“Approaching the Sands Skypark.”
Rhonda turned around in her seat and glanced out of the cabin window. In the distance she could see the distinctive shape of the landmark – three vast towers rising into the hazy sky, topped by a sky park that bridged all three towers, with one of the segments cantilevered off the north tower. Behind the resort, the waters of Marina Bay were shimmered and shadowed. As the helicopter flew closer, she could see that the façades of all three towers had been scorched and blackened by fire. The scene was one of apocalyptic devastation.
Rhonda’s phone buzzed. She looked away from the dreadful view and checked her watch.
“Thirty seconds!” she said. “Remember. Your opening line is ‘G’day, Georgie’. Then you go into your report.” She didn’t repeat the message because she thought Max needed to be reminded. She did it to take her thoughts off the gruesome spectacle of a city in ruins. She snatched her headphones off and pressed her cell phone to her ear to hear last-minute instructions and a count in from the Sydney studio.
On the opposite bench Max Winslow began perfecting his on-camera expression, oblivious to the carnage he was flying over. Then he impulsively unfastened another button of his shirt. Rhonda’s eyes turned black with silent contempt. She counted down from five with her fingers, then pointed at him.
Max Winslow’s face became suddenly stately and grave.
“Thanks, Georgie,” he said, then paused significantly, filling the moment with somber gravity. “The scene from Singapore is one of cruel ruin and total devastation. As some of you know I’ve been on assignment for many days filming an important documentary, but when word reached us of the NK Plague sweeping through Asia, I felt duty-bound as an investigative reporter to risk everything to bring Australian viewers the world’s first look at the nightmare unfolding around us. Through the open door of our helicopter, as we hover just a few hundred feet above the chaos, you can see for yourself that Singapore is burning to the ground.”
He paused again then, letting the cameraman pan away from him and get to the skids of the chopper while the noise of the rotors added drama to the moment. As he waited for the cameraman to get his shots and come back to him, Max wondered idly whether his wife and children would be watching.
“On the ground, the dead lay in hideous disfigured piles, their corpses bloating and rotting in the baking sun while around them this glittering jewel of Asia burns. Office blocks are on fire. Singapore’s once busy highways are now jammed with the wrecked and blackened carcasses of abandoned cars, and all of Malaysia has become the massed graveyard of millions.”
He liked that last line. He replayed it back in his mind while staring fixedly at Rhonda, his expression a carefully crafted mask. The cameraman panned again, for some final horrific shots before he had to reframe back on Winslow.
Max winked at Rhonda. She felt her lip curl in contempt.
“Thirty seconds and then you’re out.” She mimed the words carefully to be sure he understood. Max nodded and re-composed his features. He lifted his chin and compressed the line of his mouth, then hooked a small devil-may-care smile onto the corner of his lips. From his seat he tapped the cameraman’s leg to signal they had thirty seconds left. The cameraman swiveled obediently back to him.
“Georgie,” Max began the link back to the Sydney studio, “I know this is unplanned, but if your viewers will re-join us in thirty minutes, I intend to walk the streets of Singapore and bring you a ground-level view of the plague. Until then, this is Max Winslow, on assignment…”
Rhonda’s sat stunned and appalled long after the live cross had ended. Max beamed at her triumphantly. She shook her head, dazed by a fog of disbelief.
“Fuck! I was awesome! Wasn’t I awesome, Rhonda? Do you think there will be an award in this for me?” he was buoyant.
“You. Fucking. Idiot,” Rhonda spat the words out. She began to shake. A hot flush of temper bloomed on her cheeks. Max Winslow flinched, then his eyes turned dark with umbrage.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re a fucking idiot!” Rhonda shouted into the man’s face. Her headphones were on her lap. Shouting was the only way to make herself heard above the swirling clatter of the helicopter’s rotors as they beat the smoky air. “You can’t go down there! You can’t report live from the streets of Singapore.”
“Why not?” Max Winslow scowled. “Everyone’s dead.”
