by Pete Aldin
Doomsday's Child
Pete Aldin
Copyright © 2017 by Pete Aldin
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Melody Simmons
Formatting by GoodlifeGuide.com
DEDICATION
To my boys.
You, more than anyone, have taught me what it is to be a man.
CONTENTS
PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PART II
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART IV
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART V
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
PART VI
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgements and Notes
About the Author
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born to survive Doomsday
Is blessed and cursed in every way.
- Children's Rhyme circa 66 PC (Post-Collapse)
I
Harrietville
1
Hunger made a man do dangerous things.
Elliot should have faded back into the hills behind the Lotus Petal Day Spa. He should have retreated into the bush. Instead, he hugged the shadows, camouflaging himself amongst trees he'd once only known from the Discovery Channel, wattles and stringy barks. Selecting a spot across the wire fence from the health retreat's herb patch, he took a knee on dry grass, pressed his shoulder against a eucalypt, and he watched, and he waited. Nothing moved in the gardens this side of the two-story homestead or along the driveway, nothing but a single crow hopping along the roof. But there was noise. On the far side of the house: male voices, coarse and careless. The noise meant no deaders. He hoped.
A gunshot. He pressed tighter against the trunk, folded in on himself, glad he'd left his pack behind another eucalypt up-slope. His rebellious stomach gurgled—lucky no one was close enough to hear it. Another gunshot. Some laughter, whooping. One man congratulated another on his accuracy. Someone shouted abuse. Not the kind of men who'd likely investigate herb gardens. He hoped.
From up the hill where he'd left the pack, he'd had an uninterrupted view of the health retreat: ten acres of walks, spas, gardens, a free-range chicken pen, a horse paddock and the long driveway out to whatever local highway that was. The two horses were dead, and that meant a full belly if he could get to them. Yesterday’s birds—tiny striped things like quail—had barely affected the chasm of his hunger.
Amongst the herbs, bees nuzzled stamens. The crow cawed and hopped from sight. Metal clanged—pots or a barbeque cover. Glass broke. Someone cussed out someone else in earnest. More laughter. Deaders or not, the racket was careless, even this far from an urban centre. A motorbike started up, and a second, proving the recklessness. One appeared from behind the house, puttering up the driveway in first gear. He might just get that meal yet. Another bike followed. More engines started up, car doors slamming like rifle fire. Four more bikes appeared, riding in tandem. All six were low riders, the men on them clad in leather or denim cut-off vests and without helmets. Three cars followed. A van without windows in the cargo space—a matt black slab of steel and rubber. A gas-guzzler V8—red with flame decals. A mud-spattered white pickup with an enclosed tray on the back housing the tools—what Aussies called a ute. He shifted sideways to watch the convoy regroup at the highway and accelerate from view.
Elliot decided to wait ten minutes despite his stomach nudging him with a jab of hunger. He told it to man up and wait its turn. A half hour earlier, four gunshots had drawn him across the hill, the noise promising him—well, he wasn't sure what. Human activity might mean food, was all he could think. And there was meat in there—whoever those assholes were, they hadn't taken the horses.
Maybe one of the gardens grew vegetables too. He knew that his basic training made sense, that living off the land you should only eat things that run and swim and fly. More simply put: if it moves, eat it—which was pretty much the undead's philosophy too. Meat meant calories.
But Holy Mother, if he didn't crave a salad. A potato. A carrot. Vitamins. Fibre.
Man cannot live on meat alone. Not for long anyway. It was a recipe for colon cancer. Be just his luck to survive history's most devastating pandemic, overcome hordes of undead to escape Hobart and then die of the big C or scurvy or some shit like that.
He sat back, straightened his legs in front of him, the coolness of the earth pressing through his trousers. Around him hung the mossy scent of the lantana; the orange-flowering bushes flourished despite suffocating heat and lack of recent rain. From a small hollow to his left there grew a dark-leafed shrub taller than him and thick with berry clusters. The lantana was no doubt introduced—it grew back home—but the glossy black berries may have been native for all he knew. The tiny fruits were shaped like butts, complete with ass-crack. Were they edible? Aborigines had lived here for thousands of years before the Brits came, so there had to be food around. He could be five feet away from a feast in this wilderness and never know it.
He sighed, plucked at grass as rough as straw, crushed it. He'd left it too late to find info on what locals called bush tucker. The visit to Tasmania had been unscheduled—and he'd been here mere hours when shit began hitting fans. In the eight weeks since, he'd learned so little about the big island. Why hadn't he visited a library in Hobart and researched? Used an internet kiosk while there was power? Grabbed seeds from a gardening supplier?
Yeah, well, maybe I was a little distracted getting out of Dodge before a hundred thousand deaders chowed down on my ass.
