The Last Biscuit

The Last Biscuit

By nightfall, the river had eaten the road.

Not metaphorically. Properly.

The old gravel strip that ran from the highway past the gum trees, over the dip, and up toward The Therapy Room had vanished under a sheet of black floodwater that moved with purpose. It wasn’t rain anymore. Rain was only the beginning. This was the river remembering where it used to go, and taking the land to task for forgetting.

The paddocks were half-drowned. Fence posts stuck out of the dark like broken teeth. The rosemary bushes outside the Therapy Room bowed under the weight of water and wind, and the chickens had long since abandoned dignity for survival. Mabel, bossy old tart that she was, had her flock tucked under the shed in military formation. Huxley, smallest and weirdest of the lot, kept darting out into the wet like some feathered prophet of doom, peering toward the river and then racing back under cover as if reporting to a higher office.

“Settle down, you dramatic little toad,” I muttered through the glass.

Huxley ignored me.

Animals do that when they know something you don’t.

Inside, The Therapy Room held itself together in the usual way. Lamps on. Kettle hot. Cups set out. Biscuit tin on the low table. Rug dry. Chairs waiting. The room still smelled faintly of tea leaves, damp wool, and the kind of human sorrow that never quite leaves the curtains, no matter how often you air them.

And in the far corner, where the shadows gathered near the bookshelf, stood the elephant.

It had arrived before anyone else.

That should have been warning enough.

It was not grey exactly. More like river stone at dusk, or old smoke, or memory given shape. Vast. Quiet. Calm in the way ancient things are calm when they know panic is for smaller creatures. It only appeared for certain people. The traumatised. The spiritually cracked open. The grief-hollowed. The ones who had got too close to death and come back with their inner doors hanging ajar.

I looked at it over the rim of my teacup.

“You know something.”

The elephant said nothing.

Of course.

Then the first pounding came at the door.

Not a polite knock. Not a client knock. Not even an emergency knock. This was the flat-palmed, half-hysterical banging of somebody who had run out of better ideas.

When I opened up, Claire nearly fell inside.

She was soaked through, white-faced, wild-eyed, hair stuck to her mouth, cardigan hanging off her like wet skin. Mud streaked her legs to the knee.

“Shut it,” she gasped. “Shut the fucking door.”

I did.

She stood in the middle of the room, gulping air, staring at the walls like she expected one of them to open.

“Tea first,” I said.

She looked at me like I was insane.

Then she looked at the corner.

At the elephant.

And all at once, some part of her rearranged itself.

“Oh,” she whispered.

That was how it went with the ones who could see it. Not screaming. Not disbelief. Just that awful little sound people make when the world confirms their private madness.

I wrapped her in a blanket and pushed a hot mug into her hands. Her fingers shook so hard tea slopped over the rim.

“What happened?”

“My car stalled near the bend.” She swallowed. “Near the river.”

My stomach dropped.

There was an old burial site down there, half-forgotten now except by Elders, local gossips, and those of us who’d lived in the district long enough to know what land people avoided after dark. Flooding had been chewing at that riverbank for three days.

“What did you see?” I asked.

Claire stared into her tea. “At first I thought it was fence posts.”

That made the room colder, though the fire was going.

Then came another pounding at the door.

And another.

And another.

Within fifteen minutes, there were six more people trapped inside The Therapy Room with the floodwater rising around the property.

A schoolteacher with mascara down her cheeks.

An older farmer who smelled of wet leather and rain.

A teenage girl hugging a backpack to her chest.

A young bloke with a split eyebrow and too much false bravado.

A man in his fifties with one sleeve torn open and blood on his cuff that wasn’t all his.

And another woman from down the road who kept apologising for no reason anyone could name.

Seven of them. Eight with me. Nine if you counted the elephant.

Most of them saw it the moment they stepped inside.

That told me everything I needed to know about the kind of night we were having.

Nobody wanted to talk at first. They just took blankets and tea and stared into corners. Outside, the rain hit the tin roof like fistfuls of gravel. Water rushed under the house. Wind shoved wet branches against the weatherboards. Every now and then the lights flickered, and every time they did, Huxley shrieked from under the shed like a tiny deranged lookout.

Then Mabel answered him.

Short. Sharp. Commanding.

The flock went dead quiet.

I have always trusted women who know when to shut a room up.

The teenage girl was the first to say it.

