Where The Dead Men Lie
By James Harden
Book 3 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Out on the wastes of the Never Never
That's where the dead men lie
There where the heat-waves dance forever
That's where the dead men lie
- Barcroft Boake
Life vs. Death
The next thing I hear is the roar of a car’s engine. It’s struggling, like it’s stuck in second and whoever is driving the damn thing hasn’t bothered to change gears. I have this weird sinking feeling in my gut. It’s the feeling of acceleration. The feeling of speed.
I am lying down on the back seat.
And then I hear someone talk to me. They are telling me that I have a concussion. They are telling me that I can’t fall asleep. They heard if a concussed person falls asleep they could die.
"I don’t know if that’s true or not but I don’t want to find out. Please, Rebecca you gotta stay awake. I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I was scared. I had to do it."
It takes me a second to realize the person speaking to me is a girl. It takes me another second to realize it’s Maria.
She keeps talking but I can barely hear her. The words are muffled like she’s speaking underwater.
I open my eyes but everything is out of focus.
All I know is I’m in a car. Maria is driving at top speed and it’s dark outside.
Maria finally changes gear.
"I think they’re chasing us," she says as she looks out the rear windshield. "There’s two of them. They’re bigger than the others."
I try and sit up but the world spins and tilts and everything is distorted like I’m trapped inside a fun house mirror.
A million questions are shouted inside my head all at once.
Where are we?
What happened?
Where are the others?
Kenji?
Jack?
Daniel?
"Where are the others?" I whisper.
"I’m sorry, Rebecca." Maria says. "I’m so sorry."
She keeps saying sorry. She keeps saying that she had to do it. "I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing."
I can barely hear what she’s saying. And she’s not making a whole lot of sense.
I’m on the verge of blacking out, but then Maria swerves hard keeping her foot on the accelerator. I manage to stay conscious. She changes gears again.
I open my eyes wider. My head is pounding. Maria is driving the car like the devil himself is chasing us. She’s looking over her shoulder every few seconds, looking in the rearview mirror.
Her mouth moves and I think she says something like, "They’re coming. I can’t lose them."
But again, I can’t hear her properly.
"I’m sorry," she says. "I made the choice. This is on me. This is all my fault. I had to do it."
And then it hits me.
And even though I can’t hear her properly, even though I can’t focus my eyes and it’s dark and I have this awful sinking feeling in my gut, I know what she is doing.
She is being stupid and brave.
Reckless.
And courageous.
Risking her life and mine.
I’m beginning to realize that everything has fallen apart. Everything has gone right straight to hell.
But how?
How?
This whole journey, each and every obstacle we had to overcome, every zombie and monster and madman we've come across, everything has been about survival.
Our survival.
Maria's survival.
Every moment of everyday, we constantly weighed up the risk versus the reward.
Was the reward worth risking your life?
That was the one question we kept asking ourselves every single hour of every single day.
And right now?
Right now we are risking everything.
Again, I try and sit up but I can’t. My head pounds and my vision narrows and I’m trying to figure out how it got to this.
"How did it get to this?"
Where did it all go wrong?
I’m trying to think.
Come on Rebecca. Think.
Maria lowers her window. She has a grenade in her hand. I have no idea where she got a grenade from.
The wind roars through the car. It feels like we’re travelling at well over hundred miles an hour.
Maria pulls the pin out of the grenade with her teeth and spits it on the floor of the car. She then throws the grenade out the window, out into the night.
I wait for the explosion but I don’t hear it.
And then slowly but surely, everything starts coming back to me.
Through the haze in my mind, I’m starting to remember.
We were desperate.
Dying of thirst.
Our choices were life or death.
We had one goal. Protect Maria. Get her to safety.
One goal.
I remember now.
I remember that Kenji is gone.
Jack is gone.
I remember that we messed up.
We failed.
Chapter 1
So what went wrong?
Well, like I said, we started with one ultimate goal.
Protecting Maria.
Everything else came second. Including our own survival.
Maria felt uneasy about it. She didn't like being treated differently. She didn't want the preferential treatment and I love her for that. You should’ve seen the fight she put up when we decided that she should be the one wearing my NBC suit.
But the reality of our situation - she was different. She had survived a bite from an infected person. She was immune to the Oz virus.
