Tankbread

by Paul Mannering

  ‘Stay,’ I said. She gave a soft sigh and continued to explore. I slipped out of the room, listening and ready to shoot, it seemed clear. My thoughts were now towards food and water. The pipes were all dry, but places like this often had rainwater tanks on the roof. Food was less likely to be found. I lived on rat meat and weeds. I’d heard that in Adelaide they just ate each other, and claimed it was Tankbread. I’d also heard that there were safe havens in every conceivable place around the big country. Canberra, Melbourne, Ayers Rock, Tasmania. All bullshit. I have an idea, which sounds crazy, but it keeps me amused. I plan on getting a boat, finding somewhere safe like Hamilton Island and just fishing and eating coconuts for the rest of my life.

  I found the rainwater tank, mounted on a concrete pad. It stood about man height and was made of corrugated metal sheet. The outlet tap was clogged, rusted shut and useless. I licked my lips, and heaved myself up to the edge of the tank. Pulling the old cover aside I could see wet, green slime and the glint of tepid water in the bottom.

  Wiggling and balancing on that tank edge, the surface remained just out of reach. I twitched a little closer, on the sharp edge of balance, one wrong move and I would plunge head first into the tank and probably break my damn neck.

  I hung there, my legs waving in the air like some giant bug antenna, but that water, I just wanted to taste it, to wet my lips. Then the slime rippled and a putrid skull bobbed into view. I nearly deafened myself yelling in shock. My scream echoing off the iron sides of the tank.

  Slapping my hands on the walls of the tank made it boom, and I struggled to push myself out while barely registering that the head wasn’t moving. Whoever it was, they were really dead.

  Dropping back to the ground I crouched down and giggled like a lunatic for a while before picking myself up and going back inside. A food search of the house revealed a forgotten can that turned out to be pineapple pieces. The girl took some convincing, but once she started imitating me chewing she got the hang of it. I had to push her away pretty hard to make sure I got my share of the fruity golden treasure.

  I dressed her again, said some bullshit about how she had to keep her clothes on or there would be no more pineapple. She got the message and I let her keep the empty can.

  We headed out at sunset and she scooted up behind me on the bike and soon we were making our way cautiously along the streets, avoiding the evols who were stumbling around. These ones weren’t getting a regular feed of Tankbread and they were looking worse for wear. The arrested decay was still working on grinding them down. They didn’t speak, just moaned and shuffled and would swarm anything that smelled edible. The bike was the only reason I travelled so openly. On foot we could run, out pacing all of them, but if you run into enough of them coming the other way, you can get swarmed real quick. Once a swarm of evols has you surrounded you’re better to use the next round on yourself.

  The Moore Park golf course was on our left, now home to thousands of civilians in a tent city they called Moore Park. On the west side it had a high fence that turned the evols back. On the Darcey Ave and Anzac Parade sides they had made their own barricades. Along the length of Anzac Parade they'd stacked up cars and turned them into palisades.

  Historic battles had been fought along that fence line and legends were forged during the dark days of The Panic. Names like Jenny Scott, who sealed a breach by driving a school bus into a gap in the fence and died fighting the zombies who shattered the windscreen and tore her apart. Little Mickey Donaldson who at age twelve ran along the line carrying messages in the dark when all other forms of communication were lost and the fighting was at its fiercest.

  Little Mickey with his Aussie flag tied around his neck flying out behind him like a cape. He saved hundreds of lives during the war and then vanished. They said his family had escaped, but some of us figured he’d been done in by one of the sick-bastards who even when the shit was coming apart all around them still had that burning urge to mess with kids. Other names and legends were bullshit, or just stories that might have happened, or didn’t happen quite the way they were told now.

  Without TV, books, movies and the internet we needed to make our own fun. We fell back on telling stories and they gave us hope.

  I barely stopped the bike at the steel and mesh gates at the entrance to Moore Park. The walls swung open immediately, winched back on a steel cable compressing the car-spring hinges. It was a good system, if anything went wrong, like evols surging through, they just needed to pull a lever and the gate would snap shut with about 100 pounds per square inch of pressure. Enough to knock the most determined zombie on its arse.

