Invasion of the Dead (Book 3): Escape (18 page)

TWENTY-NINE

Thunder grumbled in the distance. The darkness of the clouds suggested it was later in the day, but it couldn’t have been later than four or five. Rain lashed the windscreen, and Evelyn switched the wipers to full speed, peering through the crowd of zombies before them. Dylan had told her to drive fast, but after the Army facility in Canberra, Evelyn had sworn she’d never drive into such madness again. And while this wasn’t the same, the circumstances were still terrifying and risky.
That’s life now,
she supposed.
You’re cool in a crisis.
This was going to be a challenge though. It wasn’t that there were so many of them, but the road was only so wide, and full of barriers and tramlines. There were only so many places through which she could pass.

And she couldn’t find a clear route. There was a car in the middle amongst the sea of dead. She decided to go straight for the horde, roll over them like pins. They’d get some damage to the van, but they could make it.
Drive fast,
as Dylan had said. Ram the car out of the way, if she had to. She turned around to tell them all to be seated, to have their belts on, but they knew the rules now. Everybody was secure in place.

Evelyn punched the accelerator. She hit the first few, and they spun aside with a heavy thud. Others stood in her path, confused, unsure which way to go, and she mowed them down, splitting them apart like rotten fruit. Blood sprayed up the windscreen. She barrelled on, but slammed into something unseen with a crunch and a bang. The van jumped sideways. She didn’t stop though, urging the vehicle forward amidst the scrape of steel.

“There’s a motorbike,” Greg yelled from the side window. “It’s stuck.”

It had jagged itself underneath the camper and screeched an unbearable noise as they dragged it along the road. The engine revved, but it would go no further.

“Keep going,” Dylan shouted.

“I’m trying!”

Zombies thumped the side. Sarah screamed. Evelyn gave another thrust, but it lurched once, and revved high again. She pulled the wheel left and drove forward; the bike slid loose, allowing some movement, but they bounced over a low concrete barrier. A steel railing used to protect tram passengers blocked further passage, and the camper came to a sudden halt, tossing them all forward. Zombies attacked the bloody windscreen.

“Reverse,” Gallagher yelled. “Throw it in reverse.”

Yes. Reverse.
Why hadn’t she thought of that? She slammed the stick back and thumped the pedal. The van jerked backwards, throwing them all again, and drove over feeders standing at the rear, jiving and jumping. When she was clear, she braked, peering forward for a pathway.

A mass of zombies, the broken-down car, the motorbike, and a narrow road lay before them. She searched for another way out, feeling the claws of desperation sink into her thumping heart. It all came down to her.

Their best chance was slightly left, down a side street off the main road. A median strip lay in between. Beyond sat a big bluestone church, a large blue box with high windows and a tiny door. Zombies couldn’t get into
that
. Something caught her eye. One of the church doors was open. An arm reached out and closed it.

Rain swept in on a strong gust of wind, shaking the camper, the wipers almost irrelevant. A zombie got hold of one of the moving arms and tore it free with a cheap snap. The remaining swung across the glass, but the visibility was terrible, water teeming over the damaged limb. More feeders crowded in, drawn to the van and its contents like flies to old meat. There was no other choice but to take the side road and make the safety of the church.

Evelyn accelerated, jamming the front tires into the curb. The engine screamed; they weren’t going to make it.
She would have to reverse—
then the wheels leapt up over the edge, bouncing the van, clawing their way over the strip.

“What are you doing?” Dylan yelled. Zombies were still coming, the road ahead filled with wandering stragglers. “We need to go the other way.”

“We won’t make it. I’m going for the church.”

“No! You can’t—”

“I saw someone. There are people inside. They have to let us in!”

“Good thinking,” Gallagher said. “Head for the back entrance.”

Dylan’s protest was drowned in tire squeals and the clunk of feeders bouncing off the van. Evelyn’s body felt like it had been drawn out, tight and stiff. Her knuckles were white around the wheel, her jaw hurting with tension. She wanted to hand the driving over and let someone else worry about them getting there safely, but it was too late to renege on her obligations.

The service road was clear of feeders, but the rear-view mirror told a different story. Evelyn rammed the camper off the curb and onto the street, running at right angles to the main road. Ahead, the street swept up and over a short rise and on their right sat a driveway entrance into the back of the church. There were two faint parking spaces marked by small rocks and a flat timber sleeper. She swung the vehicle in and parked diagonally across both spaces.

Gallagher was already standing near the door. “Wait here. I’ll get them to let us in.”

“You’d better hope somebody’s home,” Dylan said.

Gallagher opened the door and hung off the step. “Greg, come with me. Dylan, stand here and guard the van. Evelyn, keep it running and get ready to drive away fast.” He paused in thought. “No, turn it around so we’re ready to go in the other direction.”

