The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy)

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  We waited for a few seconds like that, waiting for another attack, then moved up the two who were with me and myself keeping our heads low. It was so hard to tell what was going on without our sense of hearing. Another batch charged and we three dropped to a knee and fired with the others, we were truly in the dark and I was relying primarily on gut feeling and the flashing of gunfire to guide my aim.

  I closed my eyes, firing where I could as I tried to get my night-vision back.

  Now that I look back at it, it probably had something to do with the lack of sleep. I may be basically immortal, but everyone needs nap-nap time.

  When I finally opened my eyes it didn’t matter that I’d lost my night-vision for the time-being, the light from the continuous fire was enough to illuminate the steadily growing pile of dead zeds.

  As the herd started to die down I felt the tell-tale click of an empty mag. I turned around as best and as low as I could and made my way back, the firing line parting its ranks so I could squeeze through.

  When I was at the back I tapped Kate firmly on the shoulder and gestured to my empty clip and raised my shoulders questioningly. She pat herself down for a second and then shook her head before returning to her shooting.

  Returning to camp seemed the best course of action, the pack of zeds having lessened and the others seemed to have more than enough ammo to keep them at bay.

  When I turned around to return though I saw a figure stumbling toward us from behind, clutching his gut and using the wall as a sort of crutch. I took off my ear muffs, ditched my gun and darted over to the mortally wounded Marcus.

  The gunfire died down behind me as I caught him when he fell, lying him down on the shifting gravel ground. He had a screwdriver through his right side and an exit wound from a small calibre round through his left, blood soaked through the grey jumper that he must’ve put on after we left.

  “John… they… they’ve…” And that was last thing he got out before he passed out. Harry and Clara ran over and started trying to help in their own way, while I went to do it my way.

  Red, red is the best way to explain it.

  I was red.

  I stepped into the powerful light and spotted them, standing over their bargaining chips. One of them had the AK that I’d left with Mark while the other two held knives to two of the sobbing women’s throats while the rest were forced to sit on the ground in front of them.

  “N… no… Not another step closer! I’ll kill ‘em all!” The gun holder in his authentic white-trash accent, let’s call him Billy-Bob, and the other two can be Trev and Carle, because his mother said the ‘e’ made it more betterer.

  I shrugged as I took the step up onto the platform, “Fine by me. Make it quick though,” I pulled out my knife and spun it around in between my forefingers, “I’ve a busy day ahead of me.”

  They were thoroughly terrified, visibly shaking, the muzzle of Billy-Bob’s AK had started to do figure eights. “We just want to go, alright? Just let us go!” He yelped, it was really quite funny, in my current twistedly warped sense of humour.

  “Oh sure, I’ll let you go free. I mean, that’s all you want, right? So, let me free you.” I’m sure they understood what I meant, if not though, the practical demonstration would make sure they got it.

  What followed was a literal blur of flashes as the light tried it’s very best to glint off my blade, and blood, lots and lots of blood.

  Billy-Bob was the last to go, I slit across both of his arms so he’d drop his gun and then I was behind him. He screamed, full on screamed. Until, of course, I sunk my clawed nails into his neck.

  The worst part? I couldn’t stop smiling.

  Consensus

  Harry ran into the station from the tunnel with his war face on, ready to support me in calming the situation I suppose.

  Unfortunately he’d entered at the exact moment that I tore Billy-Bob’s head off. When he saw me and what I’d done his face lost all of its intimidation, blending from shock to fear and then to concern all in a few seconds, “What did you… how did you..?” He was lost for words, me too, like I was coming off the end of a really nasty trip, my smile was gone and was replaced with dread.

  Whether that was for Harry’s benefit or my own is anyone’s guess.

  “I… I don’t know… there were hostages and then I… I’m… sorry?” I cupped my hands to my face and felt the warm liquid soak into my skin. I couldn’t distinguish whether I liked it or wanted to retch.