So we had to protect her.
This was our only goal. This was all that mattered.
Maria.
This goal has torn our group apart.
I’ve come to realize the problem with goals and decisions and choices is that emotions get in the way. People start thinking with their heart instead of their head. Take Jack for example. Jack is an emotional guy. Sometimes he doesn't know how to think with his head. But I guess Maria is no different. And I guess I’m no different.
Anyway, to protect Maria, to save her, we needed to escape from the island nation of Australia. To do that, we needed to find Daniel’s secret camp, located somewhere in the outback, somewhere in a place called the Nullabor plains. The camp had been set up by Daniel’s crack team of mercenary soldiers. It had been their base of operations. Their mission had been to infiltrate and move inside the borders of Australia, avoiding detection by the military, avoiding the wrath of their ‘containment protocol’. Their mission was to locate Maria and rescue her.
They had failed.
They met their end in the crumbling ruins of Sydney. They had been ambushed and surrounded by the infected. And something else. Something bigger. Daniel was the only remaining member of that team. He was the only one to make it out of Sydney alive, the only one smart enough to run.
This meant that now it was up to us to get Maria out of here. It came down to Kenji, Jack, Daniel and me.
We were the rescue team.
In Daniel’s camp we would find shelter, food, water and guns. But most importantly, waiting for us in that camp was the X wing. The X-wing is a hypersonic jet capable of flying at speeds of up to Mach sixteen. With this jet, Daniel could fly us out of Australia to any place in the world. We could be safe on American soil in a matter of hours. Or England. Or anywhere really. Any place that was safe.
We knew it wasn't going to be easy to get there. Standing in
our way was the ever present danger of the Oz virus and the infected. Not to mention about a thousand miles of semi – arid and completely arid desert. The Australian Outback is a harsh place. Food and water are scarce. Dangers and the presence of death are not.
The one bright spot was the dust storm that had covered almost all of Australia had finally cleared up. It was weird. One day, the sky was red, the dust storm thicker than ever. And then the next day it just vanished. We had been walking around in the red dust for so long, constantly covering and shielding our faces, it was like we forgot what normal weather was like. It was an amazing relief to experience clear skies.
Early on we decided that we would sleep in shifts. Two people awake at all times. At least one of those people had to be Kenji or Daniel. These two guys have proven their worth to the group time and time again. We wouldn’t have made it very far without them. Whenever we needed them, they answered the call. They never complained. They protected us like gun toting, sharp-shooting guardian angels. Whenever we came across a town, Kenji and Daniel would move ahead to scope it out and make sure it was secure. Jack, Maria and I would remain hidden. Safe. Well, as safe as you can be in this place. Most of the time the answer was always the same.
The town was overrun.
Crawling with infected.
They seem to stick to the population centers, the towns. I don’t know why.
So yeah, we all knew this would be hard. Like Jack said the other day, "walking across a desert, in the midst of a zombie apocalypse is not something to be taken lightly."
But I don’t think any of us knew it was going to be this hard. I think in the back of our minds we were secretly hoping to find a car or maybe even a 'Winnebago'.
Then all we'd have to do is stick to an isolated back road and follow it all the way to Daniel's camp.
Fire up the X-wing.
Fasten our seatbelts.
Stow our carry-on luggage in the over head compartment.
Position our food trays and seats in their upright position.
Funny thing was we actually found a few cars that we were able to drive. But none of them had much fuel. So we never got very far.
Over the next couple of days, we started running low on water. Rationing became really strict. It was so bad at one point we were only allowed a few sips of water over the course of a day. It wasn’t enough to survive on. Not for long.
Daniel knew how to find water in a desert. He told us to look for insects and birds. If there was wildlife in the area there would be a water source.
But we never found any wildlife.
We also looked for water in dry rivers and creek beds. Daniel told us to dig under the top soil. If the soil was damp, we would eventually find water if we kept digging. But the creek beds were always dry. And the more we kept digging, the more we kept sweating. Eventually the digging became counter-productive, dangerous.
To make matters worse, our food was almost gone. We only had a few cans of peaches and baked beans left. Daniel was in charge of rationing. And he ruled with an iron fist. As with the water, we were only allowed a few mouthfuls of food in the morning for breakfast. That was it. We went hungry for the rest of the day. The hunger pains were awful. They came in waves, making it hard to think straight.
