Doomsday's Child

by Pete Aldin

  Lewis grunted.

  Elliot lay there tracking the dying of the day’s light until it vanished completely. With cloud cover, there was no starlight, no moon, but the soft glow from the DVD player screen allowed him to keep most objects in the room in some kind of focus. If the potential for incursion didn’t keep him on edge and awake, Birdy's occasional light snore and the whine of a single persistent bastard mosquito surely would. He had applied repellent as had Lewis, but it only seemed to keep the tiny insect circling him in a holding pattern.

  Despite what he'd thought, he was drifting when a noise startled him back to full alert. The vicious growling-snarling of some hell-spawn sent his skin from hot to fully chilled in a moment. He rolled over and up, his hand snaking across the table for a weapon—then froze when Lewis started laughing.

  “Shut the hell up,” he whispered and when Lewis only giggled harder, he added, “What the hell's funny?”

  “It's not gimps.”

  Elliot cocked an ear. It was a little more earnest than the average deader. But ... “What the hell is it then?”

  “Devils.”

  Despite himself, his blood cooled even more at that thought. “Devils?”

  Lewis laughed again. “Not like Satan devils. Tazzie Devils. Tasmanian Devils.”

  “Say again?”

  “Tasmanian Devils. You know.”

  “Will you guys shut up?” Birdy complained and shifted positions, pulling the shirt up over her shoulders.

  Elliot ignored her, asking, “What is this, an Aboriginal myth?”

  “Seriously?” Lewis said. “You don't know what they are? They're an animal, a marsupial. A mammal.”

  “Wait.” Elliot remembered something then. A tornado of cartoon fur, growling not dissimilar to this. He lay back down, adjusted the shirt beneath his head. “Sure. The Tasmanian Devil like in the cartoon.”

  “What cartoon?”

  He hummed a few bars of theme music.

  “Huh?”

  “Looney Toons,” Birdy yawned.

  “What's that?”

  “Shit, Lewis,” Elliot growled. “Daffy Duck? Porky Pig? B'deh b'deh, that's all folks?”

  “You're weird.”

  “You don't know Porky Pig?”

  “Nuh.”

  “Bugs Bunny?”

  “I know him.” There was a moment's silence. “Pretty lame.”

  “Lame? Shee-it. First you diss Seinfeld and now a classic like Looney Toons. You have no culture.”

  “Really? That boring old crap is culture?”

  “Well, what's good TV to you?”

  “Nothing. TV is crap. The best stuff's online.”

  “Right. Like pranking videos. Guys scaring the hell out of people in elevators and thinking it's funny.”

  Lewis laughed. “It's better than that. There's also like Japanese anime shows. A Norwegian stunt show. Gaming clips.” The laughter died in his voice. “Or there was.”

  “Yeah. Was. Sad thing is, pal, we want entertainment in the future we might have to start reading novels.”

  Lewis groaned. “Or playing board games.”

  “Or whittling.”

  “Or banjo playing.”

  “If you can find a banjo.”

  “Spoons?”

  “Yeah, spoons-playing.”

  “Or … talking.”

  They both made throwing up noises and laughed.

  “Nothing wrong with talking,” Birdy said.

  Neither male could find a response to that, falling silent.

  “Or I could be wrong,” she said.

  After a while, Lewis said, “I'll be okay, as long as I can still get pencils and paper.”

  Elliot shifted on the hard floor, hoped Birdy's even breathing meant she was asleep again. “Yeah, you got a talent there. Not sure it's a useful one these days. Let's face it: there won't be much time for entertainment for any of us.”

  “I guess.”

  “Survival comes first.”

  “… I guess.”

  They kept quiet for a time while the Devils continued whatever the hell they were doing and the mosquito flew sorties.

  Lewis cleared his throat and asked, “Were you a cop?”

  “Private military contractor.”

  “What's that?”

  Elliot half-smiled to himself. “Security guards, basically. For big business and big businessmen.”

  “Oh,” said Lewis, but the tone suggested he didn't get it.

  Elliot waved at where the mosquito might have been and added, “Protected staff of an oil and mining company when they went into the middle-east and Asia.”

  And before that is none of your business.

  “So you would know stuff. About the gimps, I mean.”

