Solo

by Dan Yaeger

  “Organised zombies?! Holy shit, I knew it!” my theory of organisation and control was now evident and clear. It was like I was witnessing a flying saucer land with an alien ground-party emerging to demand me to take them to my leader. But it was their leader I was more interested in. Hoggy was just a name I had given but he was the proverbial Boss Hog of the group. While he was a squad leader of some sort, I could tell he wasn’t the real boss. Someone was organising and commanding those freaks. They were controlled menaces that I wanted no part of. I didn’t have much time as they were so close and they would eventually find me. I slowly and silently loaded old man with 5 reasonable rounds, knowing that I would have little chance to get all of those rounds off. As I was readying my knives and machetes for immediate action, they began to pick over my hoard. Two kept searching the area’s bushes and scrub along the waterline. I figured that I had a couple of minutes before I would be discovered and overwhelmed. Just as all my anxieties had felt quashed, a whole new world of questions and uncertainty was upon me.

  It was the ultimate reminder of Blackbeard, Skinny and the Mechanic. I attempted to remain cool and breathed deep and rhythmically. “We can sort this all out later mate, just stay cool,” I told myself. While the Boss and another searched, moving away from me, the other two were throwing precious items out of the canoe and making a mess of what I had meticulously prepared. It irritated me and pushed me past my fears and into action. I wanted to take them out first but paused a moment, sighing and taking a breath to think rationally. “Cut off the head,” I said to myself in a whisper as I cocked the bolt of my rifle, “and the limbs will die off.” I placed the scope’s reticule over the back of the Hoggy’s head. I paused, hesitated, a little scared of what was about to happen and then there was a muzzle-flash, smoke and a ringing in my ears as I saw the head explode.

  “What the fuck!” one of the zombies shouted. They were in disarray and unsure from which direction the shot had come from. I reloaded quickly and fired off another round hurriedly, this time striking one of the Crims in the chest and revealing myself. He was gone in an instant with a dum-dum bullet opening his back up like a popped sausage on a barbecue. I was clever, though. With the second shot, I had hit the one closest to me, separating the last two by at least 5 meters. I had space and time to deal with them, one at a time. I launched to my feet and swung the butt of my rifle in a downwards arc; the blow smashed the skull of the wretch dropped in his tracks. I followed up with two blood-thirsty blows, spraying dark red blood, but not black blood, all over the place. The last one smirked; fearless of the predator and killer that had eliminated his pack. “Emotions on a zombie?!” it was all very hard to understand.

  “What the fuck are you?” I said, staring him in the face. We circled each other for a moment. A face, an awful face, stared back at me. It was without a nose and ears, long rotten and had somehow not turned fully. He was decomposing in some way but he was being kept alive and lucid. “I am you!” He said with surprising clarity, it scared me and took me off guard. He pulled a knife and waved it at me with a few feeble moves reminiscent of a bad Hong Kong Kung Fu movie from the 1980s and 1990s. My Grandfather had loved those movies: all he did was laugh throughout despite them being serious films. I enjoyed his company, the humour and memories, rather than the films. But now, I wasn’t staring at a family member on a Sunday afternoon, I was fighting for my life against an enigmatic foe. Again, I needed to focus in the heat of battle. “You’re nothing like me buddy.” The response was strong, bellowed. I wasn’t much interested in wasting any more time on this wretch and my gut said to kill him dead as soon as I could. Despite my gut instinct, the curiosity of man demanded I delay and learn more about what I was facing. “Who do you work for?” I bellowed at him as he lunged at me with intent, this time it was for real. I side-stepped the weak blow and stared at him as I shouldered my rifle with its strap. My movement changed how we were faced off and I had him at range and circling again. As we circled, I drew Pig Iron Bob, my machete and my bowie knife, Orion.

