After- Undead Wars Page 10

  Crack! Ribs broken, cheek swelling with a new bruise, my little girl all grown up into a battered housewife.

  Snap! Broken finger.

  Pop! Death by misadventure.

  I don’t think so, Officer.

  I hope the bastard’s dead.

  No, I hope he’s not dead yet. Any excuse. Just give me one.

  Pop.

  I was pouring milk over cereal, Alicia sitting down for a quick breakfast before Kylie arrived, and Tom had already shouted he’d be out in “just a minute”. There was something churning in my guts, and I knew that before the sitter arrived, I’d have to go and do some sitting of my own. I tried to contain a fart. My mind was still drifting. The snap of twigs underfoot, the sudden crackle of gunfire. Snap, crackle and––

  “Pop!”

  Alicia.

  And I snapped back to realize I’d overfilled one of the bowls.

  “I’ll go get the dishcloth,” said Tom, just arriving from the bathroom. He ran to the sink and returned to mop up the overflow.

  But Candy had already found a puddle of milk on the floor and was mopping it up herself, tail flapping from side to side.

  I watched disinterestedly, thinking of the daughter I would never see again, of the kids now in my care, while Candy’s fat arse jiggled in excitement, the tail wagging the dog.

  “Pop, why do you have a gun?”

  In case I run into your dad, of course.

  “Lots of security men have guns,” I replied. I hadn’t needed to shoot anyone for years. Today would be the day that would change all that.

  “What about sa-cutie ladies? “Alicia continued. “Do sa-cutie ladies have guns?”

  “There are no security ladies, dummy,” said Tom, adding with scorn: “And it’s security, not sa-cutie.”

  “Well, there are women in security,” I corrected him. “I just don’t work with any of them.”

  I’d never been able to work with them. Not after what I’d seen in ’Nam. Not after I’d discovered what Huey Jones and Trav McKenzie were doing to village girls––girls barely in their teens!––before Huey lost an arm and Trav his life. Perhaps they deserved it.

  Alicia poked her tongue at her brother, but before I could pull her up, he added: “Then security women wouldn’t need guns, because they have security men to look after them.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to chide him for chauvinism or praise him for his misguided sense of chivalry. Barry Norton was teamed with a woman (I wonder how Barry’s doing, whether he’s still alive; I guess now I’ll never know).

  I wasn’t: I was teamed up with a man named Ash. He and his Vietnamese wife Jenny––not her real name, of course, but at least easy for an Australian tongue––were probably my closest friends. I’d eaten at their house dozens of times, I’d kissed Jenny on the cheek more than once, debated cricket scores with Ash. I’d been to the movies with them. I’d been to Jenny’s country, even, I’d blown up villages and I’d killed some of her people.

  “What do you call a one-armed gook girl with no brains?” Travis McKenzie asked while we were patrolling at the edge of a rice field one morning.

  Nobody answered. We all knew what he’d been doing to the local girls.

  He never got to the punchline, anyhow, because with a sudden, piercing zing, his brains were splattered across the field.

  Just last night, Jenny had made a meal to thank me for getting her car started. And now, her “mild Vietnamese curry” was avenging her dead countrymen by burning a hole through my intestinal tract.

  “How come all the other sa-cutie men are younger than you?” asked Alicia, as I retreated towards the bathroom.

  I’d have to consider that, I thought, until I heard Tom explain: “Because all the older ones died.”

  Perhaps he expected me to be next. Perhaps he was right.

  I closed the bathroom door, and let my trousers fall.

  There was a deathly smell.

  “Dead as a doornail,” Ash had said.

  As if he’d had some inkling of the problem we’d have to face today.

  “Yeah, okay,” I’d replied. “I can drop around after work with my jumper leads. But this is the third time, Ash. Maybe you need to buy your wife a new battery.”

  “My wife doesn’t run on batteries,” he’d retorted, grinning.

  I could only return a wry smile. Things were running down. Dead battery. Dead wife. My dead daughter. Still a security man at sixty-three.

  “Oh, the car,” he laughed, pretending he’d just realized what I was talking about. “Will you have your kids with you?”

  “No. Going to see their dad after school. He’s got special permission to pick them up. Alicia says he’s taking them to McDonald’s for dinner.” Yeah, real class, that guy.

  Ash couldn’t hide the fleeting look of concern, sympathy, that crossed his face, before he chirped: “Good. Then I’ll tell Jenny to prepare an extra plate, and you can stay for an hour or two and play with my kids. One of Jenny’s mild curries would be good for you, considering how well you cook.” He made a too-obvious glance at my expanding waistline, my straining belt. “Maybe she can prepare an extra plate and a half.”

  Mild curry, my arse.

  I’d clenched my fist and made a pretense of throwing a punch at him while we did the end-of-day paperwork sitting in the armored van. And now I’d have to clench my arse for the day, or I might crap in my pants.

  Anyhow: babysitter at my place with my daughter’s kids after an evening out with their father and his new partner; and their grandfather at the wheel of a security truck on his way to the local shopping mall, with a mild case of the shits after a night out with his partner––albeit the man I’d worked with for seven years, not the woman I’d slept with for thirty eight.

