Apprentice shushed her, ordering that we both help holding Jarhead's foot steady, as he was beginning to regain consciousness. Not for long, though. One look at the five remaining spines sticking out of his foot, not to mention the two gaping, vacant holes, elicited a less-than-manly groan as he passed out once more.
July 21st Year 1 A.Z.
morning
“I don't know what's happening,” Apprentice was saying over breakfast. “His foot is festering already, and badly.” Jarhead had not regained consciousness fore more than long enough to swallow a couple of sips of water before passing out from pain once again. “I'm beginning to think that the spines may have fractured and separated once inside... I don't like to admit this, but I don't think even my teacher would be able to heal this without him having to lose the foot, if not the entire leg below the knee.”
Apocalypse Girl paled slightly, Machete went white as a sheet. Scout, on the other hand, just nodded. “If you need someone to help hold him down, I'm your girl,” she said. Tiny nodded that Scout's statement also applied to her and Sonny vomited. Loudly and messily. “We need a bone-saw, though... or else...” She trailed off as I drew my sword and slammed it down onto the bonnet of the jeep. “Yeah, that should do the trick.”
Apocalypse Girl stoked the fire into a roaring furnace, heating Machete's blade as we lay Jarhead flat on the ground. Sonny tied a length of fishing wire as tight as he could around Jarhead's thigh as a makeshift tourniquet. Tiny held his leg steady while Scout and Apprentice grasped hold of his shoulders. If he were to awaken at the wrong moment and realise what was going on...
Swiftly and suddenly I struck, severing his leg just above the knee. Blood began pissing out from the stump. Too much damn blood. Sonny hadn't tied the tourniquet tight enough and Jarhead bled out as we watched, unable to do anything more.
noon
Sonny was clearly upset over his monumental cock-up, we were all feeling pretty much fucked up over it, but he was taking it the worst. Another fucking useless death.
Apocalypse Girl and I were riding with Machete in the jeep, taking point while the much slower, bulkier tank followed in our wake. After about half an hour, maybe a little more, we found ourselves picking through a bunch of abandoned cars, left by the side of the road. Seven in total, all parked neatly in a row. The middle vehicle contained a bunch of corpses, dead for months by the smell, all with their brains destroyed. The rest, however, not a lot that was worthwhile taking.
Apocalypse Girl was keeping watch from the jeep while Machete and I stripped the cars of the few cans of baked beans and two bottles of water. It looked like it had been boiled snow, tiny flecks of black crap were floating around inside, so we poured it all out.
evening
It was dark by the time the tank caught up with us so we rearranged six of the vehicles into a kind of defensive blockade and made our campfire in the middle. Sister was talking quietly to Sonny, who seemed to curl up within himself as much as he could. She was not one to let him do that sort of shit for long.
I went to sit by the poor kid, telling him how I first met Jarhead. He had just gotten a whole group of his men killed by being a complete fuckwit and I lost it and beat the living shit out of him for it. After that, he volunteered to follow me into Brisbane with someone we knew was dangerous and who had ultimately betrayed us.
“Ultimately, we all make mistakes,” I told Sonny, “The trick is to learn from them.” He wanted to know what he was to learn from this. I told him that I couldn't give him any real answers, he'd have to work that out himself. I also told him that I had faith that he could do exactly that. The last part made him glance up at me, at least for an instant.
I heard a snuffling sound outside the barricade and shushed everyone. Straining to listen I heard it again, moving first one way, then the other around the overturned cars. I took Apocalypse Girl's phone and shone the light through a small gap between two cars, near where I had first heard the sounds. Machete, meanwhile, had already jumped over the barrier.
“It's a puppy!” She called out, lifting the unfortunate animal over to me. Sure enough, it was indeed a young dog, just under a year old. “Why isn't he mutated? Everything else we've seen has been, well except for people...”
It had been long enough that my dog-tongue-in-mouth avoidance skills had faded almost to nothingness and I handed him to Apocalypse Girl while I washed my mouth out. She began to make a fuss over the scrawny thing, feeding him some Meat-Beast steak.
When he was done eating Apocalypse Dog crawled up onto Sonny's lap and refused to move. Sonny, at first, seemed to object but soon grew used to the idea. Soon, he nodded off, Sister slumbering with her head on his shoulder.
July 22nd Year 1 A.Z.
morning
The newest member of our little group of survivors woke me by trying to insert his tongue into my ear. Quite spectacularly successfully, might I add... and, as everyone else was awake already, I found myself red-faced and humiliated by a fucking dog. Still, he's a cute little thing. Still small, probably from lack of any regular, decent food than anything else, he had a light brown colouring that would have blended in nicely out bush. He also bore a kind of grin, silly-looking but as if he had not a care in the world, now he had found some people!
He had clearly been in cars before, in fact he seemed the ideal traveling dog, judging from the way he sat between Sonny and Sister in the back of the jeep, tongue lolling out to one side, ridiculous grin on his face. The trio in the back copped a lot of slobber, as did the passenger up front. He knew, however, to avoid distracting the driver with his canine antics.