“They’re not all dead you fucking fool. There are millions of infected. Infected, Max! They’re roaming the streets, looking for survivors to kill.”
“We haven’t see any…”
“Well they’re down there! If you had spent more time paying attention to the news that’s burning across the world and less time looking at yourself in a mirror you would know that.”
He huffed, stung by the venom of her temper. “Well it’s too late. I said I’m going to do it, so I’m going to do it. Tell the pilot to put us on the ground somewhere.”
“You conceited, contemptible fucking egomaniac,” she glared at him, her eyes wild with wonder and amazement. “I don’t give a fuck about you – but what about us? What about Jimmy and me? What about the pilot? Did you ever consider the fact that you’re just the fucking face in front of the camera, and now you’ve put all our lives at risk just so you can get thirty seconds of prime-time exposure?”
Winslow folded his arms across his chest. His face turned dark and thunderous. “Just tell the fucking pilot to land, Rhonda. Do your damned job. Do what you’re paid for. I’ll do the rest.”
DALIAN HARBOR
LIAODONG PENINSULA
CHINA
“I have done my duty, Minister,” Marine Colonel Zhang Bingjun reported to Tong Ge. “Within twenty four hours, the perimeter protecting the peninsula will collapse and the undead will overrun the harbor. I have no more men. The end is near.”
The Marine Colonel stood stiffly, his eyes fixed on a piece of wall above the Minister’s head. Tong Ge was shocked by the Colonel’s appearance. Zhang looked like an old, broken man. His eyes were bloodshot, his gait shuffling and unsteady. His hands were crippled into claws and his skin showed the sickly grey patina of exhaustion.
Tong Ge turned and stared out the window of the fifth-floor factory office he had commandeered as a temporary headquarters. Spread beneath him, Dalian Harbor was alive with frenetic activity; the bright flare of welding, the drum-like boom of heavy hammers, and the engine whine of huge industrial cranes.
Tong Ge had achieved much in the short time that fate had given him. Any further plans would need to be abandoned.
His eyes drifted to the sleek white shape of a cruise liner moored at one of the docks a mile to his left. There were four more luxury cruise vessels anchored outside the harbor awaiting the arrival of China’s elite. They were sprinkled amongst the hundreds of converted commercial ships that had already been packed with passengers and soldiers. It was a vast armada, the likes of which history had never seen before. Soon – very soon – it would be compelled to set sail.
He sighed, and turned back to the Marine Colonel.
“Thank you for your sacrifice, and the sacrifice of your men.”
*
“President Xiang. It is time,” Tong Ge spoke quickly over the phone. “The Marine commander defending the peninsula’s barricade can promise just twenty-four more hours of protection from the undead. You must make plans to evacuate Beijing immediately.”
He heard rumbling voices in the background. Tong suspected his call had interrupted the President during a meeting with his close advisors. He wondered if Yi Dan and other members of the Politburo were listening in to his conversation.
“Very well,” the president’s voice was gruff to conceal a trembling undercurrent of alarm. “There are aircraft standing by at the airport. We will make preparations to leave immediately. Have adequate security on standby for our arrival.”
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
Private rifleman Gengxin woke with an agon
ized groan and raised a slow, dazed hand to his head. Pain brought tears to his eyes, and made him blink. Slowly blurred shapes drifted into focus and his senses came alert through an anesthetic fog. His fingertips felt the coarse material of thick bandaging that had been swathed around his forehead. He felt, too, a deep ache between his shoulder blades, and a more muted but persistent pain in his legs. He licked dry lips and made a small sound of bewildered confusion.
He lay stretched out on a patch of dirt under the shade of a canvas awning. The sun was low in the sky and there was a haze of dust in the air. He could smell diesel fumes and disinfectant.
And he could smell death. It was an overly-ripe sickening odor of corruption and putrefaction carried on the breeze. It was in his nostrils and thick in the back of his throat so that for a nauseating moment the young soldier thought he must retch. Then the wave of giddy sickness passed and he turned his head slowly to the side and stared, still dazed and disorientated.
