What kind of zombie died twice?
Q smelled burnt hair. She was surprised Kate’s corpse had any left to give and felt a moment of irritation. That woman was distracting her even now, when she was on the verge of working it out.
That was it. Pious Kate was the key. Almost vegan, she took a long time to turn, but she ate beef jerky when no one watched. It meant she would not recover.
This was an outbreak of mad cow zombie flu. It infected everyone bitten, but was worse for the meat-eaters, and it worked in stages. Its victims became living zombies, sick people who could be killed. When they died, they came back as the undead, and only a spleen shot would do, until decay took them. Even the undead were not eternal.
That meant some zombies weren’t dead yet. They were just very, very sick, like Rabbit. And some of them might get better.
Q shrieked. She’d set herself on fire! She slapped at the flames in her hair and leaped back from the scorching heat, then curled up in laughter.
Rabbit would be okay. All he needed was time.
She settled into the dirt at a safe distance to watch the fire lose its light and learned something else. Zombies don’t explode. They melt away like stale grief.
Chapter Thirty-four
Q woke cold and full of joy.
Her back hurt from the damp ground she’d slept on. She stretched and wriggled, then crawled out of the bark shanty she’d built to honor Dave. She did star jumps and push-ups to force blood into her limbs and found she had pre-Z energy. It pulsed through her. She ran.
Running downhill was stupid and pointless – she might sprain an ankle or tread on a brown snake. But the sun rose each day and that was pointless, too. She ran.
Yesterday, trees snatched at her with bone-colored limbs. Today they were the guardians of her route, welcoming her, granting safe passage. The sun warmed dark places. She ran.
Q reached the cliff, glowing and breathless. She unslung her cordage. No fumbling, fear-soaked climb for her. This time she’d fly.
She whooped down the length of her rope and dropped the last few feet, landing like a cat, foot sure and smug. Angela needed to know what Q had found out, because Angela’s kids were vegan from birth. If they were bitten, they might get better. Q couldn’t wait to tell her and to charge up the phone she’d left at camp to tell Hannah. The world wasn’t over. The pandemic would end naturally, like all pandemics. It would burn itself out, leaving rotten corpses by the track and survivors everywhere else.
Moving in the same direction as the water was so much easier than walking against it had been yesterday. She went too fast to get cold, letting her momentum carry her even as her footing slid beneath her. She wasn’t worried about preserving herself. If anything happened, she’d heal. That’s what people did.
Q was back at camp a few hours after sunrise. She cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed. There was no reply.
She leaped out of the water. She could see the bark shanty and the unlit campfire, but no Angela. Clouds smothered the sky.
Where had Angela gone? Why didn’t she answer?
Q’s swollen heart shriveled. Had Angela been attacked? Or had she left without knowing it wasn’t the end of the world after all? She checked the clearing, searching for a note or a sign of what happened. She yelled again, making herself louder than the stream and the swell of wind in the trees, louder than the white noise of living things. She must be too far away, or dead. Otherwise she’d respond.
Q walked toward the spot where she had left Rabbit. She wasn’t sure what she’d find but her stomach twisted at the options. Her feet dragged. Angela didn’t know that Rabbit was human and would get better. Perhaps, deciding Q would never return, she’d taken out her rage and cut him to pieces. Or, thinking of her children and the hopelessness of her situation, the slightly crazy woman had dropped the qualifier and flipped completely, letting Rabbit bite her. She could be grunting sweet nothings in his ear. Maybe she’d gone old school and shot him, then shot herself.
How many bodies would Q find? She should never have left Angela alone.
When Q reached the site, it was less horrific than she’d feared, but more sinister. There were no bite-sized Rabbit slices, no bloodless Rabbit full of holes. There was no Rabbit.
Q called again, yelling for them both. Her words crept away through the undergrowth.
She scanned the dirt for signs. The best scenario was that Rabbit broke free but did no harm, and Angela was searching for him. Would Q be able to track them down before they damaged themselves or one other? If Angela were bitten, would she get better? Was she vegan enough?
