by JT Clay
Q launched herself as high in the air as she could and brought her left foot up to kick the ghoul free, hoping she didn’t get a second leg wedged. It would be too embarrassing to suffer death by zombie-bog.
The move worked. The creature flew backward and her right foot was free. She landed on her butt, leaped up and watched the zombie knock over three more that were emerging from the skylight behind it.
“Zominoes!” Q said, before she realized there was no one there to appreciate her wit. She moved over to the zip line, prepared herself and leaped.
As she glided down, Q heard loud thumps behind her. She twisted her head around. From the corner of her eye, she saw a steady stream of zombies walking off the roof after her and falling to the ground. Those that still had functioning legs after they hit got up and returned to the corpse ladder to climb up to the attic and fall again. She grinned.
Q braced with her feet to avoid hitting the tree too hard, and then climbed into the fork. She had picked a good spot. There were several branches a meter or so apart all the way to the ground. Clambering down was so easy, even a half-dead psycho hippy could do it. Pious Kate and Rabbit were waiting for her.
“That was the coolest thing!” Q said. “It’s like a waterfall of zombie lemmings back there! Someone needs to make a documentary of that. And an iPhone app.”
“Q!” Rabbit said.
“’Sup?”
“Look!”
Q examined his outstretched finger. “Harden up, Rabbit, it’s a bit of rope burn. Hardly cause for panic.”
“No! There!”
She turned around. There were zombies. Hundreds of zombies, all heading straight for them with the ravenous determination of the undead, except for one that had had its foot bitten off and was walking around in a circle, albeit a ravenous and determined circle.
The zip line trick had been a good one. It landed them a few hundred feet away from the cabin. Now they needed another trick.
Where were Dave and Angela? Had they bolted? Or had he booted Angela from the back of the bike and escaped alone?
Why wouldn’t he? What reason did he have to risk his life for theirs? Q had been the only bond, and he’d sent her away for betraying his confidence. Q wouldn’t see either of them again.
“We’ll outrun them,” Q said. “Be careful. They’re not fast, but they’re faster than you if you get your leg wedged down a wombat hole. Plus, irate wombat, and no one wants that.”
They jogged downhill, then stopped. Zombies flowed up toward them like a spill from a toxic river.
They turned and jogged back the way they had come. More zombies came stumbling and rolling toward them.
Q whimpered. They were the center of a contracting circle and it was the same everywhere, all the same. They had been clenched between walls for weeks as the creatures shambled closer. Was this how it would end? After winning Rabbit away from his evil ex? After being kicked out and taken back in? Her fear burnt away and left ash in her mouth.
How many times had this scene played out over the past month? Trapped people, trying to remember what nature expected of them, running hot and strong until they felt the teeth.
Would it hurt?
Rabbit reached out and took Q’s hand. His fingers were warm, his grip strong. She shook him off. “No,” she said.
He reached for her again. The things were close, but he was closer.
“No,” Q said again, louder. One of the ghouls, a pock-skinned girl of fifteen, stared at Q’s mouth. Did she understand this word that she’d learnt as a child, or was it just noise?
She grabbed Rabbit and turned him to face the tree. “Climb,” she said.
“What?” he said, as if she’d told him to eat butter.
“Climb!”
Pious Kate, perhaps keener to survive because she was so much closer to death, pulled herself up. Rabbit followed.
Fingers pulled at Q’s shirt. She kicked back like she was mob fighting, and leaped into the boughs of the tree. She climbed until she was ten feet from the ground, then swung around to sit in the fork, her feet hanging above the dead heads.
“Now what?” Pious Kate asked. “We sit here until we die?”
“There are other options,” Q said with the generosity of a pauper sharing the plague. “You can fall.”
“Great plan,” said Pious Kate. “No wonder the army didn’t want you.”
They’d shared their hopes and dreams and failures in the attic. The only thing that meant to Pious Kate was ammunition to use later.
“We should have left you on the roof,” Q said.
“You can’t leave me behind,” Pious Kate said with granite confidence. “I have something you want.”
“Yeah, a tongue. Stay there and I’ll pull it out.”
“You act so tough,” Pious Kate said.
“You should know all about faking it,” Q said. “With your secret stash of beef jerky.”
“Liar! I can’t believe you’d say that!”
Q wished she could un-say it. Pious Kate and Rabbit had been VFFs for more than two decades, and all that time the woman had been cheating on their principles. It would shake him to his core. She didn’t want him to die hurt. She didn’t want him to die at all.
She stole a glance to see how he’d taken the news. It was worse than she thought. Rabbit was hysterical. He was giggling so hard he nearly fell out of his tree.
“What a relief!” Rabbit said, when he had breath to speak.
“What?” Pious Kate said.
“It’s okay, Katie-G. I’ve known for years. It doesn’t mean you’re not trying.”
Q stretched out toward him, but their branches were on opposite sides of the trunk. She couldn’t reach.
What now?
The creatures milled below.
What else was there to do? The ghouls danced their devil’s maypole. Bloodless fingers reached for the soles of her sneakers. She thought about the darkness.
*
An engine.
