She let out a gasp, which turned into rapid breaths of pain. I could see I was spreading Mortis’s fetid touch, and her arms were shaking as the skin sloughed from them with frightening speed. “No…” I whispered. “Don’t make me do this…”
I couldn’t pull away, however. The decay reached Lox’s chest and neck, the flesh crumbling and turning to ashes, pieces of her curling up and dissipating into the air. “I’m sorry,” I told her, our eyes locked as she was reduced to a skeletal frame in seconds. Her mouth remained open as her lips and gums shrivelled back, her hair withered and died. “You were… I always wanted to say…”
Then she was just bone, all light from her gone. She fell to dust at my feet, the last of her running through my fingers.
“How poetic,” I heard Mortis say behind me as it came closer. “The guilty punissshed by a fellow sssinner.” I couldn’t move. I merely stared at my hands and the residue on them, and shuddered at the damage they had wrought. “Perhapsss I’ll keep you around. Fate, it ssseemss, hass brought usss together, and you may prove ussseful.”
One of the grey Judges emerged from the wreckage the explosion had caused with a crate that we’d seen them stacking. Mortis turned to it. “Are they sssalvageable?”
“We’ve lossst one or two,” it replied. “Mossst are ssstill intact.”
“Excellent.” Mortis returned its attention to me. “The Mossquito will fly, have no fear of that.” It reached down and picked up a container in which the grey matter slopped around, looking at it with what appeared to be pride etched on its hideous skull-face.
“I’ve got my bessst mindssss working on it.”
PART TWO
BONE WHITE SEEDS
CHAPTER ELEVEN
10 March
MR GRAHAM DIED yesterday. I can’t say it wasn’t unexpected—the guy was, like, three hundred years old, and the gangrene that had set in after Kez had tied off his stump was too severe for the mediocre meds that we’ve got at our disposal to treat, so it was always a waiting game—but even so, it hit us all hard. He was the first of our ‘family’ to pass, and I guess once the first one goes, it’s a reminder that we’re all living on borrowed time. He’d been so sprightly when I first met him, managing to keep his sense of humour in spite of all this crap that’s raining down on us, and to see him diminished and suffering was heartbreaking. The funeral was short and perfunctory, done under the cover of night, and nobody felt much like talking, so by the time we’d all retreated to our sleeping bags, it was as if the old boy had never existed. All that was left was an absence—an empty corner in which his meagre belongings had been tidied up and folded away.
It struck me there was no one recording this, no one keeping track of these departed lives. Needless to say, the grave didn’t have a marker, and he’d been buried deep enough that any disturbed earth wasn’t visible from the air. I wondered how long it would be before we forgot Mr Graham was a part of our group. I mean, I can’t remember now if he ever told me his first name—he was kind of a stickler for formality, despite our circumstances. Here we were, living nose to tail, nine of us in this one space, and he felt uncomfortable with me being too familiar! Ancient geezers can be like that, I guess, used to the proper way of doing things. Can’t say it ever offended me—in fact, I found his determination to stick to his old-school protocol kind of admirable; too easy these days to lose sense of who we were before the world went down. But, like I say, the man I knew as Mr Graham was going to risk drifting from our minds if somebody didn’t make a note that he was once here.
I found this journal amongst a bunch of old papers in an office upstairs. Looks like it was intended for book-keeping or something similar, but it was untouched and the damp hadn’t got to it so I sequestered it for the purposes of this very diary you’re reading (that is, if there’s anyone left to read it—maybe it’ll be discovered in years to come, who knows? Gotta have hope there’s gonna be something left, or someone to come after). I haven’t kept a diary since I was twelve, and even then I lost interest before the year was out ’cause not enough interesting stuff was happening for me to keep it up (I know! If I knew then what I know now, etc), but I reckon I’ve got a duty now to get all this down in writing. Routine’s kinda important to keep your head together, so if I make a habit every evening before lights out of at least penning something, then I should stick with it. Doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, right?
