The End: Surviving the Apocalypse

by Palmer, Richard

  Dave grunted in agreement.

  Q turned to explain to Angela. “Pious Kate is an evil, blood-powered, animal-mutilating, vegan-posing terrorist sleeper robot.”

  Dave and Angela looked surprised.

  “Or a zombie,” Dave said.

  “Oh,” said Q. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Pious Kate is a zombie?” Angela said. “That seems unlikely.”

  “Less likely than the fact that zombies exist in the first place?” Q said.

  “Good point,” Angela said. “What are the symptoms?”

  “Victims sleep a lot, stop eating and become secretive, irrational and aggressive,” Q said. “No wonder we missed it. And then they start eating raw meat, like dead possum.”

  “Who’s gonna tell her?” Angela asked.

  Q resisted the urge to jump up and down and yell, “Pick me, pick me!” She adjusted her face into a dark reflection of Angela’s.

  “You know her best,” Dave said to Angela.

  “How do you think she’ll take the news?” Angela said.

  “Irrationally and aggressively,” Q said.

  “Ah.”

  “And then she’ll have a nap.”

  “What do we do with her?” Angela asked.

  Q had a flash of understanding. “You mean, now that the head shots don’t work?”

  “What? No! You can’t shoot Pious Kate,” Angela said. “I dislike her as much as you do – more, I’ve known her longer – but you can’t shoot her! There must be some way of treating her. Will has a first aid kit.” Angela headed back to camp to search for anti-zombie first aid, tailed by Dave and Q.

  “Rule Two,” Dave said.

  “I know,” Q said. “We’re in trouble.”

  *

  “Hannah! Why didn’t you answer?” Q had crept away to make the phone call, and her friend hadn’t answered until the eighth ring. Was the girl doing it to punish her?

  “I was asleep,” Hannah said. “Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m hiding from the hippies. Are you safe?”

  “I’m in the attic,” Hannah said. “It smells like wee.”

  “Excellent!” Q checked over her shoulder to make sure she was alone. “Did you find my stashed supplies?”

  “There was food and bottled water and stuff. And a gun. Q, you hid a gun in a primary school.”

  “Thank me later.” She had picked the 638 revolver for its tag line, So easy, even a child could use it. It was perfect. She’d chosen to leave just one, to avoid the chance of a survivalist shoot out. While this made it unlikely that scared captives would kill each other, it did allow one person to take over. She wanted to make sure that person was Hannah.

  “Has anyone else seen the gun?” Q said.

  “No,” said Hannah. “I cached it, like you always say.”

  “Good. You have to keep it. Don’t let anyone know you have it until you have to use it. Do you remember how?”

  “You showed me and Katz Bratz like a thousand times,” Hannah said. “When you get back, can we play dolls like normal people?”

  “How many of you are there?” Q said. She resisted saying, “How many of you are there left?”

  Hannah’s breath caught. Something had happened.

  “Hannah?”

  “Tim was bleeding,” Hannah said. “I told him to climb down the rope and wait in the gym until he felt better, like your plan said. Mr Macklin said no, then gave a speech about teamwork and how disaster brings out the best and the worst and how we have to be our best.”

  Q considered. “Good speech. What happened?”

  “Tim ate him. Now they’re both in the gym.”

  “Remember to clean the gun after every shot, Hannah,” Q said. “If you keep it clean, it’ll work every time. How many are you now?”

  “Mrs Matthews, Mrs Barrett, Mrs Caroll, Mr Wright, me, Sophie, Lisa, Ricky and Anne,” Hannah said.

  Q’s mental calculator kicked in. They’d last a month on what she’d left, provided they collected more water. “Set up one of the bins under the skylight,” she said. “If it rains, drink that first.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Hannah said.

  Q wasn’t ready for this sudden shift. “I dunno.”

  “Remember Mr GLEEM?”

  Mr “God Loves Everyone, Especially Me” was a smug Seventh Day Adventist who lived across the road from the school. He and his wife did good deeds and handed out pamphlets to those unsuspecting enough to walk past their house. “What about him?” Q said.

