by Pete Aldin
“Dad walk in the Death Druids' shoes?”
A pause then: “Don't talk about the Death Druids.”
“I won't if you won't talk about those women anymore. In fact,” he turned a triumphant smartass grin on Lewis, “I agree to not talk at all if you agree to the same thing.”
Lewis turned away and tried to walk faster. He began to draw ahead of Elliot but soon had to look back to check he was going the right way.
“Want me to carry the pack?” he asked as Elliot passed him.
“What for?”
“Give you a rest?”
“I'm fine,” Elliot replied and scowled as he had to hurdle a dead animal, a feral cat from the looks, a mess of corrupted meat and fur and claws.
“My fault we left the car,” Lewis said quietly.
Elliot shook his head. “Not your fault.”
“It was my idea.”
“Forget it.”
“I can't. We're walking because of me.”
“I said forget it.”
“You want me to grow up, so I am. Dad said growing up was about taking responsibility.” He scratched his scalp for a moment. “He actually said that you know you're a man when you're taking responsibility for yourself and for other people.”
A woman with a baby in her arm, bawling in Arabic. Radler's arm, Eames' boot with the foot inside, McGovern's face. Tommy's face, crestfallen—
“You can't take responsibility for everyone,” he muttered. “Have to look after yourself first and foremost.”
“You're looking after me.”
“Pretty sure I told you to shut up about five minutes ago. That order still stands.”
“Order?”
“Keep. Quiet. Bad enough you giving me a headache, but I don't want any unfriendlies out there hearing you at it.”
“Unf—? Oh.”
And thankfully, Lewis fell silent. And even better, as far as Elliot was concerned, he stayed that way for a long time.
9
Lewis only started speaking again when they both stepped out of the woods and into a shallow valley carpeted with knee-high grass and heath. “Thank God,” he said, his voice husky from a dry throat.
The bush had gotten thicker for the past four hours. While providing better shade, it had also thrown up plenty of barriers created by screens of side-growing trees, complicated by blackberry bushes and other runners, forcing frequent detours. Bracken had regularly snatched at their ankles even when the going was clearer.
“There's a creek over there,” Lewis added, pointing north where a silver twinkling line split the forested hills that cupped the northern and western edges of the valley. “I'm dying for a drink.”
Elliot followed his gesture, then froze, put a hand across Lewis's chest to halt his progress, swore under his breath. A thousand yards away, at the northern tree line, stood a man, two women and two children, tweens by the size of them. All had stopped dead like he had. One woman had a small blob against her chest, a baby or toddler in a sling. A small child sat on the other woman's shoulders. Even at that distance, Elliot could make out the huge backpack doubling the man's bulk. The three adults carried poles or broom handles, but nothing resembling a firearm. The older children clutched bags.
Lewis raised his hand in greeting but the group backed up, blended into the bushland behind them.
“Huh?” said Lewis.
“Wait!' Elliot called. They had kids. They looked organized and fit, a group of clean and decent people; they'd been smart enough to survive two months of hell-on-earth. He'd jogged a few yards before realizing he'd moved—and realizing that the family had been coming toward them, heading away from Lewis's grandparents. There was absolutely no point in chasing them even if they were cool since they wouldn't be traveling with them.
“Were they…?” Lewis left the question unfinished. Perhaps he didn't even know how to finish it.
“We're better off alone,” Elliot said and hitched his pack onto a better position on his shoulders. “And they'll be gone by the time we get over there.” He dropped a hand to his side, drew reassurance from the cold steel of his sidearm just the same.
They were out in the open when they heard an engine. With hands shielding their eyes against the retina-searing blue sky, they watched the little Cessna appear above the trees where the family had vanished.
“A bloody plane,” Lewis said, stating the obvious. He'd stopped forty feet behind Elliot.
It dipped low, buzzing them from a hundred feet up, tipping perhaps to give the occupants a better look at them.
“Yeah, but it's headed south,” he replied.
A quarter mile past them, the Cessna banked and wheeled about in a lazy turn.
“Or not,” Lewis replied. “Do you reckon he'll land?”
