The Sixth Plague – Episode Two: Animal Crossing

A serial radio play
by Mel King
Previous episode

Charlie Maxwell, Narrator:

When last we spoke, it was to spend an eventful afternoon in the seaside town of Fiddlers Rest, getting to know two of our intrepid heroes, Rocci Reggiano and a calico cat named Quincy.

The pair, as you may remember, were separated when Quincy mysteriously disappeared from a locked flat, only to reappear some hours later with a hitch-hiker in tow – a Fiddler crab, now known as Eric – no stranger to the seaside of course, but native to much warmer shores, some 2,500 km further north as the crow flies. 

Later, we met Chris, and Chris’s dog, Isaac, who coincidentally reside on a tiny private island approximately 2500km due north of Fiddlers Rest. Chris was on a bit of a bender that day, having just laid to rest a dear friend, no small matter in a world torn asunder by a plague of apocalyptic proportions. Isaac, meanwhile, was tearing about the island barking – concerned for his human companion to be sure – but also confused and excited over the earlier appearance (and subsequent disappearance) of a wily calico cat.

If you don’t remember any of these events, I suggest you return to Episode One of the Sixth Plague and acquaint yourself with the story so far, before continuing any further into this seemingly incredible, but I assure you, entirely true accounting of events.

Rocci Reggiano has, for the moment, put aside Quincy’s mysterious adventure, sensibly choosing to focus on a more immediate problem – that of waste management, a surprisingly complicated matter when you can’t leave your flat for fear of being spotted by a burgeoning undead chef. 

We’ll leave Rocci to this practical ponderance for now, and become better acquainted with Chris, who, now that night has fallen, has retreated to the safety of a fourth storey observatory, to watch over the grave of the recently departed Vic. Chris is in a difficult and fearful position, because the PICO induced symptoms of the sixth plague do not always manifest in the same way. 

Some of the afflicted simply change; one moment they are going about their normal human business, and the next, they are flesh crazed maniacs. Others, though, fall down seeming quite dead, often rising again hours or even days later. Some are enraged and hungry – hangry, if you will – while others become deliriously giggly as they hunt for food, like teenagers with the munchies. A select few develop no taste for flesh at all, instead becoming singularly focused on the installation and maintenance of various kinds of essential infrastructure which is, of course, the best outcome Chris can hope for.

What makes the undead flesh connoisseurs particularly unsettling though, is their obsession with cooking their new favourite protein. In the early days, when mainstream internet was still operational, the undead could usually be found in their kitchens, watching YouTube videos about butchery, food preservation and cooking, as they practised on their unfortunate prey. These cannibalistic bon vivants were quite undeterred when the internet finally went dark, instead congregating in book-stores to fight over glossy-paged cook books by recently popular celebrity chefs the likes of Courtney Barnett and Eamon Sandwith.

What all of this means is that Chris cannot reliably judge whether Vic is actually dead, or if, cocooned within the earth beneath the sprawling cottage garden they once tended together, Vic is metamorphosing into something altogether less agreeable.

I’ll hand you over to Chris now, who, just as Rocci did in the previous episode, has helped us piece this story together by keeping a wonderfully detailed, if at times emotionally raw, journal.

Chris:

Oh Vic. You were so good to me, old friend. I wish I'd understood the things you said about this cursed plague – all of those clever scientific things that went right over my head. You wanted to save the world, and perhaps you would have if I hadn’t gotten you killed.

I’m scared out of my wits, Vic, but if you climb out of that grave, then I owe it to you to at least try those cures you were working on.

Please don’t eat me, Vic.

There’s still plenty of that lovely vegetable stew you made. I think I’ll heat some up now, and after a feed and a little nap, I’ll dive into your books and see if I can work out exactly what’s to be done if you rise again.

Was it the lights in the sky, Vic? The ones you were shouting at me not to look at? Is that what got you? It must have been. You know, if you hadn’t rescued me – if you’d just left me outside – you would have been quite safe. I’d make as useless a zombie as I do a human being.

I’m so sorry, Vic.

Charlie Maxwell, Narrator:

Of course, after two days of vigilantly waiting to learn what will become of the recently deceased, the answer finally comes when Chris has succumbed to exhaustion, face down in an open book, by an open window in the observatory.

Below, a dirt-covered Vic stands, growling and yelling incoherently, slapping the self crafted mud brick wall, and growing ever more frustrated by Chris's failure to respond.

