Tankbread

by Paul Mannering

  The girl pressed up against my back, warm and somehow reassuring. Evols were everywhere. I didn’t know how they communicated. No one ever saw evols standing around talking or picking up the phone for a chat. Not that the phones had worked in since the end, but evols seemed to know. Somehow they picked up on things and they started moving together, coming to one place for reasons only they could fathom. It scared the shit out of me every time they did that.

  I turned hard left into South Dowling, the nearby evols wavered and started after us, but I opened the throttle and we were soon past them and tearing down the road, weaving between long abandoned cars and windblown dust and rubbish at the breakneck speed of 50 k’s an hour.

  The evols were streaming up the ramps from the Eastern Distributor, clogging the road ahead in a thickening mass of dead flesh and gnashing teeth that gleamed in the late afternoon light. I pulled the bike to a stop feeling the girl at my back whimper in fear.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. There wasn’t enough ammo left to fight our way through the mob. Even against a crowd like that we would be dragged down and eaten before we got very far.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ I put a foot down and slide the bike around and pulled a wheelie getting us out of there.

  The gate opened when we pulled up. ‘Yeah, us again!’ I yelled as we tore through. The pregnant girl came waddling over.

  ‘Told ya youse didn’t want to leave.’

  ‘Got no fucking choice now have we?’ I said parking the bike. ‘You’ve got a shit load of dead coming this way. What’s got them worked up, fucked if I know.’

  The pregnant girl exchanged glances with the man on the gate winch. She nodded and he ran off towards Josh’s place.

  ‘We don’t ask why mate, we just kill them that try and take what’s ours.’

  Somewhere out in the rows of tents a bell started ringing, an urgent clanging alarm.

  ‘You’re here now. So you fight. Both of you.’ The pregnant chick went to the gate and slid a locking bar into place.

  I unslung a baseball bat and handed it to the girl, she took it in hand, sniffed it and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘You hit with it,’ I said, moving her hands to the right position and swinging it lightly. ‘Hit really hard.’ I ducked as she took a swing. Hooting with delight she smacked the bat into the ground with a childlike enthusiasm.

  People came running, ready to fight for survival. They’d fought battles like this before, more than I had, which didn’t make me feel ashamed at all. I just felt annoyed that I hadn’t managed to get out of this scrap before it was too late. I didn’t need to come here. I could be out there somewhere safe, heading up the coast looking for a patch of beach that wasn’t ruined by leaking oil tankers.

  The evols came in great numbers and we stood ready to receive them. Every man, woman and child held a weapon. A club, a knife a pole arm, they stood shoulder to shoulder. No one spoke and no one showed any fear. They’d all been here before, except the youngest kids and even they were ready to fight. They’d trained for this in a fucked up version of Stranger Danger, where instead of some creepy bastard offering you lollies, he would just tear your throat out.

  A line of archers stepped forward and on command loosed a volley of burning shafts that arced into the darkness. Most of the shots found a target, and burning zombies lit up the crowd outside.

  ‘Fuck me…’ the pregnant girl muttered. The dead were legion, more than I had ever seen in one place. They were pressing forward, tumbling over the barriers between the different street levels and climbing over each other to tear at the high fence around the park.

  The arrows flew again and rained fire down on the evols. They don’t burn easily but their clothes, rags and hair make great tinder. Zombies on fire can’t see where they are going and they staggered into each other, setting their neighbours' clothing alight. The blaze spread until hundreds of burning bodies lit up the night and still they came.

  A shout relayed from down the fence. ‘Breach! Breaaaaaaaach!’

  I ran down the line, past people ready to die for their patch of turf until I came to a surging mass of struggling fighters. The sheer weight of evol numbers had pushed the barricade down and toppled the wrecked cars. I could hear some one screaming as they were crushed beneath the weight of the collapsed wall of metal.

  I worked the shotgun’s pump action and waited for the first dead-head to make an appearance. I didn’t have to wait long. I fired. His skull exploded in a black spray and the body slid down to be replaced by two more. I fired again, while all around me voices shouted and weapons beat on metal as the defenders worked themselves up into a frenzy.

