The Swiss Family RobinZOM (Book 5)

by Perrin Briar

  “You’re a worse cheat than your father!” Liz said as she slipped behind him.

  “From the woman who benefited from a false start!” Ernest said.

  He turned to look ahead. Bill was right in front of him. In the far distance, hazy like a mirage, Ernest could make out the finish line. Bill pushed the goats hard. He had a length of wood like a fishing rod held in front of him, hanging just out of reach of the goats. The goats seemed to covet it more than their own lives as they drove the chariot faster than Ernest thought they were capable of.

  Ernest pulled up behind Bill’s chariot, the dirt and muck kicked up by the wheels. Clementine gweked in outrage, causing Bill to turn his head slightly. Now he knew they were there. Ernest swung Clementine out from behind the chariot and alongside Bill. Ernest leaned in as low as he could. The ostrich’s head was two feet higher than Bill’s.

  The rod had a thick wedge of grass, roots and leaves on the end of it. The goats, incensed by the luscious prize, powered their legs as fast as they could go, barely touching the ground before striding again. But they were hindered by their physiology. As fast as they might be able to run, they were no match for an ostrich. One of Clementine’s strides was worth five of the little goats’.

  “You can’t fight evolution!” Ernest said. “Clementine was built for speed!”

  “You’re right,” Bill said with a sly smile. “But one thing trumps evolution.”

  Ernest held his breath. He couldn’t bring himself to ask what.

  “Cunning,” Bill said, and he moved the clutch of foliage at the end of his rod over to one side, in front of Clementine’s beak.

  She caught the scent of it. Her eyes widened, her tongue poking out. She pecked at the grass. The goats caught the blades that flittered down to them. Then Bill made thrusting motions, and a handful of grass and roots fell onto the racetrack.

  Ernest’s eyebrows rose in alarm.

  “No!” he gasped.

  “Ta-ta!” Bill said, pulling ahead.

  Clementine’s strides shrank as she slowed. Ernest jerked forward, smacking into Clementine’s thick neck. She spun and turned on the spot, feet kicking up dust. Liz ran past as Clementine headed in the opposite direction. Clementine bent down and pecked at the roots and leaves on the ground, guzzling it down. Ernest pulled on the reins to no avail.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Jack said as he swung overhead in the vines. “That’ll teach you!”

  “Teach me what?” Ernest said. “There’s nothing to learn from this!”

  His eyes returned to Clementine, who was busy snapping up the roots.

  “Except to never trust Father,” Ernest said. He turned to Clementine. “You might as well eat all of it. We’ve got no chance of winning now anyway.”

  There was a loud roar, like a dinosaur on the loose, somewhere down the straight. The foliage erupted, and a loud crack like a cannon exploding echoed over the island. A dozen flocks of birds took flight. A tree that had been precariously leaning over fell and broke across the beach, the leafy top slamming into the sea. Bill and Liz skidded to a stop before it.

  There was a clip-clopping sound behind Ernest. He turned to find Fritz on Lightfoot’s back, making slow but steady progress. He didn’t even look tired.

  “That was pretty dramatic, wasn’t it?” Fritz said as he trotted up to Ernest.

  “You’ve only just caught up?” Ernest said.

  “It seemed pointless trying to win on the back of Lightfoot,” Fritz said. “So I decided just to take a nice stroll. Enjoy the view.”

  Francis burst from the foliage ahead of the fallen tree on Valiant’s back. The bull shook his giant horns, dislodging the tree bark and detritus. He reared up, snorted, and ran up the track toward the finish line.

  “Valiant,” Fritz said. “The great tree destroyer.”

  He looked at the food on the floor that Clementine was pecking at.

  “Father?” he said.

  “Who else?” Ernest said.

  “You know how much he likes to win,” Fritz said.

  “He hasn’t won yet,” Ernest said.

  “What do you mean?” Fritz said.

  “No one has finished yet,” Ernest said. “Looks like Francis will be the first one to the finish line though.”

