The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy)

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  All that mattered was that the charges had gone off in an uneven pattern and the top of Neysor’s tomb had started its collapse onto the building that I was standing in front of.

  To think that if I’d looked up a second earlier or later I may very well never have met… I’ll get there in a minute.

  I didn’t see the chunk until it was too late, only just managing to make sure that I didn’t get completely crushed, but it wasn’t enough.

  The bastard of a thing hit my left leg.

  “You son of a…! Ow! Fuck you!” It took a lot of energy to not just keep yelling at the inanimate object that had a sizable amount of my flesh and blood.

  Well, less energy, more the fact that it had friends that were raining like flyers in an American high-school stairwell.

  I watch a lot of movies, alright?

  Even still I gave the blend of concrete and metal a death-stare as I started my hobble away.

  I’d hoped to speed off like a cheetah to my friends with the dust cloud far behind, but it seemed that I was stuck at a pace closer to those little pugs with wheels instead of back legs.

  Believe me when I tell you that when you have at least two buildings falling down around you, you do not want to be moving like an inbred paraplegic dog.

  Then I heard the thunderous roar of another explosion and I couldn’t help but look back.

  Don’t look back.

  The first building roof that was partially inside the other exploded and threw literal tons of rubble into the sky. I was mesmerised by the sight for a moment before it all started to fall.

  That’s when I started my real running.

  The sounds, the pain, the fire, everything, they were all overloading me. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me, whether it was because of the tunnels that had been closing ever since my injury or plain old light pollution I couldn’t tell, I just knew that my eyes were useless and locked them shut.

  I pushed the very idea of pain out of my mind and just ran. My leg crunched and buckled but I wouldn’t stop, I was barely moving at a human’s pace while the fiery chunks lit up the night and tore through everything in their path.

  The ground started to shake and I knew it was finally happening, the first building was coming down to the ground and I was seconds from being buried in dirt and destruction with Neysor.

  I refused to look back or open my eyes even when I could tell that the toppling masses had clearly reached the other side of the street. I heard them tearing up the building from where I’d first seen the flames of the apocalypse crackling to life.

  My leg had started to get back to normal despite the massive stress on it and I could start to pick up speed. The dust cloud had already started its billowing cloud of death though and I was right in the kill box.

  I held my breath in preparation for the first blast of dust, which proved useless I might add as seemingly the entire cloud ended up in my nose. It was a similar story for the physical preparations I tried to do for the second and truly dangerous wave which I could feel was right about to flatten me.

  That’s when my body came to my aid as my fear riddled mind failed me. It was my legs that saved me, they seemed to know something that I didn’t and pushed me into the air while I kept my eyes tightly shut.

  I felt like I was in the air forever, floating above it all, and then I was on solid ground.

  Semi-solid ground…

  Mushy solid ground… For the longest time I refused to open my eyes even though it was clear that I was safe, judging from how far away the sounds of things getting flung around and destroyed were.

  I was terrified that my legs had saved me by landing me on some poor survivor.

  With a whole lot of wincing I opened my eyes one at a time and let out a sigh of relief as I looked at the pumpkin that my shoes had made home.

  I stepped out of the rooftop garden and shook the orange goop off as I stepped up onto the concrete barrier. I looked down at the settling destruction a good twelve storeys below me and felt pretty damn proud of my body’s inbuilt autopilot.

  A thanks seemed to be in order to my legs which had prevented me from becoming like the pumpkin which I’d just desecrated.

  I decided against it, staring threateningly at a block of concrete and thanking my body parts in one day seemed unhealthy.

  The crackling sound of a cheap walkie-talkie coming to life echoed from my pocket and for a moment I was astounded by the fact that it had survived so long, “John!? John!? You there mate? Piss off Wolf! I made the call and if he gets eaten I’ll take the blame!” A broken and static-y voice that barely sounded like Harry called out.

  I pulled it out and pushed in the button after some fiddling and responded, “Harry? Yeah, yeah, I’m here. What’s up?”

  “What’s up!? Last we heard you were going for your little pissing contest and then we hear half the city coming down!”

  I sneezed and a bit of dust and glass came out, making me immediately pat myself down looking for other potentially fatal injuries while blowing my nose and coughing.

  “You right?” Harry asked concernedly.

  “Yeah, nah… yeah. Yeah, I’m good. And what are you talking about? It’s not that-” I looked out over the destruction with new eyes and nodded in agreeance, “I suppose you’ve got a point. I ended up burying that fellow with a building. That’s such a weird thing to say…”

  “It sounds weird too. Went good?”

  “Well I’m having this conversation aren’t I?” An explosion in the distance tried to contest my assertion but quickly fizzled out, “How’s things on your end?”

  “Pretty good, we got into one of those under construction subway-stations. There are a few lights, its mostly gated, and everyone seems a whole lot more comfortable now that we’re out of the open. How long do you think you and Greg are gonna be?”

  There was a long gap before I could even push the button, I hadn’t even thought about what we were going to do in terms of finding and/or saving Greg, “Greg stayed behind with a few of the others while I took on the Commander. He’s probably just waiting for us to go get him. You wanna go get Wolf and Kate? I’ll need some help on this one.”

