by Shane Carrow
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “Classified, or whatever. Sure. I get that. But I know you’re not up here to go find your mates’ crashed helicopter or whatever.”
“Is that what they told you?”
“They’ve told me a few things,” Andy said, smirking slightly. “A few conflicting things.”
Well, I guess we’d never intended to end up at Barton Dam – we’d never thought we’d have to get our stories straight. I looked up past the column of hikers at Captain Tobias, pushing through the snow, the outline of his M4 silhouetted against his back in the morning winter sun.
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“Funny to see civilians along with an SAS team, too,” he said. “They’re SAS, right? Not normal soldiers. And they’re stringing you kids along. What are you, sixteen?”
“Eighteen,” I said irritably.
Andy grinned again. “Well, I know you can’t talk about it, but… just saying.”
And then he was striding forward again to talk with the others. Like Tobias, he barely breaks a sweat. With his stupid sword and his stupid Akubra and his stupid grin. I can’t even accuse him of treating everything like a game – he started out down on the plains, he’s seen worse shit than me, probably.
Maybe he’s just grasping at an answer. Like the people back at Barton Dam were happy to welcome the SAS in, grasping at the uniform. At what they represented.
The morning wore on. Around midday, with the sun at the top of its weak, cold little arc along the northern horizon, Captain Tobias called for another break in a sheltered terrace of snow gums overlooking a valley. He stood at the edge of the trees with Andy, deep in discussion, while the rest of us dropped our backpacks to the ground, unscrewed our water bottles and sat down in the snow to rest our exhausted muscles.
“What are they talking about?” I asked Corporal Rahvi, as he sat down on a lichen-swathed rock beside me to fiddle with his bootlaces.
“If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say the snowstorm that’s coming in.”
I followed his gaze up to the horizon. It had been overcast all day, but the clouds that were gathering to the east now looked dark and dangerous.
“Shit,” I said. “What does that… I mean, what do we do?”
“Whatever we’re told,” Rahvi said. “We’re more than halfway to that lodge by now. I reckon we’ll push on.”
“What if we get caught in it?”
“Then we’ll have to dig in,” he said. “We’ll go down in a valley, find some trees, get some snow shelters going. It won’t be fun but we’re not going to die. Me and Cutler made it through just fine the other night. Shit, last proper blizzard I was in was in Afghanistan. We were on a night raid, meant to grab some Taliban chief, but command totally fucked up the planning and sent us in with a blizzard coming down from the Hindu Kush. Now, that’s fucking snow, mate. This’ll be a walk in the park…”
There was a shout from further down the trees. “Movement! I see movement!”
Corporal Rahvi was off the rock and running in half a second. I was a little slower, grabbing my backpack, running down through the snow to where everybody else was gathering at the edge of the little snow gum forest. The land dropped away sharply here – there were a few more snow gums and then a clean sweep of snow to our right, while straight ahead of us, the land dropped away to a deep valley with a little creek running through the snow in the centre.
And down there, stumbling along by the creek, was a snow-crusted figure with the unmistakeable movements of a zombie.
“Leave it,” Captain Tobias said.
“I reckon I can hit it from here,” Simon said, resting his rifle in the crook of a snow gum, adjusting the scope.
“No, you can’t,” Tobias said. “And anyway…”
Simon squeezed the trigger. A shot rang out around the valley, deafening against the quiet whisper of the wind in the gum leaves. I saw the zombie jerk, and stagger – but it kept on moving.
Tobias rounded on Simon. “I ordered you to leave it!” he said.
Simon looked up from the scope, puzzled. “I got him in the head. I know I did.”
“It doesn’t work like that here,” Tobias hissed, standing over him, “and anyway, I gave you a direct order…”
“Oh, shit!” Matt yelled. “Shit, more of them!”
We turned our heads in the other direction – away from the valley, up the slope, only about ten metres away. The wind had been blowing in the other direction and we hadn’t heard their moans, but we could see them now: more snow-encrusted zombies, lurching up over the crest and tumbling down the hills towards us.
