by Sue Edge
With a slam of the doors, Jim hurried around and jumped into the passenger seat.
Wheels squealing dramatically, I roared away from the hospital - and towards my daughter. Jim looked at me and I saw a hint of admiration in his eyes. "Good job."
Emma slid the window behind me open, as the vehicle surged forward. "Oh Lori, you were fantastic!"
The adrenaline that had fueled me was draining now, leaving me feeling shaky. "Thanks, guys. All in a day's work, really." I knew I sounded distracted as my thoughts turned to my oldest child. How would I find her? I didn't have my mobile with me. I didn't allow myself to think for a moment that she wasn't okay. She had to be.
"So, where are we going?" Jim's gravelly voice interrupted my thoughts. I glanced at him defiantly. "Central. I'm getting my daughter."
A long pause and then he nodded. "Do you know where to find her?"
I laughed a little hysterically. "Not a clue!"
"You need to find a mobile. Then you can contact her." Emma said quietly from behind me. I nodded. But where would I get one?
"My God." I heard Ken say softly. I blinked and saw what he was seeing. All along the esplanade, zombies moved towards us. Hundreds gathered along the green strip. In the cafes and shops that bordered the other side of the street, blood and flesh splattered the pavement, tables and chairs. Even as we watched, fresh bodies rose to join the walking dead.
"How far has it spread?" Ken wondered aloud. I couldn't answer as fear for my daughter clenched my gut into a knot.
Turning the corner, I saw the creatures staggering down the road towards the business district. To my amazement, I saw people, real people, still wandering the streets. My heart flared with hope. Maybe this madness hadn't reached Michele yet. Maybe I would be in time.
Ahead, a young girl with a backpack turned towards the car. Long brown hair fell over her chest but it did not hide the gaping hole where her breasts once were or the glazed eyes. Deliberately, I swung the car over and drove the car at her.
"What are you doing?" Emma gasped. Whatever it takes, I thought. The girl stood motionless as the car powered towards her. At the last moment, I twitched the steering wheel so that the the car only clipped the girl. Spinning, she flew several feet. Braking hard, I jumped out of the car and ran back to her. She lay faced upwards, the bloody hole in her chest mocking me as I knelt beside her. I pulled out my stake, waiting...Sure enough, her eyes opened and focused on me with the mindless stare I had become familiar with.
"Sorry." I whispered, feeling a momentary ache for the girl she had once been, for the loss her parents had suffered. Before she could react, I plunged my stake through her eye with an ease that should have troubled me, but didn't. As the body stilled, I pulled her backpack off and rummaged roughly through it. My hands closed over a familiar shape and I pulled out a mobile phone. Sending up a fervent prayer of thanks, I ran back to the car.
Dialing Michele's number, I sent the car squealing forward again. It rang once, twice, three times. Pick up!
"Hello, mum." My daughter's familiar, long suffering, voice coursed through my body like red wine.
"Are you okay? Where are you?" I yelled as I drove through a red light. Vaguely I was aware of a car crash on my right.
"Um, sure, I'm fine." Michele sounded surprised and wary. "Why, what's going on?"
I took a deep breath and tried to talk normally. "Is everything okay at the shops? Any trouble?" People running on my left. A sudden scream. I blocked them out as I focused on getting to the large shopping centre which was looming in the distance.
"Everything's fine. Oh, there is something going on in the food hall. Hannah and I were just heading over to see what all the fuss was about."
"No!" I screamed, my heart in my mouth. "You run the other way right now, do you hear?! Meet me out front if you can get there safely."
Michele sounded scared now. "Mum, what's going on?!"
I took another deep breath. There was no way to explain this situation in a few words. "Bad people, Michele. Very bad people."
I heard a sharp intake of breath. "Terrorists? Okay, okay, we leaving now. Come quick, mum, please."
"I'm three minutes away, baby."
2
A commotion in the back of the ambulance attracted my attention. In the rearview mirror. I saw Roy's belligerent face appear in the window. "If you want to get your daughter, that's fine, but you have no business dragging us along with you! We should be getting the hell out of town!"
I gritted my teeth, ignoring a flare of guilt. "You don't like it, Roy? Just say the word and I'll drop you off on any corner you like."
