Jane nodded. "I get what you're saying but it seems unbelievable."
"I've seen a lot of weird crap and none of it makes sense. There's enough weirdness that I have to actually question the whole biological infection angle. To make sense of this I need to go through all the assumptions that I've made and just start testing them."
"Okay then. What can I do for you?"
"What? Why would you help me? I must have misunderstood what DOA was about."
"Things have changed. I told you earlier that there is nothing. Not a single organisation left. If we're going to save those who are left alive then we're going to have to start rebuilding everything on our own. And right now you are the only person that I'm aware of who is actually doing anything. So what help do you need?"
Dave frowned while thinking for a moment. It was a responsibility that fell heavily on him. "I don't know where to start but I'm going to need all of it."
Jane nodded. "You got it."
* * *
Dave and Jane stood on top of the bus that made up the western wall of the defences that been built around intersection. Dave looked down from the bus at a street light. At the base of the street light were some loose coils of rope.
"What's up?" asked Jane noticing how Dave's attention had wavered.
"I was just thinking of Charlie."
Jane had no idea what Dave was talking about and waited for him to continue.
"Charlie was a walker that Josh and myself had tied to that lamppost." Jane turned to look where Dave was pointing. "He was my first test subject. We used to cut him up in order to test out his healing abilities."
"Damn," said Jane in a partial whisper.
"We learnt so much from those experiments. It was while experimenting on Charlie that I started to doubt the whole infection idea and began thinking that something else was going on."
"So where's Charlie now?" asked Jane.
"We accidently destroyed him," said Dave with a surprising hint of sadness in his voice.
"What?" said Jane in a surprised tone. "How did you do that?"
"When we had some Army guys visiting, they fired some bullets into Charlie so that we could test bullet damage. I latter found out that they didn't have much ammunition but they used a few of their remaining bullets as they were probably as curious as me. We shot at various parts of Charlie until we hit him in the head. One hit to his head and his body turned into dust and fell to the ground. The wind just blew the dust away."
"I've shot at the dead before, but never in their heads. When we learn to use our rifles we are taught to aim at the centre of the biggest body mass. Shooting in the chest is pure instinct to me. I would never have tried to target the head."
Dave nodded. "You're not the only one to be caught out like that. The army guys from the camp over the river were trying to figure out a way of setting up outposts away from their camp. They set up this intersection as some sort of forward firebase, or however they'd describe it, and promptly got swarmed by masses of the dead. They had no idea that headshots were how you killed the walkers and ended up just wasting their firepower to no effect."
Jane kicked some of the empty casings that were scattered about her feet. "They certainly went to town."
"I wasn't there, but I'm suspecting that the walkers couldn't climb over these makeshift walls. That meant that this base was probably reasonably safe. I've never seen any of the dead climbing over these walls. I've been here for a while and I've never seen anything non-human in the centre of this intersection. Although there are blockages further down this street we did see a talker near where we had Charlie, but those walls are incomplete and there could be still a simple way of reaching Charlie's location with just a little climbing."
"So, the walkers can't climb anything too difficult."
"Yep. When I asked about what happened here, I'm guessing that the Army guys from the other camp were a little embarrassed. As they fired their guns they made a lot of noise. This attracted more and more walkers. Although the walkers couldn't get around or over these hastily made walls, the sheer number of them must have panicked everyone here and they just fled and headed back to their base."
Dave pointed south to highlight the direction of their retreat.
"Didn't the the walkers just follow them?" asked Jane clearly confused.
Jane noticed the dark frown on Dave's forehead. "The river stopped the walkers from crossing."
"What?" said Jane completely unable to hide the surprise in her voice.
"Until recently the river was effective in preventing the walkers from crossing."
"So, something recently changed?"
Dave hesitated. "It doesn't make any sense. I'd rather not talk about it."
"Did you do something?" asked Jane carefully.
Dave jolted in surprise. "No. No. It's what I saw. It just made no sense. A part of me is thinking that I'm just being crazy. I'm worried that if I speak about it out loud, that I might discover that I actually am insane. But that's probably an overreaction. A sign of being tired. I simply have no data. I'm certain a lack of data is the real issue. I don't have enough data so I'm trying to fill in the gaps between known points with wild extrapolation. Sadly, my wild extrapolation is just too wild and the known points too few. I need data to bring it under control and start making sense of it all again."
"That sounds confusing."
Dave had a sad laugh. "That's a fair way to describe it. I need some time and some solid data to put my thoughts together. Until then I feel that I can only contribute useless speculation. Which is another way of saying that I should just shut up."
Jane looked hard at Dave. "We'll just have to work with what we have."
Together they took one more look at the light post where Charlie had been tied, before Jane started moving.
"Where are we going?" asked Dave.
Jane pointed slightly to the left of north. "There's a Police station just up here. It's a small rural one but it should be good enough."
