The End: Surviving the Apocalypse

by Palmer, Richard

  Dave grunted.

  “It’s his socks,” Rabbit said. “They have bad chi.”

  “I use a powder for it …” Dave said.

  There were more zombies this afternoon than there had been that morning. Did they have a way of communicating with each other? Were they calling out to one another telepathically? Or were they simply sniffing out the vegans like fresh-baked bread? She reached for her little black book and scribbled a few notes, questions unanswered, a rough estimate of how many there were. It was at least a hundred and twenty, she guessed. They should have been easy to count, because they weren’t moving. They stood there, eyes fixed on the window, like kids at a candy store. But each time Q began, her gaze melted away from the task. She saw a noseless face, or a hand with three fingers bitten off, or one that reminded her of the guy who worked at the DVD shop down the road. The worst were the ones that didn’t look like zombies at all. Men, women, children, in the middle of an army of monsters, clean and neat and with such longing on their faces.

  They weren’t kids at a candy store. They were starving wolves. It was pathetic. She almost wanted to climb down the ladder and step outside to make them happy, until she saw what was caught between their teeth.

  It was day four of the outbreak. Sydney had already fallen. She knew this from her secret conversations with Hannah when she snuck off to the long-drop downstairs. There was no organized force rescuing people and distributing food and restoring order. There was no reclamation. There would be plenty of pockets of survivors on the top floors of apartments or hiding in basements, but Z had won. Q asked Hannah questions about the outside world in a roundabout way so that Hannah would not understand what Q understood, but the girl was too smart for her. Hannah got it. No one was coming to save her. The grown-ups had lost. The monsters had won.

  It wasn’t all bad news. At least Hannah still had the gun.

  Q jumped. Rabbit stood beside her at the window. She hadn’t heard his footsteps. She was slipping.

  “Keeping watch?” he asked.

  “The game lost me,” Q said.

  “I’m not sure we’ve all seen the same films,” Rabbit said. “If it wasn’t for Angela, no one would have guessed my abattoir documentary, Flesh: The Naked Truth.”

  “Dave and I would have got the title in the end, but I think we saw a different version of that film. There were no animals. Well, there were a few, but they weren’t suffering.”

  The zombies directed all their attention to Rabbit. They gazed at him like he was the Messiah of meat. She almost felt jealous.

  “Someone’s got a crush on you,” Q said. “Over a hundred someones.”

  “What?”

  Typical, Q thought. He didn’t even realize it. What was the point in making hearts race if you didn’t notice? Except in this case, the hearts weren’t racing. Maybe they rotted at a faster rate when Rabbit was around.

  Q followed his line of sight and realized he wasn’t watching zombies at all. He was smiling at the trees.

  “You’re beautiful,” Q said. Mouth open, brain shut.

  “Hmm?”

  “I said, they’re dutiful. They’ll stand there forever, waiting. Like death.”

  Rabbit shook his head. “They’re not death. They’re decay. They’re decay, and we’re growth. We’re all in the same game, Q. Different sides is all.”

  “I like my side better.”

  “Me, too,” said Rabbit. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  *

  Q cranked the phone charger, humming to cover the sound. It was the best she could do. She dialed and got an answer on the third ring.

  “Hannah? Can you hear me?”

  “Why are you whispering? Are you hiding from the hippies again?”

  “I don’t have long.” She crouched on the bottom floor of Dave’s cabin. She was next to the long-drop, her back to the wall. She could face the ladder this way and see if anyone came downstairs. Unfortunately, she could also smell why they came downstairs. They were running out of sawdust, and she wasn't sure Dave's biodigester was built for a four-person load.

  “How are you?” Q said, listening to the sound of footsteps outside the cabin. More zombies arriving. There were always more zombies arriving. She waited so long for an answer, she thought the line had dropped out.

  “Mrs Carroll left,” Hannah said. “She took Lisa.”

  The back of Q’s neck began to burn. “Where did they go?”

  “Down the ladder. Lisa was pulling out her mum’s hair, trying to get away.”

