After- Undead Wars

by Samie Sands

  Arms were reaching across the counter, but it was wide enough to stop the crazed crowd from touching me.

  The half-door was a different matter, though. The straining latch finally gave way, screws popping out and the door catch flinging itself across the floor, ricocheting from a wall and hitting the side of my security guard’s standard-issue leather shoe. And suddenly, there were people spilling into the tight area behind the counter, where there was room only for two or three watch repairmen to work at the same time. I tried to back away from the crushing group, felt cold hands scrabble over my bare skin, saw already-bloodstained teeth closing in on me, and drew my gun. As I retreated from the intruding crowd, I stepped onto a bloody arm protruding from under the back counter and almost lost my footing.

  I fired.

  Pop! A man’s chest exploded. He staggered backwards, several people behind him also falling under his weight. In such close quarters, the bullet had burst open his body and splashed me with gore, but there was little more, besides ruined flesh, than a spatter of russet fluid that seemed already to have begun to coagulate. Before I could fire again, he recovered his stance and, incredibly, resumed his motions towards me.

  I pushed myself backwards up onto the back counter, scattering tools and bits of watches with my arse. Something sharp pressed into one buttock as I drew up my feet. Across the plaza, an elevator door opened, and people spilled out like maggots from a corpse. Like the worms pouring out of the belly of some poor soldier we found in a rice paddy. I kicked away a young woman reaching from behind the watchmaker’s stand, but she grasped my leg. Macca Henshall, panicked out of his brain, had fired what seemed a thousand rounds into the steaming Vietnamese night, before we could catch and subdue him and organize for him to be sent back to Melbourne. I didn’t have a thousand bullets, but I was probably just as scared. As the woman bent to sink her teeth into me, I fired into the top of her head. Her skull burst open, shattered teeth exploding out and tinkling across the floor, blood and brains gushing up to cover my trousers in gore.

  I jumped down, rounded the palm tree and scooped up Ash’s two-way from the floor––God knows what had happened to mine in the melee––and shouted that we needed help: the police, the army, anybody.

  But only screams came back at me: someone had left a radio key open, and they weren’t hearing me at all.

  I emptied my revolver into the crowd. A shot to the head worked, I realized: anything else just slowed them down.

  Beside me, Ash shuddered again, eyes rolling back in his head, and he tried to push himself up from the floor.

  “You’re still alive?” How could that be, with his wounds?

  He rolled over, unable to stand. Without warning, he grasped my leg and pulled himself towards me. This man that I’d worked with for years, this man that I loved, this man whose family I regarded as my own... His teeth sank into my foot, but the regulation leather shoe protected my flesh. It took me a minute to recognize the threat: like the growing number of others around the watchmaker’s stand, he was trying to bite me! How long would it be until my best friend began to tear flesh from my leg?

  “This is insane.” I don’t even know whether I said it out loud.

  I crashed the butt of the empty gun into his skull. He raised his head slightly, and he looked straight into my eyes––I almost thought he was pleading––but then he returned and tried to fasten his teeth into my calf. I kicked him away, glimpsed the dulled eyes of a man no longer conscious of his own actions. I’d fired off all of my bullets. As he lunged and I pushed him aside again, I grasped the gun out of his holster and shot him.

  I shot my best friend with his own gun. God help me.

  My guts were rumbling again, but I tensed my arse and pushed the thought to the back of my mind.

  I blasted a couple more shuffling people out of my way––I had little doubt they were all afflicted––and made it to Standish, in front of the bank. I pushed away a blood-covered woman gorging on his flesh and managed to wrest Daryl’s gun from his curled fingers. He’d only fired once, and his pistol felt as though it had at least three or four rounds left. I pointed the barrel and blew away the woman. Three boys in scout uniforms rose, gurgling and moaning, from somewhere behind me; they had bloodied faces like wolves that had shoved their muzzles into the steaming carcass of a deer. One of them lunged at me. I pointed the gun without thinking.

