Tankbread 02 Immortal (24 page)

“Best you can do is keep him indoors for a few days, keep him warm. Feed him when he will eat and it should pass.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Else asked, shooting Cassie a stricken look.

The other woman shrugged, “Then he will die.”

* * *

Else stayed awake with the baby all night, listening to his breathing as it became a rasping wheeze. He slept in short bursts, until violent sneezes shook his body and he woke up crying.

The engineers, holders, and fishermen weren’t bothered by the noise of crying babies. For them it was a good noise, a sound of hope and a child who had not been claimed by the crew.

At dawn, Rache organized a team to make breakfast. They built a fire outside and cooked up cans of beans and spaghetti between the heavy rain showers. After everyone had eaten she consulted with Eric, who was keen on exploring the outbuildings. Else had taken the baby upstairs, which left Rache in charge.

She led Eric and four of the men out into the farmyard and across an overgrown yard. Three sheds stood gleaming in the sunlight.

“We’ll start there, aye?” Eric said. Rache nodded, watching the long grass carefully after her experience of the day before.

Eric went first, sweeping the grass with a stick. The others followed, climbing over a fence and into a weed-strewn driveway of packed gravel.

“Lock’s on this shed,” Eric reported. “I hope that means no one’s been in it before us.”

The men, two engineers and two fishermen, nodded and grinned. They were all armed with the scythe like stick-blades; Rache wouldn’t let anyone go outside without a weapon.

Eric used his blade to lever the locking plate out of the door, the screws sliding out of the wooden frame with a shriek.

Rache looked around; no wandering dead were in sight. It seemed that the farm might be clear of evols.

The shed door rattled open, the noise echoing through the empty space behind it. “Ohh yeah,” Eric breathed. The men and Rache peered inside. Farm and workshop tools hung on every wall. In the center of the shed a large, flatbed truck had been parked.

“Place like this should have fuel stores on site.” Eric rubbed his hands together. “Fuckin’ fantastic,” he added.

They left the first shed and jimmied the lock off the next door. Inside they found more farm machinery, spare parts, equipment, and sacks of seed pockmarked with gnawed holes and reeking with the musty smell of rodents.

Rache flicked an empty sack away with the tip of her blade. The floor underneath the hessian fabric erupted in a boiling well of tiny brown shapes. Rache shrieked and started stamping up and down as mice poured out of the sacks and stampeded out the door in a furry tidal wave.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Rache squealed and scrambled up onto a workbench. More mice ran over her boots to make their escape.

The men jumped out of the way, kicking aimlessly at the surge of tiny bodies.

“You okay?” Lug, one of the engineers, said, his face a mask of confusion.

“They touched me!” Rache sobbed.

“Did they bite you?” Eric asked.

“No!” Rache shouted back.

“Well, they’re gone now,” Lug said.

“Fuck!” Rache yelled one more time.

Eric moved on to the last of the locked doors. “You might wanna stand back, missy, there could be mice in this one too.”

Rache glowered at him, embarrassment replacing her fear of the tiny things. “Mention the mice to anyone and I’ll fucking kill you,” she said.

The men grinned but nodded. Eric wrenched the lock plate off the door; the padlock clattered to the ground.

“What’s that smell?” Rache said as the door started to slide open.

Eric peered inside. “Jesus, it stinks in he—”

A body lunged at him from the darkness. Small in stature, a boy of no more than ten years old, his dead skin as yellow and dry as old parchment. Latching on to Eric’s arm, the boy growled deep in his throat like a rabid dog.

“Geddafuckoffame!” Eric screamed and jerked backwards, losing his footing and falling over.

The boy’s blackened teeth bit hard into the sleeve of the leather jacket that Eric wore. Eric bellowed and started punching the kid in the side of the head. Rache stepped forward and swung her blade. It caught the boy in the ribs, lifting him off the ground and leaving him attached to Eric’s sleeve by his teeth.

“You’re not fuckin’ helping!” Eric yelled.

The other four men started swinging their blades, hacking long, oozing gashes in the boy’s emaciated frame. One of the wild blows bit into the boy’s neck, cracking the spine as the blade cut through the vertebrae. The kid shuddered and collapsed.

Eric threw the body aside and sat up. “Fuck, there’s more of them,” he shouted while scrambling backwards, climbing to his feet and snatching up his dropped blade.

Two more young evols came shuffling out of the dark shed, one, a girl in filth-encrusted pink pajamas, the other an even younger boy, chewing on the ear of a stuffed rabbit, its once yellow fur now stained black with zombie drool.

“Kids . . .” Lug said, hesitating with his blade ready to strike.

Rache stepped around him and swung her blade. The girl’s head rolled and the boy kept industriously sucking on the ear of the toy rabbit.

“Not kids,” Rache said, swinging overhand and burying the curved point of her blade into the young boy’s skull. “Walking dead. We destroy them. We destroy them all. Just like Else said.”

Twisting the handle of her blade, she cracked the boy’s skull wide open and jerked the metal free. “Never hesitate, never forget: they are not human anymore.”

The third shed was empty except for the torn scraps of a woman’s body, long rotted away to shards of bone and withered flesh.

“Don’t you ever wonder what their story was, who they were before they died?” Key, one of the fishermen, asked while staring at the gnawed remains.

“Maybe the kids get bit, mother tries to take care of them. Father locks them all in the shed. Hears her screams as they turn and kill her. Blows his own head off,” Eric said.

“It must have been hell,” Key said.

“Where the fuck do you think we’re standing?” Eric scoffed.

“Hey Eric, there’s another room back here.” Rache pulled horse tack and ropes off the wall and unbolted a door.

