Tankbread

by Paul Mannering

  Six shots fired and seven evols were reduced to tottering headless lumps that collapsed and blocked the stairs for a few seconds. Then the pump action slide fell dry.

  ‘We can’t get out! We can’t get out!’ Johno had totally lost his rag. Shrieking like a bitch he knocked me aside and made a jump for the rail. Aiming to get to a clear space on the concrete floor below. The nearest evol snatched his wrist as he went. Johno howled and slammed against the stairs, his feet kicking in empty space as the other evols reached and latched on to his arm. Dead lips parted, peeling back from blackened gums and broken teeth. They bit hard and they bit deep. Johno screamed, as his blood gushed, filling the air with a hot copper tang.

  I laid into the nearest evols with the butt of the shotgun. Smashing faces, crushing skulls. The walking dead are strong, and in their blood frenzy they twisted Johno’s arm until it popped at the shoulder and his screams went up so high only dogs could hear his final moments. The limb came out of his sleeve like a butcher wrapped chunk of meat. The poor bastard fell to the concrete below, landing with a wet slap.

  evols started fighting over the arm. ‘Is there any other way out of here!?’ I yelled at Haumann.

  ‘Yes… yes…at the other end of the containment pen, there is a door but it is keypad locked.

  ‘Jump! Over the side! I’ll hold them off!’ Haumann crawled to his feet and peered over the side of the rail. Maybe twelve feet to the concrete floor below. Maybe a broken leg or cracked skull for an old guy. Maybe enough of a distraction for the evols to give me a chance to get the hell out.

  ‘Move damn you!’ I lashed out with the gun butt, smashing some dead girl in the face so hard her eyes popped out and dangled like earrings.

  With a moan of fear Haumann clambered over the rail and dropped out of sight. I glanced over and saw him struggling to his feet, slipping in the spreading pool of Johno’s blood. Evols snatched at the hot flesh of my face. Some grabbed at the gun, and being too far gone to know better they bit at the stock and barrel, pulling it out of my grasp. Zombie teeth then snapped at my fingers.

  I ducked the searching hands with their claw like nails. Johno’s half eaten arm had been dropped in the melee and I snatched it up and starting swinging it like a club. It didn’t put any of them down, but I felt like I was at least making an effort.

  With one last swing, I leapt over the railing. A fast drop and I landed in a crouch, Johno’s blood soaking my slippers. I bolted after Haumann, he was the limping hunched figure in the white coat busting for the far end of the containment pen. I dashed across the floor and through the gate. Quick stepping to a halt, I sprang back and pulled the gate shut. It wouldn’t hold them for long, but I’d be damned if I were going to make it too easy.

  Catching up with Haumann took only a few moments. The containment area was littered with chewed bones, mostly human; no surprises there. I’d seen evol left-overs before. ’ I looked back; some of the dead were feasting on Johno’s remains. At least he wouldn’t be coming back. There wasn’t enough room at the table for all the diners, though. A bunch of them were pushing on the gate. They shook it until it popped open and they tumbled through and followed the scent of fresh blood.

  Haumann let out a low cry when I swept him up, my arm around his waist I half carried him, hurrying until we slapped against the back wall.

  ‘What’s the key code?’ I demanded. The doctor was breathing hard; he pressed buttons. The glowing panel made a scolding beep. He grunted and with trembling fingers tried again with the same result.

  ‘Fuck me Doc, hurry it up,’ I hissed in his ear. Evols weren’t coming up fast, but they were coming and I was all out of clever plans.

  ‘Three…seven…nine…five…’ Haumann said and pressed each button in turn and this time the door clicked. I gripped the handle and twisted, the doctor nearly collapsing as I dragged him across the threshold.

  ‘Get up old man!’ I dropped his limp carcass on the floor of the corridor and threw my weight against the door as the evols started scrabbling on the other side. I didn’t ease up until I was sure it had clicked shut and locked down tight.

  The corridor was Spartan, the exposed cables and naked lights showed a dirt and stone floor and walls of raw rock. I leaned over Haumann and shook him. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Under… the opera house. This tunnel connects to the harbour tunnel’

  ‘They blew that road back in the war, same time the bridge got taken out.’

