Hazel had set up a playground to draw them out. Toys, bikes, footballs, even a swing-set. She’d visited the Halletts recently, her neighbours from ten clicks up the road. They’d had kids, probably all dead now. Their farm was silent, and she never cared to linger long.
The ladder scraped along the guttering, and Hazel swore. She dropped her half-rolled cigarette, and slid across the hot tiles, grabbing at the top rung. There was resistance at the other end, and she peered over the side. A rotten face stared up at her.
A woman, a few days on the wrong side of dead. She should have been so much rotten meat, but here she was, smiling up at Hazel, hauling on the ladder for all she was worth. The stink was enough to make Hazel gag, and almost every inch of the walking corpse was covered in flies.
“Play?” the dead woman said, rotten slug of a tongue still working in her mouth. In time, she would become like her idiot friends, speaking in an autistic babble, finally communicating with nothing but the click of teeth, the excited wheeze of maggoty lungs. The fresh ones liked to have a chat.
Hazel let go of the ladder, watched as it clattered to the red earth. The dead woman tried to raise it up again, couldn’t quite work out the angle. She gave up the attempt to reach the roof and stood underneath Hazel, waving cheerfully. Fetching up another cigarette with shaking hands, Hazel looked down at the corpse, tried to recognize who it was. Probably someone from town, or hiding out on one of the stations. Underneath the shroud of flies, the dead woman wore dusty jeans and a flanno, torn to strips now.
Near as she could tell, the dead woman had been beautiful once. Maybe a tourist, or some fool from the coast, looking to snag a rich farmer. Hazel felt angry at the thought, and then weird, the way she remembered when she saw someone prettier than her. Jealous, wanting to belong to their world.
Now, the pretty girl was just dead meat. Hazel shook her head, vanished the dark thoughts. Everything was different now, and Hazel needed to get used to it.
Codger was going nuts. He stretched out as far as the leash would allow, snarling along the gutter’s edge. The TV antennae strained, and bent with a worrying creak.
“Doggy!” the dead woman shrieked with delight, pointing. “Dog doggy. Doggy. Play.”
Hazel looked over at her campsite, wondered if it was worth fetching Gilbo’s gun. A big .303, it would drop anything worth dropping. As he’d often reminded her after a few beers.
“Play!” the dead woman insisted, reaching upwards as if in benediction. Codger yipped and hauled at his collar till he was bug-eyed, teeth and scrap of tongue dancing along the edge of the gutter.
They were like something out of the old science-fiction movies, like at the picture theatre when Gilbo was courting her. The recently deceased, risen from death and come for the living. But in none of the b-grade horror flicks had the ghouls been like this.
Idiots. Cheerful monsters, who came calling like the Sandlot Kids. When they caught something living, they’d swarm in, babbling and chatting, smearing their rotten fingers all over the poor bugger, slobbering and kissing them.
That was all it took. You’d be dead in an hour, and up and walking by sunset. They didn’t need to bite you, not these idiot dead things. They killed you with love, doomed you with a toddler’s affection.
Hazel considered their affliction, and decided that she understood them all too well. She had a grudging respect for these lost souls, exasperation rather than anger as they wrecked the place. Turned out it was hard to hate something that loved you back.
The dead woman was caught up in a stream of corpses that poured out of the house. A man who was almost rotted down to bone carried Hazel’s toaster. Another an old record. The walking corpses made for the impromptu playground, and the dead woman waved at Hazel.
“Bye!” she called. “Bye doggy!”
Hazel watched the corpses at play, and realised that her distraction worked too well. They clamboured over the swingset, and lined up patiently behind the slippery dip. Normally, they’d have lost interest and moved on by now.
There was a pattern to these visits – gangs of the friendly dead visited all these old holdings at least once a month, and back again on their way to town. She’d seen groups heading north to Darwin, others south and maybe all the way down to Alice.
She picked up the rifle. Grimaced. Set it down by the water container. Codger looked up from his paws, whimpered with something that might have been boredom or frustration.
Only a dozen or so of the idiot dead, but she couldn’t bring herself to shoot them. They were dangerous, she reasoned, the way that a snake or a dingo could be dangerous. Just part of their nature, and they couldn’t help the way they were put together.