Curses, dirty as guts and sweet as a harp.
The thud of wood beating meat.
Dave and Angela had returned on the bike.
“Dave!” Q called. “Dave!”
He swerved past the dead. Angela made them deader. She sat behind him, holding a cricket bat and shrieking and striking like she was possessed, like she thought these corpses had killed her babies.
Q pulled her leg up onto the branch and away from the zombie fingers. Rescue was here. She clung to her safety with fierce terror.
Dave rode away from the tree, then turned to face the zombies, gunning his engine, his headlights thrown back by demon reflections. A few creatures broke away from their vigil at the tree to stagger toward him. More followed.
He swerved around and rode a slow, wide lap of the tree. “C’mon,” he said. “Come get it!”
The gang of ghouls converged on the bike. Angela screamed, her face unrecognizable like that of a bawling child. She slammed her bat over and over, all attack with no thought for the fingers tearing at her clothes.
It was not enough. There were too many. Dave and Angela had lured dozens away, but there were still at least fifty stumbling around the tree. More and more arrived.
Dave rode another wide circuit, slow enough for the things to almost catch him. Angela bashed and cracked and cackled. Then she and Dave fell.
Q cried out. She didn’t want to see Dave and Angela disappear into a heaving mass of teeth but she couldn’t look away, either.
The bike was still moving. Were the ghouls so eager to get to their prey that they pushed it along before them?
No! Dave and Angela hadn’t fallen. Dave leaned down close to the ground, and Angela clung to him. The bike approached their tree, slower than before but still outpacing the zombies. Q’s nostrils flared.
She smelled smoke. Smoke in the bush meant disaster.
She wanted to cry out, to dowse it before it was out of control, but she was too slow. Flames shot from the ground behind Ang
ela and Dave, and now Angela really was a demon, borne along by fire. It roared behind them, quicker and more agile than the dead.
Dave waved to Q and gunned the engine. They took off.
“Is he crazy?” said Pious Kate.
The fire sprinted uphill toward them, swallowing grass and scrub, spilling up like a waterfall in reverse. The zombies poured away from it, repelled by the flames. Because what do the walking dead fear most? The only thing that will stop them where death has failed – cremation.
Sweat poured from Q’s face. She closed her eyes and shielded them with her hands. They felt like they were dribbling from their sockets. She’d have to stumble around like Z, leading Rabbit by the hand.
Smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She coughed, and that was worse, because after each hack she gasped in more. Her lungs filled with dust. She was drowning on land.
The fire ran uphill and away.
“Down!” Q said.
They clambered to the ground and stood there swaying, like they were the dead, the ones who couldn’t walk, only stumble, couldn’t talk, only yearn.
“We gotta go.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Every shadow hid a shape. Every bush held thorns.
They tried to hurry, but speed was difficult across the rough ground. The fire was long gone and Q could barely see through the layered darkness. She had no idea where they were or where they should go. She had no idea what their end might be. Her only idea was to keep moving.
She cursed, colliding with branches that might be hands, and thick roots that grasped at her feet. There were no clear spaces, only hard things that hurt. She was as clumsy as Z. The attic and lack of food and the fear had made her just like her enemies, with one key difference: not life or breath, but drive. Her enemies knew what they wanted and where to get it. But she was stumbling in the dark.
Rabbit and Pious Kate followed without complaint. Q hated them for it. Is this what her games had been about? Leading others into danger, so distracted by her own fear that she didn’t see what was ahead?
She missed Dave. She’d rather follow the devil than make her own way.
What would Apocalypse Z say? Start with what you know.
Q remembered something. Dave had told her where they were going. He had said it quietly, as if he didn’t want the others to find their way unless Q led them there. There had been zombies at the window and shots and whimpers, but the directions must have entered her brain somehow, because they emerged now.
But what good were directions? She had no idea where they were and no means of following a course.
Then she remembered a second thing. Q knew how to navigate. Well, Qaranteen did.
Qaranteen had spent hundreds of hours playing survival games based on SAS training exercises. She’d played games that revived dead explorers and games of map reading, star gazing and pace counting. All of it was a prelude to tonight.
Q began to jog. The others quickened their pace behind her.
She knew where they were, the same way she always knew in which direction the ocean lay. She’d been tracking the orientation of the range and the way they had come without realizing it. She felt the distance in the rhythm of her body. She knew how long they’d been on this path.
Q found she had already been following Dave’s route and only had to adjust their course in minor ways. It was like discovering the foreign movie she’d been watching was actually in heavily accented English and she’d understood all along.
She began reciting the Apocalypse Z chapter on terrain types and cross-country flight in the dark. It was one of her favorites. It felt like sweat and the roar of spent adrenaline. It wasn’t powerful like Z-Fu, but it was real, and it rose in her mind like a pale figure in the night.
Q unsheathed her bush knife and slashed a zombie stepping out to greet her. It fell. They continued.
She walked with certainty, Qaranteen and Apocalypse Z guiding her feet. She thought about how far away they could be seen and heard and smelled by the monsters and how close a zombie needed to be to grab her or bite her. She made two moving circles in her head. The inside circle was the distance Z could reach and the outside circle was the distance she could make an accurate shot in the dark. She concentrated on keeping both circles clear of ghouls and keeping herself at the center.
