by JE Gurley
“I can teach you fly,” he said.
Marino shuddered inwardly. He was not exactly afraid of flying, but he was no enthusiast. “No thanks, Elliot. You fly; I’ll watch.”
Anson shook his head, pushed down on the steering column and took the plane into a steep dive. Marino gripped the door handle; then, realizing what he was doing, let go. The last thing he wanted to do was fall out at a mile high. The ground rose at an alarming rate. Just as Marino decided to close his eyes, Anson leveled the plane a few hundred feet above the ground. Marino swallowed to force his stomach down his throat back to where it belonged.
They had followed the A15 north out of Adelaide for several hours. Just outside the city, lines of vehicles clotted both sides of the expressway, a helpless tangle of automobiles, truck caravans and emergency vehicles that had left their occupants stranded when the Demise struck. Zombies in their thousands shuffled along the road and trudged through the fields and woods lining the highway. With easy food depleted in the city, they were heading into the countryside.
Anson turned northeast, following R.M. Williams Way to avoid Port Augusta. After witnessing the destruction in Adelaide, neither of them wanted to visit another large city. Occasional automobiles dotted the asphalt, but most had not made it very far from the city. Marino spotted tractors and farm equipment in the fields where farmers had worked until succumbing to the plague, dying on the land they loved. Farmhouses and small towns clustered along the highway. He knew there must be survivors somewhere down there, but if so, they did not attempt to signal the Piper.
They were now so low, skimming above the road’s surface, that Marino feared Anson was going to attempt to land. To his relief, Anson circled a lone SUV and gained altitude.
“Thought it was my brother’s Land Rover,” he explained. “Same color, but this one’s older.”
“How much longer to Lake Eyre?”
Anson glanced at Marino. “Getting antsy?”
“My ass is sore. It feels like I’ve been living in airplanes.”
Anson laughed. “We’re cruising at about 95 kilometers per hour. We should reach the lake in about two hours. We’re not far from Orroroo now.” He pointed to the rising hills to the north. “The Flinders Ranger.”
A glint of light at a farmhouse below drew Marino’s attention away from Anson’s pointing finger. He had seen many reflections on the trip – auto windscreens, plate glass in stores, mirrors – so it held his interest for only a moment, until it blinked several times.
“Someone’s signaling us,” he said. “With a mirror, I think.”
Anson looked uncertain. “Could just be a reflection.”
“No, it blinked rapidly several times, and then slowly, like Morse code but I don’t read code. They may need help.”
“There’s not much we can do. There’s no place to land nearby, but maybe we can drop them some food. We can spare a bit I suppose.”
He began to turn the plane toward the farmhouse, while Marino picked through several cans of meat and vegetables, wrapped them tightly in cloth and shoved them in an empty box. On impulse, he scribbled a quick note that read, “Can’t land. Adelaide’s dead. Headed to Lake Eyre. Good luck.” He added it to the supplies.
As Anson approached the farmhouse, Marino prepared to open his window and let the box fall. He hoped his hasty packing job protected the cans. He could see a lone person standing in front of the farmhouse. Anson throttled back on the engine. Marino opened the window, but before he could push the box out, Anson pulled back on the wheel and gunned the engine.
“What the fu-” he cried.
“Bastard’s got a rifle!” Anson replied.
“Maybe he’s being cautious.”
“It’s got a scope. That’s what you saw. He wasn’t signaling. He was aiming at us.”
Anson swore as he tried to squeeze more power from the small 65-horsepower engine. Marino thought his friend had lost his mind, when with a soft thunk, a hole suddenly appeared in his door just inches from his leg. A second hole blossomed simultaneously in the windscreen. He was shooting at them.
“Why?”
“God knows,” Anson grunted as he banked the plane. “Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he hates planes.”
They gained altitude and distance. Marino was beginning to believe they had escaped unharmed, but Anson’s grim-set face as he stared at the control panel told him different. Within seconds, the Piper shuddered and the engine coughed.
