I woke up, disoriented and confused. Lomax was snoring in the bunk above me. I wasn’t aboard a plane I was aboard the HMAS Canberra.
Another fucking dream. This is my life now, apparently. My own personal oracle of all the terrible things that are going to happen to me. Because I could tell, even in the dream, that whatever plane I was on, that fighter jet was not on the same side. That distant sun-glinted cockpit did not contain somebody with warm intentions towards me.
I checked my watch. It was nearly one in the morning. I didn’t feel like I was going to get back to sleep, so I pulled my jeans and shirt on, pulled my boots on, left the others sleeping in the cabin and went off prowling around the ship.
The HMAS Canberra doesn’t sleep, exactly – there’s always people in the ops room, people on the bridge, sentries on deck – but most of it is pretty quiet at night. I went for a stroll outside, and soon wished I’d brought a jacket – Brisbane during the day is a subtropical paradise even in winter, but at night it can drop down enough that a t-shirt leaves you feeling a bit chilly. Which is a petty thing to whinge about considering that we all nearly died in a blizzard two months ago.
So I was out on deck – not the main flight deck, but one of the lower catwalk railings on the port side, looking out towards the island. It was dark – no clouds, but only a sliver of a moon, and after being in the mountains for a month I still can’t get used to how faint the stars are down at sea level. Still much brighter than before the fall, when Brisbane’s blazing city lights would have drowned them out.
So I was standing there, leaning against the railing on the catwalk, when I heard somebody approaching from the other end. Like I said, not unusual – there are sentries about, sailors on night duty, maybe other people who can’t sleep. I glanced over at him as he approached – one of the sailors, in his grey uniform – and realised he was walking strangely, slightly hunched over and murmuring something to himself.
“Hey,” I said. “You alright…”
I thought for a moment he was drunk – squinting in the gloom, it looked like he’d vomited all down the front of himself. It took a second for me to realise it wasn’t vomit but blood, and that the man stumbling towards me was undead.
I let out a cry as he covered the last few steps between us, stumbling towards me, and I instinctively put a hand out around his neck to keep those deadly teeth away from me. Even as I cried for help, was shoved backwards against the railing, I felt some of my fingers slip deep into the wound on his neck, a slashed throat, the blood and flesh still lukewarm. Only a distant part of my brain noted that – I was screaming for help, no weapon but my bare hands, it was all I could do to keep him away from me but he’d been bigger and taller and stronger in life and now he was pushing me down onto the catwalk, the vague mutterings of a newly risen zombie becoming that familiar harsh hunting snarl.
Footsteps around me, boots on the catwalk, shouts and cries. The sentries on the upper deck had heard me and some of them had jumped right down onto the catwalk, landing heavily, swarming around the zombie and pulling it off. Someone helped me to my feet, gasping and panting, as the others manhandled the zombie down onto the deck. “Kill it, fucking kill it!” one of them yelled.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, it’s Greaves!” someone else moaned.
Nobody seemed to know what to do with it. They were all young sailors – maybe they’d never come face to face with a zombie before. The dead Seaman Greaves was snarling up at them, face coated in his own blood in the glare of their flashlights, still oozing out of his cut throat. It was a cacophony of shouts and yelling – “Who did this? What the fuck’s going on? Sound the alarm!” – but nobody seemed about to do what needed to be done.
There was a fire extinguisher mounted to the hull. I pulled it free of its bracket, lifted it up and brought it down heavily on Greaves’ head. He stopped moving, then twitched, so I brought it down again, feeling his skull crack and the dull edge of the canister push into the pudgy matter of his brain. Then he was still. “Jesus Christ,” one of the sailors breathed.
There was an alarm sounding now, more boots coming down the catwalk, more sentries and some civilians or Army personnel, some armed and some not. “What the fuck’s going on?” a guy with sergeant’s stripes demanded.
“Zombie,” I breathed. “Throat cut. Somebody murdered him!”