Elliot shrugged but he hoped so. Despite recent experiences, if there was a chance of a Good Samaritan giving them a ride north, he'd take it. They might after all be flying sorties from a safe haven, somewhere he'd feel comfortable leaving the teenager.
Even so, he unclasped his hip holster. He thumbed the safety while his hand was there, then slipped off his pack and M4, let them slip to the ground, raised his hands in a friendly wave as the Cessna cut back on a diagonal line across the valley. Lewis joined him in the wave. After it passed them, the pilot dipped his wings one way, then the other. Good sign, Elliot figured and stuck his thumbs through his belt to await what would happen next.
“Will he land?” Lewis repeated louder.
“I'm not deaf. I don't know, is all.”
“They might take us to Minchenbridge.”
“Sure.”
Lewis took a few eager steps forward. “Or somewhere near there.”
“They might, Lewis.” He gripped his belt harder.
The Cessna banked again and came in from the far end of the valley, angling toward the most even terrain.
“They are landing!” Lewis laughed.
“Looks that way. Let's hope they're … nice.”
Suspicion was stupid, he thought. No one was risking a landing here to shoot a couple of hikers, then take off. Only reason to land was to help.
Or ask for help.
Three hundred yards away, the Cessna cut speed, dropped low. Seventy feet off the deck. Fifty. Twenty.
Birds erupted from the heath in front of it. The plane flinched, jinked. Elliot dropped, sensing what was coming. One wing clipped the ground and the plane flipped, cart wheeling while pieces shot off in all directions.
“Holy Christ.”
Something—a chunk of propeller maybe—whizzed past. He snapped his head around to follow it, watched it miss Lewis by a couple of feet. The teenager didn't seem to notice, frozen on his feet, mesmerized by the unfolding accident.
“Get down!” he shouted, but the crash was over, the body of the plane coming to rest belly down in the grass. Some debris still rolled and bounced and skidded but none of it near them. The plane sighed as if in pain, fuselage ripped but intact.
He expelled the breath he'd been holding. He and Lewis must have both had the same thought because after one more frozen moment, they sprinted as one for the wreck, abandoning their belongings.
There was no fire, no apparent sign of impending explosion; nevertheless he wasn't leaving anyone inside. The pilot was the only visible occupant—an indistinct figure pressed against a kaleidoscope mess of the side window. Lewis showed no fear, running right up to the door alongside Elliot, though he let the more experienced man reach for it. Elliot yanked the latch and the door came loose in a rush. He braced himself to catch the pilot, but the woman didn't tumble. Rather she flopped halfway with a soft moan; if he hadn't grabbed at her, the angle might have caused her spinal damage. If she didn't already have it. Her forehead pissed blood into her closed eyes. There was no time to debate moving her. The fuel reek was heady enough to make him dizzy. Lewis had his T-shirt up over his nose. Maneuvering himself to a better position, he did a quick check inside the cabin—no one there—and tol
d Lewis to get under her legs and slide them free. He swore loud, making Lewis wince: she could have broken bones, she could have internal injuries, but he had to get her away from the plane.
Once her legs were free, he got himself under her then straightened, lugging her away in a fireman's carry. Lewis kept pace at his side as he hurried away. She cried out against his back as his foot caught a divot in the ground, but then she was silent again. Halfway back to the gear, he got Lewis to hold her head straight while he lay her down as gentle as possible. He checked her over while Lewis paced around them in a circle, face white. The slash across her forehead near the hairline still poured blood. There was more in her mouth. She was breathing, but it was shallow. Her eyes fluttered open, her mouth formed an O … and then she was out again. The fire around the plane's engine housing guttered low, so he didn't see the need to move her further away.
“Lewis,” he snapped making the teenager blink. “Keep an eye out.”
Lewis nodded, turned a three-sixty.
Elliot ran his hands up the pilot's arms then her legs, feeling for breaks, but couldn't find any. She flinched when he passed across her hips onto her ribs and she gasped, waking. He pulled away.
