Remedy Z: Solo (24 page)

With the canoe full to the brim with supplies and equipment, I was prepared for a mission out to Tiger Island. I was beginning to relax even more now but remembered not to be complacent. I would tow a second canoe out with me. There were plenty to spare at the holiday park and it could save someone’s life; shelter or a vessel back to the mainland. Tiger Island could also be a place someone else might want to find refuge and I would leave a note to let any brave soul to get there that they were not alone. The more of those little communication capsules, or “guest books” like at the Waystation, that I could leave, the more hope there was that someone would find them and find me. I had hope in my heart and mind.  My territory, my world, was expanding in all ways and I realised the profound nature of this as I pushed off in the canoe. The sand gave its characteristic “hiss” and the expected rearward jerk of occurred. That feeling was when the rope to the second canoe went taught. Its resistance on the sand hissed too and only slowed me for a moment. Like a rocket leaving the atmosphere, it was a short time before the resistance and noise was gone and I was suddenly in tranquillity; gliding physically and mentally. I enjoyed that moment of tranquillity, lucidity and being free of any stresses. It was a magical experience; moments like that cannot be explained but readers of this must understand what I felt given what I had been through. 

I felt totally relaxed and I scanned the area with my binoculars; all was clear. This vivid scene gave a truly raw feeling; alive. Without any baggage of the kind that gave me nightmares, I paddled through what felt like a surreal passage to Avalon. “Was this real?” I thought.  “Had I died in my sleep and I didn’t know it?”

I glided through the water with firm but relaxed paddle-strokes and into a new chapter of my life and an expansion of my territory. I was feeling the change. 

I knew the zombie menace would continue but I had only really experienced the fruits of the Battle of Tanny Hill for the first time in the previous 24 hours. I was enjoying the sweetness of success and being able to carry out my work uninterrupted. But interruptions were coming, today, tomorrow and the next day. In fact, my world was going to be a whole lot interrupted over the next four weeks. But my resolve and mission was changing from survival to expansion and I was ready for what was coming. I had come out of my funk and I was a happier, more purposeful person again. Whatever anxieties, hang-ups and fears I had before, I was dealing with them. That trip into Tantangara, to face my demons, was a complete success.

With or without food or goods, with or without a successful outpost on Tiger Island, I could return home victorious, without losses, for the first time. In fact, running home was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to conquer, expand, clear and explore “the New World”. I had a renewed purpose and resolve.

The wind had picked up and the water was choppy in my crossing from the mainland toward Tiger Island. I paddled a number of strokes on the left and then the right. It was good solid work, the sort of exercise I thrived on. My lungs expanded like an old smith’s bellows and my muscles pulsed. I paddled through the choppy water with a feeling in my body that reminded me of old times. Exercise and being disciplined with good physical labour had been a hallmark of my family. I also loved it and was no stranger to my genes. Work usually had purpose but exercise, mindless, purposeful or not was something that my family all needed in order to be healthy but mentally satisfied as well. 

My father had a setup of weights and a treadmill at home. When I was a bit older, he bought a kick-bag and taught me the basics of martial arts. He lived by the philosophy “train hard, fight easy”; he had heard that from someone or read it somewhere but loved the sentiment and made it his own. It was strange looking back on the days before the Great Change. People had it so easy and they took it for granted. Depression, suicide and permanent medication for mental health had never been so prolific. The decriminalisation of cannabis in 2022 had been repealed when the pharmaceutical giants lobbied to ensure that the placating and medicinal effects were outweighed by the mentally damaging effects. It was outlawed once and for all; back to industry. Similarly, alcohol was the new cigarettes of the time. The direct links between alcohol and cancer, whether fabricated or real, were established. The plain alcohol packaging, covered in images of death, illness and carnage were perhaps false prophets; never as destructive as Divine had proven to be. The pharmaceutical giants had sealed the deal. They had a monopoly on the market for cough medicines, antacids, eye-drops, mood enhancers, anti-depressants: all laced with their wonder-drug, the golden child: Divine. People had little else to turn to as a crutch in a boring, gluttonous world where life was too easy and quick fixes had become core to life. It was the way for almost everyone. Divine was what they got given and people began to enjoy it. Bars where Divine cocktails were served began to pop-up, it was added to everything from protein shakes at the gym through to baby formula and in strong concentrations as a painkiller. “Pain and killer, indeed.” I thought as I paddled out toward the island in weather than was turning bad, quickly. It was a little like Divine really; one minute all tranquil and in order and then things “changed”. “Pain” and “killer” were words I associated with Divine, for all the wrong reasons. 