There was a lot of discussion about where he had come from, how long he had been on his own, who his owners might have been, that sort of thing. Since he had come to us with no collar there was no way of finding any of it out, but it made for a great deal of speculation.
Scout and Machete rode up front of the jeep, Scout claiming that she preferred driving her old Land Rover, but that the jeep was the next best thing. Only Apocalypse Girl and I could handle the tank at present, though we were teaching Apprentice, Tiny and The Twin how best to handle the enormous, weighty mobile weapon. Tiny was picking it up surprisingly quickly, already able to maneuver the thing better than I could, hell even better than Jarhead would have been able to. Only Apocalypse Girl was better, but she can drive anything!
noon
Eventually we came to a fairly large tangle of traffic across the road. The crew in the jeep had been waiting patiently for us and we were greeted by an enthusiastic bark from Apocalypse Dog when we crawled out from our slower, bulkier transport.
“We've already been through all of this,” Scout was telling us, “Found some bottled water, a couple of eskies full of incredibly rotten food and a whole heap of Dead.” Nothing they couldn't handle, clearly. The dead Dead lay to one side of the road. “I can get the jeep around this mess, no worries, but we wanted to wait for you guys. How often do you get to watch a tank crushing cars under it?”
She made a good point, but I felt it was infinitely cooler to be driving the tank in question. In any case, a few minutes later, we were heading to the west once more, a bunch of flattened cars behind us. The trail of torn asphalt that we left in our wake would not likely be repaired any time soon, perhaps ever. Even if humanity survives this, the world would likely never recover... certainly it would never be like it was before. The devastated road seemed somehow fitting.
evening
We stopped for the night once it started to get dark, Apocalypse Dog immediately leaping out of the jeep and running off into the distance, to the right side of the road, barking like a loony. Sonny and Sister ran after him, finding an abandoned farmhouse and accompanying barn nearby. The barn was what had drawn Apocalypse Dog's attention. He sniffed around the base of the door, snuffling and chuffling about. By the time the rest of us arrived, weapons drawn, we heard a voice coming from the inside.
“Please, just take whatever you want. We d
on't have much and we've got no weapons. All we've got is some food and stuff. We don't want any trouble!” He sounded terrified, the poor kid. I told Scout to watch the perimeter, then politely knocked on the barn door. Raising my voice, I told the occupants that we meant them no harm. The door opened a crack. I could see an eye in the darkness. I smiled, trying to seem as friendly as I felt I could manage. Apocalypse Dog stuffed his snout into the opening. “Hey, you've got a dog!” The door opened wide.
Though Apocalypse Dog's welcome was by far the warmest and friendliest, we were all invited inside. Tiny and Scout went back to the road to bring the vehicles nearby, as the last thing we needed was the tank to disappear, along with all of our supplies, and the Barndwellers, all seventeen of them, cooked us a meal of Meat-Beast stew with big chunks of fresh potato and carrot.
The interior of the barn was set up in a similar fashion to that back at The Commune. The Twin looked about uncomfortably, as if she were expecting to see Dead Kindly Lady or Dead Fat Dealer followed by some Dead Musicians shamble out of the shadows. Perhaps her Dead Twin...
“Some of us have had some troubles with a couple of different groups,” Doorman was saying. Up close he looked nearly thirty, behind the door he had sounded about twelve. “And when we saw you guys, all of your weapons, the tank, your guns and shit, well... we kinda thought you might be another group like that.”
Laughing, Apocalypse Girl assured him that we most certainly were not. We would happily accept the meal they offered us, we'd love somewhere to sleep overnight that is under a roof, for a change and tomorrow we will be on our way, she told him. And, she continued, if there is anything we can do to help them out, all they need do is ask.
Doorman told her that all they would really want is a couple of guns and some ammunition, but nothing we absolutely needed. Just enough to scare away any bandits that might come by. While Apocalypse Girl sorted through our supplies, handing over Jarhead's weapons and a reasonable amount of ammo, Apprentice went from one to the next among the Barndwellers, talking to those that needed nothing more while she Healed the others of any maladies that afflicted them.
July 23rd Year 1 A.Z.
morning
We were getting ready to leave the barn, and our new friends, saying farewell at the door. Apocalypse Girl had just ducked into the tank, Tiny was already inside and I was shaking hands with Doorman when his head simply exploded, showering me with brains and tiny specks of skull.
“BANDITS!” Someone screamed from inside the barn and I was hurled inside, along with Apprentice and Machete. Sister, Scout and The Twin were left outside with a number of other Barndwellers when the door was slammed shut, the heavy wooden bar placed over the door and gunfire erupted all about outside. Sonny was nowhere to be found, inside or out.
Swearing, loudly, I climbed up to the loft, looking out between a couple of boards to see what I could see. A mob of men, all filthy, several seemingly sporting fresh bite wounds, descended on the barn. A massive booming sound came from the direction of the doors, then a crater erupted beneath the oncoming rush of semi-humanity.
Most of those that fell got back up and continued their advance on the barn. A couple simply couldn't, missing important things like limbs and heads. One of the clearly bitten men, out of range of the tank shell, fell down only to rise, now Dead, a couple of minutes later. The man next to him simply put a round in his head and went on his merry way.