Evelyn preferred having someone tell her what to do. With Callan gone, she worried they would lack leadership, but Gallagher was stepping up. Dylan stood in the doorway with a rifle and Greg was halfway between the van and the church. Gallagher jogged to a heavy wooden door and thumped on it with the back of his fist.

“Open up!”

A dozen or more zombies shambled their way up the road towards the van. They were no different from the ones in Wagga, and Yass, and at the defense facility in Canberra. Old people, young, even children, all pale skin and ropey hair. Their eyes boggled, their clothes were torn, and their grey tongues lolled from their mouths like giant slugs. They all wanted one thing: human flesh, preferably from those who were living; however, if it came to a pinch, they’d eat the dead. She knew they had once been people—sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters—but she wanted to kill them all, and would have sacrificed a lot to make it happen. No doubt in her mind, they would reach the van and engage to the death yet again.

“Open up! Please!” Gallagher screamed. He pulled on the door handle repeatedly, but it wouldn’t budge.

The rain pelted the windscreen in thick drops. Somewhere over the city, thunder cracked, and two or three seconds later, lightning flashed.
Close.
Her father had taught her to count the seconds. Dylan set himself on the gravel outside the doorway and fired at the oncoming crowd. One took a shot in the throat and slumped to its knees, then fell face down onto the road. The others shuffled on. Evelyn thought it was lucky there were no type threes, although she knew they were never far away. Greg fired into the group too, taking several down. He and Dylan had enough time to reload. Evelyn considered driving through them.

Gallagher had run around to the side of the building, searching for an entrance, but there was nothing besides a small window cut roughly at a height of about twelve feet. Evelyn expected him to come back and try to kick the door in, but instead he disappeared towards the front of the church. A handful of zombies drew away from the line after him.

“He’s leaving us,” Evelyn said, pointing. “He’s gone.”

Dylan said, “He won’t leave.”

Greg and Dylan finished reloading and began firing on the remaining feeders, shooting those closest with deadly accuracy. The blood and killing had drawn others though. Beyond, a broken line stretched on down the side street to the main road.

A zombie reached the driver’s side of the van and stretched for the slightly open window. Evelyn jumped back, scouting for a weapon. The silvery blade of a knife they had taken from Yass glinted at her from the top of a sports bag. She leapt off the seat and pulled it out. The zombie had two hands over the top of the glass, trying to climb in. Evelyn reached forward and jabbed the blade deep into a pale eye. It fell back into a thin puddle with a splat. She fumbled for the button and raised the window.

Half a dozen bodies lay on the road. The men had worked their way back to the van but were out of ammo again. Both were saturated, hair plastered to their heads, water dripping down their faces, their clothes wet and heavy. They were poised to re-enter the van again when Gallagher appeared at the rear entrance to the church.

“This way,” the admiral shouted. He stood in the shadow of the door, holding it open.

Other feeders had climbed the slope, splitting their attention between the van and the church. Greg jumped up onto the step and stuck his head through the doorway. “Let’s go.”

“We need to move,” Evelyn said in her calmest voice. She scooped up a large bag as Julie ushered Jake and Sarah towards the door. Greg called them out from the middle ground between the van and the church. He’d ceased shooting, waving Julie through the door. Dylan stood a few steps behind him and helped them towards Gallagher.

They were going to make it, Evelyn thought, closing the van door. She followed Julie and the children with the bag of guns, glancing towards the main road as she splashed through puddles on the stony earth. Bodies lay at awkward angles in clumps where Greg and Dylan had shot them dead. Further back, others wandered towards them, but they were slow and distracted, and then she was there, taking Gallagher’s hand as he pulled her into the darkness of the church and slammed the door shut behind them.  

THIRTY

After leaving Seymour, Jacob and Rebecca had pumped their way the roughly fifteen miles to Broadford when Jacob called it quits for the night. It was well past dark, but light from the part moon showed them flashes of the landscape around the modest train station: trees on a high bank, power lines running parallel to the tracks. The bats were calling, the mosquitoes sucking their blood at every opportunity, and the last heat of the day hung around with the promise of an imminent storm.

Jacob’s arms ached. He’d borne most of the work, refusing to let Rebecca do more than ten minutes at a time, and he knew he’d suffer the following day. She was a trooper though; he had to give her that, even if she was barely talking to him. She could distinguish between normal life and the need for survival. Her mother would have been complaining the whole time, crawling to a corner of the car and curling up into a ball the moment it got tough.

Still, he couldn’t believe they were still alive. He kept replaying their escape from the Seymour station over and over in his mind, goose bumps chilling his skin at the thought of the zombies getting hold of Rebecca. He had promised to keep her safe, but for how long? He had promised to keep all of them safe over the course of the last few weeks, and only she remained. He had failed, and it burned at his soul like poison.

