“Shot a W.D. point-blank and got a mouthful of junk,” Cahz admitted.
Ryan screwed up his face at the thought. “But surely you’d have…” He paused. “I mean…”
“I know most people succumb in a few hours, but then most people get bit or scratched. I ingested it. I’ve been feeling steadily worse all day.”
“But that’s the loss of blood from the dog bite.” Ryan looked down at the blooded bandage on Cahz’s arm.
“It’s more than that. I’m sure of it.”
“I’ve never known anyone who’s swallowed that stuff.” Ryan looked at the bloody arm and back up at Cahz. “I don’t even know if you can get it by eating it?”
“I don’t know either. I know you get it if it gets in your blood.”
“Surely you’ve have died by now and come back?” Ryan perked up. “It can’t have gotten into your blood or you’d be one of them by now.”
Cahz shook his head. “Ryan, I know what you’re trying to do. There’s no point—”
“Say it’s just the dog bite, right,” Ryan said eagerly. “It was a mangy thing and you’ve lost a lot of blood. It makes more sense it was the dog bite. All you have to do is hang in there. We’ll get picked up and you’ll get your rabies shots and everything’s okay.”
“What if it’s not?”
“Then…” Ryan thought for a second. “Then I’ll do what you did to Elspeth.”
Cahz gave a silent nod.
“School’s just down here,” Ryan said, changing the subject.
“Thank fuck. I’m soaked.” Cahz looked up at the black sky. “It will be good to get under shelter and dry out.”
They rounded a corner to see a squat-looking old brick school. Its tall, flat iron fencing skirting the main road marked the end of its large grass covered playing fields.
“Looks perfect,” Cahz said as he quickened his pace to the gates.
“Why the fuck are schools surrounded by this stuff? We never had this shit when I was a kid,” Ryan said, shaking a rusted post. “It’s like Guantanamo Bay.”
“It’s to keep the pedos out,” Cahz said as he stepped onto a litterbin and scrambled over.
Ryan sniggered.
From the other side of the fence Cahz stretched his hands up. “Pass Rebecca over first,” he said.
Ryan unfastened the makeshift papoose and handed the child over.
A familiar moan drifted across the derelict street.
Standing on top of the refuse bin Ryan turned round and looked back the way they’d come. Even through the grainy cloak of darkness he could make out shadows moving. He stood there like a sentry on his elevated lookout. As he squinted his eyes against the rain-veiled gloom, the shadows grew closer. The fleeting glimpses started to coalesce and out of the rain lumbered the silhouette of a zombie, the dark figure ambling past the wrecked cars and drawing closer. Emerging from the downpour a second wretched creature shuffled resolutely towards him, then a third and a fourth. More and more until a dozen shambling cadavers appeared.
“Jesus Christ, Cahz. Look at them.”
Not even the torrential rain could mask the cries now. Cahz looked through the railings to the platoon of drenched corpses shuffling their way towards them.
“Quickly, Ryan,” Cahz said.
“Yeah.”
He passed the strained plastic bag full of cans over to Cahz. Ryan grabbed the railing and vaulted over the top.
“Get inside and out of sight,” Cahz said. “If we stay out here we’re just going to rile them up.”
Ryan and Cahz ran through the weeds and long grass to the school’s entrance. Though the large glass fronted door all they could see was the pitch darkness of the hallway inside.
“Locked,” Cahz said, rattling the door handle.
“Try another door?” Ryan looked left and right trying to spot a second way in.
“Fuck that.”
With both hands Cahz swung his carbine round and battered the glass with its butt. The safety glass crunched with the impact but didn’t break.
“To hell with this,” he said as he swung the weapon into firing position and opened up on the pane.
Rebecca started bawling at the shock from the gunshot.
“Cahz!” Ryan protested as he tried to shield the child’s ears.
“Come on,” Cahz said, stepping over the broken glass.
Carefully treading through the doorway, Ryan followed close behind.
“You got that torch?” Cahz asked, his weapon pointing at the gloomy corridor ahead.
