by Frank Tayell
The Outback
Another undead passenger slammed into the gate. He was a man, or he had been, and wearing a tie. The other shreds of fabric had surely been a suit, though the clothing was so burned it was impossible to be certain. The zombie’s feet were shoeless, removed during the flight, or lost in the crash. His arms were now flat by his sides, scrabbling and twisting as he pushed against the gate.
“Pete! Throw the bolts!” Corrie called, and Pete came back to himself.
He slammed one bolt home, then another. The gate rocked as a second zombie reached it: a woman missing her nose and one eye, blood coating her thin blouse. Pete looked for more bolts, for padlocks, for something with which to better secure the gate.
“What now?” he asked, but Corrie had gone. The undead woman answered him instead, letting out a guttural gasp.
“Are you alive?” Pete asked. “Can you understand me? Can you even hear me? Are you still in there?”
But he got no reply, only another clang as she clawed at the gate. The first zombie, who’d fallen face-first in the dirt, began hauling himself up the chain-link. Him, or it?
Pete took a step back, the question forgotten as the next living nightmare trampled onto that first creature’s back. This new zombie had to be an it, because no human could survive such injuries. Blood oozed from the stump below its elbow. Charred skin flaked from its broiled face. Pus seeped from the ragged hole that had once been an eye. Yes, it. The distinction hardly mattered, offering a narrow emotional distance from the monsters, though no safety from the growing mob pushing and shoving at the creaking gate. But the gate was holding. For now.
“We should have taken our chances in the car,” he said.
“No,” Corrie said. Pete swung around. He’d not heard her return. “You were right. We wouldn’t have got through them. Stand back.”
She held her rifle, the same weapon she’d been carrying when they’d first been reunited, and a gun he’d forgotten she had. Instinctively, he relaxed. For all their numbers, for all their terrifyingly inhuman implacability, they weren’t unstoppable. He’d seen in it in one clip from America after another, of police and civilians firing from hastily arranged barricades, felling the unarmed, unthinking monstrosities.
Corrie raised the rifle, then lowered it.
“They’re not people,” Pete said.
“They are,” she said. “Or they were. Not very long ago.”
The gate shook. She raised the rifle and fired with a muted report.
“You missed,” he said.
“I didn’t,” she said. She fired again.
“Aim for their heads,” he said.
“I am,” she said. “Can’t you see the dart?”
“The dart?” he asked, turning to look at her.
“It’s a tranq-gun,” she said. “And it doesn’t do a bit of damage to them.”
“Don’t you have any real bullets?”
“No. I’m going to try the radio. There’s fencing in the workshop. See what you can find to reinforce that gate.” She ran back inside.
With one last look at the growing pack of zombies behind the shaking gate, Pete gratefully turned away, and sprinted over to the workshop.
“Fencing, fencing,” he muttered, glad to think of anything other than the impossible nightmare a few metres away.
The workshop, the smaller of the two buildings, was a single-room storage block. A humming generator took up most of one corner. In the other, a cluster of pipes and gauges erupted from the ground, presumably marking an underground storage tank. Between them were rows of metal and wood shelves. The rolls of chain-link were easy to find, stored against the far wall. He grabbed a coiled loop, and carried it back outside, not looking at the undead as he dumped it near the gate. He ran back into the workshop, scanning the boxes of bolts and nuts, the stack of fence posts, the shovels and picks, looking for something with which to secure the fencing in place.
“Time. You’re running out of time.”
He grabbed a loop of electrical wire. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do for now.
Except it soon became clear it wouldn’t.
On his third attempt to loop the wire through the chain-link, he gave up, hurling the wire to the ground in frustration. When he approached one side of the gate or the other, so did the undead. When he reached forward to thread the wire through the gate, the undead reached out themselves. Their clawed fingers curled around the chain-link, and once around the wire, while their snapping teeth pushed against the taut links.
