Shards (11 page)

Life became a blur of eating
out of tins, running hand-in-hand, and adrenalin-charged sex. I
came to love Laura, and she me, but we hit tough times when the
ammo ran out.

There were so few safe places
to hide, and so many zombies. Knots of them clogged every street.
As Laura and I eked out a life in the cracks and shadows, I had my
realisation.

We were rushing around,
exhausted, in a state somewhere between life and death. But the
zombies were different, well, except for the life and death thing.
Sure, some of their limbs were missing, and they stunk to high
heaven, but by God they were serene. They had such a laid-back
lifestyle---never in a hurry, never needing to be anywhere.

In the end, I really dug their
Zen attitude.

Laura wasn't as supportive of
my change of heart as I'd hoped.

We fought repeatedly; she
wanted to look for survivors, while I found myself increasingly
fascinated by the zombies lurking at our every turn. Soon enough,
our arguments led to carelessness. The zombies found a way into the
warehouse where we were holed up.

Their shambling line encircled
us. True to her nature, Laura took to them with a chunk of wood.
Her last stand was beautiful to watch---a flurry of bludgeoning and
desperation. I loved her more in that moment than I ever had
before.

But even that wasn't enough.
The zombies were inexorable---a groaning, stinking tide of arms and
teeth. Laura was thrown to the ground, bleeding and
unconscious.

Fascination held me as the
zombies moved in. I knew they were hungry but with typical suave
they took their time.

But I got to her first. I had
to.

That's when I ate Laura's
brain. Her skull was already cracked, her life already ebbing, and
I'd seen enough blood and gore not to get all skittish about it.
She tasted salty, like jelly with a hint of chicken. I found out
why the zombies hankered for the taste so much. Laura's brain was
ambrosia, food for the soul.

I ate her brains out of love,
but there was more to it than that. I'd been feeling it build for
weeks. All those eyes watching me, all that expectation. Peer
pressure was a bitch.

I didn't know how else to show
my zombie brothers and sisters I really did belong.

They left me alone from then
on. It's a Zen thing, I guess. Zombies are cool like that.

* * *

Wrack

I'll never forget the moment:
Louise's eyes widened, a look I first took as wounded pride. Her
eyes, though, they stayed wide, her irises dilating, her nostrils
flaring, her expression crossing the threshold into panic. A
whimper caught in her throat. An instant later, her cheeks bulged.
She pressed her palm over her lips, acting a fraction of a second
too late. A dribble of brown vomit escaped the corner of her mouth
and trickled down the side of her chin.

Her face had never looked
paler. Pale, like her sister Bella.

That moment, that's when the
wrack took hold of our lives.

Louise ran to the bathroom. The
sound of her emptying her guts for what seemed hours is another of
those things that will linger with me, although she never seemed to
stop after that. Once the wrack took hold, she could barely keep
her own spit down for long.

At least it had interrupted our
argument. It was ironic, really, because we'd been arguing about
what to do if the wrack claimed one of us. The warnings had been on
the TV for a week. Forget bird flu or SARS, this one was the plague
to end them all. No cure. No explanations. No good news.

Louise's bag was half-packed
when the wrack overtook her. She wanted to drive out to her Uncle
Gary's shack in the bush, hoping to escape the madness---and maybe
even me. She was convinced the wrack was God's punishment for the
world's wicked ways. She saw no redemption.

Well, life sucker-punched her,
and me not long after.

She'd been laid up in bed for
days, all pale and tinged with green. The vomit had darkened to
burgundy and the pain had long set in. That's why it was called the
wrack. The body shook, the nerve ends burned, and every second of
life became one painful son-of-a-bitch. I'd heard most people died
because their bodies just gave up, the way torture victims died in
the pauses between atrocities. With that sort of pain, everybody
has a time limit.

I nursed Louise for all those
days, despite my own wrack. I'd had the better of the vomiting and
the painkillers were still able to soothe me. Louise's screams
started on the second day. They trailed off into whimpers by the
fourth. Me, I held most of it back behind gritted teeth. When the
painkillers stopped working, the cheap tequila and my cache of weed
took over.

