“Woah! What the Hell have you done with my gun Marcus?” I said as I turned to see him standing up and dusting himself off. “This was my favourite gun and now it looks like a water pistol!” It really did, it had a spherical green glowing ball where the slide had once been and the muzzle was all white and… weird.
“That alien rifle? It was a dead end. I couldn’t get it to work so I spent last night with the ‘two birds, one stone’ proverb rattling around and that’s what I got out. Infinite ammo I believe, it appears to use solar energy and fires the corrosive round. Well, mostly corrosive… Doesn’t appear to do metal or glass.”
“So… you took my gun, tore it apart and now it does less? How does that help me Mark?” I was probably more upset about it than I needed to be, he’d done well with what he had, but a gun that can’t shoot through glass?
“I think it was a measure to prevent hull breaches during interstellar travel.”
I spun around with my arms outstretched, “Are we in space mate? Am I not seeing all the pretty stars?”
“Oh fuck off Joh-”
“Can I please get a hand in here!?” Clara shouted scoldingly at us while leaning hard on Harry’s wound.
Harry laughed, “Let them keep going, it’s funny…” He slurred. I was surprised that he hadn’t gone into shock yet, pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless.
I tucked away my new gross abomination in my pocket and ran over with Mark. We both looked over my pale friend, blood pooling around Clara’s splayed fingers and palm.
It probably wasn’t as bad as I thought, but at the time it looked like it was absolutely gushing, his life-force running out in the form of a thick red amalgamation of cells.
I went to ask what she needed me to do but then I saw Kate and Wolf coming out of the kitchen, pointing to something in the kitchen just out of sight, “What?” The response that met me was the low growling group that were shuffling their way through the kitchen and a severe look from Kate.
I snapped back to Clara, “What needs to be done?”
Clearly neither of Clara or Mark had heard the sounds, “We need to make sure there’s no fragments and then we need to-”
“The rest can wait. Go.”
“The rest canno-”
“Mark, get her and yourself out of here and into the truck, I’ll meet you out the front.” I was quiet and flat and Mark immediately drew that something was wrong from that.
He grabbed her by the shirt and pulled her away, “Zeds Clara. John’s got this.”
She shot me a few looks and said without words that I’d better take care of him before letting herself get dragged away and out the door, Mark scooping up the bag in the process while the others took point.
I dropped to my knees and put my hand firmly on Harry’s wound, “Hey, hey buddy, I need you to wake up for a second.”
“Go away… Sleepy…” He mumbled while trying to swat me away.
The growling was getting closer, they hadn’t spotted us yet, but they were close, I had to do something… nasty. I shook the discomfort from my body, got my middle finger into position and, as fast as I could, pushed inside the wound.
Oh did he scream while I kept him pinned, it sucked that I had to do that, but that was just it, I had to. And then I could feel the couch, no metal anywhere to be felt.
A good, clean wound.
Zeds entered the hallway, the screaming obviously catching their attention, but there was another sound under the zed’s growls and Harry’s seething. “Is that... Polka?” I asked the wall as it caved in under the reversing truck, burying a few of the zeds in the process.
The back door flew open and then Clara popped out a rifle shouldered. She didn’t have to say anything to get me to move. I got into the back of the truck and laid Harry on the ground, my finger still inside him.
Don’t be gross.
Clara followed me, slamming the door behind her. Wolf took that as his cue to get the Hell outta Dodge. With a bump, screech and a rev we were on the road and on our way to a better place. Clara took my position over Harry and begun giving him some much needed medical attention.
Who knew how useful vodka and dental floss could be?
Free and Clear
The duffel rolled off of Mark’s lap as Wolf took another corner a little sharper than he should’ve, Harry gripping his seatbelt tighter all the way through, “Soft edges!” he screamed drunkenly while Clara tried to keep him still.
She was applying a small amount of pressure through a folded shirt she’d grabbed on his still seeping wound while the truck rocked from side-to-side.
“You sound like you’ve lost your fair share of blood Har, how are you even still conscious?” I asked Clara more than Harry.
She half-laughed, “Blood-loss wise he’s fine, less than a pint. It’s the horse tranq I hit him before that’s got him.” She lifted the bloody shirt from his wound, checked it and then reapplied pressure, “Looks better at least.”
Mark shifted from his seat close to the driver’s, leaving the bag behind, to the one beside me and then grabbed her backpack from between us, “Why the Hell do you have horse tranquiliser?”
“I’m a… was a nurse, I’ve got a whole bunch of-”
Mark pulled out a fishing tackle box from her backpack and popped it open, “Alcohol, narcotics, dental floss, syringes, sewing needles, laptop batteries, tampons and… a single apple.” He sniffed the apple and immediately retreated, “Correction, a single rotten apple.” He declared as he threw it out the window behind him.
She shrugged, “I carry what I need, food was always around in the city. Pantry raider’s paradise.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t explain why you shot him up with stallion knock-out juice.” Mark said with actual concern.
“He wouldn’t quit fidgeting and bitching, kept saying something about John fingering him.”
Sexual assault is not funny and if you so much as smiled you are… You’re just as bad as me and should be ashamed.
