One by one, Brad, Heather, and the janitor came around the corner of the van and stopped. After a few seconds of expressionless stares, each moved away.
Only one thing left to do. I flopped down on the pavement, feeling the hard material making up Orky’s dorsal fin snap under my weight as I leaned against the wall. I used my good hand to position the camera on the ground next to me, angled up at my face. Well, Orky’s face. The red LED blinked several times letting me know I was running out of memory, then turned green.
Breaking news from me, Mason Grimes, your wandering field reporter. My time is short. Not only is my camera about to run out of space for this report, but I’ve been bit…and near as I can tell, that’s a death sentence for me. Only a matter of time, maybe just minutes. So there you have it. Funny, huh? Today I started my career as a broadcast journalist because the world went completely to hell. For that same reason, my career’s ending. Some people only get fifteen minutes of fame. At least I’ve had a whole day, right? Can’t say that’s fair exactly, but I imagine the rest of the world, and all the people left alive in it, are thinking the same thing about themselves. Nothing fair about this apocalypse.
My thumb didn’t hurt anymore at least, but my stomach sure did ache. I leaned forward to switch the camera off, but the girl in the car screeched again, and I stopped.
Oh. And one last thing to the kids out there. It’s been my pleasure to sing and dance with you. To make you laugh and smile. But if this…problem is affecting everyone everywhere, your time has come to be big boys and girls. Listen to your parents. Do what they say. And in case your parents aren’t around anymore…this has been a crazy day and who knows, maybe you’re on your own right now…if you happen to see Orky the Orca coming toward you on the street and he’s moaning and flapping his fins like he’s happy to see you…it won’t be a hug he’s looking for. You stop right there, turn around, and run. This was Mason Grimes.
Kris Ashton is an emerging talent in speculative fiction, with more than fifteen stories published in titles like AtomJack, Well Told Tales and Midnight Echo. His novel, Ghost Kiss, is available through Asylett Press: www.asylett.com He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two boxer dogs. Google his name and see what you come up with.
walking street * EWZN * Reports of containment false, outbreaks
Mere Symptoms of LivingReported By Kris Ashton
Fuck.
Okay, the sun came up this morning—not blood red, but its usual gold color. The minas and sparrows welcomed its arrival. I know, because my eyes opened at around five-thirty, a good hour before my clock radio was scheduled to go off.
I had left work with an unsolved problem still burning a hole in my desk. A roll of film had gone missing, and now we would have to go back to the actor’s publicist, ‘fess up, and try to arrange another photo shoot.
With the film occupying the useable space in my head, I didn’t really listen to the voices on the radio. It’s the same reason, I suppose, that I was all but oblivious to the unusual silence pitchforked now and then by wailing car tires or a drawn out scream. I was deep in my morning groove—put on my suit, drop bread into the toaster, pour some juice. Maybe if I’d turned on the TV instead of opening a magazine, things would have been different. A single day has so many maybes. It’s as complicated as any chess game. Knight to E5 was turn on the TV, rook to H8 was read a magazine.
When I’d finished my toast, I rinsed the plate and walked out to the toilet. If you’re reading this, you probably know my kitchen has two doors. One opens onto a hallway which leads to the bedrooms. The other gives onto a sunroom, the laundry, and a separate toilet. In this last area I found myself face to face with Elsie Campbell, who lived two houses down. She was an elderly woman with white hair as thin as her glasses were thick. Those glasses were my first inkling something was wrong. They sat askew on her head, one lens above her eyebrow.
“Elsie,” I said, “are you all right?”
She turned one eye on me—the one still behind the dense convex lens of her spectacles—and then lunged mouth-first.
There was nothing agile or cat-like in that action. It was more of a lurch than a lunge, like a newly woken grizzly bear happening upon unexpected prey. I jerked out my hands in reflex and knocked her right off her feet. It was like shoving a leaf. She fell back full-length—making no attempt to throw out her arms or break her fall—and smacked her head on the tiles. Her glasses flew off and rattled to rest near to the back door.
I thought the poor old duck was out of her mind— overdosed on lithium or something.
“God, Elsie, I’m sorry!”