Q’s heart fell. There had been no escape. Shreds of cordage lay in the scuffed earth. Their ends were eventhey had been cut.
Angela set Rabbit free. Why would she do that?
So that she could hunt him down. Rabbit was a zombie now and they had killed her babies. It was no relief to know that her babies were zombies too; it made it worse.
Alone and devastated, Angela must have turned to blood sports for solace. Q would have empathized but for her choice of target.
“Damn hippies,” she said. “No natural outlet for aggression and what happens? They crack in the first month of a perfectly straightforward zombie apocalypse.”
There was a gunshot. Q ran toward it.
*
She found Rabbit first and could have kissed him, but didn’t, because she didn’t want her face eaten off. She hid behind a rough-barked tree instead.
He moved in that jointless shuffle that made Q think of arthritis and too much beer. His skin was gray and lifeless. It had been for weeks. How could she have been so mistaken? Everyone looks like death warmed up when they have the flu and this was very bad flu. How many people across the country had failed to find a pulse in their loved ones and killed them, not realizing that a heart can whisper as well as beat? Even experts get it wrong.
The virus slowed down the system and the spleen worked overtime to filter out the foreign stuff. Those exposed to toxic meat sickened fastest and died, their spleen overloaded, but those who had never been in contact got better. In the meantime, the metabolism dropped, the skin went cold, the movements slowed, and everybody tried to kill the patient.
Angela could probably explain it all in medical terms, if Q could only find her. Where was she?
The cannibal cravings were strange. Maybe Rabbit got that one right. You are what you eat, and the sick just wanted to feel human again. The ultimate comfort food.
Another shot fired from the northwest. Q pulled her eyes off Rabbit and scanned the dappled bush. There were too many dim shapes to find one that stood out, and Angela was probably lying down, motionless, like Q had shown her. Deadly and impossible to spot.
Angela was about to kill Q’s boyfriend. She’d shoot him with a song in her heart, not even realizing he could be killed, thinking that he was already dead.
Q stepped into the open. “Angela!” she said. “I’ve worked it out. Sheath was right. It's Mad Cow Zombie Flu. Rabbit’s alive, he’s just sick. Infected.”
There was another shot. Q flinched away from splintered wood. A hole appeared in a trunk a few feet away. Who was Angela shooting at?
“Stop!” Q said to the hostile bush. “You can’t shoot him! It’d be murder! It’d be wrong.”
“Like killing and eating people is wrong?”
Q twisted. The voice had come from her left but she couldn’t pinpoint it. Angela couldn’t be far, she was a terrible shot at long range. But how could Q fight her? Angela had a gun. Q had none. She’d left it at camp. Idiot! She had a knife, but the other woman was too far away to strike and knew enough to keep her distance. Q was helpless. The only thing she could do was talk.
She’d have to explain the situation so clearly that even Angela, enraged and desperate, accepted it. And Q couldn’t rely on the old classroom fallbacks of logic, clarity and the announcement that she knew all three pressure points responsible for bowel control – Angela was too fa
r away for that to work. She was beyond bowel control.
Q had nothing in her favor but the truth. She’d have to call on all her powers of assistant teaching to save Rabbit. God help them both.
How would Hannah explain it to the Kindy Koalas?
“It was sick people doing awful things,” Q said. “I looked awful last time I had gastro and I did things I’d rather no one knew about. That’s all it is. Some die and become real zombies. Some get better. Rabbit’s recovering.”
If the older woman moved, she’d spot her. Q didn’t know if she could reach her fast enough but she could try, so she searched as she talked. “Sheath was right,” Q said. “It’s a virus. We don’t have to kill any more.”
The thud of a bullet in wood, ripping through a tree behind Rabbit. Angela had fired three shots, maybe more. The .22 had five. There was a chance Q could get to her while Angela reloaded, but only if she knew where the woman was.
