Moaning, he shuffled back and forth, the calls of the others luring him closer, the strange geometry of the hole keeping him back. Each walker was a desiccated and torn corpse walking in constant, mindless confusion.

Now they moved like sheep, bumping into each other, moving in a slow tide from one end of the hole to the other. They had fallen, one by one, down the slick clay sides of the stream. In the hole behind the rock a crowd had gathered. A water-filled pit ran for nearly a hundred feet to where an ancient bedrock boulder lay as it had for a million years, making a natural barrier above the new stream. The flood had torn the bottom out of the creek bed, gouging the hard clay until the low banks now stood ten feet high. The man passed through the trees and blinked with near blind eyes at the long depression beyond.

The trees that stood around the high-water mark now wore tutu-skirts of grass and branches torn from the ground-up soil. Humid mists rose through the trees and scrub as a man, his clothes smeared dark with dirt and filth, staggered towards a groaning chorus of alarm. When the rain stopped the heat of the desert sun sent the water soaking into the earth. Dead trees, trapped boulders, carefully built fences and barricades, all now lay strewn along creek beds still stained ocher with the desert silt. The growing torrent washed away everything in its path. The trickles merged into streams, which ran to flooded creeks, which became thundering rivers. It started raining a month ago, the first downpour sending tiny rivulets through the red dust of the Australian Outback.

Immortal by Paul Mannering