Where the Dead Men Lie (6 page)

We all took a step back and I actually put my hands in the air.

Daniel kept his rifle pointed directly at her head.

"Relax." She said. "It’s not loaded. And I've only got one bullet. We were told to save the last one."

We suddenly caught on as to what it was for.

"Like I said," she continued. "We each got one. All of the scavengers. Just in case. I suppose I should’ve realized how messed up the job was when they gave us this."

"Who gave you the gun?" Daniel asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. "The people in charge. The authority. The man."

"U.S. military? Australian Army? Who?"

"They might’ve been military. They had guns. But what do I know? I’m a farmer’s wife. I don’t know anything about soldiers, or military forces. All I know is they have the guns. And in a world like this, whoever has the guns is in charge."

She started coughing again, spitting up more blood. "We live in a lawless place now," she mumbled. "The people at the Fortress, they have the guns. They have the keys to the kingdom. A safe haven. A refuge from the infected."

"But for a price," I said.

"Yeah. That’s right. Their word is the law. That’s why we were forced to go out on scavenger hunts. At first, I didn’t mind. I wanted to help, you know? I wanted to pull my own weight. Contribute. Plus I knew the area; I figured I’d be smart enough to stay out of trouble." She shook her head. "I was wrong. Such a shame too. We were a good team."

S
he reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small bottle of whiskey.
"Won't get to enjoy this either."

"What’s your name?" Maria asked.

"You don’t wanna know my name."

"Why not?"

"Look, I’m about to blow my brains out. Trust me; you don’t want to know my name."

"So what now?" Kenji asked.

She lifted her head slightly and looked at the gun in her hand. "I’ve always wanted to play Russian roulette."

She spun the chamber of the revolver and put the barrel to her temple.

Pulled the trigger.

Click.

Nothing happened.

"Jesus!" Jack said. "What the hell are you doing?"

And the woman actually laughed. "Relax, it’s not loaded, remember?"

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a single bullet. Loaded it.

"Ah, now it’s loaded," Jack said.

She held up her wrist. "I’ve been bitten, remember. It has to be this way."

She spun the chamber again. Pulled the trigger.

Click.

We all took another step back and the woman laughed again.

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the woman had lost her mind. Pushed over the edge by everything that she had been through. But then again maybe she had just come to terms with how messed up this whole situation was. A bullet to the head would be a quick, painless option. A lot less painful than starving to death, I thought. Or turning into an infected undead monster.

"You don’t have to do this," I said.

"Yeah I do," she answered. "I want to. I owe it to myself."

We pleaded with her one more time to tell us where the Fortress was. She said even if she told us, even if she drew us a map, we’d never find it. We’d never make it.

The last thing she told us was to be careful. Avoid this town. Best go around. Way around.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a choice.

CHAPTER 10

We left the woman by herself, sitting against the banks of the creek, spinning the chamber of the gun, pulling the trigger. We climbed out of the creek bed and headed towards Hunter, sticking to the tree line that followed the creek. We made it to the hill outside of the town. We crouched down and watched.

The sun was setting. It was getting darker and darker.

From our vantage point we could see clearly that the dreadlocked woman was right about this town. The infected were everywhere. They completely filled the streets.

"This is not good," Kenji said.

"There’s way too many of them," Jack agreed. "That woman was right. We need to avoid this town. We can’t go down there."

"Great," Maria said. "So, we came all this way for nothing?"

"What about the Fortress?" Daniel suggested. "It has to be close by, right?"

"We don’t know that," Kenji said. "And besides, that woman said we’d never find it."

"I think we have to check it out," Jack added.

"No," Kenji said. "We stay the course. If we ration our food and water we should be fine until we locate another town."

"Barely."

"Yeah, I agree with Jack on this one," Daniel said. "We’re cutting it way to close."

"You heard the woman," Kenji said. "She said it was hidden. We can't waste the time and energy looking for a place that we might never find."

"I don’t think we have a choice," Jack replied. "We’re out of food. We’re out of water. If we skip this town, we might not make it to the next one. We have to take a chance."

Over the past couple of days I’d noticed that everyone was getting a whole lot more edgy and irritable. We were starting to argue and squabble whenever we had these discussions. I had to keep reminding myself it was because we were hungry and dehydrated. It was hard to think rationally. Hard to plan. We were still arguing about what to do and where to go, when all of a sudden, a gunshot erupted in the night.

The woman, she had finally done it.

The problem was the gunshot was loud. Very loud.

Daniel swore under his breath. He knew the danger the gunshot presented us. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before she did it. I guess we were more concerned with honoring her dying wishes to take our own safety into account. Or maybe it was because we were all starving and dehydrated; we were starting to make mistakes.

Life or death type mistakes.

"We gotta get out of this area." Kenji said. "That gunshot will attract all kinds of attention from the town."

"No," Daniel said. "We need to wait for daylight. Observe the town. See how bad it is."

"Maybe Maria’s idea of spending the night up in the trees isn’t such a bad idea after all," I said.

"Bad idea after all?" Maria asked, surprised. "It was never a bad idea."

Kenji shouldered his rifle and looked back down into the town. "This is bad. Very, very bad."

