But what?
David and I did not have long to wait to get an answer to that question.
Soon, helicopters hovered overhead, unseen but definitely heard. Spotlights shone blindingly from the aircraft and played upon the throng – and then the shooting started.
These, it seemed, were no ordinary helicopters. They were spitting fire from both sides and beams of tracer bullets rent the black sky, raining down upon the zombies below.
Dozens fell at once – others fled in all directions, trampling on the fallen.
The scream of a terrified zombie is hard to describe – the sound of thousands screaming together is impossible. So, what terrifies a zombie? Well, I can tell you for certain that helicopter gunships do.
I couldn’t exactly say how or why these thousands of zombies had been herded back onto the campus where it had all begun – but, now that they were here, it was clear what fate the authorities intended for them.
David and I needed to get out and fast. If we were to avoid being strafed by gunfire – or trampled by the panicked undead – I needed a plan.
We were hemmed in on all sides. I seized his hand even more firmly – he, too, was terrified but seemed to calm a little at my firmer hold. I took him to the base of one of the trees in the North Court. We cowered there for precious seconds as the concrete courtyard emptied a little. Time to think. My vision narrowed to a tunnel, I ceased to hear the screams and the gunfire around me. For me, everything went silent. Time slowed to a crawl.
It seemed my mind had re-directed its entire effort to solving a single problem: escape.
Where to go that might be safe? The only place I could think of was the family vault in Melbourne General Cemetery, the one where we’d found Charles and Paul. It was ten minutes’ stroll away – in normal circumstances.
But, under heavy attack from the air – and with thousands of wailing, murderous zombies between us and the crypt?
(And would our way yet be blocked by tanks and nervous troops with machine guns?)
We’d give it a try – the North Court and its surrounds were rapidly becoming a killing field for all the creatures that lingered there. We would not linger.
We moved with the Northbound flow, across Tin Alley and between the Beaurepaire Pool and the squash courts. We moved past the running track and the tennis courts. It was slow, halting progress. The undead then spilled across the cricket ground (oblivious to the damage this would cause to the finely manicured cricket pitches.) For some reason, I led David to the side of the oval and stayed off the playing area. Was that mere respect or something else clicking inside my head?
A helicopter gunship edged away from the North Court and followed the throng to the cricket oval, pouring hot metal death down on the pitch invaders. At the same time, the felt-like grass of the wicket itself was fearfully cut up by this careless strafing. It would take the curator weeks of pain-staking repair work. It seemed that I was the only one present who cared about such matters. (I would, however, have to take it up with the ACB much later on.)
We reached the North Side of the oval where the fleeing throng was forced into the bottleneck of a footpath that ran between the cricket pavilion/mountaineering clubrooms and some college buildings. Chaotic though this was, the helicopter gunship did not fire upon those who had reached this point. Perhaps there was a fear of striking the residential college buildings where living survivors might yet be sheltering.
I can’t be sure but the relief that came from being under this shelter was palpable. Slowly, the river of undead snaking North along the path crept towards the Northernmost exit of the campus.
Was escape at hand? Nope.
At that point the unmistakable chatter of a heavy machine gun shattered the temporary silence. This time, the sound was not from above but from ahead, from the direction of the exit to which we were all heading.
More high-pitched zombie wailing.
Though we could not yet see it, I guessed that a heavy machine gun had been placed opposite the exit and was systematically mowing down the beasts who were trying to escape that way.
Abruptly, the helicopter gunships departed – for no reason that was readily discernible.
“That can’t be good,” I thought. “Why would these most potent weapons suddenly leave the field of battle with the job not yet done?”
The unmistakable chatter of other machine guns started up, further away, on both sides of the campus – and, faintly, others more distant than that. I guessed that all exits to the campus had now been blocked.
Somehow, the zombies had been herded here (how?) and, now that the acres that comprised the main campus of Melbourne University were full to bursting point with tens of thousands of them, the trap had been snapped shut. There was no escaping and they were being wiped out from the air and the ground by forces that I could not even see.
“That’s one way of clearing a route to and from the port,” I thought. I supposed that’s what they were doing – but who would know?
The zombies who had pressed forward to the gate – and had not yet been cut down in a hail of bullets – started to retreat, back in the direction of the cricket oval. This made for even a greater crush of panicky bodies.
Then came a growing rumble from the air. None of the zombies paid it any heed – but I recognized what it was. No wonder the helicopter gunships had moved away. They were making way for a far more potent weapon in the form of an approaching jet plane.
Not good news. For a moment, I naively thought it might have been a passenger service. But, of course, it was not. The sound of the jet-engine was quite different. Though I could not see it, the rate at which the rumble was growing suggested the plane was flying fast and low.