I remember the few who soldiered on and stayed physical; stayed old-fashioned human. “Perhaps we were the immune?” I thought.  There were a few of us before the Great Change that weren’t disciples of the modern lazy life. Too many people were like pigs that dripped with fat while licking dripping ice-creams the size of a man’s forearm. There were the morbidly obese who had to be forklifted from their homes too; a sad metaphor for the laziness and helplessness humans had created in themselves. There had also been lots of addicted holo-gamers that starved to anorexia or ate themselves to death with Internet-ordered pizza. There were the “junkies” too. These people were the same skinny, wild-eyed chemically addicted souls of every generation that succumbed to being selfish, lazy and incorrigible. They had lost their humanity. At the root of all this was greed and addiction, whichever you pick. The people who wanted to be better than that rose above this selfishness and laziness and still kept the rigour of our survivor ancestors. I was one of these folk but we were so few. I worked to stay physical and healthy and had entered a sort of fad movement in about 2018. It was called “life running”. “Life running then, running for my life now!” I smirked and shook my head as a light rain showered and the wind continued. 

Life running was a funny memory to me. People that did try to exercise always complained they didn’t have time and few made the time, or could, to exercise. So people created the Life Running movement where they ran everywhere, wherever they went, throughout the day. Before life running had been trail running which was essentially the same concept but out in nature and on tracks. This was a crazy “sport” or discipline as it took the union of explorer and nature away. Running through the designated terrain was not the same, not as enjoyable as a hike to me. More importantly, the injuries that emerged from trail running made it seem too high risk for too little reward. People kept rolling ankles, breaking arms and collar bones. Rocky, uneven and treacherous trails were badges of courage to the people who did trail running or competed in events. Despite being those who were supposedly “better” than the gluttons and the junkies, trail runners ended up on painkillers, getting surgery on the damage they invariably had done and ultimately, ended up addicted to Divine at some step in the injury-to-recovery cycle. I was more into hiking and hunting so trail running was something I did socially a few times but I never overdid things or got heavily into it. I never had the injuries or the Divine that would have brought me low. 

Life running touched my life and my family. I remember my parents gave it a go for a while and my father, who was a suited-up office worker, got sick of sweating in the summer heat in an expensive wool suit, wearing rubber-soled gloves for the feet that had become the norm. My mother kept it up a little longer, a few months, but sweating and the general stress of running around all day because you felt you had to, put an early end to things. Such experiences meant that this fad had been short-lived. But the infinitely crafty pharmaceutical firms and corporations invented a pill and spray combination to lower the heart rate, reduce respiration and perspiration and keep you smelling good and relaxed despite your exertions. The Life Runners lapped it up and it was a sensation that sold out and had back-orders for years. The brain, nervous and respiratory systems were being duped as were their owners. And you can guess what the key ingredient had been? Divine. Some took it to stay healthy, others took it to drop out and few took it to exercise. My family had a view that it was excess and I was one of the few in society that held such an opinion and lived it. I was not sure, nor did I have the evidence but I felt that there was a relationship between those who hadn’t succumbed to taking Divine in the early days of its release and those that had changed. I was unsure if it had had an effect on me, me being immune, or if it was purely circumstance. Later this would be revealed, but then, I was oblivious and blissfully ignorant of what was true, paddling across the water. A storm was brewing.

Chapter 13: The Tiger’s Share

The water was rough and the sky was a dark tumultuous mix of greys and blues. I paddled on and had made good headway but the storm was coming. Distant thunder and flashes of lightning came closer. I realised my plan to paddle out had not included a solid plan for bad weather: “Loaded up with all sorts of kit including a nice big metal lock-box; not good.“

That lock box had the potential to be a fucking lightning rod and I knew it. But it was risk versus reward and I would be braver than my fears and anxieties. What could or would be was pushed to the side and I got on with it, like I always did. 

