet could have resulted in the deaths of many thousands. Torvi remembered how Mom sobered over dinner then, asking about the joyriders, and the sacrili said in her shoes, he’d lay low to let them pass. The team of sacrili had beaten the trigger-happy joyrider right into the hospital, but that joyrider had friends just as bad as he was.

  Joyriders didn’t care if the sigil was some harmless Shang or Ceilidh, and should they ever meet a Chwi, if that kind of sigil even still existed, they wouldn’t care either. They didn’t stop to think that an Araja or its diminishment to Aposha had the ability to wield extremely destructive magic when cornered. A joyrider wouldn’t care that Torvi was four years old, and this band following the Aposha was hungry for blood. Mom gave the sacrili a case of unguents in gratitude for the warning, and then she packed up Torvi to a nice hotel for months. A group of Sleagh was hiding in the hotel, too, since they’d also be some harmless sigils caught in a joyrider firing line.

  “Thought you’d be hunting here,” Kalanthe said. “Nice car. Let me drive it sometime?”

  “It isn’t midnight,” Cadi said. Nychos did not have the spell of glamour; they’d lost that when they diminished from Cthalu sigils. The hair remained stiff on the back of Cadi’s neck, her human half reacting to the presence of a Nychos. That made it harder for Nychos to procure. When Cadi was under the spell of her glamour, people followed her anywhere.

  Humans could sense Nychos at a distance, even without seeing them or knowing what they were. It was the prickle of gooseflesh before taking a step into an alley; it was that little internal voice that said don’t to a frantic cry of help me! Kalanthe could have cried out piteously all day and all night, pretending her foot was trapped or that someone had just stolen her purse, yet no one would have gone to assist what looked like a sweet, pretty girl in distress. No human who was not a hunter or else utterly intoxicated would go down that alley. The closer the Nychos was, the more intense the repulsion became, along with the drive to get away from it by any means possible.

  Torvi had never dealt with Nychos until Murphy, and with good reason. They were to be avoided at all measure, just like humans avoided the diminishment of the psychopathic among them. If a Nychos pack moved into your area, your only response was to move out. Cadi and Torvi would have been long gone if they had known in time, and without the relay Kalanthe put on Torvi from the emblem on her arm, they’d have left after the first meeting without packing so much as a toothbrush or moneybag.

  As far as sigils went when they first moved, Murphy boasted only a singular Shang, a man who stopped in the store once to request they never set foot on Twelfth Street. Their magic would interfere with his. His pudgy, unattractive form was carefully chosen to dissuade attention, but even as he stood there, it flickered between that and a younger, more handsome man. That man would have drawn eyes, and that was the last thing a Shang wanted.

  Twelfth was on the distant side of Murphy and they never would have gone there anyway, but they respected the boundary. Shang were solitary. Wanting nothing to do with humans or other sigil kinds, rarely even their own kind, they retreated to the outskirts of society. He was a young Shang, despite his middle-aged body. That was just the illusion of one of his emblems covering up his true form of the handsome younger one, and Cadi hadn’t needed to see it flicker to know how young he was. One could tell the age of a Shang simply by where they chose to live. Older Shang sigils divorced from society even further and lived in the wilderness.

  Shang worked with nature elements alone. Seeing a geode on the shelf of the store, he purchased it before nodding politely and exiting. They had never seen him again, although he made online orders for unusual rocks and shells. Once, randomly, he sent an online video of puppies. Cadi didn’t know the breed of those wriggling black-and-tan dogs with white bellies, neither was the video labeled. They tumbled over one another yipping after balls, and the Shang’s message had been just as ambiguous. His name is Trysaos. The bite is only from fear. She assumed that he had sent it on accident.

  It was just the three of them for sigils in the area as far as Cadi knew, at least until the Nychos came. An Araja lived elsewhere in Los Angeles; the Shang passed that along in his visit. He killed on the eighteenth of April every year, his pattern moving him west each time away from Murphy, and his other kills were only joyriders staking him out. Since the Shang alerted them to this, it was only fair that they alert him to the Nychos. Torvi sent an email that went unanswered.

