The End: Surviving the Apocalypse

by Palmer, Richard

  There was a ghost in the tunnel.

  It was in front of her, dancing and making signs in the air. Q froze. She caught her breath and it was gone.

  “You okay?” Rabbit asked.

  Q couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t turn around and go back. It was too far and too cold and there was nothing behind them except ghouls and hunger and the endless night. But she couldn’t go forward, either. There was a ghost there. She’d seen it.

  “Qwinston?” Pious Kate called. The walls tossed around the name until it died. Q couldn’t answer. She couldn’t make a sound.

  This was stupid. She was stupid. The ghost was in her head. Rabbit couldn’t see it. Ignore it and it would go away. She exhaled, hard.

  The ghost returned.

  Q whimpered. Spirits in the daytime. Was she dying?

  “Quentin.” Pious Kate called her name and for once, she said it right. The woman staggered forward through the water.

  Rabbit released Q’s hand and spun around. “Katie-G?” He went to help her.

  “I need to tell you something,” Pious Kate said, her voice thick. Her footsteps were irregular but light, as if her feet weren’t touching the ground.

  Q was paralyzed. There were spirits all around, shimmering in the air where before there had been a darkness she now missed.

  “I’m sorry,” Pious Kate said. There was a gurgle and a wet noise.

  Q turned. Rabbit and Pious Kate stood next to each other, very close. They were kissing.

  Rage broke through terror.

  There was just enough light to see clouds of breath misting the cold air. That’s what the ghosts were – her breath. They must be near daylight and the other side of the tunnel. There were no ghosts. There was only Q.

  She watched Rabbit and Pious Kate kiss. There was that damp noise again. It was Rabbit, gurgling like wet moss.

  No. They weren’t kissing. Pious Kate was biting his face off. She’d finally turned. Q took two steps forward and kicked.

  Pious Kate flew back into the black tunnel, snarling. Q heard a splash, then nothing. Where had the monster gone?

  Rabbit moaned. Q hushed him and reached for her bush knife. Something splashed, clumsy and unseen.

  Pious Kate stumbled into the dull light, mouth open, eyes empty. Q stabbed. Her knife slid into the dull body. The creature didn’t react. It was as if Q had cut a piece of clothing rather than flesh.

  She drew out her knife and dodged the reaching arms. She kicked sideways and felt a knee crack. It dropped. Q stomped twice, hard, feeling ribs snap, then leaped back.

  Rabbit lay on the ground on his side, his face under water. She grabbed his armpit and hauled him upright, then pulled his arm across her shoulders.

  “Walk!” she said.

  He groaned and twitched. The weight on her back lessened.

  “Walk!” she said again.

  His left foot moved. He reached up to touch his face and his legs buckled.

  Q dragged him forward. Their steps made an ocean. She couldn’t tell if there was anything behind them except echoes. Rabbit collapsed into the water twice and she feared she might not get him standing again. She screamed and dug her fingers into his skin, using pain where reason failed.

  She saw the other end of the tunnel.

  She tried to run into the circle of light but managed only a ragged three-legged stumble with the dying man. The circle refused to swell. It was a trick! The tunnel was endless, it was teasing her with tomorrow’s promise, but it would never let her go. She swore at it. The tunnel swore back in her voice.

  Her fingers bit into Rabbit’s ribcage and he gasped.

  Q threw her feet down, mindless of the shifting ground, the holes and hills and invisible landscape below. She was terrified that the exit was too small. It was the size of her fist. They’d never fit through.

  Rabbit fell.

  One moment he was there, the next he was a weight pulling her underwater. They’d run into a chasm. Her head went below and her boots and sodden clothing wrenched her down. She kicked. Her hand slipped so that she held only Rabbit’s jumper, as though he’d shed his skin and left for somewhere else. Her nose and mouth were full of water. She choked and kicked harder. Her head broke the surface. She gasped twice. She had lost Rabbit. She submerged again.

  Q felt around in the darkness, eyes squeezed shut. Her chest ached. She popped up, drank air, and ducked below again. How long had he been under? A minute? Two? Were his lungs empty already? Had he taken a breath before he fell?