  “Wait,” Fritz said. “You’re telling me no one has crossed the finished line yet?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ernest said.

  “And to get ahead like that, Francis must have skipped a large part of the course, failing to pick up all his flags…” Fritz said.

  He shared a look with his brother, the same thought passing through both their brains. Even Lightfoot could travel faster than Valiant.

  “Ya!” Fritz said, snapping Lightfoot’s reins and making him run.

  Ernest pulled on Clementine’s harness. She resisted once, and then relented, letting Ernest lead her in a trot in the direction of the finish line. Fritz slowed Lightfoot down as he approached the fallen tree. He let Lightfoot take him over it, the animal’s naturally cautious sense now paying dividends as it carefully climbed over the tree trunk and emerged on the other side.

  “Haha!” Fritz said, turning back and waving at the others. “See you at the finish line!”

  The tree was massive – over seven feet tall with huge arm-like protruding limbs. The goats and Lightning snapped at the leaves on the tree, and no matter how hard they tried, Bill and Liz couldn’t get them to stop chomping.

  Clementine powered up a tree branch, her broad feet good at scaling such objects. She flapped her wings as if she were about to try and fly, but really she was just balancing herself to come down the opposite side with grace.

  Despite Francis’s long head start, he was only halfway to the finish line. If it wasn’t for Valiant’s powerful hooves kicking up sand Ernest was certain he’d be able to see the finish line. Fritz had already closed half the distance to Francis. Lightfoot was fast, but not the most graceful of creatures. Fritz bounced all over the place on his saddle. There was enough straight for Clementine to catch up.

  “Ya!” Ernest said, spurring Clementine on.

  It didn’t take long for her to reach full speed, powering along the beach. They were on the home straight now, down the short length of the east coast.

  Clementine raced along the sand, her strides growing longer as they ate up the beach. Fritz checked over his shoulder and moved his arms even faster to coax as much speed out of Lightfoot as he could. But they grew larger as Clementine drew closer.

  Ernest turned his head to one side to avoid the sand that had been whipped up into a thick fog by Valiant. When he emerged out onto the other side he was startled to find he couldn’t see the finish line. As the sand began to settle he realised he had already crossed it. There was no one ahead of him.

  “Yes!” Ernest said, fists raised high in the air. “Come on! Yes! None of you thought an ostrich could win! Haha! I showed you! I showed you all!”

  Ernest reached up and kissed Clementine on the beak.

  “You beauty!” he said. “You’re the most beautiful creature in the world! Well, maybe not actually the most beautiful, but metaphorically you might be. In a sense.”

  He stopped cheering, realising no one was listening to him. The dust died down and the air became clear, revealing the rest of the Robinson family two dozen yards away. They had all gotten off their animals, which stood milling around on the fringes of the jungle, skittish, uncertain and fearful. They cast wary glances toward the black shape lying on the beach at the Robinson family’s feet.

  Fear gripped Ernest’s heart. Had Fritz or Francis come off their animals? Of the two he feared most for Francis. If he had pushed Valiant too hard he might have fallen, the mighty bull rolling over him and crushing him beneath his enormous weight. Ernest held his breath and drove Clementine toward them.

  When he got within a dozen yards, Clementine got spooked and wouldn’t go any closer. Ernest climbed down off her and let her run back to t
he other animals. Ernest approached his family on foot.

  “What’s up?” he said. “Is anything wrong? Is Francis okay?”

  A black lifeless object lay across the sand, head flopped to one side. It lifted its head and emitted a deep groan that was full of pain and fear, as powerful and full of heartbroken emotions as a slave’s blues melody. Though it was weak, it still resonated across the entire beach and several miles out to sea, a warning to any creature listening that it was not yet dead and would not be an easy kill. One look at its wounds proved the falsehood of that claim.

  “First a tiger, now a jaguar,” Bill said. “I wonder what other dangerous creatures there are on this island.”

  “With zombies out there I think Pantherinae are the last thing we should be worried about,” Ernest said.

