Tales of Sin and Madness

by Brett McBean

  TALES OF SIN AND MADNESS

  by

  Brett McBean

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY

  LegumeMan Books

  Copyright © 2010 Brett McBean

  Cover Art Copyright © 2010 Andrew Gallacher

  Design Copyright © 2010 The Spatchcock

  isbn: 978-0-9870496-4-3

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written permission of the publisher and author, except where permitted by law

  Acknowledgements

  Dedicated to Dick and Brian.

  With special thanks to the good folk at LegumeMan Books.

  CONTENTS:

  THE BEAUTIFUL PLACE

  AMANDA'S GIFT

  STOLEN LIVES

  THE NEW RELIGION

  THE GENIUS OF A SICK MIND

  HEARING THE OCEAN IN A SEASHELL

  A QUESTION OF BELIEF

  THE COFFIN

  THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

  TEMPTATION OF THE RIGHTEOUS PATH

  THE GARBAGE MAN

  WHO WANTS TO BE A SURVIVOR!

  A LIGHT FOR ROSE

  THE CYCLE

  THE PROJECT

  THE SCARY PLACE

  CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

  MAD FRED

  UNBORN LIVES

  COME MORNING

  JUNKIES

  THE BEAUTIFUL PLACE

  It looked as though nobody had been by for months to clean the sign that stood by the side of the highway.

  Simon Fletcher carefully set down the burlap sack on the reddish-brown soil, then dropped his backpack beside it. He raised an arm and brushed away the dirt from the sign with a dry, leathery hand. When he had uncovered the prize, he looked down at the large sack. “We’re heading in the right direction,” he said, spitting out a clump of dust encrusted phlegm. “Coober Pedy twenty kilometres.”

  He glanced up and down the wide, dusty highway. Empty.

  Thank Christ.

  He turned away from the highway and opened his backpack. Pulled out one of the bottles and unscrewed the top. Flecks of dirt fell away and he took no notice of the cloudy water as he downed a small amount.

  It had been a clean bottle, once. The water clear and cool. Now all ten bottles were tainted with the filth of the land, the sweat of his journey and the blood of the dead.

  Still with half the bottle left, Simon screwed the top back on then put it into his pack with the other bottles, assorted canned goods and the one special thing that he was saving until he reached Coober Pedy. He zipped the pack up then mounted it on his back.

  He yanked the scarf from his Khaki’s left pocket, wiped his face and neck, then shoved the damp cloth back in.

  “Okay, time to go,” he said, heaving the sack up, and like a gaunt Santa Claus, slung it over one shoulder.

  Simon knew the quickest way to Coober Pedy was straight down the Stuart Highway, however, he also knew that the son-of-a-bitches could drive, and he had so far survived staying away from any arterial roads.

  Placing one foot in front of the other, just like he had done for the past six months, Simon started off on the final leg of his journey.

  Which had begun half-way across the country in Townsville, where he had lived with his wife Tully in an apartment right in the heart of the city. He had forgotten the details of the place now; all he remembered was it had been nice and modern and that he and Tully had been happy.

  Happy. He had almost forgotten what that was like, too.

  But he was certain he would be happy soon. Once he had done what he had set out to do, then he would regain some semblance of his early life, before the rise of the New World.

  He had been at the hospital, his home away from home, when the first reports started coming in from America. Reports of mass murder, chaos and, unbelievably, the dead returning to life. He hadn’t believed it then, but as the days went by and the virus swept over the world, disbelief turned to despair and soon there were reports of it happening in Australia. Everyone from doctors to teachers to librarians speculated on the cause – no one had the answers, least of all Simon. However, he recalled some line from an old horror movie he had watched when he was a teenager, something about the dead walking the earth when there was no more room left in hell. That seemed as good a reason as any, in his opinion.

  “Christ, it’s everywhere,” the young man in the bed next to Tully had remarked one afternoon. He then coughed blood and died, his heart monitor displaying a flat-line.

  Simon had been thinking of the guy’s remark when, a few minutes later, the man opened his eyes and leapt out of the bed at him.

  Fortunately, Tully had been asleep.

  Because what happened next was not only ghastly, but in hindsight, monumental: Simon grabbed a pair of scissors that were sitting on the bedside table (right next to the flowers and ‘thinking of you’ cards) and, during the struggle, ploughed the scissors deep into the man’s right eye socket. This time the man stayed dead, and Simon, scared and covered in blood, had clocked his very first kill – the first, as it would turn out, of many.

  Simon smiled, his lips dry again. The sun, his constant adversary and companion, fiery and unforgiving, beaming down as he continued his journey south. “How frightened I was,” he said. “I had killed a man. I was certain I would go to jail.” He wanted to laugh, but his throat was too dry. Every time he swallowed he could feel the film of desert dust, taste the earthy soil of the South Australian outback. Even talking was unpleasant, but necessary. “Even though I had seen all the reports on TV, heard all the broadcasts on the radio. Still, I thought what if the guy hadn’t really died? What if I had killed an innocent man, someone who had been as scared and confused as I was?”

  Of course, no one had come to take him away. No one cared about the dead patient with the scissors sticking out of his eye.