“Bloody bastard got the oil line. We’re losing pressure.”
Marino was on the edge of panic. They had no parachutes and were too low to jump even if they had. “Can you land?”
The sudden silence as the engine sputtered and died seemed unreal. The Piper hung suspended between the clouds and the earth for a moment; then began to drop.
Anson did not panic, or if he did, he hid it well. “Can’t glide far at this altitude.”
The ground approached more rapidly than Marino liked. Below, he saw trees and more trees. The idea of smashing into a forest held little appeal for him. So much for my misplaced altruistic ideas of playing Good Samaritan to an insane, rifle-wielding farmer.
“There!” Anson shouted, pointing out his window.
Marino leaned over to look. A narrow dirt farm road drew a straight line through a clearing in the trees. To Marino the road looked like a footpath and the clearing seemed impossibly small for a landing. He braced himself for a crash as the Piper brushed the tops of the trees.
The Piper bounced twice as the wheels hit the dirt and barreled down the makeshift runway. Anson fought the steering wheel to keep the plane straight. He almost stood on the brakes to slow the Piper, but let up when the plane slewed to one side. Marino closed his eyes waiting for the impact. It was several seconds before he realized they had stopped moving and there had been no crash. He opened his eyes.
The Piper rested snugly between two large trees at the very spot the road re-entered the woods, the wings just brushing against their rough bark.
“You did it,” he said astounded. He wanted to hug Anson, but refrained. Anson turned to him white-faced and exhaled slowly.
“Too bloody close,” he said in a whisper. He loosened his vise-like grip on the wheel as if his hands had welded to the plastic.
“Can you repair the oil leak?”
Anson leaned back and closed his eyes. “Doesn’t matter. I could never get it back in the air from this tiny clearing.”
“I thought you said you could land it in a parking lot,” Marino snapped.
Anson glared at him. “I just bloody well did. I never said I could take off from one.” He shut his eyes again.
Marino realized he was angry with his friend for no reason. It had been his foolish idea to check on the signal, allowing some crazed idiot to shoot them down. Anson had saved both their lives.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m still shaky.”
“Good thing we brought the Ural. Otherwise, we would be on a walkabout.”
“Let me get my breath back and I’ll help reassemble it.”
Anson smiled, “Yeah. I need a bit of a breather myself.”
* * * *
Two hours later, they had the Ural assembled, fueled and ready to go. They carried only one can of extra fuel, water, and a three-day supply of food, weapons and extra ammo. They hoped to hunt wild game along the way to stretch their food supply, though both admitted they had seen surprisingly few animals since reaching Melbourne. Anson had attributed the absence to the animal’s reluctance to come near zombies or to escape the bombing in Melbourne.
After ten dusty kilometers, the dirt road bisected the main highway. Marino almost commented on Anson’s failing to stop before turning onto the highway, but then thought how absurd his caution was. There was no traffic, would be no traffic for many years to come, if ever. The kilometers sped by swiftly. They skirted Orroroo and saw smoke curling up from one area of the city. Whether a signal or a burning building, they weren’t taking any
more chances.
Rounding a curve on B 87, Anson almost spilled them onto the pavement when he skidded the bike to a halt before a line of vehicles. A stack of logs lay across the road blocking it.
“A barricade,” he said.
Marino looked around and saw nothing. “Out here? Why?”
Anson said nothing as he climbed off the bike. Marino noticed Anson took out his pistol and held it in his hand as he slowly approached the line of vehicles. Marino checked to see that his rifle was loaded. The first truck they approached held the corpses of an elderly man and a woman. Bullet wounds in their heads showed they had not died of the plague.
“They’ve been dead only a day or two,” Anson said.
Marino scanned the line of autos. Each held the bodies of one or more people. Open glove boxes and trunks, ransacked luggage and clothing strewn around the vehicles indicated a hasty search of the vehicles.
“Looters,” he whispered, looking out toward the roadside for any sign of people.
