Brother Mine, Zombie.

by Trevorah, Peter

  And, sure, there were plenty of other expensive fittings inside – including some which appeared to be made of gold and silver (or, at least, were plated with gold and silver) – but this wasn’t the most startling thing to me: that was the fact that the vault had running water!

  There was no hot water, of course – let’s not get completely ridiculous – but, there, in one dark corner of the room, sat a small water tap (with even a modest drain to catch any overflow). Why? Did the deceased family members get thirsty in the night and need to take a sip of water?

  (“Tanks, Luig’. Dat’s a verrah toughtful a’ youse.” – pardon the horrible Italo-Australian accent.)

  I put this question to David – he was no help.

  I thought about this for a while – in the circumstances, there was no rush – then the obvious answer dawned on me. There were literally dozens of vases inside the vault, mostly containing withered blooms. Who was going to lug water from outside to fill all of these vessels on a regular basis? No-one would do it willingly. Far better to have the water piped in.

  Kinda sensible – in an extravagant sort of way.

  And now pretty handy for any living person – or even a zombie – who decided to move in!

  Anyway, this meant the first item on the agenda in the morning after the battle (was it a ‘battle’, really?) was to clean ourselves up – just as, it seemed, Paul and Charles had been doing whilst holed up here. There were a couple of buckets now parked near the tap – and a watering can. I guessed that the buckets had been placed there by the keepers of the vault but the watering can? Maybe Charles and Paul had swiped it from somewhere else in the cemetery grounds.

  A small mystery – too small to wonder about.

  I brandished the watering can in David’s general direction: “Shower, Mate?”

  Barely a grunt.

  “Come on, Mate,” I said. “You could be a world record holder: the first zombie to take a shower.”

  No grunt at all.

  It seemed zombies were not keen on personal hygiene – and David stank very badly. His clothes, his hair and his face were all caked with coagulated human blood and gore.

  I advised him ‘the beautiful people are not wearing blood and gore this season’ but still he seemed unmoved. David had never actually been a fashionisto – and now that he was, well, dead, such matters seemed to mean even less to him.

  How would I get this stinking bugger to wash?

  I decided to set an example and stripped off my own disreputable gear. For the first time, I had a chance to look at my own state. I, too, was covered in filth of various kinds. I suppose that, by living in close contact with not only David but the other zombies, I had picked up a lot of the filth that they were carrying – even though I was largely unaware of it at the time.

  I decided to go naked until I had washed and dried my clothes. To keep warm, I could wrap myself in the blankets that Paul and Charles had left behind. Where had they managed to get blankets? From their raid upon the gate-keeper’s residence, I supposed. No matter. The blankets were welcome wherever they had come from.

  I had not had a cold shower for years. I had not had a shower of any description since day one. David wasn’t the only one of us who stank.

  Having filled the watering can, I stood in the corner near the tap – over the small drain – and, lifting the can above my head, played the sprinkling water over my grimy, sweaty and bloody body.

  I shivered from the shock of the cold water but, almost immediately, felt refreshed and reinvigorated. The muck that was caked on my skin and in my hair fell away – thanks to some fragrant soap that I was using liberally - and that I presumed had also been ‘liberated’ from the gatekeeper’s residence.

  David’s dead eyes observed the cleansing of my body with no obvious emotion.

  In the back of my mind, I knew that I had to get David cleaned up if I were ever to be able to pass him off as a living soul – and effect an escape from the ‘war-zone’. How much resistance would he put up when I insisted on this?

  Having dried myself – also using a ‘liberated’ towel – I stood looking at David. He returned the stare. (He was, at least, exceptionally good at that.)

  “David?” I said. “Your turn now – you’re a very dirty little boy!”

  He seemed to like being babied by me – maybe it evoked some distant memory of his childhood, when Mum used to scold us for being such ‘grubs’ (which we were). I can’t be sure, of course, but, in any event, he rose to his feet and approached.

  He stood in front of me like a small child who could not undo his buttons. (In fact, I think he may have lost so much dexterity that this task was actually beyond him.) I started to undo his blood-stained rags and he did not offer a protest. Soon, he stood naked and, like a small child, waited obediently for his bath.

  I gently bathed and washed his greying skin, patched with tape the odd tear in his flesh that he had suffered as a result of his recent carnal activities - and then shed a tear over what had become of my handsome brother.

  o0o

  Having attended to our ablutions, I felt the need to rest again and to block out the intermittent roar of the ongoing slaughter outside. I was just too stuffed from what had been happening over the last week and more – and, anyway, we had nowhere to go just at the minute

  More than that, if I was to continue on, I couldn’t afford to think about the horror of recent and ongoing events – it was simply too overwhelming and sleep was the place to retreat from all that.