  We rode in and the gate closed behind us. A faded sign painted on a ten-foot corrugated iron fence declared we were welcome in Moore Park.

  Park dwellers appeared all around us, most armed with pole-arms. Curved blades on short handles salvaged from shovels and brooms. The metal came from cars, machetes, anything that would hold an edge and cut an evol's head off without getting you killed in the process.

  ‘Hey man,’ a crowd of almost familiar faces grinned at me through the dust and grime. I nodded in greeting. Parking the bike we dismounted and I shook a lot of hands. The girl clung to my arm, watching with a protective glare every time someone touched me.

  ‘Hungry?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied, not taking him seriously.

  ‘Got any food then?’ I didn’t laugh, but they did. It was an old joke. These people mostly lived on the gravy they boiled out of their underwear and what ever they could raid out of the city. Unlike the residents of the Opera House sanctuary they had nothing to give the evols except their own flesh. They did a lot of farming, but without regular rain crops were hard to maintain.

  ‘Who’s your missus?’ That came from Katie, she’d lost a couple of kids during the war and I’d never seen her smile.

  ‘Just a girl, I picked her up over at the Opera House.’

  That set them muttering, and they looked at the girl again more closely. The park people hated the Opera House. They resented their prestige and apparent luxury.

  ‘Them Opera pricks never stick their noses out,’ Katie said and spat on the ground.

  ‘evols got in, tore the place up,’ I said an they all started talking and milling about.

  ‘Anyone alive?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Fucker’s deserve everything they get!’

  ‘What about the Tankbread?’

  I realised that I didn’t know anything, and waved them into silence.

  ‘Fucked if I know, I got out when the shit hit and that was night before last,’ I shrugged helplessly.

  They flexed their weapons and muttered darkly. ‘Those dead bastards know what’ll happen if they try to get in here.’

  ‘Just thought you outta know,’ I said. I didn’t expect them to do anything about the attack on the Opera House. If I thought something could be done, I would have been doing it.

  ‘Come on in, well get a brew on and Josh will want to hear your story,’ Katie said, pushing the others back. We entered the tent city of Moore Park.

  At it’s height they reckon over ten thousand people lived here. Terrified refugees from the horror erupting all around them gathered for a rumoured evacuation that never came. Helicopters flew overhead almost constantly, but none landed. After frustrated survivors started taking shots at them, they stopped flying so close.

  Left to their own devices the desperate men, women and children built the first fence of vehicles along Anzac Parade and stood against the evols who came at them.

  Back then evols were just dead meat, corpses of all kinds crawling out of the ground and off the slabs of morgues. Mindless killing machines, puppets with no strings that only existed to feed and infect the living. Dismembered bodies stacked up until even the zombies couldn’t crest the stinking stop-bank of rotting flesh. The Moore Park people used fire and any weapons they could fashion or fake to keep the dead back.

  For two
months they fought day and night against the dead until the evols stopped coming. Word reached them that something had happened, on the very steps of the Opera House; the war had ended with meatkind’s surrender and some kind of peace had been negotiated.

  To most of the people living in the mud and filth of Moore Park the surrender was a betrayal. They vowed to keep fighting, to destroy every evol that tried to cross their fence. A lot did and casualties were heavy on both sides. Over the next few years the evols stopped bothering, and the Moore Park tribe population went up and down depending on the number of refugees coming in and the number of people leaving. The only thing the new arrivals and the leavers had in common was that they had all heard stories of a sanctuary. For some that haven was meant to be Moore Park. For other’s it changed every day. The stories the newbies told were always the same. Death, terror, and cannibalistic popsicle-people from Hobart to Darwin.

  We walked past rows of tents and scrap-shacks. Stripped vehicles were home to entire families. Babies nursed at grime streaked breasts, kids with swollen bellies and wide eyes huddled around tiny cooking fires. The place stank of shit, piss and that weird sweet smell that rides on the breath of the starving.