  ‘Yes… yes, but we opened up a tunnel you see. From here, the secret bunkers under the opera house, they were never revealed to the public. We transport the Tankbread out through this tunnel, into the harbour road tunnel, onto trucks and out into the city for delivery. That’s what Soo-Yong sent you here for. He wants you to take a delivery of Tankbread back to the north side.’

  About damn time, I thought. ‘Where do you keep them? Give me the zombie chow and I’ll be on my way.’

  Haumann looked like he was about to cry. ‘I can’t… not anymore… It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’

  I snarled and dragged him to his feet, throwing him back against the wall. ‘Well I don’t speak your fucking language then!’

  ‘You need to see. You need to see what I have seen. What I see every day. What I see in my nightmares.’

  He jerked away from my grip and left me feeling uneasy. Nightmares? What could be worse than the one we were living in?

  We walked until the walls smoothed out from hewn rock to cement block and then doors on each side, steel doors like on a ship, each one with a glowing keypad lock. ‘The risen dead, do you know how they function?’ Haumann said between panting breaths.

  ‘They have a virus or something. It keeps them ticking along,’ I glanced back down the narrow corridor. It was clear.

  ‘Not quite,’ the doctor had that lecturing tone again. ‘The virus was genetically engineered. Like the Tankbread. Any organism needs an energy source to function. The walking dead, they are photosynthetic.

  ‘They’re what?’

  ‘Like plants, the infected cells convert sunlight to energy and this gives them enough to function.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  Haumann nodded, ‘Indeed. Higher brain function however, requires a regular infusion of stem cells.’

  Haumann dialled open one of the locked doors, and with a pressurised hiss the door swung out into the corridor. ‘Tankbread are filled with stem cells.’ He stepped through and I followed, not having any thing better to do.

  ‘We keep the mature Tankbread sedated, otherwise they endanger themselves. If un-medicated they suffer psychoses, mental breakdowns, self-destructive behaviour and assault each other.’

  The room was warm, and dimly lit. Naked people lay on shelves, plastic sheets hung down, hiding the details of features but you could feel the life pulsing in this room.

  I snorted. ‘Tankbread are brainless, and everyone knows that. They only move when they get moved. They’re like dolls, they don’t think, they don’t feel, they sure as hell don’t freak out.’

  ‘The only way to bring a viable clone, a Tankbread, to full systemic maturity is to allow them to fully develop. The human organism is a complex thing. We cannot retard their brain development without risking the rest of the system.

  ‘So… you are growing real people for the evols?’ I had a feeling right then, a worse than bad feeling. The kind of fuck-me feeling sensation you might get if someone turned around and said oh, by the way, cows can read and write.

  ‘Only when they are ready… when they are fully developed, then we neutralise their higher functions. A selective lobotomy if you will. Reducing them to the mindless mannequins you see in evol controlled areas.’

  ‘You… fuck… you can’t…’ I wrestled with what he was telling me, what I had seen out there. Haumann watched me calmly, letting it all sink in. Letting me stick my finger right into the electrical socket of this atrocity.

  ‘You’re no better than them. No better
than the stinking dead.’ I said when I could finally give voice to my disgust.

  ‘Perhaps. But what would you have us do? What alternative is there?’

  ‘Anything. Tell them to go and fucking starve!’ Somewhere in the room a living being moaned softly.

  ‘The dead outnumber the living a hundred thousand to one, maybe a million to one. We must make these sacrifices. At least until we can perfect a solution to the evol factor.’ Haumann sounded like he might be trying to convince himself as much as me.

  I pulled the plastic cover back on the nearest bunk. She was naked; tubes went in her nose and out her arse. Dark fluid seemed to be going in one end and out the other. From the colour I couldn’t tell which way it was flowing.

  ‘Doc we have a bigger problem. That motherfucker Charlie tried to feed us to the evols.’

  ‘It must be some kind of mistake. He would never try to kill anyone. Charles is my assistant; he has always supported my research. He runs this sanctuary.’

