The End: Surviving the Apocalypse

by Palmer, Richard

  “Who are you talking to?” It was Angela, half awake and already angry.

  “The phone cut out,” Q said. “I gotta find the charger. Help me.”

  Angela sat up. Q could almost smell the hope on her. If Hannah was still alive after all this time, other kids might be, too.

  They searched through the few things that remained of their old life. They turned out pockets and rummaged under the leaf mattress, disregarding spiders and scorpions and things that went sting in the night. There was no charger.

  “Do you remember where you had it last?” Angela said. A mother of three, she was an expert at this game.

  Q thought back to the night of their escape from the attic. Only a day and a half ago, it seemed like a foreign country. Rabbit and Dave had been alive. Pious Kate had been whatever she had been, before she became the creature Q understood but could not defeat. Their flight had not been the strategic retreat Q had planned. She couldn’t remember getting out of the attic at all, let alone what supplies each person took. What if someone else had the charger?

  “I have to search the bodies,” Q said, her voice like glass. Angela did not offer to help.

  She searched Dave first. She had left him where he died. Where she had killed him. She wanted to bury him, but she had nothing to dig with, and the ground was too hard to scrape at with torn nails and tears. They had gone back to prehistoric days, a time before there were rituals for the dead. When bodies were just meat.

  His eyes were closed. Angela must have done that. There was a yellow sprig of wattle on his chest, too.

  Q spat acid, then squatted down and emptied his pockets. She found useful things. String. A multitool. A survival tin that fitted in the palm of her hand. Two muesli bars and four SAS tabs. She should have done this earlier.

  He didn’t have the charger.

  Q walked over to the second corpse, the one that was still moving. Rabbit didn’t seem to be suffering. He was active, making small, silent movements against his ropes, jerking like a fly stuck in a web. He’d be easier to search if she ended it. Life might be easier if she ended him.

  She pulled out her bush knife. He was face down, so aiming left meant true left, not her right. She wouldn’t even need to look in his eyes. It would be easy. Like carving a Sunday roast.

  She tested the edge of her knife with her thumb, careful not to split the skin. Who knew what plague lingered on the blade? She wondered how many times she could kill with it before it would grow dull.

  No. She wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  She put the knife away and crouched down to search him the way he was, live, or undead, or whatever. She reached around, trying not to disturb him. Her fingers pressed into the pockets of his jeans, a quick teen grope. His body was cold. The fabric felt like an empty bed on a winter’s day.

  Rabbit didn’t have the charger or anything else. He’d given it all to her to spare her from having to search his body after the inevitable happened.

  She ran her left hand along his spine. It felt like dirt packed hard, not flesh at all. She let her fingers trace the back of his neck, then rolled them around to rest on his throat. There was no dull knock of a distant heart. She began tapping out a rhythm herself, as if calling through the walls to an unseen prison mate.

  “We have to do it,” Angela said.

  Q jumped up. Angela held a rifle, slack in her hands.

  “He doesn’t have the charger,” Q said. She walked over to the stream to wash her hands, willing Angela to follow and move away from Rabbit.

  The water was fabulous. Q realized she had been sweating. She splashed herself. It was early and the day would be bright and clear and cool, but she was sweating.

  Angela squatted nearby and cupped her hands to drink. “Why’d you bring him back?”

  “Kate took so long,” Q said. “I thought we had more time.”

  Angela accepted this but refused absolution. “Dave took less than ten minutes. Maybe it’s changing. The virus, or whatever it is.”

  Why shouldn’t it change? They had.

  Q drank. The water that slipped down the back of her throat might be her only breakfast. It was odd how she woke less hungry than she used to, even though she was eating so little. Her belly had contracted. She wished her brain would, too. She didn’t need those empty places that filled up when she was quiet.

  “Maybe the difference was in them, not the virus,” Q said, thinking about Pious Kate and Rabbit, together at last. Was Kate still animate? If they left Rabbit tied up here, would she track him down and try to make a better zombie of him?

