The Colony

by Lang, Christopher

  For Soli, it was too much. She collapsed and the swarm pulled her from Tim’s hands.

  Soli yelled for him to run and he did. He looked back and saw the herd had moved away. Soli stood up and looked Tim’s way. She looked for what seemed the longest time, and then began to twitch and snarl. He was more than one hundred meters away but he could still hear her. She snarled at him one last time and then turned and ran after her herd. That was the last he saw of her.

  Tim went to his apartment and sat on the couch and cried and ranted and cried some more. Eventually, he fell asleep and slept until morning.

  - 19 -

  Juan and Michelle sailed close to shore on Lord Howe Island. They had tried to contact the island by radio, but the standard channels were silent. They had been in regular contact with Valerie and Matthew hundreds of kilometres away so they knew the radio was working.

  They approached the shore and noted that the Island Trader was in the dock. Michelle had the binoculars out. “It looks like there is a huge crowd of people. They're standing on the grass at the end of the dock. They’re just standing, standing still.”

  Juan moved closer to the dock and the crowd began to rush down the dock, “They’re crazies”, commented Michelle. “Where do we go now?”

  “Do you think everyone on the island is dead? The Internet says that there are up to eight hundred people on the island.”

  “You expect me to count them?”

  “Well can you estimate?”

  “There must be at least 500 people there, so it’s pretty close yes. I assume there are other groups of crazies. I can see some up near one of the houses. Where do we go now?”

  “We have plenty of food and water. Let’s stay in the bay here for a few days. It’s sheltered. Michelle, can you set off the fog horn? Let’s see if there are any people on the island.”

  - 20 -

  For Tim, the four or five days after his wife was attacked were a haze. As he watched out the window, he saw herds of PVs in the streets, attacking homes and creating more herds. By the third day, the streets were quiet. Rarely, a car or a sign of human life was heard. The PV would shuffle around occasionally, but that was about it. Every three hours, loud music would begin playing at the sporting stadium northeast of Tim's house.

  Large concerts occasionally played there, and he'd heard some of the biggest bands in the world when they played in the city. Unfortunately, he could also hear the football commentary if the wind was going the wrong way. Tim thought football was for fools (but he didn’t tell anyone that).

  This was different. Four or five times a day, the stadium speakers played “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. The song played twice and then stopped until it started again at the designated time.

  Later, Tim thought that he knew what was going on. The stadium was acting like a trap, drawing the PV to the noise to be taken care of by soldiers.

  The soldiers had been ordered to quietly and discretely set up Honey Traps, as they called them. They used noise generators to attract PVs and then terminated them as quietly as possible. The noise from the sound track was loud, but they didn’t advertise what they were doing.

  By now the Government knew that the battle was lost. Luckily, some measures were put in place that would give those still living the best chance to survive.

  The engineering corps were trying to keep the water, gas and electricity going for as long as possible.

  On the fourth day, the music played early in the morning and again before lunch. Then it didn’t occur again. That night, parts of the city were without power.

  Tim awoke at dawn the next morning and heard what sounded like muffled explosions. His apartment had a good view from the bedroom window. The stadium to the northeast was on fire. About five kilometres to the north, a row of explosions and fires were occurring.

  Tim went to the balcony and looked out across the city into the dawn. Parts of the city were awash with flames. The stadium was one huge blaze, and it appeared to be spreading to the surrounding homes. A line of smaller fires went off a long way into the distance. Occasionally, another explosion would occur, and the fires would continue to expand to the north.

  When Tim saw those flames, he decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. Once he’d made this decision, he wondered why he hadn’t left already. His grief and loss had kept him in a familiar place. He’d been in a state of shock and depression since Soli was attacked. As he looked out across the city, he realised it was no longer a familiar place.

  Tim tried calling his boss to check if they had arrived at the Winery, but was unable to get through. He called his own home phone from his mobile and the home phone rang. ‘I hope it’s just a mobile blackspot out there’, he thought.

  He packed his backpack, got his mountain bike from his spare room and went out onto the streets. He stopped at the hardware store, which was closed, but the door was not. He entered the store and picked some items to use as weapons; a machete, a tomahawk, three knives and a security torch. He left enough cash on the counter to cover the purchases. Old habits die hard.

  He put the address of the winery into his phone and set it to bike, it indicated that it would take him two days to ride the 322 kilometres to the Colony.

  The first twenty kilometres getting out of the city were really dangerous. The Honey Traps had been very effective, but there were herds everywhere. There were hundreds of thousands of PVs locked in houses that Tim passed. These PVs would die in their darkened homes, and before long, the city would be a cesspool of disease and death.

