Mark was appalled at what had just happened, breathing heavily with his pulse racing. He turned to the back seat, grabbed the rifle and loaded a magazine of five rounds before checking the side mirror to see where the body had come to lie. It was a couple of metres behind the end of the tray. Mark opened the door and walked towards what was left.
The injury was horrific, the skidding wheel carrying the weight of the car, had almost completely torn the bottom half of the body away from the torso. Only a hand’s width of flesh at the right side of the abdomen connected the pelvis and legs, however there was no spurting arterial bleed from the major vessels, the tissue was a dry, brown-red. The man was a carrier of the virus. His eyes watched Mark, a hiss exiting its mouth as the teeth snapped together, hands reaching forward. Mark stood and watched in horror for a moment, until the torso and arms started to drag itself towards him, trailing the hideous bottom half of the body in its wake.
The creature wasn’t alive in the accepted sense, it wasn’t “human” anymore, there was no blood supplying its tissues, it should have bled out within seconds and died from such a catastrophic injury. Mark backed out of reach and jumped into the Ranger, slamming the door shut. He pulled away and headed for Glebe Point Rd at the end of his street, a main thoroughfare that would take him to Sydney University.
At the intersection, he took a left onto his chosen route, and found he was driving into the remnants of a massacre. Wisps of grey-black smoke whipped through the air; there were pools of congealed blood on the ground and in some cases splashed against the windows of shop fronts. The bodies responsible for the spilled blood were gone, converted by the virus to killing automatons. He saw a few shuffling figures further up the street, heading in the direction he needed to go. He drove forward, weaving around an abandoned car in his path and up onto the footpath.
Some of the Infected he passed ignored him; others beat their hands on his windows, pale faces fixed in an animalistic snarl. As he continued his trip forward, he found what the walking Infected had been drawn towards. A man was standing on top of a bus shelter, surrounded by eight of them, reaching upwards to his ankles that were just out of reach. An awful noise issued from their throats as they hammered at the sides of the shelter in rage and hunger. Upon seeing Mark in his ute, the man yelled desperately to him, waving his hands in agitation. The attention of the Infected mob remained on their quarry, ignoring Mark as he reversed up to a narrow end of the shelter. There was a heavy thud as the man jumped down into the tray.
‘Drive, mate, drive!’ he cried out. He grasped the roll bar, pressing his body tightly against the cab, trying to get away from the surrounding ghouls that crowded the edge of the ute tray, reaching for him.
‘Hold on!’ Mark shouted back over the deafening noise of their attackers. He accelerated as quickly as he thought the guy in the back could handle. Two blocks further on, the street was deserted once more. He pulled over and got out. In the back, the man had slumped to a seated position, evidently relieved at his escape.
‘You all right, mate?’ he asked
‘Fuck, no. I don’t think I’ll ever be right again after that shit,’ he said. Belatedly, he stuck out his hand towards Mark. ‘But thanks, mate, those bastards would have had me soon. My name’s Peter.’
Mark accepted the handshake. ‘No worries, I’m Mark.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the ute, preoccupied, ‘I’ve got to go; my ex is in trouble. You coming any further, or do you want out here?’
Peter looked over his shoulder back down the street; the pack of Infected from the bus shelter had been following and was now only a hundred metres away. ‘They make the decision pretty easy, eh?’ he said, suppressing a shudder as he jumped out of the ute’s tray to climb in the front passenger seat.
Chapter Eight
Steph sat bolt upright in bed. Her heart was racing – something had woken her from a dead sleep, a sound that left her gut squirming like a worm pierced on a hook. There it was again. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. It was a guttural scream, a scream embodying pure agony, terror and despair. Steph looked at her watch; 6.30pm, she’d been asleep for hours. She slipped out of bed, ditched her shorts and pulled on a pair of jeans and runners instead. As she did up the laces, she found a tremor to her fingers. She had to find out what was happening out there.