“I found a dead one in the bush,” Q said. “It rotted away. Don’t you see? That’s why we haven’t seen any zombies down here. They’ve all died already, or recovered. There are no more to hunt us. Your kids might be better too. Don’t you want to see your kids?”
Angela stepped out into the open and, like Q’s favorite therapy inkblot, morphed from a tree into a nutjob holding a gun. Q smiled at her to show that all would be forgotten and they could be friends.
The other woman did not smile back. “I lost everyone,” Angela said. “Why shouldn’t you?” She took aim at Rabbit.
Finally, the man did something helpful. It wasn’t dignified, but it was human.
“Angela, stop! Use your eyes!” Q said.
Angela paused, finger on the trigger.
Q pointed. “Have you ever seen an evil undead corpse scratching its butt?”
Angela lowered the gun. Then she laughed so hard, she completely forgot to kill Q’s boyfriend.
Q walked across and took the weapon from her hands, then put a reassuring hand on Angela’s shoulder. “Now stop being a crazy person and come help me tie up my boyfriend before he eats someone else.”
*
Beepbeepbeep.
“Hannah! I’m sorry I took so long, I had to climb a mountain and go through a tunnel and fight a zombie and stop a rampaging mother—”
“Quiet!” Hannah’s voice was cold. “You lied to me, Q,” the girl said.
What had happened? Was Hannah the last one left? If so, what had she done to the others and was she too far gone to save? “I tried, I did what I could,” Q said.
“Hippies aren’t evil,” Hannah said in a small voice. “They’re the only ones getting better.”
Q put her hand across the mouthpiece so Hannah would not hear her nervous giggle. The girl was deadly serious, as well as plain deadly. “You’re right,” she said to her friend. “I’ll never lie to you again.”
“Liar. See you soon.”
Epilogue
Q drank in the familiar classroom aroma. Chalk dust. Last week’s forgotten apple, gone to slush in a schoolbag (that was Sandy). The tinge of almost-but-not-quite-made-it urine (Sandy again). It was a different classroom from the one Q had trained in but it beat eucalyptus and fear.
The chairs and desks were gone, smashed up and used for weapons or barricades. Many of the windows were boarded up. The carpet had a Rorschach design that scrubbing would never remove. On her good days, Q pretended the stains were spilled coffee.
Crayon pictures covered the walls. Most featured headless monsters or Mommy dearest, arms outstretched and teeth bared. In the old days, pictures like these would have been bundled into the school counselor’s pigeonhole with urgent Post-it notes affixed, but now they were proudly posted by the blackboard.
There wouldn’t be much point putting these in Natolia’s pigeonhole. Natolia had had both degrees removed. With an axe.
It was a different class, too. There were fifteen children instead of thirty. Mrs Mason would have been thrilled that she finally had a manageable class size, but for the method used. Besides, Mrs Mason could no longer thrill. The Blue Ogre was no more.
The class was broader than in pre-Z days. Q taught ages four to ten, and the group drew from more suburbs than it once had. There weren’t that many children left. They couldn’t come from too far away, though; the new students had to get to class by foot or by bike. It was surprising how far a five-year-old could walk these days without complaining.
Kids didn’t complain much any more. They were a different species from the one Q remembered. Perhaps it was all the beans.
The change in classroom snack was also stark. No more cartoon-themed chip packets, no more food coloring, no more foil wrappers. Nothing chicken-flavored or beef-style. People ate apples and oranges and home-baked bread.
Gone, too, were the fat kids. Z had cured the obesity epidemic in a few short days. Any child who couldn’t run fast had lost twenty pounds instantly, usually in the form of a leg. It was a nutritionist’s dream, if that nutritionist were a psychopath willing to sacrifice two-thirds of the population to improve the average body mass index.
Q shared her observations with Hannah during recess.
“Steve says it’s like what happened after the blockade in Cuba, when America cut trade relations,” Hannah said. Steve was Hannah’s new dad. Hannah liked him a lot. He told her interesting things and had a great armory.
“I wish I’d studied history,” Q said.
Hannah prompted her with an encouraging smile.