  He rode along at a solid pace, but not so fast that he couldn't stop or change direction if a herd came. One of the oddest things he noted, was that when two herds got close to each other, they repelled each other, unless attracted to a sound or movement. If the herds merged, they would later split back up into their original groupings.

  Tim saw no other healthy people on his trip out of the City, but he avoided several herds before he got to the motorway.

  The dual carriageway was flat and made for easy passage past the occasional accident or abandoned cars. The dual carriageway continued for thirty kilometres before it become a single divided carriageway. This made getting around blockages more difficult but not much of a problem on a bicycle.

  Fifty kilometres into the trip, Tim crested a hill and saw a traffic jam that went as far as he could see. As he approached, he saw that many of the cars had PVs in them, but even more contained bodies. As Tim rode past, the PVs lunged at him, but were stopped by the glass of the closed doors. It appeared as though the free PVs had moved on.

  Up to this point on his trip, the small jams and accidents were isolated. It appeared to him that they were caused when PVs had turned in cars and caused accidents. This one was different. After a few hundred meters of seeing torn apart people, he lifted his bicycle over the barrier to the opposite side of the highway.

  Thirty minutes later, Tim arrived at the end of the traffic jam. At the turn off to the Air Force Base, they had set up a checkpoint. Unlike Bevan's blockade a few days earlier, this one had only allowed passage after extensive checks. It occurred to Tim that the holdup was six or eight kilometres long, so there must have been thousands of people in the cars.

  On a hot summers day, and short of fuel, the people had switched their cars off and got out to wait. Before long, it happened. A man was trying to take his wife to safety, when she went from a sick lady to a dangerous lady. She was sitting under a tree, trying to keep cool, when she turned and bit her husband’s arm down to the bone. He instantly became a crazy and tore out the throat of a man who tried to come to his aid. The wife of the newly dead man was bitten by the PV wife. The three of them spread the disease among the hundreds of people waiting at the checkpoint. The MPs shot a dozen before they themselves were overrun by the crowd of PVs. People either became PVs, or got back in their cars and waited for the heat to kill them. A few people tried to run away but the PVs ran them down.

  At
the checkpoint, there were people who had been blown apart by rifle fire, but no sign of the soldiers that had done this. Past the roadblock, the road was clear. It seemed that no-one was interested in going into the city.

  “Where the fuck are the PVs?” Tim was surprised to hear himself speak. “There must be hundreds of them around here.” The sign to the Airbase was riddled with bullet holes. Tim hoped they’d gone towards the Airbase, and not towards the mountain ranges where he was going.

  A sign at the roadblock had been moved from the entrance to the Airforce base. It said: “Stop for verification before proceeding.”

  Tim had a great imagination, but the thought of what happened here upset him. Over one thousand people, sitting in the sun while some military bureaucrat shits checked on people. Why the hell had they done it? They weren't even going past the fucking base?

  He imagined the frustration of people stopped on the road, unable to go ahead, unable to turn around. Stuck. The fear they must have felt when the outbreak occurred.

  Tim looked back at the line-up of cars and looked at the Porsche SUV about fifteen cars back from the roadblock. Hundreds of bloody fingerprints covered the paintwork and windows. A young woman was at the wheel, her head against the side glass with blood trickling from her nose. He put his bike on the stand and looked in the window.

  There were two children in the backseat, strapped in their safety seats. How long had they waited in this line up? How much fuel was left in their car by the time they were this close to the front of the line? How long before the fuel ran out, or the engine died and the heat in the car rose? In a thirty-degree Australian summer, it would have taken less than fifteen minutes for the car to get to fifty degrees without the air conditioning. At forty, the children would have begun to have had fits. At forty-five, the mother would have started to fit also.

  Tears welled up in his eyes as he rode away.

  - 21 -

  In the seven days since Bi-Li brained the Plague Victim they saw no one. The seven of them were living in Laurence and Bi-Li’s house as it was larger and had enough off grid solar, battery and water to sustain them. But the kids were going crazy with the confinement.

  Less than three kilometres away was the Norfolk Pines Shopping Centre where Laurence had his bakery, he hadn’t been back since he had only sold seven loaves of bread eight days earlier.

  Laurence was advocating for moving to the shopping centre. Although his shop faced out into the carpark, it was right near the entrance and he could get from his shop into the main mall where there was plenty of space. Nearly two weeks into the plague the electricity was starting to fail, the water was still on and mobile phones worked but the landlines in their street were down.

  “Honey, there are restaurants we can cook in, the furniture store has beds and linen, there are clothes shops but most of all there is thousands of square meters of mall space. The kids can bring their bikes and soccer balls.”

  “Is it safe”, asked Julie Winton.

  “Yes.” It was Bi-Li that responded. “It’s like a fortress. We’ll run out of food here.”