  Elliot sniffed. “Not much more than anyone else. We did hear things on military channels though. We had tech wizards who could tune into it. Why? “

  “Well, I mean, how does it work, being dead but moving around like they do?”

  “I got nothin' but theories there, based on stuff I heard from smarter folk than me.”

  “That'll do.”

  “Well. First theory is they aren't technically dead. They did die from the virus—or caught it while another deader snuffed them—and then they were reanimated, with their organs mostly working. Organ strikes will kill 'em: if they can't breathe or pump blood, they die like a normal person would. Gut wounds, et cetera—that only slows them down.

  “But they are rotting. And their brain function is as primitive as it can be and still animate them. So, yeah, zombies is a good enough name for 'em.”

  “Then you should call them livers not deaders.”

  “I think that word has been taken,” said Birdy. “Livers.”

  Still awake then.

  “Will they live forever?” Lewis asked.

  He mulled it over, unable to answer.It had been weeks since he considered such questions. Early on—in the hotel room in Hobart while they still had sat phone access and the internet still worked—conversation had inevitably turned to the chicken-and-egg conundrum of the new world: what came first, the idea of the zombies inheriting Earth or the means to bring it about? Did Romero catch wind of something already cooking in a government lab or did the pocket-protector brigade watch “Dawn of the Dead” and think What a great idea for a weaponized virus?

  However it had happened, someone had made a decision to break the world. Someone had ruined it for good. You couldn't unbreak a world anymore than you could unbreak a jar or a promise.

  “Try to live a long life and I guess you'll find out,” he replied to Lewis's question.

  They nose-breathed for a while in the gloom. Lewis waved his hand at a grey blur circling his head, a moth maybe.

  Better than a mosquito.

  “How big are these devils anyways?” he asked.

  “Oh, two metres long,” Lewis said. He turned on his side, raised himself on one elbow, warming to the subject. “A lady got killed by a three meter one about fifty years ago. They've been keeping them in wildlife parks since then so they don't kill people or pets. These ones must have escaped since the world went bad.”

  Why hadn't he heard of these things? There were bear-sized predators prowling the bush around them and Lewis only thought to mention it now? He knew Australia had crocs way up north and lots of snakes and spiders all over, but this was never on the tourist videos. He fidgeted, adjusting the shirt behind his head. “Can they climb?”

  “No, not really. As long as we stay up here, we'll be fine. As long as they're outside the fence.”

  Elliot lay there, picturing something like the Looney Toons drone but real. Something with a mouth half the size of its body, chewing through the fence and circling the bottom of the tower waiting for them to come down, salivating and grinning.

  Until Lewis snorted.

  “You sonofabitch.” He kicked out at Lewis but the teenager sensed it, drew his legs out the way.

  “Gotcha!”

&nb
sp; Birdy joined in the laughter, a hissing-snorting kind of chuckle.

  “You punked me, you rat bastard.” He laughed too. Wasn't often that happened—the laughter nor the punking.

  Lewis clapped his hands. “If I had a camera, I could've put it online.”

  When the laughter faded, Elliot asked him, “How come you know about them? And how big are they actually, for real this time?”

  “They're like the size of really big cats, but chunky. And, I dunno, I'm into animals and stuff.”

  “Into animals?”

  “Well, like, everyone in Australia knows about Tazzie Devils. But yeah, animals are interesting. Did you know we were making around a thousand species extinct per year before all this happened? Did you know that octopus DNA isn't like anything else on earth and some scientists think they're actually aliens?”

  Yeah, that's real useful, Cochise.

  “You know a lot about Tasmanian fauna?” Elliot asked.

  “Sure.”

  “There's kangaroos here?”

  “You haven't seen any?”

  “No.”

  “Huh. There's heaps. Eastern greys they're called. Pretty big. We'll get to see some sometime. Wallabies too, but they're smaller.”

  “Wallabies? That's good.”

  “You like wallabies?”

  “Won't know till I try one.”

  “Ew!”

  “Hey, man, the original peoples around here would've eaten them, no worries. Can't argue with that.”

  “He's right,” Birdy chimed in. “Gotta take what you can get.”

  “I guess. Seems mean though.”