I stepped forward to help her up and then hesitated, struck ill at the grisly sight of her right leg, which no longer had a calf muscle. It didn’t look like a gunshot wound, the work of a sharp implement, or a voracious sore allowed to spread unchecked. It looked like it had been bitten off. But not by a dog—the teeth marks were all wrong.
Elsie sat up, her old woman’s dress slipping off one shoulder to expose a floppy bra strap. She uttered a noise—mewling I suppose you’d call it—and reached for my thigh as if it were a drumstick in a bucket of chicken.
A braver man might have planned his next move. I jumped to one side, evading Elsie’s grabbing hands, and locked myself in the toilet.
I heard light, unsteady footsteps and then her twisted claws drummed against the door. She began to wail like an inhuman child...perhaps one crying for its dinner.
I closed the toilet lid and sat down, waiting for my limbs to stop shaking. As I sat there, with a kind old lady scratching at the door like a dog, I tried to make sense of it. Two words came into my head, words so preposterous my mind revolted: living dead. Elsie’s eyes were unfocused and her skin had appeared bloodless, almost grey, as if she were a walking statue.
“Can you speak, Elsie?” I asked through the door. Her wail turned into a frustrated growl and she scratched harder, as if trying to burrow through the wood. There was a click, which I think must have been a fingernail dislodging from its quick.
The reptilian kernel at the centre of my brain—the one that made me shove Elsie—had accepted the danger. It didn’t care what name I gave it. As my conscious mind came around to the truth of my predicament, it knew I needed to plan ahead. Once free, I could turn on the television and find out if the zombie mythology was true, discover how widespread the infection was, learn the location of shelters (if it came to that). All I had to do was get past Elsie.
Had the toilet door opened outwards I might not be writing this now. But it opened inwards, so I couldn’t use it as a ram. I considered punching Elsie, but the skin on my knuckles looked thin and easily broken. The best course, I decided, would be to open the door and kick her in the chest. No exposed flesh to worry about.
I had nearly gathered the gumption when I heard footsteps ascending the ramp to the back door. I listened hard, almost willing my ears out on stalks.
“Hey!” I yelled out. “Hey, there’s a zombie in here! Watch out!”
The footsteps accelerated and hope pricked my heart. Rescue! Foolish, perhaps, but—
I heard Elsie’s spectacles crunch underfoot. Then came a hungry snarl and a second set of hands slapping at the toilet door. Unlike Elsie’s frail tapping and scratching, these were genuine pounding; blows delivered hard enough to shake the door in its frame. Whoever had come to join the feast was at least as big as me. I braced the door with my foot, fearing its puny latch would be ripped loose.
In time, the bashing ceased, but the groaning and growling and dragging of hands down the door went on and on.
It’s still going on—four hours after I locked myself in. I found a biro in my jacket pocket and decided to write it all down. I should have started higher on the wall because as I pen these words I’m starting to crouch. And as you can see, it’s tough keeping such long lines of text straight. Guidelines would be handy.
Yeah, like that’s my most pressing concern right now.
***
>
A quick flash of the obvious: Toilets aren’t made for living in. Unless you plan to stand up the whole time, you have two options: you can sit on the toilet, or you can sit on the floor.
The toilet is okay for an hour or two until ergonomic realities set in. If I try to rest my back against the cistern, the lid digs into my shoulder blades. If I hunch over to prevent that, my spine curves and soon begins to ache.
The floor has its advantages. I can rest my back against the door, and if I splay my legs on either side of the toilet bowl, I can just about straighten them out. The problem is the tiles. I think ‘tiles’ rhymes with ‘piles’ for a good reason. Besides, sitting against the door brings me closer to the infernal scrabbling of their fingers. If I didn’t know better, I might think they were rats in the walls. That’s what it sounds like, scurrying rodent feet. Always busy, always on the lookout for food.
God, I’m getting thirsty. I’ve got to get out of here.
***
Okay, that didn’t quite go to plan.