"What?"

He shook his head.

I looked through the scope on my rifle as well. And that’s when I saw what Kenji was so worried about.

The infected people.

They were looking in this direction. All of them. It looked like the whole town.

Some of them had started shuffling towards us.

Some of them were running.

Kenji swore again. He was frustrated. This was our one chance to get food and water.

Daniel grabbed me by the shoulder. "We need to go!"

"Back to the creek bed," Kenji said. "Double time."

Another night without food or water. We were pushing our luck.

We started running. Once again, fear and adrenalin gave us a burst of energy. We made it back to the creek bed in world record time. But we still had a long, long way to go. About twenty miles. Practically a marathon. There’s no way we could run the whole way.

Throughout this journey Kenji had been quoting Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’. I think he was trying to motivate us, lift our spirits. One of the quotes he’d repeated a couple of times was ‘a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep’.

I thought about that quote as we ran through night, back to the farmhouse. We had taken that first, single footstep what seemed like forever ago. And since then, we’d been walking and running. Yeah a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep, I thought. And then is quickly followed by a million more.

Next to me, Maria tripped. I caught her and helped her up. It was getting darker, harder to see where we were running. She recovered her footing and said thanks between deep, ragged breaths.

In the distance, the howling scream of the infected echoed and chased us. In our minds, they were right there, unbearably close. They were reaching out for us. They were just around the bend in the river, seconds away from emerging from the dark.

We continued to run.

CHAPTER 11

There’s no doubt we were dying of thirst. We weren’t thinking about this at the time because we were too preoccupied with not being eaten alive. But now that I look back?

Yeah.

We were slowly dying.

We had been running through the night, along the dried out creek bed for hours on end. Twenty freakin miles.

Eventually we stopped; we needed to rest, even if for just a few minutes. Daniel did not like the idea of stopping out in the open. He did not like it one bit. He wanted to push on. Of course he did, I thought. He's a Special Forces soldier. He's tough as nails. He'd been trained to deal with this kind of situation.

The rest of us? We were barely coping.

"They can't go on anymore," Kenji said, referring to the non-soldiers of the group. "They can't."

"They can," Daniel replied. "We have to keep moving. Staying still, staying in the one place will get us killed."

"They're not goddamn Navy Seals. We have to rest."

"Hey," I said, trying to catch my breath. "Did… did anyone see the dreadlocked woman? Did we run past her? Did anyone see her body?"

"I didn’t see her," Maria answered.

"It’s not important," Daniel said. "We need to keep moving."

Kenji held up his hand. "Just five minutes. That’s all I’m asking."

T
he brief argument was ended with a distant moaning howl.

Before the world ended, you might have mistaken this noise for a wild dog, or a lone wolf.
But we all knew what it was. And we all knew we had to keep going.
In the few months since the Oz virus took over and spread around Australia, I’ve seen the infected in action, I’ve seen them track down their prey, time and time again. They are amazingly successful hunters.
It was terrifying to think that a virus could make a person act this way, turn them into such a highly tuned weapon, capable of finding their victims, in the dark, on the run.

It was as fascinating as it was terrifying.

Daniel got his wish.
We pushed on.
We followed the creek all the way back to the house. It was pitch black by the time we got back. I didn’t have a watch on me, but I’d say it was well past midnight. There was no moon. No stars.

As soon as we were inside, Daniel and Kenji pushed a bookshelf up against the front door and another one against the back door. They then moved a couple of couches up against the bookshelves, to reinforce these temporary barricades.

"Shouldn’t we board these doors up?" I asked.

"No," Kenji replied. "If board them up, we won’t be able to get out."

He had a good point. We did not want to turn the house into a tomb. We needed to escape if the infected broke through.

Most of the windows had been boarded up by Daniel the previous day. I was suddenly very glad for his foresight, his training, his strength. I had no idea where he got his energy from.
Especially since I felt like I was on the brink of exhaustion. I was having trouble seeing. The fact that it was dark didn’t help matters, but I really felt like my vision was becoming more and more narrow.

I felt like I had
tunnel vision.

And I couldn’t think straight at all. I was quite happy for the others to make all the decisions and tell me what to do.
I didn’t care that these decisions would ultimately decide my fate.
I was too tired and too exhausted to care.

Kenji pushed a rifle into my hands.
"Hey, are you ready?"

He then gave me a plastic shopping bag that was full of ammo magazines.

"I’ll be upstairs," he said. "Daniel will be downstairs. We need you and Maria and Jack to run this ammo when we need it, OK?"

I took the bag of ammunition and nearly fell over. It was heavy.

Daniel was in
the kitchen doing a brief check of our weapons, and our ammo supply.

On the table was shotgun, a two hand guns, five rifles and one sniper rifle.

Kenji had been out into the barn and retrieved a couple of crowbars, a couple of hammers, an axe, a baseball bat, and a cricket bat.
He laid these out on the table as well.

"I’m
pretty confident they’ll only attack from one place," Daniel said.

"How do you know that?" Maria asked.

"They follow one another, like sheep."

"
What if they surround us?"

"
Then we’re in trouble."