  Her fingers touched a cold, motionless arm.

  Q grabbed it with both hands and kicked as hard as she could. She broke free of the freezing water and was almost sucked back by his weight. Her limbs were fire. She twisted the fingers of her left hand into his jumper and struck out for concrete with her right. She pressed down into it and managed to haul her torso into a puddle of grime. She swung up her right leg and rolled, pulling him out of the water with her.

  Q couldn’t move with the mass on top of her, then the sharp rocks beneath began to hurt more than the idea of moving. She wriggled out from under Rabbit and sucked air like a shipwreck survivor, then reached out to his face.

  She felt hot breath. He was alive.

  Q rolled onto her knees. “Get up,” she said. He obeyed. They panted, listening to splashes in the darkness behind them. “Come on. Move!”

  They ran until the mouth of the tunnel widened and spat them out the other side.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Q shivered. The brightness of the day made her eyes water.

  She turned her back on the sun. A heavy metal gate had been pushed back from the mouth of the tunnel; Dave must have left it open for them. She leaned her body against it until it slammed into the concrete. On the ground lay a chain with links as big as her fists. She wrapped it several times around one bar of the gate and the squat concrete post beside it.

  There. Whatever was inside would stay inside.

  Rabbit slumped on the ground, holding his right cheek as if he could catch what was pouring away. Blood seeped through his fingers. She had to fix it. She didn’t think about what Apocalypse Z would say, because there was no chapter on how to treat a zombie bite. There were only two words.

  You can’t.

  She took out her survival tin. Inside were a needle, a compass, a blade, a flint and a foil package. She pulled out the foil pack and ripped it open with her teeth. “Give me your hand,” she said.

  He offered it to her, bloody as a confession. Q pushed it aside and wiped his cheek with iodine, shoving the sodden brown swab deep into the wound until he cried out. The cut was shallow. The skin was gone, but all the muscles were still intact. It was the kind of wound you got from walking through the bush, the kind that she was covered in. It was nothing serious.

  She removed the blade from the survival kit and scraped a layer of flesh from his face. Rabbit ground his teeth and stared at the sky. He twitched beneath her fingers but did not stop her.

  How long since he had been bitten? Five minutes? Was that enough time for the infection to take hold?

  She dropped the blade and grabbed a handful of dried grass and sticks. She piled them onto her bandana and sent a spark into it from her flint, then cupped her hand around it, breathing on it. A flame leaped. She let it burn for a few seconds, then picked up the scalding pile in the bandana and held it against his face. He grunted and writhed.

  Maybe eight minutes. It didn’t matter. This would work.

  She bent down to the pool at the mouth of the tunnel. She scooped up water and splashed it over the shallow red hole in his face.

  Ten minutes at the most. No more than that.

  “It’s a zombie,” Rabbit said.

  “Yup,” Q said. She reapplied the iodine pad. “Kate’s a zombie. I never would have guessed it. Hold this.”

  He pressed the pad hard into the gash. The blood had stopped pushing through his fingers – that was good, right? No more blood?
It was a flesh wound, flushed and healing. It was a shame it wasn’t a finger or toe. She couldn’t cut off his head.

  She squatted in front of the puddle and scrubbed her hands, trying to remove every speck of his blood from her skin, but her palms were so covered in small oozing cuts it was impossible to tell what was hers and what was his. She tried anyway. It wasn’t that she was worried about infection, because he wasn’t infected. It was basic hygiene, that was all.

  “A zombie,” he said again.

  There were a few red daubs on her arm. Was it her blood, Rabbit’s or Zombie Kate’s? She splashed and scrubbed. Her hands stung in the cold water. Her skin felt stretched over pins.

  “Two zombies,” Rabbit said.

  Q swore and sprang to her feet. Two ghouls approached. She should have heard them dragging their feet through the leaves. Idiot!

  She unslung her rifle and shot four times, but the gun only fired thrice. She was out of ammunition. It didn’t matter. She’d made two more corpses in the dirt.