Some of the SAS raised their rifled and opened fire with quick bursts, but it was too late. The braindead zombies were stumbling over the ridge with no thought in their rotting skulls but bearing down on us – and so of course they tumbled forward into the snow, lost their balance, and came toppling down the hill towards us, where we stood scattered at the edge of the gum trees, with an enormous downhill expanse of snow sweeping away behind us all. Taking a headshot on a zombie tumbling down a hill was a damn near impossibility. I saw one of them plough into Trooper Cutler, knocking him off his feet. Gunfire crackled out, but I saw Sergeant Blake slam the butt of his M4 into a skull, saw Andy with his sword out, Captain Tobias with an ice pick in his hand. A zombie came surging down the slope towards me in a plume of frosty ice and I jumped to the side to avoid it – but then I was on my hands and knees, and there was another one tumbling down the slope at me, flailing its limbs in the snow in a curiously pathetic way, but still baring its teeth and snarling at me – and I shoved my palm against its neck instinctively, holding that deadly bite away from me even as the rest of its momentum slammed into me and sent us tumbling, tumbling, tumbling…
My sunglasses had been knocked off, there was freezing cold snow spilling in behind my neck and down my arms and into my snow pants, and this horrifying snarling monster in my face the entire time as we went cartwheeling down the slope together. My Glock was in my backpack, not on my thigh; I’d used the holster strap for Matt’s tourniquet and never replaced it at Barton Dam. Rookie mistake, stupid mistake. I’d thought I was safe. Up here in the Snowy Mountains, surrounded by SAS troops, I’d forgotten that one lesson I’ve learned time and time again: you’re never safe anymore.
After what felt like an eternity we came to a rest. There was snow everywhere, all around us, piling up - a little mini-avalanche from the zombies tumbling over the crest. I couldn’t even see my assailant any more, I was holding him at arm’s length in a drift of loose snow. In the jumbled fall I’d luckily ended up on top of him, and I pinned a struggling arm under my leg as I shrugged my backpack off – my head and shoulders bursting out of the snow now, near the bottom of the valley, where I could still hear gunfire and even a muted grenade blast – and unzipped it with one free hand, spilling half my stuff out into the snow, desperately clawing for my Glock. My fingers closed around that beautiful, familiar shape even as the zombie pushed against my weakening arm, tried to break free of my grip. I pushed the slide against my belt, heard a bullet click into the chamber, reached down through that loose and puffy snow and pressed the barrel against the icy flesh just a few inches above my other hand.
I fired three times. The thing struggling beneath me stopped immediately. I sat there for a moment, still gasping for breath, my hand still pressed against the rotting flesh of its neck. Then I scrambled away, out of the deep snow, out towards the creek.
A moment later, on unsteady feet, I looked up. The gunfire had stopped. I’d come all the way down the slope – even now there were still little cascades of snow sliding down, burying the dead zombie, burying my backpack for that matter. I staggered over and pulled it out, shaking snow off it, looking up the slope. We’d been scattered – there were people all over the place, halfway down the slope, snow stained pink with blood, somebody screaming.
There were gun
shots behind me. I whirled around. Andy was only ten metres away, raising his rifle and firing, working the bolt back, shooting again and again. He was aiming at the zombie down here by the creek, the one Simon had shot at, still patiently staggering on through the snow. Andy caught it through one of the eyes, a dark splatter of rotted material jetting out onto the pure snow behind it, and it collapsed.
“Aaron,” he panted, shouldering his rifle and coming across to me. “You okay?”
“I… I think so,” I said. I felt dazed. “What the fuck happened?”
“Come on,” he said. “We got to get back up there.”
He helped me up the slope, picking up his Akubra from where it had been knocked away. The corpse of a zombie was lying in the snow beside it, the same one that had smashed into him and sent him down the slope like me. It was wearing olive camouflage fatigues; an Army uniform. But it had clearly been up here for a while.
