After Tomorrow: A CHBB Anthology

by Samantha Ketteman

  My brother’s long arms hold me tighter as he continues down the path to that temporary safety, and I feel a familiar safety in the embrace. I wonder if someday I’ll be able to recognize any of the others, if I will once again know the faces of our parents and our uncle.

  Soon enough, he answers, soon enough.

  The Oryx and the Undead

  Kelly Matsuura

  *This story is written in UK English*

  Chapter One

  Victoria, Australia

  August 2019

  Lily Chan stretched in her makeshift hammock and unzipped her jacket to let the late winter sun warm her chest. She read a few more pages of her tattered book, wanting to spend her precious siesta time in another world. Not that this one was so bad; it was a struggle at times, and she missed her family every day, but her group had built a permanent survivors’ camp for their forty-odd members with room for many more. On days like this, with the sun shining, the small birds and wildlife emerging to prepare for spring, and the camp’s garden producing a steady amount of food, it was enough for most people to be happy.

  With one hand shielding her eyes, Lily traced the path of two hawks flying overhead. They were probably black kites or harriers of some kind, but it was too hard to see their markings clearly through the tall eucalypt tree’s branches above.

  “Helang. Ying,” she whispered the words for ‘hawk’ in both Malay and Mandarin Chinese. With no one in the Australian camp to speak her native languages with, she liked to recall random words throughout the day, to hear the familiar intonations aloud. It made her feel less lonely somehow.

  She watched the hawks dart and dive for several minutes, wondering what they could see from the sky. The pair circled over the camp several times, then moved slightly west, where something on the ground seemed to hold their attention. They didn’t dive down to hunt though, and it caused Lily to frown. What are they watching? More strangely, why are they silent? She hadn’t heard a squawk once since she had begun following their movements.

  Lily realised what must have been happening only seconds before a group of eight men came running past her with rifles and an assortment of homemade weapons.

  “Lil! Zoms approaching the perimeter! Gear up, kid!” Jason, her squad leader, shouted. He kept running towards the front barrier before she could reply.

  “Four days,” Lily muttered to herself. Four days without seeing or killing a zombie. Her record was six and didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. While Lily’s camp was secure and they hadn’t lost anyone for months, they had a policy of killing any undead— regardless of the proximity or threat level. If they saw one, they shot or knifed it. Period. They would take back the world, one dead zombie at a time.

  Reluctantly, Lily swung her legs out of the hammock and dropped the short distance to the ground. She swallowed a few mouthfuls of tepid water and picked up her crossbow. Jogging towards the camp’s secured fence line, she saw that Squad I and III were also called up. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for a hard fight. All three squads on the barrier meant danger.

  “Where do you need me?” Lily asked Jason, who was directing everyone into position.

  “Where else?” Jason asked with a teasing grin. He pointed to an overturned Target truck where Lily’s two best friends, Santo and Danny, were preparing weapons. “Make sure those two shoot straight.”

  Lily punched his arm. He may have been their squad leader, but Jason was only two years older and loved goofing around.

  “They shoot straighter than you half the time,” she quipped back, defending her friends’ honour.

  “You do all the time.” Jason winked.

  “Thanks, Jas. Be safe, okay?” She ran off, anxious to get on the wall and see just what they were facing.

  Joining Danny and Santo at their usual post, she snatched an arrow bag from Santo’s hand. “Don’t use these, they’re a bit short for your bow. The blue-tailed ones are a better fit,” she told him. “You’ll get more distance too.”

  “Thanks, Lil. How’s your bow? It seemed loose at practice this morning,” Santo observed.

  “Yep, it was. I re-strung it and I think it’s tight enough. Can you quickly check?” She handed Santo her bow, feeling confident she’d done it correctly.

  Santo plucked the string a few times and nodded. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks.” Lily took the bow back from him with a small blush. It felt good to be a valued member of the squads–she would rather be there on the wall fighting than prepping food or mending clothes, not that she didn’t do her share of those tasks too. The other women in the camp were either five years older or younger, so Lily preferred to spend her days with the guys her age, whom she had grown up with and trusted.

