Brother Mine, Zombie.

by Trevorah, Peter

  BROTHER MINE,

  ZOMBIE

  BY

  PETER TREVORAH

  This book is dedicated to my favourite Zombophile, my beautiful god-daughter, Alexandra Lanyon

  By the same author:

  2497 AD Chief Justice to a Colony (1997)

  Brenda (Cornish Language) (2004)

  The Scribblers’ Choice (2011)

  Copyright Peter Trevorah 2012

  All rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by information storage and retrieval system, without permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  ISBN: 978-0-646-57395-3

  CHAPTER 1

  SIEGE AT THE BAILLIEU

  “He’s gotta go, Pete. You know it – and I know it.”

  Jude’s voice was firm. Any sympathy she had for me had been put to one side. She continued:

  “Dave’s a guy. When a guy gets bitten, there’s no way back.”

  She was right, of course. Dave would die – and soon. It was a matter of a few hours at best. They would cast his body out. He’d join the other guys, the ones who’d gone before.

  “He’s not gonna go,” I said with quiet determination.

  “But, Pete, you know the score. He can’t stay here. Once he’s dead, he’s a threat. You’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

  “He’ll be no threat to me. No. Not to me,” I said, without fully believing my own words.

  I could not see my brother, my twin brother slung outside the library doors, like some animal carcase. I could not see him simply exist amongst them, amongst those that we had already cast aside over the last week – and the ones who had made them like they were.

  No. He was not ‘gonna go’. Nor would I destroy him – or see him destroyed. These were not options. He would stay with me, with us.

  Jude stood and sighed. She would talk to me again, no doubt – within an hour or two – before Dave actually died.

  In the meantime, she left me to sit beside my dying brother.

  At least he was now unconscious, no longer suffering. Beads of sweat still clung to his forehead. He was pale, feverish, unmoving – except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

  When his breathing ceased altogether, I knew what would happen – and happen very quickly. I’d seen it happen a dozen or more times in the last week – to other guys.

  Always the guys, never the girls. Not so far, anyway.

  Why was that?

  Just as many girls had been bitten – maybe more. Some had gone down with a fever but never real bad. No, not real bad. In a day or two, there was no more fever, no more symptoms at all.

  But the guys? Well, every one that had been bitten was now gone – except David. And finally, he, too, stood on the threshold of his next existence (if ‘existence’ was an apt word for what the others had become).

  He moaned a little. I poured a little water on his lips. Mopped his brow. He relaxed and settled again.

  “Not long to go now, Mate,” I said, knowing he could not hear me. “But I’m still here. I won’t leave you.”

  I knew I wouldn’t leave him. Not ever. It was inconceivable.

  How had it come to this: a bunch of starving, scared kids holed up in a university library, surrounded by a mob of creatures that loitered noisily outside, wishing for nothing but to devour them?

  There had been no warning, no warning at all. This is how it was for us:

  David and I were sitting in a French lecture, ground floor, the Redmond Barry Building, taking in lots about ‘Les Philosophes’, when bang! In burst eight, ten, maybe a dozen of them, roaring and tearing, roaring and tearing.

  We thought it was a joke at first, some sort of student prank for ‘Prosh Week’. Only it wasn’t Prosh Week. And when one of the things seized the lecturer and tore her throat clean out, and when her arterial blood spurted some feet in the air, David and I knew this was no prank.

  The screaming started. Shrill, panicked screaming. The students were mainly female –David and I were very definitely in the minority. (We had liked it that way.)

  The creatures then hurled themselves at those in the auditorium - at those in the front rows, the most studious - and started tearing at them. More blood, much more blood, shredded clothing and flesh.

  David and I were sitting towards the rear – we were not so studious. David abruptly turned and looked to the rear exits: both open and both so far unblocked by the things.

  “Get out the rear,” he yelled. “The back doors are open.”

  It was a good call, a very good call. And enough of the students heard it above the screaming and mayhem that, almost as one, they surged towards the rear of the auditorium.

  Hitherto unathletic students literally leapt over the seats and desks and fled, without a backward glance, while the beasts busied themselves, feasting on their victims in the front rows.

  But not Dave.

  One of the students, a mature age student, had left a guitar behind in his haste to escape. David seized it and threw it to me.

  “Here! You know what to do.”

  I didn’t, of course - but I soon learned, once David himself seized a hockey stick, similarly left by one of the girls.

  (Yes, strange but true: a guitar and a hockey stick in a French lecture.)

  David raised the hockey stick and brought it down hard on the head of one of the creatures as it rushed at him. It didn’t get up again.