We weren’t the only ones who’d been snowballed down. A little further up we came to another zombie stumbling down the gentler slopes here at the bottom of the valley, snarling and lurching towards us. He had a combat knife sticking out of his neck like one of Frankenstein’s bolts, angled upwards into the brain, but it must have glanced off the skull or miraculously missed the brain stem because he was still motoring along. Andy raised his high-powered hunting rifle, levelled it between the zombie’s eyes, and waited until he was a few metres away. The bullet cracked through its skull and dropped it into the snow.
Further up we found that same zombie’s victim – Trooper Cutler, lying on his side on the slope, his throat torn out and his skin already turning pale. The snow around him was stained pink, a deep pink oval, lengthening downslope. “Fucking hell,” Andy muttered, and put another bullet through his head.
I looked up the slope as the echo of the gunshot rolled around the valley. There were no more obstacles between us and the others – just another zombie corpse, and Jonas, who’d been knocked downslope but had got lucky like me and Andy instead of unlucky like poor old Cutler. The three of us kept trekking up.
When we eventually got up there – a good ten minutes of clambering up steep snow, red-cheeked and sweating and struggling for breath – we found a small battlefield. There were dozens of corpses scattered across the ground by the trees, and a deep snowy crater that reached down to the dormant grasses and dirt beneath; somebody had fired a grenade. That, as far as I could tell, was the cause of half the misery. Corporal Arad had been killed, straight up, his upper body torn apart - they thought maybe he’d been the one who fired the grenade, surrounded by encroaching dead and dry of ammo, trying to take as many of them out as he could. But the shrapnel had spread, and the injuries were widespread. Corporal Rahvi was worst off, with wounds to his legs and stomach. Simon had been hit in the leg and his pants were already slick with blood. Sergeant Blake had been winged in the head and was unconscious, bleeding profusely from a gash above his ear, Tobias strapping gauze around his head and shouting orders even as I arrived at the group and stood in confusion.
“We need to get fucking moving!” Tobias said. “That storm is coming and if it hits us like this we’ll be dead! Grab the shit! Andy, Jonas, you take Rahvi…”
He kept doling out orders. I looked nervously to the east. The dark stormclouds had moved towards us frighteningly fast – they covered half the sky now, and the mountain peaks in the distance were blurred, already shrouded in snowfall.
I did what Tobias said, fetching gear from those who could no longer carry it, stepping around the fresh corpses in the snow. Nearly all of them were wearing military uniforms. Was this what remained of the first group that had come – the dead of the first chopper crash?
We moved out along the slope as soon as we could. Captain Tobias – who was himself bleeding from a nasty, untreated wound to his shoulder – had ordered the others to unpack sleeping bags to use as makeshift stretchers. Basically like carrying someone in a sheet, but what else could we do? Andy and Jonas carried Corporal Rahvi, while Tobias and Matt carried the unconscious Sergeant Blake. Rahvi himself was still very conscious, and though he gritted his teeth and clamped down on his pain he still gasped or moaned occasionally. The sleeping bag they carried him in was soon slick with blood, dripping a trail of pink dots in the snow along their path.
Professor Llewellyn and I were left to help with Simon. He was conscious, and compared to Rahvi or Blake he was doing just fine – just a gash in his thigh to worry about, just an alarmingly thick amount of blood oozing out into his snow pants and then freezing against the howling easterly wind. My hands were already going numb. “That fucking dickhead,” Simon hissed in pain, teeth gritted, as we hobbled along through the snow behind the others. “What the fuck was he thinking? A grenade, fucking hell, what the fuck?”
“Never mind that now,” Llewellyn said. “Just focus on moving ahead. Come on, you can do it…”
“Ahead!” Simon said. “Where the fuck are we going? That lodge? We’re fucked.”
“We’re not fucked,” I said. “We’re going to be fine! It’s another kay or two ahead…”
Simon panted, limping along between us, his ruined leg held up above the ankle-deep snow. “Mate, we make that lodge before the snowstorm hits, I owe you a Coke.”
We stumped on through the snow, following behind the stretcher bearers. If another horde of zombies hit us now, we were fucked. My eyes scanned every ridge, every boulder, every clump of snow gums.
And yet even now – as we picked our way along a snowy ridge, carrying our wounded, glancing over at the encroaching black clouds – I could still feel that tug in my stomach.
