by M C Rooney
Tom had no choice but to hand his horse off to one of the guards and run up the stairs after his aunt.
He stopped in shock as he reached the top of the stairs. The room was wall-to-wall full of books. So many of them on a whole floor! His teacher, Mr Fields, would never want to leave if he entered this building. He had never known that there would be that many books in the world, and this was only one floor of a five-storey building.
“Tom Dayton,” snapped his aunt, “drag your eyes from the books and follow me.”
“Yes, Mayor.” He had decided not to call her Aunt on advice from one of his brothers.
‘Don’t let the others think you’re her favourite. Or they will beat you up,’ Raymond, who was a ranger himself, had said.
Tom didn’t think he was her favourite, far from it, in fact. She had done nothing but glare at him from the start.
He followed her through numerous doors and corridors until she entered a room that was probably her place of work. He gave a start when he saw a massive black dog approach her, wagging its tail. Tom wasn’t sure what breed it was, but it came up almost to his aunt’s chest in height. It looked pretty tame, though, judging by the way its tongue was hanging out of its mouth and the pleased way it greeted his aunt. She gave the dog a loving cuddle in return.
Lily Dayton took a chair and gestured for Tom to sit in the one opposite her. Her hands were caressing the covered item that his father had given her. He wondered what it was, but as his aunt was staring at him so much, he kept his eyes on the ground.
He hated it when people stared at him. He felt like they were laughing at him. Kids at school always teased him because of his height or the way he could not express his thoughts properly. This, over the years, had built up to the point that he couldn’t really control the way he thought, which, in turn, affected the way he acted. A vicious circle it was, one that became bigger and bigger as time passed.
“You’re a puzzle to me, Tom Dayton,” she said. “You have the Beasley genes pumping through your veins, and nobody ever said they were the meekest kind of people. And you were named after your mother’s maternal grandfather, who, by all accounts, was a happy man.”
Tom said nothing; he didn’t look at her either, but when he lifted his eyes, he noticed that there was a big black hat on one of her work shelves. It looked very strange sitting there next to all the books and notes.
“But your father believes that you have inherited a lack of confidence through my father,” she continued. “This gives me some hope for you, because my father turned out to be a great man for our society.”
Jon Dayton had become a bit of a legend in the Huon community, the man who fought a battle against one hundred thousand zombies with only dozens of rangers and won. Tom was in awe of his grandfather, even though he had never met him.
“So this is the deal between you and I, Tom Dayton,” she said in a firm voice. “I will train you as a ranger myself. You will build that body to become a strong young man, even compared to your Beasley kin. You will build your confidence and your mind until you realise that you are the equal of everybody else, and hopefully, a bit of your Grandfather Dayton and the Butler genes will show up somewhere.”
Tom remembered that his father had said that Aunt Lily took a lot after her Nan, who his father said was a very formidable woman.
“Jane Butler,” he managed to mumble.
“Yes,” Lily replied, with pride ringing in her voice, “my dear Nan.”
It was said that after her Nan died, the then-teenage Lily Dayton provided the ‘final cut’ that was required for all people over forty-four years of age, in order to stop the zombie reanimation. The ‘final cut’ it was said was always provided by people who loved them the most. Tom was glad his mother was under the zombie age. He didn’t think he could do that to her, even though he loved her more than anyone else.
“I … will try, Mayor,” he managed to say. “But … I do struggle.” Tears welled in his eyes as he finished speaking.
Surprisingly, his aunt looked at him with compassion evident in her gaze.
“I know you do, Nephew,” she said kindly, “but hopefully, with training, you will build some confidence.” She looked at him now with a determined expression. “I have read all about the great people in our history, and they all had one thing in common: belief!” She leaned forward as if to drive her thoughts into his mind. “You see, there are some things in life that we cannot change. People will get sick, people will have accidents, and people will die. But there is a way of controlling eighty percent of your life.”
Eighty percent! Tom leaned forward as well, wanting to know how a major part of your life could be controlled. He stopped as the answer came to him.
“My thoughts,” he said and was pleased that his aunt rewarded him with a big smile.
“You see,” she said, “there is a Butler in there somewhere.” She focused on his face again, and her voice became serious. “Your thoughts are with you all your waking hours, and they lead to emotions, which then, sometimes, lead to actions. We are going to beat that dark cloud of yours, Nephew. Your new life begins now.”
Tom nodded and managed a smile. He thought he could see a light at the end of the tunnel ahead of him.
“Now, I have a jacket for you,” she said as she stood. “I had to make a bigger size than normal, knowing the way your family grows.” As she finished speaking, she handed over a grey jacket.
“This will be your colours for the next few years,” she said as Tom put the jacket on over his big shoulders. “One day you will wear the green of a Southern Ranger,” she added, and as she watched her nephew give a shy smile, she hoped that one day she could give him her father’s sword as well.
The Tasmanian Midlands
Fifteen-year-old Molly McLaren looked down at the plastic box that would sometimes speak to her.
