Brother Mine, Zombie.

by Trevorah, Peter

  I could no longer cry out – my voice failed. Or maybe I just did not have the breath to drive it anymore. Don’t know. Don’t want to think about it.

  “Shit,” I thought. “This is not good.” – or words to that effect.

  Then my ears began to ring loudly. I had never had any sort of tinnitus before then but it has remained with me ever since. Something got damaged, I suppose. (Nerves? Ear-drum?)

  Finally, my vision. Just as when I was trying to escape capture at Castlemaine, my field of vision narrowed to a tight circle and time seemed to slow. But, this time, it was quite different. That constrained circular field of vision did not stay put. It just kept tightening and the darkness deepened and closed in around it.

  With my final breath, I tried to scream – but failed. There was then a massive weight sitting directly on my chest. I could no longer breathe.

  In the end, my field of vision sharpened to a point and my lungs screamed louder than my voice could ever have.

  “It’s like running the final mile of a marathon – over and over again,” said an unknown male voice.

  Then nothing.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE INFIRMARY

  The next thing I remember was coughing up blood.

  I was no longer in the decompression chamber.

  I couldn’t focus my eyes – and I was so ill that I didn’t give a rat’s arse where I was.

  Deep, excoriating coughs seized me time and time again – and, time and time again, great gouts of coagulating blood emerged from my throat.

  Do you know how shitty you feel when you’ve got a stomach upset and you start ‘heaving your heart out’? Multiply that by 50 times.

  “If these are my actual lungs that I am coughing up,” I wondered. “how on earth am I still breathing?”

  A young nurse was attending me and catching my bloody ejecta in a shiny metal bowl. She showed no sign of disgust. She didn’t ask me to speak. She could see that I was beyond speech. She smiled encouragingly at me and stroked the still-raw scorch marks that she could see on my bare forearm.

  That was nice.

  “What evil have they done to you?” she whispered, apparently to herself.

  There were curtains drawn about my bed – I could see that, at least. But was that to protect my privacy or to keep prying eyes away?

  I saw a silhouetted head briefly appear at the side of the curtain. I could not make out the features of the backlit face but I felt sure it was Doctor Ingrid. The silhouette lingered for a few seconds only, long enough to exchange a glance but no words, with the nurse attending me. Then it was gone.

  “You know that she saved your life, young fella,” said the nurse, simply.

  “Tell!” I rasped. (Actually, I meant to say ‘Tell me!” but the second word did not come.)

  The nurse looked uncertain about this. Would she get into trouble for telling me what she had seen or heard?

  “T’!” I said. (This time, I couldn’t even get the first word out – but the nurse understood my meaning well enough.

  The short version was this: Ingrid and the Captain had burst into the infirmary late last night, furiously screaming and yelling at each other – their three confused goons in tow. I was on a hospital trolley, nine parts dead. Apparently, Ingrid had repeatedly called the Captain an ‘insane murderer’ – to which the Captain had, equally repeatedly, responded: “That’s insubordination, Doctor. I am your superior officer. You have assaulted me. You have disobeyed my direct order. I will have you court-martialled. I will! You can count on it.”

  (Or something along those lines.)

  The unseemly screaming match had apparently gone on for a half hour or more – during which time the nursing staff had quietly spirited me away and taken charge. They made sure that the spark of life within me had kept glowing until a doctor – i.e. some other doctor – could attend to me.

  The nurses had kept me going.

  But, according to the nurse attending me, it was not they who had revived me in the first place. According to the nurse, the ‘direct order’ that Ingrid had disobeyed was to leave me inside the decompression chamber after all signs of life had disappeared.

  It seemed she had forcibly shoved Dr Mengele aside, rapidly opened the decompression chamber, dragged out my lifeless form - and delivered life-saving CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.)

  Hmm. Most curious behaviour.

  I still did not know what David had been doing all this time but hoped that I would find out – when I stopped feeling like complete shit.

  The raking coughing fits slowed a little and the nurse gave me some pain relief. I believe I slept for a time.

  o0o

  When next I awoke, Ingrid was standing beside my bed, checking my charts.

  I supposed I ought to thank her because, despite all the abject cruelty in which she had participated, in the final analysis, she had saved my miserable neck.

  “Tanks,” I croaked. (Not a fulsome expression of gratitude maybe but the best I could muster in the circumstances – for my torturer-turned-saviour.)

  Ingrid nodded in shy acknowledgment.

  “David’s back in the cells,” she said. “He’s okay now.”

  She had known he was on my mind.

  “I want to tell you what happened to him,” she continued, very quietly.

  It was my turn to nod.

  “In the first experiment, when you were suffering, David’s EEG readout went from a complete flat-line to a sort of jagged, irregular, spasmodic thing - like I’ve never seem before. No normal brain could produce such a pattern. Your suffering turned David’s brain on – or so it seemed.”