  “I don’t think I need to go out and waste money on a new battery after all,” Ash said as we walked in, the first cash box for the morning held between us. “Since you came over, she’s running like a dream.”

  My guts were keeping me running like a nightmare.

  “I can’t keep turning up at your place just to get your wife’s car started,” I told him, trying to ignore the rumbling I was feeling south of the border. “Sooner or later, she’s going to need to get somewhere urgently, and she won’t be able to get it working.”

  I had to get somewhere urgently myself, I realized.

  “But she likes an excuse to invite you over for dinner.”

  “I’ll talk to you when I come back,” I said, turning to leave him at the jeweler’s store and head through the plaza towards the public toilets.

  “That’s the second time today,” he reminded me.

  Fourth, but he wasn’t to know.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Bill?”

  I waved a hand as I strode away, strutting through the food court and pushing the door of the gentlemen’s room with my upraised palm.

  Inside, it already smelled bad. I could hear somebody groaning in the last cubicle.

  “Yeah, me too, mate,” I said under my breath.

  After I’d finished up and was washing my hands, I heard something knock behind me. Another knock, coming from the occupied cubicle at the end, the one that had already stunk when I’d walked in. The moans were louder, increasing in volume.

  I tapped on the door. “You okay in there?” I asked.

  The only reply was more knocking.

  “Mate, are you alright?”

  The knocking turned to pounding, as though the guy was thrashing against the walls.

  “Holy shit!”

  My first thought was epilepsy. I pushed the door, but it was locked. Of course. I tried to look under the bottom of the stall, but all I could see was the guy’s trousers, fallen about his ankles. I stepped onto the edge of the toilet seat in the next cubicle, intending to climb over the wall, but a commotion outside caught my attention.

  I wavered on the edge of the bowl, trying not to lose my balance or dip my foot into the water.

&nb
sp; And then, from outside, the crack of a gunshot! A muffled pop in the distance, but I could still recognize the sound.

  I hadn’t even managed a glimpse of what was happening in the locked cubicle.

  “Just hang tight, sport, and I’ll get someone from center management,” I shouted over my shoulder as I bolted, hands still wet, my shirt untucked.

  Outside, I almost blundered into an obese middle-aged woman shuffling out of the women’s toilets.

  “I’m sorry, Madam.” I glanced at her momentarily, taking in a couple of details as I stepped around her: the dress had fallen down to cover her, but she was oblivious to the voluminous panties hanging about her knees. There was something dark about her collar, a stain that blended in with the dark outfit she was wearing. I had no time to reflect on it, though, and dashed towards my partner. He’d left the jewelers’ and was now outside Devil’s Food, the hot bread shop. He was backing away from an aged, one-armed man dragging a foot; automatically, I wondered whether the older man, too, was a veteran.

  “Who fired that shot?” I demanded. Ash’s security pistol was still holstered by his side.

  “Daryl at the bank,” he replied. He nodded towards a group of people crowded around Daryl Standish, the security man who was always stationed outside the bank entrance. It looked as though he’d collapsed outside its glass doors. People were beginning to gather around him.

  Heart attack, I thought. Daryl was as old as me and even chubbier.

  “Where’s the cash box?” I asked.

  Ash didn’t even answer. The one-armed man was still advancing. Ash threw a punch. He missed the guy’s face and caught him in the throat.

  “What the––”

  If that got reported back to base, Ash would be out of a job.

  The blow had sent the man reeling backwards, but he recovered almost immediately and started towards us again. Before I could wail my shock at Ash’s actions any further, before I could catch the arm that was readying for another punch, I caught a glimpse of the guy’s twisted face, his torn cheek, the ruined nose.

  I had no doubt now: I’d seen injuries like that on the battlefield.

  But men wounded that badly were always corpses.

  And I knew that, even if he’d managed to get in a few before I arrived, Ash couldn’t have hit him hard enough to cause all that damage.

  The veteran’s mouth fell open, and I saw now that there was blood dribbling down his chin. Bitten his own tongue? He reached again, this time for me. He angled his head to the side, and I could’ve sworn he was closing in for an unwanted kiss. Or a bite.

  “What the hell––”

  Ash jumped between us and punched him square in the face this time. The sudden whack! must have broken bone, and a gush of blood spurted out over his chest.

  As the man staggered backwards and recovered again, I saw that others, also wounded, were shuffling towards us. And then I realized: apart from the tinkling, cheery music piped all around the shopping center, the only sound was their feet sliding across the polished floor and the low groan from throats that would never speak intelligibly again. Their eyes were as vacant as their expressions. Private Jack Kelso—head injury, likely brain damage, gurgling blood and unable to say anything—as his eyes widened and lost their luster, and life ebbed from him. With bullets flying around us, I couldn’t reach Jackie in time to hold his hand, to reassure him, and then it dawned on me that it no longer mattered.

  The crowd was pushing in on us. I shoved a couple away as we tried to retreat from the reaching hands, the hungry mouths.

  “We’re security guards,” I shouted uselessly. “What do you want? Stop! Stand back!” Nobody was listening. The crowd had become a mob. I reached for the gun at my side, but didn’t draw it: security guards, as I said, aren’t supposed to shoot anyone. “Back!” I said, pushing someone away.

