Turning Read online

  Turning

  By

  Melinda Chapman

  Turning Copyright ©April 2012 by Melinda Chapman. All rights reserved. No part of this eBook can be reproduced or used in any manner without permission, except for short quotes in review articles. Artwork copyright belongs to Melinda Chapman.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  ~~~~

  Dedicated to Kieran Tobin

  Edited by Sirra Girl

  Sirra, thank you for all your great work and support.

  A big thanks to Kieran, Kirstin, Eleanor, and Joyce.

  Ten eyes are better than two!

  ~~~~

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Further Reading

  About The Author

  Chapter 1

  Think. Think what to do!

  Mari bit down hard on her right hand, hoping to mask the pulsing agony that soared up her left arm. There was no time to spare. She had to keep running. The darkness of early dawn played tricks on her eyes. Leaping over shadows and tripping through the dark debris that mottled the street, she veered onto the sidewalk. In a city devoid of humans, she was startled by her ghoulish reflection in the shop windows.

  Slowing to a jog, she jumped into the shadow of a shop alcove at a safe distance. The blood had spread over her brown hair and dried red-black. The broken fingernails of the attacker were caught in her matted ponytail and prickled the back of her neck. Bitterly, she scratched them away until the sensation was gone.

  Several minutes passed. Her wheezing remained rapid, locked above an aching lump in her throat. It wasn’t from running. At twenty-seven, she was fit. She ran more in the last year than the decade before that. This was panic. It flooded her system, a chemical effect she didn't want or need.

  Mari waited in the shadows until her body came down from its own drug and settled into more familiar exhaustion. A bloat of self-pity overwhelmed her, tugging her shoulders to her knees in a crouch. Tears delivered every flashback from the onslaught. Her body tingled hot, warning her to brace for a devastating realisation.

  I will not be okay.

  Pain hammered her arm and through to the bone. Her good hand rested, wedged between her teeth again. Avoiding the wound, Mari observed the rusted body of an upside-down sedan across the street. Her gaze drifted to the smashed railing of the overhead bridge.

  A water cooler jug rolled along the road, empty and driven by the wind. In the city's bayside, the pungent smell of oil spills and toxic fumes wafted from the deserted docks of Port Melbourne. Though her mind no longer filtered the sights and sounds of the year’s anarchy.

  Tears blurred her vision. Her sobs boomed in the alcove and blocked out all noise. Down her cheeks, water streamed and moistened the dried, sticky blood on her hand. She roared through gritted teeth and fingers.

  Where did she go wrong? She has survived for so long and almost reached safety. So why now? Was it fatigue or lack of food that caused her to falter in the car park? This would never have happened if she didn’t get lost the week before. Eight survivors in her crew were heading west in an armoured truck to a military camp right now. There should’ve been nine.

  You stupid, stupid fool!

  It was time to look at her arm; she couldn’t stall it any longer. Mari stepped out under the soft, obscuring moonlight. Raising her left hand, she blinked her eyes dry and adjusted her focus. The sleeve of her hoodie was shredded, and the skin along the top of her forearm was bruised and lacerated. Below the wrist, her burning arm swelled half an inch.

  Fighting her fear and the shakes in her hand, she rotated her wrist to see the underside. In one strike, her teeth attacked her lip and her neck jolted. The fright was so distracting that she didn’t notice the fall. Her hip hit the step to the alcove, followed by her head. The gentle moonlight turned pitch black.

  ~~~~

  In the bright, sunlit morning, the sight of the mess from her elbow to her wrist was an assault in itself. With a thump in her heart, she recalled the night’s events. Her lungs depressed, and her vision darkened. She craved to be back in the fleeting moment before.

  A food wrapper fluttered up in the air and swooped down into the puddle of glistening blood. It was almost nine o’clock. The knock to her head had left her unconscious for several hours, completely exposed and bleeding.

  Until she transformed, she was still human and vulnerable to attack. Her priority was to find a safe place and bandage her arm immediately. She kicked a cardboard box off and tried to sit up, but the wound had congealed and stuck to the pavement in the heat. Looking away, she peeled it off and crawled through the hole in the smashed glass door.

  This shop was once a café. The kitchen was now just empty cupboards and counters, smelling of dead rats and leaking fridge chemicals. Mari walked through the dank room with her sleeve over her mouth and hoisted a window open. Outside, a landing had steps leading down to an alley and up to the kitchen.

  After locking the back door, she collapsed into a vinyl chair beside the counter. Her backpack felt lighter, squashed thin against the chair’s cushion. She pulled it off to check for damage. The zip fell away from its seams, revealing a hole the size of a football. Her jacket and her book of Australian maps were gone.

  Maps were easy to replace, but hers were scribbled with notes from friends long gone. Pen lines zig-zagged from town to town, recording the history of how far they'd come since the pandemic. She wanted to feel the frustrated pang of loss, but it didn’t come.