Not even firing a flare past Chris's window works; Vic, who in life was an exceptional shot, is suffering some posthumous coordination issues, and has inadvertently set the reclaimed timber window frame on fire.

Desperate to save the house and preserve the delicious prize upstairs, Vic retrieves a ladder from the shed, and climbs it, armed with a spurting garden hose. Chris, though currently asleep, will later piece together these events from footage recorded by Vic’s truly impressive network of surveillance cameras, powered by Vic’s equally impressive slew of homemade renewable energy systems.

It’s a blast from the hose that finally rouses Chris.

Chris:

I don’t know what time Vic crawled out of the grave, as it seems I have slept through most of the night. I woke soaking wet and confused, and somehow knocked a bowl of stone-cold stew out of the window, directly onto Vic’s head. This triggered an onslaught of yelling and snarling. Vic is really mad.

'Vic, why don’t you lie down for a bit? Have a rest while I figure out how to cure you!' I suggested, and I pointed at the banana lounge, smiling encouragingly.

Vic stared at me for a moment, then climbed down from the ladder, and began to beat the banana lounge against the side of the house, before hurling the twisted wreckage into my eco-filtered swimming pond. It may seem a silly thing to worry about under the circumstances, but I admit I feel very disappointed, having spent quite a bit of money on that banana lounge for Vic’s recent fiftieth birthday. Of course, I know it won’t help to dwell on it.

Since then, I’ve been sitting here trying to read, while Vic makes a great deal of noise. There has been banging and rattling and drilling and hammering and I’m pretty sure I even heard the concrete mixer running. I can’t see exactly what is going on; panoramic observatory views aside, this island is well populated with trees, but I have begun to suspect, to my growing dismay, that Vic is rushing to complete the BBQ project we were building together – our own magnificent design, complete with a smoker, a spit, a pizza oven – even a solar powered sous vide. It really was shaping up to be the Honda Gold Wing of BBQs. 

I have to face facts though. It’s obvious Vic isn’t the innocuous “keep the lights on” kind of zombie I had my hopes pinned on, but rather the “cook and eat your best friend Chris” kind. I am a little hurt, to be honest. We were planning to make some fantastic meals on that BBQ, and none of them featured me as the main ingredient. Not to mention how much I was enjoying the process of building it together. I even drew up a lovely design for a laser-cut screen to wrap around the fire pit. I don’t know how to use Vic’s homemade laser cutter though, so I guess I’ll never get to see my design brought to life. It’s a real shame.

These books haven’t yielded the helpful information I hoped for, and I’m beginning to realise that Vic’s alleged magic bullet cure for zombiism is just colloidal fucking silver. Vic thought that crap was a true panacea; in my experience, it did nothing but leave behind an awful metallic taste. Still, there are probably a hundred bottles of it in the basement, so I guess there’s no excuse not to try. I’m going to go down and fetch some now, and double check that the house is still locked up tight. Vic built this house in anticipation of an apocalypse, tending, I used to think, on the paranoid side, so the lower floors are quite impenetrable. I’m sure that accounts for some of the angry yelling and growling I have been hearing since I woke.

Now I have lost Isaac too. I am bereft. My sweet little dog followed me into the basement, and before I could stop him, squeezed out through the old coal chute. I could hear him barking, and Vic roaring as they chased all about the island. I admit, I froze in fear for a moment. I couldn’t let my canine best friend be eaten by my human best friend, but what good am I to either of them if I become a meal myself? 

In the end I followed them, as stealthily as I could, with a bottle of Vic’s homemade colloidal silver in each hand. Vic was entirely focused on poor Isaac, who ran into a little rocky alcove on the east side of the island and – I know this sounds insane – disappeared. He ran straight at the rocks and vanished, his little hind legs and scruffy tail disappearing just as Vic lunged at him like an outfielder diving for a critical boundary save.  

And there Vic lay, grunting and growling, one arm inexplicably missing just below the shoulder.

There was no blood, no sign of a severed arm, and no trace of Isaac. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen, and I have seen some pretty damn strange things recently.

Gathering my wits, I decided to try the silver while Vic was lying prone. I poured the yellow liquid over my friend’s head, as if conducting some strange and terrible baptism, and Vic whipped around to look at me, now screaming with a truly horrifying rage. For just a moment, I considered the possibility that I was witnessing a possession, and that the PICO transmissions somehow allowed demonic entities to take up residence in human bodies.