They were dead once, but the rules for death had changed.
Even as she watched the joyful corpses, she found her eyes drawn to the dam. A broken tractor lurked by the water, jerry-rigged with a digging bucket. The metal teeth rested on a bank of cracked earth, mud once.
Across the bank, she'd laid out sheets of tin, weighed them down with cinder blocks. Empty beer bottles, anything that would make noise. The beginnings of a concrete slab; a mixer standing idle, cement bags split and gone bad from neglect. Gravel was scattered everywhere. Cursing and crying, she had quit halfway through, tossing the shovel out into the middle of the dam.
Something buried once was buried good enough.
Next to this, the trunk of a long-dead iron gum, bound with chain. Old iron, red from decades in the weather. The links ran down the trunk, ran across the clay-pan until they ended in a single shackle.
The meat chain.
Hazel took her crossword book out of her back pocket, and attacked the squares with a stub of pencil. There was nothing left to do but put her feet up and wait for the pigs.
#
Pigroot Flat belonged to Gilbo’s dad, until lung cancer ate him inside out. Young Gilbo didn’t have anyone else, and so he spent five years in a boy’s home down in Adelaide. On his eighteenth birthday he came back, moved into the old shanty. Now Gilbo was gone too, and Hazel supposed that made it her place now.
Ten acres of scrub, an hour’s drive west of Katherine. Gilbo had spent twenty years on this block, trying to turn his old man’s leavings into cash. He put up a dormitory for the backpackers who never visited, and bought riding horses that grew fat and lazy in their yard.
“We’re too far from town,” Hazel said to Gilbo, back when she still had hope of a ring on her finger. “Should look into guided tours. A boat on the Gorge. Take tourists pig shooting.”
Gilbo did none of these things. He drank, broke Hazel with his words, then his fists. Introduced her to the meat chain.
#
That old fear tickled through her belly. Hazel bit at her nails as the sun drifted through the scrub, watched as her dead visitors organized a simple ball-game.
She gave up on the crossword. Opening a tin of dog-food for Codger, she heard grunting, the thump of many feet, an excited squeal that echoed through the bush. Codger danced about on the roof, torn between his dinner and the sudden stink of pig.
They came pouring out of the bush, a big hunting pack. Razorbacks with nasty tusks, their fat sows bouncing along behind them. Piglets jumped around, struggling to keep up.
The end of the world meant nothing but good times and fine dining to these residents of the Northern Territory. Hazel watched as the pigs bolted through the playground, knocking the dead over. They squealed and squabbled amongst themselves, stripping the rotten meat from still twitching skeletons. Whatever fear they'd had of people was long gone.
The dead girl had enough sense to climb the slippery dip, but a young boar clambered after her, snapping and slavering. It reached her foot, and tore it loose. Three more pigs joined the first, fighting to get at the freshest corpse.
Hazel wasn't scared of the idiot dead, and the pigs were just a fact of life around here. But that old anxiety still danced around in Hazel, until her gut felt like it was full of bitter coff
ee. Gilbo taught this feeling to her, even as he showed her how to take it away. There was a process to follow, but now the bloody pigs were ruining things.
Fear. Amplified by the simple fact that she was completely alone. Last woman standing. She trembled all over, moved her dry lips in a silent litany.
Meat chain.
It had to be now. The rules had changed, but it was do this, or lose her mind.
“You bloody well leave her alone,” Hazel muttered. She rested the .303 on an old esky, lining up the sights on the next leaping pig.
“Keep away from her.”
A thunderous crack, and then the first pig ran in a confused circle, bleeding and screaming. Codger barked fit to burst, as Hazel sent round after round into the pack. Finally they fled, some dragging their rotten meals back into the bush.
She let Codger off the chain, and the pig-dog fought out of her hands, leapt off the roof with no hesitation. He was off, barking and bounding through the scrub like madness on legs.
Gripping the gutter, Hazel lowered herself down, dropping almost a metre to the ground. Wincing, she limped across the yard. The last light of dusk painted the carnage in shades of grey.
