Remains of the Dead (16 page)

A figure emerged from the billowing black clouds.

Elspeth’s eyes were blank but her lips were drawn back, exposing sharp needle teeth.

“What the—”

Before Cahz had time to think, Elspeth had leapt on top of him.

Cahz tried to throw off her cold grip, but he couldn’t shift her rigor mortis fingers. Flailing wildly, he toiled to heave her off, but in his struggle he stepped back and missed his footing on the stair. He fell backwards, tumbling the whole way, the zombie biting and scratching as he fell.

With a heavy thump Cahz hit the ground.

“Fuck!” he bellowed, snapped out of his slumber.

He sprang to his feet and anxiously looked round.

“Easy, tiger,” Ryan said calmingly as he popped another cranberry into his mouth. “Bad dream?” The cellophane rustled as he grasped with one hand at the dried fruit while cradling the baby in the other.

“You okay, boss?” came a more concerned voice.

“Sure, Cannon,” Cahz said, standing dazed in the converted office.

He looked around to see things exactly as he’d left them: the crates, the camp bed, and Elspeth still in her glass cage.

“Just a bad dream…” Cahz stopped dead.

He rushed over to the window and looked out at the street below. There were still thousands of zombies besieging the building. He turned and ran to the other side of the room and did the same. The back of the office block looked down at a relatively quiet employee car park, but behind the wire fencing, packed in the alleyway, was a thick mob of zombies.

“The roof!” Cahz barked as he ran for the stairwell.

“Boss, you’ve got me spooked. What’s going on?” Cannon asked as he pounded up the stairs after Cahz.

“Smoke. There was smoke in my dream,” Cahz said, worry in his voice.

“So you had a bad dream. Ain’t no other kind nowadays,” Cannon replied, jumping two steps at a time to keep pace.

“Met a special forces guy in the field once.” Cahz didn’t look back as he vaulted up the stairs. “He told me about a course on intuition his unit were sent on.”

“Don’t get you, boss,” Cannon said flatly.

“They pulled a whole unit out to go on a course run by a civvie psychologist. The crux of it is they were taught if you get the feeling something’s wrong then something is wrong.” Cahz thundered up to the roof access door and flung it open. “And I’ve got that feeling.”

Cannon barrelled up behind Cahz onto the sunlit roof. As he took in his first breath of the outside air, he could taste it.

Cahz walked calmly to look over the building’s edge.

“Shit,” he said. “Just what we freakin’ need.”

Cannon drew level with him.

Down below, the adjacent office block was on fire. The flames were unimpressive, their orange glow tempered by the bright sunlight and only visible on the ground floor, but a lick of smoke was twisting its way up.

“Maybe it’ll burn itself out,” Cannon said hopefully.

Cahz said, “Even if it doesn’t spread, do you think you can land a chopper at night with smoke all around? Idris won’t even know we’re here. We set off a flare and he’s never going to spot it.”

He pointed to the narrow alleyway between the buildings. Other than the throng of zombies there were a number of skips.

“See there,” Cahz asked, pointing.

“Yup,” Cannon confirmed.

“Full of trash that was never collected. It’ll catch. And that’s a gap for the flames to bridge and get to us. Hell, those W.D.s down there will dry out with the heat and combust. One of them could burst into a flaming torch and the fire could spread that way.”

“We’re fucked then,” Cannon said softly.

“We’re not fucked,” Cahz said confidently. “There’s plan B.”

“What’s plan B?”

“Don’t know yet,” Cahz said. “But we’d better come up with one.”

With his aching leg resting up on a stool, Ali reclined in an easy chair and took a swig of black coffee. He’d learnt to enjoy black coffee back in the warehouse. Some of the others had become accustomed to the powdered whitener but he’d never made the adjustment.

The strong smell of his drink mixed with the smoke from the small fire he’d set on the cooker to boil the water. He could have made the campfire anywhere in the apartment, but an atavistic bent instinctively called him to the cooker. In all the destruction, the rubble and collapse, Ali still clung to an ingrained sense of cleanliness.

He took a deep inhale and savoured the wafting odours from the mug. It was a good smell, a comforting smell.

