Tankbread 02 Immortal (25 page)

The engineers were jubilant. For many of them this was the first time in their lives they had made something mechanical actually work. The holders and fishermen had clustered in the backyard, watching with interest over the fence.

It would take years for the cities to crumble, for the dry center of Australia to send enough dust and sand to erode the glass and stone. Burying everything under nature’s relentless onslaught. In a thousand years, or a million, there would be nothing but a few preserved ruins, clues to the past and strange hieroglyphics that would speak of a civilization that once considered itself great and immortal.

Joel hadn’t returned by mid-afternoon, when the flatbed truck and a four-wheel-drive SUV recovered from a garage next to the house rolled out onto the decaying roadway. Else sat in the passenger seat of the SUV while Eric drove. The engineers had spent the morning planning a roster system for who got to drive the truck. The first two were old enough to have driven before, and in true engineer fashion, they trained the others on the job.

Else insisted on leaving a note for Joel, telling him they were heading for the settlement on the north side of the lake called Gol Gol, north of Mildura.

The baby’s fever broke during the morning and he had slipped into an exhausted sleep. Rache and Cassie sat in the back of the SUV; the cargo space behind them was loaded with food supplies, fuel tanks, tools, and weapons salvaged from the house and outbuildings.

“There’s gotta be hundreds of places like this around here,” Eric said. “We can get everything we need.”

“Can you get us a safe place to live?” Cassie asked from the backseat.

“Yeah,” Eric nodded, “I reckon we can do that.”

The rest of the group, packed on the deck and in the cab of the truck, were in high spirits too. Most of them had never ridden in anything other than a boat powered by a sail and oars. They cheered and sang as the truck rolled out, following the SUV.

Eric kept them moving at under thirty miles an hour to start with. The road was littered with abandoned vehicles, and the occasional evol stumbled out of the debris to stand confused as they drove past.

“We should stop and kill them,” Rache said as an evol bounced off the bull bars on the SUV.

“Keep driving,” Else said. She felt the leaden weight of exhaustion pulling her down into sleep, the comforting weight of the baby sleeping against her skin under a blanket cover.

Else woke up after dark, the baby grizzling and squirming.

“Where are we?” she asked as she moved him into a feeding position.

“Somewhere south. There’s a river up ahead. Not sure on the bridge, though.”

“Let me see the map.” Else took it and looked out the window into the darkness. At least the rain had stopped. “Did you see any signs?”

“Yeah, it’s the Black River,” Eric replied.

“Rache, take a couple of your people and walk the bridge. We need to know if it is clear and safe.” Else remembered a bridge she crossed a lifetime ago and the shocking lesson in swimming that came from it.

Rache slid out of the cab, gesturing for engineer backup she walked out into the beam of the SUV headlights. Two men jogged past the pickup and into the light. Rache directed them to each side of the bridge and the trio started walking, weapons in hand.

“Townsville’s down the road a bit,” Eric said, staring into the darkness beyond the headlights.

“I never went there,” Else replied.

“It was my hometown,” Eric said.

“I’m sorry,” Else said, it being what she understood was the right thing to say when someone spoke with such sadness.

“My wife took the kids to Sydney. We had a girl and a boy. It was right before everything turned to shit. She managed to get through on the phone a couple of weeks later, said she was going to try and get to Moore Park, some kind of evacuation center had been set up there. They were airlifting people out, she said. I never heard from or saw her or the kids again.”

Else frowned. “Moore Park was never evacuated. People stayed there, they fought to survive. They fought hard and did it too. Right up till last year, when the treaty with the evols broke down; then they were overrun.”

“Jesus . . .” Eric muttered. “My wife’s name was Katie. Did you ever meet a woman named Katie at Moore Park? She was something, you would have liked her if you met her. She was the sweetest, most kindest person I ever knew.” Eric’s voice cracked a little; he kept staring out into the darkness.

Else lifted her head and looked at him with a steady gaze. “I know the name. I heard a story about a woman called Katie with children, a girl and a boy. She was one of the lucky ones that did get evacuated. People said she was very nice and kind.”

Eric’s head lowered to the steering wheel. A sob crawled up from somewhere deep down inside and hacked out of him like infected phlegm.

“I’m sorry,” Else whispered. Her attention flicked to the headlight beams. A shadow passed in front of them, then another. It wasn’t Rache or the engineers. Evols had come, drawn like moths to the light and the warmth. Else shuddered with relief, grateful that since the destruction of Adam she didn’t feel them anymore. That she didn’t hear their voices and their cravings deep in her mind.

“Evols,” she said. “Cassie, take baby.” Else lifted the well-wrapped infant from his covering blanket and passed him into the backseat. Cassie made space for him next to Lowanna, who barely twitched in her sleep.

“Stay in the car,” Else said, sliding out and closing the door behind her.

The cold air and the standing up brought on an intense need to pee. Else suppressed the sensation and lifted the two blades she carried. Rache and her engineers were taking too long. They couldn’t stand here all night; the people on the back of the truck were exposed.

Flexing her arms, Else moved onto the concrete bridge. Cars had crashed into each other, some of the wrecks still containing trapped bodies. They moaned and snapped their dead teeth at Else as she squeezed past. She stopped, went back, and smashed their skulls in with the point of her blade before continuing on. The river ran high, swollen with the rain falling in the higher plateaus, roaring under her feet and eroding the concrete until one day this bridge would collapse and be gone.

Climbing onto the back of an abandoned truck, Else stared out into the night. A ragged line of evols were caught by the barricade of crashed vehicles, almost halfway across the bridge. Else counted a dozen of them shuffling in aimless circles, and more, trapped in their steel coffins, adding their moans to the necrotic chorus.