  A hand grasped at Ash and tore his shirt open.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I wailed.

  “I dunno,” he replied. “Rabies?”

  “Not in this country,” I reminded him.

  Their eyes were dead. I’d seen that shell-shocked look before. I spotted a young man with fresh blood and grizzled meat matting his thin beard.

  “Ladies and––” I sounded more like a carnival barker, with no real authority, and changed my tack: “People... Everyone... just stand back.”

  But they kept coming at us. Enemy soldiers on the advance. How the hell Johnno Harrington and I managed to stay alive long enough to come home is still a bloody mystery.

  We made it to the watchmaker’s stand in the middle of the plaza. The watchmaker was slumped over his counter, his jeweler’s eyepiece before him, a horrible wound at his throat. There was a pool of blood under his head. I didn’t have time to check for a pulse.

  “In––get in,” said Ash. He reached over the half-door to unsnib it and pushed me before him.

  He had his radio at his ear. “Control, this is Team 3 in Sector 7. We need help.” Static came back at him.

  A desperate, clawing hand grazed his arm. The radio spun out of Ash’s grasp and clattered to the floor. Ash threw another punch, but the hand of a torn, red-faced man returned to swipe a deep gash across his cheek. Dots of blood sprang forth, and then another hand slashed open his bicep. Before I could say any more, Ash pulled out his gun with the other hand and fired into the air. Chunks of plaster rained down on the oblivious crowd.

  Nobody heeded the warning. The man thrust an arm out and grasped Ash by the shoulder, pulling him towards a gaping mouth. Ash screamed as a gob of flesh was torn from his face. Blood spurted out, spraying over the attacker, and my partner––my friend––stumbled backwards and fell over against the fake palm tree beside the watchmaker’s stand. The red-face man lunged again, teeth gnashing and tearing at the wounded arm, his throat bulging as he swallowed flesh. Ash’s remaining arm, raised in self-defense, waved uselessly, and his whole body shuddered as another man joined in on the bloody feast.

  Human beings can’t tear living muscle like that, I realized.

  The groaning in the crowd rose to a peak, and they seemed to center on my partner, the blood like a beacon. Some of the people bowed over the security man in front of the bank raised their heads, smelling fresher meat, and started to stagger drunkenly towards us. From the gore on their faces, I could see they hadn’t been bent over Daryl Standish in concern. And now I realized I’d been hearing Daryl’s shrieks for minutes. The bank guard was lying on his back in a sea of red, his face contorted in pain, but the noise had died. Merv Johnson, a bloody stump where his leg should have been, screaming and screaming until we managed to get morphine pumped into him. I’d had to hold him still while our medic––a kid who hadn’t even finished his nurse’s qualification––thrust a syringe into him. But it was obvious that Daryl Standish was well beyond pain now. As I watched, one of the few still around him ripped a wad of flesh from his chest.

  “Fucking crazy,” I muttered, unintentionally. Homicidal lunacy. I glanced at Ash, who’d stopped moving. Something in the air, perhaps? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t have time to reflect on it.

  I wanted to help Ash but with people converging on us, I couldn’t reach him. I wanted to help my mate, like a soldier stopping to help a fallen comrade, like track athlete John Landy stopping to check a fellow runner was okay before he went on to win the race back in ’56. Blood spurting from him, a crowd converging on us with murderous––no, cannibalistic––intent, and all I could think of was that I should help my partner to regain his feet.

  I pulled out my gun and pressed it against the back of the first assailant’s neck, shouted a warning, but the red-faced man ignored me and kept tearing at my friend. My finger was on the trigger, and a shot would have instantly blown his throat out. I swung the gun sideways, instead, pistol-whipping him and sending him sprawling against the side of the watchmaker’s stand. For Ash, though, I could see it was too late: we wouldn’t be driving back to the depot together; he w
ouldn’t be going home to Jenny today, or any other day.

  As others pressed in, I escaped back into the narrow confines of the watchmaker’s stand, slammed the half-door shut and threw the bolt in the door latch to keep them out.

  I tried to shove people away from the door, but already the latch was beginning to give way under the pressure from the throng pushing against it. They were no longer people, they were just a seething mass of grasping hands and mouths and teeth. A young woman clutched my arm and tore away one of my sleeves.

  I could hear a crackling voice on Ash’s radio, becoming more frantic.

  “Return to Centre Management...help us... We––” and then a scream. It brought back the shrieks of a frantic woman outside a burning hut in Vietnam. I’d had to physically restrain her from going back in; she’d fought and clawed and chattered at me in her own language until I punched her in the face. Only later did someone translate for me what she’d been trying to tell me: her child was asleep inside.

  Screaming. There was screaming coming from farther down the mall, but with a growing number of grasping, clutching hands around me, there was nothing I could do. Across a narrow expanse filled with groaning, shuffling people, I noticed the jeweler’s store, where I’d left Ash when I’d hastened to the toilet earlier; one of the store assistants lay across the top of a display case, a string of pearls still in her hand, ribs visible through a tear in the back of her bloodstained dress.