Pushing us back the howling crowd shed their few scraps of clothing. Naked they surged forward and tore at Lizzy’s clothes. We couldn’t see what was happening but we could hear her screams. Hawk-head stood above it all, bare-arsed, erect and panting with excitement as he watched his boys crawl, licking and writhing over the helpless, shrieking girl.
‘No! No, hey, leave her alone!’ I reached out and grabbed the nearest kid, lifting him off his feet as I pulled him back from the pile. His teeth were stained with blood and he was chewing something. I stared in horror and then got stuck in and dragged them off until I could see Lizzy. Else stabbed at the ones who tried to get back in.
They’d stripped and bitten her. Face, arms, breasts and legs mostly. Their teeth had torn her flesh. She was a rash of half-circle purple bruises, deep bites and thickly seeping blood. Thick smears of cum glistened on her belly and thighs. I smashed my fist in some giggling brat’s blood stained face and helped Lizzy to her feet.
She shuddered with wracking sobs and tears streaked the dust on her skin. The kids hung back, jeering silently with their eyes. Some of them openly jerking themselves off in a distracted way.
‘We are leaving. Okay?’ I spoke to Hawk-head, ignoring his little gang of rapist-cannibal monsters.
‘Fuck you,’ Hawk-head moved fast. The beaten metal cutlass he carried whistled through the air and caught Lizzy in the side of the head. Burying itself in her face with a sound like an axe going into wood. She sighed and collapsed into dead weight as I caught and laid her down. Else didn’t move.
‘You little fucking shit!’ I ripped the heavy blade from Lizzy’s skull and came up with it in my hands. I screamed at them and started hacking. Hawk-head tried to get away, but tripped over his cohort. I sliced a long gash down his bare back and he screamed louder and higher than Lizzy.
‘Fuckers!’ Else joined in and we started killing.
Kids screamed. Shit and piss ran out of them in stinking rivers and in a few seconds the survivors had bolted. A boy of maybe twelve lay writhing and screaming among the dead and the dirt. Blood didn’t just ooze through the fingers clenched against his leg, it jetted. I kicked him aside and found Hawk-head trying to crawl away. I turned him on his back and knelt down, my knee pressing down on his chest.
‘Her name was Lizzy. She has a mother and a father and a brother. She just wanted to get away from all of this!’ I gestured at the sky and put the jagged point of the blood-stained steel to Hawk-head’s gut. Bloody spit bubbled through teeth clenched in agony and he whined. ‘Missah, I’m hurt. Help me…pleassse…’
‘There is no help. Not for you. Not for any of us. We’re all just doing what we can to survive.’ I felt cold. I’d plunged into the icy river of shock and come out the other side. Dived into dark waters only to emerge into some dark and barren place where the voice of reason was lost on the wind. I stood up pressing my weight down on the blade, feeling the serrated edge slice through the boy’s heaving flesh until it stopped against the ground. Hawk-head’s back arched, his yellow teeth bared as he screamed in agony. With a wordless cry I twisted the wide blade, tearing him inside. The acrid stink of ruptured bowel filled the air.
I cried in fury at the silent houses. The flies came to the feast and I watched numbly as Else casually loped off the corpse’s heads.
‘We should get back to the train. Harris will want his stuff,’ Else said and I nodded.
‘Yeah sure, let’s go.’ We left the bodies to rot. We had no tools to bury them with and the ground had dried to stone.
CHAPTER 21
The train steamed gently in the baking heat of the afternoon. The idea of climbing aboard and driving on almost made me puke. Every time I closed my eyes I saw visions of Lizzy. I could still taste her on my tongue and see her blood on my hands. Else set the wheelbarrow down and frowned. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘Harris? Gordon?’ I drew the shotgun. Only two shots left, I reminded myself. One for Else, and one for me. If it came to that could I take her life? Or my own?
Else bounded up to the train, and yanked the door open. Harris lurched around and Else squealed and fell back on to the platform. Harris stumbled against the door reaching for her.
‘Harris..?’ I stood dumbstruck as Harris waved his dead arm blindly exploring the space where Else had stood a moment before.
Else rolled to her feet, the long katana she carried slid from its sheath and she stood calm and ready.