  “I said- who do you work for?” getting angry at that wretch for not giving me some hints of what was going on. This time he charged forward and came to grapple with me and I had no choice but to mess him up. I hacked down on his neck with Pig Iron Bob as his body crashed into me and I twisted to get leverage with my left arm. I brought Orion, my trusty German Bowie Knife, into his middle. There was a writhing and a jerking like a fish on a hook. What was so much different to fishing or hunting (including zombie hunting) is that, in some way, I had just killed a sort of a person in melee. I lowered him to the ground and he looked at me in disbelief. “We didn’t think you existed,” red blood poured from his mouth. “Red blood?” I looked at the blood and then into his eyes; there was some sort of soul in there.

  “And I you.” I replied, not wasting words. I only had a little time before he was gone. “What’s your name?” I got back to basics to break the ice. “Terry, but” There was a wince and the eyes closed for a moment. He was back on and continued “They call me Tez.” He smiled through pain, blood and death. This was almost déjà vu; a fallen fighter, speaking with me to his last breath. But he was so much different to young Dane; no hero in the gnarled, criminal face.

  “So Tez, what are you doing here?” I asked gently, marvelling at a talking zombie who bled red, real blood-red. “Looking for you.” He tried to laugh but croaked and coughed and gasped. “We seen your fires wiv the chopper.” That damn helicopter had been a curse that kept giving. First the zombie horde on me, next they were hunting me down. They must have seen the smoke from my house and at the Waystation. I was compromised. “Please now-who do you work for?” I shook him. With his last breath, he said “the Doc”. I realised the chits of paper and the stamps all led to one man; the Doc. He was the controller, the puppeteer. I was facing off against him and his minions, whatever they were.

  It was over; his life and my life as I knew it. My mission, my job if you like, was unchanged but I was about to face a new enemy that was after me. This new enemy was worse than the zombies themselves. This “Doc” had obviously created some way of keeping the virus at bay and was using the infected to some end. They knew I was here and they were looking for me. I figured I didn’t have much time.

  First I went to the van to make sure there wasn’t someone lying in wait for me inside. “Clear.” The van had a charged battery, almost a full tank of petrol and a sump full of oil. I sighed with satisfaction as I located a port to recharge my personal device. I left it there and searched the bodies, finding knives, cricket bats and the characteristic chits of paper. The weapons went into the canoe. The chits revealed my adversaries were “Terry Warne”, “Jeff Dalziel”, “Michael Kinsella” (Hoggy) and “John Neville”. All were dead and just memories in time. After all that struggle was said and done, I wondered if anyone was left to remember these people, things, whatever they were. “Probably not,” I concluded. Those that give their lives for a losing side were often forgotten. I was resolute that whatever unnatural, warped mission they all worked to, these neo-zombies and “the Doc” would be eliminated. They were my enemy.

  Normally, I felt the sense of loss of the living. This was different. I didn’t like these guys and would burn their bodies into oblivion, just like zombies, accordingly. We were soldiers on opposing sides and I felt no loss, sadness or remorse. There was some sort of acknowledgement and recognition of their lives but it was business, war business.

  I looked at Terry and his crew and I decided that I may never again get the chance to examine a neo-zombie in such detail. I need answers and wanted to understand them more, document them in my book. I was not doctor but I had a good sense of anatomy after looking at the insides of so many animals and zombies and I decided I would do an autopsy of sorts on the bodies. While time wasn’t on my side, I decided that it was worth the risk in the pursuit of knowledge.

  What I sought was a discovery that showed the distinct difference between the lucid zombi
es in this crew and a standard zombie. One of the swimmers was still yet to be burned and would make an excellent comparison to one of the neo-zombies. It was a gruesome task but I would write about that autopsy and share the knowledge with others in the future.

  Terry was carved up but not destroyed so I decided I would use him as the benchmark for a neo-zombie. I had already made a gaping wound in his chest. I laid him out next to the fire and I plunged the razor-sharp German steel into the existing wound and pushed forward, opening his chest cavity up completely. I did so with the last swimmer too, opening him right up. I kneeling between the old new world and the new world I was just getting involved in.

  I paused at that moment and got some supplies from the canoes for this grizzly job. In some unnatural science experiment worthy of mention in a Mary Shelly classic, lightning raged, as did the wind and spitting rain. The madness of the warped scene was added to by my wearing a head-torch, bandana, some latex gloves and a floral barbecue apron. It would have been such a bizarre scene to witness; but I got into it in the name of science, survival and the future of man.

