Iain McKinnon - Remains of the Dead

Ryan’s reply was snappy: “With my clothes in the school! I’m carrying a friggin’ desk!”

“Here!” Cahz held out the M4 in the direction of Ryan’s voice.

There was a tug on the weapon.

“How do I use this?”

Cahz had his eyes screwed shut against the pain. “Safety’s on above the trigger. Flip it off then point and press!”

“Okay.”

Ryan took the weapon from Cahz’s grasp. There was the soft click of metal as he flipped the catch, then the scream of fire.

“Shit!” Ryan cried as the chatter of bullets filled the air.

“On semi!” Cahz screamed. “Put it on Semi!”

“How?!”

Cahz opened his eyes. The green blob of after burn still consumed his vision. Another chatter of machinegun fire ruptured the noise of moans.

“Stop wasting bullets!”

“They’re too close!” Ryan screamed.

There was a third burst of shots and a click.

“It’s stopped working!”

“You’re out of ammo, goddamn it!” Cahz said. “Give it here!”

The next moment he felt the hard body of the weapon being pushed into his open hand. He flipped the magazine free, took a fresh one from his body armour and slotted the new one into place, a drill Cahz was trained to do sighted or unsighted.

He brought the carbine into firing position. The blur was starting to clear, but huge floating green blobs still obscured his vision. He blinked hard, trying to squeeze the internal lava lamp from his head.

“Cahz, give me the gun-they’re getting close!” Ryan squealed.

Cahz opened his eyes. The amorphous blobs skittered across his view, but behind them, bathed in the orange light of the flare, he could see three immobilized zombies and a fourth attempting to crawl towards them. Emerging from the breach came half a dozen more.

Flipping the catch to semi-automatic, Cahz shot the crawling zombie in the head, then went straight back to clearing the breach.

“Block that up. I’ll cover you,” he said.

He fired repeatedly into the mass of bodies. Within moments he’d wiped out all the zombies who had made it through, but they were still squeezing their way in.

“Ahhh!” came a cry from behind.

“Ryan!” Cahz called without taking his eyes off the gap.

“I’m okay,” Ryan panted.

“Where’s our barricade?”

Cahz started shooting at the crowd around the gap, hoping their immobile bodies would add to the impasse.

“Coming.” Ryan backed up alongside, Cahz dragging the desk as he did. “Can you help with this?”

“No,” Cahz snapped. “I’m shooting dead fucks!”

With that, he popped another zombie through the skull as if to accentuate the point.

“How am I going to do this then?” Ryan asked.

Cahz took his eyes off the fence for a moment to examine the desk. Ryan had struggled with the large heavy teacher’s desk rather than the lighter flimsier classroom ones.

“If you push it up to about half a metre you can tip it onto its end, then shove it up against the hole.”

“There’s no way you can push this through the grass. We’ll have to pull it or lift it,” Ryan pointed out.

“Then pull it!”

“No way,” Ryan protested. “I’d have my ass up against the fence before I got it close enough.”

“Okay, quit your whining and grab an end,” Cahz said. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Cahz fired a prolonged burst into the crowd, expending the mag.

“Go!”

The two men lifted the desk, one on either side, and ran at the fence like it was a battering ram against a portcullis.

“Tip it!” Cahz shouted as they drew close.

He dropped the leading edge and used the momentum of the charge to throw the desk on its end. The upright desk rattled against the fence as it clattered to a stop.

Cahz and Ryan leapt back from the dozens of arms wedged through the railing trying to grasp them.

“You okay?” Cahz asked, ejecting the spent magazine.

“Yeah,” Ryan replied. “Do you think that’ll hold them?”

“No idea. Go back to the school. Grab a pile of tables and chairs and try to shore this up.”

“What will you be doing?” Ryan asked in an accusing tone.

“I’m going to make a quick circuit of the fence while there’s still some light.”

With that, Cahz jogged off.

“What about the chopper?” Ryan called after him.

Cahz called over his shoulder, “Do you hear it?”

Ryan tried to pick up the sound of the engine, but it was lost to the rain and the tireless moaning.

Dwelling

Ali was bored and miserable. He sat in the tent, wrapped in a sleeping bag. It was pitch black and raining. The alcove he had wrecked out of the roof left him exposed to the lashing rain, with water running off the tiles into the gaping hole. It trickled down and dripped into the Rockwool insulation. No doubt it would have seeped down the plasterboard and started ruining the apartments below.

Not that his alterations would affect the resale value, Ali mused.

Even though the tent had a sewn-in waterproof groundsheet, he was still wet. He sat in the mummy-style sleeping bag like a caterpillar from some Lewis Carol nightmare, his face and bushy beard poking through. His thick eyebrows were furrowed, his eyes squinting against the rain, but he dared not zip up the tent.

What if the chopper returned? Would he hear it above the noise of the driving rain? How long would he have to signal it? Ali couldn’t take the chance.

So he sat, the rain dripping from the tip of his nose.

The inside label of the sleeping bag had boasted a water resistant outer skin. But the amount of spray coming in the open tent flap was testing that reliance to the limit. Ali knew it wouldn’t be long before the fabric passed its saturation point and he’d be even colder and wetter and more miserable.

There was a gas-powered lamp in the hiker’s pack, the type that took the same canister as the stove. He had toyed with the idea of bringing a book to read, something to occupy his mind and help the time pass. In the end none of Frank’s martial arts manuals or action adventure novels took his fancy. Besides, he might need the lantern to signal with later and he had no idea how much gas was left.

The small tower of Franks DVDs took the brunt of a gust of wind and toppled over. The plastic cases scattered among the eaves and insulation. Ali didn’t bother to try to retrieve them. They would never light in weather like this, and besides, they were intended to produce a column of smoke. In the pitch dark and rain they were pointless.

There was a tremendous crash from across the street, like the rumble of dying thunder. Ali jerked his head up to look for the source of the noise. A veil of glowing embers wafted into the rain from a bank of shattered windows.

The buildings across the street had all caught alight and with frightening speed devoured the abandoned properties. The fire’s furious consumption of the available fuel and the lack of any fire suppression had meant the buildings were gutted in a matter of hours. The steady rain had done little to quench the flames, but it had reduced the combustibility of the zombies in the street.

Ali knew from personal experience how flammable the undead were. Countless concoctions of sugar, flour, washing liquid and gasoline were tried as the survivors tinkered to produce the ultimate petrol bomb. In the beginning, the newly resurrected had burnt for hours, the flames intense enough to ignite the fat. Those early blazing culls had been powerful enough to reduce the bone to ash. As the corpses had decayed and rotted, it seemed that they lost the fat around their bones, becoming more gaunt and skeletal. The older the cadaver, the less well they burnt. But they still burnt. With their dry rag clothing and wispy kindling hair, even the old sinewy ghouls had been ample fuel for the flames before their dowsing in the rain.