Was this how the grown-ups did it? Were they followers after all, treading along behind a book or a childhood lesson or someone else’s steps, even the ones at the front? It wasn’t so hard. She wished someone had told her.
Rabbit paused, leaning on a tree and breathing hard. Four weeks in the attic had made him slow. “Where are we going?” he said.
“There’s a place,” Q said. “It’s safe.”
It was enough. They moved.
Q began to sense the zombies before she saw them. She wasn’t finding them by sound; her crew made more noise than the ghouls did. She wasn’t using smell either. Out here, everything smelled of earth and sweet rot with the stink of fire cutting through to remind them of what they had released. But she knew a moment before a ghoul entered her circle, and she shot it or slashed it. She always hit the sweet spot.
She remembered a game she played with Hannah. If there was one thing you could do in the whole world better than anyone else, what would it be? Hannah usually settled on riding a horse, because she was a six-year-old girl and that was the greatest power she could imagine. Q changed hers every time they played, sometimes mid-sentence. She wanted to fly, or run faster than light. She wanted to strike with such force that the air in front of her fist gave her opponent a concussion. She’d never thought to choose “shoot spleens in the dark.” Who would?
Q discovered it was a marvelous power. She wondered if Hannah still thought about ponies.
They had covered around three miles and they were slowing. Where Q’s legs burned with coiled energy, Pious Kate’s and Rabbit’s dragged. Each step they took covered less ground than the last.
Q told them they’d reach the place by sunrise. It might be true. It couldn’t be more than ten miles in total, and they wouldn’t stop to rest in zombieland. It made them walk faster for a while. Sunrise on the valley and no more monsters in the dark. What else could anyone want?
Chapter Thirty
It was around five o’clock, an hour before sunrise. Q was cold. Rabbit shivered.
She dragged him along like a heavy suit of clothes. Pious Kate trailed behind them, half seen. They had walked all night.
In the last two miles, Q had seen fewer than a dozen of the dead. She was grateful. Her iron legs still worked, but her reactions had ebbed with the hours. It didn’t matter. They’d arrived.
Dave had told her about the tunnel. When they were trapped in the attic with ghouls at the door, he had told her. She thought she’d heard wrong or that he was being poetic, desperate to give her a route to another world, but he had given her directions and she had followed them. And here they were.
They stood at its mouth, listening to the night sounds give way to the day. It had a concrete throat. The roof was twice as tall as Q. She couldn’t see far inside; the dim pre-dawn light gave way a few steps in. She didn’t know where it led. She didn’t know what was in there.
She didn’t know how this could be better than the attic.
Q called Dave’s name into the tunnel. Her voice bounced back. She didn’t call again.
Rabbit put his hands on her shoulders, but she couldn’t tell whether it was to comfort her or support himself. “Do we have to go through there?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Q.
“C’mon, Katie-G. Nearly there.” He stepped inside.
*
Q and Rabbit held hands because they couldn’t see.
She thought she’d been here before. Maybe Qaranteen had. She didn’t want to come back ever again.
The base of the tunnel was uneven. Sometimes she trod on concrete, sometimes she slipped in rubble. Sometimes the ground sank away completely and she fell into a h
ole and had to scramble out before the cold made her lie down and give up.
It was flooded, too. In the first few steps, her boots got wet. After a while, she was wading knee deep. Twice the water reached her belly, so cold it made her breath catch in her throat.
What if the ground dropped away completely? Would they have to swim to the other side?
She thought of the things that lived without air and reached for whatever they could. She didn’t think she could swim through water she couldn’t see. There might be anything down there.
She tried listening for the ghouls, because it was too dark to spot an enemy. It was a fool’s game – all she heard was herself. It was impossible to move silently through the water. Her feet splashed and the curved rock walls magnified the wet sounds. Her ears filled with them. There was no room for anything else.
Q couldn’t keep them safe in here. She couldn’t keep their circles clear. Couldn’t even see them. She didn’t think she should shoot, either. She wouldn’t know what to shoot at until it was too late, and what if a bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit them or the noise burst their eardrums? She imagined being deaf as well as blind, with nothing left to rely on but touch and nothing to touch but the slimy walls and the cool undead. It was only Rabbit’s gentle urging that got her moving again.
The tunnel had no end. At the beginning, Q could turn around and monitor their progress by the smudge of light at the entrance, but that grew fainter and fainter and was eventually gone. They could have been walking on the spot but for the fact that the ground kept shifting beneath them, tripping them, dunking them, swallowing them. Had the tunnel curved around to obscure the entrance, or was it too long to see to the other side?
Maybe they couldn’t see the other end because it was dark there, too. Maybe they were walking to the center of the earth, where the dead lived.
She reached for Rabbit’s hand in a panic. They stumbled on.
Q was colder than she had ever been before. Rabbit’s hand shook. She could hear his teeth rattle over the echoes of moving water; she hoped it was his teeth she could hear.