I’m sure Mr Graham wouldn’t mind that I’m not the greatest wordsmith—it’s the intention that’s the main thing. He could forgive a lot when he was alive. He was always a little soft on us younger ones; would give us the benefit of the doubt, throw a few extra rations our way, let us off some of the chores if he was supervising that day. That didn’t always go down well with some of the other ’dults if they caught wind he was giving us an easy ride—Kez is kinda hardcore about everyone pulling their weight regardless of age, and has been known to even bawl out little Bren if he kicks up a stink when it’s his turn to clean out the latrine or whatever—but he didn’t care. He’d tip us the wink that let us know there was more to life than this. Exactly what there is beyond our situation is pretty much up for debate. Clearly, Mr Graham didn’t agree that day-to-day toil in miserable conditions simply for the benefit of a continued existence was any way to live your life. ’Course, being an old codger, he could afford to think like that; his best days were behind him, and every extra hour of breath was a tiny, precious gift. Then again, everyone’s best days are behind them—even the kids’. No one’s looking to the future, just dealing with the here and now.
The way he was around us, you’d assume he and Mrs Graham had a flock of children and grandchildren to dote on, but they never had any. I never asked him, but I guessed this wasn’t through choice—he was too patient with, and comfortable around, youngsters to be ambivalent to them. I got the impression that they were everyone’s favourite neighbourhood elderly couple—the honorary uncle and auntie that became part of the street’s extended family. His wife was a retired schoolteacher, which would account for their natural affinity with kids, while he had something to do with importing machine parts. He did tell me, but I have to confess I zoned out a little bit at the time, which I’m embarrassed to admit I did on more than one occasion. Yeah, yeah, I feel bad for taking him for granted—he would yap away and I’d have one ear turned off, aware that I’d heard the anecdote umpteen times already. What can I say? I’ve got no excuses for my ingratitude other than my callow youth.
But now that he’s gone, I want to do right by Mr Graham, ’cause he was always there for all of us, and as I look across at the mattress he’d slept on for the last six months, now propped up against the wall, all I can think of is things I wish I’d said to him, and how I should’ve listened without complaint, and enjoyed every minute of his company while I still had it. So this is my small tribute to him, and the life he left behind, and the people he touched, before the memory fades.
It was actually his motorhome that picked up several of us the night it all started to fall apart—it’s kind of testament to his innate good nature that he stuck his neck out for a bunch of strangers he could’ve just as easily breezed past. Plenty of others did—I saw streets log-jammed with vehicles as people fled the city in panic, and those on the sidewalks were banging on car windows and hoods, pleading for a ride. Few, if any, were willing to open their doors and take on extra passengers. Mr Graham did—he saw us separating from the mob, saw the greys shooting at the crowd, must’ve seen Joel going down, and reckoned that we were going to be next. I can still remember looking back down at Joel sprawled on the tarmac, blood spreading around his head, fear propelling me forward, and then the red flare of the brake lights of the Winnebago a few metres ahead catching my attention. A door swung open just as I came level with it, and I didn’t even think, just threw myself through it, aware of others piling in behind me, and then the vehicle lurching away, a couple of bullets smacking into the rear window. That was it—Mr Graham h
ad saved my life, and the three others that had joined me: Riggs, Emily and her son Bren. He probably would’ve waited for more but had to get out of the line of fire. Emily told me later that it was her husband Tony that had shoved her and their boy aboard, but she never did find out what happened to him. I think we can all guess.