“They came out of the river.”

No one laughed.

No one even looked surprised. That was the state of us already.

The older farmer rubbed both hands over his face. “Saw something moving near the burial ground before I turned up here. Thought flood had washed up driftwood.”

The schoolteacher shook her head too quickly. “No. No, I saw people. I thought they were people.”

Claire let out a hard little breath. “So did I.”

The man with the torn sleeve finally spoke. “One grabbed at the ute.”

Everyone looked at him.

He held up his hand. The knuckles were flayed open.

“Not bit me,” he said quickly. “Grabbed the door. Had rings on its fingers.”

That did something nasty to the air.

Rings meant it had once been a person in a way more intimate than bones and rot. Rings meant wedding bands, buried promises, old names, old grief. Rings meant the river had not just pushed up bodies. It had dragged up lives.

The younger man gave a dry laugh. “That’s just fucking fantastic.”

Then came the sound from the veranda.

A wet dragging scrape.

The room froze.

It moved slow across the front boards. Not limping. Not shambling. More like something waterlogged relearning balance. A step. A drag. A soft slap. Then another.

The schoolteacher clutched her mug so hard I thought it might crack.

The older farmer whispered, “Fuck me.”

That felt about right.

The shape outside paused at the window.

Rain sluiced down the glass in thick silver veins. Through it I saw only height at first. Human height. Human shoulders. A head tilted oddly to one side.

Then lightning flashed.

And there it was.

A face half gone.

Not skeletal. Worse. Enough flesh left to know who it had been once, enough missing to show the red-black ruin underneath. One eye was gone, the socket packed with river mud and reeds. The jaw hung wrong. Water streamed from the thing’s mouth as if it had swallowed half the river and not yet finished choking on it.

Claire screamed.

The thing hit the window.

The pane shuddered but held.

More shapes emerged behind it in the rain.

Not dozens. Not yet. Five, maybe six, moving up from the drowned dark below the property. Men and women in old clothes and newer clothes, all of them wrecked by water and burial and time. One had half a scalp hanging loose like peeled bark. Another dragged one leg but moved faster than it should have. One old woman’s mouth was full of silt and tiny white river shells.

And all of them were climbing toward the house.

The elephant stepped forward.

The room changed.

It always did when it moved. The air thickened. Light bent. The lamp nearest the bookshelf dimmed to a pulse. The spoons on the tea tray gave a faint nervous clink.

Outside, the dead reached the veranda.

One by one they mounted the steps, water pouring from them, mud dropping in wet clots from hems and hands. They gathered at the front window and stared in with the terrible focus of things that knew exactly what warm living flesh looked like.

The teenage girl made a choking sound. “They’re looking at us.”

“No,” I said before I could stop myself. “They’re smelling us.”

That was worse, apparently.

The young bloke snatched up the fireplace poker. “We can’t just sit here.”

“You go out there then,” said Claire.

He didn’t.

The first one tried the door.

Not wildly. Slowly. Fingers testing the handle.

Then another started tapping at the glass with one broken nail.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

A woman near the back of the pack lifted her face and I saw that she still had a lace collar around her neck, yellowed but intact. Her lips were gone. Her teeth clicked together in the rain like she was cold.

The man with the torn sleeve said, “They weren’t all buried there.”

“No,” said the farmer. “Flood would’ve brought others with it.”

River dead. Burial dead. Long-dead and fresh-dead. All sluiced together and delivered to the high ground where the living sat with cups of tea and tried not to piss themselves.

There came a crash from the back of the house.

Then another.

Something had reached the laundry door.

The schoolteacher began to cry in earnest now, silent and furious, tears pouring off her chin while she tried not to make a sound.

The younger man gripped the poker tighter. “If one gets in, I’m taking its fucking head off.”

“Good luck,” muttered Claire.

It was Huxley who gave us the warning.

A frantic burst of chirping from under the shed. Not fear. Alarm. Directed. Then Mabel joined in, one harsh commanding scream after another.

Lookouts.

Little bastards were on watch.

The elephant turned its head toward the back of the property.

Then the first dead thing came through the side window.

Not all the way. An arm first, punching through the glass in an eruption of shards and rain. The hand was swollen, skin split white and purple, nails torn back, but it moved with vile determination, clawing for the latch.

Claire threw her tea on it.

Instinct. Panic. Perfect.

The effect was immediate.