  The sky was grim and I was surrounded with darkness on all sides. But it was my fire of bodies and large lumps of wood and branches from all around acted as my shining light, my warmth, my hope for a better place. I worked as fast as I could as I held a sense of impending doom. That crew of neo-zombies (the name I coined for that type of phenomenon) would not go lost and unnoticed for long.

  I quickly looked at the damaged lungs and could see the sort of thing you would see in a smoker but zombies had that too. His lungs were liquefying into a rancid fluid though, rather than the tar of a smoker; liquefaction. It just wasn’t advanced like in the Swimmer. Nothing too different there though. The stomach was the same, full of ulcerations and, again liquefying. Terry was in better shape than the swimmer corpse but he was still showing me signs of infection. The heart was still pretty functional in both bodies, basic decomposition but little difference. The livers were completely shot: really bad smells came out of those but no difference.

  And then I found something remarkable. The kidneys in Terry were almost fresh, like a normal person. They were filtering the blood, clearly, and I theorised that this must have been slowing the complete degeneration of a human into a zombie state. Something was slowing the change. What the media had coined “turning”; the profound difference between zombie and human was being staved off. That something was potent enough to hold off Divine. It was my holy grail and I was Sir Galahad. If you don’t get the reference, you are missing out; read about it.

  I gagged at the smell of those awful livers and threw them onto the fire. They, I think, were part of the revelation. The Divine virus needed to poison the person, almost kill them so the spark was gone but take command with its own controls. I continued into the brain and found nothing unusual which was unexpected. I looked and looked, time ticking, desperately searching for some evidence but found nothing. I had all but given up and rolled Terry over toward the fire. My killing blow with my knife had gone right through him and just exiting out the back with a coin-sized hole. I saw something terrifying as I was about to put him on the fire. “Blackness!”

  I wasted no further time in slicing off a slab of his back flesh to look at what was hiding below. Divine was not a brain infection like everyone had thought. I found a thin, translucent, inky film of matter, like mouldy skin, that coated the spine, right down to the base. I knew this was a breakthrough at the time and it would prove to be an early insight into truly understanding Divine.

  I would later learn and understand that Divine used the spine as its conduit to control the brain. That film was the puppeteer. Beheading a zombie had the desired effect but it was the base of the spine where the virus had manifested its control room. I didn’t have it all worked out at the time but my mind exploded with the possibilities that the base of the spine was uniquely different between zombies that had turned and infected people who were in the process of succumbing to its illness.

  I could have stood there and pontificated in the wind and pouring rain, but I had to get moving, in order to survive. I knew that my new enemy would be upon me. I retrieved my now-charged personal device and made multiple photographs of what I had found. What had kept the kidneys functional and the other organs from complete capitulation to the Divine virus was unclear; the missing link. I concluded there was an outside factor, a treatment of sorts. I was determined to work it out another time. I was extraordinarily excited; the revelation was ground breaking. My mission and job were getting clearer.

  “Time to get moving!” I shouted triumphantly as I piled more wood onto the fire and the bodies of the Crims and the last swimmer.

  I was just about to consider abandoning my trip into Tantangara by getting into that van and driving back to the holiday park. I could then have driven the truck home; years’ worth of supplies. But my world was not just about survival anymore and a little voice reached me. “Am I going mad or can I hear a voice?” I thought. I could hear a faint voice, crackling with an electronic sound. I followed it and found a military radio on the ground, near where I had laid Hoggy to rest with a .308 projectile. “Squad 2, what the fuck are you bastards doing? Respond over.” A crass, coarse woman’s voice squelched over the old-school device. Without thinking, I picked up the radio and impersonated Terry. It was all I could do to buy time.