  “We can see his attic from ours. We’ve been holding up notes in the windows. He says God healed his wife. She got bitten and she’s getting better.”

  Q scoffed. “Then she didn’t get bitten, she scratched herself. You don’t get better from this, Hannah.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “You’re doing good. Follow the plan. I’ll come get you soon.”

  Hannah hung up without saying goodbye. Q listened to the song of a magpie in the distance and wondered where its friends had gone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rabbit, Sheath and the Scarlet Terror sat around the campsite, eating breakfast. Dave was smoking downwind and almost out of sight, no doubt chased there by tales of lung cancer and chi blockage. Rabbit was telling Sheath a story about genetically modified plants. Q grinned. Another shared interest! She should tell Rabbit that she, too, worried that one day, evil mutant Venus fly traps would take over the world. Maybe they both had the same T-Day plan?

  “Everyone’s chirpy today,” Q said. “A good night’s sleep does wonders. And also not being disemboweled by hordes of the undead. Where’s Kate?”

  “She went back to the cabin,” said Rabbit. “She said she needed some alone time after what you – after what happened.”

  “That’s rather secretive of her,” Q said.

  “I heard that!” yelled Pious Kate from the nearest cabin.

  “Aggressive,” Q mouthed to Dave and Angela. She continued. “So this morning I think we should all do some training.” Q turned to Dave for support.

  His mouth dropped open, revealing nicotine-stained teeth and bewilderment. “Train the hippies?” he said.

  “Anti-zombie training exercises!” Q said with artificial confidence. “Standard in this situation. Gather round, kids.”

  There were grumbles, but the hippies wandered toward Q. She had a problem: how was she to convince them that their queen was about to go carnivore? She’d tried the direct method on Angela and it hadn’t work, so now she had to come at this sideways, instead of her usual head-on approach, which would probably backslide before grinding to a dead standstill.

  Q shook her head to clear an unaccountable wave of dizziness, then threw Apocalypse Z into the middle of the circle.

  “Everyone read that. Memorize the rules.” She was using her best trainee-teacher voice. It couldn’t fail. “Rabbit, you start us off. Read out one of the rules to the group. Pick a rule, any rule, completely at random. Rule Two, for instance?”

  Rabbit picked up the book and turned to the correct page. “Rule Two, If You’re Bit, That’s It.”

  Q listened to his caramel voice fondling the words and drifted away to her happy place, all alone with Rabbit in a log cabin, the raging fire and their equally raging passions…

  “Q?” Angela said. “You’re drooling.”

  She snapped back to attention, wiped her mouth and addressed her troops. “Right. What do you think Rule Two means if one us is turning into a zombie? Like Kate?”

  “Hypothetically, you mean?” said Rabbit.

  “Of course. A hypothetical Kate is turning into an enraged meat-craving maniac who wants to tear us all to shreds. What should we do about that?”

  The Scarlet Terror raised a tentative hand to answer. Q was so taken aback by this unprecedented reaction to a class she was teaching, she nearly dribbled again.

  “We keep her isolated so she’s not a danger to herself,” said the Scarlet Terr
or, “and wait until she gets better?”

  There were several nods of approval.

  “That’s a very good answer,” said Q, “but not quite what I’m looking for. Anyone else?”

  “It’s obvious,” said Sheath.

  At last! One of the hippies understood Rule Two. Q nodded, prompting the explanation.

  “We are all opposed to the incarceration of any creature,” Sheath continued. “Battery hens, domestic pets, lab animals and, of course, hypothetical Zombie Kate. It’s outrageous to suggest confining her for our benefit. If we can’t coexist in her habitat, we should pack up and leave, allowing her to express her natural behaviors in her natural environment, which in this case are unnatural behaviors, unhindered by human intervention.”

  Q began counting beneath her breath to see who would be the first to slap down this absurd approach to anti-Z warfare. She also counted to keep in practice. You had to stay on your intellectual toes if you wanted to be on the fast track to teaching the Grade One Galahs.

  “Except that these unnatural behaviors require human intervention,” the Scarlet Terror parried.

