Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 1): January (12 page)

As we finished our food we heard a loud bang from outside.  Copper looked up hurriedly, told us he would be right back, and left.  Another bang, then a third.  I realised at that moment that these were gunshots we were hearing.  The fourth, fifth and sixth shots rang out and Copper ducked back into the corridor, gun drawn.  “Looks like you guys were right after all.”  He told us as he unlocked first the girl's cell, then ours.

He made to leave out the main door, but I grabbed his arm.  Asking about our weapons, he pointed out the right key before rushing out to assist his partner and boss.  More shots rang out as we hurried to the evidence room.  I unlocked the door, and The Twin immediately grabbed her bow, and a handful of arrows, then bolted for the front of the building to lend her aid.  Archer and Junior followed her example, while Biker, Apocalypse Girl and I lingered a while.  We snatched up all of our supplies and weapons, as well as the two heavy machine guns and ammo crate that lay on a far shelf, covered in a decade of dust.  Apocalypse Girl and Biker took the guns and ammunition to the door as Junior ran back into the hallway.

“Too many of them, we're falling back.  Cop says there's a stairway up to the roof past the evidence room, sent me to grab the keys and open it up for us.”  That was good thinking, as the emergency exit of the bus could just as easily be used as an emergency entrance.  I heard a shriek of agony, clearly the landlady of the pub, that ended with a gunshot.  Junior opened up the door, sure enough stairs leading up lay behind it.  The girls took the new found guns and ammo to the roof first, and I ran to get the others while Junior held the door for us.

As I opened the door, drawing my sword, I walked into a massacre.  The landlady's corpse lay in the grip of an equally dead Dead.  She had a hole neatly in the middle of her forehead, and the older cop was firing wildly through tears of rage.  Running out of bullets he simply threw his revolver at the approaching Dead, then looked about for something he could use as a weapon.  Eventually he settled on a chair, then when that broke on his first victim, a chair leg.  The leg proved more effective, and I waded through a sea of Dead, slicing heads apart with my blade to stand at the policeman's back.  We moved towards the back of the station, under covering fire from Archer, Copper and The Twin, and the five of us regrouped in the hallway out the back.  The older cop was breathing heavily, face flushed.

“Go.”  He ordered us.  “I'll buy you some time.”  He hefted his chair leg.  The Dead were pounding on the door.  Individually weak, sure, but this many was easily the rotting equivalent of an ocean, and would wear down mountains given enough time and inclination.  They definitely had the inclination, and, already Dead, had all the time in the world.  The door was already shaking more with each surge.  It would not hold long.

We ran past Junior, who closed and locked the door as we ascended the stairs, nearly falling over each other in our haste.  Copper spotted that the girls had found the weapons, and smiled.  He mentioned that those had been confiscated from a compound a few kilometres north-east of here, some cult or other that had committed mass suicide several years before.  This had happened before his time, but his partner liked to tell stories about the good old days.

Looking over the edge of the roof, we saw a massive group of Dead.  More than I had seen yet in any one place, easily several hundred of them.  Apocalypse Girl pointed one out to me, then another.  They were wearing the same prison uniform that the bandits who had attacked the commune had been.  Junior let out a low whistle.  There were an awful lot of Dead prisoners down there.  A yell of pain from below ceased our procrastination, and we leaped from the roof of the police station to that of the Greyhound barely half a metre below it.  Junior landed badly, injuring his knee and nearly falling off into the crowd.  He caught himself on my ankle just as his legs went over the edge.  As I was still kneeling it only barely impeded my balance, and he and I together pulled him to safety.

We pried open the roof-top emergency hatch and lowered ourselves down one at a time.  Apocalypse Girl and I decided, upon surveying the scene, that it would be impossible for the bus to start moving with this horde surrounding us, so we figured someone should be up top clearing the path of the Dead with these shiny (dusty) new (old) machine guns.  The ammo crate had easily several thousand rounds contained within.  Archer looked at the weapons closely and laughed.  It turned out he had smuggled these very guns out when he had left the army following the Vietnam war.  Looking them over, he judged them fit for service, and showed Copper how they were used.

Up they went, and we heard scratching, dragging, clunking sounds as they set up the guns.  Moments later the pair opened up on the Dead directly ahead of the Greyhound.  Junior shouted with glee and started the engine.  A moment later the rooftop gunners had cleared a swath of Dead in front more than the width of the bus, and three times its length and we began to move.  A bumpy ride to begin with, as we had to roll over the corpses of a couple of hundred Dead, but once we got rolling we ploughed into the wall of Dead ahead, plunging through into the freedom beyond.

night

We judged it safer to drive into the night, at least partway, as that horde of Dead had clearly been following us since we had left the commune.  Their tenacity had to be admired, but this level of persistence was also wearing.  We stopped only to eat, and even still, not once did we leave the bus.

Copper asked if we could drive to Melbourne, as he had family there he wanted to check up on.  Apocalypse Girl told him gently but firmly that they were likely to be dead now, but he would not accept it, and insisted.  Eventually we agreed, though it meant we would have to get back onto a main highway.  Junior spent much of the afternoon plotting our course to Canberra via Melbourne on the map while Copper and Archer stripped and cleaned all of our firearms.

“So those Dead that were wandering around us in the rain the other day, do you think they were following us too?”  Apocalypse Girl asked me.  I answered that I didn't, and that I thought there was a good chance they had joined up with the group from the commune.

