On Quiet Earth: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel by Kelly Chris

Author:Kelly, Chris [Kelly, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombie Apocalypse
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2020-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

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A woman runs into the tent carrying a limp child. She screams in anguish, splays him across the triage desk and grabs at the nurses. They they they, she says and babbles and grabs at her hair. She screams again. The men beyond the cars, the men in the fields, they, she said, they mistook the boy’s natural defect as the walk of the dead. A man standing on a truck fired when she bent to pick up her son. She imagined the man must have thought he was saving her.

I come up behind the woman, grab her arm and pull her away from the nurses. I make a shushing sound but she doesn’t hear. She wrenches herself away and grabs at the nurse again, pleads for action, pleads, pleads. The other nurse grabs my arm, pulls me back to the triage desk, and lays her warm hand on mine.

‘Compress,’ she says and guides my hand to the boy’s chest, to the bullet wound somewhere around his heart. She doesn’t meet my eyes, doesn’t say anything more, and when I look back again, she’s gone, rushed off for a doctor. I can’t look at the boy’s face. Every time his heart beats a surge of blood pulses against my palm, overflows from his wound and soaks his body. I say something to him, for comfort, and it is only afterwards that I realize I used my son’s name.

The nurse does not come back. The boy’s mother holds his limp head and brushes his hair into order, she whispers to him, sings him the few bars of a song. His heart pulses slower and slower. A wailing man is marched into the tent, half-restrained by two of the men who guard us, and as he comes into sight of his son, he wrestles his arms from their grip and falls to his knees. He howls miserably.

The men from the field dispassionately watch. Look to his wife. The one with his mouth hung open lets his eyes linger on her body, her waist, her hips, breasts and neck. Neither of them look at the child on the table. They are covered in blood, in mud and viscera, solid as they stand, seeming more like projections of the earth than men. The exhausted ferocity of vigilance and murder steadies their eyes, allows them to stare long after it becomes uncomfortable. The one with his mouth hung open turns and gapes at all the sick and dying. The other man finally brings his eyes to rest upon the child. I recognize him from this morning, when he escorted me in. The withering influence of even the past few hours is evident enough. His eyes are ringed in darkness, sunken pools, and he balances most of his weight on one foot, favoring the other. I cannot tell if he recognizes me through the haze of gore and time.

I barely feel the pulse of blood against my palm when the nurse pushes her way through the crowd with an exhausted doctor.

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