‘How the…? There are no evols here. What the hell happened?’
‘I have to kill him right? I have to do it?’ Else stood ready but waiting for my confirmation. Harris’ dead eyes focused on her and he half stepped, half fell onto the platform.
‘Goddamnit! What happened!?’ I demanded. Harris snorted and lurched in my direction.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Else swung her sword. Congealed blood burst and dribbled from Harris’ neck. She chopped at him again and he collapsed, his blood stained beard painting a trail in the red dust as his head rolled to my feet. The eyes blinked and then went dull.
Else killed zombies with a passion, but killing one that she knew as a living, laughing human shook her to the core. She sank to her knees, vomiting and retching, the sword dropping with a clang on the station platform.
‘Nugghh more, no more,’ she mumbled, spitting and wiping her mouth.
‘First time killing a friend is always the hardest. We call that puking,’ I added helpfully.
‘Don’t like it,’ Else groaned. A scuffling sound behind me brought me to my feet. The snatched sword flashed in my hands. Gordon cowered, a dark piss stain spreading over his pants.
‘Mamaaa…’ he wailed. I lowered the sword.
‘Fuck Gordon, where were you? What happened to Harris?’ I lowered the sword.
‘Fell down! Fell down!’ Gordon wailed and rocked.
‘Harris had a heart attack? Is that what happened, Gordon?’ I got in his face, demanding an explanation. Gordon cowered lower, hands coming up to cover his eyes, fingers waving like pale tentacles.
‘Don’t yell at Gordon. Don’t yell at Gordon,’ he repeated until I patted him gently on the shoulder.
‘It’s alright mate, not your fault. Just freaked me out is all. She’ll be right.’
‘Want Lizzy. Wanna go home. Wanna go home! Maamaaaahh!’ Gordon rocked back and forth, his fingers dancing against his face.
I stepped back, unsure how to explain Lizzy’s absence to him. ‘Lizzy’s gone mate. She’s gonna come along later. We have to get on the train now. We have to get on the train and go.’
Gordon wailed again, his voice high and wavering, strangely childlike for such a big man. Else gathered herself up and came to investigate the noise.
‘Make him shut up. Make him shut up,’ she insisted. I waved her down.
‘Come one Gordon, back to the train mate,’ I coaxed and pleaded. Speaking gently to him like a frightened animal. Gordon just dug in his heels and squatted down. Covering his ears and drumming his fingertips on his temples.
‘Evols are coming,’ Else announced and took the sword back from me.
‘What?’ I sprang up and scanned the nearby streets and open desert. The dead were coming towards us through the scrub and saltbush. A ragged crowd of dusty shufflers slowly turning towards the noise.
‘It’s that mob that carried us away from Port Germein. They’re coming.’ I didn’t argue with her. Else has a nose for zombies.
‘We have to go now,’ Else darted back to the train and then returned. ‘Now!’
‘Gordon! Come on!’ I may as well have been tugging on a tree.
‘Lizzy...’ he moaned.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,’ I let Gordon go. He immediately curled up in a foetal position, shuddering and moaning. Resisting the urge to kick the hell out of a retard I paced up and down.
Up on the platform I could see the approaching zombies spread out across a wide horizon. We were out of time.
‘Come on Gordon, come on. Pl
ease mate. Please. Just get up and come on the train. Come on mate, we’re going on a train ride. You like to ride the train, doncha?’
Gordon wailed, and shuddered. His massive hands blocked his ears, and his crying drowned me out. I had a sickening realisation that he was going to be left behind.
‘Now!’ screamed Else from the train. I backed away from Gordon about to start shrieking myself. ‘For fucks sake Gordon! Get up willya! You stay here you will die!’
Gordon grizzled in long lip buzzing cries. Rivers of mucous streamed from his nose and bubbled on his lips. I took Gordon’s hand and made a last attempt to pull him off the ground. The hungry moans of the approaching evols drowned out Else’s shouts for me to hurry the fuck up. Gordon’s hand slipped from my grasp and I fell back. I scrambled to my feet, my breath coming in panicked gasps. The stench of the long dead clouded the air with a foul haze. I ran for the train as the zombies reached it and started finding their way around the engine.