  ‘Yeah well he tried to kill me and I take that personally.’

  Haumann coughed, the grey sheen on his face making the pink flush of his cheeks stand out. He looked like he was half-rotten himself.

  ‘Help me get back up to the surface. Charles will explain, you will see.’

  I went to drop the cover back when the babe on the deck grabbed my arm. I nearly pulled her off her bed in shock. With that tube going up her nose and down her throat she wasn’t talking. Instead she gurgled, her eyes staring as if she was trying to tell me something, and by the strength of her grip, she felt it was important.

  ‘Christ! Get her off me!’ I jerked my arm away, struggling to break her hold. Haumann snatched a steel syringe from the table and plunged it into the girl’s neck. She quivered and lay still.

  ‘You killed her?’ I rubbed my wrist where bruises were rising.

  ‘Of course not, she is simply sedated. We are seeing this more and more I’m afraid. The Tankbread are growing more restless.’

  ‘You mean they know what you are doing.’

  ‘It… it is possible. Yes. You see we have been making great improvements to them over the last few years. One of these specimens may be the magic bullet we need to restore humanity to the world.’

  I helped the old man out of the room and we closed the door on maybe a hundred warm bodies stacked on steel slab bunks three high. That was just one room. We passed many doors just like it on the way to the stairs that took us back up to the opera house.

  CHAPTER 4

  Upstairs an alarm was making low groaning sounds. It seemed a shit storm was brewing and we were without our coats. Those security personnel who weren’t shouting were running. Some managed to do both at once. Haumann tried getting the attention of a solider that dashed past us. He didn’t stop. The second soldier running the other way only stopped after I stepped out into traffic and clothes-lined him onto the floor.

  ‘What is going on?’ Haumann asked as I pulled the bleeding kid to his feet again.

  ‘Whole bunch of evols are massing around the perimeter. The gardens have been breached. They’re attacking the livestock. Last report I heard is that they’re coming onto the concourse, out of the bay and everything.’

  Haumann looked stunned and then angry. ‘How dare they? How dare they breach the terms of our understanding?’

  ‘Listen Doc,’ I had to shove the old man to get his attention. ‘Hey, Doc! I need guns, my gear and a way out of here!’

  ‘Leave? We can’t leave… it isn’t safe,’ Haumann blinked at me, his face a blanket of incomprehension.

  ‘Fuck me… Okay my gear. Show me where that is.’

  Doc looked at the soldier who was still gingerly probing his nose for damage. ‘What quarters was the courier assigned?’

  ‘Dorm seven, third cubicle. I think you boke by doze!’

  ‘When the zombies get in here,’ I hissed through bared teeth. ‘They’ll eat your fucking face.’

  We took off for dorm seven. Turns out that the sleeping arrangements were strictly boys in one wing, girls in another. No wonder the human race was on the verge of extinction.

  My jeans were washed, folded and stacked neatly on a freshly made bed. My shirt smelled strange, like soap. The colour had changed from a nice camouflage grey mud to a soft blue. My boots shone with a high polish. I stripped off the blood stained medical greens and slipped into the only clothes I felt close to normal in. Inside a tiny closet I found my jacket. They had just sprayed that with disinfectant by the smell of it.

  ‘This scavenger hunt shit could get someone killed. Where are my weapons?’

  Doc fluttered for a moment. ‘All weapons are held in secure storage and are only issued on a rostered basis to authorised personnel.’

  ‘Show me,’ I pushed him out of the tiny sleeping cubicle. Shame, it would have been a nice place to crash on any other day of my life.

  Using the Doc as a human shield I got where I needed to go. He was wheezing hard by the time we came up on a couple of well-armed men in front of a steel hatch. It looked like the kind of door that wanted to secure a bank vault when it grew up.

  ‘Open up!’ I said. The two guards looked at Doc Haumann.

  ‘Yes, yes do as he says.’ Doc’s wheezing had worsened and that healthy grey colour he had before was now leeching out of his face.