As we headed west, we began to notice emergency signs on the roadsides. The signs were instructing people to evacuate the area, to make their way to the major cities of Adelaide and Melbourne. Head for the military safe zones.
One road sign listed the nearest towns. The distance to those towns had been covered in black spray paint.
The following message had been written:
Hope is abandoned.
Hunter is dead.
Beware the black smoke.
We didn’t realize it at the time but these were warnings. And we should have listened to them.
The road sign was situated right next to an intersection in the middle of nowhere. The road turned off into the distance, heading north. There were two huge signs that warned of possible nuclear fallout and possible viral contagions.
"What do you think this means?" I asked. "Beware the black smoke? It was on the sign we saw the other day as well."
"Not sure," Daniel said. "Could be nuclear fallout."
"Is nuclear fallout black?"
"A few days after the attack on Hiroshima, back in World War Two, there was a black rain," Kenji said. "It was radioactive. Maybe the fallout has combined with smoke and ash from the fires in the cities and maybe the dust storm."
"Yeah it’s possible," Daniel said. "Be on the lookout for it."
The other warning signs simply read:
Do not proceed. Viral contagions ahead. Turn back immediately.
The military has been authorized to use deadly force.
Now that I look back, I realize we were in way over our heads. We hadn’t even made it halfway and we were already starving and dying of thirst. We were getting desperate and careless. But there was no turning back. We had no choice but to push on. So that’s exactly what we did. We kept walking to the next town. We kept rationing our water.
Unfortunately towns were few and far between. And it was always the same old story. The smaller towns were empty. No people, no food. Nothing. The bigger towns on the other hand were full.
Full of danger, full of death, full of infected.
At the intersection, with the warning signs we made the desperate and stupid decision to head south, closer to the bigger towns and the major cities. Hopefully we would find a town that had supplies. We knew it was a long shot; we knew there would be more infected the closer we got to the population centers but we had no choice.
Risk vs. reward.
Life vs. death.
Chapter 2
I remember when I first moved to Sydney. I had just become friends with Jack and Maria. Maria had invited me over to her place for a pool party. She had this awesome infinity pool that looked out over Sydney harbor. I was so mesmerized by the view that I forgot to put on sun block. Approximately thirty minutes later I was sun burnt to a crisp. I looked like a freakin lobster. Jack called me ‘Pinchy’ who was apparently Homer’s pet lobster in an episode of ‘The Simpsons’. For days, I was red, and dehydrated. For days my skin was on fire.
I never wanted to feel like that ever again. But as I walked across the Australian desert, that’s exactly how I felt. Constantly burning, my skin on fire. Dehydrated. Thirsty.
We were all lobsters.
A few days after we decided to head south we found an abandoned cop car. The trunk and the back seat were packed full with guns and ammunition.
We picked up hand guns, a shot gun and another two rifles.
We each had a rifle now. Daniel took the shot gun.
With the exception of Maria, who never really looked comfortable holding a gun, we were starting to look more and more like soldiers. In my mind we were a crack team of warriors on a mission to save the world.
Yeah, out in the desert, it’s easy to lose yourself in day dreams and stupid fantasies.
The guns and ammo were a great find. But ultimately it was another sign that society in this part of the world had crumbled.
To make sure we could all use the guns we had found, Daniel and Kenji decided to teach Jack and Maria and myself how to shoot properly. The shotgun kicked like a damn horse. Jack wasn't holding it properly this one time and he nearly dislocated his shoulder. We were all a lot more careful after that.
And we had to be careful with our ammo supply as well. We argued about whether or not we should even practice shooting. After all, ammunition was a precious commodity.
The problem was, at their present skill level; Jack and Maria were pretty useless with a gun. If it came down to it, and either one of them was forced to use a rifle to protect themselves or the group, it would basically be a waste of ammo.
I was a little better than those two but not by much. So I was glad for the extra practice.
But we still had t
o be cautious. As a result, lessons were few and far between. I mean, maybe we should’ve saved every last bullet for when the time came. But in the end we decided it was better if we all got some shooting practice under our belts. Five shooters are better than two, right?
Where The Dead Men Lie (The Secret Apocalypse) Page 1