“Fuck, I wanna go home!” I felt I had to laugh and muse or cry. I chose the former. Something caught my eye from the banks of the great lake. I initially thought it was water rats splashing into the lake from southern shore-line. But my intuition told me otherwise. “Those weren’t rats,” I concluded.

I took my binoculars in hand and glassed the small, swimming figures and I realised I was looking at the heads of zombies who had entered the water. “Tantangara must be all out of protein.” I shook my head and placed my oar inside the big canoe. I carefully unslung my rifle from my back. I took a middle-of-the-road round from my ammunition belt and loaded it into Old Man. I surveyed with my binoculars, again, taking a good look all around. Where there is smoke there is fire; what had initially been 5 wretched Divine infected was now 14. More shambled out from the direction of Tantangara-proper and splashed clumsily into the water. Between these devils and the ones I had encountered at the Waystation, I concluded that these would be some of the last zombies in the area after the Battle of Tanny Hill. I wasn’t going to be too over-optimistic as I knew there would always be more shambling about. I had 19 precious rounds left and I knew that I could easily jeopardise myself by expending all the rounds. I could have easily used up the last of my ammo on the convoy of swimmers that paddled feebly in my direction “The Swim Team”. Of my ammunition, 10 were good quality rounds and I made a snap decision that these wretches weren’t worth those. The swimmers were coming in the initial group of 5 and a line of the remaining 9 in decent dispersion. Their position in the water was low, with their heads barely above. I realised that my high position in the canoe would give me the leverage of a Prussian or British cavalryman chopping down on Napoleonic infantry. It was time to consider all those aforementioned factors to come up with a plan that was economic but decisive. I would shoot the first 5 with my worst ammunition, the stuff beyond another reload and use. I would then work fast, to hack the remaining animated corpses. 

I waited for the swimmers to come my way. Through the safe distance of the binocular view, I was intrigued; watching zombies swim for the first time. They appeared to be working on instinct rather than technique in a sort of a dog paddle. I noticed that, like with people, some were stronger swimmers than others. There were three in a group at the back that appeared to be large, corpulent zombies that tired. This tiring, the body mechanics not working satisfactorily enough to keep them a-float, resulted in the largest struggling. They foundered and sank like beleaguered ships. This was a learning I would write up in my new book once I had some time on Tiger Island. It seemed that the zombies could be drowned and killed. I would have to row out to the location later, just to be sure. But these were not the lucid zombies I had encountered back at my home.  These shambling messes were like I expected; swimming on instinct and without guile. I looked all around and gathered a couple of mental trig-points, so a return journey would be less difficult. I didn’t have much time to contemplate their fate or the implications of things as my rifle was locked and loaded with the first 5 of the Swim Team approaching within 30 meters.  

I had the worst reloaded ammunition on my ammunition belt, ready for quick, close use. These shells were so used, over-used in fact, that I could see them being more dangerous with continued use than a pack of zombies. In some ways that situation was the perfect excuse to expend them. Despite the shells being at the end of their practical life, I decided to keep them. They would be a trophy of my first “swimmers” and a memory-jog when an old man and story-teller. There was a moment, regarding those rotten disgusting imitations of man, that I liked the idea of growing old and telling stories.

With a smile at the thought of living to a ripe old age, I raised up my rifle. My expression fell as I readied to attack the moving corpses in the water. They would be afforded no such luck as old age; they were cursed. They were taken too early but not allowed to rest. “You’ll rest after today,” I whispered. My crosshairs were carefully placed between the eyes of the nearest zombie. It was ugly and with rotting flesh; just part of the same old zombie team and not notable. They were all similar, the water did something to take away from their characters and I would not give them the usual nicknames. I squeezed the trigger and its head snapped back and disappeared into the water. As the first zombie slid beneath the surface, an inky black surge of oil-like slick followed it. “Onto the next one.” It would be a production line.