  That’s when Simon first realised the full impact of what was happening. They were now living in a world where murder was accepted, even expected, where it paid to be ruthless and selfish. A very strange and fucked up world.

  And nothing he had seen, before the rise of the New World or since, had best exemplified this than Alice Springs. Alice – the centre of Australia. The centre of madness.

  Townsville hadn’t exactly been a hive of peace and love – Simon had barely managed to escape from his home city alive – but there had been so much commotion and panic going on in the first stages of the horrid epidemic he had been fortunate enough to make it out; but not before killing a dozen zombies as he left.

  He used to be a fleshy man, not overweight, but enough so that Tully could grab onto his flab during sex and use it as leverage. By the time he reached Alice Springs, four months later, he looked skeletal. Even some of the humans remarked that they had seen long-dead corpses fatter than him.

  “That’s what you get for surviving on water and cold baked beans,” he had told them.

  Of course they all thought he was mad, having walked all the way from Townsville. But they didn’t ask him why, and he was more than happy not to tell them.

  “Stay here with us,” they had said. “It’s good, safe. The zombies won’t get you here.”

  He had heard about militia activity in America and the UK, but Alice Springs was the first place in Australia where he had come across it. Men – some of them police, a lot of them not – had built makeshift barricades around the town, using trucks, cars, buses and even sacks of dirt. They had stocked up on all the weapons and ammo they could get their hands on. It was a good vantage-point. A town smack-dab in the middle of the Australian outback: a perfect place for crazed armed men to keep watch for attacking zombies.


  Simon himself had almost been shot when he first arrived. Expecting either a ghost town, or a zombie-infested trap, what he found was much worse.

  “All I want is somewhere to rest and to re-fill my water bottles,” he had told the soldiers concealed behind a rusty FJ Holden. It had taken them an uncomfortably long time to lower their guns, but after deciding he wasn’t a zombie, they finally allowed him inside their utopian world – a world where the people were as dead as the zombies, only they didn’t know it yet. Paranoia, fear, hatred, pain. These were what Simon found in the New World version of Alice Springs. A place where the people were more wary of each other than of any flesh-craving, car-driving, gun-toting zombies that were, so they thought, sneaking around the scorched outback. And yet, even though Simon repeatedly told them that he hadn’t seen any of the undead for weeks, no one would believe him.

  Shut away in the muggy, foul-smelling high school gymnasium with other ‘civilians,’ Simon built up a loyal following of distrust, mainly due to the fact that he wouldn’t open his sack and show them what was inside, despite their insistence.

  Simon only stayed a few days – it was all he could stand – and he left Alice (including the vile ‘meat-wagons’ which Simon thankfully never got told to go into), before the people got rough and forced the sack open. Some of the parting comments included: “I hope you rot out there.” “May the zombies eat your heart.” “You should’ve stayed with us.” “You’ll die out there.”

  So far Simon had yet to regret his decision. It hadn’t been a hard choice anyway, in his opinion. He would rather face the zombies than live in a world where madness was King and abomination the Queen.

  That had been almost two months ago, and since then he hadn’t come across any more militaristic-style towns. He had come across a few zombies, wandering aimlessly near the South Australian/Northern Territory border; either lost travellers dead from exposure or local townspeople who hadn’t left for better food prospects. They had been mumbling about needing new souls to survive and had been weak from lack of nourishment – even zombies could get famished, he had learned. They hadn’t posed any threat, so he had just kept on walking.

  That had been his last zombie encounter, aside from the cars last week. He didn’t know if they had been zombies or humans, but nobody had come, so he guessed it didn’t matter. Either one could be as dangerous.

  Simon knew from his six-month pilgrimage that if he didn’t stop to replenish his liquids and give his feet and legs a rest, he would become delirious from fatigue and dehydration. There were times when he was sure he was going to die, lying on the hard, sun-cracked earth, his adversary blaring down on him, feeling as if he was being baked in a giant oven; he barely had the strength to get the water from his backpack. He even considered using what lay at the bottom of his bag to ease his suffering.

  What had got him through those times was his promise to Tully. Knowing that if he died, her fate would lie with the evils of the New World, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  “Not long to go,” he breathed as he set down the sack and then his backpack. He grabbed one of the water bottles and downed a small dose, dribbling some of it over the lumpy sack.

  He was putting the bottle away when movement caught his attention. He turned and spotted a dingo coming towards him. The animal walked with deliberate steps and it wasn’t until it got closer that Simon saw the trail of intestines being dragged through the ochre-filled soil behind it.

  Simon knew how vicious animal zombies could be – like humans, animals seemed to grow in ferocity when they came back from the dead. A once meek tabby would become a raging feline; a harmless pigeon would come back as a squawking feathery missile; snakes came back even more lethal, even though, fortunately, he had only encountered a few. And a dingo, an already dangerous animal, would become more vicious and blood-thirsty. Simon had fought a number of them during his sixth month trek, including a large male he had encountered while exploring Finke Gorge.

  But the one that was limping towards him was no threat. Aside from being severely wounded, it looked old and in dire need of food.

