by Shane Carrow
Not just from the battle. My blood. I was lying down. I’d been shot. Aaron was cradling my head in his lap. I could hear helicopters.
Then I woke up. It was just before dawn, and the light was a mix of grey and blue. I was lying in the hammock, three metres above the ground. David was dozing away below me, using his folded arms as a pillow. I was breathing heavily. It had been another one of those dreams, frustratingly prophetic.
That now marked two dreams I’d had where I got shot. Oddly enough that made me feel better. I can only die once, right? And if I survive one gunshot, odds are I’ll survive another. I mean, I have a dangerous life. It’s not like I’ve never been shot before. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to die.
Fuck these fucking dreams.
I didn’t get back to sleep again. I watched the sun peek up above the mountains, felt the light warm my skin. I spotted a koala in a neighbouring tree rouse itself from sleep, climb down to ground level and waddle off. I’d never seen a koala in the wild before. Some cockatoos screeched in the distance. Eventually I climbed down and went off into the bushes for a leak. David was waking up when I returned, and we had a bit of his muesli for breakfast before I took the hammock down and we set off west again.
It was harder going than the day before, with some steep tracks and thick bush to plough through. This is more of a “natural reserve” national park than a “let people come see things” national park – there are no roads or trails to speak of, at least in this part. We spoke very little, which was fine by me. Getting people to believe that I work for the government and am transporting vital PAL codes is hard enough, without throwing in the whole “I’m half-alien” thing. I told him I’d been a regular private in the Army, and had only come into possession of the PAL codes by chance, when our plane was shot down. Which is close enough to the truth.
I shot a wombat to eat for dinner. David insisted on a fire to cook it, claiming he’d had one every night he’d been in this park hunting for the plane, and had never come to harm. Eventually I relented, cooked meat being too inviting. At least he had the good sense to kick the embers out before we turned in.
Overcast tonight. Hope it doesn’t rain.
October 22
We reached the edge of the national park in the late afternoon, about halfway up the slopes of the hills. Overgrown wheat fields swept up out of the valley to meet us, and I could see the town of Mudgee down below, clustered around the road that ran north to south. “Airfield’s on the north side,” David said, “and my place is a Bunnings on the eastern edge of town. There’s a few hundred zombies in the airfield. The rest of the place is more or less clear, but there’s still enough around for it to be dangerous. They have a tendency to… sneak up on you. So watch yourself.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let’s head north a bit first. I want to scope your airfield out from up here.”
He led me north along the treeline. I kept a wary eye on the fields below us. I could count at least four zombies idly staggering through the fields, and they seemed to be turning their heads and adjusting their course somewhat. They could sense us, if only slightly.
About five hundred metres further north, we were in line with the airfield. I took the Zastava back off David, squatted down and peered through the scope to get a good idea of the place. It wasn’t big; only a single runway, with a couple of hangars and a windsock fluttering in the breeze. There were a few fuel tankers lying about, but no aircraft that I could see. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and the gates were closed.
It was also covered in the undead. There were hundreds of them, easily. Some were clawing and shaking at the fences, dimly aware that they wanted to be outside. Most were just aimlessly wandering across the tarmac and dead grass.
“Back at the start of the year, a lot of people escaped by the airfield,” David explained. “That’s why there aren’t any planes left. A lot of the zombies followed them in there, and someone must have locked the gates at some point – to trap them, I guess. Problem is, now I can’t get in at my blimp.”
“Hmmm,” I said. A solution was already forming in my mind, but it would be risky. Everything these days is risky, of course.
I drew a map of the airfield on the back of one of my roadmaps, and asked David if he had any maps of the town at his hideout. He didn’t, so I did a quick one of the town itself as well. “Zombies are getting closer,” David said.
I glanced up. The sun was starting to sink below the western mountains, and in the fading light a pair of undead had converged on us. They were about a hundred metres away, and I could hear their faint moans. Both had been badly weathered and rotted over the winter, but one was still wearing the bright yellow vest of a road worker. I put the maps away and drew my Beretta, waiting for them to get closer.
“Jeez, if you’re not going to use the rifle, I will,” David said, reaching for it.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Not worth the rounds.” I waited patiently until they were closer, while David took quite a few steps back. One took four shots to die; the other five. All headshots. I’m getting closer south. Closer to Ballarat.
“All right,” I said, holstering the gun. “Let’s get to your place before dark.”
It took us about half an hour of walking through empty fields and paddocks before we reached the fringe of the town. On the road leading south we passed a KFC and a petrol station, and David pointed silently towards a huge Bunnings Warehouse closer to the town. In the still evening I could hear cries and moans drifting around, difficult to pinpoint. I’d already had to drop a couple more zombies in the fields, and as we walked steadily across the road a few more approached us.
The warehouse was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, which had been roundly reinforced with lumber, gantries and sheet metal. I followed David around to the south side, where a rope with loops in it was dangling over the edge. “You better go first,” David said, glancing at my mangled left hand.