There was now the sound of people running, and various other cries of fear interspersed between. Steph opened her room door a crack; there was nothing in the hallway beyond. Taking a deep breath to calm her nerves, she stepped out and closed it behind her. There had to be a rational explanation for the noise and commotion.
Steph headed toward the main dining area behind reception, thinking she’d be able to find one of the staff members to explain away the screaming. As she approached the main building complex, the sound of agitated voices rose. People were running away from the building, seemingly oblivious of their surrounds.
One of the girls that usually ran the resort cafe was hurrying in Steph’s direction, glancing fearfully over her shoulder every couple of paces. Steph reached out and grasped her arm as she passed.
‘What’s happened? Has someone been hurt?’
The girl tried to pull away. ‘You need to get out of here, it’s not safe!’
‘What do you mean?’ Steph held onto to the girl’s arm to prevent her leaving, but she wrenched her arm from Steph’s grip and ran.
Steph looked back towards the main building, and after moment’s hesitation, headed on up.
The main foyer was a scene of manic activity. The two doors within the long series of folding glass wall segments that separated the restaurant from the foyer were being slammed shut by a security guard as he evacuated the last bleeding guest from the dining area. Blood smeared several of the glass panes. The guard fumbled with a set of keys until he found the right one to lock the door.
Two employees dragged the bleeding guest to the far corner, where six other injured people lay on the floor. Three others tried frantically to stem the bleeding on the two worst injured guests without much success. One of them had a hideous injury to his face, the right side of his jaw hung in a bloody ruin, a five-centimetre section of the mandible completely absent. The upper lip was ripped free, exposing crimson-stained molars. His tongue fell loose through the unwanted opening left by the missing segment of jaw. The man was choking on his own blood. As he coughed, globs of clot and scarlet mist spattered against the first aider attempting care. A young woman in yoga pants and tank top whimpered as she wrapped the stumps of two amputated fingers in a shirt to stem the bleeding. A third lady lay unconscious, her right arm missing below the elbow. A growing pool of blood extended away from the poorly bandaged stump. The others had minor areas of tissue loss and wounds that were more easily treated with direct pressure and wads of cloth.
Steph stood confused; she hadn’t heard any blasts or gunfire to account for a terrorist incident or gas mains explosion, and some of the wounds had distinctive crescent shapes of a bite. She knelt beside a resort manager providing first aid, passing a bandage from a pile of dressing equipment that had been emptied onto the ground.
‘What’s happened to them? Was there an explosion in the kitchen or something?’ she asked as they bandaged a wad of gauze into a leg wound.
‘You weren’t here when it happened then? It was Jack, the park ranger.’
‘Huh?’
‘He went mad, attacking people in the dining room – he’s still in there,’ she told Steph. ‘We need to get everyone away before he tries to come out.’
‘I saw him earlier this afternoon, he looked sick, but he didn’t strike me as a psycho’.
‘Yeah, I don’t know what happened to him either. I let him crash in one of the staff dorms. Then he appeared again not long ago at dinner. It was as if he didn’t recognize anything – he just attacked any person within reach – biting, tearing at them.’
‘What…? You mean he caused these injuries?’
The man
ager nodded.
‘How?’ Most of the wounds were horrific, too severe to inflict without a weapon. ‘Did he have a knife or something?’
The manager turned a tinge of green as she went on, ‘No, worse – it was all done with his teeth and hands.’
‘Bullshit...’ Steph said under her breath, thinking of the bite sized piece of jawbone missing from the choking man.
Steph stood and walked towards the glass partition. A few other survivors had begun to edge closer as well, drawn by the macabre spectacle unfolding within the dining room. Five metres in from the barricaded doors, the ranger could be seen kneeling on the ground, bent over something. It was the source of the heart-rending screams that had awoken her earlier. A woman’s body lay in front of the ranger. Half of the abdominal cavity was gone – eaten. Every few seconds he’d lean forward and rip another chunk off with his teeth, gagging it down without chewing. Steph was struck dumb by the view.