  “I thought you said we shouldn’t talk about it?” Angela said. “That we’re meant to concentrate on the things we control.” Angela picked up a rock and threw it at the water. She didn’t drop it or skim it. She smashed it as hard as she could. “You must have dropped the charger.”

  Q remembered something Pious Kate had said when they were hiding up the tree the day before the world ended. You can’t leave me behind. I have something you want.

  “I know where it is,” Q said. “Pious Kate took it so I wouldn’t abandon her.” She dandled her fingers in the cold water and watched them turn white as they lost sensation in the flow. “I have to go back.”

  *

  There were three muesli bars and eleven SAS tabs each, plus one extra tab. Guilt made Q give it to Angela.

  That was the end of their supplies. There was nothing more after that.

  Q gave hunger, real hunger, a sidelong glance. She’d been worried about being eaten. She hadn’t believed they might starve. What a stupid way to die.

  No, they wouldn’t starve. She’d shoot a roo, or catch fish. There were trout in the stream; she’d seen their quick, dark movements. She’d hunt as soon as she returned.

  There were two rifles with twenty rounds each, two survival kits and two multitools. Two of everything – so neat. As if it was always meant to end like this, with Q and Angela splitting up and no one else left.

  Q added these things to the two piles, then regarded the box of matches and the flint. Could Angela use a flint? Even if she could, it would be easier for her to keep matches dry than for Q, who had a two-hour upstream scramble ahead. She gave Angela the matches.

  “Don’t,” Angela said.

  “You want the flint?” Q asked. She picked it up and offered to swap.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I thought you hated me,” Q said, stashing her supplies in her pockets.

  “I broke your radio.”

  “What?”

  Angela watched the sky. She wasn’t smiling. It wasn’t a joke. Q didn’t ask why. It might have been to avoid hearing bad news about her family. It might have been something less tangible.

  Q regarded the woman clinically. She searched for a trace of crazy around the eyes, but found none. Angela had lost something too valuable to bear, but she hid it well.

  Q dragged Dave’s body into the bush. His body wouldn’t attract scavengers to the camp – animals knew not to eat the undead. Still, she didn’t want to leave Angela alone with it. It was the best she could do. She made a last check before abandoning him and found spare cordage wrapped through his belt loops. Raiding the body was easier second time around. Dave had gone. This was leftovers.

  “There’s no one else left,” Angela said, trailing behind. She rubbed her sleeve across her face, wiping the expression off with it. Dumb accusation returned.

  “There’s Rabbit,” Q said.

  Angela reached for her gun without thought. Q put her hand on it.

  “Wait till I get back,” she said. “He’ll do no harm.” She might have seen Angela nod, or she might just have wished it. It was the best she would get.

  *

  She had been walking upstream for over an hour and hadn’t yet covered a third of the distance. She had fallen twice, once badly enough to spike her system with adrenaline and leave her gasping. There was a fresh cut on her shin. The chill water tickled it.

  Q ate a m
uesli bar, waiting for the sugar to pick her up in its warm embrace, but it didn’t work. She was beyond sugar now. God help her. Was she weary because her body was tired, or because she didn’t want to go where she had to go?

  She tried false hope. Maybe she’d taken the phone charger with her but dropped it at the mouth of the tunnel. She might not have to go inside. She could retrieve it from the ground and be back with Angela by nightfall.

  But Q knew she hadn’t dropped the charger. She hadn’t taken it in the first place: it had been taken from her.

  The rocks were slick and tendrils of slime trailed in the current. She watched her feet until her eyes hurt, trying to find a rough surface on the protruding stones, searching for some place she would stick. Concentrating on her footing was better than contemplating the unscaleable walls of the canyon to either side, and what lay ahead.

  *

  Bone weary. Q always thought that was an expression for old people, but it she felt it now. Tired to the core. Nothing left.

  Before the outbreak, she always had too much energy, could never sit still, couldn’t function without siphoning off all that excess through exercise. Now she had returned to nature. Not enough to eat. Not enough power to move. Every endeavor checked for energy out versus energy in and whether it was worth the effort. A permanent state of calculating caution.

