by Shane Carrow
I threw my own weight against it, undead hands reaching around to claw at my clothing. Zhou dropped down after me through the hole, clutching his Steyr Aug, and he pushed it into the gaps at the edge of the barricade and started shooting. Jess lowered herself more carefully down into the living room.
“Help Zhou!” I yelled, pointing. A bookshelf against a window had toppled over, zombies pushing through broken boards, and Zhou was opening fire on them at close range, ripping their heads apart, the gory splatter smearing itself across the walls and the floor.
Rahvi and Cavalli had managed to wedge the couch back into place, and I left them to handle it while I ran back into the corridor where the door to the basement was. Sergeant Blake had procured a log, of all things – maybe there was a fireplace in another room – and was slamming it into the door. “Sarge!” I screamed. “We could really use a hand out here!”
Blake looked over at me in frustration, then threw the log aside, drew his Browning and followed me back into the living room. The others were still fighting a losing battle, pushing the barricades back with their own strength and shooting at the approaching zombies through the gaps and cracks in the windows. Blake and I helped Cavalli push a table back up against a window. “Go check the other rooms,” Blake yelled at me. “Make sure they’re secure!”
I did a quick circuit of the house, checking the bedrooms and the bathroom. They were all okay – still with undead slamming themselves against the windows, but the furniture shoved up against them was holding. The main assault seemed to be concentrated against the living room and entry hall, where we were. Because they could sense us there? Because they knew that’s where the food was?
With nearly all of us down in the house – Jones, I noticed, was nowhere to be seen –pushing against the barricades, shooting at the undead, reloading weapons for each other, we managed to hold. It was a long night. A very long night, one of the longest in my life. By the time it was over we were splattered in gore and blood, utterly exhausted and almost completely out of ammunition. There were quite a few close calls. Zhou was nearly dragged right out through a window when he strayed too close and was grabbed, and at one point some of them broke into the bathroom and made it into the hallway before Blake, Rahvi and myself managed to push back the tide. We used every stick of remaining furniture in the house to shore up the barricades, we fashioned curtain rods and chair legs into makeshift pikes to push them back, and we came close to giving up and fleeing onto the roof a hundred times over.
But around 5:30 in the morning, when the first grey light of dawn started filtering inside, the attacks began to ebb. The hunting cries grew quieter. Through the gaps in the barricades, outside in the grey twilight, hundreds of undead corpses were strewn across the ground. There were still plenty of zombies out there, but they weren’t exactly a horde anymore.
As the sun rose, and we began to mop up the last few zombies throwing themselves at the farmhouse, Sergeant Blake and I returned to the basement door and yelled out for the farmer and his family. We told them that it was safe to come out, that the undead were mostly gone, that if they wanted to survive they’d need to leave with us today, before another horde came along from Tamworth tonight. We received no reply, so we kept battering the door down. It took us about half an hour, but eventually it broke open.
We entered the basement cautiously, wary of receiving a shotgun blast to the face. But it was completely silent. In the small blue beam of Blake’s LED flashlight, we found the farmer and his family – his wife, and four daughters, ranging from a toddler to a girl my age. They were all dead, sitting against the far wall, shotgun blasts to their head. The farmer had killed himself last of all, pointing the barrel straight up into his mouth, spraying his brains and most of his face over the wall behind him.
“Jesus Christ,” Blake murmured.
I stared at the bodies. Felt nothing. I used to feel a horrible, sick sadness whenever I came across suicides like this. That seems strange and far away now. I don’t feel sadness anymore for people like that. Just pity. Pity for people who can’t survive in this world, who would rather die than stand on their feet and face down what’s coming. People who could somehow make it this far only to give up.
It’s a few hours after dawn, now. We’ve killed off most of the horde, and the farmhouse is surrounded by hundreds of corpses. Jones stayed up on the roof all night. He didn’t have it in him to come down – the fear won out. Blake won’t even look at him.
