‘I’m going for the power station. The rest of you stay here.’
Else immediately shook her head. ‘Not without me.’
‘Assuming you get to the power-station, what are you going to do when you get there?’ Wainright had that lecturing tone again.
‘You need our help, and I’m sure as hell not waiting here on my own,’ Donna said, lifting her chin just a little higher than usual.
‘Stay close, and keep quiet. If I say run, then follow me. Wainright, get up here. Is the power-station going to be locked?’
‘I don’t know,’ Wainright’s bald pate was glistening already.
‘Okay, stay close. Here we go,’ I stepped out into the wind and fog-like dust. With the others treading on my heels I moved towards our target. The first dismembered corpse lay less than ten meters away from the stairway entrance. One of Arbuckle’s men. I liberated his M16 and found his last full clip on the ground next to him. The final zombies he killed were a few steps further on. We kept walking, heads down, trying to see through the flying grit. I stopped and waved the others to a halt. An evol wandered aimlessly past, less than ten feet from where we crouched. I counted to twenty after it vanished into the yellow gloom and then we moved again. Reaching the edge of a building, I pulled Wainright forward by his sweat-stained shirt and hissed in his ear. ‘Is this it?’ He nodded, his heart thudding so hard I could feel it.
With my back to the wall and the M16 a comforting weight in my hand I edged up to the door. To my relief it hung open. A dark stain flowed across the threshold and dripped into a sticky pool on the ground.
I glanced inside; a half dozen corpses - all of them still - already stinking and bloating in the heat. The bad news was that the equipment in the room had been hit hard by panicked gunfire. Nothing even sparked with short circuits.
I waved everyone inside. Donna pressed her sleeve to her mouth and coughed, not looking at the bullet ravaged dead. Else, ever practical, collected weapons. Only one rifle still carried ammunition and she handed it to Wainright, who held it as if it were a live grenade with a missing pin. Else heaved one of the dead soldiers aside and pulled her sword scabbard from the tangle of his webbing belt. The blade had been buried in an evol woman’s head as she'd bitten Madden’s throat out. ‘My sword,’ Else grinned at Donna, who looked somewhat horrified and then turned back to crouch by the doorway. Else yanked the blade out and wiped it clean.
I consulted with Wainright who agreed that the power station was beyond repair. Clearly, the security of the compound had been compromised. He expressed regret and told me that Arbuckle would be receiving a very stern lecture on security protocols when Wainright found him.
‘Chances are he’ll want a big piece of your mind, Doc. He’ll eat it right out of your skull given half the chance. We cannot stay here. Once the wind dies down we can be seen, heard, or smelt. Whatever it is they do.’ Wainright opened his mouth to give me a lecture on the sensory biology of the dead, but I waved him to silence.
‘We need a reliable vehicle. Something that can get us out of here and can drive a long way, off-road at times.’
‘The American’s, they brought Humvees. They were so proud of them. They used to drive them everywhere.’
‘Where would they keep them now?’ I waited while Wainright thought for a long moment.
‘In the vehicle storage shed? It’s on the western side of the compound. About four hundred meters that way.’
‘Okay ladies, same drill as before, we are going to the vehicle storage shed. It is four hundred meters away. Stay close, don’t make any noise. Wainright, do not shoot anything unless I do. Even then, do not waste your ammo shooting the same target.’
Wainright nodded and helped Donna to her feet, she looked trapped between her eagerness to get away from the stench of the rotting bodies and her terror at being outside.
I looked both ways, just like crossing the street, and then stepped out into the compound. We stayed close to buildings. Backtracking a couple of times when we saw silhouettes moving in the gloom. Once we almost stepped right on a pair that were feeding. Else bounced past me and stabbed them both in the back of the neck with her sword. With a twist of the wrists she cut their spines and they crumpled face first into their bloody meal. Wainright had an arm around Donna and supported her as we crept along. I could hear muffled sobs squeezing out through her hands which she kept pressed against her mouth. We reached a large shed, with two fuel bowsers standing sentry out front. The hose for one lay on the ground. I couldn’t tell if the other one had anything left in its underground tank, but it did have a manual pump handle. Along the front of the building hung large sliding doors of corrugated steel, tightly closed against the wind and intruders.