A middle-aged man stared back at him, frowning and fretting.
“Ha!” the stranger exclaimed. His face broke into a wide grin of relief. “You are alive.”
Private Gengxin moaned. His body felt very heavy, and yet he had the strange sensation that he was dreaming. Everything seemed very far away, as though he were staring down a tunnel. He swallowed hard and licked his lips again. They were cracked and dry.
“Where… where am I?”
The man snatched Gengxin’s wrist and stared at his watch for thirty seconds. “You are at General Qin’s command post. I am a doctor.”
“A doctor?”
“Yes. And you are a most honored patient. Today, private rifleman, you are a national hero.”
Gengxin frowned, dopey in a haze of pain-killing drugs. Nothing made any sense. He felt the desperate need to sleep but a kaleidoscope of nightmare images flashed behind his eyes. He cried out weakly in traumatized fear until he heard a familiar voice close at his side.
“You have slept enough, rifleman Gengxin. Wake up you lazy soldier.”
The young private forced himself alert and turned towards the voice. He recognized the young man squatting beside where he lay. It was his friend from the platoon. He was smoking a cigarette, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his helmet pulled low over his eyes at a jaunty angle. Gengxin could not remember the man’s name, but he knew he was his friend.
The soldier took a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaled. His face as he stared down at private Gengxin’s broken body was lit with disbelief and wonder.
“Why am I here?” Gengxin asked, weak and confused. “What happened to me?”
The soldier squatting at his side looked shocked. “You do not remember what happened?”
“No…”
The other man smiled. He shook his head. “You don’t remember the battle?”
“No… yes…” private rifleman Gengxin said uncertainly. He thought the gruesome pictures that had flashed behind his eyes were nightmares. Could they have been real? “There was a fight…”
“Ha!” the other solder exclaimed. “Was there ever!”
“The undead…”
“So, it’s coming back to you,” the soldier nodded. “Good. A hero should remember his heroics.”
“But I don’t… I can’t…” he reached for his head again. The pain across his brow felt like a giant clamp was squeezing his skull. He wondered if he was dying.
“You can’t remember what you did when the undead attacked the wall?”
“No.”
The soldier dropped his cigarette in the dirt and crushed it under the heel of his boot. “Our platoon was patrolling our sector of the Great Wall. You saw the undead in the woods and raised the alarm. That was when they charged us Gengxin. There was thousands of the vermin – filthy wretched beasts covered in bleeding wounds, the dead black flesh rotting from their bodies. You called out a warning.”
“I did?” the young private rifleman frowned. A memory was stirring in the back of his mind, but it did not match his friend’s retelling. Gengxin remembered being on patrol. He remembered standing, scared stiff and staring at the fringe of trees at the bottom of the slope. Even though he was standing guard behind a high fortified section of parapeted stone wall, he remembered being so scared that he thought he might piss his pants. Then the undead had come charging up the steep slope, howling like berserkers as they attacked. Gengxin remembered the paralyzing fear. He remembered the hot liquid churning in his bowels – and then the shrill scream of white panic in his throat.
He hadn’t raised the alarm. He had screamed like a frightened child.
“We all raced to the parapet and opened fire on the undead. There was no great concern because our section of the wall stood twenty feet high and the stone was solid. The captain called for reinforcements and we opened fire. It was like target practice, really.”
“I think I remember…”
“We were all shooting. There must have been ten thousand of the undead attacking our position. The captain said it was the first skirmish anywhere along the defensive line. It was our platoon’s honor to be the first soldiers in the Army to fight the undead. Imagine that!”