  The two stepped aside and unlocked the door. My heart skipped a beat. This was better than the hot chicks in the cafeteria, better than the soft sheets, or the clean clothes. This was my kind of heaven. Every kind of thing that could kill people, living or dead was here. Rifles, shotguns, grenades, support weapons, swords, even an umbrella stand full of baseball bats. I looked, touched, and tried everything on. It was the best five minutes of my life.

  ‘You will need to sign for that!’ one of the door guards finally found his voice.

  ‘Put it on my tab,’ I slid the last knife into my boot and said goodbye to everything I couldn’t carry out with me.

  ‘Doc, what’s the best way out of here?’

  He started to speak, and then coughed; blood, the kind that is so thick and bright red it makes you hungry to look at it, melted over his lips.

  ‘Down… past… the … bread… shipping… tunnel…’ Haumann gasped. ‘Wait… you must…’ He paused to cough, spat a wad of bloody phlegm and drew a deep breath that gave him the strength to continue. ‘The Tankbread, they are the key. Go to Moore Park, ask Josh Mollbrooke where to find Richard Wainright. Tell him I have found the answer. Tell him…’ Haumann sagged under another coughing fit.

  ‘Thanks Doc. You guys, take care of him.’

  I ran back the way we came. People got out of my way without question. It’s one of the advantages of being heavily armed and having a face on that says I am well prepared to kill anyone who gets in my way.

  A decade spent running from one shit situation to another makes you fit, but it also makes you appreciate a ride. As I jogged down the corridor past the Tankbread storage I found myself thinking about golf carts. I came to a stop when I saw the door to the evol pen was open. I had shut that door. Now it stood open, blood and stink smeared around it like evols had been chewing on the handle. Crazy dead bastards.

  I lifted an SMG from around my neck and cocked it. The click sounded ominously loud in the barren corridor. The door to the Tankbread room also hung open and looked more ominous the closer I got. I inched towards it. Screams erupted from the inside. I ducked around and found myself staring at the back end of a zombie mob getting their munchies on the Tankbread who had crawled or been dragged from their benches and were now being pushed up against the back wall.

  By reflex I squeezed the trigger. A solid stream of bullets scythed through the crowd. Dead guts and flesh sprayed, their blood, now semi-congealed slime, splattered on the walls and ceiling. The SMG clicked empty. I tossed it and pumped the shotgun. Point-blank range, heads exploded; conserving ammunition meant trying to line them up. I pumped and fired, pumped and fired. A few of
the evols were slipping on their own blood and trying to turn around. Most were too far gone in the feeding frenzy to notice me taking them from behind.

  The shotgun ran out. I had a belt full of cartridges, but reloading would take time, so I pulled out the katana I had taken a shine to in the armoury. I started by sticking an evol in the back; he never noticed. I pulled the blade out and tried to swing it in the confined space between the empty bunks. I couldn’t get enough room to really swing until I tried going up from knee level. I cut some legs off and tore through a few midsections, dropping stinking black intestines out in a slithering mass.

  The evols chomped and tore, ripping great chunks out of the Tankbread in their lust for blood and meat. A couple of pistol shots to the back of the head did for the last of them. I stood there in a slowly thinning cloud of smoke, panting and covered in six kinds of foulness. Something leapt at me from behind a bed-rack, a savage howl erupting from its throat. I shot it in the face and then blinked as a Tankbread collapsed convulsing at my feet, his lifeblood spurting out of the back of his head.

  I took stock. A shit load of zombies. All now perma-fucked. Bits of Tankbread everywhere. Most of them torn to pieces by the evols. None of their faces looked like Tankbread after a chow session. They all looked like real people who had died in screaming agony.

  ‘Fuck Haumann… fuck…’ I wiped blood and sweat from my face. A slight movement had me on edge again. I crept forward, pistols ready; confident I had some shots left.

  She had crawled under the beds, sliding through blood and death and horror until she reached the back wall. Then she tried to crawl through that. Even as I pulled the plastic sheeting aside she whimpered and tried to burrow into the blood slick floor.

  ‘Easy girl, easy…’ I holstered my guns. Not sure what to do I touched her lightly on the ankle. She screamed, a raw, primordial sound, like a baby’s cry.