  “I could-”

  “I told you before Har, those people need a human in charge, there’s still too much stigma with… us. Just get the others.”

  Another long silence, but I could tell that one was simply from annoyance, then there was the rustling sound as the walkie-talkie was pushed into someone’s chest.

  “He-Hello?” Wolf asked confoundedly.

  “Hey, I need you or Kate to come help me find Greg. He got a bit held back in a fight. I’m at that building that we hit before all this.”

  There was a tussle and then Kate was on the other end. “Hold on, just slow down a second. What?”

  That ‘What?’ did not sound promising, “Greg, he held off a few of the other aliens while I took care of Neysor. You mind if Wolf comes and gives me a hand?”

  “… Could you give us a second?”

  It was less a request and more an update, I could tell, “Sure.” While I waited I looked over the fires and broken buildings, at least three had almost completely toppled over and a few more looked like they were just waiting for the wind to change.

  There were a few more scattered small explosive and fiery pops before Kate finally came back, “You there?” I didn’t get to speak before she continued on, “I think we should accept that he didn’t make it John. He knew the risk going in on this.” She’d changed so much since the apocalypse. I’m sure a lot of people did, but I just wasn’t sure how I felt about that particular change.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I said no Kate. He’s alive, alright? And I promised, so we’re going looking for him, he deserves that much.” I could feel just how icy cold my words were, but I didn’t care, I’d work on repairing and defining Kate and I’s relationship later. For the moment I needed to know that I hadn’t just killed my friend b
y leaving him behind.

  “John, this isn’t your choice to make. We aren’t leaving these people to die and we need you here so we can start working on what we do next.” She sounded a bit pleading that time around, a bit more caring even, and it was wearing on me. She had a way with me, probably had it with everyone though.

  I went to argue, a fair bit less cold than last time, maybe a bit more open to change too, but I was interrupted by a voice coming from behind me.

  “Good luck trying to convince them to help anyone John.” The voice was a familiar male’s, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where I’d last heard it.

  I reached for a gun that wasn’t there and turned to face the voice in the dark.

  He was sitting cross-legged under a makeshift tent on the gravel a few feet from the pumpkin patch with his head bent over and his long black hair over his face, entertaining himself by dropping small stones one by one, “Bet you didn’t think you’d see my face again, didja?” He said as he looked up at me with a smile, pushing the hair off of his bony angular features.

  “Oh…Hi…”

  The Lone Sniper

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, you alright?” the dead man asked me. Gabriel was the first person I’d seen that actually looked like a survivor in a zombie apocalypse.

  The olive skin that clung to every bone on his face was even paler than when I’d last seen and, judging from the over-filled camouflage backpack, he was sleeping wherever he fell.

  I wanted to ask how the Hell he’d managed to last so long, maybe it had something to do with the big black sniper rifle he had propped up on his bag.

  Suddenly I became aware that I’d been staring for an extended period and jumped into conversation mode, “Yeah, sorry, you just… I thought you didn’t make it.” I stammered despite my desperate attempts to sound welcoming.

  The sniper shrugged, “I guess that’s fair, I mean, when you burnt down that building with you and whatshisface in it I figured you’d died.”

  He stopped for a second, like he was counting, “Then when you crashed that plane into that ship, then when you got into that prisoner situation out the front of the ship, then when you got followed by those alien dudes, then again just now with the getting your ass kicked and trying to outrun a rubble tsunami. I mean damn dude, someone out there really wants you dead.”

  I think he was smiling, but it well could’ve been his face tensing and trying to hold onto its muscle and skin.

  I went with a smile, returning it before walking over to him and plopping down next to him under the covering and onto the wet ground after he shifted his bag and made room for me, “So you’ve been keeping an eye on me then?”

  “Not much on T.V. these days, besides, someone’s got to.” He said before starting to rummage through his backpack. He pulled out a tin of beans and an old can opener, offered the beans to me with his fingerless gloved hands, which I denied, and then proceeded to open the signature food of the post-apocalypse, “Eh, your loss.”

  “What about the others? What happened?” I asked as he slurped up some of the beans directly from the can while bending the lid with his free hand into a sort of scoop shape, an action that I hadn’t seen since WWII.

  “Chopper came down across the river then… nothing too interesting. I’ll tell you all bout it later.” He said with a full mouth. It took a few a seconds but he eventually swallowed with a barely noticeable shudder before grabbing a bottle of water and taking a big swig, “Aah…” he let out in more of a groan than a relief before continuing on to eat more of his beans.

  “You alright? You don’t sound so good.”

  He nodded and winced as he swallowed another mouthful, “I’m fine, smoke inhalation screwed with my throat, it’s getting better though, slowly.” His words were heaved and had the gruffness of a seventy year old smoker, but he seemed so adamant about not talking about the past month so I decided not to press it.

  “You seen Greg from up here?”

  “Nah, seemed like you needed more hel-”

  A loud crackle interrupted him as Wolf’s voice called through the walkie-talkie, “John? Are you alright?”