‘This is the Governor-General of Australia,’ the box would say, then it would stop for hours, and all that was heard was a humming and crackling noise. Sometimes she thought that the box was repeating a message over and over, as she did hear parts of the message on a regular basis. She thought that if she sat here all day, she could piece the message together so it would make some sense, but she couldn’t stay too long on this hill, as she thought she may go deaf from the lightning above.
However, the mad old man near to her did spend all of his time on this hill and under the tower that created the lightning. He also spent most of his time talking to himself.
“Why do you stay here, Professor?” she asked him for the hundredth time. Each answer he gave was different.
“There are places to go beyond your belief,” he rambled as what was left of his hair stood straight up from the static that the tower created.
Molly’s brown hair stood up as well, even though she rarely washed it. Her father used to call her Feral because of her hair, for reasons she no longer remembered.
“Then why don’t you go to these places?” she replied.
“Because I’m waiting for one of truth’s protective layers to be broken,” he replied.
What did he mean by that? She didn’t know and realised she would never find out. Her father had said that the old man had been here before he was born and had worked with his father, Molly’s grandfather, on the tower before the Collapse, as her father liked to call the day when the old world had ended.
All of them were gone now. Just Molly the Feral and the crazy old man were left in this part of the world. Except for the dead, of course, who, after years of absence, had suddenly decided to reappear in the Midlands.
“Well, you be careful, then,” she said kindly to the man with no name, whom she thought of as family, and left him his daily food requirements. She had asked what his name was in the past, but he said that he couldn’t remember.
“I will,” he replied with a smile, “but I think I am safe from the dead ones here.”
He proceeded to laugh with glee as he sat underneath the three-met
re prototype of the massive tower. When this mini-tower was activated, it sent lightning bolts at any zombie who approached within a twenty to one hundred metre-radius, depending on your calculation settings. It was so powerful, it fried their brains instantly. She could see a dozen bodies lying on the ground around the man with no name just from the previous night. The Mad Professor, as she liked to call him, burned the bodies every day.
Why had the dead ones come back?
Molly looked up at the clouds and the deafening lightning bolts that shot down to the top of the one hundred-metre tower and were then sent out again into the clouds in a more jagged, almost potent form. The Midlands was a never-ending place of thunder and lightning, but surprisingly, little amounts of rain.
Tying up her silver suit and placing her helmet over her head, she strode forward on the grassy plains. Two other suits lay on the ground and had been there for years, ever since her father had died. Her father had told her that the suits were made when the dead ones first appeared. So at least she knew what they were used for as opposed to what the tower was built for before that. Why build a tower just to make lightning?
Moving a safe distance away from the tower, she hit the button on her suit as her father had instructed and watched as the lightning was drawn from beneath the ground. She felt the power coursing through her suit, and when she felt it was safe to use, she lifted her arm, clenched her fist, and sent a burst of lightning racing across the open fields to test that it was still operational. Perhaps the tower was only a weapon. Her father did always say mankind was a violent creature. But her father had insisted that this experimental tower had been built by her grandfather and the Mad Professor for the benefit of the poor, whoever they were.
She sighed. It was a mystery she would never know the answer to, as with so many things in life. But one thing she did know was that this was her family’s land; her father, mother, and grandfather were buried here, and no dead corpses were allowed to trespass on it. Her father had always said she was stubborn, just like her mother.
Well, yes, I am, Dad, she thought with a grin as Molly McLaren disappeared and Feral strode across the Midlands in search of dead ones to kill. She never noticed, however, that one of the bodies around the professor was not a dead one, but was a new inhabitant on her land.
Roland King was a short man twenty years of age with dark hair. He had taken to shaving his hair off whenever he could and wore a green robe and sandals. One man sneered at him on his travels south and said he was a walking stereotype of a hermit in search of enlightenment. Roland agreed with him, then cracked him over his head with a quarterstaff for being rude. Roland was a pleasant man, but that didn’t mean he had to take any crap from anybody. What he did with his life was nobody’s business but his own. If he didn’t hurt anybody, well, apart from giving that man a splitting headache, then what should it matter to anybody else what he did?
People were far too judgmental in his eyes. If you had a habit of noticing other people’s perceived faults, then this meant that you had the problem, not the other way around.
Roland was from the far north of the state and had decided to go on a pilgrimage of a sort, to the southern part of Tasmania. The northern lands, after decades of fighting zombies and each other, was now run by one of the so-called Gangs of Anarchy, who kept a tight control of the people’s thoughts and whereabouts. The fact that they once called themselves Anarchists and now ruled the population should have given enough warning to anyone with a brain as to the state of their minds. But the population was so tired of the violence that they just complied with every new rule they came up with. But Roland was, as his mother liked to say, a restless spirit, so he decided to go walkabout, as the original Tasmanians would say. It wasn’t easy to get out of there, though. The North had maybe four thousand people in total, and most of them lived in the city of Launceston. The gangs patrolled most of the area with solar-operated equipment, all of which was very effective in tracking people down. The leader was a charismatic man who led his people with an iron fist. Some of the elders believed they all now lived in a cult, whatever that was.
