by Perrin Briar
Ernest felt the cudgel in his hand. He brought it up and around, knocking the zombie aside. She stumbled, her bottom jaw broken, her cleft chin resting on her chest. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth like she was giving him a raspberry. She hissed at Ernest and made a claw with her one good hand, ambling toward him.
“You know, I’m actually relieved to be fighting you,” Ernest said to the zombie. “How mad is that? Not as mad as talking to you, I suppose.”
Ernest took stock of the moment and realised how slow and easy to dispatch she was compared to their relentless spinning brethren. But then, zombies were horde hunters. He doubted he would feel quite so relaxed if there were a thousand of them.
The zombie’s mouth opened wide for the taste of fresh flesh. Ernest dove aside, rolling up onto his feet. Something crashed into the clearing behind him. It was Fritz on Lightfoot, a Spinner hot on his heels.
“You know, it’s meant to be you chasing these things,” Ernest said. “Not the other way round.”
The zombie turned its head, studying its spinning cousin. The zombie hissed and grunted, and then moved toward the Spinner, claws raised. The Spinner’s limbs flew out, striking the zombie on the head, neck and arm in quick succession, and then moved forward, gripped its throat and tore it out. The zombie’s thick congealed blood splattered to the ground. Another swipe, and the zombie’s neck was snapped clean off its shoulders. The Spinner’s legs spun around like the whirlwind manoeuvre a break dancer performs, sweeping the zombie’s legs out from under him, snapping its legs in a dozen places.
“There’s not much love lost between them, is there?” Ernest said to Fritz.
Ernest ran to Clementine, who he’d hitched to a tree, and jumped onto her back in one fluid movement.
A grey-purple lump lumbered out of the darkness and careened into the Spinner, knocking it aside as if it were a rag doll. Jack drove the Spinner back with a head butt from Herdy. The Spinner rolled with the strike, using the momentum to fling itself forward and away into the jungle.
“Great,” Jack said. “Just when I thought we had him.”
“Fritz,” Ernest said, “Mother is shepherding a Spinner by herself. Can you go ahead and help her?”
“What are you going to do?” Fritz said.
“We’re going to get that Spinner back,” Ernest said.
Fritz took off into the jungle. Jack turned to Ernest.
“How are we going to catch the Spinner again, exactly?” he said. “It took off at about a gazillion miles an hour.”
“I’m the ideas man, remember?” Ernest said.
He stood up in his stirrups, reached up, and grabbed a vine. He gripped Clementine the ostrich with his knees, led her backward, and pulled the vine from the tree. It snapped clean off. He let one end trail along the ground as he tied the other end with a slipknot and waved it over his head.
“We’re going to do it John Wayne-style,” Ernest said.
He took off into the dense jungle, a snorting Herdy falling behind. The jungle here was flat, with hundreds of large trees rising up to the sky-like canopy overhead. The trees could have been columns in an ancient and beautiful church.
The Spinner zipped to the right. Ernest heeled Clementine forward, guiding her between the trees like a giant slalom course. He pulled up behind the Spinner, lasso in hand. He wound it up and let go.
The Spinner dodged to the right with no preamble. Ernest’s lasso missed its target. He pulled it up, steering Clementine with his knees, and began to wave the lasso over his head again. He lowered his body, moving with Clementine as she jumped over a fallen tree. He threw his lasso. This time it latched around the Spinner’s flailing arm. Ernest pulled, wrapping the vine around the cleat-like protrusion on Clementine’s saddle.
Clementine grunted as the Spinner jerked to a stop and then pulled in the opposite direction. The Spinner crouched down, its limbs digging into the soil, looking for all the world like a giant’s resisting hand. Ernest pulled in one direction, the Spinner in the other. Stalemate.
Another length of vine flew out and snapped around the Spinner’s leg. Jack pulled up alongside Ernest.
“Ideas man?” Jack said with a smile at Ernest. “Don’t you mean action man?”