That day, day four, through my
gritted teeth, enduring bleeding gums, the screaming muscles, and
acid-fire piss, was when the epiphanies struck, one after the
other.

We'd been together for fourteen
months now, Louise and I, shared some great times, too, but that
was a long time to put up with her turn-the-other-cheek mentality,
her passivity that, at times, drove me mad. With her religious
leanings and prudishness, she was no Bella. Her sister, my
Belladonna, that dirty-sick bitch, my first. When Bella dumped me
to screw some gym-junkie, we both knew it had nothing to do with
some other guy. It was about control---her control over me. Dating
her kid sister Louise had been the closest thing I could call
revenge, but Louise's pretty eyes and soft looks, so unlike her
sister, had drawn me in. Revenge dating became pleasant, a routine.
That Bella refused to attend family gatherings with Louise and I
was a sweetener. It meant I was inside both sisters, under their
skin, one way or another.

But now, with Louise's pretty
eyes sunken in bruised caverns, her skin translucent, vomit and
spit crusting the side of her face, I realised my love for her was
eclipsed by my desire to survive, to live.

That I still burned for Bella
wasn't a surprise, but the realisation that I could abandon Louise
for my self-preservation left me retching for half an hour. With my
insides scoured and nothing but pain filling my mind, the rest fell
into place almost by itself.

At first I didn't know where my
course was leading. Pain makes the mind play strange, strange
tricks, so when I hauled myself, legs and arms afire, to the linen
cupboard, I fumbled with the blanket, befuddled, struggling to
comprehend its purpose, when the spare pillow fell free. As my hand
clutched the pillow, the clench a fresh knot of pain, that epiphany
I'd had earlier raised its ugly head, and slowly, inexorably,
guided me to the bed.

Louise watched me every step of
the way. Her body had doubled up, pinwheeling in pain beneath a
sheet stained with her fluids. Through her little whimpers of pain,
hoarse and subtly abrasive like over-rubbed sandpaper, her eyes
tracked my progress to her. She stared at me, bruised and
dirty-eyed, no longer pretty, barely human at all.

I like to think she welcomed
the end of our relationship, especially the way her hand relaxed
over mine a minute or two after I clamped the pillow onto her face.
She was too wracked to cry out or scream, too weak to resist, too
dry and empty to retch any further. My hand shook as I continued
press the pillow over her face, every breath a trial of fire and
aches. In the haze of my own pain, I had no idea how long I stood
rigid-limbed over her. I think I heard a snap but my ears were so
dulled by inflammation, for all I knew it could have been a bird
striking the balcony window or my own sense of self-worth
breaking.

The vitality fled my body when
I eventually released my grip on the pillow. With my grip eased,
black stars played in my peripheral vision and a high-pitch whined
through my ears. As I slumped to the floor, my vision clouded by
the black stars, I distinctly remember hearing an ambulance wailing
through the streets. It was the first sound in days I'd heard from
the world outside our apartment.

I woke in an awkward huddle,
staring up into Louise's dead eyes as she peek-a-booed from beneath
the pillow that claimed her life. I jumped at the sight, banging my
elbow on the dresser. It was painful, jarring, but not the waves of
pain that filled the previous days. I stood and felt strength in my
legs that I barely remembered. A few days of the wrack felt like a
lifetime. Flexing fingers, rotating my elbows and shoulders, I
could scarcely believe the wrack was losing its grip.

Something inside me had
changed.

Troubled by merely stiff
muscles, I crouched by Louise and removed the pillow from her face.
Death had given her serenity but the wrack had taken an ugly
toll---the bruises, the pinpricks on her cheeks and neck where blood
vessels had burst, red fading to black, and those once-pretty but
now sunken eyes. Her lips were blue and her skin was finally as
pale as Bella's. Matted hair obscured part of her face, which I
brushed free. I felt a tear rise but rubbed it away, kissed my
tear-stained finger and then applied it to those blue lips of hers.
It was a small gesture, a meek gesture, but enough. It was all I
would spare for her. I kept any remaining tears to myself.

