Mine (Book 2): Sister Mine, Zombie

by Peter Trevorah

  SISTER MINE, ZOMBIE

  BY

  PETER TREVORAH

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY LOYAL READERSHIP, KIM MCINTYRE.

  By the same author:

  2497 AD: Chief Justice to a Colony (1997)

  Brenda (Cornish Language) (2004)

  The Scribblers’ Choice (2011)

  Brother Mine, Zombie (2012)

  Copyright 2012 Peter Trevorah

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by information storage

  and retrieval system without the permission of the publisher,

  except where permitted by law.

  ISBN: 978-0-646-57986-3

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Author: Trevorah, Peter

  Title: Sister Mine, Zombie/Peter Trevorah

  ISBN: 9780646579863

  Subjects:

  Dewey number:

  Now also available as an e-book at www.amazon.com.

  Chapter 1

  Inglewood Magistrates Court

  I guess the courthouse was the last building they thought of.

  You’d expect a courthouse to be in the heart of town – next to the town hall or the police station.

  Not in Inglewood.

  As a boy-barrister, I’d been briefed to appear at Inglewood Magistrates Court – a drink-driving charge, as I recall.

  I’d never been to Inglewood.

  But that was no problem, was it? In those days, before all the remote country court houses had been closed down, the standard Modus Operandi was to rock up into the centre of town and bingo! There would the courthouse, right next to all the other prominent public buildings.

  So, I arrived in the morning at Inglewood after an uneventful, if somewhat foggy, drive up the Calder Highway.

  Hmm. Not a courthouse in sight.

  But I soon found the police station – a temporary, pre-fabricated sort of affair sitting on what had, very obviously, been an overgrown vacant block. And, miracle of miracles, it was actually manned!

  (This was, you will be aware, many years ago – before ‘fiscal restraint’ and ‘consolidation’ had removed any vestiges of public services from small country towns.)

  “Good morning, Constable,” I said. “I’m up from Melbourne for a court case. I don’t suppose you could direct me to the courthouse, could you?”

  (I used to be quite polite when I was a boy-barrister.)

  The sleepy constable behind the desk jerked himself awake – perhaps he’d been on night shift. (Okay, it doesn’t hurt to be charitable, does it?)

  He looked at me in amazement and awe: a young man in a suit!

  I repeated my enquiry which, plainly, he had not heard.

  “Uh, the courthouse? Are you a barrister? You look too young to be a barrister.”

  He was, regrettably, not the first – nor the last – to have made that particular observation.

  I confirmed with him my status as ‘an Officer of the Supreme Court of Victoria’.

  “We don’t get many barristers here,” he observed.

  Plainly.

  “Court’s on today, is it?”

  Obviously, this constable was not to be the police prosecutor that day.

  I confirmed that this was so.

  “All right then,” he commenced, warming to the fact that he could be of assistance to me. “After you leave the station, you hang a right and go down the street until you reach the War Memorial – there’s a statue of a soldier standing on a pillar in the middle of the road. Then you hang another right and keep going until you cross the railway lines …”

  Uh, huh.

  “…The court house is on the right. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thank you very much, Constable,” I said. “Have a good day.”

  His instructions had been correct and, having followed them to the letter (and saluted the soldier on the pillar en passant), I found he was right about something else: you couldn’t miss the courthouse. It was the only building for miles around – stuck in the middle of a field with no obvious driveway.

  (I had a Subaru in those days – part-time 4WD – and so there was no problem negotiating my way across the dampish field. The ground was, despite being heavily grassed, quite firm.)

  As I’ve said, the crumbling, red-brick courthouse was obviously the last public building constructed in Inglewood. I supposed it had been, more or less, on the edge of a once much larger town - when the town had been a mining ‘boomtown’. But those days were long gone – the building was now merely an outpost, well beyond the ‘city limits’.

  I parked the Subaru – there were no other cars and no signs of life.

  (Was I really in the right place?)

  A welcoming committee – of one – emerged from the rear of the redbrick building.

  ‘The committee’ was an aged, weather-beaten character, clad in a battered and sweat-stained Akubra hat, shabby overalls and muddy gumboots.

  He sauntered up to me in a typically ‘country’ fashion – slow-paced, laconic.

  “G’day,” he ventured.

  “G’day,” I replied.

  He yarned amiably with me for a while: about the weather, about the price of wool, about a veggie patch that he tended to at the back the court-house and so on.

  This archetypal ‘man of the country’ seemed pleased to have my company – there was still no other soul in sight.