“It seems like once they think they've found someone to eat, they just keep on coming...”  The Twin interjected.  Her voice lowered.  “Do you think those two back there will stop them for long?”

Copper heard her anyway, and responded.  “No, I don't , and you'd be stupid to think so too.  There were way too many of those fucking
things
out there.  They might have delayed them by a few minutes.”  He looked up at Archer.  “Can we make any more arrows?”  Archer told him that he had the tools needed, but he needs something for fletching and heads, and of course wood for the shafts themselves.  I told him, while rolling a joint, that we had it all on the list.  We smoked in silence, Copper joining us as well, and drove on into the night.

January 22nd  Year 1 A.Z.

morning

Little had changed overnight.  We were now out of all fresh meat, so we broke our collective fast upon the salted beef.  The clouds still roiled overhead, though there had been no more rain.  Archer was on the roof of our bus, keeping an eye out for any Dead, either ahead of us, or the group following.  Copper was having a hard time dealing with the suddenness of it all, as for him the world only ended yesterday.  Biker was spending a lot of time with the newcomer this morning, maybe she doesn't entirely trust us yet and feels comfortable around his uniform.  Junior and The Twin, and Apocalypse Girl and myself, for that matter, felt distinctly uncomfortable around our new uniformed comrade.

Archer jumped down from the roof, telling us that we should get moving pretty soon.  He had spotted the group following us on the horizon, and we needed to find somewhere we could refuel before too much longer.  It turned out that the machine guns from the police station had been smuggled out of Archer's old army barracks, coincidentally on the day Archer himself had been discharged.  He and Fat Dealer had been conscripted, and served together in Vietnam and had needed money to set up their commune when their time was up.  Stealing weaponry to sell on the black market seemed the logical thing to do.

We gathered our equipment and piled on into the bus, Apocalypse Girl taking the wheel, and off we went, long before any of the Dead were near enough for us to smell, let alone see.  Junior suggested that maybe we should have taken a few of them out before leaving, Archer replying curtly that we didn't have the ammo to spare for that, and that there were far too many of them to engage up close.  From up front came the call to “HANG ON!” as Apocalypse Girl revved the engine mightily and the Greyhound dove into a second group of Dead ones, and over them, to relative freedom.

noon

Pulled over by the side of the road was, of all things, a light aircraft bearing the logo of the flying doctor service.  A ladder leading up to the cockpit beckoned invitingly, and we decided we couldn't pass up the opportunity to score some medical supplies.  Junior took up his club, I took my sword and inside we went.

Blood covered almost every centimetre of the planes interior.  The cockpit was bare, though those seated there were quite clearly no longer among the Living, they were nowhere to be seen.  Junior snagged the fire extinguisher from behind the pilots seat and we ventured inside.  Doctor and nurse, both quite Dead, stumbled and fell about a third Dead that had been restrained, though clearly not nearly enough.  A fourth, the co-pilot, lurched out, trapping Junior in the doorway.  My blade sliced through its head, and Junior went in to clobber first the nurse, then the doctor.  I joined him just as his club crushed the skull of the restrained Dead.  Together, we swept the plane, still not finding any trace at all of the pilot.

“Anything we can use in here?”  Came Coppers voice from behind, startling us.  He came in, The Twin following him, the pair of them holding empty suitcases to fill with medicinal supplies.  There was not a lot around that we could really use, though we grabbed everything we could find that was clean.  This amounted to a couple of scalpels, some surgical scissors, a few bandages and a small amount of morphine in tablet form.  There was a portable defibrillator on the floor, but the cables had been torn out in the fray and one of the paddles was absent, so we decided not to waste time with it.  Apocalypse Girl shouted that there were Dead approaching from behind, and we fell back to the bus and left.

evening

Before the sun set behind the clouds we gathered around a fire, boiled up some salted beef and feasted.  I rolled up the last of our weed, and we smoked together, deciding that we needed to put some more distance between ourselves and the group of Dead we had left behind us before we could sleep safely.  We drove until the sun was well below the horizon, then Copper pulled the bus over.

Archer pulled out his map, and we pored over it in an attempt to locate our current position.   He had found a marker from somebody's luggage and marked the approximate position of the commune and had been tracking our progress by comparing the map with the amount of distance travelled according to the bus's odometer.  It seemed fairly accurate, from what I could see, but Archer clearly knew his stuff when it came to cartography.  He reasoned that it would be a good couple of weeks at our current rate of travel before we made it to Melbourne, and a couple more to Canberra.  I still think that going to either or both of those places is a bad idea, but we have weapons, we have the bus.  Providing we can find some more fuel tomorrow we should be alright.

Apocalypse Girl had come up to me earlier expressing concern over the amount of time we had been taking to get anywhere, but honestly, there was little we were able to do in our current state to get anywhere faster than we were going.  The fact that we were barely outrunning the Dead that pursued us was far more disconcerting in my opinion.  Junior, overhearing our conversation, once more suggested that we wait for them to nearly catch up to us, then we kill a few before heading off in the bus.  As long as we keep on doing that, by the time we hit Melbourne there shouldn't be that many following, he reasoned.  I agreed that it was worth trying a couple of times, just to see if it made any real difference.  Biker and Copper agreed to accompany myself and Junior when next the horde appears, and together we will do some permanent damage.