  Remembering that we’d left it kind of weirdly I fiddled with the device before calling back, “Hey? Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry. What’s up?”

  “Kate said you stopped talking to her. I just wanted to make sure everything was all good. You coming back yet?”

  “Not yet, just found Gabriel, we’re gonna have a look for Greg and then come find you guys, we could use a hand though?”

  There was a long silence before Kate took back the walkie-talkie, “We can’t leave here. You need to come back here, we can’t spend all our time hunting dead men. Greg knew the risks and-”

  Gabe scoffed and snatched the walkie-talkie from me and switched it off before stuffing it into his backpack, “Course she’d say that. Come on, help me break this down and we’ll go find him.”

  To say I was shaken by his sudden assertion of dominance would be an understatement, “Wha… what?”

  He stood up and nudged me out of the way and started rolling up his black covering, wrapping it with a length of nylon rope and clipped it to the bag with a carabiner, “I said come on, we’ve gotta find him before ‘little miss self-preservationist’ decides to up and fuck off on us.”

  “I… Why do you hate her so much? You all seemed to get along before and she’s probably right. Last I saw of Greg he was fighting off a bunch of those big women… things.”

  He put on the backpack, slung his sniper rifle’s strap over his shoulder and waited for me to stand, looked me right in the eye for a minute then slapped me, “You got your listening ears on princess? We’re going to find Greg.”

  “But-” He slapped me again, harder.

  I never did know how to respond to slaps, it has a way of making me feel like I’m the one in the wrong, like I’ve done something so completely and utterly wrong that I deserved to be punished.

  Punches I can deal with, head-butts I can deal with, I mean, I can bounce back from a bullet wound without so much as a wince. But being slapped? No thanks. Probably has something to do with my childhood… let’s not go there.

  “They never told you, did they? Course they didn’t. If they had there’d be none of this ‘but’ bullshit. Day one of all this shit every one of us wanted to go back for you expect Wolf and Kate, they were convinced you were dead. And no matter much how they argued Greg wouldn’t budge.”

  I went to speak but he silenced me with hand gesture, “After we crashed he was the only one who stayed with me and Mike when we tried to get Minks out from under the chopper, the other two ran and the only reason he followed them when the corpses started closing in was to try and convince them to save your stupid ass. So think about that before you tell me he’s dead, dead-man number one.”

  I was dumbfounded. It was a lot to take in, Kate and Wolf wanting to abandon me, ditching the others, the fact that I was two seconds from doing the same thing because Kate convinced me that it was a good idea. She did have a way with people, “Got a weapon I can use? I just demolished my last one.”

  Blaming her didn’t come easy, I couldn’t see the influence she had on me, on Wolf, on most of us, because I was an idiot. An idiot who was convinced that the first person that had really entered my life in a personal way for a long time was worth my love because I thought she loved me. Hell, she could’ve in her own way… for a minute or two, but I’ll get to that later.

  Something Blue

  “A knife. Really? A knife?” I whinged for the fifth time on our walk in the steady spitting rain while looking over the eight inch hunter’s knife. It’s handle appeared to made of some kind of bone, it was really quite nice, but I just felt that as far as zombie apocalypse weapons go a pig-sticker wasn’t the most efficient

  Gabe shrugged, “Quit your bitchin’ princess, or that’ll be your new call-sign. A knife is a plenty useful tool if you know what you’re doing. Besides, you asked f
or a weapon, I’ve got that knife and my rifle, and you are not touching my rifle.” He didn’t mean to, I knew that, but every second word out of his mouth made me feel so incredibly… privileged.

  And it wasn’t just the way he spoke, it was everything about him, like how he clearly had maybe ten or fifteen hours sleep since day one, how that can of beans that he slurped down was probably his meal for the next two days, how he walked with the obvious gait of someone with an unhealed wound.

  It was also abundantly clear that it didn’t have to be that way for him, there hadn’t been a food shortage and there were plenty of places to hunker down to heal or just to sleep.

  I’d seen it dozens of times in the past.

  It’s like PTSD without any of the blackouts or bursts of emotions based on specific situations.

  It just sorta eats away at you until there’s nothing left. First thing to go is sleep, because of either the nightmares or survivors guilt, then there’s eating, because you stop feeling hungry and then, finally, you either break or you get through it, sometimes both.

  Clarity is a weird thing.

  “Can you stop staring at me for a second or, you know, forever. It’s fucking creepy.” He seemed to be handling it well though.

  “Sorry, it’s just that you look so…”

  “Grey? Tired? Sore?”

  “I was going to say shitty.” I joked.

  He half-laughed without looking to me, “Well fuck you very much John. You aren’t exactly in the primest of shape.”

  I looked myself over, “I look proper fine, I’ve got my blue threads and shizit.” I said in my best gangsta impression.

  “You dropped your grills there J-Boi. And you know for a fact that looks aren’t everything. Sure I look like shit, but, other than the corpses, nobody’s trying to mount my head on a wall.”

  He had a point, “Yeah, s’pose your right, but I’m crossing them off my list.”