Greaves’ own bloody footsteps led down the catwalk from the direction he’d come, and we went down after it – or some of the sentries and soldiers did, and I ran along in their wake, heart pounding. There were more shouts coming from the aircraft deck, spotlights being switched on – a distant gunshot. I was suddenly very aware that the danger wasn’t over, and I didn’t have a gun.
Down the catwalk we found another body, another cut throat, no reanimation yet. There was water on the deck too. We weren’t far above the sea line. Flashlights bounced around, more shouts came unseen from the upper deck, there was a gunshot and then a call to cease fire. We were under attack, that much was clear – but from who, and by how many?
Ahead of us there was a splash, something dropping down to the water, and in the chaos and confusion it took a moment for anybody to train their flashlight on the spot. More shouts – another gunshot from somewhere on the flight deck – and then my own group was near the railing, peering down into the inky water, our own weak flashlights prowling around the spotlights from the tower.
It was further out that we saw him – surfacing for breath – and in that moment I knew. I couldn’t see his face but I knew it was him. The survivor from the island.
“There!” I shouted, pointing, and others had seen him and were pointing as well. But he was gone, back below the surface again.
“The boats! Go after him, we have to go after him!” I shouted. And we were on our way, down the catwalk towards the well deck, this jumble of sailors and soldiers and civilians, whoever had been in earshot when I cried out for help. Nobody that I knew, and nobody who seemed inclined to tell me to stay put. My hands were still coated in Greaves’ blood.
And so a moment later we were in a couple of RIBs, powering out over the water to where we’d last spotted him. Half the people in the boat weren’t armed – just a smattering of handguns, and one sergeant with his Steyr. We cut a path through the weaving spotlights, trying to pinpoint the spot where we’d seen the escaping swimmer, but it was dark and the lights only contrasted against the blackness and we were stumped.
“The island!” I yelled over the drone of the boat’s engine. “He’ll make for the island!”
And he has a headstart, too, I thought, as the guy at the tiller cut us in towards the beach. It was only a few hundred metres from the Canberra, and he’d probably been a third of the way when we spotted him from the deck…
There. A dark figure emerging from the water in the shallows, pushing up past clumps of seaweed, darting up onto the beach. The RIB ground against the sand a moment later – we piled out of the boat even as the stranger disappeared into the treeline. I was hot on his heels, sprinting up the beach. This wasn’t a chase out of curiosity any more. He’d killed two people, maybe more.
A moment later I was on the other side, in amongst the trees and ferns and undergrowth, charging into the darkness after a killer. And I had no gun, no flashlight, and only half a dozen people coming up behind me.
Not the smartest move in the world. But I was operating on pure adrenaline and determination.
I could hear him crashing through the undergrowth up ahead. He was in a hurry to put as much distance between himself and us as he could. That was all I had to go on: sound. I could barely see my hand in front of my face, let alone follow a trail.
We came to a stream – maybe the same one as the other day - and even over the gurgling of the water and the chorus of hundreds of frogs, I could hear him splashing his way upstream. I followed after him, slipping and smashing my knee on a rock, not caring, stumbling on upstream. When we’d first entered the forest I’d heard the others from
the RIB right behind me, heard their shouts, sometimes seen their flashlights off through the trees as we stumbled blindly in pursuit. Those had melted away now – I could still hear the odd shout, but it seemed they’d gotten lost. That was okay. I still had the trail.
I came around a curve in the stream and got a glimpse of him again, scrambling up the rocks beside a small waterfall, then melting off into the bushes. Yes. Still had him. I scrambled up the rocks after him, and here was a proper trail, now, and old bushwalking trail maybe, no more blundering through wet ferns and shrubs…
And then I screamed, because the ground gave way beneath me.
Dead leaves and earth falling with me, my own hands reaching out, scrabbling, the earth giving way again. I fell down the rough edge of a pit and felt a sharp sting in my left calf muscle. Something else had jabbed through my belt, twisting and yanking it.