I handed him the Beretta and started clambering awkwardly up the rope. Down below I could hear his gunshots, and the tinkling of empty casings on the bitumen. Zombies were shambling towards us at a steady rate. It wasn’t enough to panic – nowhere near enough to overwhelm even a lone gunman – but it was enough to set my pulse racing. As soon as I got to the top I yelled “I’m good!” and, to his credit, he threw the pistol up to me before beginning his own climb. There was a platform running along the interior of the wall, and it was easy enough to draw a bead on the approaching zombies and drop them before they could claw at David’s feet.
Once he was up he pulled the rope up after him, and we looked down at the dead. Between us we’d killed six. There were three still moving, clawing at the fence and snarling up at us, and a handful more still pottering out from the shadows to join the fun. “Don’t they build up?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “They did when everyone else was here, but they don’t seem to have the patience just for one person. They wander off.”
We climbed down a ladder and headed towards the looming bulk of the warehouse. We were in what had been the lumber yard, once, but everything was gone, used to shore up the barricade. David pulled a long sliding door open, removed a flashlight from his pocket, and we walked into the gloomy interior.
Inside was the familiar landscape of a chain hardware store, always the same, from Bunbury to Bundaberg. Huge shelves stretching up towards the roof, long aisles, silent checkouts and rows of trolleys. Most of the lumber and building materials had been removed for use in the barricade, but there was still plenty of hardware about the place. Mosquito torches were placed at regular intervals, and after shutting the door David fired some of them up for light. “I sleep up in the office,” he said, nodding towards a tiny manager’s office at the end of a staircase, clinging to the upper walls like a swallow’s nest. “Just in case they ever breach the outer walls. Not that they could.”
“This is a pretty good set-up,” I said. “And it’s
just been you here?”
He shrugged. “Everyone else thought New England would be safer.”
“They were wrong,” I said.
The glass at the front of the store had been boarded up, and it was clear that all the doors and access points to the warehouse itself were secured. Along with the stairs to the office and the outer barricade, that left three barriers between David himself and the zombies outside. And they were good barricades, too, constructed of timber and sheet metal and cement and bricks, all supplied by the warehouse itself. There were enough candles, torches and batteries to make enough light for a lifetime, and plenty of materials to make a soft bed from. Indeed, many of the shelves had nest-like beds built in them, usually two or three levels up, out of the same desire for extra security that had driven David up to the office. I counted maybe thirty beds, and wondered how many of those people were still alive as New England disintegrated around them – if they’d even made it there in the first place. “What are you doing for food?” I asked.
“Got a good stockpile of stuff from the supermarket, and some of the farms. Propane stove and plenty of cylinders. Got a generator, too, but I don’t use it much. No need, really. You hungry?”
“God, yes.”
He cooked up a meal of mixed beans and peas and corn, which, after so long spent living rough in the forest, seemed like a five course meal in Paris. As we ate we sat around my sketch map of the airfield and I spun out my plan to him.
“Zombies are attracted to humans,” I said. “Especially if they’re making a lot of noise and fuss. So all we really need to do is open the gates, draw them out of the airfield, and then close the gates behind them again. We might not get all of them out, but we’d get enough out that we could kill off the rest. We can climb over the fence. They can’t.
David looked doubtful. “Where would we draw them to?”
I shrugged. “Away. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need to kill them – we just need to get them out of there, so we can set up your blimp in peace. How long will it take to make it flightworthy?”
“Including tests and safety checks, maybe twelve hours,” he said. “But I don’t know about this…”
“It’s easy,” I said. “I’ll go open the gates. I’ll start shooting at them, and hollering, and generally making a lot of fuss. Then I’ll run off, maybe do a loop of the town. Once they’ve followed me out – maybe you can wait on the north side of the airfield – we hop the fence, shut the gates from the inside, and get rid of however many decided to stick around.”
“With what?”
“The guns, if there aren’t too many of them,” I said. “We can easily get up on one of those tankers and have a 360-degree killing field. Otherwise maybe we can grab some of the fuel in here, and the spray-pumps, and light them up.”
“I definitely don’t like that idea,” David said. “We might set the whole place on fire. And you said you wanted to do this on top of a fuel tanker?”
“Shoot on top of a fuel tanker,” I clarified. “Maybe not even that. Look, I think it’s a sound plan. How we deal with the ones left inside shouldn’t matter, there won’t be more than a dozen of them if we do this right. I’ve killed more than that most days on my way down here.”
David looked unconvinced.
“Look, it’s either get them out or try to kill all of them,” I said. “If you want your blimp back we’re going to have to grapple with them somehow. You can’t just avoid looking at them and hope it’ll solve itself.”
“Let’s sleep on it,” David said, seeming affronted.
He’s gone up to his office now. I’m sleeping in one of the shelf-beds, a few metres above the ground, made up of about five yoga mats stacked on top of each other and a sleeping bag. It’s comfy. I’m studying my maps by candlelight, trying to figure out the best direction to lead the airfield zombies in. Tomorrow morning I’m going to do a thorough search of the warehouse to see if there’s any equipment that might be useful.
I’m not sure why David is so anxious about my plan. He’s certainly used to the status quo, and doing things slowly and cautiously, and I still suspect he’s grown comfortable here in his (admittedly excellent) Bunnings fortress, and doesn’t really want to leave.