  Q pictured it. Lisa Carroll went to St Cedric’s and her mother taught there. Q liked them both. Mara Carroll was a slight woman. It must have been physically hard to drag her daughter down the ladder; she must have been determined. Why hadn’t the other adults come to the girl’s rescue?

  Because they were all going to die. They would starve, or they would be eaten, or they would give up and join the other side. It was a mark of respect to let Mara Carroll choose the method by which she and her daughter would die.

  “We lost people too,” Q said. “You have to keep trying.”

  “You didn’t lose them, Q,” Hannah said. “They died. Everyone dies. My parents are dead. Michael’s dead.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You’ll be dead soon.”

  “Stick to the plan, Hannah. You have to help the others.” Q spotted the silver lining. Two more dead meant more rations for Hannah. She wished she didn’t think like that. She didn’t say it, in case the girl thought like that, too. “How’s Mr GLEEM’s wife?”

  “She’s fine,” Hannah said. “He fell out of the window.”

  “Unlucky.” Q could picture the window in Mr GLEEM’s second-story bedroom. It had a balcony on it. He would have needed a run-up first.

  Why did people do this? When they had to run or fight, they were fine, but as soon as the struggle was over, when all they had to do was wait, their survival instinct went sour. It turned on itself. Look at her father. So strong when Linda was sick, but as soon as she’d gone, he swelled up with food and booze and started killing himself, five meals a day.

  “We’ll be okay,” she said to Hannah. Hannah hung up.

  Q redialed, then stopped. There were dusty sneakers on the top step of the ladder. She stashed the phone in her pocket.

  It was Rabbit, with ruffled hair and wearing a loose, long-sleeved green shirt. He scratched the inside of his left elbow. “Talking to yourself again? We’ve only been in here a day. Didn’t think we’d go crazy so soon.” He grinned a lunatic grin. On him, madness looked good.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Q woke from her usual nightmare, stomach rumbling. It was dark and the air did not smell like morning air. Why was she awake?

  She lay on the blankets, breathing hard and listening for whatever it was that had stirred her. A possum screamed like a torture victim, but that wasn’t it. The wind scraped a branch against the cabin, but that wasn’t it, either.

  Rabbit slept to her right and Angela to her left. It seemed natural for the three of them to sleep in a pile on the floor, like puppies. Is that why puppies did it? Were they scared of the dark?

  Q caught her breath. There it was again. Someone was out there, calling her name.

  The silent army outside couldn’t talk. Could they?

  She thought about the monsters from old black-and-white films. Creatures that stole human voices and used them to lure out their victims. Is that what these zombies were?

  No. Talking zombies meant thinking zombies, and that couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be learning. They already had all the advantages. It wouldn’t be fair.

  If the zombies couldn’t talk, there must be something else out there. Q’s gut shriveled. What could survive that mob of ghouls? The answer was obvious. Something worse than the ghouls themselves. Something so horrifying that a rotting corpse was frightened of it.

  Q knew what was out there. It had been in her dreams again. The pale woman had stepped
out of her head and into the world. She was calling Q out into the darkness. Maybe all this decay had brought her to life. Maybe she had animated like the zombies. The same force inhabiting them all.

  Q should wake the others.

  No. If she told them about the pale woman, they’d think she was crazy. And how would normal people react to a heavily armed lunatic locked in an attic with them? She couldn’t wake the others. Not until she was sure.

  She lay there, still as rock. The possums finished committing their routine acts of sex and violence and were quiet. The night sounds expanded. Angela’s soft snores became the roar of a crowd at a concert. Rabbit’s sleep twitches fell like blows in the darkness. She heard blood in her ears and breath in her throat. But there was no voice. It had been a dream.

  No, there it was again! Out in the darkness, calling her name.

  Horror shuffled over to make room for annoyance. Now that she was alert, Q realized what was wrong, besides the presence of a disembodied voice in a sea of flesh-hungry monsters.

  It was saying her name and it was saying it wrong.

  She sat up as quietly as she could. Someone else did, too. Q turned, expecting to see a pale figure in the black space. She could feel Rabbit and Angela beside her. They hadn’t moved.