  “Exactly,” said Q. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “We’re the prey,” the Scarlet Terror said. “We can’t remove ourselves and allow Zombie Kate to continue with her existence, because she is our parasite and our absence will destroy the balance that sustains her.”

  “You’ve missed the point,” said Sheath. “Rule Two is a metaphor for the order of nature and the unnatural disturbances we have caused to it. It’s not about zombies. We are the zombies. We consume the resources of this planet, including other living beings, to the point where the planet can no longer support us and our behavior becomes grotesque and self-destructive.”

  A debate began about the ecosystem and how it might accommodate zombies, both real and symbolic.

  “Hippies!” Dave said, and spat.

  Q tried again. “Rabbit, perhaps you can read out Rule Two line by line?”

  “Sure,” said Rabbit. “Once bitten and infected with the zombie virus, there is no cure.”

  “Much like the infectious state of ignorance and wilful denial in modern society,” said Sheath.

  “There is no point amputating the affected area,” Rabbit read.

  “A metaphor for seeking a quick fix by ‘cutting off’ or suppressing those areas of human nature that are most vile and most persistent,” Sheath said.

  “The only available course is the quick dispatch of the infected by gun shot to the head.”

  Q was fascinated to see how Sheath would turn this blunt statement into something other than itself. She wasn’t disappointed.

  “Which refers to the non-literal form of ‘death’ that occurs in all hero’s journeys, the death of the former self,” Sheath said. “In Western culture this is represented by head-mind, hence the ‘gun shot to the head,’ but in other cultures it is represented by belly-soul, prompting the rebirth of self into a new, enlightened and cruelty-free existence.” Sheath grinned, triumphant.

  Dave spat again.

  “Okay,” Q said. “This is all great progress, but can anyone give us an even better interpretation of the text? Anyone at all? Dave, for instance?”

  Dave, who had been picking his teeth, turned bright red at the attention. Clearly he had not been a front-row pupil all those year ago. He mumbled something, grunted, then resumed picking his teeth.

  “Can we have that again?” Q said. “This time without your hand in your mouth?”

  “Fire till undead and unmoving,” Dave said. “Repeat.”

  There were gasps of horror. Q relaxed at this return to normal classroom responses.

  “I couldn’t do that!” said Angela.

  “I will never harm a living creature,” said Sheath. “It would be an act of desecration against nature.”

  The Scarlet Terror smiled, as if she could do that and had practiced it many times in her head. Q recognized a sister in secret vengeance and wondered what crimes hypothetical Zombie Kate had committed against her.

  “Would you rather be eaten alive from the feet up?” Q asked. “That’s natural. Happens to animals all the time.”

  Dave spat.

  Q continued. “It’s not like Zombie Kate would suffer,” said Q. “She can’t feel pain, and technically, she’s not alive. Even peaceniks kill the undead, right? Ooh, that’d be great on a T-shirt, I should write that down. Has anyone got a pen?”

  “It’s so violent!” Angela said.

  “No, you hold one end of the pen like this and press the other onto the page – oh, right. Guns. You’ll get used to ’em.”

  “We should practice,” said Rabbit. “You need to teach us.” He set his jaw, struggling with his conscience but prepared to do what needed to be done. Q was so intent on gazing into those soulful, puppy-dog eyes that she did not notice the noises coming from behind her.

  “Q?” said Dave.

  A figure shuffled toward them from the direction of the long-drop dunny. It struggled with the slope. Every few steps it lurched, paused and righted itself.

  “Look!” said Sheath. “They’ve arranged for Kate to play along. Pathetic.”

  “I’m surprised Kate’s buying into this,” said Sheath.

  “That’s not Kate,” said Angela. “It looks like Christine.”

  “Christine left with the van,” said Sheath.

  Q didn’t hear them. She was thinking that Rabbit should do shampoo commercials.

  “Quentin and Dave have set up a ‘real life’ ethical dilemma to galvanize us into demonstrating how eagerly we’ll abandon our principles to save our sorry skins,” Sheath said. “Well I, for one, am not going to fall for it. You’re with me, aren’t you Angela? Michelle?”

