Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  But now after all these months she had decided it was unfair for him to shoulder the full burden of foraging for them. Instead she would share those risks with him. The more she learned from her studies and her practice drills, the more she realized that her husband was actually a bumbling amateur. In fact, she was undoubtedly far more competent than he was, but she knew that if she tried to coach him it would only hurt his feelings, and after all that he did for her, he certainly did not deserve her disrespect.

  To restore his dominance, he had tried to belittle her once, as she practiced her drawing and dry-firing a pistol at the picture of a zombie head on the wall, for what must have been the thousandth repetition.

  “That’s not the same as a live target you know, you’re just wasting your time.”

  Hana had given him a cold look. “Zombies aren’t live. They don’t duck. They don’t take cover. They just come straight at you. You just have to keep your nerve and keep your aim,” she snapped back.

  The atmosphere for the rest of the day had been a little strained until, feeling guilty, she had rewarded him with some truly spectacular sex. And since that day they had not talked about military skills, or how to deal with zombies. They were both happy to accept the pleasant fiction that Takumi was the expert, and that she was the student. However, there was no doubt in her mind that having her alongside as his partner on his foraging expeditions would greatly increase his chances of survival. The next time he started gearing up for his trip to the surface, she started gearing up too.

  “What are you doing?” Takumi looked slightly alarmed as she put on her belt and holster.

  “I’m coming with you,” she replied with an expression that brooked no argument. “The two of us can carry more and we can watch each other’s backs. It makes far more sense and it’s not fair that you are taking all the risks.”

  A look of horror came over Takumi’s face.

  “Absolutely not! It is far too dangerous.” His face was flushed bright red with emotion and he appeared genuinely horrified. Hana was deeply touched. He is so worried about my safety, she thought to herself. The argument went on until after lunch, but he refused outright and would not be budged. Once again he surprised her, she had never seen him so determined. He absolutely refused to let her take any risks at all.

  “No more arguing. It is absolutely out of the question,” Takumi cocked his pistol emphatically and slammed it into his holster. There was a colossal bang and a flash. Both of them stood stunned, looking at the smoking holster, and then suddenly bright red blood drenched his right trouser leg. Takumi had shot off his own right kneecap. He screamed once, high and shrill, and then promptly fainted.

  Hana immediately leapt into action, quickly wrapping a tourniquet around his thigh and putting into practice her newly acquired knowledge of emergency first aid. As she washed the wound out with betadine, and stitched, bandaged and cleaned him up, a calm part of her realized that she was actually quite good at this and she was surprised to find herself enjoying the experience. She finished off dressing and splinting his knee and removed the tourniquet with a feeling of satisfaction and pride.

  However, the emotion was only a fleeting one. Hana sobered quickly as she inspected her husband’s leg with a glum expression on her face. She realized that although he was out of danger, this was a permanently disabling injury. There was no way that a man as crippled as Takumi was now, would ever walk properly again, let alone run or jump or climb. Realistically, the chances of him being able to evade zombies and survive another expedition on the surface had just dropped to zero. From now on, it would be up to her to forage for the two of them.

  Hana decided to go now while he was still unconscious and unable to argue her out of it. It was imperative that she found some antibiotics and started Takumi on a course of them as soon as possible. His was a serious, open injury and without antibiotics, there was a chance that he would get an infection which would kill him just as surely as any bullet. Of course, because her husband had been so immature, their medical cabinets were lacking many essential drugs. Takumi had splashed out on all the shiny gadgets for his bunker, but had neglected to stock up on the basics. She placed a couple of bottles of water next to him with some painkillers and MRE ration packs within easy reach, and finished putting on her own gear. Then she kissed him tenderly on the forehead, turned her back and started to climb the ladder.