  She paused, looking downcast:

  “I guess that’s why the Captain devised the second experiment. He didn’t really consult me on the second experiment. I ask you to believe me on this,” she said.

  I did. But this only confirmed that she was fully aware of – and consented to – the first experiment (and the cruelty it had inflicted on me.)

  “Anyway, the second experiment followed the same pattern as the first – up to a point. You suffered, David’s zombie brain came alive – sort of. The same EEG pattern: jagged, irregular lines, some still flat, others off the scale. But then, …”

  She paused. I think she was actually starting to weep – but quickly regained control of herself. (Weeping is weakness, it seems.)

  “Then, you stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. David abruptly ceased to roar and protest at what he could see was happening to you. He went completely impassive and just sat there in his chair, unmoving. There was no gradual winding down, no transition of any kind, from what had been a very vigorous, even violent, rebellion against what he was seeing. He simply stopped – at the same time as you did. It was a complete flat-line read-out again.”

  What did this mean? I couldn’t say but, perhaps, because he was my identical twin, born of the same fertilized egg – and because I was not a zombie - he was unlike other zombies. Until I, too, died, of course.

  At least, I think this is what Ingrid was thinking – that, despite appearances, David and I were still one at some level – and that David still carried within him the germ of humanity while I lived.

  .

  CHAPTER 24

  UNEXPECTED VISITORS

  “Hey, Man,” said an unfamiliar voice. “You look like shit.”

  (I felt like shit.)

  I had been dozing. But when I opened my eyes, I saw two smiling young GI’s standing beside my hospital bed. They were wearing their dress uniforms – very impressive.

  “We’re on our way to church,” said one. “Thought we’d drop in. Heard you got pretty banged up.”

  I realized that I knew these guys. They were Privates First Class Swooper and Gately, the ones who’d asked awkward questions at the first lecture given by Captain Mengele.

  “We brought you some candy,” said Swooper.

  (Or was it Gately? No, must have been Gately – I think he
was the black guy.)

  Gately held out a roughly wrapped box – I suspect proper gift wrapping was hard to find at Puckapunyal.

  It was a nice gesture. I took it gratefully and nodded. Both Gately and Swooper saw the raw scorch marks on my extended arm and fell silent for a moment. Then their eyes went to my pillow, still blood-stained from a recent coughing fit.

  “Who did this to you, Man?” whispered Swooper.

  “Captain,” I rasped. “Mengele.”

  (Bizarrely, I couldn’t recall the Captain’s real name. I was pretty doped up – but they knew who I meant.)

  “We’ll report this to our own officers, Man,” said Gately, with quiet determination. “We’ll get you out of here. Don’t you worry about nothin’.”

  “Gotta go, now,” said Swooper. “We shouldn’t be here – Infirmary’s off-limits to visitors now. ‘Coz o’ you, I suppose.”

  And, with that, they both squeezed me firmly on the shoulder and left.

  How had this visit come about? Gately was dating one of the nurses – enough said.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE MISSING BIT OF THE STORY

  I don’t know what happened next. I wasn’t there and never heard. At the relevant time, I was drifting in and out of consciousness in the Infirmary – still feeling like shit.

  (In more recent times, doctors have told me that they are amazed that I survived at all. As well as my lungs being badly scarred, there was evidence of bleeding into the brain, revealed by a MRI scan taken years later. The doctor who did the scan told me that I looked like a boxer who’d had too many fights – or a footballer who got concussion on multiple occasions. Nice to know – perhaps that’s why I get a bit vague these days.)

  Anyway, over the years, I ‘filled in’ this bit of the story in my own mind. It probably has no relationship to what actually happened but I’ll give it to you anyway.

  If you ever find out what really happened, write and let me know – I’m still curious.

  O0o

  The Prince of Wales Hotel, Emily Street, Seymour, Victoria, Australia.

  This was a favourite watering-hole for Australian troops returning to Puckapunyal from the zombie ‘war’ battle front. (Others favoured the Terminus Hotel and the Railway Hotel – but you don’t need to know that.)

  The overseas troops who were still on the base - and who had not yet been deployed to battle front - also favoured the Prince of Wales.

  How shall I describe the Public Bar of the Prince of Wales circa 1970? Ever been to a country pub that has not been renovated since around that time? If so, you’ve seen the Public Bar of the Prince of Wales: definitely no soft surfaces, a worn and cracked linoleum floor (for easy cleaning) and a number of ‘tall’ wooden tables around which knots of drinkers gathered and upon which they rested their glasses. No chairs, of course, and a long-suffering barmaid (who was probably married to the publican or the publican’s son) camped behind the heavy wooden bar.

  Got the picture?

  As is often the case when troops from foreign lands are called upon to fight together, despite the salubrious nature of the amenities offered in their local public bar, (or perhaps because of them), they often end up fighting each other.