  But what the fuck was he doing here, in the middle of nowhere, next to what appeared to be a near-derelict courthouse?

  I asked: “So, what’s your main interest in life?”

  (This was, at the time, my curious way of enquiring as to what occupation a person held.)

  He looked a little startled and responded:

  “Well, I’m the Magistrate here.”

  Of course!

  (This was not, actually, my worst faux pas of this kind. Half-drunk at a Christmas party being held at my junior barristers’ chambers, I’d posed a similar question to some pompous old bugger who’d rolled up for the occasion – and who obviously considered that he was gracing us with his esteemed presence. His startled response to me indicated that he was ‘Sir’ somebody-or-other, a very senior Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria. Oh well, Pete, chug-a-lug!)

  o0o

  In due course, my young client arrived at the courthouse – in his late-model sports car. He, too, was late.

  We conferred – he would plead guilty to the charge of drink-driving and I would ask the court for the minimum statutory sentence (6 months off the road).

  All fairly straightforward.

  The list of cases for that day was mercifully short but there had been (relatively) a minor crime-wave in Inglewood that week: two young lads, apparently more than a little inebriated, had ridden down the main street of the town on the bonnet of a third youth’s car.

  The locals weren’t overly keen on that sort of activity – but the magistrate handed out bonds for the lads to be of good behaviour (and they probably went back to the farm and never re-offended).

  Both the magistrate and the police prosecutor remained stern-faced throughout the hearing – keen to impress upon the offenders the serious danger in which they had placed themselves and others by their conduct – but I could tell that they were more than a trifle amused by their youthful antics. (The locals probably still talk about it over a beer.)

  During the course of the hearing, my attention was drawn to the bench clerk – the assistant who sat at a desk in front of the Magist
rates elevated bench (which was, as it happened, suffering from a severe case of dry-rot.)

  She looked like crap!

  Her eyes were all puffy and rheumy and her face was pale and blotched. She looked like she had a severe case of the ‘flu – or something worse.

  She was a flame-haired woman in, maybe, her late twenties and, at another time, might have been quite attractive – but not right now. No, definitely not right now.

  As the ‘riding-on-the-bonnet’ case came to its inevitable judicial conclusion, I observed that her eyes started to roll back into her head and that she started to sway gently from side to side – as if she were fighting to remain conscious.

  The learned magistrate pronounced the decision: “And each of you will be invited to enter into a recognisance to be of good behaviour for a period for twelve months and, if nothing further is known of you within that time, each of your cases will be marked dismissed.”

  (The standard formula for granting a ‘good behaviour bond’.)

  With the utterance of the last syllable, the Magistrate cast a glance in the direction of his stricken bench clerk (for it was she would fill in the blanks on the standard paperwork for the bonds). At that instant, she pitched forward and fell, face-first, onto the desk in front of her: clunk!

  Her shock of red hair covered the desk briefly but then she tipped sideways, slid from her chair and toppled onto the wooden floorboards: double-clunk!

  “The court will adjourn,” pronounced the magistrate above the hubbub which immediately broke out. “Sergeant, will you attend to my bench clerk?”

  The magistrate had assumed, correctly, that the police prosecutor knew how to administer first aid. He immediately did so – placed her on her side, cleared her airways, checked her pulse and respiration, loosened her clothing etc. etc.

  She remained unconscious. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse thready. She was clearly quite unwell. It was amazing that she’d made it to work at all. An ambulance was summoned. The paramedics checked her vital signs again and loaded her gently into their vehicle.

  I heard the prosecutor say to them as they prepared to depart:

  “So, what is it? What’s she got?”

  “Well,” commenced one of the paramedics, with a little circumspection. “We’re not really sure but, whatever it is, she’s not the first to get it. We’ve taken five women to Bendigo Hospital in the last few days with exactly the same symptoms. They’re all in isolation now – in case it’s infectious.”

  “How are they doing?” enquired the prosecutor.

  The two paramedics exchanged glances and then looked towards me. I was the only other person close enough to hear the conversation but I kept my eyes buried in the papers of my brief - and thereby pretended that I was not attending to their words.

  “It’s very grim, actually,” said the first paramedic, sotto voce. “They’re all getting worse and one was critical when we last heard. But keep it under your hat, would you, Sergeant? We understand that there are similar cases elsewhere – and no-one knows what it is.”

  “Oooh! Very creepy”, I thought (but not really).