  Hana cracked open the hatch slowly and scanned around the inside of the shed with the tactical light on her pistol. Takumi had told her that he always cleared the shed and shut the door before coming back down the hatch, but it was her first trip out of her comfort zone in six months and she was on the ragged edge of having a full-blown panic attack. Her pulse was racing and her heart thumped as if it were going to leap out of her chest.

  She wondered if Takumi had felt like this the very first time he had exited the bunker all those months ago. Her husband had never struck her as a particularly brave man before the apocalypse had arrived, and she found it incredible that he did this on a weekly basis. She closed the hatch, turned off her light and stood in the dark to take a few minutes to try and calm her panting breath. It was cold. Her hands shook as she holstered the pistol and readied her rifle. Then with one last slow, focused exhalation she pushed open the shed door.

  Moonlight flooded in. While she had been bandaging him up, more time had passed than she had realized and it was already night. The back garden was dark and full of enough pitch-black shadows to hide a hundred zombies. Hana scanned left and right with her rifle, then left and right once again, thinking quickly. It was impossible to tell if the garden was empty or a death-trap. Her breathing became hoarse and she realized that she had to move sooner or later. Takumi was relying on her. Maybe I should just go back and wait until morning? She thought. But then again, once he wakes up there is no way he will let me go out by myself. I need to go now, while he is still out cold.

  The rifle had a tactical light mounted to the side of the stock. Hana flashed it on and off into each of the shadows, looking for zombies, but still keeping her body in the doorway of the shed. That way if the light attracted undead attackers at least they would have to come at her from one direction and not be able to surprise her from the rear. The garden was clear.

  She slipped soundlessly through the shadows to the back door of the house, unlocked it and entered her kitchen. Her plan was to get into a room, barricade the door and wait until dawn so that she could see properly as she searched the neighborhood. It took seven nerve-wracking minutes, with the rifle in her shoulder, to clear her way slowly up to the bedroom. Once she had searched the room, she locked the door and sank down onto the floor, panting hoarsely as if she had just run a race. She had only managed to get from the shed to her own bedroom and her nerves were already fried. Hana had no idea how she was going to be able to go out the next day and search strange streets and buildings looking for supplies. She laid on the bed fully clothed, without even taking off her boots, cradled her rifle and cried as silently as she could, cursing her fear and her own uselessness. In only a few minutes she slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  The next morning the sun streaming through the windows woke her up. For one blissful moment with her eyes closed, she smiled, every one of her other senses telling her unconscious mind that she was safe and at home. Her sheets smelled fresh and soft and the sounds of morning echoed faintly through the window. She stretched and rolled over onto the hard, unyielding angles of her rifle and immediately came awake in a flash of panic. Bolting upright Hana scrambled to grab hold of the rifle as she looked frantically around the room. Her barricaded door was still securely shut and she relaxed slightly.

  Then, much quicker than her husband had, she too recognized what she was hearing from outside. Cars. Voices. Laughter. The sounds of a city waking up for another day. Slinging the rifle on her back she walked over to the bedroom window and pulled the curtains aside to look at a perfectly normal sunny day, buzzing with the
morning routine of the suburbs. Hana’s face went blank and for a fraction of a second, she felt dizzy, as if an unseen hand had slapped her, hard.

  She felt almost preternaturally calm. There was no moment of shock or disbelief. Hana understood immediately what had happened. She knew instantly what Takumi had done, and she knew exactly why he had done it.

  She drew the curtains all the way back to let sunlight fill the room, and spent ten minutes deep in thought, watching her neighbors going about their daily lives. Then she calmly stripped off her military fatigues, showered, moisturized, applied full makeup and opened the wardrobe to choose one of her favorite dresses. Satisfied, she smiled at herself in the mirror, put her loaded pistol and three spare magazines in her handbag, and headed off to the mall to get her hair cut and colored. Afterwards she had lunch by herself in her favorite restaurant for two hours. She took her time, savoring every bite of her twelve-ounce Porterhouse steak, and drank two and a half glasses of red wine while she watched the crowds walking past, enjoying the January sales.