Else jumped onto the roof of a sedan, and then with long easy running strides she ran over the rusting hulks, slashing at the dead who reached for her. Her blades found their targets; skulls split and bled black fluid. Heads rolled like balls across the wet concrete and she nimbly sprang onto the truck that had jackknifed across both lanes. The bridge beyond was clear of vehicles; only skeletonized corpses remained.

“Rache!” Else yelled, her voice rolling out over the swollen river and echoing off the sky.

“Else!” Rache’s desperate shout came from somewhere out in the dark.

Else dropped to the road and started running. There was no time to go back and get help; getting every armed holder, engineer, and fisherman past the dead would take too long. Whatever trouble Rache and her men had run into could kill them if she didn’t hurry.

Laughter and men’s voices came to Else out of the darkness. Her feet were almost silent on the concrete, the rushing torrent under her feet covering any noise her boots made. A fence had been set up across the bridge. Else slowed to a halt—she had seen this kind of thing before. People died at places like this.

She could hear Rache now, fighting and swearing, no sound from her engineers. Maybe they were already dead, or maybe they were the ones laughing?

Else went to the edge of the bridge and sheathed her blades. Slipping over the rail, she lowered herself down to a narrow ledge, her hands gripping the concrete curb as her feet slid along the concrete lip.

Once she had passed the wall blocking the bridge, Else climbed the concrete buttress in a chin-up movement that let her peer over the edge and see what she was up against.

A fire burning in an oil drum illuminated a scene that Else had seen too often before. Four men armed with a variety of homemade bladed weapons, rifles, and shotguns stood around the fire watching as Rache struggled against two others who fought to hold her down and pull her clothes off.

The heads of her two engineers were mounted on spikes on the wall. Their bodies had been tossed into the river.

Else pulled herself up and dropped onto the bridge behind the spectators. She had studied a book that explained how to whistle in a dozen different ways, but every time Else tried it she couldn’t make a sound. She settled for walking up behind the two nearest men and cutting their throats. Their companions were still laughing when they turned to see what was happening. Else stepped over the bodies and buried a blade in the third man’s neck. With a jerk on the handle she pulled him between her and the fourth man as he fired a shotgun blast into his dying friend’s back.

The third man screamed, his blood spraying over Else’s face. The two men struggling with Rache scrambled to their feet, one of them pausing long enough to kick her in the face when she tried to stand up.

Else charged the shotgun man. The gurgling man with the blade in his throat stumbled and fell. Else left the blade behind and threw the second one. It spun, handle over curved blade, and hit the shooter in the face.

“Fuck!” he yelled, the shotgun drooping as he clutched his broken nose.

Else snatched the blade off the ground and with an uppercut swing she slammed the point up through the man’s chin hard enough to burst it out the top of his skull. She scooped up the shotgun as it fell, turned on the balls of her feet, and fired from the hip. The blast sprayed shot over both the men bearing down on her, sending them spinning away screaming and bleeding from ragged wounds.

“You fuckers!” Rache screamed and kicked the nearest groaning casualty. “What the fuck is wrong with you people! We weren’t a threat! We weren’t trying to steal anything from you! But you fucking killed my friends! You fucking assholes!”

Else finished them off while Rache vented her fear and fury on the bodies. “Rache, we need to go. We have to find another way to cross the river.”

Rache stood shivering, her arms locked around herself while Else found a way to open the gate in the wall. They returned to the others in silence, Else guiding Rache over the vehicles and getting her settled in the backseat of the SUV.

“We heard shooting,” Eric said. “What the hell happened?”

“Rache ran into some locals. They killed the engineers, and frightened her.”

“Shit,” Eric muttered. “You okay?” he asked, turning in his seat to look at Rache.

The girl nodded. “We killed them, we killed all of them,” she said in a flat voice.

“We can’t cross here. There will be more like them in town.” Else said. Lifting her son, she cuddled him as he cried. “We need to go back. The map says there is a road that goes west. We take that; it curves around and we can cross further upstream.”

“Yeah, we’ll head up Black River Road. As long as they haven’t blocked that bridge as well,” Eric said. “We can take the ring road and get back on the highway south of the city.”

Else walked back to the truck. The survivors were huddled together and looking around fearfully. “We need to back up. There is a side road that will take us to an alternative bridge.”

The engineer behind the wheel started the truck and got it rolling backwards. Making a ponderous turn, they pulled over to let the SUV pass them and then pulled out to follow.

The convoy did not stop again. The SUV burst through a wooden fence that had been constructed on the river road bridge. They saw no guards and speeding up they drove down the clear roads, skirting Townsville, which looked to be under siege from the dead. “There’s a bloody good reason to stay away from populated areas,” Eric said. “They’re populated now alright, with fuckin’ man-eating walking corpses.”

By sunrise they were south of Townsville, out in the wilderness and running low on fuel. The convoy pulled into a farmhouse yard.

“Stop!” Else yelled. The twitch of a curtain in an upstairs window caught her attention.

Eric skidded the SUV to a halt. Behind them the truck hissed and wheezed, its air brakes locking up on the gravel driveway.

“Back up!” Else ordered. The SUV reversed to a parallel position next to the truck.

“Back up!” Eric yelled through the open window.

“What’s the problem?” Lug said from the passenger’s side of the truck.

“There are people in that house. We don’t want to stop here,” Else said and Eric repeated the instructions to the truck.

“We’re low on fuel. We need to stop somewhere and top up the tank. The folks on the back could use a break too,” Lug reported.

“Fine,” Else said, scanning the house for further signs of movement. “Just get back on the road, now!”

A shout came from the truck bed. Else twisted in her seat, then climbed up to kneel on it as she wound the window down and looked out towards the road. A metal gate had swung shut. Two teenage boys stood on the other side, rifles aimed at the truck and SUV.