  Even when supplies were short, it was worth having a backpack. A well-padded bag protected her spine and head in a fight, not just from attacks. It also protected her from falling against walls, through glass, down flights of stairs, and onto hoods of cars. Uninfected, hungry people often vied for the contents, so Mari concealed critical items in a travel bag strapped to her stomach. From the waist bag, she pulled out three metres of bandage, scissors, and a tube of disinfectant.

  For minor cuts and abrasions, the label on the tube stated. Scanning the kitchen, she grabbed some table salt and a handful of wooden chopsticks. Five bottles of distilled water lined the fridge door, untouched. Mari almost cried with relief as she took her first sip of water in two days.

  With salt and a squeeze of disinfectant, she concocted a solution in a large ceramic oven dish. Using the scissors, she cut through her hoodie and removed it painlessly. It was ruined, but the late-summer day would be warm enough for just her grey singlet, and she wouldn’t live long enough to feel the cold of night.

  A hiss escaped her lips as she lowered her forearm into the water. Her skin trembled as she watched the liquid change colour from clear to red, and she exhaled the longest breath she’d had since sundown the day before. In the mental quietude that followed, self-loathing and anger fired in her. Idiot!

  Mari had a ‘personal space’ rule: no zombie within five paces. If a zombie were to step within five paces as she’s reloading her shotgun, she would rip the bat off her pack and clobber the zombie in its tracks. To regain distance, she would take five steps back as she reloaded and bang. Walking backward was the same as walking forward; she never reversed into a corner or trapped herself in a dead-end.

  Zombies were stronger than humans, but they were slow. She had to focus hard on maintaining a continuous route of escape with at least five paces between her and the nearest undead at all times. It was surprising what a vigilant mind will come up with in a variety of situations. />
  Last night, however, was the first time Mari felt the message crackling through her nerves. The muscle fatigue in her arm would make swinging the bat almost impossible. Instead, she continued to reload as she stepped backwards. Without the blow from the bat, the zombie held its pace of only three steps from her. As she raised her gun, it extended its hand and grappled with the nozzle as she fired. The bullets merely sprayed through the zombie’s arm, not because it was intelligent enough to push the barrel away from its head, but because she panicked and allowed the gun to kick off to the side. It closed the gap, and the proximity unnerved her.

  It was hard to stop dwelling on the mistakes that lead her here. But if she allowed herself to continue, she could rattle anxiously through a whole chain of what-if’s until she transformed. The most functional minutes of the rest of her life were ticking away now. Pull yourself together.

  With her hand shaking, Mari pulled out a small folded card from the waist bag and read over the words. Hours one to twelve caused pain, swelling, anxiety, and nausea. She normally knew the information by heart, but she wrote it down in case she survived into hours twelve to sixteen. The added symptoms included loss of memory, dizziness, momentary blackouts, fatigue, vomiting, and agitation.

  In the final stage, which was roughly hours sixteen to eighteen, the victim experienced loss of feeling including pain, not to mention the increased physical strength, aggression, violence, and loss of sentience.

  As the virus spread through one’s system, it mutated most cells and killed off what it didn’t need. The victim’s flesh would turn grey, beginning in patches around the torso near their vital organs. From the general observation of survivors, she knew that the invading life force maintained enough rudimentary functioning in the host in order for the body to seek out and attack other humans, propagating the virus.

  Due to the rapid growth of the pandemic, this process had been difficult to document. There was no official handbook to go by. Ordinary people, like Mari and her crew, simply learned in the field and shared their information with others. Opinions often conflicted regarding the precise moment when an infected human transformed into a zombie. And because many infected were killed before they transformed, the conclusion was hard to reach.

  Toward the end of the transformation process, the infected could only be observed since they were unable to speak coherently. They had to be restrained and killed when they lost all human consciousness and self-control. The aggressive and violent people displayed the worst behaviour after being infected.

  Sometimes, people were killed when they were still fairly sentient because of the risk to other humans. In the early days, fear and confusion were rife because the subtle process of transformation wasn’t fully understood. The line often blurred between a zombie and a dangerous human.

  The victims that Mari had studied didn’t survive past 18 A.I. or eighteen hours After Infection. There were three reported instances where some lasted over twenty-four hours. However, even that information couldn’t be confirmed.

  Mari folded the card and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans, careful not to disturb her arm. The salt was already killing her. By her calculation, she was bitten between two and four a.m. She called it two a.m. to be safe. This meant roughly seven hours had passed with a margin of error she wasn’t happy to include. So far she hadn’t vomited, but she certainly felt nauseous and dizzy. She was well into stage one.

  She forced the memory of the attack from her mind, only to drift to the unspeakable task that lay ahead. It was one that all survivors in her group had pledged to do; one they had to perform if they were infected and alone. Suicide. Mari had to dispose of herself before she transformed. But without another person there to confirm, she could hardly accept this reality.

  Dazed, she looked to where her perfect upper arm submerged in the cloudy liquid. If she gave into weakness, the process of transformation would take her life for her. Mari imagined in detail what she would become. The thought of turning and killing one of her own kind was more unbearable than death, but her resistance was undeniable.