The memories began to come flooding back, like a dam wall finally breached. Gengxin remembered the fetid stench of the rotting corpses as they clamored to scale the wall. And he remembered the deafening volleys of the platoon’s barking rifles as their bullets plucked the infected back and threw them down in the dirt. He remembered many of the undead rising to their feet again, despite hideous wounds. He remembered the sudden blind panic that overwhelmed him…
“That was when lieutenant Yitian suddenly fell off the wall, right into the killing ground. What did you do? What did you do? You threw yourself off the damned wall and tried to save the lieutenant! I’ve never seen such bravery. Yitian was badly hurt. He landed flat on his back. It was like those American movies where the person falls into the bear’s enclosure at the zoo. But you didn’t hesitate. You dived off the wall and protected the lieutenant’s body with your own until we could drive the undead back and send a rescue team down on ropes to recover you. I’ve never seen such bravery.”
Private rifleman Gengxin went suddenly very still and quiet. For a moment he stopped breathing. He saw it all then – the terrible, dreadful truth. He had been too scared to fire his rifle. The lieutenant had come storming down the ranks to hurl abuse at him. Gengxin had turned to flee and the lieutenant had seized his arm. There had been a split-second of panicked struggle… before the two men had fallen off the wall. Gengxin could distinctly remember the moment when he had teetered to keep his balance, his arms cartwheeling as he screamed in wild terror. Then he had fallen twenty feet and landed on the Lieutenant’s body. It had not been heroics. It had been the worst kind of shameful cowardice.
“What happened to lieutenant Yitian?” Gengxin was sick with dread.
“He died in the fall,” the soldier’s voice softened. “The rescuers were unable to recover his body.”
Private rifleman Gengxin felt his cheeks burning. He had disgraced himself in the face of the enemy. He was a coward.
The soldier saw the young man’s expression and misread its meaning.
“Don’t worry comrade! Your bravery will not be forgotten. General Qin has announced that you are to be awarded the Medal of Heroic Exemplar just as soon as the undead hordes are defeated and the battle to save Beijing is won.”
‘GARDENS BY THE BAY’
SINGAPORE
“Put the helicopter on the ground,” Rhonda seethed. Her face was pinched and frustrated. The Malaysian pilot who had been their constant companion for ten days had suddenly forgotten how to interpret English. He looked at her dumbly and shrugged his shoulders. Rhonda let the anger she felt for Max Winslow spill into her voice.
“Put us on the fucking ground, Khairy! Right now,” she shouted.
The pilot had the helicopter in an orbit over the spectacular ‘Gardens by the Bay’. It was one of Singapore’s premie
r tourist attractions; a nature park spread across a hundred acres of reclaimed land in the heart of the city. The site boasted a myriad of futuristic structures amidst breathtaking garden designs in three distinctive waterfront settings. It was a lush green oasis amidst a metropolis of steel skyscrapers and smog.
“One thousand dollar more!” the helicopter pilot scowled and shook his head. He waved a finger at her the way a parent admonishes a rude child.
“What?”
“One thousand dollar more!” Khairy insisted. “No pay… no way!”
“Fuck!”
Rhonda turned in her seat and glared back at Max Winslow. He was staring, sullen-faced, at the cityscape spread below them.
“Hey, asshole. Khairy is blackmailing us. He wants an extra thousand bucks to put the helicopter on the ground,” Rhonda glared at the journalist with smoldering contempt. “This was your fucking idea, so it’s your fucking problem.”
“Fine. Tell him he’ll get paid,” Winslow snapped. From the corner of his eye he watched Rhonda and the pilot negotiate for a moment longer. Then suddenly the helicopter began to descend.
*
The chopper circled the treetops for thirty seconds while the pilot craned his neck through the Plexiglass bubble in search for a place to land. The Gardens were encircled by discreet pedestrian pathways and sprinkled with green grassy patches. He spotted a park close to a cluster of food shops and settled the chopper into a hover. The downdraught from the rotors lashed long palm fronds into frenzy and flattened surrounding shrubs.
Rhonda watched the pilot’s face, tight with anxiety, as the chopper sank lower. The Gardens seemed completely deserted but still the pilot was skittish. The helicopter began to sway as he juggled with the controls. He gave Rhonda a last pained face that looked like a condemned man’s plea for mercy – and then the skids kissed the grass and the helicopter settled on solid ground.
Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse Page 35
