by Pete Aldin
“Where you going?” Lewis said.
“Farmhouse. Be dark in a few hours and I need some parts to try 'n fix this.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Can I come?”
“Can you…? You think I'm gonna leave you here?”
Lewis blinked.
“Shit.”
He let his pack slip to the road and peeled back the sleeve of the green button-down shirt he'd found last night until the tattoo showed. Lewis pressed his lips together, concentrating.
“Leave no man behind,” Elliot said. “Even if he did almost get me eaten.”
The growing peace on the boy's face vanished, he blushed. Softly he said, “I didn't mean to.”
Elliot grunted, picking up his stuff. “We got a hike. Grab your gear and that spear gun.” He started off, heading up the verge, then paused halfway as his companion climbed backwards from the truck. “And grab the keys from the ignition.”
*
There was no one home. Elliot felt the truth of it, because there were no dogs barking, no dogs tracking his incursion warily or waiting with wagging tails. Farms always had dogs, or rather farmers did.
Still, they approached carefully from the east, from the shelter of bushland and across an empty paddock, Lewis forty yards behind Elliot and a dozen to his left so as to offset them for any would-be snipers. The grass was only ankle height; grazing animals had been here recently.
Lewis labored under the burden of his swag. The huge bedroll had been stuffed with personal items looted from the garage apartment: toothbrush but no paste since Elliot didn't trust it; a full change of clothes slightly too big; a rain-jacket. His original personal items were all gone now, scattered around a different property neither of them would ever return to. Puffing and panting, he looked like he'd never done a minute's exercise in his life, despite his skinny physique.
The vicinity of the house boasted a stone drive and turnaround with a well-kept rose-bed as a centerpiece. Lavender plants along the near side of the building were not flowering which Elliot thanked God for—lavender put him in mind of old people for some reason. Apricot, plum and lemon trees had been spread around the drying yard behind the house, three of each, the stone fruit showing signs of bird raids, unsalvageable. A chicken coop marked the back boundary of the yard. Ducks lazed around a small dam on the near side of the paddock beyond the house where the cows were. The barn he'd seen had peeling walls, one door swinging open in the breeze. Steel fittings in the other structure indicated it probably was a milking shed. The orange tractor had a flat-tire; the shoulder of an old 70s model car poked from behind it. A gas barbecue and home-made workbench furnished the back porch, while the front one had a bench seat and pot plants on it.
Elliot entered the house first, leaving the SIG and shotgun with Lewis who lay in the paddock. He moved from room to room on the balls of his feet with the M4 at the ready. No one was there. He found a General Motors Holden key hanging on a See Tasmania keytag by the back door. He pocketed it, hoping it belonged to the old car behind the sheds. The two bedrooms reeked with a history of bed farts and unwashed linen; one belonged to a single parent or a couple with only one partner making their side of the bed. The child's room was wallpapered with bad crayon and pencil drawings of princesses, dinosaurs, cats, trees, people; the bed was also unmade. School notices and bills addressed to Mrs Emily Wilson clung to the fridge beneath magnets along with a photo of a small girl in school uniform. In the kitchen, a heavy traffic of ants ran between a crack in the wall and a single dirty bowl on the counter crusted with the remnants of cereal and UHT milk. An empty UHT carton had been rinsed and left to drain on the sideboard. Everything was dry.
Elliot returned to the back door, whistled loud and waved a hand. A head popped up followed by the rest of the body and Lewis loped awkwardly toward the house while Elliot returned to scour a kitchen stripped almost clean of food stuffs. He scratched at a mosquito bite as the backdoor squeaked shut. Maybe the chickens had lain recently.
Lewis slid the weapons on the small dining table, then pitched his swag on an armchair and slouched onto a couch that desperately needed re-springing. He put his feet up on the coffee table, his head back against the cushion.
Elliot returned to the girl's room, gathered up a handful of crayons, a notebook, a rubiks cube and jigsaw puzzle box and placed them on the table by Lewis's feet, inviting him to keep his mind busy. Anything to prevent a return to his earlier malaise.
