Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation

by Hodge, Alister

  Chris exited the end of the suburban street and walked into the light of a small strip of shops. Four out of the five shops were empty, victims of the current depression. Most people struggled to put food on the table, turning what had once been a fad diet of two ‘fasting days’ each week into an unwanted reality. Chris cared little about these struggles, and he saw the slackening skin folds on people that had once been obese as merely amusing. If anything, it was good for the Patriots. A healthy dose of desperation and fear would turn greater numbers toward his father’s party and grant them the power he desired.

  Chris shoved open the door of the only illuminated shop. A single bulb cast a dull glow over the serving area, the rest had been unscrewed, leaving three short aisles of sparsely stocked shelves in shadow.

  ‘Good evening, can I help you, sir?’ asked a man behind the counter. The shopkeeper was a gentleman of Indian heritage who observed his new customer with bright eyes. Chris ignored the question as he turned on the spot, looking over the shelves. The shop was much warmer than outside, and Chris unzipped his jacket, the edges moving back to expose the logo on his underlying t-shirt. “Tasmania First” stood in bold white against the navy blue of the shirt, underscored by the Patriots party’s lion.

  Irritated that he couldn’t see what he wanted in the gloom, Chris finally turned to the shopkeeper. ‘Why don’t you get some more lights on in here, I can barely see anything.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m trying to keep costs of electricity down. It’s either the lights or turn off the refrigerators and lose my frozen produce,’ said the man behind the counter with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘What are you after? If we’ve got it, I’ll be happy to find it for you.’

  Chris sighed and stepped closer to the counter and into the circle of light cast by the single globe. ‘I want alcohol. Preferably something strong – have you got any?’

  From his seated position, the man started to reach under the counter for something, but then paused for a moment before returning to his former seated position. His expression had changed. Gone was the pleasant openness of a few moments prior, replaced by a closed expression of muted anger. ‘No, I don’t have any alcohol in stock. Nor is anything else for sale. If you don’t mind leaving, I’m going to close the store now.’

  Chris’s mouth dropped open in surprise. ‘Like fuck you are. I saw you reaching for a bottle of something under the bench. How about you sell it to me, so I can get the hell out of your grimy store.’

  The man remained defiant. ‘I don’t sell to people who support that party,’ he said, raising a finger to point at Chris’s shirt. ‘That man Finart and his party full of traitors are an embarrassment to our state. Tasmania should be fighting with the rest of Australia, not abandoning them when they need us most!’

  Chris felt himself go cold at the man’s words. How dare he talk about my father like that. In Chris’s mind, his father was the only other human worth anything, the only other man that saw the world as he did with a clarity unencumbered with sentimentality or empathy.

  ‘You take that back,’ said Chris quietly, his mouth tight and body still.

  ‘It’s my store, and I’ll say what I please. Now get out!’ said the shopkeeper, his face flushed and hand shaking on the bench top.

  Chris glanced away from the man, his eyes roaming into the four corners of the store to ensure there were no CCTV cameras, and then out the front window.

  There was no-one to see, nothing to record.

  A half smile kinked one corner of Chris’s mouth as he lifted the back of his jacket and withdrew his knife from its sheath. The shopkeeper froze as he saw the blade appear.

  ‘What? Not so brave now? If I’m the traitor, then that must make you a hero ready to die for Queen and country?’ he taunted.

  Like a striking snake, Chris whipped his knife up and punched forward over the bench, driving six inches of steel deep into the man’s chest. His victim stared down at the knife between his ribs, eyes wide in disbelief. Chris grabbed hold of the man’s shirt collar for purchase, twisted the handle to loosen the blade against the suck of flesh and withdrew the knife, only to stab it another four times into chest and neck. Bright red blood from the shopkeeper’s lungs bubbled out of his mouth and nose and pulsed from the neck wound.

  Chris shoved him backwards, releasing his grip to let the man drop. The shopkeeper twitched on the floor, emitting a wet gurgling noise as he drowned in his own blood. Chris leaned over the counter to watch until the man finally lay still, expiring after a last gout of blood from his mouth.