"I saw that before," said Dave. "I didn't bother with it as I assumed that it would be locked up pretty tightly."
"It probably is locked up tightly. But it isn't a big city Police station. I'm hoping that it won't be as well built as a city station."
"What's your plan?"
"I want to break into it."
Dave nodded. Jane's attempt at being mysterious was a little weird, but there was no doubt a good reason for what she was doing. Together, they continued approaching the Police station.
* * *
Dave and Jane looked at the Police station. It was a simple wooden slat house with an inclined concrete ramp leading to its entrance.
"It's going to be tough breaking into here," said Dave.
"I'm not so sure about that," said Jane.
"This is a police station," said Dave gesturing towards the building. "It might look like an ordinary house but I bet that it's probably built way tougher than an ordinary house."
"We might not have to worry about that. Remember, the outbreak occurred during the day."
Dave frowned while trying to understand Jane's point. "It probably started in the morning."
"And it appears to have spread all through the city in a few hours."
"I don't understand how that helps us right now."
"If the outbreak occurred at night then this station would have been most likely locked up and we'd have a problem with getting in. But since the outbreak happened during the day then the front door should be simply unlocked."
As if to prove her point, Jane walked to the front door of the police station, reached out to the handle, and slid the door open.
"Careful," said Dave.
Jane wasn't sure what Dave's warning meant before she suddenly realised and stepped back. They both remained quiet for a minute while listening for any sounds of movement from with the police station. With a last look around the street, Dave and Jane entered the police station and looked about inside. It was completely em
pty.
"I'm betting that the staff got overwhelmed like everyone else," said Jane as she went behind the counter.
"Should we shut the front door?" asked Dave.
Jane paused to weigh the options in her mind before saying: "It's probably a good idea. It's daytime so if we do run into someone then we should be able to back out fast enough. And if we leave it open then that introduces a potential random element from something just walking in."
Dave nodded and closed the door. The rattle of the door had failed to raise any interests by anyone or anything that had previously been in the police station.
"We should still remain cautious," said Jane entering a room at the rear of the building. The exterior of the windows had been built over with what looked like wooden panels, while inside of the panels were thick prison-style bars.
"They didn't want anyone escaping from here," said Dave looking at the bars in the dim light.
"The bars are to stop people from getting in. This is the station's armoury. But don't be too impressed. The bars are just a token defence. The walls seem to be made from standard, housing-grade timber. Someone with a crowbar could get through the walls in less than ten seconds."
Jane stood in front of a small safe. It was about Dave's height and was barely wider than his shoulders.
"I was expecting something more from something called an 'armoury'," said Dave.
"This station is basically a rural police station so they'd probably only have enough equipment for one or two people."
"Why did they have so few people?"
"This is Australia, there's just not enough tax payer dollars to do any more than provide a token police force."
"You sound bitter," said Dave surprised. He had thought of Jane as the more emotionally detached type.
"Australia has some of the world's toughest gun laws. When people complained that it was too hard to defend themselves against criminals they were told by the politicians that they just needed to rely on the police, that they shouldn't even think of being responsible for their own safety. But in the end there were too few police and they were overwhelmed by recent events. Could you imagine how different this would have been if we trusted ordinary citizens with the means to defend themselves?"
"I've played a few shooting style games but I can't really remember hearing from people who were notably pro-gun. I'm not even sure that we have a gun culture."
"We don't. If we had some laws about self defence or some right to bear arms then maybe that would be a foundation for a strong gun culture in this country. But just saying 'guns are fun' isn't enough to convince the nay sayers. A gun is a tool. A tool that can be dangerous, but we often use other dangerous tools everyday without issue. I think people get more emotional about a gun than they would about a lawn mower."
"I have to admit that it's strange that you are bad mouthing the police."
Jane looked straight at Dave. "I'm not saying that there was a problem with quality of the members of the police, just that there was too few. There wasn't enough taxpayer money to pay for more, so we could have tried to fill in the gaps in man power by making using of free volunteers. That is civilians. After all the person most interested in your own safety is yourself."
"They had money to pay for you."
"What?"
"I mean the government paid for people like you who are a part of DOA."
"Oh. DOA isn't a government body. We're privately funded."
Dave frowned. "Doesn't that make you a vigilante group or even a crime gang."
Jane took her turn to frown. "I'd hope not. The structure of DOA is a bit weird, and it's hoped that the odd structure would prevent DOA slipping into criminal behaviour."
"Did it? Did DOA succeed in not crossing the line into criminality?"
"Sadly we'll never know. The goal was to create a group of people who's object was to defend Australia. But the group was new. It had too few members. It hadn't received enough staff or training to determine if its ideals were able to overcome the normal limitations of the human mind and their more morbid desires. And then this mess happened."
"I've run into a few DOA members."
"You probably ran into all the DOA members that were in this area. There aren't too many."