  David lapsed into a torpor with which I was now becoming familiar. Was it sleep? Was it another form of death?

  I awoke again in the afternoon, I think. The shooting was now very sporadic and the cries of zombies were no longer audible. Still, we’d need to be here for at least a few days before it was safe to venture out – or so I guessed – and I would need to keep myself occupied. What to do next?

  Then I hit upon it: there was a pack of playing cards that Charles and Paul had also left behind in the rush of their exit. Today, I would try to re-teach David how to play poker. It was a game he’d once been good at – and had enjoyed – so, why not?

  Why not indeed?

  But first, I would catch up on world events. Yes, miraculously, I had managed to hold onto the transistor radio whilst effecting our escape from the battle. True, it was now a little battered – and smelled a lot of gasoline soot – but it still worked. (I hoped that the batteries had been relatively new because I had no replacements to hand.)

  “This is the BBC World Service,” the announcer intoned. (I was warming to that voice.)

  News that I wasn’t interested in came first but the ‘Battle of Melbourne Port’ was the third item of the broadcast. The item confirmed a couple of things: first, the herding of the zombies into the uni campus – and their subsequent destruction there – had been entirely planned and was claimed to have been largely successful in its aim. (There was no mention of the soldiers who had been taken by the zombies during the battle.) Second, the Americans had indeed come to the aid of the underprepared Australian forces and mention was made of a squadron of F4 Phantoms assisting in the fight-back. They were now based at the recently ‘liberated’ Point Cook airbase, not far from Melbourne. (It was safe to assume that one Phantom had indeed been the delivery vehicle for the napalm last night.)

  Final comment in the item: an outbreak of the infection in Papua New Guinea, a ‘spot-fire’, had gotten out of hand and, given the terrain and lack of indigenous forces and/or solid infrastructure in that ‘new’ nation, it was not expected to be controlled any time soon.

  Hmm. Very bad news but …I’d store that one away for future reference.

  Okay. Save batteries. Turn off radio. Break out the cards!

  o0o

  I needed to know what was left of my brother, what was left of the guy with whom I had shared all the joys and pains of my young life.

  I needed to know also how much he could draw on our lifelong em
pathetic connection – a connection that, I thought, might set him apart from the other undead.

  I was not nurturing any false hopes, of course. I knew that all his ‘higher functioning’ had ceased along with his ‘vital signs’. That much was clear.

  But what was really left of Dave?

  As far as I could see, he had become akin to a particularly blood-thirsty and violent infant – just contained in an adult body. But there definitely still seemed to be some humanity about him – some of his more gentle gestures towards me were solid evidence of this - and I didn’t think this was merely a result of his connection with his living ‘other’, his connection with me.

  So, the attempt to teach him cards was no mere time-filling diversion – at least, not so far as I was concerned.

  At first, David merely looked with disdain at the five cards I had dealt to him. He picked one up from the floor, looked at it on both sides and then crumpled it. He dropped the crumpled card. Patiently, I retrieved the card and flattened it out – I did not wish the pack to be incomplete before we had even started.

  I realized immediately that I’d been overly-optimistic – I had thought he might remember, in the deep recesses of his ‘mind’ that he had once been the family’s resident card-sharp. Apparently not – poker was out of the question. Maybe ‘snap’?

  No, I thought I would start at an even more basic level than that – just as you would with a small child. I would spread the cards out in front of him, grouping them in their suits and lining them up according to their numbers and images.

  Did David still have the capacity for pattern recognition with his degraded sight and his degraded mind?

  David and I sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other in the semi-darkness of the vault. He seemed to be watching me carefully as I lay out the four rows of cards in front of him: all the diamonds, all the hearts, all the spades and all the clubs in their numerical order.

  What did he see? I sat silently as he seemed to scan across the rows of cards. He looked to me, and to the cards – and back again. He started little grunting noises and then, with a roar and a violent sweep of his hand, scattered the deck across the floor.

  He put his face up close to mine and roared angrily once more – and then retreated to his makeshift bed and turned his back on me.

  “That went well,” I thought to myself, believing the opposite.

  I remained seated (and stunned) on the floor – but, within a short time, started to reconsider what had just happened.

  “If the cards had truly meant nothing to him,” I wondered. “Why the sudden display of anger? Why the pointed retreat from me? That was not mere boredom nor irritation.”

  Had the cards triggered some painful memory? Was he suddenly aware of what he had now lost? I would have to wait and see. I was not going to get any more out of him today.