“Somewhere… Ah! Here.”
He hooked the handles of the plastic bag over his wrist and with the whir of the dynamo the dim yellow light started to dispel the insidious darkness.
Before them was a short corridor that led to a set of double doors.
With his carbine hard against his shoulder Cahz, cautiously moved forward.
“Follow my aim,” he whispered to Ryan.
The inadequate wind-up torch cast a pulsating glow of dirty yellow light over the desolate school. Impeded by the awkward position of the improvised papoose and the bag of cans dangling from his arm, the light dimmed and grew with Ryan’s ungainly cranking. With clumsy jerks Ryan frantically tried to illuminate Cahz’s sweeps.
It was a conflicting situation, the two men moving stealthily and with purpose while all the time the child strapped to Ryan’s chest wailed.
They reached the end of the corridor past the small reception area and restrooms unmolested.
Cahz stretched out with his left hand and opened the swing doors, his weapon still trained. The door swung to with a loud creak. He stepped through, using his foot as a doorstop for Ryan.
The light died as Ryan negotiated the door. When the puny light came back on, the corridor was just as empty.
“What now?” Ryan whispered.
“We check…” Cahz stopped whispering and spoke at a normal volume. “We check the classrooms. And there’s no point whispering with Rebecca crying.”
“It’s not her fault, man. She’s only a little baby. Every time you fire off with that thing you scare the shit out of her.” Ryan sniffed the air. “Literally.”
“I’m sorry I upset her, but I’m not going to fuck around. I know this can’t be any fun for her.”
“At least give me a warning in future,” Ryan said in a conciliatory tone. “I could cover her ears or something.”
“Let’s just find a room we can get comfortable in,” Cahz said. “And I’ll give you a hand changing her.”
“What if there’s pus bags in here?”
“If there were I’m sure they’d have come to greet us, or at the very least started whooping for joy. Now let’s get dried off as best we can and see about signaling the chopper.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Safety
“Found these in the canteen,” Ryan announced as he came into the classroom. He tossed a bundle of dishtowels in Cahz’s direction.
Cahz was already naked, sitting on the only adult-sized chair in the room, warming his hands by the fire.
“Thanks,” he said, catching the cloths.
“Ingenious,” Ryan said nodding at the makeshift clothesline.
Cahz had knotted together a line of skipping ropes and was drying his fatigues over the fire.
“Adapt, improvise and overcome,” Cahz quoted as he rubbed his wet hair with the small towel. “They’re going to stink of smoke, but no one ever died of a smell.”
Ryan pulled up a miniature plastic chair and sat down on it. His knees were up by his chin as he squirmed, trying to get comfortable.
“This is no good,” he said, admitting defeat and sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Did you take a look outside?”
“Yeah, but it was too dark to see anything,” Ryan said. “I could hear them moaning and rattling the fence, but there can’t be more than a handful of them.”
“What’s that?” Cahz asked, looking at the tin in Ryan’s hand
.
“Canned milk,” Ryan said. He pierced the lid with the tin opener. “I thought Rebecca might like it since we’ve run out of crackers.”
“How you going to feed it to her?”
“Spoon it in, I guess,” Ryan said, brandishing the utensil. “Got one from the kitchen.”
“Listen, Ryan…” Cahz stopped rubbing his hair. “About earlier...” He looked down into the fire and summoned up the courage to speak. “I’m sorry.” He looked into Ryan’s eyes. “I’m sorry for the shit I pulled on you. I was out of order.”
“You lose anyone close before Cannon?” Ryan asked.
“Sure. Friends, family, girlfriend.”
Ryan shook his head. “No, I mean up close. I mean right in front of you?”
Cahz folded the wet dishcloth and put it to one side. “I’ve seen countless people get devoured or put down—”
“That’s not where I was heading. Have you seen anyone you cared for die in front of your own eyes?”
Cahz looked back down at the fire and nodded gently.