The manager appeared at her elbow. ‘Poor woman – when he dragged her to the ground, it allowed the rest of us to escape. He started disembowelling her alive. It took an age for her to die while he just ate and ate, pulling her back whenever she tried to escape. While he was busy with her, we were able to pull out the other people that he’d already attacked.’ She paused, her eyes taking on a glassy look. She shook her head before continuing. ‘I’ve talked to the police; they’re coming, but are still another half hour away. The bastards are sending cops and paramedics from Cairns, but it’ll be too late for some of the people we pulled out.’
Steph looked back at the group of injured in the far corner of the foyer. The two suffering the arm amputation and jaw trauma had ceased breathing. At least their pain has stopped.
A noise drew her gaze once again to the dining room. The ranger, Jack, had risen unsteadily to his feet. He was standing side on to Steph. His head hung forward, the olive-green shirt, now more black than green from the congealed mass soaking it, hung open with the buttons torn away. His abdomen was grossly distended, pregnant with the flesh of the woman at his feet. From the back of the foyer one of the First Aid providers cried out in alarm. Jack’s head flicked around, drawn to the noise and his gaze found Steph and the hotel manager. He lurched up to the clear wall, hunger plain on his face, and started to hammer on the glass.
Steph and the manager immediately backed away. A second scream from behind notified them of a nearer threat. A lady was pinned to the ground underneath the weight of the dead man missing half his jaw. She desperately struggled, pushing up against the corpse’s shoulders to hold the monster’s face away from hers. Dark red sludge dripped from his mangled face as he snapped ineffectually, the tongue lolling sideways from the gap. Next to them, the legs of the dead amputee were starting to twitch.
Steph felt like she was stuck in a nightmare from which she couldn’t awake, her legs leaden beneath her. Her brain finally started firing – she had to escape. She spun on her heel and ran for the door. The sound of shattering glass in tandem with screams accompanied her exit as the ranger broke through the paned glass barrier.
Within minutes she was back at her room. Steph stuffed her belongings into her backpack then swung it up onto one shoulder. Keys in hand, she headed for the car park, her room door left swinging open behind. A brisk wind had picked up, shivering the leaves overhead as she jogged with her ungainly sixty litre backpack lunging from side to side. The concrete path turned to gravel underfoot as she entered the resort’s car park. She made a beeline for her white Toyota Corolla rental car at the back left corner of the lot. The car’s orange indicator lights flashed with a loud double beep as Steph unlocked the doors on approach. She threw her backpack carelessly onto the passenger seat, then sprinted back to the driver’s side and slid the key into the ignition. The engine fired instantly, and Steph switched on the headlights to drench the surrounds in a harsh white light. She stamped on the accelerator, causing the wheels to spin for a revolution before gripping to lurch the car into motion. Steph exited the resort at speed, blocking any thoughts of what she had witnessed by concentrating on the road.
Once she’d put a few kilometres between herself and the resort, she eased off the accelerator. What she’d witnessed couldn’t have been possible; it didn’t fit within the laws of nature. She’d seen a man drown in his own blood, then a short time later re-animate and attack like an animal. And the Ranger ‒ Jack… there was nothing left of the kindly man she’d met only hours earlier. What was happening?
A light rain had begun falling, making the bitumen road greasily treacherous. Red and blue lights flashed against the foliage at the next corner, alerting her to an approaching emergency services vehicle. She slowed further and pulled to the side of the road to allow passage on the single lane width as four police cars screamed past. She wished them the best of luck, they were going to need it.
As Steph pulled back onto the road, a light bulb blinked on in her mind. Australian rabies, no, it was... Lyssavirus. Jack had talked of a mutating strain of Lyssavirus responsible for human deaths, and bats involved in its research had bitten him. The people the Ranger had bitten had also exhibited the same behaviour on reanimation, meaning that he must have been able to transmit the virus through his bite. If her new theory was anywhere close to the truth, Cairns could turn into a dangerous place until the cops got it under control.