Anson pointed to one man whose finger was missing. It lay on his lap amid a pool of blood. “They even took his jewelry.”
While Anson continued to scan the ditches, he heard Anson gasp and swear aloud. He turned and saw Anson race for a Land Rover in the middle of the line. He halted at the passenger door and hung his head. Marino went to see what he had discovered. A woman’s body slumped over on the passenger seat, shot like the others. Blood stained the driver’s seat and window, but there was no body. Strewn clothing covered the rear seat. Empty boxes lay scattered about.
“My sister, Adele,” Anson said, confirming his suspicions. “Murdered.” He turned and looked back the way they had come. For a moment, Marino thought his friend was going to return to the farmhouse and find the man who had shot them down, thinking he was responsible, but then he said, “The ones who did all this must live around here somewhere, maybe a farmhouse.” His grip on his pistol showed Marino that Anson would welcome a confrontation.
“Where’s your brother?”
Anson shook his head. “His body’s gone. Maybe he was injured and wandered off or they took him. We need to look for him.”
“Now?”
Anson shook his head. “You keep watch, while I bury my sister.” He walked back to the bike, retrieved a can of petrol and poured it over the log barricade. Marino handed him his Zippo lighter. Anson spun the wheel and ignited the petrol. Black smoke poured from the wood as the flames spread. Marino wished Anson had waited. The smoke would surely draw the looters if they were still around. Perhaps, he thought, that was Anson’s plan.
They had no shovel. Anson carried his sister’s body to the side of the road, dug a shallow trench in the hard packed red soil with a hubcap he found and laid her in the trench. He covered her body with a blanket and began to collect stones, piling them over the grave. Marino wanted to help, but Anson seemed to need the physical labor to expunge his sorrow. It took Anson nearly an hour to find enough suitable stones to satisfy his concept of how the monument to his dead sister should look. He stood silent beside the grave for a while, and then returned to the Ural.
“She doesn’t need a cross,” he said as he picked up his rifle. “She wasn’t a big believer in God. Besides, if there is a God, he has too many souls to keep track of. I saw two sets of tracks back there.” He nodded at the cloud of dense smoke rising above them. “That ought to make him curious. I’m going out to find him.” He started up the embankment.
Marino sighed. He wasn’t certain if Anson meant the killer or his brother. Anson wasn’t asking him for help but he knew his friend needed it. “Wait. I’m coming too.”
“You don’t have to. You can take the bike a few clicks down the road. I’ll catch up later.”
“No, I’ll come. You might need help if your brother is injured. I can’t drive a motorcycle anyway.”
Anson slapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get this bastard.”
* * * *
The tracks they had been following petered out as the ground became progressively harder, the sun baked dirt, giving way to spines of exposed rock. The two of them stood in the middle of a flat expanse of low growing acacia shrubs and cane grass and wind-swept red sand at the edge of the vast Simpson Desert. Anson shaded his eyes with his hand and turned around slowly as he scanned the area for any sign of their quarry or Anson’s brother.
“Nothing,” he spat. “We’ve lost both of them.”
Marino licked his lips. The day was hot and they had left their water at the motorcycle. Just looking out into the southeastern edge of the Simpson made him thirsty. “There are no farms out here. Where could they have disappeared to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should go back,” Marino suggested.
Anson didn’t reply as he continued to look around. Finally, he lowered his hand and grunted. “I suppose you’re right. We lost them somewhere.”
Marino started back in the same direction they had come.
“Let’s head that way a mite,” Anson said, pointing to a low rise to the west with a solitary coolabah tree growing from its crest.
“It’s out of our way. Must be four or five kilometers at least.”
“If they turned west when they hit the stony ground, that’s a likely spot. We might cross his trail.”
“If not?”
Anson’s sneer said he would not be happy with that outcome. “Then we head back.”
Marino shrugged, “After you.”
