The End: Surviving the Apocalypse

by Palmer, Richard

  He didn’t eat.

  He drank a lot of water, and today, he drank none.

  He had no energy and slept and meditated all the time. But what good was energy in a world twenty-feet squared, and who would notice its absence?

  All that time meditating and looking after Pious Kate. She thought he was trying to help his evil ex, but he’d been protecting Q, making sure the monsters within stayed buried. And he was trying to heal himself. It was wonderful and awful and she didn’t know why he was telling her.

  “Why?” Q’s voice was the wind in the trees.

  He rolled down his sleeve. “I thought I could beat it,” he said. “Rule Two is stupid. It’s giving up. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to leave you.”

  Rabbit, who’d fight to change the world, would fight to change himself as well. He thought he could win. Pious Kate, so obviously infected but not transformed, gave him four weeks of hope. And then she’d turned and taken all hope with her.

  “No,” Q said. She moved toward him, so close she could feel his body heat, except that he was cool, too cool for a hot day. She didn’t care. She leaned in to kiss him and he moved away. “No!”

  He took a step back, then bent to lower himself over the cliff.

  “Don’t,” she said with a voice full of sand. She didn’t want to be heard. He might reply with a careless grin, as if it didn’t matter whether he lived or died. Rabbit’s legs and torso dangled over the edge and she could see he was searching for a foothold. What if he slipped?

  What if he didn’t?

  He grunted. “I can’t reach the bottom,” he said.

  “Come back,” she said. “Please come back.”

  He let go and slid. Q yelped and peered after him like a frightened dog. Rabbit lay on his back in the water, giggling.

  “You idiot!” Q ripped out a handful of grass and dirt and hurled it at him. “You complete moron!”

  He rolled over, held his head under the water, rinsed his face and stood. He took a firm footing and held his arms over his head. “I’ll be your Z-bridge,” he said, grinning.

  She ignored the comment but accepted the offer.

  *

  They didn’t know which way to go so they went downstream – it was easier to scramble with the water than against it. Q had thought nothing could be more difficult and painful and exhausting than bashing down that slope through the scrub, but now she found she missed it. Initially, she’d tried to jump from one large rock to the next, but they were covered in algae and she kept slipping and landing on her butt or stumbling forward and bashing a knee. So she waded straight through the water instead. Her feet were numb. She barely had strength to lift her soaking boots. With each step, it was harder to keep her footing. She fell and staggered and fell and swore. She could no longer distinguish sore muscles from bruised skin. Everything felt the same. Everything hurt.

  What if Dave and Angela were upstream? Q didn’t know what she would do if they had chosen the wrong direction. The sides of the gully were too steep to climb and there was nowhere to camp in the river. They’d walk until it was dark and then, soaked to the skin, they’d freeze to death overnight. It sounded peaceful.

  *

  Q spotted Dave’s camp first. She thought she saw smoke but wasn’t sure if it was the real world or a fantasy, the world she wanted. Then the left side of the gully flattened out into a clearing that contained three of the most beautiful things Q had ever seen.

  Angela, Dave and a campfire.

  She called out. Angela’s face cracked into a grin. She waded out into the stream and hugged her.

  “How’d you get here so fast?” Q asked, her mouth full of the other woman’s hair. “You take the easy route?”

  Angela stepped back. “It wasn’t easy! The path was steep and I kept slipping in the river. I didn’t think we’d make it.”

  “You had a path? Sheer luxury.”

  Angela pulled back and went to embrace Rabbit, then stopped, her hands limp.

  Dave had paused a few steps away. His hand rested on the gun slung around his torso in a way that Q might have thought casual if she wasn’t paying attention.

  “You didn’t find the track?” Dave said, his eyes fixed on Rabbit.

  “We’re here,” Q said. She waded out of the water and turned to offer a hand to Rabbit, but the beautiful man remained where he was, a portrait of a smile on his lips. “Come on,” Q said.

  “Where’s Kate?” Dave asked.

  Angela slunk backward as he spoke. She slipped and fell, spat water, rolled onto her hands and knees and scrambled out of the stream. She spun to face them, the whites of her eyes stark, a child who didn’t want to turn her back on the thing that scared her.