  God help me, I shot a bunch of kids. What the hell were boy scouts doing in a shopping mall, anyhow? Shouldn’t they have been learning to tie knots in their clubhouse or selling cookies or camping in the jungle?

  No, the jungle wasn’t safe. The allies destroyed the jungle with Agent Orange and machine gun fire. Then I remembered I was the one who’d been in the jungle. And now I was back there, surrounded by an enemy that just wouldn’t die. I fired the last round in Standish’s gun into the bank manager as he stumbled through the open door of the bank and thrust a neatly manicured hand at me. I clubbed one of the bank customers. I was searching desperately for some other weapon I could use, when––

  There was a sound that seemed to fill the shopping center, a beating sound above the sound of moans and screams—somewhere amongst the carnage, somebody must still be alive, or dying—a whoop-whoop-whoop sound, a sound like the flapping of great wings, an angel or perhaps a demon, but I recognized it suddenly, remembered that sound from the library of forgotten or wished-away sounds of my past.

  The helicopters had arrived while I was staring into the lifeless, unseeing eyes of a boy whose whole shoulder had been ripped away.

  What the hell were kids doing in the jungle? Shouldn’t they be at home, in their village, playing around the well, hanging around their mothers’ skirts in the marketplace?

  God help me.

  “Everybody, get down on the floor!”

  It was such a shock that I dropped immediately, feeling the sudden thud in my arthritic knees. Standish’s blood began to soak into my trousers.

  I looked up. A few of the mob had turned toward the sound. Soldiers had materialized at the nearer end of the plaza. Across the open expanse before the food court, a couple of people had fallen to the polished floor, but they were immediately set upon by others with gnashing teeth and claws.

  “Over here!” I waved, and a uniformed man strode towards me, pushing his way through the crowd, firing into individuals who got too near to him, stabbing with a bayonet.

  Skulls exploded, the floor became littered with bodies, a staggering young man flew through the air as a bullet hit him.

  Poppoppoppoppop!

  But there were still people advancing on me, jaws wide for a fatal bite. I struggled to my feet, despite the danger of being shot by the approaching soldier and scrambled towards an ice cream stand. A young salesgirl, her face torn off, was slumped over scattered coins on the bench, one hand still in the open cash register. Her raspberry blood had oozed across the counter and was trickling into the tub of vanilla ice cream. I slammed the hinged counter down behind me. A soldier was blasting people out of the way as he headed towards me, and they seemed to fall like dominoes. But some of the shoppers stayed bent over corpses, and hardly seemed to notice, continuing to rend flesh with teeth and nails until they were blown away for good by the soldiers.

  And now there were arms reaching for me across the counter, hands swatting only centimeters from my face, their owners oblivious to the approaching militia. I saw people falling, I saw a soldier ravaged when he lowered his weapon to reload. When the man coming for me was almost to the ice cream stand, I raised both hands in surrender.

  “Don’t shoot,” I pleaded. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I––I’m not armed.”

  “Stay close,” he ordered, pulling me roughly from behind the counter.

  We waded through a quagmire of corpses and blood and dying people, the occasional gunshot announcing that another of the crazed group had met their end. I kept my arms above my head, except when somebody lunged at my ribs and the soldi
er shot him point-blank in the face.

  He took me outside to waiting police and disappeared back into the shopping center. I heard gunshots and yelling, somewhere the agonized, high-pitched squeal of a woman.

  Women screaming, trying to push children into our arms. The Australians were leaving. We’d lost good young men in an unwinnable war, and only a change of government had ended conscription and our involvement in Vietnam. We were leaving the country and its people to their fate, leaving like a joke without a punchline.

  My hands were still in the air when a policeman grabbed me and pushed me into a car.

  The police hadn’t been inside, hadn’t seen the horror, and for all I knew they may have thought I was amongst the rioters. I expected to be cuffed, and I couldn’t blame them: my clothes were ripped, I was covered in blood, and I knew that I didn’t smell good. My belly was still churning, but I wasn’t sure now whether it was because of Jenny’s curry or from disgust for what I’d seen.