Lewis's eyebrows rose. “Where'd you get these?”
He said, “In the bedroom back there.”
Lewis got up and headed that way.
Elliot figured he'd be okay for a while and shoved one of the armchairs against the front door. He exited out the back, checking the outside of the house and the area around the sheds. No sign of deaders. He did find plenty of empty cans, bottles and string. He used these to create noise-makers and strung them around the house as hidden as he could, creating tripwires and an early-warning system. The key by the back door started the old car—a gold, rust-spotted “Torana”—without any trouble. Just over half a tank of fuel. He revved it a couple of times to blow out the pipes and switched it off, pocketed the key.
The chickens pressed around him as he raided the chicken coop. He retrieved six good sized eggs which he carried back to the house in a plastic icecream container. He thought maybe they hadn't been fed for a while and considered doing it. Later. He'd do it later.
Back in the living room, he eased himself into the spare armchair, closed his eyes for a moment's rest. Images swam around his mind's eye, most of them unpleasant. No peace there. He leaned forward to inspect Lewis's artwork instead. The shapes and swirls on Lewis's page were subtle but they were all in black. Depressing. Maybe the cauliflower-eared idiot at Southend Security had been right. What the hell was he thinking giving the young guy pencils? There was work to do and he needed to be busy.
“Time you fixed dinner,” he said.
Lewis took a purple pencil, placed the pointed lead inside a thick black line he'd outlined and started shading it. “Can I do it later?”
For Christ's sake. The picture was unsettling, like Lewis was drawing some kind of voodoo spell. The dark colors, the shapes, they messed with Elliot's head, made him want to kick the table over.
“It's called helping, man,” he said. “Doing your part.”
“Can I do breakfast instead?” The question was asked in a polite tone, if distracted, Lewis' focus entirely on the page. He put the pencil to his lips, considering his next move.
Elliot had to clench his jaw and remind himself of what Lewis had been through. Through gritted teeth, he said, “I'm securing the place, in case you hadn't been paying attention. Making sure we don't have visitors—and if we do, we're aware of them well before they're aware of us. And getting these.” He shook the plastic container, rattling the eggs. “I need you to do your part, making dinner.”
Lewis scribbled harder. “I'm not hungry.”
Elliot put a hand over his jaw, rubbed hard—then flashed back to Uncle John doing the same thing, on all the occasions where he was about to become truly mad. He dropped the hand. “I am.”
Lewis kept drawing. Elliot leaner closer still, studied him and couldn't tell if the young guy was even aware of him, he seemed so engrossed in what he was doing.
Elliot let a few options run through his mind and chose to stomp into the kitchen and get himself a fry pan, spatula and cooking oil. Out on the back porch, he used the barbecue to cook himself a meal of three fried eggs which he ate from the pan with the spatula. He washed and dried the pan and spatula in the kitchen where the water still ran clean and strong. He placed the container with the remaining eggs on the table in front of Lewis.
“In case you get hungry.”
Lewis didn't respond. The picture was looking like a human figure. A woman maybe, in blouse and skirt.
Elliot sighed and selected a book from a n
earby shelf on Australian history to spend the last of the useful daylight reading it by a window, occasionally glancing outside and down the driveway. When the light became too bad to read by, he got up, found all the useful stuff he could in the house and started piling it on the floor near Lewis's swag.
He came back into the living area with a blanket to find Lewis flicking a switch up and down without result.
“Do you have a torch?” Lewis asked him.
“A flashlight? I do, but we're not using it.”
“Why?”
“Anyone outside, they'll see it. They see it, they'll come for us.”
Lewis checked the windows, scratched his ear with the back of a pencil. “How do we see at night then?”
“We don't. We sleep. We do things when it's sun up.”
“It's … it's too early to go to bed.”
“Your family stayed up all night?”
