The Swiss Family RobinZOM (4 page)

“
Where’s the last
explosion?” Ernest said. “Shouldn’t there be one more?”

“
Something must have
happened to it,” Bill said.

“
The ship’s not going to
sink without it.”

“
Might not sink with it
either. It’s a big boat.”

“
And the Lurchers will
keep coming!”

Bill looked along the
beach to find Lurchers
heading toward the
jungle.

“
Hey!” Bill shouted at
the Lurchers and waved his arms. “Hey!”

He turned to his boys.

“
We can’t let them get to
the jungle!” Bill said. “We’ll forever be hunting them
down!”

“
Hey!” Fritz said toward
the wayward Lurchers. “Hey! Hey! Over here! This way!”

A Lurcher before him
opened
her mouth wide and growled. Fritz
knocked the Lurcher’s extended arms aside, and then followed with a
swift swing of his baseball bat at her head.

“
They’re not coming
toward us!” Ernest said.

“
I’ll go get their
attention,” Fritz said.

“
No,” Bill said. “We need
you here. Both of you. Otherwise we’ll get overwhelmed.”

“
I’ll go,” Jack
said.

Bill turned to look at
him.
He looked so small.

“
No,” Bill
said.

“
Who’s better than me at
making noise?” Jack said.

“
He’s got a point there,”
Ernest said, tripping a Lurcher over and bringing his golf club
down on the back of its head.

Bill was torn. The Lurchers
were closing on the jungle.

“
We need him to do it,
Dad,” Fritz said. “If he doesn’t, we might as well give up
now.”

“
Okay,” Bill said. “Okay.
But don’t get too close.”

“
I won’t,” Jack
said.

He took off at a run, Nip
curled about his shoulders. A Lurcher took a swipe at him as he
passed.

“
Stay away from my son!”
Bill said, swinging the machete down and removing the Lurcher’s
head.

Bill
’s heart was in his mouth as Jack approached the wayward
Lurchers.

“
Hey!” Jack said. “Hey!
Uglies!”

The Lurchers turned to
look at him. Jack paused and
took a step
back. Their faces were torn and shredded with blood seeping from
cuts and gashes. They groaned at him with their death rattle.
Something green grew across their faces.

“
Did becoming a Lurcher
make you that ugly?” Jack said. “Or were you born that
way?”

Nip hopped down from
Jack
’s shoulders and hissed at the
Lurchers. The Lurchers stumbled toward them. Jack backed away. The
Lurchers ambled after him.

“
Come on, Nip,” Jack
said.

Nip climbed up
Jack
’s leg and perched on his shoulder. A
few Lurchers at the back lost interest and began shuffling toward
the jungle again. Jack rushed around the group, his back to the
jungle.

“
Hey! Hey!” he said.
“Follow the delicious human! Come on!”

They turned to follow
Jack
, and step by step he led them back
down the beach.

“
We’ve got company!” Jack
said as he brought the Lurchers over to his father and
brothers.

“
Fritz, Ernest, you take
care of them,” Bill said. “I’ll hold back this lot.”

Fritz and Ernest
tu
rned and struck at the Lurchers. Jack
leapt forward and aimed a blow at their heads as often as he dared.
The last Lurcher from Jack’s group fell, and Fritz and Ernest
turned to their father, who was being set upon by Lurchers on every
side. His movements were slow and weak. Fritz and Ernest rushed to
his aid.

KA-BOOM!

The explosion tore the
front of the ship clean off, like a champagne cork
bursting from a bottle. The pointed end hung
limp to one side by a thin strip of rusted metal. It dangled there
a moment, and then snapped off, falling to the sea below, crushing
the Lurchers struggling in the shallow sea.

“
Better late than never,”
Ernest said.

“
All we have to do now is
kill the Lurchers on the beach,” Bill said.

“
Easier said than done,”
Fritz said. “There’s an awful lot left.”

“
And more Lurchers are
heading for the jungle!” Jack said. “I’ll go round them
up!”

“
Yes,” Bill said. “And be
careful. If we can all push through today, we can sit back and
relax for the rest of our lives.”

Bill
turned
. Jack hadn’t moved. He stood
staring at the jungle. When Bill looked up to see what Jack was
watching, the blood froze in his veins.

“
We have to cross the
bridge,” Bill said, voice distant and cold.

“
What?” Fritz said. “Why?
We can do this.”

“
No,” Bill said. “We
can’t.”

“
Why not?”

“
Because they’re already
in the jungle.”

Fritz and
E
rnest turned to see an army of Lurchers
emerging from the dense jungle foliage.

Six

“
Where did they come
from?” Fritz said.

He was holding
Jack
’s hand and pulling him along as they
ran. Despite their difference in size, Jack wasn’t much slower than
Fritz. Ernest, on the other hand, struggled to keep up.

“
The cruise liner,”
Ernest said. “They must have come out before we got here, stumbled
into the jungle and been wandering around in there ever since.
Until the explosions drew them.”

“
Great,” Fritz said. “So
we came here for nothing.”

“
No, not for nothing,”
Bill said. “At least now we know what we’re up against.”

“
I think I’d prefer not
to know,” Fritz grumbled.

Fritz, Ernest and
Jack
ran across Family Bridge. Bill got
halfway across and stopped. He took out the final grey tube from
his bag, lit it, and placed it in the hollow of a bamboo cane. The
white smoke issued out through the gap in the top like a chimney.
The Lurchers groaned and staggered onto the bridge, four men thick
and two dozen deep.

“
Dad!” Jack said. “Come
on!”

Bill turned and ran.