  The beast’s big yellow cat eyes stared back at them all.

  “They look a lot bigger in real life, don’t they?” Ernest said.

  “Really?” Jack said. “It looks small to me.”

  “What do you think happened to him?” Ernest said.

  “He’s dying,” Bill said. “Something attacked him.”

  The jaguar was smothered in blood, deep cuts across its body like it had been used in a tic-tac-toe championship.

  “But by what?” Ernest said.

  “Couldn’t it have gotten into a fight with another jaguar?” Liz said.

  “It could,” Bill said, nodding. “Except for the marks on its flanks.”

  Bill put his hand to the jaguar’s haunch, which was crisscrossed with deep gouges. His fingers fit perfectly against them.

  “You did it?” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “While you all sleep I’ve been wrestling and mutilating jaguars. Of course I didn’t do it.”

  “Some of the blood on its fur looks coagulated,” Ernest said.

  “This was done by human hands,” Bill said. “Or something similar to us.”

  “Zombies,” Liz said.

  “Do you think more of them have gotten to the island?” Fritz said.

  “Could be,” Bill said. “Or they’re from the same cruise liner we saw before, just having managed to avoid us all this time. Either way, we have to check and make sure there aren’t too many of them. We’ll have to go scouting to find them.”

  “If they came here by the sea, we’d better do a sweep of the beaches, hadn’t we?” Fritz said. “In case there are more on board.”

  “We just rode around the seashore,” Ernest said. “I’m sure one of us would have noticed a boat.”

  “Maybe not,” Bill said. “We were distracted.”

  “But it couldn’t have been a large ship,” Ernest said. “We would have noticed it.”

  “Either way we have to do a scout of the island,” Bill said. “To get rid of these things.”

  The jaguar looked around at its audience and let out a deep groan. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth. Bill wore a deep frown.

  “Is something wrong?” Liz said.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Bill said. “It’s just, jaguars sleep in trees. And I don’t believe jaguars are particularly slow creatures.”

  “So?” Liz said.

  “So how did slow moving zombies manage to maul a jaguar so badly?” Ernest said. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Pa?”

  “It is,” Bill said, nodding. “He must have fallen out of the tree and gotten injured, though I don’t see any broken bones. How else could the zombies have gotten him? I don’t understand why he didn’t run way. Zombies could never hope to keep up with him. They’re slow and stupid. No, something fast got to him and wouldn’t let go until it was done with him. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t kill him when they had the chance.”

  “Then it wasn’t a zombie?” Fritz said.

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “But it’s mighty strange.”

  The jaguar let out another low groan of pain. Bill kneeled down next to it and placed his hand on its head. It raised its paw in defence, but lacked the strength to do much more than gently pat Bill’s arm.

  “Sh, sh, sh,” Bill said. “It’s all right.”

  Bill slipped his knife deep into the jaguar’s neck. The big cat’s eyes snapped open wide, a snuffled squawk escaping its throat. Its eyes rolled back into its head and its tongue lolled out of its mouth, body going lax. Bill laid the jaguar’s head down.

  “There are dangerous creatures on the island,” Bill said. “We’d best be on our guard. We’ll go hunting for them in the morning. Until then, no one goes into the jungle by themselves. Understood?”

  The family nodded.

  The sea lapped against the unmoving black shadow on the sand. It washed him out to sea as if he had never existed at all.

  Chapter Two

  Bill, Fritz, Ernest and Jack walked through the undergrowth, each looking out in a different direction. They wore their armour; coconut helmets, knee and elbow pads, bamboo tubes over their arms and legs, and dried tar boots on their feet. In their hands they gripped cudgels with knobbly bumps on the end, the low surface area ideal for smashing open skulls.

  “I was thinking about what kind of zombies these things might be,” Jack said.

  “Oh yeah?” Bill said.

  “I was thinking, what if they’re intelligent?” Jack said.

  “Intelligent how?” Bill said.