Lewis winced but said nothing. After a moment, he went back to the table and hunched closer over his sketchpad, his coloring frantic.
Elliot lifted the blanket and nailed it over the window. He pointed to the pile on the floor, said, “Too late to cook eggs. You can eat from there if you're hungry.” There wasn't much: some old muesli bars, a plastic packet of raisins and a few UHT milk cartons. All labeled Australian produce which he could only hope meant uninfected. “Better you don’t touch this and eat the eggs tomorrow. But if you have to take something from here, let me know what you eat. It's important.”
Lewis didn't look up.
Elliot took a plastic jug of tap-water into the parents' room. He put it on the bedside table, cleared the surface of lace doily and reading lamp. He leaned the shotgun and rifle against the wall by the door, unbuckled his belt and lay it over the table, the piton hammer and SIG clattering briefly. He hung his shirt on the back of a chair to air. He was running clean water over his toothbrush in the bathroom when Lewis appeared at the doorway.
“Where'm I sleeping?”
Elliot turned the tap off. “I got the main bedroom. You got the kid's one.” He stuck the brush in his mouth and started scrubbing, sans toothpaste; he'd never been able to use it since he'd read about its chemicals doing damage to your man parts. And there was always the chance it was toothpaste bearing the agent that had created the deaders.
“Can't I drag the mattress into your room?”
Elliot spat into the sink, ran some water and continued brushing. “Nope,” he said around the brush. “You snore.”
The hallway floor creaked with Lewis's steps away, then he halted. “Do I use my swag or the bed?”
Elliot cleared his mouth again to answer. “Whatever you want. But you use the swag, you have to roll it up in the morning.” He waited. After a moment, the floorboards started creaking again.
He finished brushing, washed his face. He considered the shower stall. The evening was still warm, the house stuffy. A cold shower would be better now than in the morning when the temperature had dropped—and he was weeks overdue for a full wash. But he was exhausted and he'd suffered worse things than cold showers in the cool of the morning.
“You showering now or in the morning?” he called.
There was no answer. Something—probably the swag—dragged across the bare boards of the hallway and into the child's bedroom. The door closed.
“In the morning, it is,” Elliot said and rinsed his brush. He tapped out the excess water and left it there to dry overnight. With cupped hands, he scooped water into his mouth, swished it and spat, dried his hands on an old towel hanging over the shower. He took a piss in the toilet, flushed. He did another lap, checking the doors and the windows, except the one behind Lewis's closed door. He leaned against the wall and listened for any sounds coming from the room, but there were none. He stood there for five minutes, or maybe ten or twenty, angry at the universe for lumbering him with a teenager who could barely communicate, who seemed incapable of cooperating fully, of acting to survive, who kept folding in on himself internally. And wouldn't Elliot love to do that, just curl up in the fetal position in a warm dark space and let the dark take him? Let it take him, all his memories, all the things he'd seen and done, the screw-ups, the carnage?
And yet.
And yet.
“A man don't give in. A real man don't give the world the satisfaction.” John's words. John's legacy. The only Uncle John Advice that Elliot knew to be true, useful.
He went into his room, kicked off his boots and closed the door, checked his weapons. Then he lay on top of the bed, dragging a thin comforter up to his waist. And fell into a fragmented sleep, populated with meaningless dreams.
6
“What the hell … ?”
Elliot rolled off the bed, kicking the comforter aside and scooping up his belt. Lewis's head popped out of his door the exact same time as Elliot's; the frantic lowing of cattle must have woken them simultaneously.
“What is that?” Lewis asked.
There was more cow noise, an abrupt surge of raw animal pain and panic that Elliot couldn't put words to. But the meaning was obvious.
“What is it?” the young man insisted.
“One guess,” said Elliot.
Lewis's eyes popped wide. According to his own words the day before, he'd never come across deaders for himself. Sadistic bikers, sure, but not deaders.
Had to happen sooner or later.