  Evols poured into the gap, reaching and tearing at each other in their need to kill, to taste human flesh and to drag us down into their undying hell. We smashed them in their hundreds. Those with clubs crushing limbs and skulls. Those with blades swung and slashed, severing heads, arms and legs. The ground grew slick with the black gore that poured from the dead. I emptied the shotgun, holstered it over my back, and drew pistols. Firing both at once, punching holes in rotting heads, screaming abuse at these things that would not stop crawling, reaching and killing.

  ‘Fall back! Fall back!’ came the command and I slipped on the slick ground. The girl appeared beside me, teeth bared and grunting with a savage lust as she slammed the baseball bat down on evols in a furious rhythm.

  I reloaded my pistols and we backed up, me firing, making each shot count, her swinging wildly with overhead strokes and hitting maybe every second swing.

  ‘Get outta the way!’ A cart was being pushed by six men, three on each side. Josh was on top manning a vintage fire-hose his lipstick war-paint fresh and gruesome. ‘Pump! Pump!’ he roared at the two boys crouched underneath him. They heaved on the pump handles and a stinking liquid gushed out of the end of the hose, spraying the dead and the barricade. We kept retreating. Nothing happened for a moment until one of the burning ones fell down into a puddle of Josh’s juice. The wall erupted in fire and we ran for our lives back towards the first row of tents. A moment later the trail of flammable liquid that lead back to the cart went up in flames. First the pumpers ran and then in the final second Josh jumped clear. The fire cart exploded with a massive roar that knocked the wind out of us and seared our skin with the heat of the blast.

  We regrouped as fresh evols came through the fire. This was insane, they should have given up - the fire should have stopped them. Fire would normally send them stumbling away seeking easier prey. Not this time, on they came, wave after wave. They burned and fell, snuffing out the flames that licked their scorched flesh until we were choked by the stench of burnt meat and our eyes streamed with the acrid smoke.

  I drew my sword, and started hacking, the pregnant girl, I never found out her name, came charging down from the gate. She had a squad with her and they hit the zombies on the flank. We rallied and pushed forward, chopping and smashing. Without warning a second section of the car wall creaked and toppled over, the breach widened and more evols came over; slipping and stumbling they fell down on us from above.

  The pregnant girl swung her stick-blade, disembowelling an evol and spinning on the spot like a fancy dancer as she cut the next one down. Blades flew and caught on bone. Flesh parted, blood and black shit burst from bulging bags of grey skin.

  ‘Look out!’ I screamed and plunged forward. I missed and the pregnant chick went down, evols swarming on her. I saw her hand punch skyward, fist clenched in defiance as she aimed to knock one back. Instead her arm was grabbed and with growling savagery the zombie bit and tore at her wrist, ripping the hand off and covering itself in the arterial spray.

  I swung and slashed with the katana, thinking I could still save her, if I could just get there, I could save her. In the wavering darkness of the fires still burning an evol reared back, a squirming mass in its hands. I shrieked, and cut a fat guy wearing a ragged suit in half. The evol sniffed, and then bit into the wriggling thing and maybe it screamed for the first
and last time, or maybe that was me, as the zombie tore the unborn baby apart with its teeth.

  The sun broke the horizon before the attack finally ended. The breach was clogged with bodies, some still writhing. A group of dull-eyed camp dwellers were moving amongst the dead, crushing skulls or separating them from the bodies.

  My clothes were thick with blood and shit, none of it was mine and I couldn’t understand why. I wondered if shock was keeping me alive, or I was dead, and walking as an evol and this was what it was like. You get up and walk because you don’t know you were dead. The girl found me, and moaning softly she sank to the ground tugging at my arm. I looked down and saw she was okay, her eyes were dry, but she whimpered with a pain that didn’t seem physical. I took a deep breath and walked past her, back into the tent city. Desperate for a drink of water and something to wash the worst of this shit off. Hell I’d even drink Josh’s piss at this point.