“Commie zombies under siege,” Q said. “That must have been cool.”
“That’s not what the Cuban blockade was,” Hannah said.
“I’m kidding!” Q said. Hannah smiled, pleased to have made her point. Q continued. “I doubt they were still commies after they turned.”
Hannah tried another tack. “Steve says the zombies brought a class revolution,” she said. “The countries and people that ate industrial meat were the rich ones. The poor ate beans and rice and got better.”
Q sighed. “The damn hippies inherited the earth. Who would have thought it?” She checked the wind-up clock in the classroom and called the kids back inside for their next lesson. They entered in orderly fashion and settled on the floor without prompting. The outbreak had fixed all former discipline problems. Q only had to begin counting and everyone fell silent. She never said what would happen if she reached “three.” She didn’t have to. Their imaginations had flesh.
They sat in family groups, although the families themselves had changed. Some bright spark had decided to billet orphans with bereaved parents, creating new sets of siblings overnight. The system had its problems. There was rejection, but only ever from the parents. Angela had marched her two weeping billets back one morning, claiming she didn’t have time to look after them and her work was more important. She had signed up to the virology team shortly after they got back to Sydney, but Q didn’t think work was the problem.
It didn’t matter. There were enough parents to go around.
The kids were more resilient than the adults. Even the orphans did okay after their first couple of months. Children were used to living in a world split between fantasy and nightmare and it was easier for them to accept the monsters and move on. Especially once they were taught how to make an accurate spleen shot.
Q and Rabbit and Angela finally made it back to Sydney after three weeks trekking through the bush and a day of hitchhiking. Q had never been so pleased to see a ute full of dirt-stained travelers as she was when they heard the first engine. But she’d soon found she was an orphan, too. She’d expected it. She never discovered what happened to her father, but she hoped it was quick. She put out a hand to pat the kelpie and was rewarded with furious tail thumps. The dog’s life had improved immeasurably. Pets were welcome in the classroom now, and after only a few months, Q’s kelpie was already reading at a border collie level.
Q had tried to register herself as an orphan but was put in the “foster parent” column by mistake. She na
rrowly avoided the allocation of three toxic boys before removing herself. Maybe it hadn’t been a mistake. Maybe the world was telling her it was time to grow up.
She shook herself. Speaking of growing up, she was meant to be in charge here. She glanced to her left.
Rabbit in ripped jeans. Lean and lanky, he had regained his olive glow. The old bullet wound in his left shoulder hurt when it rained and his face was scarred, but his smile was as it had always been. The road back had been hardest on him and he had not complained. Half starved, drained from near-fatal flu, he had crossed rivers and climbed mountains.
He turned toward her and mouthed words she didn’t catch. That was fine. She’d make him repeat them that night. Being adult had compensations.
“All right, you lot,” Q said. She glanced at her lesson plan. “We’re doing music for the next hour. Pay attention or you’ll be on blanks at the firing range this afternoon.”
She handed over to Rabbit and returned to her thoughts. Hannah had told her the outbreak was the biggest global population drop since the Spanish Flu, but with way more deaths from head shots. Q’s mountaintop theory had been largely correct. Once infected, the virus lodged in the spleen and took control of the nervous system to cause zombie-like symptoms in the living. If a patient died, they became the walking dead. Viral control of the nervous system continued post-mortem until the body rotted away.
But the epidemic wasn't as devastating as the conditions that went with it. More people died from gunshots and exposure and starvation than from infection. Apparently, this was normal. In war, the enemy was rarely the biggest killer. There had also been murders, looting and abuse of all kinds. Prosecutions were considered, but what was the point? They couldn’t spare the people.
Q considered her next few days of teaching. It was easier now she had a full lesson plan for the term. She’d been asked to turn in this incriminating document and had done so with misgivings. Pre-Z, such requests always lead to quiet, serious discussions in Mr Macklin’s office with a witness present, but this time, her plan had been studied and then copied for general distribution.
The End: Surviving the Apocalypse Page 27