  Q searched her pockets for spare ammunition that she knew wasn’t there, then swore and threw down the gun. She stepped over the dead things and scanned the trees around her.

  Eight set out for a cozy weekend retreat. Would she be the last one left? What then?

  She turned back to Rabbit. “We gotta go.”

  He clutched his face. “Aren’t we here?”

  “Come on.”

  Rabbit hesitated. “We should say something,” he said, waving at the bodies on the ground and the tunnel that entombed his dead ex.

  Q began walking. He’d follow. What else could he do?

  *

  Dave sure could pick a good place. They’d been moving downhill for two hours and hadn’t come across a single ghoul. The country was too hard for them. Q and Rabbit had to wriggle between tree trunks and the lower scrub was so dense they couldn’t see their boots. The slope was severe. She tested each blind step before committing her weight to it, always seeking a sapling or a rock to lock her foot against, because otherwise the ground slid out beneath her. She kept jarring her knees and ankles but hadn’t yet injured herself.

  Rabbit emptied his pockets as they went, offering her muesli bars and a pocket first aid kit and a knife. She slapped his hands away and laughed, calling him a slacker, telling him to carry his own stuff, but he insisted.

  She held a thorned branch to steady herself and swore as it sliced open her palm. Her hands were bleeding and raw but she couldn’t afford to spare them, she needed everything to stay upright. She wondered what tourists liked about hiking. Maybe it made their office jobs more fun when they returned.

  There were no more office jobs. There was only this.

  Dave had said it was a couple of miles to the river from the tunnel, which sounded like a twenty-minute stroll, if you didn’t know what the distance contained. She wished they were still under attack. She had too much weary brain space and only one thing to think about. She tried thinking about ghouls instead.

  Why did she call them ghouls? They were dead bodies messing with live ones, not the other way around. They were ghosts with flesh and teeth. They were revenge.

  She tried to break the journey into intervals but couldn’t see far enough to mark them out. She had a premonition of her country with all the people stripped from it. No more roads or trails, just dry, angry walls of plants with scared animals battling through them.

  At least it wasn’t a hot day. Even sheltered from the sun by thick scrub, the work made her sweat. She tried to remember feeling cold – she had been cold only a few hours ago – but she couldn’t.

  Q counted steps. Each time she got to a hundred, she rewarded herself with a memory. Hannah, before the outbreak. A whole Friday night with a new game. Her dad, slim and sober when Linda was alive. She rolled her ankle and swore.

  Her pulse spiked and her blood ran hot, adrenaline filled. It barely stirred her. She was too tired. She stopped and pointed her toe up and down. It wasn’t bad. She could keep going. Her body understood the need to take care but it was beyond her thinking mind. There may not be zombies around, but a broken ankle or snakebite meant death just as surely. There were no rescue choppers out here. There were no more rescue choppers anywhere, ever again. She licked her lips and wished for water. She should have drunk at the tunnel.

  No. She wouldn’t drink that. She’d die first.

  Could be an option.

  Rabbit followed her without complaint or conversation. He was pale but otherwise fine. He was suffering fatigue, that was all. He’d be okay when they got there.

  Twice, he sat down and asked for her bush knife. She didn’t give it to him.

  Q yelped and swore again. She’d been bitten! She shook her right hand. Her fingers stung and she whimpered as she tried to find her attacker. Was it a spider? What sort? The only two she could recognize were the redback and the funnelweb, and out here, with no treatment, both would be deadly.

  Rabbit pushed through the scrub, pulled her back two paces and brushed off her arms. “Ants,” he said.

  She’d been standing right on top of their nest and they’d swarmed up the tree and onto her hand, then across her body in a coordinated offensive. Their teeth were pincers. Little bastards.

  Rabbit’s arm was covered in ants from brushing her off, but they didn’t bite him; they poured off in a steady stream to the ground and marched away.

  “There are advantages,” Rabbit said, watching the cascade.

  Q ran her fingers over a tree, thicker than those around it. Its white skin sloughed off in great strips, showing shy pink bark beneath. This whole place was diseased.