The jar he had found in Frank Topalow’s kitchen was almost empty, which no doubt was why it had survived the winter salvaging. Ali wasn’t sure if the coffee was any good or not; it was certainly on a par with the past-its-sell-by-date stuff he’d been used to. It had been a long time since he’d tasted fresh milk or anything other than freeze dried coffee. In fact, it had been so long since he’d had a good coffee it was no longer possible for him to retrieve the memory. But the drink was a calming influence, an island of normality, a source of fortitude.

Ali smiled as he recalled his dad always took his coffee black. Sitting here, the smell of black coffee transported him to childhood memories.

It reminds me of the old country
, Ali recalled his father saying once. At the time he thought it odd. Ali didn’t remember anything of the “old country”. All Ali could recall was a hazy memory of a fraught plane flight. He was bored and his parents snapped at him for “misbehaving”. Ali couldn’t remember his misdemeanour, but he could still see his father’s eyes burning with anger as he snatched his arm and dragged him to his seat. His father wasn’t a violent man and the shock of such force had stunned Ali into silence. Looking back it was obvious why his mother and father had been so distraught. But to the five year old boy it had been unfathomable.

He took a bite from the granola bar washed it down with a swig of his drink and focused on the now. The meandering scrawl on the wall looked like a convoluted family tree with branches and sub-branches frantically splitting off and multiplying. Over the previous hour Ali had listed all his options and resources, all the pros and cons, everything he felt he should take into account before making a decision. He’d watched Ray do this numerous times back at the warehouse. Ray loved to use charts and diagrams to demonstrate his point or to support his decisions. Ray had had some kind of middle management job for a corporation before all this. Many of his fellow survivors had sneered at Ray’s pseudo-intellectual approach, but Ali had found it helpful. Today he was glad he’d taken the time to ask Ray about his techniques.

One branch in particular was ringed numerous times where Ali had come to his conclusion. WAIT FOR CHOPPER. Splitting off from that heading was IS IT SAFE? and FOR HOW LONG?

Ali had no way of knowing if it was safe. All he could say was he was safe for now. The how long would depend on what supplies he could find.

“Find vantage point to wait for chopper,” Ali read off the actions points he’d written for himself.

The bedroom in this flat had a wide enough view that he could see most of the plaza, but this was far from ideal. Although he would be able to see a helicopter land, he’d have no way of signalling it from here. And what if it didn’t land? What if it just circled overhead looking for survivors?

Ali looked around at the flat. It was comfortable and pleasant. It was an inviting thought just to stay here for a few days, but Ali knew that he couldn’t. He knew he would have to find a rooftop vantage point from where to keep look out and where he could signal.

“Supplies,” Ali said out loud. “I need supplies. I need food and warm clothing and something to signal the helicopter with.”

He put the coffee cup down and took the last bite from the bar.

He gave a grunt of displeasure as he eased his leg off the stool and stood up. Picking up the marker pen, he confronted the wall.

He drew a thick line off from WAIT FOR CHOPPER.

“Get clothing from flat,” Ali said as he wrote the words down.

“Signalling.” Ali tapped the end of the pen against his bottom lip. He saw himself, pen to his mouth, reflected in the smoky screen of the TV set.

“Ah-ha!” he exclaimed.

He walked over to the defunct media centre and picked up the first DVD from a pile of obsolete disks. The front cover was pink and white like the icing of a fancy cake and in stark contrast to everything else in Frank’s bachelor pad. Ali thought he recognised the attractive woman on the cover from some medical drama but even after reading her name he couldn’t place her.

“Never underestimate the power of a chick flick,” Ali laughed as he looked over at the fishing photo. “You been entertaining, Frank?”

Ali popped open the case with a crisp snap and a glossy leaflet proclaiming “other great titles” slipped free and fluttered to the floor. In spite of the aches, he bent down and picked up the insert and carefully slid it back into the case.

Ali laughed at himself. Some modicum of civilised life still controlled him. He had just spent the best part of the morning looting Frank Topalow’s home, defacing the walls and stealing his coffee, yet he felt compelled to retrieve the advertising material from inside a DVD case. He shook his head in disbelief at his own actions and clicked the central lug, freeing the DVD. He held up the shiny disc and peeked through the hole in the centre.