Beyond the fence, nothing had moved for five minutes, nothing but circling birds and bushes responding to breeze. The crow had not reappeared, though he'd heard it call again. The sun brushed the tops of a band of cloud to the west, setting off a riot of color. It was beautiful—and its low angle meant dark was coming. Another night in the open made his stomach clench with a different concern.
Food, water, shelter: it was all on the other side of that fence.
He forced weary legs to climb the hill. He grabbed his pack. He checked the property one more time from high ground, saw nothing of concern and made his way downhill. The pack stayed by the fence when he climbed over. He skirted the main house, came around the building and into the open space of a pool and dining courtyard.
He froze, gorge rising.
Most of the black flies swarming the three bodies clustered on the man and the dog. Man and beast had been shot in the back and their heads hacked off, providing a smorgasbor
d of choice for insects. Two crows stood on either side of the woman, pecking at her eyes. One raised its head, wary. Elliot stooped, pulled up a pebble from a garden bed and tossed it. The birds lifted, cawing their objection as they headed for the roof.
Elliot ventured closer. The woman had suffered more: the blood around her thighs, her hiked up dress, the stab wound to the abdomen, the bruising on her throat. Defensive wounds—cuts and nicks—striped one hand and forearm around a banged up pandora bracelet she wore.
“Give 'em hell, babe,” he managed to say and—though he'd seen a shitload of death in his time, in diverse shapes and sizes and permutations—he had to turn away.
The yard was a bloody mess. Luggage sliced up, personal belongings strewn across the grounds. By the open kitchen doors of the house, three books fluttered in the gusting breeze like wounded birds. He snatched one up, checked the cover. A piece of mid-20th century literature a girlfriend had once swooned over and pressed him to read. Elliot had found it mopey, and had told her so after a cursory skim. The beginning of the end of yet another short-lived hook-up.
Blood spotted the book's pages. A little smeared the side of his index finger—an identical shade of red to the blood on Radler's arm when he'd had to pick that up and bag it. Radler's arm, Eames' boot with the foot inside, McGovern's face—
He lost time, maybe a second, maybe a minute, maybe more. He came to himself with hands on thighs, bent over and sucking air. He slowed it, inhaled for five seconds, held it five, released it for five. Rinse, lather, repeat. He'd been here before; it would pass. Through the white haze, he counted pebbles in the garden beside him, noting the varying shades of green and grey and orange and brown, calming as those colors grew vivid.
Inhale. Five, four, three, two, one. Hold. Five, four, three, two, one. Exhale. Five, four, three, two, one.
It took a couple of minutes before he could look at the blood-dappled novel and then at the carnage without seeing flashes of light, without his blood pressure wanting to pop holes in his neck and temples. He channeled the energy of it into that deep reservoir of cold anger within him, storing it for a better time.
There came a tinkle of metal. The woman's bracelet. The crows had settled on her again, one on the arm, one on the head, taking it in turns to peck or watch him for further barrages. He straightened and swung away from the bodies, the flies, the birds. There was shit to do, things to assess.
He gave the rest of the grounds a careful recon. Most useful things had been looted—vegetables ripped from the ground, chicken pens empty.
He considered burying the bodies, or burning them, but neither action was worth it. The dead couple were no longer people. They were detritus, “damages”, ended, anonymous. And this was the brutal nature of earth's history. Blood, blood, blood. The planet had always bathed in it. Survivors were the ones who made peace with that fact and worked with evolution's thuggish mandate: of the fittest.
These folk simply hadn't been enough.
A single brass casing caught the sunlight on a gravel path. Whoever they were, the bastards who'd ended them were armed and numbered nine or more. Elliot could only pray they wouldn't return. After burning through his ammunition in the first week of the collapse, his SIG P226 had been a dead weight in his bag. Every farmhouse he'd been, other people had beaten him to the firearms. He owned one looted piton hammer shoved through his belt, one 6-inch tanto knife hanging beside it, and one Schrade lock-blade folded inside the left cargo pocket of his combat pants. His entire armory.
The inside of the house was as trashed as the outside. The bikers had urinated on the carpeted staircase for Christ knew what reason. He hurdled the stain and inspected the bedrooms upstairs, established a profile of the people who'd owned the retreat. Syrian husband. Anglo-Aussie wife. Interesting and unusual mix in whitebread Tasmania. Teenage son and daughter, unfortunately young enough to be taken as sex slaves by the animals that killed their folks. That van had no doubt carried them both away—he certainly hadn't found their bodies.
