CHAPTER 7
The bike conversion took a few days, which was fine with me. I got to sit around, smoke some weed and teach the girl to survive in the real world. She seemed to understand language, and started trying to imitate words and getting frustrated when she couldn’t make herself understood. She got her hand slapped a lot because she wanted to touch everything. Like all of us she learned the hard way that fire is hot, knives are sharp and food on someone else’s plate isn’t yours.
She fought back every time, a savage growl deep in her throat when scolded and pushed away. She followed me everywhere, even when Katie tried to take her away for a bath. Her howls of terror could be heard across the camp until she came back, sniffing her skin and pulling her loose blonde hair through her fingers to feel what clean was.
Josh found me helping out in the vege gardens on the fourth day with the girl sulking behind me. Every potato I dug up, she tried to eat but they didn’t taste like the cooked ones.
‘Your bike’s sorted,’ he said.
I sighed and straightened up. ‘Cheers,’ I dropped my last potato into the sack.
The Moore Park community had all chipped in, we had some clothes, food, water, methanol fuel and a faded and water stained map.
‘The methanol will corrode the rubber seals, and generally screw the engine over time. But it’ll get you where you need to go.’
I nodded, my mind on the trip, no more eager to leave now that I had been four days ago.
‘The girl, she needs to stay here. You lot can keep her safe, eh?’
Josh shook his head. ‘She’s part of you now man, you saved her life. She is yours to protect for evermore. Without you she’s got no one else.’
‘I’m not worth it. If she comes with me, we’re both going to end up dead.’ Josh rested a hand on my shoulder. ‘Man, she’s your responsibility. You need to accept that and give her a name.’
Give her a name…? I hadn’t named anything since my goldfish died when I was a kid. After Jaws passed away, I gave the aquarium to my sister and she used it to display her doll collection.
The bike started easy, the girl cinched in and with a final wave to Josh and Katie and the watching crowd we headed out, kids yelling and running alongside all the way to the gate.
‘Tell them we’re here!’ the gateman yelled and I waved an acknowledgment. The hope that somewhere out there someone was willing and able to rescue them would never die.
We headed south, winding our way down through Maruba, around Port Botany and back up past the asphalt wasteland of the airport, now a graveyard of abandoned planes and torn fences where the desperate had been trampled in their hundreds in the final stampede onto the runways for the last planes out. The Eastern Distributable could have been a faster route, but the tunnels and the sections blocked with abandoned cars made nothing easy. The dead were a constant presence. On foot we could have been in real trouble. On the bike we out-ran them, twisting and turning our way through the tangle of empty vehicles and blocked roads. We saw very few live people and the ones we did see threw rocks and half bricks and shouted at us to stay away.
It took a few hours to make our way out on to the South Western Freeway and as the last evols slipped away behind us, I opened up the throttle. Some time after midnight we made camp in an old truck cab, chewing cold baked potato and sipping water from our canteen. Out here, travelling by day was safer. There were few zombies, but the ones that did wander the highways were completely feral and always hungry. So we rode hard by day and slept locked in cars at night. We rode past a lot of small towns, abandoned houses, wild dogs and kangaroos running towards us or away, depending on what end of the food chain they thought we came from.
A couple of days later when we hadn’t seen an evol all morning I took a break for lunch and we parked up in the middle of nowhere. The country around us was dry and looked barren. It’d never looked any other way, but we’d seen a flock of wild sheep, made huge and alien by their massive load of wool. They swept away over a low hill and I figured that meant there was no one, alive or dead within an unsafe distance. The girl got excited, pointing at the sheep and then the few white clouds in the sky. It took me a while to understand she thought the running flock were also clouds.
I couldn’t forget what Josh said; the girl didn’t have anyone but me so I’d taken to calling her Else. Like I said, last thing I named was a goldfish that ended up in a matchbox coffin with ‘Jaws’ written in pencil on the lid.
Else didn’t seem to mind. I was grateful that no one could see me crouched there in the dust pointing to her chest and saying. ‘Else. You are Else.’