He felt suddenly vulnerable trudging toward the rise. All he could think about was that the pair of them made highly visible targets to anyone out there with a rifle and scope. His legs ached, and he kept tripping over clumps of hummock grass and saltbush, or miring down in pools of soft sand at the edges of dunes. He was so intent on watching his feet that he almost bumped into Anson staring at a set of tire tracks in the sand.
“These are fresh,” he said. “Maybe he doesn’t live on a farm. He could be a gypsy, moving around preying on people.” Anson pointed south. “They run in that direction.”
He began following the tire tracks, which headed arrow straight back toward the highway. Marino trotted up beside him.
“What are you going to do when we find him?” he asked, though he suspected he knew the answer to his question.
“Shoot the bloody bastard in the head and get my brother,” Anson replied without missing a stride.
24
Sept. 6, Camp Rapier, Woomera, Australia
Alex and Nicole watched as Jeffries and his colleagues adjusted the settings on the EMP emitter using a laptop computer. The emitter, a small metal sphere the size of a soccer ball, sat on a metal stand in a large, lead shielded room. One of the test subjects, a female zombie who might have once been someone’s wife or lover, still wearing the tattered remnants of a powder blue negligee, bounced off the walls of a clear acrylic box a few meters from the device. Her reflection in the acrylic sent her into periodic frenzies of clawing and biting at her own image. The ferocity with which she attacked alarmed Edith. Each time the woman slammed into the thick panels, she winced as if she feared they might break. Alex noticed she kept her pistol on the table beside her as she assisted Jeffries.
The others had elected Alex to move the zombie from the cage to the test box, a chore from which he took no pleasure, but figured the scientists had better things to do than wrangle the zombies. The least he could do was a little grunt work. It had become obvious to him during the evening meal that the group of scientists were more at home in their lab than they would ever be outside among the zombies. After Oswald’s death, they had given up on the idea of securing any test subjects until Alex’s timely reply to their radio broadcast. He had attached a loop of wire to a long pole and snagged the woman by the neck, separating her from the others, and herded her into the box.
Nicole watched the proceedings with a deep interest that eluded Alex. He understood the concept they had expounded upon throughout the meal, but failed to understand
how a device the size of a soccer ball could save the world or them.
“It looks so small.” This he directed at Jeffries.
Jeffries glanced up from his work scowling. “It’s not a bomb. It’s a piece of very delicate apparatus. I assure you, it will work.”
“Then why the tests? Why not just use it?”
Jeffries placed the sheet of paper he was holding on the table. “Creating an EMP is not difficult. This device is no more than a large capacitor designed to discharge only in certain wavelengths. The difficulty is in attaining sufficient range to be effective against the nanites, while preserving delicate electronics and human flesh.” He rubbed his forehead. “It would be much easier if we knew the wavelength on which the nanites operate.”
He turned back to his work.
“They seem to know what they’re doing,” Nicole said.
“I keep thinking that the people who developed the virus thought they knew what they were doing as well,” he pointed out.
Nicole looked at him aghast. “You think someone deliberately created this as a weapon?”
“It might not have started out that way, but there’s big money in weapons. Having a zombie army doing your dirty work for you would appeal to a lot of generals.”
“I can’t believe…”
“Believe it,” he snapped. He got up, walked over to the acrylic holding cell and tapped on the glass. The female zombie stopped her constant attack on the panels and listened. He tapped once more, and she lunged into the clear panel so hard, the cell slid several centimeters across the floor. “The perfect weapon,” he said.
Jeffries stopped working and glared at Alex. “Mr. Nelson. Please refrain from agitating our test subject.”
Alex shrugged and walked back to Nicole. “You could be wrong,” she said.
“I’ve been wrong more times than I’ve been right,” he admitted, “But it makes sense.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
Jeffries disconnected a cable from the EMP device. “I think we’re ready for our test.”
He herded everyone out of the room. They stood in a semicircle in front of a monitor displaying the proceedings through a heavily shielded camera.