The girl featured in several family photos and a school yearbook; long black hair, green eyes, always with a large pandora bracelet on one tanned wrist. The bracelet identified her firmly with the dead mother outside who wore one also; both boasted among other charms a gold Orthodox cross. The same charm. Theirs had been a close relationship. In the boy’s room, he found hand-drawn artwork, and a handmade Happy 13th Birthday card from the parents. A computer game sat on a shelf atop its wrapping paper. The birthday might have happened during the collapse, the useless gift sitting in a cupboard while the world broke. The kid hadn’t found a use for a computer game in a world without power. And for all their apparent green-sensibilities, the Ousefs hadn't thought to install solar panels.
Elliot tossed the game and the card on the bed and thought, Kid hell. Lewis Ousef had been on the cusp of manhood. In this world, he should be a man. Other cultures had it so. At thirteen, Masai youths were herding cattle and preparing for circumcision sans anesthesia. Lakota youths were off on vision quests. Young men in the land of Lewis's father were taking up arms, strapping on suicide vests, or out hustling Westerners for cash. At least, they had been …
When he'd been thirteen, Elliot had been already fending for himself. And he was still doing it a quarter century later.
He returned downstairs, hoping to hell the teenagers had fled, and knowing they hadn't.
The kitchen cupboards were emptied of food. Which didn't matter anyway. Elliot had a reserve of muesli bars and protein bars in his pack, but he resisted processed food unless desperate. For all he knew, the virus or the catalyst or whatever the hell infected people was in that next tin of creamed corn or packet of rice or can of soda. Once he’d accepted that packaged goods were suspect, that they were the most sensible reason for the universality of the outbreak, his calorie count had dropped dramatically. Nibbling processed food meant a sixty minute wait, painfully counting the seconds until he could be sure he had no fever before eating the rest. He’d used bottled water twice, but had boiled it first.
He spent a good chunk of the remaining daylight cutting a leg from a horse, skinning and carving off meat which he cooked on the Ousefs’ barbecue. He found some shiny yellow buttons in a sewing kit which he used to mark a path through the gardens back to the rear fence. Should he need to beat a hasty retreat back up the hills, they might help him better find his way in the dark. Rope would have been better, but he couldn't find any. He placed a horse blanket over the fence so he could navigate it without getting snagged on the wire. He took his SIG but left his pack where it sat against the far side of the fence. A ladder from a service shed went up against the parents’ bedroom window on the side of the house facing his escape route.
He ate charred horse meat off a white plate while standing before a huge map of Tasmania in the father's den. A topographical map would have been better—and why were there no goddam military installations in this island-state?—but at least it was heavily detailed. Furthermore, six locations had been circled in red felt pen: an island off the east coast, a town in the far west, and lakes in the south-east and the west. One western lake was the destination Elliot had decided on while sheltering in a resort with sixteen dumbass people in the process of losing their minds and destroying their safe haven.
A regional map in the desk showed where he was now. The nearest town Harrietville was sixteen kilometers—ten miles—roughly north-east through farmland. And the map legend showed a police station there. He was headed west, but it was worth a diversion in the morning. If the only people left in the new world were dumbasses and murderous gangs, it was well past time Elliot got himself a firearm or two. Or ten.
After eating as much as was sensible, he practiced his bail plan twice. His stomach felt stretched to bursting point, despite his self-control. He shoved furniture in front of the exterior doors to barricade himself in. Because he couldn’t face sleeping in any of the Oussef's beds, he went to the living room, piled couch cushions on the flo
or and lay down. Sleep was patchy and dawn a long time coming.
2
The town's founding fathers had deemed three holding cells plenty for a rough night in Harrietville; a similar town back home would have had ten. The police station was a 19th Century building with its iron-barred holding cells in an annex out back, lining a wall like zoo cages. Elliot could stand in the connecting doorway from the office and scope all three cells at one glance. He was glad the place was so old: more modern jail cells—the ones with a solid door, small viewing window and meals flap—would have made his job so much more difficult.
And this is gonna be difficult enough as is.
Two cells lay empty, doors ajar, cots made up with military precision and covered with dirt that had blown in through the high and narrow window at the farthest end. Elliot definitely wasn't so lucky that he'd find what he wanted in either of those. No, the thing he wanted was in the center one, the cell with the deader in it. A snuffling noise rolled out toward him, as if to underline his opinion on his luck. The cell's occupant had its back to him, head nodding like a psych-ward patient. Every ten or twenty seconds, another labored breath lifted its ribs.
Horse meat churned in Elliot's stomach. He'd wolfed down too much that morning, the stench in here making matters worse. Stepping down onto the cement floor, he pulled his black bandanna over his nose. “You'd think I'd get used to you bastards.”
Whether the deader heard his comment or whether it smelled him, he couldn't know. But it chose that moment to whirl and reach for him in a desperate flounce that was one part spasmic dance, three parts animal savagery.