The station at Broadford was nothing like Seymour. The car slowed to a stop outside the sixty-four square-foot box cut into an embankment about halfway down the platform. Double tracks led in both directions. Jacob thought they might face a track change at some point ahead. He leapt off the car onto the hard platform and climbed over a guardrail, keeping the torch beam low to the ground. He walked a few paces then climbed a set of stairs and tried the door. Locked. He flicked the torch back towards the car where Rebecca sat, head slumped forward. Exhausted. They both needed rest and sleep.

They had lost the ax back at Seymour; otherwise, he could have broken the door in with the blunt end. One bullet remained in the revolver, but he didn’t want to waste that on a lock when he might need it to save a life. He would have to kick the door in, but was paranoid about the noise it would make. He swept the yellow beam through the darkness around the station building, searching for the flash of eyes, or other movement. The bushes and trees were still, the gravel pathway leading to a car park, which he assumed was empty. He considered searching for a vehicle but decided the risk wasn’t worth it. He might spend hours trying to find one with keys
and
fuel, all the while avoiding zombies. For now, the rail car was working, despite the physical demands, and he would take that to avoid risk any day of the week.

Jacob circled the tiny building, peering through the windows, using the torch as much as his paranoia would allow. He had to be sure there were no feeders inside, although until they entered he couldn’t be certain. He would have to take the risk.

Two more completed laps and a quick check to make sure Rebecca was still unharmed and he stood before the door, testing it for weak points. He decided the lock was old and flimsy. It buckled and banged under the pressure of his first kick, but did not open. He peered around, waiting for zombies from the shadows beyond the torchlight. The night remained stifling and silent. On the third try, the door crashed open under his heel, and again he waited, expecting for certain that this time they would be drawn to the noise. Nothing. He touched the door with the tip of the revolver and it swung open with a rusty creak. He winced, wondering if he could possibly make any more noise. He stepped inside, poking the torch beam through the darkness, digging it into the shadowy corners and behind the green-painted desk. A four-legged chair, open-mouth dustbin, and several dented filing cabinets sat silent. A plain blind had been pulled down over a wide window. There was enough floor space for the both of them. Hope beckoned.     

In short work, they had their packs and remaining supplies inside the station building, the door bolted from the inside using a secondary lock. In darkness, Jacob pressed his face against the glass, searching the silence outside for movement.     

They did their best to close the gap in the blind, and then lit a pink candle from the IGA supermarket and placed it on the desk. Rebecca ate uncooked two-minute noodles, while Jacob chewed half a pack of Savoy crackers for the thousandth time.

The silence grew, making him uncomfortable. This was his daughter, for God’s sake, his flesh and blood. Surely, they could find something to discuss? But he was afraid of saying the wrong thing again, of pushing the wrong button and sending her into further silence. He understood her reluctance to accept him, but after this long, and all they had battled, she should have been coming around. Perhaps it was his unwillingness to discuss the issues, to explain his motivations for leaving when she was a child. He wanted to; he wanted to tell her that he had thought about her every day since walking out with his three bags of clothes and bootload of junk that he’d never taken out again, except to toss into the rubbish bin. He wanted to tell her that he’d tried to build the business for her, to make a name for himself so that one day she might be proud of what he’d done, so that if she saw how hard he had worked she might understand the
why.
But it hadn’t eventuated. Everything he’d worked for had been destroyed along with the rest of the world. What did he have left? Nothing. Nothing but the wisdom of his failures and pain of things he couldn’t change.
You have a daughter.
He did, and his gratitude for that went beyond words, but he didn’t know how to handle her. To Jacob, she was akin to a bag of snakes.

Fatigue and exhaustion pulled at him. He tried to keep his eyes open, tried to think of an opening line to start the conversation, but he had never been good with such around Rebecca. He drifted, sleep taking him with a sweet, lustful cloud.

He woke later and found her cross-legged, watching him with a sad expression. The candle burned on. It was still dark outside. “Why did you leave?”

“Wha?” He tried to sit up, but his aching, aging body wouldn’t allow it. Did he hear right? He knew he should wake up and talk to her, but his eyelids were heavy. They fell closed. He was so tired.
So tired …

When he next woke, spears of light had broken through the edges of the blind. Morning. This time when he tried to move, it was easier. He rolled onto his side and pushed up with his elbow. On all fours, he saw Rebecca had fallen asleep against one of the packs. She looked so vulnerable lying there. Nothing like the difficulty she could be. He crawled aside and sat watching her sleep, the slow, gentle rhythm of her chest rising and falling. How many times had he missed watching the same when she was four, or seven, or twelve? It burned his gut like acid. It had all been for nothing, and he had missed everything. What could he do though, keep beating himself up? He had promised he would repay her, somehow. He couldn’t change the past, but he pledged again that he would make her future better. 