“When Sam died everything collapsed for me,” Ryan said, looking at the baby as he opened the tin of milk. “I held her in my arms as she went. I felt the tension leave her body. I heard her last breath. I felt her hot blood on my fingers. I mean, like you, my friends and family died when all this shit kicked off, but that’s different. I know they must be dead but I wasn’t there with them. I mean, I know my dad is dead; I had to put him down, but I didn’t see him die. I just saw him as one of them. It’s a hard thing seeing someone you love die. I dealt with it by going on a bender. I drank every last drop of alcohol that was left in that warehouse. I didn’t want to think about it, to feel it. I saw you in that same place this afternoon.” Ryan flicked the moisture from his cheek. “You don’t need to apologize. I’m just glad you snapped out of it quicker than me.”
“Thanks,” Cahz said.
Ryan fed a spoonful to Rebecca and the two men sat quietly by the crackling fire. The wind and the rain outside drummed at the windows.
“You ever thought of doing it?” Ryan asked.
“Doing what?”
“What Cannon did.”
Cahz pursed his lips in thought. “No, not really.”
“I have,” Ryan said. “Nothing serious. It became kind of normal. There were a lot that first year. I remember I walked in on one. He had the noose and the chair all ready and I walked in as he was just climbing onto the chair. And do you know what I did?”
“No,” Cahz whispered.
“I apologized,” Ryan laughed. “I said sorry, looked at my shoes and walked out. Like I’d walked into the men’s room and saw him taking a dump. I said sorry and walked out, embarrassed that I’d disturbed him. How fucked up is that?”
“You didn’t try to stop him?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nope. I’ve seen so many, but never right in front of me. You know you’d wake up one morning to find someone’s taken an overdose, or break into someplace to find a body with a blood-splattered suicide note. It became normal.” Ryan waved the spoon towards the window. “You know, normal like not in the normal world normal but in the fucked-up world normal.” He laughed. “Did that make any fucking sense?”
“A little,” Cahz said.
“We had this one woman—Petra she called herself. I don’t think that was her real name, by the way. She went on and on about it. Talked all the time about how she was close to killing herself, but she never did. Then we had that first one. An older guy slit his wrists and… Elspeth cleaned that up like she did after Sam.” He shifted uneasily and placed a hand on his stomach as if he were suffering from indigestion. “Well, once he’d done it, that was the taboo broken. We had four that first summer.” Ryan shrugged. “I guess what I’m saying is, who can blame them.”
Cahz took a deep breath. “I used to wonder if you went anywhere when you died; Heaven and Hell Sunday school kind of thoughts. Then all this fucked up world—as you put it—happened, and it didn’t seem possible anymore.”
Ryan smiled at Cahz’s use of his description and gave a snort of understanding.
“It doesn’t seem that God is listening. Cannon killed himself and that’s supposed to be a sin, but he isn’t walking around out there.” Cahz sighed. “That mass suicide at Masada doesn’t seem as crazy now.”
“No,” Ryan said. “No, it doesn’t.”
The two men sat staring into the fire, trapped by their own thoughts.
Abruptly Cahz broke the silence. “Give it over here.”
“What?” Ryan replied, puzzled.
“The milk. You’re dribbling it. Pass it over here and I’ll feed Rebecca. It’ll give you a chance to get your wet clothes off.”
Cahz scooped up Rebecca from Ryan’s arms. Ryan handed over the open tin of milk and a spoon he’d liberated.
“Should we heat this up first?” Cahz asked, looking at the milk.
“I haven’t a clue,” Ryan admitted, struggling out of his wet shirt. He stopped, the shirtsleeves still covering his arms, his torso bare. “Elspeth did all that,” he said, looking into the fire of burning school books.
Cahz poured a spoonful for the child. “I don’t know about any of that shit about sterilizing bottles. It’s not going to harm her giving it to her cold?”
Ryan shrugged. “I guess not. She’s been taking it cold and she ate the cracker all right. We’d better get rescued soon, if only because we’re shit parents.”
At that he pulled off the wet shirt and hung it on the clothesline.
“You want a can of soup heated up?” Ryan asked as he peeled his jeans off.