Jess, Zhou and Cavalli are sitting on the roof picking off the few stray zombies that still wander across the paddocks towards us. The farmer was right – they do seem to prefer hunting at night. Are there hundreds more of them, lurking in the forest between here and Tamworth, waiting for darkness to attack? Or was it just coincidence that they stopped arriving around dawn? Was that just how long it took for us to wear their local numbers down?
Blake, Rahvi and myself are in the basement, going through the family’s supplies. They have very little ammunition (and so do we, after last night - I’m personally down to eight bullets for my Steyr and only two clips in my Browning) but there’s food and water enough to last out a siege. I guess that’s what they were planning on doing. Wrong move, anyway.
We intend to gather as much as we can carry and move out within the hour. The family has a map of the region indicating a small airstrip not too far south of here.
I don’t want to get my hopes up. I don’t even want to write down the word I’m thinking of.
But at the moment, that airstrip looks like our next stop.
October 9
2.00am
A long day of travel, on zero sleep. Picking our way south across fields and farmland, through patches of bushland, feeling like I was hallucinating. Every time we stopped to rest I’d nod off almost immediately, only to find Blake shaking me awake ten minutes later. My eyes felt like they were made of glue.
We all felt like that, I guess, except Blake and Rahvi and Cavalli. Or if they did feel like that, they soldiered on regardless. I don’t know how they do it.
As we went on through the day we encountered more zombies. We’d crossed the highway and Tamworth was off to the north-west, now, a distant pillar of smoke. But the zombies weren’t just coming from that direction. They were from the east, from the north, from the south. All over the place. We must have shot fifty of them across the course of the day. It was like… well, it was like normal again. Like being anywhere other than New England.
In the late afternoon we came to the airstrip, and spent an hour lying on a low hilltop, watching it from afar. It was about as basic as they come: a long strip of graded dirt, a hangar and a few sheds at one end. There was a low wire fence surrounding it, I guess to stop cows wandering onto the runway.
It was also occupied. Sitting at one end of the runway was a blue and white turboprop that Blake identified as a Beechcraft King Air. Five ragged soldiers – filthy and blood-stained uniforms, some with bandages around their legs or arms – were busy organising a departure. Three of them were tinkering around with the plane, occasionally testing the engine and firing the propellers up. The other two were rummaging through the sheds, throwing anything useful they found into duffel bags and backpacks. Parked nearby was a beat-up Toyota Hilux, which I guess they’d arrived in. And they’d seen some action – only one of the ute’s windows was still intact, and there were bullet holes all along its left side.
We were all thinking the same thing. A plane was like mana from heaven. Even a little turboprop like that could have us back in RAAF Base Wagga in a few hours. And the way Sergeant Blake was so leisurely watching the situation through the scope of his Steyr was driving me nuts.
“The longer we sit up here watching them the more chance there is they’ll just finish up and fly off,” I said, as the sun began to drop towards the western mountains.
“We can just as easily stop that by shooting them,” Blake said, without looking up from the scope.
“Bit of a
stretch from up here,” I said. The ridge we were on was a few hundred metres away.
“I said we, not you,” Blake said. Meaning him and Rahvi. And to be fair, if I had to put money on it, I’d bet they probably could hit targets from that far with a Steyr.
“So why don’t we just take them out now, then?” I asked, shifting uncomfortably in the grass.
“You know how to fly a plane?” Blake said.
“Well... no.”
“Me neither,” Blake said. “So we’ll have to take one of them alive.”
“The one who’s the pilot.”
“Obviously. Problem is figuring out which one that is.”
We stared down at them a little while longer. “Wish Tobias was here,” Rahvi said.
“He knows how to fly?”
“Yeah. Not for the ADF, he just used to do it on weekends. But he’s the one who flew us out of Darwin to Christmas Island. Original pilot got eaten. Didn’t have the wind for that final sprint to the plane.”
“Sounds like good times,” I said. “But he’s not here. So what are we going to do?”