So today, Roland was now in the Midlands and watched in complete disbelief as a silver apparition walked across a large open field, away from the tower, and sprayed jagged rays of light at dozens of zombies. He had heard about the lightning tower of the Midlands on his way south and was delighted that one of the fanciful tales he had heard was actually true. He heard that people were calling God ‘the infinite’ or ‘the unexplainable’ now, and any who thought they spoke with God’s voice were deemed to be arrogant and untrustworthy. Roland agreed entirely; he found that the men who kept saying they were good and holy were the ones you needed to stay well away from. But that would not stop him asking questions in the effort to understand at least a little about the afterlife. Death was a part of life. It was a question that could not be avoided as far as he was concerned.
People to the south also referred to themselves as free people and free thinkers and did not have any monetary system whatsoever. He liked that, and hoped that it was true, as he thought he may find some kindred spirits down there. He wondered whether the story of a military leader named Dayton was factual. He was said to have defeated one hundred thousand zombies with only a handful of men and women.
Nah! That one can’t be true, he thought.
Roland watched until the silver ghost moved off to the southeast, then proceeded to walk down the highway to the south. He carried his quarterstaff for protection and as a walking stick, but also had a bow over his shoulder for hunting. On his head, he wore a hat, which, if he was ever attacked, could be taken off and worn on his arm as a shield. It was made of a lightweight metal, but he carried it in his hands now, as he didn’t like the way it vibrated when he was walking past the tower.
He stopped and looked again at the zombies, who were now arriving from all directions. They seemed to be fixated with the lightning, or maybe the sound of it, and didn’t notice him at all. One even, to his amazement, walked straight past him. He knew they were attracted to noise, but couldn’t they see or smell him?
The next zombie that walked past him, he decided to smash his head with his quarterstaff; one thrust to knock down and the follow up to crush its brains. It was a duty, after all, to kill as many zombies as possible.
Looking southward once more, he gave a start as he saw a large number of men had suddenly arrived. Some were looking towards the silver ghost, and others were looking at him.
So this is why the zombies have suddenly reawakened, he realised.
These men were half naked, with painted bodies and faces, and carried bows and knives and all sorts of other weapons. He watched a small group of them split off and run towards the tower. Danger, they seemed to convey to anybody with eyes and a conscious brain. They all seemed on the edge of violence, even in the simple act of running.
Well, so much for going south, he thought with a grimace, then turned and ran directly east at a steady jog.
At least there might be some sunshine over there, he thought, as the tower reached out and grabbed another dark cloud for its energy.
Rod watched as the man with the green robe ran off towards the eastern hill, then he looked over at his father in hope.
“Stay there, Rodent,” said his father sternly as he stood next to his old friend Carter. “We must focus on the silver human; leave the green man to the zombies.”
Behind his father and Carter were Carter’s five sons. Two of the elder ones scowled at him, but he didn’t care; though his own father may dislike him, Hockey still believed an attack on his family was an attack on him.
Rod, as he liked to call himself in his mind, especially since that was his actual name, looked again at the short man and wondered what it would be like to hunt him down and kill him. It was what he was good at. In fact, it was the only thing he was good at. But his father’s commands were to be obeyed, unless you wanted him to give you a good beating.
His
father, whom everybody called Hockey, was in his early sixties now and remembered the days before the Collapse like it was yesterday. He had held the tribe together by brute force, mainly because he was a giant of a man with a gift for violence. But it was said by the elders that he never wanted the position of leader but was forced into it by other tribe members in their fight against a vicious family called the Martins.
Rod didn’t know whether this was true or not, people who were there strangely didn’t talk to him about those days, but he did know that the look of the warriors in the tribe had come about because of that fight.
Rodent, on the other hand, supposedly took after his grandfather and was a scrawny-sized man with greasy brown hair thought to be between the age of thirty-five and forty because nobody could be bothered remembering when he was born. He also looked a bit like a rat, hence the nickname Rodent.
“Yes, Father,” he replied dutifully and glanced back at the green man. You are one lucky traveller, he thought and tried to quell the bloodlust that sometimes overtook him.
Another loud noise exploded from the tower, bringing his thoughts back to the matter at hand.
Who built that bloody thing? he thought with awe. And why doesn’t the lightning hit any of the nearby fields? It just seemed to be attracted to the tower, which then sent out more powerful lightning bolts back into the clouds.
His father had heard rumours of a lightning tower to the east of where their tribe lived. Nobody seemed that interested in just rumours, but once his father had the tower described to him, he seemed determined to visit the Midlands. Rodent wasn’t sure, but he thought his father may have known what it was. Or knowing his father as he did, he might know a way of exploiting its powers.
“Chief,” one of his father’s men said, “your son is returning.”
I’m his son too, you fucking prick, Rodent thought angrily. He tried to gain some respect in his tribe, but he was not the favoured son who seemed destined to replace his father when the time came.