  The policeman slid in beside me, sniffed, and scowled in contempt. After a short ride, I was hauled inside the police station.

  There was a stab of pain low in my abdomen.

  “I have to––I have to use the bathroom,” I said, doubling over.

  The cop who’d brought me in screwed up his face and nodded that it was obvious. I was escorted down towards the police toilets at the back of the station, still uncertain whether I was regarded as a witness, a victim, or a perpetrator in the carnage at the shopping mall. A policeman pushing an early drunk towards an interview desk passed me, glanced at the gore on my clothes.

  I barely made it into the stall and lowered myself to the seat before my insides gushed out. I sat in the close cubicle contemplating what had happened. Between talking to Ash about his wife’s curry and taking a dump in the police crapper, I’d fired on shoppers, shopkeepers, my own partner, a group of uniformed boy scouts. This couldn’t end well.

  The policeman who’d stood outside the stall while I emptied myself into the bowl was still waiting there when I came out. Surely, I expected, he’d drag me off to an interview room. He allowed me to wash my hands and made no comment on the stench.

  From outside, though, I heard sudden shouts, and then gunfire. The cop swore and tore open the door to dash out.

  “Stay here,” he commanded.

  “Don’t move,” said Sergeant Harrington, “they’re all around us.”

  And we’d waited, crouched between grassy rice plants in a flooded field for what seemed like an hour, not knowing whether we’d see him or the two men he’d taken with him ever again, not knowing whether we ourselves were destined to die in this beautiful, war-torn country under a wide blue sky that just didn’t care.

  I waited but he didn’t come back, and when I walked out, I saw torn bodies, pools of blood, a man lying amidst them with a shattered skull. From outside, the sounds of a crowd.

  A policewoman squatting between some desks noticed me, put a finger to her lips, and turned to waddle, keeping low

  between the rows of rice.

  Unexpectedly, the drunk at the interview desk rose and intercepted her. She tried to back away, but he tore a great swathe through her chest and down her belly with a bare hand. He was already rifling through her opened body and stuffing bloody meat into his mouth when the front doors of the station burst open and a moaning, dazed-looking crowd pushed their way in. As the screams of police men and women filled the air, I ran to the back of the station and found an unguarded exit.

  My home was only a few streets away.

  A prayer to a non-existent God: Just let me live long enough to get home and get my grandchildren to safety.

  As I rounded the building, I spotted a crowd of groaning, ragged people: women, children, men. One of them noticed me and began staggering across the lawn. Somehow, without any spoken words, the news of my presence seemed to ripple through the crowd, and a knot of them turned towards me.

  “Don’t move,” said Harrington.

  If I don’t move, I’m dead.

  I ran, gut swinging, my bowels wanting to vacate, my muscles reminding me within minutes that I was not the young man I’d once been. I noticed a key in an unoccupied car, but when I turned it there was no response. Dead battery. Ash, I told you––

  They were faster than I’d expected. Crazed individuals and even whole families were emerging now from houses around me. I abandoned the car and heaved my bulk over a fence, startling a neighbor in her back yard.

  “Get inside, they’re coming!” I warned over my shoulder, but she just blinked back at me.

  I tried to scramble over another fence as people began to pour around the sides of her house and fell heavily onto the ground on the other side.

  Behind me, there was the sound of a woman screaming in surprise and pain: the woman I’d surprised only a minute ago.

  I kept my mind on getting to my own house.

  I burst in through the front door, bounding down the hall, and almost slipped on the slick floor, almost tripped over Candy in the entrance to the kitchen.

  I stopped to focus. A soldier, taking a potentially lethal second to take stock of the battlefield.

  Something had happened here.

  I stepped over the dog’s corpse, made a mental note that it was probably her blood along the hall. Probably.

  I reached the kitchen. Kylie, the babysitter, had almost made it out, one arm stretched towards the fly screen door that would have taken her out to the garden, the back of her head opened, and strings of brain matter entwined within the strands of her hair. Sprawled across the adjoining living room floor, my grandson lay in a pool of blood while his sister tore chunks of meat from his body, blood and gore spilling down her chin and across the pinafore that Kylie had dressed her in for the day.