I can’t deny that I was terrified, but I managed to pour much of the second bottle into Vic’s screaming mouth. The enraged gurgling sounded just like a creature from a computer game we once enjoyed together, and as I write this, now somewhat calmed by a good measure of homemade mango brandy, it occurs to me that Vic would have found that pretty funny.

When Vic pulled away from the rocks and began to get up, the missing arm rematerialised, seemingly unharmed, but the hand and wrist were covered in some kind of disgusting green sludge. Vic held up the goo-covered hand and screamed at it furiously. Had that hand reached all the way into hell? Out of ideas and scared half to death, I belted Vic over the head with the empty glass bottle, and there my dear friend slumped, face down in the rotting leaves and moss, quiet and still once more.

Poor Vic. 

I searched for Isaac for as long as I dared, and when the awful yelling and snarling began anew, I retreated tearfully to my glass tower, where I now sit, wishing Vic would stop banging and grinding in the workshop, so I could listen out for sounds of my poor sweet little dog.

It will be dark again very soon, and my heart is utterly broken.

Charlie Maxwell, Narrator:

We’ll leave poor Chris to grieve, read, journal and perhaps finish the last of Vic’s delicious vegetable stew. We’ve just enough time left to quickly check on Rocci Reggiano, who was, at the time of Vic and Isaac’s chase through the woods, standing in the hallway clutching a bag of garbage, having just made the grim decision to start moving the growing piles of stinking household waste to one of the vacant flats.

Rocci was both alarmed and pleased to hear the sudden high pitched sound of a small dog barking in the bathroom. It was, you see, the first sign that Rocci’s ears were finally beginning to recover. 

Upon opening the door, Rocci was confronted with a small, white, yapping dog, who bounded into the hall, completed several noisy laps of the flat, and returned to pounce on Quincy, who frantically climbed Rocci like a tree, hissing and glaring from the safety of her human's shoulder.

Rocci was no longer concerned with the little dog, or with Quincy, nor did our confused protagonist notice Eric the Banana Fiddler hiding inside his aquatic replica of the Great Wall of China.

What Rocci was now focused on was a hand, attached to about three quarters of an arm, writhing about on the floor, reaching, grasping at nothing and slapping the linoleum angrily.

When a frightened Quincy sank her claws through the Oodie and into Rocci’s neck, Rocci screamed and dropped the garbage bag, which spilled its contents all over the floor. Horrified, Rocci watched the hand find purchase, crushing a take-away container filled with rancid three week old split-pea soup, before withdrawing into nothingness. Deeply concerned that the barking dog would alert nearby cookers to their usually well concealed location, Rocci spent some time in the laundry pacifying the noisy yapper with food and belly rubs, before returning to the bathroom armed with a broom. An exhausted Isaac, to his credit, decided he was safe for the moment, and went to sleep.

Frightened, but also very curious, Rocci slid the broom across the bathroom floor, and when it reached the place beneath the sink that the arm had seemed to sprout from, the head of the broom disappeared. When the handle was retracted, the head appeared once more. Fascinated, Rocci repeated this a few times, before pushing an empty cat food tin under the sink, and gasping when it winked out of sight. Our resourceful hero could not help but see the value in this bizarre turn of events, and, wide eyed and incredulous, proceeded to use the broom to push the rest of the spilled garbage into the void beneath the sink, before returning to the kitchen to grab another bag. 

Now, as Chris sits sad and contemplative in the observatory, Rocci is gleefully celebrating this unexpected waste management solution and has all but disposed of the entire stinking trash pile from the kitchen, as well as several unwanted house-hold items. There is, after all, no guarantee this strange anomaly will still be there tomorrow and Rocci intends to make hay while the sun shines, as they say.

We’ll leave Rocci to enjoy this delightful boon and return to the post-apocalyptic adventures of our plucky survivors in the next episode of the Sixth Plague. Until then, folks, continue to keep your pets safe, consider ways to reduce your household waste, and try not to leave your DIY projects unfinished for too long, because you never know when the next apocalypse might strike.

Stay tuned for the next episode of the Sixth Plague!

More from Mel King

Mel King is a Geelong based writer of sci-fi, horror and comedy.
Mel can be found at:
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