by Dan Yaeger
Suddenly, I knew something was off; surreal feelings and the awareness of my surroundings had changed. My world was rocked and I rolled and slumped to the left. I was in a daze. I knew that Hi Viz 2 was nearby and guessed he clobbered me in some way. I was in a bad patch. I had vision reminiscent of an old analogue television without good reception. There was an image of the world but it was unclear. I could taste my own blood or someone else’s. It didn’t matter, everything was fast and slow and my hearing was gone.
I saw the form of Hi-Viz 2 and lashed-out feebly with my knife, striking something. My attack would not have been a killing blow, by any stretch of the imagination, but I saw the zombie fall and somewhat fall apart. My senses were even further dazzled when I realised my ears were ringing.
There was a momentary deafness; someone was shooting or had shot. My mind raced; “Did the Mouse get them off him and land a few rounds? Who else was here?” As I faded into some semi-conscious state, I saw a vision of sorts.
There was a silhouette of someone standing in the entrance of the courtyard and then I must have blacked out. It was the last moment of that time that I remembered. “Had I seen a ghost?”
It must have been a moment between losing consciousness and regained my lucidity. I could see the writhing bodies of Dolly and Hi Viz 3 feasting on a bloody mass that had once been the Mouse. Inexplicably dead, and near to me, was Hi Viz 2. Its head, part of its shoulder and an arm was largely missing and messed up. Orion was still stuck in the skull of Miss Muffet and my machetes were still lying on the floor where they had been left during the melee.
The silhouette, the person or the shape of a person was either long gone or never there. I was on my own and would have to get into it. The zombies were satisfied I wasn’t a threat and had continued to feed on the Mouse. It would not be too much longer until I was dessert, however. They never forget about a prone, next meal.
I slowly commando crawled over to the body and retrieved Orion from the skull of Miss Muffet. I wiped the blade clean of the sticky, rancid zombie blood so my knife would function at its best again.
Everything hurt and I felt sick. I had had this once before; mild concussion and a touch of shock. I had gone unnoticed though, and took a moment to shake off the malaise. I picked up the first machete, Ebony and then the second, Bob. I breathed carefully to get myself ready and then I rose, like a great cat on the African plane I pounced and brought one blade down on Hi-Viz 3’s skull. Dolly received a killing blow from Ebony in the lower back. Both were gone and so was the Mouse.
Whoever the Mouse was, I had unwittingly been his nemesis. He was a mess; no clearly defined clothing or body shape was evident other than one intact hand and foot. He was essentially a pile of meat, his head had imploded. Strangely, he had held onto that 9mm pistol till the very end. “Merry Christmas Mouse,” I said wearily as I prized the pistol from his intact hand. “A gift that would keep on giving,” I smiled as I looked at the gore covered pistol. In the mess of rags and flesh were a couple of magazines that had once been in his pockets. They were covered in filth, but with a clean-up they would mean additional ammunition for my new close-quarters capability.
“Rock and roll, Jesse” I said to myself, regarding the pistol that had once been the sidearm of the brave policewoman. I wasn’t quite right and together and I was beginning to realise I had been rocked with something heavy duty. As my head cleared and I considered what had just happened, I thought the simple task of cleaning that gore-covered pistol was a good test of my faculties. I tore off some rags from the fallen and feebly began the task.
The rag was used and worked quickly to wipe the 9-mil and its magazine clean. I tried to spit onto the pistol to bring some mobilising fluid to the “cleaning” process but my mouth was so dry I came up with nothing. I worked at it anyway. My work didn’t render the pistol completely clean but it was good enough and proved I wasn’t too badly damaged by the whole encounter. Operating mechanically, I released the magazine in the pistol and cleared a round from the chamber to ensure and what I saw perplexed me. There was only one round missing from the magazine; the shot that brought the zombies here. “What the?”
It was possible that a round had been manually loaded first and the magazine was not drawn upon until the second shot. But that took preparation and was highly unlikely. Mouse couldn’t hit the side of a barn and he missed me at close range; no evidence he would have thought to load the firearm in a special way.
“What the fuck had just happened?” I asked aloud. What, indeed, as I noticed blood, my red, clean human blood seeping from my neck and shoulder from some small holes. My head hurt and my body began to ache all over. The Endorphins of battle were wearing off and a general malaise and nausea brought me low. I could see that I had a number of wounds and I needed to get to a safe place to sort myself out and work out what the hell was going on.