  Something had switched inside me, reverting me to what I was during the wars, a monster that accepted what he was and did what he did for the greater good.

  The line was starting to blur though, what was the greater good?

  What made my one friend so much more important than the three men I’d just taken out of the world?

  All that they had wanted was to leave, sure, they’d hurt Marcus, did that excuse it though?

  I took my hands off my eyes and looked up to see that the others had shown up shortly after Harry, who was slowly making his way toward me and the sobbing hostages that I stood behind with his hands up in a non-threatening surrender position, “Hey buddy, you wanna come down to the tracks?”

  Normally I’d have said something witty or snarky in response to being treated like a wild animal, at that point though it was comforting for some reason. Instead of a verbal response I simply climbed past the safe hostages and made my way over to the tracks, jumping down before leaning against the concrete platform and sliding to the ground.

  Kate, Wolf, Warren and Harry started to work at comforting the people on the platform while I shutdown. I noticed Marcus sitting across the tracks from me with Gabe and Clara. Well, Marcus was more propped up than sitting, probably the only way to stop him from landing face first on the ground again.

  I needed something to take my mind off of my crisis of conscience, anything. Then I remembered what led to the… incident, “Did… Are you gonna be alright Mark?”

  I think he shrugged, he toppled over and Clara had to prop him back up, “Yeah, I’m gonna be fine. An hour or so to recover and I’ll be fine.” His smile was so forced and empty like his glassy looking eyes. But if he said he was going to be ok, that was enough for me.

  Kate? Not so much.

  “We don’t have time to rest Mark. We need to be thinking of an exit strategy.” Pretty much the second she arrived Gabe was gone, off to do something or other, leaving Clara as Mark’s sole carer.

  I was beyond the point of caring, I was so sick of all of her shit, and I wasn’t in the mood to chase Gabe down, “For fuck’s sake Kate, why the fuck not? Hmm? What grand fucking reason do you have for leaving another one of your friends behind? Is it some kind of fucking bingo game with you and Wolf?”

  “I’d like it if that weren’t a thing, please.” Marcus said under his breath or as loud as he could, I couldn’t tell.

  I’m pretty sure it was just a way to try and diffuse the situation.

  It did not work.

  I refused to even look at Kate, I knew that the second I did either she or I would start crying, and I was one hundred and ten percent sure that I did not need that, “And, while we’re on it, what the fucking fuck is going on there? Huh? Are we just gonna pretend that nothing happened between us or that there’s nothing between you two? I just need to know.”

  Wolf, apparently sick of my childish whining, jumped down with me and picked me up by the collar before dragging me over to wall and pushing me up against it, “Grow the fuck up! Seriously! All this shit about crap you’re making up in your head when there are definitely more important things to be worrying about!”

  I went to push him off me but he just lifted me further up the wall, “You’re a good guy John, but sometimes you get so emotional, it’s pathetic! Look at those people over there, absolutely terrified because a really powerful guy who was torturing their leader no more than a few hours ago is bouncing from killing people right next to them and then having a ‘why me?’ session i
mmediately after. For God’s sake, look at Mark, who’s bleeding out right now so I can have this talk with you.”

  He dropped me and let me regain some semblance of composure before continuing on, “No one’s saying we should leave Mark, it’s you who jumped straight to that. We need to take him with us, of course, but we need to get out of here, out of this city that’s practically burning down around us. We need a leader, we need you.”

  Kate stepped over to me and squeezed my shoulder lovingly and then embraced me in a long hug before breaking it with a kiss to the cheek.

  Emotional whiplash is so much worse than actual whiplash, believe me. What’s worse is that they don’t make a collar for it.

  Well, they do, but I’ve done a fair bit of naughty language and violence so far so I’ll try and leave all the BDSM references out… maybe.