Wainright tapped me on the shoulder and I jumped so hard I nearly knocked him down. ‘Side entrance,’ he whispered and I followed his finger. The door was ajar, swinging in the wind, which seemed to be lessening. Another corpse, this one naked and missing a good portion of its head, lay outside the door. We stepped over it and slipped inside.
CHAPTER 26
The vehicle storage facility was a concrete block and iron-roofed shed about the size of a small airplane hanger. There were no aircraft here, just a line of Humvees and most of them were stripped to the chassis. A steel frame and a few wires sticking out like frayed threads on the edge of torn cloth was all that remained.
‘Someone’s in here,’ Else held her sword out at arms length, turning slowly in a full circle. I sighted down the M16 pressed to my shoulder and did a slow pirouette. There were birds roosting high up in the rafters and the place stank of their guano. The few streaks of dusty sunlight streaming in from high windows made it hard to see anything clearly.
‘Else, go around that way,’ I waved her around to the front of the line of vehicles. I moved to the back. One of us would get the jump on who ever was in here.
I found a splash of blood on the concrete, then a trail of large, dark drops. Blood dried fast in the desert heat but the trail felt sticky to the touch. I moved carefully, leading with the rifle, seeing Else slip across the aisles between the trucks in synch with me.
The fifth Humvee in line appeared unscathed. My nose wrinkled at the smell of shit, piss and fresh blood. I stepped around the corner of the fourth truck with my finger tightening on the trigger. A soldier lay panting like a dog with his head against the running board of the last Humvee. His dark skin now turned gray with blood loss and shock. Sweat oozed out of him, adding a musky stink to the cloying odour of his own filth. He had a pistol in his right hand, and he raised it with a grunt of effort. His left arm lay between his legs. The neatly severed stump above the elbow tied off tight with wire. An axe lay across his lap, the head of it dark with blood.
‘Easy man,’ I said, slowly stepping forward and putting Else on hold with a warning gesture. I crouched down on the edge of the pool of blood. The soldier was dying; I could see the chunk of flesh missing from his severed hand. The semi-circular bite had almost taken off his pinky finger. After being bitten, he managed to get to a safe place, tied a wire tourniquet around his arm and then hacked off the infected limb.
‘Man… You have balls of steel,’ I meant it too. I don’t think I would ever be able to do that to myself.
‘Oo…rah’ he managed between fast and shallow breaths.
‘Semper Fi mother fucker,’ I think that was a marine thing, I vaguely recalled it from a movie once.
The black soldier managed to smile. ‘Semper…Fi…Momma…Semper Fi…’ His voice trailed off into a whisper as his breathing slowed. I picked up the axe that lay across his lap, waited until his eyes fully closed and the last of the air sighed out of him. Then I stepped back, raised the blood stained weapon and split his head like firewood.
‘Else give me a hand,’ she came over immediately. We took a leg each and dragged the dead soldier away from the Humvee.
‘Anyone else here, you think?’ I asked.
Else’s head turned slow
ly like a dog listening for a distant bark. ‘No, they are all outside, lost in the wind.’
Else waited by the Humvee while I went and gathered up Wainright and Donna. We checked the rest of the shed for useful supplies and found nothing except a stash of well-thumbed girlie magazines. The back of the Humvee contained carefully sealed packs of dried food, some full water containers and a spare fuel tank. Semper Fi fellas, I thanked Arbuckle and his men silently.
Else rode shotgun and I took the driving position while the others loaded themselves in the back seat. The keys were in the ignition. I sat in the driver’s seat and stared at them for a good ten seconds. These rare moments of good luck are worth savouring.
‘What are you waiting for? Get us out of here,’ Wainright interrupted my moment.