It was at least half an hour, once he’d negotiated his way out of the capital, before Mr Graham called out from the cab to check we were okay. We’d all been curled on the floor of the motorhome, listening to the screams and the explosions and the rattle of gunfire, too scared to raise our heads. I was clutching my knees, which I’d raised up to chin, eyes screwed shut, reverting back to my seven-year-old self under my eiderdown, believing that what you couldn’t see couldn’t hurt you. Bren was sobbing, his mother shushing him, offering words of comfort. Mr Graham’s voice cut through our hysteria, to a degree. He said he was pulling over at the first opportunity, and would come back and check on us. Minutes later, we came to a halt. He appeared through the curtain separating the cab from the lounge area and introduced himself, offering us water from the fridge, coaxing us out of our shell-shocked states. He seemed remarkably calm, as if this was an everyday occurrence, even taking the time to fish out a chocolate bar from a kitchenette drawer for Bren that managed to dry his tears briefly. But he had another reason for parking up—he vanished into a bedroom, and returned in moments carrying a sheeted body in his arms, which he lifted down off the vehicle. I slid up onto a seat and watched through a window as he took the corpse into the scrubland lining the road. He returned a full fifteen minutes later, empty-handed, and climbed back into the driver’s seat without a word.
It was, of course, Mrs Graham, I was to learn later; one of the first to be purged. On her way back from the corner store, she’d been shot in the side of the head as she’d run up the path to their front door and what she’d hoped was safety. Her husband had come out onto their front yard, concerned at the chaos he could hear, and found her bleeding out on the step. He told me he’d placed her body in a hollow tree, covered in bracken, where she could hopefully find some peace, far from the horror. He only referenced her intermittently in the weeks that followed, as if he was holding on to precious memories that he didn’t want to spoil by voicing. What they’d had was locked inside his head and his heart, and he only gave us—me, really; he took a shine to me the most, I think—the briefest glimpses. He compensated by rabbiting on about everything else under the sun—including how to fuel and drive the RV, the one subject for which I was happy to be taken under his wing. I LOVED that! I’d been aching to get behind the wheel since I turned sixteen, and Mom and Dad, they… Well. I never got the chance, let’s put it that way. As it turned out, I picked it up pretty easily.
Yeah, he was a good instructor, Mr Graham, and a friend I’m glad to have made amongst all this; one that was hurting a lot, I think, but kept it all internalised and covered it up with kindness and bonhomie. Maybe he was a surrogate parent (or grandparent) for me, I don’t know. I probably sought his approval in the early days, ’cause I wanted him to know I was ‘worth’ saving that night. I had a lot of messed-up thoughts in the days after the Fall, along the lines of why I should’ve got to live when so many didn’t. If the Lawgiver bullet had been a few inches over, then it would’ve been me hitting the slab, not Joel; if I’d tripped or been slower getting to the motorhome, then I would’ve been left behind. It was pure luck that I got to survive that night when so many others didn’t, and the ramifications of that plagued my dreams: what could’ve been. I tried to talk it over with Mr Graham sometimes, these feelings of guilt and inadequacy, but I don’t think he was well-equipped to give me the advice I needed. He listened and sympathised, but had the embarrassed air of a man who didn’t know what was wanted of him, and didn’t want to be put in that position. He was of a generation where you didn’t speak about your problems quite so openly.
It was that same randomness that took him from us—or at least set in motion his decline. Three weeks ago he went out to collect gas from one of the abandoned stations along the interstate, and according to Riggs, who was riding shotgun, he ventured off the forecourt because he thought he heard someone crying for help. He stepped on an IED that the Resistance had laid to take out greys, and it destroyed his right leg just above the knee. Such a stupid thing to do: the cries were probably just a recording to lure in the deadwalkers, if they existed at all outside his head. I could well imagine him conjuring up the phantom pleas of those he couldn’t help that night to torture himself; to beat himself up over the fact that he wasn’t there to save his wife. I don’t know, this is all supposition—he’d never reveal what he was really thinking, obvs. But there was definitely a sadness that you’d catch when he assumed you weren’t looking, and it was buried deep, and it affected him more than he’d let on. Once he was bedbound after the injury, and when it became clear that we couldn’t stem the infection, the smiles vanished and he retreated into his dark kernel, no longer able to deny it. Pain and delirium claimed him for the hours before his heart gave out.