  I put on the most low-life voice I could muster and went with it. It was a big gamble. “Yeah, this is Tez, over. Who’s this and whaddaya want?” I said, hoping for the best. “Yeah, fuck you too Tez. It’s Maeve; who’d ya think it was? Yer mutha? ” She played right into my game. “Where ‘ave yous been? What are we doin’? Over.” The voice asked. “We’re in Tanny. The place is full of bloody zombies. Over” I replied and lied as casually as I could. It seemed to be working. “Why isn’t Mike talkin’ to me then? Over.” She was suspicious now but kept the dialogue going. I thought of the most normal thing someone has to do and then figured on how I could deliver that message in the crassest way. “Mike’s takin’ a shit. The fat bastard was eatin’ too much and he’s gotta clean house.” I said jovially. There was a snorting laugh followed up with a response; “Yeah, that’s Mike, God love ‘im. We’re headin’ your way now. Did you’s have a fire? I can see smoke, ovah.” I thought quickly and responded. “Yep, just getting’ dry after the rain,” I said.

  “Yeah, while you’s were dryin’, My radio went fuckin’ flat. Only just charged enough to talk ta ya. Ovah” Maeve snorted and gave an awful laugh. “So what ‘ave you seen and where are you goin’ next? Ovah.” She was comfortable now. I knew they would be coming and I needed to throw them off. The van could be chased-down, the fire was a dead-giveaway. I needed to act quickly. “Yeah, we tried to get ya on the wireless, good to have you back online. We think we seen a trail-bike headed outta Tanny t’ward Bimberi-way. But some fuckin' zombies got in the way. Might be our bloke.” My ruse would throw them off long enough for me to hide out on Tiger Island. “We killed some zombies wiv them cricket bats and put ‘em on the fire. Once we’re done ‘ere, we’ll head ta Bimberi for a look. You’ll come wiv? Over.” I was chuffed with the ruse and where it was heading. “Come wiv? I’m leading this fuckin’ squad patrol and I have the only gun so ya better believe it! But, yeah, right behind ya Tez. We’ll meetcha at the resort. Squad leader over and out.” I could tell Maeve had loved the radio formalities and being in charge of the operation, whoever she was.

  I quickly jumped in the van and drove it inside the shed. It may be found eventually but I needed to have it out of sight so it was plausibly far away. The canoes needed to go and I would go with them. I ran, with all my speed and agility and jumped into the canoe and pushed off. I worked the paddle hard, initially dressed like the bizarre surgeon. I smashed through the water, harder than I had ever paddled with the hope I could make it to Tiger Island and be so insignificant a speck on the lake that the unsuspecting “Squad” passed me by and headed to the ski
fields on a red herring. Even better would be if I made it to Tiger Island and watched from there.

  My mind continued to wander and ponder as the weather picked up and threatened to pick me up, literally, and roll me and the small watercraft I relied upon to stay afloat with all my gear. It was slow progress in the cold and wet. The wind began to sting and I thought I was in for a very rough night. I thrashed out ideas as I thrashed out in the bad weather and battled for survival. A thousand ideas swam around in my head “Who was Maeve?“, I thought. “Did she work for the Doc? Was she a neo-zombie too?” I questioned everything. “Schemes and future strategies formed in the choppy water and freezing wind. I was trying not to think too much and focus on the speed and technique of the paddling but I was puzzling over the anatomical discovery and having spoken to these new-found “neo-zombies” as I called them. I just needed to get to the refuge of the Island, get out of sight and off the grid, before all hell broke loose. But I knew that all hell was always going to break loose after what had just happened.

  But as with all things, the fear and dark, sinister or foreboding comes to pass. I beached my craft on Tiger Island after a hard paddle through some of the roughest weather you would ever take on in a small watercraft on Lake Tantangara. I had navigated around to the north eastern shore of the island to avoid being seen by Maeve and her squad. I hauled the canoes ashore. The weight of the supplies made it a massive physical effort but I was running on adrenaline; running indeed. I ran south to the pinnacle of the island, it wasn’t too far and set myself up in a lying position with my binoculars, watching and waiting for something to happen. Like clockwork, around a quarter of an hour later, another white van and a trail-bike drove through Tantangara, slowly past the bonfire, past the outdoor shop and onwards toward Bimberi. They thought everything was in-pattern for what they saw and had heard from “Tez” (me). But one thing was out of order; Maeve was pretty good for a zombie and I realised she wasn't truly undead. "Perhaps something between human and fully infected?" I was on the right track.