  Lily, Santo, and Danny had gone to the same high school in Shepparton, before the Breakout two and a half years ago. At first, Lily had been a burden to the boys and they had saved her butt a dozen times, but she was proud to say that she had become as tough and skilled as they were.

  “How many?” she asked Danny.

  “At least forty, I heard,” Danny replied. “We just got here.”

  “Damn, we haven’t seen a group that big for months.” Lily pulled her small binoculars from her cargo pants pockets and Danny boosted her up onto the overturned truck that served as part of the property’s barrier.

  She steadied herself on the driver’s side door, and kept low so as not to be easily seen.

  Danny was right; Lily saw a large herd coming in on the road towards their main gate. Forty, or maybe even fifty undead, all shuffled along —dirty, diseased and hungry as hell. A year ago, Lily would have paled at the sight, but she had since learned to detach. Better forty in the distance than one with its jaw inches from her face.

  A herd that size could break through the barrier if they got close enough to smell the humans behind it, and they had all seen it happen before.

  The survivors’ camp was bottled-necked with water on three sides, formed by a deep bend in the Goulburn River that provided clean drinking water yet had a current running too strong for the undead, or any other unwanted visitors, to cross over. Their well-guarded fence line was the only way in and only way out.

  “Is it bad?” Santo called, shielding his eyes as he looked up at her.

  Lily nodded. “Put it this way, you’ll be getting plenty of arrow-making practice over the next few days.”

  “Crap the crap!” Danny swore. He was more afraid of Mr. Turner, their old woodshop teacher and new chief weapon designer, than he was of facing the zombie herd in route.

  Danny and Santo climbed up on the truck with Lily, standing one on either side of her. Santo always stood a little closer, was more protective of her out in the open too, but she appreciated his strength by her side. She didn’t care if people gossiped about them either, she knew he was her best friend and she’d be dead without him and Danny as well.

  “Call the kills?” Santo asked with a grin. It was a game he had invented to keep their minds off the reality of what they were doing.

  “Loser takes babysitting duty,” Lily challenged. The three of them raised their brows in unison and let the arrows fly.

  

  The herd was mowed down at a steady pace and Squad III went out immediately to burn the bodies. Lily had lost the trio’s game and had to go to the kid’s area to assist with their afternoon lessons. She would have liked to have gone back to her hammock and book, but hanging out with the kids wasn’t the worst task around camp by any means.

  She reached the school tent and lucked out—the nine students were doing art with Katie, a young mother with a skill for making clothes from almost anything.

  “Hey, Lily!” Katie looked up from her hand-sewing. “Grab some pencils and paper.”

  “Hi Katie,” Lily answered and sat down at the small work area. The kids were all absorbed in their masterpieces and only the older ones said hello to her.

  She sat next to eight-year-old Scottie.
He was scribbling hard with a dark green pencil, filling in his forest canopy.

  “Neat trees,” Lily commented, taking a closer look. “What’s that, a bird?” She pointed to a dark shape in one of the trees.

  “It’s an owl,” Scottie explained without pausing his colouring. “He’s hiding from the Zoms.”

  “Cool.” Lily could think of nothing else to say. It was harsh to see the kids drawing the undead in their artwork, but that was the world they knew. Scottie had two zombies dripping with blood front-and-centre on the page.

  “What’s that there behind them, a horse?” Lily asked, noticing the outline of a four-legged animal. It was mostly white and gray, with a few dark markings on its face.

  “That’s a unicorn. It’s gonna kill the Zoms and keep everyone safe.” Scottie told her.

  “A unicorn? Where’s its big horn?”

  “It has two. Like this.” Scottie took a black pencil and drew two long horns on top of its head.

  “Hmm, now it looks like a deer.” Lily laughed. “Unicorns are white, but have only one horn, here. And it’s made of gold.” She pointed to her forehead. Poor kid had possibly never seen a unicorn before—they had so few picture books in the camp.