They turned and began to jog, dragging the thrashing creature behind them.
Chapter Thirteen
WHEN THEY got to the ledge they found two Spinners there already—a young girl and the decapitated body of an old man.
“Good timing,” Bill said. “We just got here.”
“Shall we do it at the same time?” Liz said, sharing a look with the others.
“Sure,” Bill said. “It can be a family team building exercise.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to do this for her?” Liz said, nodding to the young girl Spinner.
“It’s not Priya anymore,” Bill said.
The whole family ran forward on their steeds and knocked the Spinners over the side. Priya somehow made a screaming noise as she fell, and for a moment Liz’s blood curdled and turned cold in her veins. The scream died, ending with wet slaps. Liz chastised herself for thinking of the Spinner as a ‘she’ and not an ‘it’.
“Looks like one of them survived,” Fritz said, peering over the side.
“Which one?” Liz said.
“I’m not sure,” Fritz said, squinting at the figure. “It’s kicking up too much froth to tell. It’s heading out to sea.”
The figure was lost to the eye, disappearing into the light of the refracted sun.
“Hopefully a shark will get it,” Bill said.
“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Liz said.
“Neither would I,” Bill said. “Who knows where it might wind up. Hopefully far from here.”
Bill’s hair was a bird’s nest, his face caked in mud, his clothes torn. He looked exhausted.
“Are you all right?” Liz said.
“I’m fine,” Bill said.
Liz noticed something about his chariot.
“One of the goats is missing!” Liz said.
Bill let out a sigh, as if he’d been hoping she wouldn’t notice.
“I got knocked off my chariot,” Bill said. “After we got split up, a Spinner came at me and got stuck under my wheels. He slashed at random and injured a goat. I cut the goat loose and rode the Spinner down.”
“Poor thing,” Liz said. “Do you think the virus got into the goat’s system?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I didn’t want to take the risk. I don’t even know if it can infect animals.”
Jack, Ernest and Fritz shared high fives.
“I got twenty-eight!” Jack said.
“I got thirty,” Fritz said.
“You did not!” Jack said.
“Are you sure?” Fritz said with a sly smile.
“Come on guys,” Bill said. “This isn’t a competition.”
“Life is a competition!” Jack said.
The bushes behind them shook as a Spinner came through it. Jack hurled himself and Herdy at it.
“Yaaaa!” he said.
“Where did he get his wild streak from?” Bill said.
Liz raced forward, screaming “Yaaaa!”
“That answers that,” Bill said. He turned to Fritz. “How are we doing?”
“Not bad,” Fritz said. “I think we’ve got a good number of them, but there are still a lot left.”
“At least now we’ve got a method that works,” Bill said.
“It’s still going to take forever to clear them all,” Fritz said.
Liz and Jack drove the Spinner over the cliff. They shared a high-five.
“With how fast they move it’ll be easy for them to avoid us,” Ernest said. “While we scout one area they could be crossing over to another.”
“What other option do we have?” Bill said.
“We could set traps,” Ernest said. “Funnels to lead them out to sea. Traps to ensnare them. They’ll slow them down, if not kill them.”
Bill spun around, too late as a Spinner smashed into the back of his chariot, knocking it onto its side. The goats ran, the chariot churning up the earth like a plough.
The Spinner’s mutilated leg slammed down. Bill rolled aside, escaping the blow. He moved to get to his feet but found the Spinner on top of him. The Spinner’s handless limb landed between Bill’s legs, an inch from his crotch.
Bill breathed a sigh of relief. The Spinner slapped Bill across the face with a wayward blow. Bill used the momentum to roll aside. The Spinner rolled with him. Liz ran into the Spinner and pushed it clear. The boys were busy keeping another two Spinners under control, knocking them together to keep them fighting, bouncing off one another.
Liz offered her hand. Bill took it, swinging up onto the back of the zebra. Liz pulled sharply on the reins. Lightning reared up onto her back legs, kicking the Spinner on the chest, knocking it back.