  “Anyhow,” I thought, “maybe now would be convenient time to utilise those small, tubular containers of vegetable matter that I had located in the Rowden White Library. I could do with a good laugh – and some munching of my own. Hmm. Perhaps I had better open a tinned pudding first. Those key-openers can prove to be tricky when one is, all of a sudden, pressed for something munchy”

  CHAPTER 13

  VENTURING OUT

  And I didn’t get anymore out of him for the rest of the time we were there either. The attempt at getting him to play cards with him backfired badly. He withdrew from me and refused to interact – cards were definitely off his agenda. In fact, I woke one night only to find him shredding the entire pack – card by card.

  I’m not sure how many days we stayed in the vault. I didn’t specifically count and the difference between daylight and night-time inside the vault was not always clear-cut. Let’s just say we were there a few days before I even considered leaving. After all, we were warm enough, safe from intruders (no-one ever came knocking) and, for the time being, there was ample food and water.

  But we couldn’t stay there forever, could we?

  Within 48 hours or so of our taking shelter in the vault, the fighting seemed to have stopped. Gunfire had dwindled from merely sporadic to non-existent. There were no audible groans, screams or cries of panic. From this, I deduced that the zombies in this area were a spent force – if not altogether extinct.

  So, if I ventured out in the dead of night without David, I was now unlikely to be eaten –but would I be shot? That was the question. How many of the soldiers remained in place after the battle was done and how many had moved onto where they were now more needed?

  I would have to check it out - 4.00 a.m. on a moonless night seemed a good time to start.

  Before I left, I told David that I would be gone for a short time but that I would return very soon. He looked at me impassively. Did he understand what I had said? I asked him. He remained impassive.

  As I said, he had been quite withdrawn of late – since the abortive card game – and maybe he just didn’t care as much about me any more.

  Who would know?

  I decided I needed to do my reconnaissance whether or not David understood – or cared.

  I opened the heavy steel door just a crack at first. The distant streetlights provided some illumination – and I could see no movement or sign of life. So, I opened the door a little wider – and, no, the hinges had not been oiled for some time and they creaked.

  Spooky (and annoying).

  There was a large fig tree nearby and, at the sound of the creaking door, a flock of several large fruit bats took to flight, silhouetted against the night sky. They had been feasting on the figs, of course, and I had interrupted their meal.

  Bugger! I had hoped to be a little less obtrusive in my first sally forth from the vault. So, I waited, ready to retreat inside quickly if I had attracted any unwanted attention.

  Five minutes or so passed. No-one came. No footsteps. No voices.

  Okay. I slipped through the vault door and carefully pushed it shut again. It made no noise when I closed it. Why was that? Don’t know – I was just grateful for small mercies.

  I stood for a time to allow my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Even so, it was still bloody dark. I cast my eye towards the gate-keeper’s house. If the soldiers had remained stationed at the cemetery gate – opposite the Northern gate of the university – that was the logical place for them to set up base. I expected that they would sleep there, too.

  The Gate-keeper’s house was built solely as a residence some time in the 19th Century. Though it was not exactly grand, it must once have blended in well with the nearby sandstone buildings of the University. Of course, that harmony of style had long since been disrupted by the presence of more modern buildings nearby. Still, I had always thought it looked like a particularly elegant and comfortable place in which a gentleman could reside.

  There was a soft glow of light at one of its windows but no sound coming from the building. The gate-keeper’s house was, in current times, set up as both a residence and administration centre. So, I would have expected the squad – or rather, the replacement squad – at this location would find all mod cons available in the building - as well as space to set up communications, store munitions and so on.

  Having seen the glow at the window, I decided the best way to check it out was to exit from the small, pedestrian gate on West side of the cemetery (which faced Princes Park and was, presumably, unguarded) and then to circle back to the far side of the gate-keeper’s house. In this way, I would avoid having to go near the main (vehicular) gate to the South (which was immediately adjacent to the gate-keeper’s house and was presumably still guarded.)

  My plan, to that extent, was sound. The Western gate was indeed unguarded but the main entrance had a guard seated on a chair and was armed with a sub-machine gun. As I circled around to the far side of the gate-keeper’s house, this would have proven quite daunting – except for the fact that I could hear the guard’s resonant snoring long before I could see him.

  The guar
d, at least, believed the zombie terror had passed.

  This gave me time to observe without the fear of being observed.

  There was no barrier at the gate – a vehicle could simply drive through, if its driver chose to. And there were a number of vehicles still parked at about 75m or so inside the gates – a reasonable distance from a sleeping guard, if one felt like trying to commandeer one of them.

  There were at least three jeeps and a khaki-coloured Holden utility. Did they have their keys in the ignition or did one have spend precious time to ‘hot wire’ them and get them going? (Not that a boy with a good Catholic upbringing would know about such things!) That would remain to be seen.

  I turned my attention to the gatekeeper’s residence itself. On the verandah, stood six pairs of boots, all neatly lined up in military fashion. Did this mean there were a total of seven soldiers in the squad (assuming the guard at the front gate still had his boots on)?