  Q took a break. It wasn’t as restful as she intended. When her body was still, her mind grew active. What it saw were impossibilities.

  The cliff. The tunnel. Finding the phone charger. Saving Hannah. Killing Rabbit.

  She stood and stamped her numb feet. The break was a bad idea, making her cold and clumsy as well as tired. She swung her arms around her body. The canyon walls loomed, stealing the sunlight.

  She’d be fine. Dave and Angela got down, so that meant she could get back up. Right?

  When she reached her destination, she could have cried. It was a thirty-foot inverted climb – the only place to ascend and be certain of finding Dave’s track. If she went any other way, she’d get lost in the bush.

  It was definitely the right place. For a start, there were two saplings bent out of shape at the top, as if they had taken the weight of a person clambering over the edge. There were several large rocks lying in the stream, cracked and showing their clean insides as if kicked there by scrabbling feet. There were deep boot prints in the dirt at the base of the cliff.

  What clinched it, of course, were the words, “This is the spot,” drawn in a large, circular hand with a piece of burnt wood and an arrow pointing upward.

  Good old dead Dave. Always planning ahead.

  If it were a climbing wall, Q wouldn’t hesitate. She counted five handholds and two cracks she could wedge a toe or fist into. The problem was that she had no harness. If she fell, she was on her own. If she broke a leg, she’d starve to death. Unless she had the guts to shoot herself first.

  She considered her ten feet of cordage. She could try making a harness and tying herself off as she climbed so she wouldn’t fall too far, but it wouldn't reach the whole way up and she’d still have to do most of the climb unharnessed. What was the point of a little bit of safety? It only made you careless.

  She’d save the cordage for the way down.

  Q placed her hands on the cool, crumbling rock at the base of the cliff. Standing this close, she could see sky above but no end to the cliff face. She hadn’t felt like this since Linda died.

  Harden up.

  Q reached her right arm above her and found a hold. She wedged her left foot into a crack and heaved. The muscles on her arms raised their hackles. The fat had melted away during their siege, leaving a crystalline core.

  She climbed as fast as she could. Reaching the top meant speed. Pausing to ponder her next move while supporting her body weight would exhaust her, and that would finish her off.

  Either that – or a hasty mistake – would.

  No. She’d climb fast. Better an end so quick she didn’t see it coming than the long trembling fatigue before the fall.

  About halfway up, Q hit the wall.

  It was a horizontal overhang that meant she couldn’t use her legs. She’d have to hang from one hand and reach out on faith with the other. She braced against the cliff, wiped sweat from her hands onto her pants one at a time, and caught her breath. Her arms had that dull ache that precedes the shakes.

  Dave was dead. Rabbit might as well be. Her dad was either gone or turned, because what chance did an overweight drunk have? Hannah was a hundred miles away and had become something so disturbing, Q almost wished she hadn’t made it. The world was over. The few left were in denial, trying to postpone the apocalypse with mail-order survival kits.

  Standing flush against the rock like a skink, Q had a flash of her mother’s face at the end. Dark eyes, chest caved in. Pain, so much pain, but also fear.

  It hadn’t been fear of the disease or of what had happened to her body, or even fear of more pain to come. Linda accepted all of those things in the last weeks. It had been fear that it would stop.

  That was death. Linda hadn’t wanted it.

  Neither did Q. She reached out and found a grip with her right hand. Her feet left rock.

  She clung, arms trembling, fingers burning. She had to release her left hand and hang on with only her right hand to move forward. She didn’t know what she’d find. If there was no hold, she was finished. She’d be a pile of wet stuff far below.

  Q let go and reached over the edge. Her fingers found loose dirt on the upper side of the overhang. She tried to dig into it but her hand slid back. She was going to fall.

  She found the edge through torn skin. It was firm. A rock, protruding like a fist. She wrapped her fingers around it, braced and muscled up.

  Q lay on a ledge, her legs draped over the void, her body on solid ground. She rolled over onto her butt. She could see the top.

  Easy as.