But it’s like that farmer, back in New England, running down into his basement when the homestead was attacked by a horde. Or Mick and Charlie, sitting in that cave with the little girl. You can’t just hole up and pray that everything turns out okay, because it won’t. You have to have a plan. Sometimes, you have to be bold.
October 23
David woke me up not long after dawn. Morning sunlight was filtering into the warehouse. “Your plan’s the wrong way around,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Your plan. Luring them outside. It’s good. But... it shouldn’t be you doing the running.”
“Why not?”
He pointed at the map of the town. “Whoever does the running... whoever acts as the bait... they’re going to have to go through the whole town. Then loop south and east, then back up along the ridge, then cut west back to the airfield. All up, that’s almost six or seven miles.”
“And?”
He looked at me. “I can do that better than you can.”
I scowled. “Why?”
“You’re half-dead, Matt. You’ve been dragging yourself south through the mountains for weeks with hardly anything to eat. Sleeping up trees. And... your hand...”
“I wasn’t planning to walk on my hands.”
He pointed at the map. “Think of all the zombies in town. Whoever’s running won’t just have the airfield zombies to worry about – they’ll be getting attacked from all sides too. They need to be able to shoot.”
“I can shoot just fine with one hand.”
He shrugged. “Look, I’m not thrilled about doing it myself. But it’ll be better if I do. I’m in better shape. I really don’t think you’ll be able to make seven miles of running.”
I was grumpy about it, but eventually accepted it. He was right. After the ordeal I’ve been through over the last few weeks, I wasn’t in a fit state to be playing rabbit to the greyhounds. The rotting, man-hunting, undead greyhounds.
Before noon, we’d stocked up on everything we needed from the warehouse: food, medical supplies, maps and tools. Bottled water and spare clothes. We went over the plan several times together. Then we left the warehouse, climbed up to the barricade and jumped down on the outside.
The streets were bare, the zombies that had snapped at our heels yesterday having wandered off again. We moved quickly out of the town, across the wheat fields and orchards to the east, back up into the foothills of the national park. As we moved north, approaching the airfield, I took another look at it through the scope of the Zastava. Hundreds of zombies, stumbling and groaning about between the hangars and fuel tanks. From a distance, you might think it was a human crowd. Not so through the scope.
We moved through the fields again, and stopped outside a woolshed maybe half a kilometre from the airfield. At this point we switched weapons: David gave the Zastava back to me, with its nineteen remaining bullets, and I gave him the Beretta. “Good luck,” I said, as he turned and headed for the south gate, surging through golden wheat fields.
I sat and waited. It was a perfect spring day, a warm breeze rippling the wheat, dragonflies hovering above the stalks. A few wispy clouds in the sky, and almost perfect silence. It was a few minutes before I heard the noise: an air horn we’d taken from Bunnings, near the south gate of the airfield. It blared a few times. Then there was silence, then a few gunshots.
I climbed on top of the shed roof and peered west towards the airfield through the rifle scope. The buildings and fences of the field blocked my view of the south gate, but through the gaps between the hangars, I could make out a steady stream of zombies heading south. Out the gate, out into the town. Following David.
Once the stream had cleared out a bit – maybe fifteen minutes later, David long gone into th
e centre of Mudgee – I dropped off the edge of the shed and started running through the wheat towards the airfield. I shouldered the rifle as I ran, and when I reached the chain-link fence at the edge of the airfield, I leaped forward and started climbing up. Not easy with a mangled left hand, but I was driven by adrenaline and excitement.
I reached the top, hauled myself over the lip and dropped in a messy scramble into the dust on the other side. One, two, three zombies nearby, in the gap between the fence and the hangar. A fourth and fifth shambling around from behind a fuel tanker. Jesus Christ, how many were still inside the airfield? No way I could use the Zastava for quickly dispatching them, not in close quarters, not staying on my feet. I staggered up and hurried past them, running down the inside length of the fence.
A fuel tanker parked by a hangar. That’s what I needed; a vantage point. I climbed onto the bonnet, then the cab, then the tank, then onto the curving tin roof of the hangar itself. Rotting hands slapped against the tanker behind me. I reached the apex of the hangar roof and quickly unshouldered the Zastava, not yet peering through the scope, but chambering a round in preparation for quick slaughter.
The south gates were wide open. David had successfully drawn most of the undead south, into Mudgee, the tail of the column still shambling down the road. But there were still a few dozen zombies inside the fences.
The plan had been for me to immediately close the gates, to prevent any of the zombies from wandering back in – they might, after all, sense me just as much as they did David, no matter how much louder he was – but it was clear that wouldn’t be possible. Half the zombies inside the airfield (thirty? forty?) were still lingering about by the gates. Getting close to them, shouldering the gun while trying to push those heavy gates shut… not going to happen.
But they had to be shut. There was no other way of securing the airfield.
I dropped to my stomach, put my eye up to the scope... and hesitated. How long would it take to drop all of them? The sound of gunfire was a sure-fire way to attract more zombies.