“Careful,” Lug warned. They moved into ready positions and then nodded at Rache. She opened the door wide and stepped back, her own blade ready to strike.

The room beyond had a concrete floor and sheet metal walls. It was large enough to hold a five-hundred-liter tank, and the smell of oil permeated the air.

“Oh you little fuckin’ beauty . . .” Eric whispered. He ducked down and peered under the tank, satisfying himself that the room was clear before stepping forward and tapping on the metal side. A dull booming sound changed in pitch about halfway down.

“Diesel fuel,” he said with a wide grin. “Let’s get you tinkers working on the truck. If you can get the engine in a fit state to run, we can drive as far as you fuckin’ want.”

* * *

Else stood in the office upstairs, looking out the window towards the road, willing Joel to come loping out of the drifting rain. In her arms the baby shuddered and struggled to breathe. Else bent her head, closed her mouth around his tiny nose, and sucked sharply, drawing thick mucus out of his airways. She turned her head and spat on the floor. The baby shared half her genes; he shouldn’t get sick. He should be strong like her.

“You are strong,” she whispered to his fever-warm skin. “You will come through this and be okay.”

She tried to feed him again, but the congestion in his nose and chest meant he couldn’t breathe and eat at the same time. Instead she walked up and down the carpeted hallway, listening to the rain and speaking softly to her son of the things she would teach him when as he grew up.

* * *

In the shed, every engineer now crowded around the truck. They had rolled the chassis out into the rain, the tires flat after years of sitting. With the front of the vehicle under shelter, they managed to tilt the cab forward and expose the engine. They had scrubbed the green corrosion from the battery terminals and carefully topped the cells up with fresh rainwater. Another team had drained the fuel tanks and using a hand pump had filled a jerry can with diesel, pouring it carefully into the tank.

Now a heated discussion had broken out with different points of view on how to proceed. Rache slapped at a dozen hands that reached in to tug or point at the cables, aluminum, and other parts of the engine.

“Battery,” one of the engineers declared. “It’s a diesel engine; we need electricity to heat the glow plug so the fuel will ignite.”

“We should strip it down, check everything,” Lug insisted. “It’s what the Foreman would have us do.”

“The Foreman ain’t here!” Rache snapped. “I’m foreman on this job and I say keep your fuckin’ hands out of it.”

“How do we make ’trickery without solar panels?” asked a blonde woman engineer.

Rache opened her mouth to answer but realized she didn’t know what to say.

“With this,” Eric announced. The engineers rose from their huddle and turned to look at him. He stood next to a squat, square machine on a frame with two wheels.

“Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to my little friend,” Eric beamed and patted the machine.

“What is it?” Rache asked.

“This is a Milton model MD806, diesel-fueled, three-phase, two-kilowatt generator. It turns diesel into electricity.”

The engineers climbed down from the truck and pored over this new discovery.

“How does it work?” Lug asked.

Eric shrugged. “Well it’s a practical application of the Faraday principle of electromagnetism . . .” Eric trailed off and regarded their blank faces. “Magic, who cares? You put the fuel in and it makes electricity.”

“We should still strip down the truck engine and make sure every part is ready to function,” Lug insisted, and others nodded their agreement.

“Did you ever think that the Foreman had you stripping things down and rebuilding them constantly because that was the only way he could keep you doing what he wanted?” Eric asked. “Seriously, that ship was going nowhere. It was all about keeping control of the population while he sat up there in his office, stuffed his face, and got his dick sucked.”

Under Eric’s guidance they cleaned the generator, checking the fuel filter and cleaning corrosion off the terminals. They watched with intense curiosity as Eric filled the tank with fuel. He flicked a switch and waited.

“It’s not working,” Rache said.

“Give it a minute,” Eric replied. After ten seconds he pressed a button on the control panel. The generator clicked but the engine did not fire.

“I told you, we should strip it down and put it back together to make it work,” Lug said.

The other engineers spoke their agreement this time. Eric scowled at them.

“Touch this fuckin’ thing and I’ll gut you. Rache, don’t let them touch it, I’ll be right back.”

Eric vanished into the back shelves of the shed, returning a moment later with a bent steel rod.

“What—” Rache asked but Eric waved her to silence.

Inserting one end of the rod into the machine Eric twisted it rapidly, the angled shape of the rod allowing it to spin easily in his hands.

“Okay,” he panted after ten seconds of frantic turning, “push the green button.” Rache jabbed the button and the generator coughed, shuddered, and then fired. A cloud of black smoke bubbled from the exhaust, filling the shed with a choking fog. Eric straightened up and made some adjustments, the generator’s clatter smoothing out into a steady chugging.

“How long does it take to make electricity?” Rache shouted over the noise.

Eric grinned, and lifting two large alligator clips on the end of rubber-clad cables, he touched them together. A white spark crackled across the bare metal. “Step aside,” he said.

He attached the clips to the battery in the truck. Climbing up into the tilted cab, he frowned at the empty ignition, then looked up and pulled the sun visor down. A set of keys dropped into his lap.

While the engineers watched with absorbed fascination Eric slid the key into the slot and turned it. The truck engine turned over, a long whining ignition cycle. The engineers exhaled with an almost religious awe.

Eric grunted, pumped the accelerator pedal, and turned the key again. The truck engine fired, the roar of it drowning out the shouts and cheers of the engineers. Eric climbed down and lowered the cab on its hydraulic struts.

“Can we drive it with those wheels?” Rache asked.

“There’s a compressor, it’ll pump them right up.” The engineers jockeyed for position and gave each other advice as they rolled the compressor over to the truck and inflated the tires. To Eric’s relief they all inflated and held pressure.

“Alright, turn it off or we’ll have every dead prick in a hundred miles coming to have a look.”