Ragged walkers, their skin peeling off in strips like old wallpaper. The more recently dead, or at least more recently feral, with clearer skin and less post-mortem injuries. They moved with more purpose, their eyes still clear enough to see everything. Dead teeth bared and black tongues lolled. Strings of thick saliva stretched like tendons in their jaws. They all homed in on me. I drew the shotgun and smashed the butt into the side of a dead man’s head. His skull cracked and black pus oozed out like a fancy chocolate with a crème centre.
They tore at me with cracked hands, and as I jerked away from one, I stepped into the grasp of two more. I used the gun like a club, smashing and sweeping a space around me. They found Gordon and I heard him die. Screaming for his mother until his voice cracked or the dead tore his chest open and ate his lungs.
There was no way these evols wanted to carry us away. These ones were hungry, blinded by a single driving need. They would tear us into bloody rags and gnaw on our bones.
Steel flashed and a head rolled. Else wielded her blade with a blinding speed. She over swung each time, but never missed.
I pushed through the last crowded yards of rotting flesh. I almost lost my grip on the shotgun, holding it aloft in one fist I punched deep into a zombie girl’s swollen belly. The taut flesh burst, thick grey slime and a slurry of necrotic organs spilled out at my feet. I knocked her back and as I stepped forward my boot crushed something in the gore that writhed and hissed.
Else backed up, fighting a retreat. She got to the train a few steps ahead of me, reached out and pulled me into the engine cab. I yanked the steel door shut behind us against a forest of scrabbling hands and then stared helplessly at the wall of dials and levers. ‘I… don’t know how to drive a fucking train,’ I pressed my fists to my forehead. ‘Shit, shit shit.’
A chunk of wood hit me in the shoulder. ‘This goes in the fire.’ Else said, throwing more wood at me as she dug into the pile stacked in the tender like a dog on the scent of a rabbit.
I cracked the firebox open and soon a blaze was roaring. More evols were crawling out of the desert and over the train. Drawn by the noise and the motion they came on. A legion of desiccated and broken corpses that walked and crawled, summoned by an insatiable need to make us like them. We made fire until the gauges in front of me were pulsing into the red.
‘One of these levers. I’m sure it’s one of these levers.’ I waved my hands over the mechanical arms in front of me. Nothing was labelled. Else shoved past me and pulled something. With a shuddering jerk, the train moved forward. She pulled on something else and the motion smoothed out. We started rolling down the track.
‘You didn’t learn that from a bloody book!’ I grinned at Else over the noise.
‘I watched Harris. He does the same thing every time,’ Else shrugged like it was obvious. I laughed again and hugged her. She gripped me as if she never wanted to let go. I stared back down the track, trying not to think about Harris, Lizzy and poor, fucking retarded Gordon.
CHAPTER 22
The train rolled on, through the ember glow of sunset and into the night. The evols clinging to the train fell away. Those that managed to get close enough to reach at us through the heavy wire got a sword point through the head.
I sat with my back to the tender, trying to get comfortable against the wood and other burnable shit that kept the firebox sizzling.
Dreams are not something I remember often. At best I awaken with a vague sense of disquiet. An unease that fades as quickly as the vague details of the dream. That afternoon, with my back pressed against sharp corners of wood and hurtling down an unknown railway line with a girl less than three weeks old at the controls, I slept and dreamed.
I dreamed of a cave made of flesh. A living cathedral that pulsed and writhed. I floated, or flew as you do in dreams, over a writhing landscape of half-formed or half-digested corpses that wallowed within the dark gunk and slime.
Ahead of me in the dim light I could make out something vast and tumorous in the gigantic shape of a terrible disease ravaged heart. It hung suspended on great cables of pulsing flesh. Tentacles of grey intestinal colour and shape waved and caressed the surface. These tendrils of dead flesh probed and tasted the air in a sickening parody of life. I could sense none of the warmth of life here. Just this vast and horrific thing, throbbing and swollen with a black, stinking fluid that previously I had only seen oozing from the dead. Within the great cocoon there was no human shape. Only a perfect alienness. My senses told me that this thing was utterly, perfectly wrong. In my dream I flew closer to it, unable to close my eyes until the squirming landscape filled my vision. In the final moment before impact the entire shape shuddered and the rank flesh split, parted and lifted. An immense eye rolled yellow and bloodshot with black veins to fix its focus on me. I screamed and the million mouths of the corpses ensnared in the web of the cathedral’s flesh whispered my name.