As I walked and stumbled a little, the survivor in me pushed me to check and recheck for any more zombies. After a full sweep of the area, into the carpark and back to where I had parked the truck, all was still and calm. While I was sure they weren’t the last zombies in Tantangara, I was confident that I had just mopped up one of the few little groups that still wandered around. The fact I was standing there, after so many gunshots and the melee that ensued, was testament to largely clear status that could be attributed to the town. I dragged the bodies out into the carpark, alongside the existing pile, and built a pile of my own. Mouse didn’t deserve any special treatment; the idiot’s remains were piled with the other bodies. I went back to the truck and got some hose to help siphon fuel from an old car in the carpark. I looked around nervously as the fuel tank gave me its last resources, spilling petrol into an old water-cooler container I had found next to some rubbish skips. The fuel glugged out of the container as I poured it all over the corpses. Some light caught it in all its glory; glistening and beckoning me to release its power. The smell was almost overpowering and I needed to step away or risk passing out again. Just a small match was ignited and thrown at the funeral pyre. The naked little flame triggered significant force that engulfed all the bodies in an instant. As the fire burned, I considered the strange happening that led me to survive. The fire stimulated my mind and I felt my ability to think, at the very least, had improved. Thoughts of ghosts, saviours and hallucinations went through my mind. I concluded I had hallucinated and must have killed the zombies myself. There was no other logical explanation at the time. As the corpses sizzled, the smell of rancid meat cooking reminded me a little too much of Tanny Hill and I retreated into the relative shelter of the courtyard.
I scanned the shopping centre courtyard for anything else that could have been useful. Most useful items had been looted or damaged beyond utility. There was nothing too much of use left. I did find a winter beanie and a feather-down vest in olive drab colour that would come with me.
As my head cleared a little and I went back outside, I began to analyse the situation. “Who was it I had seen in the entrance?” I questioned. The hallucination theory had been my conclusion but it just wasn’t sitting right. Nothing made complete sense and I could not find the four-wheel drive utility that I had seen driving around. That vehicle added to the mystery of what had happened. It seemed strange that someone that didn’t expect company would have hidden the vehicle and walked in here. My head was better but still foggy so I made an analysis and stuck with it.
“I must have been seeing things.” I decided. I was seeing ghosts in that ghost town; but were they real?
Chapter 15: The Book Judged By Its Cover
It was time to go to Samsonov’s house; to get weapons and ammunition as part of my new plans. I was on a mission to explore Cooleman, to find out what was going on there. The questions cycled through my head “who is the enigmatic Doctor Kian Penfould?” and “when, where and how can I find like-minded people to live alongside me in the post-apocalyptic world?”
“Would Cooleman mean the future or my end?” I asked myse
lf in finality. Only time and endeavour would provide that answer. It seemed a small but complex mission to go there and I had little time to think through all the revelations and implications of the prior few days. All I knew was that I had just made some dangerous enemies in my attempt to find new friends.
“Maybe I should have just stayed at home?” On the surface, my plan to go into the belly of the beast was self-destructive but I had to think broader and deeper than my own mortality.
Cold hard survival was a crutch and I began to justify the situation in its aid of survival. Materially, I had indeed found a pistol and some winter gear for my troubles. But psychologically, I wished I had not ventured there. There was a message in those events; the image of the Mouse gesturing to his bullet-wound and chanting “Cooleman.” A quick flashback of the scene, the fight, the horror and the silhouette. It was so vivid and then gone to reveal a lonely, swaying pine surrounded by gum trees on the shores behind me.
I sat inside the truck and turned the engine over. As I revisited the memory of the Mouse and his gesturing, I found myself whispering “Cooleman”. I knew I had to go there, despite the danger. I needed to know about the people there, the helicopter and make contact with any good folk still out there.
I had to think of the region, of what I owed the Samurai (life), the future of Australia and perhaps the world. The seeds of doubt were there and diminished when above that pine, I saw the image of a Sea Eagle in my rear-vision mirror, circling majestically over Lake Tantangara. The bird of prey had its flight feathers out and was surveying, scanning and exploring for new prey, in pursuit of the next generation of chicks that I imagined were warm and snug in a rocky eerie somewhere. “You’re the Eagle Jess; make a next generation, make the effort. Find people, look after them, make it happen or die alone,” I told myself. It was a short but salient moment in my life. I got out of the idling truck and turned to view the true image of the eagle, with my own eyes. It was what it seemed. It dove, grabbing a fish from the glistening waters and flew off to feed the future. I would be the eagle.
I got back in the truck and resolved that I would not get distracted again; I would stay on-mission, unlike the unnecessary side visit into Tantangara’s centre of town which had cost one life and almost my own. The eagle had inspired me and gave me more energy than food. I was moving again and my mind was given some ease.
The truck warmed up, without issue, and I began the short drive back to the roundabout. As I drove on auto-pilot, I had an additional take-away from those events, a burden. That burden was the death of a survivor and the haunting mystery of what had happened; the silhouette that I believed was a ghost in my head. “What was that?” I asked myself as I reached the windward side of Tantangara, where Samsonov’s house was situated.
The truck managed the hill climb quite well, despite being half full of gear from the holiday park. The heavy-lifting vehicle was good, an easy one to drive and use, and I was happy to have had it. I pulled up to Samsonov’s property; an old white house on the side of a hill, surrounded by clear land and some trees. It was as I had recalled it from the loose memory I had of driving through that part of town many years before the Great Change.
I undid the old white-painted gate and drove in, leaving the portal open in case I needed a quick getaway. I knew the Doc’s people were onto me and if the Mouse was anything to go by, they were willing to shoot and ask questions later. I needed to shoot first, shoot bigger rounds and shoot well. Samsonov’s house was a vital objective in attaining the necessary firepower to achieve that plan. And I was there but with quite a Calvary yet to climb.