  Examining the players beside the field, Kalanthe said, “Mmm, I like that one.” Cadi shuddered, seeing that she was looking at Peter. The eyes of the Nychos girl moved hungrily over the players, gauging them one at a time.

  Twice now, Cadi had procured for the Nychos. The first orders were for an old man. She found one at Doyle Park, asleep on a bench. She told herself that it wasn’t as bad because he was homeless, a grizzled drunk she’d seen wandering around town pushing a cart and yelling at trees. Luring him into the alley with her glamour, the man stumbled placidly after her until two of the Nychos took hold of his arms. Vastax shuffled over from the wall as the others stopped the man from running. He was not drunk enough to make him totally unaware of the repulsion, and he strained to break away.

  The Nychos boy with the red-striped hair put his warped hand on the man’s chest, and the spikes of an emblem on the undamaged back of his neck began to glow. Cadi closed her eyes when the man screamed.

  “Save a little for us, too, Vastax,” Kalanthe ordered.

  When Cadi opened her eyes again, she was alone with a husk at her feet. It was the man, his mouth gaping open and cracked along the lips, his clothes limp around his deflated form. His skin was papery and dry, looking like every drop of water had been sucked out of his body, and his last expression was of horror. The paper said his name was Bryan Tallman, and that he’d died of extreme dehydration. He had gone to Murphy High himself before fighting in Vietnam, and in an old yearbook was a picture of a bright-eyed fellow. Cadi shouldn’t have looked, but she had, and now she could not forget. For weeks she saw that young face, that husk every time she blinked.

  The second time was bloody. Her orders were for a woman, details unimportant. She didn’t want to do this, stand in the parking lot of a grocery store watching for easy prey. After stalling on the task for hours, the clock was winding down.

  Cadi tried to blame the woman. She had parked at the far end of the lot although there were closer spaces. Didn’t she know that was dangerous? Especially at night! Under glamour, the woman climbed into Torvi’s car and chattered about getting in her ten thousand steps a day. Cadi wound through dark streets to the address in the text, which was to an abandoned factory in Dimondia. Her glamour lasted longer when only on one person, as compared to a group, but this distance was pushing it. By the time she parked inside the open loading bay, the charm was fading and the woman a little nervous. Then the passenger door opened.

  Cadi took hair and nail clippings, spit and saliva and handwriting. She never took more than drops of blood. The spells Torvi wrought of them were for unguents he sold in the shop. No one died, no one was hurt, and Cadi tried to clip hair from the underside where it wouldn’t be noticed. As she sat frozen in the driver’s seat, Kalanthe dragged the woman deeper into the empty factory. The other Nychos argued in halting voices as the woman screamed from the repulsion. She was fighting desperately to get away, but Kalanthe did not let go.

  The old man had given back Vastax some of his leg
s and he wanted more; Delyth desired repair to his face. Kalanthe silenced them both saying that she was for all of them, and to tilt her toward the jars. Emblems started to glow, on Kalanthe’s undamaged arm, on Delyth’s back under his shirt, on Vastax’s thigh, and there was a machete lying across jars on the floor. Cadi leaned over and slammed shut the passenger door as Kalanthe sank the machete into the woman’s throat. Blood sprayed over the Nychos, some of it evanescing as it was absorbed into their emblems, and the rest slopped into the jars. Cadi fled.

  At home, she wept. They tried to escape Murphy that night, but the relay triggered at the city line. Cadi drove on, Torvi shouting at her to keep going even as it killed him, the spell crushing his chest and making it hard for him to breathe. But she pulled an illegal U-turn at the rattle of death in his throat. She could not lose Torvi! He was the only family she had.

  For days, she resolved not to look at the local news, either paper or online. That she could do, but nothing stopped her from seeing the missing posters for Hope Cleary, thirty-six, blonde and brown-eyed, yoga aficionado and mother of two. Cadi burned the clothes she’d worn that night, just as she had the ones she wore with Bryan Tallman. After tonight’s work at the football game, she would burn these.

  If only the Nychos hunted for themselves! But they couldn’t glamour, and their repulsion pushed away their prey. As for these three, something had happened to their pack. They needed a procurer of their own to do their dirty work, but for some reason, this little group of Nychos didn’t have one. The solution, sadly, was Cadi.