She liked the game and her name was the second word she learned. ‘No’ getting the gold medal. She learned fast and added to her words constantly. I scrounged some kid’s books, the ones with pictures and few words. Else would barely sleep at night, pawing over them and making happy sounds as she touched the illustrations and the words over and over again.
We were on the Stuart Highway heading west and I’d relaxed for the first time months. I kept an eye on the rain clouds darkening the southern horizon. Somewhere way out there, it was pissing down. Else chattered in my ear constantly, mostly simple questions and random sounding sentences. We came thundering around a corner outside of a town called Mildura in time to see a power pole dropping in front of us. The bike hit and flipped. Else went flying. I rolled across the cracked asphalt. Our ride somersaulted down the road shedding bits and dying horribly.
I lay there for a while, trying to remember how many legs I was supposed to have and trying not to puke. When the ringing in my ears died down, I heard running feet. Evols don’t run, so that meant meat. Meat could be worse than evols. Evols will just try and eat you. Meat will fuck you, or worse, first. I got off my back, my legs held me up, and I readied the shotgun.
Kids, an odd mix of scruffy faces and long hair. They were standing around the bike carcass poking it with sticks and jabbering away in shrill voices as they pillaged the saddlebags, snatching up the last of our food, and the final canteen of water.
‘Garn…fuck off!’ I stumbled a bit, my insides still flipping over and blood seeping from my knuckles. The kids squinted in the sunlight, regarding me with curiosity but not fear as they clutched their booty. I waved the shotgun at them, trying to scare them as if they were carrion. I had to get a lot closer before they scattered like angry crows. They shook their sticks at me, and hissed like big lizards as they ran.
I found Else on the side of the road, she was out cold, but all her limbs laid out straight and her head didn’t seem bashed in. I carried her into the shade of a gum tree and then went and checked if they had stripped the bike clean. All our gear was gone, except for a water bag, which had ripped open in the crash. Else woke up when I squeezed the last few drops of water into her mouth. She coughed and jumped a bit. ‘Motherfucker,’ she groaned.
‘Motherfucker,’ I agreed. ‘But at least we’re alive.’
‘Alive,’ she replied. Leaving the bike in the middle of the road, there being no reason to try and shift it, we started walking towards town.
On the crest of the bridge over the Murray River, the residents of Mildura waited for us behind a corrugated iron fence that stretched from rail to rail. I picked out faces moving across holes, those feral kids, watching from shelter.
‘Hey there!’ I waved with my empty hand.
‘Motherfucker!’ Else yelled cheerfully flapping her arms.
‘Quiet down,’ I ordered. ‘You’ll get us killed.’
They watched us approach with that look in their eyes that people always have when strangers approach. You don’t know what they want, what resources they have and what they might try and con you out of. It’s easier to throw a rock or yell a warning than let them get close enough to see that you don’t have shit to steal or trade.
‘Piss off!’ came a woman’s cry from the other side of the fence. I looked around. Where the hell were we supposed to piss off to?
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nbsp; ‘Just passing through, just two of us, not looking for trouble!’ I called back, still walking towards that fence. I watched the quick flashes of movement as they shifted around back there. A fist sized rock bounced off the road about a foot from my boot. I kept walking, smiling with my empty hands well visible.
‘We had some trouble just up the road,’ my voice bounced off the corrugated iron sheets of the fence. It didn’t make sense that they would need these sorts of defences, there were no evols out here that I could see.
I stopped in front of the fence, faces scowled down at me from holes cut in the metal. ‘We’re just passing through,’ I said again.
‘Where you headed?’ The wall spoke with a woman’s voice again.
‘Perth,’ I lied.
‘Perth’s dead. Nothing for you in Perth. Where you coming from?’
‘Sydney.’
‘We heard Sydney was safe,’ she sounded sceptical.
‘Sydney’s just as fucked as the rest of the world.’
With a scraping sound an iron sheet peeled open. A kid stood there, with a slingshot stretched back level with his ear. A fat woman in a floral print dress motioned us forward.