The road and my thoughts had me there in moments. At first glance, Samsonov’s home was colourless and isolated. It was perched on the side of that hill, all alone and on the windy side. On closer inspection, the white house of Federation-era vintage was meticulously maintained and had been modernised within the keeping of the original style. “Not quite what I was expecting of Samsonov,” I thought to myself as I got closer. I would find that looks were deceiving and the legend of Samsonov was not quite what people in the region had made it. The house was somewhat of a metaphor for the man himself, as I would find.
Made of weatherboard and painted a white with Federation Red trimmings, the home was lovely and in great condition given the circumstances. It was as though someone had done it up after the Great Change. It had charming little features like a whirligig, a stone chimney (likely an original) and rosettes below the gables. Samsonov must have maintained the original façade and the works were recent enough to have been within 5 years. “Hardly the behaviours of an impulsive trigger-happy nutter,” I thought to myself as I parked the truck out the front and slowly crept from the cabin, readying my rifle.
I was weary, feeling ill and still bleeding after the Alamo in Tantangara. That white house looked like a place of salvation, reminded me of Sacré Cœur. After a stalk and reconnoitre of the 180-degree arc at the front of house, I decided there were no obvious snipers or belligerents. Samsonov was nowhere to be seen but everywhere in the magnificent home he had left behind.
The nausea and feeling of shock reminded me I needed to get in and seek shelter. I needed a short-term harbour and haven to weather the storm: I knew a storm was coming my way.
The destruction of the Doc’s squads and making Maeve look like a fool (not that hard), would all come at a price. “The sooner I get inside and get armed to the teeth, the better,” I surmised.
I checked under the doormat for a key and found nothing. I scouted long-dead pot-plants, nothing. The pot-plants and keys took me back to a memory from long before the Great Change. I remembered being a boy, coming home from school and retrieving my spare key from such a hiding place.
I had been teased and bullied for being a little overweight during one period in school. There were larger kids and I wasn’t truly that rotund but the name Jelly Jesse was too good to pass up. In fact the ringleader of the teasing was fatter than I was. The older boys in sixth grade were really into me one day and I had run away from school early to come home. The day was as miserable as I was; rainy, noisy day and thundering. I arrived on my doorstep, keen to get inside with the thunder, winds and rain on me; the physical and metaphoric. I knew where the key was hidden, in the pot-plant and I was about to let myself in when one of the thugs from the older year had turned up. He and some of his cronies had followed me home. They had the ringleader’s dead-shit brother (a trade apprentice) and his friends, aged 18 with them too. The apprentice was at home with a couple of his mates given to bad weather closing their construction site. When they heard there was a chance to humiliate and exploit someone, they didn’t waste a moment.
What happened next was over the top but it taught me a lesson: people would kick you when you were down. This incident and others like it had taught me to be self-reliant, resilient and nobody’s fool. As I retrieved the key on my front porch, I remember being shocked, dazed and unsure as to what had happened, much like at the Alamo.
One of the older boys had come up, and with utter cowardice, had kicked me in the head from behind with a steel-capped boot. With the thunder and rain beating down on the metal roof of my house, I hadn’t heard them come up. I was just a kid trying to get in out of the weather and take a break from hostilities. I would not be afforded the shelter or dignity of such an experience. Sometimes you have to stand and fight and that’s what I did.
I had been cornered and had no choice but to fight or die. I turned around, on my arse and saw four leering faces taking great delight in my misery and injury. I felt worthless, ashamed and humiliated; a low point in life. They were clearly of the opinion that I wouldn’t fight back and they could have some sport, sadistic fun, at my expense. Nevertheless, I got up and faced the taunts, spit and humiliation and fought back. I pushed one of the apprentices off my porch and punched the little shit that had followed. The strike had hit him right in his fat gob. A punch came at me and I blocked it with a good boxing guard courtesy of my gr
anddad’s teaching. Spit, more punches and taunts and obscenities flew, but they backed off a little and called me a “psycho” for my violent response to their actions. To them, fuck them, I was crazy. But, hypocritically, those cowards setting upon me was clearly fine in their view of things. “Such self-righteousness,” I recalled.
The whole situation was an excessive and obscene example of how people think they can get away with things when no-one matters or they perceive no-one matters. I was watching them to see if another violent assault would come my way while fumbling with the key and instinctively putting the key in the lock by feel. The key went into my father’s belt buckle. The wind and rain and thunder had distracted us all; no-one had noticed the car in the driveway. My dad was working from home.
Standing there like the God of Thunder himself, my father looked at me and then at my adversaries. His lone ten year-old son stood against four boys, all older. It touched a sore spot in him as he had said he had been bullied as a boy. He was a gentlemen and scholar in every way but he did swear from time to time and had trained in too many martial styles over many years to be a soft in this situation.
This time he said simply: “I will fucking have you!” and pointed at them with purpose. To my surprise and that of my father, the three dead-shits underestimated him and attacked. This was a further disrespect that would be dealt with savagely. They saw him in a shirt and pants and thought he was some weak, limp-wristed desk jockey. This was despite his obviously strong, fit appearance. Generalisations are fraught with danger, as they say.