Else slapped me a second time. The blow shook my tongue loose from where it had cemented itself to the roof of my mouth.
‘Gagh,’ I said, raising my hands to avoid another head-spinner.
‘You made a loud noise. I didn’t like it,’ she said crouching down and peering carefully into my face.
‘Bad dream,’ I muttered. ‘We’re slowing down?’ I pulled myself to my feet, feeling the train’s motion changing.
‘Town ahead. One with lights and everything,’ Else leaned past me as I stared out the narrow front window.
‘How long was I asleep for?’
Else shrugged. ‘Long time.’
‘Any trouble?’
She gave me a withering look. ‘You had more trouble sleeping than I did getting us here.’
‘You shoulda woken me,’ I said. ‘You need to get some sleep too.’ Else shrugged, I caught a flicker of unpleasant emotion on her face.
‘You don’t like to sleep?’
‘Gotta keep the train going. It’s what Harris would do.’
‘Yeah, but Harris liked to sleep too. Are you having bad dreams Else?’ She wouldn’t look me in the eye.
‘Gotta stop the train,’ she shouldered me aside and heaved on a lever. The train snorted steam and the wheels locked and sparked. We slowly ground to a halt, the hot metal all around us ticking, the boiler valves hissing. Only the desert was quiet.
I cracked the door open and stepped down. Lights from a single house winked at us from nearby. I walked down to the front of the engine, and stretched. Nobody and nothing could be seen in the emptiness around us.
‘Did you love her?’ Else said at my back making me jump.
‘Did I love who?’
‘Lizzy,’ Else scraped a booted foot in the red sand.
‘Nope,’ I couldn’t get my head around why Lizzy bugged her so much. Else’s stupid notion of wanting to have a baby and this fiery jealousy she had. I hoped we would both live long enough to work out what she was thinking.
‘You can’t love her anyway she’s dead,’ Else kicked a small stone.
‘Do you know how far we are f
rom Sydney?’ I asked. Else shook her head.
‘Over a thousand miles would be my guess. My life in the city was shit. But I did okay. Yet here I am, in the middle of fucking nowhere, with you.’
Else glanced up, a flicker of uncertainty showing in her eyes. ‘Why did we come out here?’
‘Like I told you, there are men out here. Really smart guys who can help us make sure you get to live as long as you want.’
‘If I live long enough, can I have babies?’
I sighed. ‘Sure, you can live long enough to learn enough to do what ever you want.’
‘How long is that?’
‘Harris was old. Harris was really old. You could live long enough to be older than him.’
‘When I die, will you stop me coming back?’
I shivered in the stifling heat of the desert evening. ‘Yes. I will put you down because I will know it isn’t you that gets back up again. It will be some empty, hungry thing. Everything that is you will be gone. Only a dead body will be left and that I will lay to rest.’ In the back of my mind faces rose unbidden. Those I’d cared about in the past, during The Panic and the plague. The ones who taught me that when they came back they were not mine to love any more.
Else tackled me in a bear hug. ‘You have to stay with me until I die, older than Harris, no one else. Just you.’
‘Always,’ I hugged her and scanned the horizon. No advancing line of evols. Maybe, finally we had gone beyond their determined reach.
‘We should check out those houses. See if anyone’s home.’
Else hesitated and then pulled away. ‘Sure,’ she nodded and casually checked her sword was in place on her back.
We walked the short distance up the track to the first lights. A house surrounded by a stand of stubborn trees and a cluster of low shrubs pushed together in what could have been mistaken for a garden. Solar power generator panels on the roof gleamed in the moonlight. A dog started barking before we reached the gate. Else shrank back, her blade sliding half out of the scabbard.
‘Best we wait here I reckon. Anyone home will come and check out the noise,’ I said. ‘Hello the house!’ I called. ‘Just passing through, we’re friends of Harris, the train driver.’
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