“Maybe build a second fence,” he said, speaking loudly to drown out the rattling wheeze of un-breathed air being pushed from undead lungs. Building an interior fence would take time. The gate was holding, but for how much longer?
“Better to do something than nothing,” he said, and ran back into the workshop. He grabbed a fence post, and carried it outside. The post was two metres tall, a half-cylinder of rough wood with a flat diameter of ten centimetres, crudely sharpened at one end. The way the zombies scrummed and pushed, if he had a row of posts, the monsters would impale themselves. But to set that up would take far longer than building a new line of fence. He hefted the pole, taking a step towards the shoulder-height gate, but the wood was too heavy to use as a spear.
“Stick with the plan.”
He ran back into the workshop, increasingly frantic as the impossibility of what he wanted to do sank in. On the shelf, he saw a pair of gloves. Thick canvas, not leather. Were they bite-proof? He pulled them on. Maybe it was best to try with the wire again. But if he got infected, if he turned into one of those creatures, then Corrie would have to— He didn’t want to complete the thought, so grabbed a pickaxe and a shovel and ran back outside.
He dropped the shovel and swung the pick at the ground. The constant passage of feet and car had packed the dirt tight. The pick barely made a dent. He swung again, with little better result.
The cabin’s door flew open. Corrie ran outside, but not over to him. She sprinted to the awning under which the cars had been parked, jumped, grabbed the roof, and hauled herself up.
“What is it?” he yelled.
“Secure the gate!” she said.
But how? He hefted the pick, looking at the gate and at the monsters behind. The zombie wearing the tie fell to its knees, biting at the chain-link. A creature wearing a steward’s uniform pushed forward, stepping on the now-kneeling zombie, trampling the creature. Trampling, but not killing. The tie-wearing zombie, now on the ground, clawed at the gate, its fingers coiling through the fence. Time was running out.
A hand fell on his shoulder. He sprung around, raising the pick.
“It’s me,” Corrie said. “It’s only me.”
“I can’t get close enough to secure the gate,” he said.
“The radio is down,” she said.
“Did you get through?”
“Not for long enough. We need to turn off the lights. They might go away.”
He looked back at the gate, uncertain, but hiding in the dark was preferable to any alternative. Still carrying the pick in his gloved hands, he followed her up the wooden steps and into the cabin.
“The breaker is in the kitchen,” she whispered as she bolted the door. He kept his eyes on it as he backed after her, into the small room. A moment later, everything went dark.
“You called on the radio?” he whispered.
“I was cut off,” she said. She pressed a torch into his hand. “Hold this. No, switch it on first. Hold it so I can see your head. You were cut. Okay.” She took a small first aid kit from a cupboard, opened it, and took out an antiseptic wipe. “It’s just a cut,” she said. “A cut, not a bite.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that,” he said.
“Then don’t,” she said.
“What was that you were saying about being cut off?”
“The mast outside, that’s the antenna. Power comes from the generator in the workshop, but the insulated cable runs along the ground. I started di
gging a trench, but they didn’t give me a cable long enough. It hasn’t been a problem. Matilda dislodged the cable once, but it only took a minute to reconnect it. There. You’re bandaged. That’s the best I can do. You need a couple of stitches, but they can wait.”
“Thanks. What about the sat-phone?”
“That works. But no one is answering. There was just a recorded message. Sorcha Locke’s voice saying that the master code had been reset to oh-one, oh-one, nineteen, eighty.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve no idea, but I can’t see it helps us.”
“Well, if the sat-phone works, can we call someone else? 911 or someone?”
“It’s triple-zero here,” she said. “And no, we can’t. That phone is programmed to dial only one number.”
“But you got online,” he said with increasing desperation. “Could you… I don’t know, make a call over the internet? People do that, right?”
“Not with that phone,” she said. “Not now. I’ve been locked out. I think Kempton set it up so I’d have to use that phone, so she could capture all the data I was transmitting. We can talk about that later because it doesn’t help us now.”