  Then she drove home carefully, still a little buzzed from the unaccustomed alcohol, and walked slowly around the house, letting the familiarity sink back into her. Takumi had at least been obsessively neat, so the house was immaculate. The fridge was well stocked with all his favorite foods and she found the old pizza boxes stacked up next to the bin full of Chinese takeaway containers. Chinese takeaway and pizza. While she had been eating constipation-inducing military rations. Well that explains the mystery of how he has been putting on so much weight while living off our ‘restricted survival diet’. Just for the diet alone, she thought to herself, there was no jury in the world that would convict her for murdering her husband.

  Her phone battery was completely flat so she plugged it in, searched briefly online and made a few calls, and then spent the rest of the day reading the magazines she had bought at the mall, and surfing the internet to catch up on the news.

  The contractors arrived bright and early at 7am the next morning, in a rumble of loud, heavy engines, headed up by a couple, a nice Cuban lady and an older man from Texas with a magnificent, silver moustache. They were both Zone ‘orphans’, out-of-towners trapped when the quarantine zone had slammed down, and they had met each other at one of the resettlement centers.

  Hana signed some papers and paid in cash, while their crew quickly dismantled her old shed and set up the wooden forms around that corner of the garden. They never even noticed the secret hatch to the bunker, which Takumi had taken such pains to disguise as part of the shed floor. Then the couple told Hana all about their upcoming wedding while the three of them sipped coffee and watched the crew pour the first concrete. They asked her why she needed such a thick pan of concrete out the back.

  “Oh, I’m thinking of putting in a basketball court. Or a hot tub and deck. Or another garage,” she replied cheerfully. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Then Hana watched, expressionless, as thousands of gallons of concrete spread out over the secret hatch to the bunker, burying her husband alive in the underground tomb that he had unwittingly built for himself. With rations for two people for nearly two years. As long as the well keeps pumping water, and if he is careful with his rations, he could easily survive another four to six years down there. That lying, treacherous asshole.

  “Well, it will be dry enough to walk on in a couple of days, but give it 30 days to fully cure before you start any construction. Plenty of time for you to decide on what you want, I guess.” The man’s eyes crinkled as he smiled lovingly at his fiancée next to him. They were holding hands with their fingers interlinked. Hana thought it was sweet. But also a little sickening. Sure, you’re in love now, but give it a few years and one of you will be burying the other under the back porch. It’s like that old joke that marriage is like a pack of cards. When you start it’s all diamonds and hearts. By the end, all you want is a club and a spade.

  She left them to finish off without her and headed off to the shop. There was a sign on the front door saying that Takumi Taktical was only open Saturdays and Sundays but that customers could visit their online shop 24/7. Hana took it down. From now on, the shop would be open for business seven days a week. It was time to make some serious money.

  Hana logged into the shop’s business email and quickly sorted through the night’s online orders. Then she put on some music, carved ‘Takumi’ into the chest of the rubber target dummy at the back of the shop and spent two hours furiously hacking at it with an axe.

  A bell rang behind her as a fat, blond man in a suit walked through the door. He had a laptop case slung over one shoulder and an expensive looking leather briefcase in one hand.

  “Good morning, sir,” she smiled brightly at him as he nodded to her, looked at the knife display and then did a double take and looked at her a little more thoroughly up and down. “Please feel free to browse, and if there’s anything I can help you with, just ask.”

  Chapter Three

  Taking Out The Trash

  Simon Michaels wiped a tattooed forearm across his brow and decided to give the guy five more minutes before he told his crew to move the body. He had called the guy at Willis Auto over half an hour ago and was becoming impatient. He wanted to get this zombie wrapped and delivered to the IDRC before lunch if possible. Michaels coughed heavily and spat out a healthy dollop of phlegm before lighting up a fresh cigarette and drawing in a deep, satisfying lungful of smoke. This was not the career he had dreamed of as a kid, but his SAT score had sucked and the two minor felonies on his record tended to discourage even the most broad-minded employers. He had been lucky his uncle on the county board had managed to get him a job in the municipal recycling department.