Soon the sky above us was piled thick with dark clouds. It began to snow, tumbling down in gentle flakes at first, then picking up, the wind gusting around us, the snow becoming heavier. The trees along the nearer slopes were getting blurred; visibility was dropping fast. “This is crazy!” I yelled over the wind. “We’re going to get caught in the storm!”
“We don’t have a choice!” Andy yelled back. “The lodge isn’t too far! We just have to push on! Follow the ridge, just follow the ridge…”
Already his words were being swept away by the wind. But I could still see them, pushing along the ridge ahead of us, trudging through the snow and murk. Andy and Jonas were carrying Corporal Rahvi just ahead of us – I’d already lost sight of the leading party, Tobias and Matt carrying Sergeant Blake. I couldn’t see more than ten metres ahead of me now. The wind felt like it was cutting right through to my bones, the fresh snow like pin pricks around my face. I was wet, too – plenty of snow had come into my parka and down my snow pants as I tumbled down the slope with that unexpected zombie, and now it was melting against my body heat.
We trudged on for what felt like forever. It might have been ten minutes. It might have been an hour. What I remember is Simon becoming increasingly more groggy, dragging on me and Llewellyn more and more. I remember trying to talk to him, slapping his cheeks, trying to keep him awake.
And then I remember him finally collapsing, dropping to the ground – and before either of us could register that, he was slipping away, sliding down the snowy slope. At this point the blizzard was so thick I couldn’t see more than a few paces to either side of us; Andy and Jonas, just ahead of us, may as well have been back at Barton Dam. I had only a split second, watching Simon’s unconscious body tumble down the slope to our left.
“Aaron, no!” Professor Llewellyn said, and tried to grab me – but I was already moving, already stumbling down the slope after Simon, hoping that I could grab him and drag him back up. In less than a second the professor’s voice was lost to me, whipped away in the wind and the darkness, and it was just me: staggering down the slope, half-frozen, trying to grab my friend before he slipped away into certain death.
By the time I managed to get a grip on Simon’s parka, we’d already gone some way down the slope, and the ground was dropping away even further. Suddenly it was like the zombie attack again, except
this time I was trying to hold my skiing partner tight, not keep him away. We slid uncontrollably down a long, smooth slope of snow, a freezing and terrifying jumble of ice-hot darkness, and all the time my veins were flooded with adrenaline, because all I could think of was how totally fucked we were. We’d left the group. We’d vanished into the storm. We were dead.
We came to a rest eventually and I staggered to my feet, dragged Simon out of the deeper snow. In the gloom of the blizzard I could just about make out that that we were in a snow gum forest, with a creek running through it. The inside of my parka and snow pants were coated with fresh snow. My hands and my feet had gone numb and I was shaking all over. Simon was only semi-lucid, mumbling something at me, pawing at me with one hand.
You’re going to die, I thought. You’ve actually done it now, you’ve finally fucked it – you’re going to die.
I staggered to my feet, not ready to die just yet. Snow forest, okay, that was fine, that was better than an open field. Still sub-zero. Well, maybe if we went along the edge of the valley we could find a way back up the ridge, find a gentler slope I could drag Simon up, make our way back to the others, yes, that was definitely doable and not the desperate fantasy of a brain that was freezing to death…
Stumbling through the forest, I stopped dead in my tracks. Through the swirling, windswept patterns of snow I could mostly make out snow gums: twisted, stunted, ghostly shapes. But before me there was that rarest thing in nature: a straight line.
I staggered back through the snow. I grabbed Simon by the loop of his backpack, dragged him behind me through the snow, my legs freezing and cramping but driven by sheer determination now. The horizontal line resolved itself into the edge of a hut, sitting there in the snow gums by the edge of the creek.
I shoved the door open and dragged Simon inside. It was dark and dank and just as freezing as the world outside, but I shoved the door shut again and stood there in the dark, shivering, and at least it was a respite from the wind. In pitch black darkness I unzipped my backpack, Simon lying on the floor and murmuring in half-conscious distress. I found my flashlight, and switched it on.