  “You hear that?” Dave said.

  “I hear,” Q said, exhaling. The creature outside called again.

  “What is it?” Dave asked.

  Q was glad she could not see his face, because when he had been surrounded by zombies and fighting for his life, he had sounded calm, and now he sounded terrified. She did not want to know what terror looked like on a two-hundred-eighty-pound weapons freak who had seen it all and caused much of it.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Q said. “But it’s out there, alone in the darkness with hundreds of zombies that are leaving it alone. It knows who I am and where I am and it’s calling my name. And it’s damn well saying it wrong.”

  The voice called again. Rabbit sat upright. “Kate,” he said. “That’s Kate! Kate! Kate!”

  Rabbit leaped up and leaned so far out the window, Q thought he would fall. She grabbed his belt and braced a foot against the wall. “Calm down,” she said.

  “She’s out there all alone! She hasn’t got food or water!”

  “She’s probably got something stashed,” Q said, thinking of jerky. “Relax. If she’s lasted this long, she’s not in danger.”

  Dave swung his torch around in a wide arc, searching for Pious Kate. It didn’t help. The night was full of bright eyes and human shapes.

  “Is she one of them?” Dave asked. “Can they talk?”

  “Where are you?” Rabbit said. “I’m coming, Katie-G!” He turned and headed for the trapdoor.

  Like an orchestrated attack from Z-Dayz III, Q grabbed Rabbit and put him in an arm lock while Dave leaped across and sat on the trapdoor, anchoring it with his bodyweight. Rabbit struggled.

  “Let me go! I’m not asking anyone else to do it, but I have to go get her.”

  “No,” said Dave. “You’ll kill us.”

  “He’s right,” Q said. “If you open the gate, they’ll all come in. It won’t be a noble sacrifice, it’ll be mass murder.”

  Rabbit sagged. Q relaxed her hold but remained watchful.

  “We can’t leave her to die,” Rabbit said.

  “Let’s find out what she is,” Q said, then corrected herself. “I mean where. Let’s find out where she is.” She and Dave exchanged glances.

  “Guys? I found her.” Angela was at the window, holding Dave’s torch. Instead of pointing the beam at the ocean of dead bodies, she was pointing it high into the air. Q had a vision of Pious Kate, floating outside the window like the woman in her nightmares, lunar-skinned and black-eyed, beckoning. Were all her dreams coming to life? If so, why couldn’t there be a few of the ones involving Rabbit and whipped soy cream?

  “I see her!” said Rabbit.

  Q joined them at the window. She spotted Pious Kate, faint in the torch light. Just as she had feared, the woman was suspended fifty feet in the air, but it wasn’t supernatural. She’d climbed a tree.

  *

  Pious Kate did not seem to comprehend their helpful shouts. Was she having trouble hearing them, or understanding them?

  “Let me handle this,” said Q. She tried a quick message in Morse code, moving her hand across the beam of Dave’s torch. The ginger-framed face stayed empty as the woman’s soul. Next, Q tried the standard army signals for use in silent combat, shining the torch onto her hand so Pious Kate could see it. Again, there was no response. In desperation, Q ran through all the guerrilla signs she knew, then tried a few scuba dive signs.

  “Sorry, guys,” said Q. “She’s not getting it. She’s too far gone.”

  “Either that, or she’s confused by your suggestion to swim a slow descent away from the approaching shark,” Angela said.

  “You know dive sign?” said Q.

  “Marine biologist, remember?”

  Rabbit interrupted. “What about Kate?”

  Q put a conciliatory hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She can’t communicate. She’s post-verbal but pre-cannibal.”

  “What?” said Rabbit.

  “Your psycho ex is a zombie,” Q said. “It’s something we all try to prepare ourselves for, but we’re never ready when it happens.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rabbit was as perplexed as a nine-fingered snail.

  “You’re in denial,” Q said.

  “I am not!”

  “See?”