“We have to get out of here!” Bill said, gesturing to half a dozen more Spinners emerging from the jungle. “They’re surrounding us!”
Bill slipped off Lightning, ran to the chariot and righted it. He jumped onto it and snapped the reins, heading toward the boys and the two Spinners they were controlling. More Spinners sprung from the foliage on either side of them.
“We have to get out of here!” Bill said.
“It’s too late for that!” Ernest said. “Look!”
The family watched in horror as scarred rotting corpses streamed through the foliage, heading left, right, forward and back, a miasma of whizzing forms. The family looked with desperation at the approaching horror of the Spinner army.
Chapter Fourteen
FRANCIS ROUNDED the concrete base of the treehouse in the opposite direction the Spinner had gone. He placed his feet carefully, deliberately, to make as little sound as possible until he realised the creature couldn’t hear him anyway. He got to the pen.
He looked over at the other side of the fence where the Spinner had been. It was no longer there. This should have made Francis feel relaxed, but it didn’t. He felt more afraid. His heart pumped hard in his chest. He looked around at the animals, who kept neighing and crowing and snorting. They clearly weren’t relaxed either. They sensed something dangerous nearby.
“Sh,” Francis said, reaching through the fence posts to calm down a fearful pig.
Francis edged around the pen to the front. He lifted the latch and opened the gate.
“Run!” he said to the animals. “Go!”
But they didn’t move. A sheep bleated. Francis entered and waved his arms.
“Go on!” he said. “You can go now! Go! Hide somewhere safe until this is all over!”
The animals ran from him, toward the opposite back corner. Francis scared them out the gate and down the short incline that led to the east coast. Most of them wouldn’t wander far. “They’re too used to the easy life to run far,” his father had said.
Only Valiant paused, looking back at Francis. But eventually he ran too. Francis smiled to himself, hands on his hips, pleased at a job well done. A man’s job. His smile soured, malformed like a tube of toothpaste squeezed in the middle. He heard Mark Jonson’s cheek flap, coming from the darkness on the left. Only it wasn’t Mark Jonson.
The figure emerged like it was being born out of the night, a nightmare in living form. It edged the property, spinning, fast and hypnotic. Francis froze. Seeing the creature from the safety of twenty feet up and at ground level in the flesh were very different things. It suddenly became real, a danger that wasn’t to be trifled with. Francis’s breath caught in his throat like a lump he couldn’t swallow.
The Spinner twisted and shuffled, crawling along the ground, heading away, and then back toward him. He wished it would just keep going in the wrong direction. But it didn’t. The Spinner slipped into the pen through the open gate.
Francis shuffled back, bumping into something solid that made him jump. It was the flint block. He put his hand to it. It was cold and rough. It no longer felt like the supporting foundation of their home, but the dry hard concrete of a prison cell wall. If he hadn’t been frozen stiff by fear he would have realised he could have squeezed under the fence posts along the sides.
He had eyes only for the creature approaching him. He loomed larger and larger in Francis’s vision until he was the whole world and there was nothing else in it but him. It was halfway to Francis now, bouncing off the fences on either side, drawing closer and closer with each passing second.
Chapter Fifteen
THE FLOWERS were pressed back against the cliff. The wind was strong and blew their clothes tight against them. Lightning and Lightfoot were the first amongst the animals to recognise their dangerous situation. They reared up onto their hind legs, teetering precariously close to the edge.
“Everyone form up behind me,” Bill said. “We’re going to punch a hole through them.”
Bill was at the head, Liz and Fritz behind him, Ernest and Jack in the rear.
“But we don’t have enough of a run-up!” Ernest said.
“We have to try,” Bill said. “On the count of three. One, two, three!”
They snapped their reins, and the animals darted forward. Bill’s goats struck the first Spinner, knocking it back. Liz and Fritz attacked the Spinners on either side, Lightning and Lightfoot rising up on their hind legs and kicking at them. Ernest turned Clementine around so she could kick with powerful thrusts of her legs. Herdy head-butted the Spinners, throwing all her weight into each blow. But the harder they pushed, the harder the Spinners bounced off those around them, striking the animals’ armour.