The thing shrieked.

Not moaned. Not groaned. Shrieked.

Steam burst off the arm in a violent hiss. The skin blistered and peeled back like overcooked meat. The smell hit the room a second later, foul and greasy and ancient, like drowned fat on a bonfire.

The arm convulsed, slammed against the frame, and withdrew.

Everyone stared at Claire.

Claire stared at the mug in her hand.

Then at me.

Then at the tea stain running down the wall.

“Well,” she said shakily, “that’s something.”

Another face appeared at the broken pane.

The younger man didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the teapot off the tray and flung it straight at the fucker.

Boiling tea exploded across its face.

The dead woman reeled backward with a scream that tore right through the storm. Flesh sloughed off one cheek in steaming ribbons. Her remaining eye burst wetly in its socket. She toppled off the veranda and took another one down with her.

For half a second, nobody moved.

Then the room exploded.

“Kettle,” I snapped.

The farmer lunged for it. The schoolteacher started filling mugs with shaking hands. The man with the torn sleeve yanked down the spare thermos from the shelf. Claire seized another teapot. The teenage girl, pale but steady now, grabbed every cup she could reach and lined them up on the table like ammunition.

The dead slammed against the house.

Front door. Back wall. Window frame. Laundry door.

Wet palms slapped wood. Fingers scrabbled. Glass broke somewhere in the back room.

But now we knew something they didn’t.

Tea hurt them.

Boiling tea hurt them badly.

There is something deeply satisfying about discovering the undead can be fought off with manners.

The first one through was an old man in a suit jacket, rotted down one side. He came through the shattered window headfirst, dragging half his torso over the sill, glass embedded in his face like jewellery. The young bloke swung the poker and smashed his jaw sideways with a crack.

The thing kept coming.

Claire threw a mug of fresh tea into its open mouth.

Its head came apart.

Not neatly. Not theatrically. More like overripe fruit bursting under pressure. Steam and black fluid and clotted river water sprayed the rug. The schoolteacher screamed, then apologised, then screamed again.

The body twitched on the floor, fingers clawing, until the elephant stepped near it.

The corpse collapsed instantly.

Not killed by force. Unmade by presence.

Its bones seemed to give up on holding together. Flesh caved inward. Mud and teeth and old cloth sank into themselves with a wet sigh, leaving behind only a dark slick that smelled like riverbank and old grief.

Nobody said a word.

Then the back door burst open.

Three of them came in at once.

One missing most of its scalp. One woman in a flowered dress with half her throat hanging out. And behind them something older, leaner, black with river mud, its face worn down to the grin of exposed teeth.

The farmer shouted, “Now!”

And the room moved as one.

Boiling water.

Hot tea.

Mugs flung hard enough to crack bone.

The woman in the flowered dress took a full pot to the chest. Her torso split open in a gush of black muck and steam. She staggered forward anyway, hands reaching, fingers opening and closing like pale drowned spiders. The man with the torn sleeve smashed a chair leg into her face. Claire dashed the rest of her mug into the wound at her throat and the whole top of her body slumped inward like wet paper.

The scalp-less one got as far as the rug before the teenage girl, sweet silent thing, stepped forward and emptied an entire thermos into its eye sockets. It made a noise like a drain unclogging and went down thrashing.

The older one kept coming.

It moved faster than the others.

Not a stumble. A charge.

The younger man swung the poker. It ducked in a way no dead thing should duck, seized his arm, and bit down through his jacket sleeve.

He screamed and punched at it uselessly.

Before I could think, the biscuit tin was in my hand.

I brought it down on the side of its head with everything I had.

The lid flew off. Biscuits scattered. The thing staggered.

Claire shoved the boiling kettle straight into its face.

That did it.

Its skin split. Steam blasted from its mouth and eye sockets. River weeds burst from the hole where its cheek had been, writhing and smoking. It reeled backward and slammed into the wall, clawing at itself like it wanted out of its own body.

The elephant stepped in front of us.

The thing looked up at it.

For the first time that night, one of the dead seemed afraid.

Then the elephant lowered its head and drove forward.

Not with gore. Not with spectacle. With certainty.

The corpse hit the far wall so hard the picture frames shook. Its ribcage opened. Black water exploded across the skirting board. Then it folded in on itself, bones cracking inward, collapsing into a heap of mud, cloth, and something that looked horribly like old funeral ribbon.