So that was Mr Graham: a good man, who fell victim to what the world’s become, like so many others. Soon he’ll just be bones, lost amongst the rest, but I want to put it down on paper that there was a life lived once: an obituary for the first of us to be taken, that forces us to remember, and ensures he’s accorded the proper respect. Sleep well, old pal.
Candle’s getting low so I better call it a night. Will be up early (as usual!). :-(
11 March
FOUND MYSELF SURPRISINGLY looking forward to writing in the diary tonight. Considered it a chore when I was younger and struggling to know what to write, but now it’s like a release. I can pour everything onto the page that I can’t express elsewhere. People are still acting reserved since Mr Graham passed, and no one’s really talking—it’s like this dam has been built through unspoken agreement, and everyone’s maintaining it in case it breaks and the grief floods out. It can’t be healthy to be shielding ourselves from our emotions like this—and I’m just as guilty, I’m tiptoeing around with the best of them—but I don’t know how to get past this barrier we’ve somehow constructed. It becomes all about the work, all about the act of survival, and to be distracted from that is to allow weakness in. Maybe they all think Mr Graham was weak, and that’s why he died—if they don’t want to go the same way, then they need to be robust in how they deal with the loss of one of their own. More likely they’re scared: Death’s taint has reached our community, and few want to admit it.
Kez, for example, is as hard as nails, and probably sees the old geezer’s passing on her watch as a personal slight, for which she hasn’t forgiven him. She worked through the night to limit the damage to his leg—transfusing blood herself, tying off the stump, cauterising the wound (though the infection still spread)—and she’s got minimal medical skills. She’s a physiotherapist by trade, if I remember right. You can’t help thinking that half her clients must’ve been scared stiff of her; she’s kind of formidable and no-nonsense, and takes charge with little argument from anyone else. She’s the ideal person to have around in a crisis, but it’s fair to say empathy isn’t her forte—or perhaps she hides it well. She assumed leadership of our group with no opposition and immediately started delegating tasks. We do it partly out of the need for it to be done, but mainly out of fear of disappointing her. Her temper is legendary.
Some of the others have whispered—a little bit unkindly, I reckon—that the day the zomboids took over was the best thing to ever happen to Kez; that she’s kinda like one of those militia survivalist goons that praises God when war starts so they can shuck off their regular clothes and climb into their camo gear. That they don’t have to hide any more, they can be their true selves. I suppose you could say that she’s risen to the occasion, given the circumstances, but no one would ever be grateful for the mess we’re in. She doesn’t relish any of this, she doesn’t enjoy it (or at least I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t—she r
arely smiles). She simply ploughs her energies into keeping us alive, because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate. We’ve all seen the body orchards where people lost the will to keep going—Kez is damned if she’s going to let that happen to her. She’s kinda inspiring in her obstinacy, and makes us all the more determined to not succumb to dark thoughts. But she is one hell of a hard taskmaster.
I tried to talk to her about Mr Graham at dinner, ’cause I knew how hard she fought to save him. She’s not big on conversation, even less when she’s eating, so I figured I’d have an uphill struggle. Turns out I was right. Meal was rice and beans (yuk!), so it wasn’t like I wasn’t distracting her from anything mouth-watering, but she just sat there on her bunk, pawing the contents of her bowl into her mouth, barely pausing to look up. I squatted next to her and asked how her arm was doing (still bandaged from where the transfusion had been). She grunted and pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows as if to say that she’d live.
“Thank you for doing all you could for him,” I persevered, keen to get the old man’s death into the open.
“Odds weren’t good,” she murmured, making a point of not looking me in the eye, and slung her now-empty bowl beside her onto the mattress.
“Even so,” I said. “We’re all going to miss him.”
“He was a fool, who took an unnecessary risk. That kind of thing puts a strain on our resources.”
The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus Page 12