“Perfect.”

He put the case back down where he’d found it and walked back over to the mind map on the wall.

SIGNAL MIRROR = DVD he wrote in the next branch.

Then he went on, mouthing the words as he wrote them, “Set signal fire—find kindling (easy) & rubber (or something easy that makes black smoke).”

Ali marched back over to the media centre. He plucked the lighter he’d found earlier from his pocket and picked back up the now empty DVD case. He flicked the flame on and held the corner of the case to it. The plastic bubbled and melted like wax, giving off dark wisps of smoke. He took his thumb off the lighter and blew out the burgeoning flame. The room was filled with the acrid smell of burnt plastic.

Ali looked at the now warped and singed cover.

“Sorry, Katherine,” he apologised, reading off the cover. “I doubt you’d have gotten a sequel anyway.”

He turned back to the wall and circled the heading “Food”.

Other than the granola bar he had just consumed, the only other food (if you could call it that) was the body building powder.

Using his pen like a baton, Ali double-checked the case of water. There were ten bottles left, one he’d drank, the other he’d used to make the coffee. The remaining ten would be more than sufficient to last out a couple of days, but the demolished granola bar would never be enough.

“I need to find a safe place, like a roof, for the chopper to pick me up.” Ali chewed at the end of the pen. “But I can’t sit up on a roof for two days without food.”

He paced over to the window and looked out at the zombie-infested street.

“The apartments below will have been picked clean and it’s not like I can go to the corner store.”

Ali spotted the picture of Frank and his buddy wearing green waders with wide grins on their vacation-rejuvenated faces.

“A fishing trip wouldn’t go amiss.” Ali paused. He picked up the picture and smiled.

“Fishing.”

* * *

Ali looked out of the gaping hole where earlier this morning a window had been. He scanned the throng of undead below, looking for the zombie he’d spotted earlier today. There was still the smell of smoke on the wind, a remnant of the Molotov cocktails.

From the fourth floor it was difficult to pick out one cadaver from the homogenous group of undead, all dressed in their decay induced uniforms of brown and grey. Then he spotted the familiar soldier, the one in the tattered chemical suit. Ali scanned around the area hoping, the two hadn’t been separated too much by the ebb and flow of the swarm.

Ali smiled. “There you are.”

With one hand on the electrical cable and the other on the makeshift hook, he started swinging his arm. Ali tested the weight of the metal bar he’d bent to form a massive fishing hook. When he felt confident about his throw he let the hook slip.

The hook sailed out the window and down to the throng, snaking a trail of electrical cable behind it as it fell.

Suddenly the cable stopped uncoiling as the hook hit the ground. A wave of moans lifted up from the zombies who had spotted the objects descent, and when Ail peered from the window a further surge of moans rippled out.

Ali gently tugged on the cable and started pulling. Hand over hand he drew the cable back, testing it for the snag that would indicate he’d caught his prize.

The cable came up unimpeded.

Ali pulled up the hook and cast it out for his second try.

“Ryan,” Cahz called as he and Cannon returned to the office.

“What is it?”

“We need to make plans to leave,” Cahz said.

“Building next door’s on fire,” Cannon added before Ryan had time to ask why.

“Christ.” Ryan ran a hand through his hair. “Now we’re surrounded?”

“I know, but we’re going to have to come up with something.” Cahz marched over to the stack of crates. “First thing, we need to get organised.”

“What you looking for, boss?” Cannon asked, watching Cahz ransack the supplies.

Cahz paused and looked back. He shrugged. “Honestly, I have no fucking idea. We need to gather what we can while we can.”

“There’s not much of use among this stuff—I mean if we’re moving out,” Ryan offered. “There’s medical supplies and camping equipment, but if we’re getting picked up in a few hours we’re not going to need any of it.”

“
If
we get picked up,” Cannon said in a flat voice.

Cahz stopped his rummaging, but kept his attention on the contents of the crate. After a long pause he spoke. “Our time in country is dependent on two things: Luck and ammunition. Since we can’t depend on the first, then we’ll need to rely on the second.” He looked up at Cannon. “How much ammo have you got?”