Steph reached across to the top of her pack on the passenger seat and unzipped the top compartment. She fished into the pocket blindly, her eyes still on the road. Her fingers caught hold of what she was after, pulling it free, she saw with relief the purple cover of her British passport. She’d had a sudden fear that it had been left in the resort’s safe at reception. She typed the Cairns Airport into the car’s GPS. Maybe it was time to head to New Zealand for an explore; she could come back to the Australian East Coast sometime in the future once this all settled down.
Steph resolved to get a flight to Sydney and from there to Auckland. She also had a second cousin, Harry, in Sydney that she could probably call if there was any problem getting a flight to New Zealand.
Chapter Nine
Penny sat knee to knee with ten other police in the back of a transport van. They were all in full riot gear, clear shields held in front, helmets with shatter proof Perspex visor on heads and stab-proof vests in place. The van was travelling at speed with siren blaring, jostling its occupants against each other with each bump on the road. They were travelling in convoy; one other van with another ten police officers was ahead of theirs.
Penny lurched to the left against the next cop’s shoulder as the driver hit the brakes, bringing the van to a sudden stop. A sergeant wrenched open the door, the late afternoon sun shining into their eyes over his shoulder. They were on Missenden Road in Newtown, fifty metres from the intersection with King Street. They had pulled up in front of a string of cafes, whose occupants now stared at the disembarking police officers with open-mouthed curiosity. Penny marvelled at their innocent response, for the public to not run at the first sight of a riot squad spoke volumes about the overall safety of Australian cities.
The squad was directed to form up at the King Street corner, the twenty officers spreading in a loose line facing south. They’d got there with little time to spare. The street was empty of traffic except for a few parked cars.
The air was hazed with smoke from a fire somewhere nearby, while the sounds of a fight carried from farther ahead. A staccato of small-arms fire echoed, then an order to disengage and fall back. The first officers came into sight as they fell back to consolidate with Penny’s line at the Missenden Road corner. Every second officer stepped back, allowing space for the retreating cops to pass through, before forming up once more. The sergeant in charge of the first group approached Penny’s sergeant, both he and his men were breathing hard, their faces pale, eyes wide.
‘Sergeant Novak?’ he gasped, trying to catch his breath after the retreat.
Penny’s team leader nodded.
‘Damn
it,’ he muttered. ‘Command swore they were sending more reinforcements than this.’ He glanced back down the road. ‘When they get here, don’t bother with the usual crowd control measures – just shoot to kill. I’ve already lost four officers to the bastards,’.
‘Are you bloody mad? I’m not shooting people without warning,’ said Novak, aghast at the suggestion.
‘Those things aren’t human anymore. They’re already fucking dead! I just had a mate killed next to me by a woman dragging her own intestines!’
Novak pushed the other sergeant aside and stepped past him, ‘Stay in the back then.’
Penny could now hear the sound of approaching Infected. A multitude of inhuman rasping snarls grew in volume as the first ones came into view. They moved at a walk, lurching forward. They were in various states of undress. The mass of Infected contained bodies that had once been executives, school kids, waitresses and more, of all different ages. Their faces were a pallid grey-white. Many had bloody mouths, fresh crimson staining their white skin. Each showed evidence of an agonizing injury through which they’d been infected. Some were missing hands or limbs; many had parts of the neck, face, and exposed skin bitten away.
The hair on Penny’s neck stood on end, her legs heavy, mouth gummed with stringy saliva. The relentless, slow approach of the monsters was sapping the fight out of the waiting police force before they were even attacked. The Infected stared unblinking at the line of officers; the combined volume of their snarling consumed the air. The numbers of Infected became denser further down the road. They had to number in the hundreds.
A police speaker blared from behind.
‘This is the New South Wales Police. Stop and lie down or force will be used against you. I repeat, stop and lie down, now!’
There was no response from the Infected. They were now only thirty metres away.
Plague War: Outbreak Page 5