  “Alright, so what makes the city such a bad place? Neysor and S are gone. Plus Greg is still here, we need to find him before we go anywhere.” I knew it was a tough sell, mostly because it didn’t make sense to stay in the city any more, to any of us. But I couldn’t help but clutch to the idea that I wasn’t the type of person who’d leave people behind.

  Hot damn did I grow out of that.

  Kate saddened even more than she already was, “I know, but there’s zeds everywhere John. And it looks like they’re back to their roaming behaviour, meaning pretty soon they’ll be everywhere again.”

  I went to argue about the uselessness of zeds and how we could just pick them off until we were safe, then Wolf had to ruin it with logic, “I know we can handle them. The key word there is we.” He said while gesturing to Kate, himself and then me, “We’re vampires, they’re humans, and they’re scared shitless. We can’t have people sitting at home while we try and make sure that not a single one of them gets bitten and we lose everyone.”

  It was hard, I needed support, someone with a counter-argument, someone who would point out the bad in everything these two were saying while pointing out the ‘obvious’ other option, “Hey Gabriel!”

  He turned around from the woman who he was cleaning up and snapped his vision to me, “Yeah? What is it?”

  “You want to weigh in her-”

  “Nope.” He said plainly before returning to his patient.

  ‘Well, so much for that then.’

  “Ok, fine, where do you guys suggest we go?”

  In unison they replied with, “The base.” Luckily my thrown expression was enough to get an explanation from Wolf, “We’ve got enough supplies to last one of us a life-time or, to put it another way, forever.”

  “I don’t want to do that, if that matters.” Mark groaned.

  “Why?” I asked to the question that I mentally answered as I said it.

  “You weren’t there when Steven and I got out with… Point is, you think Steven’s bad? Imagine that with the majority of the live vamps on base and then again with some of the fresher corpses. That’s what you’re suggesting we go back to.” A coughing fit stopped him from continuing, I was pretty sure he was going to cough up the bullet inside him.

  Clara helped Mark clean off his chin, where most of the blood ended up, “The travel alone is difficult enough, how do you think we get to Tasmania from here exactly? Because my swimming skills aren’t that good.”

  Clara decided it was her turn to chip in, “We could head north? There’s an airfield near Caboolture and failing that I’m sure that the one on the Sunshine Coast will have at least something big enough for all of us.”

  Harry joined us and I silently hoped that he was there to support me, “I like the idea. Somewhere safe, somewhere with guns.”

  I shook my head “That’s just the thing though, it’s not safe, it’s actually worse than where we are now. Zombie-vamp-fest. I say we wait ‘til we find Greg.”

  That’s when Mark finally switched over, “We have to accept that we won’t. Not for now, we might be able to when we get back to the base? But for now he’s in the wind.”

  “Not you too! Come on! What about… what about food storage? Zeds aren’t exactly known for their maintenance skills.” I said pleadingly, clawing at any possible reason to not abandon Greg, not out of a sense of friendship or guilt any more, but because I couldn’t stand the idea of losing that argument, not after all the time I put into it.

  I would like to say that I am not the kind of person who values winning an argument over friends, but at the time I was forty percent sure he was dead and wouldn’t care.

  “Actually, I did most of the electrical work on the place myself, I even had a plan for this exact situation.” Marcus half-bragged.

  “Yeah, well now you’re sitting on train-tracks with a bullet wound and ruptured organs.” I immediately regretted the venomous words that I shot at Marcus, but he seemed to take it pretty well.

  He smiled falsely up at me from the hard ground while everyone else scowled, “Thanks John, for your words of kindness in this tumultuous time for me. Can someone punch him?”

  Clara was the one who answered his call, standing up and punching me in the face, causing her to wince, “What the Hell are you made of?” She asked, shaking her sore hand as she walked off, hissing while I stood there smiling at her attempt.

  “Heh, you punch like a girl.”

  I’m not a misogynist, it was just that she genuinely thought punching me in the face was a good idea and it was the first time I could say that to a woman.

  Probably a poor choice of words though.