  Simon stood his ground and waited. The sack was behind him, as was the backpack. The dingo bared its teeth as it approached. Always the hunter.

  Simon felt sorry for the creature. It was only doing what came instinctively.

  That’s why, when the dingo ventured within touching distance, eyes cloudy but alert, Simon grabbed the animal around the back of its neck and snapped it before the creature got a chance to attack. Then, while it writhed on the ground, feebly trying to get up, Simon picked up a weighty rock and bashed in its head. He stopped once the dingo’s brain coated the red earth around its flattened head.

  “Sorry, mate,” Simon said, letting the rock drop to the ground. “No hard feelings.”

  His eyes drifted from the dingo to the desolate plane – a seemingly never-ending expanse of red and orange, dotted with purple and the green of spinifex, all blanketed by a rich blue sky, and realised, perhaps for the first time, how utterly quiet it was. He really was in the middle of nowhere, lost in a vast desert of unrelenting heat and dust, a lifetime away from the horrors of the real world, a world that was in the grips of an apocalyptic nightmare. A world that was dying.

  The late afternoon sun called him back with its penetrating rays and he knew he had to get going, had to get to Coober Pedy before night descended over the land.

  He gathered his things together then started off. He estimated another half-an-hour until he reached his final destination.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Almost there.”

  He thought back to when he first started out. How he had dreaded the journey, even though he knew he had to make it. The desire to see Australia’s outback was never strong in him; he didn’t care if he died never having seen it. Tully, on the other hand, had always longed to visit the outback. A real cowgirl at heart, an adventurer who loved the outdoors and getting dirty. That spark, however, died when she was diagnosed with leukemia. After that, she no longer dreamt of white-water rafting, or skydiving or traversing Central Australia in a four-wheel drive. Pretty soon her main source of exercise was hurrying to the bathroom to throw up – a result of the chemotherapy. It was the most painful thing in the world to watch her fade away. It wasn’t just the hair-loss, or the way her cheekbones began to jut out, or her increasingly gaunt frame. It was her loss of spirit that was the most difficult to bear. Of knowing that she would never get to see the outback, particularly Coober Pedy with its underground homes, churches and hotels, which, for some reason, held a particular fascination for her.

  “Get me out of here,” she had whispered to him the morning he killed his first zombie with the scissors. “Please, don’t let me die in here, surrounded by all this. I don’t want to end up like them.”

  He always had a hard time listening to her talk about her death. He knew it would be inevitable, the chemo just wasn’t working, but he hadn’t prepared himself for her end.

  “Take me away, far away, somewhere beautiful.” Her body had been pumped with so much morphine she couldn’t even open her eyes.

  A few hours later, Tully deeply asleep, the zombie on the floor with the pair of scissors jutting from his eye, Simon decided to honour Tully’s wishes and take her away.

  It didn’t take him long to get everything ready. He dressed his wife in jeans and an old T-shirt, filled his backpack with bottles of water and junk food that he looted from the abandoned cafeteria (it was all that was left), and found an empty sack in the storage room. It was the only way he could foresee carrying Tully half-way across the country, since he didn’t want to drive. Driving meant using roads and highways, and that meant lots of zombies. No, Tully had wanted him to take her away from it all, and that’s exactly what he was going to do. No cities, no roads, no civilization, no zombies.

  Before they left, he injected her with more morphine, then bundled her into the sack, along with a years worth of the drug he took fr
om the hospital pharmacy. He hoped Tully would be out of it for the entire journey and miss seeing all the blood-shed and insanity.

  After battling his way through the city, stopping off at a supermarket to stock up on canned goods (mostly baked beans, vegetables and meat), he set off on his journey, stopping only to sleep, to stock up on provisions when he came upon a deserted town and to keep Tully both hydrated and doped up on painkillers, letting her out of the sack often, but only when he was certain there was nobody around. His only prayers had been for the cancer to stay away long enough so that Tully could be alive when they reached their destination.

  And so, six months after setting off, a lifetime’s worth of death behind him, Simon Fletcher arrived at Coober Pedy.

  It was late in the afternoon – the setting sun was to his right, yet it was still blisteringly hot, and a mild dust storm had sprung up. The storm whipped at Simon’s face, stinging his cheeks and forehead like millions of tiny nails.

  “A fine welcome they’ve given us,” he called back.

  He stood atop a small cliff overlooking the town and was struck with how empty the place looked. There were sprinklings of shabby buildings, most with corrugated iron roofing, and lots of cars and trucks just sitting collecting dust, some of them parked right in the middle of the street. Simon guessed that the locals had either left this god-forsaken place a long while ago, or they were all lying dead in some underground dugout.

  Or maybe they’re hiding, waiting to mount an attack?

  No, there was no sign of life or death here.

  Gazing down at the town, Simon couldn’t understand why Tully had wanted to visit this place. It was ugly, Simon could think of no other word for it – there was hardly any foliage, aside from some gum trees and mulga bushes dotted about the arid land, and the hills of dirt and rock and the myriad of mining craters that littered the surrounding area reminded Simon of the Mars landscape, only less inviting. The only indication of the underground dugouts was the ventilation shafts that poked up through the soil.