  It was an hour before they stopped again. White cloud and blue sky flashed between the leaves above. It must be hot up there, where the sun lived. Q was glad it was cooler below. One less thing to fight.

  “What’s up?” Rabbit asked. “You need to eat?”

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t eat, not without water, not when her belly felt like it was full of live bait. “The river,” she said. Water roared in the distance.

  “It must be a good spot,” Rabbit said. “With all this effort.”

  “You thirsty?”

  He shook his head. Q recited the names of her favorite guns under her breath.

  *

  They had reached their goal. “River” was too grand a word – it was a rocky stream at the bottom of a sheer-sided gully, making more noise than it should.

  There was a twenty-foot drop onto slippery rock. The concave edge looked like a broken leg, like a painful, drawn-out death. They were as far away from safety as ever. She tipped her head back to the deepening blue of the sky.

  “It’s good to have the sun back,” Rabbit said.

  Q took a deep breath, pinched her thigh and spoke. “What do you think?”

  “That consumerism is dead. That we’ve entered the age of the insects. That the A-Team movie was way better than I expected – they flew a tank!”

  Q giggled. “What do we do?”

  Rabbit peered over the edge. “Pretty steep,” he said. “We could go back. Try to find another way down?”

  They had walked for hours to get here and it had been like walking on another planet; gravity turned up too high; air too thin; distance meaningless. Q was not going back.

  “Dave thought it was okay,” she said. “He wouldn’t have sent us here if he didn’t think we could get through.”

  Rabbit nodded. “But maybe we came the wrong way. Or maybe it’s a while since Dave’s been here. That—” he waved a hand at the bush behind them, as if it was someone else’s nightmare—“is regrowth. That’s why it’s so dense in the bottom layer. It might have been an easy scramble a few years ago, straight after a bushfire, but it’s not anymore.”

  “Wait here.” Q walked upstream along the edge of the cliff for a few minutes before she ran into a rock. It was four times taller than she was, emerging from the ground like a monolith. No breaks, no handholds. She couldn’t climb it.
It extended back into the scrub. She tried walking around it uphill, but this was even harder than the journey downhill had been.

  She walked back to Rabbit and tried the same downstream. She found another rock formation. She felt trapped in a fake landscape, a game where the programmer hadn’t bothered finishing the world so left barriers at its outskirts instead.

  Rabbit put a hand on her shoulder when she returned. “The rock formations,” he said. “They must be all along the river.”

  “Damn nature.”

  “They’ve been here forever.” He smiled. Q didn’t. She had no room for eternity. The immediate was too full.

  They would have to climb down the cliff to the stream. She had at least ten feet of cordage looped through her belt buckles. They could use their bootlaces, too, which were too thin to be able to grip but might work if she knotted them along their length or tied in sturdy sticks to make handholds. At least she could cut out some of the drop. They might not break when they fell.

  “I need to tell you something,” Rabbit said, putting a hand on her arm and pulling her close.

  Q’s belly turned to stone. That phrase led to joy and terror, and she was spent. She stepped back. “We have to find the others.”

  “It’s not Kate’s fault. Some things are – the things she said to you and to Dave. But I’m not her fault.”

  Q’s mouth dropped open. Not her fault? Pious Kate had tried to steal Rabbit, and had bitten him when she failed so that Q couldn’t have him either. Was he still defending her, even now? She was Pious Kate. That was blameworthy enough.

  Rabbit pushed up his left sleeve and twisted his palm outward. The inside of his arm was smooth and light gray, much paler than the rest of his skin. He had a wound. An old wound. There was a chunk removed from the inside of his elbow, a rough circle the size of a thumb and index finger joined. It was clean and dead.

  She reached out to touch it but stopped before she connected. “When?”

  “Back at the campsite,” he said. “That night they found us. A month ago.”

  A month! He’d been bitten for a month and hadn’t said anything! He wasn’t even sick.

  Except that wasn’t true. Q realized that the signs had all been there but she hadn’t noticed them in the attic. Hadn’t wanted to notice them.