  I did likewise with the guitar as another one ran at me. This one also went down but the guitar shattered on impact with a sickening twang. I would not be taking any of the others out with that particular ‘axe’.

  David’s hockey stick was, however, not so fragile. He wielded it again and again. I’m not sure how many he felled but, by the time he struck his last beast with the now-bloodied hockey stick, there was only one other left in the lecture theatre.

  The problem was that this remaining creature was, at the time, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with me – and I was rapidly losing the contest. Dead people are so enormously strong, aren’t they?

  David did not have a clear shot at him because my body was between him and the beast. So he tried to push me aside to create an opportunity to strike at it.

  As he pushed at me, it lunged forward – and, momentarily, its teeth sank into his left forearm.

  Unperturbed, David shook it off, sidestepped and deftly struck out with the hockey stick. The beast was gone. One blow from David was all it had taken. Now the auditorium was cleared of them. Only their corpses remained, sprawled here and there – and none of them looked like they would be moving about again any time soon.

  Quickly, he and I summoned one or two students who had lingered timorously at the exits – and there really were only one or two. The rest of the students were still running, we supposed. Together, we gathered five of the victims who seemed still to be living and carried their bloodied bodies to the Baillieu Library.

  It had not been a deep wound, David’s wound. It did not even require a stitch. But it had been enough to pass on the infection.

  And so, here he lay, a hero whose actions had saved the lives of some of those who now wished to cast him outside before he, too, ‘changed’.

  Fear trumps gratitude every time.

  “Not long now, Mate,” I whispered and mopped his brow again.

  Where had it come from, this infection?

  Short answer: I don’t know.

  This is not a part of the story that I can tell – but I can tell you what I know and let you puzzle over it yourself.

  As we sheltered in the dubious protection of the Baillieu
Library, we accessed a fairly beaten-up black and white TV that we found in the Head Librarian’s office. (Obviously, the library’s budget didn’t run to purchasing one of those expensive, new colour TV’s yet.)

  When we first tuned in, nothing of note. Everything was normal as far as the TV broadcasters were concerned – all the usual programmes: cooking, old movies, chat shows, cartoons – completely uninterrupted. There was no newsflash until over an hour after the creatures had burst in upon us in the French lecture.

  Then the first newsflash: sketchy and delivered in a jocular fashion by a disbelieving newsreader who concluded:

  “…Hey! Is this April Fools’ or what?!”

  It soon became clear that it wasn’t - but it was hours before any footage of the onslaught was shown. It showed complete bedlam, absolute carnage in the streets of central Melbourne – but no footage of the University itself.

  Hundreds of youthful, male zombies running amok and sweeping all before them – killing and dismembering anyone who couldn’t flee – or who even hesitated in their flight.

  “They seem to have come primarily from the Parkville area,” intoned the reporter, cowering behind an outside broadcast van. “Around the precincts of Melbourne University.”

  So, it seemed, we had been at the epicentre of the outbreak. All the havoc we saw on the flickering screen had spread from here.

  Then, without warning, all newscasts stopped.

  Why? National Security?

  The Zombie Apocalypse had apparently arrived and, besieged by the all-devouring horde, we found ourselves sitting about watching repeats of “Sesame Street”!

  This was a little unexpected. What happened to the ‘National Emergency Plan’? (Or whatever.) Where were the stern-faced politicians telling us what was now required?

  Not long after, we heard helicopters overhead. By craning our necks at the windows, we could see there were four in total: two military-style choppers (chinooks?) and two small, civilian jobs.

  After an hour or so, they went away – all of them – and didn’t return.

  I, for one, would have been happy to be plucked from the library roof and whisked away to safety. It seems, however, that this is not part of ‘The Plan’ (whatever that may have been).

  Why? Were we not worth saving? Presumably, there were others, hundreds of others, holed up in buildings scattered about the campus. Indeed, we knew positively that there were because a few had called us at the Baillieu, thinking we could help them. (Sadly, even the best trained librarians were not prepared for this task.)

  So, the other groups had been left to their fates as well. Again, why? Were they, too, so worthless?

  Then, a few hours after that, all the phones went dead and, at the same time, the TV broadcasts stopped completely. A curious coincidence, you might think. Actually, the TV broadcasts stopped in the middle of ‘The Jetsons’. (But don’t worry, I’d seen the episode before and well knew that Mr Spacely ultimately re-instated George Jetson - and even gave him a raise! So, I was able to assuage the understandable anxiety that the interrupted transmission had caused to the other survivors by advising them of George’s fate.)