‘One problem,’ I pointed to the hanger door. ‘Someone has to open that.’ Wainright and I got out and inspected the door-mechanism. There were two parts to it, on the one hand a heavy grease and dirt encrusted electric motor that ran a chain loop which pulled the door open along a track - then pulled it back the other way to close. The other option was to unbolt the door and slide it down the rail by hand. That meant someone standing out there exposed to whatever came at him, or her, until we had enough space to drive the Humvee through.
We reconvened in the truck and I explained our situation.
‘The thing is that, before the door is opened, we need to get the truck started. The engine noise is going to attract whatever is outside and they are going to come.’
‘We have weapons, we will fight them!’ Else jabbed the air with her sword.
‘When we came in here, I saw over a hundred zombies piled up against that fence. I don’t know where they are now, but I know where they are going to be.’ Else pondered my meaning for a second and sat back frowning. ‘Any of you drive?’ I asked and they each shook their heads. One day I would have to teach Else to drive.
‘I will do it,’ Wainright’s hands clenched between his thighs. He stared down at them. ‘I’ll open the door, but you have to be ready, you have to get out as soon as there is enough room.’
‘I’ll be ready.’
Wainright opened the passenger door and slid out of the truck. He looked a little unsteady on his feet as he went around the front. We watched as he worked the stiff bolt on the hanger door. It slid free and he looked back and gave a half wave, not quite good-bye. I took a deep breath and turned the ignition key. The big 6.2 litre engine caught and roared. I guess Arbuckle’s boys knew to keep the escape pods fuelled and tuned up.
I revved the engine and Wainright put his weight into pushing the door back along its rail. Slowly overcoming inertia and the hanging weight of the heavy steel, he got it moving. The twelve-foot high sheet metal and steel frame slid along the track with Wainright bent at the waist, digging his feet into the concrete and heaving with all his might. I started to roll forward. The sky outside had cleared, a thick patina of dust covered everything, but the wind was no longer blowing. Evols lurched into view, some rising from the fresh corpses they were feasting on and others just turned in their aimless wandering and homed in on us.
Donna readied the passenger door, Wainright gave one last push and we had a clear run. I pressed the accelerator and the nose of the truck slipped out of the shed. Donna threw open the back door and yelled for Wainright to get in. He let go of the door, grinning in triumph. The first evol stepped around the gaping doorway and slashed at him with ragged fingernails.
Wainright yelped and tumbled forward. I threw open my door and fired the M16 through the gap, the explosive noise in the confined space of the Humvee cab was deafening. Donna screamed and another evol staggered into the shed. Wainright tried to get to his feet, but the second zombie dropped her arms around his neck and bit into his shoulder. The bald geek screamed in agonised terror and his blood sprayed upwards in a dark jet.
I slammed my door shut and floored it. The rear passenger door hit Wainright and the zombie, knocking them both flying as we shot past. All around us evols were closing in and the truck jumped and rolled on its suspension as we hit, and drove over a wall of bodies.
‘Go back! We have to go back!’ Donna was screaming hysterically.
‘Shut the fucking door!’ I yelled and Else climbed over from the front passenger seat and pulled the rear door shut.
Corpses reached and slapped at the thick glass windows, grabbing hold of the mirrors and door handles, more by reflex than conscious thought. I sped up, driving the Humvee across the open compound, barely able to see over the dead people crawling up the hood. Donna was still screaming in the back seat, ‘Oh my god! You left him to die! You piece of shit! You left him to die!’
Else growled, disturbed by the woman’s freak out. Desperate to get out of the moving truck, Donna started slapping at Else who took that for about half a second, and then punched the young doctor in the jaw, knocking her senseless.
CHAPTER 27
I found a hole in the fence and we drove through it, scraping the festering dead off our fender against the ragged mesh, like dog shit coming off a shoe. Once we were out into the open desert I veered back towards the road. In less than ten minutes we were back on the highway. I swerved to avoid a trio of pigs rooting in the dirt by the road near Leandro’s house. With so many evols scattered around I wondered how long the porkers would last.