  “At plans and things,” Jack said. “Like us. They could have caught the jaguar and then attacked it.”

  “It’s a nice idea,” Bill said. “But so far we’ve seen hundreds of these things and none of them has an IQ over five.”

  “But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” Jack said.

  “No,” Ernest said. “But there’s any number of things that might exist.”

  “Like chocolate teapots,” Fritz said.

  “Or waterproof teabags,” Ernest said.

  “Or inflatable dartboards,” Fritz said.

  “Enough of that, you two,” Bill said. “There’s something out here. We need to be on our sharpest if we’re to find it before it finds us.”

  “I think I found it,” Ernest said. “Or, at least, a sign of it.”

  Ernest put his hand to a broad tree trunk, a trunk that had three long claw marks slashed diagonally across it. The outer bark had been torn away, leaving the inner yellow sapwood visible.

  “Looks like Wolverine stopped by,” Ernest said.

  “What could have done this?” Fritz said.

  Bill put his three middle fingers to the markings, which, when clawed, fit perfectly.

  “The same thing that killed the jaguar,” he said.

  A pheasant whistled and honked as it flew from a bush and floated on the air away from them. Fritz, Ernest and Jack spun around, wary, cudgels raised. Bill bent down, looking at the snapped foliage on the ground. He pressed the foliage over to one side.

  “He went this way,” Bill said, following the tracks.

  “I can’t make out any footprints,” Fritz said.

  “That’s because they’re not footprints,” Bill said. “It’s a handprint. He doesn’t move the way we do. It seems to twist around in circles, scratching anything that gets close to it. Here, look. He damaged another tree.”

  “Maybe he’s doing it to remember where he’s going,” Ernest said. “Some animals do that.”

  “Maybe,” Bill said. He didn’t sound convinced.

  At times the tracks consisted of footprints, other times handprints with missing fingers, but most were indented circles, like someone had pushed their elbow into the soil. There were more deep scratches in the trees – always at different depths and angles; sometimes curled up from the base of the tree, sometimes an entire trunk had been denuded as if a bear had used it to sharpen its claws.

  Then they heard an odd sound, a whooshing noise like a man shaking his head side to side rapidly, letting his cheeks flap against his teeth.

  Flap, flap, flap. Flap, flap.

  “What in God’s name was
that?” Fritz said.

  The sound quietened, and then came again.

  Flap, flap. Flap.

  “What is that?” Fritz said.

  The Robinsons crawled up a small rise on their forearms and peered down into the dimple of land amongst the trees. Something moved amongst them, hacking at a sequoia like a samurai at a block of wood.

  “Oh my God,” Jack said. “What is that?”

  It was in a constant state of motion, twisting and turning, performing an inelegant form of acrobatics that would make the performers at Cirque du Soleil envious. The creature had four limbs – each of them at the corner of its body. Two of the limbs ended with stubs, one resembling a human foot, the other a claw. It was hard to make out details with the way it was spinning around in circles and kicking up dirt and foliage from the jungle floor. It never stopped moving, always spinning and turning over and rolling in the dirt, like an uncoordinated break dancer. As it spun it made a strange noise, like a washing machine with a broken rubber ring.

  Flap, flap, flap, flap.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jack said. “It’s attacking everything it gets close to.”

  Fritz turned to Jack.

  “Bang goes your theory about intelligent zombies,” he said. “These things must be the dumbest things to have walked the earth.”

  “What is it?” Ernest said. “An alien?”

  “I think it used to be a man,” Bill said. “You see the limbs? I think they’re arms and legs.”

  “Let’s go put it out of its misery,” Fritz said.

  “How?” Jack said “It doesn’t have a head!”

  The others peered at the unfortunate creature.

  “Huh,” Bill said. “Would you look at that. How didn’t any of us notice that?”

  “Maybe because zombies never seem to use their heads, we forgot to check if this one even had one,” Fritz said.

  “You can see the severed neck where it used to be,” Bill said. “That’s what must be making that flapping noise.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Jack said.