I left her there, choosing to
remember our time together and not the ending of it, choosing
instead to discover how the rest of the world was coping.

Information was in short
supply. As I stuffed my backpack with food, I flicked on the TV and
found only one station still on the air. A newsreader wearing a
face mask mumbled progress reports from around the globe, all of it
inconclusive, but the look on his face told me all I needed to
know. The fear there, the uncertainty, told me a cure was yet to be
found. The way things were going, there soon wouldn't be enough
people left with the know-how to cook up a cure.

With my newfound strength, I
hefted my pack and pocketed the keys to Louise's car.

I was never religious and glad
of it, but looking in on Louise one last time, at her tiny, ravaged
frame, and that Bible she always kept on the dresser on her side of
the bed, it left me wondering.

They say at the end times, the
faithful will be tested and the meek will inherit the earth.

As I headed downstairs to an
empty street, listening to screams and agonies that tormented the
neighbours, and distant gunshots, clear as church bells, I came to
believe that the faithful were being tested. The clarity of thought
at that moment was like a burden lifted, like awakening from a
dream.

Bella's apartment was across
town. I started the car, leaving my girlfriend dead and cold in our
bed, believing Bella, my Bella, would welcome me back. The price of
her cure wouldn't bother her, I was sure. I couldn't even remember
his name.

Redemption was only ever for
the worthy. For those willing to make sacrifices. Louise never
understood but Bella would, my nasty-beautiful Bella. I would show
her how to find redemption, how to pass the testing of the faithful
and overcome the wrack.

No, the meek
would
not
inherit
the earth.

* * *

Genesis Six

"
And the LORD said, I will destroy
Man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both Man, and
beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it
repenteth me that I hath made them."
---
Genesis 6:7

"I can hear the ocean,
Mummy."

A roar shuddered across the
city like waves pitched onto the shore at the height of summer.

"Are we going to the beach?"
Jessica asked, excited by the abrupt change of routine. She shifted
in her seat and fidgeted with the white veil covering her head.

"No, honey," Libby's voice was
taut. "We're just going for a drive."

Libby scanned for signs of
traffic as she gunned the car along the freeway, pushing it beyond
the limits of safety. Barely a soul could be seen in either
direction. An aura of abandonment hung in the air.

The people were ignorant as
they toiled at work.

A
stale, dusty breeze forced its way through the
dashboard vents. The tiniest flecks of grey settled on Libby's
sleeve as she jammed the vents closed. The cabin became a
mausoleum, entombing them with stagnant air.

"Mummy, I wanna take this off."
Jessica fiddled with the veil.

"No, sweetie. Leave it on for
now. I'll tell you when you can take it off." Libby strained to
keep the sharpness from her tone.

She threw the car into a loping
turn as she banked up the off-ramp. Skidding onto the adjunct
highway, she blew clear of the slip-lane and weaved through the
narrow lanes. The traffic was minimal.

The roar grew louder as each
second passed.

"We are going to the beach!"
Jessica wriggled against her seatbelt. "I wanna see the ocean."

"No, Jess," Libby snapped,
"leave the cloth on."

As she glanced back at Jess,
the car wavered for an instant and threatened to fishtail out of
control.

Libby tugged the steering wheel
back to centre and regained control. A more cautious glance
confirmed Jess was still wearing the veil, much to her relief. At
least she'd be spared the worst. Hopefully no one would notice her
face when push came to shove.

A tense silence engulfed them
as Libby braved the narrow highway at speed. The road snaked
upward, climbing steadily into the city's suburban foothills.

Knots of confused people
gathered by parked cars, many more clumped into crowds by the side
of the road. All eyes were fixed on the cityscape and the coast
beyond.

Chancing a look in the mirror,
Libby's stomach clenched tight. Her view, like the crowd's, was
uninterrupted.

Dozens of cars from the nearby
suburbs scrambled onto the serpentine double lane, ignoring the
dazed crowds in their desperation. More and more vehicles joined
Libby's flight from the city, forming slow-moving obstacles ahead.
She weaved through the erratic traffic as best she could.