“We can rule out the two guys by the sheds,” Blake said. “It’ll be one of the three who are actually in or around the plane.” He shifted on his stomach, slung the Steyr over his back and turned to look at us all, lying in the long grass. “All right. Me, Rahvi, Cavalli and Matt will move down there and engage them. Jones and Zhou, you two can provide cover from this position. Try to take out the two hostiles by the sheds – do not open fire on the three by the plane, we need them all alive and you’re too far to shoot with precision. We’ll take care of that. Ground team, aim for the legs. A captured pilot won’t be much good to us if he’s got a broken arm or a bullet in his gut. Matt, you stick with me, and…”
Jess interrupted. “Why don’t we just talk to them?”
Everybody stared at her. “What?” Cavalli said.
“They’re deserters, right?” she said. “Running away. Otherwise they wouldn’t be fuelling up a plane to escape.”
“What’s your point?” Blake said.
“Why do you assume they’ll be hostile? They’re leaving, we’re leaving. They might not even have anywhere to fly to. They might just be trying to get out, and figure that out later. So if you go down there, talk to them, tell them you can take them south to a safe airbase…” She trailed off, and shrugged.
Cavalli snorted, and Rahvi was rolling his eyes. “Can it, you two,” Blake said. “She has a point. But Jess – sorry, but it’s too risky. It might look like they’re deserting, but we don’t know that for sure. They might still be in contact with Armidale or Tamworth or wherever the seat of power is now. And if they are deserting, that doesn’t mean they’ll be trustworthy. Far from it. So we can’t risk it.”
“So you’re just going to kill them?” she said.
“Some of them,” Blake said. “Come on. Let’s move.”
Blake, Rahvi, Cavalli and myself crawled down the hillside on our stomachs, sticking to the long grass, shifting our rifles ahead of ourselves. I still felt terribly exposed, but I guess we had Zhou and Jones covering us from the ridge if anyone spotted us and opened fire. We could hear the whine of the Beechcraft engine, rising and falling as the soldiers tested the propellers. As we approached the airstrip and crawled beneath the fence, Blake made a series of hand gestures, directing Rahvi and Cavalli around to the south-east, while he and I went to the south-west to take on the three men at the plane.
We slithered into a low ditch only a stone’s throw from where the plane was, squelching along through an inch of water and wet weeds. The hum of the propellers was still drifting across on the late afternoon air, the sun dropping down low in the west, casting long shadows across the runway – setting on our last day in New England, if we were lucky.
Blake motioned for me to stay put, and kept crawling along the ditch to take up a flanking position. I eased my head up slightly, peering out of the ditch between the stalks of weeds. Only one of the soldiers was still outside the plane, a lieutenant in his forties with a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around one bicep. He was watching the propellers and making hand signals to the two men who were inside, in the cockpit. He had a pistol holstered at his belt, but his rifle was propped up against a stack of crates a few metres away with the rest of his gear. Careless.
Eventually the engines were switched off again and the two other soldiers emerged from the plane. I’d kept my sights centred on the lieutenant’s kneecap, my heart beating faster and breath quickening. We were all waiting on Blake’s first shot.
About ten seconds after the two men left the plane, Blake opened fire from somewhere off to my right, a bullet slamming into one of their thighs. The soldier screamed and stumbled, but before he even hit the ground Blake had fired again and the shin of the second man burst open, revealing a flash of white bone before he too crumpled and fell.
I squeezed my own trigger and the lieutenant’s kneecap cracked open in a deeply satisfying spray of blood and bone fragments, his leg twisting, dropping to the ground with a roar of pain. Blake and I burst out of the ditch and darted towards the plane, our rifles held ready in case the crippled men tried to return fire. One of them had drawn his sidearm but with pinpoint precision Blake shot it right out of his hand, along with a few of his fingers. One of the other men, in spite of his bleeding thigh, was dragging himself along by his hands towards the lieutenant’s Steyr, propped up against the crates. I dashed towards him and reached him as he was only a few metres away, slamming the butt of my rifle into the back of his skull, feeling something give, smashing it into him again and again and again as he tried to curl up and shield himself with his hands, shrieking in pain, but I was knocking them away, aiming the butt for his head, hitting him, hurting him –
Until suddenly Sergeant Blake was roughly grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me away and I was whirling around in full savagery, ready to hit him instead.