My thirst soon dispelled any qualms I had about drinking from the cistern. I took the lid off and stood it against the wall, then cupped half a dozen handfuls of water into my mouth. It tasted different—the way water from the kitchen tap tastes different to that from the bathroom tap—but not bad. In fact, it was delicious. Maybe it was a placebo, but the water helped me think, and I saw the cistern lid for what it could be.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hesitant, but with the lid’s solid, vitreous weight in my hands, my reservations were slighter. I went through it in my head: the best way to hold the lid, what I would see when I opened the door, where and how fast they would come at me.
I twirled open the latch. It sent them into frenzy and I gripped the cistern lid in both hands. They slapped and squealed and moaned like a retarded orchestra and I waited for one to press down on the door handle. The damn thing had been jigging up and down all day.
God knows how long I stood that way. Long enough for the cistern lid to grow heavy in my arms, anyway. But for all their activity, those grey-blue hands would not drop onto the handle.
I decided to set things in motion myself. I rested my arms a moment, and then raised the cistern lid above my head. With a deep breath, I hitched up my foot and let it slap down on the handle. The door popped open and a hand with a bloody stump where the pinky should have been snaked in. The hand’s owner, a heavyset man with an orange beard stained brownish-red around the lips, followed it in. We locked eyes. What he saw in mine, if anything, I will never know. In his I saw hunger; a desperate, depraved, hellish hunger. Then I swung the lid down with all available force.
How do I describe the sound? Something like a dinner plate dropped on a wet bench-top, maybe. The zombie reeled backwards, one half of his forehead now a jagged red crater.
What I saw behind him stopped my heart.
Packed in around the doorway were at least six zombies (including the late Elsie), their otherwise unseeing eyes now locked onto the warm, vital prize inside. Their moans and snuffles intensified into animal snarls. A second zombie pushed the damaged one aside and reached for me. I brought the lid down in a wild, looping arc. It shattered most of his teeth and knocked his jaw down onto his neck. It hung there loose and bloody, like a gruesome bow tie.
I drew the lid back to land the killing blow. When I brought it down, it had mysteriously grown shorter. It swished past the zombie’s nose, while the other half exploded on the tiles behind me. Porcelain shards pricked my legs as I shrank from the zombie’s throttling hands, his dry upper lip pulled back from the remains of his teeth. I kicked out hard and he fell back like a cowcatcher, collecting the herd of animated corpses around him.
I dropped the broken cistern lid and tried to close the door, but Elsie’s hand darted in. A second, larger hand appeared above hers and began to clench the air. More and more weight pressed against the door. I propped the toe of my shoe against the door and then rammed my shoulder into it. The larger arm withdrew, leaving only Elsie’s spindly wrist with its slack, wrinkled flesh. I released the pressure of my foot a touch, then grabbed Elsie’s hand and bent it down until the bones snapped. She uttered a hoarse, unnatural cry, and I shoved her arm out, allowing the door to thud shut. I spun the latch over and fell back onto the closed toilet, sweaty hair tickling my eyes.
My hands dangled in my lap, and as the adrenaline subsided I noticed a graze just below my thumb. The tiny white flaps of lifted skin looked innocent enough until blood started to weep out between them. I jumped up and flushed the abrasion with water.
I’m ninety-five percent sure I got that graze from the doorframe. What the hell, make that ninety-nine percent.
If a racehorse enjoyed those odds, you be mad not to bet on it.
***
Jesus, that was weird.
When I’d finished writing before, I sat down to stretch out my legs and have a think. I remembered the toilet at my grandfather’s house. It was similar to this one—post-war, basic, no half-flush; small, aluminium-framed window up high, near the ceiling. Enough for ventilation, but not enough for a man to pass through.
The plaster wall looked fragile, easily breakable. Grandpa’s house was fibro, and if I’d been stuck in there, I thought, I’d try smashing my way out. But my house has brick fascia.
That’s the last thing I remember thinking before I woke. When I tried to sit up, I could barely move. My knees were stiff and cold and my coccyx felt like a searing bullet shot into my arse. My God, I’m changing into a zombie, I thought, but as my conscious mind reasserted itself, I realized where the aches and paralysis had come from. It was nearly dark, and my watch put the time at ten minutes to six.
