by Pete Aldin
More screams came from the creek bed. Elliot—clenching his jaw to force away the swirling lights at the edge of his vision—could only hope that the corpses below the hill became more interested in that than in the small noises coming from the shiny tower above them. He hated himself for thinking it.
Birdy and Lewis stayed in their embrace way for an hour more before Lewis's sobbing sighed away, and he slid away to face the wall, putting his arms over his ears.
The screams from the refugees had long since abated—either they were all dead or had fled out of earshot. But the noises of the undead had grown to a drone as if the tower were pitched in the middle of a football crowd. Elliot risked a peek over the window sill, and wished he hadn't. The bush was choked with them, staggering, bumping each other, sniffing the air. Two scrabbled side-by-side in the dirt halfway up the hill for Christ knew what. He duck-walked around all sides of the tower, checking windows. A tide of undead, a steady stream stretching in both directions, along a rough east-west line and headed south.
He sipped from the canteen, offered it to Lewis who refused, remaining in his half-fetal postion. He passed it to Birdy and she received it without expression or comment.
The swarm thinned out by noon and the noise with it until only the occasional shambler was visible or audible meandering through the bush. He and Birdy ate a little trail mix and coaxed Lewis into sitting up against the wall and sipping water. But the teenager refused the last of the seeds and nuts, turning his head away. Elliot replaced the lid, kept it for later. He gave Birdy the last of the painkillers, checked her bandage. The cut looked clean, uninfected, a neat scab forming.
Between two and four o'clock, another smaller wave came and went, splashing against and around Mount Terror. As sun hit horizon, more pockets of undead became audible out there in the forest, though he couldn't see them. Lewis finally spoke then, needing to piss. Birdy echoed this, saying she couldn't wait any longer. Elliot handed him a foam cup and her an icecream container he found in the cardboard box. “No one's going outside,” he said when Lewis refused to take it. “Not even for this.”
Lewis took it dully and shuffled away on his knees, did his business with great awkwardness. When he was done, he and Elliot turned their back while Birdy followed suit. Then Elliot made them leave the containers in the corner rather than place them outside on the platform where the wind could blow them over, the odor alerting deaders.
This time Birdy got Lewis to eat the last of the trail mix.
In the soft orange of the sunset, Elliot caught his eye across the table and tapped the spot on the map he'd spread earlier, awaiting his opportunity for this conversation.
“We're going here.”
“What?” Lewis said, voice still thick, emotionless.
“We're not going to Minchenbridge.”
Lewis came to life then, face screwing up. “What! Yes we are!”
Elliot jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We're not facing that. We're not getting caught between that and another wave behind it. If that's indicative of how many deaders are still wandering around north of here—”
“I'm going north!”
“Lewis,” Birdy started, but Elliot kept going.
“The north is a washout. You heard her. People fighting over cat food?”
“My grandparents—”
“Maybe in a year or two, you can go looking for them. Maybe they'll still be alive and the plague will be gone by then. Maybe all the stupid people will have killed each other off. Right now, survival is the top priority … like I've told you a dozen times before.”
“I'm going to my grandparents.”
“You're going to survive long enough to see them. And so am I.”
Birdy tried again, waving a hand between their two faces. “Elliot …”
“Dad wanted—”
Elliot squared his shoulders, got his angry Sergeant voice on: “Your dad wanted you to live, man. You are going to respect his wishes, you hear me?”
Lewis slumped in his chair, crossing his arms. “Sir, yes sir.”
“Damn straight, siryessir. Now look at this.” His fingers tapped the map again.
Birdy's good hand fell on top of his. “Give him some room, Elliot.”
He pulled his hand away. “The hell I will.” When she withdrew hers, he tapped the map again. “Look where I'm pointing.”
Lewis turned away. “You look where you're pointing.”
“On the map I saw in your house, your dad had Barnabas Island here marked. What is this?”
“Screw you,” Lewis whispered, face still averted.
“Jesus, man, you can't even swear right?”
“Fuck you then!”
“That's better.”
“Jesus,” Birdy hissed and retreated to her chair.
Elliot said, “Tell me what this is.”
Lewis jerked forward and studied it for a good ten seconds then threw himself back again. The chair squeaked alarmingly. Plastic cracked. “It's an island.”
“No shit, genius. That why it's surrounded by water? What's its significance?”
“I don't know.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I'm not going that way.”
“Lewis,” Birdy said, “we can't go north. Elliot's right,” she added, but she didn't sound happy about that.
Great, another ally alienated.
“What's there?” he repeated.
“Veggie farms, berry farms, pigs, sheep, stuff like that and I don't want to go there. Understand?”
“Neither do I. Neither do we,” he corrected himself, glancing at Birdy. She wasn't looking at him. “But we're going. So listen: Mom and Dad musta talked about it seriously for you to remember all that. No one else would've thought of this place?”
“How would I know?”
“How'd your parents plan on getting there? This is, what, a mile off shore, in the middle of a bay. What are the tides like, the currents, the waves?”