“No. How are we going to get out of here?”
“Wait until they’ve gone,” she said.
From outside came a metallic creak, a clunk, and another creak.
“They’re not leaving,” Pete said. “How strong is that gate?”
“Not as strong as the fence. I’m good at fences. Should have put one up around the antenna, but it’s not like I had to worry about vandalism out here.”
“It doesn’t sound like they’re leaving. We could use that fencing to barricade the cabin.”
“If we knew help was coming, I’d say yes,” she said. “And it should be coming. Surely it should. But there were all those other planes. If they’ve each crashed somewhere between here and Melbourne, they’ll deal with the wrecks near the more populated places first. You don’t get much more remote than this. It might be days before someone comes.”
“We don’t have that long. Can we cut a hole in the fence and run?” he asked. “How far is civilisation?”
“If you mean a phone or radio, there’s a cattle station twenty kilometres away. They shut it down last year, but they had someone keeping watch on the place over the summer. Beyond that, it’s Tibooburra, but that’s forty kilometres away. It’s dangerous to run at night, and won’t be much safer during the day. It’s twenty degrees out there. Sixty-eight Fahrenheit. Come sunrise, it’ll get worse. If the wind picks up, we might be outracing a firestorm. We need to drive.”
“We need to kill them, don’t we?” he said.
“I think so. Kill enough we can drive away.”
“And before more arrive from the wreck,” he said. He lifted the pickaxe. “I was okay with you shooting them, and I was okay letting them impale themselves. They’re not people, not anymore. I can do this.”
Chapter 10 - Their First Last Stand
The Outback
It was far easier said than done.
Pete forced himself outside, pickaxe and torch in his hands. He swept the light across the gate, then the fencing on either side. The few minutes they’d spent out of sight had done nothing to dispel the mob. Six pushed against the gate. Another five scrummed for position behind them with at least two squirming along the ground. Three more were hard against the fence to the left of the gate, two on the right.
“About twenty. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” he said, hoping if he sounded confident, he might start feeling that way, too. Except he stumbled at the next hurdle when he found no way to keep the torch pointing towards the undead while he swung the pick. When he placed the light on the ground, it shone on the zombie’s legs. In some ways, that was better, as he had fewer gore-coated faces of the recently living as a distraction. He hefted the pick, giving a few practice swings. It was a heavy tool, with a point on one side of the head, a broader levering blade on the other. On his first practice swing, the tool twisted in the air. He tried another testing blow, and another, and knew he was only delaying the inevitable.
The top of the gate was at shoulder-height. His shoulder, not that of the slouching undead, but two of them had managed to get their arms over the top. One arm reached out towards him, the other was braced at a thirty-degree angle above both his head and the zombie’s. Even in the fragmented shadow-light cast by the torch, he saw it was the steward.
Before more doubt could set in, he swung the tool up and over his head. The pick sailed through the air, missing the zombie’s head by a feather’s width. The wooden shaft slammed into the gate with a tremulous gong. He pulled the pick back, and almost lost it as the zombie’s outstretched hand curled around the shaft. He swung again. This time, his aim was true. This time, the pick sank deep into the zombie’s skull. And it stuck. The zombie went limp, fell, and took the tool with it. Monster and pick clattered to the ground on the other side of the gate. A second later, the body was lost beneath the feet of another zombie who pushed itself into the gap.
“I’ve filled two bags,” Corrie said.
“I lost the pick,” Pete said. “What bags?”
“Two bags. With water and some tools we can call weapons. Hammers and things, whatever I could grab. They’re on the porch. If we have to run, inside or out, grab one.”
“Right, got it. I’m going to get another pick.”
“I only had one,” she said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
She drew a hunting knife, held her torch in the other, walked over to the gate, and stabbed the blade through the links. “Missed.” She lined up her blow again, and hissed in triumph as the blade sliced through a zombie’s eye.
“Did you get it?”