“Sure,” Cahz said. “Pierce a couple of holes in the lid and stick it on the fire.”
A dribble of milk ran down Rebecca’s chin. Cahz gently wiped it away with a dish cloth.
“She seems to be taking this,” Cahz said, pouring another spoon.
“Good.” Ryan nodded. “So how do we signal this chopper?”
“Three possible answers to that,” Cahz explained. “I’ve got a radio. It’s only short range, but if the chopper passes close enough I should be able to raise them. If the radio doesn’t work, I’ve got a flare.”
“And the third option?”
Cahz smiled. “Star jumps.”
“We’ll want to put some clothes back on for that one, mate,” Ryan joked. “I wouldn’t land if there were two blokes in the nude waving their tackle at me!”
The two men laughed at the absurd image.
“God, I’m sore,” Ryan groaned as he shifted to a more comfortable position.
“Guess you didn’t get out much,” Cahz said.
“Only in winter, when the dumb fucks froze,” Ryan answered. “We’d forage maybe a few miles at most. Never got as far out as here.”
Cahz nodded.
“Ah, man, even my tits are sore,” Ryan said, rubbing his chest. “It’s wearing that rucksack with Rebecca. It’s been chaffing me nasty.” He stretched out his shoulders one after the other. “What’s the rest of the world like? I mean, away from all this?”
“Mostly like this,” Cahz said. “There are a few military bases that have survived infection. Mainly shitty little rocks like the Diego Garcia, the Aleutians—those sort of ass-of-nowhere places with an airstrip on it. There’s even a floating shanty town off Hawaii. The biggest infection-free zone is Antarctica. Got twenty thousand people living down there on the ice at McMurdo.”
“Is that it?” Ryan asked despondently.
“There’s a big plan to take back New Zealand. They’ve got a base on Stewart Island to support the Draw and Destroy campaign.”
Ryan extruded the wet socks from his feet. “New Zealand,” he whispered as he slung the soggy tubes out to dry.
“They fly in these huge concrete prefab defenses.” Cahz fed a spoonful to Rebecca like an aircraft. “They build a central compound and a segregated kill zone.”
“So they’re just sitting and sniping at them?”
“Oh
no, the kill zone is all measured out. They sit in their compounds playing loud rock music and launching flares. When the kill zone is full, they napalm the lot.” Cahz nodded at the smoke coming off the fire. “That must really stink.”
“We used to burn them at the fence when they got too many,” Ryan said. “The stench would stick in the back of your sinuses for days.”
“But the whole point of these kill zones is they’ve been specially sized so they can count how many W.D.s are incinerated,” Cahz went on. “The concept is, if they can barbeque a million then they’ve got most of them.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Ryan said.
“They want to take the island with the infrastructure intact. The plan is to secure the South Island and start rebuilding our industrial capacity, but there’s no easy fix. The insertion teams who set up the compounds have a high mortality rate. You get sent to the South Island if you’ve pissed off someone high up. And anyway, those towns and cities have been rotting away just like this one. Don’t know exactly how much they’re planning on salvaging.”
“Still, there’s a future,” Ryan said, looking down at Rebecca.
Cahz smiled and nodded.
* * *
Ryan woke with a start. Cahz had knocked over his gun; the hard metal object landed clattering on the classroom floor.
“This is India Tango One, are you receiving me?”
Still naked, Cahz ran over to the classroom window. Ryan sprang to his feet, throwing off the blanket he’d found in the first aid room.
“The chopper?” he asked, his voice quick and excited.
“Come in, over,” Cahz called into the receiver.
He pulled the makeshift blackout curtain from the window and looked out. He turned the handle and pushed the window open ajar.
“I can’t see any navigation lights,” Cahz said, running back to his kit, “but it’s still raining out there.”
He undid one of the flaps on his body armour and pulled out a red flashlight-shaped object. With nary a stitch on, Cahz ran out of the classroom.
Ryan rushed up to the window. Outside, it was pitch black, the flickering light of the fire turning the window into a mirror.
Remains of the Dead Page 22