“I don't know.”
“Did they know someone there or on the coast? Did they plan on finding a speedboat, a dinghy, a ferry, what?”
“I don't know! I don't care about bloody islands and stuff. Like, thirty people just died out there! Why don't you think about that?”
“Voice down, Lewis,” Birdy muttered.
“I am thinking about it,” Elliot said, having trouble keeping his own volume under control. “I don't want us to be thirty one and thirty two and thirty three. Now tell me what your dad had planned. This is an island: how'd he plan on getting to it and how's he know you'd be welcome there? You have family there? Friends? “
The fire departed Lewis as suddenly as it had flared. He slid down on a wall until only his eyes showed above the table. They were turned upon his knees. “No. I don't know. I don't think so.”
Elliot consulted the map and its legend, tried to catch Birdy's eye and failed. He said, “It's a sixty kilometer hike from here to the coast. Barnabas Island is south east of Mount Terror, so if there's another deader wave coming, that heading might keep us from going through it. No food here. Dangerous to hunt. We need to leave and I vote going that way.”
“Yep,” she said.
The dying rays of the sun caught one side of Lewis's face, casting the other in deep shadow. He looked like a demon as one glowing eye glared at Elliot above the tabletop. “You're an arsehole,” he said and turned his head.
Elliot gathered the map and folded it carefully, slipped it into the leather satchel. “So they tell me, pal. So they tell me.”
11
In the morning, there wasn't a zombie to be seen or heard. While Elliot silently packed the bags as tight as he could get them, Birdy went onto the decking outside the door. When Elliot noticed her heaving shoulders, he sighed and lay his pack down. “Stay here a minute, Cochise.”
Lewis—who seemed to have lost whatever ire he'd felt the night before— followed his gaze and simply said, “Sure.”
He shut the door quickly
behind him. Birdy's tears were silent and the shaking stopped the moment she heard him coming. She kept her back to him.
He said, “I'm not really good at saying sorry. But I'm saying sorry.”
She snorted. “I'm not crying about you.” That surprised him. Enough to have nothing to say back. She sniffed, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve. “I'm not the one you should apologize to anyway.” His gaze slid off, caught Lewis's through the window. Elliot broke contact first. “Not gonna happen,” he murmured.
“Feel like you ride him too hard.” She turned a little, glanced at him, looked away.
“I disagree.”
“He's lost family, yeah? He just witnessed a shitload more people torn apart. He's lost the chance to connect with his family up north. And he's probably thinking they're dead too, since I opened my big mouth about it yesterday. He needs a little TLC, ya know?”
Elliot moved to the rail and leaned there beside her, studying the forest. Still no sign of un-life. Didn't mean they weren't out there. “TLC ain't gonna save his ass or yours. TLC can wait til the pusbags are long rotted into the ground and he's safely in the middle of some walled and civilized community. Until then, hurtin' or not, he needs to man up like the rest of us.”
“Man up?” She nudged him with a shoulder. “What century you from?”
He sighed. “Same as you, darlin'. The one where humanity returned to the Stone Age in a few short decades. And all of Doomsday's children got to ride it out.”
“You have a flair for the dramatic,” she said after a beat.
He shrugged. “Too much cable.”
“I need to pee again,”
He placed a hand against his own belly, but not too hard. “Me too. We'll use the amenities downstairs there. One person inside, one person outside on each side.” He tried a smile and she returned it as he said, “Flair for wordplay too.”
“Shakespeare, you're not, mate.”
He pointed to the forest. “Think you can do this? Helluva walk ahead of us.”
“Like you said,” she sighed, picking up the speargun she'd leaned against the railing; “we all gotta man up.”
*
The motor home's wheels were hidden behind a carpet of weeds, baby ferns and bracken. Above the forest canopy, the sky had clouded over, threatening but not producing rain. The humid air around them was heavy with cannabis—someone had been growing it around here before the outbreak. The ganga certainly explained why someone might stick a Winnebago in the back of a state forest. Far worse than the pot, the air was also thick with wattle. Elliot was coming to hate wattle. The little yellow flowers—nothing more than puffy pollen-balls—made his nose and eyes itch.
“You think anyone's in there?” Birdy asked him softly.
The vehicle was about twenty feet long with the driver's compartment and engine separate from the trailer and a single access to the living quarters opening off the passenger side. They were crouching thirty yards from the motor home's ass-end, behind a low thatch of blackberries, avoiding the thorns. A thick patch of cannabis provided shelter to the north. A maze of paperbarks, wattles and some kind of needle-leafed shrub lay behind and south of them. Lewis reached through the brambles to pick three underripe berries and popped them in his mouth, grimaced. Obviously sour.