  “My shotgun is at the shop, in the gun safe. I’d feel better having it.”

  “Why don’t we go and check it out?”, asked Philip.

  “Nope. Just Laurence”, said Bi-Li. She looked at her husband. “Yep just me.”

  - 22 -

  Laurence Chan backed the Land Rover out of the garage and pushed the button to close the garage door as soon as he was clear. He drove down the street and after turning left the road went dead straight for about a kilometre until it reached Joseph Banks Way. The traffic lights were out and he slowed down to a complete stop. The four-lane road was clear as far as he could see to the left and to the right. The Gold Coast suburb of Norfolk Pines was deserted, no cars, no people and no PVs.

  ‘Where is everyone?’, he thought as he approached the shopping centre where he’d run his bakery for the last fifteen years. He drove through the car park and pulled his four-wheel drive to a stop outside his shop.

  He was used to being on alert when he arrived at the shop, as he usually did it at 2:15am when no one was around. Bakeries had been targeted as easy targets by drug addicts looking for cash over the previous few years.

  Before getting out of the car he scanned to the left and right, there was no one around. In spite of this, he opened the car door quickly and rushed to the door to his bakery. He put the key into the lock and turned it. As the door opened, he pushed the button on his keys and the Land Rover locked.

  He flipped the switch, the lights came on and he closed the door behind him. The bakery looked just as he had left it. He opened the freezer and saw that everything was still frozen. The walk in cold room was also good.

  He sent Bi-Li a text saying he was inside.

  The first job was to get the shotgun out and get it loaded. He’d hunted ducks as a kid but hadn’t hunted for years. The gun was stored at the shop to keep it away from the kids and to scare off anyone who thought a baker was a soft target at 3:30am.

  He unlocked the gun safe and took the gun out. Below it was eight boxes of unopened shells and another box half used. It had been over eleven years since he shot the gun, he hadn’t used it since he sons were born.

  He tried the mechanisms on the gun and found it perfectly operational. He put five shells in and walked to the backdoor. He opened the backdoor and swung it all the way open and looked up and down the hallway. It was the back alley of the shops, to the left was an alley that led to the loading docks and to the right, about ten meters away was the door that opened to the mall.

  The hall was illuminated by the skylights and the way was clear. Leaving the door to his shop open he walked to the mall entrance with his shotgun. He opened the door and stepped into the vast interior of the shopping centre, daylight flooded the area from the massive skylights.

  “Hello!!! Anyone here? Hello!!!”

  His voice echoed around the centre. He spent the next thirty minutes walking around and checking the shopping centre over, it would be perfect. The enormous roof areas harvested lots of water into the water tanks. It had its own sewage system that put out almost pure water to the creek, acres of solar panels and enough battery power to run the shopping centre for three days if the sun was totally gone.

  All these things that the centre owners had put in to save money made the centre self-sufficient. The seven of them could live their indefinitely.

  He went back to his shop and locked the backdoor and went out to his Land Rover. He turned the car around and started heading towards his home when he saw them.

  There were three people at the petrol station, they’d arrived while he was inside the Mall. One of the women saw him and raised a hand to wave, he flashed his lights at them and stopped his car one hundred meters away.

  ‘What do I do?’, he thought.

  The three people answered that for him, they started walking towards him, he noticed two things then, the first one was that he knew the man, the second thing was that he was carrying a gun.

  - 23 -

  Bi-Li received a weird text message from her husband. ‘Bringing home a surprise’. Five minutes later she heard the garage door opening and noted a car pulling up in front of their home. Three people got out of the large SUV. Bi-Li was shocked, the man was the boy’s Taekwondo teacher.

  Kenneth Stewart had been teaching Laurence and Bi-Li’s boys Taekwondo for the last two years and although they saw him twice each week it occurred to Bi-Li as he approached the house that she knew nothing about his private life.

  The garage door was now closing and the three people were at her front door.

  “Bi-Li, let’s open the door, let’s let them in.” Laurence went to the door and let them in.

  They started off with sharing stories. Kenneth was there with his wife Sophie and her younger sister Laura Fitzgerald. They’d been home for the past eleven days since the plague started but they were out of food, they were trying to fill the SUV wi
th diesel so they could escape from the Gold Coast/Brisbane area.

  “The smell”, said Laura. “You can smell the dead and it’s horrible.”

  “Where are you heading?”, asked Philip.

  “We were thinking about the Tweed Valley or maybe around Kyogle”, said Kenneth. “What are you planning?”

  Laurence looked at Bi-Li and then Philip and Julie. Julie nodded to Bi-Li.

  “We’re thinking about moving into the shopping centre”, said Bi-Li. “But it depends on what Laurence thinks. He went to check the place out.”

  Laurence looked at the other six adults assembled in the room.