  “Q!” Dave said.

  “Michelle!” Sheath said. “Come back!”

  “What?” said Q, irritated at the interruption in her most romantic staring contest ever, and she’d had several in her time, though this was her first consensual one—

  “Michelle’s attacking a zombie with a stick!” said Angela.

  “That’s not in the course notes!” Q registered the high-pitched ululation of an enraged flower child. The Scarlet Terror ran at the stumbling figure as fast as her long skirt would allow, leaping rocks and bushes and waving a snapped-off branch above her head. The figure she was running toward was Tinkabella, but transformed into a gray-skinned parody of herself. The right arm hung as if broken, the skin still intact. There was a chunk bitten out of the throat. The eyes were unfocused.

  Rabbit had been right to worry. Tinkabella didn’t get far in the van. Q could picture it. The woman had crashed, maybe into a tree or – no, into a zombie standing on the road in front of her. With a broken arm from the crash, Tinkabella hadn’t been able to undo her seatbelt, and she had lain there, crying and struggling, watching the zombie she had run over pick itself up off the road and walk toward her.

  Poor zombie Tinkabella.

  Q’s background calculator kicked in, thus proving the value of her “Applied Maths for the Apocalypse” class. Tinkabella had left yesterday at around three p.m. and couldn’t have gone far. Maybe the accident happened ten miles away? She’d already turned and made it back to camp. That meant a transition of between five and fifteen hours from injured human to living dead.

  Zinkabella’s head tilted toward the Scarlet Terror. The zombie redirected its shuffling course.

  “No!” said Q. She sprinted after them. The living hippy didn’t stand a chance against the dead one. Q had to get there first.

  She didn’t.

  The Scarlet Terror hit Zinkabella over the head as hard as she could with her branch. There was an impressive thump. The zombie swayed back at the force of the blow, then rocked forward and reached out. It caught hold of the hippy’s long hair and pulled the woman’s face close.

  Q arrived and kicked. The zombie grabbed at Q’s foot like a clumsy toddler, and missed. Q kicked again, connecting square on the ch
est, and Zinkabella fell backward, a handful of red hair in its fingers. The monster thrashed in the dirt.

  “Go,” Q said to the Scarlet Terror. The hippy obeyed.

  Q picked up a stick and gripped it with both hands. The bark was smooth and warm. Sun caressed her shoulders. It was a beautiful morning for a fight.

  Zinkabella rolled onto its belly and crawled upright, unable to use the broken arm as anything more than an unreliable prop. Any pain the zombie felt, it ignored. The creature got to its feet.

  She whacked the zombie on its jaw. The thing swayed, but kept its footing. Q clubbed the right side of the head, three times, then bashed the left. Her weapon pounded away the skin and muscle of Zinkabella’s face, but there was no blood. The zombie looked like a Halloween nightmare, but the damage only made it easier to fight. More like a bad special effect than a person.

  On the last blow, Q’s stick snapped in half. Zinkabella’s neck also snapped. Q fist-pumped, waiting for the zombie to fall.

  The head lolled, connected by skin and spinal cord, but the creature stayed upright.

  “Oh Shiva.” Rabbit vomited.

  Zinkabella’s eyes swiveled around to fix on Q. It lurched forward.

  “Q, get back here!” Angela said.

  Q hesitated, transfixed by the sight of the vegan killing machine, then ran back. She leaped over a fallen log and leaned against it, breathing hard. The rest of the group followed.

  “Is that Christine?” Angela said.

  “What do we do?” Sheath said.

  Rabbit opened his mouth to make peace, but managed only bile.

  “Don’t panic,” Q said. “Remember, we’ve got one thing that zombie doesn’t have.”

  “Principles?” Angela said.

  Q tapped her head. “Brains.”

  They peered over the log at Zinkabella. Its head still hung slack from the neck. Viscous liquid dripped through the head wounds. The zombie reached up and pulled at the gray matter, scooping it into its mouth.

  “Okay, she has brains too,” Q said. “Go back to principles.”