  CHAPTER 6

  Josh and I sat in silence under his tiny lean-to porch roof with the girl in a blanket curled up and sleeping like a cat at my feet.

  ‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ Josh said.

  ‘Ya think?’ I get sarcastic when I’m tired. It’s one of my few faults.

  ‘They really shouldn’t have done that. There is an agreement, an understanding. A peace treaty I guess you could call it.’ Josh wiped his hands over his face, smearing makeup and oily soot down his cheeks.

  ‘Well yeah, I’ve heard of that. It’s what stopped the war.’

  ‘Tankbread, the great salvation of mankind. D’you know what I did in the old world?’ Josh shoved his hands in his filthy jean pockets and clenched his fists until the seams came near to splitting.

  ‘No idea mate,’ I don’t have much time for other people’s problems, have too many of my own, but I’d listen to Josh.

  ‘I was an engineer. Bio-chemical engineer. PhD in biochemistry and genetics.’

  ‘You were a geek, eh? Well I can understand why you’d keep that quiet. Doesn’t really go with the whole hippy thing you have going on here.’

  ‘Man you need to stop listening to the words and hear the message,’ Josh sighed and leaned forward to pick up the cold pipe. I watched as he started to pack it with a fresh load of herb.

  ‘We did it, we made the world end. Me, Richard Wainright and fucking Abraham Haumann. We made Tankbread. We were working on a system for creating cloned organs, for transplant patients. Grow your own kidney, heart, liver or even eyes. All genetically modified to be healthy.’

  ‘You made Tankbread?’ There was a cold wind blowing from somewhere and it cut right through me.

  ‘Combined project, US and Australian military. Man, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never going to end, they were running out of troops. They came to us and said, if you can clone organs, why not an entire body? We said, sure we can do that. If you put aside the ethical considerations. Man they put so much money on the table we thought we were going to save the world. We finally got the funding we needed to make our theories on rapid growth real. We got to build the first grow tank and the first fully cloned human was lifted out twelve weeks after conception.’

  I looked to where Josh was staring, down at the girl still and quiet across my feet. Her mess of filthy blonde hair sticking out of the blanket nest she’d made.

  ‘The first one was male. The military owned it; they couldn’t patent the technology because it was top-secret. But they owned him like they owned everything else. They called him Adam, can you believe that bullshit? Adam lived for six days. We made seven more just like him before he died of organ failure. It took us thirty batches of up to a hundred clones each to get the formula right.’ Josh lit the pipe and took a deep drag, holding the smoke in he passed it over to me. I inhaled and sat feeling the blood pounding in my head.

  Josh spoke, exhaling a white cloud that gave his words physical form. ‘We were insane. Zealots, drunk on the thrill of discovery. There was nothing we could not do. Man had become God and we looked upon our work and we rejoiced in the glory of our omnipotence.’

  My head was spinning. Josh’s face seemed to split apart, a dozen mouths speaking at once in a mist that curled and made symbols in the air.

  ‘But by creating the Alpha, we were bound to give life to the Omega. It came in the form of a mutation. Something we did in that lab, something made the first evol. Something that spread like a virus, like a fucking plague man, raising the dead until they outnumbered the living and the plague had spread around the world.’ Josh shook his head against a swirl of painful memories.

  ‘We could have stopped it, we could have been more careful. Haumann and I kept working, determined now to use our technology to find a cure. Wainright went off, some secret military base out in the desert. We holed up, treating the sick and doing our research in the Opera House basement. Then the evols offered us their devil’s bargain. They evolved so quickly, they became so intelligent, beyond human capabilities.’

  ‘Josh, man… Most evols can’t play tic-tac-toe without help let alone be smarter than a geek.’

  ‘I can’t explain it man, but they’re smart. Smarter than you think. Like the more of them come together with the same thing on their minds, the smarter they get.’

  ‘Huh?’ I relit the pipe and puffed. It occurred to me that Josh might just be stoned out of his gourd and talking shit.

  ‘It’s like they are connected and together they form a massive hive mind. What one sees, they all see. What one knows, they all know.’