I lay there for a moment, stunned, gasping for breath. The pit was filled with sharpened stakes. I’d had the incredible good fortune to fall at the edge, pressed between the earth wall and the nearest stake. Another had winged my calf, and another had shoved up between my belt and my hip. For a moment I was too frightened to move, worried that adrenaline was overriding some greater pain, that I might look down and see a bloodied piece of wood protruding from my guts.
Up above I could see the stars, and the gently swaying leaves of the trees. And then someone stuck their head over the pit. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness: just a blank space blotting out the stars, staring down at me.
He came carefully down into the pit – the far side was a gentle slope, not a sheer drop, and picked his way across the stakes. I felt panic rising in my gut. I had no weapon but I had both hands around the stake through my belt, trying to pull it from the ground, but the fucker had got it in there tight…
I looked up as he approached in time to see him bring a rock down on my head. That was the last thing I remembered.
…matt?
matt, what’s going on?
matt, are you there…
A groggy dreamworld. Aaron’s voice calling out to me, worried, unsure what was happening. Slowly, the real world seeped back to me: pain all over, different kinds of pain, from the dull throbbing in my calf up to my thick-blooded headache, and then above my head, the fiery burning pain in my arms and hands. I was hanging, bound by my wrists, in a wholly unfamiliar place.
Cracked concrete walls streaked with moisture. No windows – underground, maybe. The dim flickering of candles. Stacks of junk all over the room: crates, chairs, scrap metal, rubbish, driftwood, books, rope, dried cuttlefish, beach umbrellas, mouldy old clothing, a Streets ice cream sign with the Paddle Pop lion grinning at me.
I squinted at the room, past the dried blood on my eyelids, as my wits gathered themselves and the terrifying magnitude of my mistake became truly apparent. If I twisted my neck I could look up and see, in the dim candlelight, what I was attached to – an old bracket in the wall, some piece of scrap metal, rusted divots along the wall showing where others had once been. My hands were bound with fibrous, salt-encrusted rope, my boots only barely scraping the ground.
I felt panic rising and forced it down. No point in that now, and no point in getting angry at myself either over my own stupidity. I was where I was. And where I was, was a place dangerously close to the concrete torture bunker I’d seen in my dreams.
I was alone, at least – there was an open doorway leading out into a concrete hall, and I could hear something – voices? Water rushing through pipes? Hard to say for sure, but I was alone for now.
I started pulling against the bracket in the wall, yanking down with all my weight. The rope and knots were tight as anything, but the bracket looked old and the concrete crumbling. If I could pull it out, maybe, or twist around so I was facing the wall and then brace my feet against it…
I froze. I hadn’t realised, at first, scanning the dark room with groggy eyes. But as I rose completely out of unconsciousness, as my headache flared up and my brain reasserted itself, I realised I wasn’t alone at all.
He was sitting in the room with me – squatting, rather, down on his haunches, over by another pile of random junk. I still couldn’t make out his face very well but I had no doubt who it was. He wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting and looking.
I felt the panic welling up my gut again, up my throat, and took a breath and forced it down.
“Who are you?” I croaked. “What do you want?”
He stood up and made his way over to me – but still hunching, hobbled over, as though he had some injury. As he moved I could see his face better: bearded, filthy, framed by long and matted hair. He wore no shirt but had a black jacket with gold bands around the wrists and a gold star above them. Black pants, as well, but barefoot.
He stood warily, a few feet away, eyeing me off. There was something in the way he moved, the way he looked at me, that unsettled. There was something off about him.
“Look, I don’t mean you any harm,” I said, grimly aware of the fact that I’d shot at him the other day. “I don’t…”
“Quiet!” he yelled suddenly. “What is your rank?”
“What?”
“What is your rank, soldier?”
“I’m not a soldier, I’m a civilian…”
He backhanded me across the face. It stung, and set my head throbbing worse than before, and a moment later he was right in my face, gripping my shirt, staring at me through the grease and grime with intensely blue eyes. “What is your rank, soldier?” he whispered.
“I’m not…” I said, then decided I didn’t want him to hit me again. “Private. I guess I’m a private. Please…”
“What is your name?” He drew the word out, almost hissing it.