  Although she had resigned herself to suicide, she felt a driving urge to keep going. Why stay here? To achieve one more thing, one more act of good with the humanity she had left, meant she wouldn’t die a pathetic failure alone. Her fingers rubbed her thighs to release the rising tension. She needed to move.

  Mari raised her arm from the solution. Threadlike waterfalls trailed from the wound as the cool air stung the open flesh. When her arm was drained, she wrapped it with bandage, inserting splints made out of the chopsticks. Mari gave herself a minute to get over the pain of the bandage before she stood up. Using her teeth, she ripped a piece of electrical tape and patched the hole in the backpack.

  The camp was somewhere around Ararat, in Western Victoria. Mari didn't know exactly where, but at least her group of survivors was heading that way too. It wasn't just the maps of Australia that were missing. Somewhere in the car park, she dropped the bat, and more importantly, the shotgun. Mari helplessly tried to flex her injured fingers. There was no point going back for it. Besides, that area was swarming with zombies.

  After pulling the bag over her shoulders, she heard a jingling coming from somewhere behind her. It was probably the makeshift strap for the bat that now hung loose. She slipped the bag off again and reordered it, unclipping the strap and tucking it away. As she stood motionless thinking of her next move, the jingling sounded again.

  Mari swivelled to face the window overlooking the back alley. Another faint jingle echoed. She tiptoed to the right side of the window, then angled herself to get a good look outside. The source wasn't in the laneway below. It was much closer. Leaning with her head out, she peered in front of the door to her right.

  A shadow disappeared as the door exploded inward, sending sheathes of wood, dust, and the zombie into the kitchen. Mari jerked her head back inside the window so fast that her hair caught in the splintered frame. While she gripped and pulled on the tangle, the waist-high zombie lurched at her. Swinging her leg out, she kicked the vinyl chair against his body and ripped her hair free. In the few spare seconds, she heaved a large island counter away from the wall and into the centre of the kitchen, giving herself an obstacle to loop around.

  How did she not hear it come up the stairs? Looking down, she saw the fluffy slippers with Spider-man heads on his little feet. Mari pulled out the nearest drawer to find a knife. None. She grabbed the dish of blood and threw the whole thing at his wretched face. The dish thudded and fell on top of a Spider-man. The zombie hobbled on one foot but quickly straightened up to face her. Sparse tufts of his greyish green hair and the front of his pajamas were wringing wet. The fabric clung to his tiny frame, making him look even smaller. Two skewed, shrivelled eyeballs rolled upward unevenly and glared. Red liquid trickled into his dark sockets and through the broken skin on his cheeks.

  Mari pulled open another drawer. Again, there was nothing she could use. The zombie extended his incomplete fingers and groaned. Snatching at her thigh, he tried to pull her toward the four snapping teeth in his gums. She yanked the drawer clean out and swung it skyward, knocking him backwards. Plastic straws and paper serviettes flew everywhere. He fell hard into the legs of the toppled chair but climbed back up with ease.

  White napkins had stuck to his head and torso, drenching with blood. His fist thumped down hard on the drawer, smashing a side panel off. The handle. Mari took a few steps back around the island and flipped the drawer with one arm. Holding it by the back panel, she rammed it into his forehead. The small metal knob dinted his skull. He grasped his head with both hands and shrieked.

  Mari kept pounding the handle into him. She herded him backwards to the storeroom, opening up two routes of escape: the front of the shop and the back door to the kitchen. She lunged with the drawer one more time, but he gripped and clung to the panels. He was too strong. Now he was herding her. Mari reflexively brought her limp hand up to steady the box. Screaming
in agony, she dropped to her knees.

  The zombie ripped the drawer from her grasp and swiped. This time, he came for her eyes. Mari leaned far back to avoid his nails and reached behind until she felt cold metal. She grabbed the leg of the chair and dragged it forward. The frame screeched across the polished concrete, picking up straws and wood and napkins along the way. With the weight of her body behind it, she hurled it at the zombie. The momentum tipped her whole body forward. She heard him fall down the storeroom steps and land on the floor with a thud.

  Mari lay on her side, cheek plastered to the cold concrete. Plastic straws rolled across the floor with every pump of her lungs. Collapsing onto her back, she thought of the zombie. The metal chair leg would make do as a spike. Biting down on her lower lip, she clutched the chair for stability and scrambled to standing.

  In the storeroom, she could see him lying with one little grey arm leaning upright against a shelf post. Around his drooped hand was a wristband with a tiny picture frame attached to it, the source of the jingling. The bloodied napkins that were glued to his collarbone fluttered with his breath. It would not be long before he got up again. Mari picked up the chair and held it over his head, but she was taken by the rare peacefulness of his state. What the hell are you thinking? It will kill a human being. Do you want to be responsible for that? She shut her eyes and thrust the chair downward.

  Chapter 2

  Mari travelled west along the smaller suburban streets of Seddon and Footscray while using front yards and fences as cover. Her tactics had to change, now that she had use of only one arm. A memory of Cameron triggered her heart to ache with concern. Between the two of them, they had always worked out how to survive. People had come and gone in the crew, but Cam was her friend from the beginning.