  “Kate’s dead,” Dave said, answering his own question. Q wondered how many more answers he’d worked out. They were wrong. She had to show him they were wrong.

  Her legs were about to give way. That campfire looked like home. What did she have to say to get past this guardian? “Tough trip,” she said, and showed her teeth.

  “That’s no scratch.” Dave gestured toward Rabbit’s wounded cheek with his gun but without menace, as if it were a convenient pointer and he’d use a stick instead if he had one to hand. He left his gun pointing at Rabbit.

  Q adjusted her stance. She no longer felt collapsible. Fear was a fast cure.

  Water pushed around Rabbit’s legs, as if he were nothing more than a rock or log. Rabbit always stuck up for everyone else, why wouldn’t he stick up for himself? And why was the group turning on him? He was tired and hungry and he looked it, that was all.

  She took her eyes off Dave for a moment to confirm this. She saw what Dave and Angela saw.

  There was a man standing in the creek. He was not beautiful. He was gray. He was silent. He didn’t watch the faces of those who spoke, as if he’d lost track of what conversation was and how it worked. There was a hole in his face, an open wound that would not heal. It was a hole in the world. Q’s heart poured out through it.

  “Leave him alone.” Q squared up to the man with the gun. She thought about pulling out her bush knife but decided against it. She wouldn’t use it. Too slow and too messy. Anyway, she didn’t need it. This was a game. Dave was showing her that this was his place and he was in charge. She’d play along and show him he was wrong.

  Angela ran back to the campsite. For a woman with three kids, she sure sucked at conflict.

  Dave raised the barrel of his gun into a firing position. Rabbit faced him, arms relaxed, inviting it.

  Why didn't Rabbit run? Even animals react when a gun aims at them.

  “There was an accident,” Q said, trying to draw Dave’s attention. It worked. The gun remained pointed at Rabbit, a cold metal threat, but its owner watched Q.

  Dave was four steps away. Four steps, if she didn’t slip. The rocks were covered in slime. She had to keep talking.

  “Kate turned,” Q said. “In the tunnel. She bit Rabbit.”

  The skin behind Dave’s beard moved. Was he smiling? Grimacing? “I’m sorry,” he said. He returned his focus to Rabbit.

  “No!” Q took two steps forward. It was a risk, it could have startled Dave into a shot, but it got his attention instead. “You don’t understand,” Q said. “I took care of it. I abraded the wound and I scorched it and I disinfected it and I washed it. Rabbit’s fine. He’ll get better.”

  Dave’s face hardened. “Apocalypse Z says—”

  “Fuck Apocalypse Z.” Q couldn’t hear her own words over the sounds of water and the heartbeat in her ears, but Dave heard okay. His eyes widened. It was as if she’d spat on his mother’s grave.

  “I’m not ready,” she said. For a moment, she thought he’d turn the gun on her. That would be better.

  There was a shot.

  The noise was obscene over the slippery water song. She couldn’t believe Dave had done it, then noticed that his eyes were even wider than before. He was shocked too. It hadn’t been him.

 
; Angela stood there, face pink and dripping with mucus and tears, holding a rifle. Angela shot Rabbit.

  He was still on his feet, swaying like a freshly hit punch bag. There was a small tear in his shirt on his left shoulder, stained brown.

  Close, but no spleen. Angela had missed, like Q knew she would.

  Q was the first to recover. She took the final two steps toward Dave and sent him flying with a quick front-kick. Perfect. He was winded. He wouldn’t be able to move for a minute. She yanked away his gun and turned it on Angela.

  “You don’t want to shoot me,” Q said, strolling toward the sobbing woman. “We’re friends.”

  Angela shook but she held the rifle steady. She couldn’t hit a spleen but she might be able to hit Q, who made a much bigger target.

  “You don’t want to shoot me either!” Angela said.

  “Maybe,” said Q. “But one of us here failed the army psych test. Twice.”