Blake grabbed the butt of my rifle with both his hands, bringing it to a halt a few inches away from his face. I stared at him furiously for a moment, suddenly aware of just how heavily I was breathing. The expression on his face was inscrutable.
“Stop it,” he said. “He’s dead.”
I looked at the other two. The lieutenant had pulled himself up into a sitting position, his back against the nose wheel of the plane, clutching his kneecap and grimacing as low exhalations of pain wheezed out his mouth. The other soldier, a private, was lying on his back in the dirt and gripping his wounded right hand with his left one. A few of his fingers had been blown right off – one was hanging raggedly by a thread. Blood was flowing freely down his arm, soaking into his sleeves, and the wound in his leg was spilling out more precious blood into the dirt of the runway. He was hyperventilating, going into shock.
I looked down at the man I’d been beating. His head was a sticky mess of blood. Blake was right – he wasn’t breathing. I’d killed him.
Rahvi and Cavalli came sprinting towards us, around the plane, rifles still in hand. “Sarge!” Rahvi yelled. “We took out the other two, but one of them got a radio call off before we took him out. He was calling for reinforcements!”
“Fuck,” Blake swore. He turned to the ridge and waved up to Jones, Zhou and Jess. “Get your asses down here!” he yelled, before stalking over to the lieutenant and standing above him, looming, blotting out the sun. “Who are you?” he said.
The lieutenant just groaned in pain. Blake reached down and grabbed his hair. “Who are you?” he said again.
“Conley,” the man wheezed. “Second Lieutenant Conley, 2nd Battalion, New England Army...”
“What are you doing here? Are you deserting?”
“No,” he said. “We were on our way to Moree to reinforce...” He stopped for a moment, screwing his face up in pain; I glanced down at his kneecap, a disgusting mess of shredded bone and gore. “Reinforce the push against Eddings. Resupply. Convoy got hit by the dead...”
“Are you the pil
ot?” Blake asked, but the lieutenant was lost in another writhing spasm of pain. “Are you the pilot?” Blake repeated.
“Yes,” the lieutenant managed. “Yes.”
Blake squatted down next to him, looking him in the eye. “I’m going to make you a deal. If you fly us out of here, I can promise you that you won’t be harmed any further. We need to get to RAAF Base Wagga. It’s still operating. We can get you medical treatment there, you and the kid.” Blake nodded over at the private he’d shot, who was definitely in shock now, still numbly clutching his mangled hand. “All you have to do is fly us south. Can you do that?”
Conley looked at the private, looked down at his kneecap. It wasn’t really any choice at all. Like this, they wouldn’t last half an hour on their own out here. “Yes,” he said. “Deal.”
“Good,” Blake said. “Is the plane ready to fly?”
Conley shook his head. “Needs fuelling. There’s a tanker. In the hangar. Wheel it out, that’s all it needs. Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
Blake stood up. “Rahvi! There’s a fuel tank in the hangar. We need to bring it back here. Cavalli, Matt, start moving their stuff inside the plane. And for Christ’s sake, see to their wounds, I don’t want him dying of blood loss after take-off.” With that, he and Rahvi headed for the sheds.
Cavalli moved over to the backpacks and boxes of supplies that the soldiers had brought to the runway with them, rummaging through and looking for medical supplies. Shielding my eyes against the setting sun with my forearm, I could see Jones and Jess and Zhou making their way down the ridge towards us. I glanced down at Conley. He had both hands pressed against his maimed leg, trying to stop the flow of blood, and was looking up at my silhouette with a mixture of anger and fear.