  Chris sighed, a warm satisfaction melting the tension he’d carried from Julie’s house. He picked up a chux from the benchtop and wiped his blade clean, then cleaned the blood splattered on his face and arms at a sink in the corner.

  As he walked toward the exit, he had a second flash of irritation thinking on what the man had said. If he’d been willing to openly disparage the Patriots, then there must be other people out there doing the same. That had to stop. Chris walked behind the counter, squelching through a pool of congealing blood about the corpse and started a quick search of the cabinets. With a smile he stood up, clutching a can of spray paint.

  Ten minutes later, Chris ran from the strip of shops, pausing briefly to admire the sight. Fire bloomed behind him, spreading quickly until the store was a roaring inferno. He grinned, pleased with how he’d turned his night around.

  ***

  Two shops had been reduced to ashes amongst twisted beams of metal and cracked brick. Smoke still rose in white tendrils but the fire was out, drowned in water by one of the only remaining fire crews in Hobart.

  One of the firemen, a bloke named Mitch, swore in frustration. This had been the last functioning store in the local area, run by a man that had helped his neighbours by giving lines of credit that he knew were unlikely to be repaid. And now the store was gone, with the owner dead at the hands of some cowardly thief who had burnt the evidence.

  He was tired, worn out and above all, fed up that he hadn’t been paid for over four weeks. If the government didn’t come through with cash in the next few days, he’d have to find another way to feed his family. And that scared him, because he’d not the faintest idea how he was going to manage.

  As he dragged the hose out of the shop, he noted one of the other guys staring dumbly at something on the path.

  ‘Oi, Zac! Wake up and give me a hand with this shit, will you?’ he said, annoyed at his colleague’s lack of action.

  The other guy looked up at him, his face blanched in the harsh glow of their truck’s light.

  ‘Mitch, I don’t think this was a robbery tonight,’ he said, pointing at the ground. ‘This was political. I think our state’s breeding its own fucking Nazis.’

  Mitch was confused for a moment, taken aback by the look of fear on his mate’s face, a man he’d seen climb through raging infernos without an ounce of concern. Eventually he followed Zac’s direction and looked at the concrete, and realised words had been sprayed on the path.

  ‘Dissent will not be tolerated. Tasmania First!’

  Chapter Eleven

  Mark left most of his platoon in Cob Hill to begin a rough sweep of buildings to confirm the town was empty of Carriers. He’d identified the town hall, which would do fine as a barracks until more comfortable accommodation in some of the town houses could be negotiated with the residents. There were still a few hours of daylight remaining, so he’d left with Vinh to try and find the old mayor. Mark had thought the directions incredibly vague at the time, ‘ten kilometres out of town on Westfriars Rd’. Turned out there weren’t more than a handful of properties strung out along the road in question, and only one near the ten km mark.

  Where a dirt road cut away from the tarmac of Westfriars, Mark climbed out of the truck to unlatch a wide gate blocking their path. He scoped the surrounding terrain as he opened the gate for Vinh. The dirt road drove straight through a paddock with a low wire fence as the only divider between the two. Mark walked
to the edge of the field and stretched out a hand to brush the top of the grain crop. Golden wheat rose above waist height, wind moving the stalks gently like ripples in a pond. Mark tore a head off the top of a stalk and crumbled the grains into the palm of one hand. He was no expert, but the plants looked like they were ready for harvest.

  After following the road for a few hundred metres, the wheat fell away behind them at the end of its paddock. Now to either side of the road the earth lay bare, grass poisoned so that the view from the homestead to the surrounding paddocks lay unobstructed. The house was built from a red brick flecked with bluestone and topped with a grey corrugated iron roof. The only indication of defensive measures about the building itself was found at the windows, where boards of treated pine had been hammered onto the wooden frames. The house had around 100 metres of open space to each side, and then the fields of grain continued.