The idiot dead never stood a chance. Rotten meat lay strewn across the yard, guts and bones spread wide by the feral pigs. Some of the bodies were still twitching and trying to move. Hazel coughed up a little vomit into her mouth, fought the rest back down. This is not the time to lose it, love.
A razorback lay slumped across the slippery dip. Its life-blood ran down the plastic chute, pooling at the bottom. A fat pig, well-fed and fresh, but Hazel wasn’t game enough to eat it. Who knew what the zombie-meat did to its insides? She missed bacon and pork chops, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Piggy?” the forlorn voice came. Still perched at the top of the slippery dip, the dead woman looked down at Hazel with some confusion.
“Piggy’s gone,” she replied, and crooked a finger. “Come on, love. We can play now if you want.”
The dead woman smiled then, lips sliding across a slimy jag of teeth. She slid awkwardly down the slide, clambering across the barrel chest of the dead pig. Hazel moved backwards, beckoned. The dead woman fell to the ground, tried to rise on the shattered bone where her leg ended now.
“It’s okay,” Hazel said, making sure to stay clear of those reaching hands. Even in the gloom, she could see the rapture in the corpse’s face, the joy of friendship, even love. The dead woman rose, crawled forward when walking failed her.
“We can be friends now,” Hazel called out, and meant it. “Let’s play over here.”
She led the dead woman on, past the house. There was a toolshed by the silent dormitory, and Hazel reached into the gloom, found the old school bag just inside the door. Dusty now, wreathed in cobwebs. A familiar weight, and it felt good.
“Keep coming,” she said.
Codger came back from his fruitless pursuit of the pigs, trotting through the yard with a human femur in his mouth. When he spotted the dead woman crawling towards his mistress, he dropped the bone, hackles rising. Lips slid away from bared fangs, and a snarl came from deep down in his chest.
“Leave off!” Hazel shouted. When Codger began growling and edging closer, she fetched up a stone and skipped it across the dust. The dog shied away from the bouncing rock. Fetching up the bone, Codger retreated underneath the house pilings, sulking and whining.
“Idiot dog,” Hazel said, shuffling backwards. The dead girl crawled closer, beaming, reaching for Hazel’s feet almost shyly. This close, the mortal stink almost overcame her. Hazel fought the urge to vomit.
“Play?”
“Over here.”
Slow backwards shuffle, ever aware of the disease on those lips, knowing that a single scratch would doom her. She’d fought off this moment as long as she could, held those old feelings at bay.
There were ways to cope with life on Pigroot Flat.
Living woman and dead obscenity inched across the dusty yard, past the four-wheel drive, around the brooding hulk of the tractor. Hazel led the monster towards the dam, beckoning her on.
“You’re beautiful. Pretty girl,” Hazel said, wondering who she was trying to convince. The dead woman preened at the compliment, the slimy crack of her mouth turned up at the corners.
"Pretty," the cadaver agreed.
"This way," Hazel said with false cheer, beckoning as if to a puppy. She felt her boots crunch into gravel, lead the dead woman across the corrugated iron. Clattering across the iron, the corpse wheezed with excitement, moving faster now.
"Come and play, pretty girl," Hazel said, kneeling in the cracked clay. Behind her, thousands of mosquitos made an airfield on the dam water, dancing on the murky film. On the water's edge, the cracked clay gave way to pig shit and algae. She wouldn't let an animal drink from it, but that was the point of the whole thing, an element of Gilbo's infamous script.
Hazel tensed, held ready. Opening the school bag, she tipped out her tools, checked that everything was there. She'd need to be quick.
When bruise-coloured fingers brushed against her boots, Hazel ran around the iron gum. With reflexes born of farm-life, she snatched up the rusting snake that was the meat chain. Dove upon the dead woman like a calf in need of hog-tying.
She clapped the shackle around the corpse's ankle, just above its remaining foot. Even as it turned and grabbed at her, screaming like a terrified toddler, Hazel dodged the reaching hands. She pushed it face first into the clay, knelt in the small of the corpse's back. Something gave beneath her with a sickening crack. Hazel's whole world seemed like a miasma of rot and flies.
