The Zombie Adventures of Sarah Bellum (49 page)

The wiry dark individual,
in the combat trousers and red bandana, armed with a crossbow, sidles
out of the tree-line at the top of the beach, eyeing us with the sort
of suspicion reserved for religious doorstep salesmen.

"Your wife has been
asking after you, cousin!" the newcomer greets our coolie-hatted
rickshaw pilot. "She has tortured at least six good men to death
already."

"She is here?"
Justin's voice becomes a desperate squeak.

"Not now, she got
bored, went fishing," Seymour shrugs, and shoulders his
crossbow. "Ah, Mr. Dry. A privilege to see you, sir."

"Mr. Seymour Time,"
Crispin acknowledges, straightening up. "Can you take us to the
medical facility? My brother Homer needs attention. He has just
delivered a pair of bouncing baby Squidmorphs."

"You're telling me,"
I groan, having just performed service as
'the bouncee'
–
still trying to clean slime from my ears.

"Good man! That
would kill a lesser person. Yes, you must come to the field hospital.
That blanket will make a stretcher."

"Of course."
Crispin arranges Homer on the old blanket. "Sarah, call the
others, to assist."

Reluctantly, I shade my
eyes to seek out Ace, Carvery and Luke, who have wandered further
down the beach to look at the blaze going on in the forest.

"Hey!" I yell.
"We're moving on!"

* * * * *

We trudge along the
barely-there footpath through the jungle, the sad ravaged gray sack
of skin and bone that is Homer suspended in the blanket between
Crispin, Carvery, Ace and Luke. Seymour leads the way, and I follow
behind with Justin Time, who is decidedly jumpy, and flinches at
every waving leaf.

We emerge from the trees
into an open encampment of khaki tents, some haphazardly marked with
blood-red crosses. Men wearing a mixture of combat fatigues and
Hawaiian shirts are occupied with moving crates of supplies,
transporting patients from one tent to another, or playing croquet on
the small air-strip.

"Good thing you
didn't choose to land here," Seymour remarks. "The Colonel
hates it when you mess up his game."

"He'd have been even
worse off, trying to catch a hatching Squidmorph," says Justin
wryly.

Seymour shouts in
foreign, I don't know what, and a few others hurry over and guide us
to the largest temporary shelter.

As our eyes adjust to the
gloom, lamps are switched on, and Homer is lifted and transferred
onto a polished steel gurney – far cleaner and more hygienic
than the one we just left in the Eight a.m. Lounge.

"Poor guy, he looks
like the world dropped out of his bottom," says Seymour. There
is a flurry of activity, as people are lathering up their hands and
being tugged into scrubs left and right. "We will need more than
one donor, it appears."

"I have organs
here." Crispin produces the linen bag from inside his jacket,
containing the spare pieces of unfortunate Victorian streetwalker.

I blush horribly, from
the inside-out. Seymour opens the bag, and sniffs the contents.

"These are
lady-parts," he observes.

"They were intended
for another patient," says Crispin. "But they are all we
have to offer."

"I don't think Homer
will complain," Ace points out, while Carvery seems to be taking
far too much interest in the array of surgical saws on the nearby
trolley.

"Proceed,"
Seymour shrugs, handing over the bag to a nurse, before turning to
look me up and down. "You – Miss
Hot-Limps
. You are
not sterile enough for this environment. Go to the outdoor shower and
wash that squid ejaculate off. Take some clean scrubs with you."

I've seen enough
spontaneous surgery already, after my housemate's revival back at the
University, and the streetwalker's impromptu dissection. I'm not sure
I want to watch zombie quacks perform a sex-change on top of that.

I'd rather be back on the
Body Farm, waiting for things to rot in peace. Not watching them get
recycled and bounding around ghoulishly afterwards. Privately, I
wonder how much of Crispin is original, and if he's hiding something
physiologically hijacked of his own up his sleeve – or anywhere
else on his person…

"Now," I hear
Seymour saying, as I turn to head back outside. "Clean this
V.I.P. patient up. Someone find the
XY
to
XX
re-plumbing diagram…"

"Ah," Luke
joins in, evidently fascinated, in his own cultural way. "I can
see clearly now the brains have gone…"

I head back out into the
sunshine with my armful of folded clean outerwear, just missing a
golf-ball as it zips past my nose.

They seem rather playful
for a warring tribe, here in the Nine a.m. Lounge. To my right, a
one-legged man in a wheelchair is drinking something out of a cut-off
Wellington boot. To my left, two soldiers sit playing dominoes, a
wireless playing Barry White's
'My Everything'
crackling
between them.

The shower is a
Heath-Robinson
-esque contraption under a large
rainwater-collection barrel, shielded only from the world by a
curtain rail. A rickety wash-stand proudly features a sliver of
enthusiastically worn-down soap, a completely flattened long-handled
scrubbing brush, and a bloodstained wire-wool pad.

I gulp. Some quite
possibly psychotic ablutions have been performed here.

I step onto the non-slip
rubber mat on the bare earth, and turn on the creaking tap.
Jungle-tepid, gray-tinted water sputters from the colander overhead.
I'm not sure it has the power to move any of this rapidly-thickening
sludge from my person, but I pull the curtain around, and strip off
the heavy Naval uniform anyway. The stupid clockwork hand, now
dormant again, is currently clamped around my wrist, inextricable,
like an OTT piece of Gothic bling.

I make the most of the
remaining soap. Although I think I'm only making the hard brown bar
of goodness knows what cleaner, rather than it cleaning me. I can see
why the wire-wool pad is here… but I use the matted scrubbing
brush instead, vainly trying to achieve the slightest squeak of
cleanliness against my own skin. At least the soap smell is surgical
enough under the grime… maybe sandalwood, or pine.