“
I wish we hadn’t made
the bridge quite so strong now,” Ernest said. “We should have used
paper.”

The Lurchers staggered
across the bridge. One Lurcher, intrigued by the smoke and hissing
noise, reached into the gap in the bamboo and extracted the
grey tube. He inspected it, and sniffed at it
with his ruined nose. His head jolted back with disgust, lips
curling at the smell. He brought his arm back to toss it. Jack saw
him and ran toward the bridge, waving his arms.

“
No!” Jack shouted.
“Don’t throw it!”

The Lurcher with
the
grey tube turned to look at
Jack.

“
Jack!” Bill said,
stepping forward. “Get away from the bridge now! Get away from
the-!”

KA-BOOM!

A thick wall of
a
ir rushed toward them, an explosion of
red body parts and shards of yellow bamboo flew into the air. The
shockwave knocked them all to the ground.

Seven

Bill
started awake. His vision was blurry. A cream coloured blob
stood over him. A high-pitched tone rung in his ears. Someone said
something, but the voice came in curt muffles, sounding like it
came through a tuba. Bill turned his head to the side, and a square
block of yellow began to take shape.

O
nly the ends of Family Bridge on either side of the
embankment still remained, jutting bamboo aflame. Curls of smoke
hid the beach, and then rose up into the air and disappeared on a
strong breeze like a magic trick. The Lurchers on the bridge were
gone, and those on the other side, some with newly missing limbs,
groaned with disappointment at having missed their meal. They
crowded around one another, pushing forward, forcing a couple of
the Lurchers into the raging river. They were swept downriver and
out to sea. Then the Lurchers began wandering in different
directions. Some headed back down the beach, others toward the
seafront, others headed back to the cruise liner, but most walked
along the riverside, following it up into the jungle.

Bill looked back at the
cruise liner,
still jutting up in the air
like a monument to the old world. Lurchers fell out of the wreckage
like a running tap, stumbled through the shallow water onto the
beach, and into the jungle in one continuous line. Bill’s hearing
was the last thing to clear.

“
ad… Can you hear me?”
Fritz said. “Dad?”

Fritz clicked his fingers
in front of his father
’s face.

“
Yes,” Bill said. “I can
hear you. Where’s Jack? Where is he?”

Then Bill
was aware Ernest had something cradled in his
arms. When he looked closer he realised it was Jack. His face was
covered with blood.

Eight

A
thin wisp of grey smoke wound upward into the sky. It was
thin and faint compared to the thick black clouds to the west on
the opposite side of the island. And something jutted up at the sky
there, something big and massive, but largely obscured by the jambu
trees. Liz reached for the winch to take her down to the ground,
but held back. She looked down at Francis who stood beside her,
holding her hand.

“
What was that noise,
Momma?” Francis said.

“
It was an explosion,”
Liz said.

“
Did Daddy cause
it?”

“
Yes,” she said. “He
did.”

“
Why?”

“
Because there are some
bad men out there.”

“
Like the bad men on
the
Adventurer
?”

Liz turned to look at
Francis. He was small for his age and looked even smaller in
J
ack’s old clothes that swamped him in
arm and leg.

“
I didn’t know you
remembered that,” Liz said.

“
I remember,” he said.
“Bad men on the boat coming for us. When we got
shipwrecked.”

“
Yes,” Liz said, pushing
the memory from her mind. “Bad men like that. We have to stop them
from getting on the island or we will have to leave.”

“
Leave? But I like it
here.”

“
I do too.”

The foliage on the edge
of the clearing shook and admitted Bill,
Ernest and Fritz. Bill carried something in his arms. Liz
put a hand to her chest and felt a lump form in her
throat.

“
Bill?” she said, calling
down. “Is that Jack? What’s happened?”

“
Get the winch down,
quick!” Bill said.

Liz
’s hands were a blur as she threaded the coarse rope
through her hands and lowered the winch. Bill strapped himself into
the harness and gripped Jack around the armpits.

“
Pull me up!” he
said.

Liz pushed a container
full of water
over the edge. As it fell,
Bill rose fast, gripping Jack tight in his arms. He came to a
stop.

“
Take Jack,” he
said.

Liz took hold of Jack and
laid him on the floor
. Jack had a stream
of dried blood that ran from his right ear and down to the bottom
of his neck. Bill knelt beside Jack on the floor.

“
Get my things,” Bill
said, unbuttoning his shirt.

“
What things?” Liz
said.

“
God damn it, Liz! Now’s
not the time to be dense. My medical things. Hurry.”

Bill took a pair of
scissors from the table and cut Jack
’s
T-shirt open. Liz returned with Bill’s medical kit. She dumped it
on the floor and opened the top. Bill reached in and took out a
stethoscope.

“
Mummy, what’s going on?”
Francis said. “Is Jack going to be all right?”

Liz took Francis in her
arms.

“
Yes, dear,” she said,
“Jack’s going to be fine. He’s just sleeping. Do Mummy a favour and
go down to your brothers.”

“
Okay.”

Francis tottered off to
the winch and
pedalled himself
down.

“
What happened?” Liz said
to Bill. “I heard explosions.”

“
We blew up the boat, and
then Lurchers came spilling out of it. We got to the bridge and
they followed us. We were about to blow it up too, but Jack saw one
of the Lurchers pick up the tube and was about to hurl it. So, he
stepped up and stopped him.”

L
iz covered her mouth. Her eyes shimmered with
tears.

“
Is he going to be okay?”
she said.

Bill
pressed the stethoscope to Jack’s chest.

“
His heart’s fine,” he
said. “He’s breathing normally.”