Silence.

Only for a moment.

Then more shapes climbed the veranda.

More tapping. More thudding. More drowned faces at the windows.

The schoolteacher looked close to fainting. The younger man was clutching his bitten arm and swearing in increasingly creative ways. The farmer had blood down one side of his face from flying glass. Claire’s cardigan was streaked with corpse muck. My lovely Therapy Room rug was ruined beyond redemption.

And Huxley was still outside screaming the alarm like a tiny prehistoric dinosaur.

“Get the cups,” I said.

“What?” said the man with the torn sleeve.

“All of them. Every bloody one.”

There are moments in life where the line between domesticity and war disappears altogether.

This was one.

We turned The Therapy Room into a tea-based defense system.

The kettle never stopped boiling. We used teapots, mugs, thermoses, saucepans, whatever would hold heat. The schoolteacher, once she stopped crying, turned out to be unnervingly accurate with a stoneware mug. Claire developed a mean overarm throw. The farmer favored close-range scalding with agricultural commitment. The teenage girl moved silently between us, refilling vessels, handing them out, eyes bright and strange as if some old buried self had woken up in the middle of this carnage and found it preferable to whatever life she’d had before.

Each time a dead thing reached a threshold, the elephant met it there.

And each time it did, the room held.

The dead were stronger than they should have been, and some of them still wore traces of the people they’d been. An old shearer with half his moustache intact. A woman with a pearl earring fused to rotted flesh. A young man in jeans and one football sock. One little old man in a waistcoat who lost both hands to boiling tea and still tried to crawl in on his elbows.

But they could not cross where the elephant stood.

And tea, glorious civilised fucking tea, tore them apart.

At last, near midnight, the rain eased.

Not stopped. Eased.

The river withdrew just enough from the rise below the house that the dead seemed to falter. One by one they gathered at the edge of the veranda, heads tilting as if listening to something far below us. Some turned and lurched back toward the slope. Others simply dropped where they stood, collapsing into mud and cloth and ancient stink now that whatever had driven them up from the burial ground was loosening its hold.

The last one to remain was a woman with long river weed tangled through her hair and an infant’s bracelet still circling her wrist.

She stood in the yard looking at us through the broken window.

Then she looked at the elephant.

What passed between them I could not say.

But after a long, still moment, she lowered her ruined head and turned away, walking back toward the river until the dark swallowed her.

Nobody spoke.

The room was wrecked.

Glass everywhere. Mud on the walls. Tea and blood and black corpse-fluid across the floorboards. Broken cups. Broken chairs. Biscuit crumbs trampled into the rug. We smelled like tannin, adrenaline, wet wool, and death.

Outside, Mabel emerged from under the shed with her flock intact.

She stood in the wet and glared at the house like we had all behaved beneath her standards.

Huxley puffed himself up beside her, chest out, absurdly proud, tiny lookout of the apocalypse.

“Good job, you weird little bugger,” I said softly.

He screamed once as if accepting the compliment.

Inside, I looked at the low table.

The biscuit tin lay dented on its side, lid bent, floral pattern smeared with gore.

And beside it, impossibly, was one last intact biscuit.

Of course there was.

Claire saw it and started laughing. Real laughter. Ragged, exhausted, almost feral.

The schoolteacher joined in, then the farmer, then even the teenage girl gave this shocked little bark of laughter like she had just remembered the world sometimes contained absurdity alongside horror.

I picked up the biscuit, snapped it into pieces, and handed it around.

No one refused.

Not after surviving the river dead with tea service and an elephant.

By dawn, the flood had begun to pull back from the road. Mist rose off the paddocks. The chickens resumed pecking as if none of us had just fought off a drowned uprising from an old burial ground. The first magpie called. The world, that it is, had already started pretending nothing had happened.

In the corner, the elephant stood quieter now, almost translucent in the early light.

“Thank you,” I said.

It lowered its head.

Then it was gone.

All that remained was The Therapy Room, battered but standing. Cups on the bench. Mud on the floor. Rosemary bent flat in the yard. Mabel and Huxley on patrol like decorated little war heroes.

And on the road below, where the river had receded from the burial site, the earth gaped open in long dark wounds.

Whatever had come up had not all stayed up.

That was the thought I kept to myself while I swept broken glass from the floor.

Because some truths do not help in the morning.

Some truths are better left to the elephant.