Elliot answered, “Yeah, I think someone's in there. Or coming back here. Too good a foxhole to give up, this one.” The real question was about whether or not to risk it. There'd been plenty of evidence that this forest wasn't uninhabited: several small collections of tents—all abandoned perhaps because of the oncoming dead—indicated strongly that many people had retreated here at some point. No living people though. Ten or so deadheads had made traveling interesting since leaving the tower. Six and a half hours of running and walking and ducking behind trees—and once, luckily just once, having to hack at a couple of moldering heads with the sharp end of a broken stick like some kind of caveman.
He had memorized the most salient features of the map: there were two small towns in different directions they could make before nightfall if they hurried and if all went well. A couple more within a five hour hard hike from there the following day, along with farming land rather than forest. They could hopscotch their way across the landscape this way for a week or two, using farmhouses and towns as stepping stones. Problem was, any kind of shelter might mean concentrations of living people as well as undead.
“Screwed if you don't; screwed if you do.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, here's how we're going to approach it. I'll circle around to find a blind spot, somewhere people inside that cabin can’t see me. Make my approach from there. Normally, I’d wait till dark, but I don't wanna be out here with the deaders then. Birdy, you're taking the Aimrite and heading back behind us fifty feet, watch for pusbags. Lewis, I get fired on,” He pointed to the 9-mil in the young man's hand, “you fire a couple of rounds into the centre of the cabin, then you put safety on and crawl—and I mean crawl, keep low—back behind better cover toward Birdy where I can circle around and meet you later.”
It looked like a game trail made a gap through the trees to his right. That might be the best route to take, staying low, taking his time.
“I can't do that,” Lewis whispered.
Elliot leaned in. “What?”
“I can't do that. I can't shoot at people.”
“You shot deaders.”
“Not people.”
“Lewis. You have to do things like this. Someone else's life might depend on it, not just yours.”
“It's not me.”
He gripped Lewis's sleeve. “This is what we do now.”
Lewis pulled back. “A man is someone—”
“Yeah, I heard this yesterday, enough. I hate to say it. But comes a time like this one where responsibility is using this.” He held up a fist, then touched the rifle with it. “And this.”
“What if I kill someone?”
“What if you let me die?”
Lewis winced at that, face closing over. It cut close to the bone, Elliot knew: the young man might blame himself for not protecting his family. But he could get all the therapy he wanted once they got through this and he was safely enmeshed in a sheltered society.
He glanced at Birdy, but this time she was silent, tracking a finger along the cool lines of the spear gun, staying out of it.
He said, “This is the world now. This is what we do. I'm finding a way to sneak up on that motor home. With or without your help. But without your help, I could die. Now, I'm gonna get on with my day and leave it to you to decide what's—”
A stick cracked. Someone gasped. He spun on one heel, still in a crouch, aware of Lewis attempting the same but toppling sideways, aware of Birdy shooting to her feet and bringing her weapon up. A teenage boy had come out of the scrub, while four more spread out to flank him. Four young men, a year or two older than Lewis. One girl maybe twelve, small, like Birdy. She carried a short-handled shovel. The boys at the back held bloodstained and battered cricket bats.
The one at the front held a rifle.
Elliot watched and heard it happen in slowmo, color leaching from his vision …
The shock on the group's faces.
The reflexive raising of the boy's rifle.
The muzzle flare and sharp report.
The girl dropping her shovel and putting her hands to her mouth.
Birdy collapsing with an oof of breath.
The boys all swearing, one of them grabbing the shooter and pulling him backwards.
The rifle toppling into the dry grass while the group turned tail and fled.
Elliot threw himself on top of Birdy, while his own rifle fell away, while his lungs shrank to the size of golf balls, while his vision started strobing, while the ringing started. Something pulled on his shoulder: it might have been Lewis, it might have been a stray piece of shrapnel from the IED, it might have been a sniper up high above the wadi, it might have been a medic moving him aside.
He knew he was yel
ling but he couldn't hear it. He knew his hands were pressed against the bloody mess of a woman's chest, pumping so the heart would not give up, but he couldn't feel it. He could see her and she wasn't burning, but he smelled burning flesh, burned plastic. He knew—he knew something, but he didn't know what it was. Not until he was sitting on his ass with one sleeve caught up in a blackberry thornbush and one hand pressed into his mouth to stop him from screaming. Through the ringing, he heard birds. Then flies. And he knew. He knew he was sitting in the Australian bush with another dead friend behind him. And he knew she was a friend because friends always died.
And that meant …
“Lewis!” It came out hoarse, but he heard it, could hear his voice again.
Lewis was gone. Elliot staggered to his feet, tearing his sleeve as he ripped it from the brambles. Where the hell was he? The bush spun around him although he was standing still. The air swam with heat and marijuana and dust and pollen. Where was he? Where was Lewis?
“Here!”
A face—a tear-streaked face—appeared above a Pokémon tee shirt, coming around and through the needle-leafed bushes, that face unconcerned at the way the bushes snagged his clothing. Lewis ripped free as Elliot had done from the blackberries, the eyes locked on Elliot's. His gait was uneven. The SIG bobbed above the waistband of his jeans. He'd chased them.