Perhaps smelling like a
tree helps a soldier to hide in the forest…?

"It looks like Homer
will recover, Sarah
Bellummmm
," that devastating familiar
voice interrupts my thoughts.

"Er, really?" I
rub the feeble suds from my eyes to see Crispin standing in the
shower cubicle with me, fully-clothed and apparently unaware of the
half-hearted cascade of dirty water. But he looks so downcast, I try
not to make an issue of the fact. "That is good news…"

"I am not sure that
having ovaries and a uterus will benefit him," Crispin sighs.
"It is enough that he goes around dressed in Mother's clothes,
without asking if they make him look fat and getting depressed on a
monthly basis as well."

"Mmmm," I
agree, vaguely.
Damn!
Why didn't I pick up a towel beforehand?
I try to make myself as small and modest as possible behind the
long-handled scrubbing brush. "Have you, erm, yourself, ever had
any – transplants?"

"What?" His
head raises from his introspective gloom. "No, Sarah
Bellummm
.
I have only been dead a fortnight. Nothing has fallen off – or
fallen out – yet. But Homer has put himself through the wars.
This is at least his third alimentary tract replacement. He did
himself terrible damage when I first found him in the shed, surviving
on broken beer-bottles and hedgehogs."

"Oh, dear." I
try not to picture Crispin reduced to such monosyllabic
unsophistication, forgetting his mansion and vending machine empire,
chomping on rats and fast-food wrappers at the bottom of some
alleyway garbage skip. I shudder, wondering how long such a
deterioration took to set in.

"We will have to
find other bodily replacements for your housemate, Miss, Er…
back on Mother's barge in the Five a.m. Lounge," Crispin adds,
apologetically.

"Oh yes, her…
umm…" I nod quickly. One of these days her name will just
pop into my mind, I reassure myself. "Can she still be revived?"

"The ambient spells
aboard the Great Barge will keep her suspended for a little while, by
proxy," he tells me. "Mr. Slaughter and Mr. Lukan have gone
to rummage in the medical waste bins for any identifiable rejects
which could be utilised. Although I think Mr. Lukan is convinced the
entrails of a goat could be substituted, and Mr. Slaughter does not
seem to be enthusiastic at all."

"What about Ace?"
I ask, recklessly, perhaps rebelling against the intrusion onto my
al
fresco
toilette.

"He has been asked
to look at a problem with one of the ambulance trucks, since his
suggestion that human organs could be substituted with a 50cc
water-cooled two-stroke engine," Crispin sighs. "It is a
good thing my Grandfather, Higham Dry Senior, is not within earshot.
He's always on the look-out for alternative technology to clockwork
organ replacements. He would shanghai Mr. Bumgang away to one of his
surgical sweat-shops in an instant…"

I have no time to
respond, as the end of his sentence is drowned out by the low whir of
a siren, getting louder and higher, like the whine of a giant hornet.

"Air-raid!"
someone shouts. "Incoming rickshaws, twelve o'clock!"

"Quickly, Sarah
Bellummm
!
"
Crispin grabs my hand and tries to pull me out of the cubicle. "To
the shelters!"

"But…" I
make a desperate grab for the clean scrubs, clutching them to me
defensively as I am hustled out into the open. "I'm not rinsed
off yet!"

Arrows and spears are
already thudding into the ground, as we race for the half-submerged
corrugated-iron Nissen hut entrance. I am shoved unceremoniously
inside, where the pitch darkness makes it impossible to see anything,
at first.

The drumming of
arrowheads onto the iron roof, under its thin covering of earth, is
almost deafening, while I attempt to pull on the cotton scrubs. It's
only when I find myself lacking a head-hole that I realise I must
have put my legs down the sleeves, and have to start over.

A loudspeaker somewhere
outside joins the sound of the siren.

"Camp update: Mr.
Crispin Dry and his naked lady-friend,
Hot-Limps
, have made it
to the air-raid shelter in twenty-two seconds," the announcer
says, cheerfully. "No more bets please, and the initial figures
say we have only one winner in this morning's race, not including the
sweepstakes… And now, some music. Another track from the
walnuts of love, Mick Jagger and the
Rolling Stones
–
this one goes out to all of you with wives and girlfriends –
let's hope they never find out about each other, so we can all enjoy
a little more of that
Brown Sugar
…"

CHAPTER
SIXTY-FOUR
:

GOOD MOANING,
VERAMONTANUM

"
I
s
that Justin Time on the speakers?" I ask the darkness, glad that
no-one can see me, while I continue to struggle with putting on the
clean scrubs.

"In the Nine a.m.
Lounge, he is known as D.J.
Hammer Time
," Crispin
confides, with a sigh. "I am sure that most of the hostilities
between the Lounges would be quickly resolved, if he did not find it
all so personally lucrative."

"Let us imagine what
sort of conversation Crispin Dry was having with Miss
Hot-Limps
,
before they were so rudely interrupted!" the undercover disc
jockey announces, over the tannoy. "'Oh Crispin, does this
shower cubicle make me look fat?' 'Hot-Limps, you have no fear of any
degrading sexist judgements from me. I am only interested in your
braiiinsss
…'"

I turn quietly scarlet in
the darkness of the air-raid shelter, while bawdy laughter from the
field hospital staff follows Mr. Time's squeaky impersonations.

"Sometimes he goes
too far," Crispin adds grimly.

"Sir, Mr. Dry, sir!"
an abrupt voice joins us, and from its general direction, I guess the
owner is standing to attention under the low steel roof. "Would
you like to file an official complaint, sir!"