The Ruined Ones

Chapter Four

Shaun stopped Katrina from entering the bedroom. He didn't want her to have to see the spray of blood and brain matter up the wall; the man they'd known less than twenty-four hours, propped up in his bed with his head split apart and unrecognizable. On the wall behind him, now splattered with flecks of red and clumps of pinky-grey goo, was a message written in permanent marker:

THEY WILL NOT TAKE ME ALIVE

At the end of the bed, was a note, weighed down by a key. Shaun picked it up and read it aloud to his father and brother.

"Sorry to do this in front of you folks—especially the woman—but there ain't much use for me in this here new world. Not when I've done killings and the like. This key opens me gun cupboard which is the one near the window."

"Pass me the key," Lewis said, holding his hand out for it.

Shaun put the key in his brother's hand, scrunching up the note in his fist. The paper was still crushed up in his hand five minutes later, when he sat down at the kitchen table, where Katrina was waiting for them.

On the table in front of them, they'd placed two sawn-off shot guns (one of them taken from beside the corpse upstairs), a low caliber rifle, a Colt. 45, a Glock 9 mm and a machete. There were also several boxes of ammunition to go with each gun—a couple full, a couple missing some bullets. They'd cleaned out the cupboard entirely, then did a quick search of the house to see if there were more weapons or ammo they could use, however, what was in the cupboard was all they'd gathered.

There was no conversation about what had happened. None of them mentioned the fact that a man they'd just met may have given them their best shot at survival, by blowing his brains out. None of them said it aloud. They were all thinking it.

****

It wasn't practical for them to stay in the same place for too long. Just because a group of Alphalytes had come through there once, didn't mean others wouldn't show up.

They took the guns and left, heading along the paddock tracks, just like Bob had told them.

None of them noticed that all morning Alfred's hand had been constantly returning to his chest, rubbing the same spot over and over. He didn't bother to mention it either; he assumed he'd pulled a muscle the day before. The nausea and the dizziness he was experiencing, he'd attributed to lack of food. He'd barely touched his vegemite sandwich that morning—it was not like he wasn't hungry; he just didn't want to eat after seeing the insides of a man's head displayed on the wall, like some morbid splatter art.

Lewis was the first to notice something was wrong, seeing as he was in the back seat of the car.

"Shit, Dad, are you all right?" He asked with concern. Katrina turned around to look at them.

"Oh my God, Fred, you look so pale," she said, the same trace of concern in her tone.

Shaun, having glimpsed the pallor of his father's usually tanned and rosy face in the rear vision mirror, stopped the car immediately. He jumped out and flung his Dad's door open; he knew what was happening—he'd seen it before.

One morning, he'd been sitting in the taxi-rank outside a shopping center when a man of about sixty or so, climbed into the back of Shaun's cab. He was sweating all over, even though it had been a cool late autumn day, his face was pale white and Shaun remembered thinking his passenger looked like death warmed up. An association he would come to feel bad about.

The man had asked Shaun to take him to the hospital.

"I think I'm having a heart attack," he'd said.

Shaun instead called an ambulance. They arrived rather quickly, rushing off again just as fast. Watching the local news that night, Shaun saw that the man had died on the way to the hospital. Apparently, he'd complained to his wife of a shortness of breath and strange pains in his jaw and shoulder, earlier that day. That had been only a couple of hours before he'd hopped into the back of Shaun's taxi.