I slowly stood up, wincing at five different pains, and did some light stretches. Both buttocks were numb, and my right foot had gone to sleep. They buzzed and tingled as the blood returned. Once I started to feel halfway normal, I switched on the light. It obediently illuminated my poky little room, so I guess whatever’s going on out there hasn’t brought down the power stations yet.
One thing I should mention (I have to occupy myself somehow) is the growing stench. I hadn’t really noticed it before, but now that I’m sitting to fill up the lower section of this wall, my nose is closer to the slit under the door. It’s bearable now—I sat next to smellier kids in primary school—but it’s what’s down the track that worries me.
I’ve only been in close contact with something dead and putrefying once. A few friends and I rented out an austere little dwelling for a ‘boys’ weekend away’, an excuse to escape our wives and girlfriends, fart and burp whenever we wanted, and pretend we could still drink like we did when we were twenty. It was a cold morning, and I had woken with a crazy hangover thirst. I threw on some clothes and wandered down the street towards the service station on the main road. I was about halfway there when a smell touched my nose. On first contact, my brain identified it as something sweet—musk lollies, perhaps. Then the stench revealed its true self: nauseating, warm and alive. I groaned, almost gagged, and began to breathe through my mouth.
My eyes roamed for the source of this nasal outrage and landed on a cow carcass partially obscured by shrubbery. Whether it had blundered onto the road and been struck down, or had just up and died of old age, I couldn’t tell. I gave it a wide berth, but that stink was virulent. I could almost feel the micro-organisms wriggling around inside my nostrils.
So...the zombies are moving around out there, but they’re beginning to decay like the corpses they are. They already smell and they’re not even a day old. Oh, boy.
***
Jesus-fucking-Christ am I hungry. I don’t even feel like writing this stupid diary to myself any more, but it’s the only thing that takes my mind off my gut. I’m so empty I can almost taste bile on my tongue. I wish I could sleep, but it’s getting cold, and my suit doesn’t offer much protection. Also, these goddamned zombies never shut up, never give up. You’d think they’d just pack it in and go find s
omeone else to chomp on. I’m sure there must be plenty of live people out there. I wonder if the zombies are as frustrated at being shut out as I am at being shut in? Perhaps they’d like to shamble off and find an easier victim, but the smell of my blood draws them like mosquitoes.
As you can see, I’m onto the left-hand wall of the toilet—like it matters a tinker’s cuss. God, tinker’s cuss, where the hell did I pull that from? An old teacher, I think. Yelling at some kid. Wow, the things you start to think about when you’ve got nothing else to do but think.
Just tried drinking lots of water from the cistern in the hope it would quell my hunger. It worked—for about ten minutes. Now I’m so ravenous I could retch. Not even the zombie smell can curtail my raging appetite.
Bugger this, it’s ten-thirty. Time for bed.
***
Morning now. A gorgeous sunny day judging by the light around the doorframe. Hard to be sure, really, with all the FUCKING ZOMBIES crowded in around it. More must have been drawn here during the night.
Speaking of last night, I turned off the light and sat on the closed toilet with my tie bunched up on the edge of the cistern as the crappiest of all possible pillows. Determined to sleep, I instead broke down and cried for nearly a full hour. I wonder if that’s what prisoners do on their first night in the stir? They have hardened crims taunting them about never getting out; I had brainless cadavers moaning about never getting in. Whatever the case, I felt better after my blubber. Aren’t humans really, really STUPID? I was no better off, but because I’d squeezed saline out of my eyes and made some decidedly zombie-like noises, my mood improved.
At any rate, shortly afterward I fell asleep. Come to think of it, I might have cried myself to sleep. I haven’t done that since I was a kid. It was nice in a maudlin way. There was nothing nice, however, about waking up. When I tried to lift my head off my stupid pancake of a tie-pillow, a blunt arrow of pain stabbed my neck and fanned out into my spine. I yelped and tumbled off the toilet, almost helpless to soften my fall. There was a loud crack as I hit the tiles and I thought for sure I had snapped something important. But it was the sound of my crick neck snapping back into place. When I sat up I could rotate my head again.
Eye Witness: Zombie Page 7