He scowled. "Like hell. I'm just saying - who made you captain?"
"Really, Roy, really?" I glared at him through the mirror. "You want to argue about who's the fricking boss now?!"
He had the grace to look a bit shamefaced as he mumbled "Just saying..."
"Stow it, Roy." The bald man beside me said calmly, popping a gum in his mouth. "None of us are going to abandon family."
I glanced at him gratefully as he pulled out his weapon and started loading it. "Last lot." He glanced blandly at me. "I guess I'd better make them count."
As the large shopping Centre loomed a block away, the phone rang. I snatched it up.
"Michele? Where are you?"
Her whispered reply sent cold chills through me. "I'm hiding upstairs in Tosca's, mummy. We can't get to the stairs. There are people...killing people with their bare hands!" Her voice broke.
"I'm right there, sweetheart." Did my voice sound as hard to her as it did to me? "Stay out of sight until you hear my voice."
Jim cocked his weapon. "Trouble?"
I nodded. People were pouring out the front doors of the large building ahead. Screams of terror and pain filled the air. Amongst the crowd, I spotted shambling, torn figures grabbing at panicked shoppers. I drove the car screeching up onto the curb, narrowly missing people and zombies alike. Reassuring myself that my trusty stake was in my belt, I flung open my door and took the outside stairs to Tosca's, two at a time.
On the balcony, a zombie held a young blonde girl close, teeth buried in her throat. The blood poured down her dress as she stood in his arms like a lover, the light dimming in her eyes. Two more zombies appeared in the restaurant's doorway, stumbling towards me. One had been a teenage boy before he died and the other was dressed in the whites of a chef. As the freshly dead creatures came towards me, I felt, rather than saw, Jim's comforting presence at my back. "I'll handle them." He murmured. "You get your daughter."
An agonized scream from within the restaurant sent me bolting past the zombies and inside. A woman in a floral dress chewed upon a body beside the door while another zombie sat near the kitchen bench gnawing on the leg of a large male tourist. I looked around desperately. "Michele!"
Another feminine scream sent me running to the back of the Italian restaurant. As I neared it, I saw a zombie tearing at the face of a prone girl. A girl with honey hair. No, no, no!
"Mum!" From behind a pillar, Michele launched herself at me, sobbing. "Mum! It's got Hannah! Help her!"
I gathered Michele in my arms for a brief moment, absorbing the smell of her warm, live body. Thank you, God. Pushing her behind me, I approached the zombie cautiously. I didn't believe the girl was alive anymore, but she had been part of our lives for four years. I couldn't just abandon her. The zombie, a waiter, looked up with its unnervingly blank eyes, blood dripping down its chin.
Something about that impersonal look infuriated me without measure. I picked up a nearby iron-wrought chair and swung it at the monster like I was wielding a baseball bat. It connected with a most satisfying thud, knocking the monster sideways. I brought the chair down on his head again and again. His features became a meaty mash but still I knew he persisted, if not lived.
"Mum!" A squeal of dismay brought me around and I saw Hannah on her knees, face so torn she could not see anything before her. Quickly, I turned back to the zombie before
me and, planting my knee in his chest, I ended his miserable existence with a stake through the eye. Swinging around, I grabbed what used to be Hannah around the throat.
"What are you doing?" My daughter's horrified whisper brought me up short. I didn't have time to explain all this to her, but I knew I had to try.
"She's already dead, Michele." I looked her firmly in the eye. "They all are. Take a look around you." Michele looked around and saw the two zombies at the other end of the restaurant as they began to shamble in our direction. The large gaping wounds all over their bodies combined with their complete lack of pain said more than an hour's explanation possibly could have.
"Oh my God." She whispered. While she stared at the approaching creatures, I silently finished off sweet Hannah with an ache in my heart that I feared would never go away. I had watched her grow up, seen her giggle and plot with my daughter, heard her dreams for the future. All ended with a piece of wood through her eye.
***
Keeping Michele safely behind me, I approached the two zombies slowly. Both were dripping in the blood of their victims. I needed to get us out of the shopping centre as quickly as possible, before the noise we were making attracted all the remaining zombies in the area. I did some quick calculations and then without further thought, launched myself at the nearest zombie, bowled it over, staked it, spun up on my feet, kicked the other zombie over as it started to turn, and dispatched it with a minimum of fuss. As I stood up and shook the blood off my stake, I saw my daughter standing in the corner with her mouth hanging open.