  Kate shot me a sultry look, “That’s not how you punch like a girl deary,” her words instantly changed the tone of her look to a much more sinister one. I didn’t have time to defend myself as she punched me with enough force to make me collapse backward onto the wall with a loosely hanging broken jaw, “that’s how you punch like a girl.”

  “Canth whey gek ba to tha achtewal poit?” I blubbered through the pain as my jaw clicked and rattled around.

  “Well, as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, I did most of the electrical work on the base.” He said while shooting me a fairly significant look, “The whole place runs on solar panels with back up batteries. They’re pretty much completely nuke proof, provided that the sensors are still working and they get covered whenever something dangerous gets close to them, there’s also a pretty massive wall preventing foot or ground-vehicle insertion which means zero zed interference.”

  Smugness filled his blood-soaked features, “Aaaand if that fails for whatever reason, there’s two back up power sources, one is the ocean, bless hydro-electricity, and then there’s a gas based generator that filters in oxygen to power it up. It’s a bit temperamental, but it really is just a precautionary measure upon a precautionary measure, upon a precautionary measure.”

  I needed something else, another rebuttal. I knew I was losing the argument, but I needed to have covered every basis, so we all knew exactly what we were going into. My jaw reset itself with some forceful rotations and then I had it, “What about security? We had a break-in less than a week from Z-day. You know as well as I, Marcus, that security is actually quite an important aspect of all this, especially what with, as you brought up, the vamp-zombie problem.”

  Marcus mulled it over for a second while the rest looked at him, waiting patiently for his response, “Yeeah… I suppose, but most of it got sorted out while you were out. We actually have… had a pretty decent engineering department. Look, I don’t care where we go, as long as I don’t get left here.”

  Clara, finally done nursing her hand, asked, “Aren’t you guys vampires? Why don’t you just clear them out? There’s like three of you, and today just one of you killed a guy with a building.”

  My mouth opened and closed as I tried to process what was just said, if I admitted to that fact then I’d lose the argument, but if I denied it I’d be a liar. “Fine,” I seethed, “I guess we can go.”

  “And I get to come along.”

  Kate threw her hands into the air, “No one was saying you
weren’t! If it’ll make everyone feel a better we can wait one hour. One. We could probably use the sleep anyway.”

  Both Mark and I shared a confident nod, which seemed odd at first, considering how bad he was less than two minutes prior. Chalked it up to initial overreaction to some less than dramatic wounds and dismissed it, much like the sound of a single pair of rushed footsteps coming down concrete steps. Figured it was just someone checking something or other out.

  I clapped my hands together and started to turn around, “Right then. Hey everyone! We move in one ho-!” a hand landing on my mouth and pulling me away from the others silenced me.

  It was Gabriel, his finger firmly on lips while he kept my mouth shut with his other hand, his eyes locked onto mine with something akin to fear residing in them.

  His finger drifted from his lips and he removed his hand from mine, “I…I…” he cleared his throat, “I need everyone to be very calm and very, very quiet. I may, or may not have!” He emphasized, “done a thing. A very bad thing.”

  The Thing That Which Gabriel May or May Not Have Done

  “What happened?” I asked with a sigh.

  Gabe looked abashed, I didn’t like that.

  He didn’t seem like the kind of person who got abashed. Slightly embarrassed, mildly disconcerted even, but full on abashed? Nuh-uh. ‘Maybe he just made a mess of something?’ I hoped.

  “I went to check on the gates that these guys came through, yeah?” ‘And wet yourself’ I silently pleaded. “Turns out someone cut the lock…” ‘And while you fixed it you tore your pants.’ “…and you know, the gates are open now, and, you know, there’s corpses up there and, you know, I think one saw me.” His repetition of the words ‘you know’ was starting to get on my nerves.

  It seemed he was finished though, so I took that as a good sign to express my relief, “That’s fine, isn’t it? We can handle a few zeds, we got a pile back there that can attest to that.”