  ‘What one eats they all shit?’ I giggled uncontrollably. It had been a long day.

  ‘Listen man, this is the important wisdom I am imparting here. This is a message not for the ears of the unwary.’ Josh’s face wasn’t made for anger, the best he managed was a sorrowful expression, like I had some how disappointed him. He waited until I got control of myself before continuing.

  ‘You can find the truth man, the source and the cure. That’s what Haumann is looking for in the Opera House isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah Josh, he said that he’s real close to finding the magic bullet that is going to wipe out the evols. He said I had to ask you where I could find Wainright, said to tell Wainright that the Tankbread are the answer.’

  Josh spoke like a man lost in his memory. ‘Haumann and I came to a parting of the ways. He was the one who brokered the deal with the dead. Said we could buy ourselves time and save the world with Tankbread. Sure we had no fucking choice right man? But it wasn’t something I could stand there and be a part of. No way I could see people, tank grown or not be handed over to a zombie buffet.’

  ‘Why does no one know this? Why do I know this?’ I put the pipe down. I needed to clear my head and get some perspective. Currently my senses were telling me that the less I knew the happier I would be.

  ‘Haumann is only part of the key. You have a long journey ahead of you and-’

  ‘Whoa, I have a long journey ahead of me? I thought I might hang here for a while. Plant some veges, put up a tent you know?’

  ‘No can do, amigo. There’s space and what little we have we would share with you in an instant, you know that. But you have to do something great man. The sort of thing that makes kings out of farm boys, and generals out of the little guys who dig the latrines.’

  ‘So… what exactly do you want me to do man?’ I could play along for now.

  ‘You gotta get out of here, get out of Sydney, and get to Woomera. In the Prohibited Zone. It’s where Wainright went and did dirty work for our government and the Americans. It’s where the rest of the truth is man.’

  ‘Really? Well that’s good to know, but I’m going to pass. Thanks anyway.’

  Josh shook his head. ‘You don’t get it brother. I never want to be the one to lay a bad trip on a friend, but... The girl, that hot, sweet, fully kitted out babe, with the brain of a newborn? She’s on a timer. A countdown to perma-death. Tankbread ain’t built to last my friend. You got maybe a month, and then she’ll jus
t start shutting down. She’ll get sick and then she’ll die.’ Josh had the decency to look anguished.

  ‘What…? But… How can I stop that?’ After all the work I had put in it seemed like a waste of time to let her just die.

  ‘Honestly? I don’t know. If there are answers, you will find them in the Prohibited Zone, at Woomera,’ Josh shrugged.

  ‘You’re lying,’ that came out vicious and angry. I’d beg for forgiveness some other time.

  ‘I don’t lie. There’s times when I’d really like to but I can’t. Karma knows all, man,’ Josh calmly exhaled a long stream of smoke and leaned back on his crate.

  ‘Fuck you and your fucking karma!’ The girl stirred at my feet and sat up. Blinking she yawned and then put her hands to her face, feeling the muscles move. Like everything else that was a new experience for her too.

  ‘I’ve got fuck-all gas left for the bike. I was hoping to get a few blocks, ride until the tank ran dry and then… Well… I don’t know but I’ll come up with something.’

  ‘I got gas, well not gas-gas but methanol. Won’t take much to convert a simple engine like your bike to run on it.’

  ‘You make it all sound so damned easy,’ I put a hand out to stroke the girl’s hair back from her face. It was matted and crusty with filth and blood. I ended up sort of patting her instead until I realised how weird that was and stopped.

  ‘No man, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. But you’re a fighter. The kind of crazy arsed sonofabitch who survives. That’s why karma is calling on you man. You’re going to put all the pieces together and save the fucking world man!’

  I started laughing and Josh joined in, laughing so hard the tears left pale streaks in his face paint. The girl looked from me to Josh an expression of alarm on her face. Then she started laughing with us.

  ‘You arsehole,’ I said when I could breathe again. Josh just grinned and shrugged.