He was outside when Rebecca woke. On his return to the station building, she had a can of tomato soup open and was drinking from it as though it was a soft drink.

“Careful you don’t cut yourself on the edge.”

She kept drinking. When she was done, she placed the can in the rubbish bin and collected up several more scraps from the carpet and did the same again. He noticed the candle, torches, matches, and spare batteries had been packed, stacked neatly in one corner. She was anal about that sort of thing. This pleased Jacob.

Still, she said nothing, but he caught her glaring at him as they backed out of the station building and headed towards the rail car. He wanted to ask, but if she was anything like her mother—and in this way, he suspected she was—she would eventually talk. He had learned over a long period before their separation to give Jennifer space and not force discussion about what was bothering her. 

Clouds rested like a squadron of fighters in the west. Jacob smelt imminent rain and wondered whether they might get a soaking later in the day. He didn’t know where they were going, only that the tracks led all the way into Melbourne. Others he had spoken with in their travels suggested they would head there, and it was
somewhere
; at that point, he had no better ideas. How long would it take? A full day, maybe longer, he thought. They had traveled almost a quarter of the way the previous afternoon, but today would be the killer, if they could survive.   

Jacob began the pumping motion, expecting his muscles to tighten with resistance. Surprisingly, they only gave a dull ache as his blood flow increased. The handlebar kept coming loose, but he tightened the bolts with his fingers, which helped. Rebecca faced forward, her back to him, the wind in her face, as they gathered speed. Her blonde, silky curls trailed behind, and he thought it was one of her nicest features.   

They took turns at pumping as they passed through more stations—Kilmore East, Wandong, Heathcote Junction, Wallan, and Donnybrook—each with their small weatherboard buildings, discarded and disused; none of which were places Jacob wanted to stop. But they needed rest, and after Rebecca’s shift, Jacob felt the twinge of overworked muscles in his arms and shoulders. He let them drift to a stop in the middle of an open field with the widest view to anything that might attack. None did though, for there was nothing out there. After a silent drink, they pushed on.

Approaching Craigieburn Station, they had reached the outer limits of Melbourne. That meant more feeders. It was inevitable they would face them soon, although he held hopes that the train tracks would offer some protection. There were zombies at the station. Rebecca watched them as they passed the platform, wandering down the road on the town center side. Several were caught in the twisted carnage of a fence that had been smashed down by a rampant motor vehicle with all its glass broken.

At the lower end of the station, there was a choice of two tracks. One sign read BROADMEADOWS LINE, the other UPFIELD LINE. They sailed through, taking the pre-selected track, which was the Upfield line, Jacob unsure if it was right or wrong, but knowing they should both eventually lead them into Melbourne.

It was Rebecca’s shift when the rain first came, pounding the open car with large drops. Jacob urged her to stop, but she shrugged him off. He silently admired her resolve. Sooty grey clouds covered most of the city sky. He had known rain was on the way, but this was going to be more than they might weather. He wondered about the next station and decided they would stop there if it fell any heavier.  

The first zombies appeared as the tracks, still running parallel to the Hume Highway, meandered their way along the backside of an industrial area—warehouses, large blocks of retail outlet shops, and the odd manufacturing site. On the right, scruffy paddocks eventually met houses and the suburb of Broadmeadows. 

They were still about a hundred yards away when Jacob noticed something on the railway line. He knew it had to happen sooner or later; they had sailed all the way from Seymour without a problem. He motioned for Rebecca to slow down, and she did, noticing the concern on his face as he drew the revolver from his waistband. As they approached, he spied feeders standing off to the side in the shadows of several buildings. These were not the stupid ones that had mostly attacked in Seymour, but neither were they the crazies that had chased them on the tracks.
Somewhere in between.

As they approached, Jacob recognized the obstacles as large rocks, and that he would have to climb down and remove them. He scanned the long grass at their side as they rolled along, searching for a weapon, but it was empty. He had a single round left in the revolver, but beyond that, only his fists.

The feeders stirred from their hiding places. What fascinated him in a distant way was their ability to think beyond the necessity for blood and flesh. They had planned the maneuver, but how had they known to do so?

The rail car had almost stopped. Jacob pumped several times, urging them forward. The handlebar rattled again, the nuts working their way loose from the bolts. An idea struck him. He fiddled for the bolts underneath, and this time, instead of tightening them, he spun the nuts the other way. The bar fell out of its holder and rattled onto the floor of the car. Jacob picked it up and tightened his hands around the weapon.