Elliot buckled his belt, reached for the shotgun and padded barefoot into the living room. Lewis followed at his shoulder as he went to the west and north windows to peer outside. There were no pusbags anywhere along the driveway or around the house on those sides. He went into the kitchen on the south side where the paddock with the cows lay. The animals were pressing up one end of the field toward the milking shed. But he couldn't see clearly into the field, though he could imagine what was happening.
“You have to go and see.”
He startled at that, forgetting Lewis was nearby. “A quick look maybe. We still need to go check those sheds for car parts. Here, you might need this.” He handed Lewis the piton hammer which the kid took as if it were hot.
“I don't wanna go out there.”
“But you want me to? We're in this together or not at all.”
Lewis spun the handle a moment then shoved it through a belt-loop of his jeans where it wobbled precariously. He swallowed. “Okay.”
“Better.” Elliot grabbed his pack and extricated the torn sneakers he'd found near Harrietville. After weeks in boots, his feet were craving a change of footwear. “Go get the spear gun and your shoes. Careful with the speargun.” He pointed down the hall. “We'll go out the back.”
*
Three zombies were visible through the railings where Elliot and Lewis crouched. One lay trampled and unmoving, doubly dead. Two others had brought down a heifer, chowing down while their meal still shuddered and kicked.
“How in Christ did they do that?” Elliot wondered aloud. It seemed quite a feat for them to bring down an animal that size. “And where'd they get in?” He scanned the fenceline forty yards away, saw the narrow staff-gate ajar. He'd missed that yesterday, dammit.
“Can we save it?” Lewis whispered. His eyes were big and round, watery.
Elliot frowned at him. “Save it? I'm more worried about saving us. A couple aren't dangerous, but if there's more of them around—”
The heifer gave a wet moan, head lifting a moment before crashing back into the grass. One of the corpses pulled a string of tendon from its leg.
Lewis started to rise. “We have to help it!”
A zombie cocked an ear, listening. Gristle trailed from its mouth.
Elliot gripped his shoulder and pulled him back down. “It's a cow. Cows are food. We used to eat 'em, now they are.” He grimaced as a waft of death-stink blew his way. His empty stomach churned. “Better the cow than you.”
One of the dying animal's legs thrashed out, knocking a zombie over. The head lifted again, then crashed into the ground. It wasn'
t long for this world, but there was no doubt it was having a real bad time on its way out. When he turned back, Lewis was staring at him, those puppy-dog eyes wide and imploring.
Elliot's shoulders drooped.
“I take the deaders out, but you follow four yards behind me and four to my right just like yesterday. You don't fire, you just keep a lookout for any others sneaking or crawling around. You alert me if you see one.”
The kid's face tightened a little and Elliot wondered if he thought Elliot was still sore about yesterday's near miss at the car.
Well, tough shit if he is. He tossed the shotgun through the railing, worming after it. When he was back in a crouch, he held out his hand for the spear gun. “You carry the shottie.” Lewis passed it across and slipped through after it.
Elliot stood and slipped the two extra spears from their rubber fittings, kept them in his left hand with the weapon in his right. He started across the field wondering what the hell he was doing, putting their lives at risk to mercy-kill a cow. He glanced back and grunted satisfaction that at least the kid was learning to follow orders: he was exactly where Elliot had told him to be, head and gaze sweeping their surrounds.
He stepped in close and put spears through both pusbags' heads before either became aware of him. He reloaded the final spear and shifted around to the heifer's head, sighed and lowered the weapon.
Lewis came alongside, keeping some distance between himself and the carnage. “Why are you waiting?”
“It's dead.”
“What?” The young man stayed where he was, but leaned toward the cow. The animal was still as a stone, eyes wide and bulging. Lewis made a little noise in his throat. It sounded like defeat.
Elliot retrieved the spears from the deaders' heads and wiped them clean on the cow's hide. He'd rinse them in kerosene or gasoline later. There weren't any other deaders around and shutting the gate over the other side would be simple. He studied the other dozen cows milling at the end of the field by the gate to the cattle run.