Then they were too close for me to see. We heard voices from the front of the barn, gloating over the acquisition of such pretty prizes, then a moment later I saw them herding Sister, Scout and The Twin off to the north, hands atop their heads. Another bitten man fell down as they marched the girls off, this one they left behind. Two shots rang out, one taking down the Dead man as he began trying to stand, the next blasting the knee out of the trailing bandit.
noon
“Fucking kill me!” Seemed to be all the bandit that Sonny had shot was capable of saying. “I'm not saying shit!” Tiny had volunteered to go out on a scouting run, being the smallest and fastest of us, not to mention able to kick the living shit out of several people much larger than herself. She was still not back yet, though, so we decided to try to get the location of their camp a different way.
This person looked like some others I had encountered once before. People that had admitted to eating the Dead, that The Colonel had executed in cold blood as abominations. Apocalypse Girl recognised it too, jamming a stick into the hole where his kneecap used to be, she politely asked him to divulge certain things. Mostly along the “where are your friends?” line but eventually resorting to “you know what we do with fuckers like you that eat the Dead?” while flashing a sadistic grin at him. It was a side of her that I hadn't seen before, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with it, but his friends had our friends and I doubted that they were the type to want to sit around a campfire singing songs together.
Eventually he screamed out a location, not too far from here, maybe a kilometer to the north on foot. “Thank you,” Apocalypse Girl told him, sincerely, before putting a bullet in his skull. She glanced to me and I knew what she meant. I had to get the girls back and soon. She wouldn't be able to help out easily, so I took Sonny and Machete with me, along with a couple of Barndwelling volunteers.
evening
We met Tiny on her way back, who joined up with us, telling us a little about the layout of their camp. They had two cages on opposite sides of the camp, one filled with the women they had captured and not killed yet, the other filled with Dead. Every night, it seemed, they would take a woman out of the one cage, pass her around the camp and dump her in the second cage. Tiny had gotten close enough to realise that often, the women in question were already Dead before making it to the second cage. “The men in this group are not gentle.” She told us.
The foul smell drifting down on the wind to stick to us like shit was caused by the Dead one they had put on a spit and were slowly rotating over a large fire. The fucked up part of it was that we had passed a Meat-Beast on our way to the camp, and could clearly see another halfway up a barren hillside on the other side. Nope, scratch that. The truly fucked up thing was that the Dead, roasting away, still twitched and gibbered. They hadn't even put it down before cooking it.
Through the scope on my sniper rifle I could clearly see our three friends in the cage. The rest of the women were filthy, ragged things that were probably forcibly fed Dead flesh. As I watched, the leader of the camp began ringing a bell, shouting that it was dinner time. After that, he called, would be the 'entertainment', a statement that was met with much boisterousness and hooting.
With a glance in her direction, I sent Tiny off to work. Then Machete and Sonny. Sighting the bandit leader through my scope I pulled the trigger, blowing the top of his head off in a rather messy fashion. I was quite pleased, to be honest, I'm hardly the marksman The Twin is, or even Apocalypse Girl.
That, in any case, drew their attention long enough for Tiny to smash open the lock, releasing a good dozen or so Dead. Meanwhile, Sonny and Scout broke open the other cage, releasing our three friends and the other women. As our companions scurried over towards us the bandits realised what was really going on and began to follow. Those that didn't have crazed, Dead-fed women leaping on them, attacking with tooth and nail, clawing and scratching and biting more viciously even than the Dead.
The Barndweller volunteers covered our retreat, one of them stopping to fire back at our foes every twenty seconds or so, just to keep them on their toes. By the time we made it back, Doorman had been laid to rest properly, the Meat-Beast stew was bubbling away and we were welcomed back with open arms.
July 24th Year 1 A.Z.
morning
Scout and Tiny took the jeep back to the bandit camp in the early hours of the morning. There was only a group of Dead roaming around, many of whom had come from the cage full of women. Many more were the bandits themselves. The official verdict was that the group had been destroyed and wer
e no longer a threat to the Barndwellers.
Apocalypse Dog was calmly waiting in the jeep for the rest of us to say our goodbyes properly, this time. When we were done, I realised that I had actually enjoyed last night's activities. Before I could get it out, Apocalypse Girl asked me; “Is it wrong of me to have been pissed off that I wasn't there last night?”
I told her that I didn't think so, that I kind of missed kicking the arses of fuckwits that deserved it. The Twin, the only one of the three that was riding in the tank with us, told us that she and the others had known that we'd come and rescue them, there hadn't been any doubt in their minds whatsoever. I told her that we were all friends, so of course we were coming. I hadn't been about to leave her to the bandits that had been plaguing The Commune where we had first met, nor was I about to leave her to a worse fate here.
“I only wish that we'd been able to do something about the other women,” Apprentice said, sounding slightly sad. “I know that they had been force fed the flesh of the Dead, but still... We don't really know what that does to you, do we? I mean it can't be healthy, not remotely, but still...” She trailed off into silence.
Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 7): July Page 8