  After that, we were merely left to speculation as to what was happening outside the campus. (A search for a short-wave radio turned up nothing.) Our discussions went around in circles for hour upon hour. What else was there to do – after all the library’s snack-food vending machines had been looted?

  The single fact that gnawed at all of us was this: one day there were no zombies and the next day there were hundreds of them – all young, all male.

  How was that possible?

  We had seen for ourselves that the infection spread by bite, by saliva, I suppose. We had also seen that guys who were bitten took at least two days to succumb - and then return as zombies. In David’s case, of course, he’d lasted for a whole seven days so far. (Though it didn’t look like he’d go much further than that.)

  So, let’s suppose there was a ‘Patient Zero’, the first guy to be infected, being treated somewhere in one of the hospitals or clinics around Parkville. How does he manage to bite hundreds of other guys, more or less simultaneously, and instantly turn them into zombies?

  There were a few amongst us sheltering in the Baillieu who were studying either biochemistry or medicine. They confirmed what we were all thinking: that’s just not how epidemics work.

  So, how…?

  The student biochemists suggested that maybe the initial infections, those of the hundreds of guys who ran amok on the first day, were not by bite. Perhaps, but no-one we knew had been infected by anything other than by being bitten.

  For the last seven days, we’d been living, sleeping and eating in very cramped quarters – in the presence of the sick and dying. No-one but the bitten had become sick at all. That sort of ruled out transmission of the infection by air.

  “Maybe it was some sort of clinical trial, for example, some vaccination programme that went out of control,” offered one of the medical students – without much conviction.

  The Biochemists pooh-poohed the idea and recited this experimental protocol and that. (All gobbledygook to me.)

  “It just couldn’t happen,” they concluded, as one.

  But, to my simple mind, the suggestion was certainly plausible: it fitted the observations and there certainly were a number of world’s foremost biological research institutes to be found in the immediate Parkville area. Where better for an unexpected and uncontrolled plague to erupt? And, after all, even the best protocols are only any good if researchers actually follow them.

  CHAPTER 2

  DAVID LEAVES – AND COMES BACK.

  Jude did come back to try again to talk me around – about an hour later. David’s breathing had become extremely laboured.

  He was still fighting but, like all the other guys bitten before him, was very definitely losing the battle – just as we had all expected.

  Jude put her hand on my shoulder and said as gently as possible, in the circumstances:

  “It’s time, Pete. You can do no more. Leave him with us and we’ll attend to him.”

  Jude was OK, someone my Dad would have called ‘a good sort’ but, despite this, I turned to her and blind fury suddenly welled up in me:

  “I said he’s not going anywhere! Don’t you understand? My brother is not going to join the zombies outside.”

  She withdrew her hand slowly and flicked an almost imperceptible glance sideways.

  I felt my head explode briefly and then everything went black.

  This, apparently, was ‘Plan B’, the plan to use if I didn’t change my mind about casting David outside of the library and into the hands of the zombies.

  I awoke with a sickening pain in my head.

  Jude was beside me once again but I had been trussed up. I was lying on a cold, hard floor and couldn’t move.

  I looked at her. I’m not sure if she completely felt my hatred for her at what had happened. It’s just that she was the one who was there - she was thus the object of that hatred.

  She bowed her head and muttered:

  “It’s done, Pete. David died and we’ve put him outside. You can’t do anything more for him.”

  Bullshit! David and I were not just brothers. We were identical twins. His joy had always been my joy. His pain had always been my pain. And so it must always be.

  David and I had known this from early childhood. We never had to discuss it. We just knew it. It was always a source of wonderment when others failed to realise we were, deep down, one.

  Somehow, I still felt my David-self, not far away.

  “They haven’t touched him,” I said.

  “No. Not yet,” replied Jude. “He’s still lying outside the doors of the library – exactly where we put his body.”

  I had known this. He had not been torn apart but the beasts. I didn’t need to see him to know.

  “He’s not yet one of them,” I stated.

  “No,” replied Jude. “So
metimes the change takes a few minutes but, as you know, it sometimes takes hours. But he’s dead. We’re sure of that. No vital signs at all.”

  “Take me to him. I want to see him,” I demanded.

  “It will do no good,” said Jude soothingly.

  “I shall be the judge of that,” I snapped.

  Once again, she looked to her side, towards those who were, necessarily, taking control of the desperate and starving group of survivors. (The library’s stores of snack food had long since been exhausted.)

  Jude received their ‘permission’ and turned back to me. Gently, she undid my bonds and released me.