I sped up to around seventy k’s an hour on the highway, any faster and we might hit something, and then it would be all over. The Humvee purred along the old asphalt under a cobalt blue sky. A few clouds hovered to the south. All around us the flat scrub-and-sand wasteland stretched out to the horizon.
Else got comfortable in the passenger seat beside me, her feet resting up on the dash. She watched the passing landscape with her usual wide-eyed interest. Donna lay in the back, I could hear her crying, but she didn’t make a fuss.
In the late afternoon I stopped in the middle of the road. A town lay ahead of us, a shimmering mirage in the heat. Else and I sat on the hood of the Humvee. We drank water from a canteen and ate dried fruit from the supplies loaded in the rear. Donna stayed in the back, She drank a little water but wouldn’t speak to us.
‘I like it out here,’ Else said.
‘Yeah?’ I kept looking around, no zombies in sight, and I’d checked under the truck thoroughly before letting anyone else out. ‘Why?’
‘It’s quiet,’ Else said after a moment.
‘Sure, but there are no people and nothing to do. It’s hot and it’s dry.’
‘I would have you, and you would have me. We could live in a small house and drink orange juice, I would read.’
I stared out into the burning horizon, sometimes it seemed like I’d known Else for longer than a month. A lifetime longer, but for her kind a month was a lifetime.
‘Plenty of places to choose from,’ I said, painfully aware that I couldn’t look at her right then.
Else sighed and stretched back on the hot glass of the windshield, her eyes closed. ‘We would have babies. I would make you have babies with me.’
‘Okay, okay, we can have babies,’ I’d meant it as an offhand comment, something to appease her in the moment, instead she sat up and then flipped over to sit astride my lap.
‘Now?’ Her eyes as wide and intense as I’d ever seen.
‘Not right now, no. First we have to find a place, and make sure there’s no evols trying to eat us.’
‘We have to go back to Sydney, to the Opera House,’ the light in her eyes faded, the way a storm front darkens the green-blue of the ocean.
‘Yeah,’ I said, putting my arms around her. ‘Back to Sydney, to the Opera House and then somewhere quiet to make babies and drink orange juice and read for the rest of our days.’
‘Can we get a move on? I don’t want to be stuck out here at night,’ Donna had climbed out of her self-imposed exile in the back of the Humvee.
* * *
The Stuart Highway is the only direct route from Woomera to anywher
e. We followed the road south and east. What used to be a major link across the country was now a rough track of broken asphalt and abandoned vehicles. It was slow going. At best, the run from Woomera to Port Augusta at the tip of the Spencer Gulf should have taken about three hours, now it took all day. Else found a road atlas of Australia in the glove box. With some brief instruction and a lot of questions, she soon mastered the basics of navigation.
No zombies marched around the walls of Port Augusta. I stopped the Humvee a good distance back and, telling the girls to wait in the truck, I continued on foot. The sun was setting now, long waves of brilliant red light turning the air to gold.
My boot crunched on a bleached pile of bones and I stopped, Harris’ warning about Port Augusta coming back to me like a slap. In a rough circle around Port Augusta lay a tangled heap of bones and abandoned supplies. The four hundred meter mark that the Port Augusta snipers used to drop anyone, living or dead who came too close. I raised my hands and took a large step backwards. The bullet spanged off the ground a half-second before I heard the shot. I didn’t wait to see if it was a warning or just a near miss. I bolted back into the rising darkness and we gave Port Augusta a wide berth.
We camped that first night on the highway. There is no way to sleep comfortably in a Humvee. Even with the windows open a crack to let in air, it got stuffy. You can’t stretch out and I woke up stiff, tired and thirsty. Taking stock of our inventory I found we had plenty of food, some unidentifiable jerked meat, dried fruit and a large jar of roughly ground flour. All we lacked was water, only two canteens full remained. Two full jerry cans of whatever home-brew methanol fuel we were burning, plus the three-quarters full tank meant we had plenty of range. We could probably drive all the way to Sydney.
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