“Matthew King,” I said, closing my eyes, almost certain now that this was it – this was the dream I had, getting dragged to the torture chamber by this insane scavenger. “My name is Matthew King.”
He was pacing around the room now. “Liar. You’re a liar, you’re all liars.” His voice was cracked and hoarse – it didn’t sound like he’d spoken to anybody in a long time.
“We don’t want to hurt you…”
“Liar!” he yelled. “That’s what they said! We were supposed to be allies, but I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody! The whole world’s against us, no such thing as fucking allies!”
His voice wasn’t just cracked and hoarse. He had an American accent.
“Are you from the Abraham Lincoln?” I said. “The aircraft carrier?”
He covered the distance between us surprisingly quickly and was up in my face again, shoving a hand around my throat, hissing at me. “Don’t you talk about my ship. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you over there, with your divers, more divers now, everybody’s diving down, everybody’s getting their grubby little hands inside my ship. Don’t you dare talk about my ship!”
He was choking me – I couldn’t breathe – I struggled and kicked at him but thought for a moment I was going to lose consciousness. Then he pulled away again, stalking about the room, ranting and raving at me.
“I’m sick of lies! I’m sick of allies! We shouldn’t have come here, we should have gone home, we could have done something there, we could have saved people, and instead I’m stuck here with you, the filth, the liars, the demons – stuck here in hell, and what for? What was it for, in the end? Oh, I know my duty, I know what I need to do, I shall not perish…”
He was off his rocker, but for the moment I was just glad he wasn’t choking me anymore. My windpipe hurt – it felt like he’d actually done some damage. I sucked in air and watched him helplessly.
I don’t think I’d ever seen someone who’d gone truly crazy before. I guess with everything that happened, a lot of people couldn’t handle it. A lot of people broke. But most of them didn’t live much longer than that, what with one thing and another, so you weren’t likely to run into them. There’d been Angus, near Kalgoorlie, who’d always given me the impression
he was skating just this side of sanity. There’d been Declan, on the Regina Maersk, who’d nearly lost his mind trapped for a week in his cabin with the dead outside, but he’d mostly recovered once we got him out of there.
But I’d never encountered someone who’d so clearly and totally lost their shit – gone right out of sanity, into whatever mad wasteland lay on the other side. I’d never encountered someone I couldn’t reason with.
Which was why I sat there, watching him rant and rave, wondering if I’d be able to overpower him with my legs if he came near me again. It seemed like absurd kung fu shit – heaving my legs up and trying to strangle him with them – but with my hands tied above my head I couldn’t think of any other way to hurt him. Maybe he’d have a knife or something on his person that I could then manoeuvre up with my feet…
But he didn’t come near me again. He left the room. I heard him talking to himself as he went, out the corridor, disappearing, and then his voice trailing off. There was another, noise, a watery noise that sounded like pipes in walls. It was constant. But the crazed American was gone.
I didn’t have time to waste. I spun around to face the wall, the ropes digging even deeper into my wrists and twisting my skin, and started pushing against the wall with my boots – shoving out, yanking down, using my weight and bouncing against the rope. The rope definitely wasn’t going to give, it was way too tough, but I could feel the bracket shifting in the concrete. This place was old – an old World War II bunker, maybe, like they have on Rottnest Island – and the American had tied me up to something which had been sitting and rusting in the concrete for over sixty years. A bit of elbow grease and it would be ready to come out.
It probably wasn’t more than five minutes. It felt like five hours, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if the American had returned. My wrists began to bleed, the blood running down my arms. My head was screaming in agony and my punctured calf muscle was burning too.
Finally the bracket gave way, surprisingly quickly, and I found myself down on my ass on the concrete. I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could, arms held out in front of me, fossicking through the junk and glancing at the doorway, looking for anything I could use to cut the ropes. None of it was sorted, none of it made sense – it was like picking through a rubbish tip. A rusted fire extinguisher, an empty photo frame, a barbecue hotplate, a dead laptop… What was this shit?
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 18