  The paramedics might have said more but that was all I heard. I really didn’t think a lot about it, I confess. I was more concerned about getting my case on before the beak so that I could earn a fee. (If the case were not reached, I would go home with nothing to show for the journey.)

  My financial fears proved ill-founded. The court resumed in the afternoon (without a bench clerk) and my case was duly reached: plea of guilty, weighty matters in mitigation put to the magistrate and minimum sentence imposed.

  All good.

  My client was ordered off the road for six months – so he left the court, shook my hand, hopped back into his sports car and promptly drove back down the highway to Melbourne! (In those days, long-before character-recognition programs were built into speed cameras, his chances of detection were pretty small.)

  Chapter 2

  Debbbie

  Debbie was my kid sister.

  I loved her to death – and still do.

  (After I had left my twin brother, David, to be ‘King of the Zombies’ in the jungles of PNG, she had been my only remaining kin.)

  Upon my return to Melbourne from Inglewood, I found Debbie parked in my book-lined but less-than-opulent legal chambers. She was asleep on my over-stuffed, leather chesterfield, with my legal robes wrapped her around for warmth. (I was, at first, a bit annoyed by this as legal robes creased very easily.)

  Debbie was a barristers’ secretary but she didn’t work for me. She worked for a number of other barristers on a different floor of the building - so we still got to see each other most days.

  We liked that.

  She had a key to my chambers but she rarely used it. So, when I found her asleep on my couch, I knew something was up.

  I decided not to wake her. I had some phone messages that I had picked up in my clerk’s office on the way through. So, I made, maybe, five calls to various clients and solicitors.

  These calls lasted, in total, about 40 – 45 minutes and I made no attempt to lower my voice during them. Still Debbie did not stir.

  I hadn’t eaten for some hours. So, I went to a nearby eatery and ordered a plate of mixed sandwiches – ham, chicken, salad – normal stuff. I got enough for Debbie as well.

  When I returned to my chambers, Debbie was awake.

  “Hello, sleepyhead,” I said, as cheerfully as I could.

  “I feel like shit,” Debbie replied dully.

  She looked like shit – where had I seen that before, just recently?

  “Nonsense!” I said. “You’re the prettiest girl in this whole room.”

  This was a very old – and very lame – family joke. In good times, it evoked the standard response: “But I’m the only girl in this room!”

  On this occasion, Debbie wasn’t up to standard responses. She said nothing.

  “Wanna sanger?” I asked, proffering the plate of mixed sandwiches.

  Debbie pulled a face as if nauseated by the thought of food.

  Her eyes were puffy and rheumy. Her skin was pale and blotched. And did she seem groggy? Yes, quite groggy.

  Sound familiar? Yep, Debbie looked just like the bench clerk at Inglewood Magistrates Court.

  “So what? Plenty of folk get the ‘flu,” I thought. “It must be something that’s going round at the moment.”

  “Can I stay at your place tonight, Pete?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, without hesitation. “Had another fight with Ben?”

  She nodded weakly.

  Ben and Debbie had been together for about 7 years. Ben was an okay guy, as it had turned out, but I hadn’t been very keen on him at first. You see, he had seduced my little sister when she was only 16 and still at school. Ben was 25 then. That made it statutory rape – though I didn’t doubt that Debbie was in love with the guy.

  Along with tens of thousands of others, Dad and Mum had died during the zombie apocalypse – we never did find out quite how. But Debbie had survived – just barely. She was a thirteen year old schoolkid at the time when the apocalypse came through. Most of her classmates were taken but, by chance, Debbie had been able to flee to the comparative security of the science lab after receiving just a minor wound to her arm.

  She and the science teacher holed up in the lab for about 10 days and were pretty skinny by the time the troops arrived to rescue them. Plenty of water but not a lot of food to be had – just some kibble that they had been using to feed the rats and guinea pigs. (Yuk!)

  In any event, after I had returned from my time in PNG with my brother, David, I was re-united with Debbie and became her legal guardian. I was legally and morally responsible for her.

  So, I didn’t take it too well when she took a lover and decided to drop out of school at year 10 level.

  We had lots of fights about it. Lots of fights – nasty, angry fights. I even threatened to make a court application to keep Ben and her apar
t. But, honestly, whatever the legalistics of it, those two were definitely lovebirds.

  A psychologist might have said that, in hooking up with an older man, Debbie was just ‘compensating’ for the loss of our father.

  Dunno.

  However, what I did realise was that, if I continued to oppose the relationship, I would not only fail to keep them apart but would lose my sister in the process.