In seconds she had the muzzle on. A wire frame, much like what the greyhounds wore. Next came the oven mitts, strapped onto the corpse's hands with duct tape.
"Yes, that's it," Hazel exulted, looking down on her handywork. A moment later she staggered over to the dam, and vomited up everything she'd ever eaten.
#
Gilbo vanished for a week once, took the house-keeping money and the only car that worked. He came back in the middle of the night, and Hazel woke to a furious beating. He was blind drunk, stank of booze and vomit. She begged, pleaded, crawled across the bed. He hauled her in with no effort, dragged her out of bed by an ankle. Boxed her almost into that sweet darkness.
From a dim place in her mind, she noted how he broke her nose, cracked a rib, and snapped several of her teeth. She'd been beaten before, but never this bad. He's going to kill me.
"It's time, bitch!" he shouted. Gilbo carried her out of the house, across the yard. Towards the dam, the iron gum stump, the old chain that he refused to speak of. She wriggled and fought, but Gilbo was built like a brick shithouse.
He threw her to the ground, kicked her in the gut for good measure. Winded, she tried to crawl away, tried to call for help. Stupid. Even if she had an air-raid siren, the neighbours wouldn't hear. Gilbo knelt on her back, an implacable force. Something fastened around her ankle, a tight pinch.
Next came a muzzle, and she cried out as the steel jammed against her broken face. He placed something around each hand, binding it up tight with tape.
Then Gilbo left her alone, to sob and shake in the dark.
Terror wouldn't let Hazel sleep. She saw the sun rise over the dam as she shivered in her dirty nightie. The house was silent and still, and she strained her ears, heard Gilbo's snoring.
Every movement brought a wave of pain. Hazel worked herself up to a sitting position, tried to tear off the tape. She couldn't do anything with the mittens on, and the muzzle prevented her from tearing at the tape with her teeth.
Heart sinking, she examined the shackle, noted how the rough metal already wore at her skin. The iron was weathered but strong, almost a half-inch thick. Even if she had a hammer and chisel, Hazel doubted she could hack through this. The other end of the chain fed through a bracket, hammered deep into the tree.
Planting both feet against the stump, Hazel strained, pulled the chain as hard as
she could. After several minutes, she slumped to the ground, defeated. She wouldn't be leaving until Gilbo unlocked it. Or killed her.
The sun climbed into the sky, and burnt the last of the night chill. Hazel started to roast in the sun, and by the time noon rolled around, she was burnt from tip to toe. Gilbo snored through the day. The sweat poured out of Hazel, and she circled the stump, trying to hide in a sliver of shade.
She licked her lips, wincing as her dried tongue danced across the skin Gilbo had split with his fists. Her whole mouth and throat were as dry as leather, and she ached with thirst.
When he'd had a skinful, Gilbo was known to sleep till dusk. Hazel realized that she might die of thirst before he bothered to see to her.
Crawling across the clay, Hazel inched towards the old dam. Her hands slid around in the greasy pig shit, but she picked herself up, reached towards the foul water.
A tug at her ankle. She looked back to see the chain at full stretch. The water's edge was just beyond her reach. She strained, winced as the shackle rubbed her ankle raw.
Curled around the stump and dozing, Hazel was later woken by the slam of the screen door. She looked up in terror as Gilbo stepped off the porch, a dusty old school bag in one hand.
"Richie, please," she whimpered, daring to use his first name. He crossed the yard like a man with a purpose, and Hazel couldn’t remember the last time she'd seen him stand so tall.
He looked at her indifferently, all the anger of last night gone. This dead stare was far more terrifying than the drunken rage, and she trembled, tried to back away from this stranger.
"This is the meat chain," he told her, placing the school bag on the ground. KATHERINE AREA SCHOOL, the faded old legend read. The leather straps were busted, and a canvas flap hung loose. He flipped it open, and Hazel moaned with fear.
Knives. A hacksaw. Hammers and even an old hand-drill.
"My great grand-dad brought this over from Mount Isa," he said, rattling the chain idly. "He had a claim there, ran a thousand head of sheep. Black fellas ran wild over there once, killing stock, spearing folks in their huts."