  Angela sagged. Q strode over and took her weapon. Now all she had to do was talk Dave and Angela around to letting Rabbit live. Great, persuasion; that always worked out for her. Maybe she’d hang on to the guns.

  “It’ll be okay,” Q said to Angela, not meeting her friend’s eyes. She slung the second gun around her neck and over her shoulder. Rambo chic. She did a quick check of her remaining ammunition and found plenty, not thinking too hard about what “plenty” might be used for. “He’s gonna get better,” Q said. “I’ll look after you all until he does.”

  Angela screamed.

  “No need to be like that,” Q said. “I can nurture.”

  Angela was staring past Q. She twisted around. Rabbit was eating Dave.

  Her feet prickled from the cold. An afternoon breeze shivered over her wet skin. Clouds slunk across the sky. Would it rain later?

  Rabbit’s mouth was buried in Dave’s belly. Dave, half raised on his elbows, watched the avant-garde film of his body. Q strode over and hit Rabbit with the butt of her gun. The force threw him onto his side, then he rolled back into place. The moist sound of mouth on meat made her gut lurch.

  She struck Rabbit again, twice. She forced him off the body and into the river, then struck again. Rabbit’s nose twitched, red and dripping. She shoved a stout stick in his mouth. He bit it, fingers curled as if in spasm.

  Q planted one boot on the gagged mouth and ripped cordage from around her waist. Rabbit writhed. He had forgotten his other weapons of hands and knees and legs and elbows. He was all tooth now.

  She grabbed his wrists and bound them together. The thin cord tore his skin but there was little blood. She took her foot from his face and sprang away, dragging him upright by the cord. He followed her out of the stream at an awkward angle, head forward, trying to get his mouth nearer to her but too dumb to take the wood from between his lips. She tied his hands to the base of a tree, then wound more cord around his ankles and tied those to another, stringing him out on the ground, unable to move. There was a bullet hole in the back of his shoulder – it must have gone straight through. At least it wouldn’t linger and cause infection.

  Q wrapped her belt around his head to hold the gag in place. It hadn’t been much of a struggle. Maybe a starving man made a weak zombie. Maybe Rabbit didn’t have much fight left in him. The lifelong vegan twitched, face down in the dirt. He must be the only person on the planet whose first taste of meat had been people. If he ever did get better, he’d be really bummed about it.

  Q laughed, belly aching, tears streaming. Reason fled.

  *

  “Death by hippy,” Dave said. He winced.

  “Does it hurt?” Q asked. She knelt by his head, close to Dave but far away from what Rabbit had done to him. She didn’t want to look.

  "I'm tired, that's all." He’d insisted that Q drag him from the stream, even though it made him wail like a baby. A fly settled on his ear. He didn’t wave it off. Q flicked at it but it returned.

  The color ebbed from Dave’s face. He looked like a crushed box. “I always wondered why you set up in the bush on your own,” Q said, for something to say. “Angela said you were trying to find something you’d lost.”

  “I didn’t lose anything,” Dave said. “He left me.”

  That explained a lot. Poor Dave. He was victim of the old story, too. Boy meets boy. Boy loses boy. Boy gets bit.

  The fly crawled around the inside edge of Dave’s ear. It might step right into his skull. Q felt hot acid in her mouth. She waved the fly away again, but it returned.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, thinking of guns with boys’ names. She worried about that fly. Couldn’t he feel it in there? Why didn’t he swat it?

  “Is it bad?” Dave said.

  Q grunted. She wouldn’t check his wound to give him a report. She wouldn’t look at it ever again. “Angela’s getting some stuff to put on it,” she said.

  Dave grunted. “I won’t be one.”

  “No. We’ll fix you.”

  “Help me.” His breath was shallow, his words slim and juicy. “It hurts.”

  Q stood and took a step back. She’d have to look at that inside-out stomach if she was going to aim straight, and she had to aim straight. Two shots, one in the head and one in the spleen. She owed him that.

  She caressed the gun. It was clean and cool.

  Dave grunted. Then he snarled.

  Q stumbled backward. She’d expected it, but not so fast. She’d wanted to spare him the change. She pulled the gun up to her shoulder and fired, aiming wrong but unable to overcome years of training. She hit him with an almost-perfect head shot, just above the right eyebrow.