‘Try anything stupid and we’ll kill you,’ she said calmly.
‘You’re welcome to try,’ I replied smiling.
Stepping through the door, I narrowed my eyes against the shadows and when they came at me, I was ready. A kid with a stick attacked first. I blocked his swing and then lashed out with a boot. It connected and the kid squealed.
Another lunged from the right, Else took him down with a double punch that I never taught her. She followed it up with a kick to the throat and his screaming downgraded to gurgles.
The woman yelled, and something snapped at my ear with the heat and speed of a bullet, but no shot sound. The kid with the slingshot. I pulled the pistols, fired and fired. Two children flew back crashing to the road, the gunshots flaring brighter than the sun.
‘Next motherfucker to fucking move is gonna fucking die!’ If I’d been thinking I would have said something worth writing down, but it did the trick. The woman crumpled, wailing and pulling some brat with half his skull missing into her lap. She rocked back and forth, scooping the bits that had fallen out back into his head. I didn’t care, I’d seen worse.
‘We just wanted to pass through. You understand? You did this. This is your fuck up!’
‘Arsehole…’ she hissed with pure hate rising up to me. ‘They are going to
have you, and they are going to eat you and burn you and fucking impale you while you are still alive.’
‘Who?’ I sneered. ‘Your dead brats?’ I pushed her back and walked out of the narrow shade of the fence. Staring into the shimmering heat I could see movement coming along the road. Some kind of cars, blowing a lot of smoke, but coming our way fast. I ran to the edge of the bridge. The water was a long way down and a dull green, but it seemed to be moving and I looked back in the direction of the moving smoke.
‘Else, today’s lesson is about swimming.’
‘Swimming,’ she said and clapped in delight. ‘What is swimming?’ She added, peering intently at the river far below.
‘Lesson one, the high dive.’ I climbed up on the rail and offered her my hand. She took it and climbed up beside me, complete trust evident in her face.
‘Hold your breath when we land’ I said and jumped. Else screamed all the way down.
The water was deep enough to land in but hard enough to feel like we hit concrete. I burst back through the surface, gasping for air and shocked by the cold. Else’s hand still in a death grip with mine. I looked around in a panic, she came up and her cheeks bulged with trapped air.
‘Breathe!’ I shouted and slapped at her face. She exploded and gasped panting. With my gear dragging me down I started kicking for the nearest concrete bridge support. Overhead I could hear the rattle and clank of engines. They came to a wheezing halt and then the shouting started.
‘They jumped in the river!’ the woman was screeching. ‘They killed my babies and jumped in the river!’ Some rocks got thrown, but we were out of sight under the bridge and they didn’t even come close. After a while the engines started chugging again and they headed back across the bridge. Shivering with cold, I swam for the bank, pulling Else with me until we crawled out on the stinking mud on the Mildura side.
We kept low, drying out in the sun while I stripped the guns, cleaning and drying them. Else kept trying to take her wet clothes off and growled when I said no. The sun was low in the west when we moved on, creeping out of the shadow of the bridge and across a broken road strewn with flood jetsam and dried mud.
We crept along the ramped side of the bridge, and keeping low we made our way across the dusty ground to the edge of town. Where once a thriving community lived and grew now stood crumbling ruins. The wooden buildings had been stripped for fire fuel and more than one place was now charred bricks and a smear of white ash on empty ground. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of living meat around.
Else stayed close and we slipped from ruin to ruin, not finding anything of use in the buildings we went through.
‘What-’ Else asked and I shushed her. Going from house to empty shop and avoiding the clear areas of the street we made good time across town. There seemed to be no one, only empty streets, some feral cats that fled before we knew they were there and birds that watched silently from the dust coated trees. Only when day settled into dusk did I let Else stop. She explored a trashed hotel room while I watched the street from a broken window. I could hear distant music approaching and then a short convoy of smoking vehicles rolled past. A pick up truck with a high-sided trailer rattled and banged up the street. Huddled in the trailer were figures that I thought might have been evols. They turned the corner up ahead and the engine noise faded. Else came bounding over to look and started asking questions.