  Near the centre of the camp stood Josh’s house. It was the only place made of brick and it would have taken a truckload of big-bad wolves to blow it in. Josh was as thin as the rest of us, but he seemed okay with it. His hair was long and grey and he was fine with that too. He sat on an empty beer crate under a rough veranda as we approached, his long legs stretched out in front of him. His worn clothing hung loose and he looked normal until you saw his face. The mayor of Moore Park’s tent city stood out in a crowd; he wore lipstick in a clown-like smear across his mouth. Sienna whorls patterned his cheeks and the dark eye shadow engulfed his sunken eye sockets and dribbled down to merge with the sienna patterns. You had to look him hard in the eye to see if he was awake or asleep.

  ‘Josh, you gotta visitor.’ Katie wasn’t Josh’s woman. Josh had his pick of women and Katie didn’t seem interested in men. I wondered if she considered us a distraction from her sole focus - hating evols.

  Josh nodded. ‘Hey stranger, you are looking stranger every day.’

  ‘Hey Josh. I came from the Opera House. Some bad shit went down.’

  Josh stared at his feet, absorbed by the curling leather of his boots. ‘Bad shit is going down every day in every way my friend. It was only a matter of time before the house got their share.’

  ‘True, I guess. Just thought you might like to know.’

  ‘Appreciate it, amigo. Anyone get out alive?’

  ‘I dunno. We left before the party was over.’

  ‘Shame you finally got in there and then it all fell down.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ I shuffled my feet. ‘Listen Josh, whatever peace treaty or arrangement or what the fuck they had with the evols, it’s gone man. It’s all fucked.’

  Josh drew his legs up and slowly stood. He exhaled as he straightened and stepped out from under his little porch. Stretching in the open air, he could have been ten feet tall and see for a mile in any direction.

  ‘Never counted on it lasting man,’ Josh’s make up smeared face shone in the last of the day light. ‘Walk with me brother, I need to take a piss.’

  I waited while Josh retrieved his piss bottle, a clear plastic tank half-full of about two litres yellow water. We walked together, not speaking, except to reply to the greetings of those who passed. Everyone said hi to Josh. A lot of the people wanted to ask him things, to tell him things and to take up his time. Getting to where we were going took a while. The girl clung to my arm and walked on my heels.

  Outside the camp the duck pond called Lake Kippax was their only source of fresh water and there was barely enough for them all. Piss on the other hand, holds many nutrients if you are a plant. So one of Josh’s rules for his fellow campers was that you saved your piss and it went into a big tank. From here they hand pumped it out into irrigation ditches and they grew barely enough crops to survive. I didn’t know shit about plants, but they seemed to be doing something right. Kids were strolling along between rows of six-foot tall bushes, plucking heavy green buds. Past the fields women toiled lifting long bunches of the buds around on drying racks.

  ‘You can eat this shit?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but a smoke sure helps ease our troubles. We grow veges between the dope rows.’

  They grew food in other patches too; it wasn’t just piss that they used on the garden. Every kind of waste went into massive bins and turned into dirt, then they spread it around in big patches on the old golf course and grew food. The system was labour intensive but it worked. These people were starving but they weren’t dead.

  I waited, trying not to breathe while Josh emptied his takings into the tank. I kept my peace as we walked back to his house. I settled comfortably on the ground under Josh’s porch roof and the girl pressed in tight beside me. I waited while Josh packed a homemade pipe with some dried bud and lit it with a stick from a cooking fire. Only when we had both toked up did I speak .

  ‘Josh, what do you know about Tankbread?’

  ‘Geeks make it to feed the evols, keeps them off our case.’

  ‘Yeah, but do you know where it comes from?’

  ‘Geeks, they grow ‘em in tanks. Some secret tech they were working on before the panic.’

  ‘You ever seen Tankbread up close?’

  Josh sighed, and stretched his legs out, rocking back on his beer crate chair. ‘I seen it one time. Me and a crew were out picking up some things from the local store. A truck comes rolling up, and its playing music, like one of them old ice-cream trucks. Evols start coming out of everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Man we nearly shit ourselves.’ Josh starting laughing, smoke jetting from his nose and mouth as he snorted and giggled.