  “I know you’re trying to help,” Rabbit said, “but just because Kate doesn’t understand Morse code and that other stuff doesn’t mean she’s a zombie. It means she doesn’t understand you, which is something we can all empathize with at times.”

  “Please!” Q snorted. “Everyone who isn’t psychotic and necrotic understands the basic signs. How else did you play cops and robbers when you were kids?”

  Rabbit’s brow wrinkled. “By running around, pointing a finger like a gun and saying, ‘bang bang’?” he said.

  “Which only works until the rival gang cuts out your tongue and posts it to your father, at which point you need to go non-verbal,” Q said.

  “I hate to interrupt,” said Angela, “and I really do mean that, because I’m interested to see where this goes, but Zombie Kate is waving at us.”

  They looked. She was.

  “It’s the involuntary muscle spasms following death,” Q said.

  “Now she’s waving with both hands,” said Rabbit.

  “Extra spasms are normal in these circumstances given the trauma of the change,” Q said.

  “Now she’s performing an elaborate mime about running through the scrub, clambering up a tree, looking for water, not finding any, and contemplating the meaning of existence as she dies alone in the wilderness,” said Rabbit.

  “You got all that from a few gestures?” said Angela.

  “We’re close.”

  “Right,” Q said. “Maybe Kate is still alive, but there’s nothing we can do for her now, except grieve.” Q bowed her head and closed her eyes. She opened them a few moments later. “Anyone up for some pre-dawn breakfast?”

  Rabbit squared his jaw. “We have to help her.”

  Dave appeared at the window, holding a large crossbow. He aimed it at Pious Kate.

  “No!” said Rabbit.

  “He’s right,” said Q. “You’ll never make a spleen shot at this distance.”

  Dave fired. Rabbit screamed.

  The arrow flew out, trailing a length of rope. It passed through the limbs of Kate’s tree. The arrow must have been weighted, because it raveled around the branch several times as the rope pulled taut.

  “You missed!” said Angela, relieved.

  “No,” said Q. “He’s not trying to kill her.”

  “If she can climb across,” Dave said, “she’s human enough.”

  “For now,” Q added. />
  “She’s too weak,” Rabbit said. “She’ll never be able to do it.”

  “She does have a serious case of weedy arm and chicken neck,” Q said. “Oh, well. Too late to start a weights program now. Breakfast, anyone?”

  “She’s my oldest friend,” Rabbit said.

  “Sorry,” Q said. “She’s smug about food, I’m smug about ripped triceps. Who’s laughing now?”

  Angela thumped Q on the back of the head and muttered.

  “What was that?” Q said.

  “I said, do your genes know they’re trapped in there for life?”

  The lines of Rabbit’s face hardened. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go get her.”

  “No!” said Q.

  “Don’t throw good meat after bad,” Dave said.

  Even Q, who knew he was quoting direct from Chapter Nine, cringed at the choice of words. “He means we shouldn’t throw lives away,” she said, then wished she hadn’t. Angela’s lips were pressed together, as if the woman had made an unpleasant discovery. As if she thought Q and Dave were on one side, and Angela and Rabbit were on the other, and there was an impassable barrier in between.

  Q realized she and Dave were standing shoulder to shoulder, facing the other pair. She took a step away from the fat man. “I was explaining what Dave said. I don’t agree with it!” She did, but now wasn’t the time for honesty.

  Dave grabbed her shoulder and dragged her into a corner. “Best case – one more mouth to feed,” he said. “Worst case – she don’t eat dry rations no more.”

  “Why’d you shoot the rope across for her?” Q said.

  Dave grunted and Q understood. He knew there was no risk that Pious Kate could climb across, whether she was too uncoordinated from being undead, or too weak from hiding from the undead. He threw her a rope to keep the peace. The others could fret and worry and debate the ethics of it while Pious Kate starved or fell. It was easier than an argument.

  Dave was smarter than he looked. What else had he planned?

  “Rabbit, no!”

  Q turned at the sound of Angela’s voice to see Rabbit on the windowsill, gripping the rope in his long fingers. He had no idea what he was doing. He was going to kill himself.