“Only its eye.” She stepped back as the blinded zombie swiped at the gate. “The blade’s too thick,” she said. “Too big for the gap in the fence.”
“We need chisels, screwdrivers, that kind of thing,” Pete said.
“In the workshop,” Corrie said, lining up her knife to try again.
Pete grabbed his torch and ran to the workshop. This would work. It was going to work. The gate rattled and shook as he sprinted back to Corrie’s side. He held his torch high, shining it straight into a patchwork of charred flesh. A man, maybe, or he had been a few hours before, but the heat of the crash had bubbled and cracked the skin, making the features barely recognisable as human.
Swallowing hard, trying not to retch, Pete raised his gloved hand, balancing the tip of the screwdriver on the wire at approximately eye-height. Without warning, the zombie smashed its head into the chain-link. The blisters erupted in a spray of red-brown pus as Pete stabbed the screwdriver at its face. He missed its eye, plunging the tool into its cheek. The zombie twisted its head, ripping the hole into a jagged gash from which a red-brown gore poured forth. Pete dragged the screwdriver free, and stabbed again, but the zombie had stepped back.
“Third time’s the charm,” he said through gritted teeth as he lined the screwdriver up again. The zombie bucked forward, impaling its eye on the screwdriver. Pete stabbed with the tool, then slammed his palm into the hilt, aiming to hammer it into the zombie’s brain, but the zombie moved its head back, and the screwdriver fell on the other side of the gate.
Pete stepped back. “This isn’t working.”
“I got two,” she said. “And lost the chisels each time. But yeah, we need another idea.”
“Can we up-armour the car?” Pete asked.
“What?”
“Like in that Romero movie. They turned a school bus into a tank. I think it was Romero.”
“I think that’s fiction,” she said. “I don’t have the tools and we don’t have the time. Besides, with all those dead zombies by the gate, we’d need a tank to drive over them.”
“Let’s at least turn the lights back on,” he said.
“No need. Dawn’s coming.”
“Does Doctor Dodson have a rule about ru
nning through the outback in daylight?”
“Probably that it’s a bad idea,” she said.
“Worse than staying here?”
“No. You’re right, we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to run. That gate won’t hold. We’ll cut a hole in the fence at the back, away from these zombies. Get through, and run.”
“Maybe we could cut a hole big enough for the car,” he said.
“It’s rough ground,” she said. “I don’t think we’d get up enough speed before the zombies caught us. Anyway, cutting a hole that large would take too long. No, let’s just run. Twenty kilometres to the old cattle station. We can manage that.”
“Twenty kilometres, right, sure,” he said. He had only the haziest notion of what that was in miles, but it was still over nineteen kilometres more than he’d run since leaving high school. “Yeah, I can do that.”
“I’ll get the—” she began, and stopped. She pointed. “Matilda.”
The light was still dim, the kangaroo still more shadow than shape, but there was no mistaking the silhouette. Matilda stood on a shallow incline, thirty metres from her trough.
“Go away!” Pete yelled. “Run!”
But the kangaroo didn’t. She took a bounding step towards the water trough.
“No! Don’t, please don’t,” Pete called, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Just go. Run. Go away. There’s no water. Please.”
The kangaroo took another cautious step towards the fence. Four of the undead were now heading towards her in an irregular line. Matilda didn’t run. She abruptly swivelled towards them, and cricked her head to the other side.
“Run!” Corrie yelled.
Instead, Matilda jumped. Balancing on her tail, both feet lashed out, smashing into the zombie’s chest. Gore flew as skin ruptured and loops of decaying intestine fell to the ground. The rest of the zombie collapsed a second later, sprawling to the dirt. Matilda hopped back, shaking one foot, then the other.
“Can kangaroos be infected?” Pete whispered.
“I hope not,” Corrie said.
The other three zombies lurched onwards towards the kangaroo. Matilda looked at Pete and Corrie, then at the zombies, cricking her head to one side as she stood, waiting.