A bit discomforted, I muttered a hurried 'come on' and headed for the balcony. From the corner of my eye, I saw the wide-eyed glances Michele was sneaking at me. I could almost hear her thoughts. My mum used to feel faint if she squashed a cockroach and now she's staking humans without blinking! I guess I couldn't blame her. Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined I'd be auditioning for the part of an Aussie Buffy, either. But, in truth, after the number of zombies I had faced this morning, it would take more than two or three shufflers to faze me now.
Jim stood calmly within a circle of dead zombies, wiping clean a metal picket he had acquisitioned from the nearby potted tree. I raised a questioning brow, to which he shrugged. "Didn't seem worth wasting my bullets on just a few zombies."
I couldn't help it; I threw my head back and laughed out loud.
3
In the few minutes that we had been preoccupied in the restaurant, the situation in the city centre had deteriorated markedly. In the street in front of us, people struggled desperately with implacable corpses. A zombie pulled a clueless driver out through his car window. Terrified mothers dragged their young children through traffic trying to evade the ever-increasing numbers of walking dead. Vehicles honked as they tried to make their way through the confusion.
And scattered amongst these scenes of desperate struggles were the heartbreaking images of battles that had been lost - a father shooing a toddler away as zombies tore at his body; a large middle-aged woman clawing her way along the pavement as a creature gnawed at her leg; a mother with a baby still clasped to her chest as blood pooled beneath her senseless body. The zombies crouched over their spoils like jackals at a lion's kill, squabbling over intestines and fleshy chunks. And then, to me, the most chilling image of all - the newly dead figures slowly standing up and moving off in search of new victims.
Jim whistled slowly. "This thing is moving quickly, Lori." He pointed to smoke spiraling into the air several blocks away. It seemed a good bet that it was related to this catastrophe.
"We'd better try to get ahead of it," I answered grimly. "or we might find ourselves trapped in town."
The ambulance, with its lack of obvious occupants, remained largely unbothered by the zombies. The three creatures that blocked our way proved no deterrent to Jim's picket and my stake and we were soon back in the vehicle. I slipped into the passenger seat after Michele, allowing Jim to take the wheel. Having got my oldest daughter back, I just wanted to reassure myself that she was really here. I grabbed her hand tightly.
"Oh, so kind of you to join us!"
I sighed. "Nice to be back, Roy." I glanced through the back window. "Is everyone okay in there? Jessie?"
Her thin face appeared. "I'm okay. It was a bit scary for a while, though. There was a lot of screaming and banging outside."
I felt a twinge of guilt. "Yeah, I know. But you kept quiet. That was the right thing to do." She smiled a little at that.
As Jim swung out onto the street, he made no attempt to avoid the zombies making their way towards us. There were few living people in the vicinity now, having fled or joined the walking dead. My heart ached as I recognized the dead father standing beside the blank-eyed chubby toddler he had tried so hard to save, watching us drive by.
As Jim made his way carefully down Sheridan Street, taking care to avoid abandoned cars and the occasional living human, we sat in silence, trying to make sense of the chaos. Michele didn't say much, still looking a bit stunned. I squeezed her hand tightly but left her alone to deal with her emotions. What could I say that could possibly make things better?
Slowly, we got ahead of the madness and allowed ourselves to relax a little. "So what do we do now?" I asked.
"Get the hell out of Dodge?!" came a quick response from the rear.
Emma's face appeared. "We pick up our family members and then do like Roy said - get the hell out of town."
I nodded in agreement. I had to think of my family and, although it went against every bone in my body to just run, keeping my kids safe was my top priority. Picking up the mobile, I began the hopeless task of trying to warn authorities and friends while the others planned the quickest route possible to our various homes. Our part of this nightmare was over.
This short story is extracted from the serialized web fiction novel "Dead Tropics". To read more of the story, please feel free to head over to http://www.deadtropics.blogspot.com!
If you would like to be kept informed of new books by this author, please send an email with 'updates' to [email protected].