Time for ‘Plan B’. I tugged on David’s hand and roughly pulled him sideways – out of the main flow of the throng and towards the rounded tower of St Hilda’s College.
Within a few short seconds, there was blinding flash and deafening ‘foomph’!
Two of my senses (sight and hearing) were temporarily knocked out but my sense of smell remained intact. That sense almost immediately was, in turn, overwhelmed by the pungent stench of gasoline-laden soot filling the air.
Now the military was using napalm, or jellied gasoline, on us!
The jet had screamed low over the zombie-filled oval and dumped a single bomb, filled with napalm. (I didn’t get to see the billowing, black mushroom cloud it must have made.) Many of the undead were destroyed instantly. Others, a bit further from the massive blast, were ablaze, running in all directions like so many ancient torches. Still others, a bit further away still, had been splashed by the jellied petrol and suffered serious burns (and were still smouldering).
(Was it one of ours – a Mirage – or had the Yanks already arrived with F4 Phantoms? I wasn’t sure if an Aussie/French Mirage could deliver a napalm weapon. Napalm wasn’t much favoured by the Aussies in Vietnam but I knew a Phantom could do the job. This was, of course, an idle speculation on my part since I’d seen precious little of the plane that had stooped out of the night sky and delivered ‘Hell-in-a-Tincan’ to us. It might as well have been a Tiger Moth or a Spitfire.)
I’d seen this sort of thing on newsreels from the Vietnam War. I confess that I had been more upset by the incineration of living men, women and children – mostly civilians – than by the horror that was now unfolding before me. Still, the high-pitched wailing of hundreds of incandescent zombies is something I’m unlikely ever to forget.
Sight and hearing came back to me by degrees. The after-image of the flash and the loud ringing in my ears from the blast were persistent. However, I soon had enough senses about me to continue to put ‘Plan B’ into effect.
Poor Meryl had been a resident of St Hilda’s college. She and a friend had shown me round the place – and generously invited me to partake of college dinner with them. (Little wonder, now that I thought about it, that I naively thought she might be romantically interested in me. But, no, she was j
ust a nice, country girl being friendly.)
In any event, the slight knowledge of the layout of St Hilda’s that I had thus gained was now to prove invaluable. I knew how to get into the building and how to get myself to a room that would give me a reasonable view of the Northern exit to the campus.
I dragged the uncomprehending David along with me and left the bewildered zombies to their collective fate. We soon gained the lookout point that I had wanted – with no other living or non-living persons in the building to bother us. Sanctuary from the madness outside.
The student room that we chose was somewhat Spartan – painted concrete block walls, a bed, a desk and chair set and a small bookshelf.
Its tenant had been a young woman it seemed – probably a fresher. Why do I say that? On the wall was a poster of ‘The Partridge Family’, featuring prominently a fresh-faced David Cassidy. No-one other than a first year girl would confess to still having a crush on that particular teenage heart-throb. That would have been so uncool.
And the room was scented. I can’t say exactly what the scent was (rose oil?) but it was pleasant – and strong enough to counter the pungent smell of napalm that still hung in the air.
On the book-shelf sat a few of the standard (girl) record albums of time (Carol King, Carly Simon, Nina Simone, Helen Reddy) and beside them, some surprisingly old teenage literature (Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, The Getting of Wisdom).
On the desk sat an IBM ‘golfball’ typewriter – fairly modern (and expensive) for that time. In the typewriter sat an incomplete letter which commenced ‘Dear Mum and Dad’ and continued in a newsy fashion for a couple of paragraphs before stopping mid-sentence.
I would have liked to have met the young woman who had once occupied this room, a young woman who cared enough to write to her Mum and Dad. I think I would have liked her. I wondered idly whether she had managed to escape on that first day – and hoped that she had.
o0o
The North gate was much as I had imagined it: a squad of soldiers positioned behind and beside an APC (Armoured Personel Carrier) that had brought them there and a well constructed sandbag emplacement for a heavy machine gun.
The machine gun continued to pour deadly metal into the dozens of zombies who streamed through the university gate into College Crescent. The squad members, lying prone on the footpath, added to this toll by directing their comparatively puny rifles at the same targets.
It seemed that none were getting more than a few feet past the gate before being felled. The pile of corpses had grown to an alarming height within a very short time. I guessed that, at its highest point, it was around seven feet high. But still the terrified – and often smouldering – undead came, climbing over the now-dead undead. And they, too, were shredded by the gunfire and fell just as quickly as those whose bodies they were climbing on.
What were my feelings as I watched this unspeakable carnage. Could I put my emotions to one side merely because these creatures were no longer truly human? No, not really. Some of those fallen had been classmates of mine a few days previously. More than that, my own brother crouched beside me, watching the spectacle intently – and he, too, was one of these less-than-human beasts.