“Besides, he’s fine, I know how much to give him. It’s what I used to use to get to sleep in the first few days.” She said with an almost cheerful amount of nostalgia.
Mark went to argue a few more times but decided it was either futile or that he agreed with her, either way I was happy for the chance for some peace and quiet.
I was in a weird state of flux between unadulterated happiness and an almost uncontrollable amount of paranoia. It’s not that I’m a pessimist, that amount of luck just didn’t seem natural. Sure Harry was shot and we’d lost people along the way, but we were on the road to bigger and better things.
Suddenly though, and without warning, something hit me, something that I didn’t expect to hit me ever again.
I was bored out of my bloody mind.
“Hey Wolf, should we pull over? Stretch our legs?” I asked hopefully.
He shook his head, “We’ll be at the Caboolture airfield in less than half an hour. We don’t know what’s waiting around here and I’d like to keep this.” A rumble rolled from the engine through the whole truck as he knocked it up a gear and, judging from the smile that I caught glinting in the rear-view, there wasn’t much that could get him to stop.
As bored as I was, I was happy that my team was doing well, Mark had worked through his issues and was napping in a stray sun-beam, Harry was going to pull through, Kate and Wolf seemed to be enjoying the drive, and Clara… I actually hadn’t gotten much of a read on her.
Everyone else had seemed to grow an attachment with her, something I must’ve missed out on while she was subtly using me like an RC car.
“So what’s your story love?”
She roused from her semi-coma, looked at me dazedly for a second. For some reason she turned back to Harry and checked if his wound was still seeping before pulling away the shirt, tossing it out the window behind her, “He’s fine, the bleeding’s stopped.”
It took me a moment to realise that she genuinely hadn’t understood what I’d
said, “Good, very good, but I was asking about you.”
She regarded me with her head on a slight angle and then it clicked, “Oh! Oh, sorry, off with the fairies,” it was in that moment that I knew why everyone liked her so much, she was real and caring, “um… Bit of broad question…”
“Ok, what were you before? Your profession, I mean.” I’d already gathered that she was a nurse, you know, because she said it, but you’d be surprised how easy it makes people open up about who they really are.
“Well, I’m a… I was a nurse, and so was my sister, and my mother, and… pretty much everyone else in my family.” She smiled at some memory or another before continuing on, “All I ever wanted to be was a writer. ‘There’s no money in it’ is what they said, so I got pushed into nursing and I hated it, I hated the study, I hated the hours, I hated the pressure, but you know what the worst part was?” She asked, waiting for me to guess.
“The pus and blood?” I replied jokingly.
She scrunched up her nose and shook her head, “No, that was bad, but no. They all loved it! They all got to do what they wanted. Me? I couldn’t even make friends, let alone hold down a relationship. It wasn’t all bad though, got to fill the void with video games, collectables and writing fanfiction without the annoyance of making time for another person.”
I smiled, I knew exactly what she meant, “Yeah, it is pretty great. But when you find the right one all that stuff sort of drifts away.” We both took a moment and looked at our specific others, “Anyway! What about your sister and whatnot? They survive?”
Clara almost painfully forced herself back to our conversation from her happy moment of looking at Harry, “I don’t know, haven’t seen them around.”
That threw me, “You didn’t look for them?”
She shrugged and looked back to Harry, “Sorta… My father was the abusive type. Not physically or anything, he was just angry all the time, punching holes in walls, throwing plates around, and I knew they’d go straight to him for protection. I mean, don’t get me wrong they’re lovely people but they didn’t like me. So I grabbed my laptop and charger and went my own way.”
Her words drifted off as she started to stroke Harry’s hair and I swear I heard him purr, even unconscious she made him happy.
I got the gravitation with her, she was cool, she was one of those people that you could just sit with and talk to for hours about anything.
I hoped that one day I’d be given the opportunity to confirm that, but it was clear that she was happy patting her partner and I didn’t want to mess with that.
But I was still bored.
I nudged Mark with my shoulder, “Hey, Mark, entertain me.”
He shot up “Are we being attacked cap’n!?”
“Um… no… matey? What were you dreaming about?”
He let out a sigh of disappointment and slumped into his seat, “Space cowboys…”
“Oooh… Shiny.”
Clara chuckled at the exchange before returning to her silent patting.
My feet involuntarily tapped on the metal floor until I thought of a subject of conversation, “Hey!” My shout jolted Mark back to life before he could drift off again, “What was with you in the tunnel? You’re all… not dead. How’d you manage that?”
No questioning that Mark was awake now, uncomfortable too. He straightened up and worked through several facial expressions, like he’d been waiting for the questions, both wanting to get it over with and hoping that it’d never come up. “It started when we first founded back in the day, I was ecstatic with the opportunity to work with the things that went bump in the night. But it wasn’t the first time…”
I felt a flash-back coming on, “No. No harp sit-com back in time thing, just tell me.”
I’ve done things, you guys know that, but some of it I’d rather leave in the basement of time. And I definitely didn’t want to hear the creepy experimentation shit that Mark had been involved with before Tasmania.