“Ah, shit!” She made to sit up, but barely got her head off the ground before she fell back. “Okay, that hurts. God.”
A hanky poked from one of her jeans pockets. He tugged it out and pressed it to the gash on her head. She hissed, but held still, blinking up at him, focusing for the first time, then her face contorted and she swept her gaze around them and head turning. He assumed she was checking for the undead. It was habit now. Even for the badly injured.
He grabbed her head, held it firmly, pressed the hanky back. “You gotta hold still. Where are you hurting?”
“Where…?”
“Where does it hurt?”
She regarded him through squinted eyes for a moment before swallowing blood and attempting a laugh. “Everywhere, ya dumb bastard.” She closed her eyes and bared her lips over gritted teeth.
“Where is it the worst?” he insisted.
She grunted, trying in vain to lift her head again, eyes fluttering open. “My head. My…shoulders where the harness was. My ribs where you pushed them, thanks very much. My hand here.” She held it up to check it out, wiggled the pinky finger. “I musta banged it on something, the knuckle here hurts like crazy. But I'm … I think I'm okay.”
He moved a cautious hand onto her belly again and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m okay there,” she said.
“You've got blood in your mouth.”
She grunted. “Bit my cheek.”
“Lewis, get the IFAK, the first aid kit. And my hoody to put under her head.” The teenager shot off toward the pack without comment. “Get you some pain killers.”
“Hope they're good ones,” she said and tried to smile, licked blood off her teeth.
“They're not.”
“Tequila shots?”
He shook his head, rueful. “If I'd had anything that good, it'd be long gone by now.”
“I hear ya,” she said and closed her eyes.
“Hey. Hey!”
She frowned a little, eyes still shut. “I'm not sleeping. Hurt too much to sleep.” She opened them a little, focused on him. “You any good at medical stuff?”
“Some battlefield experience.”
“The way you looked when you touched my gut. It's okay, honest. I think I just cracked my head, you know. Maybe a little concussion. My neck hurts too.” She opened her eyes. “Not broken though. Can't be broken, if I can move it, can it?”
He shrugged his eyebrows. He was pretty sure it could be. He checked on Lewis who was still rummaging in the pack for the IFAK. “If we had a hospital, hell, we could run x-rays, but…” He let go of the hanky which stuck to the blood on her head, rubbed sweat from his eyes, then felt something brush his boot: her hand.
“Thanks.”
“Thanks? I’m guessing you stopped to pick us up? Should be thanking you.”
“Yeah, there's that.”
“This goddamed world.”
“This goddamed world,” she agreed.
Lewis was on his way back now. Sensibly, he'd grabbed the canteen as well.
“Idiot,” she croaked. “I thought I could do it.”
“Land?”
“Land.”
“Awful nice of you to try. Awful trusting too.”
“Can't stand being alone, I guess. Haven't seen real people—real, good people—in maybe ten days. You look like … like good people.”
“The young fella maybe,” he joked.
She grunted. “An hour ago I got away from Launceston. I got to the airport and I … I got away. And now I've crashed my fucking plane and cracked my rib and maybe my neck? Out in the middle of nowhere.” She squeezed her eyes shut a moment. “This goddamed world.”
She lifted her head as Lewis drew near, then her shoulders.
“No you don't,” Elliot started.
“Not a baby, think I can sit up,” she growled at him. She did. Slowly. In a couple of stages. Completed the move without losing consciousness, though she gasped and swore several times along the way, apologizing to Lewis for the language. “Okay. Definitely fractured a rib. Hurts to breathe.” She flexed the injured left hand, but with little range. “Mighta sprained this too.”
Elliot took bandages from the IFAK, wound one tight around the hanky on her head.
“They'll catch us if they smell that,” she said. “The blood.”
“Maybe.” He clipped it and dabbed iodine at a smaller cut on her cheek and one at the base of her injured pinky. The knuckle there was swelling. “What's your name?”
“Birdy.”
He exchanged a glance with Lewis. “Your parents named you Birdy?”