And still I felt David’s pain – whether I wanted to or not.
We both watched for, maybe, twenty minutes or more – and then a most unexpected thing happened: the clatter of the heavy machine gun abruptly ceased.
Was it out of ammunition? Surely not. The APC must have been loaded of boxes of machine-gun bullet-belts.
I saw the commander leap into the gun emplacement and desperately try to manipulate parts of the silent weapon –with no obvious success. The gun had jammed.
The zombies apparently realized that the wall of sound and death had fallen over in front of them – and, as one, they surged forward. The squad commander barked out an order that couldn’t hear and the entire squad leapt to its collective feet and bolted for the open rear door of the APC. Most managed to enter the vehicle but the door remained stubbornly open during the few seconds that it took the fastest zombies to run across the narrow width of College Crescent.
A few rifle shots rang out but those weapons soon fell silent, as well. The squad disappeared under a mass of vengeful zombies.
I did not have time to contemplate the grisly fate that befell those brave men. An opportunity had presented itself to me and needed to be seized without hesitation.
I slapped David out of his reverie – he, of course, had no idea as to what had just occurred.
He roared his indignation at me but followed me all the same when I screamed, as I ran from the room:
“Come on, Dave! Stay here and we die!”
(I didn’t trouble him with the fact that he was, in fact, already dead.)
Soon, we were sprinting past the crowd of zombies that were still feasting on the recently deceased soldiers. David’s pace slackened. Evidently, he wanted to join in – even though he had eaten only that day (outside the Rowden White Library).
I was having none of it – another squad or helicopter gunship would shortly arrive on the scene to find out what had happened.
And there would be much unhappiness.
The gates of the cemetery were, fortunately, still open. There were a number of military vehicles parked inside but no-one attending to them. I made a mental note of where I might expected to find an unattended vehicle if one were needed in the near future – but did not linger.
My goal remained to get us back to the Family Vault where we’d met up with Paul and Charles. It was quiet, weather-proof, probably blast-proof and still stocked (I hoped) with modest supplies of food – enough to last the few days I needed while the immediate hostilities died down.
We made it. I slammed the crypt door behind us – and, as I slumped to the cold concrete floor, couldn’t help but let a sob or two of relief. David came to sit beside me. He reached out and took my hand in his own cold, rough paw. He patted my hand like he had patted the wretched cat.
I was amazed by this gesture – and it caused me to wonder if he were really so inhuman now.
Soon, I would investigate.
CHAPTER 12
SPENDING TIME IN THE FAMILY VAULT
I slept for a time out of sheer exhaustion – both mental and physical. Once the adrenalin stopped flowing, I was out cold.
When I awoke, it was daylight. I could still hear the occasional report of guns – light and heavy - coming from outside. I even fancied that I heard a few tank rounds being loosed off and singing as they flew through the air.
There was still audible screaming and roaring. The zombies had not yet been completely subdued but, surely, the military operation was now merely mopping up those who had survived the overwhelming force used by the military on the previous night.
I didn’t need to use my imagination to visualize what pitiless slaughter was still happening beyond the closed steel door of the vault.
But, for the moment, we were spared from participating in it – either as victims or as perpetrators.
For the sake of my ongoing sanity, I decided to block those events out and think of other things – anything in fact - even trivial, unimportant things.
I had a lot of time to observe the inside of the family vault in which David and I now sheltered. So, let me first share my observations with you.
The owners of the facility were plainly of Italian descent. Even if one could not have read the names which appeared on the plaques attached to the various niches, you just knew this was so, at first sight. The interior was festooned with statues of the Jesus, Joseph and the Virgin Mary (including the one that Paul had used to dispatch the zombie that attacked Charles).The walls bore frescoes of biblical scenes some of which seemed to draw heavily on the images on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – and there were holy pictures and rosary beads placed, seemingly at random, all about the space.
But my favourite artifact was a plastic model of a giant but still avuncular Pope
John XXXIII standing in the entrance of St Peter’s Basilica. Why was this my favourite? Because, if you squeezed the plastic hand that was bestowing the papal blessing, a little light lit up in the cupola of the basilica!
Marvellous! Hours of fun for the family. It made me proud to be a Roman Catholic.
(I shouldn’t be really so sarcastic because this little light actually proved to be invaluable inside the otherwise gloomy vault.)
Anyway, there was no doubt as to the ancestry of the folk who had so generously provided my brother and me with this precious haven.
And no expense had been spared, it seemed. In one of the niches, was a brand-new – and unoccupied – coffin of extreme grandeur and ornamentation. Whom was this waiting for?
None could say since it did not yet bear a plaque. Given that it had obviously been made to order – and was of the highest specification - my guess was that it could only have been made for the (still-living?) patriarch or matriarch of the family. Just a guess, though.
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