  ‘So we hunker down in the shop you know. Hiding out and wondering what the fuck is going on. This truck was all plated up and the back drops down and Tankbreads start shuffling out. They were all linked by a thin string.’ Josh paused and stared out into the darkening sky. ‘Weirdest thing I ever saw. The evols started pulling them, not tearing into them but pulling them along like they were dogs on a big arsed leash. The bread followed in a big long line and they disappeared around the corner. The ramp on the back of the truck got winched up and they drove off. Never saw anyone but the evols and the Tankbread.’

  ‘Where d’you think they take them?’

  ‘Dunno. Say why d’you care about this? It’s just bread right? Just evol Scooby-snacks.’

  ‘I seen how they make Tankbread. It’s kinda fucked up man. The girl, she’s a Tankbread.’

  Josh leaned forward, his crate clicking on the ground. ‘Say what?’ He peered closely at the girl who was curled up against me where I sat on the dry ground.

  ‘She ain’t no bread man. She got eyes that see and a mind that burns like fire behind them. She’s knowing the truth and fully comprehending the circle of life man,’ Josh leaned back and relit the pipe.

  ‘They grow the bread in tanks, but they aren’t brain-dead. They fuck them up before they ship them out. They lobotomise them. I heard it from the head geek. Some crazy old bastard called Haumann. It’s been tearing him up man. He knows that the bread are like you and me. Then they zap their brains, electro-fuck them into walking meat-sticks and ship them out.’

  Josh’s mouth dropped open and I don’t think the dazed look on his face came entirely from the dope.

  ‘Man…’ he said. ‘That’s deeply fucking wrong. It’s like that movie. Where they find out the green cookies are people.’

  ‘I dunno if she’ll ever be normal, but I got the girl out of there before they could melt her brain..’

  ‘You did a good thing brother, all life is sacred. We don’t eat much around here, but we don’t eat meat.’

  Katie turned up then, carrying a pot of vegetable stew. She gave us each a warm cup, the stew smelt like dirt, and didn’t taste much better. The girl
gulped hers down and made mm-mm noises, holding her cup out for seconds. Katie just gave a snort and walked away with the pot to serve others.

  ‘You need a place to crash man?’ Josh scooped the last of the stew out with his fingers and licked them clean.

  ‘Nah, I gotta keep moving, need to find a way back to North-Side and tell that fuckin’ Soo-Yong that I did my best but the evols fucked it all up.’

  ‘Soo-Yong, he’s that smart zombie who runs things up in Roseville eh?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him. He’s king of North Sydney. Got every evol and meat running around after him, kissing his dead arse and cupping his shrivelled up balls.’

  ‘You and the lady ride safe my man. Wish we could do more than just wish you well. But with the gear you are packing I’d say you don’t need any help from us.’

  ‘Appreciate it mate. I’ll come back this way sometime.’ I stood up, stamped the life back into my tingling feet, and readjusted my weapons into more comfortable hanging spots. I didn’t feel any concern at not mentioning Doctor Haumann’s last words to me about questioning Josh on the whereabouts of this Richard Wainright geek. The sooner I was out of this mess the better. Let them find their own damn cure.

  ‘You’re always welcome here brother,’ Josh said.

  I nodded and with the girl in tow I headed back to the bike. It hadn’t been touched, the Moore Park crowd didn’t have shit but they had pride, and that wouldn’t let them steal anyone else’s stuff.

  ‘Sure you want to leave now?’ a young girl at the gate asked me. She was maybe fifteen, belly heavily swollen with child and a shovel with a gleaming sharp edge hefted over her shoulder.

  ‘Got places to go,’ I replied, kick starting the bike.

  ‘Big mob of evols gathering out there. Reckon they’d like a piece of you and your missus.’

  ‘She’s not… Well they’re going to have to try harder,’ the bike roared into life. ‘Open the gate!’

  She waved to the guy on the winch and he set to cranking. The gate creaked and clicked, swinging open. I dropped the clutch and tore out of there. Leaving places in a hurry was becoming a habit of mine that I didn’t like.