“No. They named me something horrible, so when I got this nickname in high school I stuck with it. Shit,” she added and twisted carefully toward the wreck. Flames flickered along the fuselage, but it hadn't exploded. “Fire. I knew it. I've got a lot of stuff in there.”
“We're not going in for it.”
“Course not. Just—pisses me off.”
While she used her good hand to tug a sock up from inside a boot, he looked her over. She was a few years older than him, trace-lines of wrinkles along her cheeks and forehead, beside her eyes. She was also tiny, a sparrow of a woman, a full foot shorter than him and half his width and weight. The nickname made sense.
“Gonna tell me your names?” She pitched it at Lewis.
He smiled. “Lewis. Elliot.”
“Which one are you?”
“Lewis,” he laughed.
“Where you both headed, Lewis?”
“Minchenbridge.”
“Don't know it, but I'm originally from Wollongong, so ...” She made a duh face.
“Never heard of Wollongong,” Elliot ventured.
“You haven't lived if you haven't been to the Gong,” she joked. “Near Sydney. Long, long way from here. It's a good place, then, Minchenbridge? What's there? Food?”
“I think so,” Lewis shrugged.
“His grandparents.”
“Oh.” She watched him checking out her hand, said, “Well, if we're going, we better drop the clutch or we'll wind up someone's dinner.”
Lewis offered her the canteen and Elliot got painkillers from the IFAK. They weren't much, codeine and paracetamol. He still had two morphine syrettes in there, but morphine would only slow her down once they got moving again. And it was too valuable for her injuries.
He showed her the four pills. “Party time.”
“Gimme,” she said. He tipped them in her mouth. She sipped and swallowed. “Don't do drugs,” she told Lewis. “What are we gonna do when there's no more of these? When all the millions of 'em left in people's medicine drawers are out of date?”
“We'll think of something.”
“Willow bark,” said Lewis. They frowned at him. He shrugged. “That's where aspirin came from in the
first place.”
“Willow bark?” Birdy asked.
He shrugged again. “You just boil it.”
Elliot stared at him a moment longer. Where the hell had that little gem of knowledge come from?
“Okay,” Birdy said. “I'm okay. Not great. But definitely okay. And we've gotta move, fellas. I saw a tower…a fire tower.” She turned her head toward east. “Maybe three kays that way … If we can find it and hide, they should pass by.”
Elliot exchanged a look with Lewis. “Who exactly should pass by?”
She gave a long shuddering sigh, it caught at a spasm from her rib. Elliot grabbed her hand and she squeezed it until the pain subsided.
“Not good news, I'm afraid,” she grated. “Reason I landed? The direction you were headed in's a big mistake. There's a shitstorm on its way. I flew over it. Clusters of eaters. Like … thousands. Coming south. Maybe all the mainland refugees who got to Launceston and Davenport before everyone got infected. Lots of people came by boat, thousands and thousands. Lots came up from the midlands, other towns, trying to get away by boat. Then they … died and rose again. They're like a massive exodus, herds of the things all coming down here.” She peered north.
“Shit. Okay. Shit.” He thought a moment. “We'll go round it.”
“No. No you won't. I could see 'em stretching out for twenty kilometers. More. Twenty kays wide and at least that deep. We're in the middle of the wave front here.”
“Then we'll … we'll wait it out in this fire tower.”
“Elliot. That's your name right? Elliot. You want to go near Launceston? Don't. You know Hurricane Katrina, in your country?”
“Long, long time ago, but yeah.”
He'd got the message already but she added, “Ten times worse. Even if you keep away from the eaters. Rape … s-saw people killing each other over a truck full of cat food. Enough for all of them, but they—”
A tear cut a line through the red on her face. She handed Lewis the canteen. He shook it and Elliot heard little water left, enough for a sip each maybe.
Twenty kilometers was close to twelve miles. She was right: they weren't going round herds of pusbags stretching out that far and they weren't going through them if they stretched that far back. Made sense now why the three women, the family and now the plane had been headed south. There'd be more refugees coming their way, keeping ahead of the wave. Maybe they'd be trustworthy like Birdy. Maybe not.