  One recalls well the events of Brisbane in 1943 –when US Marines and Australian soldiers staged large-scale street battles against each other even though their common enemy, the Japanese Imperial Army, was virtually on the doorstep at the time – and pressing hard, bombing Darwin, Townsville, Catherine and other cities of the North.

  Such is human nature when large groups of young men, away from home and family, are forced to be together.

  Anyway, a bunch of Aussie soldiers were fresh back from their particular part of the “Front”. (In this ‘war’, of course, ‘the front’ was a somewhat fluid concept since the zombies weren’t actually putting up any organized or armed resistance. The military operations against them were more by way of ‘clearance’, area by area.)

  These guys had been in the Fern Tree Gully area – then part of the urban/rural interface but now very much part of middle-class suburbia. They were regaling each other with tales recounting their recent exploits. Apparently, the zombies had been loitering about places of civic or public interest: the library, the town hall, even the old, rural court house.

  Why do zombies do that? Why do they not just stay at home? Maybe some of them do – but they do seem to have this urge to congregate in communal areas. Social interaction? I don’t think so – zombie guys are not great conversationalists (even worse than their living counterparts).

  In any event, this habit made them easy targets for clearance. A convoy of Alvis APC’s (Armoured Personel Carriers) had moved along Fern Tree Gully Road until it came to the first objective (the Town Hall). The troops alighted with minimal resistance from the surprised locals.

  It was only when the heavy machine-guns were being set up that the zombies started rushing at the troops in the vain hope of a fresh feed.

  What then followed was the familiar carnage that I had witnessed at the University massacre. The zombies were blown to pieces with several rounds from bazookas and those that made it through those blasts were cut to bits by light machine gun fire. (Sten guns? Don’t know – not sure they were still being used in the early 70’s).

  It was all over at the Fern Tree Gully town hall before the heavy machine guns were even set up and operative.

  The Aussie guys were pretty happy with what they had achieved and, as they slaked their well-earned thirsts with ‘a cleansing ale’ or five, the account of what had occurred became more and more detailed and vivid. (And exaggerated?)

  The Yanks had been sitting nearby – also taking in a cleansing ale – but not joining in the Aussie celebrations. After all, the yanks had yet to ‘see action’ and could not therefore share their own experiences.

  That was okay – each group left the other alone.

  Then, as the Aussies got a bit drunker and more boisterous, things started to take a turn for the worse. The Aussies started to brag about what they had done with the zombie remains after the last one had been ‘wasted’. And what they had done was not merely defiling the corpses by urinating on them. Bits of zombies had been ‘arranged’ about the area of the Town Hall, ostensibly to scare of other zombies from coming back into the area – but no-one believed that. More ‘intact’ corpses had been strung up and hung from lamp-posts or placed, like obscene garden gnomes in people’s front gardens – many in sexual poses.

  (This disgusted the fresh-faced GI’s, straight out of basic training –and Gately was man enough to say so – very forthrightly.)

  “Ah, fuck me,” replied one of the Aussie raconteurs. “They’re just fuckin’ zombies, Man. Cool down. They’re not even human.”

  This Aussie looked as if he had just stepped off a cattle station: tall (6’ 4” or so), rangy and raw-boned. Incongruously, he sported a closely cropped, (almost but not quite) Hitler-style moustache. The stare in his eyes also suggested that he was the sort of bloke who’d rather have a fight than a feed.

  “Well, that’s where you’d be wrong, brother,” replied Gately.

  Gately, on the other hand, looked as if he’d not be out of place as an extra on a Hollywood set – maybe, as a rebellious slave on a Southern cotton plantation. He was big, muscular – and very determined.

  The Aussie soldier put down his glass of beer – a serious move in any situation – and challenged Gately:

  “Oh, yeah? And how’s that?”

  “There’s a guy, a guy they captured with the zombies while you were away. He’s at the camp now – recovering in the infirmary.”

  “So?” replied the rangy Aussie, lifting his glass to his lips once more.

  “Don’t you get it?” replied Gately. “He was living with the zombies. He says he was with them for the entire first two weeks after the outbreak in Melbourne.”

  The Aussie took in the significance of this – and placed his glass down on the bar on
ce again.

  “And they didn’t eat him?”

  “No, sir!” asserted Private First Class Gately.

  “And he’s not a zombie himself?”

  “Nope. We all saw him,” said Gately. “The guy was as alive as you or me. They had him in a cage, on-stage at one of the Captain’s lectures, you know that Doctor Captain.”

  “Bullshit!” replied the Aussie, dismissively “How can a guy live with the zombies for two weeks – and not get eaten or turn into a zombie himself? That’s just plain bullshit. How can that be?”

  (Bullshit was something that the tall Aussie was fully conversant with.)