Mark looked at me with a sort of grateful knowing, “Alright, well, short version is I messed around with genetics and gained the ability to apparently live forever. It wasn’t until the gassing that I gained the healing factor, Steve and I were kind of confused by it and, truth be told, before you showed up we were scared. We’d been waiting for any other mutations to surface, impaired cognitive function, psychosis-”
“Sudden desire to eat people.” I joked.
He smiled and nodded, clearly appreciating the fact that I wasn’t freaking out, “Yeah, that too, but so far it’s just been benefits, take a nap, wake up fit as a fiddle.”
I didn’t notice it at first, but Clara had become rather engrossed in our conversation, no doubt upset that I’d told him to keep it short and sweet.
I silently wondered if she was mentally writing a story about us and I was particularly curious as to how she’d write me.
Can you imagine that? A writer describing you? Let alone being the creation of some weirdo’s idealised version of themselves after a caffeine binge and half-a-dozen sleepless nights.
I shudder at the thought.
“Why so quiet about it then?”
He shrugged, “Life hasn’t really slowed down recently, besides, didn’t seem important.” It made sense, up until then we’d had enough difficulty getting people to trust us with three vampires in our clan, I couldn’t imagine a genetic oddity would go down well.
“I’m just glad I know now. And I’m sure we’ll get to talk all about that other stuff when we get back to Tazzy, so relax Clara.” I said as I looked at her on the edge of her seat, having abandoned Harry to his unstoppable horse tranquiliser fuelled nightmares for the opportunity to hear a good story.
It was incredible to think about how she trusted us with her life yet knew almost nothing about who we once were. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find trust-worthy people in the middle of Hell, let alone trusting ones. And it was about to get a whole lot harder.
FMR?
Suddenly we ground to a halt and immediately I went into survey mode with my new and ‘improved’ pistol, scanning the area around us through the open windows.
That’s when I realised where we were with a chuckle, “You said half hour.” I said as I tossed my gun to Mark who promptly looked over it for fear I’d damaged it.
Wolf gleefully beamed at me through the rear-view, “That was before I remembered that speed cameras were no longer a thing. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”
I was too.
Wolf had somehow managed to half our time and none of us had seemed to notice. I suppose that’s the benefit of conversation.
Clara pointed at the drooling Harry across her lap and gestured for me to help, which I did happily, scooping him over my shoulder before getting out the back with Clara with her backpack and Mark with the duffel in tow.
I breathed in the fresh air and stretched out my legs before looking around. There were three closed hangars along the long and lifeless stretch of tarmac, as well as a single propeller two person plane sitting just beside the middle hangar.
I looked to the empty motorway behind us and was shocked to think that no one had made it so far, not in a car at least. But the lack of aircraft made me feel a bit off, normally there were at least a few choppers scattered around.
To me it also meant that our truck would stick out like a sore thumb for the filthsy little thievses that lurked about in the night, call me paranoid, “Hey Wolf, park up behind that last hanger, we’ll spend the night and pull the last leg off tomorrow. Har could use the time.”
He shot me a thumbs up and Kate jumped out of the passenger seat before he drove off down the tarmac with a hearty rumble.
The rest of us followed him while keeping our eyes on the surrounding area and I could feel Harry starting to come back to the land of the living, “Mark, check that plane, see if you can get it up and running.” I said as I got Harry onto his feet and guided him to Clara like a half-conscious toddler, “You take him to the
hangar, I’m going to have a look around, make sure there aren’t any surprises.” Both of them did as they were told without questioning it.
After a few minutes of wandering and confirming the airfield was clear Kate and I came to a stop in the middle of the tarmac, watching as Mark taxied the barely functional plane into the hangar next to where the others had started to make themselves comfortable, “They’re good people John, really good.” Kate said matter-of-factly, “Do you really think we’ll all make it south?” She asked hopefully and with the slightest hint of pessimism.
“I really do, from here it’s just a matter of holding on for dear life while the roller-coaster rolls downhill.” I looked up and watched as sunlight fought its way to us through the clouds, “It’s funny. The light also finds a way, doesn’t it?”
Instead of a verbal response I got pulled to Kate and when I looked down to ask what was going on I got a kiss.
None of that cheek bullcrap either.
A proper, on-the-lips kiss.
My heart fluttered as I wrapped my arms around her, tightening and feeling her own heart thumping against mine. That was it, what I’d been fighting for.
Then it started to rain.
Fuck you precipitation!
Anyway, we broke apart and smiled at each other for a few seconds before making our way hastily to the hangar. I couldn’t for the life of me get my heart to calm down.
It was magical.
Once we got into the empty hangar large enough to hold a 747 we were met with stares from everyone who’d huddled in a circle near the centre of the cold and incredibly smooth floors, including the very not-tranqed Harry.
As we shut the door and made our way over the staring stopped and they returned to their conversations, “… but seriously, how are you up and about?” Wolf asked Harry, “Where did you serve? Afghanistan? I bet it was Afghanistan.”
“For the last time I’ve never been to the Middle East!” Harry shouted.
The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy) Page 17