  Of course, since the Lyssavirus plague had arrived in Florida and the quarantine zone had slammed down, his job description had changed slightly. People were a hell of a lot less concerned about the amount of trash that got reincarnated as coffee cup sleeves, and more worried about being infected by a spectacularly violent virus that turned them into rabid zombies. The mayor did not want to risk the ambulances and even mortuaries used by registered voters to be exposed to contamination by some unknown plague.

  Once it had been decided that there would be complete separation between healthcare infrastructure and the disposal of the infected, a councilor on the County Crisis Management Committee remarked that since Waste Management already had the vehicles, the manpower and the wash-down facilities, they should become the de facto zombie clean-up crew within the quarantine zone. All bodies from any Infected Incident were moved straight to the Infectious Disease Research Centre, or IDRC, by Michaels and his team, without coming into contact with the county healthcare system.

  The councilor who had suggested Waste Management deal with the infected was Michaels’s uncle, and coincidentally he was also the opportunistic founder and majority shareholder of Protectrex. This was the company which, thanks to a combination of discreet favors and bribes to the other members of the committee, subsequently won the tender to supply infection-resistant consumables, clothing and equipment to all first responders. Payments to the company accounted for the vast majority of the seventy-million-dollar federal emergency grant to the city council to deal with the plague outbreak, with the remainder being ploughed into the new Waste Management annual budget. In addition, the council had paid over a million dollars to a small graphic design company run by Michaels’s overweight, balding cousin to make a seven-minute Public Service Announcement film regarding the appropriate action that should be taken by members of the public upon encountering any infected.

  “Here they come,” called out Arlene, a pretty Latina who had already done six months on his crew as part of her probation and rehabilitation for gang-related offences. The judge had given her the choice of three years in jail or nine months doing community service with Waste Management. The poor girl had actually thought she was going to be picking up rubbish off the streets, or sorting plastic bottles from soda cans or something. The judge
had accurately assessed that her endearing combination of street cunning and weapon-handling skills, would be of advantageous utility to the county in assisting with zombie clearance. Arlene ground her cigarette butt under a muddy boot heel, checked that her pistol moved cleanly in and out of its holster, and started buckling on her helmet.

  Michaels saw the truck pulling up to a stop behind his one, clearly marked with ‘BROWARD COUNTY RECYCLING’ and their 24/7 toll-free, emergency call number down each side. He sucked down one last, long drag and flicked his own cigarette butt into the road. Then he checked his pistol had a round in the chamber and started to put on his own helmet.

  “Hi there,” a tall, well-built man wearing a mechanic’s coveralls got out of the truck together with a pretty looking Asian lady, and walked over towards Michaels. “Are you the guy I was talking to on the phone?”

  “Yup, that’s me. The name’s Michaels. I’m from County Waste Management. Is that your neighbor?”

  “Yeah. I’m Hugh. I live at 1124, and this is Mrs. Suzuki, she lives at 1123.” Hugh pointed at the identical two-story wooden units standing next to each other. Neither Hugh nor Hana offered to shake hands. Michaels did not notice. He had long since become used to civilians avoiding any physical contact with a man whose job description was to dispose of plague-infected corpses.

  “Okay now, let me see,” Michaels peered through the grille of his helmet at his clipboard, “that’s right, 1123 and 1124. We got a report of a dead Infected at the back of your houses from some dogwalker about an hour and a half ago.” He tossed the clipboard on to the driving seat of his truck and closed the door. “Are you two ready to go and have a look?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Okay then, here’s how this is going to go down. Me and my team will go forward, identify the body and check it’s really dead. You two stay about twenty yards back until we call you forward. If there is any trouble, we will deal with it.” Michaels looked at the pistols holstered on their belts.