  Inexplicably, I remembered she’d been ill when I left for the morning. Some kid at daycare had bitten her just yesterday afternoon. And now, as the front door banged shut in the wind, she looked up. With Kylie’s body blocking the back door, crouching in a paddy field with the Viet Cong a stone’s throw away, I realized escape would need a miracle.

  Little Alicia, teeth bared, raised herself to her full height––barely a challenge for an ex-soldier, but not so for an old man who loved his grandkids––and threw herself at me. Tiny hands tore at my clothes, clawed at my throat. I tried to push her away. She was much stronger than I’d expected, an enemy that couldn’t be defeated, an enemy that just kept coming in waves across the fields, and agony shot through my arm. She backed off with a chunk of torn cloth and bloody flesh between her teeth. I staggered towards the kitchen bench.

  Alicia gulped down the bloody gob of meat but was satisfied for only a moment. With my good arm, and through tears of pain and tears at what I knew I must do, I reached for the knife drawer. My hand found something: a long-bladed knife, good for a stab to the eye. But I couldn’t stab my granddaughter in the eye, even if she meant to kill me. I fumbled for the handle of the meat cleaver. As she came at me again, I swung the weapon over my head and brought it down to open the skull of my one remaining grandchild. She tumbled to the floor and didn’t get up.

  The shock of what I’d done was like a sobering punch.

  Like punching the face of a villager whose one concern had been to run into a burning hut to save her child. What had I done?

  Blood loss had weakened me. Merv Johnson, trembling as he died, screaming before the painkillers arrived. The horror... The blood... I could feel the tendrils of an eternal cold, filtering between the muscles in my body. I staggered my way to the table, managed to slump into a chair.

  Pop, says my little granddaughter.

  But there’s nobody here. I am alone with my thoughts and memories.

  Accept, accept, my body is saying. Death comes to everyone.

  But not like this, I reply.

  There’s an awful smell: the smell of blood, and death, and shit, and I can no longer tell which is which. A groaning in my stomach reminds me that I h
aven’t eaten today. I could do with a raw steak.

  No, a rare steak.

  Some sort of flesh. I fight the urge to go out onto the street to look for it, but my brain is telling me to accept, accept, and my memories are fading. The door, anyhow, is closed, so I am shut inside to wait for someone to come.

  My wife, my daughter... Neither of them had lived to see this. Lawrie Brown. Jack Kelso, Merv Johnson. Johnno Harrington. Enemy soldiers that I killed. Ash and Jenny. Perhaps the ghosts will find me first.

  Or will I be like those others that I saw in the shopping center and in the street and in the police station? I can feel the hunger beginning to focus in my belly: gnawing, unyielding, insatiable. My hands and feet are no longer my own, and my empty stomach, my yearning mouth, need something.

  God help me.

  Noel Osualdini

  NOEL OSUALDINI (PRONOUNCED Oswald-deeny) was still a boy when Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War ended. He has never been a soldier, and has only ever fired a rifle half a dozen times (he killed four empty cans at a quarry and shot a hawk that had found its way into his parents’ chicken shed). He has written for print and electronic publications, and was a contributor to the Unleash the Undead and Mutate anthologies previously released by this publisher. He doesn’t have a website of his own, but can be found via google, amazon, audible, and other sites. His recent collection, Train Wreck and Other Stories, is available from eBay (hardcover) and amazon (paperback and Kindle). He lives southeast of Melbourne with his partner Joanne and their largish family, is very fond of the Vietnamese people and their food, and as far as he can recall, has never met a zombie.

  Are You There?

  Samie Sands

  BANG, BANG, BANG.

  “Stop knocking.” I lean against the rickety wooden door hard. “Just stop knocking.”

  Bang, bang, bang.

  “I can’t let you in, you know that. You can’t come in here. It isn’t safe.”