  “You're not hungry enough yet, Cochise.”

  “I am hungry. I'm starving.”

  “Young man your age, course you are. And you need meat, along with the chicken food we been eating today.”

  “I guess.”

  “So I might have to catch us a wallaby.”

  “When the muesli bars run out.”

  “This is what I was trying to tell you back at the farm. About the cattle.”

  A pause then, “I know. Sorry I was such a douche.”

  “No worries. You're a guy: being a douche comes with the territory.”

  Birdy said, “Amen.”

  They shared a chuckle again.

  “So, Lewis. You seem to know about flora too, huh?”

  “Huh?”

  “Plants.”

  “Oh. A little. Mum taught me a lot. I did a lot of gardening when I was a kid, but I've been getting kind of bored with it lately. Plants don't really do anything interesting.”

  Elliot replayed in his mind some grabs from a Discovery Channel documentary on pitcher plants and corpse flowers and those plants that looked like stones, but he didn't feel like arguing.

  “Your mom was a naturopath?”

  “Really?” Birdy said. “She ever make dandelion tea? Stuff like that?”

  “That was disgusting,” said Lewis.

  “Sure. But good for digestion and your liver, I've read.”

  “I'd rather get something from the chemist.”

  “You mean the drugstore?” Elliot said. “No such thing anymore.”

  “Yeah, there is.”

  “Okay, they're still there, but what isn't looted ain't gonna last too long. Medicine's like food: has its own shelf-life.” Lewis didn't reply to that and Elliot asked him, “You know about willow bark. You remember any more of your mom's knowledge of plants?”

  “Sure. Bits.”

  “And you can read pretty well?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Just curious, Cochise.” And I think we found your usefulness in this new world.

  Next time they were wandering through mile after mile of dense bushland, Elliot would ask him if he recognized any edible bush foods—and hope he could tell the good stuff from the poison.

  Concentrate on meat, on calories, his inner warfare instructor told him.

  Yeah, and I'd like to concentrate on avoiding colon cancer thanks, he told it back.

  He was about to tell Lewis they should stop talking. But he found he didn't need to; the conversation had reached a natural impasse. Eventually, light snores came from both his companions' positions. If Lewis could sleep on a hardwood floor, maybe Elliot could make a soldier out of him after all.

  He lay awake, but slowed his heart rate, making peace with the fact he could sleep another day, like a good soldier himself. He passed the hours shifting his legs and occasionally getting up to stretch without waking the others.

  He'd just checked the clock on the DVD player—5.32—when someone screamed in the distance. It lasted only a couple of seconds and it was a long way off, but it was a scream none-the-less. Straining his ears in the aftermath, he caught it then: that weird contorted growling of the undead, not so different to Lewis's cartoon marsupials, but much much worse in its way. Maybe that sound had been there for some time, but he'd unconsciously passed it off as local wildlife, as jungle hum.

  He crouched by a window, squinting north. There was another spike of screaming—terror rather than pain. “Oh, no, no, no.”

  “Mm? What is it?” Lewis had obviously been asleep but he woke fast.

  “Trouble.”

  Dawn smeared the eastern horizon, taking the edge off the darkness. He could make out Lewis, sitting up, hugging his knees. And he heard people now—living people—calling each other, two distinct voices, male and female, maybe a half mile west. Lewis shot to his feet and came to join him, shoulder pressed to Elliot's arm. Elliot shuffled sideways to break contact. Birdy stirred and mumbled a question.

  “There's people out there,” Lewis said.

  A gunshot.

  “Sure is,” Elliot replied.

  “Maybe we can join them.”

  Elliot threw him his best wtf look though it was lost in the gloom. He said, “We're not joining them.” He scraped the camp chair across the table, unfolded it and faced it to the window, sat with his knees pressed to the wall. He reached back and slid the M4 closer across the table, then gripped Lewis's sleeve and pulled him lower until the teenager was forced to kneel. “They're armed. Let's give them as little to see here as possible.”

  “But … “

  “You remember any of the last week? Your home? Harrietville? The train? People with guns aren't friendly.”

  Lewis swallowed and folded his arms across the narrow window sill, lay his chin on them. Birdy's chair scraped closer until she could touch Elliot's shoulder.