"I guess what training that you did have ended up working. You're alive after all."
Jane looked about the deserted police station. "And yet I've not found a single police officer since the outbreak. Surely they had enough training to survive what happened. There should have been hundreds in the city area, and yet not one police officer survived."
"Maybe they tried to help people. That would mean that they would have run into danger, instead of focusing on survival by running away."
Jane gave out a bitter laugh. "So if we do find a police officer who survives then it's probably because he was a selfish prick?"
"Well, at least he'd be alive," said Dave shrugging at his lame attempt at humour.
"Let's get back to the task at hand," said Jane looking at the gun safe in front of her. "This safe is way too tough. We're never going to get it open."
Next to the gun safe were a few clothing lockers that Jane absently opened and peered into.
"It would have been too much to expect to find a spare gun in one of these lockers," said Jane thinking out loud.
"They are clothing lockers after all."
"Which is not to say that we'll come up completely empty," said Jane while pulling some ear muffs from the lockers. "These look new."
"Ear muffs?"
"Hearing protection."
Dave looked askance at Jane who nodded knowingly as she handed two ear muffs to Dave for him to hold.
Jane walked around Dave in order to leave the room that played the role as an armoury and froze in the doorway.
"What is it?" whispered Dave.
"I don't believe it," said Jane at a normal volume.
She walked forward and reached under the counter to pull out a simple bolt action rifle. She pulled open the bolt and visually inspected the empty magazine and chamber.
"It's a cheap piece of rubbish," said Jane, "and the optic is cheaper yet."
With the bolt still open, Jane put the rifle on the top of the counter and knelt down. She started peering through the various desk related detritus. She reached in and pulled out three small boxes.
"How lucky can we be," said Jane standing up and putting the boxes on the counter top. She quickly opened the boxes and looked at the contents. Dave just saw clean rows of bullets. "We've got basically three full boxes. With fifty per box were looking at about one hundred and fifty rounds of twenty-two rimfire."
"That's nice," said Dave unsure.
Jane smiled at Dave. "It looks like my plan for you can actually happen."
"I'm totally lost."
"I want you to have a weapon to defend yourself."
Dave looked dubiously at the boxes. "Those bullets look too small to do any real damage and will three small boxes be enough? When the Army guys were trying to defend this street junction they clearly went though thousands of rounds of ammo."
Jane nodded. "You're not going to be using this rifle to fight. How much do you know about firearms?"
"Effectively nothing. I found a book on firearms but it was too difficult to understand without having a firearm to practice on."
"Exactly. Which is why I'll be using this little rimfire to teach you how to use a firearm. And use it safely. Once you learn that then we'll get you a more serious weapon."
Dave looked back into the armoury. "Do you really think that we can crack that safe open?"
"Not in the slightest. I was hoping that as the crisis of the outbreak was sweeping about, that some officer who worked here would try to arm up and open the safe and leave it carelessly open for us. So we kind of lucked out to find a rifle hidden under the counter. I guess that the staff here were just in too much of a hurry and it got forgotten."
"Maybe that rifle is what was in
the safe," suggested Dave.
"I hope not. That would mean that our police were completely unprepared for the outbreak. If our police are being armed with shitty little twenty-twos then they would be next to useless in a real crisis. And this counts as a real crisis."
"Was anyone prepared?" said Dave quietly.
Jane didn't respond as there was no way to respond.
* * *
Dave and Jane had returned to the roof of the supermarket. Jane was holding the twenty-two rifle in her hands while the boxes of ammunition were in one of her pockets. About each of their necks was a pair of ear muffs.
"Okay," said Jane. "Brace yourself for the fastest crash course in firearm usage."
Dave nodded.
"Notice that we have hearing protection," said Jane touching her hearing muff with her free hand. "For something like a twenty-two it's not absolutely important, but learning good safety habits is always helpful. As long as you internalise safety routines then you shouldn't even notice them. It's just that internalising knowledge takes a lot of practice."
Dave nodded again.
"On the way back here from the police station I told you four firearm safety rules. Let's see if you remember them."
Dave raised a fist and flicked out his pointer. "Always assume a firearm is loaded, even when it isn't."
"That's the most important one of all. You can derive so many safety practices from just that."
Dave flipped out another finger on his fist. "Don't point a firearm at anything that you don't want to shoot."
"It can help to imagine a laser coming from the barrel of your firearm. Imagine that laser cutting everything it touches to pieces. A safe place to point a firearm is a place that you don't mind being shot."
It wasn't really a fist anymore, as Dave flipped out another finger. "Keep your finger off the trigger until you want to shoot."
"Some old rifles and some badly made newer rifles can discharge if you drop them, but nearly all decently made modern rifles will only fire if you pull on the trigger. So learn finger discipline."
Dave now extended all his fingers while his thumb was turned in towards his palm. "Be sure of your target and the area around the target."
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