“It’s not working!” Liz said.
“Pull back!” Bill said.
The family edged back and lashed out at any Spinners who drifted too close. The oppressive wall of death inched closer.
“How did the situation turn on us so fast?” Ernest said. “One minute we were celebrating, the next… This!”
Jack looked down over his shoulder at the crashing waves below.
“It’s a long way down,” he said, gulping.
“I’m not much in the mood for a swim,” Fritz said.
“We might miss the rocks if we jump,” Ernest said.
“Even if we were that lucky we’ll still be infected by the bloodied water,” Bill said. He turned to face the Spinners. “We can’t jump. We have to go through them.”
The Spinners formed a tight wall of thrusting fists, feet and snapping jaws. They cajoled one another, parting and converging like Battling Tops.
“We’ll never get through them!” Ernest said.
Bill stepped off his chariot.
“Maybe we don’t need to,” he said.
He moved to the goats, who were skittish with the whirlwind wall of noise before them. Bill whipped their blinkers off. The goats pulled back at the sight of the Spinners.
“Go on,” Bill said to the goats. “Find a way through.”
But the goats only mehed, rubbing against the Flowers’ legs. They were having none of it. Liz hopped off her zebra.
“Try Lightning,” she said. “He might be a bit more stalwart.”
She took the zebra’s blinkers off. Lightning grunted and backed away. Liz tutted soothingly and led her forward by the bridle. Lightning hesitated, stepping toward a gap, and then back again as it closed.
“Get off your animals,” Bill said to the boys.
The boys shared wary glances, and then dismounted, feeling even more vulnerable. They took the animals’ blinkers off. The animals approached the Spinners, stepping toward an opening, and then backing off as the Spinners closed it.
“If one gets through, follow them,” Bill said. “They’ll find a way.”
“This is so dangerous,” Ernest said.
Clementine was the first to squeeze between two Spinners.
“Quickly!” Bill said.
The Flowers dashed forward, but the Spinners closed the gap. One
by one the animals slipped through the Spinners’ defences, but each time, the family was blocked.
Gwek!
Clementine stood on the other side of the raging Spinner army.
“Clementine got through to the other side!” Ernest said. “Damn, I could have ridden her through!”
“You would have slowed her down,” Bill said.
“Still…” Ernest said.
“It looks like Lightfoot and Lightning got through too,” Jack said.
“Happy days,” Bill said drily.
“We’re going to have to jump,” Liz said. “It’s a long way down, but we might be able to make it.”
“What about the blood?” Bill said.
“It’s still better than heading into that,” Liz said, pointing at the Spinner army.
“At least the fall and the rocks will be over quick,” Ernest said. “Not like getting torn to pieces.”
“Wait,” Bill said. “There might be another way. Hold my legs!”
Liz pressed on them as Bill lay down and crawled over the precipice, hanging upside down. The water raged and billowed, roaring and reaching up like a bird ruffling its feathers.
“Whatever you’re doing, do it fast,” Fritz said, stepping forward and pushing against the Spinners with his shield.
Bill peered at the cliff face. There were no ledges jutting out from its surface.
Damn! It was their one way out. Bill ran a dirty hand through his hair at the realisation that this was the end. His throat burned and he felt the tears well up behind his eyes. He shook his head and forced a relaxed expression onto his face. He gripped the underside of the cliff to push himself back.
He paused. He felt at the rough material his fingers had instinctively grasped onto. A tint of moonlight caught an entwined rope of white roots. It curled under the ledge and ran between the cracks and fissures in the cliff face. Bill pulled at the root rope. It tore free of the soil. Bill pressed all his weight onto their base, where they met the earth. They stayed firm and did not come loose. Bill grinned like a man who had discovered gold. He pushed himself back up onto the surface.