‘You gotta stay quiet. Ask questions later,’ I scolded.
We crept out, circling the intersection on the street where the truck had turned down. Keeping low we dropped into a burnt and broken foundation. The hole was deep enough to keep us out of sight, but still allowed me to see over the edge. Else explored again, feeling the textures of the charred wood and brick. At least she wasn’t putting everything in her mouth anymore. I could see moving lights and hear voices. It sounded like they were shouting, or cheering, from a couple of blocks away. I glanced at Else and saw her holding a human skull in one hand while gently touching her own face with the other.
‘Else, leave that, it’s bad,’ I whispered. A scream pierced the night and we both ducked. Gesturing Else to keep quiet I took a look. A naked woman came running down the street in a blind panic pursued by three laughing men, one of them was armed with a hunting bow.
The guys whooped and howled, the woman came straight at us and was within twenty feet when an arrow shot her through the throat and she fell, sliding to a stop within arms reach of our hiding place.
‘Motherfucker,’ Else whispered wide eyed, her breath puffing ashes and dust.
‘Fuck me!’ one of the guys said, laughing and panting. ‘That bitch was fast!’
‘Not as fast as you Dingo!’ one of his mate’s said with a drunken slur.
‘Well go an’ pick her up. No point lettin’ her go to waste.’ That was number three.
Dingo swore and handing over the bow he came on down the road. I watched as the other two went back towards the party noise.
The archer walked right up to where we lay; the last thing Dingo saw was me reaching up and pulling him into the basement hole with us. I stabbed him deep and hard, right up under the ribs. The tip of the hunting knife split his heart in two.
With Else’s help we dragged the two bodies into deeper shadows and I salvaged some electrical wire from the ruin and used that to bind the corpse’s hands behind their backs.
‘Remember how I told you that the dead come back to life?’ I said to Else as I worked. She nodded.
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nbsp; ‘evol,’ she intoned. ‘Motherfuckers,’
‘Yeah, evols are motherfuckers.’ I agreed.
The time to reanimation varies, but it’s never more than an hour. These two came back less than twenty minutes after I finished binding their wrists. First Dingo and then the woman. Else growled and scurried back as they started to move and moan.
‘It’s okay sweetheart, just get them on their feet while they’re still groggy.’
We got them out of the hole and pointed towards the distant lights and laughter. They focused on that, and started moving, I stepped up behind them and cut the wire bindings.
‘Why’d you do that?’ Else watched the two shuffling away with an angry scowl.
‘Because there’s something going on around here, and those two are going to show us how well prepared this place is for a fuck up of evol proportions. Come on.’
We followed them through the darkness, arriving in time to see the guy and then the woman reach the veranda of what might once have been a local pub of a quaint colonial style. Wide windows stood open in adobe walls, rough timber posts held up the roof. Now it looked more like a scene from a nightmare.
Human skulls hung like bunched strings of garlic from the roof. Torches burned and set the shadows dancing. The high-sided trailer with the people in it now stood empty in the car park. From inside we could hear laughter and shouting. The kind of shouting people make when they are watching a favourite team play and they have money on the outcome.
The two evols went straight up the low steps; a guy staggered out fumbling with his fly. He gave an audible sigh and pissed into the sand only looking up when he heard a wheezing groan.
‘Dingo? Who’s that with you mate? Ding-?’ The recently dead Dingo stepped into the circle of light cast by the nearest torch and his mate leapt back in shock.
‘Fuck me! Dingo!’ he yelled and the crowd inside the pub roared. Dingo lunged forward, dead hands swinging and reaching for the throbbing warm meat. Dingo’s mate ducked backwards and tripped over a chair. He twisted his knee and went down with a cry. The two evols were on him a moment later and his feet drummed out a convulsive tattoo on the plank floor as they tore his soft belly open and feasted on the pulsing meat they found inside.
Tankbread Page 8