  Vinh slowed before drawing to a stop and cutting the engine. A moment later, the front door of the house opened and a man who looked to be in his late forties emerged into the grey afternoon light. His head was topped with unkempt curling blond hair that reached down the nape of his neck, while he cradled a rifle in his arms. His face remained relaxed, but the firm stance he took indicated that he was unlikely to be easily intimidated.

  Mark climbed out of the truck, keeping his movements smooth and deliberate as he had no desire to put the man on edge. Leaving his rifle in the vehicle, he kept only his pistol and short sword at his waist. The smith made sword was sheathed in a plain leather scabbard, a replica of the Ancient Roman tool of war that he had taken from a museum display at the outbreak of the plague. The blade, now scarred and nicked from the numerous times it had saved his life, had become a talisman of sorts for him. Without it he felt naked, like he had been stripped of his luck.

  Mark raised a hand to acknowledge the landowner. As he opened his mouth to speak, a high-pitched metal rattle sounded briefly. Mark was reminded of the bell his father had attached to his fishing rod to notify of a fish’s bite when he was a kid. Suddenly the bell starting ringing again as if it was being violently shaken. The farmer’s eyes switched from Mark to the fence line behind, scanning the perimeter for the source of the noise. He lifted his rifle, aiming straight at Mark.

  ‘Get down!’

  Mark dropped, crawling for the cover of his truck as a shot cracked. The bell stopped for a moment, then began in earnest, joined now by the snarl of an Infected.

  ‘Your truck’s blocking my shot. This one’s yours,’ grunted the farmer, clearly annoyed. Vinh had emerged from the truck.

  ‘Twelve o’clock, Boss. Carrier on the fence,’ he said pointing.

  Mark was back on his feet, pistol in hand. He looked in the direction Vinh had indicated, but saw nothing until he glanced down to ground level. A Carrier was half through the base of the fence, hips trapped as it tried to force its way onward. It focused on Vinh as the soldier stepped away from the vehicle and brought his rifle to bear. He squeezed off a single shot, smacking the ghoul’s head backward as the bullet drove home.

  The two soldiers walked over to inspect the corpse. Before it caught the plague, the Carrier had been a kid, looking no older than ten or twelve. And it looked not long dead, the wounds on its legs still wet. Along the wires of the fence, little bells were clipped at intervals, like those usually tied to a cat’s collar. Other than the warning device, there was little more than a strand of barbed wire at the top to slow a determined Carrier down. Mark heard footsteps approach from behind as the farmer joined them at the fence line. As the man gained sight of the boy, he swore.

  ‘Damn it! That’s the Jenkins gone. We’ll now bear the full brunt of anything stumbling in from the north,’ he muttered.

  ‘You know this kid?’ asked Mark.

  The farmer nodded. ‘Yeah. My wife used to babysit him when he was a toddler. His name’s Noah, youngest of the Jenkins family that lived two kilometres behind us as the crow flies. If he’s dead, the whole lot of them will be too.’

  Mark stared back down at the kid. No wonder he hadn’t seen him above the waist high grain. The corpse’s legs were gnawed to the bone under his knees, calf muscles missing, forcing it to crawl through the wheat.

  ‘Sorry for your loss, mate,’ said Mark, unsure what else to say in the situation.

  The farmer gave a brief nod of acknowledgement. ‘I’ll bury him later, least I can do for them I guess,’ he said with a sigh before turning his attention back to Mark and Vinh. ‘My name’s Joel Tipper, I used to be the mayor of this town before it all went to shit.’ He stretched out an arm, shaking both Mark and Vinh’s hand in turn with a firm grip. ‘What’s the army doing here? We could have used you guys last year – barely a third of the local population remaining these days.’

  ‘Short story, we’re here to get the farms running. If we don’t get a sustainable supply of food coming to the army and other survivors, famine will finish off what the plague started. My name’s Lieutenant Mark Collins, and this here is my Sergeant,’ he said, hooking a thumb back in Vinh’s direction. ‘I’ve been sent to your town to help the locals make this happen, and with your background, I figured you would have the best insight as to the problems we need to solve.’