  “I don’t know what it really is.” Scottie laughed. “It has these black horns and the stripes on its face, but I only saw it for a minute before it ran away.”

  Lily froze in her seat. “Wait, you saw an animal like that?” Excitement shivered down her spine as her brain processed the different elements of Scottie’s animal. She had thought he only made it up, but maybe, just maybe…

  “Yeah, this morning. It was across the river drinking, then a few Zoms came close and it ran back into the bush.” Scottie looked her in the eye as he spoke and she knew he wasn’t pulling her leg. He had seen it.

  “Which part of the river?” Lily asked.

  “With Mum, washing the clothes. But she was hanging the shirts up and didn’t see it.”

  “Good work, my man.” Lily scruffed his hair as she stood up. “Katie, I’ll be back in five, okay?”

  Katie waved her off and Lily bolted to the exercise area to find Santo and Danny. She ripped a loud whistle as she approached, and they both jogged over to meet her in the open where they could talk unheard.

  “What’s up?” Danny asked, wiping sweat from his face with a towel.

  Santo’s bright blue eyes met Lily’s shocked brown ones with clear concern. “Yeah, are you alright?” He bit on the tabs of his boxing gloves to remove them, but didn’t break eye contact with Lily.

  “Oh my god, you won’t believe it,” she gasped, not so much breathless as overwhelmed. “Nadim’s alive. He’s here.”

  Chapter Two

  Later that night when most of the camp was asleep, Lily snuck down to the river’s edge and scanned the opposite bank with her binoculars. The moon was almost full and gave her the needed light, but she didn’t see anything or anyone across the way.

  “Plan B,” she muttered, taking a folded piece of paper from inside her jacket pocket.

  She wrapped the paper around the stem of an arrow and used a tiny bit of gum to stick the edge down. Hoping the paper didn’t alter the arrow’s trajectory too much, she fired up into the air, giving the arrow the range it needed to pass over the wide river and to correct with the wind.

  It hit the mark, sinking into a tall eucalypt tree with barely a sound.

  Danny and Santo were working on a plan to cross the river. The current was too strong for humans to risk swimming across, but Lily was confident that Nadim, in his animal form, could cross safely. He was immortal in any case, so he wouldn’t be killed trying.

  Lily sank to the grass and lay back, looking towards the stars but not really seeing them. Instead, she was thinking back over her memories of Nadim, back before the Breakout and all the fighting and death; before all hope of society recovering was torn away.

  Nadim had also been a student at Shepparton High School, and like Lily, had only immigrated to Australia as a young teen. They had quickly become friends, and four months before the Breakout, Nadim had kissed her and asked her to be his girlfriend. Only a month before the world turned upside down, he had revealed his deepest secret—his family were oryx shape-shifters, belonging to an ancient Bedouin clan from Saudi Arabia. Nadim was seventeen at the time, and had only begun to shape-shift the previous year. Being in Australia where the oryx was unique and mostly unknown, he had had to be extremely careful about being seen.

  Perhaps with zombies roaming the entire country he was less concerned about shocking people. Surprising a generation who had faced a world-wide apocalypse and lived grossly outnumbered by the undead was pretty near impossible. Humans should be thrilled to find out there are immortals among them. They’re stronger, possibly even immune to the deadly virus that infected and mutated anyone bitten, Lily thought.

  On the weekend the virus broke out, Nadim and his parents had been two hundred kilometres away, in Melbourne. Lily had hoped and prayed they had survived, but wondered if she would ever find him in the aftermath. After losing her own family one-by-one, she had lost the will needed to keep moving, to keep searching for survivors. Instead, she had chosen to remain with her two closest friends and build a safe camp, one open to any and all that wanted to join them.

  Is Nadim alone? Lily imagined him leading his own group somehow, and that made her hopeful he would be impressed with their camp and want to stay and start over again all together.