  *

  She stopped dead. Someone else had stopped deader.

  Q was halfway between the cliff and the tunnel. Dave’s track was nothing more than a roo trail but it made the journey twice as fast and she was buoyed by her victory over the cliff.

  Now that victory drained away. There was a corpse beside the trail. It wasn’t moving, which meant it didn’t get there on its own. If it had, it should be moving still. Zombies don’t die unless they are killed, and who was there left to kill a zombie?

  She kept her distance, no longer trusting the dead body to be harmless. The bush was too dense to see anyone hiding in it. Boot prints and broken sticks and torn-off bits of tree indicated that others had used this path. Dave and Angela may have left the signs yesterday, but Angela had said they’d met no ghouls on their way. How did this one get here?

  Was there a zombie slayer around? A crazy sole survivor who’d lived through things they shouldn’t have? Anyone alone four weeks into the outbreak had a gun and good aim. The back of her neck itched.

  Q hummed a tune from a musical. It was a smart thing to do, because she couldn’t remember how the chorus went, and in any case, she hated musicals more than Pious Kate’s lectures on charitable giving. By the end, she was annoyed rather than afraid, which was a far more useful emotion.

  Plus, if someone was watching her, they would know she wasn’t death warmed up, even if she looked it. Monsters don’t hum. Not in tune, anyway.

  The body hadn’t moved for a full five minutes. Should she go straight past? It could be a trap. Lure in the loner, then bang! Barbecue goodness.

  Q fought paranoia. If someone wanted to shoot her, they’d do it regardless of her next move. She might as well find out what happened to this corpse.

  She walked to the body and crouched beside it. It sat on the ground, legs straight out in front, back stiff as if conscious of posture. It had been a zombie. Its gray belly bulged out between missing shirt buttons, exuding aniseed and rotten meat. It stank far worse than any she’d encountered, like yesterday’s roadkill on a summer day. The skin w
as intact but the body shrunken, as if it had rotted from the inside out. Four fingers on the right hand were missing. The wounds were old and dry and had never been infected. They must be what had turned it in the first place, but they were not the cause of this second death.

  Q couldn’t see any other damage except for small puncture wounds, no doubt from stumbling through the bush into trees and rocks. There were no large cuts on the creature’s head or torso. No bullet holes. No knife gashes. She picked up a stick and pushed the block of flesh until it sagged forward. A fresh wave of stench engulfed her and she stepped back, choking for air, then checked its back and the underside of its legs.

  There was nothing. The thing had just died.

  Q threw away her stick. Had this lump of flesh grown as tired as she was and stopped of its own accord? Weird. What would Apocalypse Z say?

  Why was she even thinking that? She’d abandoned the book when she’d decided to swap the rules for living in a zombie world with those for keeping Rabbit around as a taxidermist’s ode to her dead boyfriend. Maybe she’d chosen wrong, but she’d chosen. Now she had to think for herself.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Q was back at the tunnel, wishing for another mountain to climb.

  The metal grate sealed the opening like a clenched jaw. Moist sounds poured out. She tried not to think about damp feet shuffling.

  It had taken all day to get here and now it was dark. She ate one of her SAS tabs and wondered what would happen if she went back to Angela without going inside. She could camp at the cliff and watch the sunrise. She could tell Angela she hadn’t found the charger. She could forget the sound of Hannah’s voice.

  No. Hannah had to talk to her. Q wouldn’t let down her friend again.

  She dragged open the metal grate. It growled across the rock. She didn’t feel brave, but she had to go in, because the alternative would destroy her. Maybe that’s all courage was: all other options removed; nowhere to go but forward.

  Q stepped inside.

  *

  It was like she had never left.

  The world was full of water. It made her clumsy and weighed her down. Every step displaced more and sent it sloshing against the walls. Q couldn’t tell if the sounds were hers, or if they belonged to something else. She switched on the torch she'd brought from Dave’s camp, and swore. She should have brought spare batteries as well. Its weak beam illuminated a few feet before fading, and showed nothing at all through the murky water below.