  As Joel soaked in this new information, his eyes widened slightly. ‘So, this means the army’s starting to have some wins? All I’d heard to date was failure after failure until our lines of communication were cut.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s early days, but we’ve secured a good foothold in Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula. But if we’re to retake Melbourne – we need more soldiers and food.’ Mark cast an eye warily at the wheat field from which the kid had emerged unseen until the last moment. ‘Maybe we should head inside to talk further? If the kid’s family was overrun by Carriers, he’s unlikely to be the only one out there.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t think there’ll be any others following,’ said the farmer. ‘I could be wrong, but I doubt it was a random attack. It’ll be the Spartans sending me a message.’

  Mark looked back at the hideous trauma to the kid’s legs. If this was the sort of shit the bikies were up to, it was no wonder they’d hightailed it earlier in the day. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  Joel started to walk back to his house as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Come inside. My son will keep a watch for any other arrivals.’

  A teenager stepped out of the shadows of the front door as he heard himself being mentioned and nodded a greeting at the two soldiers. The kid looked about fifteen and had the same self-assured posture of his father. Mark sheathed his sword, not even recalling drawing the weapon, and stepped through the door to the interior’s gloom.

  As the kid closed the front door after them, the inside of the house was plunged into darkness. Mark followed Joel down a hallway more by listening to his footfall than sight until they came to a small lounge room where Vinh and himself were asked to have a seat. As Mark’s eyes adjusted to the low level of light, more features of the room emerged from the shadows in myriad tones of grey like an artificial twilight. A couch sat opposite their two armchairs, a low coffee table dividing them. To his right lay a barricaded window. The Tippers had been diligent in reinforcing these weak points, with a second layer of boards hammered into the frames from the interior as well, covering any cracks through which an unwanted eye might stare.

  Joel lit a candle in the corner, the feeble light blinding after the darkness. He brought it over to rest on a coffee table and sat on the couch opposite. Next to the candle he unfolded a map of the town area and surrounding farms. Mark saw that notations had been made on the paper in red and black, some with crosses, others with ticks or squares.

  ‘I’ve marked on here which farms still have survivors in place,’ said Joel as he sat back on the couch. ‘There’s a bit of a mix in produce from our area. If you’re able to get the majority of these places up and running, you’ll get a supply of beef, grain and poultry.’

  ‘What’s with the
ticks and crosses?’ asked Mark.

  Joel paused before answering, watching both Mark and Vinh through hooded eyes as if he was weighing them up. ‘How long’s your unit going to be stationed in town?’

  ‘As long as it takes to get the job done,’ said Mark, starting to become exasperated by the man’s evasiveness.

  ‘And if the main dangers to your mission end up being human rather than the Infected, what then?’

  ‘I’ll ensure the law of Australia’s upheld,’ said Mark. ‘Can you get to your point and stop skating around the edges. I can only give a concrete answer if you speak plainly.’

  Joel sighed, evidently making his decision. ‘The farms I’ve marked on the map are those that survived the first two months. It was about then that the Spartan outlaw motorcycle club decided they would treat the town and surrounding areas as their own private kingdom. They’ve had a chapter house outside Cob Hill for going on a decade, and the vast majority of the community saw them for the scum they are. So, as you can expect, once they started acting like they owned the place, taking what they wanted and stopping people from fortifying their homes appropriately, it didn’t go down too well. They responded by killing anyone that openly defied the club.’ He pointed at one of the small black crosses drawn over one of the properties on the map. ‘Those with crosses or squares on them have since been killed, the crosses indicating the ones that I suspect have been killed by the Spartans, whereas the squares show the farms that have succumbed to a Carrier attack.’

  ‘What about the ones with a tick beside them?’ asked Vinh.

  ‘They indicate the families that would likely support efforts to expel the club, while the rest I don’t particularly trust anymore.’