  

  “Lil, let’s go,” Santo whispered from outside Lily’s tent. She hadn’t been asleep, but was far away in her memories. She got up quietly and joined the two boys on the trail down to the river. The sun was yet to rise, but they didn’t have much time before the rest of the camp came to life.

  Lily prayed that Nadim would also be up early and by the riverside again.

  The three friends walked in silence to the river, looking ahead on the path and into the bushes, watching for danger. The chances of a Zom getting in that way were almost zero, but they never let their guard down.

  “Here.” Lily stopped in the small clearing where the women had strung a few clothes lines. She lifted her binoculars to check her arrow. “Yes! The arrow is gone.”

  “Ah, Lil, we still have a problem.” Danny tapped her arm and pointed over to the right.

  She scanned further across and sucked in her breath: eight or nine Zoms were kneeling in the grass, feeding on something. Blood, skin and guts fell from their slack jaws and covered their filthy clothes.

  “No, you don’t think…” Santo couldn’t finish his thought.

  “No,” Lily insisted. “They’re feeding on a much smaller animal. Or two.” No way were they eating her long-absent boyfriend. Fate just couldn’t be that cruel, surely.

  “Where is he then?” Danny asked, scanning the bank with his own binoculars.

  “Can’t see him yet.” Lily tried to stay calm, but every fibre of her being wanted to dive in the water and get the hell over to the other side, to Nadim.

  Movement in the undergrowth caught her attention. It was unclear for a few seconds as the leaves rustled, but then she saw it—that goat-like face with the long, graceful horns, pointing straight to the sky. The oryx had a clean white coat, and a distinctive black marking under its left eye confirmed it for her. “It’s him!” She almost screamed her lungs out. Wary of the nearby Zoms though, she waved her hand over her head.

  The oryx nodded a few times to show he recognised her.

  “Yeah! Nadim!” Both guys punched the air with their fists. They’d missed their best friend like crazy too.

  “He’s coming out,” Danny motioned them all to be quiet. “The Zoms haven’t picked up his scent yet.”

  Santo placed an arrow in his bow. “We should be ready to cover him just in case.”

  “Good thinking.” Lily readied her bow too and Danny followed suit.

  To hold her bow steady she had to drop her binoculars, but she kep
t her eye on the oryx.

  The animal sure was a missed sight. The majestic lilt of its head, the penetrating eyes that seemed to see it all, and finally, its graceful gait as it came out of the clearing. They had only seen Nadim shape-shift a few times, and had rarely seen an animal its size since the Breakout, so it was truly a precious moment for them all.

  “What the hell?” Santo whispered, and Lily’s dream was crushed as she saw what he did.

  The oryx came trotting out all right, but with a woman riding on its back. She was sickly thin and wearing over-sized clothing, but her sunlit hair was braided neatly and hung to her waist in front of her. She looked like a Viking goddess astride her steed. She gripped the oryx’s horns and she kept watch on the feeding Zoms. The oryx trotted to the water’s edge and put a hoof in to test the temperature and current.

  “That water is bloody freezing,” Santo commented.

  Lily shook away the hurt of realizing Nadim wasn’t alone and focused on helping the pair cross the river safely.

  “I packed one set of clothes for when Nadim shifts back, and it looks like she has a full backpack. Let’s hope their supplies stay dry. When they get across here, we’ll need to get her to the fire quickly. Then, help Nadim,” she directed.

  The oryx stepped its two front legs into the water just as Santo shouted, “The Zoms see him, damn it!”

  The woman must not have heard Santo, but the oryx shook its head and bucked to alert her. She looked towards the two zombies who had stood and turned towards them. The others slowly rose to their feet as well.

  “Ready to fire!” Lily commanded. “We can’t let them get too close.”

  The woman leaned forward to whisper something to the oryx and to everyone’s surprise, she leaped off his back and pulled a knife from each pocket.

  “What the hell is she doing? She can’t kill them all!” Danny yelled.

  “Shoot!” Santo called overlapping him. He released the first arrow and hit one zombie in the shoulder.