  Dave’s skull slammed into the dirt, and he was gone. Face slack and empty. Throat no longer flickering with air too heavy to breathe. Dave was dead.

  Q snorted. The head shot finally worked! Perhaps this was Dave’s last gift, to live like a real man, and then die like a proper zombie.

  The body twitched. Hands reached out for support. Zombie Dave was back. She was as quick as thought, unsheathing her bush knife and pushing it into his body, sliding it out, then pushing it in again. Accuracy was impossible, it was too messy down there. She sliced a third time and then glanced at Dave’s face. His eyes were open but no longer looking at anything Q could see.

  “I got bandages, iodine and water,” Angela said, puffing. She dropped them to the ground. “How is he?”

  Q took a few steps away from the body and bent double, mouth open, stomach pulsing. Nothing came. She was already empty.

  Angela prodded Dave with her foot. She whimpered.

  “It’s my fault,” Q said.

  “You were fighting,” Angela said. “Bad things happen in a fight.”

  “It was my fault before that,” Q said. “I brought Rabbit here.”

  “You did.”

  The older woman walked upstream to wash her hands, turning them over and over in the moving water.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The pale woman beckoned.

  Q lay on a sheet of ice. She was so cold she couldn’t move. The pale woman hung in the air before her, glowing in the night like a witch moon. She was in the mouth of the tunnel, calling, but Q would die before she went back to that place.

  It was okay. She didn’t have to move. Something was eating her legs. She soothed herself with the rhythmic vibrations of the chewing.

  Q choked on a sleep-paralyzed shriek and reached down to feel her knees. They were still there. She’d been dreaming.

  She lay next to Angela under the shanty built by Dave while he’d waited for Q and Rabbit to show up and kill him. It was sturdy, made from thick bark laid over an A-frame of branches. He’d even constructed a mattress of bark and leaves. Good old Dave. Always looking after others, in spite of himself.

  Angela slept like she was drugged. Q rolled out of the shelter hoping not to disturb her; she didn’t want to upset the woman any more than she had already. Angela and Rabbit might be the last two people on the planet. One of them hated her and the other wasn’t a person any m
ore.

  She shivered. At least the outbreak hadn’t happened in winter. They might all have died of something old-fashioned and pointless, like pneumonia. She stretched and listened to the coming day. The gurgling stream. Magpies calling to one another, so much sweeter than anything else with wings. The crackle of small paws in leaf mulch. There was another noise too, a humming sound that she couldn’t identify. It didn’t belong to the bush. Maybe it was Angela, snoring.

  There was daylight enough for Q to see the shape of Rabbit’s body, strung out and twitching like a dozing dog. He was silent. Did ghouls sleep? Was he having zombie dreams?

  The hum taunted her.

  “Shit!”

  Q leaped back into the shelter, careless of Angela’s sleep and the structure itself. She rummaged through the small, sad lump of their possessions and found the hotphone. It was set to vibrate and someone was calling her.

  Q pressed the receive button. “Hannah?”

  “You didn’t answer!” Hannah’s voice broke into a six-year-old’s sob of relief and fury.

  “Hannah banana, I’m so glad you’re okay!” Q said, her smile as wide as her face. “I stuffed up, Hannah, I wish you were here—”

  “Q, listen,” Hannah cut in, her voice returning to the brisk tone that could rule the world with color-coded timetables. “I have to tell you something, it’s important—”

  The voice stopped.

  Q shook the phone and held it to her ear.

  Nothing.

  “What’s important?” Q walked outside to get a better signal and paced tight circles. “What is it? Tell me!”

  What if the girl was alone in the attic and, without a voice to hold onto, she’d “fall” like Mr GLEEM?

  What if she’d been bitten and wanted to whisper her dying words, but Q wasn’t there to hear them?

  Q dragged the phone from her ear and studied its blank face. Hannah hadn’t cut out because of the poor signal in this valley or because something had happened to her. The battery had run down. Q’s comms were as dead as Dave.