  “You see anything?” she whispered.

  “Not yet.”

  Her hand dropped away. “Is this a bad time to tell you I need to pee?”

  The shouting stopped. Something moved down at the base of the slope. Squinting, he made out a couple of smudges, moving in typical jerk-ass fashion. He nudged Lewis, said softly, “Not just people out there.”

  Birdy cursed under her breath.

  They waited and watched until the sun was halfway above the trees, and Lewis clutched at Elliot's chair and pointed west. The tower's height gave them a view over the trees and into a patch of dry creek bed before it curved away and into the trees again. In that clearing, twenty-odd people milled. They looked like they were collecting themselves, waiting in the basin while others emerged from the trees to join them, swelling their ranks to thirty or more. Half were women, some men, a few kids and teenagers.

  “They look normal,” Lewis murmured. “Like those people in the valley. There's kids there. I can't see many guns.”

  “Too many people, too big a target. We join them and we can't move quickly or quietly enough. Besides—” He handed him the binoculars they'd found in the box beneath the table. “—check 'em out, they're not running for sport.”

  Lewis stuck the glasses to his face and swore mildly. Even without them, Elliot could see the panic. People milled. The faint noise of the children crying filtered up the nexus of hills, the women bent over them trying to keep them quiet. Dread settled in his gut like lea
d. He took the glasses back, turned them five hundred yards north-west and echoed Lewis's curses before handing them to Birdy. A patch of open ground along the face of a hill to the northwest—a firebreak?—showed a ragged mass of undead.

  There was a shout and he swung the binoculars back to the creek. A handful more people emerged from the bush fast, one falling down the slope. Tumbling after him came two undead, rolling over and over as the man righted himself and his group screamed and they all broke for the far bank like spooked sheep. Lewis shot to his feet to see better. Elliot pulled him down and retrieved the glasses for him; he himself could see well enough to make out what was happening. The people didn't get far, suddenly backpedalling down the bank they'd headed for, flanked now by deaders and heading downstream away from the tower's position. Moments ago, the creek bed had been a haven, but now it swarmed with undead in pursuit of the living.

  Elliot shifted his attention to the hill below them. Sure enough, movement. Torn shirts and torn flesh. Stumbling, shambling masses, weaving in and out of trees, tripping in ferns and brambles, going down and scrambling forward, some with keener hearing veering toward the screams from the creek, others heading straight on and around the hill, a stream of living death breaking around a large rock, following the path of least resistance.

  Lewis wrenched the binoculars from his face. “We have to help them.”

  “Can't.”

  “Oh, God,” Birdy moaned.

  Elliot turned back to the plight of the refugees in time to see two stragglers go down, vanishing into a frenzy. The figures were smaller than peas from this distance, but the activity was familiar enough from experience to know what was happening.

  Lewis cried out, dropped the glasses and pressed against the window. Heads turned their way from the bush below. Elliot tackled him, dragging him onto the floor, clamping one arm and both legs around the teenager as he thrashed, pressing his other hand over Lewis's mouth. Lewis screamed against his hand.

  “Stop it,” Elliot hissed. “Goddamit! You're gonna get us killed.”

  Lewis thrashed and moaned, but Elliot wasn't letting a thirteen year old best him. He looked to Birdy who had pressed her nose and forehead to the window above the sill. She gestured that they were okay, the undead were moving on; he hoped that would continue. Eventually the young man began to relax and sob. Elliot tried lifting the hand and when Lewis only sniffed snot, he let him go. Lewis scrambled under the table before Elliot could grab him and around Birdy's chair. She shifted her chair in time for him to bury his face in her shoulder and though she flinched and grunted in pain, she held him without complaining, without pulling away, her back to Elliot. Lewis's shoulders rose and fell in great sobs. Birdy murmured reassurances in a loop. Elliot crawled to the far side of the tower, retrieved the binoculars, caught a glimpse of mother and child pulled from the scrub, dropped them and folded into the corner with the ringing of tinnitus in his ear from a nearby detonation, the smell of copper, Radler's screams as he bled out. It might have been a minute or ten that he'd lost. When he came back to the tower, it was still gloomy and Lewis was still sobbing.